Blog

Tokyo

13 Sep 2024

As of writing this post, I am just a little under two full days away from boarding a plane to Narita Airport.

I’m going to Tokyo, the capital of Japan.

It’s still a little hard to believe. This was a dream of mine for ages.

And it’s coming true soon.

The trip

I’m landing at Narita on Monday, 16th September, in the evening (JST). That day’s most likely a wash, I’ll just have to check in at my hostel and try to recover from the 12h flight and the jet lag.

I’ll be staying there for about 10 days and returning home 26th September.

I’m going alone. As cool as it would have been to go in company - be it my girlfriend or my otaku friends - it’s hard to coordinate such big plans. Don’t worry, though, I’ll be meeting people there - whomever comes out to the Alchemist anison bar or Mogra, and some folks I know from Discord.

I’m keeping my trip limited to Tokyo and its surroundings. The temptation to dip out for a day in Osaka was there, but shinkansens are mad expensive. Tokyo alone is already too much for 10 days, but… listen, that’s all the PTO I could manage. I’ll hit up the other big cities or the countryside if I have the chance to go again.

What I want to do

I’ve mentioned before when talking about why I got into film photography - I want to go on the juiciest photowalks of my life. I want to bring some amazing negatives home - captured light from Tokyo, a hard physical reminder of my trip. This is why I got myself a Pentax MX (an appropriately Japanese brand) and a Smena 8m, and why I practiced with them for a good while.

I’ve even been tipped off about some films that are only really sold in Japan, like Fuji Superia Premium 400. Great opportunity to try those out.

I’ve mentioned Alchemist and Mogra - I really want to experience the Japanese otaku night life. The Mogra club in particular has been on my bucket list almost as long as a trip to Japan in itself. I’ve watched the streams and wondered what it’s like to party to proper anisongs.

And of course… I’ve got to hit up all the famous otaku stores in Akihabara. Melonbooks, Mandarake, Bookoff… I want to come back with as much doujins and merch as I can handle packing into my carry-on luggage (and maybe ship any excess back home). Not just for myself, of course - I’ll also be hunting down rare Sylvanian Families for my girlfriend, and various other souvenirs. I’ve even signed up for a small doujin market run by Melonbooks.

I’ve looked at some hiking spots, since I’d love to see some local nature. I’m not sure which one of the ones I picked out I’ll go to… it’s basically a toss-up between Mount Hiwada (and the nearby Kinchakuda park) and Mount Takao. I doubt I’ll have time enough for both, since it’s basically a one day trip to either.

There’s also a couple events I’ve earmarked, namely the Shigure Ui solo exhibition and the RakuSpa x Hololive Gen 0 collab.

I’m not quite as interested in the “usual” touristy spots like the Sky Tree or whatever. I’d certainly love to check out some shrines and stuff like that, but honestly - I’m more excited about just finding random, really cool, off-the-path places on my photo walks. I also want to grab a one day bikeshare pass and do a lap around Tokyo, seeing how much of it I can cover on a bicycle.

Some thoughts on going to Japan

It feels like I’ve been researching for - or daydreaming about - going to Japan for ages. Well, it’s been ages. In that time, I’ve learned a lot about Japan - not just the Cool Japan Epic Sakura side of it, but also the mundane and annoying parts of it.

I have lots of friends who have been there many, many times. It sometimes even feels a bit weird being this excited about a novel experience when surrounded by people who just go there like 2-3 times a year to hang out, or for events, or to buy a lot of stuff.

But thanks to listening to all those various experiences and all the advice I’ve been given - and thanks to having been learning Japanese for a while now - I feel pretty confident even when I’m going alone. Of course, no plan survives contact with reality unchanged… but that just kinda has to happen.

Would I want to move there? Maybe. Probably not. I don’t think I’ve really got a line to stay there, and moreover, I’m kind of averse to the idea of moving countries in general. Don’t get it twisted, it’s not out of any kind of patriotism - it’s more about the countless social relations I would have to leave behind.

I’m happy enough being a tourist in my own way.

I’m gonna embrace the novelty and ride it out. I’m going with the feeling that I might never get to go again - more of an anxious and bleak outlook on the future of this world than any more concrete reason. Well, the money part is sorta concrete, I’m terrible at saving and I don’t know if I’ll afford another trip anytime soon.

