paulisweeabootrash

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Oh yeah, I never followed up on this. I was not expecting a majority for my position (create an original character), that's pretty cool.

I got one really good comment, too:

@sarahhellfisc says: "Like a lot of trans people pre-transition, I would make a female char with a bunch of my traits, like hair and eye color, but with features I wanted in my female body. Post transition, it much more depends on whether the character is notionally "me". E.g., in a dating sim, I'm likely going to make the char look mostly like me, though with improvements. Whereas if I'm in some action rpg where I'm going to be eaten my giant space spiders or whatever, I'll go for a char that's just arbitrary mary-sue, rather than anything like myself. (Except eye color. If I can choose eye color, I always choose that to match my own as best as possible, because damnit, I won the eye color lottery.)"

I definitely suspected I would get some "how I wish I looked" answers from trans people, and I appreciate and sympathize with that. But also, I love the comment that "it much more depends on whether the character is notionally "me"." That's a good point, it makes sense, and I think that's a nuance that I haven't personally heard much. I feel like people talk about playing games (and experiencing the POV characters in other media) as self-inserting whether the character is meant to be "the player" or not.

Who do you play video games as?

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Last year at AniMaine, I took my first tiny dip into doing convention panels by teaching people how to play Tanto Cuore, and in addition to doing that again this year, I did my first "real" convention panel! I gave a nearly hour-long presentation that incorporated most of my Azumanga retrospective review with less emphasis on my personal anecdotes and a bunch of new material added about the rise of the slice-of-life comedy and its surprising lasting fandom. I'm hoping to do it at larger conventions in the future with a few minor adjustments and a gradually rotating set of examples of recent fanart that stands out to me as the kind of unusual things this particular fandom makes. Gotta make sure people keep watching and reading this!

For this first round, I'd like to specifically note @itswilliamleonard's "we're all outta green" comic and @samantaraiolaser's papercraft Kaorin as two of my favorite things I've seen this year.

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Not content to merely make their own bad "art", corporate ghouls are now using AI to make existing human art worse.

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Happy Halloween!

Ghost Pokemon - Halloween 2023

Thank you for the support on this project! Now to the next one!

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Greetings from Another Anime Convention, where I am promoting Retro Matsuri!

✓ fake wood paneling

✓ reading recommendations from the 90s and 00s

✓ t-shirt from high school I didn't know I still had

✓ bad selfie taken on a webcam because I don't own a smartphone

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I've been sitting on this for a while, but now it's official! Retro Matsuri, a new convention for anime and games at least 20 years old, is scheduled for July 25-26, 2025, in Concord, NH and I am seeking artists and vendors who would be interested in selling there. See link for details.

If you're interested, or know someone who would be, you can reach me at artists@retromatsuri.com

[paulisweeabootrash]

On the one hand, I'm extremely tolerant of other people's ships. On the other hand, when I see people ship Laios x Falin, it makes me wonder how they can possibly read that relationship as romantic. Does their particular sibling dynamic really feel unrelatable/un-sibling-y to you? Have you people never gotten along with your own relatives? Do you need a hug?

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Who do you play video games as?

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Clickbait bullshit is back with a vengeance like it hasn't been in years. But it's doing wonders for the ability to find out whether an anime has been picked up for an Nth season. If you Google "[anime title] season N" and see that the whole first page of results is posts with vague titles like "[ANIME TITLE] RELEASE DATE!" from alleged media news sites you've never heard of, or if you are browsing your social media of choice and find posts "confirming" a new season that only cite other social media posts as sources, then there definitely isn't a new season yet.

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Anyone interested?

I've been sitting on this for a while, but now it's official! Retro Matsuri, a new convention for anime and games at least 20 years old, is scheduled for July 25-26, 2025, in Concord, NH and I am seeking artists and vendors who would be interested in selling there. See link for details.

