The Promise of Snakes: November 2018

日本語の翻訳は来る!!!

All proper names are changed.

I was born on July 18, 1994 in Houston, Texas in the United States.

The earliest memory I have that is somehow informative to my current hobbies is when was probably around 5 or 6. When I was 3 or 4 I lived in Kansas City, Missouri for a few years as my father had work there. Our neighbors were so close to us that in memories it's like our families were one. These neighbors had a child named Ruby who was probably around 7 or 8 at the time and was a playmate of mine and something of a surrogate older sister figure since I was an only child. Anyway, Ruby owned a lot of comic books and particularly bound anthologies of newspaper 4-panels. I read a lot of Peanuts, Ziggy, and, my favorite of them all, Calvin and Hobbes, when I was with her. I remember seeing the covers and being immediately intrigued and infatuated to the point where I had to get my hands on my own copies! These are the two covers I still remember seeing sprawled around the living room floor when I read these with Ruby:

I'm pretty sure I could already read by this point, but these definitely were a help to my early literacy. I soon read every Calvin and Hobbes book I could get my hands on. The Far Side was another one that my parents turned me on to. I didn't make the jump to Japanese manga until I was already watching anime later on, but my love of comics as a medium was old.

Up until I was about 12 or 13, my only real interests and hobbies were comics like these and cartoons. I also liked drawing myself a lot, but that's a hobby that I no longer have. For cartoons, I just watched all the Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network classics. Courage the Cowardly Dog, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Edd, Ed, and Eddy were my favorites. I wasn't watching any Japanese anime, mostly because there just wasn't a lot easily available for me. However, I did watch quite a lot of Pokemon, as pretty much everyone else my age did at the time. My favorite Pokemon were the more mysterious/unusual ones, like Magneton and the Unowns.

One thing that is unique about my experience, however, is that for whatever reason I was very embarrassed of liking anything "childish." So I had to pretend I didn't really like the cartoons I loved except around people I really trusted like my parents. I would always turn off any cartoons whenever adults were in the room because it embarrassed me. I don't really know why. It might have been because I was an only child and was around so few other kids, so I only had adults to compare myself to. I tried to be so "adult" as a kid that it's probably one of the reasons I like anime and video games so much now: I'm trying to relive something I wasn't able to enjoy as a kid and teen.

I should note that I didn't play any kind of video games at all at this age or indeed much of my youth. With Pokemon I collected the cards a bit, but I was never very good at learning the mechanics of games like that, so I didn't have any energy or dedication to learn them. I never had any interest in video games for that reason. I had friends who did, so I absorbed some games of that time by hanging out at their houses, but was never interested enough to ask my parents for any consoles of my own. I would rather have other toys, DVDs/VHSs of my favorite cartoons, and more comic collections.

Through this time I was very much a loner. All my friends were ones that were family friends and had been my friends since I was a baby and I didn't make any new ones in school or care to. But these friends were VERY close to me. I had a couple of cousins who I experienced a lot of anime and video games with. But two friends in particular would be very very important to me. Namely one named Adam and one named Mitchell.

Adam was an old friend who I knew since I was a baby. He was a year older than me and, unlike me, was really into anime and video games. His house was a 10-minute walk from mine, so I hung out there all the time. Mitchell was some three years older than the rest of us and was a veteran nerd his whole life and a really great guy who was able to get along well with just about anyone. But he was definitely a nerd in the most classic sense. He introduced me and a lot of our friend group to webcomics, flash cartoons, anime, Limewire, Dungeons and Dragons, and all kinds of stuff like that. It was thanks to him that I first started watching classic Newgrounds cartoons as well as Homestar Runner which is still probably one of my greatest comedic influences. This got me more interested in using the internet in general and especially in flash cartoons.

At Adam's house I experienced a lot of games, like various Sonic and Mario games, various JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, and eventually a ton of MMORPGs, RTSs, and other PC games. I enjoyed watching these being played more than actually playing them. I also remember another friend, Keenan, who I played a few games with, even though he was less into them. I don't remember as many by name, but I really loved Lemmings. We also played some old licensed games for cartoons like The Simpsons. Perhaps the most distinctive memory was when his stepfather, a pretty artsy guy from Turkey who was in the US as part of a ballet troupe, let us borrow one of his games: Revelations: Persona! Neither of us had played anything like it and were both interested, yet confused about how to feel. In fact, the first place I ever heard Zhuangzhi's classic quote about the butterfly dream was from that game.