But that only means I’ve got to live that moment even more.

God, I can’t wait. I hope the crazy rainstorms hitting Poland right now won’t fuck with my trip.

See you soon, Tokyo…

–Wikt

flags, idols and yuri

27 Aug 2024

Hatsune Miku from Brazil and from everywhere

You’ve all seen her all over your timelines, in every anime art channel on Discord. Brazilian Miku, and not just her - all the Mikus who came before her or followed in her wake, donning either folk costumes or iconic modern outfits from countries all over the world. The idea of localizing Miku is hardly new – indeed, Poland was among the first, if not the first to have a Miku of its own, presented in a national museum, with a song produced for her to sing in Polish.

What’s new to me is seeing this in such a huge wave, in 2024, when the international community is in discord, with multiple major international conflicts ongoing, with wars over both territory and culture ramping up - and the dream of a truly interconnected and united world slipping away.

One notable national Miku was drawn by someone from Israel. Said artist, of course, immediately got jumped by people who hated to see Hatsune Miku associated with a violent, genocidal state. Which, in turn, made Ukrainians uncomfortable with the lack of such intense reaction towards depictions of Russian Miku… also associating in some way with a violent, belligerent state.

This was, of course, inevitable from the very start. If you want to have Miku represent your community, she inevitably ends up associated - more or less - with the opinions others may have on that community. Especially when the community we’re talking about is a state, a nation.

Some people resist this association altogether. They don’t want Miku to associate with any flag, any state, or any politics whatsoever. Miku is supposed to be everyone’s idol, after all, she’s supposed to like singing, leeks, cute things. But if she’s everyone’s idol, she’s kind of… nobody’s idol. She’s the same Miku for everyone, adrift - corporate - a safe brand.

Maybe that’s fair enough? After all, Hatsune Miku is ultimately a character to represent a suite of voice synthesis software… or indeed just one of the voices it can synthesize into singing. She is a corporate product.

And yet here we are, creating and retweeting Mikus from all over the world. Not just “our” Miku - after all, the trend popped off with Brazilian Miku - who became immensely popular worldwide. I’ve also seen various Mikus meet up and interact. I’ve seen a Miku against the backdrop of an Ukrainian city, where a bomb had just struck an apartment building. I’ve seen Mikus from neighboring countries sharing their cultures with each other.

In a way, Miku has partially escaped this brand-safe containment - kinda like the Dragon Ball Z cast (especially in Latin America). Some find it kind of stupid, maybe even silly - and it certainly is very silly when you have Hillary Clinton making tortured references to Pokemon or liberals evoking Voldemort imagery.

And yet, it doesn’t hit the same when Goku refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the state of Israel, or when an incensed transphobe finds herself waving around, in the British Parliament, a picture of Lily Hoshikawa telling people like her to shut up - or when people invoke the Joker in Lebanon, Les Miserables in Hong Kong, the Handmaid’s Tale among feminists in the US, Argentina, Northern Ireland…1

To me, this is reminiscent of détournement - the hijacking of corporate imagery, to put back in the edge. Rather than subverting things like advertisements, this is more to enlist the heroes and symbols we look up to in the service of social movements we care about.

To be sure: I personally find associating Miku with Israel distasteful, but it’s really not about Miku herself. Remove Miku from this discussion and you will find I simply do not like that state at all. Israel has earned its reputation well enough, and it’s hard for me to be sympathetic to the artist. With Russia, at least, there’s the vague shared culture of Eastern Europe to refer to (or hide behind, as some would say) - one that suffers its despots and their wars and tries to slip by and survive.

And just as Miku can represent a state - she can also represent its people, and the struggles they face, including the authoritarian actions of their own government.

Just as nations disagree with each other, so do social movements, including ones that transcend national boundaries. The struggle for ownership of our pop-culture is a proxy of the struggle for ownership of culture in general - to tear it out of the hands of corporations, governments and people who sow discord.

