Just my opinion.  No one asked me, of course.  I just think they’re being a bit drastic with the whole Erratic Direction Gambit they’ve been doing thus far.

I mean, for a couple weeks, you’d go to an anime news site and read a press release that stated that a coalition had been formed that was going to stamp out scanlations once and a for all.  And then you’d go back the next day and read that the coalition decided that maybe scanlations weren’t all that bad for the industry.  And then a new press release would pop up a few days later stating, “STOP IT.  WE REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME, GUYS.  GUYS.  WE MEAN IT.”

Of course, if you went to actual scanlation sites during this time, you’d see that many sites were shutting down for good, or at least moving their releases to IRC.  Some of them had gotten C&D orders.  Others just sensed impending doom and figured that the coalition would start moving onto more legally aggressive tactics and decided that they didn’t want to spend jail time for thankless hours of translating and editing.  Others were totally ignoring everything and keeping on with their hobby.

I can’t figure out whether this is better or worse than RIAA.  I mean, they’re being a bit gentler than RIAA, as they are, so far as I know, handing out C&D orders instead of going directly to RIAA’s trademark big hammer move: the huge random lawsuit.  It’s the random direction changes that are bothering me.  If you’re going to form a coalition and issue press releases, I would think it would be helpful to decide what you approve and disapprove of first.  Especially when you know that your press release will NOT be ignored by the millions of rabid fans that want to get their hands on the type of product that the members of your coalition own virtually all the rights to.

As a someone that loves fan translations, I’m worried.  Most of my favorite series only exist in English as scanlations, and I really don’t like the fact that I’d be potentially missing out on new series that I would enjoy.  I try to be a good fan by buying titles I like when they come out in English, and honestly a lot of them have.  It’s  just that they may never have gotten noticed if it wasn’t for the scans.

I also may never have noticed that they were actually out in English unless I happened to be in a large book store.  This does not happen very often.  I live in a small town that only has one small bookstore which doubles as a liquor store.  They do not have a manga section, needless to say.  So the only time I ever get to peruse a huge selection of  manga is if I travel to a large city.  The two closest ones are each about an hour and a half drive away.   It’s not a trek you would make just to some manga.

Every time I do go to a larger store, I look at the manga section to see if any previously scanlated titles have come out.  Sometimes titles that don’t interest me are there. “Oh. Mamotte Lolipop.  I remember it being pretty but generic.  Pass.”  Other times I react a little more excitedly. “GIN TAMA!  FOUR VOLUMES ARE OUT EVEN! HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS?!  I BUY THEM.  I BUY THEM ALL RIGHT NOW!”  That was a while ago, of course.  But I reacted similarly to The Demon Ororon, Nabari no Ou, and B.O.D.Y.

If there are no titles I know, I usually browse.  I’ll go for interesting titles or authors that I have read before.  I’ll go for shoujo, but I will NEVER pick up one with a pink cover in an actual bookstore.  I’ll generally read the blurb on the back (Not a useful source of info.  More on that later.) or read a few pages to see if it strikes my fancy.  I sometimes find a decent one, but most of the time it’ll be a volume that I buy, read, and never buy another volume of.  I’ll probably enjoy it and read it over again, but it won’t leave a lasting impression on me because one volume usually is not enough to get into a story with.  Sometimes, here I am thinking of Skip Beat, it doesn’t even cover the basic premise.  Sadly, I have over twenty of these titles on my shelf.  I can’t bear to get rid of them because I know I will eventually want to read them again, but I feel guilty that I only have the first volume.

Anyway, now with not being able to go to larger cities, I generally shop online for manga.  The problem is that unless I know a series from reading at least part of it, I am very unlikely to go for it.  The sites usually only offer the little advertisement blurb on the back, which is meaningless and full of clichéd book-marketing buzzwords.

For instance, I looked at Alice in the Country of Hearts on RightStuf the other day and it had this to say:

Alice, who has fallen asleep in her garden, wakes up to find a white rabbit wearing clothes?! The rabbit forcefully drags Alice into the rabbit hole, where he turns into a young man with rabbit ears and leads her into a frightful world where the fairytale-like citizens wield dangerous weapons for an insidious cause… Unable to return home, will she be able to find happiness in a world full of danger and beautiful young men?

