Mind Games, Son, Mind Games: Viewing Traditional Vs. E-Sports

Anyone who has been hanging out with me in the last couple months has probably had me bring up the Starcraft 2 competitive scene, something I've been following rather closely for many weeks now. Indeed, I'm not alone in this; although places such have South Korea have commonly had video games streamed live to audiences of hundreds of thousands, it is only recently becoming more popular in the Western scene.  With that said, now that it's catching on, it's growing incredibly rapidly: for instance, MLG Columbus' 3 day tournament had a 16,000 member live audience and served over 1.3 petabytes of livestream data. Impressive numbers, and they only seem to be growing.

When I first started seriously watching the games and began getting really into it, I figured it was another kind of phase; I would get really into it for a few weeks, and then I would lose interest and move onto another hobby. However, here I find myself almost 6 months later still firmly entrenched in this world, and even watching a game while I'm typing this.

I had never really considered myself as someone into sports; I'll watch the Super Bowl, and the rare sports game when it's on TV and others are watching, but in general I couldn't name most sports team or major athletes, and I would never go out of my way to watch a game, especially alone. Despite this, I find myself staying up regularly till 4am to watch GSL and devoting many hours to watch VoDs and Youtube videos from major tournaments. Because of this sudden shift, I began wondering what makes the SC2 competitive scene different than any traditional sports scene that most of my other peers are fascinated with.

Blood, Swords, and Honor: A Review of 13 Assassins

Being back home means catching up with old friends, and I did so the other day by seeing a movie. My friend suggested 13 Assassins, and after quickly skimming a synopsis and seeing Rotten Tomatoes had overwhelmingly positive reviews of the movie, I agreed and off we went to the local art-house theater to see this imported Japanese samurai movie.

Return of Giant Backlog: Mini-review Rampage #2

So now that I'm home on break, I'm ripping through various media and finishing up and starting a lot of series. This naturally means I have consumed a large amount of games, music, books, and shows, and once again I've accumulated a large backlog of things that I want to get my thoughts down about, but don't necessarily feel I have enough to say to warrant a full post on its own (In retrospect, I could do one every other day and actually get in the habit of writing more often, but whatever). I promise more serious posts will eventually be coming around...eventually >_>.

Music, Guitars, and Subspace Transportation: FLCL & Scott Pilgrim

I recently watched a show that started by having a mysterious girl from another land show up, and the main character (somewhat immature) fell about in love with but took a while to realize it. The girl was pretty shy about her origins, had the strange ability to pull things from seemingly another dimension, and the ability to engage enemies enemies in close combat with an unconventional melee weapon.

Searching for a Thread: In which Blake makes a Top Ten List

So I recently finished watching FLCL, and when talking to people about how much I liked it. At one point I made the claim "It's not in my top 10--er, well at least not in the top 5" or something very similar to that. This caused me to start considering where my opinions on things actually stood in relation to one another. I mean naturally I prefer things more than others, but I had never really sat down and though what things were absolutely my favorites. It would be hard with things like books and movies, since the sheer amount of things I've read and watched at this point means just compiling a list in the first place would be a lot of effort.

However, I realized if I restrict myself purely to Japanese media, my job gets a lot easier. I thought it might be fun to make a top 10 list of manga, movies, and anime that I've enjoyed over the last few years, partially because I can and partially to see if I can discern any underlying threads why I like certain things.

A couple disclaimers. The first is I left out videogames on purpose. For one, I approach them a lot differently than I do other forms of entertainment, and in addition adding in videogames would add a looooot of titles to the list; for instance, on my desk I have 16 DS games, of which 14 are Japanese in origin.
The second disclaimer is that the following list only comprises series that I've completely finished. There are quite a number of works that I either gave up, couldn't finish since I didn't have access, or the series themselves have yet to come to a conclusion (such as Broken Blade, Hellsing, Hani-kimi, Wallflower, Bleach, etc).

Anyway, without further ado!