Hi everyone!

In an effort to get Mike to stop chasing me around with a giant metal fan of doom, I’ve decided to finally say hello to all of you! (Just kidding, Mike’s too nice to chase me around with a metal fan, it was actually paper) I’m one of Anime Diets newest (and female!) writers, and I’ll be writing mostly anime reviews! That is if I can ever actually get a hold of the anime.

You see, I have notoriously bad luck with torrents. I think I have the touch of death to be honest. I download them after checking their stats and magically they’ll suddenly have no seeders. My friend who used to find good torrent links for me, refuses to send them to me until he’s done downloading first, in fear that I’ll kill it with magic internet bad luck.

Anyways, I’ll try to do my best reviews for you, and if nothing else I’ll post with random otaku goodness as often as I can! It’s great to meet you, please leave a comment and say hello! =^.^=

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Tonight, Anime Diet Radio and Anime Genesis go LIVE at Anime Expo–7 PM at LACC 411 (LP4), the theater! Please come if you are at AX and listen to us ham it up and say hi!

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Hello everyone–welcome to the brand new, rebuffed Anime Diet! I hope this layout is a lot easier to follow and less cluttered looking than the old one. We’ve added lots of new features, including:

• Author avatars to help identify who writes what posts.
• Page numbers in category pages and search results.
• Dropdown menus, at long last, for the site’s major sections. A category redo is in the immediate future as well, so it won’t be so cluttered and scattered as before.
• Individual staff pages. Now you can see what each one of us has written!
• Removed the reCaptcha plugin. Many of you complained, and I decided the costs were outweighing the benefits. We will be looking into additional spam protection elsewhere.
• I’ve written a brand new history of Anime Diet on the About page.

Things that still need work:

• The dropdown menu plugin breaks the AJAX comment editing plugin, unfortunately. I’m still not sure why, and it sucks because that was one of my favorite features. It will be gone until I figure out a way to reconcile the two.
• The new banner is OK, but I think it could be better. I am considering a contest to see if anyone else can come up with one. :)
• Something is wrong with the polling mechanism because for some reason, 400 new votes were added while I was revising the theme in the past hour!

We wanted to get this up prior to AX if at all possible, and personally, I think it was about time anyway.

Enjoy the new look! Please report any further bugs, critiques, etc. in the comments section. We are always constantly working to make things better.

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I’ve got a blog for it now, called “Word and Spirit.” I finally found the time to design and open it up. After the last major foray into some good old fashioned systematic theology on this blog caused an unexpected stir, I’ve been plotting how I was going to do this. Now it’s finally a reality.

So save your bookmarks, those who are interested in what I do when I’m not doing anime: http://wordandspirit.imagria.com. This is the first and last time I’ll be taking up your blog aggregators about this, so act fast. You only get these kinds of posts when one of the bloggers is a seminarian!

Thanks, everyone–and now, back to anime and manga.

(PS: this will not affect Art and Soul, my religion and anime audio column. That will continue to be hosted here.)

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As we have been suffering from a bit of a spam problem lately–one that Akismet has been starting to crack under a little–I have, like many of you in the blogosphere, installed the Recaptcha plugin for comments. You’ll have to enter the two words shown in the captcha window in order to post a comment, or else it’ll be rejected. Hopefully this will reduce our spam problem, especially on random older posts.

If you see any problems with the plugin and are unable to post legitimate comments, please feel free to contact us by email, which can found in the “About” page in the top menu. Thanks.

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This is a friendly reminder that if you are a blogger, you have only 3 days to enter your nominations for the first annual Anime Blogging Awards! Starting on April 25th, everyone, regardless of whether you have a blog or not, will be able to vote on the top 5 blogs mentioned in each of 9 categories to determine the winner.

Thanks to everyone who has nominated us for various categories, including Most Thought-Provoking, Best Team Blog, and Best Episodic Blog. Your nominations are greatly appreciated and deeply flattering. So if you feel this blog deserves a nomination in these or other categories, enter it within the next three days.

