like Goodreads, but for movies

It’s common (even clichéd) to describe a web service or app as “like X, but for Y.” It’s especially clichéd in cases where X=”Netflix” or “Uber.” But it’s the best way to describe what I’m looking for right now: “like Goodreads, but for movies.” I get a lot of use out of Goodreads, and, at this point, track pretty much every book I read and/or buy on it. The mild discomfort I get from sharing my entire reading history with Amazon is offset by the incredible usefulness of the service. (Which, now that I think about it, describes quite a lot of free, but troubling, web services. But that’s a subject for a different blog post.)

I have quite a collection of DVDs and Blu-ray discs. And I have digital movies in iTunes and other services. (Now all, thankfully, centralized in Movies Anywhere.) And I, of course, watch movies in movie theaters, and rent them occasionally, and watch them on Netflix and Amazon Prime, and so on and so forth. And I’ve really lost track of what I’ve watched and what I haven’t. I’ve started keeping track of some of this stuff in Evernote, but not in a really systematic way. And I try to add a note to Day One every time I watch a movie. But I’d really like something like Goodreads to get all of this information together in an organized fashion. (And I’d really like something that lets me scan the UPC codes off all my DVDs and Blu-rays, because I really don’t want to enter them by hand.)

So I did some internet searching and found a bunch of possibilities. First, it occurred to me that, since I like Goodreads so much, maybe Amazon owned something similar for movies. Amazon does own IMBD, and that seemed like a good place to start. IMDB allows you to create an account, and you can add movies to a watchlist, but it doesn’t have anything at all like the capabilities you get from Goodreads. So that’s one down.

And it also occurred to me that this might be something that Rotten Tomatoes would be in a good position to do. But, as far as I can tell, they don’t really do that either. So that’s another one down.

At some point, I might have had some of my DVDs cataloged in Delicious Library on my Mac. I stopped using that a long time ago, but apparently it still exists. But I don’t think it’s really a good candidate for what I’m trying to do either.

Searching for like Goodreads but for movies in DuckDuckGo led me to a number of semi-useful Quora questions, reddit discussions, and random blog posts. But a lot of them were pretty old and out of date. Sifting through recommendations, I found a few possible candidates that were still in business.

First, there was iCheckMovies. It allows you to create lists, and track what you have and haven’t watched, but there’s not much more to it, as far as I can tell. There’s no iOS app to scan discs.

Next up was Letterboxd. I liked this one enough to create an account and play around with it a bit. The web site looks really good, and there’s an iOS app too. But the iOS app doesn’t allow barcode scanning. Other than that, it’s a really nice service. You can easily track which movies you’ve watched and haven’t watched yet. And you can create your own lists to track things in other ways. There’s a CSV importer, but I don’t have my movies cataloged at all right now, so that’s of limited usefulness to me. There’s also a Pro tier for $19/year that gives you a few extra features. I’d be all-in on this one, I think, if only there was a way to scan barcodes.

The last thing I tried, which I only really stumbled across when searching for something else, was Blu-ray.com. I’d gone to the site in the past to read news and reviews, and I was aware that they had a forum, but I didn’t know that they had built up a system for tracking Blu-ray collections. Well, they have, and it’s pretty good. They have an iOS app with barcode scanning, so that’s my one big feature need checked off. I used it to scan about a dozen DVDs, and that worked pretty well. Two or three of them weren’t in their database, but most of them were. And, since they’re disc-oriented rather than film-oriented, I’m not just tracking that I’ve seen (for instance) The Matrix, but that I own a copy on DVD or Blu-ray or whatever. So that’s helpful. They have certain standard categories, like “owned,” “rented,” and “wishlist,” but you can also add your own. The organizational features aren’t quite up there with Goodreads, but they’re ok.

So I guess that, for now, I’m going to try to get a bunch of my discs scanned into Blu-ray.com and go from there. I’m not sure how far I’ll go with it, but it’s better than anything else I’ve tried.

