Welcome to the very first broadcast of O!Susume RadioBeat, Nagi’s personal music blog project that lets him jaw on and on about his fav Japanese artists and tries to get you, dear readers, to give them a spin as well.
After a lot of deliberation about who would take the honorary spot of this inaugural episode, Do As Infinity won out.
Years Active: 1999 to 2005, 2008 to present
Core Members: Tomiko Van, Ryo Owatari, Dai Nagao
Point of Origin: Tokyo
The sunlight pulled itself up over the windowsill once again, but this time instead of finding an empty bed to spread out on, it fell right onto Kaname’s face. She moaned from the indignity and rolled over, and moaned again from the bubbling pain in her ribs. It had just started to settle down from when she had to reach over and subdue her alarm clock. She had lain there for a few minutes after, wondering if she had actually managed to crack or break something; but what would she even tell a doctor? Pretty much anything besides the truth, actually, it wasn’t a hard thing to lie about.
“Thank goodness! I’m glad I made it to you in time!”
The beautiful, well-spoken girl from earlier that day came rushing towards Kaname and practically threw herself at her, and she had to grab onto a nearby jungle gym to avoid both of them toppling over.
“What? What’s going on? Who’s chasing you?” Kaname had her priorities straight, but her mind was also stuck on how did you know I was here?
“Sorry, they caught up faster than I anticipated. Are you prepared?”
“Prepared for what? That? WHAT IS THAT?”
~CONTENT WARNING: This article includes topics of porn, misogyny and descriptions of sexual intercourse.~
I was taught my morals in America, and I came away with a few main points. Don’t kill anyone. Don’t steal stuff. Don’t lie. Look both ways when you cross the road. And, finally and most importantly, sex is bad and you should feel bad for thinking about it. America is traditionally highly Puritanical, and as a result there are strong taboos that exist around the subjects of sex and sexuality. Abstinence-only sex education is an excellent of example of this. “Just… don’t.” That’s really the beginning and end of it. At one point in high school my friend’s class was asked to write and perform skits about what one could do instead of having sex, such as genealogy and baking. It was pretty dire.
Continue reading Guest Article Special: Elizabeth C. on Ladykiller In A Bind
(Ha whoops this one was a little bit late due to my own foolish negligence. I promise the next parts will stick to the schedule!)
“Are you alright? Your fall seemed quite serious in nature.”
“Ah, nah, it was mostly theatrical,” Kaname replied, only caring about the dust on her jacket in particular. “Gotta roll with the crash, y’know. Real sorry about that, hope you didn’t get hurt or nothin’…” Kaname looked up into a pair of eyes that reminded her of a snowy day in her childhood. She nearly felt the cold again as her gaze was caught and held by the girl before her. She had long, beautifully-kept hair that flowed about her shoulders in expertly-tied braids. Everything she was wearing felt expensive, even if Kaname wasn’t touching it directly. The quality was evident without being gaudy. The girl had taken hold of one of Kaname’s sleeves, and Kaname’s first emotional reaction was to feel bad that the girl was getting her hand dirty on this jacket she never washed and had just rolled on the ground in.
Welcome to the first part of this superhero serial fiction story! In case you weren’t clued in by now, this is essentially a massive fanfiction project that I have embarked upon, and am only now realizing the scope of my ambitions might turn this into a true Odyssey… word-count wise, I mean, but hey, also a clever ancient Greek lit reference.
As part of our mission to connect with and support amateur and part-pro creators, we at BLP present to you the first of our Creator Interviews! Our wonderful first interviewee is Kibble, a creator of comics from Western Massachusetts. The interview was done by Nagi on January 5th, 2018.
Given Name: Keane
Artist Name: Kibble
Location: Western Mass
Pronouns: they/them
Channels: comickibble.com, Twitter/Insta: comic_kibble
Big news! Kamen Rider Calliope has an official publishing date. Drop by the site around 9:00 am on January 14th to read the first part of Myth 1!
Something I’ve struggled with in explaining Kamen Rider to the uninitiated is how “it’s a show that’s merchandized to little kids, but the storyline and character development are written for an older audience”. I feel like that idea can’t expect a warm reception from people who are used to Western (or maybe just American/Canadian?) TV shows. In the culture I grew up in, if a show is made to sell toys to four-year-olds, you can safely assume the plotlines you’ll see are generally mind-numbing to anyone outside of preschool. YES, DORA, IT’S THE BLOODY MAP, WE GET IT, HURRY UP AND GET EXPLORING.
So, here’s a confession that probably compromises a significant part of my identity:
I don’t like reading.
More specifically, I don’t like reading books.
When I was a young kid I blossomed as one of those “early readers”. As a child under the burden of extreme social anxiety and multiple phobias, reducing my world to the space between two pages was a great relief of stimuli. And then, around high junior high-school or so, I just… stopped reading. There were a bunch of factors; I had just gotten access to cable TV for the first time in my life, as well as a computer connected to the internet. It was also right around the time when adolescents were realizing that reading was only “cool” because the adults were incessantly telling them so… Which, by ironic contrast, made it definitely “not cool”. I fell into that line of thought and never really rebounded even after my ego was no longer endangered by the cruel machinations of socialization though public schooling.
This week on “Cartoons Today are So Much Better Than in the 90’s”; Nickelodeon’s family-comedy serial The Loud House manages to get the obligatory “modern technology” storyline right! It seems like ever since smartphones ushered in the social media lifestyle, cartoons never managed to get through an episode dedicated to the topic without muttering about dang kids and getting off lawns.
Continue reading Today’s Cartoons are Best Cartoons: Getting the Tech Episode Right
