The UKA Blog:

What a hell of a couple of weeks. Four days after the London Expo and settling back into the cursed work and things kick off. I won’t bore people and go into details, but it is certainly something that I would guess nearly everyone does not look forward to do.

So I’ve been out of action for a couple of weeks, but now I’m back for a brief spell. Looking over at our forum, we’ve had some new recruits come on in who also have MyAnimeList accounts. Now I’ve heard the word MAL being knocked about, my person favourite being “I contacted you on MAL and you ignored me. I don’t like you any more.” Ah the wonders of the internet. Now clearly I’m not as down with the internet kids as I used to be back in my youth when I wasn’t being whipped on the grind stone of life and careers, so I’ve not really wanted to explore any more into MAL. From what I gathered it is a social networking site for anime fans. Not a bad idea to be sure and with the success of things like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, an anime off-shoot is logical and could be a little bit fun.

So after seeing another new member with a MAL account (MAL just sounds to me the noise a dying cat makes), I’ve hopped over and began registering mine. “I’ve got 10 minutes to kill,” I thought, “This won’t take me long to do and I can go and play some FF7 on the PSP afterwards”. Now just picture Kevin Spacey in Superman and the following words. WRONG! I didn’t realise I had to give over my entire freakin’ anime history to get a complete profile.

Now I’ll explain where my confusion over this comes from. I’m a regular to Eurogamer and have signed up to their social networking site Eurogamers. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realise it’s the same idea, but for games. But here all you do is list the game you have, give it your score and what region and add to the list. Job done. Even with a large catalogue of titles that won’t take long. So that brings me back to MAL. After entering my favourite anime and manga, I needed to compose my list of my collection. Yes it is just a way to swing you amazing large collection around the internet for all to look at, but it is relatively harmless for the most part.

So I start with the first entry, Cowboy Bebop. Been on the shelf for a while, but I did enjoy it. So title, 9/10 rating. OK, great. Tags? Nah, can’t be arsed with that. Start date and finish date? How the hell can I remember that? Fansub Group? Priority? Rewatch value? Storage? WHAT THE HELL? Do they also want to know that I have them on wooden shelves? That they are all in plastic cases. The exact geographical coordinates of my Fullmetal Alchemist tin case and whether this all meets health and safety standards or if the review discs I have sitting here are set to explode after one play? I didn’t realise that being part of a social networking site required me to do a complete thesis on my anime collection. Just hope I’ve left enough time for the exam.

I know I don’t HAVE to join the website and looking at the amount of work that is needed I think the account of mine will be left as it is. The reason I have such a beef with this is that I feel like I’m doing database entry for my DVD collection and I know for a fact that they are people out they that love doing this crap. Where the hell is the fun to compare how quickly you’ve watched a show or how many episodes? Surely this is what forums are for?