I Don't Care if Tomorrow Never Comes 1:42 PM

Recorded by Hank Williams (Sr.)
Written by Hank Williams (Sr.)

Capo on 2nd fret: KEY: E PLAY: D
I don't [D] care if to-[A] morrow never [D] comes [D7]
This [G] world holds nothin' for [D] me [D7]
I've been [G] lonely night and day ever [D] since you went away
So I don't care if to-[A] morrow never [D] comes. [D7]

CHORUS
If to-[G] morrow never comes and the sun [D] don't ever shine
It won't matter with [A] me
For [D] when she went a-[D7] way, my [G] world ended that [D] day
So I don't care if to-[A] morrow never [D] comes.

My lonely mind wanders back to days that used to be
My broken heart cries out for you
Oh, if I can't have you here, I can't go on my dear
So I don't care if tomorrow never comes.

REPEAT CHORUS

Bollycat! I'd been looking for this site, I just couldn't remember the name of it... 

Zombie Time 9:48 AM

relgion_free
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Thoughts about Zombies. I don't know why. I should write this stuff down while it's floating around my head.

When the Zombies attack, will you be ready?

IVA TOGURI aka Tokyo Rose 12:36 PM

IVA TOGURI aka Tokyo Rose
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

One of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read. It makes me feel ashamed...

Missing sleep 11:54 AM

IMG_0007
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

While Ed was gone I caught up on sleep. Now I'm not sleeping again. What the heck?

A Day of nothing got done 11:23 AM

kommandos013
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

I really enjoyed taking the day off Monday. I got to sleep in and take a nap and walk around the yard in the wonderful weather and generally waste the day away.

And that's about it.

Check out my new gallery set up

Pasadena13 8:20 AM

Pasadena13
Originally uploaded by bonniegrrl.

What a wonderful world.

Not-at-AWA report 10:47 AM

IMG_0034
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Wish I was there. I'd have the Avertec and the Pioneer burner all set up and making copies for Dave and Gavv and Surat and Neil.

sigh.

Still having trouble sleeping...

No dreamsleep 9:59 AM

IMG_0003
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Earlier in the week I had a night of vivid fever dreaming. Weird imagery and some great dream logic. Stuff that I carried into wakefulness and could examine in the daylight. But last night, I don't know what happened but I kept waking up ever hour. And I didn't get the feeling I was getting any REM. Lots of tossing and turning and talking to the cat. I feel tired this morning, and kind of achy. It's hard to explain.

Deep in the gutters 3:12 PM

Working it now. Have to print and assemble before Ed flys out tomorrow. Fun.

Check The Cool Wax 

Fictionwise 

Found e-books of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov's and Analog and even Ellery Queen here.

Jonny Quest 20,000 Leagues 1:24 PM

Jonny Quest
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

It's like a cover for MEN'S ADVENTURE...

Listen to it on Check The Cool Wax

Pick Me Up on Your Way Down 12:08 PM

Pick Me Up on Your Way Down
(Harlan Howard)

You were mine for just a while,
Now you're puttin' on the style
And you've never once looked back
At your home across the track.
You're the gossip of the town
But my heart can still be found
Where you tossed it to the ground.
Pick me up on your way down.

cho: Pick me up on your way down,
When you're blue and all alone
When their glamour starts to bore you,
Come on back where you belong.
You may be their pride and joy,
But they'll find another toy
And they'll take away your crown,
Pick me up on your way down.

They have changed your attitude,
Made you haughty and so rude,
Your new friends can take the blame,
Underneath you're still the same.
When you learn these things are true
I'll be waiting here for you,
As you tumble to the ground
Pick me up on your way down.

Copyright 1958 Tree Publishing Company
Recorded by Charlie Walker
RG

This is the one... 3:21 PM

10 years... 12:55 PM

I didn't know it, but this AWA will be the 10th Anniversary Japanese Animation Hell. So I thought I'd whip up a little mark to celebrate the fact. Here's my first attempt:

I like it, but I tought it could be a bit too much. So I came up with this revision:

Which one do you like?

UPDATE: When I get the chance, try changing the center text to red. Also try changing the center text to outlines, both black and red.

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | War of the worlds 2:06 PM

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | War of the worlds: "
War of the worlds

It has become synonymous with the terrorist attacks of September 11 - but what is the origin of the name al-Qaida? Giles Foden on how Bin Laden may have been inspired by Isaac Asimov's Foundation "

Gojira vs King of the Monsters 1:01 PM

06FLYER100
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Got the GOJIRA 2 DVD collectors set yesterday. I wrote about it over at Psychommu. What a wonderful time to live in where I can get to watch movies like this. It's something I would've never expected only a short while ago. It's seems amazing that there is enough of a demand for something so specialized that they can release a region one DVD and others like it. Too damn cool...

