Ever since the inception of D&A back in late 2015, it’s been on our minds of what we wanted our blog/site to represent. At first it wasn’t really going to be an actual blog, but in fact a cosplay album where the cosplayers that we’ve taken pictures of while at anime conventions, could see their photos on our site. It has since grown from that point to where it is now; where we do reviews on anime and manga titles, have anime and manga trivia on our Twitter page, post anime convention mocumentaries about our adventures, and show you where you can find various other anime cons in your region.
To be honest we had no idea that the blog would turn out the way it did; with all the love and support that we’ve gotten from the anime community, as well as from North American Anime Distributors like FUNimation, Crunchyroll, Aniplex, Sentai Filmworks, and many more. We’re so excited to see what the rest of the year holds for us regarding our mini anime convention tour, as well as some new pages that are soon going to make their appearance on the blog.
As for what the road lies ahead for us, we’ve got some long-term and short-term goals established regarding the future of D&A Anime Blog. Next January at Baltimore’s AniMore anime convention, we’ll be doing our first official D&A Anime Blog panel, making this our first ever fan panel at an anime convention! (We won’t be doing just one panel, but we’ll actually give you guys two panels to enjoy, because that’s how much we love our fans!) We’ll also be working on trying to get some sponsors for us to help us with traveling costs, as well as get our own domain name and establish our own newsletter so that our fans will know what new developments are coming for the blog, and what’s new with the world of anime.
We’re hoping that for our tenth anniversary, we will be able to have our own anime convention known as D&A Anime Con! It’ll be an awesome three day anime convention filled with everything that makes anime conventions exciting; such as Voice Actor Q&A panels, awesome cosplay, special events, DJs and rave parties, and just flat out fun overall! To make this dream a reality we’re going to need your help. To make this future anime convention fun, we’re going to need the help of the many anime fans that are passionate about it as much as we are.
D&A for us is awesome, and its awesome because of you (the fans). Keep making D&A a part of you, and we’ll do our job to continue making you a part of us! 🙂
Month: April 2017
We’re Back On Track, and that’s a Fact!
Last weekend we did have an unfortunate moment where we’ve experienced our first ever brain fart, but now things are really looking up for us as we come back strong for a Toonami-filled Slash Saturday! As always we bring you some action-filled samurai anime titles that many of you may (or may not) have seen, plus our male and female picks for our Samurai Hall of Fame!
Looking for a samurai anime movie filled with the action and drama that these Edo Period warriors had faced during that time? Then check out this title known as Ryo; where the son of a samurai who’s parents died during the invasion of English ships, is now the bodyguard of an individual who has a plan to fight for his country. Wanna know who we’ve elected to be in our Samurai Hall of Fame in both our male and female categories? Then check em’ out for yourselves to see if your favorites have been elected.
Next weekend we travel to Lancaster, PA for our first ever out of state anime convention, and the third stop on our 2017 mini anime convention tour; Zenkaikon! After the con is over we’ll fill you in on the details as well as update you on some new things we’ve got planned for the summer. With all that said, thank you to all of our fans who are following us on WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, and also thank you to our Youtube subscribers! Keep on making D&A a part of you, and we’ll keep on making you a part of us! 🙂
Pardon Our Dust (The Return)…
Hey anime and manga fans! Once again we at D&A Anime Blog wanna thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all the love and support that we’ve been getting from the blog recently. For the next couple of days or so, we’ll be doing some mild renovating of our site to make it awesome and exciting for newcomers, as well as returning our fans.
As for what’s good on our side of the tracks; we’re gearing up for our third stop on our D&A mini anime convention tour, as there will be a new cosplay page added to our Cosplay Hall drop down menu within a few weeks. If you’ve been following us on our Facebook and Twitter pages, we’ve mentioned that we’re currently working on getting some electronic music production equipment (laptop, MIDI controller keyboard, etc.) so that we can have the ability to introduce a new music playlist feature for the blog.
