Shit like this makes it all worthwhile.

Right, I’ll try and keep this as brief as possible.

Last night, inspired by the latest ‘foreign pirates are killing anime’ outburst from the Japanese industry, I fell into one of my usual rants on Twitter:

“The anime industry avoiding the same elephant in the room as music industry did 10 yrs ago: consumers know worthless product when they see it.

My point isn’t about ‘defending piracy’ – it’s about giving it a cultural context.”

Well, I thought what I was trying to say was fairly straightforward – that like the music biz the anime industry had devalued its own product so much that it is hard to act surprised that people don’t want to pay for it. But judging from the flood of responses I got, apparently a few things need clarifying. Lets have a look:

Wow, what show are you talking about?

I’m not talking about any specific shows, I’m talking about how anime in general is – rightly or wrongly – perceived.

Your theory makes no sense, because good shows sell just as badly or worse as bad shows.

Well, for a start, that’s not my theory at all.

My point is not ‘anime doesn’t sell because it’s low quality’, it’s ‘it is seen as acceptable to steal any anime because it’s all viewed as disposable’. My argument is that this is exactly what happened to the music industry: in a desperate attempt to exploit every revenue opportunity while also reducing costs and investment it devalued its own product to the point that consumers feel little unease with obtaining it illegally.

Nah, it’s not the industry’s fault – people pirate because they are evil and immoral.

Um, maybe. I like to be a little less nihilistic than that. Besides, there are examples of people (I’m thinking Cory Doctorow and Radiohead here) in other media making a success of asking people for money while giving away their work. Perhaps what is needed is some risk taking and imaginative thinking?

OK you clever bastard, so what did the music industry do to solve all this?

Well, the industry itself did nothing really to solve it. What it mainly did was gripe and whine and bitch and demand pointless, ineffectual legal action while still taking the same attitude to the product it was churning out. Sound familiar?

In the end it wasn’t the traditional industry that tried to fix things, but Apple and iTunes that stepped in to present a different model.

WHAT? BUT iTUNES AND APPLE ARE EVIL!!??!?!!?

Yeah, OK. I know what you’re saying – iTunes has many, many issues. Sadly this is not that debate. What is interesting about iTunes is that it showed that by finding sensible price points, breaking up albums into smaller products, supporting micro-transactions and making the whole process very quick and easy it is possible to convince some consumers (in fact, a very large number of consumers) that buying legitimately is less hassle than piracy.

But the anime industry isn’t Apple! It can’t afford to start up a version of iTunes, plus the model doesn’t fit anime at all?

Sheesh, stop taking me so literally. I’m not saying an ‘Itunes for anime’ is the answer. Not at all. To be honest I don’t have a firm answer. I’m just some mouthy Brit on teh internets, its not actually my job to provide any answers. I’d like to think there are people out there in the industry who are much cleverer than me and whose job actually should be to come up with answers, and I can just go back to drinking and babbling on in an amusing chimney sweep’s accent.

But you must have some suggestions?

Well, if we can get back to what started all this: my main suggestion is that the industry stops whining about piracy and using it to deflect blame away from how it has devalued its own product. Connected with that it could stop throwing hissy fits and pulling simulcasts or not allowing foreign distributors from putting out boxsets and blurays. That would all be a good start towards calming down and trying to find a way out of this mess. Or maybe it really is too late.

So this just sounds like your usual ranting – you’re blaming the death of the industry on moe and lolicon and some shows that YOU don’t like despite being quite popular with fans.

Okay. Please – just take a deep breath and read this whole post again. Please.

But commercialization and sponsorship has been part of anime since day one, this isn’t a new thing.

Exactly – and the same is true within music – pop music has been used to sell other products etc since the 1950s. That’s not a criticism of my argument – its further evidence for it! You’d hope that after half a century of doing exactly what I’m describing here that both industries would act less surprised that consumers view their products as low value and disposable. I mean, how stupid do they really think we are?

But what is wrong with a show being disposable? I quite like some shows that I admit are disposable.

There’s nothing wrong with a show itself being disposable! There is always going to be disposable product in every entertainment industry, plus ‘disposableness’ is in itself – like quality – a subjective term.

The issue is this though: don’t whine about something being disposable if you made it that way. If you are a studio that makes shallow, disposable product then don’t act all surprised if people might enjoy watching it once, but don’t want to pay to own a handful of episodes of it on an overpriced DVD. You can’t blame them for that. Instead you need to find alternative ways of monetizing that one, single viewing. Or to price it far more realistically. Again this is how iTunes works, by charging mere pennies for products that its customers view as largely disposable. Not perfect for the artist and industry arguably, but its still a lot better than someone just stealing it.

Or, of course, you need to make a less disposable product in the first place….but lets stop there before we start going around in circles again, shall we?

