Author Archives: SmileCitrus

Trinkets, odds and ends. That sort of thing.

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Lisbet is my most beloved Ukrainian cannibal of all time, standing heads and shoulders above her compatriots.

It’s fun seeing what else the people who buy my items on eBay are purchasing. As I’ve admitted before, I really enjoy watching the TV show Hoarders because mocking these people who are tens of thousands of dollars in debt from compulsive shopping who live in filth and have to shit in buckets behind their homes because a plumber cannot physically fit into the bathroom to get the sink, shower, and toilet working again makes me feel better about my own minor foibles.

Of course, the one question that’s always on my mind as I laugh at these basketcases is where they get all this stuff. I always wonder if the people buying the old books I occasionally sell are like the people on that show. Sometimes I find evidence that they are.

I’m not proud of the fact that I sometimes look at the purchase history of my buyers, but I’m sure others do the same. People know that others can view their feedback profiles and they also must know that each feedback entry, save for private listings, has a link to the item for which the feedback is for. That’s why I never buy stuff that could later come back to haunt me on eBay. That’s what proxy services are for.

I wouldn’t be so interested in looking at purchase histories if it weren’t for the fact that the books I’m selling are such garbage. There are kid’s books, very old textbooks that are surely outdated and nearly useless (eg. a book on Photoshop from 2000), school books, detective novels, movie scripts, and occasionally some old game-related books.

As it turns out, at least some of the people buying my items buy other garbage as well. Here’s a case history of my most recent customer, who bought a kid’s book from me:

  • a vintage hobo-shaped pin complete with bindle
  • an army strongbox for storing documents
  • a toy treasure chest for storing cash
  • a custom made motorcycle tag
  • several motorcycle-shaped pins
  • several motorcycle themed stickers and other ornaments
  • a snowflake-shaped cookie cutter
  • egg-shaped novelty salt and pepper shaker set
  • a pumpkin-shaped pie mould
  • an apple-shaped pie mould
  • 2 moon-shaped pins
  • 3 candles shaped like little girls
  • a pendant souvenir from the book/movie Eragon
  • numerous vintage postcards
  • another novelty cookie cutter set
  • a cookie recipe
  • a green, plastic, St. Patrick’s Day themed wreath
  • a pig figurine
  • various china dresses like China-san’s from Spirit of Wonder
  • motorcycle themed temporary tattoos
  • a novelty drinking glass with dancers painted on it

This is all from February. In all fairness, it is a leap year, but even so, that’s far more rubbish than I would purchase in any given month. Not that I’m complaining, since, without this sort of person, I wouldn’t be selling my books filled with scribbles and underlining and, of course, a person with my profligate spending tendencies is really in no position to preach. Nonetheless, I genuinely find it entertaining seeing what interesting folks like this customer are buying.

I’m not so hard to please, after all.

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I’m really enjoying Chihayafuru, as much as I’m ashamed to admit it again. I’ve seen up to episode 12 now but I’ll be trying to catch up as soon as I can. It’s such a soothing show. Yet, at the same time, though it feels a bit peculiar to say it, there’s a great deal of suspense involved in watching it.

I tried watching Guilty Crown last season and found it unwatchably boring. The directors are telling you that some sort of national crisis is going on, the protagonist is somehow involved, and that you ought to be looking forward to with apprehension the sinister results of this mix. If I felt any suspense watching that show or others like it it was because I felt guilty for not feeling the suspense that the show was obviously telling me I should be overwhelmed with.

With Chihayafuru the suspense doesn’t seem as manufactured as that. It’s a visceral suspense, in the stomach, that says, “I want to know what happens next!”. It comes naturally. Because I barely know the rules of karuta at all I’m learning things as I watch. The games are exciting. It feels like being a spectator at an actual competitive event. The characters’ inner dialogue serves a purpose basically the same as the announcer at a sporting event. I know I’m being manipulated but, unlike most of the time, it doesn’t feel that way. I only realise after the credits roll that I’ve wasted all that emotion on a TV show about make-believe people.

The relationships between characters develop at a steady but quick pace as well. Since the end of the childhood prologue, the passage of time has been handled well without too much wasted time on episodes that focus on just one character for the sake of some fabricated “deep character development” that has little bearing on the overall plot. Each character has some role in more or less each episode without jeopardizing the preeminent position of Chihaya as the protagonist and Taichi as the fuzzy, as-yet-not-fully-realised love interest.

