Below are Gregory's Articles:
Asian culture links from MeFi

MetaFilter recently had a couple of cool links on Asian pop culture topics. A discussion of Japanese director Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill) Visual Kei band X Japan embarks on first-ever US tour An awesome gallery of posters using pop culture images (Superman, Marilyn Monroe) to promote manners on public transit Share and Enjoy!

By Mazinga with 0 comments
Expatriates add fake foreign flavor to Chinese confabs

Some Caucasians living in China have reported making a little extra on the side by renting themselves out. Cool your jets — not that way, but to pose as visiting American businessmen and accompany entrepreneurs hoping to add an air of cultivated connections to their presence at business meetings. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image–particularly, the [...]

By Mazinga with 2 comments
Information can be beautiful

Here’s one for our resident Asian design major, Musashi: a nifty gallery of “creative infography” that presents complex information in a simple and visually appealing fashion. (via MeFi)

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Super Mario School

Some genius created an awesome stop-motion video of Mario making a two-dimensional journey around his school thanks to the magic of paper cutouts. (via BoingBoing)

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Amazing collection of Meiji-era photos

BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin is right, the captions in this Flickr photoset are sometimes cringe-inducing, but its collection of photographic images from Meiji-era Japan is amazing indeed.

By Mazinga with 0 comments
Costikyan on hardcore gaming

Game designer Greg Costikyan, a Yellow Menace fave and all-around cool guy, has an interesting article in The Escapist on the differences between hardcore and casual gamers.

By Mazinga with 1 comment
JAL stewardess uniforms feared hot item on black market

Already engaged in a struggle to emerge from bankruptcy, Japan Air Lines is now engaged in a fight of a different sort: Keeping the stylish outfits of laid-off flight attendants off the black market and out of the hands of uniform fetishists. A jacket alone can fetch several hundred pounds, while one site is presently advertising a full set for [...]

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Vintage Japanese industrial expo poster gallery

Check out this sweet gallery of vinyage posters from Japanese industrial expositions from the 1920s-1940s. (via BoingBoing)

By Mazinga with 2 comments
DVD Review – Resident Evil: Degeneration

A decade or so ago, finding anime and other Asian media used to be hard.  Fans had to settle for whatever mediocre dubs made it onto television, mail order from small suppliers like AnimEigo, lurk Usenet for fansub contacts or scrounge for low-quality videotape dubs at fan conventions.  Today, though, one can pick up DVDs of the new Astro Boy [...]

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Oh My Goddess! DVD going out of print

The good people at AnimEigo recently announced that their license to produce the classic Oh My Goddess! OVA series expires at the end of February, 2010. In response, they’ve priced their remaining DVD stock at clearance rates. I’m fortunate to have picked up the DVDs myself fairly recently — having had it on VHS for years — but if any [...]

By Mazinga with 0 comments
TETSUOOOOO!

For many of my generation whose initial exposure to anime was through imported television series of inconsisten quality, the movie Akira was revolutionary in the artistic brilliance of its animation. Now one man has teamed up with Pittsburg’s ToonSeum to create The Art of Akira Exhibit, whose mission is “To teach the entire world just why the movie Akira is [...]

By Mazinga with 2 comments
Flash game semi-repost of the day

We’d mentioned Nanaca Crash, a fun little Flash game featuring characters from the Japanese visual novel Cross Channel, in an earlier incarnation of the site, but since we haven’t reposted it at Yellow Menace yet, here goes. Incidentally, my current record is 3699.48 meters.

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Survivor of both atomic bombings dies at 93

NPR carried the obituary this morning of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized as having survived the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who died Jan. 4, 2010 at the age of 93. Injured in the Hiroshima attack of Aug. 6, 1945, he returned to his home town of Nagasaki, which was bombed three days later. Yamaguchi became [...]

By Mazinga with 3 comments
LEGO link of the day

A model of Howl’s Moving Castle made of LEGO. ‘Nuff said. (via BoingBoing)

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The Epoxies stick with new wave style

So there I was, playing Dance Dance Revolution X, and I find myself grooving on this great New Wave song called “Synthesized” by some band called The Epoxies. And I wonder, how the heck did I miss this band back in the ’80s?

By Mazinga with 1 comment