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Chain Mail: Addicted To You
The idea of taking on an online persona to escape the pressures of Real Life is hardly a new one. I found the effects of teen angst in the Internet Age in All About Lily Chou-Chou to be both effective...
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Several girls galore (the alluring aroma of Perfume)
The PC’s on the blink again. It’ll be over a week before I can put right whatever’s wrong so in the meantime I’m working on the backup machine, my trusty four-year-old low-spec laptop. So here I am,...
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Cossette revisited: Shinbo, Nasu and the Kajiura connection
Looks like I made it to the second round of the tourney thing, but I’m sadly short on topics for writing thanks to the fact that my laptop is the only working PC I have right now. It’s able to cope...
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Cat Shit One could be more than just rabbits with guns, but that’s fine for now
I’ve been hearing rumblings about this one for quite some time but since my brain makes connections in the most arcane and awkward ways I attached a bizarre preconception to it (something to do with it...
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Mouryou no Hako, a boxful of wonderfully hard-boiled madness
I started watching this back in ’08 but for a number of reasons I didn’t get around to finishing it. The subbing was sporadic, the plot derailed into a lengthy period of three blokes sitting around a...
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Halfway through Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica: holy crap, this is good
An issue I see quite often in anime fandom is the cry of “it’s not a cartoon! It’s animation!” I’m as guilty of that as anyone, and even set out my own thoughts on the topic a while ago but quite...
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Love Exposure
I can’t even remember how Love Exposure made it onto my Lovefilm rental queue, then the discs sat on my desk for the best part of a fortnight. Before you read past the jump I should warn you that it’s...
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Mass of the Fermenting Dregs are my new favourite band
One of the first things I learned when getting into Jpop/Jrock was this: never judge a band by their name. Mass of the Fermenting Dregs (or Masu Dore to their fans) seem to follow the same path as the...
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On China Miéville, Miyuki Miyabe and genre conventions
Yesterday I finished China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. It’s a prime example of his ‘New Weird’ brand of fantasy fiction, and my opinion of it reminded me of an old draft of a post I had...
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MONO and Boris on tour in the UK, December 2012
I reckon I saw more live music during 2012 than ever before, apart from the summers when I went to a music festival (I have tentative plans to attend FujiRock 2014…). Rounding off the year, just as the...
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Why Boris are relevant to my interests, and yours
If you are interested in ‘alternative’ Japanese contemporary music (as in, stuff that isn’t in the charts or a tie-in to an anime show) you may have heard of Boris. I heard their songs for the first...
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Aku no Hana, lily of the Uncanny Valley
Now that the initial controversy has subsided I finally feel able to form and voice an opinion on Aku no Hana. The art style didn’t put me off, surprisingly. I actually had reservations about whether...
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