←[108]  jpmeyer brings up a whole lot of excellent points:

There are so many aspects of the blog format…that subtly subsume the writer to the blog itself.

Yes, the author is inextricably subsumed in the blog because – by the very fact of their existence in the blogosphere – they cannot exist without a blog. Revisit this paragraph:

lelangir: …[I]n the ‘sphere, it is not communication that is most significant, but being. Being is not a prerequisite for communication – communication is a prerequisite for being. In the ‘sphere, you cannot be unless you write and are read. If no one reads your blog, that makes you not a digital individual but simply a person who keeps a private online journal. Our public identities are predicated upon this collective society, and it is a discursive system of acknowledgment that grants us individuality. So in a world intrinsically reduced to mere letters, what more can we do than produce these mere letters? [my re-emphasis]

As for my cross-posting, jpmeyer asks:

Why post at one of the over 9000 blogs you post at over another unless they are all indistinguishable?

To which I responded with this diagram:

The hypothetical circumstance “indistinguishable blogs” (as I am interpreting the phrase) has one large implication; it assumes that the focus of the content is the same (i.e. twelve blogs focusing on mecha).

What happens when content is all similar? You get a smaller readership because the perimeter of your broadcast is reduced. Let me re-articulate the previous diagram:

Now we have overlapping paradigms: the content paradigm (mecha etc.), the blog paradigm, and the author paradigm. This diagram isn’t to scale – nor is this a precise way of visualizing the complexity of the sphere (which is too complex to bother). But just to clarify this visualization, Crusader’s sphere is totally within THAT’s sphere. Crusader is also within the mecha sphere, etc. Visualize indistinguishable content-blogs:

In this hypothetical situation (and hypothetically insofar as the entire mecha sphere is comprised of three blogs), because the three indicated blogs all write about the same thing, the perimeter of their broadcast is coextensive with their content – they don’t write about yuri hentai, do they? The outlined circle is just a representation of the broadcast perimeter, and the space onto which that representative perimeter is displayed is the readership. White space outside the mecha sphere is constituted of readers, but not mecha readers.

jpmeyer: Why make an identical post on two different sites which have very different focuses? That’s brand dilution on multiple axes.

(1) The focus of the blog is irrelevant when considering expansion of broadcast perimeter, as was depicted in previous diagrams. (2) “Brand dilution”? – I don’t know if “brand” refers to blog or blogger…but in any case that also has little significance. If the representational power of my handle is diminished, then so be it, what good was such power anyway? I haven’t noticed any sort of effect after doing this since August.

jpmeyer: Why have ghostlighting make a post here rather than WRL about pedophilia here rather than somewhere else if what truly matters is who is saying it? Or, this would indicate to me that the importance is on what is said, not who is saying it. [my emphasis]

This is half true – ghostlightning constitutes the ghostlightning sphere – his own entourage. If he didn’t post it, digiboy probably wouldn’t read it, so you lose reader[s] there. Then, ghost in part constitutes the [oh, say mecha] sphere, which is author-independent – readers of the mecha sphere read mecha posts, not ghostlightning posts, so a mecha reader reading ghost writing on mecha is just incidental.

jpmeyer: Thus, [the] reason that different readerships exists is because the different blogs provide different things. This would imply to me that the blog and its branding is more important than the author when dealing with [aggregate blogs].

He got me there – revisit this:

Which can be succinctly countered with: you’re not a reader until you’ve read.

So my previous thoughts on readers exist before the fact that they read doesn’t make any sense because I was confusing the author paradigm with the content paradigm. It’s like saying a reader that reads mecha is intrinsically a reader of Crusader before Crusader existed. Nope.

…however, because some readers of mecha read Crusader not for the fact that he’s Crusader but that he writes on mecha, that seemingly author-centric reading is merely incidental, as I said before. In this respect, the creation of Crusader functions as an insertion into and expansion of the greater mecha sphere.

Dr. Lolikit (PhD in lolikiteanism) gives us his last remark:

[W]ho’s saying it and where it’s being said BOTH matter.

Yes, and this is the only benefit of nomadic blogging: I have my own author-paradigm lelangir sphere, the entourage that follows my centralized feed, and I also appropriate the THAT sphere, the Cal’intents sphere, the F’aizen sphere, those blog paradigms.

