Years before, I used to track my anime at myanimelist. It has many functionalities, but tracking and ranking was enough for me. At least when I started taking too seriously. I was reading through reviews, over evaluating and adjusting my ratings every season. I had to do something when I realized I was watching anime for the sake of finding failures in technicalities such as writing, characters and sound, while enjoyment and fun were being least important. I had become an elitist.
Elitism is harmful to the hobbyists, because only those clusters of classic, cult works deserves praise, while the rest is being diminished, sometimes to a unwatchable point. It leaves the person to consume things only for the sake of complain in some negative review later, stressing others and itself, trapping itselves in a cycle of consumimg and complaining. I have mixed feeelings about the standard kind of review with ratings. Some can tell you if the thing matches with your taste or not. If you don't be careful like me, you can delve too deep and stop loving the technicalities, obsessing over them instead. For the sake of my sanity, I chose to not read them anymore.
I don't want to write reviews as everyone does. I'm planning to write something with different purpose so we can kick elitism out. Somewhere in the future I plan to write in a lighthearted fashion about an anime or manga that inspired me for the good, even in the case where the impression was not so great, like I did in my first post. I don't want to call those 'reviews'. I'm not a fan of this word. Do you have a better name?
To solve my elitism, I deleted all of my ratings. That's all it took, but we can go further. You may have noticed we use anilist links in this blog. I came across anilist and using it ever since, because its UI solves the problems I had with MAL: Too much focus in both rating and reviewing. However, it has a key problem: the lack of a backup option. I started worrying about the possible worst outcomes recently. Imagine losing data of years of hobby, hundreds of works, thousands of hours watched and chapters read! It's really scary.
I was thinking of going back to MAL just for the backup solution, but something else entirely would be nicer. I'm looking for an auto / semi auto workaround to do this. The ultimate solution for this problem would be a kinda old-fashioned way: Moving everything into a LibreOffice sheet, or even better, a raw text document. Hit me on neocities.org if you has something in mind.
My advice for today is: be careful to not be an elitist of any hobby you can imagine. You can hurt yourself and others in the process. Don't forget to have fun as your priority.
In the audiophile world (awful name), elitism is present, but tamed, because of the chinese in-ear earphones market, which delivers nice gear for a good price (I'll make a post about my earphones in the future). Here is a album I probably wouldn't like if I was an elitist. It's from the anime FLCL. I watched it on my CRT television this year and it was one of the best experiences I had with retro anime (I gotchu, a post about those would be nice too). I hope you like!