neko's thinkbox

My shoe in your face, faggot!

Just woke up with a headache, and after reading a couple of mails, I just felt like ranting here.

Due to my current Ar Tonelico addiction, I went to amazon.jp and wanted to order the Ar Tonelico 1&2 mangas + some doujin anthologies, the whole about 5000 Yen. Shipping+charges would have been approximately the same amount, which I thought was already pretty horrendous, and one item was even a marketplace item so I couldn’t have it shipped to Luxembourg anyway.

Then I remembered what someone suggested to me once, which was to use the Tenso service, some kind of revolutionary (sic) thing that would give you a Japanese address which would upon receipt and payment forward your orders to your own address, and apparently would make you save shipping fees and charges immensely. Well, I checked the rates and they were pretty much the same as amazon’s, but the difference was that marketplace items would be shipped there, too. So I thought to myself, chansu!

Chansu my ass. My orders arrived today at my Tenso address, and unlike the 2 packages amazon said it would be, there were 3 packages. And what does Tenso do? It calculates shipping costs and charges for the three packages SEPARATELY, which ends up being something short of 9700 fucking Yen! And if the three packages were bundled/joined, I’d be paying only about 5500 Yen or so. More than 4000 Yen saved! The reason I wanted to use Tenso was to SAVE money, not pay twice as much. COMMON SENSE, right? Sent them a mail already with this complaint, blissfully ignoring the small note somewhere in the FAQs that they “do not currently provide a service to bundle multiple parcels together“.

I’m pretty sure they’ll reply with the same answer, and I am pretty sure that this was the first and last time they’ll see me there, too. Just why didn’t I go with Rinkya? They would have bundled the packages allright, and come cheaper than this pile of false advertisement. Of course, the one to blame is myself, because I naively took that page at face value. Gosh, I hate such unnecessary expenses, especially with my expensive UK studies which start next month…

If you can, avoid Tenso.

This is probably going to be a very personal post. This time I’ll lay off the usual facetious schizo act for a couple of minutes, and try to be real this time. In case you are wondering, it has absolutely nothing to do with anime so move along if you don’t care. But read with patience and precaution if you do.

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neko takes a break from making big hauls and shares some of his routine.

I’ve received quite a few mails in the past couple of months asking me about how I order this and that, especially the Hisui Moe Moe Bathtowel and the Pangya caddie plushies which I got from Yahoo! Auctions Japan.

Instead of replying to every mail, I’ll just post a small tutorial on here so everyone can get that piece of information, even those who didn’t dare to ask.

Note that there are many possible choices you can make when shopping online. I merely provide useful links and a small introduction to shopping on Japanese websites – gathering specific information and comparing is up to you, though.

I’d also like to point out that I will NOT order anything for anyone. I’ll be glad to help with search terms or links, but my cash (as little as there may be right now) will stay in my wallet. Thank you for your understanding.

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…and it’s no other than Gonzo themselves.

Following this article, new Gonzo anime will be made available online by GDH, on the same day of their airing on TV in Japan.

The new titles, the Tower of DRUAGA -the Aegis of URUK- and BLASSREITER, will be available on YouTube, Crunchyroll and BOST TV, with English subtitles. I suppose this kind of Youtube service will remain free of charge, while the other two will provide higher quality videos for a small fee, depending on the situation.

This measure is said to counter the propagation of pirated anime files that have been circulating on the internet, known under the more common name of “fansubs”. It is to grant access exclusively for overseas viewers to legally view anime as soon as they are broadcasted in Japan.

Honestly speaking, I do not think this will be a very popular measure, albeit the legal aspect of the offer might seem attractive to some. Also, I highly doubt that Gonzo or GDH are going to put up with the trouble of translating all of their future animes in proper English. Furthermore, I cannot imagine such releases having a nice typesetting either, at least not at the same level we know from decent fansubbing groups.
The biggest problem with this, is that their solutions mainly provide anime over streaming platforms, and I guess that is the point where most leechers would resort to the traditional fansubs, to download and archive anime. I highly doubt sites other than Youtube will make those episodes available for download, because, who would eventually buy Gonzo’s DVDs then?

On the contrary, it might even help most fansubbers (especially the translators) to speeden up their work – since they already get a draft of the script by watching those subtitled versions, they might complete their work much much faster. So perhaps this marks the beginning of a new speedsub era?

I am pretty eager to know if this measure will be successful or not, and if there will be more anime producers who will follow soon too.

I see what you are doing thar.

Tadaima, kaerimashita. Well, it took me a long time to do this. For some reason, I have been avoiding my own blog for over a month and a half… Don’t ask me why. Maybe I was in a state of oversaturation again… And that even if I was only following two series. Haven’t been in touch with anime ever since my last blog post. Well, maybe sorting out the hundreds of random episodes I have been downloading all this time. So… What am I going to tell you now? A lot of things, actually. Since it is too much, especially for such a run-on entry, I will divide the news into sense units after the jump.
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Because I can’t find any fitting picture, I’ll just show you a picture of what I will be playing in a few minutes: Pangya. BTW, this is Hana when she hits a HIO. Too bad that animation can only be seen in season 3…

Well, I think it’s time for a new poll, the old one already lasted for one entire month, and I am quite surprised that there were so many votes! Wow… I’d never have imagined that 77 (seventy-seven!) people would take their time casting their vote on this. Compared to many other blogs, it’s still a small of a number (of course, brag all you want), but for my standards, it’s already a revolution! (last poll had only 11 votes or so…..) Thanks for voting! May you be as many to vote on the next poll! More after the jump~
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