About

About Makigumo

What is now Makigumo began as a project in 1999 by myself and some friends who wanted to create a general hobby site.  That site, called Friendly Fire, featured our collective interests instead of just anime.  The anime portion got more and more prominent when I became the sole contributor to the site.

When I started college in 2003, I reimagined Friendly Fire to be a site more relevant to my own hobbies.  After some time, I decided that it would become an anime review site.  Still, I ended up renaming Friendly Fire, giving it the name I had originally picked: import.BOOST.  That name stuck until July 2007, after a period of extensive re-designs.

Makigumo is many things to me.  It’s a platform that allows me to experiment with web technologies, standards, graphic design, HCI, and usability principles.  It's an archive of my writings exploring East Asian pop culture and its relationship to the U.S.  Primarily, Makigumo is an archive of detailed, thoughtful reviews for anime and manga.

Writing these reviews is more than just a public service on my part.  Anime has been an interest of mine since childhood, and I think it deserves the same kind of scrutiny as any other artistic medium.  The review process has been invaluable for improving my critical thinking and writing skills, and the discussions that arise from the process have helped in my understanding of the medium and its culture.

About the Creator

Basic Info

• Name: Tian Ma
• Nationality: Chinese, U.S. Citizen
• Sign: Aries/Ox
• Blood Type: ??
• Programs Used: Crimson Editor, Adobe Photoshop CS3, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (although Makigumo works in IE7, I’ve given up on tailoring the site specifically to work with it... get a better browser), Mozilla Firefox 3, Opera 9
• Contact: tian 4t makigumo dawt c0m