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SpaceRunaway's blog

Hi.

This is SpaceRunaway.  Sometimes I write things on the site.

Beginning immediately, my production on CDX is going to drop off quite a bit, or rather, it’s already dropped off as of around a month ago.  Why is that you ask, only because you are being polite as you try to remember who I am.

Well, I have moved across space and time, and now I’m half a day in the future, writing this from the country of Japan.  While this would seem to be an ideal place for one interested in doing toy reviews, I can’t see myself having the same amount of spare time or financial freedom while I work on trying to get better at this stupidly difficult language. 

Posted 3 October, 2014 - 18:57 by SpaceRunaway
General Products 1984:  A small look at the early days of Japanese fandom

The story of General Products is one that doesn't need repeating, but here's the short version anyway. Toshio Okada dropped out of school and started a business making garage kits in addition to opening a science fiction specialty store, taking the name from Larry Niven's Known Space series of novels. This store was the first of its kind in Japan. He recruited people like Yasuhiro Takeda from the university science fiction club, many of whom had worked together on animating the opening video for the third Japanese SF Convention in Osaka, aka DAICON III.

These people went on to found Gainax Studios.

I'm fascinated with this period of time in Japan. It's the point at which the fans who had grown up on anime began to make their own, and General Products and its daughter company DAICON Film were at the heart of it.

Posted 4 November, 2012 - 19:15 by SpaceRunaway

Recently, I picked up an old General Products catalog from 1984, which I thought of translating and posting. The waxing romantic about GP will come when I post about it for real, but for now this is just a little bit of a taste. Anyway I quickly abandoned the idea of completely translating it, as I don't have the time, the experience with using editing software, and frankly, I'm too lazy. I will be posting full scans of the catalog though, and translating a couple of passages. In the mean time, I spent my night translating the store map, so I thought I'd post that. Be forewarned though, the editing probably got sloppier as the night went on. Also, it's a two page spread, and I'm not about to take the catalog apart, so the pages aren't joined together as nicely as I would have liked. Oh well.
There are some translation notes I'd talk about, but I'm going to bed for now.

Posted 28 October, 2012 - 05:15 by SpaceRunaway
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