Have you ever found yourself watching a movie or listening to music and wondering how your tastes got to be what they are today? I enjoy mapping out my own taste-makers in my head: it’s fun to think about how one thing I liked as a kid would kick-start a full investigation into a new genre, a new niche, a new world.
I’ve been listening to a lot more new music lately – well, new to me, anyways. My desk job graciously allows me to listen to music as I work, so I’ve been seeking out more things to fill those eight hours with. I’ve been listening to lots of atmospheric stuff, lots of hip-hop and jazz, and lots of Japanese noise rock and J-pop influenced artists.
One day, I found myself wondering, “what makes me gravitate towards this type of music?” Most of my teenage music taste consisted of emo and scene kid music – stuff that I mostly can’t stand anymore. Where did this blossoming urge to listen to completely different music come from?
And then it hit me. So much of my current music taste has been greatly influenced by the anime I watched as a young kid.
Real picture of me, age 10, discovering the world of anime music. No, it’s not Lain, it’s me
It’s been a long time since I’ve actually sat down and watched any anime. My anime-viewing habits are pretty fickle. I either binge watch ten series all the way through in a month, or I don’t watch anything other than snippets of whatever shounen my boyfriend’s watching in the living room.
Maybe it was a bit foolish to start a whole anime blog based on such a spotty interest. It’s not that I like anime any LESS during my dry spells…it’s just that I really only gravitate towards anime when I’m in need for some hardcore escapism.
HEY!! Remember when I said I was going to try my hand at writing some non-anime stuff? Well, I did! Check out this movie review I wrote up for TehBen. I intend to write more stuff for them in the future, so consider giving the page a follow, too! 🙂
On the top floor the towering pink and purple TehBen office building located somewhere between Colorado and Maryland, a fed up Associate Editor is flipping through documents. With an ever growing pile of crumpled papers and bad ideas, he takes to his notepad to draft a letter to a promising young nerd with some questionable interests…
Dear Jenn Coulter,
TehBen.com is in dire need of your assistance! I’ll be blunt, we’re just about out of ideas. With our editor Ben cooling his heels in Mexico after that unfortunate steamroller/clown parade incident, and with the door to Nelson Rockingham’s sex dungeon being jammed by an umbrella, I feel it’s finally time to turn to some new talent for help. From what I’ve seen on your blog and on twitter, I can only hope to put you to work for our readers before the FBI catch wind of your lurid…
Yo! Long time no post, yeah? I’ve been slacking on the content, for various reasons, so I wanted to write up a little post catching y’all up on my life and all that.
The biggest thing has been my move. It’s understandably taken me a bit of time to actually adjust to my new environment. I had been looking forward to the freedom of my own place for a while now, but I forgot how stressful having a new space can be. For some reason, I thought that once I moved in, I would immediately go into a fevered writing spree, catch my blog up, and get back to sketching but…I severely underestimated the amount of time it would take for me to adjust.
Truthfully, this gap in content-writing has me in a bit of a rut. I really want to take writing more seriously, and the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this site isn’t the right way for me to do that. I’ve been strongly considering starting a new site – one that’s not as boxed in by the topic of anime. I’ve thought of making something that focused on horror, sci-fi, and anime oddities, as well as personal essays. There are some Serious Topics that I would really like to do write-ups about, but they be awfully out of place on a site like this that has Top 10 Anime Eyebrow countdowns.
If you’ve been watching Kunihiko Ikuhara’s latest project, Sarazanmai, you’ve probably found yourself confused by what was happening on-screen at least two or twelve times. It’s a story about complicated sibling relationships, floating definitely-not-Amazon packages, gay otter police officers, and teens getting turned into kappas so they can extract desire from giant zombie buttholes. It’s wilder than I could have ever predicted.
See, wild!
You may also find yourself asking, “how much of this series is weird because Ikuhara is a weirdo, and how much of this is weird because I’m not Japanese and I don’t get the references?” If you’re anything like me, the only things you know about kappa came from games like Harvest Moon, which does not involve buttholes. So, I decided to dive deep into the world of kappa legends to better understand the madness that is Sarazanmai.
And, believe it or not, the idea that we all have a ball of desire in our anuses is more than just a wacky Ikuhara-ism – it’s a huge part of kappa mythology! Let me give you a crash course in kappa.
Hello, hello! I have been a bit of a ghost lately, I know…not a lotta writing, not a lotta tweets. But, it’s for a good reason! No, I wasn’t taking a two week long depression nap this time, I was caught up…MOVING!!!
