it's me, only not me

Have you ever searched for yourself on google?

There are two ways of doing this--you can search for your actual name or you can search for your username. Some people use a lot of different usernames (I've never quite seen why myself) so the second one is only really interesting if you keep the same username, like me.

I first did this when I got my first PC way back when. It was something of an eye opener. There's someone called Mark Sunderland who is a photographer (in the states, I think) and you can buy prints from him.

When I first discovered this I considered buying some of his stuff--it's not all that bad. I decided against it in the end, but it would have been kinda cool.

The search I tend to do is on my standard username, trismugistus. My website trismugistus.com always used to be the top result, but when I checked recently it had actually slipped to the second page. This seemed a little bizarre to me and makes me wonder quite how google does its rankings.

I mean, there's plenty of stuff on trismugistus.com and of course when I post in forums, etc, my website is in my sig, so it should all be interrelated. However, it occurs to me that as I've added more sites to my 'family' I've had to shrink the link. That is, it often says "trigs.com" or similar nowadays, so maybe that affects how google sees it all?

Anyway, one of the great things about google of course is you can also do image searches and that really does bring up a bizarre set of results. One of the things that's most interesting about my search results is all the scans that have been stolen from me. People don't change the filenames and since they got them from AP, that's why it finds them.

AP used to have actual stats visible--number of page views, number of dls, that sort of thing, but a while back they removed them. Now there's just the "popularity" ranking available via the gallery.

They've always had that too, and some of my stuff was up in the first ten pages, but I was always left wondering if people actually like my stuff. The google image results thing tends to suggest they kinda did :).

ripportage

There's a siterip of AP going about on 4han. I won't link to it--you can go there and find it if such things are of interest to you.

I've discussed before how horribly ungrateful people are about the efforts scanners go to, so I won't really focus on that, but as someone who used to "work" for AP I thought I'd discuss a couple of the weirder things.

It's strange sometimes the things people get in their heads. I mean, if you look at some of the things being posted, a lot of it is just plain wrong. As in factually wrong--I don't mean regarding people's opinions, I guess people are entitled to those, but some of the things people think just aren't correct.

What puzzles me is how people get these inaccurate opinions. It's like, when I was a mod there, I wrote the FAQ. Now, I don't mean it was all entirely my original work, a lot of it was cobbled together from other sources or the existing rules, but the point is I compiled it together.

So I know what it said. It hasn't really been updated in ages and so is inaccurate in a few places, but a lot of the stuff is still valid.

Therefore, simply reading the FAQ would give people the proper information. And yet they don't--and I'm not just talking about the 4chan thing any more, I mean in general.

One of the most frustrating and annoying things about the job was all the people that would basically try to say "no, I haven't broken the rules!" when clearly they had, it's just they hadn't even bothered to read the damn rules.

It's like, in terms of the AP rip, there's a lot of rage towards bantam as the demon that owns AP. I've not spoken to him about it, but I am fairly sure he doesn't really give a rat's arse about the rip. AP has never laid claim to owning anything on its site--it just needs some mechanisms for slowing down its bandwidth usage so that he doesn't get bankrupted.

And the fundamental point is that surely it's his site--he can do what he wants with it. I know I had my emo thing a while back and said some unfortunate things at the end, but in the end I backed down because, when I'd calmed down, I remembered that fact.

But one of the weirdest things is what the rip represents. All it really shows is how successful AP has become. It's the king of the heap and so everyone's focus is on it.

So the reality is it's actually a massive compliment :/.

mu of the moment

So yesterday I mentioned having watched Aegis of Uruk via download, so that also means I got a bunch of scanning done. Mostly this was the three outstanding anime mags, but I did also tackle a couple of artbooks.

I've sort of come to the realisation that part of the reason I've let the anime books pile up is because I started scanning them at 600dpi. To put this into context it took me the same time to scan two entire magazines at 400dpi as it did to scan one artbook at 600dpi. That's around 90 images compared to around 30. I think I may rationalise it a bit more--use the same criteria of just the pics I really like at 600dpi that I do for the mags. Anyway, the point of this post is that as well as watching the entirety of aegis of Uruk, I also watched a few of the old fansubs too:

