Links are coming a little late today because I was up until midnight working on a massive freelance project nearly every night for a week. Now to fly to San Francisco to check out my recently acquired place of employment! But in the meantime, let’s have some links.

• Three new reviews this week. Ethics in Gundam Build Fighting, Imaizumi goes #beastmode, Akashi is insufferable (“I win in everything, and everything I say is correct.”)

• Also I got to interview Genshiken creator Shimoku Kio! More accurately, I wrote questions for a fluent Japanese speaker to ask Shimoku Kio. Just another reason to keep up my Japanese studies.

• Do you have a really geeky tattoo? Ejen Chuang, the author of Cosplay in America, wants to photograph it.

• It’s no surprise that the Mary Sue is hitting it out of the park with articles about sex and gender in manga lately. Visual Representation: Trans Characters In Manga and The Top 5 Queer Voices in Anime and Manga. (HT Zoe.)

• What is it like to be an anime fan in a conservative religious country? (HT Team Deremoe, who also recently documented what it’s like to attend an international manga conference in the Philippines.)

• Two articles that show how times have changed in Japan: How Americans Changed The Way Japanese People Ate Sushi and Japanese geisha to be trained in a new art: self-defence.

• Anime scholar Charles Dunbar wrote a stream-of-consciousness review of the DC area’s most recent local convention, Magfest.

• This latest review of my book, Otaku Journalism, comes from aspiring journalist Adriano Jones. I liked this line: “The result is an approachable, fun reading experience which is informative and encouraging, without attempting to dodge or sugarcoat any potential hitches involved with the job.”

Whisky label by Kevin Bolk. You can bet I bought one at Magfest!