Sunday, April 28, 2019

Remembering the Grover Cleveland Elementary School Shooting (San Diego, CA - January, 1979)


(Posted here on April 28th, 2019, one day after the Poway Synagogue Shooting)

It’s been 20 years since Columbine. Watching it unfold on television in 1999 (while I was a grad student studying biology) left a deep impact on my psyche.

It was a big reason I decided to shift the direction of my academic studies. As I wrote in my doctoral dissertation (in the field of Science and Technology Studies):

While I have been interested in subcultures since my youth, I did not decide to make them a primary focus of my studies until April 20th, 1999, the day of the Columbine High School massacre.

Yesterday, as I was driving, a song on one of my Spotify playlists started to play: “I Don’t Like Mondays” by The Boomtown Rats. That song, of course, references the Cleveland Elementary School shooting that took place in San Diego in 1979, one of the first high profile mass school shootings perpetrated by a minor. Two adults were killed; one policeman and 8 children were injured.

For years, ever since moving to San Diego, I’ve wanted to visit the school and see the memorial plaque.

Today, reminded by the song and the coverage of Columbine, I decided to make the trip to the San Carlos neighborhood of San Diego.

In recent years, the school site has been replaced by a housing development. The original monument was moved to a new location nearby. It’s now on the corner of the development, at the intersection of Lake Atlin Avenue and Lake Angela Drive.

Please take a moment to remember the two men whose lives were tragically lost as they tried to protect the students under their care: Principal Burton Wragg and Head Custodian Michael Suchar.



Saturday, July 29, 2017

Robert Anton Wilson on Usenet (1995-2003)

According to trusted Robert Anton Wilson scholars (see "Robert Anton Wilson's personal tech ecosystem"), he used to post on Usenet using the pseudonym "Mark Chan". Shared in commemoration of Robert Anton Wilson Day, here is a list of links pointing to the various newsgroups he posted to. The linked pages contain direct links to his posts (sorted by year and month).

Due to Google Groups having a less than ideal search interface (which seems to change every few years), there may be additional unlisted groups where RAW posted. If you happen to find more, please let me know in the comments section.

I hope you enjoy reading RAW's unfiltered and unedited Usenet posts as much I did*. He must have had a certain amount of trickster-ish fun posting under an assumed name, especially in discussion threads about his own work. His four primary haunts are listed in bold.


newsgroup name
number of posts
7
1
2
3
1
2
3
97
1
4
41
2
1
3
1
1
55
1
1
1
1
5
1
1
1
2
1
2
6
6
1
2
1
50
3
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
2
3
1
1
1
1
5


* At the time of this writing, I haven't read every post. The views contained therein do not necessarily reflect the views of the author (me) ... but you never know.

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

The States with the Most Anime Conventions

Have you ever wondered which states have the most anime conventions? Are there certain regions where otaku culture is highly concentrated? Which states have the most conventions serving the largest number of anime fans? Using data from AnimeCons.com and other public sources, I've made an attempt to answer those questions. (Disclaimer: This is an informal analysis, not a formal peer-reviewed study)

To create the ranking, I simply used the list found here: Anime conventions in the USA in 2016

I used 2016 since it's a full year's worth of recent data. I excluded conventions that were postponed or canceled. Washington DC, while not a state, is included on these lists.


The top 25 states, ranked by number of anime conventions



California and Florida are the clear winners.

The bottom 25 states (plus Washington DC) ranked by number of anime conventions


Near the bottom of the list, you'll find several states with only 1 convention in 2016, but Wyoming isn't even on the list, the only state without an anime convention in 2016.

California and Florida are not huge surprises, since they are #1 and #3 in the US in terms of population; you'd expect a lot of events in those states. So, what happens we look at each state, ranked by anime cons per capita?

Ranking: States with the most anime cons per person

[not pictured: Alaska (14) and Hawaii (46)]

The picture changes quite a bit, with South and North Dakota jumping to the top of the list, followed by Tennessee and Maine. Florida is still up there, but California with its much larger population lags significantly.