The mythification of Arata as some sort of abstract karuta deity whose support Chihaya has been seeking all these years, despite not much of any response from him, also provides for some suspense and opportunities for speculation on the part of the viewer, who can’t help but wonder if the two will be reunited and, if so, what form the reconciliation will take. Will he be hostile, like he was when she saw him in Fukui? Or will he be apologetic? Could it be that he will join the team? I’m looking forward to finding out.

Can I call ’em, or what?

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I read on wjunction that uploaded.to had banned US visitors and it looks to be true.

Sure enough, FileServe stopped making payments and dropped its affiliate program. I nearly feel guilty for predicting it, almost as though by making the prediction I somehow brought it to realization, like I’m a prophet or something.

Filehost operators are shakin’ in their boots, it seems. I suppose I don’t blame them, but as far as I know FileServe is in Hong Kong. I suppose that doesn’t necessarily mean that a person from the United States isn’t involved in running the company though, which would be a good reason for them to be afraid. As for uploaded.to, I’ve never used them so I know next to nothing about the service.

This shit just got serious

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Gives you the heebie-jeebies, doesn't it?


(as though it weren’t serious already)

I never imagined MegaUpload would shut down. Years ago, it didn’t take much imagination for me to foresee the eventual closure of suprnova. Likewise, I was frustrated, but not terribly surprised when mininova went “legit” and lost all significance, but I never imagined MegaUpload would close its doors.

I suppose I’m naïve, but DDL sites, particularly one with a founder/mascot so bombastically confident and publicly expressive of its safety from those who would wish for its demise, always seemed to me too mainstream and even “safe” to be targeted like this. MegaUpload was, in many ways, a legitimate business. If they earned ad revenue from downloads of copyrighted content, that’s not their fault. I suppose when you make money by the sackfull off such advertising schemes, throw parties to rival those of Tracy Jordan in ostentation, and hire the most expensive ensemble of pop stars to sing the praises of your company, people take notice.

According to torrentfreak the defendants are being charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. I would believe the money laundering charge, but I want to know more about the “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement” and what sort of conspiring, specifically, they are accused of. I don’t totally doubt the money laundering thing though. Of course, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be quite happy to be shown that it’s false, too.

I had rarely used MegaUpload at all, actually, but I did like it a bit more than other free DDL sites after I got FiOS because it was the only service on which I could get near 1MB/s download speed without the use of jdownloader. Fileserve usually gives me about 400kB/s, which is more than tolerably fast, of course, but if I was in a rush to get a file and there was no other source for it I was always happy when it was on MegaUpload as opposed to some slower DDL site.

Now I fear that FileServe will be next. If MegaUpload was CocaCola, FileServe is at least Pepsi.

Oh good, Chiaki Omigawa is in a show this season

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Skies of Arcadia ranks as one of my favourite games for Dreamcast. I will watch anything with airships and pirates.

That means I will be watching Mouretsu Space Pirates. This is a good way to force me to watch the show, since it’s not as though I enjoy piracy or miniskirts for their own sake or anything like that.

I hate how expensive R2J DVDs are

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I like Shoukoushi Cedie very much, which was surprising to me since I usually don't go for family-oriented shows unless a cute orphan girl is the protagonist, which, as it turns out, is the case often enough that I actually end up watching such shows frequently. Cedie proves though that it's not just traps and ludicrously optimistic orphan girls bereft of their parents by whom I can be moesaserareta.

Because I’m not an encoder I rarely need full DVDs. The only time I do is when good raws are not available. Sometimes I get DVDs that I never watch. Sometimes I’ll get the first disc in a multi-disc series, intending to decide if it’s worth it to get the rest only after watching the beginning. The trouble is that these DVDs sometimes sit around for months or even more than a year before I watch them, by which time the rest of the discs are often unavailable. Sometimes the rest of the discs are never available in the first place, such as with はいからさんが通る and キャンディ・キャンディ, neither of which ever had official Japanese DVD releases as far as I know.

