Category: Personal

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Conventions Personal

Anime Detour 2022 – Panel and Event Schedule

Hi everyone! Long-time-no-see. I’ve briefly come out of pre-con hiding to share my Anime Detour schedule, in case any readers are attending and would like to say “hi” to either myself or my spouse, J.C.

As usual, I’ll be posting panel materials after each panel is completed, so those who would like to see my notes or use the hyperlinks embedded in the presentations are welcome to do so. The panels “The Odd World of Odd Taxi,” “Madoka and Homura: The Trap of Selflessness,” “Neon Genesis Evangelion: A Retrospective,” and “Anime About Anime” are essentially unchanged from the form they took at Anime Fusion 2021, so if you’re interested in those (which are mostly just discussion topics), you can check out the previous posts about them.

You can view the Anime Detour schedule in its entirety here.

Edit: I’ve added room numbers to the entries 🙂

Friday, March 18th, 2022

  • 3:30-4:30pm, Greenway A/B – “Manga for Grown-Ups” – Manga aimed at older or more experienced fans, with a special focus this year on various online (legal) manga-viewing platforms.
  • 5:00-6:00pm, Greenway A/B – “The Odd World of ODDTAXI” – Fan panel focused on last year’s noir sleeper hit.
  • 8:00-9:30pm, Nicollet Ballroom – “AMV Contest” – The AMV show of all this year’s entries.
  • 11:00pm-12:00am, Greenway I/J – “Anime by Numbers Trivia” – J.C.’s game where the object is to get closer to the numerical answers than the other team.

Saturday, March 19th, 2022

  • 10:00-11:00am, Boundary Waters D – “AMV Showcase” – Exhibition showcase of other AMV entries to the contest.
  • 1:00-2:00pm, Greenway A/B – “Anime for Grown-Ups” – Anime aimed at older or more experienced fans, with a special focus this year on older anime (which fits with the convention theme).
  • 4:00-5:00pm, Greenway A/B – “Madoka and Homura: The Trap of Selflessness” – An analysis of the character motivations in the Madoka franchise, focused on the Madoka-Homura relationship.
  • 8:30-9:30pm, Greenway A/B – “Neon Genesis Evangelion: A Retrospective” – A discussion looking back at the animated franchise as a whole.
  • 10:00-11:00pm, Greenway F/G/H – “Don’t Judge an Anime by its Cover” – A game where silly OPs and EDs are drawn and the player must describe the plot of the anime (wrongly) based only on information in the OP.

Sunday, March 20th, 2022

  • 8:30-9:30am, Boundary Waters D – “AMV Awards” – The awards ceremony for the AMV contest winners
  • 1:00-2:30pm, Greenway F/G/H – “Shiny New Anime” – Our look at new anime from the past year that we enjoyed, with a focus on shows that aren’t as well-known.
  • 3:00-4:00pm, Greenway F/G/H – “Anime About Anime” – A look at anime series focused on anime production and what we can learn about it from those sources.

We’re really looking forward to be back in person at our “home” convention, and hope we’ll see some of you there!

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Personal Site News

February 6th – February 19th, 2022 Week(s)-in-Review

Hi, Everyone! I’m back after some days of very little activity. I live in the upper Midwest USA, and we’ve hit that point in the year where it just feels like endless cold with no reprieve, and I’m finding myself emotionally exhausted with very little drive to do anything. Now that I’m in the middle of a three day weekend (the last one for a few months now), I’m feeling a little more like I can devote some mental energy to my hobbies. I spent some time finishing up that knitting project I mentioned in my previous weekly touch-base, so I’m ready to move onto something a little bit more challenging.

With my journey through fiber arts, I’ve found that it’s helpful to maintain my interest if I’m learning something new each time. In this most recent case, it was learning to use very basic short rows (a shaping technique in which the knitter doesn’t knit all the way across a row before turning the other direction). My brain craves novelty and variety, and knitting the same scarves and hats back when I was just learning (more than a decade ago) meant that it was almost a given I was going to get bored. This time around I’m realizing that there’s just so many new things I can learn to make, and it’s helping to keep me interested in the longer term.

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Personal Site News

January 30th – February 5th, 2022 Week-in-Review

Hi everyone, it’s that time again – time to wish that I’d written more over the past week. To be honest, I did have quite a bit of other stuff to take care of this week, because we’re getting to the point in the convention cycle for the anime convention I’m a part of where schedules are actually being put together. We spent a good portion of the day yesterday scheduling our panel submissions, which is always a major task – we not only take into account the time restrictions people have when submitting their prospective panels, but we also have to try to predict how popular they might be (so they get into an appropriately-sized panel room) and not schedule too many similar things up against one-another. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also one of my favorite things to do as part of being convention staff, so I suppose it all works out!

I’ve also been doing a lot of knitting and crocheting lately – two things that can be very variable in how mentally taxing they are. I’m working on a shawl currently that has a lot of striping and back-and-forth patterning that must be observed, so it’s not exactly the mindless task that some knitting can be.

I’m still chipping away at a couple of longer-form reviews at the moment, as well as finishing off the last couple of first impressions that are left to do. With that said, going forward I’m going to be putting in some work freshening up the panel material I’ll be putting on for Anime Detour mid-March, so I expect in addition to some reduced work here I may come up with some more ideas for the future.

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Personal

Winter 2022 – Schedule Change

Hi Friends! I hope you’ve been enjoying the onslaught of first impression reviews. I have been, too! So much so that if I don’t slow down a bit, I feel like I may completely burn out (and we don’t want that). So I’m planning to dial things back a bit for the rest of the week and resume operations this weekend. It looks like there are currently only about 8 or so series left to get through (excluding sequels and such, which I usually don’t write about officially), so we’re already almost in the home stretch!

