This is actually a great example of how material concerns influence culture. The differences (including this one) between manga & american comics don’t come from “japanese culture” or whatever, but from the economics of selling anthology magazines vs individual books.

In American comics, stuff runs as individual comic books and then may eventually get collected into trades, if the individual books sell well enough. The books themselves are treated as totally disposable except by would-be collectors. Back-issues are available from the printer for a very short time, and series go on for a long time. Comic readers can’t expect to…

By dying before finishing Acid Communism, Fisher freed us up not just to argue about what he really meant by Acid Communism, but also to argue ahistorically about what the best possible version of Mark Fisher would have meant by Acid Communism, and that’s a silver lining.

Leaving a mysterious gap in the most important part of an idea is a good way to haunt people, and haunted people can be very productive. What’s the left’s equivalent of Fermat’s Last Theorem?

It gets me thinking about american civil religion. We americans get indoctrinated into this really idealized version of “the…

A huge part of enjoying media objects in good faith is figuring out where you stand in relation to the media object & where you both stand in relationship to the world. When we consume media, it becomes a part of us and changes us in complex ways. Honest criticism and introspection, while it may be occasionally uncomfortable (and may often be uncomfortable for folks who are afraid of themselves), is the most fruitful source of media enjoyment.

I spent decades thinking and arguing about Evangelion — getting enormous pleasure from this in the process — precisely because I didn’t…

Long ago, when we all lived in the forest and no one lived anywhere else, Saint Dog got a Facebook invite to a great bacchanal and meeting of the Discordian cabals. Because the person who sent the invite was an asshole, Saint Dog did not attend, and by the time he found out what had happened there, the entire event had already descended into myth.

The way he heard it (from a friend of a friend) was this: since all the cabals had been separate (Discordians tending to stick apart) and the mead and acid and vodka were flowing, nobody…

The problem of generating interesting long-form text (whether fiction or non-fiction) is a problem of information density: people do not like to be told things they already know (or can guess), particularly at length, nor do they generally find the strain of interpreting content that’s too informationally-dense interesting for long. There’s a relatively narrow window of novelty that a piece of text must stay inside for most people to put up with it (and when we go outside that window, there are often motivations outside of interest: we may be daring ourselves to put up with a difficult text out…

When Fisher died, he was working on a new book describing ‘Acid Communism’. Looked at in a particular light, we can see in the three books he published during his lifetime fragments of a negative image of this theory, and when we see these fragments, it is difficult not to become haunted by it in precisely the way described in his second book, Ghosts of My Life.

Capitalist Realism rather straightforwardly describes the state that ‘Acid Communism’ is supposed to alleviate: it tells us why there is no future, and why having no future is a bad thing. Of his…

A response to iniksbane on what constitutes anime

Another blogger, iniksbane, has responded to my piece ‘What is Anime’. Their response is worth reading in full, and I think we are more closely in agreement than that essay makes out. Where I disagree is the characterization that the vibe of anime is merely melodrama. …

One conventional definition of anime reads something like “animation created in Japan for a domestic Japanese audience”. This definition offers a false sense of clarity: it does not cleanly map onto what most people think of when they hear the term — neither in Japan, where it simply means ‘animation’, nor elsewhere, where it’s shorthand for not merely a large partially-overlapping set of stylistic and narrative conventions but also a difficult to define ‘vibe’.

It makes sense to basically everybody to imagine ‘non-Japanese anime’: this doesn’t provide any of the difficulties presented by imagining, for instance, a ‘square circle’; similarly…