Great big giant MegaTokyo rant page

Back

Notice something different? If you saw the original versions of megatokyo, you'll see that i was originally intending to ink all of them. Well, i'll be the first to admit that inking takes me a long time to do, and when i do it in a hurry - it really sucks. So i said fuq it, and tried out how it would look in pencil (the way i do pencil drawings typically) Largo and I decided 'yea, that's pretty cool' and so - pencil it is. Of course, i had to re-do the first two episodes, but that wasnt too bad.

I'm off to a birthday party today, so I'll comment a little more later on the whole concept we're developing here. Also, you can find some more Megatokyo art over at fredart - including a new design for kimiko.

more later. mata ne.

"we launch!"
Monday - August 14, 2000
[Largo] - 16:45:00
Woohoo! Today we launch! This is the section of the comic that I hope everyone will find sucks. Not just suck in the same old sucking way either, MegaTokyo promises to suck in new and exciting ways. Piro and I have spent years in the field of researching suck. To you, our audience, we make this one pledge, above all else - we shall not fail to suck!

Ah, well I figure it will be a few weeks before people start finding this place, if even then, so we'll see.. in the meantime, I'm enjoying my first little rant here in the console section while piro is off playing one of his 'Tokimeki Memorial' games... ick... Maybe I'll bother to explain what that evil creation is to you someday, but for now, trust me.. you are better off being in the dark... Especially if its Joanna Dark...

"pressure... building..."
Wednesday - August 16, 2000
[Largo] - 08:14:12
As this screenshot clearly shows, I'm playing a game, a worthy game to play even with its astounding blandness. I speak of Icewind Dale from Black Isle. Now don't get me wrong, I happen to love a lot the fine products that come out of Black Isle. The masterpiece known as Planescape Torment for instance, which makes me drool via some sort of pavlovian affect each time Piro says its name. Though Icewind Dale was meant to be more of a dungeon crawl then a CRPG, it just didn't have the replay value of a Baldur's Gate or a Planescape. Next time I play a CRPG, I hope to see a essential ingredient to making a kickass game, I speak of none other then a minature giant space hamster.

I've finally got most of the essential PHP backbone into this site. For those of you just joining us, this is our first week of being up. We update the comic every M-W-F.

Grr, I need Baldurs Gate II ... or some gin.. mmm bombay saphire...

The infamous and rarely sober Tycho Brahe has put a link to MegaTokyo on his site. I am both honored, and freaked out by the number of hits this has generated.

The site isn't finished yet... ack, pressure .. building.. must.. finish... website...

"you want it when?"
Wednesday - August 16, 2000
[Piro] - 13:15:00
Well, dont be too upset if you find that nothing really works here yet... largo and I havent finished the backbone of the site. We should be launching the new version of the site, complete with four comics, on monday (barring unforseen disasters - a notably regular occurance in my life). So, in short, we aren't ready for you yet, but you are welcome to look around, where you can.

Notice something different? If you saw the original versions of megatokyo, you'll see that i was originally intending to ink all of them. Well, i'll be the first to admit that inking takes me a long time to do, and when i do it in a hurry - itreally sucks. So i said fuq it, and tried out how it would look in pencil (the way i do pencil drawings typically) Largoand I decided 'yea, that's pretty cool' and so - pencil it is. Of course, i had to re-do the first two episodes, but thatwasnt too bad.

I'm off to a birthday party today, so I'll comment a little more later on the whole concept we're developing here. Also, you can some more Megatokyo art over at fredart - including a new design for kimiko.

more later. mata ne.

"I'm working on it"
Friday - August 18, 2000
[Largo] - 09:45:21
First off, don't listen to Piro, nobody else does...
I've been scrambling to get the site up this week, Needless to say I was caught off guard this wednesday. Nothing like experiencing what I shall from now on refer to as being "Penny-Arcaded", The site was not nearly ready for massive public viewing, not that I'm complaining about the responce we got, which was very postive! I shall simply blame Tycho for exposing my lack of webskillz to the world :) ... Ah Tycho Brahe - I owe you a bottle of Bombay Saphire, but after we drink it, I plan to hit you on the head with the empty bottle(heh).

I've got more of the PHP backbone into the site, by now you'll notice that the archives pull in our older rants. I've still got the get the forward/back buttons in, should happen in the next week provided Tycho Brahe sends me some of his extremely delicious PHP source thats used over at the Penny-Arcade

Lesse, I was floored when I saw we got a email from Kenneth Lee - the Producer of Planescape Torment, who wrote in to say 'hi' to us, I must say this guy is cool!, but that goes without saying considering my worship of PS:T. Although if I get any email from Icewind Dale's Producer I don't think it will be as friendly as Kenneth's email. I will now take this moment to remind everyone that opinions expressed by Largo do not necessarily represent the opinions of anyone important.

In other news, I recently started playing Seaman, I'm just going to say this game is just weird. I am still freaked out from when I tried to tickle my new virtual pet seaman and it proclaimed "BAD TOUCH!" at me. I have a feeling the virtual child seaman services may be paying me a visit any moment now.

Last butnot least I wanted to say 'thankyou' to everyone who's wrote in, its been a lot of fun to see people have a positive reaction to the site, which is certainly better then everyone having a poisonious reaction.

"what now?"
Friday - August 18, 2000
[Piro] - 13:15:00
I'm sitting here at the office doing what i usually do every Friday - too burned out to do anything useful, recapping what has happened this week, and trying hard not to freak about what i need to do next week. Being 'Penny-Arcaded', as largo so aptly put it, certainly made us jump this week, but perhaps it was the kick start that was needed to really get off the ground. Of course, this is just what i need right now - more deadlines. :) Of course, things can always be worse.

ok, enough griping. I do that a lot.

It looks like the 3rd installment of one of my favorite dating/love sim games 'True Love Story 3' will be commin out sometime in early 2001. In what seems to me a particularly evil bent, the game doesn't just span a single month of high school, but an entire year of junior high. Gyah. Now I have a whole year to fuck up relationships with the 12 or so girls who populate the game. joy. ^^;; And to do this, the next game will be in DVD format and will require me to purchase a PS2. Drat. Finally, a reason to buy that stupid thing (sigh)

TLS is such a great game. Conversations are such that you dynamically select topics and things to talk about - choose some thing wrong and it's 'see ya looser!' and she finds an excuse to walk home a different way. ^_^. Now, the character designs for True Love Stories might not be the cutest around - in fact, they are sort of an acquired taste (yea, some people say they suck), but they grow on you. Right now, I am balking at the screen shot over on Magic Box...

I have two disks sitting here from Hibikino Watcher that I need to install. Wai! finally, i can have my favorite gal Miyuki call out 'piro-kun' in her own voice via the Emotional Voice System... now i just need some time to play Tokimeki Memorial 2 again...

"i'm a rpg fan, sue me."
Monday - August 21, 2000
[Largo] - 01:15:00
Woohoo, one week and still here, who'd have guessed? For a special treat, today is Bioware Day! Although, if I had my way, everyday would be 'Bioware Day', or at least 'Give all your money to Largo Day'.

Lately I've developed a obsession with all things Canadian, I suspect this is due to the long wait ahead for Neverwinter Nights. I've been having these dreams about maple leaves and thi s magical land known as Edmonton, with all its pink hair'd rollerblading girls. I spend a swe et amount of time on the NWN message boards in search of new info on this coveted game, all I can say is NWN is really goin g to be unique. After see'ing Bioware's E3 presentation, I think its safe to say the game will totally rock in new and ex citing ways, and all fears of it being 'over-hyped' should be put to rest. In fact, I proclaim anyone caught saying the game is 'over-hyped' should be dragged into the street and bludgeon'd to death with dead ch ickens.

This weekend I went ahead and pre-ordered Baldurs Gate II: Shadows of Amn - Coll ectors Edition This game looks very sweet, and I'm eager to pickup where BGI left off. Like most people, Baldur's Gate is the game that put Bioware in my little blackbook, where it shall stay all warm and cozy while I continue to drool over their work.

Now, all I have to do sit back and wait for my BGII to arrive while chanting... "Go for the eyes Boo! Go for the eyes -- RASSSSK!"

"baka"
Monday - August 21, 2000
[Piro] - 07:39:00
And so I end up listening to largo's endless obsession with certain employment desires which for some reason always seem to have something to do with a game that he is nuts over. I suppose I can understand the obsession - I mean, it's so much fun to *play* the game, it must be even better to help make it! To look at a game and say, "see the drool on that monster? I di d the algorithm for that!"

Frankly, even designing acidic monster drool would be a lot more work that the average gamer would think - except perhaps fo r those who have realized thier own modifications to popular games. A while back I used to be pretty proficient at Quake 2 - and in fact, i threw together a few levels using a map editor - it was kinda fun. But there was something lacking for me. There was nothing truely original, something that truely stood out, in doing a level map with pre-existing components. Wh at I *really* wanted, and to this day haven't made yet, is to make a quake character (or half life, or whatever FPS game) of a cute girl who calmly goes about wasting these ugly, frightening, standard characters that come in these games. For insta nce, my design for RuriQuake would be so much fun to trot around with.

And for me, THAT'S what *I* would like to do - if I were to work for some gaming company, I'd try to install a little cute f actor - something that is really missing from these games. Think you are sooooo tough, bad mofo lookin space marine or what ever - imagine the look on your face when Ruri pops you. :)

More later. Right now I'm tired, and i have a slew of meetings to attend todays. Gosh, dontya just love mondays?

"sci-fi is fantasy"
Wednesday - August 23, 2000
[Largo] - 23:34:00
I know I'm going to catch a lot of hell for this, but hey, whats the point of having a public forum if you can't offend people with it?

I would like to state for the record, before all who witness this rant, that contrary to what some zea lots out there think, sci-fi is fantasy. I want to turn back the clock to when Final Fantasy VIII was r eleased. All I can recall are the countless flame filled reviews by fans who felt the game was no longe r 'fantasy', and was now a science-fiction game. It really disappoints me when someone intentionally li mits their imgaination that way, to these purists, fantasy can not involve anything modern, to them - f antasy implies the past, and can't feature any technological advancement, this includes toilet paper. M aybe its just me, but when I'm playing a CRPG game, I'd like to think my character uses toilet paper, I 'd like to think the main hero is always 'fresh'.

Regardless, I just don't agree with this notion that a fantasy setting must be presented in a strickly medieval or surreal form, why should we limit ourselves to thinking in terms like that? Fantasy by its own definition, is whatever we can imagine, whatever we can dream. Fantasy can be so many things. While not everyone may appreciate everyone else's idea of fantasy , it doesn't mean you should invalidate it, judge it, and proclaim it unworthy of the title 'fantasy'.

In short, try to keep a open mind, you'll see more.

"fantasizing about school?"
Thursday - August 24, 2000
[Piro] - 13:26:00
Largo talks about the blurred lines between sci-fi and fantasy, and I take it a step further: gal games - or "gal-get games" , "dating simulations", "love simulations", whatever you want to call them, really fall in the realm of "fantasy" too. But. .. what is so sad is that you fantasize about *school* - school in another country. It's a shame that the high school memories of so many young men in this country is *so* bad that they turn to another country for fond reminiscing.

This does bring up a interesting problem i've had recently - what exactly do you call this genere of games? In japan, it's simply called 'gamu' or 'games', which pretty much covers the whole gamut. Here in the states, I suppose i need to be a lit tle more specific. There are two terms that *I* like to use, and pretty much describe most games in the category. Leaf games (like To Heart, the one in the strip) are called 'visual novels' - gameplay is basically clicking along and reading the story while watching the images a nd listening to the dialogue. Changes and shifts in the story happen based on choices you make as you go along. Games like Tokimemo Memorial 2, by Konami, are simply called "simulation games" There is a more elaborate game system to determine exactly how you stand with all the girls in the story. True Love Story and Sentimental Graffitti are two other examples of this type of game.

People like me are a relative rarity in the states, but this is not the case in Japan. Tokimemo Memorial 2 flew off the she lves and sold out in a single day when it was released late last year, and there are cult fans of Shiori that are really scarry. The arcade version of Tokimemo Memorial 1 (yes, there was an arcade version) actually had a sensor that kept track of your pulse to see how much 'in love' or whatever you really were.

Fantasy or simulation, the games are immersive and require an awful lot of free time - something (thanks to largo) i am now very short on. Perhaps this is a good thing...

"girls who kick ass."
Friday - August 25, 2000
[Largo] - 01:13:00
First off, yes, I know the strip is a low-blow, and its just plain wrong to kick someone when they are down but well, you have to understand that Piro and I are bastards, even if Piro refuses to admit it.

Now, to the rant!

There have long been a growing number of games which feature strong willed female heroines. This is so mething I'm happy to see, from Joanna Dark to Claire Redfield, gamers have been given a seemingly endless variety of characters whose shoes they can jump into, if even for just a short while.

The question I'd like to ask our readers , is what draws you to want to see a strong female lead in a videogame? If you were to ask Eidos executives (and if they were dead drunk enough to give a honest answer) they'd tell us that gamers simply want the eye-candy, they want to see women with unrealistic dimensions run a gauntlet of challenges that seems to produce a lot of bouncing, and in some cases, they'd be right. Still, I would like to believe there are enough people out there who want a main character with a more realistic persona.

Now, I'll be the first to admit I don't want the characters to look unattractive, If I'm going to spending the next week playing a game, I'd like it to be filled with a pleasant looking lead character. I do however feel there should be a balance, I'd like some realism in the designs, at least when it comes to body proportions (Core/Eidos, you listening?) I'd like the character to represent the best qualities of a plausible real person in terms of physical form and personality, rather then a unhealthy fantasy that can't be attained without major surgery, and support beams.

I am, and always will be a big fan of Biohazard's Claire Redfield. When Capcom designed Claire, a lot of things were finally done right. Lets exam Claire for a moment; she's in the age range of the average gamer, she begins her career in the Biohazard series as a newbie which gives the player the ability to grow with her character as she does throughout the game, she is given a realistic, yet attractive body, and most importantly her personality presents her as intelligent, determined, and yet still very fragile and therefore human. These are qualities I'd like to see more of in our female leads. The rest of the gaming industry should take the clue given to them by Capcom, and give us a little reality to go with our fantasy.

Having given this some thought, I've decided the next girl I get into a relationship with will first be required to be able to dispatch zombies with a crossbow.

"that cheezy MIDI music."
Saturday - August 26, 2000
[Piro] - 22:36:00
One of the weird things about anime and simulation/visual novel games in general is what it does to your taste in music. Five years ago, I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to what I can only describe as 'lizard lounge music', or 'elevator music'. Not long after getting into anime, however, I was eagerly hunting down Original Soundtracks and listening to disks like Kimagure Orange Road's "Ano Hi Ni Kaeretai" - a decidedly 'elevator music' like soundtrack. I did not loose my taste f or Industrial, Techno, Hard Acid whatever-genre-you-wanna-call-them music - It became very easy to me to switch from NIN to "Nine Floors of Elevator Bliss".

I've seen this in action, too. A good friend of mine was just starting to watch anime, but still felt that he didn't like t he music. After giving him a tape full of Ah! Megamisama! music, it wasn't a week that he was gleefully filling his collection with cheezy soundtracks and Japanese pop tunes. I still joke with him about his comment "Oh, i don't really like the music." heheh, sucker. gotya. :P

what's worse tho is when you start collecting midi files - the ones that typically play the themes and mood music for games in the background while you play. From years back, having MIDI files that played via the synth on the soundcard (and you know how cheezy those have been over the years) created a style of music that is very much like those cheezy Casio keyboards we used to play with when we were kids. I have megs (yes, many megs) of MIDI files that have been made by Japanese game fans of their favorite songs from various games. If you are curious, head over to Surfer's Paradise and do a search for MIDI files - you'll be surprised how many will turn up. Or, better yet, head over to Computer Music Center - one of the best midi sites around, and this one, the Game Music Library.

I find that these cheezy, cute little soundtracks are very enjoyable. Now, I have a SB Live, so they sound better than they did before I got this card - but believe it or not, i keep the sound fonts pretty much off to listen to these files. I sup pose there is a corner of my mind that can't handle these files being played in a higher quality.

An odd thing I came across recently is on the Leaf game Magical Antique . Perhaps computers are getting too good at playing midi files - because for this game, the midi files are actually CD tracks on the game disk. I suppose that the makers of the game didn't want the cute cute atmosphere of the game to be ruined by a midi file that might be played -too-well.

(ps: isn't Rian-chan cute? I love Leaf character designs...:P)

"drawin' as fast as I can."
Monday - August 28, 2000
[Piro] - 09:08:00
I seem to be falling into a pattern. The ideal way to be doing a comic like this is to always be at least three strips ahead so that updating on Monday, Wednesday and Friday is a piece of cake.

Well, gee, surprise surprise - I've been doing this by the seat of my pants (which have been getting reall y threadbare lately) and finishing each strip usually around the time it needs to be posted. One of two things happens with this - mistakes can be made (*cough* the three-handed piro which has now been fixed *cough*) and the fact that I don't usually get a chance to write any comments until the next day. So, it seems that you get a new comic every Monday Wednesday and Friday, but you typically won't get my comments till Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. So, if you are really bored on those off days because of our 'cliche' schedule you'll at least have something new here most days.

I was really annoyed with myself this weekend. "Ok, we need some colored images for the site" Now, I've done plenty of color CG works so it shouldn't have been a big deal to do some nice color versions of largo and piro. [CG: Computer Graphics, any artwork that is done on the computer. Color illustrations are often referred to as such by Japanese fans.] First off, I was too lazy to draw a new image (I recycled an older sketch), Secondly I was too lazy to Ink the image (painting over scanned pencil lines is a cheezy way to color something) and finally... well, the final image just sucks.

I have a poor history of coloring my drawings. I have at least a dozen sketches that I feel deserve to be inked and colored, but for some reason I just haven't had the time to get to them. I suppose the real re ason that I don't color much is that compared to so much of the CG artwork out there, mine really doesn't compare - it is a skill i need to work on. Perhaps with a little more practice...

PS: i don't know if anyone noticed, but in Friday's screenshot, the character Rina-chan wears glasses just like Piro - it just occurr ed to me that they are hard to see in the screenshot.

"thou shall not defile!"
Monday - August 28, 2000
[Largo] - 12:34:41
For those interested, Piro managed to color the characters sketch this weekend, so we put that up for your viewing pleasure... Many of you have been wondering why the site does not have a forward/back button for cycling thru all the old comics. The answer to this is simple, I'm lazy. I spent most of this past weekend reworking all the table data in the site, which isn't very fun considering the end result of all my efforts is the site basically looks the same. Anyways I'll take comfort in knowing my pretty tables are no longer broken...

To the Screenshot!

Lately, I keep hearing people getting excited at the still denied rumor that there is going to be a new Metroid game made for the upcoming Nintendo Gamecube. I satdown and gave this some thought today as I had mixed feelings on the idea of a ne w Metroid title.

I share some fond memories, along with permanent lines under my eyes from the many sleepless nights brought to me by this a ncient and revered game. However, I think this is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a long time. If Metroid was to be remade, nothing would be the same, sure we'd have Samus, and some really cool looking 3D metroids, but really guys, whats th e point? Nothing is going to live up to the memories we had of this title, and any new Metroid game made in the present day may end up suffering from the remake-syndrome, last thing we need is for Samus to suddently find herself partnered with a cute lovable sidekick who's prone to do musical numbers from 'South Pacific' during the cutscenes.

Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not against remakes and reinventing franchises, but I'd like to see some of the original talent that created the franchise, continue it. This crosses over in film as well, I'm sure I'm not the only one who is wary of what Terminator III will be like without James Cameron on board. Sometimes it's better to just retire with some dignity rather then beat the horse to death with a really big stick... Highlander II.. III.. IV anyone?

Hey, sure it would be nice to step into the shoes of Samus just one more time on a nextgen platform like the Gamecube, but if we do, it really won't be 'Metroid', it would be a game with the name 'Metroid'. Treating it any different would only yield disappointment to those die hard fans of long ago.

"nothing amazing, just the norm."
Wednesday - August 30, 2000
[Piro] - 02:20:00
I've been and continue to be influenced by a pretty wide range of 'stuff' - old and new, anime, game, manga and all sorts of other pop culture things, both in the US and Japan. One of my favorite animes right now is FLCL (or "Furi Kuri"), a new OAV series (OAV: Original Animation Video - a term for anime that is marketed directly to consumers, not thru TV or via Movie Theaters) by the celebrated studios of Gainax. Gainax, of course, are the same people who gave us Evangelion (I will never ever forgive them for what they did to Asuka. Never. Her treatment in Eva is totally uncalled for, and it still upsets me to no end - but i digress)

Furi Kuri is... well, it's kind of hard to explain. Gainax is one of those studios that, due to its histo ry of having be started by maniac otakus in the first place, takes a lot of chances and has not qualms about messing with fan's minds. Their work on Kareshi Kanajo no Jijo was a 180 degree turn from eva (a girl's manga story, love, romance, pain, you get the idea - ) - FLCL is like this really weird-ass combination of KareKano (KareKano is the nickname for the series) and Evangelion - some people love it, some hate it. I love it. It has this really quirky nature that appeals to me for some reason (but then I'm kinda off-kilter to start with).

I've taken a real fancy to Ninamori Eri (lesson: Japanese first names usually come second - so Ninamori is her last name. Eri is her first.) - while she doesn't really seem to have much of a part till episode 3 - there's something about her character design and manner that is interesting. I did a drawing of Ninamori and Kanchi (the oddball robot that comes outa Naota's head) that actually came out pretty good.

"megatokyo experiments."
Wednesday - August 30, 2000
[Largo] - 23:01:00
First off, I wanna give credit to David Lynch for emailing me some php code that I was able to use to help get the navigation engine in place today, this guy saved me days of work messing with the code and for that, I am indebted.

Next.. Break out the gin! We've been getting record hits all this week! Piro and I have been really floored by the respons e this little site has gotten from everyone, it makes all the long hard hours and sweatshop environment I force Piro to work in seem worth it. With this in mind I guess its time for us to party, and since a party is no fun by yourself, I want to direct everyone's attention to two very sweet webcomics that not only linked us; but happen to be sites I visit on a regular basis, Real Life Comics and Exploitation Now(mature content).

This week I've been getting a lot of emails asking me what types of animation I like to watch. It isn't the first question I thought I'd be asked, but what the hell eh? The answer to that question is a bit tricky, as it has evolved over the years as I find I end up liking less and less of what comes out, I suppose it's just natural to lose interest when you have be en watching this stuff as long as I have. However selective, or "picky" as Piro likes to say I am, I do see a few jewels i n the rough every year. Lately I've been really impressed with Great Teacher Onizuka and Initial D, but if I were only able to suggest a single anime to watch, it would be Serial Experiments Lain. I suppose it helps that I'm suggesting people see Lain over the other shows considering Onizuka and Initial D have not been released in North America yet. Anyways, Serial Experiments is a grea t show, especially for you network engineers out there, it has a certain charm that becomes apparent towards the end that w ill have you wanting to watch it all over again.

Hrm... Lain and gin... they mix well!

"baldur's goodness."
Friday - September 1, 2000
[Largo] - 10:34:00
I am at the office... writing a rant without the aid of gin... This may be a problem...

Well today's strip is here, I have really wanted to do this episode for a long time. I'm just waiting for l33tspeak to evolve into it's own spoken language. As it stands now, all the h4x0r types would need to speak in subtitles to communicate in their native tongue.

Since I'm always short on inspiration I'm going to write about the only thing going on in my mind right now... Baldur's Gate II! I touched on this sweet title last week, but when a game is this cool - it deserves to be written about in greater detail! Either that - or I've run out of ideas on what to rant about today and I'm recycling old ones, you be the judge.

Baldur's Gate II is going to have something I absolutely worship, and that is Re-play value! BGII is going to have many nonlinear subplots that are directly related to what class you pick for you main character. Examples given have been if you are a fighter you will defend your own stronghold, a wizard may have a tower and need to train, and fix the mess's of his apprentices, a bard will run a playhouse and deal with the egos and other issues of their actors. BGII is going to be huge, the game is so huge, that you will have to play through it several times to do everything. For those of you who haven't been enlightened to the sheer coolness of this game, know that it will floor you, it will floor you in ways you didn't think you could be floored. Why will it do this? one word - "Canada" ... It's been proven now that there is something in the water in Canada that makes great game designers. This mystery liquid needs to be bottled up and sold in Dallas, TX - perhaps then our local game companies will produce something original.

The original Baldur's Gate was great fun for me, I liked so many of the characters in the game. Like most people, I loved Minsc's dialogue .. There is just something wholesome and right about "Butt-Kicking for Goodness!" But of all the characters, one is really standing out right now, and that's Imoen. Originally, I hated Imoen, in fact, the first couple times I played Balder's Gate, I ditched her the first moment I could. Then I finally played through with her to the end, and for some strange reason - I found her less annoying. I guess characters, even the annoying ones, will grow on you after awhile. What brings me to mention this is recently I took a look a screens hot that IGN had gotten of Imoen's new look for BGII. Taking a look at this girl now, she's hardly the over-the-top perky character I once knew, this to me - is a good thing. Granted even when I didn't mind having her in my party in BGI, I stilled couldn't stand her perpetual cheery attitude. There's something cool about Imoen in this new picture, I'm not sure what it is, but the character artist has done their job as I am now.. intrigued by her.

Space hamsters are always a good thing, especially if they are miniature. Having one can be a lot of fun, you can go to a party ask a girl if she wants to see your miniature giant space hamster. Unfortunately, I tried this once and got slapped, there's no justice in the world. Piro doesn't seem to understand my affliction for space hamsters, then again he does share my love of a anime called "Ebichu." Recently Gainax put out a really odd tv series called "Ebichu", simply put - it's about a hamster and her owner. I'd go into more detail but I may exceed MegaTokyo's MPAA R-rating.

Now if Bioware would just send me my Baldur's Gate II Collectors Edition ahead of time ... I am suffering from boo-withdrawal...

"nyo."
Saturday - September 2, 2000
[Piro] - 15:47:00
Before I start, a quick note of thanks. sempai.org, where megatokyo and fredart are hosted, has been hammered recently because of us, and just I wanted to say a big "thanks!" to Kevin and crew, and please don't strangle us. ^^;;)

I am totally blasted this weekend. I feel like several people have been beating on me with long cardboard tubes and large rocks. It's Saturday morning, and I am so very glad that I don't have a webcam anymore. The visage in the mirror is really scary.

Even if my webcam was still up, I suppose I could turn it off. That's the nice thing about the net. As much your privacy is gaffed on the net, you still have some control over your 'presence' - at least if you have a little creativity. At a base level, one of the first things you get control is the selection of your nickname, or 'nick'

It's amazing how much time and effort we spend on nicks. Protecting it, nurturing it - people get really pissed if they loose a nick on IRC. In this computerized world, a nick is almost as important if not more than your real name. With some people it's obvious where the nick came from - the name of a favorite cha racter, a play on your real name, a revolting description of some bodily function, or just simply something that sounds fuming cool. But if nothing else, it says something about yourself. It's a way of adding some personal representation to yourself in what is still a pretty much text-based world.

You hear a lot of things about people hiding behind nicks, pretending to be someone else, etc. Yes, this does happen - and a lot of people maintain a very 'fake' presence on the web, but for the most part, no matter how much you try not to, your personality is there, like it or not. And for those who are pretending to be someone else? Jeeze, doesn't THAT say somethin about them as well? :P

Oddly enough, in dating sims and visual novels, you often have to enter your name (usually this will be in Japanese) - and for the most part, people will use their real names. For games like Quake, people will use nicks much like they do on the net. Gal-games really are a single-player kind of thing, and I suppose there is something more personal about the interaction. A good reality check is if you start using your nick when you play dating sims. If that happens, it is wise to seek medical attention.

Oh, and the picture? Isn't Makoto-chan CUTE? ^_^ Of course, she's a rather dangerous character in 'Kanon' (one of my favorite gal games). Isn't her kitty cute too? I'll let you guess the kitty's name...

"the future."
Monday - September 4, 2000
[Largo] - 00:01:16
The strip has really taken off as our audience doubles every few days. We never imagined this would happen, and this has m ade us both really happy... This is unacceptable, I must destroy this happiness...

To help ruin any favorable image I may of had with our viewers, I'm going to tell you all a deep dark secret. I like the X-Box.

Okay, let me explain ... err.. guys, put the tar and feathers down for a sec... uh.. guys?

It has been my opinion that the X-Box could end up being the salvation of the wounded PC games market. Developing for the PC has become increasingly more expensive, with less and less huge money makers each year. Yes, it's true that the PC world has it's share of regular top sellers, big money makers from Bioware, Interplay, Blizzard, etc., however these guys are the exceptions to the rule. It is more expensive to develop a game for the PC then for a console system. Smaller game companies have to struggle to get a title out and turn a profit on the PC, where it's a lot cheaper to produce for a console. Next question from some of you may be; "Why?", well the answer to that question is there are a lot more problems associated with PC games when you need them to run on a variety of differently configured PC systems. Every year PC game makers test, test, and test their games on dozens of different video cards using 3dfx, OpenGL, etc you name it. This is one of the reasons PC games end up with so many patches after release, they spend so much time testing to make sure their product will run on all the hardware out there, rather then spend all their time just testing the game itself. Console games don't have that issue, instead consoles have a single platform, with unified hardware, it's a breeze compared to making a game for the PC.

From Carmack to Molyneux, I've heard only good things about what the X-Box means for gamers, and as for developers themselves, PC game makers should have no trouble handling the transition to the X-Box.

In my case, I only use windows to play games. I spend several thousand bucks each year on a top of line kickass system for the sole purpose of playing PC games. What I can't reason is if the X-Box can do a better job, for only a few hundred bucks, then why are people complaining? In the end we'd finally have a standardized PC game system, everybody wins.

Of course.. Since PC games are the best... I expect the X-Box to crush all other consoles who oppose it...

uh... guys... the tar.....

"gate? what gate?"
Monday - September 4, 2000
[Piro] - 23:01:00
I finally get a real, honest to goodness holiday for a real three day weekend... and I end up working instead. (sigh) No breaks, I guess. Heaven forbid i got like soft or anything. -_-;;

I did have a pretty good weekend, art-wise. For the first time since megatokyo started, I was able to finish a strip a good six hours before midnight. Woo. I keep this up, i might get a whole day ahead. Actually, I would have had two strips done Sunday night, but I took some time to sit and draw some other stuff instead. I wanted to draw a nice drawing of Sanae-chan for Rave, a fellow True Love Story fan and artist who sent me a really nice gift art a few weeks ago. It came out really nice, actually.

After that, i thought about what to draw next. There are so many characters and series to choose from. I'm not really sure why I end up choosing one character over another to draw at a particular time - I guess it has something to do with how much that character sticks in your head after watching the anime, or playing the game. I was going to draw Naru-chan from Love Hina, but for some reason I wasn't in the mood. While flipping thru NewType, I came across a Gatekeepers article... ah, Fei Feiring, there we go.

Gatekeepers is a odd show. I swore I wouldn't like it when I first read about it. It was like Keiji Gotoh had gone trippin and went nuts in his studio developing a plethora of cute girl characters. Goto is, of course, the character designer for Kidou Senkan Nadesico, and the brilliant genius who designed Ruri-chan. I figured that anything less than RuriRuri would be a waste of time.

Well, I was quite wrong it seems. The darn show has turned out to be one of my favorites this year... which grinds me, because it is SUPPOSED to be Love Hina. It's like it was some sorta subversive plot. The show is a little corny (the battle cry "open the GATE! " and the 'Aegis Salute' are enough to make you groan each and every time) but there is a lot of time spent with the characters. For example, I didn't really care much for Fen, until the episode where she helps out this old fella... It stuck in my mind, and so I felt like drawing her. I'm dying to find out how it ends now... (sigh)

Largo, you can clean up your own tar and feathered mess - and stop tracking that in here. It's your own big mouth that gets you into these problems, so keep that tar off of me.

"pay for play"
Thursday - September 7, 2000
[Largo] - 00:00:01
Well, as expected I was burned in effigy this week due to my admitting my love for the X-Box. I still haven't been able to finish answering each email I received due to monday's rant. With that in mind I may need to stick to something less controversial for today's rant, something more tame, like abortion or n uclear weapons.

We decided to make a higher resolution version of last friday's episode 'Speak l33t', due to the number of requests we received to have this done. Look for the image in a future rant.

For those interested, the beta signup for Sacrifice is going on over at the many planeted gamespy. Now if only my Tribes 2 beta application would get approved...

Speaking of planets, I've been doing some thinking about the near future in regards to the flood of MMORPG's that is the tsunami about to hit our fragile island. I'm always up for competition, but with these games, which all require a monthly fee, many people will only be playing one or two of them at most. So the question is; which one to play? The current list of front runners seems to be Anarchy Online, Shadowbane, and Ultima Online 2. I can only speculate on which one will come out on top, but it's safe to say Origin has the advantage for now. Since all three of these are going to ask it's players pay a monthly fee, it reasons that most gamers will have to choose which one they want to play. I think we'll end up seeing the same thing we did with the last batch of MMORPG's; UO, Everquest, and Asheton's Call. That is that players will typically stick with whatever game they first get heavily involved into playing. MMORPG's have a nasty edge to them in that players will continue to pay their monthly subscription fee's long after they quit playing the game itself for fear of losing what they spent months of playing to attain in the event they ever want to play again. This is especially so in the case of Everquest, which has only helped to give it the deserved nickname of Evercrack. Now perhaps I'm jaded, but I can't help but feel there is now a business model out there to capitalize off of a gamer's addiction to their online characters. Regardless, it's obvious a lot of people enjoy and will continue to enjoy MMORPG's, regardless of the amount of time they suck away from a person's family... career... sanity...

Considering all of the above, personally I'd suggest everyone just go with Neverwinter Nights, There is something to be said for unlimited distributed worlds, and local controls and customization... but hey - that's just me.

Update: Shawn wrote in today to remind me about two other MMORPG's that I seem to have been ignorant about, these are Horizons, and Neocron.

"sugoi!"
Thursday - September 7, 2000
[Piro] - 13:41:23
Wow, what a week. I have had no luck whatsoever getting ahead (I finished Wednesday's strip around 2:00 in the morning) but the response to Megatokyo this week has been, well, unbelievable. I'm rather floored. I'd like to thank everyone who's dropped by, and to those who keep coming back. For the record, there should always be a new strip every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I'll also do what I can to improve the art - it's not as good as it could be. I'll work on that.

Largo and I are sorta new to the scene. I really have no clue as to what I am doing. Neither does largo (don't let him fool you). With that being the case, I'm even more floored by the fact that such established strips as Penny Arcade, PVP and Real Life have mentioned us on their sites, and even said nice things about us. Gee wiz, thanks guys. We are not worthy.

I'm havin a little bit of a brain lockup today - it's a combination of being too tired and having too much to do in my day job. ^^;; The image of Rabi-en-Rose from DigiCharat seemed aptly appropriate today for some reason...

DigiCharat is a really great series based on the cute little mascot Digiko (or Dejiko) for a chain of stores in Japan called Gamers that sells anime and game stuff. She became such an icon that she finally got her own show. :) The show itself is nuts. It amazes me how much cuteness and insanity can be packed into 4 minutes (yes, each ep is really short). The opening song "Only One Number One" has to be one of my all time favorite tunes.

Rabi en Rose is actually Digiko's archrival at the store and has a bunny outfit that she wears while working at the store. Digiko and Puchiko are aliens, but Rabi is a earth girl. When not at work, she dresses conservatively and wears glasses and a long braid. The pic above is actually a younger Rabi watching her bizarre parents abandon her and take off for America. ^_^ Kawaisou, Rabi-chan...

I suppose that's one of the things I like about Rabi. She has sort of a double life. Look at her in her school outfit and you'd never guess she dresses like this most of the time. Kinda the way that most of the people I work with have no idea what i do in my spare time. God help me if they find my Puchiko neko cap...

Ack... another 'megane-ko' - what is with me lately, this thing about girls with glasses? Rabi-en-Rose doesn't even wear glasses usually. Believe it or not, 'meganeko' is actually a category in Japanese CG art circles. Does it have something to do with the fact that I wear glasses? I don't know, this is kind of a new trend with me... well, actually, it has surfaced in the past.

"cataclysm good"
Friday - September 8, 2000
[Largo] - 22:04:05
Today I went to my local software pusher and he hooked me up with what can only be refered to as "the good stuff" or "Homeworld: Cataclysm". While Cataclysm is not a sequel in the traditional sense, it is the next game in the Homeworld franchise. I was pleased with the original Homeworld to no end, it was unique, exciting, and let me command a nice fleet of ships which I could use to rain firey death on all that opposed me. Needless to say, I was sold.

I spent the most of today playing this little gem and I've found it to be even more fun then the original. Some of the flaws of the original homeworld were that some ships were simply useless after newer ships were able to be made. While this isn't a major flaw it does bother me to have a game where certain units because useless late in the game, this applies to most RTS's. Cataclysm streamlined the units down a bit from the original game, and made it so even late in the game I find I still am using the ships I started out with. Another feature I like is now ships can gain experience and rank, so the longer a ship is around and more battles it fights in, the more rank it gains. This was a great touch, although I'd wish they had gone one step farther and let us name the ships for a little more personalization. I suppose considering the original Homeworld was a game of the year that it's a bit unessecary for me to tell people it's worth buying, but for what it's worth, I'm really loving this game.

Sadly, We have not started production nor or we taking pre-orders for the "Cool Thing(tm)". However it would be really sweet if Bioware would make that sweet Neverwinter Nights sweatshirt...

While I'm thinking about it, recently Piro posted a rant which related to DigiCharat. This series should be avoided at all costs, I've seen the results of what happens when people become victims to it. DigiCharat is done in a style known as 'puni' or 'squishy', marked by being filled with characters so cute and full of sugar that diabetics have cause to fear for their lives... So, for the sake of all that is good and decent in world... don't see this show!

Finally, Dave Kelly threw a brick at me and demanded I link his site. Please visit his site so he'll stop throwing bricks at me.

"somethin's not right here..."
Sunday - September 10, 2000
[Piro] - 09:02:00
The placement of large caliber handguns, large bore assault weapons and heavy artillery in the hands of female characters is nothing new. Hollywood has been doing it for years, FPS games had female characters to choose from since Quake II, and It amazes me how many fan art sites (in particular here in the US) that show cute, scantily clad females holding some form of firearm. I suppose that is has something to do with combining two strong desires of the male psyche - sexy women and cool weaponry.

To me, this doesn't really work too well. I tend to groan inwardly when i see female characters running around with guns. So often there is no good reason for these characters to be so heavily armed (other than the fact it looks cool). We've all seen the b-movies where the women wear body armor that seems to me to protect them far less than ordinary street clothes, yet are able to lay a path of destruction without streaking their makeup. There are countless examples of this in anime and manga too.

There are, of course, many exceptions. The gratuitous gunplay in Gunsmith Cats is the whole point of the story, and is well carried out. The master, Masamune Shirow, i don't think is capable of drawing women without some sort of artillery or mecha element involved. In cases like this, the characters are comfortable with their iron, feel natural with it, and have the personalities that make their obsession with high explosives very believable.

And I suppose this brings up a point - what does make a successful gun toting gal? Shirow and Sonoda develop characters where the munitions are very much a part of their personality. This is not easy to do. I myself don't think I could develop a character of this that would be successful. Why not? It's easy, just slap her in a cute top, some short shorts and a nice big Glock 20 and give her a good pose with the wind blowin her hair... gaaaack. no. To me, this is degrading, insulting to women and people who respect firearms. Most of all it is just plain stupid.

The key is personality. If you haven't noticed by now, I tend to do a lot of contrast pieces - placing established characters in clothing and situations that are outside of what you would expect them to do, but not so outrageous that it doesn't work (my personal fave is this drawing of Vampire Princess Miyu wearing a cute DKNY outfit). Hoshino Ruri in combat gear and about to frag your sorry ass is an image that just makes me chuckle. The image is believable - Ruri is wearing combat gear, not some scanty outfit. She can take a few hits - and she can give em too. :P This is out of character for Ruri - but at the same time, it works with her character. There is contrast, but it is a believable contrast. Now I just gotta build that 3d model someday...

BTW, it looks like the schedule for Megatokyo has come together like this. There will be a new strip every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, as well as Largo's little rant. My rants will show up the next day (Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday), and with luck I'll have a new sketch up over at Fredart sometime over the weekends.

"AfterLucas"
Tuesday - September 12, 2000
[Largo] - 00:09:00
We've been getting some email asking about making a MegaTokyo banner or button to link to us, so for those that haven't seen we have put a banner and a couple buttons on our links page.

I was visiting my local CompUSSR this weekend and an idea suddenly hit me. After being unable to find out who threw it at me, I looked down and picked up the idea and have now placed it in today's rant.

With all the hype flowing around about remaking Metroid, I've been thinking about classic games in general and games that would really be great to bring back. Like when I talked about Metroid in a previous rant, I think some things should stay dead if they can't be brought back with the original spirit of the idea. I used to think this meant that a remake was impossible since any change with a game that dated would result in ruining the spirit of the game. However, as a articulate reader pointed out with only the four words of "Fsck'n Metal Gear Solid", I've determined that so long as some the original feel and ideas that created the game remains, a lot can be done.

So, if I had the power to resurrect one game franchise what would it be? I decided to solve this question the best way possible, so I cleaned out my closet. In the depths therein I found a old friend I haven't seen in many years, I found - Afterlife. Afterlife was developed by Lucasarts during the days when their games were always a hit, before the dark times… before Force Commander. For those who don't remember this game, or never played it. It was a simulation game, specifically it was a god simulation game. Basically you were assigned by the powers that be to manage a heaven and a hell (at the same time) for all the souls who would enter the afterlife. There each soul would either go to heaven or hell, and once there they would need to receive their respective rewards or punishments. The challenge of the game was building rewards and punishments to meet the needs of each soul. The game had a Simcity feeling of resource management and gameplay. If you needed a new type of punishment, you simply picked one of the seven types; greed, gluttony, pride, etc. and painted it down on the tiles, then overtime the punishment will grow a lot like a building would in Simcity. Part of the charm of the game was you had both very good and very evil aspects under your control. There was no politically correct nonsense found in this game, it was what it was, a god game.

The game was way ahead of it's time, and if memory serves me, back then it ran way too slow on my 486. After installing it on my Athlon 850 - I've determined the game now runs very smooth. The game had two advisors in it, a sophisticated demon of sorts who advised you on hell's problems and a cute cherub angel chick who advised you on heaven's business. On a unrelated note; I wish I could find out who the voice actress was for that angel girl.

The game was great, everyone on it's devel team should have felt immense pride when it was completed, but from all the reports I have read and can remember, it only enjoyed modest success and so a sequel was never made. I have to give them credit though, they had a unique concept, and did a great job with it… and maybe it's just me - but Afterlife is still fun to play, after installing it tonight I began to remember why I fell in love with this game in the first place.

Ah, If only Lucasarts could bring this classic back with a sweet new version.

"hazukashii..."
Tuesday - September 12, 2000
[Piro] - 10:02:00
I know that Monday's comic might have gone over a few heads - a half-dozen in-jokes and a spoof that only makes sense if you are an anime fan or have familiarity with some of the more bizarre things on Japanese TV. If you were confused, I apologize. I figured that it was enough of a site gag that people would at least find it amusing. :) Not that largo in a bunny suit isn't adorable... :P

This, of course, is one of the problems that we are facing with megatokyo - how do we make a comic that most everyone will 'get'. Largo and I come from different worlds - I barely understand some of his gamer stuff, and he shakes his head at some of my obsessions. I guess it is the common ground that tie it all together... not really sure what the common ground is, other than a certain level of a not-so-mild mental condition. ^^;;

First off, I've mentioned Kidou Senkan Nadesico a number of times in the past few weeks. It's a anime that aired on TV back in 1996, and has become a cult classic of sorts. The show had many spoofs and internal jokes and poked fun at anime fandom within the context of the show. The 'Naze Nani Nadesico' bit was a attempt by the captain (Yurika, who wears the bunny suit in the original) to lighten the mood of the crew on the ship. Ruri, who was there to describe in detail the technical aspects of the ship itself, doesn't really find the 'kids show' setup amusing, but goes along anyways. Ruri worship is not an uncommon thing, and she still ranks #2 even 4 years later in Animage polls. I was a little surprised how well Piro fit into the roll of Ruri... for some reason i think this should worry me. Nadesico is available in the US from ADV films. The translation is very good, tho I would still recommend the subtitled version (I've talked a few times with Dan, the guy who did a excellent and thoughtful job translating the series).

Cosplay is another oddity in the world of anime. Basically, it involves dressing up as your favorite character when you attend conventions. It's almost turned into a sport both here and in Japan. Often cosplayers have little skits that they will perform on stage for prizes that are awarded later. Weird stuff, but a lot of fun. Monday's comic really could be considered a cosplay, as Largo is dressed up in Yurika's outfit, and Piro is dressed up as Ruri (hm, the kitty outfit... hmmm..... sorry, no, that might not be a good idea... ^^;;) Some good sites to check out for cosplay picks would be Mokkori and Fansview, which are at least in english. :)

But then, perhaps it went too far:

Speaking as a Nadesico overrabid fanboy...

This is wrong!@$!# all wrong$#$! Largo should not be in the bigass bunny suit ;.;

it's just wroooooooong ;.;

Oh, and another little tidbit - just found out from Tsubasa that the new True Love Story official site is up. Check it out. Finally, some more info on TLS3!

"tribes goodness"
Thursday - September 14, 2000
[Largo] - 13:01:00
Well It's been a fun ride so far, We've been up a month now and we're still here, hrm, who'd have guessed?

Doing the comic has been, an interesting experience. Piro and I are new to this stuff, and to be honest I had no idea the amount of time that would be required to make the comic. What amazes me is our strip is only three a week, yet we barely have time to do even that, I have no idea how all those daily strips out there get done. For those people who do their daily comic on the side and maintain a 40 hour/week job as well, I am in awe.

For those interested I ran across a site thats dedicated to showing all the 'engrish' or bad/fake english being used over in Japan. For the more l33t types among you, you may prefer this instead.

Today I saw that GameStop had moved the release date for Baldurs Gate II from early october to late september. As the release date draws near, I have began having dreams about Imoen...

Yesterday's rant seemed to spark some interest in Afterlife. I received a few emails of people asking why I didn't link directly to the page with it, the reason for that is Lucasart's website is setup so you can't link directly to it.. may their webmaster burn in hell for all eternity or worse... run out of gin. Anyways, to find it, click on their 'store' section and then on their 'classic games' link at the bottom of the page. It is sold by itself and as part of one of their archives collection packs. If memory serves me, it comes with a few other classics like The Dig and Full Throttle, definitely worth checking out if you want some gaming nostalgia.

Even with all the pretty new engines which use sexy words like bump maps and inverse kinomatics, I'm still playing the original Tribes. I could say it's because I have a love of good solid gameplay that transcends my shallow desires of drooling over new 3D engines, I could say that - but I'd be lying. The truth is I've been practicing my Stormhammer skillz. As all of you should already know, unless you've been living under a rock on mars, Tribes 2 is coming and when it gets here, I'll have the pleasure of fragging you all...

What more can be said about this game that hasn't already, hrm.. it rocks! Yep, you heard it here first, this game rocks. The feature I'm most looking forward to in this game is all the new vehicles, from ground assault to fighter craft, to flying fortress's this game will have it all. From all the reviews I keep reading everyone seems to say the game will have all the basics that made the first one rule, add in a new engine you can drool over, some new weapons, more teamplay options, and all those sweet vehicles, and you've got me sold.

This reminds me, This week the notices for those selected to be in the Tribes 2 beta are to be sent out. So to those lucky few of you who got into beta, I say ... damn you all!

"but... i liked her before"
Saturday - September 16, 2000
[Piro] - 15:02:00
Animated shows typically have a half dozen or so characters developed for them. There usually are lead male and female characters, a few supporting characters and minor characters that pop up from time to time. The degree to which a 'main' character is truly the focus of attention in a show varies. Sometimes every single episode focuses on them. Other times focus will shift to other characters and develop them a little further.

It amazes me how many times I find myself more interested in a secondary or even minor character than the main protagonists. A classic example is Ruri from Nadesico. I found her far more interesting than the rest of the characters in the show, and watched it for what was sometimes just 30 seconds of her screen time per show. I wasn't alone in this obsession - Ruri's popularity far exceeded that of the rest of the characters, to the point that she became the main character in the movie (which, sadly, did not do her or her character justice - i found it very disappointing)

There has been a trend in recent shows that minor characters get their 'moment in the sun' - episodes that focus on developing that character. A lot of Gatekeepers have been just that - every other episode concentrates on out one of the characters. This is an exciting moment if this is your favorite character (ah... the "the sound of water is the sound of me" episode of Nadesico) or it can be boring if the character doesn't interest you.

Not that much usually happens to secondary characters. They tend to have a past, or problems that are solved in one or two episodes. Sometimes, they come out of nowhere to become a major element in the plot. Usually, tho, nothing much happens to them. You are safe in knowing that they aren't going to change. Usually.

There are those shows... shows where something unfortunate DOES happen. As I mentioned earlier in the week, you can get attached to characters pretty easy. If it is a secondary character, that character tends to be built on a much smaller base of information - i mean, they do after all get much less screen time. This can be dangerous. A small 15 second segment in the middle of a show can devastate your afternoon. You find yourself sitting there going, wait...

i... i liked her the way she was. why did you do that to her?

All of a sudden she is different, she's changed, and you are not happy about it. Gainax is famous for this - in fact they did it to me again this morning while watching FLCL (grrr... how dare they mess with my Ninamori-chan!). Granted, it was a small thing, and it annoys me to no end, but at least it's nothing particularly vicious. You can write those things off as personal annoyances, do be dealt with in constructive ways (as i'll mention later)

Then there are the REAL bad episodes... things that bother you to this day. Things like what happened in Evangelion... your favorite characters are subjected to such abuse and mistreatment that to me it really amounts to fan abuse. Yes, fan abuse. ^_^ People have suffered major depression over some of what happened in that show. Even some of the folks involved with the show, like the chief artist for the TV series, Sadamoto Yoshiyuki, who is said to also be upset with the direction the story took. For me, 15 seconds, where we see Asuka-chan finally broken... sorry, that was too much, it was awful. It still depresses me.

Now, before this appears to be a major rail against Gainax, its not, not at all. I have enormous respect for what they did with Eva, good and bad. The whole intent of anime, or any art form, is to elicit a emotional response from the audience. Eva was incredibly successful - the emotional response from fans was amazing. I actually feared getting tapes of the show week after week, especially after a good friend told me that he had been physically ill after taping a particular episode... it all made me very nervous.

So, what IS a fan to do? I'll talk about that on monday... because we are not helpless. ^_^

"incoming rant"
Saturday - September 16, 2000
[Largo] - 17:29:00
Baldur's Gate II went gold! Now everyone can rejoice as I'll shut my trap about this title for a few days.

Long before this comic began, in a apartment not too far away, I would email the enigmatic Tycho Brahe of the Penny-Arcade and type about whatever came to mind, and in all that time I never figured out he was in a band called The Fine Print. When I finally learned this, I was intrigued so I began to look for their stuff, after some searching I found they had a page on mp3.com. I checked out their tunes, and I approve, in fact as I write tonight's rant I'm listening to 1995 Penny. Give them a few minutes of your time. If you are into alternative, you may like them.

As shown in today's comic, It's never a good idea to let me mess with your computer. To be honest I've only ever set fire to a computer once, an Amiga 2000. Back in the late 1980s I was a avid Amiga user, and had a sweet SCSI hard drive setup, unfortunately for reasons unknown while I was working on it one day, the ground wire in the SCSI cable melted thru the cable, and smoke began coming out.... By the time I shut it down, the cable was pretty melted and useless on one end. Since I was poor and 4 device SCSI cables costed way too much back then, I took a pair of scissors and cut off the melted part of the cable leaving 3 connectors on it. I then put it back in, turned it on, and poof - it worked.

I have to give Amigas credit for being durable, once on a bet I even put my A2000 keyboard thru the dishwasher, after it was done drying - it came out working fine and smelling springtime fresh.

Recently I got to spend some of my court appointed custody time with my dreamcast, for this visit I got to chill with the import Capcom Vs. SNK. After just coming off a extended period of playing Marvel Vs. Capcom I was really not ready for the transition to this game. The fighting is a odd mix of Street Fighter and King of Fighters style play. This goes so far as to let you select which type of charge bar you want to use, SNK style where you charge it by pressing two buttons, or Capcom style where you slowly build it by doing attacks.

The game has a neat system in versus mode where you are allowed to purchase up to four levels of characters to fight on your team. Each fighter is ranked from level one to three, so you could have four level ones' on your team, or one level three with a level one, etc... Maybe it's just me but I seemed to do best by playing two level two fighters, which most of the old standbys happen to be ranked, such as Ryu from Capcom, and Iori from SNK. You fight until all members of your team are gone, just like in King of Fighters.

I think the game is a lot of fun, but I have some issues with it, mainly the art. The SNK characters are all drawn really sweet looking, however the Capcom Characters seem bloated and blocky in comparison. Granted the Street Fighter characters had to be enlarged some to fit to the scale that game has them in, so maybe it's just that they've always looked this bad, and it's just I never noticed from a distance. Also the shadowing and outlining of the characters isn't that great, this really shows up on a few levels where they try some lighting effects.

Regardless, the game is fun and I do like it, although I find I end up only playing the SNK characters, they are a lot more fun for me in this game.

Nippon Ichi!

"what is a fan to do?"
Monday - September 18, 2000
[Piro] - 07:41:00
I think i was suffering from excessive visual stimuli and a quirky caffeine haze on Saturday when I commented on the fate of some of our favorite anime characters. Someone pointed out to me that the characters really don't belong to us, so we shouldn't complain about their fate. That may be true, but still, we do take these things *personally* sometimes. Like it or not, it really matters to us - even when it doesn't to the studio that produced the show.

so, what is a fan to do? your favorite character has been mauled, devastated, destroyed, or altered in ways that you do not like. Do you have any recourses? Can you do anything at all?

If you have enough fans who are totally outraged, and can swell en masse like an angry mob, a studio can find itself forced to change the ending of a show. This happened at the end of the Evangelion TV run - fans were stomping mad at the way the show wrapped up, so Gainax promised to change the ending for subsequent releases. Actions like this are rare. You have to REALLY piss off a LOT of fans to do this - so generally you can much rule this option out.

You can re-write the story - go back to where things were right, and continue from there. Doujinshi (fan art works) area a good medium for this. Doujinshi usually expand upon a story, continuing beyond the end of the show to increase the 'life' of the characters. But they can also be a chance to re-write things in the character's past to try to 'fix' things. If enough fans buy into it, you can change the collective history of that character.

Sadly, tho, many doujinshi actually do more abuse to the characters than the TV show did. Ruri has been excessively abused in doujin titles for years, which to me is unfortunate. So, if you are looking for doujinshi titles that might remedy the problem, and can't do it yourself, you may be out of luck and in fact end up feeling worse in the end.

The next step, of course, is to create your OWN characters and your OWN story... and the HELL with everyone else! This way you control the fate of your characters, and then nothing bad can happen to them.

The creative process, however, can take on a life of its own. When you create a story and a framework for characters to live in, things can develop in ways that you didn't expect. An element of the story grows and falls in to place so well that it really HAS to stay - yet the consequences for a particular character can be dire. I suppose this is how these things happen.

(sigh) I often hope I never end up doing that. Yet as I look at scripts and story arcs for the future of both Megatokyo and Warmth, I am beginning to wonder - will i be guilty of the same thing? I wonder... why am i sitting her chuckling? This is not good... bad piro, bad...

Maybe I should just go finish that Eva/Nadesico crossover doujinshi fanfic i was working on, where Asuka ends up ok in the end...

"A..Ku..Ro..Su.."
Tuesday - September 19, 2000
[Largo] - 01:29:00
For those who don't quite get the reference, Excel Saga is an anime which has its main character get hit by an oncoming bus in the first couple minutes of the show. It's really a sweet series that people should watch.

Only problem for some with it, is that every episode has some parody or inside jokes that relate to other shows, both recent and ancient.

Due to some email we received, Piro is tossing around the idea of making a redrawn color version ofthe 'speak l33t' episode and putting it on the back of a t-shirt, with the MegaTokyo logo on the front pocket area. If this is something you would be interested in purchasing, let us know in the forum.

Before I forget, I should tell everyone that I was not selected for the Tribes 2 beta, for this injustice, I place a curse on Dynamix! May your project leader leave… err oh.. wait.. already happened…

This weekend I got hit with the nostalgia bug again. So I hunted around for my CD of Infocom games and placed it in the drive, once inside - beloved classics like Zork and Lurking Horror called to me, begging to be played… I did not want to disappoint these eager games, so I gave in to their charms and spent the night in pre-marital text-based bliss.

For those that don't know or remember what Infocom games were, even though you heathens deserve only to be beaten with a wet noodle, I'll explain. Zork and the like were text-based adventure games. They had only text, no texture maps, no fancy sprites, no engines, and we liked it! Of all the Infocom games, I liked one more then any other - 'The Lurking Horror'. This game made me the man I am today, so please, keep it away from small impressionable children.

The game really spoke to your average computer user back in the day, here you were - a college student, on a campus half covered in snow, and a strange evil entity causing havoc for all those around you, and guess who has to stop it? … You get three guesses and the first two don't count.

links-o-plenty

I'm really amazed at just how many webcomics are out there, everytime I turn around I seem to find another dozen comics. So for today I thought I'd share some of them. First up is Sketch of Love, the art style has a manga edge to it, and is really good, in fact I think this artist has a very bright future. Next up is Common Grounds, another sweet and cool comic with a growing readership.

To change gears for a moment, I'm going to point out that the two comics I listed are both hosted on Keenspace, a free hosting service for comic artists to use to grow their strips. This always seemed like a good idea to me, and to prove that it is, another project has started in the same vein, called Cartoon Community.

It is dark... I am likely to be eaten by a grue.

"ijiwaru~~!"
Wednesday - September 20, 2000
[Piro] - 10:41:00
Ok, Largo, whatever drugs you are on, I want some. And remind me not to come by till you get that zombie problem taken care of.

Today is not a day to expect any kind of point from my passive little rant. That wonderful, blissful freight train known as 'life' has this way of nipping at your heels and threatening to munge you under thousands of tons of steel, plastic and deadlines. Such is the week I am suffering. It's going to be a long day.

Of course, it doesn't help that Ukiya kept sending me screenshots from Air as he played his way thru to the end last night. Grrrr... i don't have mine yet. When I get it I wont have time to play it. Ukiya wa ijiwaru~~!!

I'm glad that people seem to be reacting well to my artwork - gives me that warm fuzzy feeling. One thing I've always tried to do is encourage others, including you (yes you) to draw. Drawing is one of those things that we became too cool to continue doing around the third grade (unless you were a total geek like me) but there are real joys to it - even if you don't think you are any good. Keep this in mind - there is ALWAYS someone better. If that fact that your drawings aren't as good as others keeps you from drawing, then i might as well quit too.

I know, i know. you need lessons. I'm workin on em.

I've watched a lot of my online friends really improve over the years. For example, JPSimon, a friend of mine, has developed a really nice style and in a few years will be drawing a hella lot better than me. Great color and fashion sense too. :) I should mention that Jonah also helped me break out of my design rut for the layout of the Megatokyo site. His layout gave me a lot of the great ideas that I have incorporated into this site. Thanks JP. :) (to view his site you need to have IE version 5 - he's big into DHTML and Flash and stuff - really wortha visit.)

I'm afraid i need to keep it kinda short today - which is hard for a chatterbox like me, but may be welcomed by our readers. Crunch days happen in real life, especially in my given profession. I'm looking at it being a good possibility that i might just have to skip that thing called sleep altogether tonight... I guess I just have to pump up the caffeine IV a little...

"need new games..."
Thursday - September 21, 2000
[Largo] - 01:29:00
News! Woohoo! rejoice for Baldurs Gate II has shipped to stores early! click here, and here for details!

The impossible has happened, a ski resort opened in hell, the new Duke Nuke'm game was released, my rant is now late. I've been really ill this week, not much of an excuse but it works for me.

Behold today's strip, sometimes a strip requires a explaination, but some jokes should never be explained, and today's is one of them.

The shirt debate seems to loom over in the forum. We've got a general consensus that the l33t shirt should be made, the color of the shirt seems the biggest problem right now. We thought about using one outlet that would be easy for us to deal with, however they only deal in white shirts. There seems to be a good number of people who really want to see it on a black shirt. Since this is the case, I'll be looking around for another vendor to see if this can be done.

Some readers seem to be curious what exactly this strip is supposed to be about. Although I help make it, I still feel unqualified to answer that question. The strip is the product of two people from different worlds.

I ran across this over at the Mushroom. While not in the vein of our normal stuff, as a ICQ user, I thought it was frightningly dead on.

As I've been ill, I haven't gotten much game time in, but as I continue to take massive amounts of prescribed drugs and alcohol, I have been giving thought to a plague that has been destroying the very fabric of this great country for a long time, zombies!

I mean think about it, here you are sitting in your home and suddenly your window is broken and a damn zombie is reaching inside, and you are like "Hey zombie! get out of my house!", and the zombie just moans and pretends to be deaf, but we know better, so then we have to go and grab a crossbow with explosive bolts or a handgun to dispatch the damn thing. Then we have to deal with removing this stinking corpse from our house, and replace the broken window. Just who pays for that window? Why we do.. you ever tried to get zombie home owner insurance? I think not, they won't even offer it?I called up my insurance company and demanded coverage for zombie damage and they refused! It is a conspiracy against home owners and mad scientists everywhere I tell you, and something should be done about it.

So please, write in to your congressmen and demand that they do something to solve the zombie problem.

"bioware 0wnz j00"
Friday - September 22, 2000
[Largo] - 09:14:00
Baldurs Gate II was delivered to me yesterday. The first thing I did was in Gabe-esque style plunged the game down my pants!

Installing the game was the next logical step, well - that and washing up. I gently inserted the discs into my cdrom as the install took what seemed like several lifetimes, although Piro contests it was only ten minutes. No matter! It was done and that BG2 started, the sound begin to surround me, bringing tears to my eyes! I could feel the evil lurking around each corner, I was ready to finally play this game! Then, my system crashed to a blue screen.

There are few moments in a man's life where he will feel completely inadequate, your computer dying right at the height of gamer climax is one of them. After I recovered from both shame and shock I tried again... and again... and again... failing each time.... In the end, only one course of action was left, re-install the OS! You linux fiends are probably laughing right about now.

Now, after all this, the game finally launches and I re-enter the world I left over a year ago. I played the game for about six hours straight, and I'm still in chapter two. I'd never want to spoil a title like this, so I won't tell of my adventures, though I will say everything Bioware promised about this game is true. It's not tedious, and I've yet to run into a simple 'fedex' quest. The plot easily grips me in like a giant squid to a submarine. I find myself less concerned with the current tasks I must do in the game, and rushing through them so that I can advance the main story.

John Romero's mantra of "Design is Law" seems to take a backseat to what I'm guessing Bioware's mantra, has become, which is "Content is Law". The game has content, the story pulls you in like a best selling novel. I have to hand it to Bioware's writing team, these guys deserve some recognition for their outstanding work. This isn't to say that is the most impressive area, the sound creates the right moods at every moment. The updated engine is a huge improvement, spell effects look great. The voice acting is top notch. Which reminds me, I need to find out the voice actress for Imoen and see if she's single.

What can I say? I'm sold.. I'm hooked.. and Bioware has re-secured its place as my gaming crack dealer.

"don't be so grumpy"
Saturday - September 23, 2000
[Piro] - 17:26:00
Of course, who can blame Erika-sama for being grumpy. She's a character in this strip. It would ruin any girl's day, fer sure. :)

I'm late, and I'm gonna keep this short today, mainly because I am up to my ears in stuff to do - a good part of which are things for Megatokyo itself. I've listened and read and got a good feel for what people's reaction to a l33t shirt would be, so this weekend I plan to design one. I've done t-shirts before, and usually they come out pretty cool - hopefully we wont disappoint.

I'd like to say thank you to everyone who has e-mailed me in the past few weeks. If you didn't hear back from me, I apologize... I'm terrible with e-mail. Mainly because i could easily spend 3 hrs a day doing just email with the volume I've been getting, and I just can't do that. I'll try to get back to you. Promise. It's just that i gotta get drawings and strips done first. Oh, and that annoying day job thing too. :)

I don't even remember going to bed last night. All i knew is that i woke at 11 am this morning - and it didn't feel like i got anywhere enough sleep. I was working on this drawing of Erika last night, and had just added Kimiko to the picture. There are some drawings of Erika kicking around, but I wasn't quite happy with the design yet. After spending some time on it this morning, i'm pretty satisfied. Dom told me that he wondered where all of her heavy artillery was. My comment was that her ability to wrap largo into a small pretzel was enough for daily use, unless he really pissed her off and higher levels of vaporization were needed...

ack, giving away too much. ^_^

got a lot in store for the next few weeks. I almost fell into the temptation of playing Kanon once again last night... (sigh) good thing i didn't. I'd still be missing. :)

Ah, and while doing my normal rounds, i felt i should point you to plutonia.net - phil and I have been friends for a long time now, partly because I've always found the news, information and other stuff on his site interesting and useful. Also, his little rants remind me a lot of my own... he's an inspiration. ^^ I had to beat him over the head a few times to get him to go back to that format, but thankfully he has - it must have had something to do with the sun there down-under. :)

Of particular note is his ArtMap site - Phil regularly visits a large variety of fan-art sites and keeps tabs on when they were last updated. Very useful for those of us to lazy to check them out ourselves. :P

... and, yea, i know. I owe you some artwork Phil. ^^;;

"ohhh, I like this game!"
Tuesday - September 26, 2000
[Piro] - 10:06:00
The last time I was able to get a reading on largo was about four days ago when I heard some kind of squeal out of him like 'BG2 is here!'. Since then there has only been the faintest signs of life from his corner of the world. I've considered launching a rescue mission, but then again, I don't like to go there, it scares me.

The weather up here is starting to get rather crisp, almost chilly. Ah, I love fall. One of the things i missed when i was living down south was that it just didn't get cold enough. To me, there is nothing better than freezing your ass off, arriving home, and curling up in your chair with a hot coffee and a PSX controller, feeling the life start to creep back into your toes as you play a favorite game. Am I nuts? Perhaps, but there is just so much opportunity for moodiness and a pleasant kind of warmth you only get in a cold environment. Even Ping-chan, shown here wearing one of largo's sweatshirts can sense the chill and react by dressing accordingly. :)

Snow is rare in Tokyo, and when it does snow, it's a big deal. Snow is considered to be romantic, and I don't think that there has been a Christmas in anime where it doesn't automatically snow at some point in the episode. The lack of snow and cold weather in Tokyo is what prompted me to look for another location for 'warmth', a story that needed a colder environment. After some discussion, tsubasa and I settled on Sendai, which is just far north enough to be cold in winter, but a big enough city to give the feel I was looking for. We are still researching this, and I am just waiting for tsubasa to get up there to do some field work and get some pictures and record some sounds for me. :)

Probably the best use of a snowy scene I've seen, and one of my favorites, happens in Kaitou Saint Tail - when Asuka Jr. challenges Meimi to meet him in the park, and he waits in the phone booth because he is so cold... and he can't see her face because he's fogged up the inside of the phone booth... (sigh) I love that episode...

(runs off to get a hot chocolate...)

"sword, meet evil..."
Tuesday - September 26, 2000
[Largo] - 11:12:00
Okay, so for the first time since we started, Piro has managed to get his drink on and his rant on before I did. No matter, I've come back from the depths of Baldur's Gate II, having finally beat the game. To give you an idea of the time I put in it, realize I received the game late Thursday afternoon, from that time forward I've done nothing but the play the game, and some laundry - though I won't get into that. I liked the ending, again I'm satisfied with this franchise, Bioware has scored two for two and now I want them go make me some more kickass games.

Today's strip is more a jab rather then a insult to Maxis. I even liked playing The Sims, for all of four hours?After that I did like everyone else and just locked my Sims in a tiny room with no doors and waited for them to keel over. Don't look at me like that! Everyone was doing it!

As Piro says, it's getting colder, and I do love the cold weather, it's my all time my favorite climate, which makes me wonder why I've lived most of my life in such warm areas of the country. Perhaps it's because like all things, including games, when you are around it everyday, you don't see it as refreshing and wondrous as you once did, all things over time will lose their luster. It seems everything has a cycle from fresh beginning to climax, and then the fall to the end. This process can be quick or dreadfully slow, hell - it took Star Wars twenty years to do it. I bring this up because I've thought about comics as of late, and this seems to hold true even for them, I don't pretend to know why people read comics, I can't even explain why Piro and I are making one now. If the only reason is entertainment, then I acknowledge we too, are not immune to this cycle - and this is how I think it should be.

With all the shows I've watched, I always preferred series' that before even the first frame was inked, the creators knew the series had a beginning, middle, and end. Rather then the ones that find something the audience likes, and then milks it for as long as they can. Effectively ramming a once good idea about fifty miles into the ground. Who really wins in this? The fans trade in what could have been a great epic in favor of a seeing their favorite characters on a regular basis. For the creators, true - they make more money, steady employment is never a bad thing, but they get forced to spend several years doing 'the same old thing'., which to a creative type person - can be very painful.

I suppose there are tradeoffs to everything.

"Tomomi... Tomomi..."
Thursday - September 28, 2000
[Piro] - 10:52:00
Every once and a while I get this urge to watch some anime that I haven't seen in a long while. The urge can come from just about anywhere - an inkling of a warm feeling will surface that says "gee, I'd love to see that again," or something indirectly reminds you of an old favorite. Other times, it's deliberate and comes from dissatisfaction with your current que of things to watch.

I was in the office yesterday struggling with square footage calculations in and excel sheet that was getting way to complex for my little brain to deal with when I felt the need to change the music i was listening to. I have stacks and stacks of CDs scattered about my desk, some of which were brought in months ago, some I have forgotten that I even own. While digging for the right 'mood' (I'd had enough Skinny Puppy for the day) I came across the soundtrack for Miracle Girls. Ah! perfect mood change. Just right if you are feeling a little gloomy and chipper enough to make you feel good. After a few rotations of that disk (and catching myself singing along to "Kisu no Tochuu de Namida ga") I was REALLY in the mood to watch the show again.

Now, my video shelves are a disaster. I'm seriously thinking that I need to carbon date some of the VHS tapes to see just how old some of them are. There is no organization - tapes are stacked at random, in no particular order, labels are haphazard at best. Finding anything requires the physical effort of digging thru three layers of tapes stacked two high on each shelf (never mind the effort of getting to the shelves themselves). After about a half hour I triumphantly pulled out a very old, dilapidated VHS tape with the words 'Miracle Girls 1-4' scribbled on a tiny label.

Miracle Girls is a sweet little show that originally aired back in 1993 and is based on an equally nice shoujo manga by Akimoto Nami. It's the story of twin sisters, Matsunaga Mikage (the one with the long hair) and Matsunaga Tomomi (the one with the short hair) who have ESP powers that include telepathy and the ability to teleport short distances (which requires both of them to link fingers) Tomomi is an active gal, into sports and things of that nature, and Mikage is a bit of a brain - who also has a propensity to blow up the science lab with her experiments. They have subtle quirky personalities that are a joy to watch.

The show doesn't have anywhere near the intensity of shows like Card Captor Sakura or Kare Kano - but that's one of the reasons I like it. It moves slowly, at a relaxed pace, and even tho it can be really silly at times, it never fails to make you feel good. Another thing I like about the show is it's sense of place - the girls live in Yokohama, an area that I visited and have fond memories of. It was nice to visit it again last night.

and that teleporting thing would come in REALLY handy sometimes...

"robots"
Thursday - September 28, 2000
[Largo] - 22:14:00
Today's strip … what can be said about today's strip? … Solid Snake's new haircut sucks… It sucks in ways that I didn't think suck could suck. That being said, I hope Konami remembers to give him a haircut for Metal Gear Solid 3. I mean come on, out of all the possible hairstyles in the world, why pick the most hated one? Giving this some thought I think it means during the course of playing MGS2, Snake will need to infiltrate a WWF pay-per-view event or will be driving his new Camero.

Tonight I stopped by the PVP audio show chat, this was probably a mistake since once I was there I was assaulted with questions about shirts and merchandise. For those interested - Piro is currently drawing the higher-quality color images for the shirts. Once they are done we have two options, either to use cafepress to produce them, or if we can find a vendor who can do transfers to black shirts - we'll go with that. I'd love for us be able to make a black sweatshirt rather then just a plain old white t-shirt.

More then a few of you wrote in to point out that Poe of Exploitation Now stuck us in the background of the third panel of his 9/27 episode. I happen to like Exploitation Now, so go visit it or .. something.

Though it's a little late, but I thought I'd point out that IGN has the multiplayer beta of Mechwarrior 4 to download. I love big mechs, in fact - I think everyone should have at least one. There really isn't anything quite as cool as two huge robots blowing each other to bits - except for having three huge robots blowing each other to bits.

Well I think I'll keep today's rant short. So.. umm later :P

"munge this..."
Friday - September 29, 2000
[Piro] - 16:34:00
Ah, it's the last day of September. It's been just about a month and a half since we started megatokyo. Back when largo talked me into doing this strip during one of my slightly longer lapses of sanity, I figured that I'd give it a month and see how it goes. At first we were totally clueless about things like Sites That People Actually Visit (tm) and What To Do If You Have One(tm). Largo got some traffic analysis tools running and we determined that, geewow, a few people really ARE reading it. After 21 strips, I can draw a little better now thanks to the practice, so it wasn't all bad. My computer (affectionately known as "Ayu-chan") has had only three close calls where I was ready to take a lead pipe and munge it to a plasticy metal pulp. I get far less sleep than i used to. I think that a few of the strips were actually funny.

I guess I'll keep drawing the comic. What the hell. ^^;;

If you haven't already noticed, we've replaced the old forum with InfoPop's Ultimate Bulletin Board. The old forum worked just fine over at fredart, but then again, there wasn't a lot of traffic there. The MT forum started groaning under the load pretty quick, and I personally had trouble keeping up with all the threads. Largo and I have been talking about replacing it for many weeks now, and we knew we had to eventually. We like to think of it as a gift to our little community, such as it is ^^;; - we hope you all enjoy it. Its easier to use than the old one, lets you register your nick and stuff and is a hella lot faster too. Oh, and you can thank largo for ponying up the credit card number to get it. Whatta guy. :P

While Largo was being useful and installing the forum, I was totally veging out watching TV. My brain had finally coagulated into a rather sluggish mush by the end of the week. I couldn't draw worth crap (I have an unfinished sketch of Mikage sitting here that gives me the freaks and should be burned). So, in that fluidic state, what more perfect thing to watch than DigiCharat! Wai! I Finally had a chance to watch the DigiCharat Summer Special. The animation was a bit lacking, which really surprised me - some of it seemed excessively cheezy. It's a shame given the cuteness of the characters. The best art in the whole show was the ending credits - of which today's screenshot is a sample of... ah, Rabi-chan wa kawaii~!

I then spent the better part of two hours watching more Miracle Girls. I really had forgot how good this show is. (sigh) Only Mikage could make falling down the stairs on her ass so incredibly cute. :) Mikage-kun~~!

"link-atage"
Saturday - September 30, 2000
[Largo] - 08:10:00
Update: We went ahead and purchased/installed the "Ultimate Bulletin Board(c)" software, this means we had to lose all the old forums, but the new forums should last for all practical purposes - forever. One nice featue of UBB is that you can register your username and setup a profile.

Today's strip is a monument to my legendary lack of tact. Yeah, yeah - laugh it up, I know where you all live!

Before I go any further, there is a new online comic I want to plug, Fringe of Insanity. Fringe is put together by two creatives. Piro and I have been really pleased with our two man chop-shop called MegaTokyo, so it's cool when we see other people pair'ing off to make cool stuff? For those of you who never listen to what I have to say anyways, know that the perma-cool Tycho Brahe liked Fringe of Insanity. Also if you don't go read it, I will place a curse on you, so your pre-order'd PS2's doesn't get shipped on time!

Speaking of comics, Lamina wrote in to point out that we got cameo'd over at Beta, a neat comic you should also visit - or I'll put a curse.. hrm, no wait.. already tried that.

I promised my friends over at A Land Far Away that I'd give 'em a few minutes of link-atage so here we go. ALFA is a private organization that is being setup to recreate the entire Forgotten Realms using Bioware's Neverwinter Nights software. Though Neverwinter Nights will not be released until next summer, this group has been recruiting players and dedicated servers and Dungeon Master's like mad. If you are interested in joining a persistent NWN world next summer, give ALFA a few minutes of your time, right now it's the largest and most well-run NWN project.

There is a an article over at Game Informer about Microsoft putting a censor chip in the X-Box. It's no secret I like the X-Box, for that reason alone I get more dead fish delivered to my door now.

As for this censor ship, I'm a bit divided, I've always believed that games should not be censored and when you start giving in to censorship you begin to fall down a slippery slope that in this country is impossible to climb back up again. I don't really blame Microsoft for putting it in their console, with all their current legal troubles this is a good way to eliminate one of them. However, there should be some balance coming from the developers, now if we are going to have the ability to allow the owners of every X-Box to set the limits on what a child can and can't play, then why not target the audience on the other side of the spectrum and give us fans of obsessive violence something really sweet to play? Developers, listen up, I'm asking for something so far out there that you'll need to invent a new rating just to classify it.

I'm hoping they'll call it a "L-Rating", for Largo.

"corporate america sucks"
Sunday - September 3, 2000
[Largo] - 15:34:00
"Senior Management", what can be said for a entity with so little concern for the well being of others that creating misery becomes par for the course of going through each week. Sure, coporations are expected to act in their own self-interests, I have no problem with that - but I do hate when they go out of their way to screw people, even when it really doesn't benefit themselves. You'd think darwinism would take care of something like this... of course, with f-ckedcompany.com, maybe it is happening...

So why do I say these things? What brings on such a non-gamer topic of the workplace and management? … To tell you, I've been fired from my day job.

Like so many engineers in the past few months, I have been terminated for absurd reasons to satisfy a cleaning of house by upper management, all in the name of budget cuts. Perhaps I shouldn't be writing this rant, you could say it's only me airing dirty laundry, whining about the old white coller world. You could even say that it makes me look unprofessional? perhaps...

Maybe I'm not as professional as I once thought, ahwell -- good riddence to it.

Though it sounds extreme, I'm tired of working for people who feel that there should be no bond between employee and employer, so if this little rant actually hurts my chances in getting a new job - so be it, I'd rather not work for a place that places no merit in the virtures of truth, or loyalty, compassion, spiritu... err wait, that's Ultima's virtues...

They used to say the jester's job had only one perk, he was only member of the court that could tell his King the truth. I suppose my embracement of comedy makes me out to be more of a jester then a corporate shill.

With my departure from that place I take with me one blue ink pen. I will now always carry this pen with me just for the hope that someday I may run into my former employer and ram it through his empty black heart.

Meanwhile I'll be busy setting fire to my old office building.

"Abunai~"
Monday - October 2, 2000
[Piro] - 10:44:00
Well, yesterday sure did suck.

After an early Monday Morning Meeting (which should be illegal as hell) I sat down at my desk to find a short icq message from largo: "hey, i think I've been fired."

Oh boy. That was it, just that short message, and no response to any other querys for several hours. I feared for the lives of a good part of the population of the area where largo lives till i finally heard from him.

Largo lobbed his rant at me prior to it being posted here for everyone to read. My first reaction was to try to get him to tone down his rather, er, 'aggressive' stance. I'm a brave person, i think, to stand there, facing a frothing largo saying 'gee, are you sure about this line here?' ^^;; I was worried about it. I wouldn't be saying things the way he was...

At that point i stopped. Largo's reaction to his dismissal was very different than what mine would be. My reaction would be different, i would say different things, i would approach it from a different angle. Largo and I really are two different kinds of people. Largo is a bit explosive, reactionary, tenacious and dangerous to small pets and children. He prefers a full all out frontal attack. I tend to be far more subversive. I'd play more subtle games - come in from the side or underneath, or perhaps employ a few of my goons to go in and break a few legs 'without my knowledge' :)

I guess i decided that it's Largo's rant, it's his stage - go to town dude. What the hell. I'll always be here to identify the remains if it ever goes bad. :P

I would like to apologize for the lack of a new sketch this weekend over at fredart - I even had to pull a Bad Art Day on Monday. I should be able to put something in the next few days, if any of these crappy drawings start to look like anything.

Today's screenshot is a little random - but for some reason it made me chuckle. It's from a short comic in a True Love Story 2 special book - a very VERY cute little comic. The girls complain that in the game they never get to go on a school trip, so they take one - with many disastrous consequences. :)

"the tail end"
Monday - September 4, 2000
[Piro] - 10:01:00
(Piro's rant overwritten by Largo's rant.)

"wet noodle"
Thursday - October 5, 2000
[Largo] - 05:04:00
Well it's certainly been a interesting week. First off , I wanted to say thanks to everyone who wrote me a email over my loss of employment. I haven't had the time to answer every email, though I hope to try to make it through them. I've never had this much email sent to me at once before - except for that time I posted to usenet a couple years ago with my real email address... ick - I still get spam to that address…

Perhaps I was a bit over the top in Monday's rant, I try not to take these things so personally, but regardless they always bite hard in the beginning. One advantage I always had is my skills are in demand - so finding new work isn't too hard, but it's still a pain and annoying to 'start over' with a new company every year or so. It's become impossible to find a 'home' within a company anymore. I'm in my mid 20s, so I can't say I know what it's like to work for one place for a long time. I suppose it's true that the era of lifetime employment is long dead.

Ah well - moving on - "sore wa sore, kore wa kore ja…" - "that was that, this is this…"

As you can see in today's strip, we introduced Erika finally. So those of you who have been emailing me asking 'when will you introduce the rest of the cast?' can now… stop.

Sometime soon I really need to go back and update the story and cast section, in truth I sorta threw those together last minute when we originally started the strip. Besides, if we don't at least update the cast section soon, I have a bad feeling Tycho Brahe is going to be emailing me once a week asking when it will be updated… (turn about is fair play, and my constant bugging him to update his cast section probably has not been forgotten)

For those unfortunate souls who still haven't downloaded the Mechwarrior 4 beta, do it! I've spent this week blowing up my fellow man in new and interesting ways. I even ran into a few MT fans while playing.

Personally I love to outfit my mech with as many missiles as it can hold, there is just something graceful about a volley of 50 missiles firing at one target. Another tactic I tried for the pure sake of annoying others was outfit a mech with nothing but flamers - which do next to no damage, but causes your target to heat up. Since most players custom build their mechs with 'just enough' heat sinks to handle the heat generated by their weapons, I caused several mechs to overheat and explode that way. All in all - a really cheesy tactic that if I catch any of you doing to me, I'll hit you on the head with a wet noodle.

"wai~! wai~! wai~!"
Friday - October 6, 2000
[Piro] - 17:13:00
Ah, I'm a little late with today's rant - gomen. It was a really long hard week, and it's taking me a little bit to recover from it. I already know that next week will be busy, so i am endeavoring to get ahead this weekend. The goal - get the strips done ahead of time for once.

yea, right.

I was really happy to finally introduce the girls - even tho its a rather limited introduction, and we won't see them again for a while (chuckle - i am an evil person, i know) Someone commented in the forums that it was good to have the girls in there as a 'main squeeze' - ahhh... it doesn't really work that way. Squeezing Erika would be bad for your health, and Kimiko... well, you'll see. :)

Some of the emails i have received have said something along the line that MT was really an 'online manga.' This is pretty accurate, i think. It's been my goal from the start. A normal manga series will run 10-12 pages once a week in large, phone-book sized mags like Ribbon or Shounen Jump. A 'Manga-ka' (that's 'manga artist') and his/her studio (if they have help) has to pump out a slew of pages every week to meet this pace. Full page American comics run about twice that many pages but only publish once a month. I do 3 strips a week. The pace for all of these is different, and these are established, acceptable runs.

the biggest problem with any story based comic is the ability to pump out episodes fast enough to maintain the interest of the readers. I never did the 'one manga sheet a month' shtick because it just seemed to really not work well for story flow. (and it is one of the main stumbling blocks for 'warmth') The challenge for me is how to tell a good story in this kind of format - without making people wait three months for the next installment. I am trying to do something that is in between a online comic and a true manga series. Megatokyo is the first experiment - what i learn from this i can apply to 'warmth'. I'm sure our faithful readers if we are doing a good job or not. :)

I got home early yesterday and was in a very pleasant, dreamy, tired but not tired-with-a-headache state. I plowed my arm into the Tape Pile (tm) and pulled up a random tape, popped it in the VCR, and curled up with a hot mug of tea. Lo and behold I had grabbed a tape of Akazukin Cha Cha (Red Riding Hood Cha Cha), one of the funniest and cutes shows EVER. Wai! I sometimes forget where some of my influence comes from. The insanity, the over the top situations, the characters! wai! NO ONE says 'wai!' like Cha Cha! Cha Cha is like one of the best shows EVER. If you get a chance, dig out Cha Cha 1-4 and give it a watch. I'm gonna dig for the OAV series, the OAV kills me... I wanna go to magic school!

I did a little gift art last night for Greg Dean over at Real Life, just for the heck of it. Heck, I cameo anime and manga series all the time - why not online comics? Greg is a huge lain fan, so I had a little fun with it. A little something for all of us mired in the wired. ^_^ Hope you like it, Greg.

"dual"
Saturday - October 7, 2000
[Largo] - 23:20:00
I reinstalled my operating system and all my applications, and now a smiling paperclip is staring at me. This is not acceptable. I am now running Windows 2000, don't ask why because I really don't have a good answer.

This weekend I went binge spending at my local gaming crack shop. I finally picked up Crimson Skies. After listening to everyone else rant on how sweet this game was, I felt it was my sworn duty as "Ace Largo" to see this, for myself.

About an hour later, I realized I should change my name to "Parachute Largo." Like any good gamer, I blamed all my inadequacies on my equipment and ran to my local Gamestop store to buy the Cadillac of joysticks, the MS Sidewinder Force Feedback 2, (say that ten times fast.) In the store I checked the box to make sure it was compatible with Windows 2000, it was! Lucky!

Getting home I plugged it into my pc, installed it - and jumped back into Crimson Skies, ready to blow something up. Unfortunately, the new stick didn't work. I had come to find that though it says it works with Windows 2000, it doesn't … at least not yet. This put me in a really sour mode for the rest of the day.

Not really wanting to deal with trying to make the new stick work, I went back to using my old one, a Logitech Wingman Force Feedback. It's a good stick, though it doesn't have rudder control. Something that would have really come in handy for Mechwarrior 4.

Crimson Skies is a rocking game, the setting takes place in the late 1930s in a world where the United States dissolved long ago - and is dominated by air pirates and warring kingdoms who use planes and zeppelins to assert their control over the now not so friendly skies. Basically it's a lot like today except air pirates are much nicer then American Airlines. The single player is played out in a really over the top storyline. To give you an idea of how square jawed and absurd the dialogue is - I don't even think Bruce Campbell could pull off some of the hero's dialogue. I think "corny" is a good word here. Though I'm not knocking it - it's fun! It's really cool to play a game like this, like the planes - the acting is done in the same classic style motif where the main character is unbeatable, and he makes sure everyone is well aware of that fact. I haven't had a chance to try out the multiplayer yet, though I was promised a bout with Tycho "Wings" Brahe the next time I run into him.

Switching gears - I retired to watching a new DVD I had got in, called "Dual.", Dual is a AIC show, marked by the same old character designs that appear in just about every AIC/Pioneer title. Still the show is sweet, A lot like Evangelion, except minus the pretentious snooty artsy crappy depressing stuff. Basically it's just a happy robot show. I recommend Dual to all you people who would rather watch something uplifting and that won't make you suicidal.

That damn paperclip is still starring at me, if he so much as blinks I'm going to shoot him…

"G.T.O."
Monday - October 9, 2000
[Largo] - 15:40:00
Yes, you can blame me for Monday's episode being late. In my defense I had a very good reason for not updating it on time… It's such a great reason really, if you knew how great this reason was, you'd understand… Although I am not at liberty to tell you my reason … for reasons… of national security or something.

I think I'll spend today talking about whatever it is I'm watching this week, which happens to be "Great Teacher Onizuka" a drama / comedy. GTO is a set in modern times, with a man named Onizuka who wants to be, now pay attention... a great teacher(o-sensei).

Originally there was a long running manga series called "Onizuka" which had a much younger, and much more violent Onizuka then the person seen in "GTO". In the manga, Onizuka was the leader of a gang, and his daily routine mostly consisted of beating people up, getting girls, and trying to get enough cash to buy his cigarettes.

GTO takes place in a timeline a few years after the manga ended, where Onizuka is now twenty-two and has decided to do something useful with his life and become… now get ready for it.. a great teacher.

Initially (this is cut out of the anime for those of you who have not read the GTO manga) our hero decided to become a teacher after a failed one-night stand with a high school student that ends with her ditching him for her teacher. He decides he should become a teacher himself for the girls… Lucky for us this motivation is quickly put to bed(pardon the pun) early on in the series as Onizuka realizes there are more important things in life, like… ohh.. I don't know… ethics? morality? doing good? a gigahertz cpu...

Onizuka as a character is really complex. Though he's presented to us as immature skirt chasing(nanpa) dreamer early in the series, he quickly gains maturity as a teacher. It becomes obvious that although he must of been of ignoring it, he has a kind heart and wants only to help the students get through their difficult lives.

Each episode or "lesson" as they are titled, generally will focus on a particular student or issue. While not all lessons do this, you'll find most early lessons will follow this format as they develop the characters.

If I was to put a general theme on GTO, I'd say the series is about healing old wounds. Many of Onizuka's students represent various issues found in the real world, although some of his solutions are not orthodox… safe… or legal … he seems to pull off saving the day. To this end Onizuka helps others in order to heal his own wounds.

"somethin's gotta give"
Tuesday - October 10, 2000
[Piro] - 07:34:00
Yea, somethin has to give today - and I'm afraid that it's the rant ^_^ Not that I ever have a shortage of things the chitter about, it's just that I don't have a lot of time to type much of anything this morning. I've already been to a 7am gathering and I have a pretty stiff deadline for tomorrow night. happy happy, joy joy.

Not to mention tomorrow's comic. Thankfully I'm a little ahead on that - the sketches i did for it last night made me chuckle. I should be able to finish it fairly early tonight.

Oh, and regarding Monday's episode. First off, I really DID finish it pretty early on Sunday. Largo usually posts them around midnight his time (which is 1 am here) - but the doof fell asleep and i had to post it myself in the morning. Gomen. It's all largo's fault. :P

Go easy on him - he had a hard week.

Secondly, I asked the question in the forums regarding the use of brackets to differentiate between Japanese text and English text. I experimented with using different fonts, italics, and even Japanese text w/subtitles (which was too unruly). The consensus I gathered was that brackets were clearest, so I have changed mondays and Friday's comics back to their bracketed goodness. I guess I like them better myself.

I also finally fixed a problem with the MT code that has been bugging both largo and I for months - that extra space between the header and the comic. Turns out there was an extra "br" tag in the table, between "tr" tags. Ah, Much MUCH better.

As you can see from the screenshot, I've managed to fix up and color the image and design for the 'speak l33t' t-shirt. largo and I have been trying to line up exactly how and who the shirts will be printed by all week. I *really* want this to be a nice shirt/sweatshirt. If we can't manage any other alternatives, we will have a variation of this for a white or grey t-shirt available via CafePress by the end of the week. The CafePress stuff is nice, but i really want a darker shirt, and they can't do that for us yet.

Anyhoo, i hope you like the design. And pay no attention to my cluttered desktop. :)

Lastly, I did a little gift art of Bimbo and Ralph for Poe over at Exploitation Now - which was a hella lota fun to draw. I get a real kick out of Exploitation Now - just enough ribald humor without crossing that taste line that Clay's THL stuff does. :) And I remember doing a grafitti peice for a senior prank at my high school too... ah, the joy of Krylon. Thanks Poe.

Ah, not so much of a rant today as a ramble. Be good people, tomorrow's strip should be pretty funny, as we discover more of piro and largo's bad habits. :)

"somethin's gotta give II"
Thursday - October 12, 2000
[Piro] - 00:15:00
Well, it was a good 2 months before i finally stumbled and got caught up in a time crunch and a bad cold. I missed the rant for wednesday's strip, and for today i copped out and just did a little drawing (tho I gotta say its the best drawing of Piro I've done so far)

and three guesses as to who the kitty on my head is... :P

I was rather suprised that people have responded as favorably as they have to the gift arts that I've sent to some folks. It was the best way I could think of for repaying some of thier support and for being nice to us. :) Its very common for Japanese CG artists to trade gift art (its not really called fan art) to celebrate a particular hit count, or for a birthday, or whatever. Besides, I like the challenge of trying to draw other characters :)

I'm at work today, sadly (got too much to do) but I do feel like I have three pillows stuffed in my head. It's a good day to type up a 30 page document... -_-;;

I was gonna suprize everyone with a bench strip over the weekend, but largo's got a big mouth :) Look for that sometime either sunday or saturday.

I'm gonna go get some hot soup, and try not to pour it down my pants...

"Verant"
Thursday - October 12, 2000
[Largo] - 18:16:00
Welcome to Largo's 'House of Rant', take a seat and order something… Meanwhile I have some good news… and some bad news…

First off - the bad news, there will not be a 'normal' strip on Friday. Now the good news, instead we will post sometime this weekend a MegaTokyo / Penny-Arcade - bench strip.

Piro has some things… 'work' things that he needs to do .. or something.. so he says… I couldn't really tell.. I just know it involves some death ray or Las Vegas.. or something.

Since everyone else is taking time out to blast Verant over a recent Everquest player ban regarding some illicit fan fiction that was posted, then I suppose I should cast my two stones in as well. I personally didn't find said fan fiction interesting, tasteful… or even appropriate by any means, but banning a player for something done out of game seems… odd?

I would like some of the crack that Verant's employees are smoking though, They continue to handle so many things…. badly. However I think they see things in a more uplifting light then I do, afterall - they are raking in the cash… Now why is that? - is it because they have a kickass engine? no… is it because they listen to their customers? nope.. is it because of fan loyalty? not really… Nope, see the only reason people continue to put up with Verant is they don't have another game that's better to pick from at the moment.

I can't help but wonder how long it will take before they panic once other MMORPG's come out that use modern graphics engines, or new companies who try giving the players what they want. See I don't really blame Verant for their problems, they are making money right now, and as long as they continue to do so - why should they change their business practices? From a corporate perspective- change isn't needed so long as people continue to pay for the service. So, people who bitch about Verant, yet don't cancel their accounts are just adding to the problem. Personally I don't think people should complain and threaten to quit - unless they actually do it. Companies like Verant will not listen to you, but they will listen to your wallets.

I suppose it's a sort of a apathy, if you think about it, most players stuck in this Love/Hate cycle with Verant would rather all the 'other' players cancel their accounts and lose their items and characters, rather then taking it upon themselves to make that sacrifice, and so nothing has changed.

I personally don't have strong opinions on the matter anymore, once some of the newer MMORPG's come out, the problem … will fix itself.

"bench good, laryngitis bad"
Sunday - October 15, 2000
[Piro] - 10:57:00
Ok, being sick sucks. I'm feeling better, but still not 100%. In fact, its good that I don't have to actually speak to everyone right now because... well, i can't talk. My throat irritation is such that i have to wispier. I went around all day yesterday sounding like the Godfather with Bronchitis till my voice finally gave out once and for all around 10:30. Wonderful. I have another big presentation Monday night. Thank god I'm not the one who has to actually present stuff. ^^;;

I want to give everyone who sent me get well wishes a great big thanks. I figured I was gonna get hate mail, but instead I got a flurry of get well wishes. Thanks everyone. I don't get sick often, and I can't wait to finally get over this. :)

Yesterday I was feeling good enough to hit the town with my girlfriend Sarah to see Great Big Sea , a pretty kickin Celtic folk band from Newfoundland, it was a blast. Of course, by the end of the concert, my voice was shot. :)

Oh, and speaking of Sarah, if you are curious about the saner half of my life, and interested in cool stuff like origami, visit her site Sarah's Origami . She's as good or better at origami than i am at drawing - what do you thinks she does all the time while i draw? :P

And finally... the bench strip. What can I say? We are not even worthy of the Fan Appreciation Bat. Tycho and Gabe totally kick ass (like i need to tell you guys this) and if anyone remembers, it was Tycho that linked us in the first place over two months ago (and hence added this whole layer of work to my life) When that happened, largo and i felt we had no choice but to finally launch MT and get off our lazy asses. So, in many ways, you can thank Penny Arcade for getting us rolling. Thanks guys. And sorry about the Wombat incident. :)

"das links"
Sunday - October 15, 2000
[Largo] - 13:00:00
First off, for those seeking to find some anime and J-pop tunes in a online streaming type radio-free format, click here. Tiberian wrote in to point me to this site, which is cool if you are left handed, and find joysticks to be a bit hard to wield. Shawn Nicolen got inspired and decided to make an English to l33t-speak converter… ph33r. Jonathen Barel wrote in to tell me that the fittingly angelic voice of Aria from LucasArts's Afterlife was played by Rebecca Arthur.. now all I need is a 8x10 glossy… Tomo Sato wrote in to correct a grievous error on my part, the original manga in which Onizuka appeared (as a teenager) was titled "Shonan Jun Ai Gumi" … so .. I stand corrupted. Beta's Strange Four made not one, but two cool bits of MT gift art here and here. A very much on crack Jack Friedman wrote in to point me to a cool comic which he just so happens to be responsible for creating… Normally I'd just link here, but he forgot to send me the url to his site, this forced to be go over to Big Panda where I was finally able to locate his allusive … secret website, having braved many dangers to return with this link, I present it to you, here.

I think it's safe to say I am in worship of Neverwinter Nights, so I won't give anymore plugs to it for a bit.. well maybe just this one.. However of all the MMORPGs out there, I think I haven't really spotlighted some that deserve that second look, today I got a chance to spend some good 'me' time over at Atriarch, another of the growing batch of 2nd generation MMORPGs that will for lack of a better and less overused phrase, '0wnz j00' … Go there.. right now… I mean it! I've been personally assured that Atriarch wants to make sure customers come first... which seems like such a great idea, I wish everyone would think that way. Imagine it, customers - the very people who use your service... being... listened... to.... For this noble act, I will not link them one, but twice, so if you haven't already go visit Atriarch's site right now.

For those of you interested, I am once again a member of the working class… Of course, now I have a job again… I miss being unemployed… So much quality time I had got to spend with my Dreamcast… So many hours melted away by simply watching Claire Redfield kill the bad zombies.

"gomenasai"
Tuesday - October 17, 2000
[Piro] - 00:23:00
The question has already been asked and answered in the forum, but 'gomen' and 'gomen nasai' mean 'I'm sorry' (adding '-nasai' makes it more formal) I know it was about time for piro to sustain a little damage - but this is nothing compared to what is in store for him.

While I've managed to keep the comic going this week, it hasn't been without a struggle. It seems that this particular flu bug takes people out for a little over a whole week - it started with a throat condition that ruined my voice, and i have been feeling worse rather than better lately.

Hopefully by the end of the week I will be back to normal, and I can get some sketches done for fredart as well as get caught up on my rants. Right now, i'm going to go off and watch a little more Cha Cha, grab a few more tapes of Hell Teacher Nuubei, and then maybe ever watch a few movies... I know i've been Dead Piro since last friday - its starting to get on my nerves

and that Anna Miller's graphic in the screenshot? Believe it or not, that's really an official piece of artwork for the restaurant. :)

Ok, i'm not making any sense today. I havent had any coffee in days, just tea, and nothing tastes good at all...

"short time"
Tuesday - October 17, 2000
[Largo] - 20:00:00
First off, today the server that MegaTokyo eats, breaths, and drains bandwidth on, was offline for a several hours due to a power outage in our ISP's collocation facility.

This rant is really late… In fact, not only is it late, but I'm not sure what to write here… I'm sure something will come to me… any minute now… it'll come… yep, any second now… damn it…

I've been unable to come up with any rant material after watching, "The Ninth Gate" on DVD. This movie rocked, I should of known better then to believe those nasty movie critics. If you want a sweet suspense, horror, mystery type film, go rent it… Although you may also find yourself rant-impaired after watching it.

"This ain't no kids show"
Thursday - October 19, 2000
[Seraphim] - 01:23:00
Despite all the get well wishes, Piro has not yet recovered. He has spiked a fever and is even less coherent than usual. Right now he is medicated and prohibited from using heavy equipment or anything that glows. As his ever lovin' girl, it is my duty to fill in for him. Since I can't draw to save my life, I am developing origami Piro and Largo models should his delirium not improve. Heaven forbid Largo should attempt to try to draw. The strip must go on.

We have known each other 4 1/2 years now. I have introduced Piro to many things in my world, including George Bernard Shaw, Damon Runyon, and Great Big Sea (the only band that could have the words "blow me" in the lyrics and not get an explicit rating). In return he has taught me all I know about computers, encouraged me to try and even enjoy sushi, and brought a small amount of anime into my life. I normally just watch the subtitled stuff he has, like St. Tail or Card Captor Sakura (I love Kero-chan! I have a kero-chan plushie that he gave me.) Sadly, Piro finds my relative ignorance of japanese too annoying to watch anything else with me.

Just for fun, and perhaps because he was too drugged up to stop me, I had Piro pull a untranslated tape from his massive collection for me to watch. I decided that I would watch an episode and explain the show from the point of view of a casual fan. Be forewarned, my knowledge of Japanese is limited to 'hello' and 'goodbye'. The show that randomly slid off the shelf when piro fell into it was something called "Kero Kero Chime". Hm. I wonder what this could be about.

The Characters: Ok, we have a Frog-Princess who lives in the most phallic building I have ever seen. Her wardrobe is unremarkable - looks like a toga to me - but I need those sassy, strappy sandals she wears. There is a Wizard who struts around in a 70's pimp coat. Perhaps the 'castle' is actually a brothel?

There is a Boy that turns into a frog when wet. He is somewhat unimpressive as he appears to be afraid of the frogs even when he's human and much much bigger than they are. The Frogs themselves are these really scary little bug-eyed blobs. The frogs that wear helmets and carry spears are quite phallic looking.

Ok, now for the plot. Not 1 minute into the opening scene the Frog Princess dives *nude* out of her castle window and lands feet first on the boy character. Still very nude, She then jumps all around the boy character. Leaves are carefully placed so that we don't actually see anything, but it is clear that HE does.

This is obviously NOT a children's show. I believe the story line is a rip off of classic old Greek mythology where the sirens lured unsuspecting sailors to their deaths on the rocks with their songs. Frog Princess, obviously, lures men to her Phallic Palace while chirping 'kero kero' and then has the frog army kill them. It's a story as old as time, really.

Figures that I would grab something adult oriented from the shelf. Remind me to bean him when he gets better.

"back on track"
Thursday - October 19, 2000
[Largo] - 20:50:00
Nick of the Bad Boys of Computer Science made this very sweet giftart for us, did I mention that it was very sweet? It rocks man, thanks for sending it to us. It's really cool when we get these things, they are all great and we appreciate the time, effort, and thought that goes into them.

Mike Quin wrote in to point out that an Anna Miller's fan site linked us… So I figure I'll do the same… again... click here to see cute waitresses in even more cute outfits.

On the other cool webcomics you should read front, I submit to you, Lethal Doses - which if you don't read, then it means there is something wrong with you. Also checkout Sporkman and on a more somber note, Josh Babes the comic is ending tomorrow, and so I thought I'd direct people over there to read the comic from beginning to end and pay it tribute. Since life is full of endings and new beginnings, heres a webcomic that will begin on Friday October 20th, called Luminosity.

I went by my local gaming crack dealer to score a few ounces of silicon action, but to my dismay there was nothing new being offered… I really hate it when this happens… We're currently in the middle of one of those gaming slumps when nobody releases anything sweet for me to play.

I demand to be entertained… I deserve it right? I mean, if I can't drink booze and play games… I'd be forced to just drink booze… which, doesn't sound like that bad an idea now I mention it…

"outlaw star"
Saturday - October 21, 2000
[Largo] - 13:03:00
I recently sat down and watched all twenty-six episodes of Outlaw Star… and now my ass is really sore.

Synopsis:

Short Version:

Cool guy with a cool gun, and a cool sidekick, meet a cool chick, with a cool ship, the cool chick has another cool chick with her, and together they find an even more cool ship, and proceed to have cool adventures while trying to make some cool cash.

Long Version:

Enter Gene Starwind, bounty hunter, handyman, slacker… Modeled on your typical slacker living below his potential, not making anything out of himself, character archetype, we are introduced to a man who never thinks ahead, at the detriment to all those around him. Not to say that Gene is all bad, he is the hero after all, and is expected to save the day in the end, or at least give a good punch line.

Gene has a partner named Jim Hawking (no relation to Steven), a kid with a knack for planning and computers. Jim would describe him self as the brains of the outfit, however, like any kid he lacks real life experience. Together with Gene, they run a bounty hunter like shop on a planet called Sentinel III.

Finally, there is Melfina. I can't really say much about her for spoiler reasons other then to say she could save you a lot on airline fares as I think she'd fit snugly into the overhead luggage compartment.

These three characters make up the central cast in Outlaw Star. There are other major characters, but the story essentially revolves around the main three. Early on, they face off against space pirates, who become the main antagonists of the story. Besides pirates, our heroes face constant struggles with assassins, bounty hunters, dimwitted cat like aliens, and perpetual debt.

Like most animated shows that deal with space travel, they don't really bother to portray realistic physics in space, or like in Outlaw Star, only do a couple times when it is convenient, and make up new laws of the universe when needed. But hey, if you aren't a physic's student, you shouldn't be too turned off.

One episode of the series stands out for me, to avoid spoilers I'll only refer to it as the Jim's date episode. If you see it, you'll know why…

Outlaw Star can be best described as an entertaining space farce. It has odd aliens, absurd physics, and a fantasy element all rolled into a decent and comedic show. If you watch it, you may even find a plot worth your time.

"we have t-shirts..."
Saturday - October 21, 2000
[Piro] - 15:24:00
First of all, I'd like all of you to know that I am feeling MUCH better. It took well over a week to knock this flu down. Except for some remaining sniffles and a persistent cough, I think I've beat this cold. Thank you for all your well wishes, i read and appreciated all of them.

I also need to give a big thanks to Sarah (also know as 'seraphin') who was brave enough to take over and write the rant for Friday. Her review of Kero Kero Chime was... eye opening, to say the least. ^^;; I still maintain that it is a kids show, and that it is a girls comic, and that there is nothing racy at all in the show's content. Yes, Mimori does bounce around naked a little in the first episode, but the castle looks like three dried squid!! (tho, i do admit, it does look sorta phallic). Thanks sarahlove. :)

The other thing I need to do is get a fan / gift art section together. I really like the fact that people are encouraged and inspired to draw by our little comic. I really am.

It's amazing. You'd think that having three days off from work that I'd have drawn all sorts of stuff. Bleagh. It's amazing how much a bad flu like this will effect your ability to draw. Luckily the MT episodes this week came out OK - and largo was pretty much on his own for Friday's (i was so scared). I did this sketch during the week, but it really lacks something. It was very depressing...

Friday afternoon i felt amazingly better. Good enough to decide it was time to get a few things done. First thing I did was take one of my favorite drawings of Kimiko and color it. It didn't take as long as I thought it would, either. I hope to have nice color drawings of most of the cast by the end of the week.

Finally, largo and I made up our minds about what to do with the t-shirts. The Megatokyo Buy-stuff-or-Kimiko-will-cry store is officially open! T-shirts, mugs and mousepads are available for those of you wanting to bring a little l33t Megatokyo stuff home. As y'all know, we don't have any advertizing on the site, so this is the best way to support Megatokyo. Both largo and I thank you in advance for anything you pick up.

This brings me to something I've been thinking about for weeks now. One of the best things to me about Megatokyo isn't the comic or the art or largo's rampant drunkenness, its the community that's developed around it. Y'all are one really cool and nice bunch of people.

Of course, the only bad thing now is that Sarah has caught the flu from me. :( gomen ne, sarah-chan. She'll probably kill me when she gets better. ^^;;

"daily rant-itage"
Tuesday - October 24, 2000
[Largo] - 21:40:00
Shirt Guy Tom, the fill-in for Pete when he's sick with stick figure art/shirt guy of Sluggy Freelance would be pleased to know that his form of 'art' is catching on, already many online comics have begun experimenting with neo-stick figure impressionism, creating new and exciting dynamics with... crappy... straight... lines... aw screw it, I can't keep a straight face and write this any longer.

To the Rant-Cave!

As you all know, shirts can be purchased here, if you don't purchase a shirt, not only will poor Kimiko be made to cry, but ten Egyptian plagues will befall your household!

I have been informed that some people are unable to read the strip this week as you are presently camped outside your gaming store in order to obtain a PS2. To you, I say... err get me one. I'm not sure what to do to obtain one at this point. Though I have a feeling it will involve a me going to a black unmarked van by the docks around midnight with a suitcase full of cash.

I put off preordering for so long that when I finally decided to do it, my local GameStop told me that the soonest they would be able to fulfill my order would be spring 2001. To think, as much as I love games, as much money as I spend on this distraction, and I didn't get it together in time to get my hands on a sweet tempting PS2.

Since I won't be getting one till 2001, I think the race is on, will the next shipment of PS2's come out before or after the X-Box gets released? Now that is a concept.

As I've ranted in the past, I love the X-Box, I don't care if it is still vaporware. With the real battle going to be between the PS2 and the X-Box for console l33tness, I - and every other website that has anything to do with games, wonders which will win out.

In light of the coming console holy wars, I make to you - this one promise; Unlike some places I'm not going to pretend to know that answer, nor will I let my admiration of the X-Box force me to go door-to-door and kill the first born male child in every household that has a PS2... well, at least not for a couple months anyways.

Meanwhile, I'll be waiting at a local store when it opens to try to get a PS2... I wonder how long the line will be...

"oh wow..."
Wednesday - October 25, 2000
[Piro] - 11:55:00
Small update... i had a major hard disk failure last night (notice how all these things happen to me at once?) and I *almost* lost all my MT stuff. My 4 year old quantum drive started clacking, then stopped and kept trying to spin. I assumed that this was a bad thing. Thankfully, i have my Jwin98 computer so I could save everything.

oh, and I did a new drawing of Erika over at fredart. It's a pretty nice sketch.

Well, hi folks, I'm back. ^_^ Good to be back, too. I haven't had the flu take me out that bad in many years. The sad after effect of being sick like that is that now I have to bust my ass to catch back up with everything. Lotta thanks to Largo and Dom for takin care of Friday and Monday's strips. And Dom... I'm buying you a mouse. :)

The response so far to the T-shirts and other stuff has been really good - thank you to everyone that ordered something. A special thanks to Jonathan Steinert who managed to order and receive a 'speak l33t' shirt before they were even available. Somehow, the T-shirt item had been left 'on' over at our CafePress store last month. And, somehow, Jon found it and ordered himself a shirt. The only bad thing is that it's a older version of the shirt design, and I think the graphic is on the front of the shirt. Congrats dude, you got a one-of-a-kind version. :)

As for other shirt designs... it IS kinda weird that our first product doesn't even have any of the MT main characters in it. :) Yes, there will be other designs - I have a few schemes in mind. I personally want to see the girls on a shirt - and I suppose L P need to be on one too. If people are interested in other types of MT merchandise, let me know.

I want Erika and Kimiko garage kits... that's what I wanna see... ^_^

['Garage kits' are short-run plastic/resin model kits of favorite anime characters (usually female) that are lovingly assembled, painted and detailed. Perhaps next week I'll gather some information on the world of figure modeling.]

And as for today's strip... i note in the forums that someone DID note that this is NOT piro being a perv, it's really a delicate issue for poor Kimiko... i mean, jeeze, look at her friend. :) I had a lot of fun drawin the girls for today. I wanna try to get the quality of future strips up even more. Nowadays I can draw anywhere. i did most of this strip while sitting in a waiting room at the Dentist's office.

One of the best parts of being sick, if there is a good part, was that I re-read all of the Nausicaa manga and basically sunk myself into Ghilbi-induced coma. I watched all the movies, including my favorite "Tenkuu no Shiro Laputa" - (sigh) i *love* this film. It has such a ... feeling to it, not sure how to describe it. To me, Sheeta is one of my favorite characters, and the opening scenes where she falls off the airship still gives me goosebumps. Truly a fine fine film. I hope Disney does a good job with the dub - from what I've heard of it, i am not too worried.

BTW, i noticed that in the Nausicaa manga, brackets are used to indicate a foreign language, much like we use it here. I didn't realize that this is a real convention. :)

Ugh... email... don't know if I will ever get this mailbox cleaned out now...

"sony is evil"
Friday - October 27, 2000
[Largo] - 10:18:00
As you can tell from today's strip, I didn't get my hands on a Playstation 2... nope, I'm not bitter... not bitter at all...

Sony, in their quest for hype and free press has turned an otherwise normal launch date, into a frenzy by supplying woefully too few systems to states. With stores typically only receiving twenty units each, the lines were long, and just about everyone was disappointed.

I had a lead on getting one from a friend, who at the last minute decided that he wanted to sell it on ebay instead. I can't blame him really, with bids exceeding the $2,000 mark on some auctions, the PS2 has become this year's Tickle Me Elmo.

So I ran to my local best buy and waited in line with my fellow gamers until the store manager decided to call the police to have the crowd removed. I found it odd that the demand generated by a game console merited the use of the police force to control those unruly and violent gamers lined up to get their hands on a PS2.

Theatres didn't mind the all night lines for Star Wars episode one, so then why did some store managers get taken back with the idea of video gamers lined up? I can only assume the media is to blame, having painted video gamers as borderline psychopaths just waiting to snap and kill the person next to them on a daily basis, which is just a nasty lie, I haven't killed anyone in weeks. Sure you can say it's policy or for insurance reasons, but well.. that just isn't as funny.

Now I'm forced to wait until March to get a PS2... The thought of spending a thousand bucks for one on ebay isn't too appealing, so I think I'll just wait like everyone else.

"futsuriai' dakara"
Sunday - October 29, 2000
[Piro] - 00:10:00
It seems that Seiya has a lot more time on his hands than I do. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt his personal sanity by saying that he probably did the translation of Wednesday's comic for practice. :) Anyhoo, I thought it would be fun to actually draw up the strip in Japanese - so that's what I did.

Technically, there are a few other things I should do. I should change the format so that the entire comic reads from top to bottom, as opposed to our '4 square' format. Secondly, the text should run vertically - where you read it top-down, right-left... but that was going to be more work than I wanted to do this weekend ^_^ (well, not TOO much, but i did this fairly quickly). It's pretty cute, actually - thanks Seiya! (I'm too lazy to actually translate this stuff :P)

Ok, I *know* people will ask me this question - "how did you get the Japanese text and fonts to work?" Simple, really. Remember that hard drive failure i mentioned a few days ago? Well, I had to move everything over to my Jwin98 machine. So, now I am running jwin98 full time - which has its benefits and its problems.

Jwin98 doesn't like Illustrator that much, and it seems to have a personal vendetta against mIRC and ICQ. As with any M$oft product, it's just a question of learning how to deal with all the things you can and can't do, and remembering to reboot often. -_-

The benefit to running Jwin98 all the time is I can play games anytime I want without firing up the jwin box (this could be considered bad - I lost a lot of time to 'Air' this weekend). It's easy to rummage thru the graphics in the games (another time consuming activity). Finally, having Japanese true type fonts available in a native environment is NICE. ^_^ It was actually pretty simple to type the Japanese text into Illustrator. Er, well, the first time i tried it, it crashed so hard that i had to unplug the CPU to get it to reboot, but after that it worked fine. ^^;;

I've been hearing from a few people who have received their shirts, and it seems that they really look nice. Dave Park, my pal over at sazan.net and keeper of the 3x3 Eyes Digest was good enough to send me some pics of his shirt, front and back. Looks pretty good - i just wish mine would get here. ^^;;

My luck with anything technical this week continues to go downhill. I have had an ongoing battle with Ameritech (arguably THE worst telco in the states, hands down) regarding my phone line. When I moved in, it took 4 weeks (yes, four weeks) to get my phone line activated. Last month, the static on my line started to get so bad that i could barely understand anyone. When I called Ameritech, they told me that the line tested fine, and that it was my phone that needed replacement. This, of course, wasn't true, because i tested the line with a number of different phones. I was then told it would cost 50 bucks for a service call, even if it wasn't broke - and that would be about a week before they would come. Thursday night the line went 100% dead. Frustrated beyond belief, i went out and purchased a cell phone and then canceled my Ameritech line once and for all. What's scary is that my cell phone bill will be less than the Ameritech bill too. And the cell phone is clearer too. :) Gee, it's nice to have choices.

And finally, to add insult to injury: around 8:00 last night i discovered that I have no hot water in the apartment. It's Sunday afternoon and it's still out. God knows when that's gonna get repaired. Too bad the apartment complex won't return my calls...(sigh)

"shirts are good"
Tuesday - October 31, 2000
[Largo] - 08:18:00
Massive rant lateness... Notice to my left Piro has ranted on.. and on.. and on... I'm going to smack him for that.

First off, most of the original shirt orders have been shipped and we've only gotten emails giving us reports of everyone being very pleased with the quality, that being said I think it's safe to say the shirts were a success and we look forward to continue to take all your money from you.

Next, click here. If you have already clicked you'll notice that this is a new online comic done by Chris Jackson, cohort of Scott Kurtz of Player Vs Player fame. I want you to click on this link for two reasons, because it's good, and if you don't do it, I'll come to your house, drag you into the street, and shoot you.

Now I want you to click here, See there's this cool artist by the name of Josh Mirman who recently ended his old comic, and started a new one called Stubble. The strip of course rocks, it rocks so much that I'm linking it, and if you don't click on the site, Kimiko will get very said and cry. .... what? It worked for the shirts.

For those interested, Sacrifice has gone gold. Sacrifice is a sweet new twist on the tired old RTS genre. Whether or not it's fun, I have no clue, however if looks could kill, this game would have seriously maimed me. The screenshots look mouth-wateringly good, and with this game we may see the first ushering in of good 3D RTS's. Hell, maybe it will be even better then the perpetually pushed back Warcraft III? Since I wasnr't a beta tester for Sacrifice, I have no way of knowing how good it's going to be...

For now I say wait and see, but you can bet I'll be sure to pickup a copy to try it for myself, it does look sweet, and if it plays half as good as it looks, I'll be in heaven.

Unless you've been living under a rock, or worse - in Michigan, you probably noticed Daily Radar's We Destroy'd a PS2 hoax. I have to wonder if it was really just a hoax, or if this is just a lame excuse to silence the screaming PS2 fanatics who felt the destruction of a perfectly good PS2 was blasphemy. On second thought, I'm sure it was a hoax, hell it drummed up plenty of hits and links, which as you all know translates to money in the world of webconomics.

Daily Radar is turning into the Howard Stern of Gamer Websites, no matter how much you may hate them, you still go check them out on a regular basis just to see what they do next.

thats it for todays rant. btw, did you click here yet?

"ok, i really think too much"
Tuesday - October 31, 2000
[Piro] - 12:14:00
I've been doing a lot of free sketching this week - aimlessly drawing without a particular plan or concept in mind. These types of drawings rarely turn into postable sketches, and often are incredibly pathetic (here is an example) Yet there are those rare times that an aimless sketch results in a pretty good drawing, like the one I did last night.

Usually when I start sketching something out, I know more or less what I am trying to draw. For instance, I might be in the mood to draw Kimiko in a bath towel (hasn't happened yet) or a character from some anime or game. It really depends on what mood I am in, and sometimes what's on TV. :P I'll typically curl up in a chair with a sketchbook to draw (which tends to draw the cats who like to curl up right there on the sketch pad surface - an annoying habit they have).

As you've probably noted, it's rare that I'll draw a nameless characters, or just pretty faces. I like to give a little depth to what i draw. A lot of times, I'll end up with a drawing that looks attractive, but doesn't have any real 'feel' to it - there are no real emotive qualities. Those just get left in the sketchbook rarely see the light of day.

When i am free sketching, and really *don't* know what i want to draw, things sometimes come out of the blue that really work well. Kimiko, her design, her look, her hair, her personality, all came from a free sketch session that resulted in this drawing. It just sorta happened, and as I fiddled with it, i started to get a sense of what her character was, her strengths, her weaknesses, her personality quirks - everything. Her whole character came from this drawing and the one i did immediately following. It essentially replaced the original design, which always seemed to be lacking something.

To me, this is the real interesting part of drawing - once you've got a good handle on the fact that your drawing will at least look a little like a human being, it starts to be come a tool for the creative process. A good chunk of Megatokyo (the parts that I came up with), as well as Warmth itself were developed curled up in that chair fighting off the cats. :) I'm grateful that it seems that some of the ideas and emotive qualities I try to put into these drawings are decipherable by other people. That's where the gratification of art comes from - being able to really communicate what you want to evoke with your art.

Most of the fredart stuff is pretty rough. If you go back far enough, you can see that there are some really bad drawings in there. For some reason, i really like the idea that YOU can see things from the 'inside' - rather than just getting the finished product. For me, I enjoy the feedback, and the immediacy of just throwing stuff out there. Would everyone like Megatokyo as much if largo and I didn't share our thoughts, sketches and meaningless prattle? Imagine if we kept the existence of Ping-chan, and other details secret till they showed up in the comic? To me, this wouldn't be as much fun.

The final element to this, which to me is very important, is the forums. The participation in the forums blows me away, it really does. I like to think of them as an extension of MT itself - and largo and I are batting around a few ideas to make the forums even better. I read thru the forums every day, and dammnit it takes too long! @_o;;

Finally, I think I've decided that 'warmth' will take the form of some sort of simulation/visual novel format. I am working on some flash 'prototypes' that all of you will get a chance to play with. I did a LOT of thinking about this over the weekend - now i just need to quit my job so i can actually do some of them. :P I'll let y'all know when they are ready for testing - it might be a few weeks.

ah... ok, I'll shut up now. :)

"lotsa work to do..."
Saturday - November 4, 2000
[Piro] - 15:20:00
Sorry for the shortage of rants this week... in fact, i apologize for Friday's comic. I finished and delivered a fairly complicated document Thursday afternoon which left me effectively brain dead for the rest of the week. (Excel Bad. AutoCad Good.) It you thought Friday's comic was funny, you are a loyal megatokyo fan indeed. Both Largo and I were so tired Thursday night that no matter how hard we hammered on the script, it just came out lame. Even the Amazing Dom couldn't save us. (sigh) It's humorous, but it doesn't have the little extra edge we like to see. It's all Dom's fault. Bad Dom. :P

So, in the interest of Excellent Scrpititage, I've been sitting here typing out a fairly complex outline of where Megatokyo is going. Largo and I have most of the story in our heads, but Dom alerted us to the fact that this is not really the best place to store it, given our past histories of brain failures, memory lapses, and blue screens of death that hamper my ability to remember my own phone number on bad days. As for Largo, I think i know why he is such a X-box fan - his brain operates with the reliability of a Micro$oft product in it's first week of beta testing.

It's always interesting to gather up parts and pieces of things - notes from script dumps an chunks and pieces of ICQ conversations and IRC logs. What gives me a headache is just how much material we have produced in the past few months, and how much drawing I'm gonna have to do to get it all out to you. ^^;; There are some real challenges ahead - things in the story that I have no real idea how we'll be able to convey in the 4 panel layout we've been using. Story arcs that need to be threaded together, relationships that we didn't even realize existed, that tie the story together better than we realized... It's just that *damn* - it sure takes up a lot of time. :)

The other thing that has been keeping rants down this week is that I am in the process of coloring a drawing of Erika, so that I have a matching set of Erika and Kimiko (the goal here is to have a t-shirt available for each girl). I'm also working on a shirt idea for Fredart - that's going to take a bit of time to pull together. I have a few other color drawings that need to be done - and I need some better color versions of Largo and Piro, as well as color versions of Dom, Ed, Ping-chan and a some of the yet unintroduced characters. Ugh.

Rounding out this insanity are two other projects. Last weekend I pulled out all the material on 'warmth' and started to grind down a plan to produce some experimental flash files to test some of my ideas for doing it in a 'visual novel' format. (did i mention that I need to learn Flash now too?) I know that some of you -really- want to see this. Please be patient, 'warmth' is not like megatokyo, which can be dolled out a panel at a time. I'm doing the best i can. :)

Finally, the thing that makes me 100% certifiable is the fact that I have a November 30th deadline to finish (and, er, start) my submission to the MJ-12 doujinshi project. MJ-12 is a doujinshi circle - which is a group of True Love Story fans (a dating/love sim game) that produce a CDrom of fan art, short stories, manga, and music all inspired by the game. Last summer, Tsubasa and I produced a visual short story called 'envelope' that was featured on the 'Heartful Seasons' disk. I'm very thankful to Noritac-san and the rest of the MJ-12 group for accepting my submission, and so i don't want to dissapoint them for this project. Oh, and before you ask, Heartful Seasons sold out on the first day, so no - there are no copies available for purchase. :( 'Envelope' was about 50 drawings by me and a story by me and tsubasa in both English and Japanese. If you are all good little boys and girls I'll make it available online someday. Right now, Tsubasa and I need to bust our asses to get something done for the Winter comike disk. The project is tentatively called 'snapshots' - you'll probably hear more about this later.

(sigh) i better get busy...

"gin-esis"
Saturday - November 4, 2000
[Largo] - 23:10:00
Ah, the joy of ranting...

See, between working sixty-hour weeks at my new and improved though much harder job, I've decided to add even further complication to my life by moving. I know you are not interested in such trivial details of my life, but I thought I at least owed our readers an explanation for why my rants have been being retroactively posted. That being said I think moving sucks, in fact - it's the most annoying thing in the world, next to Barbara Streisand and Detroit of course.

Some good news this week, We are honored that Cartoon Community gave our little strip it's Comic of the Month award for our Sony is evil strip. I believe this is our first award, at least that we know about...

Also this week we were, 'walked about' over at the always cool Lazy's World. Every week Lazy walks about with other online comics, apparently this week it was our turn to be paid a visit.

Since I'm being overworked, and don't have any new games to review, (hint to you game developers who read the strip and have yet to let me beta test your sweet games.) I thought I'd try to answer some of the questions I get emailed about on a regular basis.

One of things people ask Piro and I is how we got into doing MegaTokyo, why we are doing the comic in the first place, and how we've managed to gain a nice following, in such a short amount of time.

As for the how we got into this racket, my memory on this is really kind of fuzzy, I remember it involved boredom, an interest in the team effort that went into the creation of Penny-Arcade, and gin. In fact after entering the comic strip arena, I soon learned that most comic artists and writers hold Tycho & Gabe in a high regard not just for their comic work, but rather their continued willingness to link anyone who could use some exposure. If you want a lead on new comics, read Tycho's rants. Giving credit where credit is due, it was Tycho's willingness to share links that led me to do same thing. Well that and it makes for great filler in my rants!

Looking back on it, I think the main factor in the creation of MegaTokyo was gin, specifically a gin called Bombay Saphire, which if you haven't drank the clear liquid bliss that is Bombay Saphire, you are either not alive, or a Mormon.

As for the 'why we decided to make the comic' question, we did it because Piro had been looking for a medium to get his art out into the open, and together we thought that a online comic may be that medium. So far things seem to be going well, and if we can ever find some sponsor with deep pockets to support our work, we'll - we'd be really pleased. This is a crack pipedream for now though.

Finally, as for the how did we find a audience or how did our audience find us? To be honest, we really have no idea. I can only assume it's from us being linked off so many other great sites and online comics. Which is a real shame considering those links could have gone to far better and more deserving then our stuff. That isn't to say we are not proud of out little two man chop shop, things continue to get better each day, and we love having our work well-recieved.

Oh well, whatever happens, happens.

"damage and emotive pull"
Monday - November 6, 2000
[Piro] - 02:10:01
You probably didn't see this sketch coming - Kimiko dressed up as Asuka, bandaged up and with a damaged eye, on the floor next to a hospital bed. Well, neither did I. Inspiration hit me around 12:00 last night. It just seemed like such an odd thing to do, and the idea had real emotive potential.. So I decided to draw it.

The groundwork came to me when I was rooting thru some old backup CDroms (I am a collector of the worst sort). I have dozens of CDRs labeled 'Anime' - and I'm actually pretty good at keeping all of my images in some sort of order. I root thru them looking for things sometimes. The image that caught my eye was a scan from "Evangelion in 3d", a book dedicated to Evangelion models. There is a very VERY sweet little model of Asuka in bandages from the Eva movies (I'll add a link to the image here later tonight). Kimiko is basically in the same pose, and we even get to see her with her hair down (in case you were wondering how long it was ^_^). I ended up pouring a lot into this drawing - don't know why. I guess i was just inspired.

Drawing is a funny thing. These days I can sit down and do a drawing for the weekly sketch, even when I'm not particularly sure what to draw (much like last week's sketch of Ayu's Daughter). The real fun is when i have an idea that is really inspiring. Of course, this can be bad - i finished this around 2:30 last night, but I'm pretty happy with the results. Between this and the color version of Erika i finished Saturday, it was a pretty good weekend, art wise.

The 'bandaged girl' image from the eva series is a pretty potent one, and it's been drawn and copied ad nauseum for years - you wonder what is so potent in this image? To me, the bit in Eva where Rei is suffering as much as she is is kinda overkill. For this drawing, I gave Kimiko a sad look - that in combination with bandaging that represents perhaps physical pain, sitting uncomfortably on the floor... these elements combine to have some real emotive potency. Is Kimiko just acting? Is this cosplay? Why would she pose for this photo?

I had been thinking that perhaps i should hide most of these drawings of Kimiko and Erika until that start showing up in the comic more. but in retrospect, I think that it's ok. For both Kimiko and Erika, an otaku in Japan probably would come across images of them from time to time, either in photos in some game. So really, you know just as much about them as the Japanese fans would (if they really paid any attention to them - right now neither one of them are 'known' at all). In that light, a photo like this of Kimiko cosplaying as Asuka is not that unusual at all.

A quick apology - I am very sorry to everyone about email - i have not answered anything in weeks. I think i just need to take a day and slog thru the email box. I read all of them as they come in, but i tend to be so lazy about answering them... gomen gomen! There is nothing i like better than hearing from everyone. :)

"politics to the third"
Tuesday - November 7, 2000
[Largo] - 13:26:00
Election Day!

What can I say? I'm actually excited about today, there is nothing America loves more then close competition, and in presidential politics, we just really don't see much of that. So today my nation will watch and look on with bated breath as our next President is selected.

If you haven't already voted, then stop reading this rant right now, go down to your local polling office, and vote. I don't care who you vote for, just vote. Simply go into the booth, and vote for someone whose views match your own.

It's odd, when something is given to a group of people without them having to earn it, most people then have no respect for the cost it took to provide that item by those who did work for it. The same applies to our government, if we take it for granted then we invite those people to enter it that will in turn take us for granted.

Look at it this way, we get the government that we deserve, when you don't bother to take a interest in politics, you send the message that politicians don't even need to share your views to serve as your representation. That really is a dangerous concept. I'd rather have elected officials whose views match those of the majority, even if it's not my own views then have men who don't care about our nation's issues in the slightest.

Just think guys, to live in a nation where this very day, people will get up and elect the leader of the free world for the next four years. Regardless whom you vote for, today - the people who vote will shape this nation, and all nations that surround us.

Ok, enough of my warm fuzzy public service annoucement style 'go vote' speech, now for a speech more in tune with my inner-gamer..

"Go vote, or I'll frag your apathetic lazy ass."

"politics, again"
Wednesday - November 8, 2000
[Largo] - 03:10:12
(MT) - MegaTokyo Press

In a surprise news conference Al Gore has announced that unless he is made the winner of the currently deadlocked Presidential Election, he will go back home to Nashville, TN and take his Internet back with him.

Al Gore was quoted as saying, "I invented the Internet, it's mine, you can't have it." He went on to say, "If you won't play by my rules, then I'll go home and take my Internet with me!"

George W. Bush immediately held a press conference to respond to this threat saying that his father promised to buy him a brand new Internet in case Gore was to leave with his. Bush was quoted as saying "My daddy will get me the best Internet money can buy!"

And now for something completely different:

What a wild week… our little nation in the grips of a crisis, half the country upset with the other half. West Palm Beach Floridians exposed as being nitwits. Man, you can't pay for entertainment like this.

Well, enough politics, As some of you pointed out, Politics has not yet been released for any console, and until it is - it does not qualify for a game, nor has Politics been made into a animated series, therefore I'll shut my trap about it for awhile until Politics is no longer vaporware.

Some of the websites I give a regular look would include a certain webcomic I've linked so much in my rants that if you don't know what I'm referring to then you must live in West Palm Beach. So today I'm going to direct you to a sweet humor site called The Mushroom.

This site is a cross between a gamer news source, and a humor site. Every now and then they get a good laugh out of me, so it could be worth your time to check it out. (cough) Though, All in all I'd say they rock. (cough)

Recently some fans went and started various megatokyo irc channels on various irc networks. I'm a fan of diversity, so here's me giving shout outs to #megatokyo @ undernet, and #megatokyo @ efnet. May you each live long and netsplit free lives.

Finally, I think I've found a new gaming website that will certainly become part of my of daily routine of clicks, Total Video Games. TVG is one of the many IGN affiliates whose numbers rival the near infinite Gamespy planet-clones these days, but before I mislead you into thinking they are 'just another site', I want you to know i checked these guys out and they are pretty sweet, in fact - they are so sweet they practically bleed saccharine.

"(sigh)"
Friday - November 10, 2000
[Piro] - 12:22:00
Well, as you can see, we now welcome Seraphim to the Megatokyo world. Seraphim, of course, is the MT persona of my girlfriend Sarah - anything good about my rather pathetic wit was developed under her tutelage, so it only seemed fit that she have some part in the comic. On Wednesday, one of sarah's childhood cats passed away, and I just wanted to pay tribute to poor little Bullet (who we usually called "Bullito"). Yesterday was a sad day. Loosing a pet is like loosing a family member and a good friend. Last year my childhood cat Jake passed away and it took me a long time to get over it, it's always very sad stuff.

One unfortunate facts (or is it an appealing feature?) of webcomics is that there is a tendency for the real people in your lives to sneak into the comics. Greg over at Real Life makes no bones about it. "Wanna be a character? sure!" :P We at MT borrow, steal, tweak, adjust, twist and totally change bits and pieces of the people around us however we see fit. The lines between our characters and ourselves is rather blurred. Piro is me but its not me. Largo is ... er, lets not go there. Tsubasa occasionally 'diets' for weeks at a time to support his TLS habit. Dom and Ed are evil IRC bots, i think... Well, all writers do this - we are just a little more blatant about it. Neither Kimiko or Erika are really anything like Sarah (if anything, she's a little of both) but when she commented to me "y'know, maybe i could be your little conscience, sitting on your shoulder with little wings" - bingo. The development sketch for Seraphim is a little 1" x 2" post-it note attached to my work computer. :)

The other thing about online comics is that they can't help but reflect bits and pieces of your real life. The comic itself has a life of its own - it reacts to things in my life, largo's life, and the forums too. Beyond this, there is the online comic community itself - and the extended communities for both gamers and anime fans. It all has it's effects. You all may have noticed, but there's never a dull moment in my life. I could use a few, really.

One aspect of that growth is the art itself. Up till now, I've been drawing the strips, then tracing them before scanning - it was a cleaners look and helped cover up scribbles and mistakes that i made in the drawings. Recently, tho, I've been getting comfortable enough with drawing these guys that I've just sat down and... well, drew the frames. both Wed and Fri's strip were drawn flat out, without any tracing or transfer. To me, this is better - not only because it's faster, but because you always loose something in the transfer. We'll see how this works - it lets me add more detail and, well, lets me get more sleep (supposedly)

oh, the screenshot? ^_^ heheh. nothing... kawaii, ne?

"monkey business"
Sunday - November 12, 2000
[Largo] - 23:59:59
I spent the weekend with Escape from Monkey Island, and all I got was this stupid monkey head.

LucasArts, thou hast redeemed thy self! After a long dark period of releasing titles that should have gone direct to the bargain bin at your local dollar store, Lucas's ranch boys have finally returned to their prestigious roots and managed not to kill them. Monkey Island 4 is great, awesome, and spectacular! It's everything the past games have been, only better.

The first and second Monkey Island games were done in the old low-resolution 2D style that we now only see in our dreams, childhood memories, or a Gameboy. They were fun, they were witty, and they were classics. A few years ago we were reintroduced to the Monkey Island series by MI3, which was a animated game using pre-drawn scenes. Now we've moved further along in the technology tree of gaming and have the 4th installment of Monkey Island, which uses a beautiful 3D engine and retains the original charm by being fully loaded with sarcastic comebacks and bad puns.

I really can't give a fair review of this game as I'm biased. I've been a Monkey Island fan for as long as I can remember, so to me, this game upholds the spirit of the Monkey Island franchise, which may possibly be the only franchise LucasArts has yet to taint by the foul stench of mediocrity. I think the developers of Escape from Monkey Island deserve a round of applause.

The developers successfully managed to bring up an older franchise to a modern 3D engine, and still keep the very essence of the game in tact. This is what it takes for a older game to be re-made and updated, this is what it takes to bring a classic back into the fray! This is what game designers need to do more often!

Initializing Link Engine.

Today I'm sending you to another online comic that I like to read. Adventuerers details the chronicles of two people who not only look like they popped out of a Squaresoft game, but somehow also cause you to start humming Final Fantasy battle music as you read each strip.

Finally, I've found a great new gaming website called Christian Spotlights. Basically these guys rate games on their violence, adult content, and an overall Christian Rating. Now all you have to do to find the coolest games out there is go to this site, and get the games that recieve their worst rantings. This will insure that you always pick the titles that will give you some good old-fashioned devil worshipping fun that satisfies our evil demonic desires for sex and violence!

"I'm going to hell for that bit, and you're all coming with me!"

"yuki da..."
Tuesday - November 14, 2000
[Piro] - 16:49:00
Wow, it's snowing...

I love snow. I really do. There's something about the particular chill in the air, the slow motion of the flakes - it's just a very pleasant feeling. Of course, that feeling evaporated when I discovered I had to drive to Lansing and back this morning. Ah, that wasn't quite so much fun. Snow from inside your house or office is nice. Driving thru it is another matter.

This is a particularly creative time of year for me. In the warmer months it's harder to justify sitting inside drawing all day. In the winter, it's part of staying warm. Bliss is being curled up in my favorite chair, one of the cats curled up in my lap, a hot chocolate, re-runs of Red Dwarf running on the TV and a sketchpad. Nothing in the world beats that. (well, there are *some* things that are better...;) I find it is the best way to wander around and search more of the 'middle feelings' that make for good drawings and good stories. Too bad I have to have this big 24" fan blowing on my computer guts to keep it from melting down - it's always cold by my computer. I swear, I wish i had the bucks to buy a G4 cube and a 21" cinema display... ah, I would LOVE a no-fan concept... Christmas ideas anyone? :P (yes, I suffer from mac envy - its that whole artist thing)

A few things of note this week. I finally got word from Noritac-san regarding 'envelope' - a illustrated True Love Story short story that I did for Summer Comike - he's given me the OK to post it and make it public. It's a short story with about 50 drawings, and was one of the projects that convinced me that Megatokyo was possible. I want to edit a few things and coordinate the correct Japanese translation with Tsubasa, then I will make it available for everyone to view.

What's odd is the fact that putting this site up for everyone to look at will be delayed by the work i need to do on this winter comike's submission for MJ-12. The story is called 'snapshots' and is really the first part of a series of short stories for the MJ-12 circle. I'll share a drawing or two with y'all as my November 30th deadline approaches...

I had the oddest thing happened this morning. I felt like getting a cup of coffee, so I strolled over to Starbucks on the way into the office. As I was walking towards the door, there was a guy sitting at a table with some co-workers drinking coffee who looked vaguely familiar... and sure enough, it was an old pal from freshman year in college who I hadn't seen in almost 3 years - he just happened to be in Ann Arbor recruiting for HP. We had lost touch over the past year, so it was really amazing to bump into him like that. Good seeing you Michael, if you do find your way here. :) And see? Don't you wish it snowed in California. :P

Oh, thats right. Giving a screenshot last week with no information on where it comes from was bad. Gomen. ^_^ The young lady looking so embarrassed was Mei Lin from Kurenai no Namida - an H game from Studio E-go (now, kids - no clicking on that link unless you are over 18. There isn't much adult content on the E-go site, but it IS an adult game, so behave. :) Today's screenshot is also from an E-go game called 'Twin Way'. The art in these games never ceases to amaze me.

Not that'd I'd really know...

"my poor fone"
Thursday - November 16, 2000
[Largo] - 10:52:00
First up, Hot Soup of the mouth wateringly good Lethal Doses has posted a episode that features what happens when you get three comic writers on the phone at the same time, and add gin.

This week I ran across two more online comics that rock, first up is The Other Comic. TOC comes from a genre that would make Shirt Guy Tom proud. Next up is a new creation called Otaku Feh! by Dave Kelly, the author of Living in Greytown. Lastly for a bit of local humor, someone has went and made a online comic about the Dallas Stars hockey team. I can honestly say this is the best manga style comic strip about the Dallas Stars.

Recently a tragedy befell one of my precious technological toys. My new Samsung 8500 mobile phone was run over by car obviously in league with the forces of evil. Sure it didn't help that I left my phone on top my car and drove off with it up there, but like that matters? Other drivers should know to steer clear of my mobile phones, in a three year span I've lost two phones this way, if I lose another I'll demand a law be passed that protects my phones from careless motorists who are obviously out to run over phones that have fallen onto the road.

Since I love plugging my pet projects, I thought I'd mention that ALFA is now accepting DM applications once again. So if you are interested in creating a persistent world using the Neverwinter Nights product when it is released, go over and submit an application. Better yet, donate a server, or two, or three.

While I'm abusing my rant for self-promotion, I thought I'd point out that if you want your Speak l33t shirt to arrive before xmas, then you need get your order into our store before December 12th.

Finally, I've been getting a lot of email about my progress in Monkey Island 4. I should note that I've beaten it, yes the ending was cool, and if you didn't like the ending, then you can send me a email saying how much you hated it, and I'll get your email, print it out, and file it under, 'fire', then in a year I'll take out that file, go behind my home, and burn it.

"The bullet of justice will always demolish evil. Remember that."

"otanjoubi!"
Thursday - November 16, 2000
[Piro] - 16:32:00
Well, yesterday was my birthday. Birthdays are fun, relaxing events (usually). I suppose what makes me REALLY sad is the fact that i relate my birthday with that of two well known anime characters. As many of you may know November 15th is the Kasuga Kyosuke and Hiyama Hikaru's birthday. In fact, Kyosuke and I are exactly one year apart (I'd be a year older).

"Kyosuke who? Hikaru what? Who are they?"

(sigh) I know that's what some of you are thinking. Hey, if you are new to anime, and don't know a lot about it - that's fine, i can understand that. But it's the rest of you anime fans - you know who you are - the ones who've never watch Kimagure Orange Road... SHAME ON YOU!!!

In the past, there were certain classics that EVERY anime fan had seen. We all suffered thru really bad 15th gen Arctic Anime fansubs of Kimagure Orange Road, complete with 'amiga sucks!' messages and bad grammar. We've watched all 96 episodes of Maison Ikkoku without a single break. Laughed our asses off as KO Seki Beast Warriors... but these days, there are people creating digital fansubs of Love Hina and Gatekeepers who haven't even sat thru bad dubs of Ranma 1/2 - people who never suffered thru 20 episodes of some crappy anime they hated just to see a half hour fansub of Marmalade Boy.

(sigh) ... what happened to rights of passage?

One of the problems with anime, manga and gaming is that there is ALWAYS something new and exciting. The biggest shame to me was that sometimes a really good show would be forgotten after just a few months. Anyone remember Sakurai Tomo in 'Gambaristo Shun'? Drooling over Katsura-san in 'YAT Anshin'? It's so easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest that nowadays even the old classics are being jumped over.

Don't be afraid to jump back and look at some of the older stuff. There are real gems there, and even some of the fluff (*cough* Battle Skippers *cough*) is worth a watch or two. And for god's sake, go rent or buy the Kimagure Orange Road OAV's. 'I was a cat, I was a fish' and 'message in rouge' is required watching for reading Megatokyo.

Got that? Good. ^_^

"a guide to life"
Monday - November 20, 2000
[Piro] - 00:18:00
Ah, yes, the wisdom of shoujo manga... For those who are perhaps unfamiliar with the genre, here's a little lesson about Japanese Comics:

Manga, the Japanese term for 'comics' are divided into many subcategories and target audiences. There are two main categories: Shounen and Shoujo manga. Shounen manga, or Boy's Comics, are targeted at young boys and men - and generally involve a lot of fighting, cute girls, bizarre sexually charged relationships, and other end of the world scenarios. There are some great shounen manga titles, but for the most part they tend to be a little weak on story. Shoujo manga, or 'Girl's Manga' is targeted at young girls and women - the stories tend to revolve around relationships and interpersonal problems. Typically, shoujo manga has much deeper and more complex storylines.

Of course, these are generalizations, but for the most part they hold true. The most unusual thing about shoujo manga is it's silent popularity with male readers. Here in the US, we don't make any qualms about reading girl's manga - guys like me are even proud of it. In Japan, most guys wouldn't be caught dead in the Shoujo Manga section of the local bookstore. :)

A lot of young people really do look towards Shoujo manga for answers about life. While it's true most of what happens in shoujo manga will probably never happen to 99.95% of the people who read it, there always seems to be *something* there that does help. "See? it's OK if things are a little screwed up - things can get better, things can get worse, it's OK." Shoujo manga usually has a more 'day to day real life' feel to it. In fact, stories like Mizuiro Jidai (that's Yuuko in the screenshot) is so down to earth realistic that you could almost call it boring. It really is just the day to day life of a average (tho cute) young school girl. The manga-ka (manga artist) Yabuichi Yuu has even said that Mizuiro Jidai is really about her own experiences. :)

Oh, er, Mizuiro Jidai can get a little -too- honest and frank about some of the problems facing a young schoolgirl... (ahem) yes, moving on...

Speaking of privacy, I should apologize for last week's screenshot of Kimiko. It's not a sketch that I really planned on posting, but there was something very sad about her epression. One of the things I always believe in is respecting the privacy of my characters. The wrong drawings at the wrong time can change your perception of a character - and i don't want that. There's no reason for you to see her in her shift quite yet. Heck, you don't really know much about her. :)

I was going to write a rant regarding Friday's 'Meth for Dummies' comic - but it seems that everyone's reading of it was right in line with what I had hoped. Largo doesn't really know what meth is - he just thinks its a good way to make a quick buck. My first reaction to a explosion related to cooking meth was that it wasn't funny at all. I've seen what hard drug use can do to people, to some of my friends. It's not a source for humor as far as I am concerned. Don't fuck with that shit, people. The only drug i abuse is caffeine. You can't draw if your mind is fucked up, you can't play games worth a shit if your mind is fucked up. It's none of my business what people do in their spare time, but if you're into that shit... for crissakes people, use your heads.

There. I've said my peace on the subject. :)

oooohkiiie... what else. Oh yea, schedule. Once again, both largo and I missed rants last week. We've both been a *little* disorganized recently - largo is in the middle of a move, I've been trying to get my winter comike submission done. Also, largo and I have been working some of the background stuff for megatokyo - we don't want to goof something in the future by messing up the current episodes, so it's important work. The website needs work, I'm behind on my fredart sketches, i have a whole Japanese version of MT to put together, and three new t-shirt designs to finish... it's nuts. I need a vacation. Perhaps I should just drop the whole mess and run off and live in a cave somewhere...

Having said that, I basically have a four day weekend to crank on all of this - with any luck, MT will be running smoother next week. Largo needs to travel for family reasons, so if MT falls apart this week, it's my fault. :) Thanks for being patient with us. :)

and I REALLY gotta visit the forums... and do email... ugh. 854 messages to go thru... uguuuuu~~

"moving tips"
Monday - November 20, 2000
[Largo] - 22:41:00
Where were we?

I spent the weekend playing two new games I picked up, one of which would be known as Sacrifice. After playing it for a few hours I was going to say that it wasn't that great, then I went back to play it again to make sure I was being fair - twelve hours later I went to bed.

The game is obviously a sweet looking 3D RTS(real time strategy), that uses the concept of capturing souls rather then basic mine & produce. The games unit production system works a lot like the undead race is supposed to in Warcraft III for you Blizzard fiends in the audience. This is to say that you begin with a certain number of units and souls. New units cost souls, and the only way to get more souls is to kill your enemies units and steal their souls.

After playing sacrifice all weekend I had decided to give it a rank of four out of five gin bottles. However, since the unit production is a very unwholesome concept (stealing souls), I'm giving it an additional bottle of gin for not being afraid to take chances and piss off some uptight consumers - this brings its score up to a full 5/5 gin bottles, which should be like a good score - or something.

The other game I picked up was Shenmue. So far I haven't managed to get very far into the story, so I've just been bumming around at the arcade in the game and getting really good at Space Harrier. I think the game has a lot of great features, it's certainly unique and different - but then again so are some of the bands that Piro listens to and I can't stand that noise. I know everyone seems to be blown away by this game's dynamic of being able to interact with everything, but am I the only one just not satisfied with it? Sure I can pickup a book or my clothes, but what if I want to do the laundry or start my own garage band? Hell man, in the game I don't even have a garage, so why can't I build one? I'm not going to say I dislike the game - I'm still hooked on it, I'm just finding both my progression and the wait time between loading screens to be slow.

In other non-game related type news, I recently checked out yet another online comic that is candy for the mind, called Ice Cream for Breakfast, personally I prefer for beer for breakfast or these cool new smirnoffs ice malt liquor things, but I digress. Also up is Merlin's Crew, a cool comic by a cool guy, or something. Moving along on my list of stuff that I like to read is Tang's Weekly Comic. Last but not least is a comic that seems to be making a lot of noise, called Angst Technology. I've heard a lot of good things about this comic before I ever got around to reading it, so it is said, so shall it be linked.

As my partner mentioned on the left side of your screen, I've been busy with moving. As I look around my home I realize that I'm still only about halfway finished with the process with no end in sight and a deadline of this weekend. This isn't to say nothing good has come from it, over the last three years I've moved four times and so I've learned some things that may help those of you who will also need to move in the near future.

Tips for Moving:

1. Call all your friends over for a big BBQ before you move, that way you'll have plenty of help to move your stuff. Afterall what are friends for, besides being able to provide back breaking free labor?

2. When you turn off the power to your former residence, remember to get all the food, specifically steaks and other assorted meats out of the freezer before leaving for a week. Man I have nightmares about that smell to this day.

3. Do not pack your pets in a box without air holes, they hate that.

4. Do not pack your girlfriend in a box, ever.

5. Always remember, never have more stuff then you can quickly fit into a black van. This especially comes in handy when you need to get out of the state or country in a hurry.

If you notice to my left, my partner has once again ranted on, and on, forcing me to continue writing today's update so it will match his updates length. I'm going to have throw a brick at him or something to make him write shorter rants.

In fact, if you have suggestions for how to make Piro type less, - email them to me. Remember, the more brutal - the better.

"too damn bad"
Wednesday - November 22, 2000
[Piro] - 00:00:00
I believe that Largo has received quite a few recommendations regarding 'how to keep piro from typing so much'. well, too bad. :P It's part of my nature. What bothers me is that everyone I know tells me 'there has got to be a way to shut you up' - including the people I work with.

hmm...

Oh well. I suppose I could lop off these useless appendages called 'hands'- if I do that, i wont be able to type anymore. (yes, i've been browsing Japanese CG art sites again. The talent some of these guys have is so fricking amazing that it depresses me to no end.) Or I could stick my hands into a cuisinart, but I worry that might ruin the blades on my food processor.

As this week's sketch illustrates, I might just do the world a favor by 'pureeing' my hands to prevent artistic travesties like what i did to Tohno-chan.. I wasted more paper over the past few days, it's sad. I should be shot for wasting precious paper resources.

(sigh) well, i think there is only one thing that will get me out of this funk. Gonna go home and dig out my Hime-chan no Ribbon manga and sink into Himeko-induced bliss for a while. Everyone have a great holiday. Largo's going to be out of town for a few days, but I'll be around - I have a doujin deadline Saturday (oh my god... and i just realized I can't draw worth a crap right now... perhaps they will understand if do have a kitchen accident) and really - a few surprises planned for y'all.

have a good one, folks! Enjoy your holiday, and, er, keep your hands away from sharp knives and food processors, ok? :)

"thanksgiving stuff"
Wednesday - November 22, 2000
[Largo] - 07:30:00
Well, I'm flying out of town to visit family and friends for the holiday this weekend, and so I before I split I thought I'd leave you with some of the suggestions I got on how to make Piro type less.

Suggestions Submitted:

"If he has no fingers he cannot type, therefore, his updates will be very short (typing with toes, or a tongue just doesn't cut it).....however with no fingers he could also not draw, so that would put a slight cramp in the comic, and his drawing. Hmmmmm, I'm gonna have to re-think that." - Ned Elwell

"Well since he draws the strip I'm going to assume that hacking off his fingers etc.. is out of the question so how about this - coat the tops of the keys on his keyboard with a conductive paste and then connect all the keys to the positive input voltage off the PS2 port, then connect the case of the keyboard to the negative ground on that port. granted this requires that he has a keyboard that is mostly made up of conductive componetns, or one that you could make conductive. But shock therapy is always good to keep people in line." - Adam Zilliax

"Take away his keyboard. Unplug is keyboard when he's not looking. Disconnect his monitor. format c: /q New anime videos. Put HIS arm in a sling this time. ;-) Lock him in your trunk and forget he's there. :)" - Matthew LeClair

"Let's see. A number of devious plans come to mind but the one that sticks out is quite interesting. Have whatever editor he uses to write the rants have a small sub program. After he reaches a predetermined number of words Piro will receive a "fatal exception error" and blades would shoot up from the keyboard loping off his fingers and or hands. Immediately there after his system will reboot into Linux with an incorrect monitor setting causing the convergence set beyond the limits of the monitor. The phosphor guns will hit a single point in the monitor heating it greatly till the small amount of explosive set at that point go off sending a shower of sparks and glass write anymore and make it unable for him to use any "speak and type" programs." - Steve Lesiak

"juu go sai..."
Friday - November 24, 2000
[Piro] - 10:20:00
[Quick update... I've added/replaced banners for linking to Megatokyo - you can find the new banners, in all three flavors in the links section. The old banners REALLY sucked, so if you have used banners, please replace em with the brand spankin' new ones. thx - piro]

Well, I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. ^_^ I decided to take today off earlier in the week, and made the mistake of saying 'sure' when Dom asked if he could fill in. Y'know, there should be some sort of license required before you can use Photoshop. I also think that photoshop should immediately freeze up when you attempt to draw with a trackball. I'm getting Dom a mouse for Christmas.

In other news, i seem to be over my drawing funk. I get in those every once and a while, and they are usually induced when I start roving thru Japanese fan art sites. My first reaction is a kind of depression, a resignation that no matter how much i improve, I'll never produce work like this. That usually lasts a day. Then I go thru a phase where I look closer at drawings that so irritated me earlier, and try to look closely at just what it is that makes them better than what i do. The final stage is to attempt to apply some of what I've observed done by other artists.

This is sort of how I go about improving. I know i get a lot of emails saying that my art is great and whatnot, but there really is a lot of room for improvement. The artistic ego is a funny thing. Like I've said before, most people stop drawing at a very young age because what they do becomes more of as source for ridicule than for praise (and in elementary school, who needs more source for ridicule?) It takes a lot of time and effort to produce artwork that people react to in a positive way.

When you start to receive that acceptance of your work, it's a pretty good feeling. The problem is that at that time you become your own worse critic. You get to the point that you really can't trust what people tell you about your art. "oh, its great!" doesn't do much to help you improve further. Self critique, of course, is hard to do in an honest way. I think your maturity as an artist really comes from how well you can critique yourself honestly, in ways that really help you to improve.

Oh, one other thing. I would never call myself an artist. I'm not. 'Artist' is a gift word. I can't recall who the poet was (I believe it was Frost) who reacted to a student who called himself a 'Poet'. Frost reacted to this by saying you can't call yourself a poet, it's a gift word - it's something that other people have to bestow upon you. The same goes for artist. And even if people say that you are an artist, you have to be at a point that you are willing to accept that term. Me? I'm not quite there yet.

Oh, and one other thing that helps you get over a drawing funk - having a goal for your drawing. ^_^ On Wednesday I sprung three new characters on you, some 15 year old high school girls who happen upon Piro in the shoujo manga section of the bookstore. I don't have too many character sketches and drawings of these three, so I sat down and started to draw Yuki, the one who ends up causing the most trouble. I was pretty happy with the drawing, actually. Perhaps not too inventive, but not that bad either - it seems to capture a bit of her personality.

One of my goals for the weekend is to fix up Megatokyo and Fredart, as well as get the T-shirt designs done (if you want t-shirts by Christmas, i need to get these done so you can order them by December 12th). One section over at fredart that really needs work is the 'wandering' section. I'm going to start updating that once a week with three new links to Japanese sites that i just happened to visit and like.

Ack. oh yea, and I have to get the doujin stuff done before the 30th. (gulp)

Well, Sarah and I are going shopping today, out to fight the battles in the parking lots, look and see what kinds of gifts i cant afford to buy. :)

"b4k4"
Monday - November 27, 2000
[Piro] - 08:45:00
Sometimes i do draw things from real life. I remember being somewhat self conscious in a shoujo section of a bookstore in Ginza, then turning around to knock over a display of shoujo manga with my camera bag. (sigh) comic imitating life...

Well, so much for my vacation. I spent the last two days of it suffering from a sinus headache that I know damn well is the result of the crappy weather we've been having here in Michigan. I wish it would just snow. This cold soaking rain bit is enough to depress anyone. :)

I'm trying to decide if I actually made good on some of my plans for the weekend. I did, more or less. T-shirt designs are almost done, it just took longer to do the b4k4 painting than I planned. Also, I didn't get hardly any web design work done for Megatokyo itself - except for some new banners in the links section. I spent a good deal of time Friday fixing up the 'wanderings' section of fredart. The plan for that section was that once a week i would add at least three new links to Japanese CG art sites that I found particularly decent. I also took care of a few code fixes here and there - small stuff, really. Oh, and I did manage to get today's strip done. ^_^

I'm going to keep today's rant a bit short because I have a lot to do today (yea, what else is new?) Someone commented to me in an email that the plot for megatokyo is great even if it does go 'walkabout' from time to time. Y'know, thats a really good term for it. Even tho a story, book or novel really is best when comprised of three parts - beginning, middle and end, a online comic like this is more analogous to real life. Things happen in due course. You kinda know where you are going, but things pop out of nowhere that sometimes are just little points of interest, and other times are major turning points that change everything. We've kept the story flexible and pliable for those reasons.

I know i promised that t-shirt designs would be ready today - as usual, I'm a little late. The plan is to release three shirts - a Kimiko shirt, a Erika shirt and a Fredart shirt (which will be the b4k4quake image). I need to do another Erika drawing before I can finish her shirt - i really don't like the color drawing i did of her.

Anyone want a ping shirt? ^_^ Yuki? Seraphim? Oh... Largo and Piro? Pah. who wants two guys on a shirt? Largo and Piro are rather worthless and just aren't worth the energy to paint them. Perhaps Megatokyo should go the way of Idol Project... no male characters at all! Woo!

Now that would be fun to draw. :)

"big feet"
Tuesday - November 28, 2000
[Largo] - 09:31:00
You may have noticed this week's strips are a bit on the for lack of a better word 'mushy' side. See guys, this is what happens when I go out of town and leave Piro alone in the director's chair. Not that I object to our dichotomy of interests. So far our complete lack of common ground has produced something almost unique, and sometimes readable. The strip is about give and take, which on a good day means I give Piro hell, and he takes it.

Josh over at the awesome webcomic called Stubble, made us this gift art, very cool stuff.

After playing some Mechwarrior 4 this week, I've determined some things that I'd like to share with everyone today. First off, after years of playing mech games I've finally figured out the appeal of giant robot simulations, it's the big feet. There just isn't anything as satisfying as stepping on your enemy, except maybe if you get a kick out of scraping your enemy off your mech's foot - you'd know if you were into that sort of thing. However, for me nothing really captures the spirit of total domination like squishing your opponents into the ground like the ants they are, and that requires some really big feet.

I just can't get enough of the new Mechwarrior game, I'm hooked, I'm sold, I'm hyping this thing as if I worked for Dailyradar. Some people have complained about the lack of realism in the new incarnation of this popular series, but they should all be shot - so they don't matter. See, in the past there were little to no restrictions on the load outs of the weapons you could outfit on your mechs besides the issue of weight and physical space. However now in order to better help play balancing, you can only outfit certain amounts of certain types of weapons on any mech used. This gives the game something it never had in previous versions, balanced play.

Sure the purists of the genre will bitch and whine like political candidates that have lost an election and refuse to admit defeat, but I say just ignore them and they'll go away. That happens to be my solution to most problems, like when your car starts leaking a strange colored fluid, or if your body starts leaking strange colored fluids.

I've spent the last few weeks moving to my new place, which has been a strain on my time and energy. I am happy to report that it's over and I now can rest, well - I would rest but my new place does not have DSL or @home yet, so after years of having a fast connection, I'm being forced back into the dark ages and using a modem. For those of you who don't already know, modems suck. Modems suck in ways that I can't even describe, other then to say they suck.

btw, modems suck.

"I want a kodama"
Thursday - November 30, 2000
[Seraphim] - 11:25:23
Piro and I rented Princess Mononoke for the holiday weekend. He had seen the American release of the film when it first hit theaters, but I knew he would like to see it again (and again and again...) Our sweet little kitten got her name from the Japanese title of the film, "Mononoke Hime" (Demon Princess). Both names suit her well. Hime has single handedly destroyed $2000 of appliances, clothes, and computer equipment with her little sharp teeth and razor sharp claws. Piro actually made me watch Mononoke Hime a long time ago - it was a VHS version of a Chinese subtitle that had THEN been subbed into English. It was awful, and I started to regret my impulsive generosity...

Over the past few weekends I have made Piro endure some things that really are beyond the call of duty, including a co-worker's hoe down birthday party and a boiled corned beef and cabbage charity dinner. He is such a good sport. I owed him BIG. So i figured i owed it to him to sit and watch the american version of the movie. Don't tell Piro, but I really enjoyed it.

I am not very familiar with Japanese legends and lore. I grew up Catholic - very Catholic. Put me in the middle of Catholic mass or rite in any language and I would know what is going on. My moniker is even based on Catholicism. Piro keeps mentioning something called "Seraphim Call", but I have no idea what he is talking about. The Seraphim are the highest order of angles that sing the praises of God and have three sets of wings. My girlfriend, Mary, and I were the first female alter persons at St. Francis of Assisi.

What really confuses me is when Japanese anime uses Christian symbolism. Take Seira in St. Tail - in reality she would be a novice in an order. But what order does she belong to??? Dominican, Benedictine, or does she belong to the Convent Hall of Justice for semi-super heroes? The only thing they seem to get right is the school uniform - but it should be a really ugly green and blue plaid with criss-cross suspenders, a white blouse, and saddle shoes. (I'm sure even Dom could draw it).

As for Mononoke Princess, with an excellent translation, beautiful imagery, and Piro to fill in the blanks, the story is superb. It has some violence (decapitations like school girls popping off dandelion flowers) and disturbing visuals (animals turning into worm beasts). Really, it is no more scary than a story about making a man wear a crown of thorns and then nailing him to a cross. The beliefs in the movie seem more similar to Native American mythology - the reverence for nature, animals, and the theme of birth, death and renewal. The final scene where a Kodama stands over the tiny new saplings leaves me verklempt. Forget having a conscience sitting my shoulder, I want a Kodama to watch over me.

"now i *need* a PS2"
Saturday - December 2, 2000
[Piro] - 02:07:00
Y'know, this is all your fault. Yes, you. The one reading this right now. Megatokyo wasn't supposed to be a big project. In fact, I remember telling largo that he'd be lucky to get one strip a week out of me. But no~ooo, MT has to get popular. (grumble)

This make me grumble? Well, not really. I am actually very proud of how well MT has done. In this era of such intense media saturation, It amazes me that people would bother to add Megatokyo to the mix. So why the grumbling?

It's pretty simple, really. I have missed the deadline for finishing my winter comike doujinshi submission to the MJ-12 project disk "Love Spiral". I'm pretty sad about this. For the past three weeks I have been trying desperately to get it finished, but to no avail.

MJ-12, as I've mentioned before, is a True Love Story doujinshi circle that produces CDRom disks for sale at summer and winter Comike events. I did a project for the summer comike called 'Envelope'. It was this project that convinced me that Megatokyo might actually be possible. I've been working on a follow up to the story called 'Snapshots', which centered on a new character who returns to Aobadai city. Sadly, even with an extension, there is no way I could finish anything of quality in the next few weeks.

Gomen ne, Noritac-san, minna-san. Both tsubasa and I are disappointed that we won't be able to contribute to the winter project. My commitment to TLS is not shaken, I just could not finish in time. Tsubasa and I will plan a full-fledged project for next summer's comike based on True Love Story 3. There is just too much going on right now. Please forgive us.

True Love Story 3. There's another thing to grumble about. Nono, not to you. This TLS addiction is all Tsubasa's fault. Tsubasa got me hooked on True Love Story 2 last year. TLS is a series of games that relies more on strength of story and interaction with the characters than on character designs. A lot of people say the character designs for TLS aren't that good, but I think that is an unfair judgement. There is a lot of GREAT TLS artwork, just dig into the books and support materials. I've also played TLS F fan disk - which is a little odd because you try to go on a pseudo-date with your 'sister' in the games. (I try to ignore the sister thing, really... Misaki-chan is so cute!!... or is that bad?)

TL3 will be released in March of 2001 as a DVD game for the Playstation 2 (Japanese) - yet another reason to be annoyed - now i really need a PS2. Here's the general scoop on the game (thanks to Tsubasa for helping me dig up the info). Caution, this is a little long today. :)

In the game, you are the protagonist who is a junior high school student. You secretly have a crush on Takane Aotsuki, a dream girl at the school. She loves to take care of the school garden, and broadcasting during the lunch break, perhaps because she has a sweet voice.

You're twin sister is named Kaname ("The Vital Point" in Japanese :P ), which replace the role of Kimiko and Misaki in the original TLS games. She takes secret surveys to tell you how much the girls like you.

Basically, You wander around the school during intervals between classes, trying to bump into the girls. As you talk to the girls, you have to choose the best topics and alternatives. If you talk to them right, their affections toward you will be raised. Usually, multiple choices will appear during the conversations, so you have to choose the best answer to the particular girl.

If you have good luck, you'll meet one or two of the girls at the end of the school day. She may ask you if you want to go home together. These are crucial phases of the game.

In the "Conversation Mode(Kaiwa Mode)" session, you have 12 topics to choose from. When you choose the topic, the girl will respond, and the conversation will go on if you choose the best answers. If you goof up and pick the wrong topic, or say something that is too sensitive at that time, the girl will saying good-bye. If you choose a remark that is really unexpected to her, the girl might get upset, and run away. This, of course, has been a basic feature of the TLS series from the start.

It is said that there will be as many as 17 girls in the game (According to Dengeki G's Magazine and Megami Magazine) On December 23rd, there will be a small TLS3 talk show in Shibuya. Only 300 seats will be available. Hopefully tsubasa can go, i sure wish i could ^_^

Anyhoo, that's the gist of the game. It's a lot of fun, and nothin makes your stomach sink like choosing the wrong thing to say, and watching the girls expression change from a smile to an incredulous frown. Warning - the game CAN depress you if you really suck at this stuff. :)

Long one today, gomen - but some of you have asked what gal games are really like - I'm fond of the TLS series - its a bit different from the others - there are lots of different kinds. In the future, I'll review a few other games as well.

"new shirts"
Sunday - December 3, 2000
[Largo] - 10:46:00
Sweetness abounds in MegaTokyo, all is right with the world.

First off, I have a two-hundred email backlog, which I plan to get thru sometime before 2001. Secondly, if you are reading this rant, know that the surgeon general has deemed it unfit for children, people with heart conditions, pregnant women, and small pets.

For those interested and willing to part with some cash, we are now selling two more designs for t-shirt/sweatshirt/mouse pads/and mug merchandise. These are the b4k4Quake and the Idol Kimiko designs. All orders placed before December 12th will arrive before xmas, so avoid the xmas shopping rush and just send us all your cash. It works out well for both parties. Before I get swamped with emails (again), no we can't put them on a black shirt, and I have no idea when we'd be able to do it. Sorry guys, but the process to do a black shirt is more involved and much more expensive.

I'd like to say thanks to everyone who purchased a speak l33t shirt, we really appreciate every order that was made. It's nice to go around and see people wearing them. I've even gotten emails where some megatokyo readers have met each other simply because one of them happen to be wearing their shirt that day.

Speaking of giving thanks in this post-thanksgiving mode, I have to give mad thanks to David Lynch, the php4 guru. Together we managed to get a lot of his site code worked thru over the weekend. David is a real pro when it comes to php4, in fact, some of his code makes up a good portion of the engine in the site now. I now direct your attention to the shiny new random banners that appear at the top, and link buttons at the bottom, are they not sweet?

On the booze front, some readers tried to come up with a megatokyo drink, unfortunately mixing gin, vodka, pineapple juice, kool-aid and very liberal amounts of everclear didn't turn out the way they envisioned. Frankly, I have no idea what they envisioned or what they were smoking before they had this vision.

I'm not sure what they were trying to accomplish with that combo and apparently neither were they, unless they were trying to go for a drink that is meant to kill all the brain cells that handle your sense of taste so you won't notice how bad it really is.

A quick notice to the forum users, we take a real hands off approach to it, it's a resource for the users to do as they please. Though please stop with the forum wars, flames, and absurd posts just to increase post counts.

Finally, onto the daily linking of comics that I like, I wanted to point out (again) a strip that totally rocks. I mean that to, it rocks in ways that rocking wasn't meant to rock. This holds true when you consider it's content, (warning: adult content), the comic is Exploitation Now, and it's a regular read by myself. The author's name is Poe, and this guy's work is simply amazing. Well we all have our own personal tastes, but for me, Exploitation Now is first rate, so check it out.

"gamespy.com"
Tuesday - December 5, 2000
[Largo] - 00:53:01
As some of you may have noticed, the comic is now appearing on GameSpy. There even happens to be a neat article about us on their site, here. This would be called a good thing, which is not unlike a nice thing or a sweet thing. This should not however be confused with what is called a bad thing, or a oh dear god why did they do that thing. GameSpy is a sweet network, with a lot to offer the gamer community, so if you don't already - check it out.

I was able to get thru my email backlog and so today will have a larger then normal amount of linkitage in it then some of you may be used to receiving. However, fear not as I can assure you that clicking on this many links will not cause cancer or other vile nasty unpleasantness.

First up, some gift art was sent to us. Subi of gameart.com sent us this sweet picture of Kimiko. This is really great work, the background was a great touch. Sephirot sent me this Piro voodoo-doll, which has been great fun and stress relief for me. Whenever I feel too much pressure or overworked, I take a needle and poke it in the Piro doll's face. Works wonders, try it!

Submitted for my approval was this vile link which dares to ask the question, 'are video games a waste of time?' - the nerve! Granted the author goes on to give a couple valid reasons why the single player experience is not worth our time, but logic is for the weak, any true gamer knows that.

In all seriousness I do find fault with their argument in that sure - mindless shooters are maybe just a distraction, but suggesting they are a fleeting unmemorable waste of time is going a bit too far. Even though the author briefly mentioned that the exception to this rule was CRPGs and other character building games, they forgot to include simulation games like my currently much appreciated Mechwarrior 4 and adventure games like Monkey Island, as also being an exception to their rule. They instead focused on games like Tony Hawk and the single player experience of Quake. I happen to think they are just playing the wrong games, going back to Quake for a evaluation of the entire single player genre is just unfair, why didn't they talk about the extreme coolness of Deus Ex? or Thief?

I can't expect to fully understand how everyone comes to his or her own conclusions about what makes games good or bad, but I do feel this article is a good example of journalistic doggie poop that should be passed around as a cautionary tale that shows others what happens when you sniff too much glue as a child.

Speaking of Mechwarrior, the prez of flamingsword.com wanted to let mech fanatics know that they are offering to recreate the Battletech universe for those that wish to play on teams or as a unit in Mechwarrior 4. I do wish to note that upon visiting their site I was confronted with the infamous internet monkey, and once again I was able to hit him. That damn monkey now owes me $40 and I want what is coming to me.

It seems everyday I link several new webcomics or something to that effect, today is no different. Zero's disturbing comic is well, disturbing. Continuing with the cool trend of gamer related comics, we have Little Gamers, which for some reason seems to be the brainchild of crossing bomberman with hello kitty, don't ask me why.

Well that it's for today, I'm off to go blast the undead some more. There just isn't anything more relaxing then blowing up zombies...

"when did this happen?"
Wednesday - December 6, 2000
[Piro] - 05:03:00
Largo and I aren't really all that big on hype. We've been pretty much low-key about this whole Megatokyo thing from day one. I still feel like its some kind of big elaborate gag that largo is playing on me. I envision it as being something like a big DDoS attack - only rather than bogging down servers and shutting down corporate websites, he's using some bots to send random emails and hits from servers all over the damn place. And he's got everyone on IRC to go along with the gag. I'm not sure how he is managing all the fantastic fan-art work. I think he must be paying people to draw stuff.

oh, and the forum? that's some sorta 'natural progression' bot that uses chaos theory algorithms to grind out posts.

I gotta tell you, this time he's topped himself. Largo has hacked his way into Gamespy Networks and added a big swanky article and even put us in their comics section! I have to say, bravo Largo! I am impressed.

It's a pretty good article too. Better than the 'characters' section of our own site. In fact, there are a few tidbits in the character descriptions I haven't really made public yet. Not that there really are any readers. If you do sorta wander across this site somehow, you should read it.

Wait, i remember actually TALKING to this guy from Gamespy. Hm. I wonder how Largo arranged that. I think his name was John. Hm. Pretty sneaky, Largo, preeeetttty sneaky. Betya that was Kyo. But it didn't SOUND like kyo... hm...

Anyhoo, looks like Megatokyo is now a part of the Gamespy network! Or at least until someone over there discovers whats going on and fixes things :P Even tho i dont believe it, it's pretty sweet. Being in there with the likes of Penny Arcade, Dork Tower and Angst Technologies. Sweet stuff. And we ain't worthy.

Suddenly feeling like this might all be real again, I'll say this. We've REALLY avoided hyping MT. I've worked more on the idea that 'hey, we just quietly do a good comic thats well drawn, with a good story, and a drunk largo at least once a month, and people will come'. I'm real happy to be working with Gamespy. Heck, i remember downloading beta versions of QuakeSpy itself years ago and playing fragfests over little crappy modem connections. Brings back good memories.

That's another thing. This whole T-shirt thing. I keep seeing that people are buying them. I don't know how Largo is managing that one. I decided to be really evil and add two more designs last week. Heheh, i know he'll crack under the financial pressure - never mind run out of places to hide all this megatokyo swag. ^^;;

Maybe in like a month or two i might actually believe it. We'll see. I'm still waiting for the lights to come on, and for everyone to bust out laughing sayin, "Gotcha!!"

Even so, the Gamespy stuff was a nice touch. Maybe they wont notice. ^_^

"december 7th"
Thursday - December 7, 2000
[Largo] - 10:59:00
In honor of today being the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, I thought I'd in turn bask in the irony of the gaming industry's history and talk about one of my old coin-op favorites, 1942.

Here is a classic shooter game that places you in the cockpit of a P38 as you fly thru the skies of Nippon. Sounds simple enough, get in plane, launch, and blow up as many Japanese pilots as you can.

Then the irony begins to set in, this game was created by Capcom, a Japanese game company. Imagine it, a group of guys got together and made a game where the player kills their own people. Either just plain morbid, or dark comedy at its best, this entire concept just gives me the chills.

I began wonder how I'd feel if I was making a shooter game where the player goes around and kills my own nation's armed forces.

I could call it, 1991 - you would play as a brave Iraqi pilot charging against the air and ground, and sea forces of the vile American Imperialists! Avoiding the tomahawk missiles and stealth fighters would be the worst of the ordeals, and at the end of the game you'll have to takeout the aircraft carrier with George Bush on it.

See, This is a game that will never be made, or if it was, I doubt it would sell well outside of the Persian Gulf.

But what if those tables were turned, I'm not sure if I would see this all as a twisted joke, or if I would be really insulted. I'd like to be able to ask the developers who made the original 1942 what they thought about it

Oh well, when in doubt just keep telling your self, "It's only a game."

Today's comic linkitage brings you deeper into the realm of the abstract. Beginning with a new comic based on geometric drawings. For the original in geometric abstract wacky-ness check out Triangle & Robert either strip is sure to make it so you never see basic shapes in the same innocent light, ever again.

There seems to be some comments of MegaTokyo 'selling out' or something to that effect, I'd like to point out that in order to sell out two qualifications must exist.

1. The person must agree to compromise thier own integrity or beliefs.

2. The person must get some mad cash flow for doing it.

I can assure you that we have not sold out. For one thing, I have no beliefs that I'd ever compromise, and more importantly. I've yet to get any of that mad cash flow. I mean really now, do any of you see a "PlanetLargo.com" anywhere?

Speaking of that, just why is it that I haven't got the mad cash flow... I bet Piro is hiding it someplace...

Now that I've said that, I'm going to plug our new friends over at gamespy, hah, see you can't stop me - I plug it again! and you'll click on that link and be entertained damnit!

"baka gnyow!"
Friday - December 8, 2000
[Piro] - 07:32:00
Ok, for those of you new to Megatokyo, and might be somewhat new to anime in general, I should supply a little additional information here regarding today's strip. "Naze Nani Megatokyo" is a spoof of "Naze nani Nadesico", a little skit that occurred several times in the animated tv series Martian Successor Nadesico. Yurika, the somewhat airheaded captain of the ship, decides to bolster the spirits of the crew by putting on a goofy show where she plays the 'silly bunny' asking questions of 'Ruri onesan' in order to educate the crew on how the ship works. That is why Largo and Piro are dressed the way they are.

As for why Erika and Kimiko are dressed as Rabi-en-Rose and Digiko from Digi Charat... uh... i don't know why, really... it just sorta... worked... it seemed so right... and yet so wrong at the same time... ^^;;;; Ah, what a fun episode. We must do this again.

The Gamespy linking has grossed us quite an increase in readership - which was kinda the whole point. :) Exposure is nice. It keeps me from chucking the whole project and catching up on some things, like Skies of Arcadia, and Final Fantasy IX, and... you get the idea. We even got emails from George Broussard and John Romero himself. ^^;; Thanks for havin a sense of humor guys.

It's been interesting reading some of the opinions and comments in the forums recently. The biggest problem with having a large group of people eyeing what you do three times a week is that everything you end up doing gets scrutinized. Reactions to us working with Gamespy was greeted with both praise and horror. It really is true, you can't please everyone.

That said, trying to 'please everyone' isn't what Largo and I are trying to do. If we were, then Megatokyo wouldn't be anything like it is today - it would have been driven by careful consideration and studies of what the statistics say that people want. Cheh. My attitude is give people a bit of what they want, then a whole lot of what they don't realize they want. Like Erika dressed up as Rabi-en-Rose and Kimiko in Digiko gear. Betya didn't know you wanted that :)

There are grumblings about 'selling out' and 'we dont want MT to change'. (sigh) if you folks dont get it at this point, i'll have to send Erika in to bean y'all but good. Largo and I have one goal - to improve MT until it is the best comic / manga / production (i use that word because to me, MT could move into almost any media) that it can possibly be. The only think that keeps it down are my crappy art skills, time constraints, day job, inability to write a good story... uh, you get the idea. We started MT for fun, we shall continue to do it for fun. There will be no selling out. Only things that improve Megatokyo will happen.

And as for the pace of the story, I really wish i could do MT daily. Largo and I could do the scripts for a daily with little problem, but it's the physical labor of drawing that prevents me from doing that. I'd rather just improve the quality of each episode than pump out more. We shall be doing some heavy story development in the next few weeks, so hopefully that will mollify everyone. If not, we are doing the best we can. :)

Oh, and on a side note (meaning day-job related, not comic related): I'm researching companies and/or contractors in the South East Michigan area who might be interested in doing some back-end work for the corportate website of the company i work for In Real Life. :) Myself and the marketing department have a handle on the web design and functionality - I just don't have the time to build the back-end. (unless i drop Megatokyo for a few months) It's not a huge project, but we need something that can be easily updated and modified by our marketing department (web interface) We need a turn-key solution that is well coded and won't break easily (a good PHP/mySQL backend of somesort). If you know of any companies in the reigon who you would reccomend, please email me. Once again, this is for my REAL JOB, not for the comic, and must be a reasonably close to the Ann Arbor, Michigan area. This has zero to do with Megatokyo, but you would get the opportunity to work with me - which might or might not be a good thing :P) I figure this is kind of a good place to ask :)

"things too fast"
Monday - December 11, 2000
[Piro] - 11:12:00
Ugh. What a weekend. Remember last week when I said that I had missed the deadline for the MJ-12 doujinshi project 'Love Spiral' (for the Winter Comike)? Well... Noritac-san gave tsubasa and I an extension - until December 12th. Honestly, it was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, yay! I can get something done for comike! On the other hand... drat, i thought i got out of that. :)

The biggest problem I've had with 'snapshot', the short story that I started working on last month for the project was that I just couldn't get into it. I am a big time TLS freak, as you may have guessed... yet the story wasn't coming. It had a lot to do with everything that has been happening with Megatokyo recently (as you can imagine). Saturday, however, inspiration struck. Things fell together in the story, I simplified a few things, added a few others, and bingo! It was there!

Given the short amount of time I've really had to devote to this, this is really an introduction to the story - the first installment. That left doing the illustrations to accompany the story. I figured that the minimum i needed was 11 megatokyo-strip-quality drawings. I have to say, i was on a roll yesterday. I was able to complete the 11 drawings in less than 4 hours. I'm still astounded. And Youko-chan looks realllly good. ^_^

I figure that I will do 'snapshot' on an installment basis for MJ-12 over the next few months. So, if you are good little boys and girls, and I get Noritac's permission, I'll let all of you see it in due time. Don't forget that I have already received permission to post 'envelope' (the doujinshi project i did over the summer). With any luck, I'll have it posted by the end of the week.

The biggest part of the challenge I faced this weekend was that believe it or not - I did not spend most of the weekend working on Megatokyo and my doujinshi project. I spent most of it shopping. I was helping Sarah find a dress for the company Christmas party. I have to say - i don't mind shopping. I tend to take the time to observe clothing types and fashion ideas for characters. But even I can only deal with so much. Girls have this unbelievable ability to hunt thru clothing in a methodical nature that no man can match. By 8:30 pm, i couldn't remember if I was in Twelve Oaks Mall or Fairlane mall anymore, and brain cells were beginning to shut down. I bow to Sarah's amazing perseverance. I don't know how you do it. :)

Ah, and for those who ask, "What the heck is 'Napple Tale'??" - go check it out for yourselves. Here are a few reviews to check out, here and here :) I had a chance to play Napple Tale in all its glory over at Mike's place a few weeks ago. I have to say, its a great game. You find yourself saying 'what the hell am i doing playing this?'... yet you keep playing. :)

"master of orion"
Wednesday - December 13, 2000
[Largo] - 11:03:00
Looking out my window, I see a layer of ice is covering the road… This is not acceptable.

Lately I've been keeping one eye on the upcoming Master of Orion 3. I have fond memories of wasting many a day playing the previous Master of Orion in college. In some cases I just wasted many days, period.

Master of Orion was ground breaking if not simply addicting for its time. Here you are, leader of a species ready to take over the Orion sector, all you need is people, guns, and beer! Well, maybe not the beer part, but you'd still want guns and other devices of mass destruction. For those who missed out on the MOE experience, understand that the game was not a RTS, it was a traditional strategy game using turn based combat. You conquered planets, colonized them, and thus expanded your empire, with the goal always being total domination, etc, etc. Though if you were really good, you could simply negotiate most of your problems away.

This week I began reading the designer diary for MO3, uncovering some facts that had previously escaped me. They decided to reduce the number of alien races from the original twenty-something to only eight, but expand the differences between them. I can accept that, a more developed and unique race beats several dozen races whose only difference is a few more points in their ugliness score. In general, the developers are just doing 'more', more AI, more political situations, more treaties, and a hell of a lot more lines of code.

It will be interesting to see if the new game lives up to the classics, you never can tell when it comes to sequels but from what I've seen, they have a good shot at pulling it off.

Have I mentioned how much I love Little Gamers? This strip rocks, It's on my ever growing list of ultra-sweet comics that must be read each and everyday. They did not one, but two sweet strips that feature a certain pair of characters from MegaTokyo.

Aphex sent in this link to a comic called Error Level 3, and went on to say "it's actually funny". Next up is a comic that begs the question, What's a Life? When I figure out the answer, I'll let everyone know.

I've been looking at a new toy that I'd really like to try out, the iPaq pda. Before I get blasted by you PalmOS guys, know that yes I know the Ipaq is a PocketPC (read: Windows CE) device. However, if I get it, I was thinking about dumping Linux and X-Windows on it, I found some neat screenshots over at here that show linux running on the ipaq. I'd kinda like to be able to telnet into my systems from a handheld with wireless Ethernet. The real advantage I see is I'd finally be able to compile my kernel while in my pocket, a real wang-kernel as it were. I get chills just thinking about the sweetness factor of it all

Besides, if I put apache server on it, I can finally be given the line of, "Is that is a webserver in your pants or are you just happy to see me?"

"the shopping challenge"
Wednesday - December 13, 2000
[Piro] - 15:12:00
Ah. Christmas. It just occurred to me that Christmas is coming sometime soon, like in a few weeks or something. I need to check the calendar. The reason I know it's coming is that the office Christmas party is tomorrow. Seraphim and I spent a good chunk of the weekend looking for an appropriate outfit for her to wear to the party, as well as some requisite gift shopping that needed doing.

As i mentioned on Monday, I'm pretty good when it comes to following Serpahim around while shopping for clothes. First off, watching her try on different outfits is always enjoyable. I try to he helpful, I try to be constructive, I even help her find specific things, like 'this item, one size smaller'. There is another reason I don't really mind tagging along during these shopping excursions. I get a lot of fashion and clothing ideas for character drawings by looking around. An hour spent in a Bebe store is not a waste of time to me. It's good to know what DKNY, Polo, Liz, Hilfiger, LEI, Guess, Esprit and all the rest are making right now - The girls I draw need to be fashion conscious, or people will make fun of them.

I have to tell you though, even a guy like me, who really can find constructive things to do while helping his girlfriend shop for clothes, has his limits. No matter how hard I try, after four or so hours of shopping, my brain starts to shut down. After, say, eight hours of shopping, i start to loose brain matter. Things start to get hazy. I start examining thermostats on the walls to see how they work. I start reading the manufacturers and patent numbers on clothes hangers. The world gets more surreal. I long for Puchuu's and ALF-like creatures to walk by.

This phenomenon, this ability women have to ceaselessly root thru arbitrary racks of assembled fabric must be something genetic. I can't think of any guys who can match any young lady when it comes to sheer endurance at the mall. I think this fact is often overlooked in dating simulation games. I mean, the games so idealize quality time spent with the girls that sometimes they are unrealistic about what that 'wonderful shopping trip' is really like.

I think that if I were to do a date sim, I'd be much more realistic. They have to take up a large amount of time. Much of that time must be spent doing literally nothing as she is in the dressing room trying things on. Your answers to the 'How does this look?" can get you into trouble no matter what you say. She should send you searching racks for 'that blue one in size 7' - which of course you can't find. Then, after trying a half dozen things on, you find that she doesn't really like any of them, and that she wants to go to the same store in a mall an hour away.

After arriving at the next store, you go thru basically the same process all over again. You note the lingerie department across the isle, but of course she doesn? need any of that stuff. Then you get to play 'where did she go??' where you frantically run around trying to find her. You try other departments. You start to panic. Then you find that she's been in the department you first lost her the whole time.

Then, viola! she finds the perfect dress. Happiness ensues as you get in line to purchase the hard-won dress. A half hour later, you have the purchased item over your shoulder. It's obvious that now that the task is done, you can make a bee-line to the doors, out to the car, and back home, where perhaps you could get some food, because you are starving and I swear ladies clothing sections need vending machines. She, however, has different ideas. It is amazing how many things a girl can find to look at on the way OUT of a department. After an hour of looking thru four more departments, you near the door. Relief is in sight.

"Oh my god! I need shoes! I don't have shoes that go with this dress!"

It's a blow that can kill a weaker man. As you turn to go back into the store and whatever hell awaits, you turn, and look longingly outside. It's dark now, the snow is falling. There is one lucky fellow who has escaped, walking towards his car. Your path, however, does not lead to the car. It leads back thru the store, thru the same departments, thru the same "where did she go?" game, into the mall itself.

Here, there is actually some hope. Hark! Is that a Electronic's Boutique over there? It's magnetic pull is strong, you look over longingly at the glowing store, with it's Final Fantasy IX display, it's bright glowing lights...

you look at her and casually say, "hey, look, an Electronics Boutique," hoping that she will see the desire in your eyes, the longing to be let free to drift across the hall into a 'Guys Store'. She in turn gives you this look, this whimsical, almost sad look, a heartfelt look of absolute need.

"But i need your opinion on the shoes to go with this dress!"

You are done, you are broken. There is no countering this attack. You turn your back to the heaven-like glow across the hall, and enter the darker, dimmer hellish 9 West store, a store that carries nothing but womens shoes, true hell on earth, to face your fate.

hehe. Yea. I tell you. You want REAL tests in dating sims? There aren't many that can pass the Shopping Challenge! :-)

If you remember Monday's rant, I talked about the fact that I had met the deadline for the doujinshi project I was working on. Unfortunately, I *didn't* make it. Tsubasa and I just couldn't pull together a submission that we felt was of the quality it needed to be. We needed more time for the translations to be done properly, and frankly it could use a few more drawings. So, Tsubasa and I made the tough decision to hold off.

All is not really lost, however. What we plan on doing instead is making 'snapshots' available for viewing over the net instead. It's the first installment of the story, so with any luck I'll be updating it on a regular basis. I'll put 'envelope' up first, then the first installment of 'snapshots'. It's not 'Megatokyo', but you might like it - we'll see.

Finally, I hope you all have enjoyed Dom's contribution to Megatokyo. Aside from terrorizing people on the forums, his 'Shirt Guy Dom Stick Figure Days' were quite funny. Dom doesn't use a mouse to draw these stick figures - he uses a trackball. Obviously, its hard to draw stick figures well with a trackball, and so for the benefit of all I plan to buy him a mouse. It seems that in return, Dom has pre-empted me and sent a trackball to me for Christmas. A Logitec Trackball, to be exact. Thank you Dom. Such a ... thoughtful gift. And when you get the mouse I am sending, don't mind the ticking. Microsoft mice do that. Honest.

"envelope..."
Saturday - December 16, 2000
[Piro] - 21:34:00
Ok, I'm gonna keep this REAL short tonight. I spent a good part of the day re-hashing and editing 'envelope', that illustrated short story doujinshi I've been talking about, and now ... it's ready to go. Well, sort of: I need to get the final Japanese version back from Tsubasa, but that can go up in the next few days. Everything else should be in order.

'envelope' is a story based on the True Love Story 2 game and focuses on Nanase Kasumi, one of the main girls in the game (without a doubt Tsubasa's favorite). Former knowledge of TLS2 is not really required, and i think the story stands well on it's own. I'll know as soon as I start getting some feedback if that is indeed the case.

I think the real relevance of 'envelope' is the fact that it pre-dates Megatokyo - i finished envelope back sometime in July. It was really my first large, cohesive project. The successful completion of envelope led me to the fantasy that I could handle a project like Megatokyo. It was the first time I got away from drawing just single illustrations and concentrated on telling stories with my drawings.

A word of caution - 'envelope' is not Megatokyo. It's a love story. It's not sappy, but i like to think it's cute, and a little subtle. It's not gamer humor. It's a bit like a dating simulation or visual novel game itself - it has the feel of a gal-game, or at least that was my goal. I tried to get the 'feel' of True Love Stories 2... which is what a good doujinshi story should do. According to the MJ-12 folks, I seem to have done a pretty good job of capturing the TLS2 'feel'. So perhaps this is the best way to share that 'feel' with people who have never played it.

At any rate, here it is. read and enjoy. I hope.

The presentation has some nice features - for each frame, I've included a link to the preliminary sketch that the final drawing was drawn from. I've also included higher resolution images. For the first few weeks, i plan to disable the high res images. If you are interested in higher rez images, you can go back in a few weeks and they will be active. I just don't want to bog down the poor server.

Ok, gotta do Monday's comic. Enjoy.

"alice"
Wednesday - December 20, 2000
[Largo] - 09:07:00
Well, It's been a long week, I'll start off with saying I've got almost two weeks of back email I need to go through, I ought to just stop mentioning my email backlog, as it's become a ever present problem for which I find the need to vehemently apologize to everyone about.

So, with that in mind, I'll try to address some of the emails I've gotten but been unable to discuss in detail this evening.

First off, I'd like to point out something really silly to you guys. Two weeks ago we started getting emails saying we were too 'game-ish' and were abandoning a story arc in favor of a gaming joke of the day style. Now we are getting emails saying we are not doing enough gamer oriented strips. Maybe I'm missing something, but hey guys - In a effort to reach out and appease all the people complaining, we'll try to do a better job of making sure our genuine blend of splicing the genres improves. We really haven't done much different; however, never let it be said we don't read our email.

Recently it was requested that Piro and I attend a fan Q&A session on IRC. So we'll be fielding questions and what not this weekend (12/23) at noon (CST) on undernet.org's #megatokyo. This is assuming people actually show up of course.

I would also like to announce that I've finally joined a cult. I purchased a handspring Visor, which has been a really sweet item for me. It's not what I expected, so far I've yet to figure out who is our enigmatic leader, but I'm certain that this is a cult. It has a cult feel, I walk around proudly displaying my new Visor Platinum, and other cult members give me a nod or end up approaching me, wishing to engage in some sort of religious ceremony known as 'beaming'. These people do scare me…

Speaking of scary things, I've had a chance finally checkout American Mcgee's Alice. If you haven't heard of this game, which should only include people living under rocks, like Montana, know that this game is amazing. It raises the bar in the 3D genre to a new height which for those of you keeping score means the next batch of 3D developers better be former Olympic pole vaulters if they want to out do American Mcgee's record jump.

I'm giving it my personal approval. I give this game, two handfuls of pills up, which I'll wash down with some trippy techno house music. I really think Lewis Carroll would approve of this game, let's face it - the book it's based on had more drug innuendo in it then all of Jim Morison's music combined. So my advice is checkout the game, dim the lights, and inhale to let the coolness flow into the vertebrae.

Alice bridges that fine line between game and art that I hear so much about. I look at this game and think, not only is this fun to play, but it's the product of some talented artists and designers who see this title as more then just another 3D game. Spending even just five minutes with this game ought to make even the most devote nay sayers of the 3D genre give their views a second and third thought.

Not to short change the rest of the game, the gameplay rocks, the soundtrack for it matches up with the art with a perfect fit, projecting just the right moods when needed. Calling this game a masterpiece of gaming would be an insult, it is something greater, something new. Whatever American Mcgee's Alice is, I hope that we see more of it.

Of course, people could disagree with my humble opinions, but those people should all be dragged into the street and shot.

"interview? us? why?"
Friday - December 22, 2000
[Piro] - 23:10:00
Ugh. It's been a bad week. I'm sick again - some kind of blasted head cold complete with sinus blahs (I've been thru at least two boxes of Kleenex in two days). I've been trying to hit a Friday deadline at the office, and I feel like I've been working in slow motion because my head has basically been spinning since Monday. I've been trying to take care of last minute Christmas shopping, and all the other stuff that crops up around the holidays... well, quite honestly, i am beat. I really just wanna veg in front of the TV and play Bauble Puzzle. Really, that's all i think my brain should be doing right now.

Many of you will recognize today's comic as being the bench strip that we did back in October. I still consider it one of our funnier one-shots, and I really think that a lot of people haven't seen it. So, that combined with the fact that i totally fuqqed up Friday's strip (it wasn't very good. don't know how it slipped past quality control (looks pointedly at Largo)) we decided that it was a good time to put it in the rotation. So, if nothing else, please just laugh at it again, and think of how miserable i feel right now. ^^;;

Miserable only in the fact that my head feels like a bag full of those plastic peanuts. Otherwise i am feeling pretty good. I am absolutely shocked at the response to 'envelope'. I mean it. Shocked. I didn't think people would really like it much. I don't think I've received this many emails in so short a time ever before. I'm... kinda stunned. It also tells me that I'm moving in the right direction with things. Gives me a warm fuzzy feeling in... wait, that's the decongestant kicking in.

So. You liked envelope. Well, if that's the case, I got more where that came from. I guess i should start throwing some of the other little stories and fan fictions together. Anyone here ever read 'Brewery Panic'? Heheh. I need to resurrect that...

I just noticed this, but oddly enough, today's strip was done right after the last time I was sick as a dog. I rarely get sick, but this is the 2nd time this year. I think it has something to do with the goddamn snow and stuff we've had here. Remember when i was gushing poetic about 'oh look! it's snowing!! yay!'... I'd like to go back a few months and shoot the idiot dumbass me that said that. I am sick and tired of driving in the snow. Every damn day it's more snow, more ice, more rollover accidents on I-94. I just wanted to stay home all friggin week.

I really hope I kick this cold soon. I have too much to do over the weekend. (sigh)

This week's sketch - the sketch of the week over at fredart... ah, fredart, my poor neglected page... it needs work ^_^ is something i drew up after Poe of exploitation now showed me his Xmas strip featuring the totally cute/cool Jordan-chan wearing a 'ph33r the cute ones' t-shirt in this strip. Thanks poe.

Oh, and before I forget, for some idiotic reason, Largo and I have agreed to show up on Saturday (yes, tomorrow) at 1:00 EST (that's 12:00 noon CST] over at the IRC channel #megatokyo over on Undernet for a question and answer session. Honestly, I don't mind doing this one bit. Not sure if our answers will really be all that interesting, but if you are bored beyond belief on Saturday, come on by. I might even be fun, who knows. :P

Sleep is overtaking me. Thank you for your patience with me this week - i missed a rant, and today's comic is something akin to a re-run - I promise that thinks will keep motoring along next week.

"merry christmas!"
Monday - December 25, 2000
[Piro] - 00:00:01
I'll expand a little more on this later - right now I am on my way out the door to various christmas activities ^_^

The song that Seraphim and Piro are singing karaoke to is a great old tune by the Pogues called 'Fairytale of New York', and Sarah and I have always considered this 'our' christmas song. Highly reccomended that you go out and get a CD with this tune on it. We have the 'Edge of Christmas' disk, which has a lot of other great tunes on it as well. :)

On a sad note, I just discovered this morning that Kirsty MacColl, who sang Seraphim's lines in the original Pogues song, died in a boating accident just six days ago. I was very saddened to discover it this morning. The song wouldn't be the same with out her. Our condolences go to her family and friends on this tragic happening.

Merry Christmas from Piro and Serpahim! Enjoy your holiday!~

"bah humbug?"
Monday - December 25, 2000
[Largo] - 00:00:01
In the spirit of the holidays, I'll be doing something a little different today and not be myself, if that doesn't make sense then read on, and it just may.

My friends may call me a Scrooge, but let's face it people, the holidays suck. To begin with - you can't go to any stores today because everything is closed. Yet not twenty-four hours ago, the stores were not only open, but full of stark raving mad and in some cases violent people, who were too busy looking for that one toy that the marketing wizards of Madison Avenue had successfully managed to brainwash all the kids into wanting just in time for the annual 'lets make a profit at the end of the year sale.' to notice that their foot was lodged firmly on top of your face.

Hey, don't get me wrong, it's not that I have anything against the good things that xmas stands for, in fact - I admire them. Traits like kindness, forgiveness, and generosity abound this time of year, but I question how genuine these things are, since I don't see them much the rest of the year.

I think xmas is a great time of the year to see old friends, have a nice meal with family, and try connect to our fellow man, but really now - if these things mean so much to us, why aren't we this way all year round? Two months ago I was at a store and the people would rather punch me in the face then so much as look at me, did anyone let me have their parking spot or hold a door open for me? Hell no! Yet, suddenly, almost magically - December comes to this nation and everyone around me is full of that Charlie Brown Christmas spirit.

So if it's true we aren't going to be ourselves during this season of joy, then just who the hell are we? A bunch of jerks that are pretending to be nice for the sake of the season? No, I just don't buy that, maybe it's the sap in me but I believe we are better then that. I think we as a people are busy, very busy - and xmas is the only time of the year where we are nearly bludgeoned to death with the fact that we need to stop and take time to look around us, to see what we can do to help others.

So all that xmas marketing and hype may be a good thing after all, if it makes us slow down for a moment and see what giant jerks we are when we don't take notice of our surroundings. It's easy to turn a blind eye to the problems of the world we live in, and during the holidays we are reminded not to do that.

So until people learn to slow down all year round, I'll stick to being a Scrooge, after all - someone has to keep the faith.

"mega-tokyo monogatari"
Wednesday - December 27, 2000
[Piro] - 00:45:40
Heheh. Sorry about today's comic - Dressin' Junpei like in l33t gear... (sigh) have we no shame? No, not really. :) Besides, it's all largo's fault anyways. At any rate, we're about to dive headlong into a pretty long story arc, got a lot of ground to cover in the next few months.

Developing a story for a comic like Megatokyo is a complex, but not unheard of problem. Novels, movies and short stories usually have a fairly simple structure that they follow - there is a beginning, a middle and a ending. Serial comics like Megatokyo don't have the right fabric for this structure. What you end up with in comics are 'story arcs' and an 'overall plot' that meanders along till either the fans get bored and stop reading it, or someone does the world a favor and murders the comic artist in his studio. Remember when Excel jacks the manga-ka dude in 'Excel Saga'? heheh. For some reason I foresee myself in that situation. I still have nightmares about it.

The advantage to this structure, and why I like it, is that it's much more organic. The stories can flow and roll along like life itself. You have a few weeks where nothin much happens, and you are bored. Then you have a few weeks that are a whirlwind of activity, good or bad. Then things settle down again. Yet it's all connected in some weird funky way.

Sometimes, this isn't good. I can think of several examples where the first major story arc, the one where the situations and the characters are all developed, is fantastic. Then, all the story arcs that follow are terrible, which is very disappointing. Hopefully MT won't turn out to be a comic like that. There's enough grist for the mill with this strip, and enough demented material floating around our collective heads that I'm not really worried about it yet.

Well, i hope y'all had a nice holiday. It will probably be a slow week for most of you. Even I ended up taking a personal day yesterday to catch up on some things (like, getting over this cold and getting some rest). The reaction to our 'Fairy tale in New York' comic has been favorable, and I'm glad you all liked it. I'm originally from New York myself, and Sarah and I have been singin this song to each other for years now. I'm still a bit freaked out at the loss of the young lady who sang the woman's lines in the song, Kirsty MacColl. I had no idea that this had happened when i decided to pencil the strip. I suppose in some ways it can be seen as a tribute to her and her fans. Like I said yesterday, the song just wouldn't be the same without her.

Oh, and several people have pointed out that the lines should read 'Merry Christmas your arse', which is indeed true. I took the liberty of changing it based on the fact that Seraphim herself sings it that way. I think it's that much more insulting from a north American point of view, and you know how you flub the words in Karaoke every once and a while. Oh, and the missing verse - i left that out intentionally due to the space limitation in the comic (it would have added one panel, which would have awkward.)

The question and answer session on the #megatokyo channel over on Undernet on Saturday was a lot of fun. Frankly, i don't think i said a 1/4 of what i was thinking of saying, and I never even let people see some of the screenshots and pictures of my cats I was planning on sharing. About half way thru the interview the server i was on dropped me and, well, it took me a good 15 min to get back in. I'll let you all know when the log is available for everyone to read. Thanks to all those who attended, and foraipaar 90- 6324wur a09

ack. my cat just came up and curled up on my hands on the keyboard. Makes it kinda impossible to type.

Where was I? Oh, a word of thanks to all who attended and to the guys who overcame all the technical problems with the chat itself. I've never been on THAT side of a chat like that before. Very odd feeling.

Ah, yes, the screenshot. That's Moi-san from Risky Safety, a rather adorable little animated shorts (about 10 minutes a piece) for the Omishi Magical Theater. Risky is a little devil/shinagami who is trying to gather enough souls to become a full fledged demon. Her counterpart (they occupy the same body, it seems ^_^) is Safety, a adorable clumsy little angel who is blind as a bat without her glasses. The show is adorably cute, and doesn't really appeal to everyone, because it has a very slow pace, but i love it.

Finally, before i go to bed, I want to ask a favor. I am in need of two quake models. I am recognizing the fact that the day may never ever come that I will be able to have the skill to make the RuriQuake model I've been talking about for years. If there is anyone out there who has some modeling skills and experience with making quake models, i'd like to hear from you. Lets just say I have an idea i am perusing, and I need two quake 3 models to make it happen.

I'm gonna go play some Bauble Puzzle.

"grandia xxvii"
Thursday - December 28, 2000
[Largo] - 23:57:00
You know, there really isn't enough time in the day, I've determined I no longer have any free time these days, too many projects require my attention, and end up competing for time I do not have, it's a shame really. I think I need a vacation, or several genetically engineered clones. It's always been my opinion that world could use more of me, or at least less of Piro. Either way I'm happy.

Recently I sat down and beat Final Gran-uh, I mean Grandia II. It seems the makers of Grandia have decided to do the Squaresoft thing and just recycle some general themes of their first game, but put it into a totally unrelated plot line, exactly like what has become the Final Fantasy franchise.

To those who never played this game or its predecessor, know that this title is a console RPG. Pretty standard theme, go around doing a bunch of inane fetch and beat the bad guy quests, level up, power up, and repeat ad infinitum. Eventually you discover the typical plot lines involved in Japanese RPGs, such as the main characters love interest starts off hating him, and by following her around everywhere she eventually comes to love him. [writers note: I tried this once, and it's total crap, not only does it not work, but it gets you a restraining order] you may even learn that the main villain is your own brother, or your father, or the guy who was once college roommate to the man who once spoke to a man who nearly said hello to the daughter of the guy who almost sold your father a hotdog at a Dallas Mavericks game seven years ago; you know, the normal stuff.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with recycling things, some of my favorite things are recycled; such as soda cans, paper, glass, and our jokes. To be fair, Grandia II has a sweet magic and battle system, at times I enjoyed doing the seemingly endless and pointless battles more then I enjoyed the seemingly endless and pointless plot.

You may have noticed today's episode's non-sequitor quality, it's grand individualistic virtues shine thru as a shining example of bullshit, and the shameless promotion of other webcomics.

If you are wondering who all the cameos are from, from panel 2 - it begins with the Bomberman likeness that is Little Gamers, then goes to the whacked out world of Exploitation Now, and finally ending with a big bowl of Lethal Doses.

"here we go again"
Sunday - December 31, 2000
[Piro] - 04:01:00
Well, I hope everyone has been enjoying ther vacations - that is, if you really were on vacation. Even if you didn't take most of last week off, two three-day weekends in a row is nice. I don't know if I am really rested or not, it's been a busy couple of weeks.

December, like all the months before it, was a month of spectacular growth for Megatokyo - we saw the number of visitors to the site increase exponentially over last month's figures (my god, where do you people come from??? ^^;;) and even t-shirt sales have been amazing... I must say a big thanks to everyone who purchased shirts, mousepads, mugs and stuff. It's very much appreciated. In fact, I think i should go buy a shirt or two. I'd kinda like to have one.

Not bad for a month where i felt i was tripping over myself the whole time.

I keep waiting for this mass exodus where people start throwing tomatoes at me and largo as they drink up and leave the bar. That's why i keep largo around. I figure if i stand behind him, less tomatoes will hit me. :)

While it is true that the story has motored along a little this month, I've been feeling a lack of focus that really has a lot to do with the holidays. There is too much going on in December to really focus on a single project. As for the last two weeks of December, there hasn't really been any story-related comics since the 20th (except for the 'Junpei f33ls l33t' strip, which is part of the story). Actually, i was going to launch into our 3-month story arc on Friday, but ugh... several things came up last week that prevented me from drawing a strip for Friday, so we used this one instead. This re-hash of the 'puchuu' strip was really an inside joke and wasn't going to be a comic - but thank god it was done. ^_^

poor Dom. The emergency call to create a 'shirt guy dom day' strip went out, but by the time dom got a strip to me, i had already posted todays. It's a shame, because dom's strip was way funnier. ^^;;

So, that being said - the holidays are over, the new year is upon us, and what better way to start the new year than to launch into a long, painful story arc! yea! ^_^ *I* am done messing around. Largo, myself, Dom, Ed and everyone else who has been helping with the project has spent time this weekend to help me get a little more organized and a little better prepared. It should last at least a week, perhaps a week and a half, i figure. :) So everyone who has been bugging us to continue the story... hush. this month should shut you all up once and for all. :)

On a side note, i was in Borders books the other day doing some after Christmas shopping when i wandered into the art book section of the store. Art books are funny things, I've purchased many of them over the years, and it seems that none of them have every really helped me. I have several Bruce Hogarth books, and a half dozen other 'how to draw [x]' books, none of which i think I've ever really used other than to get frustrated over. After thumbing thru "How to draw great-looking comic book women" (yes, it is a real book - which i chuckled over to no end (it should be called 'how to draw big-boobed super-hero women'... jezus.) I spotted a book called 'Your Career in the Comics" by Lee Nordling.

I ended up purchasing this book. I mean, its not like i do comics for a living, but gee... since i know just about nothing about syndicated comics, i figured i should at least read up on it a bit.

Gee, i am doing everything wrong. Isn't THAT a big surprise. :) Not that I'd ever even try to get MT into the traditional syndicated comic track... it'd never work. MT is a project born of the web and it's multi-media nature, so here it will stay... at least for the most part. :P

lessee... oh, and the sketch of the week. I've been playing 'Skies of Arcadia' lately - this combined with the desire to start Final Fantasy IX at some point in the near future brought back the idea of RPG fantasy world elements and Megatokyo. For some reason I envision it being a lot like Fortune Quest ... I don't know why. ^_^

"spam czar"
Tuesday - January 2, 2001
[Largo] - 08:02:00
Today the fine providers of l33t info over at Slashdot linked this site in their poll entitled, "The main reason I got broadband access". After checking the weblogs for today, our hit counts were indeed, disaster-rific!

"Ruri-Ruri Naked & Petrified"

For those who don't quite understand the above reference, It began as a prank to what this website originally was, a knockoff of slashdot. Long before Piro and I had the complete lack of wisdom to end up making a webcomic, while we still had an ounce of good sense left in our heads, we setup megatokyo.com as a website for Japanese news and events.

Of course, this project was a dismal failure, which only resulted in spam posts featuring the above listed "Ruri-Ruri Naked & Petrified", these posts where made presumably by the same guy who pours hot grits down his pants on the before mentioned Slashdot on a semi-regular basis.

Initializing Rant Engine 2001.1.2

I gotta hand it to mankind when it comes to technology, all the power that is instant global communication in the palm of our hands, and we choose to spam everything in existence, raising the noise to signal ratio to an unprecedented level of mediocrity.

Between all the webspyders on the net searching, pulling, and grabbing my email off the many places it sits, I end up getting to start the day off right, with a balanced breakfast of eggs, toast, cereal, and fsck'n spam!

I hate spam, can you tell?

Tomorrow morning I expect to wake up, check my email, and find a offer for a all herbal miracle drug that not only functions as a viagra substitute but also reverses the aging process, improves my memory, increases weight loss, and gets me a good deal on replacement printer toner.

In case you didn't notice, I hate spam.

Bandwidth is a resource, it may not be a natural one, but it's a resource in limited supply nonetheless. Every time a piece of spam mail is sent out, a million electrons cry out for mercy as their short sweet existence is wasted to deliver a meaningless piece of spam. I demand we setup round the clock protests at the Direct Marketers Association Headquarters until the senseless slaughter of these poor electrons ceases!

How can we standby and allow these innocent beings to be victimized and abused by the cold unfeeling hands of corporate America?

No, protests are not enough; I demand we as a nation declare a - WAR ON SPAM! - the newly formed SEA - Spam Enforcement Agency is pledged to stop all trafficking of spam into the net. My sources tell me that such an agency could - with billions of dollars in funding - be able to stop at least 1% of the spam that enters the net.

Furthermore, I appoint myself as the first Spam Czar. I pledge to carry on the good fight against senseless dribble - wherever, and whenever it strikes.

To that end I am stopping this rant before it gets even sillier.

"hanashite kudasai"
Wednesday - January 3, 2001
[Piro] - 22:00:00
I remember the day I discovered that there were real, honest-to-goodness soundtracks available for some of these new-fangled anime programs I was starting to watch. Heck, I remember freaking out when I discovered that there were far more than 5 VHS tapes of Kimagure Orange Road in existence - it had been an TV series! Wow! Then, I started to come across listings of Anime CDs that were available. I almost couldn't believe what i was reading.

"Oh my god. look at all the pretty soundtrack CDs..."

This, of course, was the start of a very long, very slippery, financially devastating slope which left me with no money, maxed out credit cards, no friends, living in the stree... er, well, it wasn't that bad, but you get the idea ^_^. The sad thing was that I never came anywhere near having all the anime CDs, tapes, books, and manga that I wanted. I think the fact that I could never, ever EVER collect everything was pretty depressing. Never mind the financial costs - acquiring the sheer volume of anime related material is daunting and I think the main cause of 'anime burnout'. But that's another story. Remind me to recount it sometime.

I was ordering Cds by the dozen - at $35 to $45 bucks a pop, it added up fast. Pretty soon I was collecting all the CDs for all the anime series I was watching. It was insane. Each series had at least 5 to 15 CDs you could buy! There were Original Sound Tracks, there were Image Albums. Then there were soundtracks from the movies, soundtracks from the OAV series, there were drama disks, there were radio show disks, poetry disks...

I never stood a chance. I really didn't. Thank god I never owned a LD player. It's the CDs that killed me. To this day I scratch my head when i look at the piles of disks I own and say, "what the HELL was I thinking?"

Over the years I've probably listened to more anime than I've actually watched. I guess that's because i would really rather draw or work on things while listening than to sit and vegetate in front of the TV. I listen to anime CDs at work. I often chuckle over the fact that the hot, sexy, final design for the lobby of this fancy dot-com corporate headquarters came to me while listening to the soundtrack for "Mahou no Shoujo Fancy La La" :) Heheh. If they only knew.

I was digging thru this pile the other day and pulled out a few disks I hadn't listened to in years. One of my favorites is Bannou Bunka Neko Musume (All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl) Nuku Nuku - Sound Phase OII. Yuzo Takada is one of my earliest influences. I actually purchased all of the Sound Phase disks (there were seven I think) long before I ever saw the anime. I hated the anime. I love the Sound Phase disks.

Anime CDs are funny. Sometimes, they are just music. Either that cheezy background music that we have grown to love, or chipper little J-pop songs that make people look funny at you when you have them blaring from your stereo in your car. Drama disks are even weirder. It's like listening to anime without the visual aids, and really rely 100% on the acting capabilities of the voice actors/actresses (or 'seiyuu' - remember that term folks - there will be a test later). The Nuku Nuku Sound Color disks are a lot of fun to listen to. These days, i can understand what they are saying. Back when I used to listen to these disks, i couldn't.

But, for some reason, it didn't matter. I connected with the acting, with the intonations, the general mood of what was going on. Most anime fans groan when they end up with a 'drama disk' - I've actually found that some of my favorite CDs are drama disks. Nuku Nuku beating up some drunk old men who get too fresh with her. I live for that sometimes...

"nan nanda onoko??"

"son'nani sune nai de yo"
Wednesday - January 5, 2000
[Piro] - 01:05:00
(Piro's rant overwritten by Largo's rant.)

"ochitsuite kangae tai kibun da"
Monday - January 8, 2001
[Piro] - 01:02:00
I was in a particularly bad mood last friday, and it even slipped a little into friday's rant. As a result, I received many very nice e-mails encouraging me to cheer up and best luck in overcoming whatever it was that precipitated the deleted rant. Thank you, i always appreciate it. I am sooo bad about answering email, but rest assured, I read all of them.

I received quite a few emails in appreciation of last week's 'Piro Bumps Into Kimiko' strips which culminated with the colored strip on friday. I was hoping that people would like them, and according to the response, most of you did. I did get one e-mail which begged me, "for the love of megatokyo take the rest of the month off and get back to what made MT so great in the first place!" Heheh. You can't please everyone. ^_^

Feedback is a funny thing. I get a lot of email - about 90% of it is very positive. The bad emails don't bother me at all. I am a firm believer in not letting your head swell too much from positive feedback, and not getting depressed by the really negative emails. Years ago, a bad email could stop me from drawing for days. Not anymore. I take everything with a grain of salt. If i didn't, all the praise would give me an ego the size of Largo's... and the world doesn't need that. :P

Life has been pretty good lately. I've been busy at work, but not insanely so. The holidays want great, the cats are healthy, the snow has stopped falling, Sarah still loves me... ^^;;. As I explained, it wasn't a negative e-mail that set me off.

So what the heck was my problem last week?

I was in an artistic funk for almost three days. I was beginning to think that perhaps Megatokyo was getting TOO popular. How can this be bad? When it was just me and Fredart, I pretty much could do whatever I wanted. Some stuff came out great, some really sucked. It didn't really matter - I mean, there weren't really any consequences to experimenting. In fact, people seemed to get a kick out of the variety.

Sequential art is an interesting medium to work in. I use the term 'sequential' rather than 'comic' because to me, Megatokyo is more a work of 'sequential art' than a 'comic'. MT is often like a 'comic', because it's usually comedic, and it has a pretty standard format. Last week, there weren't any punch lines, and it wasn't supposed to be funny. MT is 'sequential art' - 3 times a week, there is something new, something that happens in sequence. That's my only real rule.

And it's gonna get me into trouble. I can see it.

I worry that the problem with Megatokyo's popularity is that people will build particular expectations that will try very hard to force it into being just an 'online comic'. This is not an insult to online comics. Most of you know how great and refreshing online comics are. As I've said from the beginning... i wasn't really trying to create an 'online comic' with Megatokyo - there just isn't any other place for us. You know, a comic may or may not have an underlying story, but each and every day there is a gag and a punch line. For me, life usually has plenty of punch lines - but not every day.

Last week we had three comics without a punch line. It was like i broke some code of ethics or something.

MT is going to have some pretty serious moments in it. How are we going to deal with these when people expect to come here for a laugh? Honestly, I'm not sure. The whole thing is a bit of an experiment. Are we trying to do too much? Are we expecting too much of the medium? *I* don't think so. But I've been wrong before.

It's funny, but while i was stewing about a few select reactions to my chicanery last week, i started thinking about Bill Waterson and Calvin and Hobbs. You know, God and his Work. ^_^ Waterson made us laugh every day, and I will forever stand in awe of that comic. Out of all the strips Waterson did, i can think of only ONE strip that was part of a story arc that just didn't have a punch line. (you know the one where Calvin gets as big as the universe then finds a door in the last panel - there is no real punch line there (or i just am missing it)).

What did his editors say to that? "Bill, what the hell is the matter with you? This isn't funny, there is no punch line!" He must have responded, "But i need this in there to get to the next series of strips!" and then proceeded to carbonize the editor with a lightning bolt. ^_^

Right now, Megatokyo is free of strings, for the most part. We really *can* do whatever we want. But if we are to grow, i worry about what might happen when we do have to answer to someone. I don't have any lightning bolts, and even if I did, i probably wouldn't use them. I just hope I never, ever EVER have to compromise what i draw or how i feel about it. Of course, if i believe that i never will have to, i am probably smoking way too much crack.

anyhoo, that was long winded, and boring, and probably didn't make any sense. I guess the point is that some of these quandaries made me realize how important Megatokyo has become to me. At first it was just some silly little side project that i figured would fizzle before it every got off the ground. These days, i wonder. This silly, stupid, lame, badly drawn piece of crap means a lot to me. Who would have thought... but i guess that's a good thing. :)

Thanks for all the support everyone. I mean it.

"disaster-rific"
Tuesday - January 9, 2001
[Largo] - 11:20:00
Well, I've been on vacation for a week, can you tell?

While I've been soaking up the fine sunshine of warmer climates, Piro has been stuck in the snow and trash covered earth of Michigan. I'll never understand that state, I mean really, if you were Michigan, and you realized there was a cancerous lump attached to your body called "Detroit", wouldn't you at least try to remove it? Whether it is by radiation, atomic weapons, or at the very least a big fsck'ing chainsaw. Just lop that bad old rust stain out and send it over to France where it will be heralded as a comic genius.

So I'm back, I'm not dead, and I'm writing this little ditty for you, my less then loving public. Upon checking my email, which I'm now behind in replying once again, I found it to contain many anti-spam techniques, some helpful site ideas which I've yet to get off my lazy rear to implement, but mostly it contained a lot of crap. I've determined something from all this, your email is work for me. So from now on, anytime I receive a pointless email, I will throw a brick at you, also I'll find out who your friends are - and throw bricks at them as well. These won't be just any bricks either, they will be ACME l33t bricks. So ph33r.

Now I've gotten the whole unpleasant I'm going to throw l33t bricks at people out of the way, lets move onto more important matters, for instance rants.

The process to write a rant goes something like this; I need to write a rant, ok - what has pissed me off recently?

As you can tell, this is a very complex process that took years to hone. Kids, don't try this at home.

Lately these rants have become somewhat odd, because some days I've got nothing to write about, on those days I typically go off on a convoluted silly rant. However, when I'm not even able to go off on a silly rant, then this tells me two things;

1. Life is getting too happy, I need to go ruin it for myself, or the nearest living organism.

2. I need more beer. .

I've found the more beer I add into the equation the more disaster-rific the rant can become, sometimes scaling to train-wreck proportions.

I had a lot of email I was going to link and address today, but I think I'll save it all for Friday.

"The price of chaos is eternal belligerence."

" sorry about that..."
Wednesday - January 10, 2001
[Piro] - 00:11:00
Actually, I'm not sick today - this strip is the one that Dom went to great lengths to produce a few weeks ago around the holidays. By the time Dom got it to me, it was too late, so its just been sitting on my hard drive for weeks now. I am so mean to Dom. I think that's what makes him so grumpy. ^_^ I get a kick out of Dom's trackball stick-figures, so I figured this was a good point to drop this comic into the set. Frankly, I needed a day off to get back on track with Megatokyo. That happens when you get into a funk for a few days. :P

I hear from a lot of people that they like to read the rants almost as much as they like the comic. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but it does tell me that people like the little insight it gives into what makes Megatokyo click. And I guess I should be a little more careful about how much I rant about things. Over the past two days I have received over 280 emails regarding monday's rant. @_o Do you have any idea how hard it is to read that many emails in the course of a day or two? Lets just say I literally spent all of my available time monday just reading the emails.

First off, i'd like to say to everyone who emailed me, thank you. I should spend a good week replying to most of them - many were thoughtful, many short and to the point, but I read every one of them (actually, my brain started to get a little numb after a while, but that's not an unusual thing) I have no intention of changing the direction of Megatokyo, no matter how much crap i need to deal with. All it means is that I need to find the zones where I will have to be prepared to put up with crap. ^_^ I'll call it a 'creative defensive strategy' or some mumbojumbo like that. I'm a little on the stubborn side. :P

I suppose i feel more confident about the direction Largo and I are taking Megatokyo now, even if it may hurt our commercial viability. When you think about it though... who cares? Websites aren't exactly making good money these days (I could feel the pain in Tycho's ramblings last friday - makes my worries pretty insignificant), so we might as well enjoy the freedom of being a truly 'free' site that is really only done because Largo and I love doing the comic. I suppose there is a part of me that dreams about doing stuff like this all day, and about all the fucking incredible crap we could do if I only had the time. But reality is what it is - and y'know what? Reality is the grist that makes for good storytelling. If I did MT for a living, we might loose a bit of our edge.

So, that being said, we shall take advantage of this. What he hell. :) Besides, i get a kick out of getting in trouble. Just ask Seraphim. :P

I got a way-swell package from tsubasa yesterday. About 15 doujinshi CDs and 10 doujinshi booklets from the winter comike (as well as the Comike 59 catalogue data CD). Woo! The real gem in the package was the two-cd set of the works of I've called 'Verge - Girls Compilation'. 'I've' produced some of the music for Kanon and AIR and many other games, and this disk just kicks ass beyond belief.

Which brings me to another project I am working on. Largo's pal 'Nitedog' has set up a shoutcast server for us over on his networks where we will be setting up 'Megatokyo Radio' sometime in the near future. Music is such a strong part of what influences Largo and I, and I think that the potential damage inflicted by the two of us forming a few shows here and there could be very great indeed. As soon as we have a show together, i'll let you know.

Tsubasa and I spent a good part of the weekend dealing with names, places, locations, train routes, stores, etc - research that needed to be done in order to create a real sense of 'place' for Megatokyo, and to help prevent story snafus that might crop up later if I am not careful ^_^ We also finalized a few family name issues that needed dealing with, and worked on the FAQs. It's a lot of work, but i think it only benefits the story in the end.

Oh, and finally, I'd like to mention that Little Gamers, a damn funny little comic by this wacked european dude is no longer in danger of being shot in the head by his boss for sucking up bandwidth on the company servers. He's now sitting on the servers over at Gamespy, so getting your daily dose of rude little weeble-wobbles should no longer be hampered by bandwidth restrictions.

"my ESP isn't very clear"
Saturday - January 13, 2001
[Piro] - 10:34:00
The drawings above are little concept sketches - snapshots of what some of the other characters might be doing right now. I wont explain what's going on, i'll leave you to ponder. Think of it as 'story tidbits' to make up for the deviation from the MT story this week. ^_^

Yet again, we deal with Largo's obsession with Neverwinter Nights. There is a part of me that wonders if I should turn Largo in for 'comic stalking' the esteemed Mr. Oster. I am very curious about the game, but it is Largo who has the obsession. When he gets like this, i back away slowly and look for the nearest exit, then something heavy and preferably sharp. Now that I think about it, it's about the same reaction he has when I start going on about True Love Stories 3. I tend to make sure all the doors are locked before i start ranting - thus preventing Largo's escape. I hope he never picks up on this trick. At least the Bioware people liked the car. ^_^

I have a lot of respect for Largo's obsessions. I don't understand all of them, but i respect them - they are a lot like mine, only over different things. The world would come to an abrupt, violent end if both of us ever obsessed over the same game. I don't even want to think about what would transpire if that were to happen.

The image for today is from the game 'Sense Off', which tsubasa was nice enough to send me in a recent package. I started playing it last night. Basically, 'Sense Off' is a visual novel that tells the story of a group of ESPers who were placed into protection by the Japanese Government. These people are considered the most powerful ESPers in the country, and the story takes place at what appears to be a school, but is in fact an institute of ESP studies. Basically, as the protagonist you interact with the girls and find out some sort of shocking truth behind the institute. The world quite literally relies on your actions - do the wrong thing, and it all ends. The game is an 18 and over title, but I think the H content is much like that of Kanon - secondary to the story. (i have this bad habit of digging into the PDT files and looking at the game images ^^;;) Tragic stories are all the rage these days in Visual Novels, and this one is no exception. I'm sure it will help solidify my demented bent on things. ^_^

What I particularly like about the game is that the game has a little more visual depth than I am used to seeing. A typical dating sim game has two modes - 'play' mode, where characters are images that sit in front of a background (much like a green screen concept). The character image will change expressions, pose, etc, but the background stays the same. Then there are 'CG Events' - which are stand alone images, usually of much higher quality and detail where the character is actually interacting with the background in some way. In "Sense Off", the way characters are place on the backgrounds in 'play' modes is very interesting - you get a much better sense of space with the way they are set in the frame than I am used to seeing. Very impressive indeed. I like this game so far. It has a very interesting mood to it. It's kind of hard to describe. Oh, that's Minage Sanjou walking along in the image, in case you were wondering.

As far as ESP goes, mine is very blurry. Trying to make everyone happy is part of what I do for a living. Architecture is the art of compromise with direction. The final product is always the result of many people banging their heads together trying to make the massive amounts of money used to make a building work. There is a fine art to listening to what people want and doing what is best for the project. Imagine telling someone who is paying you lotsa money that he/she is wrong. ^_^

I suppose I apply some of the same principals to Megatokyo. I take in a lot of feedback, I listen to it, then do what I think is best. Since Largo and I are partners, we have to work out what we are doing amongst ourselves. This is not always an easy process, but it is the kind of process that produces the best work. I can maintain my own vision, tempered by the reality of what works. Without that process, you end up with the last episode of Evangelion, which pissed just about everyone off. ^_^ *I* know these characters and story better than anyone. I have to try to remember just how much people know, and how to let the story unfold in ways that allow you to learn about them.

So the experiment continues. With any luck, it won't blow up in my face again. ^_^

"crash & burn"
Sunday - January 14, 2001
[Largo] - 11:31:00
It's always been well documented that Piro is cursed, if you look at his life it's easy to see that some deity has it out for him. Yet, this morning *I* was victimized by what could have been a Sony sized fsck-up by the great all powerful cosmos itself.

My hard drive died...

The humanity, the nerve, the inconvenience... The loud clicking sounds my drive now makes!

I can't help but feel there was some cosmic mix up, surely it was Piro's drive that was meant to die, not mine. Six month old drives shouldn't die, much less six month old drives owned by yours truly. If you've seen Piro's setup, you'd know where I'm coming from, his computer room makes Lain's lair of wires of and god knows what look like the private office of Martha Stewart.

While I'm on the subject of Mrs. Evil, I want to point out proof positive that there is no god.. If there were a god, not only would Martha's hard drive be toast instead of mine, but I'm positive I'd be showered with sexy dancing girls and other cool shit - like some booze, and a Playstation 2... Oh! and a Neverwinter Nights beta!

Reason hasn't kicked in yet folks, I don't foresee it kicking in for awhile, maybe after 'reality' shows up, I'll give 'reason' a try. For now, sit back and enjoy the less then fluid ride.

Sure, it was just data I lost, little ones and zeros... But damn it, they were *my* ones and zeros! It's a shame to lose so much precious information. When arranged in a certain order these otherwise insignificant bits create the sweetness that was so many mp3s.... so many movies... and so much pr0n...

I proclaim this drive failure to be... "Super Disaster-rific" and "Amazingly Suck-tastic"

Ok, I think I got it out of my system now.... moving on...

Luke Taylor wrote in to point out that our little comic made it into some Euro-British gaming magazine thingy. This really amazed me, I had no idea that Europeans could read? (editor's note: I'm going to regret this line when I check t'morrow's email)

Friday's comic made it over to the front of Bioware's site, always a cool thing when that stuff happens.

Alright, I've finally caught up on my email, so here are some long over-due updates.

Our friends over at Cartoon Community asked us to point people over to their new site, called the Original Gamers Dojo. It's like a game review and industry news review site.

Awhile back, RPG World did a MegaTokyo cameo on their site, due to an over site on my part, I forgot to mention this, so for those who want to check it out, the strip is archived here. Again, I'm sorry for not getting to this one sooner, RPG World is a kick ass comic, I seriously suggest you guys check it out.

On that same note, Reality Incorrect featured one of our MT shirts in their strip.

For the music lovers out there, Kim Justice recently made a sort of theme song for MegaTokyo, that kicks ass in some cool new ways, the link is here.

BPComix has posted a review of our site, here. It seems we lost major points for not providing enough female stuff. Hrm, figures.

TAP Comics did a MT cameo recently, very cool stuff, the link is ... here.

Speaking of comics, which... I've been mentioning here and there all during this not so little rant, recently a sweet new comic hosted over at keenspace popped up called Wimply. I'd check it out.

Well, it's late now, so I should end this rant before it gets longer then Piro's rant, as one reader wrote in to point out, my rants seem to always come up shorter. There is in fact a very good reason as to way this is the law here at MegaTokyo. It's because I'm lazy.

"celebrity?"
Tuesday - January 16, 2001
[Largo] - 07:20:00
I feel sorry for celebrities, don't you?

The whole celebrity concept is a weird one for me to grasp. The more I think about celebrities and their problems, the more I wonder if we should admire them, or pity them. The moment a person attains any level of celebrity, they are drawn into a relationship with their fans, whether they want it, or not.

When you can't even carry on a conversation with someone because the other individual doesn't see you as just another guy, but rather some great subjective 'thing' - you really can't do much but nod, and hope they go away. It's no wonder so many celebrities can't relate to their fans and end up only being able to socialize, date, and marry within their own circles. Some people think it is because of elitism on their part, but I would offer that it is because of a lack of options.

This relationship has its good sides, and its bad. It's all a matter of scale really, the bigger the celebrity, the more fans they have, the more good fans, the more bad fans. So it reasons that the larger a celebrity is, the more stark raving mad fans there are that go around causing trouble.

Why bring up such an obvious observation? ... Glad you asked.

Recently I began to apply his odd bit of logic to everything else, besides the obvious actor/fan model. Take politics for example, on each side you have people supporting their celebrity, their politician. Yet, on each side you have a good number of these bad fans as well. Since millions of people get involved in politics each year, it reasons that if you look hard enough at the political fans, you'll find a plethora of fruit cakes who ought to be living in a padded room with no doors rather then spending time in a voting booth.

I've always admired the work of Tatsuya Ishida of the infamous Sinfest. His strips can be so straight forward and honest that it sometimes reminds me of days long ago, when Bill Watterson still inked his magic for us.

Well, the days of Watterson may be gone, but not forgotten. I think Sinfest captures some of the light that Watterson tried to shine on us. One of Ishida's characters that I always love to see is named Seymour. See, Seymour's deal is he is a fan, a fan of god. Perhaps 'fanboy' would be the better term for him, a character so rap'd up in his zealot idealogy that he lacks even a sense of humor about it.

I think it's safe to suggest that there is no greater a celebrity then god, so I'm pretty sure he has the most fans. If you look at it this way, we ought to pity god, because he has to deal with more lunatic fanboys then anyone else in the known universe.

It's no wonder he stopped answering his mail and just flooded the place.

Speaking of email...

I been getting mail being forwarded back and forth from myself and other website owners regarding the problems surrounding a certain adbanner provider, and the entire web adbanner network fall out of the last year.

I think Lowtax of somethingawful said it best in a article he wrote found here. The entire system seems to be falling apart when there is no reason for it to be dying. The model is sound, advertising works, it works for radio, for television, and for the internet. So where is the problem? Who is to blame?

As an American, I'm always looking for someone to blame for my problems, It's just part of culture of passing the buck. So in this instance, I blame the adbanner networks for not accurately figuring out who a website's audience really is via demographics. It doesn't do the advertisee' much good if their product, lets say for example's sake; adult toys and sexual aid devices, are advertised on a religious website. Unless that website's religion involves some pretty kinky stuff...

I also blame the advertisee's for placing blind faith in adbanner networks to properly help market their product and for not checking into where they are being advertised.

I think the model of making money on the net is sound, but right now there are too many crooks and frauds who have been milking the system and bamboozling their clients that a panic has errupted which is hurting even legitamate adbanner networks.

Eventually the snake oil salesmen will find a new marketplace to push their poisons, and then the advertisors will return, and this time maybe they will be a little wiser.

