Do you like old things? Of course you do! Do you like Mike and Meri talking about old things? Oh boy, do we have a fun video for you!
AnimeNEXT 2023 took place this past weekend here in New Jersey. We actually ran the Anime Music Video (“AMV”) contest at the convention from 2003-2008, and for a few years now I’ve been pitching Peter, the current department head, on a 20-year retrospective panel for the convention. Since the con didn’t actually take place last year, we finally got around to it this year!
Wild, right? After twelve years with nada, somehow I have two new ones?!
Here’s “The History of Bardock” (a.k.a. “oops all bardocks”):
Working through “Flashback” — a video I ended up not being terribly happy with in the end — certainly got the juices flowing again. As I noted in the write-up on that video, I actually completely forgot about the possibility of using Dragon Ball Heroes footage. I kept that in mind for any potential upcoming videos… and it sure came in handy!
I considered what footage I already had ripped and available to me from “Flashback,” and I noticed a lot of it coincidentally had Bardock in it: there was the original 1990 TV special I used in the intro, there was Episode of Bardock, and there was also Dragon Ball Super: Broly.
Hmm. I don’t even particularly care for Bardock that much, but he seems to have somehow infiltrated my personal fandom. I even have a setup dedicated to just Bardock figures from when I started buying “Masked Saiyan” figures as a “joke” (turns out it wasn’t really a “joke”).
What if I made a Bardock video…?!
The Sources
With the existing sources already set to go, I considered what else I could use.
Heroes was a definite must, so I went through all of what Bandai Namco had available on their YouTube channel and picked out all the mission openings with Bardock footage. It ended up being juuuuust barely enough!
I wanted to get creative here with footage, and Xenoverse popped into my head as a possibility: it has even more “Masked Saiyan” footage, and one of the most recent DLC packs added a new scenario with Fu and Trunks interrupting Bardock’s confrontation with Freeza (it even has an alternate version where Bardock becomes Super Saiyan, but I didn’t end up using it). Happy to say that I actually captured all of the game footage myself, so it looks super-crisp and doesn’t have any weirdo YouTube watermarks.
The last “footage” option was going to be a tough one: the Dragon Ball Super manga. There was just so much stuff in the Granolla arc, and it only exists in manga format (for now? I guess time will tell?), but I wanted to make it work. The tough part was that Volume 19 with some of the most important Bardock material wasn’t out in Japan until close to my self-imposed deadline (submitting to AWA Pro/Accolades). Thankfully it worked out just in time. The closing shot from the scouter is actually sourced from Viz’s digital release, but since there’s no text on it at all, it worked fine.
The Music
I wanted something short and extremely punchy to do quick edits to, and preferably instrumental. I listened to a few things on shuffle, but nothing jumped out at me. I remembered that we used to use instrumental tracks from some of our favorite bands for menus on our old AMV DVDs that we would hand out at conventions, so I flipped through some of those songs. Right away, the first interlude track from Rufio’s 2005 album The Comfort of Home grabbed me. That was it! About a minute long, repetitive so I could match the edits in each section, and it fit the exact mood I was looking for!
The Style
Initially I was thinking I wanted to do some sort of static-esque VHS effect throughout the entire video. Once I got editing I realized that would be overkill, but I still wanted to do something with that effect in the video, so I wound up using it in the very introduction (which, incidentally, was the last thing I edited!), and then one last time on the fade out at the end of the video.
Other than that, the song really dictated the editing style. Overall I’m super jazzed with how it came out. It’s incredibly simple, but I think the flow and movement is fantastic throughout.
For the manga section toward the end, obviously I would have to create my own “movement” to the “footage”, and I didn’t want it to get too cluttered… but there’s still so much to try and cram in, especially when it doesn’t move on its own! I ended up going with a base layer of “flashback” scenes (the ones all placed on the dark border pages) which I blurred and slowly scrolled behind everything else.
On top of that, I cropped out exact manga panels and slowly brought them in and out to the appropriate timing. It’s still a little bit of a mess, but I’m ultimately happy enough with it.
(And I’ve kept the project file to potentially swap in color versions of those panels when the Japanese digital colorized version eventually gets that far!)
It felt weird to not include the actual Akira Toriyama manga panel with Bardock, as well as anything from Jaco the Galactic Patrolman itself that kick-started the “new” Bardock… but the introduction turned out to be the perfect place for these! There’s Toriyama Bardock, New Toriyama Bardock, Ooishi Bardock, and Nagayama Bardock all lined up! Love it.
The Name
Yes, “The History of Bardock” is a riff on the Trunks TV special FUNimation title (by way of Meri’s site — does anyone realize that?!) and also the tidbit on Kanzenshuu.
I actually wasn’t sure if I wanted to call it “The History of Bardock” or “Bardock Retsuden” or “oops all bardocks”, so I (kinda sorta) went with two of the three.
Welp
Another little experiment video! I’m much happier with the final product here than I am with “Flashback”. I don’t love forcing footage onto a song; that’s backwards from every other video I’ve ever made, but I do think it worked better here than with my previous attempt. This is definitely one that I made just for myself — I have no expectations of this being even remotely popular, and I’m good with that!
I think I have one more miscellaneous Dragon Ball video to make just for myself… and after that, we’ll see if I want to do anything “more”…
Special Thanks
Ajay — For helping me slightly clean up one of the more egregiously-compressed Heroes clips
Meri — For putting up with this short song on loop while I edited sections
Forgive me Dende, for I have sinned: it has been twelve years since my last anime music video.*
Presenting: “Flashback”
The Background
The last video I worked on was 2010’s “Ain’t No Rest For the Wicked“, a multi-source video that ended up winning “Best Drama/Serious” at Otakon 2010 (after about a decade of entering, our first win!). I didn’t stop editing videos for any particular reason after that; it just kind of happened. The shift into Kanzenshuu there in 2012 and the ongoing heyday of the podcast was certainly a good set of reasons, though, looking back in retrospect. Too much sitting-on-my-butt computer time already. Between that and actual-real-work-work, it was difficult to justify the extra creative energy and computer-usage-pain.
It occurs to me that we actually went an entire computer without making an AMV. After the 2010 video, something inside our computer exploded somewhere there in 2011, and we built a new computer. That 2011 computer lasted (with a couple minor upgrades in the SSD, RAM, and video card department) up through this year in 2022! Heck of a life it had.
And so I basically missed the entire shift to natively working with HD anime footage. I left things in the DVD-ripping, AVIsynth, MJPEG swap files, Lagarith codec days. We were heavily scripting those .avs files, IVTC-ing, working through terrible dot crawl and rainbowing…
… and here we are over a decade later, with most of that same footage having fairly extensive and beautiful Blu-ray remasters, not to mention modern footage simply existing and not really needing any work. Rip it, drag it into Premiere, and go.
It’s wild beyond my wildest dreams of wildness that I ever could have wildly imagined in the wild.
Despite not actually editing any videos over this last decade, we have done the occasional pre-screening judging for contests run by other friends, and every once in a while feel the itch. With a crazy new computer built, and the Otakon 2022 AMV contest submission deadline approaching, I wondered to myself… “Could I make a video in time?”
So. I did. HAH!
