New family member and new obsession
A week ago a new member joined our family - Suki. Suki is half manx, one of two kittens in the litter, and the only one that inherited the manx characteristics. In other words, she has no tail :) Not even a stub. When she's excited, since she can't twitch a tail, her entire back end wiggles :) She's such as sweetie!
My latest obsession has to do with acquiring manga scanlations. Three reasons for this: many of the ones I download are not released in the US. As for the ones that are licensed in the US, scanlations allow me to read ahead of the volumes I've been able to buy and also read chapters that won't be released in the US for months or even a year or more. For example, Fruits Basket has been finished in Japan since March of last year. The current release in the US is Volume 19 (of 23). So it'll be at least 3 months before the last volume is released here. I fully support buying mangas when they are licensed and available, but I can't afford to buy all that I want as quickly as I want :) The last reason is that fan scanlations aren't subject to censorship and the typical dumbing down that occurs when manga is translated by a publisher for the US market.
So anyways, I've found scanlation torrents, and I've used bittorrent to download a few. Then there are sites like One Manga where you can read the manga online. I've used that for downloading the individual image files of mangas that are only one or two volumes in length. But that process is not reasonable for mangas like InuYasha or Bleach that have hundreds of chapters.
I kept seeing references to using IRC to download scanlations, so I finally decided to investigate. In spite of the fact that I was taking programming classes at college in the early 90's (COBOL, PASCAL, and Basic to be exact!), I knew nothing about the internet at that time. The first time I used the internet was when I went back to college in 96, and I had my first taste of chat rooms in 99, using chat rooms provided by sites like yahoo groups. So even though IRC has been around for a long time, I didn't know anything about it.
Learning about IRC was easy; figuring out which application to use and how to use it was another story altogether. I found several tutorials online, and I quickly figured out that using IRC was like using MS-DOS; what I couldn't figure out was how to actually get to the scanlations. In any case, after about five days of trial and error, I have finally figured out what I'm doing! Woohoo! I downloaded my first file yesterday (volume one of Love Monster).
And of course, now that this area has opened up to me, I'm going to be without internet access for the next week or so (except at work) and won't be able to download anything...
My latest obsession has to do with acquiring manga scanlations. Three reasons for this: many of the ones I download are not released in the US. As for the ones that are licensed in the US, scanlations allow me to read ahead of the volumes I've been able to buy and also read chapters that won't be released in the US for months or even a year or more. For example, Fruits Basket has been finished in Japan since March of last year. The current release in the US is Volume 19 (of 23). So it'll be at least 3 months before the last volume is released here. I fully support buying mangas when they are licensed and available, but I can't afford to buy all that I want as quickly as I want :) The last reason is that fan scanlations aren't subject to censorship and the typical dumbing down that occurs when manga is translated by a publisher for the US market.
So anyways, I've found scanlation torrents, and I've used bittorrent to download a few. Then there are sites like One Manga where you can read the manga online. I've used that for downloading the individual image files of mangas that are only one or two volumes in length. But that process is not reasonable for mangas like InuYasha or Bleach that have hundreds of chapters.
I kept seeing references to using IRC to download scanlations, so I finally decided to investigate. In spite of the fact that I was taking programming classes at college in the early 90's (COBOL, PASCAL, and Basic to be exact!), I knew nothing about the internet at that time. The first time I used the internet was when I went back to college in 96, and I had my first taste of chat rooms in 99, using chat rooms provided by sites like yahoo groups. So even though IRC has been around for a long time, I didn't know anything about it.
Learning about IRC was easy; figuring out which application to use and how to use it was another story altogether. I found several tutorials online, and I quickly figured out that using IRC was like using MS-DOS; what I couldn't figure out was how to actually get to the scanlations. In any case, after about five days of trial and error, I have finally figured out what I'm doing! Woohoo! I downloaded my first file yesterday (volume one of Love Monster).
And of course, now that this area has opened up to me, I'm going to be without internet access for the next week or so (except at work) and won't be able to download anything...