Tag: Art

A Few of My Favorite (Christmas) Things…

Published by J. Robert Matthewson on December 14, 2025

A Dragon skull wearing a Santa hat, a plush unicorn head with icy star garland around its neck, and a fairy door

Ho Ho Yo! Happy Holidays to one and all, regardless of what you celebrate, how you celebrate it, or even if you don’t celebrate anything at all. 2025 has been… uh… interesting, so this post isn’t just Content™, but also a chance to add a little positivity to the last couple weeks of this weird year by sharing a few of my favorite things that I associate with the season.

Favorite Christmas Special/Movie

Let’s start with one of the staples, as most of us who celebrate the holiday have an opinion on what is and isn’t a “Christmas” movie and which ones are all-time classics. While I won’t get into either of those debates, I do have two favorites. One I consider a more “Traditional-style” Christmas movie in tone and theme and one that’s a bit more off-kilter.

A lot of people consider A Muppet Christmas Carol to be a masterpiece and Sir Michael Caine’s performance as Scrooge is up there in all-time great portrayals (Though I’m more partial to Sir Patrick Stewart’s take on the character), but when I think of Muppets and Christmas, my first thought always goes to 1987’s A Muppet Family Christmas.

This might be the Endgame of Muppet specials considering that it features the Muppets, their CTW brethren from Sesame Street, and the Mother-lovin’ Fraggles. Watch that icy patch.

My other favorite is actually an awful movie, but it was salvaged (and savaged) by a pair of wise-crackin’ robots and their hapless human companion stranded in space by a pair of mad scientists. Come, gather ’round as we watch Joel, Tom Servo, and Crow riff to smithereens the cinematic disasterpiece Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

Favorite Christmas Song

For many years I had a deep loathing of Christmas Music. I spent eight years of my late teens and early-20s working retail in an actual brick and mortar mall. From mid-November until January 2nd, I was deluged with Christmas music for 8-12 hours a day. I still avoid prolonged exposure to the holly jolly tunes, but at least my eye no longer twitches at hearing Feliz Navidad.

That said, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t have at least a few favorite tunes. Mostly ones that are a bit quirkier and played much less often by radio stations. In regard to the classic carols, I hold a fondness for The Muppets (Can you tell I was a child of the 80s?) and John Denver banging out their version of The 12 Days of Christmas, Bah bum bum bum bum…

When it comes to more original faire, I have a trio of interesting, quirky, and just plain weird songs I look forward t hearing upon December’s arrival.

First, is the Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping

Next up is The Royal Guardsmen’s Snoopy’s Christmas

Lastly, let’s get Weird (and pretty violent) with “Weird” Al Yankovic’s The Night Santa Went Crazy

Okay, moving on from media, let’s talk Christmas food.

Favorite Christmas Food

Most people associate Christmas with carving a nice roasted turkey or baked ham, or if really old-school, a fattened goose.

I think of fish.

Specifically, fried smelts. As a kid, I always remember a large platter of these crispy, small fish at my extended family’s Christmas Eve gatherings. If I ever get haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Past and we stop by one of those nights, I’m taking an entire to-go box of these suckers with me.

Favorite Christmas Cookie

I’m a simple man and when it comes to cookies, I’m what many would call “a basic bitch.” I come from the land of Wedding Cookie Tables, and I can pack away ladylocks, buckeyes, and snickerdoodles like the love child of Pac-Man and Kirby. When it comes to Christmas time though, just give me a plate of Frosted Sugar Cookies, a big glass of Chocolate milk and leave me to it. I’m not saying I would fight Santa if someone left a plate of these on Christmas Eve, but… well, actually, yeah, I would.

Favorite Ornament

So, the tree my spouse and I trim every year is an eclectic mix of childhood ornaments, tributes to our hometown, and assorted nerdery. One of absolute favorites is just a simple ball, but the story it tells is over 40 years old and is as much a part of my childhood as Charlie Brown’s sad Christmas tree or Boris Karloff lying to Cindy Lu Who’s stupid-adorable face.

Eat’n Park is a western Pennsylvania institution and in 1982 the restaurant created what would be its holiday icon.

