Why aren't they in their boxes OMG OXIDATION NOOOOO

He was loud, stocky, swaggered, and wore a shit-eating grin as he tried to overwhelm me with facts about Alan Moore comics that he owned but never read. He reminded me of a lot of other toy collectors I’d dealt with since coming back to the geek scene. He loomed me, trying to both intimidate me and impress me with the size of his toy e-peen. He reminded me of an adult schoolyard bully.

“Hey, I checked online for the lightsaber thing.” He was a toy collector. I met him through a friend, and he promised me he was so connected that he could find whatever it is I needed. “I found one where you can mix and match parts to make the lightsaber you want.”

I rolled my eyes. Discreetly. “Yes, I don’t want that. I want a Luxeon conversion kit for my lightsaber.”

“Wow. Mmm-hmm. What series is the lightsaber?” he asked, hoping to wow me with his knowledge of Master Replicas Force FX lightsabers and distract me from the fact that he had no idea what I was talking about.

“It’s an Anakin AOTC,” I replied. “It’s got the standard row of 64 LEDs, but I want to replace it with a single Luxeon in the hilt. A few of the lights on the end have gone out. A Luxeon would be less fragile and would make the lightsaber lighter.”

I waited for his internal flywheel to spin up. “Wow. Yeah. Hmm. How did that happen? Did it fall of the display case or something?”

“No, I’ve been dueling with it.”

He stared at me blankly. It apparently never occurred to him that I would actually PLAY with my lightsaber.

=====

Back in the 90s I used to collect mainstream comics like Uncanny X-Men and JLA (the Blue & Gold era). I’d started to follow the comic seriously from the Goblin Queen storyline onward, tried to follow the team post-Siege Perilous. Then Image had its big debut and #1 chromium cover die cast holographic wrap around variant covers became prevalent. I discovered that I could no longer follow my favorite storylines because all of the copies had been snatched up by hopeful speculators hoping to make a buck on them in the future. Which is a big reason why I switched to manga. It seemed immune to the speculator market.

Same thing happened to Magic: the Gathering. At first it was an underground hobbyist scene, but then price speculation on the cards meant that you couldn’t get the cards that you wanted because they were locked inside a mylar sleeve somewhere, owned by some guy who matches the description in the first paragraph. M:tG cards, like comics and lightsaber replicas, had become just another commodity, to be traded and profited from.

That’s the problem with tabletop RPGs. They’re hard to commodify, since most of the action occurs in the imagination. Sure you can make a buck selling designer dice and book after book after book of supplements and source material, but after you have one copy of a book you don’t need another. In Magic you need at least four. With comics you need three — one to read, one to lend, and one to keep for investment. And with lightsabers, since they’re numbered limited editions, the one you DO have you keep under glass, untouched.

I don’t understand this. I don’t like it. My limited ed Vertigo Tarot (in the big white pizza box) is 2000-something out of 4000, and they’re well worn and used. My iPod touch is naked — because if Apple wanted to keep it from fingerprints and smudges they would’ve built them that way. My figmas and pinky:sts are actually out of their boxes.

I play with my toys. Why is that so shocking?

I mean I get it. Part of it is profit motive. Money is a mundane but easily understandable motivation. But having gone to an all boys’ school, I know what else is really behind it. It’s the same motive that drives other guys to collect cars or guns or women. It’s the need to have the best toys in the playground — and then dangle them in front of the other kids without playing with them. It’s an extension of comparing penis sizes in the locker room. It’s a not-so-subtle way of compensating for a certain… lack.

Normally I don’t care, since I don’t run into that crowd much anymore. But every time a new toy or comic or game comes out and is immediately sold out because speculators have snatched up two dozen copies each, I curse the profit motive and I mentally kick these overcompensating douchebags in their undersized nuts. Because I play with my toys. I don’t have them just to say I have them, or to feel secure about the size of my stash.

So… does anyone know how to perform a Luxeon conversion on an Anakin AOTC Force FX?

The Symbol of Saturn, ballpoint pen on Post-it knockoff. 2009.

This is the last part of my Saturn Rite series. If you missed them, here’s Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3!

