Anyway, since I like this manga a lot I wanted to check when the next volume comes out in English, so I head over to delreymanga.com. Which redirects to some exxxtremely fucking Web2.0 site called suvudu.com (a very Web2.0 nonsense name, too) full of social media buttons, blogging and comment fields on absolutely everything. I click around for a bit to try to find something like a schedule for upcoming releases or just a page about the manga or author I’m looking for, but soon realize that most of the buttons don’t actually do anything except jump me to the top of the page. Huh.

Thinking it’s probably some fucker who’s screwed up some fancy javascript/AJAX stuff I enable FireBug and go to check what’s going on under the hood, only to find out that the reason the buttons aren’t doing anything is that they actually aren’t implemented at all. They all go to the top of the page and there’s no javascript triggers on them either. Furthermore there’s a very fancy javascript banner image scroller with just some scrolling text implemented; there are supposed to be images there since there’s a CSS background-image property set, but the URL is blank on all of them.

At this point I’m starting to get pissed off so I just go check the Moyashimon article on Wikipedia instead, which immediately informs me volume three will be released sometime in April 2011 (fuck). Which is probably going to get delayed even more given the difference between the announced and actual release dates of volumes one and two.

This shit all puts me into a very disagreeable mood so I go to rage at the site some more. There’s a billion blog posts about “365 days of manga” all over it, all with 0 or 1 comments. This here blog that nobody gives a shit about apparently gets more attention than a fairly big publisher. Feels good, man. The seach box is shit slow and if it doesn’t find anything (extremely common, since there’s basically no content on the site) it just renders an empty middle column, with no hits as to if it actually did anything. I want to send a very angry email to someone but I can’t even find any contact page. I briefly consider WHOIS’ing their domain and sending the email to abuse@their-isp.com but decide to go Blog About It instead, and here we are.

See, here’s the thing. If I go to the website of a publisher, I don’t fucking want to read a bunch of blogs, nor read comments on said blogs. I don’t want to fucking share your fucking boring corporate site on facebook, I don’t want to watch your shitty youtube videos (actually, I don’t want to watch anybody’s shitty youtube videos) and I most definitely do not want to sign myself up for free advertising by following you on fucking twitter. Chances are I want some hard information about release dates, prices, authors, ISBN numbers, that sort of thing. If I had done the sensible thing from the start and gone to randomhouse.com I would have gotten exactly that. Sure, the page looks somewhat boring, but it gives me the information I want quickly and easily (it even has a decent AJAX autocompletion feature for the searchbox, so it’s definitely not stuck in the 90’s) without having to deal with a lot of social media bullshit or comments fields on everything (a lot of the time, Web 1.0 is vastly superior to Web 2.0). But apparently I can’t have that if I happen to read manga.

Look, faggots, I know most manga readers are retarded, but not even retards would want your shitty site. They probably can’t even figure out how to comments on all the 9003 different comments fields you’ve glued onto everything. More places to comment do not make a site better.

Also, if you’re going to launch a new site to attract young people or whatever you’re trying to do with it, please make sure it’s actually finished before you launch it.

Edit: Also, Del Rey, hurry the fuck up with the Moyashimon release, okthx. It can’t possibly take you a fucking year to fact-check 250 pages of manga, not even a manga like Moyashimon.

It is the story of the fansub group known as gg. It is also, sort of, a story about me, since all of this story is based on my own experiences and observations. I’m not an important part of the story, however, since I did very little and mostly had the great fortune of being able to observe the entire thing unfold first-hand.

Let us begin, but not at the beginning. Let us begin today, on /a/:

Today, when gg has been effectively dead for over three months, a single innocuous release that is over a week late causes a storm of comments on /a/, on IRC, everywhere. With any other fansub group, nobody would have cared, much less posted about it. Fansub groups die, they revive and they release stuff on irregular schedules all the time, and nobody makes much noise about it. Not so with gg. gg is a group so monstrous, so hated, so loved and so controversial that its very existence basically trolls the entire universe. gg has spawned more memes than all other fansub groups together. Everyone has an opinion about gg. The group’s very name smells of power, of trolling, of drama and old catchphrases. It is said that to understand the present, one must understand the past. How, then, did it come to be like this?