We’ve also noticed that when we’ve been doing our WordPress posts on the blog, that while many of them are good to read and rather informative, then ten to lack in deeper and exclusive detail. As our promise to you (the fans) we plan on making our posts a little bit lengthier, so that we can give both old fans and new fans the full D&A experience! We apologize for not being able to bring you our anime title picks for our Throwback Thursday and D&A Friday’s segments this week, but since we’ll be at Zenkaikon next week, we’ll only be able to give you guys some reviews on some classic anime titles on Thursday. (We’ll make it up to you the following Friday.)
Saturday night is another awesome night of Toonami, and a chance to redeem ourselves during our Slash Saturday segment. Until then, stay golden and keep on making anime and D&A, a part of you! 😉
Cosplay Nightclubs: Guess What World?! Nerds Turn Up Too!!
Meeting men or women at nightclubs may be the norm for many of us millennials in this modern day and age of dating (plus social media), but what about the percentage of us in America that society has labeled as ‘undateble’ due to ‘their’ standards? Yours Truly has been wondering and pondering about this topic for a few years but never really figured out how to bright it to the forefront.
In the past 20 years or so we nerds and otaku have been portrayed on television as smart and intelligent, but at the same time meek and socially awkward when it comes to finding dates and trying to get girls (and guys). Throughout middle and high school it was hard for me and A. Goldman to find a member of the opposite sex that liked anime and manga as much as we did. Hell, it was even hard for the two of us to even get dates or find other friends.
To your average awkward socialite those four years would suck pretty badly, but trust us when we say this; it gets waaaay better after high school! With anime conventions popping up all over the place as well as an awesome anime community that we look forward to talking to every time we blog about anime, you can finally breathe and be your true self and won’t have to worry about the outside world judging you, or laughing at you because they think you’re too old for cartoons.
Now here comes the reason why I’m writing this filler post; nightclubs for lovers of geeky things like anime, manga, superheroes, and sci-fi are just like going back to high school and being labeled as part of the nerd click. There are a lot of cool things that I’ve noticed since being a part of the anime community; you guys are very kind, very sweet, very supportive, and very protective against internet trolls.
But back to the nightclub thing; nowadays we’ve got nightclubs and events that are dedicated to us nerds, otaku, and even cosplayers! To be honest I’ve never actually been to a cosplay nightclub (and neither has A. Goldman), but after doing some late night Youtube surfing I made a shocking discovery; nerds turn up just as much as normal night-clubbers do! (Dancing, bumping n’ grinding, etc.) Where were these kind of nightclubs when I was in my senior year of high school?!
I’m gonna wrap up this filler post by saying this if you’re an anime fan in middle or high school; hang in there, it gets so much better after grade school, especially if you’re an otaku looking for love! 😉
Monday Cleanse: Of Spirits and Guts!
Sometimes whenever we as humans feel stressed out by the comings and goings of the day; such as work, school, responsibilities around the house, it’s nice to have a day to yourself where you can just cleanse yourself and also have time to yourself. Tonight for your Monday night we’ve done just that as we’ve brought to you our version of a ‘cleanse’, and that’s through some good old lesser known anime title and snack time fun!
If you’re already a fan of a previous title that we’ve done for our Slash Saturday segment known as Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, then you’re going to love its spin-off title called Mononoke. It tells the story of the Medicine Seller character from the 2006 aforementioned title, as he battles against the mononoke (an ayakashi spirit that has found its way into the world of the living) using his intellect of the supernatural, before killing the spirit with his sword. If you’re looking for a way to improve your digestive system, then try out some Yakult. It’s a probiotic product that will help improve and moderate one’s intestines and colon, and can even help boost immunity so that you won’t get sick as easily!
As of right now there are less than two weeks left until Zenkaikon, which will be our third stop on our mini anime convention tour. This will also be our first anime convention out of state as we gear up and prepare ourselves to meet the one and only, Steve Blum! We’ll have more Youtube videos coming soon as well as more updates regarding our plans for the summer, as well as the Fanfiction.net debut of a couple of our fanfics!
Once again, we can’t thank you guys (the fans) enough for all of the support that we’ve been getting, so continue to make D&A a part of your lives and in return, we will continue to make you a part of us! 🙂
D&A Filler Posts: What Are They Up To Now?
