Category: Secret Santa

Call of Kris Kringle: The 3rd Annual Secret Santa Project

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This cross-blogging game was even more successful last year, so it is back again!

Here: Just in case someone does not know what traditional Secret Santa is.

The idea of this project is for everyone who participates to be reviewing a show that they might not normally watch or might have overlooked. Everyone will get someone else in the project to review a series of their choice and in return review something picked by one of their fellow bloggers. The goal is threefold for everyone involved:

  1. Mixing up what you watch and review on your blog.
  2. Getting other people to watch things you feel deserve more attention.
  3. A way to interact with other bloggers thus creating possibilities for cross blog readership, also it fosters an environment to try other cross blog experiments.

Here is how this little experiment will work: If you want to participate send us your Name, Blog, and My Anime List (or some other equivalent listing) page via e-mail (secretsanta.rt [at] gmail [dot] com) with subject: Secret Santa Participant. Due by Wednesday, October 12th. Make sure that your MAL (or whatever!) is updated as much as possible before you submit it. Also, if you will not watch fan-subs mention that in the e-mail, too.

We will then make a circular list of everyone involved in the project that only we will know the order of. The order of the list will be made completely at random. Everyone will then receive the name, blog, and list of the person they are the Secret Santa for. You will then suggest three shows for the person all of which must be 26 episodes or less (yes, you can suggest movies, too). The shows must be subtitled in some fashion. Remember that you are picking shows that you hope the other person will like and give an honest chance. Look over their list and whether they watch fan-subs then try to pick out something good but unexpected.

Once we get everyone’s picks we will then pass on the shows to the recipients. No one except us will know the names of the person who gave you your choices. You then pick the show your are going to watch. Everyone is responsible for getting their own material for the review. If for some reason you absolutely cannot abide any of the shows you are given, we will allow 1 and only 1 mulligan.

You then have until late December to watch the show you were assigned and write a review. On the week of Christmas everyone will post their reviews for the Secret Santa Project. We would prefer you to post your review on Christmas Eve but you can alter it as to the schedule of your blog. On Christmas Day we will reveal the name of who had who as a Secret Santa along with a small post about the project.

Again: If you want to participate send us your Name, Blog, and My Anime List (or some other equivalent listing) page via e-mail (secretsanta.rt [at] gmail [dot] com) with subject: Secret Santa Participant. Due by Wednesday, October 12th.

Why we don’t do manga secret santa.

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The Secret Santa Project has been an unexpected success each time we have run it with the number of participants doubling from 2009 to 2010. It helps bloggers spread the word about their favorite overlooked titles while broadening the horizons of all the participants. The thing is, every time the project is mentioned there is always one request we hear time and time again. People really want us to do a manga version as well. This call has not been ignored. It is just there are some logistical problem we that need to be overcome.

It might not be apparent but there were several problems with a Manga Secret Santa that do not come up with the anime version. The first being a maximum length of the series you could recommend. With the average anime series being 26 episodes or less it was easy to make that the upper bound. But there is no easy cap to use for manga. Also you can get a whole anime series for about 30 to 50 dollars with anime but even just 10 manga will cost you 100 bucks (not accounting for savvy shopping). Keeping this in mind, we came up with a plan.

Our solution was simple. Instead of trying to read an entire manga series, you would get three series you have never read before as part of the project and read the 1st book of all three series and then write-up at least one of them. It seemed like a good compromise. While you would not get the comprehensive look you would from the anime reviews, it would allow people to experiment a bit more with a reduced commitment required.

But another problem still loomed: how to get everyone to make a comprehensive list of what series they have already read. Every year when we do Anime Secret Santa we get several people whose lists of what anime they have watched is missing several vital titles they forgot. Invariably someone will then recommended them the title they forgot to list. Using My Anime List as an example, it has 322 pages of anime titles vs. 857 pages of manga titles (thanks to the inclusion of doujinshi). Even Anime Planet’s more streamlined list is still 150 pages of manga as compared to 105 of anime. Other book listing sites like Shelfari have inconsistencies in their manga collections such as missing author names or wrong numbers even in the same series.

Going along with this is the fact that most people are reading dozens of manga at one time. Unlike a lot of anime where you just watch through an entire series in a timely manner. But even if you are following a show weekly, it general doesn’t go over a dozen. But manga, we are constantly waiting for the next book in English to emerge. It can take years, even decades, for an entire series to see an English release so people have myriads of titles left only partially read. The chances of people handing in incomplete lists is so high that Narutaki weeps at the thought of having to coordinate such a project.

We don’t really have an answer to this problem therefore we have decided to try to crowdsource an answer. Is there a streamlined program that lets you record what manga you have read? It has to be able to make a simple but comprehensive list of titles. Does anyone even want to attempt to do such a thing with their manga reading now that we’ve explained the dilemma?

Secret Santa 2010 Project Reveal

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And now the part you have all been waiting for. The Secret Santas are revealed, the ancient conspiracy is foiled, and the destined couple finally consummate their relationship. This is the master list of all the participants, what they reviewed, and who gave them their recommendations. I know that several people are not going to finish on time because of various mishaps during the holiday season. So I will do my best to update this list at least once a day as reviews come in. Hopefully everyone watched something a bit unexpected and maybe learned something new about the range and scope of anime. Other than that Happy Holidays and I wish you and yours the best of luck in the upcoming year.