The Thrill of the Hunt.

(Keep in mind this is part three of a series. Part two will get posted next time and part one will the time after. Also, there is nudity in Girls Bravo.)

In part one: A Hardheaded Holdout for Hard Copies, I discussed going from store to store looking for whatever movie or book I'm obsessing over. I am a firm believer in supporting my local businesses. What if none of these big boxes or mom and pops doesn't have what I am seeking? Or worse yet the copy I got is screwed up?

Remember the fecal storm of cursing I had over the anti-virus AVG? The hard copy I bought in the store turned out to be no-good. AVG made it good two months after I installed the competitor. Here's the thing, the version of the program I wanted wasn't on the shelf, it was in the online store. On top of that the boxed version I got was out of date. The company has honored the key code so far. There may come a time.

Other than supporting local people there is a technical reason for buying boxed software. When I installed Windows 7, my downloaded copy of Bejeweled wouldn't activate. You see Pop Cap lost my registration information. If I had the disk it would have worked no-prob. A lot of companies put excessive registration forms on downloaded software. It is even made it way onto CD/DVDs. I understand why: in this age of high speed internet and massive hard drive space it is easier than ever to upload Photo Shop CS6 to some torrent site. Cracked and ready to to go. If only these companies would realize that by dropping the price to a reasonable rate and stop with the DRM rootkit schemes that more people would buy their products. All that stuff really does is turn honest persons into pirates. People will support you if you give them a reason.

Oops. Seems as if I drifted off onto another soapbox. Where's the soapbox labeled for digital downloading? There it is.

I've gone to every store in town and nothing. My first choice of online retailers is Amazon. That way I can get a hard copy. I typically reserve iTunes for music. What if disk three of Puella Magi Madoka Magica I bought from Amazon is unwatchable. Due to technical reasons and not the content per say? (Buy the way, I always have to look at the DVD cover when spelling that out.) I could always order another disk, but the anticipation of waiting for it to arrive in my mail box has long since turned to gripping. That new disk may be screwed up as well. Also it wasn't cheap. Looking at iTunes, all there is a couple of Kill QB apps and some podcasts. No episodes.

The thrill, and frustration, of the hunt now goes into the dork underbelly of the net. There are plenty of sites to be had that post anime, OSTs, and manga. I use them when all else has failed me. You can find just about everything, almost. It's these sites where I found all those images for Rosario Vampire I used in my reviews. (Another great thing is that sometimes they are far in advanced of what we get here. Rosavam 19 on the Viz Media app finally appeared two months later. Online you can get volumes 20 or 21.) Also I found Samuri Pizza Cats and that one series I promise not to talk about ever again. You know, the one about the fox girl trying to be a “dog-god” and falls in love with a human. Plus my newest guilty pleasure: Azu Manga Daio. It's free, I am not losing any money on it, except now, I just ordered it. It wasn't available anywhere locally. (I am NOT posting a video of the opening credits. It is one of the most obnoxious anime themes of all time. Even I'm not that cruel.)

What about that messed up copy of Madoka disk three? That was a hard one to find. Most sites didn't have it. One said it had the dubbed version, but alas no. It supposedly had the entire series subtitled. It had episode one complete. Which was great, but only had half of episodes 11 and 12! No kidding. Wait a half an hour for each one and only get half. (I spent that time writing part one of this series.) Checked several others to no avail. What makes it more frustrating is that it could be under Puella or Madoka, or Mahou. I finally found it on a site that had a very slow server (which allowed me the time to write out part two of this whole rambling ramble of a ramble.)

I guess hunting for anything on the net is just as frustrating as driving around. It could take awhile to find what you are looking for, it may be a bad upload to begin with, or even laden with malware. But uses less gas.

I watched the last two episodes of Madoka, and I'll save the review for some other time. Next up: the greatest advantage to those bootleg sites. Of course that will have already been posted before this article making that line seem kinda of sillier than normal. If you scroll down it will make some sense.

Won't it?

The Unintended Advantage to Bootlegging.

Coming up over the next couple of months I'm going into a long discussion about my evolution of going from store to store to buy movies and games; to going from web site to web site to download the same. I originally started on one subject and immediately rabbit trailed into several others causing me to go over one page in my word processor. I typically type out these posts there first and try to keep it at about a page to a page and a half. I just had so much to say I figured it was best to break it up into multiple parts. I'm going to post them in reverse order so that way down the road anybody doing the typical tendency on these blogs of scrolling backwards through the entries will see them come up in the correct order.

Or maybe I'm thinking too hard about it. Maybe I'm the only one that does that?

This article is really a direct continuation of the previous. (Which will be posted in another couple of weeks.) In it I discuss the advantages (to me anyway) with going to all these manga and anime sites. One I didn't touch on was the fact that often you can find translated manga and subbed anime that is not available here in the States at all. An example of this is Magikano. The anime is here, and parents, just so you know, not for kids. The manga on the other hand isn't. It is online. Might I say, it's WAY creepier than the anime. After seeing such stuff I warn my friends about it.

