It also signals my change of name from newgeekphilosopher to Asperger’s Anime Blogger. I will express the reasons why I am doing this.

The change of hosting gave me an opportunity to change my username, which many bloggers found pretentious. It was a persona that didn’t do me or anybody else any favours. And now I want to set things right. So I’m the Asperger’s Anime Blogger now. You can still see all my old posts on the new site, so don’t be afraid to brush up on your favorite posts of mine.

But I had other motives for going there, because I wanted to see if the R.O.D. Vol 2 copy I ordered had come in yet. Turns out it was there, so I bought it. Ah, the perils of geek love, when your heart is broken and the only thing complete in your life is the set of volumes you own of your favorite manga series…

I also picked up Volumes 1 and 2 of Sorcerers and Secretaries, a complete set in itself because the series is only two volumes, economically sound and short enough to enjoy during a HSC year. It’s sulk-a-riffic if you’ve just had your heart broken and it deals with a romance between a fantasy writing woman who retreats into her fantasy world when life is too much, ignoring the people who love her for the sake of pursuing a dream guy who isn’t real and just one of her imaginings… oh dear… This is scarily starting to sound like what I would be like if I was born a woman or had a sex change… I write fantasy books and retreat into them when the world is cruel as well, the main heroine even wears similar glasses to me…

Excuse me while I hit the Twilight Zone panic button. There we go. Nice big flashing lights and loud noises. This doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying the series, and it’s really enthralling, it’s just a scarily accurate mirror of what my love life is like, only I don’t even have any girls interested in me like this heroine has boys interested in her. Quite simply I’m going to do some reading.

Tip #1: Use FaceMaker programs to design the basics of your characters.

Although these programs are often dissed for creating shockingly primitive character art, these are actually good tools to use as a starting point to see how your character’s facial expression should look before you draw it. I use FaceMaker when I illustrate, because I illustrate in colour. That’s just how I roll. But I also use it for how it helps me construct facial expressions, because those of you who know their stuff will be aware that Asperger’s people like me have difficulty reading faces, even drawing them at first is troublesome before you know what a confused face looks like. It’s not going to give you a perfect face and the options of how many sad crying faces you can make are sometimes limited, but it’s a start that will help you on your way to becoming an illustrator.

Tip #2: You can’t copyright arms and legs, or even eyes. So why not borrow some help from other illustrators?

It’s sneaky, I know. But when I say “borrow some help” I don’t mean copy the whole image. What I’m talking about is the early stages of every illustrator’s life when you can’t quite figure out how to draw Manga eyes on your own. It’s harder than it looks, it really is. But instead of sulking in a corner reading Death Note, why not take one of your favorite manga volumes, and pick out an image panel that really captures the essence of moe, or whatever you’re trying to go for in the mood of your manga series. Figure out the names of manga artists you really like and discover the way they draw other things, like tables and chairs, not just people. There are specific ways you can depict them in a black and white format which you need to learn how to draw in if you’re going to be a mangaka. Illustrators aren’t as troubled by this because they tend to draw colour illustrations. But after you’ve picked out an image of an eye or a limb, analyse the proportions of it and see how it is proportioned in comparison to the rest of the body. You’ll need to do this several times before you get it, so practice!

Tip #3: The Eraser is your friend!

Don’t destroy perfectly good paper when you make a mistake, rub it out with your eraser and draw it again. It’s even easier these days with Photoshop handy to touch up any pencil lines you may have missed. The patience to construct a single image is needed if you are ever going to make it in an artform that requires the making of many images. So instead of trying to rush things together, arrange the image with your eraser, the editor of the Artmaking world.

That’s the only tips I’ve got at the moment, excuse me while I crack out the drawing pad…

There are times when even the Anime Geeks of this world are affected by a tragedy in what is known as their most sacred of districts. And this really floored me.

They say that Asperger’s people have difficulty empathising with other people around them. As an Asperger’s person I don’t think this is true. It is simply that our reactions don’t match our emotions as quickly. I can’t bring out any tears right now, but I want to.

Why? Because only an hour ago I finished helping my best friend through getting the courage to ask out the girl he loves. This friend of mine is so cherished by me that I can’t imagine what my life would be like without him. We need other people to let us share our humanity. And when the inhuman tragedy of violence occurs, how can we possibly react to the deaths of seven people we never met or knew?

I think of it this way. Imagine, if you will, if your friend was cut down there. How would you feel if a loved one was taken away? For all the escapism of the Anime and Manga subculture there are terrible realities and horrors that occur in places so far away, but so close to home. How many Geeks dream of visiting Akihabara? Then, imagine how many people among them could have easily been one of the dead had they been there at that moment?