"wait... please"
Sunday - January 16, 2000
[Piro] - 08:10:00
I really need to start getting to bed earlier. I have been up until 2:00 am every night for the past week, and on Saturday night seraphim and I went to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - the 12:45 showing over at Showcase Cinemas, to be exact. Ugh. Didn't go to bed till 4:00 am that night. Damn fine movie. If you haven't seen it, do it. Michele Yeoh and Zhang Zi Yi were awesome, not to mention the irrepressible Chow Yun Fat. ^_^

'Multiple save points' are kind of the modern incarnation of the 'rewind/erase' button so many of us needed when we were kids (and so classically referred to in that infamous Calvin and Hobbs Strip ^^;;). The ability to go back and start over from a 'safe haven' in a game was not always possible. Remember when you couldn't save your place in a game? Every time i fuqqored up in Sonic the Hedgehog (yes, the original one. I still have that beat up old Sega Genesis somewhere around here) I had to start from the very beginning (i was too stupid to learn about the existence of secret codes until i had beat the game). My, how times change. For instance, I notice that 'Sense Off', the game i talked about in my last rant, must have at least 25 savepoints. That's a lot of room to mess up and still save your sorry ass. ^_^

The media loves to rail on the fact that video games are bad and evil because you can shoot people and get shot without actually killing anyone or dying yourself. There's nothing new about violence in young people's lives. The same people who rail against violent games no doubt played world war II in their backyards or something similar when they were kids. As far as I am concerned, the violent content is a lesser evil. The REAL portent of the ruin of western civilization is far more subtle, far more insidious. It is one thing that no generation before ours has EVER had access too before...

The ability to save their games at almost any point during gameplay.

Why is the ability to save your game so evil? I think it is because it allows you to approach things with far less commitment. Decisions can be made with the knowledge that you can always go back to a previous save and start over, or that you will simply respawn somewhere else in the same map, just short a few weapons. Imagine how hard it would have been to finish Quake if every time you died, you had to start over at the beginning of the first level? (yes, i know some people can do it, but I'm talking about most people here ^_^). Heck, if games were like real life, imagine:

... you open the wrapper on your brand new game 'Kill or be Killed' and proceed to install it. You finally get everything installed and tweaked, you read the manual from cover to cover, practice your moves in the practice area. The game then asks you, "are you ready?" - you respond yes, and away you go. 25 seconds into the game a stray rocket comes out of nowhere and aerosols the lower half of your body. You see the words "Game Over" appear on the screen. The game exits, and promptly erases itself. A small electrical pulse is sent to the CDRom that is still sitting in your drive which insights a little charge in the disk which snaps the CDrom into a half dozen shards. Game Over. It even goes to the trouble to bury enough crap in the registry to prevent you from ever playing the game again unless you totally rebuild your system (which is a kind of reincarnation anyways)...

The point is, if you couldn't go back and start over, you wouldn't last 5 minutes in most games. You NEED to be able to do this just to learn the skillz needed to succeed in a game. Game's aren't really all that analogous to life in that respect. Sure, in real life you can go out and shoot and kill people just like in the games, if that's your thing, but no one can go back and 'undo' something they did, or go back and 'try it again' till they get it right. The real thing gamers crave is the ability to go in and become experts in something - mainly because it lets them do it over and over again till they get it right.

And if anyone needed a rewind/erase button in his life, or the ability to go back to a previous save, it's me. ^_^ Ohhhh boy. I could be the poster child for the need of this ability in life. When I think about it, there are probably a lot of things i would have missed if I were able to do that. Who says that you can really ever make the right choices anyways? If Piro could really go back and change some of what he did (heck, most of what he did) would he really end up winning the game? Makes you wonder.

[mental note - drink less coffee. Much less.]

I'm very happy with this week's new sketch. Like it says in the notes, i can't really say much about her without giving things away. You could almost consider this yet another 'Development Sketch'. I know, I know, yet ANOTHER character? (chuckle) you'll see...

Today's strip is a bit of a tribute to the online comic that really inspired me to do Megatokyo. "Minase ke no shoku taku" (The dining table of the Minase's) by Iceshop Hos-Rim is a japanese comic that pretty much pokes fun at the Keysoft games (Kannon, One, Air) and has made me chuckle for over a year. He usually updates one or twice a week. The strip that really inspired me (in fact, the one that prompted me to take on the nick 'Piro') is this one. The title 'Hana yori dango' translates to 'I'll take the actual profit than a mere beauty' according to Tsubasa-san (and no, it's NOT "boys before flowers" like the anime - Iceshop is playing with words ^_^). Great strip. It showed me that you can have cute adorable girls in a strip in this format - tho MT isn't drawn anywhere near as well. Oh, The girl with the Taiyaki (a fish-shaped sweet pastry) is Ayu-chan - a character from the game Kanon. The girl holding the cat is Makoto. And you can guess at the cat's name. ^_^

As a public service, tsubasa did translate the strip that is currently up on the site:

#106 The pyramid at the middle of summer.

"shiawase desu"
Thursday - January 18, 2001
[Piro] - 05:01:00
As most of you are aware, I think too goddamn much. I don't remember who's dumbass idea it was to require a rant three times a week in *addition* to the three-a-week comic... funny how you just start doing things and after a while it's like it's always been part of your life.

I just can't bring myself to believe that it's been almost six months since Megatokyo accidentally started. It was an accident. It wasn't really a very serious project. I had plans to continue blowing largo off for a year or two. I look back to august and wonder... what the hell happened?

I won't bore you with the story. Most of you probably remember how it all started anyways. I should post a few sketches from 'the beginning' - I'll try to scan them over the weekend.

Sometimes these rants are easy to write. Sometimes, i just don't want to say anything profound. Life isn't always profound. As a matter of fact, it's usually pretty silly. I'm tired, and honestly, I'm going to go to bed early tonight for the first time in over a week. I need the rest. The first half of this month was bumpy, grumpy, petulant and annoying. I don't really know why, but what amazes me is how many people had the SAME feelings. Perhaps it's the weather.

I was really unhappy with the state of Megatokyo a few weeks ago. After the 'Piro meets Kimiko' arc, I seemed to loose step. I'm feeling a hell of a lot better about MT now. I was able to straighten a lot of things out in my mind, and it's nice to have the girls finally in the story (well, Kimiko at least). The story feels good now. Even the art is getting better. Yes, even I admit it. I'm feeling more confidant in my work. It's not stellar, but it is communicating ideas and feelings pretty clearly.

I got a few e-mail's requesting that I add a translation to the titles of my rants for those who don't know a stitch of Japanese - and I think that's a pretty good idea. So, for those times that I have a Japanese title, I'll give the translation.

Today's Japanese lesson: �K‚¹ [shiawase] = happiness. �K‚¹‚Å‚· [shiawase desu] = "this is happiness" or "I am happy" ^_^

Sorry it's so short tonight. I'm gonna chill a bit and get some sleep. And think about that True Love Story 3 doujinshi I need to do this summer ^_^

[props to largo for fixing the typos and glaring errors. I really WAS tired last night ^_^. Also, i want to add a few quick notes - piro]

I was fiddling with my winamp at work and decided it was time to change the Steven Moss "Steel This Amp" skin I've been using for the past six months (for some reason, i feel no desire to customize my work machine that much - perhaps it's because i can't stream music from here) when I could not for the life of me find that cool Kimiko Amp winamp skin that Beaner did a while back. I decided to check and see if Winamp had indeed added it to their collection - and sure enough, here it is . Kinda neat to see some MT stuff up there. I have a few other skins that people have made at home that I really should link to... and all the gift art, and... ack. ^^;;

Technical note - last weekend the Sempai box went down for several hours for some maintenance - MT has been beating the hell out of it, but it's withstood the abuse like a trooper. Kevin was also able to fix a few other things that should really improve the performance of the server. So, if MT is working better than before, mad props to Kevin for the fine bit of maintenance. ^_^

"s-words"
Sunday - January 21, 2001
[Largo] - 02:01:00
Tonight I received an elementary education about those big pointy things they call swords. Apparently they can hurt when you stick them into someone.

A friend of mine and generally all around cool guy by name of Joe Lynes showed me a website specializing in making custom swords called Tozando! In fact, you can watch as people come from the east to do battle with the amazing Tozando! Err, sorry bad joke.

Tozando's swords are really cool, they have swords that are made of a non-sharpening alloy for around $300-$900, and then they have unique custom jobs. Made to order 'real' steel swords for around $4000-$6000. The latter being the swords you'd use to cut off someone's vital limbs or at the very least they'd make kickass letter openers.

Now if I can just get myself one of those custom swords with the word 'l33t' etched into the base.

We've setup a #megatokyo IRC channel on irc.megatokyo.com, the servers are pretty sweet, anyways, enjoy.

Tonight's rant is being written while I listen to a creation called "Member of the 1337 Generation." - This composition along with others made by the same dude can be found here.

The Mail Bag

On the comic front, I seem to have been spotted living a Life on Forbez.

Kim Justice, the composer of the sweet MegaTokyo music, wrote in to tell us that due to all the people who downloaded that track, it went up to #1 on mp3.com's game soundtracks list for awhile.

Speaking of being #1, did I mention how much I love Europe? It's great, it rocks, really, and I'm not just saying this due to all those colorful emails I got for saying Europeans can't read.

That reminds me, a small pet peeve I have, recently a certain person who I will not name emailed me, and their message was a single line - which is fine, however their signature footer was longer then one of Piro's angst ridden rants. Please people, when your sig is ten times longer then your message, it may be time to shorten your sig.

So much for my public service announcement. Now is the part where that annoying star is supposed to fly above my head.

In case you haven't already seen it, the infamous Something Awful made a parody game based on pokemon, only with game developers. The end result is a offensive and fun game called AwfulMon.

Ah, here's something for you otaku freaks out there, a sweet looking comic called Strange Candy. The art rocks, and may have a lot of potential in time.

Some of you may like this, it seems Race War Kingdoms is back online, yep the gods will surely revere the first man or woman to slay the Yoro La HiHi Samurai - or something.

Finally, if anyone wants a free seizure, click here

"blurry"
Saturday - January 22, 2000
[Piro] - 04:30:00
[note - i ended up making a screenshot of the Gum Comics website - it seems that my linkage shut the page down temporarily due to exessive traffic. Oops. I need to be more careful when i link things, i guess. I still can't get used to this. - piro]

Frustrating, isn't it? the girls in the screenshot above look pretty cute, don't they? Or are they? Can you tell? Are you ready to kill me? :P

I know that people who wear glasses tend to be envious of those people who have perfect vision and don't need them. Seraphim has perfect vision. I don't. I can't see anything without my glasses. Sure, glasses are a pain, and I've never worn contacts (I just can't stand the idea of putting anything in my eye), but there is one thing I can do that those with perfect vision can't - take them off and look at the world thru unfocused eyes.

What are the benefits of being able to do this? Well, sight is a funny thing. To me, it's therapeutic to look at the world a little less indistinct. You can look at things without being drawn to the details. If you look at the pictures above, you will see that you can make out a lot of general information - the girls are cute, you have a general idea of their pose, their hair styles, and even the fact that at least one of them is smiling.

The reason you can do this is because your mind is 'filling in the blanks' - you are processing the limited information and forming an image in your head. It's a lot like the way your computer screen works. In reality, it's just a bunch of pixels - your brain puts them together into an image. Your brain also adds the information that they are girls and that they are cute. Interesting, isn't it?

Now, If you printed this image out and tried to trace the outlines, it would be very hard to do. There's nothing really THERE to trace.

If you have ever taken an art class (I think the last one I had was back when i was in 7th grade) you will remember being told that you needed to learn how to 'see'. "I can see just fine", you think. Well, that's not really true. Seeing well enough identify cute girls and avoid walking into trees is one thing. Seeing things well enough to draw them is something different.

When you sit down to draw something, you need to have a good idea of how to look at things in real life. You need to be able to get a good sense of volume, space, and relationships between objects. Also, a good understanding of shadow and edges is important. It's all right in front of your eyes - it always has been. Learning to understand what you are seeing takes practice.

People are always asking me for lessons. Well, you can consider this an unofficial lesson. Tracing the work of other people is always a good way to learn - and I suggest that it's a great way to start (trace my stuff or stuff from your favorite manga) All art is an abstraction of the real thing. Try to think about what it is these lines and shapes are really representing.

There is no such thing as a 'line' in nature. It has been said that lines are only thinly defined areas of shadow. Look at the way things are shaded, how the colors change on a surface. When you trace something, you should think of those lines as shadows themselves. You might find that this helps you think about the 'volume' you are drawing.

After you have traced it a few times, try drawing it freehand. It doesn't matter if it totally sucks - just do it, give it a try. Put the images together and look at the differences. Try to understand what works and what doesn't. Then try it again.

Some other tips - step back from a drawing and squint at it - your brain will tell you if it is right or wrong. Go back and look at it later - sometimes a drawing that looked really swell at 2am looks really crappy in the morning. Put it up to a mirror to see if it balances right. These are little tricks that I've often used.

Oh, and one other thing. Sometimes when looking, you can miss things. Take a closer look at the manga cover shown here and the blurry image of the girls above. Notice anything different?

Speaking of Kadoi Aya, I'm sitting here reading a collection of short story comics called "Heaven's Gate" - man... another artist that makes me want to give it all up for good. The stories are really cute too. (sigh) She also has some online comics over at ZDnet Japan. Check it out.

I dream of drawing as well as her someday. Till then, i can take off my glasses and look at the world a little less sharp for a while. You don't always have to focus on things. :)

"thinking geek"
Tuesday - January 23, 2001
[Largo] - 00:02:00
Have you seen this? It's by the cool people over at ThinkGeek, who just happen to sell some of the coolest stuff in the world, like this, and this.

Anyways the original this is a glass window that you can attach to PC Tower style case once you've cut out a large hole, and when combined with their neon light kit, makes for a very l33t looking box.

I think I'm going to ask my boss if I can order a dozen of these, and install them into our Sun E3500s, imagine it.. all that blacklight'd l33tness in a darkened data center full of some of the sweetest hardware ever made by Sun Systems

Though, ThinkGeek isn't the only online seller of neat-stuff(tm), Take for instance the sweetness or maybe I should say 'slimeyness' that is SlimyThings. A webstore that specializes in all things slime, and other assorted joke and novelty items. I especially liked their 'stink cigarrette loads' - a cool gag and or not so subtle way to get your friends to give up smoking.

On the gaming rumor front, Bioware is supposedly gearing up their beta process for Neverwinter Nights. In response to this, I've booked a flight to Edmonton, Alberta and made sure to pack my binoculars, wiretapping devices, and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. I plan to hold up in a hotel across from their headquarters until I see the beta, or at least some of their local pink haired rollerbladers.

Shifting gears for a moment, It's time again to point out some sweet webcomics, first up is Melon Pool. I had only recently discovered this site, it's very cool, and the strips' humor actually made me laugh to the point that I couldn't stop. Another sweet comic that was brought to my attention is. Idle Minds.

I get a lot of email from people asking me to explain "l33t" to them, fortunately someone sent me a link to a site that has an English to l33t translator for those of you that are l33t-impaired.

I'm sure many of you have been getting sick of the daily 'Sega Death' rumors that keep popping up, however I have received word that Sega is indeed going to be bought out by Sony, then sold to Nintendo so they can better sell their GameCube's to Bangladesh migrate workers in order to prevent Microsoft's X-Box from cornering the lucrative Bangladesh gaming market.

In other news, the word 'Daikatana' is still funny and contrary to popular belief, I am not Jeff K.

"megabear"
Tuesday - January 25, 2000
[Largo] - 00:22:00
Piro talks too much.

I mean really now, there was a time these rants would only be a few paragraphs at most, yet now they seem to just drag on forever like the final years of M*A*S*H*.

It's been my view that the purpose of writing is to communicate ideas. A simple enough analysis, but if you think about it, the most effective way to communicate is with as few words as possible. This is the 'less is more' concept. This concept also applies to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar.

On with the show, first up MegaTokyo is proud to present the "Mega Bear" just in time for Valentines Day. These bears are the perfect gift to make sure your significant other realizes just how much they mean to you. Then again, there is the chance they'll just think you are a big freak for giving them a bear with a webcomic on it. Either way, things will never be quite the same, and that isn't half bad! These bears will be done as a limited run, so please get your orders in quickly, because once Valentine's Day is over, these bears will no longer be available - in fact, the last day you can order these bears will be February 6th.

For those of you that don't currently have a significant other, I'm going to let you in on a secret. The bears make great gaming mascots. Just place the bear near your PC or Console and its magic powers go to work instantly. However every Mega Bear is unique and so results may vary.

Recently MegaTokyo lost the coveted #2 spot on BigPanda - the defacto standard webcomic ranking list. Even with the site's record hits this past week we've been falling behind everyone else, ahwell - as someone bluntly put it to me today 'the honeymoon is over, now the marriage begins' … This does not bode well for the advocates of marriage.

Speaking of webcomics, there is a newcomer to the scene by the name of NeoBaka which has been the cause of a lot of email sent my way. The comic is done in a manga style and is targeted towards anime fans and gamers, it also sports a strikingly similar site layout to our own. However let me set the record straight on this one, contrary to the posts in their forums, I do not think they are a rip-off of MegaTokyo. In fact, I think their work rocks. Piro and I did not write the book on manga style gamer comics, nor are we the sacred keepers of the side-by-side yin/yang rant format. As writers and artists, we all find inspiration differently, and a few trivial similarities between our sites should not detract from the coolness and originality of their work. I think they are off to a great start, and I wish them the best of luck in their new endeavor.

Tonight I found a new way to kill some time and listen to some tunes by pointing my browser over to All Game Radio, after listening to their show I've determined two things, they like some weird music, and they are much better at leveling in Asheron's Call then I am.

"ph33l the lov3"
Thursday - January 25, 2001
[Piro] - 08:35:00
Ok, i'm gonna keep it short today, because I have way too much to do, and it's 7:40am and I need to get my lazy ass to work pretty soon here... so no 'Piro thinks too goddamn much' threads today.

Added to my list of things i need to cram on this week is a special little project I am working on for a Cafe Press item that is part of a special promotion for Valentines Day. In other words, be prepared for some interesting little Valentines Day swag for your sweetheart (or for yourself - self love is good too). It should be ready by the end of the week. I'd show you the drawings for it, but I don't wanna spoil the surprise. ^_^

And on the subject of Cafe Press, I actually broke down and ordered a few Megatokyo shirts for myself. In reality, i was getting a shirt for Tsubasa (because he's been so much help, i felt i should send him one ^_^) but, while I was at it, I got myself a Kimiko shirt and a B4k4^2 shirt. I've never actually seen them before, and I have to say - wow, they do a really nice job. I was rather amazed at the resolution. I was wondering why I hadn't received any complaints about the shirts. Now I just wish I had bought a mug. :( I just need to get a 'speak l33t' shirt now. BTW, if you order from different stores, just email Cafe Press with your Invoice numbers and they will reduce your shipping and handling costs.

In other PiroNews, I broke down and use a bit of the proceeds from t-shirt sales to increase my hard drive capacity. I ambled on down to the local Best Buy and picked up a Maxtor 20 gig drive and a Western Digital 20 gig drive. My current set up used to consist of two 10 gig drives - one of which was running Windows 98, and the other running Japanese Windows 98. To switch machines, i literally reach down and swap cables. If you remember, a month or so back, the old Quantum 10 gig drive started clicking and whirring the Dance of Hard Drive Death, so i was forced to move all my crap to the one drive and subsist on a single 10 gig drive.

Of course, the other pain with this was the fact that the drive that failed was the one with the English version of windows, so I have been operating solely in the Japanese version for months now (Seraphim is ready to kill me regarding this issue). The other bad thing about this is the fact that i have been running with about 800 meg of free space - which isn't a lot these days. It was getting to be a pain.

In about three weeks I am going to be moving to a new apartment (Relax, plans are already in place to help keep Megatokyo rolling during that time). It occurred to me that the Media One folks might throw a big hairy fit if they had to install a cable modem in a Japanese OS. That being the case, I decided it was time to get some new hard drives. The rebuild went so smooth I am still wondering what is going to blow up. My setup now consists of a 20 gig data drive, which both drives can see, a 20 gig drive running english windows, and the 10 gig drive running Japanese windows. I still have to manually swap out the drives, but the lack of problems that come from doing this is worth the effort.

Oh, and by the way. Erika is NOT a skank. jeeze. You people. The girls (like milkie) picked up on that right away, but you guys have GOT to start watching more girls anime. :)

Anyhoo, off to work.... [updated]

Hi everyone. Just a quick update. I finally finished that Valentines Day image I was talking about. (chuckle) Isn't Seraphim cute? The strapless top was her idea. It's amazing what you can do with a little winged character...

Last week I was browsing art stuffs in Ulrich's Art and Electronic store when my cell phone rang - it was Cafe Press inviting us to design an image for a special valentines day promotion. Basically, they print a 3.5 x 5 inch image in a little t-shirt which goes on a teddy bear which you can purchase for valentines day. My first reaction was "i just can't see a Megatokyo teddy bear..." But after thinking about it for a while, we decided 'what the heck.' Personally, i love this image. I've managed to pull this together in less than two days.

Once CafePress makes a bear, photographs it, and puts together a store to purchase the bear, I'll post that information here - should be a little later today.

"moral dilemma"
Sunday - January 28, 2001
[Piro] - 00:36:00
Ah, the joy of shameless commerce. That little fuzzy feeling that comes with blatant plugging Megatokyo Swag. I guess it's true - we have no shame.

When Megatokyo first went up back in August, the 'merchandise' button was a bit of a joke. The complexity and difficulty of printing, packaging, selling and shipping t-shirts was something I never figured we would ever deal with, never mind there being any 'demand' for such stuff. Oddly enough, people started bugging us for t-shirts right off the bat. We really weren't sure what to do. Greg over at Real Life pointed us to Cafe Press, and MT swag became a reality. I think everyone has been pretty happy with the stuff so far.

Y'know, i've never really thought all that much about the idea of one of these stupid websites earning money before. Fredart was just a bill i paid month after month, much like my internet access bill. It let me spam the internet with my crude artworks at will without hurting anyone.

These days, Even I can't ignore the rather startling numbers of people that are visiting this site on a regular basis. It's an odd thing, really. I don't treat Megatokyo much different than I treated Fredart, except for the fact that I do try harder to update regularly ^_^;; I still go to work every day and pound my head against the proverbial brick wall to get all those things done that need doing and thankfully result in a paycheck. Drawing and scripting stories, creating characters and little lives for them is fun - it's entertaining and rewarding. As my financial status in life clearly shows, i've never been the type that tries to bring in any payment for these activities. :P

The neat thing about the web is that you can reach a huge audience of people with far less money and effort than it ever did before. In fact, it breaks the old rule that he who spends the most money, wins. Unfortunately, the Internet Economy learned the hard way that massive numbers of visitors and people coming to a site does not immediately equate to huge returns on investments. This fact is really hurting a lot of people these days. People who maintain websites for a living are getting shafted by ther banner add networks, but it has more to do with failed expectations of what all this traffic means than evil men behind big desks chuckling as they screw people over (well, in most cases ^^;;).

But you would think that with all these people and visits and page views that it has to be worth SOMETHING, right? Well, there are a lot of very intelligent people who have been ripping their hair out over this problem for over a year now. Most investors threw money at internet companies figuring that after a while they would have it all figured out. The recent problems in the net economy are because, well, they haven't figured it out yet. ^_^ Of course, it's at this time that I finally sit in the midst of a fairly successful website.

Doesn't it just figure? ^_^

As many of you may have noticed, we have no banner adds. Haven't really been able to get any (not that we've really tried very hard). Banner adds don't bother me - they are non-intrusive, and they just take up some real estate on the page.

I have been very bothered by the fact that many comics now spawn pop-up windows with adds in them. I LOATH popup windows. You will NEVER see pop-ups on MT if i have anything to say about it. Banner adds are innocuous. Pop-ups are annoying. I'd rather devote a nice chunk of the main page to advertizing - like in a magazine. In today's economy, it's not really a good idea to be picky if you really want add revenue. So for now, we'll probably be ad-free for a while.

That doesn't mean that MT hasn't earned money for us. Sales from the stuff over at CafePress has been rather remarkable, and I've put the earnings to good use (thinks like Hard Drives, etc) - and in return for your money, you've received shirts or items that (i hope) you are happy with. We appreciate your purchases, and so, forgive us when we plug some stuff from time to time - only buy stuff if you want it ^_^

With all of my recent computer problems, i've even had people offer me computer parts and whatnot to help fix my still-a-problem computer woes. Aaagrh, it's so tempting... but I can't help but think it's just not morally right to accept such things. I don't know. It's like the Paypal 'tip jar' idea that someone thought would be a good idea. There again, i don't really know - it just seems morally questionable. At least when you buy a shirt or a teddy bear, you are getting something for your money. And this 'micropayment' stuff? don't worry about that stuff - the comic will always be free to view by all.

Aw, heck, who cares. I'm doing this for fun anwyays. ^_^

oh, and before i forget - you can now get 'baby doll' style women's/girl's shirts in all the MT shirt designs (for all you g1rlz) - the 'ph33l the lov3' one will be available in a girls shirt on Thursday. For now, i need to get busy on drawing the comic - which is the fun part. ^_^

"tonari no piro"
Wednesday - January 31, 2001
[Piro] - 02:23:00
I'm out of coffee.

Like most people, I have a morning ritual. I'll drag myself out of bed, pull the computer out of sleep to see what damage has occurred overnight, a Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop Tart goes into the toaster (which, btw, actually has a 'Pop Tarts' setting) and then I fire up my Krups coffee maker and brew up some coffee! Now, I know damn well that coffee doesn? really wake you up - it just satisfies a chemical dependency you have developed over time - but at 7:00 am ... i just don't care.

This morning, the can of Folgers Breakfast Blend is empty. I swear, i must have used a spatula to get the last of the grounds out yesterday. I even contemplated digging some old grounds out of the trash, just to brew SOMETHING... thankfully there was some other stuff on top that prevented me from digging deeper. Why the big-455 can of Folgers rather than the fancier, stronger, better tasting blends like Starbucks and the like? Mainly, because i can buy more coffee with less money so I don't run out. Like today.

I just have to do without this morning.

Last night when Seraphim called she told me it was my turn to make dinner, which of course meant that we were eating out. Like most people, we have a variety of haunts that we visit on a regular basis, but for the most part I am a big fan of Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Thai cuisine. Well, mostly Japanese, in my case. There are a lot of really good Japanese restaurants here in Ann Arbor, and since we also wanted to hit the Asian grocery store we decided to head over to Godaiko (hmm, buy one California roll get one free, buy one Sapporo get one free... hmm, must remember Tuesday night special) I'm pretty fond of Sushi and Gyoza, as well as most other Japanese foods (some of the pickled stuff takes some courage ^_^)

The search for a 'favorite restaurant' is considered fun by some and frustrating by others. I'm actually the type of person that likes to have specific haunts and menus to choose from - when i experiment it can lead to disasters. When Seraphim and I lived in Atlanta, we really did have a hands-down favorite restaurant. In fact, whenever we eat sushi out, inevitably we talk about the place. Over on Buford Highway there is a great little restaurant called "Satsuki" It's not a fancy sushi place where you are expected to drop $80 a person for dinner - it's a swell little restaurant run by very nice people and always reminded me of my own side street experiences in Japan. If you live in the Atlanta area, you are hearby ordered to eat there. Tell them the American couple that used to eat there at least once-twice a week back in 1999 says 'hi'. We really do miss the place.

Oddly enough, when I was in Japan, I didn't eat any sushi at all. I spent most of my time running around visiting buildings by my favorite architect Tadao Ando (that's the Children's Museum in Himeji, Hyogo, one of my favorite Ando buildings - note that it was pouring when I was there... it was an interesting experience. And yes, that's me.)

Eating in Japan was a fun experience, because i did it 'on the cheap'. Box lunches at Lawsons or 7-11, a bowl of Udon at a small restaurant, or my infamous encounter with a friendly older Japanese couple in a Okinomiyaki restaurant somewhere in Osaka... (sigh) it was fun, it really was. We kept passing beers back and forth to each other, even tho we could barely communicate (I had forgot my dictionary - my Japanese is not as good as the comic-piro's Japanese, FYI) I distinctly remember standing in a park overlooking a river in Osaka near the hotel drinking very bad sake from a vending machine. Everything was blue, very blue. The neon signs on the buildings across the river filled the sky and the park with a electric neon blue. I guess I was feeling kind of sad that evening, because I was going home the next day...

Ah, I am digressing again.

The only 'western' food i gave into was in the mornings, when I was tired and cranky and had to get my ass moving in the morning. I would find a Mcdonalds and get a Sausage McMuffin with Egg and a Coffee. I needed my coffee. And the canned stuff just didn't do it for me in the mornings.

Ah, almost forgot a few things. Before I get another email with these questions, I'll answer them here. It's easier. ^_^ 'L33T' is 'l33tspeak' for 'elite' - its slang, its computer-eese born out of a text based environment. I find the variations and use of l33tspeak interesting because it's similar in some ways to the ways that the Japanese use english in thier own culture. It sounds cool, even if you don't always understand the real meaning of it. 'b4k4' is l33tspeak for 'baka', which is a Japanese word that roughly translates to 'fool' or 'idiot'. If you have ever seen Hoshino Ruri in 'Nadesico' you will understand how effectively it can be used to comment on the idiots around you.

Speaking of Nadesico and Ruri-ruri, the character that Piro is playing in today's strip is slightly different than the 'RuriQuake' concept that surfaced a few years ago. Out of respect for the creators of Nadesico, Keiji Goto's marvelous character design, and the desire to avoid future problems with using the name and visage of Ruri herself, i've tweaked this idea a little. 'PiroQuake' as i've been calling her is a cross between RuriQuake and Piro. I want to pay homage to Ruri with her, but i think a few twists in the character design that I have made are rather fun. :)

Finally, at the request of Seraphim, who seems to be in a rather romantic Cupid-like mode lately (must have something to do with this megabear thing) Anyhoo, this poor guy made a deal with his girlfriend that she would marry him if his site made 1 million hits by Valentines day. Ah, what the hell. Give the guy a hand, we don't want to give him an excuse to get out of marrying the girl.

^_^

"is this thing on?"
Saturday - February 3, 2001
[Largo] - 03:30:00
Sometimes you have one of those moments where you find yourself pulled in a multitude of different and conflicting directions. I've had such a moment all this week.

It began decent enough, I was able to have dinner with Scott Kurtz of Player versus Player. I had a nice rant almost finished and written on Monday night, I was flying so high and fast, it rocked. Then my pc crashed and my rant vanished. I didn't feel in the mood to write so I went to sleep and allowed Tuesday to arrive.

Tuesday started out nice enough, I was refreshed and ready to head to work and finish my rant at the office. This was a great idea! Well, until I got to work, and spent more time working then thinking. If you work in the tech industry, and do development work - you can relate when I say more time working then thinking. For a job that requires my mind be clear and focused, it doesn't help my coding when I can't even remember the difference between left and right. Ah, those are the days - I figured I'd get some caffeine in me and restart my brain, instead it blue screened. Man, that's the last time I buy my brain from Microsoft. Well that day was a waste of day, in the end I caught up on my email, and do other important tasks - like reorganize my pencil holder, and clean my keyboard of it's accumulated ick.

Wednesday was one of those days that I'll be trying to forget for a while. Nothing went right at work for me. It began with a fall down my stairs and ended with me working a fourteen-hour day. Not that I'm complaining, hell, life is full of wonderful surprises like these, unplanned events we should cherish like when your car breaks down, or your house explodes.

Have I mentioned how much I dislike my job? Yep, it sucks, for all my l33t skillz I'm still stuck doing a dead-end job for a company that flushes more money down the toilet then a crack dealer during a drug raid.

I think I had plans to link a lot of stuff tonight, but I'm just too tired to open my inbox and … nah, I'll do it. Lesse -

First up, please go vote for your favorite webcomics at the Evil Network.

I was pointed to this site, which has what he referred to as a 'whole slew' of video game remixes.

I was directed to this odd Quake mod called 'Gridiron' which is supposed to be mad fun. It's a mod that recreates football, by combining Quake with Hockey, well that is, if hockey players carried rocket launchers instead of sticks. Hrm, now I think about it, I think the Canadians already do that?

My award for the best signature line I've seen this week goes to - "is 'Lego Mania' in the DSM IV?"

Awhile back, MegaTokyo reached one of those milestones that Piro and I never thought we'd reach recently, We've began to get over a million pageviews a month. There was once a time when a million pageviews a month it was like a magical number that once reached would summon adbanner networks from all around to come to you and beg for you to display their ads. Of course, that was then, and this is now. These days all large amounts of traffic gets you is bigger server bills.

I'm am a little disappointed in the current state of the 'E' industry, which recently went thru a 'correction' - or reality check as it were. Still, I look around and see people leaving the good business models in the dirt with all the bad ones. Like rats from a sinking ship the net economy continues to suffer from both paranoia and ignorance. Funny when you consider it was ignorance that helped create the success of the adbanner networks in the first place.

Well, Ignorance give-eth and take-eth away.

"hmmm, swappable"
Saturday - February 3, 2001
[Piro] - 08:30:00
(chuckle) i wonder what largo will say when he sees that I've given him his very own 'buy a megabear' banner. ^_^ He'll probably kill me. So, nice knowin ya. I'm a dead man.

A few things going on this weekend. We've got some special stuff in the works for this month that will also help cover me while i move to a new apartment. It's weird, but this might actually be the easiest move I've ever had to do. The way things worked out, I signed a lease on the new apartment today but I don't have to be out of this one till the end of the month.

gee. A whole month to move. That will never happen again.

A year ago, almost to the day, I was driving a 14 foot Isuzu Budget Rent-a-Truck up from Atlanta to Michigan. It was just me and the two cats - Seraphim was already up here. Oh man, that was the worst move EVER. I didn't have a car for my last few months in Atlanta (Seraphim had it up in Michigan - I was using MARTA to get to work ^^;;) so just getting boxes for the move was a trick. The movers were late, I BARELY got everything into the truck... but the worst was yet to come.

I had managed to get barely 2 hrs of sleep in the previous 2 days. I was tired, and I swear the only thing that kept me awake was talking to the cats (who listened intently) and listening to my Tenchi Muyo tapes. By 9:00 pm, it was pitch dark, and I was getting really worried about making it all the way to Michigan in one drive. I pushed on.

Then the engine did something really weird. It suddenly started revving at a high pitch, and then my max speed dropped to 35 mph. Thinking to myself that this wasn't really a good thing, I pulled off into a gas station and called Budget. I think in the end, it was the best thing that could have happened. There was no way I could continue driving that night, and I was so tired that I SHOULDN'T have been driving in the first place. Budget was good enough to put me up for the night and have the truck fixed the next morning. Other than recoiling in horror at the idea of having to unpack and repack the truck, sleep was a welcome concept.

I forget exactly where this was in Tennessee - but across from the hotel was a Japanese restaurant. I remember walking over to see about getting myself a nice huge bowl of ramen for dinner - but sadly they were closed. It was icy, and cold, and you know... it was kind of a surreal experience.

The surrealness of the situation continued into the next day. It turns out that all that was wrong with the truck was a dislodged turbo hose. They had it fixed in 10 minutes. It took 3 hours to get the 'mandatory recall' parts fixed. -_- I just remember sitting in this grungy waiting room, with both cats in a single cat carrier, talking with truck drivers. It was kinda interesting, actually. I found out a lot about how car carriers worked, and the kind of routes and problems the guys had on the road. Nothin like sharing very bad coffee with an amusing older chap who was gleefully telling me about the time he shot and killed a guy who broke into his home in Florida. Life has a tendency to put interesting things in your path.

This year, I'm moving a mere 6.2 miles. Closer to work, nicer apartment complex, smaller apartment. I expect disasters galore.

Back when i discussed my Hard Drive upgrade and the fact that was manually swapping cables to switch OS's, I received quite a few emails telling me that i was flat out of my mind. ^_^ Well, that and the fact that I should get myself some removable hard drive enclosures. I had a 'DOH!' moment when I read the first one. Of course this was a very effective solution. On Friday I finally managed to saunter on down to a local computer store and pick up two removable HD kits. I installed one in my computer, and used the case from the other so that each of the HD's would have it's own case. I penned 'EN' on the English Win98 drive and 'JP' on the Japanese Win98 drive. It works great, and things seem to be running much smoother. Thanks to everyone who emailed me that suggestion.

Oh, and the 'why don't you just load Win 2000, it will let you run Japanese programs' comments. I've tried. Several times. For some reason, my motherboard and chip combo (a Epox Mobo and a AMD K6 3 450) doesn't like win2000. Win2k won't even boot in Safe Mode with all the cards pulled!! (sigh) Very annoying. One of these days I can replace this damn thing...

Today's sketch... well, once again, I can't tell you anything about her. I need to stop giving things away over at fredart. ^_^

And as far as piroart.net? Stay tuned, I actually registered the domain the other day - i have some ideas for what to do with it that I think will tie in nicely with the comic.

"dead piro days"
Monday - February 5, 2001
[Seraphim] - 00:00:00
Hi everyone, Seraphim here. Piro is taking a break this evening. Hime, our oh-so-cute kitten, is sprawled across his lap effectively preventing all purposeful work. She looks so comfortable that I have taken a break from my GRE studies to help him out so Hime can sleep undisturbed. Piro grumbled something about working on MT translations and fixing up the forums over at fredart earlier today. I think Hime's "sleep, papa, sleeeeep" spell is making him babble.

A big thanks to Christian over at Little Gamers for doing a guest strip for today. I love the first LG strips where Piro and Largo make a guest appearance, here and here. "It's not crap! It's Bust A Move!" Good stuff. How did he know that I can kick Piro's ass in Bust A Move?? I'm terribly competitive when I get into a game. My victories have been known to put Piro in a funk for weeks. ^_^

Piro just signed a lease on a new apartment and will be moving shortly. There will be a few days where he will be without internet access so he has enlisted the help of several popular online artists to provide strips to cover the gap. Since he can't survive long without his connectivity (I guess I am not interesting enough for him) - the break will be brief. Look for them in the coming weeks!

Don't forget it's the last two days to order the Seraphim Bear in time for Valentine's Day delivery. Ladies, it is the 21st century so don't be shy about showing the guy you like how you feel! As a matter of fact, in Japan on Valentine's Day the girls give boys chocolates. There is another holiday, White Day, where the boys reciprocate. My personal philosophy is that it is better to receive than to give but if you wait around for men - it could take forever! Piro has also added a misses babydoll tee to the Megabear store. He has ordered me one of each and I can't wait. I have been begging him for months to find a more femme shirt for the girl fans out there. He has also added the babydoll tee to all the styles. I'll be getting a "Ph33r the Cute Ones" next. I'll give a critique as soon as I get mine.

I have to thank Dom for helping Piro obtain a Kudama for me for Christmas. He watches over my extensive plant collection - and I swear they are thriving since he arrived. He also watches over the fiber optic tree. I switched out the color wheel and now have a Valentine's Day tree. For those of us who are extremely lazy - we will come up with any excuse to not put the tree away. I even designed two origami heart models to decorate the tree (you can find diagrams on how to make them at my website under 'diagrams'). I think i learned this kind of laziness from Piro. Don't work smarter, work harder.

Piro and I recently saw 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'. We went to the 12:45 am showing to avoid the crowds. We were the first people in the theater, and were only joined by six others. It was like a private showing. What a great flick. I love Chow Yun Fat. He kicked a lot of ass, considering he was wearing a dress. I think piro should shave the top of his head bald and grow a 5 foot pony tail. Woo baby! But really, it's the women who were the real ass kickers in this movie. Men are such frauds. This film shows it like it really is. Since it is still in theaters I don't want to ruin it for anyone - but you must see it. It has it all - comedy, action, romance, tragedy. It took my breath away.

MoMo, our other baby, is staring at me. He needs some loving - gotta go. Piro will be back later this week.

[ADDENDUM: Our Cafepress order has arrived. Piro and I are very pleased with the quality of the bear. He is 10" tall and is as cuddly as can be. In a shirt bedecked with Piro's art - he is the best dressed bear around! I really like the babydoll tee too. It isn't the skin tight version you find in the junior's section that wouldn't fit a malnourished Hollywood starlet. It is generously proportioned and definitely femme. It has a slightly scooped neckline and falls right to the anterior superior illiac spine (the bony prominence on the hip). I am 5'8'' and I hate wearing guys tees that cover my ass. - seraphim]

"guest day"
Tuesday - February 6, 2001
[Largo] - 20:01:00
First up, law enforcement has struck a blow in the fight for justice by busting a Starcraft clan. Yep, I'll sleep better at night knowing that a bunch of college students won't be using such threatening language online like, "My zealot rush will kill j00!" anytime soon.

I want to thank Christian Fundin of Little Gamers for offering to us a sweet guest strip for Monday, it rocks.

Speaking of guest strips, two more will be on the way as Piro continues his dreaded moving experience. The other talented artists involved are Greg Dean of Real Life Comics and the infamous Michael Poe of Exploitation Now. It turns out Poe and I are from the same hometown and attended the same university, though I try not to hold that against him.

Kim Justice has been busy creating for MegaTokyo inspired tunes found here, and here. The one called "Largo Frags" is my favorite, not that I'm biased or anything. For a list of all Kim's work, click here.

I got a lot of email related to my crack about Canadians using rocket launchers in hockey. Perhaps I shouldn't make so much fun of the Canadians? In fact, to let you in on a little secret, I harbor a deep respect for the maple leaf. Strangely it began about the same time Bioware released Baldur's Gate. Lets face it, Canada has it all, snow, mountains, and Bioware. It's too bad their beer sucks.

One reader found that some of MegaTokyo's art was being used to promote a campus event of some kind at their local university. They even scanned in the flyer which was an altered version of our poor confused stewardess.

To be honest we don't mind when people do this to our stuff, within reason of course, although we do want to be asked before someone edits or uses our work. [omited - it turns out copyright does not need to be actively enforced, I was mistaken, it is trademarks that must be enforced, not copyright.]

This was deemed a 'cool link' - click it.. or something.

I know I'm not the only one waiting for Penny-Arcade's return. It's no secret that I wouldn't be doing this now if not for their awesome work. They inspired me to throw my hat into the arena, along with many other online comics.

Unfortunately, the net has taken a turn for the worse when it comes to making money. What I don't understand is the hatred expressed by fans when they see people trying to make some cash from their website. You can't expect to get professional work for free, for it's not a matter of principle as it is one of practicality. If you are giving all your time to a website, then you can't be holding down a full time job at the same time. This scenario can result in not being able to pay rent bills, power bills, and beer bills. So when I see people attack sites for looking at ways to make money, it really rubs me the wrong way. After all, we can't all be college students running our websites out of our dorms forever. So, I hope the Arcade finds a good home, and just as importantly, a profitable one.

Speaking of webcomics, Fringe of Insanity is back. The creator took some vacation time away from the comic but now he's back to do the 'art' thing for us once again. So check it out, the Fringe is sweet.

Anyone else find it completely unfair that Piro can get his better half to write his rant? Normally I'd be complaining but since she writes less then Piro does, I'm going to make an exception - or something.

"piroquake dumpbox"
Thursday - February 8, 2001
[Piro] - 03:34:00
Believe it or not, I'm not feeling particularly verbose today. So, rather than struggle with trying to put together some inane blurbage, I figure i'll pull some stuff out of the dumpbox.

I might add some commentary to these images tomorrow - but for now, I'm just going to post the images. Believe it or not, there's a lot of stuff I scribble that never gets scanned. Usually, it's because the images fall below my threshold for 'acceptable and won't make me look like an idiot'. These images are candidate for what I call the 'dumpbox'.

Here is a selection of drawings that I produced trying to figure out how to go from the RuriQuake idea to the PiroQuake idea that showed up in the b4k4quake comic. enjoy. these suck, there's tons wrong with each one, but there's some raw stuff there that's pretty nice.

"the 'work' thing"
Sunday - February 11, 2001
[Largo] - 02:30:00
Damn you Westwood. You, off my planet!

This weekend I went by my local games pusher and grabbed some sweet looking titles, namely Bungie's Oni and Westwood's Red Alert 2. While Oni was cool and all, I really didn't get a chance to get into all the punch throwing and bullet heavy action as I planned. No, Instead a friend called me and demanded I do the "Online" thing with him.

So anyways, I load up Red Alert 2, and twenty hours later - Here I am.

I really don't have a good review for this game, or even a screenshot, It's not exactly 'zero-day warez' anymore, so I think everything that can be said about it, has been said. Just know I think it's a great sucker of time, not quite a Ever-crack - but for the weekend it had me re-living my StarCraft days. Oh.. Blizzard, where are you now?

Unless you live under a rock like Detroit, you should of seen that Penny-Arcade is back online and making with 'the funny' again. Now I think about it, I need to order a PAWang shirt soon.

I've also picked up Phantasy Star Online, like everyone else in the freaking country. I think Tycho was right in his rant about the size of one's mag. I've determined girl gamers dig mags, and if you don't have a big mag, you are SOL.

Tomorrow I start some new job thing, should be fun, or not. Though I've yet to find a ideal job, one where I get to dispatch the undead my crossbow.

Speaking of which, there hasn't been any new 'destroy the undead' games lately, I can't get my undead-bashing on if there aren't new games for which I can bash them in. Personally, I think we need a new Claire Redfield game, all Claire - all the time.

I'm keeping it short tonight, I need to be up early in the morning and do the 'work' thing. So like, later.

"valentines day!"
Wednesday - February 14, 2001
[Seraphim] - 02:03:00
Seraphim here. Happy Valentine's Day! I hope all you lucky lovers are enjoying your bears and tee shirts. I love mine. I'd wear my tee to the office but it is an obsessively PC environment and I would probably be sent home.

Largo has obviously be hit by the Valentine Day bug. Hhe and I were chatting yesterday when he happened to mention he likes females who are verticaly challenged (short). Isn't that how it always is? The 6' tall guy with the 5' girlfriend. Let me tell you - nothing ticks off a tall girl more that a tall guy with a short girl. I'm sure short men don't care for the petite woman pool being raided anymore than tall girls dislike the declining tall man selection. With that great of a disparity you could use the little person's head for a drink rest. A beer rest in Largo's case. I would have to date someone almost 7 feet tall to be considered "short" by him. That doesn't appeal to me anyways - I have the most perfect Valentine already.

Piro and I were lucky enough several years ago to attend the "Angels From the Vatican" exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts. As a Catholic, it was almost like a pilgrimage to see items from the Vatican's museum. They exhibited paintings, relics, textiles, and statuary. My personal favorite was a section of an elaborate German carved wood altar. It was a group of angels in a celestial jam session. For a pipe organ and harps they looked like they were really rocking. It reminded me of the elaborate altars I saw while living in Germany. There were no folding chairs of the modern day Newman Centers on college campuses in America. It was all uncomfortable pews and baroque/rococo architecture. At one concert I attended, the church even had a gilded skeleton of a Saint in a glass casket.

In all fairness to American Catholicism, at Easter I will relate the tale of the priest from my childhood staging a reenactment of the Crucifixion on Good Friday right in the aisle. It may have been a modern church but that was enough to put the fear of God in to you.

I must say, I don't approve of the Kitty Bonsai pictures. There is nothing funny about pictures of abusing a cat. Now Puppy Bonsai would be hilarious. Obviously, I am a cat person. Honestly, I love all pets and if the time is right for you - you should consider adopting a pet from a local animal shelter. Our cats have brought us joy and laughter everyday since we rescued them. I wish Piro had gotten a picture of Hime when she got her head stuck in a hole in a box. Good times.

If you can't provide a loving home right now consider a monetary donation that will support spaying or neutering. Very few shelters are truly no kill and millions of animals are euthanized every year.

While we are all in such a loving mood be sure to consider donating blood. I have an appointment Thursday to donate and to join the National Bone Marrow Registry. One pint of blood will save three lives. So go give your sweetie a kiss and be thankful you are all happy and healthy and able to give such a generous gift.

"tsukareru"
Friday - February 16, 2001
[Piro] - 09:30:00
Yea, that about sums up how I feel. 'tsukareru' - tired. And the real push isn't until next week when I actually move into the new apartment. Between the move, deadlines at work, and drawin stuff for the comic, it's been a busy, busy week.

I'm keeping it short today (how often have i said that before? no, don't tell me...) - I guess I just can't resist the compulsion to yabber endlessly.

I get a lot of emails asking me what the link for that True Love Story short illustrated story 'envelope' is located. Well, here it is, go read it if you haven't yet ^_^. I should have linked to it on valentines day, since it's a sappy, cute little romantic story. Oh, I enabled the 'larger versions' of the images so you can take a closer look at my crappy line work.

Last night, around 2:30 am i was just about to upload today's comic when the little megagremlins decided to take my box down hard. It froze up like me at a high school dance when i was a kid. I didn't think it was a big deal because i didn't really loose anything - i just had to reboot and upload. For some reason, when i rebooted, my cable modem wouldn't connect. In fact, no matter how often i rebooted. The little like labeled 'cable' would blink a half dozen times then go out. I think the expression on my face was much akin to the meth for dummies strip... there was nothing I could do but go to bed and try to upload the comic from work the next day.

luckily, the folks down at MediaOne/Comcast seem to have fixed whatever was wrong back at the Big House, and I have my connection this morning. Which leads me to the next thing i have to say... if you are a raver who enjoys those zombie-like states that come from excessive dancing, smoke, and lack of oxygen at raves, be sure to email largo about it. It's all his fault.

Considering my workload this week, i'm amazed that we've been able to pull off comics all week. We have one more very special guest comic that is slated to run next wednesday... coincidentally the day i will be offline completely. Mr. Poe is a bad man, that's all i have to say...

ugh. the hatemail from ravers is flowing in... (sigh) Hey, i'm a huge fan of raver cutlure, and i know that a lot of people (including people like Wing Zero who help out with the comic) are ravers themselves. We are poking fun at the scene, not disrespecting it - in much the same way we poke fun at ourselves and at anime/gaming culture. The largo character is infamous for being insensitive - that doesn't mean that Megatokyo is.

and you should note that piro could almost pass for a raver in todays comic. I did that intentionally. :) Please accept my appologies in advance if this offends. It's a classic case of not realizing a joke might be taken the wrong way.

"napster bad?"
Friday - February 16, 2001
[Largo] - 21:30:00
This weeks events has brought my old friend Napster back into the news. I cant turn on a radio station or enter into a water cooler conversation without the word Napster entering into topic.

Since misery loves company, Im inviting you to share mine. So let me just throw this out and say I love Napster and I think anyone who is against Napster is against freedom itself.

Now before you go and offer me your shovels so I can dig myself out of this now, very deep hole, let me explain.

It has been said that to download music when you dont own the album, is stealing. So lets think about that for a moment, why is it stealing? I'm not duplicating the CD and selling it, Im not competing or bootlegging their merchandise, yet it is somehow stealing?

To be fair, I'll play the Devils advocate for a moment. It has been argued that this is theft because the recording industry isn't making any royalties and yet you're getting to hit that play button without giving them a cent.

Well if its about royalties, then why arent used CD stores being sued? For instance, let us say I go out and purchase the new Counting Crows CD - off that initial sale the recording industry has made money. Now if I were to go to a used CD store and trade or sell it so someone else can buy my old CD the recording industry makes zero money at that point.

It is the same thing with Napster except we are removing the middleman so a third party (the used CD store) makes no money as well.

Ah, but wait with Napster you have two parties who in theory are listening to the same music at the same time, ie: that CD was never actually sold so now two, three, or a hundred people now listen to the track.

To that I say, does it matter who is listening to the music that has came off 'my' CD? and if it does matter, then is it really 'my' CD then? or is it just on loan to me from the RIAA?

Music sharing is a freedom and Ill tell you why its important we keep it this way. You see, the music industry wants very badly to make it so all music is licensed so eventually when you buy a CD you are really buying a license so that you and only you will be able to listen to that song from that purchase.

Now before you start calling me a wacko - lets think back to the DivX fiasco. This was the beginning of a scheme to make it so people wouldnt own copies of videos, but instead start the slippery slope of pay-per-use only.

What also makes me question the validity of the Napster Threat to the recording industry is if Napster is costing them all these millions of dollars in lost revenue, in lost royalties - then why did they post record high earnings last year?

Its always been said to just follow the money and youll find the truth. In the case of the RIAA versus Napster the math just doesnt add up.

Furthermore, lets look at history, the arguments being used against Napster in are the exact same arguments made twenty years ago by the movie industry when they wanted to ban VCRs suggesting that a high quality copy of the original would result in the downfall of their entire industry.

Now, I havent checked the movie industrys books lately, but I'm pretty sure they are doing just fine in the money making department.

"i'm gone for one day and..."
Thursday - February 22, 2001
[Piro] - 12:30:00
I've already mentioned that moving sucks, so I won't say it again. Even so, my relocation from my the old apartment to the new one actually went pretty well. Too well, in fact. I should have known better, I should have seen it coming...

The only hitch in my re-location came yesterday evening around 5:00 when the guy from Media One / Comcast showed up to re-connect my cable TV and cable modem. Since I was moving within the city, it was supposed to be a very simple task - I could use the same cable modem and i was already set up to use the service. The hitch came when the guy tried to screw the cable into the Cable TV outlet on the wall...

the plate with the cable TV connector popped off the wall and there was no wire behind it.

(sigh)

Yes, for some reason, which no one either here at Media One or at the apartment complex can figure out, someone cut the cable somewhere near the attic and yanked the cord out of the wall. There is even a cable that runs from the main box in the laundry room into the attic - but there are no cables in my apartment.

(sigh)

Well, this is a pretty nice complex, and the maintenance people here are pretty responsive, so I know that it won't be an inordinate amount of time before I have cable - but it will be a while. i figure it will be a week before I am on-line again. Why don't i just use a dial up modem? Well, I'm not getting a phone in the new apartment - I don't need one. I have a cell phone and with a cable modem I don't need a phone line at all. Besides, with Ameritech, it would take longer to get a phone turned on that to have the cable company install a new cable.

So how am I going to update the website? How will i post comics for the next week? It's very simple, actually. I have net access at the office, so getting this (like this rant) online isn't too big of a deal, i just need to do it when i am in the office. I'll need to find some of those things called '3.5" floppies' - there should be some around here somewhere.

So, here's the deal...

For Friday's strip, I won't be able to upload it Thursday night at 1:00 am EST which is our normal schedule. Friday's comic will go up Friday morning, around 9:30 am EST I appreciate your understanding with this - it's the best I can do under the circumstances. I will probably be able to get Monday's comic in place for our normal update Monday morning - in fact, If I stay ahead of the game, you shouldn't see any other delays in deliverance of Megatokyo Comicness.

I haven't had a chance to even view my email or the forums since Poe's guest strip went up on Wednesday, but according to Largo it has generated a bit of flack. I just want to say a few quick things about Poe's guest strip, which applies to the Little Gamers guest strip and the Real Life guest strip that went up earlier this week.

As anyone who reads Exploitation Now knows, Poe's strips are pretty ribald. In fact, that's kind of the whole point. ^_^ The truth is, his guest strip is actually pretty tame for the kinds of material he often does.

When I asked other webcomic artists to do guest strips, I indicated that i wanted them to make their own interpretations of Megatokyo and that neither Largo or I would edit or change their work. For the Little Gamers strip and for the Real Life strip, I didn't have any worries because neither of them had any questionable content.

Poe's strip, when I got it, worried me. ^_^

Not because i didn't find it to be a good strip (which it is - it was a sneaky way to get Poe to draw me his rendition of Kimiko and Erika) It was the simple fact that I really is more explicit than anything we've done here on Megatokyo. After thinking about it, I decided that I was not going to ask Poe to change anything. Secondly, i wasn't going to NOT post the strip just because I was worried about any reactions. The strip would go up, as planned, and I wasn't going to change a thing.

Poe's style is very overt, and there is no getting around it - it's the type of humor that makes up his style of comic. I didn't want to dictate to him how he should do the strip. I am respecting his decisions as to what he wanted to do. I felt that from quasi-artist to artist, i owed him that respect. And I do - Poe is an excellent artist, and i really enjoy his strip.

The same goes for Christian over at Real Life. The guest strips were 100% theirs, and I'd like to thank all three of you guys for goin to the trouble to help me out this month - I really needed it, and I appreciate it.

Oh, yea, and i should thank that Dom guy too. Something about 'Stick Figure' stuff or somethin like that...

By the way, I will get even with Mr. Poe ... by doing a Exploitation Now guest strip that is completely devoid of any racy or explicit content! In fact, I'll put Jordan and Bimbo is the biggest baggiest sweaters I can draw! Muwahahaha!!

I am so evil. ^_^

"it must end..."
Thursday - February 22, 2001
[Largo] - 23:30:11
First up, Gamespy has made some new chat rooms focused around the many online comics that grace the website. To access them, go download yourself the latest version of gamespy arcade, - like right now.

I received a large number of emails over the weekend regarding the 'napster' opinion I posted last week. While I did read them all, I have not replied to most them, instead I plan to address them in a future rant.

Initializing rant engine 3.0

You know, the world is really getting worse everyday. Yep, it's true - and I'll prove it. My friends down at Texas A&M University are little upset right now due to a new mandatory requirement that they take two additional courses in order to graduate. These new mandatory classes are 'culture diversity' oriented studies.

It turns out that in today's society the most evil of all crimes is no longer the taking of someone else's life, instead it is the villainous act of making other people feel uncomfortable.

For those of you in the states, take a good look at the cultural diversity courses already being taught to grade school level children. Such programs are meant to help our children … understand one another, but all they really do is brainwash children into believing the garbage that is political correctness. Granted I'm against the pro-lesbian messages taught in such classes since it may produce more lesbians - which mean fewer girls for me. I am however in favor of pro-gay teachings, since it will mean, more girls for me. [yes, im being facetious with my last few comments, yes it is a joke]

It's my feeling that people should be allowed to think however they want, because when it comes down to it, that is freedom. No matter how 'wrong' I may feel someone is, as a human being, it is his or her right to continue to think that way. Any attempt to control the natural thought process's is too Orwellian for me to digest without serious heartburn.

However, if a person's beliefs are so radical against the mainstream that they are made to feel shame, then so be it. That is the price paid sometimes for being an individual.

If you can't take the criticism, then don't make yourself a target by refusing to blend into the norm.

So what if people feel that they are being looked down on by others? So what if they walk around feeling uncomfortable because the guy next to them wasn't trained to understand their language, sexual orientation, or their culture? Personally I think people who worry that much about the opinions of other people they don't even know, has bigger issues - for instance, the fact that they being a self conscious ass clown.

Rather then simply allowing the world to judge them by their character, certain groups want us to understand 'where they came from' - as if knowing about their native countries' farming exports or the yearly goat-herding contest is going to enlighten us.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love the idea of people taking the time out to learn a foreign language, or even about a foreign culture. I think it can be an enriching experience that could have a profound effect on the life of the individual undertaking such things.

However, when you force someone to do something, such as learn. They are generally less receptive if not, bitter about it.

Well, this little rant was a bit more political then I normally get, but what the hell, writing about the level and stats of my mag in Phantasy Star Online would have been… boring.

"ah, but come back thursday"
Wednesday - February 28, 2001
[Piro] - 14:03:00
Ah, it's amazing. I finally am back online. Yes, as of 10:00 pm this evening, my cable modem is working like a charm. In typical 'my life is my best source of material for the comic' fashion, the hurdles that had to be cleared to GET me here is a story in and of itself.

Good to be back.

First off, let me cover a little business. I know that there have been a lot of guest strips, 'shirt guy dom' strips and 'piro bad art day - adventures of RL Piro and RL Seraphim' this month - if you've read my rants recently you will know that it is because I have been quite literally buried under work deadlines and the upheaval common with moving from one apartment to a (much smaller) new apartment. The movers moved the bulk of my possessions on Wednesday last week, when the sun was shining. The rest of my junk (the stuff i just wished would go away) i moved in the sleet and rain on Saturday, and the 50 mph windstorm on Sunday. It was so bad I started to feel as if it was some sort of cosmic joke. Yes, Seraphim did drop a dresser on me. Yes, i did recover, but I think that Seraphim's ribs still hurt from laughing so hard. In truth, I should be at the office tonight helping my crew finish up a set of construction documents. I'm a lousy boss. :(

As you have no doubt noticed, we have yet another 'Shirt Guy Dom' strip today. This was not my original plan - in fact, I am about halfway done with Wednesday's strip... I just can't finish it. I wasn't able to start drawing until 10:00 pm, and now that it is almost 1:00 am, i just don't have the energy to stay up till 3 am to finish it. Another thing, it's an important strip, and I want to do it right. Luckily, Dom, bless his trackball-biased soul, had given me another SGD strip to fill in next time I needed it. Well, tonight I need it.

I'm eager to get on with the story - in fact, i'm working to string in a few more threads and tug on a few others to slide them along more quickly - so the plethora of non-piro-drawn MT strips is as frustrating to me as it is to you (er, well, that's what i hear every time i use a guest strip). So, here's the deal: I'm going to spoil you folks - in addition to the SGD strip posted today, I will add post a new strip on Thursday, and yet another new strip on Friday. It will be like MT will have gone daily for three days in a row. Don't get used to it. ^_^

I won't prattle on much longer here - i'm very disappointed in myself for not getting the comic done for today, and I am tired and need to go to bed - but the effort required to get my cable installed in the apartment is worth telling...

As i mentioned last week, I was faced with the problem of having an apartment that was supposed to be wired for cable, but for some reason the cable in the wall itself was missing. Today's efforts involved one guy from Comcast/MediaOne and two of the maintenance guys from my new apartment complex.

To make a long story short, It took a good five hours before i was finally able to see things stream in thru my cable modem. Our first thought was that someone had just simply cut the cable and removed it from the wall. In the furnace closet, it was plain to see where the original cable had come down thru a hole in the ceiling, down to the floor, thru a hole, into the wall and down to the faceplate on the first floor. Even after cutting away a good part of the ceiling in the mechanical closet, they couldn't find a loose end of the cable to re-attach to.

You can imagine my surprise when the maintenance guys started cutting a 2 ft by 3 ft hole in the ceiling (you have no idea what a mess that can be ^_^) into which the cable guy clambered up to find where the end of the cable coming to my apartment was. It turns out that at some point in the past someone had yanked pretty hard on that cable that came down from the attic and quite literally yanked it out of it's crimp and termination. Once that was threaded thru and connected, my TV suddenly had more than 2 channels. After a quick replacement of the cable modem itself (i now have this real funky looking 3Com modem) and a run to Comp USA to pick up a 50 ft length of Cat 5 cable - i was online. It's was 10:00 pm. I hadn't even started to draw yet.

I'd just like to say 'thanks' to the Media One / Comcast guy, and to the two guys from the apartment complex here. You guys busted your asses to get me online, and I appreciate it. Thanks guys.

In March things should get back to normal... which doesn't really mean my life gets any easier, but hey - it all makes for good story material. :)

"I'm not dead yet"
Saturday - March 3, 2001
[Largo] - 13:52:00
Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

The fine people over at Bioware sent me some goodies such as a sweet Baldur's Gate mouse pad which now takes up permanent space on my desk.

Bioware recently annouced the final chaper in the Child of Bhaal saga with, Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal. Now I'm looking forward to yet another Bioware masterpiece. Now where's thats NDA at....

I love those Bioware guys, my every dealing with them only reaffirms the good things I always thought about them. Now if I can just challenge Trent Oster and his '84 Mazda RX7 to a race.

Alright, enough nice-ness, time to go back to doing what I'm paid to do, which is be Largo. Speaking of which, I get a lot of email asking how close the persona of Largo is to me in real life.

While there isn't an easy answer to that, the best way to explain it is Largo is my id. Understand that everything that I say in these rants, I do sincerely believe. Instead of portraying a character, I just try to turn off my better judgment when I write rants and scripts for MegaTokyo. I prefer to embrace the more spirited side of myself when it comes to my writings, and so - I tend to attract a great deal of flame mail when I throw my ego to the wind. Believe it or not, for all my ravings and misanthropy, I'm an idealist.

First off, for those of you who wrote in asking about my Phantasy Star Online character, I currently have a level 41 Hunter Newearl. Though I keep telling myself I need to stop playing PSO, like any good MMORPG, it's addicting, the leveling, and all that junk. However there always a feeling of 'damn' when I sit down to play the same game over and over again just to get an additional level which doesn't really translate into all that much, besides the wasting of a day of my time. It was this reason I had to stop playing Evercrack so much.

Verant, the makers of Everquest and the largest drug dealer in America, recently pissed me off. On my credit card bill this month I noticed eight charges from Verant to my card, each charge was for $9.89, totaling up to a $79.12 bill. Naturally I called them about this and their explanation was they are doing a audit for the previous year and it turns out they forgot to bill me 8 months of the last 12. So now they are simply just billing me all at once so I can pay them all that back money. Granted, I did check my credit card statements for the last year, and yes they were correct that they were not always billing me. I never gave it much thought in the past, I always figured they were giving me free months to compensate for their crappy game. Oh well, I suppose it would have been nice for them to at least 'tell' me they were going to stick a big charge on my card for this, but knowing Verant's idea of customer service, I'm not surprised.

I was notified that there is a new Erika skin over on the winamp site, found here.

On the comic front, there is a new webcomic up called TrueNuff. The guys over at Comic Ex Machina did a cool strip awhile back that was brought to my attention recently and can be found here. Funny stuff, though by linking it I'm sure I'll be barraged by flame mail.

Over at the shroom there is a interview with us posted here.

I miss broadband, there used to be a time when I could spend hours over at AdCritic being entertained by commercials that didn't suck all that much. Now however, I'm in broadband limbo thanks to the merchants of evil at @home. When I moved to my new place back in November I was saddened to learn I was too far from my phone company's central office to get DSL service. However @home assured me that my area was going to be setup for cable modem service soon, and all I had to do was wait. Waiting is what I've done, patiently waiting each day for the service to be turned on, day after day, and hour after excruciating hour. The kicker to this is the equipment is all already in place. @home assigns a node to each residence before they can provide service. Currently everything is setup for me to get @home service, except they are not allowing me to have it until they 'release my node'. I swear it's this sort of fsck'ing bureaucratic red tape that causes people to go postal.

"white hair"
Monday - March 5, 2001
[Seraphim] - 21:34:00
Seraphim here again!

I don't mean to start the week off badly for any one, but my Grandmother died last night. She was 95 and slipped peacefully away after a brief illness. She actually played a part in the choosing of my moniker. Her name was Seraphine (pronounced Sarafeen), mine is Sarah, and I suggested Seraphim for MT. I was always glad my parents didn't opt to name me after her - it was such an old fashioned name. My Grandma and I were pretty much dead ringers and I still resemble her when she was my age. Piro got a chance to meet her a few years back and just loved her. She was middle European with an olive complexion and snow-white hair, which the nurses put into a very long ponytail. I have her great skin tone and tan really easily but I really want the pure white hair when I am older. No gray for me. I want to wake up with a full head of shocking white hair one morning. (A 12 hour car drive to the funeral with my older sister and I may just get my wish sooner than later!) I really don't want to get anyone down - she had a long, full life and died with dignity - but go give your Grandparents a call or send a card if you still have them.

The move is complete and Piro even has his new drawing desk. He is no longer drawing over his key board on his lap with the sketchbook resting on MoMo. He is drawing right now and it suits him well. He looks like the mad artist that he is. The 'Moving Violation' strip really happened. After struggling down one flight of stairs he had the brilliant idea of sliding the dresser down on its side. I asked him several times if that was a good idea and was he positive? He assured me that he had the matter under control so I cheerfully let go. The dresser, however, didn't slide straight downstairs - it swayed toward the wall and back towards the banister all the while plunging downward. I have never seen his little legs move so fast as he raced to not get run over. When they reached the bottom he shot me THE LOOK. It was so full of scorn, of contempt, of resentment that, naturally, it made me bust out laughing. I giggled for a week every time I thought back to it. Good times. Shortly after that incident Piro called Two Men and Truck to complete the moving process.

Our movers were Gary and Gary and they did a great job. Gary the younger came strolling from the truck with the sofa on his head. Many cultures carry objects that way - it requires balance but the there is much less energy expended since the weight is carried through the long axis of your body and not through the arms. I was just amazed. I tried carrying a small laundry basket in from the car on my head and I am positive I compressed several vertebrae. Did you know the muscles that cause you to shrug your shoulders are extremely powerful and can even lift a person by shrugging?

After my last rant a hapless reader had the audacity to email Largo asking him to tell Piro that his gf should not be allowed to write the rant and if he wanted to hear from women he would watch 'the View'. For those of you who are not yet in the 21st century - get your head out of your asses. Women are no longer told what to say or when to say it or where they may say it. BTW, what a wuss, going to Largo with his misogynistic, sexist remarks - you got something to say honey, say it to me and be ready to say it to the hundreds of women you will encounter as fellow students, co-workers, bosses, professors, and health care professionals in your life time. In fact, why don't you just wear a sign that says 'Ignorant Sexist Pig' so society will know to shun you. Stop by the webpage for the American Association for University Women to find out more about social equality while your're at it.

[gulp! (runs for cover) - piro]

"buried in concrete"
Saturday - March 10, 2001
[Piro] - 14:20:00
Funny thing about concrete. Did you know that it never stops curing? Ever notice how in hot weather they will often hose down an exposed concrete surface as it sets up? That's because water is necessary for the chemical process of 'curing' to continue. If the surface of a new concrete pour dries out too quickly, the surface will be weak in comparison to the main bulk of the pour. This is why sometimes you will see 'spalling', where the surface of the concrete breaks away - the surface isn't as strong as the rest of the concrete. This happens because the workers didn't keep the concrete wet enough while it was curing.

As long as water is present, concrete (or more specifically, cement - concrete is technically a mixture of cement and aggregate (stones)) will continue to cure ... basically, forever. The chemical process doesn't stop. The Romans invented concrete way back long ago, and some of that Roman stuff is the hardest concrete on earth.

Concrete isn't an impervious material. Water and air can and will penetrate it. An organic mass enveloped in concrete will decay after time. The fact that when concrete cures, the chemical process releases a lot of heat also helps the initial breakdown of organic material. After time, This leaves a void in a concrete pour that can weaken the structural integrity of foundations and caissons. This can, and has, raised the threat of serious structural failure in large buildings before.

aiyaa...I think I've been listening to way too much Wumpscut this morning.

I've been pretty happy with the comic lately - I think the drawings are halfway decent, and I'm pretty satisfied that the story is now moving along at a reasonable clip. Largo and I have way too much insanity to cram into strips this month, but we will do our best.

That's about the only thing I'm happy about with. Neither Largo or I have been keeping up with rants, I haven't answered hardly any email, I haven't done a new sketch or colorwork for Fredart in almost a month, and I desperately need to finish the color drawings of Largo and Piro for our next t-shirt design.

And then there are all the other little side projects for MT that are starting to percolate. Tsubasa has recruited two very talented seiyuu (voice actresses) to be the voices for Kimiko and Erika - a very exciting project. In fact, he's also been working on lining up a few music groups in Japan to produce some OP and ED tracks. Spiffy, huh? The potential for us here at MT to produce some multi-media content by this summer is very real. The only thing is - there is a lot of front end work that I need to do to get everything started. Largo and Tsubasa have done a lot, and are waiting on me to do my part. So, with all that work to do, you'd think that I could knock a good chunk of it away this weekend, right?

Wrong.

Unfortunately, It's crunch time again at work. I expect that I will have to work Saturday and Sunday both this weekend and next weekend, as well as late into the evenings during most of the week. This is not good for Megatokyo. Frankly, I am at a loss as to how I will deal with just getting the comic done for the next two weeks.

I know you are all tired of hearing me whine about how much work i have to do, so i'll stop with the angsty stuff.

I'll leave you to wonder why i started this rant with a discussion about concrete.

"monetize"
Sunday - March 11, 2001
[Largo] - 20:46:01
I learned a new word over the weekend, it is monetize. Apparently, to monetize something is to change it in order to make money off it. It's an e-commerce term, one so vile that the venom associated with it drips from my lips as I write these lines.

Some of you may have seen the slashdot article on Saturday, found here, regarding efront. For those that have not, the deal is this; over the weekend the icq chat logs of the CEO of efront were leaked out, causing both embarrassment and enlightenment on a number of levels to a number of people. I spent a large part of this weekend reading over the logs, trying to make sense of them. The things this ad banner network did to hurt and steal from websites makes me ill.

I'd like to detail the accounts on this site, I'd like to list each item by villainous item on what was done, but I won't. I spent the better part of the day thinking about how to approach these revelations. I've watched my friends get hurt and robbed by ad banner networks, and it has been hard for me to digest. However, when some of my friends still depend on these revenues to pay rent - it becomes hard to do an all out assault against those networks, even with as many unconscionable acts as efront has performed.

Instead, I want to offer a solution, rather then be part of the problem, so the following is an outline for what I think should be the future of revenue making on the net. What things to avoid, and what we need to encourage.

First off, the big one - Ownership. Never, under any circumstances sign over ownership of your website, never for no amount of money unless that money is enough to buy you out for good. One common tactic of ad banner networks is to pay an upfront sum to 'buy your rights' then promise you control of the site and a commission. This sounds good, but what can happen is if they want to ditch you and exploit you, they simply stop paying you. Then a few months roll by as they make money on your banner ads, all the while not paying you for it. Then they get you to 'opt out' of your contract and give up the revenue they promised in exchange for you getting back ownership of your website. Basically, they exploit and rob you for a few months, and then leave you how they found you, and it's completely legal.

Pop-up ads, please kill whoever came up with these. Thanks!

Portal sites, I don't believe there is any future in a portal site concept, people do not go to a website because it is part of a network of non-related sites, the idea that you can cross-market a webcomic with the selling of a vacuum cleaner is not going to cut it. I am open to the idea that someday, ad banner networks will understand their sites' demographics and could then provide a reasonable match of product to consumer, but right now that isn't going to happen. So avoid these utopian pyramid schemes for now.

Demographics, website operators need better tools to analyze their readers' interests and establish in a documented form, just 'who' is really their target audience. You can't sell something to people unless they are open to the idea, unless you have a really sweet commercial to spark interest - which in the case of banner ads - is never the case. The one exception I've found to this rule is that cool Penguin Computing banner of the giant Godzilla sized Tux the penguin stepping on Microsoft's offices, but I digress.

Pageview inflation, one of the biggest mistakes in the arena of ad revenue is the idea of paying people on a per/pageview basis. Once a contract is signed and it's based on pageviews rather then uniques, the webmasters will pull simple tricks to increase the number of pageviews, this includes breaking a comic over multiple pages for instance, or breaking the site into many pages. I'm not saying that's wrong, but while one or two pages for a site is fine, some sites abused this to an extreme, by say - putting up a webcomic that takes 30 pages of clicking per issue in order to drum up money. As a result, ad banner networks got wise and demanded everyone go to a unique/ip pay rate, to give you an idea of what this would of done to MT, had we been on a pageview pay rate with such a network, and then went to a unique ip rate, we'd lose 50% of the money we were getting. This sort of thing is what killed a lot of websites. A point of fact: In order to force out some websites who refused to renegotiate their contract pay rates - ad banner networks have used the refusing to pay tactic I outlined in the ownership paragraph above. (pageviews are counted as any page loaded from the site, no matter if it all comes from one person. Unique ips are just that, one ip address per person, per day)

I'd rather see ad banner networks using a formula that pays us so much per pageview, and so much per unique ip address, with a greater pay rate on the uniques, so as to balance out websites who's unique address's are way lower then their pageviews, and still not punish websites that do well with pageviews. The black & white system in place now is neither fair to websites, nor does it make any logical sense.

I think a simple understanding needs to be had with these ad banner networks, they view websites as chattel to be bought, sold, and worked in the fields until death. It's a very modern business approach. Many of us who run websites, don't do it because we want to make money, we do it because it's our creation, our art, and in some cases, our lives. Banner networks and even companies who want to advertise on websites need to realize they are dealing with creative people, not business sharks. The same type of dealing you would do with an artist is what is required for webmasters.

Click thru payrates - not going to happen, they suck, and the idea of paying people only if someone clicks on the banner is not only stupid but it goes against the very concept of advertising. Commercials exist so the merchandise being sold is kept wandering around in your head, not so you will go out and immediately buy that new item. Advertisers want you to always be thinking of the product. The rules of commercials need to transcend into the rules of web-based advertising, same concept - different medium.

Finally, before you ever sign a contract with anyone, get a lawyer, or make sure you really do understand what it is you are signing. Never take the other person's word on it, because when it comes down to it, the only thing that matters is what is on that contract.

Unless you can afford some really good high priced lawyers later on to dispute it.

"pop tarts"
Wednesday - March 14, 2001
[Seraphim] - 13:46:00
Before i post yet another of Seraphim's rants, I just wanted to say a big thanks to Seraphim and Dom for filling in for us today. Largo's employers stuffed him in a pet carrier and shipped him off to New York for a few days, and well... i've been working till 10 pm for the past week (that includes the weekend folks) workin on a deadline for next week. But enough of my whining. Seraphim gave me a stern look the other day and matter-of-factly informed me that i was topping out the whine-o-meter, and that i should tone it down a bit. -fred

Heheh. She has the patience of a saint. She has to to deal with me. ^_^

- - - -

Piro is indeed very busy. I haven't seen him but a few hours since I returned from Minnesota. It has been a tough week for him. Work is 12 hours a day plus weekends and when I was gone he was responsible for feeding himself. Piro is not really a hunter/gatherer type. I give him credit for trying. He makes Pop Tarts every morning. Admittedly, the toaster actually has a specific "Pop Tart" setting. It was it's number one selling feature for him. He also embellishes his Toni's pizza's with EXTRA cheese and pepperoni. If I did it for him I could probably be brought up on attempted murder chargers. Murder weapon: cholesterol.

To cheer him up I bought him X-men and Mulan VHS tapes. I was well intentioned but got the "why didn't you rent because we are getting the region free DVD player soon" speech. He seems to forget we have late fees at every video store in a ten mile radius. I never followed X-men but even I thought it was a cohesive story. When is the sequel? Haven't had time to watch Mulan yet, but several Asian friends have complained that the movie doesn't resemble the traditional tale. I just wonder why most American animated movies have to be musicals?

Piro's last rant was a fine example of the sweet nothings he is always whispering to me. Oh Honey, look fresh concrete or let's take a long walk by the construction area. Now if he offered to scribble "Prio luvs Seraphim" in the sidewalk that would be romantic. When I suggest he make a buttock impression in the fresh concrete he always refuses. He is such a Republican stick-in-the-mud. He won't let me do it either.

A few years back Piro and I went to Anime Central in Chicago. I didn't want to be burden so he went off with friends and I wandered around by myself. In the dealer room I was looking at merchandise when two fan boys came up and started talking like big men behind my back. "I'm going to push her outta my way." "If she doesn't leave I'll MAKE her leave." I was surprised. Piro and friends had assured me Anime types were nice. Maybe not the most social but nice. Needless to say, I turned and gave them a withering look and they fled. Rude people really tick me off. Back to my Valentine Day rant - no, doing nice things won't bring you good karma but I'm sick of people being obnoxious, self-centered creatures. Doing something nice won't make your day better but it will make someone else's (possibly mine) that much better. People who are too mean and bitter to let someone merge into traffic should be allowed to leave the house anyways.

Got a ton of mail in reards to my last rant. Reminds me of an old Irish saying in honor of St. Patrick's Day which is this Saturday. "May those who love us, love us. And those who don't, may He turn your ankles, so we may know you by your limping." Amen.

"dom speaks..."
Wednesday - March 14, 2001
[Dom] - 16:07:00
It looks like today's my day, which is ironic, because it's also White Day over in Japan, and to most of you, the concept of me and love is alien. According to rumor, the only thing I cuddle up with at night is my good ol' Sig P230. Which is wrong, of course, since I don't own any guns--if I curled up with a weapon, it would probably be a nice, comfortable cavalry sabre, a double axe or something similar.

But that's neither here nor there. My purpose today is to talk about MetaMegaTokyo--try saying that ten times fast. I don't know how I got into this whole mess--I was talking to Largo on IRC one day, when he mentioned something about scripts and I felt a sock full of quarters hit the back of my head. When I came to, I found a red pen in my hand and some drunken scribbles in front of me. Not having anything better to do, I fixed 'em up--except episode 3, I confess that was a brain fart on my part--and the rest is history, I suppose.

I've kind of taken Piro's stance on this whole MegaTokyo phenomenon. "Who are all you, and how did Largo get you past the Turing test?" But I've had a harder time denying this whole deal, since I've managed to attract scary fangirls who want to chase me down, tie me up, and dress me in drag. I guess I'm kind of flattered, in a "My God, stay away from me" way... and also amused, since a girl Ed and I know decided that it was unfair that I got all the fangirls, and trained herself how to sparkle at him.

Anyway, the message boards call, so I'm off.

"my apartment? what apartment?"
Saturday - March 17, 2001
[Piro] - 10:56:00
Last Saturday was pretty depressing. I was facing not only having to work that weekend, but i was well aware of the fact that i had to work late every night all week, and more than likely all of the following weekend. Knowing that my little world would consist of little more than my work area at the office every day for the next week or so was just downright depressing. Not horrifying, mind you (i like my job), but depressing because of what it would take away from all of the other things in my life.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with working hard - a certain level of masochism is required to work in my profession. Actually, working an 8 hr day and then coming home to spend 6 hours drawing up and posting a comic is a pretty good indication that i am not necessarily a 'lazy' person. We've all had to do overtime, had to stay late to finish projects, time after school, etc. It can be a good feeling, actually - you feel like you are accomplishing something (if the reason for the overtime is to complete a task, not just more work on never-ending tasks) I suppose this is why you have to be careful about the tasks you 'add' to your so-called free time.

When i was fresh out of college, working till midnight for a whole week was no big deal at all. I had no girlfriend, i had no pressing activities, i had nothing to do, i had no life. It was a great excuse to wear casual duff to the office and kick around with the radio blaring Front 242 and Robyn Hitchcock tunes. As a matter of fact, i tended to enjoy working late.

These days it's different. I have a nice apartment (i seem to remember what it looks like), a girlfriend, a couple of deviant cats, a fairly successful webcomic, and plenty of little side projects that I am dying to work on. When i work overtime these days, it takes time away from them. With the exception of the cats, they are all understanding, but it is still depressing.

(y'know, i was thinking.... that's why employers like to hire younger folks. They can take advantage of all that extra energy you have that you haven't been able to focus on your own life yet. Kinda sad, really.)

I've been worried about MT. Everyone remembers last month - it was a tough one. I got emails from people stating that it must be nice having to only draw 2 comics a month. ^^;; Then I realize that i'd be holed up till the 20th with other projects... yea, i was worried. I know that 95% of all of you are understanding and supportive - and i appreciate that. But it doesn't change the fact that to ME i feel a certain responsibility to maintain a level of work here. It's a personal thing.

Well, it's Saturday morning again. I know i have to go into work today and tomorrow, in fact, i know that tomorrow night in particular is going to be a long evening. But the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel is visible. (and yes, it probably is a train heading towards me) Next week things get back to normal - and I am very much looking forward to it.

Oddly enough, Seraphim is scheduled to take the GRE on the 20th as well. So we are both under the gun until then. I was pretty happy with Friday's comic. It was going to be just another 'dead piro day' strip. When i started drawing, the idea for it fell into place. Largo and I knocked it around, and by the time my computer stopped crashing (i am so sick of this goddamn thing. It is flat-out going to die on me one of these days) Friday's comic was a real honest-to-goodness strip.

With luck, i can pull a strip off for Monday too. Thanks for being patient, thank you for all your emails (1500 and counting). I *really* need to get a 'fan support' section up and running... we'll see how next week goes.

"ph33r airlines"
Monday - March 19, 2001
[Largo] - 22:19:00
NOTE: There will not be a comic on Tuesday. Due to circumstances beyond our control, Piro is dead. Er, I mean he's busy at work again. So we'll resume on Wednesday with our normal happy schedule.

I hate flying with a passion.

Now before you start, it's not that I have a fear of flying - it's just that whenever I fly, I'm positive that my plane is going to crash into an ocean, mountain, or a Starbucks.

It's not that I mind the idea of death, as a point of fact - I consider him a very polite houseguest. Where was I? Oh yeah - falling from the sky at thirty-thousand feet after enjoying a last meal which will have consisted of a sample pack of beer nuts and what the airline attempts to pass off as food.

It's been my belief that airlines feed us with the remains of what America sends to third world countries. Either that, or we're eating what the third world countries sent back to us.

Since I'm going on a trip, I need some new stuff. I went out with my good friend, Joe. To start with - I needed some new luggage. We made the mistake of first going to a luggage specialty store. These bags cost more then my car payment, the store turned out to be one of those places for the mega-rich types. The manager was friendly enough, and didn't realize we'd have needed a loan in order to buy his stuff. So he showed us around his shop and tried to sell me an authentic baby sealskin duffle bag. We quickly left the store when the manager wanted to know if we could join them in a thrilling game of hunting human for sport on the weekend.

We then headed down to the Eddie Bauer store where I selected a sweet(read affordable) bag and some accessories. I went ahead and only got the essentials, you know - duffle bag, umbrella, metal booze flask, some new socks, etc. After leaving the store, we both had so much junk with Eddie Bauer written on it, we felt like walking advertisements.

There I was, packing my bags and making ready for my journey to another bloated reminder that bigger isn't always better, New York City. It's about this time that a thought hits me. Since I'm flying there, I once again run the risk of having my plane crash, or worse - run out of booze.

So here it is, my last will and testament for all the world to read:

1. I want to be buried with a copy of Neverwinter Nights. Now I realize that NWN won't be coming out for almost a year, so in the meantime, my body is be kept in Piro's fridge - next to his fresh orange juice.

2. Eventually someone will need to call up John Romero so he can resurrect me. I figure he ought to have that kind of power if he can bring Ionstorm back from the dead.

Ok, so maybe I'm being a bit silly about all this, I mean it's not like the airlines are cost cutting merchants of death. I... uhoh.

My overreacting aside, it still ought to bother some of you that many people are traveling on planes older then they are. Still, I won't let that bother me, I will bravely venture into the airport, ignoring the cold medicine drowsy pilots and meth addicted air traffic controllers, I'll make my way to a plane that's older then pong and not give it a second thought. I'll do all these things, because I'm an idiot.

Well, that's about it for me, I'll see you guys later this week, if not - I'll be seeing Piro's orange juice.

37% of your base are belong to IRS.

"dom speaks -- again"
Friday - March 23, 2001
[Dom] - 09:45:00
Next week is Fanime in Santa Clara. And, while I'm looking forward to the con, Piro's not gonna be there, as I'd originally hoped. They were going to fly him out as a guest, but, well, the whole thing fell through. Sigh. Oh well, at least I can kick Ed's ass while I'm there--you'll probably be able to find us in the karaoke room or the DDR machine, our dueling weapons of choice. Just beware of his Forever Love, it's been known to fell cattle at a hundred yards.

On to the next subject. I want to set people on fire.

Not out of spite, mind you, but for the same reason a dog licks its balls--because it can. I admit that I don't have the innate ability to set people on fire, since as far as I know there're no demons in my ancestry, but not a day goes by without at least once thinking "Damn, I want to set that guy on fire." I walk down the street and I find myself looking at people's foreheads. I imagine how my palm would fit right over their heads, so I could gaze right into their fear-widened eyes as they realize what's happening.

Ed knows what this feeling is like. Often, when we're sitting down playing a video game when I notice his hand fly off the D-pad and go straight for my temples. And I think "It's just not fair. Why can't we set people on fire?" They'd toast nicely before they hit the ground and rolled out the fire...

Disclaimer: I do not, in fact, want to set real people on fire. Not only is it wildly illegal and immoral, it smells bad and would probably get bits of ash and melted flesh all over my clothes. I neither condone nor support the setting of people on fire.

...though self-immolation's kinda cool.

In response to some of the e-mails I got, yes, the poem at the end of my last rant was, in fact, written by me. Pretentious, but I just felt like sticking something at the end. This week is a poem I wrote sheerly as a fun intellectual exercise.

O, what joy there is in brownness;
In the lack of beauty, calm rests.
What freedom it is to be formless,
To be rid of concerns, requests...
To be dull is to live in peace,
Never to be torn by small hands...

That is, until someone fills you
With air, twists you closed, and claps once.

"re-grouping"
Monday - March 26, 2001
[Piro] - 13:11:00
The past two months here at Megatokyo were not as organized as they should have been. In fact, you could almost call the whole experience 'chaotic'. For some reason, more people seem to be reading it (or Largo's is having fun showing me all these fake stats. I swear, there's probably 10 people in the country who actually read MT. I still don't really believe that we have readers) - but for some reason, people dont seem to be too unhappy with the last two months.

Except for me and largo, of course.

I think that MT needs to be tightened up a bit. We know where things are going, we've done a lot of experimenting, and it's time to push the envelope a bit. In order to do this right, largo and I have to get better at planning ahead. This is something that we've had a lot of trouble doing since we started. Its sorta hard to get ahead while you are always in the middle of production - and even harder to step back and look at the thing as a whole.

I spent most of the weekend trying to regroup the project - sitting down to go over all the material, storylines, threads, sketches, character info, location stuffs, and other bits of information to try to bring it into a more coherent whole. This isnt really a small task. There is a LOT of junk that I've gathered related to Megatokyo - my MT directory is 4 gigs, to be precise.

I'm a little annoyed with myself because i feel like i didn't get a lot done. Truth is, i really did - it's just that there is so much to do...

Another thing that occurs to me as i write this - and i'm keeping it short because it's 1 am and i want to go to bed - is that I think that one of the things people like about MT is the fact that they are really watching a work in progress. This is raw stuff, not just the finely honed and polished results of some studio, where all the people who work on it are faceless and nameless. I think that people like this. While it's true that the rather lame personalities that Largo and I have in real life probably take a little away from the comic itself, people feel a bit closer to it because you can hear us whine and complain, drone on about nothing, or simply disappear for a week because we are swamped at work. From the emails i've received, it seems that a lot of people identify with us. Hey, we don't pretend to be anything we aren't.

I suppose if I ever really did get organized with Megatokyo, it would loose a lot of its charm. Well, since the chances of me getting organized are about as much as largo spending a Saturday evening sober - i guess it's nothing to really worry about.

From here on out, we should be able to have more regular postings of rants, and a lot more movement in the story. Sorry about last month - i did my best, and i'm clear of the deadlines. Lotsa interesting stuff on the way, so thanks for reading.

"you asked for 'em..."
Wednesday - March 28, 2001
[Piro] - 21:35:00
Well, it seems that hounding Largo and me does at times result in action. I think if i got one more email that ran something like 'please oh please make that 3V1L L33t shirt!!!" i was gonna scream. ^_^ so, quite literally brought to you by popular demand, Largo's '3V1L L33t' shirt is now available. Just don't go sloppin around in sewers with it, ok? :P

Actually, if you notice, Megatokyo now has it's own store over at CafePress. You no longer have to go to three or four different stores to get MT swag - they were nice enough to give us our own cart system - so no more worries about having to pay shipping and handling twice if you want multiple designs. The other benefit to the store design is that it will let us offer a better variety of stuff in the near future.

For starters, the plan is to have two groups of 'designs' - art shirts which feature full color CG works of characters and whatnot (which is basically what the first four designs represent) and a new category Character Wear for shirts like '3V1L L33t' and perhaps some other designs sported by the characters themselves.

We will also be offering, finally, some black t-shirt designs in the near future, as well as hats (these things are kinda neat - cafepress sent me a few samples. I'm probably the only one in the country with a 'megatokyo' hat right now) as well as some other gift ideas. Largo seems to be excited about MT boxer shorts. I'm hanging out for the posters. Either way, the store gives us a single location for you to get MT stuff - which is the best way to support Megatokyo, plus you at least get something to wear in exchange for your dollars.

I know there was a price increase - i apologize for that. Cafepress raised prices across the board, but us and other stores like ours the increase was pretty minimal. Buying shirts contributes to largo's beer fund and my 'new computer' fund, so in some ways it could be considered a good cause.

Hopefully today's comic isn't too confusing. There is a fine line between taking one comic to do what would normally take a page or two - you build a lot into the visuals to try to provide more information so that the story can chug along. ^_^

Things at least start to get interesting from here on out...

"black & white"
Thursday - March 29, 2001
[Largo] - 08:30:00
I really need to get thru my email backlog…

First up, we finally got a shopping cart system in place for our online store, so now you can go and order all your MT-swag at once. Besides getting the store up, we also have one of largo's shirts now available, the "Evil L33T' shirt.

Now if only we can get the 'ph33r my l33t n4k3d sk|11z" boxer shorts online.

Black & White rules all.

Like every other crazed gamer with an ego the size of Cleveland, I've taken a liking to the recently released god simulation game by Peter Molyneux.

The game is simple, you're a god with all amazing cosmic powers and trappings that go along with it. As you can imagine, being a god is a hell of a lot of fun, with all the lightning, and the fire, and the wrath, and the running, and the thing… and - you get the idea.

The game is based around the idea that your actions determine what you are, for example; feeding your villagers would be considered 'good', while feeding your villagers to your pet would be a bad thing. Your actions determine whether you are Black or White.

The best part about the game, is it doesn't judge you, you judge yourself. This can be a real mind fsck at times. Being good is a lot more work then you'd think. Especially when you think in terms of traditional AD&D Alignment - in the past there was always a balance of good & evil between law & chaos. In Black & White, they only focus on either good or evil. So you really find yourself asking "What is good?" saying "Is helping this villager really a good act, or should I encourage him to help himself?"

Being evil is a lot easier, you can help or not help on a whim and just remain evil by torturing your people on a regular basis. There really isn't anything quite as satisfying as picking up a villager and seeing how far you can throw him into the ocean. The *Ka-Plunk* sound made when they hit the water is really relaxing.

I tried to be a good god, but that just hasn't worked out. My people became lazy and began to complain about everything. So I torched the greedy miserable slobs till they got their act together.

There's nothing like a little divine retribution before breakfast.

"disconnected"
Tuesday - April 3, 2001
[Piro] - 16:31:00
Y'know, sometimes i wonder what exactly I am doing wrong.

If you've been reading the rants, most of you will remember the fun I had back in February when i moved into my new apartment. Of particular joy was the problems getting my cable modem installed. Since i was an existing Media One / Comcast customer who just moved from one end of town to another, moving my cable service over to the new address was supposed to be no big deal. In fact, it would have been 'no big deal', except for the fact that someone had physically yanked the cable in the wall out so hard that it came loose somewhere up in the attic. The first guy who showed up didn't have a clue what to do - in fact, he seemed so lost that he quite literally walked away from my problem and didn't even close the service call. This small detail, it seems, came back to haunt me yesterday.

I'm not big on excuses. I may whine and bitch a lot, but i still believe that there is no excuse for not getting things done right or on time. This struggle has been particularly hard for the past couple of months. At work, I have literally had to work not only full 8-10 hr days all week, but saturday AND sunday for three out of the past four weekends as my project had deadline after deadline in rapid succession. As of 12:30 last night, my part in this project is basically done, and my team and I can start looking forward to getting home at reasonable times again as well as having something called 'a weekend'. Keeping MT going in the middle of this has been no small struggle, and frankly, the fact that last week was a series of (IMHO) some pretty darn good comics made me feel pretty good. To me, even with the unfair facts of the past month, there is no such thing as an excuses for being behind.

What gets me tho, is the fact that I have been getting emails bitching at me for the fact that either they are sick of dead art days, or getting on my case about the 'lack of progress with the plot'. Ok, i might be daft, but I thought i was doing ok, especially given my time constraints over the past few weeks. My favorite comments have been how i've been skimping on art lately, and re-using frames. (sigh) I have no qualms about slamming the quality of the artwork - i still think it sucks and needs vast improvement - those kind of critiques i have no problem with. What i can't deal with are emails that imply that i am slacking off or not working as hard as i should on the comic. Those really piss me off. Largo and I work our asses off on this stupid site - and we don't expect or want praise for it (in fact, please dont... just enjoy it, ok? ^^;;) We can't work harder on it without quitting our jobs. It's a fact of life.

Now, before you email me telling me how great MT is, etc, etc, yes - thank you. I get so many supportive e-mails that even my practically non-existent ego swells at times to the size of a small grape. This is not really necessary tho. I would rather you visit the forums and talk about the story and the characters. Of all the things about MT, i enjoy that the most. I love to see how people respond to the story, to the characters, to the MT world. True, i get a deviant chuckle out of a lot of it, but sometimes i am surprised by the insight some people have. If we are evoking emotive, thoughtful, intelligent, or even silly response to our work, THAT'S the reward we get for our efforts. Praise is great stuff, but if we fed off of it, we would be shallow people. Which we aren't. Well, Largo maybe, but not me. Not really. Honest.

I think my bad reaction to criticism comes down to two things - being tired and grumpy (yes, i get that way sometimes) and the fact that often, a criticism will point out something that bothers me as well. Those are the ones that hit close to home. I know that MT is in a bigger league now than a 'just my friends visit it' kind of site, so not only are everyone's expectations higher, but so are our own. I think i responded rather pissily (is that a word?) to some of the critiques - something i always regret doing. Doing something like MT exposes you much more than I think a lot of you realize - so please understand that sometimes you'll see me react to things in ways i'm not exactly proud of.

At any rate, now that the last of the deadlines for the Project from Hell are done and finished (i might even (gasp) take friday off!), i am looking forward to actually sitting down and crankin out some MT goodness both in strip form and some long overdue colorworks.

So imagine my irritation when i got home last night and discovered that Comcast had disconnected my cable service.

Yep. Disconnected. No cable modem, no cable tv. After five minutes on the phone with the rather nice people over at Comcast, we figured out what happened. If you recall, the first MORON who came (cough) never closed the service report. His visit was a 'install' visit - which is where he sets things up, gets me to sign some stuff, plugs in the cable modem, and off he goes. Once he discovered that there was no cable in the wall, he had no idea what to do, and basically just left. This work order, which was never closed, eventually came up 'canceled'. My service was never really set up. But what about the guy who came out four days later who worked so hard to get my cable installed? the guy who crawled thru a hole in the ceiling to get at the cluster of cables in the attic? It appears that this visit was a 'repair' visit, which did nothing to set up anything. He assumed that all the paper work was done, and the account was setup.

So, to make a long story short, i've been happily using my cable modem and tv for the past month, but Comcast didn't have any billing associated with the service. So, when they did an audit yesterday, they discovered activity on this address and sent someone out to put a trap on the line.

(sigh)

The people over at comcast were very apologetic, and I have an appointment on Friday for them to come out and re-connect my service. I get to live in the dark ages of no net connection till then. Whee.

I suppose i shouldn't complain too much - they will be fixing it (might even be sooner) and once it's up and running this will just a be story to chuckle over. Right now, with as tired as I am, it sucks. :P What i find so irritating is that the huge difference between the service techs who worked on my installation. I have no problem with the fact that the first guy didn't know what to do. it's the fact that he never followed thru, the fact that he JUST DROPPED it, that really annoys me. To me, it's not how good your are at something, it's how hard you try. That's all that really matters.

So, only real effect this is gonna have on MT is that I won't be able to update tonight at 1:00am (hell, i haven't started drawing the thing yet - and no, monday's one frame is NOT going to be frame #1 in wed's comic) - so look for Wed's MT to show up around 10:00 am EST.

I've got a lot of other things to talk about, but this will do for now. Thanks for the understanding (from those who do understand) and i'll poke back in tomorrow morning.

right now i need to find more coffee before i fall asleep.

"a word from our dom"
Wednesday - April 4, 2001
[Dom] - 21:34:00
Before I fire up the rant proper, I want to establish a few things. MegaTokyo is a really fun project on which to work. The community it's built has, for the most part, been a fun, energetic bunch. And the people behind MT (myself excepted, of course) are a truly nice bunch.

Now for the rant. See, as we've acknowledged before, MT has brought with it a measure of fame that's at once surprising and flattering. It's been like that for a few months now. Well, the honeymoon is over, apparently. Before any of you jump to conclusions, read on, this is important.

Let's start with Tsubasa, a very kind man who takes an ungodly chunk of time out of his life to help MT. Several times, he has requested that people not e-mail him and request translations. Yet time after time, he receives e-mails from people asking the equivalent of "Tsubasa-san, because I'm too cheap to buy a dictionary, too lazy even to try to look for an online dictionary, and a useless idiot in general, could you please translate this sentence for me?"

Or Piro, whose contributions and hard work everyone knows about. It seems like he's a very, very popular man, because it's almost to the point where he has to look over his shoulder to make sure he's not being stalked. I can't stress this enough. Let him live his life in peace, fanboys. Just because you don't have one doesn't mean you need to intrude on his

Oh, and as for myself, I used to have an online diary, a site where friends of mine could visit and check up on me. It was a private site not in its security, but in its implications. I won't go into all of my complaints about its distribution--check this thread and this thread on the forums and I think everything will become clear. See, there's something called tact. And it includes not opening someone's diary unless you have permission. Because see, there's this concept that people call "privacy". Look it up in the dictionary, it's a pretty important word to me, because I don't have much of it, but what I have, I'd like to keep.

All of this adds up to one pissed-off Dom. So let me say what the others may be too polite to say. Lay off of us. MT is a labor of love, and when the love is gone, well... to paraphrase Piro, do you know how easy it is to make a website disappear?

Now, I know that this may produce a flood of apologetic and conciliatory e-mails, but please, can it. Most of those e-mails would come from people who are not the problem, and would just be more noise. Instead, please, just stop harassing us, and let us pretend that we're ordinary people in some respects. I, for one, would like to attend Anime Central without needing to worry about a security detail for Piro. I would like it if tsubasa didn't have to deal with so many lazy fanboys who haven't yet found an online dictionary. I would like to be given some measure of personal space, however unlikely that may be.

Got that? Good.

END DOM

"one moment please..."
Friday - April 6, 2001
[Piro] - 11:17:00
Wai! My cable modem is working!

^_^

Ok, i've actually taken a much needed day off from work, and i'm actually drawing up today's comic right now. This is just a quick note to let you know that I will post the comic as soon as I can this afternoon.

Thanks for your patience, and i'll be back with todays slightly late comic around 3 or 4 this afternoon.

"a word from our dom - part II"
Friday - April 6, 2001
[Dom] - 13:16:00
First of all, I would like to apologize for the threat I made last night. I am human, and I will make mistakes, like saying things rashly, or being naive about the state of the internet. Thanks to all those people who pointed out that they didn't like being threatened and were polite about it, and those who were not-so-polite but still coherent. Special thanks to the flamer who was so incoherent his mail's going up on my wall as a badge of honor.

However, I stand by the first part of the rant. Piro has been harassed not only in his e-mail, but in his real life, and the delete button won't stop your phone from ringing. On Tsubasa's part, it's not the mail that gets to him, but the fact that people continue to ignore his requests that they stop requestiong X and Y from him, because he doesn't like it. It's a sign of disrespect, and I won't stand by quietly if I possibly have a means by which I can help.

As for the online diary, that actually stirred up a good amount of interesting discussion that I also appreciated. It was naive of me to think that I could possibly keep it a secret, but also, it wasn't exactly a kind thing of people to give out the URL when I hadn't wanted to give it to them in the first place... ah, well. I've learned a few things. Again, thank you.

Wow. Progress was actually made because of a rant. This is a new thing.

Okay, now on to the rest of the rant. Fanime was last weekend. And despite the fact that I'm still recovering from a bad cold I got from karaoke, the karaoke room started in chaos with broken computers and bad sound, and such, it was a great con experience.

I was able to meet and talk to some MegaTokyo fans face-to-face for the first time, and what I said before holds true--by and large, the MT crowd is a fun bunch of people. I'm still bewildered by the fact that my presence was requested by some really good artists in the artist's alley, and that I was asked to waste a page of perfectly good sketchbook paper by doodling some stick figures on it.

"one more moment..."
Sunday - April 8, 2001
[Piro] - 22:05:00
Have you ever noticed that the worst time of a big project is not when you are buried in the middle of it, but right after you are finished? The first week after is always terrible. I get moody, irascible, grouchy, tired, and generally just glump around a lot. It's a terrible anti-climax that comes as you try to get back to a normal schedule.

Friday was a day of doing all the things i have needed to do for weeks, including getting a haircut (after three months, i needed one bad. I was starting to LOOK like piro). As a result of all these activities, Friday's comic was VERY late. I think i finally uploaded it around 11:45pm. ^_^ So, if you didn't see friday's comic because you only look at work, be sure to go and check it out - it's not a bad one. ^_^

Largo and I felt that we needed to take some time to sit and re-work a few things in the scripts for the next two weeks. I know that i will loose at least two readers as a result of this (hey, i was told that if there wasn't any progress by monday, they would no longer read MT. oh well) To me, it's more important that the story for MT is done right than haphazardly.

Without a doubt, the last two weeks were very stressful for everyone here on the MT team. Don't worry about us tho. We've all griped, bitched and whined a lot recently, and like i said - you say and do things that sometimes you aren't happy about, but life moves on. We are a pretty plucky bunch at MT. Next week will be better.

"stick guy dom monday!"
Monday - April 9, 2001
[Largo] - 01:00:00
Yes, we know.. no comic today. Instead we've provided some of Dom's stick figure goodness. Did you know that the french consider Dom a comedic genius?

Since you've got some free time, why not go over to Real Life Comics, Exploitation Now, Lethal Doses, or The Bad Boys of Computer Science - if you haven't already sampled their inate sweetness.

My recent exodus last week was due to these things called Black & White, and Tribes 2, maybe you've heard of them? I've been really torn between them, I don't have as many hours in the day as I need to properly enjoy their gaming bliss. So I've made it a point that whenever one game crashes, I load up the other. To this end, I've been playing Tribes 2 a lot more lately.

Consider my conundrum, on one hand I could be god, and on the other, I indulge in the tactile pleasure of whipping some lammah's ass's 0ldsch00l while hearing 'shazzbot' chanted like the mantra of the damned.

Tribes 2 has won out, in fact I'll have a review up on it by Thursday.

Now to return to what I said last week about the Dom rantitage. My comments on what Dom said are simple. We are here to provide a close substitute to what some people might recognize as entertainment. We are not here to respond to every complaint, and adjust how we do things because one or two people out of the two-hundred thousand megatokyo readers want changes. If a complaint is valid - we're glad to address it. But we are tired of these "please take a break from MT, I don't want to see anymore filler strips" etc. I just don't understand that logic.

I think Piro said it best, "Nothing is more frustrating that 'oh, just you wait! it's gonna be great! i promise!'. It's like crying 'wolf'. You only get credit for doing things in this world, not promising them."

This is one of the few times I'm ever going to publicly agree with Piro.

"a mood for total war"
Thursday - April 12, 2001
[Piro] - 00:14:00
I listen to a lot of music while i work. Most of the CDs that I listen to regularly are stacked in messy heaps at the office where I root thru them mercilessly looking for the CD I really feel like listening to at that moment. Years ago, i remember discussing the purchase of my first CD player with a friend. I was eyeing a 5 disk CD changer at the time, but my friend shook his head at me and told me that i change what I listen to far too often to be comfortable with a 5 disk changer. In the end, i have to admit that he was right. The door on the Pioneer CD player that I eventually purchased finally broke and refused to open after 2 years of heavy use.

I'm a big fan of listening to Shoutcast stations. Typically, i will tune into either Groove Salad or Drone Zone over at SomaFM if I am in the mood to chill, and recently i've been listening a lot to Angeldustrial - i've been on an Industrial kick lately. A few months ago I was in a GOA/Trance/House kick, and it was Tag's Trance Trip that I locked into.

During the day i avoid streaming music at the office because i don't want to tie up what little bandwidth our office has (it's a little tight for an office our size, so i try to be good). CDs also allow me to zero in on exactly what i want to listen to. When i do this, i often switch back and forth between some pretty major extremes in music. I sometimes wonder if this bouncing back and forth between things is a sign of mental instability, but I am assured that there is plenty of evidence proving this is a fact regardless of my listening habits.

One group that I have been listening to a lot recently is VNV Nation - their 'Empires' disk blew me away and it was in the heaviest rotation while i was working on The Project from Hell (tm) last month. I think 'dark angel' is my fave track ("I'm in this mood, because of scorn, i'm in a mood for total war..." yes, i was singing this out loud at 2 in the morning in the office). Other CDs that were in heavy rotation on my poor abused little Sony Diskman were :Wumpscut: 'Bludkind', Front Line Assembly's 'Implode', Stabbing Westward's 'Darkest Days, Moby's 'Play'... the list could go on - but this is just one side of the musical story.

I like tracks that have a certain amount of intensity and depth to them. Music is funny - what i listen to tends to follow whatever emotive track my brain is going thru while I'm working. I have a tendency to wander between musical styles - and i make pretty big leaps. It's not unusual for me to go right from :wumpscut: to the Laputa soundtrack. Some of the japanese disks that I've been listening to a lot lately include the Kanon and Air game disks (i swear the games spend more time in my CD player than in the CDrom drive), the Kita E 'white illumination' disk, 'gals compilation' and 'regret' by I've, Shin Kyuuketsuki Miyu drama disk 1 (great stuff) and this neat disk called 'Lets Install' by Device High.

Device High is actually a group of musicians who produce, record and release doujinshi music CDs (fan works) as well as occasionally preform live. Hikoshi Hashimoto, the producer, does music for games professionally, but Device High is his hobby. To me, it is amazing to look at this CD and realize that it's really a self published work. REM-san has a wonderful voice, and the disk is full of very listenable tracks.

Tsubasa said to me a few months ago that it would be great if a group like Device High would be willing to do some music tracks for Megatokyo. We figured that there really was little chance of it - Device High actually has quite a following, and tsubasa was lucky enough to actually see them preform in concert... so imagine my surprise when Tsubasa informed me that he has communicated with Hashimoto-san and that he was very interested in doing some tracks for Megatokyo! I'm amazed and humbled by the fact that this group of accomplished and talented musicians are actually interested in doing work for our sad little project. I've enjoyed the 'Lets Install' cd for almost a year now. I am very excited to hear what comes out of this. i'll keep you posted.

This, of course, is not the only bit of Megatokyo musical goodness that there is. In fact, Kim Justice, who has been doing MT tracks without any prompting from us just keeps adding tracks to his MP3.com website. Kim's a professional musician who has really put together some nice tracks inspired by Megatokyo. I think that 'Erika's Lazy Afternoon' and 'Feel the Evil' are my faves so far. I feel honored that your music is inspired by us.

In other news, if i get another request for an I.A.C. (i am cute) shirt i think i will scream. ^_^;;; OK! I CAN TAKE A HINT! (mouu...) I'll see what i can do to make some IAC shirts available this weekend. Oh, and Cafepress has informed me that we can start selling baseball caps - so i'll look into getting some caps together to make available in the store.

Speaking of shirts... Greg Dean over at Real Life Comics put up some really swank new shirt designs. you gotta chuckle at this guy's sense of humor. ^_^

Last weekend was Seraphim's birthday, and I endeavored to do two things - I tried to make waffles for breakfast saturday morning (oh, THAT was a disaster) and then I tried to make a chocolate cake (lets not talk about it). I am very lucky that she appreciates the fact that I TRY... ^^;;

Right now i am chilling to track 5 - Summer on the 2nd disk of Moby's 'Play'. The man is the master. I bow to his emotive musical skillz. And i wonder where this track will carry me next...

"time for some domitage"
Monday - April 16, 2001
[Dom] - 10:33:00
Earlier today, as I was frantically scrambling around my apartment trying to find my DC GameShark so I could fire up Hanagumi Taisen Columns 2, I couldn't help but look at my fat pile of Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast games and wonder who was dumb enough to think that the MegaTokyo people hate Sega. I mean, really, now. Largo has played through Grandia II, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, and Phantasy Star Online. Piro likes Sentimental Graffiti and Kanon. Ed and I are fans of the House of the Dead, Virtua Cop and Fire Pro Wrestling D. What do these have in common? Why, they happened to appear on a Sega console. And only a Sega console (I don't count the PC ports of these games into the equation).

Oh. Yeah. We're really Sony whores here, aren't we?

Listen. We are gamers. Doesn't matter what platform it's on, if it sucks, we'll say so, and if it doesn't, we'll shut up and play it. Comprendé? Yes, we've drooled on the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo. But who hasn't? And if we haven't been talking about the Dreamcast much lately, well, that's because Sega hasn't really been talking about the Dreamcast lately. The future's in the hands of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, and while Sega will continue to make great games, they'll get about as much mention as Capcom in these pages. Like it or not, Sega isn't one of the Big Boys anymore.

Now that that's out of the way, I'd like to stop looking ahead and look back. My Smash Pack finally came in the mail today, and hasn't left my Dreamcast since. Ever since my Genesis (may it rest in piece) stopped working, and even before that, when the battery pack on Phantasy Star II died, I've been relying on Genecyst to play my carts, but it's not the same

on a keyboard, nor does it feel right without a Sega-made controller in my hands.

Now, I'm weird in my view on emulators. I suppose I'm one of the few guys out there who uses emus the legal way, only for carts that they own... which, for me, means Gunstar Heroes, Streets of Rage 1 and 2 (3 was an abomination and I refuse to play it), the Shining and Phantasy Star series (See: Streets of Rage), Herzog Zwei, Altered Beast, Sonic the Hedgehog 1-3, Sonic and Knuckles, and, um. *cough* mickeymousecastleofillusion *cough*

Which, of course, means the Smash Pack is a godsend. Anyone who hasn't experienced the joy of the smash pack, go and play it! Altered Beast is still a good beat-em-up (Weeelllcome to your dooooom), I'll play Streets of Rage and Golden Axe over The Bouncer and Fighting Force any day of the week, and... well, what is there to say about Columns? It's crack. Pure crack.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to try and find my credit card, I think I need to stop mucking with the GameShark and buy me another Dreamcast, Japanese this time.

"in motion"
Wednesday - April 18, 2001
[Piro] - 10:54:00
Ah, I've been waiting to do this particular strip. i don't know why. I've just drawn myself in a ridiculously silly outfit reacting probably the way i would if in the same situation. There are a number of spoofs in here, ranging from the play on cats chasing tails, to my real life experience of knocking over a display of shoujo manga in a book store in Ginza, to one I didn't even realize till after I had drawn everything. I think i subconsciously spoofed one of Waterson's wonderful 'Hobbs chases his tail' strips. Oops.

I'm hurting a little this morning because i was up way too late last night doing this strip. Wanna know what was most frustrating? You'd think it was the 3 panels of piro bounding about trying to catch the wayward tail - but those drawings actually came out pretty easy and pretty clean. All three of them, including piro sitting on the floor after finally catching the tail took about 3 hrs. Not bad.

For the life of me i couldn't draw Kimiko at all last night.

What you see is the best of the worst of the three attempts to draw her last night. NOTHING is worse than artists block when you are actually in progress. Hey, everyone has bad art days - but when you feel you are on a roll, and have three pretty decent drawings, and the last panel is not looking good... ugh, it's enough to make you want to tear your hair out. i spent 2 hrs drawing kimiko last night. One stupid drawing. It was so frustrating. By the time i finally started scanning and getting the final comic done, it was 2:30 am. This morning, the final panel doesn't look quite as bad as I feared, but i guess Kimiko is far cuter than i drew her today. Perhaps that's what's frustrating me. We'll see how well i can draw her over the next few weeks.

Someone once asked me what kind of 'motion lines' i liked to use - you know, lines indicating motion, running fast, shaking, etc. Honestly, I don't like to use them. If you are going to show motion in your drawings, what you really need to do is imply it with your character's stance, balance, rotation, etc. I don't know if i was really successful with drawing piro spinning around chasing his tail, but at least you can see that i tried. ^_^ I approach motion lines from a cinematic/photographic point of view. You do get streaks in photos and film (which is why i do draw some motion lines) but the motion you are trying to get across has to be implied by the drawing - you can't just rely on motion lines.

I'm keeping this short today because i have yet another of those wonderful deadlines tonight (yay -_-) So i need to get back to work. I'm going to be making a few trips next month - I'm going to Anime Central on the weekend of the 12th (we have a MT panel on saturday for anyone who has any questions about MT), and I am also going to E3 the following weekend. Yea, the Electronic Entertainment Expo in LA. Largo and I have decided that we are going to see what we can do to sneak in this year. Pretending to be Ion Storm employees didn't work, maybe if we pretend we are Bioware employees we might be able to sneak in.... Nah, it'd never work.

"1:1.5"
Monday - April 23, 2001
[Piro] - 03:31:00
You may have noticed something a little different about today's comic. It's not a typical four-panel comic (like the ones that we discussed in last friday's Naze Nani Nadesico) - not only are the squares gone, but you will note that it's taller. Hmm...

I've said in the past that Megatokyo is an experiment. Largo and I, as well as a small group of others (Seraphim, Dom, Ed, Tsubasa, and Wing Zero) have been working on this site since... gee, has it really been that long? Since August? Gee. Well, anyways, the real purpose of megatokyo was that it has been a device by which i have attempted to improve my pathetically meager art skills by the brute force of having to draw a comic three times a week. I think i've made some progress since August. A little. I can see it when i did the Naze Nani for friday - the Naze Nani eps are like snapshots. What sucks is that i can't just re-use the frames from 3 months ago - the character drawings have progressed too much.

The story of arguing over horizontal vs. a vertical format is true - we did scratch our heads figuring out which would work best. The reason i've stuck to a four-square format so firmly for the past 8 months was that it reduced some of the variables i had to deal with when trying to draw the strips - the stage was a simple square, and i worked within that. It also worked pretty good for a comic format. Except for one small problem - is Megatokyo really a comic? To me, MT has always been fighting the format.

I was reading thru some manga this weekend, in particular Love Hina volume 1 and Salad Days volume 8. I had this very bizarre thought that it really wouldn't be THAT much more work do draw a manga-sized panel than it currently is to do a Megatokyo comic.

Well, to make a long story short - we're changing format. I have no idea what i am doing with manga-style panel layout. We'll just learn by doing, shall we? A four panel comic is pretty linear - start frame, two middle frames, and a wrap up. This has worked great so far, but i think in the long run it will be pretty limiting. Frankly, the four panel layout is one of the main reasons it took so long to get the story off the ground. With a whole page, literally 1 to 1.5 ratio (which is pretty standard for manga) Largo and I suddenly have a hell of a lot more flexibility with the comic. This is a good thing. We might be getting closer to a reasonable hybrid of comic and manga that MT seems to want to be.

It was a long weekend. A format change isn't easy - i had to re-think the way i put the comic together. Even scripting is different. After fiddling with things Saturday night, i sat down and gave it a whirl. i actually finished the drawings for today's comic earlier than i usually do (a good sign, frankly) and after fiddling with it off and on all day Sunday... I'm pretty happy with the results. We'll see how well it works out. I'm sorry if you don't like the change - perhaps you liked the old format better - that's ok. It's easy to say 'it was fine, why change it'... well, it was time to change. I'm confident in the drawing end these days that i feel it's ok to start messing with the format.

Kinda funny, really, to make this change right after that Naze Nani on drawing format... ^_^

"piro's computer sucks."
Tuesday - April 24, 2001
[Largo] - 09:03:00
Piro's so stubborn about some things, upgrading his PC is one of them.

I think some of our readers are younger then the archaic rig he uses to assemble the comic. The once noble and now extinct K6-350 AT - now only found in museums and Piro's house.

I've been trying to get him to upgrade to something a little more sporty, like at least a K7-Athlon 700mhz, with about 256 megs of ram. Mmmmm... yummy.

So far my efforts have met with only failure.

I'm just waiting for the day that thing lets out the last of it's magic blue smoke and it ceases to function. Which reminds me, it's a little known fact that computers run on blue smoke. It's true, because whenever you let the smoke out of your computer, it stops working.

To be fair, (something I'm not), Piro mostly plays import games that require very little in the way of cpu or memory. The only time he needs a fast cpu and some phat memory is when he is working on the comic - oh wait, that's like every other day isn't it? ....

links and things

This surprised me. Still, I think he has great taste in threads.

Apparently, there is something called Kaillera that allows console emulators to run over the net. This has allowed a lot of old school 2-D classics like King of Fighters to make a comeback with net-play. Playing KoF 98 with other people over the net is an idea that's long overdue. Now, lesse… I'll pick Mai and...

It seems Konami is still taking submissions for having your name put in Metal Gear Solid II as a name that appears on the dog tags of the soliders that Snake kills. Sounds like a fun thing, I always wanted to be a virtual corpse.

Finally, if your're looking for a new webcomic to read, try Paradigm.

"kawaisou, sera!"
Wednesday - April 25, 2001
[Piro] - 23:21:00
It's not unusual for real life stuff to sneak into the comic from time to time. Seraphim wrenched something in her knee over the weekend, and she has been walking around with a knee brace for a couple of days now. I drew a knee brace on her in the comic just as a joke - but for some reason it just seemed so cute on her. She told me that i'm just suffering from sleep deprivation, and to get her a fresh ice pack out of the freezer.

Last night was a true test as to how well the new format would work out for me. Monday's didn't really count because i had the entire weekend to fiddle with it. True to my normal way of doing things, i barely drew anything monday night, and the script for today's comic was very rough and needed a lot of work. Kind of a normal 'gotta do a comic tonight' night.

One of the more interesting things about loosening up the format is that i find i can finish more drawings faster than i could before. I spent less time drawing six separate drawings (plus one frame i tossed out) than i usually do for the normal format. I do have to spend more time scanning and cleaning up images (there were six rather than four drawings to clean up). It was at this point that i found myself grumbling over the ridiculously slow processing speed on my computer. Largo got so sick of me grumbling about it last night that it inspired his rather petulant rant for today. Stubborn indeed!

When I moved over to illustrator to put the comic together, I found that it didn't REALLY take much longer to lay things out. Each frame is on it's own layer and has a clipping plane to cut off the excess on the image. I have placed a few guidelines to help maintain some balance and consistency, but for the most part i'm giving myself plenty of leeway with the layout. I've been flipping thru a lot of manga lately to try to absorb some of the methods and concepts manga artists use. I'm not just looking at one particular style either - I've been taking equal influence from Love Hina, Salad Days, Marmalade Boy, Hime-chan no Ribbon, Kaitou Saint Tail, Kimagure Orange Road, 3x3 Eyes... well, i've flipped thru just about everything i own - including some of the rarer American comics i have laying around (i don't have that many, oddly enough - i just found myself chuckling over some old issues of Gold Digger ^^;;) In the end, i've determined that I have no idea what i'm doing, so i'll just wing it. I figure that i'll be able to tighten up the approach to laying out stuff like this over the next few months. The best way to learn is by doing.

We've been knocking heads over the MT storyline and other projects around here lately. Being involved in a creative project isn't always easy. Working on Megatokyo is a lot like trying to fix the engine on a bus while it cruises down a bumpy highway at 75 mph with two monkeys fighting over the steering wheel and a brick on the accelerator. Tsubasa has been working very hard on the Seiyuu project and the Song project, and I've given him the freedom to develop some independent stories and dialogues to help move the project along if we need to (I'm trying to develop some lyric ideas right now ... it's not easy!) The more Largo and I work together, the more i realize that this particular Nazi Nani Megatokyo strip was dead on - this, i think, is what helps give us more vitality than we'd have if it was just myself or Largo. Hopefully we won't kill each other in the process.

Wing Zero, the same one who i blame for the demise of many of my online friends by administering 'Death by Love Hina' syndrome on them has been getting me more and more hooked on Comic Party. Comic Party is based on a Leaf game (the same people who make To Heart) where the main protagonist finds himself drawn into the wacky world of Doujinshi. It's funny, but to me Megatokyo is really an online doujishi. With the new format, it will be like getting a 12 page comic once a month. For some reason, this makes me feel pretty good about the project.

Oh, and one other thing to mention. Emi-chan will finally finished moving Okashina Okashi(Strange Candy) over to its new home on Keenspace by tomorrow (thursday). No one draws Dom in a dress better than Emi. :P

Thanks for all the feedback on the new format, btw. I need to stop doing things that result in floods of emails... ^^;;;

"damage"
Wednesday - May 2, 2001
[Piro] - 11:04:00
Well, i don't know if the past few weeks qualified as the 'train wreck' that people alluded a few weeks ago as most of the characters and story threads in megatokyo descend on Piro at the MegaGamers store, but I really think the new format is helping move things along. Today's strip, for instance, would have been impossible to pull off in the old format. I'm a bit of a moron - do i settle in and try to learn the ropes of comic panel layouts before i start experimenting? nooooooo... of course not. I think i need my head examined. I'd like to say a quick thanks to my old friend Ben for his very VERY helpful critique of the new panel layouts. He wasn't afraid to thwack me a few times and tell me what i was doing wrong. :) Largo and I are pretty confident that we've almost got this beast of a comic under control... or at least we are enjoying the illusion for a few more days.

Last night, right around the time the comic updated, something went screwy with the megatokyo server. Unfortunately, both largo and i had crashed early last night, so the site was essentially down all night. Oddly enough, it wasn't a stuck process in the UBB code that did us in, it was something that affected Apache. Largo restarted Apache this morning (he tells me the server was so bogged down that it took 20 min just to type the simple command to restart) and that seems to have done the trick.

sempai.org has been really good to us. This box has withstood the weight of a rather remarkable number of folks beating it with baseball bats and http requests for pages for almost 9 months now. Each month, it gets worse, but the box (which is a FreeBSD box, btw) just keeps on ticking. Kevin, someone who i owe a case of good beer and perhaps even a few bottles of liquor, has handled each problem that has cropped up with a level head and almost perverse joy in fixing the problems. Even so, sempai.org is a community server, and when we munge the server, a lot of people are affected. Everyone is real cool about it, but even so, i feel pretty bad when stuff goes plooie.

If you are wondering where largo has been for the past week, he's been sitting around buck naked putting the new megatokyo server together. I'll let him fill you in on all the technical details, but it's a pretty sweet setup. When it's finished and in place, MT will be sitting on a larger pipe with a machine that should have no problem dealing with traffic and CPU usage, and will even have a level 0 raid setup, so we can stop worrying about a pool of melted metal under the rack where Sempai used to sit. Oh, and in case you were wondering... yes, largo really is that scary when working with parts and equipment. I'm glad i live up here, and he is far far away...

One of the biggest problems with the new format has been the fact that my poor AMD K6 3 450 machine just hasn't been handling the graphics files very efficiently. The old format took 15 minutes to export from illustrator. The new format was taking 35 minutes. I decided that the problem might be that i don't have enough memory. Yesterday i stopped by the local computer store and picked up a 256 meg stick of memory, popped it into the computer and tested it out. I really worked! It only took 11 minutes to export the same file. Very much worth the hundred bucks. I should be ok for a while now.

Last night i uploaded some of the graphics for the IAC shirt, and i'm almost done with largo's 'j00 d34d f00' design - they SHOULD be ready by tomorrow. I'll let everyone know when.

Tsubasa has been working hard with the folks from Device High to translate the songs on the album for a re-release of their 'let's install' disk. A lot of people have been asking where they can purchase copies of their CDs. Right now, we're going to see what we can do to make these CDs available for those who are interested. Their next album will feature the two Megatokyo songs that they are currently working on. I'll post more information about this re-release and other information for Friday.

"today nothing."
Sunday - May 6, 2001
[Largo] - 00:00:04
No rant yet, will get one up later this week, until then - sit tight and read some of the 'best of largo' archives - now available in a 23 volume set. Try them all, only keep the ones you want. Operators are not standing by....

"nothing today"
Monday - May 7, 2001
[Piro] - 00:00:01
Sorry, no comic yet. I will post the comic as soon as i finish it monday night. It's mostly done. Thank you for your patience.

"entropy"
Tuesday - May 8, 2001
[Piro] - 08:35:00
Largo moved everything over to the new server last night - which is why many of you are probably having problems accessing the new site in one way or another. When everything resolves and starts pointing properly to the new server, things should be running smoothly.

He's named the new box entropy.megatokyo.com - its a fitting description, i think. "Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society." Heheh, this is so us. :)

I was pretty sick over the weekend, which is why I was late with the comic yesterday. Even when i got home from work, it took forever to get the comic finished. Updates this week are a little screwed up by two other factors as well - the move to the new server (grudgingly gives largo multiple kudos for bustin his ass to get all the problems with the PHP code and the new server resolved ^_^) and my up coming trips...

Honestly, i have no idea how i'm going to be able to stay on top of things for the next two weeks, so if the updates are a little sporadic, please forgive me. I'm traveling to Anime Central this friday with Seraphim where we will be heading up a Megatokyo question and answer panel - if you are gonna be in the Chicago Area, drop in around 3:00 on saturday. You might also want to stick around for the Iron Guest contest... It seems i've been roped into being on the judging panel for that. Regardless, it should be fun.

NEXT week i'm flying out to Los Angeles to hook up with largo and crash E3 itself. I believe that the Bioware folks are setting us up and will have the police waiting to take us away to jail as soon as we get there. It's the only reason I can think of that they'd give us passes to get in. ^_^ (joking aside, thank's guys, we're looking forward to it)

This, plus another one of those fine '50% construction documents are due' deadlines on the 15th means that i'm going to be very busy for the next two weeks. We'll try to keep things rolling along as smoothly as possible - but I am pretty sure that I wont get tomorrow's comic up until thursday... the new site code makes it easier for me to do updates when i get things done.

Anyway, we'll keep you posted.

"enthalpy"
Tuesday - May 8, 2001
[Largo] - 09:31:00
Ok, I'll make this rant a short one.. Hey - I gotta ease back into the groove y'know?

Today's guest strip is brought to you by Nick Yu - the creator of The Bad Boys of Computer Science.

Anyways, Yes, I've been gone for the last two weeks while I upgraded and moved the server to a better home. Originally we never thought we'd have two-hundred readers, much less two-hundred thousand. So as our traffic has grown, so has the load on our server. Recently it began to be too much for the box to withstand, and still not impact the other websites on it. The solution was simple, We needed a more l33t box.

So the server was born, from the vast emptyness of space, the swirling great cosmic void reached out... Eh, Ok so I went to pricewatch.com

As my counterpart has said, the box is named Entropy. I decided on this name bcause after years of admin'n servers - I've found that only truth remains constant, shit breaks.

The new box is pretty sweet, it's a step up in most every mundane respect. Although as some people have noticed, MegaTokyo is no longer running on FreeBSD. We are now running on Linux. This has resulted in a few small riots, some looting, the usual.

I've always been a Linux fan, for no other reason then I like penguins. Sure it's not a great reason to base your selection of a kernel, but what the hell eh? Or it could be I'm just afraid of the mighty wrath that Cowboy Neal of Slashdot.org would inflict upon me if I continued to go with BSD...

Of course my decision had nothing at all to do with the fact that Neverwinter Nights will have a linux server available. Nope, not a thing. not one tiny bit, nope...

Speaking of which, I can hardly contain my excitment as the great E3 approaches. I almost can taste the gaming goodness, which for some reason has a lime flavor.

Wait, correction, that's my margarita.

"of trips and scripts"
Thursday - May 10, 2001
[Piro] - 17:10:00
What's with the 'piro art day' strip? Well, a couple of reasons. Remember how monday's strip was very late? And then the guest strip for Friday? Quite simply, the work schedule caught up with me. I burned out over the weekend. After two weeks of barely managing four hours of sleep and pushing myself way too hard I finally fumbled and wasn't able to finish. When you are pushing yourself hard, fumbling like this has an odd effect on you. You don't just pick up and keep gong, you find that you can sometimes get stuck. I got a little stuck. Both largo and I have been so exhausted lately that i find that we've been looking for bigger and heavier bats to deal with each other, and we were sniping at each other more than usual. When i started looking into the price of a used rocket launcher, that threw up a red flag that I needed a time out.

As i've said before, Megatokyo is a work in progress. Part of the fun here is that you get a hell of a lot closer to the people and the process by which the comics and whatnot are made than you do with professional strips. Pro strips are usually weeks and weeks ahead. For some reason, I have never been abe to manage to get the strips done on time for the 1 am deadline. I feel like I'm on some kind of Reality TV show sometimes. ^_^

Anyways, I'm taking a bit of a break this week. Aside from the fact that I have two trips ahead of me - Seraphim and I leave for Chicago in two hours, and next weekend I am going to hook up with Largo at E3 - Largo and I feel we need a little break here to size up the scripts and the storyline. Now that we have a feel for the new format we need to rethink some of the strips - we need some time to take care of some story development. Tentatively, I am planning on doing one full strip for Wednesday of next week, and having some simpler, one-panel strips and/or art day strips for Monday and Friday. This will let me enjoy my trips, get caught up on sleep, and also fine tune what we are doing so that we can produce even better strips.

I *hate* taking breaks, but I also have a pretty good survival instinct. I'd rather cool it for a week here that find than the quality of the strip goes down. You should note that i'm not planning on disappearing, just cutting down my workload for a few days. I apologize about this, and Largo and I appreciate your patience. Besides, it gives me a chance to just sit and do some nice development artwork for fredart too. I've also started working on a rather long rant that talks about manga style drawing and why I think people gravitate to it so much. Look for that rant on Monday or Tuesday.

Oh, and one other thing. I have mounted today's drawing of Kimiko with the winged backpack and I am bringing it with me to Anime Central. I'm planning on submitting it to the art show - hopefully they'll still be accepting submissions by the time i get there. I can't remember how these things work, but i think that you can bid on drawings or there is some sort of auction - either way, someone will probably be going home with the drawing. If not, i'll have it at the Megatokyo Panel on Saturday for all to see. The Panel is at 3:00 in conf. room 16. If you are going to be at Acen, i'll see you there. Also, i have been roped into being a guest commentator in the Iron Guest competition which immediately follows the panel. Ugh... ^^;;

A few weeks ago i talked a bit about some of the side projects that Tsubasa and I are working on. One of those is the production of two songs for a future MT multimedia project. We're currently working with a group called Device High, a very talented group that tsubasa and I have been fans of for a few years. With tsubasa's help and some input from me, they are currently writing the tracks, and I am looking forward to hearing them. They were a bit overwhelmed by the amount of people who visited their website via my link that week, and they are very excited about our little project. ^_^

Many people expressed interest in purchasing copies of their CDs, so with the help from a few friends in the US, we are looking into doing this. We would like to find out just how many people are interested in acquiring their first CD, 'Let's Install'. I've had the disk for a year now, and it's good stuff. Since the original disk had such a short run of publication, Hashimoto-san is looking at re-releasing the disk to include english translations of the songs in the liner notes. More information on this is available in this thread on the forums. The two new Megatokyo songs are not on this disk, but they will be on their upcoming second release due out this summer (i'm also gonna do a little artwork for them ^_^)

At any rate, if you are interested in purchasing this CD, we need to get a realistic idea of how many people want to purchase the first disk. If you are interested, please email mailto:mtcdorder@hotmail.com and you will receive more information.

There's a little more info on the group in my previous rant.

Oh, i had posted in the forums that the new t-shirt designs were available for purchase at the Megatokyo store - well, it looks like i was premature... for some reason, the shirts disappeared off the site last night. I know CafePress was in the middle of a big update, so I'm sure that the designs will be available soon. The new shirts include the IAC design, and two versions of the 'j00 d34d f00' shirt (a largo and a piro version). Hopefully they will be back up before the day is out. :)

Ok! I gotta run. Seraphim and I have a 5 hr drive ahead of us. Chicago should be fun. Cant wait to hit the Asahiya store...

"still a bit dazed"
Monday - May 14, 2001
[Piro] - 00:03:00
Seraphim and I finally got back home here around 10:30 from our trip to Chicago. My trip to Anime Central was... I have to say, it was a tad bit overwhelming. I didn't think that the Megatokyo Panel at Acen was a good idea - to me, i didn't think we warranted our own panel. After wandering around on Friday afternoon, i figured that maybe 10-15 people might show up. Hell, I was nervous about just that many people.

I was so disorganized last week that I didn't coordinate anything with Dom. We didn't get a chance to hook up till an hour before the panel. We were a little surprised when we went around to the Live Programming 5 room at the end of the hall. There were a ton of people waiting around - seemingly, some of them were waiting for the MT panel. The room appeared to still be in use by the previous panel, so Dom and I waited outside against the wall with everyone else till they were done. We were a little surprised to find out that all the people in there were waiting for us to arrive.

I wasn't prepared for the sheer number of people who tried to get into that room to listen to Dom and I try to talk coherently about Megatokyo. I really wasn't prepared, and honestly i still don't know what to think. I'm honored that so many people would take time out of their con activities to come see us. I really am. I've never really talked to anyone outside of my friends about MT before - never bumped into anyone who read it (except for one guy who was visiting from some silly town on the other side of the state). It was... kinda hard to describe. All of a sudden there were faces to all the emails, irc chats, and forum postings. It's oddly humbling. Largo still doesn't really believe me.

I have a lot to say... a lot, really. I had to run to another event right after the panel, and in the midst of this i felt like there were a lot of people who wanted to talk to me and i didn't have a chance to stop and listen - in fact, i felt terrible because i felt like people might feel like i didn't have time for them... it was so much like all the email i get, and the fan art, and all the things i don't answer because i don't have time. All of this suddenly has more of a face to it.

First of all, if there was anyone who wanted to talk with me, and were not able to catch up with me after the Iron Guest thing - please email me. I am so sorry about all that. I feel terrible, because i KNOW there were some people who i said i'd get back with later. ^^;;;

Secondly. I have to deal with my email. I have to deal with all the fanart, submissions, ... everything. I don't know how, but i will.

thirdly... i don't have a comic for today. I'm sorry, i got home too late! I will pull something together tomorrow afternoon and post it then. Thanks for your understanding. I feel somewhat rejuvenated and freshly inspired after the trip. The future of MT should be a lot of fun. To actually meet and talk with people who genuinely like your work... there's no experience like it. I suppose i'm still a little dazed over it. And here i am, missing yet another comic deadline. -_-;;; i can't win sometimes...

I'm going to finish this 'rant' tomorrow. I'd like to say a big thanks to everyone who showed up at the panel, and that i am sorry to those who couldn't get in. I may be shy about this whole thing, but i don't ever ever want to be aloof or seem inaccessible. I wish i knew more about how to handle all this.

I'm almost scared to go to E3 now...

"respect"
Thursday - May 17, 2001
[Piro] - 09:21:00
This should be a fairly long rant today, so bear with me. ^_^

First off, as many of you have noticed, new shirt designs are available over at the Megatokyo store. Many of you requested the I.A.C. design, and i think that it came out pretty sweet. Sometimes simple is good. I have also put together two different j00 d34d f00 designs - mainly because i couldn't decide which one I liked better. It's also a sort of 'poll' to see who is more popular, Largo or Piro. So far largo is winning. figures. :)

I've also taken care of another shirt request. As you know, all the 'ph33r the cute ones' shirts say 'b4k4^2' on the front, except for the babydoll shirt, which has the BakaQuake image rather than 'b4k4^2' (to me, Babydoll designs shouldn't have anything on the back). Well, now a babydoll shirt that says simply 'b4k4^2' is available. you can find it here, with the piro version of the j00 d34d f00 design.

I'd like to thank everyone who has purchased MT goods over the past few months. As we've said before, largo and I aren't in this for the money - well, maybe largo is ("b33r money, g00d..." - to quote him) - we initially provided MT swag to stop people from bothering us. Frankly, I'm flattered that people like to wear MT stuff. :) I'm almost afraid to draw stuff on the shirts anymore - it usually leads to a flood of emails requesting 'make that shirt!' ^^;; Product placement is a common practice in today's media society. I would like to say, for the record, that I *really* don't plan these things. The '3V1L L33T' shirt was quite literally just a random sketch on largo's shirt on a bad art day. The popularity of this design continues to astound me. Go figure.

We've put the money we've been making on shirt stuff to good use. My trip to Anime Central, our trip to E3 this week, the new server (which is an amazing little box), and the ability for me to go into Michigan Book and Supply and treat myself to new art stuffs from time to time, etc. :) The other thing it does is help assure that MT will not only continue, but grow into areas that Largo and I couldn't do on our own. We do have evil plans, oh, so evil...

I feel kinda bad about last week and this week. I'm not one to take a break from things, i'm pretty happy working on stuff all the time. But between two trips, my schedule at work, and the fact that largo and I started bickering about things - a break was needed. The first thing the break did was give me the chance to work overtime at work to make up for the stuff i should have been doing last friday -_- (if you think my 'break' involves sitting around, watching anime and playing games, i'm afraid that's not the way it's been working :P) Freedom for a few weeks from the rigid schedule of the comic, however, has really helped me refresh my creative batteries - i've been doing a lot of freesketching, random drawings, sketching around into things that aren't MT related. This is *very* good for my creativity.

I think i know what was bothering me... i had lost some of my creative flair. It's nice to have it back. Duffin around at Anime Central, sketching things at random, finally reading the last volume of Nausicaa, watching the Replacement Killers on TV (i love that movie - don't ask me why... it has a really acute 'feel' to it. i know, there is no plot :P) And I've even learned a few things this week. Lee Martin, bless his soul, sent me the magic formula for cleanly masking out lines in photoshop so i can paint 'behind' them without the 'white artifacts' that i usually have to fight when making color images (take a close look at my 'experiment' in the screenshot above to see what i mean). Dude, you made my *year*. I've been trying to figure out that trick for ages. (yes, i know, i know. I'm sure anyone who knows anything about photoshop already knows this trick.) One of the things about art is that there are a lot of things I don't know - i have a lot to learn, i really do. Well, the side benefit learning this is that you will be seeing a LOT more colored work from me in the next few months. ^_^ I used to spend hours cleaning up the white junk around lines...

Lessee... I'm covering a lot of ground today, so bear with me. ^_^

My rant on monday was a pretty honest and un-edited reaction to my astonishment at our reception at Anime Central. In fact, it was going to be a simple, two line 'new comic should go up tuesday, thanks for your patience!' but, as usual, i blabbered on. :) Now that I've had some time to reflect, I have a better idea how i feel about the whole thing. :)

I'm pretty low-key about my work, as most of you know. I don't toot my own horn, I don't praise what i do. In fact, i tend to err on the side of self criticism. Don't confuse 'self criticism' with 'self depreciation'. Self depreciation is a passive aggressive technique people use to spur positive feedback from others. My comments about myself and my work aren't aimed at encouraging praise from people, it's really just a personality quirk. Above and beyond anything else, i always want to be *real* about what i do. We live in a world where things are overhyped and oversold. The whole dot.com fiasco is a excellent example of taking something really good and screwing it up by not being 'real' about it's potential. So, instead of it growing naturally and normally into something great, a lot of people got hurt because they were sold a bill of goods by people trying to milk it for all its worth. The whole dot com thing is a big joke now, and it shouldn't be. I don't ever want to be a 'joke'.

Hard to believe, but what people think of me and my work is very important. The problem that I see with people who are enamored of their own talent is that no matter how hard they try, they always have an air of superiority to them. To me, being able to draw what i want to draw has nothing to do with 'i can do this and you cant', it has more to do with 'i have this idea i want to express, and i want to share it with people'. It is VERY gratifying to me when people react to a drawing or a comic the way i want them to. So to me, it's not about how good a drawing is, it's about how effectively it communicates and evokes emotive response. Thats why i've been putting my art on the net for all these years. That's why i've been struggling and working so hard to improve my technical skills. I suppose I have a lot to say, and I'm amazed that people want to listen.

I suppose that's what was so shocking to me about my surprise as to the sheer number of people who tried to squeeze in to see Dom and I at the Megatokyo Panel on saturday. Sure, there are plenty of people who will cruise by a comic and read it at work, but how many people are going to take the time to actually visit us? I was amazed. For the first time I got a sense of the fact that I really was getting thru to people. It's not an experience i ever thought i'd feel, and i don't think it's one many people experience. Art is a personal thing, you put up a very large chunk of yourself with everything you make public. The more people that see it, the more open you are to criticism, attacks, ridicule (i think this is why a lot of people avoid art after the 3rd grade, but that's another discussion). But the reward for this exposure is that praise and respect, if you do manage to receive it, hits a lot closer to home. It's a far more personal experience than simply speaking in front of a large group of people. I do that all the time. This was just plain... hard to describe.

A long time ago I talked about the concept of 'emotional commitment' to anime shows and series. There are reasons we get attached to characters and stories. As much as people might like to say it's 'just entertainment', in reality it's far more than that. People need good entertainment. They connect with it, identify with it, commiserate with it and draw inspiration from it. Usually in small, comfortable ways that make you feel good, and sometimes it can help you just get thru a bad day. Often, it does even more than that. Growing up can be a struggle, and life is always complicated. Having something we can turn to that we feel is part of our own helps us deal with hard times. Entertainment inspires people to not only be creative, but sometimes just to jog along with everyday life. People who provide entertaimnent sometimes just love doing it. It makes you feel good to make someone 'feel' ... good, happy, touched, enraged, sad - whatever range of emotion you want to communicate.

Everyone who came to that panel, as well as many of you who are reading this, have in some small way become emotionally attached to the work largo and I do here with Megatokyo (otherwise why would you read such a long and pointless rant ^_^). I don't really know why, but for some reason you all have found something about Megatokyo that is worthy of attaching yourselves to. ^_^ To me, this represents an real responsibility, and one I'm happy enough to deal with. In much the same way that largo and I are very 'exposed' to public, you as a reader are exposed to the future course of our works. Anyone who's watched Evangelion knows that this can be a bumpy ride. :)

Largo and I often joke about the fact that the success we've had with Megatokyo says an awful lot about the failure of the entertainment industry in the US. The fact that two hacks like us can reach so many people in the face of so much talent and money spent to reach you... I think it has a lot to do with trust and respect.

I think that people respect us - and that, to me, is one of the most valuable things someone can give you. I don't think that people really respect the entertainment industry. For the most part, its because they have a tendency to not respect thier audience. They continually betray the faith of the public every single day in so many ways it's abhorrent to me. I watched a thing the other day on how the top 5 media companies in the US literally milk the young population for everything they can. Young people trust them, and when all is said and done, all young people get is a little older and huge credit card debts. And some people wonder why young people are so cynical and full of rage. If your emotions were in the hands of people who were only interested in making as much money off of you as possible, wouldnt you feel pissy too?

Largo and I talk about how we 'understand j00'. well, with that understanding comes one other thing - Respect. We understand, and we respect every one of you. Even the troublemakers i've had to ban from the forums ^_^ (hey, you had your warnings :P) Respect is a two way street. This mutual respect i think is one of the things that makes MT fun for me, and hopefully enjoyable to you. I know all the hard work is appreciated, and you know that largo and I work as hard as we can to pull it all together for you. And all of this is essentially happening in a non-comerce driven format. :) (er, ignore the megatsore banner at the top of this rant ^_^)

Back when we let Gamespy feature Megatokyo comics on their site, some people accused us of 'selling out'. The truth is, we never sold out - we just looked at it as a good opportunity to reach a larger audience. Basically, we are just average guys like everyone else. We never started this to create a product that we could sell. It's way too personal for that. That's why we've had the freedom to let it develop into this bizarre hybrid that is hard to put any kind of commercial value on. There is nothing between you (the reader) and us - not even an ISP charging us big bucks for bandwidth. I post stuff to the site like i always have. It's haphazard, its unprofessional, it's just like anyone else would. Sure, we have a unique situation that lets us get away with this... but it's not like we planned it this way ^_^

To me, accessability is important. I treat everyone the same as i always have. The problem i never anticipated was the problem of volume. Some people have suggested that i delegate my email to someone to review and pass on. it's a nice idea, but i'll never do it. If you email me, I *WILL* read it. I read everything. In fact, they help me get thru bitchy days at work sometimes ^_^. Same thing in person - If you come up to me i will talk with you. heck, thats what was so damn annoying at the panel. I wish i could have just sat there for another half hour and let people leaf thru the samples of Megatokyo art that I brought with me and shoot the breeze about stuff. Next time i'm at a public function, i'll try to arrange things better. i promise.

Thanks to everyone who emailed me who didn't make it into the panel room. I've responded to a few emails, gonna respond to more when i get back from e3. I have some fanart that Khymerion handed to me that i need to scan (I'm going to go thru my in box and link up some of the fan art i've received since MT started - i'll try to do this for the next few weeks). I saw some very imaginative 'adjustments' to some 'ph33r the cute ones' shirts in the audience ^_^, and a really sweet custom 'b4k4^2' shirt that someone made, just like the one piro wears in the comic (i swear that must have been a lot of work!) - and finally, i was blown away by the Kimiko cosplayer.

Do you guys have any idea how weird it is to see someone wearing an outfit that you sorta dreamed up while sitting on a couch sketching character ideas? I didn't catch her name, but she was wearing a pink version of the Idol outfit that Kimiko wears in this drawing. I believe she was working the Anime Pavilion booth, and gee, lookie here, there's pics of her very swell Kimiko gear on Fansview (be sure the check out the rest of Fansview for more Anime Central pics). ^_^ We talked a bit about the difficult physics of the digiko bells for earrings (she was wearing the bells in her hair) and she said she didn't have time to make the bow - but even so, it was an honor to see someone spend that much time to dress up as one of my characters. :)

Gee... maybe i can get Seraphim to cosplay next time... I'd love to see her cosplay as Makoto sometime. That'd be cute...^^;;

Uh... maybe not. ^^;;;; I have trouble getting her to wear cute pigtails. I tried out Yuki's hairstyle on Seraphim a while ago, and it was unbearably cute. :) I *wish* she'd wear them in public... :P

Oh! speaking of Seraphim, she managed to get into grad school last week. ^_^ It only took the grad school eight days to tell her she got in. tsk tsk, and she was worried about getting in. :P Omedetou, Seraphim!

Oh, and about the Acen Panel, Ed has a video of the entire thing - I'm looking into getting a copy and making perhaps a mp3 file of the comments and some screenshots. As much as i am nervous about pictures of myself around on the web, i feel i owe it to all the people who tried but couldn't get in to make this available to everyone. It's only fair. ^_^ Hopefully i'll be able to make something available next week. Oh, and if you have pictures of me and dom ... it's ok if you make them available for viewing. I appreciate the fact that people respected dom's request that you not spread pics of me all over the net, but... what the hell. I feel so bad about the overcrowding and missing talking to so many people that i'm giving everyone permission to post them. ^^;; In fact... i've got some pictures sitting on the Megatokyo webserver - three pics, to be exact, that are 4 years, 2 years and 4 months old in particular. I hope this makes up for missing seeing me there. The first one is of me in a Yakitori restaurant in japan Yes, those are Normal Rockwell paintings on the wall. The next is an old webcam pic of me and my evil evil evil kitten, Hime, and the last one is a more recent pic (you will note that Hime is a lot bigger now - tho no less evil) and yes, i am working on Megatokyo stuff in the pic - and the drafting table is long gone. ^_^ There. Please be kind. ^^;;

So, if you spot me at E3, feel free to stop me and say Hi. that's why i'm going, after all. I'll be walking around with my bookbag (same one piro has in the comic) and I've got a puchiko keychain hanging from it.

Largo is already there. He sounded like a man approaching Mecca when i talked to him a little while ago. I'm bringing my dartgun. I fully expect the overstimulation he will experience today will reduce him to a slavering zombie by the time i get there. One can hope.

See everyone on monday!

"E3 Wrap Up"
Tuesday - May 22, 2001
[Largo] - 10:21:00
I just flew back from E3, and boy are my arms tired…

::crickets::

After returning from a veritable gamers' paradise (minus the rampart excessive commercialism), I'm beat.

E3 can be a draining experience. I started off the first day with a two-hour wait in the infamous "Line of Hell" to get my badge. From there it was off to the main hall. Now let me explain something about E3's main hall - It's big, not just big in the normal 'gee that's big' big. No, instead it's big as in, "good god!, the assets on the babe at the Tecmo booth are big!" - big.

Speaking of Tecmo, I've got to give some props to them for their use of Dead or Alive costumed booth babes. Normally I'd frown on such blatant use of sex appeal to sell your product, but there was this certain honestly about their efforts. They don't even try to pretend that their games sell so well because of 'great game play'. I figure next year they'll show case "Dead or Alive 4 - Nude Edition".

I continued my tour of the main room, again - a draining experience. The reason for this is the hall is ten times louder then all of downtown Dallas's raver joints put together. In order to compete for every guest's attention, each vendor's exhibit has to be bigger, more visually stimulating, and louder then the next. I can only guess that E3 has had a sort of arms race in the last few years - except instead of nukes, they stockpile 60" woofers and jumbotron video displays.

Some of the coolest things in the main hall that I got to witness was, Mullet … I mean Metal Gear Solid II's new teaser trailer. It was so cool I can now forgive Snake's new haircut.

Silent Hill 2 looks creepy, nuff said.

Warcraft III… I had the misfortune of being right next to the speakers on this exhibit as the trailer started. I'm not sure if Warcraft III is going to be a great game - but I am positive that the Orc Army is loud. I lost my sense of hearing for several hours after this encounter.

I got into the backroom screening of the new Bioware game, Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic. The game is a 3D engine over the shoulder based adventure game using the D20 system / Wizards of the Coast Star Wars RPG system for character creation and advancement. I wasn't sure what to expect with this one, for one thing - I've been disinterested with the entire Star Wars franchise after sitting thru that 'Episode I' garbage. Phantom Menace was just missing that mood, that feeling that Lucas was able to paint into every scene in the first three films. I can only assume that the developers of KOTOR are trying to follow the original path - cause what they are making completely rocks. The game is all about atmosphere, Even in this very early release, they've put a lot of their focus into interacting with any other NPC in the game. You can talk to anyone, well - except all the dead people on the ground, but I doubt they'd be in the mood to talk with you anyways. Another nice thing about KOTOR is the way they handle 'cut scenes'. From what their demo showed, they are doing all the scenes in game - within the 3D engine itself. This happens so smoothly that I couldn't even tell if they were true 'cut scenes' while the scene went forward, or not. Very clean transitions here, very sweet.

Heh, and the Jedi light saber duels rock too ;)

Tomorrow I'll cover what was the heart of the show for me, Neverwinter Nights. Mmm, I can almost taste it.

"color sketching"
Thursday - May 24, 2001
[Piro] - 00:11:00
Ah, good to be back... well, for the most part. ^_^

I'm having a wee bit of trouble getting fully back into the groove of a three-a-week schedule, mostly because i keep getting distracted and working on other things (for example, the colored drawing of Yuki shown above). It felt pretty good to sit down and do wednesday's comic. Hopefully i can get my act together tonight and have a new comic for tomorrow. I *might* have to put it up saturday.

This weekend i need to wrap up my review of our trips to both Anime Central and E3 - I had a lot of fun on the trips, and the E3 trip deserves some time to write up a good report.

I had a chance to hang with some other web comic artists on the trip - in particular, Hot Soup of Lethal Doses (he's in the process of moving his site to a new server, as well as revamping it) joined Largo and I in the hotel lounge saturday night as we sat and tried to see who could draw the most 'wrong' piece of art. Freesketching at it's worst, my Corona addled brain (i knew i shoulda stuck to, like, Guiness or something) produced this drawing. What is sad is... Soup produced a drawing far far more disturbing. No, i won't scan it. Never in a million years... ^^;;;

Anyways, enjoy the new artwork over at Fredart today, and with any luck i *will* finish a new strip tonight. If not, i'll have it done satuday morning. ^_^ You know me tho, if i can make it tonight, i will.

...

Mornin all - as you can see, i didn't get the comic done for friday. This isn't laziness, its actually two other factors. First off, the art is a little more complicated than, say, what i did for wednesday. Its the type of thing you HAVE to start the day before (which i didn't - i goofed off and colored that drawing of Yuki instead ^^;;) secondly, I had two 'false starts', which i ended up crumpling up and tossing in the trash. Nothin blows holes in a tight schedule like trashing an hour's worth of struggling work. :P

Actually, i don't really do that very often. Typically, if i abandon a drawing i've started working on, i'll just put it aside - not in the trash. So that was another sign that it wasn't gonna happen today.

I'll finish it up later tonight and post it. thanks for your patience ^_^

"tripping over my feet"
Wednesday - May 30, 2001
[Piro] - 01:02:00
Well. Finally back on schedule. Imagine that. :)

Catching up wasn't easy, but it was worth the effort. I'd like to thank everyone for being patient with my and my schedule for the past few weeks. The 'lull' in MT strips was very productive for us. It's given Largo and I a chance to catch our breath, do some thinking and some development that was badly needed.

Doing megatokyo is a lot like developing a game and releasing it to the public at the same time. I've said in the past that MT is a bit of an 'experiment' - and it is. It's been a fairly successful one, too. The problem with experiments is that when you do them out in the open like this, you're mistakes are there for all to see, and they don't go away. But, hey, that's part of the fun. One of the things you learn about art is that it's not how perfect you are when you set pen or brush to paper - it's how adept you are at fixing or working with your mistakes. :)

Many weeks ago i switched to a new, manga-style format. I'm much happier with this approach, it's given me a lot more freedom and room to do individual strips. Keep in mind that i've never done comic-style layouts before. I haven't read or studied any books on the subject, i've just been using my feeble brain to cobble these things together. Most of the strips work well, some work great, some are a little confusing. Unfortunately i haven't had the luxury of being able to pass my work thru three levels of editors and had multiple chances to re-do the strips. This 'raw' style of MT is just part of it's pathetic charm, i think...

In the same way that the format needed to change to make things work better, so does the story format. Up till now, we've just been rambling along telling the story in a very slow, disjointed, organic kind of way. Part of the reason for this is that we've been developing the details for the story as we've moved along, and we've had to be cautious not to make moves that would hurt the story later. Coupled with my rather busy life, it's been a problem. Well, one of the benefits of the little 'lull' we took is that Largo and I have had some time to adjust and fine tune some things that have needed doing since we started. One of those things is the very format of the story and how it's presented.

Right now, Largo and I are in the process of wrapping up 'chapter 0' of megatokyo. It's been almost a year, and well over 125 strips. To me, life is a continuous, organic series of threads and happenings, but this lack of structure in a comic/story format makes it harder to build clear, entertaining stories that don't frustrate the hell out of people because there is the feeling nothing is ever resolved. By sliding into a 'chapter' based format, Largo and i can build more cohesive 'arcs' that fit within a 16-20 episode set, which also leaves room for one-liners, outtakes, art days, and other in sundry happenings. We won't be taking any breaks between chapters - that's not the purpose - it is just simply adding a little structure to the story. Much like loosening up the 4-square frames - adding structure here will be beneficial and help us with our planning. That's what we've been working on for the past few weeks.

Before I took a break, i felt like i was stumbling and tripping over my own feet with Megatokyo. I finally feel like i've got my balance. That isn't to say MT is going to be perfect - far from it - but i feel that now we can finally start providing the quality content i think all of you deserve from our tiny little world.

[update]

oh, i just HAD to add this.

There was a little confusion of Erika's confrontation with the 'chikan' (molestor, pervert) who groped her on the train (can you say 'oooh... bad choice, dude.' ^_^) First of all, yes, this kind of thing is a problem and is very common in japan. When i read the Mainichi Daily News (thier english version is fun to read) i spotted this article today in the Wai Wai section of the paper called "Molested girls pay back perverts"... read it and laugh. :)

"E3 Wrap Up II"
Wednesday - May 30, 2001
[Largo] - 08:21:00
The real gem of E3 was Bioware's Neverwinter Nights.

For those unfamiliar, Neverwinter is a single player and multiplayer role playing game designed with the 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons rules. However that fact isn't the games defining factor, nor is it a chief selling point. Instead, the real appeal of the title to us has been the concept of a "roll your own" game.

The purpose of Neverwinter was to design a product that is more then just a mere game. With most single player games, once you've completed it in all the possible ways, you tire of it. In Neverwinter - that may never happen. The reason behind this is because Neverwinter is designed to allow anyone to make an intricate adventure for anyone to use.

The product is divided into three equally important parts; server, client, and the module creation tools.

The server is just that, a server. This process runs the module you've either downloaded off the net, or created on your own with the tools. The server runs the module, and that's about it. It waits for a connection from a client, or multiple clients. Bioware has said the server is going to be able to support up to 64 client connections at once. No fancy front end, no bloated code just to make it look pretty will be found here. It's refreshing to see a company make a product that meets the requirements to fulfill its purpose, without letting marketing impose unnecessary kludge on such a crucial piece.

The client is just that, a client. There will be one for both Players and Dungeon Masters. The interface is very clean, in fact it's one of the most efficient designs I've ever seen. The concept behind the interfaces creation was as Trent Oster has said "It's there when you need it, it's not when you don't". The interface appears as a circular ring, a dial over your character when you call it, the interface takes up a tiny area of the screen, so you don't lose visibility. The dial itself is not much larger then your character to give you can idea of its compact size. The dial works by selecting an option off the ring, which spawns another layer of options. The design is akin to tree architecture, as each option branches out into another set of options, and so on. Durring the E3 demo, I saw a spell caster manually call the interface, and cast a spell in a matter of seconds.

Finally, the real jewel in this crown is the Neverwinter Tools. These tools are what allow you to edit, and create modules on your own. The interface is clean, and in 3D, so you can zoom into and get a good idea of what the final look of your world is going to be, before you load it. The interface is simple too, it appears as even a novice with no scripting background can paint down a town, forest, or dungeon and throw in any of the pre-scripted villains and features in order to create their own adventures.

However it is the scripting language itself that appeals to me, granted - I'm a coder myself, so I'm biased, but the idea of using a C-like language and giving players with the know how or drive to use it for their own is new. Most game makers never have this sort of optimism when it comes to their market's audience. As Trent Oster said "The good news about the scripting language, is it's a real scripting language. The bad news about it, is it's a real scripting language." Leaving the door wide open for people with talent to create impressive modules will only further the lifespan of this product. This is also one of the main reasons so many people are waiting with bated breath for its release. To help those new to scripting be able to make their own, more complex modules, Bioware has decided to open source their modules, so when you download, or purchase a module - you can see everything inside it, just as if you made it yourself. By analyzing existing modules, a person will be better be able to understand "how they did that", and learn to do it themselves.

During the E3 demo, I got a glimpse at some of the AI scripts already developed. To put it plainly, it's insane. I've never seen so many functions just for how something is going to attack you.

Bioware's E3 demo was a success on a number of levels. Bioware was able to demonstrate a product that is mature in its development cycle. They showed that their product is becoming everything they have scoped it to become. And most importantly, they proved they have great taste in beer.

One final note, Neverwinter Night's release date is said to be, in "winter" - but Trent made it a point to note that in Canada, it's always winter.

"Saucer!"
Sunday - June 3, 2001
[Dom] - 00:00:01
I Just got back from A-kon, in Texas. And sorry about not ranting after Anime Central a few weeks ago, but I've been running around since and just now have found the time to rant.

Let me begin by saying this--completely in jest, mind you, so put those flame-throwers away--I have seen the enemy, and he is you.

Other people's con reports have been fairly accurate--I especially like Piro's interpretation of my Vibrating Sheep of Doom. And yes, the Vibrating Sheep was a real stuffed animal. Now let me explain, before you all start wondering about me. I'm weird, but I'm not THAT weird.

See, Piro's always mentioning/complaining that people ask him for cheesecake pics of Kimiko and Erika. And with a MegaTokyo panel at ACen, I feared that a fan or two would get out of hand--thus the idea of the booby prize was born. A pair of velcro gloves was specially made by Natsuki--wool gloves with "I (heart) MT" sewn on the left hand, and "I (heart) (sheep)" on the right.

And thus the search for a suitable stuffed sheep was born. On a day I went costume shopping with Okashina Okashi's Tanzy (Yes, thanks to Natsuki and Ed's fangirl both being carriers of the cosplay disease, I'm a cosplayer now... pray for me) we found the perfect Booby Sheep at a semi-local thrift store. It was an old, dirty little wind-up sheep (note the key in Piro's depiction) with a broken unwinding mechanism. So instead of unwinding slowly, dancing and playing a tinny little tune, it all unwound at once, leading to two possible effects, depending on how far you wound it--a jingle and a twitch, or full-out vibration and a death rattle. And with Ed's video camera (not with Ed behind it, mind you) following me most of the con, you better believe there's some fun footage of me hauling that sheepy around. It took a threat from Piro along the lines of "If you keep that, I'll never let you live it down" to get me to give it away to a deserving fanboy--the one who asked if we had any shirts on us.

Okay, on to the panel itself. See, Piro and I met up a few hours before the panel and were wandering the halls talking about how the hell we were going to fill an hour with our uninteresting spiel. And yes, I was in my Shin Kusanagi Kyo costume at the time. About fifteen minutes before the panel was scheduled to start, Piro and I headed down to the tiny room allotted to MT--and noticed that the halls were lined with people. "Hmm, I wonder what they're lined up for?" And then I flashed back to the day before when I'd gone around asking people in MT shirts (or even costumes) if they were going to the panel. And after a good fifty affirmative answers I was scared, since the room seated about 30...

So anyway, Piro and I wormed our way to the front of the line and a space on the wall after looking in the room. Seeing it semi-full of people, we assumed there was another panel going on, and started talking to people in the halls without them knowing who we were--which is the best way to talk to fans, really, I don't like it when people have nothing to say to me but "MegaTokyo rocks." So Piro and I just asked some basic questions and they answered them honestly, which was cool--and then a friend of mine in the room stepped out and said "Hey, Dom, when're you coming in? Everyone in here's waiting for you."

That's when I started praying for a miracle revocation of the fire code... that room was absolutely _packed_ with people. And I heard reports that there was a cluster of people outside with their ears to the door and going "Sshhh!" to passersby. As Piro mentioned in his rant on the subject, it was pretty awe-inspiring to see this show of support and respect. Especially when that guy in the back of the room yelled "Hey, Piro! YOU DON'T SUCK!" and was greeted with a rousing cheer...

That's all for now, A-kon and cosplay thoughts coming in a future rant...

"ah, fresh spring air..."
Thursday - June 7, 2001
[Piro] - 10:11:00
Ah, nothing like allergy season. Yesterday I actually found myself staying home from work - a fairly rare thing. I'm used to walking around with the addled and somewhat non-functioning gray matter sloshing around inside my head. Intense, throbbing sinus headaches, however, can take me completely out of commission. I don't get them very often, and usually they are pretty mild, but yesterday it felt like Brain-a-zilla was beating on the inside of my head with a rubber mallet to the point i was feeling nauseous and i didn't want to move out of my chair. That's usually a good sign that i should stay home.

I don't know about you, but i'm one of those people who looks at sick days as opportunities to catch up on things. I had work to do on Chapter 1 scripts, friday's comic needed to be started, there were several color drawings that i wanted to start, i needed to finish the character sheets, I wanted to come up with some new shirt designs, I needed to write a rant - perhaps get a few done, etc. It was 9:00am, i had plenty of time to do all sorts of stuff during the day.

The big problem with being the type of person who only stays home from work when he really *IS* sick is that - I really AM sick when i stay home. ^_^ I never seem to grasp the logic that the incapacitation that prevents me from being effective at work during the day is also going to prevent me from doing much of anything else during the day. By the end of my 'sick day' i feel not only guilty because i stayed home from work, but also that i completely wasted a day that could have been put to better use. By the end of the day, i'm feeling somewhat better, but i'm grumpy, out of sorts, and irritated that i didn't get more done during the day.

this is why i hate sick days.

Some people will say, "hell, why don't you just kick back and relax?" The sucky thing about headaches, especially sinus ones, is that relaxing isn't really an option. Headaches come with built-in stress, no matter how much you try to relax. Playing games requires thought, and all that does is make your headache worse, so you can't play anything. Even sitting watching anime isn't really feasible. Reading subtitles when your vision is a little off is not exactly good for headaches.

The best thing you can do - and if you can do this, i envy you - is just shut your brain down and turn yourself off for the day. My brain is hyperactive, it's always going. Even when i'm chilling, i like to be reading or doing something interesting. Head colds are awful because your brain just bitches and moans all day because it's not happy.

I am *so* glad i feel good enough to go to work this morning. ^_^

As everyone can see, we've wrapped up the first 'chapter' of Megatokyo. For tomorrow, i'll post some of my thoughts on the first 128 episodes of MT, and what the future of the strip is. The things that largo and i are doing will, i hope, only improve the strip and make it stronger. It's been a rather remarkable run so far, and it really feels like we are just getting started. I rub my hands together often and chuckle evilly about things... i'm not sure that this is good behavior on my part, but i can't help it. ^^;;

I should also have a very nice sketch to post tomorrow. I did draw a little bit last night, and started this VERY sweet Neverwinter Nights inspired sketch. With some luck, i'll be able to post it Friday afternoon. I might be a little late with tomorrow's strip - I didn't start working on it last night, which is bad - so the strip may not go up till saturday. I will try, however, to get it done.

Oh, one final thing. A lot of people have been comparing Tsubasa's quest to find his childhood sweetheart as a blatant rip or spoof of Love Hina. This isn't really true at all. The concept of Osana Najimi (your childhood love) is so common in anime and games that i'm surprised more people don't realize it. Remember Envelope? These Kasumi is the protagonist's osana najimi in the story and in the game. Sentimental Graffiti (that's Taeko-chan pictured above, a scene from Sentimental Graffiti 2 for Dreamcast) is all about the Osana Najimi concept - in fact, you have twelve girls from your past you can chase. :) So, while there are little bits and pieces of Love Hina (and a half dozen other anime and games) that we spoof, we do try to keep things a little original.

"healing arms around you"
Friday - June 8, 2001
[Piro] - 21:17:00
Gee, two rants in two days.

I wasn't actually planning to abuse your sensibilities with a Shirt Guy Dom strip today, but the stick-figure personification of me as a kodama with a rattling head amused me to no end. Besides, it's been a while since we've been dom'd.

There are two reasons i bailed on the strip for today. The first is that largo and I hadn't finished fine tuning the script for it, and it's one of those strips i want to do a good job on. No, it's not the start of Chapter one, that will be sometime later next week, it's something else. :) By 10:00 pm i figured there was no way i was going to get the damn thing done without staying up till 3 in the morning, so i kindly asked Dom to fill in for me.

The big problem with doing something like this 3-a-week comic is that it tends to leave little room to freely pursue inspiration when it hits. For the most part, the structure provided by the comic schedule is a plus for your art. It forces you to draw when you don't really feel inspired, and often is in itself enough inspiration to create something halfway decent. As I sat down to try scribbling out the drawings for what was going to be friday's comic, i kept finding myself doodling on this sketch instead.Once i had patted Dom on the head and sent him off to do offensive things with his trackball, i took the time left in the evening to colorize the sketch.

The inspiration for this drawing actually came to me when Largo and i were at E3 a few weeks ago. The folks at Bioware had invited us to come over and sit in on a demonstration of Neverwinter Nights, their long awaited D&D based RPG game. Now, i'm not a big player of RPG games, never really have been. When i was in high school, i used to dabble in D&D, but it was really more of an excuse to hang out with friends and eat bad frozen pizzas with those little crispy onion things on them. Largo is the big Neverwinter Nights maniac - the mere mention of the game makes him salivate and get this frightening, eerie gleam in his eyes. I went into the demonstration with an open mind, frankly, wondering what to expect.

Honestly, i was astounded. You see, the gameplay for your typical visual novel or dating simulation involves complexities that deal more with story structure, cinematic presentation, portrayal of character and statistical back-ends that attempt to transparently guide the actions of the girls and other characters around you. The games tend to have long, linear paths that vary depending on the paths you pursue. The hard thing is - the protagonist tends to only gain parts of your personality - the rest is hard coded. It's always annoying when you have to select an action that is not something you would normally do. When you are dealing with dynamic story telling of this nature, it's just not possible to avoid these problems. Neverwinter Nights was fascinating because it was built around the concept that you would create your own worlds and your own scenarios - and the interface to do this was incredibly robust. In around 10 minutes, they had put together a fairly complex dungeon scenario and populated it with stuff and monsters, and then proceeded to plod around in environment that was rendered beautifully. I was also surprised by the ability to customize your characters - clothing, armor, look, etc.

The feel of the game is great. It has remarkably smooth flow and sensuality to the way the light of torches and other magical items are rendered. The little details, like arrows sticking out of your character after he'd been shot by goblins was fascinating. The visuals for performing spells was also quite remarkable. I'm looking forward to playing this game. I used to work on making level maps for Quake, but found the process to be long and arduous - the folks at Bioware have developed a system that really seems intuitive and easy to use. I just hope that we don't have to put the comic on a 2 month hiatus when the game finally does come out. :)

The illustration i did last night was inspired by one of the production illustrations for the game itself. As you probably already figured out, Largo and Piro get so immersed in the games that they play that it isn't unreasonable to actually draw them *in* the games. Largo doesn't change much when you set him in a game environment - dress him up and he's good to go. Piro is a little more complicated. Like many players, Piro tends to play female characters - hence the existence of 'piroko', his online gaming alter-ego. I've found that it's quite fun to place Largo and Piroko in gaming situations, and this is one of the better drawings of such recent attempts.

I should also mention that this is NOT the final version of this sketch. In fact, i will be producing a much more fine tuned and detailed version, including Largo and perhaps another character that I will be turning over to Merekat to color (if you frequent the Art forums, you know who she is). She has a wonderful 3d style and professional grade to her work (duh, she is a pro ^_^) that i think will produce a very nice final image, very much in the same vein as the original image that inspired it. One of my goals is to improve my coloring skills, and Merekat (who doesn't live that far from me - I had a chance to hook up with her and Thien last weekend - i was 3 hrs late getting there, but it was fun meeting you guys. ^_^) Anyway, Mere and I will keep you posted on the status of this little collaboration - should be fun.

"excuse to rant"
Monday - June 11, 2001
[Largo] - 09:26:00
In the interests of getting that horrid pic off the site that Dom put up in his rant last week - I'm having to put up an unplanned rant. On Thursday I'll post my review of Anarchy Online Beta4. Hint: This game is sweet.

I recently got a email from one of my friends with the following lessons learned from life, so I thought I'd post it.

-- BEGIN --

"What I have learned as I have matured...

I've learned that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.

I've learned that no matter how much I care, some people are just assholes.

I've learned that it takes years to build up trust, and it only takes suspicion, not proof, to destroy it.

I've learned that you can get by on charm for about fifteen minutes. After that, you'd better have a big willy or huge boobs.

I've learned that you shouldn't compare yourself to others - they are more screwed up than you think.

I've learned that you can keep vomiting long after you think you're finished.

I've learned that we are responsible for what we do, unless we are celebrities.

I've learned that regardless of how hot and steamy a relationship is at first, the passion fades, and there had better be a lot of money to take its place.

I've learned that 99% of the time when something isn't working in your house, one of your kids did it

I've learned that the people you care most about in life are taken from you too soon and all the less important ones just never go away.

Pass this along to 5 friends...trust me, they'll appreciate it. Who knows, maybe something good will happen.

If not...tough shit."

-- END --

I read over all that and decided that it lacked something. It lacked a gamer version. So the following is my take on it.

"What I have learned as games have matured... I've learned that you cannot make a realistic First Person Shooter. All you can do is frag people and hope they don't respawn.

I've learned that no matter how much I care, some people will continue to camp.

I've learned that it takes years to build a decent game, and it only takes IGN.com five seconds to destroy it.

I've learned that you can get by on hype for about fifteen months. After that, you'd better have a decent product, or you'll be shot.

I've learned that you shouldn't compare console and PC games. People that do are more screwed up than you think.

I've learned that you can keep vomiting long after you think you're finished. (no change)

I've learned that we are responsible for what we do, unless we are celebrities. (no change... woohoo!)

I've learned that regardless of how many bump maps and steamy pixles the DOA3 girls have, their relationship with Microsoft makes the passion fade.

I've learned that 99% of the time when something isn't working on your PC, it's because you fsck'd it up.

I've learned that the people you care most about in life are taken from you too soon because of EverQuest....

"the newer fools"
Thursday - June 14, 2001
[Piro] - 11:46:00
[saturday update - aren't i terrible? ^^;; I'm actually at work (again) right now, but the comic isn't quite done - i've got about an hours worth of work yet, should go up sometime tonight. promise ^_^ - piro]

First off, lets just say that this just says all that needs to be said about today. For the record, I completely deny any part i may have had in this. Dom, don't hurt me.... ^^;;;

Oh, and Eric made some very nice winamp skins this week - i have been using and enjoying the Yuki skin both at home and at work. He's also pointed out to me the unfortunate lack of color artwork of Largo and Piro. ^^;; ehehe, I guess i should take that as a hint. My thanks to everyone who has made winamp skins and emailed them to me in the past. I have used all of them, and I'll dig up links to them when i get a chance. For now, you can find most of them over at winamp's site - just enter 'megatokyo' in the search box and you'll find many of them. :)

In case you haven't heard, Largo and I have been invited to attend Otakon 2001 this August. We've been promised a slightly bigger room than we had for the Acen panel ^^;; It's kind of a fun oportunity for Largo and I to hang around and cause trouble. Be sure to check out the guest page - you'll find mention of us there. :)

One last piece of business - as some of you may know, i've been working pretty late nights this week due to a Friday deadline at work. I barely squeezed out wednesday's comic (ah, but it was SO much fun!) but I'm pretty sure I won't be finishing friday's comic tonight. There is always the remote possibility i'll pull it together when i get home at 11:00pm tonight, but lets just go ahead and assume that i won't get friday's comic up till Saturday or Sunday. Regardless, Chapter 1 starts back up on Monday, so be sure to stay tuned. :)

Now, onto sadder things. My morning routine usually involves getting up, putting a cup of coffee in the microwave, snapping on the news, toasting a pop tart and reading thru my email, the MT and Fredart forums. First of all, i'm out of pop tarts, which sucks. Secondly, i read this morning in the forums that Neobaka, another very good manga-style webcomic, is ending.

I headed over to the site and read dan's commentary about the fate of Neobaka. Dan, I so understand where you're commin from. You touched on a lot of things that have caused me myself to question the future of Megatokyo at times in the past.

I don't think you can really appreciate some of the pressures and problems associated with doing something like Megatokyo or Neobaka unless you are actually doing it. Before ya all email me about how you understand - yes, i know, but i'm talking about the actual experience of it. ^_^ I have enormous respect for anyone who can keep one of these monsters going.

I don't really know what it is that keeps you going on these things, but I do have an understanding of the many things that can make you stop. I remember when Josh ended Wendy Comics, his comments reflected similar reasons for bringing his comic to a close. Both Dan and Josh talked about how their experiences in making the comic went from being totally focused on the comic and the art, to having to spend more and more time dealing with people's reactions to their work, even when 99% of that feedback is positive, it can be overwhelming. Dan put it very succinctly:

"I became overly concerned with all the stuff surrounding the comic while finding the creation of the comic itself becoming more and more unfun."

I think it comes down to the fact that the only way i have been able to keep MT going was by routinely pushing everyone and everything aside and getting back to the comic itself. To do this, i've had to ignore email, piss off friends, ignore requests for things people want from me. i've been absent from the forums, i've missed many rants. I always got myself back to the comic and the art itself. In the end, I do MT for me. You have to. You shut down ICQ and mIRC, shut down email, turn off the forums, open the shades and look out at the stars, take a walk, listen to the traffic from the highway and the crickets, go back inside, sit down and draw. Doing this to a 3-a-week schedule is not easy (perhaps there is where my mental instability comes into play) but in the end, its more important that you are happy with your own work.

The existence of Seraphim and Largo help more than you think. Without them, Megatokyo would have come to a close back in February. Having strong, supporting partners who, when it comes down to it, care more about you than the comic, really helps. Dom, Ed, WingZero, UkiyaShun, Natsuki, the whole #(channel name deleted) crew, the #megatokyo folks, and the 30 supportive emails a day - it all helps, because they are all supportive, not demanding. Its also a support network that i take far too much advantage of. But you also need to know when to step away from it, and just listen to yourself.

Dan, don't stop drawing Yuki. If you do, i'll send Ping-chan over to slap you around. :P You love the character, you love the story. Continue it for yourself, and do it at you own pace. Remember, it's YOUR art. Yuki is yours too. Screw the 3 a week schedule. Take a break and build it for yourself when you can. In the end, you have to do these things for yourself. It's the only reason I keep doing Megatokyo. You always have to step back when it starts being 'unfun' and go back to why you draw and create in the first place. Your readers are patient - after all, it is the inner vision that spawned the work that they love in the first place.

Oh, and the whole 'which came first' think regarding Ping-chan and Yuki? You and I both know that they are different characters - you created Yuki, i created Ping. I think that the constant badgering about Yuki being a rip off of Ping and vice versa... i'm sure that this was one of those many 'outside factors' that didn't help. Its amazing what comes back to bite us in the ass, isn't it?

peace, dude. email me sometime.

"graphic narratives"
Tuesday - June 19, 2001
[Piro] - 09:30:00
[quick update - well, tonight has been quite an evening. The lady living in apartment across the way from me had her place broken into, and after talking with the police and the poor lady and the rest of my neighbors, we had a pretty massive storm blow thru here, leaving us without power for a while. Geh, what a night. ^^;; i have trouble getting things done on normal comic evenings, nevermind when stuff happens. ^_^. Wednesays comic will go up sometime tomorrow afternoon - i'd say around 9:00pm (so, it technically is still wednesday ^_^). The art is all done, its just too late to finish (scanning, cleanup, and putting it together in Illustrator takes a good 2 hrs). I'll finish things up when i get home tomorrow from work. Better to put up a good comic later in the day than a mediocre one right now - and i do need to sleep sometimes. I got very close to burning out last month, i'd like to avoid that in the future. Thanks for your patience and understanding. - piro]

Ahh... for some reason, i feel very relaxed this morning.

The past few weeks have been pretty hectic, but not because of Megatokyo. It's that other thing, you know, the Day Job. :) Finally got thru the deadline yesterday. Originally, last friday was our deadline, but as Friday loomed over us, our deadline was moved to Monday. Now this was both good and bad. The good thing about the extension was that it gave me time to get more things done, the bad thing was that I pretty much lost the weekend. ^^;;

In life, your 'jobs', whether they be things you get paid for (like your day job) or things you do for fun (like megatokyo) have various 'task lengths' that you have to deal with. In many jobs, your tasks can be repetitive - your goal is to get thru your task set before the day is over, and you repeat this every day. For others, you may have a list of tasks that may run anywhere from 1 to 4 days, and then when it is done you move onto something else. Sometimes these tasks run concurrently, and you find yourself working on 10-15 things at once.

One of the things about architecture is that most projects tend to be long and very involved. If you run a architecture firm, you tend to find yourself in a position of keeping an eye on dozens of projects, making sure that they are moving along and that the people in your office responsible for them have things under control. Those people, the ones who run specific projects, live, eat and breath those projects for weeks, months and even years at a time. Sometimes you will have 2 or 3 projects going at once, but usually your focus is on one specific project. That's what I do.

You can get pretty wrapped up in these projects. On my current project, I was really only helping out another Project Architect, but still - it's been absorbing my thoughts and my time for several months now. The nice thing about this is that you can focus on one project at a time, in all the detail you need to. The bad thing is that when you are mired in the middle of the enormity of all that needs to be done, it's very hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. For long projects is very had to see where you are, and how much left you have to do. That's why more often than not, by the time deadlines approach, you find yourself putting in beaucoup overtime to get things finished. It's not as bad as it sounds. There's a lot of gratification in getting things done, and personal commitment to a project is a personal thing - even tho its your job, you toss a lot of yourself into these things, and it's important they come out right.

Over the years I've often had to deal with the 'anti-climax' that comes at the completion of a project. When you are nearing the end and working your ass off to finish things, all you think to yourself is 'whew, can't wait till this is over so i can relax'. Finishing a project is a lot like finishing race - you can't just stop running and chill in a easy chair. You have to have 'cool down' period. Really, it's like a release. You have to deal with the remainder of that pent-up energy. That's why whenever i finish a big run like this (and it was no where near as big as the one i was in the middle of in Feb/March) I try to do something useful when i'm done. So, rather than chill out and relax when i got home last night (which can leave you moody and irritable) i dove into cleaning up the apartment, and then Seraphim and I ran out to do Laundry. We got home around 11:30, and i was completely whipped out. But i felt pretty good. I was ready to relax. :)

And that's why i feel pretty good today. Then again, it might just be the Drixoral taking effect. ^_^

In my musings about architecture this morning, something else occurred to me, and its something i've thought about before. I think that one of the reasons that i've been pretty good at putting together comic style story lines and manga layouts (not patting myself on the back here, just saying that even tho the layouts need work, generally i have a good feel for it) is because there are a lot of similarities between the production of construction documents and comics. A set of CDs (short for 'Construction Documents), in case you've never flipped thru a set, is really a graphic narrative of how to put a building together. It is a set of custom, detailed instructions that communicate information to the contractor about how I want the building to be assembled. You have to try to think of every possible unique situation (you never can - there are always surprises) and you also have to integrate things like structure, mechanical systems, electrical systems, data, fire protection, finishes, furniture, code requirements, barrier free issues, etc etc etc. Buildings are very complex things. Effective communication of what needs to be done is very important. You do this with detailed plans, sections, notes, details, elevations, etc. And you have to think about the order in which things are put together.

It's very similar to doing sequential art. It's just a little more boring. :)

Anyways, enough musing. I've been very lax at plugging some of the many online comics that have been surfacing lately. Many people have pointed out a manga/anime style comic that just started called 'North'. Take a look, it will be interesting to see where they go with it. I need to go thru my email to find the other URLs, so i'll catch the rest of you on thursday. ^_^ That's the great thing about the net - there is always room for more webcomics. :)

I've mentioned this before, but i feel i REALLY need to do something about this. I was digging thru my email download folder the other day (thank god for ACDsee) and i was rather amazed... i never realized that so many people had sent me so many damn fine pieces of gift art! I'm going to start a new thing here - i'm going to dig thru the images i have and post a link to some of the best ones. Please don't be disappointed if i missed yours - it will take a lot of time to deal with the backlog, never mind new arts. But, in short, please keep drawing. I love seeing MT fan-art. Its inspiring to see so much of it, it really is.

Ok, to start, just one for today. I'll try to do 3 at a time in the future. Today I received this very lovely gift art from Nichol which shows Kimiko in a pretty sweet little t-shirt, jeans and a lollypop. ^_^ Thanks Nichol, very sweet!

Oh, and when i said to check out winamp and type 'megatokyo' in the box in the Winamp Skins section... i never realized there were so MANY Megatokyo winamp skins! some of them are really cool, too. Wow, thanks guys. Amazing work.

Oh, to other things. I have a tendency to not get around to mentioning things I should have mentioned ages ago. I've enjoyed popping into the #megatokyo channel on irc.megatokyo.com from time to time, and its a pretty decent bunch that hangs out there (i usually pop in every day at some point in the day) One of the guys on the channel who has been a big help (he didn't want ops, but i told him too bad, he's got em ^_^) , Chris (aka Lizardman) runs a online store called Dragon Magic It's worth checking out. I've had a chance to meet Chris, and it's always nice to have a face on the other end of secure socket layer :) I've been influencing some of his stock lately (snicker) :P Thats the great thing about the anime community - a lot of people who run the stores tend to be fans themselves.

The other long overdue plug is one that will probably make many forum goers of old cringe. ^_^ My good pal Kai (who i knew long before MT) put up Neko Neko Wai! - a place for your inner Neko almost back when MT started as a MT fan site and a community of its own. He's recently set it up so that he can host people's artwork for the artwork forum. Don't let him know, but i'm a secret fan of that site. :) Thanks for all your work, Kai.

On a final note. Its an ARMANI suit, not 'armini'. Junpei does NOT wear cheap knock-off suits. :) I'll fix that as soon as i get a chance.

Oh, and the image above? Thats from a game called "My Fair Angel" - i didn't link the site there because Studio E-go specializes in adult games. So, don't go here unless you are over 18. ^_^

"iron bartender"
Wednesday - June 20, 2001
[Largo] - 18:35:00
As some of you have heard, Piro and I will be guests at Otakon 2001 this August 10-12 in Baltimore, MD.

We'll be doing some sort of 'panel-thing' in some sort of 'big room' with 'people'. Piro has assured me that there will be refreshing drinks there, so I agreed to go with him. So if anyone wants to come meet the creators of megatokyo (god only knows why anyone would?) - we'll be at Otakon.

Initializing MT Contest Engine 1.0

Ah.. Summer rocks, a time for firing up steaks on the BBQ, and getting smashed out of ones' mind.

At the end of the month I'll be attending one of those 'party'-things, you know, the places with people and booze. Normally this would be a good thing, however there are some strings attached.

I have been asked to make some 'punch' which my old university (LSU) is famous for making. Normally I'd be glad to make up a batch of da' stuff, but here's the problem with this - Since it's been years since I've made 'the stuff', I only remember the ingredients, but not the recipe itself (amount of each item).

So here's your chance to win some cool megatokyo-swag. The person who sends me the best possible reciple for 'punch' with the following ingredients will win some MT-merchandise. Also, we'll publish the recipe and call it 'megatokyo punch' .. or something.

So, I'm asking for anyone who wants to play to email me their recipes using most or all of the following ingredients.

The Ingridents are: Vodka, Everclear, Orange or Pineapple juice, Kool-Aid(tm) or some powdered drink mix, some other fruit-punch?, and sugar. The special qualties of the receipe include mixing it all together in a container, and letting ferment over night before consumption. The final product should be a high-proof fruity punch that does not even seem to taste like it has alcohol.

Now here's the thing, the contest will end in 7 days, and a winner selected. Since I can't mix up and sample every submission I may get, I ask that you only submit a reciple that you yourself have tried, and thus survived drinking.

"Man full of Life, Drink full of booze."

Note: Must be of legal drinking age to enter, megatokyo does not support or endorse underaged drinking, unless that person is on a date with largo.

"magical made"
Thursday - June 21, 2001
[Piro] - 09:13:00
[quick note - i wanna say thanks to Hot Soup over at Lethal Doses for filling in for me today. Largo and I just were not happy with the script for yesterday, so chapter one will continue on Monday. Thanks soup! (ping is so cute in the last panel ^_^)]

Have you ever been in one of those arguments with friends or just random people on the net about how good or bad a anime show is? Ever been in the position of trying to defending a show that you REALLY like, but you can't really explain why? Unfortunately, 'Generally Accepted Opinions" (GAO's as I call them -architects have a bad habit of creating acronyms for everything because we are lazy) exist, and normally pretty well match your own opinions about things. Its when your feelings on something don't gel well with the GAO that you can find yourself standing alone in a spotlight, surrounded by people with railguns and bags of tomatoes. Not fun, is it?

One positive thing about GAOs is that they are a big help to people who are just getting into anime. For the most part, the community has a pretty good idea what anime titles are good, and which are, like, really bad. ^^;; What's sad is, sometimes people's opinions of a show have more to do with what others think of it than what they themselves felt about it. That's bad. Others often feel they have to keep their feelings to themselves, and just sit there and take it as other people rip on their shows. That's life. Some people feel the need to go on the attack when someone makes a statement contrary to the Generally Accepted Opinion, and form a lynching party. That's just plain wrong.

Sadly, all of this is a deep rooted part of human behavior. Thats what wars and religions are all about. I think that most GOAs are not universal things - they tend to exist independently within groups of friends, online communities such as IRC channels and forums. Gee, sounds a lot like the term 'Peer Pressure' doesn't it? ^_^

I tend to ignore Generally Accepted Opinions completely. Why? because i tend to always be on the wrong side of things. My statements about my admiration of an anime series or show is usually more of a defiant statement than a timid declaration for which i hope people agree with. Anyone here ever seen Shamanic Princess? I love this anime. Is it one of the best animes ever made? No. is it a fabulous piece of storytelling? No. Is it any good? Depends on what you are looking for.

And that's the crux of the issue. Sometimes what you get from a show is not easy to describe. The story in Shamanic Princess doesn't necessarily grab me, but some of the visuals, especially in the first few episodes, are amazing. Also, the soundtracks are fantastic (I highly recommend the first and second soundtrack for the series).

I think it's the backgrounds... gloomy, medieval towns completely devoid of population - the characters, highly stylized, complexly detailed, almost surreal - and the music, spooky, engaging, saucy, intense, soft... the scenes, where Tiara is talking with Jopolo in her boarding room, with the rain and the wind whipping against the glass, a distorted look at Tiara's face thru the rain soaked leaded glass.... images of Tiara sleeping, dreaming, tortured in her thoughts. The inane conversation with her fellow schoolmates, and the rather fascinating character designs that these secondary characters have, angled eyes and articulated ponytails...

Can't explain it. Shamanic Princess is just one of many odd shows that i take this kind of inspiration from. Some of it comes out in my work sometimes. I think that's why people like me aspire to draw. I guess i've just been reaching for ways to communicate these perceptions and emotive responses in ways that words never have seemed to be able to communicate.

Generally Accepted Opinions are notorious for being more statistic and fact oriented than on the raw inner feelings people have about things. An anime is considered good because it's story is well done and is entertaining, the animation is top notch, and the mecha fight scenes are oh so accurate. In actuality, most GOAs are negative in nature. "this show sucks' or 'the story is stupid' is an easy to define attribute, and cause for instant dismissal of a show.

I've had people flat out tell me Shamanic Princess sucks. (shrug) maybe it does, maybe that's what most people think. I don't really care. I've taken a lot of inspiration from it and many other things that many would consider an 'unworthy waste of video tape'. Some things in those shows have found their way into the way I do things. So, you like Megatokyo? Well, guess what... ^_^

So the next time you feel the urge to try to convince someone that they shouldn't like something, lay off. They probably see something in it you didn't, and that is never a reason to suppress someone's opinion. Who knows? That 'little thing' they see might show up in a piece of art you print up and hang up on your wall someday, because that person was finally able to communicate what it was he or she understood - and thanks to them, you finally got it...

"rent is due"
Friday - June 22, 2001
[Dom] - 13:45:00
This past Tuesday, I was sticking around the office playing with Adobe Premiere and grabbing screenshots from Sakura Taisen 3, which'll dominate my rants for the next few months. Times like these I wish I had an S-video cable for my Dreamcast, but that's not the point of this rant.

At around 6:30, my sister plucked me from the office and pulled me about eight blocks down the street to the Orpheum Theater, where Rent was playing (It's worth noting that she did the exact same thing to me two years ago when Rent was in town, but at the Golden Gate Theater instead of the Orpheum).

I love that show, and I could say a lot about it, but something happened to me at that show that made me realize a thing or two about myself. I was sitting next to a young girl--I'd estimate around 15 or so, and it was obviously her first time seeing the show. And during the reprise of I'll Cover You at the funeral, I realized she was snuffling and tears were streaming down her face as if she'd shot Bambi's mother. And she did the same during the finale with Mimi and Roger.

To my surprise, even after seeing the show multiple times, I found myself getting a little choked up as well during the funeral. I looked over at my sister, and saw her looking a little raw herself. I asked her about it after the show, and she somewhat sheepishly admitted that the first three times she'd seen the show, she cried during the reprise of I'll Cover You, and she still chokes up when Tom Collins sings his farewell song.

I truly envy the ability of a writer who can create such a strong attachment to a character, especially in the, oh, hour and fifteen minutes that the audience has to see him. Jon Larson had that, and from what I'm seeing from the forums and my inbox here at MT, many fans are forming the same kind of bonds to the characters, and I envy Piro for his ability to write and draw them to get much the same effect.

Me, I can't get the same effect when I write. Those who know me know that I can't stay serious for more than a few hours at a time, which means I can do two things well: make people laugh, and make people angry at me (which are sometimes one and the same). Every once in a while I get inspired, sit down, and am able to fire off a poem that I like enough that I don't immediately set it on fire. My life's one big punch line or play on words, and while I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just limits my ability to write a certain way that makes the characters a little more tangible and reachable, rather than madcap stick figures cracking strange, esoteric jokes while inflicting untold violence on each other.

Although in my view, the ability to create an emotional attachment to a character is abused as often as it's masterfully executed--just look at the classic case of fan abuse, Evangelion. While some people will debate with me on the likability of the characters, there's no denying that a large fan base grew to love (and love in some SCARY ways O_o) the characters, and the ending is basically Hideaki Anno rolling naked in a pile of money, smoking a fat stogie and giving the fans the one-finger salute as he does obscene things to all eight cels of animation the TV show used. After learning what the future of the show was, I stopped watching at around episode 11. Then Ed tied me to a chair, propped my eyes open and forced me to watch The End of Evangelion while he laughed maniacally and played a synth version of Ode to Joy on his walkman...

Okay, I exaggerated about that last part, he didn't prop my eyes open, he let me blink every once in a while, because he didn't have eye drops at the time.

But anyway, on with the rant: Piro said at the ACen panel that he gets inspiration from Gainax. I'm gonna kick his ass if he tries to manipulate you like Eva--but that's a subject for another rant.

"i don't live right..."
Tuesday - June 26, 2001
[Piro] - 06:12:00
[update - heheh... well, i guess i managed to finish today's comic last night after all. Imagine that... oh, and btw - "hidoi" �"‚¢ = cruel, awful, severe, very bad, serious, terrible, heavy, violent - piro]

Y'know, sometimes i wonder just what it is i've done wrong in a former life. Was I a brutal hun warrior responsible for the deaths of entire villages? Did i invent some horrible machine of torture and death? Was i an IBM engineer who worked on the original IBM pc system architecture? I sometimes wonder.

Yesterday morning, after checking my email and sorting thru the forums, my computer started acting weird. The new box that Largo shipped me last month has been working like a charm (I call her Kimiko-chan ^_^), and i've been running Windows2000 pro with the regional settings set to Japanese - no problems at all.

When i rebooted yesterday morning, something was wrong. I got one of those wonderful NT blue screens that wouldn't let me go very far. Something about the ntoskrnl.exe being fuqqored. I couldn't even boot in the most basic Safe Mode. Something was definitely not right.

After finally tracking largo down on the phone, we came to the conclusion that i was going to have to try to either fix the Win2k install or do a fresh install. Luckily, i keep all my data on separate drives, so this didn't represent a disaster - just a annoyance. After spending a good hour trying to determine how to get into the system bios of this machine (oh, why on earth would they TELL YOU on start up - no, they have to make it enigmatic. -_-) so that i could boot from a CDrom, i proceeded to first try find fixing the installation. That was a dismal failure, so with a heavy sigh i proceeded to install a fresh version of win2k.

It actually went pretty smooth. I was able to find all the data and settings i needed to install things properly, and i even had a chance to freshen some installations and set things up better than before. The only thing i really lost was time. I finished fixing the damn thing around midnight last night. :(

Loosing time isn't a good thing for me, as you know. Every time i get on track, something happens. ^_^ Ah well, i guess that's part of the entertainment here at Megatokyo. My life is like this anyway, y'all might as well get a chuckle out of it, because these things happen to everyone. ^_^ The big thing i wanted to finish last night were the new t-shirt designs - we're very happy with the new designs (you can take a sneak peak here) and i was hoping to make them available today in our store. Also, i tried to get as much done as i could on tomorrow's comic while doing all my installation and setup, but honestly, i didn't get enough done. So, to make a long story short, here's the schedule for the rest of the week:

Wednesday's comic will be up thursday, and friday's comic will go up as scheduled on friday. New t-shirt designs should be available Friday. I will post some extra sketches tonight just for fun. Thank you.

Not all is bad in Piro/Seraphim land. On Saturday i finally broke down and purchased a DVD player. Yea, i was going to get a region free dvd player so i could watch Region 2 disks, but we decided that we just needed a general dvd player for now - besides, they are pretty cheap these days (having $100 worth of Best Buy rebate stuff to spend helps too ^_^) I picked up a Sony DVP-NS300 at Best Buy, and it's pretty decent (i only have a 20" Sony Trinitron tv) and while there we picked up a copy of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and The Princess Bride. It was kinda nice to kick back saturday and watch a couple of movies.

The evil thing about DVD players is that its not the player that gets you, it's the DVDs. That's where your wallet gets nailed. My resolve to not go out and purchase a dozen or so anime DVDs lasted about 18 hours. :) It started with my inkling to see the DVD version of Shamanic Princess to replace my fansubbed version.... and you know how it goes, can't stop with just one. ^^;; In the end i ordered a copy of Evangelion disk 1, Lain disk 1, Nadesico disk 1 and the new Nadia DVD as well. I guess i won't be eating lunch for a few weeks... ^^;; Still, i'm looking forward to getting them. Seraphim is gonna kill me when she gets wind of it tho... ^_^

Speaking of Seraphim, she is going to step in to discuss her plans to kidnap me and drag me away sometime in July. Till then, DVD's baaaaddd...

"website f00b4r'd"
Friday - June 29, 2001
[Largo] - 06:20:00
First off, contest strips should be emailed to contest@megatokyo.com.

Lately I spend more and more time reworking the site so it can better handle the strain it places on my b4wx.

Well, I've been busy redesigning the site, namely it's primitive backend. We're moving to a newer mysql database this time, with a more sophisticated php layout. The biggest problem with MT's current backend, is the rants are the only piece that are still primary static pages, that is to say, we operate on a lot of 'flat files' even though the site is completely dynamic, having any flat files (even when using them with SSI) is still very bad foo.

Another problem with the rant engine, is it was never designed for anyone but Piro and I to use it. So when other people rant in those spaces, it can be confusing to the readers unless they pay careful attention to the email at the bottom. The new backend will make it more clear who is ranting and when.

With the new backend, we should start seeing more articles, reviews, and rants - as it will allow a lot of new faces to begin writing new content for the site. When we first started MT, it was easy to get three rants a week up, but lately both outside factors, and megatokyo's own drain, has limited the time we can spend writing.

The winner of the iron bartender contest has been chosen, and emailed. It is unfortunate that several of you sent in such similar recipes, so I had to go with the person who sent this one in first.

1.5 litters of Vodka 1 litter of Everclear 32 oz of Orange Juice 16 oz of Pineapple Juice 3 gallons of Hawaiian Punch 2 litters of Sprite 3 litters of Ginger Ale.

On a unrelated note, if you ever get the chance, go to this restaurant. It's my all time favorite place to go.

Some of you may have read the most recent rant by Scott Kurtz of PvP. The negative reaction from the 'webcomic community' has really struck a nerve in me. So many of these comic authors are too uptight. The irony of it is you would think with so many of them being fellow creators of comedy that humor wouldn't be lost on them. Instead, while they can dish out the funny to every established institution and conception, they themselves cannot take a simple joke.

Kurtz has never asked for the humanitarian of the year award for his work. However that is what ultimately makes comedy - brutal honesty. Comedy is pointing out the absurd in what we have grown used to being the normal.

To do this, a person must be able to rise above the indoctrinated culture that surrounds them, and be free to scrutinize it.

I've always felt that comedians are the closest thing this world has left that resembles a philosopher. It is their nature to examine, analyze, and often challenge the established institutions of the world.

"road tripping"
Friday - June 29, 2001
[Seraphim] - 19:14:00
There are always a lot of complaints when I post a rant. Many people feel I don't really "rant", That is true, I am more the type to rend my clothes and rail against fate. If you've ever seen Emma Thompson's chapel scene in 'A Midsummer's Night Dream' - that's like me. It doesn't sound as snappy as ranting. Piro and I are quite peeved - a neighbor was broken into this week. What really sucks is we were outside and neighbors were walking by the area doing laundry and such and none of us saw or heard a thing. I also just found out today that a coworker who lives in our complex was robbed sometime this year and there was a purse snatching last weekend. Great. Ya know, they never disclose any of this before hand. Luckily I have Piro as my own personal body guard. I have been extremely cautious recently. Last night I saw a stranger strolling by with an odd bundle and looking into houses. I ran out into the yard only to discover the bundle was a bongo drum. Much to my relief he was simply lost and the jam session he was looking for was in another area - far away. We also have some interesting neighbors - someone named Jarrett is in a lot of trouble with one or more of his girlfriends. They come over at all hours and let me tell you - they can RANT. They stand in the yard ranting at him at the top of their little lungs. Jarrett is at least smart enough to remain inside and pretend to not be home. Honestly ladies, he's not worth the time or energy and you are disturbing my sleep.

I don't know if Piro has mentioned this yet but it is only two weeks until we go on vacation. We are headed to Mammoth Cave, Kentucky to do some spelunking - I wanted to take the moderately difficult tour and Piro wanted to do the Wild Cave exploration. Forget it! ! ! He'd probably stage an 'accident' to collect my insurance money to fund Megatokyo. We settled on a tour that mentions climbing 130 feet and fear of confined spaces. My parents took me on the tour when I was but a wee lass. My parents were in their mid-fourties at the time so I figure we can handle it being several decades younger. We then head to Atlanta and our favorite Japanese restaurant - Satsuki (probably our main reason for going to atlanta ^_^) and then down to Tybee Island to see the coast. We will end up in the Great Smokey Mountains for a few days and head home. I can't wait. Work sucks. It is only going to get worse - my coworker from my debut strip, Em, is leaving to attend Veterinary school. Damn, that is going to make work pure living hell.

I got into grad school. I'm hoping to get a full alumni scholarship. It is the Alumni Mom and Dad scholarship. Actually dad was diagnosed with cancer last year and made me promise to apply before he died and he'd cover the cost. Naturally I promised and of course he is in remission and healthy as a horse again. He has joined a health club and goes religiously everyday and is, in fact, in better shape than most people my age. Never make a 'deathbed' promise - they may survive and then you are screwed! He remembers my part of the deal - I just hope he remembers his! He likes hanging his mortality over my head and is already nagging me to graduate before he dies. I have no doubt he will live to see ninety like his own mother. That gives me almost twenty years! I'm getting a master's in Library and Information Science. Yep, I'm going to be a librarian. Not the spinster version from 'It's a Wonderful Life' - more like Evelyn in the Mummy. I'll get Piro into all sorts of trouble!

"kowarechatta"
Monday - July 2, 2001
[Piro] - 01:22:00
The full version of the screenshot above (which is in a 1998 Animedia mag, i only scanned a small part of it) is one of my favorites and one of the saddest nadesico images i've seen. This issue came out after the TV series had ended, but before the Movie. It was a pretty exciting time to be a Ruri fan. There was word that an older Ruri was going to be the lead character in the up coming Nadesico movie. This issue of Anemedia detailed some information about what happened after the tv series, about how Akito and Yurika took care of Ruri, etc. This image summed up what it was i liked about Ruri. It was before the 'older' version of ruri made her debut, before the movie.

To this day, i still can't understand how Ruri could be the star of the movie, yet the movie have so little to do with her. I was very disappointed by the film. They missed a opportunity to explore just what it was that made Ruri so endearing to her audience. I can still go back to images like the one above, but she's been given a future... and it left me feeling rather unfulfilled.

Of course, there is little that fans can do to control what happens to their favorite characters. Studios and artists try to listen to them, and they also take in such things as sales, polls, fan activities, etc, and try to do the things that work best for keeping the fans happy (so that they keep buying stuff ^_^) Sometimes they nail it, as with Card Captor Sakura - just what the doctor ordered, and it has been very successful. Sometimes it falls flat, like the Nadesico Movie - didn't hurt the series, but didn't help it either. Sometimes, they really screw up - like infamous last episode of Evangelion - riots in the streets, rumors of fans committing suicide. Yeesh.

It's odd being on the other side of the fan/producer fence.

It was not a particularly good weekend. Even when i spend most of a weekend at the office, I usually find some time to work on Megatokyo. It's a lot like taking a break. On this particular weekend, i found myself spending this time typing and tapping away at the computer dealing with a bewildering variety of problems emanating from all across the MT universe. First i caused problems in the forums, then had to deal with things on the #megatokyo channel. I had people on ICQ needing attention, and finally a barrage of emails detailing problems and issues that needed my attention. I was waiting for people to start calling me with problems. For once, Largo was one of the least annoying people in my life. ^^;;

I finally got so frustrated with it all that i just got up and walked away from my computer. Seraphim and I sat and watched a few DVDs (for the few hours this weekend i actually got to see her.) and then I went to bed. Sunday was no better, and seemed to follow the same cycle. By Monday afternoon, when i was finally done with my project at work, I went home to crash. I didn't feel like working on MT, i was too irritated and tired to even care. I missed a monday update, and hadn't even started drawing anything. The coup de grace of the weekend was finding that my evilcute little kitty Himeko-chan had destroyed yet another printer cable - a habit i thought she had given up last year.

I sat down and cranked back the recline lever back on my Aeron chair (yes, i have one) and watched the last 4 episodes of Love Hina. Later in the week, i want to talk a bit about some of the similarities and differences between Love Hina and Megatokyo, but not right now. I think Akamatsu Ken is like my Evil Twin or something...

As i sat down last night and tried to sketch up a comic for monday, i found myself thinking. It occurred to me that i hadn't really thought about Megatokyo the comic in almost four days. Sure, plenty of Megatokyo 'stuff', but nothing that had anything to do with the story, characters, development issues, drawings, designs, etc.

There was definitely something wrong with THAT. ^_^

on four previous occasions i've had to step back from the whole Megatokyo 'thing' and find my bearings. Yesterday was the fifth time. It's refreshing, actually, to step back and regroup. It helps you find the core of what is important, what you should be doing, and what you should tune out.

I've said before that I will never become aloof or some kind of asshole elitist - It's just NOT my style, and Largo is all the l33t this comic can handle anyway. I like communicating with fans and readers on a level basis - largo and i are just people like everyone else. But i'm also learning there are pitfalls in doing this. Because i didn't handle it right this weekend, there was no comic for monday.

This doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with the MT community. Hell, i get at least 10-40 supportive emails a day. The lapse this weekend is entirely my fault - because i let it effect my work. You can't control the outside world, but you can control what effects your work.

So, as i sat there in the remnants of the disaster called the weekend, i said to myself 'screw it' and spent most of last night doing development sketches. The interactions between Piro and Kimiko are more subtle and harder to convey than the interactions between Miho and Largo or Yuki and Piro. Kimiko is a lot harder to get a reading on, and so is Piro at times. It felt good to start taking a closer look at those things. It made me feel much better.

Y'know, people don't come out and tell you what they want, typically. You can only gage reaction to your work by how it effects their lives. My hope is that MT is a positive influence, and that it makes people feel good or entertains them for a few minutes a day. I think thats why I took all the upsetment this weekend hard. On some level i felt that it means that i'm not doing a good enough job. The way i tried to deal with things this weekend was the wrong way to fix anything. Doing what i do best - megatokyo itself - is the best thing i can do.

I guess my goal is that several years from now, i don't want people to pull up a drawing or illustration I did and say 'i was hoping that it would be good. Too bad in the end it wasnt.' I wish i could look at images from the Nadesico movie and feel the same things i felt about the tv-series. It's a lot harder than some people realize.

Tonight, i'm going to see what i can do to finish a MT comic and get it posted for tomorrow. My goal is to have 3 done before i leave on vacation next week. I think that's attainable. And if everyone is good, i'll scan and post some sketches to get y'all thru next week. :P

"and off I go..."
Monday - July 9, 2001
[Piro] - 01:30:00
In about 5 hours, Serahphim and I are driving south on what we've deemed a 'road trip'. Since my life has been pretty much dictated by schedules and deadlines for the past year (hell, past several years ^_^) we decided that a nice, meandering, deadline-free trip was a good idea. Of course, we have no idea how successful our exercise in unordered chaos will go, but what the hey - it's a vacation. ^_^

speaking of chaos... From now on, I have told largo that the next time i have some bright-assed idea, that he is to beat be over the head with a Louisville Slugger until the idea goes away. what the HELL was i thinking?? It was a simple idea, a guest strip contest, get a few dozen entries, pick the best ones, and an easy vacation for me. It's be easy, go thru the entries, pic the best, go away for a week.

You have to realize something... When i say I don't really have any concept of how many people read Megatokyo, i'm not joking. MT is just this silly personal website that largo and i run where we have this, like, comic, you know? I thought that we might get a couple dozen strips, maybe 50 or 60.

We had almost 400 entries.

Largo, Ed, Dom and myself have been going thru entries all day. I am rather... amazed, if you must know. Some of the strips had me chuckling, some were even touching. There is an amazing range of strips. The ones you are gonna see this week are the ones that Largo and I enjoyed the most. This contest has presented us with a problem we never considered - we had more than 5 faves. It was really hard to choose. In some respects, the choice of which of our faves to show was a little random - my brain is a little numb. Originally, I was going to list the winning strips in order, like counting down backwards to the best strip on Friday. That is not what we ended up doing. Every strip shown this week is one that we equally enjoyed. I also need to figure out what to do with the other 8 or 9 strips that SHOULD be shown this week. There are also many that deserve some sort of recognition. Over the next few weeks hopefully you will have a chance to see some of them. There is no 'winning strip'... they all win.

Y'know, after MT started rolling, and then started getting 'big' (well, people told me it was getting big), I started getting all this email day after day - it was neat. There was the growing webstats that we dont even bother checking anymore - cool beans. The surprising turnout at Anime Central - kind of mind boggling. But there's something about all these comics - all these people took time to sit down and create something that was influenced by Megatokyo. Maybe the fact that its in the same medium that i work in, i dunno, it's odd, but for the first time i seem to get a real sense of what people REALLY think of MT. It all seemed to get thru my thick skull today.

For everyone who sent a comic in - thank you.

Seraphim is telling me that i am now on vacation time, and it's time to get the hell off the computer and go to bed. I'm leaving things in largo's hands this week, so there are no guarantee that things will go smoothly. ^_^ I'll be back next week, refreshed and ready to start crankin out MT strips again.

One last thing. Please Please DO NOT EMAIL ME THIS WEEK! I will not have any access to computers, and i'll freak if i have to come back to 500 unread emails! ^^;; you wouldn't want to give me any reason to delete my in-box, would you? :P

See you folks next week, and enjoy the guest strips! we did. :)

"contest strip week"
Monday - July 9, 2001
[Largo] - 06:30:00
Well, this week is guest strip week, we'll have a new comic up everyday this week while Piro is vacationing.

We recieved so many submissions that we felt it wasn't fair that only five could be selected, so instead of spending one week on them, we'll just have guest strip every week, for a few months....... kidding.

Rest assured we'll be back next week with new material, or something that resembles new material.

Mondays's strip was selected because it featured something I never get tired of seeing, Piro injuring himself. If you would like to see more work by Matt Boyd & Ian McConiville, checkout this site.

Tuesday's strip was made by Akira Hasegawa.

Wednesday's madness is brought to you by the twisted mind of H.S. Kim

Thursday's l33tness is made by some other Dallas locals, Stars Overdose.

Friday's strip is brought to you by the Brothers Grinn.

"tadaima~"
Monday - July 16, 2001
[Piro] - 09:12:00
[oops, forgot to update this when i posted the comic this morning. ^_^ Hope you all don't mind the 'adventures of Seraphim and Piro' comic today. I wanted to do this one ever since tuesday of last week when Seraphim and I really did need to call the Park Rangers to rescue us. ^_^ Tune in a bit later tonight for the whole story. :) - piro]

Hi everyone, i'm ba~~ck...

Well, Seraphim and I got back around 7:00pm last night, and... well, lets just say it was a interesting trip. We logged over 2,200 miles... ^_^

Obviously, i think i need to squeek one more day before i jump back into doing MT strips (i'm planning on doing a small strip about a certain 'incident' that happened on the trip tonight ^^;;) so i'm going to just throw in another one of the many, many fine guest strip entries that we recieved. I got a chuckle out of this one by Ericy Huang (Ototo-Hika).

Thanks again for all the fine guest strips, i hope everyone enjoyed them. You'll be seeing more of them, here and there, somehow, in the next few weeks.

While i was gone CafePress has made the new t-shirt designs availible! I hope you enjoy the new Clocked shirt and the new Baka^ni shirt. ^_^

'keepin it short this morning, because i have to run to work now. I'll be online later this evening, as well as working on a strip for tomorrow. The plan is to do a 'adventures of Piro and Seraphim' strip for tomorrow, and then jump back into Chapter 1 full boar starting wednesday.

And thanks for keeping back on the emails. I only had 100 to sort thru, and they were mostly spam ^_^

"2,234 miles"
Thursday - July 19, 2001
[Piro] - 21:13:00
[note - friday's comic is almost done. got about 2 hrs worth of work yet to do on it, which i will do when i get home tonight. I have one drawing yet to finish, and after that i just need to scan and put it together. - piro]

Boy, i was worried.

One of the things i took with me on our vacation was my bookbag (yes, it's the one that comic-piro's bookbag is based on) packed with my sketchbooks, notepads, Megatokyo reference notes, scripts, pencils, etc. During the entire trip I opened the bag once, and that was to get a pen for Seraphim.

Normally, i draw all the time. I am waiting for the office supply people to tell me i can't have any more post it pads because i doodle on them too much ^_^ I literally didn't draw at all for seven days. I didn't touch a computer for seven days. I didn't really *miss* it, nor was I specifically trying to NOT draw or use a computer - the opportunity just never really presented itself on the trip. :)

The trip pretty much went the way Seraphim described it. We crossed the Michigan/Ohio border early monday morning and drove most of the day till we reached Cave City, Kentucky. It was kind of hard to find a place to eat there - most food places seemed to feel this overwhelming desire to feed you copious amounts of dead cow. I suppose in retrospect i should have opted for the steaks, but hindsight is 20/20, they say.

The next day we headed off into Mammoth Cave National Park and took the Grand Avenue Tour, the longest tour offered by the park - a nice 4.5 hour walk thru the rather remarkable caves and underground caverns that make up the caves in that part of Kentucky. It was a lot of fun - the caves and caverns are amazing. You have to realize that the biggest rock you find up here in this part of Michigan is probably the big stone on the edge of the UofM campus that the college frats graffiti on a regular basis.

After the cave tour, Seraphim and I figured we would go for a hike in the park. The result of that hike, as you can see in today's comic, resulted in the need for us to be rescued by the park rangers. Yes, this really happened. We didn't get lost in the park, we just ended up on the wrong trail and figured that we would just walk the long way around - hah, did THAT turn out to be a bad decision.

Thanks to the map, and the few signs that we came across on the trail, we knew where we were - just not how far we had to go. The plan was to walk a small portion of the Good Springs Loop and visit the waterfall near the church. The problem was, we went north on the trail rather than west, and by the time we realized that we were no where near the falls, we had already reached the Collie Ridge Trail.

We should have turned back, but in our infinite wisdom, and the fact that we weren't tired at all, we said "hey, let's just take the loop around! Can't be that far!" -_-;;; Yea, little did we realize that the 8 mile trek was going to take us till almost 10:30 pm to finish.

By the time we reached the Bluffs i knew we had a problem. Luckily, i had my cell phone with me, so we decided to call 911 to at least let them know we were out here. Actually, getting caught out after dark wouldn't have been a big deal, we just didn't have a flashlight. -_-. One of the park rangers called me and asked if we could hear his air horn - we couldn't. He then sounded his sirens. Couldn't hear those either. He told me to keep walking and that he was going to head down the trail and meet us. About 15 minutes later, it was too dark to see the trail. We had no choice but to stop. Off in the distance we could hear this rather pathetic trickle. We figured that we had found the waterfall. Whee.

Well, it wasn't long before we heard some shouting, and saw a flashlight up in the hills. We were extremely grateful to see the park ranger who had hiked his way in to guide us out. We were about a mile from the trail head, and had two valleys to walk thru. It was so dark that we never realized that we were only 20 feet away from a bridge.

Now, one thing i didn't touch on in the comic was the fact that i was getting dehydrated. We had run out of water, and it was hot and humid. Another ranger was waiting at the trail head with some canteens full of water. I have never been so grateful to see a pair of headlights at the top of a hill in my life.

Both Seraphim and I would like to say thank you to the two Park Rangers who helped us that evening. They were very nice and didn't even scold us that much. ^_^ They even called ahead and had them hold the Green River Ferry so we didn't have to drive a whole 45 minutes around the park to get back to the hotel. Thanks guys, we didn't catch your names, but we are very grateful. And next time we'll bring more water and a flashlight. ^_^

I've been dealing a little with the 'back to work blahs' for the past few days, but I think i'm over them. Keeping to the MT schedule isn't an easy thing to get back into, but I've been making good progress.

Oh, and when i said i was afraid? I wasn't afraid at all during our little hiking adventure. What i was afraid of was that i might loose my ability to draw MT stuffs after being away from it for a whole week. i was glad to find that i don't suck any worse now than before we left on vacation.

As for the rest of the vacation, it was a lot of fun. We drove down to Atlanta and visited some friends (hi Jen, Chae, Laura ^_^), drove on down to Savannah and then to Tybee Island where we goofed off on the beach for a while and watched lightning fire off over the Atlantic Ocean. We then drove north to stay in Cherokee, North Carolina, so we could visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park the next day. We didn't even consider the fact that Cherokee had a Casino in town.

Out of pure curiosity we walked over to the Harrahs Casino to see what all the hoopla about casinos was. I got us a $10 roll of quarters, and Seraphim and I went to try these slot machine things. Maybe i was doing something wrong, but i have more fun putting quarters in a washing machine than those slot machine things. So, i THINK we won something like $2.50 or something like that, which we just used for more spins. When we ran out of quarters, we left. Ok, we can say we gambled. I also experienced my first police checkpoint in my life. Woo, that was fun. :) I guess Seraphim and I didn't look very threatening, they just let us drive on.

The Great Smoky Mountain National Park was a lot of fun. We drove the entire length of it, stopping now and again to look at some of the rather fantastic vistas that people who live in flat places don't get to see much. The part i was dreading was yet another hike to try and see yet another waterfall.

This one we managed to complete before dark. But the 2.5 mile trek to see Rainbow Falls was all uphill. About 1600 ft up, if i remember correctly. Very much worth the hike, but by the time we were done, i was ready to start heading back home.

Anyhoo, I should have a new comic up tomorrow - I *may* not finish it till friday night, but we'll see. ^_^ We put 2,234 miles on the car last week. It makes me wonder how many miles of pencil lead i've used up since MT started...

"common reactions"
Saturday - July 21, 2001
[Piro] - 03:10:00
Communication is a funny thing. There's more to it that just words. Human beings communicate on many levels. The net works really well for communicating news and information - the plethora of sites that do this attests to its success. Entertainment is harder, because to entertain, you have to communicate more than just facts, you need to communicate emotions. Communicating emotions and expressing emotions are two different things. 'communicating' them so that people can experience them is far different than just making your feelings known. For many years i never really figured out exactly WHAT i was trying to say with my art, but then it dawned on me - i was trying to convey feelings, moods, auras. Just plain telling people about these moods and feelings doesnt do the trick - you have to be able to show them.

One of the things people do instinctively is we project ourselves into the experiences and emotions of others. There are enough shared and common reactions to things that we share as human beings that we are able to empathize and feel for others. We do the same thing with characters in stories, it's why storytelling is so potent. If i can make you feel for and understand the characters by giving you incentive to put yourself in their place, i've done a good job.

Of course, you can't really understand exactly what others are feeling. You can only work on the information that you are given. The closer you are to someone, the more you can understand his or her feelings. The same goes for characters. The more you learn about them, the more you can 'get into their heads' It's up to Largo and I to provide as much information as we can in ways that help, not hinder, the experience.

One of the remarkable things about Japanese anime and manga is that it is a prime example that the human condition is pretty universal. We understand the feelings of other human beings regardless of what language they speak or where they come from. It's really neat when we are able to connect with something that isn't even in a language we can understand. We have more ways to communicate with each other than just mere words.

We're pretty open with people here at Megatokyo. I mean, largo and I are pretty open about what's going on in our lives and with MT itself. I suppose that to me, sharing the experience of doing this damn thing is as much as part of it as the comic itself. Lots of good stuff (getting invited to go to Otakon as special guests, having the people at Bioware tell us they like us) and even some of the bad stuff (frustrations with bad vibes on the forums, abusive emails attacking Seraphim, people digging up my parent's phone number, etc) - all part of the job.

And we've even had our internal squabbles. Largo and I live in different states for good reasons ^_^ (joke, joke :P) But i'd like to address something that didn't quite work out the way I had hoped when the idea started floating around last fall.

If you recall, i've mentioned a possible multimedia CD project based on Megatokyo. Considering the fact that this is a digital medium over the web, I figured it might be very appropriate to make a robust CD available that would contain a variety of things, from high rez versions of the comics and extra art, to things like music and flash applications that simulated a 'MT dating sim'.

The problem with all of these grand ideas was that they never took into account the fact that neither Largo or I had any extra time to really devote to a project of this size. In hindsight, i should have indicated to the people i had discussed the project with that we did not really have a solid date planned to release such a thing. In the fall of last year, the concept of being able to pull a project like this together by August didn't really seem all that impossible, so my typical response was 'Sure, we should be able to have it done by then!'

My friend Tsubasa has put a lot of time and money into material for this project, and I'd like to apologize to him for the fact that the project has not materialized. In the process of preparing for the project, Tsubasa engaged several voice actresses and a music group for the project, and I am sorry that i was unable to support his efforts the way i wanted to.

I would like to apologize directly to Tsukinami Maya, Minami Megumi, and Mayumura Kanon - i have been and still am impressed with your voice acting, and i wish i had been able to produce the dialog Tsubasa and I had originally planned. I have not had the time to produce the quality material needed. I would also like to apologize to Hashimoto-san and Rem-san of Device High, because of the fact I was unable to provide all the support material they needed for the Megatokyo songs. Device High is a great group, and I would dearly love to hear the songs that have been produced in the near future.

I suppose there are two problems that have cropped up and plagued Largo and I as MT has grown over the past year. The first is pretty simple - we are not professional manga artists. MT grew out of an idea and my drawing hobby and some blank webspace that needed filling. We have made mistakes, and avoided others, so far making what we consider pretty good decisions regarding the future and direction of MT. Most of the mistakes have been mine - there are times i wish i listened more closely to Seraphim and Largo, but mistakes are inevitable, and all you can do is learn from them.

The second problem stems from cultural and language differences. Tsubasa and I had numerous misunderstandings that for the most part stem from some of the differences in otaku culture here and in Japan. With Megatokyo it is my desire to bridge the gap between these two worlds, and i've learned some hard lessons in doing so. In the end you can only get wiser, and show off your scars.

I may pick on myself and MT a lot, but in truth, i'm very proud of the work that Largo and I have done. There are a several people close to the MT project who have also worked very hard with much less acknowledgement. And the fans themselves... i suppose i'm still pretty amazed by what the group of you can do. ^_^ August is going to be an exciting month for MT. I'm hitting the boards very hard to keep the comics coming, preparing material for our guest appearance at Otakon in a few weeks, and even a few little surprises for everyone.

A multimedia CD would be a fun thing to offer this summer, but it turned out to be a far bigger thing than we could chew on. I've grown much wiser about managing such ideas and projects over the web. Maybe that's the kind of thing that makes you a so-called 'pro' in the long run.

Thanks to everyone for your support. MT is a labor of love, and i think that by the way people react to it, maybe they understand my bullheaded passion about it. I guess it too is one of those commonalities in the human condition that people react to. Who would have thought.

"akon-templations"
Tuesday - July 24, 2001
[Dom] - 04:34:00
One note before I switch from angry-rant mode to amused-rant mode: For the love of God, Outlook users, change your settings so your pain in the ass of a mail client stops auto-opening anything. The rest of you, for crying out loud, don't open e-mail attachments, even from those you trust, without first using an up-to-date virus scanner. I'm in the same boat as Piro, and I swear if I see one more "Hi! How are you? I send you this file in order to have your advice" I swear I'm going to track you down and tear out your larynx with a Chia pet... end rant.

Okay, it's been about a month and a half, I can now look back at A-kon with a muddy memory and talk more about my overall impression of the con and things that stick out in my mind than about nitpicky details of the con.

The first thing I remember about the con is arriving at DFW airport and thinking "What the hell am I doing here?" A-kon was my third con in three months and my sixth in six years. The first was Origins '95 in San Jose, in case you're wondering--that's where I got most of my 1st edition D&D collection, including one of the few copies of Oriental Adventures that still has all the pages in it. But anyway, the point is that it was the third con in as many months, just as AX was the fourth con in as many months, and Otakon is my next con. Sometimes, I fear it will be my last, since the meeting of Piro and Largo is likely to cause fan critical mass. I can see the headlines now, "Comic strip creators meet; Baltimore leveled in resulting crush of fans."

Enough of that rambling, I'll get on to the meat of my rant. As I was waiting for Natsuki to pick me up, I another thought came to mind. I'd forgotten what Natsuki looks like. Thankfully, she picked me out easily, since aside from her boyfriend, I was about the only Asian in that airport. The fact that I was carrying costume supplies and looking about in the manner of an abandoned pup probably didn't hurt either.

>From there, I eventually ended up at the con. The secrets of how I made it out of Natsuki's clutches in one piece and still in men's clothing still elude me. I'd pay good money to figure out how I kept her from tying me to the futon and slapping me in a skirt. Anyway, as I parked myself outside a room and munched on my burger, I met the first MT fan of the con. I took a picture with him, talked a bit, and we both left unfrightened. Thankfully, the encounters with MT fans I identified by their shirts generally followed this pattern, with me talking to someone as if I were another con-goer and not some sort of freak--which I am, but again, that's beside the point. That's a marked difference from Tanzy of Okashina Okashi's experience, which involved unwanted contact and a healthy dose of fear. There was one uncomfortable experience for me, but Largo was there to deflect some of the attention, and plus there was a table and expensive equipment between us and them, saving us a great deal of trouble.

And as a normal con-goer, I of course ran around in costume getting pictures taken and taking pictures of other costumes I was impressed by, such as Shiranui Mai, Solid Snake, Yun, Myotismon (the sheer amount of work that must've went into that costume boggles me), the cast of Cowboy Bebop--complete with stuffed dog and Red Dragon goons--and the lovable fool who had the balls to wear twenty pounds of chains and cosplay as KoF's Chang. Me, I went around as Kusanagi Kyo, and Wild Daigo. I had a lot of fun with Wild Daigo--only four people recognized me (the costume wasn't exactly quality at that point, but it certainly was FUN, which is all I care about) and two of them asked me for tips on Project Justice.

Another impressive effort award goes to the guys who made their own Boo consciences using the wings from a wedding cake (or something) and a stuffed hamster/gerbil/rat/trichobezoar and wore them around the con as a gigantic in-joke for all MT fans.

Actually, that's how I recognized Largo on Saturday night--he'd been given one of those Boos by a delighted fan, and was staring at it fascinatedly as the glitter from the wings slowly started migrating from Boo's wings to his head. What followed was one of the highlights of the con, as Largo was handed a drink, and, still fiddling with the Boo to see if it exploded or had a hidden prize or something, some and promptly entered the nation of Really Damn Smashed. Right about when he was lying down mumbling about panels and rooms and signs, Piro called. I only caught half of the conversation, but I felt a great deal of sympathy for Piro for having to conduct daily dealings with Largo. I think I got fired and re-hired two or three times during that span of time, too.

Hmm. All in all, I liked A-kon for the sheer fact that I hung out with so many great people--oh, and Largo, mustn't forget him--and there was a Chang cosplayer. I didn't catch your name, O Crazy Chained One, but wherever you are, you made my con.

Now if you'll excuse me, I want to finish preparing for Otakon before I rant about AX. Let's see, fingerless gloves, check. Spleen fork, check. Piano wire, check. Vibrating Sheep Mk IV, gotta buy that...

"(v) to rend"
Tuesday - July 24, 2001
[Piro] - 06:21:00
Before i start, people PLEASE be careful when opening your emails! As many of you know, there is a virus called Sircam that is running around - it's a worm virus that attaches itself to files in your My Documents folder and sends it out to people via Outlook. I have been getting sircam infected files on the average of 2 to 3 emails an hour ever since Saturday - i'll let you figure out how many files that adds up to be. It's enough to make me want to scream. ^_^ Info on the virus and how to take care of it can be found here. Thanks. :)

btw, to whoever made this virus - not l33t. not l33t at all. Very lame. Try doing something creative, not destructive, for once in your life.

If the feedback i've been getting means anything, most people liked Monday's comic. Unlike most episodes of Megatokyo, there really is no punch line, there is no joke. There are a lot of subtle, amusing things in the comic, many of which people did pick up on, but on the whole it's really just about Yuki in one of her more fragile moments. Back in January i nearly got my ass handed to me for doing a strip that didn't have a punch line, a strip that wasn't a joke. It's nice to see that people are willing to take strips like this as part of the flow of the story without giving me hell about it. Thank you.

It's also interesting to compare Mondays comic with Friday's comic (the one that actually went up on Saturday) I am not happy with Friday's strip. Its not really any more complicated than todays, but for some reason it took three days to do (Thursday night, Friday night, and Saturday morning), and I still wasn't happy with the result. Today's comic took me four hours to draw, and 2 hrs to put together. Why the big difference?

Well, a few things. For Friday's comic, i really didn't spend enough time planning the layout, reviewing the script with largo, dom and ed. I didn't do a rough sketch of the final comic. I didn't really plan the panel layouts. It was Thursday night and I had to just start drawing. The funny thing is, as a result of this lack of planning, the strip took forever to finish. In contrast, I took the time Sunday to hash out the script, layout the panels, think about text placement, etc. As usual, i didn't start drawing until almost 9:00 pm on Sunday, but in the end it only took 4 hours to draw everything. After an hour of scanning and tweaking, and then a half hours worth of work first thing in the morning, the comic was done and up. And i was very happy with it.

Planning is important. The biggest obstacle that Largo and I have always faced is not the production aspects, its that never-never land of planning and organization that always presents the biggest challenge.

Otakon is coming up on us very fast - it's only a few weeks away. In that time, not only do i intend hammer along with Chapter 1 for the next two weeks, but i have a lot of material i am trying to finish for the con. Since Largo and I are invited guests and whatnot, we aren't really sure what to expect. ^^;; And since my life isn't complicated enough this month, my cousin decided that the weekend before Otakon was the perfect weekend to get married - so guess who is flying out to New York the weekend BEFORE Otakon. ^_^ I also hear that one of my younger cousins is a avid MT fan, and never knew that it was his cousin that drew the thing (hi Justin ^_^)

There's only one way to get thru a busy time like this, and that's to plan well. Too bad i suck at it. :) As an architect, planing and managing projects is something that i have to do every day. I guess that's why i'm pretty hard on myself when some of my planning goes awry, like with the multimedia CD project i talked about in my last rant.

Not all projects go astray. Sometimes a project or idea moves along very well, and turns into something that exceeds my expectations. If you visit the Art Forums at all I'm sure you are familiar with Merekat's work. She's a incredibly talented artist (her stuff REALLY makes me want to feed my drawing tablet thru a paper shredder ^_^) I had a chance to meet up with Merekat and her significant other Thien (who introduced her to MT in the first place) in Ann Arbor a few months ago. So, rather than maiming myself by lopping off fingers with a bolt cutter, we discussed the idea of doing some joint projects, specifically her applying her realistic rendering techniques to some of my drawings. This wasn't really an accident - truth is, Largo and I have some concepts and ideas that her technique were perfect for illustrating.

There are several 'modes' to megatokyo. The standard mode pretty much reflects the real-world situations of comic-piro and comic-largo in all its metaphysical manifestations. We have the Naze Nani mode in which the characters poke fun at themselves, Seraphim and Piro mode that is almost like a free-chat section by me, and Shirt Guy Dom mode which is just plain terrifying. There are other 'modes' that we will fall into from time to time - i call these 'gaming' modes or 'campaign' modes.

I think we've slipped into a gaming mode only once so far (remember the b4k4 quake episode? still one of my faves.) But these modes are actually a lot more complex and detailed than many of you realize. Much like gamers in real life, you tend to have long running lives that you live thru games that often have little to do with your daily life. These modes will reflect those adventures and stories, and there will be times when you can see glimpses into neighboring worlds, including the real one.

Since Largo and Piro don't really have access to computers right now, it's been easy for me to let the game world stuff slip, but it really is something we've been trying to develop. One of these days we'll manage to get some nice person to put together those PiroQuake and LargoQuake mods. There's a dating sim world which is the only one where piro plays a male character. There is a whole variety of worlds that loosely represent various gaming genres that exist out there.

One such genre or world is one that is loosely based on Neverwinter Nights and games of that ilk. I've been calling it MegaWinter Nights, and since it's based on the robust and story-filled world of RPG games, we've developed a pretty elaborate story that Largo and Pirogoeth have been playing. It's a campaign that has a history, and hopefully i'll figure out the best way to present these things without killing myself ^_^ As part of fiddling around with the concept, you'll remember the color drawing i did of Pirogoeth a while back. Not bad, really, but compared to the official art of games like Neverwinter Nights and Baldurs Gate, it was lacking.

That's where Merekat comes in. After taking some time to clean up and fine tune my own version of this drawing, i sent her it on to her to work her magic on. She has transformed the image into something that i could visualize but never render, something that really comes to life and has the intensity that i envisioned in the image.

The plan for this image is that once Merekat finishes it up, we're going to have a poster size print made that I'll bring with me to Otakon where we will show off the image (don't worry, we'll make it available here too) I'm also working on a image that represents the dating sim world, which will flank this image - to help represent the two sides of MT, the two extremes. God help me but i have a challenge ahead of me to make something that looks like anything beside this image.

Since we are so evil around here, we decided that a teaser image would be fun to pass around, so Thien put together this rather fascinating juxtaposition of Merekat's painting to my original. It's wallpaper sized, and you can view it here.

I don't ever anticipate being able to render the way Merekat does, but it does challenge me to improve my own styles and techniques, something she's been gracious in helping me with. Of course, the biggest challenge might be hers...

"what? you don't even know how to use levels??? for heavens sake, piro!"

heh. lets just say i have a long way to go. :)

"megane-ko"
Sunday - July 29, 2001
[Piro] - 02:21:00
Gonna be more art than talk today, folks.

