Category Archives: General Updates

New Direction! Bechdel Testing Anime and Manga

As you might have noticed, I am not so great at reviewing things. Probably because I don’t have the (required?) degree backed by years of study. When I sit down in front of the computer, even if I had a pretty good in-depth analysis, it seems to go right out of my head, so I’m changing direction.

I’m just going to Bechdel Test everything I read and watch. The criteria are three simple yes or no questions:

1. Are there at least two women in it?

2. Do they talk to each other?

3. About something besides a man?

It comes from the general trend in all media that women are simply seen as extensions of men rather than their own selves. A woman tends to be defined by the roles of mother, sister, daughter, wife, and reflected through the lens of male characters.

I’m not saying all stories have to be feminist stories. I have varied ideas of what constitutes a “strong female character.” I think this will be an interesting topic to explore.

I probably won’t Bechdel Test yaoi manga and anime for obvious reasons.

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Merry Belated Christmas and etc.

Happy Holidays all! I’m a little late with that, but I was busy over my holiday weekend. BUSY SLEEPING.

One of the gifts I received was a tablet! So I installed the Viz manga app, and Jmanga’s app to see how they’d look on a bigger screen. I have them both on my android phone, and I like the Viz app, but the jmanga app just didn’t work on that little screen. Happily they both work like a charm on the tablet! Woowoo!

I took the chance to read the Earl and the Fairy, from Viz, and was immediately engaged in the story and wanting more. It’s got so many things I like all in one manga. Talking cats! Fairies! A feisty heroine! So far I’ve read the first two volumes, and have the third and fourth lined up for later.

I submitted a panel for Naka-kon. We’ll have to see if it gets accepted! I both want and don’t want it to be submitted, because I am super shy and don’t really like public speaking. On the other hand, talking about stuff I like is usually fun, and maybe I’ll meet some new friends.

I recently took advantage of anime and manga sales, so I have plenty of stuff to read lined up. I already had plenty to watch, and even more when you factor in crunchyroll, hulu, and netflix. Where am I going to find the time for all this stuff? I have a busy year ahead!

I hope you all had a lovely time over the holidays, and enjoy the end of the year. I’ll be seeing you next year. ;)

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Not Dead! (Yet)

I forgot about this site. Sorry about that.

I don’t really have any kind of review ready right at the moment. I do have some updates.

I have a library card! Which means I will never be out of books to read. I didn’t actually fear that. Now I can read books I don’t necessarily want to buy or swap though. This includes manga. So far I have read To Terra volume 1.

I’m baffled though. The library has volumes 1 and 3 of To Terra, but no copies of volume 2. It looks like I’ll just have to purchase it online, if it’s available. I really liked volume 1, so I have no real problem purchasing all 3 volumes, when I can afford them.

I might do a book review here and there since I read so much. Currently a great deal of what I read is young adult fiction, because to me books are books regardless of what age they’re intended for. I’ve just purchased City of Lost Souls, which is by a favorite author of mine, Cassandra Clare. I’m really looking forward to reading it along with the books by Diana Wynne Jones, Monica Furlong, and Jacqueline Carey that I borrowed from the library.

I’d also bought volumes 7 and 8 of From Far Away online, since I can’t find the series in stores anymore, and 8 finishes on a cliffhanger! I’ll have to get another volume or two next payday.

Nendoroids Date Masamune and Yukimura Sanada have arrived! To make a long story short, I’m not all that impressed with the Date, but I love Yukimura! I will likely do a more in-depth review later.

I might try to review some of the manga I’ve purchased from jmanga also. It’s a good site.

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Ask My Nendos?

I don’t know that I’ve shared the fact that I’m on tumblr. If you follow my twitter, you’ll have seen some posts. I like it for posting just one or two pictures, and a snippet about whatever.

I’m stealing an idea yet again, but I started a tumblr for my nendos to answer questions! The link is: http://asknendos.tumblr.com/ If you want to ask a question, go ahead! I’ll take a photo (or two) of their response and post it as soon as I can. It’s just another fun little side project.

For anyone who’s interested, my main tumblr is http://graphicnostalgia.tumblr.com/ I post mostly pictures of figures, plus I’ve been doing a 30 day Marvel challenge. Sometimes I go on about books and such too. If you have a tumblr, drop me the url in the comments, and I’ll follow you.

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New year, new resolutions

I don’t think I kept any of my resolutions from last year, which is why I usually don’t bother with them. I do believe one resolution was to read Bokurano, which I haven’t done (but still plan to do!), and revamp my blog design (meaning I do some of the coding myself, instead of just changing the theme).

