birdboy2000

This used to be an "I HAS DIGIMON EPISODES" post, but they're easier to find than they once were, so it's an intro post now.

I'm an anime otaku who also enjoys Paradox Interactive games and is studying history at Boston University's Metropolitan school. I write a fair amount of fanfic, usually for either Pokemon or for Digimon Adventure 02.

This livejournal is largely abandoned. Too many painful memories, weak blogger spirit, few friends these days and fewer still who use the site. If you want on my flist, leave a post here and I'll probably accept.

...fuck yeah.

I'm marathoning 02 to celebrate. Wish I had digimon fic to upload.

I share more with a fellow anime fan on the other side of the world than I do with my classmates or neighbors. It is my background. It is my home. It is the audience for whom my own creative contributions are intended, although with sufficient background knowledge, their appeal is hopefully universal.

It is true that I share many of the negative traits which make “otaku” an insult in Japan, and certainly share the obsession, but that is not why I call myself one. I use it out of solidarity and because I know of no other term which can describe members of my community everywhere. “Weeaboo” is not only a stupid word born as an insult, but it divides us, it encapsulates the notion that there’s something fundamentally different between anime fans based on race and nationality, that when we’re watching anime, we aren’t all one big community. I reject that formulation completely.

I do not pretend my community is a utopia. All communities have their flaws. But if you try to denigrate my culture or shame me for belonging to it, I can react with as much contempt and vitriol as anyone else, and will treat you like the bigoted scum you are!~ ^_^

(Wish I was posting this somewhere other than a personal journal no one reads... and that I was more articulate about all this. But I need to say this somewhere.)

Have a tumblr now. Dunno if I'll use it, or what I'll use it for, and am still choosing a layout, but. birdboy2000.tumblr.com feel free to follow and/or post names so I can follow you.

So. Digimon 30-day meme.

( Day 01: How old were you when you first discovered Digimon? )

So, uhh. Beat the E4 a couple days after it came out. Beat the super battle subway - for single battles, anyway. Doubles I'm still working on. Almost filled my regional pokedex, now working on national one. Spent most of my spring break in Unova. Didn't do much else. XP

At first glance, one might ask why I care so much about the protests in Wisconsin. Despite all the talk of Walker as a "Mubarak of the midwest" he has not actually fired on protesters, nor are the protesters themselves calling for violent revolution. The protesters are not an uprising of the poor, either, but of the middle-class. I don't live in Wisconsin, and if they start to have Alabama-quality education because they won't pay their teachers or give them rights, it doesn't effect me. But I care.

I care because my mother taught at a Hebrew school for fifteen years, before being fired for criticizing her boss's education plan. Now she has no job and no pension.

I care because in Tunisia and in Egypt, for all the attention the demonstrators got, the regimes fell when people went on strike. I care because unions are the only institution capable of calling for and carrying out such strikes.

I care because I was born into the middle class, but am well aware of what a lack of unionization has done to this generation. Had it not been for thirty years of union-busting, if the service sector had become unionized like manufacturing once was, I wouldn't have friends struggling to pay the rent.

I'm not a union member. It's possible that I'll never become one, with the decline of organized labor in this country. But I do understand the power of collective bargaining, how it protects workers from corporate abuses, asshole bosses, or simply their own poor negotiating skills. How instead of being an individual selling one's labor to survive like a slave, it allows one to stand with all the workers as an equal partner, capable of costing the company severely if they fight back.

And it's because, with plutocrats fighting to accumulate more and more wealth, unions - public or private - are the only ones fighting back.

That's why I keep talking about it. That's why I'll be at the state house tomorrow for a sympathy protest. Workers of all countries, unite!