return of the tris

Well now, it's been a while since I posted on here. As mentioned that's because I've been away on holiday--I went down to Devon to visit my Dad, as it was his birthday last week.

It was a pretty expensive w/end all things considered. My new car has really great fuel economy. I can get around 50 miles per gallon if I "eco-drive" it, but of course if you're having to do around 400 miles, that still means you're going to use about 8 gallons, which is a full tank of petrol and so costs the best part of £40 or so :/.

Then there's eating on the road - unless you pack a lunch, which I can never be arsed to do, you'll inevitably have to get something to eat (the journey is the best part of 4 hours) and prices in rest stops are never cheap - I must have spent about £10, total.

Then there's the fact it's his birthday, so I spent about £35 or so on gifts. Plus I paid for a meal at the local restauranty-pub place, which was about £40.

So, all things considered that's about £125. Not the cheapest of week-ends :/.

And speaking of expensive, I've come back and seen some annoying news this morning. I've been buying the individual volumes for ADV's releases of Welcome to NHK and Red Garden.

However, a few months back, ADV essentially went tits-up. They've not actually folded, but, from what I've read, what happened was they made a dodgy move with a backer/investor in Japan. That all fell through and (for some reason) they lost all of the titles they'd licensed during that period.

Which included NHK and Red Garden.

But then, Funimation swooped to the rescue, picking up the licenses. Now it's taken them a while to catch up with stuff (they also picked up distribution of all the Geneon titles) and the announcement they've made is that they're releasing both series as collected volumes.

I must admit I was kinda expecting that as most all of the stuff they've released that they picked up has been in the form of collected volumes (sometimes as "part 1" and "part 2" sometimes as the full series) but it doesn't make it any less annoying.

I wouldn't mind so much if either series had only been at the 1 or 2 volume stage, but both were 1 volume away from completion. Factor into that the fact that the number of eps per disk always starts higher and then reduces and it means that in order to get the last 3 or 4 eps I have to not only buy several disks I've already got, but I have to pay a huge whack for just those last few eps.

It's pretty annoying, and pretty expensive too.