• In r/movies, a redditor took some stills from Spirited Away that look more like paintings than screenshots. Here’s all 38. 

• Could cosplay be banned at New York Comic Con? This is mostly speculation right now, but a New York councilman has introduced legislation targeting costumed characters. It’d be a dark day indeed if cosplayers had to get official permission from the people who own the rights to each character.

• When Rae Johnston wore a Bioshock: Infinite shirt to a coffee shop, a man accused her of not knowing what it even was about. So she spoiled the ending. This week, she blogged about the unbelievable quantity of positive and negative feedback she received just for tweeting about the incident.

• Mattie Brice wrote a poignant, poetic, personal essay about games criticism paralleled with her identity as a transgender woman of color:

I didn’t cry when I got home. Instead I went through and looked at all of the names, all of the names of my editors, those receiving my pitches, giving me opportunity to further myself in the industry. The names on the business cards in my purse, the names already in my inbox. The guy I was dating. That man on the street knew. He knew.

• Which reminds me: in feminist and other equality writings, proponents tend to use a vocabulary that isn’t quite mainstream yet, words like cisgender and WoC. But not knowing the right words doesn’t mean you can’t participate. Here’s a great essay on why it’s wrong to punish people who aren’t in the know. “There’s no point in being ‘correct’ if only 12 of your friends understand it.”

• Adam Gurri writes about breaking the cycle of Web addiction. Do you believe you’re addicted to the Internet, or that the Internet has shortened or altered your attention span and work habits in some way?

• I started freelancing for ReadWrite this week, where I’ll be writing a story about learning to program every day. Here’s my first story, on an iPad app that teaches kids to code. I’ll also be writing about my attempts to teach myself to program. Is there a coding topic you’d like me to write about? Let me know!

• It’s been a great week on Tumblr for amazing fan game concepts that I wish were real. Check out this Pokémon concept where you play as a young Professor Oak or Agatha and make your own proto Pokéballs, and this Zelda concept where Zelda herself is the star.

• Tumblr Storyboard is dead and I am seriously crushed. I was freelancing for them and I wanted to wait until my first story was published to announce it. Now it won’t be running after all. But it cheered me up a little to read the New Yorker’s Collected Messages of David Karp.

• Despite its ups and downs, do you think you might join me in living the freelance lifestyle? Jezebel’s Laura Beck thinks you will:

According to a study conducted by Intuit in 2010, more than forty percent of the US workforce — so, sixty million people — will be contractors, temps, and the self-employed by 2020. That’s great for those of us who want to trade business casual for an all day pajama party, but is it good news for everybody?

• Are you watching any spring season anime yet? (If you aren’t, have I got a vlog for you coming next week!) I enjoyed Charles’s (of Beneath The Tangles) Tumblr post about Oreimo 2.

• Grant sent me this comic about the discrepancies in anime subtitles done by different groups. Painfully true.

• Finally, here’s a California game store that paved its floor with Magic: The Gathering cards. There are a few valuable rares in there but don’t worry, they were donated for this very purpose.

• Edit: One more link! Charles over at Study of Anime let me know that my contribution to his fandom ID project is now live. I wrote about defining my identity in fandom.

(Illustration via pookerskull.)

• Like everyone else in the fandom-blogosphere, I just found out about CONsent, a photo journalism project about treating cosplayers with respect. As research my Sexism in Anime Fandom panel, Patches and I collected anonymous horror stories from male and female cosplayers alike. It’s great to see people coming forward with their stories.

• This week, somebody found Otaku Journalist by Googling “anime characters who are journalists.” I didn’t know the answer, so I decided to look it up myself. Voila! Here’s an exhaustive list of reporters in anime, courtesy of Anime Planet.

• Why aren’t journalism students interested in journalism? I don’t quite agree with Steve Faguy’s title. I wasn’t very interested in the political reporting classes I had to take in J-school, for example, but I loved my class on community and niche group reporting. The third section of this post, “Experience > Grades,” is gold. There’s no barrier anymore. In fact, I just taught a class at American that included a few students who had bylines in some of the same new outlets as I do!

• There’s a series on Something Awful that imagines modern, often mundane publications as if they were written in the style of the world’s great authors. Here’s one that pictures Ayn Rand promoting anime culture for J-List.

• You can go to a lot of different sites to find out the lineup for the next anime season, but I just found AniChart and think it’s extremely well designed. And let’s be honest, when’s the last time you visited an anime site and said, “Wow, that’s some really clean, minimalist Web design!”

• And finally, Reddit discovered the highway nearby where I grew up in Fairfax County, which just happens to be adopted by the Dark Capital Domain of the Camarilla. People are quick to suggest it’s a fake, but I’ve driven by it millions of times! Here’s the Camarilla chapter’s charity page, too.

(Photo by Sushi Killer.)