The best part was that I didn’t tell anyone I was making the video. (Other than Meri, who it would be considerably difficult to hide from!)
The Concept
I wanted to make something, and while there are certainly some songs still kicking around in a decades-old playlist of “AMV ideas”… I needed a warm-up. Something to experiment with. Something to just test out the technology and see if I still had it in me.
I thought about the fact that there is modern, native, HD Dragon Ball footage these days, which I knew like the back of my hand and could easily futz around with. That sounded fun, but what would the concept even be?
Rather than using something like the full Dragon Ball Super television series (which I didn’t even really care for that much anyway), and rather than limiting myself to something like a single-movie AMV (so Battle of Gods and the like were out), I came up with an interesting way to force a concept onto another concept:
HD footage, but only HD footage that reanimates old scenes.
The first thing that came to mind was the 2011 video game Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi (“Ultimate Blast” in Japan), which shipped with a dozen or so reanimated cutscenes, all of which I ripped forever ago and just had sitting around. Oh, there’s also the extended edition of Battle of Gods that has some old scenes. Oh man, there’s also the beginning of Episode of Bardock that reanimates some of the Bardock TV special. Whaaaat, there’s also that extended edition opening for Resurrection ‘F’ that beautifully reanimates Goku vs. Freeza along with some other stuff (footage that would end up being a central focus of the video, and the biggest pain in the ass at the same time).
What if I took that all, as well as some other little examples here and there like flashbacks in Dragon Ball Super, and see what I could come up with?
The Song
I had no idea what to use for a song, though. In my experience, this is the absolute worst way to make an AMV: forcing a concept backward into a song. Every other video I’ve ever made has been the opposite, and I’d wager that all of the great editors would back this up: it’s far better when a song is what sparks the footage and concept inspiration, rather than this other way around.
It had to be short, and it had to be punchy; this was probably going to be an action video, after all.
I tried a few different things, but ended up with Asian Kung-Fu Generation’s “Flashback”, the first track on their first full-length album. I had considered making a Japanese MAD-style AMV with it eons ago, but knew I never would go through with that, so it was still up for grabs in my head. Clocking in right under two minutes was a big bonus. It also had very clear verse/chorus separations, with a nice bridge between it all, and then a really big drum pattern ending.
I’m fairly certain this was my first time editing to a non-English language vocal song. It felt very retro, like the old DBZ website community editing days!
The (Primary) Sources
There are a couple little things I’m going to keep a secret (and I’ll be amazingly impressed if anyone finds them… one in particular, for sure), but the rough outline of footage used includes:
Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods (specifically the extended edition’s opening footage)
Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’ (specifically the “Future Trunks Edition” TV broadcast)
Dragon Ball Super: Broly (just the tiniest bit)
Dragon Ball: Episode of Bardock (its reanimated Bardock special footage)
Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi (cutscenes from this game’s opening theme and story mode)
Dragon Ball Super television series (a couple reanimated flashbacks)
Dragon Ball Kai (opening and ending themes animation)
One notable exclusion — and not an intentional one! — is anything from Dragon Ball Heroes. The honest truth is just that I plum forgot. Some of the early base game and Galaxy Mission intro scenes would have been perfect to include… but I just didn’t think of them in time! I considered doing an extra edit on the video after final submission to swap in some of those scenes, but that didn’t feel honest and true to what I had already completed and submitted.
It’s also worth noting that Toei released the first five minutes of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero on YouTube just a couple days before the submission deadline. I decided not to include anything from that flashback footage because it would have clashed too much with what was already in the video, and would have been a distraction.
There are a couple little exceptions I made for myself regarding the “reanimated old scenes” stipulation, especially as I neared the end of the editing process; these primarily come from Dragon Ball Super theme song animations that call back to past events or imagery from the series, which I felt still worked for the overall motif and concept.
The Edits
There is not a single unintentional frame in this entire video. Even the stuff that doesn’t work quite right? It’s done that way for a reason. And it was all a fair bit of a nightmare. Let me dive into some of that a little further:
The Resolution
1280×720 ended up being the base resolution for the video. It was the lowest common denominator across the board, and also allowed me to use some of the HD 4:3 animation from Kai openings if they were zoomed and cropped appropriately (at roughly 89% they “filled the screen” at 720p) without flip-flopping pillar bars.
The Logo
Perhaps the most laborious set of edits throughout the entire video is the removal of the TV station logo/bug from the Resurrection ‘F’ opening footage. This special intro for the film only ever received a TV broadcast, despite early indications that it would be included on the French “Golden Box” Blu-ray set; this means there is no “clean” footage. (Thankfully that Blu-ray set at least served as the best source for Episode of Bardock, so it wasn’t a complete lost cause.)
Not only would I personally never release a video with a logo in the corner like that, but most contest rules strictly forbid it. The removals were all a combination of either simple paint-over masks if the lines didn’t move too much, some bits with fairly extensive frame-by-frame redraws, and the occasional throw-my-hands-in-the-air-in-frustration where I just zoomed it off-screen. I think they’re all pretty seamless and you’d never know they were there, unless you look at the upper-right of the first book scene toward the beginning of the video, where there is some 1996-FUNimation-era amateur digital paint work going on. I didn’t go a great job there (lots of frame-by-frame content aware filling), and ran out of time before I could come up with a better solution to deal with the slight zooming and light source changes.
The Editing Ideology
I feel very strongly that when you make an AMV, if you’re not paying attention to how the music is telling you how to edit, then you are just slapping scenes on top of audio… and that’s too basic/reductive. We’re supposed to do more. We’re supposed to entwine these two disparate sources so much that they become one, naturally, as if they were always intended to be together.
That’s why all of my videos have such intentional, deliberate editing styles and sequences within them. Verses are edited in the same way as each other with the same timing and same effects, and likewise goes for choruses. Your opening and ending need to stand out and make their own unique impact, both separate from the rest of the video but also complementing it.
(For a personal epitome of this, check out “Let Me Save You“, our Kimagure Orange Road video from 2003.)
It’s an incredibly difficult balance, and I love to see when other editors recognize these same types of patterns and make videos in a similar way.
I’ll touch on each of these, but that’s exactly how I approached this video, even with it only being two minutes long.
The Opening
Early on I settled on the idea that the Resurrection ‘F’ scenes of Trunks finding the book would set up the “flashback” to the HD/reanimated footage. Initially I had this start at the very beginning of the video, but I liked it better when I removed Trunks entirely, so it wasn’t clear (or mattered at all) exactly “who” the person was… but that then also meant I had less footage to work with, and more measures to fill with footage.
I also had this weird dream vision of some old footage tilted and fading into each other, which is how I ultimately settled on those four opening cuts — they also helped drive home the minor focus around Bardock/Freeza and Goku/Freeza. It’s super basic layering and 3D modeling on the footage, but that it even remotely approaches what I imagined makes me pretty happy.
The Verses
Something I know all too well from making AMVs in the past is how little animation there tends to be in these shows. You think you remember animation, but when you scrub through the footage, it’s all just implied through careful direction: the movement isn’t actually there.