Week 4: All the three previous weeks combined.

As soon as midnight hit on Week 4 and the doors closed on sex, solid food, and entertainment, I realized that if Week 4 had been Week 1, I wouldn’t have finished, but because I had proven to myself on previous weeks that I could meet each one of these requirements on their own, it was less daunting to do them all at once.

That didn’t mean it wasn’t going to suck.

But I did know what to expect. Day 2 was going to be worse than Day 1, Day 3 worse than Day 2, and Day 4 worse than Day 3. The cravings would get worse and worse up to a certain point, and then begin to fall off on the fifth day.

So I endured. And I added two new conditions in case that wasn’t hardcore enough for me — I would perform a Saturn Hexagram rite once a day, and I would do 81 (3 x 3^3 — 3 being Saturn’s number) push-ups a day.

No, not cock push-ups.

The Saturn rite was easy — I’d become adept at the Hexagram rite before (from constant practice). It was just a matter of remembering to do it, and coming up with a proper invocation.

The push-ups, on the other hand, were another story. When I was in high school I was used to doing dozens, even hundreds of push-ups a day at the hands of wannabe drill sergeants who wanted to break my will and get me to quit so that someone they liked better would take my spot. (They couldn’t.) And under our progressively-minded Special Units commander under ROTC, the Medics (which I belonged to) and MPs trained along with the would-be officers.

But this was all over a decade ago. And even if I did go to the gym semi-regularly throughout the interim, there’s a difference between exercising at your own pace and having a sergeant yell in your ear while you’re doing it.

Not this guy though. He doesn't know what the hell he's doing most of the time. De arimasu.

Something I had known intellectually hit me as I was struggling through my third set of push-ups. Aside from governing death and limitation and time and so on, Saturn is the planet that governs things you don’t want to do, but have to do, especially because you said you would. Saturn is going to the dentist, or waking up on time to get to work.

I would finish my push-ups, and my rites, and my prohibition against solid food, sex, entertainment, and stimulants, precisely because I had to, not because it was fun, or enjoyable.

Saturn is the planet that governs finishing what you’ve started.

I am a chronic starter. People who know me very well know that I am overflowing with new ideas and new projects, always inspired to pursue some new goal.

But I don’t finish nearly as often as I start. And unlike my college days, I now have more money than I have time. No, my time is definitely limited and I felt that most strongly during Week 4. Even sitting around with ‘nothing to do’ I felt the steady march of Saturnine time slipping by.

This was my greatest flaw. I waste too much time hoping for something to happen, instead of sucking it up and making things happen for me. Saturn is the complementary planet of the Moon, just as Mars complements Venus, or Jupiter complements Mercury and vice versa. I was too much of a Lunatic — a dreamer, unstructured, moody — and not enough of a Saturnine — disciplined, determined.

I finally understood. No day but today.

When midnight of Week 4 hit, signaling the end of my Saturn rite, I enjoyed my return to normalcy. The week after the Rite, I let it all slip. I stayed up at all hours, ate all the food I wanted, indulged in all the diversions I’d missed.

But each pleasure I indulged in was tinged with Saturnine black now — everything has a price, and the dearest of these is Time. This doesn’t mean there is no place for dreaming, or celebration. Complements do not mean opposites — they are pairs that complete each other.

Now each Lunar Festival is all the more precious because it is transient, ephemeral, and fleeting. And each dark period of struggle and structure, of lock-step marching through the ice and snow is also temporary, book-ended by periods of celebration, of delirium, and of dreaming.

Now more than ever, I realize: There is much work to do, and not much time left to do it in. Focus. Concentrate. Push through the pain.

Hail Saturn, Titan lord of boundaries, of limitations, of time. Thank you for the blessing of your dark, harsh wisdom. Grant me the blessing of determination through hardship, persistence through adversity, endurance despite obstacles. Hail Saturn.

Can't I even watch just one screen, Watari?

This is Part 3 of my notes from my 28 day Saturn Rite. Part 1 here! Part 2 here!

Week 3: No entertainment or stimulants.

