Blogs

A group of Japanese and American manga publishers is threatening legal action against 30 manga scanlation websites. The sites haven't been named yet, but One Manga, one of the largest manga scanlation websites, is already making plans to shut down within a week.

I'm disappointed. My disappointment isn't necessarily directed at One Manga shutting down -- even if One Manga shuts down, there will still be other places to find scanlations online. My disappointment is more directed towards that group of Japanese and American manga publishers who don't seem to understand what their consumers want.

I understand that online scanlations are against copyright laws, but I believe the official publishers should take notes about what we readers like about online scanlations: that they are distributed digitally, and that they are translated into English shortly after release in Japan. Perhaps the fact that they're free, too, but that's perhaps a separate discussion.

This sort of tug-of-war between the publishers and the consumers reminds me of how the movie industry initially resisted VHS tapes, and how the music industry initially resisted digital music. Technology is moving faster than the big wig producers want it to. Consumers are rapidly transitioning to digital media, and away from wanting physical disks and books.

In the manga industry, it takes years before Japanese manga is translated and brought to the U.S. in official, purchasable, legal format. Fans are able to scan and translate manga into "scanlations" in a matter of days. Why is there such a huge time difference? I don't know the details, but I would guess a lot of the time goes into the actual publishing process of the manga books. Distributing manga in digital format would take so much less time and it would save money (at least from a consumer standpoint).

In contrast to the manga industry, the anime industry has connected with its consumers, and is starting to understand and give them what they are asking for. Anime is available shortly after airing in Japan with English subtitles on Crunchyroll. This is a start -- I would still like to see actual anime downloads available for purchase, in addition to being able to stream it.

What I would like to see is for the manga publishing industry to understand what consumers are asking for and to give it to them, instead of going on a legal crusade against the websites who are giving the fans what they want. Yes, these websites are breaking copyright laws. But at least they understand what the fans want.

Give us a legal option for digital manga translated into English shortly after release in Japan -- that's what the fans are asking for.

I have spent the last two days spending entirely too much time reading about the Blizzard RealID fiasco. The fiasco is this: in a few weeks, Blizzard will be changing all of their online forums to a new forum system that will require you to display your real name in order to post -- instead of your character name. Blizzard cites their desire to reduce trolling and inflammatory posting as their reason for this change.

Their reason for this change is a fallacy. If their sole reason was to reduce trolling, they have at least two different options.

The first option is to create a "Gamer Tag" for all forum users that they must post under. Each forum poster would be able to choose their Gamer Tag -- it would not have to be their real name.

The second option, which could also be incorporated into the first, would be to display all characters on a person's account every time they post. That way, when a user posts on the forums, every single one of their character's identities is held accountable for the words that they are posting.

If trolling is not the real reason that Blizzard is switching to this new forum system, what is the real reason? Two main theories have been floating around.

The first is because of South Korean and Chinese law that states that online forums that are larger than a certain size must require their users to post using their legal name. I personally do not believe this to be the true reason behind Blizzard's intent, because if Blizzard really wanted to, they could create a forum system solely for use in those countries, and allow all other countries' forums to continue using character names.

The second theory -- and this is the one that is the most plausible -- is that Blizzard is merging its games with Facebook. There is already proof that Blizzard has a partnership with Facebook as of May 5, 2010. Blizzard wants a piece of the social networking pie. They even allude to it in their own forum post about RealID, referring to World of Warcraft as a "social-gaming service." But I, and most of the other WoW players that have expressed their opinion on this topic, don't want a social-gaming service. We just want our Role Playing Game back.

Blizzard's response to those upset about the forum change is that we, the players, have two choices: post on the forums with our real names, or do not post at all. To quote Blizzard Community Manager Wryxian (whose real life name we still don't know): "Posting on the forums with your real name will be optional -- yes, in the sense that the options are simply post and show your real name, or do not post and you keep it confidential. If people are happy to post and do not feel intimidated by this, then great."