If you're interested, or know someone who would be, you can reach me at artists@retromatsuri.com

[paulisweeabootrash]

Alright, I've got two thousand people here now, let's try to figure out what this site's favourite anime are. This is going to work pretty similarly to the survey r/anime ran fairly recently. I've got a google form right here for people to fill out. You can submit a list of up to 20 anime, and those anime will be given points based on how high up the list they are (5 points for #1, 4 points for #2-3, 3 points for #4-5, 2 points for #6-10, 1 point for #11-20). If you can't think of a top 20, that's fine, you don't have to fill out all 20 spots. I'll leave the form open for a couple of weeks, and then close the survey, tally up the results, and post the top 100. I'd really appreciate reblogs on this post, I'd like want as many responses as possible.

[paulisweeabootrash]

I've been sitting on this for a while, but now it's official! Retro Matsuri, a new convention for anime and games at least 20 years old, is scheduled for July 25-26, 2025, in Concord, NH and I am seeking artists and vendors who would be interested in selling there. See link for details.

If you're interested, or know someone who would be, you can reach me at artists@retromatsuri.com

[paulisweeabootrash]

The Gorgeous Life of Strawberry-chan

The Gorgeous Life of Strawberry-chan/The Super-Cool Life of Strawberry-chan (1999/2004)

Format: Manga

Volumes read: 2 (whole series)

I bought this from the clearance section in the final days of Right Stuf to get up to the free shipping threshold. And let me tell you, sometimes things are on clearance for a reason. You ever read a newspaper comic strip and wonder "wow, how is this in print"? Like, something so aggressively unfunny that you can't imagine a target audience for it? Well, Strawberry-chan is the closest I've come to that in a manga.

Strawberry-chan was published very gradually in Zero (now Kurofune), a fantasy and sci-fi magazine from a publisher that specializes in BL, and was compiled in two volumes, titled "The Gorgeous Life of Strawberry-chan" and "The Super-Cool Life of Strawberry-chan" in English (rather than being numbered volumes of the "same" series). I think the original run was 1995-2004, based on the artist afterword at the end of volume 2. According to the afterword, she tried to end the series but it was brought back by audience demand. Demand for what? Unclear.

The title character, Strawberry-chan, is a pet frog, and the manga follows the terrible things that happen to him at the boys' boarding school where his owner, Akiyoshi Taro, is a student. The two main running jokes(?) are that Taro mistreats Strawberry-chan, usually by sticking a straw up his cloaca, and that his roommate Fujikake Masayuki is in love with Strawberry-chan and wants to take him away. And that's basically it.

On the one hand, I don't want to trash something purely because I don't understand it. I wonder if this made sense at the time if you were really immersed in the 90s BL world, or at least you read other things from the same magazine. Even if it was genuinely bad at the time, I am willing to give slack to fans of strange niche media. I have definitely enjoyed, and still enjoy now, things that make other people cringe. On the other hand, ugh.

I am not the target audience for this, and I know there are jokes I'm not getting. A handful of things read as parodies, most obviously the early gag where Masayuki rejects a human-form Strawberry because he's not into humans -- I'm sure this is a play on a confidently-gay character not being interested in a woman version of his love interest -- but most of it is just confusing and unfunny to me. So I asked my wife, who has read quite a lot more yaoi than I have, for a second opinion, and she reports that if the premise is overall supposed to be some kind of joke about the dynamics of yaoi relationships, then it's a pretty badly-executed joke.

A few specific gags do stand out as pretty funny, like when Taro seems to be unable to distinguish Strawberry-chan from other frogs, or when Strawberry-chan buries himself in a flower pot to hibernate. And maybe you'll enjoy Strawberry being a butt monkey if you're a bit of an asshole or if you're a really big tsundere fan (Taro doesn't actually hate Strawberry, despite all his mistreatment), but to me it's all just tedious and grating.

W/A/S: ?/?/?

I don't know how to rate this.

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Oh hey it's August 17th: the first day of Endless Eight.

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A viewing recommendation.

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