As soon as I had finished my first solid meal in a week, I realized that I was no longer used to eating solid food, because the exertion of digestion left me strangely tired. I had to sit down and take a breather.

Sitting on my living room couch, staring at the blank TV screen, it suddenly hit me that at least for me, the TV would be off for the next two weeks.

Oh god.

What the hell was I doing? No watching anything on a screen for fourteen days? Why the heck was I thinking, getting into this magic nonsense, if it would get me into situations like not watching anime or playing video games or surfing the net for two whole weeks?

No going to social gatherings either. No parties, no going to clubs or bars, no movies together. Minimize conversation.

And no caffeine? No chocolate? No alcohol? Not even antihistamines or headache pills? What was I thinking? What was thinking?

Thinking. Oh dear. I would be doing a lot of it for a while. I would be alone with my mind for a long time. Oh sure I could read, but reading involves more mental effort than just plonking down in front of an episode of House, where the characters are so smart they do all the thinking for me.

Just lie back, relax, and leave the mental activity to us.

I soon discovered just how little time I spend undistracted. Since we moved to a hotel suite while repairs were being made to the air conditioners at the condo, I found myself sitting alone in the hotel room in silence. So I began to read.

By midweek I had finished reading 4 books, a book a day. The last time I read this voraciously was before I got unlimited Internet access and cable TV. I also noticed that I would fight reading just one thing at a time, and would flit from book to book, an urge I now stifled. I had developed my multitasking so broadly that I now gave no single task any sort of meaningful depth or effort. I had developed ADD.

This is why I hadn’t made any headway with my Vigilant light novel. The worst part about writing is, well, writing. Sitting down and shutting out all distractions and just writing. It is painful, tedious work at times, and whenever those times would hit me I would stand up from the keyboard and do something else, or check Plurk, or browse over my feeds.

A curious thing happened on Week 3. I ended up writing 6 chapters. Because what else was there for me to do?

My dreams also became more vivid and memorable, because I had no distractions to crowd them out of my mind. I went from not being able to remember my dreams at all, to remembering very long, continuous stretches of dream narrative.

This was all well and good, but Week 4 was looming before me, a combination of all three of the previous weeks. I wouldn’t even have the satisfaction of being able to watch TV or play video games again. It would be that, plus No Sex, plus No Solid Food.

Why the heck was I doing this again?

(continued in Part 4)

Oh look. A whole bunch of things I can't eat.

This is part 2 of my notes from my 28-day-long Saturn rite! Part 1 here!

Week 2: No solid food.

Immediately after my No Sex Week Ended, No Solid Food Week began, which was a mixed blessing if there ever was one. Also, I should mention that my Globelines DSL modem died in the middle of Week 1, not to be replaced by Globe until the last day of Week 4. Looks like Saturn took out my net access so I wouldn’t get distracted.

No Solid Food week was hell. I hadn’t counted on how much food was no longer an option to me. Even instant noodles were now out. I had to subsist on plain congee, yogurt, miso soup, and peanut butter.

You can't eat me! I'm solid food too!

I started cooking roux-based sauces and eating them out of a bowl, like really thick soup. Maoi would support me by picking the beef out of my Sliced Beef Congee. I would wander the restaurants in Eastwood, realizing that most of them didn’t serve any non-solid food. Pho has noodles and meat. Italian food is all solid; even minestrone has solid chunks. McDonald’s hot caramel sundae and Red Mango yogurt saved me when the cravings got really bad.

After a while, I started to distinguish between actual hunger and cravings. I realized that I mistook them for one another. Sometimes I craved something to eat because I was bored, not because I was actually hungry.

Day 4 was the worst. I didn’t know if I could make it through the entire week. I would lie or sit down, not wanting to expend more energy than necessary, because it would only make me hungrier.

Even fresh wholesome fruits and vegetables were off the table.

And then, on Day 5, I realized that the cravings had subsided, although I still got hungry, which I would deal with when it occurred. Day 5 was much easier than Day 4. I would go about my day, then I would get hungry, then I would eat, then I would return to whatever I was doing, instead of absently munching on something or the other without paying attention to what I was eating.