Japan x Korea yuri

There’s another international exchange that prompted a fascinating trend. The story of a Korean girl gallantly covering a Japanese girl’s lap with her jacket, only to later comment online “anything for my precious kitten”, and the reactions of Korean women towards Japanese women disillusioned with their male compatriots, have left people with the impression that Korean women have INSANE rizz - and that’s what inspired yuri artists to imagine this coupling, between the charming Korean gentlewomen and the sweet, shy Japanese girls.

In the backdrop of this yuri trend is an intense, downright violent misogynistic rally among Korean men, who stand against the 4B movement and engage with impunity in a number of disgusting practices that violate the privacy, safety, health and life of women in Korea. Japan’s society isn’t that much less misogynistic, itself, even to this day - and so the women of two nations look to each other for solidarity, and perhaps even love.

Oh, and they invited China along as well! Which reminded me of the posts earlier on, showcasing comments from Chinese women trying to cheer up a girl after a terrible experience with a man. “You swan, he frog”.

Diversity and solidarity

What’s so exciting and fun about these trends to me is how they connect as much, if not more than how they divide. The world may be as it is, but the dream is alive. When so many people from all over the world join in on such trends, the outcome is truly diverse. We get a window into different places, different cultures, and a bond - whether through yuri or idols - that surpasses the borders powerful people set out for each other, and becomes a means of shared resistance to these divisions and a way to look past the flags, to the real shared conflicts and struggles.

Whom so many people reject, then, is those who cannot see past those borders - those who think their flag is the most important, and should trump someone else’s flag. Indeed, the flag is mostly there to identify - what really draws people in is the countless aesthetics that come along with it, a window into the real, material culture of each people and the hardships they face in their lives.

Let a hundred Mikus bloom.

-Wikt

  1. https://www.brut.media/us/videos/international/european-news/when-pop-culture-becomes-protest-culture ↩

fediverse migration

25 Aug 2024

Thank you for always following my activities online.

This is to announce that I have migrated my Fediverse account from 101010.pl to donotsta.re.

I’ve utilized the Fediverse migration options that make this process easy, so you should be automatically redirected to follow me at my new Fediverse home.

Reasons

The instance I used up until now, as I’ve found, has a pretty poor reputation among people I respect, having already lead me to lose touch with at least one person & making others reluctant to follow my account. The amount of instances choosing to restrict 101010.pl in some way has only been growing, leading me to make this decision.

The instance I migrated to has been recommended to me by folks from an anime fandom Discord I frequent, many of which are active on said instance.

Akkoma

The instance I have migrated to is hosted on Akkoma. Some extensions of ActivityPub might not work as expected for followers on other ActivityPub software such as Mastodon or Misskey.

We look forward to your continued support in the future.

-Wikt

Just imagine it’s on a white background in black serif font.

candido and colorplus

13 Aug 2024

Centrum Janki shopping mall branding advertisement, with a woman in round shades, a black hat and jacket, holding up a Smena 8m to her eye.

I’ve got my scans back from the lab yesterday (in impressively short time, once again). This time, I shot two rolls: Candido 400 on my Pentax MX and Kodak ColorPlus200 on the Smena 8m that I got back from repairs. I’ll share some of my thoughts and conclusions.

Candido 400 & Pentax MX

The film itself is basically CineStill by another name - Kodak Vision with the remjet already removed. It generates a lot of halations - giving highlights a further bright-red sheen. It’s also somewhat grainier than the “regular” Kodak films like Gold or Ultramax. Originally, I ordered the 800T version - more sensitive and color-balanced for “tungsten” (artificial) lighting. Sadly, the store had a clerical error and none of that film in stock - so I agreed to a replacement with the 400ISO film.

The photos turned out… interesting. I’ve got a couple bangers, but I’ve also got a lot of minor defects - stuff like streaking and random light leaks. Some of them add character! Sadly, one or two of these defects distract too much from the subject.

Photo of a pond reflecting the sun. It's heavy on halations, and a dark spot appears to the bottom left of them.

This photo in particular frustrates me - it would be a certified banger, but that dark spot right next to the sun’s reflection really manifested in the wrong place. It draws my eye away. There’s probably a way to shop it out, but I’m not THAT good at editing.

