▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Interview #267 - @lpf ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ The Time I Became an Old-Timer on an Anime Website Interview conducted by: @spaceslut Reviewed by: @MeanMrMusician Lpf, tell us about yourself. Hi! I currently go by my Vietnamese name, Tam, but I have a long history as lpf on MAL. I'm Vietnamese-born, but was adopted by French parents as a baby. I was born on January 28th, 1996, making me currently 27! How did you come up with your username? Back in the mid-2000s, I picked the name "Maniak" on a Pokemon forum as a reference to the "Pokemaniac" trainer you can fight in-game. That name was already taken on MAL, so I made it "lpfManiak", the "lpf" coming from my very first, 2004 handle: "leplusfort". A childish name meaning "The Strongest". All my MAL friends called me lpf, so I changed my name to it. Can you give us a history of your time on MAL? I joined in 2010 because a lot of French anime fans had an account at the time. Between 2010 and 2014, I made a lot of friends participating in multiple MAL sub-communities like: - The MAL IRC, which had its own little community mostly separate from the forums, where a few staff members also hung out - Various MAL IRC friend groups, like AnnoKano's #amamizukan, Tachii's #malnourished, as well as my own - The Critics and Connoisseurs club, and somewhat of a short-lived offshoot, Quiet Discourse. Two clubs focused on discussing anime "analytically". This is a little more effort than I'm willing to spend discussing and thinking about anime nowadays, but these clubs played a foundational role in my intellectual development as a teenager! - The Skype groups for those communities. This was before Discord! At the time, if online communities wanted to chat in real time, there was mostly IRC or Skype... In 2013, Kineta organized a anime tournament arc-style recruitment for the first review moderators where users nominated others for the position. The rationale was that review moderators should already be active in the community. I became a review moderator then, and with the other initial mods, we tackled the report queue which was perhaps several thousands of reports long (perhaps over 9000?) and helped shape the official policies for reviews. Around that time, snatching a "entry front page review spot" for Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (YKK) was a highlight of my time on the site as it has been my favorite piece of fiction since 2011. This may come as a surprise, but YKK once had an average of over 9.00/10 on MAL, and I found it on Wayback Machine sitting at the top #4! Back then, many influential members and top reviewers like the former #1 tehnominator and Archaeon had YKK as their #1 manga favorite. In 2020, I needed to find an internship to conclude my web development training course. My intuition told me to apply for MAL, so I did. I sent a Japanese cover letter to MediaDo, the company that currently owns MAL. The staff asked Kineta about me, who seemingly vouched for me, allowing me to join as a remote intern. How did you first get into anime/manga? Watching cartoons on morning TV growing up, every single Japanese series would become an instant favourite. My biggest faves were Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Beyblade, Detective Conan, Dragon Ball, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Naruto, but there were many others I would religiously tune in for. France started importing anime before the US, so my parents were nostalgic about a lot of 70s and 80s TV cartoons that they weren't aware were anime, like a number of the World Masterpiece Theater series. Many of those oldies were re-broadcast (one at a time) on lunchtime TV, and I spent years following them. Death Note, Naruto, and Detective Conan were the first anime I watched "online", but it wasn't until watching Haruhi in 2008 that I became an avid anime fan. At the time, I loved to watch AMVs on Dailymotion (now-irrelevant French YouTube-like service), most of which were action Naruto AMVs. This is how I stumbled upon the then-highly-popular "Skittles" Haruhi AMV, which blew my mind with some of its effects that were created frame-by-frame. Proofreader’s note: This is the first I’ve heard that Dailymotion is French. With much difficulty acquiring it (I was 12, and the Internet wasn't quite the same back then!), I managed to eventually watch Haruhi, the title character becoming my first anime crush. I followed up with Lucky Star, which I knew had a lot of Haruhi references, and then every other KyoAni series. At that point, I was already deep down the anime rabbit hole. Any hobbies outside of anime/manga? Though I now do software engineering professionally, I also love programming as a hobby! I especially love purely functional languages like Haskell, whose compilers can catch many more bugs than other languages before they make it to production. Haskell requires the developer to adhere to strict rules that enforce a coding style which happens to be, IMHO, very elegant, but sadly too foreign and hard to learn for the majority of programmers. When I have a project idea, I end up investing all of my time into manically developing it like an addict, not coming out of my room until it's done. After it's done, I feel like an anime protagonist who's just gone on a solitary retreat and come back with a power-up. My routine consists mostly of doing my work, then working on my personal projects if I have any ongoing, going out to eat with my sisters when I feel like it, and otherwise reading trashy isekai/power-fantasy manga and Korean webtoons. In between all that, I sometimes waste time chatting on Discord or watching YouTube videos. This has succeeded in making me very happy and fulfilled. Occasionally fleeting interests like certain games or VTubers come in and out of my life :) As a millennial who grew up with the Harry Potter books and movies, Hogwarts Legacy feels like the game my teen self never knew he needed. Can you recommend 