Here’s my take on the anime industry inspired by Jerry Seinfeld on Google Reader:

I see anime like Jerry Seinfeld sees construction sites, there is one guy who’s working on something and all the other guys are watching and saying “Is that a Phillips Head?” and the anime director, in interviews, says “You bet.” in his own way. In the end we can’t really do anything about creators not making non-moe shows, the only real change in anime comes when somebody writes down an idea and does something (arguably) productive. Studio 04C is an example of an inventive anime studio, and Satoshi Kon or however you spell his name creates rather interesting and deep work too. If you don’t like the anime Japan is making, make it yourself like the Animatrix guys.

This post on Colony Drop examines some of the aspects of moe, but moe as a concept in anime I think doesn’t detract from the multitude of non-moe shows which are already existing in the world of anime. That’s the thing, creators of anime do what they do best, creating things. They create what they see fit, and if a creator decides he or she is going to make a moe anime show, because he or she thinks it is a good idea, you can’t really blame them for choosing to do this. Plane tickets are expensive and so are Japanese language classes, so you would most likely waste a lot of time and money trying to fly to Japan having mastered fluency of the language just to tell some anime director or creator that he’s killing the industry by making moe shows.

I remember a Seinfeld episode where Jerry Seinfeld opens with his stand up routine talking about how men like to gather around some other guy who’s building or making something, like working on a car or a bookshelf or something you make with your hands. The men are described as “not helping the guy”. They just hang around the area, where work is being done. That’s what the otaku are like, they’re sitting around the area where work is being done. They simply ask the creator or director “Is that a Phillips head?” – the Phillips head screwdriver is in this case, moe, which has now become a core element in marketing anime. What white guys like myself sometimes forget is, you’re not Japanese and these anime shows are not always deliberately marketed towards people like you. You can’t really do anything about getting the creators in the anime industry to create anime catered to your tastes – it’s been tried, with Serial Experiments Lain and to a lesser degree Afro Samurai, but when it comes to the facts of it, anime is aimed at Japanese people, and you can’t stop them from being Japanese, they like what they like and they put that stuff in there. They’re going to use the moe Phillips head screwdriver if they want.

Different creators create different things. Japanese creators create Japanese things: and it’s likely that if you want to find mature storyline and a balance of aesthetic they’ll give it to you. It’s just that people in the West are hard to please: other times we want something, another time we want something else. To say that anime is dying because of moe is a fallacy: all the non-moe anime that still has copies of it available still exists, theoretically. It’s just that the stuff that endures is the older stuff, moe shows are harder to market in the West, so fewer of that stuff remains in print on DVD and such.

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Text Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.

Cory Doctorow, man, he gave me a brilliant idea.

Why not give away a free ebook to the first book I ever published, Small Worlds: A Miscellany. It’s a book that has been compared to a Saturday Morning cartoon, but for the right audience… that might not be a bad thing. I’m not saying it’s the greatest collection of short stories and poetry ever collected… but hey, you can buy the paperback if you wanna, but if you don’t the free ebook didn’t cost you anything!

All this time I could have been raising awareness of this piece of junk I have for sale or best offer sitting in my garage, and now I regret not telling more people it existed. But be warned, it’s weird as hell. Weirder than what Twilight would be like if you replaced vampires with banshees. How weird? There’s a story in there where Osamu Tezuka uses the cel animation process mixed with modern technology to resurrect Walt Disney in cartoon flesh. So yeah.

If you like weird fiction, check it out, but keep in mind it collects the first things I ever wrote. Don’t expect anything too brilliant coming out of my emo years.

The full list of my teenage projects I published with Lulu.com is still developing, but I hope to have a complete list of my LOL inducing teenage fiction I used to publish with Lulu.com there soon.

