Subatomic Brainfreeze

This weekend: More MOST DANGEROUS ANIME at I-Con - MORST DANGEROUS

This coming week I need to have basically everything I've been lazily working on done at the same time, so I've been in buckle-down mode for a few days. Among the things going on are the panels for I-Con that I drop in for every year. I-Con is this weekend. Yes, they scheduled against PAX East, and yes, I take this to mean that they are suicidal.

Once again, the audience and I will be spending time with anime from all over the storied history of the medium: anime that will repeatedly threaten the lives of all present in the room. Here is the schedule for the con, and here are my panel descriptions.

Most Dangerous Anime - Your favorite panel is back and its content is worse than ever! Featuring the Manga Video Swearing Orchestra, hilarity ensues while watching what have been nominated as MOST DANGEROUS ANIME! (Saturday afternoon, 4 to 6PM, Psych A 136)

Yeah, I wanted to focus on stuff that got profane dubs from Manga Video. Some classical stuff, you know? Looking at my time slot, I'm a little concerned about how much I can really get away with in the afternoon.  That should be about half the panel. The rest is a mystery: expect Yashigani greats and special surprises.

Most Dangerous Anime: Too Dangerous for the Underage! (18+) - Featuring WOUNDED MAN! For Anime just too dangerous for the underage and the faint of heart!  (Saturday late night, 11PM to 1AM, Psych A 144)

Really, the majority of Most Dangerous Anime, especially this year, is stuff I wouldn't show a kid, but we're going by the old American media double standard where you can show a kid as much violence as he can stomach, but nipples put us into profane and taboo territory. Wounded Man aside, this stuff isn't going to scar you that badly.

The panel getting an 18+ extension was basically decided on last year, when I had to preempt an 18+ panel that nobody involved had done any preparation for whatsoever and pull a presentation out of my ass. I borrowed the power of Wounded Man, and the panel was actually a huge success despite the fact that everybody in the room was there for something else entirely. For the benefit of everybody who wasn't present that fateful night, I'll be running Wounded Man again... and some other things.

Finally, I will be running a third panel on Sunday afternoon, 2 to 3 PM in Psych A 137 about Game Center CX. This was an idea off the top of my head when we really, really needed to fill up schedule space, but since it's something I honestly love and want people to know about and have plenty of material for, I think it'll go just fine!

Other than that I'll be around, and there's no telling whether or not I'll be joining in on a panel or having to take over or whatever. This stuff tends to happen. I'd love to see you at the con, dear reader, but I kind of doubt you will be, so I'll let you all know how it went.

Polytechnic Spring Fest 2010: I'VE NEVER FELT QUITE SO OLD

I even feel old as I type the year 2010. It's impossible that we've gotten that far, isn't it? It's also shocking that my friends at Poly have been running their small one-day con for as long as they have. It's triply shocking that anybody showed up: we had torrential rains all day, almost nothing about the con has changed, there's still close to zero promotion, but the guys doubled their attendance from 300 to 600 this year. Nobody has any idea what happened, and I'm calling it a fluke.

I wasn't really around the con so much: a couple of times I came out and it wouldn't be thirty seconds before I'd have to turn tail back into the staff room. Given that the con is free, the crowd was really, really young-- I'm going to say the median age was lower high school-- and the whole school was a running, screaming, glomping, Caramelldansening battlefield. I usually feel a little out of place at anime cons: here I felt entirely disconnected from everything going on around me.

My advice to the staff (not that they don't know): the coat check was a terrible idea from the start, probably should have been scrapped outright. There was an alleged unsavory incident that calls for an explicit ban on "hug me" signs and yaoi paddles.

Since there wasn't really any other promotion of events going on, I stuck my flyer anywhere I could: major tables, message boards, outside the room. Once my panel room cleared out and I had access to a projector, I just stayed around there for the duration. The hour before the panel, the guys and I just watched stuff on the projector since nobody was around. The closer it got to the panel, the more worried I was that absolutely nobody would show up at all. Certainly past Poly showings have ended up as "Dave and three friends' private screening of Mazinger Z vs. Devilman."

