If you’ve been following Animated Meanderings for a while you might have come across some of my comments regarding the flood of comment spam I have to deal with on a daily basis. It all happens at the backend, since I queue comments for moderation in any case (which would explain to anyone wondering why their comments don’t appear immediately).

Regardless – it has reached a point where I have to clear my comments of something in the range of 100 – 200 spam comments per day, and over weekends it gets much worse. Bots never rest, after all. As you will also already probably know, I’ve been looking for a solution for a while now, and it appears that Disqus has offered me that solution. I hope.

If you scroll to the bottom of this post, you’ll see the comments system looking a little different (hopefully much nicer too :) ). For the time being, I’m still going to allow guest posts – as before it will still ask for e-mail addresses, and URLs to your sites, if you have them, but the system should be much less kind to bots who feel like spamming. Of course, should you wish to do so, you have the option of logging in with any of the following services: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, OpenID or Disqus itself if you have a profile there – and it will save you from needing to log in and/or enter your details the next time you come along and post.

I’ve observed it in action on a number of other sites, and it seems to work pretty well for the most part – so I’m hoping it makes things a little easier for everyone who comes to visit – feel free to test it out while you’re here.

Comments, suggestions and opinions are always appreciated – I’m looking forward to seeing more people visiting and commenting in the future. Of course, you, my regular readers can help – refer some of your mates here *hint hint wink*

That’s all for now, I’ll have some more news up in the next two days or so, and of course, keep checking back on the Summer Anime Preview page, since I’m updating that fairly regularly. :)

Those of you who have been following Animated Meanderings for a while now will probably remember – vaguely – that I did a post regarding the rather unfortunate and untimely demise of South Africa’s only print magazine that focused exclusively on anime, manga and japanese culture. I’m referring, of course, to Otaku Mag.

For South Africa, it was pretty revolutionary – the anime scene at the time was very much underground, or rather, completely invisible, and the magazine itself did a lot to bring the genre into the light. If anything, we can probably credit them to some degree with the eventual appearance of South Africa’s very own dedicated anime channel, Animax SA.

Sadly, the recession ended up taking its toll here as well – unable to get and keep advertising, Otakumag was forced to close down operations, despite a last-ditch attempt from the staff (and many fans) to keep things going. Animax, that other shining beacon of hope for anime-starved fans, became less a strong light and more a guttering candle giving off a lot of smoke and a particularly bad odour, and the channel finally caved in the latter part of 2010.

Given what the channel became towards the end, there were more sighs of relief than wails of despair.

There’s no doubt that Otakumag’s passing served as a solid step backwards for South Africa’s anime community – the related forums, which were at one point a hive of activity for anime enthusiasts, has pretty much died down, and at the point where I last visited, had attracted some spammers.

Still, Otakumag started something, and it appears a group of people are determinedly at hand to try and move things forward. How and where everything started is a little unclear at this point – but over on the Digital Natives forum, a group of guys got together and two weeks ago finally launched Anime-Ima! – a digital anime magazine with a distinctive South African flavour, for South Africans.

Other than announcing the latest arrival on the SA anime scene, I’m not going to go into too much detail – it’s the first issue, and as with any new endeavour there are bound to be a few early speedbumps. There are probably a few ways that layout could be improved – but the former Otaku staff have already given a few tips and some very constructive feedback – and the guys from Anime-Ima! have seemed quite happy to accept whatever feedback they’ve been given thus far.

It’s still very early days, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot of evolution still to come – Jay Liebenberg aka Kage and Jason Mitchell (Editor) appear very passionate about their project.

In any case – I’m sure you want to know where to get it – you can download it (pdf download – and it’s for free!!) from this link – and there is a healthy discussion going on over at the Anime-Ima! board on Digital Natives. They’re also looking for writers and reviewers, so if you fancy yourself an epic writer of reviews or topics about Japan in general, I’d suggest popping on over and getting in touch with the guys.

