The other day, US president Barack Obama, in his good-will tour of the far east, committed the
insufferable social gaffe of spreading good will. Specifically, while meeting Japan’s emperor, he
bowed at the waist in an approximation of the traditional Japanese gesture of greeting for a respected
figure. I say an approximation because, traditionally, one does not also shake hands while doing so,
which Obama did in this instance, but neither he nor the meaningless figurehead monarch seemed to
mind the fact that Obama bowed any more than the Emperor minded shaking hands. It was very much
a meet-you-half-way sort of gesture of politeness which no reasonable or rational human being could
honestly find fault with.


It should therefore come as no surprise, then, to learn that former US vice president and current
professional whiner, Dick Cheney, found fault with this, saying that America’s enemies would see in
this simple gesture of politeness a weakness which they could exploit. How demeaning and belittling
the sitting US president in this way is supposed to have weakened America less than seeing him act in
a polite manner is a little bit vague, as is the question of why, if Cheney is so concerned with
America’s president appearing strong, Cheney does everything in his power to weaken him a little bit
more each day. How, also, these un-named but presumably dark-skinned enemies might go about
exploiting this weakness is not a detail which he saw fit to elabourate upon; perhaps he envisions them
sending a group of Japanese emperors into the battlefield, and then, when American forces, emulating
their Commander In Chief, bowed before them, the enemy forces could take advantage of the
momentary distraction by opening fire upon them.

The more realistic* scenario is that Cheney woke up in the morning, rose from his coffin, ate his
traditional breakfast of freshly-plucked baby hearts boiled in a broth of virgins’ tears, and then
searched “Obama” on Google News to see what specific act there was in the news that day which
Cheney could publicly criticize. Finding Obama bent at the waist in one of the photographs, he grunted
“Guess that’ll have to do”, and had his bug-eating manservant call around to the usual media outlets to
see who would give him a platform for the criticisms he was even then formulating.

Indeed, I envision a parallel universe which is in all way identical to our own, save that at that moment,
Obama chose not to bow, but rather simply to shake hands. I envision, in that universe, Cheney having
words somewhat along these lines:

“President Obama’s failure to observe something as simple but as important as this culturally-
significant gesture indicates precisely what myself and others have been saying about him for some
time now. It shows his ignorance, his arrogance and his elitism. I think that America’s enemies will see
this failure on his part as a sign of weakness, if you will, and one which they can exploit. A president
which cannot be bothered to understand foreign cultures, as President Obama has shown himself to be
today, is one which will also be unable to understand the threats posed by certain radical elements
within foreign cultures. It is precisely this sort of inexperience that should have precluded him from
holding an office he is plainly unqualified and unprepared to hold, and this sort of hubris and self-
importance which keeps him so out of touch with the world around him.”

In two other, somewhat more distant parallel realities, in both of which John McCain won the 2008
presidential election, wherein McCain met with the emperor of Japan and, in one, bowed before him,
and in the other did not, the Dick Cheneys of these worlds had nothing whatsoever to say on the topic,
recognizing it as so trivial as to be unworthy of comment.

*It's all relative, really.

For those somehow as yet unaware of this shtick, I will occasionally take the tawdry straw of Japanese hentai (or "pornographic", to us anglophones) comics, and spin of them the purest of comedy gold. I do so under the pen name of Newdog15, for reasons which I explained here.

These posts, naturally, are ever so slightly not-safe-for-work, but I consider this a moot point in large part because, really, who's going to be reading something like this at work? Crazy people, and people with private offices, that's who.

Anyways. As always, enjoy, and by all means, let's have some feedback. It's a little more high concept than some I've done (which is saying something!), but I feel it does its job well.




( many additional pages below the cut! )

A while ago, my friend Ray brought over a DVD of a movie entitles “Sukiyaki Western Django.” I had never heard of it, and Ray seemed oddly hesitant about sharing it. It was plain that he wanted to do so, not only in that he wished to watch it himself, but I think, wisely, he did not wish to watch it alone.

