I’ve relented: rather than the near-complete separation of this blog from anime-related subjects that I had originally planned, I’ve given in to my past tradition and am going to post the complete results of my con experience this year on my main blog after all.
This is something brand new: a multipart video diary of my experiences! It also has lots of interviews with fans and some candid footage of a con in disarray and disorganization. Things were not so well-run this year and the complaints are surfacing all over the Net right now. This is a small addition to that cloud of witnesses.
I will be writing a written account of my thoughts and feelings within the week as well. Stay tuned.
Longtime readers may recall that I have a tradition of reporting on the anime conventions I attend every year. (Examples from 2004, 2005, and 2006.) This year is no different–except, this time, I happen to have an entire anime blog and podcast all geared up for Anime Expo 2007, which starts tomorrow! This year, there will not just be written reports and pictures, but also live video and audio reporting if I have time to splice everything together.
The action is happening on my anime blog, Anime Diet. So come check it out!
Notice something a little different at Imagria.com? Yup, I have finally gotten rid of that albatross of blogging software known as Movable Type (which I’ve been using since 2003) for the faster, far more flexible, and spam-freer WordPress! The theme is not perfectly laid out yet, but that will be fixed in the coming week. (It’s based on an existing theme but with my own graphics.)
WordPress is so full of awesome that there’s even a plugin available to let me crosspost to Xanga automatically, without manual cutting and pasting. I’ve been doing that for so many years now, and it’s always been a hassle…and now those days are over. So the Xanga site is, from now on, a true mirror.
For longtime readers: did you know this is, in fact, a promised but long-delayed followup to a post I wrote five years ago, around the time I saw the first Spidey movie?
I am one of those nerds that, for some reason, never took to the traditional American superhero comic book. (It took anime and manga for me to get into anything similar.) Even today there is still an instinctive part of me that wants to sneer at the superhero genre. Isn’t it supposed to be simplistic, full of black-and-white characters and dumb plots? Childish art for childish brains?
But dang it, I love–I mean love–the Spider Man movies. Ever since I saw the first one in the theater, I’ve always made sure to go to them on opening weekend. (I’ll be going to the third one tomorrow.) The only other movies that I’ve ever shown that kind of loyalty to are the Lord of the Rings movies. Why? What’s so great about Spider-Man? (more…)
Hear me speak what’s on my mind
Let me give this testimony…
I came across an article from an old issue of The Wittenburg
Door that brought back a flood of memories from my youth group days, not because the article described my experience so much as touched on names, desires, and longings that usually went unspoken–albeit centered around that “righteous fox” of the CCM world, Amy Grant. The article is called “Sex, Amy Grant, and the Quest for the Righteous Fox,” and it’s one of the best growing-up-evangelical short articles I’ve ever come across, mostly because it is so exact in describing what was going on in a lot of earnest Christian teenage guys’ minds at the time.
Unlike the author of that article I did not have fantasies about meeting Amy Grant backstage and having her falling in love with me. Not at all, considering that I loathed most CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) in the same years that the article’s author sighed over Grant’s album covers. But curious to see what this guy saw in her, I searched Youtube for Amy Grant videos just now, and along the way, I somehow stumbled on this concert video–not of Grant, but another CCM giant and her sometime writing partner, Michael W. Smith:
More memories began flooding back. In this video, “Smitty” as he is known to his fans is playing at the Patriot Center, at George Mason University. I remembered the very first rock/pop concert I ever attended was seeing Michael W Smith (Jars of Clay, opening) at the Patriot Center, at George Mason University. Was I actually at this concert? The date seemed about right–1993, the year I entered youth group and I remember distinctly a bunch of us young youth group kids making the trek to see this Bryan Adams-cum-Elton John-and-Billy-Joel soundalike play for tens of thousands of Christians (even if a few his songs did play on mainstream soft rock radio). I immediately began writing a comment on the Youtube page to shout out–hey, I’m in that crowd somewhere. This was my first concert, even if I grew to loathe this sort of music later…
Then I remembered: Jars of Clay opened at the concert I was at. And I also remembered–Jars of Clay didn’t release their first full length album until 1995. They almost certainly couldn’t have been on the 1993 tour. And I remember being older than 12 at the concert I went to, and if it was in May 1993–that was before I entered youth group altogether.
Rats. That wasn’t my concert after all.
