The Otaku Journalist Summer 2016 Season Preview

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As a trained journalist, I know this summer isn’t as terrible as it feels. In my graduate program, we learned the techniques the media uses to make current events seem very pressing for brief periods of time—the searchlight or spotlight method of journalism. Even so, every time I open up Twitter, I just want to retreat into a fantasy world.

Fortunately, the new anime season (and Pokémon Go!, I’ll admit,) are ready and waiting. Though I don’t usually watch more than one or two season premieres, this time I found myself watching a ton to keep my mind off of things! The better to be your anime oyster, sifting out the good stuff from the crap.

Here’s everything I watched so far and whether I think you should be watching it, too.

Amanchu!

amanchu

You can see from this screenshot why some people are calling it “The Muppet Show.” Otherwise, it’s a pretty standard slice-of-life about two girls just starting high school. The story takes place in a seaside town, and Kohinata comes from a family of scuba divers, so there’s an ocean motif that follows the episode around, down to their mermaid-cut school uniforms. I love scuba diving so I’m excited for this show to exit the classroom and dive in.

B-PROJECT

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Young everygirl Tsubasa lucks into a job managing not one, but three male idol groups! She doesn’t have any special talents, but her instincts are already winning over the idols—and I can see them falling for her in the future. This is an anime designed to pander to me, but I’m not sure how much more I can take. Between interchangeable pretty boys and Tsubasa always doing everything right, getting all of this fanservice is actually kind of boring.

Cheer Boys!!

cheerboys

Maybe it’s time to tone down the exclamation points, anime. From the beginning, Cheer Boys!! is not your average sports anime. For one thing, it takes place in college, when the characters are more independent and mature and (to adult viewers like me) relatable. The first episode starts slow as the boys begin to form their cheerleading squad, but I’ve already found my favorite character in the eccentric Wataru.

DAYS

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Tsukishi has a smile I want to protect. This is a sports anime in the spirit of Yowamushi Pedal, starring a hapless nerd as a main character. Tsukishi is a soccer newbie, but he has enthusiasm in spades. It’s not soccer that he’s so crazy about, exactly, but being on a team and running toward a common goal with all of his new friends. Not a lot of innovation here, but the thoughtful character designs and sweet soccer moves are pretty cool.

Love Live Sunshine!!

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I liked Love Live a lot, especially Nico. This is a high quality franchise with engaging characters and great music, and the sequel isn’t any different. As usual the best part is the character interaction—putting a dozen girls with totally different personalities in a room together and watching hijinks ensue. My favorite is Yoshiko, the chuunibyou idol who thinks she’s a demon. My one complaint so far is that Chika is very much like Love Live main Honoka. Perhaps there’s only one kind of personality that can unite this many disparate school idols together?

Orange

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I read the manga to the end, so I’m already inclined to love Orange. It’s your run-of-the-mill shoujo anime… with TIME TRAVEL. And a little bit of wish fulfillment, since 16-year-old Naho is receiving letters from her 26-year-old self in order to assuage her past regrets. Already these characters seem full of life, and the world they live in is full of subtle beauty.

SERVAMP

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A high school boy who hates troublesome things adopts a stray black cat… who turns out to be a vampire who also hates troublesome things. The two enter into a bloody contract (pictured) in which Mahiru can order his new “servamp” to fight other vampires on his behalf, like for example the first episode’s Grell reject who is threatening his friends for no reason. It’s a supernatural show with cute boys so I guess, the summer version of Bungo Stray Dogs? Either way I don’t feel the urge to watch beyond the first episode.

sweetness & lightning

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Here’s a show for everyone who liked Usagi Drop minus the weird incest part. Kouhei’s wife died six months ago, and he’s left raising his adorable daughter, Tsumugi, by himself. However, the hapless high school professor has no idea how to feed the two of them healthy meals. Enter his student, Kotori, who works at a homestyle restaurant. This is all set up to be a heartwarming cooking show, where the characters’ apparent relish in eating should satisfy us, too.

