 A chat with a cat in the moonlight "The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide you're not going to stay where you are." - J.P.Morgan Interview conducted by: @NextUniverse & @Skittles Reviewed by: @Corrout Could you tell us more about yourself? Hi, I'm Luna. I'm in my 30s and from Germany. After finishing my Masters in a field related to computer science I first stayed at the university where I obtained a PhD in the same field. Nowadays, I work in a big company, with my tasks ranging from coding to overseeing projects. I'm a huge fan of anime and manga, but I also like to consume other types of media including books, visual novels and TV shows. When I was young I loved video games a lot but in my early 20s, I noticed that I found most of them just boring or too time-consuming and I could never really get back into playing a lot. The exceptions would be Fate/Grand Order and Twisted Wonderland which I play on a daily basis. When it comes to music I'm very into certain types of metal, mostly symphonic power metal and closely related types. Some bands I really like: Nightwish (still my number one after discovering them over 20 years ago), Within Temptation, Visions of Atlantis, Delain, Lunatica, Sonata Arctica, and many more. I also like anime music and some J-pop/anime songs, especially stuff from Kalafina (Yuki Kajiura's music is just awesome). While all media shifts more and more to streaming and subscriptions I'm still very old-school and like to own physical copies (well, in addition to streaming subscriptions, I use those too). I still buy music CDs, DVDs/BDs (anime/TV shows/movies), books and manga. I'm a collector and love my collections, especially my manga collection which has about 3000 volumes. I love learning languages and plan to learn several of them to a higher level. Currently, I speak German and English fluently, and Japanese, French and Spanish on a basic/intermediate level. How did you choose your username? When I started using the internet over 20 years ago, I tried a few different names but didn't like any of them much. A few weeks later I was playing a PC game (Knights of Xentar, which I found out much later was actually my first visual novel) and one of the main characters was called Luna. I didn't particularly like this character, but I really loved the sound of the name. There was no deeper connection but for some reason, the name just stuck and even after so many years I still love it a lot. Could you give us a brief history of your time on MAL? I found MAL in early 2008 when someone linked their MAL signature on a website I was visiting. Back then I had a phase where I didn't consume anime/manga so I didn't see a reason to register on MAL. In August 2008 I remembered how much I loved the anime Slayers and decided to watch the remaining seasons. This made me start going back to anime/manga in general. After a short while, I remembered MAL and created an account. In the beginning, I wasn't very active on MAL. I had a lot of other things to do and anime/manga was just a small hobby. This changed when I joined some clubs. Back then there were still a lot of active clubs and it was a lot of fun talking to people there. I also became more active in the forum. After a while, I realized how much I like MAL and started to contribute to the site with database submissions and reports when I saw problems in the forum. In January 2012 I decided to revive the Fantasy Anime League (FAL), which was abandoned after the previous script guy went MIA. I wrote a new script that would collect all the stats and do all the necessary calculations automatically, and we re-booted FAL in spring 2012. I stayed as the leading FAL admin until spring 2015 when I had to stop because of time constraints. In May 2012 I joined the MAL staff after I was nominated as a forum moderator. I was a mod in another large forum in the past and liked it a lot, so this was the perfect position for me on MAL. While I enjoy occasional database work, I'm much more someone who likes to interact with people. I became an admin in August 2014 when Kineta was looking for more admins to help her with admin-only tasks. My tasks as admin have varied over the years, depending on demand, changes in internal processes, and other reasons. These tasks have always been user/account/community related—in the beginning, it was helping users with various problems in the support board, helping them with password or registration problems, and dealing with illegitimate accounts. Any account-related problems are now handled by the customer service and illegitimate accounts are taken care of by an automatic system, so I stopped doing these things a while ago. I kept helping in the support board though and was forwarding bugs to the dev team, trying to be a bridge between the community and the dev team as best as possible. Just to avoid any confusion though, I was never an official representative of the company but just another volunteer staff member. There were many things I didn't know and therefore couldn't communicate them. I was also not included in the decisions of which features would be added and when they'd be added. After I became an admin I was still working closely together with the forum mod team - this included for example helping with difficult cases, trying to make sure that moderation would be consistent, reviewing the rules from time to time, and being involved in the forum mod hiring process. I put a lot of time and effort into these things because my main goal had always been making the forum and the rest of the site enjoyable for the users, even though this was always very hard given the many limitations I had. Due to time constraints, I had to stop being involved in the forum moderation at the end of 2021. This was a difficult decision for me because I was involved in the forum moderation in one way or another for almost 10 years. The continued lack of time led me to retire completely in February 2022. While I still enjoyed helping users I figured that it's not helpful for MAL if I don't have much time to do my tasks and also not helpful for myself if I put the little free time I have after work into dealing with problems on MAL instead of using the time to relax. How did you get into anime/manga? It all started one day in December 1999, when I found some Sailor Moon comics that were left outside as paper trash to be collected. I remembered how I watched this show several years earlier (without knowing that it was anime, but I remembered how much I was fascinated by the art style and the story) and took the comics with me. I found out that the show was still airing on TV and that there were so many episodes that I hadn't seen before. In the following months, I turned into a hardcore Sailor Moon fan, watched all the episodes and bought tons of merchandise. This included the Sailor Moon manga series, but back then I didn't know that there were so many more manga. In 2000 I slowly started watching more anime on TV. I discovered a TV channel that showed more mature anime during their late-night program. Neon Genesis Evangelion, Bubblegum Crisis, and Silent Möbius were anime that had a very big impact on me back then and that opened a whole new anime world for me. Back then I still didn't have access to the internet, but I found out about an anime magazine which I started to buy. I loved reading about other anime and found out that there are so many other manga series. My first manga after Sailor Moon included Neon Genesis Evangelion, Magic Knight Rayearth, Record of Lodoss War, and Angel Sanctuary. During that time it wasn't easy to watch anime or read manga. I was limited to what was on TV and the few anime/manga that you could buy back then. Anime was only available on VHS tapes (for horrendous prices). Only about two years later they finally started selling anime on DVD in my country and I remember buying a super expensive DVD player just to be able to watch them. I'm really happy that nowadays it's so much easier and cheaper to access anime. Could you recommend us three of your favorite anime/manga? One Outs (Anime/Manga): If you think that One Outs is just a boring sports anime then you're wrong. Yes, they do play baseball, but this is really just a tool to tell the actual important part of the story, so don't be put off just because it has the sports tag. The anime is all about the psychological battles between the gambler Tokuchi Toua and his various opponents. If you like psychological anime and mind games then this is one of the best anime for you. Unfortunately, the anime only covers half of the story, but there is a lot more in the manga. Umineko no Naku Koro ni (Manga): Actually, if you can, play the visual novel. It consists of two parts and they're both on Steam (sometimes on sale). The VN gives you the best experience of the story. If you don't want to play the VN then I recommend reading the manga which does an excellent job at telling the story (don't watch the anime, it's not great). Umineko is a mystery drama revolving around the Ushiromiya family who meet on their private island for a family gathering and then get involved in mysterious murders. In the first 4 manga series, you get more and more clues and in the following 4 manga series, the mysteries will slowly