‘On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me . . .’

I’m Not A Blogger, by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid, who kindly distributes under a Creative Commons license

Look familiar? If it does, you’ve probably been reading The Animanachronism (since ‘anima’ beats ‘anime’, I’d appear so high on alphabetical blogrolls if I had only forgone the article!) since last Christmas, in which case you’ll also feel a sense of familiarity when I tell you that ‘I can only remember eleven things about my anime year in 200[8], and so have to scratch up a subject for my twelfth day.’ That wasn’t entirely true then, of course, and it’s definitely not true now: those to whom this entry is dedicated deserve it on merit.

But before we get to them, I’m going to repeat another element of that post, the entirely unscientific exercise of a Google image search (Moderate SafeSearch on) for the word ‘anime’. Last year, as you may or may not recall, most of the first result had to be removed before it was clean enough to appear here. This year things are better, but only a little better.

Again, the image isn’t directly taken from an anime (last year’s was a figure) – we see two anime characters (the Tsukamoto sisters from School Rumble) as they appear on a physical object. It’s a reminder of the already stunningly obvious fact that anime is surrounded by peripheral items and activities, of which blogging is one.

So yeah, anime bloggers: thank you! You’re good fun, and you inspire me. Quite a lot of the time you inspire me to stay indoors more than is healthy, and occasionally you inspire me to fly into fits of rage (I’d make a comment about drafting and proofreading here, but I have this plank in my own eye to deal with), but you’re a good lot. Pat yourselves on the back. It’s probably good for your shoulder muscles.

Anime blog readers: thank you! I suspect that you might be more awesome, since you turn up even though you don’t have blogs of your own to maintain. And also because if you do, for example, use the grocers’ apostrophe to form the plural of ‘anime’ you do it somewhere out of my sight.

It only remains for me to copy one other element of last year’s post: the gratuitous linkage.

The blogs (to my knowledge) which participated in the TDP:

• Mega Megane Moe (of course!)
• Miao on My Mind
• Shameful Otaku Secret!
• Nigorimasen! Blog
• Super Fanicom
• Anime Academy
• Minimum Tempo
• animemiz’s scriblings
• Legend of the Otakufiend
• Borderline Hikikomori
• Fallen Aizen
• Life in Quadrant 4
• Josh’s Anime Blog
• Simplicity
• wat u say
• The Coke Machine
• Anime Diet
• We Remember Love
• Death by Moe
• Drastic My Anime Blog (in one post)
• Jinx! (sort of)
• far away no where (pushing it)
• . . . and of course lelangir, everywhere, and collating everyone’s posts here.

Let’s hope that, if I’m still around when 2009 ends, I’ll Google up an image of someone who’s both fully-clothed and not part of a design for merchandise of dubious purpose.