I’ve got anime on the brain. A friend of mine told me about a promo Crunchyroll is running, and so I’ve been watching a lot of his recommendations and binging Dragon Ball Super. So when it came time to write a blog post, this topic stood out to me.

Americanized Anime

The first stuff I saw was only anime-adjacent. I was pretty dazzled by Voltron as a little kid. I mean, mechanized lions that transform into a humanoid mech, who summons a massive sword out of pure energy. Hell yeah!
Voltron was considered an American cartoon so far as I can tell, but it was a mashup of several Toie animes.

And beyond that, there were shows like Transformers and GI Joe that had wonderful looking Japanese animation despite being shows created specifically for a U.S. audience.

My first real Anime

The first actual anime I saw was Dragon Warrior, AKA Dragon Quest. According to a web search, it launched into first-run syndication from 1990-1991. I managed to wake up early enough to catch this show at an absurdly early time slot. I wasn’t smart enough to try to track this show down as a kid; I just got up early enough several times to catch bits and pieces of this one. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube these days.

Speed Racer - MTV

Back in 93’ MTV started showing Speed Racer. I was probably on there to watch Bevis and Butthead and happened to catch the jaunty theme song. Go, Speed Racer, go! Before long, I was embroiled in the shenanigans of Chim-Chim and figuring out the identity of that mysterious Racer X.
One day my mom saw me watching that one and remarked something like, “Speed Racer? That was on when your older brother was a kid.”

Sci-Fi Channel

Around the same time, the Sci-Fi channel began dabbling in Anime and I was lucky enough to be right there for it. The big deal was Akira. They started off showing mostly movies and then later moved on to having a weekly block called Ani-Monday with more episodic shows.
Here is some of the good stuff I saw there:
Demon City Shinjuku
Ninja Scroll
Perfect Blue
Vampire Hunter D
Robot Carnival
Lensman
Gurren Lagann
Read or Die
Monster

Dragon Ball Z

‍Dragon Ball Z hit the US in 1996. Another of those first-run syndication deals. DBZ was a show I watched before I had to get ready for high school. I was completely unaware of the original series Dragon Ball until many years later when Cartoon Network began to show it. I loved this show immediately, but new episodes released at a snail’s pace. I remember the show just kind of starting over after running out of episodes more than once.
Later Cartoon Network would pick the show up and start over, and it went well until they ran into their own production problems.

Adult Swim

In 2001, Cartoon Network started a block of animation later at night called Adult Swim. One of the shows in the mix was another very well-known anime, Cowboy Bebop.
Adult Swim went on to have a whole host of anime over the years:
Outlaw Star
Fooly Cooley
Fullmetal Alchemist
Ghost in the Shell: SAC & 2nd GIG
Samurai Champloo
Shin Chan
Death Note

Netflix

My next source of anime was arguably the worst of the group. Back in the day, Netflix used to mail you discs, and I’d slip some anime into the mix. It was a nice system because while Netflix’s nascent streaming service didn’t have every movie under the sun, their rental service sure seemed to. I quickly found out that the anime seemed to be the most damaged or stolen of all, and so they had a lot of incomplete series that I couldn’t get all of.

And that leads us back to the modern age of streaming.

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Warning: Once you see this trope, you may not be able to unsee it.

Here’s a trope that bothers the hell out of me. You’re watching a movie and in comes a massive war machine. Whether it be a mech or a giant robot, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is... it’s going to roar like a dinosaur. If it doesn’t outright do that, it’ll growl or groan.

I have some sympathy; these vehicles aren’t real, so we have to imagine what they’d sound like. But it seems sound designers will sneak in some animal noises for emphasis. And this isn’t limited to just robots and mechs. You can often find any kind of giant structure or vehicle doing this as well.

Roaring and Screeching:

When it comes to Mecha I find this one to be the most egregious. From time to time, you’ll encounter a depiction of a mech that will roar or screech. You could argue that this is done on purpose for intimidation factor, but that doesn’t make it much better in my opinion. Sometimes you’ll see robots do this as well, though I didn’t come prepared with examples.

Metal Gear Solid:

In the Metal Gear Solid games, the titular war machines tend to screech like a monster. In the following clip, it has a screech that almost reminds me of Godzilla.

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Mechwarrior 2:

In this clip, a kodiak class mech pops out of the ice in a sneak attack. But then it proceeds to RAWR during the sneak attack.

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Growling and Groaning:

I have a little more patience with robots and mecha groans and growls. They still have a tendency to annoy me, but I give them more leeway because maybe they aren’t actually moans and groans. They could be some kind of sci-fi transmission, scanner, weapon, or maybe even an attempt at communication.