This time, let us begin at the beginning. gg begins and ends with koda, also known as kodachrome, also known as miasmacloud and a billion other nicknames. koda is a Girl on the Internet with a talent for writing and an amazing ability to come up with crazy ideas and get other people to go along with them. I think I first met koda in the now quite thoroughly forgotten anime/manga community turned fansub group digitalpanic, which in some ways was a lot like what gg would become. It had a female leader (CelesAurivern) that liked trolling, it subbed only shows that nobody else subbed, it speedsubbed shows that slowpokes had stalled at, it engaged in oversubbing as a troll and did a lot of other things that the fansub community at the time generally considered distasteful. This must have been in mid-2005, and I was still fairly new to fansubbing at the time (having begun in 2004), but I already disliked large parts of the community.

Before we proceed, let me say a few words about what fansubbing was like in 2005: it fucking sucked. You (and I) might think it sucks now, but it was a hundred times worse in 2005. Fansubbing in 2005 was a world where nobody had ever seen a transport stream, raws usually took days to pop up on Winny/Share (Perfect Dark didn’t exist yet and wouldn’t for a few years to come) much less a simulcast, a world that was dominated by a few very old, very large and quite slow groups with enormous epenises that they slapped everyone around with, a world where the illusion about “fansubbing ethics” was still very much alive and well and everyone except a few encoders (like me) that had immigrated from the DVD-rip scene (which was deeply frowned on; DVD-rips were unethical, after all, and people who dealt with that stuff were social rejects in some circles) hated softsubs because it would let people “steal” their subs, about five people knew how to encode H.264 and of those five only three were actually allowed to use it by their group leaders because that newfangled stuff would only confuse people, it used too much CPU and it wasn’t here to stay, anyway. The best H.264 encoder was Nero’s, by the way; x264 was still sorta alpha quality. The only thing that was better then than it is now was that it was an extremely fucking target-rich environment for trolls. People weren’t used to trolling the way they are now; 4chan was a very niche thing that most people didn’t know shit about and you could make oldschool fansubbers go completely fucking ballistic by challenging their world views. This was the environment that formed gg.

Anyway, I met koda. koda had started her career as a fansub troll with trollsubbing FMA as Chopstick (a play on the name of the fansub group Spoon, which was subbing it), and then speedsubbing (a very dishonorable thing to do, according to some fansubbers, since you “stole” leechers from the “serious” groups) Gundam SEED Destiny as Cellphone^2. GSD ended in January 2005. I don’t know what she did over summer (probably played MMO’s), but gg was her next project; a group for making serious subs of Pani Poni Dash (which started in April 2005) because the only other group that was subbing it, Oyasumi, were being slowpoke.jpg about it (this meme didn’t exist in 2005 either, by the way). The first episode, episode 11 (much gnashing of teeth about vulture subbing etc resulted), was released in October. I was asked to join gg a few months later, probably in January 2006, when it picked up Ayakashi ~japanese classic horror~. I can’t say I remember my reasons for accepting, but it probably had something to do with the distinct disrespect for traditional fansubbing Morals and Values as well as with koda’s personal ability to make people do what she wanted them to do. She was (and still is) very good at that.

At this early stage we can already see all the defining characteristics that gg as a group would have later; most of them are probably just reflections of koda’s own personality and characteristics. The disrespect for established authorities, the embracing of new technology and new tools (h264-only softsubbing was pretty much completely unheard of at the time; as far as I know gg was the first non-DVDrip group that did it), the trolling, the subbing of odd “pretentious” and artsy shows that nobody else was paying any attention to etc etc.

