About

You’re looking at Anime Diet, a lean, mean, mostly spam-free anime media platform. We do everything from the usual episode reviews and commentaries and editorials to a popular podcast Anime Diet Radio, and individual audio columns. We have significantly grown since our humble beginnings at the end of 2006 as Scattered Cels, and we have earned press passes to cons as large as Anime Expo 2009 and Comic Con International. Anime Diet Radio, our podcast, is doing a live panel at AX 2009 together with Anime Genesis and How a Girl Figures, and we look forward to growing until founder Ikari “Mike” Gendo takes over the world on behalf of NERV.

This layout represents the 5th major revision of the website. It occurred on December 19, 2009.

A Brief History of Anime Diet

In the beginning, there was “Scattered Cels.” The title reflects Mike’s tendencies to be literary and snobby, and it was begun in part so Mike could write about Welcome to the NHK, and partly so the highly insightful and hilarious conversations he and Ray had over Skype about anime could be forced onto the rest of the world. The very first post that announced the opening of Scattered Cels was made on December 19, 2006, with the posting of the very first podcast episode following shortly thereafter. At that time, Mike and Ray had no good equipment and the recording was of less-than-professional quality. This would be rectified by episode 3, so please don’t listen to episodes 1 and 2. 🙂

Not long after the founding of Scattered Cels, fellow otaku Jeremy joined as a co-host on Scattered Cels Anime Podcast, episode #6, on February 9, 2007. Now a triumvirate, the podcast more or less took on its present form as three otakus bantering, talking about the news, and increasingly lampooning Mike’s confused sexual identity.

Seeing the massive popularity of the animeblogger.net blogs, the staff decided it was time to move the website over to animeblogger.net and also to give it a good rename. “Scattered Cels” was too obscure and not easily associated with anime in searches, and it was in fact Ray who christened the renamed site “Anime Diet.” Attempts to make it a double pun about parliaments as well as food were squashed. On April 7, 2007, the new site opened on animediet.animeblogger.net, with this banner logo:

Ray eventually came up with a good banner idea, to make a final break with our “Scattered Cels” past. I supplied the slogan, and it has been our mantra ever since:

Around the beginning of summer 2007, the site began to really take off, with loads of news posts–not all of them true–and with Ray’s extremely popular Claymore reviews. Readership also began to explode around the time of Anime Expo 2007, where Mike filmed his infamous video diaries exposing the glitches and general mayhem that happened that year. Throughout the summer, other reader-building events like the Nice Boat/School Days controversy boosted the profile of Anime Diet. At one point, it missed being one of the top 10 animeblogger.net blogs by one place.

Trouble started brewing when animeblogger.net, along with the rest of Dreamhost, began experiencing major slowdowns and outright shutdowns. After two weeks, it was decided that Anime Diet was ready to move to its own independent host, and on September 21, 2007, animediet.animeblogger.net became animediet.net, where it remains to this day. Ads from Google and J-List soon appeared.

In November of 2007, Anime Diet reached a milestone in earning its first press passes to a convention–at Pacific Media Expo 2007. We were able to interview, exclusively, Yukana as well as the director and the character designer of Claymore. Later, we interviewed the members of the Pillows. We anticipate going as press at every convention we attend from this point forward, including the major conventions like Anime Expo, Otakon, and Comic Con, and bring you exclusive coverage and interviews of guests of honor. It was a great step forward in securing a measure of legitimacy for this website.

The website design underwent another major revision at the turn of the year, on December 31, 2007, to make the text larger and columns wider. It also gained a new logo, this one’s predecessor.

On Anime Diet’s third anniversary, a new mascot was officially unveiled after numerous hints and appearances in videos. Drawn by Jose Cardenas, the new mascot, Diet-tan, now graces the top of our page. But the layout then was always meant to be a transitional one, and was an evolutionary upgrade from the previous “blue” theme.

Finally, on May 26, 2010, a brand new, totally revamped theme became active. It finally fulfills the magazine-like promise of the site and took out a lot of the remaining clutter, while looking much more modern.

Since the beginning of 2008, Anime Diet has received repeated requests for review copies of anime and games, and has gone multiple summers to conventions as press–and is only expanding further. The staff has quadrupled in size since the start. Our first panel is coming, at the time of this writing, this week. We have indeed traveled a long distance since our founding three years ago and it is because of all the staff who have contributed and worked hard to build this website to what it is today.

24 thoughts on “About

  1. Hi, I just want to ask one question: where are you from? HK? SG?or CN? ‘Cause I just saw your captures from the anime which were using Chinese Sub……

  2. Ah, that’s actually screen caps taken by the other co-author of this site, Ray. He lives in Taiwan, and usually watches Chinese subs. I can speak some Mandarin, but alas, being assimilated into the Borg-like machine that is the USA, I am illiterate in Chinese.

    I should ask Ray to write something about himself for this page. 🙂

  3. Well, you know mandarin, that’ cool~~~Thx for your reply, actually speaking I’m a chinese who come from mainland China…..So ,if you don’t mind, will you like add our blog to your links? our site is :http://acgism.animeblogg.net
    it was set up before long, which is running by me and my friends…… I will add yours to our blog,I hope you could do the same thing……(When you read this reply, you could just delete it,haha)

  4. Jerry Energy1 – I tried to leave a comment in the guest book on your site but I got an error :P. Anyway, you’ve got a great site! The concert pics are great! I’m going to try to look at the dolls next. Thanks for making a great site!

  5. Hey all~~!! I just wanted to say your site is pretty amazing, I’ve subscribed to both the blog and podcast through RSS. ((I haven’t actually gotten to listen to much of the podcast yet though!! > __ <)) Anyways, I found you guys through the most random of places, Tokyopop.com!! I love all the information you guys post!! And I really loved watching your videos!! Please keep on with this site, you’re doing really great!!

  6. This is Sean over at Box.net. I’m the Community Manager here and I’m always interested in talking to customers about the creative ways they use Box. I’d love to get the story on animediet.net from your staff. Could you shoot me an e-mail?

  7. Thought I will add a 2010 comment 😛

    Great stuff guys keep up the awesome work you inspire me to read more podcasts, in-fact I’m going to be a co-host on a local Anime podcast!

    I will use you guys as my wings :3

  8. omg this is a gay site and its the people that are on it. when i saw it first, i thourght it was one of them stupid diet sites that starves people into bein’ anorexic! :p

  9. Hi, i just found out this place, and I really like the contents. I am obsessed with anima and manga. I am asking for an opportunity to become an contributor to this webpage as well. Even though I have not really posted anything regarding anima, i would love to try a guest post. Let me know if you are interested!

  10. The layout for this is just like my blog! But, its thousands of times better than mine. It’s so much more advance, QwQ How long does it take to make a website so awesome? Now I’ve gotta work even harder! Arigatou gozaimasu~ for this great website!

    1. Thank you for your kind comment, remmey! Well, we have been around for many years, and I am a web developer by trade, so I was able to modify the default WordPress theme to my liking.

      Good luck with your own site!

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