I learned to love congee. It was the most fortifying thing I would eat all week. I would feel stronger right after a bowlful, which I would devour in less than five minutes.

Near midnight of Day 7, Maoi prepared a meal of rice, sliced fresh tomatoes, and longganisa for me. While waiting for the start of Week 3, No Entertainment or Stimulants Week, I watched a UFC fight.

Midnight hit. I could eat solid food, but I couldn’t even finish the fight I was watching — Ortiz vs. Griffin.

Another mixed blessing — but I was too happy from the solid meal that I barely noticed at first. At least, until I realized that my home was suddenly eerily silent.

(To be continued in Part 3)

Banishing Pentagram: A dramatic reenactment

So why have I been missing for the past few weeks? The reason isn’t a very sensible one, but it is the reason.

Many of you know that I’ve been a practicing magician for over a decade, long before I discovered that my comic book idols Alan Moore and Grant Morrison were both magicians.

This guy? A magician? No, how can it be?

I really don’t feel like getting into the common misconceptions about magic here. Fireballs, lightning bolts and so on. It’s getting light out and I’ve been busy playing video games, watching Discovery Travel and Living, and eating since midnight. I’ll deal with that some other time.

Saturn is the planet (and no, I don’t mean that ringed thing in outer space, but the concept it symbolizes) that governs limitation, boundaries, contraction. It’s the end of the party, it’s that point on the road where the bridge has gone out. It’s how much time is left on the clock before the game is over.

A Saturn rite is a period of asceticism to free you from your attachments, and to give you a clearer idea of your limits.

Mine lasted 4 weeks. See, magic depends to a large extent on the idea of “Did you do enough for it to work? Did you try hard enough?”

Apparently I’m a masochist. Masochistic enough to adopt the Saturn Rite formulated by Frater U.’.D.’. verbatim, instead of devising my own.

SCHEDULE:
Week 1: No sex, masturbation, or sexual fantasy.
Week 2: No solid food.
Week 3: No entertainment, no stimulants.
Week 4: The Grand Finale — Combination of the 3 Previous Weeks

Here is my account of those harrowing 28 days.

Week 1: Avoid sex, masturbation, and sexual fantasy.

This was WAY harder than I thought it would be. No sexual fantasies. This means if I looked at something like this:

For instance.

Never mind the first two, just avoiding sexual fantasy was murder. I never realized just how often each day I have quick, almost instantaneous thoughts about sex. To say nothing of the morning male condition.

I would walk down the street or surf the net or watch tv or read a comic and then BAM! I was on the Moon.

In such situations, I was to perform the Small Universe energy circulation, drawing energy away from THAT area, up the Governing Vessel, and down the Conception Vessel to the energy point two inches below the navel.

Which is not exactly your first reflex when you’re turned on.

It kept getting worse and worse each day, until the 5th day. This was the day something in me clicked, and realized, like the dog in the Pavlov’s experiments, I was responding to the Button, and the world around me kept pressing it to call my attention, except in this case, it was the Sex Button, not the dogs’ Food Button.

And I could simply look at an attractive woman, feel a rush of energy, and walk on without fixating.

Not all the time though. I would often still get so charged that I had to do the damned energy circulation thingy. But instead of getting more difficult to endure, it got easier. Not easy, just easier.

I am not going to tell you what happened when Week 2 hit and the No Sex thing was finished. Suffice it to say I took advantage of the reprieve before the Grand Finale.

(Continued in Part 2!)

Staggering back from my deep undercover mission as a Normal Person, I surveyed the damage to my otaku cred. I wasn’t going to be the Otaking in this state, not with my complete ignorance over most anime that came out in the time I was on my away mission. I had no idea what Full Metal Panic was. I hadn’t seen a single episode of any anime other than Initial D in a long time. And as far as RPGs went, I hadn’t rolled a non-six-sided polyhedron in years, let alone orchestrate a hypothetical scenario for multiple persons where random number generation was used in conjunction with predetermined stats to generate results and determine outcomes. (“Run a game.”)

Otaku are notoriously snobby people, see — not in the sense that they’re mean or aloof, though. It’s just that they will test your knowledge in their area of expertise. Heaven help the poser who is trying to bluff his way through a field the otaku knows by heart.