This incarnation of gg is now known as proto-gg; mostly because it eventually turned into a pretty normal fansub group among other fansub groups. Personal conflicts between koda and the main translator, Eliza, as well as the former’s eventual refusal to put up with the latter’s annoying habit of refusing every single editing change and leaving everything as really messy and unreadable Singapore-influenced English eventually made koda ragequit and go play MMO’s instead. The group stumbled on as an average-to-shitty fansub group among other average-to-shitty groups for a while but eventually collapsed sometime mid-2007 because Eliza quit and gg just wasn’t the same without koda.

I could elaborate more on this period but quite frankly I don’t remember very much of it and it wasn’t very interesting anyway. There was one cool incident though, where someone discovered that extremely long subtitle lines crashed VLC. This was soon investigated and moved upon, and for a long time there circulated a version of a Code Geass episode that made VLC crash. It turned out that the crash actually was a buffer overrun; hence it was a security issue since it theoretically meant you could execute code as the user running VLC (I don’t know if this was ever exploited for real or not). It eventually resulted in one of the VLC devs turning up in the gg IRC channel and discussing how he didn’t know anything about how ASS was supposed to work.

There are also a few more remaining artifacts of that time that like three people would find relevant, like RALPH NO TAME NI, 75MB per episode encodes of Night Head Genesis, breaking up joints with A-Keep because they sucked, the creation of Menclave (which, according to reliable sources, most likely had something to do with koda and related drama) and of course CODE GEASS.

Now, fast forward to late 2007/early 2008. koda returned from MMO land and got some of the old gang back together in order to do Code Geass DVD-rips and make right what proto-gg had done wrong. This small core of people (more specifically me, `House, magz, Xabin, el and dovac) had all been along for a very long time and would eventually become informally known as the High Council (no actual ruling powers included), or just the people who got re-invited to each new gg incarnation.

Anyway, I foiled the plans for Geass DVD-rips by being my usual lazy self, and koda yelled at me a lot. The only things I gained out of the deal was the knowledge that ordered chapters are fucking annoying, and a funny quote that I put in my AnimeSuki signature.

I was eventually rescued by the sudden appearance of Code Geass R2 in April 2008. CGR2 and gg went together like fire and gasoline since the entire show was basically a gigantic troll. It was a meta-comedy, where the greatest fun came by watching the reactions of people on the internet; hence, simulwatching it on Sunday mornings was absolutely hilarious for multiple reasons. It was also one of the first shows for which transport streams were available.

The start of R2 marks the beginning of the period that would become what I see as gg’s golden age, where the group went from being just a slightly oddball fansub group to eventually becoming a monstrosity that was a combination of the fansub Illuminati, an international organized internet crime syndicate, the Rizon Secret Police and the goddamned Batman. At this time, H.264-only softsubs had become a lot more widespread and accepted.

Wheels had already been set in motion with the start of R2, but the ball really started rolling downhill when a bunch of people were recruited (most notably veteran troll and GNAA alumni Suzuran, and arch-nerd Mandoric and shady JAED folks aers, DrX, mreweilk and pem) in order to start speedsubbing Macross F 9 episodes into the show, because it was being Menclave’d.

Somewhere around here, in a series of very gg-esque events, one crazy idea led to another, which led to someone doing something that was probably highly illegal, and slowly events spiraled out of control and the end result was HorribleRaws, which provided streaming Japanese TV live and also ripped that shit and released on TT. HorribleRaws would eventually became the HorribleSubs we all know and love; yet another project from the gg Illuminati.

This unpredictability I mentioned above was (and is) one of the best things about being in gg. gg, as a collective, has a strange and awesome ability to take any random crazy idea and run with it, and then not only run it into the ground but beyond and out on the other side where by some twisted miracle it is transformed into something else. Sometimes this led to bizarre things, like the group having five different staff channels spread out over three different IRC networks, with mostly different sets of people in them, because of :reasons:.

Another thing this unpredictability lead to was recruiting a ton of people for various reasons. At some point gg had like 8 more or less active translators. Because of the internal group culture (“lol internet” and a healthy dose of elitism) and the separation of staff channels, this quickly led to gg becoming a fansubbing gossip central the likes of which had never been seen (and will most likely never be seen again). A lot of the time several of the staff rooms were filled with pasted logs from other people’s staff rooms; if there was any kind of juicy drama anywhere, we knew about it within minutes.