It’s been recreated on T-shirts, postcards, coffee mugs, and yes, Christmas ornaments. For over 40 years that star has been helped to the top of the tree, reminding us that we all could use a helping hand, not only this time of year, but all year round.

Notable Gifts

I won’t say “Favorite Gifts” because every gift I’ve ever received is appreciated in the spirit in which it was given. However, that doesn’t mean that some gifts don’t hold particular places of honor in my home or heart. I still remember, as a kid, tearing away the wrapping paper and holding in my little Ghostbustin’ hands the object I most desired in 1987…

Kenner's Ecto-1 toy in box from The Real Ghostbusters action figure line — Who you gonna call?

Sadly, like 99.9% of my childhood possessions, it ended up in a charity garage sale and is long gone. I could always rebuy it with my middle-aged disposable income, but frankly, it wouldn’t be the same and it would really just take up space we don’t have. Luckily, as an adult, I received a pretty nice (and much smaller) replacement on another Christmas afternoon…

Of course, if we’re talking about gifts I’ve received as an adult, then my Awesomely Amazing™ (and Amazingly Awesome™) Spouse provided me the gift that never fails to bring a smile to my face (well, OTHER that their presence in my life)…

A renaissance-style portrait of a noblewoman with a cat's head — Lady Lily

A renaissance-style portrait of a nobleman with a cat's head. Cat is sticking out his tongue — Lady Lily

They commissioned Renaissance-style portraits of our Fur-kids, Lily and Burghie. These immediately went up in the place of honor in our front room so anyone who enters our home knows that A.) we’re love our kids and B.) we’re both huge dorks.

Well, it’s time for me to catch a sleigh outta here. I got several inches of “Winter Wonderland” to shovel off my sidewalks and driveway from a pre-Christmas blizzard that rolled through last night. I’ll most likely post here again after the holidays with a 2025 year in review. Have a Happy Holiday season and may it be, if not joyful, at least stress-free.

A skeletal dragon model standing next to some Christmas Trees — The Christmas Draco-lich says “Happy Holidays One and All!”

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Let the 6 weeks of not giving a f*** about my diet commence!

Published by J. Robert Matthewson on November 24, 2025

The Staff of Aburaya bringing forth a feast from Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away.

American Thanksgiving is upon us and thus kicks off six weeks of perpetual “cheat” days as we barrel full speed into that glorious amorphous blob of weeks lovingly referred to as “The Holidays.”

I’m not one to go gung-ho over Christmas and I’m firmly of the belief that the famous fat man needs to stay away until at least the turkey carcass has been carted away. That said, there are things about this whole time of year that I do enjoy and look forward to. I love decorating the house the weekend after Thanksgiving with my Spouse, blasting nerdy Christmas music, drinking hot cocoa and figuring out which geeky ornaments make the cut this year for the tree. Giving gifts to friends is something I like doing, even if sometimes it’s frustratingly hard to find the quote-unquote “perfect” one for them.

But tops of the list is the food, both consuming and preparing. From making Pecan Pie for Thanksgiving to helping figure out our contributions to various holiday meals, tis the season to nom often and voraciously. Yeah, I know, the guy who dedicated maybe 20% of his first novel to descriptions of food likes to eat. Shocking, I’m sure.

Anyway, in honor of the season, I’d like to use this space to share what I’m thankful for in 2025.

First, for the 19th year in a row, I’m most thankful for my amazingly awesome (and awesomely amazing) spouse, S. E. Robertson/C. A. Moss. Having them in my life, makes it better and they help make ME want to be a better person.

Next, I’m incredibly thankful that I was able to finally achieve the dream that sat unfulfilled for 30+ years and published my first novel. I am thankful for anyone who gave it a chance and especially thankful for those who had kind things to say about my debut effort.

I’m thankful that I’m back in therapy and seemed to have found a therapist that is a good fit for me and what I need right now. 2025 was a rough one, mental health-wise, but I feel like I’m starting to right the ship as we approach 2026.

Lastly, I’m thankful that I’m finally, if slowly, finding my feet again writing-wise and have begun earnestly crafting the next novel. Expect to hear more about that in this space in 2026.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we still have 6 weeks or so of 2025 and that means holiday sales and deals! I’ll be participating in Smashwords’ End of the Year Sale. I’ll be back with more details on that next week.