Let me know below in the comments what, if anything, you’ve been enjoying so far this season (or maybe what you’re catching up with from previous seasons). I think I’ll use these couple of days to check out second episodes of Sabikui Bisco and Akebi’s Sailor Uniform, and maybe a few others.

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Meta Personal Site News

Upcoming Material at S1E1

Hello, this is Jessi speaking to you from the recent past. By now I’ll be out-of-town on a vacation that’s been in the planning for almost a year. But in the meantime I thought I’d make a post about what you can expect from Season 1 Episode 1 in January.

The first order of business are seasonal first impressions. Unfortunately, I’ll have little access to watch new anime or update the site until January 10th, so those will be on a delay until after I get back to my computer to watch them and do write ups.

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Anime Reviews Personal Reviews Special Features

2021 – An Anime Year in Review

Happy New Year! Or, at least, I hope that this new year has the potential to be happier than the last couple have been. As many… critiques as I may have about the world in general, at the very least I think I’m pretty safe in saying that the world of anime has been extremely bountiful throughout 2021.

While many writers and bloggers have been posting their ranked lists of the best (or least-best) anime from 2021, because I’m not and probably never will be particularly keen on trying to rank apples against oranges I thought I’d try to tackle this from a different angle. So instead of attempting to arbitrarily cram things into a numerical list I’d like to instead look back at some of my strongest anime memories from 2021 by general subject matter and/or category. Thus, I can continue to be wishy-washy while also managing to put together some kind of content. It’s a win-win situation for everyone.

With that said, below the cut are some various memories I’ve put together from 2021, some related to seasonal anime in general, and others more closely related to my own experiences as an anime consumer within that time frame. If you’d like to share your own thoughts in the comments, I’d love to hear them!

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Favorites First Impressions Personal Reviews

S1E1’s 2021 Site-in-Review

Well, here we are; somehow I blinked and it’s now suddenly the end of December. As I continue to privately mull over the strange properties of the human perception of time’s passage, publicly I thought I’d take this opportunity to look back at the writing I completed over the past year. If you came here looking for a “best-of” anime post, fear not; I have one of those in the works as well. But for now, I thought I’d toot my own horn a little bit.

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Personal

It’s Not a New Year’s Resolution

I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions. In fact, I’ve never been one for big goals or long term planning – usually I make my goals too large and ultimately unattainable, so after a couple weeks of enthusiasm I spend the remaining months feeling terrible about my inability to stick to a plan. But that doesn’t mean that I find intention-setting to be a fruitless venture and though I don’t want to let my writing stagnate due to a complete lack of forward momentum that I could have addressed, so here I am with some thoughts about the general direction of this blog, my writing, and my general anime fandom as we enter the cusp of the transitioning year.

I’m going to be laying out few concrete goals here; concrete goals are historically what I’ve been unable to meet, and I don’t want to set myself up for easily-defined failure. But at my day job the management is sort of enamored with an idea called “Start, Stop, or Continue,” in which the person participating in the exercise, annual review, or whatever, defines the actions that they’d like to start, stop, or continue going forward. I’ve found that to be a more helpful way of framing things in my life, so despite the fact that I find the professional world to be a little bit jargon-y and silly at times, I feel that in this case at least its heart is in the right place.

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Anime Reviews Opinion Personal Reviews

Revisiting Shirobako – You Can’t Go Home Again

This essay contains spoilers for the Shirobako film.

As crazy as things have been over the past several months, my husband and I are finally at the point where we’re willing to go out and see the occasional movie again. As it was prior to the original lockdown, the majority of our moviegoing energy has been spent seeing limited-run anime showings on odd nights of the week. This pretty much guarantees both a small crowd (which has been helpful to settle my fears of being out in public again) and that we’ll enjoy what we’re there to see. Recently we ventured out to see a film we’ve been waiting to arrive stateside for a long time, the Shirobako movie. We both loved the anime series and really wanted to the witness the continuing adventures of the characters that we’d grown to love. That said, to expect the same of a beloved franchise (and in some sense, to receive it), can lead to some issues.

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Personal

Blue Blazes and Attempting to Tame the Imposter

This essay contains spoilers for the Japanese live-action series Blue Blazes.

I’d wager that most of you reading only know me for my writing here and perhaps from my occasional self-inflicted speaking engagements at local Minnesota conventions. Part of my day job involves providing specialized onboarding and ongoing training in a professional setting. It’s a job I sort of fell into after a while, but I enjoy being able to help people along in their learning processes, and it’s also nice to be the person with all (or at least most) of the answers.

One thing I’ve learned over the years as I’ve tried to independently become a better trainer, is that adult learners tend to operate on a fairly predictable continuum when it comes to learning a new task or process. Before they start hands-on training, most folks are eager and willing to learn a new task. It’s kind of an “ignorance is bliss” state of being, because whether or not they’ve done any pre-reading or observation before embarking on their learning process, they still don’t always have a full picture of what the upcoming task entails. Once they’re actually starting to perform the task is when vulnerability and self-doubt creeps in – they’re confronted by portions of the task that they didn’t expect or don’t understand right away, and their confidence dips. This is natural and expected; most folks go on to build their skills and become proficient in time. However, the time period while they’re still learning can be a struggle, especially for those of us who are prone to self-doubt. It’s the feeling of being a sort of imposter, fooling everyone around you into believing that you’re good enough to do something that you’re still unsure of.

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