Beyond the Staples Center
Listening — Michael Jackson, Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough
Reading — Parts of a World, Peter Brazeau
The Great Anime Expo 2026 essay is complete. This turned out quite different than my past convention write-ups, which were hour-by-hour travelogues. I'm not sure where to go from here, or if it even makes sense to write one of these again in the future.
It's long. I added a table of contents so that it can be read in smaller chunks. It's also undeniably melancholic but I hope I also managed to make it entertaining; I had fun writing it (on airplanes, on the metro, in the exhibit hall, standing behind you on the stairs, on my back porch). I could not resist planting a few deliberately opaque puzzles in it. As with my opinions, I wear my influences on my sleeve.
For reasons that might be clear from the essay, I've been listening to Michael Jackson's solo discography carefully the past week. I realized that I know Eat It far more than the original, so I've effectively been living that Weird Al comedy all my life. (Sadly I do not own a Hayboy, but I do have a Takane doll...) Listening to Off the Wall was one of those "wait, shit, this was all him?" events where an entire ecosystem of music collapses into two artists.
I have never liked Thriller but I forced myself to watch the whole video start to finish (it helps that Halloween is still months away). In 1984 this must have been a novelty, when one could get away with calling music videos "short films", but it is not for me. The situation is improved when the song is only four minutes long and not a 14-minute television show, but it would benefit from losing the "Darkness falls [...]" voiceover. Maybe there's been a good three minute song hiding in there all along?
Moonwalker for the Sega Genesis is now in the $200.00 range, so just buy an Everdrive instead.
There's no way those kids were his.
2026.07.15
