FAILGET

Ok, so I recently checked out J-List again. No, it wasn't the advertising on 4chan. No, I didn't need some overpriced porn at a $1 to 250円 exchange rate.

I used to go there a lot, actually. I used to SPEND a lot there back in the day, actually. Like, 10 years ago actually. As a whole I just plain used to spend a lot on porn. A LOT. I've got like two years straight of every issue of Milky Drop. Huh? Oh, sitting in storage, naturally. Some I've never so much as removed the clear plastic cover on. I guess collecting and being a consumerist fuck was more important than seeing a bunch of porn, huh? Gee, I sure hope there isn't a golden ticket in any of them that I never redeemed for my free permanent harem.

Anyway, I stopped buying from him when I learned about how Peter Payne ruined Anime Expo one year when he picked up loli-hentai off another vendor's table and showed it to a Disney cop affirming that it was ALL the medium is. I don't remember the complete drama filled details other than it was enough to get a lot of showings canceled at the Disney-owned location at the time and pissed off a lot of people, and that he was no longer invited as a vendor from then on.

Anyway, during my last and regrettable trip to California for Anime Expo I was surprised to see him there and figured if the con can forgive him then surely I can. I bought something off him for way too much money and did manage to get it home without it being stolen from me, which is more than I can say for my original copies of Advance Wars DS and Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow (I had 100% in that one MOTHER FUCKING BITCH*).

(* I just got mad about it again just now. LOL. Look, I call myself a gamer, but as put so eloquently by Zero Punctuation's Editorial on Super Mario Galaxy ** , I have a life. So I'm not typically a 100% completion gamer. There are few (and VERY FEW) exceptions. Zelda 1, 2, and 3. Super Metroid. Megaman X series. Castlevania's "metroidvania" games. THAT'S IT. All 151 251 386 493 Pokemon? Nah. 120 stars shines stars? Pshaw. Complete set of armor? If I can't buy it at the bazaar, nah. Unlock every song in DDR? Boi, don't make me bitch slap you. And with Castlevania DS the first 95% of collected souls were fun and easy but the next 4% were a grind and the last 1 was a pain in the motherfuck.)

(** I happen to disagree that there's no place else for Mario to go after space. The clear answer is time. Time travelling Mario, this time for real and not as some excuse to learn shit about history. And, when that happens, Mario either had jumped the shark, is jumping the shark, or will jump the shark, all within a one-game distance, as Sonic CD vs. Sonic 2 or Sonic 3 so clearly demonstrated.)

Anyway, time has come again that I need a 2008 wall calendar and had trouble finding the next Shirow Masamune calendar at the usual suspects. I've had the Masamune calendar every year since 2004. And, admittedly, the 2007 one sucked. The man draws anime women really fucking great: the way he blends CG and drawn art is amazing inspires me to pine over wanting to draw (which I can't). The 2007 one was too clusterfucked with series promotions and not so much illustrations. It was also a smaller format calendar with lower quality print on it so it just wasn't as good as the 2006 one. I blame it due to it getting picked up by Black Horse Comics instead of good ol' Tide-Mark. AND with that, it's probably because Shirow stopped illustrating? Maybe? I haven't heard of anything. The dude's probably making a fortune with his properties getting taken over and expended and kicking back some royalties. Oh well.

So the time has come to find a new calendar. But, who? What subject? I don't want an out-and-out porn calendar. Not clever enough. In searching, though, I found a Shirow Masamune 2008 calendar! Holy crap! At J-List! WOW! So I open the link and, nope, not there.

I remember way back in my [more] naive days I actually wrote them and informed them of the "problem". "I looked on page two of the doujinshi category and there's a VCD on there!" Even got a response back, too. "Uhh, we're looking into it." Little did I know that it was their version of the Amazon recommendation system: show something marginally related in the hopes that they will become educated and perhaps put items like it on their shopping list in addition to what they're browsing for. Searches usually had unrelated items thrown in for just that reason, too.

The trap, she had sprung. It was a page of calendars and, on the side, keywords for related projects. A pitiful SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, trick to get more hits than you otherwise wouldn't have. Counterproductive because if you search for something and it turns out to not really be there you won't buy anything else? Maybe, but I guess SOMEONE SOMETIME ago did that, didn't find what they wanted, but instead decided to buy a Hello Kitty cock-ring or whatever so from then on they continued to use that same tactic, quite similar to that original munged search/category trick.

Anyway, after the Firefox page search for Shirow Masamune and seeing it on the side, I scroll up and see what looks like a personals ad. ADS? ON MY INTERBUTTS?! I KEEL THEM ALL! Well, it turns out to be a true-affiliate ad, where the ad is literally hosted on the server whose page embeds them. Sounds strange, I know, but normal ads consist of pages with blocks sold to brokers who then find the ads to fill it with at that moment of time. This is a more conventional ad in which the site itself set aside the space for A SINGLE specific ad. Ah, the stuff you learn being a ex-full-time web developer.

So the personal ad had three japanese women writing about how they want to meet a new friend and practice English and all. I smirked and scrolled up and saw Peter Payne's face and a blurb about how it's really good or whatever so at that point I'm wondering what's so great about it.

Well, here it is: J-List Friends. Pretty amazing, huh? Thankfully for you, you don't need to think it's amazing or pretty much form any opinions whatsoever because I formed them for you.

Thank me later.