This was very wise of him.

Sukiyaki Western Django, you see, is not a good movie. Moreover, it’s the sort of movie which is so spectacularly ill-conceived that it is honestly difficult to imagine why anyone would think it could ever be a good idea. The fact that it could go all the way through the production process without anyone ever stopping said production and saying “Hold on, wait. Are we really sure this is a good idea?” is genuinely mystifying to me. Don’t get me wrong: As I’ve quite recently demonstrated, (and indeed less-recently demonstrated), I understand the appeal of coming up with outlandishly bad ideas for cinematic productions. The difference is, I would not then go about putting these ideas into practice. Herein lies one of various differences between myself and the creative minds behind this unimaginable train-wreck of a film.

Let’s start with the basics. The movie is set in some sort of bizarre version of mid-1800s Nevada. It’s plainly an old west town, in some sense, because of the set dressing and general atmosphere. The populace of the town, however, is less equivocal in this respect. For you see, they’re all Japanese. All of them. And not only are they all Japanese, they’re obviously native Japanese speakers. You can tell this because they speak English with extremely, and indeed sometimes incomprehensibly, thick Japanese accents. The reason for this is obscure. Are they meant to be first-generation Japanese immigrants? If so, why – when there does not appear to be a single native English speaker in town – do they not speak their native Japanese in their own company? This question is not addressed at any point during the movie.

From a production standpoint, a conceit such as this is fairly eyebrow-raising: What audience did they think they were serving by this approach? An English-speaking audience isn’t going to benefit from an entire cast of actors who not only don’t speak English very well, they seem in some cases not to be able to speak the language at all; it appears that at least a few of them are pronouncing lines which they had memorized phonetically, with no knowledge of what they were actually saying. To say that this limited the amount of pathos they could bring to the roll is an understatement. A Japanese audience, likewise, would seem to be better-served by a cast who actually speaks Japanese; even an audience who craves the authenticity involved with having cowboys speaking English is likely to balk at one which does so in such an obviously inauthentic manner.

Although to call them “cowboys” might be a little bit of a stretch: They dress in a manner which seems more closely in line with modern Japanese street gangs, while simultaneously apparently being members of mediaeval Japanese Samurai clans. This bizarre mish-mash of elements blend together remarkably poorly, even as a sort of alternate-universe type of setting.

It also bears pointing out that there is one single exception to the above casting decisions, in the person of one Mr, Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino’s role is probably the single most baffling element of the entire film. Not only is he the only native english speaker in the film, this point is never brought up by any of the characters involved. He stands out like a sore thumb who is speaking perfect english in a sack full of Japanese-speaking sore thumbs. Moreover, his role makes not one lick of sense. He appears at the beginning of the film as a young man, and after a brief introductory segment, he begins to tell a story from long ago, which turns out to be the rest of the movie. Incomprehensibly, however, he also appears later on as an elderly version of the same character. Allow me to stress this point by means of the ancient art of “all caps” thus: DURING THE COURSE OF THE STORY HE IS TELLING AS A YOUNG MAN, HE APPEARS AS A VERY OLD MAN IN A BIZARRE MECHANICAL WHEELCHAIR. He concludes his appearance as an old man by remarking to the man he’s speaking to “I suppose I shall always remain an Anime Otaku.”

It was at this point that I turned to Ray and said to him “This movie is crazy.” And it was understood between he and I that I wasn’t speaking in a kindly or jolly manner. I meant it made no fucking sense. No explanation for any of the many baffling parts of this are ever offered.

And you know, if they had decided to run with this sort of “LOL, Random!” humour, it could have redeemed the movie and made it bearable. It really could have. Ray and I began to speculate: If the cowboys are all Japanese, then maybe the “Indians” could all be blonde-haired Russians, who play their ancient and traditional player pianos out in the desert. Perhaps the Mexicans could be Irishmen. If they went that way, it could have become genuinely fun and enjoyable. But no. Aside from Tarantino’s bizarre and inexplicable appearance, everyone, cowboy and Indian alike, are poorly-spoken and badly-acted Japanese people.