Gomen, everyone, for not updating much of anything friday or saturday. I've been a little busy working on some other things - mainly stuff for Otakon. In my last rant i posted a teaser for the 'Megawinter Nights' image that Merekat is working on, but I have also been working on another image - this one based in one of Piro's dating sim worlds. I've been calling this one Megatokyo Memorial (as a spoof on Tokimemo Memorial) and the two prints should compliment each other well at the panel. Oh, and just for fun, you can see the original sketch for the picture here.

I'm going to keep it very short today - i really just wanted to share the fact that i've finally updated fredart - head on over and see what Seraphim looks like in her new glasses.

It's 7:00pm on Sunday, and i really need to get cracking on monday's comic. Lets see how well i keep to the schedule THIS week ^_^

"slack meter"
Tuesday - July 31, 2001
[Piro] - 05:21:00
There's an old saying, maybe not so old, but it's a saying that rings rather true. "You can only do what you can do." To me, i've always looked at it as a cop-out, just another excuse. When i set goals or targets, i always view any inability to reach them as some kind of personal fault. I really *am* a slacker of the worst order - i have been ever since i was a kid. I just don't want people to find out.

I know i can work harder than I do. I know that the 2 hrs i spent reading Maison Ikkoku manga last night when I first got home from work was bad. I should have been finishing the comic. I shouldn't have wasted two hours on Sunday watching 'Dual' (great anime, BTW). Goofing off is evil. TV is the devil. IRC is a highly populated plane of hell. ICQ is the evil spawn of a thousand hells. Or something like that.

One of my saving graces is that i have a 'reality chip' somewhere deep in this addled brain of mine. Its the part of me that i'm glad is there because it keeps seraphim from having to deal with a madman. It's biggest job tends to be convincing the rest of my Drama-driven brain that a little reality is ok and a good thing.

Slacking is an art for some people. In fact, it is a high art. I'm not really very good at it. The most i can slack off is about 2 or 3 hours in a row before i start to feel guilty. Don't think that this is something new with me - it's a behavior pattern that was part of me long before MT ever started. (to quote seraphim a while ago when i was thinking that MT was taking up too much time and i should stop: "you might as well keep doing it, you'd just start puttering around with something else anyway." - she so understands me :)

Have you ever sat down to draw something, or write something, and find that you just can't do it? One of the best illustrations of this you can find in the classic Ghilbi movie "Kiki's Delivery Service" (Mahou no Takkyubin)...

Oh, spoiler warning if you haven't seen it. Skip the next paragraph to avoid the spoiler...

When Kiki looses her ability to fly, she is faced with the horrible realization that her 'gift' has left her. Up to that point, she never questioned her ability - It just came naturally. The movie draws some direct comparisons between Kiki's abilities and those of Ursula and her art. She used to count on her ability to paint, it came natural enough that she never had to worry about it. When suddenly she had found that she couldn't draw anymore, she had to dig deep inside to find it again. The whole movie, to me, is as much about maturing with your 'art' as it is about witches and flying.

Ok, safe to start reading again. Spoiler is over. :)

Learning how to be creative on demand is about the hardest thing any person can learn to do. Fredart was fun because i just updated when i was able to produce a drawings that looked ok. If i went a week or month without any drawings, it was no big deal. The schedule here at Megatokyo, however, is like this never ending artistic boot camp - Doesn't matter how i feel, or how tired i am, I have to draw 6 to 10 drawings for each comic, three times a week, rain or shine, hell or high water. Thats like doing a 6 to 10 fredart sketches in one evening.

Learning to be creative on demand isn't something new to me. As an architect, you are paid to be creative every day - boss dun like it much when you say "i don't feel creative this week, i'm gonna play some Anarchy Online." ^^;; Creativity is like a muscle - you can work it into shape, and the only way to do that is to use it. That's why i try to keep this three-per-week comic schedule. It's a personal thing. It's good for me. It has its personal rewards.

When you suffer this kind of mindset, a little slacking is not a bad thing. It's like those times when you sleep thru your alarm clock in the morning because you have been staying up too late all week. Your body is telling you something - you're gonna get some sleep whether you like it or not. ^_^ Same thing for me with my slacking episodes. A little creative slacking is good for the brain, helps decrease potential burnout. And sometimes i don't really have a choice. :P

I'm rambling a bit here, so i suppose i should get to the point. As most of you have probably noticed, i haven't been very successful lately in having those MT comics up and ready to read by 1 am every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In fact, if you look closely, i've had some real problems hitting that schedule ever since i changed format. Hmm... is there a connection here? :P

Without a doubt, the new format strips are more work. But to me, they are worth the extra effort. We can do more with them. The plot is actually moving now. For the most part, everyone seems pretty happy with the results. I can draw much faster and clearer than i used to. Layout is getting easier, and frankly, doing these is getting to be more fun. The problem is, they still TAKE longer. ^_^

So here's the deal. I've reached a compromise with my brain's 'reality chip' and have been thinking of the best way to deal with this shaky schedule. It's nothing really more than a formalization of what's been going on anyway:

I will continue to draw 3 comics a week, targeting Monday, Wednesday and Friday as days to post them - but this is not a guarantee. Only rarely will there be a week that has only 2 comics - and even then i will probably ask Dom to fill in or do a Piro Art Day. Comics might go up on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, or perhaps Thursday, Friday and Sunday - regardless, I'll typically get them done.

To facilitate this, I am going to add something to the front page which will help inform you as to the status of the next strip. I am going to add a Status Meter - a small area that provides some information on the next comic, what percentage of it is done, when I predict i will be done, etc. This way you can know if you should bother coming back tonight, tomorrow or, like, next Thursday. :) I've been inserting little 'status' comments in the rants lately - but i think this might be more effective. I'm thinking of even making little piro-mood icons to illustrate my satisfaction or frustration with the current comic. :) It will be easy enough for me to update that i should be able to keep you folks generally informed if a comic is late.

What this eliminates is the pressure i sometimes feel at 1 or 2 am as i am about 90% done with the drawings, and still facing a good 2 hrs to finish and post the comic. Staying up till 3 am just knocks the hell outa me. This new flex schedule leaves me room to have a schedule, but the flexibility to finish it the next day if i have to. The stress reduction will be very welcome. I love to draw. It's the panic i get into when i realize i still have 2 hrs of work ahead of me that really sucks.

The first question i see coming is 'why don't you just get ahead a few comics?' -_-;; I've been trying to get a day or two ahead with MT since it started. I've managed to keep up, i've fallen about a day behind overall at this point, but i've never been able to 'get ahead' - i could have easily done that if i hadn't switched formats, but i'm an idiot and opted for more work instead. ^^;;

I'm hoping that the increased quality of the drawings, more rapid and complex storyline movement, and overall cohesiveness of the strips is ok compensation for these changes. Oddly enough, i haven't received one complaint about the schedule lately. I appreciate that.

"honto ni"
Monday - August 6, 2001
[Piro] - 03:34:00
I swear, people probably think i make this stuff up.

If you recall, i was supposed to head to New York over the weekend to attend my cousin's wedding on friday. It was going to be a pretty tight schedule - 8:45 flight into Newark, drive to the Island (about a 2 hr drive). I would have got in around 12:30 in the morning. Fly home Sunday morning. Well, by 10:00 pm my flight was still on 'indefinite delay', so i said screw it and had Seraphim come pick me up. I didn't feel like driving thru the city at 2 am, and they were making noises like the flight was gonna be canceled, and they could fly me out the next morning. Peh. I just hope my flight to Otakon this Thursday goes smoother.

So, having a weekend to myself that i didn't have before, you'd think it would have been easy to catch up on things. Heh. I should know better. It was a remarkable series of 'oh jeeze, what now?' events.

I've been trying to print out a set of MT comics at 300 dpi - it takes a while. It takes even long when your cat eats thru yet another printer cable. Fourth one this year.

Yesterday, Seraphim and I spent several hours in the dark as the power cycled on and off most of the evening. Coupled with this, Comcast was suffering from some kind of major outage for the entire region yesterday. It's been working off and on.

And then... agh, no, that's enough. ^^;; You get the idea.

It all adds up to be rather frustrating when you are preparing for a con, and trying to get some comics done. ^_^ Didn't do too bad, considering - all the drawings for today's comic are done, all i need to do i scan, clean up, and put it together. It will go up later this evening. I think the status meter works pretty well. At least now you know what's going on if the comic doesn't show up on time. Maybe it provides too much info... at any rate, for this week, it will be very handy indeed.

Well, this is the week - the week Largo and I head of to Otakon. We really don't know what to think about it, really - it's odd going to a anime con as a guest rather than just another intrepid con-goer. As such we really don't what to do - so we'll probably be making it up as we go along. I'm sure we'll both end up in trouble before the weekend is out (better come this year, i bet otakon wont invite us back next year ^^;;)

Dom, Largo, Wing Zero, and I will be there to answer any and all of your questions (at least the ones that Dom lets people ask), plus we'll be showing off two full color works that Merekat and I have been working on for the past few weeks - just as a little something extra for everyone coming. If you can come, i hope to see you there. This time, i'll make sure i have a chance to talk to everyone who wants to talk to me. :)

I will post the time and location for the Megatokyo Discussion panel as soon as the schedule is finalized. Stay tuned...

Hot Soup from Lethal Doses, who is also coming to Otakon to hang with Largo and I, finally launched his new web comic / online graphic story 'winter' last night - check it out. He's delving into more of a story telling mode, with the help of his two writers Mike (Daedalus) and Matt (Arturis). They even have quite a head start, and have 7 comics done. ^_^

Agh. As i was writing this, my cable modem died again. (sigh) I guess i'll just pop this onto a floppy disk and upload it from work. Now if only i can find a floppy disk...

"Rice Turismo 3"
Monday - August 6, 2001
[Largo] - 06:21:00
First up, Otakon, We will be there, and hopefully so will many of you. It's going to be neat to see how many MegaTokyo Shirts will be walking around the Balitmore Convention Center this weekend. If you have one, then do us a favor and wear it - if only to amuse my sick sense of humor.

The panel schedule has been in limbo this week but now have it worked out, we will be on a "Web Manga" panel on Friday at noon. However, we're also going to hold a super secret evening with "MegaTokyo Panel" so we can field questions from our readers and handle other MT related things. The "MegaTokyo Panel" will be held on Friday August 10th, 6pm-8pm in Panel Room 3. The convention should be fun for us, we've been looking forward to seeing our readers, but also we'll be having a bit of a get-together in the webcomic realm, Hot Soup (formally of Lethal Doses, and now artist for Winter) will be lurking around with us as well.

[To the Rant-mobile!]

Well, it's been an interesting month

It all started innocently enough, I went to my local crack dealer (read GameStop) and picked up an assortment of new games for my button-pushing pleasure. One of them was "Gran Turismo 3".

For the unenlightened, "Gran Turismo 3" is an extremely realistic racing simulation game, minus the "racing" and "realistic" parts.

The physics engine would be great, if it weren't for the fact that I can hit another object while going 100mph and just "bounce" off it. I expected better from a game that touts itself as a "Realistic Racing Simulation". Yet, I cause would should be a fatal crash and just bounce right off the wall, the car's engine continues to run, and no GEICO agent has contacted me about a claim on my insurance. In GT3, you begin the game like most teenagers do: lotta money, no license.

Unfortunately, this money is barely enough to buy the cheapest of the rice burners, after which you engage in the afore-mentioned "realistic racing action".

I purchased the black & white panda Trueno -- I was told by my friends that this car was extremely "rice-able" -- and so I began play with it, and some custom mods I purchased with the leftover cash.

Initially, I found myself losing even the easiest races. Slowly, I began to accumulate more funds and flush more of my hard fought winnings into upgrading this now expensive piece of crap.

To its credit, I did finally realize how GT3 is "realistic". The point of the game isn't to race, or even to make a fast car thru purchasing and installing parts upgrades, instead: it's to spend lots of money on a car that sucks, and get very little in return - just like the real world.

On a unrelated note, everyone seems to be furious about George Lucas's title for "Star Wars Episode II", now called "Attack of the Clones". I may really guys, relax - it could have been worse... They could have called it "Send in the Clones."

I saw this over at the makers of "the funny" - Penny Arcade. It suggests the Coke doesnt own the copyright to their own logo anymore, and did a lot of other very bad things to the justice system.

"otakon bound"
Monday - August 6, 2001
[Piro] - 06:46:00

Otakon Information UPDATED - WEDNESDAY, AUG 8, 2001 11:38 PM EST - PLEASE READ MEGATOKYO DISCUSSION PANEL WILL BE FRIDAY AT 6:00PM IN PANEL ROOM 3 the panel will NOT be moving to Saturday. We've finally nailed down our tentative schedule for some of the Panels and Events that we will be doing at Otakon this weekend. Here is the schedule so far: Friday, 12:00 noon - WebManga Panel - discussion panel about web comics, will include other web comic peoples in attendance. This is NOT the main Megatokyo panel. Friday, 4:00 pm - Opening Ceremonies - I've been asked to talk with some fansubbers about the fan community durring the opening ceremonies. Friday, 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm, Panel Room 3 - Megatokyo Discussion Panel - This is the main Megatokyo Discussion panel at the con - and i'm hoping everyone can make it. Largo, Dom and I will be there to answer any questions you may have, and we will be debuting two full color poster images that Merekat and I have been working on for the past few weeks. We've asked for the largest room they can manage, so there should be plenty of room for everyone. Remember this is FRIDAY NIGHT not SATURDAY!! Saturday, (TBA, most of the day)- Largo and I are planning on hanging out in the Artist Alley for most of the day, so we should be pretty easy to find. This is one place where its OK to hunt us down... I will put all otakon information in this box, so if you are going to the con, be sure to check here. Largo and I will have net access durring the con, so we'll keep things up to date for you. Should be fun!

Ok! Gotta make this very quick. I have to leave for the airport in about an hour. Gah... still not ready, even after taking the day off to finish getting things together ^^;;

As you may have noticed, i've dipped into some more of our fine Guest Comic Contest submissions - this is one I actually didn't get to see last time - nice work John, Largo and Piro look so... natural... in Dejiko clothes and with a shotgun... geh... ^^;; There will be one more guest strip tomorrow.

If you are going to Otakon, I'll be seeing you there. At Acen, because of the way things were scheduled, I didn't have time to really respond to all the people who wanted to talk to me - that shouldn't be a problem here at Otakon.

Remember, the main panel is FRIDAY NIGHT at 6pm. If there are any changes, or additional things we will be doing, we'll post that info in the box above. If you get to the con early, I'll be doing a panel on Web Comics with Ian Kim and a few others - I think we'll deal more with web comics in general than Megatokyo at that one, but it should be worth going to.

Saturday, I'll be running around in a dark blue T-shirt that pretty plainly says 'NYU', and i think we've secured a table in the artists alley. If nothing else, look for the images of Kimiko and Pirogoeth - that's where we'll be. :)

I have to say, i'm kinda stoked about this trip. Nervous as hell too - the panel at Anime Central broadsided me - i didn't think anyone was gonna go, so i wasn't nervous. I have a feeling that there will be a few people at this panel... Trying not to really think about it, i'm just gonna go.

For the rest of you, I'm not going ANYWHERE for the next few months, so MT's should be back on schedule without too many more delays. two guest comics, and then back to chapter 1 on Tuesday - that's the plan.

More updates from the con tomorrow night.

Oh yea, and i think that monday is the one year anniversary of Megatokyo. We're into Year 2 already??? good grief....

"Fires & Floods"
Tuesday - August 14, 2001
[Piro] - 13:21:00
Today's 'suprise' is the second poster sized image that Merekat and I worked on - Megatokyo Memorial (a spoof on the dating sim game 'Tokimemi Memorial').

A little surprise for y'all. 'Pirogoeth' is the culmination of about four weeks of hard work by the very talented Merekat. She was able to take my original design and color sketch of Pirogoeth, a spoof on this official artwork from NeverWinter Nights. Spectacular, isn't it? I present proof to how much i suck!! ha-haa! ^^;;; Seriously tho, Merekat and I had a lot of fun collaborating on this image - it is a great collaboration of our particular talents. We've been exploring other pieces and styles we can do that will help expand the artistic vision of the Megatokyo world, so this is just the first of many pieces we'll be working on. Yes, we are going to print posters. Yes, you will be able to buy them. I'll post more info on that as soon as we have it.

I'll put up the other image we presented at Otakon, the Megatokyo Memorial image, on thursday.

I believe that today marks the one year anniversary of Megatokyo. It was one year ago today that we put up the first strip. We used to joke about where things would be a year later (partly because Penny Arcade was just getting into it's second year). I'm a little frazzled about it all right now, and didn't even really think about it till i got home from Otakon. Neither of us really thought that we'd stick with it for this long. You've all heard me bitch and moan enough over the past year, sorry about that, but i think that generally people have enjoyed the comic.

I did have one person tell me that i needed to get serious and either commit myself to Megatokyo or quit doing it... not really sure what that was about, but there is no way I could be more committed to this project, without quitting my day job or breaking up with Seraphim. Sorry, not an option - You're gonna have to accept my 'partial' commitment, dude.

First off, i want to thank everyone who attended our panel discussions or found us in the Artist Alley at Otakon over the weekend. Both Largo and I were a little overwhelmed with it all, and we hope that we did an ok job, and that no one was disappointed. No matter how much denial i suffer from, Its a bit hard to ignore the bunches who showed up to support Megatokyo. It was a lot of fun - never seen a con from that side of the table before, really... well, there was Anime Central, but that was kind of surreal... ^^;;

Secondly, A big thanks to all the other web comic artists who showed at the Web Manga panel and helped to make that a success. Mac Hall, RPG World, Genesis Chronicles, Bad Boys of Computer Science, NeoBaka, those crazy Avalon people, and there were several others in the audience too... my brain can't remember them all right now - someone help me and get me a list! agghhh!!! ^^;; I think the main conclusion that we came to in that panel is that here in the US, web comics and manga are a new medium that is here and is not going away. People need to take us seriously. I learned a lot of things that made me feel much more confident in the future of this medium, very confident indeed. (i'll insert links later today)

Thirdly, A big thanks to all our friends and the MT crew who tagged around with Largo and I over the weekend. Dom, Wing, Ukyo, Merekat, Thien, Hot Soup, Kai, CrowQueen, Ian, Shaggy, oh yea... and all you 'other' channel people. ^_^ Thanks for the badge, VM, hope you guys didn't get shut down again Mokona, and... heh, and someone asked me if i was really as frazzled as i looked? Yes, i was. I know i missed a bunch of you here - gomen. My brain isn't good for much right now. :)

The best thing to come out of this trip to Otakon was it gave the MT crew a chance to synergize - we're scattered all over the country. It worked, it felt good, and I wish we could do it more often. Ed, we missed you. Please come to the next one. Dom is too hard to deal with without some help... ^^;;

Fourthly, a big thanks to the Otakon staff. It was tiring just to watch you guys scrambling to keep things moving. Running a con that big is a hard job, and we appreciate everything you guys did for us. Thanks for inviting us, we felt honored to be there.

And finally... to the proud city of Baltimore... From fires and chemical spills in your tunnels and on your bridges, to exploding gas lines and flying manhole covers, fire and smoke billowing gaping holes in the ground, closed streets, traffic nightmares, a rainy drizzle that soaked everyone to the bone both friday AND saturday night, open fire hydrants flooding the streets (in an attempt to clean out chemicals in the water system), to the poor little underground critters that had to run for their very lives as the sewers filled... I'll never forget Baltimore. It all seemed so oddly... appropriate.

^_^

As of tomorrow, we will be back on our original schedule again, and I will continue my commentary on our trip to Otakon in a little more detail.

[ps: i got a few emails from some baltimore natives who got the wrong idea... i am only poking fun at the weekend, not the city of Baltimore itself. I've never been to Baltimore before, and even WITH all the rain and disasters, I thought it was a great city. The waterfront area is REALLY nice. We're gone now, so the fires and floods should be over with. :)]

[pps: hahah! I got some 'corrections' from Dave Spracklen this morning regarding some 'errors' in my baltimore report:

Anyway. The explosion wasn't a gas main. There was a chemical called tripropylene which had built up in the drainage system under that intersection. The chemical is a common one and is used by many industries . . . and it's also highly flammable. Some types of the chemical have a flashpoint of only 75F. Anyway. That's what blew. People reported weird smells there as long as a week ago, but nothing could be detected. (They suspect that was apparently because this stuff is very heavy and so most of it wasn't floating up) As a side note, one of the train cars in that big mess a month ago was carrying this chemical. They're running tests to determine if it is likely the chemical came from that.

"Riots & Earthquakes"
Tuesday - August 14, 2001
[Largo] - 16:13:00
As some of you already know, this past weekend Piro and I spent our time as a guests of Otakon, an anime/manga convention held in Baltimore, Maryland. Otakon had asked Fred and I to be guests this year and we cordially agreed to their request.

The thing to know about Baltimore is that currently it's under attack by the rest of the world. This private war has been waged in secret, taking place deep underground in specially made tunnels. In a recent wave of attacks, a chemical bomb was detonated in one of the main hive tunnels. This caused a chain reaction resulting in chemical spills causing even more uncontrolled fires, manhole covers exploding off the ground, and a huge reduction in Baltimore's rat population.

The rats' plight in all this went shamefully unnoticed by the media. One eyewitness account went as follows, "The vermin were forced to become refugees as the civil workers began flooding the sewers with water from the fire hydrants in order to cleanse the city of the quickly ensuing fiery chaos. Given the choice of being burned alive by the raging gas fires, or drowning in the cold waters, the rats tried to escape to the city surface, many did not survive the journey. "

All this took place right at the Baltimore Convention Center, also known as - "Ground Zero". With the constant sounds of police sirens, firetrucks, and the afore mentioned exploding manholes - we expected our own hotel to combust the moment we left to go home.

After having been a guest at a convention, my experience can be sum'd up with the following comments, "Conventions are work, work is bad, I hate work".

Which reminds me, this month I'll be at AnimeFest in Dallas, TX on August 31st.

The pirogoeth and memorial posters we unveiled at Otakon seemed to generate enough positive responce for us to look into printing them. One suggestion is most people want them larger, so we're thinking about doing them 24" x 35", big giant pirogoeth posters. The image even made its way over to the Neverwinter Vault, and even our friends at Bioware.

"otakon-nyo?"
Saturday - August 18, 2001
[Piro] - 13:22:00
Ah, beautiful day. Yesterday, i was convinced that someone upstairs likes me. I went to the local supermarket to get some stuff, and i discovered that FINALLY you can get Jones Soda in bulk! Yay! I can feed my Cream Soda addiction four bottles at a time (why 4 packs and not 6 packs, i don't know, but i'll take it). Life is good.

A lot of people have been asking me for high rez versions of the Pirogoeth and Megatokyo Memorial images, many of these requests in the same breath that posters are asked for. Like most of the artwork released to the net here at MT and on Fredart, the low rez stuff is all we post. This gives us the option of printing higher quality versions in the future, lets say for posters and for books and whatnot. Its dangerous to release full scale high rez versions of work to the web - by doing so you give up a lot of control over the image (it's akin to releasing the code for a program). For most of my crap, its no big deal - the most work i have into a piece is typically a few hours - i've even given some people higher rez versions of some things. But for high quality works like the Pirogoeth image, merekat has a hell of a lot more time into it - 4 weeks to be exact. So please don't be angry with us for being a little stingy with the high rez stuff.

Just to show that we aren't ALL bad, Merekat has been making a few wallpapers for everyone to enjoy - which gives you a chance to see some of the rather remarkable detailing she's put into the thing. I particularly like the first one she did here... Pirogoeth almost looks candle lit, and almost more aggressive than the first one. It's a good one for your co-workers pause:

Back to the Meandering Otakon Report. So much happened in three short days that it's really hard to remember it all, and having a rather befuddled brain this week doesn't help. I'm working on gathering together all the pics i can from the con - i didn't bring a camera - so, if you have any pictures of anything MT related, please send them to me. ^_^ In particular, i am interested in seeing pics of the people who cosplayed as MT characters - two Mihos, one Piromi, and... not sure what the rumored fourth was. I was only able to see the Piromi and the Miho (I already have the pic from Fansview of one of the Miho cosplayers). I also see that someone cosplayed as Kimiko at AX - i have that picture now too. ^_^ Anyways, i'll put together a MT Cosplayer Sighting report as soon as i have all the info.

The other thing i need to do is sort thru all the fan art and stuff fans gave us at the con. I never did this for Acen, but I'm gonna do it now. Probably the most interesting thing i got was a stuffed, plushie Piro, complete with a little Seraphim on his shoulder (detachable) and a bookbag complete with sketchbook. It's sitting on the TV looking at Seraphim and I right now, and i need to take some pics of it. Someone got a picture of the Largo and Piro Kodama figurine someone showed us - need to find that too. A complete report on this stuff next time around.

Largo and I did get a few minutes to roam around the dealer room on Saturday, and after stopping and buying a little Jiji for Seraphim at Wizzywigs (i don't know why i did that - they're store is right around the corner from me here ^^;;) i noticed a sign that said 'DigiCharat Merchandise Here!' ... so, as you can imagine, i trotted on over to see the goods. It turns out that OmochaBox people were actually fans of Megatokyo, and were eager to show us the opening from the english language version of Digicharat on the little TV they had setup. It was amazingly adorable - even in english. I whispered to them and their parent company Digital Manga that if they could put in a good word to Broccoli so that they don't send us to jail for all the DigiCharat spoofs. ^_^ They assured us that everything would be OK. Very nice people, be sure to visit their store - you can never have enough DigiCharat stuffs. :)

And as for other potential lawsuits... It seems that Bioware liked our Pirogoeth image. They wanted copies, and even linked it on their main page :P. I betya they plan to use them as exhibit "A" when they have us kidnapped and dragged into Canadian court to exact swift and brutal justice on our heads for spoofing another of their games. ^^;; Glad you guys like 'em - enjoy the prints. I, er, don't really live at that address...

I also had the opportunity to show some of my stuff (the posters and the collected MT comics) to Maruyama Masao, the Producer and CEO of Madhouse Studios - actually, Wing Zero talked to him and i attempted to listen (in Japanese). In case you were wondering, Madhouse studios is well know for such great shows as Trigun, Perfect Blue, and Card Captor Sakura. He got a kick out of the "Seraphim Check" spoof, and seemed to get a chuckle out of the Naze Nani Megatokyo spoofs as well. I'd like to thank Maruyama-san for taking the time to look at my material - it was an honor to show it to him.

I also had a chance to chat a bit with the indomitable Fred Perry of Gold Digger fame. What a cool guy. I remember reading Gold Digger comics years ago... you have no idea how weird it is to have someone who's work you respect greatly tell you that he genuinely thinks your work is good. Thanks Fred, it was an honor to speak to you, and I am sorry about my cohorts forcing you to look thru the collected arts for MT. Next time i have to leave them alone with you, i'll bring some duct tape. :)

My goal right now is to REALLY get back on schedule. I might have a chance if i really bust my ass this weekend, so that's what i'm gonna do. Send me those pictures, people, and i'll get the last part of my Otakon report finished and up by Tuesday ^_^

"not done yet"
Monday - August 20, 2001
[Dom] - 06:10:00
(Before I start this rant, I'd like to say this, because it's worth saying: There is currently a comic book on the market with Garth Ennis' name on it. It's a World War II story about a rifle brigade assigned to destroy Hitler's missing testicle, which has grown to several thousand times its original size--or at least the size it would've been if it ever existed in the first place--and gained occult powers. I've read it. It at once frightens me and validates my existence.)

Wow. Another con done and past. That's five cons in five months already... I'm taking next month off--sorry, Anime Weekend Atlanta, but I need this time. Then comes my birthday at Neko-Con, another couple of months off unless c0rtana manages to drag me to Winter Comiket. KatsuCon in February, Fanime in April, A-kon, Otakon, Anime Expo, and of course I have to go to E3 for my job... cripes, do think that last year I only had intentions of going to AX, Fanime, and one east coast con for the rest of my anime-lovin' life. Oh, by the way, a few of you have asked me when your local con will be around--I don't know, check the Turnpike's con links for your local con. Those of you in Canada have two upcoming cons, one in Toronto, the other in Vancouver. Belgium gets one soon, and I'm sure Australia has one somewhere.

You know, when I think back, I find that I really don't have that much to say about AX--it was fun, I didn't do too much that was MT-related, there was a gigantic King of Fighters cosplay group and I got a bunch of Kyo cosplayers to do the can-can with me. Another thing I had fun with was running around cosplaying as Kayama from Sakura Taisen and tracking down the Oogami cosplayers I found. It was a lot of fun sneaking up behind them and going "Iyoooooh, Oogami!" while they turned around--the first guy was speechless for a second and then had his picture taken with me, the second guy took it more in stride and gave as well as he took. And for those four other people who

recognized the costume, thanks a lot, one of the parts of cosplay that I love is finding people who love the character too. Mad props to Ed's fangirl, who helped me with my Wild Daigo makeup. Wouldn't've been able to do it without you, thanks a bunch. Oh, right, and the Otaku Generation dancers, who at once frighten and fascinate me.

Yes, guys, you're being classified in the same file as Hitler's giant testicle wreaking havoc on the Allied fleet, so take that as you will.

On to Otakon. My first statement is: I was right about Otakon. I hereby declare that MT staff makes up the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Piro's Famine, Largo's Pestilence, I'm War, and Ed is Death. It's a good thing that Ed wasn't there. Forget about California's Big One splitting it off the mainland, it's Baltimore that will vanish off the face of the Earth when all four MegaTokyo Horsemen descend on its unsuspecting surface. You've heard enough about the city's disasters, so I'll talk about the con's various disasters.

The Orioles were in town. That's a disaster in and of itself, especially since I didn't get to see Cal Ripken Jr. in his farewell season. Because of the train derailment of a few weeks ago, I had to walk past Camden Yards to get from the light rail to the convention center, and now I'm all bitter that I didn't get to see anything. Well, maybe next year. Anyway, after I got to the convention center, I hooked up with Piro and Largo, who were already waiting for the web manga panel to start. Then after we got my badge--thanks to a guy in con ops who stopped what he was doing to point at me and say "YOU'RE Dom?!"--it was almost two hours of listening to the ultra-fun guys from RPGworld, Bad Boys of Computer Science, Mac Hall and a bunch of other comics whose names I can't remember at the moment.

After that, there was a solid two hours of a Piro and Largo autograph session. And can you believe that people wanted my autograph too? I didn't believe it for the first fifty or so, and then for the next hundred people in line for MegaTokyo autographs got theirs... it was insane. Though of course, the kicker that nearly got me running home to California was when a Rabi-en-Rose cosplayer came up to me near the end of the session and says "Will you sign my brassiere?" Piro calls it the only time he's ever seen me speechless, and it's a fair assessment. And later, Largo kept saying to me in a traumatized voice "Dom, do you realize that around this con is underwear that has our names on it?" I wish I'd taken Piro's way out of doing it... anyway, new MegaTokyo autograph policy, people, no signing of undies unless you aren't wearing them at the time.

After that came Opening Ceremonies, where I was impressed by the number of people who were at their first convention--including what WingZero spotted as a Pretty Pretty Piromi cosplayer. Piro and Largo said their bit on stage, then we all ran off to Burger King for my first meal of the day at around 5:30. After that was a frenzied rush to panel room three for our panel while the burgers sat like rocks in our stomachs. And when we got there, it'd overflowed and they'd moved us to the largest room--something I wish had happened at Anime Central, but hey, live and learn, right? So I changed into my Kyo costume in the bathroom, dashed into the panel room, and found out that since there was no wandering mic, I was going to have to seek out and belt out the questions from the back. So I spent the next two hours running around with my Vibrating Sheep mkIV and entertaining people... a lot of fun, but afterwards, Piro, Largo, Ukyo, and myself collapsed in a heap in our hotel rooms.

Enter Hot Soup. That man is instant energy, and he'll forever be my friend for coming in late and picking all of us up with his stories, antics, and "Hey! We got TOWELS!". Oh, and I got some cool Winter shirts from him, because Winter is a great comic and I need to pimp it out some more. Actually, I did that the next day, wearing my Winter T-shirt and shouting "Winter comic dot com winter comic dot com read winter comic dot com" while Soup gave me the hairy eyeball and said "Ey, read MegaTokyo dot com". Just in case I haven't linked it enough, Winter.

And then there was the Artist's Alley, which was a long autograph session with occasional breaks while the fans drooled at Merekat's posters. Thanks go out to Merekat, who kept the MT boys sane during the con with her humor and level head--I think we all envy your boyfriend to some extent, but let's not tell him that, shall we? ;)

Saturday was also an event that proves Piro is evil and I'm one of the dumbest guys on the face of the planet, something I'll talk about later, maybe. It was also when most of Mac Hall's pictures were taken, as there was an hour and a half between everyone getting together and going out to dinner, so I felt obligated to entertain the troops.

Sunday was a blur, I think something happened involving me promising Tiffany Grant that some day the two of us karaoke buffs would get together at a con and sing the Bakuretsu Hunters opening, and Fred Perry's toy department getting outweighed by his luggage department, if you know what I mean... and some Game Boy Advance, and a Japanese guest or two looking at MegaTokyo and kinda liking it... and then a plane, home, and sleep, merciful sleep.

See why I need that month off?

"deep down scared"
Wednesday - August 22, 2001
[Piro] - 13:45:00
I've been in kind of an odd mood lately. I suppose it's because i've been knee-deep in story-mode ever since I got back from Otakon - i've really enjoyed the recent Yuki storyline stuff. Everything in the MT story is clicking into place better than I ever figured it would...

Oh, Before i get accused of placing myself 'in front' of the comic and damaging the 'purity' of comics as an art form again - no one has to read these ramblings. I'm under no delusions that anyone reads them. I write these things for myself, not as some sort of sick grab for attention (in fact, there are times i *really* need to learn to shut up. Some rants generate an extraordinary amount of email ^^;;) Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. He's nobody, really.

For those interested in listening to me drone on about nonsense, read on. For the rest of you, two things: First, here's the next desktop wallpaper Merekat has put together for your background pleasure. This gives you an idea of the kind of detail she's thrown into this image. For the posters, we're looking at a printing run of around 1000 - We should have everything worked out by the end of the week. :) Secondly, the NekoNekoWai and #megatokyo folks have finished putting together all of the guest strips for your viewing pleasure - go check em out. Thats all 308 of them (those that aren't, we couldn't download or were missing image files). Thanks a bunch, Kai.

Ok, switching to bothersome droning mode. No need to read further unless you are bored.

Largo and I had a lot of mixed feelings last week. Speaking for myself, I'm not used to the kind of attention we got at Otakon. As an architect, you get pretty good at standing up in front of a crowd to present projects, or dealing with militant plan review boards, but this kinda stuff is... different. I really don't know what to think about all the attention we've been getting lately. In high school, college and grad school i was shy and introverted to the point of incapacity (i was a 'nerd' before it was actually hip to be one) I'm in no way used to being the center of attention. I've been getting by by convincing myself everyone was there to see Dom. :P

I've gained a lot of respect for people who are in the spotlight all the time. It's fun, its oddly invigorating, it's exciting, but it's stressful too. 'overwhelming' is a good word for it. I think it's real easy to get wrapped up in the attention, trying to return it as best you can to all the people who want to talk to you. I feel really bad about the various "I tried to find you guys at Otakon, but..." emails, and the guy who wanted to take Largo and I out for a beer (we're still gonna hold you to that, dude :). It's a lot like my email problem - too many people to pay the appropriate amount of attention to. :( I suppose that's why i try to hang out in #megatokyo as much as i do. If people know they can reach me when then feel the need, it removes some of the desperation of getting my attention RIGHT NOW... or at least, that's my hope. :P

I guess that dealing with these problems is just part of doing this. I suppose in some ways i wish MT wasn't so popular - I'm seeing people attach stigmas to it, people telling me i only do this to feed my ego (WHAT ego?), that i gripe about things only to get sympathy and pity, that i bask in the attention, etc, etc etc. People can be pretty mean, really. When i say that i'm just an average joe doing this, and that there's nothing special about it, i mean it. Please stop trying to convince me otherwise. ^^;; What are Largo and I supposed to do? Ignore everyone and be aloof assholes? It's not in our nature. We're doing the best we can, please stop being so hard on us. So we don't get it right all the time, hey, we try.

People joke with me about 'go to your happy place, piro! Sad girls in snow!' (thanks, Ian, Matt - i really need give you two a swift kick the ass for that comic one of these days ^_^) the odd thing is - it's really is kinda true. You bastards saw right thru me. That 'happy place' for me is drawing the comic. It's really odd, but in the middle of all the stress and worry about deadlines, keeping the site up to date, that day job thing, etc, it's amazing how much i actually enjoy the process (hell, if i didn't, there would be no way that MT would have lasted a year). I've got a really good feel for the story now, and i have a real good feel for the characters. In fact, thats the interesting part. Largo and I are giving these characters lives, and they are the kind of lives that we've enjoyed seeing in our favorite anime and manga series. Its a very satisfying feeling to be able to at least approach being able to do that.

so, in short, i guess my 'happy place' is story-mode. I've got a lot of empathy for Yuki and her situation. Even tho i know whats going on, and i know all of the inner thoughts and future events, it doesn't take away the experiential quality of it for me. Maybe thats what is so neat about doing a web manga - the authors/artists get a little of the experience of watching their work with everyone else.

There's more to it, i guess, but that's enough. Sometimes you just don't really feel like putting all of it down into words. Life is complicated, and some would say it's stupid to tell people what you think and feel. It's true, it is dangerous. I was reading something that said that young boys were actually more emotional than their female counterparts. The reason so many boys have the problems they do is because, unlike girls, they are told that they need to keep their feelings to themselves - men don't talk about their feelings. What bullshit. Howabout understanding the REAL reason for it - people can use those feelings against you, you don't want to give anyone any ammunition. It take a lot of balls to be honest about your inner thoughts. There's nothing 'girly' or weak about it. I've come out fine on the other side of the emotional battlefield known as 'growing up', so maybe i've developed my own way of thinking. It's a kind of toughness that serves you well in life.

MT is an organic story - we know the general direction, but the finality of what really happens to the characters doesn't happen till it happens. In many ways i'm as curious as you are to see how things go for all of them. Things change, sometimes, because that's what the story or the situations that develop call for. Sounds a lot like life, actually...

[wanders off to find some coffee humming namida ga yuuki ni kawarutoki~ to himself...]

"tuesday thursday"
Monday - August 27, 2001
[Piro] - 01:45:00
Last night, while drawing frames for the next comic, i did some thinking. I was still a little sore from helping my sister move into her new apartment on Saturday, and I had spent a good 4 hours wrestling with script changes and other MT stuffs for the earlier part of the day. Once again, it didn't look like i would be able to upload a new comic Sunday night. Since I haven't really been on the M/W/F schedule for over a month, I don't think anyone was really expecting it. Personally, I was once again frustrated by my inability to reach what is, really, a personal goal - three comics a week, uploaded and ready to view monday, wednesday and friday morning at 1:00 am.

Ever since Megatokyo started, and even moreso recently, just about every comic that goes up goes live about 10 seconds after i finish the thing. In the world of professional syndicated comics this is a horrifying concept - it leaves no room for error, no room for a bad night, no room for artists block, nothing. In fact, oddly enough, it has the feel of live performance - you have to sit down and draw it right the first time, and there are no second takes. If you get behind, it's even harder to catch up - i got one day behind schedule several weeks ago, and i've been unable to really catch up yet. It's like continually tripping over your feet, never actually getting your balance back.

My initiall reactions to missed goals like this is to blame myself, my lack of planning, my lack of dedication, etc, etc - all those things that really don't do a damn thing to do with the real reason for missing goals. After wacking yourself in the head with a board for a few hours, and the self pity and loathing has run it's course, you can start thinking about what the *real* problems are - and what you can do to fix it.

Sometimes the solution to your problems is not only right before your eyes, but sometimes it's already in place and you don't even realize it. Stubbornly insisting on doing a 3 comics a week schedule has not given me any chances to get ahead, and in fact, i've fallen behind schedule (and i can't get up! (gak)). People have suggested that I take a whole week off and just get ahead. I don't feel good about that concept. I've had to take time off from MT for travel and other things - more time wouldn't be fair to people. It's also been suggested that I drop down to doing 2 comics a week rather than three. I've resisted that idea, but the truth is... that's what's been happening, whether I like it or not.

So, rather than fight this - i'm going to take advantage of it. For the next four weeks, we're going to switch to a Tuesday Thursday schedule - new comics will go up Tuesday and Thursday morning at 1am EST. I will still be pushing to finish 3 comics a week, but this way I might have a chance of getting ahead a little. The status bar thing is great, but I haven't been too happy with the 'new comic will go up when it's done' thing. I think that you folks deserve to be able to find a new comic here on a reliable schedule - for instance, you will know that when you get to work on tuesdays and thursdays, there will be a new comic waiting to view when you get there. A month from now, hopefully we can return to the 3 a week schedule, where you can reliably expect a comic to appear when they are supposed to.

I think that getting ahead is important for several reasons. First of all, even tho you have all be great and supportive about the flexible schedule lately, it's not a very professional thing to be doing. I want to see MT continue to grow and gain respect as a professional peice of work - reliablility is, i think, an important part of that. Secondly, there is something satisfying about hitting your schedule, and concequently something very unsettling about always being 'late', even if it is a self-imposed schedule. By switching to Tuesday/Thursday for a while, I'm gonna feel a hell of a lot better about it when i do post the comics. The third thing is, and I don't think most people realize this but... it can take as much time or longer to write a good script as it does giving Largo and I more room for planning, real life disasters and maybe even raw moments of pure laziness. Plus there is that (grumble) site re-design that we've been working on...

For those of you who think that i'm getting lazy - that's not the case at all. When Megatokyo was a 3 panel comic, I would typically have to draw 4 drawings per comic. The new format usually calls for anywhere between 6 and 10 drawings - recently it's been averaging around 9 drawings. With the old format - it was a total of 12 drawings a week. With this format, it can be anywhere from 18 to 30 drawings a week - i can draw a lot faster than i used to, but certainly not fast enough to actually catch up at that rate. And people wonder why I haven't posted any sketches at Fredart lately... every drawing moment gets absorbed my Megatokyo. One thing I'll try to do with the looser schedule for the next four weeks is try to get a few more free-sketches online. My old site deserves a *little* attention. ^_^

Anywhoo, i think that this will be a good thing for Megatokyo, so i appreciate your patience with me. No more 'gee, is there a comic yet?' - for the next four weeks, there WILL be a new comic tuesday morning and thursday morning. I can pretty much guarentee that you will find new sketches showing up on Fredart, as well as some overlooked things that need to be fixed on this site (like the character bios)

I really wish Largo knew what we were doing. It would make all this so much easier. :)

"Arcanum"
Monday - August 27, 2001
[Largo] - 20:35:00
For those interested, Scott Kurtz and I will be attending AnimeFest this we weekend in Dallas, TX. We'll both be attending panels, signing junk, etc.

On the webcomic front, BlinkTags and Project Fanboy. Also, be sure to checkout Polymer City Chronicles, it has a new site, and a new look to it.

Like most right thinking people in their mid-twenties, I went and saw Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back over the weekend. Man, did this movie cheer me up. Besides the normal Kevin Smith goodness you'd expect to find in an Askew flick, I was treated to an entire subplot revolving around something that I can relate to - internet trolls. Not a day goes by that our website isn't made a target by someone who either doesn't approve of what we do, or thinks they can do a better job. I don't want to spoil the ending of the film, but I will say that I came out of J&SBSB feeling relaxed, calm, and as if a great evil in the universe had been finally vanquished.

Posters & Color T-Shirts are coming soon, but we've been swamped with paperwork lately. Scott Ku rtz once wrote that success could kill your website, giving it a lot of thought these past few mo nths, I think his statement was close to the real truth, which is - "Success can kill you."

Somehow this missed my attention when it first happened, but the new Neverwinter Nights Designer Diary was posted to da vault. This time we look into the mind of Marc Holmes, which is a pretty scary place.

I've been gone a lot lately, lost in an amazing new realm, where trolls and calculators co-exist together in an unholy union of magic and technology. No, I haven't been to my accountant's office, I've been playing the recently released, Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.

For the uninitiated, Arcanum is a CRPG (I do so love CRPGs) that combines traditional sword & sorcery elements of fantasy role playing - with would could be described as a Jules Verne's inspired world of electrical and steam based technology. It takes talented people to merge two opposing concepts to create one unique and fluid product such as Arcanum.

The character creation and advancement process is extremely diverse, this is as much to its benefit, as its weakness. First time players will more then likely be confused as to what they should make their character, what skills to raise, what stats to raise, etc. I suggest playing a bit and then re-starting once you've gotten used to the game, and have a better idea what path (magick/technology/both) and skills (pick pocketing, melee combat, gambling) you want.

To create my character, I choose my favorite race in any game, a human. I gave him extra intelligence and charisma and the trait of having a 'strong personality', so people have extreme reactions (either positive or negative) when first meeting him. I then dumped a point in the Persuasian skill, and selected the Electricity technology track. Finally I thought about whom this character this reminded me of the most, and named him "Largo", to begin the game.

After I began play, I quickly learned that this game revolves around looting dead bodies, you begin play surrounded by them. I was little upset at first, I didn't know looting corpses was a skill, otherwise I'd have put more points in it. I tried to persuade the dead with my amazing charm and charisma, but it was like talking to a wall. After I finished stripping all the corpses of their most valuable items, I continued on my epic journey.

The first critical path of the story involves going to the next town to find a priest, after I arrived there - I realized that this game has more to offer then looting corpses, I was surrounded by living people now, all of them who would become prey to my amazing charm and persuation! An hour later I died while trying to talk some sewer rats out of eating me, so I gave up and restarted the game, this time with a more a fighter like character, dumping points into strength and selecting the trait of "beat with an ugly stick" - I found I was able to hurt things now, and spent less time talking to the NPCs, and more time turning rats into pulp.

In all seriousness I've really been enjoying the game since I've gotten it, the story picks up around the second critical path of the story, so I'd suggest sticking it out till you reach the next town. Also, when you get there, be sure to look for Madam Lil's place, tell her Largo sent you.

This game's theme is really refreshing, after Bioware re-energized the CRPG genre with Baldur's Gate some years ago, the market has been full of uninspired games offering the same old thing in terms of the fantasy genre in order to cash in on 'the new big thing'. It's been reminiscent of when id software first released Doom and suddenly everyone had their own "doom-like game".

Sierra, the makers of Arcanum, have had a tough time of things lately, the problems with the Homeworld Franchise (which is still hands down the best fleet space-combat RTS ever made), to the recent closing of the Dynamix studio in Eugene, Oregon. I can only assume Sierra is doing what It needs to do to keep making great games, so I hope.

"kamisama ga, itekureru~"
Thursday - August 30, 2001
[Piro] - 22:45:39
Sometimes its fun to dig back into the archives and pull out old ghosts. Old anime series, music and art that was once a big part of my fanboy existence, shows that elicited almost religious and militant loyalty. Sounds and visuals that still stir up good memories and remind me of some good stuff from the past. There's a lot of inspiration to be found back there.

The pic above is none other than the infamous Ayukawa Madoka. If you don't know who she is, shame on you. I suppose I have more of an attachment to the Kimagure Orange Road OAVs (Original Animated Videos - also sometimes called OVAs (Original Video Animation) - its anime that is released directly to video in japan.) than the TV series, but I only watched it once (this might have something to do with the 14th generation copies of the Arctic Anime fansubs that I used to have). The music from the series is a different matter. One particular CD, "Ano Hi Ni Kaeritai" - the KOR Movie Soundtrack, seems to find its way into my CD player on a regular basis. Psst, in case anyone was wondering, my favorite KOR character is Manami-chan... somethin about the pony-tail and glasses. Yea, i was a big time Manami fanboi. My first real CG art was of Manami-chan. Classic Manami episodes included "I was a Cat, I was a Fish" and the infamous "Manami's Big Adventure."

I also dug out my Marmalade Boy CDs recently. Marmalade Boy consumed my life and very existence for a time many years ago. My obsession with Miki-chan was quite serious - at the time i pined for a girl like her (yea, i was totally out of my bloody mind. ^_^) and to this day the names 'Yuu' and 'Namura-sensei' evoke feelings of bitter rage and hatred. What always amazed me about Marmalade Boy was just how intense people felt about the series - watching it was a rollercoaster ride, and I swear some people became almost suicidal when watching it. Its a good series, in particular the first season (the second season kinda sucked). Miki was particularly adorable in the Movie. As for the music, I had listened to the CDs so much that for a long time I just couldn't stand to listen to them anymore. It was kinda fun to listen so some of the tunes again, like "Moment" and "Saigo No Yakusoko" (btw, you might notice some similarities between Meiko's hair and Seraphim's hair). I found myself humming "kamisama ga, itekureru~" a lot yesterday. During this time I was doing a lot of anime based websites - one that I never finished was "Miki's Style House". If you peruse various Marmalade Boy sites, you will often find a purple-black 'Marmalade Boy' logo. I made that, years ago, and it's been copied just about everywhere.

BTW, largo gets this wide-eyed look of terror in his eyes when i talk about stuff like Marmalade Boy. I don't really know why. ^_^

Another favorite series that I've pulled back to the surface is Kaitou Saint Tail (Mysterious Thief Saint Tail). I remember watching my first episode of this series on a cold, wintery Christmas eve, years ago, Unsubbed and in raw japanese (complete with cheezy commercials). There's something about Saint Tail that really appeals to me... it is a series that was lauded by fans for having a very potent storyline as well as engaging and interesting characters. Meimi-chan is adorable - to me she is the best mahou shoujo ever (mahou shoujo = 'Magical Girl'. It's a genre of anime that includes Sailor Moon, etc.) I'm not a big fan of mahou shoujo series, really - i fast forward thru transformation sequences and all that stuff. It's the everyday stuff that appeals to me. Meimi's an engaging heroine, and her transformation into Saint Tail is a distinct and very real part of her personality. Ah, the scene with the phone booth and the snow and Asuka Jr... and you wonder where i get the idea for this 'Sad Girl in the Snow' thing :) As for the music of Saint Tail, I can listen to "Junshin" over and over and over again... Oh, and if anyone out there has a copy of the Project Genki fansub of St Tail 1-4... check the credits. :)

You'll probably hear more about the Saint Tail series from me in the future. The show is actually being released in both translated manga and DVD format here in the states by TokyoPop... and I am waiting to see for myself what kind of job they did with it. A word of warning - i am very sensitive about this show, so i hope that they did a decent job. If they did, I'll strongly recommend that people pick up the DVD. If they do a horrible job - which is something i am very worried about, I will advise against it. I'm not normally sensitive to english releases of anime - but St. Tail is a special series, and if it is treated like its some cheap lame kids show and is 'dumbed down', you will hear about it from me - at length. Stay Tuned.

I hope you dont mind me droning on about this stuff - my rants for the past few months have been a little too heavy on the drama - sorry about that. Megatokyo is an absorbing project, and I have to admit, i've been really tired and almost burned out for well over a month. I understand that after a year, this is not uncommon. As for how i feel about it all - both Largo and I are very happy with Megatokyo right now. We both like where it is going, and I am really enjoying presenting each episode, even if my schedule has been a mess. I've got 4 days to get the next two strips done and get ahead - which is my real goal. I'm also going to post some new fredart sketches this weekend as well. Lots to do. :)

I'm gonna go back to listening to my St. Tail Original Sountrack Volume 1. Yea, it's another one of those 'happy places'. Geh. I sound like a mental patient...

"without tricks or deceptions"
Tuesday - September 4, 2001
[Piro] - 01:35:00
Quick shameless MT swag update. Hats and caps are now availible in the to the Megatokyo Store in a variety of designs. The caps are pretty nice - i've been wearing around a 'sample' megatokyo hat for a few months now, i figure that folks might like them (they are a nice microfiber cap). I've made hats for the 3V1L L33t design, the b4k4^2 design, the I.A.C. design, the Clocked design and the Baka^ni design. In addition, i've made a Megatokyo Logo design, that comes in both a microfiber hat and a swank bucket cap. Good stuff for hiding your head.

Long weekends are always nice. They give you that extra day which you can use to goof off, or actually get something done. I admit. Saturday was kind of a goof off day, I admit. Seraphim and I finished out the day by watching 'Chocolate' - a pretty engaging film, actually. Sadly, I never did get to the 'Chasing Amy' DVD that largo has been hounding me to watch. He says I'll relate to it. If that's the case, i don't want to watch it.

Speaking of DVDs, I got a little feedback on my comments about the forthcoming Kaito Saint Tail DVD from Tokyo Pop, much of it leading me over to the forums over at AnimeOnDVD.com. I haven't seen the DVD myself yet, but the word is that there ARE some notable gaffs on the first DVD - but much of those seem to have been attributed to the 'predecessor' of the guy who's in charge of finishing out the series - who is taking an active part in the discussion. I feel relieved. It's a fabulous series that deserves some attention, and I'm glad to see that if nothing else, the Tokyo Pop folks are listening to feedback. They indicate that future disks will not have the problems that the current disks have. I'm looking forward to reviewing the disk. I watched my own fansubs of it over the weekend, and I remember some of the difficulties in translating, so i'm very curious to see how they did it. :)

Like the sketch of Yuki? I dunno, i really like the Yuki character. When you consider the fact that she came out of nowhere, and forced her way into the story, she one of the more developed characters in MT so far. I thought it would be fun to draw her in something a little different. I also drew her with a yakpak bag. Look familiar? Big thanks to the nice folks at yakpak for the link. :) (psst, take a close look at Piro's bookbag in the strip...)

I dunno, there was a whole bunch of things i was supposed to touch on today... oh yea, Merekat has revamped her website, and i think y'all should go take a look. She actually DOES do tutorials (unlike someone else i know). Very much worth checking out.

She made some more desktop wallpapers, this time of the Megatokyo Memorial image - i just can't find them right now. I'll post them here sometime later tonight.

Other than that, i'm not really very far ahead on the comic. I spent too much time over the weekend designing hats for the Megatokyo Store. They should be available sometime tomorrow. They are actually kinda nice hats. There are going to be some major changes in the Megatokyo store in the next few months, i'm going to retire some designs, offer some colored shirts, etc. We'll let you know what's up.

Oh, and whats the 'without tricks or deception' bit above? That's how we translated Saint Tail's transformation phrase - supposedly a pretty standard line spoken by magicians before their act - it's an example of how some Japanese phrases can be translated a number of ways. What's always amused me was how rampant the tricks and deceptions in the series are...

"game bonanza!"
Friday - September 7, 2001
[Dom] - 13:41:00
You know what? I haven't really ranted about the games I'm playing in a while. Wow, that's so many games to talk about with so little space. Well, I suppose I'll start at the top and work my way, uh, sideways?

Final Fantasy X has devoured my soul for the past couple weeks. Though I haven't really been a big fan of the series--I liked FF6 way back when, but it hasn't quite stood up to the test of time as well as Phantasy Star 4--this game really has captivated me. The break from the Active Time Battle system really places an importance on strategy over brute strength and speed, since instead of having your three beefiest characters in a party doing their strongest moves when their bar fills up, each character has a unique set of skills, all of which are necessary to a sound strategy. Well, okay, with the exception of Kimari, who copies whichever path you set him on.

But that's not what captivated me about this game--the characters and the story pulled me in. After about an hour of "What the hell's going on?" the game settles down and becomes a story of faith, death and renewal, with seven of the most compelling and well-acted characters I've ever seen in a game. Full voice on every main character allows for a lot more character development in a single line than plain text does over a whole game *coughRedXIIIcoughcough* and boy, are these characters great. They interact believably, have more than just one dimension and hell, they even give out noogies when they're deserved. Also, one of my major gripes about the FF series was eliminated with this series--most of the side quests actually assist the plot, giving you more of a character's back story or more of the history of the world--however, I refuse to dodge that damn lightning 200 times. Much like watching chickens having sex and challenging every Joe on the street to the devil offspring of Magic and Tic-Tac-Toe, it's inane and I refuse to do it.

Next up is Comic Party, which I haven't played myself, though my roommate swears by it. One of those Simulation Life Games (read: dating sims) that Piro likes so much, it's about an artistically inclined college student who gets sucked into the world of doujinshi. So this game, from a genre that I usually don't pay attention to--I seriously played Tokimeki Memorial 2 because I got to fight against a banchou... nothin' but kendo club, baby--got my interest because it's such a mocking look at the world of fandom. You have the self-centered mangaka, you have the gung-ho mangaka, the outsider looking in who hates the world of fandom, the con staff, the voice actress, the printer, and my personal favorite, the cosplayer. It's just hilarious at times, though it's weird when I get the jokes and my roommate doesn't, so I have to translate for him.

But huzzah, there's a Comic Party-related game that I can get into. See, Queen of Hearts is a series of doujinshi games. The last one came in '99, and involved... To Heart characters, as I recall. All kicking and slapping the snot out of each other. What grabbed me about Queen of Hearts 2001 is, the cosplayer is dressed up as my man Kyo. But she's dressed more like Cosplayer Kyoko. So she's a cosplayer, cosplaying as a cosplayer. And she has all of Kyo's moves and some of his lines, complete with a '94 version of herself... it's just freakish enough that I consider it absolute genius. So I've been playing Party's Breaker pretty frequently lately simply for shock value, though it's a nice game with nice backgrounds, good gameplay and low-res sprites.

What else, what else. Oh, right, Parappa the Rapper 2 came out. I've played it. It disturbs me terribly, because Master Onion's level is the bastard child of Tae Bo and Loveline. It's a fun level, but I'm sorry, I don't need to see Parappa sexing up his teddy bear while Tamanegi-sensei spouts things like "Punch punch love". But hey, I guess I just gotta believe! ...okay, I have no idea what that meant either. Big props to the level apparently sung by Barry White, though.

Oh, right, Devil May Cry. Words fail to describe this masterpiece of style and panache. As my buds over at VGD say, "Thank you, Capcom. Thank you." Suffice to say Ed and I will be wearing red trench coats for a couple months after playing this thing. As if we needed another excuse to beat the snot out of each other.

Side note here: I bid a not-so-fond farewell to VGD's pet project GameGO! magazine, which is pretty much dead as of last week. I loved the concept, but the one issue they released wasn't the kind of stuff I'd expect from a professional rag. There were more editors than actual editing, in my opinion, but given where I work, I suppose I'm a little biased...

In other gaming news, my recent acquisitions of Mech Warrior 4 and Mech Commander 2 led me way back in my BattleTech history, all the way to BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, a game I had fond memories of, and which held up surprisingly well to the test of time, for all the two hours it took me to beat it. I guess next up is MechWarrior 1, the last MechWarrior I actually played... and maybe DeathTrak, or even Decathlon. Ach, so many choices...

Aww, hell with it, I'm going back to Hanagumi Taisen Columns 2. I need to practice using a Dreamcast controller with my feet so I can beat the snot out of Cortana the next time he tries to play as Iris. Until next time, people.

"first person"
Friday - September 7, 2001
[Piro] - 19:14:00
Gosh, i really love listening to Velvet Acid Christ. Track 2, "Dial8" on Twisted Thought Generator has 'Miho' written all over it. :P I've been bouncing back and forth between this disk, "Kita E" White Illumination Pure Songs and Pictures, Richard Humpty Vission's Damn, that DJ made my day (i have got to do something about my recent House obsession, this isn't healthy), and Tonde Burrin Bu no ni. By the end of the day i'll be sketching a cute, enigmatic girl humming a highly distorted industrial/EBM "Ba Bi Bu Be Buurin~" to a tune of funky house/backbeat tracks while surrounded by dancing pigs. Like i said before, you don't really wanna know what goes on inside this beanhead of mine sometimes. ^_^

Yet another quick update regarding the Megatokyo Store. - I added more bucket cap designs to the stores, because people requested them - to the 3V1L L33t store, the b4k4^2 store, the Clocked store and the Baka^ni store. I have one of these, too - it looks really dopey on me, but that's kinda the idea. I sometimes wear it in public just to embarrass Seraphim. :P

The most shocking thing to happen this week was the fact that i (gasp) was on time and on the correct schedule for the first time in months.... granted, it's the temporary Tuesday/Thursday schedule, week 2, but it sure made me feel good. I think the quality of the comics is staying decent as a result, and it really IS giving me some breathing room. It's good for the easy-bake oven in my brain, you know.

Part of this downtime was spent zoning off and watching some of my anime backlog. Five episodes of "Galaxy Angel" very pleasantly mulled my brain into a viscous little pasty substance. It's an adorable show that is very well animated. I think what is most curious about the series is just how well designed the character's faces are. The eye designs are particularly appealing (for some odd reason, i find Rahra's character fascinating - mostly because her character has some of the most interesting and subtle facial expressions in the show). Oh, and Vanilla-san? Yet another Ruri-chan clone. See? I'm not the only one who does it :P Oh, and in case you didn't know, "Galaxy Angel" is produced by the same folks that brought us "Digi Charat" ^_^

The other show i watched with interest was Niea under 7, a show about a poor girl struggling to get thru college, who unfortunately is plagued with an annoying and rather useless roommate, who also happens to be an alien. This show is by the same guy who brought us Serial Experiments Lain, and is quite a bit different - on the surface. Watching Mayuko's character carefully, there's something interesting there that i can't put my finger on. Maybe it's just me. I'll have to finish watching the subbed version to figure it out.

As usual, it's been very interesting reading some of the supposition and thoughts that people have regarding the direction and coming events in the story. People keep noticing the relative absence of Kimiko compared to the other characters. Well, if you must know, i've been building up to the point where she becomes more a part of the story, things have to happen in order. After thinking about it, i think i may have realized why it's been difficult for her character development.

One of the difficult things about fleshing out kimiko's character and personality is that her character is like a real live flesh-and-blood girl from a ren'ai game, in much the same way that Yuki is a personification of a character from a TV anime. Fleshing out a ren'ai-inspired female character is harder than i thought it would be.

In most gal games, you learn about the female characters thru the eyes of the protagonist - the games are really first person simulations - you play the protagonist, and you live vicariously thru this interaction with the computer to interact with the girls. There really aren't many 'third person' events, like Yuki contemplating her looks - it happens all the time in anime and manga, but not in ren'ai games. You only see the girl characters when the protagonist does, you can only find out about her personality by how she interacts with YOU. Obviously, since the chances of Piro being bold enough to dig out Kimiko's personality in this way is about zilch, it presents a real problem for me - but perhaps that's the real grist of the challenge - can i really make this work? should i? What is really going to happen? Is kimiko really a red herring? Largo tells me he could care less, and that it's my problem - throw her down an open manhole and get rid of her. He is SUCH a bastard. :P

A lot of people have pointed out some 'similarities' between Love Hina and Megatokyo (we've seen so many comments to that effect that Dom is getting violent about it ^_^) The truth is, i didn't see any Love Hina or read the manga until Megatokyo was well under way. The only real influence it had on Megatokyo is that it inspired the move to manga-style format. So why the similarities? Well, because Ken Akamatsu and I are spoofing the same stuff - Both Love Hina and Megatokyo are parodies on Anime and Gaming culture in japan - there are bound to be similarities. Naru-chan, just like Kimiko-chan, is based on designs and concepts found in ren'ai games.

If you've ever watched Love Hina, have you noticed that everything is mostly shown from Keitaro's point of view? Naru remains pretty enigmatic for much of the series. Keitaro has a distinct advantage over Piro - He lives with the girls in an all-girl dorm with a hot spring. Oh ya, like you can't get some distance out of THAT plot vehicle. ^^;; For me, Piro and Kimiko barely know each other, and the strings that connect them are very tenuous. Piro knows Erika better than any of the other girls at this point, because he works with her... or does he? He hasn't been trying to find out her deeper, inner thoughts. He's too busy catching up on back issues of Nakayoshi. Basically, piro is getting nowhere.

Interesting, isnt it? ^_^ Perhaps it speaks to how more fantasy-oriented ren'ai games are than anime, in all it's forms. From the beginning, i've implied that Piro and Kimiko are the destined pair in the story, but most of you are wise to me by now to know that you can't assume anything will go the way you think it will. There are no guarantees. The only goal i really have here is to bring Kimiko to life, not tell her what she should do. I'm not going to twist things around so that Piro and Kimiko get paired just because i feel like it. Life isn't like that, and neither is this story.

we're not the only ones who have to bridge this gap of getting to know the girls - comic-piro does too. We've had the benefit of being privy to Yuki's thoughts, but he hasn't. In the store he's been keeping to himself, and we're pretty sure he's not chatting up Erika :). Basically, he knows just about nothing about all the girls around him.

I guess Piro isn't really very good at this Gal-game stuff after all, is he? His inability to play the game that is going on all around him in real life sure doesn't help me out, either. ^^;;

Maybe it's piro i need to dump down an open manhole... :P

"demanding fear"
Wednesday - September 12, 2001
[Largo] - 07:30:00
For many us in America, the last seventy-two hours have felt like a lifetime.

There isn't a soul in the civilized world that isn't aware of the tragedy that has hit the United States, or of the wrath that is about to be unleashed on those responsible.

I had woke up Tuesday morning expecting to get dressed, drink my coffee, and go to work, It was by chance that I turned on the TV and was greeted to the images of the Towers, one of which was on fire. I was shocked, I heard the reporters say this must have been an accident, and then, suddenly - as the live video of the towers was broadcasting, a second plane appeared, and crashed before my very eyes, and both I and the reporters on the news, were silent. Media personalities are trained to never allow 'dead silence' while on the air, it's unprofessional for them to stop talking, no matter what happens. Yet, at this moment - even these resolute people, we're without words.

I had the pleasure of visiting New York City a few months prior, I walked around and got to see the World Trade Center first hand. I suppose I am now one of the lucky few to have seen it with my own eyes, it was beautiful, the pictures you see of it on television do not do it justice. I stood on the sidewalk and looked up, and could not see the top of the towers as they went seemingly forever into the sky. Now, they are gone, and in their place is six stories of devastation.

To give an idea of the stature of the Towers, they were built with 1.5 billion pounds of concrete. Now that material is being used to make the world's largest American tomb.

"I fear that we have woken a sleeping giant - one with a very great resolve." - Admiral Yamamoto

The above quote was made famous by one of the architect's of the attack on Pearl Harbor. History has since proven him correct. My generation is now faced with its very own 'Pearl Harbor'.

The reason I refer to Pearl Harbor in that our sense of security has been taken from us, and it has been replaced with outrage over our lost friends and loved ones, outrage over our lost spirit.

One of my friends sent me his opinion, which for him was summed up nicely by one of the editors of Mr. Cranky. "America, to put it bluntly, is a basically a collective badass. The kind of country that, even when some ass-weasel sneaks up and clobbers her from behind with a lead pipe, stands back up. Spits out a bloody tooth. Rolls up her sleeves and shows everybody what she's made of."

This nation is one of the most compassionate and forgiving entities on the earth, yet we have our limits. I have been told that we should pity these poor people, to feel sorry for them. I watch as some people try to tell us that these men were victims themselves. I see the old guilt trips already rolling in, "I was abused as a child, beaten by my father, raised in poverty, the devil made me do it." -- Maybe it's true, but I don't buy it. I'm not interested in their background.

Although, in Osama Bin Laden's case, the man has more money then the late co-founder of Akamai who is no longer among the living, since along with so many others were passengers on the planes used to destroy the World Trade Center.

As Americans, we have only response that is available to us, which is the outright eradication of all terrorist threats made against the people of the United States, and to those who would help anyone that make such threats to us. I'm happy to see that the rest of the free world is in favor of this position.

Not to be graphic, but from the images of people on fire, jumping out the towers to grant themselves an early death, to the cleanup aftermath - watching as rescue workers go thru the wreckage with sifting buckets to locate partial human remains, I've become only more agitated.

However, as a civilized person I can not let my anger dominate my actions, we can not afford to lash out wrecklessly on the innocent. To do this would go against everything we stand for, but we will see vindication, we will with the rest of the free world, bring those responsible to justice in time.

Terrorism - by current definition is "The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons."

That dry statement sums up the method by which the attack on our nation was carried out. However, it's lacking - the very word 'Terrorism' - is derived from 'Terror', to strike fear in those you seek to dominate. It is used to make someone stop and take notice of your agenda.

It is in that sense that I feel those responsible for this unforgivable act, have both suceeded and failed. While we have had to stop and take notice, this event has only strengthened our resolve to protect those who love freedom.

I offer only this thought to those who support terrorism, expecting to get our attention, "Be careful what you wish for, you may just get it."

The world is now changed, the reality in which we live our lives is changed, I am changed.

"painting with blood"
Wednesday - September 12, 2001
[Piro] - 13:14:00
Seraphim and Dom have also prepared words in reponse to the events that transpired this week. Please read Seraphim's comments and Dom's comments - for they too have been deeply effected by all of this.

...

red cross disaster relief fund

donate blood. (we'll need blood for weeks to come, not just today and tommorow)

http://www.redcross.org/donate/give 1-800-GIVE-LIFE or in canada 1-888-2-DONATE

(212) 560-2730 for information on recovered or still missing people in NY

...

As i sit here writing this, i have a horrid headache. I've had so many false starts on this 'rant' that i wonder if I will ever finish it. Emotions have ranged from shock, to sadness, to rage, to hopelessness, to a bizarre kind of grim determination. I've had several days to sort out my feelings on these attacks, and i have felt the urgent need to pull away from this loss for words and find a way to say the right things, whatever they are.

I won't go into details about my own experiences with the past few days. We all have our own stories of how we have dealt with this - some better than others. For me, as an American, a New York native, an Architect, a Citizen of the World, and lastly as an Artist (yes, i will use the word here), the events of September 11th have impacted me on many fronts.

As an American, i'm not going to get into a lot of flag waving and patriotic speeches - there are people far better at it than me. I am very proud to see that happening around this nation. People have feared that the US would retaliate violently, but I have faith that our country will respond with specificity and appropriate actions. The logic of peace and the logic of war are not the same. I fear having to learn more about the differences.

Even though I have not lived in New York for many years, the majority of my extended family lives and works in and around the New York/Long Island area. For two days I worried extensively about friends and family who work in the Financial District, and as of this morning we finally have word that all are safe and accounted for. I am well aware of the fact that not everyone with friends and family in that area will receive the same news. As a New York native, i am at the same time horrified by the damage to our city, and proud to see New Yorkers pull together once again in time of tragedy.

As an architect, there is something deeply unsettling about the collapse of two of the world's tallest buildings. All buildings are far more than a complex assembly of steel, concrete, glass and systems - buildings have lives - they live and breathe. Large structures have immense symbolic presence in cities - they are beacon points used by people to navigate the city streets, they define the skyline, they house the lives and work of countless thousands of people. It wasn't just thousands of people we watched die on Tuesday - we saw the death of two buildings. As an architect, i not only had a previous understanding of the structural systems of the World Trade Center, but also an understanding of the sheer physics involved in a catastrophic failure of this magnitude. The buildings themselves, in the end, are unsung heros. They did not buckle and fall upon impact. Fireproofing on steel can only last so long before a intense fire will burn thru it. Once steel is heated to high temperatures, it weakens. Columns buckle, floors fall, dead loads become live loads with deadly complex inertia. The forces released by this chain of collapse are beyond comprehension. Because of the way buildings are designed, this did not happen immediately - These buildings stood long enough for many people to escape with their lives. I think it's important that people understand this.

As a citizen of the world... i don't know what to say. Today's comic came probably says all i want to say about this. But it only talks about one side. We are all mourning the fact that this act, and others like it that happen around the world all the time (no lesser in tragedy, if lesser in scope), happen at all, never mind with the frequency and the ferocity that they do. You would like to think that ANYONE with a functioning conscience would not be able to do acts like this. My first reaction is to loose faith in human conscience.

But maybe that's not really where it ends. It's more of a challenge to the rest of us and our own consciences. Like any disaster, we have seen people operate purely on what they feel is the right thing to do. All i need to do is think of all the public service people, police, fire fighters, and many others, who went *to* the crisis after it transpired, threw their own lives into danger to help others. It is horrible that not only did we see the failure of conscience on the part of those who perpetrated the crime, but in the loss of so many whose consciences functioned so well, that they paid the ultimate price in following them.

Finally, as an artist - and i only apply this term to myself loosely, and only then because i find no other way to express what i am about to say next - i find my feelings not only clear, but a grim resolve that in this area there must be a response. Here, I am defining an 'artist' as anyone who reaches out to touch other people's souls in one form or another. This can be thru art, painting, drawing, comics, writing, poetry, film making, video, photography, graphic design... any creative endeavor that revolves around the art of evoking an emotive response from an audience. As a manga/comic artist I try to evoke emotions of all sorts with what i do. Writers use words to paint images and events that make us laugh or cry, photographers try to capture image that move us in one way or another, film makers create immersive montages that carry us away and touch us in a variety of ways.

On tuesday, our own medium was stolen from us, and used as a direct assault on the people we serve.

The attacks on the WTC building were masterfully designed to produce the most shocking video footage possible. The first plane flew down the length of Manhattan at a low altitude, in such a way that it would draw attention to itself, so that eyes would be on it as it plowed into the first tower. Because of this, we DO have footage of the first impact. But that was just gravy for the perpetrators. The first impact was intended to draw the media eye squarely on the exact point where a second plane was brutally flown into the second tower shortly thereafter. We are used to seeing the aftermaths of disasters. Watching one actually happen has unbelievable impact. This was planned so that there would be no question that we would see it.

The intended targets of these attacks were not so much the people in those buildings - it was everyone of us who has seen the images of that second plane plowing into the world trade center's south tower. The horrible brutality of the timing and the staging of this chills my heart to the core.

These people were painting with blood.

Their work is available on all the major news websites. The result of their efforts has left for us a series of video clips, photographs, sounds and images, that record their execution of this horrible act. It is intended to shock. It is intended to strike fear and loathing in the heart. The third and fourth works are almost extras - horrifying video of immense structures collapsing on themselves. My heart stopped the first time i saw the collapses. Most of us do not live in or near New York. Most of us will never see the devastation in real life. it doesn't matter. We experienced it. We all did. The jets bled fire, fuel and shed velocity, the buildings bled concrete dust, broken glass and twisted steel into the city below. Like a Hitchcock film where horrible atrocities are only hinted at, leaving the worst to your own imagination, we don't even have to see the horrible painting in real blood underneath it all. We know it's there. It's in our mind's eyes.

It is a horrible work. I am sickened by it.

We must take the hearts, minds and souls of our people back. We must not allow such images painted with blood stand in their potency. We cannot let it have a greater impact on the world than the rest of us do. I have never felt more challenged before in my life. We are all artists in one form or another. We musn't let this work stand. We must touch people's souls to better things.

Life goes on - things change, but life does go on. But we have to work hard to build, collectively, things that will lessen the effect of this horrible work. Everyone in the online comic community, as well as the rest of us who are involved with entertaining and enlightening people every day have much to do, but i think that in the end we will prove far more capable of producing a body of work that makes the footage from tuesday a piece of history, not a everyday factor in our lives.

whew.

Deep stuff. I'm sorry, i do that sometimes.

It felt good to get that off my chest. For those of you who stuck with this rant and read it thru to the end, thank you. We've all been dealing with this stuff in our own ways. I originally had many other plans for this week, there is a lot of pretty interesting stuff going on - tuesday's tragedy interrupted everything, but it does not stop them. So, on a lighter note, I will mention something i was planning on mentioning today - mainly because, i am not going to let a group of terrorists interrupt my life and our comic anymore. Besides, if you live in the Los Angeles area, you might enjoy this.

This Saturday, the new OmochaBox retail store will be having it's grand opening in Los Angeles. This store is basically the equivalent to a 'Gamers' store opening in the US. :) If you are in the area, head down and check it out. They are gonna have Kunihiko Ikuhara (director of "Utena") and Mari Iijima on hand to sign autographs and stuff. Visit the store's site for more info. [quick note - OmochaBox has postponed thier grand opening stuff in light of recent events, but they are still going to open up on the 15th. So, if you are in the area, it's probably still worth visiting the new store. :) - piro]

After a hard week like this, i think we could all use something to brighten the spirits a little. I think i'll run down to Wizzywigs myself after work.

Take care, folks, and thanks for sticking with us thru this difficult week. Megatokyo will be back in full gear next tuesday with a brand new comic, brand spankin new back end for the website, and even some new graphic goodies to freshen up the look of the site as well. And no one, except our own inneptitude, perhaps, is gonna stop it. ^_^

"selah."
-- saturday - september 15, 2001 --
I don't know what to say. I was awakened Tuesday morning by my roommate, who told me that something big was going down--now, we're in the process of moving, so our TV is pretty much out... so I sat in front of my computer and greeted a friend in Baltimore, who promptly replied in a panic, which was one of my first signs something was wrong.

Then I looked at my IRC window, went to my local news site, and nearly shat myself. Then I spent three hours trying to patch through to Washington DC, where my best friend Victor's an EMT... it was one of the most panicked three hours of my life. I know he's not in that much danger, but given the deaths of rescue workers and other heroic individuals in New York, I can't help but be scared shitless for him. I'm sure people feel the same way as I do, and many are worse--they have loved ones who were affected directly, and my hearts go out to them. I am unashamed to say that I spent a few lonely minutes last night curled up in a ball and praying for my friend's safety, and if I get this worked up over a friend I know is safe and know will keep himself safe, what can I say for many of the people of New York, many of whom could say with pride that a close friend or loved one worked at the World Trade Center?

I'm giving blood next week, when the lines have died down, but the need is still there. It's the least I can do.

well, that and encourage people not to fly off the handle and look for scapegoats--for example, those of you pissed off at the footage of Palestinians celebrating in the streets, please consider this information I received from Aiee and Merekat on the MegaTokyo channel and forums:

"September 11th 1948 was when Quai-i-Azam died, and is a fixed palestinian holiday since the 50's. So basically, everyone's condemning them, but they may have just been celebrating their own national holiday, without knowing what happened inNYC at the time. I mean, the video clips were aired, what, 30 minutes after the first plane struck. How could they have known so fast and mobilized a celebration?

So they were celebrating one of their own dead, not the americans."

Also... I know of a half-Iranian child who was nearly attacked at her elementary school on Tuesday. Please. Paranoia led to the methodical violation of Japanese-American civil rights after World War II. The last thing the world needs is more reason to hate the US...

J. Michael Straczynski recently taught me a nice Hebrew word, and whether he was right about its definition as a word calling for a "pause for thought and meditation" or if there were a few details he left out for artistic purposes, I will end my rant with it.

Selah.
[dom] - 3:47:24 am EDT

"unfathomable."
-- saturday - september 15, 2001 --
This week has been unfathomable. I was in my first Tuesday class when a staffer came in tried to explain what was happening and school was closed. Fred had left a message for me on the cell phone trying to break it to me 'gently'. I feel like Edward Munch's "The Scream".

Let me first and foremost make a plea for tolerance. I have great faith that MT readers would not personally join in violence against innocent Muslim Americans merely because of their faith. The people who perpetrated these heinous crimes are a fanatical, militant sect that has perverted the true teachings of Islam. As Americans we must respect one another and protect their rights now more than ever. I am appalled by news reports I hear about Arab Americans being persecuted around the nation. Please, do whatever you can to promote equitable treatment of ALL our citizens.

We have many in the Armed Forces who visit MT and I am embarrassed by some of the forum posts. You keyboard cowboys bitch and moan about possible loss of life - not even your own pathetic existences- while they stand ready to defend us. I stand with our troops. They are ready to fight to defend our land - not our right to use oil or our ability to jet set - they will fight so we can simply walk our streets, go to work, and raise our children without being needlessly slaughtered within our own borders. God bless and watch over all of you brave men and women.

After this horrific attack the Taliban dares to deny their and bin Laden's involvement and to then threaten more attacks. They say they are too downtrodden and incapable of a strike of this magnitude, yet if we retaliate they quickly threaten they will do it AGAIN! ! When will be a good time to fight terrorism if not now? When the capitol of our nation is leveled? Evil can only triumph when good men fail to act. Would any of you care to live in world of bin Laden's making?

I send my sympathy to any and all affected by these horrible events. Let us not forget that many foreign nationals were also lost. For the few international readers who have sent unkind words regarding America and Americans to Fred and I personally, I speak to you - I pray that terrorism never comes to YOUR land as it did to ours, although it would be the only means by which to temper your ignorance, for until then you will NEVER understand the violation that was perpetrated against us.. It is pertinent to remember that bin Laden's edict is against the WEST. Every terrorist act has had international impact. We use the same airliners, inhabit one another's countries, dress the same and to them we all look alike. If America were to shutter itself up and cower what would the next Western target be?

My thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, the brave and generous rescuers toiling at this very moment, our Armed Forces, and our leaders. God bless my country - may we all always be free and never take our freedoms for granted.
[seraphim] - 3:09:23 pm EDT

"reprise"
Monday - September 17, 2001
[Piro] - 20:34:00
Last tuesday's comic wasn't up for very long before things went to hell, and even I could barely remember what it was, so for today i've reprised that comic for those who haven't seen it yet - and also as a way to get us back into gear for the rest of the MT comics to come this week.

I really did have a lot of trouble working on the comics themselves this weekend, for some reason it was easier to free-sketch, so that's what i did. There are two new drawings over on Fredart for you to see - here we have another gameworld image of Piroko and Largo in Operative Failure, and also a character study of Kimiko, showing a hairstyle i was working on - including the post-it note that i scribbled on first.

As for the forums - they are down, and will stay down for a while. I put up a warning that both Largo and I were sick of the anti-american rhetoric that trolls were getting thier jollies out of harassing people who really were having trouble with the events last week. I said that now was not the time, have some resepect, cut the anti-american crap, or i will shut the forums down. Someone had the audacity to post a 'american is not totally without blame' rant in that very topic. I wasn't bluffing, so i closed the forums. Largo and I are in agreement that while you have the freedom to say what you want in this country, we do not have to provide the bandwidth to harass people in these difficult times. We both applogize for the inconvinience that this has caused many people, but sadly the problem was getting out of hand, and this was all we could do.

I'll be adding stuff to this rant as the day goes on, just getting back to business. I am really gonna try to have a comic done tonight, but i highly doubt i'll be able to. I have not been lazy - It has taken largo and i a long time to get back on track after last week. I know that most of you understand. For those that don't - deal with it, we are doing the best we can.

"megatokyo 2.0"
Monday - September 17, 2001
[Largo] - 23:59:00
Tonight, MegaTokyo launched it's new backend, version 2.0!

I've spent the better part of last month doing data entry into this beast, over 160 strips, and 200 rants had to be manually re-entered due to the way we used to store the data, (it wasn't pretty).

I had thought about writing a script to do the conversation for me, but going back over the old data gave me a chance to clean it up, fix some broken links, incorrect dates, etc.

The new backend is running off the defacto standard combination of apache with mysql & php. It's also about 20x faster then the previous backend. Why not give it a few clicks and see if you notice a difference?

ah, I love speed.

It's nice to finally get this system finished, and in production. After the events of last week, it feels good to be creating again. There just isn't a substitute for the feeling of bringing something new to people, in any form.

Well, having done that, I'm going on vacation. In the morning I'll be heading out to somewhere in the mountain ranges of Colorado, so I'm told.

"first regrets"
Thursday - September 20, 2001
[Piro] - 11:31:23
Ah, last night almost felt like old times. Finishing drawing at 1:30am, not happy with hardly any of them, changing the script completely at 2:30am (this is not unusual - i tend to adjust the verbiage to work with the drawings. They play of each other - expressions need to match verbiage), and finally uploading the comic as 3:02am (I'm rather proud of this feat - i had to navigate the new mySQL backend to the site to do this. ^_^) and then, like and idiot, i sat there in a tired stupor teasing people on IRC with the question "what anime is the line 'don't wear clothes you can't get out of yourself!' from?" (pretty sad, even Natsuki couldn't remember till i gave her a big hint (sigh)) This morning I am exhausted, but oddly enough, i feel pretty good. Every one of these is like climbing a small mountain. Feels good when you hit the summit.

As most long time readers know, I've fallen on my face many times in the production end of this comic - many have called it an 'erratic' update schedule for the past few months. It's true, between trips to conventions, vacation, work, Seraphim starting grad school, etc, there has been a lot of stuff to manoeuver around. After a short panic-filled hiatus, I can often be found saying "well, now that i'm back on my feet, back on schedule" - which lasts a few weeks. ^_^

Today is a little different. It sort of makes all those other 'back on my feet' comments look like a joke. Like many people, I had a lot more to overcome than just being 'behind schedule.' I'm finally over the hump. Back to business. I've said that I'm not gonna let the stuff that happened last week prevent me moving on. Easy to say, hard to do. Now, I feel like i've achieved it. Sorry it took so long.

So, shall we get back to things? ^_^ I'm gonna touch on a bunch of things real quick, so bear with me.

First of we should all give a big thanks to Largo and Ukyo for the hard work they put into re-building the backend to the MT site. Most of you don't even realize what kinda stuff we can do now - it's going to be very easy to re-organize and offer various options for searching for comics and rants for things. Everything is easier to update, easier to change. There are a few little glitches we are still working on (like the table problem in IE for Macs - hang on folks, we'll get it fixed) but overall its pretty sweet. Thanks guys.

As many of you know, I don't like to accept donations of money or equipment from fans. I just normally don't feel right about doing it. In light of my recent problems with my very old CDR burner, and the fact that almost NONE of the original Megatokyo data had been backed up to CD (scary concept, isn't it?) I made an exception. AcquaCow smacked me upside the head with a spare HP burner that he had laying around until i finally agreed to let him send it to me. I'm glad i did. Megatokyo is now safely archived on 7 cdrs. Thanks dude, I appreciate the generosity.

Last week, i was going to point out exactly which bookbag is was that Piro uses over at Yakpak (i set up one of those nice little affiliate store things so that if you wanted to get yourself one, it'd help support MT ^_^). The disaster last week not only made me forget such things as bookbags and affiliate stuff - but it turns out that the collapse of the WTC buildings also took out the fibre cable that served the colo where yakpak's site is hosted. They were down for a whole week (everyone is fine - they are located in Brooklyn). Two weeks ago, the Yakpak folks sent me a box of bookbags in thanks for featuring one of their bags so prominently. I've replaced my black Medium Flapdozy with a Olive Drab flapdozy as my everyday bag - i love these things. ^_^

So, need a bookbag? Want one like the one Piro caries? Look for the Medium Flapdoozy under 'messenger bags'. That's what it is. :) Oh, and girls will get a kick out of the Small Flapdoozy (like the one i drew Yuki sporting.). Oh, if you decide to buy something, be sure to do it thru the following link. All purchases thru here help support MT:

Ahh, commerce. Like I've said, I don't really like donations, but if you would like to support MT and get some cool stuff in return - i don't think there is anything wrong with that. Besides, I need a new printer. :P

Speaking of merchandise, I still haven't uploaded that 'ph34r my l33t n4k1d skillz' boxer short design. It's almost ready to go. Oh, and the Pirogoeth poster is STILL in the works. i was gonna set them up for printing last week, but, well, you know. ^^;;

Geh, this got long quick. ^^;; I hope you enjoyed to day's comic. As you can see, we bounce around a lot between all the stuff going on in the story. Doing a meaningful dialog between two people is not easy to do in the space of a single page - what i covered today could easily have taken up 8 pages. I hate condensing things so much, but i think it's just part of the medium here that's developed for Megatokyo.

I hope everyone is doing well. I'm going to pick up the DVD for Patlabor Movie 2 tonight. I feel the need to watch it. If you've seen it, you know why. :

"kinda sad about"
Friday - September 28, 2001
[Piro] - 09:45:24
Well, i trashed the first rant I was writing for today. I tend to be pretty reactive to things sometimes. Depending on where I look, I can find MT related things on the net that can make me smile, laugh, feel good about the comic, think, sad, annoyed, angry, upset, depressed, ready to nuke the hell out of a few small towns in Iowa. I can find positive comments about me and MT that glow blindingly like some kind of creepy radioactive goo, or I can read long winded hate-filled personal attacks that call MT a piece of 'filth' and me a "crybaby full of false modesty".

Y'know, i'm one of those types of people that just can't stand it when someone isn't happy with them. I just can't rest till everyone around me is happy and content. This kind of behavior construct leads to a life of frustration, as you can imagine. I had a bitch of a time when it was just friends, family, co-workers and the variety of people that surround a normal life i had to keep happy. So what do i do? I have to go and make my neurosis even more impossible to deal with by making a popular webcomic. Oh yea, way to go piro. -_-

Anyways, i wrote something long and boring and irritated. You are saved from having to read it thanks to the wonders of the delete key. The only point in it that was worth saving was a comment directed at those who seem to feel the need to attack me personally in your dislike of Megatokyo - You don't understand me at all, so go to fucking hell and take your hatred with you.

There, that's better. ^_^

Today's comic is gonna be late, and I apologize for that. Seraphim had some complications arise last night from the oral surgery procedure she had last thursday, and we need to run back up there today. No worries, she's fine, we just have to deal with it today, and she was hurtin pretty good. I love Megatokyo, i'm good on the 3 a week schedule, but Seraphim is my #1 priority, so... you get the idea ^_^

Gosh, all sorts of stuff going on. I'm glad to be (almost) back on schedule. I didn't like the 2 a week thing. Sure, i didn't have to draw as much, but we found ourselves trying to squeeze 3 comics worth of material into 2 comics. Thats harder than just drawing 3 comics. ^_^

One of the nice things about college having started up recently is that the local college anime clubs are starting ther anime showings. The local club here at the University of Michigan, Animania, has a pretty decent showing this weekend - Angelic Layer, Love Hina, Mimi wo Sumaseba and Initial D. I'm thinking i might run down and see Mimi wo Sumaseba (whisper of the heart) ... it's one of my favorite all time movies. It's a wonderful Ghilbi film. Anyways, be sure to check out and support your local Anime clubs, for years they've all had a big part in helping bring more and more Japanese Anime to these shores, and the screening are usually a great way to sample stuff you haven't seen before. Always see the Ghilbi films on a bigger screen if you can - it's well worth the effort.

I've got to run - i'll probably finish most of todays comic while sitting in the waiting room at the surgeon's office. It's true, i can pretty much draw anywhere these days. :)

Great, now i've got the strains of 'concrete road~~' running thru my head... gah!

...

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

...

On a sad note, i recieved word that one of our webcomic creators has passed away at the very young age of 20. Nicole Kohn, one half of the webcomic "The Osaka Journals" died Friday, September 21st at 2PM - I recieved an email from Bart telling me about her passing, and that she was also a MT fan. I'm particularly sad because i never did get around to answering Nicole's email. :( Our deepest sympathies, Bart, for you and your family and friends.

...

Oh! yet another note. Remember OmochaBox? they just opened a new store in Los Angeles a few weeks ago - but they had to postpone thier opening ceremonies because it was the weekend after the WTC disaster. Well, they are holding the grand opening stuff this weekend instead. Kunihiko Ikuhara, renowned director of sailor moon and revolutionary girl utena, will be signing autographs on saturday, september 29, 2001 from 2pm to 4pm. Mari Iijima, international recording artist and actress, will be signing autographs september 30, 2001 from 2pm to 4pm. So, if you live in the area, head on over sometime this weekend.

"Circling Overland"
Wednesday - October 3, 2001
[Piro] - 11:59:21
Ok, now before i get one more email about Seraphim's smoking habit... Seraphim smokes in real life, and as long as she does, so will her character. She doesn't smoke to look cool, she doesn't do it because she saw some celebrity smoking - it's a habit. The character's struggle to quit will mirror her real life struggles with the very difficult task of quitting. Don't get all high and mighty on some friggin higher moral platform, people - quitting smoking is very difficult, and I have a lot of empathy for anyone who tries. I also have empathy for those who don't quit and defend their right to smoke. Since when did we all become fisking saints? Jumping on someone's ass because they smoke is nothing more than trying to enforce some kind of moral stance on them - don't do it. Besides, you'd smoke too if you had me for a bf. :)

If you must know, Seraphim thinks that her comic version shouldn't smoke. To me, i look at it as another subtle thing i can do to inspire her to quit. :) So, stop with the emails, ok? I have my reasons for what i do. Besides, i've of the opinion that getting up on some moral soap box, shaking your finger and saying "don't smoke! it's bad for you, bad!" is about as effective as the RIAA's attempts to convince people that sharing MP3s is a bad thing. Use your heads, people. You have brains, make your own decisions, and make good ones.

I hope people don't mind the occasional 1-frame drawing like today from time to time. I don't plan on doing them often, but sometimes its a nice break to just sit down and draw one decent drawing rather than hammer out 6 or 9 of them. I was so goofed up this week that i almost forgot to pay the rent this month ^^;; I like the sketch - it's true, Boo is a little too big, but then again so is seraphim - it's the car that they are sitting on that is too small. (the relative size dif between Seraphim and Boo isn't too far off) One lame excuse that I could use here is pretty simple - many Japanese cars are REALLY small - some of them look like toys. Let's just say its a really small car, and leave it at that.

Oh, and about Seraphim's new haircut... at first, i was very apprehensive. I like long hair, but she had wanted to get it cut shorter for a long time. Seraphim has had more trouble with hair stylists. Some of them have come close to death because of their screw-ups with her hair (one time she went to the ends cut off and the woman took of 5 inches - talk about a traumatic experience that was (for me, i mean :P)) But i gotta say - the new doo is really nice. And what amazed me was that now she can do this Card Captor Sakura thing with her hair... yea, i'm happy. ^_^

I've been meaning to do something about this Ian guy and this Matt guy over at MacHall for a while now. As most of you know, my nick 'piro' is actually taken from this little Siamese cat character in the japanese game "Kanon" (and for the 1 millionth time, it's pronounced 'pee-row', NOT 'pie-row', dammnit.) I was delighted to be able to scam a friend of mine into getting me a little stuffed beanie-baby style 'piro' for my computer (*cough*stillneedtopaywaylandforit*cough*). I made the mistake of bringing this little beanie piro with me to Otakon. Now, in Kanon, Piro has a tendency to sit atop the girl's heads in a very cute way, so this beanie was designed to do the same thing. At Otakon, i didn't really see much of it, because a significant amount of it's time was spent atop either Ukyo's head or Ian's head. Ever since, Ian's character in MacHall has had a Piro on his head... I'll let the Power Puff Piro thing slide - this time. Just remember, cute little piro han't been declawed... :P

heh, all joshin' aside, the machall guys are now doin a strip for Inside Mac Games - check it out.

Oh, and be sure to read Winter. Shameless, random plug. :P

Seraphim came up with a very interesting quote for me yesterday - For some reason, it really struck me with its insight. George Bernard Shaw was a cagey old devil, and he sure had some interesting things to say sometimes:

"Hatred is the cowards revenge for being intimidated."

from "Major Barbara"

... shameless commerce plug ...

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

"doped up"
Friday - October 5, 2001
[Piro] - 12:41:02
Just a short rant today. I just feel kinda numb today, and most of that is because i was up way too late last night - and the entire time i felt all dopey because i had taken some Benedryl to fight the onset of a cold. It's not impossible to work when you feel like that, it just makes you work sloooooow.

I've been real irritable for the past few weeks - gomen. I think i actually get some kind of perverse kick out of being difficult. Not a very admirable trait, but its only one of my lesser flaws.

Seraphim is doing much better, BTW, and has completely recovered. Allergic reactions to medications are no fun, and i'm glad we're past that. :) Looking forward to a weekend without a medical emergency. :P

A few random, aimless plugs today. I think i should do this more often. There are a lot of websites around that i pop in to visit from time to time, or friends point out to me, or are connected in some way with people i consider friends in the ether. My habit of not linking people very often is a bad one - and has more to do with the laziness of not wanting to go to the trouble of typing in URLs than anything else. ^_^ A few at a time, what the heck. First off, i got an email from Shari that she'd revamped and relaunched Sketch of Love - a very edgy and uber-neat manga/comic/art piece. Secondly, I never did give kudos to Ian over at RPG World. Ian was a part of the Webmanga Panel at Otakon, and he's just generally a cool dude.

There. For some reason (and i don't know how it started) pimping this guy's comic has become something of an inside joke here at MT - course, *I*'d never pimp soup's (rather cool and neato) comic. And to make up for any pimpage that may happen, i'll just throw in a totally random, meaningless and pointless link of some sort.

Ah, what the heck. Most of you should recognize this site, and then there's this site - don't go there...

On a MT Merchandise front, the big news is this - We will be releasing the printers to start printing Pirogoeth posters on either Monday or Tuesday. We'll be printing 1000 of them, and we are going for the high quality print/paper approach. They should be available for purchase in about three weeks.

I'm working on a Megatokyo Beer Stein design right now. I know the damn things are only available till the end of the month, so by the time i get the damn thing up, it's gonna be a real small window in which you can buy one. We had a neat idea that i'm still trying to work out, and of course it requires me to draw some stuff. ^_^ Oh, and l33t N4k1d Skilzz boxer shorts will be available on tuesday. Next month, i'm planning two more shirt designs (both of these will be on colored shirts), and i am going to retire these designs: Does anyone Sp33k l33t, both j00 d34d f00 designs, and the Kimiko Idol design. If you like em, get em now. They come down next month. Lotta work to do, really.

And for those of you wondering where Largo is, he's preoccupied with something far more important that silly things like comics and games right now. :) He'll be back pretty soon, so patience people.

I generally feel like crap today - but its more of a dull dopey buzz from the medication than being really sick. I'm trying preventative measures this time to keep from goin down hard.

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

"mt break"
Monday - October 8, 2001
[Piro] - 24:31:00
Ok, now THIS will be a short rant. ^_^ I'll flesh it out at lunch tomorrow.

Did a lot this weekend, just one of those things wasn't the comic. Was never able to quite get in the mood. Sorry. I did have fun doing the full color art for the Megatokyo Stein, it came out pretty good IMHO. It just took a little longer to finish than i thought it would.

It seems that most of my creative ability left me after that. Happens, i guess. Hopefully some of the new art here will tide everyone over till wednesday. :) Hope you like the drawing of Saeko-chan and Tomu-san. Warmth is a good story, one i am looking forward to doing someday. It's more of the shoujo love-drama that MT sometimes wants to be - in fact, i've transposed some ideas from 'warmth' into MT here and there - but i dont think it would have QUITE the broad appeal that MT has. Even so, most of you might enjoy it - its a little different. :)

more tomorrow - time for bed now.

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

"Ninja Magic"
Thursday - October 11, 2001
[Dom] - 16:52:00
Holy crap, has it been a long time since there's been a rant on this section. Up until recently, I've been going through the maddening process of moving and learning a new commute... but everything's set up, everything's rounded up, and mostly unpacked. So I'm ranting.

Recently at work, Microsoft brought by a pack of Xboxes and a crudload of games. I mean all of the launch titles: Halo, Fuzion Frenzy, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, and others.

And, having gotten my grubby hands on both a debug X-box and a Japanese GameCube, I have these short conclusions about the future of these consoles.

First, the Xbox controller needs to be shot. Seriously. We call it the Veal Dreamcast Controller--someone grabbed a Dreamcast controller, stuck it in a closet and fed it pure lard for six months. So it's fat, bloated, and unsuitable for any real purpose. The memory sticks are kind of cool. with a sort of chest-buster look to 'em. But if my thumb rubs up against the analog stick when I press the A button there's some problems. There has seriously been a collective brain fart by the Xbox guys with this monstrosity. The testers for the controller must've been Manute Bol and a rhesus monkey with elephantiasis. There's no other explanation for something this bad.

Second, I feel this need to stick pop tarts in the GameCube. It just doesn't look like a console to me... oh well, Super Monkey Ball kicks ass.

Third, the fact that Luigi hums or sings along to the music in his new game amuses me to no end. Sometimes you don't notice him and think he's the actual soundtrack. I don't know why this amuses me, but it does.

Fourth, I agree with my co-workers. Fuzion Frenzy needs a Typing of the Xbox, or something. It's just so right.

Finally, the little aliens in Halo may just be the most fun bastards to shoot in a while. They give you such crap when you die ("Not so tough NOW, are ya?") that you can't wait to respawn and pop a few more of them so they start scattering and screaming "Run! It's him!". When Cortana buys himself an Xbox for DoA3 and Halo, I'll spend some time with Halo.

Of course, half you readers out there won't let me get away with this rant without mentioning the game everyone likes to drool on, Dead or Alive 3. And I must say, while I haven't really liked the game much engine-wise, but everyone who plays this game has to give it its due: It's one of the most friggin' beautiful games in history.

Seriously. The ice cavern, with the reflection off the ice patches, with the darkened passage lit by torches, that took my breath away. The subtle muscle movement you can see on some people is amazing. Ayane's ending, with the reflection of the pyre in her eyes, friggin' awesome. And I actually kinda like the gameplay of this one over the last one, for the sheer fact that the counters don't do 50% damage anymore. It makes the game much less annoying to me--though I'd still rather play Soul Calibur 2.

A random note before I enter the next phase of my rant. According to Helena's ending and the fact that she swims for a good two minutes without surfacing, she can apparently breathe underwater. I was mystified by this revelation, until a co-worker came by and pointed out that with any of the Dead or Alive girls, any dive they make is a two-tank dive. So that, and her treading water without moving a muscle, make perfect sense now.

Now, as I was playing Dead or Alive 3, I started thinking about ninja--why everyone loves 'em so much, why I love 'em so much, and why, centuries after they ceased to exist, they persist in popular mythology. Dead or Alive 3 gave some insights into this phenomenon.

Ninja magic is cool. Everyone wants to be able to jump from rooftop to rooftop only making that "shwwwwp" sound. Admit it. Part of the fun of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the goofy fun of seeing Zhang Zi-Yi and Michelle Yeoh jump from rooftop from rooftop, although they must be better ninja than most, because they didn't even make a "shwwp". And anyone remember Shinobi? The greatest thing was busting out the Ninja Magic, freezing everyone on-screen, and kicking their asses at your leisure. Plus, ninja get to say strange, cryptic yet badass lines. One of Hayabusa's fight intros says something like "Rage is a whirlwind!" Doesn't make much sense for him to say it, but it certainly sounds impressive, doesn't it?

And, of course, everyone wants the uniform. Not only is it slick and will keep you warm and unseen by mortal eyes, but it's never anything less than stylish. And usually magical (and thus this is a subset of my first point); just take the Dead or Alive kunoichi as an example. Their outfits somehow protect them from below-freezing temperatures, even while covering less than half of their surface area. Not only that, but they alter Japanese DNA to allow gigantic chest sizes, while providing magical back support to prevent these girls from keeling over with horrific back problems.

Well, I'm done talking out of my ass for today, though if Largo's rants continue to be AWOL, expect more random weirdness from me in the near future.

"service, service!"
Monday - October 15, 2001
[Piro] - 12:13:02
[ok, i'm inserting this here to put cap on the flood of emails i am getting telling me about the appearance of some familiar characters in today's Exploitation Now comic. Lets see, so far in the past two hours i have downloaded 38 emails telling me about it. ^^;; Yes, I KNOW. ^^:;; You people forget, I *read* Exploitation Now on a regular basis. (I'm a Jordan fanboy, i admit it). Having said that, i'll say it again: Mr. Poe is a bad man. I really need to retaliate... i mean, do that guest comic one of these days... ^^;; - piro]

Sorry for the 'no punchline' comic again today. You should be aware by now that when i pull something like this, i'm hinting at other things, and sometimes covering them with a joke isn't appropriate. Also, sometimes, there is a kind of humor buried in a strip that may not be apparent at first.

And before you ask, her name is Megumi. Kimiko's co-worker at Ann Millers. Yes, she is also an aspiring seiyuu (voice actress). She made her first appearance in the 'adjustments' strip way back near the beginning. I get accused of keeping things like character names secret for long periods of time just to torture fans... yea, i admit it. :P Truth is, I'm taking a serious look at the character info and story info pages this week - a task that i have been avoiding for over a year. The site really needs better support information, and it's time i got off my lazy ass and did it. Don't hold your breath, it may take me a few days to finish.

A couple of other things of note. First off, I received an email from the Library of Congress last week informing us of the following:

The Library of Congress's mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. If the Library of Congress is to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it must extend to the digital world its traditional functions of acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance. As digital information on the Internet has a short life span, we are pursuing a project to collect digital material relating to the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, its aftermath and the national and international response. Your site has been selected for inclusion in this project as we assess the scholarly value of born digital materials in creating digital collections. For more information on the mission and activities of the Library of Congress, see the Library of Congress web site at http://www.loc.gov.

Needless to say, we are rather dumbfounded and humbly honored by this. As soon as i have more information on this, i'll let you know. Who'd a thought?

On a similar note, I received an interesting request from serviceman in the US Navy the other day. He told me that while they still had access to e-mail, that they were unable to browse websites during the current conflict. He asked if it would be possible for me to email strips so that he and some of his shipmates (who are also MT fans, it seems) can keep up with the strip.

I told him i'd be more than happy to oblige. In fact, it started me thinking that there may be other servicemen and women who can't directly access Megatokyo who might enjoy being able to keep up with the strip. I would be more than happy to provide this service, or do whatever i need to do to provide it, to anyone serving in the military during this conflict.

There is a great tradition of comics entertaining soldiers in times of war. Entertainment is an important part helping people deal with stressful situations. We at Megatokyo would be honored to be able to provide some of this entertainment, even if it means doing things that are done specifically for them. If anyone reading this who has any ideas or thoughts on how strips like Megatokyo (and perhaps others as well) can be made available to our service men and women during this war, please let me know.

[note: i've received 15 emails already suggesting the idea of putting together a mailing list to mail strips to service folk - and that is one of the ideas that i have been thinking of implementing. I worry a little that the military might not appreciate me spamming the mailboxes of so many service personnel with graphic files 3 times a week (you have to consider these things) so i guess my hope was that someone who is familiar with or is in the military might have some ideas about how to make things available to service folk without resorting to mass mailing things. ^_^ thank you for the positive response so far tho :) - piro]

Oh, recently I was toying with people to see if they recognized Kimiko's hairstyle. Most people guessed 'Card Captor Sakura', but that isn't the correct answer. Only two people got it right, and they guessed it right away. The prize was the knowledge that they had the correct answer ^_^ Kimiko's hair style was inspired by Katsuragi Moe in Risky Safety (Omoshi Magical Theater). If you watch the later episodes, you'll see that Kimiko is also wearing the same sweater Moe wears. :) Risky Safety has influenced Megatokyo in other ways as well - 'Safety' the little angel apprentice, was a big inspiration in the creation of Seraphim's character. I love that show, not really sure why. Something about the character designs, i think. The girl characters are great, but i'd be happy to see that little boy character fall under a pavement grinder.

Time to go find my little Mistao and grab some lunch...

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

"Devil Never Cry"
Saturday - October 20, 2001
[Largo] - 23:59:59
During E3 this year, I had the sweet opportunity to sample one of the year's upcoming hits. A surreal visual and testosterone-laden experience named Devil May Cry.

There really isn't a good way to describe it other thean as the first game to replicate a Hong Kong action/fantasy film. The game rates you by a system that had to be built around having the player go thru the game in the most stylish, fluid, and flawless possible fashion. The system takes a dislike to you for taking damage from baddies, revisiting rooms you don't need to, taking too much time, wasting your resources, and requiring certain bandaid items. Basically, the more entertaining the game is for people around you watching, the better you're scored. Which is a great concept – considering since I got this game, I've had to watch one of my friends play thru it… for hours...

Its game play is similar in style to a cross between Onimusha & CastleVania. Part of this is evident in that you have differing camera angles that you are unable to control, and the added suspense of being attacked when you least expect it or want it.

The usual survival horror tools can be found in the game as well; including items, weapons, and puzzles – yes… lots of puzzles… All of this presented over a backdrop so sinister that you may find yourself sleeping with the lights on for a while.

It has two crucial elements required to have a kick-ass game.

1) Big Ass Sword 2) Unlimited Ammo

Given those two factors alone, it would have earned my full support. However the game perfectly captures the feeling of a suspense film, from haunting music, to breathtaking scenes around an abandoned island. The castle on the island is so intricate and detailed with elements designed to unnerve you, that it easily could of been pulled straight out of a novel by H.P. Lovecraft.

I've only had a few complaints about the game, for one – Trish is no Claire Redfield, but then again – who is? Still, she gets major points for having sweet hips. Mmmm hips...

Other then that, my only major problem with it, is the total lack of zombies. As most people know, I loathe the undead – and I take a substantial amount of pleasure in filling them with immeasurable quantities of lead. Now, demonic puppets and giant spiders can be a nice close second, but there just isn't a greater feeling in the world then seeing a bunch of filthy zombies being blown into tiny pieces.

As … one or two-hundred thousand of you… have pointed out to me in email, I haven't ranted in the last month. Main reason for this is I've been busy with other aspects of my life, including the whole girlfriend thing. I generally don't go into great detail about my personal life (like some other people on this website *cough*). However, I thought I'd let you, our wonderful and always appreciated readers, know that yes – I'm alive, and yes – I'll be ranting on a regular basis in the future. Even if it's only because I'm being blackmailed into writing them by my significant other, Ruby.

A lot has happened over the last month in terms of MegaTokyo, from certain cameo strips to my friend and fellow LSU alum over at EN (Poe is great, tho one of these days Piro is going to kill him),

Another recent event has been finding out that we have some readers over seas right now working with the operations in Afghanistan. As Piro pointed out awhile back when we learned that those soldiers wanted a way to see MT, we were stunned. I mean, here these guys are – half way across the world, fighting to defend my freedom – and what some of them just want right now is to read some MegaTokyo? It's an odd feeling when you realize something you've created means so much to other people. In general, I try to pretend that isn't the case. However, as a long standing strong supporter of this nation's military, I couldn't have been happier to know we're able to do something to make the day a little more enjoyable for some of our troops.

Some of the people who picked up our steins have been really happy with the quality, I've got mine in front of me (and yes it's full), I'll be getting more these suckers next week to give out to my friends. Ahh.. Steins… one of mankind's greatest creations… next to alcohol.

That about raps up this installment of largo-rant, be sure to tune in next week when we revisit the inane thoughts of a largo.

"one comic to bind them"
Tuesday - October 23, 2001
[Piro] - 11:58:01
Oh, just so you know, the Megatokyo Beer Stiens will only be available till the end of this month, so you have one week left to get one if you want one ^_^. I'm also going to be retiring several designs (Sp33k l33t, j00 d34d f00, Kimiko Idol shirts) by the 2nd week in November. Just FYI if you like those designs and want to get one. :)

One of the few things i miss about commuting to work by train when i lived in Atlanta was that I had a lot more time to read. The last book i sat down to read was Gibson's 'All Tomorrow's Parties' ('Idoru' still influences my thought processes from time to time, but this book could have been better'). It's sad, because I like to read, but like so many busy folk, its just not possible to find the time to curl up in a chair on a lazy sunday anymore.

A lot of what i do at work is visually processed stuff, cad work, etc. I listen to a lot of music while i work (the pile of CDs and MP3 disks around my workstation is embarrassing) but there are times when i just don't feel like music. Talk radio is fine, but the news can get pretty stale pretty quick, so often i turn to various books on tape or CDs to help me get thru some of the pretty major grunt work it takes to get thru a lot of the cad work i do. One that i've listened to quite a bit in the past, and still turn to from time to time, is the unabridged recording of The Lord of the Rings, which i just recently purchased on CD.

I'm actually a big fan of Tolkien's master work, but not in the sense that many others are. Oddly enough i could care less, for the most part, about the elder history of Middle Earth. Grand, epic tales of the history of elves, men, dwarfs and the like just simply bores me to tears. For me, it's always been the story. That's what i've enjoyed over the years. Sam is my idol.

There is a prologue to 'The Fellowship of the Rings' where Tolkien comments on his experience in writing the story. I suppose that these days his words hit home a lot more than they did years ago. He seems almost grumpy and defensive about all the scrutiny and attention it received. Gosh, it feels awful familiar... ^^;; Yet, even though he seems to indicate that the attention to his work is almost annoying, he does indicate that he was 'encouraged' but the requests for more information concerning hobbits, and his comments regarding critics are particularly amusing. ^_^ In the end, he did the story for himself, but if you listen to what this really was, its something I can really identify with: He wanted to tell a story, one that people would enjoy.

At one point in the forward, he notes what he considers the biggest problem with the story: it's too short. I think he's right, in many ways - there was so much going on that some extra length could have helped explain a few more things, flesh out some parts of the story that we never hear about, etc.

These comments started me thinking about my own feelings about what's right and wrong about what i'm doing. The biggest problem with Megatokyo is pretty simple - it's too slow.

It's not slow because i'm lazy - i'm not. I put at least 32 hrs a week into producing this comic, and thats all outside of my day job. It took Tolkien 5 or more years to write the Lord of the Rings. Most stories are presented either in installments or in final form. We're feeding you the story in one page installments three times a week. You can't just take a typical manga or comic and do this - like it or not, each page stands on its own. The biggest thing that is lost in doing a comic/manga this way is rather surprising: There is no real sense of time. It's so bad that even I have trouble keeping any sense of time in what's happened and what is going to happen. It's an unusual challenge.

The solution isn't doing more comics a week (well, it would be, but quite literally cant do more than i am doing) so it falls upon the story itself and the way it's presented. I think that in trying to understand these issues of time, i might be able to fix some of the frustrations some readers have with the story. I know what the story is, and where its going. But it's the experience of getting there that is what keeps people reading. Hell, I wanna see exactly how it gets there myself. ^_^

If you sit down and read Chapter 1, start to now, in one sitting, it doesn't read half bad. When you consider the fact there were 2 to 4 day waits between some of these pages, its easy to understand why people are frustrated. Getting a handle on the paradox of collected works which can be read one page after another, and performance works which need at least 2 days between strips to produce, is a real issue and a real problem for me. If nothing else, it's an interesting quandary. :)

MT is an experiment, and a training ground for me in my quest to figure out just how the hell to make a really good comic and manga. So far, not so bad. For those who are frustrated with the lack of gaming jokes, the lack of violence, the lack of this, that, or anything else that prompts emails asking me what happened to one character or another - patience please. I am doing the best i can.

In the past 3 weeks or so, we've had a really good run. Regardless of some personal misgivings about doing this better, or that drawing sucks, all in all its not bad. This week is going to be a little light mainly because i have to be out of town for thursday and friday this week, which puts a minor crimp in doing friday's comic ^_^

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

"Boogie oogie oogie"
Friday - October 26, 2001
[Dom] - 09:08:00
This past Friday, I went back to my hometown of Redwood City for an annual event I wouldn't miss for the world, the Project Read Trivia Bee. I've always been a lover and collector of esoteric knowledge, so trivia contests always attract me, especially the team-based ones, since I know my knowledge doesn't cover many fields at all. But that's not what keeps bringing me back to Redwood City. As the name suggests, Project Read is a literacy program, and they use the Trivia Bee to raise funds for their programs. I'm a big fan of Project Read. I started volunteering there when I was 14 (which makes my age 28 at most, for those of you who care), and over the years I've developed a close relationship with them. I've helped build and dismantle their float for the 4th of July parade, organized books, worked in their mail room, organized barbecues and other fundraisers... about the only thing I haven't done for them is tutor, which I've unfortunately never had the time to do. Now that I don't live in Redwood City anymore, all I can really do anymore is special events, so the Trivia Bee is always a special treat for me when it rolls around.

Anyway, some of you may have heard that today, October 26th, is my birthday. This is true. Some of you think you know how old I am. If you do, you're one step ahead of me, because I keep forgetting myself. I just don't find it important.

What I find important is that Halloween is coming up, and after walking around my office knocking on pieces of furniture and shouting "Maaaarioooooo", I'm going to be Luigi for the office party. And I find it disturbing that it's easier to get my hands on a backpack vacuum cleaner than it is to find that big green cap Luigi wears... I also find it disturbing that my cosplaying twin Genjitsu, AKA the man in charge of American Cosplay Paradise has decided that he either needs to be Mario to my Luigi, or Kirby to my Yoshi.

All I can say is, I need to practice my devouring things and pooping them out as eggs and powerups.

Let's see, now it's time to link people...

First, in case you didn't notice, my last rant included a link to Ninja Burger, a website which keeps ninja magic alive and well in the fast food industry. Their comic is pretty funny, so check it out if you saw Ninja Burger before it had its own comic. Now, if only Ninja World actually existed outside of The Tick, I'd really be in business. Ah, well.

Second, since I owe her a couple favors, and she has incriminating pictures of me, I'm obliged to plug Chibi-chan's fresh new comic, which I like so far because it involves a goddess having her wings taken away. The less wings in this world, the better.

Speaking of incriminating pictures, Mac Hall continues to amuse and surprise me. I owe Matt Boyd a stick figure strip, and I owe Ian a kick in the teeth.

Emi-chan, who has fled from California and is no longer within strangling distance of me, has taken the opportunity to start updating Strange Candy again. So all those people who stopped paying attention when she moved, well, she's back. And for the last time, the only relationship between Strange Candy and MegaTokyo is that Ed and I know both Piro, Largo, Emi and Tanzy personally. The characters in the two strips are completely, totally, and utterly separate.

Also returning to life is The Jar, which went down due to traffic overload, but is back, and still really weird.

And with winter's chill setting in, I've started to read this little, infrequently updated comic by Lem, who gave me a Winter T-shirt to ward off the chill. Not that I'd whore out his comic just because he gave me a T-shirt, mind you. But this little story is pretty cool, and you can say "I was there back at the beginning".

Oh, and on Wednesday, I went to an Orbital concert with my roommate and Mitsune, a friend of ours who happens to own Hinatasou, one of the best Love Hina sites I've seen. By the way, for the millionth time, Piro is not Keitaro, if you compare Erika to anyone in Love Hina you're looking in the wrong direction, so please, stop posting your "great discovery" in our forums. Dozens of other people have made the comparison, and are wrong--the only thing Fred took from Love Hina was the layout idea, which is a fairly standard comic layout anyway.

But I digress. About Orbital. The show was awesome, but one thing jumped out at me--Mitsune tried to get me to dance. And, as an Asian male, I am genetically incapable of dancing competently. Seriously. Excepting line dances, which are an abomination and must be destroyed, the only dance I've ever really gotten right is the "cross your arms and nod your head arrhythmically while eyeing the refreshment table" dance. But she insisted, and I didn't really want her pulling on my arm anymore, so I tried. And yes, I sucked. But I had fun anyway. Don't ever expect me to dance again, though.

Gotta sleep now. Good night, and see you next SGD.

"computing needs"
Sunday - October 28, 2001
[Piro] - 15:38:23
Before i start, just want to let you know that Wednesday is the last day to get the Megatokyo Beer Steins so get one if you want one before CafePress pulls the plug ^_^.

There is a part of me that really hates pimping merchandise. New shirts, beer steins, posters, etcetera. When we started Megatokyo, the requests for Megatokyo t-shirts was almost immediate - and the first t-shirt stuff on CafePress went up as much to stop the flood of 'we want shirts!' emails as to bring in any profit. The great thing about Cafe Press is that Largo and I could offer shirts without having to pay for a whole bunch of them up front, since CP stuff is printed on demand. At the time we figured we'd sell a few shirts, people would be happy, perhaps we could get some DVDs or something with the profits. The main reason for providing stuff to buy was simple - people wanted it. I only mention the fact that you only have a few days left to get steins because... well, if you want one, that's all the time you have left. I still have to get one for myself, actually. ^_^

Last weekend I got together with a group of local Megatokyo fans at a local pizza joint to jabber a bit before the local anime club showing (which i couldn't go to ^^;;). I commented that i was just waiting for someone with real talent to come along and blow me out of the water, and that the popularity of Megatokyo was a bit of a fluke. One of the guys made a comment that made me wonder - He said that it was unlikely that someone would be willing to put as much time into it as I do to make something that's basically free. To a certain extent, he may have a point. People have asked about what the process behind making a episode of Megatokyo is, so let me enlighten you (it gets a bit long here, sorry ^^;;):

The overall story, general concepts, ideas, and other junk that make up the Megatokyo universe is something I've been working on since the comic started. Mixed into that are all the unusual takes and bizarre twists that Largo likes to interject ("we need Great Teacher Largo!", for instance). Writings scripts is a odd process, that falls somewhere between sketching loosely on paper or notecards, post-it notes, and typing it out in text on the computer. The absolute best way is to build out a script is right in Illustrator, basically building the final comic before the drawings are done. That's the best way to script - you know that the text will fit, the flow of the text and how the drawings can fit around it, and you know up front what the proportions of your drawings need to be. Doing a script can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 4 hours, depending on how much i beat my head on the table. Sometimes, i run a script by Dom, Ed, Seraphim, or a few others just to see if i am off my rocker. Sometimes i even show it to Largo, but mostly i just ignore him. (just kidding :P)

The fun part (and the longest part) is drawing all the frames. I draw everything on 8.5 x 11 sheets of HP Bright White Inkjet paper on which i have printed a large rectangular border. Within this border, i will usually divide it in half, or thirds, depending on the needs of the frame. When drawing a frame which has limited or no background, its a good idea to bound the frame on only two sides - that way the size of the image can be adjusted in the final frame just in case the text doesn't fit right. As far as what i use to draw, all i use is a single 0.5 mm mechanical pencil with HB lead. Nothin else. A typical comic takes anywhere from 6 frames to 9 frames (sometimes as much as 11) - and it usually takes me about 5 hours to draw all of them. There are times it goes very fast, and 3 hours is all it takes, but there are also times it takes as much as 8 hours. I can draw just about anywhere these days (since Seraphim has started grad school, I've found that the local Starbucks is a great place to camp out and draw for several hours) so the need to be home and at my desk is no longer a problem.

Then, its time to scan all the drawings, clean them up as much as possible using photoshop (i scan everything in at 300 dpi - my scanner is an old UMAX Astra 1200S). This process usually takes around an hour and a half. Then, it's time to switch to Illustrator, where i put the rest of the comic together - importing each frame separately, sizing and laying them out on the page, adding frames, clipping where necessary, adding text and then finally adding text bubbles. I've got the layers set up in the blank comics that make it pretty easy to keep the artwork on the bottom, and the text on top, as well as clipping, etc.

Oh, if I have a finished script, this part isn't that hard - usually an hour or so. But if i am still debating lines or changing text (this happens more often than not) this can take anywhere from three to four hours as i sit there whacking my head with a small board while trying to think how to save a terrible comic from itself.

Exporting used to be the biggest hassle. The 'save to web' function is nice, but i find that the quality of the final image is not what i am looking for. What i do instead is export the finished comic to a photoshop file at 300 DPI. On my old computer it would literally take a good 25 minutes to do this. On this newer machine that i upgraded too six months ago, it takes around 5-10 minutes, depending on how much text there is. Once that is done, i'll switch back to Photoshop, clear up any clipping problems, reduce the final comic to 650 x 795, save to a gif file, upload and make the changes in the database to load up the current comic.

So, lessee... on average thats about 1 hour for scripting, 5 hours for drawing, 1.5 hours for scanning and cleaning up, 1.5 hours for illustrator work, and a half hour for exporting and uploading. Thats about 9.5 hours per comic. Three times a week. So, that makes it about 28.5 hours a week on top of my day job to do the comic. Not too bad. :)

There are a lot of other things to add up too, however. Rants take around 1 to 2 hours to write. Things like t-shirt designs and whatnot take time (the MT Stein image took 18 hours to make) dealing with other things (like the Pirogoeth posters, which are now done being printed) and other 'business' stuff here at MT... it easily adds up to another 3 or 4 hours of work a week that most of you never see - sometimes more.

That makes a grand total of around 32 extra hours a week that i commit to Megatokyo. Does that make me certifiable? Not really. It's not as bad as you might think. The biggest problem i have has nothing to do with the amount of work, its problems with coordinating it.

You see, i really do love doing this stuff. I'd put even more time into it if i could, but that 32 hrs is really just about all there is. ^^;; Life's little disasters, bouts of laziness, colds, exhaustion, family, cats, laundry, political upheaval... and stuff like that can disrupt the schedule in major ways because schedule is really tight to begin with. For several months i was REALLY having trouble balancing things, but in the past month or so I seem to have finally got a handle on it (something which is very satisfying, i might add). There's only one small problem that i have, and it has to do with managing the limited access to a resource that both Seraphim and I share here at the Piro&Seraphim abode - the computer.

As many of you know, Seraphim just recently started her graduate studies in the field of Information Sciences. One of the great things about this is that now she too has 'other commitments' outside her full time day job (school full time AND day job - hee hee, we are so much a like ^_^). I feel less guilty than ever for all the work i put into MT, because she's putting as much (if not more) into her studies. What's problematic is that we only have one computer in our lives, and given the nature of her studies and her research, we're finding that she has to spend a LOT of time on the computer - like, everything she has to do.

Now, when it comes to Seraphim's school work, to me, it *always* has higher priority than mine. Unfortunately, she doesn't always see it this way. Last week, after i finished drawing everything, she let me hog the computer for the several hours i needed to finish the comic. What i found out the next day is that she skipped finishing several homework things till the next morning so that i could do the comic. :( While this was very noble of her, it bothered me that she had to scramble the next morning at school to finish her research and get done in time. :/

This weekend we face a very similar situation. Yesterday she had a take-home midterm that she had to work on non-stop from friday night to 4pm saturday. Once she was done with that, she had to work her butt off to finish up another huge project that is due tomorrow. There is a distinct possibility that i might not have a chance to put the comic together as a result tonight, which isn't really a big deal, but it speaks to a larger problem - one computer isn't going to satisfy our computing needs around here anymore, and i need to do something about it.

The solution to this is that I need a new laptop computer - a good one, one which i can run Photoshop and Illustrator and has a good enough screen that i can do graphics work. (i have an old toshiba that has a 10 meg HD and won't even run Word anymore ;_;) It has to be portable for several reasons - first off, i don't have room for another desktop station (no joke, you should see this place), and secondly, i need the ability to be able to take my work with me - sometimes Seraphim's schedule is such that we are on campus pretty late in the evening. Having a decent laptop will basically ensure that i can always be sure to have what i need to do MT stuff no matter what is going on. I'm pretty portable, so is the art, my computer stuff isn't.

The first problem is figuring out what i need, and what kind of machine to get. i was going to get a mac TI for seraphim, but in retrospect i think i need to stick with the windows platform for this. Secondly, I can't afford one right now, which is why i have been debating with myself long and hard about whether it would be right to look towards the MT community for help in acquiring one. Most of you know that I am not a big fan of accepting donations for MT - I'd rather you support our efforts by getting t-shirts and stuff. I know from experience that the MT community is very generous, and I feel that it is my responsibility to make sure that we NEVER take advantage of it, or abuse the trust that people have in us. Considering the nature of this problem, and that it could be several months before i can afford a new laptop, i am wondering if this might be an instance where some help might be acceptable, because it effects the production of the comic directly.

So, i'm basically looking for two things (i know i'm going to regret asking this, i can see the flood of emails already ^^;;). First off, what kind of portable computers would you recommend for my needs? What's a good, reliable machine these days? Screen quality is essential, but what's 'good enough' for graphic work? Secondly, is there anyone out there who can help get me a decent laptop at a reasonable price? Finally, would any of you have a problem with a short-term paypal donation system solely for the purpose of purchasing equipment for mt? In case you were wondering, your support via t-shirt sales, etc has helped Largo and I purchase the new server, a new printer, memory, hard drives, art supplies, software, etc, as well as travel related expenses for the various anime cons. A lot of what we earn for MT goes right back into it.

I'm sure i'll catch some flack for this, but I wouldn't be asking the MT community if i didn't feel that this wasn't something the MT community might not mind helping me with. I love doing MT, and a good laptop would make my life a lot easier. Like i said, the biggest problem i have these days is access to some of the tools i need to do MT (for instance, i usually script comics while away from home, and on paper. Being able to do it right in Illustrator would save me a bunch of time on many occasions). I am still thinking about this, but i need to do something, and i figured i'd give you-all a change to let me know what you think. ^^;;

Speaking of the comic, its Sunday around 3:30, and i really need to get cracking on Monday's comic (thank god for the time change ^_^). If you were wondering how i am able to write this while Seraphim is so busy our home computer? I came over to the office to write and upload this rant ^_^;;; I'm about to head over to the library and find a cubicle somewhere and crank for a while.

Thanks, as always, for your support, and i think that you can look forward to MT being as on-track as it has been in the past four weeks or so without any worries. It's taken a little time to find my second wind, but i did finally find it. ^_^

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

"Tobacco Control"
Friday - November 2, 2001
[Seraphim] - 01:31:00
I have a new haircut and new glasses. My hair was almost long enough to donate to Locks of Love. They use donated hair to make special wigs for sick children. But I would have had to cut it shorter and I wasn't quite ready to go that short - yet! With grad school I have already had to revert to cutting my own bangs again because I don't have time to get into see Luis. Piro was very hestitant about the new cut but he has grown accustomed to it. I must say I was gratified to find out in a forum thread that I am only 5 years too old for one of the MT readers (Maruader).

All I have to rant about is grad school - because that is all I do anymore. Where shall I begin? [edited for scholastic safety ^_^]

I have to agree with all of you who disapprove of Seraphim smoking in the comics. I don't want to ever encourage anyone to smoke. I beg him to not add it. If I had one wish for anything in the world - money, fame, whatever - I would wish that I had never started smoking. It is a very addictive, nasty habit. MoMo hates smoking. He'll jump off my lap when I light up and give me a very dirty, disdainful look. One of my classes just did a study of the Tobacco Control Archives and trust me - we aren't getting reimbursed by the cigarette companies for brand placement.

Piro brought me flowers when he got back from Alpena. He came home to me typing frantically at the computer on my take home midterm so that I never even turned around when he came in. The next day was even worse I sent him out for paper and while alone the cats were tag teaming me for attention. I was typing over them, around them, under their bellies. I got on the cell and hollered for him to come back immediately. Piro finally hid at the office. And he knows he can't complain since he encouraged/forced me to return to school. I don't know what I was thinking when I decided to go to grad school. I am always tired and my eyes go blurry from reading too much. At least the new laptop will give me more computer time. There are many keyboard skirmishes around here.

Luckily we didn't get any Halloween visitors - we didn't have any candy. I thought we were going to have to lay on the floor with the lights off all night. Everyone knows that apartment dwellers don't give out the good candy. We do have two daily visitors though - two more kitties! They are strays that were abandoned in the complex. I like to feed the birds and walked out of the door one day to an explosion of feathers in our yard. I figure it is more eco sensitive to feed the cats than let them annihilate the local bird population. They are semi feral but oh so cute. I love them like my own.

Piro and I worked really hard on the Beer Stein image. I was just the artistic director of course. I described the traditional German 'Trachten' that my friends wore while I lived there. Piro did a quick sketch of a German biergarten slut and I gave him a big NO. It took hours of searching the web for good examples of Dirndls and Lederhosen to get the right look. I was very pleased to hear people though it was authentic looking. If only I could find a video of a Schuhplattler, I would be happy. Yes, the area I lived in the people danced the Schuhplattler and not for the tourist trade. I drank many a Radler Mass and ate many a Wurst while I lived there. I miss the Semmeln, Butterbrezen, Bratwurst, and Lebkuchen. Hopefully, I'll get back there someday and take Piro with me. I'll make him take me when I finally get my masters.

I was appalled to realize that I can't donate blood anymore because I lived in Germany for a year. I couldn't give blood after the N.Y. disaster because of my surgery and now the rules have changed! I was good at giving blood too. I was ALWAYS the fastest and I am O . I need some kind soul out there to donate a pint for me every once in awhile.

If you have a few extra bucks, remember your local charities. Small charities are really hurting by money being diverted to the N.Y. victims charities. My Mom and Dad have worked many years to feed the hungry and food pantries have a special place in my heart. I've seen my parents go grocery shopping on Christmas Eve with their own money when the pantry ran out of food. My folks aren't rich - never have been - but they have never been hungry and cannot bear the thought that others may have an empty belly. I can promise you that people in your own community are hungry right now. We all have to give EXTRA this year.

I guess I did have more than grad school to rant about.

"laptop tracking"
Tuesday - November 6, 2001
[Piro] - 08:10:10
I'm exhausted today, and no, not because of any Megatokyo stuff - the process of making and putting up the comics has actually been downright pleasant and fun in recent weeks. It's just been a bad day. one of those days where each and every thing that happens makes you just wanna curl up in a ball and not come out till everything bad goes away. A day that has me seriously thinking about going home, turning off all the lights, wrapping myself in a blanket, getting some Hot Cocoa, and finishing playing DigiCharat Fantasy on my Dreamcast late into the night until the world realizes that i dont care anymore.

but that wouldn't solve anything. :)

One of the reason's I'm tired is that Seraphim's schedule is gonna kill me - hell, its gonna kill both of us. If you recall in my last rant i went off in a big discussion how we had outgrown our current computer resources - oh ya, that became proven fact over the weekend. Man, what a crunch. Several papers and projects later, we're both just punchy from lack of sleep. And what's funny is that Seraphim was BUSTED! haha! In her rant on monday she mentioned a few things about what she's doing for her class - and someone realized that Seraphim was actually in their class (they just dont know which one in class it is). :) hahaha! It never occurred to her that there might be some MT readers in her class. heh. Poor Seraphim. :)

Oh, on the laptop thing. I'd like to thank everyone who emailed me with advice and information on recommendations and thoughts regarding laptops. It all amounted to well over 700 emails - and within those mails it was pretty easy to see some patterns about what people recommended or had good experiences with. In a nutshell, aside from those of you who tried to convince me to get a Apple Titanium G4 laptop, Dell was the clear winner, with IBM and Sony coming in as secondary choices. I was told to avoid Toshiba and Compaq laptops like the plague. Granted, its not a scientific poll, but thats where the recommendations came in at. Also, i received a plethora of really good and helpful information regarding what works and doesn't work for laptops when it comes to graphics work and other things.

And regarding accepting PayPal donations to help pay for the laptop? Nah. I appreciate all the positive feedback on the idea, but in the end i still would not feel right about it. I've decided that i can foot this bill. I got creative last weekend and figured out how i could swing it.

In fact, my new laptop should be here tomorrow. I ordered a refurbished Dell Inspirion 8100 with all the bells and whistles. Largo is annoyed because it blows his desktop machine away. ^_^ tee hee. On saturday i picked up a Linksys broadband router at CompUSA and got that running so that I could plug the new laptop in and start using it right away. Well, that after I strip Windows ME off that thing and get Win2kpro installed. brrr.

Its odd because it's not really a toy or a luxury, like the idea of getting a laptop always was before. It really is a necessity. Seraphim and I work pretty hard, and I like the idea that i wont be in her hair anymore when she needs to concentrate on things. ^_^

Oh, almost forgot - you might have noticed some banners for Think Geek showing up on the MT site - well, we just started a banner exchange with OSDN which will expose countless unassuming millions to the greatness that is the new Megatokyo Banner ^^;; (and hopefully draw some new readers). Anyways, Good folks at OSDN (things like Slashdot, Freshmeat, SourceForge, etc, are all OSDN sites) as well as that ubergeekycoolstuff store Think Geek.

Ugh. i am tired tho. I'm going to take it a little easy tonight - tomorrows comic is a bit of an experiment - i wont ruin the surprise ^_^

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

"Survival Boredom"
Wednesday - November 7, 2001
[Largo] - 14:07:00
Scott Kurtz continues to produce his sweet comic book, available here. If you've ever wanted to support sites like ours, and Scott's, then please - buy these comics. Scott's work has always been great, but he puts a substantial amount of time into all the material that goes into the print form of Player Vs. Player. I enjoy Scott's work, and I love reading his print comics, so if you have a couple extra bucks, and want to be entertained, order a few of them.

Had megatokyo.com launched two years ago, we'd be a shining example of sucess on the net, instead, we waited until the dot-com fall out to start, so we've been pleased that we can just stay in the black and continue to produce product for your visual pleasure.

Our biggest cost has always been hosting, and with about six million pageviews just last month, you can imagine the situation. In the old days, the more pageviews you had, the better. Getting the kind of traffic we do was a cause to celebrate, now it's just a reason to wince as we pay our bills each month. However, since the dot-economy seems to be recovering, we at MegaTokyo.com felt it was time to seek investors again. Whether one materializes or not, is another story. Interested parties are always welcome to contact us.

In recent news, one MT reader doctor'd up a picture of a military plane with a bomb under it's wing, on the bomb was written 'evil l33t'. I can't help but wonder - with all the MT readers that are currently in the military and overseas in the middle east, if this has ever really happened. The idea that one of the bombs dropped on Afghanistan has one of our catch phrases, or even our site url - is too funny too comprehend. If this was ever the case, I'd kill for a photo of it.

I've been playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto 3 lately... It's way more sweet then the last racing game I picked up, Gran Turismo 3, I've determined the difference between GT3 and GTA3 is the 'A' , well that, and all the car jacking, helicopter crashing, pimp capping, and cop car smashing fun that's included. I'm having so much fun with this game that I've completely stopped trying to play the actual missions, and instead just play own version of the game.

In LGTA3 - Largo's GTA3, the point of the game is to just drive around and run over as many people as possible without getting busted, or blown into tiny bits. While this sounds easy, it's a lot harder then you'd think, the game has this annoying feature where the cops actually try to stop you. I mean come on, the game is called "grand theft auto", if I wanted to be arrested for just mowing down some pimps in my hoopty, I'd go play something with a more puritan sounding name to it.

Now, on with the show, Today's little game rant is written by a friend of mine. While normally I don't post rants by non mt-people, I am making an exception today because I recently lost a bet with him.

KungPao writes " Several months ago, Largo and I headed to CompUSA after work. I wanted to buy a Handspring Visor, and he wanted to look around. When I got there, I discovered that Palm had just released their new m500 series PDAs. In short, these things are incredible. Far too many people have told me that Handspring's PDAs are better, but not a single person has ever given me a valid reason. My Palm m505 is attractive (it has the form-factor of the Palm V); it's lightweight; it has color and a sharp, backlit display; and it's every bit as expandable as the Visor. Largo was seethingly jealous, and almost bought one himself.

Instead, he bought a PlayStation 2. He and I have enjoyed countless hours of fun playing Onimusha, The Next Tetris, Devil May Cry, and more. A week ago, he bought Grand Theft Auto III and Silent Hill 2. GTA3 is fun. SH2 sucks corn-filled fecal matter out of gay, horny rhinoceros bottoms.

An increasing number of game developers have a severe problem: they have no talent. Look at Silent Hill 2, for instance. We start out with no context, no information to give us an idea of what to do. Our only lead is that we're standing in what appears to be a turd-covered public restroom. The instant we walk out (or moonwalk out, as Largo did), not five seconds after we start playing, we have a cut scene. Well why the hell didn't you just give us an intro movie? Fine, we discover that we've received a letter from our wife, Mary, who (huge surprise here) is dead. Oh my! How horrifying! I'm turning on every light in the room because I'm suddenly afraid that my long-lost grandfather will send me an Instant Message. Not only do we have to suffer this trite, hackneyed plot device, but the voice actor pauses and hesitates in mid-sentence so much that I'm starting to worry about a William Shatner career rebirth.

Never mind that, it's time to find the conveniently placed GPS device. I mean map. No wait, it's paper, but our little green arrow tells us exactly where we are and in what direction we're facing. Christ on a cracker, there's nothing more chilling than OMNISCIENT PAPER! We then try to run down the main road that appears on our FishFinder2000, only to discover that we can't. Instead, the game designers have decided that they're only going to give us one option. See, they've planned a little rendezvous with an anonymous woman down in the graveyard and they want to make sure we don't do anything at all until we've had a pleasant conversation with her about our live-again, die-again wife and the missing graves of her family. You see, according to her, *SPOILER ALERT* there's something wrong with the town. In order to have this wonderful little tete-a-tete, we have to run down a little path with invisible force fields on either side, which prevent us from straying into the fog of war. I mean mist. Well, whatever it is, you can't see through it at all until you get to within a certain distance of it, and then the next layer of it disappears and you can see for another few feet. Just like real fog. No wait, just like... no wait, I don't know what it's like, but it's really damn annoying.

I don't want to spoil too much, so I won't tell you about the long, uneventful run along a deserted road. In town, the same mysterious not-quite-fog ails our vision as we try to find a road that isn't completely blocked off. One obstacle is a row of 55-gallon drums with police tape strung across. Being good, law-abiding citizens, we're unable to cross this formidable wall. Finally, we run down the path that the developers wanted us to discover ("Oh my god, and then they could, like, have to find this path, and they can't do anything until they do, and we won't give them any clues, they can just figure it out, and like, isn't that really clever?") until we come to yet another barrier. This one, though, is special, because inside a little tunnel we stumble upon a cut scene. Our expressionless character finds what appears to be a pack of cigarettes. It isn't until you open your inventory that you have any idea what it was, and then you find out that it's a radio that gives off static when monsters are near. Oh yeah, and he finds a zombie. Well, it's not a zombie so much as it's a retard in a shrink-wrap body bag, struggling to get out. Conveniently, our ingenious developer has planned for a wooden plank to be close at hand. Since he can't trust us to be able to play the game for ourselves, he gives it to our character in a cut scene. Now that our wills are in tune with the developer's, we're allowed to attack the creature. We couldn't possibly just run away because the developer has another Oscar-winning cut scene planned, so the exit is blocked. So we bash the zombie a couple of times and it falls on the ground. The cut scene begins, and our character clambers past the blocked exit. See, he couldn't do that before because the zombie umm, had Jedi powers and umm, he like, put up this force shield behind us, and when we umm, killed him umm, he like umm, stopped... and stuff.

Well we run back to town, and the unsurpassable is now quite surpassable, as the yellow police tape has been mysteriously broken. As we wander around looking for something to do, more zombies attack us. Now, they weren't there earlier, because their leader, the zombie in the tunnel, had been using his Jedi powers to prevent them from attacking us. But now, of course, the leader has joined the ranks of glowing, blue apparitions with Yoda and Obiwan (but not Quigon), and the others have free reign. What's fun about the others, though, is that they have a breath weapon. See, they're actually dust mephits, and they can breathe this cloud of sand on you which does... something and you can bash them. But when they get bashed, they fall down and then scramble around by pushing themselves along with their legs and they move in random arcs, to the accompaniment of odd clicking noises, and nibble your ankles if you get too close.

Well around about this time, Largo and I were completely bored and extremely annoyed by the grating piano string soundtrack the developers put so much effort into. So Largo went off to talk to Ruby and I sat down to tell you about this game that, apparently, has been dubbed "Creepiest Game of 2001" by many of our beloved developer brown-nosers, which most of you call "Press". Look, the only thing creeping me out right now is the thick layer of green algae that's building up on the inside of Largo's fish tank. I think I'll go play Solitaire on my Palm."

"Harry Potter"
Monday - November 12, 2001
[Ruby] - 20:39:00
(Largo here for a sec, today's rant is being taken over by my girlfriend, so without further ado, I present – a Ruby rant.)

Earlier this year my life changed.

A man whom I never fully knew and loved at the same time, the man who helped me financially through college, and said that next time he would see me it would be at my wedding, died. My grandfather loved Arizona, and the Diamondbacks on Sunday, November 4th made one of his wishes come true, even if he missed seeing it by four months, almost to the day.

It was a time of pain to me, a man that I saw invincible had been taken by illness and I was awestruck. I needed a way to cope and as the reality sunk in, I needed something to make me just for a moment see reality in a different way or not at all.

So thus, Harry Potter.

The commercials for the movie had just started really heavy. I had never read the books, and the commercials were just enough to give me a glance..of something I then lacked. So I bought the first one, lucky for me it had just gone to paper back and wasn't twenty dollars.

Harry Potter, the tortured kid who lives under the stairs who gets to see a new life for the first time in a land of mystery of magic. This place of imagination was a breath of fresh air in otherwise painful time for me. To smile as I saw in my head the world of Hogwarts open up to me, was a delight, and a break from all the pain and all the reality around me. In the first week I read all four of them, each in a day. Watching Harry potter fight in magic duels, fight off the bad guys, and deal with sadness in his own way as well, even if it was only in my head, gave me a place to go to take comfort.

Do you remember when we were kids? I used to dream of being an astronaut and flying in space. or being a great mind that would give lectures, or being that award winning actress, or even being a wizard in some castle and having magic and magic spells. I knew in my mind that this eight year old was never going to see a dragon, but I didn't care...

Harry Potter brought that back to me, reminded me that we need to have fun, sometimes we need to stop trying to be adults...and just, daydream a bit. So after closing that book every day, I would shut my eyes and let my mind take me to Hogwarts..where magic does exist...where life was different and new.

Some find this escapism unhealthy..unnatural. I call it ..a release. And something I desperately needed

Now, after the attacks of September 11, we all stand vulnerable. Our imaginations stolen and replaced with words like "Terrorist and Anthrax," leaving us to wonder if we even have fantasies anymore. Our dreams have been replaced with nightmares, our souls marred from the vivid images the media "graced" us with that fateful day and every day after.

Its time we all had that release. Find a book or a place of your own, where you can let your mind free. We all need to let the world go, if even just for a hour or two. And you can guarantee that I will be in line for Harry Potter on Nov. 16.

"annoucement"
Thursday - November 15, 2001
[Largo] - 21:32:00

"lazy piro week"
Friday - November 16, 2001
[Piro] - 12:27:00
Well, back when we switched to a 'chapter' based format, i said that i wouldn't use the end of a chapter as an excuse to take a break, to goof off and be generally lazy. I apologize for the unfortunate 'Omake' examples on monday and friday, and for the fact that there was really only one good comic this week (tho i felt that Wedneday's comic came out pretty good). Anyways, everyone seems happy enough, and thanks for being patient. I could sit here and say that i have been working hard on scripting out more of chapter 2, but the truth is that i've had writers block all week, and there has been little progress on it. Chapter 2 SHOULD start on monday, i'm hoping this block dissipates - after all, the stuff we come up with this week basically lays out what we will be doing for the next month and a half. So, its a bit more stress than usual.

My new laptop is working out very well - better than i expected, actually. For a while I was having a real problem with the fact that the colors on he screen were -really- off - but a little twiddling with Adobe Gamma and suddenly everything looks fine. While it's true that you really shouldn't trust a LCD screen for detailed color work, it's more than good enough for what i do. :)

If you remember, i mentioned that i had installed a Linksys cable/dsl broadband router so that seraphim and i could have net access. It worked great, but soon after i installed it, a friend talked me into going wireless... so the next thing i knew, i was placing an order at CDW for a Linksys EtherFast Wireless Cable/DSL Access Point/Router (which is really the same router i had with a wireless access point ^_^) and a sweet little Lucent ORiNOCO World PC Card - Silver card. I figured that i'd leave the thing plugged in most of the time, and that the wireless stuff would be nice when i need to sit around or move around - but what i've discovered is that this wireless stuff is REALLY neat. Sometimes, being chained to one location while trying to be creative is REALLY hard. the ability to move around the apartment, sit in a chair and type and think... is really pretty invaluable. I've been VERY happy with this combo - and so has Seraphim, because now she can work on her stuff and i don't have to bother her at all.

What happened to the old router? Well, i brought that back to where i purchased it, and exchanged it for a new scanner ^_^ I couldn't connect my old UMAX Astra 1200S to the laptop (it's a SCSI scanner) so i really needed some kind of USB scanner - and the little Canon CanoScan N670U talk about a sweet little scanner. Same rez as the big scanner, and more color depth. Wednesdays and fridays comic/omake's were made using the new scanner.

While it's true that the new laptop has distracted me to a certain extent (i was watching some Card Captor Sakura DVDs last night ^_^) it really has made it easier for me to work on stuff. That means that my writers block is completely in my head, and i can't blame it on equipment this time ^_^

I suppose i look at a new chapter as good opportunity to make some significant improvements, or leaps in evolution of Megatokyo as an online comic/manga - and of course this challenge only makes it that much worse. ^_^ I turn to a lot of things for inspiration - When we started, i was really into FLCL and Excel Saga. It was the Love Hina manga that inspired me to go to a full page format. Maison Ikkoku was an inspiration to some of the storytelling aspects. Kaitou St tail, Mimi o Sumaseba, Shamanic Princess, Vampire Princess Miyu, Digi Charat... there are dozens and dozens of shows and manga titles that inspire me in one way or another. What happens to be inspiring you at a given time is always an interesting set of circumstances.

At this very moment, the things that i'm looking to for inspiration are various works of Koge Donbo, like Pitaten (i love this manga) and Snow Sugar (inspiring Megatokyo?? ^^;;) Koge Donbo is the gal who created DigiCharat, in case you were wondering. :) Another big influence is Comic Party, the tv anime in particular - as well as the game (which i now have and need to find time to play.)

I'm still trying to figure out how to get largo's world to mesh with all that - but hey, thats part of the fun. :)

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

"four days, my fault"
Tuesday - November 27, 2001
[Piro] - 11:17:00
I hope everyone had a good holiday. Me, i barely survived it, but I blame that on the way i am wired.

Depending on your personality, a nice four day weekend can be viewed as either an opportunity to relax, visit family, chill out, play some games, and generally goof off and get some rest, or an opportunity to catch up on allllll the things you've been letting slide because you've been too busy to fit them in before. This is how I viewed the holiday. :)

Now, for me, the family thing wasn't too difficult. Luckily, Seraphim and I don't live very far from our families, so travel time and headaches were not an issue this year (on Wednesday, I got a call from Largo as he spent two hours attempting to get thru the traffic jam that had enveloped his city on his way to visit his 'significant other' for the holiday. I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to talk him out of ramming various vehicles around him ^^;;) That doesn't mean that i was able to actually DO anything thursday - by the time we got home, the day was shot, and I decided that i needed a break and blew off the friday comic. Sounds like a real recipe for goofing off, doesn't it? Yea, right.

Friday morning i woke early and looked around the apartment. Now, you have to keep in mind that Seraphim and I are pretty busy people. She works full time AND goes to grad school full time. I have my day job and then work on Megatokyo most of the rest of the time. Add midterms, on and off flu for both Seraphim and I, and one sick kitty - you get the idea. The apartment needed some time devoted to it.

It's funny where we sometimes get inspiration for things, and where we look for encouragement to do tasks that we don't REALLY want to do. Cleaning the apartment, top to bottom is NOT a favorite task of mine. After a few cups of coffee, some pop tarts, and a few episodes of Mahoromatic, i was finally inspired attack the tasks at hand. Hey, i'll take inspiration from wherever I can get it. :)

I did a LOT of drawing over the four day weekend. In the next few days, i'll be finishing up a few pieces (some of which are destined for the MT store - Christmas stuff, you know ^_^;;). Actually, the best work i did is not really 'specific' to christmas - I think you folks should like it. It's based on a joke i made a long time ago, but it's still amusing. :P

Speaking of christmas presents to yourself, my laptop is working out very well - very well indeed. I could get spoiled by this. The best thing about it is that now, when i am truly in a grumpy, discouraged, foul mood because i can't think worth crap, i can go curl up in my chair, and huddle in a dark cloud with the laptop on my lap. It doesn't mean i am actually any more productive, but it sure helps in my attempts to get sympathy from Seraphim (i didn't say it works, i just said it helps in my efforts to make her feel sorry for me. ^^;;)

The other thing i did was get myself a new laptop bag. I've been stuffing my laptop in my Flapdoozy, but the pack isn't really designed for laptops (especially big ones like mine). I've been worried that it might get damaged, so I went and got myself a Mixmaster bag... supposedly, it works well as a laptop bag. We'll see when i get it.

Sorry about the rather bumpy start to Chapter 2 - episode 2 and 3 were a struggle, for some reason - maybe it was the holidays, getting started back up, i dunno. I think they are good, just... not executed as well as I could have done them. Actually, i plan on going back and fixing up 2 and 3 a little in the near future, but that will have to wait till i really get back on track.

So much for my 'short' rant. I think i need to get on the phone and smack largo around a little. Nothing irritates me more than a 'happy' largo.

[heheh, all joking aside - congrats to Rod and Ruby on their engagement. Best wishes, and, oh... Ruby... i did warn you. :P)

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

"Mullet Gear Solid 2"
Tuesday - December 4, 2001
[Largo] - 14:47:00
First up, Christmas time is here, which means, Christmas MegaTokyo Merchandise is available!

Also, as promised long ago, you can now order Ph33r My L33t N3kkId Skillz!!! boxer shorts and other assorted items. Just think how cool it will be have a naked Largo in your pants. This one is that perfect stocking stuffer for someone you loath, er.. love.

It's really sad to think that what will likely be heralded the best game of 2000, was mediocre.

I speak none other then, Mullet Gear.. er.. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Now before I proceed to bash it, I will engage in the standard practice of saying something nice about the game, then beat it into the ground with an ugly stick. This is a method used by game reviewers to make us seem more professional.

For all of MGS2's technical merits, and great gameplay, the game has lost a lot of the charm that it had in MGS. The very world that was so painstakingly crafted for us to save in MGS, is gone.

It's my belief that the game designers got really loaded, called in sick the next day, and let some philosophy/art students that were interning take time off from bringing them coffee and donuts to let them write what passes for plot in MGS2. Sure the game is fun, so long as you wear a blindfold and earmuffs while interacting with the characters. Besides that, it's great.

From a technical achievement, the game is a milestone, a new standard by which to measure tactical simulations. It's just too bad that in the effort to make such outstanding game play, they forgot about the whole 'plot' thing.

In comparison, I've been playing another game as of late, with great game play, and as good a plot as in MGS2. The game is called, Super Monkey Ball. Apparently, there are these monkeys, and they have balls, big giant balls, which you use to move about. My friends and I spent the entire evening coming up with monkey and ball related jokes from this one.

Playing with your super monkey balls is never a dull experience. I recommend this game for parties with people who don't drink beer, but still want to experience the effects of public humiliation and shame. Seriously though, we had a lot of fun with our monkey balls, and I hope you fun with yours' too.

"i wear this chaos well"
Wednesday - December 5, 2001
[Piro] - 13:01:22
Well, it is finally up, out, and official.
No, I am not talking about Piro admitting
he is good at something. I am talking
about the new Hosting Company, ColoGuys .

ColoGuys was created to be 'The Name'
behind the hosting. After many long
discussions, the services are now being
offered publicly.

There are a few services which are not
listed yet, as they are not fully ready
for the public and are still in testing.
One particular one I would like to
mention is the Shared WebHosting which
is hoped to be available soon.

"Doujinshi rule #5"
Sunday - December 16, 2001
[Piro] - 11:39:00
Well, its Sunday morning, and it's been almost a week since I did a real Megatokyo strip. After spending most of the week apologizing, agonizing over the delays, excuses, and the inability to really write anything decent, I had to face it: with the exception of Monday's comic, last week was a total write-off. I decided that rather than try to catch up from behind, it was more important to concentrate on getting back on my feet for the following week. In working on this rant, which has been floating around in my head for days, I think I learned a little bit about myself from the problems that caused the catastrophic failure in my ability to produce this comic for the past several days.

Whenever I hit snags, overreact to criticism, get sick, or am just in some incurable petulant funk, the readers and fans of Megatokyo hear about it, know about it, and deal with it almost as much as the people who are around me in real life. I think that this annoys some people (as evidenced by a few rather delightful emails this week) but in concept, that's part of what makes Megatokyo tick. Part of the 'entertainment' factor of this site, IMHO, is the fact that we (well, me mostly) are pretty open and communicative about what is going on in our everyday lives. Unfortunately, because of the time intensive nature of the comic itself, when things knock me around, the comic usually suffers. I like to believe that things like the forums, the IRC channel, as well as just the archives of comics themselves keep this site at least mildly interesting when things do go to hell around here for short periods of time. Granted, there is usually some hiccup every month (much to the chagrin of one particular reader) but hey - so sue me. :P

I think that one of the 'value added' features of this site, is that I try to convey what the experience has been like to go from just another anime fan who worked hard to learn how to draw, to being the artist and main author behind what is arguably a very successful and popular webcomic (even I can't deny the numbers these days - we had well over 7.5 million page views last month, and we guestimate that our audience hovers around 200,000.) If you read my rants, its because you like to hear about and perhaps learn from my experiences doing this. I remember hearing from some people that they found MT annoying because it spawned so many 'knockoff' comics that tried to be just like it. Peh. To me, the fact that I get several emails a week that basically say 'you inspired me to start drawing again'... that makes me feel really good. Megatokyo isn't perfect, and neither am I, but maybe that's what attracts people to it - if that doofus piro can do this, maybe I can too...

I have a theory that most people out there are frustrated creators - you WANT to draw, you would LOVE to be able to make the things you enjoy, but due to what you consider lack of skills or ability, you are stuck in a 'consumer' mode. Sadly, that's exactly where the entertainment industry wants you - they don't WANT you making your own music. They don't WANT you making your own stories. They want you to buy them from people who can 'do it better than you can' because you only have so much attention span, and they want to own all of it. A few hundred years ago, before you could buy all your entertainment pre-packaged on nice shiny little disks or whatnot, people had to pretty much entertain themselves. Sure, there was always the traveling bard or musician that really could perform, but people would entertain themselves in the gaps. Over the years, the entertainment industry has done a very good job of convincing us that 'entertainment' isn't worth listening to, reading or watching unless it comes from them, in much the same way that we have a skewed idea of what 'beauty' is because girls compare themselves to what they see on TV and in magazines (leading to a lot of self worth problems and depression). Webcomics, as well as other things you find on the web, represent a challege to these schools of thought.

I can also argue that Anime and Games themselves challenge these concepts - games allow you to interact with them in ways that can be incredibly immersive, and becoming skillful at gaming is a feat that many people work very hard at and are proud of. Anime inspires a lot of things, both here and in Japan. Here in the states, fans work very hard to do everything from translate anime series, work hard at putting conventions together, anime showings, clubs, cosplaying, drawing and whatnot - building communities around such activities become virtual 'neighborhoods' for many people (Megatokyo is an example of this). In japan, the main way anime fans work to show appreciation for a series is thru the creation of 'doujinshi' (quite literally, 'fan works') - and doujinshi conventions are major events these days, where fans strive to create works that express their feelings and love for the genere. Megatokyo itself is considered a Doujinshi, and 'original' work. People love to create, and the the activities that we are involved with are just a few that inspire creative work from 'ordinary people'

Being what I consider an 'ordinary person', you have to look a little deeper to find out just what the motivation is for me to devote 36 hours of time a week, outside of the 40 hrs on my day job, doing this comic. I notice that whenever I have a glitch, or I whine that I'm not gonna have a comic done, or someone disses me in an email, I tend to get a lot of email replies and direct replies from folks that almost all follow the same lines: "dude, it's your comic, do whatever the hell you want" "how can they complain, it's free!" etc, etc etc. I think I want to explain a few things about how I look at the reasons why I do this comic, and why I react the way I do sometimes.

Most you probably remember that on Monday, I received an email where I was told that Kimiko reacting moodily to the rail card she still carried in her purse was 'presumptuous' and 'contrived' and that he hoped that it didn't represent a trend in the comic. Now, being at work, struggling under the pressure to get a bunch of stuff done there, I admit - I over-reacted. I had a friend on the IRC channel make a blank page that read 'this comic has been pulled until further notice', replaced the Monday strip, and went back to work in a huff. Last time I pulled a stunt like that, the comic wasn't anywhere near as widely read as it is these days, so I wasn?ft really prepared for the snowballing effect that little stunt caused ^^;;;; It didn't help that in the forum, and in talking to friends, I basically said 'fine, they don't want story stuff, screw it, I'll just pull all the story stuff out and just do joke comics.'

I don't know why I get into snits like that. What I do know is that when you create something, you often feel that one of the perks of being the creator of a creative work is the right and the ability to destroy it at will to prove a point or to reinforce a sense of ownership. Doing this, however, is not right, and is beneath me. It's just like someone pointed out to me in the forums: 'stop jerking your fans around and acting like a petulant child'. Indeed, I couldn't agree more. So, WHY did this upset me? "It's your comic dude, your site, do whatever the hell you want. We don't pay anything for it."

ah. but that's not really true.

People invest something far more important than money in Megatokyo and the works that Largo and I have created - they have invested their attention, their loyalty, their time, and a piece of their grey matter to Megatokyo. These are things that money can't buy. Sure, money usually follows fandom - fans of a series they are emotionally attached to will almost always spend money they don't even have for bits and pieces of things related to it. To me, the entertainment industry spends more time chasing money rather than hearts. Remember the buzzword 'capturing eyeballs'? No wonder the net economy fell apart. It's not about capturing eyeballs - eyes don't have brains, they see whatever you put in front of them. Getting thru to people's souls is what you really want to do. Remember my comments on 'emotional attachment' way back when? Never would I have figured that such a phrase could even be loosely applied to my work - but I think that recently, to an extent, it can be. You have no idea how proud I am of that fact.

And this is why I have such a deep sense of responsibility towards doing the best I possibly can on Megatokyo. And this is also why, when I feel like I let even one person down - I take it to heart. Now, I don't feel the need to start changing things or doing things according to what people think I should do - I said when I started this, "give people a little of what they want, and a whole lot of what they don't know they want." - which is why every time I try something a little different, or pursue things the way I think they should go, I get nervous. I don't want to disappoint people, but at the same time, I have a vision, and largo does too, of where things need to go.

Comics are a form of communication. I'm a pretty emotive person (this is part of what makes me such a friggin drama queen :P) and conveying emotions, whether it is humor, sadness, joy, annoyance, frustration, fear - whatever - feeling emotions is part of being human. We love to feel things. Stories enable us to feel emotions without actually going thru the experiences. Some feelings we never really want to feel, some we dream about feeling. Either way, a good story serves all parts of our soul, and I think that's why so many people are attracted to anime and manga. Unlike the commercially driven crud that the American entertainment industry tends to feed us (don't get me wrong, some of it is awesome, I'm talking as a whole) did you ever wonder why so many people go to such great lengths to collect stories and whatnot that are in a language they don't even understand? That's why I feel that this is such a great medium to reach people with - and so far, I think my theories on the matter have pretty much held true.

On Monday, I felt that I had a failure in that communication. Remember the comic where kimiko was in color and she had just received the rail card? I call em 'no punchline comics' I remember getting 'what's the joke?' emails. (sigh) It was very depressing. But I stuck to my guns, and didn't back down. Why I reacted the way I did Monday, I don?ft know. I'm tougher than that. If someone doesn't feel what I was trying to communicate in a strip, then it?fs a small failure, and I can learn from it, but it's no reason to back down. Most people, I think, got the message.

As for missing comics - I get upset about missing comics, having to use filler, or not having anything up at all not because some people whine about it, or even because I feel that I let people down when they expect to find something there (well, I do feel that a little) - it frustrates me because I want to tell the story, make people laugh for feel sad or whatever, and each missed comic is a missed opportunity. When I started MT, something about the concept that Largo was pushing on me made sense - figure out what the maximum amount of time between 'episodes' can be - what was the maximum span between comics you could have and still hold people's attention. It's not one a week, its not two a week. Three a week, I believe, is what people need to follow a story. I miss one day, I break the flow. It upsets me more than it could possibly upset anyone else. Doing three a week is a VERY tight schedule for me. Sure, if I could do this full time it'd be easy. I figure another year of hard work, I might just be able to do that. But for now, I gotta do the extra push to keep things going. Since its so tight, when I fall, or have a bad week, everyone sees it. It's embarrassing, its depressing, and... well, it's part of what MT is. This is my comic, this is my life. Please don't throw tomatoes at me. :) But if I am going to do what I want to do here, I have to stick to 3 a week - it?fs a worthy struggle.

Most fans of Bill Waterson (Calvin and Hobbs) have probably read his comments in his '10th anniversary book'. It's sad reading - he sounds as if he was frustrated and beset upon for much of the time he was producing Calvin and Hobbs. Yet, in ways I can SO totally respect, he was stubborn about it to the end, even though you get the feeling that he was pretty hurt in the process. You have no idea how much respect I have for this man. Considering what I've learned about the creative process and myself, it's sad reading. What is most sad is that while we were all laughing and enjoying his strips, none of us knew what was going on in his mind. The nature of syndicated comics being what they are, we were isolated from the very person who made the strip we love so much. We had to wait 10 years to find out what was on his mind.

While there is no comparison between the genius that is Calvin and Hobbs, and this pathetic excuse for a 'comic', I do feel a little kinship to the struggles that anyone who does this has. The benefit that I have is that not only do you get to see the chunk of my soul that goes into the comic, but the rest of it as well, down here in the rants, in my posts on the forums, little newsbits about the ongoing disaster I call 'my life' - and hell, you can even talk to me one on one if you like (I hang out pretty regularly in the #megatokyo channel on irc - tho you sort of have to catch me when I am not too busy, which isn?ft that often ^^;;;). Perhaps it?fs a little bit of a burden for fans to get this - but then, you don?ft have to read the rants. But if you don?ft, you are missing out on part of what makes MT what it is.

The screenshot above is from 'Comic Party', a game and anime from Leaf that is the story about a guy named Kazuki who 'accentually' falls into becoming a doujinshi artist. When I first watched this series, it kinda freaked me out. It's like a mini-history of Megatokyo, from the crazy friend Taishi who cajoles you into drawing a doujinshi, to the 'girlfriend' Mizuki who doesn?ft like anime, the crazy people and the quiet people who spur you on... very scary. Anyway, Taishi is the know-all source of all things doujinshi, and in the course of training Kazuki in the ways of Doujinshi, he lists several rules - 'convention rules', but lets call them 'doujinshi rules', because that?fs basically what they are. The little girl shown above is the first one to buy one of his books - and in his flustered reaction to actually having someone WANT to buy his work, he forgets to thank her. Taishi then tells the audience what doujinshi convention rule number five is - it is the most important rule...

"Always be grateful."

Indeed, I think this is one area where I fall short sometimes. After all, without fans and people who invest their time, attention and loyalty to Megatokyo, I wouldn?ft be able to communicate things to anyone. People tell me 'do it for yourself' - the truth is, I do - but the joy comes from being able to communicate to people, to make people feel something. Just drawing pictures for myself to hang on my wall has no meaning. As long as people enjoy what I do, I'll keep doing things like MT, and will always, always be grateful - because that, in the end, is the exchange that matters. Not money for product, but attention, loyalty and feedback from fans, in exchange for respect, hard work, and the best comics I can possibly produce. It's a fair trade, I think. :)

I'll end this very long winded rant with a quote from the forums that really made me smile yesterday. Hansagan wrote:

Personally I find the little dramas of the forums, the occasional delays and other hiccups almost as entertaining as the comic itself. This thread is a good example of that, and probably something you would never find in a 'professional' strip.

Oh, and I'd like to extend a quick word of thanks to mirvje, who was patient enough to help me out with something last weekend, and I want him to know I appreciate it ^_^ And yet another poor fellow finds out just how annoying I am to work with :P

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

"Time to recover."
Monday - December 17, 2001
[Dom] - 13:44:02
Wow. Finally, the holiday work rush is over. It's been a long couple of months for me, full of stress and pissiness. Hell, during some of the longer work days, I've almost been as bad as Fred at times.

Wait, no, I take that back, it didn't get that bad. There was always a game to keep my mind off of hurting people and on hurting little digital representations of people. But before I get into games, like I always do, I have to get into the shout-outs and freak-outs.

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting Kara of Con Screw, and... oh, crap, I forget their names, but they're behind Fans!, which is cool in my book because they had a crossover with Knights of the Dinner Table, one of my favorite print comics out there. They're nice people, and though Kara's comic is a bit regional in its humor (It makes much more sense if you've ever been to an east coast convention), they're still worth at least a good look. Unfortunately, they're on keenspace's servers, which have never been kind to me.

Speaking of fun people, due to my fiendish plotting (and my roommate's purchase of a bun-bun plushie), I now know Shirt Guy Tom's home address. He lives less than fifteen minutes from my parents. I'm torn between christmas caroling at his apartment, or perpetrating some sort of fiendish prank involving stick figures. One suggestion is that I take cardboard standups, draw stick figures on them and surround his door with him. I'm still torn, myself... maybe I'll just e-mail him and talk to him about it instead of the readers--nah, I'll let you guys inform him, it's more fun that way.

On with the games! I recently installed Win2K for the Japanese support, and after finishing with Party's Breaker (which cheats on higher difficulty levels by cutting your damage and boosting the computer's by a ridiculous amount) I cast about for worthwhile Japanese games to play. Finding none, I grabbed Pia Carrot he Youkoso!! 3. Despite being a horrible prude (Ask cortana about how I've run screaming from his room before), it's a pleasant enough game--there are some pretty funny jokes in there, a few decent romance stories, but the rest is an excuse to put girls in uniforms and have sex with them. Yes, I know, many of you will cry "What's wrong with that?", but, well, I'm not a big fan of the porn games Fred likes (Yes, I'm making fun of Fred a lot, but well, I work for him, I'm allowed to ;p).

Strangely enough, after installing Win2K and setting it to Japanese, I got sucked into the updates of some truly vintage games--Civ 3 and Wizardry 8.

Civ 3 is just like the Civ I remember, with only a couple real changes. Taking a cue from my favorite Civ-type game (with Colonization a close second), they started differentiating the civilizations, giving them a selection of special abilities that affect things like industrial production, corruption, military experience, etc. The thing is that unlike Alpha Centauri, the differences don't affect the AI much--while you had a host of different strategies to expect in Alpha Centauri, the AI in Civ 3 has one path to victory: build cities wherever there's room (and some places there aren't). It annoys me to no end, especially since the Culture factor (also refined from an Alpha Centauri concept) means that the cities they build in your desert will eventually desert to you.

I like the addition of strategic resources--it makes city placement more important than just "Hmm, how much food can I get and how many shields?". Now, I have to ask myself "Alright, is this close enough to the coal mine? Or should I just take over Jerusalem for its saltpeter and trade it to the Russians for their supply?". I also like the separation of Workers and Settlers--another Alpha Centauri concept.

But my biggest complaint about Civ is this: Where are the diplomats? The espionage system is okay, and nice and fast, but I would've appreciated diplomats. See, when I was younger and playing Civ, it was one of my ambitions to be a diplomat. But I wouldn't be a wussy diplomat that would always be captured and sold for 50 gold. No sir, I'd be a tech-stealing, production-sabotaging, water-poisoning ass-kicker of a diplomat, you know, like Colin Powell or something. It was a source of endless joy when my diplomats threw around large amounts of money and brought the enemy forces flocking to my banner--or if they didn't accept my bribe, having his escort send them to kingdom come. But now, it's all down to a series of menus and the Intelligence Agency, which, while convenient, is much less personal... I long for AC's probe teams, they were much more efficient.

Ah, well. On to Wizardry 8. The last Wizardry I played was something like 3--I remember running that sucker on my cousin's 286, and, like all other Wizardry players, I remember the long pain of hitting Reroll 600 times so I could get that damnably rare Faerie Ninja. I usually ended up wussing out and getting a dwarven ninja instead. But this time around, I like the character creation system a lot better. It removes the pain of waiting for your bonus point pool to be large enough to make a character you can use--though some masochists I know kind of miss hitting reroll a million times.

Another bit of Wizardry 8 that I appreciate was best described by a co-worker of mine: "It doesn't feel like I'm navigating a six-headed monster anymore". Common to Might and Magic, Wizardry, and (to a small extent) the Gold Box games, the "One perspective, lotsa fighters in a line" system is replaced with a formation and movement system which works well. I can now maneuver into a safe corner and let the monsters come at my samurai and two valkyries while everyone else throws rocks, or protect my flanks with my ninja and my priest as my psionicist and bard drop bombs from the middle. I like it, even if it does become high-maintenance every once in a while.

Anyway, enough pontificating about PC games--next time, I'll talk about the console games that have been sucking out my soul (namely, Dead or Alive 3 and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance) and other subjects I geek out on, like sports.

Well, a preview of that--I am thankful for the Euro symbol, as it, combined with the yen and dollar signs, make it so much easier to spell "Fuck the Yankees".

Yes, I'm an Oakland fan. Let the hate mail flow.

"christmas break"
Thursday - December 27, 2001
[Piro] - 07:26:01
gah... it looks like i picked a good week to take a hiatus. ^^;;

Largo moved the server to a new location on Monday, and, well... we've had some glitches along the way. The faithful old hard drive seems to have seen better days, so largo had to rebuild the system drive - and, well... some stuff is still in flux.

Oh, and my email was bouncing for a few days, but piro@megatokyo.com is working again.

There are a few other things, but stuff should be working fine for the rest of you. [note - as of 9:00am this morning, everything is now working just peachy ^_^]

As far as my little 'hiatus' this week - it was definately needed. I feel rested for the first time in a long while. I have a massive deadline at work looming over me until the 3rd of next week. This little break made Christmas doable and my deadline reasonable.

All is not completely lost, really - the guys from Mac Hall are whipping up a guest comic for tomorrow, so be sure to drop back in tomorrow to see it.

Thanks for the holiday, folks (even if there are some who are predicting that this is the death of MT - peh, gimmie a break) MT will be back in the groove next week.

oh yea, and if anyone knows anything about the comcast switchover from roadrunner here in lower michigan - let me know.

"Comcast Blues..."
Sunday - December 30, 2001
[Piro] - 16:44:00
(grumble)

Ok, its around 4:00pm, and I just got to the office (I have to work this weekend - big ass deadline on the 3rd - one of the many reasons that i am damn glad that i took a little week off - jeeze) but that's not why i am taking a few minutes out to write this.

Last night, around 2:30 am, Comcast did the big changeover for all of us cable modem users here in lower michigan in the Ann Arbor / Ypsilanti area who were on the Roadrunner system (we were MediaOne for the longest time). Of course, as you can read in this lovely article over on ArsTechnica, Comcast is pulling some really funky shit with the software package you have to install. I never did figure out if they were switching from MAC address verification to PPPoE or something like that - but lets just say it was a pain in the ass this morning. First off, i was dead set against installing their software. I do NOT LIKE the idea of being forced to use a 'branded' Comcast browser, and this 'support.com' thing that they install - talk about severe privacy violation issues. Anyways, once i realized that there was no way around it, i installed the frickin software.

So, you'd think that after that, everything would be peachy-keen, right? Wrong. Oddly enough, my net connection started working again and was just fine. IRC came online, Yahoo.com loaded, everything seemed fine.

Then i tried to load the megatokyo.com page. Nothing. Couldn't find it.

After verifying that the server was indeed working, i came to the conclusion, after attempting to ping the MT server that perhaps the new Comcast DNS server wasn't working properly, and didn't have the address in it, so i switched to another set of DNS servers. That fixed the ping problem. In fact, my email worked, ftp worked, i could SSH into the MT box, everything worked fine...

But i still could not load a webpage from megatokyo.com. fredart.com and none of the other stuff on that box would read either. I tried different browsers, rebooting, even entering in the raw IP address... nothing. It would sit there for a long time, then finally give up.

Puzzled, largo and tried a few things - and the odd thing we discovered was that if we changed the port that we served webpages to, i could load them. But anything i tried to load from Port 80 (which is the default port for webpages) didn't work. It was like the port was blocked or something.

but... every other webpage i tried worked fine. Slashdot.org, tinami.com, shoutcast.com, groovetech.com - but megatokyo.com and fredart.com refused to respond.

We have a few theories, some of it having something to do with the possible use of a really fuggored up proxy server on comcast's end, but really - i have no idea what is wrong. So, in an effort to find out if it's just me, and that i need to look on my side of the cable - if you live in the Ann Arbor / Ypsilanti Michigan area and are a Comcast user who went thru the big change over last night - let me know if you have trouble accessing the site.

Hopefully i can get this cleared up. Damn, i picked a good week to take a 'break', so to speak... :( AT T and Comcast are SOOOOOO on my shit list right now... (i am very close to writing something about my AT T problem right now - keep in mind, i am not an AT T customer either...)

Anyhoo, on a lighter note, a big thanks to the guys at MacHall for today's... guest strip. I think it's pretty amusing. Not only do we have server disasters all week, no comics to speak of, lame replacement rants... but we have a guest strip calling our fans monkeys. hehheh. kinda cool.

:P

Happy New Year folks - 2001 was an amazing year for Megatokyo. 2002 is gonna be even better... er, as soon as we figure out how to put our pants back on, that is. ^^;;

You can support Megatokyo by getting yourself some cool YakPak swag using the link below. Piro has been carrying a black Medium Flapdoozy since the comic started (because that's what i really use ^_^). Also, the YakPak people are cool folk:

"New Year Plug-atage"
Tuesday - January 1, 2002
[Largo] - 00:00:01
Happy New Year or something!

You ever wonder what they do with the old years when they get the new ones? I have to wonder if it's like computer hardware. New Year comes in and the old ones get donated to some under funded universe or school system, or there is the Steven King version where they get eaten by flying pac-man like things... I dunno. moving on now...

Resolutions, simple - I resolve to drink more, and rant less. -- or was it the other way round? Rubiko seems to want to resolve to eat more pie. (rubiko like pie)

Well it's been awhile, but I'm back in the rant-seat and kicking it old school… er, okay, screw that. I've got some things I'd like to plug, and whether or not you continue reading will determine if I've inflicted my shameless plugging upon your person.

First up, conventions.

Piro and I generally only attend conventions that can pay our way (hotel/travel), it makes it easier on our tiny mt-budget, the time we have to take away from both our day jobs and the website, etc. As such, we don't attend very many anime conventions.

However, some exceptions have popped up in the next few weeks for those interested.

I will be attending Ohayocon in lovely smog filled Cleveland, OH on January 11th-13th.

Also, I'll be displaying some Texas pride that I picked up recently by attending one of the state's local conventions - Ushicon on February 1st-3rd.

The only convention to book both Piro and I for 2002 so far is the ancient tradition known as A-Kon in Dallas, TX on May 31st-June 2nd.

For randomness we plan to be lurking around E3 again this year, hopefully run into some other of the website crews that seem to flock to that tradeshow like flies to a very bright light.

Ahhh.. E3 goodness… Nothing like wall to wall jumbotrons blasting you from every direction with video game sweetness. It's akin to my religious pilgrimidge now, but like any good holy-type quest, only the truly divine can survive the trials such as the line of hell. Last year I had to save Piro from the Minotaur in the center of the maze-like main ballroom. I dunno why, but Minotaurs like webcomic artists, especially on toasted bread with honey mustard.

And Finally, before I get slapped. Rubiko is holding a fanart contest with the prize being some of her cool stuff(tm). The cool stuff being her own personal collection of Asuka, Ribbon & LaLa compilation manga. Information is located here on her forum.

"resolutions"
Wednesday - January 2, 2002
[Piro] - 00:05:05
I hope everyone had a pleasant holiday. I, too, enjoyed my 'break', such as it was... Oddly enough, i was even able to catch up on sleep. I never realized just how overtired i was. Doing much better now.

Last monday i remember how i was just NOT able to draw. I remember struggling all weekend to do a two part chirstmas comic. I remember promising 4 comics for that week. I remember how i felt like i was forcing things, and how i was so ... *unhappy* with the way my drawings, the scripts, and the comic itself was looking. I remember standing in the kitchen saying to myself that i needed a break.

I sat down and wrote a long rant about why i needed a break. Seraphim told me that people don't need excuses and explanations - just take the break, and stop whining about it.

so, i deleted it. ^_^ Glad i did. It was pretty dumb.

Anyways, it's been a rather crazy week. I've been busy with a deadline at work (project is due tomorrow night - i've worked every day since christmas to try to finish it) so... i haven't exactly been goofing off, but not having to do the comic make it so i actually got some sleep this week ^_^. The MT server got a major overhaul over christmas, including new hard drive, new linux kernel and install, and a new slab of memory. Once things settled out, the server has been working well.

Once that settled out, i started having my own problems. Comcast did this lovely switch-over from the old roadrunner network I was on to new comcast.net service... and lets just say it's been less than 'smooth'. A lot of websites are inaccessible to me, including (believe it or not) Megatokyo.com itself. After changing the DNS servers manually, i was able to access the server, ftp, ssh, etc without any problems - but i discovered that comcast has a horribly implemented proxy server in place now... and it has major issues with many popular websites... including mine. I found a way around the problem by manually setting a different proxy server on different ports - its slow and annoying, but it works. It will do till Comcast gets their shit together. (sigh)

Anyways, the new year is here, and its time to get cracking again. We're starting off a little slow with a one-panel filler comic that i had done a while ago (since i am technically still in the middle of a deadline, i was a little short on time tonight to draw up a comic), but we are back to normal MT storyline starting friday.

Thanks for the patience, folks, and thanks for the break. I know it was frustrating for some of you, and people have been predicting the death of MT. heh. gimmie a break. Some people have no faith. Faith is good. We don't really have plans to let you down. :)

Oh, and where is the status bar? we wont need that anymore. My new years resolution is to have a comic up and ready to go every monday wendnesday and friday from here on out. I've cried wolf too often about when things will be done, and i havent really been maintaining the window properly anyways. Less griping, more coimcs - Megatokyo, year 2002. :) Or at least thats the plan ^^;;

"falling down"
Monday - January 21, 2002
[Piro] - 00:31:22
Hi folks, we're back. Sort of. ^^;;

It's late, it's been a long week (and a long weekend) so i have to keep this rant a little short - no time to write a long explanation of what's been up since we went down ten days ago. It's not ENTIRELY over yet, either - there might be a glitch or two this week, but hopefully everything should be smooth sailing from here on out.

In short, we had to change our hosting much sooner than we expected and were caught off guard. We were able to move the server fairly easily, but the server needed some repair, on both the hardware and software ends. I spent nine days working hard to reduce the bandwidth of all the elements on the site, catching as many errors and whatnot as i could. Largo busted his ass to get the forums upgraded and online (we will be adjusting the color scheme in the future to match other site revisions), and right now we are watching our bandwidth use with total horror - even after all the work i put into it (reducing most of the site by more than 1/2, 2/3 in most cases) the bandwidth we have been using since the archives went back up is... far more than we thought it would be. ugh.

With our hosting change, our hosting expenses have also gone up dramatically. We don't really know where it will settle out at, but we are keeping our fingers crossed. Before people start asking, we will NOT be asking for donations or having a paypal donation button - MT will survive like any other good property, based on it's ability to sell a reasonable amount of merchandise. If you would like to support MT, please visit our store and buy some swag :)

Oh, and if you are interested in advertizing on Megatokyo, please contact us.

As far as the comic itself goes - we felt that today's little gag was a good way to get back into the swing of things. Yes, we really did have a bad RAID controller. It's gone now. It won't hurt the server anymore. I have also taken the downtime to get ahead a tad, so you can look forward to the next installment of Chapter 2 to show up on Wednesday.

as always, thanks for all your support, patience, and kind emails regarding our recent downtime. Megatokyo is still strong as ever - and hey, these little blips are part of what makes MT real. It's flawed, it's not perfect, and neither are we.

but that's part of what makes us Piro and Largo. Unfortunately. :)

"boogie woogie january"
Friday - January 25, 2002
[Largo] - 12:33:00
Man… what a crazy ride…

First up, the most important news, Bioware and Interplay have settled their differences as outlined in this press release. Which means Neverwinter Nights now has a publisher again, and will soon be in my game starved hands.

What this means for megatokyo? Well more updates for starters – at lease until the game comes out, then Largo may disappear off the face of the earth for a few days, but never fear, I will return with treasures from the far off region of the sword coast, treasures such as screenshots! and… umm.. you know, important stuff.

Due to the recent downtime of the site, which was just frustrating on a multitude of levels, I've got a linkitage backlog I need to dump, so here goes.

[begin link spew 1.0]

Dave Kellet, one of our own webcomic brethren and author of Sheldon, has made good and hooked up the fine folks at United Media Syndicate. Now don't worry because this isn't the Syndicate[tm] with the cyborg implants, chain guns and trench coats. This is the friendly kind, that can publish you and sometimes even pay for your work. Sheldon is a great comic and so it's well worth your time to click here.

Earlier in the month, I visited Ohayocon, and got stuck on the strangest of panels… unfortunately for me, Strangefour of the webcomic Beta, was in the audience and captured the event in this comic.

Normally, when I visit conventions, I get a little run down, having only our comic to talk about with fans, but for a change of pace – I was asked to host a website design panel, man was that a blast – I was able to spend an hour talking about the virtues of Apache, PERL, PHP4, and MySQL. I even got to sneak in some of my own personal rules to follow about how to design a good relational database… The audience was subjected to me drawing out the various tables and schema that make our site's backend. ah… it was so refreshing…. I should give up my day job and just teach… hrm.. Great Teacher Largo…

Speaking of webcomics… Just Weird, which holds true to its name, felt that perhaps I should spend a bit more time answering my email, as shown here.

As Piro pointed out, we are doing more advertising on MT, and the rates are pretty affordable, even for just the average joe lynes to buy. We're trying something a little new compared to most sites, and offering ad banner impressions at a reasonable cost, with discounts for higher volume. email here, for more details.

In my spare time… what little there is, I managed to help out our friends at PvP by settling up their forums this month. It's good to see them back up, the PvP community seems glad to have them back.

I want to thank Magus of #megatokyo for doing some UBB debugging with me, and for working on a sweet stylesheet, which I'll add to the list of available stylesheets in the forums later today.

All things considered, 2002 is looking really good for MegaTokyo, with a book in the works, a site redesign later this year, and some special projects lined up in the coming months – it looks like a very good year ahead… Indeed!

… or check into a psycho ward, whichever comes first.

"not dedicated"
Wednesday - January 30, 2002
[Piro] - 11:01:00
Return-Path: (deleted)
From: (deleted)
To: piro@megatokyo.com
Subject: Today's Comic
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 08:56:12 -0600

Ah yes, another day another com-- oh wait, once again you've let us (your readers) down. Thanks for your dedication to your readers.

That was sarcasm by the way, just in case it got past you.

Sincerely, (name deleted)

- - - - - - -

(sigh)

I suppose a public apology is sufficient? Probably not.

Obviously i'm not dedicated. I obviously don't care about our readers. Its SO fucking obvious. I have been working non-stop for almost four weeks to keep this site alive. I have been working hard to write good comics, not tripe. I have spent the time and the energy to do quality drawings. For almost a year and a half i have drawn around 200 comics. At an average of 6 drawings per comic, that equates to around 1,200 drawings. I try to cut corners on the art sometimes, but sometimes you can't, because it would ruin the effect - the comic would loose some of its potency. When planning todays comic i was faced with some of these choices, and it's obvious that i made a bad decision, since i was unable to finish all eight drawings, some of which are more complex than usual.

So, what can i do to fix this lack of dedication? I average 6 hrs of sleep every night, i know i cannot go with much less. Why didn't i draw more of the comic on tuesday night? Because i was too busy putting together advertising info and working on the banner ad system so that Largo and I can raise the money needed to pay for the bandwidth that delivers this site and all its content, including the forums. Lets see, perhaps i shouldn't be trying to publish that first collection of MT comics. Maybe i don't have the time to work on the layout and build the specifications needed to get pricing and search for printers. Have you ever printed a book before? do you have any idea how much work is involved? Do you have any idea how much money Largo and I are going to have to invest to do it?

Yea, I know. I'm not dedicated at all. I don't care about our fans.

Oh yea, and don't forget that i have a day job. One where i actually have to work the full eight hours i am there. Sometimes more. Boo hoo.

For your information, mr fucking "name deleted", i spent 6.25 hours drawing last night without even a break for dinner. The comic is late because the comic involved a lot of complex drawings, not because i was lazy. At 1:30 i was too exhausted to continue. Can't keep my eyes open, slurred speech kind of exhaustion. You wanna know whats really sad? It's that horrible feeling you get when you *know* that someone write you an email like this the next morning, telling me that i let everyone down. Its a horrible feeling. It sits in the pit of your stomach. It's like leaving a part of yourself exposed to be kicked, and you know someone will kick you when they see the weakness.

Call me a bad planner. Call me a crappy artist who's art isn't always up to par. Call me whiner who goes on and on about how difficult his life is and how hard he works and how no one really understands. Call me someone that always feels he can do more than he really can, who commits himself to things he shouldn't because he always underestimates how much time things take. Call me slow, call me too particular about my drawings. Tell me i just ain't gonna cut it because i don't have what it takes to do this. Call me someone who doesn't really have to do this if its so hard for me to do...

but NEVER fucking tell me i'm not dedicated.

I've been doin pretty good since the site came back up. Thanks for kicking me the first time i stumbled. Very nice of you. I feel very good now.

Now, if you'll excuse me, i need to get back to work, at my day job. You know, the one that pays my bills. The one that i took 15 minutes out of my day to write this with... a rant where i was originally going to write about happier things - the Kanon anime which debut today on Japanese TV, the upcoming Pitaten anime, the beautiful snow outside. I haven't been able to watch any tv or anime lately, or finish playing DigiCharat Fantasy like i want to, someday. In fact, i even made a rant image to use for it, as you can see above.

Can you, mister "name deleted" tell me honestly that you have not played any games or watched any TV or sat and chilled at all in the past four days? If so, then you should be more understanding. If not, then I don't feel ANY fucking need to analogize to you.

Sincerely,

piro

PS: For the rest of you, i apologize for this venting in public like this. You can take if for humor value, if you like.

"eep."
Friday - February 1, 2002
[Piro] - 09:56:01
aiyaaa... ok, ok, i get the message! ^^;; please, you don't have to email me anymore! gyahh! I've received 2,234 emails since this rant went up wednesday morning... I have no bloody idea how i am going to read them all (i will, but it will take a while)

Thank you to everyone who emailed me - i really do appreciate your thoughts. I should know better than to vent on the front page of MT, i really should by now. Bad piro. Mental note: all inflammatory rants should go on the Fredart page...

I'm really swamped this morning, so i'll keep it short. This week was a royal pain, but not really because of the comic itself - i managed to get all three comics done this week, and it feels good to have done so. Last night, the ice storm here in Michigan conspired to prevent me from updating (after numerous power outages (laptops are nice for that) the Comcast DNS servers finally went down, so all i could do was ftp to the megatokyo ip address - which was a no brainier for uploading the comic, but actually adding the comic to the database... that required some help. Largo is on his way to Ushicon this weekend, so i had to get Dom to help me. Thanks dom.

Whats amusing with all this email volume is that last week, Largo and I got completely fed up with the sheer volume of spam we get every day (thats the sucky thing about having an email address listed on a popular website) - we were both getting anywhere from 50 to 60 spams a day. Largo set us up with the RBL service to block email from known spammers - works like a charm. I think out of that 2000 plus emails, about 10 are spam.

So, in essence, i don't have the spam problem this week, i've been "canned ham'd" - higher quality meat than spam, but it still takes up a lot of space :)

Thanks for your kind emails - i know i shouldn't overreact to the one or two bad emails i get here and there. Please just enjoy the comic - i'm having a lot of fun with it, really.

"BAMF!"
Saturday - February 2, 2002
[Dom] - 11:28:03
First off, I'm perversely proud to announce that there's going to be a geek gathering in San Francisco, organized by hepkitten. Usually I avoid large gatherings of MT fans at all costs, but as I said, I'm perversely proud of this one. Why? Because the acronym is BAMF--Bay Area Megatokyo Fans. And because I'm a dork. But before I speed off into facetious blabbering like I usually do, I'll give the details on the thing. Like I said, it's taking place in San Francisco. Hepkitten hopes to hold it some weekend in February, first going to dim sum (mmm... dim sum), then to the park or something. If you're at all interested, send her an e-mail at bamf@woebegone.org with your day of choice. I'll most likely be unable to attend, due to other engagements, but who knows--as long as it's not Katsucon, there's a chance of me being able to attend. Plus, maybe you can convince her to move it to some time in March. Stranger things have happened.

Moving on. Yes, as you can tell, I'm an unabashed comic book fan. Not of the tripe that litters the stands these days--though I do sometimes read those to give me something to do on slow days, it gives me something to laugh at--but the stuff that really interests me as a story.

Comics are a fairly unique creature. Unlike children's storybooks, movies and illustrated books, the comic relies on equal parts image and printed word. You can't shove the words out of the way, but you can't get away with just word bubbles, either. Look at the work Kevin Smith does--while it's witty and all, I can't stand Clerks. I get the feeling that it'd work better as a short story, so I didn't have to stare at the same static image with different dialogue every panel. And in contrast, take a look at the recent (silent) 'Nuff Said issues of Marvel comics or take a look at some of the scripts that Marvel has up on their site. When I was flipping through those, I got the distinct impression that I was missing the point--some worked, some didn't, and I knew I didn't want another month of these things.

And that's why, back in college, my prof affectionately called 'em "co-mix", due to what she called their "verbal/visual hybridity that commingles image and text, sometimes using the visual for the temporal demands of narration and the verbal for merely visual effect". I don't call them that, though--it sounds pretentious. :)

So, yes, I love comic books, both as ten minutes worth of pulpy enjoyment and an artistic/literary genre--to do anything less would invite the wrath of Will Eisner. So far, though, I've only found two stories where the medium is absolutely essential to the story it tells, rather than an illustrated short story or movie lite. One is Art Spiegelman's Maus, which is at once inspiring to me as a bad, but aspiring writer and disturbing to me as a human being. The other is the first three issues of Warren Ellis' "Transmetropolitan", because it needs both the columns and the images of the riot to be wholly effective--if you only get the column, you only take in part of the scene, while if you just see the riot, you miss the whole impact. Fascinating...

What's the point of all this? Well, other than plugging a personal interest of mine, it helps me write for MT--which I think would work just fine as a movie or a short story, so I can't really say it's in the same category as the previous two. I've also started up a random pet project with Meruru of Nekobox that it will be useful for.

On to what you usually expect from me, the rants on video games. Well, here we go...

Dynasty Warriors 3 is a nice example of beat-em-up action, but unlike other people who rant and rave about that game until the sun comes up, I can't compare it to Streets of Rage 2, my personal benchmark for all beat-em-ups. One thing Streets of Rage had going for it was digestibility--you would be in once scene, fight a set of enemies, and within a few minutes you'd be somewhere else, fighting a new set of enemies before you could get bored. Dynasty Warriors 3 is like whittling--you run into a crowd, press square a few times, maybe end it with triangle, circle, or both. Lather, rinse, repeat as needed. Sure, the different missions provide needed variety, but cripes--there's only so many times you can cut through hordes of ancient Chinese soldiers. Plus, that battle where you kill the peasants always makes me feel vaguely guilty. So enough with that.

A co-worker of mine recently visited THQ and told me that a game called Britney's Dance Beat exists, while they never showed a lick of Red Faction 2. I think that speaks for itself.

In another piece of news that speaks for itself, apparently, Casey Kasem refused to reprise his role as Shaggy's voice for an upcoming Scooby-Doo game. Why? Because he's a strict vegan, and Scooby's health is represented by sandwiches, which have animal products in 'em somewhere.

Aaaand, with that, I leave you. I'll rant again when I have time--which will be a while from now, given how my February looks. Oh, well. Come summer, things will slow down--especially since my boss told me I don't have to work at E3, but I can still go...

"Moving Violations"
Monday - February 4, 2002
[Seraphim] - 08:11:02
T minus 12 days and counting.

As if going to grad school full time, working full time, and life in general with Piro isn't hectic enough, I decided to uproot us and change our abode. The actual impetus to move occurred before Christmas. I was INNOCENTLY walking around and walked full speed into a large mailing tube of posters protruding from under the coffee table. My first non-swear words after determining no bones had been broken were "We're moving." When Piro saw that he would have his own work/gamer room to lock the cats out, he was on board with the idea.

He even got into the idea of shopping for appliances. I was looking at an Eco sensitive front loading washer with 1050 RPM spin cycle - he liked it too - because it was l33t - yes, a Kenmore Elite. Only Piro would need a l33t washer and dryer. A washer and dryer, I'm giddy. I hate the laundromat. I hate laundromats even more than the can recycling centers they have in Michigan. I recycle all the glass, metal, paper, and plastic I can and I do that for free. I would save and recycle cans without a deposit just to avoid those horrid counters. In Georgia you could crush the cans and take them to a local fire station that would take them to a recycler and donate the money to a hospital burn unit. Here they can't be dented in the least or the barcode is invalid. It is a big hassle and it doesn't recycle non-deposit cans - like for juices - and you STILL have to go to the recycle center.

We got hit hard by an ice storm last week. Our neighborhood was decimated. So many trees lost - and a few cars. If I would have had comprehensive on my car I would have parked it under one of them. As it is I only have PLPD and that wouldn't even pay for towing its crushed carcass away. We didn't lose power but my folks, sister and some friends were out for several days. I think we should move to the desert when I am out of school. You never have to worry about an ice storm knocking down Saguaros unto your house or power lines.

Although a good deal of Ann Arbor was without power the University was up and running. Every campus in Southern and Northern Michigan could close but the Ann Arbor campus would be open as usual. My undergrad college was the same. It was run by Dominican nuns who figured we had God as our co-pilot while commuting. I was driving home in a snow storm one evening after class and unfortunately God was not co-piloting for the dame in the brand new Mustang and who crossed the center line and totaled my car. It was a crappy car but it looked something like one of those old fashioned steamer trunks with all the stickers on it. I had stuck all the bumper stickers I had collected from every country I visited in Europe (plus a few anti drunk driving and other socially responsible subjects). Those were my more hedonistic days. I figure the Rabbit didn't disintegrate into a million pieces around me (picture Wiley Coyote sitting on ground with steering wheel in hand) because of them. This car was so old it was almost before safety belts but definitely before crumple zones and air bags.

The car I have now is airbagless and it is from the time manufacturers actually thought automatic shoulder belts were a good idea. Silly manufacturers - next they came up with SUVs which are the scourge of the planet. If people want to drive something that big and really compete out there on the road, they should just upgrade to a semi cab and trailer. To quote a dear friend of mine, "Go big or stay home." Piro and I were driving in the Detroit area and witnessed an Explorer Sport Expo where professionals were teaching Explorer owners to drive on large mounds of dirt they had piled up. How does one get to be an expert at driving on fake dirt mounds? We laughed our asses off. Really, what comes next? They'll be slapping metallic paint called Desert Patina and vanity plates on busses and selling them to yuppies for their outdoor adventures.

Ah well, time to think about a new car after we move. Hopefully piro won't hurt himself like he did last time. That boy worries me sometimes.

"Maximo, Mail and Misc."
Saturday - February 9, 2002
[Dom] - 19:34:00
First things first. Some of you who attended Anime Expo 2001 may remember what I termed the "Million Moogle March", a display of silliness in large groups. But the thing is, I don't really like moogles that much, unless they're stuffed and being held by a Lulu. So I want to outdo those moogles. I unveil the Million Maximo March. The aim? Not only to be absolutely silly and have an excuse to run around in underwear, but to outnumber those moogles by about two to one--there are sixteen in that picture, so I need thirty willing and shameless men to run around a convention in nothing but heart-patterned boxer shorts, maybe a skin-colored leotard for decency's sake (or whatever decency exists when you run around a convention in your knickers) and a classic Ghouls 'n' Ghosts or Maximo weapon. For the forgetful, the list includes the following: dagger, crossbow, axe (single or double bladed), sword and shield, lance, scythe/sickle, shuriken, torch, Goddess Ring, double-edged axe, and shuriken. Also, if we can get just one guy to costume as the magician, and carry a lot of stuffed ducks... but nah, it's for another time. This Million Maximo March is scheduled for AX and/or Otakon--anyone who's interested, or just morbidly curious, e-mail me. I need at least vague numbers.

Now, on to my mail. After getting a small amount of quality mail from that comic book rant, I went back in time and sorted through some of the mail I've gotten that isn't so flamey it's funny. For example, here's one from Shidoshi about my rant waaaay back in September or so of last year about GameGO! magazine. It's a fair defense of the whole thing, so I would feel bad if I didn't post it SOME time:

Yeah, so you wrote about the topic two months ago... but I just stumbled across it today, and thought I'd write you a quick note. NOT a quick note to defend the mag or anything, just a comment I wanted to relate to you. If you didn't like the first (and last *heh*) issue of GameGO!, well, I didn't either, and I worked for the thing. Well, let me change that - I DID like it, but I also found it to be a total mess of a magazine. Simply talking about the layout, there were so many problems in that first issue that I could have screamed. It was a shame that issue #2 never came out, because my little anime section totally blew the rest of the mag out of the water. *laughs*

Back to the point I was going to make. The magazine WAS a mess, but it was also 100% a labor of love. The money to get the first issue out was scraped up from wherever they could find it, and to be honest it was like two people putting the entire mag together with the other staffers just chipping in here and there. Every member of the staff lived in different places - the two main editors lived on each coast, for example. Having working in a magazine office environment, it is enough trouble putting together a magazine when you've got everyone in the same building. The way GameGO! was working, it was total chaos. Which, of course, no doubt helped to lead to its very quick downfall. Issue #2, which was totally finished, was greatly improved over the first, but still had some problems that needed to be worked out had it lived on.

The way everything worked for that mag, it honestly was very much like a fanzine getting professionally printed. The situation wasn't even CLOSE to being of a pro-magazine level behind the scenes, and while I disagree with a lot of opinions that were stated in the magazine pertaining to who it was targeting and the such, it was an attempt by a couple of people to make something a bit more honest after having gotten burned out by how fake so much of video game publishing really is.

Like I said, not trying to defend the mag or say that you were wrong in your opinions on it, I just thought you might find it interesting to hear a bit of the story from someone on the other side of the situation. As much of a mess as it all was, I also thought the mag was doing some damn cool stuff as well. I mean, a guide to how to play mahjong games in a US magazine? Gotta give GameGO! SOME credit at the least for that. ^_^

I think I'll let that speak for itself. I also got an e-mail from one of Shirt Guy Tom's co-workers regarding the possibility of me visiting the Shirt Guy at the workplace. I haven't taken him up on the offer yet, but maybe in March I will descend upon Tom when he least expects it--meaning I will probably announce it in this rant section.

In addition, I got a mail from a guy at THQ, saying that Britney's Dance Beat is actually a good game, in spite of the brand name. That may be true, but I don't think I would ever be able to look at myself in the mirror again if I promoted a game named Britney's Dance Beat in this column. But of course, the real reason is: The Red Faction extends life. The Red Faction must flow...

And finally, I come to the actual e-mails about comic books. After talking to a few of my friends, I agree that at least two episodes of Sandman deserve mention as needing the comic book format to work properly, or at least are better from it: Ramadan and A Hope in Hell. You may have your opinions, but these are the ones I've decided on for now, pending re-reading of my friend's trade paperbacks. Rising Stars, meanwhile, is a meandering story that would work just as well as a movie (especially since a movie would hopefully cut out that dreadful Chicago arc). Preacher, I admit, I haven't read yet, but I liked Garth Ennis' work on the Punisher, so I'll eventually pick it up when time and budget permit. Poison Elves I haven't really been interested in--mostly because no one tells me what it's about. ElfQuest I read the first book of and didn't quite get into. Other comics, I do like, but not always. It's a case-by-case basis, and based on what I'm looking for, too. I've always been a fan of Spider-man for the dialogue, for example.

Did I miss anything? Well, if I did, I'll certainly hear about it, so g'bye for now.

"Final Rantasy"
Monday - February 11, 2002
[Largo] - 10:01:00
First up, I'd like to direct everyone's attention to our newest sponsors this month. Remember to click on each of our sponsor's links, or Kimiko will become sad, and cry.

Planet Anime - retailers of anime/manga products and other assorted goodness.

Anime News Network - providers of fine anime styled info, news, current events and other such goodness.

Kim Justice - Man of many musical talents and creator of a collection of MegaTokyo inspired tunes.

Venis Productions - producers of the webstyled comic Angel Moxie - a very sweet read.

on with the show...

I've waited for a while to give my review of Final Fantasy X because I did not want to prematurely judge the game as it's held in such high esteem by so many people. To accomplish this feat I played thru it several times before writing my final opinion on the fantasy.

I have to hand it to Squaresoft, they've managed to take name branding to a new level in mega-marketing, Squaresoft can turn any of their titles into an entire line of neatly packaged merchandise due to it's large loyal fan following. Er, not that I know anything about that.

Before I begin my review, I want to speak about a few words about the world of game design and about Squaresoft itself.

Game developers will tell you that fan input is a mixed blessing. The people who desperately want your product and patiently wait for screenshots of it a year before it's final release, the people who count the days down to it's public release with bated breath are the very same people who will rip years of your hard work to shreds with a few short words. For instance?

"This game sucks."

My opinion of Final Fantasy X is that it is essentially the same game as Final Fantasy 7, 8, and 9, meaning Squaresoft has made another impressive game, provided you like Squaresoft games.

Squaresoft's biggest criticism and in some respects greatest strength, is its lack of innovation. Long ago, Squaresoft found a successful formula for making a game for a target audience, and so they have continued to stick with that formula, over new innovations in game design. The results are obvious, Final Fantasy X is just another Final Fantasy.

What this means is that fans of "Square" games will love it, and everyone else? will hate it. That's pretty simple - no suprises here guys, afterall - it's Squaresoft.

So lets take a lot at this newest addition to the Final Fantasy series?

You play a character named Tidus, who seems like a gay water polo player... wait, wrong review?

You play a somewhat unwilling hero who is destined to save the world in his own haphazard way. Along your fantastic adventure you will meet interesting people and visit many extraordinary places. As the game progress?s you will fight increasingly more powerful enemies, some of whom may have once been your allies. Not to fear, because along the way you will be assisted by an unlikely group of powerful allies. You?ll even gain new abilities, magic powers, and weapons of legendary might.

wait? that's Final Fantasy 9? I mean.. 7.. no? Final Fantasy 8? err.. maybe it was Final Fantasy 6?

but seriously...

Final Fantasy X continues all of Squaresoft?s proud traditions, such as tedious leveling up of your characters right before you fight the last boss. Grr...

To be fair, Square produces some of the most visually stimulating scenes ever to grace the console. The problem I have is that I think the Squaresoft?s developers are tired of game design and would rather spend time doing CG work. Essentially turning the game into a movie with long intermissions where you fight things.

Maybe it is akin to writers who really want to direct? hrm, I can relate to that.

"moving melodies"
Sunday - February 17, 2002
[Piro] - 11:13:00
mornin everyone,

I know its been a while since i wrote a rant - gomen. I have this really long one that i need to tie together before i post it (sometimes i have to go back and thread together my logic paths and make sure i dont make a total fool out of myself) but i'll finish it up during the week.

The move is going well so far, with only a few glitches here and there (no, we haven't dropped any dressers on me, tho i did clock my head on the edge of the moving van REALLY good yesterday, i think i almost saw stars ^^;;) The washer was damaged when it arrives, so now we have to wait a few more days for them to deliver a new one -_-, but the new sofa came just fine. Finally, i own a real sofa. One that you can actually sit in without your ass hitting the floor. Life is good. ^_^

Today is a packing day - movers are coming next week, and i need to get everything into boxes and stuff. Still tons to do. I'm listening to a archived broadcast of Glitchpop radio with Cid and Eric on Groovetech radio... ah, nice downtempo stuff is always good. Cid and Eric rule.

There will be a nice new comic tomorrow, not really sure what yet, but largo and i will get something together. Thanks for your patience as i get thru the fun days of moving. Now i gotta go pack some boxes.

"the art of gifting"
Wednesday - February 27, 2002
[Piro] - 00:36:15
As you can see, there is no comic today - that's my fault, and involves many factors (the most significant of which is my complete and utter inability to draw tonight. once you go thru 10 sheets of paper its time to face facts and go to plan 'b') So, you get a new comic Thursday and Friday this week instead of Wednesday and Friday. What's a few more hate e-mail this week, i'll live.

I have a tendency to forget things sometimes. Like, for instance, Sweetest Day. Valentines day. Seraphim's Birthday. The fact that you buy gifts for people at Christmas. Things like that.

Even when i do remember these things, the execution of them often has tragic results. I don't send Seraphim flowers typically. Mostly because of one incident where i sent her this amazingly beautiful arrangement that had pollen so toxic that we had to lock the bouquet in the bathroom to keep it from killing her. This florist has subsequently gone out of business.

When it comes to gifts, i'm not big on 'oh, its a holiday, i gotta find something, anything' kind of gift giver. I'd rather come up with something REALLY nice, or really useful. This attitude towards gift giving makes it harder than normal to find things for the people in your life. More often than not, i tend to push off these shopping tasks until it is too late, resulting in the 'pick up anything you can find' method of shopping the day before you need it (i've purchased chirstmas presents on christmas day. Yes, i am that pathetic.)

Anyways, as you might expect, valentines day this year was even worse than usual. Seraphim told me without hesitation that she was more than happy with the botched shirt and candy box gift i attempted to give her days earlier (long story), but i still felt BAD for not having something to give her on valentines day itself. So, i think to myself, i'll send her an e-card! Yea! the ultimate loser geek thing to send to your girl.

For years, i've been sending out Blue Mountain Arts cards to Seraphim, often forgetting that i had already sent her that particular card (bear themed cards are popular between us) but even so, i don't do it THAT regularly. So imagine my surprise when i pulled up Blue Mountain Arts that day and discovered that this once free service was now something you had to pay for.

So, as a loving boyfriend, did i pony up the dough and send her a card? Hell no.

There's an inherent part of human nature that just makes you bristle at having to suddenly pay for something that you didn't have to pay for before. Have a great free service? Sure, people will use it and love it. The business model that says 'give it to them for a while for free so they fall in love with it, then start charging them?' - er, sorry guys. Nice business model, absolutely no understanding of human nature. Since a significant portion of the dot-com economy was based on this model, it should have been no surprise to anyone that the whole thing fell on it's collective ass.

I can totally understand why Blue Mountain Arts switched to a pay for use model. All that traffic has to use a LOT of bandwidth, and with companies no longer hosing advertising dollars around without any real worries as to whether it was effective or not, there's gotta be some way to pay the bills. So, the idea that you get a significant chunk of your users to pay a small fee makes a lot of sense - after all, you get a LOT of people to pay a LITTLE money, you're problems are over, right? Sadly, i don't think this is really the case. It goes against the very nature of the web.

Lets face it. One of the reasons people LIKE the internet is that it gives people access to a LOT of information and entertainment for very low cost. It's not free - most of us pay a reasonable amount of money for bandwidth and internet connections - but on the net we pretty much like to think that once we've paid admission, we're free to roam and do whatever we like. Transferring information on the net is CHEAP. its so cheap, you can pretty much give it away for free. If people like it, they keep coming back for more. The commodity of the internet isn't money, it's access. It's connections. You're wealth in net terms is defined by 'what you have access to'.

We all have friends or people we know who can find just about anything, legal or otherwise, on the net with little or no effort. MP3 files are a good model to look at for this. A lot of great music is pretty much free for the asking at sites like mp3.com but most of the files traded around aren't really 'legal'. Are people really willing to pay for Mp3 files? Not really, because we already have it in our minds that mp3s are a 'free' resource. We don't feel we get any value buy paying for it. If we DO slap down money for music, we want the tangible piece of circular plastic where we can say 'this is mine'.

Then there is this rather interesting phenomenon that often occurs. Once you have the CD, you burn MP3 files and make them available for others over the net. Why would someone do that? Because it adds value to their purchase. We get not only the music, but the added benefit of having added something to the collective pool of information. You've added access to this music, you've increased your own online 'wealth'.

One of the reasons i started Fredart years and years ago was that i found that i wanted to provide my own thing to the 'pool'. For anime fans, especially back then, there was this whole world of japanese anime and manga where entire series lay waiting to be discovered. If nothing else, you could take all the information available on them, collect it together into a webpage, and make it more easily available for people seeking info on a particular series. At the time, I remember noticing that there were no web pages on 3x3 Eyes, so i decided that i would make one. Pai's Page was, really, the first web page on the series, and i did a fairly good job on it. Once making it, however, i had little interest in working any further on it. There was something that just wasn't satisfying about just re-arranging what was, in effect, someone elses work.

Around that time i started to explore japanese websites that revolved around anime and manga. In japan, it was considered bad form to just scan and post copywrited images, so japanese fans found that the best way they could express their loyalty and love for a series and its characters was to do their own fan works. I really liked this model, and Fredart was direct derivative of those style of pages. I wanted to provide NEW material to the web, not just stuff i had found surfing around, or even stuff scanned out of magazines. I was adding something original to the pool, not just reorganizing and recollecting.

I think that one of the things you get when you add to the pool, so to speak, is a certain amount of respect. you don't just take, you give as well. The net lends itself well to new ways that people can provide things to the collective pool. You don't need to be sponsored and paid for by some big media company to get your work in front of millions of people. The old model was that you had to be able to convince a bunch of people with lots of money that you were worth promoting before you even had a chance to see if people would respond to your work on a grand scale. This lead, for the longest time, to the sad state where only a small number of people decided what the public was going to see. Also, since these same people convinced all of us over the years that ONLY people that they felt were good enough to promote were worthy of entertaining us, that we should not waste our time entertaining ourselves - only paid for entertainment was worthy entertainment. Worked great till the net came along.

The net shatters some of the basic structures that people have used for ages to control the dissemination of information. Easy to send, easy to duplicate. The Dot com economy was doomed from the onset because it was formed on the basis of the idea that by just getting out there and capturing the attention of a big chunk of the internet population, the money would just start flowing in. Heh. Some hard lessons have been learned. It doesn't really work that way.

If you think about it, the real currency on the net isn't money. It's respect. Either as an individual or as an entity you gain respect by providing either new material to the net pool, or you provide effective and useful ways for people to access information that is already out there. A lot of big sites that do this started out small (even yahoo. i remember when it was just a link list over at Stanford run by two guys). Of course, respect doesn't pay the bills, so there always comes a time where you have to start looking at how to not only survive, but maybe even prosper a little on all this.

It's in this armature where the real economic viability of the net rests. There is no direct relationship between turning respect into dollars, but that doesn't mean to say that there isn't some relationship between the two. In my opinion, i feel there is a trade off - when you start charging for what you provide, you loose some of the respect you've earned, because now people have traded cash for it. The nature of the relationship has changed. When you move to a pay-for-services model, it completely changes the nature of the interaction between a site and its users. It's especially bad if people suddenly have to pay for something that was, for the longest time, free. Honestly, i think that it's human nature to almost feel 'betrayed' - which, of course, leads to a real loss of hit points in the respect column. ^_^;; The paradox here is that once people loose respect for a site, won't they be less willing to pay for it?

Odd train of thought, huh? I've had to think a lot about stuff like this lately. Running a site like MT is expensive - we've crested 10 million page views this month already, but at the same time the site is almost no different than it was when it was a non-working html template that i had pieced together over a weekend a year and a half ago. Largo and I really do, i think, have a little bit of an understanding of what makes MT what it is - tho i do have to tell you the mind boggles at why so MANY people seem to find the site worth visiting - and with that understanding comes a responsibility to make sure that whatever we do to help keep the site alive NEVER messes with those things. To me, the respect people have shown me over the years for all the hard work and dedication we've put into the site is something i never want to trade in on - because its worth more than any amount of money to me.

I suppose that its the post-dotcom economy sites that now bear the burden of figuring out how to survive in the wired. How DO you survive, pay hosting bills, make enough money to support yourself and others who help run the site? Traditional business model ways of looking at things has already proven that we all know less than we thought we did. Largo and i do it the hard way - we both work full time jobs AND do this silly site. This is not, of course, ideal, and speaks more about our lack of useful brain cells than any kind of success as a website.

I think that an understanding of human nature is almost more important here on the web than in any other business environment. Why? because unlike in the real world we are used to, we've been trained to an 'us and them' mentality in regards to our entertainment and things that we purchase in stores - we are consumers, they are providers. On the net, its different. We are all one in the same - fredart.com was just as accessible as ibm.com. We all can make websites. We all KNOW we have the ability to reach millions of people. Many sites, even Megatokyo itself, has proven that individuals can do this. You dont need to be a big corporation. We all have the same basic presence on the net - its how we use it that makes us who we are here.

Oh, and Seraphim's reaction to me being so cheap that i wasn't willing to pay for a subscription to Blue Mountain Arts to send her a valentines day e-card? Her answer was, if you think about it, not surprising: "The hell with that. you're little ASCII heart was so cute."

It's not the money you spend, its the thought that goes into it. You can't buy respect, you can only earn it.

"Slashdot-ted"
Thursday - February 28, 2002
[Largo] - 21:30:00
First up, some news from our friends at Bioware. For the full press release, click here.

"BioWare is pleased to announce the launch of the official Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic Message Boards to coincide with today's unveiling of LucasArts's official Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic website. In launching these new forums, BioWare and LucasArts have given expecting fans a place to discuss the highly anticipated title with input from people directly involved in the game's development.

Additionally, to celebrate the launch of the official KoTOR website, LucasArts has posted a Q&A with the game's producers: Casey Hudson at BioWare, and Mike Gallo at LucasArts; as well as several new screenshots of the title in action. That can all be found at the official Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic website at LucasArts.com."

and in local news...

Well we've gotten slashdotted, which was fun considering my poor server survived mostly intact and Piro and I ended up with even more email because of it.

Hey, I can't knock the exposure from another highly traffic'd site. However I find it ironic that the very rant about dot coms that caused the link, is an example of one of the new problems associated with a successful website - too much traffic.

It used to be, in the not so distant past, that page views were like gold itself, and the more you had, the more money you made from advertising. With bandwidth costs now exceeding some site's advertising revenue, traffic has become a punishment for success. While it's still true that you want a lot of page views / people visiting your site, the rules have changed (and in my opinion - for the better).

Website operators like myself now cringe while viewing our webstats sometimes. We live in fear of traffic spikes while looking at mrtg(a tool for measuring bandwidth utilization).

Advertisers were cheated by the net because their ads where never targeted, they would pay a high dollar value to some ad banner network who would plop their ad on a random website who's audience may have no interest in the advertisement at all and to make matters worse, their ads could appear at the worst possible times, for instance a banner hopelessly assigned the 3:00 am 'infomercial time slot'.

With some of this in mind, I've decided to give everyone Largo's expanded rules for advertising on the net.

Rule #1 - 'Quid Pro Quo' - your cost for advertising needs to be less then the advertiser's potential reward.

Business is just that, and outside the dot com world of yesterday, people expect something for their money. In the case of advertising - they want results that translate into something real for their side, whether it is exposure, sales, etc. Advertising on the web when done right can satisfy this. This is the key to success with advertising, you have to be able to provide something real and beneficial to your sponsors. Ad banners are not 'pennies from heaven' - they are payment for an investment in your site and its ability to provide vital exposure. If this doesn't materialize for the sponsor, if they don't see a return for this exposure that exceeds what they spent - then it's rarely in their best interest to advertise with your site.

Rule #2 - 'The Amish Don't Rave' - your ads need to be targeted to your website's primary demographic.

I believe in the power of advertising relevant ads to the proper demographic on the net. I believe in it because I've seen the real effects of it here with our own site, with the response we've gotten back from our own sponsors who claim the exposure made back their ad costs - and then some. However - just as the Amish don't attend raves, don't expect sales for your religious bookstore to sky rocket while your ads are being displayed on a website called "The Atheist's Daily News". The matching of advertisers to relevant website audiences is a crucial component in this business, and while it was side stepped by corrupt ad banner networks in the past, don't expect companies to accept that sort of behavior any longer. For a website to survive they need to really understand what it is they are providing, and to who it is they are providing it to.

Rule #3 - 'Show Me The Numbers.' - advertisers want to know what it is their advertising got them.

Advertisers want to know at the very least, exactly how many impressions were delivered and how many clicks were registered. It is important to be able to provide advertisers with as much power over the delivery and statistics/reporting of their ads as possible, the old method of paying a website for some impressions and just hoping they got delivered is gone, now even being able to track vital stats such as impressions delivered and clicks made is not enough. People want control for their money, they want to be able to pick when their ads are displayed, to know as much as possible about the people who are responding to them, when they responding most often, etc. Frankly, this should be a given, - the web gives us tools to provide better reporting then TV or magazines ever could, yet most website operators fail to provide this level of reporting to their clients.

Rule #4 - 'Less is More .' - using tricks to artificially inflate your page views only hurts you in the long run.

Advertisers no longer care about page views, since they've figured out it's irrelevant, what matters is unique sites, and not much else. Why should an advertiser care how many page views your site gets? - that only matters if you're trying offer up all your impressions to one sponsor, or a network - either way most people have figured out the tricks used by some sites to inflate their numbers, such as using a cover page that people click thru to get to the real content. There's countless examples and methods to make it so users 'click' more often - but when a user does that, you actually reduce the impact of your ads, sure you're showing them more ads, but those ads will rotate out and thus the user will look at them individually less then if you had one ad on a page that could capture their attention for five minutes - ie: 'less is more'. Again this goes back to rule #1, you must make sure your ads have a positive impact.

Rule #5 - 'The mountain won't come to you' - you must be able to approach potential advertisers.

While it is true that a popular website can attract advertisers on their own, it still doesn't mean that a operator shouldn't be out contacting companies who's products or services would be a good a fit to the demographic of their website. This is the traditional role of marketing and sales, and well - some things never change.

Lastly, time for a plug - all this talk of advertising reminds me, if anyone would to advertise with MegaTokyo, please email here.

"Classics and old friends"
Monday - March 4, 2002
[Dom] - 01:00:00
First off, I have to apologize for the length of time in between this rant space being filled. Whenever I think Largo is going to start ranting regularly again, he ups and disappears for a few weeks, and then when I think I want to rant, he pops back up. I swear that man knows this and times his rants to interfere with mine--for example, I originally scheduled this rant for Friday, and the Million Maximo Rant rant was followed about 20 hours later by Largo's rant.

Anyway. About that Million Maximo March--it's still on for both Otakon and AX, though for legality issues, we're restricting the March pretty much to swimming pools. Yes, I know, it'll be kind of disappointing not having it in public, but, well, I'd rather not test the law. Oh, and one of the moogles from Anime Expo has told me that there were about twenty of 'em. So now we need a good forty or so. I have a few confirmations, and a few girls willing to donate their (unwilling) boyfriends to the cause. I've even gotten a few offers from women, who'll also wear heart bras with heart boxers. I'm debating whether or not to let them join, as it's going to be rowdy enough with certain leg-humping or muffiny elements joining the march and trying to give everyone wedgies, or muffiny goodness. Yes, I mean you, Mikey and Daniel...

As for BAMF, well, I never got any e-mails saying what and when it was, so I suppose it's cancelled. But dammit, I like the name, so some time after the storm of business that is E3, I might try and hold a less ill-fated BAMF event.

Okay, business done, pleasure now. My roommate picked up Virtua Fighter 4, which is technically breathtaking, especially in their water effects. My problem with it is the accursed jaggies that plague all PS2 games. Just like Dead or Alive 2, the thing is a mass of bad cutouts, which make the visual experience less inspiring. Hopefully, they'll release an Xbox or Gamecube version and take a sander to the lines in the game... because it plays great, now that I'm actually taking the time to learn how to use characters. Besides. The game has a ninja. I have to respect that.

At the same time, he picked up State of Emergency, which was extremely fun--for about an hour. Then I ran screaming back to Dynasty Warriors 3, which I'm appreciating more and more as I sink an ever-increasing amount of time into it. The main difference between the rhythmic whittling of DW3 and the frenzied, Track and Field style of SoE that makes me prefer one to the other? In DW3, the characters actually play differently from each other. SoE, I got away with hitting the throw button repeatedly, and for some reason, people chose not to hit me over the head with their clubs while I was breaking their comrades' arm. Meanwhile, DW3 requires a mix of moves in different situations for its characters, and there's a real sense of movement and progress as you watch the morale bar swing back and forth. I think what expressed State of Emergency for me was the "Last Clone Standing" mode, in which you basically stand near the M16 spawn and shoot unending streams of identical passersby...

So anyway, Dynasty Warriors 3/Shin Sangoku Musou 2 has driven me to start reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms/Sangokushi. A co-worker of mine told me that when Stephen Chow is singing in Shaolin Soccer, he's taking parts of the classics and perverting them to his own ends, so I'd like to be able to understand the joke, which undoubtedly will be garbled or gone in the Disney version. It's slow progress, since I'm still trying to find a good version of it--some good translations don't have liner notes, while the ones with the best liner notes try waaaay too hard to make the poetry rhyme in translation, which is almost always a recipe for disaster.

And moving on from classics to a game I consider to be part of my misspent teenage years, Magic: the Gathering. I spent a significant amount of time in high school playing this sucker before budget and increasingly uninteresting player interaction moved me away from the game and toward... well, everything else that makes me an ubergeek today.

Enter Magic: the Gathering Online Beta. Free cards. A host of players that may or may not talk smack. A new chance to play an old game without the budget concerns and without everyone gearing themselves toward the next tournament. And did I mention free cards? All of a sudden, I'm pondering getting back into Magic. But once the cards aren't free anymore, I'll probably slink back into the realm of playing with friends' cards once a year or so. Especially since the Beta has introduced me to a part of myself that I'm not quite sure I'm comfortable with--the part with the drive to win over the drive to have silly fun. I think I'm going to make a deck based around the Atogatog to make myself feel better. Or maybe use that card that requires that I win coin flips to win. Yesssss... I will call it Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and require that I call heads every time... yesss.

Anyway, enough of that silliness, I'll be running off to write s'more crud now--as anyone can (and will) tell you, deadlines suck. And then they'll tell you that they probably wouldn't be able to write without 'em.... sigh.

"wear this chaos well"
Friday - March 15, 2002
[Piro] - 08:29:00
My appologies for the lack of rantage recently - i've actually been doing a lot of writing, fine tuning and fleshing out a lot of the less defined areas of the MT storyline - but I can't really post that stuff without ruining the story for everyone. Besides, brain matter splotched on monitor screens really upsets the cleaning lady. :P You think my public rantings are inchoherent...

It's kind of nice to be back on track with MT again. I realize that for several months things were quite disjointed - thanks for being patient and sticking with us. I was sure that people would get frustrated and give up after a while, and i've been warmly suprised that this hasn't been the case. Thank you. I know i tend to get a little heavy on the pirodrama and piroangst at times, and the odd email or two will set me off (this is something new with me, i dont really understand where this reactionary segment of my personality came from...) As long as MT is a part-time thing for me, there will allways be little hiccups here and there. The past few months, of course, have been more like some kind of massive hiccup fit, like when Calvin tried to cure his hiccups by eating big scoops of sugar ^_^ - ah, Watterson, you magnificent bastard...

Well, i said i wasn't going to go to any Anime conventions this year, but... oh well. Somehow i got roped into it. More than one, too. I personally don't think we deserve any special attention, but it seems that several cons have seen fit to invite us as guests this year. So here's the 'Megatokyo Tour 2002' schedule so far:

I will be attending Anime Central in Chicago between April 19th and April 21st (the con runs from Thursday the 18th, but i'm planning on driving out there that friday). Anime Central is a great con, i actually consider it my 'local' con because i can drive there :) It was at Anime Central last year where the first Megatokyo panel was held. That was... an interesting experience... [insert 'flashback scene' harp pulls here]...

I wasn't really at Acen last year in any official capacity, but Dom said that we should try to get a discussion panel that saturday. I figured 'what the hell' - i mean, if ADV vision can have a panel, why couldn't I? :P I figured that if we were lucky 15 people would show up, so it's not like i did any kind of preperation for it. When it was time for the panel, we went down the hallway to where our panel was scheduled (a room sized for about 30 people or so), the hallway was pretty packed. Most of the rooms along the way had panels or gaming rooms going, so this hustle bustle was pretty normal. The room our panel was going to be in was still packed from the previous panel, so dom and i waited outside with people who seemed to be waiting for our panel (the megatokyo shirts were a dead giveaway). After chatting a bit with some of the folks there, some people from inside the packed room asked us what the hell we were doing waiting in the hallway - the packed room was for OUR panel, not the previous one, and they were waiting for dom and i to arrive.

Y'now, as an architect, i'm pretty used to presenting projects and whatnot to people. I don't have a problem addressing a large crowd at a plan review meeting, or presenting designs to board meetings - i'm fine with public speaking, really. But this was different, way different. Freaky, if you must know. I was not... ready... to deal with such a ... large crowd. As we went to sit down, my hands were shaking - that hasn't happened since i was a junior in college giving my first presentation to a grumpy irritible jury of critics in design class. ^^;; The room was more than packed, it was scarily packed, and i heard from many people later that they were unable to get in.

Well, when Anime Central invited me as a guest this year, i told them sure, but we sorta need a bigger room this time. :)

Anyways, Akamatsu Ken, the artist and creator of Love Hina is gonna be there. I feel it is my DUTY to admonish him to have a litte more respect the wonderful characters he creates - it's not fair that they are so damn... *exposed* ... all the time (cough). Damn DAMN fine artist tho. Makes me wanna shove both my hands in a food processor and hit 'liquify' when i look at the Love Hina manga. (historic note - i was using the love hina manga as a model for the switch from 4 panel to manga sized MT strips)

So, if you are in the midwest, Acen is a great opportunity to come down and help us break some more fire codes and room occupancy limits :P Largo and Dom unfortunately won't be there, but WingZero (also know as Asmodeus and Wing "bandai please don't sue us!" Zero) will be there, as well as Ukyo (he doesnt do anything) and a few others. :P Should be fun.

At the end of the following month, from May 30th to June 2nd, both Largo and I will be attending A-kon, a really great little convention in Dallas, Texas. A-kon is Largo's local con, and he's been going for years. I've never been to texas, so when the really nice folks who run A-kon invited me (it was a 'how can i possibly say no this nice lady?' thing) i said 'sure'. Also, MT is physically hosted in Dallas (gee, i get to see the actual server), and several mutual friends that have been a big help with MT live there and will be attending. Ukyo, Natsuki, Rubiko, and maybe even Dom (god help us). So, if you are in the south and wanna bop in and see us, please do. A-kon is a fun, well established con and i am looking forward to going.

There may be one more convention this year, and i'll give you details on that when we have official word on what we are doing.

One big worry about going to these cons is that it that it seperates Seraphim and I from each other for several days at a time - which is the biggest major drawback. Call me sappy, but i hate bein away from her for more than a few days. Seraphim is not a con-goer, it's just not her thing (i honestly think she could only roll her eyes and groan so much at watching me fumble in front of a crowd of people.) Also, just consider - comic seraphim at an anime convention - 'nuff said. ^^;;)

Of course, when i tell her that going to these cons is 'work' and 'i'm doing it for Megatokyo' i get this dead level stare that she is so good at. "but... but... I not going to play. Really! It's a working trip!!" to wit she replieas, "uh huh. really."

I'm so misunderstood.

So, what to do? It just means i have to pay some extra special attention to her in large doses over the next few months - which isn't something i mind at all, it just requires some 'planning' (refer to my last rant to reference how good i am at that). Ah, the next few months should be very interesting.

I do have one small dillema surrounding Anime Central. Right after the con, i have a chance to see VNV Nation perform in Chicago... gah, i am so tempted, i really want to see these guys. If i go, it makes it a longer trip, and i'm still not sure if i want to be away that long. I really should go - i plan to hire the VNV nation to produce MT tracks for "Megatokyo the Movie" someday ... yeah yeah, i know, but hey, i can fantasize too. :P

Oh, before i forget - go pick up a copy of 'Future Perfect'. Damn fine disk. If you are new to VNV Nation, be sure to pick up 'Empires' too. These disks, 'Empires' in particular, had a major influence on the Pirogoeth/RPGworld backstory. It also satisfies my inner sense of passive megalomania. Highly reccomended.

Some other quick things to mention - next week i am planning on starting the process of print new Megatokyo posters, based on the Capture the Bear image currently availible in our store - these will be 18" x 24" posters, not quite as big or as thick as the Pirogoeth posters (which were more art prints than posters ^_^). These should be availible in a few weeks, i'll keep you posted.

Finally, i have a little request for help, of sorts. As you may know, our hosting issues are still a pretty serious issue that we are dealing with here at Megatokyo. Our audience just seems to keep growing (it boggles the mind, where do all of you people come from??) and we are moving a pretty serious amount of bandwidth every day. While we are in no danger of falling over dead as a result of the bandwidth bills (yet), we are still facing having to change things again in the near future. Part of what we are going to be doing involves working with the small start-up colocation company currently hosting the megatokyo server.

It is actually owned and operated by our mutual friend and MT helper elf Jon (also known as 'Ukyo') Jon has several existing customers as well as hosting his own anime site 'Aniverse', which includes the IRC network that irc.megatokyo.com points to. When we had to move to new hosting, he took us in and we've been hosted there since. The only problem is - Megatokyo uses SO MUCH bandwidth that it's forcing him to have to grow - something he was planning to do in the future anyways, but with MT burning things up, he's gotta expand a lot faster than he was originally planning to. :)

Anyways, one of the things i was going to do for him was put together a website design - i have it started, but i've just been too damn busy to finish or refine it, and he needs a better site design ASAP so that he can attract new customers to support his expantion which helps us out by getting us the badnwidth chunk we need... you get the idea. ^_^ So, if anyone has some time this week and has good web design skills (we'd like to see basic layout examples) please email Ukyo@Megatokyo.Com.

"Carte Blanche"
Saturday - March 16, 2002
[Dom] - 11:00:00
The next two Tuesdays are going to be very bad for my wallet. Thankfully, I managed to snag a copy of the Great Teacher Onizuka DVD early, and have the Japanese version of Virtua Fighter 4, so the hit at least won't be as bad.

What games're coming out in the next couple weeks? Well, for one, Soccer Slam. Which is an absolute BLAST to play. There is nothing like playing Soccer Slam with a person who's seen Shaolin Soccer, because they are inextricably linked in the minds of those who've experienced both. When time slows down, a little targeting cursor appears and my player leaps into the air with a mightily improbable kick, I can't help but yell "Go, Mighty Steel Leg!" and my co-worker feels obligated to shout "Damn you! Nothing gets past Bruce Lee!". God, that game's fun.

Gunvalkyrie: ...no. I played some of that, and the controls are far too awkward for me to get to love. High learning curve plus American Xbox controller equals baaaad.

Deus Ex: The Conspiracy is coming, and it will devour my soul. As a sidenote, I once joked around about making a fake ad that read "Warren Spector will make you his bitch", in a mockery of the old Romero ad. The problem is--he already has...

Freedom Force is also on the 26h, and that's the game that's finally motivating me to upgrade my computer, which has served me decently for almost three years now, despite its ATI Rage Fury Pro 8 MB card. What do I like about Freedom Force? It's like The Tick, but more for the purposes of nostalgia than parody. How else do you explain Minute Man, whose origin movie looks back at the height of cold war hysteria? Or Bullet, whose origin is a Rambo-like "Let's win the war this time" fantasy... but lord. The gameplay is also great--it's like Baldur's Gate, but without the running from zone to zone--in between missions and quests, you head back to headquarters, level up your members, and recruit new ones. Then you go see the plot, you do some bashing, and you see some more plot. The game calls to me--the only problem is the lack of co-op multiplayer, but hopefully someone will mod it to do that.

That about wraps up the games that will be devouring my soul for a couple weeks, and so I'll address what I know everyone wants to see: Nintendo and Square, kissing and making up. Or, a little more accurately, Yamauchi deciding that Nintendo losing money is a bad thing, and making sure that when he finally gets around to retiring, no one will start their tenure as the new head of Nintendo by reversing his decision about Square.

What do I think will come of this? Well, my personal hope is that Square will diverge from the Final Fantasy cash cow, and try and make something new for the Cube, rather than a rehash of the old standbys. Re-releases of old Final Fantasies for the GameBoy Advance are almost inevitable, of course, but I, for one, don't like where Final Fantasy is going. The game is fun and all, but at some point it stops being a game and becomes a plot about statistics manipulating, or statistics with a plot in there somewhere. Few things annoy me as much as "Remember to level up at least five times before the boss or he'll kick your ass" and then "Okay, time to press Confirm for an hour." Xenogears suffered heavily from the latter, and what I've seen of Xenosaga so far does too--there's no game there.

Maybe I'm just too jaded about these things. I should sit down with Dragon Warrior VII for all 120 hours of play some time... or just beat Valkyrie Profile again.

After all my deadlines, I think I'll do one of those... until next time.

"Resident Evil - The Movie"
Thursday - March 21, 2002
[Largo] - 17:04:00
Contrary to popular belief, a watched pot does eventually boil, however it takes what seems like an eternity to do so.

This week I took it upon myself and to go see 'Resident Evil – The Movie'. I've been a big fan of the series from its first incarnation to the subsequent releases. I've always liked the Survival Horror genre, even if the genre has been reduced to just mean "things break in thru windows". Regardless, the mood of Resident Evil (or Biohazard for you Japanese gamers out there) has always created that perfect mix of being both the hunter and the hunted. I do loathe the undead, so naturally a game where you get to shoot zombies, would appeal to me on a base level.

The game, for those of you unfamiliar to the series, was setup as follows - you played a member of a special police unit in Racoon City that is sent to investigate strange events at a mansion that turns out to be a secret research facility of the Umbrella corporation, your friendly neighborhood worldwide uber-corp that runs the world, etc. Upon reaching the spooky house, you learn that an accident at the facility has caused the release of the T-Virus, a nasty viral weapon which seems to make the dead walk around and be generally moody all day.

I went to see this live action adaptation of one of my favorite series expecting to experience ninety minutes of under cooked dialogue with a few spicy one liners served with some microwavable explosions, instead I was shocked to learn that at long last a film maker has managed to figure out how to boil water.

Alright enough with the cooking references, I've been watching too much Iron Chef lately and it's beginning to bleed into my style.

