Otaku Links: Escape from reality

Otaku Links

  • I’m a huge fan of Yaya Han, whose passion and craftsmanship have helped her become one of the first and most prominent professional cosplayers. Her interview with MyMotto shows some of her struggles behind her cheerful exterior. Check out around 4:15 when she talks about the Catch-22 of being a female cosplayer—if you succeed in looking like a fantasy character, you’re “slutty,” and if you fail, you’re “ugly.”
  • A literary, near-poetic essay about visiting jazz clubs in Tokyo that attempts to answer the question: why do American blues resonate so strongly with Japanese audiences?
  • Evangelion‘s Hideaki Anno gave an interview where he commented, somewhat harshly, about his criticism of “escapist otaku.” It looks like his definition means otaku who are content to consume without creating derivative works, so in a way this could be taken as Anno wanting us to write more Eva fanfic.
  • I just heard about Aimee Blackschleger, an American-born vocalist who has sung anime songs I’ve definitely heard from Attack on Titan, Kill La Kill etc., but it seems I’m not alone. One redditor said they went to an American con panel of hers where only four people were in the audience. Luckily, they shared some really fascinating highlights of the panel, and she’s definitely on my “creator to follow” list now! (HT Crimm).
  • What’s yaoi and where does it go from here? June Manga wrote about how anime that depicts relationships between men used to have very specific (and unrealistic) tropes like uke/seme. Now as shows about gay relationships reject these clichés, what can be defined as yaoi is becoming more of a gray area.
  • Bree of Geek & Prosper shares how she got clients in 2016 and how she’ll get them in 2017. Client hunting is the worst part of freelancing because it’s labor with no income, so the tips she used to get to $4,000 a month in writing income are hugely helpful.
  • I’ve mentioned my favorite YA author here before—Natalie Whipple of the Relax, I’m a Ninja trilogy. Her books, which discuss Dungeons and Dragons, anime, Japanese folklore and bronies among other topics, are mainly self published because we’re still in a time where “geek stuff doesn’t sell.” I really liked her blog post about not getting book deals even when you’ve mastered your craft because of your subject range.
  • I wrote about Mari Okada’s involvement in Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans and how a lot of the elements of the show fans criticize for being “too Okada” are actually Gundam franchise staples. Expect an upcoming refutation to this article from Karice, who believes I give Okada too much credit. That’s totally a rational viewpoint; I was responding mostly to angry comments about Okada’s involvement without knowing the full extent of Okada’s involvement (or lack of) in creating the show’s storyline.

Photo of Yaya Han by Brian Boling. 

How I unhacked my blog

Tech

Not too long ago, the website you’re reading this on was hacked.

Sometime in late December, I became aware that two of my websites, Otaku Journalist and Gunpla 101, had been hacked. A reader notified me on Facebook that he’d attempted to visit Gunpla 101, but had been redirected to a different site instead.

Logging into Bluehost, it was clear something was not right. Aside from my own and Crimm’s FTP profiles, there were more than 20 additional FTP accounts made out of letter strings that looked like they had been randomly generated. Running Exploit Scanner led to two odd looking files in the Gunpla 101 folder:

At first, Crimm and I only saw the Gunpla 101 issue. He worked first to quickly resolve the hack by installing fresh WordPress core files and then to teach me how to fix things in the future. But in the end, my friend Mike, who works as an engineer when he’s not running Anime Herald, pinpointed the point of entry. He found a French IP address (definitely not me!) accessing both Otaku Journalist and Gunpla 101 through the base theme I use for both, Impreza, which apparently has a vulnerability. (I paid $60 for each theme, so I paid $120 to get hacked, unfortunately.)

If you’re curious, here’s a paste of pomo/bo.php, and here’s a paste of the redirect that some users were seeing on Gunpla 101. What these scripts mean is that things weren’t as bad as they could have been—this was not a malicious hack. It was somebody using exploit scripts to make a quick buck.

