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.

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.

The DVD of DearS that I watched had a strange glitch: dd-ing the image gave an I/O error 770 KB in. The disc was badly scratched, so I buffed it (even bought a new kit). It looks much better now, but the error remained. But then, I noticed that libcss fails to crack a couple of keys… which may be relevant. The content is watcheable with mplayer.

Spotting reports are welcome by e-mail as usual.

Ah My Goddess S1 v.1 should be a common disk, and it’s not scratched, but it played with some skipping. It may be my software (VLC 1.0.0-rc2), but still, better mark it in case.

Piracy is the only recourse.

The disc was barely playable; not scratched, but dirty.

Coincidentially, the first instance of v.1 that Netflix sent me was cracked and unwatcheable, so I ordered a replacement. I was so sad at the attrition, but never imagined it would again strike so close, so soon. Netflix are total jerks for not using good envelopes for rarer DVDs.

BTW, I marked the v.1 with a little dot. The picture of the main girl was too pretty to sully, so I placed it carefuly on a design element. If someone rents v.1 and sees it, let me know. Take a picture.

Liked: Yes
Rewatch: Not likely, but would not object

One thing to rant about here is how it took me more than a year to complete the run (the opener post went up in December 2008), thanks to the leisurely release schedule. How is this acceptable, Media Blasters? I know that such things were the norm back in the 80s, when Pioneer made American fans to dangle for 6 months [!] between tapes (it was also a major cliffhanger with Ryoko about to strike and kill sleeping Tenchi). But this is not the 80s anymore. Moreover, considering how quickly DVDs go out of circulation on Neflix, there is very little chance that someone may be able to see all of the series if started late. Pure insanity, honestly.