Anyway, some of you might have been wondering if this changes my stance on the issue of scanlations and licensed anime and manga. Well, it kind of does. Because while buying a hard copy of a licensed manga allows you to read a book volume version of a manga series, and DVDs and Blu-Rays allow you to have a hard copy of anime shows and movies, the reality seems to be kicking in that eventually, people need to accept that region coding and DRM prevent people from enjoying cultural products the way they want, and how they should be enjoyed. Suing people also doesn’t work in terms of stopping millions of people downloading things illegally, so it’s interesting to note that DRM free ebooks might be the future of manga, because they allow for the widespread use of manga rather than keeping “content” in limited release. The scarcity of non-ebook products that don’t have DRM for example have caused people to scan and distribute Japanese light novels online because who wants to pay a hundred dollars for a used copy of Welcome to the NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto? Anime and manga distributors like Tokyopop and Viz Publishing shouldn’t be suing people and making their content harder to find, they should be finding better ways to distribute anime and manga in a DRM free format so that more people can enjoy the same cultural product, the same anime and manga everybody else is enjoying because it would be possible to find a digital copy of the product, which if people like it, they can make a donation to the artists and directors who made it. The scarcity of light novels is partly what drives piracy of them in the first place, and I recommend that a DRM free ebook of Welcome to the NHK would solve a lot of hurt, and make a start, at repairing trust in anime and manga translation companies that light novel fans have lost in being neglected by them so long. The same could be said of hard to find manga like FLCL and the elusive Card Captor Sakura.

We certainly live in interesting times don’t we?

(P.S.: I realise, Mr. Doctorow, if you’re reading this, that the ebooks listed have DRM. Please help me find a solution to remove the DRM somehow in your (possible) reply. Help a Little Brother out!)

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Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.

Plot Bunnies in their Unnatural Habitat. Fun Fact, I took this picture myself!

It’s NaNoWriMo time and as a result I haven’t been able to post much about anime and manga aside from my glowing promotion of MangaViews. But this article, it’s from the heart. Selling out doesn’t necessarily mean selling out on your ideals, it’s redefining yourself as a person and not letting other people define you for who you are. The greatest act of selling out is to accept who you are yourself, instead of labelling yourself with things in hope that people will like you. This form of selling out is what the rock band KISS have perfected, whether you like them or not, there are legions of fans who like them, and then again there are legions of people who don’t, and while I find KISS has questionable motives and themes in their music, their tenacity to continue what they do no matter what people think of them dressing up in more makeup than the average teen girl does is inspiring.

You see, when I started out my NaNoWriMo career, no wait, my artistic career, I was trying to draw Osamu Tezuka manga style to illustrate a book in two different art styles for a very specific reason I can’t go into right now before that NaNo is revised and published. Heavily influenced by a man who died the exact year before I was born, I failed to realise the uniqueness of my work wasn’t my shameless Osamu Tezuka fanboying but the sheer weirdness in how I expressed myself in my own voice, blending elements of my Scots-Irish heritage into phantasms of urban fantasy novels that dealt with the role of mythology in the modern world.

Instead of trying to have a Japanese sensibility, I discovered, I had to come to terms with the reality that my perception of the world as processed by my autistic spectrum disorder brain was actually affecting the way I wrote and the way I arranged words on the page. The sheer mess that spilled out of my brain into my notebooks I polished into fully fledged ideas, and over time I accepted that it was okay to be wrong about something like dialogue or any other part of writing in the first draft. This is because editing comes later, and editing actually helps develop ideas into comprehensible things that others can understand.

During my teenage years up until now I struggled with my fears and anxiety about whether I had any worth to society as a human being, since my disability prevented me from traditional student employment like a McDonald’s minimum wage shift (the quintessential McJob Douglas Coupland probably got the term from) which other people who didn’t have the disability I had took to make ends meet. I was afraid in my paranoid delusions that were Australia to turn into a fascist state people like me would be rounded up and shot before I got a chance to achieve anything. Of course, recognising which thoughts are too paranoid rather than the apathy of not being paranoid enough is the key in developing a sane political thought in these troubled times. It’s bad enough that I’ve struggled with my Asperger’s Syndrome in interpreting the world which seemed so confusing, but my anxiety disorder distorted small worries of no real consequence from a mouse to a cat, amplifying my fears every time I turned on the news when the reality was that there was a lot of good happening in the world, especially locally in Australia, that just didn’t get covered on the news. Times are indeed tough, but I enjoyed very good health care whereas other writers who aim to be published struggle to even obtain health care in America, as John Scalzi points out. At least I had that to count on. We have dodgy internet bandwidths, censored video games and crowded public transport, but even worrying about these things is nothing compared to my comfort of having health care provided to me by the same government my anxiety sometimes makes me terrified of in paranoid and unrealistic ways.