One runaway project probably ended up being the best thing gg has ever done, namely the gSS release of Gundam 00 S2 ep 20, which had the OP replaced by a version sung by resident group music nerd grunty, the fabulousest karaoke the world has ever seen, an absolutely ridiculous logo replacement (Plorkyeran really outdid himself with AFX there) and half of Rizon credited in one way or another in the OP.

Yet another of these crazy ideas led to gg picking up every single show of autumn 2009 that wasn’t Crunchyroll’d. At this point koda was becoming rather burned out on fansubbing and mostly just wanted the entire thing to go out with a bang. Which it sorta did, because she did ragequit the group again, while some people who took fansubbing too seriously tried to finish the existing projects.

There are a lot more stories I could tell here, but I’m sorta starting to run out of steam here and most of them should probably remain classified to ensure the safety of the people involved. Suffice to say that gg has always had a significant advantage in available resources when compared to pretty much any other fansub group in the history of fansubbing, and that even today, there’s no really juicy piece of gossip that gg doesn’t know about. Instead I’ll talk for a bit about the gg “culture”, such as it is, or was. Proto-gg was sorta different because we were all younger and dumber then, but the Return of the Trolls incarnation had an internal tone and jargon that made 4chan look like a British upper class tea party (some people, like pem, would eventually turn out to be unable to deal with this and ended quitting). Also, gg has always been about elitism; the entire game was about being faster, smarter and more unscrupulous than everyone else. Especially during the heyday of the Return of the Trolls period nothing was sacred, everything could be laughed at and there were no such thing as a secret (except where those secrets would incriminate ourselves).

A common attitude is to just dismiss everything gg ever did as “trolling”, but that’s just proving that you don’t get gg or what it stands for. gg very rarely did something just for the plain shock value; almost every “troll” gg has ever done has at least had the side effect of making a point. Oversubbing things “for the lulz”? Criticism of fansubber flock-of-sheep mentality. Hilariously overdone karaokes? That’s gg’s way of saying “hey faggots look how dumb this is”. The entire Gundam 00 S2 ep 20 project was an attempt to make certain fansub groups that took themselves way too seriously realize just how fucking ridiculous they were. Overlocalization? An attempt to make people realize that hey maybe leaving Japanese words untranslated isn’t that cool, after all. A big part of the reason gg liked Geass R2 so much and that it suited the group so perfectly was that Sunrise was doing things the exact same way as gg were doing them: they were trying to make people realize just how ridiculous anime is (a vast majority of the viewers missed the point). Yes, a lot of this was indeed done mostly for fun, but there was almost always a bigger purpose behind the “lulz”. You could almost say gg did meta-fansubbing. Where is your god now!?

What now, you say? Will gg revive? Maybe, who knows. It has always been extremely unpredictable. But “that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die”. So watch out, fagsubbers. gg is watching, and one day it will return to show you the error of your ways, and for a short but fabulous time faggotry will once more run rampant through the world.

(holy shit that was a lot of words; over 2500 in fact. inb4 “cool story, bro”)

Here, then, is the Grand Mufti’s ruling on the use of Lagarith: don’t.

The reasons are as many as there are grains of sand in the desert, but the most prominent ones are:

Lagarith is slow

If you are using a lossless codec, chances are that you are doing it because your original source is so slow on decoding and/or filtering that it bottlenecks the encoder (or you could just be doing it because someone told you that’s how things are done, and then you should seriously reevaluate your encoding practices). Therefore, using a lossless codec that is slow on decoding is extremely dumb. You should take care to use the fastest codec available, in order to bottleneck the encoder as little as possible (you shouldn’t be using uncompressed, because you’ll bottleneck on disk read speed instead).

Some of you will undoubtedly hurf a blurf about how Lagarith compresses better, but if you’re already blowing 20 GB of disk space on a lossless file that you’ll only keep for a few days at most, why would another few GB matter? If you want good compression there are better alternatives available anyway.