The Guardian has some interesting coverage of SXSW this last week. Contrary to popular geek belief I frequently find mainstream reaction to events and ideas just as fascinating as specialist coverage – although that may be due to my science fiction projects, which deal with the public and cultural acceptance of bleeding edge technology.

In particular, this bit on ‘gamification’ caught my eye:

“The current public face of gamification is Jane McGonigal, author of the new book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World, but many of her prescriptions are cringe-inducing: they seem to involve redefining aid projects in Africa as “superhero missions”, or telling hospital patients to think of their recovery from illness as a “multiplayer game”. Hearing how McGonigal speeded her recovery from a serious head injury by inventing a “superhero-themed game” called SuperBetter, based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which her family and friends were players helping her back to health, I’m apparently supposed to feel inspired. Instead I feel embarrassed and a little sad: if I’m ever in that situation, I hope I won’t need to invent a game to persuade my family to care.”

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this. Certainly the idea that a generation of gamers can only be motivated by turning what should perhaps be common sense into a game seems a little patronising to me, and the mention of African aid there borders on some kind of imperialism. But perhaps I’m overreacting. What’s your take?

Oh my days.

Okay, let’s just cut to the chase. What exactly is the Otaku: man up hashtag all about? Good question.

It’s about a few things. It’s about a flimsy, non-existent manifesto. It’s about a pointless, ill-conceived philosophy. It’s about angry, knee-jerk rational debate. But mostly it’s about BOTH shits AND giggles.

‘But wait!’ you say, ‘There’s a manifesto?’ Yes. Yes there is. A completely non-existent one:

• Real otaku men treat real women with respect. And by ‘respect’ I do not mean ‘fear’. That is not good enough. Watch all the moe and hug all the body pillows you want, but don’t hide behind them. Get out there and interact with people – both sexes – that are NOT otaku, so that when you go back to your fantasies they are just that. You’ll enjoy them even more, trust me. Perspective is amazing.
• Real otaku men do not cry like a girl if someone disagrees with them. You see, the whole point of otaku is that you are passionate about something. Passionate. Like a fucking warrior. Not a victim. You can man up and just shrug it off. Move on. Or, if you have reached the advanced stage, you can MAN THE FUCK UP and get stuck into the fight. Debate. Reason. Discuss. Don’t whine – educate.
• Real otaku men do the unexpected. Do something you don’t normally do. Get drunk. Watch a movie you wouldn’t normally watch. Smoke something you shouldn’t. Watch some TV that’s not anime. Read a book about politics. Talk to that girl.
• Real otaku men don’t give a fuck what the Otaku Elimination Game says about their blog. They also never pay any attention to retarded ‘manifestos’ on the internet.
• Real otaku men never, EVER use the excuse ‘but it’s only a cartoon’. Really. Don’t shit on the medium you are meant to be championing.

But hey – don’t listen to me. I’m just some shit-stirring, sarcastic Brit. I’m not even – by any stretch of the imagination – what you would call an otaku. What the fuck do I know about any of this stuff?

Luckily, I wasn’t the only person contributing today:

• The REAL meaning of #otakumanup: RT @wintermuted: This is perhaps controversial to some, but I love me a productive argument.
• @serial: Guys, @animealmanac couldn’t take the heat, he needs to #otakumanup
• @janaiblog: If you’re gonna criticize moe or any other large fandom, be prepared to respond to criticism. #otakumanup
• @digiwombat: PSA: @timmaughan is a fantastic cunt with a substance abuse problem. #otakumanboy
• @debaoki: being a passive whiner does not make you inexplicably irresistable to women (e.g. kimi kiss or evangelion)
• @CrusherJ: Is it to early in the course to mention that actual women can be attractive too?
• @RedConfession: Girls like geeks. Not guys who compare everything to geeky things. Show her you’ve at least heard of the real world #otakumanup
• @edsizemore: Don’t forget to have fun too. Cause it’s okay to laugh at yourself. #otakumanup
• @Sheentaku: #otakumanup Role models: Golgo 13, Lupin III, Kenshiro, Archer, Captain Kiichi Goto. You dont have to look manly to be manly.

Follow the people above. They will change – and may even save – your life.

That’s right folks, February 28 is the First Annual Global Makoto Shinkai Day, organised by the wonderful fansite Cherry Blossoms Falling. Plus, controversial anime steaming site Crunchyroll will apparently be offering all the director’s movies available for free for those 24 hours. Good option as a last resort, but really if you can try and get your hands on some DVDs or even Blu-rays if you want to check out his beautiful work for the first time.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to participate in the discussion over at CBF, but I am planning to get involved in some way. I’ll be posting (hopefully) two relevant articles, one of which should be my long delayed review of Five Centimeters Per Second. Stay tuned, and enjoy the celebrations.