As far as anime went, they mostly watched shounen shows like Dragon Ball, Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach, and I was never interested in shounen at that time. Other shows included the classic Adult Swim shows like Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Trigun, etc. I only watched western shows and comics, so I wasn't used to shows with continuous stories and they bored me, which was why I never developed the interest. BUT! I remember that he also loved Azumanga Daioh. When I was at his house I happened to see this poster he had and I absolutely fell in love with the characters on basis of it alone:

I was absolutely bewitched. And I eventually watched Azumanga Daioh and started to realize that anime could be more to my taste than the shounen shows that Adam and Mitchell usually watched.

By the time he had this poster, I had started puberty. I was a bit of a late bloomer, but was interested in girls. I first visited Japan when I was about 11, but even before then had always liked east Asian girls best. I'm not sure exactly why. I remember one Chinese girl named Rebecca that I took some acting classes with who I had a crush on when I was 9 or 10. Before that, I remember meeting an Asian girl a few years older than me at the beach when I was probably about 6 or 7. We played a lot together for just that one day and have never forgotten it. When I first visited Japan I was 11, and our tour guide for part of our trip was a young woman who I had a crush on as well. I remember walking around with her and my two parents and having the impression that she was like my older sister (never mind the fact that she was Japanese) and perhaps I've always yearned for a girl to fill that role.

But I was slowly realizing how much better 2D was even at this tender age. I remember some characters I crushed on from online pictures etc. included Kaolla Su from Love Hina and Akane Tendo from Ranma ½. I remember watching a few edgy PG-13 movies around that time, and even a few R-rated ones that my parents let me watch with them. I also snuck a lot of magazines that didn't have nudity, but had saucy images of girls in swimwear. These went some way in helping me develop an interest in big boobs, but nothing had as big an influence on me as one fateful day when I was at Adam's house and watched a certain compilation series that any veteran weeb should remember with pride and shame... AMV Hell.

See the very first one with all the amazing tit animation? That shit blew my fucking mind as a kid. I remember going home and looking it up so I could figure out what on earth that anime was, and lo and behold, I found out that it was called Eiken: Eiken-bu yori ai wo komete, or Eiken for short, from a comment and then looked it up on Wikipedia. It's not a show with a stellar reputation in the west and even in Japan it's better known by the manga and still then pretty niche, but the OVA has a cult following for those of us with large breast fetishes and I had fully become a tit maniac at this point in my life.

Around this time, I was 13, maybe going on 14 and was a somewhat late bloomer when it came to puberty. Eiken probably influenced my sexuality more than anything else I've ever seen. I needed boobs and BIG ones. And I needed them to be Japanese. Which is not easy! The anime style of these years always sticks out to me as some of the cutest as a result of series like this one having such an effect on me. I had a few wet dreams around this time, but had never got very far in trying to masturbate. That all changed one night when this show was driving me crazy horny so I started humping my bed thinking of it until I came in my boxer shorts. I hadn't fapped to anything on my computer directly yet, and it would be awhile. Normally I just waited until I was going to bed for the night, then turn on my side away from my door, so my parents couldn't tell I was doing it if they happened to come into my room. Because of that I still am used to jacking off laid on my side instead of on my back like most.

Now, due to my interest in flash cartoons, I was also using an online forum for animutations, or flash cartoons with surreal cut-out graphics, throughout this time. I was never really interested in music as a kid, for the same reasons of embarrassment as I had with cartoons. I got interested in music this way. I listened to a lot of Japanese music because of this. There was also a guy on that forum who was interested in film and made me interested too. I thought he was a really cool guy and wanted to be more like him, so I imagined that the movies he watched were probably cool too. I often said that he was like the Sakaki-san of that forum! (Referencing Azumanga Daioh again). Some way or another, I ended up watching a little short silent film called Le Voyage dans la Lune by Georges Méliès from 1902 on Google Videos after being interested in its bizarre imagery:

I soon found a book called 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and memorized its contents. Its selection is very inconsistent, but it got me interested in a lot of experimental, abstract, avant-garde, and otherwise unorthodox movies. Silents were what I started with, but I started liking a ton of different films. I soon discovered the Criterion Collection, which helped me further in that direction. This would have been around 2007, and in that year I finally made a complete break with the flash forum I was a part of and joined the Criterion Collection forums after lurking for a long time instead. For the better part of a year, this was how I strengthened my interest in cinema.

