MSG: Nutritional nuisance or good eats?
My wife swears that MSG gives her headaches. Frankly, my wife gives me headaches when she starts whining about the level of MSG in her Chinese food…because for all the noise generated about MSG’s supposedly harmful effects, nobody has been able to definitively determine that MSG – eaten in normal amounts – causes any physiological problems. Despite this, many people [...]
Yellow Menace Podcast Episode 7: Gen Con 2010 wrap-up, my RPG announcement, and Ghost in the Shell 2.0
This week we welcome co-editor Gregory ‘Mazinga’ Harris, Patricia ‘AnaKhouri’ Correll, and Ed to put a cap on our Gen Con 2010 coverage. We also have some other convention news, I announce my in-development chambara tabletop RPG, and we pick apart Ghost in the Shell 2.0. (Note: If you dig the podcast, please take a moment to rate and review [...]
Blogging from Gen Con Indy 2010
With two days of gaming under our belt I thought it would be a good time to post a handful of highlights from this year’s con. Freemarket – The new sci-fi RPG from indie game stars Jaren Sorensen (octaNe, Action Castle) and Luke Crane (Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard), Freemarket is a bizarroid mix of transhumanist tropes – reputation economies, matter [...]
Off-topic: The best kids show on television…Adventure Time!
One of the things I hate about kids television programming is that kid’s shows rarely deal with how kids’ minds actually work. Typically, kid’s programming is designed to teach kids oversimplifed moral lessons or how to be a fully functional member of society (‘share your stuff’, ‘disabled people aren’t monsters’, ‘Queso is Spanish for Cheese‘) – rare is the show [...]
YM Photo Essay: Krohn Conservatory Butterfly Show
Last week Shapiro Keats and I took Gohan to the Krohn Conservatory’s annual Butterfly Show. The Krohn Conservatory is in Cincinnati’s lovely Eden Park, and the butterfly show is one of those deals where you go into this room where there’s a ton of butterflies flapping around free, and you just hope you don’t accidentally squish one. We had a [...]
My friend showed me a Youtube video where a guy took a music video and changed the lyrics of the song to tell you what was happening in the video. That doesn’t sound very funny, but it is and I have wasted way too much time watching and laughing my ass off at these videos. So I am sharing the [...]
Added Sep 1, 2010, Under:
News
The Shan family in Shangdong province, China have been forced to choose a new family name – thanks to computers which can’t render the character necessary to spell their name. The residents had no problem when identity cards, driving licenses and other documents could be handwritten, but now they have to be printed using computers, and their name is so [...]
My brother’s chief problem with RPG’s, or at least the one he always brings up when we talk about videogame RPG’s, is the lifeless townsfolk you deal with. Shopkeepers tend to be flesh-covered vending machines eager to turn your hard-earned gold into swords and potions. So how about this: a Japanese indie RPG in which you play the shopkeeper selling [...]
Back in 2006, Shapiro Keats and I took our honeymoon with Pop Japan Travel. We went on the February Sapporo Snow Festival tour, and it was amazing. We had great hotels with space-age toilets, a sweet-ass flight on Singapore Airlines (all the flight attendants were way hot, and we had a ton of movies to choose from- I watched Wallace [...]
According to Aint It Cool News, John Woo is planning to return to World War II with a proposed film about the legendary Burmese Flying Tigers squadron. I can’t think of a single post-Hong Kong Woo film that moved me in any way, and I don’t imagine this will be any different…but the Flying Tigers are definitely worthy of a [...]
OK, listen up, Hollywood starlets and people with more money than sense: dogs are not made to wear clothes. They are not made to be rainbow colors. They do not like riding in strollers or in your luggage-sized purse. Dogs are made to roll in dirt and eat their own vomit and slobber all over your ankles. You people in [...]
Added Aug 26, 2010, Under:
News
If you listened to the last podcast, you’ll remember my hackneyed ‘announcement’ about Death Frenzy, the chambara card-based RPG I’m working on. Well, here’s a link to the game’s development site where I’ll be posting updates and details as the game progresses. You’ll also find details of the other game design project I’ve got on the burner. I’m working on [...]
Yes – it looks different! I’m updating the theme, so things’ll look a little weird for a day or two. (Yes – I know we’ve got a huge thingie that says ‘AD BLOCK’ over to the right…) Sorry for the inconvenience…
Being Yellow Menace’s resident ‘Asian Design Major’ (as Greg likes to call me), I found this interesting… What Do I Do With Those Damn Anime Kids? Excerpt: Introductions were made, and more chitchat was had about the problem at hand, namely, the Damn Anime Kid. “They just wanna draw the same stuff over and over again. The big eyes, the [...]
Added Aug 25, 2010, Under:
News
Sumo wrestling has been in some deep shit lately because the wrestlers have been caught gambling on other sports games, a big no-no in Japan. Apparently the sumo commission has done a lousy job investigating too. All of this is being blamed on bad communication;: it seems sumo wrestlers can’t text each other…because their fingers are too fat for cell [...]
I thought traffic was bad in the place where I used to live- a small city that had outgrown its britches, and had not been designed to handle urban sprawl- resulting in tedious traffic jams (it didn’t help that the majority of the inhabitants there are retarded monkeys who would never use their damn blinkers, let you over, or NOT [...]
Brian Dunning tackles the Yonaguni Monument (aka ‘Japan’s Atlantis’) on this week’s episode of Skeptoid. As usual with Skeptoid, if you tune in expecting to hear about verified evidence of some lost culture off the coast of Japan you’ll be disappointed. About 25 meters beneath the waters off Japan lies a stepped pyramid. We don’t know who built it, or [...]
I don’t have time to properly eulogize him, but I was shocked to learn via Twitter that anime director Satoshi Kon (Paranoia Agent, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika) died today at age 47. Rest in peace, sir…
Sorry to be scarce- I’m actually working on a couple reviews for once (Red Cliff FTW). Anyway, Threadless is having one of their awesome $10 t-shirt sales, with the usual glut of gaming-related tees: Cheat Codes Mario Mario in French Extra Lives And a couple Japanese-type ones: Tokyo Skyline Loooove This One But They\’re Sold Out in Adult Sizes!