(I have a few related topics I want to write up at some point, but I probably shouldn’t try to shoehorn them into this post. One topic relates to a recent attempt to rip a DVD on my PC. Another has to do with my attempt to whittle down my DVD collection a bit. And yet another could cover my related attempt to actually watch some DVDs that I’ve had sitting on the shelf for 10+ years. But I’ll get to all that eventually. Maybe.)

iOS scanning apps

I have a bunch of stuff in my head that I’ve been meaning to organize and turn into blog posts, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. So I’m going to take a little time today, on a Sunday morning, to try to get a few of them out. So I may post three or four items today. Or I may post just one, then the schedule the rest to go out over the next few days. Or I may get halfway through this one, and get distracted by something, and post nothing. So you’ve been warned.

Anyway, my first item is going to be on iOS scanning software. By this, I mean apps that make it easy to take a photo of a document, then clean it up a bit and store it somewhere. I think that the first app like this that I ever used was something called CamScanner. I first found out about it when a client at work sent me a printout that he’d “scanned” with a free version of CamScanner that put a watermark on the scan. (At the time, there was a free version that watermarked the scans and a paid version that didn’t. This was probably ten years ago.) I thought it was kind of a funny way of sending me the information I needed. The “right” way (in my mind) would of course be to have printed it to PDF and sent me the PDF. (Or to take a screenshot and send me a JPG or BMP or whatever.) Printing it on paper, then taking a photo of the paper with a cell phone struck me as a deeply weird workflow. (Printing it, then scanning it with a traditional desktop scanner would also have seemed weird, but a little less so.)

Anyway, using your phone as a scanner has become a much more accepted workflow over the years, and there are now a bunch of apps that you can use for that. And the ability to scan a document is built into a bunch of other apps. I’ve continued to use CamScanner myself on and off over the years, and paid for the “pro” version (or whatever they called it) quite a while ago. But, at some point, the design of the app changed and they started adding a bunch of ads and popups and cruft to it, and it started to seem a little scammy (for lack of a better word). I would still use it once in a while, and it still worked well enough. But, recently, the Android version of the app was found to have some malware in it. The malware was coming in from their advertising library, and was not built into the app itself. (And it only affected the Android version and not the iOS version.) Still, it’s not a good thing. So I decided to delete it from my phone and look at alternatives.

The Evernote app has had the ability to take and add photos to your notebooks for a long time, of course, and they can treat the photos as documents, and straighten them out and OCR them and all that stuff. So I’ve been using Evernote for that a lot anyway. Evernote also has a standalone scanning app called Scannable. I’m honestly not sure why you’d want to use that rather than just directly using the Evernote app, but maybe it’s worth looking into.

There are a number of other apps that have document scanning built into them, generally with the idea that you’d scan a document in, and store it in the service associated with the app.

  • The built-in iOS Notes app has a document scanner. It was added in 2017 and is apparently really good. I don’t use Notes though, so it’s not the best option for me. (I know I can get the scans out of Notes via the share sheet, but it’s still not a great workflow for me.)
  • Google Drive has a document scanner built-in on Android, but not on iOS. The iOS app does allow you to take photos and add them to Google Drive, but it doesn’t have any of the usual document scanning extra features.
  • Adobe has a scanner app that looks pretty good, but I honestly don’t even want to try it, since I don’t want to have to get into the whole Abode ecosystem if I can avoid it.
  • The Dropbox app has built-in document scanning, but I’ve been trying to move away from Dropbox.
  • The Microsoft OneDrive app can scan documents and store them in (of course) your OneDrive account. I use OneDrive, so I tried that, and it works OK, but I wasn’t entirely happy with the workflow. (And I often want to scan something to my camera roll, not to OneDrive.)
  • Microsoft also has a standalone app called Office Lens that does a pretty good job of document scanning and can easily save the scan to your camera roll (or OneDrive or OneNote or a few other places). That works well enough for me that I’ve decided to use that as my CamScanner replacement (for now).

There are a handful of dedicated scanning apps that might be worth looking into. I’ve bookmarked a few, but haven’t actually tried any of them out.

