Weeb shit

Sooooo it might not come as a surprise that I'm a massive weeb. My anime collection is best measured in terabytes, and I own so many volumes of light novels and manga that I have to buy them as ebooks now because I'm rapidly running out of room for physical books in my tiny, eight-tatami apartment. I learned early in my Japanese-learning journey that nearly every single English translation of any Japanese subculture media is unbelievably, insultingly awful, so I consume just about everything in the original Japanese now. I mean, hey, it's better, it's way cheaper, and now that I live in Japan, it's easier to access. Plus, it means I have a much wider selection of works to choose from, since only a tiny fraction of what gets produced ever gets translated. So unless you speak Japanese too (or you're just drowning as helplessly in the sauce as I am), you're not gonna recognize a lot of the titles I mention on this site. Sorry.

Actually, not sorry. I'm doing this for me, not for you. But it's not like I'll be leaving you completely out to dry: on occasion, I might end up writing reviews (or just general thoughts) about some of the stuff I feel particularly strongly about. Now, there's not a lot of background information to give about this topic like there is on the linguistics-related sections of this website, so let's get right into the categories:

Anime

It started with Yugioh on 4Kids and Naruto on Cartoon Network in elementary school, then moved on to Death Note, then spiraled and spiraled until I found myself neck-deep in more degenerate Malaysian tapestries than you can shake a stick at. On my anime page, I catalog the shows I watch by season. I'm not sure how many reviews I'll write; most of what I watch consists of adaptations of works I've already consumed in other mediums. We'll see.

Manga

Back when I lived in the Empire of Dumbfuckistan, newly a vassal state of Russia, my collection of shittily-translated manga was massive. I had, like, three bookshelves of the stuff, and my collection only kept growing and growing, much to my mom's frustration. She often tried to get me to use an ereader, but I refused. Nothing beats a good, physical book you can hold in your hands. I still feel the same way, but when manga is a fraction of the price and living arrangements are a fraction of the size of what I've always been used to, I don't exactly have that luxury anymore. I do buy some of the manga I read nowadays as physical books, but the bulk of my collection now consists of ebooks. At least ereader technology has come a long way since my teenage years.

LNs

It kinda took light novels a second to catch on in the precursor to the Fourth Reich, didn't it? I mean, even now, they still haven't "caught on" when you compare them to their situation in their homeland. Part of that, I think, is due to their decidedly not light price point and form factor in translation, so it's harder to just casually pick one up. But it's also because the few series they do decide to translate tend to be shit. My collection of Japanese light novels is even more impressive than my manga collection, though just like the manga, most of my LN purchases are as ebooks lately.

Games

I was originally gonna title this page "VNs," but then I realized some of the games I play aren't visual novels. I used to be fairly involved in the online VN fandom... until I ran out of stuff to play. I've long since read every translated VN I'm interested in, so just about everything I play nowadays is either never going to get translated, or new enough that any translation it might get is a long way off. That said, games are a lot longer than manga and LNs, so my progress through my game backlog is going to be much slower than those.

Comiket

Comiket, in case you don't know, is the Japanese subculture convention. Held twice a year at an enormous convention center called Tokyo Big Sight, it gets six digits of visitors coming to buy self-published, often derivative, often degenerate works related to their favorite things created by fellow fans. That mostly means doujinshi of anime and gacha games, but you do get the rare military or train otaku there, too. Comiket also has a big cosplay scene, but I mostly go for the doujin stuff. On my Comiket page, I catalog the creators whose works I enjoy.