be resolved. As the story progresses you get introduced to more amazing characters and more crazy subplots that make you wonder how many more crazy things will happen and how the mysteries will be resolved. Tiger & Bunny (Anime): This is a fun show about superheroes who are doing things mostly for the TV show about them and to get more fame… But then things suddenly get more serious. The show mostly follows the two heroes Wild Tiger and Barnaby who are forced to work together even though they don't want to. Some of the episodes focus on the other heroes which might seem a bit boring but gives them more personality. Overall it's a very fun show to watch. What are your hobbies outside of anime/manga and MAL? My biggest other hobby is learning languages. I find it fascinating to be able to speak in a different language and it opens up so many possibilities, like speaking to people who can't speak English well and learning more about other cultures. My main focus is on Japanese and one of my goals is to be able to watch/read Japanese media without the need for subtitles/translations. I also have Japanese friends and went to Japan before (and plan to go more often in the future), so being able to communicate is also important to me. I'm also learning Spanish and French because I love these languages and want to visit Spain/South America and France more often. I find a lot of other languages super interesting and hope I can learn more in the future. Another hobby of mine is playing visual novels, though I have to admit I don't play them very regularly. This is mostly because I don't have a lot of time but also because many visual novels (especially the really good ones) are fairly long. I still plan to read many more of them (my plan-to-read list is huge!). I like going out with friends and my favorite place to go is the karaoke bar. I've always liked singing a lot and karaoke is the most fun way for me to do this. Thanks to COVID I haven't been there in over two years but we sometimes have karaoke sessions at a friend's place. I also enjoy outdoor activities like cycling or hiking where I can enjoy nature at the same time. How do you feel about how the site is run? Especially in regards to your former fellow moderators and admins. As someone who had been part of the MAL staff for almost 10 years, I know quite well how things work, though some things can and will change in the future so everything I write here is up to the point where I retired. With my insights over the years, I can see a lot of good things but also some bad things that need improvement. Overall, I think that the MAL staff (the people listed on the staff page) are doing a really great job, given the possibilities and tools that they have. The staff consists of many very passionate people who love MAL and always give their best to improve the various areas of the site to provide users with a better experience. Many users probably don't realize how much work is actually going on behind the scenes in the various teams to handle all the database entries, moderate the forum and reviews, share news and SNS posts, run Discord, and organize fun events. I was always very thankful to work with so many great people to improve the website. I don't think MAL would be the same without its moderators and I think that the mods and their great work are a big part of the reason why the website is still running and growing more and more even after more than 15 years of its creation. Moderators are just users like the rest of the user base, they use the website themselves daily and are close to the community which makes them always think about how to improve the website from a user perspective, and I strongly believe that this is very important when running a website. I've seen my fair share of problems though and I do think that there are many things that can and should be improved. I believe there are many factors that influence how the MAL staff can (or can't) improve things and I want to talk about this a bit. Probably, the biggest factor is that MAL has been owned by big companies (CraveOnline, DeNA, Media Do) for almost 14 years. The MAL staff doesn't have access to the code and code-related decisions are made by employees of the company and are then carried out by the developer team of the company. CraveOnline did basically nothing for the website. For about 7 years we got almost no new features or bug fixes. MAL was in a horrible state during this time (older users might remember things like the 30+ minutes lag, getting logged out every day, or how the IMG BBCode was broken for many months) and all we could do was keep doing our mod jobs, trying to make the website enjoyable despite the hundreds of bugs. DeNA did a good job fixing most of the bugs and giving us some new features. But it wasn't enough to catch up on so many years of complete neglect, which is why things were still quite slow at the beginning with Media Do when they were reworking and fixing a lot of things. But the good news is that we're now at a point where we're getting more and more new features. I believe that we're very lucky with Media Do because from what I've seen they care a lot about the website and its community, and I'm sure they'll continue to add more features that the community wants. That being said, it still means that the MAL staff is not free to do whatever they want but for many things, especially everything code-related, it depends on the company and the decisions of the higher-ups. And while we will get new things, we should not forget that Media Do has to keep a balance between new features the community wants and other things that are necessary to maintain such a big website, making development look slow sometimes. A common complaint I see a lot and that has directly to do with being owned by a company is that "suggestions in the suggestions board are ignored" and I agree that the suggestions board is one of the things that is not run in an optimal way. The problem here is that most suggestions are code-related and the MAL staff simply can't say yes or no to these suggestions. I could have given my personal opinion about them, but in the end, this would have meant nothing because I wasn't involved in the decisions about features. This doesn't mean that the suggestions board is completely useless though and I think it's good to have a place where users can voice their opinion about what they would like to see because it gives the staff and also Media Do a good overview of what people want. In the past, we've actually gotten some highly requested features and I'm sure we'll get more. With how things are progressing I hope that the suggestions board can be improved in the future - I already see some effort put in by categorizing suggestions so it looks like things are starting to get better here. Communication between the staff and users is sometimes not ideal and this has several reasons. In the case of new features, the staff either doesn't know enough or can't share information before something is released and in these cases, there's not really much that can be done. Complaints about moderation are sometimes not seen because they're posted in a place where none of the staff sees them. For complaints about specific cases, I recommend contacting the moderator who was involved directly or a different moderator/admin to get a second opinion. The best place for general moderation-related discussions/questions/suggestions would be the Support/Suggestions boards. If none of the staff replies then it could be that other important things came up and that the thread was forgotten. In this case, it helps to @ mention staff members who can answer there as a reminder. Another big problem is that it takes a long time for submissions to be approved and reports to be dealt with. Most mod teams are constantly understaffed and this results in longer waiting times. Also, the moderators are volunteers which means MAL is not their day job and they can't put several hours into moderating the site every day and real-life events (exams etc.) always have priority. Why not just hire more mods then? There are different reasons for this and I can mostly speak for the forum/community mod team because I had been involved in the hiring process here for a long time. It's incredibly hard to find more forum mods. The nominations to apply (sent to active forum users) are most of the time declined and good open applications are rare. Many people drop out during the practical test or shortly after becoming moderators because it's different from what they expected it to be. And to be honest, I can understand why people would decline/quit quickly. MAL has a huge user base which creates a huge amount of problems every day. Constantly having to deal with trolling and abuse is very exhausting, especially when you get abused for enforcing the rules on top. Other related problems are the lack of mod tool improvements and the lack of features on the forum/site that would help improve the situation. For many years I had been asking to get improvements here, but we only got the bare minimum in the past. I find it irresponsible that huge companies rely on volunteers to do work that involves them getting abused on a regular basis while not investing a lot into said