  • Genius Scan looks kind of interesting. There’s a free version, an $8 “plus” version and a subscription version that costs $3/month.
  • Scanner Pro is a scanning app from Readdle. I’ve never used any of their apps, but (last I checked) they have a good reputation. It seems to be oriented mostly towards scanning to PDF and doing OCR. It got a good review on MacStories a few years ago. It currently costs $4.
  • Scanbot is another app that’s been around a while and seems to have a good reputation. The Sweet Setup lists it as their best scanning app for iOS. The pricing is a little confusing. There’s a free Scanbot app in the app store, with an in-app purchase of $7 to unlock the “pro” version. But there’s also a separate “pro” version, priced at $70. So that’s weird. And when I dug into it a bit more, it looks like they’re going to a subscription model. If there’s any information about the subscription pricing on their blog, I couldn’t find it, but I found a blog post from a user that indicates that it’ll be $22.50/year. (I guess this was announced just recently.) So I guess I don’t want to get mixed up in that right now.

In a nutshell, I’ll likely be using a combination of Evernote and Office Lens for my scanning needs, for now. I’ll use Evernote for stuff I want to store in Evernote, and Office Lens for stuff I want to save to my camera roll or OneDrive. I might give Readdle’s Scanner Pro a try at some point, or maybe play around with the scanner in the iOS Notes app, but I guess I’m OK for now.

Climate Strike, Batman Day, NYCC and more

Happy Batman Day! I’m a big Batman fan, but yesterday’s climate strike is probably a bigger deal than Batman Day. (Also bigger than Talk Like A Pirate Day, which was two days ago. Or the reopening of the Fifth Ave Apple Store, which was also yesterday. Or the reopening of my local Apple Store, which also reopened yesterday.)

Today in Somerville we have the Village Brewing Oktoberfest, not to be confused with the Tapastre-sponsored Oktoberfest, which is next Saturday.

It’s all very confusing, especially since I got no sleep last night, due to the music on Main St playing until 1 or 2 AM last night again. I have a bunch of stuff bookmarked that I’ve been meaning to write thoughtful and/or entertaining blog posts about, but I just haven’t gotten around to it, and now my brain is kind of fried, so… you get this post. Sorry.

New York Comic Con is just about two weeks away, so I’m looking forward to that. Warren Ellis is going to be there, which is kind of a big deal, since he doesn’t really do conventions anymore, and definitely not conventions in the US. He’s only coming to NYCC to promote the Castlevania Netflix show, so I probably won’t get to hear him talk about his comics work, but I will definitely go to that Castlevania panel. There’s also an Adam Savage talk that will probably be good, but costs $75 to attend. (He also has a regular panel during the con that doesn’t cost extra, so I’ll probably try to go to that one.)

There’s a lot of serious stuff going on in the world right now, and I’m trying to balance concern/involvement in the serious stuff vs. staying sane with Batman and NYCC and Castlevania and what-not.

A couple of end-of-summer visits to NYC

It’s Labor Day morning, and I’m kind of exhausted from a visit to NYC yesterday, so I think I’m going to write a rambling blog post about my two recent visits to the city, and some associated topics. I hadn’t gotten into New York much this summer. I always think about doing a bunch of stuff in the city over the summer, then I do about 10% of that. Or maybe 5%. Anyway, I tried to make up for it a bit with a visit last Friday, and another visit yesterday.

On last Friday’s visit, I first went to the Met. I hadn’t been there in a while. I finally saw the Play It Loud exhibit. I honestly didn’t expect much from it, but it was great. They had a lot of stuff in this exhibit that reminded me of my teenage years, including my obsession with Jimi Hendrix, and Rick Griffin’s album and poster art, and guitar rock in general. The exhibit included one of Griffin’s Hendrix posters (which I had on a t-shirt when I was a kid), Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein guitar, and many other guitars, played by the likes of Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, and many others. I don’t actually listen to a lot of classic rock these days, but the exhibit reminded me of how much I loved that stuff as a kid. So that was cool.

I also went to the Batman exhibit at the Society of Illustrators. There have been a number of interesting exhibits at the Society of Illustrators in recent years, and I keep meaning to go to them, but I never get around to it. So I’m glad to say that I finally made it to one of their exhibits. It’s a small space, and the exhibit was primarily black and white original art, so it’s not immediately visually impressive, when you first walk in. But they had a lot of really great art on the walls. There’s a good write-up of it on syfy.com and another one at the NY Times. I was glad to see that they had some art up from some of my personal favorite Batman artists, like Jim Aparo, Marshall Rogers, and Gene Colan. (Colan, in particular, isn’t primarily known as a Batman artist, but I really liked his Batman work in the 80s.)

