How To Make Your Physical-Copy Doujinshi Readable Without Learning Moon

[Also works with any Japanese manga, but doujinshi tend to be the ones that get bought in Japanese by people who don’t know Japanese.]

If you’re like me (god help you), then you like owning doujinshi—preferably ones that’ve been scanslated—but you can’t read Japanese, and it bothers you that you can’t actually read your physical copies of those doujinshi. Today I’ll be sharing my solution to this problem, which probably isn’t the best nor the most professional (and might be the most time-consuming), but anyone and their grandma can do it.

Otakon 2010 Post One: The Haul

I’m gonna be segmenting my Otakon coverage, partly because the thing as a whole is so massive, and partly because I want the sense of accomplishment from writing an Otakon post tonight without the incredible amount of work it’d take to do it all at once. So first up, I’ll start with the easy stuff: my haul.

Here's all of it together~

Loving Your Fellow Fan – It's All A Rich Tapestry! (Also: I Learn to Truly Understand the Thirst for Akihabara)

It’s quite evident that we of the anime blogosphere have a great love for our fellow fan. After all, we spend a lot of time reading anime blogs (yes, it’s crazy that I post 3 times a day, but you’re also crazy for reading three posts by me a day!) and we allow the views and opinions of others to enhance our fandoms and our lives. It is, however, because I share such a strong bond with anime bloggers that I feel I almost try to ‘do too much with them,’  like a clingy girlfriend. I’m sure that some of you do the same as well, as I feel that the blogosphere moves at a pace and has a livelihood that wouldn’t be possible if we spent most of our time interacting with fans of other groups. However, every so often I remember that anime fans are a vast, vast sea of people, and many of them have a lot to offer us. Just as a sheltered person would never be able to gain enough experience to have worldly knowledge and grow an epic wizard beard, a sheltered anime fan may be disallowing their beard to fully grow. That might not be a problem for everyone, but for a guy like me who strives to be the biggest otaku possible, I find it important to make sure I’m getting the ‘full experience.’

The Ever-Embarassed Ogiue Teaches Me About My Own Reservations

Art by maromi http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=maromi_%28artist%29

I can’t seem to find the chapter in which it happened, but there is a certain scene in Genshiken wherein Ogiue Chika explains to one of her friends (I can’t remember whom) that she is embarrassed about showing her manga to the world, because she is literally putting her fantasies onto the page. When someone reads her hardcore yaoi manga, they are reading exactly what she gets off on, and there is an obvious sense that if someone sees this and finds it disgusting, it only takes a little line-drawing to consider the artist equally disgusting.