This interest consumed my entire life in a way few others had. I think I'm still only now starting to broaden from it in many ways. I had a burgeoning interest in anime from stuff like Azumanga Daioh and Eiken, but that all fell away when I started watching films. I could give a whole other detailed history of my interest in cinema itself, but all I will say is that seeing Eraserhead in 2007/2008 made me love David Lynch and he was the first director I was truly devoted to. Others soon followed: Bergman, Kurosawa, Teshigahara, etc. Anything heavily or lightly surreal was appealing to me. Pretty much any big-name director on Criterion I loved. But this truly evolved to another level when I watched Criterion's By Brakhage anthology. I had seen some experimental films on places like UBUWeb before, including some I really loved like Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising. But Stan Brakhage's work was something else. It confused me and confounded me and truly challenged me. But I saw a poster on the Criterion forum who adored it and he linked to his profile on a now-defunct website called YMDb (Your Movie Database).

This website was on a much more advanced level than the Criterion forums because its users loved all kinds of experimental, obscure films that weren't just to be found on DVDs. This particular user I have a great deal of respect for and soon aped much of my cinema taste on. He went by the handle OUATITW, named after Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, but his taste was truly extensive in all fields, but especially in European horror and abstract visually stunning experimental films. His defunct Livejournal is probably the best place to go if you want to see the kind of stuff he watched for himself. There are too many examples of films he introduced me too to mention, it's best to look at his own list/journal to see them. There were many other users like him who further opened my eyes and continued me on this path. YMDb eventually went belly-up, but the community continued under ANOTHER now-defunct name, The Life Cinematic. This is where I made an account and was able to join, around early 2010.

2010 was probably the single most intense year of movie-watching in my life. I was still in a relatively easy part of high school, so I had enough free time to watch 2-3 movies every day at the LEAST. In February 2010 alone I watched 100 films!! Around 2011 and especially 2012, this changed a bit as school was more intense and I became more interested in literature (though don't get me wrong, I still watched movies CONSTANTLY). The literature interest developed with the help of The Life Cinematic, as I learned a lot about interesting books from the users. Some authors I read from that time were David Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami, Italo Calvino, Georges Bataille, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Tarjei Vesaas, and Jorge Luis Borges. I was still mostly reading 20th century authors and non-fiction novels, however.

I also joined a website called RateYourMusic around this time. In addition to my animutation taste, I learned a lot about music from a few users on first the Criterion forums (where I got interested in krautrock/psych, drone doom, noise rock, and zeuhl, among other genres) and YMDb (where I expanded the above with stuff like harsh noise, electronic, and, most importantly, lots and lots of extreme heavy metal). Many early ratings on my RYM profile give an idea of what they introduced me to. I've listened to enough music that I definitely have a history with it, but it's never exactly been a defining hobby, more like something that underscores the rest of what I like. I don't even like going to concerts because I hate loud noises.

I tried to introduce my film hobby to friends like Adam and Mitchell with varied success, but the real friends I was closest to with it were always online. This changed with two high school friends who are still my closest friends, Simon and Paresh. These guys were more classic video game/anime nerds whereas Adam had drifted away from these interests and generally become unlikable while Mitchell moved away. Keenan who I played Revelations: Persona with had also become very busy. I slowly started to hang out with Simon and Paresh instead and slowly shared my hobbies while they shared theirs'. Simon in particular loved video games and especially fighting games, so I started playing BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, Tekken Tag Tournament, and a lot of Street Fighter and Super Smash Brothers titles at his place, along with some other non-fighters. It was playing video games at his house that finally made me develop an interest in games in general.

