Guillotine

There are a lot of views out there on the topics of anime and manga piracy these days, and just as with what I guess would be called “domestic” piracy there are are extremely polarized viewpoints on both sides. I like to think of myself as a middle ground type person. I kinda see the points of both sides, but the extreme viewpoints sometimes just leave me with nothing more than a nasty headache.

So I feel a lot of mixed emotion right now about certain events that caught my attention, and want to add my two cents into the mix. Unfortunately my long-winded-ness won’t allow this to fit into a 140 character Twitter post or even a dozen of them. The beginning of this article for me started with a post on Twitter which got my attention. Someone ratting out a manga scanlation site about having licensed material up. As I researched into the causes of the event I found some things which kind of knotted me up inside, but I decided to hold my tongue and go on with my life pretending to be blissfully unaware of the ridiculousness of what I saw. The second event was the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” for me, and has spawned my own entry into this foolish behavior, and yes I am aware of how foolish it all sounds to the average person. This second event is something that is still on going, and will be my first point of discussion. [More]

So… I have taken yet another long hiatus from updating the site. Unfortunately my brother passed away in April and I just haven’t felt like writing since then. I’m still not quite sure about it at this point, but the urge to write a new article is definitely starting to create an itch inside my skull. To those that still subscribe to my RSS and to those that have continued to visit the site even though I haven’t updated in several months I am truly appreciative. Hopefully soon I will be back to full speed and getting some new posts up. I should have plenty to write about since there seem to have been several tasty things that have occurred during my absence.

As always… Thanks for reading

I kind of recently took a bit of a vacation from the site during the holidays. Real life issues made it hard to concentrate on writing, so I decided to do some “research”… If you wanna call it that. I think I must have watched at least 20 or so complete anime series since around Thanksgiving not including the ongoing shows that I’ve been keeping up with every week.

So, I hope everyone had a great holiday, and has a great 2010.

By the way… I am still seeking guest writers for the manga section of the site, so if anyone out there is interested please contact me.

From dannychoo: “AmiAmi has recently launched the English version of their website.”

Now you can buy your anime figures and related merchandise straight from Japan… http://www.amiami.com/shop?set=english

Taking a quick look at the site they carry all the major brands of anime figures and dolls you would expect along with games, music CDs, DVD/BR, and all the anime costume and related merchandise you can imagine

There are some good reasons to read the FAQ of the site before ordering though. First of all the prices are all in Japanese Yen (currently 99 JPY = $1 USD) and due to this they only accept Paypal since it will automatically convert the funds from dollars to yen. Also while you may notice the prices seem quite a bit lower than US based stores keep in mind that the shipping is going to easily make up the difference.

According to their FAQ shipping to the US is approximatey from 1500 JPY to 5200 JPY (about $15 – $52 USD) for single item purchases depending on size, so that 1/8 Alter Mio figure going for 5450 JPY (about $54 USD) is going to have a $20-$36 shipping charge with it bringing the total cost to around the same as US based stores are selling it for. Of course it should go without saying that returns would be a pain, so I’d suggest not buying something unless you really intend to keep it… As a matter of fact the only thing even mentioned about returns was in the case of damages, and it stated that the item must be returned within 7 days.

The only other thing that stuck out in the FAQ was that they do carry some items that are restricted to Japan only, and if you for some reason add one of these items to your cart it will cause the whole order to be cancelled, so keeping that in mind would be a good thing.

I’m sure some have noticed by now, but at the suggestions of several others I have finally given in and set up a Twitter account for the site, and I’m sure many have seen the craziness on the main page as I wrestled with several different widgets to display tweets on here. I finally settled on one of the simplest widgets which allowed me to customize it with css since most standard widgets don’t display well with my narrow sidebar menus.

Also after a little test the other night with some interesting results (70 additional visits within 2 minutes of posting the tweet) I have decided to post my updates on here to Twitter, so now everything seen here will post there, and vice versa. Except hopefully this post which is sort of a test. The tool I’m using to post to Twitter is set to exclude the “site news” category from the feed, so we’ll see how that works out when I post this. I’ll have to wait until early AM to run a test to see how regular posts work, but I don’t want to mess with the site during the time normal humans are up and about.