For yesterday’s visit to NYC, I made it to three museums: the Guggenheim, the Met (again), and the Frick. At the Guggenheim, their main exhibit right now is called Artistic License. The idea is that they’ve gotten six artists to curate themed mini-exhibits through their rotunda, one on each level. It’s a mixed bag. There are some works in there that I really liked, but a lot of it didn’t really do much for me.

At the Met, I saw Apollo’s Muse again. (I’d seen it once before, not long after it opened.) I also made a point of wandering into Death is Elsewhere, which I’d also seen before. And I saw Epic Abstraction again, which honestly isn’t that great, but it’s got some good Jackson Pollock works, so I like it. And, for the full Met experience, I got a hot dog from this cart right outside of the Met for lunch. (The lady in that video is actually the one I bought the hot dog from.)

After that, I stopped by the Frick. I hadn’t been there in a while, and I figured that maybe I should, since they’re closing for renovations soon. They have an Edmund de Waal exhibit going on right now. I was curious about that, since I read his book The Hare with Amber Eyes a few years ago, and liked it a lot. But the exhibit didn’t really do much for me. It’s a bit too weird seeing his abstract art in a setting like the Frick, I guess.

I wound up doing a fair bit of walking yesterday. I took the subway up to the 86th, initially, and walked across Central Park to get to the Guggenheim. Then, I walked down to the Met, then the Frick, then walked the rest of the way back to Penn Station. So that’s a fair bit of walking for an old man like me. (Which is why I’m too tired to do much other than write a blog post this morning.)

As an aside, I walked by the Paris theater at one point, and thought to myself, “Cool. The Paris is still there.” Well, yes, it’s still there, but it just closed. It was, apparently, the last single-screen theater in the city. I’m kind of sad about that, since i have some good memories of seeing films at a number of the great single-screen theaters in NYC, including the Paris. And now they’re all gone. The article ends with this quote: “All these people lamenting the loss of the Paris, I would be curious about the last time they set foot there.” Well, ok, yeah, it was probably twenty years ago.

If it wasn’t raining today, and if I wasn’t so tired, I’d take a look at this Labor Day art guide and maybe catch a couple of more exhibits in the city. I’d like to get to the Whitney Biennial before it closes, for instance. But I think I’m going to spend the day reading comics and watching TV instead.

Miyazaki DVDs and Blu-rays

I finished watching the last episode of 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki last night. (I mentioned the series in my last post.) The first couple of episodes concentrated mostly on Ponyo. The last couple covered The Wind Rises, which is likely to be Miyazaki’s final film. They also covered From Up on Poppy Hill, directed by Miyazaki’s son Gorō Miyazaki. (The series spends some time on that father/son relationship. It’s a bit prickly.)

Anyway, watching this got me interested in watching some Ghibli films again, so I starting poking through my DVDs to see what I had. I was surprised to see that I apparently only own three Miyazaki films: Castle of Cagliostro, Castle in the Sky, and Princess Mononoke. I could have sworn I owned a copy of Spirited Away, but I can’t find it anywhere, nor can I find any indication in my email archives that I ever bought a copy. So I think I was mistaken there. And I also remember owning Kiki’s Delivery Service, but that might have been on VHS.

So now I’m thinking it might be a good idea to rectify that in some way. Back in 2015, there was a big Blu-ray set of The Collected Works of Hayao Miyazaki, available exclusively on Amazon, for $225. I probably should have bought it back then, since it’s going for $600 now. (It looks like it was a pretty nice set.)

Looking at the state of Ghibli/Miyazaki films in the US right now, I see that the rights for most of them moved from Disney to an outfit called GKIDS in 2017. I was vaguely aware of that already, but hadn’t bought any of their releases. I see that they have a number of films available right now, including an “anniversary edition” of My Neighbor Totoro and a “collector’s edition” of Princess Mononoke, both of which look pretty cool.

