Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Today was Massin's birthday, did you remember to leave him some love?

(BTW, he fixed the voting lag on fan art, yet another reason.)
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Sunday, October 8, 2006

- We're very close with Fan Manga, just need to test and tweak, test and tweak.

- Our artist roster for the new Art Of Otaku is amazing. We have top artists from this community, from DeviantArt, and from independent freelancers.

Back to work...
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Thursday, October 5, 2006

Sitting In Awe
The quantity and quality of the responses I've received thus far to my post on Art Of Otaku have surpassed by expectations.

It was very hard for me to assemble our team for the first Art Of Otaku; I had to fight to sell the idea and was lucky that a solid group of people trusted my vision for the book.

This time around, every artist knows how successful Art Of Otaku turned out, both in popularity and critical acclaim. This has led to a huge turn-out; I no longer have to sell the concept: It sells itself.
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Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Seven Big Bets
Seven big bets in seven months.

You know two and a half of them:

(1) My business book for artists
(2) A re-imagined Art Of Otaku (not a sequel)
(3) *Something* related to the Fan Manga section
(4) ????
(5) ????
(6) ????
(7) ????

I think we're on track to have four of the initiatives completed by January 2007. Then we'll have a few months to knock out the other three. It'll be tight, but I think we can do it--I know we have the right teams in place.

If you know any A+ artists, please encourage them to apply to our founding team for the new Art of Otaku. They'll thank you again and again for it, trust me :-).
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Tuesday, October 3, 2006

- I spent a few hours today creating an Excel dashboard that enables me to view both the network's and my own personal finances side-by-side. The reason I need them in this way is that I've had to invest a lot of my savings into the network the last couple months. I'm investing in both growth and a few big bets.

- By far the most well-written review for Art of Otaku was penned by a freelance professional writer named Brett Rogers. The moment I read the review I knew I had to work with him in the future. That was almost a year ago.

Cut to the present. I recently finished the rough draft for the business for artists book and Brett's name jumped into my head. I tracked him down and am now pleased to announce that he has agreed to edit the book.

I'm also pleased to announce that the #1 illustrator for a major freelancing network has agreed to let me interview him for the book as well.

- Very soon, I'm going to announce a project that will have a lot of people *very* excited. I expect the hype level to reach final fantasy levels.
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Monday, October 2, 2006

Adam's Sessions
- I've recovered from my bout with food poisoning. So unpleasant.

- I attended a convention that featured dozens of exhibits on future technology. One of the exhibits was an interactive video game that puts you inside the game and lets you battle, free-style, against enemies. It was one of the most fun things I've ever done. Having been classically trained in Kung-Fu for 7 years from two different schools, I was very comfortable kicking the crap out of my virtual enemies :-).

- Gail is really a superstar quiz producer. Her second quiz is up and it's just perfect. Thanks also to Sangome for updating the site with fan submissions.

- I saw CRANK tonight, the movie with Jason Statham. It was a fun stupid film, recommended if you want mindless action.

- I think Nintendo's Wii will become the console of choice for fans of anime-style games. A DBZ game is a launch title and there's a slick Bleach game coming out too. What's interesting about both is that they utilize the motion-sensitive for casting spells/combat/etc.
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Friday, September 29, 2006

I'm battling moderate to severe food poisoning now... :-(
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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

- I drink a lot of Gatorade. A lot. If I was cut, I'd bleed fruit punch flavoring.

- Is there something scandalous going on between Ichigo from our podcasting team and Kei?

- Even if my book on business for artists fails to sell a single copy, I've extracted a ton of value from it. Just the process of organizing my thoughts and putting them to paper has strengthened my ability to run the network.

- T-shirts are expected to arrive at our warehouse tomorrow. I'll spend much of tomorrow night manually typing in everyone's orders for shipment. I can't wait to hear feedback on what everyone thinks.

- I need to go over the network's finances, I have a feeling that we're spending a little too loosely. I'm very conservative with finances...In 2003 I actually had to borrow money every month to keep things afloat; never want to go through that again!
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Monday, September 25, 2006

Too Ambitious?
Team Otaku is awesome all around :-). I'm very blessed to have such great people around me.

As I said before, I have seven big initiatives for the next seven months. "Bold", "Ambitious", "Insane", and "WTF?" are all appropriate adjectives.

You know some of them and might guess at others.

My art book is one of them. The fan manga site is *part* of another one.

That leaves a lot of mystery.

Can we do it? I really hope so...I've written these seven initiatives on my whiteboard, so I'm reminded of them every single day.

I wore my theOtaku.com t-shirt to the gym today.
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Sunday, September 24, 2006

Ah...
Uwe Boll, hated director of video-game based movies, challenged four Internet critics to a boxing match, streamed online.

While all the critics were defeated, I found myself envying their position. It must be quite a feeling to go up against an 'evil' and have a lot of fans cheering for you. It would be comparable to someone from our site going up against the personification of 4Kids.
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