Reading around on the internet lately, I have seen a great deal of talk about piracy and how it “negatively effects” the economy and the companies involved. I am strongly of the opinion that such a statement is complete and absolute bogus. If anything, piracy has helped the economy and companies. I myself have downloaded plenty of things that I didn’t own. Why, might you ask, have I pirated things? Well; how else am I going to find out if it’s actually any good?

Sometimes you can walk into a music store and listen to an album to see if you like it, or download a demo of a game off the internet to see if the game was actually fun–sometimes being the key word there. For the most part, this simply is not the case. How can you expect someone to buy something that they don’t even know they will enjoy? And for such unreasonable prices, I might add!

You know how much it costs to have DVDs pressed? Approximately $0.50 per disk. The current generation of video games costing between $50 and $70, that’s over a 10000% profit margin! The production budget of Halo 3 was less than most major blockbuster movies like Spiderman 3, so why does Halo 3 sell for $70, while I can find Spiderman 3 DVDs all over the place for $20? Greed.

But I said that piracy even helps the economy didn’t I? Well, yes; I did. If it weren’t for piracy I never would’ve found Serenity or Casshern, two of my favorite movies, I never would’ve found about 90% of the music I listen to, I never would’ve found out Gitaroo Man was such a fun game.

Would you deprive me of my enjoyment in hopes that I buy your product? That doesn’t exactly seem like a very effective marketing strategy to me…

Open Source is the future, in all respects. You will never get anything back if you never give in there first place. I’m not saying we should all turn commie and live in identical mud huts, but we should have the freedom to support what we want to and only IF we decide we want to. We should be given the chance to experience it for ourselves before deciding if we want to fork over $50+ for it, these things should not be concealed. You know what my greatest regret is? That I actually paid for Beyond The Beyond. That game was so horrible I snapped it into little pieces and melted it, so no one else would make the mistake of inserting that cancerous disk into their poor defenseless Playstation.

I have plenty of pirated stuff, yet I, on more than one occasion, have donated up to $100 to some random programmer on the internet for programming fun games independently. They released the games for free to anyone, but I felt it was deserving enough of my support, so am I still a thief for downloading a game I never would have paid for anyway? Tell me that.

So why is piracy so much more rampant now than way back in the olden days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth? It’s not. There is a greater number of people involved in the piracy scene, but there is also a greater number of people in general. The ratio has actually decreased rather significantly. How many of you couldn’t dig through your house and find an old mix tape lying around somewhere? That was piracy. Everyone had mix tapes back in the day, piracy is not a new thing at all. It just got easier because that’s what time does; it improves things. If, in several decades, the efficiency of piracy had not improved it would be nothing short of an miracle.

Piracy isn’t a bad thing though; sure, it adds a bit of unbalance to the equation, but more often than not, it gets you more attention. Everyone likes free stuff, even if it’s not ‘technically’ legal.

That having been said there is one simple reason why piracy still exists even when it shouldn’t; everything sucks. That is the first expectation anyone has until proven otherwise these days, because that is quite often the case. The market has been flooded with so much mediocrity that it becomes nigh impossible to sift through it all to find those rare, hidden treasures. Thus is the dark side of the technology age. But with the technology age many of these hidden gems wouldn’t even exist because even the companies producing all this mediocrity follow the mindset that everything sucks until proven otherwise. You can’t go to a game company and say, “Hey! I’ve got this cool idea for a game!”, because they’ll just tell you to buzz off. That certainly doesn’t help to promote creativity. I don’t know about you, but I’m not really looking forward to Burnout 17.

I’m sure you anime fans know piracy all too well. Fansubs are treading on mighty thin ice, and could quite easily be interpreted as an immoral practice. They continue to be released because someone loves the shows so much that they feel others deserve to see the show too–even need to see the show too. We’re it not for piracy, I would never have experienced the greatness of Makoto Shinkai’s or Hayao Miyaaki’s works, I never would have experience anime at all. This blog would not exist. The several thousand people that read this blog would likely be in the same position. It is unfair to conceal such a powerful art from such an expansive audience.

Art is to be shared, not locked away for only a privileged few to experience.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. If you know any employees of the entertainment industry send them the link to this post. This is a message that needs to be seen, before the entire entertainment industry simply collapses into itself from such anti-creative methods.

Popularity: 21% [?]

You probably still remember my recent post about the animated film Beyond The Clouds–well, this is a brand new movie from the same director and animation studio! Byousoku 5cm, literally meaning 5 Centimeters Per Second, just came out in Japan this September. The art is absolutely fantastic (as you can probably assume by the fact I posted 65 screenshots of it. *_*), there is some definite improvement in the quality of the art since their previous project, Beyond The Clouds. The art is extremely colorful and extraordinarily detailed at times. You’d almost swear you were looking at the real thing in some scenes!

Aside from the noticeable improvement graphically, I found the story in 5 Centimeters Per Second was much more dramatic and engaging than Beyond The Clouds. The story is split into three chapters, each centered around a boy named Takaki Tono. Because of circumstances beyond his control he has been forced to spend his youth constantly moving from city to city. Takaki’s relationship with his close friend Akari Shinohara is very central to the plot.