I’m kind of trying to cut down on my accumulation of physical media though, so I checked to see if any of this stuff was available to rent or buy digitally. I was surprised to see that none of it was available on iTunes, nor does any of the GKIDS stuff seem to available digitally at all. I found a bit of discussion related to that on reddit. I guess it makes sense, though it would be nice to be able to rent a few of the films I haven’t seen, but that I’m not interested in owning.

GKIDS and Fathom Events are still doing their Studio Ghibli Fest thing. Looking at the schedule for the rest of the year, they’re mostly doing one movie per month, generally near the end of the month. I could actually go see My Neighbor Totoro tomorrow night. But it’s a pain for me to do that kind of thing on a weeknight.

So it wasn’t looking like I was going to be able to catch up on Miyazaki films without spending a bunch of money on Blu-rays. But then I checked my local library system, and they have a bunch of Miyazaki DVDs, so maybe I’ll start checking them out of the library and watching them that way.

more manga and anime notes

I’m still on my manga and anime kick. I mentioned last week that I might start reading Oh My Goddess! again, and I did do that. I reread the first volume, and read the second and third. I don’t have the fourth or fifth volumes. (I have about half of the first twenty volumes, pretty much randomly selected, that I picked up on sale at a con at some point in the past.) I haven’t decided if I want to just read the rest of volumes I own, skipping the others, or if I want to fill in the missing volumes and read all of the first twenty. While there is some continuity to follow, I think I could probably just read the volumes I own, and still manage to enjoy it without getting too confused or lost. While I am enjoying Oh My Goddess!, I’m looking at it mostly as a mildly pleasant diversion, and not as an epic story that I need to read, beginning to end.

I’ve realized that, if I want to read the whole series, it might be a little complicated to acquire. All of the volumes that I own are from Dark Horse’s original run, from the late 90s and early 2000s. They were printed left-to-right, and were broken into volumes differently from the original Japanese volumes. Those are all out of print. They reprinted them all starting around 2005, but this time in right-to-left format, and broken into volumes the same way as the originals. Those are still in print. So, if I pick up any of the new volumes, I’ll be missing some chapters and I’ll have duplicates of others. And I’ll be switching back and forth between left-to-right and right-to-left format, depending on what I’m reading.

I also made the mistake of searching for info on the creator of the series, Kōsuke Fujishima. It turns out that he married a 20-year-old cosplayer a few years ago. (He was 51 at the time.) So, not nearly as bad as the Rurouni Kenshin guy, but still kind of questionable.

And speaking of anime and manga creators, I just started watching a documentary series called 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki. This series follows him through the creation of the Ponyo movie. It’s quite interesting to see his creative process, which seems to be fueled mostly be chain-smoking and self-doubt. (So, hey, if Miyazaki suffers from something like imposter’s syndrome, it’s cool if I do too, right?)

I’ve also been continuing to watch the special features on my Full Metal Panic: TSR DVDs. There are videos from the creators’ trip to Hong Kong on every disc. They’re not that exciting, really, but they’re kind of interesting. They wandered around somewhat randomly in Hong Kong and got a lot of video. Given the current situation in Hong Kong, it’s interesting to see what the city was like back in the early 2000s, not that long after the handover, really. There are also commentary tracks for every episode, done by various voice actors from the series. The audio is in Japanese, of course, so I have to follow them via subtitles, but they’re fun to listen to. I’ve listened to American voice actors on a whole bunch of commentary tracks (Simpsons, Futurama, etc.), but I don’t think I’d ever listened to a commentary track from Japanese voice actors.

thinking about the Apple Card

I hadn’t been seriously considering getting an Apple Card, for a number of reasons. First, because I don’t need a new credit card. And second, because the card is issued by Goldman Sachs, and I’m not a huge fan of their work, as the saying goes. (And maybe third, because I’m not entirely comfortable with Apple getting into the financial services business.)

Some of the news coverage of the card has been pretty funny, mostly related to the physical titanium card, which sounds kind of cool, but apparently has some issues. The fact that they had to write a support article to explain how to clean it is kind of ridiculous.