Lastly, as we are about to be inundated with mistletoe and holly 24/7 (if you aren’t already), I just had to share the strangest and yet most delightful interpretation of the holiday season’s most famous icon. May I introduce you to a Santa… with muscles?

Blu-Ray of the cinematic trainwreck from noted racist, Hulk Hogan, Santa with Muscles.

No! Not him! (Seriously, fuck that dead racist.)

Kazushige Sanda, Shiori Fuyumura, and Hitoshi Amaya from "SANDA" from Science Saru

This guy! Jolly Ol’ Saint Kick Your Ass. Jacked Frost. Badass Santa. Kazushige Sanda.

Once again, my spouse has found another bizarre, but utterly amazing Anime for us to consume and SANDA is quite possibly the most interesting interpretation of Santa Claus I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience. If you have a Prime subscription, it’s worth checking out. At least it’ll give you another reason to use it until Fallout season 2 starts.

Okay, that’s gonna wrap up things here until after Turkey Day. If you celebrate, whether with blood family, chosen family, or found family, I hope the holiday and the whole upcoming season stress-free and there is joy to be found for you and yours.

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Summer Anime Season 2025: A Retrospective

Published by J. Robert Matthewson on October 5, 2025

Okay, after all that waxing angst, I thought that it would be nice to use this space to also talk about the things that make me happy that don’t necessarily involve writing and… uh… writing about them.

Anyway…

The Summer anime season just wrapped up and the Fall shows are just starting, so I thought it’d be neat to share what my spouse and I watched the last 3 months or so, which ones we enjoyed, and which were meh.

Anne Shirley

Let’s start with one that actually began during the spring season and continued through the summer. Anne Shirley is a 24-episode adaption of three of L.M. Montgimery’s Anne Novels, Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island.

I never read the books as a kid or as an adult, but I fell in love with this show. Sweet and very slice-of-life in a time before smart phones, A.I. and social media. I give this one my highest recommendations for both fans of the books and complete strangers to the characters and world. It’s just so damn well done from the opening theme to animation to the pacing.

Dan Da Dan Season 2

This one was probably one of my most anticipated shows this last season, the first season completely catching me off guard and quickly becoming one of my favorites of the last 10 years by a wide margin. The second season did not disappoint, expanding the cast in interesting and fun ways while never losing focus on the true heroes in Momo and Okurun who retain their championship for most adorkable couple in anime after season one.

My Dress Up Darling Season 2

Which brings us to the only couple with a chance to challenge for that belt in the form of Marin and Gojo. We had watched the first season after it had come and gone after seeing some positive reviews and fell in love with the characters and premise. Honestly, the best and most refreshing thing about both this show and Dan Da Dan was how they both treated their females leads as people and not eye candy or prizes for the male protagonists, which is something more Shonen and Seinen series would benefit from emulating.

Sakamoto Days Part 2

Sakamoto Days is sorta guilty pleasure shonen show for me. It’s basically what if John Wick became a family man, let himself go, and was still the worst’s deadliest hitman. It’s cartoonishly violent, features a million one-shot antagonists with weird gimmicks and a million other side characters with even weirder gimmicks. Honestly, it’s dumb. Very, VERY dumb. But like dumb in that fun way that doesn’t make you feel dumb for watching or even enjoying it. I’m AM enjoying it and looking forward to Part 3, but I’m not staring at the calendar counting down the days.

Turkey! Time to Strike

Turkey! Time to Strike was quite possibly the oddest duck this season. First off, as this was an anime original and not based on a manga or light novel, no one had any idea what the story was about until it finally aired. When the first trailer came out, it was presented as a “Cute Girls X Hobby” anime about a high school girl’s bowling team with all the expected drama of both being teenage girls and being on a sports team.

So, it was only at the end of the first episode that everyone learns that the studio absolutely and completely bait and switched the audience.

