Everybody else is doing it, so please find my new account here:

I'm not doing this to be fickle or annoy my watchers. Actually, it's what I should have done way back when when the account was born. My goal is to synch up everything related to my "band" (really just me and a computer) the Sakura Amplifier. [link] will now be simply a hub that links to my MySpace music page, Live Journal, DA, and Fotolog. Part of this process, though, is giving all of those accounts the same name. Believe me, I'm not looking forward to re-uploading 100+ deviations (and probably won't re-upload everything), or having to re-watch everyone. But I think it will be worth it in the long run to have the Sakura Amplifier name attached to everything I'm doing online. This is something I've wanted for a long time, but I've only recently decided to cowboy up and do it.

I hope all of you will follow me even though I'm not around here much anymore.

A while back I posted lyrics to a song called "Flower Drown". It has now been recorded, and I present it to you in almost complete form: Flower Drown.

At the end of this sentence there will be a link. Click it and you can find an explanation as to why I will be absent for a bit. [link]

Despite having two papers to write this weekend, I woke up this morning and decided to go on a bit of an otaku hunt. My goal was to see if I could find anything anime or manga related that interested me in the least. I'm pleased to report that the outing was a minor success, though I don't know if I actually have the funding to get back into the swing of being that particular type of nerd.

My first problem is that there's only one place in my town to rent anime. I don't know if Blockbuster carries anime becuase I don't go there. But I do know that Hastings has a better selection, though still not what I'd call great. Since most anime is in the form of TV series, I view it as kind of an all or nothing proposition. I get nothing from watching, say Volume 4 of Samurai Champloo by itself. But this is how Hastings tends to buy anime: one or two volumes of each series. And usually not the first two, which would at least allow me to watch the beginning of a series and see if it's worth buying the rest (not to mention the prospect of spoilers that comes with watching the middle of a series first). So anime is tough for me.

Still, today I rented something called Le Portrait de Petit Cossette, mostly because it's a 3 episode OVA that I can watch tomorrow afternoon in one sitting. Also because the plot sounds relatively interesting, and the box art gave me the distinct feeling that said plot would not have to be interrupted every 10 minutes so some school girls could flash their panties at me. An online friend also recommended that I check out Midori Days, which certainly appears to have lots of naughtiness, but the plot about a guy's right hand turning into a girl who has a crush on him has the potential to be surreal enough to distract me from the lowbrow sex humor. Plus I actually find Love Hina and Chobits funny, so I'm not always opposed to that type of humor...I'm just burnt out on it at the moment.

Apparently, though, my time and money would be better spent on manga. I spent some time in the manga section at Hastings, and will spend more in a few hours when I go to Barnes & Noble to work on a paper for school. Beautiful People, Loveless and Full Moon wo Sagashite all looked interesting enough to invest half an hour to read. I've come to a point where the scratchy, whispy manga style of drawing is way more appealing to me than the plastic look of anime. Again, it's not that I don't like the latter, just that I'm burnt out. The shiny plastic look is a nice diversion every now and then, in the same way that a Jacque Louis David painting is a nice diversion after looking at a lot of Cezannes and Gauguins (and there's a comparison I bet you weren't expecting). But saying that the former is a diversion is also stating implicitly that I'd rather look at Cezannes and Gauguins most of the time. And that is, in fact, the case. Most manga might still subscribe to the big-eye style, but there's more individualism within the style.

Finally, I concluded my otaku excursion by preordering Kingdom Hearts II, which I'm about to start losing sleep over. I had more or less sworn off the institution of the preorder after purchasing Tales of Symphonia and discovering that, in fact, an RPG with Kosuke Fujishima character designs could suck. And suck. And keep right on sucking. I know KHII won't be an exceptionally fun game, but as long as they keep throwing out weird combinations of Disney and Square Enix characters, I will feel that I have spent my money well. And plus there's always the chance that I'll get a third game in which to play as (or at least interact with) Yuna, and that chance is something I'm willing to pay for.

You know what would be funny? If people wrote crossover fanfiction for serious literary works. Imagine what might happen if Holden Caulfield suddenly found himself in Heart of Darkness.

But I kid fan artists.

I'd like to watch some more anime someday, but it seems that everything coming out now is completely 100% substance free. This summer will mark the 14 year anniversary of the first time I saw anime in Japanese (if you wanna go all the way back to watching Robotech and Voltron as a kid, it's been 20 years). That being the case, maybe I've just hit that point in my life where everything new seems really crappy and everything old seems great, but it really doesn't seem like anything these days not made by Miyazaki or Gainax is any damn good. I guess Yotsubato! will get animated someday (or maybe it already has--I don't even keep up anymore), and that would be cool. But is there anything else that's worth watching at all? Bearing in mind that I expect more from entertainment than cute girls and/or hot guys.

The truth is I'm really fascinated by fandom, but I just can't keep up with it. I have about a billion hobbies that compete for my time and money, and if something doesn't stay consistiently exhilirating, it gets left behind. But I see fans, otaku if you will, and I want to be part of their clique. I always have. I've tried very hard. I wish I could Bit Torrent every new anime the second it aired in Japan. I wish I could read every manga. I wish I could buy every new video game on Tuesday, have it finished by Friday and have my fanfic online by Monday. I wish I could go to cons dressed as my favorite Final Fantasy character (wait, they're all girls--ok, dressed as Vincent Valentine, then). But I just don't know how.

Of course I do have an anthropological interest in otaku, so maybe if I were on the inside, I wouldn't enjoy it as much. If I got to sit at the otaku table at lunch, wearing my Chobits t-shirt, listening to Gackt on my iPod, I'd be staring across the room at the Philosophy majors, thinking maybe I should grow a beard and read some Hume. And let's be perfectly honest: I am a Philosophy major, and I do wear a Chobits t-shirt and listen to Gackt on my iPod...it's just not required of me. My point is, I probably shouldn't be in such a hurry to corrupt my data by trying to be assimilated into the culture.

Besides, the best otaku I could ever be is the Takashi Murakami variety: I would start writing about the culture, trying to expose it through art, and I'd be ostracized by the mainstream for being an otaku, and by the otaku for trying to throw open the windows on their cozy little world. And you know what? Both sides would be absolutely right to do so.