Wait.

I assumed that given the process of acquisition of otaku knowledge, which is largely a function of time and effort, there would be one uber-otaku who possessed all knowledge, and that there would be lesser otaku beneath her (let’s face it, if such a thing existed, no one studies harder than a girl on a mission) with smaller areas of expertise.

This is, of course, a ridiculous scenario. Although I’m a pretty fast learner, and I know a few mental tricks to improve knowledge absorption, there simply isn’t enough time during a human lifetime to know it ALL, at least given current non-augmented human learning technology and brain capacity.

(Science and Sci-fi Otaku basically think it’s a matter of time before we figure out this learning thing and create hyper-learning through highly efficient methods of knowledge assimilation. Or that we figure out how to live indefinitely.)

So the key was not to keep up with the J’onzzes, so to speak, but to be knowledgeable in esoteric or specialized fields. I may have not seen every episode of every Star Trek series, but I know every Firefly episode by heart. (Because when you can’t walk, you crawl, and when you can’t crawl, when you can’t do that…)

I haven’t watched every magical girl anime, but I can tell you that Revolutionary Girl Utena contains numerous references to Herman Hesse’s semi-autobiographical novel Demian that are essential to the story. (For instance, why is the organ piece that plays when the Student Council rides the elevator entitled ‘The Legend of the God Named Abraxas’?)

I’m not with the Spirit Questors and I’m dreadfully unfamiliar with the local spiritual fauna. But I’m a chaos magician and Thelemite. (Love is the Law; Love Under Will.)

I have no idea what happened during Final Crisis, and what I hear about Civil War makes me glad I didn’t follow it. Sorry. But I’ve collected every issue of the adventures of Spider Jerusalem or Lucifer Morningstar or Sophie Bangs. (“I am the Holy Splendor of the Imagination.”)

Finally, I had my one trump card: I was a Monty Python and Black Adder nut and had watched every episode of both series. (“There were zwei peanuts walking down the strasse. And one was assaulted… peanut.”) So I was still a expert in a specialized, well-respected field even after years of neglect.

This was good. I wouldn’t have to start from scratch. Plus since I had focused on physical fitness and social interaction (I spent a lot of nights clubbing and partying during my time away), as well as alcohol tolerance and a brand-spanking-new law degree (two things that appear to have a direct correlation), I was sort of a hybrid creature that straddled both races. Like Spock.

But I still had a lot of learning and watching and reading ahead of me, if I was going to make myself intelligible to other otaku with less obscure tastes.

(to be continued)

I would have to say that the radical downturn in my academic career beginning in college coincided neatly with the rise of three influences in my life: access to anime, access to Magic: the Gathering and RPGs, and access to the Internet.

All of these things would be supplemented by a community of geeks known simply as The Hill. The Hill alumni are many. You might actually know someone who was part of the Hill. We were, for all intents and purposes, a catch-all otaku group just like in Otaku no Video or Genshiken. Some specialized in anime, some in CCGs, some in RPGs, some in comic books, science fiction, tarot card reading, and so on.

We contributed to each other’s academic demise. Going to class man? Nah, just stay for ten more minutes and have one more duel. If you come with us we’re going to So-and-So’s place to watch the new Ranma OVA. Hey, study later, read this Oh! My Goddess fanfic I wrote and tell me if it’s good enough to submit to the FFML or if it needs work. Captain, I detect no intelligent life on this planet. So roll the dice already. You’re already late for class anyway.

I took more pride in my knowledge of trivia like voice actresses and opening themes and animation directors than, say, in how fashionably I dressed or if I had actually studied for the midterm I had that afternoon that I only found out about that morning.

During this unglamorous but necessary period in my life, I watched Gainax’s masterpiece, Otaku no Video. For those of you who can’t be bothered to check Wikipedia, Otaku no Video was Gainax’s last anime before doing underground, triumphantly emerging from its own ashes three years later with Neon Genesis Evangelion.

This would be the first time I had a word that described I was, encapsulates it so completely. I had always been that way, but had no name for until now.

I was otaku.

(to be continued)