volunteers, not even giving them better tools. Thankfully, Media Do is better and we got more help and improvements from them than ever before. But for the sake of the current and future forum/community mods (and by extension the community), I really hope that all the other necessary improvements that are long overdue won't be delayed for too long. For anime/manga mods there are a lot more applications and the work here isn't very stressful, so people tend to stay longer. Still, the database teams have been understaffed for a long time, way too long. I wasn't involved in the hiring process here so I can't say much but some issues for the lack of hiring more mods include time constraints on the staff side and having to focus on other things which are also important and can't wait. It's a bad situation that definitely needs to be improved. What I also saw a lot during my time as an admin were complaints about inconsistent or biased forum moderation and yes, it's not perfect. The biggest factor here is that there are not enough forum mods. MAL is a huge website and the mods can't be everywhere. The mod team heavily relies on user reports, but not everything gets reported, so there are things that go unnoticed which can make it look like mods are ignoring them. Another factor is that not all reported violations are clear and can be dealt with easily. The forum mods are discussing difficult cases to be as consistent as possible, but this is something that gets harder in larger teams so inconsistencies can happen more often than in small teams. Also, moderators are human and can make mistakes. We're all not perfect and have made mistakes in the past, but the mods can be talked to if there's a problem. I could go on with other things but then this would turn into a novel. My point is: the staff is aware that not everything is perfect, problems are discussed in the teams, and the staff tries their best to improve things in all ways possible. Also, with Media Do many things should change for the better in the future, even if it sometimes might look slow. I always see you talk about learning languages, picking up new ones, and reaching Duolingo streaks! Is there a new exciting language you've recently discovered or are you focusing on languages you've been studying for a while? from @cyruz I love so many languages that I always find it hard to focus on just one. So sometimes I try out new ones for a few weeks before I realize I'm not putting enough time into my "main" languages and then I go back to focusing on just those for a while. It's an endless cycle, haha. One language I'm super excited about learning in the hopefully near future is Arabic. It's a fascinating and beautiful language, but also pretty challenging because the vocabulary and grammar structures are so different from the languages I know. I already know how to read and some basics but to learn it properly I'll need a lot more time. It's very high on my list of new languages though. As the other German on the admin team, do you think the German hostile takeover of MAL is progressing as planned? Do you think we should try to get more Germans to join the team, change the website colors from blue, white, and orange, to schwárz, rot, gold (I think the answer is ja!) from @cyruz Ja, natürlich! Honestly, it's going way too slow, we definitely need to step up our game and get more people quickly. Who even needs a toggle for English or {insert other language} titles when we can simply change the entire website to German only?! And with how everyone is asking for dark mode, everyone will be absolutely pleased to see MAL in schwarz, rot, gold! LET'S DO IT!! This was written before I retired. Now it's up to you cyruz. I'm counting on you!!! Joking aside, as someone who's been on MAL's staff team for a long time, what are your ways of recharging your mental batteries after a day of admin work on top of your regular everyday life? from @cyruz There was a time when I didn't do enough for it, and it was bad. Later I tried to make sure that I still had enough time that I didn't spend on MAL. In the evening I usually checked the site and did some admin work but after that, I disconnected from it. So after I was done I liked to just watch or read something without checking MAL anymore for the rest of the day. Going out or in general doing things that have nothing to do with anime/manga also helped. Taking breaks and doing something completely different were important things for me to recharge my batteries. Do you play games to take your mind off things? If so, what kind of games? How about reading in order to rest your eyes from all the screen time? If you do, is it still anime and manga-related or something different entirely? from @cyruz I rarely play games anymore because I usually find it boring or too time-consuming. Sometimes I have the urge to play something but after a short while, I'm already bored and stop. I bought several games on Steam that I would like to play but most of them are just sitting there, waiting for me to maybe… maybe play them one day. If I do play something then it's usually a strategy game. I love city-building games and tower defense games, but any other kind of strategy game is great too. My favorite game here is Age of Mythology because it has all the aspects of a strategy game that I like plus I love the fact that it takes inspiration from mythology and legends. There are two games that I play every day though and these are Fate/Grand Order and Twisted Wonderland. I like that you don't have to put a lot of time into these games, so if I'm busy I just do a bit for a few minutes. The battles are turn-based and involve using strategy to complete harder fights which is my favorite part. And I love a lot of the characters which also makes the games very enjoyable. I'm probably not reading enough off-screen as I should even though I love physical books and prefer them over digital books any time. Nothing is better than holding an actual book in your hands! I read almost every volume in my manga collection but I still always have a small pile of unread manga next to my desk that I like to read when my eyes feel tired. I also like reading books which I either buy or borrow from friends/family. While I have some anime-related light novels, most of the books I read have nothing to do with it but are thriller/suspense/mystery/fantasy novels. My favorite authors include Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Jeffrey Deaver, Steven King, and Wolfgang Hohlbein. Do you have any tips for all the new people on the team who've recently joined to make MAL a better website? from @cyruz Most importantly, ask questions whenever you're not sure about something or if you need more information. There are no dumb questions and everyone is there to help! Also, it's usually more fun to moderate together with other mods instead of trying to do everything alone, so getting a "mod buddy" or two or three is highly recommended. And lastly, don't forget to have fun, be it by doing your mod work or doing fun things with the rest of the team! What is your favorite memory from being part of the MAL staff? from @Ardanaz It's quite hard for me to choose just one favorite memory. Being part of the MAL staff doesn't only mean doing work on the site, it also means having a lot of fun with the rest of the staff. This includes having fun conversations on IRC/Discord and planning events for the community. April Fools is something that a lot of people hate with passion, but I really enjoyed the ideas we had for some of the years. My favorite was when we changed the top character list to show staff members instead of characters (including editing the character descriptions), followed by when we opened a MAL Store to sell mod merchandise. Since your user name refers to the moon, what is your favorite moon in the solar system other than Earth's moon and why? from @gaussian_ The most interesting moon for me is probably Europa because its environment might be suitable for some form of life. There's still much to discover and it might not even be suitable for another million or more years, but just the thought that there could be life somewhere other than on Earth, now or in a far away future, sounds exciting. What was the hardest year on MAL as a mod/admin and why? How about the easiest year? from @anime-prime As a mod, the easiest year was 2012 when I had just become part of the MAL staff. Back then the community was still much smaller and the number of problems was much lower. Things got a lot worse in 2014 and I felt like we were constantly walking from one huge drama to the next one. Even though there are more problems nowadays, things still feel calmer and better to solve compared to back then, so 2014 was the hardest year for me moderation-wise. In my days as an admin, the hardest year was 2018 when DeNA decided to shut down the website without warning and without giving us information about how and when things would get better. The easiest year was probably 2021 because we got a lot of support especially code-wise from Media Do and that made a lot of things easier. How seriously is the Suggestions forum board taken? Has any action taken place in relation to new suggestions? from @NextUniverse CraveOnline didn't care for suggestions