The Anime Sickos Suffer a Year of Malaise
The newsletter is finally back! I feel like we've said that before.
Hello Sicko fans!
You may have noticed three things:
1) We have not released an episode today
2) We have not held Sicko Movie Nights for many weeks
3) We have not sent out a newsletter for many weeks
We understand it is extreme violence to withhold the slop from you. When da piggy opens their widdle mouth expecting a spoon of slop and the spoon does not come, it’s worse than being murdered. We apologize.
Our explanation is that a long, LONG simmering Sicko project recently was in its home stretch of production and we poured all of our (limited) energy for the last week into definitively closing the book on it. There is still a large amount of post-production needed before the project will be ready for release, but that process is being handled by others. In a very real sense, something that has been taking up all our free energy for six months is done.
We realize it is absurd and ridiculous to constantly rationalize newsletter droughts by vaguely referring over and over to a ~secret project~ and never actually saying what it is. Oh well. You’ll understand when it drops.
What this means though is that, at least in theory, we’re going to be able to get back on da newsletter horse. Also, does anyone want movie night to come back? Would you prefer if we started to do streaming or something? If so email animesickos@gmail.com and let us know.
Oh, also we are doing another Q&A episode soon. If you have any questions you want us to answer, drop them here: https://forms.gle/FRVwGVVVgut1DAVQ8 (PS: be aware that questions like “what do you think about [insert an anime series here]” will likely not get answered because most of the time the answer will be “haven’t seen it”).
Tom finished Yu Yu Hakusho
So I just recently finished watching all of Yu Yu Hakusho, a classic 90s shonen anime. I won’t get too much into the specifics. The short review is yeah, it’s a classic, it kicks ass, what do you want.
Part of why I wanted to seek out Yu Yu Hakusho is that I am fascinated by the manga’s author, Yoshihiro Togashi. Togashi also wrote Hunter x Hunter and you can see a lot of the truly deranged storytelling instincts HxH is so rife with start to form in YYH.
You may remember on our Hunter x Hunter episode, we read a letter from Togashi that was printed in the final volume of Yu Yu Hakusho. In it, he explained his decision to end the hit series with a tone of what seemed to be frankly psychotic self-hatred. To paraphrase: “I am a wiggly worm, I am so fucking pathetic, I’m like a fucking bug, I am taking away a thing you all love because I’m so fucked, I’m so sad dude, oh man you’re right to hate me, I do too” -- maybe I’m exaggerating here, but not by much.
At the time we read that, our take was that it was a massive overreaction from a man who was trained by an exploitative industry to put himself last and never consider his own worth. After watching the end of Yu Yu Hakusho, I still believe that. But also like....yeah, he’s right to write an apology letter for that shit!!!
Super quick recap: Our hero in Yu Yu Hakusho is Yusuke, a kid who owns. He has a friend Kurama who is an ancient fox demon in a human form, he’s smart and chill and really nice.
He also has a Vegeta named Hiei who is a little sour manlet who acts like he doesn’t care, but he does.
They previously won a huge fun tournament against a really cool villain, and then after that, had a big world-saving battle against a kinda just fine villain.
Now, Yusuke learns that his distant ancestor is a super badass king demon. His ancestor is one of the three kings of Demon World who all have equal power and keep each other in a cold war with no one ruler. The other two demon kings want to invade Earth and kill everyone and Yusuke’s ancestor is the one keeping them from doing so. Problem is that he’s dying. Yusuke is brought to Demon World to be his heir. But his enemies are preparing for his death as well.
One other demon king used to be Kurama’s second-in-command millennia ago, and now he recruits Kurama to his side. Another used to be great homies with Hiei and recruits him to his side. The audience sees this and goes wow! A three-way all-out demon war where friends are pitted against each other in brutal combat? Where bonds of brotherhood are tested and shattered? Cool! Can’t wait! It’s around here that you notice there are eight episodes left.
Short version is, when Yusuke’s demon dad dies, Yusuke just goes “instead of this war we’ve been talking about, let’s just do a big tournament and whoever wins gets to be president of demons!” And everyone’s like OK. Immediately Kurama and Hiei are like “whew, awesome, now we can enter the tournament as individuals and not have to be subordinate to these scary guys who want us to be mean. Hi Yusuke, we love you.”
The wild thing is that this series already had a tournament--the most famous arc is the Dark Tournament and is one of the best tournament arcs ever. Literally every single frame of this final tournament suffers from comparison to the better-in-every-way tournament we already saw!
The moment that made my jaw drop is when Yusuke has his big bout against Yomi, one of the demon kings and a favorite to win the tournament. As the match begins, Yusuke realizes he has no real drive to fight Yomi. He goes like “this is just another fight. I don’t even know why I would fight this guy. All I do is fight, but why? My last two fights were just to stop some other guy, it’s not because I wanted to do it. If I win this fight, what’s next? Another fight? Is that all my life amounts to? Fight until I die, just because I can’t do anything else? Is that all I’m good for? I don’t want to do this!” Upon hearing this, Togashi’s editor becomes enraged and yells “You idiotic child! You’re tired of fights? You want to quit? This whole tournament was your idea! We’re all here doing this because of you!” and proceeds to beat the shit out of Yusuke.