3 anime/manga for us? As if I haven't already mentioned it enough, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is one. The manga for the full experience, or the first anime for a preview. It has its little part in MAL history. By the way, here's a cute fansite I made for that series: https://alpha.cafe Then I suppose I'll name some kind of lesser-known trashy isekai/power fantasy as I've become a bit of an enthusiast in recent years. Since a lot of people are basking in the Eminence in Shadow anime afterglow currently, I'll go withJitsu wa Ore, Saikyo deshita?. An anime adaptation is coming up this spring. The MC's little sister is a chuunibyou whose delusions coincidentally become true, much like the Eminence MC. And to finish it off, I think I'll go with a safe bet with a broader appeal than the previous two. No one should be overlooking Yotsuba&!. It's been a cornerstone of Internet culture for decades - and for good reasons. How do you feel about how the site is currently run by the mods and admins? I've always respected the work Kineta puts into running the site. I sincerely think that without her, MAL might not still exist in 2023. Any users you like/dislike and why? Teenager me was fascinated with @tehnominator's reviews. Back then, AnnoKano would call her "The queen of MAL". Her reviews were a great influence on me at the time. I've made many great friends in my small MAL bubble, some that I remarkably still talk to after over a decade. I won't name all of them, but they were pretty much all people from the clubs/IRCs Critics and Connoisseurs (and its offshoot Quiet Discourse), and Tachii's MALnourished. What led you to become a review mod? I was pretty passionate about reading and writing MAL reviews, and I had a group of friends who also were into it. Before I was recruited as part of the first batch of review mods, only Kineta could see review reports, and she didn't have the time to look at them, so the report queue had gotten quite sizable, and I knew my help would count. I was eager to help run the site; reading a lot of random reviews was already something I did, so I didn't mind reading more to help MAL, and I appreciated having the chance to influence what the rules are. What did you do in your moderation work? The bulk of the work consists in reviewing reports, reading reviews, deleting offending or low quality reviews (and informing users of the removal reason and how to amend the review so it may be reposted). We've also refined the rules and guidelines for reviews. How would you describe your workload moderating reviews? There was room to put in as much or as little work as you liked. spaceslut: So you were one of the first review mods? Correct; until I was recruited alongside a few others, there was only Kineta. Could you describe how you applied/got the position? As mentioned in my MAL History; In 2013, Kineta organised a anime tournament arc-style recruitment for the first review moderators where users nominated others for the position. The rationale was that review moderators should already be active in the community. I became a review moderator then, and with the other initial mods we tackled the report queue which was perhaps several thousands of reports long (perhaps over 9000?), and helped shape the official policies for reviews. How would you describe your relationship with community members? I've become pretty low-profile. Mostly chilling with old friends. Sometimes, I check out some clubs' Discords. At the time that I became a review mod, I was friends with people from many sections of the community, and many knew that I was passionate about MAL reviews (I never found out the details, but it seems I was nominated by a lot of people). Now for a funny story, a very unbecoming screenshot of me was passed around a bunch for a while, and someone dubbed me the worst MAL moderator. The screenshot was of me sending an abrasive 4chan copypasta in someone's private messages. In my defense... this was the removal notice for a review that, itself, was a 4chan copypasta. I thought the author might find humor in my response. That said, there are things that you can't take a chance on, and this was one of them. Shouldn't have done that. Have you ever had to change a rule or create a new one? We came up with a whole set of guidelines in 2013 (which have no doubt been revised multiple times since then). I don't remember many details of the specific rules we decided on. I remember one of the primary concerns at the time was "preliminary reviews" unfairly cementing their position at the top, often hindering "full season reviews" from taking their place. This was a problem for readers who should have the most up-to-date information and reviewers who waited until the end of a show to publish their reviews. I believe we created a rule along the lines of requiring preliminary reviews to be deleted upon season completion. Nowadays, there's a "preliminary review" system in the website's code, so that surely has changed. What led you to retire from moderating? This year, I started at a new university. I was a little overwhelmed with this new life, new friends and new responsibilities, and I wanted to free myself of this online commitment. What were some of the tasks that you did while you worked at the MAL parent company? I would prototype new features mostly on my own, deciding myself on what to create. I had Kineta, other mods, and the lead engineer provide feedback on the design phase, and the lead engineer also gave feedback on my code submissions. Once a design document was validated, I would implement a working prototype for staff to test out. I've conducted three projects in this manner. One made it into production, and I'm very happy with it because I feel that gave MAL a substantial usability boost. It is the new filters and sort options on People and Entry Characters: - An entry's character list was previously polluted with roles for languages you're not interested in, making the page hard to navigate. Now you can filter