Issue 2 is at this point scheduled to be released at the end of July (it’s a bi-monthly publication at this point) – let’s all hope it takes off and we can get to see it in print soon – well, that’s my preference anyways :)

Some of you may probably have noticed the little banner linking to J-list hovering in my side-bar lately. J-list is an online shop specialising in all sorts of goodies from Japan, and when I say all-sorts, I do mean all sorts.

We’re talking books, toys, figurines, anime (although mostly in BD format), magazines (you can even get subscriptions through them), cosplay items and clothing. And … ummm … some other things I should probably not mention here.

The shirt (source: jlist.com)

If you’re wondering why I feel the need to mention the store suddenly – well, in light of recent events in Japan – I’m specifically referring to the earthquake/tsunami – J-list and Danny Choo of Culture Japan have teamed up to create a t-shirt that’s being sold through J-list.

The shirt itself features Culture Japan’s mascot character Suenaga Mirai (her Millenium version), and the text Ganbare Nippon!! (“Don’t give up, Japan!!/Do your best, Japan!!) – serving as a message of hope and encouragement for the disaster hit Tohoku region. It’s not an empty message either – the shirt retails for $19.95 and 25% of the retail value gets donated to the Japanese Red Cross each month. So buying the t-shirt effectively means you will be donating $5 towards helping with the relief effort, and you get a pretty awesome shirt to show off to all your other otaku mates.

It’s a worthy cause – if you love anime, manga, or anything else about Japan in general, and if you happen to have a bit of spare cash lying around, go ahead and buy the shirt.

And just look at Mirai. She’s cute:

Mirai (source: dannychoo.com)

It would be interesting to hear how much J-list manages to donate to the Red Cross based on sales of this shirt alone – aside from the fact that they are already donating 5% of all their sales to the Red Cross already.

Depending on interest, I may make a point of reviewing more items available on the J-list site from time to time. Yes, the links are affiliate links – so along with supporting J-list you’ll be helping me support Animated Meanderings (along with my future projects) as well. More on all that further down the line :)

Well … it’s about time. After a lot of fussing about and hard work (and tearing my hair out because things were taking too long), Animated Meanderings is finally back up and running in its new home.

As you can see, we have an entirely new theme going – looking, in my personal opinion, a lot better than it used to. Of course, with a big move like this there are bound to be some teething pains – with any luck I’ve managed to do what’s needed to avoid most of them – but there might still be a broken link or two – if you find one, contact me and let me know.

A few things are still going to happen – both visible and invisible – some things weren’t really possible to sort out while the blog was in maintenance mode. Of course, anyone trying to visit the old URL will be redirected to this one; Quantumworx and Animated Meanderings – while related – will be going their seperate ways.

A couple of things are still in the works – a submission form, for anyone that would like to share news, an archive page – since getting back to some of the older posts will be a pain – and, well … more things as I can think of them.

One of the changes you might notice (if you were following us before) will be the fact that I’ve removed registrations from the blog. Firstly – they serve no real purpose, and secondly – the spammers seem to love registering. They love posting comments too, sadly for them I usually forgot to approve them. If you are interested in following my posts, you can now register your e-mail address to receive updates on the days I post, or you can follow me on Twitter if you have/use the service. Maybe – if I can get enough readers I’ll consider putting up a fan-page on Facebook. Worth it? You never know.

That’s it for right now – things are coming still – welcome back and sound off in the comments and let me know what you think.

Ja ne!!

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Well, here we go …

Whoever thought this would happen, me … with a blog. I’ve played around before, on MySpace, but its not something I ever took seriously, but this time I’d like to take something of a different approach.

This blog was meant to tie in with my website, but with time being as limited as it is and things just not going quite the way I want them to – that website just doesn’t seem to want to happen.

Because the site will mostly have to do with anime, that will be one of the things I’ll be focusing on, along with manga, japanese language, and any other tidbits I can come along with that wanders along those topics.

Of course, you’ll be faced with a couple of other posts as well – all dealing with my various likes – such topics as gaming, LANs and even the results of my cricket matches will all find a home on this blog

I’m off to an awesome start, look at the originality of that title … ;-)