So in between writing stories—I got some great stories and even a video out of ROFLcon—I had a chance to meet my favorite memes in real life. A surprising many were just as endearing as you’d expect. When I snapped this photo of taxidermist Chuck Testa with a squirmy puppy, he quipped, “I’m getting really good!” Believe me, he was at it with the one-liners all weekend.

One of my favorite parts was getting my picture taken with Antoine Dodson, the “Bed Intruder” ranter himself. I stopped him in the hallway and got another fan to take our photo together (afterward, I took a photo of him with her.) Dodson was loving it. He took photos and signed autographs all day in a schedule that would have exhausted a jaded mainstream celebrity.

I thought nothing of tweeting a photo of Dodson and I. But later, while reporting the next story of the day, I started to worry about whether I’d violated one of the rules of journalism by acting like a fan at an event I’d been assigned to cover.

Bad journalistic behavior is a topic that makes its way into the news from time to time. When a female reporter wrote up her GQ interview with Chris Evans as if it were a date, getting drunk with the star and even passing out at his house, reviews were mixed, to say the least.

Less ambiguous was an incident this week between a Montreal TV Host and David Beckham—the reporter asked Beckham to autograph a pair of underwear in a move other journalists near-universally denounced as unprofessional.

Is it ever professional for a reporter to act like a fan? Here’s what I think.

It’s NOT OK when:

• You are currently reporting on the star. You can wait until after the interview to let them know you’re a fan. Try to do it with as low key an attitude as you can muster!

• You’re at a group press conference, or anywhere that an expression of your fandom would be disruptive to the star or to other reporters.

• You find yourself using your position as a reporter to try to get closer to the star. If you’ve been given a press pass to interview the celebrity, be the professional the celebrity is expecting to see. You can go to the autograph signing with the other fans later.

It’s OK when:

• You’re not on active duty as a reporter and you run into the star in passing. If you don’t plan to report on it, you don’t need to act like a reporter. (You should still be decently polite though, of course.)

Of course, these are just guidelines based on my own experiences. In any case, it’s important to use your own judgement. For example, depending on the fame of the person People like Antoine Dodson and Chuck Testa are just Internet-famous, so their fame doesn’t affect their everyday lives. I’m sure they loved being popular at ROFLcon and didn’t mind the attention of fans.

That evening at ROFLcon, I consulted the Daily Dot’s community manager, Logan Youree, about my tweet. Luckily, Logan agreed that it wasn’t unprofessional. In fact, he thought our audience would find it logical for us to want to meet the people we cover all the time.  I was running on caffeine and sleep deprivation, so I just wrote to him to ask him to remind me what he meant:

“In some sense the Daily Dot is a true newspaper, but we are also enthusiast press,” he wrote. “We are supposed to write about the news in online communities but also about the things that interest us about them.”

From that perspective, my only concern is making sure I’m not too enthusiastic about my reporting topics. It’s a problem I’m happy to have.

I define myself as an otaku. However, dozens of people have personally written to me to tell me I’m wrong. For various reasons, they’ve decided that I can’t use this word or that it describes something that isn’t me.

This doesn’t surprise me. I have to define “otaku” every time I bring it up. It’s a relatively new word that was coined in Japan in the 1980s that spread to Western countries a few years later.

As scholar Lawrence Eng writes, otaku literally translates to “your home,” so all slang definitions for the word are up to the cultural context we place around it. I’d argue that the term is still ambiguous, still applicable to its original use as a derogatory term, but also widely known as a catch-all for enthusiasts of all kinds.

With shifting parameters like these, nobody’s definition can be overtly wrong. Yet people still feel obliged to “correct” me, possibly because they feel an ownership over words or meaning that they do not think I deserve.

I started thinking about the ownership of words when I wrote an article on fangirl culture. My source, Flourish Klink told me that although the word “fangirl” is sometimes used to trivialize women’s involvement in fandom, she wanted to “reclaim” it.

Reclaim it from who? Based on our interview, the patriarchy. Klink said she’s especially interested in studying the ways women respond to media texts, an interaction that is responsible for millions of creative fanfics, pieces of fanart, and apparently, much of Rule 34.

Read the story and let me know what else you’d like to know. Because this is just a preview.

