May 5th
Jonathan starts off today talking about food which sounds like kebab and he compares to “London cat meat.” I don’t think this man can get any worse. He’s racist, sexist, and eats cats.
1 Let’s Read Dracula – What Happens in Transylvania Stays in Transylvania
May 3rd
So a couple months back I found this academic book, Reading the Vampire by Ken Gelder, at a used bookstore for six bucks. I picked it up with the intent to read it and send it to a friend who likes this kinda stuff more than me (shout out to Leigh, if you’re reading this). That book’s discussion of Dracula and the introduction of “Buda-Pesth” as opposed to “Budapest” brought me down an interesting rabbit hole about the city and how it’s kind of two cities and there’s a lot of local baggage about it—look it up if you’re into that. John Harker doesn’t care about any of this, leading me to believe he’s a basic bitch, but I suppose he is just spying on it from the train so maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh. Checking on the modern Anglicizations makes me feel less like white colonialist scum.
0 Let’s Read Dracula Like a Fujoshi – May 1st, Me and Dracula
I’m starting a new Let’s Read where I read Dracula like a pervert!
Me and Dracula
I thought I’d open with a spooky fun personal anecdote about Dracula, but I don’t have one. I’ve never read it before, nor have I seen any Dracula movies. My relationship with Dracula mostly comes from cultural osmosis and the Netflix Castlevania TV show.
[ROUNDUP] February, March, and April/May to Come
I hope you’re all doing well <3
I’ve been working on a few things and it’s tough because a lot of them are just behind the curtain and I can’t show them to you for a little while, but I’m very very excited for the moment when I can.
February
I feel like February was a lot of working on things that will be due to come out soon, and nothing that I can actually show off. I drew some stuff that I posted on social media and I will collect to post here at a later time! I would like to have all my fandom art in a pile, isolated for convenience.
March
Young Lady Albert is Courting Disaster Volume 2 is complete, and you can now buy the ebook!
Young Lady Albert is Courting Disaster Volume 3 is now being serialized!
I started taking driving lessons!
Beloved friend of the show Ashley Lauren Rogers has a play available for purchase at Next Stage Press. Check out and pick up Chasing the Ghost here! Ashley also has her own Patreon here!
Another beloved friend of the show, Kai, has been working hard on their comic, Ukiyo! They have a Patreon as well where you can support them, here!
April
Fujoshi Guide to Web Development Kickstarter launched. I helped!
Finding God in No Man’s Land—Christian Influence in Trigun: Essay posted on Easter 2023! Because I thought it was funny. I’ll be writing up a few elements that I didn’t get to work into the essay itself for Patreon that I also hope to make available on ko-fi.
More stuff to come?? Maybe??
May
Hideo Kojima’s Memes and Torquil Campbell’s DNA – Artists on Art as Genetics: Coming out on Unwinnable Exploits on May 1st. Might only be available for subscribers right away, so keep your eyes peeled. I’ll post it as soon as I see it!
Also on May 1st, playerprophet friend and supporter Mirth Turtle is having a very special livestream. Details to come.
I have another Author Spotlight Interview coming out soon with Nightmare Magazine. I believe it’s out in May but it could be June. They don’t tell me these things (but I also don’t ask).
I’ve signed up for a course to learn about making TTRPGs late in May: Designing Games that Matter with Avery Alder. I wanted to go last year, but full-time work left me very little room for fun. Looking forward to it this time! I bet I’ll have some fun things to share afterward. :)
I also now have a discord server that you can join with extra perks for patrons!
Also I’ll probably be working on a Trigun doujinshi (as short as possible) because the fandom is on fire and I have more stuff I want to say. Now’s as good a time as any, right?
ESSAY: Finding God in No Man’s Land — Christian Influence in Trigun on womenwriteaboutcomics.com
I worked my butt off writing this essay in December/January and it’s finally here! Please enjoy it on wwac.com.
Sixty billion double thanks to everyone who supported me with tips on ko-fi to buy these books, to wwac for hosting this piece, to Kat Overland for her editorial guidance and wisdom, and Lena LeRay for help with some translating. xoxo
20 Stories that Changed Me in 2022
This is the last thing I write about 2022 I hope.
For Christmas I asked for and received (thanks to my mom and brother Jeff, thanks guys) Hideo Kojima’s The Creative Gene. The book (so far) is mostly Kojima’s account of stories that have influenced him, why they mattered to him, and sometimes how we can see their effects in his work.
I keep a yearly planner — a hobonichi techo — which has a “my 100” list in the back where you can chronicle 100 things. I never knew what to do with it, but in 2022 I kept a chronicle of media I consumed, whether I liked them or not, or other special memories of new places or things. So for the first time I had a reliable, localized collection of the things I read/watched/saw that were new to me. After starting The Creative Gene I thought it might be nice to share with you, like he shared with me, the things that I believe I learned something from that will help me go into the future.