But applying a decent amount of logic to my own life, it’s become easier to know when to panic, and when not to panic. For example there was one time I only escaped from a Sydney Funnel Web Spider by running sideways to avoid it running directly towards me. I knew this because of all those ridiculously nightmare-fuel unleaded books I read during my childhood in Queensland, you know, the ones my mother told me not to read because it would scare me, but turned out to be life saving because in Australia, no doubt, you’ll come across a situation where you or somebody you know is threatened by our infamous deadly native fauna. And it’s these experiences, reading up on things no matter what your parents say about what you read being not very useful at all, that shape you as a human being and a writer.

Your influences aren’t always as obvious as you imagine them to be. Osamu Tezuka’s a big influence on my creative work, in writing and other art media like my photography of anime figure still life photos, but all the same, I was equally influenced by Andy Griffiths’s Just… series. Let me put it this way. Andy Griffiths is what you would get if Chuck Palahniuk was Australian and wrote children’s books for children of a subversive bent. That’s pretty much how I could describe him in a way that does him justice. Andy Griffiths has gotten into hot water occasionally with whether children won’t try to emulate the crazy antics of his stories (some which are dangerous), but I believe that in this coddled PC age we need to be reminded of the fact that, like with my anxiety disorder, your fears are sometimes greater than the actual danger of something. The spirit of Andy Griffiths is the spirit of an Australia that remembers its larrikin and convict past, not afraid to be itself in all its unwashed glory. If you can find the books in an Australian bookshop, the Just… series of books is worth picking up for this reason. It’s what made me contemplate being a writer myself, back when I was a kid. The first pre-Harry Potter kids books I ever read.

What my writing, I learned, was really about, was wimpy men becoming not so wimpy under extraordinary circumstances. I can’t go into what the content of my novels and short stories are too much at this point, because I need to find a way to preserve the copyright for them in a way that protects my intellectual property as it’s developing. If anybody can tell me if copyright can protect works-in-progress let me know, especially under Australian copyright law. So if anybody knows about that stuff pop me a comment with a link. I try not to post too much of my stuff online because I want to be professionally published, but I aim to provide free downloadable eBooks of each of my works of fiction and non-fiction which exist alongside paper-book form volumes that people may or may not decide to pay for as they please.

Me with my camera. Self-portrait.

Anyway, what I’m saying here is, in finding myself as a writer, especially when doing NaNoWriMo, I had to go back to my roots and explore my hopes and fears, what really inspires me and what really scares me. It was the turning point where I had to tell myself “Yes, you are Jacob Martin, and you write your own stuff, and make your own art your own way!” – but at the same time taking account of my influences that made me who I am. It’s no secret I’m influenced by anime and manga, but I’m also inspired by some of the most obscure Japanese light novels and Internet Literature you’ve never heard of. Welcome to the NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto and Train Man by Hitori Nakano aren’t just inspiring to me because they’re Japanese and I come off as a bit of a weaboo, but they inspire me because Welcome to the NHK really captures the mundane terror of a man with an anxiety disorder (even if it’s different, and worse, than my own anxiety disorder), and Train Man inspires me because it really gets into the bones of how a story can be told through the transcribed forum post concept. Even more obscure books like The E Before Christmas inspired me because The E Before Christmas is one of the earliest Western world examples of internet literature told through emails, and Twitterature allowed me to see “Gee, how do I transcribe Twitter posts into written text in an actual book?”.