Resident Evil impressed me as a gamer. For the first time I've witnessed a movie that remains true to the original video game's ambience. The pace of the film is identical to any of the games in the series, there are several movements of slow story and fast action, along with the typical plot twists. Speaking of plot, it has one – just a heads up to you cynics out there who went to see Tomb Raider for the plot… all four of you.

Like the games, the movie instilled in me a sense of frustration as the main characters are mercilessly thrown from one bad situation to another. At times the film had me grasping for a invisible controller so I could move the actors to a imaginary save point, this would have worked if I had some imaginary type writer ribbon.

Hollywood has a history of ruining of what could be a great film by needlessly inventing story that the viewer doesn't need to know then spelling it out for them with Duplo block sized exposition. In many video games – Initially the less you know about who the main character is, the better. The reason being is it allows us to get a better feel for that character and as you progress the game, so as the characters learn more about themselves, so does the player. It's a great vehicle to draw people into games and it's a shame that it isn't used in film more often. Thankfully – the makers of 'Resident Evil - The Movie' decided to go with this angle, and ended up creating a film that feels more like a ride.

Man, and what a ride it is, for a fan of the game, the film is all the more enjoyable. References from the games, however subtle are all over the film's sets. Besides the use of corporate logos, security cards, memorable names/places, and the leveled design of the building, the filmmakers went thru the trouble of creating a detailed recreation of familiar scenes such as a simple manhole with a ladder that is the exact design as in the games.

There are some who feel that Paul Anderson(the director) who seems to be competing with Jerry Bruckheimer to be the new crown price of "Loud Movies", should not have been handed this project and would of preferred it go to George Romero as originally planned. It's my opinion that Paul did a great job of staying true to the original game, instead of trying to mold it into another cookie cutter Hollywood flick.

To the average movie watcher, Resident Evil may just be another horror / action film to fill their B-movie shelf when it hits DVD, but to a long time fan of the games, the movie is a real tribute to video games.

It may even be the first film to correctly bridge these two different genres of storytelling. Granted, that's my opinion, though I would advise you all to go see it and judge it for yourselves – this weekend.

In other news - my better half recently went to work for the Plano, TX branch of one of our sites advertising sponsors, Planet Anime, located at Highway-75 & Parker Road. If you happen to stop by there, buy stuff.

Speaking of current events, in responce to some requests for a local get together - there will be a MegaTokyo meeting in Frisco, TX at the Dave & Busters in the Stonebriar Mall on April 13th at 4pm for those interested. I'll of course be there and happily playing House of the Dead 2 John Woo Style.

Should be fun.

"art therapy"
Friday - March 29, 2002
[Piro] - 12:56:01
Well, as i said in the status bar above - real sorry about the schedule collapse this week. (and please, stop sending me emails telling me to stop apologizing. its only common courtesy to apologize for being late. mou...)

but you gotta admit - even YOU would apologize for putting up a Shirt Guy Dom strip. ^_^

I've ranted enough about the joys of deadlines in my day job, so i won't bore you with any more griping (griping is fun tho ^_^) I finally managed to get home fairly late - and just as i expected, i had about as much energy and time to do a comic for tomorrow as that little AA battery in the clock near my TV that has been telling me it's 3:23am for the past few days.

Stress is a funny thing. I admit, its been a really stressful week. One of the things about forcing yourself to draw to meet a regular schedule like MT requires is that i've had to draw in all sorts of moods - from the euphoric, relaxed and totally in groove with what i'm drawing, to the seraphim-taking-away-the-pruning-shears-as-i-take-them-to-my-fingers moods.

Sometimes, when you are stressed, you feel like there is all sorts of stuff bottled up inside. What it is might not be what you need to draw the scheduled work, but sometimes, when just allowing yourself to freesketch, that stressed, pensive mood can lead to some pretty good drawings, that have a lot of feeling in them.

over on Fredart (my poor neglected art page (sniff)) i posted one these types of sketches, a drawing i did just by sitting down and sketching at random. I had no plan, really, but... for some reason, it really caught something profound about Kimiko and Piro. Since Dom had worked so hard on the SGD strip for today, i decided that fredart was the place to put this sketch - think of it as something extra. I hope it makes up a little for leaving you hanging on the largo/miho story. no worries, i'll have the next installment up by saturday. :) WORST case monday :P

I'll keep you posted. I gotta go to bed before i fall over. ^_^

"Music therapy"
Friday - March 29, 2002
[Dom] - 21:30:00
I'm always amused by what it takes to work myself up into the combination killing/giggling frenzy that is needed to make an SGD day. Like Fred--and unlike Fred--music helps. Take a look at what I popped in at various times over the writing and scribbling of this SGD. This is by no means a list of my favorite songs, but you'll see that most of them make me laugh or make me angry, for one reason or another. The anomalies are when I needed a little mellowing because of an excess of emotion getting in the way of the writing process.

Bon Jovi - Bad Medicine: Most '80s metal makes me laugh. Don't ask me why.

Utada Hikaru - Sukiyaki: a Japanese singer, covering an English cover of the original Japanese song...

Roy Orbison - Only the Lonely: Sometimes, I need to feel mellowcholy. Don't ask me why. It's just cathartic, I guess.

Miles Davis - Freddie Freeloader: I worship Miles Davis. Well. Except for the covers of Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper he did...

Happa Tai - Yatta!: If you need to ask why I like this song, you haven't seen the video yet. I own two copies of the DVD (one's set aside as a gift) and am casting about for a Nan-chan UFO catcher and a pair of green leafy undies. I already have Maximo boxers from Capcom, so I'm set on that front.

Phantasy Star 4 Orchestral - Fight!: I've always liked this one over the Final Fantasy fight music. But maybe that's just old Genesis vs. Super Nintendo bias.

Bust a Move 2 - Let the Music Take Control: Because I want to be dancin' like a hero.

DJ Taka - .59
Silent Hill - Tears Of...
Dracula Battle 1 - Bloody Tears: what can I say, I'm a sucker for Castlevania remixes.

Cookie Monster - Cookie Disco: He's shaggy, he's blue, and he knows what to do... COOKIE!

Yuzo Koshiro/Streets of Rage - The Revenge of Mr. X: I once had a piece of Streets of Rage music stuck in my head for three years. THREE YEARS. Music to kick ass by, hands down. Crystal Method doesn't compare to Mr. Koshiro, in my mind.

Radiskull and Devildoll - We Roll & Rock: Natiskull and DevilDom will, one day, happen. Just you wait. It'll probably happen before the next episode comes out, too... blah.

Saeko - Yume ha Tooi keredo: Iria Zeiram: The Animation was one of my first exposures to anime. I have a soft spot for it, especially the gory parts.

They Might Be Giants - Dinner Bell: No SGD goes by without at least one TMBG song playing. It's just right.

New Model Army - Purity: When I was a kid, my exposure to music mostly came from my older cousins, who had money and could buy records, tapes and radios. These guys, and The Cure, were the favorites of one, and for some reason, Their songs have stuck with me more than The Cure.

Orbital - Tootled: Ah... tasty.

Matsuda Seiko - Ashita he to kakedashite yukou: Just a nice, mellow, wholesome song, from a nice, mellow, way too wholesome show.

Vivaldi - Violin concerto for four guitars: I have no explanation for this.

Alison Krauss - Down in the River to Pray: Most of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack has been stuck in my head since the Grammies. I curse them. This track is a particular favorite of a friend of mine, who until recently was studying to be a priest.

Tokyo Ska Paradise - Lupin '78: ACen reasons which will be revealed later.

And there, you have a glimpse into what makes an SGD tick--lots of psychosis and a little bit of melody.

"Freedom"
Monday - April 1, 2002
[Ukyo] - 00:08:26
Hey everyone, it's about time that I ranted. As I am sitting here, I am listening to a live audio broadcast via ShoutCast by our friends over at JapanARadio, a free service that may be permanently leaving the the internet. (Or come close to.)

On May 21st, the U.S. Copyright Office will be presented by recomendations by the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel ("CARP") to charge webcasters at rates that would almost in effect shut down next to all webcasters out there save a few 2 - 3 large ones. If you would like more information on what you can do, for information on what you can do help stop this, and for more detailed information, please visit www.SaveInternetRadio.Org.

From what I am told, and read, they want AM/FM stations that do WebCasting to pay .07 cents per listener, PER SONG. And if that's not bad, its double for non-airwave webcasters. Those webcasters who are not actual AM/FM stations will have to pay double that per listener, per song. Webcasters barely make enough money off of it to keep it going as it is already. Even non-commercial sites have to pay .02 cents per.

I don't believe that I or anyone else out there likes the idea of not being able to groove to live audio streams while at work, or at home chatting. I agree with 'Phil' when he said, "The government fails to see that most webcasters aren't businesses, but simple not-for-profit enthusiasts that enjoy music and like to listen and program their selections to their individual tastes instead of having their selections dictated and plagued with commercial interruption and traffic reports."

Not only will they be charging webcasters, but they will also be invading YOUR privacy. That right, webcasters will be forced to make all of their listeners fill out personal information forms online, to submit to them.

As many of you know, we will be attending Anime Central on April 19 - 22. We are still not sure on when our panel will be, but as soon as we find out we will try to post it here for everyone.

"Baseball"
Wednesday - April 3, 2002
[Dom] - 13:12:00
Welp, it's baseball season again. And you know what that means. Lots, and lots of statistics flying around. WHIP, ERA, K/BB, OPS, SB, CUTFAABB... oh, what's CUFAAFBB? It's my annual "Countdown Until the First Article about Another Possible Battle of the Bay." It's a yearly ritual, and inevitably, the first columnist will write it around the 18th of September or so.

But anyway, baseball. I grew up with it, but since I grew up with Joe Montana, it was always sidelined by the golden boy who was always seemed too small--until he stepped on the field and made everyone else look like a flea circus. My family got caught up in that mania, just like so many others in the Bay Area, and baseball was barely worth mentioning in the house. I think I went to a Giants game once, when they were doing a "good students get Giants tickets!" promotion at my school, but what I mostly remember about that park is that Candlestick was very, very cold. Note that in the years since I first visited Candlestick, it's still pretty much the only impression I have of it.

The only time baseball became a real blip on the radar was 1989, when both San Francisco and Oakland went to the Series. I remember being forced to sit on the porch and watch the game through the window while everyone else was in the living room, all because I chose to root for the A's. (What can I say? They had the more recognizable names) Then there was an earthquake, and a strike or two, and baseball was off the map again.

Flash forward to my freshman year of college. There I am with about 3 hours of class a day, no parents around, a two-minute walk to any given class, and therefore waaaay too much free time. What could a bored boy do? After all, there's only so much porn you can look at before it all starts blurring together, and besides, that leaves another 10 hours and 50 minutes to burn, assuming 10 hours of sleep. So what filled the time, and kept things relatively sane for me? ESPN. There was always SOMEthing going on, be it baseball, basketball, hockey, or football, and the various stories kept my mind busy.

The natural progression of this newfound sports fanaticism meant going to games. Since I was on a college budget, it meant going to cheap games. So, I went to lots of Warriors and A's games, and was lucky enough to get into a Niners game in the nosebleed seats. And from there, I decided that baseball is the best sport to watch in person, because it gives you plenty of time to hang out with your friends, make an ass of yourself on the scoreboard TV, grab food in between innings, et cetera. The Niners game I was at I couldn't see a thing, while... well, it was a Warriors game, I don't need to explain that pain. Basketball fans in Memphis and Vancouver can relate--so can the Hawks, to some extent, since they peaked right around the time our team did. And so, I became a big baseball fan on top of everything else.

Things got even worse two years ago. Pacific Bell Park--one of the most beautiful locales in the sport--opened up no more than three blocks away from where I work. So, I sunk further and further into laid-back baseball fandom, kicking back with a friend, a few Krispy Kremes, some cotton candy, some Ben and Jerry's ice cream and the accompanying huge sugar high.

And when I thought things couldn't go any further, last year, Jon Miller's voice started haunting me. Obviously, when I was watching the game, I would hear his voice. But then, he would start popping up when I least expected it. Walking to lunch? Jon Miller on the radio as I'm passing a newsstand. Working? Jon Miller ever-so-faintly coming from my boss' office. On the subway? Jon Miller the moment we were out of the transbay tunnel. Jon Miller in the morning, Jon Miller in the afternoon, Jon Miller in my sleep. I swear, if I'd had sex I would've been giving Jon Miller play-by-play. "Ground ball to short, this could be two... Aurilia flips it to Kent, on to Snow... DOUBLE play!"

Which brings me, in my meandering way, to today. I love Opening Days. They're full of hope and ridiculous possibilities that will most likely be quashed over the next 6 months but are still possibilities. I love the fact that as of today, Baltimore and Tampa Bay sit atop the AL East while the Yankees and the Sox are at the bottom. I love that Barry Bonds is 'on pace' to hit 324 home runs this season. I especially love Bud Selig scrambling to try and denounce Forbes magazine's assessment of baseball's finances after losing his credibility during the congressional hearings. I love that... well, that there's 161 more games of variable importance for me either to watch or ignore, numbers to keep track of for fantasy baseball purposes, and, of course, the ludicrous injuries that baseball players suffer. Would you believe that last year, David Wells was held out for gout? Gout, of all things...

Hehehe, until next time.

"Speechless"
Monday - April 8, 2002
[Dom] - 01:43:00
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 18:46:44 -0800 (PST)
From: [name deleted]
To: dom@megatokyo.com
Subject: D.O.F.S(Dom Official Fan Site)

Hello Dom;
I want your permission to create a shrine to you and your many forms. Send me links to every site youve [sic] been on and some personal info. I believe a Dom praising website is needed. It will also double as an object of your destruction.

I have no words.

"Annoy Largo in Person"
Wednesday - April 10, 2002
[Largo] - 08:14:00
Just a reminder to all you Dallas/Fort Worth and neighboring North Texas people.

I'll be at available to be annoyed by all of you this weekend at the following bat-place and bat-time.

When? This Saturday, April 13th at 4:00pm

Where? Dave & Busters In the Bar/Arcade section underground.(in the Stonebriar Mall) 2601 Preston Road Frisco, TX (214) 387-0915

How? Uh, well ... get a ride ... or something

Why? To hear me explain the virtues of apache webserver and unix administration, why PHP is better then ASP, and why I in complete lust for MySQL. Also up on he agenda will be my rant on why the tech job market in DFW area is sucking major wind. Either that, or to just challenge me to a game of House of the Ed... er I mean Dead.

What? Dave & Busters is one of those neat places that combines coin-op video games with an open bar. Naturally this seemed to be best place to hold a MegaTokyo gathering.

Dante Hicks: "You hate people!" Randal Graves: "But I love gatherings, isn't it ironic?"

"No, not Watchmen"
Monday - April 15, 2002
[Dom] - 01:30:00
What was interesting about my Monday rant was how people reacted to it. It turned into a sort of Rorschach test, in that it was a neutral shape onto which people projected themselves through their perceptions-- or words to that effect. Don't blame me of this rant is unintelligible, I got home at sunrise today and am running on very little sleep.

About two-thirds of the e-mail I got thought that I was a little frightened, while the other third thought I was speechless more along the lines of the old Coffee Talk "I'm verklempt... talk amongst yourselves, here's a topic: FLCL (ƒtƒ�ƒNƒ� to those of you who have Japanese enabled) is neither furry nor curry."

Meanwhile, and this is the most interesting thing, all but two people stayed along gender lines. As in everybody, except a couple of people who know me really well, thought that the sender of the e-mail was their own gender. Which makes things really fascinating, and kind of made me wonder what made people project these qualities onto a nebulous e-mailer.

But that's a topic for another time. When I was thinking about Rorschach, I thought about Watchmen, since that's the last place I saw a Rorschach test--my tenth viewing of the Batman movie doesn't count. From there I could've gone somewhere cool, deconstructive and anti-empiricist, but, alas, no.

Instead, brainwashed geek that I am, I thought about Freedom Force, and by extension, City of Heroes. And I thought "Hmm. About now would be a good time to start organizing a group of MegaTokyo Mystery Men to assist me in my goal of defending the city and getting maximum face time on billboards." So of course I decided to whore it out in this space, after the success of the Million Maximo March.

And randomly segueing to the MMM, I'd like to say that it's still on, and most likely to be scheduled for Saturday afternoon, just after lunch (but more than 30 minutes after you eat, since the last thing I want is a lot of annoyed mothers snapping at me). This applies to both Otakon and Anime Expo, and the gathering will occur at an as-yet-undetermined location. Mostly because I don't know where the closest pool to the convention center is. Maybe at AX we can get away with heading toward the aquarium in our skivvies.

On second thought, no.

And, a random bonus question before I go to sleep and stop writing deliriously: if you were playing Pictionary with people in various degrees of inebriation, how would you draw a rock so that they would get it? How the hell do you represent a rock and make it recognizable?

"con surfing"
Monday - April 15, 2002
[Piro] - 23:13:03

Anime Central Information Anime Central is the midwest's largest Anime convention and is held at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare in Rosemont, Illinois (basically, its just outside of Chicago ^_^) Several Megatokyo related folks, including myself, will be there (I'm actually a guest - lookie, i'm at the bottom of the list ^_^). Dom, Wing 'Asmodeus' Zero, and Ukyo are comming, and it should be a lot of fun. I'll have a table in Artist Alley where i'll probably spend a lot of the 'well, whadda we do now?' time common at cons. It's a good place to catch us if you can't go to the Megatokyo Panel. I've learned better than to believe that i'll be able to get mondays comic drawn while sitting here - which means i might just hide out in my room. ^^;; This is the schedule so far: - Friday, April 19, 2002 - Opening Ceremonies - 11:00am (Grand Ballroom ABCD) - I am driving to Chicago Friday morning, so there is a good chance i won't be able to make the opening ceremonies - it all depends on how early i leave. I'm gonna try though.... Meet the Guests Reception - 7:00pm to 9:00pm (Grand Foyer) - i guess this is a 'eat and mingle' thing, so unless something comes up, i'll be there with Wing, Dom and Ukyo. - Saturday, April 20, 2002 - ???? - 2:00 to 2:50pm - Grand Ballroom ABCD - not really sure why, but i'm supposed to show up for something at that time. ^^;; Megatokyo Revealed - 4:45 to 6:15pm (Live Programming 3) Remember the panel last year where we broke fire codes by there being too many people there? Well, they promised me a bigger room this year ^^;; This is the main Megatokyo discussion panel; we'll answer any questions you may have and throw things at dom as he works the crowd. It should be fun, i just wish i knew what the hell i'm gonna talk about... There, that should do it. If there are any changes or updates to the schedule, i'll post them here. It should be a fun con, i'm looking forward to it. Also, there will be some Megatokyo t-shirts availible for purchase at the USAnime booth in the dealers room. I purchased a bunch of shirts and i'm gonna dump it on the USAnime guys to take care of for me. I'm gonna swipe some Kanon merchandise from them when i do too... shhh, dont tell them. :)

"NWN Beta!"
Monday - April 22, 2002
[Largo] - 13:26:00
This just in from our friends at Bioware.

News Alert!

From Bioware: Media Advisory

"You've asked for it, now you've got it!

Neverwinter Nights limited open Beta Test announced. Select fans and members of the public play Neverwinter Nights early!

EDMONTON, Alberta, Canada - April 22nd, 2002 - BioWare Corp. and Infogrames Inc. are pleased to present the limited open Beta test for one of the most anticipated PC games of the year - Neverwinter Nights. Selected PC game fans will have an unprecedented opportunity to dig into the rich world of Neverwinter Nights before anyone else.

"Neverwinter Nights will appeal to all types of gamers. This limited beta test will allow selected gamers, of every type and interest, an opportunity to find out why Neverwinter Nights is a 'must own' addition to every gamer's collection," said Greg Zeschuk, Joint CEO and Co-Executive Producer of Neverwinter Nights. "We've never conducted an open beta test before," added Ray Muzyka, BioWare's Joint CEO and Co-Executive Producer of Neverwinter Nights. "We'll be testing module designs, connectivity, and other technical aspects of the game, as well as offering the growing Neverwinter Nights community a snapshot of what we' ve been working on at BioWare these last five years," he concluded.

To enter the Beta test program, prospective testers must visit (http://www.betatests.net/), click on "Register Now" and complete the sign-up form. BioWare and Infogrames staff will select beta testers every week in a rolling acceptance process. The initial wave of Beta discs will be sent to the lucky first testers in early May."

"lost days"
Wednesday - April 24, 2002
[Piro] - 07:44:02
UPDATE

well, it looks like today DID go well, after all. Thats a good thing, because right now i am sitting down to get a comic out for tomorrow. Thanks for your patience, and i really appologize for the blip - it almost gave me a heart attack.

I'm gonna go draw now. more later.

- piro (7:56 pm)

------

i am in the middle of a very serious work related crisis, and as a result, i just cannot get anything MT related done right now. I *don't* want to leave everyone hanging, and i am so sorry about this, but i am very worried about my job right now, so i have to do everything i can to fix the problems that have arisen. Please don't email me regarding this - i appreciate all the kind thoughts (and complaints that always come too ^_^) but i really wont be able to look at any of your emails for a few days. Honestly, i'll be jumping back on finishing the next comic before i read anything anyways. :)

If things go well today, which i am hoping they will, i'll jump back on to getting the next comic done tonight - so there is a small chance it will be ready by tomorrow. If things go badly, it might be a while. Once i finish up the comic, i have a very exhaustive Anime Central con review to write, and lots of pictures to show. I had a really good time at the con, it's a shame i had to return home to a disaster of this magnitude. I just don't fsking live right... why me? (sigh)

i am NOT going to disappear for any length of time over this, and please be assured that doing MT is VERY high on my priority list - i'm almost stubborn enough to pull off a comic tonight, no matter what happens. Thank you for your patience, MT fans are the best. :) - piro

"in progress"
Monday - April 29, 2002
[Piro] - 08:15:00
I'm working on that Anime Central report, as well as some other comments on what was horrid week last week. Things should be back on track this week, so look for the next comic and the Acen report by wednesday.

so think of this as the shortest piro rant ever. :)

"So very tired"
Friday - May 3, 2002
[Dom] - 01:30:00
Oh, mercy. The last few weeks are a blur for me, especially last weekend. They've been a mess of cons, work, deadlines, and, to top it all off, a new PC.

Yes, a new PC--replacing the three-year-old piece of junk that was keeping me from playing such goodies as Warcraft III and Freedom Force consistently. Hell, even Wizardry 8 was chunking and dying on the old thing. So, off I went to gamepc.com and grabbed me a new box--and a cheap hundred gig deskstar while I was at it.

So. ACen and Fanime reports. I'm sorry to say that I remember very little that I can write down at 2 in the morning. But what snippets I can both remember and exrpess, I will put down here:

ACen 2002
Iron Guest needs more decapitations per contest to keep my interest. Last year's was good, this year's was not quite as good. And I'm not quite big on the fact that someone said if the judges knew who Fred was, he would've won--that just isn't right. This isn't the Olympics, people, we're supposed to be fair judges.

I'm glad I switched from briefs to boxers. Eliminated conspicuous bulges from pictures of me in my "Maximo Costume".

Speaking of that, everyone's a lot more fun at midnight, except maybe tired people. Fred's going to kill me if he ever finds out everything that I did over the con while high on my own adrenaline.

Akamatsu Ken didn't link us from his blog, thank God--the last thing we need to get is a flood of hits from Japan before the translations are ready.

Listening to Akamatsu over pizza made me realize just how much I despise multiple publicatiosn of the same character. He nearly spat out his food when he heard there were at least four different Spider-mans, with four different writers (I didn't count Ultimate Team-up, since that's Bendis and technically isn't just Spider-man)

Next time I go to ACen, we request two large cardboard boxes from ACen staff. One marked Dom House and the other marked Piro House. Then we will be cunningly hidden.

Eileen Hu needs to be spanked more often. It'd keep her in line.

It's oddly appropriate that the Largo cosplayer and the Miho cosplayer were in a (non-fatal) car accident and couldn't make it to the con. Glad no one was seriously hurt...

It disturbs me that the vibrating catbus was torpedo-shaped. And almost fit in a cardboard tube. It made a good replacement for the Vibrating Sheep. Now, to you who received the Vibrating Catbus--congrats, but stop e-mailing us while drunk, please. And patch Outlook while you're at it, because Klez sucks.

My girlfriend says that the Coo hat looks better than my hair does. I find it disturbing that she wants me to style my hair into little ears... or something.

Fanime
Note to self: Run faster when fellow karaoke MC calls for girls to molest me on stage.

I remember this a bit more clearly, so here's an actual Story for all of you. See, there is a man named Henry Lee, AKA Genjitsu. People keep mistaking us for each other. So we've decided to do this Twin schtick. Thus, when he got up on stage and threw off his bathrobe to reveal his undies and a green leaf, I was obliged to strip down, stuff a leaf down my boxers and be Ucchan to his Nan-chan. The additions of Ed dancing backup with a hockey mask on and the video camera recording this for posterity were unexpected, though not unwelcome...

Note to self: Never, ever, EVER eat 40 chocolate-covered coffee beans in two gulps ever again. Especially not with red bull chaser.

This was the con where I really, really wanted to cosplay. Natsuki and Meruru were Cantide/Kanchi and Mamimi (though you wouldn't know, from Lillard's selective cropping. Beyond that, I don't remember much, though Greg Dean's girlfriend (more on her later) was in an impressive kero-chan costume. But the real kicker was the post-masquerade Denny's excursion. I think Henry and I dropped our pants again for the group picture, but that wasn't what I was getting at. Hold up a second.

Ah, there we go. The interview at Denny's with Ah! My Cosplay, Anything Goes, Henry, Myself, and... uh... Amy... was cool, though I apologize for not being able to remember everyone's names and affiliations. It was 3 AM, alright? Anyway, the interview was informative, fun, and inspiring. I just wish I could remember the interviewer's name and not just her screen name... sigh. That's what 3 hours of sleep a night does to you, I guess.

Speaking of Greg Dean and his girlfriend, I find it amazing and disturbing that while his hair has gotten longer and he's grown chin pubes, Greg Dean has not changed his shirt in two years. And yet he still has a great girlfriend.

It's amazing what video game tunes you can do with just a cello and a violin. I should've requested Bloody Tears. Oh well, maybe they'll be at AX, like they said. They sure earned enough money for gas and hotel.

And speaking of... nah, I'll save that for later, once the gemas rise.

Anyway, big thanks to:
Akamatsu Ken, for being a lovable dweeb.
Ryan Gavigan and Trevmex for getting us bigger panel rooms.
Henry Lee, for being a nifty decoy, a handy shaving mirror, and a shameless freak. Just like me. Oh, and buying me food. That was cool too.
Andy Kent, for proving that Yuichi Kayama (zansu) is not a fruit, just a little fruity.
Jon Sugerman, who paid my way to ACen and started to teach me bass guitar...
along with all of SWEK, who brought great music and the saga of Real Kenshin vs. Fake Kenshin, which deserves its own rant at some point in the near future.
Tanzy, Tommy, Ed, and Yellow Shirt Girl, for sitting through ALL of the Fanime karaoke contest, lack of ventilation and all.
Ellen Ohlmacher, who kept me sane during the really hectic bits. Well, as close to sane as I can be.
Ed, who kept me crazy during the slow bits.

That's all I can think of for now. Until next time, keep it weird. Or something.

"little by little"
Sunday - May 5, 2002
[Piro] - 12:23:00
Gyah. I should know better than to go to cons. For some reason, whenever i leave the state for any length of time, all hell breaks loose and i spend weeks cleaning up the mess. My trip to Anime Central was no exception.

I still can't believe that Anime Central was only two weekends ago. It feels like it was months ago. First, i returned home to find my Eudora in-box was corrupted, and after making the mistake of saying 'yes' to the 'rebuild indexes' prompt, i lost 15,000 emails. Why in god's name did i have 15,000 emails in my In-box? Mainly because i never did sit down and work out a way to properly handle all the email i get as a result of MT. I read it as it comes in, and god help me if i want to answer anything a few days later - it was almost impossible to find anything.

There is some good that comes from loosing all this email (basically, it's all the non-spam emails i've received since MT started a year and a half ago) I decided that i needed to find better ways of dealing with my email, and better ways of filtering spam and virus ridden emails (btw, word to everyone out there, PLEASE SCAN FOR VIRUSES... i literally get 50 emails with the Klez virus attached PER DAY.). I've also developed a system for marking emails that i want to answer, priorities, flames and beatdownmails, etc. I simply cannot answer most emails, but i am going to try harder to answer emails that i want to answer.

Speaking of viruses, the next thing i returned to was a rather nasty virus infestation at the office that came in through my personal email account (yes, my Megatokyo email). We finally got on top of it, but it just added a truckload of stress that i didn't need last week.

Then, it was a whole host of other Megatokyo related things that needed to be done. There's a lot of stuff going on in the background, above and beyond just getting the comic out three times a week. Yes, the past two weeks were screwed up. This happens when you loose momentum. I know some people still have a problem with me trying hard to keep the 3 per week schedule - well, tough. you know damn well that you will at LEAST get two good comics per week, and on good weeks there will be a third comic. It's rare to completely miss a comic, but it happens. Let me explain real quick why 3 per week is preferable to 2 per week one last time so maybe all of you will finally 'get it'.

When it comes to drawing and storytelling, momentum is the key. When I am on a roll, it's actually EASIER to roll from comic to comic. What kills you are the breaks in between, where you get out of your groove. I tried 2 per week for a while, but the gaps between comics were too great, it was actually HARDER. 3 per week is a good schedule for me. What gets me are all the extra things that i do in the background. Honestly though, if you've been reading MT for any length of time, you've got to be used to this by now. Also, i think it shows people that the creative process isn't perfect. People think that THEY can't create anything because what they see on TV or in print is always there and flawless. Sure, with lots of lead time, money, and it being your main job, thats very possible. Most of us don't have that luxury, so perhaps my way of doing things isn't so bad? :)

ok, enough whining. I need a little electronic 'whine meter' that can sit on my computer (maybe it can be shaped like seraphim sitting on the monitor, showing me her laptop which has a readout that says '75% annoying - stop whining before i smack you." Gosh, that'd be cool.

I had an absolute blast at Anime Central, as did the rest of the Megatokyo crew who came. I didn't get there till Friday afternoon, but once i had a chance to hook up with everyone, it was a lot of fun. We managed to get an art table to sit at, and for once i think i was able to actually draw something more than just a scribble for most people who came by (sharpie marker is not really my favorite medium). On friday we came across the first Megatokyo cosplayers...

now, before i serve up some pics and whatnot, i need to pause for a second here. I don't think i can describe how WEIRD it is to see people dress up as characters that you created. Even here, a year later, i found myself blinking and looking around with a funny feeling in my gut. My first experience with this was last year when i went to Anime Central - i was told that there was a girl running around in a burgundy version of Kimiko's idol outfit.. Sure enough, there was (i come to find out a year later that a friend over on the Fredart Forums knows her - small world ^^;;) I remember drawing this sketch while sitting on the couch scribbling out ideas for this webcomic rod and i were working on. It's just too spooky.

At Otakon 2001, i think i was more prepared for the idea of MT cosplayers, but even so, it's just... a WEIRD feeling to see people dressed up as you characters. For instance, at otakon, the one's that i did catch was this gal dressed up as Pretty Pretty Piromi (from this horrid sketch i did) - she looks a hella lot better than the sketch, and then there was this darkly spooky cute Miho cosplayer - she even had red contacts in her eyes... ^^;;;

At Anime Central, there was a whole crew of MT cosplayers - and the most amusing thing about them is that they are Asmodeus's friends from school... they knew Asmo was involved with MT, but weren't aware that he was the 'asmodeus' character until he started helping them with thier oufits ^^;; I knew they were going to be there, and on friday i got a chance to meet Piro and Seraphim ^^;;; That's another thing... cosplaying MT characters is cool, but when someone is cosplaying as your girlfriend... that's really kinda spooky ^_^ i gotta tell you tho, she pulled it off quite well. Looks disturbingly LIKE seraphim. ^^;;;; oh, and there was this guy cosplaying as Dom, who oddly enough looks more like Dom than Dom does. ^_^

Oh, and i understand that there was a Largo and Miho cosplayer... but they got into a car accident on the way to Acen, and couldn't make it (no one was hurt, just the car ^^;;)... that somehow seems so... prophetic, somehow... ^^;;

Saturday was the real work day for us. First there was the Iron Guest competition against the lovely Lorraine Reyes McLees, which i lost (no surprises there ^_^) - oh, Ukyo has put together some of his pics from the con here - he's much more organized that i am). After that, we went to visit Akamatsu Ken's panel and hear from the great Love Hina artist himself. I had made a little gift art for Akamatsu-san, which i carried around in hopes of giving it to him. I finally was able to later that day, but we were both so busy that we didn't have a chance to talk. More on that later, though...

Its right after the iron guest that i made a small mistake. Issac asked me if i could help judge the cosplay masquerade later that night. Like a doofus, i said 'sure!'. what i didn't realize was that this would goof me up later that evening.

after relaxing for a bit in the guest suite, we finally headed on down to the do the Megatokyo panel which was at 4:45 to 6:30. First off, the line to get into the panel was huge... mind numbingly huge. People described it as being bigger than even what i saw. When i got into the room, my heart fell... i had assumed we were getting both programming rooms, but what i saw was that the room had been divided and we had only a room for 200 people - and there were way way way more than that outside. Now, to be fair to the con staff, we had a room for 30 people last year, and they figured that a room for 200 would be plenty... but it wasn't. I was pretty upset about this, and i couldn't figure out what to do. I had committed to the cosplay judging, and i had to go, but i insisted on having a second panel after that just in case any of those people in line would be willing to come back later. I don't think its fair or right that anyone who gave us the honor of coming to see us couldn't - no matter what ever happens with mt's popularity, i don't ever want people shut out. My many thanks to everyone who came back to the second panel (which included the MT cosplayers, who didn't make it in the first time :(

The first panel went pretty well, i think we were sort of entertaining (there are times i just want to beat dom, asmodeus, and ukyo up with a baseball bat, and there were times that evening... ^^;; I think Crowqueen felt the same way. :) There was even an underwear signing request... gyah, i felt bad for refusing, she looked dejected... but i have to keep my conscience in mind, you understand. ^^;;;

after the panel, i helped judge the cosplay event... now, honestly, i think that everyone, and i mean EVERY one of the cosplayers that got up there and performed their skits on stage deserved a prize. It takes a brave person to do that, and i have to say i enjoyed watching all of it.

I was, of course, late for the second panel... to my chagrin, i discovered that Dom, Asmodeus and Ukyo had been, er... entertaining the crowd... while waiting for me. I do humbly apologize for this, and I will be bringing a liberal supply of duct tape to the next con to prevent any further... incidents...

At least the MT cosplayers were able to get to the second MT panel ^^;;; I've ruined some of these panels by posing with them (i don't look like piro at all, tho i do have the whole 'dork' thing down well ^^;;). Here's the cast - Junpei, the Megagamers boss, Piro, Seraphim, Ping and Dom., as well as them posing here and here, and then me ruining the picture here. Here Ping beats up on Junpei ^_^, and a better shot of ping-chan.

And yes, there have been other sightings of MT cosplayers, most recently a Piro cosplayer, of a sort, at Fanime 2002, and yet another Seraphim cosplayer at Sakuraocon...

Needless to say, i've never ceased to be impressed or not honored by people dressing up as MT characters. People seem to have fun doing it, and that really, is all that matters. :) Thanks to all of you, and if i missed anyone, please send me some picks, i'd love to see em.

Ok, this is getting long (what else is new) i should finish my con report. As i said earlier, I didn't have a chance to talk to Akamatsu-san, the guest of honor and amazingly talented creator of Love Hina, on saturday. However, on Sunday, thanks to Seizo-san, who was working as Akamatsu's translator, myself and the MT crew were invited to join Akamatsu-san and his wife for some Chicago style pizza at a restaurant near the hotel. I have to say that Akamatsu-san and his wife were incredibly nice, and were very receptive to talking with us (and trying to work their way thru a chicago deep dish ^_^). Many thanks to both Seizo and Asmodeus for their translation efforts. I have to admit that i was so damn nervous at the lunch that i didn't eat much, and any Japanese comprehension went out the window. Akamatsu-san had indeed checked out Megatokyo before coming to the con, and i was very grateful for the chance to talk with him about MT and to tell him about the nature of the market for anime, manga and comics here in the states.

after that, i headed home. I have to say i was pretty thoughtful on the drive home. It's been a very weird year and a half since Megatokyo started. Sometimes i dont know what to think. I've just been enjoying the ride, with all its trials and tribulations. Things do indeed change little by little, but its better that way... it makes it more surprising when you suddenly register just how much they HAVE changed over time...

I'd like to give thanks to Issac, Tony and Ryan as well as the rest of the Anime Central crew for all their help and for running a great con. You guys really made me feel welcome as a guest, and I hope i am able to come again next year. Keep up the good work. Props to our silent MT crewmember Crowqueen for proving that not everyone involved with MT is a freak :P, and hi to Cortana, Cookie, Pingchan, Shinji, cddikers, Mike, Rob and everyone else i missed or didn't get a chance to talk to at the con. That's the trouble with cons - too many friends around ^_^

"My l33t Wedding"
Tuesday - May 7, 2002
[Largo] - 12:20:00
First up, Some Bioware News!

This Media Alert has been brought to you by the letter 'L' and the number '3', oh, and also by those talented Canadians that make my favorate unreleased game, Neverwinter Nights.

"Neverwinter Nights fans get an early look at the tools that make the game.

Fans of Neverwinter Nights will soon be able to get their hands on the BETA version of the Aurora Neverwinter Nights Toolset - the same tools that BioWare developers are using to build the game's expansive Official Neverwinter Nights Campaign story. This BETA version of the Neverwinter Nights Toolset is being made available to enable the Neverwinter Nights community to become familiar with the easy-to-use Toolset, and with the process of building Neverwinter Nights modules. The BETA version is an 'in development snapshot' of the toolset that we've chosen to release to the fans early. It is not finished, but it is quite cool, and we thought the Neverwinter Nights community would appreciate getting their hands on it. The full, complete toolset will be included with the Final Neverwinter Nights game (coming soon to a software shop near you).

So, where can you get the BETA version of the Aurora Neverwinter Nights Toolset? Participating retailers (Electronics Boutique, Best Buy, and GameStop) are making the Aurora Neverwinter Nights Toolset available as a Pre-Order bonus disc. As well, some of the participating retailers are also including in the pre-order package, a special 'custom created' module - to be made available after Neverwinter Nights is released.

About the BETA version of the Neverwinter Toolset:

This is a BETA release of the Aurora Neverwinter Nights Toolset. As with the previously released Neverwinter Nights Model Viewer, the Toolset may not work on certain systems. As a BETA version, it will include a limited selection of the final content in the game. There will be no updates, patches, or fixes to this BETA version of the Toolset. You will not be able to play, or test modules created with this version of the Toolset - you need the server software to do this, and that will be shipped with the final version of Neverwinter Nights.

Modules created with the BETA toolset will probably not work in the final game. Neverwinter Nights is still under development, and we may change the way things work. We will attempt to build a utility to convert modules made with the BETA toolset to be compatible with the final retail game, however we make no guarantee this will be possible.

Additionally, fans with a fast Internet connection can download the Aurora Toolset from various gaming websites (to be announced). Be warned, the toolset download is quite large! -Brad Grier, Bioware Communications Manager"

Well.. there you have it, within the next few weeks, everyone will be able to start working with the NWN Tools Set... I can't wait to craft myself my own little magic sword with that thing...

It's always an odd time when a game that you've been following for years while in development begins to approach that final moment of release, for us - the fans and press, we wait patiently, telling ourselves "Just One More Day." -- meanwhile the developers themselves are working "standard 60 hour crunch weeks", which is code for "I live in my cube, shoot me... please!"

Initializing Wedding Rant

As many of you know, I'm getting married in just a few short weeks on June 3rd. A Wedding is a wonderful thing, I always pictured it like a big fancy party with some ceremony and lots of beer at the end.

... man, was I wrong.

The truth is, a wedding is a massive undertaking, and ironically, the middle-sized weddings are the hardest to plan, apparently a large wedding is easy to deal with as you're forking out so much cash to hold it, that you just hire everyone else to do the work.

Having spent the last few months tied up in planning, decision making, and other assorted wed'd goodness, I've come to conclusion that couples who end up just eloping may be on to something.

Still, there is a certain irreplacable charm to a traditional wedding and reception, and so - my bride to be and I are looking forward to it. It should be great, I only wish I could invite all the fans of MT out there to it, but I don't think that could be managed with our current budget.

However, I have gotten a lot of emails about where to send gifts / where we are registered, etc. So for those of you interested, we are registered as Rodney Caston & Ruby Boiko at the following websites. Amazon, Bed Bath & Beyond, and The Knot.

Recently I've taken a keen interest in playing Go, as a gamer I've always been fasinated with gaming systems from the d20 rules on down to far older games such as Chess and Go.

Lately I thought I'd try to see if I can actually get good at playing Go. Initally I started some games up on yahoo and the zone but finally came to find a server called Kiseido, a site for playing Go online that allows you to use their software so others can view your games and vice versa - and so you can determine your ranking and progress. Along with this, you compete with others for purposes of learning, or in my case - losing, lots of losing...

I had always been a good chess player, but it gets stale after awhile, like most strategy games, it eventually comes down to a war of depleing resources, as the board yields fewer and fewer pieces.

In Chess - you begin play with a board with a complete set of pieces, and as the game progress's the pieces are slowly removed, one by one. You always end play with less pieces on the board then when you began.

With Go, it's the opposite, you begin play with an empty board for you to fill with your stones like it was a canvas.

With Go, it's not that the stones that get depleted, it is the territory left on the board.

Another difference between the two, is scale - where Chess is about unit control, Go is about entire armies. You get a different vision about conquest from Go then you do from Chess. Chess has a singular objective - "CheckMate" - the striving to capture one piece on the board, where as Go focus's on aquiring territory on the board, not capture - instead, capturing stones in Go is a side effect, not the goal.

I suppose I could go on for a few more pages about Go, but I doubt I could really give my description of the game any justice.

If you want to learn more about the game, or to find local Go clubs and tournaments - try this link.

"soul looks like..."
Friday - May 10, 2002
[Piro] - 12:07:00
First off, i'd like to thank dom for stepping in last night. I was really stressin over things, and even though Shirt Guy Dom stick figure days are a symbol of all that is wrong with the world (and california), it made me feel a little better and a little less down. Thanks dom.

One of the problems with all the stuff thats been goin on lately (lately being, what, about a year?) is that the nature of the rants changed over time. At first, they were supposed to be a small, three times per week commentary about whatever was on our minds at the time - a braindump, of sorts. Unfortunately, I got into the habit of writing rants sporatically, and as a result they started to get overly long and overly serious. I've spent far too much time whining about things. When's the last time i talked about what anime or manga i was into? Yeah, i know...

I think i take MT way too seriously sometimes. It's like this odd paradox of dissatisfaction and joy with the damn thing that has my poor inept little brain feeling like a little bunny rabbit struck stiff with fear and terror while dodging Semis and Buicks during rush hour.

Chill time is important, and i think my biggest problem lately is, well... i havent had any. It's my fault, really - i commit to too many things, and sacrifice in the only area that i have availible to sacrifice - chill time and sleep. I don't mind not having chill time. Its when you get overtired AND don't have any chill time... thats what leads to crashes like last night. I need to start takin better care of myself. :(

Anyways, i know for a fact that a lot of you are sick of listening to me whine (too bad - my rant space, my whine space ... it's all part of the package :P) On to other things.

Today i was looking for a copy of DJ Shadow's disk 'endtroducing', which unfortunately borders didn't have, but i picked up 'preemtive strike' instead. Gotta tell you, if you are interested in some really thoughtful, casual, chill down music, get one of these disks. It's classic stuff, and i should have picked it up ages ago. If you listen to DJ's Afternoon nap at all, you'll definately like em.

Music and moods are funny things. They tend to support each other. I really dont know why sometimes i am in the mood for downtempo tunes, and sometimes for House, other times Industrial EBM, and yet others jpop, various metal stuffs... i dunno. I was listening to DJ Shadow earlier, and now i'm listening to Stabbing Westward. I suppose i like the contrast. (btw, Stabbing Westward is one of my fave bands, right up there with VNV Nation).

On the anime front, i'm way behind on the shows i'm watching. If you can believe it, i STILL havent finished watching the Kanon anime - mainly beause the last batch of shows is such an emotional rollercoaster that i haven't felt i've had the time to put the emotional commitment to them yet. I've been entertaining myself with Pitaten (new anime based on the manga Pitaten by Koge Donbo, the intrepid artist behind DigiCharat - Pitaten is where the little bunny-rabbit ears piro is wearing and Erika's current outfit comes from.) In fact, to help cheer myself up this morning i watched a bit of episode four. Heh. I really wonder if its a requirement that EVERY anime have a japanese bath (onsen) scene in it at least once. :P

I've also picked up on watching Chobits. Now, i already got an email wondering if i got the idea for Ping-chan from Chobits - obviously no, because ping-chan was introduced before Chobits came out. :P Also, there are some major differences between a Personcom and an Emotional Doll System unit like ping, as you will see as the comic progresses. I have a drawing of 'pirobits' that i need to scan and post too... Piroko as a personcom... ya, i know, way too weird.

Then there is Tokyo Mew Mew. Don't ask. I'm gonna draw dom in a Mew Mew outfit. I feel this need to do this...

I've also spent a little money in bookstores recently. Since most of the little bits of time that i have are away from home and the office, i've been getting selections of translated manga to read. What's been suprising me, honestly, is how reasonably decent the TokyoPop manga translations are. I remember the horror that is thier Miracle Girls translations (i'm still mad at them for that), so my initial reaction to thier acquisition of some of my FAVORITE shoujo titles - Kaitou Saint Tail and Marmalade Boy specifically - was abject horror.

In regards to the Saint Tail DVDs, it's nice to say that my fears were unjustified. A purist could, of course, nitpick and dismiss many things in the translations, but honestly, i think they are more than fine - in fact, there is a noted improvement in the 2nd DVD that shows that someone actually gives a hoot about the production of the series :). I feel relieved that Tokyo Pop is treating the series with some of the respect it deserves.

Unfortunately the Saint Tail manga translation was started before Tokyo Pop changed its approach to printing translated collections. The translation is not bad at all, and i've been enjoying it, but i would have loved to see it treated the way all of thier new stuff is printed - unmirrored and right to left...

As most of you know, japanese is read from right to left, and all japanese books and manga start at what we consider the back of the book and read towards the left. Usually, translation requires that all the art be mirrored as part of the transformation into english. TokyoPop took the bold step of leaving the comics in thier original form, and tranlating the bubbles in thier original order... I picked up a copy of "Chobits" (great manga, definately pick it up) and one of my old nemises and favorites, "Marmalade Boy" which are in this format. I have to say, i like this format, and the translations are not bad at all.

Ah... Marmalade Boy... this series has ruined many lives. It was fun reading it again, this time in english without the help of translations. I remember Craig Nishida's translation efforts that i couldnt keep up with and the MBoy Translation Mailing List... I remember all the hard work Karen and Bruce Duffy put into fansubbing the series... and waiting desperately for new tapes... even designing tape spines for Karen to use for her distro... ah, yep. I love Marmalade Boy. i had to get away from it because it was like crack. I remember having homicidal feeelings toward certain teachers who needed to be run over by a bus several times... and a major crush on a silly character who liked to play tennis... i forgot how much MBoy influenced me. Theres more of it in Megatokyo than i realzied. God help me, i feel like pulling the fansubs out and watching them again. I'm starting to hear that Marmalade Boy song again...

ack... ok, that was close... (pulls out some :wumpscut: and Velvet Acid Christ CDs. It's the only stuff that can drive the REALLY evil stuff away. ^^;;

"invisible fanart"
Sunday - May 19, 2002
[Piro] - 11:46:00
Just a quick update - gonna try to do this more often (hahaha, ok, stop laughing at me. :(

Kinda nice to have an entire weekend devoted to nothing but MT stuff, but even so, it seems like the weekend is half gone and i don't feel like i've done anything. Which isn't really true. On monday, i am bringing the final design for the Capture the Bear poster to the printers. These posters will not be as big nor on quite the chunky paper the Pirogoeth poster was on - it's more like just a nice poster. They should be available for purchase in a few weeks. Here's a preview of what the poster looks like - i think it came out pretty good, considering how lame my photoshop skillz are. ^^;;

I finally sat down and watched the last three episodes of Kanon. I've been thinking, recently, about just how long this stupid game and it's related works have been part of my collection of things that effect and influence my work. Kanon has been around for several years, actually - the game originally was released in june of 1999 - i was living in Atlanta at the time. I was starting to see Kanon characters show up in winamp skins, and then in fan art. A friend of mine sent me a AVI file of the opening sequence for the game, and I was hooked. I must have listened to the opening song 'last regrets' a million times.

Who hasn't done that before with a series tho? What strikes me as odd is just why this one has stuck with me over the past three years. I mean, its just a GAME. The original didn't even have any voices. Hell, i didn't even know the stories and scenarios back then. Yet I had this kind of odd obsession with it. I dug and dug and dug over the past three years trying to find what was locked inside the stories i could barely understand, took apart the game itself and poured over the 771 images that make up the game. I got artbooks, cards, collected fan works...

Isn't it funny that i really haven't done much fan art for the series?

but then again, you could consider most everything i draw to be a reaction in some way to one series or another. For me, i try to get to the core reason WHY something effects me the way it does. I like to get into why things work the way they do. There is a misconception that in real life I am fluent in Japanese. I am not. I know little more than your average American anime fan (well, maybe a little more). I've been into anime for over 8 years, you'd think i'd be fluent by now, right? Not really.

You see, i spent my time learning the language of the art and the expression, not the japanese language itself. I'm still learning too.

When you do fan art, you get all the elements of that character or story to help elevate the emotive impact of a drawing - the character you are drawing already HAS a past. Doing original works is harder - you have to give that character a history, a past, something that people can connect with. If you are good, you can do it all with one drawing. You can cheat and do what i do - put a truckload of crappy drawings together to get your point across.

Often, for many people, no one else seems to see what you see in a drawing you did. All art is really about putting your feelings down on paper. Learning how to do that so it effectively communicates it to others is a major undertaking. The mistake that people make is that they feel that if it doesn't communicate well to others they should not do it. Don't EVER think that. If it makes you feel something, remember that your frustration with it is that you haven't been able to communicate what you want effectively enough - and doing that takes time. Just don't give up on it.

Thats where the frustration in learning to draw comes in - from thought to paper is never as potent as you feel it. Thats why i will never be satisfied with my work.

heh, getting a little cryptic there. Gomen. Finishing Kanon just made me think, that's all. It's always made me think. I think they did a great job with the TV series. Sure, it could have been better. Trying to wrap five different scenarios into a single show is gonna leave some of the girls hanging, but it was kind of odd... i actually appreciated the way they tweaked it together. I can't really go into what i liked about it, because that would lead to some spoilers... spoilers for both Kanon *and* Megatokyo, because the reasons why i felt something stir in me that was a reaction to the ending of the show has a lot to do with a strong thread in the MT story. A thread that i still have to refine.

I think i've turned into a Nayuki fanboy. I don't really know why. Maybe i do, but i just can't go into it...

"Who wants some?"
Saturday - May 25, 2002
[Dom] - 09:30:00
Ah... last night I enjoyed going to KublaCon. Mostly for one reason: Shadowfist. That game inspires me.

What's Shadowfist, you ask? Why, it's only the card game of Hong Kong butt kicking, with a good mix of peasant epics, ghost stories, sci-fi blow-things-up-real-good flicks and miscellaneous action clichés for spice. It's the only card game I know of with such great card titles as "Mo' Monkeys, Mo' Problems" and "I will avenge you!". (Note: If there are more card games with card titles like that, someone point them out to me, I wanna play those, too)

So why haven't I talked about this game before? Simple. I hadn't found players until KublaCon. See, the thing is that I first got into Shadowfist in... I think some time early 1996. And the play was good--Shadowfist has been described as the best multiplayer CCG (collectible card game, for those of you who are unaware), and I don't doubt that claim. The problem was that Daedalus, the publisher of the game, died a horrible, horrible death after a painfully short time.

Then the game was picked up by Z-man a year or so ago, and I was ecstatic--but I didn't know any local players. So I sat with my old cards, playing Atlas Games' re-release of Feng Shui with friends, and waiting for my chance to be a Kicker of Butts again.

So back on topic, this was (and is) KublaCon's purpose, in my mind. I have opponents again. They're wearing "Who wants some?" pins. And any time I see one of those pins, I have every right to say to the person wearing it, "Try my kung fu!" or "You want some? You, over there, you want some too? I got enough beatdown for both of you!"... God, life is good.

A final note: I can't escape MT T-shirts. Even at work, or at gaming cons... I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

PS: This is from an interview with Takashi Uriu of OverWorks, which developed the Shinobi and Sakura Taisen games, and is now working on the new PS2 Shinobi:

I know I'm not alone here when I think to myself that ninjas can make a game cooler all by themselves. If you have a lot of ninjas in your game, more people will be interested.

Preach on.

"graphite noises"
Saturday - May 25, 2002
[Piro] - 23:39:02
"uguu~"

That little sound succinctly sums up the way i felt all week.

Last week i managed to pull off something rare - two days in a row getting a good nights sleep (which means, more than 4-5 hours). As a result, i feel oddly rested. Of course, now i can't blame my fuzzy head on sleep deprivation - it's pretty obvious that my allergies have kicked in. I swear, there must be like Mutant Ninja Pollen around here or something.

Is "uguu~" even a word? Actually, its not. It an odd 'noise' that the character Tsukimiya Ayu in the game/anime 'Kanon' makes. It's her trademark... 'noise', i guess you could call it.

For those of you not very familiar with japanese anime/radio dramas/games/manga, this must seem rather a bizarre concept. Characters having cute trademark sounds and phrases is nothing new. Sakura from Card Captor Sakura has her trademark 'hooeee?', Yuri from Galaxy Frauline Densetu Yuna says this mind-meltingly cute 'desu~' after everything she says (historical note - Yuri is yet another robot girl that influenced the Ping-chan character), there are the infamous 'nyo/nyu/gema'sounds from the DigiCharat girls, Misha-san add's a cute 'suuu~' to everything she says... the list goes on.

You may have noticed that Yuki and Kimiko already have their own surprise/bewilderment 'sounds'. Know what they are? I've done this for two reasons. First, since MT pokes fun at anime and anime culture, it's only fitting that my characters have trademark sounds as almost an in-joke. The other reason? It's cute. :)

Voice Actors (called 'Seiyuu' in japanese) are a very important part of Anime/manga/otaku fandom culture in japan. Almost every well known seiyuu has a cult following of some sort. Having a well known seiyuu cast in your animated TV show is important because many fans follow their fave Seiyuu from show to show. For some, the ONLY reason they will watch a show is because it stars a favorite Seiyuu.

For example, i have several friends who were only interested in watching one single episode of Love Hina - the one where Tsuru Hiromi did the voice for Shinobu's mother. Seiyuu worship in japan borders on the frightening. I have a promo tape for the Nadesico movie that is a half hour of nothing but voice actors goofing around and jabbering on about nothing. Japanese fans love this kinda stuff. I suppose that's because its these people who help bring characters to life on screen.

Years ago, i used to be really up on who all the latest seiyuu were (Mariko Kouda Mariko, Iwao Junko, Sakurai Tomo, Kikuko Inoue, etc.) but recently i've been totally out of it - keeping current with who's who these days is hard work. If you are curious about the rather terrifying depths of seiyuu worship, be sure to visit one of the most comprehensive seiyuu database sites around (and its in english too), Hitoshi Doi's Seiyuu Database.

Since we are talking about cute sounds that are associated with female anime characters, you'd assume that Ayu's trademark sound was the result of a talented seiyuu. Actually, this isn't the case. Even though Horie Yui makes an absolutely adorable 'uguuu~' sound as Ayu in the TV series, the original sound was 'read' - The original Kanon game is text based with static images. You 'read' this sound as part of the dialog. Thats how this character got associated with her trademark sound, long before Horie Yui actually uttered it.

What's so darn interesting to me about this is that fans were able to associate a sound with a character thru text and images only. Most mainstream games these days have voice components (including Kanon now - the Dreamcast and PS2 versions have voice) - but i sometimes wonder if this is a good thing or not...

Megatokyo is a black and white, sketchy comic. How deep do people read the characters? Do Kimiko's and Yuki's expressive sounds come off the same way? I dunno. Not really with Kimiko yet - i don't think you folks have really had a chance to know her yet. I swear, i've held Kimiko in the background because i just didn't have the skillz to get her personality across a year ago. i still don't, but i gotta do it one of these days.

Ok, quick link time. There are a lot of different fan-sites for different ren'ai games and dating simulation games, but a friend of mine just launched his sentimental graffiti website 'SentimentalGraffiti.com. Sentimental Grafitti is one of the classic dating sim games, and Mitch has taken on the rather vast task of translating and collecting information on the series. Currently, he is translating the Adachi Taeko scenarios (you can find them under 'translations') - you might find them interesting, and you'll see how dating sim games read. If you like what you see, you might find it worthwhile to pick up the game itself. Oh, and be sure to check out the 'configure' section - you can change the look and feel of the site (the borders are examples of frames you find in ren'ai games)

Another site worth checking out that i didn't link when i mentioned DJ Shadow's stuff last weekend was the official DJ Shadow website. Looks like there really is a new disk in the works. Also, I finally did manage to get my hands on "Endertaing". Good stuff. Need to get some DJ Krush stuff next, while i'm in this mode. But first, i gotta track down "Ambient Intermix" - i need to get the disk that has "Beacon (universal)" by SETI and Adham Shaikh on it. Being a fan of more mainstream stuff would make my life so much easier...

"Texas scares me..."
Thursday - May 30, 2002
[Piro] - 08:09:01

Project A-kon Information Ok, its con time again, and this time both Largo and I will be at Project A-kon, which is being held at the Hyatt Regency DFW. Located at the DFW International Airport. May 31 - June 2, 2002 (that's tomorrow folks!). From our little poll that we put up last week, it looks like there are about 500 or so Megatokyo readers who are going to A-kon, so here's the place to find the latest information on who what where and when. First thing. If i can manage to bring a couple of tubes onto the plane without getting arrested for being a terrorist, I'll have a bunch of Capture the Bear posters available for sale at the USAnime booth in the dealers room (same guys who sold MT T-shirts at Anime Central). These full color posters are 18 x 24, and cost $13.99. Don't worry about trying to get one if you arent at the con - the majority of these posters will be available to order online starting next week. Also of note, if you remember last year tsubasa and i were working with a japanese group called Device High - Tsubasa was working with them to produce a few Megatokyo tracks for the CDrom project we were working on. Well, the CDrom project never happened, but the music did. ^_^ Their newest disk "The Device In Love(Koi suru Device)" has two Megatokyo related songs on it. Hoteiya, a los vegas based Anime specialty store, has a bunch of these disks in stock and will have them available for purchase at their booth in the dealers room at A-kon. It's a very good CD - i look forward to the possibility of doing work with them in the future. Ok, enough of that, on to the schedule: - Friday, May 31, 2002 - I don't think there is anything specific planned for Largo and myself for friday - i'm flying into Dallas that morning, so i think the schedule is fairly loose. My plan is to spend most of the day at the Megatokyo table in the Komic Market area - I'll actually have net access at my table, so i should be able to update this page as things come up during the con. As always, drop by the table to say hi and whatnot. Sketches are free, don't be afraid to ask me to draw something. - Saturday, June 01, 2002 - Megatokyo Discussion Panel - 1:00 to 3:00 pm (Enterprise 3 & 4) This is the main Megatokyo panel and event at the con. Maybe this time someone will listen to us and get us a big enough room to fit everyone. (ahem) I've been assured that this room is big enough to accommodate everyone, so hopefully no one will be stranded in the hall. If for some reason the room ISN'T big enough, i will give a second panel if necessary. - Sunday, June 02, 2002 - Autograph Session - 2:00 (Autograph Area) ugh. this is Largo and I get to ruin program books and other pieces of paper and cloth by scribbling on them with sharpie pens. There, that should do it. Basically, i plan to hang out at the Artists Alley table for a good part of the con. I will warn you, however - i'm not prepared for this con at all. Thinks have been too busy. Finally, one last note about the Megatokyo schedule for the comic itself. Unfortunately, since i had to work last night, and i leave for dallas friday morning, i need to face facts and realize that i will not be getting a regular comic done for friday. I'll put together a nice Dead Piro Art Day - i know, disappointing, irritating, etc etc etc - i do what i can do, which isn't always good enough. I wont make excuses. I knew this week was going to be a hard one to make it thru. :(

"miscellaneous debris"
Thursday - May 30, 2002
[Dom] - 13:00:00
Well, I ended up going to KublaCon for more time than I originally intended, simply for more Shadowfist. And, yes, I bought Grave Robbers from Outer Space, a game that I will have no problems getting Ed to play ("Wait. You said there's a chainsaw in this game?"). Thanks to all the people who helped me shake the rust off of my kung fu, including Frank (who kicked my ass handily in Who Wants Some) Max, Eric, and all the others. Special props to the guys who gave me the Golden Gunman and the White Ninja (pictured above in the awesome art by Kaja Foglio) for pretty much free. I'll definitely be heading to the Proving Grounds this summer to go in for some redemption action... muhaha.

In other news, E3. I didn't go myself, electing instead to sit back and hold down the fort at the office--IE take some paid vacation time, since everyone I would have dealt with normally was down in LA running around the floor begging for the next appointment to be closer. The VP of creative services gave us homebodies a few free lunches in the bargain, so I don't think I missed much there--well, except an opportunity to kick Greg Dean's ass. And make more fun of Hot Soup.

But what I did get out of E3 was a picture of my future. And it is full of ninjas. Well, just one. Shinobi ate my quarters in the arcade, it owned my soul on the Sega Master System, and filled up lots of my Genesis time. And now that Sakura Taisen is effectively done, Shinobi can begin again.

Meanwhile, Panzer Dragoon Orta looks like it'll be great--except I'll be freaked out when it turns out to be an actual sequel for once, instead of a cryptic prequel. I'll be absolutely shocked, given how Zwei and Azel were connected to the first.

Yes, I'm a Sega fan.

But beyond just Sega, some more games I can't wait to get my hands on are Steel Battalion--which my editor said made him nervous, because the controller for that thing is huge and made him feel as if his father was forcing him to pilot the world-saving robot--and BloodRayne, which has some interesting concepts if they can pull it off (cough cough Munch'sOddyseecough) and Deus Ex 2, which suffers from being in the same show as Doom III, but which I don't doubt will do just as well.

I guess a rant on E3 wouldn't be complete without mentioning my roommate's insatiable lust for Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. So there it is. I shall speak no further on the subject.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to craft some war. Goddamn double hero rushers...

"Gods and dogs"
Wednesday - June 5, 2002
[Dom] - 17:00:00
One of these things is not like the other; one of these things does not belong.

To:
Subject: [VizNews] New Phoenix Site Added to Viz.com!

In honor of the long-awaited release of Phoenix: A Tale of the Future by Osamu Tezuka, Viz has a created a web site for the critically-acclaimed series. Complete with a series backgrounder, author information, character profiles and critic reviews, the site offers a glimpse into the series' profound storyline and influential artwork by the "God of Mange."

Plus, fans can also read the author's own thoughts on his self-proclaimed "life work" with a special feature entitled, "Phoenix and Me" by Tezuka himself!

That made my day at work...

"Cabbages and kings"
Thursday - June 6, 2002
[Dom] - 23:00:00
My roommate mentioned in passing that he'd picked up a game called "Lost Kingdoms" or something last week. I didn't take real note of it until this week, when I decided to dust off my GameCube (still resting after long sessions of Soccer Slam) and fire up whatever was in there, be it Soccer Slam or Monkey Ball.

I was greeted with this odd little RPG screen, and interested, I dug the manual out of the couch (my roommate, like me, isn't known for his tidiness) and started playing. What I ended up playing was a very bite-size action RPG where you play as a princess, who, instead of ancient magic powers or mysterious bloodlines, has a deck of cards that summons things.

Simple? Yes. Fun? Hell yeah. I spent the next couple hours running around, having good memories of a little-known Dreamcast game named Culdcept II, an odd cross of CCG mechanics and Monopoly that I sunk a good long time into.

There's just something fun about having a limited number of uses on, well, everything, as well as only having access to a few at a time. Final Fantasy VIII's card system was... interesting for about the first two times I hit Draw, but after that I threw away the game. Lost Kingdoms I'm having much more fun with--though I know that it will be all too short, since it's an action RPG, and those things always spend more time on the engine than--well, everything else.

The other reason I like the game is extremely petty, but hey, whatever works. See, the heroine looks rather like my girlfriend, so I want to see if I can get her to cosplay the character. It's easy enough, and is one of the few heroines who doesn't show more cleavage than can possibly be natural.

It's just too bad that the music is the absolute worst I've heard in years. I mean, I haven't heard anything like this since the Master System/Nintendo days, and even then, the Mario themes still managed to be better-sounding than the tinny, half-muted pieces of crap coming from my speakers.

But oh well. The game's fun, it's a reason for me to pick up my GameCube again--though I still haven't gotten Pikmin--and will tide me over until Way of the Samurai and, of course, Neverwinter Nights. If only I could find my copy of Shining Force III scenario II... this would all be irrelevant, but as I said, oh well. I have a fun new toy to play with until the next toy comes along, and when it comes down to it, isn't that what gaming's all about?

"netspace and lifespace"
Friday - June 7, 2002
[Piro] - 13:04:02
(before people ask - the Capture the Bear posters are 18 x 24, full color, and on good paper w/ aqueous coating (to protect the surface). If you want to frame them, this is a pretty standard size. - piro)

If there is one thing i've heard over and over again from people who run popular websites it's this - no matter what you do, there will always be those who complain about it. Frankly, if you know anything about human nature, you understand that this is a given.

As anyone who regularly reads these rants will know, i spend a goodly amount of time whining and apologizing for any irregularities in the comic schedule. I know it irritates many of you, but it is just part of my nature, so you're gonna have to live with it. ^_^ The most common email i get regarding this is 'stop appolgizing all the time, its irritating'. Yea, you're probably right - so i've been keeping the complaing to a minimum recently. If a delay comes up, i keep it short and as free of PiroDrama as possible. I think most of you get the idea that if there are delays, there really isnt anything i can do about em, and i try to avoid them.

Wouldn't ya know it, but now i am getting emails demanding explanations about whats wrong, why is the comic delayed, etc etc. I can't win, can i? Jeeze people, make up your minds. ^^;;

As most of you know, i spent last friday thru Sunday at A-kon 13, an anime/sci-fi con in Dallas. I remained in Dallas until tuesday to attend Rodney and Ruby's wedding monday night. I managed to miss my plane tuesday morning so i didn't get back here till early afternoon, at which point i went straight back to the office to jump back into the fray so that we could meet my monday deadline. It's not as bad as it sounds - we should make the deadline without too much difficulty ^_^

A-kon was a lot of fun. I spent most of the con at my art table drawing as much as i could for people. At previous cons i always felt bad that i was giving people these really crappy scribbles with my signature on them (i'm not a big fan of 'autographs' - to me, they don't really mean anything), so this time i decided that i'd try to draw something worthwile for everyone who asked.

I'll have to bring more index cards next time - i went thru an entire stack of 100 cards, plus an awful lot of paper. Crazy? perhaps, but it was fun. I like to draw, and there was more than enough variety (i remember drawing one of yuki in perkigoth regalia) that it was fun. After seven hours of this on friday, i just kept waiting for the crowd around the table to thin out... but for some reason it never did. Spooky.

Thanks to everyone who came by, and i'm sorry that it may have been a long wait to get a drawing - after all, it does take a few minutes to do a decent drawing, and since it wasnt an 'official' signing thing, i felt i could take a reasonable amount of time with each drawing. Hope you all enjoy em.

I think the panel went pretty well. This time we had a big enough room (i think we had around 500 people in there) and i don't think we bored people too much (not too many people got up and left durring the panel). We did go over by 45 min or so (that was Ukyo's fault). Of course, it would of been nice if the lights didn't keep going out. Sitting in total darkness on a stage in front of 500 people is an interesting experience to say the least. I think they were trying to tell us something. Also, sorry if you couldn't hear me - i'm just gonna buy a bullhorn to take with me from con to con - the sound reinforcement at these things is never good enough.

One thing i decided after this 'question and answer' session, which is all the Megatokyo panels ever seem to be, is that for Otakon 2002 i wanna try something different. I'm thinking that we might organize something a little more... special... for Otakon. Not just a panel, but more of a presentation, of sorts. I'm working on some ideas right now, but i'll let you know the details as they become more solidified. I'm working with the Otakon folks right now to make sure that we have what we need availible. Lets just say that it might even involve making some cosplay outfits...

After the panel, I went back and spent as much time as i could at the art table again - I hope that everyone who wanted a sketch got one. I did my best to cover everyone (i even ended up leaving a sketch for someone to pick up later that evening - glad to hear that you did indeed find it). Later that evening I ended up spending the latter part of the evening playing a Kanon fighting game with Natsuki, Young, Jon and Aaron - heh, talk about a fun wind down from a long day. Some fellow came around with a list of parties at the con, and for some reason our room was on the list. Uguuu~~~ well, he was nice enough to take it off the list. It had been too long of a day to deal with crowds of people knocking on the door lookin for booze ^^;;

Sunday was also unsusually busy, but i was able to spend a good part of it sitting on the floor in the main hall just chattering with people. One thing i've figured out about why anime cons are so popular these days is that its really a social event - its a chance for people who spend all year hanging out with online friends a chance to meet up in real life - a sort of a mixing of your netspace and lifespace existances ('cyberspace' is overused and i dislike the term 'meatspace' because is a too derogatory (there's nothin wrong with real life) - so i'm going to use the terms 'netspace' and 'lifespace'). Cons are where you let the two worlds mingle a little.

As for the update for monday, i suppose a little explanation is in order. I'm not sure if Ian is talking to me anymore. ^^;;; First, i send hundreds of people off to flood his email box, then he busts his ass to get the comic done for friday, only to discover that i really wanted it for monday. (communication error on my part) Then, sunday night, i finally see the comic and realize that i *really* had to change something (there's a more thurough explanation in the 'story discussion' forums if you are interested in why i changed it ^^;;). Anyways, to do all this i was sitting on the floor of the empty convention hall plugged into the phone line we had secured for me to use durring the con itself (i was too busy drawing durring most of the con to use it). It was a goofy experience, really. I had to post Ian's comic because i knew if i didn't he'd get more email. ^^;;; I'm terrified to visit Mac Hall to see what he and Matt think of me right now...

Monday was spent, of course, getting ready for Rodney and Ruby's wedding. I'd like to officially congratulate Rodney and Ruby, and offer my best wishes for the future. The wedding went off without a hitch, and it was a lot of fun. I even had a chance to chat with Scott Kurtz for a while, and we all had the ability to fire off small explosives at the happy couple. Gotta love fireworks. :)

When i got home tuesday night i realized that i was dead in the water. A guy can only do so much. My plan was to finish some scripts for the week, do some drawing (i even brought my scanner with me to texas) and finish up a comic for wednesday on tuesday night. Considering that not a single drawing i did all weekend i kept for myself, and i really didn't spend any time working on scripts, i had to admit it to myself - i was burned out.

There is another thing too. For the past two months i have not spent enough time with Seraphim. After work, i've been spending all my time in my office drawing, writing, working on all the extra stuff that is gonna keep MT alive over the next few years... it's been a very intense couple of months. My chair in the living room has had several bags of fabric sitting on it for weeks. We haven't even sat down to watch an evening of TV together for ages.

that's not right. One of my faults is that when i get absorbed and focused on things, i tend to forget about the little things. Seraphim is the most wonderful and forgiving gal in the world, but - spending four days away from home really made me think about things. My lifespace is pretty good. So is my netspace life. Last year Seraphim and i took a weeklong vacation, remember? (hint - we got lost in the woods) We aren't doing that this year because we are so busy.

So i decided - ok, i need to take a break from MT for a while. I'll just do some DPD stuff for a week. Catch up, do some quality writing on the scripts instead of rushing them. Give myself some breathing room for my deadline at work. Do some free drawing. Spend some time with Seraphim.

And I'm not gonna appologize to anyone about it.

"Sails and sealing wax"
Tuesday - June 11, 2002
[Dom] - 09:00:00
�u"̣‚ñ‚Å‚Ư‚Ä
ŒN‚È‚ç‚Å‚«‚é�v
‚Á‚Ä�B‚È‚º�¡�c

"world gone gold"
Wednesday - June 12, 2002
[Piro] - 08:31:02
Before i get into my typical, normal, uninteresting rantage, i think that congrats are in order for the Bioware crew on the news that Neverwinter Nights has gone gold - which means that we'll be seeing it on store shelves pretty soon. I guess Largo and Piro really didn't make it home before the game came out ^^;;

As you can see, my 'break' from Megatokyo is now over. Well, it wasn't really a break, per se - i spent most of the break working at the office, or working on a few other Megatokyo related things, and fun things like planting garden boxes out on the porch with seraphim. I've also endeavored to get ahead in strips a little, an elusive goal that still seems elusive, but the good news is that i feel much better able to forge on with Megatokyo now that i've had a little 'mental break' so to speak. Thanks for your patience, i think that some of the DPD weren't too bad (i LOVE the one i did for monday, the Cave of Evil one... i don't know why)

If you must know, each of these DPD drawings took a lot longer than i ever planned. I really have had trouble getting back into drawing. I dont know why, really - i went thru dozens of false starts with each of the drawings that went up. I guess that now when i do illustration style drawings, i feel like each image has to stand on its own and tell some sort of story. It was a good refresh for my head about the mt characters and personalities, if nothing else.

As you all probably have noted, the Capture the Bear posters are available online now. The guys from USAnime have been very supportive of MT over the past year, and i decided to let them handle the posters this time. One of the main reasons for producing these posters is that Megatokyo really does need your support right now - the best way to help out is to pick up a poster or two - all the profits from these sales go towards helping MT stay alive. The next few months are critical for me and the survival of this site, so if you feel the need to acquire some wall decoration, please buy a poster. you know me, i don't ask for support that often. Also, the sooner all of these posters are gone, the sooner i can get to the next poster design, which i plan to have in production at the end of next month, if all goes well.

If you didn't make it to A-kon, or if you want to refresh your memory of the Megatokyo Panel for some reason, run on over to Anime Tourist where you can read a transcript of the entire megatokyo panel. There are a few spoilers, embarrassing moments, and some small errors (which is my fault - Glenn sent me the draft, but i still haven't sent him my minor corrections). Its not a bad read, actually. It was a pretty good panel.

I really haven't been playing too many games lately, as you may have realized, but i DO need an outlet sometimes. One rather unusual type of doujinshi game you see these days are fighting games that feature ren'ai game characters. Queen of Hearts, Leaf Fight, Glove on Fight, etc. Right now i'm getting a real hoot out of Eternal Fighter Zero, a fighting game featuring characters from Kanon and One (both games from VisualArts). It's an absolute riot - and done with a lot of sense of humor... the idea of these cute little characters kicking the crap out of each other... You know all is right with the world when you can play as Sleepy Nayuki and whack people with a giant stuffed frog. :) Bliss...

"Giving Back"
Friday - June 14, 2002
[Largo] - 11:53:00
Once in a while, you get the chance to give something back to world around you, and today just may be the day I get to do just that.

There is a project being ran by Intel and United Devices, Inc that is being used to help find a cure for cancer thru the use of distributed computing.

Essentially, thousands of users around the world download a small client software that uses your CPU's spare, unused cycles to compute vital data for a singular purpose. In the past this has been used for encryption cracking and for the seti@home project, but this time it's being used for something a little more practical, finding a cure for cancer.

So, to help this cause, I'm giving you this link to download the client software, once you've done this just click on this next link which will take you to the Team MegaTokyo home page for this project and sign you up on our team.

The client doesn't take any performance away from your computer and just requires you be connected to the internet every so often to send its data back to them.

At the very least, it makes a l33t screensaver, and who knows - maybe MT can actually do some good for the world in the process.

Speaking of giving back, there's a couple websites I've been wanting to plug for sometime, but being the lazy largo that I am, never got around to it.

First up is Hero Games. A long time ago, in a comic shop far far away - I was introduced to an old RPG called "Champions", very likely one of the most flexable character creation systems ever made and well suited for 'Super Hero' gaming. Ah, those were the days, red capes and over the top villians... but alas - the game vanished for awhile, which made me a sad Largo.

Then Recently I found out that Hero Games brought back and revised the Champions system with the book "HERO System - 5th Edition". Since it's come out I've spent days playing with character creation in order to perfect the perfect 350 point power armor.

For those familair with the system, I'd like to share some of the powers I came up with;

"The Needler", A high velocity slug thrower that fires 12" long spikes into the target, generally annoying said target with pain and such - RKA 3D6; Autofire (5 shots), Boostable Charges 16 x 2 clips

It's also fun to work this into a multipower with different ammo types, like.. Explosion...

I know for those of you who haven't played with the system that might seem meaningless... so um, go buy the book or something. Hero Games is actually a sweet company run by a small group of people, which in the day and age of megacorps running everything, it's nice to see that gaming can still have some of that old garage effort.

The other site I wanted to give some pluggage, is the esteemed Toriyama's World. Home of such prized things as translated Hikaru no Go.

As those of you who have found me hanging out on the Kiseido Go Server have noticed, I have a real fondness for game of Go, and while I may be no insei, I love playing the game for hours on end. So naturally, yes... I watch some Hikaru no Go, and well - so should you.

Hrm, what else... well there was that whole wedding thing I did last week, I want to thank everyone who sent us emails, congrads messages and cards, etc. It was very sw33t and we would like to thank everyone for thinking of us.

"the other brick"
Monday - June 17, 2002
[Piro] - 01:05:00
I think it was about two years ago this month that Largo started bugging me about doing a webcomic.

When I think about it, it really is kinda weird that Rodney and I ever started a project like this together. We have such *completely* different takes on things. Yet from these differences came the inspiration that helped define just who 'Piro' and 'Largo' are. Much of the psychology, physics, philosophy and spirituality of the Megatokyo universe has been developed in an effort to find ways to make these two completely different worlds work together. I'm still working on it.

Back when we started MT, Largo was a huge fan of webcomics but I never really read them. I was too busy hiding in my own little world doing a sketch or two a month, fiddling with little ideas, working on 'envelope' (which was never going to be seen by more than a half dozen people as part of a Japanese Doujinshi CDrom for Winter Comike). I was working on 'Warmth', but it wasn't moving along very quickly. Largo used to pester me endlessly saying that i *really* should be doing a webcomic. For months I dismissed the idea entirely - after all, i wasn't interested in doing things that Penny Arcade, PVP Online, Sluggy Freelance and others do so much better than i could. It wasn't my genre.

Finally, after mulling it over, i realized that maybe largo was right - a webcomic might actually be a good medium to do what i wanted to do - if i could get away with doing things a *little* differently. I decided to try a few strips, and see how it went. Megatokyo was born.

It was based on a domain name that Largo owned, our nicknames, our personalities, and vague pieces of storylines that simply put two guys in Japan with no way of getting home. There were some similarities to the 'Warmth' story (which is about a young American guy who runs off to Japan to escape his problems) but megatokyo was supposed to be more lighthearted and fun - and far more flexible. I couldn't pull off Warmth at the time, but Megatokyo i could grow with. It's growth and future had more to do with our real life growth in abilities, not some set-in-stone plan.

These days even I can't maintain much denial about the audience that faithfully reads Megatokyo and how much it's grown over the past two years. Bandwidth bills do not lie. The comic has grown, changed, fallen down, got back up, dusted itself off, fell flat on its face, stood, run, walked, fell asleep, zombieshuffled, sprinted, died, slit its wrists, bandaged up it's legs, floated ghostlike meandering through abandoned hallways and danced in sunny fields of flowers. I have two boxes of drawings, each stack 4 or 5 inches high - all 8.5x11 sheets of paper. I've gone thru several tubes of 0.5 mm HB lead and tens of those little Pentel erasers. I've learned to like cold coffee.

Many of you have watched Megatokyo grow and change over the past two years, but i think that even newer readers can see the changes that happened over time, both in the comic and the rants that accompany them. Rants are an imperfect medium for recording things, but the do work for taking snapshots of what is going on at the time. Megatokyo behind the scenes has changed almost as much as the comic. We've never been afraid to change if we felt that it made it better. A year ago i used to have to battle with people whenever i produced a strip that didn't have a joke or punchline to it. Now people accept them and even seem to enjoy those, because they are an important part of how MT works. Dead Piro Art days are a convenient way of taking a break. Shirt Guy Dom strips are proof that evil exists in the world.

Do you remember this Naze Nani Megatokyo strip? The one where we we're given a glimpse of what Megatokyo would look like if either Largo or myself were out of the picture (because of a tossed brick or two)? - my version of Megatokyo would be rather shoujo-ish and dating-sim-ish, while Largo's version would involve lots of big guns and people running in terror. It was a fun strip, and it described the differences between the two characters very well. But how accurately does it describe what would happen if in real life if Largo or myself was less involved in the production of the strip?

The answer is that it did change, but not quite so drastically.

When Megatokyo started, it was Rodney who wrote the initial scripts, and from those I did the drawings and put together the strips. This worked great for a while - we collaborated on strips, each of us getting our two cents in, producing some damn funny strips along the way. Rodney's 'does any one speak l33t' strip is still regarded by many people to be their personal favorites - I personally didn't even realize it was an 'Airplane' joke until months later (I'm a little slow sometimes). I had problems with SOME of the things Rod wanted to do (a bloodbath in the streets of tokyo where Zombies went on bloody killing spree was not something i was willing to do) and he used to get on my case for all the 'lame shoujo crap' i always kept sneaking in. The balance we struck made Megatokyo what it is today.

My problem is that i actually have more faith in my ability to write than my ability to draw (think about it, when's the last time i slammed the story?). As i got more and more into doing Megatokyo, i started to push the strip further and further into the realm of storytelling and farther away from the one-joke-setup strips that Rodney was so fond of.

We collaborated on overall ideas and worked together to fuse a real mishmash of crazy stuff: Great Teacher Largo, Zombie Hunting, Rent-a-Zilla, Junpei the l33t Ninja, Boo... It all was absorbed and became part of the overall story, which i was in charge of keeping in order. Over time, however, I started doing more and more of the comic on my own, and Largo found himself doing other things, since i usually had a handle on where things were going.

A few months ago i decided that i wanted to pursue Megatokyo as a solo project. I talked to Rod about it, and we came to an agreement that since this was where things were going that it would be the best thing for Megatokyo if I officially took over and ran solo with it. We reached an agreement last month, and this point forward, i'm officially handling Megatokyo on my own.

These kinds of things happen when creative people work together - partnerships often suffer violent and nasty break-ups - egos clash, feelings get hurt, and the very work the partnership produces is often used as weapons against each other. That, of course, hasn't happened here - Rod and i are still good friends, and he'll always remain an important part of what got Megatokyo to where it is now. This split is a result of how Megatokyo grew and evolved, not because we started to dislike each other. There's a big difference.

The main thing this does for Largo is it gives him the freedom to move onto other things and not have to deal with any looming responsibilities of the grudge work required to keep MT alive. I'm enough of a masochist that i don't mind taking it all on myself.

How will this effect the comic? Not much at all. In fact, the change really happened months ago. The last comic rodney wrote in its entirety is the "Wack a Troll" strip (damn funny strip too). Has some of the gamer-based humor disappeared over time? yes, unfortunately it has - that's my fault. To that extent perhaps that Naze Nani strip was right. Will comic-Largo still act like largo? yes. Even though Rod and I are quite different, we have a little of each other's personalities in us - i can pull of largo pretty well, because there's a little bit of that nutcase in my head too. Rod has some piro qualities as well - he's a lot more sensitive and caring a person than you might believe, given the nature of his comic character.

Will he still be involved with Megatokyo at all? As much as he feels like, really - in much the same way Dom, Ed, Asmodeus, Ukyo and all of my other friends help in their spare time - free to help, but not obligated.

I'm actually grateful to Largo for working with me on the split, and encouraging me to make sure that Megatokyo keeps growing and only gets better. The ability of a webcomic like Megatokyo to support two people is a long way off - but there is a small chance that someday it will be able to support me, enabling me to spend all of my time doing the kinds of things i like to do - the kinds of things that result in stuff like this silly comic.

Oh, and Rodney is still the same Largo he was before MT ever started. I'm grateful to him for all the help and inspiration he has been over the past year and a half, and of course I wish him lotsa luck on any other projects he might pursue. Both Largo and myself will keep you up to date about other things he might be up to. After all, we need to know what he's doing so we know when to head for the bomb shelters...

As for me, I just gotta watch out for falling bricks. :)

"Hosting Released!"
Monday - June 17, 2002
[Ukyo] - 03:14:27
Well, it is finally up, out, and official.
No, I am not talking about Piro admitting
he is good at something. I am talking
about the new Hosting Company, ColoGuys .

ColoGuys was created to be 'The Name'
behind the hosting. After many long
discussions, the services are now being
offered publicly.

There are a few services which are not
listed yet, as they are not fully ready
for the public and are still in testing.
One particular one I would like to
mention is the Shared WebHosting which
is hoped to be available soon.

"music is good"
Friday - June 21, 2002
[Ukyo] - 02:54:22
Wow. BS. I have never seen and heard, so much BS in my entire life.

Firstly, Trythil, a friend of mine pointed out a Dilbert Strip that reminded me of this whole situation. "I started by reasoning that anything I don't understand is easy to do." -- Dilbert's boss.

"The Librarian of Congress has accepted the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights and rejected the rates and terms recommended by a Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) for the statutory license for eligible nonsubscription services to perform sound recordings publicly by means of digital audio transmissions ("webcasting") under 17 U.S.C. §114 and the statutory license to make ephemeral recordings of sound recordings for use of sound recordings under 17 U.S.C. §112. In place of the rates recommended by the CARP, the Librarian has adopted his own rates."

This is expected to start, and go into effect on 09-01-2002. I have many questions about this. Mainly, How?.

How do they plan to enforce, and control such a thing? With more than 50,000 broadcasts on the internet, how can they keep track of the ones that are US Only? How can they keep track of the different 'types' of streams that the Librarian of Congress has decided different fee's for? Does this mean every and all broadcast software will have to login and register on a server even if it is in a different Country? Would they have to keep track of everyone on the internet, no matter what Government jurisdiction they are in, they would have to know about it?

Now that every broadcaster in the US is registered with a US Agency, they have to log every song played, how many listeners (and they want to know WHO) was listening.

Right now, the Recording Industry has been trying and with constant failure, has not been able to create a copyright secured audio format, or media.

How can they tell the difference between a Brittany Spears song, from a Live trance mix? Will they be charging for Non-RIAA titles? What about titles that are covered by other countries recording industries?

I do not know of one single broadcast that plays RIAA titles only.

Now, I suppose once they manage to make every media device copyright secured, and they have collected information on the millions of listeners. Have full control over all broadcasts on the internet, I suppose the world will be a better place. .. Wait... the world? When the RIAA get into world affairs? I thought it was the US recording industries.. not international? Are they going to be one of the first 'Internet Governments'? Will there be elections? I want to vote. Jack, from Jack in the Box would be the best candidate. At least then we would get antenna balls for the monitor.

Also, how often will broadcasters be made to report and pay on all their user information, and songs listened to per user? How long do they plan to spend on information processing, and getting checks to the artist? A month? A year? I mean, that is a LOT of information to process. At the RIAA's current employee count, and with how busy they are, they could help the industry my hiring all of the unemployed! Hey! Great idea! But wait.. with the number of new employee's it would take to handle everything, after paychecks, how much will be left for the artists? Oh well, who cares as long as the RIAA makes their point and gets their control.

RIAA says, "Contrary to what has been reported in the news media and circulated on the Internet, the RIAA and its member companies want ALL webcasters, large and small, to succeed." .oO( .. "I need another summer house. My $450,000 home is just too small." )

Now, I am told that the listener information gathering has been dropped. No one seems sure at this point, as it's hard to tell what is what.

Until then, I will keep listening faithfully to my favorite stations like Japan-A-Radio, and Digitally Imported, and I would be listening to Tags Trance Trip (the guy who WRITES shoutcast), however he has ended his broadcast due to this pile of BS.

Now, not only will they start charging, but they expect to BACKCHARGE all broadcasters. What in the hell? No broadcaster has kept track of how many users listen to each song, and which songs were RIAA, or anything of the nature. Why are they getting penalized??? This will get rid of most broadcasters right there. We have already started seeing some end broadcast with the passing of this because they are afraid to get backcharged, and do not have the money to pay that, let alone future costs.

First RIAA goes after Napster. When Napster became mainstream, the industry sales shot up. Everyone was listening more to the songs they liked, and wanted to hear, and were buying more albums from it. But, the word 'free' was involved. Anytime 'free' is involved someone has to step in and make an ass out of themselves. The RIAA finally locked down Napster for the most part and what happened? The earnings plummeted back down to below what they were. They blame this on the internet. .oO("I shot myself in the foot and still have not learned my lesson." "Wow.. look at all those potential buyers. We can make them pay too!") Would you pay per song to listen to your radio in the car? Just think, if the Government banned all radio broadcasts, and required everyone to use satellite services such as XM Radio. The ARRL would NEVER allow that.

Now, the Government has some good people! Congressmen Jay Inslee and Rick Boucher are both fighting to stop this mockery. They deserve all the support they can get!

If you want to help put a stop to this BS and get more info, you can visit sites like, saveinternetradio.org, www.kurthanson.com, www.copyright.gov, www.copyright.gov, www.copyright.gov/carp/webcasting_rates_final.html, www.riaa.org and www.soundexchange.com .

------

Now, onto other big news. (Yes, there is more.) I have spent 18 hours so far, playing the latest and the greatest, NeverWinter Nights. It is a ton of fun. Great graphics. Excellent NPC interaction.

We are putting our GM staff together for our own massive NWN server. This will be a joint project between MegaTokyo & Aniverse. We are waiting for the linux server release by Bioware right now. If you are interested in playing, you can go Here for info. The page is not much, but we just now started on everything. I think the guys over at BioWare did an extremely good job.

My comments on this are short, because I got to get back to playing and module writing. Later!

"dumb ideas"
Monday - June 24, 2002
[Piro] - 08:41:00

For those of you who will be at Anime Expo this weekend, be sure to check out the US Anime booth in the dealers room - they have plenty of Capture the Bear posters on hand if you want one. :) Also, Dom is running around, so lets make sure he gets plenty of abuse while he's there.

-piro

Ok, i really need to start getting more sleep. Something is screwy when you start considering 2am your normal bedtime (considering that 6:30am is your normal wakeup time). 4.5 hrs of sleep a night isn't really healthy.

As many of you know, Otakon 2002 will be taking place in Baltimore at the end of next month (july 26th thru the 28th), and we are guests again this year. I don't really know how i get roped into going all these cons (Anime Central and A-kon so far this year), but after the last Megatokyo Panel discussion (which was really a 2 hr Q A session where Largo and I just sorta sat there and answered questions) I decided that for the next 'panel' we had to do something a little different...

I'm just full of dumb ideas sometimes, and the ideas for what we will be doing at Otakon has flourished into outright stupidity, but thats sorta to be expected. Rather than do a standard 'panel' discussion, where we sit like lumps and hide behind microphones that dont work. For Otakon 2002, we are doing something different.

For Otakon 2002, we will be presenting "Naze Nani Megatokyo Live" - a slightly more ... organized and planned presentation that... well... you guys figure it out. ^_^ Part of it involved Seraphim and I spending an hour in Jo Ann Etc buying lots and lots of fabric and things... I got quite the look when i told Seraphim what i was planning, but being the qualified seamstress that she is, she agreed to make it for me ^_^. As for Dom, Asmodeus, Ukyo... eh... they scare me. I really wish i didn't have these dumb ideas.

Anyways, one of the reasons for mentioning this now is that i wanted to let people know what we are planning, and invite everyone who is going to come to otakon to come see the show saturday night. Part of the presentation will be how i put together MT strips (Kai is putting together a flash presentation - we have projection and sound available). Will the room be big enough for everyone? eh... we dont know. Tomorrow i will put up a poll similar to the one we used for A-kon - it gave us a pretty accurate count of how many people were planning on coming. This way we can figure out how many people we have to accommodate before hand.

Also, a portion of the questions are going come from questions that we will take before the con - i will have a special email address where you can send questions so that we can prepare better answers than 'well, er, duh, because we felt like it.' Fear not, there will be a live Q A session towards the end of the presentation, if you have a burning question that must be asked in person. :P

Anyways, should be fun. Please come, we promise to try to be entertaining. Look for that poll about otakon either later today or tomorrow.

nyow.

If you would like to advertise on Megatokyo.com (it's not too expensive, it helps us pay our hosting bills, and we have a really way-cool-l33t banner administration system), please email us at mtstudios@megatokyo.com. for more info.

"Musings"
Monday - June 24, 2002
[Dom] - 17:30:00
That image up there is Nick Ut's famous photograph of Kim Phuc, taken on June 8, 1972. It won a Pulitzer prize that year, and I've been thinking about it since Father's Day.

I first saw that photograph in a seminar I took on visual culture, talking about the studium and punctum of images. Blah blah blah, my eye was always drawn to the little boy (at least, I've always thought it's a boy) in the corner, looking lost and lonely back at the smoking ruin behind him. He makes me think of my father, because every once in a while, when I ask him about Vietnam, his eyes go very distant and sad before he says to me "My Vietnam isn't there anymore."

So when I saw this image for the first time, I immediately thought about my father, and how it must have been during the war, after the Communist forces had already most of his life. It must've been lonely, looking back at the ashes of his home, at parts of his life which had been torn away from him, clutching mementos of dead family members.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I don't listen to my father. How years of fierce struggle for financial and emotional independence from my parents have hardened me to him, taught me to tune out his voice and turn into a nodding audioanimatron spouting out "Yes, Dad" every few minutes.

So when I started thinking about this on and after Father's Day, I realized that I've been entirely unfair to the man. Yes, he's an overbearing tyrant at times, or overly smothering at others. But it seems to me that part of him is still lonely, staring back as the ashes of his home float slowly into the sky.

I dunno. Maybe I'm being overly sentimental, but with that in mind, I'm going to start listening to him. Not to everything he says, mind you--there's still a lot of stubborn, angry teen in me--but especially his stories about the Vietnam I've never seen and barely heard of, about what my grandfather was like before he was purged, about what was in the photos that had to be left behind. Because if I don't start now, soon it'll be too late, and I'll never hear stories about where I came from, and where he came from. And I'll only have other people's pictures to look at.

Who thought Father's Day would mean more than just a hug, a family dinner and a tie in a box, huh?

"Movies"
Wednesday - June 26, 2002
[Dom] - 12:50:00
Follow this link. Shaw Brothers. Remakes. Re-releases. Sequels. SCREENINGS.

I think I need a clean pair of pants, excuse me...

Anyway. This rant is a lot lighter than the last one, which is a good thing, because if I was that serious all the time, I think I'd explode. It's about movies. The movies I've really, really liked over the past few weeks. That is, mostly an indie flick known as World Domination, which I saw last Saturday at "A Night of Distraction". I saw this thing instead of Minority Report (which apparently is a good movie in its own right), but everybody I went with found it well worth it. Why? Because it was the first movie I've seen in years that you could tell was from an under-forty director (for reference, the other was Three Seasons by Tony Bui, which was a beautiful movie in its own right and a personal favorite of mine and my mother).

See, I don't mind Hollywood that much, though I kinda dread the lack of originality I see in lots of the drek that makes it to screen. But I'm really disconnected from a lot of it, being nowhere near the age group of and not produced by the same culture as the average Hollywood hotshot director/producer.

So it was really refreshing to see a movie that two guys I went to high school with had a hand in--plus, the game was about six guys getting really into Risk, which was especially fun for me since I'd spent until 3 AM the same day playing games like Axis and Allies and Illuminati.

But anyway. About World Domination. The movie was one of the funniest I've seen in the past year (yes, right up there with Shaolin Soccer). It, like Easily Distracted's previous short "I'm Not Funny Around Girls", was all the funnier because it's stuff I've done at the game table, with people I've played games with, told from the perspective of people I know. It's rare that I see something like that.

So, uh, yeah, order stuff from Easily Distracted and tell 'em Dom sent you, I figure Marcus and Berbick will buy me lunch if I get enough people to check out their awesome movie about Risk and World Domination...

Tune in Friday for con stuff, like costumes and of course, the long-neglected Million Maximo March.

"Final check"
Tuesday - July 2, 2002
[Dom] - 17:30:00
Update: The MMM is going to take place at 1 PM on Friday. Plan for it. And bring cameras, and whatever goofy props you think are good!

If you have a question for the Otakon MT panel, please send it to: nazenani@megatokyo.com. Fred's mailbox is full as it is without people flooding him with questions the entire staff needs to go over anyway. Now, on to the Million Maximo March.

Yes, the long-awaited info on the Million Maximo March. Time is posted above. Place is the pool at the Hyatt, because there's nothing illegal about being in your trunks next to a pool--unless Ashcroft decides that nakedness is a threat to national security between now and Thursday.

For those of you who don't quite remember the Million Maximo March rules:
1) The Maximo/Arthur costume is a pair of heart-patterned boxer shorts and a weapon. In later levels of Maximo, Maximo changes underwear (a much healthier habit than Arthur's one pair of underoos through two or three games). These other patterns of boxers are also acceptable. Update: The other designs are: brown cow-spotted, monogrammed M, blue design with special red "POW"... if you haven't seen that one, you probably shouldn't make it. Also, the old-school ghosts and goblins costume... well, you can figure that one out yourself. (Thanks to Uncle Scaryhead for the heads-up)
2) The weapons available are anything in the Maximo: Ghosts to Glory/Ghouls and Ghosts/etc. series. This includes sword and shield, big-ass sword (preferably yellow), dagger, ring, scythe, torch, lance, etc. Please adhere to Anime Expo's rules about weaponry, found at the bottom of this page. In other words, NO LIVE STEEL. GETTING ARRESTED IS BAD.
3) Also acceptable is one of the forms Arthur is turned into by the wizard: old man, duck, etc.
4) Anyone cosplaying as the wizard will be thrown into the pool.
5) No pants-ing other Maximo cosplayers. There are some things man was just not meant to know--most of these things involve other men.
6) In case of pantsing-happy bystanders, you may want to put on an extra layer of underoos, briefs, speedo, whatever you can do to protect yourself.
7) If you can, bring a camera. If you can't (the lack of pockets could be a problem, and if you store it in your boxers you'll have problems getting other people to take pictures for you), bring a person who has a camera.
8) Women are free to join the MMM (Natsuki's confirmed for Otakon's MMM), as long as they, too, aren't breaking decency laws. So make sure you have something like a flesh-colored tanktop or something, and join in as you will.
9) Above all, have fun. After all, we're just a bunch of kinds being silly... and of course, "Cosplay is love!"

All those who still are interested in the MMM at Anime Expo, please e-mail me so I can get a rough count of how many people want in. All those of you who want in on the Otakon MMM, please wait until after AX weekend so I don't get confused. Also, someone who knows the Baltimore area well should also check out where the pools are so we don't, like, get arrested. Otherwise, we have to stalk around looking like flashers... which may not be a bad thing, but it certainly isn't for everyone.

Anime Expo and Otakon are going to be great. Especially since I get to interview Tsukasa Hojo, the Father of Mokkori...

Until next time!

"Zugzug!"
Tuesday - July 9, 2002
[Dom] - 02:30:00
I have a copy of Warcraft III now. See you in a few days.

Loktar ogar!

"if cosplay is love..."
Friday - July 12, 2002
[Piro] - 12:34:02
Then doujinshi is pain. :)

Y'know, it's been a long time since i've done an OSE (One Shot Episode). I was drawing the stuff for what was originally going to be today's comic and it was taking forever (there are some days that the art just doesnt flow well, and when you start late, it sucks that much more). So, after realizing there was no way in pipe cleaner hell that i was gonna finish on time, i put this together instead. :)

Also, i felt the real need to give props to the Bioware guys. A few weeks ago i got this really nice package from Canada, and inside was a copy of NWN signed by all the people who had worked on it. I gotta say, thanks guys, it's sitting in a prominent space on my shelf next to my DigiCharat paws and signed Love Hina manga #1. :) You guys rock, plain and simple. And you KNOW largo hasn't come up for air since it came out :P I have NWN loaded on the machine Seraphim uses, and she has instructions to smack me if get anywhere near it - god, for a few free days to dive into this game (sigh) maybe someday soon.

I suddenly have this really bad idea for a NWN vs Warcraft strip... curse you dom... make these thoughts go away. ^^;;

In other news, plans for Otakon are going well - at least as well as this bunch can plan things. According to the poll which ran for a week, out of 9601 votes, 1193 people said they were 'definately' comming, 1284 said they were 'thinking about it'. So, based on poll results vs. actual crowd at Akon (that poll told us about 480 people were comming to the con, 550 showed up at the panel) well... we might have a LOT of people comming to see Naze Nani Megatokyo Live ^^;;;. The Otakon folks have given us the biggest room they can, but i am starting to think that its still not gonna be big enough. Geh... Where the heck do all you people come from????

So, in an effort to try to make sure everyone has a chance to see us at the con, i'm going to see about getting a second time slot - one later that night. Right now, we are scheduled for 3pm or so on Saturday - i'll see what i can do to get a midnight slot for "Late Night with Megatokyo - NeverNaked Nights" (tentative title)

... er... no, scratch that title...

Anyways, i figure we can do a less formal panel/presentation later that night for those who cant get into the first one. I'd rather plan this NOW rather than at the con. Please keep an eye on the website here the week before the con for the latest updates on our offical schedule and times. As always, i'll spend all the time i can at the Megatokyo table in artist's alley giving out sketches and stuff. I'll bring more index cards this time.

Oh, and i'm planning on doing some artwork for the artshow.

this is actually a big reversal on my normal policy of not putting my work in con art shows or selling it. Why? Well, two reasons. First off, i had a very interesting conversation with the lady who ran the A-kon art show that enlightnened me to a few things. I always felt that it wasnt fair to post my work because i didnt want to crowd out interest in the other work presented in the show. It was pointed out to me that by putting work in the show it would draw people TO the artshow which would be good for the other artists - not bad. I thought about this and decided that she might be right.

I'm of the opinion that these Anime Conventions, which to fans are *really* events where they can gather and meet thier online friends and have some fun for a weekend, need to shift thier official focus a little. To me, they concentrate a little too much on suckin money out of youngster's hands in the dealers rooms. (it bothers me when you have young teens quite literally begging for money outside of the dealer room near the end of a con) Anime cons are not needed as much as they used to be for anime merchandise because most stuff can easily be found online these days. To me, fandom of any sort should have as much to do with creative expression as spending money to buy things.

What's the biggest creative outlet at cons for fans? Cosplaying. I'd like to see the role of artists alleys, fan-produced art and other stuff take a larger role in cons than they do. Most art shows are stuffed away in little rooms that that are hard to find at cons. Think about it - conventions in japan are about FAN works (doujinshi), not where you can buy anime merchandise. I think that this is gradually happening, and i'd like to see it nudged along even more.

Oh, and secondly, the reason for allowing a peice of artwork to go up for auction... i have to face facts, i need a new server. The forums, when more than 100 people start using them at once, tend to lock them up pretty hard. The current server just can't handle it. So i figure i'll put a original piece for auction and use the funds from that to seed the 'New Server' fund. It's gonna have to be a really nice peice of art tho, if i will let anyone pay for it. we'll see if i can actually do anything of good enough quality.

As for the 'outfit' seraphim is making for me... heh. It's looking pretty good. Seraphim is amazing. She can do anything. :)

Oh, almost forgot, one of the things we will be doing for this presentation is answering questions sent in via email (gives us a chance to work them into the presentation) so go ahead and email your questions to nazenani@megatokyo.com, and we'll select the ones we feel like answering. :) We already have a bunch, but i dont know if everyone saw the bit about it in dom's rants. I mean, i dont read them. :P

Lessee, what else. Oh, for some reason Megatokyo seems to have won some awards or something over at the 2002 Cartoonist's Choice Awards. I don't really know why MT would win anything - certainly not best comic and stuff. ^^;; Anyways, thank you very much - award's like this should be won by comics and people who deserve it, and MT doesnt really fall into that category (especially lately). I'm honored to have been selected over the many other fine comics listed. Thank you.

Finally, i'd like to wish Best Wishes to Akamatsu Ken and his wife, who are getting married this weekend. :) (Akamatsu Ken is the manga-ka for Love Hina, and the MT crew had a chance to have lunch with him and his wife at Anime Central - they are just the nicest people and a sweet couple.). I was going to try to finish a gift art for them, but i just have not had the time to do anything worthy :(. Congrats and best wishes from all your fans in the states! :)

I have another big announcement next week too - something that i've been working on for months (many months) has finally come together, and you'll see a few exciting things happin here in a few weeks (probably around the same time as oktaon) I am so gonna need a break after otakon...

it's times like these that i am so glad i have stuff like the 'boards of canada' to chill to... downtempo chill ownz...

If you would like to advertise on Megatokyo.com (it's not too expensive, it helps us pay our hosting bills, and we have a really way-cool-l33t banner administration system), please email us at mtstudios@megatokyo.com. for more info.

"Conventioneering v1.01"
Friday - July 19, 2002
[Dom] - 04:00:00
(addition 7/19) Looking over at Penny Arcade, it looks like Gabe and Batjew are doing a good deal of Warcrafting. Therefore, I would like to issue an friendly challenge to both of them for a 2v2 game on b.net some time. Random races if you want, chosen races otherwise... and of course all in the interest of having fun and learning some more tidbits of strategery. I've already e-mailed Gabe about it, but I figure putting it on the web wouldn't hurt. :) (end addition 7/19)

Alright, the rage has passed. But now I'm going to hate on people who decide to play "hide the farm" behind some trees... there's no point in doing it except to annoy people and prolong an already-over game. I just don't see the appeal. But then again, I'm not the kind of asshole that gets off on annoying people at games--I'm just your run-of-the-mill asshole.

Second, I've been sifting through the nazenani address. And people keep asking about the book. Well, we're hoping one will be out by Halloween, but Skull keeps using the copy machine to xerox his ass. So I guess maybe around Christmas. So please, stop asking about the book!

Anyway. Anime Expo.

I just did a decently long look at Anime Expo for m'job, so I'll keep this one brief, which I guess is becoming my trademark.

First of all, the Million Maximo March. People FLAKED. BIG-TIME. All of you wannabe Maximos out there (save the five who showed up) of you are bastards. I'm holding it again next year, since so many people said they'd recruit. As for the Otakon MMM--well, someone e-mail me with a convenient and legal location... I'll plan it for then. And let's make this one... I guess Friday evening?

I place my hopes in Raijin for the future of US manga. Mostly because I like City Hunter and Grappler Baki, and anyone that can bring Slam Dunk TV to the US gets my vote. Also, I don't think a monthly Shounen Jump running One Piece will -ever- catch up, given it runs weekly. Oh well, there's always the Japanese manga (for me, at least).

I am still amazed that Urban Vision is doing an animated version of... the Sammy Sosa story. I'm sure it's a good story, but... I dunno.

And last but not least, Cosplay is pain too. But also love. See above! (addition 7/19) I've gotten some e-mail asking for me to clarify this statement. Well, after talking to a few more experienced cosplayers than I, cosplayers are _the_ most vulnerable to criticism. People can, and will, tell you to your face that you're fat, ugly, your costume sucks, and you have no right to cosplay. Sure, people do that with doujin, but more often than not they just criticize it while you're happily off doing another one. Or you're just getting nasty e-mails rather than being mocked by a group--which is distinctly unkind but rather frequent. And then there are all the stories about lonely, starving, cold, miserable cosplayers waiting in line for construction judging, unable to leave the line for food or drink... and the late nights at sewing machines just before con (or at con)... it's hell, this hobby of ours. Well. It's worse on the girls, simply because those costumes tend to be more complex.(end addition 7/19)

I'll add to this later when I'm less tired. Zugzug.

"Ready to work!"
Tuesday - July 23, 2002
[Dom] - 14:15:00
As I continue to Warcraft away my time, I need to rant every once in a while. So here's a quickie as I pack, get ready to run off to Otakon, and improve my ranking on the 4v4 and 2v2 ladders on Lordaeron.

This journal of a woman working as a clerk at a porn store is one of the best things I've read on the 'net in years. I would be in love with Ali Davis if I knew what she looked like and could confirm that she was actually female. But I'll probably settle for finding that porn store somewhere in Illinois and talking to her, she's well-spoken and damn funny, so I figure it'd be nice... unless, of course, I get caught in a Porn Trance and never go home.

But while reading that journal, I realized that I haven't really written about my job in this space. I've written about things I learn during the workday, like how The Rock is gonna star in the Spy Hunter movie, which is at once frightening and promising, or about Super Monkey Ball 2, which will devour my soul as much as Warcraft 3 does. And it'll suck out my productivity, which thankfully War3 hasn't. But not writing about my job itself is probably a good thing, given that my editors read MegaTokyo from time to time, and so if I ever had anything to complain about, I'd be asked about it some day after I got into work.

The really odd thing is, though--whenever something weird or funny happens at work, we write it up ourselves for the behind-the-scenes articles of the website. We've put up some of our LAN game results there, some comments on our office space, silly little slices of life... I guess writing for a living keeps me from writing about my living, or something like that :)

Maybe I'll write about my job some day. Hell, some day I'll actually come out and say where I work, so that the guys don't have to stay mum about it out of respect for my sense of privacy. :P But oh well...

By the way. Million Maximo March may be cancelled due to lack of convenient and legal venue... sigh.

"Otakon. nyow."
Thursday - July 25, 2002
[Piro] - 08:14:00

---- Baltimore, MD July 26, 27 and 28. Otakon 2002 - Information Ok, schedule time. Here's the scoop on Megatokyo events at Otakon this year. These are specific events and locations, as should be pretty much up to date and correct - always be sure the check the official schedule at the con to make sure there aren't any changes. Also, we'll try to keep the information here on the page up to date, if possible. When i am NOT at one of these functions, i will probably be at my artist table in Artist Alley (along with Merekat, the uber talented artist behind the Pirogoeth rendering). As usual, i'll be doing free sketches for people (i'm gonna bring more index cards this time). I'm happy to take requests, but please keep it to one character and not TOO complicated - drawings take time, and i can't spend a half hour drawing stuff for just one person. :) ALso, you are welcome to just stop by and say hi without contributing to hand cramps :P I'll do my best to make sure everyone who wants a sketch gets one. Now, for the big events... - Friday, July 26, 2002 - Friday: 1:30-2:30pm - Opening Ceremonies Not sure what we have to do at Opening Ceremonies except make fools of ourselves (since we are guests). This literally starts just a few hours after i get off the plane. :) Friday: 4:00-5:00pm - Megatokyo autograph session - Hall F This will be the main autograph session, if you want to come by and get us to ruin various pieces of paper. If you can't make this, you can always try to find me at my artist table in artist alley, where i will be spending most of my in between times. Friday: 7:00-8:00pm - Closer Look: Webmanga - Panel Room 2 Webcomics are a growing source of entertainment and we're starting to creep our way into various forms of fandom all over the world (good god that sounded corny) Anyways, as you know, webcomics are cool. There are a lot of Webcomic artists who will be at Otakon this year, and at this is the place to hook up with them and ask questions - a chance to meet some folks who have some real talent. ^_^ It gives me a chance to make fun of the MacHall guys in public again. That's always fun. - Saturday, July 27, 2002 - Saturday: 3:00-5:00pm - Naze Nani Megatokyo Live: Panel Room 1 Ok, this is the big presentation for Megatokyo. Naze Nani Megatokyo Live. We've gone to a lot of effort to try to make this more than your standard old Q A boring panel discussion, so be sure to come see us. We've got the biggest room possible, but even so we're a little worried about fitting everyone. If you are in line to get into this showing and don't get in, we have 'deadpasses' to hand out that will give you priority for getting into the Midnight panel. Saturday: 12:00-1:30am - Late night with Megatokyo: Panel Room 3 Technically, this is the 'overflow' panel for the main Naze Nani Megatokyo panel, and people who have passes (people who were not able to get into the first panel after waiting in line) will get priority for getting in, but you are still welcome to show up. :) This will be a lot more laid back than the earlier panel, and... well... you'll see. - Sunday, June 02, 2002 - Honestly, i dont think there is anything specific planned for Sunday. I'm heading back to Michigan later that afternoon, but there is a good chance i might spend a little time at my art table before i go. If nothing else, i will probably stop by the art auction before i leave to see how the server fund auction is going ^_^ and that's that. I'm still not sure what i am going to do about a peice of art to auction off at the art show - i haven't been able to finish any decent peices, so i'm actually considering auctioning off one of the Dead Piro Day sketches. I hate parting with them, but this is for two good causes - to help promote the art show for other artists, and to help raise money for a new server for Megatokyo. I'll have something for the show, so be sure to stop into the art show and check it out. Remember too that i'll be doing sketches for people at my art table, so don't feel you need to bid on this just to get a peice of my artwork - bid on the peice if you like it. Oh, and finally, there wont be any shirts or anything availible for sale at the con, but there will be Capture the Bear posters which you can find at the US Anime booth in the dealers room. They should have enough so that anyone who wants one can get one. should be a VERY fun con, i've been looking forward to it for a while now. I'd like to thank the entire MT Crew of friends who have worked very hard to help put all of this together, and a special thanks to Seraphim, who put an awful lot of work into my... costume. :). See you at the con!

"3... 2... 1... BANG!"
Monday - July 29, 2002
[Dom] - 02:00:00
Otakon. I can't see straight right now. I'll put up a quick and dirty rant and then fix it up in the afternoon when I've gotten some sleep:

Hours of sleep a night: 3

Hours spent signing autographs on Friday: 3

Costumes in 15 minutes: 3

Strings on the guitar a cute Studio Ironcat intern lent to me for my Kayama costume: 4

Times pants were dropped in public: 0

Injuries Natsuki inflicted on herself: 1

Times Natsuki saw me pantsless because she was helping me change costumes backstage: 2

Injuries Natsuki inflicted on herself because of that: 0

People in the first panel: 900

Hours the people in the second row were in line: 2

Dollars Fred's DPD went for: 1750

Times I said "Smell my hair, it's an inhalant!": 20

Times I said "マイブラザー！"(MAI BURAZAA!): 17

Times I said "SO FULL OF HATE!" 2

Times I was actually full of hate: 0

References to Warcraft 3 made in a panel: 4

Bags stolen from backstage of Naze Nani Megatokyo Live: 2

Number of sketches Ian of MacHall was gonna give me but GOT STOLEN: 1

Temperature:humidity ratio at Baltimore when I checked: 91/82

Suggestions that the identical twin staffers at Otakon should pole dance to introduce the next MT panel at Ota: 2

Largo cosplayers giving leet lessons outside the green room: 1

Number of minutes Fred and I could stand to watch before our heads started to hurt from the surreality: 3

Songs sung at Otakon karaoke: 0

Songs sung with Asmodeus while walking to/from hotel, and at the autograph line: 20

Hugs given to Ardith Santiago: 3

People who said "Hey, that's Dom!" as I walked by: 6

Dollars more I spent on cab ride home than I spent at the dealer's room: 23

Mega Charat posters sold in the 10 minutes after the midnight panel as Fred got mobbed by fans: 9

Mega Charat posters in existence: 20

Asian laps that Merekat sat/laid on: 3

References made to the metal detector scene in Spinal Tap: 4

References made to the floating head's first lines in Zardoz: 3

References made to the floating head's first lines in Zardoz without Natsuki and Vaz around: 0

Pixy sticks stuffed down my pants: 1

Dollars stuffed in my pants: 0

Times I got slapped: 1

Legs humped at MT panels: 2

Times Fred denied knowing me: 2

Correlation: unknown

Cons this year so far: 5

Cons left: maybe 1 or 2

"Let's do the Time Warp again!"
Wednesday - July 31, 2002
[Dom] - 19:40:00
Dom's note: this is a rant from Ken, AKA Asmodeus... you may have seen him at Otakon running around drunk and trying to make trouble. Here's his story, edited for content, humor and grammar

I'm slowly recovering from the trip down to Baltimore for Otakon. It was a 5 day trip for me-I was driving alone for the 780 miles and I wanted to be safe. It was a long distance trip to a place I've never been before. The thing is, 5 days passed so fast it felt like a 2 day trip.

Pre Con
I left my home at around 10 AM on Thursday, the day before the con started. I wanted to arrive at the hotel before 5 so I could avoid the nasty traffic of Baltimore. Driving down there went better than what I imagined. Didn't get lost. Got there in 6 hrs. including lunch/bathroom/gas break. Got to the hotel on time but Ukyo wasn't there yet since his girlfriend's flight got changed. The room was reserved under his name so I could neither check in nor park my car until he arrived. So I just sat in the hotel lobby, pulled out my laptop, and played bunch of 2D fighting games like Party's Breaker, Glove on Fight, and Eternal Fighter Zero (Editor's Note: Blah... play some real fighting games, Ken. :)). While I was playing the game, a couple of people came to see what I was doing. Some of them were MT fans but since I'm not famous like piro (yet) they weren't going berserk or anything. They were very cool. After playing games on my laptop for a while, Ukyo finally arrived. So I went to drop my car off in the valet parking and brought my bags in. That nite, we just chilled and met with friends who arrived early. Had a small party in our room, where I got groped by like 6 people at the same time. THAT wasn't fun (Editor's note: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA). At 1 AM, we kicked everyone out so we could sleep. We had a long day ahead of us.

Convention Time!
After a good 6 hrs. sleep (Editor's note: Lucky bastard), I was ready for the con. Since Fred and Dom wouldn't arrive until later in the morning, we wasted our time checking the convention center for the cosplayers, the Dealer's Room for goodies, and friends for conversation. Once Fred and Dom arrived at the BCC, the riot started. We ran to the Green Room to meet up with them, headed over to the opening ceremony, snuck back to Green Room to plan out the day, then to the Dealer's Room to pick up a Comic Party Visual Fanbook that was on reserve (Editor's note: I want that book, dammit), and to the autograph session that lasted for 3 hrs. I believe we did autographs for over 500 people in the 3 hrs. We had to share the autograph table with Fred Perry for the last hour.

After the autographs, I had to make a quick run back to my hotel room to pick up Nadesico the Movie: Prince of Darkness LD box limited edition to be autographed by Tatsuo Sato. Mr. Sato is such a nice guy that he not only autographed but he also did a Ruri sketch on the back of the cover of the box. It's sad that he had to leave early on sat. afternoon. I didn't have a chance to talk to him after that.

The night ended with a fun dinner with group of MT crew and MT fans. But after the dinner we had to plan out our panel on Saturday. We found out that the flash file for the Naze Nani Megatokyo crashed. Kai made a promise to do his best to get it fixed before our panel. The meeting ended around 12:30 and I headed over to the dance and danced there till the convention center closed.

Saturday finally came. It was the busiest day of the con and it became the BUSIEST day. Since we truly appreciate our fans, we were mostly down in the artist alley to do autographs for the people who missed the session the night before. Before that, we made a stop down in the dealer's room to see how many "Capture the B34r" posters were sold down at the US Anime booth. Fred had to run to the artist alley so he gave me $100 and told me to grab Chocola 2001 and some Japanese gal (editor's note: non-porn) magazines. After buying Chocola 2001 and Megami for Fred, headed over to the artist alley and hung around with friends and staff for a while.

After that, we went back to our hotel room to prepare for "Naze Nani Megatokyo: Live!" and we freaked out when we saw the line of the people trying to get in. It extended from the entrance of Panel Room 1 all the way to the end of convention center, near Skywalk entrance. The poll gave us the data that over 1000 will show up but never expected to see over 1000 people coming. Where did all these people come from? Isn't there any other things to do besides come watch us make fools out of ourselves? The con staff assigned to organize the entrance wasn't enough, so some of us volunteered to help them. Still, it took almost 30 min. to fill up the room. The panel started half an hour late since filling up the room took more time than what we expected. Seeing Fred in a cat suit was simply funny. He's not the type of a guy who would normally cosplay. He's not shameless like Mr. Shirt Guy :P (Editor's note: Damn straight) The flash presentation had some trouble but it went pretty well. Kai did an excellent job to recover the lost flash file. He only had like less than a half day to recover the thing. I heard some people say it disappointed them but seriously, he did a fine job to recover the lost file and pull off such a funny flash. After the submitted Q&A, we moved to live questions from the audience. During that, I asked kai to show some images I chose that would be interesting to show. I had to pull out the "Taishi in a Union Jack speedo" (Editor's note: Mustn't forget the roses... with the thorns still in them. That HURTS image since that's what dom's future cosplay will be. (we're trying) (Editor's note: No we're not). And I wanted to see how 900 people would react to that funny yet horrific image.

One thing amazed me with the panel is number of MT cosplayers. We saw like 3 at last year's Otakon. But this year, there were like 50. I was amazed with the quality of their costumes. Especially Idol Kimiko cosplayer and DJ Piro cosplayer. That sure reminds me that "Cosplay is Love!" (^^)

After the panel ended, we found out that Eli and Ian's bags were missing. We thought the back hall would be secure since it's restricted to staff and BCC personnel only. Guess we were wrong. Whoever stole the bags, I wish they die in a horrific way. It is absolutely wrong to take another person's belongings. I feel really sorry for what happened to them since it's partially our fault. If they weren't helping us setting and running NNM:L, their bags and precious items would still be in their hands.

On the way to the guest dinner, I was chatting with staff and guests. I had a chance to exchange some words with Yoko Ishida. She is very sweet person. It's sad I didn't have a chance to go see her concert. I was mostly talking to Mike, Jessica, and Amy, the autograph table staff. On the way, we found out that Jessica and I live like 5 min. away from each other. What a coincidence, eh? (Editor's note: And he didn't even hit on her once. I'm disappointed in him...). It's very odd meeting person from your neighborhood at a random location. It truly is.

We returned from dinner at around 11:30. We had no time to waste and headed over to Panel Room 3 for Late Night with Megatokyo. There was a huge line again. Not as big as the afternoon panel but it surprised us completely. I had fun with this panel since I was able to mess with Fred and Dom. Got to hump Dom's leg and show the Kanon poster that explains why Fred nicknames himself "Piro". Midnight panels are really fun since we can do things we can't during the daytime panel. I gave out Yakpak sampler bags to people who asked interesting questions that caught our attention. Hope you enjoy them.

Sunday was pretty much chill out and wrap up day. It was mostly business talk with industry people and chatting with friends and staff. One thing surprised me was that Mr. Nightow of TriGun heard about the Saturday madness. (I introduced myself and about MegaTokyo on Sat. morning when I met him in the Green Room.) He mentioned it when I went to get his autograph. Wow, what an honor.

While sitting around in artist alley with friends, we heard that Fred's DPD sketch got auctioned off at the price of $1750. $1750!! I can't believe someone is willing to spend that much money on a single piece of art. Thanks to him, we're going to have a new server, which will improve the access quality of MT.

Almost forgot. We saw the lecture of Great Teacher Largo in front of Green Room on Sunday afternoon. It was simply...scary. It made us think "Is this our fault? Are we the ones who made these young men go insane? What have we done? What have we created?" Now we know how those Japanese creators feel when they see their characters in cosplay skits. It is truly odd.

At 3 PM, I said good bye to everyone and left the BCC, headed over to my friend Shaggy's place for an overnight stay. (Thanks for the kick-ass dinner and comfy couch.)

Post Con
I drove 7 hrs. on Monday to go home. Got lost twice but the trip was smooth. Had no serious problems at all.

Wow, I was gone for 5 days but it only felt like 2 days. It's truly an odd feeling. And I'm still trying to recover from the con.

Thank you list
I had a great time at Otakon and hope to return next year. For letting me have a good time, I would like to thank following people:

John Heaton, Scott Argenziano, John Harmon and John Scofield of the Otakon Green Room.

Mike Williams, Jessica, and Amy from the autograph table. (Jessica: since we are like neighbors, we should hang around sometime.)

Sam D. and Chris of Con Ops.

Ardith, Uchino-san, and Yamashita-san of Broccoli International.

Lianne, Cat, Joel from TokyoPop.

Andrew and the entire gang of US Anime. Without you, MT posters wouldn't have been a success. (Editor's Note: And Ken would have a lot less porn and other such items to rub on people)

Kei, Ellen, Steve, and David of Studio Ironcat.

Richard "Pocky" Kim for doing a kick ass MC for the opening of NNM:L

Bill, the guy who won the DPD sketch at the art auction. Without your support, we would've been stuck with slow server.

All my friends from the channel which shall remain nameless. Sorry we couldn't hang around with you guys that much. Next time, drag our ass out from MT business to have fun.

All the people from #MT who helped us pull off our panel. We couldn't have done it without you guys.

All the MT fans who support us. Without your support, we couldn't have done this.

Dom, Ukyo, Natsuki, kai, patchmonkey, merekat, and Crowie. I had a great time hanging around with you guys.

And finally to Fred and Rodney for creating such a wonderful web comic. It is an honor to be part of something big and entertaining.

"uhm..."
Friday - August 2, 2002
[Piro] - 10:42:02
The official press release is here. you can skip the rant and just read the press release here if you like :)

You'd think a week where i barely was able to finish one comic (its still not done - it's a good one, its just not finished yet) that i'd be relaxed, recovered from the Otakon trip, refreshed and relatively stress-free.

ha. this is me we're talking about here.

I started working on a Otakon 2002 wrap-up, but it's still not done (dom's quick wrap-up is amazingly succinct (yes he did get slapped once) and it covers some salient points. First off, panel 1 was a disaster. Panel 2 was much better. fans seemed to enjoy both, which is all that *really* counts. I'm still overwhelmed with gratitude for all the friends, associates, and Otakon crew who spent so much of their time at the con helping me out. I'm not really sure how to thank all of you. I'll try in my Otakon wrap-up.

To, the sheer number of fans who spent a lot of THIER con waiting in line for MT events - not having any comics done this week is NO way to repay you all for your patience and, well, stamina for waiting for stuff. I really tried to do my best to get to everyone - to those of you who i was unable to meet or talk to, i'm very sorry. Nothing sucks worse than standing in line for an hour and not then not being able to either get in or meet the person you are waiting to see. I think the DeadPass idea worked pretty good, i'll have to make sure we do that again next time too (either that or we have a room that really is big enough).

That and i really have to work on the 'uhm' thing between thoughts. Sorry 'bout that. ^^;;;

Oh, and the art auction. To the fellow who cast the winning bid of $1,750... you're nuts, dude. :P I still can't fathom any drawing of mine being worth that much, i figured that it'd bring in a few hundred dollars (mainly because of the server fund thing) I swear i am suffering a bit of a guilt trip over this. ^^;; Honestly tho, i have to say, I personally liked the piece, i felt it was a good drawing, and, well, dude, you looked really happy to have it, and that's what matters. Thank you very much, your excessive generocity has lead directly to the following announcement.

On tuesday i ordered a new server. I don't have the exact specs on hand, but it has 2 gigs of DDR Ram, dual 1600 AMD processors, a nice shiny case, and it should at least be able to handle Megatokyo and it's forums for... a few months of growth at least. ^^;;; With any luck Megatokyo will be moved over to the new box by next weekend.

I have several other announcements too. Some are the culmination of months and months of work in the background - dead piro days don't just happen because i am tired, they usually have to do with me being overwhelmed with other projects in the background.

First announcement has to do with the Megatokyo store. As i announced during the 2nd panel at Otakon, Megatokyo has partnered with Think Geek to open a new store sometime in the next few weeks. I'm very excited to be working with them, because they are a great online retailer that offers high quality stuff with attitude. :) They are great people, they make good stuff, and i am very happy with the new shirt designs (i have introduced new shirts and refreshed old favorites) and yes, most of them are either on black shirts, or other, specific colors. More information on the new store when we are ready to launch.

Oh, and how much time did all that require to set in motion? A lot more than you folks might realize ^_^

Announcement number two is also a big one. The 2nd biggest request i get has always been for black t-shirts. Got that covered. The number 1 request i get is 'is megatokyo available in print'.

The answer to this is now "come this december, yes". Don't say i never listen to fan requests. :)

Yesterday i reached an agreement with Studio Ironcat, publishers of the Vampire Princess Miyu, Yui and Dahlia series, to publish the first and subsequent collection volumes of Megatokyo. The official press release is here. Press releases always sound so damn silly, it's almost like they exist in this land of marketing and hype lingo where you have to say all sorts of really glowing things (my friend patchmonkey, who is my de-facto marketing guy wouldn't let me write it :P) but the truth is, i'm very excited about this because the IronCat folks are hyped and willing to work with me to help produce these volumes the way *I* want to make them. Megatokyo in print is a big deal, and i am going to work very hard to make sure that volume one, which will contain all of chapter 0 in its entirety along with a lot of extra material, is well worth buying.

I have a lot more i can say, but i think that should be enough for today. ^^;; It's all very exciting stuff, and as you can see, things here at MT just, well, keep getting more interesting. :P All this was actually more work than it would take to do 3 comics in a week, so i hope you guys at least understand why the delays. :)

Oh, and then there is that deadline at work on monday. Gonna have to put some time in the weekend to hit that... (sigh)

"Sleep is for the weak"
Monday - August 5, 2002
[Dom] - 06:00:00
It's 5 AM, and I've decided I'm just not going to sleep tonight. And no, Natsuki, I refuse to let Fujisaki Shiori count sheep. It's just not right. So instead of sleeping, I'm gonna write. Sleep will take care of itself. Until then, Otakon.

I already took care of most of the fun details, but skimped on the shoutouts and other fun little stories. Well, okay, here's some of the fun "behind-the-scenes" MT stuff you wouldn't hear about otherwise.

For example, Ken keeps bringing the same set of posters to any con he's at with Fred. This has only been two cons so far, so here's hoping he finds something else to hold over Fred's head than a picture of a girl in overalls. I figure that a few doses of Comic Party and he'll find something--or he'll just target me, which is fine because it's always amusing to prove to Ken that I have no public shame.

It's foogin' creepy to have guests be fans of you. In the Green Room, Fred Perry (whose Gold Digger animation looks like it'll be a reality soon, which is a frightening prospect given the one-man studio) asked Fred to draw a sketch for his daughter. Fred promptly cooked one up, gave it to the other Fred--and Perry tried to give Gallagher money. What followed was high comedy on the level of watching Vietnamese parents fight for the honor of picking up the check at a dinner. Money was offered, refused, forced, returned... it was awesome.

Meanwhile, Lianne Sentar also turned out to be a big fan of MT--and when Ken got my manga signed, Nightow-san inquired about MT. It's... just weird.

Speaking of Lianne Sentar, a bunch of people wanted me to ask if that was her real name or a pen name. I didn't ask--I figure if it's impolite to ask a lady's age and weight, it's also impolite to ask her what is written on her birth certificate.

As for being slapped, that is part of the "Smell my hair, it's an inhalant!" story. See, given I only had 2 minutes backstage to get my hair green, about half a can worth of green hairspray went on my head over the course of 2 hours, since I renewed the coloring in the Green Room. And the chemical smell was STRONG around me--Merekat was getting lightheaded just from sitting next to me, and I had an aura that rivaled the Abomination's Disease Cloud and the Fanboy Funk for sheer strength. Later in the night, it turned into a kind of potpourri smell, but while it was still wet, various people tried to noogie me and got green knuckles. Me being me, I stuck my head under that person's chin and rubbed my hair against the collarbone. The problem was that the person who noogied me happened to be female, and it looked like my head was going elsewhere--thus the slap. It stung, too.

As a random sidenote, I lost a friggin' expensive pair of slacks that was supposed to go with the suit for my Taishi costume. Many cosplayers can sympathize with the amount of swearing I did backstage at the NNMT:L! panel, when I discovered that said pants were missing. I ended up wearing the white pair of Kayama pants with the Taishi suit, which just looked horrible. I apologize for the pants going missing--but at least I was wearing pants...

Speaking of wearing pants, it's weird that when I take my glasses off, Young Wang of Nekobox looks better in a skirt than his girl Natsuki. I have no idea why. I think it's because I've known Nats for too long and find it strange when she acts feminine.

In a rather reassuring development, several people told me to my face that they fear what would happen if I ever got drunk. They continued by saying that they never wish to see it happen, confirming that their wishes align with mine. I love being as amusing and shameless sober as other people are drunk. It cuts out a lot of the headaches, and no one ever tries to slip you something to see what you're like drunk. I still pour my own drinks, though...

I love being interviewed. Some people will just say I'm an attention whore, and to some degree that's true. But I just love being asked questions and being able to come up with creative answers. My personal favorite was the "creativity as semen--don't release it and it'll all pop out at an inconvenient time" metaphor I used while on camera with Nats, Young, and Vaz. It really does explain a lot of webcomics out there, and it was an inspired bit of oddly appropriate word weaving.

The US Anime guys are cool, but what frightens me is that Doujin Man (update: His name is Andrew. However, for the rest of his career I will call him Doujin Man, and sing the Doujin Man song. Thanks, Doujin Man, we needed you!) rubbed Leaf merchandise on himself. I thought only Ken and my roommate did things like that, but apparently there's someone just as strange as they are out there. The prospect of there being more is at once comforting and terrifying.

G-On Riders is a piece of gooey, starchy shit. I feel compelled to say this about a series whose sole purpose in life is to fill in every fetishy girl position available--"Glasses-wearing girls of justice", my ass. When you can't figure out what fetish is left unfulfilled, you have a problem. Let's see, we have the nun with big sword, the schoolgirl whose panties keep falling off, the robot maid, the catgirl, the 12-year-old, the yamato nadeshiko, the nerdy girl with glasses --who if I remember right, speaks Kansai, but since I saw one episode at AX and almost punched someone, I won't watch it again to confirm--it's... well, yeah. Anyway, as I was saying, if Fred is ever subjected to that series, I will tie him to a chair and show him all of GTO, animation and live action drama. And that will be but the beginning of the G-On Riders purge. I despise the show/manga that much.

I forgot to bellow "FOR KHAZ MODAAAAAAAN" at the midnight panel while brandishing my vibrating Afro Ken. The warchief was saddened.

I guess that since this thing is running long and I'm finally starting to feel tired, it's time to give out the standard set of thanks.

Here's to Kei and that nameless yet cute Ironcat intern, who have put up with MegaTokyo's crap for quite a long time now. Seriously, on Saturday night when Kei and Fred went out "for a talk", I thought someone was gonna get cement shoes. But that may have just been the sleep dep talking. Thanks for the guitar, too, even though it was missing strings... all that mattered is that it fit my Kayama costume.

To Ken and Pocky, who amazed me with the depths of their fandom. And made me envy their Japanese skills--I wish I could read manga without furigana. I really do. But I don't have a proper dictionary yet and have to guess a lot of the meanings based on pictograms, and that's just a bad idea in Japanese :P

To the Otakon staff guys, who put up with all of our crap. I WILL have those poles onstage next time and I WILL make sure that the fans in the front row have their dollar bills ready. Yes...

To Natsuki and Young, who never fail to make me laugh, and Vaz, who's great at feeding me lines.

To my muse, you know who you are.

To all the people who told me that Shirt Guy Dom days don't suck. You're a bit deluded, but as long as I can make you laugh it's all good. And making people laugh makes it all worth it.

And to Fred, who, in his benevolence, hasn't had me liquidated yet.

"InovaPC Magazine"
Friday - August 9, 2002
[Largo] - 13:22:00
Initializing Largo version 4.2

So just where have I been? This rant may help explain the emails and posts around the net which ask that very question, and perhaps other important questions like – why the grass is green, why the ocean is blue, and why the yellow face burns – making us stay in our dank caves guarding our precious.

Alright, maybe this writing will not be able to cover all those, but here's the proverbial smack which I intend to lay down on you.

For the past few months I have been working with a new startup print magazine called InovaPC. The Magazine will focus on such sweet things as computer hardware modifications, over clocking, water cooling, case mods, and other ways to make your system run faster, stronger, colder, and glow brighter then the Las Vegas strip.

The Magazine just recently launched this last week, and is offering in its infinite kindness a free trial issue for anyone who wishes to sample the sweet fruits of delicious InovaPC goodness.

The following is the l33t Press Release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

InovaPC Inc. Introduces Its New Publication InovaPC Magazine

ONTARIO, CA (August 3, 2002) - InovaPC Inc. today announced the release of InovaPC magazine, a premier publication delivering ground breaking content for the computer enthusiast.

InovaPC Magazine

As the first publication to focus heavily on PC modification, InovaPC magazine offers a unique blend of content, feeding an untapped market that has grown vastly in popularity over recent years. InovaPC also provides an exclusive set of technology based content, with in-depth articles focusing on high-end PC technologies and their functionality. Taking a step above the competition, InovaPC not only provides product reviews and recommendations, but also educates the consumer with technology specific articles, allowing readers to make more informed decisions in their product purchases.

InovaPC Online

InovaPC would also like to introduce InovaPC Online. This developing resource will allow readers to subscribe and manage their subscriptions, review previous issues and keep current with the latest online exclusive content. InovaPC Online also aims to provide a news portal containing select industry related news articles of current interest, with an editorial twist. InovaPC Online can be found at http://www.inovapc.com/.

InovaPC Announces Free Trial Issue Offer

InovaPC is proud to introduce their free trial issue. Subscriptions are available at http://www.inovapc.com/ to those interested in receiving their first trial issue of InovaPC, free of charge and without obligation. Readers will be able to upgrade their free single issue subscriptions to one year and two year subscriptions in late Q3, 2002. This offer is limited to one issue per household, and is available to both US and Canadian readers

InovaPC Corporation

Based out of Ontario CA, InovaPC Corporation was built from the ground up to construct and deliver InovaPC magazine. Through strategic partnerships, and a focused and talented staff, InovaPC managed to achieve its goals in record time. Its first publication of InovaPC magazine will be released in both US and Canadian markets, and is expected to hit store shelves in early Q4, 2002.

© InovaPC Corporation 2002. All rights reserved.

Media Contacts

For media contact information, please mail: info@inovapc.com

End l33t Press Release

I would ask everyone go and grab the free sample issue, and then go subscribe if they like it.

However, since this magazine is Largo's only job right now, I can't deny I have a personal interest in it's success.

So, in the traditional of Largo shameless merchandising and marketing, I ask you all to subscribe to this magazine, not because it's jam packed with sweet news, reviews, and mods… not because it's going to have a sweet new comic written by yours truly… Not because I am one of the writers for the magazine and thus plan to have a section devoted to all things I find otherwise neat and or cool... and not even because it is going to completely rock in every sense of the word - unlike all the other water downed PC magazines on the market...

No... I ask you all to subscribe to this paper bound sweet magazine, so that I can continue to be employed and have much needed beer funds in my checking account.

"We broke sound barrier!"
Wednesday - August 14, 2002
[Dom] - 00:30:00
Well, crap. Officially two years. It seems like an eternity ago that Largo showed his anal-retentive editor friend a few scripts he wrote. And crikey, look at where we are now. Who would've thought?

Well, okay, Largo did. But then again, he thought MegaTokyo.com would make a great Slashdot for anime-ish stuff.

By the way. I apologize for episode 2's punch line, not episode 3, like I said in a previous rant... I hope it gets changed in the published version.

Addition: Just when I have a short rant that I like, someone makes me do something like plug the Ironcat website, where you can click on the MT logo at the top of the page to pre-order the MT graphic novel. Remember, do not click the MT logo on this page, do it there.

"graphic novelties"
Friday - August 16, 2002
[Piro] - 12:02:00
Before i start mubling along about nothing here, i've got one rather nice little announcement to make. Studio Ironcat (which just recently changed it name to Ironcat Entertainment :) has started taking pre-orders on Megatokyo - Volume 1. This is in every sense of the word a 'pre-order', since the books will not be available until December, but since people are chomping at the bit to put in pre-orders, i guess it's not such a bad thing :) Pre-ordering does a few things - you'll get your copy before they hit book and comic book store shelves (they are shipped to you right from the printer) and they really help us get a good idea of just how many we should print. Bigger the demand, more we print, and everyone who wants to buy one will be able to.

I'm always torn between the fact that i don't feel comfortable pushing my own stuff for sale, but at the same time i have this tiny little desire to see this graphic novel be, like, really successful. ^_^ My attitude with MT has and will always be the same - i'm not gonna overhype anything ever, i'd rather do something solid and build on that, and quietly let people find that they are getting *more* than they expected. I'll be working very hard to make this volume something a little more than just a printed collection of Chapter 0 - i view it as a real opportunity to add something special to the MT universe. I'm very happy with the fact that IronCat understands and shares my vision for the book (ok, 'vision' is such a corny word... ugh...^^;;).

Let me give you some details on where the book is at right now, because there have been some changes since the 'press release' (btw, no more 'press releases'. that thing sounds oh so professional and serious and ... so damn un-Megatokyo i can't see straight. It pains me to read something with such a positive spin to it :P)

The retail price on the book went up from $8.95 to $9.95. Why? not because we're being greedy, but partly because i want to make sure that the book is printed the way i want it printed :P My goal is for the book to be very much like a regular Japanese manga collection (called a "Tankubon") - there will be a dust jacket and a thinner 1/3 height 'band' over the dust cover. The book will be around 120 pages (about 2/3 the thickness of a standard tankubon). We aren't fully settled on the size yet, but it will probably be either 7" x 4.25" (standard tankubon size) or a little bigger. I'll let you know which.

The dust jackets will be full color, and the main cover will be black and white. (my intent is to have the color version of the cover art on the dust jacket and the sketch itself on the book cover itself). There will be a LOT of extra material (for instance, remember that much of chapter 0 was in 'square' format, so i have some space to play with) and... well... my artwork has improved quite a bit since chapter 0, so i want to put in some drawings that, er, show that i don't suck QUITE as bad as i did when chapter 0 was done.

The book will NOT read right to left, as people keep asking me. I know its all the rage to do this with Japanese comics, but people... this STARTED as an english language comic, and print it so it reads right to left... i'd have to mirror everything - which would not only be silly, but go against the very reason we have right-to-left english language versions of the japanese comics in the first place - so they dont have to change the art so much! So stop asking!! :P

I've heard rumors that Dom, who has been seducing interns at Ironcat for his own evil purposes, has been trying to get a "Super Special Squeaky Dom Supplement' inserted into the volume. I have teams of people working very hard to make sure that this doesn't happen. Please, don't panic. Or at least, try not to.

If after reading all this, you still want a copy, please visit IronCat's website and place a pre-order. (just click on the banner at the top) For those of you who do place pre-orders, thank you. Nothing would make me happier than melting down Ironcat's website a few times. If you feel more comfortable waiting for it to appear in stores, make sure your local comic book shop knows that you want them to get them for you :)

Ok, enough about the book. I'm sure you will all be sick of hearing about it by the time it is available.

Y'know, the biggest trouble with the 'slowly growing rumble' that has been the growth of Megatokyo over the past two years is that some of the changes haven't really been good ones. Oh, i'm not talking about bad things that have happened (and yes, there have been plenty, all seemingly matched by amazingly good things - life, it seems, is like that) but i'm talking in particular about these rant columns.

When i laid out the version of the MT site that you are currently looking at, it was really mainly a twist on two other webcomic websites - PVP Online, and Penny Arcade. I liked the idea of having the comic on the main page, and i also liked the fact that Penny Arcade had both an amusing comic as well as amusing rants. Clearly, Largo needed a place to rant and rave, but since i have as big a mouth as he does, this is what lead to the side by side format that we have. Since Largo left Megatokyo, the right column has pretty much turned into Dom's space. (scary concept)

What's missing is what's going on with my rant area. I always seem to have some big thing i have to announce, or a problem to deal with, or i just grumble and whine and grumble on about how busy i am and i have no life and everything sucks and i just wish i wasn't so tired. I kinda miss the days when i'd prattle on about miscellaneous things. The rant area is supposed to be a peek into our lives, a little something to connect with the thoughts and feelings of the inept people who run things around here.

What's sad is - i don't think that the rant area has changed, i think it really *IS* a peek into whats been going on with my head for the past six months. I've just been on the verge of having taken on too much. Missed comics dont happen because i'm lazy, they happen when i get overloaded.

having said that, i'm pretty happy with the past few weeks. With Otakon behind me, the Think Geek store almost ready to go, i've been settling back into doing what caused all this mess in the first place - the comic itself. Yes, the book will be a lot of work, but i can handle that. That's fun stuff.

My first goal was to get the comic back up and running on as close to a normal 3 per week schedule as i could manage. Next is getting more regular with the rants. Writing these things is fun when you do it causally. When you wait weeks between them, they become nothing more than announcement columns - i'm sorta tired of that.

Oh, one last thing. The new server is almost ready to go online. Ukyo, Cortana, and several other friends have been working hard on getting it fine tuned and ready to go all week. I've named the server 'Makoto' - i think it's a very appropriate name, if you are familiar at all with the character from Kanon. I think by next week the days of a slow site and unusable forums will be nothing but an amusing memory.

Makoto is a good girl. please be nice to her.

"Brownies and Beowulf"
Friday - August 16, 2002
[Dom] - 22:00:00
Before I start with anything else, I would like to say this: "No more goddamn Assgoblin Land Mines in Warcraft III! FINALLY". After that, I'd like to say that I still hate huntresses and get a particular joy out of seeing them die. But that's not really a balance issue, it's me not quite having my anti-huntress build perfected.

And then I'll plug the pre-order site here, because dammit, you should buy the book so Fred can go to work as an artist full-time and not die of exhaustion from what's essentially holding two full-time jobs.

This is the quick story of how I went from Taishi fan to gigantic doujin fan in 10 days... and became a picky one in even less time.

On August 6, I was in San Francisco hanging out with the Nekobox guys. It was Free Museum Tuesday, so we wandered around art exhibits, looked at the Comic Book Art exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and moved on to what I was fearing/looking forward to, the Lewis Carroll photography exhibit.

But when we were done there, I still had a lot of time before I had to meet some friends at Pac Bell Park for the Giants-Cubs game. So we hopped on the bus to Japantown and made a stop at Kinokuniya. Lo and behold, what do I find there but the Comic Party Visual Fanbook that Ken had taunted us with so much at Otakon. Even though I was very familiar with Comic Party (my roommate owns the Dreamcast and PC versions, and I've seen a couple of the eps from Ken's DVD collection) I wasn't a big fan of non-Taishi characters. But I poked around anyway, figuring that since I couldn't complete my GTO or Trigun Maximum collections at that Kino, I had to pick up something to make it worthwhile.

Enter the Comic Party anthology manga. 8 volumes of various doujin artists playing around with Comic Party characters-and it must be noted, being respectful to the characters and keeping it clean. 8 days later, I was done with the manga and burning for more-especially since after cruising some of the doujinshi circles' websites, there was some really, REALLY twisted parody stuff I wanted to see (see above).

But dammit, I'm pissed. By the time I knew what circles I wanted to see, Summer Comike was over, and Doujin Man had hurt himself in the line of duty. Where am I to get the doujin I want now?

Why don't I just grab some random Comic Party doujin off of ebay, you ask? Well, note the "respectful to the characters" clause I put above. Ken and I have talked about this a lot. A lot of doujin out there is made simply because a show or a game is popular, and therefore if it has some of the characters on the cover, it will sell. I remember Watsuki at Anime Expo saying that he likes doujin--but he has his own vision of the world, and it's not very fun for him when his characters are rewritten and twisted around so that they'll have sex with each other (or anything, in some cases).

Sigh. Maybe I'm just a prude, not wanting to see my favorite characters have sex with painting implements for no apparent reason. :P

On second thought, nah. :P

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas"
Tuesday - August 20, 2002
[Dom] - 23:30:00
One of my friends, after his first taste of Pepsi Blue: "I can't quite describe what it tastes like, but I get a vague feeling of Christmas in my mouth."

That was Sunday, and honestly, I hate Christmas right now. See, at the office, everyone's working themselves sick beating on the November issue, and soon after that is the hell known as Christmas Deadlines.

It's funny. I'm writing too much to want to write, and am playing too many games to want to play games. So I'm basically vegetating when I get home--which I'm used to, given that this is my third Christmas season with the company. But it's still draining as hell. I'm starting to sit around staring at the wall simply so I can turn my mind off...

On the plus side, I'm catching up on a lot of the anime I never finished or got around to seeing, like Blue Seed. Maybe I'll finally watch all these baseball movies I have sitting around, too, to distract me from the rampant cynicism and bitterness surrounding an impending baseball strike.

But back to video games, since I'm spending so much time with them these days. I'm sure many of you have heard of BMX XXX, the game that Dave Mirra decided he didn't want his name on. I only heard about it recently, because Acclaim was demo-ing it at work. And I have to say, I wish I'd been in the room for that one, because I'm told the PR guys were completely confuzzled by the fact that a woman was in the room too.

Meanwhile, Super Monkey Ball 2 will soon own my soul, since it's a complete and beautiful improvement over the original Super Monkey Ball. Simultaneous, Ben-Hur style Monkey Target? Yes, please! Psychedelic Monkey Bowling? Monkey Shoot? THE BEAUTY THAT IS MONKEY TENNIS?! Dammit, why isn't it the 26th yet?

Mario Sunshine is... well, it's Mario. Which means I probably won't play it even though it's an awesome game--I just don't really play platformers anymore. Don't ask me why, perhaps I'm too used to the glory that is Gunstar Heroes to accept anything less than explosion-a-second gameplay in platformers or side-scrollers. Note that Maximo is an exception, since it's... well, it's Maximo.

I am mightily pissed off that there's an entirely superior version of Soccer Slam coming out for the Xbox. Don't get me wrong, it's still one of my favorite sports games, but... dammit! There's so much more in the Xbox version! It's enough to make a man grumble as he reaches for his wallet.

The other game I want to try out is Medieval: Total War. After the micromanagement headaches and stresses of Warcraft III, I figure I could use some staring as I watch 20,000 things beat on each other without having to worry about having to control them 5 at a time. Maybe I should go back to AoE2... In fact, I think I'll go and mass dozens of hussars right now, just to see 'em run around. G'night.

Random sidenote: I think USAnime and I are going to start working on a "Doujin Man in the Valley of Otaku" custom mission for Warcraft III, since he managed to injure himself in the line of duty at Comike. All in a day's work for... Doujin Maaaaan! (Thanks, Doujin Man! We needed you)

"This is Porno Graffiti music hour!"
Friday - August 23, 2002
[Dom] - 01:18:00
I would like to announce that playing games under a deadline sucks. Here I am sitting and staring at an empty Microsoft Word document when this goddamn guide is due for copy edit some time in the early afternoon. Ah, well, time to pull out my long-unused ability to spew words as if I were a river.

Until then, though, I'm sitting here, too stubborn to fall asleep and too stressed to keep writing for work.

Bloogh. That about says it best.

For those of you heading to AnimeIowa later today, Hot Soup would like you to visit the Amuse Me table/panel. Fred was supposed to rant about it earlier, but, well, yeah.

Meanwhile, Comic Party's viselike grip on my soul has tightened, and you can see entire IRC arguments where Ken and I do nothing but snipe back and forth like Eimi and Yuu. It helps that he's from Osaka. Fumyuuuuun... that panda should give up on US citizenship and go back to Kansai! この温泉子パンダ！

I have been invited to Nekocon as a guest. Fred is definitely not going. I am afraid that I might be able to fit it into my schedule. Being at a con without Fred scares me, for some reason. Probably because I don't think I'm amusing enough on my own without a straight man... blah.

I know I'm going insane. I'm listening to Porno Graffiti and the Electric Light Orchestra in equal amounts. This doesn't bode well for the future of my insanity. Especially when the "band" I'm in (it's really just a joke that got out of hand... and getting more out of hand when we actually have a show scheduled... please don't ask) is practicing Spinal Tap. Sigh.

Oh, and speaking of the future of my insanity, there's going to be an SGD on Monday. Prepare yourselves.

"Strikeouts are fascist."
Tuesday - August 27, 2002
[Dom] - 22:30:00
Here we are just a few days from baseball's strike date. I can't support baseball players striking, and I won't dig into it here lest I unleash a font of incoherent venom that, while enjoyable, wouldn't really help my mood much. But I'll say that I didn't like it 8 years ago, I don't like it now, and dammit, I really hate the major leagues right now, even as I cheer on the A's and Giants.

So, what am I doing about it? Watching all the feel-good baseball movies I can, to try and build some goodwill toward the sport itself rather than the players. Two days ago, I watched Bull Durham. Yesterday and today, I watched the three volumes of Princess Nine I had lying around the apartment but hadn't gotten around to yet. Tomorrow, I have The Natural on tap, and I plan to fire up The Bad News Bears any day now.

Geez. Sometimes I wonder why I bother with baseball. Then I listen to a convenient little .wav I have lying around for situations like these:

The one constant through all the years, Ray, is baseball. America's rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good... and that could be again. Oh, people will come, Ray, people will most definitely come.

That always makes me feel better. Next stop after all those DVDs, I'm gonna dig into Adachi's famous manga, Touch. But it's friggin' 26 volumes, so I'm going to go knocking on a friend's door to borrow that and H2. Then I figure I might have enough goodwill toward baseball that I won't burn down a stadium...

Then again, maybe not. Ah, well. At least football season's about to start.

"random thoughts"
Wednesday - August 28, 2002
[Ukyo] - 02:35:23
Well, We have Makoto (The new MT Server) up and going finally. As most of you have noticed, the forums _work_ now. As Fred said, the box is a Dual AMD MP 1600, with 2Gigs of DDR 2100 Registered ram. So if you were once afraid to use the forums due to the -make you cry- slowness, fear not. Cortana, and Masa from Japan-A-Radio put a lot of time and effort into helping to make sure everything on the box was top notch.

Otakon was a fun experience this year. I wanted to say thanks to John Heaton and the rest of the con staff for putting up with us. I will be attending next year without doubt. I have a few MT related pictures here from the con that I will be posting shortly. If you have MT related pictures from otakon, panels, artist ally, or just us making idiots of ourselves please send them to MTCon@Megatokyo.Com.

Speaking of cons, I was planning to attend AnimeFEST, but now I have enrolled in college at Texas State Technical College in Waco, TX. Unfortunately for me, I have to move that weekend now. Speaking of College, if you attend this one in particular, drop me a line at Ukyo@Megatokyo.Com.

If your interested, JTEC is taking applications for the Winter Tokyo Comiket 2002 Tour at this site. They arrange travel, 4 night hotel stay, ect. If you want to go to Japan, this is a good chance. The tour website is in English, the con website has not finished English area yet. I am planning to try to get there this year. Hope to see you there!

People are emailing me asking for the link to pre-order Megatokyo - Volumn 1. You can do so by clicking here. Fred's been working like crazy trying to make sure its perfect.

Piro, I stole your rant space. I warned you to post something. :P

"[Piro] I hate you."

"image excavation"
Tuesday - September 3, 2002
[Piro] - 00:50:02
(quick note: the interview over at the pulse is now up. Thanks Jen.)

The other day i finished writing up some answers for an interview for The Pulse, and one of the questions had to do with what artwork I am currently 'digging'. :) Ah, what a great term. It's actually very descriptive of what I am currently doing with a much of the artwork i've been collecting recently.

I've been using the time between the end of Chapter 2 and the start of chapter 3 for several things. First off, I've been working on scripts, outlines and organizational stuff for chapter 3. The hardest part about doing MT is the scripting - writing is hard work - but this work will effect what I do over the next few months, so it is worth the effort to try to get things in order before i start. I know where Megatokyo is going and I allow the story to take its natural paths, but sometimes I feel like i just didn't spend enough time hammering out the details, and a lot of Megatokyo is a little sloppy. Chalk it down to growing pains, hopefully things will get better.

The other thing i've been doing is trying desperately to figure out just what my color rendering style is going to be. Right now, i don't feel like i have a style. I've colored a lot of images, some more successfully than others, but none of them really seem to be 'rendered' - most are just 'my pencil sketches in color'. Why is this a problem suddenly? Remember that book that's coming out in December? I have to come up with a cover for it (the one you see on the Ironcat site is just filler - the real cover for Volume 1 is still in my head) The cover art for the Megatokyo book has to be as well done as i can possibly do it, and i have to say, I'm a little nervous about it.

Part of doing this involves trying to figure out why i like some of the pieces i like. Delving into the coloring of a piece means that you have to look past the drawing itself, and see if there is something about the coloring method that makes the image better than if it was just a sketch. A lot of coloring efforts are pretty non-eventful - merely fleshing out a drawing in the established colors (anime cell coloring tends to be like this - kind of a 'paint by numbers' approach). While this can make for great peices of artwork, it isnt the effect i am after.

Most of the work that falls into this category tends to be CG events in Ren'ai games ('ren'ai games' = dating sims / visual novels) where these images are pretty much the 'rewards' or 'special scenes' you get by getting to particular points in the game. Since players are supposed to have worked hard to get to these points, it's pretty important that these peices be more than just simple cell colorings, and in good games they are.

The game i am anticipating the most right now (big suprise) is a game called 'Clannad' from Key. Key is, of course, the company behind the Kanon and Air games that i'm sure all of you are sick of hearing about by now. Yes, i know, 'Clannad' is the name of a music group, but the game has nothing to do with that. Now that we are getting closer to the release date for the game, a lot of CG art is starting to pop up in various gaming magazines (the image in my rant header comes from one such image - that's Furukawa Sanae, Nagisa's mom. Ok, so i like girls that are more in my age bracket, so sue me :P) Cuteness of the character design aside, there's a level of detail and 'rendering' of the CG images for Clannad that impresses me to a great extent.

Looking at an existing piece of artwork for clues on how to attain somewhat of the same effect can be both frustrating and depressing. Just seeing the end result doesn't show you any technique, and you can only make up your own ways to get there. There is also the added difficulty of the fact that my technique is so... sketchy. I've struggled with ways of solidifying the lines and boundaries of things, but so often i feel like the drawing looses something when i refine it...

So, my efforts to develop some sort of coloring style that does what i want it to do is still in the research stages. Frustrating? Yes, but if i can figure this out, it will be worth it.

Of course, there are fantastic CG pieces in games by other companies. Games by Leaf, Studio E-go, F&C, Alice Soft, Neko Neko Soft, etc - there are more than i can list (note, all of these sites contain adult content, so don't visit if you are under 18 - i'll have Dom and Ed hunt you down and wash your eyes out with soap if you do).

Oh, Jennifer tells me that part one of the interview will go live Tuesday, so check it out. I was my usual verbose self, unfortunately. Poor Jen - thanks for your patience with my inability to shut the hell up. :)

A few things coming in the next few days include the launch of the new Megatokyo store - which if everything goes well will go live on Wednesday, so save your pennies, these new shirts are pretty cool (I honestly think they are - I'm very happy with the t-shirt designs and how they came out)

I am still trying to pull together a decent con report for Otakon, including such things as lining up pictures and whatnot... promise that will be worth it.

Speaking of cons, i've had some disturbing reports from our felid operatives in New York that there was a sighting of a Piro cosplayer at AXNY... These photos here and here have surfaced over at Fansview.com.

Ok, i'm officially scared. Some young lady is cosplaying as me cosplaying as my character who is cosplaying as ruri who is cosplaying as... some kinda cat. I'm sorry, even just the gender issues here are more than i want to think about...

My god, what would all my family back in New York think... thank god they don't know anything about all this stuff...

(all kidding aside, a big thank you to the cosplayer pictured there - i'm honored that you would spend the time to go to the effort of making and wearing that outfit, never mind the, er, embarrassment. Trust me, i know. :)

"camera angles"
Wednesday - September 4, 2002
[Seraphim] - 02:10:01
(quick note: part two of my interview with the pulse. is up. The Megatokyo store over at Think Geek should be opening today, so be sure to check back to see when. - piro)

The inspiration for this "Seraphim Check" was a news show about how fashion photographs of supermodels are digitally altered to create the perfect image. I was astounded. First the clothes are pinned, glued, and stapled so they actually fit over the girdles and padded bras used to perfect the model's figure. Then the images are sent to a special facility where inches are taken off of thighs and arms (to correct 'bad' camera angles, don't we all suffer from that?) and any wrinkles, crease lines or pregnancy stretch marks are erased. Super models are gorgeous people, and even they are not gorgeous enough 'au natural'. Does that mess with their minds? So in the end, it isn't enough that real women should look like super models - we're supposed to look like digitally enhanced super models. No wonder so many teenagers have poor self image perceptions and eating disorders.

There was a great deal of controversy regarding the "Angelic Body Attack". Yes, it was my idea. But don't worry, I use a body double. What was underneath the coat? The mass marketing machine that forces the perfect female image on society and makes half of it bow down before it, and the other half try to emulate it, was under the trench coat. The marketing machine that feeds the multi-billion dollar cosmetics, diet supplement, and cosmetic surgery industries. Trust me, even Asmodeus, the evil demon, didn't stand a chance against that. What chance then does the average person have against the media? The greatest irony is that it is all smoke and mirrors. The only people who fit the stereotypical image are 12 and the rest are digitally altered and erased. Whenever I think about it I can't help remembering Mike Teevee from "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" and all his atoms being blown apart and then reassembled elsewhere. I could afford to lose a few atoms in that kind of process.

As for stereotypes, I am really getting tired of the 'librarian' image that is flaunted all over. From the reference in Frasier that the only women one meets through dating agencies are "librarians who want help bathing their mother" to the King of Queens show about Carrie wearing a her hair in a bun and the only way to make her stop was to show a picture of the school librarian wearing a bun pulled so tight it had the added benefit of acting like a facelift. King of Queens ragged on librarians in another episode where Doug and Carrie donate money to the library and hilarity ensues when the old lady librarian can't seem to count. I also expected George Lucas to be more open minded. Even a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the librarian is a sourpuss old lady in a bun. Of course in LOTR the librarian was a male and he let Gandalf drink in the reading room. What was that? It was a freaking archives and he's bringing in his Starbucks. Obviously, only female librarians 'shhhush' and don't let food or drink in. Let me tell you, if Legolas came in wanting an answer I'd be letting my hair down out of that bun. That elfin look is hot. Mmmmmm. But I digress.

Piro brought back some really nice fan art of Seraphim from Otakon. Vaz did an excellent watercolor. Piro never puts Seraphim in such stylish clothes. And the plushie Seraphim doll by Ramothre-chan was so very clever. The turtleneck tank top was made out of a cut off nylon knee sock that really hugs the curves. Kawaii! I also saw in the photos from the con that the doll was greatly abused throughout and she came to me with only one boot. I also have to say many of the Seraphim cosplayers look more like Seraphim than I do. Although, one observant fan did recognize us driving behind her one evening this past summer in Ann Arbor. I ran across her blog while searching the internet. A perfect stranger recognizes me in a car through her rearview mirror while Mr. Poor who goes to my college and has come into my office sends me an email wondering if I am truly at the 'U' or if it is fiction. I was probably the one that spoke with him! We never run into anyone wearing MT swag but my former coworker Merrie would come in and tell me about her and Dan, her fiance, meeting someone in an MT shirt. Even Tanya at work has a friend who is a reader. If it wasn't for being in grad school, the comic, the book... maybe we would get out more.

Alas, I have some images to digitally alter...

seraphim

"A black (backpack) day"
Friday - September 6, 2002
[Dom] - 00:01:00
My backpack's dying.

It's been dying for years, really, but it became official this year when the zippers starting popping and refusing to close. I remember that back in grade school, I used to go through a backpack a year--which was pretty common, from what I remember of my classmates. Backpacks made for kids are pretty much made to last a school year before being discarded.

But I think around 7th or 8th grade, I got my backpack. It was big, it was black, it was comfortable, it had just the right number of pockets. And I've had it ever since then. It's funny. That backpack's been with me longer than almost anyone I know. I was talking to my best friend the other night, and he mentioned that he can't remember a day he didn't see me wearing that backpack around.

Heck, no con has gone by without me wearing that sucker for at least half the time. I guess it was sort of like a security blanket full of books, or sometimes a spare pair of underwear--because you know, you'll always need a clean pair of underwear in case you get hit by a car. Or something like that, I forget.

But yeah, it started dying years ago. After years of being hung by a strap while loading and unloading books, after lots of time just hanging from my back, the threads holding the straps started to pop. Not that this mattered to me--I just lightened the load on my backpack, and the straps are still fine, if a little bit looser than before. The waterproofing started to go, but I didn't mind--it doesn't rain too hard around here anyway, and when it does I just wore it under my coat.

But then threads started showing up in the zippers last spring, and I knew my backpack was not long for this world. It's still hanging in there, even though the zipper doggedly hangs open like a dog's mouth on a hot day... but I know that soon it'll be time to put it away and find a new backpack. But it's weird going and buying a backpack when I've had the same one for half my life.

Oh well... hopefully, Eddie Bauer still makes the same model, or something like it. It'd suck if they didn't.

Addendum: A few of you have asked me why I simply don't get it fixed--it's partially because of stubbornness, and even more so because of stubornness now that half of you have e-mailed in calling me a lazy bastard stuck in the American culture of disposable consumerism. I also like it the way it is, even as it becomes unwearable. "Warts and all", you know. If I get it fixed it simply won't be the same backpack anymore. But mostly, I think it's be a good time to let the backpack go. The thing's served me well for a long time, and I figure it's time.

"Don't let these shakes go on"
Sunday - September 8, 2002
[Dom] - 23:30:00
Before I get into my rant, I would like to rejoice in the beginning of football season--or more specifically, Fantasy Football season. It marks another great year of trash talk, janky trade proposals, and me yelling "Yeah, that's right, I beat you and you had MARSHALL FAULK. How do you feel NOW?" Okay, done for now.

Okay, let's take a quick look at what books (comic or otherwise) Dom has read and re-read over the past week.

Touch, Adachi Mitsuru. Widebans 1-11
The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller.
Kingdom Come, Alex Ross
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner.
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll.

Given the list above, I think you can understand why I'm trying very, very hard not to write anything right now. It'll end up monosyllabic, inane, and nearly incomprehensible.

Okay, okay, so that's how my rants usually are, I admit. But it's worse than usual, okay?

But man. My dreams are so messed up right now. They start with me playing for the Hanshin Tigers, and move to breaking criminal noses with impunity while spouting run-on sentence upon run-on sentence about my mother, singing about some horrible pun or other. I can actually remember them, that's how weird they are. But oh well. I'll live, as far as I know.

But from this eclectic reading list, I've come to a couple conclusions. First of all, Frank Miller is the only person who should ever be allowed to write Batman. Ever. It's like Tim Burton directing it--nothing else comes close. Hell, I'll go running to see the Batman Broadway musical when it comes out, simply because Burton does it. And when Batman: Year One is finally made into a movie? First in line, baby.

Second, I do love baseball. I just don't like the players. I won't get into the details of it, but I poked around the press on August 30th, and noted that only Barry Zito, the A's player representative, even mentioned what the strike would have done to people who depend on baseball for their livings, such as the stadium workers who e-mailed me after my baseball rant.

And just to be silly, when the Mariners come to town this weekend and Ichiro's at the bat, I want two friends with me who're willing to paint themselves and go shirtless so we can write めざせ on our chests and 甲子園 on the back. Why? Why not?

And I've also decided that there's no such thing as reading too much Faulkner.

But I won't get into that in this rant--I'm tired, and there's Warcraft to be played.

"quiet perceptions"
Wednesday - September 11, 2002
[Piro] - 08:30:00
As you know, i have a tendency to ramble on and on about things. I think making fun of the length of my rants is a stock joke here at Megatokyo now.

I used to get a lot of emails pointing out a rather profound error in the tribute comic that we put up last year, it listed the date "September 10, 2001" rather than "September 11, 2001". I don't know how i made this mistake, or why it has taken me a year to fix it.

Today i fixed that error. I guess i felt it was fitting to at least correct that today. I think it was an example of just how mixed up things were last year, and how much it effected just about every thought process.

I was originally going to do something very profound today - I had some basic ideas of what i wanted to say, and how i wanted to put it across. But in the end, I ended up with a Watterson moment - of course, he was far better than I am at being lyrical... but even tho the words my drawings express are far fewer than his, its still more than i could type in effectively.

And so i'll just leave you with that for today. I'm going to work shortly, i have a deadline later this week, and Chapter 3 will continue on Friday.

(my appologies about the ads. i completely forgot about them, and i appologise to everyone who was offended by them being in my column today. - piro)

"scripting woes"
Monday - September 16, 2002
[Piro] - 00:31:01
Ugh.

Ok, pure and simple, no whining, no apologizing, and as such i don't wanna hear any bitching :P Comic schedule this week is sorts nudged forward a day - still gonna have 3 comics, but they are going to fall on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Two reasons for this - I spent a lot of time at the office this weekend working to help hit Monday's deadline, and ... i flat out was not happy with today's script.

Scripting is probably one of the most intangible part of writing a web comic. On the surface, it looks like its the easiest part - a typical script looks something like this:

----[ROW - 2]----
....[frame 1]
(Yuki has springs up 
behind him, piro freaks out.)

Yuki:  ohayo, piro-sensei!!
Piro:  Waaagh!!

Pretty simple, right? Not really. I can usually figure out how long it takes to draw 8 drawings, how long it takes to clean them up, how long it takes to finish the comic in illustrator, etc. When I have to estimate how long it takes to write a script? I have no idea.

A script for a comic starts from two sources - first, you have to have some kind of vision in your mind what the comic is going to be, what is going to happen, how it will look, what you want to say. Secondly, you have to think about both the past and the present - how does the comic fit in the flow from last weeks comics to this weeks - things i do now, will effect what i can or cannot do in the future.

That being said, i've had times where i've spent an entire day on a single script. I've put other scripts together in the car waiting to pick up seraphim from work and they come out great. A lot of times, the script isn't finished... i sit here at 3am pondering what the final lines need to be. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, its a good thing. Scripts must be flexible - they have to react to the art, the dialogue has to be flexible enough to work with the drawings that you produce. It's a weird chicken-and-egg problem. Sketches influence the script, the script prompts the sketches which in turn influence the script again. Add a layer of 3am blurriness to it and you get a typical Megatokyo comic. Hell, there have been times that i've done all the art and had no idea what the dialogue would be - felt like i was playing ad-libs. :P

Is this bad? No, its not. Comics are not about sitting down and writing a script, then just doing drawings for it. Drawings are part of the communication, part of the language itself. If the text isn't flexible, you leave out a lot of potential to tweak dialogue to match something in the drawing that may have come forward that you didn't plan.

The bad thing is that sometimes, there is nothing you can do to feel good about a script. I spent 3 hrs working on the script today, and at the end, i decided to scrap it. Starting from scratch, and a different perspective, it still is taking time to get it to work. Writers block? A little. I'm trying to do a little too much with the next few comics, which is part of the problem. By the time 9pm rolled around, and i was still working on the script... i could see the writing on the wall. So, rather than get too worked up about it, i decided to just push the schedule up a day, put up a little fredart sketch.

Anyways, at least i seem to be back into the habit of writing rants. :P I've been re-discovering a lot of old anime music i haven't listened to in ages, most of this is the fault of my new MP3 player - i picked up a I-river Slim-X (my office computer doesn't have a sound card, so i finally sad the hell with it and got myself a MP3 player :P) Works pretty nice, actually. The controls are a little cheezy feeling, but it works well, and once you figure out how to navigate, its not that bad.

I came thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis close to finally buying a Nintendo Game Cube today. Seraphim is a MAJOR Puzzle Bobble adict (they call the game 'Bust a Move" here in the states) and she felt the need to play the Nintendo 64 version (Bust-a-Move 2). So, i found myself digging in the closet and unearthing the old N64 console only to find that i had no video cable anymore. I was delighted to find out from Dom that the video connection for the Game Cube and the N64 were the same, so i figured that we'd run to the store, grab a game cube and whee! Off we go.

Wouldn't you just know it'd be my luck that the goddamn store would have a Gamecube video connector. "thats all we need, right?" "well, yeah, but..."

I guess its all for the best. I think getting that GameCube would have meant more delays in the comics - i'm bad enough as it is. (sigh)

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -

"A minute clicking of little wheels"
Tuesday - September 17, 2002
[Dom] - 01:15:00
So this week is, again, a busy week. I spent much of the non-football-watching portions of Sunday trying to browbeat a script out of Fred (futilely, but I at least made progress), and with one of the staffers in my department on a month-long vacation, I'm shouldering a little more of the burden than usual. Deadlines creep up on me again, and what do I do in this situation?

I get really contradictory. I've spent the last few days alternately desperately searching for something to do, or avoiding anything that looks the slightest bit productive. Sometimes I do both at the same time, in the great art of procrastinating through semi-useful tasks.

Ranting's one of these semi-useful tasks.

My relationship to MT and to my job is funny, though. While it's a damn lot of fun working on these things, it warps my perception of other things in the same vein. For example, video games get run through a pretty vigorous gauntlet before I decide whether or not I like them, which kind of makes me a video game snob now--though I'll still play games I deem mediocre, just to fill in time, and sometimes to be able to complain about how good they'd be if they developers had done {X}, where X is the set of actions they could take to improve the game. Similarly, reading comic books has become a game of Spot the Innovative Layout, which is why, unlike many people I've talked to, I (gasp!) like what Frank Miller did with DK2, even if the writing and art weren't as good as Dark Knight Returns. It's the same game with Identify the Metaphor, a game I got used to after over half a decade of literary training.

But enough of that! On to the games that I believe will devour my soul.

First on the list is Super Monkey Ball 2, which I'm still refusing to buy during the busy season, because I'll spend too much time unlocking Monkey Tennis and Monkey Shoot to get anything done. They've improved on Super Monkey Ball so much that I don't feel the need to pull out the original ever again--simultaneous Monkey Target, more varied arenas in Monkey Fight, the whacked-out lanes in Monkey Bowling, and, of course, the fabled Ei-Ei-Poo song. Dammit, I also need to make (or browbeat someone into making) my Misheard Lyrics "The Monkey's Down with the Sickness" music video. So many pipe dreams, so little attention span!

The next is Animal Crossing/Doubutsu no Mori, which has already devoured two of my co-workers. It sounds like The Sims, but with surrealia instead of Suburbia as its setting. Some of the stories my co-workers are telling are... just so strange. At lunch today, I was regaled with the tale of how someone received a satellite in the mail--which was immediately topped by the lunar base sitting in the living room of another co-worker's Animal Crossing house. Or about the 6 AM aerobics, the exciting prospects of getting new shovels and fruits, and special hats. I'm more intrigued than I should be, and I wish I could plant sacks of money in my background and have them turn into money trees... ach. It's like a less insulting city of Seamen, with The Sims and Harvest Moon thrown in.

Meanwhile, Tekki/Steel Battalion is coming to the office soon... many people I know are intimidated by the controller and the price point, so apparently I get to be their monkey's paw. That, or I get to taunt them--either way, I hopefully will get some face time with the mech simulator people are talking about in hushed whispers or outright disbelief...

Alright, back to being useful. Later!

"low maintenance revenge"
Friday - September 20, 2002
[Piro] - 12:50:00
Life is full of high maintenance things. You know, the kinds of things that if you don't deal with them on a regular basis they go from maintenance item to disaster in a hurry. Things like the laundry, the dishes, the litter box (we have three cats), websites, email, Seraphim's extensive jungle of plants (several years ago i killed most of her plants... it's a long story, and it involves freezing weather, a moving truck, and breaking down somewhere in Kentucky.)... well, you get the idea. Maintenance is just part of that thing we call life.

Sometimes we don't really sit and think about the things in our lives that don't require a lot of maintenance. Like the TV. It just works. The microwave, that's another really swell no-maintenance item (well, for most of us). The ceiling paint in your apartment. I mean, it's great, it works, and you don't have to think about it (once again, for most of us, that's the case). The maintenance free items in our lives are the things that rely on day after day and don't even think about. You just know they will be there.

Until, of course, a generally low maintenance items suddenly requires attention.

Some people are very anal about their cars. I know people who wax and wash their cars just about every weekend. I know people who spray expensive cleaning crap on tires to make them all shiny, people who take tooth brushes to the treads. People who change their own oil. People who love, cherish, maintain and baby their cars.

Freaks.

I'm the kind of person that only worries about making sure his car has enough gas in it to get from point A to point B. I try to remember things like getting an oil change every once and a while (every six months or so, if the poor car is lucky). When i purchased the car, i picked the color based on how well it hid dirt (had a black car once - no, it was 'dirty grey' :P)). Two days after i picked it up, i backed into a pole and did about $1000 worth of damage to the car. That was 3 years ago, and i still need to get it fixed. I'm thinking about maybe doing that this year. Maybe.

I'm not so bad that i TOTALLY ignore the car, it's just... well, its not on my list of things to do every week. The nice thing about new cars is that when you turn them on, they pretty much always go, and in fact... they are pretty unremarkable. Just one of those everyday miracles like how Starbucks never seems to run out of coffee beans. Chai, yes, Coffee Beans, never.

Imagine my surprise the other day when i got into my car, started the engine, and was greeted by what could only be called 'an alarming shuddering rattle' coming from the engine compartment. I was quite surprised - the car isn't supposed to sound like that. Undaunted, and not really knowing what else to do, i backed up, and went and did my errand, wondering all the time if my engine was going to blow up. The look on Seraphim's face when i picked her up was such that i realized that it wasn't just me - there was definitely something not quite right about the sounds emanating from under the hood.

After we got home, I did something that reminded Seraphim fondly of one of her favorite 'Dilbert' strips. It's the one where Dilbert checks under the hood of this lady's car and pretends to know whats wrong with it. "All men are frauds." i think the line was. Undaunted, i opened the hood, and looked the engine over as it ran, rattling and grinding away. Of course, i was afraid to touch anything (i've learned that it's ok to touch the little yellow dipstick to check oil, and sometimes that 'windshield washer fluid' thing, but thats the only things under there i feel safe touching). "I can't see anything," i said. Well, duh, like i'd know what was wrong if i saw it. This was really alarming. Something was wrong, and... I couldn't ignore it. I... I had no choice...

I called up the service department and set up to bring my car in the next day.

I had to find a dealership, because the dealership i bought the car from went out of business. When i called, i did feel a little better, because the guy on the other end seemed to know exactly what was wrong - some sort of heat shield had broke its spot welds and was rattling loose. While it was in, i figured i'd get an oil change, get that 30,000 mile check up i should have got 15,000 miles ago, stuff like that. Also, to check things out, let me know if there was anything else wrong, and to check and see what that clunking sound coming from under the car was.

Well, it was a mixed bag of things really. Turns out that the heat shield repair was covered by warranty, and they had to replace the sway bars (also thankfully under warranty). The 30,000 mile tune up stuff wasn't too expensive, and i figured the poor car needed it. I forgot about one thing tho...

I'm hell on brakes. This didn't surprise me, after i was told about it. I've been bad on brakes since i was a teenager.

It seems that by putting things off as much as i have that my bill for this service call is not a small one. I suppose its better to find out about bad breaks this way rather than, say, the hard way. ^^;; But my point is... Daa~aamn. Sometimes those low-maintenance things in your life can sure sneak up and twhock you in the ass if you aren't watching. Damn care is probably laughing its ass off at me. That'll teach me to not pay attention to it.

I'm terrified to bring Seraphim's car in. Maybe we can just park it somewhere and hope it doesn't hurt anyone.

...

P.S: by calling are you car fanatics out there 'freaks' i meant it as good natured ribbing, so please take it as such. My poor car wishes that it was you and not me who owned it. :P

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -

"Toreador, en garde!"
Tuesday - September 24, 2002
[Dom] - 23:45:00
I really should stop writing these rants while I'm exhausted. I really should. I've been writing and playing Animal Crossing today, so reality and unreality and digital reality are meshing in my head to the point where I can barely tell if I'm writing this to an MT audience or if I'm writing to the hippopotamus down the street. I think the main thing keeping me on this side of reality is that Escamillo's aria is playing, rather than K.K. Condor.

Animal Crossing's a fascinating game, it really is. A lot of people at work (and three people in this apartment) are absolutely fascinated by it. It's just so deeply quirky and has such attention to little things/injokes. In my character's living room, I have a few potted plants, a diary, some various pieces of furniture, the Tokyo Tower, and the moon. Yes, that moon. My editor has the Master Sword sitting in his, while another co-worker of mine is playing around with his wife's pink furniture while collecting his own. Oh, and I think there's a space station spinning in another co-worker's basement.

We keep talking about what clothes we have. We dangled flame shirts in front of our flame design-obsessed co-worker, and when he caved and got the game... he started out with a flame shirt. Destiny. We talk about how to grow shovel trees and money trees, and what furniture you can get from shaking trees, and fossils you can find, and the instructions the wishing well gives us. And we try to balance the feng shui of our living rooms.

That's not the least of it. Friday was the Undoukai/sports fair, and every cuople of hours we'd get out of our cubes and go "It's the tug-o-war!", then sit entranced by our town's inhabitants testing their strength, all the while reddening and letting out little dust(?) clouds. Morning aerobics with the police officer was a treat, too.

Oh. And if anyone has any fruit to trade, we have apples. My roommate's looking for fruit furniture (he has the orange chair, two melon chairs, and the pineapple bed--we need the lemon table), while I'm trying to get bonsai trees, samurai armor, and a sword. If anyone wants to trade/donate, drop us a line.

In other, non-Animal Crossing news, I think I'm finally back in my writing groove. I'm carrying a notebook around with me again, which is always a good sign. But a better sign is that around 5:30 this afternoon, when I was heading home, I decided to sit under a tree and do some writing. It felt good to write without a deadline--it's been a while, and hopefully this will unblock my clogged thought processes some.

It's interesting, though, writing without a computer. I went away from writing on pieces of paper a couple years ago, preferring to let everything out over a keyboard. It is, after all, faster, easier to read after I'm done-especially if you've seen my handwriting at 1 AM-and less messy to edit.

But recently I've forcibly tried to drift away from my computer, because it's simply so distracting--whenever I hit a block these days, I goof off instead of bulling through it. It keeps some of the frustration off, but kills time and productivity, especially when I'm staring at ESPN or slapping around forumers. I need to shape up if I want to contribute as much as I plan... and hopefully, you'll be seeing the results after a chapter or two. Who knows? We'll see...

"dpd rejects..."
Friday - September 27, 2002
[Piro] - 01:25:00
Not too much to say right now... i had a terrible time drawing tonight. I not only had to give up on doing a comic, but i couldn't even pull of what i consider a satisfactory DPD day. Dom should have something up before the morning hour.

Even so, there was one drawing that i did that wasnt TOO bad. I put it up over at fredart, if you want to take a look.

I might write some more rantish stuff later, but for now, i am just going to go to bed. Sometimes, you just can't do it, and i've beat myself up enough about it tonight. My elusive goal of a full 3 comics per week may never actually come to pass at this rate, but i'll keep trying. maybe next week.

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -

"I have failed."
Friday - September 27, 2002
[Dom] - 02:00:00
Argh! My worst effort yet. It is my turn to commit seppuku...

Wait, go to the happy place, go to the happy place... Soul Calibur 2, Steel Battalion, Animal Crossing...

Happy place found. But still not quite happy.

"forums are closed (were)"
Tuesday - October 1, 2002
[Piro] - 10:25:02
The forums are open again. I believe we have turned off the functions that permitted this exploit. Do not, i repeat, do NOT attempt to see if the exploit still works. If i see people experimenting with breaking my boards, the forums will go down and they will stay down until i get a new version of UBB.

Clear? good. now i have to go finish the comic.

- piro

... (original post)...

The forums are closed until further notice.

Unfortunately, someone decided to experiment with an exploit that others then tried to emulate. While not harmful to the point of being destructive, i feel that this is a very severe violation of the trust i place in people to not fuck with things on the website.

Therefore, until such a time that we can determine how to prevent this from happening again, the forums will be offline.

Yes, one or two people CAN ruin things for everyone. It's not fair, i understand that, but when i ask people to behave within certain limits, there are reasons.

Now i'll go see if i can still manage to finish tomorrows comic. Tomorrow evening when i get home from work, i will see what i can do to rectify this situation.

And to think i shelled out $3,000 for a new server JUST so the forums could run smoothly. Now that server is sitting there doing nothing. Makes me feel really good, you know?

piro

"shortcut to bananas"
Friday - October 4, 2002
[Piro] - 04:01:00
i'm slowly going crazy.

well, my sanity was a relativity issue to start with, but for the past week, i think what little vestiges of that abstract quality known as 'the sane Fred' have pretty much been run into the proverbial ground by crayon colored knobby tires. Today's comic is entirely Seraphim's fault.

Oddly enough, even though i do happen to own more game consoles than most people, most of them are older systems and many of those are japanese-only systems (i only have one modded box, and that's my Sega Saturn). This is great for some of the funkier games i like to collect, but when it comes to simple, modern day, entertain-friends-and-the-kids gameplay, i got just about nothin. When sarah's neice and nephew were over last weekend for a few days, his little eyes glowed as he looked over the jumbled mess of cables and game consoles under the tv in the 'office'. After beating up my poor dreamcast for a while (which i have very few english language games for) and telling him that my playstation is broke (once again, few english games) i finally had no choice but to drag out the old Nintendo 64.

There's a reason the N64 was stuffed deep in the closet. There are two evil carts that i made the mistake of not melting down years ago when they had been cast into the darkness that is my closet - Bust a Move 2 and Diddy Kong Racing.

Bust a Move 2, which is really just one of the iterations of Puzzle Bobble, is actually a great game, and i admit a certain level of addiction to it. I actually like the N64 version better than the Dreamcast version. Seraphim can kick my ass in Puzzle Bobble. Flat out, totally, complexly owns my pants in it. Bust a Move 2 is one of the lesser evils - only part of a much bigger evil that i will not cover today.

Diddy Kong Racing is one of those smaller little evils that is like a life-sucking destructive force all in itself. The kids were nothing - Diddy is here. He had taken over. The problem with that damn game is that there is too much to do, and its frustrating as hell sometimes when you get *this* close to winning and (whump!) you're in 8th place.

Seraphim has pretty much been playing it non-stop since the kids left. There is nothing but Diddy Kong Racing music in my head. It has chewed out my brains, and sent my sanity running for places more civilized.

The worst part is when she gets frustrated and hands me the controller and says 'here, win this one for me' Gyah. In desperation sometimes I'll take the pad and work for several hours, playing again and again till i win thru the level she has been fighting with. It's always a glorious moment, when that LSD inspired blue elephant with the bad Indian accent floats down to give you one of those egg-like golden balloons that i'm sure are filled with nothing but happy gas. But it is short lived. I play in hopes that Seraphim will be satisfied that the evil level has been defeated, and that maybe she would be finished for the evening... but lo, such is not the case. It's on to the next challenge.

Sometime in the distantly near future, she'll once again beat the entire game. But i know it wont stop there. The good thing about new games and new systems is that there is a relatively low number of 'current' games people are playing. Once these are thoroughly beat down, there are usually newer games coming out. The problem with old-schooling games is that it is a completely bottomless pit. What would happen if you went back and started digging for older games that you fondly remember playing years ago? there is simply no end to them, there is no bottom.

The last new console i purchased was a Dreamcast, and that was a while ago. Why? because i've been avoiding that endless sucking noise known as 'the next great game' - but now i'm almost desperate to go and buy that damn GameCube or PS2 just so i could get some *variety* in the games that burn my brain down. But every time i look, i get scared away by how expensive it all still is. I've been so busy that I've been pretty much avoiding gaming anyway.

I'm scared now, though. I'm seeing signs that i'm on the verge of being sucked into the bottomless pit of Old Schooling. Last week i was looking around for that opening song for "The Secret of Mana.", i borrowed a friend's US playstation so i could play Final Fantasy VII, i found my old disks for Myst and Doom II, Tokimeki Memorial is beckoning me...

I feel like typing a desperate plea for help, but my fingers are kinda stiff (damn N64 controlers)... Besides, i dont think i can be saved. I need to start a "Buy Seraphim a New Game System and Save Piro's Sanity" fund while there is still time... but it might already be too late.

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -

"Happy trails"
Friday - October 4, 2002
[Dom] - 19:00:00
My happy place just shrunk a little bit. Well. By two books, more specifically.

Transmetropolitan ended, at a ripe 5 years old, and I liked how it ended--when the writer wanted it to. That's an infrequent thing in American comics.

Meanwhile, and this is the more crushing blow to me, I'm out of GTO to watch. I finished the drama, finished the manga, and the anime doesn't interest me as much as it used to, due to the fact that they key animator needs to be shot repeatedly in the face. If you think I'm smoking crack, just turn everything off and pay attention to the animation--it's so inconsistent I can barely tell what it's going to look like from one second to another.

But the end of one hobby is the beginning of another, after all--and I recently bought oop-ack.com, as a homage to my first cartoonist hero, Berkeley Breathed. I figure that there, I'll be able to pursue two things that piss me off about how GTO has been treated--I'll to translate the parts of the manga that TokyoPop has left behind, as well as talk about cultural references they missed that you may not know... et cetera. Meanwhile, given the horrible, HORRIBLE digisubs of an otherwise enjoyable GTO drama out there, I'm going to be joining an effort to sub it, and sub it right. Because I was about to go kill someone after I saw a note in the sub script that went something like this: "The translator mis-translated Miyabi's name as Minami. It will be like this for the rest of the series." Note the subtext "And I didn't do a simple find and replace because I'm a lazy bastard."

If you want a job done, do it right... and if you see a job done wrong that you can do right, do it right. Or something like that.

What else will oop-ack.com be for? Who knows, maybe I can use it as my version of Fredart...

And someone at work just handed me a copy of Earth and Beyond. I wonder if I should play it...

"Need I say more?"
Monday - October 7, 2002
[Dom] - 01:00:00
dammit i don't want to be a bitch but your fuckig stick people r begin to piss me off
can u fucing try to draw, i may relly suck at drawing but u can at least try to fuck draw a person wearing clothes, com'in can'y u fucking a least draw that much, really that not that much to do.

God, I love my e-mail sometimes.

"A heads-up"
Tuesday - October 8, 2002
[Dom] - 11:00:00
I had nothing to do with this one. Honestly. This is all Fred.

More rantage later, I'm tired and busy trying to catch coelecanth in Animal Crossing.

"whoops"
Friday - October 11, 2002
[Piro] - 11:00:04
boy, do i feel dumb.

If you've been wondering why the status bar hasn't been showing what you could call 'current' information, it might have something to do with the fact that i keep updating the status file on the wrong server. ^^;;

This week we finally migrated the main www site from Entropy (our poor old abused and worn out buggy server) over to Makoto (our brand new hope-it-can-handle-it-all server). For most of you, this is pretty transparent. For me, it involves logging into different servers for stuff, and i keep forgetting to check where i'm logging into sometimes. Hence, the old server was getting the updates, but no one could see them.

BTW, the same goes for Fredart - you may notice that the most recent sketch is missing - thats because i had updated the site between the time the directory for fredart was copied over and when the site finally went live. Still need to fix that.

Next week is crunch week on the book for me. I sat down the other night and did a pretty detailed to-do list of things that need doing - and its ugly. ^^;; Part of it, of course, is that this is the first Megatokyo graphic novel i've done - there is always a learning curve, and in particular for any webcomic - all the stuff you did wrong two years ago that you really need to fix. ^^;; What makes the MT books a little more work than i think most Graphic Novels is that I was stupid enough to want this to be a little more than just a collection of stuff thats already done - for the price, i think people would be fairly satisfied with that, but not me. I really want there to be a lot of decent extra material to round out the book. This, of course, only makes *my* life difficult.

And, of course, the fact that my deadline moved up a few weeks just really makes me feel oh so happy. yay. shoot me now.

There always comes a time in any project when you just gotta shut up and finish the tasks that need doing. That's my goal over the next 6 days. If this book isnt 90% complete by Thursday next week, i think i'll get REALLY whiny and bitchy - and you know you dont want that :P

I'm thinking that i might put the story comics on hold till the following Monday, and use the three comic slots next week to give you a peak into the material that i'm putting together for the book, and talk a little about the process. I just feel that its better to concentrate on one thing at a time. Get the book done and out, then just get back to doing the comic. I've been trying to do both recently, and neither the comic or the book prep has been going smoothly.

And no, don't worry, i don't plan on subjecting you to a week of Shirt Guy Dom strips. That'd be too cruel, too cruel. Though wait a minute... that's it!! If i'm not 90% done by Thursday next week, i'll just switch to "Doodlin' Dom, All Week Long!" until i hit that 90% goal.

I KNOW you don't want that. I better get crackin. Wish me luck.

PS: i want to extend a big help to everyone who is helping me with the book process and all the work it entails. Seraphim, Dom, Merekat, Gally, Kei, Asmodeus and everyone else who i have forgot to add. Also a big thanks to Ukyo and Cortana for all the hard work on the server stuff. thanks for puttin up with me.

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -

"WHOOOOO"
Monday - October 14, 2002
[Dom] - 22:00:00
THE GIANTS HAVE WON THE PENNANT!

THE GIANTS HAVE WON THE PENNANT!

THE GIANTS HAVE WON THE PENNANT!

"bookwork"
Sunday - October 20, 2002
[Piro] - 10:50:22
Last week flew by a little too fast. On the one hand, i look at how many hours i put into image prep and see how much i got done and say "wow, not bad." Then i look at my to-do list and the things i had really wanted to do last week and say "damnit, where did the week go?"

The positive thing is that i really feel that the cover art is finally falling into place - i'll post a composite of how it turned out sometime during the week (probably over on fredart). Oh, speaking of fredart, i fixed up a few things over there, some code stuff and re-posted the latest sketch that disappeared (not that it was any loss - man, my sketches are getting crappier and crappier)

The plan is to get back into the comics this week. One of the most interesting things about going back and working on the first 133 comics or so was the fact that it was a little like going back in time. I was re-visiting things i had done almost two years ago, and had a chance to really get into the 'old comics' and get a better feel for some of the things i was doing back then. It was a little enlightening. Personally, i feel that Megatokyo was at it's best around the time of the Mosh Mosh Revolution series, and the Beergarden sequence, and as such i'd like to hit sequences of that quality more often. You have to do a lot of setup to get there sometimes, and the trick is to keep the setup as entertaining and interesting as the good stuff - i dunno, i really have no idea what i am doing, and i'm just making it up as i go along.

I've got to work on scripts now, and then get monday's comic ready. Like i said, hopefully, i wont have to take any more breaks in the comic between now and mid november (my dude date). I still have a LOT to do to get the book ready - i still have a lot of extra material to put together - so please bear with me if there are any more hiccups.

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -

"Machine Gun Talk"
Monday - October 21, 2002
[Dom] - 01:30:00
Okay, so I haven't ranted in a while. You'll have to forgive me, I've been riding a World Series roller coaster (two one-run games? My heart's gonna explode!), while balancing old deadlines, new responsibilities, upcoming events and, of course, The Book.

Alright, first The Book. Looking back at the early MTs, I've realized just how much things have changed since the first days of this sucker. God, has it been two-plus years already? I still remember where the sun was when I was looking at the first MT scripts--and trust me, with all the time I've since spent in cubicles, around demos, and under tables, that's an achievement.

But as Fred also discovered, it's a great way to touch base, no matter how much we think the early days sucked. I go back and think "Hey, we need to tighten that up soon"... so I guess this is a good thing. But it won't really be a Good Thing until we're done, and even then we'll probably complain about it. But it'll be done and we'll be ready to go on. Greeeeat... oh, and to answer your questions, yes, there will be SGD in the book. I won't say what ones, though I will say that most likely, Abstract Art Day won't make the cut. The original version was self-censored two years ago, and it'll be censored now.

Oh, right, and games. I work with those, so I might as well talk about them. But I warn you now, just as I won't touch BMX XXX with a ten-foot pole, I won't touch the subject either. I don't like dealing with Acclaim much, with their growing history of tasteless grabs at media attention, so I'll just leave it there. If you think it's funny, you think it's funny, and if you think it's crass, you think it's crass. I think it... is.

Super Monkey Ball 2 and Animal Crossing are ruling my world right now. My GameBoy Advance, once a $99 machine that existed solely to run Castlevania, has become a $60 or so controller for Animal Crossing that lets me go to Hokkaido. Meanwhile, I've lent Super Monkey Ball 2 to a friend with much greater patience for the single player game than I, so she can give it back with the tasty treats that are Monkey Tennis, Monkey Dogfight, Monkey Shoot and Monkey Baseball. Anything my 4-year-old niece can play her aunts and uncles at a nearly equal level of skill and fun deserves props... and of course, the magical spell is ei-ei-poo.

Meanwhile, in case I haven't talked about Steel Battalion before, I will again. It is awe-inspiring. There I am, sitting behind my editor in a darkened room, and I'm awestruck just by the ignition sequence. I love all the aspects of the game that I've seen so far. It looks gritty, plays at a nice, deliberate place, and there is no such thing as a debilitating leg shot. After much thought on this, shooting for the legs in a mech combat game, while effective and all, is no fun for the man you just shot down. At least you can appreciate a good head shot--especially if it's using the pistol in Halo. All you can appreciate with a leg shot is your new view of the sky or the turf. But if there's anything lacking, it's more games using the controller. While I enjoy my Twin Sticks, and had fun with the Maracas, I wouldn't mind too much if I could use them for more than one game, and those were less than half the price of the Steel Battalion controller. Feasible multiplayer wouldn't hurt, either.

And because I'm a big Sega fan, I have to give them some love for the spooge-inducing trinity of Panzer Dragoon Orta, Toejam and Earl 3, and Shinobi. All of these franchises have made great memories of three different systems, and I'm happier than a wet pig that the updates are as fun as I remember the originals being. Orta looks good in the preview builds I've played, though I can't help but wish it was Panzer Dragoon Azel/Saga 2. The Panzer Dragoon RPG had the best combat system I've ever had the privilege to get my grubby little mitts on. It was real-time and much more active than other games where you just watch a time bar build up, the maneuvering was simple yet intense, and it had more plans of attack you could shake a stick at.

Shinobi, meanwhile, is one of the better 3D action games I've played. Unlike certain 3D games, many of them platformers, the enemies are actually harder to fight than the camera. Most 3D action games haven't yet perfected the camera yet, and the number of times I was ready to kick Kingdom Hearts into the street-even though I wasn't playing it, my roommate was-just proved to me that it's still damn hard to get active cameras to feel right. But I haven't yelled at the Shinobi camera yet, so hopefully that'll hold up. Then again, I held the same hopes for Devil May Cry for a while, and that disappointed me a bit too, so we'll see.

Toejam is a peanut. That's all I have to say about that. (That's a good thing, by the way)

And finally, my sense of perversity (not perversion, though that sense is keen as well) has led me to playing Bistro Cupid, the game I linked up above. Some of you may have heard of this game, then promptly forgotten about it. I wouldn't blame you, but the sheer strangeness of this game led me to buy it.

The best way I can describe Bistro Cupid is as the mutant offspring of one of those Tycoon games, an RPG, and a girl get game. You see, the main character runs a restaurant named, unsurprisingly, Bistro Cupid. He's just graduated from cooking school, and many of the people in his graduating class, who happen to be young females designed to attract the fanboy eye, are also running their own establishments. He has to run the restaurant, and... er... run the restaurant.

This is where things start getting weird. Y'see, he starts out knowing one recipe, Spaghetti. To learn new recipes and become a better chef, he needs to... go out into the world and fight villainous monsters with his giant cleaver. He can bring two girls who like him into combat with him, and as they level up, they gain the ability to learn and equip more recipes. And the recipes don't just help you out in kitchen mode, no sir, they count as spells, too. Every recipe is assigned an MP cost and an element, and people who know the recipes can cast the recipe card as a spell. Weirded out yet? It gets better, the enemies that you fight are quite villainous, ranging from apples and eggplants to monkeys and ducks. My personal favorite enemy so far is the circus panda, who was a pushover but got quite a few laughs the first time I saw him.

Apparently, there's a dating game of some sort in there too, but who cares? I get to cast Vacuum Spaghetti at the enemy sheep, then follow it up with a slice from my mightily oversized, yet still SD blade. What's not to like?

Out for now-have some deadlines I have to make, and some of them are even ones that I can't push.

"Real Time vs. Emotional Time"
Wednesday - October 23, 2002
[Piro] - 13:10:00
If you read my rantings and ravings with any sort of regularity, you might get the impression that I get nothing but flames, hate mail, and lengthy dissertations on how i could do the world a favor by falling into a wood chipper - but this isn't really the case. Aside from spam and virus laden email (which i still get in voluminous amounts - never put your email address on a webpage kiddies), 95% of all the email i get is both positive, warm, supportive, and generally good natured. Actually, i get a lot of email that is just plain fun to read - one of the most rewarding things about doing MT is that people really seem to like to think about it, and i probably get better feedback than most 'creative professionals' get back in a lifetime.

If you have ever written me an email, but have never received a response - you should know that at that i read all of them - in fact, reading email is one of the more enjoyable 'breaks' used to get to take (note i used the term 'used to' - more on that later). I have a horrible habit when reading emails - I mark emails that i "must answer" and then read on rather than just answering them as i read them. I swear, i may never get to answering them. I have an inbox full of emails marked 'must answer' that is now 1,854 msgs. It used to be much bigger, but Eudora crashed out several months ago and destroyed 2 years worth of backlogged MT mail. Now it's building up again. So much for my fresh start.

So, in short, thank you for all the supportive emails. It really pisses some people off that i have so many people emailing me and telling me how great i am and how much they love MT... y'know, there's really nothing wrong with it. You'd think it would be easy to get puffed up on how swell you must be with all these people emailing you such stuff... but that's not how i view it. To me, it's a sign that i'm doing ok with MT so far - as flawed, delayed, messed up, unorganized and unprofessional as it is, people are willing to look past that and stick with me as i try to do things right. MT fans show me a lot of respect, and to me, respect is a two way street. This is one of the reasons i try as hard as i do to do things right - even though i routinely fall way short of the mark.

My life tends to defy any sort of 'routine' - i suffer from an inability to understand what i am capable of doing and what i am NOT capable of doing. I routinely commit to far more than i can physically do - it's like some sort of twisted mental disorder - my brain is incapable of estimating time. An old employer used to refer to my time estimates as 'fred time'. For instance, when asked how long it would take to produce a fully rendered 3d model of this doctors office, i'd respond "two days". To this, he would apply the latest 'conversion factor' (like, say 5x) and come up with what it would really take me to produce image (ten days). After a while, even i learned to apply 'conversion factors to my estimates.

I think that over the years i've discovered why i do this. I think there are two types of time - Emotional Time, and Real Time. Real Time is fairly easy to discern - its basically the agreed upon and measurable duration between things that we use mechanical devises to measure (clocks) so that the measurement is the same for everyone. Now, we could get into deeper discussions about the fabric of time, space and other metaphysical stuffs... but i'm just a lowly webcomic artist, so for the sake of simplicity, we'll stick to keeping 'real time' in general terms.

Emotional time has more to do what we feel the time should be. We have all experienced the fact that an hour at work lasts a hell of a lot longer than an hour relaxing with friends later that evening. I can sit at work at 3pm and feel that the day will never end, but then later i can find that the time between 7pm and 2am disappeared in a flash. I think this is because deep down i measure time based on how important something is to me emotively. Its more about what i think that time is worth.

For instance, i can easily say 'a megatokyo comic takes eight hours to draw and put together'. and at this point i can really understand the time it takes to draw stuff - but that is only because i've been doing them for so long that i've been able to make the Emotional Time and the Real Time numbers align better. I run into problems with everything else. "i need to process, clean up and export these 133 comics to TIFF files. Sure, i can do that tonight, shouldnt take more than a few hours."

47 Real Time hours later, and i still have 16 more comics to 'clean up and export'

I do this kind of thing all the time. When i plan projects, or think about what i would like to do, I never estimate the amount of time it takes to do it correctly. Usually, its a stubborn factor - "i WANT to do this, therefore, i can do it in four hours." for something that will take an entire week to complete. I am currently suffering from this problem with the book. Just the basic stuff is taking far longer than i thought it would, even with appropriately applied "fredtime conversion factors"

This always leads me to think that i am just slow. Why can't i work as fast as my 'emotional time' says i should? I don't know. I really don't.

Maybe its a good thing that there is this kind of discrepancy between Real Time and Emotional Time. I swear, if i really knew what kind of time Megatokyo would suck out of my life, i would have been way to terrified to start. But once you commit to something, you have to find some way of compensating for your 'errors' in time estimating. At work its called 'overtime'. For something like MT, its 'deprivation of sleep' and paring down all non essential activities as much as possible. Recently, i haven't even been reading my email - and it's been piling up in alarming numbers.

The saddest thing that has had to give is the Megatokyo comic itself recently. I really AM sorry that Chapter 3 has stalled a little, but i can't help but think that in the future, people will be able to understand the infrequency of comics for a few weeks now, rather than real serious flubs in the quality of the book. Once that goes to print, its kinda hard to fix it. :P

I've also had to be more realistic about just how much new material i can put in the book. Just preparing old material for print has taken weeks of work - far more than i thought at first. How can i expect to prep old material, produce new material, and keep the current webcomic going all at the same time? The answer is simple - i haven't been able to.

Yeah, its enough to make the head spin sometimes. I'll be the first to admit that i am probably slower at a lot of these things than most professionals would be, even most other webcomic artists. I am a lot faster than i used to be, but it's still not fast enough, it seems.

I always get the same response from some people when i grumble about all the stuff i have taken on. "why don't you just quit?" (sigh) they just don't get it. People get on my case for whining a lot, but you know somethin... too damn bad. to quote a character from an old comic called "Fusion" that i used to read - "Leave alone, bitching only pleasure left in life." And it's like Seraphim told me once, over a year ago when i was feeling particularly overwhelmed and felt like quitting:

"If you weren't doing this, you'd just be messing around with something else just as time consuming."

Y'know, that poor girl deserves a hell of a lot more Real time and Emotional Time than she gets from me. hopefully once the book is off to the printers...

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -

"freaking freaky freakfest"
Friday - October 25, 2002
[Seraphim] - 07:55:02
Piro and I took a well deserved few hours of relaxation and went to see Spirited Away last week. That movie was the most freaking freaky freakfest I have ever seen, and I even like the macabre.

I enjoy reading Roald Dahl and the traditional fairy tales where Cinderella's sister cuts off her toes. American fairy tales are too sanitized. I think children should realize that there are people in the world so greedy they'll hurt themselves to get what they want and they are even more likely to hurt someone else! God forbid an American child should read that the little mermaid died when the prince didn't choose her and she lived the rest of her life as a spirit on the ocean breeze. The moral of the story ladies is it to never lose your identity or your voice for the sake of any man. You are never going to get anywhere if you don't speak up.

I have even read Irish Mythology which is just plain cruel. Paddy O'Rourke marries the bonnie lass Colleen , they have three children, and she dies. So Paddy marries her sister who turns her nieces and nephews/stepchildren into swans for 900 years. After 900 years the children return to human form and instantaneously realize that everything they have ever loved is dead and the next moment die of old age themselves. That is just depressing. Piro and I recently watched Time Bandits and yet Spirited Away is by far the strangest I have encountered. It didn't help that the tiny theater in Royal Oak was packed with Evil Dead fans who had come to meet Bruce Campbell and get an autograph.

The movie itself gave me nightmares. What was with the gigantic, ugly baby and the WB frog? Or the excessively grotesque big headed lady and the projectile vomiting spirit? I just have to be thankful it wasn't a musical. Just don't tell me that they have merchandised this like the Lion King and everyone in Japan is wearing clothing emblazoned with those disturbing images.

Yet, as a movie it was at least more entertaining than Shallow Hal or Hollywood Ending. If you want to read some classic fairy tales and myths go to the reading room of the Internet Public Library which links to online texts that are in the public domain. Be sure to look up Ashputtel by the Brothers Grimm.

[note: seraphim's website has it's own domain name now - www.sarahsorigami.com. I figured it was about time she had a real domain for her site. :) - piro]

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -

"Ninja vs. Schoolgirl"
Monday - October 28, 2002
[Dom] - 22:00:00
Quick note: Clannad is the name of a game. It is also the name of a band. I am referring to the game. Click the link.

Yes, the Giants lost the World Series. I'm going to curl up and mutter the names Felix Rodriguez and Dennis Eckersley for a few hours to remind myself that I will never, ever trust relief pitchers.

In other news, yes, ninja vs. schoolgirl! While I am quite aware of the sub-genres "schoolgirl ninja" or "girl in ninja school", this battle has defined much male gaming for the past decade. Are you Shinobi, who defines himself with a scarf as red as the blood he spills? Or are you Okazaki Tomoya, whose purpose in his digital life is to put the moves on a set of very small, very sad girls?

It's a matter of what your fantasy life plays out as-heroically or romantically, I guess. Which is part of why people like romance plots in their RPGs. Once suspension of disbelief is in place and people place themselves in the role of the hero-or the heroine, as the case may be-then you can imagine that you're saving the world _and_ getting the girl/guy/alien/robot-with-compatible-"equipment".

Well, okay, the other reason is probably that RPGs tend to be boring without any sort of major romance to promote character growth. Wild Arms 1 excepted, though there were a few threads of a romance in there.

Fred and I actually haven't talked about this much, so it's not really an issue. But it's funny to kick around the idea once in a while when he plays AIR and weeps like a candyless child on Halloween, while I poke people in the feet with Raphael, the only Soul Calibur character who has a shirt on. Yes, I admit that I play what the above SGD termed "wussy games" from time to time, but with a very specific purpose. I played Tokimeki Memorial 2 because in one of the storylines, you have to beat up hordes upon hordes of delinquents and their bosses. So the game consisted of pretty much kendo club, rest, take girl on a date to a location to where a fight will take place, kick ass, repeat. It's the same way in some ways with Bistro Cupid... and Comic Party was a special case because it's the funniest damn game I've played since Tondemo Crisis.

In other news, I just played through one game of Bistro Cupid. Next, I'm going to train the princess ninja schoolgirl (hey, I didn't design the characters) to become the greatest warrior chef in all the land! I haven't had such fun with such a weird game since I raised a warrior queen in Princess Maker. Kill, blood of my blood... wipe evil from this land!

Oh. And I saw Adaptation the other day. I can't describe it in anything less than "fucking best irony I've seen in years". A lot of people just plain didn't get it, but fuck them. It was a great movie, and if you don't get the joke it's your own fault for missing the blatancy of it all.

Out!

"workflow snippets"
Tuesday - October 29, 2002
[Piro] - 11:10:20
Well, as you can see, i DID produce that little drawing of Dominobi for dom's little SGD hell for monday - to ease the pain a little... just a little. I've put the full size version of the image over on fredart for all to view.

Just a quick update today, there's quite a few things going on. First off, the book is going along pretty well. First thing i should probably do is point out that Ironcat Studios has changed its name to I.C. Entertainment (they should have thier new website up and read in a few days) - Secondly, they seem pretty happy with the graphic files i've prepared for them, which makes me feel good. It was a lot of work, and the quality of the original graphics has a major effect on the quality of the printing.

The cover art is going well too, even though it is taking me twice as long as i had originally planned (doesn't it always? i blame 'FredTime') I've had a little help with the image from Merekat (you know, the gal who did such a bang up job on the 'Pirogoeth' and 'Megatokyo Memorial' images.) While i have improved quite a bit in certain areas, i still have some problems with hands and anatomy that i asked her to help me tweak so that it wouldn't look odd on the cover. After going over what seemed odd and out of place, and looking at the structure of things, as well as what i could do to correct it, i've fixed some things that really help improve the look of the cover - largo's hands in particular. I learned a lot doing it, and as stubborn as i am about learning things sometimes, it's good to question your work in ways that lead to it's improvement. She's also giving me some pointers on shading, which all should result in a much better image, and a little increase in my own skill level in doin this stuff.

Oh, and if you are fans of Merekat's work, she now has posters available for purchase. Go check them out, mere has really produced some impressive work. Will there be more pieces like Pirogoeth done in the future? Yes, there will be - Merekat and i are talking about some projects we'll probably have underway early next year.

I still have tons to do on the book, but i've decided that it's time to take the comic itself off of it's accidental hiatus (last three weeks, there has been far more DPD and SGD than real comics). Thank you all for your patience with this, but things are ready to start flying again. I'll have more updates for tomorrow.

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -

"Hellaweenie"
Wednesday - October 30, 2002
[Dom] - 01:00:00
Since some of you don't seem to get the joke... that picture up there is not me. It's Henry Lee, of Anime Cosplay Paradise. He's been in my rant pics before--I believe for Fanime 2002. Check the mouseover, people! And donate to ACP, they need bandwidth

Getting off of the ninja subject for now--I'll be right back to the subject on Friday. But I do have to talk about one of my favorite holidays, Halloween. I have good memories of Halloween. Lots of 'em. The only bad Halloween memories I can think of are getting black licorice in my bag, and those damn plastic masks that always got really really wet below your nostrils and were hot as all hell.

But everything else is a great memory, from deftly dodging drunkenly thrown eggs to the 45 minutes after trick-or-treating spent trading with my family. Something about Halloween makes people act with less shame-is it the fact that you can't see their faces, perhaps? Naaaah... can't be.

I would use this next story as an example, but I have no shame anyway. It's just a fun Halloween story. See, at a recent Halloween gathering with friends, I came home late from work and was at a loss to get any of my usual costumes ready. So, in a hurry to get there on time, I took my trench coat and a tube sock, stopping off at my local convenience store for a handy supply of candy bars. Once there, I waltzed into the bathroom, took off my pants, stuffed the sock as (in)appropriate, and walked out.

One of my friends still refuses to look me in the eye. See? Lots of Halloween fun!

I have a few more stories I want to tell about Halloween, but then I can't pull the trick on the local kids... so I'll say a little more about costumes. It seems like a custom in my family to do costumes on the cheap. It's not that we dislike spending money, but in my mind at least, costumes are more fun when there's imagination and craft involved rather than handing your credit card to your local shop. While I freely admit that my Hamlet costume was just plain lazy, I really liked pulling off the flasher costume. Come to think of it, I actually did the flasher thing two years ago at work, though it was less... shall we say... fancy. Meanwhile, my sister decided that she's a teapot for this Halloween. It entailed a beret with a Lipton sign hanging from it, and her standing up showing off her handle and her spout. Last year, she was a mail-order bride, while I was... damn, I forget what I was last year for Halloween.

But in making my Kayama costume, for example, finding such a loud tie was a damn lot of fun, and cutting it out of the loud fabric was pretty cool too, with all thanks going to Katie for making the whole thing work. My Shin Getter Robo Ryoma costume involved breaking things I already had-handcuffs, chain, a coat, a blank white t-shirt, athletic tape-and it was (and is) amusing to wander about in.

Okay, enough 1 AM costume ramblings. I have deadlines to work on that will make me miss the real Halloween. Oh well, at least I have stories, memories, and a lot of fun with costumes...

"full time jitters"
Wednesday - October 30, 2002
[Piro] - 23:55:00
Well, i have some news. It's both bad... and good.

It's not like things haven't been crazy enough around here - trying to get a graphic novel ready for publication, coloring cover art, trying (and failing) to keep the webcomic up and going (story development, scripting and drawing all competing with each other), Ignoring the fact that i need to produce more product designs for the Megatokyo store (Christmas is just around the corner, and the bandwidth bills are not getting any smaller), all while trying to keep my head above water at work. I'm pretty stubborn, and I've managed to keep things rolling along for the past two years or so, no matter what has been thrown at me. Dealing with the constant conflict between the time Megatokyo needs, the time my day job as an architect requires, and the small in-between moments that are left for Seraphim and myself... I won't lie, it's been a hard balancing act. But it's always been worth it, because i feel that Megatokyo is something to be proud of (even with all it's problems). Unfortunately, something happened Monday that changed this balance drastically...

Monday afternoon I was laid off.

This has taken me completely by surprise. I won't go into the details about why I was laid off because there really aren't any - the industry is in a severe slump right now, and there just isn't enough work to keep everyone working. I just happened to be one of the people in-between projects. I know for a fact that there are a lot of readers who have gone thru this, so some of you know how it feels. It happens. It sucks.

Funny though... I always figured that it'd be because I was starting to spend too much time on Megatokyo that it might someday get me in trouble - which is why I was always very careful to make sure I did my job and did it well. Fat lotta good that did me in the end.

What does this mean for Megatokyo?

Economically speaking, the smartest thing for me to do would be to drop everything and find myself another job as an Architect. Finding a job at my level will take a lot of time, effort, and footwork. I have to revise and update my resume and my portfolio, research and dig for contacts and prospects in the area. I really should drop this 'hobby' of making webcomics and get serious about finding another job. That's what I should do.

Well, I'm not going to do that.

You see, my goal has always been to do something like Megatokyo full time. I really want to be a true manga-ka, or manga aritist. It's not an easy goal - I don't have any delusions about it. But i feel that the past two years of hard work has presented me an opportunity to pursue that goal. So, rather than finding a job that will conflict with Megatokyo just as much as the previous one did, I'm going to take a real chance and try doing Megatokyo full time.

I'm looking at it this way - maybe getting laid off is really an opportunity in disguise - a kick in the ass that will force me to let go of the wall and start swimming on my own. It will entail forsaking the security a regular paycheck and other benefits, and its a very scary prospect - but I'm willing to take the risks and see what will happen if I devote myself fulltime to doing something that I love doing and i am so passionate about.

One thing i can't afford to do right now is get corny, so i'll stop now. Lets cut to the chase and start talkin facts. I'm gettin misty.

Ok, so. I am now doing Megatokyo full time. Technically, I now work for all of you. A lot of people have commented on how great it would be if I could ever quit my day job and do Megatokyo full time. Well, now we'll get to see if hey are right. First, lets talk about what will change around here, now that the site has my undivided attention.

Every reader will notice a HUGE change in the regularity and amount of creative material on Megatokyo. This is my job, my priority, and i will treat it as such. There WILL be a new comic ever Monday, Wednesday and Friday from here on out. Period. There is no longer any excuses for a missed comic - missing a comic deadline is akin to missing a deadline at work. DPD days, SGD days, and things like that are a thing of the past (unless they are planned for a reason) Dont worry - if you like Dead Piro Days, you will find that i will post at least one sketch to fredart every week. The status bar will be pretty much obsolete, and will probably go away. So, the first order of business is to get things back on schedule.

I have already started working on the 'characters' and 'story' sections of the website. It's time i got those up and working. There will be a lot of new artwork in these sections (especially the character stats). Also I will start working on the lessons section at fredart. Second order of businesses is to patch up the holes in the websites and start finishing things i started years ago.

I also going to investigate starting other projects. I'm going to start development on 'Warmth', which i have been teasing you with for way too long. There are also several Megatokyo Gameworlds projects that i want to work on.

Thankfully, the first Megatokyo Graphic Novel collection is well under way. I have incentive to try to get the second volume (which will consist of chapter 1 and chapter 2) underway soon after. I have also been approached about doing an art book.

None of this is just lip service, you know. If i'm going to ask the Megatokyo audience to support me and my efforts, they have to feel that it is worth their patronage. I just got an extra 40 hrs per week to spend on Megatokyo, i'm going to put it to good use.

Some of you are probably wondering when i am going to start begging for money. I'm not going to. Am i going to ask for your support? Yes, i am. I need it. Without your support, I'm not going to be able to do this. But i am not going to put up a 'paypal' donation button and ask you to just send me money. I won't do that unless i really need to - so please don't bug me about it.

Ok, so how do you support MT if i wont put up donation buttons?

Well, I have been working on some ideas that would help support MT, while at the same time give you something in return. Last month we started looking at the idea of providing webhosting on the Megatokyo network - the idea i had was that you could get a piece of space, much like a small room in the 'walled city' in the Gibson novels - a place to upload your own art, avatars, whatever you wanted - unlike the distributed nature of the Walled City, MegatokyoCity.net will be analogous to a physical space in Megatokyo itself. Ukyo is still working on the back end, but it should be up and running by next week. I feel that this is a great way that people can donate something, yet get something in return. I'll post more on the idea next week. It's suddenly a lot more important than it was before.

I've been very reluctant to offer original pieces of artwork for sale online, but i am looking at ways that perhaps i can produce one or two really nice drawings and offer them for auction - maybe more, i don't know. I am also looking into taking on commission work - in order to survive in this business, you have a lot of things going - you can't just rely on one source of income.

By the way, i don't expect every MT fan to buy stuff. In fact, that's a good thing. Most will simply be able to tune in and enjoy the comic like always. And that's how it should be. Megatokyo will always be a free online comic. I will not be changing the site to put in-your-face advertisements on 2/3 of the page. I will NEVER offer popup windows. I will not experiment with subscription based services, or take any comic offline because it's gone to print, or even offer 'premium' services that let you view more material. Everything on this site will always be free and open for use. I prefer it that way. I want people to support Megatokyo of their own free will - not because they are forced to pony up before they get the goods.

Also, one of the best ways you can support Megatokyo right now is to buy the graphic novels, and head over to the Think Geek store and buy a shirt. I've been working hard on the book to make it well worth the $9.95 cover price, and i am currently working on the next round of shirts and other products for the MT store, most of which should be ready by Thanksgiving. Obviously, you'll be seeing a lot more of my drivel here in the rant columns, so I'll keep you up to date. Oh, and did i mention that there will soon be a Sad Girl in Snow Blanket? :)

Anyways, this is almost like a test case to see how feasible it is to make the leap to being a full time webcomic artist in this post-net-boom internet economy. Maybe if i can figure this out, perhaps others will be able to learn from my experiences and perhaps do even better. If nothing else, the ride behind the scenes should be at least as interesting as the comic itself for a while.

Finally, i would like to say... i wouldn't even dream of doing this if it wasn't for all the friends, both online and off, who have given me the encouragement to pursue this. Most of all, i have to thank Seraphim - not only is she my muse, and my conscience, but my cheering section as well - without her, i don't think I'd have the confidence to do this. Someone asked me once if she really did have little angel wings - I replied that yes she does, you just can't see them. If I succeed at this, there is no way i could have done it without her.

So, welcome to the new Megatokyo. It should be an interesting ride, and i'll do all i can to make it as interesting as possible ^_^

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -
(uhm, sorta more important than before ^^;;)

"God of Mange II"
Friday - November 1, 2002
[Dom] - 11:00:00
Viz's PR department is the undisputed king of unintentional comedy. With the possible exception of Trip Hawkins.

Check this out:

Subject: [VizNews] NO ONE EVER SAID LOVE EASY...FEBRUARY TITLES FROM VIZ

It's that time of year again, when love is found, lost or rekindled. To celebrate, Viz is offering fans several loves to choose from, including brand new passions and comfortable, familiar stand-bys. To find out more, visit (link deleted) for detailed information, including pricing, page count, author & artist backgrounders, and more! Or, just click directly on the links below.

****************************************
RENEW YOUR LOVE LIFE WITH THESE NEW TITLES... ****************************************
Outwit...Outlast...Outlive
BATTLE ROYALE
The Controversial Japanese Novel in English!
(link deleted)

I wonder if anyone got fired recently...

"Voting"
Tuesday - November 5, 2002
[Dom] - 21:30:00
I voted today. I'm not going to say who I voted for, or who you should've voted for--that's your own choice.

But I was talking to our own Asmodeus today, and he told me how desperately he wishes he could vote--after all, it would mean that he had his citizenship. And my parents are exactly the same way. Every first Tuesday in November, they've diligently headed to their local voting booth and put in their vote. A few times, they brought me with them, and each time impressed upon me how important it was to be able to cast a vote at all. They've always been proud that I was born on the day that Bao Diep was overthrown and the Nguyen dynasty ended--they call it the Vietnamese 4th of July--and understandably enough, their experiences as Vietnamese refugees have made them value their vote 'til the day they die.

The voting experience was funny today, though. I looked up the place online, and when I saw "Totland", I blinked a few times and checked again. Yup, I walked to the local playground-slash-day care center and voted there. It was a little surreal seeing a sign on the door saying "Parents of 3 and 4 year olds-no art class today due to elections". But at least the new touch-screen ballots they have here in the Bay Area rock. It was nice being able to look at all my choices and revise them before submitting the ballot. I hope more precincts get these things... they rock.

But... dammit, I forgot to grab my "I Voted" sticker. That was the best part of going to the polls with my parents back when I was 8! I'm bitter, now.

"laying gravel"
Thursday - November 7, 2002
[Piro] - 12:50:00
Good grief. I think I've actually worked more hours this week than did when I was working full time. Oddly enough, I've been enjoying this, even though it has required a lot of scrambling around.

My apologies for leaving the 'full time jitters' rant up as long as i did. I've just been a little TOO busy to get to a new one.

As i said last week, it's been my plan to someday go full time with this manga stuff since... well, i've always wanted to. I mean, who doesn't dream about doing stuff they love to do professionally? I've been drawing, doodling, and writing stories most of my life. When i got my first computer, an IBM PC (it had two floppy disk drives, no hard drive, and an RBG screen. WOO!), I logged far more hours in WordStar and WordPerfect writing stories than I spent playing games. When I was in high school, I really wanted to go to either Sheridan College or UCLA and study Animation. I was a huge Disney fan, and I loved animation - but studying to be an animator was an absurd notion back then. This sorta gives away how old i am (33) but when I was planning my college career, the animation industry was dead. 'The Little Mermaid' didn't come out until my Senior year of college. We all know how much things exploded after that. I had a chance to get in on the ground floor if I had followed my 'dreams'... but instead, I followed other paths, and eventually graduated with a degree in Architecture. Funny huh?

Honestly, I have no regrets about missing that boat. My creative nature would be totally different than it is today. Instead of being directed and nurtured to service the existing Animation industry, I've had the freedom to let it develop the ways I've wanted it to. Maybe I wouldn't have succeeded back then. I wouldn't have designed and built the buildings that I have. I would have never met Seraphim. I would never have done Megatokyo. I'd probably have different cats than I do now.

Anyways, i'm getting off track. Sure, I've always wanted to do something like this professionally, but it's not something you can just throw yourself at and hope you make it. You have to be smart about it, honest with yourself, and realize that pursuing such things not only has risks, but its far harder than following well paved and trodden tracks. The only time I had to pursue this stuff was in my spare time outside of work. Once Megatokyo started to really take off, I was suddenly seeing that maybe there was a real path opening up here - something i could follow, if i nurtured it right.

Most of the time, the path do being a professional manga-ka was like plowing thru the underbrush in a forest that had no clear path thru it. Megatokyo started to form the beginnings of a trail. I've widened it, tried to make it more passable, but these were just forays into the brush on either side of the well paved highway that was my architecture career. Now, i've completely left that highway behind me, and the path before me is a lot like a dirt road. Now, If i can upgrade this to a gravel road, i think i'll be ok.

Ok, i think i was getting a little too metaphoric there, but you get the idea. :P What i've been doing for the past week has been trying to lay a little gravel, something to keep the mud from swallowing me up.

I've been working hard in the background to try to set things up so that one day I could go full time. Quite a while ago I actually set up a 'company' that I work thru for all of this - Fredart Studios LLC (one employee, and that's me :P) Neat, huh? So, even though I am not really ready, I've been trying to set things up so that one day I could take the plunge and do this full time. It's just about eight months ahead of schedule.

The very first thing on my agenda was to get back into doing the comic regularly. Each comic takes six to eight hours, so it's not a small amount of time, but it's definitely the #1 priority. I've managed that goal. I have a lot of other things to do for the websites, including getting the character and story sections updated, being more regular with rants, uploading more artwork to my fredart site (this I have actually started doing - from here on out, I intend to upload at least one sketch every week.) - it will take some time to get all of this moving along, but it will happen..

The second thing on my agenda was to get new merchandise ready for the ThinkGeek store. Designing this stuff takes time, but I think i have a pretty good selection of new shirts and other items in the works. Of interest is Junpei's NINJ4 hoodie, some girl's stuff (Kimiko's 'angel' shirt, and version 2.0 of the I.A.C. shirt), a new version of the 'overclocked' t-shirt, Erika's QuickKill shirt, a big Megatokyo coffee mug, and some other swag including a megatokyo hat, polo shirt and maybe even a bookbag.

There's also this nifty little thing that should be in the store pretty soon. What is it? It keeps you warm, it's soft and fuzzy, and it's laying over a pool table. I have one, actually, and the cats won't let me near it. It's also kinda scary, because Kimiko is like 14 feet tall on it. If nothing else, it will answer all the questions about where this rant image came from.

Also, the Capture the Bear posters will soon be available from the ThinkGeek store as well, in case you haven't got one yet :P

Believe it or not, all that was an awful lot of work. What else have I been doing?

I've been teasing people with another project I started years ago called 'warmth' ever since Megatokyo started. In fact, I never planned to do Megatokyo, it just sorta came in and took over my life before I knew what happened. 'Warmth' was the comic/story/project I was working on at the time. Honestly, I didn't have the drawing skillz at the time to do the project - and that's part of why i decided to do Megatokyo - i needed practice, and Megatokyo was a better medium to practice with.

Well, here I am, over two years later, looking at doing this manga stuff full time. Megatokyo, of course, will do nothing but improve - i think that just having 3 comics regularly per week will be a vast improvement for most readers. I also wanted to look at how i could revive the 'warmth' project and get that going. I.C. entertainment (formerly IronCat) (the people publishing the Megatokyo book) approached me with the idea of issuing 'warmth' as a monthly installment in their new manga collection 'AmeriManga'. - basically, a comic-sized 'graphic novel' format book printed every month containing the work of 5 american manga artists. I was pretty impressed with the artists contributing to it, and also with the format (nice decent quality printing and binding) so i decided to give it a go. Starting in February, 'warmth' will premier in I.C. Entertainment's AmeriManga collections. Hopefully I can pull off a real, honest to goodness 25 page per month manga title... I'm nervous about the concept, but i'm looking forward to it.

While talking about it and digging thru all of my old notes and materials, I drew this sketch of Tobari Saeko, one of the main characters. If you are worried about my work on Warmth effecting Megatokyo, don't. I have time now to do all of this. More info on this in the near future.

What else? I *still* have a ton of work to do in the first Megatokyo book - i lost about a week of time due to getting laid off and all this other stuff i'm balancing, so now i have to scramble and get back to it. In fact, i really should be freaking out majorly about my to do list... eep...

Funny. I no idea how I could do all this if i was still working. :) Sorry if this rant rambled a little, just got a lot on my mind.

I want to end this rant by thanking everyone who emailed me since last Wednesday since I announced my layoff and the full time MT thing - It took me until TODAY to finally get thru reading all of them. Thank you very much for your support and kind words. My approach to email will be vastly different here in the near future... hopefully I don't have any backlogs like that in the near future :P

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -
(uhm, sorta more important than before ^^;;)

"Miscellaneous Debris"
Wednesday - November 13, 2002
[Dom] - 00:45:00
Okay, I promised myself I wouldn't rant at this time of the morning. But dammit, I have 500 words to go on this foreword, and nothing left to say. But the mere fact that I have 500 more words means that I need to use at least a few hundred of them... right?

Anyway. You may have noticed that our forums got a little shake. That's because Fred, me, and a few other people decided that things needed better organization and grouping. And that something needed to be cut for the new writing forum. Dr. Largo's Mecha Forum was elected, and it was cut. Go ahead and complain, but I see no reason to bring it back.

I would rant about games, but I'm too busy writing about games to write about games--I know, it's weird, but hey, it's part of writing for two jobs at once with a project on the side.

I'll have more on Friday. I need to crash now, make some deadlines tomorrow, and catch up on my Lacanian theory by next Tuesday. Sigh... oh well, can't say I didn't bring it on myself.

"Color Overload"
Wednesday - November 13, 2002
[Piro] - 10:30:00
I'm kinda swamped today, so this will be a very short rant today. The main reason for it, actually, is to link up to the other two color works that I posted today over at Fredart. The first one is a quickly colored version of the 'Warmth' dead piro day I did sometime last year (there is a link to the comic in the comments under the image at fredart. AmeriManga needed a stand-in color cover for promotional purposes, so I spent four hours and got this hammered out. The actual cover will be far better than this, but really, it didn't come out all that bad, given the time frame. I like Saeko and Tom and the other characters in warmth - they are unique characters in and of themselves, and the thoughts of them interacting with any of the MT characters makes me think of how the end of the world might look... yeah, i wonder about my brain sometimes.

The other art piece for today i actually did several months ago as a design for the Megatokyo blanket that ThinkGeek wanted to produce. Not only did the artwork itself come out very interesting in a bold, graphic kind of way:

But it has the full approval of all my cats, especially hime, who we can see here curled up literally in Kimiko's lap. If you are interested, the blankets should be available for purchase in the ThinkGeek/Megatokyo store sometime in the next few weeks.

Oh, and about today being a Dead Piro Day rather than a comic... some have accused me of breaking my promise to not interrupt the comics from here on out. I'm not, actually. It was either skip a comic this week, or cause a week delay in the release of the book, which has serious consequences for my poor publisher. :) Just because I am doing MT full time now doesnt mean I am superman. I'm in a major crunch to finish additional material for the book, and I made a decision that it was my responsibility to take the time yesterday You have to do that sometimes.

Ah, and some would call that last paragraph pretty typical Piro-whining. And so it probably is. Like I said before, this isn't fsking Penny Arcade - i can be a whiney bitch and skip comics if i want to. :P

Heheh. Sorry, i just couldn't resist.

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -
(uhm, sorta more important than before ^^;;)

"The Stage of History"
Sunday - November 17, 2002
[Dom] - 22:00:00
Soul Calibur 2 Regionals came and went, and I was an awed spectator for the entire thing. It's sad, really, I've always wanted to be tournament-quality in a video game, but I just don't have the time, money, and patience to master a fighting game. So I always end up being a student instead of a player; that guy who can talk the talk, but sits squarely in the middle skill level; able to beat scrubs and the casual player, but unable/unwilling to play against the top players and learn from the severe beatings provided by said top players.

This is really apparent in my Soul Calibur 2 experience. I play Xianghua, widely called the easiest character to master and one of the best. I have since the first Soul Calibur, so as long as I can make people think they're stupid after a "Nanchatte!"/"Just kidding!", I feel good. But I just don't have the time to head to my local arcade (where Srayer plays... I am in awe of his Nightmare but don't have the guts to challenge him) and work on fake-out tactics or learn enough Soul Calibur goodness to do what I want to, and be able to play Charade with consistency.

I honestly don't know if this is good or not; on the one hand, I enjoy learning about these fighting games and talking about strategy with people. Most of the tournament players I know are friendly and full of shit, just like me. But I don't like not being able to play with them on even terms. It gets stuck in my craw whenever someone gives me seconds, for example.

Man, it sucks to be afraid to lose. I'll get rid of that, some day, but until then, I'll always choose the Random or Charade-type options and continue having loads of fun hanging out in the arcade with friends.

I love Soul Calibur 2, by the way-it's a great update of Soul Calibur 1. It's not a coincidence that I love SC2 and hate the Tekken series with a passion, though. Tekken is a little too much about the juggles for me to like it. "Oh, look, I've knocked you down, time for me to take off half your life bar before you hit the ground". That kind of crap pisses me off, which is also why I dislike MvC2. But while you could argue that against certain characters-Xianghua and Nightmare come to mind-you make one mistake and another big chunk of your life bar comes off, I don't see it that way. There's much more in the way of "Oh my God, I saw that coming 20 frames ago and just didn't react in time" instead of certain quick, disgustingly strong moves in Tekken that I've seen. There's also the beautiful thing known as Air Control-you can keep yourself from getting juggled by making sure you're not in range of the next juggle hit, unlike Tekken, where you bob helplessly above the ground.

I also like how it's easier to dodge in this game. Eight way running has been improved, evasion is better in general, and damn, is it satisfying to watch Ivy's new Criminal Symphony go off.

And yes, I like the costumes, too. Look for some elements of SC2 costuming to make it into MegaWinter nights, though it won't be nearly as shirtless as certain SC2 costumes... stupid Shirtlessfried.

And for my next trick, I need to learn how to beat Nightmare's 66B without having to go back to square one and going into the guard impact/re-parry mind game. Later!

"out the door"
Tuesday - November 19, 2002
[Piro] - 12:50:00
done.

I swear, i was beginning to wonder if I'd ever finish. There were so many little things, it was mind boggling. But as of about an hour ago, I finished doing the last thing I had to do so that Ellen could finish things up.

I'd like to extend a big thank you to Ellen and Kei and everyone else from I.C. Entertainment for all the hard work they put into helping this hack pull together what I think will be a pretty good book. I also want to thank Dom, Seraphim and Largo for their help and hard work in helping me pull things together.

There seems to have been a lot of discussion about my 'whine quotient' this week. Fftt.. Whatever. :)

Wanna know what i'm gonna do now? Well, other than get crankin on tomorrows comic - I'm gonna sit down and watch tv. I don't even care what it is. I need a break :P

Got a whole bunch of new stuff to dive into this week now that the book is out the door. I'll put up a new rant sometime tomorrow afternoon and let y'all know what's up.