Then I thought: how the heck do I still remember the exact date of Jars of Clay’s first release? Why, when I listen now to “Place in this World,” does it seem pretty tuneful and well-constructed and not retch-inducing like it used to be? (Even if it sounds almost exactly like a Bryan Adams power ballad?) Why does the chorus of Amy Grant’s “Every Heartbeat” get stuck in my head and “El Shaddai” turn out to have actual Biblical and theological substance? (Well–I do understand the Hebrew now, maybe that helps.) Amy Grant and Smitty also actually wrote a song together that we still sing from time to time–”Thy Word”–and while it has some of the things I still don’t like about most praise songs, that song is probably the main reason I remember Psalm 119:105. In the King James rendering, of all things.
My friend Matt once said that one day, we are going to look at all those cheesy CCM and praise songs that filled our ears as teenagers, and think of them the way our parents do when they hear the Beatles or the Stones–with nostalgia, recognizing late that there must have been something to them if we still remember them so clearly and so distinctly all those years later.
I’m going to go put on Jars of Clay’s first album. For old times’ sake. “This is the one thing/the one thing that I know…”
This is the original, uncensored version of an article I wrote for my school’s student newspaper, the Semi, in the annual Arts Festival issue. The article was retitled simply “SFD” for publication and “shitty” replaced with “s$#(@”. I don’t have a huge problem with that seeing that this is a Christian school I go to, but I’d note that the profanity is from a quote–they’re not my words but Anne Lamott’s and this is in the interest of exact quotation. Here endeth my excuse. (more…)
Today we are reminded, O God, of the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil ones and establish your rule of justice, love and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (HT to Joel at the Boar’s Head Tavern)
I think what’s hit hardest for me is that most of the victims were in the engineering and computer science building, the kind of things I studied, badly, in college in similar kinds of buildings with similar kinds of people. There are (unconfirmed, will update with confirmed info and I really really hope this isn’t true though multiple witnesses at the shootings report this) rumors that the shooter himself was a frustrated Asian student–a South Korean. An English major, even, the other subject I majored in. He cut down his classmates studying German, fluid dynamics, algorithms, physics, linear algebra, programming…and if he was an engineering student, fellow geeks, really. Techies, perhaps like himself, and like me.
We geeks don’t usually think that our lives will ever seriously be in danger, least of all in the classrooms and subjects where we tend to flourish–or complain together, with understanding nods and fatalistic laughter, about how damned hard the projects and tests are and marvel together at 50% test averages that still count as B-minuses. That was what we called trials and tribulations as engineering students and it all seemed so insurmountable because we’d never think there was anything worse that could happen. How small and petty those concerns–back then I wrote blog entries with titles like “Woe to Computer Science”–seem now.
I pray for everyone and their families at Virginia Tech, and my heart hurts for them.
Edit 4/17/07: The name of the shooter has been released, Cho Seung-Hui.
Kurt Vonnegut was a formative influence on me as a writer. He probably gave me most of whatever sense of humor I have now, and his novels Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, and Slaughterhouse-Five are not only fine works of modern American literature, but fine works of science fiction. I remember going through a “Vonnegut phase” in my late high school years, devouring his books, including his less-than-great ones like Breakfast of Champions. I even wrote a short story around that time that mimicked his satirical style, and it was probably the best thing I wrote in high school.
I don’t agree with a lot of his philosophy, such as his atheism, or the fatalism of books like Slaughterhouse-Five. But Vonnegut’s writing made me laugh and made me think, for many fine hours. He’ll be missed. So it goes.
I came here to escape this.
But it’s been cloudy all week
and today the drizzle doesn’t fall,
but settles on my skin, gently,
seeming to materialize from the gray air
before it seeps into the earth,
greening the buds
and quenching this desert land’s thirst.
At a certain distance I follow behind you,
ashamed to come closer.
Though you have chosen me as a worker
in your vineyard and I pressed the grapes
of your wrath.
To every one according to his nature:
what is crippled should not always be healed.
I do not even know whether one can be free,
for I have toiled against my will.
Taken by the neck like a boy who kicks and bites
Till they sit him at the desk and
order him to make letters,
I wanted to be like others but was given
the bitterness of separation,
Believed I would be an equal among equals
but woke up a stranger.
Looking at manners as if I arrived
from a different time.
Guilty of apostasy from the communal rite.
There are so many who are good and just,
those were rightly chosen
And wherever you walk the earth,
they accompany you.
Perhaps it is true that I loved you secretly
But without strong hope to be close to you
as they are.