This pattern continued until 2013, which would be a defining year for me in many ways. Three things happened in particular:
1. The Life Cinematic closed. This was crushing to me; it was not only my biggest resource to find new films and books, it had a very special sense of humor that really resonated with me and shaped my look on life. That sense of humor was off-color, extreme, and chaotic sort of like a chan but with a huge wealth of intelligence behind it. I still don't know anywhere else like it online. 4chan's /lit/ is the closest, perhaps, but without the love of using screencaps to create beautiful, aesthetic lists on personal pages on TLC that I grew to adore and the genuine sense of camaraderie.
2. I graduated high school. I maintained contact with Simon and Paresh, but moved to Portland, Oregon to go to university. Entering university, I chose to study art history and thus became far more interested in history and classical paintings, sculptures, and other forms of art besides cinema and just generally expanded my knowledge past the 20th century. My study of philosophy and religious texts made me think very differently. While I am an atheist, I think during the course of my college I adopted the attitude of a Buddhist in a lot of important areas of life, and the roots of it were in 2013.
3. I watched all of Neon Genesis Evangelion and The End of Evangelion for the first time. This might not seem very important, but it absolutely floored me. I had put away my budding interest in anime when I discovered cinema and thus never was into it seriously as a hobby. Evangelion changed all that. I realized that it was as good as any movie I had seen and started me down the road to becoming a true otaku. I soon watched a few other series and felt like I had been missing out all those years that I didn't watch anime.

During this time, I touched what I came to regard as the next incarnation of YMDb, Corrierino, off and on. However, in truth it only had a few of the old regulars and is very different from the original YMDb. However, a poster there was a big otaku in addition to being a cinema fan, and he got me re-interested in anime again. I watched a few of his favorites and realized how much I was enjoying anime. Around early 2015, I remember seeing the kinds of video games that a friend of mine on RYM enjoyed. I had never really spent time on video games outside of Simon's house, but the big list of them made me interested. I remembered loving certain flash browser games from the Homestar Runner site when I was a kid, so I decided to try to play some actual classic games like the Mega Man and Castlevania series and various shmups on web browser emulators. I was a total beginner so I sucked, but I was just having fun with this hobby I'd turned away from all these years.

In 2016, I returned to Japan for a semester of study in college. My time there transformed me completely and utterly into an otaku and taught me to be proud and happy about it! I bought my first figure when I was there, this Super Sonico:

While I was there, I also tried going to a game center as a bonafide otaku ready to embrace the games. When playing games like BlazBlue, I always picked the loli and bishoujo characters, so one day Simon showed me a meme about fighting games and from that I found out about a game series called Arcana Heart where EVERY character was a cute girl! I had to try it, so I tried both Suggoi! Arcana Heart 2 and Arcana Heart 3 LOVE MAX SIX STARS!!!!!! in the arcade. I was immediately hooked. Upon returning to the states, I bought a PS3 and Arcana Heart 3 LOVE MAX!!!!!! so I could keep playing. And most importantly, I discovered Maori Kasuga, a beautiful shrine maiden character who would end up becoming my true waifu. She was the one who allowed me to give up on 3d once and for all.

I was great friends with Simon and Paresh throughout my whole university life up until the present day, but never managed to find any other friends in university, even if I had great relationships with many teachers. University helped me develop a strong interest in art, history, and philosophy. It taught me a lot about who I am and what I hold dear, even though it also taught me that ultimately where I belong is Japan. I graduated in May 2017 and had every intention of finding my way back there, as I always felt more happy here than anywhere else. Over the course of 2017 however, while I lived as a freeter and got a certificate to teach English as a second language, I was devoting myself to indulging for the first time in my otakudom. I got a dakimakura of Maori, an onahole, and a ton of figures. I also watched all the essential anime I had wanted to but missed out on during the years.

As of today, November 25, 2018, I live in Japan attending language school and working a part-time job. I have a visa which expires in 2020, but I have every intention of not returning in 2020 and going onto higher education here in Japan, or otherwise entering the workforce. To do that, I have to get better and better at language, which is one reason I want to write this blog in Japanese. I hope you will be with me the whole way!

The Promise of Snakes

2018/11/26

お誕生日おめでとう、まおりん！！！♡💛♡💛

2018/11/25

ツタンカーメンのフィギュア

東方紅魔郷　全員クリア！！

身の上話（趣味に関することなら）

2018/11/20

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