those languages out. - Previously, it was hard to find popular supporting characters if a show had a lot of supporting characters. Now, characters can be sorted by favorites, making it much easier to find what characters are the most popular - You can now filter a person's roles to only include entries that are in your list. This was very important to me as my most common use for looking up a person's roles was when I recognize a voice and want to know where I know it from. - Previously, a person's roles were sorted alphabetically, which made it difficult to find recent or popular roles. Now, a person's roles actually display the entry's release date, as well as the number of members or favorites. Furthermore, you can sort roles by release dates and by favorites! Proofreader’s note: We are truly indebted to you. The other two projects were a score progression chart on a particular anime’s "Stats" page and "highest rated anime by year" charts on user profiles. My designs needed more work, and porting my prototype code to production would have taken more time. However, I'm really quite happy enough that I was able to improve MAL with just the filters and sort options! spaceslut: So you made some important changes to the site. Were there some changes you wanted to make but weren't able to? Other than the two projects that didn't make it, there was nothing specific I wanted to do and couldn't work on. Were you offered a permanent position there after your internship ended? Nope, but that was expected. It also worked out for me as I ended up finding jobs using purely functional programming languages, which are my true passion. Was it a paid or unpaid internship? It was unpaid, but that was mandated by my school. What skills did you gain from your internship with MAL? It was my first time using the PHP backend framework Symfony. I became pretty good at PHP and Symfony in the process. I decided to never write PHP again due to being very opinionated about programming languages, but it still improved my overall programming skills, especially considering I wrote my first REST API and used a backend framework for the first time. This was also very valuable on a career level since you could pretty much call yourself "full-stack" if you knew at least one frontend framework and at least one backend. The frontend JavaScript code I wrote for my prototypes also helped develop my programming skills, and going through a formal design process also became a valuable experience in my professional life. As all communications were in Japanese, the internship also gave me a huge amount of Japanese practice. Can you walk me through a typical day working as a MAL intern? It was quite atypical, but it suited me perfectly. I'd start working at no set time and would advance my current project, mostly on my own. On some days, that was a lot of design planning and writing - I translated my design documents to Japanese myself, which also took quite some time. On some days, there was a lot of coding. The projects were pretty much chosen by me as well. That was both a lot of freedom and a lot of responsibility. If I needed someone else's input (MAL mods or the lead engineer), I'd text-chat them, and they would sometimes respond immediately, sometimes asynchronously. Then at the end of the day, I would write down a summary of what I did that day, any difficulty I faced, and what I planned for the next day. On Fridays, we also had Zoom meetings. What was the most disgusting/insulative review you’ve had to read? From @Zettaiken That's a hard one. It's rare for reviews to be outright offensive. There may have been some odd cases, but I also can't remember having to hand out punishments (other than removing a review). However, I will say I'm quite disgusted when reading my old reviews. What's the nicest/best review you’ve ever seen? From @Zettaiken One review which has stayed in my mind is AnnoKano's Anime Tenchou review, which was an inspiration for my own reviews. I was fascinated by the way the over-the-top excitement of the review matched the anime's tone. This one is going to sound random, but I've laughed a lot reading this Wagamama Fairy Mirumo de Pon review by janesis_15. I like how it starts out fully in English but then at some point starts mixing in Tagalog with no warning. I know this is common for Tagalog speakers, but the fact that this is with no warning and coincidentally starts in the middle of the review is pretty funny. What was it like working for the previous holding company for MAL? From @ACasualViewer It was the best internship I could've hoped for. I worked on something that I cared about, created a feature I cared about, had an incredible amount of freedom. Plus, everyone was very nice. One of my Japanese coworkers happened to be visiting my country soon after the internship, and we met up and had a great time. What do you do these days? From @ACasualViewer Read isekai, code (professionally and as a hobby), tinker with AI, and listen to J-pop. Do you see yourself leaving MAL in the future? No Is there anything you wish MAL had? Free food Is there anything unasked that you would like to talk about? Nope Any feedback on the interview format? Nope - all good Can you recommend 3 users you would like to see interviewed next and briefly explain why you would like to read their interviews? I met @OblivionXKnight in 2013, and I'm surprised he's consistently been his energetic happy-go-lucky self all these years. He's also a very unique person who might have some very interesting answers. All review moderators knew him during my time after helping him with reviews. (As written on his profile, he has autism, so keep this in mind.) The Critics and Connoisseurs club stopped its activities recently after 15 years, and I think it's been a minor but still important name in MAL history. My friends @ladyxzeus or @Lightfellow might have interesting things to say about its history. That’s all! Thank you for the great interview. |
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