It's time again for the wave of anime reviews from the brothers Hack (swear we'll actually finish this year). Per usual, we're kicking it off by picking our top openers and enders of the year. Steve is absent this year because he's being super lazy and lying on the couch whining that he doesn't have enough time to write - forget the fact that Chris and Jeff started and finished just moments ago. But whatever, here we go!

Best Opener

Matt - Guren no Yumiya (Attack on Titan)

Trying to figure out what the best songs of the year is a difficult task. It's even worse when you have to write words about why you enjoy said aural experience. But, this year was completely easy. The very first time I heard Attack on Titan’s first opening back, I knew it was going to be taking this position. The music itself is all fired up and high energy, with lots of choral bits, lots of trumpets, and just general awesomeness. Married perfectly with this amazing track is some slick, high production animation with lots of high action scenes and some interesting typographical interludes. Overall, these two pieces combined make for one hell of an opener and will not be easily matched anytime soon.

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I don't entirely recall why, but last year I sent my one-year-in-the-future self a note with what I predicted would be my life in 2013. Yesterday, I received that letter.

Dear Me (in the future), I'm doing this on a whim, nothing really to say. devusb has said that 2013 would be the year you get a girlfriend, but your current self is dubious. My predictions for 2013 are a repeat of 2012 with the possibility of having a house. Hopefully that trip to Japan happened and that you got a Super Famicom (with Panel de Pon if'n you can swing it). Good luck, we're all counting on you!

Not much said, but I'm 2/3 in predictions. The needle on the girl front went even less of anywhere this year than last and that Japan trip certainly did happen (with the SFC and Panel de Pon). That one part in the middle is so wrong, though, that saying my letter was 66% correct doesn't seem quite fair.

Because as has been stated before, this year was nothing like 2012.

Now, to go pen myself a letter for next year.

I'm sitting in the Atlanta airport awaiting the flight that will whisk me into Jamaica to celebrate the marriage of my oldest friend. I'm short on sleep, having lost three hours on the flight over from the Pacific coast, and am oddly reflective on the previous year.

Never have I considered my life to be anything interesting. When I'm not at work, I'm generally doing nothing. Or, at least nothing outside. My down time consists of bumming around on the internet, watching TV, or playing video games. It's an introverted bachelor's paradise; I wouldn't even know what to do "outside" if I were to venture out of my hallowed kingdom. But, somehow, 2013 has turned some of that on its head and been by far the most interesting year of my time alive. Items of particular note are:

• Got a job at fuckin' LinkedIn. I still don't understand how this happened, but it's been by far the best thing that's happened to me
• Moved to the fuckin' Bay Area. Second best thing that's happened to me. I don't think I could live anywhere else again (except maybe Japan)
• Went to fuckin' Japan! Ever since my brothers and I were bitten by the anime bug back in 2008, this was something we wanted to realize... and we made it happen! Every now and then I still get super bummed that I'm not there right now.
• Fuckin' presented at my alma mater. Perhaps it was slightly egotistical of me to want, but ever since I graduated Full Sail in 2009, I'd hoped to return as a presenter. And this year LinkedIn helped me realize that on a campus recruiting mission.
• Got fuckin' drunk... many times. Perhaps this shouldn't be a highlight, but these drinking sprees have given me an opportunity to connect with so many awesome people. Perhaps it's not the medium so much as it is the setting. Either way, I've had many great conversations over one too many beers.
• Fuckin' brackets, son. In addition to the awesome people I get to physically see on a daily basis, there's the community over at /r/awwnime that I've come to know as well. And running the brackets this year is fun for me both because I get to watch people enjoy (or hate) a thing I've created, but also because it brings out a lot of interesting discussion.
• Went (or am going) to fuckin' Jamaica to participate in the wedding of my oldest friend. (Holy shit dude. You win!)

Those are only the major highlights, but 2013 has been a hell of a year. It's made me realize just how awesome my life is and at the same time makes me wonder what I ever did to deserve it. And every day I'm so thankful that I get to wake up where I am, go to where I work, and interact with all the wonderful people that I know. If I were manlier, I might even shed a tear.

But enough of that smarmy ass sentimental bullshit, expect pictures of Jamaican shores and the annual anime reviews to be kicking up soon. But until then, I leave you with this.

The bracket, which I have mentioned so many times by this point, continues to be an entirely intriguing project. Brackets in general are a very math heavy thing, full of all sorts of logistical and statistical related calculations. Setting up a bracket per standard sports seeding was a bit of a fun nut to crack by itself. However, the interesting problems have been the ones relating to issues cropping up while the bracket's running.

Eliminations and actual user voting began last Saturday and was off to a pretty good start. The next day had an even better turnout. And so it's continued.

Day 1 - 7054 votes, 370 users Day 2 - 9947 votes, 623 users Day 3 - 11512 votes, 647 users Day 4 - 12956 votes, 680 users Day 5 - 13731 votes, 816 users Day 6 (in progress) - 14799 votes, 1005 users

As can be seen, each day has had quite a bit of increased turnout over the previous day and the trend doesn't seem to be stopping. This has brought around the very real problem of girls in the first day suddenly having very low vote counts compared to those in the later days.

And that's where math comes in.

To help normalize all the votes against each other, each girl has her votes calculated as a percentage of her day's votes. This is then applied against the day that had the highest number of votes:

adjusted = round((characterVotes / dayVotes) * maxVotes);

(Yes, I'm aware that those extra parenthesis are superfluous thanks to order of operations)

So, now each girl can be correctly ranked against how well she did within her own group and not just as an overall sum.

Last Saturday, the 2013 Awwnime Girls Bracket opened for business for the second year. The first phase of the brackets always sucks because it means a lot of tedious labor for me.

Phase 1 consists of people nominating the characters they'd like to see make it to the actual voting. This year, I put a lot of additional rules in place, limiting the time span from which somebody could enter a character. This was done to give new characters a fighting change, keep things fresh, and also (hopefully) shrink the pool.

Well, that didn't work.

As of me writing this, three days into the seven day long nomination period, there have been over 1500 nominations. I have had to go through each and every one of those and, for the 830 nominees that were eligible and not duplicates, clean up the name and create a thumbnails. A few things have made this slightly easier this year than last.

• Better admin tools
• A requirement that the user provide an image of the character so I don't have to go hunting for one
• A type-ahead field that pulls data from MyAnimeList that will prefill character name, media source, and image.

The MAL images always come in a 225x350 size, so I've gotten the cropping down to muscle memory; I can complete an entrants record in under 10 seconds. Which is good, because even at ten seconds per, that's over two hours of solid work. But, the average is much higher because I still sometimes need to find a better picture, figure out if the character is eligible if I'm not familiar with the source, etc and so forth. I've probably put five to six hours into just cropping those fucking pictures.

But, still, I'm happy with the turn out. To give you a bit of comparison, last year when there were no restricting rules, there were a total of 797 nominations of which 473 made it into the elimination rounds. I suspect part of that is due to the fact that this bracket is starting out with the traction we had at the end of the last one. But also, a lot of people are just nominating every female character from their favorite shows, regardless of how much actual screen time they may have had. I personally think this is a silly approach because only 256 characters will make it to the actual bracket and those will all be the heavy hitter characters. I mean, who seriously thinks that this will win against this on a battle based upon cuteness?

Not me, that's for sure.