So here's how it actually ended up going. A few minutes before we were to actually start, two visitors read the flyer outside and asked exactly what anime I'd be showing. "What if I've seen it before?", the girl asked. Obviously I insisted that she had not, and considering there was still some time before we got going, I figured I could roll this to give her an idea. Black Lion stopped onlookers and forced them into the room. Of course, there was a lot of turnover and people walking out during this clip alone. But by the time the clip was over, I had an audience.

It was still early, and I'd promised ninjas, but Black Lion didn't contain the same ninjas as I'd promised. I'm an awful man, so I ran some real ninjas and a few more people looked at each other and walked out. When the lights went up on this one, I had an audience that fully understood the kind of material I wanted to share with them. It wasn't long until this stuff was again playing to a packed room. It's powerful material!

I started with bad dub montages, went to Musashi Gundoh and Zaizen Jotaro, and for the last half I just ran the Baoh dub all the way through. I had expected to have just an hour-- I was going to walk in, press "play" on Baoh and call it a day-- but I got another at the last minute and decided to tag other features on and actually talk about the material. It was a little bit like a real panel, even! I know my job is well done when somebody comes up and asks me where to buy everything I just showed: too bad so much of this stuff is out of print, huh?

We loitered after the panel until events on that floor ended and we had to come back down to the staff room. Unfortunately the staff room was now a walk-in closet open to anybody who wanted to be there, on account of it doubling as the ridiculous, half-baked coat check idea that I talked about earlier. After this our musical guests took over and backstage I got the guys in on some multi-player Mahjong Fight Club. Hell yeah. I came out for the punk band at the end: they were a lot of fun.

Spring Fest has really not changed or grown at all: it's still a tiny, one-day business that tends to target kids and people who haven't been to a con before. That said, I think the guys have finally found their audience after a couple years of looking like a ghost town, and I'm happy for them. As for myself, I have to sort through this pile of dangerous anime and put together my I-Con presentations!

In closing, if 30 convention staffers all make reservations to go to a small restaurant at the same time, say no. Your food will take two hours, it will be mediocre, and it will basically be your own fault.

MOST DANGEROUS ANIME at POLY SPRING FEST is incoming: WATCH YOUR BACK, SON

Alright, guys, it's that time of year for me again. Spring Fest at Polytechnic in Brooklyn is coming up this Saturday. As usual, I am helping out by putting on a kind of preliminary version of the Most Dangerous Anime panel I run at I-Con for a crowd I project to be at about ten people. As you can see on your left there, I decided to make a little flyer to drum up some interest at the event itself. There's a lot of danger involved in this, and the very distinct possibility of EX-danger. The material's all going to be drawn from previous I-Con panels, and obviously Baoh, the source of that image, will be played in full. Be aware.

Dave's HELPFUL MAHJONG LINKS

So, you want to play? That's good!

I will quickly list some learning resources: I'm not going to bullshit you here, this game is tough to learn. There are a lot of rules and English-language material is scarce. This Flash game is a nice, light introduction to the basics in English with the absolute essentials listed on the page. Note that you should do yourself a favor and memorize the Japanese numbers on the character tiles while you play with this: whether you're playing a videogame or on a real set, you will usually not have the luxury of having Arabic numbers on them.

Play around with that for a minute, then read this friendly tutorial to get all the basics down. Then come back to the Flash game. There will be a world of difference between playing against these AIs and playing against real people, but just concentrate on learning how the game works. A truly exhaustive set of rules is available here: I keep a printout of the site around for reference.

Reachmahjong.com is the biggest English-language community: there's a lot of good material on the site but the design's kind of a mess so you've really got to dig for it. Also, their basic tutorials confused the hell out of me when I was first learning. Read their advanced stuff once you already know the game.

Here's some more really good material for the intermediate player.