When I talked to my hosting provider, Bluehost, a technician told me that it’s very common for people to discover a hack, as I did, right after upgrading to a virtual private server. When I was on a shared hosting plan, sharing my server with hundreds of other bloggers, people were logging in and out all the time. If somebody got access and started injecting scripts, it’s unlikely we’d notice. But when my VPS logs, which should show my activity and my activity alone, revealed IP addresses that weren’t mine, it was easy to see something was up. In other words, that exploit may have been on my sites for a long time. It reminded me that hacks are incredibly common, and I need to do more to protect myself from now on. Relatedly, you’ll notice that Gunpla 101 is now an HTTPS site, and I have Crimm entirely to thank for that.

Here’s what I did to get un-hacked after finding and removing the exploit:

Installed security plugins.

Aside from Exploit Scanner, Gunpla 101 is rocking several new security plugins. It’s insecure to name everything my site is using, but the one I want to tell you about is Shield, a completely free firewall for WordPress. Shield has several levels of protection culminating in “Lockdown” mode, so you can adjust how severely you want it to protect the site.

After Crimm removed the first exploit, but before Mike found the point of entry, Shield caught and reversed several attempted hacks. It acted like a second level so that even though we weren’t sure how the hacker was getting in yet, they still couldn’t alter the site.

Removed everything I wasn’t using.

Did you know that even inactive themes and plugins can be a point of entry for an attack vector? Even if you make sure to keep them totally updated at all times. After finding out about the hack, I went through all of my WordPress sites and deleted all themes and plugins I wasn’t using.

Since base themes like Twenty Seventeen are automatically installed on WordPress sites, hackers know they’re a likely point of entry for most blogs. Of course, anyone can use What WordPress Theme Is That to figure out what you’re using, and it’s not exactly a secret I use Impreza. But since I wasn’t using the snippet of code associated with Impreza’s vulnerability, I just deleted it. It’s a good idea to research your theme and see where its weak points are.

I also removed old passwords and accounts. Even though this particular exploit didn’t give the hacker control of my login or the database, it never hurts to have a stronger password.

Asked Google to reindex my sites.

The hack rewrote my metadata for Gunpla 101. So when people searched the term “Gunpla” on Google, my site came up looking like this:

Ugh. If this kept up for long, Google would rank it increasingly lower in searches because it doesn’t appear to be relevant. So I had to tell Google to recrawl the site and get the correct metadata to show up in searches again. Even if your site hasn’t been hacked, it’s good to remind Google to do this every now and then. You can use the Google Webmaster Tools wizard to walk you through adding a site and making sure its pages show up in searches.

Finally, I considered myself lucky.

When a site is hacked for a long time, Google starts to penalize it. Since I make a big chunk of my income from Gunpla 101, I already have been losing money from it showing up lower in search rankings. If I didn’t know a hack was behind that, I may have even had to start again from square one building up relevance and reputation.

Though this was stressful, I didn’t panic. There was one bad actor, but at least three people who helped me fix the site—Crimm, Mike, and the Gunpla 101 reader who spotted the hack. I sent all three of them Amazon gift cards, my go-to way of saying “I appreciate what you did.” It was definitely easier to have help and guidance than to do all of this alone!

Getting hacked is surprisingly common and it doesn’t necessarily mean you are a bad webmaster, because new exploits pop up all the time. Even if it happens, it isn’t the end of the world. A week after the discovery, my site is safer and more secure than ever. Don’t panic, remain vigilant, and know that plenty of people have been there before.

Photo by Serena Epstein

Otaku Links: Work. Life. Balance.

Otaku Links

It’s been almost a year since I took this photo in Japan. I just dug it up again as possible inspiration for an oil painting class I’m taking. I’m trying to switch things up in the new year, like swapping Japanese classes for painting classes (just for a semester) and trying to unplug for this entire upcoming weekend. But first, links!