Your influences embed in you without you having to deliberately copy somebody else’s style. Understanding what your own voice is, is the most important thing you need to figure out. If your writing flows out onto your keyboard or notepad really naturally and you can really feel that yes, this is the kind of style you write in, instead of feeling like it’s a copy of something else – that’s how it probably should flow like. Remember, it’s okay to be wrong, because we are human beings. Because we are human beings we don’t like being reminded we are wrong, because television and movies and rap and rock music tell us that all of us are geniuses all of the time, when in reality we are defined by our abilities to recognise when to turn our ego off. It’s times when you decide to help somebody else along with a problem they are having, instead of grumbling you could be doing something you want to do, that really develop your personality.

The Big Merino: the Concrete Sheep in the Family.

Something helpful to remind yourself of is to be spontaneous, but remember to edit and revise things as a writer. It’s like how I don’t upload every photo I take to Flickr: because I don’t have a Pro account, at this point I can only upload so many images, so I have to choose them carefully. Like words, photograph images you take have to be chosen carefully, the shot considered, but if you don’t have enough spontaneity and impulse in deciding to take a photo at the right moment, maybe the opportunity to preserve that idea in its true and most beautiful form is lost, like a snapshot taken six seconds after the subject of the photo has moved on, most often with animal photos. This is why I feel frustrated with people who say “I hate having to keep everything in my head but when I write down ideas they never amount to anything.” – it’s just incongruous to how my brain function works – when I get an idea for a story or an opportunity to take a photo, if I feel like I must write it down NOW (or NAO in LOLcat speak) or take the photograph NOW, that’s what I do. It’s the reason why so much of my early works exist, I developed them and wrote them down, documented them on the page or my camera’s hard drive.

As an artist/writer I feel (in my personal opinion at least) that it is my job to document interesting things, or things that just I find interesting, which I can talk about hopefully at a level and skill which will make other people find what I talk/write about/photograph interesting. I know I can’t have immortality on Earth and I’ll get old and die, but my faith in God takes care of the after-effects of that stuff for me. You might think my attempts to convert to Catholicism are misguided and superstitious, but as long as I can get forgiveness from God and I can forgive you none of that really matters if I can respect other human beings no matter what they believe in. However, I do find it my duty as an artist and writer to document ideas, cultural concepts, thoughts, stories, images and feelings. That’s my job. I write everything down as it comes to me, and if I’m not near a notebook or keyboard I keep it in my head and meditate on it constantly on a bus, but I never forget to write any of it down. It is important when you are either a writer or an artist, to never forget to write ideas down. You may call me a romanticist hack who believes in the eternal Romantic idea of Author, but you won’t be laughing when I’ve written down at least fifteen ideas I have in any one day (sometimes I have more, or less, it doesn’t matter because I write it all down) and you will have forgotten all your ideas, like the grasshopper begging the ant for shelter and food when you have lost all your idea stock for the winter.

Goulburn Courthouse: The First City outside Sydney

I guess I got a few plot bunnies while writing this post, because I was originally going to write just about finding my own voice when I developed over NaNoWriMo. My original point was going to be that in crafting my stories I learned to not just write anime and manga inspired stories in my novels and short stories, but to attempt to tell the stories of my own nation, my own surroundings, in the context of the world around it. This is because I am not Japanese and don’t live in Japan – so trying to write in a completely Japanese style would betray my own identity of being a Scots-Irish Australian with autism spectrum disorder. That’s who I am and as I get older I discover more layers of  being myself, and am always learning. more.

Further Reading:

Usagijen: The Woman In The Mirror

Happenchance: Who is Your Audience?

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Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.

]]> http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?feed=rss2&p=1495 3 http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?p=1490 http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?p=1490#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:34:08 +0000 admin http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?p=1490

Ok, so my last post about MangaViews.com may have rubbed people the wrong way. I’m afraid that if I’m going to get anywhere in the blogosphere at all, I’m going to have to enter some minefields. One of the biggest minefields I’ve skirted with in my blogging career wasn’t actually the Screen Play entry where I attempted a proposal for a video game designed to teach dating social skills to socially disabled people, nor was it the ever controversial anti-twincest post I made for personal reasons but had to deal with a bunch of comments from twincest fangirls where I understood where they were coming from but I still didn’t agree with them.