but even during that time, Kineta collected highly requested features in case things would get better at one point. DeNA actually implemented many features based on this list (the seasonal anime page, preview videos, episode information, notification system, club mass message system, redesigned list layout with a better CSS structure and more filter options, etc.). Media Do is also interested in user suggestions because they want to know what the community thinks and wants. They also started implementing features that were requested before (better API, MAL apps, language title toggle for lists, favorite studios, streaming information, OP/ED previews, sort and filter functions for VAs, etc.). So yes, user suggestions are taken into consideration and I want to encourage everyone to keep posting there because the more people want to see a certain feature, the more likely it is that we will get it. For this purpose, it's also very helpful to actually search for existing threads and add more replies to them instead of creating many new topics with just a few replies. Could you put into perspective in such a way that would help users understand why moderators aren't as "good" as users want them to be? from @NextUniverse I've seen many different complaints about why users think the mods aren't "good" or "good enough". Some of these are rather subjective: while some users like certain things, other users dislike them. For example, some users think the mods are too strict (lock too many threads, give warnings for small spam posts, etc.) while others think they are too lax (let too many threads go unmoderated, don't delete/ban enough, etc.). People will always have different opinions on how much a forum (or user content in general) should be moderated and these opinions range from "users should be allowed to do everything" to "the mods should be much stricter with their moderation". Besides this, I believe that many complaints come from misunderstandings, not fully understanding how moderation works, and not knowing that the mods also have to deal with limitations as I mentioned in the "how the site is run" part. For example, many people complain that the mods are lazy but they don't know/understand that the teams are most of the time understaffed, that there are hundreds of submissions every day, and that mods are volunteers who don't work for MAL full-time, so even when they are on the site, they won't be modding for several hours. People also often complain about the rules and many times it's because they don't fully understand why they are there. For example, many people don't understand why saying something like "you are dumb" already counts as an insult, but what many users don't realize is that even small insults like that often turn into huge flame wars which can ruin an otherwise nice thread and in addition make the moderation workload a lot higher. I know that for users it's hard to understand everything because they don't know what is going on behind the scenes and because they usually don't have the experience of moderating such a large website. I tried to explain many things during my time as admin when I saw complaint threads, but not everyone will read these things. Because of this I never expected users to know and understand everything. But it would help both users and the staff if the mods weren't immediately seen as "bad" without knowing much about what's actually going on. Instead, it would be better to ask questions and to try and understand why things are the way they are before jumping to conclusions and assuming the worst. There are always reasons behind the things the mods do (or don't do) and being open to what they have to say will help understand them better. Where would you take me for dinner? from @NextUniverse I would take you to one of my favorite places for food, a conveyor belt sushi place, where we could eat tons of delicious sushi and other yummy things! I've been to such restaurants a few times already and I loved the variety of the food. It's also a very fun way to eat with the food passing by your table and you can just pick whatever you want to. What movie would you take me to watch? from @NextUniverse Back to the Future, the whole trilogy. I've seen the movies like a hundred times already, but I still enjoy them a lot every time I watch them. The greatest story about time travel with great actors and great comedy. Everyone should watch them and don't worry, if you've already seen them, I'll gladly rewatch them with you :D. My house has burnt down and I've lost everything other than a phone to call any MAL mod. Who would be best to call for comfort and hospitality? from @NextUniverse A lot of mods would be great for this for being good listeners and always being helpful, so it's hard to choose just one. But I'd say @tingy would be good for cheering you up and sending you lots of nice cat pics and other cute pics for some extra comfort :). Is the MAL mod team a cult? from @NextUniverse I don't know where you would get this idea from, it's totally not like we all make a special kind of contract or anything like that… ／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼  How come mods and admins don't use the forum as regular users would. Even if it is just as much as every now and then? from @NextUniverse Before becoming mods, most of us were actually using the forums quite actively and only after modding for a while did our forum activity become less and less. I can't speak for everyone, but here are my thoughts based on my personal experience and what I heard from some other mods when talking about it. Modding can take up a lot of time and it can be very exhausting. It's not like mods are required to moderate for several hours every day, but they usually spend a good amount of their free time moderating the site. After that, they either don't have time to post anymore or they're just too tired for it and prefer to do some other activity. Opening a thread and seeing lots of problems that you first have to deal with before replying to the thread can also ruin the motivation, especially if it takes a long time to clean things up. I and others sometimes tried to be more active but after a short while, it was back to how it was before because we were all just tired. It's a byproduct of constantly being understaffed which results in higher workloads for each mod as well as constantly dealing with the toxic behavior of users. The workload needs to be lowered so that mods still have enough time and motivation to post on the forum but this requires getting more mods and improving the forum and mod tools. What do you think about "MAL vs Anilist"? from @NextUniverse I always find it good if there are different options available. Some users might prefer MAL, others might prefer Anilist, and again others might prefer a different anime list website. The good thing about having different options is that you can just pick whatever you like best or just use several websites if that's your thing. Competitors can be beneficial to get more development for new features (don't ask me how important that is in the case of MAL; I don't know). Anilist has a few advantages like not being owned by a company and a probably more structured approach when they created the website. They can decide themselves what to implement and don't have to spend tons of time fixing old code, which can make them develop new features faster. What I find pretty dumb though are "MAL vs Anilist" wars that turn into bashing the users/moderators on those websites. Most of the time people are just frustrated about something and then create some drama instead of trying to find ways they can help make the situation better and/or discussing it with the staff. Constructive criticism is always great and every website can learn from it, unnecessary drama doesn't help anyone though. Personally, I prefer MAL. Anilist has nothing that I'm really missing on MAL (except for list stats, but I can see that on MALgraph too) and I don't like the design much. On MAL I enjoy how the lists can be customized, the bigger community which means seeing more opinions, having more reviews including on lesser-known entries, anime/manga news, the events, FAL, … so I don't see a reason for myself to switch to Anilist. I am locked away in a tall tower with a very scary dragon ready to eat me if I try to escape. Which mod would be best suited to free me from my imprisonment? from @NextUniverse We have a lot of great report queue dragon slayers but if it can only be one of them I'll nominate @Ardanaz, I think he will have a lot of fun with it :> Over your period on MAL, was there something you weren't happy with regarding the site, but couldn't change or improve? from @Mimurona Looking back at all these years, I think I could contribute a lot to improving the forum moderation but it never reached the level I wanted it to have. When I joined the forum mod team there were a lot of inconsistencies and other problems. After gaining some experience with the moderation on MAL (and my experience from being a mod on another forum) I suggested internal guidelines that would help the mods be more consistent with the moderation. We restructured the forum, made the rules clearer, and made the warning/ban system consistent/transparent