アニ・ノート

Some time ago Shamus ran into a problem: Netflix sent him a wrong disc. The tale of horror reads in 3 parts [link 1, link 2, link 3]. After the third turnaround with them he was obviously getting peeved.

Today it’s my turn to drink from this cup: they sent me J2 vol.4 in the slieve of J2 vol.3. This time they have a bit of an excuse: the volume number is in kanji (四). But it’s a very tiny bit. I am sure the sorting monkey does not ever bother to read the numbers.

So, what to do? The only way to correct this is to hold onto v.4, order v.3 again, and hope for the best.

Both Mark and I are following Nadesico by means of Netflix. He is about to get (or received already) the v.4. The v.4 marked “very long wait”, and it took me a few weeks. Unfortunately, v.5 is a greater hurdle, “availability unknown”.

Starting with estimations for the size of anime market in North America (such as the 60,000 Harurhi DVDs) and observed delivery times, I tried to estimate how big the Netfix’s stock might be. It seems that for Haruhi, it must be a few thousand discs. For Nadesico? May be as low as a 10 for the “very long wait” and zero for “availability unknown”.

These numbers might make it feasible to fans to engage into a stegagography themed game. Once I receive a rare disc, I will mark it in unobtrusive way and enter the mark into a database (of course, I will take utmost care not to damage the disc in any way and not obliterate any pre-existing print; after all it’s rare!) Other fans could then look up the mark and know who watched the disc before them.

Netflix themselves do not mark discs, they use sleeves and barcodes to track them. The barcode should be entered into the database as well.