🤍
A near perfect vampire anime that I was turned on to by my emo Latino friends in Orange County (California) as a teen. It was originally drawn as a hentai manga by the Rubenesque Kouta Hirano, who eventually replaced the sex with extreme violence and sold it as a show. I bought a bootleg Hellsing shirt in London a few years ago and was stabbed the first night I wore it out. The shirt is still covered in dried blood on the sides. I wore it for the first time in years a couple of weeks ago.
May 10, 2023
Related Recs
This is a 12 volume manga by Inio Asano. I'm not a big manga reader & consider myself highly selective. This was one of the best & most beautiful series I've ever read. A love letter to imageboard culture alongside exploration of diverse human responses to horrific circumstances that can't be understood even as they happen to you and those you love. Sympathy, empathy, pity. Aliens and teen girls trying to cope.
I believe it's getting an anime adaptation soon, which I hope will be well done and impactful. I don't know, it just really stuck with me.
Sep 11, 2024
Manga and the 1997 anime
This goes so fucking hard. My favorite thing about Berserk is how the creator Kentaro Miura originally made it to just bring his coolest teenage boy, ultra violent, badass fantasies to life but through the story of Guts and how this character evolves we also see Miura maturing. It's a process that many young boys have got to go through and it's uncomfortable and scary and that's what Berserk is. It's horrifying and beautiful and sometimes funny and mostly heartbreaking.
*As a warning, Berserk is incredibly graphic*
May 20, 2025
May 14, 2025
Top Recs from @patrick-mcgraw
🫶
This is probably less of a choice and more of a personality defect. It’s ultimately an alienating and soul crushing way to live your life. But there is no way to be successful without being highly critical, at least as an editor. The danger is when you turn it on yourself and people you are close to (inevitable). In a culture where we’re sold blind positivity (profit motive), it's important to stay critical, to stay on your toes. As an editor this is most important. But it’s also important to be an “A-type” thinker instead of a “B-type” thinker: you have to offer ways to improve what it is you’re criticizing, and not just be critical for the sake of criticizing.
May 10, 2023
🤍
Network spirituality etc etc etc. One of the only books I have ever read twice.
May 10, 2023
🫶
Favorite architect, still alive and teaching in Kyoto. His buildings are all formally bizarre in terms of structure and ratio and there’s a theory that him and other Japanese architects of his generation purposefully do not adhere to western architectural proportions and aesthetic ideals as a silent protest against the west because of the war and the nuclear fallout that many of them endured as children. He is also a terrific fiction writer. I’ve been trying to get him to write for the magazine for some time now. Apparently he used to beat his employees with a T-ruler.
May 10, 2023