If you were going to say “eh, the difference isn’t that big”, shut up before you embarrass yourself. On encoding, FFmpeg’s HuffYUV encoder is about 160% faster while compressing about 10% worse (the latter number being source dependent, of course). On decoding, it isn’t quite as far behind, FFhuff “only” being about 150% faster. The comparison gets even more unfavorable when you start taking a look at lossless h264, which (while being annoyingly slow on seeking, something that may or may not matter to you) is not only faster on both encoding and decoding, but also compresses better (except in intra-only mode, which is still faster but compresses worse than FFhuff), even on fastest settings.

Lagarith is buggy

Not much needs to be said about this one. Both the encoder and the decoder have had numerous bugs in the past, and some surely remain. The decoder is known to randomly corrupt frames in the decoded output for no particular reason (happens rarely, but still often enough to be annoying). There have also been multiple funny issues with x64 versions.

Lagarith is a dumb format

Floating-point arithmetic in a lossless video encoder. Nuff said.

So what should I use instead?

FFmpeg’s HuffYUV encoder (use “plane” as the predictor), as featured in ffmpeg itself, mencoder and FFdshow (and FFvfw), or lossless h264, depending on your requirements.

Exceptions

If you’re using a shitty NLE like Adobe After Effects or whatever, use whatever the fuck you want that works, because you’re most likely fucked anyway. It may also be forgivable to use Lagarith for RGBA (the above numbers on performance etc apply to YV12 only) since not many other lossless codecs support that.

References

Mostly DeathWolf’s lossless codec test and personal experience.

DON’T

• Have more than two QC’ers. If you need more the script was probably not worth doing anything with in the first place, or the QC’ers aren’t doing their job properly.
• Recruit fucking useless QC’ers who only QC and do nothing else. They should at least be able to fix simple TS problems they spot and stuff like that, or else you’ll have to wait for that lazy ass typesetter to come around again and that alone will probably delay your release by a day.
• Hardsub. Anything. For any reason. Ever. Hardsubbing is the best way to burn out encoders and delay releases forever. If you think you need hardsubs to make a good release, you’re either retarded or a TS perfectionist (they’re mostly equivalent anyway).
• Think you have to make a release “perfect”, because it won’t ever be. Small errors that do not affect the translation accuracy or the viewer’s ability to enjoy the episode don’t matter; fix them if you have the time and ability, otherwise don’t.
• Do useless things like letting the TL look over the episode a final time before release. If you can’t trust your editor and QC’ers to do shit right, why do you have them in the first place? If the TL really wants to do this, drop one of the QC’ers and let the TL QC instead.
• Recruit people who are only around for two hours a day. Fansubbing is a job for NEETs.
• Filter your encodes with slow filters. Most broadcasts are pretty shitty and you know they’re gonna fix the animation on the bluray anyway, so why waste time improving something that is going to look shitty anyway?
• Do RC’s. Since everything is softsubbed, just upload a premux and then you can just mux it server-side and release when everything is OK. Let someone with a fast connection download it and check it if you’re paranoid, but full RC’s are for faggots.
• Involve too many fags in fucking with the script (related to the “no more than two QC’ers” rule above). It usually just leads to confusion, drama and inefficiency. Each additional person you involve is an additional bottleneck that you have to wait for. TL, editor, two QC and optionally TLC (if you don’t trust your TL) is enough. Ruling by council is inefficient and so is fansubbing by council.
• Don’t let people have multiple passes at the script, either. You can create infinite QC loops if you do.
• Try to translate every fucking background sign everywhere. Nobody cares and it takes fucking forever.
• Let people block progress for more than 8 hours. If their job takes longer than that they’re really fucking slow and should be fired or skipped. You should also consider timezones when filling a position.
• DO KARAOKE, YOU RETARDED FAGGOTS

DO

• Use transport stream raws, assuming that your encoder has a non-retarded connection and a good computer (if he doesn’t you should fire him anyway because he’s fucking useless without those two). They’re really simple to get these days, even if you only use torrents. If you use anything else, don’t bother reencoding it unless it’s 120fps or something retarded; just remux it instead.
• Temporarily replace or skip people who can’t be around to do their job. If they’re not 12 years old they shouldn’t have a problem with it.
• Recruit multi-talented people and keep a team that is as small as possible. More people means more timezone issues and more potential bottlenecks.
• Have fun. If it’s not fun, why are you doing it?
• Be lazy.