This weekend, the Daily Dot is sending me (and most of my coworkers) to report on ROFLcon, which we’re also sponsoring. It’s a really exciting time for me because it marks the first time ever that I’m literally being paid to report on a fan convention.

As I’ve written before, opportunities like this one are the reason I started Otaku Journalist in the first place. I’d dreamed of being a convention reporter, but I wasn’t sure how I could make it happen. My solution (as I’ve also written before), was to define myself as a journalist and start reporting, despite the fact that nobody was paying me to do it yet.

Maybe other people think a “journalist” is somebody who gets paid to report. Or somebody who has her articles published somewhere other than a personal blog.

My definition didn’t fit at first. But I grew into it.

Highlights included delicious taiyaki, getting a “Very Good” fortune from the Shinto booth, and the amazing shirt pictured below. When I dashed over to take his picture, he told me he had gotten the shirt custom made. The back—you guessed it—says, “And it’s only one dollar.”

As usual, my favorite part of Sakura Matsuri was watching the Anime USA Cosplay Fashion Show. Even though I volunteer for AUSA, I have no part in planning the show (all I do is send out the newsletter announcement the week before), so it’s always a surprise to me. And every year, I think, “How did we FIND these people?”

This year we had much larger J-Pop stage and a larger audience to go with it. (Watch last year’s show here.) Aspiring voice actor Mario Bueno emceed the show, and I was really impressed by his professionalism—even when his mic died, he kept going.

And here are the winners posing with the AUSA sign. Zelda won first place—two free nights at the hotel for Anime USA 2012.

Were you at Sakura Matsuri this year? What were your highlights?

When I wrote An open letter to Asian people from a weeaboo, I wanted to apologize for my unprompted and enthusiastic interest in everything Japanese.

However, I never considered they’d find my obsession entertaining.

That’s exactly what I discovered last night when I was contacted by a Japanese television producer—Kaoru Inagawa of the show Wafu-Souhonke. Aired online and in Japan, Inagawa’s show features people all over the world who love Japanese culture and products.

Here’s an episode shot in Los Angeles. I don’t know any Japanese, but it looks like the camera crew is walking around Hollywood, asking people about their interest in Japan and whether they own anything from Japan. If anyone can translate, help me out!

Inagawa said she contacted me because I live near Washington DC and own a kotatsu. How did I even get a kotatsu, she wanted to know. I bought it at Ginza, a Japanese furniture store in Dupont Circle. What brand? I never checked—it’s a Morita. She wanted to know about my yukata, my bento box collection, and my interest in Japanese cooking, too.

Inagawa wasn’t fazed by my anime or manga collections, but she definitely surprised by how I, a white American, was so invested in her culture.

“Surely you are half-Japanese?” she asked.

“Nope, just really, really otaku,” I replied.

She was especially curious about whether I have any friends like me. I talked about my friends volunteering at Sakura Matsuri later today, everyone at Anime USA, and bringing onigiri to Kevin Bolk’s holiday party—she was intrigued by onigiri as a party food.

After our chat, Inagawa followed up with an email, part of which she’s given me permission to post on my blog:

“If you find some people who really really love Japanese culture and collect something from Japan or are into unique Japanese traditional things at the festival, please let me know. For example, who does Japanese painting and uses brushes from Japan, or who are into Shodo (Japanese writing) or Japanese archery… something very traditional and unique is what we are looking for. Let me know if you know anyone, so I can convince the director to do a show in your area!”

Otaku in the DMV area: do you fit the bill? Please write to me about your love for Japan. You know we’d all look great on TV dubbed over by peppy Japanese voice actors. Let’s make it happen!

P.S. Also if you’re around DC, see you at Sakura Matsuri today!

After my profile on Jackie Lee last week, both of us got a lot of feedback. When it was positive, it was fantastic because it affirmed that the Magic: The Gathering community is moving forward. When it was negative, it was fantastic because people were talking.

Most people sent me feedback on Twitter since that’s where I spend the majority of my waking hours, but I did get one encouraging email from a supporter who asked me to forward it to Jackie. When I sent it along, Jackie replied:

“It’s interesting, because even though the article is about me and I’ve gotten many responses like this, I continue to feel like it’s not about me at all! It’s really about a shared experience.”

