This past week, an image from my Super Sentai World review was hotlinked by JList.com, a hugely popular site selling Japanese products. The result was that my site just got hammered with bandwidth for about 2 days. There was more traffic going through here than ever before, and since it was just from a hotlinked image used without permission, nobody was actually coming to sykografix.com. That sucks. I didn’t make this website just so other sites can leach off my content. I made it so that people would come here! I have come to expect this sort of behavior from some of the more moronic people on myspace or xanga or whatever, but not from a professional site like JList.

I managed to get ahold of the owner and talk to him about this, but if circumstances were different this whole website could have been shut down due to the server overloading from that insane amount of activity. All that traffic I got absolutely nothing out of it. That site uses a picture on my webspace, and yet my site was getting the shaft until I brought the issue to the owner. Of course, it was not malicious at all on his part to hotlink the image, he just found it on Google and didn’t even think to ask if he could use it.

Bloody hell, people! You can’t just take whatever you want without asking! All those pictures you find on an image search actually belong to somebody! And that somebody could be paying out of their own pocket just so folks like you can look at it. At least have the decency not to steal it! Bandwidth is expensive, and nobody should have to pay for webspace just so some other clown can steal from it for their own purposes. That’s just not fair, so don’t do it!

If you have a website or a blog, than try to be more considerate of other people’s property. I tried to be nice to the owner of JList, and everything is cool now. But I can not promise that I’ll be nice to everyone.

Sayonara.

You know it.

Sayonara.

From an article posted on Nintendojo.

Nintendo’s announcement of Revolution’s 20 year backward compatibility was met with extreme support from the gaming industry. Apparently, the competition is not quite as impressed. Xbox Live Arcade group manager Greg Canessa says Nintendo’s virtual console games are not going to be as fun as fans expect.

“A lot of those games are fun in your head when you think, ‘Oh, yeah when I was 12, this was really fun,’ and you have these great nostalgic reasons to play them,” says Canessa. “Then you do play them, and they’re just not very fun anymore.” He says some older games like Joust and Gauntlet (both offered on Arcade) are still fun today. He says, however, that “Nintendo games aren’t going to hold up.”

First of all, Microsoft WISHES they had the gaming history and experience that Nintendo has. This is true. Bill Gates has said that if Nintendo was for sale, he’d buy the entire company. But now we’ve got this shmuck saying that they’re really not that great. Hmm, something smells like grape to me. Big juicy sour ones.

Next, has this guy even played a Nintendo game? There’s a reason why people still talk about those games today, and it’s not just nostalgia. There were some phenomenal games on the NES, SNES, and N64. They were great back then, and they’re still great now! If they didn’t hold up, then why are the GBA and DS remakes as successful as they are? I seriously doubt that there is a single game on the X-Box that as deep and involving as, let’s say, Super Mario Bros. 3. They just don’t make ’em them like that anymore. At least, they don’t make ’em on the XBox. Perhaps I am biased because I do not own an XBox, but I don’t particularly care to own one since there are no Nintendo games for it.

Finally, since it seems that Microsoft is going to continue to pander to the drunken jock segment of the gaming market and say that these classic, revolutionary games are not that great anymore, then as far as I’m concerned they don’t deserve to play them. People like that are too full of their own crap and don’t appreciate true quality anyway.

I hope that I pissed somebody off.

Sayonara.

Everyone has been talking about Densha Otoko. I had heard the story, of course, and was interested, but never really looked into it.

Until this past week, when I watched fansubs of the J-Dorama that the story inspired.

Actually, I should clarify. I watched the entire series in 1 day. I was so captivated by what I was watching that I could not bare the thought of not watching anymore until I had seen the very end.

I had never seen a proper J-Dorama before, but I thought that this was just an amazing series.

BENOIST!!!

Sayonara.

As part of placing in the top 10 in the TFW2005 Super Deformed Transformers contest, my SD drawing of SkyByte has been incorporated into a poster with the other 9 winners. You can purchase a copy of the poster and see what it’ll look like on the first4figures website. It’s $29.99 US, which I guess is expensive for a poster, but only 500 copies are ever going to be made available. Plus, this is the first ever project that is both 100% licensed and endorsed by Hasbro and 100% created by fans. I think that’s pretty freaking cool, myself. And hey, it’s pretty much the first thing that I ever had a hand in that is going to be published so widely. I don’t get any money out of it, but that doesn’t really matter here. It’s just neat that I can say that I drew a part of something and now you can buy it. And hey, maybe when I’m all rich and famous and have risen to the heavens with my god-like superpowers, it’ll be worth something. Ha ha.

I’d say that it’d make a great gift for the holidays, but it looks like they won’t be ready to ship until January, so just buy one for yourself I guess.

Sayonara.