- - - - Support Megatokyo! - - - -
(uhm, sorta more important than before ^^;;)

"GSP"
Tuesday - November 19, 2002
[Dom] - 23:00:00
I swear, half of the time I wish I could stick a muzzle on Fred. What kind of a rejoinder is "I can whine if I want to"? A proper insult would have been something like "This isn't PA. You don't have to pay for my crappy art every month". Or instead of retort, perhaps my style of "yarisugi" riposte, "Hey! I only cater to the finest pedophiles. MegaTokyo: The latest in a long tradition of stalking Japanese little girls". But getting petty and defensive? Sheesh! ;)

Aaaaanyway. The question came up recently: Why do I like Tenchi Muyo! GXP? It's an odd question, but I guess that at my stage of "otaku growth" I'm expected to be bitter and anti-franchise. But dammit, I liked Tenchi Muyo 9 years ago, so why should I hate it now?

Okay. Okay. So admittedly, I didn't quite like the extra TV series and movies, but that's just a matter of the whole "alternate continuity" thing that I don't tend to like (UC Gundam is the only Gundam! Everything else is just trying to replace Char. Talk amongst yourselves). I liked the first OAV, the second OAV was a bit odd but I still liked that. And the third OAV will make me happy when it finally comes out.

"But Dom," say the others, "You didn't like Love Hina, why the hell do you like GXP?" And to you I have one word, or rather two half-words stuck together: Nabeshin. Watanabe Shinichi has rapidly become one of my favorite Japanese directors, behind the obvious choices Kurosawa and Fukasaku. Why? Because like me, he's fucking nuts, and he has an great sense of when to overdo things. So I can live with the harem formula that is so common in fanservice anime because the comedy is so damn funny sometimes. GTO-style wild takes make for a happy Dom.

And I end this rant with this: Funimation better get a better script writer for GXP than they got for Fruits basket--those subs are just painful to read and pick through! ...or maybe I'm just an anal asshole. Whatever.

"the christmas spirit"
Friday - November 22, 2002
[Seraphim] - 10:00:00
It's not even Thanksgiving and I'm already sick of the Christmas marketing and advertising. I can't believe stores are actually opening on Thanksgiving day. What about the poor employees? When I was a kid my family never really went all out for Christmas. We had a tree with lights and when I was under five it was even a real tree. Now I think artificial trees are environmental friendly but Dad got our artificial tree back then because it was practical. They hadn't exactly perfected artificial tree technology yet. Not that I'm complaining - my best girlfriend had one of those foil stick trees with a light shining on it. I can't even find a picture of it on the web - it was a seventies thing. Our tree was cutting edge for the day - it was a wire cone with plastic pine needles that actually tried to look like a real tree. I am the youngest child and came along many years after my next oldest sibling. I don't know if Mom and Dad had more energy and Christmas spirit when they were younger, but after I came along it was a wreath on the door and that was it. We had a fake tree but a live wreath. Don't ask me about the logic.

How many trees are sacrificed to stuff my mailbox full of catalogs? At least old Christmas trees can be chipped into mulch after the holidays. Who really enjoys fighting for parking spaces and elbowing through the crowds for a sweater? I'd really like to give gifts from Heifer Project International but I'm sure that would go over poorly with the nieces and nephews. I may just be jaded by years of working in retail. I used to do merchandise and window displays - we started the Christmas decorations in August and had to have it ready to go by the end of the back to school rush. Then there was the year I worked security and apprehended a shoplifter about a week before Christmas. She maced me right in front of all the kids waiting to see Santa and proceeded to attempt to assault me. What I did after she maced me wasn't considered an assault, THAT was self defense. She only made me mad and I won.

[ I remember getting a call that Sunday: "Can I speak to Fred? Uhm, yeah, Sarah's been hurt, and I think she'd like you to come down." After breaking many traffic laws, seeing an ambulance and several police cars outside the store with lights flashing, rushing in knocking old ladies and little children out of my way as i made it to the break room, I found Sarah laying across several chairs with paramedics holding one of those IV bags over her. Talk about a freak out moment. Thankfully, it wasn't an IV, it was saline solution, and they were washing the mace off of her face. From personal experience I will tell you that nothing upsets you more than someone you love getting attacked. I refused to let her work Security after that ^_^ - piro]

What's really sad is that the assault charges were only a misdemeanor. She only did jail time because she stole over $250 worth of merchandise which was a felony. Merry Merry Christmas.

I don't 'bah humbug' Christmas, I just think it has all become too commercial. Rudolf the Reindeer was created by Montgomery Wards as a Christmas advertising campaign! (Wards went bankrupt. Ha ha ha. I worked for them and predicted that.) There just isn't even time to enjoy Christmas anymore.

I found a very 'l33t' site. Dirk. The Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things. At least one Megatokyo fan has visited and added Piro. I could get seriously addicted to making connections.

I recently found out that in a six degrees of separation kind of way that Piro and I are only 4 and 5 degrees of separation from Tolkien. My supervisor at work had a professor who was a student of Tolkien's at Oxford. That must put us only 5 and 6 degrees of separation away from the Queen of England. I wonder how many degrees of separation I am from Legolas? Soulful sigh. I am trying to get Piro to grow his hair long like either his or Gandalf's. Either one, I don't care which. Then I could sew him a tunic and some leggings. It can't be any harder than the tri-color appliqued Neko costume with hat and shoes I had to design myself.

Anyone seen the new T-Mobile commercial with the librarian looking up the lyrics to Def Leppard's Pour Some Sugar On Me? If I'd been on the reference desk I could have answered that off the top of my head but yet again the librarian is an older lady with glasses and a rather severe hair style. And while a huge percentage of librarians are due to retire in the next 5-7 years (hopefully!) most of these ladies could take the young computer and software guys apart and eat them for breakfast. Librarians are extremely l33t and they are out there protecting everyone's privacy and rights to free, unrestricted access to information. For more reasons to worship librarians, see the Librarian Avengers [we pulled the actual hyperlink because we were worried about slashdotting her poor website. we'll put the link back when its off the front page, or you can check the source for the url - sorry erica! - piro] webpage, which is the creation of one of my classmates. You may even find a mention of Megatokyo and Seraphim in her blog…

"We got the axe!"
Saturday - November 23, 2002
[Dom] - 17:00:00
So... then... it's...

UP with the Blue and Gold
DOWN with the Red
CA LI FOR NIA's put up a victory
We dropped our battle-axe on Stanfurd's head (CHOP!)

We just met her, our team just soundly beat her
Down on the Stanfurd Farm there is no sound
As our Oski rips through the air
Like our friend Mister Jonah Stanfurd's team will be found
In the tummy of the Golden Bear!

GO BEARS

"blankets and snow"
Monday - November 25, 2002
[Piro] - 28:00:00
Just a quick note (until i finish my real rant for today), because I know a lot of people have been waiting for this - the Kimiko 'Sad Girl in Snow' blanket is now available at the Megatokyo / Thinkgeek store (look under 'cool things'). 60x80 inches of warm, fuzzy Kimiko goodness. Er... something like that. Quantities are limited, so if you want one, you should get it.

Also, i've moved the Capture the Bear posters to the ThinkGeek store, so you can now pick up one of thse 18x24 posters at your convenience.

Thanks for your support, and look for my finished rant later this afternoon.

"Gomen!"
Tuesday - November 26, 2002
[Dom] - 23:45:00
First. Yes, I'm aware that Square and Enix have merged. And no, I don't really care. It means that Square is out of the debt it made for itself with Square Pictures, and it means that people may actually pay attention to the Dragon Warrior/Quest series some day soon. I don't think much else will change, except the logo. And maybe Shounen GanGan may get some Final Fantasy manga or something. I'll believe the rest of the flying rumors when Wada or Honda confirm them.

Back to my favorite topic--ninja games.

See, I've been playing Shinobi on and off for a while. I love every second of it. Other people complain that it's too hard, but... screw that. I could finish the game pretty quickly if I was actually trying to finish the game. But no, I'm trying to master the game. I want to kill everything in a room without ever touching solid footing. I want to slice everyone in half as Hotsuma quietly utters "Kataki ha kanarazu...". I want to get the old-school Shinobi bonus (no shuriken!) as well as the new No Damage bonus (though I haven't managed No Damage yet).

And so, level 6-A is currently kicking my ass. It's so hard to perform tate on everything while not falling into the pits. But it's so rewarding when I hear that good ol' "Yuruse..." or "Gomen!" as Hotsuma sloooooowly slides Akujiki back into its sheath.

So in short, if you don't like Shinobi because it's too hard or too repetitive, bah. It's got style.

As for other ninja-type activities... I'm trying to get back onto my Shadowfist horse after a long layoff due to deadlines and other stress. I am, of course, making a ninja deck. Complete with the Ninja Interior Decorators, who aren't exactly good, but are a damn lot of fun. The 10,000 bullets set is coming soon, so that should probably be a good time for me to hit up the local scene again. Sorry for not showing up on Thursdays lately, guys, it's been hectic.

Let's see what else is going on...

Well, this doesn't exactly have ninja in it, but the first issue of Raijin is finally heading out to subscribers, and will soon be in stores. I recommend this over Shonen Jump USA for the following reasons:

Reason the first: MSG. No, not Mobile Suit Gundam, Mamotte! Shugogetten. I like Sakurano Minene's art better'n most of the stuff in either magazine. As much as I like reading Slam Dunk and Grappler Baki, they aren't exactly easy on the eyes sometimes.

Reason the second: City Hunter. Slam Dunk. Fist of the Blue Sky. Grappler Baki. All series that I would read over the Shonen Jump headliners Yu-Gi-Oh! (which I don't dislike, per se, but I am not an avid fan of) and DragonBall Z (which is just waaaaay too long).

Reason the third: Shuueisha's long-standing grudge with Comic Bunch means that they want Raijin to go out of business. They desperately want to see Raijin die. So, being the perverse being I am, I want to see Raijin fly. And bring Slam Dunk TV and Fist of the North Star TV to the states.

Reason the third: Mokkori!

Reason the fourth: MOKKORI!

Any questions?

"soft comprehension"
Wednesday - November 27, 2002
[Piro] - 11:50:00
(update: information on the blanket and other stuff related to the release of the Megatokyo book can be found here in this FAQ Kei and I put together. More stuff later today.)

Before I get into today's rant and braindump, let me sum up some biz things with a few bullet points:

• Kimiko 'Sad Girl in Snow' blankets are now available in the Megatokyo Thinkgeek store. 60x80 inches of warm, fuzzy, sad girl in snow goodness. Quantities are limited, i don't expect them to last much longer.
• Capture the Bear posters are now available from the store as well.
• Other goods that I had mentioned, like the Ninj4 hoodie, YakPak Flapdoozies w/ embroidered Megatokyo logo, Polo shirts, girls shirts, MegaCoffeeMug, and other stuff coming soon. I'll let you know when they are available.
• Yes, the Megatokyo/Thinkgeek store will be carrying the Megatokyo Volume 1 Graphic Novel when it finally hit the shelves. You can also check your local stores. Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered or inquired locally about them.
• Remeber this image? Well, the first issue of Amerimanga coming out this December will have this illustration of Saeko and Tom as a pull out poster. 'Warmth' itself starts in March, and will be 20 to 25 pages monthly.
• A very quick list of conventions i've confirmed for so far: Ohayocon, Katsukon, Anime Central. I'm working on others as well. I'd like to get to most parts of the country this year if I can. More later.

Ok, thats enough of that. There's enough there to take up a normal piro-rant, but I decided to spare you the prattle. Besides, I wanted to talk about other stuff today.

Things are going pretty good so far. Self employment agrees with me. No draconian rules and limitations on what I can do over the net, the response to the book and other stuff has far exceeded anything I could have hoped for, and oddly enough... I'm less stressed now than I've been in over a year. My old situation was killing me, I think. I've even found a few spare moments here and there to relax. Working on 'warmth' has been a lot of fun, too. The rantimage up there was for a very quickly done sketch and coloring of Eimi-chan for a future Amerimanga cover. My cats actually have roles in 'warmth' - the one in eimi's lap is Hime - who in real life really does have a propensity for gnawing on cabling. The tally of damage so far for her is in excess of $2500 (including my first digitizer, which she chewed the cable right thru). So its appropriate that she's always gnawing on a piece of coax cable in this story. Yum.

It amazes me how much anime i have sitting around here that I have yet to watch. Years ago, before digisubs and other forms of downloading anime was so prevalent on the web, I had a good friend who used to rent tapes from Japan Video and compile that week's worth of anime that was airing on TV in japan. For a while, i was getting 8 to 10 VHS tapes per week. As you can image, this led to serious problems with storing all of it. Two years ago i culled the collection and gave a friend of mine four huge boxes with almost 500 VHS tapes to do with as he pleased. I think they're still going thru it. A lot of it I never did watch. I never did finish watching Gambaristo Shun! Or Nurse Angel Ririka. Oh well.

I didn't give everything away. I still have two bookshelves full of VHS tapes. I kept the stuff i really liked - TV source of Nadesico, Eva, Escaflowne, Saint Tail, Mizuiro Jidai, YAT Anshin, Kero Kero Chime, etc - unsubbed, complete with commercials, glitches, and little weather alerts scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Contrary to popular belief, I am not fluent in Japanese. I can't watch an untranslated show and understand everything. Sure, i can comprehend enough to understand a little here and there, but certainly not enough to understand the storyline.

So why in the world did I watch so much untranslated anime?

It used to be that you would have to wait at least a month for fansubs of a new anime to show up in circulation. Prior to that, if you were eager to follow a new show, you had to sit and watch it in raw Japanese. This led to something most anime fans don't get these days - the gradual understanding and slow absorption of their favorite shows.

If you remember this rant i wrote a while ago, I talked about how sometimes not seeing things clearly can be good for getting an overall understanding of things. The same goes for anime. I honestly feel that one of the reasons people become so passionate about anime is because of the fact that it's not in english. There is an emotional component to all language - by taking away the immediate comprehension of things you get with understanding the language, you are left following just the emotional output of the sounds themselves. I can think of tons of examples where something, if said in english, would make you roll your eyes - but in Japanese, for some reason, it sounds cool, meaningful, and gets thru.

I think that in this age of digisubs and the amazing availability of subtitled and dubbed DVDs, that fans are missing something. I watched the entire season of Escaflowne without having a clue what was going on. In an abstract way, the series hit home very deeply. The same goes for Saint Tail. It's hard to explain - maybe it's a lot like why abstraction in art can effect people the way it does - it bypasses the normal way of looking, or listening, to things.

I suggest an experiment. One of the really nice things about DVDs is that most of them give you the option to not only listen to the original Japanese, but to turn off the subtitles as well. Next time you pick up an anime DVD, turn off the subtitles, listen to it in Japanese first. As with most anime fans, you'll more than likely pick up on quite a bit of the general speech, but rather than being frustrated with not understanding what is going on, just go with the flow. See what you think and feel while watching. Then, a few days later, watch it again with subtitles.

It's been argued that I'm crazy before, and I don't refute it, but I think there can be a lot of value in not understanding everything up front. Faith and wonder, i think, thrive better when you don't have all the answers. Letting your brain fill in the blanks can be, at times, very rewarding.

"Wide open spaces"
Monday - December 2, 2002
[Dom] - 22:00:00
This space will be open for the next two weeks. Got things to do, so I'll be absent from MT in general, really. Don't break the forums while I'm gone, and someone please edit for Fred... God knows he can barely do it for himself ;)

Addendum 12/3/02: No, this doesn't mean you can take my spot. The only people who can ask for this space and get it are Asmodeus, Largo, Ed, Natsuki, and Maya Angelou.

Addendum 12/5/02: Hmm. Hijacked space! -Ukyo

"virtual real estate"
Wednesday - December 4, 2002
[Piro] - 11:35:00
Looking back at a lot of the rants that I've done over the past few years, there always seems to be this conflict between checking off bullet points of information and getting on with some sorta freeflowing braindump about whatever is rattling around in my brain. With all the stuff that's been going on in the world of MT these days, my list of 'things to inform people about' just keeps getting worse.

If you have ever worked on designing a webpage or two, you know about the conflicts that come up when dealing with the real estate on a webpage. There is battle between look and feel, navigation, readability, providing content effectively, providing information effectively, and the ever onerous issue of space for advertisements to help pay the bills.

I don't know if many people realize this, but the layout and design for the webpage you are looking at was done over the course of a weekend without any concept that it would be as widely read as it is today. The side by side rant thing worked pretty well, i guess. I've tweaked and pulled and pushed here and there to fit stuff in (like the 'status' bar section), and spent an entire weekend trying to make the forums match the flavor of the base website. People seem to like the site, and maybe this lack of polish is part of it's charm. I've seen plenty of sites where the re-design changed the site so drastically you wondered if it was the same website. Personally, I prefer re-designs that are more derivative that completely changing.

I've often considered re-designing the site - starting fresh, working out the bugs, giving it a new look and feel. There is pressure to provide 'skyscraper' ad space on the page - to push the comic to the side to allow for advertising space that actually sells. This, of course, is one of the problems with advertising. The advertiser wants readers to pay attention to the add. The website visitor is not interested in the ad, they are interested in the content they came to see. On a lot of websites, the solution is to smack big ads right in the middle of the site content, or use the dreaded pop-up windows.

Well, I don't have any plans to make those kind of changes. I will not compromise the content of this site just so i can sell advertising. Of course, if I could figure out how to provide effective advertising without resorting to 'intrusive' methods, i certainly wouldn't have any worries about paying the rent next month. ^_^

This doesn't mean that I'm going to give up on advertising, mind you - it just means that it's more of a challenge to provide effective advertising while at the same time not compromising the integrity of the content of the site. Patch and I have a lot of ideas that I'm going to look into trying out over the next few weeks to see if any of these ideas can work. Solving this requires not only respect for the content and the readers, but understanding the nature of megatokyo readers as well.

The status bar piece of space is the most ripe for better development. The days of missing weeks worth of comics is (hopefully) behind me for the most part, and i just think there are better ways to use the space. I want to create a combination news / information / status / webcomics to check out / this week sponsored by / newsbox thing to sit there that can provide a lot of info in a very small space, and leave the rants open to what they should be left open for - mindless prattle. I'm going to look into designing that today.

You'd think my email woes would have been solved by suddenly having all this time to work on MT, do email, etc. Heh. Well, the big thing about email is, if you let it slide for a day or two, suddenly, you are facing a huge backup. I'm spending today to try to clear that backup and start my new 'treat email with respect!' program. Speaking of email - if you emailed anyone here within the last three weeks, at either megatokyo.com or fredart.com addresses, and it bounced - please try sending it again now. It turns out that we had a DNS problem crop up that was directing a lot of mail into oblivion. It's all fixed now, and things have been working fine since Saturday.

Kei, my publisher from I.C. Entertainment, put together a bunch of Frequently Asked Questions to help reduce some of the email load they are getting, and I've made that list available here. It answers a lot of questions about the MT Book, AmeriManga, and other MT Merchandise issues, including stuff about the Kimiko Blanket and Megatokyo Plushies. I'm starting to put together some general FAQ material, as well as work on the character and story pages. My goal is that by the start of the new year, it will be easy to find answers to most of your questions from the site itself.

Ok, i'm going to go sit down and get back to reading the 520 emails left to read in my mailbox. Oh, the rant image above is actually a picture out of my window at the snowfall we had on Monday. I did a lot of writing for 'warmth' on Monday - the heavy snow that day was actually perfect weather for it - even though i did freeze my ass off next to that big window.

Speaking of 'virtual' real estate, I want to mention that we are still working on the megatokyocity.net webhosting project - it's behind schedule because the backend is taking us longer to get together than we planned (please don't try the link, the site is not up yet). Thank you for all your interest in it, and I'll be sure to provide more information as soon as it's available.

"Daaaaannng...."
Friday - December 6, 2002
[Seraphim] - 11:50:00
Daaaannngggg, people. After reading the 'magazine model' thread in the forums, if ya'll think you are ever seeing me in person - you are INSANE.

Piro regularly gets emails asking if I really look like Seraphim. It is usually phrased 'is she REALLY that HOT?' Piro always says (and fully believes) that I am. You know what they say - love makes people blind. Personally, I feel that loves make people stupid. You say tomato, I say tahmahto. But frankly, I am not that hot and I am the first to admit it. We actually have discussions where I insist Piro must add some additional pounds to Seraphim. In my Camera Angles rant, I mentioned I could use some favorable camera angles.

I have always thought that beauty/handsomeness is a simple equation that depends on varying amounts of distance, lighting, and level of intoxication. It's a tale as old as time - "he saw her across a crowded room". The distance variable is obvious, what is implied is the fact that it is a dimly lit, smoky room and he's had a few. The equation is Further Darker Drunker = Better Looking. Or:

F D I = BL.

It's part chemistry and part physics. I used to have another factor in the equation but the math got too complicated. Everybody on the other side of the room always looks better. But get them in front of you in a well lit area while you are stone cold sober... Whoa, what were you thinking?

None of us RL people strongly resemble the characters in Megatokyo but Seraphim is probably the closest since Fred changes the hairstyle and glasses to match what I do wear.

Seraphim is actually a better representation of the RL me when I first met Piro six years ago. I was thin, young, trendy, and out there. Piro was the exact opposite - deck shoes, chinos, button down collars, and a 5 dollar haircut. I introduced him to sweater vests, a hairstylist, and trendy footwear. For as high as he has risen on the 'coolness' scale - that is how far I have sunk. I'm not trendy anymore but I am comfortable!

(Disclaimer - the following is not to be construed as a pity party - I know I'm the luckiest person alive).

Things have changed drastically for Piro and I since the beginning. The first real sign was at the time of the "What's with the knee brace" comic. A little Real Life sneaking into comic land. My knee had suddenly swollen up like a soccer ball. Finally, after a year or more of going to the doctor with fatigue and malaise and other invisible complaints (like pain), I had a visible symptom.

All the doctor had ever done for me was ask what illicit street drugs I was taking, how much alcohol I was consuming daily, and then she would prescribe NASAL spray. She was freaking crazy for nasal spray. Freak. I had the good fortune to be scheduled with another doctor who looked at the x-rays and blood work and diagnosed a chronic autoimmune disorder. Unfortunately, he left the practice soon after, but I also had the good fortune to require the services of a maxillofacial surgeon who I truly believe saved my life in more ways than one.

He is the one who finally got me in to see the elite field of specialists who treat my disorders. There have been many days where I couldn't walk 50 feet without collapsing, but Fred is there to carry my bag, schlep along side me at my decrepit pace, and sit with me when I need to rest (all while working full time and doing Megatokyo).

As the wheel of fortune turns, having been at the bottom, I can tell we are slowly headed up again. It's still hard for me to reflect on the person I was back then – both physically (appearance, endurance, strength) and personality. Sometimes you can only see what has been lost along the way. Even though I don't agree with the idealized, perfect images of females (including Megatokyo characters), I actually like Fred's representation of Seraphim. It gives me a chance to see out of the corner of my eye what I can't bear to look at straight on - myself before I became ill. Yes, a lot has changed but at least I haven't lost my sassy attitude.

What started out as a funny rant just started to seem false, although, the 'magazine model' thread WAS cold. I don't want to get anyone down. I have been very lucky - most times it takes many, many more years for people to get correctly diagnosed and start treatment for this. I also have Piro, who has unfortunately gotten more than he ever bargained for.

I do hope to make it to some cons sometime soon when I have the energy to travel again. They are big, crowded, dimly lit rooms - all the better for a high BL rating!

"clipping feathers"
Friday - December 13, 2002
[Piro] - 27:50:00
It's been an interesting month since I lost my senses and started doing this stuff full time. The support from the MT community has been mind boggling. Both Seraphim and I thank you very much, and I hope to continue doing whatever the heck it is I'm doing right that seems to warrant this kind of support.

To be honest, I feel horribly guilty because to me the comic hasn't been up to snuff for the past few weeks. The current story arc is missing something - its not horrible, but I know I can do better. The artwork has been a struggle, and I have been finishing and posting comics with the belief that half of doing something is doing it - waiting till things are perfect is why many people never do anything at all. Do what you can now, make the next ones better.

I know why I'm having these problems. Some of it comes from a combination of writers block and artists block, some of it comes from the mad scramble to keep myself afloat and the planning needed to make sure I can still make my rent payments in April. Most of it, really, has to do with the transition from doing this as a part time hobby to doing... whatever this is... full time.

Recently, I answered a few questions for a student who was writing a paper on the career they wanted to pursue. Since I am technically a 'comic' artist now, I said sure. Then I read some of the questions... "name 3 schools that offer the necessary training for cartooning." "How many years of training are required for a professional cartooning job?" "Range of starting salary?"

uhhh...

It dawned on me that I could answer these questions if I was talking about being an Architect, but I had no clue how to answer them based on what I am now. Am I really a cartoonist? I dunno.

Humans love to categorize and organize things. We break up time into hours, days and years. Everything has to have a name, a history, an understanding of it's origins and must be indexed somewhere on Google. Part of this comes from the fact that the human mind really can't absorb and understand everything. We need this information available to help us connect the dots of everyday living. As amazing as the brain is, most of what we work on is interpolated between the small bits of factual information we take in. Much of what we know is not based on personal experience, but learned information. Humans have a remarkable ability to do great things with limited information. One could also say that the various control and or influence over information can have drastic effects on human history. Personally, I feel the concept of montage works not only in film and art, but can be applied to all thought processes (for example - film and video are nothing but a series of still frames flashed before our eyes at a so many frames per second. Our brains fill in the gaps, interpret it as movement, and we understand what we are seeing).

The reason I bring this up is because I'm finding myself pondering the question of what exactly it is I'm doing. A 'webcomic artist'? Yeah, but what is that really? Isn't there more to it than that? Isn't that just one of the things I do?

When I was in high school, I dreamed of being an animator for Disney or Bluth some other studio. (Japanese anime wasn't really around when i was in high school.) This was back in 1986 - before 'The Little Mermaid' came out, and the Animation industry in the states was not exactly healthy. I felt that I needed something stable - a real career - not following some fantasy path that might lead to a dead end. So I became an architect instead. I took an established path, an existing category.

I don't really regret this. I think that if I had studied to be an animator, I would have been pretty heavily indoctrinated with styles that were developed by other people, in stead of being free to, over time, develop my own.

The struggle to find a 'path' in life is something every young person deals with. Colleges and Universities have made fortunes by becoming the 'gateways' to these paths. All you have to do is take the right course of study, get the degree that gives you the 'pass' for that path, then off you go into the industry to make a living, get married, settled down buy a house and have 2 1/2 kids. What i'm doing now doesn't really fit into any category. Yet somehow, all of the things i've done, both good, bad and otherwise, have made me what I am today.

Maybe I can't put a clear label on what I am. Some people don't fit well into categories. All they can do is find spaces in between them. Maybe its in these in-between spaces that I'm defining myself, maybe that's why the paths there and the labels for them are so elusive.

Ah well, I hate labels anyway.

Labels aside, there is some structure to what I'm doing. Continuing with Megatokyo is, of course, one of the primary activities of my new 'career'. Megatokyo really has been a vehicle that I've used to build not only a series that people seem to enjoy, but to introduce them to other things I might do. The reaction to 'warmth' has been very gratifying, even though people know very little about it yet. I've found that what I am learning how to control and manage, isn't projects as much as it is Creativity, Inspiration, Raw Labor and The Other Stuff.

Raw labor is easy. You kick yourself in the pants and make yourself draw. If the creativity and the inspiration are there, this is really not as hard as it sounds, it just takes discipline. Hell, without the day job in the way, this is easy.

The Other Stuff is also not so bad. It includes things like managing your business and finances so you can survive, plan ahead, and then the biggest part - spend time with the people you love and actually have a *life*. I actually have a better handle on that now than I ever have. I'm far less stressed.

Creativity is funny. It's not like a faucet, you can't turn it on and off, but you can learn how to coax it along and even 'fake' it using old bits of creative output laying around when you are dry as an old well. Truly inspired strips come from when your creativity is clicking along. Sometimes you literally 'got nothing', and you rely on bits of dried creativity that you try to bring back to life to get you along to the next bit.

Inspiration is also a funny thing. My old schedule was very hectic. I left out a lot of things that seem frivolous, but in truth can have a very indirect bearing on your creativity, raw labor and other stuff as well. Reading, watching tv, going shopping, watching anime, playing some games - I write stories about life. Kinda hard to do that when you don't have one. It's nice to have one again.

I've been wondering why I identify so much with "Haibane Renmei", (Charcoal Feather Federation), a new anime based on several doujinshi by Yoshitoshi Abe (Serial Experiments Lain). I enjoyed Lain, but it felt so empty. With Haibane, Abe has created an oddly remarkable story and world that probably won't appeal to everyone, but for some reason stirs some deeper things in me. The Haibane are exceptional creatures, but they only exist in between things. They don't really understand what they are, but they manage to get thru and take every day one day at a time. It's a remarkably comforting anime. Even the odd mechanics of Abe's little world isn't so much fantastic as... well, just there. It works. It's Ok. Its just how things are.

Inspiration is valuable when it helps you challenge existing categories, existing perceptions and preconceived notions. Like Abe, I'd never do this just for the sake of shocking or annoying people - that's a very shallow reason to push boundaries. Tweaking boundaries helps you find those odd little turns where you can often see something profound that's just a little out of reach.

Out of reach things often defy categorization and labels... personally, I prefer it that way.

"hahaha..."
Sunday - December 15, 2002
[Dom] - 21:00:00
Gee, ya think?

"Schnitzelbank"
Wednesday - December 18, 2002
[Dom] - 00:00:00
Right, so I'm back.

What does this mean? For one thing, we won't get clunkers like how Super Moe Moe Ball was handled. I partially take responsibility for that one, since I cooked up the idea but didn't follow it up with the two-week absence. Future GameWorlds will be... better treatments, once Fred and I get into the groove on these sorts of things.

We're back into the thick of things in one way, but the time of year isn't exactly conducive to getting ahead on comics, like Fred has always wanted. We're at least planning more than one or two strips ahead, which is a step up from a couple years ago.

In random news, I've finished Suikoden III. I don't quite know why, because I was never drawn to the first two games. I mean, I wasn't really able to get into Final Fantasy 6(J)/3(US) because there were just too many people without enough character between them (14 playable, if I remember right). And 108 was a number I couldn't comprehend being at all manageable, so I stayed away from the others.

Suikoden III solved some of these problems by creating others. See, you have to play three different main characters through three chapters each, one chapter at a time. And then there are a couple of extra chapters thrown in for flavor. And through the triple perspective, you manage to get a pretty good picture of many of the characters.

The problem is, you don't get much else. The pacing is horrible. HORRIBLE. It tries to be freeform and still flowing, but it just plain doesn't work. There were parts of the game I simply despised and wished I could skip, but no, it was an ENTIRE CHAPTER of the scenario designers laughing at the people trying to play the game and get an iota of story...

And then there's my eternal problem with 3D games, the goddamn camera. Is it so hard for Konami to make a camera you can rotate, or at least try and fix in a position of some sort? Apparently, it's the Holy Grail of games to have a camera that's better than shitty. The Suikoden III camera jumps around as wildly as a baboon in heat, turning otherwise straight jogs into an exercise in "play keep-up with the camera". Fucking annoying... I'm going to go back to Shinobi for a while and L1 a lot, just to prove to myself that some 3D games have cameras that are at least manageable.

Oh well. I played it, I kinda liked it, I beat it, and that's the story I'm going to remember.

On the manga front, I started--and finished--reading Ai Yori Aoshi, which, tellingly enough, runs in the same magazine as Berserk and Futari Ecchi. But for some reason (probably because first impressions are important, and it's easier to flip pages in manga than it is to fast-forward the part of a show you like) I liked it. I still hate Love Hina with a particular passion, but Ai Yori Aoshi doesn't bother me as much. Maybe I've become more inured to fan service. I flip past all the gratuitous fan shots and stick to the story, which coheres a bit better than LH's sprawl.

I finished AiAo in a day, leading me back into the lack of manga problem. At least Raijin comes weekly, even if I already have read the early Slam Dunk and City Hunter. It's still weekly, and having something in front of me to read is good...

"Be Just or Be Dead"
Sunday - December 22, 2002
[Dom] - 21:00:00
First: Yes, we were down. No, we didn't like it either. And yes, we should be back to normal shortly. Here endeth my tale.

On to Guilty Gear XX (X2, Igzex, whatever). I first played this sucker at this year's Anime Expo, where I pissed people off with May and my endless Guile-like cries of "summahsal!". I loved Guilty Gear X, so the opportunity to get the second round of an established Guilty Gear player-Mikey, the Korean master of GGX and XX, is also known as Crackpr0n... love him or hate him, he's gooood-was too tempting to pass up. Free play at an arcade? Sign me up!

I can't say much positive about the game's balance, but damn, I still love it. The character designs and the animation are both damn beautiful (notable exception, the drawing of I-no on the Japanese box art is butt ugly), and Faust is my favorite character in a fighting game, like, ever. Just based on style. And the fact that I want Mikey to cosplay as my Faustino so I can throw him out of a paper bag.

The gameplay is just under the radar for me; it's simple enough that I can just pick up a random character, learn one or two of their moves, and do pretty well. It's also got complexities that people keep explaining to me but I know I won't be able to do without sticking $20 worth of quarters in there. Knowing when to Roman Cancel or Yellow Burst instead of waiting to blow off that super at the end of a future combo? False Roman Cancel? Impossible Dust? I can't do that crap. I just wanna hit punch and watch the whale come out (Rock on, May!).

I realized something else when I was playing PS2 GGXX, though. Had nothing to do with the game itself, and had everything to me. I can't play fighting games without a good arcade stick anymore. I can't even imagine Soul Calibur 2 on the PS2 controller, because I will always hate the standard PlayStation D-Pad, while the analog stick just doesn't cut it. I used to be satisfied with the old Japanese Saturn controller for fighting games, and the Fighting Pad for the Dreamcast worked on those same principles.

But after playing Capcom vs SNK 2 on Xbox Live, I started realizing that I hate controllers for fighting games. It wasn't just the Xbox controller, either. It was just frustrating using a d-pad just so I could talk. I wanted to pull out the X-Arcade or anything that would offer a better experience than the D-Pad... but alas, it was not to be, I stuck with the headset and got my ass handed to me by someone whose moves I could read a mile away... the dragon punch motion was denied to me by a d-pad, and when I play wakeup games with Joe, I like those few frames of invincibility.

But yes. The next gaming purchase I'm going to make is going to be a decent arcade stick, followed by GGXX or Soul Calibur 2 (whichever comes first).

"little good things"
Tuesday - December 24, 2002
[Piro] - 09:30:02
Boy what a fuggled up couple of days it's been :)

Things actually started to crumble last Thursday and earlier, when I had to face the fact that the Megatokyo graphic novel was going to be late. The printer had busted their asses to try to make the print window but we were unable to make it. The binder was overbooked, so there really was no way around it. Still, it's like someone pointed out to me - often books are delayed by months, not just a few weeks.

I did get a copy the latest Vampire Princess Miyu book by IC Entertainment called 'Encounters', which was printed and bound by the same printer and binders... damn, it looks good. The MT books will look really good when they come out. I put together a card you can print out and give for Christmas if you had planned this as a Christmas gift - Of course, here it is Christmas Eve and most people are only just now finding the site again after the outage...

Yeah, the outage. I wont go into details, but it was serious enough to take out the main router in our network. Because of the holidays, with people traveling, not available, and everything else, it was a nightmare getting things strung back together again. We all owe Ukyo, Cortana and Kelly a great big 'thank you' for all the hard work and lack of sleep. Oh, and of course, we owe a big thank you to Makoto-chan herself, our lovely server, who has been kindly answering questions regarding the outage in the forums. She's a good girl, she is.

Oh, and how aptly named Makoto is...

For me, the outage was pure stress. I tell you, when what has become your livelihood goes crashing and burning and disappearing off the net, its amazing how upsetting that can be. In reality, a few days down, right around Christmas, is no big deal. But combined with the holiday stress, it was just over the top this year. But you gotta suck it up, do the best you can, and get thru it.

I spent yesterday doing all of my Christmas shopping. I always wait till the 24th to shop, but this year I managed to get out and do it all on the 23rd. Seraphim and I do so much together that its a pain to shop for each other, and its such a tight Christmas this year that i've had to be really careful (no worries - all the support and purchases and whatnot that all of you have made in the past month will really benefit me in the up coming months - just not right this moment :P)

Speaking of support, that's one of the other things. Even though the auction for the broken miho drawing ended at $1,200, doesn't really mean much when the high bidder doesn't respond ^^;; It's been seven days, so i guess its time to email the next bidder and see if they are interested. This is why I don't like auctions. Oh well, no big deal, really. Worst case, i'll find someone willing to spend a few bucks to get it, or just keep it with my piles of other drawings. :) It's pretty moot at this point.

So, that's my depressing christmas rant. ^^;; Actually, its not so bad - the holidays are all about a lot of little things that just sort of happen and you deal with, combined with what is in the end, a lot of good things. Little good things, really. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I have trouble with christmas and other holiday special comics because i always end up dragged around so much around the holidays, and this year is no exception. I've finally got a decent toehold on the christmas special comic, and you can expect that today before the end of the day. Normal comic schedule starts back up on Friday.

From everyone here at Megatokyo and Fredart Studios (dang, that makes it sound like bunches of people!) I want to wish everyone a happy holidays. Be safe, and I'll see everyone later :)

"Epiphany"
Monday - December 30, 2002
[Seraphim] - 15:00:02
I was surprised to see on a major cable news network report that January 6, or the Epiphany, was the day Jesus was baptized. I had always thought it was the day the Magi arrived in Bethlehem and marks the start of Carnival. Being as cynical and skeptical as I am, I researched it and I did find an encyclopedia and a dictionary reference that cited the Epiphany as the celebration of Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist and also Jesus' miracle at Cana (turning water into wine). Hey, it's always a good day when I learn something new. All seven citations did, however, first mention the common belief that it was the arrival of the Wisemen. How could anyone miss that fact in all the citations? Hmm, sounds like they aren't giving us a complete story. Anyone surprised?

I'm not so much concerned that the network got a religious fact wrong or incomplete but that they got it wrong or incomplete at all. What good are half truths? We heed what they tell us without thought. They determine what the story is in the first place and then beat us it to death with it. Why are there even multiple news stations? They all have the same story. Whether it is 24/7 coverage of the snipers full of speculation and fiction or the pending Iraqi war. I am appalled by the shows - Wargames: Iraq, The Lowdown Showdown, Countdown Iraq... This is not responsible reporting.

They are playing right into the hands of those who want war the most. This war mongering is the greatest diversionary tactic ever. Has anyone seen or heard decent coverage on the fact the economy is swirling the bowl as I write this? What is really going on in Afghanistan? What about the citizens of the other nations we are detaining in Guantanamo for a year? Do we forget if the media isn't blitzing us with it? Why aren't the overpaid network talking heads asking these questions? Is the media really so naive or are they actually just the mouthpiece for the government. The war would make for great ratings for them. Is peace really so boring and unprofitable?

When Piro and I want to know what's really going on we watch Canadian news, listen to the BBC on National Public Radio, or read foreign newspapers. An excellent source of links to online newspapers is the Internet Public Library. They have thousands of links to newspapers all over the world. NOT that they don't have their own biases but two sides of a story are always better than one. I don't want to tell you how or what to think - just to think. Whenever you start getting complacent - think about the Epiphany and think again.

I am continually amazed by the diversity of the Megatokyo audience. It spans all ages, races, and nationalities with a breadth and depth of interests and talents that amazes me. I wish my Mother knew you. She is a fantastic lady and a dynamo who has devoted her retirement to volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and a local food pantry. But her real talent lies in hooking people up with resources or the people who can help them.

One time I off handedly mentioned to her that Piro had A LOT of clothes he had outgrown and I was trying to clean out the closet. I've frankly never seen so many T-shirts outside of a retail establishment. Mom called around and found a family who had a house fire and lost everything and the husband could use the clothes that he had outgrown. We gave everything to them, from jeans to heavy boots, which got him back to work. It felt good. So, I off handedly mention worthy organizations that someone reading this can participate in or just talk about and get the word out. You never know when a word in the right ear will do make a world of difference. So, talented people, take a look at Bugles Across America, which provides a network of buglers who volunteer to perform at local military funerals. Another organization is Angel Flight, (you know Seraphim has to like this one!) where private pilots provide non-emergency medical transportation to those in need. Piro and I also donate our used eyeglasses to the Lions Recycle for Sight. Lions Club International collects used prescription glasses through Lenscrafters stores and distributes them in developing nations. There are also donation centers in France, Spain, South Africa, and Australia.

Have a safe and happy New Year!

Seraphim

"666 plus 1337=2003"
Wednesday - January 1, 2003
[Piro] - 14:45:02
The equation above has been pointed out to me by several people at this point, and I have to admit, it's rather amusing. You take '3v1l l33t', which can also be written as '666' (evil) and '1337' ('leet'), add them together, and you get 666 1337=2003. How odd.

Of course, evil is a complicated subject, and the disturbing number combination of '666' is not to be used lightly. The whole concept of 'l33t' is in and of itself ridiculous and overused (yes, Megatokyo is partly responsible for this overuse, but at least I am aware of it). Adding these together, taking a cue from a t-shirt design that to this day is enigmatic and open to interpretation... you could take final leap of logic and say that maybe 2003 will be a good year for Megatokyo.

What better way to kick in the new year than to pull a grand Megatokyo tradition - miss a comic. :P Yes, all is indeed right with the world.

Regardless of math or petty number divination, the real life signs are that it might actually be a very good year for MT. At this point you all know that i'm a bit of a pessimist about things, downplaying things, always worrying about when things are gonna start fall apart. The truth is, I don't think things could be going much better for MT. Of course, there are always the little pitfalls - i suffer at least 12 or so a week (a good friend of mine once shook his head after hearing about my weekly adventures and told me that I was like a bicyclist riding behind a manure truck). Things always seem to work out, one way or another, and I keep plodding on. Problems get resolved, new ones come up, its part of life, part of business, grist for the angst mill.

Someone once asked me if i jumped up and down and shouted for joy when I 'got the publishing deal' with I.C. Entertainment. The truth is, it was a very stressful time. There was no jumping around - Seraphim and I went out to have a quiet dinner at the local Japanese restaurant to try to absorb and think about where things were going (mmm, California Rolls) ^^;;. It was a weighty decision, and it wasn't made lightly. Going into the unknown like that is always kinda scary. When you do something like this, there is a lot of work, a lot of responsibility, and your reputation on the line if you can't manage what you agree to do. No one is going to do the work for you, no one is going to hold your hand thru the process. I didn't know if things with I.C. would work out, no matter how comfortable I felt after getting to know them.

Thankfully, working with I.C. Entertainment has been very reasonable, flexible, and rewarding. The MT book is going to look better than I had hoped, and even though we are late (which really is my fault - it took me two weeks longer to get material finished than I had hoped) Megatokyo - Volume 1 will ship at the end of this week. Huzzah. :)

November and December of last year were a bit of a whirlwind for me. November was flat out insane. The book, merchandise, keeping things afloat - I had to jump thru a lot of hoops to get things geared up for 'Full Time Fred'. The good news is, the book got done, the merchandise made it to the ThinkGeek/Megatokyo store, and all of you were very generous in your purchases this year. I would like to thank everyone who got stuff from the store this Christmas - I have renewed faith in my ability to do this stuff full time now. :)

Of course, not every month is 'Christmas', and there is a whole year ahead. The trick is to not put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify, do lots of different things, that's how a company survives. My plan for this year is... well, a little on the insane side. Let's look at everything on my plate as of right now:

First and foremost, there is the Megatokyo site, which will continue on as a free, 3 per week (usually) webcomic. MT actually suffered a little right after I was laid off (not that it wasn't suffering before). Things fell into a bit of a lull with the whole Moe Moe ball sequence (which was too long and poorly executed) and recently I've found that i was loosing my grip on the story - when you completely rewrite scripts after all the art is done because it doesn't feel right, it means something isn't right. I took today as a 'In Service' day to sit down and do what I haven't done in four months - write. Hammer out the rest of chapter three, in detail. See how things fit together, see where better ties between things can be made. When I do this, i can add better layers of story and humor to the strips that has be so missing lately. My little writing session yesterday and today has so far resulted in a cleaner, clearer, and far better series of strips. I feel a hell of a lot better about the rest of Chapter 3 (29 more comics, folks)

The Megatokyo store at ThinkGeek is very much a success, and you can look forward to all sorts of interesting new product ideas. I went with ThinkGeek to be able to provide better, more reasonably priced merchandise and more unique and interesting items. I'll continue to work with ThinkGeek to pull together more cool stuff this year.

The Megatokyo books. If everything goes well, we should have a total of three Megatokyo graphic novels out in 2003. Volume 2 will be out in March. Volume three will come when Chapter 4 is done (September, if things go well)

Seems like a minor thing, but I am also working on an Artbook for sometime this spring. For this i will have to dig out a lot of old artwork and see if it is in any kind of condition for scanning. For Megatokyo, i scan everything in at 300 dpi to start with, for years I never did that with Fredart, so some things i have scanned there are missing. A shame, in some respects, but you never know what you are going to be doing years later when you start these things.

The other rather large project I am working on is 'warmth', which will debut in AmeriManga #4 in March. I'm getting a little head start on it and doing a 3 page teaser for AmeriManga #3 just to get my feet wet. Thats 32 pages of manga per month. Warmth doesn't have a huge cast like MT does, and no where near so many story threads, but the goal is to be able to explore the threads in far far more depth. Anyways, its a LOTTA work, but it's also very much a part of reaching my goals.

One other thing I am doing this year is attending a lot more anime cons. I'm trying to hit most of the areas of the country the best I can. In testament to how quickly time flies, I can't believe that I have a convention to go to next weekend - Ohayocon, down in Columbus, Ohio. Dom and Asmodeus will also be at this con, so if you live in the area, be sure to come down next weekend. Oh, and I believe Seraphim will be coming with me - this will be her first public appearance. :) I have no clue what we are going to do yet. I'll post a full list of cons I will be attending in my next rant.

What else? Well, damn, that's enough. I still have a lot of work yet to do on the Megatokyo site, the Fredart site needs to be updated at least once per week, I need to launch the 'warmth' website, keep up with email (i've been trying, actually), commission work (i have two projects that I have to get to very soon - and i want to finish these before i consider others. Merekat and I are talking about her rendering the 'Broken Miho' image, I'm still scribbling out a whole series of the female MT cast in 'wings' of some sort, i have a set of drawings of the three Warmth girls that I just started yesterday.

The depths of my insanity even go so far as to reopen the possibility of getting my 'circle' into next winter's Comike in Tokyo (I have an idea for a Haibane Renmei doujin and a Clannad doujin (which I'm not too sure of until i have a clearer idea of the Clannad story))...

but that's a year off, and a lot can happen in a year. If i am as productive as i was in December, I'm screwed. If i can really buckle down and start drawing like a crazed madman, I might actually be able to pull it all off.

So don't expect me to whine any less this year. That wouldn't be the Piro way. :P

Despite the desires of some to descend our already messed up world into wars, strife, chaos and other wonderful things that threaten to wrest control of our lives away from us, I say screw them. It's our world too, and 2003 IS gonna be a good year if i have anything to say about it.

Happy New Year everyone.

"Save it for later"
Sunday - January 5, 2003
[Dom] - 13:00:00
Woof. What a vacation. I'm finally home, and around 3 AM tomorrow is going to mark the first time I've been in the same city for more than 24 hours. It's kind of a relief. I've been playing Baldur's Gate II (again) in what spare time I've been able to scrounge, and that's just because my roommate stole Planescape: Torment out of my room as I started. I don't really blame him...

But anyway, this rant will be a short one. My brain is really scattered right now, and somehow, I'm supposed to be able to deal with OhayoCon at the end of the week. On the plus side, I get to torment there, and on the minus side, there's apparently a decent chance of snow in Ohio. And you see, this is a problem because I'm a California boy born and bred. Snow, like sex, is something that happens to other people. It's something I go to Lake Tahoe to see, or maybe a Museum of Natural History. I'm pretty sure that I'll need to be sedated before heading out into any of that cold stuff. Well. That, or Fred and I are going to have a snowball fight. Who knows...

The other thing I want to talk about is Yoshi. I've decided that Yoshi is the ultimate lifeform. Don't be fooled by his(?) cowardly flight at the first sign of pain. Ignore those stupid boots and the stubby little arms. Realize this: Yoshi has evolved to the point where his digestive and reproductive functions are entirely devoted to the production of weapons of war. If I ate an apple and pooped out a grenade, it would be disgusting, but it would also be something like what Yoshi does, in cartoony form. Just... think about it. I'm out. See you in Ohio!

"Episeidion Plero"
Wednesday - January 8, 2003
[Dom] - 01:00:00
A week or two ago, my roommate decided to re-install the Xbox mod chip, just in time for Panzer Dragoon Orta to arrive. But with the last few days of my existence devoted to work and Baldur's Gate, I didn't get around to playing it. I'd already had a crack or two at it at work, and was busy doing... um... I forget what, now.

So, tonight, on my way out to stick in my colored laundry, I looked at our naked Xbox (Cortana seems to have decided that the Xbox is best without its shell, to maximize the damage from spilled Pepsi) and thought "Hmm. I think I'll play Orta for a sec. Might as well see how it is."

Five hours, one forgotten load of laundry, and six pairs of soiled underwear later, I realize why the guys at work have been drooling at even the slightest possibility that Orta will lead to Azel/Saga 2. This game is SWEET.

Where do I start? The graphics are all I imagined when I started thinking about the Panzer world. You can play the original Panzer Dragoon, and while it looked good and played better back for the Saturn, it sure does seem old now. The little touches everywhere are beautiful--the dragon's lock-ons change slightly as your dragon levels up, the new Berserks are well done, and even damage shredding the dragon's wings looks awesome.

And they put in a whole boatload of what I liked about Azel/Saga--they've played around with the action points and the maneuvering system, turning it into the Glide Meter and the ability to move around bosses. They've made leveling up the dragon a much more strategic affair. Do you want to level up Glide, so you can shoot down more missiles and heal for more? Do you want to level up Heavy Wing, so you can lay down the mighty beatings? Or do you want to play it safe and add some more lock-ons to Base, while adding to its always-fun Berserk? Just switch to whatever you want to level up just before that power-up arrives. It's easy, it's fun, and it pays off fat dividends in strategy.

And it controls like a dream--well, almost. I just want a better Xbox controller...

But that's enough whoring myself to a dragon. I need to get some sleep, head to work, and then get ready for Ohayocon. See you there.

"warm hands"
Wednesday - January 15, 2003
[Piro] - 17:30:00
I seriously think that I may have taken on way too much.

Last week, after some prompting from my publisher, it dawned on me that the amount of work i have to do between now and February 10th is... well, almost physically impossible. Here's what I need to have done by the 10th of next month:

- 20 to 25 pages of 'warmth'
- 11 MT comics
- full color cover for amerimanga #4
- all material for Megatokyo book 2
- full color cover for Megatokyo book 2
- traveling to Katsukon on feb 13

And you people wonder why i don't answer email or write rants every day ^_^;;;

Part of the problem is that I am producing two major projects - Megatokyo and Warmth, and it's just one guy (me). Most manga-ka have assistants who help them put things together, and that's usually for one project at a time. Best i have been able to do so far is one page per day. If i don't manage more than that in the next few weeks i'm screwed.

ah, but enough whining. I'm pretty excited about both MT and Warmth right now, so it's very much worth the effort. It's always a challenge getting large projects off the ground. I've also enlisted the help of some of the people around me to do some of the work that I don't have time to do. Anyways, as a result, don't expect less whining from me this month on account of working full time. I've managed to fill up the extra hours and then some. ^^;;

I want to say a big thank you to all the people at Ohayocon for a fun, relaxing and pretty decent con experience for Dom, Asmodeus and myself. Thanks for having us, and thanks to everyone who came by to see us at the table. Rather amazingly IC Entertainment sold every last one of the MT books they brought with them. By Saturday afternoon. All the AmeriManga #1 too.

Which reminds me, yes the Megatokyo Volume 1 books have not only shipped, but most people should have them by now. If you ordered a book and haven't received it yet, you should be getting it very soon. I didn't get mine till Thursday of last week.

The books look pretty darn good, actually. Feedback so far is that most people seem to like what we did with it, which is a huge relief - you get so damn close to what you're doing that you don't know if it looks good or not.

Writing is, as always, the biggest and most time consuming thing I do. Warmth has been percolating right along for almost two months now. Once I dusted off my old notes and tried to bring the story back to life, I faced the challenge of taking feeble formative threads and turning it into a real solid story. I'm so used to doing one page at a time strips that doing bigger chunks like this is proving to be somewhat challenging.

The other thing that is hard to do is to stop thinking, writing and start drawing. In an effort to get off of dead center on the creative process for warmth i offered to do a little 3 page teaser for Amerimanga #3, which comes out in February (a month earlier than 'warmth's official debut in March). This turned out to be an excellent exercise - it gave me a chance to just make the characters actually interact, and to see how that felt. The teaser came out really well (here's one of the frames from it which i posted on fredart). The biggest problem with Warmth is i feel the need to have more backgrounds than I normally do for MT - that takes time.

And, of course, what a time for my computers to start giving me headaches. Because of my more frequent travels this year, I needed to set up a print server so that i could get the printer off of my laptop so that Seraphim can print her papers and whatnot while i'm gone (why? Usb ports on her computer are fried, add in ports didn't work, 25 ft printer cables get chewed in half by the cats (i've gone thru 8 cables in the past 5 years), wireless print server was the best option) and that took a good three hours to get working properly. I need to rebuild both the main desktop that seraphim uses and my laptop - like any fine windoze solution, you have to wipe it clean and re-install every so often - its been over a year, and its starting to show in the systems. But, of course, i don't have time to do this, so i have to live with it.

the other thing that's driving me nuts is the system performance of my main machine. I've been doing a lot more photoshop and illustrator work recently, and the 'grind time' is really starting to get on my nerves. See, my main computer isn't a desktop, its a laptop - a darn nice one, really (Dell Inspirion 8100 - remember, i bought it last year), and i have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc all plugged into it. I store all the MT files on a separate hard drive over on Seraphim's desktop - it's a system that works pretty well, but some of the graphics i've been doing recently have really been testing the ability of my system to work with them. (1.13ghz p3, 256k, and the lovely speed of a laptop's hard drive). I was ready to rip my hair out while working on the cover for MT book (160 meg pshop file). Portability is nice, but most times its plugged in like Lain on a two week binge in the wired. There's also the fact that when on your lap it has a tendency to burn off layers of skin, even thru jeans.

So, just like everyone else who suddenly finds themselves dreaming of new systems, i'm luxuriating in the system dreams only possible when you wont be able to afford even a reasonable new system for a while. What's most troublesome is that i've even been giving into fantasies educed by my lifelong case of Mac envy.

Those of you far younger than me may not remember Mac Envy, but it was particularly prevalent back when windows machines couldn't even come close to matching Macs for performance with graphics and desktop publishing stuffs. A lot of it is probably more mystique than anything, and i have my share of friends who smack me around any time i talk about getting a mac instead of another hobbled PC upgrade.

It's rare for me to drool over equipment (that's largo's territory) but the Apple 23" Cinema display at the Comp USA had me standing and staring like a befuddled schoolboy for at least 15 minutes when i first saw it. I've even sat down and priced out systems. Mac g4 dual processors 1 gig ram 23" display almost eight thousand dollars wow i wonder what that would be per month?...

But then, i shake myself out of it, and sigh. It's nice to sit and say to yourself its time for a new boxen, because the one you have is getting in your way, yadda yadda yadda... and it's pretty sad when even just adding more ram (which would require all new ram in this laptop - not just adding it) seems like more trouble than i want to deal with.

that's right, the battery in this thing is starting go. Maybe i do need a new machine...

"Hahahahahahaha"
Wednesday - January 15, 2003
[Dom] - 20:00:00
From: (name withheld)
To: piro@megatokyo.com
Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2003 7:38 PM
Subject: Asmodeus from MT...

Hi Piro,

First of all: Thanks for a great comic. Keep up the good work.

Second: I know that Asmodeus of MT is a "bad" guy, but I find him charming in an odd sort of way. I would like to use a small image (from strip 299, second panel, He is standing next to Seraphim with his arms crossed) for my personal pleasure (emphasis mine -Dom). However, in order to do so, I will from time to time make the image available on the web. The reason I mention this is for you to allow or deny me the right to use said image. I You won't allow it, I'll be sad. but I'll not use the image. If you allow it, however, you will indeed have pleased a poor student from europe. I will, of course, mention your comic whenever I use the image.

"Potpourri for 400, Alex"
Friday - January 17, 2003
[Dom] - 00:30:00
This is the miscellaneous debris rant, where I put in miscellaneous information before I sleep.

First, I highly recommend this flash vid. It's beautiful in its own way, though it makes more sense when you realize that Kikkoman is a brand of soy sauce and shoyu (pronounced "show you") is the Japanese word for soy sauce. Oh, hey. Someone just linked me an English version of the flash, here. Sweet.

I keep meaning to link Insert Credit, but keep forgetting. Well, there it is. I really, really don't agree with their review of Panzer Dragoon Orta, but hey, it's Tim's opinion. I just don't think he'll ever get another warm invite to my pad (do you hear that, Timbo? No more free root beer until you confess that you really do like Orta!) but I respect that it's his opinion. The Insert Credit guys are cool, though--where else can you find coverage of random crap like Sexy Beach and Melty Blood in English?

There's a fansite devoted to me. I'd be frightened if there was more to it, but as it is, it's only a little surprising.

I wish I really could have an executioner's hat with the Cal logo on it. That'd rock, especially for the good ol' "Give 'em the axe!" chants.

For some reason, I can't stop reading First President of Japan, a decidedly less-than-standard manga running in Raijin. I don't know why. It's about politics. I usually avoid politics like the plague, since I sound like an idiot when talking about it. But I like it, even if it has less action than Ah! My Goddess.

I want to see Yao Ming play Shaq on Saturday. I really, really do. But I'll be out with friends around then. Damn! I want to see how Yao takes to Shaq's power game...

When I put "nin" into IME now, the first kanji that comes up is "suffer/endure" instead of the more common kanji "person". I feel somehow proud.

Oh. And Fred really did misspell Ed's name in the book. ^^;;;

"fractures and flow"
Saturday - January 25, 2003
[Piro] - 13:02:00
First off, regarding everyone who pre-ordered a book from IC Entertainment and has not yet received it. Every single pre-order shipped as of January 14th - every single last one. If you ordered once since then, most of them have shipped or are in the process of being shipped. If you have not received it yet, that is because it is en route - most were shipped USPS. If my recent experience with a book order from Barnes & Noble is any guide, that order two 12 days to get here. I am hearing that the people at IC Entertainment are getting a lot of very nasty emails and calls regarding their books.

Please consider several things. IC Entertainment is NOT a huge company - they aren't DarkHorse, they aren't Marvel. We are talking about a staff of seven people. The demand for the Megatokyo book FAR exceeded ANYONE's expectations. When we started the project, we figured that we would print around 5,000 books. If we had NOT done preorders, there would have been a HUGE shortage of MT books - most people would not have been able to get them. Usually when they pre-order a book, they get a few hundred, and they get shipped right from the printer. No one was prepared for 4,718 preorders. It was clear that a 5,000 print run was not going to do. So, as a result of the pre-orders, and the real and visible demand for MT books, the total amount of orders thru distributors and others came to over 8,000 books. Another 1008 orders came in the first week of January That is a LOT of books. As a result, IC did a print run of 11,000 books.

Right now, the tally for books sold is 9,548. The rest are in inventory, and not expected to last very long. We have to do a second printing. Yikes.

Shipping all 4000 of the preorders, by a relatively small staff was NOT easy. It took a week to get them all out. The Post Office would only take so many per day. Add to this, the fact that I delayed things at the production end, which delayed the books being finished till the 4th of January - yeah, the book is late, no question. Every single MT book that was preordered was out the door and in the hands of the USPS by the 14th. Kei tells me that they have had quite a few books come back with the wrong address, so that could be part of the problem for some people. For everyone else, there is nothing else that can be done - its in the hands of the USPS.

My point is, the print runs and the demand for this were FAR bigger than anyone anticipated. This put a lot of pressure on a very small company to make things happen. Frankly, i think that IC Entertainment has done a great job of working hard to make this all happen. I know that if you are a person who preordered, and still don't have your book, that doesn't make you feel better, and in the end you need to feel happy about things. If this explanation as to what's up doesn't make you feel any better, email me with [preorder issues] in the subject line and i will see what i can do to help. Thanks. :)

Part of doing business is learning from it. We have learned a lot from this, and because you guys are so damn important to it all of this, IC Entertainment has worked out a different plan for getting things to you faster - every single preorder for the second MT book will be drop shipped directly from the printer, who will have the framework in place to deal with the numbers of books that need to go out. It doesnt help for the delays this time, but it will next time.

Ok, back to my regularly scheduled rant...

There always seems to be something to panic over. Sometimes small things, sometimes big things. This morning's adventure involved my relatively new Canon D1250U2F scanner. If for some reason my scanner stops working, I think that warrant some panic. My first course of action was to reboot my computer (usually solves most problems in windoze) but when that didn't work either, then i started to worry.

I checked the USB cable for chew marks - luckily there were none. I unplugged the power cord in the back of the scanner and plugged it in again to reset it. Nothing. Rebooted again. Nothing. After about 15 minutes of rising panic, i checked the plugstrip...

As you may know, Seraphim and I have three cats - Momo, Hime, and Mufie. The first is a laid back long hair that has an obsession with food. The second is a short hair female with a propensity for chewing cables (seriously chewing them - she destroyed a $500 wacom tablet 4 years ago, and has done an estimated $1800 in damage to appliances and computers over the years). Mufie is a relatively new addition, and is built like a pro wrestler - big, strong, and playful. It's not usual for a computer component to suddenly stop working because Hime has finally chewed on its cable enough to prevent it from working. I've gone thru 7 printer cables, 2 SCSI cables, 3 USB cables, one network cable, about 4 powerstrips... you get the idea. It wont be long before i have to get some new Coax cable for the cable modem that goes into the wall. She's been casually chewing on that for a few months.

Oh, before you email me about applying sprays, goo, jells, bitters and duct tape to cords to keep her away from them, trust me, we have tried everything. The only thing that works is to physically protect the cables. Hime is not a real cat, she's a demonic spawn from one of the multiple layers of hell, i think. People wonder where i get some of my 'evil cute' concepts from...

In futile effort to protect my computers and the exposed cableage, i have a remarkable network of boards, covers, boxes and other things covering cables. Next to the power strip on the floor, i have several clipboards that cover the loose cables. It seems that the culprit in the case of the non-working scanner wasn't Hime at all... it was probably Mufie.

What appears to have happened is that mufie, who is not a fat cat, but a *big* cat, while walking thru the area behind my desk, pushed down on the boards protecting my cables which slipped under one of the transformer plugs (the one for my scanner) and lifted it right out of the plugstrip.

The goddamn cats have learned how to unplug stuff.

I hope you'll pardon the little foray into the life of me and my three cats, but its a good example of life in the FredArt compound. Most of my panic situations have to do with getting things done or not being able to do all the things i've set up for myself to do. Right now, I'm not worried about having enough projects or earning enough to support myself. December was a good month for MT, and January is also looking very good. Like i've said before, the overwhelming support of the MT community, and the success of the Megatokyo/ThinkGeek store as well as the rather remarkable sales numbers for the Megatokyo book has even a pessimist like me believing that this all might work out. Thank you.

I hope everyone has been fairly happy with the progress of Megatokyo itself lately. I didn't want 'warmth' to interfere with the progress of Megatokyo, especially with the current directions of the story. As with everything I do, things aren't perfect, things could be better, but overall I'm pretty happy with MT right now. I am also pretty happy with where 'warmth' is going. I am behind schedule on its production (big suprise, huh) and i am actually quite worried about making my February 10th deadline, but i still have 16 days, and I'm doing the best I can. Things feel good, i'm happy with the art and the story, and the reaction from my friends and people who have seen what i'm working on so far has been positive.

Like I said before, things are looking good for MT right now, which is good because i can concentrate on just working, not figuring out what i need to do to make ends meet. This, of course, not only requires successful sales and stuff, but a lot of planning. Just dealing with things like budgets, taxes, health insurance, copyright issues, contract issues, etc takes a lot more effort (and money) than most people might realize. Megatokyo, or more correctly, FredArt Studios LLC, is a real business. It's grown together gradually over the past two and a half years, with a lot of learning, trial, errors, problems and successes. Why talk about it here? Because MT, at least the rant end of it here, is as much about the real life side of MT, with all the good, the bad, the whining and the bitching that come with it. From the beginning, you have known pretty much what's been going thru our heads, and I don't ever intend to change that.

I find it highly amusing that Gabe thinks that i'm " about three sad girl drawings away from a complete breakdown"... (chuckle) he's so damn right right, actually. I whine too much. No one really should have to hear it. His advice about doing a webcomic is excellent. Be yourself. Do it for yourself. Who cares what others say.

Unfortunately, me being me does involve a *lot* of whining. Sorry about that, but to act any different would be hypocrisy. This is me, the good, and the bad, such as it is. :P

Besides, if MT was perfect, it's suckage wouldn't be so entertaining.

"We're all guilty"
Tuesday - January 29, 2002
[Dom] - 16:00:00
We're all going to hell.

This is proof. Excuse me while I curl up in a ball and shudder.

"Kyou no bikkuri toki!"
Thursday - January 31, 2002
[Dom] - 11:00:00
I have my (legal US release) copy of Guilty Gear XX in the house. I'll still be editing MT strips, but don't expect much in the way of discourse over the next few weeks... :)

"morning news"
Saturday - February 1, 2003
[Piro] - 11:58:00
I imagine most of you who have seen the TV this morning have heard about the apparent disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia over Texas. I don't normally react to news items in my rantspace, but I just felt like typing, for some reason...

In life, depending on your age, there are always events that people remember: disasters or historic events that also become personal points in history. Many older people remember where they where when President Kennedy was assassinated. Most of us remember where we were when the attacks on September 11th happened. When I look back at my own life, the first event of this type that I remember was the Challenger disaster in 1986. I was a senior in high school. I only had classes in the morning that day, so I was on my way home when I heard the news on the radio. The news this morning, heard from the TV which just happened to be on as I went to get a cup of coffee, eerily reminded me of that day so many years ago.

Humans are emotional creatures. We are defined as much by the emotive events in our lives as we are by our own actions. Many times, we have no way of controlling these events, and they can come out of nowhere. Depending on your focus, you can wallow in the sadness that is life, or you can reflect happily in the joy that also is life. It's an odd paradox.

We sit here looking at proceeding into a war based on preemptive principals and 'high moral' goals (I don't think i want to get into my opinion on this potential conflict). We watch this morning as something that normally isn't even newsworthy, the return to earth of a Space Shuttle, as it suddenly bursts into our consciousness as it disintegrated over the clear skies of Texas. We watch the apparent disintegration of the lives of seven people a craft that has symbolism in its own right. Fears of our own mortality that arise when others die within the view of our conscience radars.

Somber thoughts for a quiet, grey, snowy day here in lower Michigan. I could go further with these lines of thought, but for some reason i want to just let them set. My condolences go out not only to the families of those lost in this disaster, but to those who also mourn for things that may not reach so high on the public consciousness.

Maybe thats one of the reasons people need the ability to express themselves in words, music and art. It helps you deal with all shades of things, from the joyous to the tragic.

"Zardoz speaks to you!"
Sunday - February 3, 2002
[Dom] - 01:30:00
While I'm off practicing my GGXX combos (I can never get off that last HS when I do S HS 236S FRC K 9K 9K S HS... blah) Natsuki is taking over the rant space for a bit. She's going to be back on Wednesday, so consider this a teaser. Oh. And to e-mail her, don't poke dom@megatokyo.com, use cellise@IHATESPIDERS.yahoo.com, filtered by common sense. -Dom

Taking up the offer to hijack this column while Dom is off making sweetsweet love to his copy of Guilty Gear XX. *eeew* (It's nothing to be ashamed of... if they didn't want me to do it they wouldn't put the hole there -Dom)

So you may be asking yourself..."So what will we be subjected to in said rants?"

A short but nowhere near complete listing:

My sick fascination with movies like Zardoz and Ninja III the Domination!

Ravings about DIY (do-it-yourself) culture! (especially fueled since a trip to the Alternative Press Expo, but more on that on Wednesday)

Old Skool Anime Grumblings.

Shoujo manga ravings.

Fansview put my brother's life in danger! *gasp!*

Books to read! Comics to worship!

I use too many exclamation marks!

Why girls are like that.

The recipe for the perfect mug of keep-you-up-all-night vanilla tea.

Creative ways to knock off Na-chan and Yuu from Marmalade Boy, since that always seems to cheer piro up. :3 (that Electra-complex wench should've stuck with Miwa, dammit... and Yuu's a stalker -Dom)

To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a box of hot-n-spicy cheezits...

Japanese pop-culture tidbits.

An illuminated history of the MT forums.

Obscure Megatokyo trivia. (ooh aaaah~~~)

Cosplay wa ai~ (That should be "ha", technically, but whatever, Nats doesn't need to avoid bad IME habits -Dom)

Mad pimpage!

All this and more! (including scary little dolls)

Reminder 2/3: DO NOT E-MAIL ME, Goddammit! Can't you monkeys read? cellise at yahoo! -Dom

"Warm & Fuzzy!"
Tuesday - February 5, 2002
[natsuki] - 21:30:00
(Yep. Natsuki again. Remember, e-mail her at cellise at yahoo... anything that goes to dom@megatokyo.com addressed to her will be deleted. -Dom)

As promised! (since of everything I mentioned this got the most email O_o...well this and Zardoz, but we all know Sean Connery in thigh-high leather boots is "teh win")

The recipe for keep-you-up-all-night vanilla tea.

I learned this recipe from a lovely young man that once worked at HP (Hewlett Packard). Yes! Tea recipe from a codemonkey, and you know what kind of octane they run on...so it's got to be good.

You'll need:
water
something to boil it in
1 bigelow tea bag (anything from their vanilla family will do...or if you have a vanilla tea you like better, go for it!)
sugar (and lots of it!)
some sort of creamer (powered non-dairy, milk, 1/2&1/2)
BIG thermal mug (so the warmed by the fires of hell water stays that way!)

First a handy little diagram!

I make mine in a 15.9 nissan stainless steel mug, this is not tea for some dainty little teacup...it may even overpower some weaker mugs! When you make this tea you're going to want LOTS!

A recent venture to the grocery store led to the discovery that bigelow now makes not just french vanilla, but also vanilla almond, cherry vanilla and vanilla hazelnut. O_o

But in the original recipe we use french vanilla as a default.

Boil your water on the stove, I like to use a teapot that whistles, it's got this little turtle head...why a turtle? Who knows, it's cute though.

Prepare your mug ahead of time by dumping at least enough sugar to be an inch or more deep.

Now pour in the water, it'll dissolve the sugar instantly.

Grab the teabag and pop it into the water as well. I usually stand around and absentmindly dip it in the water several times.

Can you see the bottom of the mug anymore? No? Good!

Now it's time to add the white stuff until you achieve a nice light tan color.

Now you can zone out on the steam as it rises from the cup while you wait for it to cool to a tolerable level.

"So yeah, that's great Nats...but how does this keep the sleep demons away?" You might ask yourself, well here's how!

The unholy amount of sugar keeps you just under the vibrating enough to enter a new plane of existance...and if you drink a lot of it before you are "supposed" to go to bed... you'll be up with the ol' full bladder effect. ^_~

This tea always cheers me up if I'm in a snarky "dunwannadoanything" type mood. Also wrapping your hands around a warm drink in cold conditions is always comforting. (Of course, Natsuki always has a nice Wang to comfort her... just saying -Dom)

And perhaps sitting in front of a warm vcr with a few tapes (yes! tapes! bulky vhs, how I love ya!) of Miracle Girls. ^_^

Now with that out of the way, it's been rumored that "Warmth" will soon be renamed "Saeko's Big Fuzzy Adventure!"

So until next time...when we finally find out what happened at APE, this is Nats signing off and hoping you don't scald your throat too badly!

(And just because people seem to need this warning {some genius cut and pasted the entire rant--including the warning at the end--and e-mailed a one-liner. Bah} you should NOT send e-mail to dom@megatokyo.com, send it to her cellise account)

"pebbles in the snow"
Friday - February 7, 2003
[Piro] - 14:55:02
Before I get started, I want to let everyone know that both Seraphim and I will be at Katsucon next weekend (February 14-16) in Crystal City, Virginia. This will be Sarah's first con appearance ever, so you folks better behave :P Asmodeus will also be in attendance (this should prove interesting). So, if you live in the area or are planning to attend Katsu, be sure to stop by and see us. I'll post more information about our schedule here sometime next week. I know that one of the things I'll be doing is giving a drawing class (gulp) so bring your drawing pads.

It's been an odd week. Sunday night I was looking foreword to what i was assuming would be a nice, productive, easy going week. It turned out to be anything but. I did a lot of wheel spinning - things took forever to do, or i found myself idling aimlessly between tasks. Sometimes life feels like trudging thru snow in a vast open field. if you look back, its hard to see your tracks, and when you look ahead all you see is white and the edges of the field that never seem to get any closer. The tracks behind you fill with fresh snow, and going on seems to be a kind of endless, pointless toil...

Heheh. I'm getting to metaphorical these days. I finally watched the last ep of Haibane Renmei subbed, and the damn thing makes me well up to watch. The series reminds me how long its been since i really connected with an anime character. My emotive connectiveness with Reki is both disturbing and oddly comforting.

I suppose that the whole 'In Search of Lost Wings' series is some sort of cathartic exercise on my part. It's one part gushing Haibane fanboy and one part something else trying to get out.

One of the problems with me is that I tend to get too wrapped up in my own work. As much as I enjoy watching anime and playing games, I tend to get frustrated quickly and want to get to producing something. It's in periods of frustration or a weird kind of creative exhaustion that i turn to the works of other people to find my bearings. Being creative is like flying blind sometimes.

Ok, these winged analogies are getting out of hand... ^^;;

Recently i've been poking around the web a lot more to find and start exploring creative works by other people. Part of this is because in an effort to provide some exposure for other worthy webcomics that people might not know about. In order for this to be a truly honest exercise, i feel that i should not only read and explore the sites in some depth, but that I should try to link stuff that I really like - stuff that in my travels i find worth looking into.

On Monday i posted a linkup link to a really nice webcomic called Demonology 101. I was a little annoyed with the site because i kept going back to read more. ^_^ I even got an email from Faith and traded a few emails back and forth. It occurred to me that one of the things that i've missed with MT growing at the rate it did when it first went up was that I never really spent a lot of time socializing with other artists on the net.

When i think about it, part of the reason for this was that before I started MT, I was pretty focused on the Japanese CG art and fan art world, and didn't spend a lot of time perusing stuff outside of that genre. Then, when MT started to grow as quick as it did, i ended up focusing mostly on my own work, not able to really deal with the barrage of other webcomic and art sites out there that I should have. Most of my friends are non-art type people (points to dom, i rest my case :P) who has skill sets that were different than mine. I wonder why it is that I didn't learn to mingle more with other 'artists' on the web?

One could argue that my non-attention to other artists is a kind of elitism, but really it's not. I tend to shy away from other artist types for the same reason i gravitated to people older than me when i was growing up - competition makes me nervous. I have a built in inferiority complex that hasn't gone away with the growth of MT, it just got more... complex. ^^;; Looking at the work of other people always makes me feel, well, nervous.

I wonder if that's why i gravitated to the Japanese websites the way I did. I was an outsider in that realm, and therefore i didn't feel that i needed to compare my work to theirs directly. Funny, huh? I feel cautiously comfortable existing inside the walls of a artistic genre where I am an outsider. A little like a Haibane myself, settled in my own OldHome inside a wall that cannot be crossed....

ohhhhkay, focus, fred, focus...

Anyways, here i sit, with the ability to strike servers down with a single link (you'll note that they had to redirect calls from this page because the serverload was too high - Dormando from Rydia.net says that he'll have the capacity to deal with it next week, so be sure to check out Demonology 101 next week sometime if you can't get to it now.) I sit here with a huge server that does nothing but serve MT pages and run the forums, and it's starting to strain heavily under the load (necessitating the need to purchase another MT server for some clustering a hella lot sooner than we expected at first - I wasn't planning on buying Nayuki until May, but the way things are going, i might even need to plan on getting Ayu before summer. uguuuuuuuuu~~~)

I need to figure out how to give props and links where they are due without melting servers. In most cases, for sites that already get a lot of traffic, its not a huge deal, but sites that have a lot of back comics or don't get a ton daily traffic suffer mightily under megadotting (if you'll pardon the blatant spoofing of the term 'slashdotting' - sorry rob ^^;;).

Oddly enough, it seems to happen to me too. I got a frantic call today from Kei, my publisher - looks like the mt books are gone - aside from the books that they have for Katsucon next week, the first print run is kaputz. ^^;; gee wiz, people. Another print run is underway, and in about two weeks the 2nd edition will be available - if you ordered a book recently or were planning on doing so, our apologies for any delays in getting you your book. Don't worry, they'll print however many they have to :)

Now, i need to get back to work on 'Warmth'. I'm already behind (big surprise, huh). What i really need to do is not give into the wandering desire to draw that little sketch of Raven from Demonology 101 that's been bouncing around in the back of my head for the past week. Giving into the desire to freesketch stuff isn't always bad. The 'Lost Wings' series is a good vehicle for it, and such drawings are good for clearing the mind, but it's also a lot like tossing pebbles into the snow...

"Here comes daredevil!"
Monday - February 10, 2003
[Dom] - 00:00:00
Update 2/11: Kei has informed me that IC Entertainment has just started taking pre-orders for MT Book 2. While the book will burn holes in my eyes, you guys might want to get a copy, so there's the link right there. If you want to be one click lazier, click here for the pre-order page. (please note that IC Entertainment is not taking pre-orders for Book 2 - piro)

Short rant for now... gotta get some sleep so I can have some rest before I go and vegetate in front of my arcade's newly acquired GGXX machine. Woohoo, people other than my roommate to play against!

I have this new game in my possession, borrowed from UkiyaShun. It's called Baldr [sic] Force, and the best way to describe the gameplay would be a sort of Armored Core played with a Smash TV view/pace. I haven't installed it yet, due to work and Guilty Gear concerns, but I really want to go around jump-kicking and gut-punching other mecha. Oh, sure, and using the buckshot shotgun and other weapons.

Oh yeah. And the game happens to have porn in it. Not like I care--I can always just put a weight on the enter key and do some other reading. I did that for Comic Party, too. Though Comic Party was cool because there was only one porn scene per character, and while you saw it coming a mile away, you could just skip it and get to the good stuff, like "Shitteta yo... sonna koto, zutto mae kara" and such.

I've been reading my manga like a good boy--finally managed to get around to Shinesman, which was well worth the effort. I'm probably moving on to Ken's recommendation, "Adesugata Junjyou BOY", about a guy who is ordered to attend an all-girl's school so he can learn how to play girls in kabuki. I'm probably not going to pick up Pocky's recommendation, though, which is the same premise plus smut. I might be tempted to pick up Fruits Basket just 'cuz I've come to like the show (and it's become a hobby of mine to find grammar/spelling errors in Funimation's subs... not knocking the disc, just sayin') and want to see if the manga's just as fun.

I'm finally putting something on Oop-ack.com! You'll see soon... but basically, the subtitling group I'm in (Doquote 262, if you care) is gathering money for our GTO drama translations the old-fashioned way... asking for sponsorships. So at least temporarily, there will be information on my poor, unused domain. After that project's done, I can actually work on a personal page. I'll put a link in this space as soon as the page is up. And, of course, when I get real information on that, I'll start maintaining oop-ack.com for real. Projected date I'll find serious time to work on a website? Hmm... probably June, right after my E3/ACen marathon.

Oh, and I've decided to pick up my abandoned project to gain a broad knowledge of American film history. I lived through the jingoistic war flicks of the '80s, studied a lot of silent films as a film/English student in Berkeley, and am going through Film Noir (which happens to be the golden age of narrative) now. Tasty, tasty Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard...

After this, I'll probably watch the cold war flicks of the '50s-I was a Communist for the FBI is on my short list. I've already seen a lot of the social apologist movies of the '50s too, so after that I'll probably touch on the auteur movement, and then... I dunno what I do after the auteur movement. Maybe I'll talk to my adaptation professor and finally kick my screenplay ideas into gear. Who knows... it's all good, I get to watch more movies however it goes.

Aaaaand it's time for me to go back to dreaming about Guilty Gear XX. Maybe I'll practice Slayer's semi-infinite just to annoy people... or maybe not.

"'switch' ja nai mou!"
Thursday - February 13, 2003
[Piro] - 02:02:00
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is just how quickly things sneak up on you. Just last week I felt pretty relaxed about everything early last week, then things, well, things got complicated, as usual ^^;; Anyways, this wouldn't be MT if I was ahead of schedule and wasn't doing things in a last minute mad panic. ^^;; Both Seraphim and I are leaving for Virginia tomorrow evening for Katsucon in Crystal City, Virginia.

As promised, here is my schedule for the con:

Fri: 6:00pm - Opening Ceremonies (Main Programming)
Fri: 7:00pm - Autograph Session (Autograph area)
Sat: 11:00am - Autograph Session (Autograph area)
Sat: 1:30pm - Megatokyo Panel - (Main Programming)
Sat: 5:00pm - How to Draw Manga (Gameshow)
Sat: 11:00pm - Dead Piro Sketching (Workshop)

The main MT events at Katsucon are the Megatokyo Panel at 1:30pm on Saturday, and the Dead Piro Sketching workshop Saturday night at 11pm. All other times I will probably be at my own table near the IC Entertainment booth drawing sketches and signin stuff for anyone who wants a sketch. There will be Megatokyo Volume 1 books available for sale as well as the last of the Capture the Bear posters (not sure if I'm going to do a reprint or not). As always, you do not need to buy anything to get a sketch from me!. I have plenty of index cards and i'd be happy to draw whatever you like. The only rules for sketches really are just one character at a time (i'm happy to do multiple sketches for friends and stuff), and please, don't ask me to draw you - i suck at caricatures ^^;; Also, be creative in what you'd like me to draw. If i have to draw the same piro drawing 100 times i'll go crazy. Yes, i'm more than happy to do a drawing in your book if you have one.

One other little bit of news, since i'm too lazy to update the news box before I go to bed - IC Entertainment has a brand spankin new website up and running. Big improvement on the old one. Also, preorders have started for Megatokyo book 2. Remember, Book 2 should be available towards the end of March. Ugh, i still need to do a cover for that, and extra material... yikes...

Anyways, you may have noticed my comment yesterday about getting a new computer (and it being one of the reasons today's comic was so late. "i'm just gonna set it up and turn it on and then ignore it. yep. well, i can at least setup Office so i can write the script. and maybe email. and i need instant msging..." - you know how it goes). Here is a picture of my new setup. Before the hate mail starts rolling in, Yes, i got a mac. no, I don't care how wrong it is to switch to a mac. Besides, I didn't 'switch', I 'added'. There's a difference.

There's been so much going on recently that this purchase and the decisions and stuff around it happened in the cracks between things. There was no question that I needed to upgrade from my laptop setup, and I wanted to invest a little in a new setup that i'd be happy with. So, a few weeks ago I cringed and ordered a Apple G4 with dual 1.25 ghz processors (the 2 meg cache ones), 120 gig drive, 1 gig of memory, and no modem. I also ordered mac versions of Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 and a new 9x12 Wacom Intuos 2 (my old tablet wont work with OS X). Ouch indeed.

Why the hell did i decide to get a mac over the more logical route of just building one kick-ass winbox? I suppose i have a lot of reasons, some definable, others not quite so easy to explain. If nothing else, I can give you an honest and upfront view of what it's like to actually make the decision to move to a mac as your main workstation. I still have my laptop and my other PC workstation (which has been upgraded with the help of some friends who drove down a few weeks ago from Grand Rapids - thanks guys)

Oh yeah... the monitor. Yes, that is a 23" Apple Cinema Display. The big one. I've already had quite a few people wish me an early doom for possessing it. This monitor is... amazingly sweet. I hate 'l33t' with a passion, but...

this monitor is fsk1n l33t.

It makes my other monitor seem like this dim little box i'm trying to peer inside, and its a really nice Samsung too. I didn't originally order the 23" display. What happened was not days after I ordered the top of the line G4, Apple introduced newer more powerful G4s and slashed prices 40% or so. Luckily, i found that the price changes meant that the price of my order went down considerably. I also noticed a curious fact - that $3,000 monitor i have been drooling over was suddenly less than $2,000. Even so, i considered it an extravagance.

That's where my lovely little angel, the queen of my heart and the one who knows all the keys and passcodes to my little soul offered to spring the difference and get me the monitor. Good god, i am so not worthy.

So, what do i do for Valentines day? I drag her half way across the country to an Anime con in Virginia. ^^;; I am, like, the worlds absolutely worst most horrible boyfriend ever.

And you guys wonder why i'm so mean to poor Piro. :)

Oh, and i would like to send a special thanks to Sogarth for all his help in getting this new mac on my desk. I'm sure he's blocked me off his AIM list by now. ^^;;

I need to go to bed so i can get up early and try to get a comic done for Friday. I'm working on a guest fill in for Monday, but if i can't swing that, I may have to skip Monday's comic all together. Too many bullets flying overhead right now...

"the scenic route"
Wednesday - February 19, 2003
[Seraphim] - 13:00:00
Katsucon is my first con since Megatokyo has become 'known'. I was a little afraid but I mistakenly believed that most fans were like Dom and Asmodeus. Now those two guys scare me to death. I've heard the stories and seen the pictures. Nothing can top the Origami fanatics on the strangeness scale. They are a breed apart. I like to do origami and all but I don't want to get into the whole origami Zen 'way of life' thing. I think the scariest con scene is the American Library Association conventions. Imagine thousands upon thousands of librarians gathering together and taking over an entire city not once but twice a year. Sure we're cool and we know it but outsiders will never fully understand.

Much like the emails and messages I have received in the past, the fans are incredibly friendly, supportive, and very patient. So many people showed up for autographs and would say that they had been waiting in line for their friend, cousin, or children. Wow, what great friends and parents. My dad wouldn't have waited in line for me. I always got the 'your legs are younger' excuse. I find anime fans are extremely creative from their costumes to the Haiku forum threads. There was also one crazy guy who when church services were cancelled because of the BLIZZARD decided to catch the Metro and come meet us on Sunday morning. I was truly impressed.

I was extremely shell shocked by the amount of work Piro and the rest of the MT crew does at a con. I had a class Thursday and had to meet with a professor Friday morning so we got in late on Friday after getting lost in D.C. We circled the Pentagon several times but finally got there. Saturday started off with autographs in the dealer room, then racing to another autograph session, then back to the dealer room for more signings, then to a panel, and a few minutes for lunch and back to the dealer room until a 5:00 workshop. After about two hours I could barely remember how to spell Seraphim and was wishing she was named something shorter. We had a nice dinner and then Piro had another workshop at 11:00. Piro was up and in the dealer room again Sunday but we took off early and raced the blizzard to Michigan. We are slightly crazy but we also hadn't arranged for anyone to check on the cats. That probably sounds like a dumb reason but they count on us. At least we know there won't be a blizzard at Sakuracon, Anime Central, or Otakon! But I've heard Baltimore has other natural disasters.

Having lived in Michigan my entire life I wasn't too afraid of the drive home but I saw things I have never seen before. I have to admit driving down the middle of the Beltway with no other vehicle in sight was incredible. It felt a smidge like something out of Steven King's 'The Stand'. When we finally did encounter other life forms they were invariably pulled over under a bridge or overpass and scraping off their windshields. Oh no, you would never see a Michigander stopped along side 696 or 94 scraping their windshield. We do that BEFORE we start driving. Where did that bizarre practice come from? Dozens and dozens of people were doing it. Or the habit of reaching out of the driver side window to grab the wiper while driving in a blizzard. My favorite all time event on the drive home was the Jeep Cherokee that decided to go into the 'Scenic Outlook' (to look at more snow??) which hadn't been plowed and got himself stuck.

Yet none of this compares to what has happened within our own apartment community. Driving to work one sunny morning 5 of our neighbors rear ended each other before even getting out of the gates. Admittedly, it was very bright and if not for the lights of the fire truck, we may have ended up the sixth car that scenerio. We got to the main road and another neighbor rear ended someone at the exit. A rescue vehicle going to the 'big' accident was stopped to help them. Just today Piro came across an SUV that ran up over a curb and crashed into a small tree on the property. The tree is just barely past the sapling stage and it totaled the SUV. There wasn't even any snow on the ground. I actually feel safer out on the roads then in our own parking lot. Our neighbors' sucky driving is probably going to drive up the local insurance rates. We probably live in the highest accident area in the whole town.

I was going to leave the announcement to Piro, but who knows when he'll have time to write a rant. The rumors are true, he proposed at the panel. And now that there isn't a gigantic audience, the answer is still yes. We had seen CNN coverage of a soldier proposing to his GF on the T.V. and I think Piro just wanted to steal the his thunder. I now know exactly what anyone who is surprised by a proposal thinks as it is happening - "What the hell is going on here?" I just kept wondering what Piro was babbling on about. It did explain all the 'What did Piro get you for Valentine's Day? HA HA Nudge nudge wink wink' that was going on for the whole con. Wink wink. It was a surreal event all around. How we are going to squeeze nuptials in this year, I do not know. We'll probably have to make Ukyo get a divinity degree from the Church of Blue Suede Shoes advertised on matchbook covers, so he can marry us. Maybe he could become a ship captain. Whatever would be easiest for him to study. I'm not picky.

- seraphim

"proposal ponderings"
Wednesday - February 19, 2003
[Piro] - 15:05:00>
After finally getting home yesterday, a local on the #megatokyo channel told me to look out the window at the snow that had just started to fall. After driving 15 hrs in treaturous snowy conditions, i have to say that this was one of those few times where the sight of snow drifting past my window really didn't excite me very much ^^;;

One of the problems with going to anime cons is that they have a tendency to turn my world upside down for several days before, during and after the convention. Katsucon this past weekend was no exception. In fact, for various reasons, it shook things up a lot more than my usual travels.

First there is my perpetual problem with being behind schedule on... well... everything. Some of it has to do with taking on a little too much for January and February (which, by pushing into February crowds out what i SHOULD be working on this month). The irony of overloading yourself is that the pressure of having too much to do actually makes it *harder* to work efficiently. Go figure. Cons are a nice break from the grind, but they also require being ahead by at least 2 comics. As you can see, this did not happen before I left.

Next, we were late getting to the con. Sarah and i decided to drive to Virginia rather than fly because, well, we like road trips. 8 hrs isn't a long drive for me (i can sit at a table for 8 hrs, i can drive for 8 hrs). Our original plan was to leave thursday afternoon and get there friday around noon. Unfortunately, Sarah had to see a professor friday morning, which meant that we didn't leave till ten-ish friday morning. This put us into the DC area just in time for rush hour. Yay, fun. Great time to get lost on the roads circling the Pentagon.

Then there was that pleasant little snow storm that blew in Saturday night. Gee, what wonderful timing. On Sunday we faced the daunting question as to if we should leave DC and try to drive out of the storm, or face getting stuck for days in the additional feet of snow arriving later that night. As fun as it would be to hang out another day with everyone at the con, we had cats that were all alone in the apartment, sarah had work and class, and I needed to get home so I could get back to work on all this stuff i had to do. We figured that we would drive out of the snow somewhere around mid Pennsylvania. Hah. We never did drive out of the snow. It took us five hours to get out of Maryland. Five hours to get out of Pennsylvania. after 11 and a half hours of driving in snowy conditions we decided it was time to stop. The next day, we faced even more snow. I think the snow finally stopped about 30 minutes from home. I was forgetting what pavement looked like.

The final problem with cons, especially cons that involve stressful travel conditions (happens to me often for some reason) is that it takes a day or so to wind down after getting home. My original plan was to get home sunday night and spend monday winding down and taking it slow, then punching out a comic on tuesday. Fffft. After getting home around 3pm on monday, i was pretty much useless. Yesterday i stared a blank piece of paper and a blank script and couldn't even remember what Megatokyo was about. Creativity isn't a faucet that you can turn on and off, it's more like a horrid old lawnmower that you have to coax and yank into shape, coupled with prayers and a little 10W40 spritzed into the joints. After struggling all day, things managed to turn over and i remembered that somewhere down there I actually do know how to draw. ^^;; Drawing the actual 'Sad Girl in Snow' picture that has been hinted at for all this time was, well, kinda daunting. Nothing I could actually draw could meet the expectations for it, so i hope this stand in will do for now.

Even with all of that, Sarah and I had a great time at Katsucon. I would like to thank not only the Katsucon staff, most of whom i didn't even have time to meet, but to my friends and all the fans who helped make Sarah feel welcome at her first real anime con. Oh, and Pocky, I hope you get your voice back. ^_^ Sarah and I would both like to thank you for inviting us. Most of all I'm glad that everyone seems to have made it hope safe and sound, and that most of you aren't idiots like Sarah and i are when it comes to traveling where angels fear to drive. :P

One other thing that happened at the con was really my doing. Do you have any idea how hard it is to run a panel, run around and take questions because Dom isn't there, and then at the end of it prepare to ask your girlfriend to marry you? Somehow, i managed it, and amazingly, Sarah said yes.

Sarah and I have been together for a long time, and we've been thru a lot together. Never once has she failed to support me, in fact without her i would never have had the courage or the self confidence to do what i'm doing now. I like to think that I've been there for her whenever she has needed me, and I know that I always try to be. I guess you could say i really am her #1 fan, and i always will be.

maybe that's why i've been so nice to Piro lately. He's been getting way too many breaks. I need to do something about that....

"Curiouser and curiouser"
Monday - February 24, 2003
[Dom] - 01:00:00
As you can probably guess, Guilty Gear XX has been taking up the bulk of my time lately, as I struggle to improve on my 9th ranking at the local arcade's tournaments. I need more work on my May game, I'm currently having trouble landing Overhead Kiss consistently. I also need to practice my Faust anti-air, since my ground game's solid (if unspectacular), while I freeze up against a good Johnny jump-in. I've been told that Johnny's jump-in is godlike, but I still need to learn how to deal with it other than by hopping away and using Faust's j.HS all the time. The occasional standing K works when Johnny messes up, which is happening less and less as the local players improve. Urk. Maybe I should just move to Chipp, to throw around Shuriken like a madman.

But enough of that! In a recent bout of boredom/procrastination, I picked up my roommate's .hack//INFECTION game. It brought back some good memories of playing PSO with friends (Mistral especially reminds me of Tori, the little mage who would always run around in circles going "Yay!" after beating bosses) but otherwise kinda left me cold. There was way too much menu getting in the way of the game. The trade system I really liked, along with the sheer amount of environment they put into the game, with the e-mail and message boards. However, repetitive and plain dungeons kept the game on the "eh" side of the eh/wow spectrum. I played a little, beat the game after adding about 2 and a half hours to Cortana's 20, and I'll probably play the second one for a few minutes just to get that PSO feeling back.

Lessee... oh yeah. It's deadline time again. I have been working on several projects at once, which is always bad on my nerves, but dammit, I'm going to get it done. And on time, too. It helps that I don't have to draw anything, I just have to write and get my stuff done.

I guess now's as good a time as any to say this... one of my current projects is "MegaTokyo Special 1". It's scheduled to run right after this chapter wraps up, and if all goes well, two things have a decent likelihood of happening. First, I'll write more and more of them (hell, I have like 4 specials planned already). The second is secret. But anyway... it's nice to be able to write my own MT scripts instead of staring at Fred's all the time. It'll also be nice to work with a better artist than me ;P

行ってみよう！

"of feathers and unicorn skulls"
Tuesday - February 25, 2003
[Piro] - 00:45:01
Back in December, after mentioning my obsession with Yoshitoshi Abe's latest work Haibane Renmei (Charcoal Feather Federation), I received quite a few emails telling me to check out a book by Haruki Murakami called "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World." Without question, they said, this book had influenced the story and the world woven together in the Haibane Renmei story. Since this particular anime (and it's related works) had grabbed my attention far more than any anime story in years, I was actually curious to delve a little deeper and see if this unusual sounding book could shed further light on some of the threads that run deeper than a passive viewer could follow into Abe's story.

So, like any guy who's significant other works in a Library, I sent Seraphim some info on the book to see if she could dig it up. I was quite surprised at christmas to find that this book ended up being one of my christmas gifts.

Inspiration is a funny thing. I doubt that there is much of anything out there that doesn't have some sort of inspiration behind it. Inspiration can be something that does nothing more than start a thought process that ends up in totally unexpected places - places you might find it impossible to find your way back from, or it might be as simple as placing your inspiration right smack dab in the middle of your own works. There are many examples of such inspiration types in Megatokyo, from transparent parodies to threads that only I really know the origins of. Various types of inspiration are the building blocks that people use to make their own works. I would also argue that the extends far beyond just works that we might create for others to see, we build our lives using bits and pieces of the things that inspire us or effect us in some way. Works like Megatokyo, and maybe even Haibane Renmei, are also peeks into private worlds made of of similar parts.

In reading Murakami's book, I found that in the end the book has almost as much to say about my own work as it did about the possible connections to be found with Abe's story. I won't mention too many details here, because such readings are experiential, really. I can say that there is this oddly familiar construct of a city surrounded by a wall that only birds can cross. There is a library. There is a clock tower. But there are no girls with wings. There are unicorns. And most interesting of all was this unusual duality of worlds.

Hmm. Dual parallel worlds, things happening at the same time. Sounds kinda familiar.

One interesting flavor of the book oddly enough is the part that is essentially cyberpunk in vein. It reminds me eerily of William Gibson's work. Not all of it, mind you, but specifically my favorite Gibson novel, the one that I read a dozen times till i gave it back to the friend who loaned it to me, another book i was having trouble tracking down... and the other book that seraphim got me for christmas, "Idoru".

Believe it or not, "Idoru" is one of the biggest silent untraceable influences on Megatokyo. I'm aware that it's not considered Gibson's best work, but I don't care - this is the book that effected me the most. It's not the big things in the book that get me thinking, it's the little things. the in between things. A lot of gibsonesque stuff could be considered cliche, i suppose, but much of that is from overexposure, not the material itself. There are so many little things i find when i read it...

Does this mean that Kimiko is nothing more than a holographic construct and Piro has some sort of brain fault that allows him to see powerful emotive nodal patterns in raw, untranslated anime footage? Hardly. Tho it would be fun to give Yuki a Sandbenders...

It's funny, but sometimes when you talk about inspirations, especially the kind where its hard to follow the threads of that inspiration, i'ts easy to start talking in apparent nonsense. For Haibane Renmei, i see Abe's work as almost an insertion into not only some of the physical constructs of the world contained in 'Wonderland', but in some of the harder to see, invisible threads of metaphor and subtleness. I can only guess, but something in the book effected Abe in a way that stirred something in him to create a subset that expanded and became it's own thing, with only fragmented formative bits and pieces left to connect it with it's inspiration. Maybe he never read the book. Who knows. Only he really does.

You get odd parallels in real life too. I'm looking forward to reading Gibson's latest novel, "Pattern Recognition" not just because i'll read it anyway, but because of something I read in a review of the book in the February 2003 issue of WIRED magazine. Referring to the random, homeless, snippets of video have been gaining huge popularity on the net (much to the chagrin of commercial interests that would kill for that kind of following), the comment reads "The Web makes it possible for an independent artist to gain a global following for no commercial purpose whatsoever."

What an interesting comment. An early goal for Megatokyo itself, really. I dunno - maybe it still is. Of course, i still need to feed the cats and pay off my new mac G4 purchase... maybe that too is one of those odd dualities that i have to deal with, and maybe it's in the balance that it really does work in some quirky way...

"Come baaaack"
Tuesday - February 25, 2003
[Dom] - 23:30:00
For once, this isn't going to be a Guilty Gear rant, though I still have a lot to say about that game.

No, this is to ask a question. A very important question, one that's been weighing heavily on my mind for the past few days. I have this feeling that I'll spend the next few days pondering it, especially since I'm in the procrastination stage of meeting my deadlines and need something to think about other than how late I'm going to be. It's a mystery for the ages, really.

Why do girls keep giving me condoms?

I see that eyebrow arching and that flame forming at your fingertips, but hear me out. It all started just after Christmas, when a friend of mine (who, by the way, is in a very stable relationship) said "Oh! Dom, here, I'll give you my Badtz-Maru condoms. I got them on eBay once, you can have 'em".

Innocent enough, right? Well, not innocent at all, but I'm not going to get into that right now.

Anyway, a couple weeks after that another friend (also in a stable relationship, one that contains no Y chromosome) handed me a little plastic square saying "Here, I don't need it". And, yes, it was a condom. I don't remember what kind it was, since I threw it away without really thinking about it.

And then, last night, another friend (a pre-med student who, yes, is in a stable relationship, and is also one of the most innocent creatures I have met over the age of 5) hunted me down after dinner and handed me a Trojan, saying "Hey, guess what I got!".

And I have to ask... what the hell? The first gift of condoms I can brush off. The second I can shrug at. But three times now? From girls who're taken? That's cold. That's like buying a membership in the Ham of the Month club for a Jewish friend.

And I'm left wondering what the pattern is in all of this. Are people trying to give me hints? If so, what are they trying to hint? I'm leaving out the "I want your body" possibility, since I know these girls and for at least one of them, that's a psychological impossibility. Are they taunting me for the lingering remnants of my Catholic upbringing? Or (and this one seems most likely to me) are they giving me a message that I shouldn't breed?

I don't have any answers. I don't know if I want the answers. But damn is the question weird...

"a sad day in the neighborhood"
Thursday - February 27, 2003
[Piro] - 12:04:01
Childhood is a funny thing. You have a tendency to look back on things that were a part of your life back then with a certain kind of deep nostalgia that is hard to pin down. There's also a saying that those who fondly remember childhood were never children. There are a lot of consistent themes in anime and manga that deal with childhood memories and longing for the simpler happy days of childhood. Even the theme of "Osana Najimi" - looking for your childhood love - that is so common in ren'ai games deals with the source of your affection being someone you first met as a child.

I saw on the news this morning that Mr. Fred Rogers of "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood" fame passed away. I guess i just wanted to say, sad to see you go, Mr. Rogers, the world will miss you. :)

I suppose it's kind of sad to realise that significant memories of your childhood can be connected to TV shows. When i was a kid (yes, they had electricity back then... enough of the old age jokes >_<) I used to watch plenty of TV. We didn't have VCRs or DVDs, or even cable - programming for kids was actually pretty limited compared to what is on the tube today.

It's easy to call it 24 hrs of nonstop braindulling sludgefest, but i wonder if that's not really fair. Kids like the stuff. There are shows i used to love when I was a kid that i couldn't stomach today, and there were shows that would have bored me to tears as a kid that i worship and watch religiously as an adult.

It's funny how when you are a kid you wanna watch shows that make you feel more like an adult, yet as an adult we often gravitate to things that harken back to things we connected with as kids. The popularity of animated stuff has been directly tied to the fact that we all used to watch them as kids.

We tend to undervalue exactly how much impact TV has on our development. When i was a kid, Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood was my favorite show. I was born around the time that Seseme Street first aired. I also used to watch Captain Kangaroo and The Electric Company. We didn't have any purple dinosaurs. Heck, even Speed Racer was a rare treat. I don't know if i can tie anything i do specifically to any of these shows, but i can't describe how sad i felt when i learned that Mr. Rogers had passed away this morning. I mean, he had lived a full life, it wasn't nessisarily a tragic thing like some of the recent tragedies that we've all seen on the news, but it still made me stop for a moment. I guess it's some sort of connectivity thing. Humans are remarkably odd emotional creatures.

Anyways, i don't know i even have a point this morning, but I guess i don't always have to have one.

I've been keeping pretty busy with MT and Warmth related stuff this week, so much so that i've been letting little things slip (not that there is anything unusual about that). I've become very comfortable with my new G4, and in the near future i'll be writing a pretty extensive report about my experiences with Mac OS X. One of the main benefits has been my change to a fresh new email setup here on the mac (been using Entourage... its so weird that the mac version of Office is better than the version for tier own OS. Go figure). This is resulting in much better email handling by me. If you have emailed me recently, i have read it, and in many instances i've actually responded! I can't respond to everyone, but that's just because i dont have time to answer every single email that comes in ^^;; But let's just say that things are better.

The first installment for 'warmth' is done, and I am currently working on re-hashing the cover image and some omake material. I am rather upset with myself for the fact that I was not able to finish as many pages as I had originally planned. That said, I am in no way ashamed of what i have is done, i just wish i had been able to do more... but thinking I can do more than i really can do is normal for me. Getting this off the ground, and getting the first salvo of a multi-page manga like this done was something new for me, and I learned a lot doing it. If you go to the trouble to read "warmth", i hope you won't be dissapointed. I'm happy with where it's going.

In other publishing news, the second printing of Megatokyo volume 1 is under way. It still boggles my mind that all those books, like, sold. Still trying to absorb it all, i guess. I also feel honored that one of the most respected trade magazines in the publishing biz, Publisher's Weekly, did a story on Megatokyo as well as a review of the book itself in this week's issue. You can read the article here. I'm more than proud of how well MT is doing, and its all because MT fans are the supportive, crazy maniacs you all are. :)

Speaking of Megatokyo books, I am in the process of working on extra material for Book 2, which will be available in about a month. IC Entertainment has started taking pre-orders, so if you are eager to get your hands on the 2nd installment of Megatokyo, which will include Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 as well as extra material, head on over and place your pre-order (please note that IC Entertainment is not taking pre-orders for Book 2 - piro).

Now, if you had any problems or issues with your pre-order for the first book, I would like to assure you that IC entertainment has taken drastic steps to make sure that Pre-orders, no matter what the volume, will be what they are supposed to be - the quickest way to get your hands on the book. I would not be promoting pre-orders if I did not feel comfortable that this was the case (Just ask Kei, i've beat her up about this quite a bit). Like I explained before, IC is a small company, and they usually handle shipping pre-orders themselves. Due to the volume of MT books and the needs of MT's online fanbase, they now have in place the resources and the manpower to professionally and quickly ship anything we can throw at them. :) If you have ANY problems, old or new, you can email either me directly or you can email Kirk at questions@ic-ent.com. It's been a priority of mine to make sure everyone is taken care of.

Back to drawing today's comic. Hope everyone has been happy with the progress of the story so far. I'm almost happy with. Getting there.

"A Wonderful Life"
Monday - March 3, 2003
[Dom] - 14:30:00
This is a quick prelude to my real rant, which will go up tonight.

But the next Harvest Moon game looks like it'll rock. Sure, I have a soft spot for Harvest Moon because my first published article was a Harvest Moon review. Well, okay, my first published article was technically a Digimon World article, but I prefer to act like that game never existed. So, Harvest Moon. The next game I'll get for my GameCube. Count on it... farming fun for everyone!

"Oop ackpthhhbbt"
Wednesday - March 5, 2003
[Dom] - 01:20:00
I promised that there'd be a rant on Monday. I was wrong. Stuff's come up. Back in a week. I'll still be editing, and on the forums a bit, but I won't be checking mail (guh, I can feel the viruses piling up already) and no ranting.

"moods and distractions"
Wednesday - March 5, 2003
[Piro] - 16:20:01
Every few hours or so i get an email that asks me for advice on how to create a webcomic, or how to draw better, how to write better comics, how to become super popular, or how to make the images burned into your brain after reading Dom's comics go away... honestly, there aren't simple, good answers to any of these questions (except the last one: use a sharp object to poke your eyes out then flush with bleach.)

The other day i received an email that asked a question that I think gets to the root of what i and many others struggle with every day. Chris wanted to know how I motivate myself enough to actually do the work. He stated two problems that he has, problems that just about every creative person has dealt with. I'll deal with them separately, but the answers are pretty much the same.

The first problem he described has to do with 'the mood': "...I have a problem getting myself into the 'mood'. You're familiar with the 'mood', when your drawing away and nothing else in the world matters but you and the creation coming to life on the paper beneath your pencil."

Yah, i know the feeling. I live in terror of not being able to get into 'the mood'. Its one of the reasons I refused to consider doing MT full time for years, and why i still feel nervous about it. Creativity is not like a faucet, you can't just turn it on and off at will. Even so, you can't limit your creativity to only those times when you happen to be in the mood. You have to learn how to find it, and how to compensate for it when it is no where be found. You'd be surprised just how often I have no desire or will to draw.

His second problem is also something I am familiar with: "I can feel the want to draw burning away in the back of my mind, but I sit down at my desk and become so distracted, and wind up wasting a day playing computer games or browsing the internet."

(hmm? oh, sorry, I was watching the Shamanic Princess DVD. Ok, i really need to finish this rant that i started three hours ago...)

Dealing with these problems, finding 'the mood' and dealing with distractions, are not easy to overcome. In fact, I think conquering them is the most difficult task you will face in pursuing any kind of creative goals. Learning to draw, improving your skills, or anything else you may want to learn or do are minor issues in comparison.

First thing to understand is that doing anything creative takes time. it takes real time. The time needed to do creative things is in direct conflict with time spent goofing off, relaxing, watching tv and other stuff. This is your 'free time', time that you control how you spend. Time for things like work, school, mowing the lawn, etc, you can't exchange for doing creative stuff. Your free time is the only time available for it. Making this exchange is not as easy as it sounds, no matter how strong your motivation, for several reasons.

Being creative is a lot of work, it really is. There is a lot of real, honest, mind-numbing grunt work. That's why even with the 'want to draw burning away in the back of your mind' it can be hard to sit down and actually do something - we are eager for the rewards that come from being creative, but the amount of work needed to get there seems daunting at times. It's easy to be distracted by games, the net, or that Love Hina DVD you want to watch that can lead to a much quicker 'reward'.

Here is where that bit about 'the mood' comes in. Sure, sometimes drawing can seem effortless because you are in that 'mood'. The work involved in finding that 'mood' or compensating for can actually be downright depressing. 'the mood' is really about the creative synergy between your ideas, your emotive processes and that little pointy stick in your hand that makes marks on paper. It's like a muscle. The more you use it, the more you can rely on it. But like excersize, sometimes you just dont wanna.

There are no ski lifts in the world of creativity. You gotta haul your own ass up the slope every time you want to come back down it. It's not so bad, the more you climb up, the stronger you get, and the higher you can go, which makes for better runs :P

And that's the problem that most beginners face. work vs. rewards. When you start drawing, it might take four hours of drawing to produce something that gives you as satisfying a feeling as, say, one half hour episode of your favorite anime. Even then, you are not guaranteed to have anything worthwhile after that four hour stint. That's why distractions are so effective. Being in the middle of a creative process can be a lonely place, and you sometimes just want to drop it and do something that you at least know is a little rewarding.

Even after years of struggling with this stuff, i deal with it more than you might think. Just this Sunday, actually. I had a horrible case of artist's block. I had absolutely no motivation or desire to draw. I mean, i would rather have gone to the grocery store than sit and draw mondays comic (which is one of the things i did). The comic was not going anywhere, and the drawings just were not coming. After spending most of the day avoiding working on it, i finally forced myself to sit down and draw. I turned off all distractions, turn off all IM programs, all email programs, and run nothing but the internet radio streams i like to listen to. What's weird is that, after a few hours, things started to come together. I started to get a feel for the drawings... there is always one drawing that makes me feel like i'm getting there. These drawings started to spark other drawings, and then changes in the dialogue. Somehow, I had found my groove. I was late, and i had to finish drawing the next morning, but i put up a pretty decent comic on monday :)

To sum up, the biggest problem with being creative is starting. Every time i start something, getting into it is always a struggle. Sometimes it never stops being a struggle, but it's funny how it never fails that at some point, i am not sitting there worrying about how long it's taking, or how many more drawings i have to do, its all about what i'm working on at the time. it feels good to finish a comic, and it's always worth the struggle... until, of course, i have to start the next comic. ^_^

So, some hints. Fist off, its not easy. Learning to draw or embarking on a creative project is like loosing weight. It takes time and commitment before you start to see any results. You will feel discouraged a *lot*. This is normal, because what we want to make and what we actually make rarely synch. I was asked once how i find the time to draw everything i do and play all those games. Well, the answer is simple: I don't play games, I don't have time. Creating things is far more rewarding in the end than immersing yourself in the creative works of others.

It's not that i don't play ANY games, i dabble enough here and there, but if you want to grow as an artist, you have to draw more than you play. Be honest with yourself about your work, but don't be exceedingly negative or positive. Show it to others. Create goals. Many people have online sketchbooks where they post one new sketch every week. That's what i used to try to do. Creating 3 comics every week is a very difficult goal to reach, but its still a goal. Goals are important. I haven't been able to fully reach my 3 comics per week goal for almost 3 years now, but that doesn't matter - its part of what's driven me to produce over 300 comics so far. :) If i was lax on myself and wasn't so anal about my 3 per week goal, i'd probably have done less than half of what i've actually done.

Inspiration is good too. Watching anime while drawing can be distracting, but have a pad in front of you and doodle while you are watching. I find that music is a very important tool for helping me concentrate on drawing. Variety is good. Actually, you'd think that a lot of what i listen to while doing Megatokyo is super genki Japanese pop stuff. Not true. I tend to listen to a lot of downtempo, industrial, house and other odd little collections. For instance, the station i was tuned to Sunday night while doing monday's comic (one of the best ones i've done recently, imho) was Somnambulant Corpse Radio, a rather unsettling Dark Ambient Industrial Noise station, and one i listen to all the time. Weird, huh? Don't be afraid to experiment with what motivates you, you might be surprised what works for you.

Oh, and in regards to dom's little rant about being a condom magnet... a little birdie told me that Dom practically begged the one girl for the Batz Maru condoms. Now, i don't know about you, but that is an image no amount of bleach can make go away.

That and the fact that the rant image he used is Bridget from Guilty Gear XX, and Bridget is actually a boy...

"talking to scribbles"
Tuesday - March 11, 2003
[Piro] - 12:04:03
Funny thing about doing the MT comic is that once I get rolling along, it tends to get easier. Nothing is really hard scripted, i have tons of flexibility in what each new comic is going to be. This is both good and bad. The good thing about it is that I leave a certain amount of room for creative tweaking. The bad thing is that you can find yourself without much to work with late in the evening with the prognosis for the next day's comic looking rather bleak.

Monday's comic suffered from this problem. When i sat down Sunday morning to start drawing something didn't feel right. It felt very flat, because it was little more, really, than a sum arrived at by adding up the previous strips. It felt very mechanical, very devoid of feeling, or mood. Considering the fact that this was supposed to be a important comic, that wasn't good.

One thing i learned ages ago was that if you are struggling too much with something, it means that you might need to do something different. I tossed the original script, and started scribbling. I focused in on the mood i wanted, and let the scribbles talk to me. This is the sketch that helped me fix the mood for monday's comic. Pretty scrappy, isn't it? but it talked to me, and i was able to pull monday's comic together fairly successfully after that. The dialogue completely changed, and the direction of the strip suddenly was far more in tune with what i wanted to do in the first place.

Getting from that vague idea of what you want to a final product is the hardest thing to do as a creative smook. People often ask me if i have Megatokyo planned out to the end. Yes, i do, sort of, to points i do, but it's changed a lot over time, and it continues to change. See, if i had hard scripted everything, the comics that came about after that scripting would have no ability to effect the direction of the comic. I look at the direction of Megatokyo as something akin to a framework, one that has many branches. Pruning and grafting is all part of the process.

An example of hard scripting, or scripting that didn't get the kind of additional creative umph it needed was the whole Moe Moe Ball arc. The middle of chapter 3 fell a little flat, mainly because my focus was too divided, i had too many things going on, and the MT comic was not in the proper place on my priority list. Sure, i could pump out comics, but i'd have to get more structured about how they are scripted and produced.

...If only my mind worked well that way. I was seeing loud and clear that the MT comic was suffering because i wasn't giving it the priority it needed. At that point, much to the chagrin of some people for whom i was doing other things, i made MT once again my #1 priority. It's about the comic, stupid. The extra projects, the side projects, and other things don't mean squat if you let people down with the comic itself. I'm pretty pleased with MT lately, and i feel very good about it's direction right now. Chapter 3 is going to be a tad longer than i had hoped, but some things took a few more comics to do than i anticipated.

The problem with this attitude, is that it's put all the other projects behind schedule ^^;; That's why i'm taking a bit of an in-service day today to throw a tad more time at some things. Let me give a little run-down of what's in the works.

As you may know, Megatokyo, Volume 2 will soon be available from IC entertainment (pre-orders have started, so go preorder :P I've been assured that this really will be the quickest way to get the book, and the problems with the first pre-order shipping issues have been resolved). Of course, one thing i am somewhat behind on is material for book 2. It's a bigger book, 184 pages. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 together with all the extra artwork and other things make for more material. Now, one of the things that people seemed to enjoy about book 1 was the commentary at the bottom of the first 2/3 of the book. Unfortunately, I can't do that for anything in this book because the comics are full page, not square format. I've tried to strategically add information and comments at points in the book, so hopefully that will give people a good feel for the history behind some of the comics from 1 and 2. Honestly, i'm far more happy with the material in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 than i am with anything in Chapter 0. It's not a bad read. Seraphim is working on a preamble for this book, which leaves only two things for me to really deal with - the cover, and the extra material.

I thought hard about what the extra material should be. Originally, i was thinking that I would work on character guides, but I need to do those for the website, and it wouldn't be right to make the extra material something that eventually found its way to the website. I wanted something that would compliment the content of Chapter 1 and 2, and make people feel that the book was truly worth the purchase. While paging thru my archives, i came across just the thing - the beginnings of a short story narrative for the whole Megatokyo Endgames ('MegaWinter Nights' as it was first called), that delved a bit into Pirogoeth and Largo's adventures. Since the recollection of Piro and Largo's activities in that game by Miho are a strong thread in Chapter 2, i thought that this would be the ideal addition.

My long range plans for the whole Engames scenario is that it will also be a comic, or a illustrated work of some sort, or even... a novel, really. Most of what i have for it now are illustrations and narratives. Believe it or not, i have the whole scenario roughly worked out, because it is part of the puzzle that is MT... and it is a piece that most of you are completely in the dark about. You are all used to my comic works, and my ramblings here in the rant column, but you haven't seen much of my prose. Granted, i have zero talent at it, but what i had was a really good start at a short story that I think people would enjoy reading if. I added pages to the book to accommodate it. Now i just need to finish writing it. Writing is not less work than drawing the entire thing out - in fact, as anyone who write knows, it can be a horrible amount of work, but i feel that this is a challenge that will be fun to take on. Hopefully, it makes a good addition to the book. That's the thing i need to work on today. I'll be doing some drawings and sketches today to help the process along, and i'll post one of them tonight as a DPD. I hope you all don't mind. :)

Of course, i still have to do the cover image. And there is still work to be done on the commentary. I have to get back to work on 'warmth' - its due in a few weeks, and i haven't even started the second installment. >_< Next month I am doing so much travel that i'm worried about how I will get anything done. Ugh.

In other news, I want to announce that in about a week and a half, a new version/reprint of the Pirogoeth poster that Merekat and I did back in 2001 will be available in the ThinkGeek store. It's a slightly different layout, and the poster is smaller than the original, but it's bigger than the Capture the Bear poster, and we're holding the printer to the same high standards we always do. :) There is more Merekat/Piro goodness coming... Mere has been working hard on rendering the Broken Miho image, and it's looking stellar so far. ^_^

Ok, enough rambling, i need to get to work...

"Back... kind of"
Wednesday - March 12, 2003
[Dom] - 10:00:00
I'm not quite back, but since I promised there'd be a rant, here it is. First things first, about my now-infamous condom rant. I got a LOT of e-mail about this one. I mean a LOT. Sheesh... talk about video games for months on end, get barely any e-mail, even from the people who still whine "They used to care about video games". And then talk about little plastic squares filled with latex/rubber/whatnot and boom! Mail everywhere... ah well. Anyway, here are a few of the more interesting replies I got:

This one's from Panda, who had a LOT of theories.
Okay, you'll probably get tons of responses, if only because they saw the word condom in your 'rant.' But I'm being serious.
1- I don't know you. You mentioned the catholic upbringing. Does that mean that you do not believe in premarital sex? --which would render the condoms useless to you, which they would know.
2- If you could plausibly have sex relatively soon-- EVEN if based on social factors it seems very unlikely (I'm not making fun, just if)-- then maybe they honestly think 'I don't need this anymore... maybe Dom could use it.' Condoms are usually good for 4 years you know. ;) I had a friend that gave me condoms after she decided to stop using them (but was on the pill), too.
3- still under the 'if you might actually need them' clause: maybe they think you could plausibly get laid (I put it that way because of the context) in the not-so-distant future, but know that you don't think you will, and they don't need them anyway, so they're thinking this way you're prepared, and then they made you think a little about the possability, if that makes sense. Again, on the tired. I sure hope this isn't all incoherent.
4- maybe they think you get laid at Cons a lot. I know a high schooler who isn't 'semi-famous' like you that does, and that really weirded me out when I found out. He's not even that attractive (not NOT attractive... anyway). Even the guys I went to Akon with that thought most of the people were freaks still watched for hot girls and complained when they didn't get any.

I'll answer in as few words as possible, since this one e-mail is as long as any of my rants :P

Casual sex just isn't something I go in for. I just don't see any point in it. Pre-marital sex I'm okay with, but casual/random stuff I don't personally agree with. Con sex is just eww.

There was another one that was just amusing, from Small Pink Mouse:

1. "I just *know* that you're active so stay safe!" Not necessarily a vote for your sense of discretion but at least an expression of concern for your wellbeing. Don't forget, *supposedly* these things are AIDS prevention as well.

2. "I hope you find the right girl with which to use these." Again, not a great vote for your discretion, but then again it's a positive vote for your romantic life and can be taken as the way those who are attached would like to see *everyone* happily attached. It's possible that some matchmaking attempts are in your future if this interpretation is correct.

3. "I'm settled down but you aren't, so score one for me!" At one time married people did have an excessively romantic view of how much "action" singles got and for all I knew it still might happen today. In that case they might be going for vicarious romance through the notion of "helping" you (I noticed a long time ago that the female appetite for Romance novels seems to increase rather than decrease after marriage).

4. If they know one another then perhaps word got around from the first, "You can pass them along to Dom. *He'll* take them." In which case what you have is the sort of generous frugality that wants to think an item is "in use by someone else" rather than "wasted". In this case expect more such gifts as word gets continues to get around (Sorta like the way we get books from our relatives that we wouldn't touch in a million years once word gets out that we like to read). In this case no hidden message; they just think you have a genuine use for the stuff. 5. Any combination of 1 through 4 that you would like to picture: No reason that people need only one motive. ^_~

A couple of additional thoughts do occur to me:

1. *Used* condoms got from *Ebay*? ^_^; Used for what by whom, and why would you want to trust them? ^_^;;; Either your first friend is a ditz, was being malicious, or else has a twisted sense of humor and was expecting you to get the joke.

2. If your one friend is as completely Lesbian as you believe (Although people *do* change their minds about these matters upon occasion unexpectedly!) you may want to regard this one as in the same spirit of having gotten the condos from a guy rather than from a girl. In that case possibility #3 would be the likeliest one in her case.

Hope some of this helps,
Small Pink Mouse

Interestingly enough, I haven't carried around a condom in ages. I just haven't felt the need to, since, as I said, casual sex isn't my thing. When you know that you aren't getting any any time soon and are okay with that, there's not really a need for condoms. Strangely enough, people have gotten the impression that I have a steady girlfriend recently. It's weird. Maybe it's some kind of strange "man with condom" aura... or maybe it's just overly huggy friends ;P

Oh. And the condoms weren't used, they were still in the package and stuff. They just weren't, y'know, NEW new.

Meanwhile, as many people have pointed out, my next hobby should probably be making condom balloon animals, since I just KNOW people will start giving me the damn things at cons, just like those miscellaneous stick figures. Dammit, Rod gets booze at cons, Fred gets fanart, and I get condoms and leg humpings? There's no justice.

Well, I guess I can at least get people to use protection when they try and go for my leg. I wonder if I can find airtight body condoms to rid the world of some overzealous fans...

And speaking of overzealous fans, this one's from kudaketa usagi ningyou:

weeeeelllllllll.....

if it's any consolation, i'd like to have your babies? *blink*

Uh. Right.

On to actual game stuff.

In between sessions of deadline panic, I've picked up my roommate's games of Xenosaga and Dark Cloud 2. Penny Arcade's already said a lot about Dark Cloud 2, but I have to say, while most of the game is fun and all that, monster transformation is one of the biggest wastes of time in an RPG since... well... all of Final Fantasy 8. You have to get fucking 26 levels just to raise your monster's attack from 8 to 9? That was just plain poorly thought out. For the same amount of experience that it takes to level up ONE of your monsters to the next stage of growth, you can easily make a weapon and bring it up at least four, five transformations. In that time, the weapon's attack will go up by about 80. How weak is that? I find it to be a horrible design-one of the only things about Dark Cloud 2 that I find to be poorly designed. Well, except that the Island King looks ugly. I mean "gouge your eyes out rather than looking at this monstrosity" ugly. Who decided to put a pinwheel at the end of the damned thing? I'll stick with the Dark Cloud, thanks...

On to Xenosaga. I don't really play the game itself--Xenogears burned me far too badly with its slow-ass pace, bad combat design (Hey, look, I just learned a new technique! Okay, time to ignore it until the boss fight, gotta learn the next one!) and the excruciating agony that was disc 2. I think I would've preferred gnawing off my own leg to sitting through even a half hour of that monstrosity. Xenosaga has the blessed, blessed skip function, and the voiceover makes it much easier on the psyche. Too bad Wendee Lee has about as much emotion in her voice as a plank hitting a wall. It's just about the only outright bad performance I've heard in it so far.

But all that doesn't matter, because all I play is Xenocard. Why? Because it reminds me of the Battletech card game, and even with the whole "Rares infinitely outclass commons" thing, I still like the design of it. There are a few things that annoy the crap out of me about the game. "Turn 1 Shion, turn 2 make Shion level 10, wipe the floor with you" has happened far too many times for me to be happy with what's supposed to be the deliberate pace of the game, and I don't think Gnosis should be able to start on the battlefield the turn they enter play... but oh well. It's a CCG that I don't need to spend money on.

I do have a question, though. It has, again, been bugging me for a while. So KOS-MOS is this robot that's been designed to save the world from these alien/spirit/parasite/demon things called Gnosis, right? And so she's an ultimate weapon on legs. I can understand giving her a female design. It's... well, it's just a design choice. Why was Data male? Because the designer wanted Data to be male. But the real question is, who's the crack addict that decided to give her a garter? I mean, really, a goddamn garter? On an android? What's the point of it, to keep her metal socks up? For all I know, those boots are part of her leg, so why the hell would she need a garter? It's just dumb.

Anyway, I should head off. I'm tired, and should sleep. I started this rant at 1 AM and have been writing it on and off for the whole day, so I figure it's a good time to head off. 'Til next time...

"by no means..."
Thursday - March 13, 2003
[Piro] - 23:04:01
I'm taking a moment this evening to clarify something that has been pointed out to me recently, and I want to make sure that there is no confusion about how i am representing myself.

Recently, based on some of the things that I have said here in my rant space some people have the mistaken impression that I am claiming to actually be a manga-ka (the japanese term for 'comic artist/writer), and to be a 'professional' comic artist, artist. I wish to clarify things and apologize for any wrong impression I have given based on my writings.

I have expressed a desire to *become* a manga-ka, and to *become* a 'professional' comic artist. I lay NO claim to be one, or to even be close to being one. On a professional level, i *am* an architect. I am licence in the state of michigan, I have a Bachelors degree and an Masters degree in architecture from the University of Michigan, and I practiced for 11 years in the business before I decided to pursue my goal of trying to become a professional 'manga-ka' or 'comic artist'. Yes, THERE i am a professional. As a comic artist i am NOT.

I think the confusion here comes from the fact that I am trying to do this full time, and I am making a living attempting to do this full time. Just because i am capable of doing this gives me NO right to claim either of the above titles, and I DO NOT claim them.

There are a lot of reasons it would be very rude and egotistical to claim such things. First off, regardless of my success as a webcomic artist, I did not fight my way thru the industry as a 'professional'. It was also pointed out to me (and has been on many other occasions) that I do not produce anywhere near enough volume to be considered either a professional or a real manga-ka. That is because in addition to being able to produce excellent quality work that people are willing to follow and read and enjoy, they can do it at a certain pace and speed that I am incapable of reaching. A pro can produce 3 to 4 pages of material per day, and a real mangaka will work 16 hour days non stop. I could *never* lay claim to being on par with what japan considers a 'manga-ka'. I might work the hours, but i could never match the output.

remember, i said it was a GOAL of mine, not that i would EVER ACHIEVE IT. Geeze.

Honestly, i average 12 hours of work at least 5 days per week, and about six to eight hours on off days (not always on the weekend). It takes me eight hours on average to produce a megatokyo comic. I am having a lot of difficulty doing 'warmth' because i am so slow. Truth is, i can't really do it. The first installment is half the size i wanted because it was all i could get done. I'm trying, and i'm pushing myself to try to reach something that is at least acceptable in the industry. As things stand right now, i would not survive if i tried to claim to be a 'pro'.

There is one small defense i would like to put up for myself, in small reaction to some of what i've been criticized for... does being slow mean that my work isn't any good? Not really. It just means that i can't produce work at the levels that the 'media', whatever media it is, requires to feed the machine. Megatokyo has it's own pace. It has for years. Is it slow because i am a lazy ass? no. I may be slow, i may not be reliable to the 3 comic per week, but i am reliable for the work as a whole I'm just slow. It takes time for me to get the emotive quality i like into my work. I'm constantly chasing my muse down and making it do my bidding. I'm not fast, but i am consistently slow.

The nice thing about how i've done things is that you the reader always have the choice as to if you will accept my pace or not. it's not acceptable in the 'industry', and there is no reason they should make a special case for me. I'm not hurting anyone doing what i am doing. That is why the comic is free, that is why its here on this website. if people choose not to like it anymore, they are the ones who will decide to leave. I do not HAVE to be a 'pro' to reach you. I'm just proving that you DONT have to be a 'pro' to reach and entertain people. It's great if you can do it, but not all of us can.

So, i repeat. I AM NOT an 'american manga-ka'. I am NOT an 'manga-ka'. I am NOT a 'professional comic artist'. I AM NOT an 'artist'. I AM NOT an 'author'. I like to draw, i like to write stories, I like to share my work with you. I do my damndest to make it the best work i can do. If i tried to get a job doing this i'd get fired after a week. I have enormous respect for the people out there who really ARE professionals, and would not belittle their achievements by brashly claiming to be on the same level as any of them.

So, having said that, i'm gonna go back to that slow, plodding, activity of drawing that i've been doing for three years now. I've wasted an hour or so fretting over this, but i'll still finish tonight. Actually, i'll be a little late, but bear with me. I Thanks for reading :)

"Rock you"
Thursday - March 13, 2003
[Dom] - 19:30:00
You bastards better like tonight's MT. I dropped out of a GGXX tournament to work on it.

It's weird, trying to work my schedule around MT. Fred always talked about it, and now that I'm juggling a good 3 part-time writing/editing gigs (not an easy task, but certainly better than the alternative) I can see what he meant. Even though I only really have to deal with Fred on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, it's still difficult to find time to work with Fred in that maybe 5-hour window between when he finally writes the script and the drawings are mostly done.

Some day, we'll be ahead of schedule and he'll be able to throw scripts at me with some implied time between me reading them and him drawing them. Some day. Until then, it's time to run around like crazy on Tuesday and Thursday... hopefully the MT specials (which I haven't finished yet, ugh) will help alleviate this problem, as he doesn't have to write anything for 'em. Go fig...

"Translations"
Monday - March 17, 2003
[Dom] - 00:00:00
Quick note: Last week, Happa Tai was shown on the Jimmy Kimmel show. There was Yatta! footage. I NEED VIDEO. SOMEONE PLEEEEASE give me video! E-mail me ^^

So. I'm at the procrastination stage of my deadlines. Which means I probably won't sleep tomorrow night trying to catch up, which is alright, because I know I brought it on myself. I still haven't checked my mail with any frequency, so if you've e-mailed me over the past week or so and haven't gotten a response, be patient... I'm a cross between busy and lazy.

In between, I read my stack of new manga. It was a short stack, sure, but I haven't laughed so hard in a while.

See, on Ken's suggestion (I usually don't follow Ken's suggestions, the last one he made to me was Love Hina, and I hated that) I bought three volumes of Pretty Face, a fairly new manga by Kanou Yasuhiro. He said it was a kouha romance, and I, wondering how a kouha series could possibly involve romance that doesn't end in Harlock's girl being shot, was interested enough to pick up the first three volumes. Volume four comes out in a couple weeks, and believe me, I'll be chomping at the bit for it to arrive in the mail.

So anyway. I picked it up, started reading it, and thought... "okay, so it's about Randou Masashi, a karate champ and punk, who's pretty much a big bully. Well, except around this girl he likes, Kurimi Rina. And... hey, wait, he gets in a bus accident on page 4? The hell?

"And he wakes up from a year-long coma with a girl's face? What the--hmm. Okay, so the explanation kind of makes sense. His face was so badly burned, they couldn't make any positive ID on him, so the doctor--weirdo that he is--used a picture that Randou carried to reconstruct his face. And the picture was of Rina. But he still has all his male equipment... weird.

"He goes to run to his parents' house to find a picture of how he used to look... and they're not there. They moved away because they identified the wrong body and thought he was dead. And... he meets Kurimi Rina in the street, who stares at him, and says 'Oneechan!?'. What the--hmm. She had a twin who ran away, and it looks like in the year he was in bed, Randou's muscles atrophied to the point where he looks kinda girly... interesting. Somewhere in the little, shriveled, blackened heart of his, he realizes that this is the happiest he's ever seen her. And decides to pretend to be her sister long enough to find the real sister, bring her back to the family, get the surgery to make him look like he used to, and come back and finally (FINALLY) tell Rina he loves her."

So yeah, that's the premise. Weird, huh? It gets better. The whole thing had me in stitches--the characters are a pack of nutcases. Well, okay, mostly the guys are the weird ones. Randou especially--he may look girly, but he's still a karate champ and likes to kick the occasional ass (especially if said ass wants to lay a hand on Rina). But still, the characters are interesting, each chapter brought in something new to make me laugh--like my rant image, where Randou (as Kurimi Yuna) can't stand guys checking out his "twin sister". The art's great, and like GTO, Kanou-sensei is a master of drawing wild takes.

Then I realized something--I had to spread the word to other people that Pretty Face rocked. I have already converted three friends to the cause, one of whom is willing to help me pay for future volumes of the manga as long as he gets to borrow them. And now I want to spread the word more... but to friends who don't know Japanese.

Which means... translations! But I hate scanslations, since in my mind they're another form of blatant piracy--don't e-mail me about that one, I won't reply to anything trying to change my mind. But that means that I'd just be translating it and giving out scripts. Ken's encouraging me to do it, and since I have some free time coming up, I think I just might.

But the question is, will anyone care about translations if there aren't any scans with it? It would require, y'know, actual effort and money to get your hands on it, rather than being cheap and downloading some jpegs on 'em. It may seem silly, but it's something I worry about--does anyone care?

I put up a forum topic about it. Please, give me your opinion on whether or not you're interested, since I don't want to spend my off time on something no one will care about... y'know? It'd also be nice to finally put something on my poor, neglected oop-ack.com.

"the other side, part 1"
Monday - March 17, 2003
[Piro] - 17:05:00
It's been a little over a month since my new Apple Power Mac G4 arrived via Airborne Express (you know how it is when you are waiting for something to arrive, especially a big purchase.). It actually arrived on the 11th of last month, right before my trip to Katsucon. It's been an interesting month.

A little over a year ago, I remember facing the same problem I had this year - my computing facilities were not anywhere near up to snuff, and having a new machine would help speed things up and help me produce more and better work. At the time, the best solution for me (especially considering how much I moved around and portability was a big plus) I ended up getting a rock solid (and heavy as a loada bricks) Dell Inspiron 8100. Great laptop. After a while, I picked up a new monitor, an external keyboard, set up a remote fileserver (because i didn't want to store all the MT stuff on just the laptop drive) and It served me quite well. The only problems I had came when I started doing higher resolution color work with Photoshop. Laptop hard drives are slower by nature, and it tended to show (especially when you only had 256 meg of memory on board). Doing MT full time, having a good month in December, and feeling more confident about looking ahead to the possibility of a good year made me think that the investment in a new machine was a smart idea.

Back when I first started thinking about upgrading my computer, the concept of actually going the Mac route seemed silly - I could get a windows box that had more capacity for far less money. The more and more I looked, the more i started to decide that perhaps going with a G4 wasn't such a bad idea. Some of these decisions were based on what I heard from the field regarding macs - both good and bad. I did price comparisons. I did some research.

I suppose a lot of my decision came down to look and feel issues, in particular in comparing OS X and Windows XP. There was something about XP that I just didn't like. I had so many problems with windows over the year (who doesn't?) that even if OS X wasn't the crash proof gates of heaven some people claimed it was, i think it really came down to one simple thing...

I needed a change. I needed a break from the windows environment.

And i can already hear the Linux users out there readying emails to start hammering on me about that alternative and how great Gimp is... yes, Gimp is great, but I love my Photoshop and Illustrator. I have a machine sitting here that i will be turning into a linux workstation of some sort, but i couldn't use linux as my main workstation.

Now that that's out of the way, lets get down to specifics. There comes a point where you just stop looking at numbers and stats and you make a decision. I did that, and started to determine what PowerMac I was going to get (and what my credit card could handle ^^;;)

At first, i was looking at a dual 1 ghz machine, but i decided to go the extra step and go for the 1.25 ghz machine. i had read that there were a lot of noise problems with this machine, and this did worry me, but considering how loud even my laptop was, and how, well... spoiled? mac users tended to be about fit and finish on mac products, i wasn't sure how bad this really was. More on the noise issue later. I wanted to have at least 1 gig of memory, and the standard ATI card and whatnot that came with the G4 was fine by me.

Software was an issue. I was facing having to buy all new software, and having to do without or change from some of the things i was using. When i sat and thought about the stuff i really used, the only really expensive things were MS Office, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. All the other programs I liked to use there were versions or types that were not too expensive (under 100 bucks) for most of them. The G4 came with a promotion for MS Office X that was like 200 bucks. Photoshop and Illustrator cost $1000. all part of the cost of changing, i guess.

Then there was the issue of existing periferals. My speaker subwoofer thing would do fine. My new scanner would NOT work with the new mac (stupid Canon - they dont seem to be making drivers for some of their scanners for Mac) So i figured I would just leave the Canon D1250 U2F hooked up to the other machine if i ever needed to scan more slides, and i'd go back to using my N670 U with the mac. HP said they made a driver for my DeskJet 1220C. My Wacom digitizer was a serial digitizer, and i would have to replace that with a USB digitizer (another 500 bucks. ouch). Other than that, it was looking ok.

Now, the monitor. Like many others, I drooled over the idea of having a 23" Apple Cinema Display, but there was no way I could justify the $3,200 price tag, and my Samsung 900NF was perfectly fine.

So i placed my order, Power Mac G4 w/ dual 1.25 ghz processors, 1 gig ram, and mac office X promo. No prob. I also ordered Photoshop, Illustrator and a new digitizer from CDW. Whee.

Then, a few days later, Apple slashed prices. >:/

My first reaction was to be severely annoyed, but then i found out that they had automatically adjusted the prices on my order... and dropped the price on that 23" ACD to just under $2000.

You know how it is when you get money back, it feels like somehow it's new money, or free money, and its just like a bonus? heh. Ok, i'm not immune to that. After skillfully presenting my case to Seraphim about how much such a screen could improve my productivity (which she didn't buy for a second) she said we should go ahead and spring for it anyway.

Ah, true love. i tell you, it does exist.

So, last month, three boxes from Apple arrived, and I soon had the new system perched on my desk. I know there are a lot of really sweet looking PC accessories, cases, mice, etc, but the Mac sure has gadget and sweetness appeal to it. The G4 itself is a heavy mofo, which surprised me, but the fit and finish on it is really nice. You do get a little of what you pay for.

The 23" ACD is itself a thing of beauty. After using it for a month i have to say it really is very comfortable to use, and when it comes to illustrating in color - photoshop and this screen make for a VERY nice combination. Using a 19" monitor after this is like trying to look inside a box. It's not perfect - it doesn't have the serious high resolution that the CRT screens are capable of, but at 1920 x 1200, its the same height in pixels i used to use anyway, just wider. It's a slick unit all around - the feet work very well, there is a single cable that goes back to the card on the G4 itself. There is a USB port on the back you plug your keyboard in (and your mouse plugs into your keyboard). The buttons on it are kinda neat - they are touch sensitive, and when you brush your finger over the power symbol on the clear plastic, the white light below it glows and the system puts itself to sleep. Sweet, except when you accidentally graze it when rubbing up against the screen. er, or something like that. ^^;;

I'm very sensitive to mice and keyboards. I have gone thru a lot of them based on the fact that I liked the feel of one better than another. Based on the initial feel of a mac keyboard i was convinced that i'd want to change it, but after using it a little i actually found that i liked it a lot. It was nice not to have to change it.

The most common email I got after i mentioned getting this was that the first thing i should do is get rid of the single button apple pro mouse and just plug in my Microsoft wheel mouse. Well, i tried that. The sad thing is, i liked the feel of the mac mouse a heck of a lot better than the wheel mouse. Yes, i miss the wheel, but the pro mouse was... well, smoother. Besides, i fixed the gap left by the lack of a wheel in the mouse by getting a purely gadgety item known as a Griffin PowerMate - basically, a machined aluminum volume knob. You can program it to do just about anything, and it works real well for scrolling thru things. I like it, and its actually more functional than you might think (works for PC too, btw)

After a month, i've really grown quite used to the feel of this system, and other than the major difference between the location of the Apple key and the Control key for common, similar keystrokes (ctrl-S, for instance), it hasn't been as hard to get used to as you might think. Computers are our windows on the world, for the most part, and what we use effects what we do. I used to have two machines in my life - my machine at work, and my machine at home. Now, I have one that is serving both purposes. So far so good. That doesn't mean to say that I haven't had problems. In part two of this rant (because this is already getting long) i'll go into some details about my experiences getting my feet muddy putting this thing to work for me. It hasn't all been perfect, and I will tell you - I am very capable of making OS X unstable.

It's a gift, I admit it. :)

"Responses"
Tuesday - March 18, 2003
[Dom] - 22:50:00
Boy. Talk about discouraging. I lent my Pretty Face manga to a friend for three days. And then I walk home and see my roommate reading scanslations of Pretty Face. He couldn't wait two days for the manga to come back... no, he had to have it now. It was an attitude that, had it been prevailing, would mean that I would keep my translations to myself. But hey, the feedback on the forum was primarily good, which makes me feel nice about this project. I'll start as soon as my vacation starts, between 5 and 6 PM on Thursday.

An unexpected side effect of a miscellaneous sentence in my last rant was an interesting reaction from two different people from #Akatsuki-Manga, a group that is, in fact, scanslating Pretty Face. One took my backhanded comment about scanslations as a personal insult, for which I apologize--it's neveer my intention to launch personal attacks from this rant space. Well, except on my accursedly impatient roommate.... But yes. While I still don't support scanslations, it doesn't mean that I hate any who scanslate--there are people with good intentions behind it, I just don't agree with them. Anyway, the second response was much more encouraging. I'll let it speak for itself:

Hi Dom. In case you're wondering who this is, I'm (edited) one of the translators for Akatsuki-Manga (among other groups). I'd like to begin by saying I'm a fan of your work.

I know some of my other fellow members of the group are treating your dislike of scanlation as a challenge, either to themselves personally for their choice to scanlate, or to the work they've put into it. Personally, I approve completely of the stance you're taking about the issue.

Fansubbing, all semantics and speechifying aside, is and always has been a major form of piracy. The cries from the fansubbers that "we stop as soon as the series is licensed in our area and always encourage people to purchase the originals for themselves" convince no one. Anyone who pays attention to the fansubbing community knows that the moment a series is licensed, sure, the big groups will drop it, but that doesn't stop translation from finishing. Sometimes it's even the same people doing it, just with different aliases and under a different group name. And as for "be sure to buy this when it becomes licensed in your area", that option may never become available in some cases, and in all cases the option to purchase the original Japanese version is open as well--and is often not even mentioned as a possibility.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here by saying all that to you. You're obviously well aware of the facts, but I like to ramble and seldom have the opportunity.

The thing about fansubbing, though, and scanlation in particular, is that we do it because we love it. Obviously you understand the desire to help others understand and be able to enjoy works in languages which they may not themselves speak. The problem is that were I to do translation work of a series I enjoy and distribute only the scripts, one of two things would happen. Either nobody would bother to look, because I'm just some guy on the net, like millions of others, or my translations would be quickly stolen by some less-than-ethical scanlation group--and let's face it, there's more than enough of those out there--and they'd be used to aid and abet the piracy of the manga, and likely without any urgings to purchase the original title included. So I have chosen to join the scanlators, with the knowledge that maybe I'll be able to make a difference in the quality and legitimacy of the work by urging left and right that people purchase the manga, with a sincere hope that they will, as opposed to saying it just to keep myself out of trouble.

You, on the other hand, are rather well known and respected by many in the internet community. You're in a very good position right now to set precedent by distributing scripts, as opposed to scanlations, and I urge you not to become discouraged or dissuaded from that path. I would like nothing more than to be able to present a translation without the accompanying pirated scans--or even to translate legitimately. In fact, I'm looking into the feasibility of taking the group I'm working most closely with into the legitimate realm by purchasing the rights for the manga we're working on and trying to found a publishing group of my own. But that may be just a dream. In the meantime, the legitimate support of manga can be aided by your idea of distributing scripts without scans, and I again urge you to continue with that plan.

Geez... how much more encouragement do I need than that? Thanks... If you want to reply to this person (who requested that their name be withheld), send mail to countb@hotmail.com. Personally, I wish the e-mailer good luck on the company startup.

Now to address what some will perceive as my hypocrisy in forming/joining the fansub group Doquote 262 for the express purpose of subbing the GTO dramas. Well, when it comes down to it... we're three guys with DVDs we want to watch. Whatever we sub will stay with the people who own the GTO box sets, IE Cenon and Roger. And maybe friends who help pick up the tab for our translation fees, but that's a subject for another time... ^^;

And to end this... Wheeeeee~, a subscription to Weekly Jump through Kinokuniya is surprisingly cheap. Cheap enough that I'm willing to subscribe to Jump just for Pretty Face...

Next rant I'll talk about another (relatively) recent manga I like, No Bra. It's... interesting.

"Phhhbbbbppth"
Friday - March 21, 2003
[Dom] - 00:06:00
One realization I've made in my first few hours of translating Pretty Face: typing out Japanese and English at the same time fucking SUCKS. Sorry for those who want to see the Japanese right next to the English, but I'm only one man, I have to set reasonable goals. Two hours to type out 15 pages of just Japanese (no translations) is just ridiculous. Switching alphabets every line is a pain in the tuckus, so... screw it. If someone else wants to transcribe ALL of the manga's Japanese, feel free, but I'm just going to stick to English so I can finish this project before I die.

On to other subjects. When I was cruising Fileplanet the other day, I came across this game. And it pissed me off. Seriously pissed me off. Go to that game site. Take a look at what it says. And my quick response?

Dear Infogrames,
Fuck you too.
Love,
- Dom Nguyen

A quick, important note: this rant has nothing to do with the current situation in Iraq. I refuse to say much about that, except to those of our readers who are in the armed forces: keep yourselves safe. Dying sucks. Trust me, my family has done a lot of it in wartime.

Back to the subject at hand. Some of you may not understand why that game is so offensive to me. Let's take a quick, dirty look at their description, shall we?

Disrupt the enemy's command structure, scout Viet Cong positions, and ambush the enemy in the dead of night. In LINE OF SIGHT: VIETNAM your job is to locate elusive enemy soldiers and pick them off one-by-one.

The FUCK? Okay, so the point of this game is to shoot the oh-so-sneaky Vietnamese people while they sleep-it doesn't seem very promising in that respect.

I usually make it a point not to make political stands on MT, but this is something I can't fucking stand. It's simply disrespectful to treat the Vietnam War this flippantly, as if it were something so simple--see: Rambo's "Do we get to win this time?". Fuck that revisionist shit. I have a lot of opinions about the war that are hard for me to express in English, but I feel that it's a disservice to my parents' pain to re-cast history like this. What's next, the Agent Orange expansion, where you get to destroy the vegetation and fertilize the land for future generations at the same time? Or the awesome "we had to destroy the village to save it" missions, complete with the joyous cries of Vietnamese children as their houses burn down? Or the My Lai map, with the ever-dangerous unarmed gooks ready to pull out their urine-soaked punji sticks and stab you?

What kind of shit were the people at Infogrames on when they let this game through? I mean... take a look at this screenshot. Ooh, firing blindly into the vegetation! It's just like really being in Vietnam! CHARLIE IN THE TREES! THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!

Ugh. My anger has run its course.

Wait, no, one more time.

Fuck off and die, nFusion. You should do something more productive with Infogrames' money, like kick puppies or introduce children to the wonderful joys of pissing contests.

I feel better now. Not coherent by any means... but better. God, that game offends me with its very existence.

I know I promised to talk about No Bra with this rant, and I still will in a future rant--but this was too much for me to ignore.

Bastards.

"The fan art project"
Monday - March 24, 2003
[Dom] - 00:30:00
Yep. It's all true. Oop-ack.com is officially open, with four chapters of Pretty Face translated, and a whole lot of space for your fanart... check the page for submission guidelines.

Be gentle. Please be gentle...

"Shoujo? Me?"
Friday - March 28, 2003
[Dom] - 08:30:00
Oof. I must have a huge e-mail backlog on my megatokyo account by now... I've spent almost an entire week working on Oop-Ack.com, and I've almost finished translating the first tankoubon of Pretty Face, all while still working on MT and getting ready for E3 and April Fool's day at work. Not to mention still trying to help out Doquote 262, which has started to work on subbing the GTO drama. I have the script for episode 1 in front of me. And, like fansubbers of old, we're asking for donations so we can pay our translator--check out the Doquote 262 page on oop-ack for more information.

Oh--Hodge-podge, my partner in crime, is getting an automated submission form ready for the MT fanart project. It'll be ghetto-ish, but it'll work, dammit.

Speaking of E3, wanna know something amusing yet crushing? It overlaps with Anime Central by a day. Meaning that I'm gonna be in E3 workin', and then fly from LA to Chicago and keep workin'. I will be one cranky bastard that weekend, so be kind, eh?

What's been keeping me sane lately (other than Shadowfist and copious amounts of Faulkner) is manga. Pretty Face is nice and all, but I'd go insane if I only had that to poke at.

Which is where my beautifully twisted friend Joyce comes in. A few weeks ago, she recommended this manga by the name of Yamato Nadesico Shichi Henge and let me borrow the first volume. For a while, I was turned off by the pink binding, since I have never had any shoujo manga on my shelf. Well, I lie--I had Marmalade Boy volume 1 there for about three days before I sold it to someone. But the principle is there--I don't read stuff aimed at girls, it's just not my style.

See, YMSH is about this girl who got so burned by her first love rejecting her that she goes completely anti-social. She turns to horror movies, has a skeleton as her only friend, grows her bangs long so no one can see her face... et cetera et cetera. Then her jet-setting aunt leaves her in charge of her boarding house. Where four prettyboys happen to live.

I almost put the manga down right there. But I stuck it out, and was pleasantly surprised to see Sunako bust out a cleaver and chop a fish's head off with such force that it flew at the prettyboys (sending them running) and splattered her cheek with blood (which she caressed). And I thought "Holy cow... this is awesome."

So the four prettyboys get it into their heads that they'll turn her into a lady, and she resists to the point where she plots to kill them in their sleep.

The chainsaw scene sold me on it--I've bought all seven volumes from Bk1 (warning: Japanese only) and am anxiously waiting for the rest to come in. So, yes, I now own a shoujo manga. I have no regrets.

Because coming in at the same time is a very strange manga by the name of No Bra, which runs in Shounen Champion-since it's published by Akita Shoten, maybe I'll get lucky and IC Entertainment will pick it up. Yeah, right :P

Ask a certain bot on IRC (the same one you want to give the the Doquote 262 command) and he'll say this about No Bra: "No Bra is the heartwarming story of a boy, his hot transvestite roommate, and his Issues". And that's part of the fun of it.

As a side note, even though I seem to be on a transvestite kick right now, I don't like Tenshi na Konamaiki, because I don't like the art style. Pretty Face and No Bra are quite enough at once, thank you.

Anyway, it's been a while since I saw any work where the LGBT (that's "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender" for those of you who don't know) character is more than just a lesbian lust puppy or flaming comic relief, so No Bra's portrayal of Yuuki is a refreshing change. The way Yuuki's written, you actually support him, and support that the main character is willing to protect him from... the rest of the world, really.

I'll put up slightly more coherent versions of these two overviews on my Manga page some day, especially if I can get in touch with Kawatsu Kenjirou and get permission to use some of his art on the page... accursed Japanese form letters. Anyway, until next time!

"core dump"
Friday - March 28, 2003
[Piro] - 11:15:06
Between last friday and tuesday afternoon I had both artist block and writers block *really* bad. It's weird, you can be rolling along just fine and then boom - you got nothin'. You find yourself reaching to pull things out of thin air like you usually do, but there ain't nothin there but air. ^^;; Believe it or not, the SGD monday was planned, but it was a good thing... if a SGD can be called a good thing. ^^;;

I don't really have a lot of organized thoughts to deal with today, just a lot of little things. First thing I want to mention is that as of today the 2nd reprint of Megatokyo Book 1 should be finished and start shipping to bookstores, comic book shops and the ThinkGeek store and direct to you from the IC Entertainment store. I am very sorry about the long delay, but at least they are done now. We tweaked and fixed some typos and errors in the first book so this one should be just about dead on.

The other thing i wanted to mention is actually hanging on my door. Yesterday, a truck from Homewood Press pulled up and dropped off a box of Pirogoeth poster reprints - and they look amazingly good. Yes, Merekat and I have pulled together version 2.0 of the famed 'Pirogoeth' poster we did almost two years ago. (i don't have a preview of the final version for some reason, i will shortly) The reprint is smaller than the original print (which was almost too big) but I am very happy with the size - 20 x 28. It's bigger than the Capture the Bear poster, but it's the same excellent print quality. Kudos to the folks at Homewood Press - they do a great job. Anyways, due to a goof up on my end, they actually delivered the entire order of posters to my Mail Boxes Etc. address rather than the ThinkGeek warehouse. ^^;;;; No worries, they are on the way there as we speak, and should be available sometime next week.

Merekat and I also have yet another poster project in the works. She is busy rendering the Broken Miho drawing, and we expect to be able to show off a preliminary print of the image at Sakuracon next weekend. It is looking rather remarkable. :)

Oh ya, and don't forget, Sarah and I will be at Sakuracon in Seattle this weekend. Merekat will also be there, as well as two other well known webcomic guys (i don't know if they want it known that they will be there, so i'm gonna stay mum about it). Anyways, we will be there Friday thru Sunday, and I don't know the schedule yet, but when I do I will post it here. I've never been to seattle, so it should be a fun trip.

I can't believe how many responses I got to my request for info from people living in and around Sendai or who knew the place well. Thank you for all your emails, and I will be responding this weekend. Like i said, it's fun writing a story about a place you've never been.

Lessee, what else... oh, if you know of anyone serving in the military who cannot reach the web to read MT but is a MT fan and can receive attachments, please let them know they can e-mail me and i will send out strips starting from when they were cut off until they are current. I didn't do a good job of doing this last time, but this time I am determined to be more organized about it. From everyone here at MT, you guys have our support and best wishes.

There are many opinions on the conflicts that are now underway in the middle east, and I don't want to make any comments myself for a variety of reasons. I feel that the best thing that I can do is provide support to the people who need it... and to me, that is not just the troops in the field, but you the readers as well. I will do my best to give us something to laugh at and something to react to that you can rely on in this unstable world we live in. That is what entertainment is for, really.

I was asked to join the 'make games, not war' benefit drive by that annoying little european bugger from Little Gamers (don't get offended, it's a private joke between the LG guys and me that goes back to the early day's of MT ^_^). Like i stated above, i did not feel that i could join this project, but i feel that people should make their own choices about what they support, and that is why i'm graciously providing a link for them.

And, since i'm providing all this gratuitous linkage, Visit Robert's little piesquares game page. Robert, cool dude. piesquares, not a bad little game. :P

Ya ya, anime radio. I hate it when the DJ's make fun of me because they know me. Listen to Aniverse radio and feel my pain.

So much mac support from people, i can't even deal with all the emails. ^^;; Drew from Vizspring Software deserves a bit of a pimpout for providing me with some Mac OS X goodies to play with. :)

Originally i was planning to change the 'linkup' thing in the newsbox once or twice every week. As you can see, i haven't been keeping up with that. ^^;; I'm gonna try to automate some things so it will change more often. I have a huge list of things to link.

Ok, now this has turned into one disjointed rant, so i might as well wrap it up with more random information. Like i said before, i'll be going to Sakuracon next weekend with Seraphim, but there are a few other things coming up real fast too. I'll go down the list:

On Saturday, April 12th, from 9:30am to 4:00pm both Seraphim and I will be in South Bend Indiana at the St. Joseph County Public Library Open Book Festival. So, if you live in the area, you can come down and hear me talk about the process of getting published ^^;;

I tentatively have a Lecture I am suppose to be giving on "Publishing your Creative Works to the Internet" in Dublin, Ireland - i'll provide more information on when exactly that will be when we get things all sorted out.

I tentatively have a book signing lined up for April 19th at Wizzywigs in downtown Ann Arbor. It's a tad tentative, but i'll toss out the date here just for the heck of it.

Other conventions I am planning to go to this year are... Anime Central in Chicago, which is May 16 to 18. This will be the first of two Naze Nani Megatokyo shows we are planning this year. You have been warned. Oh, also, one of my friends in the Chicago area is a Industrial/EBM DJ, and is looking into the possibility of doing a club event near the convention on thursday night before the start of the con. Essentially, we were thinking of doing a Cave of Evil themed club event. If you would be interested in attending this, please email me with 'CoE Chicago' in the subject line. We would be doing a set of tunes that we put together, much of it reflecting a lot of the heavy industrial and EBM stuff that has influenced me over the years. If there is enough interest, we might just do it :)

Next con will be Project A-kon in Dallas, Texas on May 30 to June 1 (which is still a little tentative, but i plan to go). It was a really good con, and I really feel like coming back :)

then I get a few months off, and then we will be in full force at Otakon on August 8th thru the 10th, like we have for the previous two years of insanity. This will be the second showing of Naze Nani Megatokyo this year. Nyow.

Ok, what else... I am also planning on attending the San Diego Comic Con on July 17th thru the 20th. Originally, i was just going to go and float around, not really having a home or a booth at the con, but a webcomic friend of mine wanted to know if i wanted to go in on a booth at the show. I'll provide more details as we get things organized, but when we started talking about it we had the idea that this booth we got could be more than just a place for us to park our butts, but a nice nodal point for any other webcomic people who will be at the show. Sort of a casual spot to radiate too. I think webcomics deserve a good representation at that show, so i figure if we can do that, that'd be cool. :)

And finally... my little 'fantasy trip' so to speak, the one that will probably NOT happen, is going to Winter Comike in Tokyo at the end of December. That would be a very expensive trip, and I don't think i can justify it, but it is something i really want to do. We'll see how the year goes. I've got an application sitting here, and i have ideas for what i will do, so i'll do some preliminary planning, but that's all i feel safe doing right now.

ho boy, tons of stuff. Sorry about the rambling nature of this, but i think i got a lot of info out in this little core dump. Now off to do something productive :)

"An exciting announcement"
Monday - March 31, 2003
[Dom] - 10:00:00
I never thought this day would come. Sure, I dreamed about it, but until today, it was all just another pipe dream of mine, like writing the screenplay for an MT movie. But thanks to a lot of hard work and more than a little good fortune, it's finally a reality.

We at MegaTokyo, in partnership with BioWare Corp and LucasArts, are proud to present an exciting new video game experience like none you have ever seen before--Shirt Guy Dom Gold Collection.

Shirt Guy Dom Gold Collection is not one, not two, not even three but four great games from our award-winning friends in Canada. We've been developing these since early last year, and there should be enough in this pack for everyone.

The first game we worked on was Shirt Guy Dom Make My Video, which I'm glad to say is a feast for the eyes, the ears, and the soul. We've managed to get the licenses to such timeless classics as Southern All-Stars' "Manpii no G-spot", Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing", Billy Idol's "White Wedding", and Ministry's "Jesus Built my Hot Rod". To my great surprise, the Beastie Boys joined the project, lending their hit song "Girls". So as you can see, we have an all-star lineup, and from what I've seen of the game, BioWare has completely eliminated the FMV mistakes of the past. Each music video has at least three different ways to make it. I got my hands on the Sexual Healing demo, and it looked great. With the ability to cut to a healthy selection of stick figure tableaus, as well as shots of Marvin Gaye himself, it looks and feels awesome. Watching the video made me think that I was Spike Jonze for a second, as I watched my masterpiece unfold. First, it cut to some shots of some actors slowly dancing to Marvin's soulful croonings, who slowly morphed into stick figures. Then it cut to that kid from the Red Balloon crying, and from there I was in heaven. I can't wait to see what they have in store for the rest of the videos.

The next game in the collection, I have to admit I was a little nervous about. Just the title MegaTokyo Mud Wrestling made me nervous, but Trent Oster kept insisting that he would do it with the utmost discretion, and now that I have a copy, I can safely say that this is a game I would be proud to let my children play. Kimiko, Erika and the rest of the girls are treated with respect in the game, even as they tear off their clothes and roll around in the mud. And wait until you see the special Boo events with a humorous cameo from the Cardboard Tube Samurai! Truly awe-inspiring. Ping squirmed around as if she really did have...well, I've talked too much about that already. What really sold me on the game was the one-handed control scheme. It was convenient for those moments when I had to get a drink, or eat a sandwich. I haven't even touched the Miho Pie mini-game yet, but I'm sure that those boys in Canada did a great job with it.

Star Wars Episode 3: Stick Figure Sith is another masterpiece, something that I never thought would happen in the venerable Star Wars universe. Someone is assassinating Jedi, and you, as Obi-Wan, are dispatched to find and eliminate this threat to the Jedi. The character designs and 3D modeling in this game are awesome, especially the Stick Figure Sith character that is behind all the Jedi slayings. The Unreal engine is pushed to its limits for this game, allowing unprecedented use of Obi-Wan's Force powers to reach secret areas, fight epic battles in beautifully rendered Star Wars environments, and awesome deathmatch play. And watch for the unlockable character, Todd McFarlane's Spawn!

The crowning masterpiece of this project, though, is the SGD expansion for Neverwinter Nights. I can't say enough about this, and if I talk too much, I'll spoil the excitement. I'll just say that the new character classes are great--you can finally be a Sony Assassin, Sega Black Operative, and my favorite, the Rabid Fanboy. The new items are a lot of fun too, the Cool Thing is in there, the KillStick is in there... and boy, are the lighting effects cool. They haven't integrated Pirogoeth and Largo into the design yet--that's for the Endgames expansion, along with Magic Beer 1.

Alright, I've talked enough about myself, just go to ThinkGeek and pre-order the Gold Collection, already!

"Mop-up"
Wednesday - April 2, 2003
[Dom] - 08:30:00
The response to the SGD Gold Collection has been overwhelming!

Most of it said "Dang, you got me good" or "I laughed so hard I crapped myself", but there's one particular e-mail that I'm especially proud of. It's censored, due to quite legitimate complaints about my recent language, but you can still feel the burning anger in it:

**** you and your april fools joke up the *** with a big rubber ****

That's why I do it, baby. There are actually going to be some fruits from this joke, surprisingly enough--once Fred gets back from SakuraCon we'll talk more about it.

The work on the MT Fanart Archive continues, and my partner Hodge-Podge says that it'll be ready for public consumption around the Monday after next--for now, he has a working submission form so you can submit images without e-mailing me.

Let's see what else... uh... hmm, nothing. Talk to you later.

"Seattle is so far away..."
Wednesday - April 2, 2003
[Piro] - 22:00:00
quick rant to cover a few little things.

First off, the reprint of the Pirogoeth poster is now in the ThinkGeek store. Its 20 x 28, not quite as unmanageable as the last poster, but it looks REALLY good. Got one hanging on my door (i never did hang up the original one, all of mine are stored in a big tube ^^;;)

Secondly, It's been officially announced, so i can blab too. The two other webcomic guys who will be appearing at Sakuracon this weekend are none other than Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade. Come watch as we throw things at each other. :P

Unfortunately, due to things going on in the world, most of the Japanese guests at Sakuracon have had to cancel their attendance, but there are still enough of us left that we'll try our damndest to make sure everyone enjoys the con as much as possible.

Here's the schedule for Sakuracon as it stands right now:

Friday (4/4)
1400 - Web Comics Panel (with the PA guys)
1630 - Meet the Guests Reception

Saturday (4/5)
1200 - Megatokyo Panel
1300 - Autograph session

Sunday (4/6)
1200 - Penny Arcade Panel
1300 - Autograph session
1700 - Closing Ceremonies

Should be fun :) Most of the time, Merekat and I will probably be in the Artists Alley doing sketches and drawings for all who ask. Remember, you dont have to bring anything to get a drawing, just an idea of what you want. I have tons of index cards :)

Last night Merekat and I were up till 3 am (i was up till 3am EST, Mere was up till 3:30am PST) putting the finishing touches on the Miho image. Hehehe. it came out *really* nice. This morning she took it down to get a single print made for Sakuracon - a 3 foot by 4 foot print we can use to present the image at the Saturday panel.

Now, posters of this image will be available in May in the ThinkGeek store, so there is no need to panic that you wont be able to get a hold of the poster, but we will be auctioning off this rather unique 3'x4' print of the poster at the con as part of the Art Show. Since it is a print, i expect that it will sell for a reasonable amount rather than the, uh, large amounts my original work seems to be going for these days. (boggles)

There is also the Charity Auction, which mere and I are donating a proof of the Pirogoeth poster reprint (high quality stock, and used to verify the color matching for the posters) for the auction that benefits the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Alaska, Montana, Northern Idaho and Washington. I was originally going to do an original piece for this (I still might, maybe on the plane trip over ^_^) but i'm hoping that it will result in a worthy donation to that cause.

Ok, now i gotta get cracking on comics for Friday and Monday...

"kowareru"
Thursday - April 10, 2003
[Piro] - 12:00:00
Before i rant along here about my weekend visit to Seattle, you should take a moment to look at the full shot of the Broken Miho image that Merekat and I showed at Sakuracon. A rather amazing piece of work, is it not? I think it does a real good job of capturing the feel of the piece. Yes, there will be posters, sometime in May, don't start email-bombing me. ^^;;

I can honestly say that Seraphim and I had a blast at Sakuracon. The trip started to look bad when we changed planes in Minneapolis and ended up being in two center seats, one in front of the other, rather than next to each other (doh!), but it worked out ok in the end. We put the Sakuracon crew, most of all poor Lony, who had never read MT before and no idea what he was getting into as our 'liaison', went far and above the call of duty for us on many things, and for that you guys have our thanks.

Of course, one of the highlights of Sakuracon was the ability to toss things at Tycho and Gabe - though honestly it was great seeing them again. Last time I saw them was E3 almost 2 and a half years ago. One of the most satisfying moments of the con was watching this cute little girl giggle her head off as she smacked Tycho in the ass with a paper tube as he talked to me. Our webcomic panel was a lot of fun. In fact, i think it was better than the MT panel itself. I did chuckle at the wide eyed dazed confusion of panic you could see in their eyes as they experienced their first Anime convention. Tehehh. I hope we get to see them at other conventions, honestly - these guys are a hoot. There are reasons why i tell people to go read PA when they complain to me about lack of humor in MT. :)

Oh, and yes, Tycho and I do disagree on issues such as donation systems for supporting a site like this, but i should clarify that I FULLY respect and encourage people to use the system if they are comfortable with it. It really does directly support great sites like Penny Arcade, and my resistance to using such a system has more to do with personal neurosises and a highly evolved guilt complex (i think it even has its own zip code now). By all means, support the comics you read if they have donation systems in place. I just have different ideas of how to survive on the web, thats all :)

Both Seraphim and I want to thank all the fans who were patient enough to stand in line as i slowly drew stuff for everyone. For me, this is the best part and the most important part of going to a convention. It lets me indulge my masochistic side, as well as have a chance to meet as many MT fans as i can and give them something in return for all the respect they give me. MT fans are the nicest bunch of people. :) Well... there was the 'sign my balls' incident, but lets not go there. ^^;; I've been collecting con pics, and with dom's help we'll see what we can do to get a decent gallery system going so people can see how things went.

I also had a great time meeting and having dinner with the Japanese guests on Sunday night. Nagahama-san is one of the nicest guys i've ever met, and we spent dinner talking without the help of an interpreter, and given the limitations on both sides, it was a fun and interesting conversation. The con staff even gave me a Con Survival Kit that contained aspirin, a wrist brace, water, and a thing of Icy Hot. ^^;;

K, that said, one more time - Sakuracon was a great con, and thank you to everyone who helped make it a good con for us. :)

Of course, being somewhat masochistic, guess who is traveling again tomorrow afternoon? :P On Saturday, April 12th, from 9:30am to 4:00pm both Seraphim and I will be in South Bend Indiana at the St. Joseph County Public Library Open Book Festival. So, if you live in the area, you can come down and hear me talk about the process of getting published ^^;; I believe there will be an article in the local Tribune paper as well (yikes, need to get the reporter some artwork, gotta do that next ^^;;)

I've got to get back to work on Friday's comic, but i'll post some pics from Sakuracon next week. Please enjoy the above linked image of the Broken Miho - Merekat worked very hard on it, and we'll be showing some closer up details so you can see some of it in full droolage - probably as some wallpapers. My favorite part really is the hair and the eyes... and the lace. Yes, amazing lace, it really is...

okies, off to work...

"Dead Air"
Tuesday - April 15, 2003
[Dom] - 16:30:00
Yes, I'm quite aware that I haven't ranted in almost two weeks now. I'm not sorry, there's been a lot of crap I've had to take care of. And there's going to be more, too. Oop-ack.com is aaaalmost ready for public consumption. The estimate was off. Hodge-Podge's new estimate is that it'll be up... soon. And then we'll start hacking at a cosplay database. Whee~

A final bit of clean-up: I recently got this e-mail from our buds over at Bioware: It's pretty interesting. Yeah... interesting.

Shirt Guy Dom, I must say that I am incensed that you have the unmitigated gall to put up such vile misinformation in your rant section of the Megatokyo web site. BioWare has NOT authorized the release, marketing, development, or conception of the "Shirt Guy Dom Gold Collection" nor the games "Shirt Guy Dom Make My Video," "MegaTokyo Mud Wrestling," "Star Wars Episode 3: Stick Figure Sith" or the Shirt Guy Dom expansion to Neverwinter Nights. This is all typical of your desire for more face time and self-promotion on the Megatokyo web site, something you've been clamoring for ever since the mysterious disappearance of Great Teacher Largo some months back. Should you persist in perpetrating these unsupported announcements of unauthorized products, I will be rather upset with you and all your Megatokyo brethren. Besides, I'd much rather see a "NeverLargo Nights" game where Largo finally gets his chance to rid the Forgotten Realms of its zombie infestation once and for all.

Who is depicted-in the July 12, 2002 Megatokyo cartoon-drooling over a Neverwinter Nights box? Why, I do believe it's someone whose name is NOT Shirt Guy Dom! Who has been assigned Boo as a guardian angel? Shirt Guy Dom? Most certainly not! Who wanted BioWare to make him their monkey boy? Someone other than Shirt Guy Dom, as I recall. In the face of all that evidence, which can be easily found in Megatokyo's archives, I think that if BioWare were to do anything with MegaTokyo, it would be with Great Teacher Largo and not you, so-called Shirt Guy Dom, or should I say "Short Guy DUMB"? Yeah, that's right, you heard me. I'm calling you out. What are you gonna do about it, huh? Sic your stick-figured alter ego on me, is that it? You gonna poke me with your stick-figured hand or draw unflattering stick-figure representations of your victory over me? I'm shaking in my Neverwinter Nights shirt (which is included in the Neverwinter Nights Collector's Edition, I might add). Come on, Shirt Guy Dom, bring it on! You and me, this Sunday at Wrestlemania, in the squared circle! No holds barred, no disqualifications! QA Ninja Stan and Shirt Guy Dom in the steel cage!

That's right, Shirt Guy Dom. We want overenthusiastic, conspiracy-theorist fanboys like Largo hyping our product, not shirt-selling, rant-writing, glasses-wearing, stick-figure-drawing, Piro-subsituting, Largo-killing, weasel-rapping, tire-rolling, beef-triping, gold-smelting, table-constructing, penguin-suiting, carbohydrate-consuming, beer-drinking, language-speaking, elbow-dropping, bus-driving, two-timing, pain-bringing, game-worshipping, television-taping, computer-defragging, pants-swiping, fence-painting, plant-growing, video-renting hacks like you.

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance Ninja
BioWare: Where quality begins with QA!

What a pack of nutjobs :)

Meanwhile, I was sent this Fist of the North Star-inspired flash recently. It's also... interesting.

That's your horoscope for today.

"flight check"
Thursday - April 17, 2003
[Piro] - 08:45:00
quick note: if you are a UofM student who can't come to the Wizzywigs booksigning on Saturday because you have to leave before then, please email me and i'll see what we can do to perhaps meet up as a groop before you all leave. :)

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had a tentative book signing at Wizzywigs on April 19th, which would be this saturday - now that things have solidified, and my trip to Ireland was postponed, we moved the signing to NEXT weekend, on April 26th at 2:00pm or so. If you live in the Ann Arbor area or nearby, you probably know where Wizzywigs is (Downtown Ann Arbor next to the Michigan Theater). We'll actually have copies of MT book 1 availible (gasp!) but you don't need to buy one - just drop by if you are in the area and i'd be more than happy to draw somethin for you (i always have index cards handy).

Well, it always feels good to end a chapter.

It seems sort of anti climactic sometimes, finishing up a chapter. Most of the big events in a chapter have happened, and there is a lot of wrap up, and when you have as many threads and characters bouncing around as there are in Megatokyo, it's hard to stop this train (so to speak). My goal for Chapter 3 was 60 comics, i overshot it by 9. Not bad, really - Each MT chapter was supposed to be around 30 comics or so originally. Seems like a long time ago...

When I started Chapter 3, I really didn't feel like I had a firm grasp on where the story was going. During a good portion of the first half of the comic, there was a lot of wavering, and some of those extra nine pages are a result of having to stall a bit by extending the story here and there, or doing something more random while i worked out the hard bits.

After comic #10, i forced myself to sit down and map out the rest of chapter 3 comic by comic. I've pretty much stuck to that, with some minor (and major) re-writes here and there as the chapter progressed. The method I use for this is to write a fairly simple outline with a short description of what each comic needs to be. I leave lots of room for development, and it's not unusual for what is listed as one comic to take 3, and sometimes even 3 comics to be done as one.

As i've said so many times before, Megatokyo is an experiment, which is a nice way of saying that Megatokyo is like on the job training for me - when I started working on MT I had never done a sequential comic before, nor been able to write a long complicated story. I've learned a lot over the past three years, including what works and what doesn't work, and I'm always questioning what I'm doing in an effort to improve things.

Especially towards the end of chapter 3, I started to feel a lot better about the artwork. It's still not professional quality, but I think that things have been looking better, and trying to add more backgrounds helps. This, of course, just adds more time to each drawing - I think that for the rest of my life i'll never actually be ahead on anything... i'll just keep making things more complicated so they take longer :)

From a story perspective, I'm fairly satisfied with chapter 3. There are a lot of weak things about it, but there are some pretty decently handled strong points too. Some things that are considered weaknesses to the MT story have more to do with where the story is at than me not writing things properly. Writing is 80% setup and 20% execution. Most of it is about setting things up so that you set in motion the high points of the story. If you go directly to the high points, they don't mean as much because you need the setup and the background to really feel whats going on. Would Kimiko's smile have made any sense without the buildup in the chapter? Not really.

one problem with MT that developed over time, and it's my fault really, is the lack of punchline humor or amusing bits to each comic. There are a lot of comics in chapter 3 that don't follow my rule of 'wrapping up each comic with something funny when appropriate'. For the end of the chapter, it's just the way things settled out. There's nothing wrong with that, but in my own mind i need to get a better balance back. It's like i've said before, Life is funny - not always, but usually there is plenty to laugh about.

Part of the reason for this i think is two fold. First, since i am a story-biased writer and not a gag-writer, it's only natural that most of the structure for the layout for a chapter is based on making things happen. Comic descriptions hit salient story points, and humor is often alluded to or left to be developed at the time. When i was working with Largo, i tried harder to work his gag-based style of humor into the comic. Maybe i've just been stretching my creative freedom more by avoiding it, but that doesn't mean i shouldn't.

For chapter 4 and beyond, I'm thinking ahead this time to give the humor some development as well, rather than just doing it off the cuff. One thing I will never do, if i can help it, is forced humor. That's sort of why there has been less humor lately - if i can't do it well, i wont do it.

The setup for chapter 4 actually has far better opportunities for humor than Chapter 3 did. Some of this is just because this is where the story is going, but also because much of what i've setup is humorous in it's own right. There are some downright horribly mean and gut wrenching things in there, but it wouldn't be MT if i didn't do that. :)

And, of course, my mind has been wandering here and there. I am sort of stalled on Warmth right now - i don't know why, i just feel like i know where and what i want to do, but it won't come into focus. Maybe i haven't really built the skills i need to do it yet. I can probably squeak by on the art, but the writing end - i've never felt so woefully inadequate. So i guess Warmth is going to be for my writing skills like MT was for my art - practice. Writing is hard work. I have to sit down and map out Chapter 4 - which is what I will be doing for the next week.

When does chapter 4 start? probably the week after next. I figure about four non story style comics - we're due for them, honestly. Chapter breaks are a nice place to change gears and do something a little more fun. I have a bunch of things planned - Naze Nani, Seraphim Check, a few gameworld spoofs... heh, i am REALLY looking forward to the gameworld spoof. Somzing a wittle diffewent. :)

One of the more interesting little side things i'm working on is a Haibane Renmei doujinshi idea, which is where this sketch of Memai comes from. You ever have something that just sits at the back of your brain and keeps nudging you to work on? Well, with MT and Warmth i don't have the freedom to just pursue random ideas anymore (which is one of the bad things about your hobby becoming your job) but it doesn't mean i can't freesketch from time to time. :)

"I can't escape!"
Monday - April 21, 2003
[Dom] - 09:30:00
First things first, then I'll get to the meat.

During my usual trip to Steve Jackson Games' website, I was directed to The Lords of the Rhymes. I have no coherent description that is sufficient for these nutjobs. They're some sort of unholy mixture of the Beastie Boys, a Lord of the Rings costume club, and Vanilla Ice were he about three feet tall and afflicted with some sort of horrific foot disease. You have to listen to their rap long enough to get to the Gollum beat box. It's... precious.

Also, the Fanart Archive beta is up, courtesy of my man Hodge-Podge. Check it out, and then submit some of your own!

As for the actual purpose of this rant: curse the Xbox Live version of PSO. I thought I was out two years ago, when I was finished with the Dreamcast. I try to get out, but... they keep pulling me back in! I've played stuff on Xbox Live before, and it's a whole lot of fun, but still! PSO was such a time eater back when the Dreamcast was still alive, and PSO for the Xbox has proven no different. I've put 12 hours into the game over the weekend--which is about 10 more than I had to spare. Damn them! I'm even playing an Android now, after I told myself I'd never play one in PSO... stupid traps, they're goofy, they're dumb, you can't use them against bosses... but they're fun! And I'm counting the hours until I reclaim what is rightfully mine--my beloved Dragon Slayer. we needs it...!

Grr. I might actually have to buy Xbox Live for myself now instead of using my co-worker's account. What's up with that? Well, anyway, I'm off again for now. Gotta run, and by run I mean RUN. So I'll catch you later.

"fire alarms"
Monday - April 21, 2003
[Seraphim] - 14:05:00
One strip out of each chapter, the 'Seraphim Check', is my responsibility. It's not much, but I like to think it gives Piro a tiny mental break. I struggled to come up with an idea for this one throughout the entire chapter. I had nothing. It took me eight months to come up with this one strip idea. One strip out of close to 100. Not to sound too self deprecating, like Piro, but this strip isn't even that good. I'm not sure MT readers will even get the Julia Roberts montage joke from 'Pretty Woman' and 'Sleeping with the Enemy'. The only thing that saves it is Piro's art. Piro is very meticulous and even researched the proper kimono style an unmarried girl wears. I obviously think Piro is the greatest and I am his number one fan ever, but now I really appreciate what he does.

Piro and I had a fantastic time at Sakuracon. We had some trouble getting out to Seattle. I ended up getting a complete and thorough frisk down in Minneapolis. Take my advice and don't wear a western shirt with metal snaps or jeans with rivets when going through airport security. I swear the metal detector was picking up the iron in my blood. Once we got to the plane we found out we were sitting in different rows. Piro ended up next to a baby. It was an adorable baby. It only cried and screamed during take off, landing, and flying.

The Sakuracon guys must be the sweetest in the business. It was my birthday while I was there and they got me beautiful tulips and had all the guests sign my birthday card. I didn't even have to wait in line for hours for the signatures (evil laugh). I actually feel sorry for the guest relations staff assigned to Piro. One hour scheduled autograph sessions turn into 3 or 4 hour marathon signings. Saturday evening Piro signed for 4 hours and we missed Cosplay. During that signing the fire alarms went off - not one person got out of line. No one even flinched. It turned out to be a false alarm but next time there is a potential emergency, please, at least look around for an exit and consider leaving the building.

I also met Lauren who has the dubious honor of being the first Seraphim cosplayer that we know of. She looks more like the comic Seraphim than I do. She's definitely much closer in height to the comic character than I am. I was hunched down in the picture. What is it with cons and snow? We came back to a snow and ice storm in Michigan. At least I'm positive that Anime Central will be snow free.

Piro and I also had great time at the St. Joseph County Public Library Open Book Festival. About a hundred fans showed up. Two girls got one of their Moms to drive them five hours to see Piro. That meant they left at 6:00 am. What a great mom. The rant pic at the top was a fan art done by Willow, a five year old up and coming artist. I just love it. As a librarian-to-be I love the fact we lured MT fans into a library. Libraries can be pretty cool places. Public libraries are even slowly accepting the graphic novel as a legitimate genre.

I am on vacation this week and hope to help Piro get new merchandise going, set up a calendar of his appearances, and if it is humanly possible, organize his studio. What am I doing? We are going on two years since we took time off - no MT, no computers, no phones... I should be at the beach!

"Critical shift"
Saturday - April 26, 2003
[Dom] - 11:30:00
A few changes of plan first: due to a rapidly decreasing amount of time to take care of affairs before ACen and E3, I'm suspending my translation project for a month. After ACen, I'll start it up again.

Also, what I termed MegaTokyo Special 1 is not going to happen any time soon. Rather, the current plans are either to publish our own little doujinshi, or to delay it some. Ah well... there's plenty of stuff I'm writing for MT that's coming up in the next chapter. Look forward to it... I know I do ;)

As for looking forward to things, check out this lovely art auction from Vaz, of UnderPower. It's going to fund his trip to Fanime this summer, where the Four Horsemen (Bitter, Random, Cute, and Girl) will be reunited to terrorize interviewers and fans all over Santa Clara.

And with that I leave you.

"Wa ha ha na ha"
Tuesday - April 29, 2003
[Dom] - 23:00:00
If you wonders how he cools with beer
And other science facts
Just repeat to yourself it's just Largo
I should really just relax

Anyway. They've gone and done it. Announced in today's Dengeki G's was Bistro Cupid 2, the sequel to the ever-so-strange dating/cooking/role-playing game from Success and Firedog.

This time they've assembled another respectable voice cast and given the characters another pack of goofy names (Celery Periwinkle is a personal favorite)... and it's coming out for the PS2 AND the Xbox, which leads me to say "Wa ha ha ha ha!". It comes out this summer, so look for a full review some time after I get the game.

Speaking of reviews, the boys at Insert Credit have finally put up their feature about going bowling with me and Cortana. It's rather amusing, though I still say that Panzer Dragoon Orta is a great game, despite what Timbo says. As I said once before... he only gets more root beer outta me if he plays Bistro Cupid 2 and gives it a good review. And gets me some tchotchkes while he's at it ;)

Alright, I'm gone again.

Update 4/30: Piro appears to be working by the lunar calendar. My first con this year was Ohayocon. Oh, and the official Bistro 2 website is up, check it out here...

"lighter shades of grey"
Wednesday - April 30, 2003
[Piro] - 15:00:00
I don't know why, but there is something very weird and depressing about throwing three big garbage bags of VHS tapes in the trash dumpster.

Last week, Seraphim was on vacation and one of the first things we did was clean out the 'office'. Unlike the rest of our place, the office tends to suffer from my organizational technique known as 'dump and pile'. Access to the closet had been blocked for months by boxes and other junk dumped there when i cleaned out my desk at my old office. The blockage has grown substantially since then, and subsequent pilings of various paperwork, magazines, bags, stuff from recent trips and the jumbled mess known as my CD collection was threatening to block the door leading to the rest of the apartment.

The goal of this cleaning exercise was to get the rather sizeable boxes for my new computer into the closet and pare down the junk. It turned out to be a massive challenge. At one point I was ready to see if i could commandeer the bobcat skid steer loader that the landscape guys have parked outside and use it to shovel the whole mess into some dark corner of the apartment that we could just agree to avoid. In the end, and after a lot of hard work, civilization and exposed carpet have returned to the Fredart Studios landscape.

Cleaning up your work area is always both a physical and a mental exercise. There is nothing more liberating than to be able to walk from your desk to the door in a straight line without running a slalom course of papers, boxes and other things. Now, things weren't quite as bad as i make them sound here, but straightening the physical things around you actually does help you get things straight in your mind as well - and i need all the help with that I can get.

Another thing you have to deal with when cleaning is the 'do i really need this, can i give it away, or is it just garbage?' question about things. Ever since Seraphim and I met one of the most mind boggling things she's had to deal with was my fansubs collection. Her first reaction years ago to the four bookshelves of VHS tapes was "you have got to be kidding me."

I first started collecting fansubs and tapes of raw off-tv anime many years ago, long before people were spoiled by the easy ability of digisubs (digital fansubs). At it's height, my fansubs collection - which was about half subs and half raw untranslated anime - totaled over 500 vhs tapes. That took a lot of shelf space. :) I stopped collecting fansubs about six years ago (for various reasons, expense mostly). The size of this 'static' collection has been getting smaller and smaller as I cull it occasionally. Several years ago i threw away almost 300 tapes. The remaining 200 have been culled here and there, but it still took up most of an entire shelf unit

The first things to go were tapes that I knew i'd never watch. I knew that i'd never actually sit and watch the entire season of Revolutionary Girl Utena or VS Lamune and 40 Fire in raw japanese (no offense to Utena or Lamune fans ^^;;). Some shows i'd never sit thru again, like Ganbaristo Shun! or YAT Anshin. These all went in the bin years ago. I still had a core group of tapes that I was reluctant to let go.

Now, Fansub ethics is pretty straight forward, at least for old school fansubber types like myself. Anime is *not* a free hobby, fansubs are NOT a cheap alternative to getting the real thing. The idea behind fansubbing was to translate and subtitle a series so fans could promote awareness of it and have access to shows that were unavailable outside of Japan. Once the rights to a series are purchased, you are supposed to stop distribution and delete or destroy the subs. In it's purest form, you were supposed to buy the american release when it came out as well, if you watched it.

Real life has few true black and whites, most things have various shades of grey. The fansub debate has been so horribly beat to death that it's almost a joke. Fansubbing's current form, Digisubbing, is tolerated by anime companies as long as it stays a lighter shade of grey.

I took a hard look at some of my favorite fansubs which were now out on DVD and decided it was time that they had to go. Technically, i haven't broken any fansub codes because i haven't WATCHED any of the damn things in years. I kept the tapes more out of habit, in case i felt like watching them again. After all, replacing all of these with DVDs would be expensive. Of course, I haven't exactly been in a position where i could just go out and do that. The 'i don't have enough money, its too expensive!' excuse, right? Old as the hills. Heard it a zillion times. Doesn't make it right.

Honestly, the old fansubbing days are truly gone. Most anime that is decent at all WILL come out domestically these days (like Haibane Renmei, which Pioneer announced recently - be good little boys and girls and buy the dvds when they come out, people ^_^), and in most cases the DVDs are well done and well produced. What most of you don't realise is just how incredibly fsking cool it is that so much is available these days. Back when I started watching anime, it was just one rack of tapes at the local Suncoast. There were so many shows that I would have bought on the spot, but the only way to get them was find the fansubs. Anime fans don't have that problem anymore. Fansubbing and the fansub community did its job, and did it well. Anime is more popular than ever, and enough so that even many obscure anime series are available on DVD. It's what we all wanted years ago.

Digisubbing has it's own place in todays anime culture. Some good, some bad - It relies more heavily than ever on the ethics of fans. If it wasn't for digisubs, how many people who know the story behind Kanon? Even so, you must remember, it's not free entertainment. There are people just like me who sweat blood and tears and who's livelihood increasingly relies on a series to not only doing well in Japan, but here in the states as well. That's the future of anime on the global scale, and this is a good thing.

I get asked about the possibilities of a Megatokyo anime all the time. Lets say Megatokyo came out in Japanese first, but was coming out in english two months later. Would YOU download a fansub, or would you wait for the english release?

I don't understand some fansub groups these days. It's a huge rush to sub and finish a new show as soon as it airs and try to do so desperately before the rights to the series are purchased and announced. It always amazes me when people get DEPRESSED when a series is picked up in the states. What the hell? I think that fansubbers these days would better serve the community by subbing more obscure, lesser known shows that may never see english release without more exposure. But that's just me.

Weird things to be thinking about when cleaning your office. I guess in the end, my fansub ethics made it easier to throw out three bags worth of VHS tapes and clear off some shelf space. I threw out everything that is either now or soon going to be available on DVD. I haven't watched any of them in a long time anyway - If i want to watch them again, i will buy the DVDs. DVDs take up less shelf space anyway.

I did keep some tapes - two shelves worth. I somehow doubt that Kero Kero Chime will ever find its way to the states, or Mizuiro Jidai, Hime-chan no Ribbon, or Miracle Girls... but then again, i never thought that the Saint Tail series would come out on DVD here either. I think it would be a good thing if I had a reason to clear of the rest of those shelves.

Oh, I threw out my beloved Saint Tail subs too... all except one. It is the one that I worked on with my friends Craig and Yutaka under the Project Genki! fansub group label so many years ago. I think it's ok - i own the TokyoPop DVD for it now.

A quick update on my convention schedule. In a few weeks we will all be at Anime Central from May 16th thru the 18th in Chicago. This will be the first of two official Naze Nani Megatokyo shows this year, so be sure and come if you can. Acen has given us da big main programming room, and this will be the first appearance of Dom this year. More info in the coming weeks.

Unfortunately, Seraphim and i will not be attending Project A-Kon this year (May 29th thru June 1st in Dallas, Texas) Hopefully we can go next year.

Then, we get a little break, and Seraphim and I will be exhibiting at San Diego Comic Con(July 17th thru 20th in San Diego, California) with Greg Dean over at Real Life Comics. Everything is all set up now, and we will have a nice little 10x10 booth to play with. More information on this as we get closer to the show.

Then it's on to Baltimore, Maryland for Otakon from August 7th thru the 10th. Once again, this will be show #2 for Naze Nani Megatokyo, and once again, they are finally listening - we got the big room! What will make this year's otakon particularly exciting is that both Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade will be guests as well as those crazy european dudes from Little Gamers. It promises to be... an interesting con. :)

As usual, i would really love to overwhelm the staff at these cons with the huge numbers of MT fans, so be sure and come if you can. I'd like to continue being as big a pain as possible, and we here at Megatokyo can't do it without your help your help :) Cosplaying as MT characters is, of course, encouraged.

"crowd shock"
Thursday - May 8, 2003
[Piro] - 11:20:00
note, i've updated a few things here - in particular a note about the Yoko Ishida concert at Acen - piro

It would break with a long standing tradition for me to actually prepare for an anime convention.

Anime Central is only one week away. Yikes.

Hard to believe that it was just three years ago that Dom suggested the idea of having a panel at Anime Central. I figured what the heck, and found myself driving out there that weekend.

After meeting Dom for the first time, we went down to the panel area and found our room. The room was still full from the previous panel, so we waited in the hallway for the room to empty. There were some people standing in the hallway wearing Megatokyo shirts. It was bizzare - just a few miutes earlier I met the very first megatokyo cosplayer EVER (she was dressed in a burgandy version of Kimiko's idol outfit). We talked with some of the people in the hallway for a bit. Dom showed me this prize that would be given to the person who asked the worst question... a sad, broken little toy sheep that used to walk and shake its head in a former life, but now only buzzed and vibrated pitifully when it was wound - the VSOD of legend - and some mittens. Then someone from inside the crowded room wondered what the hell we were doing standing in the hallway - the crowded room was OUR panel.

The room was packed. It was obvious we were breaking a half a dozen fire codes and an awful lot of personal space in that room. It was my first experience with 'crowd shock'

Since that day, we've learned that for some reason people like to come to Megatokyo panels at anime conventions. I have no idea why. Until very recently, I've had great difficulty in convincing con staff that i needed, like, a big room. Since we didn't really get big rooms for a while, we usually had to offer overflow/late night panels to accomodate people who couldn't get into the normal panel. If anyone remembers the room we had for last year's Anime Central and the line of people thinking they could get into that room... yeah, i think the fans proved a point. :) If you are comming to Anime Central this year, I am pretty sure that there shouldbe enough room for everyone. We're gonna be in Main Programming from 12 noon to 1:30pm on Saturday.

One unique thing i think i've noticed about the crowds and lines that form for MT related events and signings is that the lines themselves are like a mini Megatokyo con. It's sorta like a big linear Megatokyo community event or something. :P I don't think i've had a single complaint about having to wait in those lines. Maybe suffering as a community dulls the pain :P

Anyways, enough musing, lemme fill you in on what we have planned for this year's Anime Central.

First off, last month I had mentioned the possibility of a Megatokyo / Cave of Evil Industrial/EBM club event somewhere near the convention on thursday night. The response to this was really good, but unfortuntely we were unable to find a venue nearby that didn't cost a proverbial arm an leg, so we've had to postpone the idea of holding a MT club event for now. It is something i do want to do at some point in the future, but it will take more planning.

I don't feel too bad about it because Acen has a LOT of music/dance events at this con. There are several concerts on Friday, the first of which is a concert by Yoko Ishida of ParaPara fame, who will perform her concert immediately after opening ceremonies, at 12:00 Noon. It's an early concert, so please be sure to come see Ishida-san perform :)

Next, at 4pm by the suprisingly good Japanese group Dual Jewel (you may have seen them at other cons around the country). This is followed at 7pm by a show by the american anime music group SWEK. I've known the SWEK people for a long time (we all hang on the same irc channels) and thier concerts are a lot of fun. If you read WIRED magazine at all, you may have seen the mention of SWEK in it last month. If after all that you still find yourself in the need of more music, you can then roll onto the UndergroundGroove@Acen which startes at 8pm.

There aren't any actual MT events scheduled for Friday, but I plan to spend the entire day doing my best to draw and sign stuff for people. As always, you don't need to bring or buy anything for a sketch or a drawing, i'll have index cards on hand. I do ask that you try to keep the number of requests down to something reasonable tho - asking for four drawings can take 15 minutes of time, and historically the darn line never seems to get shorter ^^;; I am not sure where I will have a table, I don't know if it will be in Artist's alley or in some remote corner of the convention where we won't bother anyone, but I hopefully won't be too hard to find.

There won't be a lot of Megatokyo merchandise availible at the con (as usual) but there is one thing you might be interested in. I was asked to come up with the image for this year's Got Soap? shirt design, and I think it came out pretty amusing. They tend to go fast, so try to pick one up early if you want one.

I am going to try to have two original drawings in the art show this year. The first one will be auctioned off to raise money to purchase a second server to help relive some of the stress on poor Makoto-rin. Nayuki-chan will be taking over serving the main website and leave Makoto-rin in charge of dealing with the forums only. I just need to stock up on Nikuman and Strawberry Nutrigrain bars. :) The second artwork will be auctioned off for charity (more info on which charity it is later). Ugh, i still need to do these drawings ^^;;

Saturday is the big day for Megatokyo stuff. The main MT panel will be a second attempt to pull off the Naze Nani Megatokyo show. If you remember the first Naze Nani Megatokyo show at Otakon last year... well, we learned a lot from that (planning is a good thing not a bad thing. don't trust to complicated flash presentations. Make sure dom's handlers have big metal pipes.) and this time we promise a new and improved version! We promise! :P Actually, the idea behind a Naze Nani is that its an attempt to add some color to what i feel can be the bland old panel discussion, and because i like to complicate my life. Dom, Asmodeus, Seraphim, Ukyo, Natsuki, Cortana and myself will be there and we'll try to manage the mayhem a little. We will try to avoid it being a disaster like it was last year. :) The show will be in Main Programming (that's the big room with all the lights and stuff) at 12 noon on saturday. We will also have a special musical guest :)

After this at 3:00 will be the official Megatokyo autograph session. I'll be doing drawings at my table as much of the con as possible, but this is the official one.

On sunday at 10am the esteemed Hot Soup will be presiding over the Webcomics panel which is also being held in Main Programming. Please stop by so we can talk about webcomics (other than MT for the most part please ^^;;). I'll update this with a list of the webcomic folks i expect to be there later.

Somehow I was talked into doing yet another Iron Guest comptetition at 12pm on sunday. Come watch Bruce Lewis kick my ass in public (no contest here, i think, but it should be entertaining :)

That should do it. I don't think we'll need a late night overflow panel this year, we should be able to take care of everything on saturday. Megatokyo cosplay is welcome - and be sure to stick around after the panel for a bit so we can get a picture of everyone.

Ok, time to get to work, got a lot of prep to do yet. I'm probably going to do a Dead Piro Art day for friday - it will be the drawing that I put up for auction next week, but after that, with some luck, there shouldn't be any other breaks in Megatokyo caused by the con (possibly the following monday, but it all depends on if i can get Friday and Monday's comic done before I leave. I'll keep you posted.

If you are going to Acen, we'll see you there. It should be fun. :P

"Stage hands"
Thursday - May 8, 2003
[Dom] - 17:50:00
When Fred says that it's hard to believe that it was three years ago that I suggested a panel to him, it's because it's not true. Two years ago was the first MT panel ever, three years ago was just about when the first strip went up...

But he has a point that things sure have changed since then. For one thing, I had a bowl cut. Well, okay, technically it wasn't a bowl cut, it was just part of the costume, but... damn, man, did you SEE the roundness of that horror on my head? Now you see why I wear my hat everywhere. Ventilation's improved at MT panels, too. It was so packed I could barely breathe at that ACen. I was staring into my water cup and wondering if I could evolve gills before I suffocated.

But this rant isn't about things like that. It's about how weird it is that I feel comfortable in front of hundreds of MT fans. I don't recall any significant instances of me stuttering at an MT panel--which is odd, because I stutter to my roommates, stutter to co-workers, stutter to family, used to stutter in class... yet I talk just fine when talking to MT fans and industry contacts.

Odd. I can't explain it, either. Isn't it true that you stutter more when you're under stress? I act the opposite way. The more nervous I am the smoother I talk. One of my theories is that I have two modes--Normal Dom, where I'm just a nervous little guy who stutters and stumbles over his own words, and Showtime Dom, where I talk like I write. It would explain why people I feel comfortable around tend to hear the ums out in full force, while MT panels hear me shouting all day and talking a mile a minute...

Anyway, I hope to see you there--it's always a pleasure to meet MT fans who don't want to inflict physical harm on me. (Before you ask about emotional harm--there is yaoi of me. No further emotional harm can be done to me without killing members of my family)

I have an appointment at E3 to check out City of Heroes, I'm excited... and will be dead tired when ACen rolls around. So be merciful to me when it's Friday night or Saturday morning and you see me, I'll still mentally be in LA.

"ARGH"
Monday - May 12, 2003
[Dom] - 00:00:00
One day to 2,000 words due. Two days to E3. Five to ACen. 10 until I have 20,000 words due.

Argh.

"Phew..."
Tuesday - May 13, 2003
[Dom] - 10:00:00
Words written as of 10:00 this morning: 1995

Days to be spent at E3: 2.5

Days at ACen: 2

Hours of Naze Nani MegaTokyo panel: 1.5

Days until 20,000 word due date: 8

Number of MT scripts I will most likely be unable to edit: 3

Amount of comfort making a list in order to gain some illusory measure of control provides: unmeasurable

"lemme finish already!"
Wednesday - May 14, 2003
[Piro] - 17:30:00
I need to make a correction here - i claimed in this rant that i created Ping before Chobits was published (the point being, there is no way chobits could have influenced the creation of ping because it wasn't out yet) - I should have checked first, but it seems that Chobits actually printed in japan before Ping first appeared. ^^;; I appologize for the error! :)

AND, i just found out why people have been whacking me around about it. I never realized that Chii also wanted to download data on how to take a bath. DOH. FSKING DOH.

That's what happens when you don't finish watching an anime series. I would never have done such a directly similar thing had i known about it. damnit to hell, what a fubar. ^^;;

I'll have to go back and change the start of Chapter 4 as a result of this new info :P I'll be trashing #8 and #9 and rewriting a few things, but it's salvageable. I do appologize for the goof up ^^;; I just got back from Chicago and i'll need to do some planning to fix this fubar. It's tweakable (i'll keep the old versions availible somewhere so people can see the past history stuffs for MT, and since most of those drawings won't work for whatever I replace the comics with) :)

Still not sure if this is indeed what I will do. I have to think about it, there may be ways to move forward, make some adjustments that play with what i see now is a very direct parody, and acnowledge it in the comic somehow. #8 and #9 are ok comics, in some ways i hate to loose them... more thinking on this tomorrow.

- piro

----

Ok, a few quick updates...

First off, the router problem is NOT fixed yet - there were some problems with the hardware and a replacement is arriving monday. We did some work arounds that should keep things humming till we get back from Anime Central. The Forums are back up and running - hopefully it wont overload things.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish all the drawings for friday's comic, and I wont be able to before I leave for Acen. Ah well, why fight it - it happens every time I go to one of these cons ^^;; The next MT comic will be Wednesday of next week. I've got a really nice DPD sitting here that's a little different than what I usually do, i'll post that friday.

Thanks for your patience :) - piro

----

I'm still scrambling to get ready for my trip to Chicago tomorrow, but I have to make some quick comments about the current storyline.

If i get another email bashing me around about how I am being unoriginal and stealing a storyline from Chobits with the current 'ping and her interest in finding data on how to use a public' bath story thread, i'm gonna scream. I don't like having to come out and tell people what i'm up to (because you are all smart boys and girls and its more fun to figure it out yourselves) but let me make a few quick points.

First off, I am making fun of the whole concept - 'public bath' scenes are as common in anime as the need for a 'cute girl' character. It has been done and overdone ad nauseam in both anime and manga. There are a lot of apartments in Tokyo that do not have bathing facilities (hasn't anyone here ever read Maison Ikkoku? Jeeze) and public baths are where people can go to clean up. In most anime and manga, bath scenes are used as a vehicle for fanservice. Even the most innocent anime will often use it to show the main girls in towels.

Secondly, there is a reason for all this setup. There are a lot of things that will feed off the current direction of the story and branch out as Chapter 4 rolls along. Yes, I hear there is a similar scene in Chobits (hence the emails). Chobits is great stuff, but lets face it, the fanservice level is huge. Ping and Chii, even though there are a some similarities on the surface, are VERY DIFFERENT. Just like the Love Hina comparison's i get all the time - Megatokyo is different, even if it walks some of the same paths other stories do here and there. It's not like most of these paths haven't been walked a zillion times already.

The roll that Ping plays in Megatokyo is far different that Chii's in Chobits. VERY different. Chii doesn't have the privacy setup that ping does. Ping doesn't suffer from having to learn everything because she came with no programing. Embarrassing situations in chobits lead to a lot of sexual humor and innuendo (more than usual even for CLAMP) Does anyone really think that this is gonna lead to some big fanservicy bath house scene? Would I even do that?

Fanservice has it's place. I'm more than willing to use it if it is appropriate. Who says they really will end up at a public bath? Maybe the smell will settle in Ping's hair by the end of the chapter and she'll be obsessed with the horrible smell in her hair and cut it all off, going for the cute-short haired girl look. Maybe she'll want a service check to get her hair replaced. Please don't bash me for what is happening next if it hasn't happened yet. You don't know what's gonna happen. Let me finish.

For the record, i developed Ping long before Chobits came along. Ping pre-dates chii. I swear, i need a FAQ so bad...

I've faced the problem before - people jumping to conclusions because it's 'obvious' where things are going. This happens because the comic is released one page at a time. Y'know, you can ponder away at things all you want, in fact, i encourage it. But please don't jump on my case about 'ripping off' things until you see where the story thread is going. Emulation of certain things in anime is exactly how you poke fun at things. It's just a comic, ok? it's part of the fun.

There. Jeeze. Can't even toss in the potential for a good bathhouse scene if you have a robot girl character without being accused of ripping someone else's work. Fine. I'll do that bath scene, but i'm gonna let Dom draw it.

(echoes of evil laughter)

Ok, felt good to get that off my chest. Now, for the rest of today's business.

I discussed at length in my last rant all the stuff that's going on at Anime Central this weekend. Seraphim and I are leaving tomorrow for Chicago, and oddly enough I think i'm in OK shape. Remember, if you want to come to the Naze Nani Megatokyo LIVE! 2.0 show on Saturday, it starts at 12:00 noon in the main programming hall. There should be plenty of room for everyone, but there almost never is, so be sure to get there a little early. We aren't planning an overflow/latenight panel this time because we are in hopes that the room is big enough to take care of everyone. I won't give away what we are planning on doing, but lets just say it's not like an ordinary panel - it's an attempt to try to do things that give more opportunities for things to go wrong - with lights and sounds and stage props too :)

I won't be bringing any merchandise with me to Acen, but books should be available at the IC entertainment booth. As for me, they are giving me a table in the Dealers Room where i will spend a lot of my time doing drawings and stuff for people. I'm gonna try to organize things better this time so that i can take care of everyone without having people waiting in line for hours then me having to run off to do something. Something pretty cool arrived in the mail today that should make it easy for people to find us in the Dealers room :) I'll try to post a schedule here before I go, but best thing to do is check out the table itself - i'll have a schedule there that should say when and where i'll be most of the con.

Oh, as for merchandise, there are the Acen Got Soap t-shirts that I did featuring Piroko with a SoapChunker 2000... Got Soap shirts tend to sell out fast, so be sure to try to pick one up early if you want one. They should have them with the rest of the official Acen 2003 tshirts being sold by the con.

Comic schedule is a little iffy at the moment. I had hoped to have Fridays and Monday's comic done by this afternoon, but i am so behind that i'm worried about getting Friday's comic done before I leave. Worst case, i'll have Friday's up, but Monday's comic might be late or skipped all together. I'll post an update when i get back.

I almost forgot to mention that the piece of work i am putting up in the Charity Auction is the pencil trace i made for this colored drawing on fredart. Please note that it is NOT THE ORIGINAL SKETCH, but the trace/cleanup i did over it. A nice piece, and all proceeds from this go to charity (i forget which one it is - my brain is going, but its a known one, not 'dom needs pants fund' or something ^^;;)

Ok, that should do it. Oh, one last thing - the gals over at Sequential Tart are having a SDCC Booth and Outreach Program so that they can raise funds to get a booth at the San Diego Comic Con in July. Having got one myself (with Greg Dean's help), i know that it's not cheap (^^;;) If you are a ST reader, here's your chance to help get them there.

If you are gonna be at Acen, see ya there. If not, we'll have a full report (with pictures) next week. Should be fun.

"Meeshin conpreet"
Friday - May 16, 2003
[Dom] - 10:30:00
Ratio of money spent on cab fare:everything else at E3: 40:35

Amount of that money which is tax-deductible: unknown

Hours until flight to ACen: 3

Number of meals I have paid for at E3: 1

Number of meals I've eaten over the past three days, period: 4

Favorite number/letter combination seen at E3: 548R3 (at the Bioware room).

Amount I'm indebted to the Insert Credit guys for letting me stay at their places for free: unmeasurable.

"So much hate..."
Monday - May 19, 2003
[Dom] - 01:30:00
I'll pass on E3 and ACen stories until Wednesday. I'll instead flesh out the saga of my horrible, horrible experience with United Airlines on the way from E3 to ACen.

Here's the short version. My flight was supposed to depart LAX at 1:40 PM on Friday. Instead, it lifted off at 8:10.

That's six and a half hours of being unfed (eight and a half if you count checking in and going through security) except for an order of fries, a cup of Hi-C Orange, and a three dollar oatmeal raisin cookie. Most of what I wrote above is true, with a little embellishment.

Other highlights of my imprisonment at LAX included the captain overstepping his bounds and declaring that the flight was cancelled--customer service reps spent about an hour explaining that the flight wasn't actually cancelled, the captain had no authority to say something like that. There were also the announcements from the captain that came every half hour, explaining how one problem had been fixed, only to be replaced by another, until he finally said "Alright, it'll be another 6 or 7 hours until this plane is unbroke. You should probably get off the plane now. We'll get you to Chicago... eventually. Just not on this plane."

And once the overworked, highly stressed clerks got a new airplane for the extremely stressed passengers, the departure time kept on slipping into the future. It started at 6:45... then, without warning, changed to 7:00. It got all the way to 7:30 before they bothered explaining what was going on.

Did I mention that they kept thanking us for our patience? It was almost as annoying as the delay, they started to use "Thank you for your patience" instead of the word "the". "Thank you for your patience flight is going to be leaving thank you for your patience airport in about 15 minutes. Thank you for your patience flight will be beverage only, so you should check thank you for your patience rest of the airport for a meal if you want one."

Urgh. To top the day off, they didn't give me a meal voucher, a discount on a future flight, or anything except an apology and profuse thanks for my patience. In other words, United Airlines gets a nasty e-mail/call to customer service and none of my future business.

But interestingly, Friday was the most rest I'd had in weeks. Not that I had any choice in the matter, but I did nothing but sit down for a good 12 hours...

P.S.: According to the document in my hands, a "Dominic Nyuguen" now works for MegaTokyo. Dom is dead. Long live Dom.

"mental note..."
Monday - May 19, 2003
[Piro] - 10:15:00
Mental note - when tired, don't do your thinking online and in the forums. Sheesh.

That's one of the problems with Megatokyo becoming as, er, popular as it is. Whenever i start grumbling around about something that's irritating me in regards to the story or something else about MT I have got to learn to keep my trap shut till i work thru everything and THEN announce what i'm planning on doing. Otherwise i end up with a storm of emails and tornado paths thru the forums.

Anyways, let's recap. The 'similarities to chobits' issue has been something that's been irritating me for the past few weeks, partially fueled by emails and other comments, but you have to keep in mind that the reason for the irritation wasn't the fact that i was getting emails, its that these similarities were getting in the way of what i am trying to do in the comic. If people look at Ping and see Chii, it changes what i'm trying to do, and it's irritating because it is something I have little control over. At first, i thought it was just superficial similarities between the shows that was the problem. What's curious to me is that people get worked up about the similarities between Ping's ear pods and Chii's, but the truth is they are far closer to Nuku Nuku's ear pods and Multi's ear pods than Chiis. I think i'll actually draw a detail drawing some time of the pods and what they do and the reasons for them sometime, just because i really did think it out.

I wrote my comments in my last rant just to let people know what was on my mind when i was writing all this, and commented that I developed Ping long before Chobits came out. The problem here is that I made two errors, and understanding these errors helped me understands WHY i was getting the feedback i was getting.

First off, Chobits did come out around the same time Ping first appeared in the comic. Even though the truth of the matter is that I personally didn't know this, there will always be people who say I got the idea from Chobits. I should have checked before saying that. I apologize for that, my bad.

Secondly, I now understand why i was getting the feedback i was getting in the volume I was getting it. There is a scene in Chobits where Chii wants to download information on how to bathe. I haven't watched enough Chobits to see this episode, so i was completely unaware of the similarities between the two scenes. In my defense i'd like to think that the outcome of my scenario (which no one out there actually knows yet unless i actually continue it) is far different than the Chobits one, but it does raise the issues that I would never have done such a direct spoof without it being more obviously a spoof. In short, i'm embarrassed to have made such a goof. I didn't think the idea was 100% original of course, but in light of knowing what happened in chobits, it really does seem 'lifted' from the show. I would never do that, but it doesn't change the fact that it certainly appears that i did - regardless of the facts.

So, that raised the issue (which i started mulling over while sitting at the computer tired, zoning, and recovering from my chicago trip) as to what to do. Some of the critisims was pretty snide, and one reaction i had (and it's a valid one) is to remove Ping from the story in some way. I've done it before, but there's no question that it would be a knee jerk reaction and certainly not fair to Ping fans. The second option was to change ping in some way that would result in avoiding all these comparisons that were bringing all these preconceived notions and comparisons to her character that I don't want - i don't want people constantly thinking Chii/Ping, i really don't. There are a lot of things i could do, but it would gut Chapter 4 pretty bad, and i don't know if i want to change things that drastically.

Third option would be to go back in history, change the two comics that had the joke/references that caused the direct comparisons. It seemed like the best option, even tho it involved having to go back and rethink some things. That was, i felt, one of the best ways to resolve the issue (please note that i did not remove the comics or take them down). Even so, i wondered if this was a good tact.

The fourth option, and it's probably the one that makes the most sense, is to not change the most recent comics, but look at how i can work with this close comparison to Chobits can be used in a productive way in the story. All the characters in MT are changing and evolving in some way as things move on, and this will in some ways effect how Ping turns out, but it's like anything, you don't really know exactly where it will go - perhaps this will be a good thing in the long run. But it's pretty obvious that whether I intended it or not, the comparisons to the Chobits story and characters are there and I have to deal with it, and even tho it wasn't my intent, i have to work that into what I am doing.

So, ping fans, relax, i'm not going to remove Ping the way i removed tsubasa, i like Ping too much to do that anyway, it just means that I'll have to subtlety work around this issue and maybe in the end it will make for a better story. There's a lot about ping none of you know about, and i am sorry it's taking so long to get there, maybe over the course of chapter four most of you will see why the chobits comparison is rather moot when it comes to Ping and her character - or maybe it isn't, who can tell? Maybe i need to finish watching the show now... ^^;;

(skitters off to pick up the dvds...)

I'll have an Acen report up for wednesday, complete with pictures and other things. As always, if you have pics from Acen and you want to share, please email them to me :)

"A tale full of sound"
Monday - May 26, 2003
[Dom] - 10:30:00
Whew! What a crazy two weeks. But it's Memorial Day, so I can finally sit back and start talking about what's happened.

We'll start with E3, where I'll echo what many other game journalists have said: It was a good show. But it wasn't a spectacular show. The major announcements were the playstation pocket and the N-Gage. To paraphrase Ken Kutaragi and Kenshiro, "The handheld wars is already dead!" There's just no way those two will challenge the Game Boy. And the N-Gage had the most gaudy press conference I've seen outside of the WWE. That was embarrassing even to hear about. If you haven't already, check out a look at the N-Gage and PSP here and a discussion of the N-gage press conference here. Suffice to say that I won't be getting either of those, since my GBA has become an expensive GameCube controller recently, and my GameCube is a $200 footrest. Well, it will be until Lost Kingdoms 2 comes out...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. After a hectic Monday night, I ran off to the airport and caught a flight to Long Beach, at which point I was kindly picked up by Brandon of Insert Credit and his girlfriend. An overpriced Bibimbab later, we were all off to Vince Diamante's place, where I found out I was going to stay rent-free. That was a surprise, and I owe Vince big. And I'm not going to just plug his Anime sheet music website, either. I'll, I dunno, give him some root beer or something.

Moving on, I won't give a day-by-day breakdown... I'll do it by company, since that's how I remember it.

Sega was, of course, one of the first companies I went to. I've been a big Sega fan since I was 6 or so, and I've stayed loyal to them throughout their gigantic cockups over the past decade or so. While Sonic Heroes was an absolute blast to play, and I got a sick satisfaction out of throwing Tails and Sonic at walls, the rest of the booth was kind of disappointing. I mean, I'm still looking forward to PSO III: C.A.R.D. Revolution, and I liked playing it, but it wasn't the sort of zing! feeling I was looking for. Otogi was really floaty and kind of ugly to control, Vectorman was 6 weeks old, and... well, okay. I must confess that I liked Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg for sheer strangeness factor. So I can say that Sega had an average show--nothing groundbreaking, a few bad eggs, a few giant eggs.

Capcom had so many games I can barely remember them all. First of all, I'll talk about the whipping boy of Capcom's lineup, P.N.03. That game sucks. To quote a former co-worker of mine, it controls like trying to pull pubic hair off a bar of soap. It's slippery and you don't quite know why you're doing it. The "dance" and style stuff was completely unnecessary to anything else in the game, and just looked ridiculous. Viewtiful Joe... the jury's out on Viewtiful Joe for me. I appreciate the style of the game, but I don't like the speed of it and the fact that Joe's arms and legs are like half a centimeter long. I can't stand beat-'em-ups where you practically have to be on top of an enemy to get anything done. Ahh, Streets of Rage, where have you gone? Steel Battalion Online was cool... until I died once and got spawn killed for the rest of the game. It's no fun taking hits during that 45-second ignition sequence, especially when you're not even DONE yet when you die. Of course, if my teammates had warned me or covered me better that would have saved my experience with it, but for now I have to say that I had a bad time with Steel Battalion Online. Hopefully it'll be better once it's on Xbox Live and the people on my team will be more than random dorks on the E3 floor.

Where I spent a disgustingly long amount of time at the Capcom booth was with Culdcept. You may have heard of this for the first time over at Penny Arcade. I played it on the Dreamcast a few years back, and as my roommates can tell you, many times they went to sleep as I played it, and woke up to me still playing it. So it was great to sit down with it again and goof around. And Mike, I know you're reading this-I'm gonna make a Piercing deck just to deal with your goddamn Walls of Ice. Just you wait, fool... when it comes out in the fall we'll box.

And of course, I played some Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown. It's a lot harder on the PS2 than I remember it being on my 286. The siege portion was ridiculously difficult, but still... it's Defender of the Crown. Nostalgia dictates that I must buy it when it comes out.

I got to go to a trio of private demos with the NCSoft stable, and let me tell you. City of Heroes looks GOOD. It's the first MMORPG that I've been interested in playing for years (I picked up Earth and Beyond for about a week and then sold my account for dirt cheap). When it goes to beta, I'll probably spend days just flying around the city and jumping around like a happy fool, shouting "I'm a superhero!" The combat system is a bit generic, but... I'll live. I'll get to play as a superhero, after all! I don't know what I'll do about a team, but... I dunno, I'll figure out something. I've never been in a real clan-type thing before, and I know I wouldn't want to lead my own. Meanwhile, Guild Wars has an interesting Magic: the Gathering model going, where you don't have to buy future expansions to play, are allowed to play with people who have those expansions, and are allowed to go to expansion zones--though you can't go without someone who does have the expansion. It's an interesting model to follow, and I'll look forward to that one in 2004.

I ignored most of Namco's booth, since I've played Soul Calibur 2 for months, and the concept of I-Ninja is just lame. The boss battles looked like ice skating with swords, and that's not kosher. For my ninja needs, I'll just go back and play Shinobi, thankyouverymuch. There were some other games there that got people's attention, but I didn't notice.

Sammy's booth was interesting. I played a sushi puzzle game for a while, kicking ass, and of course spent about an hour playing Guilty Gear XX. I didn't lose a single round, making me realize that people who play fighting games only on the console suck. I'm barely a mediocre player at my local arcade, and there I was mopping the floor with everyone. Oh, and Seven Samurai 20XX has the prize for "game least related to its movie license", since it has nothing to do with Kurosawa other than the number seven and the name "kurosawa" on it. It looks vaguely interesting, but really, why the Seven Samurai thing if you're not actually going to make a game based on the movie?

SNK was a very, very small booth. After beating Brandon at King of Fighters 2001 with my Generic Dragon Punch/Rising Tackle Action, I was disappointed to see no mention of Matrimelee-AKA the next Power Instinct-at the booth. I really, really wanted to see how the franchise that produced Groove On Fight, which is still one of my favorite fighting games just on style. The preview for SNK vs. Capcom was... interesting. The art looks pretty good so far, unlike certain parts of the CvS series (coughcoughMORRIGANcough) and I'm kind of interested in the part of the video that suggests you can Roman Cancel, Guilty Gear style. But other than that... there was nothing.

Bioware was quite accommodating to me, and thanks to Derek French I got to sit back and have a Pepsi after a long day on my feet. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic looks awesome. And I'm not saying that just because the demo had "549R3"s in it. It honestly looks like the best Star Wars game on the market in years. I like how the Light/Dark system works, and appreciate that I can choose which side I end up on, even more than the Jedi Knight games did. I'd buy it if Derek didn't keep insisting that they'd send me and Fred copies of the game, and I just might spite them by buying it anyway.

This is where I segue temporarily into LucasArts and say that they should really give up on making Star Wars games. Rogue Squadron III was worth about 15 seconds of pain before people put it down, and that was 15 seconds too many. Full Throttle 2 and the new Sam and Max game ooze with all the personality and fun that the Star Wars games don't anymore. And Secret Weapons Over Normandy wasn't bad either--but damn, those Star Wars games were completely outclassed by KOTOR.

Back to Bioware. I'm not sure what posters they gave me, since they went to Fred at ACen, but thanks for them anyway, I'm sure they rocked (and hopefully I'll be getting replacement posters from you guys... hint hint). They were a great bunch to hang around with, but next year, I fully expect to see more booth mods than just a ceiling fan. Some LCDs, get a clear wall going, liquid cooling... you know, the good stuff. I look forward to seeing you guys again next year, and hopefully Stanley Woo will come on down so we can box.

The last company I'll talk about at length is Konami, who didn't really impress me with Snake Eater (I think the KILL OR BE KILLED / EAT OR BE EATEN messages turned me off than the actual footage of Snake eating a... uh... fish...) but gave me a lot of hope with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Castlevania: Lament of Innocence. While they weren't especially deep or engaging at E3, they were smooth, and they brought back good memories of the TMNT arcade game and Devil May Cry, respectively. So I'll be watching those two games quite closely to see if they live up to their promise.

And with one last note, I leave you for now--I saw Bistro Cupid on the E3 floor. Sure, it was in Kentia Hall, where booths go to die, but I still saw it. Unfortunately, the Hong Kong Pavilion didn't bring anything for Bistro Cupid 2, but since I'm buying that game anyway, I don't particularly care.

And this concludes my E3 report. I'll probably be going next year, and I'll probably be just as tired when it's done... but hey, I had some fun.

"bleah."
Friday - May 30, 2003
[Piro] - 11:45:00
Shortest. Piro Rant. Ever.

:)

hope everyone liked the (gasp) three whole real honest to goodness MT comics in one week my god pigs are gonna fly the world is commin to an end week. :P Big thanks to Seraphim for t3h funny in today's strip :P

Since i'm not traveling this month, i have a lot of plans in place for changes to the MT site here. Nayuki-chan has been ordered, and in a few weeks she will be sharing hosting duties with poor overworked Makoto-rin. :)

Acen rant is almost done, i'll post it monday. Also, part 2 of my mac g4 review will be ready next week as well. Have a good weekend folks :)

"4-koma"
Monday - June 2, 2003
[Piro] - 01:12:00
You'll note that today's comic is in a different format than usual. No, it's not a filler, it's part of a little experiment I'm playing with for this chapter.

This style of comic - the vertical top-to-bottom format is called a '4 koma' or 'four panel', and is a well established comic style in japan. Fans of Azumanga Daioh know that most of Azumanga is a 4 panel comic (with some special parts in normal manga format). I also have an incredibly fun book of Kanon 4-koma comics that has been amusing me since a friend gave it to me at Acen. One of the main inspirations for me when I started doing Megatokyo was an online japanese 4 koma strip called 'Quarter Iceshop'. It was these 4-koma strips that made me think it was possible to do an online webcomic like MT.

Anyways, getting off track here. When Megatokyo started, it was a four panel comic. In fact, Largo and I went back and forth on the vertical vs horizontal format (American vs. Japanese format) till we did compromise on the square format (similar to PVP Online's old format). Remember this Naze Nani which explains it? The most amusing thing about it is that the very next comic did away with this four panel format and opened things up into the more flexible manga format i've been using since.

The way humor comes across in a 4 panel strip is different than it is in a full page comic. 4 panel comics have a far different kind of comic pacing, a different structure, a different kind of ordering. The manga style layout offers a lot more flexibility and complexity in which to weave a more complex tale - i think Megatokyo has only benefitted from the change. But there is something about a simpler format that leads to types of humor that just isn't possible in a more complex layout. Yes, MT has been missing this kind of humor. Hence my little experiment here...

The title of the comic is 'Aida Ni...' which basically means 'meanwhile...'. The idea is that I intend to use a smattering of 4-koma strips quite deliberately to touch on some things going in and around the main storyline thread. Literally, 'meanwhile, kimiko is doing this...' kind of thing. There will be a series of these following Kimiko's day, and there some of the other others characters as well. The page format here is pretty standard, too - 4 koma comics will either be fit 2 to a page, or one with a title bar. Ideally, these 4 koma segue will be like a combination of old style MT humor and Dead Piro Art days, all threaded quite nicely into the sequence of comics.

Like i said, this is an experiment. We'll see how it works. MT is NOT switching to this format - these are going to be interspersed in chapter four here and there when appropriate.

It's funny how going from 4 panel to manga style helped break free some ideas - and here it is two years later and i'm finding that going back to the 4 panel structure is a refreshing break. :) It's actually quite common for manga artists to do 4 koma comics as omake or 'extras'. Me, I'm just threading them right into the story. I actually did a new drawing for the left side of the page but... it came our pretty bad. Ok, it sucked. No, it really did - this drawing of kimiko looked far better, so i left it in.

Are strips like these easier to draw? yes. Are they cop-outs like DPD or SGD strips? no. Is it nice having some time to work on other things? yeah, it is

Speaking of that Quarter Iceshop comic, Here is the strip that influenced me the most... and what for some reason prompted me to take on the 'piro' nickname. The comic is back online again (yay!) but i'm going to contact Himuro-san first and see if it's ok to link the site... i don't want to kill it by linking it ^^;;; Please note that i stored the linked comic locally to not cause Himuro-san any problems ^^;; megadotting a site is not nice if they don't know its coming ^^;;

"Anigami"
Monday - June 2, 2003
[Seraphim] - 02:10:00
ACen was a unique experience. We went to the dealer room to sign autographs on Friday. First of all, the dealers room was across the street. Walking around outside the building to get in was a good distance but the indoor skywalk from the hotel was a daytrip around, over, and behind the building. I'm sure it is a convenience in inclement weather but this was ridiculous while toting around our displays and Fred's suitcase of drawing implements. When we finally got to the dealer room someone had stolen our table and chairs for their own booth. Although there were tables and chairs around it was a union shop and the union guys were on lunch. Everyone was very patient until lunch break was over and we got set up with a new table. I was worried but we came back Saturday and it was still there.

I actually made some money at this con. One fan gave me a dollar bill folded into an elephant, and yet another one gave me a $2 bill folded into a stand up heart with a quarter displayed in the front of it. I cleared like $3.25 at this con. I recommend all fans learn origami and fold money and give it to me! I love money I mean origami.

It was very ironic that the Dead Piro comic for the weekend was "L33t Folding Skillz" and these fans show up with origami having not even seen the strip. The morning we left for the con I woke up with Fred holding the drawing in front of my nose. Even without glasses I immediately recognized that the girl on the right in the flower shirt and the boy with the glasses were Fred and I as children. That is so me. I was pictured in a newspaper in 3rd grade playing in a fountain with my classmates during a field trip and I looked just like that. Big mouth and all. Fred has never even seen it. But then again I think I am running around screaming and laughing like a maniac in a lot of old pictures. A lot of fans asked if that image would be for sale but I have to say I called dibs. The happy kids and Junpei - I just love the image.

Origami is my only real artistic talent and if you can learn what the diagrams mean anyone can do it. There are 8 year olds who can kick my butt at origami. Fred is always very encouraging but I have an art phobia. I think what did me in is that I have no sense of perspective. Zero, zilch, nil. Fred has tried to teach me. The road going off into the distance between two hills - can't do it. I end up with something like the optical illusion test asking you which line is longer when they pass through another line.

Art classes in grade school were a nightmare. I got one A - it's my masterpiece and I still have it. It was the carved linoleum print block unit. It was 8th grade. I gouged out a cat sitting on a braided rug (see I have always loved cats). It wasn't that good - I only got B's on the technical portions of the actual image, final print block, and inking- but one assignment was to print it onto a page out of a magazine. I found a line drawing of an old fashioned kitchen scene and slapped it on there. It ended up in the art show. It's hard when your talent peaks so young. Knowing I will never be able to top my piece 'Cat in Kitchen' I have never tried.

Actually, I do still try but no one but Fred ever sees it. Last year I took up oil painting. Now I end up with something more akin to a colorized Rorschach Inkblot Test. My last recent accomplishment was when a fan asked Fred to draw Largo in sailor cap for his cousin who was deployed. Fred couldn't remember what the style looked like so we tried to verbally describe it to him (which failed miserably) so I drew one for him. And Fred could actually tell what it was from my drawing. Most 3 year olds can kick my butt in drawing. I don't doubt there are several chimps out there who could best me too. I'd like to see them fold origami though.

"Blur"
Tuesday - June 3, 2003
[Dom] - 23:30:00
Since I only spent 36 hours at ACen, and you heard about how I spent about 12 hours before ACen, this rant doesn't need to be very long at all.

This is what I remember:

When I got in from the airport, my first task was to minimize the damage Asmodeus, Sakurai, and Jan Scott Frazier did to Monica Rial. They kept teaching her rather... uh... flagrant... Japanese. And with three of them against one of me, all I could do was explain to her just what they were teaching her to say. Which of course made her say it with more gusto. Whee.

Saturday morning was the MT panel. I met Fred for breakfast, and was about to go and rent a teddy bear costume before saying to the con "Fuggit, I'm tired and don't want to bother". Otakon, maybe. We'll see.

The MT panel was the smoothest MT panel we've had since... um... ever. Any problems there were were not our fault (apparently, the reg line was backed up all the way to Canada) and that makes this a good con in my book.

After that was the... autograph signing, I think. And the highlight of that was when one member of a pack of high school(?) girls that had been toward the back of the line realized "I don't have anything for you to sign! Except... my Faulkner book, I guess". Given my Faulkner fanboyhood and the fact tat I'm less than six months removed from a 5,000 word article on Darl's vicarious self-destruction, I said "gimme that". I then proceeded to give them a quick lesson on Darl. That was a big highlight of the con, mostly because I'm a dork.

There was also my first time at Fogo de Chao. That can be an entire rant on its own. For now, let it suffice to say that I ate more meat in one hour than I'd had in the previous two weeks.

And, well, that's about all I did during my 36 hours at ACen. Tune in next time for a real rant that covers more than 36 hours.

"skyway to nowhere"
Wednesday - June 4, 2003
[Piro] - 23:40:00
Hard to believe Anime Central was almost three weeks ago. I feel like I just got home. Conventions always seem to feel like four or five days of activity crammed into two days, and this year's Anime Central was no exception.

One of the hardest things to believe is that this was only my third Anime Central since Megatokyo started. Oh, and Dom was right - it has been only two years. MT had just started to build a readership around the time of our first con. Our first Acen experience I described in a recent rant. The next Acen, last year's con, was a lot of fun and it was an honor to have lunch with Akamatsu Ken of Love Hina fame. Nothing like making a total fool out of yourself in front of someone you admire and respect ^^;; (thankfully my lameness was buffered by the rather excellent translation skills of the infallible Asmodeus ("uh, are you sure you wanna say that?" ^^;;)). The most astonishing thing about last year's Acen was the sheer number of MT fans who stood in line to get into that tiny little room... the Con folks noticed, and that's why this year we managed to get a room big enough for everyone. It was a true 'told you so' moment :)

Of course, the fact that so many people are so bored at these cons that they see fit to waste time coming to the MT panel puts a little burden on us to try to be somewhat entertaining. By some quirk of nature, we manage to do so at most conventions, but I feel that fans deserve something special at some of these cons if we can manage it. That's how the Naze Nani Megatokyo's were born.

Anime Central is kind of my 'home base' con - in fact, i remember going to the very first Anime Central years ago. Hard to believe that here I am, years later, talking about how I was able to make a total fool out of myself in front of 1800 people wearing a cat similar to one worn by one of my favorite female anime characters. Life sure is kinda weird sometimes.

Seraphim and I arrived Thursday night and were put to work even before we had a chance to unpack the car. All the guests had a meet and greet session with all the con staff before the rest of the con got underway. Later that evening, the con treated us and the rest of the guests to a trip to see the Matrix Reloaded. Of course, by the time we got back to the hotel it was almost 3am. I won't comment on the film - enough people have done a better job at critiquing it than I could. I'll leave it at that.

On Friday, Seraphim and I didn't have any scheduled events, but we planned to sit at our table and sign and draw stuff for people for as long as we could that day. There were a lot of complaints from people in the Artist Alley from previous years that the line of people waiting for MT autographs was impinging on other activities in the Artist Alley area, so I decided that moving over to the Exhibitors Hall was ok - All I wanted to do was sit and take care of people without bothering anyone.

The biggest problem this year with the Exhibitor Hall at Acen was that it was in the Convention Center next door, not in the hotel - a veritable 2 mile walk via the 'skywalk'. Now, this 'skywalk' is probably a real blessing in bad weather, but it was so circuitous that it was a lot quicker to walk outside. Aside from the distance, it was pretty nice. Dealer Rooms usually tend to be pretty cramped, so the extra space was nice. When we arrived to set up, we discovered that someone had taken the table and chairs the con had provided for us, and that they would have to wait for the convention people to bring out more but and they were on lunch. Once we were set up, things went fine. We were set up right across the way from the Nekobox folks, who didn't have chairs (they were like $35 a chair x_X)

If you were there, you may have noticed these really nice banners on stands that were behind us at the table. Seraphim and I purchased a pair of 7 foot x 3 foot banner things to bring to cons to, like, spruce up things. ^^;; One has Piro and Kimiko on it, the other has Eimi from Warmth. They came out really nice, and I'm giving it about three cons before someone rips them off :( I think that we were able to take care of everyone who stood in line on Friday - thank you for your patience if you were in line. :)

Friday night Dom, Asmodeus, Ukyo, Cortana, Natsuki, Seraphim and I were supposed to get together to go over the plan for Saturday's panel. Only one problem - Dom was still stuck in Los Angeles. ^^;; It seems that his plane kept breaking. He finally got in around 2am central time... which left a rather comatose looking Dom to explain things to over breakfast the next morning. He nodded a lot and rambled on about things that had nothing to do with the panel, I felt we were good.

The Naze Nani panel went... really well. Surprisingly well. If anyone remembers the disaster that was the first Naze Nani Megatokyo panel at Otakon last year... this was a lot better. Tons better. I guess there is something to be said for (gasp) planning. I learned a few things from that disaster , and tried to apply what I learned to this years Naze Nani... things.

First problem with the Otakon show was that I tried to put together a single, 10 minute presentation that offered little in the way of audience participation, and then expected everyone else to, well, just sort of ad lib things and we'd go from there. Ya. that worked well -_- This year, I put together a much more organized framework but left leeway for Dom, Asmo, Seraphim to improvise. A series of Top Ten lists worked surprisingly well. We filled up any time left near the end of the show with our usual Question and Answer stuff. Dom gave away a vibrating ducky. We finished on time. In short, it went off without a hitch, and i think everyone enjoyed it. For once the room was big enough - it held about 2000 people, and about 1800 showed up. :) There were a number of Megatokyo cosplayers at Acen - I'll post some pics in my next write-up.