This movie is so spectacularly bad that it probably-unintentionally succeeds in being sort-of-kind-of good in the sense that, while I didn’t enjoy the movie itself, I enjoy COMPLAINING about it. And to that extent, it might be worthwhile to watch with a group of friends who go into the experience with the intention of mocking it during the course of the viewing.

There is certainly nothing else redeeming about this overwhelming clusterfuck of a production, which honestly places alongside Battlefield Earth in terms of ill-conceived abominations of film-making.

After a five month long wait, I have ready to present to you, o lovers of ribaldry and pornography as mixed unto a single pasty consistency, and offering which I take singular pleasure both in having created, and in now presenting to you. By all means, enjoy.




( Seventeen additional fun-filled pages of laughter and unease below thecut! )Comments, as always, are both welcomed and appreciated.

Apparently Warren Ellis (best-known to the masses as the writer of Transmetropolitan) is writing a crazy anime-style Iron Man series. The trailer looks fucking fantastic, and I have always LOVED Ellis's take on Iron Man. This looks exceptionally promising. If the series lives up to the promise of this trailer, I can very, very easily see myself buying DVDs of this one.

I'm especially impressed by the fact that the localization is being kept to really reasonable levels; from what I've heard, it has Tony Stark travelling to Japan (rather than being a Japanese teenager or somesuch nonsense), and they're plainly using an Adi Granov design for the armour, which I think establishes on a global scale the truth that everyone can agree that Granov is by far the best Iron Man artist of all time.

Oh, this is some kind of wonderful.

Good day, friends and fellows! As promised, my latest re-write is ready for consumption by the public! 

For those of you new and unfamilliar with the process, allow me to explain in brief: For reasons of my own - principal among them the entertainment of those depraved souls out there in the ether who share my comic sensibilities - I have taken to taking japanese horrific pornography and turning them into english-language pornographic horrors, and in so doing, crafting the finest of comedy gold.

Previous such works are to be found here.

And now, without further delay...



( Seventeen additional pages below the cut!  )

My latest pornography-turned-comedy re-write is at long, long last complete, and ready for presentation. Enjoy! 



( (Sixteen pages - all of them uncensored - below the cut) )As always, it is my sincere hope that you, my treasured readeers have enjoyed the fruits of my labours. Comments, as always, are both welcome and required.

Rejoice and be merry! Less than a month after the release of Luck be an Empty Vessel for my Poisonous, Flesh-Destroying Seed Tonight, comes the Newdog15's most politically-charged thriller of all time...

For this masterwork, I am joined by a dear friend, one Doctor Ultimo, who I have for some eight years now hoped to collaborate with creatively. Alas, for all his towering intellect and sparkling wit, never has his genius been committed to text in this form before. Frankly, I suspect that his never-ending one man war on his hated enemy, the wicked King of Portugal, has dominated so much of his time that such pursuits have been frankly impossible. With the completion of this work, however, he has tasted the sweet juice of the fruit of success and found it pleasing. Already he speaks of our next collaboration. I can only hope the oppressed people of Portugal can afford to go without their living folk hero for another few days in the near future.

Now, without further ado...
( Click, dear readers, and hear a tale of sinister foreign powers and the brave men who stand against them! )

It bears pointing out, it seems to me, in the interests of prudence, that the above link perhaps ought not to be clicked upon whilst at your workplace, as some of the images in the tale woven therein have some faintly sexual undertones, which - depending upon your employer - may not reflect favourably upon your place in the workforce.

After far, far too long a delay, my latest opus is at long last complete and ready for consumption by a public no doubt shuddering with need and quivering with barely-contained anticipation.

