Alde’s Stuff

So imagine this:

You walk into a datacenter, oh say, 60 Hudson, and you walk towards your cage. You look over into someone elses cage, and you see rack upon rack of Sony Playstation 3’s. This boggles your mind; why would anyone want to use those cheezy gaming machines as servers…

Well, consider this:

I just hope Sony won’t have a hissy when people start replacing servers with PS3’s at a loss for Sony.

The Thrifty Knitter has a pattern for Katamari Damacy earmuffs. If I knew that more than one person in New Jersey would get this reference, I’d get my wife to make me a set…

Buy a PS3 Cheap!

Q: Do you have plans to release a Playstation 6 in the future?
A: No, that’s just ridiculous. I’m not made of duct tape.

Sony Playstation, 3 of them. This reminds me of the guy who was selling Playstation 2 boxes… And in the description it was that it was the empty Playstation 2 box. Think he got $400 for the empty box.

Buy a PS3…Oops, you set the buy it now price at 99 cents… What a bargain!

I’ve had bitch fests about the 9th Circuit Court (the Federal court that serves California, which is full of liberal-assigned judges), and their inherent stupidity and anti-sanity rulings, but on most things internet related, they tend to be on point.

Today’s ruling, which sided with internet web sites/forums/bulletin boards in that these sites are not liable for libellous postings by third parties, is quite a win for freedom of speech and the right to express oneself. From the Fine Article:

Unless Congress revises the existing law, people who claim they were defamed in an Internet posting can only seek damages from the original source of the statement, the court ruled.

What this does is allow web sites / bulletin boards / web forums / newsgroups to provide these services without having to police the responses. If the plaintiffs had won, it’d be a lead-pipe lock that free websites, BB/Forums would dry up, or would become such draconian censors that there’d be a stifling of just about all freedom of expression. Not everyone wants to set up their own blog, some people are just happy in reading and participating in a conversation, not necessarily starting it or hosting it.

And with the Dem’s in congress, we’ll not get a anti-freedom bill in congress either. Hooray!

Tonight we took my aunt out to Buona Sera, an incredible Italian restaraunt in Red Bank. I had the Scallop and Shrimp pasta special, my wife had the Pork Milanese, and my aunt had the Veal Milanese. All were quite exquisite and tastifirous. For the wine, we had a bottle of Penley Hyland Shiraz, which was a nicely fruity, fairly light wine, which went well with the entrees. It definately wasn’t a Melbourne Holden Yellow…

A good time was had by all, and I fully expect my aunt to phone up one afternoon saying “Hi there, I’m on the Ferry, I’ll be up there in about 2 hours, and then we’ll go to Buona Sera.

Yea, that’s right, you read it, I’ve updated the pocky pages… Added a few more pocky flavours I’ve had the luck of having over the last year. Things like Murasaki, Pineapple, Green Tea, and Giant Strawberry Pocky… Check it Out!

The exceedingly rare GRAPE Pocky, from Nagano (Untried)	Hokkaido Melon Pocky (Untried)	Cornflakes & Almond Pocky! Yum! (Untried)
Looks like an entire pocky stick wrapped in chocolate. For Upscale Pocky eaters! (Untried)	“Winter Melt-in-your-mouth Pocky” (Untried)	Spring Release Pocky! (Honey Flavoured) (Untried)
Kyushu Giant Mikan Pocky (Untried)	Summer Release Pocky! Looks to be Kiwi & Mango flavoured (Untried)	Kobe Giant Wine Pocky… Bizarre! (Untried)
THE Pocky Watch (I WANT ONE)	Canadian Maple Syrup Giant Pretz (Untried)
Almond Crush Pocky vending Machine! Note the hidden Glica vending machine behind the person.	Stand alone Pocky vending machine	Stand alone Pocky vending machine

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Grape Gummys. Very aeromatic and flavourful gummys. Not as solid as your German gummys, more maleable and sweet.	Coke flavoured hard candy. Injected with carbon dioxide, these candies bubble in your mouth, just not as violent as pop-rocks. Definately an aquired taste.	Cafe au Lait hard candy. Taste like watered down Cafe au Lait. Not as good as the Meiji black box toffee.
Kasugai Roasted Hot Green Peas. Roasted peas with a large quantity of hot wusabi. Crunchy, with that wusabi kick.	Cracker Nuts. These are peanuts with a cracker shell. Kinda like a captain’s wafer hardened into a shell and wrapped around a peanut. Salty & sweet at the same time. Not too bad. The nuts with Crunch!	Cider Soda Pop candy. No this does not taste like Woodchuck, nor any kind of cider. It’s a hard candy with a bubblegum type taste.
Milk Candy. These candies are like popping hardened sweetend condensed milk into your mouth. Tasteeee.	Cracker Nuts. These, according to the label, are the “Tangy Tastebud tickler” of the cracker nut family. They seem to be just like the butter ones, with garlic powder applied. Not bad if you love garlic.	Strawberry Milk Candy. These come two per individually wrapped package. One sweet strawberry candy, with one milk candy. Mix, and Strawberry milk happens in your mouth.
	Meiji Cafe Au Lait Scotch. Rectangular hard candy that tastes like a Cafe Au Lait with 4 Sugars. Best of the type.	Pucca Choco Snack. This is an unsalted pretzel instead of a cookie fish.

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Butter Flavored Pretz. Pretty flavourless, unless butter is a flavour.	Cocoa flavored pretz. Chocolate pretz with a light cocoa power sprinkled on.	Tomato flavoured Pretz. Sun dried tomato pretz in an Italian dressing powder.
GIANT Tomato Pretz. Just like the Original, but larger. Costs about $9 a box. Get this one if you can!	New box for Tomato Pretz

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Came across an article on Reason Magazine that describes how the 80 billion dollar Japanese Animation market grew out of Piracy. Now I wouldn’t call what we did as fansubbers piracy. The amount of time we put into properly subbing a show or series tended to take up alot of our off hours. And it’s not like it is now, where you can get HD or digital transfers straight off a tivo. Most of the times a friend/Anime store owner/etc would go over to Japan and would bring back Laser Discs with which we’d use to make our Fansubs.

And the translations; if you were lucky to have a friend or know of someone who liked the anime you were wanting to subtitle, they might translate it for a discount rate ($50 an episode) or if you got really lucky, free. The problems with the translators were that most of them were Japanese as a first language, so their comprehension of English grammar was quite poor, so a lot of editing after the fact took place. (Needless to say, some unnamed translators for titles we subtitled straight out stole our translations and passed it off as their own works).

But I do agree with the author in that the Anime industry’s “Looking the other way” did more to encourage the growth of anime in the US, but the comparison to the US media companies is not very solid. Anime was and still is a fairly niche market. The values don’t even come close. $80 billion is just barely what the advertisers spend on US Broadcast advertising. That doesn’t even count DVD sales, Syndication (Just ask Jerry Seinfeld and Rick Berman how that syndication thing works for them). Then we get into the Motion Picture industry, since Japanese Anime isn’t just TV Broadcast. The US theature domestic take is a mere 8.1 billion, before DVD sales. And I think the world already buys into the US TV & Motion Picture market; Anime was an untapped network in the US in the 80s and 90s.

I think what you’ll see as the next emerging market is Bollywood and SE Asian content. With the increasing populations from those parts of the world living in and moving to the United States, those niche markets would seem a good bet to grow. The difference between them and Anime is that the main consumers of the Bollywood market are relocated Indians, so there would be no need to subtitle and re-package; they already speak the language of the original.