On Sunday we had our Web Comic panel, hosted by the irascible Hot Soup / Pogo of Fate Drifters fame. What made the panel so much fun was how many webcomic people were there - Dub This, /me glomps j00, Fate Drifters, Nekobox folks, Ghost Girl Kimiko, and a few others. There were a lot of really good questions asked, and everyone on the panel had quite a bit to say. So far, i'd say it's the most informative webcomic panel i've seen, and hopefully future ones go this well at other cons.

The final activity for me at Acen was the dreaded 'Iron Guest' competition. As you might imagine, it's a spoof of the whole Iron Chef thing... and last year i lost. ^^;; This year i went up against Bruce Lewis of CheapDisposable Entertainment - an excellent artist in the more traditional manga/anime genre. I was pretty exhausted by sunday afternoon, and i have to say... if 'kawaii' (cute) wasn't the subject matter, i would have probably lost :P Pulling from my sleepy brain, i did a 'happy cute' and a 'depressed cute' character, and added a little Boo with a jet pack in a IAC shirt (ok, that was laying it on thick) and managed to pull ahead and win.) Here's a picture of the drawing. It was a fun competition - but i only won by a few points - Bruce did a great job with his (I have a picture of it somewhere, but I can't find it), but i think my little Boo with IAC shirt won the day for me :P.

I originally considered sending dom up to be a stand in for me, but it would have been unfair to Bruce. Dom was able to produce a comparable 'cute' piece in 8.65 seconds - imagine if he had had the whole 20 minutes. :)

After that, we were pretty much done. I don't know why, i but this con wore me out. Anime Central is always a great con, and i would like to thank all of the Acen staff, in particular Eileen, Issac, Fraggy, Pocky, Willie, the sound guys at the panel, the guys who lugged the lounge chairs onto the stage, Crowie, The staff of the green room, the guy who we woke up and helped me and john update the website saturday morning via his cell phone data connection... the list goes on. ^_^ Thanks guys, great con.

As always, a big thanks to the MT crew people. Hope you liked the pizza. I don't think I even got a piece ^^;;

You'll note that i'm trying to increase the rantage a little. My goal is to get it back up to three times per week again. I'm not gonna promise it (because we all know what happens when i do that) - but i figure i'll just quietly try to do it. Doing it is, after all, what counts.

Oh, and just a quick note - I've been spending some time working on new merchandise for the MT store. The latest piece is a new version of the old 'ph34r the cute ones' design, in an attempt to provide something cuter, a little more deadly, and a little less Ruri. :P It came out really well, actually. Look for shirts in about a month. Other stuff in the works as well, more info on that later. (whispers 'blankets' and 'darkly cute' into the air)...

"I am not a crook"
Thursday - June 5, 2003
[Dom] - 21:30:00
Okay, first things first. As you may already know, I'm a baseball fan. And given how much crap the sport has brought on itself, and how the fans are extremely jaded by this point, I shouldn't be surprised at how quickly people turned on Sammy Sosa after cork was found in one (and only one) of Sammy's 81 bats. After all, with steroids and scuffballing being a proud tradition in the sport, what's so hard to believe about a home run hitter putting some cork in his bat to add a bit of distance to his swings?

But me, I'm waiting on the evidence to come in, and the initial evidence supports his story that it was an honest mistake--so far, at least. But from cruising ESPN and The Sporting News, it appears that everyone wants Sosa's head on a stick. Or wants an asterisk next to his home run total. And I say "screw that". For how many years has he broken bats, and how many times has their been cork in them before this week? This incident hasn't been fully resolved yet, people, give it some time before you try to crucify the dude.

Okay, that's enough baseball talk for now. On to the thrust of this rant. To wit, I have yet another question:

Why do people keep asking me for help with their porn games?

Warning: The rest of this rant will talk about pornographic video games. If you don't want to hear it, don't go any further than this. On the other hand, if you expect anything particularly lascivious, you won't find anything in here for you, either.

I guess it all started with Baldr Force, when I lent out my copy to a couple of friends who are mech combat fans. Like me, they liked the combat system, turned off their speakers and skipped through the porn as quickly as possible. Unlike me, they don't read Japanese, so I ended up explaining the surprisingly deep story to them. Or maybe it started with my roommate asking me to translate portions of Ren'ai Chu! for him, which I did for about 5 seconds at a time before running away from the screaming.

Of course these brushes with Japanese H games came back to bite me in the ass two weeks ago. Here's a half-remembered conversation with a friend in whose room I'll be staying at Anime Expo:

Her: Hey Dom?
Me: Yeah?
Her: Could you help me get a porn game?
Me: Why do you want to get it in the first place?
Her: My friend and I want to cosplay it, we think it's cute!
(Note: I have a few issues with people who want to do cosplay from games they haven't played, since I think cosplay should be love for the character, but maybe that's just because I'ved played too much Comic Party. It's also not my policy to get in the way of anyone else's enjoyment... which explains a lot of why I make myself the butt of so many jokes, really)
Me: ...and why are you asking me, of all people?
Her: I was told you were the best person to talk to about H games.
Me: ...

Things got worse from there. See, she wanted to get not just any H game. Noooo, she wanted Brightia (which I refuse to link to for reasons I'll get to), because she thought the costumes were cute, and she couldn't find any pictures of the costumes from the back (I'll come back to this factoid later).

Because I had nothing better to do and can read Japanese, I poked around for info on the game. I discovered that it's a rather... ah... objectionable game, with lots of what I like to call "bad kanji". When I asked Asmodeus-who really is a porn master-about Brightia, even he recoiled a bit, and considering that he's watched mind control porn within earshot of his mother before, that's quite a feat.

And what do you know? I found a place that had it, and a few days after she asked, it was on my doorstep. But guess what? She can't read Japanese, and didn't feel any enthusiasm for actually playing the game. So guess who played through the game trying to find CG for her costume reference?

Hint: It wasn't Senator Lieberman.

So there I was after a couple days of desperately skipping through a WHOLE LOT of screaming. And I grumbled over to Asmodeus about it, at which point he mentioned that he had all the CG for the game if she wanted it. Which led to the inevitable exchange:

Me: 何故そんなこと言ってなかった、同士？　（＞＜）； (Why didn't you say that before?!)
Asmodeus: 聞かれなかったから　(Because you didn't ask).

Of course.

So anyway, that's the situation as it stands. And I'm sure that my legend as a master of Japanese porn games will grow because of what I've done for my friend, acquiring an out of print game and all.

I guess I have no one to blame but myself, doing so many favors for friends who want to play/see porn games. And I can probably blame myself for not thinking of ways to solve this problem that didn't involve me getting my hands dirty (and DAMN do I feel dirty). For example, UkiyaShun suggested that I should've just downloaded someone else's save game, or asked around for the CGs. And it's probably nobody's fault but mine, especially since I don't know that much about porn. But me, I blame Asmodeus. You should too.

And that's all I have to say about that.

"the other side, part 2"
Sunday - June 8, 2003
[Piro] - 02:40:00
Ok, now for part two of my report on life after Windows. I wrote part one of my review of my new Mac G4 system while we were still in the honeymoon stage of our relationship - barely a month after getting it. Now it's a few month later and a good time to give my impressions about how living and working with my new system has been... the good, the bad and the ugly. :)

I think I can sum up the experience here at the beginning by saying that I don't regret the 'switch'. I've been enjoying my setup, though I am sure that a good part of that enjoyment comes from the fact that this system is a lot more powerful and nicer than my last system. It's good to keep in mind that it was a major upgrade as well as a switch, but I think that overall I'm a fairly satisfied new mac user. That doesn't mean that I haven't had moments where I've wanted to grab the thing by the handles and hurl it out the window... it IS a computer, after all.

Let's recap what my setup is. It's a Apple Power Mac G4 with dual 1.25 Ghz processors, 1 Gig of PC2700 DDR SDRAM, a 120 gig hard drive, the SuperDrive DVD/DVDR/CDR, the base ATI Radeon 9000 Pro w/ 64MB DDR ram, all coupled to a lovely 23" Apple Cinema Display. A pretty nice setup, really. I'm a horrible technofettishist, I think.

In regards to OS X (the X is for 10, pretty much a rebuild of the entire mac operating system around a unix core), I think that overall I really do like it better than windows. It didn't take too long to get up to speed with how it works, and tweaking it isn't too hard either. I haven't lifted the hood and delved into core bit tinkering, because I'd just break things, but for the most part things have been fairly trouble free. I've only had one kernel panic (that was fun). Is it crash proof? hell no. Does it crash less than windows did? yeah.

The biggest difference for the end user, really, between windows and the mac is how the child windows of programs are not constrained to a program window but are right on the desktop. When you switch to a different program, windows specific to the control of that program disappear, reducing screen clutter. It's a lot easier to work in one program while referencing material in another - a lot easier than in windows. Also, it means that you see your backgrounds a lot more often :P I particularly like the 'hide' command - I tend to have a lot of programs running at once, and it's nice to be able to just hide programs so they are out of the way. I know, how is that different than 'minimizing' the program? Not sure, I just like it better. Also, the 'dock', which really looks at first like an afterthought stuck at the bottom of the screen, is actually kinda nice. it gets cluttered easy, but that just means you need to be more efficient as you work.

There are times when programs do misbehave. I'm aware of the fact that usually if a program crashes, it doesn't affect the system. This isn't *always* the case, of course. The way OS X will go to sleep at the touch of a button and come up flawlessly is great. I also understand that with Windows XP the recovery from sleep is much better, but more often than not my Win2000 laptop doesn't wake up and I am used to losing data often.

I have noticed that after a while it is a good idea to reboot the system, which sort of surprised me. There are times when things just seem to start acting... odd, and the best way to fix them is to reboot. I thought only windows was like that, but I guess I was wrong :P I reboot about once or twice a week, which isn't really too bad. I usually have to reboot once a week anyway because Comcast dinks with the cable modem and the only way to get net access back is to reboot the entire network. yay.

One of the best things about using the Mac is how much I like Microsoft Office X for Mac. For cryin out loud, it amazes me that Entourage can be so nice to use when Outlook is such a pain. I have a much better handle on my email now than I ever did. If you still feel that you've emailed me and I haven't responded - gomen, I can't answer everyone's email - I've received over 6800 emails since I got the new mac, and none of that is spam (a very special thanks to Cortana for doing a great job of spam filtering on the server side of things). Entourage also handles Japanese text far better than my windows versions ever did.

Actually, there are a few quirky things about using Japanese on the mac. The system itself is great, but there are two areas where it falls flat. First off, Japanese tends to get eaten in IRC and over AIM, and file names from a windows system that are in Japanese come into the mac all screwed up. I haven't had time to really delve into why this happens, but I've been getting by just using email to deal with Japanese encoded words and stuff. Japanese entry in Illustrator, Photoshop, Word, etc is flawless. In fact, OS X handles my Japanese True Type fonts without any difficulties.

Now. Mac Office isn't without problems. I notice that often word does weird things with character spacing (there doesn't appear to be spaces between words, and other times there appears to be 3 or four spaces, but it is just one) - this leads to funky problems with layout on screen. It's not a serious problem, but it can be annoying.

Without question, I have found using Photoshop and Illustrator to be far better on the Mac than it was on my PC. Of course, having the 23" screen, a new tablet, and tons of power and memory helps. :P The biggest problem I had from a graphics point of view was that my new scanner wouldn't work with the mac - but that's because it was developed for USB2, and there was no way to deal with that interface. I've been using my older CanoScan N670U without any problems, so it's really a non issue. The newer scanner is hooked up to my other computer for when I want to scan slides.

Oddly enough, there is one very odd thing that happens sometimes with Photoshop - every once and a rare while it quits unexpectedly. I mean, it just closes. It doesn't give any warnings, it just disappears and shuts down, and you loose everything you were working on. Thankfully it hasn't happened in a while, but it is NOT cool when It does. Most programs say 'this program unexpectedly quit' or something - I don't know why Photoshop doesn't do that. As for Illustrator, there is a weird problem where it will check for updates on start up, then crash. The only way to get past this is to reboot. Weird, but livable, and rare enough to not bother me. I used to have far more problems than this in Windows with these two programs, so I can deal with it.

One program I really miss is ACDsee, which gives me the ability to quickly browse images in folders. ACDsee for mac doesn't work worth a crap, and I can't find a program that does the job. The File Browser in Photoshop works pretty well, but its not quite what I need. I've been using iView MediaPro, but you have to make albums - it doesn't just read the directories automatically for browsing, which sorta sucks.

Now printing from this thing has been a nightmare. HP says they make drivers for my DeskJet 1220C, but they are USB *only*. I originally had a LinkSys wireless print server that I needed to connect to to print. Considering that the LinkSys didn't support macs (which is dumb as hell, when you consider that the packaging showed the smiling couple *USING A MAC* -_-... Part of the problem was solved when one of my friends traded the LinkSys for a HP JetDirect that could handle internet printing without the clumsy interface the Linksys used. That fixed that problem, but it still didn't fix the problem that HP didn't make a driver that supported IP printing. I tried plugging the printer into the mac using the USB cable, and letting the other two computers print via the printserver... oh ya, that like didn't work worth squat.

After a couple of weeks of messing with GimpPrint, Hpijs, and some other open source solutions to the printing problem, I and some friends finally managed to get something to work. I can print without too much difficulty from all of my programs except illustrator, which for some reason prints text really thick and blotchy - but at least bitmaps and most other kinds of printing work ok. I tried so many things I can't even remember what worked, and I know it's all been upgraded, so I have to go back in and load new drivers to see if it fixes that problem. Overall, a real mess. I have to print a lot of things from the PC because the open source drivers have a smaller print areas too.

The other thing that was an issue when I started using the mac was the browser. I'm sorry, but Internet Explorer for the Mac kinda sucks. Ok, it really sucks. I disliked it pretty much immediately. There are a lot of browsers available for the mac, and I tried them all. I didn't like Safari, even after it implemented Tabbed browsing (it doesn't work quite right, you should be able to drag and drop links on tabs), Mozilla is ok, but not great. Netscape is just Mozilla with all the netscrape stuff on it. I haven't tried OmniWeb yet, but it doesn't have tabbed browsing so its not worth trying for me. My hands down favorite browser is Camino. It's a sweet, nice to use browser that has tabs and bookmarks and a layout that works just right for me, and its nice and minimal and slick too. Too bad it's still in development, and has glitches that irritate me from time to time. I just keep installing nightly builds, and things slowly seem to keep getting better. Hurry up and finish the thing, guys. Please. I'm beggin ya. :)

I rely on AIM and IRC for pretty much all of my online communications. I really preferred ICQ over AIM, but everyone had moved to AIM a few years ago so I sorta had no choice. AIM's client for OS X is horrible, but there are a few good open source solutions. iChat, which comes with OS X is really cute and works well, but... its too cutesy, it gave me a headache :P I liked and used Fire for a while, which also let me use ICQ, but the one I like best and am using now is Adium. I tend to get 10 to 15 msg windows or more during a day, and it's nice to have them all tabbed in a single window instead of all scattered about. As for IRC, I miss mIRC. I've been using IRCle, which is pretty good, but having a single input window for all the windows in the damn program just sucks. Also, I had to load a script to pop up new windows when people msg'd me. It works, but I miss mIRC. :) Yes, I know about X-chat, but I'm daunted about getting the damn thing to work in OS x ^^;;.

Another thing about the mac that sort of surprised me was the difficulties I've had with video files. Ya, sure, I toss out fansub tapes and encourage people to make sure they don't opt for the free downloads over DVDs, but watching Divx files of raw and/or subtitled anime is still a staple part of anime culture. The most surprising thing to me about the mac, considering it is supposed to be the ideal platform for digital video and audio... I just how difficult it is to get video files to work if they aren't native Quicktime files. There are a slew of codec solutions, and most seem to work ok, but AVI files have to be converted to mac format before you can watch them, and this doesn't always result in playable files. I'm surprised by how buggy the whole thing can be. I guess I just wish I knew more about how these codecs worked, so I knew more about how to fix them - I guess it's just a learning curve. The other annoying thing I've noticed is that when I play DVDs there are really annoying horizontal scan lines that I just can't seem to make adjustments for. I'm not sure if this is a function of the DVD program, or the screen, or the DVDs themselves. Some DVDs actually crash the DVD player -_-;; Weird problems to have from a system where this stuff is supposed to be it's strong point.

(ok, ok, I know about Video Lan Client (VLC) and Mplayer OSX2! Thank you! Geeze ^^;;; I had already tried VLC, which didn't work TOO well for me, but Mplayer OSX2 is one I hadn't tried yet - so far, that seems to be a good solution. I'm getting 10 emails ever 15 minutes giving me the same advice, so... er, thank you very much, I got it :P Also, there were several emails that had a lot of 'this is how these files work' kind of info, and I wanted to thank you for that information as well - It never fails, I say in a rant that I have no clue how something works, and it isn't long before several kind fans have gone to great lengths to enlighten me. Thank you :P - piro)

Music on the mac is pretty nice, actually. At first, because iTunes worked so much differently than I was used to with winamp that I looked for more winampy solutions. I used Audion for a while, and it's a great little mp3 player with a lot of features Itunes doesn't have (I use Panic Software's Transmit FTP program too, which is really nice). Yet, for some reason, after a while, I found myself going back to iTunes, and now that I've organized things a little better, I really like it. I never really felt the need to rip Cds to mp3s before - hell, own the CD, just put it in, but I've been organizing things in such a way that now its easier to get at my music. I've gathered a lot of files together that I normally don't hear because they aren't on a CD or in the directory in question. I've found myself listening to things that normally would have taken far more effort to dig out and put in the tray. Also, the way Itunes handles Japanese track info is nice. Gotta hand it to apple, I like the dratty little thing now, plain and unskinned as it is.

There are a few mac only programs that I really like and have found very useful. Omni Outliner, which comes bundled with Mac OS X, is a really nice outlining program, and I've found it to be very effective for laying out my thoughts and ideas. Right now, I'm using it to outline and plan Megatokyo strips. Another neat little program that I've started to use more is Hog Bay Notebook - a little catch-all kind of program where I can just dump little snippets of things, ideas, song track names, urls, and other junk to find later. For text and HTML editing, I've been using Bbedit, and it's nice, but I sort of miss UltraEdit 32. Loading and unloading programs in OS X is pretty easy, and fairly painless. I've tried a lot of things, and there are a lot of neat programs made for mac that it's been fun to experiment with.

Games? I haven't really even looking into games on the mac yet, not really. The few I've played recently have all been on the PC or on the PS1 I borrowed from a friend. Pathetic, I know. ^^;;

In part one of this review I mentioned the fact that this particular G4 had noise problems. For most general use, the fan noise is pretty insignificant, and certainly not a problem. This changes, however, if the system gets hot. The damn thing can sound, at times, like an airplane taking off. :P The max fan speed I've ever heard only happens at start up, but it's something else. On warm days (none of which we've seemed to have yet here in Michigan) the fan speed does seem to increase a little - its very controlled. I'm thinking that by the time summer gets rolling along its gonna sound like an airport in here if im not running the AC. I did get the Power Supply replacement kit which gives you a new power supply and fans to replace the noisy ones with, but... its still in its box in the closet. I haven't had time to install it yet. ^^;;

the only other thing I've done to this thing was add a blank hard drive... which was more difficult than I thought it would be. The manual says to use Cable Select, and I tried to put the drive on the same cable as the main drive - no dice, wouldn't find it. I ended up putting it on the second ATA cable, which eventually worked, but only after a few tries. Not sure why this was so difficult, but the drive is stable and fine, and I only use it for media storage anyway.

This is getting rather long, but I guess that's because the computers we use are such a big part of our lives, that it's only natural that the interface we have with them is complex and many leveled. There are some things I want to experiment in the future with - things like video and even trying to animate some things, but for now, life with my G4 is pretty decent. I still use my PCs, the temptation to load Ragnarok Online is always there, and I have data and files all over the place, so I have to keep everything on. ^^;; my network setup is a mess, some weekend I need to sit down with some friends and set things up better, but for now, it all works pretty ok. I don't think I'd be a good candidate for a 'switch' add, but that doesn't mean I'm not happy to have the thing sitting here on my desk. :P

"Jumpin' Jupiter"
Monday - June 9, 2003
[Dom] - 01:00:00
I'm running a Jump panel at Fanime in two weeks. It'll be at 10 AM on Saturday, though I don't quite know WHERE it is yet. I'll consult with Trevmex and post it when I know. By all means, come to the panel and talk about manga with me!

I knew it was coming, but it was still a big shock when Pretty Face ended in this week's Jump, and rather rapidly at that. But it's the way of unpopular manga, Shueisha gives it the axe. Thankfully, there's plenty of other manga keeping my interest.

For one thing, my friend has introduced me to Narue no Sekai, which runs in Shounen Ace A. See, it's the heartwarming story of a middle school boy, his alien girlfriend, and the trouble they get into. And it appeals to just about every part of the manga fan in me. There's just enough baseball in it to make me happy-Maruo is a baseball player but hates practicing. There's weird-yet-mellow humor with Shiki and Pete, the cat on her head. There's spastic, Excel-style humor, with Haruna and Yagi. And of course, there's Narue, who beats a puppy so violently with an aluminum baseball bat that the manga mosaics the bloody pulp (for those of you who've seen the anime, yes, that first scene happens much differently in the manga). So that's keeping me sated in the post-Purife era.

I'm also reading Black Cat these days. Since it's a Jump property, I'll probably talk a lot about it at the panel, so I'll just give a quick overview here. First, it has the silliest names on characters I've heard in years. While not as silly as the names in, say, Magic Knight Rayearth or Sailor Moon, you have to admit that something's weird when a character's name is Beluga, of all things.

Still, Black Cat's plot moves forward a lot more often than it moves sideways, which is a refreshing change from the other series I borrowed, Mamotte! Shugogetten. Boy, is that brain candy. I think I got dumber reading it, and kind of liked the dumbening process.

Hrm. Looking at that, it doesn't look like I'm reading enough manga these days. Looks like I'll need to dip into older stuff, like Star of the Giants (now available in wideban!) or Ushio to Tora (also available in wideban). Of course, I could always just save my money and go to Japan with Fred later in the year, but what's the fun of that?

Anyway, it's 2 AM. I should probably go to sleep now. I will talk more about manga soon, I promise! Just gimme 2 weeks to get ready for my first non-MT panel in years.

"Quick hits"
Tuesday - June 10, 2003
[Dom] - 23:00:00
Firstly, a little bit of cleanup regarding my Jump panel at Fanime. It turns out that it's at 11 AM, and not 10. And I know the room and everything! So to sum up:

Panel: Shonen Jump
Time: Saturday, June 21, 11 AM.
Place: Fanime, "Spiderroom 207" (wherever that is)
Panel description: Shounen Jump is just now making it big in the US, but it's been a juggernaut for decades in Japan. Come here to ask any questions you have about Shueisha's weekly manga, from One Piece to Naruto to anything from the past twenty years. Or, come here if you want free manga, that works too.

It's funny, my history with Fanime. The first time I went to it was... what, 4, 5 years ago? Something like that. I stayed at Ed's place, went for a day, walked around the dealer's room, and went home. The year after that I was a... standard attendee, I think. And then I was karaoke staff for a couple years (favorite moment out of many moments of staffing: Yamaga's translator sniffing me and saying "at least he's a clean otaku"), and now I'm attending as press and running a panel. So if the pattern continues, in a couple years I'll a guest of honor (HA! No, that'd just be too weird), then an exhibitor. And shortly after that, the world will end due to me running out of stuff to do at Fanime.

In other news, did anyone notice the name of the new Charlotte NBA team? The Bobcats. Owned by Bob Johnson. Greeeeat. As if egos in the NBA weren't big enough, a team bears its owner's name? What's next, the Dallas Marksmen? Sheesh...

Meanwhile, a quick look at my local comic book store reveals the continuing lack of any issues of Planetary (Warren Ellis), Spiderman/Black Cat (Kevin Smith), and that The Target thing that featured Bullseye (Kevin Smith). Geez. I wish I was famous enough that even with a year or more of delays, people would read my stuff. But nooo, a few hours late and people are out for my blood.

Then again, I guess it's fair, since if MT is a few minutes late Fred gets bugged a fricking load too...

And speaking of late, I should probably head to sleep. G'night.

"reverse googling"
Thursday - June 12, 2003
[Piro] - 00:55:03
As you may have noticed, there has been little information released regarding Megatokyo Book 2 by either me or IC entertainment in recent weeks. I would first like to apologize for the lack of information regarding the book, especially to those of you who have pre-ordered it. IC entertainment and I will be making an announcement next week regarding Book 2, so please bear with us. Also, if you are having any difficulties in receiving your copy of Megatokyo Book 1, IC Entertainment has set up a special email address, mt-orders@ic-ent.com, to handle your inquiries.

One of the more unusual benefits of having a website that seems to attract a lot of readers is that when you mention your dismal lack of knowledge about something, you get a lot of very helpful, informative emails that help fill in the gaps in your knowledge. It's sorta like this weird Reverse Google reflex - I toss out the fact that I have no clue about something and a myriad of information laden emails float into my mailbox. I feel sorta guilty, as if I didn't go to the proper amount of effort to learn some of the info I've absorbed in the past few days.

For example, I was very surprised by some of the very informative and enlightening emails I received regarding digital video. I now have a much better understanding of how much of it works, why some things work and other things don't, a lot of history and how this history has helped shape some of the problems we have today. :P I received some rather interesting emails about coding and programming. I received a lot of really interesting advice from other mac users, some of which has already proven to be really useful (even silly things, like holding down the 'option' key when selecting another program will 'hide' the program you just left).

Some specific things I've learned... tons of hints regarding the playback of AVI files (a very interesting history of the differences between the Mac and Windows platform), a 'duh' moment for me about the 'attach inputline to channel windows' item in IRCle. Another 'duh' moment on the correct way to use the bundled Graphic Converter software. Several tutorials on how to install Fink and experiment with the wide variety of open source software available (and some of the specifics as to how that works with OSX). Also, a lot of software recommendations that I am still experimenting with. Yes, I know about Opera. I didn't know about Mozilla Firebird.

So, in short, I'd like to thank everyone who emailed me ideas, explanations, solutions, 'me too's, 'I dun have a freakin clue' and in particular the 'we're working on it' emails. Thanks mucho : )

Finally, one of the most often asked questions I get at anime cons is if I've brought any shirts or posters to sell. Most of the time, I don't - trying to handle merchandise is a bigger pain than most of you realize. Yet it would be nice to have stuff at the cons, so I've teamed up with Wizzywig Collectables who will now be offering Megatokyo shirts, posters and other stuff at conventions. You will find Wizzywig at their next stop at Fanime from June 20th to the 22nd In Santa Clara, California. They won't have any MT shirts in time for Fanime, but they will have some posters and books. :)

This month is like a little breather. Trying to balance all the travel and other junk in the next few months is gonna be... an interesting challenge. :P More info on what my convention and travel schedule looks like next week.

"That's a good muffin"
Thursday - June 12, 2003
[Dom] - 22:30:00
I'm not completely DVD ignorant. I own enough, having been a film student for a while and now being a part-time reviewer. But still, when my roommate said the words "Superbit" and "Adaptation" in the same sentence, I cocked my head and asked him what the hell he was talking about.

See, Superbit is this nifty little marketing word that means "hey, look, we dedicated every bit of this disc to making the video and audio look as good as possible". While Adaptation is this movie that consists of Nicolas Cage mumbling to himself for about an hour and a half.

Now, don't get me wrong. I absolutely love Adaptation. My old film professor (Bless her soul) invited me to a screening of it last October, maybe earlier than that. And I got to ask a few questions of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, and I was one fricking happy camper. Ask me about Adaptation, and I can probably give you entire lectures about its ironies and formulaic breaking of the formula. Hell, I'm going to be sitting in a little lecture hall on the night of the 24th just so I can hear my old prof talk about it for two hours.

But SUPERBIT? For a simple little thing like Adaptation? What kind of "mind-blowing audio and video experience" can you get from Nicolas Cage singing "So Happy Together" off-key? Or from his neurotic little monologues? It just seems really pointless. I mean, think of all the cool things you could have on a normal Adaptation DVD. Sure, the whole thing is a Charlie Kaufman commentary track, but still, wouldn't it be nice to have Spike and Charlie just talk? Some interviews, or... well... ANY sort of extra?

It's such a waste of disc space, really. All these opportunities to please fans of the actual movie, instead of fans of video... but noooooo.

Sigh.

"Best subtitle ever"
Wednesday - June 18, 2003
[Dom] - 01:00:00
So, an explanation of today's rant image and why it's so funny to me.

As I was watching the (excellent) Hoshi no Koe DVD, I bumped across the easiest-to-spot error I've seen in years. How this thing got past edit I'm not sure. I mean, even my beloved "God of Mange" fuckup got caught fixed, but whoever proofread the scripts just fell asleep, or something.

Or maybe 5 is Japanese for 4, in someone's twisted brain. Who knows? Maybe, as my roommate Cortana says, it's the true explanation why 100 yen is worth 80 cents.

Before I forget, here's my panel information for Fanime again:

Time: 11 AM
Place: Fanime, Spiderroom 207, above the main hall.
Panel description: Shounen Jump is just now making it big in the US, but it's been a juggernaut for decades in Japan. Come here to ask any questions you have about Shueisha's weekly manga, from One Piece to Naruto to anything from the past twenty years. Or, come here if you want free manga, that works too.

"real life"
Wednesday - June 18, 2003
[Seraphim] - 19:25:00
I have actually quit my icky 9 to 5 job to help Piro out with Fredart Studios. I only get paid in hugs and kisses from the boss. It doesn't seem fair because I got those before I started and I wasn't doing this 'work' stuff. Piro is making out like a bandit. Even without money it is the best job EVER. It is just fun being able to work with someone as creative as Piro and who loves what he is doing.

I do all the boring but necessary stuff that allows Piro to draw and write more. When I first sat down to straighten things out for him I found the bank balance heart stopping low. Like how are we going to afford to eat or feed the cats low. Not ever thinking Fred hadn't balanced the account - I naturally panicked. After several hours of searching for receipts and statements I found out he hadn't entered all of the deposits. Let me just say, it is ALWAYS better to find out you have more money in your checking account than you thought you did instead of less.

I also spent a good deal of time filing 3 years worth of paperwork he had accumulated. I had called the lawyer to tell him we hadn't received the copyright registrations yet and later in the week I found it buried in a pile of stuff. This 'stuff' being everything from unopened junk mail to contracts. Piro hadn't even opened the copyright office letter yet. I was too embarrassed to call him back to tell him I found it. Now my filing system is beautiful AND color coordinated. I also do large, tedious projects that after Piro explains what he wants me to do he says, "See why I don't want to do it?" Oh yeah, I can't help loving that man o' mine.

For everyone who has ever asked if they could have a tour of Fredart Studios - it is actually just a spare bedroom. This is, however, an improvement. When Megatokyo started in 2000 Piro had taken over the dining room. This strip is actually a good representation of the workspace, well, at least of Piro's side. We work back to back most of the time or sometimes I use the laptop out in the living room. What you don't see is that while Piro has the expensive Aeron chair - I sit in the 1970's Cesca chair with a caned seat that leaves the back of my legs with a horrible waffle weave imprint. Piro also has the tricked out computer while I have a hand-me down. A friend, Rick, custom built mine and it works great so I'm not complaining. In this strip my desk is off screen on the right piled dangerously high with papers still awaiting filing.

There is also always a cat, if not three cats, trying to lay across the drawing table under the lamp. It is up against the window and the cats want to look out. It is a constant power struggle between Piro and the cats. Piro hardly ever wins. Speaking of the cats, Hime is the number one reason Piro buys so many erasers. Hime, as we all know, is a chewer. She loves erasers. I'll get up in the morning and walk downstairs to find erasers littering the hallway and sometimes even in her food bowl. In... the... food bowl. The cat is weird.

Lastly, the IRS is NOT after us. That was just a joke. We have an excellent accountant who is as honest as the day is long and does all the butt kicking when it comes to financial matters. I am usually the one to get in trouble now because he knows I took over the bookkeeping. I am definitely going to point this strip out to him.

"Pressing matters"
Monday - June 23, 2003
[Dom] - 10:30:00
You've heard about Fanime from people who are paid to do it. Hell, I wrote some stuff about it for work too. So this report is written entirely for my enjoyment. If you don't like it, well, it wasn't written for you anyway.

First: Greg Dean won't watch porn with me. He somehow doesn't believe that bad porn is meant to be shared and laughed at. But he's a hands man. Wait, no, I got that wrong. He's not a hands man, one of his fans is a hands fan, he just likes hands. Or something. It confused me but left me mildly aroused. Wait, no, that's just my phone on vibrate.

I want to marry into the Wang family. But the Wangs only had sons. Curse the Y chromosome!

Vaz of Underpower says that in the middle of my masturbation jokes and clowning around, I let slip two insightful comments during the Webcomics panel. I need to keep better control of myself. People might actually ask me for advice if I prove that I have some to give.

I had to borrow money to buy an MT book. This amuses me to no end. At least I got to give the book to Daichi, though. That was nice.

Lance Heiskell of FUNimation has a very stressful job. But at least no one is trying to lynch him for the infamous "Fruits Basket rap opening" thing, though.

I finally own a plush version of that hippo-rat-baby from Spirited Away. This also makes me happy. It's currently on top of my monitor next to the red Cthulhu and Death.

I have Hank Wong's approval to give out a cojones (it has been brought to my attention that what I was told was wrong, and the word is in fact cojones. So I've changed it. Again. People keep telling me different things when I ask if it's cojones or cajones) award at AX karaoke, to be awarded to the person who displays the most guts in going up on stage and singing. The current plan is that the prize will be a dice pouch (from Chessex, probably) containing two large Superballs.

The Japanese have kind of a smart idea. It's almost as comfortable sleeping under my Pretty Face jumbo towel as it is sleeping under a blanket, come summertime. I just wish my friends wouldn't look at me so weirdly in the morning.

"The heartwarming story of a boy and the 12 girls who are in fact the pets he had as a kid reincarnated as cute guardian angels", eh? I somehow think I'll pass on that for now.

Random House. Publishing manga. How random...

Alright, enough dilly-dallying, time for a 500-word review and then sleep... and maybe I'll fit in some actual recreation too... oh well. Two weeks to AX!

"catering to complexity"
Saturday - June 28, 2003
[Piro] - 16:55:00
Quite a few people are a little confused by today's comic, and I apologize for that - but that was actually part of the desired effect. Unless you have paid close attention to some of the hints in the past, and have some familiarity with MMPOG online games, what Miho is talking about goes right over your head. It will make more sense as the chapter progresses - it's hard to have one character surprise another and provide ALL the missing details all in one strip. Piro is, of course, reacting to things HE knows and connecting the dots in HIS head... and some of this information you, the reader, doesn't have. As for the face stabbing reference, I'll refer you to this strip. The rest I'll let you figure out yourselves :)

As for the accusation that I am catering to the people on the forums who like to speculate about some of the deeper story threads in Megatokyo - fft, gimmie a break. I'm catering to the some core elements of the story and to people who like to have things to discover as they read or re-read the story as a whole. MT is like a big onion, and onions have layers. :P

One of the neat things about a webcomic is that they are read in three ways - when you first arrive, you can go back and read all the back issues. By reading many strips at once, you can get a grasp of the whole story much easier. Then, after you are caught up, you read the strips as they come out. Its fun to watch a story unfold, but frustrating too - many of the strips are in the middle of a story arc, and you are left pondering what happens next in the days between strips. Most people find this fun, I think, but some find it frustrating ^^;; Then, the final way that a webcomic is read is when people go back and re-read strips that they had read as they were released, and are able to get the 'flow' of the strip as I intend them. The dynamics of webcomics are rather interesting, and the fact that the nature of reading them changes I think is one of the fun things to tinker with.

Got a lot going on today, I was going to write a longer rant, but this will do for now. LOTS of things coming up, so be sure to check the rant column this week. :)

"Sad girl in Sand"
Monday - June 30, 2003
[Seraphim] - 09:55:00
I haven't been in the sun at all for the past two years. The doctors say something about auto-immunity disorders and the sun being bad. The past two years has been nothing but ankle length skirts, pants, sunscreen and hats. I felt guilty when the tops of my feet got tan when I wore sandals. Well, I have religiously stayed out of the sun for two years and it hasn't made me any better so I figured why not risk it? Besides, I always heard about the sun and Vitamin D and something about calcium absorption and not getting rickets. Life is all about the lesser of the evils.

Despite my mother being 100% Irish, I, thankfully, took after my dad's Slavic side and have a relatively dark complexion. Even with my complete abstinence from the sun I am darker than most people. Piro on the other hand is as pale as a newborn infant. Like using white shingles on a roof, I actually use Piro to reflect sunlight away from me he is so pale.

We leave for San Diego Comic-Con in two weeks and I need to make sure he is toughened up. I picture him arriving in California and stepping into the street and spontaneously combusting in the sunlight. I dragged him poolside for some Vitamin D. We stayed out reading in deck chairs. He is reading "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and I read the "Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls" (expect a rant in the future about that). We were out about an hour. Oops. I have to say I have never seen a sunburn quite this color before. It must be the red of his skin and the fact you can see the bluish venous blood through his super pale skin making him so purplish. I have to say that I, on the other hand, look fabulous.

He has to get used to it anyways because once I am finished with my graduate degree in library science next year we are outta this cold climate. I have one more winter left in me and then I am finished. As much as I dread hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfire, mudslides, sink holes, and every other natural disaster that seems to befall more temperate climates - I dread Michigan winters more. Then there are Michigan summers which are just as humid, even during our numerous draughts, as other parts of the country that don't get snow. Michigan - the armpit of the Great Lakes.

Besides, I figure Piro is the stereotypical super geek who NEVER goes outside - what does it matter where he lives. All he needs is an internet connection to work. We could live in the tropics and if I put a picture of snow scenes in the window he would never know the difference. He doesn't do any winter sports and goes outside EVEN LESS (if that is possible) in the winter. Sorry guys, it is going to have to be 'Sad Girl in Sand' in the future.

"ehh? where? what?"
Wednesday - July 2, 2003
[Piro] - 16:04:00
I suppose I should have been trying to relax a little and enjoy one of the few months this year that I wasn't traveling somewhere... but we all know that the alignment of the planets is never in my favor... June is over, July is here. Eep.

I've been trying to take a more relaxed approach to rants, partly in an effort to increase the number of them, but this rant is gonna be one of those chock-fulla-info rants, so bear with me. Or, you can just click on Komugi-chan above and discover the wonderful wrongness of the world of Nurse Angel Witch Komugi-chan (she might seem somewhat familiar... :P)

First off, I REALLY wish I was going to Anime Expo this weekend. I would love to have the opportunity to meet Yoshitoshi Abe-san, but alas, it wasn't to be. Dom, will be there, as well as a lot of Megatokyo merchandise. ^^;; Wizzywig will have a good selection of t-shirts, posters, books and other stuff available at their booth, so be sure to check it out.

Speaking of merchandise, all sorts of new stuff available in the Megatokyo / ThinkGeek store. First off, the long awaited Broken Miho poster is available, as well as the Ph34r the Cute One's poster. Also coming very soon is the new ph34r the cute one's t-shirt - here's a preview of it. Should be up in a few days.

Also coming in a few weeks are Megatokyo lanyards, and I have a sample of the new Miho blanket arriving for me to look at tomorrow. The blanket should be available sometime late august.

Also of note and in the works is a complete revamp of the girls t-shirt line, including a new style of shirts that fits better - not all girls are junior sized, after all ^^;;. Yes, some of the classic MT designs will be coming out in ladies versions. Other stuff is in the works as well, but that's enough pimpin for today.

Next on the agenda of things to cover is convention appearances.

Coming up fast is San Diego Comic Con, which is July 17-20 in San Diego, California at the San Diego Convention center. I've teamed up with Greg Dean from Real Life Comics to get a exhibitors booth at which we can park ourselves, sign stuff, draw pretty pictures, sell t-shirts and books and posters and stuff (my first taste of doing retail myself... my god, what a headache). Seraphim and I will be there for the entire show, and the booth number is 4805 (which is somewhere near the Artist Alley area)... now, one small problem - I can't FIND the booth on the map they gave me, so please be sure to check here just in case they gave me a bogus booth number ^^;; Also of note, there will be an honest to goodness, Megatokyo panel on Sunday July 20th at 11:30am to 12:30pm, in Room 18. Seraphim, myself, Dom, Ukyo and a few others will be on hand. I'll be sure to provide more information as we get closer to the show, so please be sure to check the site before you go. This is the only California appearance Seraphim and I will be making this year, so be sure to stop by if you are in the area.

In August I will be traveling to two conventions. First, we once again descend on Otakon in Baltimore, Maryland from August 7th -10th. Otakon this year will be particularly special - we will be doing our 2nd installment of Naze Nani Megatokyo, and if we fill the room we're getting this year... I'm gonna be scared. ^^;; Of special note for this year's Otakon, also attending as guests this year are Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade and Madsen of Little Gamers - all the way from some European country. I'd like to use this opportunity to scare them as much as possible, so MT cosplay is encouraged. :)

A few weeks after this Seraphim and I will be off to Toronto, Canada to attend Canadian National Anime Expo. I'm going to see what I can do to have some shirts and stuff available for Canadian fans. More info on this as we get closer to the show.

September is free and clear (sort of) but October get's really busy. Seraphim and I will be at C-kon in South Bend, Indiana, October 3rd-4th. We'll be there Friday night in time for the Charity event, and then there all day Saturday.

Now, if you remember last year there was talk of a lecture that I had been invited to give at Dublin University in Dublin Ireland (by the Dublin University Internet Society). I wasn't able to do it last year because things were way to busy, but this year, after an invite from the folks at Ayacon (an anime convention in the UK) I'm in the process of firming up dates and travel plans that will enable me to take care of both on the same trip. I'll be attending Ayacon in Northampton, UK from October 31st to November 2nd and them moving on to Dublin to give a lecture on 'Publishing your Creative Works to the Web' on either November 3rd or 4th. More information as we get things firmed up.

After that, well... gah, that's enough. I still have to do things, like, the comic and stuff. I was originally going to try to get to Winter Comike in Japan this year, but I've postponed those plans - I just don't have the time or resources to go yet.

In closing, if you remember a few weeks ago I mentioned that there was more information coming regarding book 2 and IC Entertainment - I apologize for the fact that it has been yet another several weeks without further information, but please be patient, I'll be providing more information as soon as I can.

I think I should try to get ahead a little... yeah, like that will ever happen :)

"Con Madness"
Sunday - July 6, 2003
[Dom] - 22:00:00
I just got back from Anime Expo. Four days of work. Urgh. And just think, I get to go to SDCC in two weeks, with Otakon a couple weeks after that.

I love my job. Really I do. I swear.

So in the spirit of con reports past, here are entirely random notes I collected over the course of the convention:

It's really, really weird for both parties involved when your cousin asks you for your autograph. Especially when the cousin involved used to rub your bald spot for good luck (long story). I don't think we looked directly at each other after that.

Somewhere, someone still has my boxers. I want them back.

I think I watched more of the "Girls Gone Wild!" commercial than actual TV while I was in the hotel room.

I successfully forgot one thing everywhere I stayed: three pairs of socks, two keychains (not just the chain, but the keys too) and my E3 messenger bag. I suck.

Sister Princess? Are the guys at ADV insane, or just horny?

I should never be allowed near a store with two dollar manga again. My bookshelf is already starting to sag.

FutaKoi scares the crap out of me.

Kisa, of Fruits Basket, needs to be punched at every opportunity. In the face. Anyone who doesn't think so is obviously a pervert. Or criminally insane.

Ardith Santiago, of Anime Gamers/Synch-Point, is such a little darling. I miss talking to her at every con.

On a related note, Koge Donbo is a peddler of evil. For the third year in a row, I've bought the Chocola box. Dammit!

From my interview with him, I learned that Kazuki Akane (Heat Guy J) wanted to make a show about a manly man. A man among men. A heroic hero. You know, a man. So he made a show about a cyborg.

I want to cosplay again. I really do. But I can't do it this year, and may be very limited in doing it next year. Damn the professional veneer! If Josh Kushins of Bender/Helper can cosplay, why can't I?

And that's all for today. Dom sleep now...

"re: megatokyo book 2"
Monday - July 7, 2003
[Piro] - 12:15:05
First, I would like to apologize for the lack of information regarding the status of Megatokyo book 2. The response to the publication of the first book far exceeded anyone's expectations, and I know that many of you are eagerly awaiting the publication of the second volume. I have an announcement to make regarding this and future print volumes of Megatokyo.

I.C. Entertainment (formerly known as Studio Ironcat) will not be publishing Megatokyo volume 2 or any future volumes of Megatokyo material. If you have pre-ordered Megatokyo volume 2 from I.C. Entertainment, please contact them directly regarding the refunding of your preorder.

In addition, please note that IC Entertainment will not be publishing any future installments of 'warmth' in 'AmeriManga'. This does not mean that 'warmth' will not continue - it just means that I will more than likely offer it free to the web, in much the same way that Megatokyo is presented. I will provide more information about the status of 'warmth' in the near future.

The decision to no longer work with IC Entertainment was my decision and has been made for reasons which I will not get into at this time. I have been holding off on the announcement for well over a month, but I feel that any further delays are unfair to fans and loyal readers of Megatokyo.

Now, this does not mean that there will not be a Megatokyo book 2, it just means that IC Entertainment will not be publishing it. I have a lot of options. I could find a new publisher (a very strong possibility because MT readers helped make the first book a proven success), I could publish it myself (sort of like a doujinshi or self published work) or, who says it needs to be in print? The comic is all right here, and it's not like the lack of a print volume will deny any readers access to the story :) I feel that doing the books right is far more important than rushing to print, now or in the future. I will pursue the options that work best for Megatokyo and the future of my work.

I would like to thank all of you for your support and want to assure you that this announcement does not put the future of Megatokyo in any doubt - Megatokyo is going strong, and intend to keep it that way.

"Back in the saddle"
Sunday - July 13, 2003
[Dom] - 23:00:00
So after going to a wedding and a farewell party on Saturday night/Sunday morning, I woke up around noon Sunday to the shocking realization that it was perhaps my first free day in about two and a half months. Ever since shortly before E3/ACen, I haven't really had a day to myself, and I celebrated today by doing a whole lot of nothing. It was glorious.

I watched Hero with friends, which was nice, not just for the movie (which is great from a cinematographic and artistic perspective) but for the fact that I was able to lie down and just shoot the breeze with people for a while. Especially during that ultra-phallic fight scene in the lake (Maggie Cheung lake water money shot, banzai!). It was also nice having a lotta Chinese people around to explain the other parts of the Warring States background. I may have to brush up on Warring States legends after that movie...

Then, I got around to what people have been telling me to do for a good three years--playing and finishing off Skies of Arcadia. I like the game, especially once the encounter rate goes down. But I'm sorely disappointed by the lack of a "Vyse the Pimp Daddy" title, because I honestly think it's a more appropriate title than Vyse, King of Rogues.

(note: I think I inherited some of Largo's Bioware-love when I inherited this space... so be warned) The next game on my "must play" list is Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic. When I saw it at E3, I fell in love immediately, because it was Star Wars video gaming the way it should be--a little cheesy, but with good camera angles, action, and nicely hokey/fun dialogue. A Bioware guy promised me a free copy when I was there, but I'm wondering if I should buy the game anyway and pad its sales numbers...

In other news, I didn't get around to playing my shiny new copy of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, because my friend pointed me out to Rimu Revolution, a Japanese webcomic. It's the heartwarming story of a magical(?) girl who wakes up and decides to take over the world, and I find it evil and wrong, which therefore means that I love it. Seeing that I had neglected my poor oop-ack and the Pretty Face translations for far too long, I decided that it'd be a nice, easy way to start translating something if I worked on Rimu Revolution, so... there it is, on oop-ack, the first new content in three months.

Oh, and before I forget to mention it, Hodge-Podge is putting up an MT/Webcomic Cosplay Archive on oop-ack, much like the MT fanart archive. You should e-mail him if there's anything you want to see, since we're sort of at a loss on how to organize it, since cosplay is much more naturally divided by date than subject.

So it turns out that I'll be arriving at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday or so, which makes me thankful because I miss much less work than I would have otherwise. Cons sure suck on the work schedule, except when they count as work, in which case they suck even more because you can't spend much time enjoying yourself.

But enough bellyaching! I'll be hanging out with Fred, Sarah and Greg at the booth on Saturday and Sunday, with maybe Friday if I can make it in time. I've never been to SDCC before, but I figure it won't be too different from everything I've seen so far... mostly because I'll be seeing most of it from behind a table. But who knows, right?

"smiling a lot"
Monday - July 14, 2003
[Seraphim] - 01:45:00
Piro and I are - and have been - getting ready for San Diego Comic-Con. I had the crazy idea that we should have books for sale while we are at the booth nine hours for 5 days. Hey, we were going to there anyways right? Somehow that snowballed into shirts and posters too. The apartment has been a pseudo warehouse for weeks.

Frankly, we have no idea what we are doing. Usually we just show up somewhere and I try to smile a lot and look like I know what's going on and we planned it that way all along. Our longest signing was six hours and we were pretty much the walking undead by the end. This is going to last 2 hours longer everyday for 4 days with a panel on Sunday. Two months ago this all sounded like great fun. I was obviously a raving lunatic at the time I agreed to this. I've got giant, killer butterflies in my stomach. There is a fine line between excitement and mania.

What I am really curious about is our combined trash pickup and water bill. So this month we are going to be gone for one week. A fourth of the month. Anyone want to place odds on if our bill will be one quarter smaller. Even a fraction smaller. I'm sure we are also paying for them to fill the pool which we don't have time to use and water the grass which I don't care a crap about either.

That fee just ticks me off. It has nothing to do with your actual water consumption or trash production. We are very conscientious about recycling and conservation. We have eco-friendly appliances and we sort and lug plastics, glass, paper, cardboard, Styrofoam and even useless computer parts to the local recycling center. We take our one weekly trash bag to the dumpster and our fellow community members are throwing away couches and half their apartments. It so makes me want to be wasteful just because they are ripping me off.

If you are going to SDCC stop by and see us at booth 4705. Check Piro's rant for links and additional info. I recommend coming Thursday or Friday before we totally have lost our tenuous grip on sanity.

-------

[start piro transmission]

oi, Piro here. It seems I got bumped by Dom and Seraphim, but that's ok - I just wanted to convey some specific information regarding our appearance at San Diego Comic Con.

First off, and this is important, they DID give us the wrong booth number initially - the Megatokyo / Real Life Comics Booth number is 4705 - it is right across from the Central Park Media booth on the east side of the convention hall. This is the same side of the hall as the Artists Alley. We're near the doors at the front of the hall, we shouldn't be too hard to find.

Like Seraphim said, we've lost our heads and are actually selling stuff ourselves - I have to tell you, I have so much more respect for retailers after going thru this, especially retailers that have to travel from show to show. ^^;; We'll have shirts, some of which are a little unique (I have a white version of the 'evil l33t' tshirt, for example), Posters (Broken Miho, Ph34r the cute ones, and a limited number of Pirogoeth and Capture the Bear), and even some Megatokyo books. We had to ship this stuff out there (special thanks to Greg and Liz who will be driving the stuff down to the show for us ^_^) so please stop by and pick up a shirt or a poster. The less I have to lug home on the plane, the better :)

Also note that Greg from Real Life Comics will have his own t-shirts available for purchase at the booth, and they look pretty sweet (plans to steal one...)

Oh, and Greg has put together this neat little guide on where to find us :) Plus a picture of Greg himself, so you can have something to visually ID the booth by ^^;;

Other than that, I plan to spend as much time as I can sitting at the booth doing my usual sign and draw stuff for anyone who asks. This does bring up one small issue that I want everyone to take into consideration who might show up at the booth. Usually, there is like this big line of people waiting for me to draw stuff for them (it is only large because I am so slow) - we can't really do that at this show - I'll do my absolute best to take care of everyone, but try to make sure that we don't cause any problems for the booths around us. Seraphim and I will be there Thursday right thru Sunday, so we hope we can take care of everyone.

The only other thing to note is that there will be a Megatokyo panel at San Diego Comic Con! It's on Sunday, from 11:30 to 12:30 in room 18. Dom, Seraphim and myself will do our normal panel thing, and try to answer as many questions as we can.

Also, if you are going, be sure to check out Penny Arcade's booth - I don't know exactly where they are going to be, but be sure to drop by and throw things at them. Just at Tycho and Gabe - be nice to the girls, ok? ^_^

I've never been to SDCC before, so I'm a tad nervous about it, I mean, there are gonna be a LOT of really talented people there, so I'm feeling very much like an upstart who doesn't belong ^^;; Regardless, it should be a lot of fun, and if you are going, be sure to stop by the booth and say hi.

piro

"The sea is calling me~"
Friday - July 18, 2003
[Dom] - 00:30:00
A few quick notes before I leave for SDCC:

Monday's comic will be an SGD, and will probably go up Monday in the early AM, Pacific time (-8 GMT).

The new manga by Nobuhiro Watsuki (Kenshin) in Shounen Jump is... really generic. I'll give it a few more weeks to grow, but for now, it's not very compelling at all. "Boy dies, is resurrected by magic (in this case, alchemy), and oh, by the way, the magic that keeps him alive also allows him to destroy magical (alchemical) monsters". Whoop de doo... I've only seen that done a few hundred times in the past month. I'll see if he can put new wrinkles in it, but for now, it's not worth the read.

Volumes of manga I'm bringing to SDCC to lend to Fred: 17

Total volumes of manga he has previously borrowed from me: 4

Total volumes of manga I own but are currently on loan to other people: 21

Total dollars I've spent on MegaTokyo merchandise in the past 3 years: $45 (two shirts in the CafePress days, 2 books)

Number of books I've had autographed by Fred as favors for friends: 2

Pieces of MegaTokyo merchandise I own: 0

Chance that those numbers will change within the next three months: 99.5%

and with that I sleep. Well. Okay, I have to pack first...

"Placeholder"
Monday - July 21, 2003
[Dom] - 01:00:00
There'll be more rantage tomorrow night after I collect my thoughts. But for now, I would like to say that I can die happy now, having talked to Bendis and thanked him for his letters columns in Powers, as well as having received a Diamond sketch from Oeming.

I would also like to say that almost everything in the above SGD actually transpired.

"Sunny San Diego"
Thursday - July 24, 2003
[Dom] - 18:00:00
Sorry this rant is late, but there has been much more lying in wait for me this week than I ever expected.

On the plus side, Hodge-Podge has finished the Webcomic cosplay archive, a project to collect pictures of those fans crazy enough to dress up like their favorite webcomic characters. So far we're collecting pictures of MT, Real Life and Penny Arcade cosplay, since that has been by far the most common. But if you have other cosplay pics you want to send in, feel free to. Oop-Ack exists to pay respect to the madness of fans, so submit your pictures and get recognized! (And as a special note to the family of that Boo cosplayer who showed up on Sunday: A space is being reserved for your little sister)

Anyway, it's time to talk about San Diego. I was only there for a day and a half due to work constraints, but it was still a blast. Besides getting to talk to Brian Michael Bendis and thanking him for his mean, cynical letters columns (no, I didn't thank him for monkey ass, though I should have), I got a nice sketch from Oeming. My Comic-con would have been complete if I'd managed to get autographs from J Michael Straczynski and John Kovalic, but working the MT booth prevented me from doing everything I wanted. As always, though, it was great to meet all the fans, talk to them (especially the ones who didn't know who I was) and just plain hang out.

I know Greg Dean won't let me get away with writing a con report that doesn't include him, so here's the part where I give him the love due to a man who shared the same hot, steamy space with me for the better part of a day. And yes, the person who shouted "Oh my God, you're GREG DEAN!" was me. Seriously, Greg's a great guy to joke around with, and we even played phone tag as if it was still E3. I kind of wish I bought one of his T-shirts, but I was all tapped out from buying a Fruit Friend T from the Penny Arcade booth.

And, of course, the panel was as fun as always. For some reason, Fred likes to book really tiny rooms, even after two years of packing 'em in like sardines. See, he figured that no one would come (as always...) since it was a Sunday afternoon. The problem was that attendance on Sunday was estimated at some 65,000 and at least 600 of those tried to get into a room that seated 120. I apologize to MT fans who were cut off and to the Comic-con staff, who were just as put out as the people who were left out. I ended up giving my seat to a Miho cosplayer, because I figured she needed it more than I did. Those boots can't be comfortable.

Some actual highlights to the panel include the look on Greg's face when someone asked him if he really had a Master Sword (fun fact: he doesn't and is really tired of answering the question. I have a Zelda letter opener, which is the closest either of us will get) and talking about a Piro action figure with kung-fu angst.

Oh, I guess I should explain the kung-fu angst thing. See, someone asked if there would ever be limited edition MT items made. And the answer is an unequivocal no, since MT merchandise is made for people to enjoy, not for people to collect and sell on the secondary market. If someone wants a T-shirt or a plushie, then they should get it, says I. There's no reason to limit the number of people in this world who own MT stuff, since that's against our way of doing business.

Oh. And no, there's no kung-fu angst coming out, though maybe that can turn into a nice, tongue-in-cheek T-shirt... hmm. Ideas bobbing through head... must go.

"local libraries"
Monday - July 28, 2003
[Piro] - 15:12:03
There was a post on slashdot recently called How Do You Get Work Done? I have to say, I not only feel for the guy, but I totally understand. It's amazing how much you can get done when you have no time to do it, but when you have loads of time, you can't seem to find the focus you need to get anything done. Maybe that's why I like overloading myself - if I didn't, nothing would ever get done. The self imposed three-comic per week deadline is like a big gear that smacks me in the ass three times per week to keep me going. Remember that classic Calvin and Hobbes strip, the one that talks about waiting for the right mood to start working on his project? I live by that mantra.

I'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth at San Diego Comic Con and helped make our visit to the show a rather exhausting success. I was unable to see much beyond the location of our booth, the walk to and from the hotel, and a few food places in the Gaslight district. I wanted to take Seraphim to the zoo, but (sigh) there was no time. But it's like I told a friend in the middle of one particularly harried day - there's nothing I'd rather be doing. Masochism has a weird kind of mechanics to it.

Also, a big thanks to the SDCC folks who helped out, especially the security folks - according to the rules, they are supposed to make me stop doing the things that cause lines/crowds, but they didn't. In stead, they helped manage the line and kept the line under control. Thanks guys. Sorry we were such a pain. Oh, and I've been assured that if I come to ComicCon next year, they'll give me a bigger room for the panel. We squeezed 100 people in there, but unfortunately most people couldn't get in. They DID try to get a bigger room, but there was nothing available.

I also need to put out a big thanks to Greg Dean, Liz and their friends for all the help. I was glad to see lots of people wading thru to talk to Greg and Liz - in fact, the very first fan to stop by the booth was a Real Life fan. :)

I really should write more comprehensive reviews of what happens at cons, but so MUCH happens, that it's hard to remember it all, and my rants tend to be long enough ^^;; Onto other things... my summer isn't over yet.

Coming up real soon - in fact, this week, I will be giving a presentation at the Ypsilanti District Library on the history of Anime and Manga, and a little bit about how I use (and don't use) what I've learned about it in what I do. The presentation is at 6:00 pm wednesday night (July 30th) in the main library over on Whittaker Road in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Stop by if you are in the area, I intend for it to be pretty casual. Just doin my part to support a local library (and check the building out too, it's a really nice facility)

Next on the travel agenda is Otakon in Baltimore, Maryland from August 7-10 at the Baltimore Convention Center. Otakon is one of the biggest anime conventions in the country, and each year I go, I get a little more scared. ^^;; This will be the 2nd and final showing this year of the 'Naze Nani Megatokyo 2.0' show where we break out of the boring old box of plain old question and answer panels and try to make bigger fools of ourselves than we usually do. We have the main programming hall available to us, so filling it to capacity will be a big challenge for MT fans. Like I said, Megatokyo cosplay is encouraged. In fact, the more the better - we might be able to make a easier getaway if no one can spot us in the crowd. We have some special guests lined up (though they may not know it yet). Should be fun (if I can get everything prepared by then @_0).

A few weeks after Otakon I'll be heading off to the great white north and visit our Canadian neighbors in Toronto for the Canadian National Anime Expo. I'll have more info on that as we get closer to it.

Ok, that'll do for now. One thing I will do before I head off to Otakon, and I've been pushing it off for weeks, is start giving little reviews and snippets on anime I am following - most particularly DVDs of note that are being released here in the US. I have a list of 'DVDs I must make every MT fan buy because I say so' :P More on that thursday. :)

"San Diego Recollections"
Wednesday - July 30, 2003
[Seraphim] - 01:55:00
I can't believe how big, crazy, and hectic San Diego Comic-Con was. It engulfed the entire convention center. We know this because we were at the butt end of it. The booth was very close to the doors and far away from the side of the room with the nasty con food so it wasn't so bad.

Amazingly, for the panel we possibly got the tiniest room in the entire building. It only seated 100 - several hundred showed up and most were turned away. Piro was just happy to have been scheduled a panel his first year exhibiting. I was a mess on Sunday and I'm just glad there were fewer people to see me. I had cut the top of my foot on the front seat while getting out of the taxi Sunday and wasn't feeling so well. The paramedic at the first aid center immediately asked when my last tetanus shot had been. I had been thinking the same thing. Being a vintage 70s cab, what kind of rusty metal spring was under there? Knowing that Piro would cancel the panel if I needed to go to a clinic for a tetanus shot - I lied to the EMS and told him I had one in the last five years. What's a little lock jaw? Besides it bled a lot and the gets all the germs out right? It's a week later and I am still yapping so I must be all right.

Although I was out of it at the time, I do remember Piro stating at the panel that the two of us are reclusive. What!? How did I let him get away with saying that? Piro is a J. D. Salinger wannabe and I'm Greta Garbo. I don't think so. Well, at least not me. I still have my internship and school. I'm out and about meeting and greeting people all the time. Piro is the recluse. But I come home everyday and tell him what the real world is like on the outside. I will admit to us being committed homebodies who like to eat in and watch anime - when we have time.

There was also a question regarding new merchandise. I am fighting to get a new ladies tee. The style currently at ThinkGeek won't hold the complicated images Piro likes to produce due to the heavy ribbed fabric. I also want GLITTER. I must have it. I try to keep an eye out for our female fans. Our booth with Real Life had a large backdrop with all the posters and shirts on it and it was a sea of Piroko. It was Piroko on posters and tees of Capture the B34R, Ph34r teh cute ones, and Pirogoeth. All I can say is even I hope Piro comes up with a new character design.

I'd talk more about the con but all I got to see was a life size graphic of Legolas at the LOTR Pavillion. Ahhh, Legolas. I also caught a glimpse of a booth with Lenore but that is about it. Mostly I just saw fans. Lots of them. But that is exhibiting as opposed to being a guest. It's different from an anime con where we don't even leave the hotel for 4 days. We had to get ourselves across town everyday and San Diego is very pleasant. I just wish we could have seen the Cat's House while we were there. Now, that's my type of decorating.

"Huh?"
Friday - August 1, 2003
[Dom] - 00:30:00
So I have a few new games in the house. Knights of the Old Republic is waiting for me, calling my name, especially since I've heard that HK-47 rivals Minsc and Morte for Best NPC Ever. I recently borrowed the PS2 Sakura Taisen remake from a friend, which marks the first time I've gone back to the Sakura Taisen franchise in two years. Soul Calibur 2 sits in my roommate's GameCube, awaiting my purchase of an arcade stick so I can avoid the freakishly unwieldy GameCube controller. Heck, if I wanted I can go back and finally finish Shining Force 3 part 2, which I bought two years ago and have barely touched, even though I love the franchise.

And on the PC front, Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne awaits, with the members of my clan ($uck Ass, you may have heard of them) getting more impatient for my return to Warcraft after almost a year of being away from the game. And hell, Magic Online just updated to 2.0 and added 8th edition, so I'm not suffering from a shortage of games to play.

And yet, with all these games going "Hey! Play me!", what do I fire up? Minesweeper. I don't get it. Every few minutes I have free, I play Minesweeper. I can't explain it.

Well. I guess I can with the word "obsessive", but still, there's no reason I shouldn't be playing any of the other games sitting unwanted in CD drives around my apartment. Sure, none of them are puzzle games, but if I wanted a puzzle game I'd probably be playing Bejeweled, which doesn't have any of Minesweeper's 50/50 situations where you just have to choose blindly and hope.

Maybe it's just a game to pass the time while waiting for word to come in on so many things that will affect my future drastically--for example, did you know that I still don't have plane tickets to Otakon? Yeah, those plans sort of fell through, so Fred and I have about a week to figure out how I'm getting there--if I'm getting there at all, that is.

Which of course brings me back to Minesweeper. In the course of writing this rant, I've played about 20 games of Minesweeper in between sentences. That's just nuts. I think I might have to uninstall Minesweeper from my home and work computers now, or I'll just stop being productive. Ugh.

Hopefully, I'll be able to kick the habit over a weekend spent celebrating my best friend's birthday. If not, I may have to resort to finding a friend willing to hit me over the head with a 2x4 every time I even think of going to the Games menu.

Welp, if I actually manage to get to play any of these games, I'll rant about it on Monday. See you then!

"otakon, take three..."
Sunday - August 3, 2003
[Piro] - 11:30:00

Otakon 2003 information u p d a t e ! ! ! Please note change in time for Naze Nani Megatokyo Panel on Saturday!!! Otakon 2003 is coming! Starting this Thursday, August 8th thru Sunday, August 10th, most of the MT crew will be in Baltimore for our third year at one of the largest Anime conventions in the US. Please check this box for any changes/updates in information regarding our activities at Otakon this year. I'm going to try something a little different this year... I've actually sat down and planned out a schedule that includes when and where i will be sitting down to draw/sign stuff for people. The good folks at Wizzywig have given us a section of their boothspace in the dealers room for us to call home, so look for us there. If we aren't there, this will be where you can find out when and where we will be. Also, Wizzywigs will have a lot of MT swag to waste money on, if you feel like wasting money. :P SCHEDULE - Friday - 12noon-1:30pm - signing/drawing at Wizzywig booth 2:00pm-3:30pm - Opening Ceremonies (Main Events) 4:00pm-5:30pm - Official Autograph Session (Autograph 1) 7:00pm-8:30pm - Webcomics vs. Webmanga (Panel 1) - Saturday - 1:00pm-3:00pm - Naze Nani Megatokyo 2.0 (Panel 4) 3:30pm-6:00pm - signing/drawing at Wizzywig booth - Sunday - 10:00am-2:00pm - signing/drawing at Wizzywig booth Bold indicates official Megatokyo events. Times relating to when i will be at my table at the Wizzywig booth are subject to change. Shameless plug: make sure you stop by and visit the Nekobox booth or Natsuki will cry. :) It's booth #1108. The Nekobox crew have been a great help to us at MT at recent cons, so be sure to stop by and check out their stuff :P

"of books and cons"
Wednesday - August 6, 2003
[Piro] - 00:15:00
I would like to apologize for the lack of information regarding my relationship with IC Entertainment and the status of book 2 preorders. As of today, IC Entertainment and FredArt Studios have reached an agreement officially ending our working relationship. We part on amicable terms.

As part of this agreement, FredArt Studios will be taking responsibility for Megatokyo Book 2 preorders. Once I return from Otakon next week, I will be contacting all Book 2 preorder customers with more information. Thank you for your patience in this matter. I promise that you will be taken care of.

Please do not email me yet regarding your pre-order - I will be in Baltimore most of the week and I will not be able to respond until I return next week. I'll keep you posted on future developments.

Otakon 2003 information u p d a t e ! ! ! Please note change in time for Naze Nani Megatokyo Panel on Saturday!!! Otakon 2003 is coming! Starting this Thursday, August 8th thru Sunday, August 10th, most of the MT crew will be in Baltimore for our third year at one of the largest Anime conventions in the US. Please check this box for any changes/updates in information regarding our activities at Otakon this year. I'm going to try something a little different this year... I've actually sat down and planned out a schedule that includes when and where i will be sitting down to draw/sign stuff for people. The good folks at Wizzywig have given us a section of their boothspace in the dealers room for us to call home, so look for us there. If we aren't there, this will be where you can find out when and where we will be. Also, Wizzywigs will have a lot of MT swag to waste money on, if you feel like wasting money. :P SCHEDULE - Friday - 12noon-1:30pm - signing/drawing at Wizzywig booth 2:00pm-3:30pm - Opening Ceremonies (Main Events) 4:00pm-5:30pm - Official Autograph Session (Autograph 1) 7:00pm-8:30pm - Webcomics vs. Webmanga (Panel 1) - Saturday - 1:00pm-3:00pm - Naze Nani Megatokyo 2.0 (Panel 4) 3:30pm-6:00pm - signing/drawing at Wizzywig booth - Sunday - 10:00am-2:00pm - signing/drawing at Wizzywig booth Bold indicates official Megatokyo events. Times relating to when i will be at my table at the Wizzywig booth are subject to change. Shameless plug: make sure you stop by and visit the Nekobox booth or Natsuki will cry. :) It's booth #1108. The Nekobox crew have been a great help to us at MT at recent cons, so be sure to stop by and check out their stuff :P

"uh-oh-takon"
Thursday - August 7, 2003
[Seraphim] - 01:20:00
Otakon. This will be my first year attending as I have been stuck at home working in previous years. I almost didn't let him return to Otakon after 2001. He called one night that year raving madly about rats in the streets, floods and manhole covers flying through the air. I thought he was drunk as a skunk and hung up on him. I told him to call me back when he was sober. Little did I know the streets WERE flooded due to pipes rupturing from an underground tunnel fire and rats were swimming around the city. Oops. I never should have doubted him. I need to tune into the news more often. That was the last time I drove Piro to the airport and waited with him at the gate and picked him up there too - 9/11 was just around the corner. I hope this year there are no catastrophes.

I've heard Otakon is a madhouse. The funny thing is I hate crowds. Well, I hate being in crowds. If there are people out there who don't mind being cheek to jowl with others like so many cattle in a pen - good for them. I really dislike being jostled and bumped or getting swept away by a mass of people heading in the opposite direction I want to go. This applies to many venues including malls around Christmas, the Ann Arbor Art Fair, and the U of M diag at class changes.

On top of my natural dislike of crowds, I am scheduled for out patient surgery on my foot in a month and am worried about the safety of said foot with thousands of other feet tramping around. I am shocked at what the medical profession considers 'in office procedures' that can be done by a general practitioner. I'm not saying I need to stay overnight in a hospital but could it at least take place near one. This office is next to the freaking MALL. He might as well come to my house - it is much closer to the hospital should anything go wrong and there is less traffic out this way.

Yeah, I'm a little freaked. I can't imagine where on a foot you could get a shot that would not hurt like hell. They better be able to lash both, and possibly all, of my extremities down because I don't think I'm going to just sit there and take it. I can't think about this anymore. I'm going to need valium.

Well, we are leaving in 10 hours for Baltimore. I got 'Running with Scissors' on CD so I hope the time passes quickly. Of course it won't take the 19 hours that the drive back from Katsucon took and I won't have to put the strap of cell phone though my zipper pull in case we get into a wreck... I thought that would be a big pisser to get into a wreck and have a cell phone but lose it in the dark or it be out of reach while you're trapped in the wreckage. Man, that would suck. What really, really, really sucks is the fact I still have to pack!

"Strange Days"
Monday - August 11, 2003
[Dom] - 20:30:00
I suppose you're wondering what I've been up to. Especially since I wasn't at Otakon and haven't even checked my e-mail in days. I apologize for my absence, but it couldn't be helped, due to there being... y'know, no ticket and no time. I'd been to 5 conventions in 10 weeks, and that was just wearing on me.

So what have I been doing with my time? Well, while I haven't ditched Minesweeper, I did pick up Knights of the Old Republic last Sunday, which destroyed my productivity to the point where I had to lend it to a friend so I could get work done (as a sidenote, when I handed it to him he said "Well, there go my nights").

See, what happened is that after I bought it, I headed back to my apartment with a friend, and fired up KotOR at around 7:30. We blinked, and suddenly it was 3:30. I know that you've heard it before, but I'll repeat: it's that good. Bugs be damned, as soon as I'm settled back into a normal schedule again I'm getting it back from my friend and freeing up some weekends.

Unfortunately, in exchange for KotOR, I borrowed Da Capo from my friend, pictured above. It's an H visual novel that amuses me to no end, though the TV series amuses me too. For one thing, the main character is dumb as rocks when it comes to (most) girls, and it feels comforting to me that even the heroes of H games can be extraordinarily stupid about these things. He reminds me of me, really.

But no, the real reason I like Da Capo is its weird-ass sense of humor. I mean, c'mon. The upcoming PS2 version features a girl who looks like a normal girl to everyone except the main character, who sees her as a girl in a pink bear costume. Why? Who knows? It's Magic!

I've avoided talking about where I've worked for the past three years, since I didn't think it was anyone's business. But since I feel that I owe everyone a complete explanation for why I had to miss out on all of Otakon, I'll say it. I don't know how much longer I'll be working there, but hopefully I'll be able to stay on. See, for the past three years I've been an intern at GamePro Magazine, brushing up my writing skills and keeping a close eye on the video game world, which is why I laugh long and hard when someone accuses MegaTokyo of being uninformed about video games. And, in the past few months, I've been in charge of the online Entertainment section, struggling to keep it up to date pretty much by myself, with the exception of New Comics Day. And now, I've been placed in charge of daily gaming news, which is sucking up even more of what was once free time.

But then again, I'm having a grand time, so I don't mind. Anyway, this is probably the last time in a while you'll hear about my job, since I can't really talk much about it. You know, because there's this piece of paper I signed three years ago (at least, I think I signed it, and I'm not taking any risks) that holds me to this non-disclosure thing...

Oh. And did I mention that I'm graduating from UC Berkeley on Friday? I'm kinda excited about that one, and it's the primary reason I stayed home from Otakon. I still have a healthy bit of work to do before I finish, meaning that I have even less time to update MT over the next week.

But hey, time moves forward, and I'll eventually be able to rant with some sort of frequency again. On that note, I leave you to finish a few more articles...

"Otakon Recapped"
Wednesday - August 13, 2003
[Seraphim] - 02:45:00
I'm starting to feel like an authentic con vagabond. I now recognize people who are also on the con circuit like Rik and Jeff from Seattle who I saw at Katsucon, A-Cen and San Diego Comic Con. I know the names of other guests and the translators. We are even getting repeat visits from fans who I recognize. I would have thought that this would be impossible with the number of people we have met this year. I wish my memory was so good when it came to course work.

Piro has inadvertently created a monster. I love it. This con was especially fun - I actually got to go shopping. I got Piro a Nekobox t-shirt. He never says it but I know he thinks it. It's perfect for him. I also got him some Ruri stuff. I love giving Piro presents. Best of all for myself I found a Nohohon plushie and an Ah! My Goddess Belldandy image I have wanted for years. I like to think of it as supporting the weak economy.

The Naze Nani Panel went well. Our presentation was a top ten list of 'Why Megatokyo Sucks' by Piro and I did 'Seraphim's top 10 reasons Megatokyo doesn't suck'. In Chicago I messed up and said 6 when I should have said 5. Let me tell you, 1800 people yelling simultaneously "NO! Five" at you is scary. This time Piro mixed up the numbers. I'm glad it was him and not me. We also unveiled the prototype of the new 'Darkly Cute Blanket'. It isn't available yet but it will be this fall. Please read the previous line twice. All I can say is that it is being manufactured as you read this.

A fan happened to mention the radio play that was posted in the forum a few months back. Piro and I really enjoyed it. After I was reminded I got to tease Asmodeus about how the voice actor totally captured his sleazy side. It is really funny, people think Asmodeus and I don't get along in RL because what is going on in the comic. We are friends. Although, I think he secretly enjoys the torture of my Seraphim character in the comic.

We signed a lot of autographs and had a lot of pictures taken. After seeing so many bad pics of me taken at SDCC where I blinked or was talking and had that half closed eye stoned but happy look - I thought I should just start making faces when having my picture taken. Kind of like Calvin during school pictures. Do it on purpose! Go for the Astroboy Crisco look. Maybe I can draw a face on my abdomen. It can't look any worse than the unintentional goofy looks people seem to capture when I'm trying to be photogenic. Next time, I swear I'm doing it.

"Otakon Madness"
Friday - August 15, 2003
[Dom] - 16:30:00
Note: this rant is from Asmodeus, AKA Ken, AKA "Doushi Kenzuki". He wanted to put up a rant about the blackout and why there was no MT strip, then it ended, so there goes that window of opportunity... instead, we get to hear him talk about Otakon! So without any further ado, I turn this over to Asmodeus. -Ed.

This will be a long rant so please bear with me.

It's been a week since Otakon 2003, the largest anime convention in the Eastern US. Fred, Sarah, Jon (Ukyo), and I had lots of fun, along with a lot of scares. Too bad Dom couldn't make it 'cause I would have been able to dodge few of those terrors if he was present (Suck it! I dodged that like Neo... -Ed.). So here is the list of the pros and cons of Otakon 2003!!

Pros:

• Lots of fans coming to the MT panel and autograph sessions
• The panel going very smoothly (Hey, we're getting good at this)
• Meeting a lot of friends from MT and other communities
• Finally meeting Tenebrae, info source for the Miho character (She's so damn kewl!)
• Getting autographs from Yoshiaki Iwasaki, the director of Love Hina, on my Love Hina R2 DVD box and Love Hina artbooks (Yes, I'm a big LoveHina fanboy)
• Jerry Chu of Bandai coming to complain that our autograph line was colliding with the Bandai booth (Mwahahahahahaha!) (Tell Jerry that he gets no luv until he tells us what they're going to rename Quattro Vagina! -Ed.)
• Being with 2 gorgeous girls in corsets! (I should get a silk bathrobe and a pipe :P)
• Sleeping in between 2 very very cute girls! (Nothing sexual, I mean it!)
• My girlfriend cosplaying in the costume of my dreams (mmmm..... )
• Seeing two grown ups in cat suits and pink bunny suits
• Missing otaku announcements in the Dealer's Room (Ben blah blah, I believe you are old enough to be aware that your mother is looking for you)
• Not seeing Great Teacher Largo lecture (Hallelujah!!)
• Never seeing it rain during the day
• Getting to meet Tsukasa Kotobuki again (I was his interpreter at Katsucon)

Cons:

• Hot humid weather (It's Baltimore, what do you expect?)
• A "L33t n3kk1d sk1llz" Largo cosplayer humping me and rubbing his (censored -Ed.) against my thigh (uguu... I can still feel it...)
• Not seeing the T.M.R. concert
• Not spending enough time with some friends
• My right arm hurt pretty bad by the end of the con (No, not what you're thinking)
• Walking (Maybe I should ask Fred to get a Segway for conventions) (Wuss! -Ed.)
• My car acting strange while driving there and coming back (It was shaking like it was about to break apart)
• The Pocky riot (go easy with the Pocky next time, Go Takarada)
• Getting stopped every 5 seconds for an autograph (People, please listen to what we say)
• Not seeing many cosplayers
• Hearing ADV booth bimbos screaming like boars with a front row seat
• Not getting to buy goodies 'cause I'm broke (Where is my paycheck?!)
• The con only feeling 2 days long
• Dom asking Fred and I to strip during the panel (Hey, the fans wanted it, not me -Ed.)

There's more but I'm sure you are all getting tired of reading my trash, so I will stop. Thanks to all who came to see us and made a stop at our booth in the Dealer's Room. Here is the quick list of thanks to the people who made my con experience fun.

Otakon Green Room Staff
Otakon Autograph Staff
Storm
moku-chan
Kaki-chan
Tenebrae and Tene-daughter
Kerisu
Rest of the #censored crew
Richard "Pocky" Kim
Uguu-sensei
Taka the ukulele-man
Pontus Madsen from Little Gamers
Natsuki and the Nekobox gang
My "kawaii" girlfriend Crowie (Dude, what's with the quotation marks? -Ed.)
Ukyo
Sarah (Seraphim)
Fred (Piro)
The Fans!!

To e-mail Asmodeus, use his aniverse address: asmodeus_mt@aniverse.net. -Ed.

"Freedom, of a sort"
Monday - August 18, 2003
[Dom] - 17:30:00
Wow. If there's anything that kills my urge to sit down and write more than sitting down and writing all day, I don't know what it is. But here I am after a day's work, realizing "oops, I left this space open and didn't fill it". So, here's a quick update on what's going on in my life--at least in game terms.

First, I'd like to point people to GamePro's Pro vs. Pro: Vietnam, which, as you may know, is a subject that is very close to me. My piece is a cleaned up version of what was a very angry rant a few months ago, but it's the other parts of the debate that are interesting anyway.

With that out of the way, I'm currently gearing up to get back into the swing of having leisure time again. I'm getting Knights of the Old Republic back from my friend on Wednesday, and at the same time he and I are also planning a New Year's trip to Japan, for Comiket and general hijinks.

Meanwhile, one of my roommates, who works at EA, recently hooked us up with Madden NFL 2004. While I haven't played a football video game since NFL2K1, and had sworn that I would remain loyal to Sega forever, I've always enjoyed the Madden series, an on-and-off relationship dating back to the halcyon days of the Genesis. Besides, I told myself, ESPN NFL Football comes out in early September, so I could always just pick that sucker up if my free Madden wasn't working out.

Well, I'm currently the owner of the World Champion 49ers, having wrested Jerry Rice back from the evil clutches of Al Davis, and I have to say that I'm enjoying myself. While this, like all other football games ever, is susceptible to "finding the money play", and the Niners' money play has been the quick slant plus the YAC since 1981, it's a cinch to beat the computer. When I actually learn how to play defense, maybe I'll be up to playing against other people. But time will bring that around.

But what's really been sucking up my leisure time lately have been good ol' pen and paper RPGs. You know the kind, the ones that the Dead Alewives made fun of so well in their "I attack the darkness!" skit.

On that note, let's start with D&D. I started playing THAT back in grade school, thanks to a certain cousin who has asked for my autograph before. And I've been an addict on and off ever since, with almost a decade and a half of fantasy RPGs under my belt. And, for certain (New York Times Bestselling Fantasy Novel by a certain man I used to write letters to back in 6th grade) reasons, I've always played a ranger in the first D&D game with a new edition. Did it in 1st edition, when the followers rules could net the Ranger a baby copper dragon, did it in 2nd edition, did it in 3rd edition where the Ranger got the hairy purple shaft, and I'm about to do it with edition 3.5, where the ranger has been restored to his rightful glory. Ah, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

But whenever I get angry at the many design mistakes of D&D 3.0 (goddamnmonkgrumblegrumble), I just turn to Spycraft and let out a relieved, happy sigh. Spycraft, the D20 RPG of espionage and underworld dealings, happens to have the best design of any level-based game out there. There's always a reason to take another level of a class, there's always a reason to start as a class instead of another, there's no reason not to pick up whatever class you like due to no multiclassing penalty... in other words, I love it to pieces. My current game may be breaking up, but if things work out I'll have another group together in no time. And I'll still be the Pointman, because Pointman is the coolest class in any RPG, like, ever :)

Until next time!

"A simple equation"
Wednesday - August 20, 2003
[Dom] - 09:00:00
From what I saw yesterday: (Note that for some reason, plus signs don't register in our DB... sigh)

Ninja Gaiden = (Shinobi - Stealth Dash) plus (Devil May Cry - horror) plus Hayabusa.

I think I'm in love.

"power and memory"
Thursday - August 21, 2003
[Seraphim] - 01:55:00
It was nice being home between cons - at least while we had power! The power went out while we were at Wizzywigs trying to buy Fruits Baskets and Risky Safety. I actually didn't mind the black out. I couldn't wait for the sun to set to look at the stars with all the light pollution in the area gone. It was beautiful. I felt like I was in a planetarium. Piro on the other had drew until the light faded in the West and then sat in the dark moaning and complaining about not being able to work. To what end? He couldn't upload the comic even if he finished.

I'm not much in to the Homeland Security idea of buying duct tape and plastic. If all it took was duct tape and plastic to protect yourself then why does the government spend a gazillion dollars on hazmat suits?? I did, however, heed their advice about non-perishable foods. I, pitifully, bought a can of Spam and bagged rice. (Piro likes canned spiced ham.) It would be fine if we were just snowed in but we had no power to cook anything. Keeping emergency food around the house is pointless because Piro eats it because he doesn't have to cook it.

I'm just eternally grateful we were neither at Otakon or CNAnime in Toronto. It came right in between the two. I love Canada. My family used to travel to Algonquin Provincial Park every summer when I was a kid. I first discovered chipmunks there. I love chipmunks. I really thought Boo should have been a chipmunk.

Leonard Nimoy is going to be a guest of the SF portion of CN Anime. The advertising is a riot - it uses a photo of him from 40 years ago. What a great idea. It's like you never have to age. I'm going to start using pictures of me from when I was 20. What gets me about the Spock character is the Vulcan Mind Meld. He mostly used it to gain access to repressed memories, or whatever, but he used it once to erase Kirk's memory. Kirk had gotten lost in an episode that featured a big phallic obelisk and married a woman when he thought he would never be found. Then Spock and Bones show up and lay a big guilt trip on him and he leaves his wife. So as a good friend Spock wipes his memory clean. Kirk was jerk. Bones was an ass too. He married a woman when he thought he was dying but then found out her people could cure him so he left her and took all their medical information. Creep.

The whole memory erasure theme is a common plot device from Men in Black to Fruits Baskets. I think it is a good idea. I'd mostly like the memory of ever watching Star Trek to be erased from my long term memory.

Piro and I will be at CNAnime this weekend with half of the Wizzywig crew. We have panels at 2pm on Saturday and 11:30 am on Sunday. Otherwise we will be in the dealer room autographing (or shopping) ]^_^[ Nyu!

"a feather or two"
Thursday - August 21, 2003
[Piro] - 02:01:00
Seraphim and I will be at Canadian National Anime Expo this weekend in Toronto, Canada. We will be at the show Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Most of the time, we will probably be at the Wizzywig booth (C32-33 in the dealers room). There are two Panels - one on Saturday at 2pm and one on Sunday at 11:30am. Both of these will be in Theater 1. Sarah and I are taking this as a bit of a vacation as well, so expect a DPD for Friday and a SGD for Monday :) - the comic will be back on track Wednesday of next week.

Also, those of you who will be at Anime Iowa this weekend, Wizzywig has a real good selection of MT merchandise that they will have availible at thier booth, so be sure to stop by and check it out if you want to pick up some MT merchandise.

A long time ago, I was a pretty sad example of an anime fanboy. I used to get four or five VHS tapes every week - either the latest shows in raw Japanese or fansubs garnered from trades to try to flesh out my collection. There were all these things that I just *had* to have. I would be the most devout fanboy of a show, and it was very important that I buy everything I could relating to that series. Then when something new came out, or some other show caught my fancy, I'd repeat the process all over again. Thank god I never owned a LD player - it was bad enough with just a VHS anime habit. Hell hath no hole as deep as the debt you could dig yourself into collecting LaserDiscs.

People sometimes ask me what my first 'anime' was. Truth be told, it was probably something like Speed Racer or Star Blazers when I was a kid, but to me that doesn't really count. The first 'anime' I ever watched was in the form of two VHS tapes rented from a local video store, things I rented because I was bored and I wasn't really sure what to expect. 'Project A-ko' and 'Urusei Yatsura' volume 1. It wasn't really these tapes the led to my downfall, but a small advertisement at the end of the Urusei Yatsura tape promoting a show called Kimagure Orange Road. That small bit of tape was enough to start me on the long downward spiral.

Funny thing is, these shows that I liked so much had existed for years, yet because I didn't know they existed, I didn't have a chance to find out about them until much later. Often we are separated from the things we enjoy experiencing not by lack of access, but lack of information. How many things have you enjoyed recently that may have existed and been available for months or even years? It all comes down to knowing about things.

Compared to when I first started collecting anime (just before AOL connected itself to the Internet, if that tells you anything) I just have one thing to say - you people are friggin SPOILED. :P Nevermind digisubs and the ability to watch fansubs of shows often less than a week after they air in Japan (fansubs used to not surface until months after a show first aired) just the selection of Anime DVDs to choose from today is mind boggling. When I started collecting, the anime section of the Suncoast was one small rack of about 30 tapes. Next time you feel like whining that the next DVD in some favorite series you are watching won't come out for another month - waaah, suck it up. :P

I've wanted to make some recommendations regarding Anime DVDs that I am either enjoying or looking forward to because, well... because I can. :) It's only recently that I've been actually sitting down to watch a few DVDs here and there (still not as much as I would like - things have been far too crazy around here) Some of these are really good shows, at least in my opinion. :)

The first DVD I recommend you pick up (actually, I should make a proclamation that all Megatokyo readers must buy this DVD, but that's going a little far ^^;;) is Haibane Renmei (Charcoal Feather Federation). I've already commented a lot about this series in past rants, but suffice to say it's one of my all time favorites. Done by the same guy who did Lain and NieA Under Seven (Yoshitoshi ABe) it's a pretty remarkable series. What's great is that a series like this is being released in the US market so soon after it aired in Japan. The DVD will be available starting August 26.

(small disclaimer - Pioneer advertises on Megatokyo, but my promotion of the DVD here is not connected with that in anyway. I'm just a huge Haibane fanboy. :P)

Another DVD that both Seraphim and I have been enjoying recently is Fruits Basket. Fruits Basket is the story of a girl who finds herself living with a family who turn into animals of the Chinese zodiac when they are hugged by someone of the opposite sex. Sound ridiculous? not really. It's a highly amusing and funny series, and I have really enjoyed it. What's really neat about it is that the English dub is wonderfully well done - and I usually dislike English dubs. All four DVDs are out, I believe, so it's pretty easy to find.

Remember back when I asked people to guess what anime series Kimiko's hairstyle was from? I don't think I ever provided an answer. It is from an unusual little series that has influenced my work quite a bit over the past few years, and it's really nice to see it finally out on DVD. Risky Safety is the story of a girl named Moe and two little spirits, a Shinigami named Risky and an Angel named Saftey. More than the story, I am very fond of the style and the feel of the show. The show is a little unusual because each episode is only 15 minutes long, but there are eight 'episodes' on the DVD. The cutest feature of the DVD of course is the fact that you can reverse the insert to display either Risky or Safety, depending on your mood. Disk 1 is out now, Disk 2 will be available in September (there are 3 disks in all).

Another DVD set that I am looking forward to picking up soon is the first Maison Ikkoku Box Set #1 DVD. Maison Ikkoku is a classic anime that is about 96 episodes long, and one that most old schoolers like myself worried would never come out on DVD in proper format. What's really cool is that they are offering 12 episodes in a box set for a really reasonable price (not too much more than just one DVD) - there will be 8 boxed sets in all. Maison Ikkoku, both the manga and the anime, have influenced me quite a bit over the years, and it was one of the first sets of manga I ever purchased (in Japanese, that is). Its awesome that Viz is releasing the series in this way - and hopefully it does well enough so that we can see the rest of the series released as well.

That's enough for this review session - I still have a few other DVDs that I'd like to recommend, and I'll do so over the course of the month. It's safe to say that these four are at the top of my watch/buy list right now.

What I really need to do, however, is borrow that box set of the Kimagure Orange Road TV DVDs from a friend, and smack Animeigo around to get them to release the OAVs in DVD format. :) Maybe next time. :P

Oh, one last thing - looks like the Megatokyo lanyards are now availible from the ThinkGeek Store. Check em out :)

"Megatokyo joins Dark Horse Comics"
Wednesday - August 27, 2003
[Piro] - 14:00:00
Well, it's been a very interesting few months here at Megatokyo. To say it's all been a whirlwind would be a bit of an understatement. Back when Megatokyo first went online three years ago, I had no clue of what I was getting myself into. It's sort of like scrambling up a mountain, looking back and not having any clue how you managed to get yourself where you are. I've been clambering over some pretty difficult terrain lately, but I've reached a spot now that has the kind of view that makes it worth the climb.

I would like to announce that I have gone with Dark Horse Comics as my new publisher, and that we are already working to bring the long awaited Megatokyo Volume 2 to store shelves this January. You can view the official press release here.

Those of you who pre-ordered book 2 from IC Entertainment will receive your copy of Volume 2 from Dark Horse when it is released. I have the list of pre-orders in my possession, and I will be contacting you to verify shipping addresses in the next few days. Please wait until you hear from me regarding your pre-order, as more specifics are forthcoming.

The IC Entertainment edition of Megatokyo Volume 1 will not be reprinted - once the current supply of books are gone, they are gone. There will be a new and revised Dark Horse version of Book 1, at the larger trim size, with a new cover and even more additional material that will be released sometime this spring, after Volume 2.

Needless to say, I am very excited about working with Dark Horse Comics. Years ago, when the idea of printing Megatokyo was not something I took seriously, I was sometimes asked what publisher I thought would be best for MT, my answer was always Dark Horse. I've always felt that the quality of their books were exceptional, so much so that it was one of the 'Ah My Goddess' volumes that I used as a model for what I wanted my books to look and feel like. With Dark Horse's quality standards, I know that both book 2, the re-issue of book 1, and any subsequent projects I do with them will more than satisfy my expectations and give the MT readers books they will enjoy owning.

I feel honored and humbled by the attention that Megatokyo has attracted over the past few months. I've managed to get a very interesting overview of the comics and publishing industry, and I think that now is not only an exciting time for myself and my works, but for other owner-creators as well. The success and popularity of graphic novels and related works has a future that goes beyond just Japanese produced manga/comic titles. I feel that there is a lot of great work out there, and that people far more talented than me will also be able to put their work in front of a lot of people. All they need to do is keep climbing, and never mind the scruffs and scrapes - the view is worth it.

"happy dance"
Thursday - August 28, 2003
[Seraphim] - 03:14:00
Finally, the news is out. We found out that the Dark Horse/Megatokyo publishing agreement had been signed, sealed, and delivered while on the Bluewater bridge on our way to Canada. I found it really difficult not to blurt out everything during the CN Anime convention. After several weeks of keeping the secret and constantly monitoring what I could or couldn't say - it was almost too much for me. Each panel we presented had the obligatory 'What about Volume 2?' question. Gah, don't ask me! I wanted to do my happy dance. Lucky for everyone, I have forgotten, both mentally and instinctively, the happy dance and the little song that went with it.

When Fred first mentioned publishers I was clueless. All I knew was from my childhood of reading 'Nancy and Sluggo' and 'Archie' comics and more recently the library debate about whether comics and graphic novels belong in libraries. Personally, I would have thought that debate was ended with the release of the Maus novels by Art Spiegelman, but alas. Our trip to San Diego Comic Con didn't help and after we returned I convinced Fred to take me to a local comic book shop to do some research. Fred ended up wanting to leave long before I did. I'm really impressed by the quality and variety of genres published. There is more out there than superhero comics and imported manga titles. The publishers, from large to small, and the independent comics are supporting a creative community of artists and writers.

While Megatokyo is the latest addition to the Dark Horse titles, they have been publishing unique and artistic titles for two decades. Fred and I were impressed with their reputation and commitment to high quality publishing. I love their eclectic selection in style, story, and format from the chibi 'Lone Wolf and Cub' to the 'Ring of Nibelung'. I am also particularly fond of the "What's Michael' series. Many years ago, before Megatokyo was even an electrical impulse crossing someone's synapses, Fred got me a copy in an effort to gently introduce me to his world of graphic novels, manga, and anime. He knows I'm a sucker for cats. I've taken up his passion and added the librarian twist with an interest in intellectual freedom and the efforts of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the Friends of Lulu organization which promotes female creators and increasing female readership. I've also poked around and found other interesting sites, like Sequential Tart, an amusing and informative site that works to raise awareness of the influence women have had on comics.

Fred and I couldn't be happier with the partnering of Dark Horse Comics and Megatokyo. They are genuinely interested in preserving the originality of the story and artwork of the online version in the published format. We are also looking forward to a large initial release in January to national chain bookstores and independent comic book sellers in the American and Canadian markets. Of course, most of the work still needs to be done ^_^;;

In the process of composing this rant I have, to my chagrin, remembered the origin and history of the happy dance. It actually started off as the 'show off dance.' As a child I had tons of warts and every time I went to the doctor he would give me a safety sucker for each one he removed. This usually meant I had a least a dozen from one visit. I would get home and stand on our front porch, which was very stage like, and dance around with my sucker in front of all my friends chanting about 'I've got a sucker ha ha ha you don't have one' or some such.. Then I would drop the safety sucker, which has a HANDLE, into the rose bushes. But that didn't bother me because I had gotten so many and I would run in and get another and proceed to dance and drop it again. This cycle continued until I was out of suckers. I usually only got 4 or 5 licks in being a clumsy child. By then all my friends had left because I was so very obnoxious. Of course I got my comeuppance in the end but I feel bad that my friends never stuck around long enough to see it happen. Over the years the happy dance turned into a kinder and gentler expression of celebration with no taunting chants. And the dance is far more entertaining than Fred's at the Naze Nani panel at Anime Central ; )

"The Terrible Twins"
Tuesday - September 2, 2003
[Piro] - 11:35:00
Y'know, I swear I can feel it when writer's block or artist's block is coming on. There is this little voice in the back of your head that is like an advance scout, whispering that there is trouble ahead. Sometimes, of course, there is no warning at all. That is usually when both are ready to take you out.

My most recent slump, the one I have just dug myself out of, has more to do with positive things than with negative ones, I think. In fact, I think it's partly in reaction to the successful culmination of months of hard work and worry revolving around finding a new publisher for Megatokyo. Finally, to have things all positively worked out with both my old publisher and my new publisher (Dark Horse Comics - see my last rant for more info on this) feels, well, pretty good. It's a good kind of feeling that actually makes me feel somewhat more secure, more confident in my work. I almost feel like... my work might not be that bad after all.

That, of course, is when both artists and writers block slams you the hard in the face, rips you out the window and plummets you five stories down face first onto a gravel driveway. Sometimes I think these 'blocks' actually use your own inertia against you, having to do little more than set you off balance, gravity and inertia do the rest.

Well, writers and artist block are a normal part of doing this kind of thing. In fact, it's really just a manifestation of the barrier that keeps everyone from doing this kind of work. It's not because most people can't, its because most people don't stubbornly fight it day after day. Most people have better things to do with their time. ^^;;

Y'know, it also occurs to me that comic/manga artists have it worse than other creative types in some ways. Sometimes I suffer from artist's block, where I can't draw worth a hoot. Sometimes its writer's block, where I can't write worth a damn. The bad days are where you suffer from both, and you just want to grab your hair, rip your own head off and slam it against the wall repeatedly. That's when you go to Target and by a new entertainment center cluster for your TV in the living room and spend Saturday putting it together.

I guess the two kinds of blocks are similar, really. Comic art is this hard to define balance between words and drawings. They work best when they work together, each part conveying something to the reader. In fact, I find that there is a real back and forth between art and writing - often it is the words that inspire the art, which turn around and inspire the words. They bounce off of each other a lot, really. There are no real rules about how the two interact, it's a bit like pulling things out of thin air - only sometimes the air is thinner than usual.

Having said all that, I'm really not that far behind. Wednesday's comic is done, and I'm working on Friday's right now. Since monday was a holiday, I decided that I would take the extra day to try to get a strip ahead again. Like I said in my comments, I really would like to be a little more consistent with the story for the rest of chapter four - there is a lot going on, and I want to wrap it up well. That is, if I don't get slammed too hard by the Terrible Twins again. :P

"Blindsided"
Wednesday - September 3, 2003
[Dom] - 01:00:00
A few notes before I get to the meat of this rant, also known as "the story of how Dom got hit in the back of the head with a metaphorical piledriver".

First, the first pics of Sega's elusive Kunoichi are out. Every Shinobi fan wanted a piece of this at E3 but was denied, but TGS attendees will be lucky enough to see the heir apparent to Hotsuma. But I'm a patient man. I know that I'll soon be dashing along walls and slashing up demonic chumps on my PS2 again. Life, as they say, is good.

One of my co-workers recently interviewed John Whitmore, development director for 2015, and he had a lot to say about the making of Vietnam-based video games. It's not something I agree with, personally, but all voices deserve to be heard. Check out his opinions here.

Also, look for my poor, beleaguered Oop-Ack to resume functionality in a couple weeks, as my server guy is having a T1 installed in his pad in that time frame.

Oh. And I take full responsibility for Piro's current costume [there are too many crack dealers in my life, i swear - piro]

Now, on with the show, the story of how Disgaea: Hour of Darkness hit me like a mack truck.

So I get home on Saturday to find that my roommate Cortana is playing a strategy game on the PS2, which has been neglected lately due since I finally got KotOR back from my friend. I've heard good stuff about this game from co-workers, so I sat down and watched. I was never much for Final Fantasy Tactics, but was a Shining Force freak, so I figured I'd at least give it a chance.

Then I saw that the game had a ninja character class in it. "Hmm, okay, I'll play at least enough to get me a ninja," I say to myself, "That should be enough for me."

Then I blinked, and it was 3:30 AM, a phenomenon that is occurring with increasing frequency. I kept telling myself "Okay, just one more level on the Item World and I'll be fine... just one more color chain and I'll be fine..."

Yeah, right. At every turn the game gets more and more complex, and I can't help but play another 2 hours per shiny new weapon in order to get the most out of both the weapon and the game in general. I mean, this thing is insanely complex. I regularly spend 15 minutes trying to work out color chains in my head (I refuse to take notes on a game I'm not writing the strategy guide for) and am still trying to save up enough Mana to convince the Dark Congress that I need better stats. I mean, I'm 20 hours in already, and I'm only on episode 4 of 14. I haven't left the castle for about 8 hours. I have a bad feeling about how much time I'm going to have for eating and sleeping over the next few weeks...

It gets worse, too. I look on the horizon and see the third .Hack game begging to eat up my free time, along with Dynasty Warriors 4 for the Xbox.

It's great to be alive.

Shake well
Friday - September 5, 2003
[Dom] - 09:00:00
I'm giving up valuable Disgaea time for this, so I'll make it quick.

So there was an earthquake last night, here in California. It was a 3.9. In California terms, it means that it could easily have been mistaken for someone slamming the door shut.

But since all the freshmen are newly into Berkeley and one of my good friends is a dorm resident, she was telling me about how out-of-state people were freaking out about it, which I find hard to understand. I mean, if it was something that you could feel for more than a half a second, I could understand that. Then again, when you get over a second or so then buildings start falling.

But c'mon. This earthquake was barely enough to knock over my Kagura figure, and my Kagura figure falls over when I put my drink on my keyboard tray.

I suppose I can pin a lot of it on the unfamiliarity factor. I mean, people talk up California's quakes a lot, and with good reason. I lived through the '89 quake, after all, and that was about 1000 or so times greater than the one today. But honestly, I could've done more damage throwing my controller at the wall. What's the big deal?

Alternatives
Wednesday - September 10, 2003
[Seraphim] - 08:35:00
Piro and I just got back from the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland. It was so cool to go as anonymous attendees. Piro and I were interested in the alternatives that were out there from indy creators and publishers.

I lie. I found out my favorite creator was going to be there and HAD to go. I've only been interested in comics for a month and I'm already a fan girl. The first comic I picked up was Tom Beland's 'True Story, Swear to God' and it was all over for me. It is a romance comedy where he tells how he met his wife, Lily, at a bus stop at Disney World. I do find the story hard to believe because if I had met Piro at a bus stop and he had tried to chat me up I would have maced him and performed all my self defense moves and ran off as fast as I could. (I grew up in a town with it's own mass murderer - don't talk to strangers is etched pretty deeply into my psyche.) In one of his mini-comic collections Beland refers to his own story as a 'chick flick' comic but that is wrong. Guys, if you want to know what to do to win the gal of your dreams pick it up. It's like a handbook on what to do right. The cover of the latest monthly issue depicts him in full superhero garb flying into a hurricane to save Lily. That's the kind of thinking the ladies like gentlemen - swear to god.

If you prefer your stories less fairy tale perfect then you would like Andi Watson's 'Love Fights'. This is more of a boy sees girl and girl barely gives him a second glance story. It pokes fun at the superhero theme and tabloid journalism but the best thing of all is the talking, flying, laser vision, superhero, crime fighting cat. Even without the cat it would be a great story.

If you are more into spooky horror stories we picked up two really freaky ones. I chose 'Nightmares and Fairy Tales' written by Serena Valentino and illustrated by Foo Swee Chin. They scare me. The story is told by a doll, Annabelle, who sees her owners through their bizarre nightmares and retold fairy tales. Issue 4 was the retelling of Snow White with lovely Snow cast as a 1960ish 'That Girl' who doesn't need no stinking Prince Charming to help her. This isn't the Disney version of the fairy tale.

Piro chose 'I Feel Sick' by Jhonen Vasquez. It's about a gal who can't get a decent date and has a malevolent creature trying to take over her brain. If you ever thought you had a bad date or only get hit on by creeps you have got to meet Devi. She gets picked up by club hopping vampires, complete with smoke bombs for entrances and exits, and brain eating zombies. I laughed, I cried, I almost freaking died.

Another personal favorite of mine is Avigon by Che Gilson. It has been described as Burtonesque but it is more goth than bizarre. Avigon is a manufactured clockwork who is seeking the meaning of her existence and naturally turns to the library. Another of my favorite themes. The library in the capitol city is taken directly from the NYPL with clockwork lions as sentinels outside. It was originally published in 2001 as a graphic short story but was supposed to be released as a full length graphic novel continuing the story last June. Hmmm, delayed. I guess I'll just have to wait patiently like other fans I know :)

There are really excellent artist and writers out there but they aren't in the aisles of the typical bookstore. Check out the Comic Shop Locator Service.

Movin along...
Thursday - September 11, 2003
[Piro] - 11:05:00
PLEASE NOTE - IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING BOOK 2 PREORDERS IN THIS RANT, PLEASE READ IF YOU PRE-ORDERED BOOK 2

Before I get into today's rant material, I want to stop for a moment to remember the traumatic events that happened on this day two years ago. Many of us, including us here at Megatokyo, found our lives overwhelmed by sheer magnitude of the events happing on the TV screens before us. It took a long time for us to move on, to the point that the events didn't somehow dominate our thoughts and our lives. Last year, on the one year anniversary, both Seraphim and I found that we still had not fully delt with it all, and revisiting the events helped, I think, finally help us come to terms with such a horrific and overwhelming tragedy. Time heals all wounds, I believe the saying goes, but scars will remain, as well as the positive effects of a successful healing process. The anniversary and memory of the events of two years ago do not warrant us having to stop our lives, make websites go black, or require memorandum webcomics, but that doesn't mean that we don't think about them. For the people who's lives were more directly affected by the loss of loved ones - your wounds will take longer to heal, and our thoughts are with you today.

If you are one of the people who had preordered a copy of Megatokyo volume 2 you should have received an email from me this morning that verifies that you are on the list of preorder customers provided to me by IC Entertainment. The main purpose of the email is to verify your shipping address - if it has changed, please respond to the email with your current shipping address (one that will be valid in January 2004). If you pre-ordered and did not receive an email, it is probable that your email address has changed. If you do not receive your email by the end of the day, please email me at piro@megatokyo.com with [MT BOOK 2 PREORDER] in the subject line, and I will update the list with your new email address (and address, if that has changed too).

I apologize that it has taken this long to actually get the emails out. Trying to figure out how to deal with a list of people this big, and get all the information into a usable form so that I could email everyone effectively was more problematic than I had realized. Big kudos go out to Seraphim who spent several hours entering and verifying information so that we can take care of all the preorder customers. Hopefully we can get all the shipping information and preorder stuff verified so that when the books are done, there won't be any problems with you finally receiving them.

In other news, some of you may have noticed from Seraphim's rant that she and I snuck away last weekend and drove down to Maryland to go to SPX (Small Press Expo), and yes, we went without telling anyone :P.

I seem to have backed my way into the comics industry here in the states without really knowing a lot about it. Most of this has to do with the fact that I never really was a reader of American comics, and the only indie comics I ever followed were a few little titles back when I was in college. The Japanese comic scene is where most of my attention has been for the past ten years. Yet, I don't think it's the fact that the 'manga' style comics that we all like to read are as popular as they are simply because they are Japanese - they just represent the kinds of stories and a type of comic language that is really appealing. To me, there is no reason why a non Japanese artist/writer couldn't produce works that had the same appeal. I'm not really sure if I'm doing this ok or not, but that has sort of been my attitude.

So, in an effort to better understand what other English-language writers and artists are doing, I made the mistake of agreeing to take Seraphim with me to Underworld Comics and Games, a rather nice comic shop here in Ann Arbor. Ho boy, that was a mistake. ^^;;; She dove right in and started sampling comics left and right. Neither Seraphim or I still have much interest in the superhero genre, but what's surprising is how many other fine comics and stories there are out there, if you just take the time to look.

In the end, we not only did we get a pretty good sampling of the kind of comics out there besides just manga titles, but... she seems to have become a ardent fan of several titles -_-;; Some of these creators were going to be at SPX, and that's how we suddenly found ourselves driving eight hours to Maryland (our third trip down there this year) and wandering a convention as an (gasp) attendee, rather than a guest or exhibitor. It was kind of refreshing, being on the other side of the table again. :)

SPX is a showcase for alternative, independent and small press cartoonists and publishers. We spent a lot more money at this show than we've spent at any of the other anime cons this year, and I have a big stack of stuff that I've been looking at since we got back. In my next rant, I'd like to share some of the titles that I liked and thought were worth mentioning. It was also cool running into several other webcomic artists - Jonathan Rosenberg from Goats, Richard Stevens from Diesel Sweeties, Corey Marie Kitley from Life So Rad and some folks representing Eat Your Lipstick (Monica Gallagher, the gal who does it, wasn't at the table when we stopped by, but we grabbed a post card so we could check it out later). Anyways, I'll cover the other stuff I looked at and read in my next post.

One thing is for sure tho... if I have to drive to Maryland one more time this year, I'm gonna scream... unless of course I get one of those really nice little crumb cake things from Bau Au Pain or whatever it is at that one service area off the Ohio Turnpike... try the Urban Blend coffee, it was pretty good.

Girl gamers and other "rarities"
Sunday - September 14, 2003
[Dom] - 11:00:00
Here's an excerpt of some more news from last week that caught my eye:

(The Day.COM)--Like many in her generation, Leslie Lund likes nothing more than all-night video game sessions in which she builds armies, destroys villages and shapes the future of the world. But the 20-year-old is also part of a little known subgroup - women gamers.

The Entertainment Software Association found that a surprising 26 percent of video game users are women over the age of 18, confirming what many "game girl" advocates have long argued: Women love video games.

At the same time, they say, game makers haven't acknowledged that players aren't just young and teenage boys who want to shoot, terminate, and conquer their way to virtual victory, all the while using female characters with unrealistic curves and tight clothes.

While girl gamers are always crying out for respect, in recent weeks I've been seeing more and more articles like this, and it bears inspection on both the professional and personal levels... at least, I think so.

So recent surveys say that the girl gamer population is rising--which is only natural as video gaming passes further into the mainstream. After all, Sony recently shipped its sixty millionth PS2 (no, there aren't that many actual PS2s owned) and video games are just plain everywhere across popular culture. And yet all walks of gamer life continue to ignore the female segment of the population.

The easiest example is on the personal level, where (for example) there was that British survey where gamers were found to ignore their significant others to the point of not having time for sex. I know a couple of girls who call themselves "gaming widows" due to Warcraft, Diablo, and now Disgaea, because, while they're gamers, they're, y'know, not worth gaming with. 'Cuz they're girls and all. While I'm not saying that this is a common thing, it occurs more often than the girls'd like.

And of course, there's the professional realm, where developers just can't quite seem to figure out what the girl gaming segment of the population wants. Phaedra Boindiris even runs womengamers.com to try and tell game companies "Hey, that's not kosher" when it comes to character design and game design, but it doesn't seem like anyone is listening--Sports games, FPSes and various action platformers continue to dominate sales charts, and those are distinctly male-dominated markets, leading to a "we don't need to care about girls" attitude. And the male-dominated developer community doesn't hurt this attitude, either.

Of course the RPGs have the large female audiences, as is well-recorded among sales numbers, so at least that segment of the game industry knows what's good for them. Meanwhile, oddly enough, the games that appeal most to a lot of girls include... Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball, which ostensibly is a distinctly male game but has drawn in a good deal of girls I know with the shopping elements. Which is also, as far as I know, one of the driving factors behind the mega-success of The Sims, which has a huge female audience and, according to some articles, had a large influence from its female developers.

And yet even with the increasing impact on the market, companies still ignore the girls just as the boyfriends do, making me wonder what it'll take to put girls on the gaming map.

But anyway, the whole point of this rant is, I want to hear more opinions from female video gamers about how the video game community treats them, both on the personal and professional fronts. Is what I'm saying off base? Is it right? Did I miss something? If you have any contributions, please e-mail me and I'll post the comments that interest me the most (I'll ask permission first, just in case).

Okay, that's done, back to the Triple Threat of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, Disgaea and Bistro Cupid 2 that is consuming my life like a trio of vampires with controller ports. On the plus side, I can play all three at once, with the help of a lot of remote controls and a 2-page feature I'm writing on Crystal Chronicles that mandates that I have to play games (oh, woe is me :)

Until next time!

Goodbye to the stage of history
Tuesday - September 16, 2003
[Dom] - 01:30:00
Thanks for your many replies to the girl gaming rant! I, uh, have a few deadlines to meet, so I won't be able to read through all of them until the weekend rolls around, but rest assured that I'm trying my best to do the subject justice. Patience is what I ask, especially since I'm not being paid for this, while I'm taking time away from something I am paid for.

Anyway. I don't know when I realized this. But I just can't bring myself to play Soul Calibur 2 anymore.

I can't quite explain why it is, since I loved the first Soul Calibur so much. I mean, when I finished Soul Calibur's mission mode, I used to delete my save game and do it all over again, just because I wanted to play more of it. But now, my roommate and I own all three versions of Soul Calibur 2 (I'd like to note that I didn't pay for mine, something I'm glad for) and I have absolutely no urge to play any of them.

Maybe it's because I spent too long around tournament players (yet this is odd too, since I used to work with WC Maxi and I was always just impressed with his Soul Calibur stories), and that made me bitter about the vast imbalance in the game, otherwise known as "Play as Cervantes or lose". Lack of variation bores me, and while most fighting games do have a top tier, it takes a massive imbalance like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or Capcom vs. SNK 2 to turn me off to a game. After all, just like there are only so many Storm/Sentinel/Cable vs. Cable/Sentinel/Storm or Sagat/Sagat/X vs. Sagat/Sagat/X matches you can watch before you want to gouge your eyes out with a pencil, there is only so much Cervantes-on-Cervantes action you can stand before you feel like vomiting.

But wait, I think to myself, I never actually saw any tournament players play as Cervantes. So that can't be it. But maybe it was that I spent too much time studying frame counts and stuns that I forgot how to have fun with the game. That makes some sense, especially given that I only use 2 moves when playing as Cassandra (236 B and A K, if you must know) and maybe 8 when playing as Xianghua. And those two are my favorite characters, mostly because they're the least naked. And it's freaking boring playing as them (see below for more details on this).

Or maybe it's because I miss Mission Mode, and despise Weapon Master Mode. After all, the missions were part of what kept me going in Soul Calibur, and I don't like how the new weapons change the game (good god, WHY does Talim need range?). And those thrice-damned dungeons in 2 bore me to tears. The only way I can stand them is to have a friend around who plays as characters I don't like, so that we can combine to be a decent Charade player. I mean, honestly, who wants to play as one character for that long, especially in that dungeon where you fight nothing but goddamn Berserker? One of the reasons I liked Soul Calibur 2 in the arcades was that you could pick different characters in between matches, so you wouldn't lose just out of boredom (I know I had that problem with Faust back in my GGXX days). And yet the dungeons don't let you do that.

Or maybe it's that I think that the non-Spawn additional characters are largely crap. Necrid is ten times better than Cervantes, making him absolutely joyless to play either as or against, Link retains many useless moves from Smash Brothers and simply doesn't have much of a personality, and Heihachi is an annoying holdover from a series whose fourth game also bored me to tears (Tekken 4 players will probably know what I'm saying when I say "Screw 1 2 1 2, do something interesting, dammit").

Addition: Since I didn't feel that I could properly represent SC2 without talking to one of my regular playing buddies, Hodge-Podge, about why we got bored with versus play. Here's a transcript of that conversation

hodgepodge: the thing is, none of us (Me, You, Opus) are particularly good at the game
hodgepodge: plus, we don't really have the urge to get that much better
hodgepodge: competition SC2 demands dedication that none of us are willing to put up
hodgepodge: so when we play, we bust out the scrub tactics
hodgepodge: and well, there are only so many scrub tactics
dom: Quite possible
hodgepodge: to break the plateau we're on, we'd have to devote a huge amount of time to the game
hodgepodge: it's not happening
dom: But even when we play each other we just goof off
dom: And it's still not fun
dom: Charade-Charade matches only went so far
hodgepodge: I've played Opus a few times seriously
hodgepodge: it's fun at first, until you realize that you're at an impasse
hodgepodge: we've all seen the scrub tactics, but we're not good enough to break them yet
hodgepodge: so it seems boring
hodgepodge: cause we'll just do the things we've always done
hodgepodge: seriously, I've played X like you, and ya, it's boring as hell
hodgepodge: but pretty effective
dom: Meanwhile, even at the mid-level GGXX continues to fascinate me. It's weird
hodgepodge: probably because it's got a less steep learning curve
hodgepodge: as hard to believe as that is
hodgepodge: that and moves are significantly safer in GGXX
dom: ...especially if you're Faust
hodgepodge: yea
dom: or Eddie, for that matter
hodgepodge: 'course, I totally agree with you on the extra characters
hodgepodge: even spawn isn't all that
dom: I just like Spawn's voice
hodgepodge: heh
dom: Berserker is just a gigantic Rock, and Assassin is just Hwang
hodgepodge: don't forget Lizardman
hodgepodge: don't get why they didn't make it in
hodgepodge: oh well
dom: Who's the same Lizardman from last game
hodgepodge: yup
hodgepodge: supposedly they have truncated move lists though
dom: It's like, only Yunsung, Talim and Rafael play much differently from their SC versions
dom: Mostly because with the exception of Yunsung, they didn't HAVE SC versions
hodgepodge: heh
dom: while even the Street Fighters shake themselves up from game to game
hodgepodge: I'd say that Nightmare plays significantly differently
dom: except Ryu, but then again I never play as Ryu
hodgepodge: haha
hodgepodge: Cassandra is also different from Sophitia
dom: though they put Sophitia in pretty much unchanged from SC, also
hodgepodge: well, yea.
hodgepodge: She's an Extra character
hodgepodge: Come to think of it, Mitsu plays really different from his SC1 incarnation
dom: Does he?
hodgepodge: yea
dom: I didn't notice too much
hodgepodge: his Relic stance is completely different
hodgepodge: and they nerfed all his unblockables
hodgepodge: also nerfed his ringout game
dom: Ivy's new stance and new command throw added maybe 3 moves that were of any use
dom: Kilik got... one new stance
hodgepodge: it's a really good stance though
dom: with moves extremely similar to his other stance
dom: Xianghua didn't really change at all, nor did Astaroth as far as I see
hodgepodge: there's a few significant ones
hodgepodge: the double spin Great Wall Lower is guard crush
hodgepodge: which makes it infinitely safer
hodgepodge: she's got throw range now
hodgepodge: I think she actually got faster...
dom: Everyone got faster, though
hodgepodge: Mitsurugi and Maxi stayed about the same
dom: Taki... gained some stuff, lost it, and basically traded the back throw game for the Exorcism cancel game, I think
hodgepodge: I dunno... Exorcism cancel is pretty sick
hodgepodge: plus she has more fakes and more range moves
hodgepodge: like she needed those :-(
dom: Cervantes gained speedspeedspeed
hodgepodge: oh god
dom: And did I mention speed?
hodgepodge: his little back turn thrusty thing turned unblockable too
hodgepodge: yea, I'm feeling some wrongness
dom: wrongness in the rant, or?
hodgepodge: Cervantes
dom: ah, k
dom: curse you Cervy
hodgepodge: the rant is just whatever you think
dom: yeah, there's lots of opinion but nothing blatantly wrong is what I'm getting
dom: and that's good
hodgepodge: essentially, the three of us have hit the limit of what we wanna put into it

So maybe it's just that I've hit a plateau and have no urge to spend the time required to get better--which is odd, considering the sheer number of months my old roommate and I spent playing Soul Calibur back in my dorm room.

Or maybe I'm just much more bitter about games than I was four years ago, when Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast rocked my world in ways that it hadn't been rocked since the first time I saw A Clockwork Orange. Any way you cut it... goodbye, Soul Calibur 2. It was nice knowing you, but it's time to say goodbye.

Alternative Readings, part 2
Wednesday - September 17, 2003
[Piro] - 15:04:00
For years I've read and collected quite a bit of manga, both English translations and original Japanese. The selection of stuff available for the Japanese deficient (including myself - people seem to think I am proficient in Japanese like comic-piro, but the truth is, I am not.) is remarkable these days. It's even getting to the point that we are seeing 'just ok' titles showing up instead of 'only the best stuff'. I think this is a good thing - it might help dispel the idea that all manga is good. :P

I think that there is this misconception that all Japanese comics are good and American comics suck. That's unfair, really - both have examples of excellence and excrement. I think that people feel that the Japanese stuff is great because the material meets their expectations more than the American counterparts typically do. I don't think this is because manga/anime 'style' is inherently 'better', its just that in the mass of work it's easier to find the stuff that appeals to our emotional needs. it doesn't mean it's not there. It's easy these days to stay safely in the bounds of 'japanese' titles, but I think that over time there are a lot of things you will miss by doing this. You really need to be daring and take a look around, there's some really good stuff out there.

Since I've sort of backed my way into the comics industry here in the states, Seraphim and I wanted to spend some finding out more about what is current and going on in the industry. It's been kind of fun, really. Anyways, let me run down some things that I enjoyed reading or thought looked interesting. Some I picked up at SPX, others I've found in my travels in recent months.

I came across the work of Arthur Dela Cruz several times while browsing the comics shop, and was surprise to recognize it in last year's SPX annual. I hadn't picked any of his comics, but I did like his art style. I was surprised at CN Anime when I saw some of his work at an artist's alley table - and Arthur himself sitting behind the table ^^;; Arthur's pencil work is wonderful - much like myself he works in a sketchy, loose but solid style, with the added plus of knowledge of anatomy and proportions :P I picked up his "Kissing Chaos" book (available from Oni Press) and was finally able to read it. There's some scariness to the story, and the way it's told is beautifully done. Sometimes, the art seems sparse (like I don't do that myself) and the nior style can really be intense, but it's something I'd definitely recommend.

Another comic I picked up at SPX that I really liked was The Adventures of Mia. I could do it a disservice by comparing it to Porcco Rosso (because it has much the same feel), but there's something delightful about Enrico Casarosa's drawings. The characters are very expressive, and the personalities come thru very clearly, and there is just a pleasant, nice feel to the work. I'm looking forward to picking up more of these as they come out. Mia is published by Monkeysuit Press - I also picked up 'the art of Mia', a very nice little companion sketchbook.

As I mentioned in my last rant, there were a few webcomics represented at SPX. The first I came across was Corey Marie Kitley's 'Life So Rad', and I picked up a few of her 'zines' (yeah, Kinko's really did mess up the freebies ^^;;) which were fun. The next one I came across was Gods & Undergrads by Monica Gallagher. She wasn't at the table at the time, but I flipped thru the printouts of the online work, and it definitely is worth checking out.

Then I came across a bit of crazyness where R. Stevens and Jonathan Rosenberg were sharing a booth hawkin stuff for their comics, Goats and Diesel Sweeties. Jonathan has several 'Goats' collections out, and he did it the smart way - he started backwards, printing collections of the more recent comics first... so I picked up Volume IV first. ^_^ (Goats is amusing, go read it if you don't already). I also picked up a copy of Volume One of Diesel Sweeties 'Pocket Sweeties'... y'know, there is just something -disturbing- about Diesel Sweeties. ^^;; But that's kind of the point, I think. Richard also gave us some bumper stickers, and I plan to put a 'It's Fun to use learning for Evil' sticker on either my car or my neighbor's car.

I think that was most of the webcomic folks (if I missed you, gomen! let me know).

Some of the more indie stuff was interesting too. Eric Kim and Miguel Sternberg gave me copies of their SAS comic at CN Anime, and it was quite amusing to come across their table at SPX. I really liked these little books, actually. They both have nice, exrpressive, manga-inspired styles that retain a unique character. Thanks for the books, guys.

I've been familiar with the work of Lea Hernandez for quite a while - I know she's been doing anime-style artwork longer than I have. :) I picked up volume 2 of her Texas Steampunk series 'Clockwork Angels', and found it quite enjoyable. Interesting twists, and I really enjoyed some of the subtlety in Amelia's expressions - that and the fact that characters like that amuse the hell out of me :)

I picked up an anthology collection called Fractured Kisses from Moonation Comics as well. Including the work of several different female artists and writers, both collections were interesting reads, drawing very heavily from various shoujo styles.

Some of my favorite comics that I picked up came from Slave Labor Graphics (yeah, these guys rule - a friend hooked me on Lenore months ago). If you get a chance, be sure to read GloomCookie by Serena Valentino and Ted Naifeh. Wonderfully gothic, I think my favorite chapter has to be the Girl Talk one. It just amused me to no end. There is an unsettling balance between the surreal and unearthly and the 'yeah, some of my gothy friends are like this' to the book.

The most inspiring for me, artistically, were the Nightmares and Fairy Tales books. These delightfully disturbing and unsettling stories (also by Serena Valentino) flow with this wonderful artwork by Foo Swee Chin (FSc) and... well, it makes me want to experiment with abstracting my own work a little. #4, the retelling of the snow white story, still spooks me.

There's more, of course, and I'll try to point out more stuff in the future, because of course I haven't even begun to scratch the surface. I've been reading manga titles too - most notably Tuxedo Gin... I don't know why, but I love this dumb little story, it's adorable. :) Sitting here is also .hack // Legend of the Twilight, and Hanaukyo Maid Tai, Kare Kano, Azumanga Daioh...

Ok, few other quick links and notes, while I am at it, having nothing to do with comics to read :P

If you are going to Nan Desu Kan in Denver, Colorodo, Megatokyo merchandise and stuff will be available at the Wizzywig booth. The Wizzywig folks have been doing a great job of making MT merchandise available for people to purchase at cons all across the country, including cons that I am not able to make it to, so be sure to stop and see what they have :)

A few MT related links to post. There is an interview I did with Applelinks that went up yesterday - its amazing, I actually sound coherent and non-stressed. Talks a bit about my leap into the mac world and other MT related stuffs.

Over at Anime Tourist, long time ago they posted a transcript of the SDCC panel we did with Greg Dean of Real Life Comics. Click here to give it a read :)

Megatokyo was mentioned in an article in the Japan Times recently. That was kinda creepy to read ^^;;

And finally... it's official, Megatokyo has been listed as being partially responsible for the degradation of the English language according to the BBC. I have to say, in my defense, its not my fault. It's Largo's fault. :P

-----

- megatokyo merchandise -

Megatokyo t-shirts, posters and other merchandise can either be purchased online at the Megatokyo / ThinkGeek store, or from Wizzywig at various anime conventions around the country, even conventions that I will not be at. Below is a list of upcoming conventions where Wizzywig will be at:

• September 26-28 Anime Weekend Atlanta (Atlanta GA)
• October 3-5 C-Kon (South Bend IN)
• October 18 Motor City Comic Con (Detroit, MI)
• November 7-9 - Neko Con (Virginia Beach, VA)
• November 21-23 - Sugoi Con (Cincinnati OH)

Just for reference, here is Piro and Seraphim's con schedule for the rest of the year:

• October 3-5 C-Kon (South Bend IN)
• October 18 Motor City Comic Con (Detroit, MI)
• October 31-November 2 Aya Again 2003 (Ayacon) (Northampton, UK)
• November 4 Lecture @ Dublin University (Dublin, Ireland)

Miscellaneous Debris Returns
Friday - September 19, 2003
[Dom] - 10:00:00
Okay, so it's gotten to the point where I've realized that I want to post every single e-mail I've gotten about the Girl Gamers topic. Because the variety of replies is simply so rich I can't decide on just a few. So change of plans--if you DON'T want me to put your e-mail on a special oop-ack site in the future, please e-mail me. Otherwise I'll be putting up all of 'em, with corrected spelling etc. This has turned into a full-fledged Project.

After talking s'more to Hodge-Podge, who played much more Soul Calibur 2 than me and knows my Xianghua game better than I do, I realized one of the most important changes between Soul Calibur 1 for the Dreamcast, Soul Calibur 2 for the arcade, and Soul Calibur 2 at home. When Soul Calibur 1 was fairly recently out (about a year), I had the privilege of working with WC Maxi, who has since left GamePro and gone to Namco. Talking to WC Maxi gave me a lot of respect for SC1, even more than I'd developed over a year of play. Because he taught me things I never knew, gave me more tips than I could ever absorb--and he wasn't even trying, since we were playing Capcom vs. SNK at the time. The same happened with Soul Calibur 2 in the arcade, when G (AKA Halister) taught me all I know about Soul Calibur 2--without smearing my face into the ground every 3 seconds, like everyone else did. He would to his Taki Exorcism cancels and calmly tell me things like "You just lost 50% of your health, hit A earlier next time or GI me". But now he's going to medical school in the Midwest, and since them the only things I learned playing Soul Calibur 2 are "Srayer just beat me in 10 seconds. Srayer is much better than me". Soul Calibur 2 is simply too brutal in the differences between skill levels, and without anyone around who was willing not only to devote enough time to learn the game but to teach others, I lost interest after my skill hit a plateau. And that's the story of how I don't play SC2 anymore.

Meanwhile, thanks to Rich Redman at Wizards of the Coast, Greg Dean and I now have a shiny set of Japanese 3.0 D&D books. Hot diggity! Thanks, Rich, we owe you big and you won't go unrepaid for this.

The Sandman: Endless Nights is out, and while I'm not a big fan of the Despair and Destiny chapters, the rest I recommend wholeheartedly. Not that Neil Gaiman needs my recommendation or anything, since people have mostly decided whether they like him or not after Neverwhere and American Gods.

I haven't updated my resume in so long, it still says that I'm a Computer Science major. HA!

Speaking of my job hunt, a friend of mine who works at Macy's took me out to buy interview suits last night, and I have got to say, the salesman who sold me the suit was absolutely mighty. He taught me more about suits in 15 minutes than I've learned in the past 22 years or so. Then again, that's not that hard, being a California boy born and raised in the land of Casual.

Tomorrow's the Mirrodin pre-release (except for areas in the wake of Isabel), and those of you in Oakland might find me and my buds on Atogateam across the table from you. Who knows? :) Either way, I'll be bashing my forehead against my teammates unless I get to play white...

If any of you are going to Tokyo Game Show next week, could you do me a biiiiig favor and get some video of the Kita He ~Diamond Dust~ performance? Normally I wouldn't care about anything that goes on at TGS, but dammit, Chiba Saeko is going to perform at that event, and being a big fan of hers, I can't stand to miss it, since I had a chance to go to TGS but missed it due to the big fat chunks of money I would've had to blow to get there.

Oh, and Oop-Ack should be back soon. T1 was dropped a few days ago and it should be running by now.

Read Free or Die!
Monday - September 22, 2003
[Seraphim] - 03:50:00
September 20th was the start of Banned Book Week 2003. Yes, most of us know Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned years and years ago but censorship is alive and well and there are people out there battling it on the front lines today. One case is taking place in Montgomery County, Texas. A member of a local group called the Citizens Task Force for Family-Friendly Libraries (but not First Amendment friendly) wrote a secretive letter outlining their plans to rewrite the county library system's collection policies which would turnover the power of determining what is fit for the library collection to a local elected judge and the cronies he appoints. In rewriting the policy the library's Freedom to Read and Freedom to View Statements were deleted. These policies were replaced with the Freedom to Exercise Good Judgment Statement. This statement starts off by declaring that the First Amendment doesn't really guarantee our right to free speech at all and we have no individual freedoms to read or view. It is terrifying to read. Citizens have the freedom to exercise good judgment but only in so far as we can choose among titles, materials, and information that they feel is acceptable. Obviously because we are born idiots and can only function with their guidance. So far the effort has been voted down and the district attorney is looking into whether the Texas open meetings laws were broken. Breaking laws is some mighty fine family values. I really want them determining what I can read.

In the CBLDF's news magazine, Busted, there is an article about a group in Michigan who opposes the Motor City Comic Convention, ironically, Piro and I will be in attendance next month at the WizzyWig booth. This group is terrified because comics are marketed towards children and the conventions are crawling with porn stars and adult male porn users. You may think censorship doesn't or won't affect you personally but how long until these people discover anime and manga such as Love Hina or Battle Royale and decide it doesn't fit with their family values. Graphic novels of any genre can't stay out of the fray for long.

In preparation for Banned Book Week I read one of the most frequently challenged books of 2002. It was challenged for the reasons of insensitivity and being unsuited to age group, as well as encouraging children to disobey authority. I was intrigued by the last reason thinking the book really had to be subversive. It must be a juvenile version of the anarchists handbook or something. I was ready for a titillating read! The book was The Adventure of Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey. I was kind of appalled but only by the fact it was written for 10 year olds and that I enjoyed it as much as I did. Essentially it is about two pranksters (who write their own comic book btw - how cute) that get in trouble at school and end up hypnotizing their principal which leads to madcap adventures. I can see why principals would think it was insensitive but I hardly think there are enough of them in the world to make it one of the most frequently challenged titles.

In my research I also found a Sendak title that stirred up quite the controversy and features, gasp, nudity. I don't care much for Sendak and his whole Where the Wild Things Are so I had never heard of In the Night Kitchen but it is on the list of 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990's. It depicts a toddler boy - anatomically correct. There was an uproar and teachers, parents, and even librarians were inking out the offending images. I checked my two local libraries to see if they even carried this porno title. The Ann Arbor Library didn't have it in the catalog but the Ypsilanti Library did and I was glad it hadn't been defaced back in the day. Yeah, the images are about as offensive as Michelangelo's David. Is that all there is? It is almost incomprehensible what people freak out about.

I would never take away anyone else's freedom to not read or to view something by creating a MUST READ policy. Everyone would have to read what they disapprove of just because I say so. Yet censors are perfectly happy to create MUST NOT READ policies or try to ban books from libraries or comic shops from towns. Freedom to Read and View statements protect the right to choose for everyone. If a classic version of Red Riding Hood could be banned because Red was taking wine to granny - is it such a stretch to envision someone coming after Megatokyo - Teh L33t B33R comic. Maybe we should ask Dav Pilkey or J.K. Rowling what the odds are? To quote Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, "Movies, books, tv, music - they are just entertainment, not guidebooks for damning yourself."

Pioneer no more?
Friday - September 26, 2003
[Dom] - 12:00:00
Check out this story on Pioneer getting bought out by Dentsu.

Say what you will about the new name, but Hodge-Podge and I are now taking bets on how long it'll take for Geneon to turn into Genom. And then we start counting down to 2040...

Oh, and by the way. The fanart archive over at Oop-Ack is back up, so go ahead and hit it again. Maybe I'll even start working on it again once I'm unemployed...

the five minute rule
Friday - September 26, 2003
[Piro] - 19:02:00
Ever hear of the five second rule? You know the one - If you drop food on the floor and you pick it up real quick, you can still eat it without and adverse effects (don't try this at home kids). Maybe it takes five seconds for dirt and germs to realize the food item is there, and if you pick it up quick enough you manage to get there before they do. If something sits on the floor for a longer period of time, obviously more and more germs, dirt, and other nastiness will find it, rendering it dangerous (if not fatal) to eat.

I've never been a firm believer in the rule, probably because I have three cats - trust me, anything that falls to the floor is instantly covered with cat hair. Doesn't matter how often you clean the floors, or vacuum the carpets, if it falls to the floor, it's instantly contaminated.

In more traditional media, when something goes to print, there are a lot of points in the process where you get to look things over, check, double check, make sure things look ok, give final approvals, and off you go. Once things go to print, you can't really go back and change things. Sometimes, when collections are printed, small corrections are made, things tweaked, etc, but for the most part, there aren't drastic changes.

After posting the comic last night and giving it a final read with my sleep addled brain, it dawned on me that the comic needed a different ending. I liked the idea much better than the way the comic stood. This isn't the first time this has happened. There are a few comics in this chapter that I came up with better lines or phrases days or weeks later. In those cases, I feel that things should stay the way they are. After all, most MT readers have read the strip, and have come to understand it the way it was presented.

Last night the strip was up for five minutes, if that, and I decided to take a flyer on it and pull it down. I was too tired to draw the new frame, but early this morning I got up and finished it off, and was much happier with the finished comic (there was one flub in things, and that was that Comcast was having major borkage issues around here and I literally could not upload the comic for over an hour, but eventually I managed it).

Interesting question that comes out of this is... what really is the 'real' work you put up? would it be the same if went back and re-drew an entire comic I didn't like? What if I changed a few things here and there? I have, changed a few comics in the past because they needed tweaking (for example, this one, where I changed Megumi's lines a little, and got the reaction more in line with what I wanted). I don't do it often, never really in major ways. Mostly, I avoid doing this, if I can.

I guess with the nature of digital media being what it is, you come to understand that it's not the final page that is the issue, its people's experience of it. A lot of people saw the original, but certainly not the entire MT readership. Its hard to change an old strip because most readers people have experienced it, and changing it wont really change what people think of the story. Taking a strip down 5 minutes after posting, and reposting a new version the next morning provides an interesting grey area. Is there an equivilant to the five second rule when it comes to posting things online? Is it more of a five minute rule? Or does the comic just end up tasting like cat fur?

It gets down to that whole 3 ways of experiencing an online comic - reading the archives for the first time to the current point, reading them as they come out, and re-reading things later. each person starts at different points, and experiences them in different ways. It's not like a book or a movie, where just about everyone sees it once for the first time, then maybe again if they liked it. How did people feel when they re-mastered 'star wars'? The new Cgs were great, but the whole change with that green Greedo guy suddenly shooting first so it didn't look like Solo shot him in cold blood... you get into issues of revisionism that can leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Anyways, I don't know really where I am going with all this. I suppose it's just a little bit of a brain bubbler, something that just got me thinking a little. I watched the reaction to my little stunt last night to see what the reaction would be, and I think that most people didn't have too much of a problem with it. In the end, I don't really have much desire to go back and change things. Once a comic is done, I like to think its out of my hair, and if there are problems with it, I can always do better on the next one. This one, I felt, was worth changing, so that's what I did.

Of course, this didn't come without sacrifices. Rather than getting up this morning to spend some quality time with my new PS2, I drew a new frame, rehashed the comic, and fought with crapcast all morning to get it up. :(

Yes, I did something last week I've been avoiding doing for years... I bought a PS2. I didn't want one of the damn things sitting there, tempting me, hounding me... but... well, too late now, there it sits, taunting me. I started .hack infection. I have a copy of Disegea sitting there, and I haven't even opened it yet, and I won't allow myself to until I am done with the pre-press for MT book 2... it's almost some sorta weird zen thing, the self control I am having to exert here....

Anyawys, one result of this purchase was that it dawned on me that my Endgames character designs were really more suited to the Everquest / Neverwinter Nights / Ultima Online kind of RPG than the cuter more anime styled ones I actually prefer so I did some free sketching, and the little pirokiko sketch above was the result :)

-----

- megatokyo merchandise -

Megatokyo t-shirts, posters and other merchandise can either be purchased online at the Megatokyo / ThinkGeek store, or from Wizzywig at various anime conventions around the country, even conventions that I will not be at. Below is a list of upcoming conventions where Wizzywig will be at:

• September 26-28 Anime Weekend Atlanta (Atlanta GA)
• October 3-5 C-Kon (South Bend IN)
• October 18 Motor City Comic Con (Detroit, MI)
October 24-26, Anime Reactor, Rosemont, IL
• November 7-9 - Neko Con (Virginia Beach, VA)
• November 21-23 - Sugoi Con (Cincinnati OH)

Just for reference, here is Piro and Seraphim's con schedule for the rest of the year:

• October 3-5 C-Kon (South Bend IN)
• October 18 Motor City Comic Con (Detroit, MI)
• October 31-November 2 Aya Again 2003 (Ayacon) (Northampton, UK)
• November 4 Lecture @ Dublin University (Dublin, Ireland)

"Schnitzel with noodles"
Thursday - October 2, 2003
[Dom] - 11:30:00
I had a bad day today. No, I lie, I had a really lousy, grumbling at everyone, "Wow, Dom, you really had a crappy day" day.

But instead of taking it out on you guys, I'm going to go the Maria Von Trapp way and list things that are good right now--not to make me feel better necessarily, but so I at least know at some level that I have no right to feel down.

For example, my friend and I are making Full Metal Panic Fumoffu costumes, which will allow us to stalk people and have the "in character" excuse. It's also why I'm going to wear a horse head and trench coat as my Halloween costume.

And I just beat Disgaea, which means that I can slowly start reclaiming my free time and write again--free time that will be copious due to my impending unemployment, which I look at as more of a break than a bad thing. Yeah... a break. I get to write a bunch of projects I have floating in my head, get to work on some MT and Oop-Ack stuff I've long neglected, et cetera.

Speaking of Oop-Ack, isn't it great that Xanie of punched.us is giving me 500 megs of storage and 5 gigs a month for $10, with an extra fifty cents per gig? I'm happy about that.

And I'm happy that I have the Shinobi re-release (with Super Play videos and Kunoichi trailer) coming in the mail via NCS, and that next week I get to hang out with the Real Life guys and play Crystal Chronicles on a TV bigger than I am.

And I'm happy that Godannar is pure '70s cheese and not embarrassed about it (though there is a bit too much of the bouncing jubbly in there for me to enjoy the show).

I'm happy that Battle Programmer Shirase actually exists and is about to air.

I'm happy that Johnny Depp has more arms than he has eyes in Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

I'm happy that I can say the words "Bruce Campbell is Elvis" and people will go "ooh, that's playing in Berkeley next week?" instead of "Wha?"

And I'm happy that I'm full of Snapple and sushi right now. Even after a bad day.

"Artifacts"
Friday - October 3, 2003
[Piro] - 01:00:00
Just a quick rant to touch on a few things tonight. First, for those of you who had pre-ordered Megatokyo Book 2 from IC Entertainment, did not receive an email from us regarding your order, and then emailed us regarding your order... We have your emails and we have been slowly been working our way through them. The book doesn't come out till January, so don't worry, we will take care of you. Sarah has been slowly working her way thru the emails - keep in mind that she's a full time grad student too, so thanks for your patience, :)

Second thing to note is that Seraphim and I will be at C-kon in South Bend, Indiana this weekend. We plan to be there Friday evening and all day Saturday. I know that there are two panels scheduled, just not sure of the times. Sarah and I will spend as much time as we can at our table in the dealers room, so be sure to stop by. Wizzywig will also be there selling the usual smattering of MT goodies, if you need tshirts to paint the house in or whatever :)

Right now I'm mired in the middle of pre-processing all the megatokyo volume 2 comics. It's actually not as bad as it was doing the comics for book 1 - things are in better shape, I was starting to learn some things about how best to put things together. It's interesting, really, to go back and see some of the odd ways I used to do things and how I kept trying new things until I got to the system I have now for assembling the comics.

It was also interesting delving in and finding out why when I imported EPS files into photoshop, all of the black seemed faded - and was actually a few shades lighter than pure CMYK black. Turns out it was something in color management, and now that that is fixed, I'm much happier - no more adjusting levels on the finished comics :)

I haven't turned my PS2 on in a week. It seems like such a waste, but there is little I can do about it now. Maybe over Christmas I'll have time to play with it. .hack has been fun so far, and I really should crack the seal on Disegea, but I worry that Book 2 will never happen if I do that...

Some other, overdue and random linkages, just for fun.

Down at Georgia Tech, the guys at Phi Kappa Theta are hosting a 48 hour gaming marathon called Extra Life for Kids from October 11 to 13th to rais money for the Children's Miracle Network. Check it out, gaming for a good cause. :)

I peruse a number of news sites on a regular basis, Insert Credit isa pretty nice gaming news site that deals mostly with Japanese games, doujinshi games and even cell phone games - in English, no less. Definitely a nice informative little site.

If you are looking for general news on japan, there are a few pretty decent English-language options. There is Japan Today, and pretty decent news site that also had discussion threads for each of th enews stories. The Japan Times is an old standard for basic news targeted towards english speakers living in japan. For something slightly different, there is always the Mainichi Daily News. A word of caution... the Wai Wai section is not for the faint of heart.

Overdue webcomic linkages needed for AppleGeeks. Not sure what's up with the nudist colony in the dorms right now, but its still a damn fine and stylin comic, check em out.

My sister has a webcomic/story of her own that she's posted online. If you like fantasy stories, definitely check out Swenyar's Find

What about Japanese webcomics? Oh, there are plenty of them. The Web Comic Ranking site is a great place to poke around, if you can figure out how to navigate it (understanding a little Japanese helps)

Ok, enough randomness for one night. :) Oh, almost forgot, today's DPD is kind of different, isn't it? ^_^ I thought it'd be fun to make an actual DVD cover for one of the Girl Phase DVDs, sort of an 'artifact' of sorts. The comic above is really just a photograph of the DVD cover I made. If you would like to see the original scan, be sure to visit the Fredart site for the drawing itself. No, I can't give you anymore info on the characters in Girl Phase yet, so don't bug me. :P

-----

- megatokyo merchandise -

Megatokyo t-shirts, posters and other merchandise can either be purchased online at the Megatokyo / ThinkGeek store, or from Wizzywig at various anime conventions around the country, even conventions that I will not be at. Below is a list of upcoming conventions where Wizzywig will be at:

• September 26-28 Anime Weekend Atlanta (Atlanta GA)
• October 3-5 C-Kon (South Bend IN)
• October 18 Motor City Comic Con (Detroit, MI)
October 24-26, Anime Reactor, Rosemont, IL
• November 7-9 - Neko Con (Virginia Beach, VA)
• November 21-23 - Sugoi Con (Cincinnati OH)

Just for reference, here is Piro and Seraphim's con schedule for the rest of the year:

• October 3-5 C-Kon (South Bend IN)
• October 18 Motor City Comic Con (Detroit, MI)
• October 31-November 2 Aya Again 2003 (Ayacon) (Northampton, UK)
• November 4 Lecture @ Dublin University (Dublin, Ireland)

"things inbetween"
Tuesday - October 14, 2003
[Piro] - 14:05:02
Before I start, just a quick note. Sarah and I will be at the Motor City Comic Con this Saturday in Novi, Michigan. We should be there, at the Wizzywig booth, most of the day, so if you live in the area, stop by and say hi. :)

It's been an odd month for me. At least three times in the past two weeks I have sat down to write a new rant, but found myself unable to write much of anything. Ideas have wanted to stay vague, thoughts wanted to stay thoughts and not suffer the ignominy of being organized out and communicated to anyone else.

There is always a multitude of odd little things bouncing around inside the protoplasmic goo that fills my brain cavity, but there is something about the cold weather that seems to slow them in their endless tumble. They become harder to corral, more difficult to coalesce into some communicable medium. It's almost like they just want to stay where they are and remain disassociated thoughts, comfortable and freely disconnected in the goo.

It's odd, then, that I consider fall to be my 'creative' season. Back when MT started, one of my earliest rants dealt with how much I like this time of year, when the very nature of the outside world seems to change into something more amenable to my inner thoughts. I don't really know why I have an affinity for this time of year. If you look objectively at Fall and Winter, you can almost see shades of death, of ending, of nature turning itself off to hide until the warmth returns in the spring. So why *do* I like this time of year?

One of the indelible things about being human is that most of us have the capacity to feel emotions. "Oh god," I hear some of you think, "Piro is gonna talk about 'feelings' and 'emotions'. Get me a bucket." Well, like it or not, even that inner groan you feel is a 'feeling'. Everything we do is affected in some way by your emotional makeup. When I refer to emotive things, I am talking about the whole range, even the subtle and mundane feelings. These are the inbetween feelings that are often overlooked in most mass marketed media.

Emotions are funny things. Sure, there are words, phrases, commonly understood concepts that describe feelings. We all know what 'happy' means, what 'sad' means, 'depressed', 'jubilant', 'ecstatic', 'gloomy', 'suicidal', 'bubbly', 'petulant'... human language is chock full of words that describe emotions. We understand what they mean because we can connect them with how we actually feel. An essential part of human communication is the communication of emotions. Words are probably one of least efficient way to describe feelings. People are very sensitive to the signs - body language, tone of voice, the eyes, facial expressions. What's remarkable is how universal most communicable feelings are, even subtle ones

Yet there are inner thoughts, moods, places - the bits inbetween the easy to describe emotions, that I think many of us strive to understand. It's a lot like being able to see something only out of the corner of your eye, or something that becomes less distinct the more you focus on it. This is where 'entertainment' media comes in. We tell stories not because the facts of a story are really all that important, but because the process of experiencing a story lets us feel something we wouldn't get from a simple description. Good stories, or stories that mean something to us, help us experience thoughts and feelings we aren't quite sure how to put into words.

The most important thing about emotions is the fact that descriptions alone don't mean anything - it is the experiencing of emotions them that give them validity. Sort of how you can't really describe a taste, you can only label something you've experienced, and use that as a indicator. There are several levels to communicating information about emotions. You can describe emotions or the state of someone's feelings with a certain detachment. This is what news reports are supposed to be like - objective, neutral, informative. Or you express things in such a way that the reader/viewer actually experiences the feelings you are trying to communicate. This is what most books, movies, TV, anime, manga do best. They are an experiential medium.

Have you ever had anyone try to explain to you their 'great story idea'? It's usually something they have worked very hard on, figuring out all the details, what happens where, who the characters are, the mechanics of the universe, etc. ... and this is often followed by a blow by blow outline of everything that happens. The only feeling you get from listening to this is usually just the desire to claw your own eyes out or strangle the person before you. This is not because the story is bad, per se, but because the method they are using to tell you totally does nothing to convey the emotional content that they themselves feel quite strongly. A big mistake that many people make is not realizing that just because you feel something, it doesn't mean that others will automatically feel what you feel. Communicating what you feel inside successfully is very difficult, and the desire to do this is what I think drives creative people to work as hard as they do on things.

I've had people ask me to describe Megatokyo in a few sentences. I can't do it. I've been ask to describe 'warmth' in a short paragraph. I can't do that either. I think that's because the expression of the story comes out in the telling of it, in the art, in the dialogue, in the experience of it. In this world of Cliff Notes and sound bytes, I think a lot of important little subtleties get lost. And people wonder why I avoid doing the Story and Character section of this website :)

So, I guess in the background, outside of the actual work I've been doing (Megatokyo itself, working on Book 2, etc) there have been a lot of vague inbetween thoughts and feelings brewing in the goo that wants to somehow find it's way to paper. It's raining out today, but it feels oddly comforting, not really sure why...

One good thing about this is that these moods have prompted me to start working on 'warmth' again in those little cubbyholes of time that I can spare. This story has been missing something, and I've been trying to pin it down, to find what's missing, what isn't working. I guess that's where the frustration comes into these things, no matter how much you try, all you can ever do is get close.

But maybe close isn't so bad, it lets people fill in the blanks with their own feelings. Maybe in the end its more important to prompt people to feel, and fill in whatever blanks you've left. Maybe the blanks are important too...

-----

- megatokyo merchandise -

Megatokyo t-shirts, posters and other merchandise can either be purchased online at the Megatokyo / ThinkGeek store, or from Wizzywig at various anime conventions around the country, even conventions that I will not be at. Below is a list of upcoming conventions where Wizzywig will be at:

• September 26-28 Anime Weekend Atlanta (Atlanta GA)
• October 3-5 C-Kon (South Bend IN)
• October 18 Motor City Comic Con (Detroit, MI)
October 24-26, Anime Reactor, Rosemont, IL
• November 7-9 - Neko Con (Virginia Beach, VA)
• November 21-23 - Sugoi Con (Cincinnati OH)

Just for reference, here is Piro and Seraphim's con schedule for the rest of the year:

• October 3-5 C-Kon (South Bend IN)
• October 18 Motor City Comic Con (Detroit, MI)
• October 31-November 2 Aya Again 2003 (Ayacon) (Northampton, UK)
• November 4 Lecture @ Dublin University (Dublin, Ireland)

"Down time"
Tuesday - October 14, 2003
[Dom] - 22:30:00
Please note that the above picture has nothing to do with the work part of my rant and is all about the second part of the rant. I loved working at GamePro and hope to work there again soon, so no, I'm not going to take a P90 to the GP guys

So Friday was my last day at work, and since Seraphim was originally scheduled to take this rant spot, I ran off to my parents' to celebrate my father's birthday. I thought the rant space would be good 'til my Wednesday rant, but, well, look what happened to that.

It was weird cleaning up my cubicle on Friday. There were three years of accumulated gaming crap in that cube, from t-shirts vacuum packed into the shape of race cars to action figures of the vice president and a coconut monkey. And a Butterfinger foam finger, which I need to get to Greg Dean this weekend.

It was also weird saying goodbye to everyone, because they wavered between saying "Goodbye, it's been great having you around and life will be weird without you workin' here" (I was the intern for a good three and a half years, a record for the ages) and saying "psst... check craigslist in a few weeks". It was weird, but not entirely unwelcome, so that's got me feeling better.

But the weirdest thing was that Cliff (also of Real Life) was there helping me clean out my cube after his interview, and if he gets the job, he gets what used to be my cube. So he was there helping clean out what could be his own cube, while at his interview my boss told him "Yeah, we don't expect Dom to be gone long". Which seriously gives me hope.

And then that night, my friends and I went to watch Bubba Ho-Tep, and that restored a whole lot of my faith in the world in general. Seriously. Bruce Campbell had a huge fight scene with a scarab, for crying out loud. How can you claim that life is bad when you've just watched a shameless actor beat an evil "cockroach" with his bedpan and a space heater?

And I'm staying busy, too, what with the second MT book coming soon, and then a lot of other MT work coming after that's taken care of. And nothing cheers up your unemployment period like... working.

So with a lot of cheer under my belt, I then proceeded to read Gunslinger Girl, perhaps the most messed up and depressing manga I've ever read. Seriously. It has my friends saying "oh, NO. NO WAY. That's messed up!" And yet we can't stop reading it, because it's fascinating and (gasp) decently written. Sure, there are a lot of "interesting" name choices, but I got over being weirded out by manga names after reading Puchimon, where the main character is named Melty Bagel. Anyway, Gunslinger Girl is a TV series now, but what I'm interested in is that 'someone' has licensed the manga. Go and get it when it's out in the states--I probably won't get it myself (I'll talk about this in a future rant) but I'll gladly plug whoever translates it, as long as they do a good job.

In other manga news, Chrno [sic] Crusade is also eating up my reading time, partially because the role of Azmalia will be played by Chiba Saeko in the TV series, and also because it's a halfway decent action series with good art and characters I can very easily get to like. I'll talk more about Chrno Crusade later, too.

As a final note, I'm sorry to everyone who's e-mailed me in the past month or so, I swear I'll get to my mail this weekend or next. I bet I have a few thousand in there, which is gonna take a while to sort through, even if most of it is spam or virus mail.

"Betting fools"
Friday - October 24, 2003
[Dom] - 03:13:00
This is the story of how I stuck my foot in my mouth and got into one of the more interesting bets in my life, one that means I have to watch a fairly average (but at least watchable) harem anime called Maburaho. And which may end up with me undergoing approximately 88 minutes of pure torture once this TV season is over.

So I'm hanging out on IRC with Ken, AKA Asmodeus, and he starts ragging on this new show called Maburaho. He mumbles something about a weird-ass premise for J. Standard Bishoujo Harem Anime, and being bored and fascinated, I grabbed the show from him and started watching.

And it turns out that Maburaho is seriously as weird as he mentioned it was. See, Shikimori Kazuki, who's your average shounen anime loser boy, lives in a world filled with magic, and goes to magic high school. Where people leave paper dolls disguised as themselves to skip class, and posted on the bulletin board is "I will not use offensive magic in the halls". But all that just enhances Shikimori's loserness, since he has no hobbies, isn't good at sports, and can only use magic eight times in his life. In other words, he's Big Fat Loser Boy. Everyone knows it.

One particularly depressing day, he comes home to a girl his age claiming to be his wife. While running the hell away from the freak, he runs into another girl who tries to strip him, and while running from HER another girl tries to cut him in half. You know, typical harem anime stuff.

But wait! There's more! It turns out that Loser Boy Shikimori has in him the blood of some of the most powerful magicians in history, and most of the girls are after his "genes" so their children can be the most powerful magicians ever. In other words, they want to have his babies.

Really standard stuff, right? Yeah.

But wait! There's something in the opening that makes you think "Hey, wait, Shikimori's not a loser boy... that little girl called him the best magician in the world".

Enter Seiya, who currently has my copy of Disgaea. We're talking about the series, and I talk about how I hate the generic loser boy archetype that populates the harem (oh, sorry, "Shounen Romance") genre. And I say that things would be so much cooler in Maburaho if Shikimori snapped, released all limits on himself and became, y'know, a villain. And it was up to the main girl, Yuna (pictured above) to save him from himself. The conversation went something like this, though this is by no means an exact transcript:

dom: Looking through the doctor's glasses, Kazuki is full of magic pawaa
dom: He's... burning!
dom: With EVIL, I say
seiya: ...
dom: I swear, this show would be so awesome if Shikimori snapped and tried to destroy the world that looked down on him when he was a weakling. Y'know?
seiya: It won't happen :P
dom: I bet it will!
seiya: I'll take that bet.

And so there it is. If, before the end of the series, Kazuki turns into a villain or even shows strong leanings toward it (His voice actor, Sakaguchi Daisuke, made a great psycho villain in Heat Guy J) then I win. If he goes through it remaining a good guy and probably a loser boy despite his BURNING POWER, then he wins.

Winner gets to force four episodes of the anime of his choice on the loser. Seiya plans to make me watch Divergence Eve, perhaps the most pointless, fan servicy show of the past ten years. But that's not going to happen, because Shikimori will take over the world, and I'll be able to force Seiya to watch Boboboobo Boobobo, which, as the name suggests, is just plain weird. See, Boboboobo Boobobo is the heartwarming story of an afro with a man attached to it, his prehensile nose hair, and the most random situations you can think of. And I know Seiya will roll over and die if he has to watch it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some sleep to catch up on. And book 2.

"Big Air, Dead Time"
Monday - October 27, 2003
[Dom] - 09:00:00
SSX 3 for the Xbox is going to devour me. I just know it.

It's amazing how much of an improvement over Tricky the third installment is, starting with the soundtrack--the fact that there IS a soundtrack that isn't just Run DMC remixed is nice. Unfortunately, EA didn't use the Xbox's capability to let you use your own soundtrack, which is a pisser, but at least half of the tracks on the provided soundtrack are well worth listening to. It's just that it doesn't feel like EA gave the Xbox any love, other than a slight graphical boost and lower load times.

Anyway, one of the best things about SSX 3 over Tricky is that EA Canada stole the best parts of Tony Hawk and shamelessly put them in the game. And while I have never been a big Tony Hawk or SSX fan, the hybrid of the two games has me hooked. The freeform feel of the whole thing, the ability simply to ride from top to bottom without getting involved with those pesky races, even the challenges provide a great deal of variety. And in the age of Wario Ware, variety isn't just the spice of life--the spice is life. Or something like that.

I'm also re-experiencing some of the joy I had playing the Dreamcast Soul Calibur with this one, wanting to win events and earn money not just to upgrade my rider, but to unlock all the art (Adam Warren... love him or hate him, the guy can draw pretty well, sometimes).

In other words... people who've e-mailed me over the past month and a half, sorry, blame SSX 3. Who wants to read e-mail when they can be blasting down a mountain at 70 MPH and pulling physically impossible tricks without blinking?

One last thing. This isn't new, but DAMMIT EA, get over yourselves and start using Xbox Live the way it was intended! Okay, so it costs you a little bit of money. Okay, so it means the servers are under Microsoft's control. But dingblast it, it makes the game FUN. And isn't that what the game is supposed to be about? Ergh. Stupid EA online strategists... leaving us Xbox Live boys out in the cold because they can't be in control.

"over the big pond"
Tuesday - October 28, 2003
[Piro] - 15:15:00
Quick note #1 - the Miho Blanket should be in the Megatokyo / Think Geek store sometime today. I may not have a chance to update this again before i go, so check the Megatokyo / ThinkGeek store under Cool Things to see if it's availible yet.

Quick note #2 - there are some pretty nice unofficial 'guest strips' showing up in the Story Discussion forums - you might want to check em out :)

The nicest thing about announcing my little one week hiatus for Megatokyo in the comic rather than the rant area is that most readers see it. As a result it gives a chance for all those readers who are "tired of all your excuses, you lazy [explitive]" to email me, proclaim in no uncertain terms that they are sick of my whining, the Dead Piro Days, the Shirt Guy Dom days, the lack of comics, the lack of story, the fact that nothing happens in Megatokyo, that they have been gracious in giving me a chance but now I have gone too far and that they will no longer read Megatokyo.

Now that those readers are gone, I guess I can speak more freely. I guess i don't have to worry about sounding whiney or that I might irritate those 'sensitive' readers. It's a nice feeling, really - I should do this more often.

The good news is that I'm on schedule with the prepress for book 2, we've had several months of regular comics, and my brain is only slightly more mushy than it usually is. It felt really good to burn that DVD-R and pop it in the mail to Dark Horse yesterday. I still have a lot to do on book 2, but the biggest chunk of it is done. It's all extra material from here on out :)

There are two kinds of tasks, i think. Big things that take up huge chunks of time (like doing a comic, or processing 160 comics for print), and little things - things that don't take more than 10 minutes to do, but when you put them all together adds up to hours of work. Yesterday was a 'little things' day. I don't know why, but it seems so much more rewarding to check off 30 things than just 1 thing at the end of a day.

As for what will be going on here on the MT site while i'm gone, aside from those insane people who actually WANT a week of Shirt Guy Dom Strips, the most common suggestion is to do a 'Guest Strip' week like I did several years ago. Well, there is a reason we aren't doing that. It's called 'learned from experience.' MT readers tend to be rather creative people, and the last time i did the guest strip contest, we received over 500 strips. Do you have any idea how long it takes to read, judge and select five strips out of 500? This was back when we had around 20,000 readers. There are well over 100,000 readers now, and I recoil in terror at the volume of strips we'd get. Weird as it might sound, it'd take less time to just do the strips :P That doesn't mean that this isn't a good idea, and that we won't do a guest strip week in the future, it's just that it requires planning (and we all know how good i am at planning).

I'll be putting up a DPD or something on Wednesday, and while we're in Europe Seraphim and I will be uploading rants and pictures from our activities over there. Also, there is the small worry that Dom has full access to the site, and i won't be here to keep an eye on him.

What are Seraphim and I doing in Europe? Well, we're going to be guests at Ayacon in the UK, and then we will be going to Dublin where I will attempt to give a lecture on 'Publishing your Creative Works to the Net'. Aya Again 2003 will be a fun opportunity to meet some of the European fans and hopefully this won't be my last time visiting that side of the pond. The funny thing about the lecture I will be giving is that the Dublin University Internet Society invited me to give this lecture well over a year ago - in fact, well before I i started doing this full time. It's given me an interesting perspective on it. The lecture will be Tuesday, November 4th around 7pm (I think, I'll need to verify that). If you can come, please do :)

Speaking of international stuff, over the past few years there have been many projects to translate Megatokyo into other languages. I welcome these projects - I consider them like fansubbing projects, as long as they are non-profit and are free to access for all who want to see them, I'm ok with it :) Truth is, I really need to organize them so that they are easy to find, and the efforts are coordinated in an effective way. One example of a translation project that is doing quite well is the German translation project. Last week they told me that they had successfully translated chapter 0 in its entirety. :) Other projects in the works is an Italian translation project and a French translation project.

Probably the most interesting thing about these projects is the software they have developed to streamline the process. It's called MegaLettering, and it involves mapping out areas in the comic where text are, and dynamically replacing this text with the translations. Neat stuff. Hopefully by next year we can see some well organized and focused projects in place in lots of languages, so I can get hate mail in more flavors :P I know there are other projects out there, I just don't have the info in front of me right now :) More on this when I get back.

Anyways, I think that once we leave and head off to Europe, I can relax a little, if only on the plane. I've been madly dashing around trying to get things in order, and I'm ready to just say 'the heck with it' and come what may. :P Once again, I am sorry about the week hiatus on the comic - we'll start rolling along with things when I get back. In the meantime, I've put together a little list of comics and other... links... you might want to check out, just for fun. There is no rhyme or reason to this list, and it's a quickly gathered one, so proceed with caution :)

I'll poke in with another rant once we are in the UK. Thanks all, have a good week!

Webcomics and stuff:

- Winter (it's back!!)
- Demonology 101
- Machall
- Nekobox
- Tsunami Channel
- Trilokan
- Underpower
- URD collaborative manga
- Get a Life
- Slackers
- Movie Comics
- Tea Club
- Follow
- Faito Club
- Strings of Fate
- Skinny Panda
- Tuesday Comic
- Ctrl-Alt-Del
- Little Gamers

Comic related websites:

- Onipress
- Slave Labor Graphics
- Friends of Lulu
- Sequential Tart
- Comic Pulse

Megatokyo reference and fan stuff

- McFinnigan's MegaTokyo Reference
(there are a lot of other good links at the above site)
- Readers guide to Megatokyo
- Megatokyo Database
- CG'd Strips Database v0.75
- the font used in Megatokyo

Total Randomness

- Momotato Daioh
- Natsume Maya's Anime & Manga Webpage
- Moon Phase
- Quarter Iceshop
- Tinami
- Somnambulant Corpse
- Vintage Synth Explorer
- A Cat Shaped Hole in my Heart
- Mill Run Windpower
- SendaiPhoto
- Japan-a-radio

-----

- megatokyo merchandise -

Megatokyo t-shirts, posters and other merchandise can either be purchased online at the Megatokyo / ThinkGeek store, or from Wizzywig at various anime conventions around the country, even conventions that I will not be at. Below is a list of upcoming conventions where Wizzywig will be at:

October 24-26, Anime Reactor, Rosemont, IL
• November 7-9 - Neko Con (Virginia Beach, VA)
• November 21-23 - Sugoi Con (Cincinnati OH)

Just for reference, here is Piro and Seraphim's con schedule for the rest of the year:

• October 31-November 2 Aya Again 2003 (Ayacon) (Northampton, UK)
• November 4 Lecture @ Dublin University (Dublin, Ireland)

"back home slowly"
Thursday - November 6, 2003
[Piro] - 19:33:00
Hi everybody, we're back

Somehow, we managed to survive the trip, and it was an interesting one. I'll put some rantage together tomorrow or Saturday to talk about our trip, but for now, I just wanted to touch base real quick and let everyone know whats up, now that I'm home.

Aside from dealing with the fun over overcoming the kind of jetlag where you are still waiting for part of your inner soul to catch up with you from wherever over the atlantic it still is, i'm working on Friday's comic (much needed, i see, after from what i hear was an alarming level of domage) - I'm not on schedule, per se - I don't think i'll be able to finish before i need to crash tonight, but the comic should be up sometime tomorrow. I want to do a nice one because it's been a while, and thank you for your patience with the little break.

Finally, the Miho blanket is available in the Megatokyo / ThinkGeek store - looks like they went up Monday, so if you would like your own peice of fuzzy dark cuteness, trundle on over and get one.

Back to work on the comic. I'll have a better idea of when i might be done later tonight.

"Talkin' about shaf...shoujo"
Friday - November 7, 2003
[Dom] - 11:00:00
Okay, so a pet peeve of mine (inherited from Seiya, who you may remember from the Maburaho rant, and who is giving me tickets to this year's Big Game) came up in the forums today. See, someone was looking for some shoujo manga, which for those of you who are among the video game/tech population of our audience and not the anime/manga side of it, means "girl's comics". You know, comics with a young female audience in mind. Sailor Moon's pretty much the easiest example out there, though Card Captor Sakura can come close in terms of name recognition.

But see, something I've learned from slugging after Seiya at Anime Expo for a few years is... a disturbingly large amount of anime fans throw around the terms "shoujo" without knowing fact 1 about what they're talking about.

For example. Some people say "CLAMP is a bunch of female artists and they draw cute, therefore everything they do is shoujo". That'd be a big fat no. Look at the rant image. LOOK at it. Does that look like it was meant for a young, predominantly heterosexual female audience? Why, no. It's pretty obviously meant for a young, horny, predominantly heterosexual male audience. And yet people persist in bandying "shoujo" about to describe things, because it's not about sports, violence, or a persistent student's endless quest for sexual gratification.

That kind of assertion, much like many statements made without knowing anything at all about the subject, ticks me off. So this rant is going to be dedicated to teaching you the difference between what manga is meant for a female audience, and what is meant for a male audience.

This article (reposted with permission from the Cal Animage folks at UC Berkeley) is a good start. Quick, simple rules about how to tell the difference. Plot and theme have nothing to do with classifying things as shoujo or shounen--audience is everything.

For example. Love Hina is often described as "shoujo" because it's a romance series. Bah. It's shounen on many, many levels. One, the "one guy surrounded by girls who're all in love with him" convention is more often meant for a male audience than not. Conversely, the "one girl surrounded by prettyboys who fawn on her" convention tends to be meant for female audiences. Funny, that. Two, given how often those girls are drawn in nothing but towels, it's hard to see how it's purely meant for a heterosexual female audience. Three, it ran in Shounen Magazine. If that doesn't convince you, I don't know what will.

Anyway. Please, people. Before you call something "shoujo", make sure you know what you're talking about. Do your homework on Google. Hell, just e-mail me (probably via oop-ack, since I actually check that right now) or ask Seiya at Anime Expo about it if you're really curious.

But don't try and claim that Ah! My Goddess is meant for girls without expecting to get shot down hard by anyone with half an idea.

"circling down"
Monday - November 10, 2003
[Piro] - 13:10:10
Quick note - Sarah and I will be at Wizzywigs in downtown Ann Arbor Saturday from 1pm on. Depending on how many people show, we're going to try to organize things so people dont have to stand in line for long periods of time. Ticket stuff will be handed out starting at 11am, and will tell you what time to come back to the store.

----

Well, like I said above, it seems that I brought home more than just jetlag from my Europe trip. I also collected some sort of bloody head cold that is sapping away what little energy I usually operate with. Yesterday i slogged along the best i could, but honestly, even the drawings i did manage to finish (shown above) are rather blah. I decided that rather than do a substandard comic, that I should accept the fact that i needed to pull a break today, finish this up, and get on track for Wednesday.

This is part of why i hate traveling. It really does kick me around and cause problems for the MT machine, since i'm not only the management team but labor force as well. ^^;; Ah, what i've give for my own personal Magi (and no, i won't explain what a Magi is :P)

Of course, a DPD of any sort is no replacement for a regular comic, but i figured that this might help answer an often asked question of how i put the comic together. As you can see, i tend to draw each frame individually. The sheet above is the sheet i was working on last night. The blanks I use are printed from a Adobe Illustrator file and are really nothing more than a big rectangle with some tic marks that i can use to divide the sheet into two or more frames. Also, this is a straight scan - i didn't adjust levels, clean up smudges or anything - what you see is pretty much what i start with.

Sarah and I had a really nice trip to England and Ireland. It was a lot to do in seven days. For starters, international flights always suck if you don't sleep well on planes. Unfortunately, I can't sleep sitting up, so i was pretty tired when we got there. We had a half day to roam around London a bit before we took a train up to Northampton where Ayacon was being held.

Ayacon was a small con by US standards, but everyone who was there was pretty enthusiastic and energetic - it was a fun con. I think everyone had a good time. The concept of an American con where you could fetch a pint from the bar and carry it around would be rather alarming, but in England it seemed almost natural. Sarah and I would like to thank everyone who attended the the con, including all of the staff, who really made us feel welcome so far from home.

Oh, and i really should apologize for the glib jab at English food. If you really want to know, we enjoyed our meals over there. Just because the English tend to like burgers a darker shade of black doesn't mean you should knock the whole menu :P

There were only a few glitches in our trip. The first came from flying the delightful little airline Ryanair from London to Dublin. Obviously, you aren't supposed to take much luggage with you because between flying there and back, we got hit with almost $200 extra in weight overage for our luggage which was really irritating, but i guess it's just part of traveling. The most amusing part of this luggage 'overage' was that Ryanair's scales added 4 kg to each piece of luggage (compared to what they weighed at the Northwest counter). Funny that, isn't it?

The second glitch was totally not being able to hook up with a fellow who came all the way up from Germany to meet with us in Dublin. Totally my fault, dude. We'll defiantly hook up at SDCC, Stephan. :)

Dublin was quite enjoyable. Sarah and I spent a good part of the day walking around in what really is very much a pedestrian city. The lecture at Trinity College / Dublin University i think went pretty well. The only flub was that i couldn't get my PowerPoint presentation working, but I guess in the end i didn't need it. It was a series of screenshots of old websites that i had done since i started, and I think i'll just go ahead and link them up here in my next rant. Kind of embarrassing, really, but it was fun to dig up the old websites.

The trip home was a nice combination of watching Pirates of the Caribbean, a Harry Potter book i purchased in Dublin, and the lull of a pleasant ride home. I thought i was feeling tired and run down because of jetlag, but at this point it's obviously more than that - seems i picked up a cold. It's not TOO bad, but it is resisting my efforts to think about and do the things i'm supposed to be doing.

For instance, Saturday afternoon was not very productive. Odd things about colds is that sometimes your mind wanders, and freesketching and freewriting can produce interesting stuff. I pulled out an old sketchbook and started drawing. Maybe it was watching the 2 nd Haibane Renmei Disks from Pioneer/Geneon [subliminal] you will buy these DVDs [/subliminal] but i started scribbling out the story for a little doujin project i've been thinking of doing for next year's comike. I've placed one of these sketches on Fredart for your pusual. The story itself is interesting. I normally don't like writing within the confines of other people's creations, but there's something about the structure of the Haibane Renmei story the lends itself to what i'm doing, so it'll be interesting to see if anything comes out of it.

This weekend (that's November 15th) Sarah and I will be at the Wizzywig store in downtown Ann Arbor doing a signing - not sure of the times yet, but i'll be spending a good chunk of the day there. Depending on the turnout, we're going to experiment with some ways to have to spend so much time waiting in line just because i am so damn slow. ^^;; After that, we're done for the year, i think...

"Trouble for the ear taco"
Wednesday - November 12, 2003
[Dom] - 16:00:00
Yeah, like there was really that much money to be lost by this phone-game-thing anyway...

"embedded apple logos"
Monday - November 17, 2003
[Seraphim] - 15:20:03
I have to thank all the wonderful taxpayers out there who in part funded my student grants which allowed me to get a Powerbook. I love you all. It is so beautiful. I have always wanted one and now with the final year of grad school - I need one. Seraphim has had one in the strip for three years but I haven't really had one. It was all lies. I am finally l33t.

Piro named it Nemu, the sleepy librarian, from Haibane Renmei. Mine should have been Reki, the smoking bad girl, but Piro already claimed that name for his computer. I thought I would be really wedded to the PC but I dropped it quicker than a bad husband in a quickie Reno divorce. I kind of thought that it was going to be impossible to use like the 10 million iMacs the U of M library bought. What is with the worthless mouse on those? Piro never lets me use his G4 so how was I supposed to know it would be heaven. I wanted to give it a test run to see if I could leave the apple imprinted in Piro's forehead but he wasn't interested in participating in my experiment. L053r. I'll have to wait until I see Asmodeus. With him I won't ask for permission.

Why is the black cat from Trigun in FLCL? Or am I the only one who sees a resemblance. I picked up the manga and I really like the art style but what the hell is going on? Piro has read the manga, seen the anime, and claims it has had an influence on MT and yet he doesn't have a clue about it either.

We watched the final two disks of Risky Safety. I really like the episode at the temple. I think everyone could use a temple goddess bestowing blessings. There is also a 'silent movie' episode which is very cleverly done. But then there are the two Momotaro legend episodes that are presented as if it is told as a child's picture book story. That means there are a bunch of still illustrations and the camera pans over them. There is about 30 seconds of animation between the two. Cheap, but very cute. Hmm, artistic story concept or no budget? You decide. Piro considers Safety part the inspiration for putting Seraphim in MT but I think Seraphim is more Risky. I'm strangely drawn to the little apprentice Shinigami. I want to cosplay as her next year.

I also recently picked up 2/15: The Day the World Said No to War. It is a book of pictures and commentary from peace rallies that occurred around the world. An interesting demonstration took place at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The picture and story are in the link. After being told that anyone organizing a demonstration (or a union) would be fired and then forbidden to wear their National Science Foundation issued extreme weather outerwear for a protest, 10 people went out on the icepack to protest Naked Aggression. At least one person lost his job after the demonstration. Hear nothing, speak nothing, see nothing - or else.

Piro and I are still sending comics out via email to troops who otherwise don't have access. If you know anyone who is deployed and would like to be on the list email me the address and I'll add them. We try to do what we can but our efforts are woefully inadequate so I'll tell you about a one man and a few friends operation who is sending comic books overseas to the troops. A friend of a service man began Operation Comix Relief. He was also featured in the official military newspaper Stars and Stripes. So far they have sent out over 500 packages to 10 countries and they are committed to sending out comics free of charge to any troops who request them. They take donations of stamps, comic books, and dollars via snail mail at Operation Comix Relief, 8 Capri Drive, Framingham, MA 01701. If you want to send a small donation and Paypal is more convenient, Piro and I are willing to take collections through the MT account and forward them on to OCR in a lump sum from the MT Fans. Email me if you are interested and I'll send the information.

"pirowalking"
Thursday - November 20, 2003
[Piro] - 12:24:00
As i've said before, the hardest part of doing Megatokyo is the writing. People ask me all the time how far in advance I have Megatokyo planned out. The answer is yes and no. Do i know generally where Megatokyo is going? Yes. Do i have a word document that has the next 20 comics scripted out, complete with comments, scene descriptions and comic layouts?

Hah, right. Excuse me while i laugh myself silly.

If you must know, I'd LOVE to have such a document, but the sad truth is that it will probably never exist, not the way I work. Writing a story is a lot like focusing in on a picture. You start with a general idea of what the story is, where it is going and the general concepts you are trying to get across. After this, there are several degrees of 'focusing in'. You get more detailed about what happens within the story, adding more levels of details as you connect the dots and weave the threads together. This is all a nebulous process - it's a lot like pulling things out of thin air and trying to make something solid. It can be very frustrating sometimes.

The final step is actually one of the most unpredictable: pulling together the specifics of what actually happens in the story. You have to pull the actual moments into sharp focus - The scenes, the events, what the characters say, etc. I think if i were any sort of professional comic writer and artist, I'd finish this part of the comic writing process before i started drawing the actual comic itself. This is actually pretty rare. I usually have a vague idea of what the comic is going to be, a few scribbles on paper, some loose setup in my head, and then i start drawing.

The nice thing about this approach is that it lets the dialogue and the art bounce off of each other, and i can take advantage of the flexibility to make an ok comic better on the fly. There is an ad lib quality to it that i'm not really sure how to match in a development phase without drawing the final frames. I've been doing MT this way since it started but I keep saying to myself i have to change, start writing ahead further, finalizing strips sooner, doing more development at this last 'focusing in' level... It's a lot harder than it sounds.

When i started working on 'warmth' last year - trying to take it from that nebulous idea phase to the production of actual, real, panels for it - I learned something about the comic creation process. With MT, each page stands more or less on its own, and the story stumbles along one page at a time. I bring each page into focus one at a time, and following pages are in many ways solidified by what happens in the page before it. With 'warmth', i was trying to pull together 15-30 pages of material all at once. What startled me was how hard it was for me to do this. I found myself not able to move very far forward without actually finishing bits and pieces of the comic first.

That's why the initial release of 'warmth' wasn't very good. The first 3 pages, then the three after that, came out really well. The remaining pages fell apart and I ended up cutting it short because, well... i felt stuck, and that things weren't coming together quite right. Sobering, really, to see a concept you are so keen for not living up to your expectations.

Since that time, i've been able to step away from that first bungled attempt to bring 'warmth' to life, and i've had a chance to rethink some things. There were vast gray areas in the story that needed resolution, stretches of flatness that was devoid of the kind of character and life that it should have had. It doesn't matter how strong a story feels to you, if the mechanics that hold it together are, well, mechanical and lifeless, then the story is not going to communicate well to others. Thankfully, i'm pretty thick headed about not drawing things that i don't have a feel for. In recent months I've spent a lot of spare time trying to reduce the mechanical structures holding the story up and replace them with living structures - giving the story the soul it's supposed to have..

Much of what i've been experimenting with can be applied to Megatokyo as well. While its bit-by-bit nature makes it easier to create comics with ad lib life to it, I do think that getting deeper into the story development process for MT will only improve things. Honestly, Chapter 4 isn't bad, but there are a lot of things wrong with it. There are so many story threads that they are overpowering the little segways that can add spice and humor to it. Hopefully i can do a better job with the next chapter. We'll see.

Originally, i was going to cut back on convention appearances and other travel next year to give myself more time to work on things like development, but... well... things didn't work out that way. ^^;; From the look of things, it's going to be another busy year of traveling, and it starts with a bang for me - thanks to the good folks at Anime Expo Tokyo, i'll be visiting Japan this January. :)

It's been nine years since my initial visit to the place where all of my stories seem to take place, and i'm looking forward to having a chance to recharge a bit of that inspiration that helped form them. Anime Expo Tokyo is a con where they are attempting to combine the best elements of American and Japanese style conventions into one, and they have invited me as an American guest. Anime Expo Tokyo takes place this January 16-18, 2004 at the Sunshine City Convention center in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, Japan. There are quite a few Japanese guests, from Kikuko Inoue (Beldandy in AMG, etc) to Akamatsu Ken (Love Hina) and many others (a full list is on the website). I know that there are some MT readers in Japan - not as many as here, but it should be fun. One thing they really hope to do is attract fans from outside of Japan, and the con is set up to take care of english speaking fans, and I very much welcome the universality of the fandom that surrounds the things we like. [oops, seems like its too late for the travel packages ^^;; - piro] Its worth checking out if you feel like doing something crazy like, fly to japan on a whim... wait, where have i heard that before...

I've also managed to set up and start to organize the rest of my convention / travel schedule for the year. Don't fret if you can't fly out to Japan to see me at AX Tokyo, Seraphim and I ended up planning to travel as much, if not more, than we did last year. ^^;; Here are some of the conventions that we are confirmed for, so you can plan ahead a little if one is in your area:

- Katsucon - Crystal City, Virginia - Feb 13-15, 2004
- Megacon - Orlando, Florida - March 5-7, 2004
- Sakuracon - Seattle, WA - April 23-25, 2004

There are more, but for now that's what's been confirmed. It's looking like I might be going to Anime Central, Fanime, A-kon, San Diego Comic Con, Otakon, and a few others this year. Ugh. I think i need my head examined...

Quick notes to be added here - be sure to read Seraphim's recent rant where it talks about Operation Comix Releif if you haven't yet - its a good cause.

"Interactivity"
Thursday - November 20, 2003
[Dom] - 23:00:00
A note to MegaTokyo fans who're pen 'n' paper gamers: due to Dunjin Master's intervention, I'm currently statting up major MegaTokyo characters using the SpyCraft system. While they're by no means official RPG stats, they're my take on how to turn the guys into D20 characters. Check out the ENworld thread here. I've currently completed statting up Piro (why people would want to play as him is beyond me), Junpei and Dom, with Ed and Largo coming soon

So I've gotten back into a gaming groove, which is nice, all things considered. Things could be much worse. But what's interesting is how vastly different the games I'm playing are.

See, on the one hand I'm playing Phantasy Star Generation:1, which is Sega's PS2 remake of their Master System classic. I'm loving it, mostly because--bless Sega for this--they finally instituted an auto-map feature for the dungeons, which makes the game much more palatable than it was on the Master System. The difficulty seems to have been lowered a bit, but I don't care--I'm basking in the nostalgia and keeping Final Fantasy X-2 away from the TV while I'm at it.

But at the same time, I'm playing Da Capo ~Plus Situation~, a visual novel with an emphasis on the "novel". As opposed to the amount of control you have over your characters in any standard RPG, Da Capo reminds me of the second disc of Xenogears in that it's a festival of hitting "confirm". But for some reason, I don't mind it as much as I minded Xenogears--perhaps because I came into the "game" knowing that I was going to be reading a story rather than trying to play an RPG, and without the 30 hours of playing an RPG before settling into "press confirm" mode, I was much more used to the idea. It doesn't hurt that Da Capo's text scrolls by about 30 times faster than Xenogears' slow crawl, and that the Japanese language is much more compact than English. But the fact remains--it's funny how I turn my fingers off when I'm playing this visual novel, and then I go right out and start planning RPG turns.

Maybe I'm just turning my mind off when I play Da Capo--but that's not it, really, since my Japanese isn't good enough that I can process it on the subconscious level. Maybe it's just that I find the pink bear outrageously funny, especially given how many drugs the scenario writers had to have taken to come up with her. Maybe I'm just finding a relatively brainless way to take a break from nonstop RPGs when SportsCenter isn't on... but it's still an odd mix of games I'm playing right now.

Oh. One last thing. It amuses me that some readers who read the rants still don't know that I went to Cal. So here's proof, with a small time remaining before the next Big Game: Go Bears! Beat Stanfurd!

"Superstitions"
Monday - November 24, 2003
[Dom] - 12:00:00
So, there I was at halftime in Stanfurd. Our team had coughed up the ball four, maybe five timse in the first half, and we were down 10-0 at the midpoint of the game. Cal fans were quiet, demoralized and grumbling "Why isn't this team consistent?" while Seiya and I were noting to each other "you know, it's a miracle we're only down ten".

As Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News put it, "What happened, in a manner of speaking, was this: Cal loaded the Axe onto a cart, hauled it to the front door of the Stanfurd athletic department and pleaded with the Cardinal to take it." (I know there's more to this quotation, but that's the first half for you)

And so, with no solace in sight, I turned to the last resort of the educated sports fan--purest superstition.

See, I have this theory that I came up with back around 1999, when Pac Bell Park first opened. The more sugar I consume while my team is on offense, the more likely it is for the team to score. If I eat it in one bite, the score will be bigger/better than if I just snarfed it down. I think a few friends have pictures of me with entire bags of cotton candy in my mouth, and dingblast it, it seems to work.

And so, I armed myself with some of Seiya's leftover Halloween candy, and snarfed down 3 rolls of Smarties in about 4 seconds after the Golden Bears had the ball. They scored a touchdown, of course.

Amusingly, I talked to a number of other Cal grads and students, and many of them regaled me with their tales of how their specific superstition helped the Bears win the Big Game. Some people were forced to eat fried chicken in exchange for the touchdowns. Others were good luck charms; as soon as they arrived at the party, the Bears scored. I can probably ask 6 people and find at least 2 who think their superstition helped the Bears win.

What is it about sports that causes some of the most educated people I know revert to 14th century villagers with virgins on white horses riding in the cemetery? I suppose there's some need to think that you're important to the outcome of the game, especially for those watching on TV who can't try and yell loud enough to make sure the team on the field can't audible, or who can't show their support in person and provide some much-needed morale to the players.

But boy, is it funny to talk about afterwards. Good luck charms, pre-game rituals, odd habits, they're all part of why I love sports. What else, other than sex or politics, can get large groups of people together and turn their brains right off in an amusing manner?

That said, it's time to watch the NCAA Basketball season. Go Bears!

"blue blue glass..."
Sunday - November 30, 2003
[Piro] - 22:22:00
One thing that I just can't seem to shake is my reluctance to write 'rants' lately. I don't really know why. There's all sorts of stuff bottled up in the addled little brain of mine, and I have no idea where this idea that 'rants' have to be organized, orderly affairs with either an informational or educational purpose.

Bleah. Bleah, I say.

Most people may not realize this, but Seraphim was not an anime fan when I met her. In fact, if it wasn't for me I doubt she would have been exposed to it much. I remember the first time I tried to explain to her what 'magical girl' anime was, and the look she gave me. I remember when she helped me move and was able to see my VHS fansub collection fill box after box and crate after crate -- and the look she gave me then. I'm still amazed that she didn't run far far away after these experiences.

Anyways, our relationship aside, the fact is Seraphim and I never really used to watch a lot of Anime. I tended to watch stuff on my own here and there and on the computer, but the TV in the main living areas saw remarkably little anime. Ever since I started doing MT full time and Seraphim started coming to anime cons with me, we've been watching more. I can even say with pride that she's become hooked on a few series. Heheh. ph33l the evil influence.

This all started, if you remember, when I threw out most of my old fansub collection to make some room on the shelves (well, to free up entire bookcases, to be exact), with the idea that I'd replace the majority of it with DVDs and over time. So, we started to pick up some DVDs and we've been enjoying some of them together. The only bad part, for me, is that Seraphim prefers (brrrrr) ... the English dubs.

Now, I fully understand that a portion of my anti-dub stance (like many obsessive anime fans) comes from, well, being obsessed with the medium, and having acclimated ourselves to reading and watching shows in Japanese. Having done this, we get all the right emotive cues from the Japanese voice tracks and enjoy what we are watching without problems. Part of my aversion to dubs also comes from the fact that years ago dubs tended to be... REALLY bad. So it was with a kind of abject horror (and loosing the argument ^^;;) that we have been watching the stuff dubbed.

It's actually been an interesting way to experience some of my favorite shows. Some of the dubs have actually been amazingly good. For instance, they did a fantastic job on Fruits Basket, and even the Trigun dub was pretty good. It felt almost sacrilegious to watch Haibane Renmei dubbed, but... even that was pretty good. Probably the most amusing dub we saw was for Mao-chan. Mao-chan is cute, kinda pointless, and very odd, but when the gal who does the English dub for Misora says 'I must protect the peace of Japan, I say, with high spirits!' ... I don't know why, but it cracked me up, and its become somewhat of a standing joke around here.

Like I've said a half dozen times, my Japanese is not very good. If you were wondering where the Japanese I do use in the comics comes from, its usually Asmoedus (who is Japanese himself :) who helps me out. Even so, I still prefer the original Japanese tracks. Part of this is elitism, I agree, but a part of it isn't. If it were pure elitism, I would refuse to watch the English dubs. It's much better to be open minded to them and see just how far English dub actors and actresses have come over the years. But there is something interesting about the disconnect you get from listening to something in a foreign language. I've talked about this before (I should dig up the rant but I can't find it... yes, the MT site will be getting a search function sometime next year :), but sometimes just tuning into the emotive content of speech without actually knowing what is being said can be enjoyable and moving, if you open yourself up to it.

For example, one of the things that most anime fans in the States avoid like the plague are drama disks. You know, the kind where voice actors act out anime skits for radio shows or as part of a CD drama collection. I love these things. Even though many of the ones I have I have no clue what is going on, some are a lot of fun to listen to. The Bannou Bunka Neko Musume Cds are a riot, and the Shin Kyuuketsuki Miyu disks are very haunting. The Kanon drama disks, for example, are really excellent disks. Even if you just have the basics of what is going on, the acting really gets through to you - especially in the Ayu and the Makoto disks. they are very moving. If you have a grasp of the story, they hit you more than the TV anime does. I just recently picked up these disks. The Akiko tribute disk I haven't listened to yet, but the Mai one is also really good. Dare I say the Nayuki disk is one of my faves? Kouda Mariko's voice is to die for. Ok, I'm obsessed. ^^;;;

Of course, if I were to put one of these on in the car while we were driving somewhere, I'm sure I'd get the same look I used to get when I first tried to explain the nuances of magical girl transformation sequences. :P Some things work best with headphones.

There have been a lot of really good anime shows lately. Of particular note is Shingetsutan Tsukihime (True Chronicle of the Moon Princess). This anime is based on a highly successful doujinshi (fan-made) game by a group called Type-Moon (that's the commercial group they are now, this link is for the doujin group site.). In much the same way the Hoshi no Koe ('Voices from a Distant Star") guy made me feel totally pathetic by animating this masterpiece all by himself, I feel absolutely inadequate next to the Type-Moon guys. I aspire towards making a deep, complex and emotive game and complex stories, these guys did it successfully, and garnered such a following that its now an animated series. Bleah, I say!

Putting my feelings of inadequacy and the desire to stick my hands into a food processor aside, it's an excellent anime (tho I admit, it wont appeal to everyone). It's inspired me a little, here and there, so much so I almost found myself drawing Kotone in Arcueid's outfit for the last DPD ^^;; I haven't played the game, or let Asmodeus or Cortana tell me what happens, so I've just been patiently waiting to find out what happens. Also, I must have the Soundtrack. And the... ok, you get the idea :P

I dunno what it is about me and my affinity for vampire stories like this. I need to keep my morbid side in check sometimes, lest it spill over into MT or other things...

Enough rambling for this rant. I think I'll just meander along like this for a while. Hope you guys don't mind, I'm just in a mood to talk about little things.

Oh, and next time, I'll talk a bit about Clannad. Word is that the game will finally be released early 2004. Yay!

"Backing up"
Wednesday - December 3, 2003
[Dom] - 22:00:00
There was going to be a rant some time in the last week. I swear.

But I'm going crazy. So don't mind me, I'll rant on Friday when this rant space will not be filled with invective and self-doubt.

"the joy of deadlines"
Friday - December 5, 2003
[Piro] - 11:00:00
Ok, just a few quick comments today. My deadline for getting book 2 done is monday, so that's what I'm concentrating on this weekend. I'm about a week behind my original goals (my self-set deadline), but things are still on schedule for the January release. The book is coming together really well. Rather than comment on what I've been working on for it, I'm going to try to finish it first, and then comment on it.

That said, I'm off to work. There is a good chance that Monday's comic might be late as a result of this (as in, I might not actually do it till monday) but it all depends on how much I get done today and saturday. Thanks for your patience. :)

UPDATE:

Oh! I just came across this today, and its very much worth pointing out. I was checking out an article over at the Pulse on a new Antarctic Press title called "Legends from Dark Wood", mainly because the artwork really caught my eye, and i did a double take when the artist for this title mentioned that he had done a guest strip for megatokyo before...

And sure enough, John Kantz did this highly amusing guest strip as part of our guest strip contest back in July 2001! Even if i had not made that connection, I was gonna pick up this title when i went to the comic shop, because frankly it looks pretty good. :) Way to go John, and good luck with the new series!

"Back to the mailbox"
Monday - December 8, 2003
[Dom] - 13:00:00
Okay, so it took a little longer than I thought to get back into the mood to write. I'm sorry. But with that out of the way, I'd like to poke at my mailbox, which I'm finally starting to read again.

The most surprising mail I've gotten in the last few months was from Christopher Maden, who's running for the California Assembly. He's going up against Leland Yee, and take a look at this:

You have probably heard by now that California Assemblyman Leland Yee (D-SF) is introducing legislation to add violent video games to the definition of "harmful matter", which currently is only prurient sexual matter under state law. This would make it a crime to sell them to minors.

I happen to be in a position to fight the issue, as his opponent for Assembly next year.

Below is the text of a handout I gave to the press at his press conference this morning. His staff asserted that, despite the ESRB system (thanks for Friday's strip, Greg), 70% of stores will sell M-rated titles to minors.

What is your anecdotal experience? Some of you are younger adults; do you get carded? I am not much of a gamer myself (though I greatly enjoy all your strips, which is why you have the dubious honor of receiving this e-mail). How easy do you think it really is for a youngster to buy inappropriate games? Do parents have the tools they need to monitor their children's consumption of entertainment software?

What do your readers think?

What do my readers think, indeed? Check out Chris Maden's handout on Yee's proposed video game ban here, and if you wish, contact him via the address found there. It's an interesting issue, to say the least.

In a lighter note, I got a mail from John Balbach, an assistant professor of physics at GWU, after my Superstition rant. He had this to say:

I was recently at a conference of nuclear magnetic resonance scientists, at which a dozen or so of us were sitting around a table drinking beer and swapping lies. Topics of discussion were wide ranging, and at one point we hit upon a favorite of scientists: the rise of superstitious behavior in society. People were bemoaning the continued presence of horoscopes beside the funny pages of the newspaper, using crystals to better health, and other such activities. All of the people at the table were experimental scientists, so I asked if any of them did not have some sort of ritual or superstitious behavior that they rigidly adhered to in their labs because otherwise the equipment would inexplicably fail to work. None were able to say that they did not, and every single person at that table had a Ph.D. in either physics or chemistry.

Superstition is everywhere.

And that was the highlight of that week. It's good to know that people who've spent decades unlocking the secrets of creation still knock on wood to make themselves feel better. Thanks, John.

The nice girls at Broccoli sent me a very nice Christmas card, which is appreciated, and then pointed me at something I didn't notice before--Galaxy Angel, which I've avoided because it was distilled, bottled cuteness, is written by Mizuno Ryou, who also wrote Mahou Senshi Riui and Record of Lodoss War, two of my favorite anime fantasy stories. So I have to check that out when it comes out next year.

And in oop-ack news, I've been talking back and forth with my cosplaying twin Henry Lee, and he's gearing up to hold a MegaTokyo cosplay contest through Oop-ack and American Cosplay Paradise. Fred and I are assembling swag for prizes, and I've managed to wrangle out a promise from Fred that he'll give some original sketches to the cosplayers who win--so if you're interested, check this space for more info soon. I don't have an e-mail from him to post for more information, but I do have a picture of him molesting a traffic cone, does that count?

Anyway, with that, I'm out. Back later with a Fred-like introspection on writing... I think.

"Words, words, wor... images?"
Friday - December 12, 2003
[Dom] - 12:00:00
I can't write the same way I did three and a half years ago. I blame MegaTokyo.

Helping out with this comic for three and a half years has pretty much shaped my life. I started as a computer science major with a strong interest in writing short stories and poems. And then Rodney/Largo roped me into editing some scripts that he'd written, because I had a reputation for being anal about spelling and grammar.

And, after three and a half years of poking at various scripts, here I am with a degree in English, focusing on "folklore, culture and mythology" (read: comic books and movies). My junior paper was on Transmetropolitan. My senior paper was a movie script. Well, okay, I had two senior papers, and the other one was a Faulkner essay. But one of them was a screenplay, and that has to count for something.

Another sign of change is that I simply can't write short stories anymore. Not that I was particularly good at writing them in the first place, mind you--I was trying too hard to write stream of consciousness, and in doing so tended to wander off on tangents. But writing scripts, reading screenplays and studying graphic novels by the metric assload has rendered me incapable of writing a short story without thinking "Hmm, this part would be much better illustrated, so I could use body language and foregrounding to express everything in a few strokes of a pencil instead of 200 words. And then in the next panel, I could shift this and this to fit, and..."

I bet that Will Eisner is patting himself on the back right now.

So, yeah, anything I write these days has to be a script, or I lose track of where I'm going. While I'm not sure whether or not this is a positive development, it's certainly gone well with my sporadic writing style. Every so often when the mood strikes, I'll sit down with a notebook and scribble down some dialogue and stage directions. If I like it, I start building around it until I have something resembling thirteen to twenty pages. While I tend to throw out a lot of what I write, I've gotten a lot of practice to the point that I'm almost satisfied with my technique.

How this applies to the back end of MegaTokyo--the comic, not the website--is interesting. Fred often starts with art and fits dialogue to it after the art is finished to his satisfaction, similar to the old Stan Lee method. It frustrates me to no end, since I always start with dialogue and adjust the image in my head to fit it, but most times we meet somewhere in the middle and no one ends up bashing their heads against the wall.

Sometimes, I get the urge to write a short story again. But after a few minutes, it always turns back into dialogue with stage directions, so I don't know if I'll ever write a whole story again. I also don't know if I care. Because, dammit all, I like writing for comics. It makes my short attention span happy.

"Geld oder leben"
Monday - December 15, 2003
[Seraphim] - 03:44:00
OMG. Oh my god. Ohmygod. oh my gawd! Piro and I headed out to do some Thanksgiving Eve day errands and when we got up to the bank police were pulling in and blocking off the exits. It had been robbed just before we got there. It's crazy – had we made the light down the street just a few minutes earlier we would have been there during the robbery. The poor bank ladies. They are just a bunch of hard working, middle aged ladies who can count really well. Years ago Piro was actually in a bank when it was robbed. He walked out and the bank manager locked the door behind him saying the bank had just been robbed. He was probably walking across the parking lot with the robber. Piro was all cool about the our local bank being robbed – with his experience and all- but I was freaked. I can't believe someone robbed our branch. When ever we go to the bank now I tell Piro to pick a branch that isn't being stuck up.

I finished my classes on Friday. Cue Handel's Halleluiah Chorus. I read over 100 pieces of children's literature, had a killer group project, and I don't even want to talk about government documents. I'm not proud of what I had to do to finish. I completely researched, wrote, and edited a semester long term paper on Reading Material for Learning Disabled Youth and Young Adult Readers in slightly less than 48 hours (any of my fellow students, please do not point this out to the professor, I don't want to get busted again!) I'm not really looking forward to the instructor's commentary about it. It was definitely a Calvin moment.

I did have to read, watch, or listen to a lot of children's media. My favorite was the box set of Schoolhouse Rock! I can't believe how many of them I remember. "I'm just a Bill" is hilarious – especially when you are taking a government documents class. "Bill" tells the kid that only a small percentage of bills ever become public laws (it's around 5%) and that he could end up dying in committee. It is a riot. Take a look at all the bills introduced by Congress this year. There is one titled Concerning the national cheerleading championship of the University of Central Florida Varsity Cheerleading Team and another one about Congress expressing concern that they feel families should eat dinner together. Our tax dollars at work - inviting cheerleaders to the White House for their historic championship win. Nothing against cheerleaders, but c'mon - historic? There's a couple thousands reasons to get out and vote.

Piro and I have chosen a non-traditional tree this year. We don't sing Oh, Tannenbaum here. Our lyrics go - Oh, Ornament Stand. We are lazy. I think we are getting better because I'm not even sure we had a pseudo tree last year. We are pathetic. Truthfully, we don't have any space to put up our very traditional fiber optic tree and I have no idea how we would protect it from the cats. With the way Hime chews on cables and wiring I don't know how we would protect her from it. What I absolutely cannot believe is that the aluminum Christmas treethat my girlfriend had when she was a child and I that made fun of in a rant last year, is in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. I think my friend's parents claimed it was safer since you shine a color wheel light on it instead of stringing Christmas lights. You probably could string it with lights because it sure isn't going to spontaneously combust being all metal. I have to say that the fact it is in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog doesn't make it anymore attractive.

I want to share the two best things in the world I've discovered this year: One is Delsey luggage. If you ever need luggage go for the kind with 4 wheels on the bottom. They are so convenient. We didn't do all that traveling last year without learning something. The second greatest thing is Amy's Rice Macaroni and Cheese. Not the soy cheese version! It is better than homemade. I am a cheese fiend and this is the best I've had. Why wasn't this stuff around when I was in college. Kids these days have everything.

Thanks to everyone who donated to Operation Comix Relief. Piro and I added all the Paypal fees back in so everything you donated went to OCR to help provide comics to the troops. And Glenn Schmall of Anime Tourist has some kind of a Y2K end-of-the-world stash of comics he can send along. Just teasing Glenn!

After I finished my paper I vowed to not write anything again until next semester so I'm surprised I pulled off a longish rant. I don't know if I'll rant again before Christmas, so I wish you all a Happy Holidays and a peaceful New Year!

"Finger crossing"
Monday - December 22, 2003
[Dom] - 10:00:00
Apparently, it's a good thing when there's an earthquake during your job interview.

Wa.

Hoo. :D

"holiday stuffs"
Wednesday - December 24, 2003
[Piro] - 12:59:00
I'm sorry that I haven't been writing many rants lately. One of the big problems with having all encompassing projects (like putting a book together) is that for a period of time you put a significant chunk of your life on hold. Once you finish the project, everything that you've been putting aside suddenly needs to be dealt with. :) I've dealt with this before, so I'm not really surprised that the tail end of December has been just like that for me.

Rather than trying to dig out all the loose ends of things in my head that I've wanted to talk about over the past few weeks, I think that, for the moment, I'll just take a moment here to say Thank You to the MT community for all the support you have given Me and Sarah over the past year. Looking back, it was a rough year in many respects, but it was also a very good year. Most of all, it is looking like 2004 is going to be a very good year for Megatokyo, and I just hope that I can live up to it.

I always worry about letting everyone down - for example, the amount of missed comics this month was very high. Most of you are used to that, and the fact that it does happen sometimes. It doesn't change the fact that the person it annoys more than anyone is me :) Every year I promise to try harder, and I'll make the same promise again this year.

I'm quite happy with the way book 2 came together. I don't think I'll be letting anyone down with that. Well, there isn't as much under-comic commentary as there was in book 1 - that's a function of the size of the comics. Hopefully the other stuff I did for the book will make up for it. We'll see.

You probably have noticed that we upgraded the forum software recently, and moved all the existing content of the forums to the new forum. There are always hiccups and problems with a move of this size, but I think in the long run this will (and already has) work out and serve the community better.

In the next few months I will be working with some people to rebuild the backend of the Megatokyo site itself. The site itself has outgrown itself and is quite outdated - just the dropbox alone is a huge inefficiency. My goal is to not change the look and feel of the site too much - more to tweak it, and to make it easier to find things and to navigate the site. I'll provide more info on this as the project starts up next month.

Sarah and I will be traveling a lot next year, but my first trip is to Tokyo to go to AX Japan. Part of this trip will be a side trip to Sendai, where I plan to take a lot of pictures, get a good feel for the place, and determine some specific things about the 'warmth' story that I need to visit there to determine. I've been putting time into writing 'warmth' from start to finish and do the development that it needed.

Sarah and I have a lot going on the end of December, and our update schedule might have some hiccups, but I'll try to get as many comics done as I can and try to get in a few more rants before the start of the new year.

Happy holidays everyone!

"Christmas wishes"
Wednesday - December 24, 2003
[Dom] - 22:52:00
Here I am with my family, watching Smallville, playing hearts and talking about karaoke, and I would like to extend a big "Merry Christmas" to all of our readers while I can--I'm mostly offline back with the family, and I'll be leaving for Japan on Monday. So, I kind of won't be in contact for a couple of days (sorry, people who've e-mailed me recently).

Anyway, we're opening presents soon, so I have to go. The next time I rant, I'll probably be in Japan. Hopefully, I'll have a few pictures of underwear vending machines or something.

"we're baaack..."
Tuesday - January 6, 2004
[Piro] - 22:15:00
Seraphim and I are back from our little sabbatical - thank you very much for the break. We took a little road trip, just got away for a bit - it was sorely needed.

Rather than chatter here, I'm going to get back to drawing. It'll be late tonight, or early AM, but the comic is in progress. :)

"Still out..."
Wednesday - January 7, 2004
[Dom] - 23:00:00
Here I am in a hotel room in Ikebukuro. I apologize for not ranting earlier when I was in Osaka and connected, but I didn't have time. A whole lot of things have happened while I'm here in Japan, both on my side and at the home front.

I'll be spending the weekend dealing with family stuff after coming home, and then on Monday I start work at WIRED. I'll see if I can find time to rant somewhere in between.

"breaking in the new year"
Saturday - January 10, 2004
[Piro] - 14:20:00
Update:

Ok, real quick, i'm heading off for japan right now. I'll have net access while there, and i will be updating the site from japan, including when and where i can write some commentary, and show some pictures from the trip. It's as much a research trip as anything. If you are going to be at Anime Expo Toky, i hope to see you there :)

Here's the scheudule for me at AX Tokyo, as far as i know right now. Might change, but this is what i have:

Day 1 (friday):
13:30-14:30
Autograph session together with MIQ (a famous vocalist for Dambine) and Philmoi (the author of Power Puff Girls)

16:30-18:00

Megatokyo Panel Session

Day 2 (saturday):
10:30-11:30
Autograph Session together with Crispin Freeman (a voice actor).

That should do it! I'll be posting updates thruought the weekend and stuff. Next regular comic will be Wednesday (this friday and monday will be DPD days) so i'm only missing two comics for all this. My poor new year's resolution ;_;

piro

----

Well, it's the new year, and I can see that i've already borked three of my new year's resolutions: not missing any more comics, not being late with comics, and doing more rants. It's sorta like declaring that you're finally gonna go on that diet and then falling face first into a three layer chocolate cake. Oh well.

One of the reasons Seraphim and I decided to take a sabbatical last week was because it was quite literally one of the few gaps in the next few months that we had free. The next six months are looking that busy ^^;; So we jumped at it and took a random road trip. It was nice to get a break, recharge the batteries, etc. I would have liked to have been ahead a little before we left, but... since when have i ever done that? ^^;;

Like i say every year, I am going to seriously try to reach these goals, one more time. My first challenge to them is my trip to Anime Expo Tokyo next week. My plan is to finish up Chapter 4 and have enough comics done before i go so that there are no gaps. Hah, i think i just made myself laugh (or cry?). I'm not sure if i'll be able to manage this, but i will try. I am doing a lot of traveling this year, and one of my top goals is to not let these travels effect the comic as much as they have in previous years. Doing this for my trip next week will be very difficult, but there is a better chance it won't be so hard for the rest of the year.

Before i get to my trip next week, i need to mention that month the Dark Horse release of Megatokyo Volume 2 will hit stores on January 21st. Finally :) Many of you who pre-ordered book 2 initially from IC Entertainment will, of course, be receiving your book in the mail, but the rest of you will have many options for picking up the book if you want to get it ^_^. You can order it from the Megatokyo / ThinkGeek store, you can head out to your local comic book store, you can visit your local Waldenbooks, Borders or Barnes & Noble, or you can get order it from Amazon.com, Right Stuff, or pick it up from the nice people at Wizzywig either online, in their store (if you are a Ann Arbor local) or at one of the many Anime conventions around the country... in short, you should be able to find it just about everywhere. Dark Horse and I are committed to making sure that there aren't supply problems - if you want a book, you should be able to find one :) So, just for fun, remember to go out and get one on the 21st and cause a huge run on these books :P - only if you want one of course. It contains Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of Megatokyo, extra material and a short story from the Endgames universe. I worked pretty hard on this book, i just hope everyone likes it - hard to tell when you are so close to it.

What about volume 1? Well, Dark Horse and I will be releasing a re-issue of volume 1 in March. New cover, new size, more extra material, and it will match volume 2 and future DH releases. It's gonna be a mad scramble to get this done (I have to pretty much start from scratch (thankfully I'm getting some help from the Nekobox crew)). The print quality of this book will be far better than the original version. It's been fun working with the Dark Horse people - they are really great to work with, and their attention to quality and knowhow is pretty impressive.

One special little thing that I am doing with Dark Horse and Waldenbooks is a new Megatokyo t-shirt design that you will be able to find at Waldenbooks stores around the country. For the moment, only Waldenbooks will have these shirts in their stores - but if people like em, we will offer them in other venues as well. :) it came out a lot better than i thought it would, they are kinda nice.

One thing i can't believe is that i'm getting on a plane and heading to Tokyo on wednesday of next week. I haven't been to Japan since 1995 - a trip from which much of the mood of Megatokyo and Warmth is based on - so as you can imagine i'm really looking forward to going back. Obviously, i will be doing my best to fill my duties as a guest of Anime Expo Tokyo for most of the trip, but i have a lot of other things planned as well. I don't have a schedule of things I will be doing yet, so if you are going to be at AXT please visit this website for updates or check for information at the con itself for dates and times of things like the Megatokyo panel. Anime Expo Tokyo takes place in Ikebukuro, which is not too far from a lot of the places i need to visit while there. :P It will be nice to refresh my memory and get some new and current feel of what Tokyo is like today.

While Dom just returned from his trip to Japan, Cortana and Kaki will be coming on this trip with me. While there we will be joined by several friends who will help make sure i don't get into too much trouble while I am over there. Tsubasa has already been a huge help and I am looking forward to finally meeting him :). It will be good to see Seizo and another friend, Scott, who will be (i think) acting as translator for me. I am also looking forward to meeting many other friends and new acquaintances who i have only known thru email and IM before.

It should also be fun to have the chance to meet some of the more famous people who will be there - most notably Akamatsu-san (Love Hina), Inoue-san (Beldandy), Momoi-chan (Under 17 concert on friday, w00t!) and REM-san from Device High (yikes, i need to do a little drawing for REM-san yet)... ok, well, like a little webcomic artist from the states is gonna be able to do much more than say hi and pass a scribble or two - but it should still be fun :). I'm sorta terrified of there being a Key/Visualarts booth... Clannad is coming out pretty soon, and i dont think i can financially survive being confronted with the temptation of Clannad goods...

We are very close to being able to launch the japanese version of MT- we're just gonna miss having it up before i go, but it will be close. I'll try to post more information before I leave. Also, I'll be getting online while in japan and doing some updates, post photos and stuff. It's not vacation - it's work, so you will be hearing from me.

The other thing I am doing while there is taking a little side trip up to Sendai to do some field research for 'Warmth'. I will be hooking up with a friend there and spending an entire day wandering around getting down a proper sense of place for the story. People are already bugging me about 'warmth' - patience, people, let me do some research. One of the biggest problems i had doing what i've done so far was struggling to get a sense of place, so that is what I am attempting to do. I need to take a lot of pictures, walk the paths, learn a little about the city the only way you really can - by being there.

My first trip to japan back in 1995 was for very much the same reason, albeit for a different career. As an architect, i had spent a lot of time studying the works of Tadao Ando, and I was eager to visit some of the buildings he had built (some of which i had built models of). One thing about buildings and spaces - pictures can only convey part of the experience. You have to actually walk around in a space, to occupy the space, to really understand it, to really feel it.

Funny how this applies to writing a story about somewhere. Architecture is about creating and manipulating space. Writing often is about dealing with spaces that are already there, and the haphazard interaction of designed and built spaces. The sense of 'place' has a huge impact on who and what we are. Comics are a visual medium - communicating spatial ideas is important, and has a huge impact on mood.

I really enjoyed ArchitectTour Japan 1995 quite a bit, but what i never really thought about at the time was how all the little things, the city itself, the small, unimportant buildings, unimportant streets and vague interaction between it all would have a far bigger impact on my life than the specific buildings i was there to see. Funny how things work sometimes.

"The rundown"
Friday - January 16, 2004
[Dom] - 13:30:00
Here's a quick rundown on why I won't have a real rant until Sunday.

Friday morning, January 9: Arrive in Honolulu airport, go through customs.

Friday afternoon, head home and find out I'm going to be a pall bearer at my grandfather's funeral (I'd found out he was dead on Wednesday Japanese time, Tuesday Pacific).

Monday, start working full-time at Wired Magazine.

Today, head back home to bury Ong (Grandfather).

Please don't send any consoling e-mails, it had been my grandfather's time for--well, we've been waiting for this for a while, honestly. I'll tell you all about Japan and the job next week, I swear.

"Posting from Tokyo"
Saturday - January 17, 2004
[Piro] - 20:34:00
Well, i'm sitting in the press room at Anime Expo Tokyo finally having a few minutes to get online and give everyone a quick update.

First off, even tho this DPD of Largo, Junpei, Sonoda and Rent-a-zilla was something I did on the plane ride over here (i'm sorry, 14 hrs on a plane is just not fun no matter how you look at it) this is quite literally the first 10 min i've had to get online and post.

Oh, it's actually 10:35am on Sunday here, the last day of AX Tokyo. The show is taking place here in Ikebukuro, and you know it's nice when you look out the front door of the hotel and see an Animate store :) Unfortunately, they've kept me busy enough that i've had difficulty escaping into the city to do the photography, poking around and other things i've been wanting to do since i've been here.

One of the main tasks, of course, was to visit the areas where Megatokyo is supposed to take place. One of those areas include Yoyogi, which i've included a picture of above. it has about the right density and is pretty much what i was hoping. Oh, this is where the Megagamers store is located.

We also popped down to Shinagawa and had a piece of pie and coffee at the Anna Millers there. It was finally nice to be able to look around an actual anna millers and see how it works. I managed to get a lot off things right, including the fact that they really DO carry around coffee pots to refill your cup. :) Oh, and i discovered that i draw the skirts on the uniforms way too long. They are actually about mid thigh, but that's just details, i guess. ^^;;

Other that that, i had a chance to present Akamatsu-san with a copy of book 2, and he was nice enough to give me a copy of his latest doujin. Oh, that reminds me, i DID manage to get a few copies of book 2 before i left - a big thanks goes out to Tim and the folks at Dark Horse for really going the extra mile to get it sent to me. The books look REALLY nice - as good as i hoped. They will be in stores on wednesday the 21st, so be sure to pop out and see if you can find one, even if it's just to see it.

Anyways, i feel honored to be here, and there have been quite a number of Japanese anime fans who stopped in to look at the MT and Warmth examples i put out for them to look at, and they very politely asked for drawings of everything from "cute girls" to "girl with glasses". I managed to stay quite busy most of the time. :)

I have a bunch of other things i want to do today, so i'll stop my comments here, because i could go on for a long time about everything i've done since i've been here. It was great meeting Hashimoto-san and REM-san from Device High (they gave me a copy of their latest CD), Tsubasa, Shibahara-san, Suguri-san, Yamamoto-sensei,... so many people. ^^;;

I'm off to Sendai tomorrow to do some research for a day, and then i'll be on my way home. I'll see if i can post more at some point on this trip, but it all depends on if i can get access or not.

I'll be finishing up the artwork for what was supposed to be wednesdays comic on the flight home from japan, so it will be posted either thursday or friday (friday from the look of it). THEN many be i can get on schedule... :P

"Acid dreaming"
Sunday - January 18, 2004
[Dom] - 23:30:00
So, over a week after I arrived safely in SFO, I'm past all the exhaustion and adjustment that comes from arriving in the US a few hours before you left.

Here's my Japan trip, which lasted from December 30th to January 9th. I'll have vacation pictures up on oop-ack as soon as I nab them from seiya, but for now, here's a quick look at the first half of my trip:

December 30th, 2003. My Game Boy saved my life. Seriously. With 13 hours on a plane, then two hours on the bullet train and half an hour on the subway, a borrowed copy of Advance Wars was all that kept me sane. Also--Japan is a really, really poorly labeled country. It took us a good hour to find our hotel, including 15 minutes lost in the subway/JR station. But with all that out of the way, seiya and I safely landed in the Comfort Hotel in Osaka, a pretty nice place with a bathroom that attacked seiya.

December 31st: KOUSHIEN. Anyone who has read this rant when I'm in baseball mode, or has read pretty much any baseball manga ever written, knows the importance of this site. While pretty much everything was closed down, seiya and I managed to get a good look at the stadium where stars are born and forged. We also checked out the very amusing Koushien shrine, which is supposedly a Susano-o shrine for traffic safety, but is really a Hanshin Tigers shrine. I mean, c'mon, they have a home plate made out of stone in front of the place where you hang your prayers.

We also checked out Osaka's Den Den Town, which is sort of a miniature Akihabara. Here, I scoured about 10 stores for Daibanchou, the 18-plus game where you get to take over the world, and no doubt an influence on the freaky dream I had that night. But, like Tears for Fears said, everybody wants to rule the world, and every freaking store in Osaka was sold out. Every one. As a sidenote, Daibanchou's a really fun game--though I, unlike a lot of other people who play the game, hold control and skip through the porn, so I'm actually not getting the 'full' experience of the game. Eh, whatever--I get to rule the world and beat people up. On the clean side of things, I also picked up D->A: Black and Kunochi, which confirms that there are three types of main character which will almost always pull me in: banchou (gang leader), shinigami (Death god), and ninja (badass). The one that has the most exceptions is ninja, since there are few situations where I can imagine myself playing I-Ninja, unless threats of violence are involved.

I also got to play the Lupin typing game in the arcades, which was certainly an interesting experience--nothing like playing a typing game in another language to prove that you suck at typing when you don't have muscle memory to save you.

That night, I had the weirdest dream, which is described (and embellished) above. It was an odd mix of Sega Gaga and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, where I was Nolan Bushnell in the '70s, and taking over the continental United States. There were no drugs involved, just Japanese video games and TV.

January 1st, 2004: Japanese New Year's TV is the best stuff EVER. From daifuku russian roulette to celebrity parenting contests, we saw all sorts of great programming--oh, and a whole lot of SMAP. SMAP's top song of 2003 (of all time, really), "Sekai ni hitotsu dake no hana", was everywhere on TV, and it was the start of a long, long period of time where the song would haunt us.

We went to hatsumoude at Sumiyoshi Taisha, where pretty much everyone else in Osaka was gathered. It was an awesome experience, with everyone coming to wipe off ill fortune, have some really good booth food, and practice that "religion" thing I've heard about. Seiya had some takoyaki and okonomiyaki, while I snacked on sponge cake and taiyaki (which I got specifically so I could take an "uguu~" picture for Fred). I went to Japan for two reasons--to go to hatsumoude and Koushien, and by the third day of the trip, both of those were done. Neither disappointed me, either. I only wish I'd been in Kyoto instead of Osaka, but every single hotel in the Kyoto area was filled to bursting, since everyone else wants to be there, too. New Year's in Japan was awesome, though--bustling without being excessively noisy, beautiful, and a lot of fun.

January 2nd, travel day to Hiroshima. In Hiroshima, after a good 13 stores being sold out, I finally found Daibanchou as Seiya and I met up with Trevmex, our bud in the JET program. Hiroshima suddenly turned from the city of peace to the city of porn as Trevor happily discovered two bags full of questionable material by the river of the Peace Park. If you look at the pictures we have in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome, you'll see them behind his feet. His wife was none too amused.

At Trevmex's suggestion, we got Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, which is infinitely tastier than Osaka-style okonomiyaki, and unfortunately, extremely difficult to find in the US. Then, we happily trundled off to the boonies of Shimane-ken, which has one of the Three Shrines of Japan, and... that's about it.

January 3rd: It's foogin' COLD in Shimane, especially since most of Japan doesn't believe in central heating. I slept on the hot carpet, in front of the TV, which was just about the perfect place to wake up--I get well acquainted with the boob tube in the morning, though I found it difficult to pull my arm out from under the blanket to change the channel. I watched Ashita no Nadja because I didn't want to change the channel, and felt slightly dirty afterward. Heat Guy J (with the second, Chiba-sung ending) cures all ills, though, and at some point we watched a show about a cell phone-toting teenage detective, which was fascinating, even if it was kind of dumb. Once I have $200 to blow, I might even buy the DVD set for it.

But anyway, the order of the day was the Hinomisaki lighthouse, which is probably the best view I got in Japan--even over the Tokyo Tower or the garden in Kyoto. If you're ever interested in going to the boonies in Japan, check out the views--they're great. Just make sure not to drive through Izumo Taisha the weekend after New Year's, because we moved about one block in a half hour. We got there before the lighthouse closed, though, which was a bonus.

On the way back, we stopped by a Japanese supermarket, where I had my first curry pan, and liked it. However, I didn't find any yakisoba pan, which started the next great search after finding Daibanchou.

January 4th: Parting ways with Trevmex, we headed via bullet train to Kyoto, where we saw... nothing, really, collapsing in a travel-weary heap in a genuine ryokan. Japanese TV continued to be weird well after the new year, which was no surprise, but a great delight.

Next rant: Tokyo, baby!

"Sumo over Anchorage"
Thursday - January 22, 2004
[Piro] - 02:45:00
As i start to write this, i'm somewhere over Alaska, on my way home from my trip to Japan. I watching Sumo on the little TV in the headrest in front of me. It's kinda surreal.

Hard to believe that the day started with me leaving the Hotel JAL City Sendai, walking to the bus stop to catch a bus for the 40 min bus ride to Sendai airport, catching a small commuter turboprop for Narita, and then getting on this flight for the 12 hr trip home. The trip home is a few hours shorter (something to do with flying with the winds rather than against them), Of course, when i step off of this plane in Washington Dulles, I still have to fly to Detroit.

Whee.

Ah well, doesn't matter. I'm really looking forward to getting home. Traveling is great, but it always feels good to head home. Besides, i miss Seraphim. This is the first long trip i've taken without her in well over a year. Felt like i was missing my better half all week.

Last time i traveled to Japan it was to visit buildings and architectural landmarks that I had studied in college. I considered it something worth doing because it was connected with what I did for a living. The funny thing is, in the end it wasn't the architectural landmarks or important buildings that impacted my life and my career, it was the inbetween moments and my quiet impressions of Tokyo, Osaka and Kyouto that ended up being of most value. Megatokyo is based on these impressions.

Admittedly, a large factor in my decision to go to japan back then was my growing interest in anime and manga. The tour to look at japan's architecture was as much an excuse to go as anything. What was nice about the trip I am now returning from is that my reasons for going were far clearer - i make a living writing a story (soon to be two stories) that take place in Japan. That requires research, going there, doing the appropriate research that any good writer or artist will do. It's almost hard to explain exactly how you do this.

Trying to absorb a sense of place takes more than just taking pictures and walking around. Actually, on the surface that pretty much is what it is, but there's more to it than that. Doing research for a story isn't, i think, like doing scientific research. I didn't spend all of my wandering around time taking pictures and mapping out neighborhoods. Sometimes i just... walked. Waited a half hour for a train to arrive. Put a can of hot coffee in my pocket to see how long it stayed warm. Stood and looked at a river. Kick back and watched an episode of Hamtaro while drinking a can of Boss coffee. People watching. Looking up, looking around.

It's not much different than what i did last time i was here, only then I had no idea that i'd be writing stuff based on what I was looking at. On this trip i was able to be a lot more focused, to look at specific neighborhoods, look at specific things... It's sort of like expanding on the toolbox of impressions that I had from 10 years ago. I've been able to add a lot to it. A whole lot, actually..

After a week of constant absorption, you sort of reach a saturation point. Last night my brain was saying "ok, i'm full. I'm not paying attention anymore." ^^;; You get to a point where you have to stop looking and start absorbing what you've seen. You have to start making connections, start to mix what you've seen with what you are writing and what you are drawing. That's sort of what i'm working on right now - decompression. Since i can't sleep on planes, that's pretty much what i've been doing.

Oh, I have a bunch of things to relate regarding Anime Expo Tokyo, but I'll save that for friday. I'm kind of in a thoughtful mood, so i'll go with the flow here. It's my rant area, i can rant however i feel like ranting. :P

Something that worked really well was to spend a few hours sitting here slowly reading thru MT from Chapter 1 right thru to the most recent strip. It's odd, but I look back at some of what happened previous chapters and some of it isn't bad, not bad at all. I feel like there are some dimensions to things that I can add that i hadn't thought of before. All in all, Megatokyo works all right. Not bad for winging it all this time.

I've been doing some sketches for warmth, and i think i'll turn now to working on the story a little. I have about three hrs of batter life left, that should get me thru the rest of the flight... yeah, just about. 3:10 left according to the flight data stuff. These little flight data readouts are the best thing ever. You know exactly where you are and how much longer it's gonna take to get there. This ANA plane actually has down pointing cameras that you can tune into. Of course, it's nightime out now, so it's just nothing but pitch black out over northern Canada, but in the daytime it's fun to look down sometimes.

I'll be posting this when i get home, with a picutre or two - so obviously the flight will be done and i'll be home when you see this, but i think i'll be too tired to do much else - traveling wears on you. I feel pretty energized about MT and warmth right now, it was really good to refresh my memory and learn some new things to help fill out some of the density of the stories and the sense of place. We'll see how all that pans out in the comics that i'm gonna have to get cracking on as soon as i can shake jetlag when i get home :)

...

Just a small note now that I'm home - god, what a day. That's a lot of flying. Good to be back. I kinda crashed and had to sleep for a while when i got in. Gonna go crash now to try to get my internal clock back on schedule. I'll post friday's comic as soon as i finish it (should be early on thursday evening). Gonna post some more comments, and some more pictures tomorrow and friday as well.

"Just add monkeys"
Thursday - January 22, 2004
[Dom] - 11:00:00
Chuc Mung Nam Moi, people! Or Gung Hay Fat Choy, Gung Hsi Fa Tsai (Gong Xi Fa Cai for the communists) or Saehae Bok Mani Paduseyo, depending on your culture. I'd say Akemashite Omedetou, but those Japanese freaks don't celebrate the new year properly ;)

Now, let's see, where did I leave off? Oh yeah.

January 5th: Our first day in Tokyo starts with a slight snafu in finding our hotel, once again proving that Japan desperately needs street addresses rather than the block/district/city/etc. system. But what do I know? I'm just a tourist.

It also starts with me finding out that Toubu and Seibu are both attached to the Ikebukuro station--and that Toubu is west of Seibu, which is freaky because the Tou in Toubu means "east" while the Sei in Seibu means "west". I have no idea why this is, and I don't think I want to know.

After checking in at the hotel, Seiya and I immediately head to Yokohama, where we hit the Ramen Museum. We didn't do anything else in Yokohama, because, well, the Ramen Museum is something you have to plan around, let me tell you. The first floor of the Ramen Museum is a fairly run-of-the-mill museum, which runs old ramen commercials on its TVs and has exhibits on ramen bowls, instant ramen, and other stuff. But the bottom floor's the real draw here--underneath the ramen museum is a theme area, set to resemble a city street in the 1950s, complete with Hidden Fortress movie posters. Walking down the stairs, you get the standard "You're going back in time!" cliches, like the clock running backwards and the old posters. But once you're down there, it's Ramen Time.

As far as I know, the best ramen restaurants in Japan are invited to be in the Ramen Museum, and every place sells mini-ramen for sampling the best ramen in the country. There are bigger bowls, too, but those are for chumps--well, and for the people who waited the 45 minutes to get Sapporo-style ramen, which is understandably rare in the Yokohama area. Even though I'm not the biggest fan of pork in the world, this place was awesome. Anyone who has ever had instant ramen (and since many of MT's readers are either college students or in the tech industry, that's a whole lot of you) owes it to him or herself to hit up this museum and try it out. It's that good. Come hungry, since you probably won't be hungry for about a day and a half afterward, too.

January 6th: This is the day we headed to Akihabara, where we bought things. And bought things. And bought more things. I had to buy a new piece of luggage to hold all the crap, but that was easy enough, since I had come into the country planning to get new luggage anyway.

Among other stops, we went to Toranoana, where they have a shrine to Moetan, the English phrasebook for fanboys that you can see in the top left of 510. It's a frightening monument to what people in Akihabara can do. I'll have a picture of it up once I hit up Seiya for the CD he made of our vacation pics.

Other highlights of the day in Akihabara included playing a whole freakload of games at Asobit City, which is now my favorite game store on the globe, due to its tradition of having a row of TVs dedicated to letting people play games that aren't out yet. I spent some quality time with Donkey Konga and Seven Samurai 20XX, which will be the subject of my next rant, and watched the Japanese discover EA's Lord of the Rings: Return of the King game.

I had to go to Gamers, so I did, and that was the only place in Japan I found Magic cards that I could give to my friends... as well as a very "special" card game that I had to get for a few other friends.

To complete my day of being a complete fanboy, we ate dinner at the Taishou Romandou, Sega's theme cafe based around its Sakura Taisen series (which I call Sega's Star Trek--once you work in that franchise, you'll never lack for work again).

The Taishou Romandou was probably the most expensive meal I had in Japan, since the kaiten zushi lunch we had in Shibuya (yes, we did see Hachikou, and even met a friend there) was only 100 yen a plate. Damn good prices for some pretty good food, that kaiten zushi.

But wait, my day as a fanboy wasn't over! I stayed up until 3 AM to watch Chrno Crusade, which is far too short to do the manga justice. After listening to the Chiba-sung ending song, I promptly fell unconscious, exhausted from the effort of being so nerdy for a day.

January 7th: This is the day we did stuff actual tourists should do. A trip to the Meiji Jinguu in the morning was perhaps the most peaceful time I spent in Tokyo, and that includes the time I spent sleeping in my hotel room. Seriously, the Meiji Jinguu, which borders both the Harajuku and Yoyogi stations, is the kind of place where you can forget that you're in a major metropolitan area, and think that maybe you're in the woods or something.

After that, we went to the top of the Tokyo Tower, which is surprising, given that at some point in my life, I was afraid of heights. I got over it at some point, though I'm not sure exactly when. But I certainly got a flash of it from the lowest observation deck on the tower, where you have the 'privilege' of looking about 150 meters straight down. The view from the top was nice, but it was nothing compared to that of Hinomisaki lighthouse--though that may just be bitterness on my part, because the day was too cloudy to see Mt. Fuji.

We then went back to Akihabara to buy stuff for other people, indulging our fanboy sides a bit more before going back to being tourists again and hitting up Shinjuku at night. Unfortunately, the seedy Shinjuku of legend is mostly gone, replaced with a business district, so we didn't see anything shady during our quick li'l tour of the area around the station. Which means that unfortunately, I didn't manage to get a picture of any underwear vending machines or other stuff that Tokyo is infamous for--but I suppose I shouldn't be too disappointed, given what happened in Hiroshima.

January 8th: About five minutes before we're about to head off to Kyoto on our way back to Osaka airport, we get an IM from Genjitsu of American Cosplay Paradise, the site that will soon be running a MegaTokyo cosplay contest. Turns out that his Tokyo stay had been extended by a week, meaning that he was sleeping in net cafes and playing a lot of OutRun 2's Heart Attack mode.

So we met with him at Hachikou, made fun of him (while seiya made fun of me for getting a nosebleed on the train while looking at the strategy guide for some mech game or other) and wandered Shibuya for a while, when we saw the greatest commercial ever. As you may know, Shibuya has gigantic TVs on the sides of many of its buildings (and dammit, that SMAP song was playing on one of them, making it at least once a day that we heard the song), and we got to see a man in a broccoli costume fight a man in a carrot costume, to "Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting". (added 1/23/04: some of you have informed me that this was stolen from Daddy Day Care--a movie which I carefully avoided. I stand corrected, though it was still weird as hell to see on the side of a building and in Japanese)

Did I mention that Japanese TV is weird and great?

That night, we stayed in Kyoto, wandering the area and finding out that yes, Virginia, Kyoto has only two businesses--hotels and temples. Well, Nintendo might count too.

But we decided not to head up the Kyoto Tower, given that we'd just been to the Tokyo Tower, and just wandered the stores. Then, we crashed and got ready for the flight home.

January 9th: As we were about to head out of the ryokan, the woman in charge said to us that we HAD to go to this one garden nearby, and, being American, she promised us samurai. And while there were no samurai at the garden, it was yet another place of serene beauty we found in the middle of a city.

Then we went to Osamu Tezuka world, which was basically a couple of bookshelves, a gift shop and a theater. It would've been disappointing if we hadn't seen an episode of Tetsuwan Atom/Astro Boy made exclusively for showing in Kyoto, so that turned out alright.

Then we headed to Kansai Airport, and that's my trip to Japan in a nutshell.

Some random things that don't really have a place in the chronological narrative, so I stuck them at the end:

- I counted 23 McDonald's while I was there, and not one Burger King. Don't ask me why I counted McDonald's, because I don't know either.

- You remember how I said the bathroom attacked Seiya on that first night in Osaka? Well, it's because he decided to test the "shower" function on the toilet, without actually sitting on the toilet, as it was intended. He walked out of the bathroom sheepishly that night, saying "There's no real good way to explain this..." with a wet shirt.

- I wanted to, but I never found time to just ride the Yamanote line in a circle for a while and watch people on the train. Oh well, I had plenty of time on the shinkansen.

- Governor Ahnold wanted to declare state bankruptcy while I was in Japan. If it weren't for the job that was waiting for me when I came back, I think I would've stayed.

- Rosenqueen, from Disgaea and La Pucelle, is a semi-real store. It's in Messe San-o, behind the boys' live and next to the Konamilk. I bought a Prinny shirt.

- Buying omikuji (new year's fortunes) until you get "lucky" doesn't really work. At least not for trying to get Daikichi.

- Never, ever go to the boonies for about 4 days after New Year's. It's all closed.

And with that, I leave you. Next time, why Seven Samurai 20XX is not a complete disgrace--though it's not exactly an epic, either.

"my boyfriend's back!"
Friday - January 23, 2004
[Seraphim] - 22:31:11
Happy 2004! Every New Year's Eve Piro and I sincerely say to each other that THIS is going to a good year. It is going to be our year. You know - a year when neither of us get sick or hurt and nothing bad happens. So far we have never been right. This year is no different. First, I have to apologize to our advertisers Revolution Hosting, LRNJ Project, Battle On, and Nitrocosm for all my mistakes. They are very nice guys and never call me a total git even though they are probably thinking it. It is only the third week of January and I've already screwed up so much. Piro is probably going to fire me. Then yesterday I opened my laptop and the screen flickered on and then it flickered off - permanently. You'll hear some definite rantage from Piro about that. It has not been an auspicious start to 2004.

