Senpai Noticed Me: My Blogging Influences

Hi everyone, I’m back. If you haven’t noticed on my twitter feed a week and some change ago, the Sunday before last, one of my blog posts was quickly featured on one of Glass Reflection’s videos. In quick terms, this post was featured was featured in this video. I know that it was only there for a split second, but you have no idea what that meant to me. (A special thanks to Sam from Unsheathed for figuring this out, because I was a complete ditz that didn’t even notice when I first watched it.) I’ve watched Arkada’s videos for years, so the very fact that something that I worked on appeared on one of his videos made me so happy. (If you ever read this, thanks for noticing me Senpai!) Since one of my influences did something small but huge to me, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about all of them.

I know that I have said this before, but my primary influence has always been Podtaku. If you didn’t know what that was, Podtaku was a podcast that featured four anime reviewers on youtube that had great chemistry with each other. The two big names Arkada and Gigguk were a part of it, but so were Holden from Holden Casanova and Jean from Anime Appraisal. The podcast had its own small culture that grew a little more when more youtube personalities were added to it called J-Taku. And no, it wasn’t the only podcast that was interesting, it was there videos. No matter how frequent they were, there was something special about their videos that made them extremely entertaining. By watching the podcast, I was introduced to anime culture on the internet for my first time, because I never seeked it out anywhere else. Podtaku ending was the main motivation for me starting this blog after all.

Right now, I still watch Glass Reflection and Gigguk videos, but my media focus comes more from blog posts and other written media than anything else. I also watch some smaller youtuber videos if they appear on my feed and look interesting. A couple stand outs are The Cartoon Cipher and Canipa. They both have a wide variety of videos about different aspects of anime series that look interesting. That’s about it really, because episode reviews and series reviews have gotten incredibly stale these days.  Well, they at least have for me but I’m kind of biased because I’ve never been a huge fan of that sort of media with some exceptions.

Moving back to writing, I do my best to read a lot of other people’s blogs. I like the special editorials from Anime News Network and Crunchyroll. These are people with more access to anime media then a lot of us do, so it’s interesting to see them use it from time to time. Then there are an endless amount of blogs that I read on WordPress. I’m not going to name any specific names because I don’t want to leave anyone out, but if you are reading this you are probably one of them. I may not comment all the time, but I do read a lot. Each blog that I read gives me a new idea on what to write about and how to write it. I’ve changed a lot of how I’ve written things, like my seasonal anime stuff. After reading what other people have been doing for seasonal impressions and reviews, I borrowed some inspiration from a few cool people and changed up what I was doing and I think that change works much better for my blog.

I have a small amount of influences outside of the internet anime realm as well. When I am able to talk to people about anime in person and we have a discussion, there’s a post possibility right there. Or even outside of anime completely. I’m a Christian and one of my major influences are my pastor’s sermons. Pastor Hiedi has some deep sermons with great messages in them. She also leaves a lot of them open ended, which is what I try to do with a lot of my discussions. Speeches in general are also influences. Figuring out sentence structure and formats that people are using for my own purposes is fun.

If there is a quick simile that can be used for blogging, it’s like soloing in jazz music. Take as many influences as you can to make your own stuff feel unique. Jazz musicians don’t just listen to jazz music to help with their soloing capabilities. They also look into classical music, rock and roll, or whatever tickles their fancy to get unique rhythms and licks to use whenever they need them. I try to do the same thing when it comes writing my blog posts. I’m not sure if that truly makes my stuff unique, but it’s been working for me.

Who or what are your major blogging influences and how have they changed how you write your blog posts? Let’s have a fun discussion in the comments section.