by defining ban stages and categories and adding them to the public guidelines. Over the years I was involved in a lot of smaller and bigger projects to improve the forum moderation, like improving the consistency of moderator actions or trying to make the moderation more efficient. Overall the moderation is much better now compared to 10 years ago but I still see a lot of problems and it made me quite unhappy that I couldn't solve them because there is only so much you can do if you have no control over the code and at one point you need code changes to improve things more. As I mentioned before, the biggest problem MAL has to deal with is still catching up on the years of complete neglect while trying to add new features. There's a lot of development involved and all the different things that need to be done need to be prioritized (most of it made sense to me though I didn't agree with everything). It also makes sense to prioritize changes to the database or general site features because they're used by more users compared to the forum which is used by a smaller portion of the user base. But I see it as a problem to keep adding user content features and growing the user base rapidly without investing more into the moderators. The mods are already struggling with moderating user content. Adding more to their workload but not doing a lot to help them deal with it in better ways is a big problem for the mods and the site in general. You can't effectively moderate a forum/site of the size of MAL with only a handful of people, period. Especially if these people are volunteers who do this in their free time. Volunteers will leave quickly if the work keeps being tedious all the time (and forum moderation is very tedious for several reasons) or when they're constantly dealing with abuse and other toxic behavior unless they are very dedicated and go to their very limits which is another big problem. Over the years I've seen so many good mods getting burned out (often quickly) and some of them left being very affected by all the abuse. And the smaller the team, the bigger the workload for each mod, and the more they are exposed to all these problems. The result is a constant struggle and never being able to improve certain parts of the moderation like dealing with reports faster or doing more active moderation. In recent years, it has gotten even worse because the user base is growing faster than ever and with this, all the problems have been increasing a lot, especially toxic and abusive user behavior. Since we couldn't get more mods and also not many code-related improvements, we had to have a look at the forum and all the problems and restrict more things. I'm aware of the many complaints about restricting so much and I understand why people think like this. While I think that certain restrictions are definitely good, (like banning "XYZ doesn't deserve its score" and other score-related drama threads) I wasn't happy that we basically had to put a blanket ban on certain other topics. Yes, it would be better to differentiate more and moderate these threads instead of just disallowing them. But time has shown again and again that even the harmless ones turn into problems that take much time to deal with. And with the current state of the mod team, it's simply not possible to deal with all these problems. If the site gets more improvements and if there are more mods then it might be possible to remove certain restrictions again, similar to how we removed the "simple listing" rule when it wasn't necessary anymore. But that was something that never happened while I was still an admin. (To clarify something, it wasn't me who was forcing the rules on the mods. All rule changes were proposed by the forum mods or me and then discussed with the team. While not every mod always agreed on every rule, we didn't add rules that the majority of forum mods disagreed with.) A lot needs to be done to improve the situation and it mostly requires action from the higher-ups. The mod tools need more improvements to make moderation more efficient and less tedious, the forum/site needs improvements to help reduce violations, users need to be given better tools to ignore threads/users, and the forum mod position needs to be made more attractive. More motivation and a much bigger team can help reduce the stress on the individual mods and improve the overall moderation. Media Do already started doing many improvements and I'm very thankful for it. Still, a lot more needs to be done and my hope is that this is done soon so that the team can better deal with the increase of problems without getting burned out quickly like in the past, and to be able to improve the overall moderation beyond what we currently have. What exactly do you enjoy about BL and do you wish to keep reading them until you die? Which ones would you recommend to people who you know and do you believe in straight fudanshies? from @Kazu-chan-san I'm a huge fan of romance and stories about relationships in general. But the problem with opposite-sex romance anime/manga is that they're often aimed at a younger audience. I do sometimes enjoy a cute little romance story, but overall I'm tired of stories where characters are shy and awkward around each other and the most that happen is holding hands or if you're lucky a kiss. I'm looking for more mature romance stories with adult relationships/couples nowadays. I'm also tired of gender stereotypes like girls being weak and always accepting what the guy is doing (often shown in smutty romance stories) or guys having to be tough no matter what. BL has its own annoying stereotypes and problems and there are a lot of things that I don't like. But overall I find it easier here to find something I enjoy, like mature characters in an equal relationship, stories that focus on established relationships, and characters showing and talking about their feelings and finding solutions. I find that these things are often done on a rather deep level in BL, while I have a hard time finding something similar in other romance stories, and I like all the emotions that these BL stories convey to the reader. I don't know if I will keep reading BL until I die because my tastes and interests might change, but so far I don't see myself stopping anytime soon. There's still a lot out there that seems promising and in general, BL seems to be moving away from the problematic/annoying stereotypes it had in the past and I'm looking forward to finding more great series. For people who are not fully into BL but might enjoy some lighter story I would recommend Seven Days, Bokura no Shokutaku, and Hidamari ga Kikoeru. These stories focus on character development and/or how the relationship between the two main characters develops, without (explicit) sex involved but full of wonderful emotions. For more explicit stories (that still focus on character/relationship development) I would recommend Pink Heart Jam, Hana nomi zo Shiru, Therapy Game, Tamayura, and Kyuuso wa Cheese no Yume wo Miru. I'm not a fan of the terms fujoshi and fudanshi because of their negative connotation and also not a fan of labels in general, but I do think that BL has readers of all orientations and backgrounds, including guys who identify as straight. As with all other readers they might have different reasons for liking it, be it being curious, wanting to see deep emotional connections between men, or for other reasons. That's the nice thing about BL, it's not just "yay gay sex" but the genre can offer a lot more when you find the right series for you. What do you find interesting in the character of Enkidu? from @Moonspeak For me, the interesting part about Enkidu is their character development, from a being created by the gods as a simple tool to gaining a better understanding of others and especially Gilgamesh, to the point where they become Gilgamesh's friend who he appreciates very much. I'd really love to see more about them and their journey and adventures in some form of anime or manga. The following questions and onwards were conducted when Luna was no longer an admin of MAL. This half of the interview was also conducted by @NextUniverse. The biggest news for everyone is that you have retired as a MAL admin after such a long time. Do you believe that your efforts have paid off? As well as achieving goals you have wished to achieve? For the most part, yes. My biggest project was the forum and I do believe that compared to how it was before, we have achieved many improvements, like more consistency, more transparency when it comes to the warning/ban system, and getting at least some more features for the forum and the mods. I think the biggest overall achievement is that the forum still exists in 2022 despite all the problems it caused over the years. That's not a given, I know other websites that shut down their entire forums or other social features because the effort to moderate them became too big. The only part of the MAL forum that was affected by this was Current Events, which I could save from being shut down until it became impossible to moderate given the current state of the mod team. The rest of the forum hasn't been affected by it though and I hope that it will stay like this (no, there had never been talks of removing