Sunday, June 2, 2013

Chronicles of a Down (But not Out) Otaku



I haven't posted any hard-hitting material since college graduation a few weeks ago. Truth is, life has offered me some hard-hitting disillusionment. I think I'm depressed... no, I'm sure I'm depressed. Maybe I'm a little impatient, but finding a job as an Art History grad isn't the easiest thing to do, especially since I don't wanna teach and every employer wants 2 - 5 years experience, which they (shockingly) aren't willing to offer. I hate sitting at home with all this time to think about my future and my place in the universe. Watching anime isn't even fun anymore - yes, I'm shocked to hear myself say that too. But I'm trying to be a productive otaku. Here's some of the more interesting parts of this period thus far:


1. Deciding to Learn Japanese

Every single weeaboo on the planet aspires to one day learn Japanese. It's part of our pilgrimage, our journey to otaku enlightenment. After learning that New York's Japan Foundation won't be offering any  fresh language courses until autumn, I bought myself those Pimsleur language learning tracks I hear so much about. While I've certainly learned some stuff I never knew, part of the difficulty with the tracks is their speed. Japanese, to me, sounds like its always spoken like a tape on fast-forward, and pronouncing all those sounds in the 2 seconds the narrator allows me for each prompt is a pain in the ass.



2. Making a Japanese Penpal

This is part of my overall aim to learn Japanese, of course. His name is Mago, and apparently he's a half-decent artist with a website and everything (http://artistmago.jp/). He's in New York now, so I'll probably hang out with him at some point. He needs help learning English and I need a crash course in にほんご, so we talk. It's been a few days since our last chat. I should probably tend to that...


3.  Finding Otaku Hotspots

I recently found out about bookstores Kinokuniya and BookOff in Manhattan near Bryant Park, within a few blocks of each other. I don't read anything other than hiragana at the moment, so perusing through their stock isn't the easiest task. But the stores do have an abundance of English manga, books and even anime. Kinokuniya even has a small cafe on the second floor, where I've been chowing down on some very foreign dishes. I gotta say, their bottled tea drinks have been very off-putting for me, but I guess I'm just not a fan of tea.



4. Visual Novels

I've been interested in playing visual novels for some time. In America, they don't really exist, and are either accessed through torrents or... yeah, just torrents. Fred Gallagher at http://megatokyo.com/ put up a post about playing Katawa Shoujo, where the sickly protagonist goes to a school with other disabled children. I haven't gotten too far but I've already run into a class president character who only speaks sign language. I can't imagine what this game will have in store for me...



5. Making Comics

This one isn't exactly related to Japanese culture, but my uncle wants to make comic books for a living. I want to write for a living. Put two and two together, and you end up with a makeshift project called Thunderstorm, the name for the company he wants to create someday. We'll be putting up some content very soon on http://www.tgcinfo.com/, though for the love of Almighty Jesus I hate the website's look right now. I'll work on that...

Well, that's it for now. I'm still hanging in there. Thanks for reading, all 100 some odd subscribers to my various social networking pages. It's nice to feel like people care. There isn't enough of that in the world. 

- Nelson

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