But I had an issue with my usual, old-fashioned, credit card this week, and now I’m thinking that it might be nice to have a virtual card on my phone that isn’t tied to a physical card and that’s easier to manage than my old-fashioned card from my old-fashioned bank. So I’m a little tempted to sign up for the Apple Card on my phone (and opt out of the physical titanium card). There’s a fairly thorough review of the card at iMore. It sounds pretty good, to be honest. I’m still not convinced though. I’ve checked, and it looks like you can’t download the card activity into Quicken, so that’s probably the deal-breaker for me.

backing the wrong horse

I have a long history of “backing the wrong horse,” as it were, when faced with decisions between two competing products. I’m one of the idiots who bought an HD-DVD player, back when it wasn’t clear whether HD-DVD or Blu-ray would win out. I have a boxed copy of OS/2 around here somewhere. And so on.

And, when deciding between git and Github vs Mercurial and Bitbucket, I chose the latter. I had good reasons for doing so, of course. In the early days, the tooling for hg (Mercurial) on Windows was much better than the tooling for git. And, for a small company looking to host a handful of private repos (my situation at the time), Bitbucket was a better deal. (And also, for personal use, Bitbucket allowed private repos under their free accounts, while Github only allowed public repos for free.)

Well, of course, git won the git vs. hg battle some time ago. Bitbucket added support for git several years ago, which was inevitable. And Microsoft added git support to Visual Studio, and even to TFS. Then, they bought Github. But Mercurial has hung on as an alternative, and is still actively maintained.

But now, Bitbucket is dropping support for Mercurial. As of June 1, 2020 “users will not be able to use Mercurial features in Bitbucket or via its API and all Mercurial repositories will be removed.” So, I’ve got some time, but I’m going to have to convert my old hg repos to git eventually. And if I’m going to do that, I might as well move them to Github too, since Github now allows unlimited private repos under free accounts. It might even make sense to make a few of them public, if they’re not too embarrassing. There’s been a lot of talk over the last few years about how valuable it is to have some public code up on Github when looking for a new job. (Not that I’m looking, but I assume I will again, at some point.)

The thread about this on Hacker News has some interesting discussion on the history and evolution of version control, along with a fair number of pro-Mercurial comments. (And of course a lot of the usual stuff you’d expect in a Hacker News discussion thread…)

The Bitbucket announcement of this change includes links to a couple of tools that can (theoretically) help you migrate from hg to git. Hg-Git will probably be the easiest for me, since it says it’s included in TortoiseHg, which has always been my favorite tool for managing hg repos. (Which reminds me that I need to try TortoiseGit again.)

At work, I’m hosting some of my current code in Azure DevOps, under git repos. But a lot of my code is still in on-prem TFS servers, under TFVC. I kind of wish I could convert all of that stuff to git and get it in Azure DevOps, but some of it still needs to stay in TFS for various reasons. Sigh.

pulling together some anime and manga threads

There are a few stray threads rattling around in my head that I’ve been meaning to gather together into a blog post. I got one or two into this morning’s post about Full Metal Panic, but it didn’t make sense to pull any of the other threads into that particular post.

First thing: I’ve been relying on my Sony PS3 as a DVD/Blu-ray player for, let’s see… eleven years now, apparently. It has always been pretty noisy, and has gotten more so as it has gotten older. (And it’s particularly bad on hot days.) One of my rationales for buying an Xbox One was that it would probably be a better, quieter, DVD/Blu-ray player than the PS3. I still haven’t gotten around to buying a media remote for the Xbox though, so I’ve continued to use the PS3 for playing discs. But I think I may have finally driven it over the edge this weekend. After watching an hour or so of the first disc of FMP: TSR, I took a break, then when I came back and tried to pick up where I’d left off, I found that the PS3 wouldn’t recognize the disc anymore. I didn’t try to do much troubleshooting. I just switched over to the Xbox, and it worked fine. (And there’s no fan noise on the Xbox!) The regular Xbox controller doesn’t make a very good media remote, but it’s workable, once you’ve read the support article telling you what all the buttons do. I’m probably still going to want to buy a media remote at some point, but I’m not in a hurry.

As for the PS3, I’ll give the drive another try at some point and see if it’s fried or if it just overheated yesterday. I’m not sure what I’ll do if it’s fried. Maybe it’s time to give up on the PS3. (But I have so many games I haven’t gotten around to playing yet, and the PS4 isn’t backward compatible with PS3 discs. Oh well.)