Casual Discussion too and I would have been against it, but I don't know how this will be handled in the future; personally I hope that MAL will keep a board for general discussion). For me, it's also an achievement that we now have a system that detects downvote/upvote accounts for DB entries automatically. This has been a huge problem for years (and it seems it's getting worse) so I'm glad that this feature was developed for the website. Deleting accounts manually was super painful because I had to carefully verify each and every one, and it was also quite pointless because most bot accounts went undetected. It took a lot of time and discussion to create this system but it was definitely worth it. One achievement that took a lot of time and effort but is one that I have always been quite proud of was reviving the Fantasy Anime League (FAL) after it was abandoned by the original team. This meant writing a new script that would automatically collect points and do all necessary calculations. What's greater is that it continued to live after I gave the code to other people and that the event is now even officially integrated into the website and has participant numbers of over 25k people. I had put a lot of time into the support board, helping users in general, and explaining things in PMs and in posts on the forum. Like with many other things, this was an ongoing process where you never really achieve a certain goal, but knowing that I could help a lot of users along the way was the kind of goal I was aiming for here. That being said, there were also many times when my efforts didn't pay off or felt wasted. Like I said in another question, the forum moderation never reached the level that I wanted it to have, no matter how much effort I put into finding solutions. I spent many hours thinking about and designing new features for the forum and the mod tools with the goal to improve both the forum and the moderation. Most of the time my suggestions were put on some backlog (and never seen again) or rejected. I spent hundreds of hours trying to find more forum mods, but most people declined (no surprise given the current state of things). Over the years I spent thousands of hours helping with reports even though this wasn't part of my admin tasks because I wasn't given what was needed to improve the overall situation and I wanted to help the team when things were really bad. Sadly, having one more person helping out is just not enough. In hindsight, this cost me a lot of time and energy and I wish I could have focused my efforts elsewhere. A lot of MAL extensions have been made to improve the site experience. Would you say such extensions are on a level similar to what the owners can produce, or maybe better? Do you use any of these extensions yourself? I've used many extensions over the years. Many of them were mod related to helping with the suboptimal mod tools. I also wrote my own scripts to help me with some of my very specific tasks. Besides those, I've also used extensions that would add additional or altered functionality to the site in general, like filtering out your list entries from search results, automatically adding tags to your list, or removing the horrible link hover effect that DeNA once added. I've also used style extensions that would give the entire site a slightly different style - while I like the way MAL looks and works in general, I think that a few small changes can make it look better and the extensions I used were great for this. I gave up on those a while ago though because the continued site changes kept breaking them. Overall, I think that there are many talented people out there who are doing a fantastic job with their extensions. Many of them are super useful and are designed in a way that they could easily be implemented like this on MAL directly without any changes to them (if at all). It's actually hard to compare user-made extensions to something the site developers can produce. Extension developers work with the final output of the website in the browser so they have to deal with certain restrictions, while site developers have full control over both the frontend and backend. On the other hand, extension developers have more time and freedom to make their extensions really great over time, while site developers often have to quickly get a feature out even if it's not 100% perfect. But overall, many extensions are definitely on a very high level when it comes to design and implementation and might even be better than some native implementations. I really wish there was a way that people could contribute to the site development with their extensions. Not only could it speed up the site development, but it would also remove the disadvantages of extensions: that they need active developers that can fix things when site changes break the extension and that extensions are only useful on the computer where they're installed. Seeing as you have a PhD in Computer Science if you had the chance to improve MAL’s code, would you? What do you find interesting about the field too? In the past, I would have liked to help improve MAL's code, especially during the times when we didn't get any code changes or when things were very slow. I probably would have even done it as a side project for free like all the other things I did for MAL. But only the dev team is ever allowed to work on the code and volunteers can't help even if they wanted to, so it was never possible for me to do this. Now my personal situation is different from before. Similar to how I don't have time for moderating MAL anymore, I also wouldn't have time to help with MAL's code as a side project. Even if I had the chance to officially join the dev team now, I wouldn't want to do it for several reasons, like wanting to focus on other things. I was really into web design, database stuff and site management in the past, but now my interests lie more in other areas that I'd like to explore more. In general, I'm fascinated by everything that has to do with math and logic. I remember the first time I wrote a computer program and I thought it was absolutely amazing how this was possible and I knew that I wanted to go for a job related to this in the future. At university, I learned that there are lots of IT-related fields that are super interesting. My current interests are in artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, etc. It's fascinating to me how computers can learn and perform actions independently from humans and what is already possible in these fields, and I prefer to keep going in this direction in the future. What I also find super interesting is IT security and computer forensics, but I don't really know a lot about these fields at the moment. How did you fit in your life schedule whilst also working with such a demanding role on MAL? It was easier in the past when I was still at university where I had a quite flexible schedule. While I was already very busy back then, it was still easier to squeeze in some MAL time here and there. It got more difficult when I started working at a company. My time became rather limited to what I could do in the evening and on the weekend when I was finally home and could be at my computer. Modding on your phone or on a tablet is simply not possible and since I spend most of my time away from my PC nowadays because of work/commuting/work trips I reached a point where I couldn't do as much anymore. During my time as a MAL mod/admin, I often spent most of my free time working on my MAL tasks, usually several hours per day and often until my day was over. I guess I don't have to mention that my work-life balance during all those years wasn't the best. I think the sentence everyone heard most from me was "Sorry, I'm currently quite busy" - because of work, because of MAL stuff, because of other life events, or because of everything. In the last couple of years, I tried to improve my situation, especially with better time management and taking more time for myself in the evenings, but it resulted in me having less time I could put into MAL. In the end, a day only has 24 hours and there's a limit to what you can do. That's why I decided to retire because it became really hard to fit everything into the day. For working here for such a long time, is there anything you miss? To be honest, what I miss most are the older times when things were simpler and working on MAL was less complicated. Sure, it's definitely nice that MAL got handed over to companies that started to invest in MAL and I don't want to miss all the improvements and I look forward to more. But it also made some things more complicated and I can't say that all changes were great for me. Though me saying I miss the older times is probably also affected by the fact that things are often better when you just start—you're still full of dreams and hopes and motivation, and you think that if you just put in enough effort, you will be able to achieve great things. However, later down the road, you've just seen too many problems, disappointments, and frustrations and that makes everything harder. Do you have any advice for anyone learning new languages? If you want to learn a language to a high level then you should understand that this is a serious time commitment. Learning some