anime watching (or not)

I appreciate most of these review posts are a bit negative, but as I said before I don't really feel last year went very well.

I guess my point in this one is that watching anime and reading manage is supposed to be one of my hobbies - something I dedicate spare time to because I enjoy it.  Well one of those I managed to achieve (the reading manga side of things) but the other didn't go so well.

I seem to recall there was some watching of anime fairly early in the year, but there was a real lack of anime watching in the latter half of the year.  Now there are some reasons for this.

One is that I have not really been scanning my imported anime magazines.  While I scan I used to watch fansubs and/or crunchyroll.  Fansubs and crunchyroll don't really fit in very well with my more general TV viewing.  I have got a PC set up as a Blu Ray that I could theoretically use to watch both, but in practice this hasn't proven very practical.

One of the biggest issues is a bit unusual in that TV / monitor is actually relatively small, particularly given the distance I am away from it, so it can be very hard to see stuff, even with using the larger font modes of windows.  But also I have a wireless keyboard and mouse I use with it, but UI have to take the batteries out of the mouse and that means I have to re-synch it every time I switch the computer on, making it a huge pain in the arse.

I mean, I had managed to streamline the process a bit, but then not so long ago one of the hard drives in it packed up and I still haven't gotten around to really sorting it out properly since.

Anyway, point is that fansubs and crunchyroll are best done at my normal computer while scanning and I've stopped scanning.  I've stopped scanning mainly because I've found the whole A4 scanner plus "image stitch" on Photoshop to be horrible.  It doubles or even in some case quadruples the number of scans you have to do and then (and this is that bit I really hate) it takes three or four times as long again to stitch the pictures together... assuming it even works - a lot of the time it just doesn't put them together very well and then I have the horrid nightmare of having to try to do it myself.

The solution would be to get an A3 scanner again (I have one, but it doesn't have drivers for windows 7 and the machine I intended for XP doesn't work and I was never arsed to fix it) but that will cost me money I wasn't really expecting to have to spend, given what I've spent on it all already.

Of course if I'm honest it doesn't help that I'm not a fan of the whole weekly watching of anime that streaming sites seem to basically only be set up to support.  I prefer to watch series in big chunks.  But then the rubbishness of the Blu Ray machine also means I often hold off on watching Blu Rays and I've started to buy more anime on Blu Ray, so that's not exactly a help.

The final issue of course is time - given how much time I have spent job hunting and then working it's tough to find a good chunk of time to sit down and watch something that could be 10 or 20 hours long.

Obviously none of that has stopped me buying anime, because I'm an idiot.  Why am I spending all this money and then not enjoying the stuff I buy?

I really need to come up with some better plans.  Maybe a proper Blu Ray player could help in some regards, but then I really need multi-region and that's not something that players really support in the way DVD players used to - there seems to be a lot of faffing around with firmware, which surely negates the benefit over using my current system.