I speak of course on my stance on licensed anime and manga, which is really surprising in that while I think that fansubs and scanlations may be needed for some countries where such anime and manga series isn’t available, and that I try not to judge people who do download fansubs and scanlations, I do think that at this point in my blogging career I should start trying to cover licensed anime and manga only, but I will try and cover anime figures I have of various shows which I will review here.

My opinion stems not so much from my opinions about the anime and manga industry as a whole, but the nature of the local Australian anime and manga industry which relies on local licenses for anime and imports for manga before it can be sold in bookshops. People downloading scanlations and fansubs here really affect the local anime and manga industry in that if nobody buys anime and manga that’s licensed in Australia, the local market for it might disappear. America has far more licenses for anime and manga than Australia does, and they see stuff far before we get to see any of it. What makes it more frustrating is that local distributors like Madman Entertainment here rely on having to buy licensing rights to dubbed and subtitled anime from American companies before it can even be shown here. There is no “localisation” for Australia because we don’t have voice actors to locally dub stuff here, which is expensive to do for such a small market population which is a niche hobby in commercial terms for this country.

For those of you who hate me by now, I understand why the slowness of stuff getting to Australia or even America makes people resort to downloading anime and manga illegally, I understand why the oppressive nature of corporations who own anime licenses not sharing with other countries what they have makes people angry at the anime industry as a whole. But why can’t I personally make a choice to cover licensed anime and manga which is already available here, to make people aware that yes, they can go to a bookshop or a DVD shop and buy this stuff? Just because everybody else is blogging the latest seasons doesn’t mean I have to all the time, it’s frustrating to see how slow licensing is in this country but I really do find new stuff to watch all the time which nobody talks about anymore.

Because of the MangaViews.com site policy I can’t cover scanlations of manga on this site. I don’t think I’ve ever done that here actually, because it’s a lot easier to get hold of manga for me than it is to get hold of anime that’s recent here. I know I’m professionally selling out in doing this, but I feel that all the shows I like are either licensed or about to be licensed, and nobody really talks about them any more and that makes me sad.

I have no doubt this is hard for me to take as it is for you, but even if you do read scanlations and blog about them I’ll still try and comment on your blog. Just don’t keep pressuring me to do the same thing when I struggle to find an audience outside of new ways I can bring awareness to my blog and really make a difference in making people aware of cool anime shows and manga series, locally speaking. People sometimes forget that I’m Australian, and in the sea of the world of bloggers I tend to get lost in the crowd or forgotten about. I took a chance which might bring better awareness to my articles and I’m paying the price of it by not being able to cover scanlations of manga, and eventually perhaps no fansubs either.

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Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.

You might have noticed if you read Manga Blog that there’s a new site called MangaViews.com which showcases a bunch of really interesting manga reviews. So far I reckon, after having become a member of the site to contribute stuff to it, it has the potential to really do good for the aniblogosphere in terms of reviewing licensed manga. The reviews can at the moment be accessed over time as more manga reviews are added, but it also provides news stories about recent manga publications which are relevant to newcomers and veteran manga readers alike.

I believe this is an important step for manga reviewing because it makes us feel that we’re not so alone in it all. Sharing news and reviews could really invigorate our participation in documenting not just our love of manga but also the history of manga publication in the Western World: the site is aimed at a wide variety of people of different nationalities rather than just America, which is a breath of fresh air for an Australian like me, but just think about how useful this could be to bloggers in countries like the Philippines and Malaysia, maybe even China and Korea, yet this also could include the many manga fans in Europe whose voices need to be heard. Manga isn’t just about Japan or America anymore – it’s an artform with a world-wide following whether one participates in creating manga themselves or not. I personally tried to create manga myself but my skills of writing and photography far exceed anything I can do with a pencil and paper in manga style. But I don’t think I should stop appreciating the manga works of others just because I can’t draw it myself.

