Mecha has been an insep­a­ra­ble part of anime cul­ture ever since Mobile Suit Gun­dam inspired the first gen­er­a­tion of Otaku. But while I’ve met a lot of mecha fans over the years, most of them are under the impres­sion that there is no prac­ti­cal rea­son to have mecha — that it’s purely a mat­ter of look­ing cool, and mecha chang­ing the future of war­fare was merely a fan­dom dream. I blame this as amongst the rea­sons why mecha design in many recent series has been stray­ing more and more from main­tain­ing a degree of semi-realism (just com­pare Gundam00’s against the original’s). The Rule of Cool goes a long way, but it’s always nice when you don’t have to shut off half the brain to love the cool factor.

But is there a rea­son to have mecha? Even the fin­gered hands and human pro­por­tions of Japan­ese mecha? It might still be a sci­ence fic­tion fan­tasy due to the cur­rent imper­fec­tion of gyrosta­bi­liz­ers, but mechas do make actual sense. And with the right tech­nolo­gies, they really could change the future of war. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past two weeks my life’s free time had been almost entirely con­sumed by pho­to­shop, as the Tarot Project is finally com­ing together. I only have three things to say on the mat­ter — I’ve never taken pho­to­shop to be such seri­ous busi­ness before; I can finally say I’m more than just a noob to pho­to­shop thanks to the picto-editing skills I’ve acquired; and I haven’t felt so proud of my goods for a long time.

Before any­one asks “why all girls?”, it’s to cut down on the com­pe­ti­tion between char­ac­ter and more con­sis­tency in art style. Not to men­tion — the deck is cuter this way.

I might think about mak­ing a bishie/GAR deck later, maybe, if I feel like throw­ing away another week+ of free time.

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