A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

On Friday, the fabulous seshat visited branna and her husband in LA, and brought a ton of Gundam Wing doujinshi for me to ogle. I don't know who was sweeter, the former for dragging them all the way here, or the latter two for making me coffee and dinner in their home while I totally ignored them and read a stack of doujinshi. Thanks guys!

My favorite circles were 25ANS and Nattsu, though there were others that I liked quite a bit but neglected to write down. I love their art, and they actually draw the Gundams too! They draw the boys tinkering with their Gundams! They draw them on missions, with guns! They put in random extra drawings of the supporting characters! They have plot (much of which I couldn't follow!)

There was one side story of Heero and Duo (roommates at some boarding school) adopting a kitten in which the kitten was so cute and kitten-like that I totally forgot my usual aversion to cute domestic stories. I especially liked the page where Heero sees the stray kitten, looks around furtively to make sure no one will see what he's about to do, then guiltily picks it up and cuddles it.

I am now convinced that Duo/Quatre is the most adorable pairing ever. There should be more of it. Also, Quatre looks good in a burnoose, and Duo looks good with a gun in his hand. There should be more of that, too.

Note: If you comment on GW doujinshi, please do not spoil the canon plot in comments.

Then yesterday yhlee and I watched Avatar through 1.08. Fantastic detail and worldbuilding, likable characters, a fantastic array of weird animals (the flying bison never gets old), and dialogue which is funny without relying on the tired use of anachronistic humor. (I cannot see any animated American movies because every other joke is based on the hilarity of fish/fairy tale characters/cows seeing psychiatrists/having cell phones/making other modern pop culture references, and they're all basically the same joke, and it makes me want to self-detonate rather than hear another one.) Excellent! Spoil me for later episodes and I will drop a giant flying bison on your head.

Yoon reports on Avatar.

Yoon reports on Cain Saga volume 1.

Rilina reports on Gundam Wing 26-30, with pilot sanity rankings.

Rilina reports on Gundam Wing 31-35, with pilot sanity rankings.

Blue Rose returns! Stephanie and I will be continuing the story of Rivas, Jordan, Nick, Chely, and Project Blue Rose itself, in a manga of about the same length. This really is because you demanded it-- we both got quite a few requests for a sequel, and we are happy to oblige. I always did intend it to be a series, anyway.

Price TBA, publication date TBA. We'll do it after the Rukia/Renji Bleach doujinshi, but that shouldn't take that long as it will be much shorter.

Like the doujinshi, we are looking into printing it in Japan, as we were struck by the excellent print quality of the doujinshi we saw, and if we do that, we will have both English and Japanese editions. If you know of any doujinshi circles in Japan, we would be very interested in getting in touch with them to discuss printers.

Copies of the first volume and of Spindrift are still available by mail order via www.projectbluerose.com.

As a warm-up to our next BIG project (which will be announced next week) we will be doing a Bleach doujinshi.

It will be Rukia/Renji, rated R, 10-16 pages, price TBA, date of publication TBA. But it will be GREAT!

It was inspired by a request by bravecows, and assisted by sage advice from sho_sunaga. The name of our doujinshi circle will probably be Parakeet of DOOM.

I am sitting in a manga kissaten (manga cafe), side by side with telophase, bravecows, and sho_sunaga, all of us typing away on our respective LJs. It is a great moment in the history of geekdom, especially since it is the culmination of a day which also included manga-shopping, doujinshi-shopping, and a dinner in which we regaled each other with tales of how we discovered slash, fic, and fandom.

Meeting bravecows and sho_sunaga was definitely one of the best bits of Worldcon for me. I think some of you know the former already, but the latter is newish to LJ; she is a Japanese fan who is into manga, SGA, Supernatural, Sentinel, Star Trek,, and fic.

Today, after a brief stop at an English used bookshop, Good Day Books in Ebisu (where Stephanie was briefly trapped in the elevator), we met up at the statue of Hachiko the loyal dog at Shibuya station, along with approximately one thousand others attempting to meet friends at the same coordinates.

We went to a bookshop, where I bought several copies of Saiyuki Gaiden 3 and was irritated that many of sho_sunaga's favorite manga have not yet been translated into English, and where telophase bravecows bought bilingual Tale of Genji manga.

Then we went to Mandarake, a massive doujinshi shop, where bravecows talked me into buying a mysterious doujinshi with the subtitle "The love between an animal and a plant," from the RPS section-- I think it might be Russell Crowe/Paul Bethany. telophase made an astonishing find, detailed on her LJ.

Then we proceeded to an izakaya, where I had a lychee soda, and we all had a fantastic appetizer of Vietnamese/Japanese/California spring roll sushi-ish thingies, before proceeding to sashimi, fried chicken wings, soup with noodles and cabbage, and oyakodon (chicken and egg over rice). It turns out that me and both had original Trek as one of our first fandoms, and discovered slash when searching for it online. bravecows, the baby of the group, began with Hanson fic at the tender age of ten!

sho_sunaga showed us some downloaded manga she can read on her cellphone (which also connects to the internet.) When it gets to the rape scene, the phone vibrates!