John Zeitler

I’m gonna try an experiment with this blog over the next thirty days (since it’s not like I have much else to do in the meantime). I got to thinking about the way I’ve spent the last week: at work I’ve been focused on my tasks, getting myself ready for this coming month or so. But outside of work I’ve been a neurotic, frazzled mess because I’ve been bombarded with advertising. Not advertising from a marketing group, or advertising from a company, but advertising from people who I’m fairly certain aren’t being paid to advertise. It’s mostly been negative advertising, too: trashing certain products, implicitly praising others (or sometimes not so explicitly). Sadly, I’m just as guilty, which frustrates me to no end.

Fortunately, I have the chance to do something about it. So, for the next thirty days, I’m not going to write about any commercial products on this blog. None. If it’s a proper noun that’s not a person’s name (and, in the case of names, the person isn’t a celebrity or brand in their own right), I ain’t typing it here. It might not make a difference in the grand scheme of things– I almost certainly know it won’t– but it’s mostly just a way for me to gauge how easy or difficult it would be to “genericize” my life.

The thing is, I’ve complained at length about how we’re not supposed to be defined by what we own. If we allow our possessions to speak about us on our behalf, we quickly become slaves to them, because not everyone has the same perception of that object’s brand, make, or model. By tying what we have to who we are so closely, we objectify ourselves more than any sleazy magazine could possibly do– we become passive objects, things, instead of individuals acting on the world, people.

I’ll still post. It’s just that I’m going to be telling you more about what I’m doing, rather than what I’m doing it with. The Twitter feed is going to go generic too– heck, I can’t even say “Twitter” come tomorrow! The only exceptions to the rule are going to be e-mail (and even then only work-related e-mails) and technical forum posts (because it’s damnably hard to get help with a program when you can’t say the name of the program). Since we’ve got two days left in January, we’ll say that the product placement floodgates re-open on the first of March. Oh, and yeah, it’s not like I’m going to stop playing games or watching TV or anything like that– any Game Clear notices are going to be post-dated to the 1st as well.

And, on the off chance that you’re a corporation, celebrity, or other interest who might think this is going to be harmful to you somehow, first, please stop doing drugs. Second, more seriously, there is a way out of this. I will “unlock”, with full disclosure on this blog, the proper nouns and trademarks related to a company if and only if that company pays me $5000, cash, up front. That doesn’t mean I’ll post about it every day– just that, if I wanted to, I could. Third, there’s a catch: each time a company buys me out like that, the price goes up by a thousand dollars for the next one. (I don’t expect to make a single red cent on this, mind. Just tossing it out there in the interests of full honesty; every man has his price, after all.) Companies considering this, ask yourself: is word-of-mouth really that important to you? I could easily turn around and say that your company is a bunch of shallow, money-obsessed drones. That’s basically what years of negative advertising has created with word-of-mouth: six billion people who will more readily drag your trademarks through the mud than recommend you to anyone else.

Believe it or not, folks, tonight’s a busy night. So I’ll just leave you all with that little thought. Have a generic night, and tomorrow have a generic day.

I have a particular relationship with winter. I happen to love the season, but it is doing its best to dissuade me of this affection. Case in point: for the longest time I was able to survive the snow and cold without suffering more than the occasional discomfort of soaked gloves. However, the last couple years, I’ve been getting progressively worse instances of dry skin on the backs of my hands. My sister has graciously provided me plenty of lotion with which I can remedy, if not prevent, this situation. Of course, every time I really need to apply lotion, I’m doing something where having the substance on my hands would be extremely inconvenient, or more likely damaging to the project– like, for example, painting miniatures.

So, in keeping with this weekend’s nerdity, I have the Burning Hands spell… it’s just, well, not quite the one in the Player’s Handbook.

I’ve been thinking at some length about what’s going to happen at the end of my current job contract, and while it would be easy to look at my options in an optimistic, glass-half-full kind of way (either I have a job, or I have time to work on personal projects), I’m still sort of in that in-between phase, where I’m still upset over the circumstances but not completely through the emotion enough to actually do something constructive about it. That last part is a lie, in fact; I have been doing some constructive things, but I prefer not to put those out in the open until they’re certainties (read: until about two hours after I’ve had my first day and they haven’t called the cops on me). In some strange way this is itself its own blog post fodder. My career advancement search is in stealth mode.