War Machine:

The war machine in this movie is a growler. It’s even more noticeable in the movie, but I went with the trailer since it’s a new movie and I didn’t want to be spoilery.

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Judge Dredd (1995)

The war bot in Judge Dredd is another one that has no excuse to be growling. It vocalizes as though it’s sore from sitting in one place for so long. Maybe somebody coded it to growl a lot to sound intimidating, but I think this is just a weird choice in sound design.

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And then there’s this:

RoboCop:

In RoboCop, there’s a scene where the ED-209 robot tries and fails to navigate some stairs and then has a temper tantrum that is... well, I don’t know what the hell it is, just look at it.

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What works for me:

Personally, what works for me is the sound of heavy machinery amplified to the size of the machine in question. Booming footfalls, pieces clinking and clanging as they work. Thrumming engines or weapons. Here are a couple of good examples.

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Titanfall 2:

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Pacific Rim:

Whoops nevermind, none of the Pacific Rim clips I could find on YouTube would allow me to embed them. Great example though.

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Metal Skin Panic:

So instead enjoy this music video filled with pleasing mecha sounds of Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01.

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***

Hey Did you know I wrote a book?

No? Well, go pick up a copy and read about how Maeve McKinnon gets stuck on a reality TV show with life or death stakes. There's space travel, a sentient robot, VR, Combat and even a cook-off. I can't help but notice that you haven't got a copy yet; what are you waiting for?

https://www.danielsevenwriting.com/books-audio

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Operating System

Linux Mint
I just wanted an excuse to put this here, but also, it’s useful to note in case I throw out some application names that aren’t available on Windows. As I pointed out in a 2024 blog post, Windows rubbed me the wrong way for a while, and I finally had enough when I realized I was really only running it because of a few video games. Then I deleted and reconstituted my Windows partition with a certain sense of satisfaction.
Are you guys still running Windows? Ew.

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Word Processing

Obsidian
Obsidian is a journaling / note-taking app that uses bidirectional links to help you connect your information. You can bring up a nifty graphical view that’ll show all your data points and how they link together. That drew me to the program in the first place; however, it’s absolutely not how I use it.

Around the time I was discovering this thing, I was also looking for a simple text editor like Xed or Notepad, but with the ability to use bold and italics. I realized that one of the nice things Obsidian was doing was acting as a file browser for a ton of markdown files. Markdown, for those of you who don’t know, is a simple text format that uses some characters to tell the markdown editor to show features like bold and italic.

I was already keeping my notes in folders on my work-drive on lots of simple text files. So once I fully trusted this app, I migrated all my stuff over. So now I have all my scraps of simple text at my fingertips in a convenient file explorer.

Aside from my notes and such, I write my rough drafts here. It works well except that I found (to my annoyance) that the app can only display so much info in a single file without generating visual errors. So I had to split my latest work into a file per chapter. But this is how most of the online text programs work, so it’s not too bad. I wrote the rough draft of this blog post in Obsidian.

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LibreOffice Writer
Microsoft Word has become the unofficial standard writing tool. The generic Linux version is LibreOffice Writer. Thankfully, it’s built to handle all the Word features I need as a writer.

So when my work in progress is ready, I’ll move the whole thing into a *.odt file and move the margins around so it looks relatively like a novel and start editing. I learned from the first book that it pays to keep this file as my master file, which is copied over to other services. Because running your book through a website and back has a tendency to eat formatting. I foolishly had to sit down with my first book and copy over the missing bold, italic, font changes, etc by hand more than once.

By making this document the master file, it’s easy to hand over to an editor when the time comes.

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Editing

ProWritingAid
I use ProWritingAid so you guys can’t tell just how awful at spelling and grammar I am. You can only get so far trying to make your way through a document trying to make all the red and blue squiggles go away. So I get more in-depth help there. I use it to sharpen up my blog posts to be as professional as I can manage in a short timetable. And I use it to sharpen up my manuscripts until they're ready for a pro editor.

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Formatting

Atticus
My formatting tool is Atticus. It’s built in a way that you can use it as a word processor as well, but I already have that covered. So I just use it for its formatting abilities. You can use a preset or define your own style and apply it to the document. Quotation mark style, first paragraph capitalization options, fonts, horizontal rule style, and more. Plus, you can set the print size for all the popular sizes, and they even tell you which print sizes are available from KDP, IngramSpark, and Lulu.

