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As an ardent fan of anime and manga, I love to consume media both for enjoyment and for personal growth (I know - cheesy, right?). I feel like I've seen my fair amount of shows, although I never seem to have enough time to watch everything I want to (or, perhaps more importantly, have enough money to buy enough merchandise to decorate my room!). I also blog about it along with my fiancee Rebecca, who's also on MAL.

Outside of anime, I love watching stuff more generally, playing video games, and reading (both books and papers). My main academic interests are in astronomy and physics, although I spend a lot of my free time dabbling in fandom studies (and other anime-related offshoots into different areas of media studies).

NOTES ON RANKINGS:

Ranking a show is at its heart a subjective process of reducing everything about a show down to a single number. As such, rankings are most useful as a general guide rather than some objective "quality" criteria. I know most people keep that in mind when judging other peoples' tastes and/or deciding what to watch, but it's always good to state it explicitly. That being said though, rankings are still useful, which is why big movie critics are still in business and MAL is the place I go to determine the general impressions of a show. Maybe I'm "unrefined", but I find my feelings to align much more with general opinion than popular reviews.

My rankings tend to be a compromise between two things:
- 1) How did I feel about a show? This generally is pretty straightforward and personal.
- 2) Is the show "objectively good"? This is much more complicated and involves a lot of me attempting to pick apart a show.

Both are useful questions, so I use both to rank shows. Other than that, I have absolutely no criteria: I grade holistically rather than piecemeal, since I find that's a more useful way of doing things.

I periodically (~ every 6 months or so) go through and update my ratings based on how I feel about shows *now* (since I consider posterity important). My current rankings are still somewhat in flux until the next big re-evaluation - I've been trying to update them closer to a 5-6 center to rather than the 7-8 center I used to have (due to selection bias, I tend to only pick up shows I like, which means I don't view as many shows I consider to be "average"), but its still somewhat incomplete.

NOTES ON VIEWING PREFERENCES:

You might be suspicious with my 0% drop rate. Note that I only will consider a show "dropped" if I stop watching after I have become particularly invested in it, which translates (in practice) to dropping it after the 50% mark. If I'm just "taste"-testing shows, I don't see why I need to mark down all the ones I never really picked up (especially since I forget about most of them in a few months outside of the name). Fortunately, it turns out I generally am pretty good at dropping bad shows and am quite masochistic about trying to finish ones I don't like (watching bad shows does help make you a better reviewer!), so...yea.