Marcie: she's cute because she wears glasses!

Warmer weather activates my nerd powers

June 2015

June marks the rainy season here in Japan. Aside from the rain and battling mildew in my home, it's not so bad because it's not hot yet. But now that the weather is getting warmer, I feel my nerd instincts powering up. I guess I was conditioned this way since I was a kid in school. When I was a student, the long summer months meant that I did not have to do homework, and that I could do what I pleased. When I was an elementary school student, Mom would enrolled my sister and me into a summer reading program. I would check out a stack of Peanuts comics, Choose Your Own Adventure books, and since I didn't have to do book reports, I read any SF book I felt like. As I've mentioned before on here, seeing The Empire Strikes Back in the movie theater when I was a four year old boy had an incredible impact on me. We didn't have a VCR until I was in junior high. My cousin in Tuscon had a VCR and could watch any movie he and my aunt had recorded off of Showtime, but I did not have that luxury. It was my passion for Star Wars which inspired me to read at a far higher level than other kids my age. I was in the 1st or 2nd grade when I read the novelization to the first Star Wars movie. Kids in my class thought I was faking it, because they hadn't seen someone their age reading a novel that's 300 pages or so. But since I could not see the Star Wars movies, I wanted to read the novelizations. This branched into other books, such as Brian Daley's Han Solo books, but other SF books as well.

I'm sure another part of this summer conditioning is because of the summer movies. My sister is 3 years older than I am, and when we got bigger, Mom would drop us off at the mall where the movie theater would show movies geared towards kids on weekday mornings. We saw Back to the Future, Short Circuit, The Last Starfighter, and other older movies. That was a nice thing they did in the summer and for us kids who didn't have a VCR, that was quite a treat to see those older movies again, especially on the big screen. So my summer months were spent reading, watching movies, and playing with friends. I had an Atari 2600, and later it was replaced by a 7800. I used to spend the night over at my friend Doug's place. He had a swimming pool and an Atari 8-bit computer with a ton of copied games on 5.25" floppy disks. My friend Matt had a NES, and I'd go over to his place to play those games. One summer day in 1989, Matt and I spent a day at the movie theater and watched Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade back to back. We also spent a lot of time at the game arcade next door.

In the later '80s, summer vacation meant that I could stay up past 9pm to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation every night on syndicated television on the local UHF channel (normally I could only do this on Friday nights). That was when I was in junior high, when my family finally got a VCR. In the summer of '89, we got a family computer, and that meant I could play games on that as well. The first computer game I ever bought was Arkanoid II.

It was during my junior high school days when I started to turn into an anime and manga fan, with my rediscovery of Robotech thanks to Matt. In my high school days, the summer is when I watched a lot of anime and read a lot of manga, too. There was a privately-owned video rental store within walking distance from my home that had a selection of anime, or what we called "Japanimation" at the time. It was there where I discovered Bubblegum Crisis. I would say that during the late '80s and early '90s was truly the golden age of anime fandom in the United States. Back then, discovering anime was like finding a hidden cave full of treasures that nobody else knew about. In high school my friend Nathan taught me how to use our computer's modem, and how to connect to BBSes (bulletin board systems). From there I was able to find other people who had a passion for SF and anime stuff.

I would frequent my local comic book stores, Stalking Moon and Atomic Comics. I didn't really care for the latter so much, but occasionally I would find cool stuff there. Stalking Moon focused more on Japanese stuff, plus they rented anime VHS there. There I would rent quite a lot of anime, until the store's selection tended to turn towards everything dubbed in English. It wasn't until later that Blockbuster Video started stocking anime.

During the summer months when I was in college, I would also watch a lot of the fansubs I'd accrued, too. Summer was also when I could stay at my friend Nathan's place in San Diego for a couple of weeks, and during this time we would visit the San Diego Comic Con together. This was back in the late '90s, before it got obnoxiously crowded. Back then, we were able to show up on a Saturday, pay for a one day admission ticket, and spend all day at the con. Nowadays, tickets are sold out soon after they are available for sale. It's insane.

As a result from my years as a student, I became subconsciously programmed to look forward to the summer months in which I was free from studies in order to pursue my nerdy passions. As an adult, I find myself purchasing anime on DVD more often during the summer months. Consequently, summer is when I feel more motivated to watch it, too. When I still lived in Phoenix, I had attended the Phoenix Comicon during Memorial Day weekend in 2010 and 2011 before moving to Japan.

Now that I live in Japan, mid-May means the Shizuoka Hobby Show and in July it's the Summer Wonder Festival. These are the two warmer month nerd events I look forward to each year. I've never been to Comic Market, and I don't believe I would really enjoy 95% of it anyway, since the majority of it is aimed at more recent anime and perverted crap.

Summer is indeed the time of year when my nerd powers activate to the fullest.

Next is a photo gallery of the Summer Wonder Festival 2015!

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