Last night, softlykarou and I finished watching Tamayura: Hitotose. I gave it a nine. It's not super popular. The animation is fuzzy and obviously not particularly high quality, it's a slow slice-of-life anime shows about cute anime girls doing cute anime things, and the hook is that the main character likes photography and moved back to Takehara, in ( Read more... )

A couple days ago, I read this article about the game Wurm Online and a man who was a king. I found it really poignant, the image of the author and the man riding together through an overgrown and abandoned landscape, littered with the crumbling ruins of what was once a vibrant community of players now almost all gone. A single house, alone in the ( Read more... )

Thanks to ping816, I found a gif that perfectly encapsulates my feelings about the deer on Miyajima:


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After a delicious and cheap breakfast of toast and butter and tea and no soup because it had pork and shellfish despite being beet soup, we left the hotel at 10:15 in order to have enough time to make our 11:30 Sailor Moon Cafe reservations in Shibuya. But we had more time than I thought, so when we passed by Ozz On and softlykarou saw a blue and black dress ( Read more... )

This is the 11th year since I started going to ACEN and the 10th year since I started going with softlykarou. She couldn't make the first year because of a small convention she was running at Knox College, but she came the year after and every year we've gone since, which is all of them except 2009-2011 (when we were in Japan) and 2013 (when we had no money ( Read more... )

Thursday we had a friend over to watch Revolutionary Girl Utena, and then after she left I got a bit overwhelmed by my upcoming schedule and the fact that the pants I ordered arrived and didn't fit, and I ended up lying down in a dark room for fifteen minutes while softlykarou did some work in the kitchen.
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A while ago, I put to friends that I was looking for something to watch that was similar to Kino no Tabi and Haibane Renmei, and stephen_poon immediately came through and suggested Mushishi. And true to form, I thanked him, and softlykarou didn't get around to watching it for another six or eight months after that. Then it took us four months to watch the first ten ( Read more... )

I'm not sure I've talked about it here--I know I've talked about it before in the book reviews I do--but one of the things that most annoys me about coverage of Japanese culture is the almost worshippful attention paid to the concepts of wabi sabi and mono no aware. Sure, let's talk about the value of wabi sabi while Japanese construction companies ( Read more... )

I mentioned before that I was a bit worried about going to ACEN this year. Last year had been a bit disappointing, and I was worried that this year was going to be a waste of time and money. It turned out to be a completely unfounded fear, and I had a blast. Read on for a recounting of our time at the con in nauseating detail.

FridayI had ( Read more... )

I watched Sailor Moon Crystal on Saturday with softlykarou. I liked it.

It's difficult for me to really say much more than that, because unlike a lot of the people who have been waiting for this for a long time, I didn't grow up with Sailor Moon and don't have any fond memories of it. I didn't even see any anime at all until I was 19--and since the first ( Read more... )