Important Stuff about Okama Punch! by James/Ganymede, written 9 January 2001 Welcome to Okama Punch! "Okama Punch" literally means "Gay Punch" or "Wimpy-ass Punch" - and I heard this amusing bit of Japanese mixed with English when I watched Outlaw Star, if I remember correctly. ^^;;; It might have been Cowboy Bebop, but I don't remember for sure. ^^;;; But anyway, as a gay man myself and as a person who finds Japanese/English mutt phrases highly amusing, I decided to name the site after it! XD (NOTA BENE: If you're wondering what happened to PSHA!, I will discuss that further down, after I'm finished with Okama Punch! Please bear with me till you get to that part! Thanks! ^_^) Okama Punch! is just a site that hosts my random anime spoofs/parodies/ what-have-you. Please read the notes below before you read my works, as these notes will help you understand the parodies better. #1. My parodies are all done in script format, as if one was writing a play. As an example, instead of writing something like this: Shion picked up the phone and said, "Hello, Zaitesu residence." I would actually write something like this: Shion: *picks up phone* Hello, Zaitesu residence. See the difference? :> #2. My parodies are a very random, very "stream-of-consciousness" type of writing (I consider it one of the purest forms of writing that I do, though it's certainly not the best). Therefore, if you do not understand what I'm saying in my parodies, don't feel bad; in the same vein, if you e-mail me nicely or even flame me saying that you can't understand my parodies, I won't feel offended either. :p After all, in addition to being very stream-of- consciousness, my parodies tend to be filled with a lot of computer faces (like o.o and ^^; and ^^v and XD) and Japanese phrases/sentences, so it would not surprise me one bit if you didn't get what was going on. These works are not meant to be "for the masses" or whatever - they're self-indulgently meant to give me and any fellow anime fan who can follow my line of thought a good laugh. If you want to see one of my "polished" works where I actually sound more coherent and place more consideration into my writing and its audience, ;) feel free to visit my literature site at http://jeddy.org/lit/. :p #3. Legal stuff: first of all, the characters in my parodies are created by their respective owners and they belong to them and the people who produced the movies and/or the series they starred in. However, the parodies themselves are the result of MY intellect (?) and hard work and it would greatly upset me if you plagiarized my words in ANY way. This means that you can not put my parodies up on your website - not even excerpts - and you may not post them anywhere online, whether it be in e-mails, chat rooms, or on message boards, newsgroups, or even on your own website. Besides, after reading my parodies, you probably wouldn't want to touch them with a ten-foot pole, much less copy them and/or take credit for them yourself. ;p So I don't know why you would want to, but just in case, please do NOT copy my words and post them elsewhere online. Whether it be for online or offline use, I do not want you to copy my words; even if you intend on giving me proper credit, I do not want you to do it. Instead, please direct people to http://jeddy.org/psha/ so they can see Okama Punch! for themselves. ^_^ Anyway, that's it for my notes! Feel free to go back and read my parodies at Okama Punch! if you'd like; however, if you want to read a brief note on the history of PSHA! and my reasons for shutting it down, then just keep reading down further and finish this message in its entirety before you return to Okama Punch! ^_^ Thanks a lot! - James/Ganymede - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - About PSHA! My friend Mel and I first got the idea for PSHA! after I received a flame from someone who belonged to the Lunar Inquisition (the LI is a group of people who hate the English dub version of Sailormoon and love the original Japanese version). This person had visited one of my Sailormoon sites and criticized me for getting my information wrong: he insisted that Fish Eye was never in love with Mamoru and that Zoisite was a woman. Both of his claims were wrong, though, and because of this he was even reprimanded by one of the owners of the LI website. Here he was trying to promote the original Japanese version of Sailormoon and yet he had his information mixed up with the English version and yet another dub version from a different country. Mel and I were so amused by this that we decided to create a site parodying the LI, and we even planned to call our site The Lunatic Inquisition. However, as we planned for the site, we ended up writing a bunch of different anime parodies instead of a parody of the LI, and when we finally opened the site, we opened as "PSHA! - Psycho