Ranking: States with the most anime cons per square mile



What if we look for states with the most conventions per square mile? Washington DC (not a state, but close enough) is at #1 followed by New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Maryland. Florida manages to stay pretty high at #5.

This is all well and good, but the rankings presented thus far don't really answer one of our primary questions: Which states have the most conventions serving the largest number of anime fans?

In that case, it doesn't make sense to overemphasize anime cons per capita or anime cons per square mile in states which have very few people in it. We want to find out where there are a lot of cons serving a high volume of people. So, let's look at the same data above, but filter the lists by population.

When you look at the states with the most anime cons, they are also the states with the most people, with two exceptions: Tennessee had 15 cons, but only 6.65 million people, compared to New York which had 14 cons and 19.7 million people. Michigan has 9.9 million people, but only had 6 anime cons in 2016.

Here's what it looks like when we calculate state rankings for anime cons per capita, but only focusing on the top 10 states by population:

Populous states with the most anime conventions per capita



Now, Florida is #1 and Ohio is #2. California and Texas, with 36 and 23 cons in 2016 respectively, are not in the top 5 due to their high populations. Florida cons are more spread out than Ohio cons, so there are more events in Florida with overlapping dates. When we only count events with unique dates (assuming no one is likely to attend two conventions in the same day), Ohio actually edges out Florida in this metric (anime cons per capita).

We can apply the same population filter to our state rankings for anime cons per square mile:

Populous states with the most anime conventions per square mile



Florida and Ohio come out on top again!

What does all this mean?

First of all, to interact with this data and apply your own filters, you can visit the dashboard I created:


Secondly, we obviously need to talk about Florida and Ohio. That there are a lot of conventions in Florida is perhaps less surprising, given that Florida is the #2 tourist destination in the US after California. Ohio, on the other hand, is #12 on that list.

Note: It's not just anime conventions. The same people who made AnimeCons.com also made FanCons.com . Using fan convention data in general, I created some visualizations to examine that. Based on the same type of analysis, Florida and Ohio come out on top there as well (across multiple flavors of fandom, not just anime).

Personal Perspective

To date, I've been to 51 cons in 5 states (California, Maryland, Ohio, Georgia, and New York), but mostly in California where I live, and mostly repeat visits to the same few conventions.

I've had the honor of being a repeat guest at Anime Punch: Armageddicon in Columbus, Ohio. I remember a staffer I spoke to telling me about all the conventions she went to in Ohio, either as an attendee or as con staff. It was hard to believe there were so many, but the data doesn't lie.

I've never been to Florida, but I am acquainted with the folks from the Anime World Order podcast who are from there. I'll leave it to them (and others) to tell us about the particulars of anime fandom in that state.

I do know that both states have old school anime cred, Florida being the birthplace of JACO - the Japanese Animation Club of Orlando - home of JACOsub, one of the earliest pieces of fansubbing software. Ohio is home to the venerable OSU anime club, formerly known as "Animate". Ohio State servers were the original home of the Anime Web Turnpike. Going back even further, it's where the Venice FTP anime-manga archive was first hosted.

I've been to Ohio for Anime Punch 7 times, not enough to really get to know Ohio fans, but the scene there was unique and I really enjoyed it. It gave me a much stronger appreciation for small cons. I've been to Anime Expo, Otakon, and San Diego Comic-Con plenty of times, and they're great, but the energy and enthusiasm of a lot of small cons out there is something to be experienced, and Ohio has plenty of them. You might say: some people attend a few big cons as special events; others attend a lot of smaller cons as a lifestyle.

Ohio has been called the nerdiest state (a badge of honor, in my opinion): people in Ohio apparently visit libraries more often than people in other states. Maybe there's a connection between reading/library-going and anime fandom, but that's another study for another day.

I have fond memories of con-going in Ohio. Someone invite me to Florida so I can get a measure of fandom in the Sunshine State!

Saturday, August 13, 2016

Film Review: In search of 'The Lost Arcade'

I'm glad to see it's starting to get the attention it deserves (see here and here), because The Lost Arcade (2015) is the best subculture documentary I've seen in a long time, and I've seen plenty (and even helped on one). It's the story of Chinatown Fair, the historic penny arcade turned video arcade in NYC Chinatown, how it closed down and then reopened (in quite a different form), and the community of people for whom it was a second home.

