Takanori Makes the Squeeze
So some of you know that TM Revolution is coming to New York ComiCon. For those who are planning on going, they’re stuffing all of yall into a hall that sits 3000.
That’s right, 3000.
They have the Javitz Center. Which means it has enough space that can hold at least 10,000 in the basement. Of course, odds are that’s simply not possible as the Comic con doesn’t really use up all that space overall, and it probably costs a metric ton of $$$.
For comparison, when L’arc en Ciel went to Baltimore for Otakon, they had over 10,000 people show up at that gig. Of course Otakon draws like 30,000 people all by itself so much of that can be attributed to that fact alone, but this is the Big Apple and not the dump that is Baltimore. It’s midtown madness! TMR’s Otakon visit topped out at around 4-5000 or so? But that was in 2003.
But anyways, even if TMR was not coming (and, FWIW, I’d have made plans to go much earlier if he is bring Abingdon Boys School), NYCC is a crowd crunch anyways if it was anything like last year. I suppose I can go again and try to score free loot, but I’m a lot more busy now than last year. Even if TM Revolution is showing himself in a venue that holds 10,000, it’ll be a crowd anyways.
Choices choices.
Anime On the Go
How many of you watch anime on the go?
I’ve been doing that lately and it’s rather productive. I suppose I’m in a small minority in the US who commute by train, but I imagine some of you Europeans and Asians might find it just as appealing.
The rise of cheaper PMP makes this really a breeze too; my current piece-of-crap is a no-name Chinese thing that I got for free because of connections. It holds 2 gigs and has a SD slot (but I can’t get to it from the default UI…), plays the usual mix of encodes and media including whatever that may run on an iPod. The battery life is acceptable but the quality of everything is about as bad as it gets. The screen works fine, I guess; but in its cruddiness lies a comfortable simplicity and wide compatibility.
Watching fansubs on it is a bit of a challenge simply because some fansubs have a text size of TOO SMALL. Some are pretty ok however and suddenly it is as if my eyes are opened to all the neat little optimizations some fansubbers put out on their videos to make those who do watch anime on their PMP easier, like encoding it a certain way or the use of certain sort of typesetting. I never noticed these things before.
I haven’t really experimented with what pay-to-download solutions there are for this file format.
If you got any pointers or tips as to optimize your experience in doing so please share. I don’t know anyone who are into PMPs that care enough about anime to use it to sway what they may purchase hardware-wise, but I suppose I can hit up the usual venues about what’s a good transcoder and the like. I think I’m just using some generic anything->ipod converter. Alternatively I can just use something like TVersity, which is what I’m using to stream to my PS3…
Pillows And More Pillows
March 22nd is the world pillow fight day. You can read all about it on their website, which is pretty simple and straightforward. I mean, it’s a flashmob armed with pillows, exercising their freedom of assembly as strangers and comrades in arm, may it be feather, cotton, or something else more sinister. Or oops, not a flashmob. Just a bunch of people doing something people don’t do.
What’s more interesting for me is March 21st. The Pillows is hitting up Anime Boston that weekend, a con I never bother to visit and is sort of kind of a local thing for them anyways. On Friday March 21, however, they’re playing a gig in New York City, where Ryusuke’s friend died. I guess.
Having been to a prior show with a similar lineup (Noodles, the Pillows) back in ‘05, I can say with some confidence that this is a pretty fun gig that you don’t want to miss if you’re at all a weeaboo, or otherwise have affinity with this breed of rock.
Speaking of that breed of rock, I just got Rock Band the other day and it’s a pretty addictive and fun game. Especially with a group of folks. Kind of like this picture.
Retail Valentine
I lack the bravado and skill to do this kind of self-insert, so I’ll just rant on some more about retailing. Saint Valentine’s day is a retail holiday after all in Japan.
I’ve been actually writing a long piece about the business end of this anime business. Or the non-business end, whatever. Where rubber meets the road. Where society pays out to creators for their copyrighted expressions. Where you and I pay in to get our fix. But the more I read my own writing the less I want to publish it at all, says this creator.
I think Shizuki’s written a good shakedown in the ongoing conversation about not just curry but also how we value DVDs and how we are asked to value them. It’s not about blame or who’s got the better way to do things or what, but merely a challenge to you and I; a dare to spend money. It’s a no-brainer why that the anime industry suffered when the retail industry did; Suncoast folding was a huge deal since it is a primary retail customer of our staple region 1 importers. It’s not a big surprise that online stores like AN and RightStuf stepped into licensing because both have ran relatively successful retail operations in this market. We (as fans and as an industry) all have to grow–some vertically.
To be more precise Shizuki’s discussion reminded me of the Tenchi Muyo OAV box that Pioneer put out in the early days of the DVD switchover. I remembered when Pioneer was dumping its LD catalog and going all DVD. Was DVD to be an premium format? It didn’t turn out that way. Today we have people watching (crappily produced) DVDs on their $75 portable DVD player with a craptastic 5″ LCD screen, mono sound out of a set of $5 headphones. It just doesn’t compare to the home theater system few people first had back in ‘98 with their $1000 DVD/LD combo player. That’s what DVDs are as a format now and back then, respectively. Like newspaper and cell phones, we junk the old ones we had since yesterday or two years ago, simply because they are worth slightly above nothing today.