And that’s how I wound up with the little “whoosh” effect in the verses. I had initially set it up where there would be an internal action sync on the first guitar hit, followed by a woosh, and wash/rinse/repeat until the chorus, but there was just no goddamn animation in enough of these clips! This allowed me to use a larger base of scenes, while still paying attention to the music itself in terms of the number of edits.
The timing on the whoosh-es was difficult to pin down, but I ended up going with “the whoosh finishes on the frame that the guitar hits”; that felt most natural as I shifted them around the timeline and watched different combinations of possible timings.
The Choruses
Kinda more like the pre-choruses, actually, I guess…? I don’t know how music works!
The reanimated Goku vs. Freeza footage from the extended Resurrection ‘F’ opening was too good not to put to extensive use, so it pretty organically wound up in these parts of the video. I went for a combination of internal action sync and actual cuts in these parts, letting the footage tell me how it wanted to go.
The Instrumental Bridge
I moved these four scenes (Piccolo death, Trunks transformation, Cell explosion, Goku transformation) around over and over trying to find the right flow. I knew I wanted to end on Goku’s Super Saiyan transformation (since it would transition into the fight footage), and the audio really demands those drumroll video cuts. But if I do one, do I have to do all four? The Piccolo one worked great when I threw the edits together, but the Trunks one still doesn’t feel great to me. I think it’s just the terrible drawings from the Super scene? Maybe? And then the Cell explosion part actually sounds different in the music, and there’s so much going on in the animation there that it didn’t seem necessary to do the same kind of single-frame drumroll edits…
The whole section’s a little bit of a mess, but them’s the breaks.
The Ending
I knew I wanted to end on a series of very deliberate, intentional, great-looking punches (see also: “My Fist is the Worst Kind of Weapon“).
Hey, turns out that in a giant batch of footage that has less animation than you thought, there are also far fewer good hits than you hoped for!
This then in turn morphed into a few scenes of power-ups, which then transitions (by way of that Freeza lunging forward, which worked with the music there) into the best hits I could find. There were others, but I considered any I found and didn’t use them for a very specific reason (whether it was a lack of extra content frames on one or both sides of the hit, or some in the Ultimate Tenkaichi opening that weren’t CaNoOnN!!! like Trunks fighting Ginyu folks).
Overall it’s a pretty decent ending, and I like the imagery of Goku being punched in the face so hard that it literally flashes back to the beginning of the series.
The Footage Usage
I honestly expected to use the ever living hell out of the Ultimate Tenkaichi footage… but there’s no goddamn animation in it! Every once in a while there’s something good like the Great Ape Vegeta transformation, but everything else is just lips flapping and cardboard cutouts sliding around the screen. It’s the perfect example of what I mentioned earlier with the verses, where the animation is all implied through direction.
This gave me a pretty good stretch of minor panic attacks over the lack of footage I had available, which led me into picking apart the XENOVERSE opening (whoops, also no real animation!) and looking back into the Super TV series for additional reanimated scenes (whoops, also no real animation yet again!).
The very last scene I placed in the video was the Super ending theme #10 footage of little Goku (with the water drop) and the hand reaching toward the sky (a Mike and Meri classic AMV scene choice) transitioning into the Goku vs. Freeza Kamehameha. Until that point, I had no idea how to narratively transition from the Bardock footage into the Goku vs. Freeza fight.
I had actually already placed the hand reaching as the final drumroll, but you can’t really tell and it works here so well, so I didn’t mind using that same footage twice in the same video. Check out how the sun transitions into the ki gathering! Huh? HUH?! Right?! (I wanted to perfectly line them up circle-for-circle, but the amount of zooming necessary to do that made it look crummy and far too off-center.)
I wanted to do more scenes like the Bardock vs. Freeza bit, where I juxtaposed the Episode of Bardock version against the Dragon Ball Super: Broly version, but this particular video just didn’t end up going that way. It’s something I would still love to try again some day.
The Final Export
By the time I entered the scene in 2000, it was all digital editing on computers and the final delivery was a digital file (generally an MPEG-2); no two-VCR editing for me, no sir.
That said, I spent the majority of my AMV years editing on a CRT monitor with a final product that would screen on a CRT (or projector) through an analog connection, interlaced at standard definition.
Making precise to-the-frame edits in this new video was a goddamn nightmare.
Things felt different on the Premiere timeline than they did in the exported video on the same computer than they did on a 1080p TV than they did at the contest pre-screening, all with different connectors (HDMI vs DisplayPort), display refresh times, room audio acoustics, etc.
I hate it.
If something feels “off” in the final video — wherever it is that you’re watching it — please know that it’s not intentional. I wanted it to feel perfect. Every whoosh, every flash, every drumroll, every cut… they’re all supposed to feel perfect, and they goddamn don’t.
I really, really hate it.
Welp
Didn’t make the cut for the Otakon 2022 contest. Bummer. Pretty hard gut punch and eye-opener after easily making it in from 2004-2010 each time I submitted, and half-expecting to just waltz in with anything here and at least scrape by into the contest.
But I also framed this video as an experiment for me to take on, a sort of warm-up coming back to the game, with a video concept that was incredibly forced and rather stifling.
So with that said, I dunno that this experiment really worked out, but it certainly got me reacquainted with the editing process. The bug has bit! I have some older ideas I would definitely love to try to get back to, and I also want to keep experimenting with random Dragon Ball footage in new and different ways. I don’t know that I’ll ever make anything quite like our golden era of dramatic narrative videos, but who knows what the future holds?
Special Thanks
Doug — For keeping the spirit of Dragon Ball AMV sub-culture alive all these years
Randy — For ripping some Kai themes I didn’t have, without knowing this is what it was for
Ajay — For helping me track down some of the Super flashbacks, without knowing this is what it was for
Meri — For the review and encouragement and overall secrecy
Bryce — For pretending he didn’t know I was making this even after Meri all but certainly let the cat out of the bag
Vic — For the perfect text message response after letting him know I submitted a video
*This is technically correct in terms of released products intended to be actual AMVs. I edited a roughly one-minute music video with Saiyan/Tsufruian-related footage and Kikuchi music for the “Bardock+” project I started working on back in 2011, meant to act as a sort of interstitial between some of the other edits. This entire project was on a computer that then exploded, was then replaced, and now it’s been over a decade since I’ve attempted to resurrect that project. I really should. It was almost done!
I always meant to do stuff like this with the blog: drop easy-to-read, simple, layman explanations on things I figured out with tech stuff, and maybe someone else will find it, and even find it useful…!
So I got a brand-new, fresh, vanilla MediaWiki install all finished and set up and ready to go. (No, I didn’t delete and have to reinstall the Kanzenshuu wiki!) For what it’s worth, here in December 2021, that’s MediaWiki version 1.37.0. Cool. I’m actually using this new wiki on a fresh domain name and porting over existing wiki pages from another wiki installed elsewhere (effectively a staging site someone else put together a while back).
Problem is, I import a page totally fine using Special:Export on the old wiki and Special:Import on the new wiki, except none of the references are loading at the bottom under our “Sources” header. It’s all really basic citations just listing a URL inside the <ref> and </ref> tags, and they’re showing up in-line as URLs right there in the text rather than as the nice little superscript blue notated citations.