It’s not a “Cute Girls X Hobby” anime. Well, it is, but it’s also actually a “Time-Travel X Isekai X Cute Girls X Hobby” anime, when our five protags find themselves transported via magical pin reset mechanism to medieval Japan (The Sengoku period to be exact). From there an adventure commences as our heroes have to figure out a way back to the 21st century without wrecking the future and their possible existences.

Also, they still bowl. Like, A LOT. It’s still a bowling anime, albeit, for sometimes utterly bizarre reasons.

And it’s GOOD. Like it’s a genuinely fun watch even if you find yourself asking several times “Yeah, but why BOWLING?!” The characters are, for the most part, fun and not annoying or grating. The story itself is pretty good and even with so much potential to go completely off the rails and crash and burn before the end, it manages to actually stick the landing, though not perfectly.

Honestly, this was a bizarre and fun idea, and I can respect it for taking risks in a genre that seems strangely averse to doing such. That said, this show would’ve definitely benefitted if it had been 24 episodes (or 26, if you’re an Old-taku like me and remember when that was the standard length of almost 90% of shows). With 10 protagonists total, basically all the character development feels either very rushed or inadequate. Honestly, I almost feel like 2-4 characters were unnecessary and served no purpose other than to check off a box on the archetype checklist, which is a shame as I would have liked to spend more time with some of them to really understand them as people.

With all that said, I do recommend it. It was fun and weird and sometimes that’s all you really want. Though, I’d still like a straight up bowling anime one day.

City: The Animation

City is another odd duck. It’s a comedy and there were several times I found myself genuinely laughing hard. But there were just as many times that I found myself staring at the screen, baffled. It’s very Japanese in its humor and some of the best jokes were meta humor around anime and manga itself. I don’t regret watching it, but I’m not sure I would recommend it to everyone.

With You and the Rain

This was both a strange, and yet very grounded show. A writer adopts a stray tanuki and they cohabitate as pet owner and pet. It’s slow, sometimes sweet, and there’s always a hint of surrealism in every episode. It’s very much in the vein of The Masterful Cat is Depressed Again Today and if you liked that, I’d definitely recommend this.

Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon

The last in our flock of odd ducks, we’ve got another Isekai with a bizarre premise. A Vending Machine otaku (Yes, they do exist) dies and is transported to a fantasy world as an actual vending machine. I’m always a fan of shows with bizarre premises and am happy with creators take chances. That said, I do think Season 1 was much stronger because it focused on our protag, Boxxo, learning about both his new body and the world he’s found himself in. This season, he’s pretty much established and figured out how to communicate, move, and fight and its settling into a pretty standard comedy fantasy, it’s just that the hero is, again, a vending machine. I’ll watch season three when it comes out, but it might fall into that category of shows that we watch when we don’t have a full itinerary for the season.

Kids on the Slope

This show is already over a decade old and came out in 2012, but we watched it over the last 4-5 months, so I wanted to at least bring up a few feelings I had on it.

Feeling one: I wish they would’ve pulled the trigger and actually made this a queer coming of age story set in the 60s. Then again, considering how campy they made the one queer-coded character, maybe it would’ve ended up a total disaster instead of a mild-disappointment.

Feeling two: Die in a fire, Brother Jun. You’re 60’s hipster trash along with many other kinds of trash. I hate you and I am glad I never have to see you again.

Okay, that pretty much covers the anime we just watched last season. We have about a half dozen lined up for the upcoming Fall season and a few on the back burner should we need a show to watch during our down time. If you like this kind of content, and want to see more like it, drop me an email or a DM/Comment on my Bluesky.

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Updates from Vacation Land…

Published by J. Robert Matthewson on August 9, 2025

A scene from "Laid-back Camp" in which one of the main characters relaxes in a camping chair by a fire next to a calm lake.

We’re a week into my August self-imposed vacation from writing, and the results so far have been interesting. I do feel like taking the time away from sitting down every evening to write has let my brain get some much-needed breathing room and as a result, new ideas are already beginning to flourish.

The biggest benefit of this has been that I think I finally nailed down what my next project will be. It’s an idea I first came up with like 5-10 years ago, but really, it was just a setting without an actual story attached, so the idea kinda just sat there waiting for an actual story to come along.

