First of all, here's yet another mashup. It's one I more or less finished several months ago but was never particularly happy with. Some friends of mine love it, though, so I'm putting it up here in the hopes that it'll get a laugh. The songs merged? Uh, Motteke! Sailor Fuku and The Perfect Drug. So yeah, needless to say, it's noisy.

In other news, I've put a few pages down on two essays for the site. If I ever finish them - which probably won't be soon - they'll be a lot more careful and analytical than the last one (for a polemic written in a few hours I guess wasn't bad, but conking people over the head isn't really what I'm interested in doing with my writing). The first essay is more or less a sequel to the Kasimasi piece from way back when, except hopping over to Claymore for a different perspective. It's one I've been planning to pen for awhile, but I never really had a reason to. The second, which I will likely finish first, provides a kind of introduction to writing about anime in a comparatively serious way. The point isn't to say how we ought to write - I am not trying to improve readers' grammar or organizational skills - but rather to point out how we do write when we actually seriously take up the challenge (to, as it were, diagram the mode of thinking). That part should be relatively short and easy - the more difficult bit is building the paper up to where the very small things I wish to say can make sense. So hopefully I can finish both of these, and hopefully someone somewhere will get something out of them.

Finally, not to be a negative nancy, but has anyone else been a bit disappointed with the stuff that's been showing up on Fan Words? (Not to say that I'm no longer dubious about how the feature happened because I still am - I just figure that if it's going to happen, it's better if it goes well) In all honesty I was expecting better - not masterpieces, but at least work at a level comparable to the last days of the old articles section. There've been several gems, but they're the exception. CassieR may disapprove my being too harsh, but seriously: a lot of it reads like glorified blog posts or copypasta'd homework assignments (and god help my mind if these really are the "top 1%" of all posts). I don't know, maybe I'm just too darn old. Does anyone else get this sense, or are my standards unreasonably high for user-created content?