Renaissance Josei

I swear, I don't mean to keep picking on Tokyopop. It's just that this company has done so many notably dumb things over the years.  It has failed so many goddamn times.  It has screwed over so many goddamn people.  Yet it keeps coming back like a manga-publishing cockroach, even if its current form is naught but a shadow of its turn-of-the-millennium glory.  For the last decade, it's been fairly easy to ignore them unless they pull something audacious like a sketchy charity book for Ukraine or bringing back their controversial Rising Stars of Manga program. So you can only imagine my surprise when a link came across my social media feed advertising Tokyopop not as a manga publisher, not as a multi-media company, but as a potential investment. Their sales pitch is a seemingly simple one.  Any wanna-be investor can purchase private shares in Tokyopop itself.  These shares are just $5 apiece, although they must be purchased in bundles ranging from $1000 ...

This post began as an in-joke between me and my husband, who was the one who came up with the analogy of ambrosia salad .  The rest just kind of grew from there; this is the end result.  Enjoy! Imagine any given season of anime as a potluck dinner.  Some of them are bigger or more diverse than others, but there's always a spread of dishes to pick from.

Recently I've been thinking on those times when life is hard and then some piece of media comes blazing through your life like a comet, bringing a little bit of light and wonder in its wake. I remember around this time of year three years ago, when I stuck in a long stretch of unemployment.  Few things chip away at your self-confidence than the endless search for a job, trying to tell total strangers what you think they want to hear and trying to project enough confidence to pretend that you can do some random office job in some industry that feels miles away from your true calling.  That's where I was, filling the time that wasn't spent in that search (or the resulting funks that came from the lack of results) with household work and writing reviews. That's when the fall season of anime started, which included what was easily the most hyped show of the season, an original work by a well-acclaimed lady director about (of all things) ice skating. Of course, tha...