If you guys are familiar with the concept of fillers or filler arcs in anime, then you might have an idea of what we’re getting at with this post. If you don’t then don’t worry, because we’re about to explain it to you! Every week on the blog we usually post anywhere between 3 and 5 posts a week. (Or about 1.5 a day for four days.) With that in mind we thought about ways where we can keep the momentum of the blog/site going, while at the same time continuing to cater to you (the fans) of what you wanna see from us. So far in the past fifteen months that D&A Anime Blog has been active; we’ve gotten over 30 WordPress followers, over 500 Twitter followers, over 25 Facebook followers, and we’re closing in on close to 7,000 total views on the blog itself!
We can’t thank you guys enough on all of the support that we’ve been getting from the blog, as well as from the anime community. Plus as always we wanna give an awesome shout-out to the crew at FUNimation, the voice actors, everyone at Crunchyroll, Sentai Filmworks, Aniplex, VizMedia, and to everyone that we’ve met during our 2017 mini anime convention tour. As for the filler posts that we’ve mentioned, they will fall into one of the following categories; Anime Episode Reviews, D&A’s Top 5 and Top 10, or Fan Posts. (Anything that you want us to write about.)
We’re also thinking about extending the length of our posts so that our fans can get an in-depth feel from what we post on our blog. We welcome any critiques that you may have as a D&A Anime Blog fan, in order to help us become a better anime blog and website, so that we can give you the ultimate anime blog experience! (Send them to us through our Contact Us page!) There’s no real time of when these filler posts will pop up, but when they do, you’ll know that that’s our way of making D&A more awesome, more attractive, and more a part of you! 🙂
D&A 404 – We Had Our first Brain Fart…
If you’re an anime/manga blogger like us its safe to say that you’re bound to have one of those days, where you’re trying to get something going review wise but nothing seems like it wants to come out. This my anime and manga fans, is our first brain fart…
Brain farts are those kind of things that usually happen just after you have a great week or month of reviewing popular anime series, or classic manga. This one (on our end) unfortunately just had to happen right before Toonami. There is one good thing that came out of this; we were able to review our title pick for our Samurai Anime of the Week, so if you’re on the lookout for a martial arts anime title, then check out the series known as Shura no Mon (Shura no Toki).
Aside from our little 404 brain fart issue, we’re proud to announce that we officially have reached over 500 Twitter followers! We at D&A want to thank you guys for helping us reach this monumental goal, and hopefully we’ll reach the big 1K follower count before our two year anniversary, which will happen January 11, 2018! Next month we’ll post our first official D&A 411 segment on our YouTube page for you guys to enjoy, plus we’ve also got some other fun and exciting news and updates to share with you within the coming weeks/months. We hope you guys aren’t too disappointed in us due to our brain fart, but next Saturday we should be back on track giving you what you want! 😉
Shaking Hands and Oral Hygiene: Just Another Friday Night for D&A!
The title of this post is pretty much a dead giveaway for what we’ve got in store for you on this week’s D&A Friday’s! As always we make sure we work our butts off to bright you the latest and greatest of anime and manga titles, and new to the scene, anime OVA titles. We’ve taken a small break from posting some manga reviews for the moment just so we can (hopefully) build up some popularity with our Anime OVA of the Week page under our drop down menu for D&A Friday’s. If you’re looking for an anime title that deals with forming duos and gaining powers through the mind of one’s psyche, then Hand Shakers may be the title for you! Looking for a series about battling against the everyday (twice a day) villain that hides in your teeth? Then scrape the plaque of your butt n’ check out an OVA/ONA series called The Dragon Dentist!
Tomorrow night marks another exciting night with Toonami, the final season of the Cartoon Network classic; Samurai Jack, and of course us with our weekly weekend segment you know as Slash Saturday! Plus we continue with our mini anime convention tour with our third stop: Zenkaikon in Lancaster, PA! If you ever find yourself at any of the remaining anime conventions on our tour list, be sure to check us out and stop n’ take a picture with us!