• Kaiba - Hmm, I've a feeling this is brilliant. But unfortunately, I just didn't like it. There were a couple of reasons for that. First off, the art style was a real turn-off. If you've ever seen The Beatles Yellow Submarine film, or are familiar with some of the 60's psychedelic inspired art, it's like that, and it does nothing for me. But also, a lot of the story is quite abstract. This is why I suspect it's brilliant, but unfortunately I must admit I'm too stupid to work some of it out, so it just didn't do much for me.
• Monochrome Factor - This was, well, if not rubbish, then just plain dull. It just seemed like a rehash of bunch of shounen standards. It does appear to have a gay character in it, though, so I wasn't entirely sure who this was quite aimed--certainly not people who like well told stories (zing!). The third ep especially was terribly dull and horribly drawn out.
• Ikkitousen: Great Guardians - I've only seen the one ep, but I actually kinda liked it. The reason the previous animated versions of ikki tousen have failed is they've taken themselves too seriously. I know the English manga translation is all fucked up, but you can still tell that Yuji Shiozaki knows his manga is really all just about tits and arse. Great Guardians seems like it might finally have cottoned on to the same idea.

it's all legal like

Well, it's post weekend of doom.

Quite a good weekend in all--I got quite a lot done. I'm not sure I can be arsed to detail it all at the moment, but something of notable interest is that I did my first legal anime download.

I joined bost tv a while back when it was announced they were going to be one of the people carrying gonzo's stuff. The reason I went with bost is because it seemed pointless going for the youtube--I'm really not a fan of youtube at all--and crunchyroll just made my head hurt when I tried to work out how to use it.

Despite all that I was still a little nervous about taking the plunge. My fears were: what if I couldn't pay properly? or it needed some weird codec or other requirement and I couldn't get it to work? or the rental period expired before I got to watch it? or what if the dls didn't work properly? or it was horribly slow? or what happens if my connection flakes out?

What I decided to do was go for the Tower of Druage: The Aegis of Uruk. This seemed to be a short 12-episode show and it isn't quite in my normal preferred genres (i.e. it's a fantasy show) so it wouldn't hugely bother me if it went tits up.

The 12 ep show thing didn't quite work out--turns out it's one of those half season long shows that are really a full length season chopped into two parts for production reasons and it ends on a massive cliff-hanger.

But in terms of the actual viewing of the show it was very much a success.

First off, you can buy individual episodes or a season pass--I bought a season pass as they work out as slightly better value and it seems a little pointless just watching one or two eps.

The season pass basically does what it says--it lets you watch all the episodes in the season. But the key is you can still watch them when you want to. So if you go on holiday or something the pass doesn't expire. The episodes you've already watched do expire, because you're actually just "renting" them.

You rent them for 14 days and you can watch them as many times as you want in that period. That alleviated my concerns over my connection flaking out (which it did do several times) since I could just restart.

In terms of the streaming, the eps are actually broken up like DVD chapters--there's a gonzo splash then the opening credits, part 1, part 2, closing credits and next episode preview and you can skip through them or use the slider to move about.

Obviously, as it's streaming, you need to wait sometimes, but I found the streaming speed pretty quick. Basically, I found that if I start the thing going and then pause it and give it five or ten minutes to build up a buffer then I could watch pretty much un-interrupted and skip the credits.

So when watching eps in a row you can just start ep 1 and half way through open the link to ep 2. If you start and pause ep 2 then by the time you finish ep1, ep2 will be all streamed and you can watch it interrupted, plus start ep3 going in the same way.

Also, and I'm not entirely sure if this is just for season pass customers, you can properly dl the episodes. The dl is intended for ipods and PSPs, but the PSP one is just a regular mp4 file so you can watch it on your PC. I've no idea (yet) if these 'expire' in the same way as the streaming rental.

It's all pretty high quality files--they're not huge res like a lot of fansubs are, but they're a superior product to fansubs (e.g. image quality is better--there's no artifacting, the sound never goes out of sink and the translation is a proper translation, not the broken English you tend to get in fansubs).

As I say, I watched all of the Aegis of Uruk. It was actually pretty good--there's a slightly weird weird "meta" level to it, but as fantasy stuff goes it was okay. But here's the key: if I'd seen it via fansubs it wouldn't have gone on my list of DVDs to buy, so really Gonzo or anybody else wouldn't have seen a penny. But with the streaming, they do--it's a lot less per ep, obviously, but it's better than nothing, surely?

And, while I don't think I'll ever be a real fan of dl content over DVDs, at least if this is the way it all goes then I have found I can live with it.