A choice between posting on the forums with your real name or not posting at all is not a real choice at all, for a lot of people. By not being able to post on the forums, you lose the following:

1. You cannot submit bug reports. Bug reports can only be done through the forums.
2. You cannot submit suggestions to the people who have the power to implement them. Suggestions can only be submitted through the forums.
3. You cannot seek customer support or technical support via the forums. These are available via other means (email and phone), but oftentimes, the queue times of the email and phone support is so large, that posting on the forums is a much faster way to get your issue resolved. The phone queues even instruct you to post on the forums when the phone queues are full.
4. You cannot recruit for your guild via the forums.
5. Roleplayers (of which I am not one) lose their ability to roleplay on official Blizzard forums.

So what is the big deal, anyway? Why are so many people up in arms about revealing their real life name on the World of Warcraft forums?

1. Knowing only your name, anyone who sees it can Google search your name and find things like your phone number and address. Less than scrupulous people could then use this information to threaten and stalk you.
2. Many employers Google search potential job candidates -- and many employers discriminate against World of Warcraft players because online gaming has a bad stigma for addiction and playing too much.
3. People who have obviously ethnic names could be harassed on the forums (or outside of them) solely based on what their name is.

As of writing this post, there have been 41,000 replies to this forum topic on the North American World of Warcraft forums alone. Most of those replies have been against the change. Despite this enormous outcry, Blizzard has not backpedaled and announced a reversal of their decision.

Well, money talks. I'm trying to speak Blizzard's language -- I canceled my account last night. Maybe if enough players cancel their accounts, Blizzard will listen. However, even if Blizzard backpedals, I'm not entirely sure that I will re-activate my account. Blizzard has lost a lot of my trust because of this move.

I recently finished watching the Soul Eater anime. The first half of it was really good. Unfortunately, the second half's plot was laughable. Despite not having read the manga beforehand, I could immediately tell when the anime's plot veered away from the manga's.

My first impression of Soul Eater was that it was going to be an anime a lot like Bleach, but I ended up being wrong. I came to that conclusion after noting that the main characters were very much like the Shinigami in Bleach.

To summarize the plot fairly quickly, it revolves around 2-3 person teams of weapon meisters and humans that can transform into weapons. When I saw the first couple of episodes, I likened the weapon meisters to Shinigami from Bleach, but they're a little different. The weapon meisters kill evil humans instead of monsters that were once human. Okay, they are starting to sound more similar now that I think about it.

I didn't like Soul Eater's characters at first, but they've grown on me. My favorite character is Crona, but I can see a lot of myself in Tsubaki. Black Star and Death the Kid's personality traits were pretty annoying at first, but I think they became less annoying as the series progressed and the characters grew up a little bit.

Now that I've finished watching the anime, I caught myself up with the manga. It was interesting to see that some parts of the anime's second half were taken from the manga, but were altered for plot. For instance, I was convinced that Buttataki Joe was an anime-only character.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the manga develops. I'm going to have to give the anime only 3 out of 5 stars, though, since the second half's plot was a failure.

During the last two weekends, I've spent a lot of time tinkering with Drupal. I discovered some useful modules that I had not found before.

SEO Checklist: This module is a good Drupal checklist for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It will automatically check to see if you have certain Drupal modules installed that are important to SEO.

Rotor Banner: This module provides a block in which you can provide "rotating" content. It can be images, or text, and each piece of content will fade into the next. It's pretty cool looking and I was really impressed when I saw it in action.

Nice Menus: This module provides drop-down/left/right expandable menus if your current Drupal theme doesn't already provide them.

Pathauto: This module automatically creates aliases for your content based on the content's title. I was glad to find this module because I was tired of creating URLs for every single piece of content I created.

Search 404: This module replaces the standard 404 error page by doing a site search on the keywords in the URL.

Google Analytics: This module adds Google Analytics support to your website, which is good, because I had thought I had installed my GA tracking code when apparently I hadn't.

LiveJournal CrossPoster: This module cross-posts content from your Drupal site to a LiveJournal account (like I'm doing with this post).

Twitter: This module allows you to update your Twitter account whenever you add new content to your Drupal website, among other things. If you install the Twitter application on Facebook it will also update your Facebook status. On my Drupal module wishlist is a Drupal module that will update your Facebook status without needing Twitter as a go-between.

Also on my wishlist is either a Drupal module or a WoWArmory addon to show my latest WoW achievements in the sidebar -- right now I am doing it manually.