This Art Club Has a Problem!

artclub

Why did I even watch this? Starring a dude obsessed with drawing his own waifus in the creepiest ways possible and the girl who loves him, this is everything I dislike about “meta” anime, that acts like its self-awareness forgives it for re-using the same tired tropes.

The Morose Mononokean

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I’m a huge fan of Natsume’s Book of Friends, in which a high school boy hangs out with yokai only he and a select few can see. This is a clear knockoff, and as usual, it’s nowhere near as good as the original. Hanae’s self-deprecating everyman personality feels cookie cutter, and holier-than-thou Haruitsuki isn’t any more likeable. But hey—yokai hunting at school! It’s going to take more than a meh first episode to make this overall plot less appealing.

Thunderbolt Fantasy

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You absolutely need to be watching this puppet show, is a phrase I didn’t think I’d be saying this season. When I saw everyone hyping this, I thought it must be hilariously bad or something. Nope. These puppets are stunning with painted faces and elaborate embellished outfits. The animated effects are gorgeous, and the voice acting and musical score makes you forget that the puppets’ mouths aren’t always moving. I’ve already watching episode one twice.

TSUKIUTA. The Animation

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We’re definitely not hurting for idol anime this season! This one features just two male idol groups, instead of three like B-PROJECT, but definitely trades that quantity for increased quality (though not enough to make this a must-watch). I liked this storyline, in which three of the idols took a bored little kid on an adventure, because it gives the characters slightly more than the minimum of character development. Even so, that CG dancing has reached uncanny valley levels of discomfort. Once again, being pandered to is better in theory.

All this, and Mob Psycho 100 still hasn’t premiered yet! What are you watching this season?

June 2016 Income Report

Careers, Income Reports

june-2016-income-report

Welcome to a new thing I’ll be doing based on a reader request to post my freelancing output. I blog about how you can make money blogging, but you don’t really get to see how I personally do that. This will show you how I make a living with my hobbies in a more transparent way.

One caveat—I’m not comfortable posting all of the exact monetary amounts right now. That could change. I’m nervous it’ll be alienating, eliciting both “that much??” and “that little??” responses from people. What I can tell you—I live in a major city, I split expenses 50-50 with my husband, and I’m currently using my extra income to save for a house. After I’ve done a few of these and if I feel more comfortable (and if readers think it’d be helpful), I’ll consider sharing numbers.

oj-june-income

Here’s where my money came from in June. It’s sort of an unusual month, because more than half of my earnings came from my part-time job. That’s because I didn’t work a lot of freelance in May. I was sort of exhausted with life and not pursuing a lot of freelance work. Since most of my clients pay me 30 days after I turn in work, this June earnings report doesn’t reflect my June work much at all.

Freelance-wise, here’s what I got paid for in June:

I also did pretty poorly on the Amazon side this month. My affiliate earnings peak around Christmas and drop off summer. This month, I earned $425.53, which is the smallest amount I’ve made all year! (Yeah, with that one number you can probably get a pretty good idea of the whole pie chart, but whatever, still subtle enough for me.) My suspicion is that during convention season, people prefer to buy Gunpla models in person than over the internet.

oj-june-profit

In business, you need to spend money to make money, as the saying goes. I spend money on the freelance and Amazon pieces of my pie chart, so I included just them in this comparison of revenue and expenses. You can see that in June, I spent about 1/5 of what I made on business costs. Those included:

  • Freckle, my time tracker. I often bill by the hour, and Freckle makes sure I bill accurately.
  • Paying two of my Gunpla 101 contributors, Mario and Milky.
  • Paying my developer, Rusty. We’re working on a big new feature for Gunpla 101, more on that soon!
  • My monthly internet hosting. I have 10+ dot coms.