I think I finally have the beginnings of that story. Now, this comes along with a lot of big ol’ caveats. I only have a handful of story beats even remotely fleshed out in my head and on paper, but what I have is the general 10,000-foot up view of what acts 1, 2, and 3 will be about, along with some character notes, and some other general hodge-podge mish-mash of scene ideas and plot points.

Nothing that makes feel like I must cut the vacation short and rush back to the writing desk, but enough to also not make me dread that rapidly approaching time when I will. I’m excited about starting this new project but not necessarily chomping at the bit.

Yet.

So, what else have I been do with this time away from the literary grindstone? Mostly getting our new gaming rig set up with all the stores and emulators I’ll need for the next wave of games. I did treat myself and picked up the Silent Hill 2 remake from Bloober Team when it was 40% off on GOG.

Silent Hill 2 holds a special place in my heart as a video game. Both it and its precursor mark the first time a video game made me feel legitimate dread and unease while playing, which is quite the feat for any game from the PS1/PS2 era. The first game’s atmosphere was something that few “horror” games had attempted in the 90s, as most preferred to rely on the classic jump scare. The sequel, however, might just be not only the best written horror story in video game history, it might be one of the best stories, period. Now, nearly 25 years later, a remake built for modern graphics expectations arrived and I’ve been eagerly waiting to travel once more into the quiet, foggy town of Silent Hill.

I played the original PS2 version of Silent Hill 2 at least a half-dozen times, so I’m well versed in the story and the narrative twists and turns James’ journey takes him through. I wondered if I could possibly feel that same sense of dread and foreboding playing this graphically superior version.

The short answer: Yes. I find myself tensely gripping my controller as I try to navigate even the earliest parts of this story. The game not only looks absolutely gorgeous; the atmosphere of isolation and loneliness has been perfectly preserved. Logically, I KNOW I shouldn’t be running into anything too difficult or deadly this early on, and yet, I’m cautiously creeping along wondering if even the most basic monsters will eat my face. Indeed, the limit amount of combat I’ve seen makes me realize that if I can avoid it, that’s the smart play because James is as physically fragile as he is emotionally (which is as it should be, IMO.)

As it is a remake of a late 90s/early 2000s game, it definitely retained some game design elements from that era, for good and ill. Just been stabbed? Better drink an energy drink! That’ll patch you right up. Now, why would you think that you could walk up those stairs? Can’t you see the single bucket blocking your way affixed to the earth like it was Mjölnir waiting for Thor. That is something you absolutely definitely could never EVER just STEP OVER. Nope.

On the other hand, the voice acting is much improved from the original. I mean, the original part 2 was leagues above part 1’s, but even then, there were bits where you could tell Konami was not going to pay for a second take, which leads to some, um, interesting choices on how the actors read their lines. In the remake, it’s clear (so far) that the actors took the time to try and understand their characters and match the performance to them.

Anyway, I’m not even out of South Vale and I’m taking this playthrough deliciously slow (also, I’m avoiding playing too close to bedtime because I do not need THAT running through my brain as I sleep. Further updates as warranted.

Next, as we’re firmly into August, let’s look back at July’s sales figures for Tales of a Stranger Sister:

Well, it’s not zero, so that’s something, at least. Do I wish it was more? Oh, most definitely, but I won’t say that the two people who took a chance my debut novel is nothing, either. I’m still blown away that anyone would want to read my book, so the fact that there have been multiple someones is something I will celebrate.

I won’t post a graph of Kindle Unlimited page reads for July because, well, there were none. In the last five and a half months, there’s only been one complete readthrough and one where someone got five pages in and noped out (which is their right, and I won’t begrudge them that.)

That leads me to my next bit of business. My current term on Kindle Select / Kindle Unlimited runs out right before the end of August and I think it might be time to leave the program and go wide for the ebook version. It’s a shame, really, because Kindle Unlimited actually pays me MORE per full read than what I charge for the ebook version, but it doesn’t matter how good the royalty rate is if NO ONE is reading it there, so this is the official announcement: Tales of a Stranger Sister will be leaving Kindle Unlimited on August 27th. If you are interested in reading it with that service, please download it as soon as possible as if you download it before it leaves the program, you will still be able to read it using Kindle Unlimited after it leaves.

