I’m trialing some new medications this week and taking this time off (about a week for fall break) to review and revisit a lot of old projects I’d put on hiatus, namely some writing stuff and site stuff. 

My writing bug for reviews has definitely come back and I’m part-way done with what will be my first in what I’d hoped to be a series of write ups on professionally published Hentai manga from a personal and queer lens more-so than a critical one (though I do occasionally have my criticisms to share)! It feels good to be writing a little bit again even if I still have yet to truly get back to the fiction bug.

I’ve also revisited my Tarot reviews since coming into possession of a new deck The Bound Tarot by Jonathan Grimm.

Along the same lines of touching base with things left abandoned I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. I’ve once again fallen deep into reading about the afropunk movement and BIPOC experiences in the punk/hardcore music scene. I’m almost done with Black Punk Now which has been a fabulous spiritual successor to 2003’s Afropunk documentary which I got a chance to nab on dvd from James Spooner’s website directly (along with some cool looking zines!)

If you’re at all interested I’d absolutely recommend checking it out and getting yourself a copy! BPN too as a fun follow up! 

In general I’ve tried to put myself on a solid book buying hiatus and push myself to work through outstanding books on my reading list that I’ve purchased but have lain untouched in my little dragon hoard. 

The rules are simple, no new books (outside of preorders already committed to) until I knock out the current reading list. And from there I’d like to maintain this system to curb the exponential growth of my library vs functional library space. (It’s never that you have too many books, it’s that you don’t have enough shelves!)

Seeing how many truly unread books I’ve had in spite of buying more was definitely eye opening! So here’s what’s on the reading list currently:

In Progress: 

Black Punk Now

The Bloody Chamber

Fear and Desire

Unread:

That’s Revolting

Angels Before Men

Shotgun Seamstress

The Day Hikaru Died Vol. 2 (manga)

Life With the Slime (Hentai)

Race Riot 2 (zine)

How to start a Race Riot (zine)

Muchacha Fanzine #16 Decolonizing Punk (zine)

Understanding and Addressing Adult Sexual Attraction to Children

Takarazuka Sexual Politics and Pop Culture in Modern Japan

Dementia 21 (manga)

Finished:

Innocent Omnibus 1 (manga)

The Day Hikaru Died (manga)

The God Eaters

Camp Damascus

What Moves the Dead

On a follow up note, I’m a little over halfway meeting my goal of reading 20 books this year! I’ve only got a few months left, let’s see if I can make it! 

molten_gold

In the meantime I’ve continued plugging away at writing up some posts to make a DW-centric index of my doujinshi catalog, which will in turn link to various posts where I share or review my books here! I’m about…80-90% done with the Twelve Kingdoms catalog including adding new books which I’ve long put off. It’s just a matter of getting a few more minor details added here and there like page counts, dates and double checking accuracy of title translations, creators credits and the like. There’s also the matter of finishing up a few outstanding book descriptions too which are definitely the more fun part of this project. So keep an eye out for that!

in fannish news, I’ve recently been made an admin of the 12kingdoms  comm here on DW! Still feeling really flattered and astounded by this turn of events, initially I’d messaged one of the older mods to clarify a few things before committing to writing up a few more detailed posts (like sharing a few, ahem, more risqué doujinshi over there ahaha!). I’ve also been debating making a call for help in updating a few fandom-centric wiki updates for the series in light of the new books becoming more accessible to the English speaking fandom as Eugene wraps up his translation of the last of them. Particularly the TV Tropes page and fandom Wiki both of which I often reference for double checking details here and there! I’m sure other folk must make use of these as well and I’d really like to see them updated a little… I just have no idea myself how to really edit wikis! 

Since there’s a nice little community for it, I’ll be posting Twelve Kingdoms Doujinshi reviews and shares over on the 12kingdoms comm as exclusives over there, so they’ll be locked to members and any adult content filters depending on the content of any given book I post on! 

I’m still waffling on the idea of supplying scans of full books, even if they’re small and generally not like, the most Quality of images, I’m limited by a heavy old scanner bed that doesn’t play nice with books and look, my priority is preserving the quality of my books!

Secondly, there’s the ethical concerns. A part of me says information wants to be free and valuable niche fandom history like this should be preserved, but as we’ve seen time and time again, scans are a big problem for doujinka and fan artists over seas, I’d hate to contribute to something that takes control the distribution of someone’s work from them… but on the other hand… most of the books I’d be most keen on backing up in this manner are almost a good 20 years old by now. What could it hurt? 

Maybe it’s best to leave it at photographs for review purposes or limited scans at least for higher image quality for review purposes… additionally perhaps I could add a generic watermark to dissuade the use of even my couple pages of scans for spreading works around too much? One of the bigger losses in my mind after having left Twitter is losing convenient access to several active doijinka whose work I still follow and support which made it easy to reach out and strike up small conversations, ask for assistance with understanding a story through the language barrier (many djka have been kind enough to write story summaries for me after I expressed interest in their fanworks!)

When it doubt it certainly wouldn’t hurt to ask! But again, in the cases of ,any of these older (10, 15 and 20+ years since publication) works being as old as they are, sometimes pen or circle names changed, sites and emai addresses have gone lapsed and abandoned and the original artists can be all but impossible to find, especially on the western side of the web! 

Maybe I’ll cave and make an account on the blasted bird site again for the strictest purposes of communicating with doujinka whose only known contact is twitter but honestly I’d probably be better off following up on email addresses or instead investing in a pixiv account… we’ll see!

At any rate! More doujinshi sharing will definitely be in the future! For those interested, I do have a small subsite dedicated to cataloging my doujinshi collection and offering small comments and such! I do not host scans or images of the interiors currently, it’s really more of an at a glance catalog along the lines of the Doujinshi Lexicon, but be aware a fair amount of my books are R18 and my ships are nasty~! <3 

Man, May is almost over, can y’all believe that? My domain’s birthday is coming up, I’ll have had Satsnet online for three years now! And after that of course is the Glorious 25th! I’ll have to do something special, maybe a little doodle?

I’ve been referencing several YouTube tutorials and channels breaking down gesture, structure and basic shapes, things I never really… properly learned when I first started drawing, self taught as I am. 

The end goal has always been “I wanna draw anime style!” Or “some day I’m gonna be a mangaka!” As were probably most of our middle school aspirations. But, public school art credentials never really made basics very fun, and failed to connect them to what I really wanted to draw (animes). So I feel like I’m coming to a lot of these art “fundamentals” much later in life and am only just now connecting them to what I want out of my art.

Even the anime artists I admired as a kid and continue to emulate in my art as an adult have a basic, foundational understanding of anatomy, structure, and various other things that go into drawing figures, paneling comics and creating sequential story telling! 

So, in my attempts to create more intentional, structured practice and study time into my routine, I’m gonna just ramble here a bit and try to come up with a schedule or method that works best!