Running Red Lights

  • Good article about Japanese Magazines and how there’s almost a cult-like following in the US. I’ve been “reading” Japanese magazines for a while (I can’t read Japanese so I just look at the pictures) and they seem much different from Western magazines. The article makes the point that Western magazines usually have to keep their advertisers in mind when writing their content, whereas the Japanese magazines are written from passion and love of their subject matter. I love that the magazines are hyper-specific too. I visited Tokyo a few years ago and they still seem to be really into physical media; there’s still lots of bookstores, magazine stands, news racks, record stores, etc, so it seems like their magazines still have high readership that allows this hyper-specificity.

    A couple of my favorites:

    • Lightning and Clutch – Focus on Americana, i.e. vintage denim, leather jackets, boots, 70s band tees.
    • Popeye – Men’s lifestyle and fashion
    • Free and Easy – Now defunct but focused on 60s Ivy League fashion
    • Garage Life – Solely focused on garages, no cars

    I was just in San Francisco and visited the Kinokinuya store in Japantown, where I picked up the latest Tokyo City Guide issues of Brutus and Popeye. They’re actually English editions so I can read them for the first time.

  • Apple released a short teaser for their upcoming Neuromancer adaptation. A movie/tv show has been in the works for so long that it’s hard to believe it’s actually finally happening. I’m cautiously optimistic cause Apple TV seems to be the place for good sci-fi, with shows like For All Mankind, Foundation, Silo, Severance, and Dark Matter.

  • This is awesome, Terminator 2D: No Fate is a side-scrolling game based on Terminator 2: Judgment Day but done in a 16 bit pixel art style. It totally looks like it could’ve come out at the same time as the movie, except the animations are smoother and more detailed than other games of the time. It looks like an old school run-and-gun type action game and you play as the T-800 and Sarah Connor.

  • The Zonai device capsules from Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom are now available in real life as gachapon (capsule toys) at Nintendo stores in Japan. Just like the game, the real-life toys come from dispensers in plastic capsules that look identical to the ones in the game. There are 6 zonai devices: flame emitter, portable pot, beam emitter, fan, rocket, and wheel, and they have magnets so you can stick them on your fridge or whatever.

  • This site has a huge collection of backgrounds and levels from classic video games. It’s really cool seeing scrolling levels composited into linear horizontal/vertical images, and then you realize how long (or short) these levels really were. Some of these also work great as desktop backgrounds, like the classic Street Fighter II Guile level below.

  • The Academy Museum in LA has a new cyberpunk cinema exhibit, examining the impact of cyberpunk classics like Blade Runner, Tron, and Ghost in the Shell. I went to the museum a few months ago and the exhibits they had were very well done, so I’m sure this one will be cool too.