And this does have something to do with the curse of collectors, too. Aside from your personal satisfaction and peace of mind of ownership of some…random anime in its limited edition format, on the whole there is very little market value for used anime DVDs. I suppose people do trade them in at game stores or used media stores for some petty cash/credit, but we’re talking about a large depreciation of value. Or rather, what value we see for used anime DVDs (say, on eBay) is derived purely out of people’s personal valuation for those items, and not so much a fair market valuation based on consistent supply and demand. Or am I wrong?
As the global media industry grapple and come around to embrace the fact that we no longer treating music and movies as albums and DVDs, but as music and movie and as a part of our popular culture and life, we are left to deal with the business end of it. How do we make it work? Media companies can no longer peddle that same bicycle, try as they might. Or maybe they can upgrade their bicycle into hi-def, or over the internet. Or peddle something else all together different like the new wave of internet music and video sites. I don’t know.
To me, this is the real nail-in-the-coffin. It’s not about fansubbing, but it’s about how people value disposable entertainment media. If people valued it, even fansub “pirates” would buy them simply because they are worth the money (presuming they can afford it in the first place). This intangible value is what’s missing. It is what all those collector’s edition trinkets are trying to pump up. It’s what limited edition, limited print runs are trying to make. It is about being able to pay a good amount of cash and get something really cool, versus paying very little to get very little (that we can live without). The former bargain just doesn’t quite exist anymore, so we’re all going for the latter.
WTB: One Stop Shop for All Things Anime
Okay, so licensing companies might cry and fans might whine, but it is where the retailers are that rubber meets the road. All that talk about internet distribution offers a glimpse of another world, another way to do business; but that’s not today. At least when it comes to anime anyways.
My question to you is: who and where do you go to get your fix? When you’re buying DVDs in the US, they are abundant and cheap. Places like DeepDiscount consistently provide margin-killing prices for a wide selection of videos on discs. I pretty much go there for anything that I’m not in a hurry for. Well, maybe between that and Netflix.
The licensee RightStuf operates their own store, and often they also provide good prices. Granted it’s not often and their normal prices are not exactly exciting, RightStuf is a candidate to an one-stop shop. I wonder how much money they make off a copy of Piano… That said, I use RightStuf only because it is cheap, and because they have the selection for some of the less popular wares that catch my eye. I suppose the only notable thing about this Iowa-based retail operation is that they almost hired Lawson for something. For better or worse.
There’s also this other licensee, AnimeNation. They are also one of the earliest entries into the US regional market to provide both imported and locally licensed goods. While they don’t do the same kind of margin-killing sales, they do offer a much wider selection with more imported goods. Maybe ‘wider’ is not so accurate of a description as more, different kind of stuff go through their inventory than RightStuf, which tend to stick to some relatively exclusive goods that are hard to find elsewhere. Yet, for an import junkie like me, the fact that RightStuf doesn’t sell imported CDs means they’ll only get a couple hundred dollars (at best) of my sales each year. AN plays the import game very conservatively so I rarely buy from them, at any rate. I don’t blame them–it’s not easy and I’m not sure if a FL-based company can pull it off.
Fair enough. The only “real” one-stop shop for anime, as an importer, is Amazon Japan. And I do spend way too much money on them (when I have said money to spend). They even have a complete figure store, but I guess they’re too high profile to sell that stuff as exports. What the hell, right? I mean, ok, blocking exports of video games make some sense (not much more, but at least they are controlled much more tightly by a handful of licensors), but why figures? They part with CDs and DVDs without a care, so I don’t see the problem. Maybe a customs issue? Anybody knows?
There are a few other near one-stop shops. Animaxis, if you can put up with how annoying they are and how much more things are marked up, is a potential option. Akadot retail and Broccoli’s AnimeGamers (currently dot-anime.com) are also good options online, but neither is that cheap and their selection is spotty at best. They are good places to go to get some exclusives, though.
That brings me to the final potential of an one-stop shop: Kinokuniya. Now I’m not sure what you can buy from them over the internet, but their local stores are chock full of imported CDs and DVDs. And of course books and manga and artbooks and random trinkets. Kinokuniya’s selection is not great, but it isn’t stale. They get the new stuff, the popular stuff on the shelf. I can go in on a Friday and expect to see the new singles that came out that week displayed there. The markup is notable, unfortunately. Now the American Kinokuniya stock tons of the region 1 anime and manga, and it has transformed into something more like a B&N or Borders. But when it comes to the somewhat more hardcore fanboy stuff, there’s traces of it to be found.
Admittedly, my simple survey skips a lot of nuances. If you want to buy anime porn, well, don’t ask me where to find them. Certain some goods like doujinshi and specialty imports like bishoujo games and indie fan CDs and the like require a specialty outlet. A lot of the figures you can buy (and almost all the ones I buy) also require a specialty outlet. There’s stuff like Y!JA and other special order stores. Still, that is not to mention only AnimeNation, out of the stores I listed, deal in used goods. There’s a healthy division of labor to avoid competition?
And of course I must’ve missed some stores out there, too. Anyone care to add?
