Naruto Ch. 437

щ(ﾟﾛﾟщ) ｵｰﾏｲｶﾞｰｯ!!

SINCE WHEN DID HINATA GROW SOME BALLS!? WHAT THE FUCK

Screw Meta, let’s talk about blogs missing in action!

Does this image clearly resemble your blog?

Sure everyone & their grandma is doing the “let’s mention new blogs” post. Well I’m gonna be an ass and say “i don’t care about new blogs” how about we talk about all the great blogs that are now missing in action for reasons still unknown to me. Or perhaps they are not missing in action, but they only seem to update less than once a month. I mean where are all these great bloggers who I started blogging with, we had some great times together. Perhaps if they actually get more visits spewing from this post it will motivate them to update!

Clannad After Story 20

Looks like Button was the only other one to "grow up"

This is the episode to sit back, relax and enjoy Ushio before she’s gone…

DAMNIT! (´ノω；`)

Mei-chan no Shitsuji – 07

((((o・ω・)o))) ﾄﾞｷﾄﾞｷ

I really do feel sorry for Mameshiba. He’s there for Mei while she cries all arone at the beach, while Rihito is down with a cold over at Shiori’s love shack. But you know it’s obvious that Rihito is gonna end up with Mei because this week he “indirectly” confessed his feelings to her when he said that he liked her not as a butler but as… (Oh Japanese indirectness.) Looks like next week it’s the battle between the brothers for Mei. While Mei values Mameshiba as a close friend, it’s really obvious where her heart stands right now. Also I don’t care that Tami was picked up by Shiori when she was a loli, killing for her? Please gimme a break, freaking psycho bitches.

Kurokami – 08

Oh Akane you try too hard.

Someone last week said that based on the screenshots the show could be some kind of harem love comedy.

i want to like ride back so much, but i just can’t

No really, I do. Ride Back is a half-decent show with interesting themes, a likable lead, and cool mecha designs. It just doesn’t work.

For the first few episodes, my thought was “I kinda like this”. At the time, it was still really just about Rin getting on the Ride Back and doing acrobatic moves. During previews and whatnot though, I had read that the show was also about civil rights, so I was getting a little antsy since I was eagerly awaiting that part to begin. Even after reading what Evirus said, I was still willing to give the show the benefit of the doubt. And to an extent, I still am because I really don’t want to drop it. Well, culminating with episode six, I really have to agree with his complaints.

one last economic thought

So while I know that obviously DS was trying to razz me (hence the =P), I feel like part of my mindset is because I can look at doing things the “legit” way and still not having it matter because the legit way still doesn’t actually work. That’s what I wanted to get at with my whole “bad consumer” part. My dirty little secret isn’t that I didn’t spend any money on all those beloved, precious animus that I watched last year that are so important that you just HAVE to support the industry, but that I got a lot of value for my money. I averaged about one DVD per month in 2008. I bought even more than what I hear people (like you-know-who) telling me to buy when they say “Just scrimp and save and buy that DVD once you can”.

The problem is that even those who were being told to scrimp and save wouldn’t have had to sacrifice much in order to buy what I bought. The large portion of the anime that I bought I’ve bought during big sales, like when DeepDiscountDVD (which is already incredibly cheap) would have a buy one get one free sale, or when ADV used to have seasonal clearance where you could buy singles for like $5. I bet if you looked hard enough that you could find that $3 that I spent on individual singles that I spent during The Right Stuf’s fall closeout sale just laying around. Or you could find that twenty-five cents that I earned Funimation in advertising when I watched a half-dozen episodes of Mushishi online by looking inside of the change slot in a random soda machine. When it comes to Cartoon Network shows, even excluding the fact that mom and dad are the ones paying the cable bill, because of the sheer quantity of television watched the cost of watching anime gets amortized pretty damn low. Watch an hour of TV per day and spend $60 per month on cable, and you’re spending only a dollar per episode. That’s just you, of course. Toss in mom and dad and onii-san and imouto-chan’s TV watching and it might be more like a quarter per episode. And on that note, we managed to pick up Imaginasian over the air somehow and can watch Kurokami literally for free, since they only seem to air commercials for their own shows.

Essentially, if we assume that everyone in that panel room thought that “BUT IT’S TOO EXPENSIVE! I CAN’T!” and therefore didn’t spend anything instead went “Well, I can spend $3. That’s even less than the gallon of gas it cost me to come here”, we’d end up with what, enough money maybe to buy a full 26 episode series in singles with the limited edition artbox volume? Congratulations, an entire room bought one show. We’re now back in the same nice boat as if everyone in the room kept downloading and he who cannot be named bought singles as normal. Again, Justin Sevakis continues to be correct that anime has been constantly devalued and the price deflated to the point where it’s just about zero. I want to feel bad that people’s labor is now essentially valueless, but you just can’t fight the free market.

Finally, this basically encapsulates my feelings of lololololololol at your average AoDVD poster being “forced” to buy the same show like, three times because a company released it three times lolololololol.

(Also, I lol’ed when I realized just now that we have two separate categories for posts like this: “Commentary” and “Rants & Raves”, depending of course on who was writing it.)

the recession’s got me thinkin’…

Two articles interested me yesterday. The first was a New York Times story about the recession in Japan. The recession is even worse in Japan than it is in the US because Japan is heavily dependent on exports. The reason that it is so heavily dependent on exports is because the population saves a large percentage of its income, for various cultural and economic reasons.

This whole recession thing has me deeply ambivalent. I’m a pussified liberal academic, rather than a Randroid who wants to make a million babies with the free market, but I still give the free market a hell of a lot of respect. I understand that you can’t fight it and it will always win out in the end. Bail out failing companies, keep extending refinancing and so on and the day of reckoning will still come when the money will run out and someone will fail. And again, while I am a pussified liberal academic, I support sustainability not in crunchy granola feel-good terms, but simply because of the laws of the free market: keep spending resources you don’t have and you’ll go bust. Or, run your business poorly and you’ll go bust.