Now we're back on course.

I hang around a group of friends that are not otakus. They consider Japanese comic books and cartoon shows to be kids stuff. What adult in his right mind would waste his time watching that crap? So I have always kept my mouth shut and talked shop or if the discussion went to TV it would be shows I watched like House, Closer, or classics such as Knight Rider and A-Team.

After finding all the watch for free anime sites, I would then tell my friends about them. First I would ask if their kids like Japanese cartoon shows like Bleach, Dragon Ball, or Naruto. Inevitably they say yes. By now they are looking at me kinda cross wise. Then I suggest all the sites. Then they look at me like I'm clearly crazy. I can see the wheels spinning in their heads: “That Iraqi heat must have fried what little brain he had left.” Then I point out that they would probably want to preview, for free, what it is their children are asking you to buy for them. Unlike the stuff you see on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, the stuff you see on store shelves is a lot less like She-Ra and Bugs Bunny and more like Playboy.

My friends will say “Yeah, I'll give it a look.” Whether or not they do is up to them. From that point on it's back to work. I'm not on any kind of holy crusade here. I just want to inform parents as to what is going on out there so they can hopefully make the best decisions in raising their kids. Especially since the age range of a lot of anime is mislabeled.

Mind you, parents: You can control what your children read and watch in your home, but you have no control over what your kids watch in their friends' house. It was one of my buddies' son that told me about a couple of these manga sites.
He doesn't even have the internet!

Patriot Day 2012

Zook the Hero Z: The Complete Instruction Book.

I have been receiving numerous comment, countless phone call, not to mention voluminous card and letter. Bowing to the pressure, I shall forestall talking more about Madoka and Rosavam and instead present the entire Zook Z instruction booklet.

Sans snarky remarks by me or even long drawn out stories on how much trouble it was to scan these images.

Just so you know, I have no problem what so ever with people saving the Zook the Hero Z instruction manual scans to their hard drive. You may even go a head and upload them to the net community of your choice without any credit given. You don't even need to link back to Ravy Online, or Ravy Comics. However any link is appreciated especially to here or here.

By the way, click on each image and it will take you to a page that has a full size version.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica Volumes 1 and 2.

You've probably gotten those Nigerian Prince emails, right? Now it's Libyan General pleas for help. I got an email the other day from someone that was a general's daughter. You can pretty much guess the rest. Her daddy was killed and she managed to escape with much of "his money." Now she is stuck in some other African country. Her accounts have been frozen and she needs a loan to finish her escape. All she needs is your credit card number or better yet you bank account routing number.

The sad part is that these scams do work on enough people so that they keep doing it.

Admittedly I really only read the first few lines of that email. I mean, come on, you're asking a guy that does a webcomic and reviews manga, for money? (Now THAT'S a segue.)

         

Looking at it on the shelf you would think to yourself that this is just another magical girl snooze fest. I decided to pick it up and give it a try. You just don't know unless you give it a chance. A lot of the stuff you would expect is indeed in there. Younger teen lead character with overly bubbly personality: Check. Totally impractical silly costumes: check. Weird hair styles: check. Cute animal sidekick that has a bad habit of not telling you what you need to know: check. Guns: check.

GUNS!?

Hand grenades? Blood? Head splatters? Trying to kill each other? Holy cow! This is done by people that are sick and tired of She-Ra, Sailor Moon, and Pretty Sammy. Parents watch out. This is NOT for little girls. Yeah you get the “Does this ribbon make me look pretty?” conversations. That is quickly dispensed with in favor of scenes of possessed people attempting mass suicide. You wouldn't guess that looking at the covers. It looks like some kind of super heroine team. Anything but. Homura spends most of her time fighting everybody. Mami dies. Sayaka gets a little bloodthirsty. Madoka has yet to transform by the end of volume two.

I think I got a winner here. Now I admit I'm bothered by the fact that the main characters are in their younger teens, but, this is a magic girl manga after all. Graphically it swings between the simplistic: characters on a white background, to hard to follow complex action. The writing is good for the most part with some leaps in logic that leave you scratching your head. Of course if it was all logical then it wouldn't be mahou shoujo. I really like the character development. Each one has some kind of back story that is tragic and can even twist a character into something quite unexpected.

In my research for this article I was totally unable to find any scans of it what so ever. The site I got the images for Rosario Vampire did not have Madoka. Yen Press didn't have it in it's app store. So no extra images to comment on. I did find a few episodes of the anime on one of the manga sites I go to. This series is trippy. The one thing I didn't like was packing in too much detail. Glass walled classrooms? Those hallways, jeeze they're huge. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you have to. All that detail overpowers the characters on screen and make it even more difficult to read the subtitles. Fortunately the DVDs I ordered are in English. What I liked the most was how the character animation looked almost like color manga. It was awesome.

The battles in the witches' wards piqued my interest. It seemed very much like British animation I watched a very long time ago. Maybe some inspiration from Ralph Bakshi. With a twisted twist of Terry Gilliam.

Can't wait for volume three. When's that out? December? Aw man.