Once I get the book set up on other ebook services, I’ll make the announcement here, so stay tuned for that as well as for some other ebook-related news in the next week or so (fingers crossed.)

Okay, I’m gonna wrap up things here for now. I’m hoping to have some good/interesting news in the next week or so and if it comes, I’ll share it here. So, until then, stay cool folks.

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Gone, but never forgotten…

Published by J. Robert Matthewson on May 24, 2025

Author Douglas Adams holding a copy of his novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" which simply has the words "Don't Panic" inscribed in large, friendly letters on the cover.

This month marks the 24th anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams (May 11th, 2001). I acknowledged Adams at the end of my debut novel because he is a literary, well, for lack of a better term, hero to me. He wrote the books that made me want to be a writer and while my first novel may not share a genre with Adams’ most famous works, I like to believe his influence on my own writing style put a tiny bit of his voice into my first novel.

In particular, a passage like this was heavily influenced by Adams’ style of taking ordinary ideas and making them sound ludicrous to a grand extent.

Text that reads:

Mer cheeks reddened and she laughed awkwardly. Oh, yeah... that.
I took gymnastics when I was a kid. The first time around, I mean. I
guess the muscle memory was still there even if they're not my muscles.
It probably helps that this body doesn't have a spine and joints that have
been totally wrecked from almost a decade of sitting on a crummy o6ce
chair in a kubickle."
"You've mentioned that word before, 'kubickle.' What is that?’
She gave that Question some thought and said with a playful twinkle
in her eye, Okay, imagine a box."
"Okay."

Text that reads:

"Now, imagine taking all your bitterness, resentment and regret about
every wrong life decision you've ever made and putting them into that
box"
Uh, okay, sure,’ I said, trying to imagine demon-like creatures representing those negative feelings being released from my head and put into
such a container.
"Now, imagine that for five out of every seven days you have to go
inside that box, where you'll have to sit on a wobbly, uncomfortable chair
and stare at a glowing square for nine hours a day, all the while those
unpleasant things are constantly yelling at you for not going to grad
school."
"That sounds terrible."
She shrugged. "It wasn't all bad. Sometimes someone would bring you a piece of cake because it was someone's birthday or because someone
managed to escape from their box to go work in another box, or better
yet, to stop working in boxes altogether.’
"Cake,’ I mumbled as I began to eye her skeptically. "Is all that really
true”’
She frowned. "Okay, I might have been lying about one thing. They
stopped giving us cake a few years ago. Management said it was a cost-saving measure.’ The frown slowly turned into a mischievous smirk.
I responded with a flat, annoyed look in return.

I still hope to one day write a fantasy or sci-fi comedy more akin to Adams’ novels, but for now, I’m satisfied that I was able to add a dash of Adams to my Ghibli-inspired stew.

I’ve been thinking about Adams a lot recently, now that I finally can call myself a published author. Adams died at 49. I’m about to turn 46 and while I have no plans for an early checkout from this mortal coil, I look at the short amount of time Adams was creating and am in utter awe of what he managed to put out into the universe is such a cosmically brief period. I can only hope that when I do check out, I’ve managed to put out 1/100th of the amazing he brought to our vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big universe.

Adams also died four months before September 11, 2001, and I do wonder about how he would’ve written about the world of the last 25 years. Between both the UK’s and US’s shenanigans on both the domestic and global stages, I have to believe he would have had fascinating, if not hilarious opinions on all if it. But a part of me worries that the sheer absurdity of the world we live in might have made a master of absurdist humor such as him obsolete. Moreso, as a conservationist, Adams might have simply been too dismayed at the rapid destruction of our world and its natural treasures to find any humor in this modern world as a whole.

Sadly, or maybe fortunately, we’ll never know. We can only look at the wonderful work he left behind and speculate at what he might’ve created had he not waved his towel, stuck out his thumb, and flagged down the first teaser leaving sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.

So, please allow me a moment to lay flowers at the feet and to raise a cup of tea to the man who taught me to never panic and that the two most important things you can take with you out in a cold and uncaring universe are a towel and a book.

