So yeah, 2026 has come around - not to an amazing start, but much better than the utter shitshow the latter half of 2025 was. Gonna be hard to go as low as that...
I do have a couple leftover dōjinshi from the previous batch I'll be reviewing soon; besides that, as I'm waiting for the next, beefier than usual shipment (see: me trying to work around that new silly custom tax), I figured I'd do a bit of a different post.
I've been watching a lot of 'otaku room' videos on YouTube - you know, weeaboos displaying their hoards of asian plastic and wall scrolls for anime that everyone stopped watchin a decade ago. They are a fascinating time capsule of a different era of otakuness, and one I squarely belong to: in fact, with the exception of dōjinshi and visual novels, I sort of fell off the weeaboo train once it became laughably easy to track down Japanese products that, before some arbitrary date probably located around the mid 2010s, required connections and knowledge to get one's hands on. Pickets are sort of difficult to place, but I feel that a big change for the worse started once Crunchyroll became popular: moving from obscure YouTube playlists and sketchy download links to a streamlined, dedicated service killed a lot (not all, fortuntately) of the subculture. That's when I began to see big scanlation groups die out, lots of 'the usual places' go belly up from one day to the next, and so on. This is all off the top of my head: I'm sure people like Patrick Galbraith would have a lot to say on the subject.
I feel that, by large, the Western otakusphere has gone the way most of the Internet has - oversaturated with cheap, rehashed content that simply doesn't excite me anymore. Which explains a lot of my dōjin preferences, I might add. You may have different opinions about places like Sankaku Complex, ZeroChan etc., but for better or worse they were a part of my otaku intake back in the day: nowadays, thanks to a passable knowledge of Japanese, I mostly get my stuff off PIXIV or straight from JP blogs. Never been into figures, so those don't factor in.
This rant just to say that... a very specific type of dōjinshi aside, I don't really collect. So my hypothetical 'otaku room' video would be, like, ten seconds long. Figured I'd be easier to just show a couple of pics.
My dōjinshi collection. While it might seem small, keep in mind that I collect only non-h, original IP doujinshi, which constitutes probably 1% of all yearly dōjin output. I have a few fairly rare and older thingies - some you can find by perusing previous blog entries, others will be forthcoming. I also have a couple intruders that cross-link with other interests of mine, like a few issues of Super Mystery Magazine MU. What's that? read and find out.
My new battle station (and no, I'm not a redditor). For most of my adult life, as I frequently moved from one country to another, I couldn't feasibly get a proper desktop PC. Finally gifting myself a nice one, led lights and all, has been on my bucket list for a while, and this year I made it happen. Nothing special (still i7), but it's a huge upgrade on my laptop, and I mostly play retro anyway.
A poster from IKEA's 2017 Art Event, which I got mostly as I really liked Yasuto Sasada's art after seeing it at a Tokyo gallery way back in 2013.
And, for something really offbeat - a limited edition poster by Little Thunder for the 1st anniversary of Hong Kong's Coffee & Laundry. Besides being a really nice poster, I'm a huge Little Thunder fan - Kylooe is probably in my all time top 3 of non-JP comics. Really worth a read.
Short and painless, wasn't it? next shipment I'll be getting my hands on my first tapestry, which I guess sort of invalidates all of the screed above. Whatevs.