basics can often be done rather quickly, but if you want to advance you need to put more time and effort into it. Don't get tricked by books/apps/websites that promise you "Fluent in x weeks/months". There are many ways to optimize language learning but there's no method that magically makes you "fluent" in a short amount of time. Not every language learning method works for everyone so be wary when people tell you "You have to do X" or "You should not do Y". Try out different methods so you can get a feel for what works for you and then stick with it. But don't waste too much time figuring out the "best" method. Apps can be a great learning resource for learning some basics or reinforcing what you learned already. For more complex languages and for advanced language concepts they're usually not that suited though because they often lack explanations or advanced content. A book might be drier but it goes into more detail and many languages have advanced learning books too. Personally, I like a combination of books and apps and that works well for me. Classes are something many people don't like much. If you don't like them because language classes in school sucked, I'd still recommend trying out classes at language institutes or online classes. Having a teacher is very valuable because you can ask them all your questions and get corrections all the time. There are also websites where you can book a personal tutor for little money (like iTalki). A spaced repetition system (SRS) can help learn vocabulary. There are many apps that have spaced repetition included, like Anki. I wouldn't recommend spending too much time on them though because a high amount of reviews every day can get quite annoying. Learning with books and apps isn't enough because their content is limited and often doesn't really reflect real-world usage of a language. That's why it's important to include consuming native content like books or TV shows. There are websites that help with that by providing translations and learning modes while reading/watching, which can help at the beginning. And the most important piece of advice: don't be afraid to make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes (even native speakers) but you shouldn't see them as your personal failure but as a great opportunity to learn. |
| Since you have quit your position as community admin of MAL, is this an indication that you may be finding yourself leaving MAL in the future? Or perhaps you wish to lurk for the time being? I still enjoy anime and manga a lot and as long as that's the case I will continue being on MAL. I might become less active at one point depending on how life will go, but I currently don't see myself stopping completely. For me, MAL is the most convenient website to track what I watch and read. I would only switch to another website if MAL changes the site/functionalities a lot and makes them less convenient for me and if I find that another listing website offers me better options, but at least at the moment, that's not the case. I'm currently mostly on MAL to update my lists though and don't involve myself a lot in the social parts like the forum, clubs or even comments. For almost 10 years I felt the weight of the responsibility of being a MAL mod/admin. I was working almost daily on MAL for several hours a day including weekends and the stress that came with it has affected me too to some degree. That's why I currently want to focus more on myself and doing things outside of MAL and the internet in general. So you might not see me around on the site a lot anymore and it might take quite some time until I reply to any messages. Despite working on MAL for such a long time, is there anything MAL does not have that you’d wish was on the site? There are a lot of things that I wish MAL had. Some of these are highly requested things by the community too and I really wish they would be given higher priority because I believe they would benefit many users and the site as a whole. My top pick would be having more webtoons on MAL, not restricted to the ones that have been published in physical form. I understand the DB staff's stance on this matter as no one wants the DB to be filled with low-quality webtoons. But over the years, digital products have become more and more common and important and I feel that MAL is missing out by not including a broader range of digital-only webtoons and losing many potential users to other websites that do list more webtoons. Personally, I tried some other websites to track them but don't like them much so I'd really like to be able to track these on MAL too. I hope that in the near future the guidelines will be adjusted so that we can have more webtoons in the database. What I'd also really like to see are statistics and badges for your lists. Statistics are super interesting, especially if they go beyond standard things like "how is the distribution of watched TV shows/movies/OVAs/etc." I like to discover things that I don't already know myself, for example, my favorite genres based on different things (number of watched/read series, scores given etc.) or if there are years/seasons where I gave a lot of good scores compared to other years. MALgraph has some really cool statistics like this which I like a lot plus a lot of other additional information and features based on your lists, like listing anime/manga that you might have missed, score distribution, and a watching/reading history heatmap. For badges, I currently mostly use the MAL Badges website. Badges are cool because they make me watch/read things that I might normally ignore. And I'm really thankful for this because this way I discovered a lot of great series which I would have otherwise missed. It's great that we have these external websites for statistics and badges but they have the problem that they can break with site changes and might not be fixed (like how MAL Badges won't receive any active development anymore). That's why I wish MAL had statistics and badges so that I don't have to worry that they will disappear one day. I think these features would also benefit many other users who love to see statistics and like to collect badges while exploring new anime/manga. I would have loved to help design statistics and badges but unfortunately, this never had a high priority while I was still part of the staff despite me bringing up the topic a few times. In general, MAL could do so many cool things with all the data they have about database entries and what/how users are watching/reading stuff. DeNA once tried to implement an automatic recommendation system, but it's very basic and favors very popular series, not what would actually be interesting based on what a user watched/read. MAL has so much data on hand that they could easily make this system better, which would give users a much better way to explore new series. Going back to the DB, I'd prefer to have more fine-grained tags on anime/manga and possibly characters. I really like the detailed tags on A-P and MU when I want to find something specific and I think that even with the changes to the genre/themes system on MAL it won't reach that level of granularity. Interest Stacks are a cool feature, but not every interesting topic has a stack already and existing stacks might be missing entries or reach the limit of 50 entries (which is way too restrictive). Sure, I can create my own stacks, but this also requires finding something through other websites first and there are some topics I'm interested in but I wouldn't want to create a stack for them. A dark mode and some tweaks to the design, in general, would be nice. But when I'm on the PC I don't really use the dark modes of websites and on the phone, I use Brave browser which has an integrated dark mode option that works quite well for MAL. So while these things would be nice to have, I can live without them for a bit longer. Is there something unasked that you would like to talk about? I want to say thank you to the community for the last 10 years that I spend on MAL as a mod/admin. Despite the many problems I had to face basically every day, I also have many good memories of my time as a mod/admin. I had a lot of interesting discussions with people that helped me understand them and the community better which in turn helped me a lot with my work on MAL here. Overall it was a good time for me and that was possible with the great community on MAL, so thanks, everyone! Can you recommend three members who we can choose from to interview next, and briefly explain why you would like to read their interviews? @tingy - She's an interesting and hard-working person who recently became a new admin. I think it'd be interesting to get to know a bit more about her. (I actually think it would be interesting to read interviews from all the new admins). @Naruleach - She was on the team even before I joined so it would be really interesting to see what another long-time staff member has to say about MAL and herself. @Kunii - He's one of the most active people I've ever seen on MAL, be it as a user or as a mod, and I think an interview with him would be interesting. Well then, that's the end of the interview. It’s been a long one in the making, but on behalf of the MAL Interviews team and to all interested, thank you for coming on, and thank you for your time. You have worked very hard. Do enjoy your retirement, Luna c: Thanks for the interview! I will certainly enjoy my retirement :). |