Herewith ends the “For Your Consideration” pimping. The bribes gifts are in the mail. See you at the poll!

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EDIT (10 April, 12:29 PM PST): Since this morning, the site has been running at very fast speeds for me. So it looks like we are fully back in business! Please report if you still have slowness, though, and recommend a backup host provider should the day ever come.

Yes, folks, we were down for a good three days. Why? We were transferring host providers, from 1and1.com to dreamhost.com. I decided to leave 1and1 due to the sluggish performance on the website as well as them falsely accusing me of unspecified “abuse” a couple of Saturdays ago–I found myself unable to access the website all morning, without warning. Later, I checked and it turned out to be a server reset that had nothing to do with “abuse.” Good riddance.

Anyways, on my end, the server still seems kind of sluggish. If you’re reading this, it means the DNS servers on your side of the world are working, though, so please let me know if it also seems unnaturally slow to you, too, or if it’s just something on my end. We have a pretty big archive so I wonder if the database is just getting a bit too big for its own good. Any help and advice would be deeply appreciated. We’ll even mention you on our next podcast or something. :)

Anyways, consider us back in action. Up next: a takedown of Kanokon, the lost Anime Diet Radio episode, and the return of Matt as our reviewer for Code Geass R2!

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I guess I’m really late to this party–the whole thing started when I was still swamped with final papers–but I have at last made my nominations for the various categories in the Anime Blog Awards! I think the idea of the awards is a great idea, especially for lesser-known or read blogs. Now (if you are also a blogger) is your chance to put in the names of blogs you enjoy in several different categories, by April 22nd when nominations end and voting begins! Voting is open to all.

As a previous recipient of an award of sorts (and two), I would like to humbly suggest if you feel so moved to nominate this little establishment somewhere too. (Some of you have–my deepest thanks.) Anyways, that’s my part in the anime blogging community…though, come tomorrow, you might see what else I’ve been up to lately. Stay tuned. :)

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Just wanted to assure everyone that I’m not dead yet from this blog. I am not on hiatus so much as simply immersed in the end of the quarter with 4 papers due soon, and lots of things happening in Real Life ™ too. Like actually working out at the gym, for a change. (You can take away my otaku license now, boys.)

There will be new content this week for certain, including a lengthy piece that I hope you will enjoy. Plus the next episode of the podcast, if I can find time to edit it. So stay tuned, dear readers.

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Notice a few things different? That’s right, I installed a whole raft of new plugins alongside the necessary security upgrade to Wordpress 2.3.2. A bunch of them were more for us admins (database backup, batch category editing, and the like), but here are the ones that affect you, our dear readers:

• Category Tree–now there’s a much, much better way to navigate the categories and subcategories our on site. The levels are collapsible, at long last, and don’t take up enormous oodles of space. Courtesy of the wp-dTree plugin.
• Edit Your Comments–ever wished you could fix a mistake you made or add something to a comment left on our site? Well, now you can, within 15 minutes of your posting. Courtesy of WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin.
• Related Posts–see what posts from our past might be related to the article you’re reading now! Admittedly, this doesn’t work quite as well as it should for the moment. Anyone got any clue how to fine tune it so that genuinely related posts show up? Courtesy of the Related Posts plugin.
• Currently Blogging List–see the list of shows we are blogging for the current season in the sidebar. Made possible by ExecPHP plugin, which allows PHP code to be run on the sidebar via a widget. Will change, of course, as soon as the Winter 2008 season gets rolling.

Planned future enhancements include a horizontal drop-down menu that clearly marks the sections of our website, so you don’t have to search or go digging through hard-to-navigate archives for something you’re looking for. Also, in the longer term, the entire layout needs a refreshing.

Thanks for reading and we hope the new features will be useful to you. Let us know in the comments if there are any problems/bugs. Thanks!

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