The aniblogosphere and the manga reviewing blog community worldwide as I have experienced is not just about what country you come from. It’s a beacon or SETI signal, and it sends out its own frequency of weirdness and the joyful elements of mundane life alike. That message might be along the lines of “Yes, we’re here too, if anyone can hear us, we’re here, and we know that you might feel the same way about these things as we do.” Anime and manga for a lot of people isn’t just about mindless consumerism of character goods, or rejecting reality for cute 2D girls. Many people interact with anime and manga as a fun house mirror of the water cooler, which Twitter.com and Google Reader have assisted in maintaining a strong anime and manga community, which uses technology developed for the purposes of perhaps not solely catering to anime and manga fans, but it’s certainly a useful time of technology to live in isn’t it?

And having joined MangaViews, I think I might have found a way to give my articles on manga exposure they might not have enjoyed before. This site really does do a good job at collecting together useful articles and reviews about manga, and I might seem like a bigger sellout than Gene Simmons in saying this, but I would recommend this site to other anime and manga bloggers hoping to find relevant information about licensed manga.

So are we going to review some of those  crazy Japanese comic books or what?

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Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.

If you want to read my latest Screen Play entry I worked on click here.

If you want to see my reviews for The Ranobe Cafe, you’ll have to wait until I finish reading Brave Story (the 816 page toebreaker of a light novel that is so long, most reviewers on Goodreads.com have never finished it). I want to put in the real effort and get into the bones of it, but most of all I want to know how it ends before I review it. Because I don’t want to be a hypocrite.

If you want to see my Welcome to the NHK inspired photography series Welcome to the ABC click here.

If you want to see my post critiquing Stuff White People Like from an Australian perspective, you’ll have to wait a while as well.

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Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.

Let’s take a look at the box of my new figure purchase!

Marvelous Melmo is a character I have an appreciation for because she is one of the only lolita-characters who actually managed to grow up somehow. I don’t know about you, but as a vintage character she has class. As you’ll see in this back-of-the-box picture, her child form is holding a bottle of magic candies, but her adult form is posed like Marilyn Monroe. Considering Tezuka took his original manga design illustration style from Disney cartoons and Betty Boop, the influence on that on Marvelous Melmo is striking. Melmo’s manga has no English translation, her anime series she appears in has never been translated into English or even fan-subbed, but she does make an appearance through Tezuka’s Star System in Osamu Tezuka’s manga Apollo’s Song.

The back of the box, with more detail on the figures.

This figure was quite a find for a Tezuka-nut like me, as Tezuka goods are hard to find in Australia. When you do find them here, you have to snap up what you can. Anyway, Melmo’s a bit classier than some modern bishoujo figures, so I thought to myself “Why not! It’s Tezuka!”. Melmo actually originates from a 1960s anime and manga series intended as a sex-ed program for children in Japan, but from what I saw at the Tezuka exhibition one year I can safely say that Melmo was probably responsible as an influence on character design for quite some time, but she’s not really moe. More classy, I reckon.

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Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.

]]> http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?feed=rss2&p=1465 2 http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?p=1461 http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?p=1461#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:31:59 +0000 admin http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?p=1461

Ok, so this month is NaNoWriMo, the gruelling exercise where you try and write a 50,000 word novel in a month.

I liked my start, I’m up to 11,000 words. Haven’t been able to blog anime much, but I have been enjoying watching Dragonball on my new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone for my anime fix. Of course this is all distracting me from increasing my word count, hopefully I will be able to reach 50,000 by the end of the month…

I also went out to Circular Quay this week and didn’t get to show you any photos of my trip out there. I was there to see An Education, the new Nick Hornby scripted film. It was a good movie, I recommend you see it if you can because it’s one of the most well written and plotted movies out there at the moment.

As well as that I uploaded the photos from my trip to Circular Quay on Flickr, check them out and leave your comments if you like my photos.