Now if only I knew where it was headed…

Tired now, so no writing was done and no post of any kind of quality. Sorry.

I realize that I’ve been coasting along, phoning in pretty much all of my content and posts since, oh, 2007. I’m making an effort in 2010 to not have another bad year in terms of stuff for you folks to read. But for the interim, while I’m recovering from crunch mode and getting Frangible Time together, please bear with the inanity for just a little while longer.

So, yeah… I got sick. Like, seriously sick. The kind of sick that begins with coming to on the kitchen floor and ends with three nights doing nothing but huddling in bed waiting for the NyQuil to knock me out.

I’m better now, of course. But the writing has kind of stalled. Um, completely. So that’s my big plan for the next few nights, at any rate– to get back into working on the book. Tomorrow I should have an update on where I’m at with that.

Later, folks. Don’t catch what caught me.

Frangible Time Update: It was a short writing day yesterday due to class and my sudden illness, so my total of 10940 words is still fairly respectable. I don’t think I’ll be writing at all today, though, because of what you’re about to read…

Well, folks, it’s happened. As soon as it becomes incredibly inconvenient for me to get sick, I manage to do so. My sense of timing is just fantastic. And this is after I’d even said “oh, I can make up the time if I need a sick day”… which is true, normally, but my presence is needed today for some testing. GAH. In any event, I’m going to drag myself to the shower, take a shot of Dayquil, and get on the road.

On the plus side, I’m sleeping much better.

The work difficulties I dealt with on Friday and Monday have been, well, troublesome. I was definitely thrown off my normal groove all weekend, with the issue weighing on me for a good long while.

All of that is now completely moot, because the program works. IT F@#%ING WORKS NOW. I can probably go have a good night’s sleep tonight because of it.

The Latin up there means “through difficulties, to adversity”. Translated a little more liberally, it could be said to say “from bad to worse”.

Today was just that kind of a day.

Sometimes, we don’t really know how good we have it. In discussion with a few people today (and over the past couple weeks, in fact– amazing how it comes up at an anime convention) the topic of how much it costs to be an anime fan these days has come up with a bit of regularity. Now, neglecting logistics costs– that is, gas spent driving to a store/many stores or shipping and handling costs, and also the cost of shelving, etc.– is it cheaper now to be an otaku than it was ten years ago? Most of the folks I talked to said “no”, but I said “yes”. It’s weird, but the more I think about it, we’re both right (even though I still am firmly in the camp that we have it almost too easy these days).

Rather than deal with sub/dub VHS (which was horrendously and prohibitively expensive), let’s instead compare five years ago– the relative height of the anime boom, 2004– with today, using series that are “current” to that time period. For 2004, we’ll look at ADV’s release of Azumanga Daioh, while for 2009 we’ll look at Funimation’s release of Ouran High School Host Club. Assume for the sake of simplicity that there is no significant difference in the value of a dollar between 2004 and 2009 (a blatant lie, of course, but just go with it).

In 2004, Azumanga Daioh was released on six DVDs with an MSRP of $29.99 each. Each DVD contained four episodes of the series (two contained five) and, in their first runs, a cloisonne pin of one of the cast members. To collect the entire set cost $180 (6 x $30) for a value of $6.92/episode.
In 2009, Ouran High School Host Club was released in two half-season sets with MSRPs of $59.99 each. Each set contained 13 episodes over two discs. The second set contained a small calendar. To collect the entire set cost $120 (2 x $60) for a value of $4.62/episode.

Now, obviously this ignores discounts on the sets– Media Play usually carried the Azu DVDs at between $22 and $25 in Erie, PA, and BestBuy.com lists the Ouran sets at $43 each. Taking these into account, then, Azumanga still costs $150 for the season ($5.77/ep) and Ouran costs $86 ($3.31/ep).

Is anime on par with collecting American or British TV? Nope. CSI’s season sets list for $50 for “recent” sets (older sets are marked down… getting to that) and contain between 16-20 hour-long episodes per season, pricing each episode somewhere in the sub-$3 range. Torchwood Season One is listed at $80 for 13 hour-long episodes, making it an impressive $6.15 each. It varies, but the catch is that live-action series like CSI (or Pushing Daisies, or The Wire, or Chuck) span multiple seasons until their ends or cancellation.