Oh right, they're talking about Tenhou. When you have a handle on how the game works, consider diving into Tenhou, the best, simplest online mahjong client. Yes, the client is in Japanese, but it is easily navigable with the help of this thorough English documentation. Read all of that. Tenhou is free to play for as long as you want, but at a certain rank you're limited to the "economy" version, which is charmingly and intentionally bare-bones, going so far as to replace voices with blips and bloops. However, there is a premium subscription ($5/month: not a recurring subscription, can be bought by the month when you want it) that gives you access to a pretty Windows client where every piece of the interface can be customized or changed outright. I have a Psyduck setup going.

One last thing: I'm always digging through mahjong videos on Nicovideo to watch pro matches. The language barrier means I can't get much out of the commentary, but it's still very valuable to look at how pros handle situations.

Dance in the Vampire Bund edited for release: Anime fandom, get ready for the PEDOPOCALYPSE

Of course Pedogeddon is a cooler-sounding name, but funnier dudes than I used it a long, long time ago.

Here then, friends, is today's anime scene drama. If you pre-emptively asked "Are there pedophiles?"-- before even reading the title of this post, in fact, the moment you heard someone say "anime" let's say you correctly assumed that pedophiles would just kind of be hanging around, doing their thing-- then yes, yes there are.

This is what's up: Funimation just announced that their US release of the recent Dance in the Vampire Bund anime will be edited for content. This is not a case where some content is cut for a general-audience release and an uncut release is made available later. There will not be an uncut release. The anime contains scenes which the company has deemed "inappropriate for U.S. viewing".

Nobody is saying what the scene is. I had described it, but then I decided "well, do I want this description on my site?" and you know what, I'm not too crazy about ending up on an FBI watchlist. It's around the middle of the second episode. If you don't notice the overt sexuality in the scene you probably can't see your own two hands in front of your face either. Real talk.

That scene, by itself, completely breaches what's typically allowed in American entertainment. You definitely wouldn't be able to get away with it in film. It's not just dipping into taboo, it's wading waist-deep. It's not a huge surprise that Funi doesn't want to be associated with a scene like that, especially given what's been going on.

I'm talking, of course, about Christopher Handley, who was recently sentenced for possessing lolicon (TL note: "lolicon" is Japanese for "pedo") manga that he imported from Japan. I disapprove of the idea of legislating the contents of somebody's imagination-- there are real children in the world facing real abuse who are really ignored in favor of silly, easy shit like this, and I believe it's better for pedophiles to have a fictional outlet than for their desires to boil over and explode into the real world-- but the ruling sets a precedent.

It is worth noting that before the Handley ruling (and since), Funi has been running a big campaign for the pedoriffic Strike Witches, one based largely on the fact that the characters do not wear pants, skirts, or anything that might obscure their underwear from our view. Now, after the ruling, Vampire Bund is being edited. Will this become the marker standing between the pre- and post-Handley eras of American anime fandom? What will we do when two devastating sales forces-- an anime with the word "baka" in the title and an anime with the word "vampire" in the title-- are sold side by side? I don't know, I don't know! Anime is so confusing, you guys!

Mahjong anime and manga THAT YOU CAN GET IN ENGLISH

Want manga/anime about mahjong? What the hell, I can do that. Here's a list post. I just posted about Mudazumo: mahjong isn't really the point here, this is just hilarious. There's the Akagi anime, obviously, which all people should watch. The manga is being scanned, but be warned that Akagi has been stuck on the mahjong equivalent of Planet Namek for years, and because the comic keeps Kindai Mahjong magazine alive, it literally cannot end.

The title that introduced and popularized the character of Akagi, Fukumoto's Ten, has been scanslated in its entirety. This should keep you busy for a long time. I would not recommend reading this unless you know mahjong: it's very much the same situation as the shonen fight manga tournament arc. After the first few books, these characters simply sit down and play mahjong against each other until the comic becomes The Akagi Show for a fantastic final arc and then just ends flat. It's very dry, lacks much of Akagi's atmosphere and tension, and is only really interesting if you already care about the game. People who want to see Ten animated probably just mean "the end of Ten," which starts around chapter 137.

