by Ryan Mathews

---

September 1999

This sucks. After nine months of enjoying this new format, with its incredible picture and five-speaker sound, I've found myself without a player for the last three weeks, with no immediate relief in site. A stack of six anime DVDs, including titles I've been anticipating for months such as Serial Experiments Lain and the new El-Hazard series, sit on a table near my television and mock me.

All because I bought the wrong model of player. At the time, last October, the model seemed to be the best buy for the money. Great performance and picture for a low price. But months later, the failures began. One by one, the owners began to report their players' inability to play any disc without the picture breaking up. Mine broke down in July. Most owners were able to get their players repaired by the manufacturer within a week. In my case, my player has been gathering dust at the repair center for two weeks while they get hold of a new traverse mechanism, the dohickey that moves the laser back and forth.

So in the meantime, I'm watching VHS. Yuck.

I'm afraid there's not going to be much of an editorial this month. I've been too distracted to find something to rant about. I was going to mention my annoyance at site authors who say "Don't steal my images!" when "their" images are nothing but scanned artwork they don't even have a legal right to display anyway. I was going to mention the stupid sites on Xoom.com that add another navigation bar each time you click on a link. But these topics wouldn't fill more than a few paragraphs.

I do have one question to ask, though I'm afraid it won't fill much space either. What is the motivation for stealing content from others' sites? In more than one case while researching this month's column, I came across interesting features that appeared in two sites, where neither site attributed the other. Obviously, one site stole the feature from the other, but there was no way to tell who was the originator. (It's possible both sites copied the feature from somewhere else.)

What does one get out of this? I know there's no right reason to plagiarize web content, but I can't even think of wrong reasons. The usual motives for plagiarism are either for money or recognition. These aren't pay sites, so money's out as a motive. That leaves recognition. In most cases, however, the sites that practice plagiarism are crappy little sites that no one's visiting anyway. What recognition can the plagiarizer get? I guess he tells his friends "Hey, look at me, I've got a site!" It just seems like such a waste of time, effort, and server space.

That's about it, as far as my opinions for this month. Tell you what. If you really want to read me ranting and raving, read . I mentioned this link last month, but the interview hadn't been posted yet. It's there now. You can read my views on fanfic and learn how I got started writing this column. Oh, and I don't really have an "intense hatred of Ranma fanfics". I could just do with fewer of them. :-)

While I have you here, I would like to ask you for help. If anyone knows how I can get ahold of CDs from the J-Pop band Psy-S that were released in the 90's, please let me know. Their earlier albums from the 80's are fairly common, but their 90's material is next to impossible to find, which is odd if you ask me. I can only guess that their latter albums were less popular, which would be sad if true, since they produced some of their best stuff in the latter decade, if you ask me. Even , a site I highly recommend, was unable to help me in this case. If anyone has a suggestion as to how I can complete my collection, I would be truly grateful.

Okay, enough of this! Let's look at some websites!