Now, about that “older” remark. It’s true that first-adopters pay a premium for the privilege. CSI Season 9 is listed at $65 right now; Season 1, however, is $30. As time goes by the older seasons either languish on shelves or get reprints, driving the supply up, thus reducing cost. The same is true for anime.

Going back to 2004, the sunny-day estimate of $132 for the Azumanga set ($22/disc for $5.08/episode) sounds like a good deal, but as early as September 2005 a boxed set was available in the thinpack format for $70 ($2.69/episode). (A cheaper-constructed set was released in 2008 at the same price.) Anime buyers got wise to this over time and sales of the individual discs tanked after 2007. This either contributed greatly or directly caused anime distributor Geneon to exit the market; for the longest time Geneon series were sold as single discs with boxes becoming almost prohibitively expensive.

In 2009, single-disc releases of series are the exception rather than the rule. More common are half-season or third-season sets; Ouran, as mentioned before, came as half-seasons, while niche series like Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha or The Familiar of Zero are released as full seasons right off the bat. Bandai seems to be the only distributor clinging to the stretch-it-out model, but even that’s showing some concessions: their biggest moneymaker for 2008 through 2010, Code Geass, is being released in two-disc third-seasons.

The joke about anime’s expense is so proverbial that t-shirts proudly proclaim “Crack Is Cheaper”. It used to be more true when the industry was relatively clandestine, but now that it is on the edge of mainstream, a new problem arises: keeping up. I ran the numbers on my current watch-for-these list. To get everything on that list– about ten items, which would bring me up to current on three series still being released, reclaim one of the series I still have missing from 2006, and add four series that have come highly recommended to me– I would need to drop just under $400. That’s after discounts from the frequent-purchase club; without that it’s closer to $460. Free shipping is sort of a lackluster blessing there. (It’s also worth noting that of those four series, only one is a “recent” set that involves a collection of items; the other three are either already their thinpack versions or weren’t released any other way!) And, don’t blink now, but it’s October– the new season is starting up in Japan, and many North American localizers are backlogged to 2006 or 2007 releases (despite the fact that it’s shameless fanservice, I’m looking forward to Strike Witches).

So, I suppose to bring this to some kind of a conclusion, while the average price of a series’ episodes has undergone a dramatic downturn in the last five years, the explosion of titles available has driven up the overall cost to stay current with the hobby. In short, it is cheaper to be an otaku these days, assuming you limit yourself to just a couple of series as you would in the old days; but the only reason to do that back then was because there wasn’t as much to draw your interest, and now that there is, it’s cumulatively more expensive. Merch is a whole different kettle of fish, which I feel no need to get into now (I say as my plush Domo-kun stands ward over my dinner).

As a parting shot, some companies didn’t quite get the memo. Bandai’s Honneamise imprint released Super Robot Wars Original Generations in NA as nine DVDs, subtitled only, for $50 each. In 2008. No wonder a) nobody outside of the twelve NA fans of the games have ever heard of it and b) it’s f^@%ing impossible to find.

This year has, to be polite about it, not been very good in terms of projects. I haven’t completed very many games, I’ve done little in the way of writing, and my game development has all but stalled out completely. Still, I have to take into account the things that I have done, as well as the stuff I’ve done in years past being, in all honesty, extraordinary.

Even taking that into account, I feel like I’ve wasted the better part of the year. I can’t say on what, because I don’t know. Nothing has proceeded, nothing has made it past even the most rudimentary stages. All of the work I feel most confident about is prep work for my big end-of-year rush of writing and other stuff– but, it should be stressed that what has been done is vitally important, and I feel like I’m well prepared for the November to come. And yet November is still a month off.

What has always been my tradition for the cooling days in October has been a gaming rush, to complete one game from start to finish in those thirty days. I’ve done it two years running, with a Pokemon and a Zelda game, accordingly. With my last bout of laziness sucking up my time and ambition, though, I decided to call it off for this year so I could focus on game development and projects. Now, I still might be able to do some development in the coming month, but I still need to find an artist (the last contact I had kinda fell through).

I’d love to be able to do development this year, but the wind was perfect today… Something in the wind this time of year makes me want to curl up with a good game and play it through. It never fails, really. Once the temperatures drop, so do my defenses and excuses.

I suppose I can wait, then, to do game work…. I suppose, really, that I have to.