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Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.

Yotsuba Kowai is represented well in this Revoltech figure, it out of all my anime figures shows a real sense of the childhood wonder Yotsuba possesses in her worldview, she comes with two heads, one really happy, one really angry. Yotsuba does get angry occasionally in the manga, but not often. Yotsuba’s strength is her almost unending cheerfulness in the face of a somewhat annoying world.

Yotsubas of the Carribean: At Cicada Season’s End

She doesn’t just come with an extra head – she comes with two extra right hands for holding her water pistol and her ice cream. As I remember it the water pistol turns up in the second volume of the manga. The hands may be a struggle to alternate between at first but once you get the hang of it you realise this figure is really sturdy and well made.

Yotsuba stands to three volumes detailing her epic adventures. Pre-reprint ones too!

Yotsuba comes with a stand, but don’t worry, like her optimistic characterisation in the manga, she can stand on her own two feet. The feet may feel uneven at first, but they’re actually adjustable. Her legs fold into a semi-lotus position so she can sit down and enjoy the scenery.

Yotsuba meditates upon the weight of her own biography, containing as much humor as it does karma.

Yotsuba is happy even though she has not reached enlightenment. Or maybe she has?

Yotsuba helps change the spent batteries in my digital camera.

Yotsuba auditioned for Liam Neeson’s role in Taken, but she wasn’t quite threatening enough.

Now you’re probably thinking “Why should I buy this figure, all you’ve done is shown off silly posed photos with silly captions!” – but hear me out! Yotsuba Kowai isn’t just a great figure for display purposes, she’s a great find for figure photographers who want to do flexible figure photography with posable figures which are customisable. Yotsuba isn’t just a shelf item, this figure is meant to be taken out of the box and played with. I recommend you get her, because she’s one of the least fanservicey figures available and has appeal to both genders.

Yotsuba also auditioned for the lead role in the TV show 24, but missed out because she didn’t like torturing people.

If all else fails, Yotsuba always has two things by her side: Ice Cream, and 4Chan.

I haven’t done a real photo-essay review of one of my anime figures before, so here’s the people who really pushed me past wishing and hoping that I could really buy a digital camera and start doing figure photography and reviews myself:

DancingQueen

HappySoda

Hope you have enjoyed this photo-heavy review, maybe another time I will review more of my figure collection?

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Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.

]]> http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?feed=rss2&p=1442 2 http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?p=1425 http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?p=1425#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:39:27 +0000 admin http://aspergers.dasaku.net/?p=1425

First of all, I’ve never really been able to cover anime seasons while they currently air because of my HSC, and now that that’s over, I am a Graduate lacking a Mrs. Robinson. For those of you who don’t know what I mean by that joke, rent The Graduate, it has Dustin Hoffmann in it for crying out loud. HE RULES.

What I’m trying to say is, there exist items in cultural history which are not anime related directly, or are anime related outside of the current zeitgeist. In short, try and experience a wider variety of culture like Kaioshin is doing here. He makes a good point that one’s local culture may well contain stuff that’s less embarassing than you think. For an example, my culture of Australia is now famous for video game and internet censorship, but it also has awesome stuff like Mad Max, the animated films of Adam Elliot, the supremely awesome The Man From Hong Kong which was filmed here, and of course we have stuff like… err… art exhibitions which are on in Sydney. Oh wait, also Wake In Fright and He Died With A Felafel In His Hand and Nick Cave are examples of Australian things which aren’t an embarrassment to our culture.

There are times I’ve wanted to talk about different things than anime like Hynavian occasionally does, but I don’t really have the same vibe as a hip and happening chick who happens to blog, I just come off as just another male nerd on the internet when I talk about these things. Yet at the same time, I struggle to comprehend why hikikomori should be idolised like digitalboy does sometimes. Yes, I sympathise with hikikomori because it’s a horrible, horrible suffering, but I don’t aspire to be one – rather it’s a life style I’d want to escape. But how do you escape it when you’re lonely and isolated, I can’t throw stones at digiboy because I live with my parents too, albeit for a very different reason I’d rather not discuss on the internet where my disorder is frowned upon.

