Okay, so this blog or 'diary' post about of all things a "Princess Jasmine of Aladdin" manicure is from Yukari, not Halca, both of the once-popular Japanese party-hop duo, HALCALI, but the point is--- Is it me, or is HALCALI quickly becoming less relevant than the fucking Do-Nuts for chrissakes...? Girls, I know you're enjoying the fallout of stardom & the leisure time it brings, but you won't be able to play Anime cons forever--- Maybe you might want to go into the studio some more and I don't know, make some music... Stop writing about your pink carpets and nails & turn the drum machine back on again. Please? More on this later.

A Bathing Ape? No! Greedy Genius? Forget about it... The next wave in cool hoodies is being surfed upon by a poorly dressed akiba maid addict with an Issey Ogata via Yi Yi -style haircut in this super-cool jacket on sale at Japanese clothing-outlet, Sanki.

Anyways. Everyone knows that Japanese is the coolest language to get tattooed on your body, decal'd on your car, or even just adorned upon one of those wacky & kooky t-shirts from pornagraphy outlet, J-List--- but what about this?

You could always claim to be remiss in knowing what it meant--- you could claim that the characters on this jacket meant something like Eternal Strength, Kung fu Hippie, Dragon Fist or something equally profound.

Translated, 萌え (もえ) moe is a sort of catchall phrase for certain aspects of what those aforementioned akiba dwellers love, and a word they say when they want to express the fact that they love it.

It's possible this jacket might earn you credits with your other otaku friends, if you were in Japan, were Japanese, and that sort of thing mattered to otaku--- I don't know.

As is, I think you might get more action by wearing one of those strikingly lonely "Looking for a Japanese girlfriend" t-shirts.

It's the sort of credit that only an ero ero rorikon figurine can earn you. Moe is calling, do  you want to accept the charges?

If anyone thought that the advice I gave was worth listening to, I might have started this article with "I get a lot of questions..." I get a lot of questions about how to properly clean my mini-lathe, I get a lot of questions about how best to tell a man you're in love. But nobody gives a god damn what I think, so I'll just let you know that I've heard word of a good number of people asking how it is that they can get a piece of the graphic design job pie in the land everyone seems to call their next permanant residency.

Courtesy Jean Snow's blog, PingMag (in Japanese & English for your reading pleasure), has an interview up with Normal Design's Ross McBride (he would be the white guy pictured in this article...), who himself started working in Japan as a graphic designer, and moved thereafter into the perhaps trickier art of product design.

The article is a little light on information, but it does have some advice that should serve as a wake up text-message to those would be artistes out there looking to sell their deviantart chibi-kawaii-robo maid pictures to that Japanese population that just loves them so.

In short, McBride wisely makes the case against a certain common strategy (read on); there have only been a few outsiders who could seemingly beat (or compete with) the Japanese at their own game. Trevor Brown comes to mind, first and foremost.

Does the world need another, (or even one) MegaTokyo? Do I need to answer that question?