Tag Archives: music video

Anime Boston 2010 Panels Preview

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This past weekend was the deadline for panel applications at Anime Boston 2010. After spending the past few weeks brainstorming and cutting down ideas, I finalized 9 panels for this year. Hopefully a bunch of them will be accepted into the official schedule, but for now, here’s a preview of what might be in store from The Department of Alchemy. Note: the descriptions are extremely short, because the application was limited to 150 characters per panel, so if you want more informaiton on what the panel will include, leave a comment, and I’ll respond to your inquiry there!

Anime Boston 2010

New panels for 2010!

On the Road for Anime Pilgrimages
Many anime reference real-world locations, inspiring otaku to seek out these destinations. Come discover the significance of the “anime pilgrimage”!

Bite-Size Anime
Some anime don’t fit the film- or TV-length format, so we’ll take a look at these dwarfs: webisodes, music videos, anthologies, and all things short!

Hentai Manga: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
What makes a good ero-manga? We’ll show and support some of the funniest & more artistic adult comics (and hilariously bad, “imaginative” ones too).

Revamped panels for 2010!

After Cowboy Bebop: The Works of Shinichiro Watanabe
Many fans recognize Cowboy Bebop’s director, but let’s look at his other shows, from Macross Plus to Samurai Champloo to Genius Party and more!

Introduction to Anime Intro and Ending Themes
Today, many OP and ED themes are ignored! We’ll show the best and worst anime themes from Space Battleship Yamato to Evangelion to One Piece and more!

From Antisocial Loser to Economic Hero: The History of Otakudom
From the 1980s subculture, the concept of the obsessive fan has changed in Japan & America. Come learn the history of the fandom and its obsessions!

Chains, Trains, and Happy Endings: Japan’s Underground Sex Culture
The Japanese sex industry is pretty closeted, but here’s a peephole into host clubs, no-panty bars, hentai magazines, costume play, and love hotels.

Anime in Academia
Learn about new research, which resources are available, and what’s necessary to understand the history, trends, and meanings of anime and manga.

Impact of Evangelion
Neon Genesis Evangelion is the most successful Japanese animation ever. Come learn why Eva matters, and how it had such an impact on Japanese culture.

Cutting Up Wolverine: On Choreography & Film Technique

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I reluctantly went to see Wolverine with my girlfriend at the local theater in Fenway Friday night, but I walked out of the theater satisfied, quite contrary to my expectations. The move contained a solid storyline and, though many critics seem to disagree with the plot, I felt that the narrative fit the mood of an X-Men supplement. Many corny lines, lots of action, and a satisfying amount of cool mutant powers later, and I felt like I’d gotten my money’s worth plus an extra bit on the side.


The trailer to X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

However, I have one gripe about the film: its fight choreography.

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Xanadu and the Internet Memetics

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On May 26th 2008, Alex declared “Xanadu and the Internet Memetics” a great band name. So, if y’all steal it, I’m calling Creative Commons on you!

But, really, in this post I want to discuss Internet memes. Not in full — that was done well enough at ROFLCon, though the conversation will continue, especially at ROFLCon 2.0 (??). What I will talk about: On Thursday, Weezer released a music video for their new song, Pork and Beans, via YouTube. The theme? Internet memes.

If you haven’t heard already, the term ‘meme’ has hit mainstream, and Richard Dawkins even gave memes a new branch of academia: memetics. On Wikipedia, the “meme” is defined as a unit of cultural information. What kind of culture Jay Tron Guy Maynard, Tay Zonday, or Sneezing Panda are reflecting cannot be explicitly defined, unless we consider the Internet to have birthed its own culture (which I will discuss in a future article), but all of these Internet stars certainly can be classified as belonging to contemporary popular culture.

To wend a way back to Weezer… the music video encapsulates a general bird’s eye view of the popular Internet memes of the day. But can Weezer’s video exist as a separate meme entirely? To pose the real question: Is tallying Internet memes a new meme?

At the beginning of the year in a creative display of marketing to the digital niche, Mozilla uploaded a marketing video (also of the musical variety) which borrowed the talents of many Internet icons:

On April 2nd, a South Park episode aired in the show’s twelfth season featuring a number of famous Internet memes:

view it here until I can embed it into WordPress

In another example, Meth Minute 39 produced a short, animated tribute to the same memes:

If you visit MM39′s website, they wrote a chicken-or-the-egg post about whether or not MM39′s video had influenced Weezer’s own. Originality is difficult to define online — hence the brouhaha concerning intellectual property rights, or the term “public commons” — but it seems here that these videos all fall under the category of Internet metameme. (Or maybe I should rename that, since Christian Lander hates the prefix meta-.)