So here are 20 of the stories that changed me in 2022, in no particular order.
2022 List of Credits
Lots of people in the manga industry like to post collections of the year’s work, but it’s difficult when you do proofreading because the list gets pretty massive pretty quickly.
Here’s all the stuff I worked on this year, and it’s probably not comprehensive because it’s just based on what I wrote down in my planner. I’ve been thinking it would be good to collect all the titles I’ve worked on as a reference just for job searching, so this is just a start. This also doesn’t include volumes of series that I started working on in previous years.
Yakuza Games Ranked by How Much I Liked Them
As I mentioned recently, 2022 was tough for me. Some of my friends were excited about Like a Dragon, but I didn’t want to play it until I played all of the other Yakuza games because that’s what I’m like. I hate skipping things.
During this stressful year I found it easy to move from one Yakuza game to the next without having to apply new and unique brain power to an entirely new game. As such, I played almost only Yakuza series games. I’m afraid to find out how many hours I spent on them when I turn on my ps5 to install Like a Dragon. It’s going to be a lot.
Anyway here’s the list in reverse order to build suspense. This list is ordered to my own tastes and therefore you cannot judge me.
Young Lady Albert is Courting Disaster
High on the list of “stuff I’ve been up to” is editing this fantastic manga for J-Novel Club, Young Lady Albert is Courting Disaster.
If you’re not familiar with J-Novel Club they have a very unique style of subscription service that gives you access to a chapter-by-chapter serialization of their manga and light novels. When the book is complete, they compile it into an ebook for purchase and (sometimes) make print versions. I’m a big fan of physical books so I’m hoping we’ll get a version for print.
There’s a popular trope in isekai for women/girls (josei) that involves a girl being reborn into an otome game as the villainess. The protagonist often tries to reorient her life to become a better person–but not in the case of Mary Albert. Mary decides that her future is set in stone so she might as well go ahead and drive this metaphorical train into a pit.
I’m not a huge fan of isekai, but I think I am a fan of otome isekai. There are some really delightful series out there that are all doing something a little different. As such I now feel as though Lady Albert is kind of my baby. It’s a great series with good characters, great jokes, and I’m going to do my damndest to do right by it as its editor.
If you’re interested in giving it a read, volume 1 is available now via J-Novel Club’s subscription service, and chapter 1 I believe is available for free. (It won’t be forever!) Volume 2 will be starting serialization early in January 2023.
You can read it on J-Novel Club here: https://j-novel.club/series/young-lady-albert-is-courting-disaster
Alternatively, you can also buy the ebook which will be released in full (with bonus content) on Amazon or on BookWalker.
The volume 1 ebook is coming out on December 28th! I’ll let you know when volume 2 is coming out, too.
Personal Post: 2022 Was the Worst Year of 2020 to Date
With the ongoing collapse of Twitter which they now say will soon have a character limit of 4000, I decided to bite the bullet and just use blogs as originally intended. Social media is for shitposting and blogging is for things I care to commit to history so I hope to update this blog with a lot of random nonsense from now on, some of which will be under lock and key via Patreon integration, so if you’re interested in having more of a conversation about me and my content, please find me there again.
I think I made a post here about moving to Gumroad and right after that Gumroad revealed that they’re also full of twats and since lots of people use Patreon (including myself, to funnel cash to people I like) I might as well stick with the same twats that everyone else is affiliated with. My Patreon will be reactivated at the end of December. Here’s my Patreon link: https://www.patreon.com/playerprophet
This blog post is a bummer so far but I promise I’m doing well, I just hate living in late capitalism.
To brighten things up, here’s a photo of my current foster cat, Scruffy McFluffers (adoption pending). Maybe I’ll make a big blog post about him soon. And perhaps my other fosters?
I am no longer working at Seven Seas so I have retreated to freelance work. This is fine. Now I have the time to get back to the projects I’ve abandoned since 2020, so your support on Patreon and elsewhere would be appreciated. I’m hoping to cut back on the number of contracts I’m juggling for January in order to write a novel (but please do contact me about work opportunities). When I got a full-time job in 2020 I had several ambitions I was trying to fulfill, and one of them was to spend that November working on this novel for NaNoWriMo. Instead, I got a job, and had no time for the novel. I feel like it would be better if I took the summer to slack off and write instead, but there are a few things in the world that seem to be telling me it’s a good time, so I’m going to get started in the new year. I’ll tell you all about it soon… and probably on Patreon first!
I’m looking forward to the holidays and ringing out this crappy year. For me it’s been a lot of disappointments and loss and stress, but a lot of learning too. I think we can ring in 2023 on a better note with blogs, Patreon, and really gay novels. Thank you all for being here. It means a lot.