Then Piro was gone for a week to Japan. That was the worst. We have never been apart for that long ever! Two weeks into the New Year and your fiance leaves for a week - bad omen. I had to drive him to the airport at freaking 3:00 am in below zero weather. That was painful. He did bring me lots of uber kawaii Neko things. He also brought 'me' a PitaTen art book. Hmmm, it is kind of like the Christmas he got me a webcam for HIS computer. Funny how that worked out.

Piro has always told me how crazy Japanese TV is. Now Spike TV has the Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. It is a Japanese show somewhat like Fear Factor without the disgusting eating stunts and without the safety precautions, The show lets the contestants fall like 20 feet into a little mud puddle- I don't think the kneepads are going to help much. I particularly like how the helmets never stay on. I don't know how people don't end up maimed or paralyzed. What exactly are they competing for? Is it a game show? Do they get money? Or is humiliation a prize? It is completely dubbed over so I don't know what is really going on, I don't really care since I just howl with laughter whenever I watch it.

I got a really nice email from Chris Tarbassian at Operation Comix Relief regarding the donations received from the Megatokyo Community. It makes my 2004 seem a lot better.

Dear Sarah,
    Just want to let you and your readers know that thanks to all of the help, packages are going out rather quickly now.

    Since we received their donation for postage, hundreds (not a typo) of comics have gone out.
    Again thank you,
    Chris Tarbassian
    Operation Comix Relief

Ok, the con season begins again. We will be attending the following 2004 cons with Wizzywig!:

Katsucon 2/13-15 Crystal City, DC
Megacon 3/5-3/7 Orlando
Sakura-Con 4/23-35 Seattle
Anime Central 5/14-16 Chicago
Fanime 5/28-5/30 San Jose, CA
Akon 6/4-6 Dallas
San Diego Comic Con 7/22-25
Otakon 7/30 - 8/1
Anime Weekend Atlanta 9/24-26

Also keep an eye out for Wizzywig at Anime Boston 4/9-11 and Anime Expo 7/2-5, and if you are in Columbus, Ohio this weekend, be sure to visit them at Ohayocon. :)

I felt bad after my Banned Book Week rant because I thought that people would think I was picking on Texas. I had actually found references to book burnings and cuttings in Maine, Pennsylvania, and (gasp) even Michigan but the Texas cases seemed the most egregious. I recently found an article on the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund website about a new law in Michigan that makes it illegal to allow minors to examine any material that may be harmful. The wording of the law is scary. The proponents say it just refers to pornographic material but the actual text of the law goes much farther in so much as to include any book with narrative descriptions of sexual excitement, That is a hell of a lot of stuff from classic novels to Seventeen magazine and the possibility for interpretation is too broad. It also applies to visual performances and music. It doesn't just refer to gas stations with Playboy in the magazine rack even though the censors describe it as just that. Oh yeah, Piro and I are CBLDF membersand I recommend it to anyone who values reading. The work they do extends well beyond the realm of just the comic book industry.

"a little obsessed"
Saturday - January 24, 2004
[Piro] - 22:53:03
This is really kinda sad, when i think about it.

I've got a little 2:37 minute AVI file here that i've been watching over and over most of the day. It's not even really animated - most of the images are stills, and most of them i've seen before. The music is new - good stuff too ("Megumeru" by Eufonius) been listening to it most of the day, off and on. What is it? The opening for Key's new game Clannad that many of you know i've been looking forward to for quite a while now - or at least a sample of what it might be (I won't really know till i get the finished game).

Reminds me of my first exposure to Kanon - it was a AVI file of the opening. First time hearing the song "Last Regrets" which is still a fave of mine. Funny the things that inspire you. It's also sad how much i'm looking forward to something that isn't animated, is only 2d for the most part, and as far as i know doesn't introduce anything really groundbreaking or new as far as gameplay goes. Pretty sad how just the art and the mood of the game is enough to make me eagerly await it's release, as well as all the stuff that will come out connected to it (hmmm, goodies). It falls squarely into the genre of stuff that I like best. Word is that it will be released early this year. It's about time. God, I'm such a pathetic Keyfan. ^^;;

One of the problems with most American games these days, i think, is that developers feel the need to always push the envelope, to make things 'better', bigger framerates, better netcode, more advanced AI, more polygons, better weapons, etc. It's gotta be the most advanced, newest, the best game engine ever - one that require you to buy a new computer...

Bleah. That's a whole 'nother rant. Got other things to talk about first.

Regarding Megatokyo Volume 2 - As many of you already know, Megatokyo Volume 2 is out there, having been released last week. Some of you have even managed to find a copy, even in places like Australia and the UK :P. Thank you for the kind words about the book, and even the critiques - people are saying exactly what I figured they would about the short story included in the book :) No offense taken, guys, I know exactly what the problems with it are. :P

I've also received some irritated emails telling me that they had been told by various bookstores that the book had been delayed. That's not true - the book shipped early last week, it's just that it may take a while for the books to find their way thru distribution channels and onto some store shelves. Your local comic stores were probably be the first to get them. Other stores, like Amazon, Borders, Waldenbooks, etc, might take a little longer (some stores are telling people mid February, for instance - not sure if it will really take that long). The Meagtokyo / ThinkGeek store should have books early in the week, just waiting for our shipment of books to arrive.

As for pre-orders, Dark Horse has all the mailers labeled and ready to go - I think they started packing and shipping last Friday, so you can expect all of your books to ship no later than mid week. If your book doesn't arrive in three weeks, be sure to email me and I'll see what happened :)

I was going to rant today mostly about something that irritated the hell out of me the other day, which Seraphim alluded to in her rant - I'm a little irritated with Apple right now.

If you remember, I purchased my mac G4 system about a year ago, and I've had very few problems with it - it's been a great system to work with. Some things have bugged me (for instance, having to pay almost $200 for a system upgrade to a computer that was not even 9 months old when OS X 10.3 came out) but probably the most irritating thing that apple does is push the sale of their Applecare extended service plan crap.

Granted, I come from a 'I built it myself out of spare parts and stuff I purchased online and there is no hope in hell anyone can help me fix what is wrong' PC background, so sure, the idea of paying for a service plan is a bit irritating. What is REALLY irritating is that after making the decision to pay premium for the mac systems in the first place, that the applcare stuff is *not* cheap. $250 bucks for... pretty much nothing. At least not till after the one year warranty runs out, right?

Ok, you may also remember that we got Seraphim a 15" powerbook when they came out. Damn nice little laptop, she's been inseparable from it since we got it. First thing that sort of went wrong with it had to do with the defective screens they used for the first batches of 15" powerbooks (the infamous 'white spots' on the screen, if you follow the mac news stuff at all). Sure enough, her computer developed them. We decided to do nothing about it because she couldn't afford to not have her system for the two weeks or so it would take to repair it. That and I didn't feel like fighting with them about it. Other than that, it's been working fine. Fine till I got home from Japan, that is...

Literally, not 4 hrs after I walked in the door from my rather long and convoluted flight, the light on her screen flickers a few times, and goes out. Open and close the screen a few times, it flickers a little, but then stays off. I can see that the computer is working, just the backlight is out.

Yes, things do go wrong with machines, even good ones. Laptops have problems, it's a pain, but it happens. I checked the warranty, and it was what I expected - one year warranty on parts and labor and stuff. 90 days on phone support. I figure that's unimportant, not really needed anyway. The thing is broken, I just need to send it in and get it fixed.

So I call them up, and the first thing they try to do is sell me the fsking Applecare extended warranty plan. I wasn't interested in that - it's still under the 1 year warranty, let's get this fixed and I'll think about it. Once I got rid of him, the next guy prodded me about it again. What the hell? Stop trying to sell me the goddamn applecare! I want this thing fixed!

Turns out that since 90 days had passed, that it would cost me $49 just to talk to the tech person. I asked him if he was joking - its broken, it needs to be sent in for repairs. Of course, you see where this is going - they have to walk you thru all the 'its probably the idiot between the chair and the computer that is the problem so lets walk thru some diagonistics' crap - and for that, I had to pay 50 bucks (or, of course, pay $250 for Applecare, at that point the phone call would also be covered.) Screw that, I paid the fifty bucks. Really not happy at this point.

Then, after a series of diagnostics, all ending with 'I can't see anything on the screen, there's no backlight', I finally got them to process sending me a box to return the thing in. Took over 40 minutes on the phone. Seriously questioning my 'switch' at this point.

Anyways, time helps you cool off. Also the fact that I got a sales call later that day from some poor bastard at Apple who was contacting me regarding my FIRST mac purchase of the year - the G4, for which my 1 year warranty was almost up, and wanting to see if I wanted to get the extended plan for two more years. heh. Did I chew on HIM for a while. I'm getting cranky in my old age.

Dumb thing is, I did want to get the extended coverage for my main machine - it's a year old, it's nice to have - I just don't appreciate being pressured into it. The guy knocked 50 bucks off to cover my bad experience earlier that day. What sucks is that this only covers the one machine. Hell, what incentive do you have to buy more machines when you need to tack a whole extra $250 bucks onto each one just in case something breaks? Not a good way to keep customers like me happy.

I don't think I'm wrong not being happy about all this. I spent a lot more money switching to the mac platform than I would have sticking with the windoze world. I ponied up and paid for what needed buying, including new software, licenses where needed, etc. The whole Applecare thing just feels like an extra grab into my pocket that makes me feel pretty used. And add to this the fact that Seraphim is without her laptop for a good two weeks right in the middle of her school term. Not fun. Not at all.

Anyways, even so, I do like these machines, it's just feels kinda rotten to have this come down this way. I mean, it took the Clannad OP to cheer me up, for chrissakes. :P

Oh yea, need to talk about japan... ok, next rant :P Pretty sad how life moves in and just kicks you square in the butt soon as you get home. :) I filled up a whole rant and I've only been home a few days. Ah well, Wednesday then :P (once again, more rants, more comics this year - you all are sick of the promises, so I wont promise, I'll just do :P)

"Wired living"
Wednesday - January 28, 2004
[Dom] - 23:30:00
Okay, okay, I promised Seven Samurai 20XX, but I felt more like ranting about work than about games, for once.

Working at Wired is definitely interesting. I knew that when I sat down for my interview and two of the editors said "Before anything else is said, we'd like to say that we're big fans", while my future boss looked at them oddly.

But oddly enough? It's a lot like working at GamePro, except that now I have a bigger toybox. Case in point, last week I went to see Nintendo show off Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles (where it turned out I knew more about the game than the presenters... that was a little embarrassing), Metroid: Zero Mission (which is great looking) and Pokemon Colosseum. And then I started thinking about E3 registration. About then I started thinking "I DID change jobs, right?"

Then I went to the Sega event on Monday (meeting back up with a few of the GP guys, which was nice) and listened in on Sega announcing their upcoming lineup after Sonic Heroes, which includes Dororo, Samurai Jack and the game I'm most excited about, Astro Boy.

Unfortunately, I saw a writer for Viz grab Astro Boy's ass, which is something I could have lived a long, happy life without seeing. But at least I saw the game, and what I saw gave me the urge to play it, which is always a good sign. I would've been excited for Nightshade/Kunoichi, but... uh... I already own it. Oh well.

Oh yeah, I have to do that "writing" thing. I should get back to that. I'll write more, and more coherently, later.

"An American Con in Ikebukuro"
Sunday - February 1, 2004
[Piro] - 11:50:01
One of the things that i've learned over time is that for some reason, It's really hard to write rants about trips. I've done a lot of traveling related to Megatokyo in the past few years, but in many cases I never do a big write-up about the trip I just arrived home from.

Not really sure why this is. I suppose it's a combination of things. For starters, the last thing you end up doing while actually on a trip is sit around for a few hours to write a rant. Then, when you arrive home, all the stuff you should have been doing attacks you and the trip itself gets pushed to the back of your mind. Finally, a week or so later, you've moved on, and the trip was something that happened, well, weeks ago, and you have other things to talk about.

So, here i sit, a week and a half after returning home from my trip, trying to figure out where to start. So much happens on trips like these that it's hard to hit just the high points, when in truth its usually the little things that are the most interesting. Anyways, I might as well take a stab at it, and i'll try to include some pictures to add some vague interest to the thing.

As you know, Anime Expo Tokyo did me the honor of inviting me to come to this first attempt to have an American-style Anime convention in Japan. It's a difficult goal, really. For starters, Anime and Manga are an easily accessible commodity in Japan, unlike here in the states. For example, a 'dealers room' in a Japanese show just isn't going to have the focus and draw one in an American con has -- especially with an Animate store across the street with 7 floors of stuff and an event floor, never mind the multi-story Gamers store and Toranoana around the corner. More on that later.

Fan culture is also, i think, a little different there. Here in the states, fans share a real sense of commonality by being an 'anime/manga fan'. In Japan, fangroupings are more aligned with specific genres and sub-genres. Just being an anime fan isn't that big a deal - it's like saying you like sports. ^^;;

I have some thoughts about what worked, and what didn't about AX Tokyo, and why i think that this idea could really be something. If you manage to get a really savvy mix of what makes successful Japanese events work and what makes American cons work so well, I think it can make for a very interesting event. I think that American fans (well, what i should say is 'english speaking fans' - Anime Fandom outside of Japan is more than just the states) are a large, growing, active and eager community, and we want to make our contributions to the Anime/Manga world. The idea of cultures connecting thru some sort of commonalty is corny as hell, but there is some real validity to this. It's bound to happen, i think. Did AX Tokyo succeed at this?

I suppose that i should lead into this by talking about my trip. To sum up, it was a fantastic trip, and it fell into three distinct parts - AX Tokyo, Megatokyo research in Tokyo, and Warmth research in Sendai. Less important things, like seeing friends, sleeping, eating, happened in the cracks. I think that this will take three rants to cover properly, so i'll start with the AX Tokyo part of the trip.

I won't dwell on the flight over. I don't really like flying. I can't sleep sitting up, and no matter how hard i try or how tired I am it just doesn't happen. I figured that if i stayed up all night so that i was exhausted for the 14 hr flight i'd sleep, but it didn't happen ^^;; When i finally arrived in Tokyo, i was pretty beat. I flew over with Eileen and Phil Moy (the artist who does the PowerPuff Girl comics for DC), and we boarded a bus with a group of others who had also arrived to go to AX Tokyo. It was a surreal ride down from Narita airport to Ikebukuro. Of course it took well over an hour, and i was getting punchy tired by then, but wonder of wonders, we were able to see Mt. Fuji - something i had not been able to see at all on my previous trip to Japan. I was even more surprised to see it the next morning from my hotel room. :) After that, the normal haze returned and i was unable to see it for the rest of the trip.

That night i was able to finally meet my friend Tsubasa for the first time in real life. :) Tsubasa and I have known each other for a very long time - nine years at least and it was nice to finally meet him. Funny, really - and the more i think about it the more is makes me wonder - there are so many people that i've known and worked with over years through the net, some of whom i've still not had a chance to meet.

The next day, I found myself a lot more busy at the show than i thought i would be. Thankfully i was able to start it with a Starbucks coffee... these friggin things are everywhere now. I figured that since there really wouldn't be that many people there who even know what Megatokyo was that i'd not really have a lot to do. I was quite wrong, it seems - i was quite surprised not only by the number of english speaking fans who had come to the show from the states, but the number of english speaking fans who were living and working or going to school or stationed in Japan that had come. I was also surprised by how many Japanese attendees who had come to the signing having no idea who Phill, Crispin and I were. Luckily, I had brought several binders full of MT comics and Warmth, some of it even translated (thanks Asmodeus!) who were very nice in asking for drawings. Usually they requested 'kawaii onnanoko' (cute girl) and even one 'megane-ko' (girl with glasses - i drew seraphim) - i was only happy to oblige.

I also was surprised to see someone walking around with a t-shirt that looked really familiar - in fact, it was a tshirt that *I* had done years before - the KOR Twins t-shirt!. Ah, the days of Mailing Lists... Itono-san, who i had conversed with on many occasions on the KOR ML had come bearing gifts - a bad full of manga, actually. It was REALLY good to see you, Itono-san - too bad you weren't able to stay!

Once again, its weird how things you do years ago sometimes pop up now and again. Really is.

After the signing, there was a press panel, where i sat next to Ishiguro Noboru, the guy who directed Space Cruiser Yamato and Macross... yknow, i remember feverently watching Space Cruiser Yamato on TV when i was a kid -- it was kinda mind boggling, answering questions about american fans and american cons to the Japanese press, sitting next to the guy who directed Macross and the chairperson of Anime Expo, as well as several other guests... I told them that i think that American fans really want to contribute to anime culture, and that i felt honored to be there, and that i felt much humbled to be here where manga artist types actually had talent, unlike myself.

The megatokyo panel was actually for the most part all english speaking, except for one Japanese lady who sat in to listen to what we were talking about (poor Seizo had to translate all of my blathering - sorry Seizo!). I was later quite amazed to get an email from her ^^;; The panel was fun, and it felt nice and relaxed - not the super overcrowded panels we've been having in the states, and i think it went ok.

Honestly, i think i've got the order of things a little messed up - i can't remember if i went to lunch before or after this panel - i think it was after (my poor head). Anyways, after hooking up again with Tsubasa, who was working as volunteer staff for the con, we headed off to lunch with some friends and Hashimoto-san and REM-san from Device High, a doujin music group that you may remember me pointing out a few years ago. They have actually done several Megatokyo inspired songs. It was very nice to meet them - I love Device High's work, and when REM-san wanted me to draw her likeness in the CD booklet for her, i felt like i did a horrible job. It was times like this that i really wish i could speak japanese conversationally - its hard to talk via interpreters. :) They gave me a copy of their latest EP, and i'm looking forward to what they put out next.

Device High has a number of fans, one of whom has already helped me quite a bit with my 'warmth' project. Suguri-san had first heard of Megatokyo from the MT inspired tracks on a Device High CD. He also happens to live in Sendai, and was very gracious in not only traveling down to Tokyo to meet me, but getting together with me in Sendai days later to help me get familiar with the area. :) More on that in Japan rant #3

Doh, that's right. we went to lunch BEFORE the panel. >_< ok, now i got it straight. In fact, i think we had lunch before the press conference. As you can see, my brain was working really well at the time :P.

Anyways, later that evening as things settled down, we all went out to dinner. I need to mention here two people who were instrumental in helping and hanging out with me at the con. First, of course, is Cortana (you know, he helps keep the servers alive and my email as spam free as possible) and Glenn from Anime Tourist. Nothing like wandering around Tokyo with friends who not only keep you out of trouble, but know their way around. I have this really bad habit of wandering aimlessly, and the challenge for me is not missing where i'm going. Cortana is about as easy-going as a person can get, and Glenn knows Tokyo pretty well. In fact, his knowledge of the Toranoana and what was where was kinda frightening... These guys tried to get me into trouble, but i was good... well... mostly good.

Anyways, we got together with Tsubasa and some of his friends - Yamamoto-san, Shibahara-san, and Suguri-san. I had to run upstairs and leave in the middle of cooking up korean food on the grill to give Akamatsu Ken-san a copy of book 2 - I wanted to do at least that. Akamatsu-san remembered me from Anime Central the previous year, and he gave me a signed copy of his most recent doujin. :) Upon heading back to dinner, another friend living and working in Japan, Scott, who was my official interpreter for the show (and who i ran ragged sometimes :P) joined us as well as Jake Tarbox from Raijin Comics - anyways, we had a lot of fun. As usual for me, i was pretty out of it by then, but it was really something to think about how i can travel halfway round the world and be able to meet with so many people and run up a food bill that high... Sure different than my last trip to Japan. :P

The next day, i was surprised to find that there were STILL lots of people who wanted drawings and signatures. O_o I did my best to take care of everyone. I also wanted to get out into the city - I had hardly been out of the hotel and convention center at all since arriving. I wanted desperately to go out and visit the parts of the city where Megatokyo took place, and i had not yet had a chance to do that. Glenn and Cortana and I went out on a little excursion that i'll discuss in my next rant. :)

The next day there was kind of interesting. Saturday night, Scott told me that there was a chance to get Koge Donbo's signature the next day, and that she would be there at 9am the next morning. Koge Donbo is the artist behind the DigiCharat and PitaTen stuff. This was not part of AX Tokyo - Broccoli was holding a big event in the same convention center, so Scott and I purchased entrance passes and we went down on Sunday morning to see if we could get in. My guest badge has absolutely no meaning at the broccoli show :)

We should have known better. People had started lining up for this event the night before - we were able to get in, but the line to get Donbo-sensei's signature was already closed off - and probably had been since the night before. Even tho it was disappointing to not be able to get her signature, it was fascinating to go to an actual anime event - it was crazy. People were standing in huge lines just to get into booth areas just to *shop*. Imagine going to a convention, and having to wait in line for 30 minutes just to get into the Wizzywig booth. :P

After this, Scott and I went upstairs to the dealer area for AX Tokyo and sat down to have an ice coffee at the Creamy Cafe - a cosplay cafe (basically, you sit down, and girls cosplaying as various anime characters bring your drinks). You can even have pictures taken with them. ^_^ One was dressed in a Clannad outfit, so it was kinda necessary to have my picture taken with her. Kinda scary tho, i look like some big freaky goon next to the girl -_- Research, research :P

I picked up a fun little book at the cafe called the Moetan Wordbook. It's a study guide for learning english, and has all sorts of words, with japanese equivalents, all used in sentences that have some sort of anime or game reference. Ink-chan, "the moest of lovely teacher on the planet!!" (I think that "moest" is spelled that way on purpose - it is moe-est (if you understand the concept of "moe")) is cute as hell, its an adorable little book, and the quotes are completely *wack*. Any book that illustrates the use of the word "weapon" with the phrase "My Ultimate weapon is the China Canon attached to my groin" is alright in my book. ^^;;

One thing i wish was that I had had a chance to show more people my work. The only japanese attendees i really saw were the ones who checked out my signings out of curiosity. I think a future addition to this type of show would be a venue where non japanese guests, like myself, and Phil and Crispin Freeman (who was also at the show) could show examples or describe what we do. I would have really loved to have seen what the reaction from a more japanese readers. Maybe the next show of this nature can take that sort of thing into account, who knows. It's almost like there needs to be the kinds of things that facilitate american fans to show japanese fans what we are doing.

So i guess this rather long winded rant comes around full circle to the question - did AX Tokyo succeed in its goal: To present a american style convention in the heart of a the older and more established fan culture in japan? Yes and No, i think. I don't think something like this will be perfect the first time out - because it IS different, it IS a different kind of idea. What it takes is to try it, and see what works and what doesn't, and take from it ideas about what would make the idea work better. I know that I certainly have a clearer idea in my own head about what can really work about this kind of convention, and i am sure that the people running the show have also learned a lot. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

I enjoyed AX Tokyo, and i am very glad to have been invited. I was unable to make it back to closing ceremonies - the only thing i missed out on, but i think i did ok while i was there. I want to say thank you to everyone who helped or assisted me at the convention, even all the staff who tried desperately to understand what i was trying to say in my horrendous japanese, and to the friends and people who some of which i only saw momentarily.

There was another side to the trip, and that was the Megatokyo research side. Thats for the next rant. :)

"White Bread"
Monday - February 2, 2004
[Seraphim] - 03:02:00
In the spirit of Valentine's day, I put up a new Seraphim Survey! - select your favorite couple from a select group of characters. Please, no complaining about characters that aren't listed! Rent-a-zilla is NOT considered a viable partner. Other does NOT apply. :)

Valentines Day Seraphim Survey - Favorite MT Couple! [The poll is now CLOSED. thank you for voting! results to be posted in the next rant :)]

---

Makeovers are the hot new craze and it is almost impossible to get away from them. The media from television to magazines is inundated with them. People are crazy to makeover everything from people to houses. As if there weren't enough individual shows – they had to create the Style Network to tell people how inadequate they are 24/7. What is really insulting is the fact the makeovered person is usually recommended by their so-called friends who obviously think they are pathetic. On Style Court the makeoveree is accused of being criminally dorky and their nominator acts as the prosecutor. These friends send in their names secretly to the shows. Why do they do it in secret? Probably because the person is happy they way they are and wouldn't volunteer themselves. But you know, don't let that fact influence your decision to possibly humiliate someone.

I'm really turned off by the shows that feature cruelty. Can't someone tell a person how to find clothes that are flattering without turning vicious? And I usually find that I don't think the people doing the makeovers impress me all that much. As in I wouldn't be caught dead in what they are wearing. Everyone has different tastes and personalities. Why is it so popular to make everyone into white bread? If it's not homogenized it's not a 'good thing'. I also can't believe people have so much time to be concerned with how other people are dressing, wearing their makeup, or decorating their home. GET A LIFE! If I don't care what I wear I really don't think anyone else should take the time to bother.

I am currently taking a business information class for my library science degree. It's not what you think – no learning about reference resources. This program has a heavy emphasis on economic information policy and the use of the web for business purposes. For my project I created a survey for the wonderful MT readers. If you are interested in taking the MT survey (poll is now closed! Thank you!) it is anonymous and hosted on the MT server so you won't get spammed and I'm not asking for an email address. It asks about basic demographics such as gender and age, MT reading habits, your favorite character, if you have used the online store or conventions and stuff like that. There is a glitch in the question about Canada and Mexico. If you select either of those click next and then skip to question 7 using the arrows at the bottom of the frame. Sorry Canada! Some Safari and Mozilla users may experience problems (like Piro did!) depending on what version you use. I like the software so much I plan to come up with more MT surveys in the future but those will be short ones just for fun. So please fill out the survey or Kimiko will be sad.

Katsucon is just around the corner. I'm looking forward to the convention season. After Ayacon it was nice to have a long break but you get to miss it after awhile. We hope to meet a lot of MT fans this year. We went to a lot of cons last year but we weren't really good at telling anyone we were going. So to give everyone fair warning – this is a list of the conventions we know we are attending this year,

Katsucon 2/13-15 Arlington, VA
Megacon 3/5-3/7 Orlando
Sakura-Con 4/23-25 Seattle
Anime Central 5/14-16 Chicago
Fanime 5/28-5/30 San Jose, CA
Akon 6/4-6 Dallas
San Diego Comic Con 7/22-25
Otakon 7/30 - 8/1
Anime Weekend Atlanta 9/24-26

Wizzywig will be at all of them and a few more so check out their schedule too.

"break in the workflow"
Sunday - February 8, 2004
[Piro] - 00:43:00
Well, it took long enough, but it seems that supplies of Book 2 have filtered thru the distribution networks and should be readily available. For instance, the Megatokyo/ThinkGeek store has em, and there are reports of them being in Waldenbooks, Borders, and various other retailers. It also seems to have been doing pretty good on Amazon. Reaction to the book has been very positive so far - only one complaint :). Also, all you pre-order people should either have your books or they are on their way. If you don't have one by the end of next week, email me.

Not sure when the new Megatokyo t-shirt will be in Waldenbooks stores, but if anyone spots one, let me know :) Should be fairly soon.

I should be enjoying this respite, with the book now in stores and all the work that went into it behind me, right? Peh? not a chance. :( Unfortunately, the reprint of Book 1 was solicited a liiiiiiitle earlier than I had figured, and well? I have to have everything done by next Wednesday. ^^;; Luckily, I have been getting a little help from some friends - Merle and Natsuki from Nekobox put in long hours over the past few weeks helping to re-process all the comics from book one into higher rez from for the new book. This morning I sent out a DVDR to Dark Horse with all the reprocessed files. Next I have to finish the cover, and get all the extra material pulled together? The extra material in this re-issue of book one will include a lot of artwork, sketches and other stuff from the early days of Megatokyo. I've been pouring over old sketchbooks and other material and other things - it's been interesting re-visiting it all. Hopefully it will prove interesting. I have to say tho, it's embarrassing how bad some of my old artwork is.

In other news, Seraphim's laptop is back. It's all fixed and working like new. Despite my rather irritated rant two weeks ago (of which Applelinks picked up on my ire -- eep) I'm pretty happy. The problem with rants like these is that they are just reflections of what I feel and what I'm thinking. All arguments aside about how good or how bad or how fair Apple is with it's Applecare stuff, I reacted the way I did, and honestly, I don't think I was out of line.

I think I need to clarify that its not the fact that Applecare exists, or that it costs X amount of dollars, etc that was the problem. What irritated me was being pressured not once, but *twice*, to purchase Applecare before we even got to my repair issue - THAT is what set me off. I don't think I was out of line, my reaction was genuine. Now, regarding the rest of my experience with Applecare - it was quite good. For example, I wasn't sure if the 'white spot' problem on the screen (common with early 15" powerbooks) would be dealt with, so I called Applecare back to see if that would also be looked at, and the person on the phone was very helpful. I checked on the status a week later and the automated system couldn't find it -- the guy on the phone was also quite helpful. I was told they were waiting for a new screen. The laptop arrived the other day, and now that things are back to normal, the screen works and looks good, Seraphim is happy, and I am actually quite satisfied with things.

Ok, I have to get back to work. ugh ugh ugh?. why me? Why do I always have to deal with these deadlines? Ah well, rant #2 about Japan hopefully before I leave for Katsucon next week.

"Publicity Stunts"
Wednesday - February 11, 2004
[Seraphim] - 11:50:00
In keeping with the theme of the comic and rant today – the Seraphim Surveys asks 'What would YOU do for publicity?' No write in options on this one – there are some places you just don't want to go J See the bottom of the rant for results from previous surveys.

Dangling babies over balconies or over the jaws of a wild animal. Stars getting married and divorced all in the span of days or hours. Shall I even mention the Super Bowl halftime show? Forget implied nudity – I'm WAAAAY behind the times. What did they think they were getting away with?. The best cover story they could come up with was that it was a clothing malfunction? Good thing Janet and Justin are singers because they sure can't act. I am most disgusted by their backpedaling. It was intentional (see above about acting) and they don't even have the guts to stand behind what they did. I get the feeling that they thought it would be accepted and they expected praise for being so daring. Oops. But it is said there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Whether it is the stars or the publicity agents - what were they thinking? What happens to people when they become media celebrities? Does it lower the IQ? That would be really sad because I don't think a lot them have the IQ points to spare. They are such uninteresting people they that need publicity stunts to gain attention or to rouse interest in their movie/book/cd.

I blame the media. They get a clip of a baby poised on the brink of disaster and that is all you see for days on every news show. And not just the 'news' shows either. I swear that the Travel channel had a show about the 10 Best Balconies and Zoos at which to put children in danger. Really, I saw it. And they love to rehash the past. If I see Nick Nolte's mug shot one more time just because another celebrity has gotten into trouble I will scream. It is interesting or funny maybe once. Why don't they do a news story about whether or not stars get a walk after being caught breaking the law. All these mug shots for DUI but we never hear about the fallout. Ok, Diana Ross got 2 days in jail. I'm sure that will be a lifetime for her.

I'll be truthful. We have never been arrested. I was watching a late, late, late talk show one night and the guest was Martin Sheen. He is a big protester – for peace and against political oppression and such. The host asked him if he was going to be at an upcoming rally and he said he couldn't because he was on probation. Now that peaked my interest since he is about the age of my father. What's the old codger been up to? He's been arrested 67 times. Whenever he was told to back down he took a step forward and crossed the line. That is the kind of celebrity I would want to be. I'd be out there speaking my mind and not acting the fool for the handlers, studios, and publicity agents.

But Piro and I are BORING and we know it. I like to grow exotic and unusual plants and Piro gets excited about wind farms, trains, and earth sheltered housing. Piro hates the word celebrity and can't stand it when someone asks him about being one. We prefer to think of ourselves as personalities. Mostly somewhat disturbed personalities. Dom would be an extremely disturbed personality. And not even Dom endangers small helpless beings. Which points to the total freakiness of true celebrities. It appears they will do anything for attention. What will someone do next to up the ante? If Piro ever has to pull an outrageous stunt to sell a book or if he ever cares about selling a book more than his own dignity – it would be time to give it up.

Seraphim Survey Results!

Respondents – 11,767 It took hours to process the results.
Demographics – readers are overwhelmingly male at 76% but ladies did account for 24%. 76% of readers were between 14 and 24 years old. We had one person 65 and older – yeah for you! By ranking, readers were from North America, Europe, Australia/New Zealand, Asia and Africa.

Favorite character by votes:
Largo – 2339
Miho – 1583
Piro - 1328
Boo - 1132
Erika - 956
Junpei – 939
Seraphim – 700
L33t d00d, Megumi, Pirogoeth – 581
Ping – 483
Dom – 345
Ed – 154
Rent-a-zilla – 147
Asmodeus – 127

The rest were in the single digits. And I'm too tired to write them out.

76% read MT online at home and 45% found out about MT from friends. So ladies get out there and tell two friends and they'll tell two friends and then we will rule the world! But then again the male to female ratio is 3 to 1. Not bad odds for finding a really nice and obviously intelligent male!

54% never used the forums and 40% only sometimes. That might be skewed since forum users were probably obsessively posting and didn't take the survey J

Most desired future merchandise was wall calendar, wall scroll, plushies, and action figures. I wonder why wall scrolls are so popular. Posters have better image quality. Is because they don't need a frame or that you can use them as curtains? Gotta warn you – Piro is all about the image quality.

Thanks for the taking survey. We got emails that reminded us about things we had forgotten – like the site being Slashdotted in the beginning and old CaféPress store designs.

Valentines day survey results:

Favorite couple of Megatokyo is – Piro and Kimiko! A close runner up is Largo and Erika.

The third favorite couple was Boo and Seraphim... not really sure what to think about that.

Lots of pairings with Miho too. In fact, just about every pairing was selected, all except Ed and Kimiko. Interesting.

"Hope it doesn't snow"
Thursday - February 12, 2004
[Piro] - 14:04:00
[quick note - seems that the Megatokyo t-shirts are starting to show up in Waldenbooks stores :) - piro]

Geh. Last year was that horrible snow storm that socked in the East Coast and Seraphim and I drove thru that mess coming home from Katsucon... for once in my life, i hope it DOESNT snow over the next few days. ^^;;

Ok, as usual before I travel, a quick and frantic rant. :) I've managed to meet my deadline (yay! Book 1 stuff is almost done! Just a few things to do when I get back next week :) so that rather annoying Dirge-esque monkey is off my back. ^^;; God, I hate monkeys. Monkeys suck. But at least I think I have my life back. Just in time to drive to Virginia to go to Katsucon. I ... sorta feel (and sound like) Meemers today. Remind me to start covering all the mirrors in this place.

Ok, Katsucon. First con of this year's con season for Seraphim and I, and as always, we'll do our best to sign, do drawings (as best I can, anyways) and whatnot while there. There's a lot going on at Katsu this year (see schedule below) but when Seraphim and I aren't at events, we'll be at the Wizzywig booth hiding behind cute fluffy stuffed things. It looks like we won't be at the booth on Friday, but there is an autograph session at 7pm Friday, so we can try to take care of you there as well. We'll be at the booth on Saturday from10am to 12noon and from 5pm to 6pm. Sunday, we'll be there from 10am to 3pm. As always, we'll try to take care of everyone. Thank in advance for your support :)

Now, the con schedule specifics are as follows:

- Friday -
Opening Ceremonies - 5pm
MegaTokyo panel - 6pm
Autograph session - 7pm

- Saturday -
Web Comics - 12pm - 2pm
Iron Artist - 2:15pm - 4:30pm
MegaTokyo overflow - 11pm

- Sunday -
Closing Ceremonies - 3pm

Be sure to come to the Megatokyo panel on Friday if you can. We're gonna try showing some photos from some of the stuff we did last year. Should be fun.

Also, the webcomics panel will have a lot of webcomic people there, including the Mac Hall guys, Vaz from Under Power", Hot Soup from Winter and Lethal Doses fame, Hawk from Applegeeks... more too (I'll update this list when I get there tomorrow :P) For the most part, I think most of these guys are brining stuff to sell (for example, Vaz is gonna have some very nice pieces in the art show, and the Applegeeks guys are brining some shirts ^_^) - be sure to support your fave webcomic artists ^_^

As I've mentioned before, I REALLY got tripped up right from the get-go this year. A lot of things came down far faster than I anticipated them to, and it's been hell on my nerves and my sleep schedule, but the good news is *I got thru it* ^_^ and it's done. The plus side of this is that rather than working on book 1 for the two weeks after Katsucon,it's done, which means I can focus on chapter 5. :) If all goes well, Chapter five will start Friday of next week (unless I need one more comic to finish off the GTC arc). Hope you guys haven't been too disappointed with MT recently - been doin my best.

A few things I keep completely forgetting about. First, a note from Dom:

"Sorry about being late on this whole thing, but American Cosplay Paradise has started its MegaTokyo cosplay contest! We're going to offer an original sketch and a couple of posters as prizes, so go here for rules and more information! The deadline is February 28, so get crackin'! Good luck"

Dom says they will probably move the deadline because it's taken so long to get announcements out. Gah, no idea when I can get a sketch done for it... Oh well, I'll deal with that next week. ^^;;

Another thing I promised that I'd link well over a month ago is 9th Elsewhere - a very cute and well done webcomic that I think I've linked before ^_^ Give it a read, well worth the visit, and tell the girls I sent you.

"we did"
Monday - February 16, 2004
[Seraphim] - 02:11:04
During the panels at Katsucon this year Fred and I announced that we eloped after Christmas. On our holiday sabbatical from Megatokyo we went to Las Vegas and were married on New Year's Eve. We spent our honeymoon freezing our butts off in the desert. Only Fred and I would go to the desert when it snows for the first time in a decade.

So people who have been sending me emails with statements such as "isn't it about time," and "aren't you of the age to be married," (frankly, I don't even know what that means) well you can stop now because despite age and time, Fred and I got married. Bad news for his fangirls, I know!

-----

We're back from Katsucon. It wasn't pretty. First our main panel was scheduled during the only free hour that wasn't devoted to a convention sponsored event or a game show. It was definitely not a good time for the panel. The opening ceremonies ran over and that gave us a total of 45 minutes to set up, present, and, frankly, get the hell off the stage. We weren't even half way through our presentation and people coming to the AMV panel after ours started coming into the room, and were all talking so much that people couldn't hear us even with the microphones. Hmmm, we weren't very happy.

Signing for fans was great -- except when the hotel was 'locked down' due to a 'biohazard' prank which had me standing in the parking lot for 45 minutes, Fred trapped inside the hotel, and the Wizzywig crew stuck in the dealer's room in the basement. Our cell phones wouldn't work and none of us could contact one another. I think the fans had fun at the con though. But trust me - behind the scenes isn't all it is cracked up to be. (AND the furnace broke while we were gone and we are currently sitting in a 54 degree house. Traveling sucks.)

So the Seraphim Survey this week is about conventions. Do you love 'em or hate 'em? Where are you going this year? Let me know!!! It's the first time I used a emoticon survey tool so check it out.

The wedding - now that I have some time. Fred and I chose a traditional non-traditional kind of wedding. I wanted to keep it a secret because of things like the J-lo and Ben Affleck debacle. All the hype and publicity and then nothing. IF it was real and not a huge stunt - how embarrassing. Mortifying actually. I know we aren't flaky Hollywood types but thousands of people expecting something can really mess you up in the head. We hadn't even finished our honeymoon and Brittney was off playing the fool in Vegas.

Not that I didn't want to rant like crazy about the whole process. The wedding dress alone was a near disaster. First of all the popular styles this year were the Renaissance style (not a flattering style on many including me) and this two piece skirt and top ensemble thing. Ok, that totally defeats the dress theme. A skirt and top is not a dress - it is a skirt and top. They are not the same. Ivory dresses are really hard to find. An ivory crushed velvet dress is impossible. Using my l33t library skills, however, I found a mill that would weave the velvet and crush it to order - cheap. Wholesale cost! It is beautiful fabric. Too bad it arrived too late. Luckily my wonderful dressmaker, Teres, had a substitute fabric for me.

I just wanted a very simple frock and couldn't find any. The guys are going to kill me for telling this story because it sets a very high standard for anyone to reach. I was very pressed for time and over confident in my ability to find a dress. At Thanksgiving I was desperate and facing heavy deadlines (read the rant about completing an entire research paper in two days...) and I was a very sad girl in snow. Fred took it upon himself to find a dressmaker for me. He set off one day in his NINJA hoodie and rattiest pants and shoes to hit these little boutique shops in a ritzy area where the owners are also dressmakers. He looked like such a punk. He told them about how busy we were with the comic and my classes and we only had four weeks and could they please do it. I'm sure his sweet (and very cute) demeanor won Teres over and she agreed. Fred doesn't even realize how special what he did was. Truthfully, most guys don't realize that clothes DON'T grow on the shelves of department stores. He is really the greatest guy ever.

We got married in a ubiquitous little wedding chapel. It was not the one Brittney Spears used and it wasn't the "Say I do Drive-thru". Afterwards we ate at casino restaurant (not a gawd awful buffet) and people in Vegas love the sight of a wedding couple. People were yelling congratulations from all around or whispering in awed tones 'they got married!'. Being New Year's Eve it was like everyone (300,000 plus) was celebrating with us and not everyone has a giant fireworks show on their wedding day.

We kept the wedding a secret to announce at the Katsucon panel which was the one year anniversary of our engagement. While in Vegas we were recognized by two fans at the Japanese restaurant at the Luxor. His name was Brian Deutsch and his friend from Purdue. We were sure we were going to be ratted out but it must not have crossed their minds that we'd be in Vegas to get married. We were surprised nothing showed up in the forums after the panel about the announcement. So we still got to pull off our little surprise on the fans. That makes me happy. We barely get away with anything these days.

"Dead Runs"
Friday - February 20, 2004
[Dom] - 00:00:00
Been a while since I last ranted, and I'd just like to point out what's happened since then, in the order I think of them. My life's gotten pretty interesting lately, involving a lot of gallivanting around the Bay Area and finding excuses to use the word "gallivanting" in a sentence. Let's take a look at a few of the things that are of interest to people other than me, though:

As mentioned by Fred, the American Cosplay Paradise MT cosplay contest is on, and due to our dropping the ball on our side, the deadline has moved back an entire month, which means that you have until March 31st to take pictures of those MegaTokyo costumes you want people to see.

Meanwhile, my good bud Cliff has set aside his gig working at Telemundo--it's a long story, don't ask--to put up a great strip called Dr. Devious vs. Lincoln High. It spoofs spy movies and teen drama at the same time, and makes me want to head up to Sacramento so I can play a Dr. Devious-branded Spycraft game with him, Greg Dean, and whatever other guys come along.

But I'll probably just wait for all of them to move down to the Bay Area, like all cool people should.

Speaking of RPGs, I found out today that one of my all-time favorites is getting an update! Mongoose Publishing (bless their hearts) announced today that they were bringing back Paranoia, updated for a post-Soviet era of fear, mistrust, totalitarianism and, yes, paranoia. They announced that Allen Varney, Aaron Allston and Greg Costikyan will be hammering out the design, and given the first few entries on the developer blog, it looks like Paranoia's in for a glorious rebirth.

I haven't played video games in a while, but I did get a look at the upcoming Transformers game, which reminds me of Mech Assault--and in case you were wondering, that's a good thing. Unfortunately, unlike Mech Assault, there's no multiplayer option, meaning that you can't take Optimus Prime out and beat the snot out of your friend's Starscream, as is right and good. To someone with as little free time as me, that's a deal killer, but those with more free time and an appreciation for the license will be glad to know that it's looking good and (gasp!) isn't a disgrace to the license.

Oh, and did I mention that I've taken over the video games section of Anime Insider? I received a message last week from my old co-workers at GamePro who said "Anime Insider was looking for a game writer who knew a lot about anime, and we immediately thought of you". With that kind of recommendation, how could I say no?

I also watched some pretty fun stuff last Monday, but that deserves its own rant--if not Monday, then Wednesday. Until then, I'll be off getting my gallivant on, this weekend in Sacramento and next in... I don't know where, actually. Catch you later!

"Nuptials and Chaos"
Monday - February 23, 2004
[Dom] - 16:00:00
A few quick comments before the meat of this rant:

First: Fred actually expects a game to come out on time. Heh. Cute. Any release date two months in the future has to be considered suspect, but hey, we all have to believe in something ;)

Second: Dr. Devious is going strong, and I will beat Cliff at Ro-Sham-Bo/Jan-Ken-Pon to run game nights some day...

Okay, on to what I did last Monday. See, last Monday, I decided I wanted to one of the nation's current hot spots: San Francisco City Hall. In case you've been ignoring the news for the past week and a half, Gavin Newsom (who, to Beach Blanket Babylon's delight, rhymes with "twosome") declared that California's marriage law violated the "equal protection" clause of its constitution, and started issuing gender-neutral marriage licenses. So, being the stereotypical California Liberal I am, I went out there to watch and support the long-suffering souls who marched into City Hall and came out married, at least in the eyes of San Francisco.

It was quite an experience. There were rose petals and rice grains everywhere, cake was everywhere, motorists were continually sounding their horns in support while the crowd outside applauded (and didn't mind the rain one bit)... and I got to stand behind the mariachi band for about a half hour. This was an unexpected boon as well as a fun time, as I finally learned the lyrics to Cielito Lindo, which has been stuck in my head since about 1996. I also caught a garter, which is something I completely didn't expect to do. The question is, since I caught it from a lesbian couple, does that mean I'm going to marry a man or a woman? I'm hoping the latter, but there isn't really a precedent for this, is there?

I'm not going to launch into my opinions on the whole matter, because it's fairly obvious what mine are, though I'm amused that Governor Ahnold said some pretty extreme words about the long-reaching effects of the gay marriages on NBC News' Meet the Press: "all of a sudden, we see riots, we see protests, we see people clashing". If mariachi and tap dancing counts as rioting, well, count me in. Personally, I subscribe to something more like Mark Fiore's cartoon on the whole thing. Be warned, it's Flash. But it's also pretty funny.

I also find it funny that, even though the gay marriages are likely to be ruled invalid, the "divorce" rate among these couples will be lower than that of heterosexual marriages, since most of the 3,000 gay couples have been together for so long already. But that's just my take on things. I could very well be wrong about that.

Join me on Wednesday when, fresh off of a rant showing support for what many Christians believe is an abomination, I talk about Lent and why I'm giving up (certain kinds of) video games.

"the fanboy inside"
Monday - February 23, 2004
[Piro] - 17:20:00
At least I'm getting better with getting comics up more or less when they are supposed to. Now I just gotta get up to speed with the rants. ^^;; Then, I need to get better at updating Fredart, answering email, working on the missing parts of the website, cutting back on the coffee intake...

In a perfect world, right?

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who emailed Sarah and I congratulating us on our nuptials. Sarah and I are quite happy together, and it kinda surprised me how nice it felt to get so many people wishing us well. Thank you, it meant a lot to us.

As a side note, there are so many things we take for granted in this world. For instance, the fact that there were no legal or political obstacles that Sarah and I had to overcome to get married. It is so hard to find your partner in this life that it really bothers me when people feel the need to tell you can't do something because your relationship doesn't fit into "their world". I'm sorry, but when people feel the need to restrict the rights of others because it is some kind of obtuse threat to "their way of life," it really bothers me. Most of the world's woes can be attributed to this kind of ignorance based logic. That's all I'll say on the matter.

[actually, I guess I need to clarify, just a little. My point above is not to slam anyone or any group, but to merely point out that restricting the rights of others based on the logic of your own belief system is 'ignorance based logic' (which doesn't make me right, of course).]

I hope you've either enjoyed or tolerated my little segue with Grand Theft Colo - Otaku City (yes, "segue" not "segway" -- a "segue" is changing to a side story, a "segway" is a little scooter that tosses presidents). Doing things like this can be a refreshing break, and it's a harmless way to mess with people's minds. I am sorry if anything in these comics offended anyone. It is a delicate balance to push the envelope a bit without going too far. While it's true that you can pretty much do anything you want on the internet, the MT reader base is a very broad demographic, and I feel that a certain amount of responsibility on my part is wise. Also, I think that having edges to push against is a challenge that makes things better. Also, Piro the Homicidal Web Comic Artist wanted some screen time, so who am I to argue with him? (with many many apologies to Mr. Jhonen Vasquez and his delightful, touching work, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac :P)

Speaking of comics, I really wish I had been able to go to APE this year, but oh well, there really was no way. Obviously, I got a real kick out of Johnny the Homocidal Maniac, but there are a few other Slave Labor Graphics titles I really like as well, including Nightmares and Fairytales (which I've mentioned before) and a new one that I really enjoyed - Serenity Rose by Aaron A. I was only able to find Issue #2, so I need to hunt down the first issue, but there was something really fun about it. I dunno if it's the art style, or the subtle writing (you really have to read it carefully to follow it) but it really amused the hell out of me. That puni style is something I'm not very good at, I wish I was. Sweet little comic, it really is. Need to find #1 and get #3...

Another comic that I picked up a second volume of was Legends of Darkwood. It's definitely going to take a few comics before the story really falls into place, but I like John Kantz's artwork (some of it seems rushed, but like I'm one to talk), and I think that once this title matures it could be really nice. Besides, the covers to #1 and #2 are awesome :)

Also, I had mentioned another comic I particularly liked called Mia It seems that Enrico Casarosa is also experimenting with the serialized webcomic format with a storystory called Haiku 5-7-5. Worth checking out, Enrico has a neat artistic style.

Yeee, I'm so not talking about the things I'm supposed to be talking about, like part 2 and part 3 of my japan trip, or our trip to Katsucon (which was great, and without the snow this year - tho there was an Anthrax scare at the show which resulted in Seraphim and I getting separated for a short period of time... that was NOT fun).

Oh, one of the things that we'll be doing this year is shooting video footage at the cons we will be going to. Since so much energy will be spent this year at conventions and stuff, we felt that it might be kinda fun to record some of it and share it with readers who never make it to cons. I might try to put together some footage from Katsu just for fun in a short clip. Anyways, I'll keep you posted as to what we end up doing with it.

Oh, and I just sorta have to mention this... allow me to let my inner fanboy mode take over for a bit. Clannad, the new visual novel game by Key (the makers of Kanon and Air) finally has a release date! April 28th! yay! Finally. I must see what I can do to get a copy lined up. I also must look into lining up some minions to gather some of the two-sided promo posters that are going up in stores 5 weeks before the game release. You can't buy them. Minions must find alternative means... must take more drastic steps to get them. Yes, must have... it has nothing to do with the kitty ears (each of the girls has a different set of animal ears... ok, I know, that's kinda weird, im in fanboy mode, it doesn't bother me, so sue me). No, I can't... no... mustn't... yes...

(rattles himself out of fanboy mode)

Oh, and my apologies to all the wonderful Applecare techs out there for the little dig in todays comic, but I couldn't resist. :P I wish I had an Ipod. I need to make someone give me one. yeah. That's what I need to do...

hee hee. :)

"Ashes and Rain"
Wednesday - February 25, 2004
[Dom] - 16:00:00
Well, my day started just right. I woke up an hour early to see some pouring rain outside my window, waded across a nearly-flooded street to get to the train station, and showed up soaking wet at the office.

Glorious. And I mean that. Because it's Ash Wednesday.

See, I grew up with a good 13 years of Catholic school. And among other things they teach you in Catholic school, it's that one Wednesday a year is dedicated to the mantra "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

But of the many traditions of Catholicism, Lent is the one I observe strictly, even after learning philosophy from a Jesuit taught me to question and reject parts of my religion I couldn't reconcile. Because as I learned it, Lent is a time of year where you try to strip away what's unimportant and do some serious thinking about your life, without the whole "going into the desert and eating nothing but locusts and honey" part of the old-school religious experiences.

What am I doing for Lent this year? I'm giving up H games, at a friend's suggestion. And it's probably a good thing, because Japanese PC games have taken over more than half of my video gaming lately-which, admittedly, isn't saying much, maybe 2 hours a week tops. But still--H games are bad for me, because with the exception of Comic Party, which is just plain funny, I play H games that are actual games. If you remember me talking about Baldr Force, I spent a lot of time in the game's mecha combat engine, and not very much time looking at porn (in fact, given the rather nature of that game, I had to turn off the speakers and look away fairly often). Or Daibanchou, which has taken over my strategy gaming.

And the thing is, beyond a few, most H games are really bad games, which have a game engine tacked on to provide a way to break up the monotony of porn. And I still play them, largely because my standards for what makes an H game playable are much lower than for other games. Why? I dunno. But it's bad for me, as a writer. I can't be applying lower standards to these things just because they're made with a different audience in mind, one that isn't so big on gaming.

Well, okay, I admit it, I'm giving up these games because someone dared me to. But everything I said before still applies.

I think. Damn, it's hard to write coherently when you're fasting.

"rolling along"
Wednesday - March 3, 2004
[Piro] - 21:06:00
Before I let loose with what turned into my usual blather of a rant, I wanted to make sure that I mentioned that Sarah and I will be leaving for Megacon in Orlando, Florida tomorrow. We'll be there for the entire weekend, most of it at our table which will be right next to the Wizzywig booth. As always, we'll be more than happy to sign stuff and draw stuff for you if you stop by and say hi. Also, there will be a Megatokyo panel, which will be Friday, March 5th in room 312 B&C from 4:30pm to 5:20pm. Should be fun :)

Well, it finally feels like Chapter 5 is starting to roll along the way I wanted it to. When I sat down to start planning it I faced that normal problem of a blank slate with all the parts, pieces, directions, threads and other things that make up a story floating out somewhere in that hazy space between my ears. I'm not a professional writer, nor have I had any training. I've just had to poke along, learn from my mistakes, and keep trying different approaches to mapping things out that will work for me.

I honestly don't think there is a single best way to do anything. Everyone has what works for them, and what works for one person may not work at all for someone else. I think I've got a good idea of what my process is now, or at least what it is that I'm attemting to make work for me.

The real challenge to writing is to try to distill things from the ether and get them into some sort of cohesive comic form. Chapter 4 suffered greatly from the fact that the formation of the ideas, concepts, themes and linear outline of events was never well formulated -- in fact, it was pretty much non-existent (except in my head). I sorta knew what I wanted to do, but because I never sat down and actually tried to map things out, I was always deciding the direction of things almost the same day I ended up drawing the comic (most of the comics in chapter 4 didn't even have a prepared script in place before I started drawing). This doesn't mean that Chapter 4 was horrid - it had its moments, but it sure didn't hold together as nice as I would have liked. About 3/4 of the way through my lack of planning became painfully evident, and I found myself with a unwieldy storyline that was gonna take a lot of effort to bring back down to the ground, and some of it wasn't pretty.

All together I think I did ok, but I know I could have done a lot better with some planning. So that's what I have been endeavoring to do here for chapter 5. Briefly, these are the steps I'm taking for planning this chapter, and some of these steps I am no where near complete with. Ideally, I shouldn't start the chapter until it's all done, but I figure if I keep at it, I'll have it all in place before the chapter gets moving too far along.

A tool that I've been using a lot is Omni Outliner, which happens to come with Mac system (yes, it only runs on macs, sorry) and it's a treat to use, far easier to write with for me than just using Word or text files is. On the PCs I used to use Ultra Edit Pro, which is a text editor. Programs are just tools. Don't be afraid to experiment -- find what works best for you.

The first thing I did was map out the general themes and goals for Megatokyo. I know where things are going, I just haven't really put it all down into one place before. I wanted to fine tune things down to large, specific themes that I could track the progress of, to make sure I take care of them each in turn. This is more of an overall step that really applies to all chapters, not just this one.

The next step was to graphically layout of what I figured was going to go on in the chapter. I use blank pieces of paper and scribble on them. I sorta use some kinda demented, deformed flowchart-like approach. Lots of little bubbles and circles with things in them describing events, character names with arrows showing where things connect, where other characters come into play, events, things that are happening at the same time, etc. This is the hardest step in writing -- its like pulling stuff out of thin air, trying to make sense of the general ideas you have. You can't just sit down and start at the beginning and write it to the end. You have to think scenarios through and move things around, have good ideas that can suddenly push out old ideas, or deal with ideas that are not going anywhere. Be brutal, don't be afraid to discard a path if it's not really working for you. Don't to worry about specifics at this point -- even if all you can think about is specifics. For instance, I may know what goes on here and here, but no idea how to connect it all together. That's why you keep things loose.

This graphic step may take several iterations before you end up with something even close to the final direction of the story. I've rehashed the general direction of chapter 5 many times, each time I do it, things come more into focus.

This just gives you a general idea where things are at, the next step is to bring things into even sharper focus by starting to write what I call the narrative. What this is each episode or what I think will be a single episode written out in a linear outline fashion - usually each one being a outline item. These are usually not fully refined -- in fact, sometimes they are very rough, including things like "Erika makes some kind of comment about what she sees" kinda stuff. If you know the details, you write it down, if you don't, you gloss over it and move on. Sometimes you find that one comics really needs two comics, or that you really should stick something else in-between these events, or things should move to later -- it's a fluid process that is almost as hard to get through as coming up with the main ideas. I take a lot of notes for things to remember in the future, things that I need to remember later. Sometimes, you'll have a great idea while doing this, and that gets worked into things. This is the part of the process that I am working on now with Chapter 5, and I'm about 1/4 the way thru.

Once this is done, then you start writing actual scripts. I still think that scripts should be done as the comic goes along, rather than all at once - I think scripts need to feed off of the comic and the art as it progresses, to keep things dynamic. The planning function of things is to help make sure that the things that come up can be fit in even better, rather than relying on spontaneity to solve all your problems :P

The final piece, of course, are the comics. I have a very serious goal this chapter which is one I've had for many years, but I feel a strong desire to meet it - that is to try to get as many comics as I can done every week. The flow of chapter 4 (and other chapters as well) was seriously hurt by all the hiccups and missed comics for the last few years. The comic will be more readable, more enjoyable, and overall much better if you, the reader, know you can come here 3 times per week and read a new comic. There will be off days here and there, its bound to happen, but last year I averaged 2 comics per week. that's an AVERAGE. That will never do -- you folks, and the MT story itself, deserve better.

Anyways, that was far more detailed and much longer than I intended. Bleah. But that's the kinda stuff I've been working on since finishing book 1. I even felt the need to clear out the cobwebs yesterday and spent a few hours in a Starbucks writing. Sometimes doing that is good for the creative flow. I'm feeling more confident in chapter 5 now that its moving along, and I hope to make most MT readers happy. Those of you who wont be happy no matter what I do, well, you know where you can go. :P

Ok, I was gonna talk about some games and some things that I've been poking at recently, but I think I'll save that for the next rant. :)

Oh, and that stack of sketchbooks on my desk in the rant image? Those are sketchbook from the first few years of MT. That's the stack I went thru to find images for the extra art section of book 1. I have about 4 times that many sketchbooks laying around here. Contrary to what you might think, 95% of what is in them is pure crap. I should take a picture of all the drawings that I've done for mt... it's quite a stack, I should do that.

"Soul burn and other news"
Thursday - March 4, 2004
[Dom] - 11:00:00
So I'm finally taking an interest in seeing movies in the theaters again. I have a pretty good idea why I'm finally uprooting myself from the DVD player, but any way you cut it, it's not a very good season for movies. Cruising Rotten Tomatoes to check out the week's upcoming movies, there are more green splats than fresh tomatoes--though the critics are just barely liking Starsky and Hutch.

But it's this Hollywood Reporter news that caught my eye. Soul Calibur is turning into a movie.

When I told that to my cube mate, Chris Baker, he responded "Why won't people learn? Bad movies based on fighting games killed poor Raul Julia!"

Me, I'm still waiting for the next movie based on a video game that can be at least as fun as the first Mortal Kombat movie. MK knew it was nothing more than an action showcase, and did it well, even with a few absolute woofers trying to pass off as Arnie-style one-liners. Anyway, that's all I'll say about the Soul Calibur movie until the first trailer comes out a year or two (probably two) from now.

In other news, I really, really want to see the exoskeleton legs that BLEEX is testing out. And thanks to this job, I just might end up doing so. Sweet... I wish I'd had one of those things when I was still a student lugging around a good 20-40 pounds of text books a day. My back would be much happier with me.

Meanwhile, I may be forced to take back what I said about Clannad not coming out on time-according to the Key Official Home Page, Clannad will be completely without voices. Which is a deal killer for me, but then again, lots of things are deal killers for me, since I don't have much time for games any more, since I spend too much time writing about them.

But if there's anything I have time for, it's Typing of the You're Already Dead, AKA Gekiuchi Online Typing Battle. I'm going to have fun with this one...

Until next time!

"memai descending"
Monday - March 8, 2004
[Piro] - 08:20:00
Well, i was doin great till i got home from Florida last night. I was doin pretty good, script in place, drawings all started and moving along. I figured that when i got home around 9:30pm or so i'd just push on and finish up. Heh, i didn't count on completely crashing out last night :)

Anyways, i still have several drawings to do this morning and i'm muddling along on them. Its ice-snow-raining outside, and i'm just gonna sit here and be glad i'm home :P

I didn't really want to do a DPD for today, but I did want to post this sketch of Memai i did while in Florida. It's not MT related (even tho Memai does look surprisingly like Kimiko, which is not necessarily an accident) but i figured that it'd be something nice to look at while y'all wait for me to get my head together and finish todays comic.

The whole Haibabe doujin idea in the back of my head is one of the more moody ideas i've had, and for some reason I do find myself wandering back to it. Anyways, enjoy.

I have some great pics from Megacon that I need to post as well as a con report as well. Hopefully in the next few days :)

(skitters off back to work)

"The Joy of Kicking"
Monday - March 8, 2004
[Dom] - 16:45:00
After a nice little recuperative jaunt to Sacramento, I've rediscovered the joys of video gaming as a hobby, rather than a job.

What did it? Unreal Tournament 2k4. Well--the demo, technically. I've never been very good at First Person Shooters, due to a lack of practice. It used to be that whenever I played an FPS for more than about 10 minutes, I would get increasingly nauseous until I had to go lie down. Playing Halo a few years back didn't do that to me, so I think I can safely chalk my early bouts of motion sickness to two things: first, the annoying "bobbing" thing that games used to do to simulate the "real walking experience" (a horrible idea if I ever heard one...), and second, bad frame rates.

I know I'm late in saying this, but UT 2K4 was a blast to play, though I have issues with vehicle driving--aircraft have Halo-style "forward is relative to the camera" controls, while ground vehicles have "forward is relative to the vehicle" controls. I'm not a fan of mixing up the controls, so I spent a lot of time in the Manta, then jumping out and going nuts with either the Avril or the minigun. I didn't get the hang of the flak cannon, unfortunately, since that's the closest thing to a newbie cannon the game has. Oh, and where the hell did my Impact Hammer go?

Meanwhile, I'm playing Cortana's copy of Ninja Gaiden, and having fun. I'm only at chapter 7 so far, so I won't say anything about people who claim that it's "damn hard". Sure, I've died a couple times, but if I didn't lose a few lives here and there, I'd be mightily disappointed with the game. I think the game's a little on the easy side, but I'm not halfway through yet. So we'll see.

I have two complaints about the game, really. It controls well, but being unable to escape from throws is pretty lame. Sure, it's an anti-turtle measure, but stylistically and from a gameplay standpoint, I despise it. Maybe I'm spoiled by fighting games, but if a big meathook of a hand comes out and tries to grab me by the neck, I want an answer other than "get out of the way".

Lessee, what else?

Hmm. Nothing. I guess I need to wait for Sengoku Musou/Samurai Warriors to arrive before I get mightily excited about another game.

"vote early, vote often!"
Friday - March 12, 2004
[Seraphim] - 10:12:00
Seraphim Survey! Since this is a Presidential election year here in the States I want to know who you would elect President. If Largo wins - I'm leaving the country! (be sure to hit 'submit' when you are finished to record your votes!) [survey all fixed. Sorry about that - piro]

Election years are so over done in the media with the analysis, predictions and polls. The reporters and the experts go off like they are picking a dog race trifecta not reporting caucus results. I have to say that the best commentary I've heard so far about the election process was Matt's rant at MacHall. I don't care which talking head reads the teleprompter but Matt should be writing the news. I am very curious that I have never once been polled by Gallop, Nielsen or any other pollster and I don't know of anyone who has ever been polled. My question is who are these people that they are polling? Where are they exactly? Do you know of anyone personally? I barely know anyone who even agrees with the results of the polls which are bandied about so frequently.

I don't believe half of it and I don't vote according to polls anyway. But I do vote. It is appalling that in the 2000 election only 51% of the voting age population turned out to vote. I think it is a disgrace and there is no excuse. You can register by mail in most states using the National Voter Registration Form if you didn't already do it while getting your license - unless you are in North Dakota which doesn't have voter registration. What is really ironic is that if someone told an apathetic voter that they weren't allowed to vote - they would go ballistic. So get registered this year, vote, and wear the cheap 'I voted!' sticker. This isn't the last you'll hear about this subject either.

Seraphim Survey Results

Favorite Character - Kimiko was #8 with 656 votes. I overlooked her while reporting the results earlier. Mi culpa.

- Publicity Survey -

The winning publicity stunt was getting married in Vegas. I'm so sneaky, I was dropping hints about Vegas weddings all over the place and no one even suspected Fred and I did exactly that. Secrets are fun. It was followed up by same gender kiss, indecent exposure, and endangering a baby. 38% would most likely be seen in the National Enquirer, 31% in Glamour, and 31% on celebrity mug shots. The story would be about decking paparazzi, bad style sense, having a much younger date, being too heavy, indecent exposure, being too thin, a much older date, rehab stays, multiple divorces, and dead last was plastic surgery. Surgery had one half of one percent - must be the young readership.

- Convention Survey -

82% like conventions
10% are neutral
8% dislike conventions
62% have been to a convention
35% haven't but want to attend
3% would never go to a convention

70% will be at one con or another. By ranking you will find MT fans at these larger cons:
"Other" cons
Otakon
Anime Expo
Anime Central
San Diego Comic Con
A-kon
Sakuracon
Anime Weekend Atlanta

Most people would go to a con in the same state or their tri-state area. Oddly, more people responded they would go across the country than across the street to attend the convention. Maybe the local one isn't that good.

The most important feature of the con is, not surprisingly, the Dealer room. That was closely followed by Special Guests, Location, and Costs. Cosplay wasn't that big of a deal. 70% pre-register, 27% decide the night before, and 3% are total procrastinators.

Someone checked all the response for which cons will you be attending. Hmm, either they are trying to throw off the data or they are a fanatic. It will be an amazing feat since Animazement in North Carolina is the same weekend as Fanime in California. Impressive.

Florida was astounding. They had green grass and leaves on the trees. We won't see weather like that until June. Megacon was sharing the convention center with the National Cheerleading and Dance Competition. Sometimes I couldn't tell the difference between the cosplay and the cheer costumes. There was a great turnout of MT fans and we were busy the entire time. The convention survey said 89 attendees at Megacon and there were at least 3x that many. The next con for us is Sakura-con in April.

"Not too shabby, i guess"
Saturday - March 13, 2004
[Piro] - 11:10:03
Sometimes it's hard to believe that I really *am* doing this comic/manga thing for a living. One of the things you end up doing when you get into an "industry" or particular business segment is that you tend to keep tabs on what is going on in that industry. Since technically I'm pretty new to the "Comics" industry, I've have had some catching up to do. I regularly read a lot of different news sites and talk to lots of people, always trying to get a feel for this crazy "industry" and how i might fit into it in my small, insignificant way.

As you might be aware, the "manga" market here in the states has done incredibly well in the past few years. All you have to do is look at how many titles are available and how much shelf space "Manga" has in today's bookstores today compared to three years ago. The growth is pretty remarkable, and is well documented.

For some reason, Megatokyo seems to fit pretty nicely into this category. Technically, it's not really "Manga" because its not done by a Japanese creator and released first in Japanese to a Japanese market. I never set out to fake being Japanese, or to try to create something "Manga-like" because it was popular (I get accused of this sometimes). I've just been heavily influenced by Japanese comics far more than traditional American comics, so it's natural that's my work tends to fall into that category. In fact, you could hardly call my tastes mainstream (I've never watched DBZ and i like dating sims - that's so mainstream :P). Yet, for some odd reason, the Megatokyo graphic novels fit nicely on the shelves next to other manga titles -- enough so that I can even poke fun at the right-to-left nature of most of them with the last page of the books.

Talking about having Megatokyo books on store shelves sure speaks volumes about how things have changed and grown over the years, most of which you readers have been able to follow. That being said, I figure you might be interested in hearing how the MT books have fairing in this "market".

Recently there was a news item on Icv2 (an industry news site) that talked about how Ruronin Kenshin vol. 3 was topping the BookScan charts after it's release on January 24th. Bookscan is a sales ranking system that is based on actual sales of books thru major book retailers like Borders, Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, etc, and is compiled every week. The Dark Horse folks are nice enough to let me see the actual BookScan numbers (It's a service run by Neilson, and is something you have to subscribe to to get) and the Kenshin book was indeed the #1 seller in the Adult Fiction Overall Graphic Novels category for those two weeks, and has actually continued to be #1 up till the most recent week. There are many other titles up there in the top ten, including Fruits Basket vol. 1, Trigun Vol. 2, etc. -- the ratings cover well over 700 titles. So, where has Megatokyo Vol 2 ranked in all of this?

For the first full week that it was available in bookstores, the week ending February 11th, Megatokyo Volume 2 came in at #4, being being outsold by only 3 titles - Kenshin Vol 3, Fruits Basket Vol 1 and Trigun Vol 2.

Holy crap, as they say.

The week after that, MT Vol2 came in at #7, then the third week it came in at #9. On the fourth week it wasn't in the top 10 anymore -- it fell to #13, and in the fifth week (that was last week) it fell to #22. Still, that's really not too shabby in a field of well over 700 titles. Also, another thing to consider is that Bookscan numbers do not include sales outside of major book retailers -- comic shops, specialty retailers, or even the Megatokyo / ThinkGeek store, where many of you purchased books. I don't believe that the Bookscan numbers even reflect sales over at Amazon.com, which has also been selling the book at a pretty good pace.

Not too bad for a "manga" like title that has no TV series on Cartoon Network or DVD anime release to back it up. The only thing backing Megatokyo up is this silly little website, with it's spotty and sketchy release schedule, and the unfaltering support of the Megatokyo fan community. Megatokyo has proven that a Webcomic can hold it's own in the retail market.

I'm telling you all of this not because I feel the need to brag, or to have some sort of "gee, maybe I don't suck as much as I thought I did" revelation (I'm not, if anything I'm even more embarrassed by the fact that I'm published by Dark Horse and I still can't draw hands ;_;) I'm telling you because this is something that people like yourself -- casual reader, regular visitor or crazed fan minion -- have made happen. I just draw and write the stuff, and have worked hard to make it available for you. Without you guys wanting the stuff, MT would be just wasting hard drive space on some server in Texas.

Numbers, as i've said from the start of this, don't lie. I can't weedle out of the fact that Book 2 has done really really well. Thank you. I don't deserve this kind of support and loyalty, but thank you. If you did purchase it, i hope you have enjoyed it.

It'll be interesting to see how the re-issue of Volume 1, which is due out at the end of this month, will do. ^^;;

This comes to a grander point that I think all of you should never forget. Various media industries sometimes think that they are the ones who make "the next big thing" happen, whether it be a movie, or a TV show, or popular book. Manga and Anime is a true examples of an "industry" that exists ONLY because fans here in the states demanded it. Hell, Thanks to the networking made possible by the internet, fans MADE it happen. This "hot thing" we are all fans of was not orchestrated by some media corportation -- in fact, for years it media companies never considered it viable that Japanese anime/manga could ever be 'mainstream'. It's something the fans have made happen by sheer brute force.

Don't ever let the industry change that. You are the ones they watch to find out what you want. Don't ever let yourselves be manipulated into being blind followers that are told to become fans of something and do so because the industry says so. Always remember that it's the fans that are the ones who should decide this. The fact that something like MT can do well with pretty much nothing backing it up but fans is a good thing. The fact that the comics industry got it thru their thick skulls that yes, there ARE women in the world and girls DO read comics, and that we want good, solid stories and we will read manga that isn't all fighting and action and we don't need nudity and violence to be popular and (gasp) consumers have real, working brains...

Keep the brains, don't become media zombies. Media companies are listening to you now, but they'd rather have it the other way around. don't ever ever ever let that happen. Don't ever lose sight of what got us here.

"All-consuming nostalgia"
Monday - March 15, 2004
[Dom] - 19:00:00
So I'm on this big classic gaming kick right now. A few weeks ago, I bought a Genesis to replace my broken one, though I have yet to hook it up to my new TV--since I only have RF cables, the system currently resides at my parents' house, waiting for me to get off my butt and find out what model it is so I can find some A/V cables for it on eBay.

I don't know why I'm feeling nostalgic lately--maybe my epic struggles with the ponderous camera and stupid platform jumping portions of Ninja Gaiden are making me long for the days of 2D platformers, where your only enemy was the level designer, not the !#$&ing camera. I mean, I haven't been able to play a Sonic game since Sonic and Knuckles, simply because the modern cameras have a hard time keeping up with the speed of the game, and Ninja Gaiden is the same way. I've died many times to the camera suddenly deciding that Ryu doesn't need to be on the screen anymore, instead taking up happy residence in the ninja's stomach. Or from frustration at the camera's refusal to center properly without having to dip into the ponderous "free look" mode, usually getting shot in the process.

Or maybe I'm eagerly awaiting Samurai Warriors/Sengoku Musou's arrival, and playing the last good beat-'em-up before the Dynasty Warriors/Sangoku Musou series, Streets of Rage 2.

But whatever's going on, it's weird--nostalgia's popping up in all sorts of places for me. On Saturday, before I went to a birthday party, I saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory playing on TV, and was entranced, thinking about when my dorm floor used to call me the Candy Man, due to my habit of buying large amounts of candy and hanging it from my door for everyone.

I think I'm turning into the target audience for horrible remakes like Defender, Frogger and Pitfall. And that scares me. It really, really does. Because as many have pointed out before, nostalgia is a way of looking back at the past and conveniently forgetting what was wrong with it. I don't figure that I'll succumb to it fully and play bad games just because they're remakes of old ones... but it's scary to think about how easy it is to say "Man, I loved Choplifter when I was a kid!" and pick up something randomly vaguely related off of a store shelf.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll fire up Shining Force 2 on the ol' emulator. Stupid battery backup going dead...

"coding blu3s"
Sunday - March 21, 2004
[Piro] - 17:58:00
It's been a while since I've actually sat down, designed and coded a web page. Coding has never been my strong point, even though over the years I've taken enough classes in programming that I should know SOME of the basics. It makes me cringe to think about it, but my first programs were written in BASIC and stored on cassette tapes for PET computers (weren't those fun?). The next step up was classes in COBAL, FORTRAN and Pascal, where output to hand in was usually recorded on a DECwriter. True, I wasn't around for punchcards, but there were stacks of cards in the computer center.

That was high school. :) Hey, I could program a mean dice rolling program, but that was about it. I didn't take any more programming classes until I was a Graduate student in college, and by that time I was scratching my head trying to figure out how to program in C in a windows enviroment. Bleah. I did manage to put together a rudimentary drafting program - it didn't work very well, but it did work, and it was fascinating to see what the mathematical underpinnings of some of these programs really are.

After many rather feeble attempts to keep up with the intricacies of languages and concepts that were being developed and used to make computer programs, I came to the glum conclusion that I didn't have the mental makeup to be a programmer.

That was until the net came along. The great thing about web pages is that HTML is a pretty simple language to learn. It was pretty easy to make simple websites, and you could make more and more complex wesbites gradually as you learned more. I was able to create some decent looking, functional web pages pretty easily. I also had an edge over many people who put pages together because I wasn't restricted to images found on the net, I liked to make my own. Programming is indeed an art form, but the nice thing about HTML was that it let me take advantage of the kind of artistic abstraction I was actually capable of - the kind you can tweak in Photoshop. :)

Of course, the web didn't stay static for very long. Static pages that never change aren't really very interesting, nor did they take advantage of the real capabilities of the internet. Early in 2000 I decided that I wanted to try to build a dynamic site, one that would be easier to update, less update-goof-proof (a very serious consideration with someone as scatter brained as myself). I dove head first into building the new fredart.com site using PHP. It's not bad, considering the fact that I'm not really a programmer -- I solved problems in ... unusual ways, sometimes ^^;; I'm actually quite proud of the darn thing, though I'd never share the code with anyone, because I don't want them to die laughing. ^^;;

Later that year I threw together the first design for the Megatokyo site... which, er, is pretty much the same design you see today. As I've mentioned before, the first version of the MT site didn't work - it was just a template really, all in HTML. Thankfully, others were a little more capable of making the site work and added functionality to it. Actually, Largo had only two days to make the site work at the time, but he got it working.

Since then, the backend of the site has had at least one major rebuild. We replaced the text-file based database with a mySQL based backend. That's served us pretty well for the past few years, but... I think it's getting a bit long in the legs. I've felt for a while now that the website needed some attention, and I've decided to go ahead and do something about it.

No, my programming skills have not reached some level where I can code a robust backend for the MT site. Hardly. But I've found someone who can, and sometime in June the new site will be ready to go. What kind of changes are we talking about? A far more robust navigation system for reading previous comics (for instance, you'll be able to select if you want to read just the story comics, include DPD, leave out SGDs, etc), you'll be able to search for comics by dialogue, character, location (inspired by the Megatokyo Database v0.75) and you'll be able to search rants as well. It's pretty sad when even I have to use a fan-built system to search my own comics and Google to find things in my own rants.

I figure you readers have suffered with the archaic navigation system and the Dropdown of Doom long enough and deserve better. Oh, and yes, I'm going to finish the story and character sections too, so shut the hell up about them, please. :)

Now, I can't really do the back end justice, but I still feel that I'm the one who needs to do the templates and the site design. Don't you hate it when one of your favorite websites changes drastically? When the web designer looks at the chance to re-design the site as a chance to wipe the slate clean and re-do everything?

Me too.

I'm not planning on changing the MT website that much. More tweaks than anything, adding new features, trimming things, making them work a little better. I feel its better to take a design that works and just try to make it better than to completely redo everything.

That being said, the real fun has been getting up to speed on current web standards. Ugh. Shoot me now.

Well, its not so bad, actually. I picked up a Visual Quickstart Guide HTML for the World Wide Web and read thru it to catch up a bit. Honestly, none of my site coding has ever really met HTML standards, even remotely. My CSS implementation was sketchy as best. So I figured I should start from scratch and try to do things right for once.

So far, it's been pretty interesting. I've managed to assemble the new site using strict XHTML and using CSS for all the layout (no tables! yay!) which is great, but I'm not sure if I'll go quite that extreme for the final site - depends on testing and stuff.

Anyways, it's been fun getting my feet wet with site design again. It's a real pain, but it's rewarding too. Of course, I have already spent too much time on this this weekend, and now I am behind getting started on mondays comic, but ah, that's just normal for me :)

"Cuttin' off hedz"
Wednesday - March 24, 2004
[Dom] - 11:30:00
I figure you know what this screenshot means. Yes, I'm playing FFXI now.

Y'see, Saturday was this little affair called ReccaCon, where I sorta just showed up and got a guest badge. It's not like I really did anything--I read One Piece volumes 13 through 18 or so, hung out with Greg Dean, and got a really, really old Sonic soundtrack disc.

And really, just basked in the feel of being in a tiny con and hanging out with friends. I've said this before, and I'll say it again--Recca makes me feel like I'm at Fanime ten years ago, and that's a good thing. It's homey.

But another upshot of going to ReccaCon is that Greg, Liz, PacoPaco, Hamusutaa and many other friends finally reached critical mass. There are now so many of my friends playing FFXI that I have to, too. Yes, a straw broke this camel's back.

To make myself feel better, I pre-ordered City of Heroes a few minutes before heading down to CompUSA and grabbing Final Fantasy, which means that technically, the first MMORPG I ever bought was CoH.

I feel like I joined the mafia, though--not five hours after I bought the game on Monday, I found that Greg had told one of his minions to buy me a World Pass to Phoenix. So I was already dubbed a Shirt Ninja before I ever even stuck the first CD in my computer, since I spent Monday night at the Metreon for a decidedly uninteresting PS2 launch party brightened only by hanging out with great people (no, Yuwanna Mann doesn't count).

In case you're wondering, I'm working toward being a Taru Samurai--people are calling me nutty, and they're probably right. But hey, I have every right to be weird--I'm known for it. It's why my Magic Defender on City of Heroes is named Durian, it's why I'll probably create Token Asian Superhero as a Technology Scrapper, and it's why I put up a screenshot of a dead Hamusutaa.

"weekend travels"
Wednesday - March 24, 2004
[Piro] - 23:15:00
Before I get started, I need to mention two things. First, I'll be speaking at the the St. Joseph County Public Library Open Book Festival this weekend in South Bend, Indiana (That's Saturday, March 27). Not sure of the entire schedule right now, but I give my talk in the afternoon around 2:30. If you live in the area, please feel free to stop by. Always glad to support local libraries. :)

The second thing I need to mention is that next week, on April 1st, actually, I'll be giving a lecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 7pm as part of their 'New Funnies" lecture series. No, it's not an april fools joke :P So, if you are a MIT student or live in the Boston area, please feel free to stop by and here me talk about… stuff. :)

I've got a rant in progress here, but… I'm not feeling very good tonight. I seem to have picked up a head cold that has been dogging me all day, so I'll finish it up for friday.

"The Cool Thing™ Factor"
Tuesday - March 30, 2004
[Piro] - 12:44:02
Two things before I get started here... first off, I'm holding in my hands the Dark Horse re-issue of Megatokyo Volume 1. Damn, this thing is so much nicer than the original version. The books have shipped and just have to work their way through the distribution chains to your favorite bookstores and comic specialty shops. So, all you people bidding on those last copies of Volume 1 on Ebay, you can stop now -- the re-issue is a lot nicer and only $9.95. Sheesh.

The second thing is just a small reminder that if you live in the Boston area, don't forget that I'll be giving a lecture at MIT this Thursday evening (april 1st) at 7pm.

Every once and a while I get an email or a random forum question that asks one of the "40 questions I get asked so much that the next person to ask gets beat to death with the Fan Appreciation Bat™." I've discovered that the more I stay up to date with the comic, the less of these I get, so there is a definite incentive for me to keep solidly to the 3 comic per week schedule. One of those questions is always "What happened to Largo's Cool Thing™" or "What exactly is Largo's Cool Thing™?"

The answer is, I don't think anyone really knows. The theory is that it is a extradimentional device that... well, I'll let you find out for yourself later in the story. Metaphorically, it's much easier to describe the idea behind the Cool Thing than what it might actually be.

Haven't you ever wanted something that was just... cool? Haven't you ever wanted some device or toy or thing that you have absolutely no real need for but the desire for it burns your soul until you can't take it anymore? You find yourself running out in the rain without a coat to get in your car just minutes before the store closes to buy one with the last bit of space on your credit card...

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has ever dealt with this moment of consumer driven insanity. The economies of industrialized countries depend heavily on this "Cool Thing Factor" to feed the bottom line. If consumers only purchased the things that we needed, I think the US economy would collapse, and all those credit card companies would go out of business. Think of all that money in excessive and draconian interest rates that these companies wouldn't be getting every month from us. How tragic. Imagine getting out of college with no credit card debt. How un-American.

But I digress. That's a whole 'nother rant.

I've had many "Cool Things" in my life. In fact, its kinda sad as I look back at all of the little purchasing obsessions I've had over the years. Ever spend months "researching" (aka "drooling over") something before that wonderful day comes when you place your order? Ever sit at work and hit the Fed Ex or UPS or Airborne website every half hour to track your package? Ever have have that YAY! moment when it comes up 'delivered' and you know that as soon as the work day is done (or before, depending on if you can sneak out early) you are gonna make a bee-line for the apartment complex front office to get your beloved package...

Yeah. Kinda sad, really. Maybe what's even more sad is that they are happy memories. I mean, I remember the first time I opened that box that had my new 23" Apple Cinema Display in it. I remember oogling over the cords and connectors and how nice they are. How sad does a person have to be to oogle over a cable? Sheesh.

The "Cool Thing Factor" doesn't always result in a purchase, of course. In fact, most of the time either the factor isn't strong enough to push you into the "Purchase zone" or the cost is far beyond your ability to raise and you find that your blood plasma isn't worth as much as you thought. Often, you just move on to a new "Cool Thing" to research and you look back, wondering just why in the world you wanted the previous item as bad as you did.

"Cool Things™" actually fall into two categories. Things like my Apple Cinema Display are 'usable items' - things that you still use after the initial glow wears off and you stop wiping it down with a dust cloth every 10 minutes. Those kind of "Cool Thing" purchases most of us can justify to some extent in the end -- Sure, I could get buy with something less, but it is still useful. A true and pure "Cool Thing™" is something that has no real use or purpose in your life, and there is nothing you can do to justify it's purchase beyond its pure "Cool Thingieness™"

One such item for me the Ipod. I don't know why I want one of the damn things. I work at home, I'm always in front of a computer, I have a nice set of speakers and music is always playing (I don't need to use headphones much, Seraphim is very tolerant :) and besides, I usually listen to streaming audio radio stations. Why on god's green earth do I need an Ipod? Worse yet, I have this little twitch that almost makes me want a MINI Ipod! There is no logic here. For what they cost, you have to USE the damn thing, right? So why is IpodLounge bookmarked on my toolbar?

Maybe the point about cool things is that there is some kinda weird primitive thing in our brains that the logical side of our heads can't quantify. It's probably the same part of the brain that made early man oogle of bright and shiny things. I don't think Largo really knows what his Cool Thing does or what it really is. It doesn't really matter. It's Cool, it's a thing, and he had to have it. Now I just have to keep quelling my own struggles with the "Cool Thing Factor". Wish me luck.

(the image linked above was crafted by "the peacemaker" and had been posted in the forums - pretty sweet rendering, isnt it?)

"A brave new world"
Wednesday - March 31, 2004
[Dom] - 28:00:00
In case you've been wondering where I've been the past week, I've been working on some more SGDs for you while Fred's off. We've been planning this for a while--since book 2 came out, actually--and I think some of my best work is coming out of this period. Anyway, check back tomorrow when I'll have a new strip for you while Fred's in Boston.

And if you're wondering what I've been doing at work, well, check out the April Gadget Lab from Wired.

"train wreck"
Friday - April 9, 2004
[Piro] - 10:25:00
[i posted the best of yesterday's meager efforts over on fredart - a small unfinished sketch of Asako and Mami. Not good enough for a DPD, but postable on fredart, i guess - piro]

Ever have one of those days when you look back at it and wonder what the hell happened? Yesterday was that kind of day.

It's now around 9am and I'm sitting here sipping reheated coffee (yum, love that bitter day later in the microwave taste!) wondering how the train wreck that was yesterday's effort to produce something meaningful happened. There were many casualties -- my schedule, 4 to 20 unsuspecting pieces of paper, a good quantity of lead, a little bit more life shorn from my poor little click eraser, and worst of all, what little bit of pride I had started to eek together having been able to produce at least 3 comics per week for the past month or so.

Surprisingly, I didn't sink into my normal drama-filled whine-fest about my blockage yesterday (a fact for which I know Seraphim is very grateful)... in fact, I've been remarkably low key about it, feeling surprisingly ok about things. That's not good, I think -- I think it's an indication of the problem that I am dealing with.

It's rare when both writer's block AND artist's block afflict me at the same time. Usually, I can use one or the other to bust my way forward and get things rolling. It's really quite common to find myself stuck with the finer points of what I want to do with a script, so I turn to the art and start drawing. After drawing for a while, the strip comes together because the drawing part helps loosen up some of the writing ideas. Many times, it's just the opposite. I'll have a script and I'll be ready to go, but the artwork just isn't coming. Sometimes, I'll sit down and write some more, usually on the balance of the chapter. Most times, overcoming writers block or artists block just requires some discipline to force yourself to keep working at it till something breaks. I don't know how professionals deal with it, I know everyone has their own methods, but this is mine. It works, most of the time.

Sure wasn't workin' yesterday.

First the script wasn't coming together. Then the drawings weren't coming together at all. I tried to go back to the script, then the drawings. Around 11:30 I decided that I was wasting my time. I figured that doing a DPD of some sort would clear my head, let me focus on something else for a while.

Sheesh. I couldn't even manage that. How sad is it when I can't even swing a decent Dead Piro Day drawing? I suppose that the problem with doing a DPD is that they usually work when I have other ideas creeping around in the back of my head interrupting things. A DPD is a good way to get them out of the way. I was having a lot of trouble coming up with something to draw that I could put some life into. Sure I did pages and pages of drawing starts, but none of em had much of anything worth finishing.

I can hear the "post them anyway!" emails I'll be getting already, so please don't. ^^;; I mean, the whole idea of doing art is that there has to be something in it that gives it life or meaning of some sort. Dead pencil lines that don't mean anything to me aren't worth the time to scan. Seriously.

I look back at my lack of drama about it all last night and I wonder to myself if that wasn't part of the problem. Normally, I hit a bad snag like this, my vocal admonishments of myself and claims of eminent doom, disaster and desire to set fire to the bookshelves drive Seraphim to the point that I get the deadly "one more whine and I'll hurt you" look. This usually mollifies me, and then I sit quietly and start drawing again, usually working my way thru the blockage (note how important she is to my creative process :P).

I seriously think that, for me at least, getting past writers block and artists block always involves the release of some sort of built up frustration and angst that finds its way out, and once it's cleared and out of the way I'm able to move on. The complete lack of this angst peak last night really bothers me.

I guess it just means that I haven't worked my way through it yet. Writing this has been a bit of an angsty output of sorts. As much as I am sure you'd rather have a comic than read this low key whine-fest, at least you know I'm not sitting on the couch playing FFX XI (hah! I don't even own it!).

I think I'll go make a fresh pot of coffee, and see what I can do to muddle my way thru this today. I am sorry about the lack of comic today -- hey, this is a webcomic, there are always going to be missed days. My goal this year is to miss as few as possible. I might even find myself doing a comic later today, I don't know yet. I might do a DPD, I might just wait to post something till Monday. In a professional environment, this kinda stuff wouldn't effect you, the reader, because pros are a few weeks ahead, and slipups like this get absorbed and passed over. Web comicing is like performance art, I think, and that's part of what gives it some of it's energy and vitality. So we all miss a day or two (or 52 or 200 or so, if you are me). It's part of what makes us human.

I'll post some stuff later, let you know how it's going.

Oh, in closing, I do want to mention two things. First off, the Dark Horse re-issue of book one should be finally finding it's way to bookstores and whatnot pretty soon. I've already seen it in local comic shops (Otherworlds here in Ann Arbor, for instance). Secondly, the fine folks at Wizzywig are in Boston this weekend at Anime Boston. As usual, they have a nice selection of MT swag and stuff, so be sure to stop by if you feel the need to get some MT stuff. More on the Megatokyo convention schedule next rant. :)

"Megatokyo 3.0 beta"
Tuesday - April 13, 2004
[Piro] - 10:50:00
-- update --

First off, i want to thank all of you who took a look at the new site and took the time to take screenshots and give me feedback about the display problems you were encountering. It really helped.

Ok, for the most part it came down to three things that needed to be fixed. People using Opera and in many instances Mozilla and some other variants on various systems found that the text in the Newsbox was spilling out of the boxes and overlapping things. This was because i was hard-coding the pixel height of the boxes to try to get things to line up at the bottom. There's no real way to fix this for all browsers, but i think my fix for this is a good compromise - on many browsers, the boxes at the bottom extend to the bottom like they are supposed to, on some they don't. Better to have a slightly awkward bit at the bottom of the newsbox than overlapping text. Check it and see how that looks now.

The second problem was that the new drop down was, in many instances, dropping down and overlapping the checkboxes. This happened because the width of the drop down box varies a LOT from browser to browser - what has plenty of room on my browsers is way too wide on others. To fix this, i set a width for it. Hopefully this will prevent it from dropping down.

The last and most complex problem was the fact that the site was still very broken in Konqueror - it just doesn't like having images next to each other like that. So, to fix the prob, i made the shadows background images and placed the images over them. That should fix the problem all around. I need to tweak the shadow images a bit, but thats not too hard to do - just a bit of photoshopping. I used this trick on the banner, the comic, and the rant images.

there was also a IE white space error at the top of the page, but with the last fix, that went away anyway :P There were some other little things i tweaked here and there... cant remember it all, but if you sent in some feedback, check and see if the fixes take care of the formatting problems you were having. As far as netscape 4 stuff, there are tricks to dealing with the formatting for that problem child that i will put together later.

anyways, check it out again (its the same location, just refresh your browser). thanks again for the feedback!

-- end update --

Things seem to be moving along a little smoother now, from a writing and drawing point of view (even if some of the drawings of Yanagisawa-san in monday's comic look like he evolved differently than the rest of the human race), but onward and upward as they say.

I have a lot of things to talk about this week, lots of stuff going on, but I gotta start somewhere, so let's talk about the new website. As you may recall from a few weeks ago, I mentioned that the MT site is getting a long needed overhaul. The site has served us well for many years, and has been rebuilt completely only once since we tossed it online back in 2000. (I think it's only one major rebuild - there have been minor upgrades here and there). I don't want to re-invent the wheel when it comes to reading MT, but the navigation system for reading the archives desperately needs this rebuild - the comic has outgrown the Drop Down of Death. :)

Some of the new features include a search function that will not only let you search rants and the rest of the site, but comics for dialogue, characters and locations as well (just like the Megatokyo Database. Also, there will be check boxes that will let you read the comic with or without all the non-story comics. Fun, huh?

Even though I did cobble together the fredart website in PHP, I'm hardly what you would call a programmer. What I have been able to manage over the years (barely) is web design. The HTML code that makes up the MT site is my fault -- the good, the bad, and the very ugly. The site works, but it has tons of nested tables, little transparent pixel nudgers, hacks and wacks that look at least serviceable in most browsers. Even by early 2000 standards it was a hack job of HTML coding, and it's chances of it validating, even back then... not very good. In fact, I think that over the years some of my html has actually broken a little by the insertion of the backend coding and various tweaking of it (I believe the site still breaks Konqueror).

Like I said before, I don't really want to change the look and feel of the MT site too drastically, but just like the back end of the site, the new mark-up has to be built to higher standards than my original hack job. When I realized that I had taken this task on myself, it dawned on my just how little I knew about current standards and the way web pages are assembled these days.

Once I started reading, I could see that things have actually changed quite a bit. Using XHTML (HTML redone in XML) and CSS properly was going to take some effort to learn, and I was going to have to change my thinking. The incentive for doing so was that the nudge and kludge of nested tables and transparent gifs is horrid to work with -- being able to have a cleaner, easier to work with code would be worth the effort.

I've actually made two false starts to rebuilding and assembling the new site. The first two times, I was still trying to assemble things like I did back in 2000, just using CSS rather than tables. The hardest thing to get a handle on was this concept of separating structure from formatting. The books I had mentioned this concept, but I was having trouble applying it.

I'm sure there are people out there who obsessive to the point of needing medication about web standards. There are many flags that people fly, insisting that this way or that way is more correct. I'm just a little guy who wants to make a website most people can use without difficulty. ^^;; Web standards are an evolving thing. There are issues of backwards compatibility (it's foolish to design a page that only people who have the latest and greatest browsers can see) yet it's also dumb to not look ahead to where web standards are going (for instance, trying to kludge the current MT site on a text based PDA or cell phone is a nightmare right now). I wanted to pull together something that will work now and for a few more years without causing problems for readers.

Ok, what's this "Structure from Format" thing? Well, the current direction of web standards is that you should try to separate the structure of your page and the formatting into two parts -- let XHTML handle the structure, and use CSS to handle the formatting. Simple idea, but really hard to figure out how to implement if you are old school about web design :P The idea is that the information on your page should be structured so that many different devices can use it, and your formatting should be applied to that structure so that end users can modify it or work with that formatting to serve their needs. In other words, the formatting should not get in the way of the information and usablility of your website.

I got a number of very helpful emails from people regarding my efforts here, many encouraging me to keep lumbering along in this direction. The one that helped me the most highly recommended a book that I should read called Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman. Reading this book really helped me break some of my old habits, and explained things in ways that even my simple brain could fathom. Definitely a worthy read.

Anyways, all that blathering aside, I've posted here the most current version of the front page template for MT readers to look at. Now, I'm not looking for extensive feedback... for the love of god, I couldn't handle the email ^^;;. I'm posting this to see if it breaks in people's browsers. I'm designing this in a Mac environment, and even tho it works on every browser I have in this apartment (both PC and Mac) that doesn't mean it will work for all of you. If it works in your browser and in your working environment, great - you don't have to email me to tell me so :P. If it doesn't, make a screenshot and send me a link to it.

There's no way I can design a site that works in all browsers -- the current site doesn't do that -- but it will be interesting to see how well this version does. It's XHTML 1.0 transitional (it even validates! I've never been able to do that before! :) and the real amusing thing is this... the page is 20k, with a CSS sheet that's 8k. The current page, the one you are looking at, is 60kb. Yikes. ^^;; Most of that is the Drop Down of Death, but even taking that out, that the site is a good 32k of coding. Faster loading is always nice, isn't it?

[please note that this is a NON WORKING template - it's just a simple XHTML file. None of the links do anything.]

I know that many times people like to keep the 'new look' of things under wraps and then 'launch' the new site with trumpets and fireworks. Blah. I'd rather let you guys see it now. The timeline for all of this to be done and working is sometime in early june. Whee, so much to do... Hope you guys like where things are going, It'll be really nice to bring the site up to snuff.

"Blech"
Wednesday - April 14, 2004
[Dom] - 17:00:00
edit: DSL at home! Bless you, Speakeasy tech support. Bless you. I'm still angry at Cohn-Wolfe and Lian Li, though.

edit 2: Rage... abating... Cohn-Wolfe... called back...

Dom very angry. Will not write in coherent sentences yet.

DSL company sent Dom "express install" CD, which when used made DSL modem fail. Tech support: "WHAT?! You're not supposed to install the CD!". DSL modem is just being an ass in general. Only being connected at work means no FFXI, means no City of Heroes, means very angry Dom.

Bastards at Cohn-Wolfe won't tell me if I'm registered for E3 or not, even though I sent my reg in almost a month ago. Bastards. Won't return phone calls. Don't want to spend three sweaty SoCal hours trying to prove I'm me and I write. Note that I tried contacting Cohn-Wolfe a few months ago asking to renew my GamePro reg with a few changes, and they said "don't worry, registering online is easier than ever before!". At which point I went through the exact same form as last year, faxed almost exactly the same info (though with a new article, natch) and what do I get? Squat. Ugh.

Why haven't I ranted in two weeks? Well, about ten days ago Fred said to hold off until Sarah had a rant up. Then I fell off the face of the earth due to that nasty "moving" thing. My own computer isn't set up due to heat problems (Whose bright !#%&ing idea was it to put the power supply DIRECTLY OVER THE PROCESSOR?!), I'm using a loaner in the meantime.

I want to punch someone in the stomach.

Hard. Preferably causing Houdini-style internal bleeding.

Rant end.

"html tweakin'"
Sunday - April 18, 2004
[Piro] - 19:05:00
Ok, been working on the damn website template some more. ^^;; I know that there really is no end to this process -- its pretty damn hard to make a page that looks good in all browsers and takes care of all readers. I've had a pretty remarkable cross section of replies, and most of the tweaks that i've made have tried to address the problems, changes, etc.

Please take one more look and tell me if things are borked or not. There will be some browsers that render a few things odd here and there, but i've done the best i can to minimize that problem. If nothing else, everyone should be able to access the content.

[yes, the text sizes might be a little wonky. That's because im trying to do it *right* (using em to declare text sizes) but it's astonishing how to one person and browser the fonts are HUGE and to another the fonts are so tiny they cant read em. Hehehe, gotta love standards. :) I'll be tweaking that sometime tonight - piro]

"whee, isn't this fun?"
Monday - April 19, 2004
[Piro] - 10:04:00
Ok, I'm getting there. I think. Sort of.

Once again, thank you very much for all the feedback. It's almost more than I can absorb all at once. Often, I can't address everyone's problems, nor can I make the site look perfect in everyone's browsers, but I'm trying to at least get close.

For your reference, here's a screenshot of what I'm looking at. The fonts are smaller in Safari, and bigger on most PC web browsers. It wont look the same in all browsers - pretty hard to do that, but this method seems to get close. (by the way, a big thanks to TwystNeko for his advice and help with all of this. I think he's ready to strangle me by now :P)

Font sizes are closer to making sense now. I still might tweak them one way or another, but it should be MUCH better than it was earlier today. It's a mix of one em call and percentages, so it should all scale easily if you like fonts lots bigger (even in IE!).

Old Konq seems to be rendering things just fine now. Hah! about time. :P

The biggest problems seem to be in Opera. It just doesn't seem to like the CSS in the comic navigation area very much, and as a result I'm probably going to divide that area into a table just to make sure that it works for everyone. There will always be small cosmetic errors, but opera pooches the drop down over the checkboxes... that's a usability issue. :) Oddly enough, I installed Opera 7.23, and it seems to render everything for me just fine. We'll do some more testing to check later.

Yes, I know about the lack of content in many of the "alt" tags and lack of "title" tags for mouseovers. I'll be adding those in properly as for the final site.

Two small things. that line of text under the "relax, we understand joo"... that's a GIF file, people. It's cut off on purpose. It's part of the design. You can stop emailing me about it.

Oh, and hello, this is a TEMPLATE. It's a NON WORKING TEMPLATE. the prev and next buttons don't do anything, nor do the checkboxes or the drop down menus. ^^;; Thank you.

I know about the small problem with the shadow around the comic (at the corners, you can tell it's a bit uneven). I've been working on solutions for that - it's a graphical thing, there a few ways to fix it, none of which will bork the front page (I hope).

Also, many of these are not final graphics. Some of them need to be re-done, but they are pretty easy to replace later (like that nasty little 'go' button). Also, the top banner, where Largo and Piro are, that will cycle so there are different images there. it's a simple image size and location, so I can more easily change/add them over time, to add some variety to the page.

Oh, for the old Netscape 4.7 and the fact that it can't deal with CSS very well... I'll have a pretty standard work around that takes out the CSS formatting. It'll look plain, but you'll see the comic and relevant rants and stuff.

Speaking of non-CSS browsers, some people have suggested adding some more things to the body tag to deal with link colors so that the text always is readable. I'll add some of that as well to the final version.

yes, there will be a finished and working Characters page and Community page when the site is done.

Some other browsers really mess things up (one person sent me a screenshot that was massively messed up... good god, what the hell browser were you USING???) :P

(if I can think of anything else, I'll add it after I post. I THINK that's everything)

I know some of this seems like im obsessing over little things -- this single page has taken up a lot of my time, but hey - MT really is mostly a one page site. This is the console that people use to read the comic. im adding sub pages to support this page (like the news area, etc) but for the most part, this is what people will use to read the site, and will for a while... so I wanna get it mostly right. :)

Oh, and about today's comic... I've been wanting to do this one for a while. There's something ridiculous about a lot of what is going on in the world, and these are only a few of them. A little while ago, Gator (who has since changed their name to "Claria") threatened to sue anyone who called their Gator software "Spyware." I'm sorry, that's just wrong. What's next, Microsoft will sue anyone who calls Windows "Crap"? What is going on in this country? (psst, sorry. Gator --is-- spyware... shh, you didn't hear that here...)

What prompted me actually doing this comic today was the culmination of a long struggle to remove another piece of spyware/malware from the Win XP machine. Since sarah and I moved over to Macs, we haven't dealt with or worried much about the virus/spyware/adware stuff we used to worry about on the windows machines. Now, to be fair, Mac users are a far smaller percentage of users on the net, so it makes sense that Microsoft systems get targeted more. The trouble is, I haven't been monitoring the Windows machine the way I normally would have, since we used it so little. It's amazing what can sneak in when you aren't looking.

For a long time, Sarah used to use the XP box for a lot of her research. Being in the school of information, she did a LOT of online research, and it took her to a lot of websites far outside of the range most people normally visit. Of course, in doing this, she managed to pick up a nasty browser hijacker called CoolWWWsearch. It replaced the front page, and whenever you did google searches went to its own search engine instead... ya, nice stuff. People who write this stuff and force it on people need to have a six foot glowing hot iron rod forced slowly down their throats. I could not get this goddamn thing to go away. When it came up, I switched her over to using Firebird (Firefox), and tried to clean it, and ended up giving up. Every so often I'd try again, but I was always too busy to really work at it. I thought what was really needed was a complete system rebuild. There hasn't been time for that yet.

As sarah used her laptop more and more, it was less of a concern. Till I started testing web pages. The fact that this goddamn thing was still there, mocking me, really pissed me off. Fsk the page design, the hell with the comic... CoolWWWSearch was goin down, or the XP box was goin thru the window.

with the help of some friends, Ad Aware, SpyBot, and some liberal use of Safe Mode, I was able to eradicate it. There was much rejoicing. Took 4 hrs of fiddling and some hair pulling. I wish I could send the people who run coolWWWsearch a bill for my time. I wouldn't even pad it.

Anyways, this struggle made me think of the Gator story (another one that wasn't so easy to remove on the few occasions I managed to get it), and wanting largo to get a bill from SCO, and, well, I decided that it was a fine day to do this comic. Hope it was at least somewhat amusing. Oh, if you look back, you might find examples of LDE on largo's screens. It's not easy to find :)

The last bit about RFID tags... RFID tags scare me. I have seen what they can do with them in libraries. You know those odd white plastic things in CD cases? Little white sticky things stuck in the books you buy at Borders? Those are RFID tags. Basically, they are activated when radio waves hit them and they return information (those things you walk thru when walking out of stores, the things that go 'beep!' if you try to walk out with something without paying for it.) Google for RFID tags and read up about them. Innocent, useful things, yes, but there are major privacy concerns.

read up on them, and I'll continue this line of thought in my next rant...

"and the winner is..."
Monday - April 19, 2004
[Seraphim] - 11:55:00
President Poll Results

First and foremost, as I am STILL getting emails about this, I didn't forget Junpei in this poll. Junpei decided not to run in the mock election because being a politician goes against the Ninja code of honor which forbids things like lying, cheating, and stealing.

This was a large poll - there were over 15,000 responses. It took 4 hours just to parse the data and compile it.

And the winner is Largo, of course. Although if Junpei had run, I think he would have won.

93% would vote for a woman candidate. 7% would not.
59% vote in national elections
11% didn't vote
30% were too young to vote.
25% have been officially polled.
75% have never been polled.
26% think their votes matter.
74% are cynical voters.

I should have riled up the conspiracy theorist and asked who they thought actually won the 2000 Presidential election and if they thought it was rigged. I love the move Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts. It's a bad movie and I usually don't admit to enjoying it. Captain Picard as the evil doctor. I love it.

Piro was getting out of the car the other day to run up to the ATM and he says to me, "You should step out of the car." Being the loving and trusting wife that I am I did not hesitate to ask, "Why?" I'd gotten a really creepy feeling like in a movie when you see the monster sneaking up behind the actor and the victim is totally clueless. Piro was obviously telling me to leap out of the car to my death. So Piro being a sensitive husband whips out a Nike slogan and says, "Just do it!" As I'm getting out of the car I see an enormous spider above me. I hate spiders. I detest and loathe spiders. I hate spiders that are above me most of all. At one of my jobs I encountered a wolf spider and started screaming, "Spider! Spider!" Unfortunately, people mistook what I said for Fire! Fire! It was especially bad considering it was a rehab clinic with more than a few disabled clients. It was a bad scene. Now I have Piro. He kills all spiders that threaten me. That was part of his vows. To love, honor, cherish, and kill all spiders. So far this spring he is 3-0.

There was yet another bank robbery in Ann Arbor. How do we know? We drove by it again. Do we drive by every bank that gets robbed around here? What really astounds me is the fact that when I have researched and compared Ann Arbor to other cities - Ann Arbor always has the best overall crime statistics. Always. With the bank robberies in town and assaults on campus I just don't buy it. I wonder what happened to the Ann Arbor man stopped in Nevada with the bodies of 2 Ann Arborites in the trunk of his car. Haven't heard a thing about the case. There must be a giant mound under a giant rug where they keep sweeping things.

Gotta love the story on Countdown with Keith Olberman (I love Keith) about the librarian who taped the mouths of third graders shut. I've encountered a lot of negative views on librarians this week. I've also been reading many, many young adult novels and they never have anything good to say about librarians. They are all finger pointers, shushers, and detention givers. I attend classes with lots of school media specialists - I sat next to two just today - and they are not evil people. I think school media specialists and children's librarian are actually cooler than the general librarian population. They even know what graphic novels are.

Strange but true - Samwise Gamgee is the son of Gomez Adams and Helen Keller. His parents are Patty Duke and John Astin. I don't see it. I can't help thinking about the photo morphing machines in Vegas where you could both get a picture taken and see what your child would look like. I look at the two of them and I don't see him as the end result.

In case you need good reading for summer I recommend Fairy Tales and Nightmaresby Serena Valentino and Fsc. The graphic novel just came out and I picked one up to have signed at San Diego Comic Con. Tom Beland has new book coming out, True Story, Swear to God: 100 Stories. He is really funny and Piro especially liked Dancing Crab. Uh, and don't forget Megatokyo Volume 1. I even wrote a little something for it about the early days of MT. It's riveting!

And very cool and very sweet, Piro stood in line and had Neil Gaiman sign a copy of his book Coraline for me while he was at Penguicon. He even drew a rat. He writes and draws. Multi-talented people annoy me. And that includes Piro!

"off to seattle..."
Wednesday - April 21, 2004
[Piro] - 11:03:00
Well, I was gonna touch on RFID tags in this rant, but gee, shock of shocks, I'm woefully behind on... well, everything. :P So, RFID tags aside, I need to go over a few quick newsitems.

Tomorrow evening I'll be heading off to Sakuracon in Seattle, Washington for my second appearance there. I'll be there the whole weekend, most times at the Wizzywig booth to sign, draw, and other wise lower the worth of items placed before me. I am pretty sure that Wizzywig will have copies of Book 1 available as well as a nice cross section of MT stuff.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Seraphim will be able to join me on this trip, something which I find really depressing. :( She has an exam friday night, and her final paper due Monday morning. There's just no way she's going to be able to make it. You'll just have to deal with boring old me.

Honestly, I've been looking forward to going to this convention for a number of reasons. Aside from the fact that the staff at Sakuracon are great folks, I'm particularly worked up about possibly being able to meet Yoshitoshi Abe-san (you know, that guy who did Haibane Renmei and Lain). I'm also looking forward to meeting Akitaroh Daichi-san (you know, the director who did Fruits basket), being able to see Hiroshi Nagahama-san (we met last year) again, seeing Tim, my Editor from Darkhorse (Dark Horse is located in Portland), and even seeing those two Penny Arcade guys again. That is, if I don't embarrass the hell out of myself meeting Abe-san, after which I will just fly straight home and wrap myself in a blanket, never to set foot online or in public again.

Lots of neat stuff going on at this con this year, including a concert by Hiro that I'll have to try to see (saturday at 8pm), and a few panels that I'll be doing.

The first one will be Friday at 3pm, a Webcomics Panel with me and the Penny Arcade guys, Tycho and Gabe. It was a fun panel last year, so we we get to throw things at each other one more time. This will be in the Emerald Ballroom A-F.

The next panel will be Saturday at 1:00pm, the Megatokyo panel, where I get to see just how many of these boring things I can do before people stop coming. As long as you don't ask me about one of the 30 forbidden MT questions, I'll try to make it entertaining. This will be in the Glacier/Horizon/Alpine room.

I also plan to sit in on the Dark Horse panel with Tim at 3:00pm. Tim is looking for feedback about not only MT, but other directions Dark Horse is looking to go in. I hope he brings the Kuu hat I got him. This is in the Columbia room.

All other times I should be at the Wizzywig booth (click there to see the con schedule for the year, which shows where they (and I) will be located :P). As always, stop by and say hi, I'll be happy to draw something for you. Be creative with what you'd like, but lets not get TOO creative, k? :P

I didn't mention this above, because I decided to leave my whining for the end of the rant, but I am pathetically behind on things right now. I'm supposed to have friday and monday's comics done before I leave tomorrow, right? I was super late with todays comic, so take a guess how well im doing with fridays and mondays ^^;; I'm determined to do it, its just that mondays might have to wait till late when I get home to scan and finish, depending on how things go. Good thing I'm getting used to working on planes.

I need to get back to work. More updates if I have any. :P

"Aliens in my lap"
Thursday - April 22, 2004
[Dom] - 10:00:00
You'd think that, working at Wired Magazine, I could advise Fred on recent technology jokes, such as last month's utter failure of the much-hyped DARPA race (though DARPA says, and rightly so, that it's just the first step in a long walk toward robotics), the neo-Luddite posing as Salt Lake City's mayor, the continuously unraveling bust that is Diebold, or dozens of other topics.

That assumes that we have free time at the same time in which to talk, though. See, there's this little thing called E3 coming up, and given that I'm always be more of a game journalist than a technology journalist, taking care of that is always a priority. And on top of that, we have an issue closing this week, in which I have two bylined articles (woohoo!).

And, yes, FFXI/City of Heroes. Those don't help my free time either.

On to more substance to my rant! As I write this, I'm patching FFXI on an Alienware laptop, which makes me feel so inferior that I want to throw my monitor out the window. While I can't talk too much about it since I'm writing a review for Wired, I must say. UT2k4 looks sweet on this thing.

Let's see what else is going on. Ah, yes, anger. Well, most of my anger is abated, due to connectivity at home and... well, a continued silence from Cohn-Wolfe, actually, I should ping Ashley about that again. And I'm buying a new case soon, which should help my mood a great deal, when I can type in Japanese again.

One thing that helped my mood a great deal was the arrival of a CD entitled The Very Best of Sega from OneUp Studios, which has remixes of some of my favorite video game tracks ever, especially the ToeJam and Earl theme, Streets of Rage 2 and Eternal/Skies of Arcadia. It made me want to go out and find the actual Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack, but apparently, it was a limited release back in 2001 and is extremely difficult to find. This makes me sad.

Whoop-I have more to say, but I have to go. It's Take Your Children to Work Day, and I have to set up the robots and the EyeToy for the little rascals. See you next time!

"Frenzied planning"
Tuesday - April 27, 2004
[Dom] - 10:30:00
Updated: a few more companies have confirmed appointments, and I'm adding another couple companies that were on Brian's list

Ugh. What a week ahead.

Let's start with something I think people should know: oop-ack is down right now. That's because punched.us has been replaced with MidPhase, due to Damien quitting the hosting business. Don't worry, Hodge-podge is working on it and it should (hopefully) be up and running by May 1st.

So my registration for E3 finally went through, and I'm busily making appointments. And not just my own workload anymore--a co-worker of mine recently broke his leg in a motorcycle accident (amusingly enough, he broke his leg in front of a hospital during a shift change, which meant that he was immediately surrounded by help). So now, beyond just my appointments with Sammy, SNK, Bandai, Activision, Sega, Atlus, Koei and Square Enix, I get to try and meet up with Bioware, Logitech, Valve, and Blizzard. Kill me.

Yeah, I know what you guys are saying, "boo hoo, he's going to E3 and gets to see all these people". And in a way, you're right. But YOU try running from South Hall to Kentia in five minutes and see how happy you are with your job.

Meanwhile, I have a deadline for Anime Insider on May 3rd, which, while not particularly challenging, is time-consuming, meaning that this will turn out to be one helluva week.

Okay, back to work--and not "Play FFXI on the Alienware" work, but actual WORK. Augh!

On to other news. Chris Maden recently pointed me to this blurb in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Ain't that a kick: Democratic Assemblyman Leland Yee (of feng shui fame) made headlines again the other day when he proposed banning the sale of violent video games to minors -- a move that didn't go unnoticed by his Libertarian opponent, Chris Maden.

Just the other day, Maden points out, the same antiviolent Yee sent a legislative aide to a tae kwon do tournament to present a resolution praising the event.

An event, Maden noted, where children as young as 14 were encouraged to kick each other in the head and win by knockouts.

How does Maden know? He was a referee.

Cool.

Oh, and one last thing--if you guys have anything you want me to pay attention to at E3 that isn't already on my list, by all means e-mail me and ask me to check something out for you. I can't promise that I'll have time for everything, but I'll at least make an effort to take a look at the more interesting games on people's lists. Remember, the better you sell it, the more likely I am to look for it :)

"broken old friend"
Tuesday - April 27, 2004
[Piro] - 22:30:00
[quick update - april 28, 2004]

I just have to post this today just... because. :) So pardon my fanboy moment here. Clannad was released today (in japan, of course) and no, i don't have my copy yet and no i is not why i was late with today's comic. Give me time to get a copy, THEN i'll let you know when it delays the comic. :P

A friend of mine has ordered the normal version for me, tho i do sorta wish i had gone for the limited release version (it comes with a blanket and lots of other goodies). I also have the Pre-Clannad disk coming too... Heh. I'm such a fanboy.

more on clannad in my next rant :) And before you ask, Clannad is Japanese only, and it does NOT have any adult content (it is an all ages game) :P Many were surprised by that, but I think that games like these can do just fine without the unf unf factor. :) Here's some basic info on the game, in case you've never heard of it before. :P

---

I really had a great time at Sakuracon, something I will go into in more length tomorrow, but that doesn't mean I haven't had my share of problems. Traveling across the country is always a relative pain, and having to fly to one city then change planes to get to your destination is just t3h bl3h.

My flight out there wasn't too bad. In fact, it was a nice, smooth flight on which I finished all of the drawings for Monday's comic. Fateful, these drawings, it seems. For they are the last drawings I was able to scan on my old friend, my Canon N670U scanner.

I bought this scanner back in early 2001, around the time I got that Dell laptop, and I've been using it to scan in drawings for Megatokyo ever since. I tried to replace it once with another canon scanner, but when I bought my Mac G4, that particular scanner didn't work with the Macs, and so it was back to the old N670U.

Not a bad scanner, really. Nice and small, inexpensive (I think it was $60 at the time), and did what I needed it to do. People often ask me what kind of special scanner I use to scan my drawings, and the truth is there really is nothing special about it. My N670U was just a plain, basic portable scanner. One neat thing about it was that it used LEDs rather than a cathode diode as a light source. It had a little worm gear that moved the scanning chassy back and forth and it was a noisy sucker. It was slow by expensive scanner standards, but it worked fine. It was also pretty portable - I could unplug it, stuff it in my bag with it's USB cable, and scan stuff while away from home. This, unfortunately, proved to be it's undoing.

I'm not really sure what happened, but I place it down to three things, all three of which were my fault and no fault of any airline, Sakuracon staff person, the city of Seattle, the city of Chicago or anything else. I can't even blame my cats. The first thing I did wrong was not pack it with enough padding. Sure, it was nice and light and thin, but that probably meant that it was more sensitive to being knocked around. I had it in my rolling bag (the same one I keep the camcorder in).

The second thing I did was, well, I was pulling the bag behind me on it's nice little wheels on the way to the car to head to the airport when I hit a crack in the pavement, and the whole bag slipped from my hand, and slammed to the ground. When I finally arrived in Seattle, I was able to set myself up and start scanning the drawings to put the comic together. Nothing on the scanner appeared broken, but something wasn't right. It kept telling me it was locked, and that I had to unlock it to continue. But it was unlocked. I tried it several times, finally tilting it slightly, wondering if somehow something was stuck. That did the trick. I was able to scan everything, and then proceeded to have almost no time to actually finish the comic until monday.

Not that I didn't do some drawings. I did several gift arts, including one for the Make-a-Wish foundation charity auction, and I wanted to scan them to post on the MT site. One small problem, I was never able to get the scanner to really work again. As far as it is concerned, it is locked, or stuck, and it won't allow me to scan anything. Finally, it allowed me to scan one last drawing (the drawing i did for the Make-A-Wish charity auction), but it had a line running thru it. After that, it would not do it again.

Figuring that it was just me, I figured that I would look at it when I got home. Unfortunately, I think I managed to hammer the nail further into the coffin while getting off the plane in the jetway at Chicago. Once again, the wheels got caught on the lip of a ramp, and the bag went down hard. Oops. That's should fix the problem -_-

Getting home at 12 midnight (there were lots of delays yesterday due to weather) I looked over what I had assembled so far in the comic, and felt that a few of the drawings needed to be changed. I went to work on the changes when it occurred to me that my scanner might not be working. I went to plug it in here and sure enough, it said it was locked, and nothing I could do short of taking a hammer to it would free it to scan for me. I had to face facts - my old scanner was probably broken.

So I made due with what I had already scanned (it turned out ok) and glumly went to CompUSA to pick out a new scanner. I think I was kinda grumpy with the salesman in the store who kinda wouldn't leave me alone so I could look over the scanners in peace (I know what I am looking for, please leave me alone) but now I feel kinda bad about it. I picked up another Canon, an 8000F which so far seems really nice (maybe now I can start scanning those japan trip slides from 9 years ago). It does a wonderful job of scanning stuff, its much quieter than the N670U, a hella lot faster, much higher resolution and color depth - basically, a much better scanner.

But I still feel kinda sad about the old one. I've used that thing a lot in the past 2 years. It's my fault it's not working. I suppose I could wrestle with it more and see what I could do to make it work, but I dunno... computers and components are funny things. Usually, when we get something new, the old stuff gets kicked to the curb and we don't worry too much about it. Pride and joy equipment becomes stuff that gets tossed in the closet a year later when it's replaced. Maybe its because I broke it that I feel bad. Maybe because this scanner was quite literally the window thru which much of my work found its way into the world.

pretty silly, but that's me. I'm feeling tired and oddly drained today, and my motivation is pretty low, but I'm working along slowly on wednesday's comic. This week's schedule seems pretty well borked from the outset, but I'll still have 3 comics done when it's over. Need to put the new scanner thru it's paces.

Oh, and those of you who gloated and rubbed my face in the fact that I missed a comic on friday, your words cannot hurt me anymore. I got Tycho love this weekend. The man said some very nice things about me, we had a great panel where we actually made people laugh. We pointed and laughed at people together. they wrote a comic about me for Monday. The man even hugged me.

It was some kinda special. Take that, MT Hate Club. :P

In all seriousness, Sakuracon was a lot of fun, and it was great to see Gabe and Tycho again. As for monday's MT comic, the other special thing about it was that both Daichi-san and Abe-san saw some of it as I was putting it together, but I'll tell you more about that in my next rant. right now, I need to get busy on tomorrows comic. Gonna be using this new scanner to put it together.

I don't know why, but that makes me kinda sad.

---

errata
(correcting misinformation in a previous rant)

it has been pointed out to me by several people that the little tags on CDs, in books and other merchandise are usually NOT RFID tags. Doh, that will teach me to read up a little more before I prattle on about things. One source, who asked that I not reveal his secret identity, gave the best summation of what these tags really are, so I'll post the info here:

These aren't RFID tags. There is no information stored on them. These are SensorMatic/Checkpoint "EAS" systems. The little tags that are on the books have two states. On and Off. Once de-activated, they don't re-activate. RFID tags have the ability to store fairly significant amounts of data on them. (However, if the tag doesn't de-activate, it's permanently on. The companies know this, and sell rolls of "permanently on" tags as a pricier product) Here is a Nice page on the specs.

I guess not everything is evil. Well, mostly not evil, or something like that. Sorry for the gaff.

"Drive Away Dream"
Friday - April 30, 2004
[Dom] - 08:00:00
Okay, so here's an updated list of the companies I currently have appointments with or can piggyback into via Chris Baker:

Activision
Atlus
Blizzard
Koei
Konami
Namco
Nintendo
Sammy
Sega
SNK Neo Geo

These are the companies whose PR contacts I've gotten in touch with, but don't have a set appointment time yet:

Bandai
Bioware
Square Enix

Those are the companies on my list. Most were on my last list, too--and if they're on this list, it means that YES, I will see what they have on display at the show (this means you, overzealous Square Enix fans). If you have something you want to see from companies not on this list, by all means, contact me--Fred wants me to check out the Ragnarok Online people, while a few other fans have piped up wanting to see NCsoft's Guild Wars.

Guild Wars is kind of interesting to me, because I saw an extreeeeemely early version of it last year alongside City of Heroes, and the design was pretty novel--for an MMORPG at least, not for ex-Blizzard employees and Magic players. In Guild Wars, see, there's no monthly fee. You buy the game, you get to play everything that's in the game. The company's profit beyond the initial purchase will come from expansions. This is the interesting part: people who are without the expansions can still go to the new zones along with people who have the expansion, but will not be able to initiate missions in those zones themselves (the developers compared it to Magic: the Gathering's expansion system, where the old decks are still playable against the new 'uns).

Speaking of Magic, I'll probably be heading to the Invitational in the Wizards booth at some point--though I already have Brian Kibler's autograph, I might as well get Kai Budde's and Zvi Mowshowitz's. I'm such an ubergeek... what other person in this lifetime would like autographs from Joseph Campbell, Kai Budde, Vladimir Guerrerro, Barry Bonds, Yu Suzuki, Phil Foglio, Chiba Saeko, Misato Mitsumi and Aaron McGruder?

You know what? Don't answer that, if there's anyone else like me out there, I'll need to kill them.

Back to appointment making and some translation duty, talk to you guys later.

"big changes comin..."
Monday - May 3, 2004
[Piro] - 05:15:00
[Quick note ... here is the final version of the new MT site template. I think i fixed the font size issues, and tweaked a few other things too. I still need to tweak some graphics, but that can be done later - the template structure is the main issue right now. Also note the two newsbox ads - the newsbox ads have been very popular, so much so that they have been sold out months in advance for a while. Rather than raising the price on them, we decided to adjust the 'support' area to allow for two ads. I think this works out pretty decently. Anyways, check out the final version of the template, and let me know if it blows up your browser :)]

I have a few announcements to make today, one of which will have a major role in the future of Megatokyo and all of my other projects. It's something both Seraphim and I have been working very hard on for the past several months, and it is finally coming together. This is something that will enable us to serve the MT community better than ever before.

You may have noticed recently some changes over at the current Megatokyo/ThinkGeek Store, including the disappearance of some shirt designs and other items as they have run out of stock. The reason for this is that Megatokyo will be leaving ThinkGeek this summer and we will be opening our own online store, MegaGear in July.

I am proud of the fact that you don't need to spend a dime to be a Megatokyo fan, but if you want to it is my job to make sure there is good quality stuff available for you to buy. Merchandise sales help keep Megatokyo online, and keeps me stocked with erasers. MT readers have been incredible with their support over the past few years, and have never let us down. You guys deserve good stuff to choose from.

One of my main philosophies about merchandise is to not sell anything that we wouldn't buy ourselves. Both Seraphim and I feel that we should be doing far more than we are with the current store. At the moment, it's little more than an offering of MT branded merchandise in a subcategory at the ThinkGeek store. We felt that there are far more creative things that we could and should be doing. I wanted the freedom to pursue ideas from start to finish, without feeling that l was risking someone else's business. We decided that it was worth our own risk to take the next step and open our own store.

Opening your own store involves more than just coming up with new and cool stuff to sell. It is more complex than you might think. We need to set up a store that people will feel as safe and secure shopping at as the current store. We can't just start taking payment via PayPal and shipping stuff out of our living room. We have to invest the time and the money to do it right.

This includes setting things up so that we can accept credit cards online, provide a secure shopping and ordering environment for customers, planning for inventory, setting up how we will fulfill and ship merchandise... it's complicated stuff, but it's worth taking the time to do it right. Also, since I've already taken over most of the apartment with Megatokyo related stuff, Seraphim refused to give up anymore of our living space. We had no choice but to find a small warehouse space out of which to operate.

Part of what we've been doing this past month has been fixing up and painting the new space because we'll be spending so much time there. Seraphim and I like working together, so it made sense to move my work area over as well. We are in the process of packing up all my stuff and relocating it to the new space later this week. It's like moving, I just get to leave all that unimportant stuff (kitchen, living room, bedroom, etc) behind.

For the new MegaGear store, We have a lot of great ideas for new products and shirt designs in the works. Seraphim is excited about some of the more cute things she's looking into, and I have been doing a lot of research into new product ideas as well. Many things we are working on are things that you have been asking for, others are for things you don't know you want yet. As always, I figure that if its something we'd want, you guys might be interested in it as well.

With webcomics, there is really no one between the reader and the people who create them. We upload comics and you come to the websites to read them. With MegaGear it will be very much the same thing. We will be making and selling merchandise, and if you like it, you'll be buying it from us. To me, this simple relationship between creators and customers is very important, and it helps keep things like Megatokyo close to it's roots.

The MegaGear store will be opening towards the end of July. Until then, stuff will still be available at the ThinkGeek store. Some stuff, like the Evil L33t shirt, we will carry in the new store and will never die, but some stuff (like the Miho Blanket, for example) you should get while supplies last. ^^;;

Obviously, we will keep you updated on how things are going. The next three months are going to be very busy. In addition to the new store, I still have to keep the new website backend rebuild moving along, travel to five conventions (Anime Central, Fanime, A-kon, Anime Expo and San Diego Comic Con), and, oh yeah, that Megatokyo comic I've been working on. :)

You might have noticed that the opening date of the new store happens to conflict with one convention appearance that I was originally planning. As much as I wish I could, I won't be able to go to Otakon 2004 this year. Otakon is a great convention, and I have been a guest at Otakon for three years, and I was to be a guest again this year.

Anyways, should be fun.

"Candy Apples"
Monday - May 3, 2004
[Seraphim] - 05:25:00
If you haven't read Piro's rant yet go see his announcement first. Yes, somehow we have talked each other into the venture of online retailing. We've been called crazy but it can't be anymore crazy than the guy running his own specialty candy apple store. Does anyone eat candy apples other than at Halloween or at the circus? Does anyone over the age of six eat them? We saw that guy on the Food Network and thought if he could do it so could we. In fact millions of people sell online. It isn't rocket science. I am, however, gaining a healthy dose of respect for everyone who does it. We are really excited about expanding the product line. T-shirts are great but after a while they are kind of a little like getting underwear for Christmas. They become just a good practical and serviceable item. I want cuter, more fun, and girls stuff. I have been, dare I say it, nagging Piro for years to get some items made and now we'll finally be able to do it. Our first ventures were procuring lanyards ourselves and new character buttons which are currently available at conventions. It boosted our confidence - bur how can you go wrong with a Boo button?

If you are jonesin for the Clocked, Quickkill, Angel, I Am Cute, Ph34r the Cute Ones (mens and ladies), Megatokyo logo, Joo Dead foo, the Miho blank, the bumper stickers or the mug - they are all being discontinued and are only available while supplies last. It sounds like someone going out of business but it is actually a going into business announcement. New and better is on the way.

Frankly, I'm just thrilled to be done with classes. I had a economics/psychology class this semester where they are taking the mean grade and making that a B so more people can pass. I have a horrible feeling that I'm going to wake up on the wrong side of the mean on this one. I'm gonna fail this friggin course. "Fail" in grad school is C-plus. Still, I'll be screwed. I've taken hard courses. This one was HARD. I figure I had to have done better than the students doing crosswords or sleeping in class but I'm not positive. I'm in a very negative place right now. Okay, I'm going to forget about it for now and quit obsessing.

Reason #11 to be a librarian - really funky junk mail. I am a grad student of library and information science and I am a member of the American Library Association and on their mailing list. I received a full color 4 page brochure for a set of books entitled "Cheese: Chemistry, Physics & Microbiology". It includes wonderful phrases such as "scientific aspects of cheese'" and "principles of cheese science". Chemistry and microbiology I understand but the PHYSICS of cheese? What is that about? Do you calculate the rate of speed of a falling body of cheese? Maybe it was a hunk of cheese that hit Newton on the head. Who reads this stuff? I love it I love it I love it! This is the real deal too - it is published by Elsevier Academic Press. My apologies to any and all cheese makers. I love cheese. All cheeses including, but not limited to, bacterial surface-ripened cheeses, surface mould-ripened cheeses, acid-heat coagulated cheeses, and pasteurized processed cheese. Mmmm, delicious. This is the best junk mail I have ever received.

Speaking of junk mail, I'm kind a ticked at a charity I donated to recently. It is a well established food reclamation charity program that saves food from manufactures and restaurants and donates it to food banks. They sold my name, well they sold my address to a mailing list and got my name wrong. Hmmm, they think I'm "L. Wooden" and suddenly I get tons of junk mail from hundreds of charities. If Paul Newman sends me one more envelope there will be hell to pay. I can't believe I donate to their organization and they get my name wrong AND they sell it. Frankly, I think they are making money selling my address - they don't need my cash, Jaded attitude I know but now I have dozens of other charities from which to choose.

This segues beautifully into my rant on the Ann Arbor and possibly the entire southeastern Michigan postal service. Several years ago when we moved to our current location I started to receive mail for a L.. Woods at 1234 Elm St. while my former address had been 1234 Erwalk. Supposed the similarity in first few characters of the last names and address messed up the sorting of mail. I was getting this guys court appearance notifications, failure to appear in court notices (which are postcards btw), his medical information (I don't think he was? is? a well person) and other vitally important mail. Ok, mistakes happen. I take the mail and write in black marker not at this address over the forwarding labels and take the box to the post office and explain everything. A week latter I receive the whole lot back with my message written all over them. Then I took them the Postmaster himself. It was mostly solved but I still get an occasional letter meant for him. Just recently they post office for our address sends out a postcard asking for customers patience because mail can be late due to high volume and CAREFUL sorting takes time. I would have a lot more empathy if we didn't get letters for neighbors or find letter dropped in front of our door by neighbors at least twice a week. We happen to have the very last box so I think when the mail person has stuff left over at the end she just leaves it with us to deliver. But they are done yet, The Postmaster sends a letter essentially telling everyone where every mailboxes is located in the area so we won't come to the post office branch. And last but not least, having lived here two and a half years the post office has started putting yellow 'no forwarding' address labels on our mail (did I mention we aren't moving)and some of it is getting returned. Just things like bills - never the junk mail which always makes it through. The postal service is one of the most antiquated and obsolete systems out there.

"Letting Paragons be Paragons"
Friday - May 7, 2004
[Dom] - 15:00:00
I've known this would happen for almost two years now. But did I really have to get addicted to City of Heroes right before E3? Seriously, I should start packing and planning now, but no... I'm fighting Vahzilok and Tsoo alongside my valiant allies. I'm about to fight my first archvillain, but before that I'd like to get a rant in before I'm in the Los Angeles area. I was going to rant about CoH and review why it's taken over FFXI as my drug of choice, but that'll have to wait for a week as E3 has taken over my mind just as much as CoH has.

So all the appointments are made, the travel and boarding is arranged, and all that's left to do is rest before the axe falls and I go through four days of hot SoCal weather and crazed dashes from booth to booth.

Well, I exaggerate about the crazed dash from booth to booth part. I've actually managed to squeeze in at least 15 minutes to get from one booth to another, and no company has been cruel enough to force me to run from West hall to South hall with less than a 30 minute buffer. So that's all good.

Monday I'm going to the Dear Friends concert, which seems to be the only way to get friend sto go to symphony halls with me. Seriously, I mention that Holst's The Planets is in town and no one even looks me in the eye, but when Uematsu comes to town, everybody's just about ready to pay $60 to fellate him. Philistines! I bet most of them didn't like Adaptation, either.

Then Tuesday is a Day of Rest, in which I "only" pick up my badge and head to some sort of Nintendo thing. Or I just sit around, watch sports and scratch myself, either method works. Although you and I both know that I'm probably going to be playing City of Heroes on the Alienware when I have free time.

Wednesday and Thursday are the big appointment days, with Wednesday seeing me mostly in South hall until the late afternoon, when I'm in West hall, and Thursday being my day for South and Kentia halls. Friday, I've been blessedly left to my own devices

Expect a rant from me on Monday night, Wednesday night and Friday night next week as I talk about the games that interest me--and the games that you pointed out I missed, like Half-Life 2, Guild Wars, and that car thing NCSoft is putting out. Be warned, I probably won't write about anything related to Final Fantasy, simply because I'm tired of hearing about it and you guys have many more professional places from which you can get information on what was earmarked to be a million seller even before it was officially announced.

No, I'm more interested in games like Evil Genius, innovative little things that aren't just sequels or licenses, but are sleepers that might go under the radar if you aren't careful. I have to thank Dan over at GamePro for even pointing out the game's existence last year as "Dr. Evil's Dungeon Keeper", and while I bet it'll get a lot more coverage this E3, that kind joyous discovery is exactly what I'm hoping for.

See you guys next week! I promise that I won't work myself to death... maybe.

"Acen Info, as requested :P"
Tuesday - May 11, 2004
[Piro] - 14:05:00
Just a quick update today to give you some information on Anime Central this weekend. Seraphim and I moved into the new warehouse place this weekend and everything is still in boxes, but i have enough stuff out that i can get some work done now. Obviously, one of the things i've been slacking on recently is rants, and i am sorry about that:

Hey is there any way you can get off your lazy ass and update the rant so it has convention info for chicago ?? I know that it takes 15 mins out of your lazing around the house to write a rant but maybe you can some how msuter the energy it takes to write it..I know it's asking a lot but I was looking forward to maybe seeing you at the con but it's getting really f-ing old waiting for updates and info do you like pissing your fans off ?

Yikes. Well, sorry about that. The old excuse of "i've been busy" never really cuts it, does it? While i'm not particularly worried about this particular reader (since i assume that this is just the culmination of his massive frustration with me and i certainly dont want to waste anymore of his time) he is right about one thing - those of you going to Anime Central need some info about whats up, so here it is.

There will be a meet and greet thing with guests and stuff Friday night at 5:30. Not sure of the details on that, check the website out for more. There is a Webcomics panel on Saturday at 10am - I don't plan to be on the panel because i want to give the other webcomic folks a chance to talk. I intend to be there if i can, however.

The main Megatokyo panel, the "Cheap Naze Nani Megatokyo Panel 2004" will be at 1:30pm on Saturday. As crazy as things have been around here recently, our show this year should be... interesting. Being prepared is not something we here at Megatokyo are known for, so why change now? :P We have 2 hrs to play with. Should be fun (we hope)

On Sunday, i have one panel, and thats at 11am panel called "Tips on Learning to Draw" panel with Bruce Lewis and Roberd DeJesus. That should be fun. At least Bruce and Robert know how to draw :).

For the balance of the con, Seraphim and I will be at the Wizzywig booth in the Dealer hall at the Wizzywig booth signing and drawing stuff for everyone who wants one.

There! should be fun. If you are gonna be at Acen, we'll look forward to seeing you. :)

Oh, and regarding the occasional pissy flame email -- I usually don't read or pay much attention to them (the number of supportive emails far outweigh the crappy ones), but sometimes it's cathartic to answer, so forgive my indulgence in this rant :P

"Meditations and reflections"
Tuesday - May 11, 2004
[Dom] - 20:00:00
2004-05-12: Prepare for explosive information decompression! This is the Wednesday edition of Dom farting everything onto a few pages worth of information so he doesn't forget it.

So here's how the day went, in order.

At around 7 AM, I woke up and started staring at the ceiling, waiting for either Greg or Cliff to wake up so I could pee in their rooms.

Wait. That sounded wrong. I wanted to pee in their BATHrooms. Because each of those two schmucks has a bathroom in their bedroom, and because I'm me, I was sleeping on the couch. But this is Beverly Hills, so it was at least a posh fold-out couch. Yeah, I realize I just said the words "posh" and "fold-out couch" in the same sentence without any sense of irony.

So anyway, around 8 or so I actually got to pee. And, uh... yeah, it was in bathroom, sure. *eyes the sink warily*

Around 9 or so, we left for the convention center, which was a dumb, dumb mistake. Because this is LA, and going 6 miles takes more than an hour. Asses, I hope this entire region reverts back to Mexico, so they can have it as their problem instead of the Governator's.

Or something.

So anyway, at 10:30 I had an appointment with Activision. Technically, I had the appointment at 10, but at 10 I was on The 10 staring at the words Convention Center, literally close enough to spit on it but stuck on a raised highway. I was seriously ready to jump out of Greg's car, yell "I REGRET NOTHING!" and hop off the highway, hoping to jump far enough to splatter into the convention center and while I would be dead, I would not be late.

Anyway. The Activision thing. I got to see DomDoom 3 for the Xbox, which thankfully plays like Halo. Thank God people have learned that the Halo control scheme is the right control scheme for FPS games on the Xbox. I picked up the controller and was in it insantly, which mildly surprised the id people.

Then I went to see Safety Monkey at the Nintendo booth, where I took the briefest of glances at Paper Mario 2, Resident Evil 4 and... uh... that was about it. Because then we went to the Elixir Studios booth in West Hall to see Evil Genius, which is one of only two games I saw today that I know I'll eventually buy. Because dammit, the concept is just that cool. And knowing that every single device in the game is a death trap of some sort (even the library stacks) gives me pleasure. Lots of pleasure. Mmmm, evil. Yay evil. I like evil, as you may be able to tell by the number of instances of the word evil in the previous few sentences. Evil evil evil.

So anyway. I'll be buying Evil Genius when it comes out in September, and cultivating my evil (and volcanic) lair. I await the arctic palaces they will add in the expansion. And more evil torture devices.

At 1 I went to the Microsoft booth. Where I was able to play a little bit of Jade Empires, Forza Motorsport and Fable. Fable makes me wet. But I won't automatically buy it because I no longer have an Xbox, which makes me dry again. Jade Empires, meanwhile, I'll buy anyway for reasons I will explain after this.

So then after seeing Microsoft at 1 it was 2:30 or so and time to see my Bioware buddies in West hall. Blessedly, I had my first twenty or so minutes of free time here. And Bioware gave me pretzels, and those pretzels were the first solid food of the day for me. I will love Bioware forever for those pretzels. Well, okay, I'll love Bioware forever for reviving the Star Wars franchise as we know it, creating a couple of the best RPGs ever, and for letting me know that MDK stands for Murder Death Kill. Then they showed me Jade Empires again, adamantly refusing to admit that they ripped off 1942/1943/19XX for their minigame, but oh well I get to shoot stuff in between levels in Jade Empire. Shooters make Dom happy. Except when they're made by Treasure and they make Dom weep like a beaten puppy. But still a happy beaten puppy. I don't know what I just wrote. Edit after a good night's sleep: Jade Empire is the second game I know I'll buy, in case you're wondering

After meeting with BioWare, giving Stanley Woo of BioWare QA a noogie and steadfastly avoiding beer because I was on an empty stomach and I'm ASIAN DAMMIT AND CAN'T HOLD MY LIQUOR. I can't remember where the previous sentence was going so I'll start again.

After that I went to Atlus. Atlus gave me a poster signed by some artist dude. I also noticed that Atlus' version of Dante for Shin MegaTen Nocturne has more clothes on than Capcom's version of Dante for DMC III. I don't know what to make of that since the hero of the game is wearing nothing but tattoo looking demon things. Anyway, they also showed me Phantom Brave, but the important thing is that Nippon Ichi Software now has a US division and they're going to distribute Nippon Ichi games from now on. Good luck to them and I hope you make less games about singing puppets and koudouryoku. Trust me, don't ask, Rhapsody was weird. But Phantom Brave is cool because you can make it rain fish on your enemies. And you can also pick them up and beat their allies to death with them. That makes Dom happy. Edit after a good night's sleep: The most important thing about this appointment was that Atlus fed me... yes, boys and girls, my first non-pretzel solid food (The pretzels were at BioWare) came at 4 PM in Atlus' room. I will love them forever for this.

After that I went to InXile , because I was informed that they're making another Bard's Tale game. so, that sucker is on the Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance system and has a very twisted wonderful sense of humor. Because Brian Fargo and Robert J Woodhead pretty much created the American RPG, and after long enough, Brian Fargo decided that he was going to make a great deal of fun of his baby. Because the baby, in his mind, is a twisted mass of cliché and is ripe for mockery. So of course he got Cary Elwes to do the voice of the Bard and make fun of every RPG made pretty much ever.

End rant. This thing will only get longer on Thursday Night. Because I'm pretty much having a baby named information and I need a C-section bad. And I'm sure you didn't need that image in your head. If you'll excuse me I'd like to collapse in a heap in the corner and take perhaps an hour of free time before dying. Thank you and good night.

-----

So here I am in LA. Well. To be specific, I'm in Beverly Hills watching Safety Monkey play Splinter Cell on a hotel TV, waiting to play City of Heroes after I finish this rant, so I guess it'll be quick.

On the way down I-5, I spent a lot of time spacing out watching the fields roll by. It was especially fascinating staring down the rows of plants, as you would suddenly be able to stare straight down a row for miles with nothing in your way, and then the aisle disappears, becoming lost in the sea of green again. I'm sure there's a metaphor there, but I don't know where it is and I'm not pretentious enough to look for it.

Yesterday was the Final Fantasy concert, which I have a few comments on, and only a few:

- The concert was good because now people are willing to go to The Planets with me.
- I. Hate. One Winged Angel.
- Okay, what part of "formal dress required" did those dipshits in T-shirts and jean shorts not understand? Seriously, people.
- I. Hate. Eyes On Me.
- Uematsu Nobuo is such a ham... but he's an honest, earnest ham. There's something refreshing about that.

And with that, I leave you. I'll rant again after Wednesday and update it each day of E3... I hope. I'm stealing monkey's Cat-5 right now, so who knows.

"Dead on my feet"
Thursday - May 13, 2004
[Dom] - 14:00:00
This rant has its beginnings in the Internet center sponsored by Intel. It's two-thirty, and in a wild imprvement from yesterday, I have had a decent meal at this point of the day, consisting of a ham sandwich and a brownie, as well as a Pepsi. Thank you Safety Monkey for bringing me that. I'm sorry I stole BatJewess' affection from you. But I'm sure we'll make up for it with heavy drinking.

Saw World of Warcraft and Starcraft: Ghost this morning, and thankfully made it on time for that meeting due to an early start and an avoidance of the highways.

After that I was free to roam the show floor for a bit and used that time to see Capcom's booth and look up Devil May Cry 3, which looks pretty good so far, but just didn't zing like the first one did. I'm not sure why. I think it's because I'm jaded and didn't get to hear Dante's trademark cheesy dialogue.

After that I saw the Square Enix theater, which spun around like crazy and was kinda cool, even though the only games of the lot I'm truly interested in are Final Fantasy XII (and only a mild interest at that) and Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. And, even though I hate Final Fantasy VII, I have to admit that Advent Children looks pretty good. I'll just watch it with the mute button on because I've always believed that Final Fantasy VII had the worst plot of almost any FF due to the fact that the plot just kind of stops around disc 2. I will also be willing to watch someone else play Kingdom Hearts 2 just for the sight of Mickey Mouse laying down the mightiest of mighty beatings.

After watching the hallucinogenic circle that was the Square Enix theater (it's hard to explain but involves a whole lot of spinning in Aeron chairs) I wandered over to THQ's booth, where they were showing off the Punisher game. Well, to be honest the Punisher game was sort of shoved off to the side and for very good reason. It is perhaps the most vicious and bloodthirsty game on the show floor this year, because it seems to be based on Garth Ennis' twisted vision of Big Pun. You get to put people in woodchippers, you stuff grenades down their throats and throw them in pirahna infested waters. And people wonder why E3 is an 18 and over show. (Well. Punisher and Leisure Suit Larry's sperm-based mini-game).

Alright, after THQ was Sammy, where I got to play on a Double Faust Team during my test run with Guilty Gear Isuka, and realized that GG Isuka is one of the perfect games to play while drunk. Because you don't really know who's won until the end. Not because there's a lot of comeback potential, but because people don't remember who they're playing until the very end. So I imagine a lot of late nights of a few boozed-up friends and someone mumbling "who was playing as Faust again?"

My session with Sammy will also be remembered for a PR rep using the words "crack whore" in a pitch not once, not twice, but thrice. I promised him I'd quote him, and there it is.

They also showed me The Shield, which made me think of The Punisher, and Darkwatch, which made me think of Van Helsing. And then there was Spy Fiction, which I don't think I'll end up buying because I don't like stealth games, but I will probably buy an artbook for because I like Range Murata.

After that, it was back to Square Enix for my appointment with Final Fantasy XII (which I don't really like the system for because it's not really hands-on enough. You can just hit "all attack" and walk away for a minute, and when you get back the battle will be over and you'll have won). Star Ocean: Till the End of Time pretty much looked the same as when I saw it last year, except with English instead of Japanese. Which I suppose matters to people who don't speak Japanese. That group of people only mildly includes me, so I met that one with a shrug as well.

What I didn't meet with a shrug was City of Villains, but unfortunately, besides the cool barbed-wire-and-wrought-iron setup they had on the show floor, they weren't showing anything real about CoV. They had PvP running, yes, but the rep promised that when CoV comes out early next year, they'll have entirely different power sets and costume options for the villains. But the show floor simply had heroes dressed up in dark colors with slightly more ominous names, so I won't be able to judge CoV until it's out. However, I have wrangled out a promise from Greg Dean that he will join City of Villains when it comes out and create El Chupacabra, hopefully making his logo a goat and a straw. But anyway...

After that--miracle of miracles!--I didn't have any appointments for a while. So I ran into the media hospitality room, sat down on a couch and realized that I was sitting on BatJewess, who promptly declared me her new favorite (besides BatJew, of course) and invited me to the BatWedding in Vegas because I said I wanted to wander around E3 in a Char costume. Why? Why not, I suppose. At least, unlike Fred, they will be married in the presence of an Elvis Impersonator.

After a blessed, blessed hour of sitting down and shooting the breeze with those two about how the ethnic food in the San Francisco Bay Area is better than the ethnic food in Seattle, we ran off to Koei, where I got to kill a whole lot of Japanese and Chinese soldiers. It was a very cleansing and violent experience. I want to be a ninja. Still.

As a random note, Batjew and I ran into an Evil Genius staffer on the way to Kentia Hall and asked a question that had been on our minds for a day: How the hell do you use a training ground for gentleman spies as a torture/interrogation device? His response? "I don't know, there are way too many ways to torture people in that game." I am so buying Evil Genius come September.

After that? We took a picture of a guy with a chainsaw standing behind a little boy (on a poster, remember that little boys not named Dominic Nguyen are not allowed into E3). And then I wandered off to Namco to finish off the day, where I saw Xenosaga II, Taiko no Tatsujin and Tales of Symphonia. I saw a hell of a lot more there, but I'm tired, need steak and am going to try and eat it raw. Before I go, and remember that I'm updating this rant tomorrow night as well, I would like to note that Xenosaga Episode II: (whatever is German for Beyond Good and Evil, it probably involves umlauts and a lot of phlegm) brings back the only thing I liked about Xenogears before I used those CDs to prop up an uneven chair. Yes, it has a good dose of the cheese. They have Sakura Taisen-style combine attacks in that game, which include Shion picking up a sword and carving kanji into the enemy just to match her brother, and also Momo sitting in a field of flowers and sparkling up at Shion. The cheese must flow.

He who controls the cheese controls the universe.

It is by caffeine alone that I set my thoughts in motion. It is by the juice of the bean that the lips acquire stain, the stain becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone that I set my thoughts in motion.

Schnoogins.

"Decompressed, stressed, partially undressed"
Monday - May 17, 2004
[Dom] - 12:00:00
Okay, so I left off without talking about my Friday. I'm sorry. This rant will be about Friday at E3, and then it'll be an overall wrap-up, including a few highlights that happened in the hotel room and in the greater LA area.

So Friday was a bit more leisurely than the other two days, mostly because I didn't have much on my plate. But given how stressed I was, I woke up around 6 AM with a Hamusutaa in my bed, and oddly that didn't surprise me at all. I sort of walked around in a circle for a few hours for no apparent reason other than to welcome the creeping onset of madness, and then it was 9 AM and time to head off for my 10 AM appointment with SNK.

Once at SNK, I spent most of my time with Metal Slug 3, one of my favorite side-scrollers of all time. I saw Samurai Shodown Five/Zero, but I've simply become disenchanted with SNK fighters after what I believe is the pinnacle of their creation, King of Fighters '98. Guilty Gear is the premier 2D fighter these days, and Capcom's recent lackluster offerings have done nothing to unseat Sammy's series. Meanwhile, I've heard bad things about Samurai Shodown Five/Spirits Zero for months via Hodge-Podge (who, by the way, is working to get oop-ack back up within the next month... we're both getting our asses kicked by work) and so, I laid off of that.

And then it was glorious, terrible freedom, as I was finally able to see what I wanted to see. My first stop was the theater THQ had set up for Destroy All Humans, and their wonderful little theater, headed by an authentic 1950s-era Man in Black, gets my prize as the second-best presentation of show (more on that later).

After that I ran off with the Hamster and the Princess to see Sid Meier's Pirates!, which is a remake of one of the first PC games I ever played. In case you're wondering, my first PC games were Decathlon (with Bruce Jenner!), Moria (a rogue-type), Deathtrak, Bard's Tale, Battletech: Crescent Hawk's Inception, and some Gold Box game I can't remember.

Anyway, Pirates! looks awesome, though I'm kind of leery of the addition of a stealth mini-game to the core of its scallywag gameplay. I mean, it's a Pirates! mini-game that doesn't actually involve sailing, swords or cannons. What's the point of that? The Pirate DDR (AKA the ballroom dancing system) is pretty neat, though.

After that came the scariest part of the show, turning around during the Pirates! presentation and seeing Safety Monkey looming over me. Safety Monkey is by no means a small man, and considering he'd just been singing the praises of Splinter Cell, I was afraid he'd snap my neck and whisper taunts in my ear as I faded out of this world.

But thankfully, he didn't do that, and from there it was a stop by the Tecmo booth... which I'll also check out later. I wasn't even able to see what they were showing off, the testosterone was so thick.

After a few more stops I can't even remember anymore, it was then time to run back to the hotel and pack up to go--though before that, Hamusutaa, Safety Monkey, BatJew, BatJewess, and the robot known to many as Ian McConville decided that the best way to wrap up the week would be the unhealthiest lunch we could think of. So we went to Carl's Jr., where I had a bacon and cheese baked potato, a Six Dollar Western Cheeseburger, chili cheese fries, and I think a cup of lard. I'm not sure if there was cheese on the fries, but I do know I sucked down that lard like a pro. And after the food deprivation that marked the rest of the show, it was very, VERY good. It was especially nice given that it was again my first solid food of the day, a habit that many people yelled at me for, but I couldn't help. I was working, dammit!

As a sidenote, due to the severe stress I underwent while working E3, the next MT fan who says to me "I envy you so much for going to E3" will be punched. Not hard, just punched. Because if you want to go for fun? More power to you. If you want to be me and work 12 hour days with little food and no rest? You're an idiot.

So that just about wraps up the show for me--if you want to know about games that I didn't spend enough time on, go ahead and e-mail me with questions, and I'll answer them in Friday's rant. Until then, here are a few stories from the hotel room, and E3 statistics that may only matter to me:

First, the story of how Ian's hat met my crotch. So it was Thursday night and I was exhausted. Given that I slept in the living room of the hotel room I shared with the Real Life people, it wasn't easy going trying to get to sleep, what with four or five people gathered around Ian as he started drawing his comic. And when they, as a collective, all said that I just HAD to see Ian's "Meh macro is broxor" comic, I grudgingly pulled myself out of bed and wandered over there. Given that I was IN bed and all, I was just wearing my trademark heart boxers and a T-shirt of some sort, which prompted cries of "Dom, cover yourself up for God's sake!". So I grabbed the nearest piece of loose clothing and put it over my crotch (not like I was actually showing anything, because, well, they're good boxers). That happened to be Ian's hat. Which prompted cries of "Dom, stop molesting Ian's hat!". Geez, people, make up your minds on what you want...

In a slightly more clothed story, Safety Monkey and I won $25 or so from the Real Life folks, which we've placed in a private "Let's go drink on other people's money" fund, which I probably won't touch much given the whole "I don't drink" thing. But the fund exists, which is the important part.

Meanwhile, Liz seems amenable to playing H games, and while it seems a bit odd that Liz would play them before Greg would, it's all good. Because I get to show her the strategy games, the 2D action games, and other things I own which just happen to have porn attached to them. Not like she'll understand a word that's said, but hey, we'll have both played the same game--that's the important part, sharing the love. Or in some cases, the tentacle love. But that's neither here nor there, and I'm not even sure why I said that, other than the fact I like to say the word "tentacle".

Other stories include my incoherent babbling on the way back from the convention center on Wednesday--sitting in the back seat of Liz and Greg's car, I'm not even sure what I said to them, other than the fact that I created a new word: rabagan. It's a noun, and means "one who rabagans". I think rabaganning involves theft of some sort, but I honestly don't remember that car ride very clearly, so you'll have to ask the RL folks.

And now, on to my personal favorite part of any con report, Babbling with Numbers Attached at the End (and a few show prizes):

Number of times I walked past the Tecmo booth: 2

Total amount of time I spent looking at the Tecmo booth before I had to look away in disgust: 20 seconds

Number of women I counted in the audience of said Tecmo booth: 1

Least Number of Sequels On the Floor (tie): Sammy, THQ. Other than Guilty Gear Isuka and maybe a couple THQ games I didn't notice, those two booths were a breath of fresh air in a floor full of sequels (Capcom, EA, I'm looking at you).

Best concept of show: Evil Genius. Freedom Force 2 would've been on this list but they're self-publishing and didn't have any floor presence. This makes me sad. But Evil Genius, as I said, makes me happy because it provides so much PURE GLEE. From the ability to gloat over prisoners to the myriad humorous torture methods, this is an overdue idea and I'm glad that it's coming out this September. More power to you, Elixir!

Second best concept of show: Destroy All Humans. As I said, THQ put on a special show for this one, which included a guy dressed as a man in black delivering great line after great line. See, in Destroy All Humans you get to play as an alien invading earth during the 1950s, and you get to take over men's minds, interrogate them, or just plan destroy them with your disintegrator beam, your death ray, or your psychokinesis. And of course, you say "Pathetic humans!" a lot, and this looks like a surefire hit in 2005 if they live up to the concept.

Least complete game of show: Prince of Persia II. Okay, seriously, why not just show a video instead of showing a single, buggy room? Okay, we know that the Prince looks like Trent Reznor. We know that the Prince is "darker" and can use two swords. But did you need to show off his one new move so badly that you'd create a buggy little room to show it off? Oh, look, he has a sword in his left hand and he doesn't use it in the current system. Yeah, that's real sharp. Seriously, didn't anyone learn from Sega's 3% complete Vectorman blunder from last year?

Most joy in game creation (tie): Evil Genius' Elixir Studios, Bard's Tale's InXile. Nothing says "We love making games" quite like paying attention to all the little details, from casting Cary Elwes as your sarcastic hero to writing songs about beer and figuring out how everything can be used to torment superspies. Noogie!

Least joy in game creation: Capcom. Seriously, other than the Viewtiful Joe team, does anyone at Capcom actually LIKE making games anymore? Each year they bring out the same crap, with a few retreads and meaningless additions. Devil May Cry 3 had three playable fighting styles for Dante, and only one was at all interesting--Trickster. The others were just plain boring, especially Gunslinger, which involved hitting square a lot and hurting your thumb. Note that I'm not counting Onimusha 3 on this indictment of Capcom, which came out before the show and is therefore not something I'd call "on display".

Best game to play while drunk: Guilty Gear Isuka. "Dammit, I'm on your team!" "Oh, sorry, I'll stop hitting you." "You'd better, you bag-wearing freak! Stop poking me in the ass!" "Well, I can't promise that part..."

Worst game to play while drunk: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. 'Nuff said.

Best game that's all about getting drunk (tie): Pirates! and Bard's Tale.

Best presentation of show: Splinter Cell 3. If you haven't read any other gaming site's glowing description of Sam Fisher's next adventure, go do so. I can't do it justice.

Second-best presentation of show: Destroy All Humans.

Third-best presentation of show: Square Enix: The Ride. Seriously, the Square Enix theater spun, the Aeron chairs spun, and if I'd had food in me, I might have vomited gleefully, Roller Coaster Tycoon-style. I just spun and spun and spun, while they showed me some games that I was kind of interested in.

Most promising no-show: Freedom Force 2. We all know it's coming... it's just not there because they don't have the money to get a booth.

Most disappointing no-shows (tie): True Fantasy Live and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Where were you guys?

Best RPG on the floor: Fable. Jade Empire came close, but Fable is what convinced me that the Xbox RPG drought, which saw a shining oasis in the form of KotOR, is over. Long live the Xbox RPG! As for Final Fantasy XII... I just can't deal with the fact that I set my characters to attack, TURNED AROUND AND TALKED TO THE PR PERSON, and then turned around with the fight won. I'm sorry, but a game that can be beaten without any input from you is just not appealing.

Best fighting game on the floor: Guilty Gear Isuka. See above.

Best stealth action game on the floor: Splinter Cell 3 doesn't quite count because it wasn't playable, so Starcraft: Ghost gets the nod here. I'm looking forward to Spy Fiction, but that wasn't exactly playable, and thus I give this award to Blizzard for giving us more Starcraft. I just wish that fighting zerglings was a bit more interesting. It got kind of old.

Best FPS on the floor: Surprisingly? Far Cry. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 have been floating around the magazine circuit so long they aren't showing us anything NEW. And I just wasn't impressed with Half-Life 2 having the same multiplayer as Half-Life 1. Where's Team Fortress 2, dammit?

Best puzzle game on the floor: Pikmin 2. Mmm, all the Pikmin, none of the time limit.

Best movie on the floor: The Incredibles trailer. Woman, where's my super suit?!

Best strategy game on the floor: I actually didn't look at very many, so I'll have to trust Ian's judgment on this one and say "Well, Ian said he really liked Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War."

Game that gave me the most warm fuzzies: Playing Combat at the Classic Gaming Expo booth. It's all about invisible tanks, bouncing bullets, baby. That and Space Invaders.

Best piece of swag: Natsume was giving out plush cows. But dammit, I wanted a chicken hat. I was denied the chicken hat. Boo!

Best T-shirt: The Bard's Tale T-shirt simply says "I am the chosen one!" on the front. Simple and effective, except for the fact that the tag on the thing is really, really itchy. I need to take care of that.

So that's all I can think of right now! If there's anything more you'd like to know about the show, just e-mail me with a general request and I'll fulfill as many of them as possible

"Loose ends"
Wednesday - May 19, 2004
[Dom] - 14:30:00
As a note: The June issue of Wired is heading to magazine stands now, and yes, ladies and gents, that's my byline on page 62. Woooooo! :)

Okay, so I have to clear up a mistake I made in a previous rant: I credited Woodhead for Wizardry. I should've done my homework and gone to Moby Games, but I was under a lot of stress and forgot to. My bad. Here's the text of the e-mail I was sent:

From: Robert Del Favero
Subject: Woodhead and Wizardry

Concerning your rant of 5/11: My name's on Wizardry 2 as a contributor and on Wizardry 3 as a coauthor. I was involved with playing the game from when the prototype was an overhead-view 2d game written in Basic. Andrew Greenberg wrote that prototype in his dorm room at Cornell on his Apple ][ computer, got his friends to test and give feedback on it, and then wrote a design for Wizardy as it eventually made it to market. Robert Woodhead was responsible for implementing the game in UCSD Pascal, but the design of the program, the design of the content and most importantly the passion for making the game, was Andrew Greenberg's. Woodhead was little more than a contract programmer, brought on to the project because Andy was too busy working on a PhD in Computer Science to code the program he'd designed.

To say that Robert's responsible for "creating the American RPG" is a significant misstatement of the situation. Andy's moved on (he has a family and practices law in Florida these days) but he still deserves credit for what he accomplished in gaming, and Wizardy was his brainchild. Robert used the money and Japan connections he made from Wizardry to establish a successful anime import/production company, and that would be his claim to fame, not Wizardry.

So consider this a "my bad". I'd feel worse about it, but then I actually did my homework and realized that the first Wizardry came out while I was in the womb. Bet that made some of you gamers out there feel old... I apologize for that, but I just needed to make a point that it was an understandable gap in my video game knowledge that has since been filled.

Meanwhile, regarding my Final Fantasy Concert rant of last Wednesday, I got this mail from Germany:

From: Bastian Diedrich
Subject: formal dress required

Hi!

In germany we have a fair called Games Convention. It has taken place only twice up to now, and this year will be the third time. Last year they held a concert on the evening the day before the opening. The concert had a mix of videogame music from both the east and the west, containing music from games like Splinter Cell, Wind Waker, Final Fantasy, but also older games, like Quest for Glory V or 1991s Apidya. The guests were quite a mixed bunch. There were the guests of honor, all in formal attire. There were the older gamers, some more, some less in formal attire (myself I was wearing something I did not wear since I graduated from school). And then, there were the others. Adolescent guys wearing T-Shirts and short trousers, sitting around as if they sat in front of the TV. Some of them even wore baseball caps, I spotted one with a Simpsons-cap. In one of germanys most prestigious concert halls. I don't want to know what people like the mayor of the city holding the convention think of video gamers now. Oh well. This year they'll hold another concert, and say it will be longer, better etc. I'll be there.

So it looks like this is a worldwide plague. Okay, people, I know that it may be hard to get out of your jeans and branded t-shirts, but would it kill you to at least dig out some sort of collared shirt? Even in my grungiest days I had a few of those for formal occasions. Then again, my family's big enough that there's a wedding and/or a funeral every year, so I've never gone a year without wearing at least semi-formal wear. But that's neither here nor there--have some respect, people... these people--composers, musicians, event coordinators--put a lot of effort into creating this show for you. The least you could do to spend your appreciation (above and beyond buying a ticket) is spend more than two seconds dressing yourself.

Another person asked me to go into more detail about my thoughts on Blizzard's two offerings at the show.

My impression of World of Warcraft can be easily summed up by the word "eh". I appreciate the level of effort put into the game by the developers--the interface is easy, the graphics are pretty and the dungeons well thought out. But the problem is, I'm more than a little burned out on fantasy MMORPGs, a burnout that NCSoft picked up and did something about with City of Heroes and Auto Assault. There's only so much spell-slinging and swordplay I can deal with on a daily basis. Gimme aerial battles, rooftop melees, Giant Robots! Gimme copy machines filled with NINJA! Something other than rabbits and boars and wolves and goblins and elven warriors and ohmygodIthinkI'mgoingtovomit. This is not a knock on Blizzard, mind you--I'm probably just a jaded gamer at this point.

As for Starcraft: Ghost, that looks like a lot of fun. It's been long enough since the last Starcraft game that the world seems fresh again, and while I'm disappointed that the main character doesn't sound like Clint Eastwood, I like the core gameplay--there's just enough action that I don't get bored waiting for someone to freakin' turn around (See: Tenchu) and just enough stealth that I feel like a badass while dodging Marines and throwing them off of cliffs. The controls felt smooth, and the game oozed typical Blizzard personality.

Another reader asked about the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP. Unfortunately, those weren't on my beat and I didn't get a chance to see them. I just know that I won't get either of them, no matter how cool they are.

And, finally, one unfortunate reader gets the Dom Hates You prize. Here's an excerpt of her mail:

Hiya Dom!
I've E-mailed you a couple times before. About random stuff like your Grandfather, FFXI, and how I'm your #1 Fan! It probably not true though...and I used to sign as LockhartFF7.

Anyway...It sounded like you had fun at E3.

LockhartFF7 (I won't release your name because that just seems mean), you have earned a uterus punch. Because I have no idea how you read my rants and got "I had fun" out if it. You may have had fun reading my rants--that's the point of writing them, after all--but you didn't get the parts where I wrote that I spent most of E3 hungry, exhausted and in pain. As DeadKennedy put it on the forums, "according to my roommates who went to E3 you didn't so much walk the floor as shuffled around."

And for those people who e-mailed me wishing that I'd gone to ACen like I did last year, let me note to you that I spent most of Saturday and Sunday asleep or sitting still and staring off into space. It's Wednesday and I'm STILL drained--would you really wish 6 straight days of convention work on anyone? Be honest. And explain why you want to kill me.

Dom out.

"lightning strikes..."
Friday - May 21, 2004
[Piro] - 01:57:00
Figures, the one time in the past few weeks that im done with the comic before 1am, and we get hit with a massive electrical storm here in lower Michigan. I'm not the kind of person that unplugs everything when we get a little lightning, but this storm was bad. Lightning hit somewhere near the office, and we could hear the crackle, and that crackle was one of our new phones getting fizzled. Hail was falling and rattling the hell out of everything. We unplugged everything and figured that we'd wait out the storm, but here it is almost 2am and its still going. Just had something hit real close. Whee.

I actually love thunderstorms, but I also know what they can do to computers. Years ago I learned how to build PCs when a lightning strike blew out all 8 computers in the architecture firm I worked for. That was fun. On one machine a ribbon cable actually had burned away. I take lightning somewhat seriously. :P

We decided to come home and I'll just head to the office and finish up and post first thing tomorrow morning. I'm working from a wireless connection right now (there's a part of me that wants this buggy Linksys wireless router to get zapped so I can one that's more stable). Oh well. Even mother nature seems to be against me when it comes to ever posting on time :P

"mini-seraphim survey"
Wednesday - May 26, 2004
[Seraphim] - 14:03:00
We have been working on shirt designs for the ladies and I have found a babydoll t-shirt that fits ladies of all sizes. We just don't know how to break out the sizes when ordering. We don't have any data on ladies t-shirt sales. One manufacturer of ladies t-shirts says that a Medium is a one size fits all and will fit 80% of the female population. Hmmm, interesting. Then why are there only small and mediums left on racks when one goes shopping? Those sizes are always left on the clearance rack and not a large or x-large is to be found. I think some people read to many fashion magazines. Most real women aren't airbrushed down a size every morning they get up. We'd like to know if we should offer 2XL or 3XL? If people want them we will try to make them. So if you intend to get a ladies t-shirt for yourself or someone else take the survey to let us know which size you would buy. There is a picture of the shirt embedded in the survey. This shirt style is in misses sizes not junior or women's sizes. Email me if you have any questions.

Acen report: two cardboard boxes: free, oversized wiffle bat: $19.99, Wireless Powerpoint controller (that didn't work): $49.99. Look on the faces of fans after seeing N3kid Largo cosplay photo: Freakin' Priceless. I so wish I'd had a camera at the time. I think it was the best moment of the year so far. Worst moment of Acen - Piro leaps from the stage in a paroxysm of insanity onto a box. It's all good fun until someone breaks a drawing arm. Hmmm, a six week vacation... right. Piro would learn to draw with his teeth or his feet.

Another young woman is missing in Oregon under suspicious circumstances. Another young woman disappears in broad daylight. There are a lot of West Coast MT fans so take a look at her picture and lets hope for the best. Ladies be smart, cautious, and aware - there are sick, psychopathic people out there. Women don't have to be involved in high-risk activities to become crime victims. I'm really disappointed in the web resources I found about safety awareness. The sites aren't user friendly or they are trying to sell you something. I did find one website with practical advice. If anyone has a better one send me the link and I'll post it. Just be constantly aware of your surroundings, the people, and always think of your personal safety. As an architect Piro is alway professionally scoping out a building he's in for routes of 'egress' or things that look wrong. He's trained me to look for exits and think of windows as exits too. We ended up jammed into a theater once and we had a plan to get out if anything happened. We should have left when we saw the overcrowded building wasn't up to code. We can't help thinking that way automatically. That is how everyone has to think about his or her personal safety at all times. If you don't feel good about a situation - change it. Make it safe.

I was going to write more but these news stories really upset me. If you are out west keep your eyes open and everyone stay safe.

"a whine-free rant!"
Wednesday - May 26, 2004
[Piro] - 16:34:00
Rants sure seem to be the things that get short shift these days. And when I do rant its about not having time to rant. How lame is that? :P For today, I'm going to replace my normal whining with this cute little forum avatar I made for myself:

Much more entertaining, don't you think? Oh, and when I say I made this avatar, that means I just put it together in ImageReady. The drawings are actually from a webcomic that prompted me to take on the nickname "piro" - "Dining Table of the Minase Family" (Minase-ke no Shokutaku) by Quarter Iceshop. None of them make a lot of sense if you don't know much about Kanon or Air, but these were some of the comics that inspired me to start working on MT years ago. Comic number five is the one I used to make my avatar. It's almost like a little tribute to Himuro Tomoe-san for sticking me with this damn nickname for the rest of my life. :P

I had a whiny drama-laden rant I typed up, but I think that little bit of mt history instead should be far more entertaining. :) Lots of stuff going on, as you might guess. Seraphim and I are real busy with the store, and things are going well. I've finished quite a few new shirt designs, and even have a few off to the shirt printer (gasp). Lots of new girls shirts too - something a lot of our girl-type readers have been after for a long time. Sorry it took so long. (be sure to take Seraphim's little survey on ladies shirt sizes - we have little data on them :P). The website backend stuff is muddling along, and I have two trips to take in the next two weeks. Let me provide some info on those real quick.

Seraphim and I will be at Fanime in San Jose, California this weekend (May 28-30). Not only will we be there, but so will Dom, Ed, Cortana... yes, Ed will be there. Maybe that's why I'm scared to go. :P Sarah and I will be there Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and you should be able to find us at the Wizzywig booth drawing and signing stuff most of the time :) The Megatokyo panel is at 5:00pm on Friday, so be sure to come if you're commin to Fanime. :P

The following weekend (and that's the killer - we'll be home for three days between cons) we'll be at Project A-Kon in Dallas, Texas (June 4-6). I don't know what our schedule at A-kon is yet, but I'll post it here as soon as I know. I won't be at the Wizzywig booth for A-kon (they don't want us in the dealer room :P) but we will have a table somewhere to take care of everyone. Wizzywig has some maps on their website showing where they will be with MT swag stuff at least.

What does this mean for the comic schedule? Well, hopefully, not too much. I have 4 comics and two DPDs planned. If everything goes according to plan, then there will be something up each day, and (gasp) no SGDs. Well... I will only resort to Shirt Guy Dom strips as a last resort, but I've been known to resort to last resorts before. In fact, Dom is actually doing some to fill in the gap. it was very nice of him to offer to do two full weeks of SGD strips, but... I thought that might be a little overkill. :P

More info later if I have any. Right now, I'm gonna get cracking on more drawings. One other small problem with A-kon is that I will be getting my copy of Clannad when I am there from a friend who picked it up for me... heheh. ^^;; I have a feeling Seraphim will lock it away till after the store is up and running. Hell, I might do that myself. :)

As for the rant image, thats one of my fave little MT fan arts i have scattered on my hard disks. Yuki goes Apes**t. :P Makes me chuckle every time i see it. (if you know who to did this, please let me know so i can credit them ^_^)

"Crossing deadlines"
Friday - May 28, 2004
[Dom] - 00:00:00
So. They're not only re-releasing Disgaea, but they're giving out a free artbook with purchase. That's nifty. It's nifty enough that if I didn't already own the Japanese limited edition, I'd get the re-release of Disgaea for it, because I'm tired of Sony America being dicks about limited editions and not allowing package sizes to be any larger than the standard.

Screw you, Sony, I want gigantic packages with oodles of goodies! Gimme the Koei treasure boxes for the Dynasty Warrior games! Gimme ridiculous amounts of coasters and a parfait spoon! Gimme calendars and art! Hell, I don't care, give me that princess dress that came with Princess Concerto (warning: Japanese link). It doesn't matter to me, I just want SOMEthing. Yes, I'm a limited edition whore. I don't mind.

Sigh. Oh well. I'll just stick to Japanese games.

But speaking of American games, I just got an e-mail from Trebor himself (known to the mundanes as Robert Woodhead) that I'd like to relate, just to complete the whole Wizardry saga and give everyone an important gaming history lesson:

One of my many spies has informed me that in your May 19th column, you quote Robert Del Favero as saying:

"Woodhead was little more than a contract programmer"

Needless to say, my perspective is a little different.

Before Andy and I started working together on Wizardry, I had written and published a couple of Apple II programs (Infotree and Galactic Attack). I was looking for a new project to work on and came up with the idea of doing a computer RPG.

I was well into the design of this game, which I called Paladin, when I heard that Andy Greenberg was doing something similar. I knew Andy because we were both heavy users of the PLATO computer assisted education system.

We got together, compared notes, and realized that we could do a better job as a team than we could apart. The final design for Wizardry combined features in his original BASIC game and the Paladin design.

I did almost all of the programming of the original Wizardry game and the scenario editors that created that database it ran off. Andy used those editors to create the first few scenarios, and he and his friends, including RDF, playtested them. This was an obvious division of labor since I had a lot more time than he did, having been kicked out of Cornell for a year for fooling around too much on the computers and neglecting my grades. And finally, my company released the program onto the market. Had Andy and I never gotten together, most likely his Wizardry would never have evolved into a marketable product, because of all the other demands on his time, and my Paladin would probably have made it to market but would not have been nearly as good as Wizardry was, because of his story skills and the efforts of his playtesting team (who it would not be unfair to credit as the "third" author of the game). Fortunately, it was one of those "right people in the right place at the right time" kind of things.

That said, RDF is entirely correct that your statement that "Brian Fargo and Robert J Woodhead pretty much created the American RPG" is wrong. I assume you mean computer RPG, btw.

The Computer RPG had its real genesis on the PLATO system in the mid-70s. By 1977 or so, PLATO was featuring real-time multiplayer dungeon games, not to mention real-time spacewar, IM, chat, email, netnews, and a host of other things we now take for granted. All this on high-resolution plasma panel terminals connected at 1200 baud to twin Cyber 6600 supercomputer. Now you understand why I was kicked out of Cornell for a year; PLATO was crack for computer nerds.

Wizardry (and Paladin and the original BASIC Wizardry) were our attempts to see if we could do something similar on the puny personal computers of the day. For example, the idea of the 6-character party was a way of simulating multiplayer interaction when in fact there was usually only one person playing the game. But at the same time, the fact that only one person was playing the game allowed us to put in a story (and lots of cute ornaments) that raised Wizardry beyond the "hack-hack-kill-kill-loot-loot-run home" style of game.

Best R

I consider myself educated. I seriously need to find a book about the early days of computer gaming like Game Over has the beginnings of Nintendo and The Ultimate History of Video Games has for the arcade and console industries. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm interested in hearing them.

"stress positions"
Tuesday - June 1, 2004
[Piro] - 10:33:00
Monday, early afternoon...

I have a pet peeve about flying that has been bugging me particularly recently. As I write this, I'm somewhere between San Jose and Minneapolis. So far on this particular flight, I have not been bothered by this pet peeve, but the flight is still young.

I'm one of those people who can't sleep on airplanes. I'm not particularly nervous about flying, I just can't sleep sitting up. I usually try to keep myself occupied while flying, either by reading, drawing (which is very hard to do on most trips because there is almost always mild turbulence) or writing on my laptop. Using my laptop is my preferred manner of keeping myself occupied, but unless you are flying first class, using a laptop is very difficult.

With all the traveling I had planned on doing this year, I picked up a 12" mac powerbook before I went to Japan. I figured that by getting the smallest of the powerbooks, I could work pretty much anywhere. My old Dell Inspirion was completely useless on airplanes. The little powerbook really is very portable and a joy to use (except for the heat problem - where your palms rest can get very hot). It's even *almost* useful on airplanes. The reason I say almost is that your ability to actually use it relies heavily on the person in front of you.

As anyone who has tried to use a normal sized laptop with a generous screen in economy class, it's almost impossible to type and see the screen at the same time. There just isn't enough room between the seat in front of you and yourself. With the 12" powerbook (and other smaller laptops, I am sure) there is just barely enough room to type comfortably and see the screen - if the person in front of you doesn't crank their seat all the way back. This tendency of people to just slam the seat back as far as they can as soon as they can - That is my pet peeve, and it inspires me to almost violent irritation at times.

Y'know, even when relaxing, reading, resting on a plane, I never tilt my seat all the way back. To me, when you tilt a seat back, you are putting yourself back into the personal space of the person behind you. Everyone on planes know that you can and have the right to tilt your seat to get comfortable, but I feel that this must be done with a certain amount of respect. Just because you can slam it all the way back, doesn't mean you should. I consider it common courtesy not to.

If you aren't using a laptop, you can argue that it's not really that big of a deal. I still argue that it feels like an intrusion into your space, depending on how it is done. Regardless, what it does mean for me is that if the seat is all the way back, It becomes impossible for me to use my laptop. On a long flight that can be very irritating.

What's amusing is that, right in the middle of typing "even while relaxing..." the lady in the seat in front of cranked her seat all the way back. I'm now in what I can only call a stress position, attempting to at least finish my thoughts on this. Whee.

----

Tuesday morning...

Well, so much for writing an in depth, rambling rant about Fanime on the plane trip home. I tried to draw on the plane, but drawing on planes is just too hard. Planes are really cattle cars, where all you really have room to do is sit and read or stare into space. Even so, it was a nice trip home. I gave up and pulled out my collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories and finished reading the Dunwich Horror and The Mountains of Madness. The things I do to relax. :P

I applogize for the lack of DPD today. I was going to post a scan of the drawing I did for the charity auction at Fanime this weekend, but it looks like the email they sent me with the file attached has been lost in the email. It's not a bad drawing, so I'll be sure to post it somewhere when I get it. Till then, hm... well, if I can come up with some random sketches to post today I will, but it looks like I just need to move on and do Wednesday's comic. Definitely two comics this week - I'll have one comic done today and one on wedensday. Sarah and I leave for A-kon on thursday and won't be back till monday, so next monday's comic will also be either late or skipped, but the good news is this - that's the last con for a while, and I should be able to get back on schedule.

One thing I noticed, especially this year, is that no matter how much I try to not let traveling to conventions interrupt things, it does. I have done so much traveling in the past year that I have not been able to get into any kind of stride, and I think that has been a negative thing for the comic. I made the decision earlier this year that I needed to stop traveling so much and take a year and concentrate on the comic. You know, that comic thing. :)

So, bear with me as I finish up my travel commitments for the year, and get thru the startup for the new store. Once all of that is in place, and my travels are done, I can start putting things into high gear and chain myself to my desk and get some work done. I feel very frustrated, honestly - there's a lot of stuff I want to get down on paper, and im tired of not being able to do so.

That said, it's time to shut up and get to work. :)

-------

If you think you'll never, ever get a chance to meet Seraphim and I at a convention then enter the Anime Network Sweepstakes. If you enter through the banners on the Megatokyo site or the Megatokyo link from the partner page and win the grand prize trip to Denver, Colorado then Seraphim and I also get to go to the debut of the Anime Network in Denver. We think it would be pretty cool if a Megatokyo fan won and we need a vacation :)

"down to Texas..."
Thursday - June 3, 2004
[Piro] - 10:04:00
Just a quick rant today, more to provide information than anything. I will be leaving for Project A-kon in Dallas, Texas this afternoon. According the the schedule, the Megatokyo panel is at 2pm on Friday - I don't really expect too many people to be able to go, but we'll be there. If you can make it, please do - it'll probably be a nice, small, casual little thing. :) Other than that, I don't think there are any other panels or events we are going to be involved with, so... I'll just spend my time doing what I usually do at conventions - sit and draw stuff for people :)

I won't be at the Wizzywig booth in the dealer room like I've been doing at other conventions this year, instead we will have a table... somewhere. Not sure where yet, not sure if its in the artist's alley, or hidden under a stair somewhere :P Anyways, you'll have all weekend to find us :) If you are looking for MT stuff, be sure to stop by Wizzywigs first - they will also know where Seraphim and I have been hidden. :P

Now I have to head off and finish fridays comic - just two drawings left to finish and to scan and stuff. Shouldn't be a problem to update tonight at the more or less normal time. :P As for Monday next week, expect a late comic, either late late monday or early Tuesday, but after that I'm home for a while so I should be able to get back on schedule.

"back from texas..."
Monday - June 7, 2004
[Piro] - 18:50:00
Heyo, finally home.

While at a-kon, had a chance to bump into a lot of people I know, which has fun. It was also fun to talk with the Antarctic Press guys a bit, in particular John Katz who does Legends from Darkwood (along with Chris Reid, the writer for the story :) We did a little gift art trade, and oddly enough the Pirogoeth drawing I did for him came out looking not too bad, so I asked him to scan it for me so I could post it as a DPD if he didn't mind. When I got home I found a link to the scan sitting in my email box. Thanks John :)

I was bad today, and I admit it. I was supposed to work on the next MT comic on the plane, but instead I wrote about 5 pages worth of development on another project that I'll be working on sometime down the road (yes, that other project I will not name because people ask me about it every time I turn around and ask me when it's coming out ^^;; I'll say first thing in 2005, but don't hold me to it). I was really in the mood to do so for some reason, and i was able to work out some story problems that have been bugging me all year. Funny how things can really clear up and click into place if you let them sit long enough :)

I also finally got my copy of Clannad. :) No, I am not going to load it and play it right now. No really. ^^;; Well, uh... if I disappear for a few days, you know what happened. :P It's all Pocky's fault. And Uguuu-sensei. Blame them. They are evil.

On a more serious note, I'm seriously thinking I'm gonna just ditch working on the comic tonight. I wanna see a movie, damnit. I've wanted to see a friggin movie since Hellboy hit the theaters and I STILL haven't see it yet. I assume its not in the theater anymore, but there are a few decent ones i think Seraphim and i can suffer thru. :)

So, to those of you all set to send me one of those pissy little emails about how sick and tired you are of me not delivering comics when I say I will, and how tired you are of DPDs, save your keystrokes. It's not like you are gonna say anything i haven't been hearing week after week for four years. For the rest of you, I appologize for the "1 DPD, 2 Comics" week rather than the "1 DPD, 3 comics" week i was originally shooting for. This is the way things are when i have to travel around.

That said, I'm going to be home for a good stretch of time (nothing till San Diego Comic Con, and then nothing after that for a while :) and the only thing that has messed the release schedule up this year has been trips... of course, there is still a lot of work to do for the new store we are opening at the end of July... aw, hell, like it'd be MT if i was reliable. :P You can form your own opinions about the comic schedule in the next month :)

Me? i'm gonna go see a friggin movie.

"We need bigger guns"
Sunday - June 13, 2004
[Dom] - 21:26:00
It's been two weeks since my last rant. Wow. So, uh, there's a lot to catch up on, and I'll get started right away. But first, a blatant plug for my buddies in the Shadowfist gaming community. I missed out on seeing them at KublaCon this year, which was a bitter disappointment--I just bought a box of the new set, Seven Masters Versus the Underworld, and I'm absolutely in love with the card art. Great job as always, Z-man, and I hope to see you at Gen Con SoCal later this year.

Two weeks ago was Fanime, and to be honest, It doesn't really stand out in my mind. The MegaTokyo panel was disgustingly early but as fun as usual, but the rest of the con was just my usual thing. I've been going to Fanime for some six years or so now, and given that it was held only a couple miles from where I went to high school, it's rather homey. So I relaxed, had fun, and realized that I only have two more cons this year before I'm free... a comfort, since I'm also going to be unemployed soon--my contract with Wired expires on June 30th, after which I become a freelance writer again. And that means I can't really plan very many trips.

So anyway, other things I've done in the past two weeks? Well, I've done a whole lot of writing--Asmodeus introduced me to a 2channel saga called 電車男(Train Man), about an otaku who meets the girl of his dreams, and comes to a giant BBS for help on how to woo her. It's sweet, it's only slightly improbable, and it's wildly funny. Too bad it's all in Japanese, or I'd be able to share it with all of you.

Wait, I said I was writing, not reading. Well, the point is that Densha Otoko/Train Man has inspired me to start writing again. If something that crazy can happen in real life, after all, it can definitely happen in one of the many screenplays I have floating in my head. So I'm writing again, because deep down inside, I'm a squishy little romantic. And that squishy little romantic has awakened from a long sleep and said "DUDE! I have this GREAT idea for a story, you should TOTALLY write it!"

Yes, the romantic inside of me is a goofy Californian with a sunny grin. What did you expect, a tuberculoid Brit with a black rose? Edit 6/14: I've gotten a couple of e-mails misunderstanding the thrust of my joke. This is not a knock on the British--it is rather a reference to an old literary movement known as the Romantics, who saw the symptoms of tuberculosis--weight loss, chest pain, the flush of fever, uncontrollable sweating--and saw the same features of a pining lover, and used it as a symbol in literature. Sorry for making a joke only English majors would understand at first glance ;)

Anyway, back to writing. I'm one year out of college. I consider myself an average writer at best--I just have good editors is all. I mean, look at the quality of these rants. They're my natural voice, and they're erratic in quality, ranging from uninformed rubbish to amusing rubbish. And so when several people responded to my request for history books about the early days of computer games by suggesting that I write one myself using the Wizardry saga as a beginning, I was taken aback. A book is a huge project, and I'm still cutting my teeth on magazine writing. But who knows? I might get an urge to write longer non-fiction some time.

As for the books that I WAS pointed to for the early history of computer games, here are a few names with ISBN numbers for others who're interested:

Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic, by Brad King and John Borland (ISBN 0072228881), which is... well, about what the title says.
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Stephen Levy (ISBN 0141000511), which has a section about Sierra (specifically, Ken and Roberta Williams) and about Lord British.
Masters of Doom, by David Kushner (ISBN 0375505245) which is about id (obviously).

As for High Score! and Supercade, I remember those from my GamePro days... I think Dan Amrich told me that they weren't so hot, but I'll definitely hit him up for more advice on what books are good and what books are crap. Game Over was a recommendation of his that I highly enjoyed, so we'll see if he liked any of the others that I didn't put on the list.

Hmm, what else... well, coming back to card games, I got silly with Hamusutaa's cards the other weekend and created a "Sad Robots in Snow" deck for MT fans who play Magic: The Gathering, which you can view in our forums here. I don't claim to be the best player in the world, and I know that the deck isn't good... but dammit! Sad robots in snow!

Meanwhile, I've been trying to fit Shadowfist back into my schedule, which has been hard... but will get easier with time and unemployment. Hurrah for monkeys!

Stay tuned until next time, when I talk about video games (especially why I prefer City of Heroes to Final Fantasy XI) and manga.

"scribblin'"
Tuesday - June 15, 2004
[Piro] - 13:34:00
Bleah.

Sometimes writing rants requires as much or more creative energy as writing a comic. Writing a decent rant, at any rate. I've been sitting here typing random words for over an hour and I've come to the conclusion that my brain isn't empty, it just suffers from a complete lack of cohesive, ordered thought. I think this might have to do with an odd feeling of anti-climax I've been feeling recently.

I've done a lot of traveling this year. Japan and AX Tokyo, Katsucon, Megacon, a book fair in South Bend, a lecture at MIT, Sakuracon, Anime Central, Fanime, A-kon.... that's over 9 trips in six months. I won't count Penguicon because that was a local convention :) That count also doesn't factor in the fact that Sarah and I were in Las Vegas when the new year began ^^;; If you look at last year, I spent most of that traveling, as well as the year before. I feel like I've been on a 3 year promotional tour, and it's finally come to a close.

Since I'm not going to Otakon this year (figures, Koge Donbo-sensei will be there. (sniff) ;_;) and SDCC is over a month away, arriving home from A-kon felt like the end a long journey. I am kinda looking forward to being home for a while.

As much fun as traveling and seeing MT readers all over the country is, there is no question that it's had a negative impact on the comic. My general feeling has been, many times, I've been squeezing the comic inbetween other things. Granted, there is a lot going on - the new store, books, the new website, new and inventive ways the cats develop to destroy the apartment... all of this has had a tendency to cut into my work on the comic a lot more than I like to admit to myself. Now, add all this travel into the mix and it just makes things a real mess. Maybe without all that travel, things will be easier, and I can focus on some of the sillier things, like, say, the comic.

Of course, I expected myself to become instantly productive as soon as I got home from A-kon. I planned to dive right in and work diligently on comic development, scripting, drawing, coloring and other things that I've been dying to devote huge chunks of time to for months. I'm eager to reach the "comics done on time" goal, and maybe even that elusive "get a few comics ahead" grail... or even, in my wildest fantasies, ahead enough with Megatokyo that I could work guilt-free on other projects. Sure, there is still tons to do for the new store (we have boxes of new shirts that came today - the new designs look pretty cool) and I still need to get cracking on new content for the website backend... now that I'm going to be home for a while, I can do it all, right? No worries right?

So here I am, sitting at my desk, spinning my wheels, barely capable of writing even a simple rant. :) Nothing will sap your creative energy faster than staring at a blank piece of paper or looking at an empty word document on your screen.

...

Kind of a pointless rant, isn't it? It has no real structure, doesn't say much of anything, and much of it is stuff you are probably sick of hearing me whine about :P I write rants like this from time to time, and usually I just toss them aside and give it up as feeling I have nothing worthwhile to say today so why post it. The time spent sitting here struggling to write even that is time wasted, right?

Well, not really. I'm finishing this rant today because maybe even worthless ramblings like this do, in the end, have some value. I've said many times that if you want to put your work up for people to see, you have to be willing to post the bad with the good. Not because you want to cause people pain (I have dom for that), but because even seemingly worthless stuff has a purpose. When climbing a ladder, the lower rungs are just as important as the top ones, for without them you can't reach the top of the ladder. A pathetic rant, much like a random throw-away drawing, is sometimes just part of the process towards writing or creating something better. This rant got me off dead center today. It got me thinking. That's a good thing. It had a purpose.

Most times when I do this I tend to just delete the rant and move on. Its part of why my side of the rant column seemingly lacks rantage as much as it does. Oddly enough, I've found that random thought dumps do have a purpose, and are far more important than I though they were. In fact, I've incorporated the concept into how I break loose my pathetic excuse for a brain so I can write. A few months ago I started a word file that is more like a diary than a real development document. It's writing for writing's sake, and it's not anything I ever expect anyone to read - in fact, I doubt I'll ever go back and re-read it myself. If I'm smart, I'll make sure to delete it when they come to take me away someday :) It's like scribbling to loosen up a pen to get the ink flowing. the scribbles are hardly worth keeping, but without them, you'd never get the ink flowing.

So pardon my little scribble today. It helped me get going this morning.

Just one other bit of randomness before I go. We're busy pulling together information for the Megatokyo Community pages for the new website, and we're trying to gather as much info as we can on all of the MT related websites, blogs, fan-art pages, cosplay, random silliness related to Megatokyo. The hope is to pull it all together and maintain it so MT readers can see what other MT fans have been up to.

The sheer volume of sites and material has been more than I've been able to deal with up to now, so I'm getting some friends to help me put it together. ^^;; If you have a MT related site or know of anything you think should be listed, please email us at this email address: community@megatokyo.com. We won't be linking to or posting EVERYTHING, of course, but we can't put it on the community link pages if we don't know about it. It's been a long time coming, and I'm looking forward to finally being able to acknowledge all the hard work MT fans have been doing over the years.

"cart chunking"
Wednesday - June 16, 2004
[Seraphim] - 19:31:00
The last rant I wrote late at night was a disaster. I was so embarrassed when I went back later and saw all the typos, misspellings, and dropped words. Piro proofread it for me too. Last time I ask him.

Piro and I have completed a year or more long quest this week. We have been hunting the elusive and wily Hershey's Dark Chocolate Kisses. The quest is ridiculous because I don't even like sweets. I don't like pie, pudding, or custards. I have never, ever not once in my life had a Hostess Twinkie, Ho Ho, Ding Dong, or a Snowball. Creme filling is toxic or something and evil. I do, however, like dark chocolate which is not the most popular chocolate around. In a box of mixed chocolates there are like three. And how about the Hershey miniatures bag? They should kick out the Mr. Goodbar and put in more Special Darks. Candy makers are so stingy. So for years we would hit the stores after seeing the 'dark chocolate kisses for a limited time only' commercial but with no success. Finally, I stumbled across them at a Target of all places. Ya know, dark chocolate is actually a health food because it is an antioxidant. They're pretty good but I don't feel the need to seek them out again. Our quest is over.

I thought the survey results regarding the ladies shirt sizes would be boring and I wouldn't post them. It turned out more interesting than I imagined. There were 8776 respondents - 47% women and 53% men. The distribution of sizes by gender is dramatically different. Men said that 70% of the shirts they would buy would be Medium or Small and only 10% would be XL or bigger. The women's distribution was almost evenly divided between small, medium, large, and the XL - 3XL sizes. I fully believe men skew the sizes smaller. Years ago Piro got my engagement ring two sizes too small. It barely fit on my pinky. He also used to buy me Petite clothes because he didn't know that Petite is just a euphemism for short. I'd love to see a comparison survey where couples both answer the size question and see how close the guys come to what the women actually state their size is.

Can anyone tell me why women's shirts are more expensive than men's shirts when they require half as much fabric and less sewing time? And don't tell me it is because of pleats or darts because it is a lousy t-shirt. A few weeks ago in a state out east, the practice of Ladies Night at bars was banned and declared unconstitutional because it gave women special treatment. Yeah, we women get lots of special treatment - like paying more for haircuts, dry-cleaning, and clothes. I don't hear anyone saying that kind of special treatment is discriminatory and unconstitutional. Half as much fabric as a man's shirt and it still costs more. Oh yeah, it ticks me off.

On a happier note, we are also going to be offering selected designs of men's shirts up to 5XL. There are about 6 colors so if a design can be put on one of the available colors without changing screens or inks we'll be able to produce them.

Speaking of shirts, didya see the story of the guy in Scotland who got 0wnzed in court for wearing a t-shirt that said 'kiss my 4R5E'. I guess the law over in Scotland is L33T. Those sheriffs got some l33t nekkid skillz.

And talk about seeing something. Piro and I stopped to pick-up mail and get some groceries late one night. Piro ran in while I perused the mail. I open the bank statement to see our bank cashed two larger size checks, for rent and the car payment, even though they weren't signed. Great security. So while I am pondering that a man who is parked next to us in the opposite direction, comes out of the store and puts his groceries in his trunk. He's like three feet away from me. Obviously he did not see me sitting there in the poorly lit parking lot, so he decides to give his cart a tremendous push hoping it would steer itself magically between our car and the one across from us. Needless to say this magical cart failed and the it rams into our bumper and gets hung up on the license plate. He does decide to extricate the cart from our bumper before leaving and this is when I open the door and yell at him "What do you think you were doing?" That was a good laugh. I scared him so much he took off running across the lot to take the cart all the way to the cart coral. Honestly. It reminds me of the quote, 'Ethics are what we do when no one is looking".

"pulling a smile"
Friday - June 18, 2004
[Piro] - 13:31:00
One of the things that I've noticed about myself is that I am very much a creature of habit. For instance, when I find a dish at a restaurant that I like, I will order the same thing every single time I go there. Habits are hard to change, it's a lot like trying to divert a stream - it takes a lot of digging, engineered fill and concrete pipes to encourage it to go somewhere else.

My worst habits are all time management related. Simply deciding, for instance, that I will start working on a comic at 10am instead of 10pm is about as effective as trying to coax a stream to flow uphill just by talking to it. For months I've been battling this subliminal habit of mine which had arbitrarily set the real deadline for MT comics to "within 12 to 18 hrs of the 1am deadline I keep telling people." Upon returning home from my last trip, I decided that it was time to change this bad habit.

It's amazing how long it took for the actual change order to filter thru the various bureaucratic levels of my brain. Yesterday was like a bit of a breakthrough. I was able to start early, do things mostly to an acceptable level of quality, and finish things a whopping four hours early. This is what I hope becomes a habit.

Like all changes, of course, things don't always go smoothly. After going home, making dinner, and sitting down to watch the midnight re-broadcast of the Keith Olbermann show and taking in what I felt was a well deserved couple of episodes of Full Metal Panic Fumoffu (of which I will speak more later), Sarah says to me... "Did you post the comic? it's 1:15am."

Doh.

Of course, by the time I went thru the process of getting it up, it was 1:20am. Technically, given the fact that the comic is usually REALLY late, I shouldn't berate myself for this little trip up at the finish line, but still, it set me in a bit of a glumpy mood that only another episode of Fumoffu was able to rectify.

The new website backend, which is coming along nicely, will enable me to actually enter comics into the system and set them to go live at their actual release time. There will also be a RSS feed that will alert those who utilize RSS feeds that the comic has been updated. The system will also put another level of pressure on me - I'll have to enter the finished script into the database as I post (so the search function can work properly). This means I really can't be doing comics last minute like I tend to do. So I hope the new habit sticks.

Oh, and i want to give props to Larry Ullman from DMC Insights. Larry is currently embroiled in building the new backend for the Megatokyo website. I actually worked with Larry years ago when looking to do a website for the architecture firm i was working for. Larry has also authored a few books on PHP, one of which i had and didn't realize it was by him ^^;; We are currently a little behind schedule, but that is 100% my fault because i didn't anticipate the learning curve for getting up to speed with XHTML and CSS and i was late finishing the templates.

When I was working on today's strip, one of the things that worried me the most was trying to show Erika smile and still have her looking like Erika. I've had people email me in the past and ask my why the girls I draw always look so sad. I've had people ask that and then go on to ask if I am unhappy or sad too (sound familiar? :P) So how do you make a sad girl smile?

In one of the many Kanon inspired comics that I have, in particular, in the "Kagikko" Kanon & Air tribute comics by Twin Hear Comics there is a comic where Sayuri and Yuuichi are trying to get Mai to smile. Probably the most amusing part of it is where Mai looks in the mirror in the bathroom and tries to force herself to smile. For most of us, how we feel inside is reflected on our faces or in our eyes, and you can't truly hide it. I wanted to convey that Erika can give a eyes open smile that would come off as extremely creepy - and it would only be so because we know what she is really feeling inside.

I've been picking up a lot more stuff lately. I've been digging thru my backlog of manga, digging into magazines and routing thru more websites than usual. I've been feeling more inspired lately, I guess. For instance, Full Metal Panic itself was ok, I enjoyed watching it, but theres really something about Full Metal Panic Fumoffu that *really* appeals to me. That's the nice thing about the huge variety of things that are out there. You can be selective.

I've been playing around with Clannad a bit, but I'll go into that in my next rant. I feel that the world really is ok, because Quarter Iceshop now has a clannad inspired comic called MINACLA (it's on the front page, easy to find). :) I also bought the first Marvel comic I have bought in... in... like, EVER? Something about this particular one grabbed my interest, so I snagged it. I'll let you know what I think when I read it. Also, Seraphim and I got a really nice stack of stuff from Antarctic Press that we are still going thru, and there's some nice stuff in there too.

But I'll save that for monday :)

Oh, and wonder of wonders, there's an update over on fredart. If you liked today's comic, you might want to step over and see one of the erika drawings that i had done a few weeks ago, while thinking about all of this. :)

oh, one other thing, i almost forgot ^^;; Last week marks one full year that my sister Jen has been working on her website, Swenyar's Find. Congrats Jen, and good luck on another year :)

And I also put up a RSS feed today. It's manually maintainted for now, but we'll see how well it works. :)

"In the shadow of giants"
Sunday - June 20, 2004
[Dom] - 23:00:00
So I'm typing this rant with one hand (no jokes until you finish the sentence, please) because with my left hand, I'm playing City of Heroes. I have 89 more minutes to rescue a group of mystics from the nefarious clutches of the Circle of Thorns, and I haven't a moment to lose--if I dillydally even a moment, they may not survive the night.

Yes, I'm that addicted to the game. I can barely pull myself away from the Alienware long enough to write.

I mean, I've been talking about CoH since around 2002 or so, so it's only natural that I've been playing it a lot recently. But I didn't realize that it'd be so... so GOOD.

I know MMORPGs are time sinks, but good lord! Final Fantasy XI didn't suck nearly this much of my time! Well, more on that later.

I mean, I intended to write about other games I'm playing. I mean, I picked up Sakura Taisen Monogatari at E3. I've had D->A: Black lying around since I got back from Japan. My Tarutaru Warrior awaits his promotion to Samurai status. Hell, I still haven't finished Shining Force 3 part 3 and it's been years. And in a development that I knew would happen two years ago, I'm too stuck on City of Heroes to play any of them.

Lots of other webcomic people have already spent a lot of time and effort talking about the game, so I'll content myself talking about why I dropped FFXI like a ton of bricks and lifted City of Heroes like a certain famous car from the '30s. It's a simple explanation, really, but it illustrates a lot.

See, a week or two before E3, I was running around the Tahrongi Canyon in Final Fantasy XI, trying to get to Jeuno, where it's recommended that I'm supposed to level up. I ran my stubby little legs over to Meriph[tab], and about a half hour later, was through. And then came the Sauro(tab). I asked the Shirt Ninjas, "Hey, can anyone help me through this zone? It's probably going to kill me."

No one helped, so I said "okay, I'll just log out for a while then."

A day later, City of Heroes came out.

Now, I want to point out that in the three or four weeks that I played Final Fantasy XI, I partied with my friends exactly five times. Twice with Paco-Paco, twice with Dingoko and once with Pdac. I was never able to group with other friends because they were off crafting, farming, or levelling jobs that were wildly higher than mine. Just keep this in mind.

So Gamestop messed up my pre-order because of a snafu regarding my CoH order, which meant that I didn't get to play during the three days of head start that pre-order people got. I joined my friends (on the Justice server, in case you're wondering) and realized that they were about 8 levels above me.

I, still in my Final Fantasy XI mode, said "ach, I guess I'll have to level up a lot before I can play with you guys".

They, who mostly didn't drudge through FFXI (notable exception: Kuro), said "Don't worry about it, just get to level 5. It'll take about 20 minutes."

So I got to level 5, told them (they were about level 12 by this time), and they said "come on by!".

So I ran to Steel Canyon, and saw the words "[character name] invites you to join forces as a sidekick." After clicking the yes button, I was greeted with the words "You are now fighting at level 11."

And so began our adventures, which I'm starting to chronicle at Villain Hunter, our supergroup's official website. Almost daily, I'm out playing with my friends, shooting the breeze on TeamSpeak, and kicking righteous ass. "Almost" daily because thankfully, most of us maintain healthy social lives outside of the game. We've done task forces together, we've gone on missions, and that handy little "sidekick" button is always there to pick up whoever's lagging behind in levels.

On May 16th, something similar to the following was said on the Shirt Ninjas linkshell and my diseased imagination:

Dom: "Hey guys, can anyone help me through Sauro(tab)?"
Shirt Ninjas: (crickets)
Dom: "anyone? I don't know the way and it already took me like a half hour to get through Meripha(tab)"
Dom: "Alright, would anyone at least tell me what mobs are aggressive here so I can avoid them?"
Shirt Ninjas: "Goblins and Yagudo, both aggro on sight. That's it."
monkey: "Okay, thanks..."
Final Fantasy XI: Sauromogue Couerl hits Dom for 68 points of damage
Final Fantasy XI: Sauromogue Couerl hits Dom for 50 points of damage
Final Fantasy XI: Sauromogue Couerl hits Dom for 62 points of damage
Final Fantasy XI: Sauromogue Couerl hits Dom for 70 points of damage
Final Fantasy XI: Sauromogue Couerl scores a critical hit! Dom takes 97 damage
Final Fantasy XI: Dom has fallen.
* Dom pushes up daisies
City of Heroes: Come back to me, sweetheart... in Paragon City, the time between point A and point B is mere minutes, and you can avoid aggro by superleaping out of trouble. And you can party with all of your friends by becoming their sidekicks.
Dom: I love you, City of Heroes.
Final Fantasy XI: Wait! I'm not done sodomizing you yet!
Dom: I have a new sugar daddy now. Goodbye.

That illustrates the main point: Things are FASTER in City of Heroes. Teleporters cover 100 yards in the blink of an eye, superleapers hop from rooftop to rooftop as they hum the theme to The Tick (dup dweeeee dup dup dup dweee dow), fliers fly, and super speeders run really fast. You get these powers at level 14 (or later, if you don't plan right). In Final Fantasy XI, you spend about 6 hours getting a Chocobo pass, and then you have a long-ass way to go before you can ride the airship. Time passes sooooo slowly in FFXI... you can ask the Shirt Ninjas, whenever I got bored I would start making off-color jokes on the linkshell.

Then again, whenever I was having fun I would make off-color jokes on the linkshell, so I guess that's a bad example.

So City of Heroes doesn't have crafting. It doesn't have a significant economy at the high end. But you know what? It doesn't require a white mage to every team, either. It doesn't nail you to the "Seek Team" button after level 12, because every archetype has a chance on its own, and meshes fairly well with another archetype. It doesn't penalize you levels when you die, and when you die you don't lose hours upon hours of work--you just lose some future XP to debt. Sure, blasters are overpowering in groups... but my Storm Summoning/Dark Blast Defender sure dies a lot less than seiya's Fire Blast/Fiery Melee blaster when soloing. In groups, our death numbers are about even, but that's a tale for another time.

Anyway, I'd like to finish this off by saying... the next update includes evil clowns and giant robots. I'm SO there.

PS: I finally got to Jeuno a few weeks ago. I then logged out and haven't gone back since, because my supergroup needed me to help stop the 5th Column's nefarious plot to build an army of super robots. And yes, I just wanted to say "nefarious" again.

"parts and pieces"
Tuesday - June 22, 2004
[Piro] - 01:18:00
After finishing the comic last night, i sat down and foolishly watched the first two episodes of Samurai 7, a new anime series by Gonzo roughly based on Akira Kurosawa's classic film Seven Samurai. Sorta like Ghost in the Shell meets an old fasion samurai flick.

I'll be the first to tell you that this is not the kind of anime i generally drawn to. I'm not a big fan of big fancy swordfighting scenes, nor am I a big mecha fan. In fact, in my opinion you could pretty much remove mecha from my favorite anime that contains them and i don't think i'd really notice (makes note to put on flak vest - mecha fans are scary). Well, in my normal rounds of poking around at new stuff, and seeing a few particular screenshots, i decided to give it a try. Screenshots of what? Impressive fight scenes? Beautifully detailed animation? Intense, emotional heroism? Well... not really. What really got me was one of the character designs, specifically Kirara, more specifically, the look in her eyes.

"cute female characters" are about as common in anime as ketchup bottles are in burger joints. Just about every anime ever made has at least one cute female character in it somewhere (yes, yes, there are ones that dont, but it is pretty rare). If you decide to watch every anime that just happens to have a pretty girl in it, you're gonna end up watching a lot of anime (and, therefore, preclude your ability to meet real ones). Girls aren't so lucky, of course - anime with pretty boys in them are actually part of a sub-genere, not a standard requirement of all anime.

Anyways, i won't say i didn't enjoy watching Samurai 7, because i did, to a point. Honestly, i could care less about the story. I could care less about the samurai. I was pretty much only interested in Kirara's quest and her troubles. Even so, her character does fall a little flat - she's a little TOO much the good priestess. So what in the world made me stay up till 3:30 watching both episodes?

Maybe it was just the look in her eyes, the way she was animated. Sure, it is an element to her character that isn't strongly defined. In fact, i often found the way she looked and the intensity of her gaze to be drastically weakened by what she was saying.Having Fumiko Orisaka's voice didn't hurt either. I like her character design, the way her outfit looks on her, the way her headgear works with her facial design and not against it (as so many costumes do). I even like her silly hat. I like her character. Maybe not enough to watch the entire series, but then again...

Have you ever watched something because you liked just one little thing about it? that's pretty much the case here. I've suffered thru amazingly bad anime because there was one character i cared about, i've flipped past hundreds of pages of manga to get to the pages that focus on some minor character i liked. I've even valiantly endured horrifically boring books just to make sure a favorite character came out all right in the end.

I don't think this is necessarily unusual. In fact, i think that it is more unusual for me to like every element of an anime. Haibane Renmei was the last one i can think of that I really liked the show as a whole. Maybe that's the difference between shows you watch, shows you like, and shows you love. Shows you love are shows you like everything about it, the entire package. Shows you watch and shows you like you watch for parts and pieces that are important to you.

When the material is in a forign language like, say, Japanese, you are suddenly often faced with not having all the parts and pieces available for you to judge. I used to watch a lot of raw japanese anime, often having only the most basic idea of what is going on. I watched all of Escaflowne raw, and honestly, to this day i still don't really know what the hell was going on at the end :P The DVDs are on my to-watch-in-my-next-life list. Yet the anime itself effected me deeply.

Even if you don't fully understand the language, emotions usually require little translation. When watching raw anime, you may wonder why a character was reacting the way he or she was, but you usually don't have to worry about understanding the way the character is feeling. Watch a new anime DVD that you know nothing about with the subtitles off sometime and you'll see what i mean.

It wasn't unusual for me, really, to have a favorite anime that I barely understood. In fact, there use to be a lot of fan-sites run by people who had only a have minimal grasp on what their favorite show was about. Sometimes, the parts that you could see and understand were enough to make the show important to you.

Of course, these days most shows are fansubbed fairly quickly, and soon after released here in the English on nice little DVDs. Even a lot of manga is more accessible than ever, either via scantranslations or as one of the many hundreds of new titles seem to be released here every month. There is less of a gap these days in understanding the "why" of what you are watching.

This doesn't always make it better, of course. I knew what Kirara was saying in Samurai 7, but I don't think really had much impact in what i liked about her character. In fact, it really seemed to dull her character for me. I almost wish i didn't know what she was saying. The show would then have a far more exotic quality to it, and between her looks and her voice and her mannerisms, i would probably form my own thoughts about her as a character, which i think would be far different that what she seems to actually be.

I'll continue this line of thought on wednesday. :)

"Dot dot dot"
Friday - June 25, 2004
[Dom] - 11:30:00
Typical. I spend an hour writing a rant about manga, and MOZILLA CRASHES. The first Mozilla crash I've had in like two weeks, and it's RIGHT as I finish writing an epic rant. Okay, here's the condensed version.

I was going to make fun of Fred's rant. Seriously. Because who watches Samurai 7? The thing is an unmitigated piece of crap. Fred was doing so well with Fumoffu, and then he goes off and drives his sense of quality off a cliff. It's like those people who, mystifyingly, watch Divergence Eve or Tenjo Tenge because they just can't feel anything when they drive nails into their skulls.

But I can't make fun of everybody for that, because I was taking a look at my manga shelf and realizing that I stuck with things much longer than I should have, out of a sense of loyalty, or maybe an obsessive need for completion.

Examples: GTO (should have stopped at 18, but no, I just had to read to the end where Onizuka becomes freakin' invincible and comes back from the dead), Ichigo 100% (should have stopped around volume 2, but nooooo, I need to finish it because I need to finish it), and Fruits Basket.

Okay, I have to explain why Fruits Basket is on my "sucks but I read it" list. It all goes back to my friend Brian Mao's theory of Fruits Basket. In his view, it's like Dragon Ball Z, but with angst instead of superpowered martial arts. See, in his view, Tooru is like Goku. She has her own angst, and vanquishes it, in the process becoming the pinnacle of anti-angst power. She meets a few people who have their angst, and vanquishes their angst as well. They join her fight against angst as each season, a newer and stronger angst comes to destroy them.

In this light, Fruits Basket isn't very interesting after a while, since I realized that... it's actually following that formula. That, and I have no interest in the last three bastions of angst--Rin, Akito, and that chicken dude.

So yeah. No calling the kettles black, lest people point out my own potness.

But on to things that I actually LIKE. Like the above pictured Puchimon. Not only did the limited edition of volume 3 come with a ninja cell phone strap, but the whole thing is unbearably cute as well as funny. I won't mention the fact that there's no real plot to speak of, given that it's just a story about a (sword-toting) girl going to (adventurer's) school. But I like it, and Nanase Aoi's art should be classified as either a deadly weapon or as a controlled substance. I'm not sure which, but I'm sure there's a happy medium somewhere between those.

I'm also reading Kobayashi Jin's School Rumble, which I consider to be Azumanga Daiou with a forward-moving plot, and male characters who not only exist, but are at least as funny as the female characters. It's turning into an anime soon, but I don't particularly care--it's hilarious in manga form, and anything in animated form is either icing on the cake, or to be ignored.

On the opposite side of the cute spectrum from School Rumble and Puchimon comes last week's Del Rey announcement, wherein they said that they had licensed Yamato Nadesico Shichi Henge and would be releasing it under the (appropriate) name "Wallflower". Astute readers of this side of the rants page may remember that I talked about this a while ago, while violent readers may remember that it involved chainsaws. Whichever kind you are, I would like to remind you that Yamato Nadesico Shichi Henge, with all of its gothy weirdness, is the only shoujo manga that I still enjoy, partially because it's more violent than any shoujo I've ever read, and some shounen stuff. Asmodeus warns me that Del Rey may butcher the script, so I reserve the right to retract my support of this title if Del Rey does so--but for now, I'm doin' a happy dance that Hayakawa Tomoko's work is making it over to audiences on this side of the Pacific.

And that's all for now--I have a bunch of deadlines that I want to take care of before Anime Expo, and before I'm released from my contract and enter that great unknown known as "freelance writing". I'll rant again next week, hopefully... failing that, I'll rant again after Anime Expo. Later!

"77 cents"
Monday - June 28, 2004
[Seraphim] - 03:50:00
Walmart is in trouble! HA! This is a great case to highlight unequal pay issues. Equal pay for women for equal work has only been law since 1963. The mere fact that there needs to be such a law indicates serious societal problems. Women with the same skills, education, and experience as men only earn 77 % of what the men earn for the very same work. Wages for minority women can be even lower. A good informational site is Girls Inc.

The discrimination is often subtle - like big ticket items in retail. Although at least two thirds of the retail workforce is female - men dominate in the higher paying commission positions in departments like appliances, home electronics, and hardware. From my personal experience with males in my family and even my own husband - men are the least knowledgeable gender about washers, dryers, and dishwashers because they have the least practical experience using one. Take a look around next time you are in a store. Women get to sell the clothing for minimum wage. So that shirt, haircut, or dry cleaning that we as women are charged more for than men- costs even that much more. And for everyone who said "women want to and are willing to pay more for clothing..." I will just say that we aren't really given a choice now are we?

Piro and I are equal partners in the new MegaGear company and since the start I have run up against very ugly biases. People call up asking for the boss and could I tell HIM that so and so is calling. I just say that HE isn't in. Even the lawyer's office, who wrote up the business papers, tells me to pass along messages to the person who needs to know. Hmmm, well that would be me. Although i assume this is unintentional, it is indicitive of the widely held biases and assumptions people unconciously hold.

I'm sure this will prompt many emails accusing me of being feminist. Every rant I have written has turned up ugly responses from people who are either pro-censorship or anti-voter rights. Well, hold your name calling because I am a feminist, which means I believe in social, political, and economic equality for both genders. Frankly, I don't think there are many women out there who aren't feminists. Any of you ladies really just dying to be discriminated against, paid less, promoted less, given fewer opportunities, and charged more just because you have two X chromosomes? Unfortunately, not nearly enough women and girls speak up and take a stand because the terms feminism and feminist has been made into words with ugly connotations. The opposite of feminism is chauvinism, which is the belief in the superiority of one's own gender. Chauvinism and chauvinist, however, are such pleasant sounding French words that require the use of additional words like "male" and "pig" to connote meaning. So let's just pick simple words that accurately reflect the spirit and meaning of the words, such as - prejudice and bigot. Now, THOSE are some ugly words and are an ugly thing to be.

"stunt pixels"
Wednesday - June 30, 2004
[Seraphim] - 01:30:00
Spiderman 2 will be released today. I can't really enjoy movies that rely so heavily on CG effects. Spiderman, Matrix Reloaded, the Hulk and others annoy me. When I go to a live action film I go there to see actors acting not a computer generated character swinging around New York. I like the actors to work for it by being suspended by a rope 20 feet off the ground hanging on for dear life in a sound stage whilst industrial fans blow them around like a scrap of paper in a hurricane. Dress up a mannequin and make me believe it is the real thing. Use CG to fix their hair and plaster a fake smile on their face. Use special effects to hide the wires and harnesses don't computer animate the entire person.

Not all tricks are achieved with computer graphics. I know people who believed Elijah Wood and the other Hobbits were actors of very short stature and all they used were camera angle tricks to achieve that effect. It looked real and felt real. Fooling people is what it is all about. Knowing it is CG takes all the fun and wonder out of it.

Free Comic Book Day is being held in conjunction with opening weekend of Spiderman. If you think you don't like comics (the non-web comic type) stop by a local participating independent comic store July 3rd and try it for free. For more information about Free Comic Book day and how it works, be sure to read the website. We're lucky in that we have two comic shops locally and Piro and I are reading a few:

Nightmares and Fairy Tales - Serena Valentino
Love Fights - Andi Watson
True Story: Swear to God - Tom Beland
Serenity Rose - Aaron A.
Legends From Darkwood - Kantz & Reid
The Adventures of Mia - Enrico Casarosa
PVP - Scott Kurtz
Usagi Yojimbo - Stan Sakai
Courtney Crumrin - Ted Naifeh
Neotopia - Rod Espinoza

If you are interested in comics for younger readers there is Amelia Rules! by Jim Gownley, Mia, Neotopia, or Courtney Crumrin. There is a lot of good stuff out there with several interesting titles coming out later this year like Autumn by Slave Labor Graphics and Flight by Image. Personally, I have been waiting around for two going on three years for Image to publish a sequel to Avigon by Che Gilson and Jimmie Robinson. What is with that? One year is forgivable and I can understand. Lots of people are just one year overdue ^_^;; I was told by the author that it will be out in October. She is going to be at SDCC and I plan to track her down. 90,000 people and all - I will locate her. I could just send Piro over to the Image booth to go all Piro the Homicidal Web Comic Artist on them.

We are hoping to meet Serena Valentino, Enrico Casarosa, Ted Naifeh, and Stan Sakai at San Diego Comic Con this year. I actually wasn't into comics last year when we were there and I can't believe how much I missed out on. Don't worry, we'll be at our booth too - at least a little bit : ) We just don't know where that is yet. We'll go where ever they tell us too when we get there. The Megatokyo panel is Friday the 23rd at 3:00 p.m. in room 8. It is supposed to be in a much larger room so hopefully everyone will fit this year.

"a not-so-strange ceiling"
Saturday - July 3, 2004
[Piro] - 18:41:00
In light of Friday's comic, this could almost be an amusing rant. I once considered getting a Live Journal, but I realized how silly that sounded, considering i already have a good rant space, this space right here, with plenty of people (who for some reason) are willing to read it. So why on earth would i want somewhere else to rant as well?

I wonder if part of the function of having a LJ is that most of the people who read it are people you know. I suppose I thought that maybe a more private spot to be my normal whiny self would be therapeutic. Sure, its fun for MT readers to see what I'm thinking, but I know for a fact that listening to me gripe about things endlessly would become more irritating than entertaining. Better to have a private journal for that. But then i realized that a private blogspace might irritate the hell out of my friends in the same way. So, in the end i just started keeping a devlog that only Reki (my poor abused mac g4) has to deal with. It's the writing that is important, not the fact that anyone might read it... at least, when it comes to most of my daily grumblings.

But that's not really what i wanted to rant about today. The following could, i suppose, fall right into the category of the type of LJ entry that Seraphim was reading from in Friday's comic. I'm sure a lot of you don't want to hear it, but maybe this one does involve a few more serious things than just normal pirowhining. :P

Friday morning was, actually, quite a beautiful morning and the birds were indeed singing. I was feeling a little bleak about all the stuff i had to do that day (remember, our new online store opens at the end of the month, so Seraphim and I are hella busy) but there's nothing really abnormal about that. Also, I have made a lot of progress lately, so i had reasons to feel at least moderately optimistic that it was going to be a decent day.

After running around town taking care of various errands, we arrived at the Factory (this is what I've dubbed the warehouse where we're running Megagear out of. I call our apartment "Old Home". I am such a pathetic Haibane fanboy ^^;;), I started on a rather simple task that I had been putting off for a while - running a network cable over to the shipping computer.

Now, i've adopted a rather Largo-esque approach to managing network cables - i'm hanging them from the ceiling. Our space has a drop acoustical ceiling, like the kind you find in most office buildings. What i've been doing is using plastic zip ties to hang carabiners (metal spring-snap hooks used in rigging) from the ceiling structure at 4 foot intervals and looping the cables thru them. Keeps them off the floor, and out of our way so we don't trip over them. Works amazingly well.

Now, as an architect, i've been poking my head above ceilings for years. I remember pushing up and aside thousands of tiles in builds all over, mostly hospitals where i often wondered what rare, long dormant diseases i was breathing in as dust and particles fell from tiles as i lifted them. Lifting a few tiles and sticking a zip tie over the support Ts shouldn't be a big deal. Done it hundreds of times before.

Well, this time it turned out to be a big deal.

Part of the problem with getting tiles to set back into place is that you sorta have to 'bounce' them, pushing them up and letting their own weight set them into place. This can, of course, produce some dust and particles. What it can also do is land chunks of ceiling tile in your eye. This is what happened to me.

Not a pleasant feeling, as you might imagine. After (amazingly) getting off the ladder without falling, I tried to flush it out of my eye, but for some reason we couldn't get it out. It the end, because i couldn't open my eye without it hurting, we ended up going to the emergency room. It's scary having something happen to your eyes. I wasn't really worried, not really, but still, we couldn't get it out, that was a problem.

Sarah drove me to the Emergency Room, a place i swore that I'd never end up. I had to keep my eyes closed the entire time, because even opening the good eye made my injured eye hurt more. It's a weird experience, being driven around. Being in a wheelchair, sitting in an ER not knowing what is around you, no idea where you really are, not really able to see at all. I had done a lot of work on hospitals as an architect, including an Emergency Room retrofit and addition. I figured that I had spent enough time in hospitals over the years that i didn't need to actually be there for any other reason. What was i doing here?

It took a while to get the last of the particles out of my eye. It two two tries, and the second time they had to swab the back of my eyelid with solution. It kinda spooked me, having to go through that. You don't want to think about loosing your sight, it's not a pleasant thought.

"Good rant material" i kept thinking to myself, jokingly, as they looked at the surface of my eye for scratches or abrasions or damage. It's sad, but i also sat there thinking about how, if i write about this, that people are going to think I'm just making more excuses for why i am late with this, or why i was distracted away from doing that. I wasn't thinking about the fact that i was lucky that my eye was ok, i was upset about having blown almost a whole day by my own stupidity. Safety goggles are cheap. I will be getting a pair before i finish the cabling project.

Four hours later Sarah drove us home. Once i left i realized that i was more worked up about this than i thought i was. My eye still hurts, but it's more sore than in pain. I don't think there will be any lasting effects from this, other than it really spooked me.

I think that a lot of things that happen to people, the kind of things that you write entries in your journal about, are not always interesting, or entertaining, or even moving. I am sure that some of you probably think "so, your eye is all right, get over it." It's easy to take what other people are thinking or feeling, and apply your own scale of values to it. It's really easy to belittle how people feel when you aren't feeling it yourself. But as a writer, it is also important to understand that very fact: just because you feel something and you write it down, it doesn't mean you are communicating what you feel effectively. Just because it means something to you, doesn't mean it will to others.

Of course, if you are just writing for yourself, as a way of exploring your own feelings, it doesn't really matter, does it? Maybe that's what LJs are really all about. Sorta like this rant here is, i suppose - it's one for myself. Thank you for your patience with it.

"FOOTBALL!!"
Wednesday - July 7, 2004
[Dom] - 16:40:00
Update 2, 0:44 PT: Whoop, looks like Cortana's letting me host it on MegaTokyo for a little bit. Here's the link: Football!! [its comic day, so i had to take this offline for a while - piro]

Update, 22:40 PT: We've exceeded our bandwidth limit for oop-ack. But thanks to donations, I can buy another five gigs... which may last another day or two, at least, if we put up a torrent. Oop-Ack will be back up in about 24 hours.

I'm writing this quickly, but I have plenty to write about Anime Expo, which was this last weekend.

While the con was wildly disorganized, I managed to have fun, mostly thanks to a lot of cosplaying friends and my buds over at Cal Animage Alpha.

Congratulations go to Kevin, who won Best of Show in the AMV (Anime Music Video) contest by combining Azumanga Daiou and Strongbad Techno. For those of you who don't want to go to AMV.org, Kev has asked me to put it up on Oop-Ack, and since oop-ack has been having database problems lately, I figured I might as well. So if you want to download his excellent video, go to oop-ack and feel free to grab it. Just... be kind to the bandwidth.

I wish I could say that I had more to do with Kevin's award-winning video (and so does his girlfriend Kim), but all I did was introduce him to Strongbad Sings, and he did the rest himself. We're hoping that he'll be making a G Gundam version of the video next year, just for more dancing robots.

As for me, I managed to rope Kim and Danny into joining the Karaoke Contest under the name Karaoke Without Honor or Humanity. We were edged out in a tough fight to Otaku in Crime, but everyone lost horribly to Shadowflight(?), who kicked everyone's asses by singing up a storm.

And before I go (I have a deadline with Anime Insider to fulfill) I'll leave you guys with this question:

Why do I always end up playing H games (see rant pic for which one) for girls who aren't willing to buy them themselves? WHY?

"Save in the name of true luv"
Saturday - July 10, 2004
[Dom] - 13:00:00
So now that I'm done with my little science experiment in Domming myself (it only took six hours, bwahahahahaha), i'd like to talk about the aftermath of Anime Expo.

But I'm busy this weekend, so I'm putting this up as a placeholder until Monday. Sorry about that.

"a big month"
Sunday - July 11, 2004
[Piro] - 14:55:00
Whew, what a week. I can't believe it's Sunday again. Looking ahead, I can see that the end of the month is coming up, and coming up fast. I need to get on the ball and update you folks on the two major things coming up at the end of this month. First there is San Diego Comic Con, and the second is the opening of the official new Megatokyo store, Megagear. I'll start with the Megagear stuff :)

It's weird, but I almost feel like i've been working on some kind of secret project. The blow by blow coverage of what it takes to get something like this up and rolling is interesting, but we've been too busy doing it to actually write about it :) Merchandise has already started to arrive here and I'm starting to get a feel for what the new line of Megatokyo stuff looks like. It's both exciting and nerve racking at the same time. Kinda like every comic i post - you have no idea if people are going to like them or not. In the end, my approach to designing t-shirts and stuff is the same as my approach to writing and doing comics - i make comics i'd like to read, and i make shirts that i'd like to wear and stuff i'd like to buy. I'm wearing one of the new shirts right now, actually. :)

Also, i have been getting a lot of emails about availability of things that were in the Think Geek store. Right now, if you head over to the ThinkGeek store you will find the remaining selection of what they have in stock, and if you'd like anything, please be sure to snap it up :) Not all items we were offering before we be available in the new store, but some will. For instance, we will have Ninj4 Hoodies, Megatokyo bookbags, the 3ViL L33t shirt and one or two other designs. Unfortunately, we will not have any more Miho or Kimiko blankets. We have other stuff in the works :)

It has taken quite a bit of willpower to not show you the new stuff. While it's true that a lots of my creative flotsam and jetsam never spills out onto the net, more often than not when i create something i think is worth showing people, it goes online (like this sketch of Saeko and Tomu I did the other day - I scanned and posted it on Fredart the next morning). In fact, on those rare occasions when i do finish a comic ahead of time, you have no idea how hard it is not to just post it. I'm spoiled, i guess. I tend to get instant feedback on stuff as soon as i finish it.

A lot of work went into the new stuff for the store. There are seven new t-shirt designs and six new ladies t-shirt designs, there is a new ball cap (it's so cute!) and knit cap (which is pretty cool). Sarah worked very hard to determine what would be the best kind of ladies shirt to use because we wanted girls shirts that didn't require you to have a Barbie doll figure to wear. I just finished a new mousepad design last night (it's the nice kind, not those horrid fabric things :P). I have to finalize the sticker designs. I have to figure out how to make this design for a coffee mug work. There's other stuff in the works too, stuff that will be coming in the weeks and months that follow the opening of the store. We will be offering a selection of art supplies, including sketchbooks (I have to keep resisting reaching into the box and grabbing them to use them :P). I'm having trouble locating a source for a particular .5 mm pencil i love to use that i'd like to offer in the store (i'll probably have to find a way to smuggle them in from japan :P). We're still working on the store website, i still have a lot of graphics to finish, i have only recently finished the overall design concept for the site. The list goes on.

It's all a little nerve racking because you really don't know if people are gonna like the new stuff, or if they will react well to the new website. I feel good about everything so far, and I guess we'll find out if you folks like them when the store opens on July 30th. That is, unless you are going to San Diego Comic Con.

Sarah and I are once again going to San Diego Comic Con, and we will be there for the entire show. We have a booth - booth number 2722 - and it's in a remarkably nice location right near the Dark Horse booth. We will be bringing a nice selection of the new merchandise to San Diego, so if you are coming to the show you'll be the first to not only see the new stuff, but to purchase it as well. The less we have to take home with us the better, too :)

San Diego Comic Con runs from Wednesday, July 21st (Wednesday night is Preview night), right thru Sunday, July 25th. Friday the 23rd will be a big day for Megatokyo at SDCC. The Megatokyo panel will be at 3:00 pm in room 8, and based on the fact that the room for our panel last year was *way* too small, the nice folks at SDCC have given us a much bigger room, so hopefully all of you can make it in this time. After this, I will be doing a book signing at the Dark Horse booth from 5:30pm to 7:00pm. It's kinda weird, having a signing scheduled right after Mike Mingola and Guillermo del Toro. ^^;;; While i will be spending as much time at the Megatokyo booth as possible, signing stuff and doing little scribbles for people, this will be my main scheduled signing, so feel free to show up and cause some havoc at the Dark Horse booth. Havoc is good. :P

Speaking of havoc, i was very surprised when i read this report over on ICv2 called "ICv2 Looks at Manga Channel Shift". Actually, the first time i read it, i didn't really look at the listing of the Manga top 50 for the 2nd quarter of 2004 as listed in the article. I knew that Megatokyo had been doing pretty well, but I didn't really expect it to be in that list - certainly not in the top 25 Manga titles. It took an email from someone to point out to me that not only was Megatokyo in that list, but it was number 10. Wow. Uhm, Wow. Give yourselves a hand, folks. That's some kind of support. Thank you, you have no idea how awesome that is.

One other little bit of havoc can be found in the July issue of Animerica. Y'now, years and years ago, when i first started really getting into anime, i started collecting Animerica magazine. This was back when i was collecting Ranma 1/2 VHS tapes - DUBS no less. ^^;; Now, here we are 9 years or so later, and this month's issue has a 3 page article on me and Megatokyo. ^^;;; I'm honored that Animerica felt that Megatokyo was worth giving a three-page feature. I'd also like to thank Dan for writing such a nice article. :) It's kinda weird seeing 'megatokyo' on the cover with Inu Yasha. Crazy stuff.

Anyways, this week is going to be a particularly long one. I have to do a comic each day this week in order to be ahead enough to keep the comic on schedule for our trip to San Diego. I'm taking a very serious approach to this, and i'm really keen on actually making this happen this week. It'll be interesting to see if planning ahead actually works. :P And on that note, i better get my butt to work. :P

"John Reid"
Monday - July 12, 2004
[Seraphim] - 19:30:00
The most interesting class I had last semester was on copyright issues including fair use and infringement. There have been some good cases this year. In February there was a decision on the Neil Gaiman/Todd McFarlane lawsuit over joint copyright ownership of several Spawn characters. The judge's decision in the case was some of the best legal writing I have ever read. It was what actually kicked off 'Seraphim Theater' dramatic readings. I read all 29 pages out loud to Piro while he was drawing (the comic was probably late that night). Any legal document or ruling that says things like, "McFarlane's original Spawn, Al Simmons, was a tall figure clad in what looks like spandex (it is actually "a neural parasite)" is brilliant writing in my book. The decision also reads, "But the Lone Ranger doesn't have a proper name either (at least not one known to most of his audience-actually he does have a proper name, John Reid)" - I did not know that. What a riot. The judge and his law clerk seemed to have a sense of humor and must be golden age comic fans. You can read the entire decision at Find Law under U.S. Court of Appeals Opinions and Websites 7th Circuit. Search for Gaiman or McFarlane.

My interest in copyright has to do with Piro, obviously, but also as a librarian. As a student you are bombarded with it in almost every class. Last semester an Intellectual Property Rights lawyer gave a lecture. She recommended some interesting sites. One was the Copyright Website. It has many notable copyright cases - some won, some lost. The movie The Devil's Advocate was embroiled in a lawsuit regarding the sculpture behind the desk in the devil's office. It was actually lifted from the facade of the National Cathedral in Washington. I'm sure they thought they were being really clever using a religious sculpture. Warner Brother was allowed to release 475,000 copies of the DVD that had been made but additional releases have all been re-edited. Which one do you have? Piro's disclaimer - you have natural copyright when you produce a work and can force people to stop infringing on your rights but registering the copyright with the Library of Congress allows you sue others for damages.

The website Illegal Art features examples of artists using corporate images, logos, and brands in their works. When you mess with corporate America the terms parody and fair use don't seem to apply. In the not too distant past the gents over at Penny Arcade got a cease and desist letter about a certain fruity entertainment character. No, not the robot with the orange. Would the company have sued Penny Arcade? Probably not. Would they have won if they had? I highly doubt it. Corporate America just wants to push people around and stifle creativity and thought. Suing the smaller guys was just made a little less attractive by the ruling in a case between Mattel and an artist who used Barbie dolls. Admittedly the dolls were not portrayed very flattering but the was his entire point. The photo I saw had Barbie dolls as the stuffing in an enchilada wrapped in tortillas and sauce laid out in a baking dish inside an oven. Mattel lost not only their case and their appeal - they were ordered to pay the plaintiff's $1.8 million in legal fees. Mattel is like 0-2. They also lost a case against MCA Records for the Aqua song "Barbie Girl". That makes me smile.

