Top 25 (recent) Anime for people who dont watch anime

What’s this all about then? Well this is some suggested viewing for people who are only passingly familiar with anime in general or with anime thats come out in the last few years. If the last time you watched some anime it was prefaced by this:

or the words “Studio Ghibli” then this list is for you. If you think all anime is shallow super powered adventures aimed at teenage boys or heaving tits and demon penises, then this list is for you. I’ve tried to cover as many of the major genre’s as I could (so now you have no fucking excuse for referring to anime as if its a genre rather than a medium ;)) without a) sacrificng quality or b) sacrificing accessibility. So the majority of shows listed here require no prior knowledge of or familiarity with anime or japanese culture in general to fully enjoy. If you do end up checking any of them out let me know what you think. Continue reading…

Best of 2011 – Manga

It’s currently September 29th, if past years are anything to go by that means that I should get this posted sometime mid-2012, possibly in June as an early birthday present to myself. Then again starting three months early may actually mean that this is one of my rare yearly round-ups that make it out at an appropriate time. Despite the tragic intervention of an MSc into my life of lazy media consumption I have already read what could fairly be described as too much this year. So much in fact that I’m rather apprehensive of adding up exactly how much. Went and added them up, 16543 chapters read since January. Not counting that a large number are monthly releases (i.e. generally twice as long) lets assume a weekly chapter size of 20 pages, that’s 330,860 pages. Around 135 individual titles. Seems a bit excessive if I do say so myself. On the other hand though its been an awesome year, lots of long-running series finally finished scanlation and I got around to reading a large number of the “classics” that I had avoided or missed (including the “Big Three” – Bleach, Naruto and One Piece). This means that paring this list down to ten was an even bigger pain in the arse than it usually is. Continue reading…

Best of 2009 – Anime (Yes it is super overdue) (But its full of links)

I get the feeling that I’ve somehow forgotten a large amount of the stuff I’ve watched this year as I feel that I’ve watched a fuckton of anime but when it came time to compile a list it was a real struggle to come up with ten. Of course when I did put together a list it became difficult to select just ten titles as I watched a lot of quality stuff this year. Continue reading…