It’s true. It’s a story that could resonate with anyone—not just other women or other Magic players—who’s ever felt unwelcome.

Just as Jackie’s story is a shared experience, in a different way, so was the one I wrote. As I said myself on Untapped Cast, I don’t keep up with the Magic community enough to be an authority. Instead, I relied on the knowledge of two guides, Bill Boulden (@ThaGatherin) and Chris Mascioli (@dieplstks), to suggest sources and offer two perspectives on the state of Magic today. Neither of them are quoted in the story, but their contributions are just as essential.

I mention Bill and Chris because I want to convey how much reporting goes into a story before it’s published. A reporter I admire once told me he only puts about 10 percent of his reporting into a story. (For me, I’d say it’s more like 25 percent for a profile like Jackie’s, but 50 percent or more for the three quick news stories I publish on the Daily Dot every day.) On a similar note, when I was a source for the Washington Post’s story on anime fans, I was a guide to Josh duLac, but not quoted.

One final insider note: I actually considered spiking this story. Not because Jackie’s story isn’t incredible, but because I was worried a story about a minority player in a somewhat obscure game wouldn’t resonate with a wider audience. Then, I worried that a story simplified for non-players would be too watered down to resonate with Magic players. Luckily, my editor urged me on, even though he wasn’t sure whether Magic was a card game, board game, or video game. Also luckily, I was wrong on both counts.

The reception of Jackie’s story has got me excited to write more about developments in other niche groups and fandoms. If you think I should write about a phenomenon in your community next, I’d love to hear about it.

Photo by Wizards of the Coast.

1. Venus Angelic is a 15-year-old British teen who wants to look like a Japanese ball jointed doll. Her creepy-cute blog and YouTube videos blur the line between fandom and fetish.

2. Bakuman: The Manga Within the Manga. Remember in Genshiken how the characters’ favorite fictional anime became an actual anime, which became more popular than Genshiken? Cassie points out that the fictional manga discussed in the manga would actually make pretty great stories.

3. When I wrote about Richie Branson’s Gundam Wing album, I forgot to mention another notable Gundam-inspired album. Andrew W.K.’s Gundam Rock is a tribute to the original Mobile Suit Gundam.

4. Sex sells: how cosplay could die. This isn’t anything new, but it’s helpful to hear it again. Our society expects women to serve as decoration at all times, and female cosplayers are held to the same standards.

5. On a related note, Sakuraso writes about why she quit cosplaying. No surprise here; she felt as if she’d been participating in a beauty contest she didn’t agree to enter.

6. Steal this article. I love stories like this one: in order to figure out how Magic: The Gathering players can best protect their cards from thieves, Chas Andres actually interviewed some of the thieves themselves.

7. I was honored to be included in tRzR23‘s aniblog tournament. I explore a lot of general fandom topics on my blog, so I’ve always worried that I don’t “fit in” with the aniblogger community. I’m glad this isn’t the case!

Photo via fuckyeahotakon. Backstory located here.

EDIT: On the advice of Susannah Breslin, I tweeted Tara Tiger Brown about the story. I may not agree with Brown’s article, but I just feel awful for her now. She wrote this article for no compensation at all. The reward, she says, is “knowing who [her] friends really are,” but in my opinion, that’s no adequate payment for the trolling she now faces. 

In my opinion, this article is the divisive sort of argument that harms the geek community. However, according to Brown, it’s not link bait but a message she truly believes. For that reason alone, I can’t write it off completely.

As a geek and a girl on the Internet, there’s no way I could have missed today’s drama over Tara Tiger Brown’s Forbes post: “Dear Fake Geek Girls: Please Go Away.”

While there have been some great responses to come out of this—my favorites have been Team Valkyrie and Leigh Alexander‘s rebuttals—I don’t think anyone’s touching on what’s really going on here.

This is the Internet, and Brown needs hits. Today, I learned that geek feminists are no more immune to geek-rage link bait than self-described angry fanboys.

As some people who’ve been reading for a while know, I’ve got a very slight connection to Forbes blogging—thanks to Susannah Breslin, whom I regard as a mentor, I’ve gotten the chance to try it myself. And one thing I know from Susannah is that Forbes bloggers get paid by the hit.