Second thread: I mentioned the “hedgehog’s dilemma” in my post about Neon Genesis Evangelion a couple of months ago. I saw this week that Felicity Ward has a comedy show about the hedgehog’s dilemma that is available for download here. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I’ve liked her appearances on The Bugle, so I’m curious about it.

Third thread: I just finished reading the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series. I’ve had the original black & white books in my reading pile since 2010, and just decided to read them now, as a break from War and Peace. I liked them a lot. I saw an article about a fifteenth anniversary party for the Scott Pilgrim books on Twitter yesterday, so that’s another (slightly) weird coincidence. I think you could probably get a decent essay out of the idea of applying the hedgehog’s dilemma to Scott Pilgrim. Out of curiosity, I searched for “Scott Pilgrim hedgehog” and found an academic paper that matched those terms, but the reference was to Sonic the Hedgehog.

Fourth thread: I’ve now succeeded in selling off all of my Ai Yori Aoshi manga and most of my Rurouni Kenshin manga on eBay. I still have nine items listed on eBay that haven’t sold. I’m just letting them automatically relist every week, with lower prices. I guess if they don’t sell, then at some point I’ll give up and put them aside for a library sale donation or something. I have more books I’d like to put up on eBay, but I don’t really want to do the work right now.

And I’m resisting the urge to buy more manga on eBay. I noticed somebody selling the Full Metal Panic manga, all nine volumes, for $36. That’s kind of tempting. And it’s out of print in the US, so I can’t get it digitally. That’s the problem with selling stuff on eBay; I always start straying off into looking at other people’s auctions, then I wind up buying more stuff!

Anyway, I think my next manga series might have to be Oh My Goddess. I’ve read three of those, and have nine that I haven’t read yet. Of course, there are another 6 or 7 that I don’t own, so I’ll eventually end up back on eBay… And now that I’m looking at it on Wikipedia and Goodreads, I realize that there are a lot more volumes of OMG than I thought there were. I was only looking at the first twenty volumes, but there are actually 48 total. Well, I assume I’ll get tired of it after twenty, but who knows? At least OMG is available digitally.

Full Metal Panic

I found myself in the mood for anime again recently, so I picked something out of my anime DVD pile and started watching. I started with Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, about a week ago. I finished that up yesterday, and started into Full Metal Panic!: The Second Raid. I’d watched the original Full Metal Panic series quite some time ago, and liked it enough to buy Fumoffu and TSR, but then never got around to watching them. I’m not sure when I bought Fumoffu, but I know I bought the first TSR DVD in 2008, since I left the receipt in the DVD case.

After watching a bit of Fumoffu, I took a look at the Wikipedia page for it, and realized that it was produced by Kyoto Animation, the studio where that arson attack happened last month. From the Wikipedia page, it appears that Fumoffu might have actually been the very first series they produced.

I wasn’t really familiar with Kyoto Animation, prior to reading about the arson. It looks like they’d been around since the 80s, but only started acting as the “main producer” on stuff in 2003. Reading up on them, it sounds like they’re a pretty cool company, which only makes the arson thing all the more heartbreaking.

Both Fumoffu and TSR were directed by Yasuhiro Takemoto, who died in that attack. The first DVD of the TSR series has a couple of special features on it, showing a few of the creators of the series, including Takemoto, doing some background research for it, going to a demonstration of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, and on a trip to Hong Kong. Those were fun to watch, but now that I know what happened to Takemoto, I’m feeling pretty melancholy about it.

I started out watching this stuff purely as goofy escapism, but now it all seems a lot heavier. I’m still going to finish watching TSR, and I’m sure it’ll still make me laugh, but lately it doesn’t seem like I can enjoy anything as pure escapism anymore. The real world always intrudes somehow.

As an aside, Fumoffu and TSR are both available to watch for free on YouTube, as is the first series. These appear to be legitimately posted by Funimation. I’m not sure why they’re available for free. Maybe they put older stuff on YouTube to get people interested enough to pay for newer stuff? Regardless, it’s cool that you can watch this stuff for free if you want to.