So those are still in effect. Another resolution would be to blog more. In my year end report from WordPress, I learned that I added 28 new posts last year, which is an embarassingly low number. Also my most-read posts were from previous years, which is pretty interesting. It tells me that maybe those topics aren’t written about enough.

With my entry into ball-jointed doll fandom, you can expect more of those sorts of posts, for better or worse, heh! Also, there’ll be plenty more figure, manga, and anime reviews, plus whatever else I think of to write about. I’m thinking of doing some sort of weekly vocaloid feature sharing some of my favorite videos, and why I like them.  I have plenty of ideas. I never really set out for this to be a very focused blog, which may or may not be a good thing.  I have some ideas. We’ll see if they pan out. I also want to do more figure comics and/or just captioned pictures. That’ll be a random thing, I don’t really plan on trying to keep to a story this time.

Happy new year to everybody reading this blog! Let’s make it a great one. :)

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Happy Halloween!!

Halloween is always an interesting time of year for me. It’s an excuse to bust out some of the crazier clothing I have on occasion or just to wear a wig and some contacts. This year, I thought carefully about a costume. I don’t go out much for any reason, but there’s still my workplace. I’m super shy but some years I have the courage to wear a costume.

It’s pretty difficult to do something that you know is going to get you critical attention. This year I surprised my coworkers by wearing a blonde wig (my hair is currently brown with pink streaks) and a She-Ra t-shirt. My workplace has a fairly strict dress code: no skirts or heels. Do you know how difficult it is to find a women’s costume that has pants? They’re quite rare, and I refuse to dress like a hippie. I could always wear one of my cosplays, but that would require too much explanation. Most of my coworkers don’t even know what anime is, although they do enjoy looking at the figures I bring in to sit on my desk while I work. I also don’t usually think of Halloween in time to make any kind of costume, since I procrastinate like crazy and am inclined toward lazyness anyway.

So this year I was blonde, and I wore a t-shirt that was a little too snug (I’m also pretty chubby). It’s really strange, but I find that doing things like that which keeps some of my coworkers and the general public off balance actually gives me confidence. Today was all in fun anyway. Tomorrow I’ll go back to work with my pink streaked hair, and it’ll be business as usual, although I was told a lot that blonde looked good on me.

Also I dressed my little doll up as a witch.

Plus there were trick or treaters tonight. We bought 5 bags of candy and it still wasn’t enough! There are too many kids around here!!

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Figure comic? Yea? Nay?

I’d meant for this to be a post about Peepo Choo, which I finished reading a week or two ago and want to discuss via blog post/review. At the moment, I’m afraid it’s either going to be long and rambling or super short, but I plan to try and tackle that this weekend. I feel that I need to get back to reviewing some manga, at least, cause I haven’t been watching too much anime lately. Of course, I could fix that too. I own plenty of anime I haven’t watched.

Today though, I thought I’d post about figures a little bit (maybe). I’ve been collecting figures for around 7 years now, I think. I’ve only been collecting figmas and nendoroids for the past year, but before that, I was all about trading figures. I still buy quite a few of those, but not nearly as many as I used to. In fact, I think I may go through my collection again and get rid of a few – or attempt to get rid of them. Keep an eye on this blog! I have a history of sending people stuff!

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a figure comic, especially after stumbling on to collecting communities and blogs like Tomopop and myfigurecollection.net. (I’m sailorsamus on myfigurecollection – friend me!)  Also reading A Day in the Life of a Nendoroid over at mangacafeblog has me wanting to do the same thing, in a way. I dislike straight copying another person’s idea although I am aware that this is exactly what all artists do.

So I think I will. I finally came up with an idea, now I just need to clear a space for pictures, take the pictures and get rolling.  As you can see in the picture above, my handwriting with my tablet is awful, so I will probably stick to text boxes, but I might draw effects now and again. Hopefully they’ll look smoother eventually, as I get the hang of things.

What do you think? If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to share them! At the very least, I’ll probably do a few strips worth of comics while I hammer out the format, and see how I feel about it then.

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Side Rant: Art and “ownership”

I’ve been messing around on tumblr lately, and it’s a lot of fun to share pictures and text, and see what other people are sharing. As a bit of a side project, I recently started a secondary Sailor Moon-themed tumblr, to help get back into my fandom. “My” fandom, not “the fandom.” As you’re probably aware, every anime and manga has a pretty awful fanbase full of crazies. I like to think I’m not one of them.

I ran across an entry wherein the tumblr owner stated to not reblog her manga image posts, because she worked hard tweaking them and didn’t want to watermark everything she worked on. You’d assume the images she was talking about were her own, but THEY WERE NOT. They were Naoko Takeuchi’s manga images, she merely photoshopped them a little, then posted them on her tumblr.