Okay, the first sentence lets you know that it’s based on Alice in Wonderland, which is not very interesting because a lot of manga have at least one Alice in Wonderland parody chapter in them. The second sentence hints at being abducted by a Moe Boy, which could potentially turn out to be interesting, but usually doesn’t.

Then it drops a load of overused buzzwords that hint at some sort of dark plot. To me it sounds like it could that the citizens are kidnapping others for medical or magical experiments to create bio-weapons to gain an upper hand in a long-running Cold War. But I also read a lot of horror manga and play Shin Megami Tensei, so I can easily come up with stuff like that.

The last sentence is a draw for the Bishie-fan group. The ones that will only buy manga for the beautiful men in it. I am not part of this group and find them obnoxious.

So I read some of the scans to see what the series was really like. I started reading and sat mesmerized until I got to the end of the first chapter in the second book. And then I ordered all the volumes currently released immediately. It was brilliant. I couldn’t believe it. The art was amazing, the characters were unique and likable, and the story was fascinating in a way that would only be gleaned from the blurb through use of large amounts of psychoactive drugs.

Honestly, the heroine was kickass. She doesn’t seem that strong physically, but she’s not a wilting violet at all. She easily stand up to an entire cast of mentally disturbed characters and even goes so far as to befriend them. The rabbit is was maniacally insane in way I liked very much. He reminded me of a combination a couple of characters I used have have in my own comic, only better than I could ever hope to draw or write for. The other characters were were just as unique and totally unlike the generic reverse harem that you see in most shoujo.

The plot wasn’t totally original, but it was put together in a very intriguing way. It was like the plot of first Professor Layton game mixed with certain elements and the general weirdness of The Phantom Tollbooth, stirring in a big old wad of Monkey’s Paw morals, fondued in the kind of dark fascination that I would normally associate with as series like Hatenko Yuugi (I should have ordered that too), and finally topped with a heathy dollop the phrase, “Please kill me and release me from this nightmare.” I loved it.

I also ended up ordering Beast Master, Dengeki Daisy, High School Debut, and Suzunari. All of these were previewed by a similar process. In fact, I read the whole of Beast Master a couple of years ago and still ordered it. The only one that I ordered that I haven’t read any of yet is Aspirin. I bought it based on a review that implied it was second in comedic genius only to The Violinist of Hameln, which is one of my all time favorite scanlated series.

Basically, I feel that scanlations are the biggest marketing tools the manga industry has available for people like me. I think that they’d be foolish to squelch it.

Yesterday I was informed that I have a lot of spare time.  It was heavily implied that I had great gobs of it in fact.  Obviously, this must be true since I work in retail instead of an office.  Yes sir, I may be working a job that deals personally with customers, involves heavy lifting, and frequently consistently involves working five to six days a week and double shifts on weekends, but since I don’t work in an office management position that somehow allows me to take two ten-day vacations within three months, I must have it pretty easy.  Or someone’s bitter.  Either or.

Excuse me.  Continuous back-handed insults tend to miff me somewhat.

Anyway, what takes up this enormous amount of time I presumably have?  A plethora of half-way finished and unstarted creative projects, that’s what.

For instance, up until about 4:30 yesterday, I was trying to plan a new site design.  Now it is finished.  It involved a creative process of:

1. Realizing that I wasn’t using my web-hosting effectively
2. Buying back my old domain name back (hint: defaulthero.com will in fact lead you to the main page.  I plan on making it my main domain once my hosting runs out)
3. Trying to plan the site layout for a couple weeks (during which time I was extremely “not busy at all”)
4. Installing WordPress
5. Mucking about with themes
6. Installing a really horrible-looking theme so I would have break down and fix it (McManus was right about temporary fixes.  I use that knowledge to my advantage)
7. Amazingly getting a good idea for the design
8. Sketching a rough design late at night two days ago
9. Scanning a detail off of the design and making a vector graphic based off of it in Illustrator, also also two days ago
10. Finding a theme similar to what I was planning on making
11. Sleeping
12. Working
13. Coming home and practicing CSS wizardry
14. Checking the outcome
15. Editing
16. Repeating the previous two steps a couple dozen times
17. Examining finished product, calling it good
18. Basking in the afterglow.