Ah, whoops just noticed I made a typo in that last paragraph. I wrote “Togashi’s editor” when what I meant was “Yusuke’s opponent Yomi.”
In the end, it’s hard to get too mad at Togashi for ending the series this way. Sure, from a narrative perspective it’s absolutely laughable, but drawing manga fucking sucks and kills you, so good on Togashi for getting himself out of the grind. Plus, the clout of Yu Yu Hakusho gave him the leeway to take breaks and hiatuses with Hunter x Hunter, something he couldn’t do before. People talk shit on how much time off he takes from HxH but it’s clear he wouldn’t have been able to create such an incredible series without it.
In the end, I guess what I’m trying to say is, why didn’t Yusuke ever use the spirit shotgun
Joe Beautified his Home
Winnie and I just hung up this cow canvas. The canvas is from Ukraine. When we bought it, we did not realize it was coming from Ukraine. We incorrectly assumed the USA had domestic capacity to produce cow prints.
Here's what happens when you buy something from Ukraine: it fucking falls off the grid and you try to get a refund for a very long time. While this happens, guys with scary tats kick it back and forth for a third of a year and it suddenly shows up in a wet box that smells like the sea. The nice woman in the receiving room hates you now. The canvas was undamaged.
It looks really good in my awful 900-sq foot condo that is both prison and warden. Coincidentally, my other big piece of art is Ukrainian in the sense it was made by a Ukrainian guy I used to work with.
The plank of leopard wood looks cool as hell but is supposedly toxic if you get a splinter. I have intrusive thoughts about licking it all the time.
Sickos Pickos
TOM’S PICKO: Making tofu at home
I love cooking, so you’d think that being privileged enough to work from home in plague time and enjoy cozy domesticity 24/7 would be a blessing for me. No. Foolish. Dumbass. So wrong. Fuck you for thinking that.
Turns out cooking brings with it a number of other tasks that suck ass: going to the grocery store. Cutting stuff up into little pieces. Washing dishes and pans and shit. The thing about these tasks is that when you are full of anxiety and depression and a year’s worth of accumulated malaise, you don’t want to do them. So instead I will eat very basic one- or two-ingredient “meals” basically every day, and then once a week order delivery and pay a 30% tip and try to convince myself it’s ethical (it isn’t).
As a result I have made LESS homemade food and tried FEWER new dishes in 2020 than any year of my adult life. It sucks shit and makes me feel really bad! It doesn’t help that even in the better times of the recent past, I would only really push myself and grow in ways I was proud of when I cooked for guests. Turns out when it’s very dangerous to bring loved ones into your home, it is easy to just go “what’s da point. Who’s looking” and roast a pan of salted broccoli and call it dinner.
Even the famous quarantine bread that was so prevalent in early days has fallen off. I made a few loaves but the level of conscious forward-thinking decision making required to make a loaf of bread is so far beyond what any human in 2020 is capable of. If you want bread, you’re already too late idiot. You have to have wanted bread yesterday and decided to do a bunch of prep work you don’t even get a reward for right away. Impossible. Plus, what do I even want bread for? I’m sure as hell not going to make a sandwich, because sandwiches require multiple ingredients and I’m sorry but I am not going to be doing that.
All of this is to highlight what a psychic balm it has been to begin regularly making homemade tofu. It’s a process similar to but significantly quicker than making a loaf of bread, one that isn’t particularly difficult but requires prolonged periods of quiet focus and stillness. It owns dude. It whips.
Tofu from the store generally is not amazing. You have to put it between plates and squeeze out a ton of water or else it tastes like nothing. It’s the chore food that makes you do a chore. There is a local tofu company called Phoenix Bean in Chicago that makes tofu that’s actually really good, but the downside to its freshness is that it goes sour in like a week, so you can’t stockpile it, and I can only get it at the Korean grocer that has maybe 4 square feet of floor space total, so I hesitate to constantly be going there to breathe a ton of death air if I can help it.
From this came the decision to just...make it myself. And guess what, it’s so good!
I must pause here and disclaim that while I am about to say that making tofu is “cheap and easy,” I am going to be the change I want to see in the world and make it very clear that you do require specific equipment that, if you don’t already have, radically changes the “cheapness” of the process. So often I see a recipe that’s like, “make X at home and save” and the first line is like, “get out your dehydrator...” Bitch shut up. That’s not cheap and easy, I have to buy a dehydrator!!! That’s expensive and hard!!! Tofu’s not at that level, but you do need a blender, several big pots, a colander, a fine mesh strainer, a ton of cheesecloth, and a tofu mold. That last one is the cheapest, I got mine for like six bucks, but it’s the only tool that has only one possible use and threatens to just take up space in your kitchen if this doesn’t do it for you. The big limiting factor is the blender. I actually have wanted to try making tofu for years but didn’t want to drop dollars on a blender just for that, and honestly if I hadn’t gotten one as a gift I don’t know that it would be worth it.