Joshua's Birthday 2:11 PM

Orfeon-Front
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

http://mexicovers.blogspot.com/

I caught a ride with Josh and Michael to ROY'S, a Hawaian themed resturant where we had Josh's birthday party. (Today is Josh's birthday, btw...) It was a classy joint. A $50 plus type of joint. Great food, great service, but very expensive. Still, we had a great time and it went well. I guess I could do that once or twice a year...

The Japan Times Online - Fans lift J-culture over language barrier 1:33 PM

The Japan Times Online - Fans lift J-culture over language barrier


Fans lift J-culture over language barrier

By PATRICK MACIAS

Special to The Japan Times

Global interest in Japanese entertainment continues to heat up. Quite literally.

News photo
A scanlator who goes by the name of DDRtatsujin is part of a community of fans whose love of Japanese manga drives them to take each page, scan it into their computer, then translate the material from Japanese into English and upload it to the Internet for a wider audience.

Hardcore manga fans around the world are taking their Japanese comics off the shelf and putting them into the microwave.

"They do that so the glue melts, which allows them to take apart the volume page by page so they can be scanned easily," explains Jonathan, 21, a journalism student at West Virginia University who did not want his last name published.

Why would folks do that to their precious and costly imported comic books? Because they are "scanlators," a growing community of fans whose love of Japanese manga drives them to take each page, scan it into their computer, then translate the material from Japanese into English and upload it to the Internet for a wider audience to enjoy for free.

But it is not just Japanese comics that have proven ripe for amateur translations. Homemade English versions of anime shows and Japanese television series (such as "Densha Otoko [Train Man]"), along with plenty of clips featuring comedian Razor Ramon HG -- Hard Gay as he styles himself, are increasingly popping up on the Internet via blogs ( www.tvinjapan.com to name one), file-sharing programs known as torrents and especially the phenomenally popular YouTube site.

A little Net surfing is all it takes to suddenly find translations of everything from feature films -- like last year's hit "NANA" -- to annotated versions of ancient Shinto myths (found at www.sacred-texts.com ) readily available.

There are also subbed music videos by girl-group Morning Musume and boy bands like SMAP. U.S. followers of these acts often use the Internet to trade clips and communicate with like-minded fans in Asia in places like Taiwan and South Korea, resulting in translations that are truly international affairs.

Japanese-to-English translations of both professional and amateur varieties are nothing new. But the Net allows publishing, archiving, copying and distribution on an unprecedented scale. As a result, more Japanese pop culture is spread across the globe than ever before.

Even though suburban shopping malls in Middle America are filled with officially licensed J-culture items (manga and anime, especially), Japanese companies that own these products are not keeping up with increasing global demand. Followers want the latest thing from Japan now! The fan translation phenomenon not only fills the gaps, it also shortens the time it takes for Japanese pop culture to journey around the world.

Manga fans in particular, addicted to page-turning narratives, often complain about the agonizingly slow speed at which officially translated products are released abroad when compared to Japan. In the race to keep up with new story chapters, doled out in weekly and monthly doses in Japan, a scanlator doesn't even need to put his manga in the microwave. A razor blade is the tool favored by the scanlators over at Ignition-One ( manga.ignition-one.com ), which offers free downloads of Japanese comics subtitled in English. As of March, the site, which operates on a monthly budget of $ 117, paid for by donations, boasted 435,768 individual downloads.

Among the 50 titles that Ignition-One has translated is Naoki Urasawa's "Pluto," which was awarded the 2005 Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize, one of Japan's top honors for comics. Thesite also hosts English versions of boxing saga "Hajime no Ippo [aka Fighting Spirits]" and "Jojo's Bizarre Adventure," both well-known in Japan, but not as famous abroad.

That's fine with West Virginia's Johnathan, who runs the Ignition-One site. "The entire reason I joined the scanlations community is to promote manga that I was interested in and, coincidentally, that no one else would translate," he says. "I simply want to share what I love and, as an scanner and as an editor, enjoy the manga I'm interested in to its fullest extent."

It's this fervor for Japanese pop culture that has led to a boom in fan translations, with anime and manga leading the way. Some 537 scanlations groups, which range from one-person operations to multiple members scattered across the globe, are listed by www.manganews.net , a major hub for keeping track of new scanlations.