And I always know where I can find both.

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Non-book related content: Let’s talk anime (Part 1 of ?)

Published by J. Robert Matthewson on April 11, 2025

Okay, so I’ve not been shy about calling my debut book a “Ghibli-inspired fantasy” and indeed I have a deep love and respect for what Miyazaki as a creator and what Studio Ghibli has done for both animation in Japan and worldwide. It’s not a stretch to say that you don’t watch a Ghibli film but rather you experience it.

My first experience with Ghibli was in 1997 when Princess Mononoke was released. I was a freshman in college and my circle of geeky friends made the two-hour drive to the one small, independent theater (which ironically was in the neighborhood where I would find myself living with my then fiancé ten years later) to see the much-hyped cinematic experience. It did not disappoint.

And in years that followed, I tried to hunt down and watch every Ghibli film that was available, mostly through the Disney/Miramax releases, but a few were some truly awful lost dubs. Yes, the first time I saw Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was New Line Cinema’s Warriors of the Wind dub, which I would not recommend.

But my love of anime didn’t begin with Ghibli and it dates back much further. As a young child in the 1980’s, I was a die-hard fan of Voltron: Defender of the Universe, though 5-year-old me had no idea that the show originated from Japan or that it was actually called Beast King GoLion. As far as he knew, all cartoons were made in the same cartoon factory and they drew Scooby Doo & Inspector Gadget right alongside my favorite cat-themed giant robot.

My first true exposure to anime as a medium from another country and culture was in 1994 and my best friend brought over a VHS tape he’d recorded from what was then The Sci-Fi Channel during their special week-long “Animation Festival” hosted by Ralph Bakshi (of Cool World, Fritz the Cat, and Lord of the Rings fame). What the tape contained was four hours of Japanese anime that would start me on a 30+ year journey into a fandom that that has enriched my life in many unexpected and unusual ways. The specific anime that was that tape? Masamune Shirow’s Dominion: Tank Police.

Even 30+ years later, that dubbed opening still kicks seventeen kinds of ass and It’s one of the few titles in my collection where I prefer the English soundtrack over the original Japanese. Sadly, the series itself is badly dated in the sense that at the time it was created, over-militarized police who blatantly ignore both suspect’s and civilians’ procedural (and human) rights was supposed to be a dark satire. Now, it’s kinda… ugggggghhhhh.

But still, it was what kickstarted what would become a lifelong fandom for me, and I would spend the next three decades evolving from a teenaged Weeb (though that term did not actually exist at the time I was one) to a full-fledged Old-Taku. And if I hadn’t watched it, I wouldn’t have wanted to watch Princess Mononoke, and if hadn’t watched that and fell in love with Studio Ghibli, then I wouldn’t have written the debut novel that I did. So, to recap: animated movies about hyper-violent cops in tanks –> sweet, coming of age story about friendship, feelings, and food porn.

Hey, I never said it was a particularly straight path.

I’m going to end this little trip down memory lane here. I plan to pick this up again later to talk about some particular favorite anime series and films I’ve loved (and may have inspired my writing), as well as how this fandom has impacted my life. Hope you’ll come back for that next leg of the journey.

Webpage note: I have disabled comments on this and future posts. I was getting too many crypto spams, and when got one for a pro-suicide website, I was thinking that maybe there are better ways for people to tell me that they have thoughts about what I’m writing here. So, if you like my content, hit me up on BlueSky @infinitesquirrels.bsky.social.

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Covers and GenA.I.

Published by J. Robert Matthewson on March 29, 2025

Okay, so two updates, one large and one small:

First, I have added a new article to the Trivia and Miscelania page for Tales of a Stranger Sister. This article, ahem, covers the creation of the gorgeous cover art and title design. Its chock full of original sketches that any cover art aficionado will appreciate.

Second, I have updated my About the Author page to include an official statement about the usage of Generative A.I. in regard to this website and my books. (Spoiler: I don’t, I won’t, and I don’t ever plan on starting.)

Big news next week! Have a great weekend everyone!

a rough sketch of the character Sam from Tales of a Stranger Sister. A woman in professional office attire lounging with a cup of takeout coffee and a tablet computer

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