Anime Boston Artists

Anime Boston 2019 was awesome, and there was a ton of cool cosplay, official merchandise dealers, and also the great "artists' alley".

Here are a very few artists and a few merch dealers I thought were cool, missing many of the artists who were also cool just I didn't note them. I am overlooking so many cool works by people, I love the creativity... the dice people and die-rolling mats, the old console sellers, the videodisc sellers (so old school)... In no particular order:

Tea Fox Illustrations had a really cool Okami print I want to get.

• Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TeaFoxIllustrations
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teakitsune/

Ruby Art had great red and black images, very striking, also some on metal. I really liked the Yin/Yang koi print.

• DeviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/ruby--art
• Storenvy: http://rubyart.storenvy.com/

Studio de Sade, incredible color palette and level of detail, and, Star Trek, Firefly/Serenity, and Dr. Who. I spoke with Nigel, very cool people there.

• https://www.studiodesade.com/

Nat Rodgers, who was awesome (we spoke, she of course has a great name) and I loved and was shocked by her chickadee print, with the chickadee saying, "I will end you." So innocent. Killer. I've bought a laptop sticker version of it from her online store.

• Redbubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/NatRodgers/shop

Comiku, two awesome artists, from whom I bought a minimal print with poem in Japanese. I also liked their snow fox print, really lovely.

• http://comiku.com/sales.html

Alternate Universe Geeklectic, cool stuff (although I can't figure out their internet presence at the moment). Enjoyed talking with them.

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/augeeklectic/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/augeeklectic/

Skimlines have some very cool ceramics but they do more than that.

• Storenvy: http://skimlines.storenvy.com/
• Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/skimlines (the ceramics, here).

Merch, ok yes artsy (some of these are hand-made) but IIRC not the artists' alley.

• TeeTurtle, really cute designs.
• Tangerine Mountain, one of a few kimono shops at the con.
• Volante Design, I seem incapable of not buying their amazing jackets. 
• Great American Gothic, fun stuff!

Kondomari Damacy

#mariekondo #katamari
A little thing I made, seemed like a natural fit.

Best Reviewer Award

And, here's the certificate! Nice and pixely.

Nat Poor, Best Paper Reviewer!

ICA 2016, Fukuoka, Japan

Had a great and busy time at ICA 2016: one paper, one panel presentation, moderated a session, and won an award! (Google is being impossible with photos and tables as usual. So much for interfaces.)

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak on the new Computational Methods panel, for the CM interest group. I tried to give the crowd an exhortation to engaging with such methods, because we as social scientists have a lot to offer computational analyses. You can see the slides in SlideShare, but I don't spell it all out in the slides when I present. My presentation got a nice tweet too!

Presenting on the Computational Methods panel.

As part of the Games Division pre-conference in Tokyo at Nihon University (I love the neighborhood there, the Ekoda stop on the Seibu-Ikebukuro line), we all went to Akihabara, and of course we saw and did cool things, like engage in deep discourse with Mario, the working-class Italian-Japanese plumber.

"You don't think quantitative and qualitative methods
are complementary? Explain!"

I also was lucky enough to run into Sanrio's Gudetama in Hong Kong and then again in Japan.

Gudetama!

I also won the very first "Best Reviewer Award" for the ICA Games Division, which is a great honor and we need more motivations like this, as reviews are an important part of the quality of the discipline. Awards for organizing, best papers, and best reviewer!

Architecture Link

www.bow-wow.jp

Emojicons on Your iPhone

(What, you don't have an iPhone?)

Emoji (Japanese emoticons, and these ones are very Japanese) are on your iPhone, but activating them, not so easy. I'm not sure what the technical details are behind all of this (I'm curious about it, but not so that I'm going to kill myself Googling), but I just did this on my 3GS and it works.

You need to get this (free) app and follow the directions. There are, apparently, other apps that work as well, so I assume the app makes a call (software call, not phonecall) to the Japanese emoji character set, so the phone then makes it available, but that's just a guess. Some of the emojicons are a little strange, but there are a lot of them. Make sure you use the "updated" number, not the one in the illustrations. No idea why you need to enter those numbers in that order, but it worked.

Bento! C/o Mimi Ito

I may have been introduced to bento back in high school (aka, "the eighties"), but I know we used to eat it when I was at Ziff-Davis out in the Bay area in 1992 (with font-man and Colin). Mimi Ito apparently makes a lot of bento -- every day for her kids! And she's posted a lot of beautiful bento photos at flickr. There's a large set of images and a smaller tagged group, they may overlap, not sure. 

Okami Art

I've talked about it previously -- the beautiful video game Okami (but with the cutscenes it was so annoying). Apparently there is an Okami Art site, that is also just as beautiful (and you don't need the game now to see the art!). Also thankfully on the Wii version you can skip the cutscenes (another reason to get a Wii besides Mario games).

NYAFF 2008

"One of the city's most valuable events." - The New York Times

Joi Ito and Bamboo

So I got around to viewing a BBtv episode from a while ago, with Japan's mythical Internet guru Joi Ito, where he cooks up some bamboo shoots. I will link to the episode so you can go and read the text, which is informative and interesting. I also think Ito looks like Sulu from Star Trek (George Takei), which only adds to his mystique. (Yes I know they are both Japanese, I am not saying all Japanese people look alike -- I've been to Japan, I know this isn't true. Judge for yourself.)

Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum

Brooklyn Museum Murakami page.

Art! (AKFG!)

Because good living requires good artwork.