Beheneko: The Elf-Girl’s Cat is Secretly an S-Ranked Monster! beyond being a mouthful is also an ecchi, uh, handful. For the longest time I’ve avoided ecchi stories. They weren’t my thing, and they remain not my thing. But as an anime writer and armchair academic, this genre has been a blindspot for me. I’ve watched…
Texas Senate Bill 20, Obscenity, and Banning Anime and Manga
Texas’s state senate unanimously passed Senate Bill 20 which aims at AI-generated child pornography but can also end up banning many anime and manga titles in the process. Texas has joined many other states, such as Ohio and West Virginia, in efforts to crack down on materials deemed obscene. Ohio and West Virginia have…
New Book: Kappa The Deadly Finger Puller and Bonesetter
I’ve been behind with my book projects; I didn’t release anything last year. But publishing can take more time than you’d expect. I have several books awaiting release this year and next year. The first will be Kappa The Deadly Finger Puller and Bonesetter. In this brief book, I trace the traits and origins of…
Japan’s Once Exotic Culture is Now Humdrum
More than a century ago, the West had little contact with Japan. The fabled Asia, distant and strange to Westerners, was a land of mystical stories, of elixirs of immortality, and lands where gods were found everywhere. It was civilized and pagan, advanced and locked in time. Japan had just begun to open to the…
Learning Without a Goal: The Joy of Learning
In the United States, learning is seen as a means to an end, not as an end of itself. You go to college to get a degree that will net you a good-paying job. You learn new skills on that job to get a promotion that will increase your wages. You learn that side hustle…
An Outage and a Good Problem
You may have noticed JP was down for a good part of the weekend. I didn’t notice the problem until Sunday morning. So what happened? JP outgrew its hosting. If you aren’t aware of how web hosting works, you subscribe to a package which offers a certain amount of bandwidth, storage space, and processors. I…