In her recent post about how to be successful without really trying, Susannah encourages bloggers to go for the lowest common denominator, the stuff that is guaranteed to get clicks:

When you blog for dollars, which is what many of us do here at Forbes—that is, our page views dictate our paycheck—you pay a great deal of attention to what works and what doesn’t.

What works for me? Tits and porn.

Forbes’ Chief Product Officer Lewis DVorkin confirms that this is how Forbes bloggers are paid:

It’s a simple deal: there is a flat monthly fee, a bonus for hitting certain unique visitor targets, and a fee per unique user after bonus targets are achieved.

In other words, raging at Brown is playing right into her hands. If people keep linking her article, she’ll reach her unique visitor target and won’t have to put out another blog post for the rest of the month. Think of it like paid vacation.

I’m exaggerating a little here. Forbes blogging doesn’t pay enough for it to be Brown’s full time job, or at least that’s my guess since Susannah, who regularly gets tons of hits, often blogs about her other freelance positions. Speaking of which, Susannah is a blogger who constantly pushes people’s buttons—and she only encourages them to come back for more. Insisting that Brown’s credibility or readership is lost after one controversial article wouldn’t be reasonable.

If you really need to rage, there are plenty of examples all around us about the ways female geeks get shafted in our own fandoms. We’re confronted with sexism and geek elitism at every turn already. You don’t need to read a sensationalist article that’s been crafted to garner your clicks in order to figure that out.

This probably isn’t the first time you’ve seen a review for Boomslank‘s otaku-catnip t-shirt line.

Boomslank’s marketing tactics would make my SEO expert proud:

1) Pick a nonsense name that nobody else has and trademark it.
2) Send free t-shirts for review to every anime blogger you can find.

Now, any Google search for “Boomslank” leads to nothing but happy bloggers and their positive reviews, because everyone loves free stuff.

Obviously, I’m not exception. Let this be my statement of transparency: I’m reviewing this company in exchange for a free t-shirt. But before I agreed to that deal, I made sure to do my homework. I wouldn’t be recommending a shirt from a company I couldn’t get behind.

Boomslank is an independent “anime clothing line” out of Raleigh, North Carolina. It’s run by three brothers, the youngest of whom designs the shirt graphics. While the designs are anime inspired, each one is original. The one thing I couldn’t figure out was why Boomslank needed a review from a small time blogger like me—they have 30,000 Facebook fans.

The thing I liked most about Boomslank was its women-friendly designs. Not just the fact that it carries women’s sizes, something my feminist t-shirt article concluded that any geek company or convention can do easily. These shirts go above and beyond because their graphics are neither obscured by nor designed to highlight a woman’s chest.

I picked the Pisces design, currently the shop’s fourth best-seller. I may be curvy, but both the design and cut of the shirt mean my figure doesn’t warp or hide the image very much. In the photo, I still am stretching out the t-shirt to show off the design as much as possible.

As you can see, the cherry blossoms have reached their peak here in the DC area. John took these photos of me after the rain, and the wind must have shaken the blossoms right off the trees. It’s too early for this pond to be filled for the summer, but it’s already filled with petals.

When Richie Branson‘s email landed in my inbox, I had to read the subject line a couple times. And then, I had to tell my best friend, Andrew.

“I’ve got four words for you,” I told him in GChat. “Gundam Wing Hip Hop.”

In the entire time I’ve been blogging, I’ve never done an album review. And believe me, I’m no music expert. I’ve been listening to the same ten songs on repeat since 2010. But when I listened to Richie’s album, I knew I wanted to help promote The Wing Zero EP, which was released today.

Gundam Wing wasn’t the first anime I ever watched, but it was the first one I became madly obsessed with. At thirteen years old, I think I was a little young to fully appreciate the plot, but I loved the cute boys. You should have seen my cringe-worthy fanart of Duo Maxwell! And needless to say, the show’s music was my background music for a long time.

Branson takes the signature riffs from “Just Communication,” “White Reflection,” and the unmistakable “There’s about to be a Gundam battle!” song, and remixes them into an original beat. The album is primarily instrumental, but my favorites are the songs in which Branson raps on the audio track.