  • My new gig with Anime News Network involves building and photographing model kits. I realized when I did this Patlabor review that I’ve been photographing my models for seven years, and using the same camera that entire time, a Nikon P7000 which is $300 cheaper now than when I bought it! It does not take a fancy new camera to take good toy photos, just patience, good lightning, and a device with a macro setting.
  • Defining Gundam Reconguista in G. I’m so torn about this series because on the one hand, it has gorgeous art, animation and music, but on the other hand, the plot is so bad Tomino has publicly apologized for it. Bless is the latest aniblogger to try and decipher this confusing, sometimes charming show.
  • I started playing Mystic Messenger about a year after everyone else, and I just couldn’t stick with it. All these boys demand so much from me and it makes me tired! It turns out I’m not the only one to have this impression. At Kotaku, Cecilia wrote about how Mystic Messenger attempts to gamify emotional labor.
  • Are you working in your career or on your career? “When you ask for advice, you’ll often get vague, unhelpful answers. Instead, you need to observe what the top performers in your field are actually doing differently. Act like a journalist.” Tony of Manga Therapy sent me this because he said it sounds like career advice I’d give someone, and I agree.
  • This is the most dramatic article I have read on work-life balance: A Not-Very-Relatable Post About Taking Zero Maternity Leave and Doing All the Things and Everything Working Out Just Fine. Jen runs Get Bullish, which contains some of my favorite career advice on the web, but this doesn’t seem easy to emulate!
  • Sometimes the journalism that needs to be written and read doesn’t make you feel good. I really enjoyed watching Awesome Games Done Quick last weekend, and I had no idea that it was plagued by so many controversies. But this is the stuff people need to know.
  • Speaking of which, maybe you saw the thing I wrote on Anime Feminist about a My Anime List writer’s bad experience with censorship. This story could have been mere gossip, but Reuben was smart enough to document everything. Even when you feel like you don’t have any power, keep those records.
  • Bloodlines of the anime vampire. I didn’t realize, as The Little Anime Blog explains, that there are no vampires in Japanese folklore. They didn’t appear in Japanese entertainment until the 1950s!

The worst business advice I have ever received

Careers

Last year around this time, I attended an energy healing session.

This requires some context. I had decided to put renewed effort (and capital) into my business, and I was working with a pricey business coach. Her online business model was smart and succinct, and she was doing incredibly well for herself. So when she provided a free energy healing with the coaching package, I figured I’d give it a try.

Fast forward to me on my couch, a phone to my ear while the energy healer directed me and five other women to “raise your hands to the sky and feel good vibes flowing through you.” Over the course of an hour, she walked us through breathing exercises, told us about our past lives (“Your ancestors are grateful for the career you’ve chosen,” she told me, maybe not realizing I write about anime), and cleansed our “aural grids,” whatever that means. By the time the hour was over, some of the other women were eagerly signing up for follow-up sessions, which run to the tune of $300 an hour. Me? I was vowing to never tell anyone about it.

Honestly, I got nothing out of it, and felt sort of stupid I even attended. And yet, I can’t write it off completely—my business coach, who is wildly more successful than me by every measure, swears by her regular energy cleansing sessions. Maybe focusing on your spiritual outlook first helps other people succeed at business, but not this skeptical atheist.

This may have been the only such session I’ve ever attended, but certainly not the only one I’ve heard about or been invited to. I’m not sure why, but the narrative of business success (for women especially) is tied to the spiritual. Perhaps it’s because women are encouraged to “have it all” and strive at every aspect of their lives in order to feel successful at even one thing, so mental health, “self care,” and fitness are all tied to having a brilliant career.

Now that I’m getting over my embarrassment, I want to say this is some of the worst business advice I’ve ever received. And I feel that even well-meaning, non-superstitious people believe it.

Here’s some more pseudo-psychology advice that hasn’t helped me at all:

“You can leave your work at the office”

At one meeting for local women entrepreneurs, I met a shaman. Her day job is going out to the wealthy suburbs of DC to burn candles and ring a bell to “purify” McMansions. We were talking about taxes until it became clear she was in a much, much higher tax bracket than I was.

By this point, I was almost thinking, “Sign me up!” But there’s no way I wouldn’t erupt into giggles between sutras, because I think this is all bull. Just think of how amazing this woman is, being able to do all this with a straight face. She really believes in her work.

