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Strip 390, Volume 3, Page 71

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< Piro >

yay, pirogoeth poster reprints!

"core dump"

Friday - March 28, 2003

[Piro] - 11:15:06 - [link here]

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 :)

< Dom >

Mwahahahahaha

"Shoujo? Me?"

Friday - March 28, 2003

[Dom] - 08:30:00 - [link here]

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!

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