From what I read after reviewing the photos, CineStill-type films just… do that. They’re highly sensitive to weak light, which makes them catch even tiny light leaks with ease. There’s also no protection from static electricity, which could explain this and some other dark spots - it happens if you wind the film fast enough to gather and discharge the static.

There’s another photo that shows a bit of streaking, for which one I’m not actually sure if that’s the lab messing up a bit, or if it’s just the film doing that. On other photos, though, the light leaks… are actually kind of welcome? They add a lot of character to the shots and they really sell the fact that you’re shooting analog.

Lens

I’ve also had some thoughts about the two different lens I’m using - I have a borrowed Takumar 28-80mm and my own Pentax 40-80mm zoom (which is something like 55-80mm in practice because the lens is slightly defective). I think I like the 40-80 lens more, after all. The Takumar can do macro properly and is nice & sharp at wide angles, closer to the 28mm end - but zoomed in, it seems to struggle with sharp focus.

I should really just get the 40-80mm serviced. Once I can use all of its features, it’s gonna be perfect. It already takes very good photos, which is kinda why I’m reluctant to even hand it off into repairs… maybe when I pick up a prime lens to use in the meantime. I could use a prime lens, anyway, it makes for a much more compact camera.

ColorPlus 200 & Smena 8m

I got my Smena 8m back from repairs, loaded it up with ColorPlus 200 and gave it a good ol’ test run, taking a lot of janky photos… and a couple of real good ones!

Flowers on a windowsill, looking out into a small garden.

ColorPlus is just one of the mainstream Kodak offerings. Oddly, it’s not as popular or often mentioned as Kodak Gold, but I suppose decades of Gold being the standard, default, go-to pick did its work. It renders colors very nicely.

With this roll, though, my main project was to get a better handle on the camera itself, and a better handle on… myself, really. To make sure I meter everything properly and judge the focus distance correctly - and not forget to do any of those things before firing the shutter.

What I’ve learned from this is that I could still do better with range-finding. Some of my estimates were okay, sometimes it was just a matter of cranking focus to infinity since I’m shooting a landscape anyway… but I might just make like my friend and carry a tape measure with me. Hard data wins over vibes and “that should be about 2 meters, right?”.

Also, I should trust the Smena viewfinder more, and only adjust for parallax. I was never sure if the optics of the viewfinder accurately reflected Smena’s focal length, but looking at some of the shots… they mostly do. A lot of my shots suffer from bad composition because I’ve been over-correcting.

What next

I’m planning to pick up a small stack of Ultramax 400 next. This film stock might become my mainstay - among the various films I tried, it’s my favorite. 400 ISO really is a sweet spot for me - you can shoot it a fair bit into the late hours after sunset, you can sometimes even get an indoor shot, and it still handles bright daylight effortlessly.

One film I still want to try is the famous Portra series. It’s the pro’s film for good reason - and sure enough, also one of the most expensive films… I might save that for Japan.

analog film

02 Aug 2024

A bike impaled on a fence, against a backdrop of apartment buildings and a tree, shot on black and white film

In the past few weeks, I’ve been into analog photography on 35mm film.

Photography is something I always enjoyed - something probably passed down from Dad, whose digital camera I fondly remember shooting in Bulgaria. If I had that kind of windfall money, a DSLR camera was somewhere on my bucket list - something I can stick a proper zoom lens on.

Even on my smartphone, I always cared about the camera, and I would often mess with the pro version of it - taking pictures as well as I can, messing with exposure, white balance, to capture whatever I’m looking at precisely.

How it started

In September I’m heading to Japan for a 10 day trip.

Japan has always been a dream trip of mine, for reasons that are probably obvious if you scroll my timeline for just a bit. Now that I’m finally set to go, I wanted to create an unique record of my time in Japan.

At the same time, over the years, I’ve been talking to a friend of mine who’s into analog photography himself. I had a few shots taken of me on film, I even fucked around with putting Polaroid cartridges in my old 635CL.

It turned out my uncle had a Smena 8M laying around gathering dust - one that was still operational. So I borrowed it and shot a roll of Fomapan 400… and after that, I picked up a Pentax MX.

Why film?

