Hello Everyone, This is JM from Anime Pilipinas. We know that the fireworks and festivities had ended about a few weeks ago, but we would just like to greet our readers and our social media followers a very, very happy new year!
This is also our first anniversary, and the year 2014 has been an amazing ride for all of us here. We know that we had posted some good stuffs, but we also have some downtime… both on the technical side (sometimes, servers are crap), as well as some personal commitments.
We have also covered amazing pop-culture events, like the 13th Philippine TOYCON, The Best of Anime 2014, and Cosplay Mania ’14: Evolution, which we brought live updates on our social media… but personally, I’m very happy that we’ve get the chance to attend Anime Festival Asia 2014, and hopefully we’ll get to return this year.
But in all seriousness, we’ll promise that we will give you a detailed event reports of each of those events, especially AFA 2014, very soon.
The Future of Otaku’s Verdict
Before anything else, I would like to make a disclaimer… Anybody remembers our old December tradition, Otaku’s Verdict? We were actually planning to revive the project, but we’ve initially decided to postpone the polls at that time because we feel that we need ample time to prepare for our visit to Singapore.
We have ultimately decided to postpone our December polls indefinitely, as we have felt that the polls had done its purpose in bringing the community together on a similar purpose. We will be focusing our attention more on our website, as well as dipping into other ventures that we may be planning in the future.
And besides… I could suggest other popularity polls like Anime Trending and Golden Ticket Awards that did similar purpose as Otaku’s Verdict. But who knows? If our followers want to, then we could bring it back.
As per request…
Now, lets get to business… Yes, the site still looks the same, but we have made some changes as suggested by people who participated on our survey. Thank you very much to those who have pitched in!
Now first, several people had messaged us throughout last year regarding the website’s content. Specifically, why does our news website lack opinion pieces. To be honest, we would like to “test the waters” first, so to speak…
We would like to establish to everyone that the goal of Anime Pilipinas is to be a place for some serious Japanese anime and pop-culture news from a Filipino perspective, and not to be labeled as just another otaku website. No offense!
Also, we would want to differentiate ourselves to our predecessor, ZEN Otaku Honbu… but in hindsight, we still have the same team & a similar content from the previous one. Not that there was anything wrong with it!
Anyways, we have deliberated & decided that we will be bringing back our column section. At the moment, we are gunning for it to be semi-weekly, and will feature “Dispatches” and the return of “Random Thought”.
DISPATCHES will be a semi-weekly column, written by Anime Pilipinas events correspondent Red Mendoza, where he shares his personal opinions regarding the Japanese pop-culture scene in the country, particularly Anime, Cosplay and the Events scene. If you have seen the opinion piece, titled “When will they ever learn?”, then you now have an idea on how will this column go.
RANDOM THOUGHT will also be a semi-weekly column, where I talk about things that may be random to some but most certainly make a big impact in the pop-culture scene. Yes, this was also the title of my blog during our days as ZEN Otaku Honbu.
In addition, our colleague Marlo Magtibay, better known as “Anime Kabayan”, will also share his views & opinions on the Philippine anime scene in Filipino from time-to-time.
But we are open to a different varieties of voices, and if you want to add your viewpoint on the Japanese pop-culture scene, you may shoot us an email at [email protected] (Subject: Viewpoints). Who knows? We could make you a regular contributor, and possibly join us in covering events.
Also, we have expanded our categories for a much easier access of a specific pop-culture genre to everyone, like “Live-action”, “Music” and “Gaming”, and not dump them to the “Pop-culture” category. My Mistake.
But frankly, we also need some people who can contribute in all categories. If you want to volunteer for us and contribute news articles, you can send us an email as well.
Foreign News Stories
Also, there are several people asked us about some of the news articles we publish, specifically those that may be targeted to other countries, like from Viz Media, Sentai Filmworks and several others.
There are also some who are saying that we are Anime Pilipinas, emphasizing on the word “Pilipinas”, and that we should strictly focus on news from the Philippines.
As much as we want more news from the Philippines, the problem is that you can only go to few places for valuable news… For example, there are only three (3) terrestrial networks that airs anime programming, about the same number goes for cable & satellite TV channels, and there is only one licensing company that we know, which is Telesuccess Productions… and they are quite secretive.
Besides, whatever happens in the United States greatly affects other institutions around the world.
For example, ANIMAX Asia aired the sci-fi comedy anime Space Dandy in English dubbing, and that dubbing was provided by FUNimation Entertainment. Also, licensing companies like Madman Entertainment (Australia) and Manga UK (United Kingdom) has to coordinate with their American counterparts to acquire a certain anime title.
So, we just cannot ignore the things that is happening in other countries, not that we want to be Anime News Network or something… but we will do our very best.
We also hope that we could do some feature stories and several others, but if you want to see something on our website then let us know. Enough chit-chat, we still have a lot of backlogs to do!
Thank you very much for supporting Anime Pilipinas throughout last year, and hopefully you go deeper with us this 2015. Cheers!
JM Melegrito is the Executive Editor of Anime Pilipinas, and you may follow him on Twitter at @blockerZENPH.