| Very interesting interview. I've been hearing so much about Luna during all these years and never knew we lived in the same country and have almost the same job and hobbies. Ich wünsch dir alles Gute für die Zukunft @Luna :) |
| This was a very interesting interview as we got to see things from a mod perspective. Appreciate the effort in trying to make MAL a better place for anime and manga fans. @Luna |
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| Wow Luna this was soo fun to read. We have been talking about Germany lately... Didn't know you were from there 😅 It's also comforting to know we're both into learning languages |
Coolest1234DJun 25, 2022 8:13 PM
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ateks said: Very interesting interview. I've been hearing so much about Luna during all these years and never knew we lived in the same country and have almost the same job and hobbies. Ich wünsch dir alles Gute für die Zukunft @Luna :) Thanks! And yep, the world can be so small haha. There are actually lots of users from Germany here on MAL and I knew many of them when I was still active in a German club here but sadly clubs nowadays are quite dead... Vielen Dank :D Gween_Gween said: yooo a fellow artificial intelligence enthusiast, interesting interview bro i respect the effort *high five* It's always nice to see other people on MAL being interested in it too :) And thanks!! AddaeAkono said: This was a very interesting interview as we got to see things from a mod perspective. Appreciate the effort in trying to make MAL a better place for anime and manga fans. @Luna I'm happy I could provide some things from an (ex-)mod perspective. Thank you so much! Coolest1234D said: Wow Luna this was soo fun to read. We have been talking about Germany lately... Didn't know you were from there 😅 It's also comforting to know we're both into learning languages I'm glad you enjoyed it :D And yeah, I guess it wasn't so clear when I started talking about how I'm not the biggest fan of traditional German food that I live here and get to eat it a lot (well, when I get invited by people who love that food). Ah but Currywurst is great :D We even share one language, Japanese! The other languages that you speak/learn are interesting too, I hope at one point I can also learn some Hindi and Polish :) |
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| Interesting... It has been a very good interview with very elaborate responses. In addition, the advice that @Luna has given are very good, especially about languages. As always very good organization @NextUniverse, @Skittles and @Corrout. |
NextUniverse said: The most interesting moon for me is probably Europa because its environment might be suitable for some form of life. There's still much to discover and it might not even be suitable for another million or more years, but just the thought that there could be life somewhere other than on Earth, now or in a far away future, sounds exciting. As a fellow european moon, I couldn't agree more ;) NextUniverse said: For me, the interesting part about Enkidu is their character development, from a being created by the gods as a simple tool to gaining a better understanding of others and especially Gilgamesh, to the point where they become Gilgamesh's friend who he appreciates very much. I'd really love to see more about them and their journey and adventures in some form of anime or manga. Thanks, I was curious since you seemed fond of him. To me he represents the animal nature of humankind, it's a notion I really am attracted to these days, and the Epic is a great source to dig into that. This was a great read full of useful info, nice to have this kind of perspective. Thank you guys ! PS : also, hiking (lil) high five o/ @Luna  |
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Horizon98 said: Interesting... It has been a very good interview with very elaborate responses. In addition, the advice that @Luna has given are very good, especially about languages. Thanks for reading it, I'm glad you found it interesting :) Moonspeak said: Thanks, I was curious since you seemed fond of him. To me he represents the animal nature of humankind, it's a notion I really am attracted to these days, and the Epic is a great source to dig into that. This was a great read full of useful info, nice to have this kind of perspective. Thank you guys ! PS : also, hiking (lil) high five o/ @Luna Glad you enjoyed it! Your reason for liking Enkidu is also very interesting. To be honest, I haven't really looked much into the epic and only know a few bits and what I picked up in Fate (which might not be all accurate). I'm quite interested in the epic though and definitely want to read it at one point to learn more about it. Nice to see someone else who likes hiking o/ I do it rather casually myself, nothing super extreme, I just enjoy being outside. |
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| What a massive review. I finally had enough time to read it all. Thanks for this, and thank you to @Luna for answering all the questions. Some of them I don't even remember asking anymore. Hope you're well! |
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cyruz said: What a massive review. I finally had enough time to read it all. Thanks for this, and thank you to @Luna for answering all the questions. Some of them I don't even remember asking anymore. Hope you're well! Thanks for reading it even though it was so long, and thanks for your questions, they were great! I'm currently dealing with a lot of things irl, many things that take up a lot of time and involve big decisions, but otherwise I'm fine :) I hope you're well too! |
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Luna said: Thanks for reading it even though it was so long, and thanks for your questions, they were great! I'm currently dealing with a lot of things irl, many things that take up a lot of time and involve big decisions, but otherwise I'm fine :) I hope you're well too! I just realized I called it a review. D'OH! I'm okay, just suffering a bit in the heatwave as I'm sure you've noticed, too. I'm not made for this weather. But I'm glad you enjoyed the questions, I always fear they're too basic. Hope you'll soon get some time to yourself; good luck with everything. Stay healthy! |
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cyruz said: I just realized I called it a review. D'OH! I'm okay, just suffering a bit in the heatwave as I'm sure you've noticed, too. I'm not made for this weather. But I'm glad you enjoyed the questions, I always fear they're too basic. Hope you'll soon get some time to yourself; good luck with everything. Stay healthy! Heh, going by how long it is, it's more like a review :'D Ah yeah, the heat... I usually love the heat but I have to say that right now it's too much even for me. Let's hope the weather cools down soon so we can both feel better again! Nothing wrong with basic questions imo, but I didn't find them basic, they were really interesting and fun to answer :) Thanks and stay healthy too! |
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| Really engaging interview, and I'm happy to see it published at last! Lots of fantastic and funny questions, especially from @NextUniverse. @Corrout also did a flawless job with the editing, and I'd say this is one of the best formatted long interviews in this club. @Luna I especially like your response to the language learning question. I picked up Japanese at the beginning of this year and I'm having a blast with it. Started off with Anki before moving on to immersion using raw manga and visual novels. Considering taking the JLPT this December, so keeping my fingers crossed. Do you have any suggestion on good Japanese textbooks? Or perhaps some other useful language learning advice? P.S. Sorry again for the extremely rocky interview process :( |
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| @Luna got the best taste in husbandos of all time. Best mod along with @Ardanaz. Also good to know you don't believe in straight fudanshies. I heard they hit a lot on each other and expect the other one to be "expensive straight" then deny each other. Man what a bunch of unrealistic pasts. Now envergonhe can know that they're just like good-hearded liberal Christian. They're just a myth. |
 ねえ、それはあなたです！ あなたがカズマやトーマが好きなエッチ/ハーレムファンなら、女性を「平等に」扱うので、女性を殴る/軽蔑する2人のマッチョな男性か、Free！/YOIが好きだがフェアリーテイルの悪を話すTumblrファンガールです/ DxDとSAOは、ファンサービスがあり、アニメやマンガでBL / LGBTQ +ファンサービスが好きで、自分を「フェミニスト」と呼んでいるためです。自分は偽善者に過ぎず、価値観を再考し、これらの二重で停止する必要があることを知ってください。標準。 真剣に、それを止めてください😁。 #MenHaveTheRightToWorkInShortsInHotDays #MALMemberSince2010#Kirisuna Nico Nico no Hyouryuuken!https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMsHeAUgW0lgREhidvVfUeeXb2M5WTADZ (Music about God). *Bill Clinton's voice* I did not have sexual relationships with that anime girl. *Hilary Clinton's voice* waifu's rights are human rights, and human rights are waifu's rights. *God Emperor Donald Trump's voice* Yaoi anime will soon be illegal. All fujos will be arrested. |
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