Promare

Everyone told me I needed to see Promare. Twitter told me I needed to see Promare. My students told me I needed to see Promare. People I have been friends with for years told me I needed to see Promare.

As of yesterday evening, I can finally say that I've seen Promare, but it took me two months. Except for the three days I went on vacation (from Promare), I treated it like homework, watching five to ten minutes every other day.

As far as I can tell, the movie is about strobe lights and screaming teenagers. If you can imagine looking directly at a fire alarm while it's going off, that's Promare. No joke, I had to let my husband know in advance when I'd be watching the movie so that he could make sure to leave the apartment.

The story is a linear progression of basic anime tropes, and none of the characters has any depth. I was surprised to learn, during the end credits, that many of them have actual names. I think the main point of the movie is supposed to be the flashiness of the animation, but it just gave me a headache.

It's weird. I like Studio Trigger. I used to love their ONAs, and I was one of the original Kickstarter backers for Little Witch Academia. I've watched Kill la Kill from start to finish multiple times, and I had a lot of fun with BNA earlier this year.

Promare is way too much for me, though. It's very long, and almost every minute of its runtime is physically unpleasant to watch. The two male leads have an epic life-saving soul kiss at the end, but they don't share any actual romance, and the journey to get to that point really isn't worth it. I think that, when it comes to anime that's squarely situated within the genre of "not for me," it might simply be best to read the Wikipedia page and quietly appreciate the fan art.

Live Your Best Life

I ended my post about theme park fandom with a question concerning how someone gets a job as a theme park journalist. I don’t have any serious interest in theme parks, so what I really want to know is how to get paid for doing what you love. It was mostly rhetorical… but also sort of an actual question.

Do you have to have your own YouTube channel? I am not telegenic and hate the sound of my own voice, but maybe it’s something to consider.

( Read more... )

Or not, actually. I mean, we’ll see, but I think it’s important to listen to what my anxiety is telling me. Right now, my anxiety is telling me that this isn’t a good time to teach myself to do something that I won’t enjoy and that won’t be rewarded with positive feedback or financial compensation.

What I actually enjoy is making slideshows, and I also enjoy making zines. Maybe, instead of trying to make videos that I will hate and (let’s be real) no one will watch, I could adapt my slideshows into zines. Printing isn’t that expensive, but it isn’t cheap either, so what I could do would be to make free PDF zines and then, once my finances are a bit more comfortable, print one or two that I think might attract interest. A zine based on my class session about urban legends might be good, for instance.

I don’t think making zines out of my lectures is going to win me fame and fortune, but you know what?

If your dream job doesn’t exist, perhaps you just have to make it yourself.

Legend of Haiku Zine

Speaking of zines!

I’ve been spending a lot of time this past week sitting on my couch and riding out waves of bad feelings (this is the world we live in right now, what can you do) while hunting for Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild. I just finished a second completionist run on the Switch version, and I didn’t want to delete everything and start a new game, so I dug my Wii U out of my closet and picked up where I left off in that version of the game in 2017. Along the way, I’ve been coming up with all sorts of silly haiku, like this:

a star fragment falls
as the lone hero watches
from a mountaintop

Haiku are a lot of fun and relatively stress-free, so I think it might be cool to make a Zelda-themed haiku zine. I put together a similar project for the class I taught about The Wind Waker in Spring 2019, so I already have the basic format set up and ready to go. If I were doing this by myself, I’d probably write something like 26 haiku and make three small illustrations (along with the cover page, front colophon, and back bio section) for a total of 32 pages (plus another four for the front and back covers). If I did the interior pages in black and white and used the same small format I used for the class zine, it wouldn’t be expensive to print.

I don’t have much of a following on social media, but it might be interesting to open the zine to contributions. I don’t have the time or energy to put together a big project, so this would be a super casual “email me your haiku and I’ll send you a copy of the zine” sort of deal, as well as a no-pressure “post your work whenever and wherever you like” sort of approach. I might also open artist submissions, with the encouragement that anyone of any skill level is welcome to contribute. I’d use Gumroad to host a free digital copy of the zine once it’s finished, and I might use Etsy to open preorders for at-cost physical copies of the zine (to be printed in addition to the contributor copies) if there’s any interest.

I’d post the announcement on October 1 and close submissions on November 30. I’d try to put the zine together a bit at a time so that I could send it to the printer during the first week of December, and I could spend the rest of the month getting everything ready to go before mailing out the physical zines during the first week of January.

If I were going to open submissions, what I’d need to do in advance would be to:

- find and commission a cover artist
- put together an information sheet
- create a graphic to use for the information sheet
- plan a series of three additional images to use for promotion
- create an account on Tumblr
- create an account on Twitter
- create an account on Gmail

And of course I’d have to write my own contributions in advance so that I don’t get stressed out.

I’m going to take the rest of the month of August to see how I feel, and then I’ll make a decision in September.