It’s 2024. We all carry INCREDIBLY competent cameras on us every day, in our phones. If there’s one thing shooting film has reminded me of, it’s just how crazy sensitive modern smartphone cameras are - capable of taking shots with mere crumbs of light. Much unlike film, where past a certain hour you need a tripod to capture anything at all.

Film is also expensive. The rolls themselves, the development and scanning - for which you have to wait, to even find out if the photos turned out okay.

If the photo itself and the effect of it was my goal, I can accomplish that with my phone and Snapseed. So that’s not the whole story.

The gear itself & mechanical satisfaction

The first time I fired the shutter on my Pentax MX, the slap of the mirror was incredibly satisfying. Operating the focus, zoom and aperture rings has a tactile feel to it, along with every control on the camera. Now, this is also true of DSLRs…

Vintage gear prices

…but I don’t think I’d be able to buy a DSLR for the price of a Nintendo Switch. The operating cost of film photography may be high, but the entry level to some of the more pro-tier SLR camera gear is actually a little lower. The Pentax MX with its 40-80mm lens cost me about 700 PLN. Considerable, but affordable.

Physical record

At the end of a digital shot, I am left with a file. In my experiences, files are a bit more volatile than physical media. Tended to correctly, they can last pretty long - but a freak accident can still wipe them out more easily and irreversibly than physical media.

Negatives are physical media that contain a record of the photons my camera saw, frozen at a moment in time. This in itself is a little fascinating. I can reproduce the images even from old negatives and slides we found in the attic.

To be sure, these negatives are hardly more immortal than a file. They’ll end up in a cupboard only to be forgotten about. But it’s easier to forget about a negative than about a backup…

No opinions

Every now and then, shooting on my phone is a struggle. The camera app has opinions. Its autofocus might be unable to lock in on the tiny detail you care about. It might change the curve it’s using to balance your image right before you press the shutter, suddenly making the image wash out.

With film, you get more options to shoot fully manually. If you don’t want to, there are also plenty of point and shoots - controlling optics using electronics is something we’ve gotten crazy good at even before the digital sensor. There’s a camera for every level of engagement with the process you care about.

The process & being present

Having a whole separate camera and a development step means two things.

When I shoot, I have to lock in. I don’t want to waste too much film, after all. Thanks to this, I feel like I come out taking photos I like more.

And when I finally get the mail from the lab with my scans, it’s like a gacha pull, or like a tiny Christmas. It’s a whole event - review the photos, send them around to friends, post them online.

The photos are still really good

Physically capturing photons, even on small format film, can still produce a really crisp, sharp digital image. Slides and negatives store information pretty well, and reproducing & enlarging the images with light is something we’re already very good at.

If anything, I like seeing film grain much better than some of the crazy post-processed AI stitching I see in smartphone photos…

Experiences thus far

The Pentax is amazing. I love shooting it, the sound of the shutter. I’ve been turning out some fun images on it, including when I took it to the outskirts of Animatsuri and took some cosplayer photos.

The Smena… is unforgiving. Having no feedback like you get with an SLR, I often ended up metering the scene wrong or forgetting to switch one of the settings (shutter speed, aperture, focus). At one point, I had to get it repaired, since I applied too much force when making a mistake (unwinding the film without holding down the shutter trigger). I’ve got a Kodak ColorPlus 200 wound on it now. But as seen above, it can still take a real photo. After so many years. I guess that’s another thing - old cameras are more repairable.

The 40-80mm zoom lens that came with my Pentax is partially dysfunctional - it won’t zoom out below about 55mm focal length, so it’s effectively a 55-80 lens. Not a big deal, I’ve been taking photos with it anyway, but I’m thinking of getting another lens at some point - most likely a prime lens.

I’m well aware of GAS, which is why I’m deliberating on these choices still. I’d like to give myself better odds for late evening/artificial light photography as well, so it’s a bit of a tossup between 50mm with a wider F1.7 or even F1.4 aperture, and 28mm with a tighter one… (Wider aperture -> more light)

I do also have a borrowed 28-80mm lens that I plan to shoot with, on Candido 400 film (a CineStill clone).

I love the photos I took - some of my best work, lots of stuff I couldn’t pull off on a smartphone. I’ve been posting them on my socials, and I can’t wait to shoot more.

–Wikt