Moving on. Once you have the equipment, the ingredients themselves are ridiculously cheap and simple. You need 1) a huge bag of dry soybeans, 2) nigari, some special salt crystal things (I got a big bottle of nigari dissolved in water already), and 3) water (from da sink).
First, you soak the soybeans. This could be overnight, but if you are a dumbass like me and will NOT plan ahead, you can start in the morning and they’ll be ready by the evening. Then, you liquefy the beans in the blender. Watching them turn from beans into milk is fun. I let the blender run an extra few seconds just to watch it.
Then you pour it all into a big pot and let it simmer. It takes a while to get up to temperature and you have to keep stirring it every now and then so the bottom won’t burn and the top won’t form a skin. You also need to make sure it doesn’t boil over. Like dairy milk, this can go from absolute stillness to boiling over in seconds. You stand over this steaming pot, gently stirring now and then, silent, free of thoughts. I have no thoughts but soy. I will become soyboy. My mouth will be permanently wide open...all will be well.
When the milk is warm and foamy, it must be strained. As much as you blend the soybeans there is solid mass that will always remain. You capture this bean residue, called “okara” by real heads, in the cheesecloth. They say that the okara will be too hot to squeeze by hand at this point. I take this as a personal challenge. You pick up this big steamy bag of okara, twist it tight and with all your strength wring out as much liquid as you can. When you think you’re done, you’re not. There’s more. Near the end it’s not even coming out of the bottom. With every squeeze it looks more like the entire surface of the bag is sweating. You can see exactly what you are accomplishing with every action. There is no ambiguity. There is no ulterior motive. I squeeze the bag, soy milk comes out. Soy milk is for tofu. I will eat the tofu.
When the okara is as dry as it’ll get, you save it for later. It’s a good filler in stir fries. Tastes fine and very good for you. As a filler goes you could do worse, and throwing it away feels perverse. You have gotten to know the okara very well after wringing it out like that, the least you can do is give it a dignified end.
The soy milk you’re left with now is smooth and beautiful. I’ve tried store bought soy milk before and it sucks. This is good. I made this! It is simple, comically so—it’s soy and water. But I was there, I did it all. And now you heat it again. Again, you must wait and attend the pot. I can’t leave and addle my brain with some fucking screen—I need to stir the milk. If I don’t it may burn. If I don’t it may form a skin.
When it has simmered for a while, it is ready for the nigari. A few teaspoons in a half cup of water does the trick. In three helpings you drip it in. The first time, you stir the milk vigorously and pour it in while it’s still moving. Then you wait. For round two you start to notice the milk separating. You drip in another third onto the still liquid. You cover. You wait. You could check Twitter now but why would you? You’re almost done. There aren’t going to be any posts about tofu. After round three, you gently stir just the top. You can see as you stir the solids beginning to form. You cover. You wait.
When it’s ready there is a layer of yellow whey over the white curds. You gotta skim that off, buddy. I know what you’re thinking—is it easy? Yes. Does it require you to do the same action over and over? Yes. While you’re doing this, are you completely focused on it and nothing else? Yes.
The whey is gone. Now you prepare your mold. You line the inside with a cloth like you’re tucking a baby into a cradle. You gently spoon the curds in. They look wet and goopy and wiggly. When you’re done, you gently fold the cloth over the top of the curds and put the top part on the mold and weigh it down. It needs 20-30 minutes like this. Maybe go take a shower. It feels warm and you don’t have to think.
It’s not ready yet—it needs to cool. Get a bowl of water and ever so gently transfer your brick into it. The cloth is going to be sticking to the tofu after being pressed. Peel it off—you have to go slow or you can break the tofu. It feels like unwrapping a Christmas present slowly so you can savor the process. When it’s free, when you can see it complete and finished, there’s a feeling that I have missed for so long, that this cruel and stupid world has stolen from me and replaced with some kind of concentrated dread called “megadread” that stresses me out beyond the limits of my dumb animal brain.
Then, you eat it. It’s good.
Anyway, I recommend making tofu. Here are some links:
Recipe: https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/killer-tofu-with-andrea-nguyen
Soybeans: https://www.amazon.com/Soymerica-Non-GMO-Soybeans-Identity-Preserved/dp/B0763GC8SB
Nigari: https://www.amazon.com/Nigari-Coagulant-Hand-Harvested-Vancouver-Island/dp/B07JD8KXLY
Tofu mold: https://www.amazon.com/Mangocore-Maker-Cheese-Pressing-Kitchen/dp/B01HTKIO3I