Sayonara.

Yes, I realize the irony of that title…

The overwhelming majority of hits that this website receives are coming from Google image search. That means that people are typing in their search terms, such as “Anime Samurai“, getting my site as one of the results, viewing the picture, and, more often then not, taking it for their own use, without actually reading the webpage or viewing the image in the proper context that I intended. And the result of this usually amounts to someone using the images on this website on their own websites, or in their web logs, or on message boards.

That sucks.

I’m not paying for all of this web space just so other people can exploit my property. I put time and hard work into adding all of the content found on this site, be it an original piece of artwork, screen capture from a DVD, or anything else you find here. All I want out of it all is for people to actually see what I have done, read what I have to say, know that I am the one who is presenting it, and tell me what they think. To bypass all of this and just take what they want for whatever reason is disgusting and immoral. It just lacks the very basics of human decency and conscience. These people are stealing my property and my bandwidth, and last time I checked, stealing is wrong.

If you want to look at any of the pictures on this website, you must look at them through this website. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, do you?

Though my web host has not been very helpful, I have spent the last week taking certain measures to protect my property, and I will be continuing to look into doing more.

Be fairly warned: If I catch anyone using my images on their website, message board, weblog, or whatever, I will not politely ask you to take them down. No, I will simply skip right ahead to the part where I horribly embarrass you and make your lives miserable. And don’t think for an instant that I won’t. I will.

Anyone got a problem with that? Just try and stop me.

Sayonara.

This website was down for a while yesterday. I’m not sure why, but things have seemed to be running a bit slow recently. It must be something on the servers’ end. Have patience, young Jedi.

Now, I’m not one to complain about the weather. I generally have a very high tolerance for both extreme heat and extreme cold. That all said, damn is it ever wintery out there! It has been just miserable, the worst I can remember a winter being in several years around here.

But that would not deter me, oh no. For today is a momentous day, and I was not about to let some snow and ice stand in my way, because today is the release date of Godzilla vs Megaguirus and Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters all out Attack on DVD. As a monster fan, I’ve been waiting for this day for a long, long time, and now these films are in my possession at last. Godzilla Against MechaGodzilla is slated for a March release, and I’ll be picking that one up too. Perhaps someday I’ll do a review on these movies, like I did in my Godzilla 2000 article.

I’ve also recently gotten my hands on the Ultraman Tiga starter set, containing the first of four volumes of the show and a spiffy T-shirt in a collectors’ box. I’ve really been enjoying that, and it’s great to see a high quality release of this classic Japanese series for the North American market. It’s pretty expensive, but there’s 13 episodes in each volume, so there’s a lot of bang for your buck. Plus, it’s subtitled, which is what the fans wanted.

On a similar subject, I had been keeping my eye on Kaiju Big Battel for a few years now. It’s live action monster wrestling. What’s not to like about that? Well they finally have a DVD available, called Teribi Sento, and I used some Christmas money to buy it. It’s full of weird characters and lots of bizarre Japanese style humor that only a few people will find funny. I, of course, am one of those people. It’s an acquired taste, and there is some room for improvement on the production end, but it’s quite entertaining to see a giant sandwich fighting against a kung fu fighting can of soup. I also got a T-Shirt, some actual debris from one of their fights, and a whole bunch of stickers, pins, magnets, and other promotional items, which is very cool. Dr. Cube rules!

At the request of their tech support, my digital drawing tablet was shipped over to Wacom last week and has just arrived there. Hopefully they’ll be able to fix whatever it is that’s wrong with it without costing any money. I’m getting very anxious to start using it again.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some monster smackdown to watch.

Sayonara.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGG!!!

I’ve been getting a whole bunch of returned mail that I never sent in the first place. Mail that looks like it originates from Korea and contains obvious links to porn sites.

Somebody out there is using my e-mail server, complete with my e-mail address as the return address, to send wave after wave of vile, disgusting spam. Spam that looks like it was sent through sykografix.com.

I had NOTHING at all to do with this. This was completely out of my hands. Someone is using my site and my e-mail address to continue the endless stream of Internet sludge-pumping, and I’ve got to deal with the drops that don’t go through the system. Now my website’s name has been tainted by this scum, and that makes me look bad. This pisses me off to no end. This is the kind of thing that I’ve been trying to fight against, and for my property to be violated and this garbage thrown my way, well that just makes me sick to my stomach! This is a cancer on the Internet, and I’ll be damned if I let my website become another malignant cell.

Go to hell, you worthless porn-swilling bastards, and take your God damned spam with you! You pigs make me want to vomit, and I can’t wait until the day comes when all of your asses fry. In fact, I hope that I can actually be there when it happens so I can personally rip your freakin’ heads off ahead of time!

There. I feel better now.

But you know what else pisses me off? With all the promotion that I do with this site, and with all of the times that I try to encourage participation and feedback, how much e-mail do I get? After cleaning out the several hundred spam mails I get each week, I’m lucky to get 2 or 3 actual, real e-mails from people who actually want to talk to me! That’s pathetic.

Yeah, it’s been a bad week, and I’m in a bad mood. Well my anger is justified. Somebody tell me I’m wrong. I dare ya. That’s right, you can’t.

Sayonara.

This has been a pretty busy week so far. I’ve probably accomplished more in this week than I ever did in any given week at school this past semester. Even aside from Christmas shopping and the website updates, the past two days have been fairly eventful.

On Wednesday I went to go see The Return of the King with some friends. It was an amazing film, of course. I’m very happy that I was able to see it with a great bunch of folks.

Thursday I went to an elementary school to do some presentations on anime drawing. Tips and tricks and the like, sort of a little taste of my work at Comic Book Masters. It went very well and all the students were really into it. The teachers enjoyed it as well. I did 3 presentations with 3 different classes, essentially the same thing each time. It really opened my eyes to how the school system has such a poor focus on art and drawing and how this is an opportunity for people like me to pick up that ball and run with it. There’s a lot of interest out there for drawing programs, people just don’t always know where to look. I think a lot of people who make decisions don’t realize that not every kid is going to join the hockey team. Doing these presentations made me discover that what I do has an important place, and can potentially become even more important.

So after all of this I have been pretty tired, and today has been the only day where I just decided to relax. So I’ve just been eating pizza and watching anime, two things I am very accomplished at but haven’t done enough of lately. So I might be doing this for a few days.

Sayonara.