Responding to Blogger Appreciation and Sunshine Blogger Awards

For a while, I’ve been debating whether I wanted to participate in the blogger awards that make their rounds from time to time. I love the community feeling of these types of posts, but I don’t love how much they remind me of chain e-mails or social media posts encouraging users to tag other users and pass along the message. I’ve decided that I like the community feeling more than I dislike the chain-mail vibe, and have finally made up my mind to participate in them (my apologies to those who have nominated me in the past that I did not respond to. I enjoyed reading your responses!).

Back in March, two wonderful bloggers, Matthew of Matt-in-the-Hat and Zboudrie of Let’s Talk Anime, nominated me for the Blogger Appreciation and Sunshine Blogger awards. I wanted to write a response to these in March, but it was a major semester crunch time for me and I didn’t have time (as mentioned in my Dramatic Pause post). Today, I wanted to share my over-due responses to these two fun awards!

For those who have not encountered such “awards” before, these are fun community-building challenge posts that bloggers issue to one another. They always have rules that the nominees must follow and share in their own response posts, and they are usually called “awards”. I like to think of them as “challenges” instead of “awards,” so you’ll see me using that wording later on.

I’ll be responding to two nominations in the same post today due to my tardiness, but most bloggers only respond to one at a time. (As a fun coincidence, a few hours after I finished writing and scheduled this post, I spotted a post discussing these types of “awards” by Irina of I Drink and Watch Anime. It’s an interesting read and touches on several reasons to like and dislike these types of posts).

The Blogger Appreciation Award

The Rules

• Thank the blogger who nominated you, and link back to their site
• Write a paragraph of something positive about yourself.
• Nominate and notify as many bloggers as you wish
• Use the award image

My Response

First, I wanted to mention how much I enjoyed reading Zboudrie’s post about having pride in up-keeping and improving on a wide range of incredible talents, from writing to cosplay (I hope the Todoroki Shouto and Chise Hatori projects turned out!). If you get a chance, swing by and give the post a read.

For my own positive paragraph about myself, I’d have to say that I’m enthusiastic. What this means to me is that I am able to genuinely care about almost any project or activity that I find myself involved in. Cashiering for a cool outdoor gear store? I’m excited to be helping people find the gear they need for whatever adventure they are about to embark on (while daydreaming about my own future adventures). Taking a statistics class? I’m excited to learn how to use data more effectively even if I don’t end up doing number-focused studies in my future. It’s rarely difficult for me to find some aspect of a situation to appreciate. Likewise, it is rare for me to find a situation where I can’t find a reason to be invested in whatever I’m doing.

The Sunshine Blogger Award

The Rules

• Thank the person who nominated me for this
• Answer the question that has been mentioned in the post
• Post a question for my nominees to answer
• Nominate users for the Sunshine Blogger Award

I’ll be responding to two questions this time around, one from Zboudrie, and one from Matthew.

My Answers

In his post, Matthew responds to a question about other hobbies he has and talked about what being a gamer means to him (coincidentally, I’ll also be responding to this same question in this post). Matthew asks nominees:

As bloggers, we write about anything we like to talk about and express our ideas and opinions. Some of us have our own writing style and schedule and we write the way that can be read easily. As bloggers or even vloggers, we can write or say about anything. However, some people don’t do anything of that and they just become our audience. Can you, a writer or vlogger, imagine your life right now if you never did blogging or vlogging? Would your life be really different?

If I had never forayed into blogging, I imagine that my life would be a bit different than it is now. For one thing, one of my first professional jobs was blogging for a Dental company, followed by blogging for an outdoor gear company. Those positions gave me confidence, taught me more about writing, and helped me build my resume. I don’t know what my current trajectory would look like without that experience (though it is always possible that it wouldn’t be much different).

On a personal level, I feel like blogging has helped me visualize and explore personal literacy (the ways that people learn to understand different types of texts through personal experience with those texts and repurpose their content in new ways such as by writing a blog about it) in online spaces– my own, and that of other bloggers. Without this experience, I think that I would have different ideas about personal literacy and the value of internet spaces. This concept makes up one of my three current research interests, and I might not have become interested in exploring personal literacy in blogging without becoming a blogger myself.

On top of that, I would still be struggling to find an outlet for my love of pop culture and my conviction that it has a great deal of educational potential. I also would never have discovered the amazing blogging communities that I’ve found since starting this blog.

Zboudrie’s response (linked above) answers a question asking respondents what superpowers and what ideal jobs they would love to have someday. Zboudrie asks nominees:

What other hobbies do you have besides blogging, and watching/reading for your blog? Like how mine is writing other writing projects and cosplay, what else do you do for fun? Do you create other things, or is this where all of your creativity comes out?

I have a number of hobbies outside of watching things (anime, YouTube videos, nature documentaries, cartoons…), reading (blogs, manga, comics, novels…), and writing for this blog. For one, when I’m not drowning in research projects, I enjoy writing fiction. I have other home-body hobbies as well, such as gaming, listening to podcasts or music, discovering new types of augmented reality apps and games (not to be confused with virtual reality), and making data visualizations and infographics (which is a fairly new hobby, actually, as I didn’t know how to do this until I took a class recently). Occasionally, my home-body hobbies are a little more social, requiring the participation of other people such as boardgames, Magic the Gathering, and DnD.

Although I can get lost in home-body hobbies pretty easily, I try to keep them balanced with my more active hobbies. On nice summer days, I love breaking out my hammock and chilling in parks or on campus (wait, that’s not active!). I’ll also hop on my mountain bike and just cruise around (or try to keep up with my husband on a single-track trail), or lace up my hiking shoes and hit the trail. Throw a little camping and paddleboarding into the mix, and it’s a perfect week!

My Question and Nominees

Now comes the best part: asking my nominees a question that they’ll have fun answering! My question is this:

As a blogger, you have topics that you like to write about. These topics might be things that you’re passionate about or have an interest in. These subjects are often centered around various pop culture media or topics of interest. If you can remember, what first attracted you to the topics or media that you focus on in your blog? Has what interested you about them back then changed at all now? Why do you write about these topics or media now?

To no surprise, nominating other bloggers was the hardest part. To my nominees, I hope that you have fun answering either or both of these award challenges! Please don’t feel obligated to respond, however. And to those of you who I didn’t challenge, if you want to respond to this award challenge, please do so! I will always welcome write-in candidates!

Note: Each of the links to bloggers below will take you to one of that blogger’s recent posts!

 Lita Kino Anime Corner

The Things I’ve Seen

Rai’s Anime Blog

Takuto’s Anime Cafe

Mel in Anime Land