It looks like upgrading to WordPress 2.8 broke the poll widget. Nevertheless, I think there were enough votes to pick the first round winners:

Cowboy Bebop (42%)
FLCL (23%)
Haibane Renmei (23%)
.hack//SIGN (17%)
Aria (15%)
Last Exile (13%)
ef: a tale of memories (11%)
Death Note (11%)
Azumanga Daioh (11%)
Code Geass/R2 (11%)

These ten will advance to the final round of the best anime OST poll. I’ll post the second round once I figure out how to get the poll working again.

And besides, I don’t really see how there could be such a thing as a “surge” in popularity for Light Novels; they’re basically just romance novels written for men, which is, uh, not a terribly large demographic here in America.

This is too imbecilic to let pass. “Romance novels” for men — absolute nonsense. A “light novel” is essentially the Japanese equivalent of an occidental “young adult” book. Fuyumi Ono and Nahoko Uehashi are counterparts of such writers as Diana Wynne Jones,¹ not Harlequin romance hacks.

1. One of my favorite writers. Her book Howl’s Moving Castle is far better than Miyazaki’s botch of a movie and is strongly recommended. [↩]

I spent most of the weekend installing and tweaking a new theme. It looks fine in my main browser, but I just discovered that in Safari, there are suddenly ads on my site.

I’ll see if I can root out the offending code this evening, but the chances are that I’m going to be looking for a different theme. Don’t worry; Pyun and Potaru will remain.

Update: It turned out to be an easy fix. I just needed to delete a few lines in three of the .php files.

When you’re burned out, do something else. You’re not doing anyone a favor by going through the motions. By the time Zac Bertschy quit his “Answerman” job, my sympathies were with the Flakes of the Week. Justin Sevakis’ review of The Sky Crawlers tells me more about Sevakis’ life than about Oshii’s movie. (Sevakis might want to look up the word “obtuse.”)

About reviews: that someone paid for a review doesn’t mean that it’s insightful, and length does not imply profundity. If you want to find what’s worth your time, you can do just as well surfing at random through the otakusphere as at ANN.

Yesterday’s post has mysteriously disappeared. This is not the only anomalous incident involving my websites this week. My guess is that the web host’s server migration is not going as smoothly as it should. Until I’m reasonably sure that what I write won’t vanish, this weblog will be even quieter than usual.

(The missing post itself was of no consequence. It was just a few amusing links: this, this and this.)