Blogger's Block #2: Anime for the Nonplussed

The lowest-stakes entry in the archive, and a charming period piece: a snapshot of what falling into anime cost in 2006, before streaming, when it meant a mall media store, a clerk whose taste you learned to trust, and experimental DVD purchases running to thousands of dollars. The list itself has aged the way lists do (Steve grades it in the author's note above), but the beginner's field notes around it still land: the discovery that "what genres do you like?" is the first question any fan asks, the trick of buying whatever a store clerk half-disparagingly calls "a thinker," an unrepentant taste for English dubs that Steve knows will scandalize the purists, and the week he and Linh were dead serious about naming their future children after two cartoon characters. He also confesses, with the requisite gasp, that he still hasn't seen Cowboy Bebop.

Read it as a diary, not a verdict. Several picks were provisional — one made the cut on the strength of a single disc, another he'd stopped watching because it got too sad, ranked anyway because it wouldn't leave him alone. And watch for the moment the Suncoast clerk hands over her second recommendation and trails off mid-sentence: that pause sets up the essay's best joke, entirely at Steve's expense.