Okay, this should be a lot fun. With hopefully tasty consequences.
Randomly chatting with some people on Twitter about lunch today, we got on to the point that being able to cook a decent meal is an important stage in the otaku manning up process. And no, by decent meal I do not mean adding boiling water to some instant noodles. I mean being able to cook at least one amazing, proper delicious signature dish. See, some fools might think that’s the opposite of manning-up, but they couldn’t be any more wrong. It’s about being able to impress your friends – or a date – with your culinary skills. It’s about not having to depend on your mother or a fast food place just to be able to eat. But mostly it’s about expanding your horizons, doing something different and having a laugh.
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Ironically, the titular anti-hero takes a bit of a back seat in my favourite Black Jack story to date. Instead it is left to a company president and a construction worker to make the hard moral decisions in High and Low, taken from the first of these three latest Black Jack collections. Set during a recession, and highlighting the disparity in status – but also the common human bond – between corporate fatcats and the working class it can’t help but touch a nerve in today’s economic climate. A stunning example of Osamu Tezuka’s continued relevance, it’s tempting to call it a stand-out story, but in honesty that would be doing the other tales here a disservice.
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So I’m back from Thailand – two weeks of Buddhist temples, amazing food, beach paradises, raving and cyberpunk culture-clash urban environments (more on that to follow). If you’ve got time to kill then hit-up my Flickr photoset for the now standard image overload.
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Matt Brown is the adoptive parent of Anime Dream, and has written for the site for eight years. He’s an RPG gamer turned anime fan who lives in Florida and dreams of escaping, someday. A programmer and language enthusiast, he devotes most of his energies to slacking off, raising laziness to an artform. He maintains a pocket-busting love affair with Japanese music. His Twitter personality is MattB_AD. In a very exciting post for me personally, here he looks at an anime set in my adopted hometown of Bristol.
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Bradley Meek has more interests than he has time. He likes reading about science and politics, playing PC games and discovering new music, reading novels and comic books, playing complex board games and obsessively checking his Twitter feed. But what he always has more time for is his primary love, animation, and for the last three years he has been a staff reviewer on THEM Anime, and has also recently joined the staff of Anime 3000. Old or new, cute or manly, he has no fear and is willing to tackle any anime. Though, as he details below, this one was a “whoozy.”
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Alex Leavitt writes for The Department of Alchemy, while working “for real” as a research specialist in the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT in Boston, MA. After studying abroad in Kyoto, Japan in 2008, Alex returned to the States to travel around the country speaking at major anime conventions such as Anime Expo (Los Angeles, CA), Otakon (Baltimore, MD), and Anime Boston. Follow his eccentricities over on Twitter at @alexleavitt.
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Ed Fonseca is the brave soul commandeering edythemighty.com, otakuexperience.com, and a range of other one-man enterprises on the internet, as well as a frequent contributor on the iPhone-themed website touchmyapps.com. A native of Puerto Rico living in the Cajun heartland of New Orleans, he spends his days watching new anime and saying “I saw it done better in an anime 10 years ago!” You can find him on twitter as edythemighty.
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The Reverse Thieves are a blogging duo made up of the stylish Narutaki and the indomitable Hisui. With a detective theme they report on and analyze all aspects of anime and manga fandom with the hope to promote critical analysis and an overall love of Japanese pop culture. Their complementary eclectic tastes, over all positive attitude, and emphasis on character studies make their reviews a unique voice in the blogging community. The duo can frequently be found puttering around East Coast anime conventions and presenting panels on a wide variety of subjects. They also like to orchestrate large-scale projects that bring together various elements of the blogosphere and the fan community including the Otaku Diaries and the Secret Santa Project. You can visit them at http://www.reversethieves.com.
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This Saturday I’m off to Thailand, for some much needed relaxing, culture and raving on the beach at the Full Moon Party. Hopefully I won’t be bumping into our friend Sagat, above. Good news though is you won’t be going without content here – quite the opposite in fact. My call for guest writers before Christmas had an amazing response, with the result that some of my favourite bloggers have contributed some really exciting posts to keep you entertained in my absence. To whet your appetite here’s a schedule of what you can expect:
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