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Thursday, March 17, 2016

8 year anniversary for Rambling Rican!


New 8 year banner!

The end of March is fast approaching!  You know what that means!  Time to change the banner!  To me that also means that 8 years have passed since I started my Rambling Rican blog.  Time has flown by so quickly!  It's been an amazing journey to this point and I still can't believe how far this blog that started out as a lark turned out to be the clearing house for Sasuke tournaments! I blame you Ube! I totally do!

How I USED to watch Sasuke.
Sasuke All Star and Grand Champion Kazuhiko Akiyama 秋山和彦

Sasuke 20 was my first tournament blog and it grew exponentially from there! To think it used to fit on one page.. unlike the current season..  Waking up at the crack of dawn to watch a Powerpoint presentation of live television while taking screenshots that had to be manually cropped afterward. We didn't have a way to record live video so this was my life for about half a year!  Thanks to the encouragement of a lot of friends I met through Sasuke, I took a nosedive into the Sasuke blogging pool. 
Quote from the Sasuke 21 blog - I am woman hear me roar.. oh wait NAGANO is roaring.. mmmmmm yeah.. Rawr™ Whoever in TBS managed to get his shirt off.. the female population (and probably some of the males.. ) love you.. absolutely LOVE YOU!! 
   
I had a lot of help from Ube and the massive support from the community to branch out and expand even if I spent most of the time ogling men and talking about male waxed eyebrows, crunchy orange hair and fangirls birthing kittens! LOL Now I kinda back down a bit from that but every so often I go into that territory.
(top to bottom - 2015 Maguro Festival) Sasuke All-Star Shingo Yamamoto 山本進悟, New Star Kazuma Asa 朝一眞,  New Star Hitoshi Kanno 菅野仁志, Sasuke All-Star Toshihiro Takeda 竹田敏浩 and Sasuke All-Star Makoto Nagano 長野誠 ©Makoto Nagano
     
I still find extreme enjoyment following the lives of our favorite Sasuke Stars.  With the semi-recent adoption of integration into social media it's been an explosion of information.  It was a boon since Sasuke was being scaled back to the point of extinction.
TBS Facebook posted the above pic as a wallpaper.. Drool...
   
We survived the death and resurrection of the show.  We mourned the retirements of our favorite competitors, celebrated weddings, mourned divorces, cheered the birth of babies, we cheered the new faces and cheered whenever a new tournament was announced.  We continue to suffer only one tournament a year with no other shows like Kunoichi or Sportsman #1.  So many people had started to rely on my blog for news it became a daunting task to organize the information.  I dared to look one time and realized I had over a million views on this site.  Sasuke was still alive and people still wanted to see it.


Time continues to march on and around the world more Sasuke spin offs emerged.  The Americans left Sasuke behind to nurture the American Ninja Warrior behemoth and Sasuke only news became a rarity.  Finally, after many years of self-imposed denial, I finally ended up creating a podcast.  It's funny but it's almost a year since William took me up on the crazy idea to host a monthly podcast. Recently I decided to create it's own dedicated site to house them.

Sasuke All-Star Makoto Nagano 長野誠 and me during Sasuke 31 ©Arsenette

2015 the busiest year so far for me was also the year I finally realized a dream. I visited Japan!  Not only that but all of YOU helped me get there.  There I met long-time Sasuke friends both competitors and community members.  Many of us who corresponded through the internet finally had the chance to meet face to face. It was an amazing experience and I'm hoping lightning can strike twice.  Just like last year the process is slow and painful but I'm hoping beyond hope that I can return to Japan.  To think that it happened at all is something that to this day makes me cry.

Me and ANW Champion Geoff Britten - National Ninja League Finals ©Arsenette

So while I work on a bunch of projects (some of which will be posted soon™), expand my YouTube channel, continue the podcast, and introduce new ways for the Sasuke family to interact, I hope to forge on updating all of you on the show I love the most - Sasuke.  It's 19 years old this year, it's still here even if it's a bit bruised and limping.  But I'll continue to blog about it until it's no longer fun.  So far 8 years and counting.. and it's still fun.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Like the fact that you are in the pics yourself nowadays. Surprised no Yuuji ?

Arsenette said...

Was trying to not clutter the banner like I normally do. LOL I need to get more smiling photos of him in good quality. Most of the really nice ones are group shots and I didn't want to appear like I'm cutting others out for someone's head shot. LOL

Robb said...

Congratulations! I think I've been following Sasuke for about the same amount of time and your post got me reminiscing a bit. I really miss watching "Ninja Warrior" on G4... we'll watch a DVD of the TBS broadcast, but there was just something about those early tournaments that were so much fun to watch.