I have no problem parting rich people from their money, but without that devotion, I would just feel like a fraud every day. We spend the majority of our time working. If you go into work that directly opposes your belief structure, you’ll be depressed even after you go home.

“Build it and they will come”

A lot of business and life advice for women centers around “putting an intention out into the universe.” Create a vision board of your dreams. Chant personal mantras. Write your goals on a piece of paper and burn it while meditating into the flames. You get the idea.

Frankly, I don’t think the universe gives a shit about what I “intend” to do. Last month I launched Asuna, my first WordPress theme from scratch, and since then have sold exactly one copy. Time to double down on daily affirmations? Probably I’d be better off, you know, advertising it.

“How you do something is how you do everything”

I heard about a woman who charges thousands to train people to run races in order to increase their earnings, stating the correlation that lots of successful people run races. By that logic, I should be rich—I ran two 10K races and four 5K races last year.

The idea is that if you can put the time, effort, and capital into running races, you’ll discover that you have renewed endurance to put into your business. But I’m not sure there’s a connection. Some of the times I’ve earned the most money in my career have been times when every other aspect of my life was falling apart. I once had a period of emotional stress in which I stopped eating. I didn’t really notice what a wreck I was until I attended a conference for work and the promotional fanny pack (long story) they gave me to wear slipped down to my ankles. And yet, I was doing pretty well as a careerist, getting lots of bylines and recognition for my work.

It is certainly easier for me to work hard when I am happy and healthy. But whether I’m good or bad at other aspects of my life doesn’t transfer to whether I’m good or bad at my career.

“Fake it ’til you make it” 

Haha, I have imposter syndrome. I will not attempt to sell a service or product until I am at least twice as qualified as I need to be.

Different things work for different people, but none of this advice has worked for me. If I had to boil down what has worked for my business is one word: persistence. I go back to my work every day. I try a variety of techniques, including some of the events and programs for women entrepreneurs listed here, which you may also find sort of questionable. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, and sometimes I try something so dumb I vow not to tell anyone (except only all of my readers, a full year later). I decide if it’s for me or not, and move on.

Photo by Claire on Flickr

Otaku Links: Badass ladies

Otaku Links

  • Yattatachi listed their favorite female anime leads who take no shit. My favorite is still Yona, because we get to see her character develop as she learns to toughen up.
  • Teen Vogue’s Lauren Duca gives a shout-out to her numerous trolls. Most relatable line: “I can take it, and I will continue to take it… That doesn’t mean it’s OK.”
  • Feminism, Anime and Me. All Hail Haruhi wrote a thoughtful, personal post about how Anime Feminist made her feel welcome in fandom again. I’ve been so happy to support Anime Feminist, and stories like Haruhi’s remind me that it’s worth it.
  • Index of Flip Flappers Reviews and Articles. In case you wanted to read virtually everything anime bloggers have written about the charming and addictive show Flip Flappers, here’s your chance. I marathoned it between Christmas and New Year’s and loved every second.
  • I was on one of my favorite podcasts, Fansplaining, to talk about Yuri!!! on Ice. I realized that I usually assume a lot of anime knowledge on the part of the listener, so it was helpful to start at square one while talking to Flourish and Elizabeth.
  • The BL Manga Starter Kit. During the podcast, I contrasted Yuri!!! on Ice, which features a non-exploitative gay romance, with some of the worse BL and yaoi I’ve seen, so it only feels right to share some of the genre’s highlights, as presented by Khursten.
  • Finding the silver lining in a bad year. 2016 wasn’t great, Anigamer’s Evan admits, but hey, we still got Overwatch and Yuri!!! on Ice.
  • When Gundam Came to Hollywood. After Tom told me he got a copy of the script to an ’80s Hollywood Gundam movie that was ultimately never produced, I begged him to write it up. At one point, I had him dictate the article to me while I typed an outline, that is how bad I wanted to read this article. Now that it’s here, I couldn’t be happier!

Screenshot via Yona of the Dawn, episode 5.