But what surprises me of all things is that I never could speak a word about how school massacres such as Columbine and Virginia Tech affected me, but it’s a slaying in Akihabara that makes me rage and say “no more”? Maybe Anime and Manga bring attention to the human condition in more ways than we think…

I’ve caused a ruckus with my critique of the Otaku Room Post phenomenon, but what remains interesting to me after offending so many people and feeling so awful about it, is the matter of consumer pride in how we display the spoils of our wealth, such as Anime posters, wall scrolls, and DVD box sets/Manga volumes all neatly arranged. Is it right to flaunt our riches spent on Anime stuff with all our effort, or should we be more subtle in how we arrange our belongings?

I like the idea of Anime posters, but in practice they can be an embarassing reflection of what we really spend our money on. The wrong Anime poster might also give guests to the room the wrong idea of you. But if I could get hold of something decent, like, say, an Akira movie poster or a Miyazaki film poster. Maybe something discreet that isn’t too gaudy.

But ecchi posters are out of the question if you want to impress the ladies. Same with “holding pillows”. I have heard it suggested that one can print a holding pillow of your girlfriend to show your affection, but you’d need to explain this in a way that makes her understand why you don’t just hold her close to you anyway. But for those Anime Geeks who don’t live with their girlfriend/don’t want to do it before you marry, this is a great way, if an understanding is reached, to show your geeky love for your woman.

lelangir has suggested to me that the Geek and Nerd subculture is nothing without aesthetics. I mistakenly thought that one could separate the aesthetics from the internal contemplation of the Geek and Nerd mind.

But how does consumerism affect the Anime fandom subculture? Well, to start with, it’s a subculture with a strong consumer aesthetic, because it’s based on consumer pop culture like Anime and Manga. The issue with consumerism in Anime and Manga is not so much “is it right to put Anime posters I love on my wall” but “what Anime and Manga related paraphernalia am I purchasing, and what motives or desires do I have for purchasing them?”.

It is perfectly fine to buy the latest Manga volume to treat yourself, but is it right to go without food so you can continue to buy expensive Anime figures? This dilemma has plagued Anime fans and otaku for decades, and the simplest explanation I can come up with to solve it is with this Golden Rule of Anime/Manga purchasing:

If you can afford it, buy it. If you can’t afford it, save for it. If you want it badly, don’t starve for it.

Simple enough a rule, huh? There’s nothing wrong with buying Anime and Manga you enjoy, but when you are buying for inexplicable motives, impulse buying when you can’t afford it, or starving yourself so you CAN afford it, then we have a problem. If you feel guilty about purchasing something, reconsider buying it until you feel you’ve earned it, like when you’ve completed a school/employment related task you put off to watch Code Geass. And if you feel like you’ve earned your Anime and Manga stuff, you’ll be proud to plaster it all over your walls. Why wouldn’t you? It’s not like you’re ashamed of something you earned.

Too often Anime and Manga fans feel they have to justify their purchases. This behaviour saps the enjoyment of the actual items purchased into a cycle of self-pity and trying to make yourself look good in the eyes of others. For every Geek Treat you buy, make sure you have enough money to buy lunch. You need to feed yourself, not just your collection. This way you can have your cake and eat it too. And I am aware that was the worst pun/cliche ever. But that doesn’t make it less true.

It’s a known fact that shopaholics and drug addicts will do anything to justify the ways they satisfy their addictions. But if you stop feeling guilty about treating yourself once in a while, you won’t need to justify who you are and what you do with your money. In the same way you shouldn’t have to justify your Anime/Manga hobby to your friends and loved ones, they should accept you for who you are if they truly love you. (Unless you like lolicon, in which case I can’t help you there)

Because Anime and Manga is viewed as a sort of “outsider hobby” which is viewed as “shameful”, some Anime and Manga fans feel guilty because of the way their hobby is viewed by others. This leads to a spiral of self pity as well. There will be times when it’s tough, but your true friends and lovers will accept who you are. And when you are buying things you like not because you feel you “have to have it” just to have it, but you want it as something to enjoy, this is a much healthier attitude to have towards Manga and Anime purchases.

And if you really, really feel that guilty about how much Anime and Manga stuff you buy a month, there’s always donating some of your spending money to charity. Chances are you can delay your gratification to achieve a greater good such as sponsoring an African child, supporting your local place of worship (or your local place of atheism), even buying a friend lunch that you can share with them. There are far worse things in life than not having the complete set of Death Note figures. You could be on fire, or homeless, or deceased.