Episode 1: Okasho

Upon graduating from elementary school, Takaki Tono and his close friend Akari Shinohara drifted apart. Akari moved to Tochigi Prefecture due to her parents’ jobs, while Takaki attended a junior high in Tokyo. The two kept in contact by writing letters, but despite the feelings that existed between them, the only thing that persisted was time. When Takaki became aware that his family would move to Kagoshima, he decided to go see Akari since they would be too far apart to visit each other after he moved. However, when the day came, a severe snowstorm delayed Takaki’s trip, and it would be hours before he reached Iwafune, where they promised to meet.

Episode 2: Cosmonaut

Takaki is now in the third year of senior high in Tanegashima, where the Tanegashima Space Center is located. Kanae Sumita, a classmate of Takaki, has feelings for Takaki, but she does not have the courage to express her love to him. She later observes that Takaki is always staring off into the distance, as if searching for something far far away. Even though she loves Takaki she understands that he is searching for things far greater than what she can offer.

Episode 3: Byōsoku 5 Centimeter

It is now 2008, and all three characters have gone their separate ways. Takaki is now a computer programmer in Tokyo, and Akari is preparing to get married. One day, Takaki goes out and sees the face of a familiar-looking woman at a railroad-crossing. He tries to look back, but a passing train obstructs his view.

The movie is very subtle in it’s presentation, but it is very rich in emotion and depth. I could very much feel an actual love between the characters in the story. That isn’t something that can often be said of an animated film. It was easy to relate the characters’ actions and emotions–Takaki, in the second chapter had a girl that loved him right by his side the whole time, but he couldn’t acknowledge her because he just couldn’t let go of the past. The movie quite much had a theme to it that dwelling on the past will only be damaging in the future.

From the art to the story right down to the characters this is a truly breathtaking film that anyone, regardless of interest in anime, could walk away with a part of themselves forever changed. This movie is pretty much required viewing for anyone with any interest at all in Japan and it’s unique culture.

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Popularity: 21% [?]

Beyond The Clouds was an extraordinary anime, but not so much in the story as the artistry. I call it “a moving masterpiece” because the art in the movie is like a moving painting. People have said that of just about all forms of anime, but this one very much is a piece of moving art. Pictures alone don’t really do justice to the quality of the art, as much of it is in the movement and small changing details like the flashing of lightning or the distorted view created by heat vapors. Parts of this movie actually managed to feel warm despite the video medium being technically incapable of projecting physical things such as temperature.

This is a movie for people that enjoy the art behind an anime as much as the anime itself. The story, though interesting and unique is actually quite slow. Despite that, I kept wanting to watch it because the characters were just so interesting and human feeling. The personalities were far more believable than most animated films I have seen in the past.

The movie takes place in an alternate timeline version of Japan several decades after an event refered to as The Separation has occured. The Seperation split Japan into two halves leaving the southern part occupied by the United States and the northern part occupied by something called the Union. Around the same time as The Seperation a scientist named Ekusun Tsukinoe began the construction of a strange tower for the Union in Ezo, a city we would know as Hokkaido. The tower was so massive that, on a clear day, it could be seen all the way from Tokyo

An underground group called the Uilta Liberation Front was formed in the South with the goal of reunifying Japan. Secretly supported by some Alliance government officials, it engages in terrorist activities on Union territory. At the time of the movie this organization is attempting to bomb the tower. This all sounds like an interesting plot–however; the main characters are more spectators in the whole event than anything really.

The story begins in Aomori on the northern end of southern Japan and follows the story of three friends. The characters are two boys; Hiroki Fujisawa and Takuya Shirakawa who both have exceptional abilities in physics and engineering, and the one girl; Sayuri Sawatari, a classmate who becomes friends with the boys.

Hiroki and Takuya have been working together to build an airplane out of a crashed drone plane they had found. They keep it hidden in a warehouse where they work on it regularly with parts they have scrounged from where they work at the Emishi Manufacturing factory. Sayuri mysteriously disappears during the summer while Hiroki and Takuya’s work on the plane fades.

The story then jumps 3 years ahead where Hiroki has become a physics engineer working for the Union, but secretly a member of the Uilta Liberation Front, while Takuya has basically sat around in Tokyo moping about Sayuri’s disappearance. Takuya eventually gets involved when he discovers that Sayuri has basically been asleep at a hospital because of alternate realities being fed into her mind in the form of dreams. If she were to awaken the world could basically come to an end.

I highly recommend this movie, despite the somewhat slow pace, if only for the extraordinary art. It really is something to see, it’s so beautifully done.

Popularity: 8% [?]

So, I started watching Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni Kai–I got through the first five episodes before figuring out that there was another season that came before this. Oops. Now I’ll have to go back and watch the previous season. It started out all light-hearted and then suddenly everyone was dead. I was a little confused when I looked it up a little further online to find stuff to write about on here and saw all these screenshots from what was apparently the real first five episodes and I didn’t recognize any of it. Why must animes have different names for different seasons? It’s confusing that way. >.> (more…)

Popularity: 30% [?]

School Days was a very entertaining high-school life kind of show for about the first ten episodes, then everything went bad. Not in the sense that it sucked, but in the sense that the love was dead. The last two episodes were dark and violent, especially much the final episode. School Days was very much like Narutaru in that regard in that the story completely shifted to a dark and violent finale. I kind of expected it because of what I had heard about School Days reading about it on the internet, but I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. (more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]