Hiroshi Hiroshi On the D/L It’s a great ...

It's a great time to be an anime fan. With an abundance of newsgroups, Torrent sites and IRC channels there's a source for whatever particular obsession you have?from the Samurai Epics to Magical Girls, the net will provide.

Recently, Scrapped Princess #24 was posted by Anime-Kraze. It's the last episode of the series as far as I know. I suppose if the DVD sells well, they might make more. If you haven't heard about it, you will. I haven't seen much about it on the web, and since I can't read Japanese, the official site is wasted on me. It's the story of a prophecy about a girl named Pacifica who on her 16th birthday will release a deadly poison and destroy the world. She winds up on the run with her two guardians chased by the assassins of a possible false god. It's hard to say what's really going on. Some have complained in the forums about the show's sci-fi aspects, but I like the odd twist. It also displays what could be described as a Matrix influence, fortunately not in the action sequences.

It's from Bones, who created Angelic Layer, RahXephon and Wolf's Rain, all of which are available via newsgroup. I'm still surprised when people contact me on Kazalite and ask how I collected so much anime. Newsgroups have been around long before Napster and the other p2p services; if you have broadband, you owe it to yourself to get educated.

BitTorrents are decentralized p2p networks for individual files. Way cool, and works great if there are people still sharing the file when you get there. Can be slow, but I've gotten meg-a-second connections. The complete RahXephon episodes were posted recently on a Torrent site. It's a lot like Evangelion, but not a rip-off. It's dense and confusing with a big cast of characters, it's totally engrossing if you can stick with it (and if you like mecha). I've downloaded a ton of One Piece, the greatest rubber-man pirate adventure ever.

I also just caught up with You're Under Arrest; I wish that Striker or Strikeman wouldn't appear so much. It was cute the first time, and I'm someone who finds the kindergarten characters endearing. The series is by Fujishima Kosuke, creator of Aa Megami-sama!, which is also reposted with some frequency. As it's only five episodes and a movie, you should be able to get them quickly and easily.

I guess it's a good time to mention video codecs and stuff. Some shows have been encoded with two audio files and with Y.U.A. two different subtitles. The language options I have are Japanese and English, but post a request for other language options, audio or subtitles. These files usually are Xvid with OGG audio, but sometimes DivX and mp3. They're usually about 250 megs with really clean encodes, nearly tv-quality. Who has time for crappy encodes? A lot of files have been coming as DivX, but it's easy as pie to convert them to make VCDs if that's what you want. Some burner software comes with built-in converters, which makes it easy, but there are better, more flexible software and hardware solutions.

One last technical point if you're using newsgroups: Use the pars. It took me a couple of months and the overhaul of my ISP's news service (a separate issue) to get the hang of it. Plus, I was stoned the whole time, so, if I can do it, you can too. Get FSRaid or Smart Par and stop requesting so many reposts, unless the show is really cool or you didn't download it the first or second time.

Great newsgroup help: timdoc.com.

VCD and beyond: dvdrhelp.com.