I have watched all of Legendary Gambler Tetsuya and I really didn't like it much. You know that shonen manga trope where they cut away to a spectator talking about how the hero is the most amazing person ever to live? They're constantly doing this with Tetsuya, but he never really impresses. He's got no character whatsoever: Tetsuya just wins as blandly as possible. This show is about cheating at mahjong, and he's still somehow boring. There's an episode where he waits for a single tile, draws the tile on the very last draw, and then is hailed as the greatest gambler of all time. It's not that uncommon, guys!

There's also Saki, which I ran through pretty fast recently, skipping the filler, the first five episodes, and other bullshit. Saki's about 80 percent moe/fanservice, 15 percent mahjong, and 5 percent Yu-Gi-Oh, so keep that in mind coming in. It's not incredibly sleazy, but "not incredibly sleazy" on the moe scale still means a bunch of closeups on a blushing girl's quivering thighs as she appears visibly aroused by another girl's mahjong power level.

This is a tiny enough niche in manga to begin with and even more so in anime. There's obviously still less material available in English. I'm pretty sure that I've actually listed everything here. You are now equipped to complete a genre. Kind of.

I have also EATEN PRINGLES AND PLAYED MAHJONG

It doesn't feel right to leave Carl alone to post about this subject, as I too have been hitting the mahjong hard as of late. The game has fascinated me since I saw Akagi-- this is a common symptom of American players of Japanese mahjong-- and I've made attempts to learn to play in the past, but only in the past few months can I say I know what the hell I'm doing.

I was grinding away by myself online, but in a very unlikely and convenient situation, a local group (the USPML) formed here in NYC. If you know how to play and you're local-- this is itself exceedingly unlikely-- you should be coming to these meets. It's a very friendly environment, and as Carl and I have both mentioned, Pringles, Kindai Mahjong magazine and Dr. Pepper are on hand. If you don't, and you're local, they are going to start doing teaching events. I recommend giving the game a shot: you may find yourself having as much fun as we are. But why are we having so much fun with this game?

From one moment to the next, reach mahjong is a game of chance, a game of skill, and a game of balls. I won't bore you with too many of the details, but the closest thing you've likely heard of is rummy. Four players take turns drawing and discarding tiles to make a 14-tile hand. Certain hands are more valuable than others and a match usually takes place over eight or so hands, so the goal of the game isn't necessarily to race to finish one hand. It's to finish having taken the most points from everybody else. You have to think of the war and not so much the battle. People say it's not so much a game of winning as it is a game of not losing.

While Japanese-style mahjong heavily rewards a player for putting together their hand by themselves, it's also possible to steal tiles: particularly in the endgame, the need to finish your own hand presses against the potentially disastrous possibility of dealing into somebody else's. When a player's hand is one tile away from winning, they can declare "reach" or "riichi" (take your pick), formally declaring their status to the table. From a practical point of view, you wouldn't want to let people know you could win at any moment. However, winning on a reach gives you a number of point bonuses, so it's a very common move. Reach is at the heart of the game: you can prop up a low-scoring hand with it, you can use it as a semi-bluff, you can turn a strong hand into a monster.

When the reach stick goes on the table, the mood gets really tense: I was in a hand at the last meet where one player after another reached, and I was faced with the terrifying possibility of dealing into any one of their hands at any moment. I survived by simply folding: taking my hand apart and discarding only tiles I knew all three players didn't need. The danger of trying to win here greatly outweighs the loss of a small hand. When we finished in a draw, it turned out that I was in fact holding every single tile the other players needed, including one tile that two players needed. Had I dealt into this, I would be paying for both players' hands, which could have well knocked me out in one shot and ended the game with me in last place. This is the shortest match I have ever played: I won on the second hand. This game is a very tense, very dangerous, and mostly blind negotiation.

That's what I like about the game, anyway. When I was writing this post it got really huge and out of hand, so I'll be posting one of these a day.

Anime about games, game logic, and how SUMMER WARS IS KIND OF LIKE YU-GI-OH

Last week I went and saw Mamoru Hosoda's Summer Wars with friends, including Carl and the Reverse Thieves. After we had gotten through all of the other cool stuff that had happened in the movie, somebody had to get to the heart of the matter:

"Wasn't that Yu-Gi-Oh scene great?"