In “I think I’m Heero Yuy,” Branson calls out haters who would deride him for rapping about anime and suggests that, actually, the ladies love him for it:

Yo, I’m rappin’ bout that anime

Yeah, they see me rappin’ bout that anime

I think I’m Heero Yuy

Call me Wufei

The ladies used to diss me now I’m who they wanna date

But… is he any good?

To answer that question, I sent the album to Bill Boulden, AKA Spruke. I last wrote about Bill when I covered his Magic: The Gathering themed album, Tha Gatherin.

Before he even listened to the album, Bill told me: “Hey, I obviously have HUGE respect for anybody brave enough to rap about their fandom. As long as it doesn’t suck, I am sure to be impressed.”

According to Bill, it didn’t suck. He said the music was strong and Richie’s “flow” was excellent. Not sure what a flow is, but I’m guessing that’s a good compliment for one nerdcore rapper to get from another.

The Wing Zero EP is a free download, so go check it out for yourself. Show him some love—Branson took a huge risk in composing this album, and he’s bound to get crap for it from mainstream artists. Supporting fellow fans in their endeavors is a wonderful thing.

When’s the last time you waited in line for an hour to get into a fine art museum? That’s how I, John, and a couple hundred other geeks spent Saturday morning. This weekend was the opening of The Art of Video Games, an exhibit which showcased everything from Pac-Man to Mass Effect.

The last time I’d visited the Smithsonian American Art Museum had been for a dressy Online News Association cocktail party. Several miles from the better known Smithsonian museums on the National Mall, it’s a place you expect to see fewer tourists and more established patrons of the arts. Its classical paintings, puzzling modern art, and live jazz performances in the orchid-filled courtyard feel highbrow to me.

However, this exhibit showed me that I was wrong to assume there was anything snobby about this open-minded museum. The organizers arranged The Art of Video Games with the same reverence for the subject as any fine art display. I particularly appreciated their regard for video game fans—since early 2011, I’ve been voting along with 19,000 other people to choose which games would be exhibited.

In fact, I think other art museums can learn something from the Smithsonian. Rather than seeking to please a few wealthy patrons, the Art of Video Games looked to the crowd for its funding. Here’s my name in the scrolling list of donors to the exhibit. It took around ten minutes for this video to cycle through, which gave me plenty to look at for the thirty minutes I stood in line trying to get in.

However, before I could get inside to even wait in line to see the exhibit, I waited outside for an hour before the museum opened to see Hideo Kojima. A couple weeks ago, the organizers gave a few of us the chance to see Mr. Kojima in person—if we could click fast enough. The free Eventbrite tickets sold out in less than two minutes! You can bet I had set an alarm in order to snag those. Kojima stepped outside for a photo-op with Pac-Man while we were still in line.

At the conversation, Kojima still seemed to be surprised to have his games exhibited at a fine art museum.

“My games are displayed around the world, but to have them at the Smithsonian is truly an honor,” he said through a translator.

In 2006, Kojima once insisted during an interview that “games aren’t art.” During this interview, he conceded that while he still does not think his games are art (at least in the traditional sense), the fact that the Smithsonian thinks otherwise has caused him to rethink a bit.

“I’m not going to come to the Smithsonian [where my games are being displayed as art] and say they’re not art,” he said, prompting appreciative laughter from the audience.

Kojima said he’s been busy working on a project he can’t say anything about. Could it be the previously alluded Metal Gear Solid 5?

Outside of the exhibit, most of the activities taking place were in the courtyard. Visitors could listen to chiptunes, have their photo taken in a video game setting, craft “pixel art” or take part in a live action game with Spontaneous Art. And of course, there were plenty of screens for actual gaming, both in the courtyard and in the exhibit itself. Plus, Pac-Man cookies.

For a complete set of the photos I took, check out my Flickr photostream. They’re mixed in with photos of the cherry blossoms, since during these unseasonably warm times we’re nearly at peak season. (Last year, the blossoms weren’t in full bloom until mid-April.)

Since the exhibit was so crowded, I’m planning to make a trip back after the hype dies down. Until then, I’ll be paging through companion book John picked up, also titled The Art of Video Games. If you can’t make the real thing, it’s a complete round-up of every game featured in the exhibit.