Blogs

Hosts: Die-anne, Jeremy

This is about homeless pregnant ladies, fat jokes, and laugh tracks.

Click [HERE] to bring the funk.

Okay, so as you've come to expect, we have a hot new page of Golden Gate Riot for your reading pleasure.

I also have been working on getting some art scanned and cleaned up for Jeremy's Misspent Youth, which is art and comics I made when I was a kid. Turns out I actually located some extremely early art I made, to the tune of 1986. I didn't realize anything that old survived, but it did.

I am joined by fellow CollectionDX reviewer Anavel to discuss Eureka 7 AO in all of its strange glory.

Right click here and save as to download

Click here to listen to me swear about mecha shows for like an hour.

Hosts: Die-anne, Jeremy

This is about right-wing propaganda, manipulative parents, and butchering Shakespeare.

Click [HERE] to do some extracurricular activities.

PUT IN THE CYBER CYCLE DISKS YOU DAMN DIRTY DOG!

Click the above to jack in!

I finally have access to my own computer. Set up in my bedroom, it’s where I’ll be hanging out until the basement is fixed.

While I lost my books and nearly all of my drawings , I haven’t lost my otaku spirit. That will never be broken.

Things have been returning slowly to normal. While I’ll never get back certain books (oh how I morn the loss of my Artmic Studio book from 1987), I’ve been ordering some artbooks and the manga I care about (Hidamari Sketch and K-On).

In the meanwhile I’ve been cleaning my mind boggling amount of toys. Most of it will be as if nothing happened but others have significant damage (the salt water caused corrosion on my shiny Hyaku Shiki chogokin. Eh, I’ll pretend it’s battle damaged).

Check out the latest page of Golden Gate Riot, okay? It takes place in front of a vintage clothing store named Channel One. Channel One was actually a real place at 736 The Alameda, San Jose, California, and it really did sell vintage clothes and records. They went out of business years ago, but they also had live shows there when I was a teenager.

Here's a list of bands I saw at Channel One:

Ziakis
Crack
The Timeouts
Tsunami Bomb
Shut Up Donny
Outtaline
Creeper Lagoon
Bunkbed
The Contrail
Deerhoof
Ten in the Swear Jar (some of the members went on to form Xiu Xiu)
Milwakee
Oranger
The Aislers Set
Bright Eyes (at the time, it was just one crazy dude yelling at his acoustic guitar)
Mates Of State
Concerning Eye
Audio Crush
Spike And Princess

Unless any of you have been living under a rock, you know about the destruction left by hurricane Sandy. Me living in Queens NY, it was in its path.

I'm okay! My family is ok, That's the most important.

Where I hang out, my basement however, is not. I lost ALL of my books (including some really rare ones), my manga and sadly my artwork (even though a good deal of it was scanned) and most of my supplies. I was able to rescue my DVDs (took them out of their cases to dry them and will put them in jewel cases) and my toys (many got wet and I'm in the process of cleaning them. There is A LOT I have to go through).

I'm glad that my iMac, LCD TV and external hard drives were brought up before the flash flood came. There really wasn't time to get anything else.

For two weeks life was tough, but I didn't get upset and just concern myself with bringing up things both clean and damaged from my room.

Up today is a new page of Golden Gate Riot for you! This comic features an appearance by the notorious Laffing Sal. She is a spooky mechanical creature that unnerved children at amusement parks all over the country, but she was particularly notorious in San Francisco's Playland At The Beach, which is where this part of the story takes place. Playland was a real amusement park at the western edge of San Francisco at Ocean Beach. Today it is a bunch of condos and a Safeway grocery store. In the War World, Playland closed down, but due to the political instability, it was never torn down the way it was in the Real World.

Here's some videos of Laffing Sal working her stuff. This particular model of Sal is at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, but there's also one at Playland Not-At-The-Beach, a Playland Museum in the east bay.

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.