A few takeaways from June 2016:

June is a historically low-earning month for me. Since I started Orsini Bowers Media in 2014, I’ve been keeping spreadsheets of my earnings. All three years, I haven’t even hit $2,600 for the month. I wonder if it’s because for most of my life, I got out of school in June and I crave a vacation around now—my productivity definitely tapers off. Even worse, the money I earn passively from Amazon fades then, too! My goal is to build more reliable passive income streams so I can support myself even at this sluggish time of year.

My personal projects have taken a backseat. This is the first year in two years that I haven’t written a book. (Unless Affiliate Linking for $$$ counts?) My Gunpla 101 Secret Project is slow going, as are my Otakon panels. I’m mostly chalking this up to having a part time office job—for five of my most productive hours in the day, website code is all I work on. So I’ve finished fewer things I’m proud of this year, overall. The list of my career priorities and the breakdown of how I spend most of my time do not match up this year, and it’s something to consider when I hit my job’s one year anniversary.

On the other hand, not paying taxes is THE BEST. Not paying taxes CONSCIOUSLY, I mean. Ever since I started freelancing full time, I have had to pay estimated taxes four times a year. It sucks to have money in your bank account that you know you’re just going to have to pay to the government soon. This is what’s neat about jobs with withholding, like my web developer job. They take tax money out of my paychecks before I even see it, so I never have to kiss it goodbye. This year, I had a brilliant plan—I am withholding double the amount that I need to. The result is that I barely bring any money home from this job, but I don’t have to pay estimated taxes! I’m withholding so aggressively, it’s more likely that I’ll get money back from the government, rather than having to make up the difference with an April check like usual. This has been the best part of getting a somewhat-traditional job after years of working for myself.

So that’s what’s on my mind this month, as a business owner and employee. It feels pretty good to get this all out there, and I wish I had started doing this sooner. Fellow freelancers, how do you keep track of your earnings?

Otaku Links: Spring season wrap-up

Otaku Links

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  • A Cosplayer Is Running For Political Office. Everyone is sending me this link, from my editor to a former journalism professor. It’s neat to see how this Green Party candidate stays true to herself. I’ve seen enough political scandals to know that many politicians have WAY worse hobbies than cosplay, so power to her!
  • How am I going to wait for the next season of My Hero Academia? In the meantime, I loved reading these translated character sketches from creator Kohei Horikoshi. Thanks to @LossThief for sending me this when I asked!
  • Day of Gar Gar Stegasaurus wrote an angry but poignant essay about homosexual erasure in Kiznaiver. Maki went from yuri mangaka involved in her own lesbian romance to suddenly straight heroine, and it’s a little odd.
  • The secret life of K-pop fans over 30. Colette went to K-Con and wrote about the not-insubstantial group of older fans who have made a place for themselves in K-pop’s youth-obsessed culture.
  • About a year ago, my friend Scott let me beta-read his short story about a brave and capable science fiction heroine. Now, he’s about to be published in an anthology of diverse sci-fi—Enough Space For Everyone. With two more weeks to go, the Kickstarter is a third of the way there!

Screenshot via Kiznaiver

Getting published isn’t everything: a cautionary tale

Careers, Writing

cosplay-book-tale

A few days ago, my friend Ejen Chuang sent me some direct messages on Twitter, leading with “Your book has been repackaged as a UK magazine-format book.”

He sent me some snaps of a book/magazine hybrid that doesn’t look familiar to me at all, except for the fact that it uses photos of cosplayers I selected. Oh, and there’s my name listed as the author of it. All published by a publisher, Imagine, I’ve never heard of/worked with.

I’ve known about The New Cosplay Book since May, but this is my first time seeing it in the wild. And I’m not exactly proud of it being out there, because it’s such a glaring indication of my biggest mistake as an author.

new-cosplay

Back in 2014, I was so starry-eyed with the possibility of writing a Real Book, I probably would have paid for the opportunity. I signed the publishing contract without really looking at it. I proceeded to write the manuscript in seven weeks as ordered, documenting it on the blog. I ignored the warning signs through readers’ innocuous questions like, “What is it like working with an editor in traditional publishing?” (I didn’t) that proved this was not a traditional book deal. I was just excited to see my published work in bookstores around the world.