I just picked up a Fantagraphics book "The Pirates and the Mouse which is about Disney taking on underground comic artists in the 60's. The case is referenced many times in the Gaiman ruling so it must have become case law. I'm just positive that Disney's new movie, which is nothing more than a glorified National Geographic made for T.V. documentary, is a brown nosing attempt to get copyright protection into perpetuity for their herd of corporate characters. They managed to strong arm (or buy) another 20 year extension so what's another eon or two?

"Vardoman"
Friday - July 16, 2004
[Dom] - 21:15:00
My grandmother is a fish.

"An explanation"
Sunday - July 18, 2004
[Dom] - 23:11:11
I'm writing this rant from San Francisco--I spent today hanging out with my best friend, following him around as he did some Food Not Bombs stuff. It's a sign of our friendship that we haven't talked to each other for two months, but we still pick up like nothing's happened, and we can talk to each other about anything. And with him running off on a boat for a year starting in August, we'll probably pick up right back where we left off when he gets back.

So, Fred asked me to explain what my Friday rant meant--I told him what it was in advance, but I realize that not everyone who reads MegaTokyo has read and written academic treatises on Faulkner. I have. They're boring. It's okay.

See, I was paraphrasing (Paraphrasing is English major speak for "ripping off") a chapter from As I Lay Dying, a chapter where the young Vardaman attempts to comprehend death. I could probably write a few thousand more words on this--and I already have, they're sitting on my hard drive. But the point is, Vardaman has a hard time with it.

Why did I post that? Because at the time posted on the rant, my grandmother died.

Don't worry. It's going to be okay... probably. I'm just very, very busy and tired. And unfortunately, it means that my stay at San Diego Comic Con will be cut short, with Grandma's funeral taking place Saturday morning back in Redwood City.

I apologize in advance for missing time on the show floor. Like Fred, I enjoy meeting MegaTokyo fans a great deal, despite my supposed hatred of them... I guess it's like Clerks, I hate people but love gatherings.

Anyway, I probably won't be ranting for a while after this, and my mailbox is probably bursting to the gills with spam. But I'm looking forward to getting right back in the saddle and back into the business of annoying Fred and making the fans angry at me.

Take care of yourselves, I'll try my best to take care of me in the meantime.

"panic time"
Monday - July 19, 2004
[Piro] - 14:23:00
IMPORTANT!! - it appears that the time for the Megatokyo panel at San Diego Comic Con has changed. According to the schedule on the Comic Con website, it appears that our panel has been moved to 1:30 - 2:30 (the room is still the same - room 8). I have not received any notice of this change (which is irritating, since i've been telling everyone its 3:00pm) but I would assume that the time has indeed changed. I'll try to verify this tomorrow. Special thanks to Nishiko, who (unlike me) actually looked at the schedule :)

---

Ok, just a few quick things as i run around in a panic (the realization that we are leaving for San Diego in less than two days has finally sunk in).

I was surprised and downright shocked to find that The New York Times had a review of Megatokyo in the Sunday edition (click on 'No More Wascally Wabbits"). You can read it here (unfortunately it does require free registration and stuff). They actually said nice things too.

As i pointed out above, we'll be leaving for San Diego Comic Con in less than two days. If you are going, please stop by and see us. We have brought along some of just about all the new designs we'll be making available in the Megagear store at the end of the month. Yes, you can buy them. In fact, please do. Hopefully we brought enough. We have new shirts, new ladies shirts, new hats, MT book bags, buttons, posters... stuff like that. The booth is 2722, and is right next to the Dark Horse booth, so you should be able to find it.

No question that we have a very nice booth placement this year. However, i'm quite jealous of Greg of Real Life Comics, with whom we shared a booth last year - he seems to have managed a free trip to Bolivia! well, not quite, but sheesh, he's all the way down at the end of the earth. :P Be sure to drop by and say Hi to Greg and Liz and tell em we miss em. :P

Other MT related stuff of note, the Megatokyo panel is on Friday at 3:00pm in Room 8. We should have plenty of room this time (I hope). After the panel, at 5:30pm we will have the official Megatokyo signing at the Dark Horse booth. Please feel free to come by and help spook out all the DH folks :) Aside from that, Seraphim and I will try to be at the booth as much as possible over the course of the show, so please stop by and say hi.

Now, as for comic schedule, I'm definitely not any where near as ahead as i wanted to be today. I really don't want to leave you guys hanging on the story over the next week, so i'll do my best. I'll have Wednesday's comic done with no problem, Fridays i'm planning a bit of a filler comic (Piro and Seraphim) and then monday... well, Monday's comic might be a little late. After that, we'll get back on schedule.

"ambiguity"
Wednesday - July 21, 2004
[Seraphim] - 02:18:00
When I first came across images for the anime Kino's Journey I thought what a great show. Here's a show with girl cruising around on her bike solo. Finally, a female character who won't be apologizing, crying, or blushing in every scene. I really like Fruits Basket but c'mon Tohru what would your girl gang mom think?

I was waiting for Kino's Journey to come out on DVD when someone who was downloading it raw told me that Kino was a boy. Hmmm, I would have sworn it was girl. Just look at the characters stance. It's very girl like. And the hair is longish, but then again so is Piro's. People are always confused whether Piro is a male or female character. I searched a little further and found a lot of very gender neutral references to the characters. You have got to put some work into being that non-gender specific. Pronouns are a natural part of speech! The author's notes mention 'young man' but the voice for the show is provided by an actress. I found individuals who thought the "traveling young person" was male and others who thought female. Maybe the creators intended that or the American distributors are leaving it ambiguous to appeal to a wider audience.

I got the DVD this week on our first visit in months to Wizzywig. I swear on the cover to #1 that the character has, uh, girl features. Risky in Risky Safety was also referred to as 'he' in the DVD but was unmistakably female. Sexual ambiguity seems to be really common in anime.

I just think there is a certain charm and even novelty to a girl character who is a real adventurer - not just clinging to a guy while riding on the back of the bike.

"an unsteady hand"
Sunday - June 27, 2004
[Piro] - 01:22:00
I did some freesketching while on the plane back to Michigan, and i've posted two of them over at fredart. The first one i did during take off and during some turbulance, so it's quite sketchy (and in the dumpbox) the other came out... kinda interesting. Not the best drawing I ever did, but it's not too bad.

More tomorrow, right now, I gotta crash.

"learning to fly"
Sunday - August 1, 2004
[Piro] - 17:59:00
Well, by all accounts the new MegaGear store should be up and running. Unfortunately, when we launched the store Saturday afternoon, we discovered that the two servers running the store (Mai and Sayruri) didn't have anywhere near the capacity needed to handle the load.

E-commerce sites do take at lot of horsepower to run, and given our setup (one chosen to provide the best level of secure shopping i could afford and pull together) the problem is just a question of horsepower. We underestimated what we would need, by a lot it seems, and as a result I'm in a panic trying to pull together a plan to acquire the additional servers needed to handle the load. I am looking into getting the additional servers we'll need ASAP as well as working with keith and others to find the best way to optimize things so that we can handle the traffic. Luckily, i think this can be fixed, it's just gonna be a little painful on the plastic. ^^;;

I apologize for the problem. We should have done a better job of assessing what we'd need. When you consider the fact that the servers collapsed and i never even announced that things were open - it was only reported in the forums - Mai and Sayuri need help. We have been working very hard on the store, and no one is more disappointed than we are that it's not up.

In fact, after exhaustive talks with a lot of people, and trying desperately to figure out what we should do, we reached a point where it was clear that nothing could be done until monday. It's kinda hard to describe how i felt. Depressed, angry, frustrated, tired, sad, an odd mix of all those things that really left me feeling oddly blank. Sarah and i went home and dusted off and unwrapped a few of the DVDs that have been sitting on the coffee table. By four AM we had sat through most of Kino's Journey... for some reason, it made me feel better about things, i don't know why. There is a bizarre, surrealistic feel to this series. This is not a beautiful world indeed. But maybe that's part of what gives it a kind of beauty. It was just the kind of somber, oddly twisted and tweaked story you will find on the disks.

Today it's sunday, and i feel drained, and tired, and after spending most of the morning talking with many people (including several people who have experience with the system are using and are really helping us figure things out :) i need to turn over and start working on Monday's comic.

If you tried to visit the store yesterday - thank you for your patience, and we apologize for the problems. We will do everything we can to get things online and working properly as soon as possible.

we'll get this thing off the ground eventually. We just need a bit more road. :P

"Crawling up"
Monday - August 2, 2004
[Dom] - 15:30:00
So! A lot has happened since I last ranted. Not the least of which was San Diego Comic Con, cut short by my duty as a pallbearer at my grandmother's funeral.

But! Between freelance work for Wired Magazine and a whole lot of hanging out, I feel almost human again. I'm taking a break from taking care of my mother (who had toe surgery on Friday and is immobile) to let you guys know that I'm still around.

And! I'm starting every paragraph with an exclamation. Not even an exclamatory phrase, just an exclamation.

BASEBALL! Yes, while my Giants are currently floundering (Ricky Ledee? Who trades for RICKY LEDEE?), I'm personally in a hyper-baseball kind of mood. Why? Well, I've been thinking of re-reading Adachi Mitsuru's Touch lately, especially after seeing a strange, strange OAV called Azusa, o-tetsudai shimasu!. It's about a maid robot playing baseball, and surprisingly enough, it's not that bad. It's not earth-shaking, but it's sweet and has the least fan service I've ever seen in any show involving a maid. Although anything involving slow-motion baseball and high school kids dreaming of Koushien is fan service to me, that's not really the same. But there you have it. Maid robots playing baseball. Making me want to read about baseball, while baseball is going on. I'm such a fanboy.

Yes! You must all also watch Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. Despite it being a stoner movie (or perhaps because it's a stoner movie), it's great! And I'm not just saying that because John Cho and Kal Penn do absolutely no martial arts during the movie, and are not villains. Ebert and Roeper gave it a thumbs up. Princess and I sang along in the theater. Hodge-Podge tried to will himself to die during the East Asian student meeting because it was US! See this, dammit. It's better than Catwoman, and deserves better than Catwoman gets. So go see it! Not just because I said so, but because it's 72% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, which is a full 28% more fresh than The Village.

Oh yeah! I've also started playing the Spycraft CCG, with many thanks to Hamusutaa and his obsessive urge to buy a box of any given card game that comes out. It's a lot of fun, especially with good bluffers--you know, people who aren't like Hodge-Podge, a man who likes to declare "Dammit, why can't I draw agents!" before clearing his throat and trying to bluff that his card's an agent.

Anyway! I'm done for now, but I'll be back soon to talk about San Diego Comic Con and my usual collection of miscellany. It's gonna be good to be back!

"Wired, but not Tired or Expired"
Wednesday - August 4, 2004
[Dom] - 03:30:00
Okay, so I quit drinking caffeine around Lent--I was having trouble staying awake at the Wired offices, and my energy level was a roller coaster. So, after the initial withdrawal period (no headaches for me, woot...) I found that my energy level was much more consistent throughout the day, and caffeine remained an option, though unused... sugar (a trick Hodge-Podge taught me) was usually enough to keep me up when a deadline loomed.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, Tuesday night, Hodge-Podge and I went to join Hamusutaa for a rousing night of card games and... more card games. Which meant that dinner, when it finally rolled around, was a voracious affair that took place at a Carl's Jr. at midnight. I was thirsty, so I figured it'd be okay to take a few sips from Hodge-Podge's Diet Coke before heading home and drinking something real.

Big mistake. Here I am at 3:30 AM, and I'm not tired at all. Heck, I think I'm vibrating, even. I've played all the Magic online that I can stand for a night, I've beaten Memories Off 2nd (the source of today's screenshot... an interesting story that I'll tell later in this rant), and I've read all the baseball results twice. So all that's left is writing a rant, which I should do to make up for lost time anyway.

So, on to subjects I promised I'd talk about in previous rants, but didn't get to due to family obligations.

The first is Anime Expo. All in all, Anime Expo went okay--the first two days were great, with Karaoke Without Honor or Humanity taking third place in a hotly contested sing-off. We didn't win nearly as much swag as Kevin did for his amazing run in the anime music video contest, but hey--we had a lot of fun, and I got to sing without having to wait in line.

One great story to come out of Anime Expo was the Dokkoida cosplayer that Seiya and I saw manning the Genom booth. We watched Dokkoida avidly when it was on the air (and we watched episode 8 at least 10 times each, because it's funny as hell) and fully plan on buying the DVDs when it comes out. So we stopped by the poor, lonely Dokkoida costumer, who didn't have people gathered around him(?) for two very important reasons: one, he wasn't giving out any swag like the other booth bunnies, and two, he was a he and not a scantily clad she. But we had to give him props for wearing a costume that looks like someone poured blue PVC on a baby and put a diaper over it, so we went over to the guy and told him he rocked. Heck, we even tried to shake his hand. Things got really weird after he shook Seiya's hand.

He made a "wait a sec" gesture with one hand, then reached into the diaper and pulled out a Dokkoida antenna topper. As Seiya and I stood slackjawed, he handed us each one, and THEN shook my hand (with the same hand that reached into the diaper, I might add). Our business done, we walked off bemusedly staring at the spoils of Dokkoida's diaper. And for the rest of the week, just the sight of the smiling Dokkoida head was enough to make us collapse in helpless laughter.

Maybe you just had to be there, watching a cosplaying booth monkey reach into his diaper for the goods.

Then again, maybe you shouldn't've been there, it was Speshul with a capital SH.

The problems with Anime Expo mostly involved the Masquerade, which seemed horribly run... but that's a story for another time. I know too many cosplayers and masquerade staffers, and they know the story better than I do.

And, as a sort of kicker to the whole experience, I ended up buying MuvLuv because a friend of mine thought the character designs were cute. Or maybe that was why I promised I'd play Tea Society of a Witch, I'm not sure. Either way you cut it, I ended up buying one H game and committing to playing another. I place full blame on my friends, who don't know Japanese well enough to play visual novels. I don't know it well enough to slog through real novels, but most H games aren't advanced enough to require much thought anyway. I mean, it's the old joke--how much do you have to translate moaning? (Me, I usually hold down the skip button and turn my head... but that's the Catholic guilt in me talking)

So I guess I'm the closest thing they have to a translator, or something. Anyway, I would like to assert this: I am NOT the porn master. Left to my own devices, I'd play visual novels to improve my vocabulary. Case in point, the aforementioned game Memories Off 2nd, which, instead of making me vaguely embarrassed, has forced me to read Chinese folklore to understand the whole story--or at least, the Japanese versions of Chinese folklore, which muddies the water a great deal.

I mean, you believe me, don't you? I'm just a clean, innocent boy deep down, slapped with the title of Porn Master by people who see me play one H game and assume that I like them. Just because MuvLuv made me laugh my ass off.

Sheesh. No respect, I tell you--you play ONE H game that has an awesome mech combat system (and, it must be noted, is coming out in a all-age form for the Dreamcast) and everyone thinks you like them. I mean, just because I search for a strategy (H) game across over a dozen game stores and three cities doesn't mean I like them, alright?

Okay, okay, I admit it, I like some H games (not all) because they're an excuse to indulge in old-school gaming. Baldr Force was a top-down mech combat beat-'em-up in pure form, Daibanchou was a world-conquering simulation, and Giga's upcoming Duel Savior is a side scrolling combofest that Hodge-Podge and I can't help but drool over.

But that doesn't mean I like H games, dammit, or that I'll play H games for you! I'm an innocent little boy!

You believe me, right?

"quietly open..."
Wednesday - August 4, 2004
[Piro] - 15:08:00
Well, we think we have adjusted things so we can let people into the store without the walls exploding on it ^^;; The MegaGear store is now open, so please feel free to browse, look around, and buy stuff if you find something you like. The store has actually been quietly open for the past few days, just to make sure Mai and Sayuri could take the load. We're worried about spikes of people visiting it, but there's only one way to really find out, and that's to open the doors. :P

Anyways, head on over, see what we've been up to. I hope you like the stuff, and as always, no pressure to buy anything, nothing in the store is limited in any way, and we are really just getting started - this is the starting lineup, and we'll be adding new stuff and fine tuning the store over the next few months as we move along.

It's been a crazy busy couple of months, but it feels good to finally open. As always, thank you for your support, and have fun browsing.

"shredded"
Friday - August 6, 2004
[Seraphim] - 02:25:00
Piro and I returned from San Diego Comic Con to an absolutely stuffed mailbox. It is partly our fault because we forgot to leave the key for the kitty sitter, but that aside, we are totally inundated with credit card applications, offers and mailings. With two individuals and two businesses we get 20 applications per week between us. That's not to mention the credit companies we do business with sending blank checks in the mail. I just love the apps and checks floating around in the mail system. We don't use credit and haven't for years and they just can't wait to get their greedy hooks into us at their mafia interest rates. I haven't used their card in years and they think I'm going to be enticed by their 0% interest for 3 days and then the rate being jacked to double digits greater than my age. Silly sillies.

I bought a commercial shredder to deal with all of it. I really want a shredder that will handles the entire envelope without even opening it and multiple at one time. I want something that will chew it up and spit it out. I need a wood chipper. Maybe I will put my credit to use. It seems like poetic justice.

We do use a piece of plastic that you have to pay off every month to pay for groceries and gas to earn reward points. We have been doing this for eight years and we still can't afford anything! I was looking around the point redemption site and saw under the 'other travel' rewards that for 1 million points you can take a Zero Gravity Parabolic Flight or for a mere 3 million points you can an MIG-25 Edge of Space Flight and for a whopping 20 million reward points you can take a suborbital space flight. That's really great - space travel just almost within the reach of the average consumer with a credit card. We'll isn't that how NASA is essentially funded?

I'm also not extremely fond of people who still write checks in stores. It is SO old technology. Have these folks heard of debit cards? I do still write checks to pay bills because I don't think the utility company that was involved in the great black out of the East should really have automatic billing access to my bank account. I write checks in the privacy of my own home. And if you are wedded to the idea of getting the float from the delay in depositing checks, be careful because some nasty companies are skipping the whole bank business and manually debiting your bank account electronically upon receipt. This just recently happened to us. I really enjoy how the transaction wasn't marked with anything to identify it - like corresponding check number or who initiated the transaction. It was just a big ole anonymous withdrawal.

I think Piro and I will just start bartering on the black market for goods. We'll use manga, comics, computer parts, and anime fansubs to conduct trades. We know a lot a people who would trade the necessities of life for these goods.

"coloring quickly"
Thursday - August 12, 2004
[Piro] - 12:48:00
Whew.

Well, the past month sure has been, uh, interesting. Seraphim and I have seen so little of our apartment that we think the cats are forgetting who we are and have started to develop the behavioral patterns of abandoned kitties. The level of rampant devastation is such that we are going to have to mount a reconstruction campaign this weekend. At least now we might actually have time to do it, as things have finally settled down a little and the biggest crunch of the year is (hopefully) behind us.

As most of you are aware, the new MegaGear store is up and running and we would like to thank everyone who has shopped with us. :) Aside from problems with the website software (which i will touch on in another rant) everything has been going fine. Lotsa store stuff to talk about, but i'm trying to keep this particular rant short -- i gotta get to work on friday's comic. :) Oh, yeah, must do a little shameless pimping: Please go buy stuff or kimiko will cry. You don't want that on your conscience, do you?

Aside from the store, there were three other things that had been looming over me. There was San Diego Comic Con, which went really well (I haven't yet had a chance to rant about that either. Sheesh, i need to rant more), then Tim from Dark Horse gave me the wonderful news last month that I needed to have the cover artwork for book 3 done by August 8th... a week after the store was scheduled to open. Gee, thanks Tim :P Actually, not Tim's fault, It HAD to be done by the 8th, or they would not be able to release the book in January. So... after recovering from SDCC, rolling into the logistics and brute panic of getting the store off the ground and running smoothly, i had to turn around and produce the cover art for book 3 in less than two days.

It actually didn't come out too bad :) I've posted the artwork over on Fredart, and a mockup of the cover you can look at here. There are some problems with it, but it will do. There had been some speculation as to who would be on the cover of book 3, well, now you know :P

I had planned out the cover sequence for MT books last year, and so far, i think the set is starting to look nice. Book 3 should be pretty cool - it contains some of my best work so far on MT (IMHO) and i'd really like to do something special for the omake this time... we'll see what i can come up with.

The last project I have had to deal with, and the one that is currently slated to take up a chunk of my time this month is a poster for the American Library Association. The ALA has asked me to do a poster for its series of posters and bookmarks for libraries. You know those READ posters you see in the library? Yeah, stuff like that :) They seemed to really like the concept sarah and I pulled together on monday, so hopefully i will be able to finish it by the deadline at the end of the month. All proceeds from sales of this poster will go to support programs and initiatives of the American Library Association, including literacy programs, etc. Sarah and I feel honored to have been asked to do this, so i hope i can do a decent poster for them.

Need to get cracking on the next comic. I wasn't really happy with the art for the last comic, so i'm gonna try to focus more - still a lot to do in this chapter.

"Brain go splat"
Sunday - August 15, 2004
[Dom] - 14:00:00
I hate writer's block. I really do. I've wanted to rant about the San Diego Comic Con experience, and I have a rant half-written about that... which I can't seem to finish. I'm trying out for the part of Slashdot Games editor, and I should be writing for that--but again, it's half-sinished and I'm poring over the last few words trying to figure out how it should end. Heck, I can barely finish an e-mail right now, it's so bad. I don't know where this came from. My weekend was spent in San Francisco for my sister's birthday and my cousin's upcoming engagement party, and while up there I read enough books to choke a camel, so it's not like I didn't think about writing enough over the past few days.

Maybe it's nerves. I've been drifting through the past month and a half in a sort of bemused daze, and now that a serious employment opportunity has reared its head, I'm trying to do too much.

Maybe it's the blues. I've been drifting even more aimlessly than usual since Grandma died, and some things seem peculiarly less important to me after that.

Or maybe it's just my brain deciding to fart at a very inopportune time. I lean toward this explanation more than any other one.

So, in the interests of making my brain fart less prolonged, I'm going to try and write down a few thoughts here, and see if they come out coherently. First subject, the Olympics.

I've been following these Olympic Games like a rubbernecker seeing a particularly gruesome car wreck. The reports out of Athens for the months preceding the games were full of doom and signs of horrific failures, from labor problems to construction delays and power failures. But things seem to have worked out somehow, and now I get to watch the Iraqi soccer team kick a surprisingly large amount of ass. Seriously, who knew that such a gross underdog would be able to pull this kind of thing off? "That's why they play the games", as the sports saying goes...

NBC's coverage of the Olympics is also, to my great relief, less stupid than it has been in years past. I actually get to see events that don't involve Americans, and I've heard fewer stupid comments than I have in years. Absolutely fascinating.

Anyway, I'm off to try and recover some sense that I'm still capable of making words do things. Failing that, I'm going to play more of the Duel Savior demo and take my frustrations out by beating up skeletons and golems. Or maybe I'll fire up Streets of Rage 2 for some old-school action. I dunno, I'm just gonna do SOMEthing other than sit and stare at a blank document in Word.

See you guys later.

"green grass"
Wednesday - August 18, 2004
[Seraphim] - 00:18:00
I remember August in my childhood being hot. It was the dog days of summer and in Michigan it was hot and humid and nights were spent flipping the pillow to find the 'cool' side. There was running through the sprinklers, going to the pool everyday, drinking ice cold lemonade and getting a brain freeze, being too hot to run after the ice cream truck, or just sitting around waiting for a storm to cool things off.

I walked outside last night and it was cold enough to see my breath. That is the universal kid sign for WINTER. Over at Weather Underground it says Ann Arbor, MI is 49 degrees. Something is wrong. This 'summer' (if you can even call it that) has been overly wet and unseasonably cold. My flowers are leggy from no sun and the blooms are stunted and rot before they open. They look like Audrey II from the "Little Shop of Horrors".

Weather Underground lets you look up the history either monthly or weekly and compare across years. In July 2002 there were 15 days that were 90 degrees or above - this year we had one whole day above 90 degrees and Piro and I weren't even in the state. I live for summer and warmth. May only had 7 days without rain. That was also the month that lightening hit nearby and blew the phone off the receiver. I haven't even recovered from last winter's seasonal affective disorder. The weather is very strange for southern Michigan this time of year.

And get this, just get this - - - the grass is actually GREEN. No - that is seriously wrong. In August in Michigan the lawns are supposed to be brown and parched and should have been scorched since July. Listen you Oregonians and Washingtonites - take your lousy Pacific Northwest weather back!

And good luck to all in Florida and anyone with family down there!!! I see the victims on the news and the majority of them could be my grandparents down there. If you can spare a few bucks check out the American Red Cross donation page. Charities rely on the many making small donations and not a few making giant endowments. Thanks!

"computer 'smithing"
Saturday - August 21, 2004
[Piro] - 00:12:00
Last week I did something that i've been wanting to do for a while -- I stripped win2k off of my old Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, wiped the hard drive and repartitioned it (after archiving a lot of junk i'll probably never need unless i actually delete it) and did a fresh install of winXP.

You might remember when i got this Dell about two and a half years ago. It's a potent, refurbished little beast that is more of a mobile desktop than a laptop (the bloody thing weighs 7.5 lbs). It came with Windows ME, which i didn't even boot up before i repartitioned and installed win2k over the top of it. This old Dell has been through a lot. It was the laptop that failed miserably in our attempt to show flash content at the first Naze Nani Megatokyo event at Otakon in 2002. I used it to process files for the first book. I did well over a year's worth of comics on it. Up till now, I haven't done a clean install of the operating system. As a result, there was the usual muck and clutter that slows down windows machines and makes them cry for the mercy of a fresh OS install.

Ever since I switched to the mac side of things, i have to say i've been enjoying not having to deal with the peculiarities of the windows operating systems. That isn't to say that macs don't have thier own peculiarities - they just seem to involve a lot less theatrics and drama than I was used to. I'm responsible for enough of my own drama that i don't need any from my computing platform. That said, there are things i i've missed not having windows as my main OS. All computing platforms have their own flavors, their own pluses and minuses, so i don't subscribe to the idea that one might be better than another. Even so, I did approach this rebuild with some apprehension.

Not because I haven't done windows installs before, it's just that with them you really sorta need to be current on things in the windows world to do things right. You know, all the tricks, settings, drivers, bits of twine, witches root and blood for sacrificial offerings to ensure a good build. Not really hard to do when you are using the platform, but you gotta do some research when you've been worshiping other gods for over a year :) I used to do regular rebuilds on an office full of Windows 3.1 machines running AutoCad, so i know how important this can be. The bad memories run deep.

The pleasant thing about XP, even over win2k, is how much easier it is to install. Good lord, its like night and day compared to the horror of a 3.1 install. Once you get past the... er, rather ugly (IMHO) colors of the basic XP theme, the interface shows a lot of small improvements. Once everything installed and even had the SP2 upgrades in place, it was like a different machine.

Given the fact that I have my mac G4 (Reki) at the Factory and my little 12" powermac (Hikari) for when I'm home, you might question exactly why i went to the trouble to rebuild the Dell (named Rakka -- see a pattern here? :P). Well, MT may not be a hardcore gaming comic like it sorta started out as, but that doesn't mean I don't miss playing games. I'm pretty much done traveling for the year (with the exception of Anime Weekend Atlanta next month, which Seraphim and I are going to), the store is up and running, the big crunch time of the past six months has started to level out... dammnit to hell, i deserve some friggin game time. :P

If you wanna hear from someone who is far more current and more on the cutting edge of games in play these days, you'll wanna read what Dom has to say about things. I'm a bit more behind the times. Not because i don't know what everyone is playing, it's just that I'm a little more quirky about the games i like to play. I rebuilt Rakka because i wanted to get back to playing Ragnarok Online.

Now, for everyone who has already started to write an email to me groaning about how RO is boring, or how much RO sucks, or how much Gravity sucks, or how i should be playing FFXI instead, save it. I like RO. I like RO because it's cute, it's quirky, its fun (for me) it meanders, and i like the feel of it. I don't play a game because others like it, i play it because i like it. Remember that old rant i wrote about "Generally Accepted Opinions"? Yeah, same thing.

The sad things about my little RO obsession is that i've wanted to get into the game for ages, but never really had the time. I tried during various beta phases. I tried when you had to pay to play during the beta phases. I wanted to play when all my friends were playing. Now, the game is out of beta and a fully released. the RO website doesn't suck anymore. All my friends have stopped playing. RO is "old news". I actually don't mind.

"I'll help you level up!" was what friends always used to tell me, but there was always a part of me that rebelled against that idea, at least initially. I wanted to do my time as a true noob and figure things out the hard way. Having someone walk me through everything just seemed... like it'd take the fun out of it. Part of that comes from a very single player mindset i suffer from. Kind of odd that'd i'd take so much interest in an online roll playing game :P

Anyways, i won't bore you with more details about learning the ropes while trying to level up out of being a novice. And even more odd is the fact that the extreme lateness of fridays comic had nothing to do with RO - i wish it did, that'd be a better excuse than the reason you're tired of hearing - struggled with the art, beat my head on the desk till the dialogue at least started to work. :)

"pera pera pera"
Monday - August 23, 2004
[Dom] - 00:00:00
So my sister's boyfriend (a boy I'm fond of calling my de facto brother in law) is hosting a Japanese exchange student named Kayoko. I know this because he came up to my at my sister's birthday barbecue last week, took me aside and said:

"Dude, I need you to take her off my hands for a little! You can speak Japanese, talk to her or something."

After blinking and doing my best impression of Desi Arnaz ("Dude, you got some splainin' to do!"), he said that Kayoko had only recently arrived, and she was being a bit clingy--understandably, given that she's in a strange country and doesn't know many people other than my sister and her boyfriend. After his explanation of Kayoko's understandable reticence, knowing that I was the only person at the party who could speak competent (note that I don't call it fluent) Japanese, I did the only reasonable thing.

I ran, like a certain foreign language teacher in Azumanga Daiou. Then I realized how stupid that reaction was, and just sort of sat trying to think of what to say to Kayoko in a way that wouldn't mark me as a punk or an idiot, and a reason I should try to talk to her in Japanese instead of English.

A random note if you're wondering: most characters who speak in Japanese in MegaTokyo talk as if they were young women, given that most of them ARE young women. Piro also talks like a young woman, because we decided it would make him sound even more like a loser. It's very strange looking at Ken's translations into Japanese in this light, since my instinct is to cut everything down until they sound like they're men. Especially since Piro's speech makes me instantly think of a multitude of transvestite characters I've come across who speak similarly. It's warping to think that Piro talks even vaguely similarly to One Piece's Mister Two or Sakura Taisen's Baragumi.

Aaaaanyway. I sat thinking about what I could possibly talk about, when my de facto brother in law let slip that he was taking Kayoko to a baseball game the next time the Seattle Mariners visited the Oakland Athletics--so she could see Ichiro, of course. Bing! I had a topic to talk to her about. We ended up discussing American and Japanese baseball, her love for her doomed Hiroshima Toyo Carp, and Adachi manga (an essential part of your balanced sports manga breakfast). It's fascinating how quickly my conversations can turn to baseball, but this was a little extreme. At least we ended up talking about other things, which I honestly can't remember because they didn't involve baseball.

We had our conversations half in my limited Japanese and half in her limited English, and it turned out alright in the end, when my sister pulled Kayoko away and introduced her to vodka watermelon. As for me, I fled the scene due to my sister's habit of making "Get my little brother drunk" one of her birthday wishes.

A few days later, my sister asked me to keep a running translation of Kayoko's blog (which I won't link due to Kayoko posting pictures, and her hosting would die horribly if I linked) and I fascinatedly read her observations about our particular segment of American society. My sister has spent a long time trying to disabuse her of the notion that any one group can represent America, but her stories about us are still pretty interesting reads.

Now to wait until the Olympics are over so I can divert her attention to baseball again...

Speaking of the Olympics, I really like this ESPN article about the surprising Iraqi soccer team, and their distaste for being used by American politics.

Talk to you guys later.

"impressive"
Wednesday - August 25, 2004
[Seraphim] - 03:46:00
We haven't had much time to watch the Olympics, which makes the doping scandal in the only event that I was actually able watch start to finish even more disappointing. We watched the Shot Put last week, which took place in Ancient Olympia. These female athletes were the first to ever compete on the site. This week the gold medal was stripped from the women's gold medalist. This woman had been banned from previous competitions and previously striped of a medal in world championships for doping.

Why don't they test the athletes BEFORE the competition instead of afterwards? They test the medal winners after the competition and medal ceremonies. How sad for the Cuban athlete who was robbed her gold medal flag ceremony. Why give athletes who use performance enhancing drugs the opportunity to compete at all? Considering this athlete's use of banned substances in the past, how could they give her the benefit of the doubt? She would have been the first person I tested. Another athlete that was kicked out of the games for doping tried to tell officials she'd taken cough medicine. Yeah, right. Like everyone who tests positive for heroin has just eaten a poppy seed bagel.

Do these athletes think they can fake the drug test? Are they hoping it just won't show up? Does it speak to the fact that so many others are getting away with doping with the new and undetectable designer steroids? One official said the steroid the shot putter used was 'stone age' compared to the new ones like those that triggered the doping scandal in the States. Why aren't the laboratories and chemist working on something beneficial. These modern day alchemists are taking gold and making it base.

What's really impressive is the Paralympic Games. I also know a special young man with Downs Syndrome so I am also a supporter of the Special Olympics. I have a physical therapy education and the accomplishments of these athletes really impress me. I may just stick with these two organizations from now on.

"Sex, Games, and... More Sex"
Friday - August 27, 2004
[Dom] - 01:00:00
Edit: I've just been informed that BloodRayne isn't the only video game girl taking it off for PlayBoy--CNN Money Magazine has a more comprehensive list. So I'll be editing a few things on the fly here--my information was based solely on the BoingBoing and BloodRayne2.com postings.

It's been three or four days since the announcement, and I'm still not quite sure what I'm supposed to think regarding BloodRayne's upcoming appearance in the October issue of PlayBoy, a first in the history of video games. I'm certainly going to try to make a point, or at least explore what I think about the whole thing.

This rant may be a bit reachy, and I'm not even sure where it'll go--so I'll start by establishing a few simple statements that form the foundation of my argument, if it is indeed an argument.

Statement the first: Sex sells.
- This one's easy enough. Sex is called the second oldest female profession, et cetera, et cetera. Nothing groundshaking, but let's keep going.

Statement the second: Vampires, at their root, represent repressed eroticism.
- This one also has a body of literatury theory devoted to it--just read Bram Stoker and Anne Ri... okay, just read Bram Stoker and you'll not only get the point, but have read a good book to boot.

Statement the third: PlayBoy is, at least to the American eye, a symbol of unabashed sex selling (amd selling well) in a Puritanical mainstream, not just in seedy hardcore stores.
- This one's a bit stickier, but hey, Hugh has been working for longer than I've been alive to get that status for his brainchild. And I've seen many an interview with women who've appeared topless in PlayBoy who don't think there's anything strange or wrong about posing topless for the magazine's pages. You may disagree with me here, but work with me... there's only one foundation left to lay before trying to link these all together.

Statement the fourth: Video games, once deemed the realm of the very young, are growing up with their audience.
- Again, not very hard to prove... Brian Fargo said in an interview with GamesDomain that "the average RPG player is about 30", while The Sims has also edged the age of the "average gamer" far above the 20 mark.

So what's my point? Well, games like Tomb Raider and Dead or Alive have always sold on the sex appeal of their digital femmes--gameplay is a secondary concern at best, especially in the case of Tomb Raider. But the mainstream game industry has always shied just short of the dreaded AO rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Sure, everyone knows that the games in question are selling based on sex, but God forbid that there be actual SEX in these games beyond a standard fade to black. M has always been the limit--games that merit an AO rating either ignore the ESRB and sell to straight to specialty stores, or are made by Peach Princess. I'm sure there are gaps in my knowledge of who else submits their erotic/pornographic games to the ESRB, but I don't go to said specialty stores, so I wouldn't know.

But there was a definite line, and crossing that line was tantamount to market death--the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue (slogan: Not Quite PlayBoy, but Good Enough!) crowd's parents would immediately clamp down when that M morphed into an AO. And now here comes BloodRayne, and it's not just her fangs that are bared. People in the industry know that the generation of adolescent gamers, who once desperately wanted to believe in the infamous Tomb Raider nude code hoax, is long past the drooling pubescent period. They're old enough that they won't go screaming into the hills at the first sight of flesh--at least, that's the hope. And in the deal, PlayBoy and Majesco the companies involved get to claim that they've broken exciting new ground, then lean back with smug smiles as marketing bobbleheads start talking about whether THEIR game should be the next to try out this whole "bare your digital boobies for publicity" thing.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here babbling on and wondering "Is this a sign of things to come, or is it a minor event that doesn't bear too much further thought?"

Honestly? I don't know. I wish I did, because from where I stand, there are way too many things that can happen, and I can't account for all of them. But if this PlayBoy spread creates enough buzz for BloodRayne 2 and the other games that the game industry has to sit up and take notice, where will that leave the game industry? If it's proven that you can financially safely ignore the under-18 crowd and gain more from the AO rating than you lose, conventional wisdom will be turned on its head. We can safely assume that Nintendo will continue doing what it always has, but would BloodRayne's chest pave the way for a trickle of games unafraid of the AO? Would that trickle turn into a flood? Probably not, given the way American game retailers work--they get enough crap for selling M games to kids under 18, why risk letting people see AO? But what if game stores, like video rental places, started partitioning off a section and dedicated it to the adult audience? (I'm assuming that American game stores, unlike Japanese game stores, don't have the luxury of simply saying "The 2nd and 3rd floors are for the TV games, the adult games go on the 4th floor, and the anime is the 5th floor". Japan builds up... America builds out, so I can't imagine Gamestops across the nation adding a second floor and selling AO games there)

Oh, who'm I kidding, it's not going to happen like that. The game industry may move quickly, given its youth and its spurts of growth, but it's not going to endanger itself with a mass reinvention at this point. There's too much money involved in publishing and developing the current wave of games to risk endangering that cash flow for the sake of a much smaller market, and retailers get enough grief from child safety and protection groups without having to protect some beaded curtains leading to a fabled "back room".

But then again, the porn industry's numbers remain in the billions despite attempts to quash it, too...

Welp, we'll see, I guess. But that won't keep me from thinking about what could go wrong--or right--with the whole thing.

"muddling through..."
Friday - September 3, 2004
[Piro] - 12:11:00
It's not often that i'll write a "i'm working on a rant, i'll post it as soon as i'm done," but this is one of those rare occasions. I've been trying to write a rant for almost two weeks now, but every time i sat down to write something, i kept coming up blank. I haven't even been able to pull off my normal whinefest about the stuff i've been working on. I think the problem is that i've been doing a lot of thinking recently about the creative process, and i've had a lot of trouble getting my brain around it.

I'm going to take some time this morning and see if i can force myself to write something reasonable. I'm not doing this because i feel the rant here is getting a little old (tho it really is - my eventual goal is that for every comic, you get two new rants, one of which comes from me) but more because there is some kind of blockage going on here that i have to force my way through. While it is true you can't force yourself to be creative, you can force yourself to work through the blockage to try to get to the other side. If you don't, you may find yourself never getting past that point.

Anyways, off to see if i can put some dents in this thing.

"muddlepuddle"
Saturday - September 4, 2004
[Piro] - 10:12:00
Well, to say that my efforts to write something profound had failed would be an understatement. :) I finally gave up trying to write anything yesterday and turned to the task of finishing that ALA poster that has been hanging over my head for the past two weeks. Oddly enough, when i think about it, this may be part of the problem that i've been having - the stress of doing this poster has been more than i thought it would be. They asked me to do something that might showcase the different services the library offers, and i ended up with something that is really a six panel comic with complicated backgrounds, no dialogue, and full color. Eep.

It took a lot longer to get the final hardlines than i thought it would. This is a lot harder and more work than the Book 3 cover was. Each of these is a full drawing, and has a background, so its like 6x the work :) That's ok, because i think its coming out pretty decent, i just need to finish it. I need to finish it, like, yesterday. ^^;;

As i've said many times before, coloring is not my forte. After reaching a certain point last night, i asked Hawk over at applegeeks to give me his opinion on the colors, my approach to doing the background, and to see his take on what the shading might look like (you can see his shadowed take in the screenshot above). Thanks hawk, that helped break me off dead center. It's always interesting to see what other art types and people who actually have talent see when they look at the my drawings. His approach to the shadows on this are far more dramatic than i would have done, so it'll be interesting to see how much of his shading direction i follow, and where i'll break off and do things differently.

The screenshot is really just a random screenshot so as to not bore you too much. Before you ask, its reduced - my screen rez on the 23" ACD is 1920 x1200 (i reduced the size of the screenshot in half). More importantly, I recently got my long awaited copes of two Key Lia disks - Birthday Song, Requiem and Spica/Hanabi/Moon. Lia has a wonderful voice - if i can manage to get Kimiko to ever sing someday, it's what i'd envision she'd sound like.

Grr. Upon visiting the Key Sounds Label page, i now see that they have released a 3 disk Clannad soundtrack. Goddamnit. Need to get that...

Sorry for the rant lackage. This is more like a pointless Live Journal post, but maybe i should take more of that approach to this space anyways, instead of trying to write a frigging dissertation every time. I'll be posting the final ver of the ALA poster as soon as i finish it. It really is looking pretty decent, i just gotta finish it...

"a slow brain"
Wednesday - September 8, 2004
[Piro] - 09:18:00
Man, after finishing the ALA poster stuff yesterday, I totally ran out of steam. I was only able to get four drawings done in four hours. That's pretty pathetic :) So, here i am pulling myself together to get the rest of today's comic done. Of course, it doesn't help that todays comic requires 9 drawings. ^^;;

Anyways, just to keep everyone at least moderately entertained, i figured that I'd show you how the poster came out. Not too bad, i don't think. There are still some things on here that i need to tweak, and i have to pull the high rez for-print version together, and i have to balance the colors a little... little stuff, really. Overall it didn't come out too bad. It's a bit like what MT would be like if it were full color. Each page would take two friggin weeks to produce :P Once again, big thanks to hawk over at AG for some "oh, you can do that in photoshop? wow, that makes my life easier" pointers.

Sorry the comic is late today, my brain slowed down last night, and there's not much that can be done about that. See, if I were really bad i'd just post this poster as a DPD, but i'm not gonna do that. :P Comic is coming, enjoy the fake DPD like posting here this morning, and on that note, i'll get my sorry ass back to work on this comic thing...

Oh, and just for fun, here's the first preliminary sketch of the poster, and the second one. It's kinda fun to see the progression :)

"conspiracy theory"
Monday - September 13, 2004
[Seraphim] - 01:14:04
For Labor Day we went to my folks who live 50 miles from us out in the country. Dad made ribs. Personally, I hate ribs. The upshot is that we borrowed their truck to run errands during the week. We had the mother load of cardboard and other recyclables to return and we bought a cheap college dorm room piece of furniture from a local retailer that is kind of a Target wanna-be. It is touted as a sofa-bed. Well, those terms a might generous as I would label it more park bench-army cot. It's just for guests so who cares! Not this has anything to do with the rant it's just strikes me as funny.

Ok, ok, back to the rant. So this morning Piro drives back to retrieve our car and walks into the house and there sits my dad recuperating from surgery which he had sometime during the week and did not tell any of us kids about. This is the THIRD time in 4 years that he has pulled this stunt. These aren't minor little things either. He knows I am extremely not happy when he does this and yet he persists. He says he doesn't want us to worry. Well, ya know what, I am in a constant state of worry that he is going to run off and have surgeries without telling us. Wouldn't it be better to worry just one day? What if, god forbid, he should cork off right then and there during surgery? I can't believe my own mother plays along with him. She'd be the one left to call us up and say, "Yeah, I worked in the food pantry today and oh, BTW your father is dead." Or maybe they just wouldn't tell us because they wouldn't want us to be sad. It is so infuriating. I'll call him tomorrow and give him the usual scolding. It's almost like a game to him now.

Parents never get less annoying - they just start annoying you differently. There must be a secret rule book parents get. They must pass it out in the delivery room or in maternity ward with the formula and diapers. It is too well planned to be anything but a conspiracy.

"random rawage"
Friday - September 17, 2004
[Piro] - 02:16:00
Still working on Friday's comic. For the sake of giving you something to look at until i'm done (i dont want to post any of these frames as previews to the comic) i posted a random sketch over in the dumpbox over at fredart. I should be able to finish this comic up before noon tomorrow.

"artblogging"
Sunday - September 19, 2004
[Piro] - 11:16:00
For some reason, the months of August and much of September have been really hard for me, creatively speaking. Not because the creative ideas aren't there or that i haven't been able to be as productive as i need to be to make these creative things happen. The flow isn't right. It's like i've been stuck in a rut, and I'm still not sure how to get out of it.

This isn't a new problem. I often have prolonged dry spells that no amount of determination or forcing myself to work will solve. I often wonder if its just part of some cycle of creativity and blankness that i go through every year. For the past couple of years, things have been so crazy that i have always been able to blame something for the problem, but deep down i know that these issues have nothing to do with work, travel, or random domestic destruction by the cats. It's a problem that stems from controlling my inability to focus.

The real irony of this is that i've been working on a rant for almost four weeks regarding my inability to focus. Maybe it's a bit like the brain trying to understand itself, i'm trying to develop a better understanding of the mechanics of how how i create through the creative process of writing a rant. For some reason, i can't get it blogged down. My frustration in not being able to do so is so great that it spurred this little rant about how frustrated i am that i can't write about it. How lame is that?

The ability to do creative stuff relies on two important things - having creative ideas, and being able to effectively make them happen. Everyone has ideas, and often we all have fantastic ideas, but they aren't worth much if you can't make them happen. Just simply working on a creative idea doesn't necessary mean you can make them happen. You need to have a structure to work within, a medium in which your ideas can come to life. For me, the conveyance point where these ideas come out is in my drawings. When i draw, the ideas that i often struggle to describe or understand come out, and it provides the structure upon which the comics are built. Scripts and the overall story is just a framework that attempts to provide direction. It's the drawings that make the characters speak and gives them life. I'm not a writer, nor am i an artist, because i don't think i do either of these things well. I write through my art, and it's an imperfect process. It's one that is ideally suited to this medium, so i can get away with it. :) Through these imperfect acts, i create comics that are fairly effective at communicating my ideas to other people. That, in the end, i think, is what the whole point of creating things based on your ideas - communicating them to other people.

This website is a nodal point from which i can share this output with you. Doing Megatokyo comics is often a struggle, and the translation from idea to finished comic is never perfect, but it's as close as i can get to blogging my ideas to people.

I think that many other comic artists, especially in the more traditional sense (print, newspaper, etc) the comics are pretty much the ONLY transference that these artists have. Webcomics are unique because in addition to the comics, there are other channels of communication that come along with them. rant spaces, the ability to email the creators, forums, live appearances at conventions, etc. It's funny that we sort of expect ourselves to be good at all of these things. The nodal point works both ways. Depending on how far i want to look, i see how effectively my ideas are being communicated. I can also see the effect that these communicated ideas can have. This is both good and bad, and the more popular the site, the more daunting this feedback can be.

I guess i sometimes feel almost afraid of what i'm doing with the comic. It's really sad when you are working on something, that you know you are gonna get flack for it, and that you already know what people are gonna gripe about. And you already know that there are all these people that will come to your aid and beat up the people who don't like what i'm doing right now, and the old tired assessments of what i'm doing compared to what i've done in the past and what people think i should be doing will surface and... well, i just end up having to do what i always do when it comes to comics. I shut it out, and i let my own drawings tell me what i should be doing. Sometimes this is a lot harder to do than you might think, but in the end its what works for me. Seems simple to understand, but i keep having to relearn this over and over again. I think that's where a lot of the churn in my life is... the constant re-learning of how i really work.

I just wish the same approach worked for things like rants and blogging :)

Well, this turned into more of a 'rant' than i had planned it to. Funny, I sat down to write something quickly that would just touch on the rant ideas that i was having problems talking about, and ended up talking about them more effectively than all of my other previous tries. I wonder if that says something else about how i work, something i keep having to relearn over and over again...

-----

Almost forgot to mention this, but Sarah and I will be at Anime Weekend Atlanta this weekend (September 24-26) - it's really more like a vacation for us than anything, so we'll be taking it pretty easy at this con, but we will be there. :) No idea what our schedule is yet, but i'll post it as soon as i find out. If you are in the area, be sure to stop by and say hi :)

"Flash! A-aaaah!"
Monday - September 20, 2004
[Dom] - 11:00:00
You may be wondering where I've been for the past month or so.

To be honest, I've been wondering that myself. Beyond all the pretentious pseudo-intellectual meanings I could give that, I can honestly say that I've spent the lsat month just sort of drifting.

See, I've been fighting depression, and when I'm depressed, I don't like to tell people about it until it's over. It's a very private thing to me, and I don't feel like I'll gain anything from sharing my gloom.

If you must know the root of the matter, my aunt died on September 4th, while I was on my way to Sacramento. This marked the third death in my family this year, and given how closely knit my family is, each one hit us hard. There's something about being a pall bearer three times in nine months that makes you feel a little weird, but I think I'm over that now. Which means that I'm ready to resume the whole "writing my ass off" thing that I like.

The real purpose of this rant is to announce a new way Fred and I have decided to use this rant space, though it'll change once the new site layout comes around.

In the interests of having daily content on this site, I'm going to start writing news, and given that my writing specialty is Japanese video games and miscellany, most of my news will be along that vein--you can find American game coverage almost anywhere, so I'll be ignoring that aspect of news in favor of the weird stuff that Fred and I think MT fans will appreciate. For example: did you know that Gainax's upcoming Princess Maker 4, scheduled for a Spring 2005 release, uses the character designer for Sister Princess, Tenhiro Naoto?

It's stuff like that, stuff that you may not have known but, as a game or anime fan, might be interested in, that I'll focus on.

I'll also be posting the occasional "review" of games I'm playing or manga I'm reading in the interest of filling space and staying in practice, mostly reviewing stuff that hasn't come to the states yet but I think should (or really think shouldn't).

A couple of warnings on that--to make sure that there are no conflicts of interest, I'm going to avoid writing about certain topics if I'm planning to use them for a magazine pitch. It's just easier to avoid these things... so if I don't write about something I think is important, it's probably because I want to write about it for freelance work. Also, given what kind of games Fred and I frequently play (but I'm NOT the porn game king, dammit!), some of the news I'll post will involve games that you can't play unless you're over the age of 18--I'll be posting warnings about any adult content I link to... or maybe I'll just talk about the news or the game without actually linking, leaving you guys to find it yourself if you really want to see more than I show. I'll figure that part out later, when it actually comes up.

So how'll this work, putting up daily news without having a new space to put it every day?

Easy! I'm going to just edit the bottom of every rant with every news tidbit I see fit to post. This'll include editing Sarah's rants, a minor inconvenience that we'll no longer need when the new site goes live.

Anyway, check the space below this tomorrow for news!

Tuesday, September 21
Okay, so even in the pursuit of knowledge, I need to remember that I should never, EVER click on a link to a game titled "Futanari Milkshake", no matter how morbidly curious I am. Don't ask me what the title means, or for a link, I'm still traumatized.

The new PS2... so cute!
Anyway, I said I wouldn't do much in the way of news that was already covered on every other site out there, but I had to show off ITmedia's pictures of the new, lighter PS2, which just looks so damn cute! And it can probably be used as a slashing weapon...

Gee, another Square Enix sequel
Meanwhile, companies are gearing up for the Tokyo Game Show right now, and Square Enix has announced a new Romancing SaGa game, to come out in Spring of 2005. I've never really been a fan of the Romancing SaGa games, though... where the hell is my Valkyrie Profile 2? C'mon, Enix, you know you want to make it... get the Square people on your side and you'll do it, instead of vomiting forth sequels that I don't really care about (although I must admit, Dirge of Cerberus at least looks cool, even if there's been absolutely no hint of what the gameplay's like).

Wrong Valkyrie, dammit!
In a cruel little twist of fate, they haven't announced Valkyrie Profile 2--they've announced a THIRD UFO Princess Valkyrie series, this one an OAV. The second one was really, really bad (I didn't watch much of the first one, but I'm told that it was at least stupid and fun to go along with the fan service).

Rumors of Negima
Moon Phase is reporting a rumor that Akamatsu Ken's Mahou Sensei Negima will be turned into a TV anime to air in January, but I haven't found any evidence to support that yet--I'll tell you when I find it. It's funny, I really don't like Akamatsu Ken's work, but I'm rather fond of the guy. He's a dork. And Asmodeus is hot for his wife, which always counts for something.

First sisters, now twins...
TV Tokyo has opened the official page for its upcoming anime FutaKoi (Twin Love), the direct successor to Incest Sister Princess. Seriously, its short stories and pictorial spreads started dominating Dengeki G's magazine right after Sister Princess stopped, replacing the "sister not related by blood" fetish with the "Twins twins TWINS" fetish (Pocky has already fallen under its spell, more's the pity). If you're interested--and if so, I'm very sorry--the anime starts airing on October 6th.

Back tomorrow with a look at the latest manga I'm reading and more news... whee~

"Giri giri"
Wednesday - September 22, 2004
[Dom] - 09:30:00
What I'm reading: Onii-chan to Issho (vaguely translated as "With my brother(s)")

I started reading Onii-chan to Issho after seeing a summary on Mangaoh that got me curious. After living with a Sister Princess fan for about a year and a half, I was thoroughly tired of the sister fetish (you may have seen hints of that in my rant yesterday). Onii-chan to issho is the exact opposite of Sister Princess--as opposed to some random schmuck suddenly having 12 fawning little sisters, it's the heartwarming story of a girl who, after her grandmother dies, has no living relatives. And then, out of nowhere, 4 "older brothers" come to claim her as their own, turning her life upside-down. And then she finds out that they aren't actually related to her by blood at all, making her wonder why they claim she's family...

Like I said, it's the exact opposite of Sister Princess, especially since it runs in one of Hana to Yume's sister magazines, La La.

In case you're wondering, this does, in fact, make it a shoujo manga.

Anyway, after reading Onii-chan to Issho volume one a few months ago, I felt a dangerously warm and fuzzy feeling creeping up on me, something I suppressed quickly and brutally by playing Guilty Gear XX for a while.

Then I read volume two earlier this month, and that warm and fuzzy feeling returned, and I realized that not only was I reading the second volume of a shoujo manga that didn't involve chainsaws, I liked it.

See, when I said it was the heartwarming story of a girl yada yada yada, I actually meant that it was heartwarming for once. The art is frightfully cute, but the writing is also solid, sweet without being sappy and kind of dorky without being stupid.

I mean, the brothers are written so that they aren't just representations of various fetishized archetypes, you can honestly like them as they are--or dislike some of them, free from such stupidity as "ugh, he wears glasses, that's stupid"--although I guess you're free to dislike character designs, it's just that this manga isn't solely based on character designs.

Anyway, I don't know if this manga is coming to the US soon or not, but I recommend it to anyone who wants to read about a girl growing up and rediscovering the meaning of family.

Amazon links to:
Volume 1
Volume 2

Old Singles
Okay, can anyone explain to me how a cover of Mickey can be the #1 single in Japan this week? I mean, I know a lot of Japanese music is stuck in the '80s, that's part of why I like it--but I didn't realize they were THAT stuck.

Still Beboppin'
According to Studio Bones, a new Cowboy Bebop artbook is due out next month, entitled "Toshihiro Kawamoto: Cowboy Bebop Illustrations ～The Wind～". It'll be 144 pages of full color, cost 2800 yen (before tax, conversion rate and shipping cost markup in the US) and be released on October 22nd.

Full-size goddesses on TV
So in 2005, there's finally going to be a proper Aa! Megami-sama (AKA Oh My Goddess!) TV series, after a decent OAV, a very pretty movie, and a very, very random SD TV series. I've been reminded by this by a Newtype article interviewing Hiroaki Gohda (the director), Ishida Youko (who sings the opening song, "Open your Mind ~Chiisana hane wo hirogete~"), and Inoue Kikuko (who is Inoue Kikuko). About the most significant thing in the article is that Inoue Kikuko continues to maintain that she's 17 years old, a joke that may go on as long as Jack Benny's 39th birthday. But it at least reminded people "Oh yeah! That's coming next year" before concentrating on the new season coming up in October.

September 23, 2004
Tokyo Game Show is this weekend, and that means gold mine time for news writers. And that means that I can't possibly write about it all, so I'll just put up tidbits that amuse me. For example...

Ramblin' Rumblin' Roses
So most of the Dead or Alive-type fans out there already know about Rumble Roses from E3... it's a rasslin' game with "hot digital girls" duking it out (I saw a lot of people at E3 staring raptly at the mud wrestling mode) and, amusingly, Hidaka Noriko and Horie Yui are going to appear at TGS to promote it. If you didn't know, Hidaka Noriko was the voice of Akane in Ranma 1/2, Minami in Touch, and Erika in the Sakura Taisen series, while Horie Yui has been Tooru in Fruits Basket and Naru in Love Hina. The most amusing part? The other person who's showing up to plug the game is Choushuu Riki, a 52-year-old professional wrestler. That's something I wish I could see...

Something for the ladies
I'd never heard of Meine Liebe before today, with good reason--it's a dating game series aimed at girls. There was a GBA version of it a couple years back, there's going to be a PS2 game, and now it's going to be animated under the name "Ginyuu Mokushiroku Meine Liebe". It, too, will have a seiyuu event at TGS 2004, which will include Koyasu Takehito and Seki Tomokazu, among other fangirl bait. As for the anime, the cast is announced so far as Sakurai Toshihiko, Seki Tomokazu, Seki Toshihiko, Hoshi Souichirou, Ishida Akira and Koyasu. Some of those names mean little to me, but if they've been chosen to voice vaguely Euro-looking prettyboys, there has to be somebody out there who wets their drawers over them...

"Game shows"
Friday - September 24, 2004
[Dom] - 12:45:00
It was there in the back of my mind as I brought my City of Heroes character to within 18k experience of level 34.

I figured "oh, I guess it's hunger or something" and heated myself a bowl of pho, nearly starting a grease fire in the process. But no, as I was eating, it was still nagging at me, and then it hit me.

Tokyo Game Show! It's going on, and there's plenty of little stuff that many will ignore in favor of such minor news as Metal Gear Solid 3, Gran Turismo 4 and other games that millions of people not named Dom really like and want to play.

So on with the parade of strangeness!

Red Riding Hood... gunner?
Konami and Madhouse have announced a collaborative effort that's going to be turned into a TV(?) series and a series of figures. It's titled Otogi-Jushi Akazukin, which vaguely translates to "Little Red Riding Hood Gunner" (Otogi means "fairy tale", and I'm assuming most of you know that Little Red Riding Hood is a fairy tale). You should take a look at the character designs, they're really freaky.

To Hearts on the flop
Animate.tv has a preview video of the new To Heart anime online, and anyone who liked the slow sappiness that was the first To Heart TV series should check out the two buttons at the bottom of the article--the right button is the broadband version, and the song's not bad.

Mabbawabbadingdong
Mahoraba, which is not to be confused with Maburaho, which is not to be confused with Maburavu, is going to become an anime. It's the heartwarming story of the heartwarming story of an art student boy and his cute second-cousin, who has Dissociative Identity Disorder. It's directed by the guy who made Hand Maid May and Cosplay Complex, which means that I'm very, very scared of it.

"Banned Book Week!"
Wednesday - September 29, 2004
[Seraphim] - 03:55:00
It's time again for a Banned Book Week rant. Glenn Schmall of Anime Tourist sent me a link to the Forbidden Library website. It is short, sweet, and to the point. The site has a select list of titles that have been challenged and the reasons - such as Dr. Seuss's The Lorax being challenged because it showed the foresting/logging industry in an unfavorable light. Challenging a book gives the author a certain cachet. Dr. Seuss is suddenly a lot cooler.

I'm going to read The Execution of Private Slovik by William Huie if I can find it at a local used bookstore. It is an investigative story about a soldier from Detroit who was executed for desertion in WWII. At the time it was published in 1954 a city councilman from Hammtramck, Michigan wanted a city clerk to challenge the book because there were derogatory remarks about his city in it - something about Hammtramck being the cheap bar capital of the world. I'm sure that request was for the benefit of society at large and wasn't self serving at all. I found out about that book at the University of Kansas Library's online exhibit of books worldwide that have been censored, banned or challenged through the centuries (up to 1955 at least).

My favorite frequently banned author is the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. His play Man and Superman was temporarily removed from the shelves of the New York Public Library in 1905. That was 99 years ago. I like to read books considered salacious and scandalous from the past and see how tame they are compared to current standards. Although, Of Mice and Men remains one of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2003 reported to the American Library Association. I wonder what the future will think of our era.

Negima cleanup
I got a lot of e-mails saying "yes, there is an anime coming out, would you like to download the trailer?". To which I say no, but thanks for the tip.

Shoujo and Shounen
After an e-mail asking to be reminded about the difference between shoujo and shounen, now's as good a time as any to link back to an old rant I did about the subject. It was back in November 2003, and given that I'll be talking about a lot of manga in the coming weeks, it helps for you to remember what magazines are aimed at what audiences.

Gimme the short bus any day
Remember what I said about FutaKoi? It has a bus. That's so frightening... so very frightening.

Under 17 Goes Under
You know how I spent about a year or so living with a Sister Princess fan? Well, I spent two and a half, almost three years with a Momoi Haruko fan, and Momoi Haruko is one of those voice actresses/singers who can regularly make my ears bleed with her incessantly whiny drone. Some people think she's cute, and I don't blame them for it, I just don't see it myself--which is why I'm rather glad that the music group she formed announced it will break up at the end of 2004. If you're curious what kind of music they put out, you can either listen to the rather disturbing "hits" "Uwaki shite mo ee yo", a song in kansai-ben about how she loves X guy so much, X guy can cheat on her and she won't care, and the similarly horrible "Love Slave", or go for their less disturbing stuff like the Popotan opening "Popotan Batake de Tsukamaete", and the inordinately stupid (but not outright disturbing) "Mouse Chu Mouse".

Processing TGS
I'm writing about Tokyo Game Show for one of my freelance assignments, so I won't be able to write everything interesting that happened over the weekend for you guys--as soon as I'm done, I'll report the weird, minor news, I swear.

September 28, 2004
I'm almost done working on my Anime Insider stuff, but I'll take a little break before my Tuesday Nerd Night (which is usually Magic, with sometimes some Shadowfist or Spycraft mixed in)

Men at Work, hold the porn
Kid, a company mostly known for the Memories Off series and a few other dating games, is bringing out Studio e.go's Men At Work! 3. While it's not unheard of for Kid to bring out cleaned-up versions of H games, another company usually does e.go's clean versions, making this kind of strange. I wonder if it's a one-time deal, or if Kid will be cleaning up more e.go stuff in the future.

Perhaps the worst URL ever
Okay, so Fantastic Children wants to portray itself as a wonderful fantasy adventure in the style of Future Boy Conan. They want to project a wholesome image, and yet... their website is f-children.com. That's certainly not the right foot to start on, no...

Every Little Tale
Every Little Thing, a band that I actually kind of like, appeared at Namco's booth at TGS and talked about their upcoming song "Good Night", which will be used as the theme for Tales of Rebirth. What's odd is, I liked the character designs for Tales of Symphonia and didn't particularly like the music, and from the first impressions, I hate Tales of Rebirth's character designs and will probably like the music. Ah well.

September 29, 2004
Today, I'd like to highlight one of my favorite character designers, since a game with characters designed by him is in the news for the day, and I'm still busy working for Anime Insider.

The man in question goes by the name Murakami Suigun, which was the name of a famous pirate navy in the 15th and 16th centuries. He previously did character designs for Hourglass of Summer, and D->A: Black, which I bought while I was Japan.

Coming in December, D->A: White, which is obviously the sequel to D->A: Black, is coming out. Quite honestly, the combat system was annoying (though interesting), and hopefully that'll be cleaned up. The story was screwed up and awesome, though, so once I get some debts paid off, I'm definitely picking up the game. The fact that Chiba Saeko sings the opening has nothing to do with it. I swear.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

September 30, 2004
Not much in the way of news today, at least from me--today's a day for sitting around the house writing and nervously tracking the remaining playoff races in baseball. But I do have at least one thing to show you guys...

Yukikaze Reborn
I never watched Sentou Yousei Yukikaze, mostly because I always thought of an old net game called Battle Fairies when I saw the ridiculous name. But Bandai's giving the series the full-out Bandai treatment, AKA giving it at least one sequel. Comptiq has a story about how they're putting out a new Yukikaze OAV, now with more sexy.

"teaching imperfection"
Wednesday - September 29, 2004
[Piro] - 15:45:00
Ok, back from AWA, sorta managed to get thru it without missing a comic (we'll just let the fact that they weren't on time slip, ok?) and i think my soulmapping has managed to find it's way back to some sort of normalcy, tho it's kinda tired from it's travels and just wants to sleep. Nothing wrong with that, i guess.

Anime Weekend Atlanta was fun, and i think the show went pretty well. We sorta took a laid back approach to the show that helped keep the stress level down. Since AWA is always a laid back show, it was a combination that worked really well. One thing i didn't get a chance to do was get pictures of the various Megatokyo cosplayers - i saw at least one Miho cosplayer and one Seraphim cosplayer - if there were more or others, please let me know, i'd love to see pictures.

[doh! yes, and a Junpei cosplayer. I even waved at him. Good lord, my brain is going. I need to just start doing a full MT cosplayer roll call for each con. In fact, i'll start that right here and now. Pictures only, no names unless you want em :) - piro]

Our main Megatokyo panel went pretty well, i think. Some of the panels this year have come off better than others, and this one wasn't too bad. Usually the bad panels are a direct result of me talking too much and only reeling it in when i start seeing glazed eyes and people drooling on their costumes. I could probably create a undead army of my own just by talking the audience into undeadness, but i'm not really sure if i ever want to do that.

There was one panel i gave at this convention that started me thinking about my stance on teaching and lessons. It was a panel called "draw with fred." Other than the fact that it sounded like a bad public access channel show ("watch i how draw sad little clouds, such sad little clouds...") it was one of the more interesting panels i've done recently. The main Megatokyo panel usually deals with general megatokyo related questions, but a panel like this where i can talk about how i draw and what i think i've learned from doing this for the past nine years, was an interesting change. Judging from the number of people who wanted to get into the rather small room, i could see that there are a lot of Megatokyo readers who are interested in hearing about it.

One of the most often asked questions i get (or used to get -- most people gave up asking ages ago) is when i'd be putting up some lessons on the Fredart site. My usual response (aside from the 'whenever i have time to do it') is that i am leery about giving 'lessons' because i am worried about people picking up bad habits, or picking up all the 'wrong' things that i do. I'd rather people learn from people who know what they are doing.

It's not really a cop-out -- there are a lot of things that i do that i think would give art teachers and trained professionals fits. I really would hate it if someone picked up on some of my bad habits only to have to try to break them later. But I am beginning to wonder if i'm not giving everyone out there enough credit.

To put it simply, i want to make sure that if i talk about how i draw or how i draw, i want you to make sure you are never afraid to question it. I don't want you to draw faces and eyes and hair and hands (god forbid) the way i do. I don't care how much you would like to draw like me, i'd rather you learn how to draw like yourself.

I think i worry too much about people just blindly mimicking my bad habits and not just mixing what i show them in with all the other things they have learned or picked up on their own. Hell, that's what i did, so why do i worry about it so much? There is no right way to draw. There are no rules, not really. You can get caught up in the rules of a particular school of artistic thought... and i hate it when people do that. Like it or not, folks, manga and anime style *IS* a school of thought with all sorts of 'rules' and 'basic ways things are done'. Thats fine. Work with them, challenge them, don't ever let anyone tell you that you 'aren't doing it right.' If they do, i'll come over there and smack them for you.

Art shouldn't be about just mimicking the things you like, its about expression something you want to say. You like the things you like because you can identify with them. This doesn't mean that you should just fall into step and do things exactly the same way they do. You are the only one who knows what you are trying to say, and using other people's tools and techniques to say it will not work. What you have to do is take bits and pieces from what influences you the most, and make your own mix of it all. Make it up if you have to.

Sometimes people mistake 'not following the rules' with 'show no respect for them'. That's not what im saying at all. You have to understand what others do before you can challenge it. I worry that what i do is not solid enough for you to really be able to gain a lot by challenging it. If you are gonna learn anything from me, make sure you learn from others as well. Its very important that you do.

One thing i hear a lot is "thank you for doing megatokyo. I stopped drawing a long time ago, but thanks to you i started drawing again." Hearing that as much as i do makes me feel pretty good about MT, and i think i need to stop worrying about my imperfections. I think i should show a little more respect for people who do admire what i do, and be willing to share it, imperfect as it may be.

So, to that end, i'm gonna spend some time in the next few weeks talking about how i draw. I also think that for the cons that i go to next year, i will try to have workshop/classes/panels where i continue to talk about these things, and can have a chance to answer more specific questions. It might be fun, and i think i might learn from it in the process.

Speaking of learning, I've been experimenting a bit lately. While it is true there is a little bit of a 'cool thing' element to Copic markers, I've been scribbling a little with a Copic Sketch marker and some of the resulting pictures have been amusing. I don't know why, but i feel there is something in the ink laden messes that has some potential for refinement. :) When i draw with pen the way i draw with pencil, the drawings usually come out pretty decent. When i hesitate, they look like crap. Interesting how your mental approach to drawing can effect things.

Part of the reason i'm experimenting with Copics is that I'm thinking of carrying Copic markers and related items in the megagear store. I don't want to carry things that i myself do not use or am not familiar with in the store - everything there is stuff that i use or have used at some point in the past. You might have noticed that we added a few things to the art section recently. I'm still working on getting the mechanical pencils i used for the store. One type of pencil you can get here in the states, but sadly the one i like to use now is just not available here. :(

If you look to the right under Seraphim's rant, you will see the beginnings of our 'megatokyo news service', a new feature that we will be adding to the Megatokyo site. We are adding it because it's neat, and well, if dom doesn't have a place to bleed out some of the weird news i think his head will burst. I don't really want that. When the new website is finished (the first phase of it will be done in a few weeks), we will have a page devoted to this. I'm placing it in the right rant column for now just so dom and the rest of us can get into the swing of things. Its a lot like the little tidbits of news that we all discuss among ourselves anyways, so now we have a place to put it. I hope you find it useful and entertaining.

A little random today, but its a random kinda day. Gonna see if i can snag a copy of Fruits Basket #5 today when i hit the bookstore (i saw it in Barnes & Noble yesterday, i should have picked it up then, doh) and then curl up in my chair and read it tonight. I feel much in need of some curl time.

"Duel Saber? Wha?"
Friday - October 1, 2004
[Dom] - 14:00:00
Two games today, and I don't know which I want to talk about.

Actually, I do know--I want to talk about Duel Savior, since I've talked about Evil Genius enough. I would like to say thanks to the guys at Vivendi Universal for the comp copy, even if the Wired story did get killed.

(A note: Other than the top picture linking to the publisher's home page, I'm not going to link to anything Duel Savior-related today, because the material is 18 only--even though the two demos are clean, I don't want to get into any trouble here)

So anyway, Duel Savior came out today in Japan. It's developed by Team Baldrhead, who you may remember from way back when I talked about Baldr Force. And once again I'm entranced by the combat system they've put in an H game. Duel Savior is a standard "boy gets transported into fantasy world and hailed as its savior" story, and so Team Baldrhead has made it a... 2D beat-em-up!

In case you didn't know, my favorite game of all time is Streets of Rage 2, which happens to be a 2D beat-em-up. So I downloaded the demo of the action portion of the game they had up, and I was hooked.

The combat system in Duel Savior is extremely simple--the A button (Z on keyboards) is for weak attacks, which combo into each other and also into the B button (X on keyboards), which are stronger, slower attacks. C (...C) blocks. Different directions and these buttons produce different moves, from the good ol' invincible backdash to launchers and charge attacks. You have a super meter, and you can use one diamond of super to cancel into any move you want (I'm personally fond of the dive bomb at the end of a combo). A direction plus A B consumes two diamonds (three if you're canceling out of something you normally can't cancel out of) and does a super move.

Simple, no? Then add in a blocking system very similar to Guilty Gear's Instant Block to reduce your block frames, a few more characters to mix things up and, of course, my favorite hobby--trying to get the combo meter as high as I can (I've only managed to make it roll over as Ginjirou in Guardian Heroes and as Gold Faust in Guilty Gear XX). My current Duel Savior record is around 340 hits, and I'm still trying to beat that. Maybe I'll do better in the full version.

So yeah, it's safe to say that I'm hooked on the fighting system--it's simple, since it's constrained by being designed for a num pad instead of a controller, but it's still fast enough to keep my interest, difficult enough to challenge me (stupid juggle queen zombie!) and pretty replayable, even if it's just two levels to replay.

I think there's other stuff to be said about the game, but I can't talk about it until I've actually played it--Baldr Force had a pretty good story (though honestly, I wish it'd been pornless, some of that was disturbing) that unfolded like the layers of an onion, and I'm honestly curious about the cleaned-up version of Baldr Force EXE that Alchemist is putting out for the Dreamcast--maybe I'd like that better.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot.

Duel Savior has a ninja. It wins.

Okay, next week I'll talk about Evil Genius.

Kaijuu ja nee ze!
Tange Sakura, known mostly as the voice of Card Captor Sakura (and as Dead or Alive's Kasumi before she retired and Kuwashima Houko took over), is coming out of retirement. She's been out of the seiyuu business for four years or so, but she's been announced as the main character of Y's 6, re-sparking speculation that CLAMP is planning something to be animated and they need Tange Sakura back in, whether it's more CCS or Tsubasa. I wonder how much yakuza debt she got into before having to come back...

Anyway, you can check out her website here if you want to read more about it (if you can read Japanese, that is). I don't like Tange Sakura's voice that much (I'm not much for the high-pitched whine that the Japanese are so fond of) but one good thing came out of this: this quote from Pocky: "her fan boys have got to be doing stretching exercises and crap to 'knock off the rust'."

Ravi!
Asmodeus has gotten this song stuck in my head, so I might as well stick this in your heads too. You must all suffer with me as you listen to the insanely catchy song for Kimi no Tame Nara Shineru, the upcoming Nintendo DS game about... well, stalking and rubbing the DS screen, as far as I can tell.

"open sesame!"
Monday - October 4, 2004
[Seraphim] - 02:15:00
Is there ever a good story about Walmart? Now there are people in Mexico City staging a hunger strike to prevent the construction of a Walmart (called a Bodega Aurrera in Mexico) just outside of the Teotihuacan ruins. The site is close enough to the ruins that it is probably being built on an archeological site. A small ancient altar was discovered on the site but don't worry the altar will be displayed encased in plexiglass in the PARKING LOT. Horrors. Construction projects the world over unearth historically relevant sites and artifacts but I have never heard of them being incorporated into the parking lots. It is just the epitome of bad taste.

Here's a link to an article about it :)

Piro is ready to stage his own protest around here. Our apartment community is attempting to reactivate (not that it has ever been active) the infamous gate system at the entrance. We've been here two and a half years and this is their second try. The first attempt went horrible awry. I think the community maintenance man quit or had a nervous break down over the fiasco. Management started shutting the gates this past May. We saw our neighbors pushing the gates up or sneaking through behind someone else and the gate bouncing off their roofs - all of which broke the gates on a daily basis. We'd come home in the late, late night and the poor maintenance guy in charge of this ill advised endeavor would be sitting in his truck trying to catch people breaking the gates. Even if you want to gain lawful access the card readers only work half the time. Why don't they use something like keyless entry for garage or car doors? Supposedly this is a "gated" community. That would be great if every other inch of the perimeter wasn't completely accessible to the road and anyone walking by. I feel so much safer that just the driveway will be blocked and that it will only block out people who are scrupulous enough not to just push up the flimsy fiberglass gates.

Piro wants to mount a petition campaign to get them to drop it. We are very rule and law-abiding people and when the card readers didn't work we had to drive through the out gates. We felt like the Mr. Bean episode with him trying to get out of parking structure without paying. I expected a three-wheeled car to pull up to the gates to get out. We were actually able to just drive in under the gates without even touching them. These gates are totally useless. The arms on the gates got blown off in the wind one time. I agree the gates are inane but I'm not interested in stirring things up in our last six months here. Besides, I really don't want to meet all the neighbors.

Kaijuu ja nee ze!
Tange Sakura, known mostly as the voice of Card Captor Sakura (and as Dead or Alive's Kasumi before she retired and Kuwashima Houko took over), is coming out of retirement. She's been out of the seiyuu business for four years or so, but she's been announced as the main character of Y's 6, re-sparking speculation that CLAMP is planning something to be animated and they need Tange Sakura back in, whether it's more CCS or Tsubasa. I wonder how much yakuza debt she got into before having to come back...

Anyway, you can check out her website here if you want to read more about it (if you can read Japanese, that is). I don't like Tange Sakura's voice that much (I'm not much for the high-pitched whine that the Japanese are so fond of) but one good thing came out of this: this quote from Pocky: "her fan boys have got to be doing stretching exercises and crap to 'knock off the rust'."

Ravi!
Asmodeus has gotten this song stuck in my head, so I might as well stick this in your heads too. You must all suffer with me as you listen to the insanely catchy song for Kimi no Tame Nara Shineru, the upcoming Nintendo DS game about... well, stalking and rubbing the DS screen, as far as I can tell.

October 4

Man. What a horrible week for Bay Area baseball. Well, at least Cal's ranked #7 in the country. Go Bears! Beat the University of Spoiled Children but good! (Or at least lose with your boots on).

Opus movie
Thanks to Heather Brennan for the tip that Berkeley Breathed's Opus is going to get a movie. I'm not going to get my hopes up too high, but I did like A Wish for Wings That Work, so I'll be optimistic for now.

I'm Uematsu Nobuo, b****!
For those Final Fantasy fans out there, I'd like to point out that Nobuo Uematsu's band, The Black Mages, is putting out their second album soon. It's titled The Skies Above, and you can find sound samples on Uematsu's official site. I personally think that the songs sound really, really funny.

"Ofuro Anime"?
Well, as you might have been able to tell from the first season of Girls Bravo being titled "Girls Bravo first season", there's a second season set to air starting in January. So for all of you out there who love plotless fan service, bravo. For the rest of us, we can safely ignore it and it won't hurt us--probably.

October 5, 2004
Nunununu nenenene nunonuno nenenene
Nunununu nenenene nunonuno nenenene
RAVI!
(deee doo deeee do dedodedodeeeeee)

Damn you, Asmodeus.

"rantage interrupted"
Tuesday - October 5, 2004
[Piro] - 10:47:00
Y'know, i have this very long and very introspective rant sitting here that I don't think i'll post. Why not? I think it hits pretty close to the mark on a lot of things, and, well, it's done its job. It helped me figure some things out, get a better handle on how I deal with mounting criticism, and deal with the writing problems i've been having for the past few months. It felt good to get it down in writing, and now i think its good to have it behind me.

Silly, huh? Not really. Trust me, i think it would bore the hell out of you. :) I'm a difficult little soul to deal with, and i burden you folks with enough of my introspective blather. Introspection is a good thing sometimes, but you have to know when to stop and step away from it, because it can also be counterproductive.

The thing that has really been helping lately is that i've been drawing... drawing a lot. Most of it is worse than the usual stuff i draw, but i certainly have been pulling together lots of material for the dumpbox. :)

Off to work on today's comic.

"Guru guru"
Wednesday - October 6, 2004
[Dom] - 12:00:00
I've been reading School Rumble for months now, but now that there's an anime for it, I guess I should tell people about the manga.

School Rumble, which is currently airing on TV Tokyo, is a manga by Kobayashi Jin in Koudansha's Shounen Magazine.

Yes. That makes it Shounen.

Anyway, it's the hearwarming story of an airheaded high school girl, the delinquent who loves her, and the crazy things that happen to them and their friends over the course of a school year.

The reason I like School Rumble isn't because it's crazy or wacky, though it is. It's genuinely funny without trying too hard, or trying to exploit itself. I mean, one of the Japanese bloggers I keep track of over at Opera House noted that School Rumble specifically decided against panty shots in the anime. That's pretty much the case in the manga too--the girls are well-drawn, but they're not made to be fanboy lust objects (coughcoughNEGIMA), they're characters in a story that actually moves forward.

Okay, wait, I shouldn't get sidetracked by my Negima-hate. Let's start over. See the picture up at the top? That's from the manga, and it may remind you a bit of Osaka from Azumanga Daiou. And indeed, there are plenty of similarities between the two manga. In fact, I like to describe School Rumble as "What Azumanga would be if there were guys in it". While it's not the 4-panel goodness of Azumanga (In my opinion, the purest form of comedy is the four panel comic. Setup, setup, beat, punch line...), it has its own charm.

Presented in a series of shorts about 8 pages in length, School Rumble is more focused than many other manga thanks to this format. There's a beginning and an end to all of the stories, and there's no such thing as filler. Every panel is either linked to the ongoing story of Harima Kenji and Tsukamoto Tenma, or it's part of a punch line, which makes SukuRan an extremely smooth read.

Going back to my earlier point, there are a lot of characters in School Rumble. But given the format, there's plenty of room for all of them to have a little screen time that doesn't seem like a forced cameo. And what do you know, they're pleasantly nutty and funny, except for the normal ones (who don't get much screen time compared to the ones who're actually funny).

I'd be amiss if I didn't mention the art. Kobayashi Jin and his assistants have a very clean art style that often gives way to what I can only call a "super-machismo mode", with heavy shadows and cross-hatching as the guys try to act cool (though it sometimes comes up when the girls are really, REALLY angry). Combined with the hyper-cute chibification used for comedy, there's probably something for everyone's taste in here, unless you need a foolish consistency in your manga's art style. And as Emerson said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

There are currently six volumes of School Rumble out, and the anime isn't half bad either, though with only one episode out, it's a bit early to judge.

And no, I have no idea who's going to license it, and when. It's pretty certain to be licensed, though, what with an anime out and all. I highly recommend looking out for its English release, whenever that happens. Or you could be a dork like me and take years of Japanese classes so you can read this stuff. (Though at least I can use Japanese literacy as a job skill)

Amazon links to: Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Volume 4
Volume 5
Volume 6

Chaaaaar
Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I'm a big Char fan (no, not Charmander, the Gundam Char). And if you didn't know that, you do now--which means you know why I think this helmet is so cool.

October 7, 2004
After a rousing night of the Girl Genius game with Hamusutaa, Hodge-Poge and a few other friends, I'm here at the Hamu's house watching SportsCenter and writing up the news. Mmm...

Shuffle!
For once, I'm going to write about an H game that Fred likes and I haven't seen yet--as you might be able to tell from the title, it's called Shuffle! Comptiq, a magazine Seiya subscribes to, reports that Shuffle! will be getting a TV series and a PS2 game in the upcoming months, completing its transformation to the mainstream in a big way. Is it just me, or is every H game turning into a TV series these days? Kakyuusei 2, Hani Hani, now Shuffle...

Oh, by the way, in case you needed proof of Fred's fandom of Shuffle, take a look at Erika's Chapter 5 costume and Shuffle!'s uniform design.

"Voting blues"
Monday - October 11, 2004
[Dom] - 09:30:00
edit 10/12/04: Thanks to all those who gave me contact information for my formerly local registrar of voters, I have all the info I need. Woo! I can gets me a stickaaaaaa~

So it's the 11th already, just a few weeks until election day 2004 here in the states, and I haven't received my voter pamphlet in the mail yet. Which means that I'm not sure if my Change of Address form actually fixed the address on my voter registration or not--does anyone know if I can check where my current polling location is, and if it's not too late to change if the electoral process still thinks I live in Berkeley?

Even though my state traditionally votes overwhelmingly Democrat, I still feel an overwhelming need to vote--my parents went through far too much on their way to America for me to shirk the right to have a voice, however small, in politics. So, whoever e-mails me first, thank you.

Oh, and RIP Christopher Reeve, who once made us believe that a man could fly, and spent the later years of himself convincing us that a man could walk.

October 12, 2004
So I had a restful holiday yesterday, which consisted of finally beating the last Duel Savior scenario (which sure was stupid... after 5 cool stories, the last one was just dumb) and recuperating from an exhausting weekend. Back to "work"!

Aselia the Eternal
For those Nippon Ichi fans out there, they've put up more information on their upcoming Eien no Aselia game. A pretty standard "one guy, lots of girls" adventure game with RPG elements, combat parties are made up of an Attacker, a Defender, and a Support character.

I'm kind of disturbed, though, the Game system page says that after choosing your party members, you don't actually control them in combat. Which just seems boring to me. I've never been a fan of non-interactive games--which is why I don't play very many visual novels, for example--and Aselia looks like it might shape up to be that kind of game. Oh well.

Edit: Okay, I've just been reminded that Eien no Aselia was once an H game that I saw for about 2 minutes before we all decided the game was boring and stupid. I KNEW I'd seen it somewhere before, but just brushed it off as having seen Nippon 1 stuff... but nope! They're taking a bad H game and putting it on the PS2 minus porn.

"Nine Breaker"?
For all you mech fans out there, From Software has released a demo movie full of crunchy goodness for you guys to enjoy. The music's pretty bad, but at least you get to see robots running around and blowing each other up, which, really, is what life is all about.

"Yay, Canada~!"
Monday - October 11, 2004
[Piro] - 14:47:00
UPDATE: Ok, it just figures. We open up sales to Canada, with PayPal being the only option to pay by and... PayPal goes effectively offline. (grumblegruble) If you tried to order but were unable to because of the problems with PayPal, please let us know. :( We'll let you know when things seem to be working again. (sigh)

------

Or was that "Blame Candada?" I forget. ^^;;

I'm workin on a rant for today (i swear, i'm gonna get a rant out of my head if i have to use a blunt object to smash it out) but one thing i did want to do was let our Canadian readers know that we are no longer discriminating against you - the Megagear store is now accepting Canadian orders! Before you order, please make sure you read the shipping policy, and also be aware that we can't accept credit card from non-US banks, so if you want MT stuff, you'll have to use PayPal. rawr. :)

What about shipping to the rest of the world? We're workin on it, and this is the first step. I'll go into some more detail about that later. For now, you Canadian folx can go get stuff. Only if you want to, of course.

If you have any problems ordering, be sure to email me, i'll take care of you. :P

(hold off on the Capture the Bear shirts... there are some problems with this bactch - gomen!)

"Gero gero"
Wednesday - October 13, 2004
[Dom] - 15:00:00
Waaaay back at Anime Expo 2001, a few friends, some of whom just happened to run A-kon's infamous Hentaifest, got together one night and decided that instead of the traditional "get drunk and vomit" plan, we'd try something new. Well, at least new to those of us who didn't run Hentaifest.

We all gathered up on what we dubbed the SPOON room (named after the then-president of the Society for the Promotion of Otaku-Oriented Needs) and, well, watched animated porn so that we could make fun of it. The only way to watch porn is in groups, in my opinion--it's pretty useless except as a comedy outlet, so this was perfect.

Imagine my surprise when, three years later, one of the DVDs we watched that night comes back to haunt me as a TV series. Clean, even! It turns out that in the intervening time, they've released a few more episodes of this "Magical Canan" thing, which surprises me because it started off as a rather cheesy and obvious Card Captor Sakura ripoff, and as far as I know, stayed that way.

Who knew?

So yeah, in 2005, Magical Canan is going to be airing on Japanese TV, making me wonder what the new "schtick" of the show is going to be--after all, ripping off just one show can only take you so far, and minus porn, that's at least 8 minutes of extra content an episode that someone has to write, instead of sticking "PORN HERE" in the script.

Strange, how things can catch up to you...

No news today, I just got back from voter registration and have some more things to take care of--I'll have some tomorrow, though.

October 14, 2004
So Ultima Online: Samurai Empire went gold today, and it would probably damage my friendship with Greg Dean if I didn't mention it--especially since Game Watch has a very amusing interview with Jonathan LeCraft and Anthony Castoro that involves them trying not to look like idiots while wearing hakama and toting katana--and failing miserably.

While I can't translate the whole thing right now, there are a few questions in there I want to point out: first, after mentioning the usual "Ninja Scroll, Seven Samurai and Musashi" references, they joke that they hired a Ninja Consultant for Samurai Empire. And, Jonathan LeCraft likes Pocky.

Gee, I wonder why
So if you've never heard of Za Conbini/The Conveni (AKA The Convenience Store), that's because it's one of those games that gets marked off as Distinctly Japanese in its weirdness. You... run a convenience store. That's it. And so I always wondered how an online version of the game could possibly work after they announced The Conveni Net Battle.

Guess what? It didn't. As of December, they're giving The Conveni Net Battle the axe, putting an end to perhaps the most ill-conceived idea since the millions of attachments to the Genesis.

"Strange hobbyfellows"
Friday - October 15, 2004
[Dom] - 12:30:00
I'd like to preface this quick little rant by noting that Fred has put me in charge of compiling the MegaTokyo FAQ before the new site comes up (which will, yes, have the Characters page if all goes according to plan). If you would like to see whether or not your question is going to be answered in it, please check the forum topic where I'm asking for question submissions.

Anyway. It's always weird for me to find out that anyone in my family shares my hobbies--I mean, I'm a Geek's Geek, given my penchant for card games (whether collectible or not), anime, manga, comic books, and sundry other pursuits that you tend not to associate with a family full of bon vivants.

I mean, my interest in sports is easy to share with family--we're all in a fantasy football league with each other, and we get together for dinners and poker nights pretty frequently. But my nerdier pursuits, I thought, would let me be a geek in peace.

Then two years ago, my illusions came crashing down when one of my cousins, who I'd grown up with and gone to school with, came up to me and asked me to autograph his friends' copies of the MegaTokyo book.

We didn't look each other in the eye for weeks.

Then came my niece (in the broader sense--my cousin's daughter), who's now an anime fan and has borrowed DVDs from me.

And last week I found out that another cousin is playing City of Heroes on another server. She's invited me to her supergroup because they want more Defenders. I don't really know what to say to that, "Alright Kiwi, let's go defend justice together" or "That's a little weird..."

Then again, nothing's as weird as signing autographs for your cousin.

October 14, 2004
So Ultima Online: Samurai Empire went gold today, and it would probably damage my friendship with Greg Dean if I didn't mention it--especially since Game Watch has a very amusing interview with Jonathan LeCraft and Anthony Castoro that involves them trying not to look like idiots while wearing hakama and toting katana--and failing miserably.

While I can't translate the whole thing right now, there are a few questions in there I want to point out: first, after mentioning the usual "Ninja Scroll, Seven Samurai and Musashi" references, they joke that they hired a Ninja Consultant for Samurai Empire. And, Jonathan LeCraft likes Pocky.

Gee, I wonder why
So if you've never heard of Za Conbini/The Conveni (AKA The Convenience Store), that's because it's one of those games that gets marked off as Distinctly Japanese in its weirdness. You... run a convenience store. That's it. And so I always wondered how an online version of the game could possibly work after they announced The Conveni Net Battle.

Guess what? It didn't. As of December, they're giving The Conveni Net Battle the axe, putting an end to perhaps the most ill-conceived idea since the millions of attachments to the Genesis.

October 15, 2004
I'm all about retro game music remixed--that's why I bought the Mario and Zelda Big Band Live CD, it's why I have OneUp Studios' The Very Best of Sega, and it's why I'm interested in Team Studios' Sega Ages soundtrack. That Space Harrier and Alien Syndrome groove will bring me back to my childhood... hopefully. But I still can't found the Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack for a reasonable price.

Tales of Not So Ugly As I Thought
I'll admit it. When I first saw the art for Tales of Rebirth, I thought it was going to be the ugliest RPG since... I dunno, since something very ugly very long ago. But after seeing some screenshots of how the game actually looks when it's not on a poster, it's definitely not ugly. So I apologize to you, Tales of Rebirth. Now stop putting burning paper bags on my porch.

"the death of my mech"
Monday - October 18, 2004
[Piro] - 12:00:00
[UPDATE: uh... i didn't plan it this way, really.... remember how i said we were having trouble getting the Pentel Graph 1000 for the store? We placed an order for them literally over two months ago and had pretty much given up on ever seeing the darn things. Maybe writing this rant triggered something because a box of them arrived today ^^;; So... guess what we have available in the store now? ^^;;; Just to clarify, the Graph 1000 is what i've been using since i started Megatokyo four years ago. The Pilot S5 is the one that i picked up in japan this year and just broke (the one pictured above). The Graph 1000 is the one we have in the store, and we've bundled it with some erasers and lead to make a pencil set. We do NOT have the Pilot S5. *I* don't even have an S5 anymore, at least, not yet :) - piro]

------

It is with a heavy heart that i must report that i have recently suffered a personal loss. It is like a good friend has passed, someone i relied on, someone i was comfortable with, who would listen to all of my angst and anger and joy and sadness and never complain. Someone who always worked for me (well, except for those few times it got jammed) It feels like such a short time since we first met, and now... my friend is gone. My favorite mechanical pencil... broke.

It happened the friday before last. I was sitting down to draw in my sketchbook, not doing anything out of the ordinary. I was scribbling my usual scribbly garbage and i simply did what you do with all mechanical pencils -- i just pushed the button to advance the lead. I do this countless times, almost without thinking. It is a natural movement for a mechanical pencil, and almost never is there a problem. This time, however, catastrophe struck. The plastic threads at the front pencil where the nib screws into the barrel of the pencil gave way, breaking in a way that no glue, duct tape, or crying and weeping will ever fix. My favorite pencil will advance lead no more, ever again. ;_;

How to continue? This pencil had traveled great distances with me, and i've always made sure not to loose it. It has been used for many, if not all megatokyo drawings in the past eight months. It was the most comfortable mechanical pencil i'd ever owned. Going back to what i was using before feels awkward, out of place. I suppose i will get used to it (actually, i'm pretty much used to it already, but lets keep that hushed for a moment). Still... Why not get a new one? Am i saddened that i can't replace an old friend? Do i not want to dishonor the memory of my 0.5mm Pilot S5 pencil?

Er, no, that's not quite it. I just can't get this damn pencil in this country, that's why :P

It really was an 'oh crap' moment when my Pilot S5 broke. People often ask what kind of pencils do i use, and you'd think i'd have tons of them to choose from, but the honest truth is that over the past four years i've really only used three mechanical pencils to draw Megatokyo. Actually, four, but i had just started using #3 when i got the Pilot pencil while in japan. But i am starting this tale in the middle. For those suffering from m4d boredom today, i shall present the Tale of Piro's Pencils, in brief fullness.

I've always been a big fan of mechanical pencils. They are pretty much standard issue for architecture students and draftspersons, and i've had many over the years. While most drafting these days has been replaced by computer aided drafting (CAD), back when i first got out of college i used mechanical pencils quite a bit in the production of construction documents, floor plans and elevations. The move from hand drawn plans to CAD documents and the effort that went into giving them some modicum of spark and life is another rant. Lets just say that I got used to using .5mm pencils with HB lead early on. (note: I am purposefully leaving out drafting lead and lead holders. After years of sharpening and jabbing them into Styrofoam to clear away the graphite, i found that i could get the same range of line thickness with a mechanical pencil so i abandoned them with glee.)

Most mechanical pencils you come across are not designed to last forever. Most are disposable, school-grade things that are nothing more than bic pens with pencil leads in them. If you draft a lot and you were willing to spend some money on your mech, things get a little better. Plastic pieces are replaced by metal barrels and resin bodies. Most 'better' mechanical pencils cost from $8 to $20, so it's not like they are THAT expensive, if you use them a lot.

One problem I have with most 'drafting' pencils is that i really think pencil manufacturers think that draftspersons have no feelings in their fingers. I think that they assume that most of us have fingers that are so callused that we need the equivalent of metallic sand paper to keep the pencil from slipping out of our hands. Seriously, look at the knurled metal grips on most pencils. Then look at a nail clipper, and look at the nail file. Its the SAME THING!!! I'm sorry, but if you draw a lot, your fingers starts to hurt. I have quite a number of very nice mechanical pencils that are nice, some very heavy, some just difficult to use. There are reasons that there are so many kinds of pens and pencils -- what's comfortable for one person is not for another, and vice versa. You just have to buy the darn things till you find one or two that you really like and doesnt remove layers of skin with use.

A few months before i started drawing Megatokyo, i was in a drafting/art supply store somewhere in Detroit (a Charette, i think) when i picked up a .05mm Pentel Graph 1000 FOR PRO (PG1005) (i'd link to to the thing, but it's one of those goddamn flash sites - go here and enter the product catalogue, and look under "automatic drafting pencils" and pick "Graph 1000") . It's a sharp looking thing, black barrel with a matt finish, all metal parts, and one particularly nice feature - rubber grips. I liked the thing enough that i picked up a .3 and a .7 mm version as well (tho i rarely ever used them). I never realized how much i'd be using that Graph 1000, and i think that one of the best things about it is that it is a simple shape, yet its comfortable and doesn't bite into you with use. I also happen to know that parts of this pencil are made with brass. Why? Because over the course of two years i wore off the black paint on the edges of the barrel. :P

Oh, a small side note on line thicknesses with mechanical lead. You might think that you need a dozen or so pencils with lots of different thicknesses to get various pencil widths. Thats not true. There are few people that draw with the pencil straight up and down, drawing with the flat of the lead, drawing a -true- 0.5 mm line. Most of us draw at an angle, and as we draw, the lead develops a angle (take a look for yourself). the way you control line thickness is that you can use this 'angling' of the lead to vary the thickness of the line you are drawing by turning the body of the pencil. for thin lines, you turn the pencil around till you have a sharper line (sorta like a chisel), then turn it again once it flattens out. You'll feel and see the line thickness and learn how to work with it. Need a thicker line? flatten out the angle more, and draw of the line several times, to each side of the line till its the thickness you want. keep a piece of paper nearby that you can scribble on to sharpen the point when you need it sharpened. You'll find you can do a lot with that, and varying pressure, with just simple .5 mm HB lead. That is seriously all i ever use.

OK, back to the pencil story thing. I used that original Graph 1000 a LOT. The first two years that's pretty much all i used. It dawned on me that I really should get a few more of these pencils, just in case the thing broke, or i lost it. The biggest problem with the Graph 1000 is that it's not that easy to find. I had to order it from Michigan Book and Supply (you can try to do the same at a local drafting supply store or you can just wait till we manage to get some for the MegaGear store - we're having trouble getting our hands on the darn things -_-). Right now, i have three 0.5mm Graph 1000s. The original one, the one i used till February of this year, and a newer one that i haven't used that much (the one i am using now.) So, what about the pencil that just broke on me?

When i was in Japan in January, i didn't do a lot of shopping. Most of the time i was either at AX Tokyo, or wandering around the city investigating places where Megatokyo takes place (yes, i still need to show you all of those pictures :) and just general poking around. Since i was going up to Sendai i didn't want to load myself down with stuff. When i was in Sendai, i wandered into a Stationary store. Now, i gotta tell you, the Japanese have a far better selection of pens, pencils, stationary, and other things that we do here in the states. At this store they actually had several Graph 1000s - just no .5 mm ones. In japan they have .3mm, .4mm, .5mm, .7mm and .9mm lead to choose from. Good grief. I almost got a .4 mm version, but then i realized that it would be next to impossible to get lead for it here :(

What i did do was look at some of the various other pencils, just to experiment. One that picked up was a Pilot 0.5mm S5 series mechanical pencil (HPS-50R-TB3/TB5). What I really liked about this pencil was it was one of the few that had a large rubber grip, and it had a slightly larger diameter than the standard mechanical pencils i had been using. I didn't really think about it when i bought it, it was one of several i tried. It wasn't until i started using the pencil that i found that i tended to like it better than all of my other pencils.

There are only two problems with this pencil. The first problem is that much of it's construction is that it is made of plastic, which (as i sadly discovered) can break over time. This wouldn't be a HUGE problem, if i could just buy a new one. Sadly, Pilot does not sell these pencils here (we looked into it) so, that's the second problem.

It's not one thats THAT hard to overcome - my friend Uguuu-sensei has already picked up some replacements for me and will be shipping them to me from Japan. Also, if you look at that link, you will see that there is a S10 series of pencils that Pilot makes that seems to be all metal construction but... notice the grip. It's that knurled metal again. (grumble) Why can't they have the nice comfortable grip on the metal pencil??? GAH! (stabs at things).

So, as i wait for my pencils to arrive, i've gone back to using my trusty Graph 1000 pencil. As much as it may sound like this is a bad thing, its not. This is a great pencil, and i've been doing ok work with it, so i have no issues with it. :)

Boring, huh? Next i could go into a brief history of my experience with erasers, but that might result in people stabbing their eyes out in boredom (for the record, i use two click erasers - a Y&C Eraserr (two 'r's) and a Papermate Tuff Stuff eraser stick. The Y&C is a soft, general eraser, and the Tuff Stuff one is stiffer and better for tight areas that need erasing... oh, and i also use a Pentel Hi-Polymer brick eraser, and a Factis Extra Soft for very wide areas that need...)

(cough)

Sorry. ^^;;

"Student Body Left"
Monday - October 18, 2004
[Dom] - 13:30:00
It's so weird going to a Cal game and actually having it be crowded. I mean, back in 1999, when I was a freshman, I could wander out of the student seats when my voice got tired (yeah, I'm a wuss) and sit with seiya in the Young Alumni section with no problems. Now that I'm a Young Alumni myself, it seems like there aren't many empty seats at all. Being ranked in the top ten will do that to attendance, I guess, but... it's still weird.

I mean, it's a mark that Seiya and I are old Cal fans when the team's up by 21 points in the fourth quarter and we're still somehow worried that Cal will blow the lead and lose out of nowhere. It's happened before, and it could happen at any time, right?

Man. I never knew how good I had it being a 49ers fan from birth (I was born pretty much the year the dynasty began, even). But after four-plus years in the crapper for Cal, things look up--and it's a great feeling. I wonder if this is how Carolina Panthers fans felt last year.

So anyway, Go Bears! ...but please, people, find your proper seats and stay in them, don't keep climbing over me in search of them.

October 18th, 2004
So the requisite "inspidly catchy song" of the new season is Moon Phase's Nekomimi Mode by Dimitri from Paris, which you can hear here. And, from the 19th to the 31st, some poor schmucks at Shibuya Center on Center street in Shibuya (thanks to Curt Sampson for correcting my brain fart... sorry about having to live near streets full of speakers) have to deal with it playing as the BGM, nonstop. I pity them so much... the song will never, ever leave their heads.

"Bloody hell"
Wednesday - October 20, 2004
[Dom] - 10:30:00
Edit 10-20-2004: SWEET MOTHER OF CRAP, they did it. That's nuts. People will be talking about this for generations.

I'm going to preface this by saying that I am neither a Red Sox fan nor a Yankees fan. I dislike any time anyone talks about the overhyped curse, and dislike the fact that those two teams have payrolls higher than the GNP of several nations.

But Curt Schilling going out there with sutures to keep his ankle tendon in place? With his foot actually bleeding every time he pushed off the mound?

That's crazy. That's stone-cold, frothing, babbling, get that man a straitjacket crazy.

Wow. Just wow.

I would feel amiss if I didn't point out that the American version of Taiko no Tatsujin comes out next week. It's called Taiko Drum Master in the US, and the song list for the amusing little drum game is as follows:

Licensed Rock/Pop: ABC; American Girls; Are You Gonna Be My Girl; Bowling for Soup - Jimmy Neutron Theme; Girls & Boys; I'm A Believer; Killer Queen; Lady Marmalade; Love Shack; Material Girl; My Sharona; Rock the Dragon (Dragonball Z Theme); Slide; That's The Way (I Like It); The Impression That I Get; Toxic; Tubthumping; Walking On Sunshine

Classical: Beethoven's Symphony No. 5; Carmen Prelude; Foster's Medley; Hungarian Dances No. 5; Symphony No. 25 in G Minor; William Tell Overture

Namco Original: Don Rangers; Dragon Spirit; Katamari on the Rocks; Ridge Racer; Soul Calibur II Brave Sword, Braver Soul; Taiko March; The Genji and the Heike Clans

Even though I'm afraid that Lady Marmalade is more than likely the crappy Moulin Rouge version and not the REAL one, and that Rock the Dragon is a deal breaker, I still like the quirky gameplay of the drum game. So check it out, if you weren't already planning to. Maybe it'll surprise you like Katamari Damashii (Katamari Damacy, same thing) did.

Starship Operators
So according to the December issue of Dengeki Daiou--which, if you're wondering, has hosted Gunslinger Girl, Azumanga Daiou, and Sekihiko Inui's Comic Party--Mizuno Ryou's Starship Operators is going to be animated.

You may know Mizuno Ryou as the writer for Mahou Senshi Riui/Louie the Rune Soldier or the Legend of Crystania. If not, you more than likely know him as the writer of the Record of Lodoss War. Which makes it interesting that he's been doing Starship Operators, a science fiction series. I haven't been able to keep up on the Starship Operators short stories, given that they've been running in Dengeki Animation magazine, which I hadn't heard of until a few minutes ago. But given Mizuno Ryou's track record, I think I'll give Starship Operators a go when it comes out...

"small problems"
Friday - October 22, 2004
[Piro] - 19:39:00
Just a quick and important announcement regarding Canadian and International customers for the MegaGear store:

A few weeks ago we enabled taking orders from Canada and have sent off many packages to fans up north. Unfortunately, what we have been seeing is that some customers have been charged exorbinant brokerage fees by UPS - wide ranging fees for essentially the same service. We think that this is not acceptable, and we feel that we must find a better solution. So, for that reason, we are going to disable Canadian orders until we resolve this issue, which will probably involve shipping thru other carriers.

International shipping will always have some fees and extras associated with it - we can't control what your country my add to the cost of a shipment by way of tariffs or taxes. What isn't fair is unreasonable brokerage fees, and this can be changed, by using different carriers.

If you are one of the many Canadian customers that have ordered from our store, first i would like to say thank you, and i would like to apologize for any unreasonable fees you may have had to pay to get your stuff. I think that in the process of solving this, it will get us a step closer to being able to ship worldwide in the near future. Thank you so much for your patience.

"Continued sports craziness"
Monday - October 25, 2004
[Dom] - 13:30:00
Sorry about the brief pause in updates, this Saturday was the 100-day mark since my grandmother's death, and oddly enough, my family full of Vietnamese Catholics holds ceremonies on that date just as if we were Buddhists. Strange, but hey, it's a cultural thing, who am I to knock it.

This weekend also marked a Cal win over a pathetic Arizona squad. Two World Series games that were very sloppy, yet still won by the "Why not us?" Blood Sox (that's what I'm calling them for the rest of my life, and you can't stop me).

Oh, and did I mention that it's my birthday tomorrow?

Busy time of year, with a few more Anime Insider articles due. But that should be all taken care of by next week. On to the news! br>

October 25th, 2004
So later this week, Gakuen Alice starts airing on Japanese TV. I would talk a little about Gakuen Alice, but honestly, I've barely read the manga I own, since it's been on loan for so long.

However, Gakuen Alice amuses me in too many perverse ways for me to let it pass without comment. Y'see, I like to call it the "Shoujo X-Men". And I'm not joking.

Y'see, the main character, Sakura Mikan, and her best friend Imai Hotaru, transfer to a school for Alices (thus the name, Gakuen Alice). What are Alices? They're people who have special abilities beyond that of normal humans, and to develop their abilities, the principal of the school is gathering them up.

See what I mean? I can't help but be fascinated by the Bizarro World version of X-Men, especially since they're all ten years old. One of them controls fire, one invents, one... emits animal pheromones...

But c'mon, how can you not be morbidly fascinated by that?

Sentimental Cancellation
You may know about Sentimental Graffiti from the Media Blasters release of Sentimental Journey. If you don't, well, Sentimental Journey was based on a Saturn/Dreamcast series of games called Sentimental Graffiti, which was basically a stalking simulation. Fans of the game might call it something more euphemistic, but the main character basically went back to one of twelve places he'd gone to school before and stalked a girl who'd fallen for him when they were kids. Then in Sentimental Graffiti 2... well, Sentimental Graffiti 2 has perhaps one of my favorite premises in dating/stalking game history. Because the main character becomes road pizza.

Anyway, the Sentimental series is continuing with Sentimental Prelude for the PS2, and comes out on October 28th. However, it has little to do with the Graffiti games other than the name and the company putting it out. Meanwhile, a game called Sentimental Graffiti Saikai (Reunion) just got cancelled, most likely because Interchannel finally got the memo that the Dreamcast died long ago.

Poor, poor DC...

October 26th, 2004
Thanks to all for your birthday wishes! A few of you asked how old I am. I ain't tellin'.

But I am saying that my favoritest console controller ever, the Japanese-style Sega Saturn controller, is currently being sold for the PC for a limited time, and online only. Mmmmm, USB Saturn controller. That feeling like it was made for my hand... the ease of access of every button, including Start... the D-Pad that seemed to be caressing my thu... okay, I should stop there.

"Busybodies"
Wednesday - October 27, 2004
[Dom] - 12:00:00
I have a deadline for Anime Insider and a job interview tomorrow. I'm booked! Sorry, but I'll get back to ranting and writing news tomorrow. In the meantime...

Take a look at the character designs for the upcoming PS2 Shining Force game. Is it just me, or does the main girl REALLY remind you of FFX's Yuna?

"Hallow Spirits"
Monday - November 1, 2004
[Dom] - 12:30:00
Vote, dammit! Or at least don't complain if your candidate(s) do(es)n't win!

Hope everybody had a happy Halloween! I had quite the hectic weekend, starting on Saturday with Cal's absolute destruction of ASU (We're #4 in the AP poll and the BCS? Whoa!). Then Sunday was for a little Halloween party/joint birthday party with Hamusutaa, where I felt really old, yet oddly at peace with it. I was handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, and for some reason I was okay with giving out the candy in costume instead of running around in costume getting candy from people. I think it's because I'm going to die soon, like Sturm in the Dragonlance novels or something.

There were two highlights of that night, though. The first was, since the get-together was pirate themed, we watched the obvious Pirates of the Caribbean, but we also watched The Princess Bride, which is only really a pirate movie on a technicality. The highlight of the movie was when Mandy Patinkin talked to Cary Elwes about what he would do when he met the six-fingered man, and everyone--EVERYONE at the party recited it along with him, with such reverence for the line that this exchange happened:

EVERYBODY (including Mandy Patinkin): Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
ME: Amen.
(silence)
EVERYBODY (but not Mandy Patinkin): BAHAHAHAHAHAHA

So that was definitely cool. And then, later in the night, we showed Ed the joys of Katamari Damashii/Damacy, which led to this morning's exchange:

ed: I was a little weirded out at first
me: everyone always is
ed: then after awhile I coulda sworn I felt drunk
ed: and now I kinda want to get a copy. go figure
me: hahahaha

What's ahead this week for me? Well, The Incredibles, but other than that, I get to relax for a while. Hurray.

Okay, off to level up to 39 so I can join my mentor on the Eden trial. Later!

"vote early..."
Tuesday - November 2, 2004
[Piro] - 02:17:00
Even those of you who are not from the US are probably aware that today, November 2nd, is the day those of us here in the states choose who will be our President for the next four years. I have been very quiet about this race, and even now I don't feel it my place to air my political views. I, unlike some people and organizations, do not believe in the promotion of my own political views by any means nessisary. I fully respect *everyone's* right to their own opinion. I have seen a lack of respect for mine. I have been told that it would be preferable that I didn't vote because I was voting in a way that they didn't agree with.

I don't care who you vote for, but make sure that today you vote. Make your own choices, don't let others choose for you. Use your head. Even if you choose NOT to vote, it better be a conscious decision not to. That too is a choice.

I'm sure we could all use a break tomorrow night with some bit of humor, but I have a different treat in store. I've been working on a new poster design for the MT store, and I'm going to try to finish it up tomorrow, and hopefully it will be worth posting as a DPD. So far, I think it looks pretty good. I've been experimenting with some things in photoshop, and so far it hasn't crashing into a disaster... yet.

"care packages"
Saturday - November 6, 2004
[Piro] - 20:31:00
[shameless megagear store note: we underestimated the demand for the Pentel graph1000 in Piro's Pencil Set in the MegaGear store (they, er, sold out the day i linked 'em). It took a while to get them back in stock, but we have em now, and hopefully we have enough to take care of everyone. So, if you were interested in the set, get em while we have em :) - piro]

-----

[Bear with me today, it's a -long- rant. Guess I had a lot of stuff bottled up that I wanted to talk about. Just so you don't have to slog thru the entire thing if you don't want to, I've broken it up so you can get to the more important stuff, like the ALA poster info, MT Volume 3 info, international versions, new stuff in the MegaGear store, Child's Play etc. If you're tryin to kill some time, please read on, otherwise scroll down to see if any of the topics interest you ^^;; - piro]

[update made to the MT translation projects, added some links - piro]

Long rant on art and music and stuff

First off, I'd like to thank everyone for the feedback on the Kimiko poster. Here's what the full image looks like after some revisions. It turned out OK, but I've been suffering from an artistic problem that many of you also share -- the desire to produce work at a certain level and the struggle to attain it.

For me, it's even more daunting because I think people have very high expectations of me. Almost every flame I get contains some comment along the lines of "now that you are doing this full time, you should..." People seem to always forget that I started out as an amateur, and in most ways I still am, I've just done a lot. My growth towards someday being an 'artist' is a wandering path that isn't really effected by the terms "professional" and "full time." Being hyper-sensitive to criticism, it's understandable that these expectations weigh on me, but my real motivation to improve in areas that I feel am artistically weak in is a personal one -- I just want to be better.

There's no question I am stronger in some areas than others. Artistic expression is all about trying to communicate stuff that is in your head in ways that are effective. The medium I am most effective in is pencil drawings combined with dialogue in a sequential art medium. Gee, that's the core of what I do -- that helps. Not that I don't have problems with it (there are plenty -- I've set a lot of goals for myself to improve upon, mostly in writing, organization, managing story flow, etc, but that's another rant. :) but working on those problems is all about refining what I am already fairly decent at. The real challenge is improving in areas that I am not quite so good at.

I love music. There's no question I am very influenced by what I listen to. Music is as much a guide for my moods as the images I scatter about my desk and on my walls. I've been a fan of electronic music and it's related equipment since I was in high school. I always dreamed about owning a synthesizer and I've always been fascinated by synth gear and audio equipment. While other boys were hanging Sports Illustrated swimsuit models on thier walls, I was taking apart Korg catalogues and hanging images of synths on mine. I wanted a Korg Polysix so bad I could taste it. The fantasy of owning a Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, or an Oberhiem OB-Xa was beyond any sort of realization. I used to create equipment lists and even drew equipment layouts. I was so sad that I wasn't appalled by Geoff Downes "wall of synthesizers," I thought it was cool (yes, I grew up in the 80s, yes I was an Asia fan, Strange Advance was my favorite group, and I wanted to be Thomas Dolby. Yes, I was watching when MTV first started. Yes, I was really lame.)

I'm digressing, but the point of all this is that I have no musical ability. I tried for years to learn to play keyboards, but I could never even master the simplest basics. As much as I liked the equipment and the things that you could do with it, no matter how hard I tried I could never learn enough to justify owning a synth. Not only that, but I knew that even if I were to get the basics down, I would have far to go before I could create things that would actually be meaningful to me.

I'm not a frustrated musician who turned to art because he couldn't play. I was drawing just as much as I was ogling music equipment. I was never able to go anywhere with music, but with art I was able to keep motoring along for some reason. Art just happens to be what I was best at expressing myself with, I guess. Just because you are so strongly influenced by something does it mean that you will be able to do it, or even enjoy doing it if you could. I could not overcome the technical barriers of playing music, but over time I overcame many of the technical barriers of drawing. I still toy with the idea of getting a little keyboard and music software for my mac, but I always stop myself because i don't have the skills to express myself with music even if I had the equipment, and I am daunted by the learning curve. Learning skills takes time and commitment, and you have to choose your battles carefully. (Shaggy, if you say "aww, just buy Reason and play with it, you'll like it!" I'll smack you :P)

I don't think music creation is really in my future, but there are learning curves that I do want to pursue, and have been trudging along with for a while now. Finding my coloring and rendering style is one of them. I think I'm fairly well with the basics of coloring. I can color things well enough to be able to call them 'colored' and even dare to sell posters of them. The challenge is to move past the basics and move into my own style, to develop my own expressive way of coloring. I look at Yoshitoshi Abe's renderings and wish I could render the way he does, but inside somewhere there is my own way of doing it, and I'm trying to find it. My pencil work is kind of my own way of doing things, and my own way of expressing things. I just need to find a style that expands upon that, with color. The Kimiko image is one of the best I've done so far, but its far from where I really want to be. It's just a step in the right direction. Steps are good.

the ALA poster

While I don't expect the Sad Kimiko in Snow image to be some kind of runaway best seller, I do hope some of you like it enough to buy it. Speaking of posters, I forgot to mention that the Megatokyo @ Your Library poster for the American Library Association (ALA) is now available for purchase in the ALA store. I got several last week, and already have one hanging on my wall. They don't look half bad. :) Not only can you get the poster, but there are Megatokyo bookmarks too (in packs of 100 so you can, like, pass them out to friends and strangers and stuff). All purchases go to support the ALA and its reading programs. Oh, also of note - the Poster is featured on the cover of the ALA catalogue too. I guess they're happy with it :)

Megatokyo Volume 3

As you should know by now, the next Megatokyo book, Volume 3, is due to be released in January, 2005 - that's just two months from now. I still have a lot of work to do, and Young over at NekoBox has once again stepped in to help me by doing all the initial file processing to make them ready for print. I need to go over each one and edit, clean up, extend images to bleed zones, etc. I also have to finish the extra material for this book, which will be a 6 to 8 page Endgames comic (yes, a comic, not a short story). The time table is pretty challenging, but I really hope to add something special to this book, not just a bunch of random crap. This book contains some of what I feel is my best work (chapters 3 and 4 - chapter 3 being the good part :P), so I'm looking forward to it's release.

International Megatokyo Stuff

Some of you may be aware of this, but Megatokyo has been translated into a number of languages on the web. The German MT crew and Italian MT crew are the most active and best organized efforts I know of, and the .de site is actually built around a system that allows for easy translation of the comic into any language. What is going on is more than I can cover in one paragraph, and I will hit upon again in the near future, but lets just say the efforts of MT fans around the world is mind boggling. :) It's amazing what these guys have been up to ^^;;;)

[i've been hearing from the other translation projects that i knew i was forgetting - please excuse my poor addled excuse for a brain, i didn't omit anyone on purpose! I will do a full rant on the whole translation thing as soon as i get a full handle on where things are at. This rantbit was just a start.

BTW, i didn't make it clear that there IS a online french version as well as an online italian version. Special thanks to the French and Italian translation crews, and forgive the braindead omission :P - piro]

What you might not know is that even the books have now been translated into at least two other languages, and more are on the way.

Eidalon recently released a German version of Megatokyo Volume 1, and will soon be releasing Volume 2. This version was coordinated to a great extent with the German MT fan team and it's translations. I understand there are a few translation errors in the final book, but what is exciting is the fact that I even know this, not speaking any german myself. It was the first effort we've made to try to coordinate fans and publishers in another country. It's an interesting endevor, to try to make sure a free web version can coexist with a print version in other countries as well as it works here in the states.

Another translated version of MT is a Polish version released by Mandragora. I have already received several emails from fans who have found the book, and they seem to be quite happy with it. :) There is a Polish fan who wants to start a translated online version and I will be getting back with him this week to give him the go ahead to get started. The fact that the publisher is more than happy to provide the translated version they have done to help create this says a lot about how open the rest of the world is to this kind of medium.

Honestly, the whole international thing is something I boggle at. There is so much potential there, and so many fans who want to do things, but I'm only one person and trying to coordinate it has been frustrating for those fans. I apologize for that, and as things continue to grow in the print arena thanks to the efforts of Dark Horse, I must get become more proactive in helping MT fans around the world do their stuff. Multilingual versions of MT are definitely something you will be seeing more of, including, I believe, a French version sometime in the near future. Whee :)

Me and My Mech: followup...

If you look at the rant image above you'll see a number of things. First, sitting on a rather interesting envelope put together by Uguuu-sensei (you have no idea how often I get packages from japan that are just shopping bags taped together with postage slapped on them :) you can see my fine new selection of Pilot G5 mechanical pencils. Yay! It's nice to be using them again. I'm a bit torn now because I've been gettng used to my Graph1000 again... gah. Also, you will notice a S10 in there (it has a metallic grip). It's a nice solid pencil, but I don't know if I like it better than the S5s. Its almost too heavy. (I'm getting finicky about my pencils. This comicking things must be addling my brain).

Also in the picture you can see a scattering of other things, including some Copic markers and one of my Graph 1000 pencils...

MegaGear Store Stuff

I got another bag of art goodies this week in the form of a small sampling of markers and pens from Copic. Why would Copic send me this stuff? Well, because as of last week Megagear is now a approved Copic Dealer, which means we will soon be carrying the stuff in our store :) We should be receiving some holiday packs for the store pretty soon. I'm also waiting on my own set, so I can experiment more with the things -- I don't like to sell stuff in the MG store that I don't use a lot or think is worthwhile. I know a lot of people who love these things, and I've been wanting to experiment with Copic markers for years. Computer stuff is great, but there's something to be said for using actual media too. What are Copic markers? Well, they are a high quality marker system used a great deal by illustrators and manga artists in Japan. The sketch markers are particularly nice (and what we'll be carrying). The sets are kind of expensive, but the markers are not disposable - you can replace the nibs, refill the inks, make your own markers by mixing your own inks, use an airbrush attachment... all kinds of neat stuff. There's even a "How to Draw Manga" book that covers methods of coloring with them.

Other stuff in the MegaGear store? Indeed. We just put up the new TPCD Zilla shirt (which I particularly like for some reason -- It is the result of some random sketching one day :P). Also you will find that the Megatokyo B33r Stein is back! I've re-done and revised the image from the original beer stein that we offered years and years ago. It's pretty cool, so, like, buy one. Works for beer and even coffee, if you are a SERIOUS coffee drinker. Yeah yeah, I know, we missed Oktoberfest. Who cares? It's always Oktoberfest in Largo's mind.

Just one of the things we'll be bringing you as we close in on the Christmas season. More as we finish 'em.

Megatokyo Website ver 4.0

Some of you may be wondering what happened to the new megatokyo website that I said should have been up and running last month. It's actually very close to being done, the delays that keep surfacing have to do with my inability to provide template material and direction in a timely manner. ^^;; It's looking real good, and we should be getting the first phase of it up and running to replace the current site real soon. More specific info next week.

Other important stuff: Child's Play

One thing I am very late in prompting you folks to become a part of is from those crazy guys over at Penny Arcade, their charity drive for games for sick kids - Childs Play. Last year everyone was amazed at what the PA community could do by purchasing and donating games for sick kids at the Seattle Children's hospital. This year, they are doing it again, and this time they have expanded it to include children's hospitals across the US.

So, for all of you who read Megatokyo because Penny Arcade has no goddamn story, head on over and lets make sure us anime/gamer fans are heard too, ok?

We here at Megatokyo have some charity drives of our own that we will be launching hopefully by the end of the month. While no where near on the scale that the PA nutjobs are doing it, it's a start for us, and we'd like to see what the MT community can do. :)

you've reached the end of the page...

Ok, now that is one long rant. Good grief. Well, I had a lot of stuff I wanted to cover, and I keep having this 'I have so much to cover I have no idea where to start so I end up writing nothing' kind of thing going. Bleah. :P If you read the whole thing, go get yourself a cookie, and for gods sake please tell me you aren't THAT bored. :) Hopefully this will help break this damn rant block I've been suffering from all year.

Ya, right :P

"Braaaains"
Monday - November 8, 2004
[Dom] - 00:00:00
So over the weekend, the Golden Bears gave me a few more gray hairs with their lucky squeaker of a win over the Ducks. I think I aged a year or two during that game, honest.

But that wasn't what set my imagination racing this weekend. What really got me thinking was a CNN article about scientists growing a rat "brain" in a dish that can fly flight simulators. And after thinking about various Evil Genius-style ways of using a brain that can pilot an airplane, I thought up whole hordes of ways I could find a rat brain in a dish handy. For example!

Rat Brain Chauffeur: This one would be especially awesome, since I wouldn't have to make small talk with it and wouldn't have to pay it--I mean, what does a brain in a dish WANT, really? It's not like a brain in a jar, where it used to be a Nazi and either wants a body again or wants to take over the world. Maybe I could pour some stimulants into its container or something.

But the rat brain chauffeur would also be awesome not just for the laziness factor, but for the "wtf" factor I'd get from onlookers. I mean, what if it got a speeding ticket? Can you just imagine the following scenario?

OFFICER: (walking slowly toward passenger side window) Sir, do you know exactly how fast you were--
(sees brain in a dish turn toward him)
OFFICER: WHAT THE !#%& IS THAT?!

That'd be the cost of research right there.

Rat Brain Spam Filter: Since it seems like all I do when I open my inbox these days is delete about 200 pieces of spam and see maybe one or two real e-mails, I might as well let the rat brain do the deleting for me. I mean, the error rate wouldn't be THAT high, even if it just deleted everything. Sure, the pattern recognition on rat brain dishes is horrid so far, but I would never fear about the rat brain wanting to enlarge its non-existent penis or chest. So at least those wouldn't get through.

Rat Brain Video Game Player: The way I see this one is, I could just loose the rat brain on the FPS world in general. If it can fly a flight simulator, it can play Counterstrike -- some of the levels feel like navigating a rat maze anyway, and it would never complain about aimbots or anything like that. Its rudimentary brain would only be capable of l33t speak like "pwnz3d" or something anyway.

It'd at least be better than I am at CS (note that I'm the kind of gamer who gets motion sick from playing FPS games, thus why I don't write about them much).

Rat Brain Forum Moderator: Wait, we're employing a rat brain to moderate our forums already, never mind, on to the next one.

Rat Brain Fantasy Football Manager: Given some of the boneheaded moves I've made in Fantasy Football in the past (Why, WHY did I drop you, Ryan Longwell? For MORTEN ANDERSEN! Who's, like, 70!), replacing me with a rat brain wouldn't be all that bad. Maybe it'd be smart enough not to waste a fourth-round pick on that bum Aaron Brooks, and grabbed Javon Walker on the wheel or something. Not that I can complain that much.

Rat Brain Marching Band Member: Hey, it'd know more songs than the USC band (rimshot).

Rat Brain Pet: Related to the Chauffeur and Game Player ideas above, why not keep the rat brain in a dish as a pet? It wouldn't eat much beyond what's probably a protein-rich solution in its container, and unlike playing with more normal pets like dogs or something, it could play ESPN NFL Football with me and not slobber everywhere.

Yeah, I think I've thought way too much about what to do with my very own rat brain in a dish. But isn't it pretty to think so?

November 9, 2004
Wow, it's been a while since I did this. Sorry about that. Been a little busy lately. Aaanyway.

Catching up with old friends
So after talking with a couple of old GamePro co-workers over the last week, both of whom now work for GameStar, it turns out that they're running game blogs. Wat, the "panites" fan of the bunch, is running Bikini Gamer, which is rather obviously aimed at the male crowd (he points out the Dead or Alive alarm clock rather prominently, where I chose to ignore it, for example). Sean, perhaps my favorite person in the industry to talk to, lends his amusing little sketches and profuse wit to Normal Mode. So go read what they have to say, says I!

Gunpla strangeness
I've been up against some weird forms of fandom before. Hell, in a way I AM a weird form of fandom. But soon is coming out a book of "Gundam Photography", which is, well, Gundam photography. Teruhisa Tajima took Gundam models, put them in little dioramas, took pictures of them and ended up with a 128-page photo book. That's more than a little scary, if you ask me...

"breathing deeply"
Wednesday - November 10, 2004
[Piro] - 21:00:00
I've told Seraphim that if I ever produce another chapter with 97 episodes that she is to beat me senseless with the chapter 5 printout. :) I'm not going to talk about Chapter 5 today, I just want to breath a bit. :P There were a lot of problems with chapter 5, but I think it came together ok towards the end. Now I need to apply what I've learned from looking back at chapter 4 and 5 to see if I can do a better job with chapter 6 and future chapters. I'm actually going to touch on some of this in a rant later this week or early next week, but for now I am digging in and getting busy with finalizing development of the next chapter.

I was originally going to do a 6 episode Omake for the end of this chapter, but I've decided to move forward with chapter 6 instead. There are a few reasons for this, the biggest of which is that there is some momentum going now that I am loath to bring to a halt. The second reason is that I need to focus on the 8 page Endgames manga short I'm doing as an extra for Volume 3. I have two weeks to finish it, and it's going to take every bit of that. :)

The schedule for the next few weeks, then, is this -- I will be doing a nice little DPD for Friday, a series of Omake next week (Seraphim check, Piro the Homicidal Web Comic Artist Reads Poetry and then Kills Lots of People with the Jagged Shards of his Smashed iPod, etc) and then we'll launch right into Chapter 6 on November 22nd. I'm a little overloaded right now with Book 3 stuff, chapter 6 development, MegaGear store stuff... oh well, it keeps me out of trouble. :P

Speaking of the store, the Piro Pencil Sets are back in stock. When I first linked them a few weeks ago, they sold out pretty much immediately. It took two months to get the first order in, so I was worried that it would take a while, but the distributor came through and got us a bunch more pencils far quicker this time. If you missed out the first time around, we have the back in stock again. :)

The Kimiko poster is at the printers and I should have a proof of it to review tomorrow. That should be fun, it's always fun to see these things in a larger format. I'm figuring that we should have them available sometime next week, at which time I can be depressed about how boring people think it is. :P

This is hardly surprising, given how late I tend to be with things, but I'm just now getting started with the 2nd part of my Japan trip blog. I've been digging through my trip pictures, and I've started to write about my tour of Megatokyo Tokyo. It makes sense that I am revisiting this now, as I work on Chapter 6 - my January Japan trip will influence the next chapter far more than chapter 5. I'll post that rant, with pictures, as soon as I finish it.

I have a copy of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha sitting here, taunting me. No, I don't like stuff like this. Nope. No idea why Cortana thinks I do. It'll be easy not to watch it. Yep. Not gonna watch it.

Nope.

"Contact"
Monday - November 15, 2004
[Dom] - 12:00:00
Sorry for not updating over the last week. There was a little confusion over who was going to fill in the rant spot, and I also came down with a sudden case of employment.

Yeah, I seem to have picked up temporary employment at Konami, either as a game tester or a localization tester--I applied as a localization tester, but we'll see if that's how they actually use me in the upcoming projects. Which means I'm going to be quite busy in the next few weeks, though hopefully I will still be able to write for MT pretty often. If not, well, it's a tester job and it will pass fairly quickly.

Anyway, on with the news--I want to point out the new Nippon Ichi game, and some "peach girl" thing getting animated.

November 15th, 2004
A couple days ago, Nippon Ichi pulled the lid off of its next strategy RPG, Phantom Kingdom. As you can see from the characters page, the designs are extremely similar to Disgaea, with notable changes to the male mage, who no longer looks like a half-naked idiot, and the female warrior, who's now wearing some real clothes--damn hippies! (said the Cal graduate).

The schtick of this game (like Disgaea's geo panels and Phantom Brave's Confine system) is that you can store items and characters inside buildings, then "Invite" (IE reconstruct) those buildings onto combat maps. Enemy forces can also have buildings, which you can take over and steal from. So basically, they've added something vaguely like base assaults to the game, as opposed to "see enemy, hit enemy over head". Which might be welcome, we'll see how it goes.

Phantom Kingdom is scheduled to come out "some time in 2005", and naturally, is for the PS2.

Peaches 'n' Cream
Ueda Miwa's Peach Girl is going to be turned into an anime, according to Bessatsu Friend. So you fans of the TokyoPop release can be sure that within the next two years or so, it'll be in the US--probably less, honestly. I don't subscribe to Bessatsu Friend, so I don't have any more details yet, but I'll see if there's anything interesting that comes after this announcement.

"disabling"
Monday - November 15, 2004
[Piro] - 16:09:00
Bleah. crunch times just suck, you know that? I started working on a rant, but I really need to get back to drawing. Bleah. :P I have to have the majority all of the MT book files to Dark Horse by friday, and the remaining files (including this 8 page Endgames thing) by friday of NEXT week. Ugh.

Also, the bit about replacing the shopping cart software for MegaGear... I'm actually in the middle of trying to coordinate and do that as well this week. Yeah, it never rains but it pours. It's going smoothly, but it still takes time. One of the big benefits of moving to a different cart system is that it will help us deal with shipping issues that were preventing us from being able to ship internationally. Thanks for your patience, please bear with us.

Actually, I've been enjoying this Endgames project to a certain extent, because I'm experimenting with different ways of working, trying to improve upon the way I put things together. Rather than doing things one entire page at a time like I usually do, I'm doing all the drawings for all 8 pages at once. It's kind of interesting to see how much easier it is to do the drawings when there isn't a full stop at the end of each page. It's kind of refreshing, actually. This is just one of the frames. I figured that I'd post it, just for fun.

we have two more omake planned for this week, a Seraphim Check, and... something else :P With luck, we'll start chapter 6 on monday of next week. I'll keep you posted in case I have to change that schedule a bit.

Oh, and I just have to say this: "nooo!!!! how could you do that to DeeDee!!!! you bastard!!!!" (if you have no clue what I'm talking about, read it from the start. It's good. :P)

Ahem. Ok, back to work.

"Leg work"
Wednesday - November 17, 2004
[Dom] - 00:30:00
Is today's SGD funny? Maybe, but probably not. Is it true? Yes, all of it. And that's what I wanted out of it. Consider this me taking a break from trying to be funny and just trying to tell a little story...

And if you're wondering, the con was called Anime Destiny and the website is/was here.

My friends and I got honorable mention for our "skit"--which, to be honest, was just me prancing around and singing "I'm Yuber, thanks for asking!", the product of sitting around at noon after spending 17 hours working on a costume, then asking "so, uh, should we do a skit?"

I go to work in about 7 hours--so good night.

"perpetual stereotypes"
Monday - November 22, 2004
[Piro] - 11:49:00
[please note that this rant is refering to Monday's "Leave it to Seraphim" comic, not today's Chapter 6 comic. - piro]

I've already received several angry emails this morning berating me for taking cheap stabs at their country by bringing up boring, stupid stereotypes. Before I say more, I will say this - if you were offended by today's comic, I sincerely apologize. It was not our intent to make fun of anyone but ourselves. That is why the stereotypes are rather lame and silly. I understand that some people do get the point made in the last frame and understand what the point is, but are offended anyway... If that is the case, then I think you are being unfair.

The whole point of the comic deals with how even those of us who may feel we are enlightened and really smart about the rest of the world are often victim of built in stereotypes that we may not realize we carry around. Most of the time these stereotypes exist because of something we saw in a movie (for example, for most Americans, the limit of their exposure to things Australian is Paul Hogan and The Croc Hunter). Sure, these are easy to spot stereotypes, the ones used in todays comic (which is why they were used. These were not used to gain cheap laughs, please stop emailing me accusing me of this). What this is is a jab at the ignorance of people who feel that they understand the world based on limited knowledge.

It's one thing to simply think that Canada is always cold because, well, its up North (please. I live in in Michigan, we have the exact same weather patterns.) It's one think to think this. Imagine how bad it would be if Americans decided that we needed to do something about all that cold weather in Canada, for the good of the Candian people, to free them from the perpetual cold?

Japanese comics are full of bad stereotypes about Americans. For example, there is that wonderful Kimagure Orange Road episode where Kyosuke and Madoka are terrified because they are in America, and that the people around them might have guns (we all carry guns here in America, right?) Then there is the rather irritating instance of the blond, buxom, cowboy-hat wearing, American flag bikini wearing model in the Sgt. Frog manga. All Americans wear cowboy hats, right?

The roundabout point of all of this is how I sometimes wonder how the Japanese feel about what Americans and the rest of the world think about them based on what people see in Anime and Manga. I'm not talking about the crowd that thinks Japan is just a nation of Pedophiles and oversexed fiends because they only see the sex and violence in anime, I'm talking about us, the more enlightened crowd. How do they feel when foreigners look at Japanese school girls based only on what they see in anime and manga? Are we capable of understanding this? Aren't these sterotypes too?

Personally, I'm more worried about what the rest of the world thinks about Americans than what us silly Americans think we know about the world. Even me, who I always like to think is very open minded, has found time and time again that there was some small stereotype that I believed that I never even realized had been imbedded in my brain. Makes you wonder sometimes.

Anyways, I am sorry if this offended anyone, I really am. No one has more respect for the rest of the world than Sarah and I do. MT really DOES have a global readership, and we are poking fun at ourselves here, not the rest of the world.

"store blip"
Saturday - November 27, 2004
[Piro] - 17:55:00
A quick note to anyone who received an error while attempting to purchase stuff from the MegaGear store this afternoon... the problem that was causing the error has been fixed, and the store is up and working again. It is one of the many reasons we are replacing this software as soon as possible. :) I apologize for not being able to fix this sooner, i was busy with book 3 work. :)

Anyways, happy shopping, i'll try to pull some rantage together later tonight.

"Helmet safety"
Monday - November 29, 2004
[Dom] - 00:30:00
Oof. Sure has been a while since I ranted last, and I apologize for that. I said that I would put up content on this site every day, and it's a huge failure on my part to leave this space open for 12 days, job or no job. I would blame City of Heroes, but I can't stay mad at it for very long. It just looks at me with those cute little puppy eyes, then shoots laser beams out of them...

So anyway, what's been up lately? Well, I've discovered what Hell is while working at Konami--it's having to edit English that's been translated from Japanese, which in turn was translated from [German, English, Italian, French]. I've been doing alright so far, though, and I can't complain about the fact that my bank account is showing positive numbers instead of a string of minuses. So hurray on that front.

On another note, I have before me a completed JET application, which I need to send off tomorrow ASAP, so it'll get to the Japanese embassy on the 1st of December. I didn't originally plan on applying, but the urging of family and friends finally got to me, so I'm contemplating spending a year or two in Japan. It would create some interesting material to put in this rant space, that's for sure.

Anyway, I plan on putting up more random news and reviews soon--just let me get settled into my new schedule and get to level 50 in City of Heroes, then I'll be free to go! I swear!

"The east side"
Wednesday - December 1, 2004
[Dom] - 00:30:00
People who know my gaming habits know that I game in what I call "itches". I'll get a gaming itch in the form of a particular genre I feel I want to play, and I'll scratch it with my favorite game. For months, or at least a few sleep-deprived weeks.

For example, when last I got the RPG itch, I played the first Knights of the Old Republic for a solid week and a half. Delayed my graduation, KotOR did. (Well, that and some issues involving a hospital and a roommate, but I prefer to blame KotOR, since it's a funnier story). When I wanted to play a strategy game, I decided that I was going to play about 120 hours of Disgaea. So I did.

Usually, these itches come up every few months, and then stay scratched for a few years. For example, the last console RPG I really played before KotOR was Final Fantasy X in Japanese, which was around 2001 or so. The last strategy RPG I played before Disgaea was Shining Force III, which was long before that. I won't even tell you about the gap between Streets of Rage 2 and Dynasty Warriors 3...

Anyway, this rant is about my Shooter Itch. The last time it was scratched was in 1998 with Radiant Silvergun, one of the few Sega Saturn games I still own--and proudly so. I bought it when it was $50 and I'm keeping it, demmit). Six years later, and I still hook up my Saturn just to play Silvergun from time to time, just like I still have my Genesis plugged in so I can play Streets of Rage 2. And six years later, and I still sometimes wake up in a cold sweat from the sound of my own heartbeat--get to the last boss and you'll know what I mean.

Six years, and I haven't really played shooters much. I played Mars Matrix from time to time due to my roommate at the time loving the game, but I always went back to Silvergun once or twice every year, because the design was so great. I especially liked the part where you didn't have to run around grabbing power-ups, and could just play the game.

Yet a few months ago, some friends who follow the doujin game market (you know, stuff like the Tsukihime-based Melty Blood, the silly little Super Cosplay War Ultra, and their ilk) recommended a shooter called Touhou Eiyoshou - Imperishable Night to me. It was a remarkably complex game by Team Shanghai Alice, and it was hard as all-get-out, too. I was intrigued, but it still wasn't convinced that I'd play it very much.

Enter Touhou Youyoumu - Perfect Cherry Blossom, a prior effort from the team. Much simpler than Imperishable Night, and just right for my purposes. Oh, and still insanely hard. I've been working on it for about a month now, and still haven't managed to beat the game on Easy mode with one credit. I've gotten riiight up to the end, but I haven't quite touched the promised land. I'll do it some day, I swear. As long as Sister Prismriver and her band don't take out too many of my lives before Youmu comes along with her ability to slow time.

Anyway, given that I've been splitting my time between City of Heroes and Perfect Cherry Blossom over the past few months, I guess you could say that I recommend you find Perfect Cherry Blossom from any place willing to send you doujin games. It's good stuff.

"The lightning round"
Friday - December 3, 2004
[Dom] - 13:00:00
I'm about to head up to Greg Dean's place for the weekend, since it's Cliff's birthday, so this'll be quick. I think I'll just give you guys a whole lot of links to chew on :)

First, there's an upcoming line of toys from Konami called Mecha Musume. These are no ordinary mecha girls - they're not bridge bunnies, pilots, or professor's daughters. No, they're... girls dressed up in outfits based on World War 2 mecha. As in Zero fighters, and what looks like a modified Crusader Kyushi Shinden, and the Valentine. Things like that. Man, the lengths the Japanese marketing machine will go through to put cute girls in things...

For Tamaki Nami fans (she sings a bunch of Gundam SEED and SEED Destiny songs, if you didn't know) and Square Enix fans alike, Square-Enix has put up a promotional video featuring snippets of Tamaki Nami's new song "Fortune", which will be the opening song for Radiata Stories. Anyway, to get to the movie, you need to visit the official Radiata Stories site, enter the flash-heavy website, click on "gift", and then click on the "large" or "small" button on the lower right, which will launch a pop-up Flash application, which unfortunately enough, requires Internet Explorer to work. But at least the song is decent. And Radiata is made by the same people who made Valkyrie Profile. Oh, and I should probably mention that the movie's only up until the 7th.

In Moetan news, the quirky little "english vocab builder" is busy promoting Moetan II, the upcoming two-volume set. Ink-chan, the main character of the story portions, is going to be appearing at Tora no Ana in Akihabara. I'm not TOO surprised by this, considering they had a Moetan Shrine up when Seiya and I went there, and costume events are commonplace in Akihabara. But still, it amuses me. Especially since Moetan II was on the topseller list for Amazon Japan recently.

In art news, I've recently discovered the (clean! Yay!) work of Dragon Land, which just does awesome art. I need to pick up as much of their stuff as possible... that man can draw.

Okay, off to get ready for birthday festivities!

"shopping and whining"
Sunday - December 5, 2004
[Piro] - 11:24:00
Just a bit of a heads up - this week is going to be hell. I've already received notice that this week has rented a huge front-end-loader and is planning to run me over with it repeatedly.

I'm sure by now most of you are used to my whining, and honestly I think I've been doing a pretty good job of keeping the whining to a minimum this year, so indulge me for a bit. You got 3 comics last week, I think I earned it :P

Why such a gloomy outlook for the week? Well, I wouldn't call it gloomy, lets call it 'realistic'. :) I'm very close to being done with all of the content for book 3 except for the 8 page endgames extra. fixing up all the files for book 3 ended up taking 2 weeks longer than I planned, which has put me way behind the eight-ball on getting Endgames done. Finishing this is gonna be a real challenge, but I think I can do it..

One thing I don't want to do while under the gun here is skip on Megatokyo comics. Too often has this website been sacrificed because I was busy trying to catch up on this or that project, or traveling, etc. I'm tired of that. I'd rather the book be late than skip lots of comics just to finish it.

Of course, now that I've said that, I am worried that I might have to cut one comic this week in order to be able to get everything done. I sorta might not have a choice. I can say all I want that I'll just be late with the book, but, well... its not a good idea to actually blow deadlines like that if you can help it. Dark Horse has been really good to me, and I really don't want to do that to them. I value Tim's health :P.

In the end, the way to deal with this kinda hell week is simple -- you just have to slog your way through it. I dealt with worse crunches before, and I can handle this one. I'll just have to try the positive attitude approach. :)

There are a number of things that I have moved to the back burner because of the current crunch over the past month. One is the new Megatokyo website - there are a number of things that I need to do, and Larry is just waiting for me to finish them so that he can go ahead and finish. If I had been more on top of things earlier in the year, the site would have been done months ago, but oh well, it'll be a nice treat for January/February :) Seraphim and I have also finished setting up new software for the MegaGear store, but we've decided to not launch the new store software until the end of the month. It's just too busy right now.

Speaking of the store, yes, we have more Flapdoozy bags coming. Hopefully they will be in this week. We have to custom order the bags (YakPak doesn't make them for their own line anymore, but they still make them for us if we give them enough time to have them manufactured. yakpak rocks :)

Anyways, sorry for the whiny sounding update - I just came off of being sick for the past few days, and I'm only today starting to feel better. Nothing like being sick to make you even further behind when you are in crunch time :P Oh, and if you for some odd reason don't mind my whining, Hawk and Cortana managed to get Movable Type working and threaded into the fredart site, so I do my daily whin-- er, blogging there. I hate to say it, but my daily blog stuff is pretty boring and repetitive, so its more something I do for myself than for others. You are welcome to read it if you like.

Okies, off to work. I promised Sarah that we'd go shopping today (we were supposed to go yesterday, but we never managed to get out), so I better get cracking on tomorrows comic. Aw, crap, that reminds me of another problem.... I gotta figure out what I'm gonna get her for Christmas... uguuuuu.

"Putting the BS in BCS"
Tuesday - December 7, 2004
[Dom] - 23:00:00
I started this week very angry.

I mean REALLY angry. As in "every third word was an expletive, kicking the walls" angry. The summary of my next eight hours of conversation, minus a few hundred curse words:

Cal got jobbed.

Monday... Monday was a little better. Cal re-signed Tedford for another 5 years, assuring that the rumor mill won't churn around him for at least another year.

Then I started reading articles about Cal inexplicably being dropped to seventh and eighth on some coaches' polls.

The next few hours, again: Cal got jobbed.

Dammit.

I feel a little better today. But dammit.

"run away, run away!"
Thursday - December 9, 2004
[Piro] - 13:45:00
First off, some shameless merchandise updates for the MegaGear store. :) The Megatokyo Flapdoozy bags are now back in stock - YakPak doesn't offer these bags anymore, but for us they make 'em special, it just takes a while to get em in. Also arriving today (please feel sorry for our UPS guy, Ken :P) were more Ninj4 hoodies - these are also now back in stock. So if you've been waiting for these to come back in stock, now's your chance to go order em. Oh, we also got more Boo caps too. :P

Also, one last bit of merchandise plugging. We now have three different sets of COPIC markers in stock and available to order. There are three sets - 12 markers, 24 markers and the big 36 marker sets. The 12 and 36 marker sets come with a marker pad, a full set of Multiliner pens and a travel wallet. the 24 marker set is a special Manga set that contains a good selection of markers for manga illustrations, and comes in a travel wallet. They are a little pricey, but these are good markers -- they are refillable and have replaceable nibs, and these are good ways to get started with the COPIC system. I'm proud to offer them in the MegaGear store, and hopefully people like these and all the other art supplies enough that we can expand that section of the store in the future. (yes, I like the idea of being able to go swipe art supplies from the shelves when Seraphim isn't looking ^^;;;)

Ok, enough of that. Both Seraphim and I do want to say thank you very much to everyone who has ordered from the MegaGear store since we launched in August. It's been a lot of fun, and I really am enjoying taking part in getting stuff out to readers. We've been busy, so I've been helping Seraphim pack and ship where I can. We're tired and we're working quite hard right now, but there's nothing else I think either of us would rather be doing :)

(pay no attention to this alternate strip for wednesday...)

As for my other projects, I've hit a few more milestones and managed to get all of the files done for the book with the exception of the Endgames extra. It took me a good two weeks longer to fix up all the files for the book, even with Young's help. What takes so long? Well, one problem with doing this in webcomic format is that I don't have to worry about bleeding past the edges of the frame for the comics posted to the web. For a long time I had a bad habit of not worrying about it at all, and having to extend every drawing that is cut off a good 1/8 or 1/4" beyond the end of the page. Basically, I had to touch up just about every page in the book.

The last part, and the one that gave me a real headache, as usual, was all the freetalk stuff and notes and comments. Ugh. Do you have any idea how hard it is to summarize the first two books worth of Megatokyo into less than 500 words? I don't think its really possible, but I did my best. It's in Tim's hands now, so I don't have to worry about it anymore. :P

That leaves the Endgames extra, which I really need to get cracking on. I haven't been able to work on it for two weeks, and I have to have it finished by the 14th. eep. For that reason, please forgive me as I put together another 4 koma strip for friday. Hopefully you will enjoy the extra in the book when it comes out. (for those of you who don't want to buy the book just for the extra, just read it in the bookstore - it's only 8 pages :P)

Having a working blog over on Fredart is working out quite well for me. I hesitate to blather too much here on the Megatokyo site, especially about all the boring little things that make up my day, but I figure that the Fredart site is obscure enough that the only people who will read that are people who don't mind being bored with my journaling antics. Honestly, if you really want to know just how befuddled a person I really am, reading my blogbits will clue you in. :P

Oh, remember the Front End Loader I was talking about that was gonna run me over this week? Well, it was big enough to get both of us and run us both over, repeatedly. Thanks to marscorp for sending me this image that so well visualizes what has been bearing down on us this month. :P

I'd also like to apologize for my complete and total lack of attention to email recently. There are some emails I really need to respond to, and if you emailed me, I just want to say I'm sorry for not responding at all. I have been getting better lately, but as soon as things really started to get hectic last month I completely dropped the ball. I think I need to make 'read and reply to email' my new years resolution this year...

"Drawin' for a livin'"
Friday - December 10, 2004
[Dom] - 00:00:00
So I got a pretty strange request this week, from a magazine I can't name yet. But they wanted to pay me for art. I don't quite know why, but... yeah, that's not something I'd ever have thought someone would need me for.

Oh well. A check is a check...

But it's still weird.

As for my last rant, some people asked me what I was talking about. here's a link to a Sports Illustrated writer talking about why he thinks (and many others think) that Cal got shafted out of a Rose Bowl bid.

That is all. Carry on!

"fall down, get back up"
Wednesday - December 15, 2004
[Piro] - 14:20:00
Well, I made my deadline. Book 3 is done and out of my hair. yay.

(falls over)

Things didn't quite go according to plan, of course. My goals were to finish the artwork by Sunday night and to put all eight pages of the Endgames short together on monday. Of course, I forgot the fact that while an average comic page takes 5 hours to draw, it takes an additional hour to scan in and clean up the images for that page, and around an hour to put the rest of it together in illustrator (this includes the inevitable script tweaks and rewrites on the fly). that's about two hours of work per page, which means that as of monday morning I had about 16 hours of work ahead of me. I think I understood that but didn't take it seriously enough ^^;;

As of yesterday morning I was still going through and tweaking the script. I decided that I had to redo two drawings to finish things up properly. I was actually quite satisfied with the finished product. There are 62 drawings in total, most of them are on the high end of what I usually do for Megatokyo comics, many have backgrounds, etc. All in all, it's actually up to the quality level of extra material for the books that I've always wanted to do.

I think that being able to journal about what i'm doing on a regular basis over on the fredart site has actually been helpful. I so often feel that people are in the dark about what i do on a day to day basis (case in point, a recent email that asked me pointedly "just what do you DO all day??" as part of a "now that you do this full time, why cant you..." email). It's nice that now, if you really need to know, you can follow my whining and grumbling as i go.

You'd think that finishing this damn thing would give me a sense of accomplishment or something, but it doesn't really. All that really happens when you finish a huge project is you suddenly start thinking about all the other things you pushed aside in order to finish it, so there is a panic of sorts that creeps right in and overwhelms you. An unfortunate chunk of yesterday was spent dealing with some things, and most of this morning was dealing with MegaGear related stuff. I feel as if i'm looking up a mountain that is ready to start pelting avalanches at me.

But now it's time to turn back to Megatokyo and chapter 6. :)

(gets up off the floor)

I had hoped to be done monday so I would have Tuesday to work on getting back into chapter six, but that didn't happen. Ah well, I can say im not a machine and stuff, but jeeze, even a machine would be behind given the raw time it takes to do this stuff :P Aw hell, it's been just like a Finals week, and most of you seem pretty cool with how things have been going. I thank you very much for your patience, and the feedback on the Endgames extra has so far been pretty good, so I hope you all enjoy it. Like I said before, if you don't want to buy the book, that's ok - just drop into a bookstore and read it there, it's only 8 pages :)

Speaking of the book, we do plan on offering pre-orders on book three when we switch over to the new store software at the end of the month. This is in NO WAY like the preorder fiascos that went on with my previous publisher -- these will be actual pre-orders, where we do not charge you at all for the book until we ship it. More info on that when the time comes. ^_^

Ok, time to get back to work. Knowing me, I won't have it up by 1am like I always say I will, but I'll try :P

"Cute little faces"
Sunday - December 19, 2004
[Dom] - 22:00:00
With the holidays coming, I've been concentrating on family and earning enough money to get presents not just for the usual circle of family and friends, but also for my gaggle of nieces, who're just starting to get past the "cute" stage and into the "cute and devious" stage, which I usually like better because there's only so long you can coo at a baby, but children have infinite variations in their wickedness. Heck, one of my nieces got a kindergarten report card saying she had "learned to use her powers for not-evil" (that's when I knew she truly was related to me).

As for the work situation, life is alright at Konami. While life as a game tester is exactly as I imagined it would be--kind of dull, very repetitive--it pays the bills fairly well when combined with my writing, so it's all good.

Speaking of my writing, I'm not sure I mentioned this yet--NewType USA tapped me to do a few reviews for them, starting with the February issue. Looks like I'm movin' on up on the world!

Unfortunately, now's not the best time to be a writer in the industry. As I learned from an old, awesome friend, who worked with me during my GamePro days, more than a handful of game magazines recently folded. Maybe I should switch specialties and become a full-time anime writer...

Anyway, happy holidays to all! I'll be ranting more this week, since I'm probably not going to be doing very much in the pre-holiday rush. MY holiday shopping's been done for a while. What about you guys?

"Holiday plague"
Tuesday - December 21, 2004
[Dom] - 23:30:00
While my holiday spirit remains undampened, my health appears to have been. My lungs spent the greater part of the day trying to migrate south for the winter, and their escape plan involved a mad dash up my esophagus to safety. It's nothing horrible, but this cough just isn't going away. And that's irksome.

But while I was taking care of some business at home today, something hit me. This is going to be the least crowded Christmas ever for me.

Let me explain. When I was young, our family was extremely close-knit, something I'm pretty sure happens frequently in refugee/immigrant families. But we were all pretty much within 30 miles of Grandma and Grandpa's house here in Redwood City, and even the cousins down in Anaheim came up for the holidays, and so Grandma and Grandpa's always was packed to the gills with family. Not counting the San Jose segment of the family, which was large enough that it had its own Christmas separate from Grandma, there were 11 cousins, me, my sister, and the older generation who all gathered for dinner (and mass, but as we got older and more agnostic/atheist, we sort of stopped that part of the tradition) each holiday. And, as we grow up, get married, and have in-laws to drag the kids to, Christmas has been getting a little smaller every year. And this year, we have representatives of the family in Philadelphia, New York, Vancouver, and other parts unknown for their in-laws, and it looks like we've gone from around 24 to 12 for Christmas Eve dinner.

But I guess the core of it is that this will be my first Christmas without Grandma and Grandpa. Well--I don't know if that's entirely true, they hadn't been a true presence at Christmas dinner for years, due to their bedridden states. But I guess it's a sign that time has taken its toll on us.

Hmm. I'm starting to feel old. That wasn't the point of this rant, I was going to talk about something random. Oh well, that's what happens when you write while medicated and listening to the Katamari Damacy soundtrack.

Anyway, since the next scheduled rant date is Christmas, it'll probably be a bit late. On the other hand, I'll also be chock full of energy from playing with my nieces--well, maybe I'll be a bit sore. Loannie still prefers being carried to walking, and at age 3 that's starting to get a bit rough on the arms.

Well, enough of my musings on the continental drift of my family's holiday dinner. I still have presents to wrap!

Hmm. Maybe I should just give them the presents in the box... or make duct tape giftwrap.

Wait, the duct tape seems like a bad idea. I wonder what other lazy ways there are to do this.

"Merry Christmas!"
Friday - December 24, 2004
[Dom] - 00:00:00
Merry Christmas, everyone! Enjoy this picture of a Sad Santa in Snow :P

"Yule Log Joke Here"
Sunday - December 26, 2004
[Dom] - 23:59:59
So it's Christmas Eve, and I am confronted with the purest image for the comedy that is my life. I'd say it's a tragedy, but really, it's not--comedies are tragedies with distance, and to most other people, it's a comedy.

Anyway, there I am on Christmas Eve. A girl is riding me for all she's worth, grabbing my hair and ears and guiding me on with increasing urgency. There're just a few catches:

1) She's fully clothed
2) She's related to me
3) She's five years old

Honestly, I don't mind those three facts too much, since I have Nieces of Cuteness plus 4, and there are few things that make you feel all warm and fuzzy the way piggyback rides do--my shoulders are still reminding me how out of shape I am, though. Also, there are few things that remind me that these children are of the same blood like when she says "Uncle Ga, go up behind Uncle Crazy so I can hit him in the head!"

Ah, youth...

Other than the avuncular rush that was Christmas Eve, my holiday's been blessedly quiet. I've spent the last couple days reading my Christmas gift from my sister, Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". She figures that a spermologer like me (that's collector of trivia, my dear, dirty little readers) would absorb and adore a book of collected miscellania about the sciences and the rich European men who loved them, and she's right. With one exception. The chapter on quantum physics.

I. Hate. Quantum Physics.

It all started a few years ago, when I realized that after the word "quantum", my eyes started watering and I heard this strange oozing noise. It found out later that the strange oozing noise was my brain melting and leaking out of my ears, at which point I gave up trying to learn anything about physics past the atomic level--even Professor Muller's excellent Physics for Future Presidents class couldn't do much to prevent me from curling into a fetal ball at even the merest discussion of quantum anything.

Which makes it amusing that I'm heading up to Lake Tahoe in a couple weeks, not just for the annual family ski trip/gambling vacation, but to meet up with an old friend of mine who's visiting family for the holidays.

He's currently doing his post-grad work in quantum physics somewhere in Maryland.

See? I told you my life was a comedy.

"Keep your mind off"
Tuesday - December 28, 2004
[Dom] - 23:59:59
It's become in vogue among the blog/webcomic crowd to link to organizations providing some measure of relief to the surviving tsunami victims in South Asia. While I applaud this way of dealing with mind-numbingly large numbers like death tolls and damage totals, I'm an obsessive-compulsive. My way of easing my mind of this big is to submerge myself in something else entirely, so I don't think about it. Thus, I will write about something else entirely! (In case you are one of the few people who hasn't yet seen a donation link and feels vaguely like donating something, I found this link via the Wikipedia entry).

Now for something completely different. If you're wondering what the above link is, that's an upcoming "Animal Moe MMORPG". If you're wondering what "moe" is, lemme tell you, it is very difficult to explain the concept of moe. And lemme tell you, Fred and I find the above link very discomfiting, since the immediate upshot of that MMORPG getting released is gonna be furry cyb0r. And nobody wants that (well, except the furries, but they don't count).

Lessee what else...

Oh yeah. This coming weekend is going to be a long one, due to the Rose Bowl BCS screw job Holiday Bowl, which will shortly be followed by a trip up to Sacramento for Real Life's last hurrah in California.

Okay, I must off. I've a pitch to write, a ride to arrange, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped!

"snow for a new year"
Thursday - December 30, 2004
[Piro] - 14:14:00

[scroll down for important news about the Megagear store this weekend - piro]

It's been a few weeks since i've done a rant, and I apologize for that. It's been a busy month, a hellishly busy month, but I think i've managed to do ok. There weren't as many rants as i would like, i missed quite a few comics on account of finishing up book 2, and i still have not dealt with my email backlog, but chapter 6 is well on track and i feel pretty good about it. Not a bad way to end off the year, and certainly not as bad as some previous years. Honestly, I would like to spoil all of you next year. That's my goal. I want to produce as many comics, *good* comics, as possible, I want to have a more 'complete' site, I want to produce more material. I can't promise it (this is me we're talking about here) but that's my goal.

Before i start in on goals and stuff for 2005, i need to talk about the Megagear store. About this time last year Seraphim had pretty much decided that we wanted to branch off on our own and open our own online store to sell Megatokyo and other related merchandise. It was a risky idea, and certainly a reflection of our masochistic tendencies when it comes to overworking ourselves (especially since Seraphim still had two more terms of grad school ahead of her). When we started looking at what we would need to do to do it right, i have to say, it was daunting. Everything from finding and leasing warehouse space to figuring out what software and hardware we needed to run our store, to dealing with inventory to silly things like "what size box do we need to pack mugs in?"... It was quite an experience.

Yet here we are, almost six months after opening in late July and it looks like we actually managed to pull it off, and I'm dam proud of it. I know that some people might think that it would be more efficient if I concentrated on just doing comics and let others deal with things like helping with packing and shipping merchandise, but i dunno. There is something gratifying in helping to pack and ship packages to fans (if you get a poorly packed package, i probably did that -- Sarah is the one who most of the packing and shipping :P). Its the same kinda reason why i like doing drawings for people at cons. The less people there are between fans and people who create the work they enjoy, the less stratification you get, and i think that's a good thing. Megatokyo and Megagear are our little world, and we don't answer to anyone but you folks, and we kinda like it that way :) Sarah and I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has ordered stuff from us. Like everything else we do, we couldn't do it with out you, and we feel honored by the level of your support. Oh, and we hope you've enjoyed the stuff, too. :)

Of course, it hasn't been entirely smooth sailing. Most of the stuff Seraphim set up has worked flawlessly, but many of the things that were my responsibility to do... er, well... (cough). I made some goofs. The biggest one was our software. Even before we opened, we were having problems with it. The software works, and works well enough for us to stay in business, but there are problems with it that are major enough that two months ago we decided that we had to scrap the entire thing and start over. One nice thing about doing this was that we could develop the new site and get that up and going while the old site stayed operational. Our original goal was to switch to the new site before thanksgiving (you know, Christmas rush and all that) and we didn't quite make it. We decided to push it off to the end of the month and do the switch then, and so, here we are.

I think we're ready to make the switch, so to accomplish this and to do end of year inventory stuffs the Megagear store close tonight (wednesday) at midnight, and we will re-open on Saturday, January 1st. Hopefully all the new stuff with work without a hitch and we can roll into the new year with a new system that doesn't give us migraines :) If you order stuff today and up to close, your order will go out tomorrow. If all goes well, you should see the new store on saturday. One of the biggest new features of the new store is that we will finally be able to do international shipping! Yay! (give us a week or so to make sure things are working right, then we'll enable it) Also, we'll have fun things like places for customer shots and stuff. Should be fun.

Speaking of websites, you may recall that last year i mentioned that the new version of the Megatokyo site was under development. The bad news has been that the reason it did not go up back in september was because i had not been able to design the sub pages or provide information larry needed to finish. The worse news is that i still haven't provided this info to Larry :) He's basically been on hold with the project till i could finish my part. The good news is, we're now scheduled to get this thing wrapped up and launched in January. Definitely looking forward to doing that.

Another thing coming in January is Megatokyo book 3. All the deadlines were hit, so according to tim they should have no problem hitting the January 15th ship date. This does NOT mean that you will be able to run out and buy the book on the 15th -- more than likely, most places will see it around the end of the month. We will be offering pre-orders for book 3 at the Megagear store soon after re-opening on Saturday. It may not be the fastest way to get a hold of the new book, but it will be as quick as we can manage.

A small note on pre-orders... these will NOT be anything like the way pre-orders were handled by my previous publisher. These orders will be managed through OUR store, and we will NOT be charging credit cards until the books ship (Paypal orders, unfortunately, do transfer the amounts immediately, but there is not much we can do about that - you will still be able to cancel your order and get a refund if you use paypal). As for when we will ship out the new books, you can pretty much count on the fact that we will start shipping things out the day we get our shipment of books. Seraphim and I are getting pretty good at this shipping and packing stuff, and you'd be surprised how many we can ship in a day, so i think i can say quite confidently that the books will go out pretty quick.

This is getting long, and all i've really talked about so far is next month. i want to seriously talk about my goals for next year, so i'll continue this on friday. (and i have not forgotten the fact that Friday is a big day, and i don't mean just the fact that it's New Years Eve :P)

Till then, enjoy the rest of your holiday (if indeed you got any time off this week) and i'll be back on friday. :)

"pre-goals notes"
Sunday - January 2, 2005
[Piro] - 11:31:00
I find it highly amusing that my rant about goals and things i'd like to do for 2005 is late. I was going to post it on friday, but changes at the store and various holiday stuffs (the 31st was our first anniversary, after all) has forced me to put it aside as i run around with a fire extinguisher. I want to just update you folks on two things real quick, then i need to get back work.

We had intended to re-open the new Megagear store on saturday, but we ran into some snags that I am still working my way through. Nothing serious, just lots of little things that are adding up to a lot more time to fix and coordinate than i at first thought. It doesn't matter how hard you try to account for every possible need, when you jump there is always something that comes out of the woodwork that you didn't expect. I'll keep you posted on the store status.

In the past several months, i've been getting emails from various people saying that they cannot reach the megatokyo site. There are always instances why, for some reason, someone may not be able to reach our servers for various reasons, but i was starting to get a lot of them, and they were talking about not having been able to reach the website for months, and being able to reach it at school, but not from home. We double checked things on our end, and there was nothing we could find that would in any way block these people from accessing megatokyo. The only commonality we were noticing was that all of them were Verison customers.

Ukyo (theCologuys dude :P) did some digging, and spoke worked with some people who were having this problem, and we have narrowed down what it is. Here's what Ukyo asked me to pass on:

'Verizon has blocked port 53 on a number of IP Blocks. This basically means that DNS requests going to any IP's in those blocks don't go anywhere. You can ping the servers and you can access them by IP. That is because only the DNS port is blocked. Why are they doing this? No idea. Can't even get them to admit to it even though so many of their customers have shown clear evidence of this.'

'NetGear router users:'

'Please check yoru DHCP settings on your computer. You can do this under Xp by going to Stat -> Control Panel -> Networks, double-click your LAN icon. Click the support tab, and hit the details button. If your DNS servers say something like 192.168.1.1, or anything that starts with 192.168. That means your netgear is acting as a DNS server. We found that some people can login to their netgear, goto the status tab, and get the assigned DNS server IP's from verizon and use those. To use them, goto the properties of your LAN icon, highlight TCP/IP and click the 'settings' button. You will see the option to 'Specify DNS Servers'. Check that and fill in the blanks. This has worked for most people.'

'For those that this does not work for, please contact Verison and open a trouble ticket. Tell them you and many others are having the exact same problem, and it is a NOC (pronounced "Knock") issue.'

So, in short, for some reason we can't fathom, we are part of a block of IPs that Verision is blocking. We have tired to contact them to fix the problem, but they won't talk to us. So, if you or someone you know is having this problem, please pass this info on to them. Maybe if enough actual customers complain, they will do something about it.

Ok, i've got to get back to working on some Worldship integration issues. >_< Just to give myself some breathing room (and because i know this is what is gonna happen anyway) i'm going to say that the ETA for monday's comic is 12 noon on monday. If everything falls into place today like it supposed to, that shouldn't be too hard of a deadline to hit. But we all know how good i am with deadlines :)

"MegaGear 2.0 now open"
Monday - January 3, 2005
[Piro] - 16:02:00
PLEASE NOTE - WE ARE NOT TAKING INTERNATIONAL ORDERS -YET-

I've been getting lots of email saying that you can't find where to enter international ordering information... that's because its not on yet! Give us a few days to make sure stuff is working and then we'll turn it on! sheesh! ^^;;

---

Ok! the MegaGear store is now open! Of course it took a bit more time than I expected to get everything up and working properly (like that should surprise anyone ^^;;) Feel free to check out the new site and some of it's new features. Oh, and you are welcome to buy stuff. That's ok too. :)

A few things to note... we moved most of the existing MegaGear accounts over to the new software, but not all of them. You can log into your account using your email address. If your account doesn't exist, just make a new one. :) We will begin taking international orders as soon as we are fully re-stocked and are sure the new systems are working without a hitch.

We will begin taking pre-orders for book 3 in a few days, once again once we are sure all the systems are up and running without a hitch :)

Talk about a weight off my shoulders, it's good to have the new store up and running (does a happy dance). Now that that is over with, I need to get cracking on tomorrows comic. Whee :)

"finding kimiko"
Thursday - January 6, 2005
[Piro] - 14:39:00
I actually posted this over on my fredart blog yesterday, but i think MT readers might find it an interesting insight into the wednesday DPD of kimiko, and a little bit about how i feel about my drawings and the some of the challenges of 'finding' a character. I'll edit out the whining and paste the important bits here for your amusement :

---

After about four hours of struggling and getting absolutely nowhere, i decided that the writing was on the wall, and i needed to do a DPD in service day. Luckily, my drawing ability was at least reasonable yesterday. Unfortunately, i also wanted to do a drawing of Kimiko.

I should never draw Kimiko, i haven't been able to draw her in over a year. I'm embarrassed by the poster i made of her (i admit, the entire project was an attempt to 'find' kimiko again, and it was a failure) and alas, todays drawing is also a disaster. I'm not just talking about how off everything is, from her right arm to her chest seemingly being off (after a dozen comments to that effect, i felt i had to do something to fix it, so i tried to add some more shading... it sorta works... the poor thing, no one ever notices her chest unless things are unbalanced :)

What bugs me most is that i can't find Kimiko in anything i draw anymore. I have one little pen sketch i did a few weeks ago, and its as close as i've been able to capture her recently (i scanned it as my rant image above) Maybe it's much like the indeterminate nature of what we really know about Kimiko. All of the other girls in megatokyo are loosely tied to various stereotypes (tough girl, spooky girl, etc) that help define the characters and give visual clues as to how to put them together. Kimiko has no such stereotype by design, and this elusiveness of her nature, and the complexity of her inner workings leaves me as flummoxed as piro himself when it comes to putting her together and understanding her.

As we get closer to the parts of the story where focus involves Kimiko more and more, maybe i'll start to find her. Maybe i never will. Kimiko is the one who will have to tell me, too, at some point, were the story goes. I'm not gonna force her to talk to me, she may pass both piro and me buy, i really don't know yet.

---

Working on fridays comic right now, as well as a rant about goals for Megatokyo and myself for 2005. Kind of a rough start for the year, but there's been a lot going on... at least i didnt disappear like i did this time last year :P.

"The sleeper has awakened"
Monday - January 10, 2005
[Dom] - 01:45:00
Hey gang, sorry I dropped off the edge of the world, but I've been horribly busy this new year. That's a good thing, since it means I'm gainfully employed and having fun, but it's kind of bad because I'm too busy writing to, well, sit back and write.

This is the problem with taking your hobbies and turning them into your job. All I need to suck the joy out of the rest of my free time would be to be a book reviewer and a sportswriter, and poof, all of my leisure time becomes my job.

Anyway, I'm kind of nursing a sore back and neck right now--the back because I'm busy meeting writing deadlines for Anime Insider (and hopefully, Atari will come through with the info I need to write my last story... otherwise I'll miss the deadline), and the neck because either my nieces are getting heavier (possible) or I'm just horribly out of shape in the upper body (likely).

So anyway, a belated happy new year to all--I'll write a proper rant on Tuesday night for the Wednesday strip, and I guess I'll figure something out on Thursday night, before I head up to Lake Tahoe for a family trip to the snow.

I'll try to take sad pictures for everyone, since it's become expected of us.

"California's version of cold"
Tuesday - January 11, 2005
[Dom] - 23:59:59
There are plenty of amusing little witticisms about the weather in the San Francisco Bay Area, from the all-too-true "California, where summer means your lawn is dead and winter means it's growing too fast" to the misattributed witticism "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."

I can't remember where I heard my favorite one, but I repeat it often--"I can't live anywhere else, they have SEASONS there." Working in San Francisco in the summer, you get used to 60 degree days, even as the sun happily shines down on you. Ocean air and an insulating layer of fog will do that, as San Diego residents will also tell you (I know some people whose least favorite phrase is "sunny San Diego", which is precisely why I use it).

What does this have to do with anything? Well, when I was in sunny San Diego a few months back for Comic Con, Fred gave me a Megadustrial hat as a joke, since the weather in the Bay rarely gets cold enough for me to wear the thing without getting seriously uncomfortable.

But now I'm going up to Lake Tahoe, where they actually have winter, and thanks to a few recent storm fronts, have several feet of winter lying around, trapping motorists and delighting snow bunnies.

First time in years that I'm going up to the snow (okay, last year's jaunt in Shimane counts, but I had a hat, at least) and I don't have the damn hat, because I wore it at a New Year's party to deal with 3 AM, one of the few times the Bay ever dips below the freezing point. And I left it there, like a chump.

That's just my luck. Oh well. I still expect to have a lot of fun up in the mountains, but I expect that my ears will fall off at some point, hopefully making me a little less goofy-looking.

Well, I dunno if anything will ever make me look less goofy-looking, so scratch that thought.

"Head games"
Friday - January 14, 2005
[Dom] - 00:47:00
I bought a new hat. I will most likely wear it for two days, then forget it somewhere again. Thus is the fate of hats for an absent-minded writer...

I'm going to write about something relevant in this space eventually, but that will come after Tahoe purges my mind of stress. I've been working a little much lately, given the "job plus freelancing" thing, but I took the job knowing this would happen, so I'm not complaining.

But one thing I do know is that, with the advent of Epic Power Pools in City of Heroes, my secondary character concept of a Soul Sucking Santa has finally become realized. I can make it snow on the naughty, and then I can run up and drain the very essence from their bodies! All while shrouded in darkness and a personal cold front.

And of course, when duty truly calls and evil threatens the land, I can clap my hands and become SENTAI Soul Sucking Santa!

Man, I love City of Heroes for the pure silliness I can wreak.

"more largos??"
Saturday - January 15, 2005
[Piro] - 19:32:00
This is actually a two-part rant, and i want to get the happy stuff out of the way before i deal with something more serious. So, lets get to the happy news :)

I got a msg out of the blue the other day, one i didn't catch, from Largo. "I'm gonna be a dad!" I didn't see the message right away but when i did, it made me blink. It sort of didnt sink in. Then i heard it from some other mutual friends - yes, Rodney, the Great Largo himself, is gonna be a dad.

Oh wow. ^^;;;

Official word is that Rodney and Ruby Caston are expecting a baby. Everyone here at MT would like to say a big 'congratulations' and wish you two the best of luck on this new adventure. :) I'll keep y'all updated on things, but i'm sure you'll find the freshest updates over on largo's own site www.rcaston.com :) Congrats you two!

-- -- --

Now, i want to touch on something that i'd rather not have to do, given the happy news related above, but it's not me who brought this up. Given what another web comic artist has said publicly i feel i have to respond.

Scott Kurtz over at PVP online today posted his own best wishes to Rodney and Ruby on the news that they are expecting a baby. Good stuff, but I wasn't prepared for Scott's parting line:

"Luckily, this is one of Rodney's creations that Fred can't steal out from under him."

What?

You have no idea how shocked, upset, and very... sad this comment has made me feel. Not only is it mean spirited, but by it is a lie. So much of a lie and a falsehood that i feel i have to set the record straight.

Rodney and I had the equivalent of a creative break up. There are always bad feelings in break ups, but you move on. Contrary to what people might think, we were not best buddies who had known each other since childhood prior to starting Megatokyo. We just knew each other via IRC chats and general hanging about,. We got to know each other after he offered to host my Fredart site on his servers. We soon became friends. After a while Rod really did bug me about starting a webcomic, he really thought i could do one, and wanted to do one together. It wasn't very well thought out, really. He owned the domain megatokyo.com, so thats what we named it. We then came up with two characters named after ourselves, i scribbled some stuff, Rod wrote some scripts, and we just randomly started.

While things were good at first, over time we found that we were not working well together creatively. There is no fault in this, it happens. I've never blamed Rodney for this creative 'falling out' nor do i blame myself. Not all creative relationships click, ours didn't in the long run. Megatokyo continued because i was able of doing both the writing and the art for it, and since much of my scripting comes out of the art, scripts really end up having little effect on the final comic anyway.

Eventually, as the story grew more solid and the randomness started to fall away, I found that I was doing the comic more and more on my own. Not all of Rod's ideas fit in to the world i was starting to build. He came up with the concept of "Great Teacher Largo," and i wrote it into the story. Rodney wanted there to be zombie hordes going around and killing lots of people. I refused to do this. Rod was so frustrated with the restraints the 'story' was putting on him that he felt we needed to tie it all up, have a few characters get run over by busses, and get to some kinda place where we could do more randomness. I didn't want to do this either. It's not hard to see how our creative partnership sort of fell apart. Our ideas ceased to 'click'. Eventually i was doing the comic entirely on my own and Rod and I didn't talk that much.

As you might imagine, since there was no real partnership anymore and I was doing the entire thing on my own, I want to move on and officially do things solo. I didn't cut Rodney free, i didn't steal anything from him or trick him out of anything, i tried to do it right. I approached him with an offer that I would either buy out his interest or agree that Megatokyo would end and I would move on to something else. What I would not do is continue with things the way they were.

Sure, Rodney was not happy about this, but neither was I. It wasn't a happy situation all around, but i feel that both Rod and i approached it professionally and we worked together to reach an agreement (a legal agreement, of which the details are private and between Rod and myself. I am legally bound not to say much more about it. Thats the nature of legal agreements). Rodney determined a settlement amount that he felt was fair and i accepted it. Over the course of time I paid it. I have completely and fully honored our agreement.

I did NOT steal Megatokyo from Rodney. I did not force him to accept an agreement, i just didn't want to continue doing Megatokyo the way things were. He could have chosen to let Megatokyo die, and i could have decided not to accept his buy out price (which would have also resulted in Megatokyo ending - I could have switched over to work on 'warmth'). Both of us, however, believed in the future of Megatokyo, we had a lot of respect for our readers. Neither of us wanted it to die. I was willing to take the financial risk to keep it going. Rodney has indeed felt bad about no longer being a part of something he helped start. No one said life was perfect, and we did the best we could with a difficult situation.

I will not accept being accused of 'stealing' Megatokyo. I have said little about it for years, mostly because i felt that the problems between Rod and I were not anyone's business. I am very often slammed and accused of being a horrible, greedy person and that i 'screwed my best friend.' These people don't know anything about what happened between us. It's sad how people fill in the gaps about what they don't know with the worst possible things.

As far as i am aware, both Rodney and I have moved on. In fact, look, he's about to be a dad! Sure, we aren't best buddies anymore, and there has definitely at times been strain between us, but things are fairly cool between us now, i think. Thats what happens when you have a falling out.

Now, Rodney and Scott are good friends, and it's only natural that Scott is going to support Rodney more than he would me. That's fine, i have no problem with that. When there is a break up, each side has friends that support them, and those friends tend to dislike those on the other side. I nor any of my friends have ever talked trash about Rodney in public. In fact, i always give Rodney a good and honest rap at cons and when questions are asked about him. We did a lot of good stuff together.

I've never taken any pot shots at Scott or said anything bad about him either. In fact, Scott had contacted me recently wanting my opinion on some business matters, and i was more than glad to help out. I'm shocked that he'd take a swing at me like that. I feel kinda hurt.

I can deal with and respect the fact that you don't like me, Scott. that's fine. You may even say that its not right that im still doing Megatokyo without Rodney, You may feel that in the end Rodney didn't ask enough. Those are opinions. Do not call me a thief.

(BTW, is it me, or aren't there plenty of examples in comics where writers and artists move on and the series continues? Aren't there plenty of examples of this? How come i'm not allowed to do this? Does this make all of these people who continue work started with others, thieves?)

Rodney was a big part of where Megatokyo came from, but i have since done far more comics on my own than we ever did together. It is different today than it was then. There was some real concern that Megatokyo would not survive our split. I was scared that it wouldn't - we did loose many readers. Sure, some argue that Megatokyo was better back then - thats fine, i can accept that, but some people actually like it better now. Without a LOT of hard work, Megatokyo would not have made it, and still won't if i don't keep working on it. Its not like this is some kinda oil well that just keeps pumpin out the money. If i slack off, things will crash.

All in all, we're doing ok. Is that a bad thing? I guess i'm supposed to feel guilty and ashamed that i was able to make Megatokyo successful in spite of doing it without my founding partner. I hardly think that this is the first time in history that this has happened. Does it make me a thief?

Shame on me.

-- -- --

Thank you for reading this, as full an account of what happened between Rodney and I as I can give you. My apologies to Rod for having to respond to this at such a happy moment in his life - It's not fun talking about such a difficult period. For you readers, I hope you can now understand that things are never as perfect or as simple to define as people like to believe they are.

"Snowball fights"
Monday - January 17, 2005
[Dom] - 09:00:00
Looks like I missed quite the firestorm while I was gone. But given how Kurtz acts and how Fred reacts, I'm pretty confident that one of them has called the other and things are cool again.

But since I didn't get to take a shot at anyone during this whole thing, I'm going to make up for lost time by saying "But I bet they made peace a lot more tactfully than Matt Boyd did". And then I'll make the requisite comment that Kurtz is a [edit].

There. I said it. I feel better.

Tahoe was fun, but what amused me was that when my sister's carpool arrived at the cabin, it was actually warmer in Tahoe than it was when we left San Francisco.

Anyway, I've got to get to work, since I don't work for the gub'ment, so I'll sign off for now. It was a good vacation, though! Very relaxing. Saw some movies. Told people to buy Harold and Kumar go to White Castle so that they make a sequel, and just hung out with family. And that's a good vacation.

Except for the part where I lost $50 to Harrah's, but I kind of expected that.

[sorry to have stepped in and edited that out, dom, but i felt it wasn't right to do that here on the MT site. This is not my opinion, and i'm taking the liberty to edit it out. My apologies to dom, i try not to ever do this - piro]

"tastes like zombie"
Tuesday - January 18, 2005
[Piro] - 13:23:00
I think that rant has been up long enough, and i think it go back into the archives where it belongs. You can go back a comic if you want to read it :)

Thank you very much for all your supportive emails, i very much appreciate how understanding most people are about all of this. It can be discussed because things ARE cool and it's more history than anything. I am, unfortunately, saddened by what i hear has been a lot of flack that Scott Kurtz over at PVP received as a result -- most recently by Dom himself right here on the MT site. While i make no apologies for Dom (Dom is also an outspoken kinda guy who says what he feels, and i support that) i do feel that his angry retort was the kind of thing i don't really want to see on the Megatokyo ite. My apologies to Dom for having to edit his rant, and my apologies to Scott for having it said here.

The trouble with any kind of internet drama is that things always get blown out of proportion. Scott had every right to say what he said -- hey, that's the way Scott is, he gets himself into trouble with the regularity that i whine about things :) Even if it was meant as a joke, it hurt (jokes often can, you know), so in the same way he had every right to say it, i had every right to respond.

I didn't want to toss back vitriolic barbs because, honestly, i have no beef with Scott. My response had more to do with wanting to try to set facts straight in a honest manner, and maybe even maybe give people some more insight into Megatokyo itself in the process. In fact, it gave Rod and I a chance to talk on the phone, and wish him and Ruby congrats on the new baby (be sure to visit his site and give them your best wishes too). What made Scott's comments funny and a joke as he may have intended has to do with how how often these things are said about me. That can make it funny to some people, but it should be pretty clear why i was hurt by it. That's why i wanted to target the facts themselves, not sink into battle mode with another webcomic. I have enough trouble getting comics done without all this.

My response was more directed at clearing the air and any concerns about me and rod than causing any ruckus between PVP and MT. Scott's a good guy, don't be so hard on him. He runs an excellent webcomic :) There is nothing to see here, move along. In fact, i don't know why Dom is bringing up some stuff about some sparks that may have been tossed between Matt and I ages ago. Jesus, that's water under the bridge. It was such a non-issue that it hardly even surfaced anywhere and was more of a misunderstanding than anything. You'd think that anyone familiar with the webcomic 'community' would know that there is no shortage of drama. The drama that i'm involved with is a negligible percentage. Sheesh.

These things are like zombies -- they are dead but exist by feeding on the living. Can we stop them from eating my brain now? Thanks.

And next time i see scott, I'm gonna make him wear some kitty ears. :P

"Censeredzors!!!11!!"
Wednesday - January 19, 2005
[Dom] - 00:30:00
Heh. I come back from work and see a dozen angry messages from Fred on my home machine because of the last rant, followed by a "Oh, you were quoting Kurtz, not insulting him."

I'm a simple man, really. I get angry for very short periods of time, I get frustrated for longer periods of time, but when you get down to it, I'm a mellow guy. That manic little ball of rage you see on stage during anime/comic book conventions? Yeah, I guess he's me too, but not in any prolonged manner. But when I'm angry at someone, I come out and say it. And I don't get mad at people over the 'Net. It's a waste of energy. So just remember--unless I start a rant by saying I'm pissed and want to set people on fire, I'm most likely sitting at my keyboard, drinking a soda and either catching up on some reading, or avoiding work.

Anyway, since I've been censored, I figure I should celebrate it somehow. It's been a while since anything I said was pulled back, and in true journalistic style, I guess I should complain about it bitterly whilst... uh... I dunno, really, I'm new to the whole writing gig. Should I make endless posts about the iniquity of my situation, as a poor oppressed writer who can't earn his wage without being oppressed? And that all should witness the violence inherent in the system, until justice is served on my terms?

Should I drink absinthe and give up on life (I think drinking absinthe and giving up on life are equivalent, but what do I know?), devoting my meaningless, silenced existence to writing bad poetry and trying to get laid?

Should I rail against the man, camping out in Ann Arbor and fighting the power until Fred gets tired of me stinking up his doorstep and gives in to whatever it was we were talking about?

Or should I realize that all of those things require effort, sit back and play video games?

I think you'll know what choice I'm going with.

"contests and stuff"
Thursday - January 20, 2005
[Piro] - 02:38:00
Gee, i think i've done more ranting in the past four days than i've done in months. Maybe i'll try to use the momentum to, like, rant more. Ya, like that'll happen. Anyways, short non-rant for today.

First off, we've opened the MegaGear store to international orders, so if you live outside of the US, you'll find that there is a place to put the country you live in now. w00t :) Also, you'll note that we're accepting pre-orders for Megatokyo Volume 3. The books are technically due in stores February 2nd, but depending on shipping and other distribution stuffs it's hard to say when exactly you'll be find them in stores. Preorders may not be the quickest way to get a book - we'll probably get our books around the same time they show up in stores, but we'll be shipping them as soon as we get them. More details on the Megagear site. Oh, and we've got more Ninj4 hoodies too. Yay.

Second thing is that Dark Horse is running a Megatokyo contest over at the Dark Horse website, which will result in the giving away of many Megatokyo books, Megatokyo ALA posters and even a Flapdoozy bag. Free to enter, winners chosen at random. yay for contests :)

What else? well... lots of stuff, but i'm feeling lazy and i think i'd rather read than write tonight. I think i'll go dig out my copy of Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and spend some time getting closer to the end of it...

"Silicon Valley obstacle courses"
Friday - January 21, 2005
[Dom] - 00:00:00
So I'm sitting here pondering how much of a sucker I am, since I just bought eight boxes of Girl Scout cookies when my niece brought the full brunt of her cuteness to bear on the aunties and uncles via e-mail. Take a look at all it takes to get me to buy something: (note to spammers and people who want me to sell me something: Are you an adorable, energetic and helpful six-year-old? Are you related to me? If you can't answer "yes" to both of these questions, this method won't work for you)

hi aunties and uncles,

i am selling girl scouts cookies. would you like to buy some, please. the cookie choices are caramel delites, peanut butter patties, shortbread, thin mints, peanut butter sandwich, reduced fat lemon pastry cremes, aminal treasure and iced berry pinatas. a box is $3.50.

thank you for helping me. i love you very much.

from your niece,
be tuyet

The girl's going to grow up to be either a con artist or a marketing rep. Not that there's much difference between the two...

"finding my other self"
Sunday - January 23, 2005
[Piro] - 02:14:00
It's almost a standing joke about how fond i am of snowy days. Given the amount of snow we've had in the past few months, you'd assume i was doing quite peachy. Actually, i have been enjoying the snow in those somber in-between moments when i can let my mind wander and drift with the stuff. All the other times, I grumble just as much as everyone else does about it. Like when i tried to dig out the car this morning.

We got a ton of snow last night, enough to convince me it was a good day to stay home, do some straightening up around the apartment, work on some writing, and maybe even watch some anime. Hey, it's saturday, i'm allowed.

While i haven't been watching as much anime as i'd like in the past few years (it's not unusual for me to watch 10 minutes of something, finish it a week or so later). Why? Well, for seraphim and i tend to put in pretty long hours and when we get time to break away from things, we usually watch stuff together, which usually isn't anime. Still, i squeeze what i can in, especially if i'm obsessed with a show. When i watch something, its usually not out of boredom, but more out of obsessive need.

It's kinda sad, but i tend to keep tabs on what playing by reading various anime blogs. Actually, these are great resources if you aren't familiar with them (my faves include momotato daioh, nowhere anime blog, Matthew's anime blog, JASCII, We are mizuho!, Cinnamon Ass, Hontou Ni Taihen desu... there are lots of good ones (Visit the links sections on some of these sites for others.) They can help you not only keep tabs on what's new, but can give you some insight into which shows are worth looking into.

In recent years there have been only a few shows that i've really watched obsessively. One was Haibane Renmei (which still stands as one of my all time favorite series) and another was Kanon... right now, i'm waiting patiently for episodes of AIR to, uh, air (on tv in japan, that is :P)

Even as an obsessive keyfan (a 'keyfan' is someone who is obsessed with the games produced by Key), my understanding of the stories and scenarios in the game "Air" is fractured and incomplete. I never did make it all the way thru the game, and i haven't talked at length about it with any of my friends who have played it (and understand it -- my japanese is so poor that playing these games is an exercise in frustration that i really haven't had the time for since starting MT) I don't know how the series will end, or what will happen. this is refreshing, actually.

Normally when i'm looking forward to an anime i am obsessing over, i'll find out as much as possible about it beforehand (real easy to do if the anime is based on a game) Because of that, i think I won't touch on the story here (you will find much better synopsis's on the web pages listed above) but i will comment on what else i really like about the series so far -- how well it captures the mood of the artwork and atmosphere of the original game.

Now, i enjoyed the Kanon anime immensely. What i didn't like about it (aside from the natural problems that arise when you try to mesh five separate storylines and make the protagonist look like a womanizing jerk, and then you let poor Nayuki... ah, nevermind. I'm digressing.) is that the anime felt quite different than the game. Not drastically, but different enough to be slightly jarring. For instance, the music was different, new, and i felt gave it a different flavor. Not a bad one (i own all the TV anime soundtracks for it) , just... different. The signature OP song for Kanon was missing! Come on, "Last Regrets" has to be one of the best damn songs ever (well, it is! There's only one i might like better, but i'll get to that later :P) and while you could find the melody in the background music, it all just felt... different. Visually, the character designs were slightly odd, too (especially in the face) but hey, if you look at old school Key character designs, they are an acquired taste and can at times look very, uh, odd.

Anyways, one of the best features of the AIR anime is that not only does the music from the game follow into the anime, but so does much of the visual style.

The music from this game is some of my favorite game music ever. Before they released the 2 disk Air Original Soundtrack, i used to just listen to the "orange" disk of the game itself. The first track was a data track, but everything after that you could listen to on your CD player :) 鳥の詩 ("tori no uta" -- a bird's song) was, and still is, one of my favorite songs. It (just like "Last Regrets") is by the disgustingly talented group I've who have cost me lots of money in CDs over the years (the most recent one was IVE05 Lament, which i picked up in the Sendai Animate. :P) If you listen to their stuff you'll recognize that they did some of the tunage for Onegai Teacher too. Anyways, i was very happy to see the game music utilized in the anime. AIR is very much a mood piece, and the music is part of what sets that mood.

The other wonderful thing (at least so far) are the visuals. While there are always going to be obvious differences between the still rendered images from a game and an anime, great efforts are made to pull some of that flavor in. The most notable achievement is the way eyes are rendered. Key has a particular way of rendering eyes, and it comes off very well in the anime. The backgrounds are beautiful, and the sense of place is very well done. I think the voice acting is spot on so far too. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the production values do not slack off as the series progresses. I'm hopeful because once the TV series is done, there will be an AIR movie too...

All in all, i am very happy with the anime version of AIR. I just wish they had taken this approach with Kanon.

f you are sitting here wondering if this might possibly at all have anything to do with Megatokyo, you just have go back a few strips. Almost back to the beginning. There you'll find this strip. Note what game Tsubasa and Piro are talking about. ^_^ the game AIR was just coming out when Megatokyo started. Ever wonder who Misuzu-chan is? this is her:

(yes, and that links back to to the official Air page. Yes, i am a pathetic fanboy :P)

Writing this rant, with all the URLs and stuff, was a lot easier than it would have been a few months ago, working the way i used to write these things (in a simple text editor). This is thanks to a rather nice blogging tool called Ecto that i not only use to post my boring fredart blogs, but i am now using to construct my megatokyo rants as well. While Ecto doesn't directly interface with the MT backend, it does allow me to type this stuff out in a nice environment that is very friendly to sticking URLs in the appropriate places. All i do is copy/paste stuff into my rant entry on the MT backend, and poof, works fine.

The real amusing thing though was finding that the guy who wrote the darn thing not only reads Megatokyo, but reads my Fredart blog as well. Small world, i say. Nice program Adriaan. :)

"Oops"
Friday - January 28, 2005
[Dom] - 13:00:00
<Hamusutaa> Dom! It's been a week! Write a new rant already!
<Dom> huh?
<Dom> oh.

So I've been playing City of Heroes pretty hardcore for the past week, trying to get my Soul-Sucking Sentai Santa to level 50, so I can make an alien squid character. But things keep getting in the way, like the Betrayers of Kamigawa prerelease (Magic: Now with NINJERS), my niece's baptism, and a lot of writing to catch up on.

But I'd like to mention something before getting back into the ranting groove full-time:

I want life to have a soundtrack.

Not just any soundtrack, mind you, I want Chinese martial artists trailing me when I walk around, singing about how to be the perfect Han. I want a strings section and a men's chorus following me chanting "Es ca! Flow ne!" I want Isaac Hayes (or, alternately, the Bee Gees) following me around when I strut down the street.

Is that really so much to ask? And I know people have thought the same way I do--so why do those same people look at me strangely when I sing scene-appropriate songs as I walk around? Why?

The world does not make sense.

"Home fronts"
Tuesday - February 1, 2005
[Dom] - 23:59:58
So I got my JET rejection letter in the mail today--and I'm fine with that. While being in Japan would be cool, I've been reading my most recent rants and blog entries and realizing that I probably wouldn't enjoy being away from my family and friends for more than a month or so. So I'm chalking this letter up as "Somewhat disappointing, but for the best".

I have plenty to keep me busy right now--I'm almost to level 47 in City of Heroes, at which point I'll be able to drain souls... which will truly be sweet (the ability, not the souls--I have no idea what souls taste like).

I also got an invitation to Greg and Liz's wedding, and while my date has apparently been decided for me, neither of us really mind, especially if it makes the two of them happy.

I've also been writing more, not just freelance. I'm trying to get my story groove back--I've had a plot kicking around in the back of my head since college, and it would be a shame just to let it sit there--I also have a half-finished movie script left over from screenwriting class that I don't think I'll ever show anyone, but I'd enjoy finishing it up just for a look at how I've grown as a writer in the past few years... if I have grown at all.

I'll talk more about my freelance writing next rant--in short, I'm doing some writing for Newtype USA, Anime Insider on a regular basis, and have a few stories at Wired percolating around.

But in short, those're my reasons I'm not very sad about not making the cut for JET. So don't cry for me, I'm doin' fine.

"Stasis and love"
Friday - February 4, 2005
[Dom] - 01:15:00
This is a rant in three parts. First, a random City of Heroes note. Second, a musing on the career path I've chosen, specifically, how far you can go writing about video games. Third I haven't thought about yet, but will think of by the time I get there. Maybe it'll be about movies, or something. Or maybe I'll stay on topic and talk about games.

Anyway, so in City of Heroes news, my toon hit level 47 today--meaning that he can now hitch a ride on the Sooooooooul Drain, sucking out the souls of evildoers and turning it into righteous might.

FEAR my soul-sucking sentai santa!

On a much more serious note, I was talking to an ex-coworker of mine, Wataru (Wat, apologies for the possible flooding of your blog). After the collapse of Gamestar, Wat's been looking for work again, and he pointed out to me that video game writing isn't really a growth industry. It's an industry people stay in for love, and as another ex-coworker of mine can attest, sometimes the work beats the love out of you.

I mean, seriously, after making it to Editor, where do you go? Jay, a fellow GamePro alum, is now working for Bioware, and Wat is thinking of making the same move to development--or to marketing, a move I told myself I wouldn't ever try to make (I'll talk about THIS part later).

So really, what future is there in this for me? I once had a dream where I would join the GamePro staff as an associate editor, then gain experience and became a senior editor or something, so I'd make my living writing about video games... and then what? What would I do once I had that quirky little office covered in game posters, action figures, and strange artifacts, from which I passed judgment on games as they flitted through the offices on their way to store shelves?

Wat made Senior Editor and was briefly an Editor-in-Chief, but realistically, Senior Editor is about the highest you can really aim for in this business. The hierarchy, as far as I can tell, basically goes Intern, Freelance Writer, Associate Editor, Editor, Senior Editor, Editor-in-Chief, Vice President of (insert title of the editorial department). And the higher you go, the less you actually write, and the more you deal with business-end crap, which really takes the love out of writing for me. So would I just stay in that office for the rest of my conceivable career, and be happy with that? Pumping out little nuggets of sarcasm and honesty in 50 to 500-word nuggets? Is that my ambition in life?

Other options I've seen for video game writers include lateral movement, like Sean, another ex-GamePro, who I'm told has moved to a Mac magazine. So he's gone into the rather wider field of personal technology, which, while it has the same problems with advancement as the video game writing gig, has the benefit of having a much broader pool of categories and magazines dedicated to it.

Or, like in other industries, you can become an "expert" and write books on the subject--but I have no idea if I'm ever capable of writing a book, since I have such a horrible attention span.

The saddest thing is that with all this thinking and dreaming about video game writing I've done since I started as an intern at GP in June 2000 (amusingly enough, almost exactly the same time as MegaTokyo started, contributing to my withdrawal from the Computer Science courseload and moving to English Literature), almost all of my freelance writing is as an anime writer. So the video game gig might be a dead end in the first place. I'm currently writing reviews for the April issue of Newtype USA, I'm writing about anime-related video games for Anime Insider every issue along with a soon-to-be-expanded role in the anime side of the magazine, and I've written just as many articles about Japanese culture for Wired as I've written video game reviews.

I don't know where I'm going with this, really--I think it's a combination of frustration at the inability to find myself a job in the industry. Most of my freelance gigs have come thanks to old GamePro co-workers, while I write for Wired because I interned there... and it seems like no other magazines I've contacted want me to write for them. I just don't know what more I can do--or if there IS more to do in my chosen field.

Okay, I lied, there's no third part to this rant, I'm too busy thinking about what I can do with this whole "writing" thing. It's 1:30, and I have a lot to think about.

"fredrinOS"
Sunday - February 6, 2005
[Piro] - 11:41:00
Well, i can tell you one thing about my list of goals for 2005 -- I've already dropped the ball on the "minimum two rants per week" item. I can't even manage a compromise goal of one rant per week. I wonder why i resist writing rants the way i do? Am I too uptight about them, worrying too much that they need to be like entertaining or something? That may be part of it, but it is probably has something to do with the fact that i'm not that good at multitasking. This isn't really surprising considering that i'm not really good at singletasking either.

True multitasking is not about doing several things at the same time, it is about threading multiple tasks together and applying time to each of them in an efficient way. Kind of like the way most processors can't really do two things at the same time, it just applies varying about of CPU time to each of the programs running. By doing this well, you can run many programs at the same time. Remember the days when you could only work with one program at a time on your PC? That's kind of the way my brain works. Moving between projects requires unloading of one program and booting up another. Sometimes the reboot process requires several tries.

Deep down i don't think i'm ideally suited to being the jack-of-all trades that being an independent owner/creator self employed trying-to-run-a-website-and-keep-it-from-falling-apart kind of guy. The cracks, flaws and down and out embarrassments that make up this site are a testament to that fact :) I do worry sometimes that i'll never be able to do all the things i want to do. For example, i have an item on my goal list for this year called "build various backgrounds for Megatokyo in Maya (also learn how to use Maya and be able to save up for and justify purchase of Maya to budget department)" the Maya 6 PLE icon is sitting there, but i haven't launched it in ages.

There are many tasks that i've started and continue to work on, but the approximation of multitasking i use (lets call it "multiple singletasking") can be more frustrating than rewarding. Some things i do manage to get done in a reasonable amount of time, like implementing Movable Type over on Fredart and keeping up a rough and boring daily blog. Some things get started but get put aside and i have trouble getting back to (like the site re-design and rebuild for Megatokyo - i'll get to that in a minute). In the end, there are a few tasks that take precedence over everything else: the Megatokyo comic, the Megagear store, and all those tasks that will result in armed goons or lynch mobs at my door if i don't get them done. The remaining fredrinCPU time is a precious commodity, and action on other projects requires efficient use of it. Too bad fredrinOS is so inefficient. Damn organic OSs have a mind of their own...

I was originally going to present a list of goals for 2005, but i know myself better than to think i can really do everything on the list so i decided that i don't want to embarrass myself further. This doesn't mean I'm not going to try, i just figure it's better if people are amazed by anything i manage to get done this year :)

One of the things that i am just now getting back to is finishing up the Megatokyo website rebuild. The project has been on hiatus for six months because I have not managed to get to the task of finishing several design templates for some sub pages of the site. I won't give a time table for this getting finished, but i will say that i've jumped back into the process and hopefully I'll be able to get Larry back to work on the project in the next week. Considering the fact that I started this project over a year ago, i think it's time i did my part so Larry can finish up. The drop down of death is just getting too big.

I should also note that i've been working with Dom and a few friends putting together a rather extensive amount of material that will become the community pages and FAQ page for the new site. Dom has finished a FAQ that i need to review and shinmeko has gone to great lengths to unearth every MT related website she can find ^^;; I'm working on the long absent Character pages... It's all in progress, and i want to have them all part of the initial launch of the new website.

People often ask me about what is going on with warmth. As i've said before, warmth is a project that really should not have been started two years ago, and should have been left in the wings until i had time to do it right. I've been doing a lot of thinking about how best to work on it and at what time I should get it off the ground again. I prefer to actually do things and have them underway rather than hype about something i'm planning to work on, but i will say this - i'm not doing many conventions this year (San Diego Comic Con, Anime Central, Otakon, and perhaps one other) and the main reason is: i intend to start the Warmth project up and start production on it this year. I won't make any promises right now but lets just say that i've settled on a plan for 'how' it will be released, and all i need to do is jump in and start working on it. This is a huge task, and it's going to be a real trick to keep it from derailing other tasks as i work on it, so don't get your hopes up too high, not yet :)

As you might expect, there are also a lot of projects i'm working on for the MegaGear store. One of the reasons we wanted to run our own store is that it gives us the freedom to pretty much do whatever we want and choose the kinds of products we feel like we want to make. I've been working on several new products, and some of these have long lead times so it will be a while before they show up in the store. Some of them are looking pretty good tho (at least i hope people like em)

The real pain about some tasks is that you put a ton of work into them but don't see results until months later. Books definitely fall in that category. As many of you may already know, Megatokyo Volume 3 shipped last week and has even started to show up in some comic stores around the country. Because of the way the distribution system works, comic shops are usually the first to get books, and bookstores the last (this is not always the case, because it varies a lot depending on where things end up in the distribution system). Our shipment is en route to t3h factory, and should arrive mid week or so. As soon as they do, we'll start sending out preorders. :)

New shirt designs don't have anywhere near the lead time some products have, and can take only a few weeks to show up in the store once i send in the design. Of course, sometimes it takes me months to get a design right. ^^;; It took a few weeks for me to get the design right for the Recycled Heart girls shirt, but the final product ended up looking pretty good.

The best kinds of products are the ones where you just pick something you want to offer in the store and order it :P Even this isn't always easy. Those Pentel Graph 1000 pencils in the Piro's Pencil set are hard to find, and it takes a while to get an order of them shipped from japan through our distributor. I seem to have a proclivity for making even simple things difficult.

this is a pretty disjointed rant, and I apologize for that, but its a pretty fair representation of the struggles i deal with in trying to keep multiple large projects going at the same time. I haven't mentioned things like mopping floors (i had the joy of picking out a bucket and mop last week :) and trips to the recycle center with all the cardboard from the boxes shirts come in... there are all sorts of tasks that make up a busy life, and not all of them are, uh, interesting. If you don't mind disjointed rants like this, then i'll see what i can do to fill the space more often. I do need to write another one this week so i can cover all the webcomic related stuff going on at Katsukon two weeks from now (even tho I won't be there, there are a LOT of webcomic people who will be).

A few notes on my last rant - several readers pointed out to me an error in my translation of the title of the opening song for AIR i was gushing about. The title of the song, 鳥の詩 is indeed "Tori no Uta" but the translation is wrong. The correct translation is "A bird's poem." "A bird's song" would be written this way: 鳥の歌 thanks to the several people who pointed this out :)

On a similar note note... wahhh! there are times i wish i lived in japan, this is one of them. The AIR movie opened today (saturday the 5th) Anime movie releases are always a pain because unless you like, live there and can go see it in the theater, it will be a while before you finally get to view it. I remember suffering from similar pangs when the Marmalade Boy movie came out. Also on this page are all kinds of AIR goodies, some of them i'm sure Piro would want (cough). Me? I'm just holding out for a Potato plushie. :) Gimmie.

"Future tense"
Monday - February 7, 2005
[Dom] - 12:00:00
I have a deadline tomorrow, and I still have quite a few words to go, so there'll be no rant today. Wednesday for sure, though. In the meantime, enjoy the purty picture.

"To ash"
Wednesday - February 9, 2005
[Dom] - 17:00:00
Today's a very odd day for us Asian Catholics. It's Tet (the Lunar New Year, which every year I feel obligated to point out that people who are not Chinese also celebrate) and Ash Wednesday at the same time. So I don't know whether to be celebrating the new year or pondering my own mortality, but I know that I am supposed to be writing something. So here it is.

So I don't know what to give up for Lent. I've given up most of my bad habits by now, and the remaining habits I have left are ones that I do for a living.

Two years ago, I gave up soda drinking and caffeine in general, was cranky for a while, and came out of those 40 days feeling refreshed. I stopped feeling sleepy in the middle of the day, and felt a lot better about my sugar intake.

Last year, I gave up playing H games, and realized that my Japanese got worse while I didn't keep up with my regular reading/listening practice, so that's out too.

I guess I could give up cheese like some people suggested, but I'm lactose intolerant and avoid it anyway.

Hmm... how about this? My Lenten promise is that I'll rant in this space every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, since it's a habit I need to get into anyway? And at least 100 words, none of that "I'm filling space" crap, either.

Okay, that's done. Now I should go and call my family to wish them a Happy New Year.

And to all you MT fans out there, Chuc Mung Nam Moi!

"out t3h door"
Friday - February 11, 2005
[Piro] - 09:23:00
Just figured I'd do a real quick update here, just because i can. :P

First off, as I think i mentioned somewhere, our shipment of Megatokyo volume 3 came in Wednesday, and as of yesterday most pre-orders have gone out. The book should also be showing up in bookstores pretty soon if not already, and i know that most comic shops have theirs already (if they ordered any, of course). I've heard that the book is readily available in the UK and some other countries. Figures, there are people in the UK who got to see the book before i did :)

If you want one, you can check out your local book store or comic shop, or you can order one from Megagear and we'll have it on its way to you the next day (well, that'd be monday, seeing that today is friday). Amazon has them, and after doing some checking, various international Amazon online stores will have them as soon as they get their inventory of them (which should be real soon).

The main thing is, it shouldn't be too hard to find a copy if you look around, you've got plenty of options - including not buying it at all :P. The eight-page Endgames comic at the end came out pretty good, i think, and you can read it fairly quickly in the bookstore or at your local library without having to buy it :)

Or, if all else fails and you still want a copy, there is still time to enter the Dark Horse Megatokyo contest to win some books and other cool stuff. The contest closes in the next next few days, so if you live in the US or Canada, be sure to enter.

We will be making a run to the post office this afternoon to ship out all the international pre-orders that we can as well, but for the most part i'll be spending today working on the comic i normally would have worked on yesterday ^^;;. We wanted to make sure we got all of these out as fast as possible, and I didn't want to make Seraphim have to to do all of them by herself, so please pardon the delay in today's comic. I still have quite a bit to do on it, but i will have it finished by sometime this afternoon.

thanks for your patience :) Maybe this afternoon i'll finish off my rant about coffee too. hmm. that's what i need. coffee.

(goes to make some)

"Thoughts on..."
Friday - February 11, 2005
[Dom] - 12:30:00
Note to those who think I broke my Lenten promise: Look at the time and date on this rant. This is when I finished writing this rant, but it just didn't get posted until I got home at 1 AM Pacific time. Among my vices, lying about deadlines is not one of them (it's a very bad habit for writers, often a career-killing one, so I don't do that). Sorry it didn't get put up, but the permissions are funky on the RSS file and also, I wasn't around when Fred finally finished the comic. End note.

So I got this e-mail recently asking if my Monday rant link revealed any sort of pedophilic tendencies on my part. And at first, I just laughed it off as the usual "Anime = small children raped by tentacles" overreaction.

Then I clicked on my own link and scrolled down, and realized "oh, hey, I guess this does go a little further than I thought it did once you scroll further down than I did."

I'm not sure how that really slipped past me, though I guess that it's mostly because I only scrolled down a little past the purty picture and didn't really pay attention, so negligence is one factor.

Another question is, how de-sensitized am I to the whole nakedness thing? As I've mentioned many times before, I grew up Catholic and therefore very embarrassed about anything involving the human body. But ever since I passed through the "ooh, look, pornography!" stage and into the "let's study the visual culture of pornography, be it classical, modern, heterosexual or homosexual" stage of my education, I haven't really reacted to it nearly as violently.

One factor is that the Japanese art site I check every day shape-codes the art, with circles meaning "safe for work", triangles meaning "risque" and diamonds meaning "Bow chick-a-bow-wow". Some of the art listed as a circle could be considered risque by an American audience, but in general I agree with their ratings. The picture was rated a circle (and on its own merits, there's absolutely nothing offensive about it) and I liked it, so I poked around there and didn't see any "this site is for 18 or over" warnings like all Japanese erotic artists put on their pages, so assumed it was safe.

But a little more at the root of things is the aforementioned education. I studied a great deal of pornography and erotica in my Visual Culture seminar, and by necessity I became desensitized to the study material. After looking at pictures in terms of semiotics, they lost shock value, and I forget that other people still have that shock value.

So anyway, I apologize for anyone who was offended by the link, but I honestly didn't see much wrong with it on first inspection.

The upshot of all this is, next time I'll be more careful about which artists I link. Or I'll at least put warnings on things.

"coffee trips"
Saturday - February 12, 2005
[Piro] - 19:12:00
It's funny how sometimes we will develop an indirect fondness for some things because they in some way remind us of other things. I'm sitting here drinking a fresh mug of Seattle's Best Morning Blend coffee and it's making me think of Tokyo.

Tokyo?

Well, It kinda goes like this. I'm sure that most of you know by now that i drink unhealthy amounts of coffee. I'm not as bad as i used to be. I used to drink from 8 to 12 cups per day (I''m down to just a few now) but i do sometimes feel that there's not enough blood in my coffee stream. I think that caffeine has no effect on my anymore. Any cells that coffee used to effect have been killed off by now. These days I just drink coffee because i like it.

Now, there are no Seattle's Best coffee shops around here, just way too many Starbucks (like, 20 within a 5 mile radius) as well as the random Caribou Coffee as you move away from the A2 area (yes, there are many nice coffee shop alternatives here in the Ann Arbor area, but i think the locals would prefer we keep those little haunts a secret.) Another thing - i rarely drink coffee at Starbucks. I like my coffee black, not frothed and messed around with. Straight Starbucks coffee (any variety) is one of the bitterest substances on earth. To be fair, their hot chocolate (sans whip cream ickieness) is to die for - but chocolate is a whole 'nother rant. I tend to just make my own coffee and drink that. Believe it or not, you standard Eight O'Clock French Roast whole bean does everything i want coffee to do. Aside from that, i'm not really too picky.

I don't have a grinder at the office, so i have been stubbornly just getting pre-ground stuff. Once you get into the good stuff, Foldgers just wont cut it. I've tried a few things here and there, and most of them (including Starbucks Breakfast Blend, which is the only Starbucks coffee i can deal with) are ok, but nothing worth writing home about. Why not just buy a grinder and get the Eight O'clock stuff like i have at home? That's too easy, and i never go the easy route. When i spotted the Seattle's Best Morning Blend coffee in the local Krogers, i knew i was gonna be happy with it before i even bought it. Why is that?

It has something to do with the fact that sometimes our fondest memories of trips are the small things we do while there. While at AX Tokyo last year, i was hoping to find a place near the hotel where i could get online and check email, check up with some people, and most importantly talk to sarah. One really dumb thing about traveling these days is that you can travel half way around the world and see the exact same goddamn stores in Ikebukoro you see in Ann Arbor. Yes, there was a Starbucks, McDonalds (at which i was friggin recognized by someone who was there to meet a friend but had no idea there was an anime con going on. I really need to start wearing a bag over my head in public.) and a dozen others -- and, oddly enough, a Seattle's Best Coffee. What was so nice about the Seattle's Coffee was that at the time they had free wireless access, so i got myself some coffee, something muffiny, and sat down with my 12" powerbook and wirelessed myself back into the world.

A fond memory? Yes, it was. Why? Because it was one of the few times during my trip that i actually sat down and stopped to absorb a little of what was going on all around me. Years before, i remember stopping in a tiny tiny little Key Coffee shop somewhere in Yokohama and having a similar feeling of decompression. When i'm traveling, especially on a high-data filled trip like Japan is for me, i'm not really able to deeply absorb things until much later. It takes a lot to let a place seep into your soul, and sometimes doesn't get there till long after you leave. Times when i feel i can do that on a trip are usually important. That time in the Key Coffee in Yokohama, sitting quietly on a block of concrete staring out at the bay while listening to the water at the Suntory Museum in Osaka, quietly watching people walk by while my email downloaded in a Seatle's Best coffee in Sunshine Plaza...

So, ad dumb as it sounds, having a cup of this silly coffee brings back some of those fond memories. It also reminds me of the fact that i have yet to finish my recollections of that trip, over a year ago. That's not a bad thing, mind you - Megatokyo itself is really inspired by thoughts and feelings experienced on my first trip to Japan back in 1995 (ArchitectTour Japan 1995 a big part of that trip - sadly there is little on the net about it. I'll try scanning some slides someday related to it) In fact, there are still things i recall from that trip that help inspire me from time to time.

It's funny the things that you cling to that are important memories of your trip. I have a can of Nescafe Santa Marta X sitting on my computer that actually has some odd, assigned, importance connected to it. I purchased it at a train station in Sendai in an area that i'm using to model the station and area where the 'warmth' story will take place. It was a hot can at the when i clunked it out of the machine, and i carried it in my pocket for the rest of my trip and then in my bookbag for the plane ride all the way home. Dumb, huh?

Come to think of it, there's coffee in that can. What the hell is it with me and Coffee anyway?

Anyways, over the next few rants i think i'm gonna revisit the two parts of that trip that i haven't talked about yet - Megatokyo in Tokyo, and then my trip to Sendai. I think i have enough coffee to get me through.

---

Not to change gears too suddenly here, but i wanted to touch base on next week's Katsucon convention in Arlington, Virginia on Feb 18-20. The reason i'm gonna give you a bit of an information dump here is because there is a LOT of webcomic and american manga related stuff going on, so if you are a webcomic reader, make sure you keep these folks busy. Here's some of the people that will be there:

- Hawk and Ananth from Applegeeks (be sure to check out hawk's photoshop panel on friday from 5-7)
- Matt and Ian from Mac Hall
- Michael Terracciano from Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire
- Scott Ramsoomair from VG Cats (have i mentioned that VG Cats is awesome?)
- Jekka Cormier and Sarah "Nami" Hevey from Seraphic Blue (have i mentioned that Seraphic Blue is also awesome?)
- Katie Bair (Oasis Destiny, Karaoke Kate, and Ninja High School)
- Kara Dennison from Conscrew
- Rob Balder from Partially Clips
- Rich Burlew from Order of the Stick
- Christy (Nyanko) Lijewski from "Next Exit" (a Slave Labor Graphics title),
- RE:Play (from TokyoPop) and Doors (short story in RSoM from TokyoPop)

Oh, and that Dave Lister guy from Paradox Lost. Please throw things at him. And don't tell him i said to do that.

Here's the latest schedule, so make sure if you are going to check out all the panels and other things being put together by these fine folks. Unfortunately, *I* won't be there this year (like i said, i'm not doing many cons this year) but i'm sure these folks are a lot more fun than I am anyways. :P Have fun guys :)

"Tettletales"
Sunday - February 13, 2005
[Dom] - 22:49:00
I hate Tet sometimes.

I mean, it's not the occasion itself that gets me riled up or anything. It's just standard family stuff. Like visiting the distant relatives I have nothing in common with (as opposed to my cousins, who are awesome people, especially the ones who read this space).

This is a conversation that happened on Saturday, translated from the Vietnamese:

(translated from the Vietnamese):

Relative: So, what are you studying at college?
Me: Well, I actually gra--
Dad: He graduated a year and a half ago, actually.
Relative: So what do you do for a living?
Dad: He's a software engineer, works with computers.
Me: Uh... no. I'm a writer.

Yeah, that was a real confidence booster, let me tell you.

But the weekend wasn't all bad, thankfully. My sister and I ran off to Huong Lan for some Vietnamese sandwiches after the customary visits, where we had a lot of good food, though we did spend quite a bit of time staring up at the ceiling after the deli started pumping out very loud Cantonese new year's music (at least, that's what I assume it was, since I heard "Gong Xa Fa Cai" in the middle of all this dance music).

Which made us wonder what the hell a Vietnamese place was doing blasting out bad Cantonese music.

Eh, but to each their own, I guess...

"rawr!"
Wednesday - February 16, 2005
[Piro] - 10:40:00
hehe, a friend sent me this little scribble and i have to say, it really DOES describe how i feel today. :P

Anyways, yesterday was a mess so i'm once again doing most of the work on todays comic... today. :P Not sure when i'll be done, but i'm gonna opt for doing a nice job rather than rushing it. Till then, enjoy the message from the zombie hordes.

Really, i do think they might actually get me in the end. :)

"Reading Pains"
Wednesday - February 16, 2005
[Dom] - 15:00:00
My parents live about 3 blocks from the Redwood City Public Library. It used to be my sanctuary from the world--I would go there to find new books, pore over magazines about games and sports, and just get away from people for a while.

In high school, it was still my sanctuary, but in a different way--every Friday afternoon, my best friend and I would go over to the library and volunteer time for Project READ, the local literacy program, and it helped take the load off of a week of classes. (You have no idea how liberating it is to file books when you have no obligation to read them...)

Then, when I was going to Cal, I lived about 7 blocks down the street from Comic Relief, hailed by many as the best comic book store in the San Francisco Bay Area, if not the state. And so, every Wednesday after classes and/or work, I would head over to Comic Relief and check out the new shipments, perusing various titles but inevitably just buying a few, mostly by Warren Ellis and Brian Michael Bendis.

I did my Visual Culture thesis on first three issues of Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan, actually... wasn't one of my better pieces of work, but it got the job done. But anyway, the point is, the comic book store replaced the library for me in recent years--and now, I don't live anywhere near a good comic book store. It's at least a 20-minute drive to get to a halfway decent one, and I really miss having that around.

But now, I live near a library again, and I only set foot in it once in September, to pick up a voter registration form. I wonder when I stopped reading, and gave myself over to comic books? I wonder why I did it?

I mean, i know that one factor is time--much like the serialized novels of the 19th century (and today, but much more rarely), comic books are a nice little diversion for maybe an hour, then I can move on.

But time and attention spans aren't the only factor. Like many avid readers, I've forsaken food and sleep in favor of a good book before, and just this morning I was up until 4 or 5 AM reading some of the old books I have lying around the house.

Maybe it's just that my standards for reading a comic book are lower than my standards for reading a book--my brain goes into most comic books thinking "okay, now I get to see someone beating up someone else, or maybe some cool people saying snappy lines". And after years of studying the written word, I can't do that when it comes to books, I can't stop analyzing what I read, and often find it coming up short in my estimation.

I really need to break that habit, and start reading for fun again. It's been too long since I read a book for the sake of reading a book... especially since I don't review books yet, so it won't feel like work when I start reading. I've often finished a review of a DVD or a manga/comic, and thought "well, great. What do I do now to entertain myself? I have no urge to read more graphic novels/watch more TV for the rest of the night, and there's no football/baseball on."

Hmm... I think I'll go to the library right now. And try and rediscover the joy of reading for its own sake.

"Driving music"
Friday - February 18, 2005
[Dom] - 01:25:00
I've discovered that there are some soundtracks I just shouldn't drive to.

Seriously. I'm the kind of person who's enough of a toe-tapping sucker that when I play Tomoyasu Hotei's Battle Without Honor or Humanity on my MP3 player, I start walking in rhythm with the bass line.

Which, of course, means that I must never, ever put any of my Hotei CDs in the CD player whilst I drive, with the possible exception of King & Queen, which is a swingier, more big bandish album, rather than his usual guitar stylings.

Unfortunately, the "no hard rock, metal or techno" rule I've enforced on myself leaves me with a limited selection while I drive... which actually leads to a funny story.

So about a month ago, I was driving my mother to the cemetery for the one-year anniversary of my grandfather's death, and, looking at my collection of various anime and video game soundtracks, I tried to figure out what my mom, who listens exclusively to Vietnamese pop and hymns, would not mind playing.

So I stuck in the Mai-HiME soundtrack, crossed my fingers, and drove down to the cemetery. She seemed lost in thought for a while (understandable; it's been a long year since her father died), and then she turned to me and asked "I really like this CD, what is it?"

Since my family has a long-standing prejudice against the Japanese (that's what happens when you grow up during World War II in Asia), I just left it at "it's a soundtrack, Mom".

But hey, who knew? Parts of Mai-HiME's soundtrack sound enough like church music that it gets my mother's seal of approval. Heck, she had me copy the CD for her so she could listen to it. Isn't that weird?

Okay, sleeping time.

"Sore feet and aching mind"
Monday - February 21, 2005
[Dom] - 10:00:00
So, Hunter S. Thompson died yesterday, by his own hand. That means that two of my favirote sportswriters have died in the last year (the other was Ralph Wiley).

Oh, sure, Hunter did all sorts of other things, like inspire Transmet, write books that were a beacon to the counterculture, inspire a new form of journalism, and sure, he was the spiritual father of about a third of my rants... but I'll always remember him as the weird guy on ESPN Page 2 who would write about all sorts of cracked-out stuff.

Rest in piecepeace, old man. Or, since you didn't really surround yourself with much peace, maybe you should rest in chaos.

So I discovered the dangers of walking up and downhill for three hours in new shoes--thanks to the San Francisco Treasure Hunt, my calves are still aching. But demmit, it's fun running around, finding new murals I didn't notice before, and learning more interesting tidbits of San Francisco history.

But next year, I'm bringing better shoes...

"Zubaaaaan"
Wednesday - February 23, 2005
[Dom] - 14:00:00
I need to stop playing Nanaca Crash. I have things to do, rants to write, games to get ready for...

Yet, I simply can't stop playing The Little Flash Game That Could.

If you haven't had the fortune to have someone send you the Nanaca Crash .swf file, or found it somewhere, it's a brilliant little game--the concept is similar to, say, a Track and Field game, where you have a projectile you want to fling as far as you can, so you have a little timing game to determine what angle and what force goes into the throw.

Except in this case, the projectile is the main character of some dating game or other, and you propel him by crashing into him with a bike--and depending on who he smashes into, you can get extra boosts to fling him further.

It's marvelously addictive, and I've spent the last day playing it--my personal high is about 9000m, but I know a friend who's gotten as high as 14000m or so... it's so much fun!

Hmm. I guess I should play City of Heroes again at some point, too...

"sad golf in snow"
Thursday - February 24, 2005
[Piro] - 12:27:00

Bleah, what a week. Nothing like getting sick twice in the same month to really mess you up. I've been working pretty hard to make sure it hasn't messed up the comic schedule too much, but my rant schedule is completely blown at this point ^^;; Pheh.

Just some dumb stuff today. Cortana, the miserable bastard, also tried to hook me with the Nanaca Crash game yesterday (see dom rant), but i managed to escape it's grasp. I think he was trying to get even with me for encouraging him to get out his credit card so he can play Kooh in Pangya. Pangya is a bizzare and cute as hell golf game (yes, i said golf) that can almost make you like the game. It's actually really great Korean game, but true to form there is a japanese version and even an english side of the site that gives you info on how to play it. It's free to play, but if you pay you can get perks. Like playing Kooh. :) Oh, and i could prod Cortana on to this because they accept US credit cards. t3h evil, i say.

But screw the golf stuff. It's all about t3h kooh. you will worship t3h kooh. :) Look for the 'white wiz' wmv file on the front page of the korean site (down near the bottom, where it says 'pangya' movie - it's the first one to the right of the image of Kooh kneeling down). Actually... it's easier to find it here, on the bottom of this page on the japanese site. Gothy little Kooh's got t3h moves, she's perky, she's got 'tude and she's playing in snow. What more could you want?

Now, with that bit of nonsense out of the way, i gotta get back to comicking. I shoulda stuck with a DPD for wednesday and posting todays comic friday but no~~ i have to be a stubborn masochist. :P

---

Server Move Tonight
(Thursday, February 24th)

oops! almost forgot to mention something important. Cologuys is moving some stuff to their new facility tonight, and one of the first things to get moved will be Makoto-rin (the main Megatokyo server). Things will go offline sporadically, and the longest outage will be about a half hour. After that, things should be back to normal. I'm not sure when Nayuki is getting trucked over...

Since we have this lovely messed up schedule this week anyway, it actually presents and easy way to deal with server traffic tonight -- i have an beautiful excuse and reason not to post friday's comic till friday morning :) Look for it before noon EST tomorrow.

"Feed Frency"
Friday - February 25, 2005
[Dom] - 10:00:00
Welp, after a whole lot of poking and grumbling, I can now edit the RSS feed--so now my Lenten promise to rant anew with every comic will come with even MORE work for me!

All kidding aside, though, I'm talking about E3 this year, since I just sent in my registration form..

As you may have read in my information vomiting post about E3 last year, E3 was three nonstop days of pain for me--which is better than how it went down in 2003, when I learned to hate LAX.

E3 is not a fun time for me. But I swear, that this time I'll make it work! I'll book appointments with lunch time in mind, I'll sleep well, I'll...

Oh, who am I kidding? I'm going to work myself to the bone, as always, and then write a few thousand words about it.

Inevitability sucks.

Edit: Aww, crud! I linked to the wrong page in the last rant pic, I meant to link to the clean, KID-published PS2 version, and accidentally put in the other one. Arrrgh! Apologies, again.

"Brief randomness"
Monday - February 28, 2005
[Dom] - 10:30:00
So I'm sitting here with 7 and a half boxes of Thin Mints sitting next to me, wondering when I started being old and weak. And maybe feeble, too--chasing around a three-year-old for 3 hours on Saturday was enough to drain me of energy for the rest of the day. Heaven help me when I have kids of my own...

So anyway, I realize that I haven't ranted about non-City of Heroes/Nanaca Crash games in a long while, and there's a good reason--now that I no longer have a roommate as obsessed with games as I am, so my gaming options are limited to my Japanese PS2, my PC, my footrest GameCube, and... that's it, actually. With the reduced number of gaming options, there aren't too many things I'm honestly looking forward to--there's Minna Daisuki Katamari Damashii, but that doesn't have a real release date yet, so that'll be at least a couple months. And in that same time period there'll be Sega Ages: Phantasy Star 2, which I'll definitely snap up.

There was Sid Meier's Pirates! a couple months ago, but I bought that for a cousin for Christmas, and...

Hey, wait, I'm going to be housesitting for that cousin for the next two weeks while he and his wife go to Paris!

Okay, expect a rant about reliving the pirate days of my youth over the next couple weeks. Mmmm, getting back into the saddle.

"comfort anime"
Monday - February 28, 2005
[Piro] - 12:22:00
Have you ever got into a series because you decided that you that you were supposed to get into it? You know, the art appeals to you, the concept, you see some snippet of it somewhere and it's just the kind of thing that you tend to like... You know you are gonna be a fan of it before you even see it.

Sadly, this doesn't happen that often for me. There have only been a few shows that have really taken me down like that in recent years. Haibane Renmei, Kanon, Air... there haven't been that many. Years ago i remember patiently waiting for the mail to arrive with my weekly pak of six VHS tapes full of raw anime (all lovingly assembled by my friend Craig - hi Craig if you're still out there somewhere :P) Nothing was better than getting the next four episodes of shows like like Saint Tail, Nadesico, Escaflowne... back in the day, it was weeks before you could even see raw content, nevermind fansubs (which would be months out if you were lucky -- you damn kids got it so easy (shakes cane at you)) It was a lot of work (and money in postage and VHS tapes and finding places to put the tapes) but it was a lot of fun. Sure, most shows weren't really worth following but when you were hot on a show, it was great.

Of course, there are many times when a show that you think is gonna be t3h awesome kinda lets you down. Shingetsutan Tsukihime was kinda like that for me. I was really looking forward to it, and I did enjoy watching it, but in the end it left me feeling like it drove past me and i missed something. Love Hina was worse -- i was so looking forward to the anime, but for some reason I just didn't connect with it. I'm not saying it was bad, but i ended up not really looking forward to new episodes. It didn't work for me. I could mention others, but i don't want to raise anyone's ire (It's not anime but don't get me started on how i feel about the 2nd and 3rd LOtR movies :P)

Accidentally discovering a show that becomes a favorite can also be a lot of fun. I watched the first episode of FLCL without having a clue and it took a long time to find my brain again :) Another 'sleeper' for me was Scrapped Princess. OMG, i fell in love with that show. Sure, it ended kinda flat, but it was a great ride. Stellvia was another one like that, a show that totally exceeded my expectations.

Thankfully, there aren't that many of THOSE either, or you people would never get comics.

The brutal truth is that it's amazing how many shows i've watched an episode or two of but felt no need or desire to continue watching. I'd probably watch a lot more if i were bored and lots of time on my hands, but i can barely fit in watching stuff i show signs of having a chemical dependency (emotional dependency?) on as it is. There are times when i'm real busy that i'm glad that there is nothing i'm watching.

I've been talking, i guess, about 'favorite' shows. You know, the kind of shows that you list when people ask you what your "top ten" anime faves are, or the kind of shows you recommend to anime n00bs. These are the shows you build shrines for, you re-paper your walls with wallscrolls and burn incense for, and you sacrifice a percentage of your food budget for (not anymore for me of course... my conscience would have a talk with me if i did that these days ^^;;) There's another category of shows that you kinda never mention when talking about faves, or when waxing poetic about your latest-2D-character you would give your ever shrinking soul to. These are the shows that mean something to you, but only on a personal level, and aren't part of any 'obsession'. Shows that you just plain and simply enjoy. I call shows like this 'comfort anime'

A comfort anime, much like comfort food, isn't the greatest or the hottest or the best anime you've ever seen, but one that for some reason, you really connect with and simply watch and enjoy. You don't do the normal excessive fanboyish stuff you do with other shows. Often these shows are stumbled upon, by random chance and often out of boredom and i think they take up a warm place in my soul that i'd miss if they weren't there.

Mahoraba - Heartful Days is turning out to be that kind of show for me. I don't take it seriously, I'm not desperate to learn everything i can about it, i just... really enjoy it. I'm particularly amused by the fact that the show is not excessively Moe (like so many are these days) and that there is no blatant fan service (just enough to be cute, and so far all of it is implied in amusing subtle ways that appeal to me :P) Some of the characters are completely nuts, and Cortana thinks i like it because it reminds me of my life somehow (which is kinda scary). Regardless, it's a nice warm quiet corner i am happy to visit when i can.

I don't have a huge list of comfort shows. In fact, i can be almost as selective about these as i can about 'fave' shows. Another recent one for me that was pretty good was Narue no Sekai. Often they can be real non-shows that most people don't really consider worth watching. I loved YAT Anshin for some absurd reason. Hell Teacher Nuubei was another one that i still dig out the VHS tapes to watch sometimes (the bath house episode is a friggin riot). Kero Kero Chimu is total fluff and wonderful for it. Some shows are actually good and it puzzles me that more people aren't aware of them. Akazukin Cha Cha is some of the best brain deadening and tummy warming material ever made, yet where is it?

I guess that's why i hate 'what is your favorite anime' type questions. It's a question that can be answered so many ways and on so many levels that i don't think there really is a good answer. My favorite anime movie? Umi Ga Kikoeru. Is it REALLY my favorite? Sure, but so is Laputa, Castle in the Sky, and Patlabor Movie 2. It just depends on what corner of my mind i ask. :)

And I've just been talking about anime here. Put manga into the mix and my brain starts to hurt. It's amazing the selection of manga we have to read these days, but there are still these huge gaps -- Where is my Kimagure Orange Road manga? What about Akazukin Cha Cha? Hime-chan no Ribbon?? Comeon, get with the program, you publishing bastards! :P

Oh, speaking of publishing, just a side note, but Megatokyo Vol 3 did pretty good on it's first week out in the wild, according to Bookscan (Bookscan is a list that shows sales based on actual sales at bookstores around the country). It came in #3 on the list (out of 700 graphic novels listed) which is pretty cool. We were only beat by the new Fruits Basket book and DNAngel (but we beat out Ruronin Kenshin! woot!) I want to say a big huge thank you to everyone who bought a copy. It just proves that a title doesn't have to be Japanese or backed up by an anime or a big studio to do just fine. Our readers rock :)

Sorry for the rambling anime-ish rant. I should probably get some work done and not go digging for more Mahoraba. Actually, i should have Cortana snag the manga for me... Or maybe i should just read more Salad Days, because i'm all caught up on Rubbers 7...

aw crap, vol 3 is out now. damnit...

"Robot Carnivals"
Wednesday - March 2, 2005
[Dom] - 01:45:00
So I'm sitting here re-installing Baldr Force EXE on my computer, since it looks like the next "itch" for me is mech combat games.

I'm surprised that the mech combat itch came up so quickly, to be honest--I was figuring that it'd be at least a year before it came up in the rotation. In case you're wondering, the itches I haven't scratched in the longest time are cockpit combat simulators (X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, 1997), sports games (NFL2K, 1999) and music games (Dance Dance Revolution 3rd Mix, 1999).

As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, I'm feeling the itch for mech combat again. The odd thing is, I played Mech Assault plenty, but was never really satisfied with it. I think that the pace was just fast enough that I didn't consider it a mech strategy game, an itch I consider myself to have scratched with Sakura Taisen: Atsuki Chishio Ni, 2003, and it was too slow to be a frenzied flurry of robots blowing things up, like Baldr Force.

What most likely brought this on was the fact that there are two mech games coming out in Japan in March, both for PS2. One is just the cleaned-up version of Baldr Force EXE for the PS2, meaning that I'll finally be able to play the game without having to turn off the speakers every so often. Which will be nice. I've ranted about Baldr Force before, so I won't really go much into it here. Suffice to say that I'll be sinking some time back into this puppy... ah, Pile Bunker, how I've missed you.

The other game is Blue Flow, an upcoming mech game from Kogado (AKA the Power Dolls people).

From what I've seen, it's pretty much the same Power Dolls-type game as all of the others, but hey, it has robots hitting each other, which is exactly what I'm looking for in a game right now (oh, One Must Fall, where were you when I needed you?).