Welcome to my dark pit of not really that darkness

Costume design by Jessica Rabbit and the Ice Capades.

Because I owe certain people a post, here it is: Wendy Pini's Masque of the Red Death, the first original series (as conceived by Edgar Allen Poe) from Go! Comi. It's a daring "walk on the dark side" kinda like Hot Topic is a walk on the cutting edge of alterna-cool, but hey, it's free to read when you register at the Go! Comi site. Editor Audry Taylor describes it as "what all fans of homoerotic fantasy and horror dream of: a long and involving story line with a cast to die for ... characters who make love, pursue immortality, and suffer from the highest peaks to the lowest depths of human emotion."


"I can see the outline of your fibula and it is totally turning me on.
Also, I've sculpted my own hairdo out of marshmallow fluff."

I describe it as a slow-moving story about boring pro-ana assholes making glassy eyes at each other. There's been none of the promised love-making as of yet, but I imagine it will look pretty much like this when it comes.

As you may have noticed by now, the lead characters are styled, unsuccessfully, in what might be described as a pseudo-Peter Chung, pant-averse future look. People, if you want to draw emaciated yaoi reeds, don't do it halfway! Go all out and invest it with flair, or else your fellas just look repulsively disproportional. Despite Pini's professed interest in manga, her art here is much stronger--and less glaringly Photoshoppy--when it more closely resembles an exaggerated American animation style; no doubt there was a lot of effort put into this, but right now it's not gelling well.

As for the dialogue, well, it exists and it conveys information. So, uh, kudos on that accomplishment--

Bunchh [sic]: A woman's perfect breast... Royess' slinky grace... Steffan's bone structure... you're saying these miracles are just illusions fashioned by whims of the mind?!
Prosper: There's no miracle involved. Royess slinks in black because she wills it. Steffan looks as he does because he wills it.

--wait a minute, dude! This shit is just an infomercial for The Secret!


"I am devoid of all vital organs and muscle mass because I will it.
And now, I will you... to purchase my DVD for $29.95!"

Anime: a beacon of nuanced multi-ethnic representation since, well, never

Hey fan-kids! Want to blog against racism? I know you do, because it's easier than trying to make a difference in the "real" world! And now pretense to action is cooler than ever with these handy dandy anime icons! Nothing creates concrete change like a "ninja against racism" icon, because you know how Naruto is about the fight against--against, well, ninja, mainly. Um. Maybe they're ninja who stand for racism (except for the good guy ninja, who stand only for being ninja) and also ninja.

Here at Power Level One Million, we're ready to join International Blog Against Racism Week and speak out against racism. For a week. On a blog. Which only a few of our friends read. Because that's how we'll turn back centuries of institutionalized inequality. See, there's even an icon.



Because like so many bloggers out there, we too can commit... to looking committed. As long as it can be accomplished entirely from the comfort of our computer wheely chair, anyway.

One of these things is not like the other

Although Black History Month has ended, perhaps it should be extended for a few days to bring a much-needed ray of reality into the lives of juvie anime fans everywhere.

Sayeth the 4Kids fangirls of Save Our Voice Actors:

I found the absolute best quote for SOVA. I'm going to be putting this all over my banners!

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

....I'm making a shirt with this on it.

Yeah. Uh. Kids. You know what Dr. King was talking about? Because somehow I don't think it was--

Wow, that is a perfect quote for SOVA... We definitely need to use it!!

Seriously, I really don't think he was thinking on the level of cart--

I agree!! It's a very SOVA-y quote!! I love it!

Oh, fuck it. Yes, chilluns, the civil rights movement and the recasting of a cartoon have exactly the same moral, social, political, and historical weight. Uh-huh. You go with that.

But is SOVA the goofball-poppingest fan campaign yet to see the light of day? I'm betting "no way"--somewhere out there, the race to the bottom surely continues.

Keeping that Internet alive!

Oh Wikipedia, please bestow upon me your sweet baby tears of knowledge about uh, visual novels:

A visual novel (ビジュアルノベル) is an interactive fiction game featuring mostly static graphics, usually with anime-style art. As the name might suggest, they resemble mixed-media novels or tableau vivant stage plays.

I'm all for the interactive, the fiction, the anime-style art even, but tableau vivant? I clicked on that link, and um, no. Just no.

But enough of the font of pointless knowledge. The seedy underbelly of Wikipedia that are talk pages are a much better read, sometimes, especially when they're longer than the actual article. Does the visual novel talk page follow this example? Oh hell yes!

While I recognise that free images are vastly preferable to copyrighted images, I don't think it's really reasonable to illustrate an article about a game genre with a fake "screenshot". Particularly not if the caption claims it's a real screenshot of a "typical" game, which the Wikipe-tan image definitely would not be.

You see, the image currently displayed on the page to illustrate what the hell they're talking about is this:



"Hey, look at me, I'm on Wikipedia! And I am Wikipedia! Wikipedia is awesome!"

So you could see why this user might have a problem. Seems perfectly reasonable. But it's Wikipedia! So instead of "sure, let's find a real image to illustrate the article" we get:

I'm not opposed to the use of fair use images, and I think they usually add great value to our articles. I'm usually on the side defending the use of a fair use image. However, in this article, this specific article, that kanon image does nothing more than the Wikipe image. If fails policy. This is not optional. Had that image actually added some value to this article that Wikipe-tan's could not (an image of a girl in front of a backdrop with a dialog box) then you might have a point, but that's all the image is. This is not the same as those other articles you listed.

Ah, policy. Because Wikipedia policy is the Constitution and you're Justice Scalia.

After that settles down, we get a discussion about what the "fake" image should look like. Everyone seems to hate it, but with the last comment made two months ago, the image still hasn't been changed.

Wikipedia: You always get what you want, if you have a longer attention span.