Read and enjoy, dear friends. And do remember: This work, as with anything I ever have or ever shall present within the NewDog15 body of work, is quite spectacularly not safe for work.




( Read on, dear readers, read on! The bringer of jolity demands it! )

Have you heard of the newly-released Megaman 9? Capcom has made an awesome decision, I feel.

See, people have for years now been requesting a new Megaman game... and a game in the ORIGINAL series; not Megaman X, not Megaman Battle Network, not Megaman Legends. Now, Capcom has looked at these requests and tried to understand them. All of these newer series have been basically the same, but with various improvements, you know? So why are people demanding a new instalment in the original and inferior series?

They eventually decided that what people were looking and asking for was basically "Give us more of our childhood experience again!" And so Capcom decided to do exactly that: They made the brand-new Megaman 9 in 8 Bit style, using the engine for Megaman 2, with the same style of graphics and music and everything.

I applaud their insight and just sheer balls in making this decision. Japan, I take back, like, 30% of every bad thing I've ever said about you.

I've made no secret of my love of the original Megaman games. As I've said before, Megaman 2 was the first Nintendo game I ever owned, and I played it obsessively for months after I got it. The idea of this sort of return to form is extremely enticing to me. I've been planning on getting a Playstation 3 for some time now, and when I do (and how hillarious is it that I should need a BETTER, NEWER system than the Playstation 2 I still have in order to play this?), this is going on my first-purchase list.

I've been humming and hawing about whether or not to post about this for some months now (in part because I know there are some people, like my mother, who read this journal and who really, really wouldn't "get" what I'm doing here), but my need to share the bizarre fruits of my genius is such that I cannot in all good conscience keep it to myself  any longer(if one uses the phrase "in all good conscience" interchangeably with "stand the lack of attention derived in the event that I"). 

First some background: There is a country which we call Japan. Japan is strange and bad. Their pornography is in particular an assault upon the functions of the human mind. I've often said that anything which comes out of Japan must - in addition to whatever other function a given product or service may serve - work to erode the concept of human dignity. Japanese shoes? They must encase your feet and erode human dignity. Japanese cars? They must drive you from place to place and erode human dignity. Japanese toothpaste? It must clean your teeth and erode human dignity. Their pornography? Well, you get the idea. Orgasms and degradation, you know. 

And then there's the North American fan community for these things. There is a large community of people who dedicate themselves to the task of accurately and faithfully translating this Japanese pornography for consumption by an english-speaking audiences. Additionally, there is a community of "re-writers" whose skill in the english language is only slightly greater than their entirely nonexistent skills in Japanese. They provide "re-writes" of these pornographic works which are entirely unconcerned with the original text or story of the works they're plastering their appalling english text over-top of. Most notorious and prolific of these is a fellow known as "OldDog51". 

A few months ago, I decided I would begin to create my own parody re-writes; making mockery of both the original content AND of the terrible re-writes of them, crafting an online identity as "NewDog15", and going out and about to seed the internet with this business. The reactions have been nearly uniformally positive; I have not shown these to one person who has not found them to be hilarious. This having been said... they remain, at their core, Japanese pornography. So while they're to be read as comedy and not as masturbatory aids, there will be those more sensitive among my readers who might find the content a trifle uncomfortable (and indeed, depending upon where you live, possibly even illegal) to view. So you know. Fair warning. 

Edit: Both of my early re-writes are now more-or-less permanently hosted here and here .

Are you familliar with Dada artwork?

It was this art movement in the early 20th century, created in part by a french artist named Marcel Duchamp. I won't go into great detail as to the history and origins of the art movement; if you want to know more, just click some of the above links. What I'm more interested in here is the spirit of Dada.

Dada is basically all about taking substanceless crap and - through subverting and corrupting it, either in presentation or in form - create some new peice of artwork out of it. Probably the first example of Dada artwork came in the form of Duchamp's "The Fountain", in which he yanked a urinal out of the wall of an art show he was judging, signed the name "R. Mutt" onto it, named it "The Fountain", and declared it the winner of the show, saying "Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.".