Be sure to follow us on all of our social media pages to see what we’ve been up to, and continue to support the voice actors in the industry that make us laugh, cry, and feel oh-so kawaii, with their amazing voicing talents. D&A, it’s a part of you! 🙂
Throwback Thursday: The 90’s come rollin’ in like a Rock!
And roll they shall! We’re back on this awesomely cool Thursday night with some anime classics that old school otaku have come to know, and love. Tonight we take a trip back into the 90’s decade of the Throwback Thursday timeline, where titles like Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z broke ground and reshaped the anime world as we know today. Looking for a classic anime series that follows a different path that other anime story lines? Then Seraphim Call might be the show for you! Are you scouting for some classic romance and magical girl titles? Then why not check out a little series called Saint Tail, and see what it’s all about!
Here’s a quick update! We mentioned in our last youtube video about us starting our D&A 411 segment this coming Saturday, but since we want to give you (the fans) the full experience of having both A. Goldman and Yours Truly on some upcoming youtube video announcements, we’ve decided to debut D&A 411 on the third Saturday of next month. We return with another installment of Anime OVA of the Week tomorrow night, and Saturday get ready for another showdown with your favorite samurai titles, Hall of Fame inductees, and of course Toonami! 🙂
D&A’s Top 5 Reasons Why Anime Conventions Are Awesome!!
With the third stop in our 2017 mini anime convention tour coming up at the end of this month, we though why not give our Top 5 reasons why we love going to anime cons! There are many of you who have had good and bad experiences at different cons that you may have went to at one point and time, but for us we’re going to focus more on the pros than the cons. (Get it?)
Number 5: They’re Judgement Free!
A. Goldman and myself have been going to Otakon for a total of eight years, and not once have we seen anyone judge a person based on what cosplay they’re wearing. (Or other things to that effect.) Sure, we’ve had our fair share of sighting panty shots and open boobs while attending that convention (among other things that many in the corporate world would deem NSFW), but it’s all in good fun! So when you’re thinking about going to your first anime con, and you’re a bit nervous as to what people may think, don’t worry, there’s no judgement here. And if there is, we’ll send Broly on em’! 😉
Number 4: You Get to meet other Anime Fans!
Growing up for both of us it was hard trying to find other people who liked anime as much as we did, in fact the thought of us liking it was stupid to them. At cons however you get the chance to meet and mingle with other people who are passionate about anime and manga as much as you are. Heck, you might even be able to take cosplay pictures with them too! Connect with an anime blog (like ours) or head to a local meetup group if you’re looking for more people who love going to cons as much as you do. And have fun! 🙂
Number 3: Anime Voice Actors!
Although this one should be number 2, this is the second biggest reason why we love going to anime cons! Who wouldn’t wanna drive 500 miles across three states to see the voice actor who plays Alucard in Hellsing Ultimate? These guys and gals are the reason why we love so many of our favorite anime characters from our favorite shows! The fanbase nowadays is quite amazing, plus a lot of the actors are anime fans themselves.
Number 2: Cosplay!!!
An anime con is not a con without cosplay, because it’s the cornerstone of the entire anime otaku fandom! We of course love cosplay because we get to pose with our favorite characters from our favorite shows (and we’re sure that you feel the same way). Dedicated fans will spend hours and days trying to perfect that perfect cosplay for the character that they’re going out as, plus you even pick up a few sowing and threading skills too! Cosplay plays an important part in anime convention pop culture, and that’s one of the many reasons why anime cons are awesome!
And Finally Number 1: You! The Fans!!
We said it! You guys are the number one reason why we love going to anime cons overall! The other four reasons were part of it but the biggest part of it all is the fandom itself, including you! Your support for the industry is why we have such awesome shows like One-Punch Man, My Hero Academia, and more! You guys even brought back Toonami and helped us reach the heights that we’re currently at now as D&A! Thank you fellow fans, thank you for being so awesome! 🙂
Well that’s it from us. Be sure to check in for some awesome updates coming your way within the coming weeks! Remember, D&A is always a part of you!
D&A Anime Blog 