OK, cool. So there’s an extension called Cite that automatically came as part of the MediaWiki install, and that should be handling things. It’s already there on the server from the installation right where it needs to be: in the main MediaWiki folder, then the extensions folder, and right there as Cite:
(If it didn’t come as part of your installation — I don’t know why it wouldn’t, because it’s included in the standard MediaWiki download — you can download from them and upload the extension yourself to your web server.)
So why isn’t it just automatically working?
I swear to Dende I have no idea how I missed it, because it’s right there on the extension’s page… but you have to add something to the bottom of your LocalSettings.php file (the one that MediaWiki made you download as you finished the installation… or you can FTP into your web server to download it) in order to actually turn it on and make it work. You have to add the line:
wfLoadExtension('Cite');
That was it: all I had to do is add that one line at the very bottom of the LocalSettings.php file, reupload it, and without doing anything else, citations started working as expected:
I really don’t know how I missed it listed right there as a necessary step on the extension’s own page. I was going down a rabbit hole seeing all sorts of stuff about instead having to add require_once "extensions/ExtensionName/ExtensionName.php";… which really wasn’t helpful to me because there wasn’t actually a Cite.php file in the extension’s folder (thought there is in old versions of the extension).
Everything was right there for me, and I was just missing it. It was at the very end of a work day after I had done all of the other installations, so it was definitely just a matter of not fully reading / skimming, thinking I had it it, clearly not having it, and being too head-foggy to get it done.
Sometimes you just gotta give yourself a day, man.
OK, here’s the deal, because good lord does this need some heavy explanation:
The Setup
Shortly after COVID hit big in 2020, some friends began organizing Saturday evening online gaming hangouts. We cycled through a few things early on, but by April we had settled on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for Nintendo Switch because it was the one game the most people owned.
It’s been about 18 months since then, and while a few special guests have come and gone over the weeks and months, for a core group of us, our Saturday nights are still fairly consistent. As you can imagine, all sorts of house rules and in-jokes have evolved over that time, and — being the type of people we are — even productive “content creation” has come out of it…? Feels gross to say that.
We initially started streaming for friends who didn’t have Mario Kart but still wanted to chat and react to the gameplay, which transitioned into it being a publicly streamed performance every week (complete with highlight reels), and then somewhere along the way we started reviewing anime. The anime chat was just a natural extension of our regular conversations with each other (we all met through college/anime/AMVs/podcasts/etc.); that anime chat solidified into a stream norm even more once we made Cloudtop Cruise our One Piece-specific discussion course (due to it resembling Skypiea, the arc we happened to be watching at that time this all started).
But then somewhere along the way we also started threatening a review of the 2001 anime series Angelic Layer on top of everything else, and here we are.
Been joking (threatening?) to do this for a couple weeks (months?) now. Are we gonna talk about the first episode on the Mario Kart stream tonight??? @yatpay@SirSawbosspic.twitter.com/zrjtNyNvNO
It took us six months, but three of us actually made it through the full series. This is a complete documentation of that journey.
The Review
Don’t approach this review like you would with a “real” review. This is completely stream-of-consciousness. There are no notes. We don’t fact-check. We’re throwing bananas at each other. There’s a lot of yelling. The review segments can — and will — be interrupted by everything imaginable. Sometimes there will be stretches of silence before someone remembers they had something else to say. Sometimes we’ll change the subject and then come back around to it. Sometimes people forget to talk into their microphones. We don’t always say the nicest things. The audio isn’t necessarily balanced. It’s also just raw Twitch stream archive quality, so don’t go in expecting high-bitrate gameplay in the background.
We recorded a little introduction to help set it up. So enjoy, I guess?!
This never happens. I’m immune to this kind of marketing.
Dammit, they got me.
While doing the usual message board rounds one day back in September, I stumbled upon an advertisement that spoke to me: it was about vinyl records. Not just regular records, though: postcard records.
Having recently thrown myself into the world of record collecting/listening (something I’m massively late to the party on — but that’s a story for another day), it caught my attention and I couldn’t look away. I love novel tchotchkes tangentially related to hobbies!
The long and short of it was that this service — Vinyl Post — sends a new record each month, except that record isn’t actually a “record” as you might think these days, but is instead a postcard-sized flexi disc (a medium that has long been used as a cheap alternative to traditional vinyl). Each disc holds a single indie rock song (curated from the owner’s music blog), and comes packed with an actual postcard with a message from the respective band, a lyric sheet, and a digital download of the song.
Registration
I put in my order with the coupon code provided in the Reddit advertisement on September 3 ($2 for the first month). I was charged that same day for $2. I didn’t receive any further communication until October 3, at which point I was charged a normal, pre-paid, three-month amount ($15.65 for me), and my first postcard arrived two days later on October 5.
Something definitely felt “off” or missed on their end here; it seems like I absolutely should have received something during the month of September (even acknowledging that the item I received here in October is dated as the “September 2021” release — kinda confusing). From the registration email:
If you signed up before the 15th of the current month, your first postcard will be dispatched between the 16th – 22nd. If you signed up after the 15th, your first postcard will be dispatched around the 16th – 22nd of the following month. (Postcards are sent as letters via USPS and can not be tracked, sorry!)
I put in a support request on October 7 asking for clarification and what I should have received for that first $2 month. Josh wrote back to me the next morning, explaining that due to some delays at their plant, this was indeed the September release, and now I was paid up to receive my additional three for October, November, and December (and October will indeed be sent out later this month).
Works for me. World’s still on fire. Delays happen. I get it.
The Vinyl Post Website
In the meantime, I had full access to the Vinyl Post website’s membership area… and by full access, I mean I could just download any song I wanted going all the way back to the start.
Thing is, you don’t even really need to be a member to listen to or even download the songs: they’re all just directly embedded on the “Releases” page, so you can stream or inspect/right-click and download right there.
It’s worth noting that Vinyl Post has released several compilations of prior releases on proper vinyl records, and members get a 20% discount on those ($20 down to $16 each)
So at this point it really isn’t about the website “member” amenities at all — let’s check out the product.
The Package
Everything came in a postcard-sized envelope. It’s super lightweight and inconspicuous. You might mistake it for junk mail.
It’s a cool little package of the flexi disc, the postcard with/from/of the band, and the lyric sheet. It’s that last item in particular that really helps bridge the connection between this product and traditional records: purposefully sitting down, listening to the song, and reading along with the lyrics is “the experience” here.
So how does this all work?
The Flexi Disc / Postcard
Particularly coming into the hobby when stuff like 180 gram is effectively the new norm, this flimsy little thing is adorable.
It was a bit of a struggle to get it going on my player (really just something entry-level, an Audio-Technica AT-LP60XBT, an automatic player with 7″ and 12″ settings). If I didn’t drop the needle in precisely the right starting point, it would just lift back up and turn itself off. It’s all much harder than it sounds, with these being something like 5″ circles within an actual rectangular postcard. I didn’t want to tear or bend it, so it took a little finagling to get it to sit right on the spindle. Gotta really push down.
But hey, once it plays, it plays.
Sorta. I had one big skip the first time I listened, and three big skips the second time I listened. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.