Yeah. After resisting for years, I’ve finally folded to the demands from some readers and set up a Twitter account. As if I needed anything else to distract me from getting some writing done. Anyway, the link’s below so go ahead and add me (or ‘follow me’ or whatever the correct terminology is for this one, I lose track) and find out what I’m thinking about/doing. A lot of it will be about anime. Some of it won’t. Some of it might even be interesting. Ahhh, the suspense…

twitter.com/timmaughan

…which is on 28th February, apparently. At least according to Makoto Shinkai fansite Cherry Blossoms Falling, who are organising this (probably less than official) event. According to this post:

In order to celebrate the works of Makoto Shinkai we’ve decided to throw a Global Shinkai Day. We’ll spend 24 hours watching Shinkai’s films, chatting during the movies and having discussions and contests along the way. We hope you will be able to drop in and join the party/conversation

All you need is an internet connection to this site and access to Mr Shinkai’s works. We’ll publish a schedule of when we’d expect folks to be watching certain films and we will have a forum and chat room available for people to share their feedback on the films and Shinkai.

Sounds like fun, and a nice way to celebrate the work of probably the most interesting talent to emerge in anime in the last decade. Not sure how much I’ll be participating, but I’ll try and sit down and give Voices of a Distant Star yet another watch (which is always a pleasure), or check out 5 Centimeters Per Second which, at risk of losing my Shinkai fanboy credentials, I still haven’t had a chance to see yet…

I fucking love this story.

Although really, you do have to feel sorry for the guy. Daisuke Enomoto, the multi-millionaire executive of one of Japan’s leading ISPs Livedoor, paid Space Adventures $21 million to travel to the International Space Station and to be the first tourist to take a walk in space. Sadly he failed his physical, and is now trying to sue SA for allegedly misleading him. Harsh.

But that’s not the bit that I love. You see, Enomoto-san is a HUGE anime freak. So much in fact, that he was planning to dress as Char Aznable from the Gundam shows. While he was up there. Seriously.

But that’s not all. If you want to be a space tourist in these early, pioneering days, while SA and the Russians are all too keen to take your cash, it seems poor, precious NASA insists on you doing some kind of scientific experiment to justify your orbital presence. Enomoto’s planned experiment? He was going to see how hard it was to assemble Gundam model kits in zero-gee.

Sadly, it all seems to have got a little messy and complicated, and unlikely to happen. Even though, i still hope Enomoto-san gets his wish. To quote him directly, all he wanted to do was “go up there and chill”.

Story from Wired

Whilst surfing over the weekend, I stumbled over a quote from sci-fi author Ken MacLeod. Now, I haven’t read any of MacLeod’s stuff for a couple of years, but this quote (apparently from his novel ‘The Cassini Division’) hit a chord with me.

(The technological singularity)…is the rapture for nerds.

Genius. I’ve been searching for a way of summing up my discontent with contemporary singularity theory, and all the time MacLeod had hit the nail right bang on the head.

For those of you not familiar with the concept of the rapture, it’s a fundamentalist Christian belief that at some point in the future Jesus will return to the earth and transport all true Christians up to heaven to leave in immortal, eternal peace with the Lord.

It’s the perfect get out clause. Belief in this happening means that Christians don’t have to deal with everything that challenges their world-view; homosexuality, the internet, women’s sexual liberation, stem-cell research, the pro-choice movement, rival religions, Darwin…all of this can be just dismissed as sin, and left to perish, when God comes down to save them.

What MacLeod is saying, is that for a large tract of the geek community, the singularity is filling the same role. It’s the perfect get out clause. Belief in this happening means that geeks don’t have to deal with everything that challenges their world-view; ecological break-down, global warming, digital rights management, the hypocrisy of being a corporate IT professional but hating anything not open-source, global poverty, the high price of oil, obesity and heart disease….all of this can be just dismissed as Luddite heresy, and left to perish, when the AI Gods rise up to save them….uploading their brains to immortal digital shells, using nanotechnology to clean up the environment, giving everyone fusion powered flying cars and lots of free cybersex with VR constructs of Kristen Bell.

Of course not all geeks think this way, just as not all Christians blindly believe in the rapture.

And me? In case you haven’t guessed already, I’m a fucking atheist.

I was procrastinating preparing to do some work today by clearing out my office/studio/spare room, when I found myself taking the above photo. I was emptying a drawer of the usual flotsam of modern life, when I realised it was subtly different. Maybe it’s because I’m weird, but instead of the usual collection of random badges, elastic bands, paperclips and the tops off lost biros, this little pile included:

• An old 3rd party Playstation memory card
• A Gunpey game cartridge for the Wonderswan, complete with protective slip case
• A weird Playstation cable tidy thing, that I was given at a Sony developers conference some years ago
• The cover for the network adaptor port on a black Nintendo Gamecube
• Protective covers for what I think are Dreamcast memory cards or VMUs (x3, various colours)

I don’t know why I took a photo of it. Possibly because it’s in someway a comment on how the minutiae of even the most mundane aspects of our lives have been changed by our reliance on consumerism and technology. Or something.

If you can actually use any of this shit then give me a shout.