My office is once again in desperate need of a cleanup, so it’s time for some Lucky Boxes!

This time we have 5 Lucky boxes – all are premium boxes with media, manga, candy and toys. They also include other flat fun things like stickers, bookmarks or postcards which are equally random and frequently bizarre (and often not at all Yuri.) As always, there are candy and toys. The larger boxes have a few other surprises, as well!

My promise to you is that you’ll get random things, sometimes in other in random things. ^_^ I assure you that this is all 100%, unadulterated stuff.

This time we have 1  Very Large USPS box (which is listed on the box as Large Mailing box, but it’s about twice the size of the Large Flat Rate box, go figure, so I’m calling it the Very Large box,) 2 Large USPS Flat Rate and 2 Medium USPS flat rate boxes.

We have one Box remaining!
Medium Box 2 – $30

1 Very Large Box – $75 – Claimed
Large Box 1 – $50 – Claimed
Large Box 2 – $50 – Claimed
Medium Box 1  $30 –  Claimed
Medium Box 2  $30 –  Claimed

***

To be eligible to buy a Lucky Box, follow these instructions carefully. Please. Thank you. Failure to follow all of these instructions will disqualify you. It’s not personal, they are all claimed pretty quickly and I don’t have time to track you down for a piece of information.

1. You must live in the Continental USA (contiguous 48) only, no APO/FPOs. This is disappointing for me too, so I apologize.

2. You must be over 18, I am not policing books or recipients.

3. Email me with the Yuricon Contact Form with the subject “Lucky Box.” Use an email you check regularly, because I will reply asap. The first person who responds to my email gets the box.

4. *****Please include your name, age, mailing address. ***** Tell me which box you want. Even if you’ve given me your address previously, please include it, I am very lazy.

5. I will contact you at that point and give you details about payment by Paypal. Please be prepared to check your email and get payment out so this post doesn’t linger. Thanks in advance. These will be shipped out asap, as well; the whole point of this is to get these out of my house. ^_^

This whole process will be handled with utmost capriciousness, as usual. ^_^

Get your Lucky Boxes and get this stuff out of my house!

Well, it’s raining and I have nothing today, so I decided to sit down and make a single Premium Lucky Box.

This box has an Artbook AND a Drama CD AND manga and other stuff like toys, candy, paper goods and other fun goo-gaws! I assure you that this is all 100%, unadulterated stuff.

This time we have 1 Large USPS flat rate box only and because I filled it up with some extra fun, it’s going for $75. This is 18lbs of utter nonsense. None of that 5 snacks and a cheap plushie crap here. (Although I probably should by cheap plushies – they’d provide more padding.)

Large Box – $75  – Claimed

To be eligible to buy a Lucky Box, follow these instructions carefully. Please. Thank you. Failure to follow all of these instructions will disqualify you. It’s not personal, they are all claimed pretty quickly and I don’t have time to track you down for a piece of information.

1. You must live in the Continental USA (contiguous 48) only, no APO/FPOs. This is disappointing for me too, so I apologize.

2. You must be over 18, I am not policing books or recipients.

3. Email me with the Yuricon Contact Form with the subject “Lucky Box.” Use an email you check regularly. Because I will reply asap. The first person who responds to my email gets the box.

4. *****Please include your name, age, mailing address. ***** Tell me which box you want. Even if you’ve given me your address previously, please include it, I am very lazy.

5. I will contact you at that point and give you details about payment by Paypal. Please be prepared to check your email and get payment out so this post doesn’t linger. Thanks in advance. These will be shipped out asap, as well; the whole point of this is to get these out of my house. ^_^

This whole process will be handled with utmost capriciousness, as usual. ^_^

If you come here too late to get a Lucky Box, you know what? Contact Me and I could, possibly, put one together for you. I got plenty o’stuff sitting around.

So this month and next are going to be a bit of a lot, and I was looking for something to fall into for relaxation, I popped over to Bookwalker JP and thought I had bought the Super Cub light novel series. Trying to make sense of technical manual talk for a scooter I don’t own sounded about right for taking my over-stimulated brain offline. Well, it turns out I bought Volume 1 of the Super Cub manga and you know…that worked for me very well. I’ve seen the anime, and this can just remind me of that, until I get to the end and then pop over to the novels. Since I read it, the differences between the manga and the anime are much on my mind.

To begin with there are two major changes. One, the manga is full of creeper gaze service, which never adds anything good to a story. So be warned.

The second thing that is different is pacing. I’ve talked about this a lot over the years on Okazu. I read quickly  and even my reading Japanese is going to take less time than an animated scene that takes its time. In the case of Super Cub anime, the first few episodes of the anime are handled with deliberation. We spend time watching Koguma’s daily schedule and really get to feel the emptiness of it. That emptiness becomes a burden for the viewer, each detail weighing us down more as a form of sympathetic depression. It’s rough going, but we *need* to feel that, so the change in her world that comes with her Super Cub will feel that much more uplifting. The manga takes pages to tell a story where the anime took episodes., so if you have not watched the anime, it will feel less like a miraculous change from the beginning of the volume to the end. 

Nonetheless, Koguma’s life does change  –  quite radically – with the purchase of a used Honda Super Cub. While she’s still on limited funds – more so now – her day is less filled with the drudgery of riding her bicycle along mountain roads to school. She has free time and mobility. And, as the volume closes, she finds herself making an acquaintance. Again, in the anime, this was extraordinarily difficult for Koguma and she held herself back from friendship for a long time, unwilling to be hurt.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of women’s friendship in my love of anime. Mainstream media, focused on stories of romance and  – oh, you know straight women doing straight women things with wine and man bashing and other things completely alien to me – rarely shows women just relying on each other, being there for each other. Which is why I so obsess over She Loves To Cook, She Loves To Eat.  Super Cub does tell just exactly this story, from the perspective of a girl who has been so cruelly treated by life, she literally describes herself as having nothing in every way. By the end of this volume, she has one thing – Koguma has a Super Cub –  and that one thing is going to lead her to many other things.