Dada took on a lot of different forms over the years; it was never about the specific medium so much as it was about the gesture of contempt for a genre or body of work. One of the questions about almost any Dada artwork that inevitably comes up is "Are we supposed to like the actual creation, or the mere act of corruption and subversion?" The great thing about dada is that that question is meaningless; the two concepts are inseperable and indistinguishable.

Today, the spirit of Dada lives on. I've seen two videos on Youtube which I feel are worthy successors to the legacy of Dada. The first is Japanese...



The second is an actual, honest-to-goodness American presidential campaign video from former senator Mike Gravel...

 

...which I feel shows the appropriate contempt and subversion of the medium and substanceless crap of American campaign videos.

 

 For years now, I've been telling people that the only possible explanation of modern Japanese culture is that they've been thoroughly infiltrated at the highest levels of their society by Illithids. They hate humanity, you see, and here we can see them using their Japanese proxies to communicate this fact to the world at large. Doing so, I believe, is a great source of amusement for the Mind-Flayer over-class which rules over Japan; they set their human thralls about the task of demeaning the human condition and eroding all human dignity - a task which the Japanese have become uniquely skilled at - in order to serve the overall Illithid agenda of breaking the wills of the human race, so as to facilitate their eventual consumptions of all of our brains. 

It is with this in mind that I view Japanese culture with a unique combination of fascination and bottomless, endless, dread.

I was about eight paragraphs into writing a post about how I was washing my hands of all harem anime forever, when it became clear how little I had to say on the topic which wasn't said in the Wikipedia entry on the subject which I was linking to anyways. So: I invite you to read this and share in my contempt. 

All I really have to say on the topic which isn't said there, I say here: 

I recently watch the long, long, long-awaited conclusion of Tenchi Muyo: Ryo-Ohki! (which finally concluded after about a seven year hiatus), and was disgusted by the fact that they couldn't be bothered to resolve the romantic tension which WAS THE ENTIRE SUBSTANCE of the plot up to that point! I get it. I know. It's not commercial to resolve these things. But if, as stated, it is their earnest intention to have the series finished, then fuck commercial. Fuck stringing the audience along. Finish the story and give us some motherfucking satisfaction. 

A year or so back, I watched the end of the Sabre Marionette J series, which was similar, though considerably more sophisticated. It was a fucking harem anime, too. But at least by the end, it addressed the weakness of the genre. The three girls who were vying for the affections of the male lead finally confronted him and just accused him of being a selfish coward for refusing to choose one of them and make a commitment; his excuse, that he liked them all, was nothing but self-indulgent bullshit. He considered this, and admitted it was true. And he made a choice. The writers, though, coped out, by having some backgound noise drown out his words, and at no point was the choice he made made evident, since all three girls ended up getting killed right afterwards. I applaud the choices of the characters, since it reflected what I thought of the genre, but the cowardace of the writers, who didn't want to offend the two-thirds of the audience who weren't rooting for that particular hook-up remained contemptable. No, it wasn't even cowardace. They just did what was commercial. They did what they needed to in order to sustain their fandom. In that sense, it's not their fault. It's the fault of the fans. 

Fucking anime fans. Their small-minded, emotionally immature bullshit keeps many a potentially-quality story from having satisying conclusions. 

So I'm done with the lot of them. I wash my hands of the genre. It exists to pander to the needs of people whose needs, within their fiction, are diametrically opposed to my own. They need for there to never be a conclusion, so that the romantic resolution which they've projected themselves into is never concluded. I don't require this, because I don't give a shit about living vicariously through a bunch of fucking cartoon characters. I just want to see a good story. Is that too much to ask? 

Well, apparantly in this genre it is. So fuck 'em all. 

Hey, only six paragraphs this time. Much better.