In short, if you’re an Anime and Manga fan, you shouldn’t be so much worried about how to justify a hobby that makes you happy, even if other people think you’re weird for buying schoolgirl posters, as you should be worried about the effects your hobby has on yourself and the economy. Go happy life.

Well, it sort of works like this. For me, the “Professor Hat” is like the potion that Dr. Jekyll drinks to become Mr. Hyde. Only instead of becoming a brute who bludgeons children I become a pretentious git. Whenever I start talking about “philosophy in the boudoir” or “pipes”, you know these are warning signs that I’m not myself. Whenever I mention these I tend to go to the dark side of philosophy, thinking my words are gold.

What’s even more embarrassing is that whenever I put on my “Professor Hat” I usually make an arse of myself in front of more experienced intellectual bloggers. They expose me as the Emperor who has No Clothes, and thus the cycle of sulking and lack of self worth begins. But is there a way I can destroy the Professor Hat, throwing it into the fires of Mt. Doom so it will never again trouble me with its nefarious power?

I guess I have to stick to what Geek Philosophy really means instead of donning the Professor Hat and staying away from associated “Clive James in the Library” sort of imagery that reeks of pretention. How could I go from an insightful Geek Philosophy post to something so smug as a subversion of the Otaku Room Post which may have been feeding my ego?

I guess it’s about restraint. In my years as an intellectual I have become familiar with being roasted by other intellectuals, most famously by Germaine Greer at a Q&A. Maybe I need thicker skin, I won’t go into hiding this time though. Not this time.

Because experience tells me that going into hiding only makes people think I’m a wuss. There are times where I slip up, and there are times when I am insightful. I aim to be more insightful than slipping up in my blogging. Maybe I just need to swallow my pride and burn that Professor’s Cap once and for all, before it gets worse. I can always be an intellectual without having a persona, it’s not something I need, and it’s dishonest to put up a facade. My readers deserve the real me, not some Tolkienesque Professor clone type who smokes his pipe like a chimney.

Nothing says “philosophy” quite like a picture of Carl Jung. Just look at him, it’s like he’s got philosophy written in his wrinkles!

I’ve just looked at the Blog Stats for this week. Wow. The pain.

It appears that while I initially got good view ratings when I began posting about Anime, this novelty has worn off. Why has it worn off? Is it because, despite my blog name, there has been a severe lack of philosophy?

Now that all depends on your view of “philosophy”. To some people, philosophy means “Aristotle” or “Nietzsche”. To me, philosophy can mean something as simple as “Train Man” or “Can an Asperger’s patient blog about Anime?”.

Because philosophy has been around so long, it’s changed a lot from what it originally was, men talking about how the universe and their lives worked, and whether gods or God exists. But nowadays people associate “philosophy” WITH old men talking about things they now grumble about since nobody listened to them as philosophers when they were younger.

HOWEVER! Philosophy can be complicated, but it can be as simple as contemplating a work of art such as a work of Anime in the simple terms of whether it expresses emotion effectively, or how an Asperger’s person reacts to a form of expression that requires them to read faces, which they find difficult to do.

I started this blog as a mixture of Geek and Nerd Philosophy, and gradually it turned into an Anime blog as I made connections with other bloggers. This blog was originally my set of manifestos about the Geek and Nerd community, and because I tried to become popular by doing Anime reviews, forgetting my original purpose, I have met with some criticism in the few weeks this blog has been young.

To me “Geek Philosophy” is a mass philosophy, one that is easily accessible to a wide audience. It does not have any pretensions, just like a Geek or Nerd isn’t pretentious about liking one Anime show or Computer Operating System over another. “Geek Philosophy” is not so much what is put into lengthy arguments about what an Anime or Sci-Fi show really means, but Geek Philosophy is more about how a group of outsiders can be united, instead of divided, by the forms of popular culture they enjoy.

We don’t need a civil war inside our community, we already fight to be accepted by society, we fight to be loved by men and women who we hope in our heart of hearts will love us back, and wanting nothing else but their love in return. And we do this even if the man or woman is a two dimensional animated character, an illusion of life.

Geek Philosophy isn’t about taking down the foundations of the society we are outsiders in, no, Geek Philosophy is knowing that no matter how lonely we feel as individuals in this crazy old world, as long as we have our Geek and Nerd subculture and embrace it, we will never be alone.

