A Short Break

I have good news, bad news and some other good news!

The good news is that Mystyr E and I have finally cowboyed up and got ourselves an apartment! That’s right, we are – at this very moment, perhaps – moving all our junk into a spacious, 800 square foot place that will no doubt be filled to bursting with manga and comics in a few months’ time. Also, fish tanks. We have an asston of fish tanks.

The bad news is that we’re not going to have internet for a little while.

Horrific Imagery: Junji Ito and The Human Centipede

If you haven’t been under a rock lately, you may have heard about a terrible movie called The Human Centipede. The reason I bring this up on a (mostly) manga blog is that while I was initially interested in the film after only seeing the trailer, the horror of what exactly is happening to the victims therein sank in, and its focus on the way the “centipede” is connected ruined it.

Consider Junji Ito’s Gyo. The man can stick tubes in every orifice of a bloated, gaseous corpse, pop it on top of a pair of creepy mechanical spider legs and run it all over Japan and I’m disgusted, disturbed and unable to put it down. I’m disgusted and disturbed by the very idea of Human Centipede and have no desire to even be in the same theatre as it. Why?

The End of YenPlus

Today I was planning on writing one of my usual posts – a veritable whingefest about a manga that I had very high hopes for that fell magnificently flat – but got sidetracked by an announcement on the YenPlus website: The July 2010 issue will be the last print issue of YenPlus.

As a subscriber from the fifth issue and a reader since issue one, I feel like a broken record even writing this post since a similar one was posted not even a year ago. I truly loved and enjoyed YenPlus even more than Shojo Beat because it had a wider variety of manga styles and included manwha and OEL series as well. The thought that I won’t be able to idly flip through the latest Soul Eater episode while eating dinner is, well, heartwrenching.

A Plague Upon Our House

Due to a sudden plague affecting the joint Geekerella and MystyrE household, bloggery has been put on hold until we can stand upright for more than a few hours and/or lay on our backs without coughing ourselves into migraines. Or at least until we’re well enough to figure out the wrappers on the DayQuil.

We hope to be back online with next week’s Hagaren episode.

~The Management

Snacking the Japanese Way

Snacks in Japan are serious business. Every month hundreds of new “limited edition” snacks are on the market, some of them variations on old favorites such as Pocky and some of them are new offerings altogether. These snacks are only on the market for a few months or even a few weeks, so there are actually entire magazines devoted to alerting snack maniacs to the latest trends before they’re gone. Shiso Pepsi (along with previous years’ Ice Cucumber Pepsi) is a limited edition summer flavor, destined to be replaced in the fall with something new.