- Sad to hear the 1:1 scale Gundam at Odaiba is going away and, even worse, the Gundam Front Tokyo museum is shutting down too. If you won’t get a chance to see it before March, I wrote an intensive essay on my trip there last March. Want more? Anime News Network has an even longer report!
- As you may have noticed in last week’s roundup, I started blogging at Forbes again. I get paid $0.005 per click (but only up to two so don’t bother refreshing) if you feel like reading about the overlap between wrestling and anime fandom, Fakku’s fight to protect your right to read hentai, or an interview with American translator Jenny McKeon about how your manga gets made.
- Oh yeah, NaNoWriMo happened. Kara Dennison is the only person I know this year who actually finished it! Here’s 7 things the anime localizer and webcomic artist (among other things) learned while finishing her latest novel.
- Colony Drop just released a fanzine all about Patlabor, with 50 pages of art and writing produced by fans of the 1989 mecha anime. I’ve recently been watching the TV series and it holds up really well.
- I also wrote about Patlabor, for Anime Feminist: a very specific look at Noa’s insecurities in episode 36. My favorite line, which my editor Amelia actually came up with: “When Patlabor was created, it was more realistic to imagine a future with giant robots than one where women were treated equally all the time.”
- Figure skating anime ‘Yuri on Ice’ is one of the best shows of 2016. Guess we all have to watch Yuri!! on Ice now, since news outlets like the Daily Dot are picking up the cause. I’m hardly watching anything regularly except Yuri!! and Keijo, and I apologize in advance for my many racy tweets about the latter.
- Working your way through a long-running anime or manga can sometimes seem like a slog—like when I caught up with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure earlier this year, I just wanted to be current! At Manga Therapy, Tony writes a brief and thoughtful defense of the middle volumes of a manga.
Photo by my good pal @patzprime (Instagram here).