Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
It’s no secret that Stella Lai is one of my favorite artists and favorite people. (You might remember her as the cover artist of Giant Robot 58.) So I was super excited when my friend asked me to beta test an app that she built with her friends Krister and Jessica. The Mr. Chiizu app, which combines the Neo Print experience with downloadable packages featuring the art of various cool/cute artists (including Stella), is finally out now. Here’s what Stella has to say about it. MW: I think it’s cool that while I may never be able to purchase one of your pieces of art, I can play with them using Mr. Chiizu! Where did the idea for this app come from? SL: About two years ago Jessica approached me about making a purikura app for the iPhone. I thought it might be fun, so I shared the idea with my business partner, Krister. He felt that a purikura app might be a bit gimmicky (he lives in Japan and has seen the waning popularity of photo booths) so the idea sat on the shelf for a while. When Apple released StoreKit, which simplified selling content in-app, we saw an opportunity to make a photo decorating app with a variety of different pieces of purchasable content. As popular as the iPhone and iPad are, we didn’t see an obvious way for artists and illustrators to publish their work, so we thought it would be a cool idea to create a fun app featuring work by our friends and artists we love. MW: Beta testing was pretty cool. Did you get any surprises when the testers’ images starting popping up? SL: The beta testing was helpful and we are thankful for the nearly 50 people who participated. We’d been working off and on for seven months in a bubble so it was great to see the app through the eyes of other people. We received a lot of helpful insight and I think we were able to improve the user experience. MW: I understand you were already bootlegged in China. I suppose in a way, it’s flattering. How did you find out. Was that a straight crack or what? SL: Krister is obsessed with checking our user analytics and about two weeks ago he noticed there was a discrepancy between our internal analytics and our sales reports from Apple. He probably lost a day of sleep trying to figure out why until he tracked down a site where people with jail-broken phones are able to download the app for free. At first we were a bit angry but then we realized it’s just part of life and embraced it. The reviews on the hacker site were very positive, ha ha. MW: Nice acting in the promotional video. You were a natural. Was that the first take! SL: I tell people it’s my cousin the dancing bear. Yeah, Jessica and I did a video shoot at my studio on a Saturday and...
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Beginning today, see our Meat Bun Pop Up shop at Giant Robot 2! Stop by for Game Night 6 tonite!
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A decade has passed since Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center. Multiple news sources have commemorated the event as a moment of self-reflection in which America and the world have evolved–for better or worse–in the Post-9/11 world. Salon ran a story by Matt Zoller Seitz describing some of the ways in which popular culture changed and reacted to the event. We know about America. How did the rest of Asia fare? Mark Austin recalled what it was like in the newsroom at the Daily Yomiuri when both planes struck America’s shoulders. Nothing too interesting to tell and as far as I know, no one has openly recalled on this anniversary of anniversaries how the War on Terror influenced Japanese pop culture. Let’s start with cinema. Battle Royale II: Requiem contained several less than subtle references to the landscape of the time. The most unsettling part about the sequel is that the survivors of the first film formed their own terrorist cell called the “Wild Seven.” The movie veered dangerously close to glorifying terrorism and resistance as a mode of existential relevancy. For video games, Konami released Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, shortly after the attacks. The moral ambiguity of the terrorist antagonists of the game didn’t cause any substantial changes or delays. However, developer Hideo Kojima had to make some last minute changes to the script and cut scenes where downtown “Arsenal Gear” devastated Ellis Island and downtown Manhattan. He further more removed a scene where the American flag fell on the Solidus’s corpse. Additionally, Japan’s Hip Hop scene had a few words of their own to say on the matter. The controversial rap group, King Giddra, released their single, “911,” on the first anniversary of the attack. They criticized the hypocrisy of America’s War on Terror and the Japanese government’s complicity in America’s grand agenda. With the exception of Hideo Kojima, these twoexamples represent a moment in which America’s position in the world came into question. To a certain extent, I wonder whether it marked a moment where Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution on the country’s pacifism came into question. As we all remember, 9/11 eventually led to the Iraq War and then Prime Minister Koizumi supported the invasion with a provision of troops from the Japanese Self Defense Force. America’s inability to secure an immediate victory further called the article’s legitimacy into doubt. If America couldn’t protect itself or prevail as a super power, then how are they going to safeguard Japan? No sooner than this, then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for a review of the constitution in 2007 to endow Japan with a stronger role in the world and bolster the country’s national pride. What I’m getting at is that 9/11 may have temporarily thrown the ball further into the Japanese Right’s court. K Dub Shine of King Giddra possessed some right wing views of his own. He produced the soundtrack to the Sakura of Madness film where a Neo-Tojo gang targets...
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So this is happening fast. An Angry Birds theme park in China. It’s part of a larger park, but there is a section where people can practice catapulting in person. Undoubtedly it started without any permission as the article says, but from hearing experiences, sometimes in China you have to play with the piraters or else you’ll be getting nothing. This goes for film as well. They’ll do it regardless and you can stop them once you get injunctions and so forth and who knows how the Chinese legal system works. There’s merch too. (ABC – Angry Birds)
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