Ratings:

Art – barfing noises
Story – Not as hard one the emotions as the anime, but still rough
Characters – Can we give Koguma some props for existing at all? I’m not sure I would have.
Service – barfing noises and with Reiko, it ain’t gonna get better
Yuri – 0

Overall  – 8

Postscript:  If you come here too late to get a Lucky Box, you know what? Contact Me and I could, possibly put one together for you. I got plenty o’stuff sitting around.

Among the many things I am doing now that my health is improved is cleaning up the office.  ^_^ Yuricon & Okazu Central gets so absurdly filled up with stuff that it’s time for Lucky Boxes!

This time we have 3 Lucky boxes as you can see on the left. They are full of comics and manga and poetry and magazines. All of these boxes include other flat fun things like stickers, bookmarks, comics, or postcards which are equally random and frequently bizarre (and often not at all Yuri.) As always, there are candy and toys. These boxes all include some special CDs, as well!

My promise to you is that you’ll get random things, sometimes in other in random things. ^_^ I assure you that this is all 100%, unadulterated stuff.

This time we have 1 Large USPS flat rate box and 2 Medium USPS flate rate box.

Large Box 1 – $50 – Claimed
Medium Box 1 – $30 Claimed
Medium Box 2 – $30 Claimed
***

To be eligible to buy a Lucky Box, follow these instructions carefully. Please. Thank you. Failure to follow all of these instructions will disqualify you. It’s not personal, they are all claimed pretty quickly and I don’t have time to track you down for a piece of information.

1. You must live in the Continental USA (contiguous 48) only, no APO/FPOs. This is disappointing for me too, so I apologize.

2. You must be over 18, I am not policing books or recipients.

3. Email me with the Yuricon Contact Form with the subject “Lucky Box.” Use an email you check regularly. Because I will reply asap. The first person who responds to my email gets the box.

4. *****Please include your name, age, mailing address. ***** Tell me which box you want. Even if you’ve given me your address previously, please include it, I am very lazy.

5. I will contact you at that point and give you details about payment by Paypal. Please be prepared to check your email and get payment out so this post doesn’t linger. Thanks in advance. These will be shipped out asap, as well; the whole point of this is to get these out of my house. ^_^

This whole process will be handled with utmost capriciousness, as usual. ^_^

Ready….Steady…Get Your Lucky Boxes!

The first thing that must be said about Pension Life Vampire by Shouichi Taguchi, is that it is available to read in English, for free on the Shueisha Mangaplus app. I like this app, because it has all the popular Shonen Jump comics, and some from Ultra Jump and other Shueisha mags. It is completely free to use and read, but there are time embargos on some chapters of some series. (For instance, if a volume is on shelves now, those chapters are not available.) Many series are completely free to read – once. Once you open a chapter and read it, it is no longer available to be read. As compromises go for free, this is perfectly fine for me. I’m following a number of series on this app.

The second thing that must be said is that Pension Life Vampire by Shouichi Taguchi is a lot of fun. You may recognize the art style or Taguchi’s name, because he is the creator of Futari Escape from Comic Yuri Hime.  Volumes 1-3 are available in English, Volume 3 came out this week in fact. Volume 4 is slated for 2024 English release. Like Futari Escape, Pension Life Vampire is goofy, Yuri-adjacent and worth reading if you like that kind of stuff.

Eri was part of an elite force of teens, the Rewriters, who were tasked with hunting legendary monsters. When the war is over and the Rewriters disbanded, Eri starts a new life as a student in a regular school. She really gives it her all, and actually figures out this making friends thing, which was refreshing. She also discovers a cute little vampire who is running a boarding house (the “pension” of the title) close to the school. Eri ends up working for Veronica – call her “Nica” – and having a life still filled with monsters and mayhem, but also with ice cream parfaits and friends.

There is a warm heart at the center of this story. Even as shouty and full of hijinks as individual chapters are, the jokes are only slightly groan-making and generally sweet, rather than mean-spirited. Nica is kind to Eri, who is learning to be a person after having been a soldier for most of her life, and new characters quickly become friends.

I said that this series is Yuri-adjacent, and I stand by that. Much like Futari Escape, (in which there’s no way to know that the protagonists are a couple, except that we are told they are,) Vampire Pension Life is filled with hijinks and jokes, some of which are based upon the idea that Nica actually like-likes Eri.I would dismiss it entirely but in a chapter where Eri thinks she is about to lose Nica, she becomes upset far out of proportion to losing the acquaintance of someone she hardly knows. To her credit, Eri understands that she’s overreacting and implies that…maybe…her feelings are not just friendship. Then the hijinks continue.

If light-hearted vampire x vampire hunter comedies are your thing, I think I can actually recommend this one. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 6 It’s Taguchi, so the focus is on ebullient rather than good
Story – 7 Amusing, occasionally laugh out loud funny
Characters – 8
Service – 1 on principle, but it’s not the point
Yuri – …probably a 2, but let me have my fun.

When a vampire hunter needs a new life
A mysterious vampire think she’ll make a good wife
Monsters great and small
Walk up and down the hall
But in this monster’s house there’s no strife

A vampire story I can enjoy. Woot.