DTS FLASHFACTS:

• It is a lossy codec
• It uses constant bitrate at 1509.75 kbit/s (at least on blurays)
• It is so hilariously inefficient that FLAC (a lossless codec) usually manages to compress better than it, even with 6 channels of movie audio

DTS isn’t just a hilariously inefficient codec, it’s also criminally incompetent of you to use it when a Dolby TrueHD track is available. If you extract the TrueHD track and convert it to FLAC, you will not only get a lossless track instead of a lossy one, it’s also quite likely that you’ll save space!

BUT BUT BUT MY AUDIO RECEIVER CAN’T DECODE FLAC!!?!
Shut up about your goddamn receiver. If you still believe the bullshit about the decoder (bit-exact decoding, yo) and/or DAC being better than the ones in your computer and you also think you’re able to hear the difference, you’re one of those insane audiophile spergers and I can’t really help you. Still, if your receiver isn’t some ancient piece of shit from the 90’s it will have a HDMI input, and then you can pass as many LPCM channels as you want to it with that.

Also, don’t even get started about DTS-HD, there’s nothing that plays that.

TL;DR: just stop using DTS, you goddamned mongoloids

edit: don’t get started on zOMG DTS ENGINEERS either, faggots

The answer to this is obviously “flag it in the h264 bitstream” (if you’re one of those scrubs who still use Xvid just ignore the issue, nobody cares about Xvid anymore). The problem with this answer is that nobody understand what the hell vui.txt actually means. However, in some recent conversation in #darkhold Kovensky linked to a paste where pengvado/akupenguin explained it in more detail.

More specifically:

• –colormatrix specifies what coefficients are used when converting YUV to RGB. This is the one you want to use.
• –colorprim specifies what color primaries (see for example the Wikipedia page about sRGB) the RGB uses. Setting this properly most likely requires knowledge of the studio equipment used to master the stream and/or its settings, so just leave it undefined. No one without a color calibrated monitor would ever notice or care, even if decoders/renderers actually supported this.
• –transfer specifies the gamma curve used for the RGB. Like –colorprim, setting this correctly probably requires knowledge you don’t have, so don’t set it at all. Again, only people with calibrated studio monitors will ever notice or care.

TL;DR: Use --colormatrix bt709 if your source is a HD transport stream; --colormatrix bt470bg if it is an SD transport stream.

argon, if you want I can simply forward this to our lawyers and they’ll suck the
life out of you (and all your money with it). Keep your cool, please.

You know what, GPL faggots? Fuck you forever. You’re just as bad as the sue-happy proprietary software owners/patent owners you claim to hate so much. The entire point of open source is that anyone should be able to do whatever they want with it. You’re trying to keep the cake and eat it too; either you let the code go and let other people use it freely, or you keep it under locks and sue the fuck out of anyone using it in ways you don’t like. There is no middle ground, and it’s pretty clear which side of the fence you’re on.

The GPL isn’t a “free software” license in any way whatsoever because of its ridiculous restrictions. People who use it are the kind of faggots that are still attached to the “I made it so I should be able to control what happens to it until 90 years after my death” school of intellectual property management, which is about as far from any definition of “free” as you can get. Stop pretending you’re different from the HURR YOU ARE MISUSING OUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, SUE SUE SUE companies like Adobe and Microsoft.

tl;dr: fuck copyright forever

edit: disclaimer: I have not ever used the kmplayer and from what I read about it on the cccp wiki it is a useless piece of shit anyway

edit edit: YES I GET VERY ANGRY ABOUT THINGS ON THE INTERNET, DEAL WITH IT

edit edit edit:

• number of projects in the ffmpeg hall of shame: lots
• number of ffmpeg license violators actually sued: 0
• number of ffmpeg license violators that are actually likely to ever get sued: 0
• number of companies that give a shit about the gpl: 0

edit edit edit edit: the gpl has actually been tried in court a total of like three times ever in all the time it has existed and those cases were limited to a total of two countries, namely the US and Germany, so don’t go off thinking that it is a well established or even internally consistent legal document or anything

Alternative theory: Kyoto Animation is the new Gonzo.