All of these steps are absolutely necessary, which is why I don’t do it as a job.  The only thing that really slowed me down was babysitting an extremely noisy cat.

I’ve also been planning out and doing the blue-lines for couple inking projects.  I just need some time to sit down and actually do them.  Today would be a good day for that.  I’ve had the rough drafts for one of them already finished.  Here is just one page of those drafts:

Yeah, I still use my comic characters for something.  A couple of them actually managed to develop into decent designs, and they give me something to draw when I need.  The other inking is probably going to be done sooner than this one.  The subject matter is a surprise.

My other major (minor ones are not worth listing) project is designing a doll that I can make a lot of and dress and decorate as different characters.  I’ve got an entire list of characters that I want to make, including Genzo, Fujiki, and Yasuda from Cheeky Angel, Funabashi from A Bad Boy Drinks Tea (Basically Genzo with slightly bigger eyes and a gakuran, sans scar and dyed hair), Hamel and Raiel from Violinist of Hameln, Ida from Traveller of the Moon, Riiya from Akazukin Cha Cha, Woo Joo-In from Do You Want to Try,  Jacob Grimm and Wilbur Wright from BROTHERS, Kokonose and Kashii from Momo Tama, etc.  Basically the doll will be a generic form and fairly easy to make, but it should be able to be embellished to look like different people easily.  I know what I want it to look like, I just haven’t gotten around to making the pattern yet.  Three-dimensional sewing patterns take more effort than just drawing an outline on a piece of paper.

Webcomics – not so much.  I’m not going to make time for something I have very little inspiration for.  I occasionally come up with a some story ideas for it out of habit, but this is a project I’ve been doing and doing over since high school.  Sophmore year, I might add.  I’m not calling absolute quits on it, but I feel that it’s not worth doing in its current or previous forms. Especially when the only feedback I get for it is from relatives and friends that overpraise the generic things and totally ignore anything I think was actually of merit.

Everyone and their brother are doing webcomics now, anyway.  Having one does not make me special.  Nor does it make you special for knowing me or even being related to me.  My comic was not that great to start with, so please stop asking about every single time I mention drawing or web development on the phone.  It’s something that you honestly don’t appreciate as anything besides something someone you know did. And that someone can do better things.  I am not a one trick pony.

..until I expand my content even more and find a bunch of stuff I have to fix because I basically just spliced a bunch of CSS into an already existing theme until it looked somewhat decent. Lol, run-on sentence.

I’m going to go eat the pizza that has been sitting out for about two and a half hours. At least I remembered to take it out of the oven. I tend ignore my basic bodily needs when I’m working on a project. Or anything, really.

That’s why the site looks so horrible right now.  It’ll get better.  I’m working on it.

I was just really tired of Kubrick smooshing my pictures in it’s horribly narrow content space.

A couple of weeks ago I was playing Final Fantasy IV. I actually managed to get to the very entertaining “The Male Characters Suddenly Decide to Kick the Female Characters Out of the Party for No Discernible Reason” cut scene before stopping. I usually end up stopping when I get to Edge for some reason, but I managed to persevere this time, probably because my computer was non-operational.

I was also attempting to illustrate a fairy tale as a comic strip. I didn’t get very far, but I’m still working on it off and on. It was excessively gory and bawdy and delightfully bizarre, totally not the type of thing I would want to show my mother or post on a Bluehost-hosted site. It is possibly my favorite one right now, narrowly overcoming Hacon Grizzlebeard, which is about a prince that gets a princess preggers with his illegitimate child by utilizing what are possibly the smoothest moves known to the whole of mankind.

That’s why I ended up with this page in my sketchbook:

At the top are two SquareSoft-style dwarves. One is shouting the confusingly public password of the Dwarf Castle (SAY IT WITH ME!), while the other is engaged in firing his lazor.

The bottom half is the character design for the shepherd’s daughter that ends up marrying a a giant, talking snake-monster before going on the the most inexplicable adventure ever dreamed up by mashing a bunch of existing folklore themes together. The story never actually gives her a name, instead preferring to call her the shepherd’s daughter or the young queen, depending on whether she has married the prince yet in that particular stage of the story. I call her Zinnia because her most outstanding attribute is the fact that she does not wilt, not matter what strange and frightening things are occurring around her. Also, I find her to be colorful and easy to understand, which is pretty much how I feel about Zinnias. If they get too dry, they droop at bit, but after you give them water, they recover quickly and stand out just as brilliantly as before.

