“The easiest way to stop piracy… is to give those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” -Gabe Newell

Yep – although even there, I have 5x as many games on GOG as Steam because they’re mine and I don’t have to worry about dealing with forced updates ever. That was a BIG deal for me when I had crappy internet access – a single game’s forced update could tank my entire month’s quota… I still get nervous putting Steam in online mode to this day even though I don’t have to deal with that shit any more.

Disagree with you on the BD issue, though. Much more capacity, higher quality video and audio, and drives are dirt cheap. I have a BDROM in an external enclosure, and it handles DVD and BD perfectly.

My complaint there’s about Blu-Ray’s DRM. Better quality video means nothing to me if I can’t actually get the damned thing to even play.

Whilst I agree, there’s (currently) nothing stopping you from buying the DVDs?

I have a ridiculous number of DVDs. (Blu-Ray on the other hand can fuck off and die.) A ton of content is just not practically available as DVDs.

Checking Amazon just now for some stuff that was absolutely impossible to find at all a few years ago when I was looking for it, there seem to be non-US releases now (e.g. region 2, region 4…) for some of them at not insane prices. Others want $300 for “only 1 in stock” from a nonsense bot account with a last purchase comment from ~2015… i.e. they probably aren’t real listings even if I was willing to pay that insane amount. A few others look like they might be commercial pirate offerings with only subsets of episodes and strange packaging. (I might just be OOTL on some marketing gimmick with those though.)

Honestly, I’ve largely given up on anime since COVID hit. I still like the art, but I don’t really watch new shows any more. The inability to get legit copies in a timely fashion is the main reason why. The shift to Blu-Ray really alienated me. Yes, I can work around its bullshit up a point. No, I am not going to pay ~$60 for half a show from years ago and then have to do quasi-illegal shit just to get it to maybe play on my computer – without menus. Fuck that.

I really wish someone would just set up “GOG for anime seasons” and let me buy and download MP4 files (or whatever) so I can have an offline collection legally.

Yuyushiki, maybe? It’s slice-of-life with three girls in a computer club instead of a music club. I liked K-On’s humor more, but I remember thinking they were similar when I watched it a long time ago.

Trying to decide if I want to stick this out to find out what all the fuss is about or not.

I don’t know if you’ll enjoy the ride overall, but the show’s a roller coaster with a long hill climb. It picks up later.

Looking through the list of sellers, I don’t think they’re going to collect much, if any, of that…

I know a graphics designer personally (from work) who used an AI generated video clip as part of a proposed background video for the landing page of a marketing-style website that was getting a refresh on one of our projects. That one ultimately didn’t end up getting used – not because it looked bad, but because of other branding considerations. Frankly, I’m glad that he didn’t have to put much effort into making something that ended up getting canned.

There’s a LOT of art out there that’s functional. Few people stop and pay attention to it as art in itself – and it rarely lasts more than a few years before getting swapped out for something else in rebranding – but someone with design sense still needs to make it or a product will be less appealing.

Not sure on the exact flavor of “weird af” that Nokotan or Gintama get into since I haven’t seen them, but here’s some of the weirder shows I’ve watched:

• Nichijou
• Azumanga Daioh
• Penguindrum
• Utena
• FLCL
• Space Dandy

Thinking along a different style of weirdness, there’s also shows like Serial Experiments Lain – but I’m not sure if that’s what you’re looking for.

My kneejerk reaction to the question is “Grave of the Fireflies”.

I’ve seen most of the older shows from the Studio Deen stuff up through the 13 episode Rail Zeppelin spin-off or thereabouts. Never got to most of the movies other than the old UBW adaptation. I’m aware of FGO, but my opinion of gacha can be summarized as “fuck that” so I’ve ignored it beyond what’s occasionally popped up via fan art posts.

If there’s something about the shows you want to talk about, I’d rather you just post threads here than start a new community.

I just checked back through copies of stuff I physically have and somehow I never got around to watching Your Name or Perfect Blue in the last ~7 years I’ve had them.

I watched Aria the Animation back when I was having panic attacks. It’s too slow for me to find interesting when I’m feeling OK, but was just about right when my body was freaking out and I needed something calming to distract myself with.

That kind of thing just doesn’t work when you try to do things in a browser without making you constantly think that things are broken.

There’s some things you can’t really avoid dealing with that stuff for, but if it doesn’t really need to be a dynamic interaction with the service, you may be able to just write a script that runs on your server (either once or periodically) to download what you need as a batch, and then serve static results based on that to your users. It’s not only easier to implement when you can use that technique, but the UX is often better that way too…

the async nature of web stuff is really breaking my brain

I am being forced to learn async stuff and I kind of hate it…

I remember beating my head against the wall working through the details of Promises in JS a couple years ago when I needed to figure out how to trigger certain pieces of logic only after all of a large batch of slow, dynamic results were fetched – which the user would often want to interrupt and adjust as partial results came in… so, I know what you mean.

Looking back at my notes from the last several years, here’s some of the ideas I wrote down:

• Kray-On (K-On/Crayon)
• “The power of memes compels you!” (someone’s probably already done this one – seems obvious enough – but haven’t seen it if so)
• “Ani, are you OK? Are you OK, Ani?” – FMA meets Michael Jackson, maybe?
• Konata face on flatbed scanner (animation + output of scanner)
• “Space and Wolf”
• Azunyan-ga Daioh
• (For FangMoe) “OnlyFangs” (note the ‘g’), Fangsgiving, … other silly puns
• “Guns & Nurses: Your one stop shop for shots!” (DRIVE THRU) / Kino and Hermes: “What a strange country we’ve come to…”
• “Hatsune Mikau” – Miku/Zelda Majora’s Mask cross-over
• Ghost in the Shellfish
• “Flan”-dre Scarlet
• Weebdeluxe interviewing Shredder (Foot Clan) on his preferences about anime

I’ve also got several others – including one with a terrible pun related to Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san, and another with a Lain + Futaba (P5) crossover – that I’m still thinking of trying someday, but definitely don’t have the skill for yet.

I’m probably not going to watch anything hosted on YouTube (I blocked it completely a while back), but I don’t think it’s a big deal if someone links the first episode of something that’s legit freely available (i.e. not pirated) as long as they’re not being spammy about it.

Edit: to expand on that, we’re not exactly getting flooded with posts and that kind of restriction from reddit is more because of volume than anything, I think.

They’re from Nier: Automata.

A few off the top of my head: Shirobako. Space Dandy. Samurai Champloo. Ghost in the Shell: SAC.

Mawaru Penguindrum

After I finished watching the series, I discovered that there is a movie version of the story that condenses it down to <2 hours. I haven’t watched it, but that might be a more approachable way for modern viewers to digest the story.

I have seen both (a long time ago), and from what I remember the movie was REALLY different – like, almost unrecognizably different. I do not recommend substituting one for the other.