We know culture when we see it. But have you considered what culture really is? At the most basic, it is how people approach life. It includes language, approaches, ideas, and items. Most of the time, we consider the external factors like buildings, doodads, and language as culture. Language grants access to the culture your…
Tag: psychology
The Curse of Knowledge: I Know, You Know, Anime Know.
The Curse of Knowledge makes it hard for people to communicate. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing an anime blog post or an academic journal article. We know what we know, and we don’t know what the reader doesn’t know. Worse, we can’t really push our knowledge aside. In fact, this problem makes it hard…
You Must Watch…
Recently, I attempted to read The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner because I’ve heard that I must read Faulkner as a writer. People herald him as a great American writer. Frankly, I couldn’t stand the book. It’s nonsensical and drove me crazy with its purposefully bad grammar. Faulkner attempted to write the American…
You Are What You Watch. The Effect of Anime on the Mind
You’ve likely heard the saying “you are what you eat.” Well, the stories you consume influence who you are as well. Your body uses the nutrients you put into it to rebuild itself. If you eat poorly, your body will build with poor materials. We build our character in the same way. The messages we…
What is a NEET?
Anime and manga fans are often accused of being NEETs. In Internet parlance: neck-beards, otaku, slacker, hobo. But what is a NEET? NEET is an acronym for an English (as in British, the acronym started in the UK) expression: Not in Education, Employment, or Training. The acronym started in July 1999 in the report “Bridging…
Recovery of an MMO Junkie and the Dichotomy of Offline and Online Life
When I first saw Recovery of an MMO Junkie on Crunchyroll’s list, I wasn’t terribly excited. MMORPG-focused stories have become a genre to themselves ever since Sword Art Online became huge. However, Recovery pleasantly surprised me as a slice-of-life story that followed a 30-year-old woman who had enough of corporate life. The story itself isn’t…