I’ve got the first four discs of Shoukoushi Cedie. A nice bonus about the DVDs are that it’s one of the few series to have Japanese subtitles, which, other than subtitles in your native language, are about the most helpful thing in the world when, like me, you don’t speak the language in which the dialogue is spoken. All DVDs and Blu-ray discs should have subtitles in my opinion. I usually turn the subtitles on when I watch movies or TV shows in English, too. I just prefer being able to confirm what I think I’m hearing by reading it simultaneously. Either that or my English is even worse than I realise it is.

The problem is that I just can’t get the rest of the DVDs. I have similar problems with other shows that I’d like to watch, too. I want to watch 巴里のイザベル but I can’t find any DVDs. I can find it on Amazon, but the only two sellers who ship internationally on there, one with a new copy and one with a used copy, are charging JPY 30000 and 50000, respectively. The series is only 13 episodes. It should be about JPY 2000. Sometimes I see 13 episode series of relatively unpopular shows like this for JPY 500 on Yahoo! Auctions.

I wanted to watch さすらいの少女ネル very badly at one time. I looked at Amazon and saw that the only seller who ships internationally was selling a used copy of the DVD box for JPY 60000. That’s nearly USD 800. This is almost as ridiculous as the price for the Card Captor Sakura special Blu ray box set that came out recently. Yahoo! Auctions is a bit better, but I’ve only seen copies of the show on there a couple of times for JPY 10000 to 20000 and none of the sellers would ship internationally. With a proxy service I’d still be looking at USD 300+ for a lousy DVD of a feel good kids story based on a book I could buy for USD 2. Thankfully ARR released rips. I love ARR.

I was looking for at least two years for a copy of the 野ばらのジュリー DVDs. There’s only four of them. It’s a short series. Someone finally made them available, by the way, but this was another series I had considered buying because it was so rare in digital form. If I had, I’d be out JPY 49000.

These aren’t even World Masterpiece Theatre shows. Those are more expensive. They don’t release DVD boxes that contain the entire series for those shows; they release a “complete version” which condenses the entire series into only a few episodes. These are actually relatively inexpensive, but why would I want them?

One show that I’ve mentioned I really like before is 風の中の少女 金髪のジェニー which is loosely based on Stephen Collins Foster’s childhood and did not, I repeat not, make me drag my morose, inconsolable Sunggie-clad self out of my desk chair, and drape myself in a comforter as I groped about in the dimly lit room for my weeping companion teddy bear Sniffles because he knows the telephone number for the Tennessee Valley Authority. That most certainly did not happen.

I did cry when I saw the price the same Marketplace seller at Amazon who had the above items for sale was charging for the Jeanie DVD boxes: JPY 64000 and 59000 for volumes one and two. That’s 1579 dollars! Of course, nobody will purchase these items. It would be much cheaper to buy from sellers who do not ship internationally and use a shipping proxy in a case like this, but even if I did, I could expect to pay more than 200 dollars. Maybe that’s reasonable for some people, but it’s still too high for to make it practical for me.

There are other shows I want, too. They all cost too much money though. Proxy shipping services are impractical for low value items like DVDs, but I must either use such a service or pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars for these DVDs from the few sellers who do ship internationally.

This is one of the ways copyright infringement by duplication via Internet can be rationalized. You may think it’s immoral to duplicate some DVDs without permission and then proceed to enjoy them for free. But then, when you see that it would actually cost around USD 500 for many of these series, some of which are unpopular and short, you may no longer think it so immoral. Shoukoushi Cedie is a Sekai Meisaku Gekijou series and has 10 volumes, each of which are about JPY 3000 for domestic buyers. That’d be JPY 30000 for a domestic buyer. If I used Shopping Mall Japan service I’d pay an additional USD 35 plus various other fees for an order like that, not to mention domestic shipping and international shipping, which is always expensive with Japan Post. On the one hand I understand that international mail needs to be expensive because the transportation, inspection, and other costs are very high for any type of postal system, but I’m used to USPS prices. I can send a book from New York to Guam for USD 3.50 and probably have it arrive in less than a week. 30000 Yen is about 400 dollars, plus 35 dollars, plus a few dollars for domestic shipping, plus about 30 dollars for international shipping, plus a few more dollars for other fees, and you’ve got a pricetag of nearly 500 dollars for used DVDs of a show from the 1980s. When I think of it this way, I can’t really think of duplication of such DVDs as immoral.