I started my quest in Geek Philosophy with a book called Train Man by Hitori Nakano. It was a gift from the Geek Pantheon, a thunderbolt to my Nerdy skull. This book taught me that the internet was not entirely the realm of miserable misanthropes who would hurt anything that moved, but it was a place we could make better through our own actions. It is our actions as Geeks and Nerds that define us, what make us part of the world within and outside the Geek and Nerd community.

The world is bigger than our bedrooms that we make into our Fortresses of Solitude, but never, ever, use fear as an excuse to hate your fellow man. Chances are they’re just as scared as you, and everybody needs their friends. We can hide in our bedrooms, but it is when we emerge that we have realised the sun may burn our skin if we don’t wear sunscreen, but it won’t kill us. No matter how many Vampire books you read, it won’t kill you.

I started Geek Philosophy as a reaction to the despair of the otaku counter culture, and taking what I knew from my own Australian culture, and the Geek and Nerd subculture I experienced locally, I knew there was something in what Geeks and Nerds had that could be used as a great power of good. That power of good is the collection of misfits and freaks who will one day be the people who are the CEOs, the graphic designers, and the benevolent bigshots who will shape our planet’s future.

That is Geek Philosophy. Even the aesthetics of Geek and Nerd culture such as fashion are merely an expression of the true Geek and Nerd qualities within, which I hope people will look inside themselves to find. There are millions of us, and we are not alone.

I also watched the first two episodes of Genshiken. Man have I been missing out, I had no idea this great Anime show existed until I saw it referenced in an IGN.com article. Clearly I’ve been living under the Anime rock, because since then I’ve found major fanbase of this show online. I’ll definitely watch the whole thing if I get the chance, but I am quite busy at the moment.

Manga is a pet love of mine, because it is an artform that needs to be appreciated within a specific mindset. That mindset isn’t so much the “OMG Schoolgirls” mindset, but “Gee, the cinematic structure of the panels tell a story which is well illustrated in a school of art which can be as subversive as it can be derivative in some cases”. I like Manga a lot, because it gives me something I can enjoy in between studying and writing/drawing. The important difference between me and the average Manga artist fan is that the only time I draw in the Manga/Anime style is when I’m trying to comment in my work on the artform in a visual and merged textual form (the illustrated novel). As an illustrator the worlds I construct should have characters who look different from the Anime characters they identify with on screen, visually they shouldn’t be too much like the Anime characters. I’ve needed to keep this in mind for an illustrated book I’m writing about Australia and Japan’s relationship.

I’ll probably do a lot more Manga reviews here in future as I acquire more Manga to read, as well as reviews of the Manga I already have on my shelf. (I only bought Vol. 1-4 of Love Hina so I could learn to draw Anime girls, I swear! I usually buy the tasteful stuff, mmkay?)

Lucky Star: Exploring the minute details of life from dining habits to studying.

Lucky Star is growing on me. Maybe because I see it as entertainment rather than a deep examination of the human psyche, or a philosophical blockbuster like Kaiba is. I enjoy a variety of Anime forms, from slice of life, to comedy, to drama and sci-fi. Even the odd fantasy genre Anime is good to throw in the mix, with Miyazaki delivering on this front among others. Yet Lucky Star, for all the hate it receives for being hyped up by media as the next Haruhi, delivers a satisfying and easy to follow plotline, which is easy on the head. But when something is viewed as entertainment, it is often seen as meaningless escapism. But Lucky Star is sort of like a Japanese version of Clerks in some parts as it deals with Japanese culture and pop culture by having the high school girl characters talk about these matters. I’ve only seen Clerks II but the point stands, both deal with popular culture through conversations between characters.

Konata’s vision of the Male Dentist Fantasy is one of the amusing imaginings of the series.

But how does this Asperger’s Anime Blogger comprehend something like Lucky Star? The opening is hyperactive and attention grabbing, yet the plot of the series is slow moving. I personally enjoy slice of life because it can entertain with slow moving plots well, without overloading you with huge epic plots like something Naruto would expect you to follow. It’s also quite funny without trying too hard to be, if you’re in the same mindset of the young man who’s grown up with video games, manga and Anime. I’d hardly call it the best source on Japanese pop culture, but this series parodies it well with creative sequences where the girls imagine what real life / fictional life would be like if *insert concept* happened.

I’m enjoying this series a lot, and I’m up to the fourth episode. Lucky Star is hard for me to review because although it is slow moving, it’s difficult to piece together the main plot or theme of an episode, as like my own brain it goes on tangents from what you see in the first part of the episodes. Still, Lucky Star doesn’t suffer from repeat watching of episodes, so full marks there.