Viewed this way, the internet is fractal – the previous diagrams in part constitute the sphere we are familiar with. But it is reducible to one circle that shares the same paradigmatic space with other content-oriented spheres, technology, news, porn, etc. What syntagmatically connects these spheres is cross-posting authors, trackbacks and links:

Maybe it boils down to that we need to recognize the author (unlike the plethora of bitches who don’t distinguish between authors in team posts) as the content-producer of the blog, the readership as an equally important component, and the blog as a significant, integral, intrinsic and inextricable part of the blogosphere (hence BLOGosphere, or what have you). Anyway, thanks, jpmeyer, for shoving a whole bunch of flutes up my ass…it was fun.

And chew on this for some idiolectic food for thought

Anyway.  This “moment” refers to being accepted into Super Fanicom.  Yes, I actually had to apply for this job — or, given the very low rate of pay Pontifus is offering, perhaps “task” is a better word.  Anyone know the story of Sisyphus? 

It’s rough, going out into the seas of uncaring blog-readers on your own.  Even if people do read one’s posts, they might not comment.  A team-blog generally guarantees a handful of readers, as the other bloggers are (assumedly) interested in what one has to say.  Also, it expands one’s pool of friends, which is always a good thing, I hear.  

My head, it pulses like a blazar.  So huzzah for being accepted into the biggest circle-jerk this side of Oi, Hayaku!

It was this or NSFW. Damn fanart.

As Pontifus already told you, we’re diving hip-deep into the twelve moments of anime project for 2008.  However, I will warn you in advance, I’ll be “cheating” a little and doing some video game moments as well — I don’t think that’s too much of a problem, as Super Fanicom is about gaming as well.  Moving on!

As you might have gathered, my first entry into Superfanicom’s ultimate, giant Christmas extravaganza is Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu.  The trick here — the one that explains the questions you’re hurling at your screen right now — is that it isn’t the show that I’m entering here.  It’s the phenomenon.

I know things turned sour, yes.  I know the show went awry.  I know I haven’t even finished watching it, despite my maddened oath to blog every episode (I believe what I said was, “By God I’ll finish this show if it breaks me“).  But can you cast your mind back to that moment when the first episode had just come out of your local fansubber’s hot little queue?  Your cursor rested lovingly on the file icon and you prepared yourself for. . .  something.  I’m sure my following statement includes people who didn’t even watch, but it seemed as though we were all excited.  And for a few episodes it paid off.  The Akihabara episode was actually pretty great.  This is a show, we felt, about us, about the sometimes-crippling sense of alienation that we have, to greater or lesser extents, put up with.  Some of us maybe for all our lives.

Perhaps the part that hurts nerds (of all stripes) the most is that gnawing anxiety that underlies every reminder that we’re different from those around us — we chose this.  It may not actually be true, by the way.  Some people think biology determines our personalities.  If that’s true, then I have generations of other people to blame for the way I swoon when Luke turns off his targeting computer.  But unlike people discriminated against for their gender, race, or sexual preferences, most would agree that nerds, in some way, chose to be nerds.  That is, at some point I was (metaphorically) presented with a football and a lightsaber toy.

So Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu seemed promising to a lot of us.  Some otaku are still self-conscious about being nerds.  I’m not, but that’s because of my circumstances in a grad. program.  So for someone so demonstratably-popular among the “normies” to be an otaku did a lot of things.  It let the still-self-conscious feel better, because even the popular kids like moe.  All of us can identify with the social estrangement Haruka fears, and so the show, in some ways, functioned as a microcosm of our lives.

Bloggers, fans, and anime-watchers all came together to talk about this show, to wonder what was going to happen, and to be fascinated by someone’s attempt to chart the really painful moments of an otaku’s life.  Sure, we had Genshiken and Lucky Star already, but those are after the fact — sure, some people still make fun of the Genshiken, and even Konata’s friends think she’s a bit odd, but the nerds in both shows were basically in safe zones, where they could do whatever they wanted and only their actions, not their predilictions, would be judged.  Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu put its characters in the worst pit of arbitrary judgment and bias imaginable:  high school.

So that seems to me to be a great moment for this year.  Personally, at least, and this is meant to be my twelve moments.  My reasoning stands this way:  I rarely know anything about the state of the otaku-rhombus, but I was made aware of it by this show and the giddy discussions about it.  We seem to have risen up as one and said we need some kind of figure to rally behind.  And getting that many nerds to agree on anything is nothing short of a Christmas miracle.