Number 1: Why even post them on tumblr if you don’t want them reblogged? I thought that was part of the point. Maybe I’m missing the point, I have no idea. I’m not up on all the social media, and I don’t think I’m very good at the ones I do use.

Number 2: I despise people who merely photoshop, color in, or otherwise alter the artwork of another person, then claims ownership of that work. You wouldn’t even HAVE the work if it wasn’t for the person who originally created it. Shut the fuck up and create your own drawings to color and/or photoshop.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a great deal of respect for people who can do their work digitally. That’s something I can’t quite wrap my own head around. I’ve tried drawing with a tablet multiple times, but it’s just weird to me, and I don’t know anything about attempting to color my own line art. Honestly though, I really have the most respect for people who create their own work from beginning to end.

Fandom-ish rant done. Next post will be a more positive post.

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Update Time! With Manga!!

Hello all! There’s been a recent lack of posting in general, so it seemed like it was time for a general update.

I did go to MTAC this year, and I should be posting about that this week or later this weekend.

I also have new figures I need to take pictures of and post about here.

My brother is graduating tomorrow, and I don’t feel like resizing pictures right now so they don’t end up looking wonky with my layout, so I’m just going to brag about the manga I bought today, and review them a little.

Today, I bought 20th Century Boys volume 4, Oresama Teacher volume 1, Dengeki Daisy volume 4, Stepping on Roses volume 5, and Skip Beat! volume 23.  I haven’t read 20th Century Boys or Oresama Teacher yet.  There may be some spoilers for the volumes I’m going to post about, just a warning.

What I really like about Stepping on Roses is that it has a fairly small cast. I don’t want to get very detailed into the plot here because I haven’t mentioned it before, and I want to review it a volume at a time pretty soon. I’ll go into more detail then. However, I can still say that the small cast really carries more dramatic punch than some other series I’ve read, where a large cast is introduced only to bring trouble to the couple. Soichiro and Sumi have enough problems on their own without needing to lean on other characters for plot though, and this is what keeps me reading this series.

I thought Dengeki Daisy volume 5 was weak. Something lacking in the art bothered me, it seemed like the layouts didn’t have the punch I’ve come to expect, or the detail. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but this volume focused more on the comedic aspects of the story, even though Teru discovered Daisy’s true identity. Of course, after the cliffhanger ending of this volume, I’m definitely on pins and needles for the next volume. These cliffhanger endings and two to three month waits really kill me, keeping up with manga releases here.

Skip Beat! volume 23 continues with Kyoko getting injured after her new rival pushes her down some stairs. There wasn’t too much in this volume that was surprising if you’d read previous volumes.  It looks like Kyoko has gained a new frenemy now that Moko is out of the picture following her own career.  There’s absolutely no Sho, and Ren shows up for only a few pages, but the lead singer (I forgot his name and it isn’t mentioned in this volume) from Vie Ghoul makes a return! Just in time for the volume to end, of course, so that’s another one I’ll be eagerly awaiting.

Stay tuned for my MTAC post! I won’t be posting any cosplayer pictures, but instead a couple of my favorite shots from the concerts we attended.

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Bloggers for Japan

 

Daniella Orihuela-Gruber over at www.allaboutmanga.net had a wonderful idea for helping the victims of the natural disasters in Japan.  She set up a group of anime and manga bloggers, and set a goal to donate $1000 to Doctors Without Borders and Shelterbox, and has been busy on twitter promoting the hell out of her initiative.

I’d already donated to Red Cross, but since then I’ve heard that there’s administrative fees taken out of Red Cross donations, which is unfortunate.  I really appreciate Daniella’s idea of specific aid that is the most needed right this moment, so I donated to both Doctors Without Borders and Shelterbox, and I’ll be donating again the next time I get paid.

If you can, please help out. It doesn’t have to be much. I’ve only been able to donate $10 to each charity so far. One of my current ideas is to attempt to ebay things I don’t want cluttering up the house anymore and donating whatever I get from that to the people of Japan, who need the money much more than I do right now.  If you’re unable to donate, that’s cool too. There are other ways though, such as helping to promote efforts like this one.

For instance, you can create.  Tim Maughan posted a techno mix on his blog with the theme of reconstruction in mind, with the hope that people will listen and be inspired to help in any way they are able.  Write, create art and music, or just whatever you can think of.

So please, check out the website for Bloggers For Japan, and at the very least, add one of the banners to your site or blog if you have one.

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