And that happened. You can now pick up a copy of Cosplay: The Fantasy World of Role Play at any Barnes & Noble in the US, and some places in the UK, too. But I knew I was replaceable. I didn’t attend a single one of the book signings I was invited to, since the publisher told me I would be expected to pay my own way to get to the locations (London, Toronto).

Still, I was thrilled when my typically uncommunicative contact at the publishing house reached out in January to let me know the book had done well enough to garner a second printing! She asked if I had any changes to make to the original manuscript before that, and I excitedly outlined a strategy for getting all the previously unidentified cosplayers in the book credited. (Since I was under a time constraint, I simply credited photographers when neither I or the photographer could remember a cosplayer’s name.) I never heard back.

Then in May, one of the photographers I’d worked with told me she’d become aware of a second cosplay book using her photos, and was reasonably upset she hadn’t been paid. When we used her photos for Cosplay, it was presumed to be a “one time use” license. The link she sent me to Imagine’s website was how I got notified that there was a new book with my name on it.

I was shocked. I hadn’t heard a word from my publisher since January. At first I was angry. But flipping through my contract again, I realized that I had no right to know about what they did with my work after I handed it over in November 2014. Even if they sold it. Back then, I sold my rights entirely for about $3,000. (And since then I haven’t made a cent, since royalties aren’t included. I don’t get paid when the book gets bought.) They don’t owe me a response at all.

I wrote to my original publisher on the photographer’s behalf, but never heard back. What made this an especially awful mistake was that I unwittingly roped eight fantastic cosplay photographers into working for free. I used my reputation as the Otaku Journalist to convince them to work with me, if we weren’t friends already (“Look at my blog to see how seriously I take fandom,” I told them). But ultimately they were working for the publisher, not for me.

If I could do it all over again, I’d model it after what Ejen did. That’s what I wrote in my Forbes article, I Wrote A Book About Cosplay, But This Guy Wrote A Better One. “I’m grateful to the publisher for giving me that opportunity, but I hardly consider that book as my own work,” I wrote. “If I had the chance to do it again, I’d want to tell a story about [cosplay’s] people.”

I’m no longer proud of what I did with Cosplay—writing an impersonal 101 and hardly protecting the photographers that worked with me just so I could see my name in bookstores. I’m much happier with my self-published books, for which I chose the topic and content myself, for which I paid my artists and editors on my own terms, for which I still control the rights.

Last November, I wrote about how writing a book didn’t change my life. It didn’t make me wealthier or better known or better established as an author. But now I realize it did change my life in one key way—it made me wiser. I won’t be signing a contract like that again.

Top photo by me, other photos by Ejen.

Otaku Links: SD Week

Otaku Links

otaku_links-musha

Hope you’re having a less hectic Friday than I am. The thing about freelance work is when it rains, it pours. A bunch of my dormant long term clients suddenly had new work for me, so I’m glad it’s almost the weekend for a different reason than usual—I don’t want to relax, I want to catch up!

  • It’s SD week over at my other blog, Gunpla 101, where me and two of my contributors are sharing our recent builds of the cutest Gunpla grade—SC (Super Deformed).
  • By the way, if you are interested in Gunpla and writing and would like to write for Gunpla 101, email me. Pays per blog post, competitive rate—I’m a web writer myself, so I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t!
  •  Zac and Jake at Anime News Network just unveiled the site’s first webcomic since Anime News Nina ended—it’s called Vice and Luna and tells an alternate fantasy story of ANN in a world where fairies are real.
  • I love discovering new anime blogs. Fanservice Check is a blog that lets you know which anime feature lots of panty shots and naughty situations so you know to avoid—or seek out—those particular titles, your pick.

That’s all the links I have this week. This is why I need you! If you have recommendations for Otaku Links, you are welcome, nay, ENCOURAGED, to let me know.

Photo of SD Gundam Musha Victory by me.