It’s OH! Time!
It was getting late, vision was blurring, and it seemed as if a /headdesk was imminent. But I still had a ton of work to do. The cookies and energy drinks were wearing off, and in an act of desperation I called on the help of a mildly intoxicated otou-san to assist in writing an OH! welcome post. What came next ended not only in an internet bar fight, but in a slurring of words describing Oi, Hayaku! better than I, the mastermind behind it all, could have ever concocted myself.
Here it is in it’s entirety, with only select parts edited out. And maybe a few points of praise added in. For unicorns.
As quite a few bloggers have pointed out in various posts across the otakusphere, there’s been quite a proliferation of team blogs recently. Some people seem to view this as some kind of harbinger of doom, or perhaps the death of aniblogging’s purity and innocence. That may be true, but don’t panic, the sellout hasn’t quite happened yet. At least, not until now.
The sellout is here, and its name is Oi, Hayaku!.
Schedule? Author compensation? Standards? What the fuck are we trying to do here, succeed?
Well, yeah, guess so. I myself have been a somewhat terrible participant in an otherwise-great team blog that I trust you all know and love, and I’ve racked up a few day-job hours working with some of the world’s most successful non-anime blogs. But it took a much crazier person than I to play midwife to the mutant tentacled kaiju born from the unholy marriage of the two.
Team blogs in the otakusphere have survived, up until now, on raw potential, untapped power. The power to post more often than a single author. The power to write from different perspectives, and on a wide range of subjects. But it sometimes reminds me of a long-running shounen series where moments of brilliance are like little islands in an endless sea of filler. What if that show was balls-out awesome, top to bottom? I’d call it Soul Eater, probably, but that’s a matter of taste and besides — this is a metaphor. Don’t lose me here.
I’m not talking about anime, I’m talking about blogs. Blogs where every post is something of real value — not because every post is something everyone’s gonna want to read, but because the author was chosen on merit, because the post was thought over for a week, and because it’s all gone through an editorial process. This is the insane vision that Riex had, and it’s an idea (I think) whose time has come.
Alrighty, back to me.
On this, the dawning of Oi, Hayaku!, I ask only two things from you, the readers. I ask for your Presence and your Patience.
Your presence because at the end of the day it’s you who are going to make this place rock at a level that the rest of the otakusphere won’t be able to comprehend. Because we’re going to have a lot of things going that we need you to be involved in. And because whores need clients.
Your patience because this shit ain’t happening overnight. It took almost a month of preparation, planning, interviewing, book-sized email writing, theme designing and hours of IM conversation to get OH! to where it is right now: it’s beginnings. We have a lot planned, we have a lot of crazy ideas, but we’ve got to get this ball rolling before we start jumping on top of it or throwing ourselves under it.
For right now, all I have are promises. I’d like to think that most of you will believe them, and that when the time comes, you’ll be glad you did. Welcome to Oi, Hayaku!, and welcome to a wild ride.
Alright Riex, let’s see how your great experiment goes. T^Tb
ps. you hoe, get me some unicorn crack!