The Music
My first postcard — the September 2021 release — comes from the band Ozwald, “the indie side project of lead singer and guitarist Jason Wade and Steve Stout of the band Lifehouse.” Like most folks my age (the pushing-40-or-above bracket), I pretty much just vaguely remember Lifehouse from that first big single “Hanging by a Moment” from 2000.
Ozwald’s song here — “Young Suburban Minds”, the title track off their fifth full-length album — is definitely a modern day indie rock song. It was produced in Nashville and has all that millennial reminiscence and perseverance stuff in there with a jab at the lost COVID year… yeah, I guess this whole thing is pretty solidly in my wheelhouse.
As for how it sounds… well, it’s certainly not as crisp as a “real vinyl” record would be, but I think at least for this particular band and this particular song, it all works — it sounds like a home-grown, down-to-earth, chill little tune.
Should I sign up for Vinyl Post?
I certainly don’t see myself hanging on for more than the three months I initially signed up for. At the same time, I feel like I have a little more personal a connection to this song that I otherwise would if I just found it on my own. In that respect, it absolutely plays into that physicality collection mindset sort of thing that records are all about.
It doesn’t look like Vinyl Post has put out a compilation for a while; I would like to eventually pick one up that has this song (and possibly the two others I have coming my way) as a more permanent record (pun intended) of having checked it all out.
I dunno, man. Your money is yours. Something like $5/month for a little novelty isn’t too bad, right? Check ’em out.
As we head into the Shadowbringers finale, I’ve been reflecting back on my early days with Final Fantasy XIV. The game has been an unexpected constant in my life since 2013, with an uninterrupted subscription since A Realm Reborn‘s launch, hundreds of dollars spent on Primals Blu-rays, and quite a few art books kicking around. I may have even custom printed a canvas world map for the wall in my office.
I wanted to jot down a few good memories. Where historically appropriate (and available), I’m going to dig through my screenshots folder and see what I can pull out. I unfortunately don’t have anything from the earliest PS3 days, so images after the shift to mainly playing on PC will have to suffice! I didn’t upgrade from my 550ti until Stormblood, anyway, so it will be LIKE looking at PS3 screenshots!
It might be worth noting up front that I had, miraculously, somehow completely avoided MMOs up until this point. Despite being the perfect demographic, things like Phantasy Star Online and World of Warcraft missed me entirely. I often hear that there’s nothing quite like the magic of your first MMO, and I’m clearly not alone when it comes to FF14. Much of what has been done in Eorzea may have been done elsewhere earlier (and arguably better), but for me, well… it was my first.
I have never dipped into the (still somewhat recently-added) New Game+ options to replay anything, and I have never made an alternate character, so my original A Realm Reborn playthrough is still my “canonical memory” of the game. Much of it is faded, but there are still bits and pieces that shine through.
No agenda here, no real plan, no real flow to the writing… just a little bit of self-indulgent gushing. There’s a fair bit of revisionist history these days about the overall quality of A Realm Reborn, so this different perspective may be… interesting, at least? I would love to hear some of your stories, too!
***
June 2013. Final Fantasy XIV is holding another open beta in preparation for its big A Realm Reborn relaunch, itself also in conjunction with its long-promised PlayStation 3 version. This round includes cross-platform play and a traditional opening sequence and story quest.
After hearing about the disastrous 1.0 launch (the Game Trailers review with its showcase of silently walking through the copy/pasted maps still fresh in my memory), I can’t help but be curious. Let’s check this out, right?
Determined Final Fantasy XIV is not for me. I just don't care. And I can't be bothered to care. Nothing I played was interesting at all.
(In retrospect, I now realize that I rolled as a Marauder – one of the two tank classes – and therefore started out in the city state of Limsa Lominsa. I don’t recall anything more other than the feeling of being completely lost. I suppose that tweet pretty much sums it up.)
***
August 2013. I’m not playing anything in particular, I have some Amazon credit, and an additional promotional credit on top of that due to a separate botched order. If you pre-order Final Fantasy XIV, you can get in on a final round of beta testing.
Hear… Feel… Think…
Hey, did anyone else hear that?
Following that initial beta failure, my real college-try at the game was by way of the Gladiator class. I had absolutely no idea what I was choosing or why – as will become quite apparent when we get to the first dungeon – but I figured that having offense and defense in the form of a sword and shield would be smart for a new player like me.
I distinctly remember cracking an Arrogant Bastard, ordering pizza from the place down the street, and wandering around The Steps of Thal for a couple hours, completely entranced by what I saw and heard. For better or worse, that combination of flavors and smells still conjures FF14 to my brain!
In wandering around the outskirts of Ul’Dah, more than anything else, it was Masayoshi Soken’s musical score that entranced me. The pieces that make up the suite of “To the Sun” perfectly encapsulated that feeling of leaving this city of riches, stumbling across refugees, smacking bats and rats, running from giant turtles that seemed far too strong for where they were and where I should be, and watching the sun rise over the mountains and aetherytes in the distance.
(Probably too late to reasonably recommend this to anyone, but “To the Sun” makes for a perfect driving atmosphere in Final Fantasy XV.)
I was playing the game on console, hooked up in my living room with surround sound. Despite playing for years on this exact same setup, it was somehow FF14 that made me take notice of the rear speakers. Whether it was a goldsmith cranking out some earrings over to my left, or a FATE kicking off behind me, the sound design added to that feeling of it being a real, living, breathing world. Even in the shift to PS4 and now PS5 on the otherwise exact same setup, I still feel like I’m chasing that original experience of sound all around me, which hasn’t quite hit since the PS3 days. (This obviously can’t be true, since it’s the same game hooked up the same way with the same speakers and everything…!)
Perhaps one of the most embarrassing experiences in retrospect – yet not realizing it at all at the time – was that first dungeon run in Sastasha. I legitimately had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know what a tank even was, nevermind the fact that I had specific things to do here! Enmity? Combos? Cooldowns? What are you TALKING ABOUT…?
The first boss of the dungeon is a large Coeurl named Chopper. Not knowing the first thing about tanking, but figuring I should be doing damage while also avoiding his attacks, that big ol’ cat was spinning in circles, I tell you what. I don’t have any specific memories of the dungeon beyond that, but this should tell you something: you have 90 minutes to complete a dungeon (which at the time were generally made to be completed in 30 minutes), and we… well, we did not complete that dungeon. I don’t think any of the three other people said a single word in the chat that entire run, which leads me to believe we were all on PS3s without keyboards. I like to imagine that all four of us were completely new to MMOs and had no idea what we were doing, and therefore couldn’t be disappointed that we failed to complete what is effectively the game’s training dungeon.
And yet for some reason I pressed onward. Thanks to some friendly advice of “Flash, flash, and then flash some more” (remember the “Flash” ability…?) and “lol don’t just do halone, do your combo” (oh, is that what the glowing dotted lines around the abilities mean?), I managed to learn what I was missing entirely: I was supposed to “tank.” Grab the enemies’ attention. Hold it. Face them away from the other party members. Step out of the way of attacks if you can. Get yourself back into place. Use your defensive abilities to soak some of the damage. Wash, rinse, repeat.