But in the complete drought that is supposedly here during the Fall 2009 season, I think about how it’s already started and it’s whooshing past me, and by the time I can say anything of worth about any of the shows they have already finished and the cycle begins again. I’m so out of the loop over successive seasons where I was unable to blog that I feel lost and helpless… unable to fathom what I could write about that people would read. I have come to the point where everybody else is more experienced in the blogosphere than I am, and I’m lagging behind.

What do people come to read my blog for? I don’t have a clue, I’ve managed to struggle through a year of seasons without saying anything much about new shows, and I’ve paid for it in being isolated from everybody else in the sphere. It seems that I started this blog to reach out to people, and I never truly found the purpose of why I wanted to blog in the first place. Mostly to get friends, which I achieved to a lesser extent, but why do people read my blog? Most people don’t, and here’s why.

Like the Fall 2009 season, it seems like there’s a Content Crunch. The ‘crunch’ is the collective stress of trying to post stuff, anything, to try and be noticed by people. Because I don’t know what people want to read about, I’m no better than the anime studios which have allegedly failed to satisfy the anime fanbase. What do people come to read my blog for? I need to really provide content for people to continue reading me. I have varied interests and my style is mostly good, shame I haven’t really found any topics of interest in the sphere that really define what my blog is about.

Here are things I want my blog to be about:

1. Osamu Tezuka, and all things vintage that I manage to get my hands on.

There’s a man who died the year before I was born, and his name was Osamu Tezuka. He is not the only master of anime who ever lived – Miyazaki by comparison has developed his own style of Japanese animation for the current era – but Tezuka had a very specific mindset that only emerges out of very traumatic but life-changing historical circumstances: he witnessed the firebombing of Osaka, but the dude still wouldn’t give up hope in humanity. That’s what Tezuka’s works are really about, despite his depressing endings he never really gives up hope in humanity. Osamu Tezuka wouldn’t have spent hours looking at FAILBlog.com despairing at the lot of the human race, much of his work attempts to address why we are the way we are and how we can try just a little bit to improve it, even if we do fail. It’s trying at all which really defines who Tezuka is: he could have shot himself like Hemingway or Kurt Cobain did under his circumstances, but he lived till his old age still doing what he did best, drawing manga. And isn’t that really what we need as a role model for the children these days?

2. Lots of photography, anime figure reviews, manga reviews and anime DVD reviews.

Why just comment on content when you can create some yourself? I can’t draw for peanuts but I can write and I can take photographs. I’ve taken a fair bit of photos in the past month, some of which have to be extracted from my dead computer’s hard drive. I’ll show you those when I get the hard drive put in a new computer.

My computer, Reginald III the PC, in his death, was a significant setback for my blogging. For a while I felt shocked and hurt that fate would do this to me the week before my final HSC exam, but I had to roll with it. The computer is dead but my blog is still here, and I need to keep it going otherwise what was the point of it all? There’s a bit of manga I need to do more extensive editorials and reviews on, but right now I’m in mourning for a seven year old computer who really was just a hunk of junk, a machine. I have anime figures yet to be reviewed: lots of them. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe I want to share my collection with the likes of DancingQueen who has more figures than me but I hope we can swap figure photography tips. Also anime DVDs from Australia need to be reviewed.

3: The rest of the nerdy stuff I like (including Mudkips)

Here is a list of the nerdy non-anime stuff I like which I hope I can touch on in this blog and relate it somehow to anime regardless:

Video games: a sure winner for anime comparisons what with J-RPGs and the like.

Star Trek: I like this slightly better than Star Wars, but each to his own. Kirk in my opinion is better than Picard by default because I have never seen Picard in action. Only seen TOS.

Random comic books I like: Useful in understanding why manga is different in the first place, plus a Western perspective.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough, maybe in my next post I will briefly touch on some Epic Mail I recieved today…

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