First, note the series page. There may be a better way to keep track of series, but I don’t especially feel like messing with our category/tag taxonomy too much, and a dedicated page allows more control over presentation. If I’ve missed anything (that is, any series of posts that exists primarily on Super Fanicom), let me know.

Second, I have this project in mind, and I need you (yes, you) to let me know how viable it is.

I’m envisioning a series of free ebooks of essays on various topics in fandom. The goal would be to produce something more “professional-looking” than blog work — that is, the things would be copy edited proper-like, and made to conform with some style manual or another, to a degree. But I’d want the “kinds” of essays present in each collection to vary quite a bit. That is, a theoretical analysis paper on franchise x might be followed by a personal account of franchise x’s impact on the writer’s viewing habits — the point being that, as we’re free of the constraints of what approaches are in vogue in the popular press and academia and so on, we should take advantage of the opportunity to present a tremendous variety of angles on the things we enjoy in one mighty document.

What I need to know is, would anyone — bloggers, commenters, readers, or otherwise — be interested in contributing articles/essays/papers (I’m thinking 2000 words and up) to such a thing? As it’d be offered for free, there’d be no monetary compensation involved, of course. But I think the effort at letting ourselves run with a topic and compiling the results in a nice-looking package could prove worthwhile.

Update 8/9: I’m going live with the new theme now, after making some changes based on the feedback I got here. You’re welcome to keep commenting with suggestions (and bear in mind that I have yet to decide what else to do with the header, so there may be a place for more color up there).

Lest you thought my Twitter comment about revamping the site was an act of impulse, mere offhand rambling, I present to you the basically-finished prototype of Super Fanitheme 3.0, a simplified, cleaned-up affair compared to what we have now. All I need now are thoughts on how it might be made better.

The front page, with image caption formatting

More sections offered for your perusal after the break.

No, it’s not SF.c’s anniversary, or even the anniversary of my adoption into the SF.c gang; it’s a far more important date.  On this day my beard is one year of age.

Yes, it’s been hard, and like any relationship ours has gone through its share of rough patches, but we’re still together after a year.  It’s remarkable.  A lot of people said it would never work.

For the time being, I’m un-publishing and putting a hold on our (my brother and I, that is) joint audio project, while I think of what should be done with it — not that it was oft-consulted, but I don’t especially want to pull a handful of posts without explanation. Simply put, I’m unsatisfied with it as Super Fanicom content for a number of reasons; it may be insightful every once in a while, but it’s also rougher than I’d like in terms of audio quality, and most of it isn’t very useful (unless you especially enjoy listening to me complain about how I wish Gurren Lagann would end already). I may move it over to pontif.us at some point, though I’d really like to (and I really need to) focus on getting some written content done for the time being — and besides, there’s faint murmurings of a Voice Module on the horizon. At the very least, I can say I’ve learned a fair bit about audio editing from it all.

As you might have guessed, it is the time of year that many of us are bogged down by schoolwork, so while the old SF.c is not exactly dead, it is quieter than we would like to see it.  If you cast your mind back, even just a little, you’ll also find this means it’s time for strange fluff.

As happens sometimes your genial host Pontifus and I were chatting just a while ago.  Here’s what happened.

I’m aware it’s usually Pontifus doing housekeeping duty here on the Super Fani (I say it like super fanny,  because I’m up way too late and that’s how I roll), but I thought I would duck in here out of the storm of paper-writing and grading to say that we’re cooking up something wild and crazy here on the Super Fani (see, I said it again).  

What is it? you should really ask right now.

Mysterious, that’s what!

I have some (arguably) substantial posts in the works, really — in particular, I intend to relate some thoughts on my local convention in the very near future, and I can (and will) probably churn out another half dozen ruminations on Aria before I run out of things to say about it for the time being. My hard drive having been devoured by viruses has set me back a bit, though, so I’ve decided to follow in Cuchlann’s footsteps and run my posts (excepting the Otouto dialogue, for which I’m not fully responsible) through Wordle. The results are as pictured above.

It’s appropriate, I think, that one of my most commonly-used words is “one,” whatever the context may be. After all, it’s my goal — nay, my holy quest to demonstrate that, in the right hands (i.e. all of ours), art criticism can become a great unifier and therefore a more effective means by which to understand ourselves. If this requires the forcible divorce of criticism from clandestine academic circles, then so be it — but let’s not jump to that conclusion and charge in with guns blazing just yet. Also interesting is that I use “hell” more often than weighty terms such as “existence,” “concerns,” and “Socrates.” Clearly, I am the devil.

Speaking of criticism, I recently received my academic adviser’s comments on the essay I’ll be using as a writing sample in my grad school applications, upon which she wrote what is clearly the best comment ever. And I quote: “Derrida is turning in his grave :(” For the record, it was a misunderstanding — in the following paragraph, I proceed to explain why the statement she didn’t like is flawed — but that comment, complete with frowning face, made me lol.

Dammit, this post has nothing to do with anime, manga, or games. I’m done here. Pontifus out!