"Caterpillar" of Caterpillar's Nest ( caterpillar.voiea.net ) is a 25-year-old Austrian college student in Vienna. His site is home to English translations of manga you probably won't (or wouldn't want to) find on the shelves of a chain bookstore anytime soon, such as the erotic and grotesque work of the notorious Suehiro Maruo. Says Caterpillar, "I started doing scanlations because I wanted to read certain manga and I knew they didn't stand a snowflake's chance in hell of ever getting an official English translation."

Aided by personal computers and the Internet, fans are able to become "ministudios." They get to choose exactly the manga they wish to read, and with the help of volunteers with the right language and computer skills, they can produce works that rival professionally translated comics for quality and accuracy. American publishers, in hopes of reaching the mass market, sometimes tone down the sex and violence in Japanese products. Fans pride themselves on creating work closer to the original creator's intentions.

But to some, even within the anime and manga fan community, scanlations are digital-age piracy, pure and simple, and do nothing but take away profit from publishers and artists. A lot of money is potentially at stake. The U.S. market for English translations of Japanese manga driven by publishers such as Viz Media, Tokyopop, and Del Ray was estimated by the comic industry news and analysis Web site ICv2 to be worth between $ 155 million and $ 180 million at retail in 2005.

Says Johnathan, "There's no denying that scanlations are illegal no matter how groups might spin it. But I wouldn't consider it like the advent of the MP3 format, where sharing music damaged the music industry. I legitimately believe that scanlating manga encourages domestic publishers to license manga."

Jason Thompson, a professional freelance editor who has worked for several major U.S. manga companies, claims that "although few or no American manga publishers ever mention them, scanlations have become extremely important to the American manga scene. They're a way of gauging a title's popularity. If the scanlations are popular, you know that a title has a fanbase."

"AK of Troy," owner and main translator of the site Toriyama's World ( www.toriyamaworld.com ) named after Akira Toriyama, creator of the much-loved "Dragon Ball" series, says, "I don't think scanlating affects the sales of the books when they are eventually licensed because the best-selling series in the U.S. are also the ones that were scanlated the most."

An unspoken agreement seems to exist between scanlators and manga publishers. When a series is officially licensed for English-language publication, scanlators are expected to police themselves. For instance, when three of Toriyama's World's most poplar manga offerings -- "Bleach," "Fullmetal Alchemist," and "Naruto" -- were due to be released in officially licensed editions, the site took their scanlations offline. But pockets of stubborn scanners refuse to give in.

That could soon change. While manga scanners still enjoy relative freedom, anime fansubbers are being directly threatened by Japan's anime industry.

Fansubbing, an activity that predates the advent of manga scanning, originally helped to spread the gospel of anime in English-speaking countries in the 1980s and '90s; lean years for imports of Japanese pop-culture products abroad. At first, tapes of amateur-subtitled anime were traded in person at anime clubs or sent through the mail. Now anime fansubs reach thousands daily through peer-to-peer clients on the Net such as BitTorrent, Usenet groups, or through Internet Relay Chat channels.

Daryl Surat, a freelance contributor to U.S.-based magazine Anime Insider, says, "There is a widespread idea among many fans now that 'anime should be free," as if to suggest that anime isn't a commercial product. The amount of anime fans [in the United States] seems to have increased, and yet sales of anime DVDs here are down."

On Aug. 22 this year, Bandai Entertainment Inc. issued a press release in America for their highly anticipated upcoming title "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex -- Solid State Society." The film, budgeted at $ 3.6 million, has already been licensed for a 2007 U.S. release. That hasn't stopped several fansub groups from announcing their intentions to translate "Solid State Society." Within days of the film's Sept. 1 debut screening on Japanese TV, raw untranslated footage, which usually proves irresistible to fansubbers, was already popping up on the Internet.

Bandai's August press release read like a declaration of war: "The creation of translated versions of 'Solid State Society' is considered an unauthorized derivative and constitutes infringement of the intellectual property rights in the work as well as unfair competition." Ken Iyadomi, Bandai's president, is quoted as saying, "We are prepared to take legal action against fansubbers and illegal download and other distribution sites if this notice is ignored."

Surat believes Bandai is in the right to defend their intellectual property.

"But I question the effectiveness of such a measure," he says. "Even the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America are unable to do anything to curtail the unauthorized online distribution of their works due to peer-to-peer distribution networks set up outside of the U.S. Still, 'Ghost in the Shell' is one of the most popular anime franchises in the U.S., so its financial success is virtually guaranteed regardless of how many people fansub it beforehand."

