Month: February 2005

*Grumpf* is my word for when I’m feeling just a slightly bit grouchy. Not enough to make me want to rip people’s heads off, but enough that I’m less than enthusiastic about Life, the Universe and Everything. Of course, feeling *grumpf* today is mostly my own fault. I’ve been staying up far too late: reading, playing on the computer and what not. But it’s also work’s fault; what with the recent changes and all.1 Then for an extra kick in the chops, I finished the book I was reading and went to grab the next one in the series for something to read over my lunch hour.2 Naturally, I can find books 3, 4 & 5 but not book 2. *grumpf*

Still, today’s not been all bad. While searching for book 2; I did run across some Discworld books that I’d forgotten I had and those will give me something to read for the next couple of days. Maybe even enough to get me through to the weekend, when I might rip the house apart to find book 2. *shrug* I hate having to stop reading in the middle of the series. Particularly, when I know I have the next book. But I’m trying to focus on the good things about today here; so that’s enough of that. Umm, tonight was the monthly Mindbridge meeting. It appears now that I have officially taken over their webmaster duties. Spif. Now I just need to finalize our plans regarding the hosting and what I’ll be basing their site on. As mentioned in previous postings, their current site is a nightmare of M$ FrontPage generated vomit and since I’m a lazy git; I want to implement a CMS. Of course, I also need to know what all they want out of the site and if they want to merge their Yahoo! group into the real site or to keep that seperate. It’ll be a lot of work, but I’m oddly looking forward to it, even –and this is the kicker– in my *grumpf* mood. Anyway, that’s enough for tonight; so good night inkernet  vast repository of porn  all you people out there in TV land. Ah screw it, stop reading this drivel and go get yourself some sleep.

1 I’m not really going to get into it further here; as I need to keep my job. So let is suffice to say some people have left the company recently due to changes that are a result in the company having been bought out. I respect their decision and somewhat wish I could take the moral high ground with them. However, I’m in a 2 person household with a 1 person income and plenty of bills; so that’s not really an option for me. *grumpf*
2 Sometimes I surf the internet. Other times I play video games. Occassionally I’ll watch some anime, but lately I’ve been really enjoying kicking up my feet and reading in peace & quiet. *sigh*

I’m a bit of an anime fan. I’ve bought many a VHS tape, Laser Disc and DVD in my time and I plan to buy many more… unless the anime studios shutdown the fansubbers. For those of you who might not be familiar with the world of fansubs; here’s the definition of a fansub from Wikipedia:

Fansub – short for “fan subtitled”; a copy of a foreign movie or television show (most often anime) which has been subtitled by “fans” into their native language. This has been done to provide shows that would otherwise be unavailable in one’s native language, but with the growth in the popularity of anime, fansubs’ purpose has expanded to include programs that would be commercially unviable (I.e. older or niche appeal market titles.) in one’s country or simply to reduce the amount of time one would wait to see a particular program. Also, many American anime viewers feel there is too much censorship of anime broadcast on TV, especially in scenes related to nudity, which is common in Japan (even in children’s shows) but is typically considered inappropriate in the United States.

I mostly get my fansubs from online sources via BitTorrent1. This allows me to:

  • Judge if a series will be worth the money to buy once a U.S. distributer starts selling it here.
  • See some of those niche shows that no distributer will bring over.

Given that I quite often am not fond of the “mainstream” anime that is brought over and that my budget is limited; being able to view the series completely via fansubs is a vital part of my process for deciding what series I will buy. If the anime studios force the fansubbers to stop their work; then I’ll be forced to spend my money elsewhere. Harsh, but I’ve already bought my share of crappy anime and I’m not willing to shell out ~$20/disc in the hopes that a given series won’t suck.

Oh and in case you were curious, this article over on C|Net prompted my post.

1 If you’re interested in more info on this; leave a comment and I’ll see about writing something up.