Crunchyroll gets $4… no, wait… $4 MILLION?

The other day, I was reading ANN, as I normally do, and came across this story about some VC firm giving the anime streaming site Crunchyroll $4 million bucks to do what it does. Now, this wouldn’t be news, in all likelyhood, if it weren’t for the fact that the controversial Crunchyroll already charges for the ability to view things they don’t own, rationalizing it as charging for the bandwidth  the high-quality streams use. Second, they charge to be able to download the fansubs they have on the server, which are the same ones you can get from an torrent tracker. Finally, a lot of what they do is illegal/grey market, especially the displaying of already-licensed material such as Azumanga Daioh. So, needless to say, they’re a bit scummy.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that such a service isn’t attractive, but the site basically plays out like a badly-run anime club. The forums are full of threads such as “When is ur bed time?” and “Which site do u go to watch anime,Crunchyroll,Veoh or Youtube“. Which should give you a hint about the community, if you ask me. But beyond that, this sets a bad trend. Now, I’m no darling cuddle-up of the anime companies. I think they’re morons who need to get their acts together before they go under. But a site like this is bothersome in another way: Rather than having fans who go out and become part of the “anime culture”, for what it is, they instead end up in “the bottom of the barrel”, an exclusionest area where intellegence and not acting like a moron are almost punished in a sense. The community is run in the exact wrong way a community is run: people who pay are given preferential treatment, people look up to those with high post counts (why do you think I use Vanilla? No post counts next to the posts.), and one-word posts are seen as no problem. Seriously, the place is more of a sewer than YouTube video comments. Now, granted, people would be morons on their own, but when a concentrated group of them like this happens, it creates a problem. Now, with Crunchyroll, and by extension its forums, being a well-known meeting place for fans, people are going to go there and think that this is how you should behave, or even worse, that all fans act like this. Now, granted, I’m being a bit extreme here. But this grants a kind of elevated status to the morons and dipshits, whereas the smarter fans are even more marginallized than they already are. A site like Crunchyroll is useless to anyone who knows enough to bother with torrents. Therefore, the only people who are going to go there are morons. Yes, you heard me, and I hope someone posts this on the CR forums. Not me, tho. I value my sanity too highly.

Flock Browser – The Social Web Browser

Why does it have to come SOOOO close and then fail? I’m talking, of course, about Flock, the Firefox-derived “social web browser”.

The principle behind it is pretty nifty: a browser based around the idea of social networks being center stage. Thus, rather than local bookmarks, it’d use del.icio.us, or you could upload things to your photobucket with just a click. Whatever you think of certian things, such as del.icio.us, alot of the features would be pretty cool and well used.

But, the problem creeps in between theory and usage. In theory, the browser’s integration is a great feature, but in practice, it ends up falling a bit flat. The actual apps supported are minimal and arbitrary. (For example, it supports updating Twitter, but not Pownce, despite the fact that both have an open API, and Pownce has been pretty damn popular lately. Secondly, it’s so slllllooooowwwwwwww. Using Flock is like cutting my bandwidth in half. Granted, I am used to the fairly fast speed of Firefox 3b3, but still. The thing felt like I stepped back into the Internet Explorer era. Thirdly, the damn things more of a RAMwhore than Firefox 2.o.12. With only two tabs open, it reported well over 80 megs of ram reserved, whereas Firefox (even 2.0.12) used that much for 5 or 6 tabs.

Lastly, and most importantly, the thing seems incomplete. Flock is stuck in that weird neatherzone between what should be a Firefox extension and what should be a browser. It could be both, but the way it is now seems like you could easily emulate this functionality using a Firefox extension and get much more usage.

OpenID

God. What a stupid idea. I mean, seriously.

I guess I should explain what I’m complaining about. I’m complaining about OpenID, the, ahem, “open and decentralized identity system, designed “not to crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business”.” Seriously. I wouldn’t waste the pain it takes to talk in quotes on some bad joke. Which is all OpenID is, after all.

Here’s the principle of the whole thing: let’s say you create an account somewhere, like… I dunno. WordPress.com, the site hosting this blog. Then, let’s say that you want to create an account on, sayyyyyyy…. LiveJournal. Why you’d want two blogs isn’t any of my business. Let’s just say you did for some reason. You could just use your information from WordPress.com, give that to LiveJournal, and BAM, you’d be logged into one whenever you’re logged into the other.

Doesn’t this sound familiar?

And then, if you’re a website developer, you could just use the OpenID system, trusting that it verified everything, and remove some of the hassle from signing people up.