Have you ever watched an interview where someone asks an actor/artist/writer/creator/whatever what their advice for other aspiring whatevers is, and their response is: “Just Do the Thing!”
This is not very good advice. Obviously, there were some extra steps that made that whoever whatever they are. It seems almost insulting to hear their success reduced to such a simple statement. It sounds like, “it’s easy, I did it, so just get off your lazy ass and Do, dummy!”
Yeah, I get the idea behind the advice – don’t be afraid to fail, the first step is the most important step, everyone has to start somewhere, don’t let fear hold you back, blah blah blah. But starting is very, very hard.
Well, well, well. Here we are, on a fine whatever-day-I-schedule-this-to-post. And here I am, trying to shit out some content. I have a giant list of things I’d like to write, but they all require research or actual critical analyses or watching something and boooooooooooooooooooooooo I don’t want to do real work right now! But I do want to write. So here I am. Writing. A thing. I guess.
I’ve made a resolution to post more often in the new year. I’ve burnt myself out in the past by exclusively planning posts that end up being suuuuper time-consuming. So part of this resolution is to kick back and write some fluffy, easy posts every once in a while. Maybe a few quick listicles now and then.
…Then that word listicle triggered something in my brain. LISTICLE. It makes me think of shitty BuzzFeed content, or those websites that make you click through penis enlargement ads before you can find out which 90’s celebrity you are based on your zodiac sign’s mother’s birthday.
Most of all, it reminded me of…SP00N UNIVERSITY.
DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!
I hope they don’t find this post. I’m going to replace the OOs in sp o on with 0s so that they can’t find me through the wonders of SEO. I don’t know what I’m afraid of, exactly. It’s not like they’re my employer. I just don’t want them to, like, bitterly delete my wonderfully trashy listicles.
Let me explain. In college, I studied television and film. At first, I thought I wanted to make television and film, but then I realized I mostly just wanted to write about television and film. I expressed this to a roommate, who then excitedly told me that she had found a hot new website called Sp00n University. Basically, it’s a website that gets college students to churn out food related content for ~experience~. You know, like an unpaid internship. Or as I like to call them – scams!
In order to write for them, we had to start a chapter at our college. We even had to do a little interview over the phone in order to be in charge of the chapter. We forced invited our friends to join, and we were on our way. Little did we know, though, these guys at Sp00000n were going to request A WHOLE FRIGGIN’ LOT OF CONTENT. Essentially, they wanted us to treat it like a whole ass job. A whole ass job where we didn’t get paid nor did we get any school credit.
So we panicked. We panicked and wrote some absolute trash, and then we quit because it was dumb as hell. Wanna read some of my trash?
This is something I wrote a few months ago that’s a little off-brand for this site. I’m not throwing any anime reactions pictures into this one because…well, it’s not about anime at all. I actually wrote this during a rough patch and wasn’t really sure where to put it. Finally, I’ve decided to post it here. You might not be able to relate to the specifics, and maybe you’ve never seen the shows mentioned here, but I still think that there’s something important here that someone might find themselves in. Trigger warning for depression and suicide mentions, but I promise this is an optimistic post. I’m leaning away from all that doom and gloom these days. Anyways, enjoy this personal slice of my life.
So, here’s something kinda crazy. I think I’m going to be okay.
What made me, someone who has been dealing with depression for a veryyyyyy long time, finally come to this conclusion? Well. I marathoned NBC’s The Good Place today.
That probably sounds like I’m being hyperbolic, right? Like I’m saying, “this show is so good, it will cure your depression!”
Well, I’m not doing that. It’s just what I did today, and it’s what made me realize something very important.
I’m being vague. Let me get a little more specific.
I’m having a very hard time. Sometimes, I forget that I’ve been having a very hard time for a very long time. I’ll have little periods where I’m doing okay, and then I’ll have loooong periods where I’m doing very bad. When I’m doing bad, I lose sight of everything else – I forget about the more lucid times and I forget about the millions of other times I’ve felt bad. More importantly, I forget that I’ve always gotten through feeling bad.
Heh heh. Remember when I made a big old post about how I was determined to start writing and posting more often, and then I didn’t make a post for a month? Woopsies daisies! I tend to do that a lot, huh. Well, in my defense, it’s been a bit of a messy month. Let me get on my knees and beg for forgiveness explain.