To the game’s credit, it does attempt to teach you this stuff. The individual class quests often focus on specific abilities, and there’s even one where you’re basically told to just keep using the Flash ability over and over and over (I wonder what this one is like post-Flash removal and post-A Realm Reborn trimming…?). The guildhest missions are little primers for partying up and taking on specific kinds of enemy formations and attack patterns. There’s that one FATE out in Coerthas where the big cyclops troll uses the 100-ton swing, which is a primer for it being used again later by dungeon bosses.
Nah, all of this went completely over my head.
To MY credit, hey: this was a lot to take in. I had never seen anything like this before. There are UI elements all over the screen, and every button combination imaginable can do something. The PS3 is also struggling to play this at 15 frames per second, so give me a break!
It was somewhere around the halfway mark of the main storyline that everything clicked into place for me. I understood the holy trinity, I understood class quests, I understood cooldowns, I understood attack indicators… I finally understood the game!
And yet it was then, right as I actually felt comfortable with it, that I once again felt completely overwhelmed and out of my league. I no longer didn’t know what I didn’t know: I knew exactly what I didn’t know, and that was pretty terrifying, particularly in a tank role.
***
I never saw most of the fights in The Praetorium, because I was watching the cutscenes while everyone else ran ahead and burned everything down. (They’ve since locked the two A Realm Reborn ending dungeons to their own separate roulette with forced, party-wide cutscenes.)
(I was so disenfranchised from ever running those two dungeons again, that when I eventually did Main Scenario Roulette during Shadowbringers to help level my White Mage, I was shocked – SHOCKED, I tell you! – to [re]discover that Nero was actually a boss you fought back then! To me, he was just the dude that kept stalking Cid during the optional raids.)
After finding the then-as-of-yet-unimplemented entrance to the raid and building excitement, my first steps into Labyrinth of the Ancients were met with, “Well, I hope you read a guide on what to do.” (I hadn’t.)
I chickened out of a lot of early post-game dungeons (Copperbell, Haukke Manor, Halatali) because that word “Hard” next to them was too intimidating. Instead, I got my first philosophy tomestone gear from running Ifrit over and over. And over. And over again. (I would have been hilariously well prepared and fine for the dungeons, I would later discover.)
I’m ultimately very thankful for Hydaelyn nudging me over to a tank class, and though I’ve since moved on to a Dragoon main, I always feel comfortable sliding back into a tank role. Maybe it’s the decades of running a website and all the project management that goes into it, both at the micro and macro level. It’s good to have goals, and I’m able to easily jump into a leadership role and guide us there. Perhaps it’s also the narcissism that likes being “in charge” of the run, but there’s no denying that being able to set the pace is a relief.
It was around the 2.3 update that I really found my end-game groove. Syrcus Tower (the second of three 24-player raids in A Realm Reborn, with Labyrinth of the Ancients and World of Darkness before and after it, respectively) was my absolute jam, and may still be my favorite location in the game today… even after just running it 15 times for the current relic. The brilliant blue color with its yellow highlights is just peak Mike color choice (dating back to Daizenshuu EX designs!). Yes, the Crystal Tower is originally from Final Fantasy III, but the new piano and orchestral arrangements alongside all the enemies and environments… This is a very special area of the game. (It’s also mandatory, now!)
This update also brought the Tam-Tara Deepcroft hard mode dungeon, continuing a minor story about a group of adventurers from waaaaay earlier in the game. It’s amazing looking back on this era of the game and the staff’s growth in the area of storytelling, particularly here with Edda. There are Big Things™ happening out in the world, sure, but there are also very tragic, very relatable, very personal stories to tell. That face…
(And then that OTHER face…)
The 2.4 update kept the hype train rolling for me as I became even more comfortable in my role, both as a literal job within the game, but also as a player within the world’s lore and ongoing story. The Snowcloak dungeon music is comforting and pleasant, a perfect winter soundtrack. This lead in to the forthcoming Heavensward expansion also brought us our fight against Shiva, and another contender for Best RPG Battle Music of All Time.
Keeper of the Lake in the 2.5 update is another strong memory and accompanying feeling of accomplishment in A Realm Reborn‘s post-game. As a non-Coil player (I’ve always mostly rolled solo), the final boss fight against Midgardsormr was one of my earliest experiences with really needing to “learn the dance,” so to speak, of the rotating attack choreography. Where to position yourself for what was GOING to be coming, as opposed to what IS coming, was suddenly imperative. All with “Primogenitor” playing in the background? Insert chef’s kiss here. Also, uhh, Einhander is in this dungeon.
I often wish I were a better writer. I mean, I’m sure everyone does, but especially me, and especially here: I want to truly convey just how much the pre-Heavensward patches were so incredibly spot-on, responsive, predictive, well-crafted productions… which may be funny to hear, because they’re often looked back upon by the community as massive slogs gating people from reaching the expansion.
I look back on that era of the game incredibly fondly. Just as I was growing as a player, so too were the writers, artists, animators, composers, etc. in their respective roles. We all found our footing together.
***
People often say “there’s never been a better time” to get into a long-running, well-established game like Final Fantasy XIV.
They’re not wrong; the game is always improving and making it easier to jump in.
They’re also totally wrong; the journey over time from the literal beginning is something special, and the things removed from the game are sometimes just as important to the journey as the things added.
I don’t think it’s possible to replicate four completely green PS3 players heading into a dungeon without keyboards.
I don’t think it’s possible for you to wander out into the leveling grounds without seeing a flying Christmas bear. Or the Regalia.
I don’t think it’s possible to replicate forming a Dhorme Chimera group with no Duty Finder.
I don’t think it’s possible to replicate the enormous amount of people challenging Svara’s three-step FATE out in Coerthas. (You’re lucky to see two people out there nowadays.)
I don’t think it’s possible to replicate the player base collectively walking into the game’s first expansion all at the same time. (You could perhaps make an argument for 1.0 to 2.0, but even with the mass destruction, it was largely still the exact same areas as before.)
You no longer need to level a sub-class to 15 in order to unlock the job expansion for your main class.
We used to have separate tank-DPS/tank-tank and healer-DPS/healer-healer stances.
Our teleportation menu didn’t list enough information.
There used to be bees here.
I’m know people say similar things about the early, halcyon days of World of Warcraft; there’s a huge audience for WoW Classic, of course. But you can never truly go back, and you can never truly offer that same experience to a new audience. And that’s fine. I don’t want it. I certainly don’t want 1.0 (not that I ever played it), but I don’t want 2.0 back, either.
And yet I wish I could share that time and that experience with everyone exactly as I remember it. That’s one of the biggest hurdles in game preservation these days, isn’t it? It’s no longer about the raw 0s and 1s of the game data itself (that problem has long-since been solved), but rather the people, the experiences, the atmosphere, the learning, the growth… is it even possible to preserve something so esoteric, so fleeting, so ethereal?
I think that aforementioned “canonical memory” of A Realm Reborn is perfect for me. Good ol’ tin can, sometimes green and sometimes yellow-spandex, naïve, under-geared Paladin wandering around Eorzea. You were the real hero.
***
Heavensward was amazing and a true step forward, Stormblood was good and even better in retrospect, and Shadowbringers was groundbreaking and revitalizing. This is all true.