Yes, there was a Yu-Gi-Oh scene in this movie. It's not coincidental: the scene is deliberately staged and directed like one of Yugi's card battles, down to the rapidly fluctuating life point counters displayed on the screen. The climax of the film is the same hand-to-the-sky card-playing sequence that so often ends a Yu-Gi-Oh episode, except it's about ten times as majestic. If you've ever watched that show, it is impossible not to notice this direct resemblance.

In Summer Wars, the characters are playing the Japanese hanafuda card game. I don't understand it at all, the viewer isn't expected to, but the scene is made to be exciting despite that. We see cards being played rapidly, the characters making aggressive, resolute calls at every play, and those life points plunging and swelling as a direct result of the action. We understand that this is a hard-fought struggle, and it's compelling on those grounds, but we don't understand exactly what is going on.

It's all about presentation: this is why Nobuyuki Fukumoto's mahjong series Akagi is a cult classic in Western anime/manga fandom despite the fact that the vast majority of us viewers have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on. It is always clear that Akagi is toying with and crushing his enemies: if not via the game, then through the tension in the air and the looks on people's faces.

Technically speaking, Yu-Gi-Oh spawned a real-world card game with real-world rules, but the characters in the series are not bound by said rules. They do whatever the writers decide they can do at any given moment in the name of entertainment. Actually knowing how the card game is played detracts somewhat from the cartoon, because you know everything they're doing is total cheating nonsense.

The nail in the coffin for viewer interest is hero Yugi's writer-granted power: this guy believes in the "heart of the cards". What this means is that when the chips are down, Yugi just believes, and in so doing wills the single card he needs for a complete turnaround victory into his hand. This deflates any possible tension, of course: not only do we know that our young hero will always win, it takes that extra step into predictability by letting us know exactly how. It's a kids' show, of course, but even kids get bored of this stuff.

And so, when in my recent Japanese mahjong research I watched Saki, I immediately said to Carl "what is this Yu-Gi-Oh bullshit and when do they start playing mahjong?" He had me skip the first arc. The mahjong in Saki is an actual game when the small fries are playing and Yu-Gi-Oh when a major character gets involved. Saki doesn't need the viewer to understand the game either: if you're watching this it's a lot more likely you're in it for the blatantly suggestive camera angles and the longing gazes between girls that form the majority of the show.

By the final table, we've got two characters with entirely ridiculous mahjong powers that all four players understand to be absolute fact: when heroine Saki calls a kan (a set of four of the same tiles) and draws a tile, she will win. When reigning champion Koromo draws the last tile, she will win. This will happen 100% of the time, no matter what. What's funny is that we start to see the characters take this into the logic of the game and attempt to maneuver around the craziness: for example, calling to shift the turn order so that Koromo doesn't draw last (Koromo just calls again and resets the situation). In the end Saki calls a lot of kans, wins with the heart of the tiles, and nobody is terribly surprised.

I found the bits with the lesser players more interesting because I felt like they earned it. My favorite character in Saki was the one I like to call Bad Odds Girl, because she just bets on lousy odds over and over again. Sure, she wins, but it's thanks to a conscious decision on her part. It's admirable. And of course, Shigeru Akagi doesn't so much play mahjong as he masterminds the interaction between four human beings sitting at a table. He earns it: he's on another level of earning it.

Summer Wars isn't actually about hanafuda, of course. It's about a large, tight-knit family out in the Japanese countryside using Web 3.0 to fight off a rogue AI. (It's also about Terry Bogard.) We feel like the heroine earns the final hanafuda victory because she has grown in so many ways over the course of the film, and she is at the peak of her being when she slams down that card. Without a soul behind it, the whole spectacle-- the light of heaven beaming from under the cards, the observers flipping out in the background-- would be empty. It's just some lucky guy you can't empathize with. Kinda like Legendary Gambler Tetsuya.