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...s Singapore Blog - Anime Festival Asia 2009 ⏎ Day2 - Wednesday, November 18 ⏎ It's exquisitely pretty here. So pretty, in fact, that one might forget for a second that they're drenched in sweat and covered in mosquito bites. This is a park that was once a British fort. They do NOT have trees like this where I come from. ⏎ I spent most of the day in Chinatown, which is a seemingly never-ending sprawl of insanely crowded malls and food courts. Unlike the rest of Singapore's malls and food courts, these look and feel completely and utterly foreign. There is NOTHING like this in America. ⏎ I'll spare you the laundry list of foodstuffs I was way too excited to be cramming down my gullet. Suffice it to say I ate my bodyweight in some local specialties. Unlike our depressing mall food courts, Singapore's food courts are their haute cuisine. They span the gamut from cheap to expensive, decent to tastes-like-being-french-kissed-by-god. ⏎ Except for this. Durian, the big yellow spiky fruit infamous among foodies for its rank, decay-like stench, is popular in Southeast Asia, and though there are myriad laws against its consumption in confined spaces, it was being sold here in crepe form. I had long been curious about it (the flavor is supposed to be lovely and custard-like), and got one. It tastes like a desert that had been previously vomited up by an animal. ⏎ Throughout all of this, I had my eyes peeled for every DVD shop I managed to by, or perhaps an anime shop. Every Chinatown I've ever been to had tons of the former and at least one of the latter. To my utter shock, there was barely anything worth mentioning. Most bigger American cities have more anime stuff to buy. ⏎ To start with, there were very few anime DVDs to be had. A few shops had VCD collections (most of which were several years old), but they were all small mom 'n' pop shops. Odex, the company synonymous with the Singaporean anime DVD market, has pretty much abandoned packaged media and now focuses on managing broadcast rights under a new name. After an ill-informed attempt to sue Singaporeans for illegal ing RIAA-style, people picketed and staged mass burnings of their product... well, let's face it, few companies could come back from that. ⏎ There are one or two other boutique publishers, but anime has largely gone underground. I'm told that nearly every otaku here now watches illegal s pretty much exclusively. People who absolutely MUST have physical media will either import US product, or cross the border to Malaysia, wherein pirate DVDs can be had pretty easily. It's hard to believe that such a vibrant anime community could have gone entirely illegitimate. You can bet I'll be trying to find out more over the course of this weekend. ⏎ Ah, yes. This weekend. The real reason I'm out here is to emcee the industry event on Friday, Animation Asia Conference 2009. Tonight I got to meet a prominent English-speaking ist that I'm surprised I'd never met before. ⏎ Yep, that's blogger and Storm Trooper extraordinare, Danny Choo, along with his maid girl minions. I found it utterly impossible to take him seriously when he's dressed like that and posing for pictures, but once he took off the helmet he revealed himself to be an extraordinarily nice and smart guy. His day job involves holding Japanese companies' hands as they explore the terrifying world of the internet, and holding American internet comapnies' hands as they explore the terrifying world of business in Japan. Needless to say, he's paid pretty well to do a job that would make most people want to hurl themselves out the nearest window. ⏎ Anyway, Danny will be ing me in a roundtable with Vince Shortino from Crunchyroll and a few very big industry luminaries. This is going to be a very interesting weekend. ⏎ Day 1 - Tuesday, November 17 ⏎ I'd...