But none of that would have been possible without the heavy lifting of A Realm Reborn. Sure, it’s bumpy, and we know that not everything was planned out from the start… but considering what they were able to shape it into, where Shadowbringers brought us, and where Endwalker promises to bring us and wrap things up… it really is a special little miracle of a game, isn’t it?
It’s a game that respects you, respects your time, and offers you as little or as much as you want. It’s beautiful, it’s memorable, it’s special, and I’m so glad to be a part of it. The whole saga is there for playing, complete in content, if not in its original state.
And that’s OK. In fact, it’s probably better this way.
For whatever it’s worth to whomever it is that’s still reading this drivel, Eorzea and Hydaelyn welcome you with open arms.
It’s no surprise that the pandemic hit us all in different ways. In this article I will share an in-depth summary of the last year and a half and all the emotions and life events that led up to the creation of this recipe…
…ahahaha nah. I’m not going to do that to you. Wow, you should have seen your face just then. Priceless.
For real, though, it was a decent time to experiment with drinks. The “infused” trend seems to be here to stay (and a quick search shows that CBD-infused drinks are the next new hotness because of course they would be), but for now let’s just work on something easy, something simple, and something affordable that you can do at home.
Ingredients
Here is literally everything you need to easily make your pecan-infused bourbon at home:
An oven
A baking sheet
Aluminum foil
Bourbon of choice (750 ml)
Pecans of choice (1 cup)
Something to measure 1 cup I suppose???
You might also want a funnel
An appropriately-sized container to soak it all in
Only a few ingredients. Simple instructions. Easy clean-up. Let’s do this!
Just Give Me the Short Version
Cool. 750 ml bourbon of your choice (something you already like, and something you also don’t mind altering the flavor of). One cup of regular pecan halves. Roast the pecans at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 minutes. Let them cool for 20-30 minutes. Put the roasted pecans and the bourbon in a container, cover it, and wait for three to five days. Enjoy. Repeat.
Need a little more hand-holding?
Step 1: Purchasing the Right Ingredients
The Pecans
Don’t waste your time cracking the shells on the big boys. You want regular pecan halves; not salted, not candied, not pre-roasted… just regular pecans here.
The regular plastic bin or bag of pecans at your local grocery store is totally fine; that’s what we used each time we’ve made this recipe. You’re looking at probably $6-8 depending on the amount here.
For the purposes of our recipe, you will need 1 cup’s worth; that’s going to be around 4 ounces if your packages are labeled that way. You will likely be purchasing in 6- or 8-ounce packages, which means you’ll have some extra. It’s a good snack to have to while you wait a few days! Or to make a second batch next week…
The Bourbon
The sky’s the limit, but let’s be reasonable here. We are going to be altering the taste of the bourbon a fair amount, so choose something you already like, but something you also don’t mind adding quite a bit of “oomph” to.
The default for me here is Knob Creek, regular nine-year aged bourbon. Woodford is also a decent choice. Something around this price range ($30-40ish) holds up against the pecan while still letting in the new flavor you’re introducing. It’s a bit of a balancing act. Don’t cheap out on it, but also don’t go nuts here.
Step 2: Roasting the Pecans
Measure out one cup of pecans (assuming you’re going to combine it with the full 750 ml of bourbon).
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s about 204 Celsius I guess?). Spread aluminum foil across a baking sheet. Don’t use any cooking spray or olive oil; the only flavor you want is the pecan. Spread in a single layer, and roast the 1 cup of pecans for 15 minutes. (Other recipes out there say 10-15; I’ve found that the extra time, if nothing else, makes the house smell better, but don’t go above 15 minutes.)
Step 3: Cool the Pecans
Take the pecans out of the oven and let them sit for around 20-30 minutes. Eat a couple. They’re great.
Step 4: Adding It All Together
The first time we made this recipe, we tested it with a much smaller amount, soaked the pecans in a glass bowl, and then four or five days later strained the pecans out and transferred the bourbon to a carafe. This is fine, especially if you feel like you’re not going to use up all the bourbon in a “timely” fashion (“timely” here being different for everyone…).
That said, these days we prefer to just dump everything straight into the carafe and keep it there, beginning to end. There is far less to clean and manage this way… and you’re going to like it so much, that it’s not going last in there for very long.
I used the Crate and Barrel “Mingle” decanter here; it looks like the “Jaxson” ($50) is their current version. These decanters hold ~32 fluid ounces, which is a perfect amount for the bourbon and the pecans.
So pick your container of choice, dump the toasted pecans in, dump the bourbon in, give it a stir or a swirl, cover it, and let it sit in a cool place.
Step 5: Wait and Watch Your Work!
You want to keep it stored away for three to five days. I’ve found three is the minimum to get that bite you’re looking for, and anything thing over five a bit too much.
Check out the color change over time! It’s pretty awesome.
Further Customization
You may see other recipes out there telling you to toss in a vanilla bean. I’ve never done that. I have no idea how it affects the flavor. I have no desire to do it. If you decide to go this route, let me know how it works out for you. Godspeed.
I just don’t think it needs anything else. It’s already perfect.
To Mix or Not to Mix
Can you make an old fashioned with pecan-infused bourbon? Of course you can! Should you? Well, that’s a personal choice.
I’ve done it, and it was fine, but the sweetness of the sugar and cherry kind of act as a cancellation to the stronger pecan flavor. If you’ve gone to such lengths, why muck it up? The style of bourbon you pick may already have hints of vanilla and caramel anyway, like the aforementioned Knob Creek.
I’m not above a cocktail, though, so if you want to make a cocktail with it, knock yourself out. I find it actually goes great as a replacement in a Jack and Coke, more so than as part of an old fashioned.
Personally, I think the pecan-infused bourbon is best served with a single large ice cube, and nothing more.
Can I Eat the Leftover Pecans?
Yeah, do it! I think they’re pretty good for a day or two after the bourbon’s gone. Your mileage may vary.
This Seems Like a Lot of Work
My dude, it’s only a couple minutes of work, 15 minutes of baking, waiting half an hour, and then drinking a few days later.
OK, fine.
Double pour of bourbon on the rocks (preferably just a couple small ice cubes or one large cube; don’t be that person with a full glass of ice). Drop three or four pecans in. Wait a couple minutes. Enjoy the quick and dirty version, which hopefully whets your thirst for the real deal.
I’ve always been a pretty casual “fan” of Giant Bomb: primarily a Bombcast (and later Beastcast) listener, and rarely a viewer of any video content. That… probably sounds bizarre considering what their primary output is, but I guess I’ve just always been a text-and-audio person, even when it comes to commentary on a visual medium. Strange, but if you follow me and the things I do online, that probably makes sense, right?
Trying to put my finger on when I first began following Giant Bomb is difficult. I don’t go back and re-listen to podcast episodes, so trying to think back, my earliest memories are probably of the recurring bits planning “raids” on Japan’s used game market. Ryan Davis’ passing was difficult to hear, and if that was 2013, that means I had already been following them for a while.
We launched the merged Kanzenshuu in 2012, so a lot of my Bombcast listenings are wrapped up in Kanzenshuu pre-production work memories. I think that’s why listening to Vinny, Brad, and Alex announce their respective departures this week, talk about what they built, being proud of it, hearing stories of the early basement days, and thinking about the future – both their own individual futures as well as that of the site – is really giving me some pause.