It also includes a messenger. I like his snark and I want his hat.

I also ended up drawing another Final Fantasy IV related page a few days later.

This is basically how I imagine a few of my characters would react if they were to get a hold of a copy of FFIV that supported multiple players, a system capable of playing it, and were made to play the character that had the closest sounding name to their own.  Ed certainly seems to be enjoying himself, even though he is far too old to be playing video games.

They’re fighting the Trapdoors, a series of irritatingly strong mid bosses that block every single door in the Sealed Cave dungeon. Those battles are button mashers because a Trapdoor can kill one of your dudes in one hit, and the only way to stop it is to beat it down really fast before it was a chance to do so. I was very much reminiscent of Ed and Cecelia when playing against one. I alternately shouting “CESSHY! CESSHY! CESSHY!”, “JUMP, KAIN! JUUUUUMP!”, “EDGE! ATTACK! ATTACK NOW!”, “STOP HAVING TURNS, ROSA! WE DON’T NEED YOU!” “RYDIA! QUAKE NOW!” “AUUUUGHH! EDGE DIED! WHEN IS ROSA’S TURN COMING?!”

The battles were extra exciting because you have to go through about 15 of these dorks before you are able to get to a save point.

I’m tired now. I’m going to bed.

• “Seto” seems to be a fairly popular name in manga.  The reason I noticed this is because I’ve been reading a lot of scanlations recently and am now incapable of reading the phrase “Hey, Seto!” without hearing LittleKuriboh’s impression of Mokuba saying it.  It sort of breaks the mood of the story sometimes.  Especially if it’s a shoujo series and the Seto in question is a girl being talked to by her boyfriend.
• My feet come into contact with my refrigerator more than my hands do.  I’ve caught on to the fact that I can open both of the doors by gripping the handles with my toes and I can get the doors shut by side kicking or knee-slamming them.  It’s especially fun with the freezer, because it’s really high up and I can still reach it with ease.
  I also found that I can open the cooler door at work by axe kicking it if my arms are full.  I made extra sure to sanitize the hell out of it when I came out, though.
• “Well, if you two get hitched someday, maybe I’ll be the one that fixes your broken electronic appliances.” is the best sentiment ever displayed by a game any sort of character whatsoever. I’m not sure why I finally decided this. I mean, I played Earthbound years ago and it’s always been one of my favorite lines.  I do know that I aspire to be like Jeff now.
• Sweet Baby James cures all ills.  I heard Smiling Face on the radio today, and then I looked up some of his concert videos on YouTube, and now I can’t stop listening to him.  I was humming Smiling Face for at least 3 hours at work this afternoon and that somehow caused me to be in a very good mood all night.  I need to buy one one of his albums now.

I want to own it so bad!  I can’t afford ordering online right now, mainly because I’d have to order a ton of other stuff to get it shipped free.  I’d probably get Beast Master (which I have been neglecting to do for a long time) and any other Motomi titles that I can find to fill out the order.  Maybe some Gin Tama too.  Can’t right now though.

Apparently the fifth volume of Momo Tama is coming out in November.  Can’t wait to read that one either.

I certainly do wish that we had  a proper book store around here.  I’d probably live there.  The only one that we have in town is also a liquor store and is half filled with books by local authors.  Writing Sterling North-esque memoirs seems to be a popular activity among old men around here.  Also: unoriginal and campy Sci-Fi.

Here are some of my ink drawings.  Actually, I suppose you could call them paintings, because they are done using a brush.  These were done a few months ago, back when I had the money to buy new art supplies and the inclination to use them.

All of them are of characters in my super retarded comic

If you’re wondering what I used for this, it was black and white Koh-I-Noor ink and Rosemary’s Kolinsky Sable Brushes done on really cheap Bristol.  Both the ink and brushes are things that are far too nice for my skill level.  Both are also things that are just sitting in a chest in my apartment.  I really should use them again.  Otherwise the money I spent was pretty much wasted.

Yes, it’s a WordPress blog with a standard Kubrick theme for now.  I’ll work on it later.