Sailor Humor Archives" - a site for anime parodies (which were all Sailormoon parodies when we first opened) - instead of opening as the "Lunatic Inquisition." We never got around to parodying the LI at all, and the LI group and their website ended up shutting down anyway, so that was the end of that idea. Once the PSHA! site opened (this was some time in fall of 1998, if I remember right), Mel and I got our friend Zurd to join, and we called ourselves the Chibi Amazon Trio (the Trio are three villains from Sailormoon); Mel was Chibi Fish Eye, Zurd was Chibi Tigers Eye, and I was Chibi Hawks Eye. The three of us would write parodies, either alone, or one-on-one through online chatting (where one of us would write a bit of a story and then the other person would write the next bit). Later, we had our friend Nna join PSHA! as Chibi Zirconia (Zirconia is a villain who bosses the Trio around) because we would invariably end up writing parodies with her whenever we talked to her online. Soon after, Kakyuu joined PSHA! as Chibi Kakyuu Eye after writing a parody with Mel. The problem with PSHA! is that although it wasn't very well-known, it had quite a bit of a fanbase. Which would have been alright, except that people started copying us. Other people started opening up anime parody sites with one or more of their friends, and they would call themselves "the Chibi Anima- Mates" or "Chibi Michiru"... and they would also come up with acronyms for the name of their websites, the way Mel and I had done with "PSHA!" They would steal our jokes (usually copying them verbatim) and would even pick up on private expressions that my PSHA! friends and I used only around each other. Soon, our jokes were not our own, and it almost seemed like people were watching the PSHA! website to see when it would be updated with a new joke they could copy. When I and my PSHA! friends said "dance dance" or "ru ru ru" on a parody page, someone else would say "dance dance!" or "ru ru ru" on their own site. Because we had named our site "P.S.H.A." other people would name their sites things like "S.O.U.S.E.D." or "C.R.A.S.H." - and because Mel and I got the idea to use character icons of the Amazon Trio on our parodies to indicate which PSHA! member was talking at a given time, other people would copy that as well. As one might expect, it got tiresome for me and the other PSHA! members to see this happen. PSHA! was one of the very first of its kind (perhaps THE first) - a huge website housing tons of anime parodies written by a group of friends, either separately or in tandem during chats. But when it got to the point where people were copying our catchphrases and ideas as minor as computer faces... :p Well... x.x;;; XP And that leads us to today. Why am I shutting PSHA! down? Well, it's not because of the plagiarism. In fact, the plagiarism tempted me to leave PSHA! online as a sort of "proof to the world" that we WERE the first. *g* However, PSHA! had/has become a real chore for me to maintain and worry over. Not only that, but me and my PSHA! friends are more busy nowadays, and we chat less online these days; and when we do actually talk, we're not writing anime parodies (which was difficult enough to do since each PSHA! member had long since started liking animes that the other members didn't like as much or didn't know much about). This meant that PSHA! started getting updated less and less - and without the parodies being written, what could I have updated the site with? I got so desperate that sometimes I would put up really OLD chats and parodies that were really short or that we really never intended to have on PSHA! anyway, or I'd put up a little junk that I'd written on my own or put up a new picture or something. PSHA! got to the point where it was rarely being updated with anything substantial, and that's the main reason it's going down. Not to worry, though! Mel and Nna, former PSHA! members, are still running PSHA's younger sister site on Nna's server, Annland.Com. The site is called FVS - Freaks Variety Show (http://www.annland.com/freak/) and houses anime parodies written by Mel and Nna (both written separately as well as in concert with each other). Also, FVS will probably soon have some of the material on that was formerly on PSHA; and besides that, Okama Punch! also has a bit of old PSHA! material. So the PSHA! site may be gone, but parts of it live on elsewhere! Isn't that just sweet? :p *L* *shoots myself* XD Anyway, that's it, and that's all I have to say about either Okama Punch! or PSHA! I hope that answers your questions, and now that you're REALLY done, please feel free to go back to Okama Punch! and read my work! ^_^ Thanks lots for reading this long rant, take care, and happy reading at Okama Punch! XD!!! (Written 9 January 2001 by James/Ganymede, The Cubist Formerly Known as Chibi Hawks Eye. XD)