The documentary's singular and intimate focus on one arcade, its historical significance, and (most importantly) the people who inhabited it, has so much to say about so much more than its title would suggest, but it does so in an understated way. Its tone is less instructive, and more reflective. Instead of being explicitly analytical, it's more atmospheric and empathetic.

The Lost Arcade paints a portrait of one very specific microcosm--primarily the players of one genre of video games in one arcade in New York City at one particular point in time. But this narrative resonates far beyond that time and space. It is a story that has played out the same way in other locales and in other circumstances, so that many of us, who have never visited Chinatown Fair but belong(ed) to our own transformed communities, know exactly what the documentary is talking about.

Years from now, dismissive critics might naively point to how dated the film is, how gaming and arcades and neighborhoods and cities have moved on, but they will have missed the point. Filmmakers Kurt Vincent and Irene Chin have documented something that will inform and inspire us for years to come.

That's because it's more than a movie about a genre of video games, or video games in general, or one or even a thousand video arcades, or one particular subculture/community, or one particular neighborhood in one particular city. It's about all those things, and more.

It's about subcultures in general: how they change, for good or ill, whether by choice or because of forces they can't control, and the consequences of those changes. The film shows us how home video game consoles and the Internet forever changed the way video game players interact with each other.

It's also about what's happening in cities and neighborhoods across the country, about the devastating effects of gentrification--altering the urban landscape, and the displacement of local culture for the sake of profit.

Most of all, it's about the communities we build, the places we inhabit not because we have to be there, but because we want to be there. It's about Sam Palmer (the owner of Chinatown Fair) creating a vibrant space for people from all walks of life to interact, initially gathered by a shared interest in video gaming, and ultimately staying because they grew attached to the people they met there.

It's a celebration of those kinds of communities--the fact that they exist, the fact that we can create and be part of them. But the film is most poignant as a story of loss. Although Chinatown Fair was the last of its kind in Manhattan, the documentary is called The 'Lost' Arcade, not the 'Last' arcade.

For the players at Chinatown Fair, they really did lose their community. It was taken away and transformed (brutally, some would say). I watched the film in April when it played as part of the San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase. I still get choked up when I recall the scene featuring Akuma Hokura, one of Chinatown Fair's most important denizens, visiting the new incarnation of the arcade. The scene featuring arcade manager Henry Cen--struggling to come to terms with the way his vision for the arcade had been perverted--also hit me pretty hard.

Among those of us who belong(ed) to subcultures that have changed, some of us have felt that same sense of loss. It's a familiar story: we were part of something good, and while some things have changed for the better, we've also lost some important things along the way. More so than video gaming, the subculture/community I belonged to in the 90s and early 00s was anime fandom. I used to (but no longer) dream about anime conventions the way the opening narrator of The Lost Arcade dreamt about Chinatown Fair. We (the anime fan community in those years) were part of something special that only existed in that particular form for a relatively brief moment in time, and it might never come back.

Don't get me wrong. It’s more than just bittersweet nostalgia or a knee jerk reaction to change. Things do evolve and improve, and change is not always bad, but the documentary shows us what happened to a community for whom change came knocking, not from their own efforts and desires, but from outside forces who didn't understand or care about them. Instead of just memorializing them, however, The Lost Arcade shows that community's beautiful and hopeful response.

In the end, The Lost Arcade is a story of redemption in progress, a reminder that community is not just where we happen to find it; it is wherever we decide to build it. We can nurture and grow it when given the opportunity. It is a warning not to take those opportunities for granted. We have to seize them. We have so much to gain if we do, and so much to lose if we don't. We owe it to ourselves to make it more than just a dream.

Official site: http://www.arcademovie.com

About the author

I earned my PhD studying anime fandom in America. In my professional life, I build and nurture online communities for companies and their customers. I am not much of a video gamer, but grew up going to arcades in Southern California and South Korea in the 80s and 90s. I've never been to Chinatown Fair, but my dad went there as a kid after moving from China to NYC in the late 1940s.