But... WE'RE FLYING!!!

I once saw a stand-up comedian do a routine about how jaded we've become. He talked about all the petty complaints airline passengers would make... "my seat's too small", "I didn't get enough peanuts", "It's too cold" etc... and how these people had lost sight of the fact that they were FLYING! A couple hundred years ago, a machine that could fly through the air would have been considered an impossibility, and today it is so mundane that we take it for granted.

It's easy for us to get caught up in the fast pace of the world, we don't stop to appreciate it when amazing things happen... or we forget that these things ARE amazing as soon as we become used to them. That is as true of our fandom as it is of anything else. It was a big deal, a REALLY big deal in 1991 to have a VHS subtitled bootleg of GODZILLA VS KING GHIDORAH. Who knew when the movie would be released stateside? Who knew when it would be translated? So you've got a third generation copy that we have to turn up the contrast on our TV just to read the text? So what? We're starving, we'll take it! Heck, we'll settle for something non-translated recorded directly out of a theater onto a handheld camcorder!

We're not starving any more. I want to give a shout out to great job being done by the tokusatsu fansubbing community. Groups like Hi-No-Tori Fansubs and Megabeast Empire are giving us stuff we could only have dreamed of 20 years ago. Fansubs existed, but it was strictly anime. I once asked someone I knew who ran in anime fansubbing circles about the possibility of finding live-action stuff. He told me that he didn't believe such things would ever exist. There simply wasn't a big enough market for them. I MIGHT be able to pay some of the anime guys to fansub some films, but the problem would be 1. Finding them and 2. Paying them what they ask for. If you had told me then that someday the entire series of KAMEN RIDER AMAZON would be fansubbed and available for free-download, I would have... asked you what a download was?

And it's not just fan-produced stuff. IRON KING, ULTRASEVEN, ULTRA Q, KIKAIDA... all these shows and more are available as legitimate subtitled releases, and there will be more. Some of these shows and movies are subbed and put online for free almost as soon as they are released in Japan. There was a time when the fandom viewed bootleggers as a "necessary evil"... not so necessary anymore.

So folks, please... sit back, relax. We are FLYING. Take some time to enjoy it...

To Print or not To Print (HINT: Print)

Ah yes, welcome to my first "proper" post on the brand new Monster Attack Team website.

So yeah, I got a little something to say:

MAT #11 was intended from the beginning to be a print magazine. It was designed as a print magazine. It was proofed and conceptualized as a print magazine.

When we went through Ka-Blam, (and consequently IndyPlanet) to print our latest issue, the digital download came with the package. This is something that was, for all intents and purposes, out of our control. I had no idea how the digital download looked compared to our print issue. So I bought one...

And I am here to tell you that the digital download is not the way to go. For whatever reason, some text disappears. Also, the magazine was designed to be viewed in spreads, not individual pages.

So here's what I'm going to do: If you purchased a digital download, forward me your receipt from IndyPlanet/Ka-Blam to mike@monsterattackteam.com, and I will send you a much better PDF.

That is your public service announcement for the day.