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Website

Webflow
I’m using Webflow to create my author platform (website, blog, and eventually selling books) Honestly, it’s a bit much for my small business, and when the annual bill comes up, I wonder if I should downsize.
It’s a little technical, but not so much that I can’t handle it. I need to redo the blog because it’s becoming large and needs organization. This is pretty easy though; Webflow keeps all the blog info in a little database (products too) and you can have the website dynamically serve up your database entries.

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Word lookup

Artha ~ The Open Thesaurus
I’ve been using this one for a few years now; I just have it load at startup and I can quick-draw it when I need to look up a word. Type a word in, and it gives you the dictionary definition, and then you can look at synonyms, domains, and derivatives. That kind of thing.

PowerThesaurus.org
From time to time, Artha doesn’t cut it, and I jump on this website to find a very comprehensive list of synonyms.

LMStudio
One thing I’ve been dabbling with is running an AI while I work. LMStudio lets you give your chat session a prompt. So I set it to act as Igor, my little book bug mascot. So when I log in to work for the day, I’ll greet him and he’ll role-play flying up to me and saying hello. But since I have that window open, I’ll just throw in there something like, “Igor, give me a bunch of synonyms for blank,” and he’ll rattle a bunch off.
It’s also fun to take what I’ve written for the day and plop it in the chat window and get its opinion. AI are usually overly enthusiastic, so it has a tendency to note what I’ve put down as sheer brilliance. But getting immediate feedback has gotten me to see flaws occasionally. Often enough to keep doing it.

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Images

For my writing, I don’t have that much need for image generation, but I use this a lot in my blog and my quarterly merch designs, so I’ll start with the stuff I used to make my cover and then talk about the others.

MagicStudio.com
MagicStudio was the only online AI art program I could find that didn’t require you to make an account before fooling around with it. So I used them. The art it generates is a bit dated and bad if you compare it to the cutting edge, but it worked well enough for me to generate some clip art to make into a cover.
I recently downloaded Invoke. AI art’s complexity annoys me when I compare it to text-based AI. But I’ve got it going.

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Krita
I was never much of a Photoshop guy and certainly wouldn’t be after they changed their business model to a subscription. But it doesn’t play well with Linux, I’ve heard, so I tried out GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP for short. But it really didn’t work for me, so I looked for alternatives and found Krita. I was thrilled with it, and now it’s my go-to art program.

Canva
I learned that Canva is great for making art for your business. Book covers, ad images, and such. So I tried it. I don’t own any fonts, so this was a convenient way to get access to a library of fonts I can use. It’s a web-based app and has some powerful yet simple controls.

KolourPaint
And for a very basic editor, I keep KolourPaint around. It’s basically a clone of the old MS Paint program. Sometimes you just need to slap something together or draw yourself a picture of what’s happening in your book to keep it straight in your mind.

Inkscape
This is a vector graphics program that has come in handy for making art for my print on demand store. (LINK HERE) It’s especially handy for making a gigantic file. If I tell a sophisticated program like Krita to make an image at, say, 10K x 10K pixels, the program would struggle. For Inkscape, it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience.

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Note Taking

Keep
I keep 3x5 memo pads on my desk for those sudden ideas you have to jot down in a hurry. And the cardboard covers come in handy if you need to squash a bug. But as for apps, I use Google Keep to jot down all my notes. I let them build up in there for a while, and then I transfer all those notes into my work in progress, or add to the accretion fields that are my future book ideas.
I find Keep handy because I’m already signed into Google on my phone and PC, so it’s available in all the places I want it and it’s easily available.

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Final Thoughts

One of my gripes with all these programs is how many of them utterly struggle and die when you try to feed them too much writing at once. It blows my mind that in our modern age of computing that I can only flawlessly do stuff with an entire novel's worth of text when it’s in a very basic format like in Notepad or Xed.
Programs like Word and LibreOffice Writer can contain a complete book, but the longer it gets, the more the program struggles.
And beyond that, almost all the other programs need you to cut the book into chunks (I go with chapters) otherwise, they just break down and time out. I find that especially frustrating because they don’t always tell you up front. You learn it be ruining the program’s day and having to struggle to recover your work.

Looking over these tools made me realize I need to break off some time to work on the business side more. It’s just so much easier to jump in and get going on my book. I’ve got the rough draft about half done now. I hope my progress will be pretty consistent now that we’re moving into summer. It was a gray, nasty winter, and I felt some significant brain-drain, which really slowed me down.

(Note: I am not affiliated with any of the products, services, or companies mentioned in the article.)

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