One thing I struggle with is trying to explain how happy I am that we never made Kanzenshuu “more” than it is, because that’s not the right way to explain it. With something like a website, you would probably assign a default meaning of “more” as being “turned it into a business.” We didn’t pivot to video. We didn’t selectively target other services. We didn’t ever put ads on the main website content.
Kanzenshuu isn’t a business, and despite some of the things we may want and need to do in the future, it’s never going to be a real business. That’s explicitly built into our mission and goal for the site. And because it’s not a business, there’s no chance of it ever being bought-out, sold, or managed in a way that isn’t of our own vision. For us, working “real jobs” while keeping Kanzenshuu as a hobby is what we all agree allows us to keep the same passion we’ve had since the 90s, and continuously reinvest that passion right back into it. We may not be regular, but we also never stop.
I’m exceptionally proud of us being able to stick it out as an old-school DIY “fansite” in an era where no-one even knows what websites are anymore. We believe that raw information and documentation (text will forever be the best format for this) is separate from commentary and personality: the former should be free and widely accessible and a labor of love by people working toward an unachievable yet worthwhile ideal, while the latter… eh, you do you, and hustle how you need to.
Our website is weirdly both of those, though: particularly with the launch of the podcast back in 2005, and looking ahead to the wiki in 20XX, we’re solidly split between documentation and commentary.
What that ultimately means is that Kanzenshuu – and its former incarnations – will forever be entwined with me, no-one can take it away from me (or my fellow co-founders), and I don’t think it’s possible for me to ever walk away from it. Even if there are breaks, we are Kanzenshuu forever.
So as I listen to personalities from a business I’ve followed say their goodbyes and pontificate about the future of the brand, I start worrying and wondering for myself about that same thing for my baby. I have a pretty good vision of where I want to take Kanzenshuu, and one thing I’m thankful for is that my comrades share not just that vision, but the timeline for it. We’re not going to have stuff done tomorrow, or next month, or maybe even next year. We’re old, and shit’s hard. But it’s always a work in progress, it’s always going to get better, and it’s always going to be there.
(I want to make explicitly clear that this is all what works for us. A documentation source with the full support of a backing corporate entity is [probably] totally doable, and I don’t inherently have anything against it at all. Same goes for legitimate anime/manga releases. There’s good, valid, even archival-quality stuff out there [see: Discotek]. That’s just not what we want to do.)
That ultimately means we’re never going to be the biggest, the most contemporary, or most recognizable, though.* I’ve been OK with and made peace with that since I let Planet Namek eat my lunch by launching a website with a real domain name in late 1998.
One thing I can guarantee is that in the end, after everything else, no matter what happens with whatever other online services may come and go, I’ll be there to help you figure out what Toriyama said on page 214 of Daizenshuu 6, when that preliminary release of V-Jump actually hit book store shelves in Japan, or where that image of Goku actually first originated.
And I’m going to still love doing it with friends and family by my side. You will keep referencing the Intended Endings Guide, translations archive, and rumor guide – and next up the wiki! – over the next several decades whether you like it or not!
(* One thing I love† doing is searching misspellings of Kanzenshuu and seeing people conflate us with official publications and hurl racial epithets at each other as they argue the nature of canonicity, with us indeed ultimately being the underlying source of whatever information they may or may not even remotely have a grasp on, generally two languages removed from their native one.)
When you find yourself with a free afternoon in Las Vegas, what better choice is there than to… *checks notes*… take a ride out to Chinatown Plaza…?
And so I did back in 2019, because and of course I would. I had to go see Sun Wukong!
The Theme: Journey to the West
Las Vegas’ Chinatown Plaza (4205 Spring Mountain Rd, Las Vegas, NV 89102) is only about two miles — roughly 10-15 minutes by car depending on traffic — directly west of the main strip. Originally opened in 1995, it’s theoretically host to Las Vegas’ largest concentration of Asian businesses. Their website claims the plaza’s “theme” is based on Journey to the West:
Well, when they say “theme,” what they really mean is “we have one big statue outside, and there are a couple other littered references.”
Outside and the Main Statue
The main statue – right in the center of the plaza, after you enter through the pagoda and in front of the main building – is pretty impressive. Maybe I’m just easily impressed by Journey to the West stuff. Wukong is up front, focusing his eyes on the journey ahead with his golden-hooped compliant rod ready at a moment’s notice. Tripitaka rides atop their horse (in actuality a dragon; it’s a long story), while Wujing and Bajie escort alongside and behind, respectively.
I found it pretty hard to capture the statue with my phone. I initially arrived somewhere around 10:00 a.m., and the sun was in a difficult position. If the light hit the statue just right, it really did appear golden. If not, it looked pretty dull.
Below the statue is a plaque which reads:
Journey to the West
Journey to the West is a mythological novel based on centuries of old popular stories. The novel tells of the amazing adventures of Priest Xuanzang and his three disciples, the irreverent monkey, the greedy but lovable pig, and a hard working river goblin as they go on the journey in search of Buddhist sutras. In spite of all the trials and tribulations along the way, they are successful in reaching their goal: the Palace in Western Heaven where Buddha lives. They become gods themselves and live happily ever after.
That’s a pretty decent, if not necessarily 100% accurate, simplification of the story!
One last outside angle: it’s a little jarring when you turn around, look back at the entrance, and see things like the electrical supply store across the way.
Inside: More Sun Wukong!
Inside the main building (the front entrance is down around to the right), you’re greeted by a pretty colorful setup with Wukong himself. I didn’t see any signs around here, but I’m assuming this is supposed to be Wukong in his original home, the Flower-Fruit Mountain with its Water-Curtain Cave.
And… well, that’s pretty much all I saw for Journey to the West stuff, except for one instance of Bajie at the Noodle Pot restaurant.
Unfortunately I arrived too early in the day for most of the restaurants to be open, so I survived for a bit on a coffee and snack from the tea house.
One store that WAS open, however, was the Great Wall Book Store, which was loaded with all the usual bootleg merchandise you would expect to see in any given Chinatown.
Anyw-… wait, computer, enhance:
I’m preeeeeeeetty sure that’s supposed to be West Kaioshin, who – let’s be honest here – only gets figures because of Toyble’s Dragon Ball AF.
I don’t know that I can really recommend going out of your way to check out the Chinatown Plaza in Las Vegas, especially after showing you literally everything there is for Journey to the West stuff. Maybe I missed something? I doubt it, because I really scoured the place looking for anything else to take photos of. Maybe when they hold events again it would be fun to check out?
More Mike + JttW
I’m spending a lot of time with Journey to the West again for a bunch of website/wiki work, which is what rekindled the memories of visiting Chinatown Plaza in Vegas. I know I tossed out some photos on Twitter at the time, but the blog definitely gives me a better space to share and expand upon things.
Until I’m ready for any of those pages to go live on Kanzenshuu, here are a couple things you can check out:
Episode #0249 of our podcast over on Kanzenshuu, where Jake (Herms) and I provided a Journey to the West primer, and then shared a few of our favorites stories and how they relate to Dragon Ball.
This old blog post with a crummy photo of Wukong from a local art exhibit. I would go back and take new photos, but the installation is long since gone.