Really, I’ve heard this somewhere before.

Then, you could theoretically store specific information in your OpenID account and it’d automatically be filled in when you signed up for a new service.

Yeah, I’ve really heard this idea before…

Oh yeah.

That’s right.

MICROSOFT PASSPORT.

Yeah, that was a stunning success, wasn’t it? Everyone uses their Microsoft Passport account everywhere.  I just used it the other day to log into AltaVista.

Seriously. Why do people think that other people want to store all their stuff in one place and use that to sign up? By the time you finish figuring out how to get the OpenID to take, you’ve lost time compared to just signing up for the site straight up.

I actually tried to use OpenID the other day. I was signing up for Plaxio or some other Web 2.0 service out of boredom. It took me about two minutes to figure out how to get it to take, and then I had to do it all over again because the first attempt timed out. So it took me about four minutes to “save time” on a one-and-a-half minute process. I think just about the only thing it saved me was a confirmation email.

Yeah. Big save, there. One email versus dealing with OpenID ever again? I’ll take the email.

Snow

As a New Englander, I’ve almost entirely acclimated and become immune to the effects of this region’s weather. However, there’s still one thing that pisses me off. Walking in the snow.

First, a description for those from more temperate climes who have never had to deal with walking in falling snow: Imagine you’re on a beach, only the sand is twice as slippery, and the sand and the air are cold, and there’s more sand falling from the sky, and when it gets in your hair it melts into water and makes your head even colder, in addition to being wet, and also I’m there stabbing you in the eye for having beach weather in February.

Prick.

But yes, the snow presents some interesting challenges and annoying choices. The first, of course, is footwear. Wear a pair of sneakers, and you’ll end up with them soaking through. Wear boots and you’ll end up with no mobility below the upper ankle. Next up is choice of coat. Of course, you’ll want a thick one to keep warm, right? Hahaha, fool. Watch as you end up moving like the kids from South Park trying to get somewhere, twisting your entire torso to reach anything. Or, you could wear a thin jacket and end up frozen to the bone in about five minutes. Then, there’s the question of long johns: If you wear them, you’ll be warm, but do you really want to be caught wearing long johns?

Personally, I think the best solution is the most obvious: Build a huge, retractable dome over Massachusetts and close it during the winter.

God damn it.

Since when did I have to conform to the norm of idiocy rather than the idiots having to come to this level? I’m refering to people’s love of raping the English language. Now, I’m no English teacher, nor am I one of those guys who constantly corrects people with “whom”, but there are some basics of grammar and spelling.  And yet, whenever I correct someone, I get either some sarcastic remark like “What are you, the grammar police?” or “What is this? English class?”, as if one should only bother to not act like a total fuckstick a few hours out of the day.

ATTENTION MORONS: THEY TEACH YOU THAT STUFF IN ENGLISH CLASS SO YOU’LL USE IT.

I mean, seriously. Some of them are easy mistakes to make, yes, but that doesn’t give you the right to make them! And then, invariably, it’s not the people who keep making the same stupid misakes who get punished, it’s the people who correct them! Are we seriously punishing people for NOT being morons, now? I mean, seriously. People bitch about “spelling trolls”. Maybe if you bothered to take five FUCKING SECONDS to look up the spelling of a word you were unsure of, there wouldn’t BE any spelling trolls! I mean, seriously. People seem to have gotten the idea that other people should just accept their moronic actions. I say, next time someone says “should of” instead of “should have”, you beat them with a rake.

Jabber

A lot of people don’t know about Jabber and its awesome. So, why do I, and a whole lot of geeks, have such hard-ons for this?

A) It’s an open protocol.

This may not sound like anything you want to care about. But you should. The advantage of an open protocol is fairly straightforward: People know how it works. The protocol can’t do anything sneaky or insecure or just plain crummy to your IMs without a ton of nerds getting their back up and telling everyone.

B)  It’s a feature-filled protocol.

Pretty much any feature can be built into an XMPP client or server. Voice chat, doodle boards, webcam, anything. And, because the protocol is smart, clients downgrade gracefully. A client that supports a feature won’t hammer you with a thousand error messages, or even worse, not connect to you, if you don’t support the feature too.

C) The big boys are supporting it.

AOL has announced that they’ll be allowing people to connect to their service using Jabber clients. They already have an alpha server up and have stated they’re dedicated to getting a real server up and working “soon”. Granted, “soon” is a long time sometimes, but still.