"John," 24, head of the fansub group Anime Classic ( www.l33t-ninj4.net ), thinks that continued global interest in Japanese pop culture might lead to some solutions if Japanese companies step up to the plate. "If Japan wanted to wipe out the fansubbers, all they'd have to do is open a site like Bandai Channel up to foreign viewers, slap on some simple translations, and charge 200 yen an episode."

Perhaps the next generation of digital playback technology will force Japan to open up even more to the international market. Most Japanese DVDs are currently "region-coded" to work only on Japanese players, but future video releases on the new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats are expected to work on U.S. machines. While this may be great news for consumers, it may bode ill for fan translators. "They could start wiping out the fansubbers if [Japan] began to put English on their releases and brought prices down enough to be competitive. Will it happen? Who knows?"
Patrick Macias is the author of "Otaku in USA" (Ohta Shuppan) and "Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion" (Cadence Books). He can be found at www.patrickmacias.blogs.com

See related story:
Web gives niche interests a chance in the free market
The Japan Times: Thursday, Sept. 7, 2006
(C) All rights reserved

Draining 12:38 PM

Buddhamachine!
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Nothing sux more then being congested, except when all that crap is draining out of your head. I'm past the flu, but now my body is cleaning out all the crap. Which means I'm blowing my nose every few minutes. Augh...

sicko 1:46 PM

Didn't post yesterday because I was ill. I was feeling sick on tuesday, too, but I pushed on through. But wednesday, I took a half a sick day and went home and went to bed. I'm feeling a bit better today, but I'm still hacking up crud. The headaches gone and the bodyaches are gone. Just clearing the junk out at this point. I think I'll dose up and sleep the rest of this off tonight...

The second day of a 4 day con 10:53 AM

I almost called the whole thing off. When Michael called me Saturday morning and told me he and Joshua couldn't make it to the show I just wanted to give up and walk away. Everything just seemed to be going wrong. But mid-afternoon Bruce convinced me to do the show anyway. Apparently people at AnimeFEST were asking about the show, so I figured if people were gonna show up I may as well do a show. Then Emily called and told me that she and Bob would help out, which really sorta threw me. I guess I really wasn't expecting it. I admit it was really fun having Bob and Em and Taliesin at the show.

Although I wanted to start set up at 9:00 it ended up being closer to 9:30 when we got to the panel room. And it turns out that the panel room we had been assigned to wasn't set up for "mulitmedia" so we were moved to panel room two. I had wanted to try running two DVD players for this show but the Dell video projector didn't like my video switchbox. Every time I changed the video source it decided it needed to recalibrate. Yeah, I know. In the end I gave up the second DVD player and just ran with the new Audiovox. I also gave up on recording the show on the iriver and with the webcam/DVD recorder, too. So now there's no record of the halfassed show. And to top it all off we had audio issues throughout the whole show. I really needed somebody on the audio board but I had no control over that issue. Maybe if I'd gotten the set up going sooner I could've gotten this worked out.

Things to have done by the next OtakuHELL:
Burn a new 200 disc.
Burn a new Halcali disc.
Find a new video switch solution.
Find a new audio solution.

If I ran the video from the Avertec would that solve the video/audio problems?

On the up side we had a full room, and we had alot of folks still hanging on at the end, God bless 'em. Even if they wouldn't sing along with Monkey vs. Robot.

Where did the week go? 10:18 AM

IMG_2675
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Friday already and I'm still without a big bag of Tootsie Rolls. Good thing I've got all of Saturday to get my shit together. Most of what I needed to get done has gotten done. Just a few things to do and everything will be ready for tomorrow night's big show.

The more I think about it, the show is like throwing a party. I get all these things together and there's set up time and we get everything working and all that's missing is a table full of food. Instead it's a table full of DVDs, a TV Party.

The final episode of Who Wants to be a Superhero? was on as I made the buttons. So I dreamed about a show called Who Wants to be a Masked Vigilante? framed in a Republic Serial and filled with Rocket Jocks and Water Heater Robots and guys in union suits with domino masks and cloaked fedora and twin automatic sporting avengers. Every chapter ended with a challange where it seems like somebody's about to die, but then they're just removed from the group. Weird.

A thought about last year's AnimeFEST show. It was kind of special. First, because it was Michael's first show on the microphone, and I'm still not sure how I convinced him to get in front of the crowd. But it worked out fine. Second, it was the first time we had Nurse Katie at the show, too. And Michael gave her alcohol! What a way to start. Third, we were in the wake of Katrina. And they'd just bused a few hundred displaced NOLAians to Reunion Center. So when we arrived at Reunion Tower we were greeted with police cars and fire trucks and lots and lots of buses. And it was rather scary. But we went ahead and had a great time. We usually do...