No seriously, it fits. Shitty animation (see: K-On!, that one series with the stupidly long name (Munto?), most episodes of Endless Eight, Lucky Star, etc etc) shitty fanservice-based/moeblob/just plain nonsense series (see: everything they ever did on their own except possibly FMP), shitty everything. Also note: Kyoto Animation was involved in producing Kiddy Grade.

• Yesterday: Funimation announces (well, mentions in its official twitter feed) that it will be resuming FMA streaming after “additional security” is implemented for all videos.
• Five hours ago: Funimation’s representative says he/she doesn’t know when FMA streams will be back.
• Two hours ago: Certain people do some poking around and find that most series are still available via the old method of using video.funimation.com/FLV/[ANIMENAME]_[EPISODENUMBER]_JPN_640X360.flv directly. They just changed the name of some files, i.e. instead of FUN_PHANTOM_06_JPN_640X360.flv it’s now PHNTM_06_JPN_640X360.flv. FMA, however, is not available through this method. This is mentioned on IRC.
• One hour ago: I poke at Funimation’s FMA page and find that while you can still access the FMA page and watch episodes, you don’t actually get the episode it claims to be; instead you get what appears to be the “default” episode, which for some bizarre reason known only to Funimation is episode 8 of Dragonaut: the Resonance (why the christ did this ever get licensed in the first place? seriously Funimation, what the fuck?).
• Half an hour ago: Some enterprising individuals find out that it seems that Funimation has switched to RTMP streaming for FMA. They poke around for a bit, guess the URL to episode 9, dumps it with rtmpdump, remuxes it to MKV and posts a torrent to TT (which currently has like 30 peers; obviously everyone is hot for Funimation’s version of FMA when the fansubs have already been out for three days). The episode in question still hasn’t been posted to Funimation’s official site. Nor has the older FMA eps.
• Right now: Funimation’s entire website goes down for unknown reasons.

The website is now up again, but God knows why it went down in the first place. “TORRENT? OMG, PULL THE PLUG!”? Who knows.

More on this story as things develop.

Edit: By the way, Funimation, didn’t you say it took four days to finish the translation and script QC? Why did you already upload a finished episode to your website then? Hasn’t it only been three days since Sunday?

Edit edit: Oh and for those of you who are going to go off screaming OMG HAX SUE THEM ALL: guessing URL’s IS NOT HACKING (and hence it isn’t illegal in all sensible jurisdictions; see for example this German court case (warning: in German)). The W3C agrees in a quite interesting article; for those of you with ADD I’ll go ahead and quote the most relevant parts:

[A]ny attempt to forbid the practice of deep linking is based on a misunderstanding of the technology, and threatens to undermine the functioning of the Web as a whole. The two chief reasons for this are:

• A Web Address (“URI,” or “URL”) is just an identifier. There is a clear distinction between identifying a resource on the Web and accessing it; suppressing the use of identifiers is not logically consistent.
• It is entirely reasonable for owners of Web resources to control access to them. The Web provides several mechanisms for doing this, none of which rely on hiding or suppressing identifiers for those resources.

[...]

Two analogies have been proposed to help illuminate the question of deep linking through parallels in the real world.

The first analogy is with buildings, which typically have a number of doors. A building might have a policy that the public may only enter via the main front door, and only during normal working hours. People employed in the building and in making deliveries to it might use other doors as appropriate. Such a policy would be enforced by a combination of security personnel and mechanical devices such as locks and pass-cards. One would not enforce this policy by hiding some of the building entrances, nor by requesting legislation requiring the use of the front door and forbidding anyone to reveal the fact that there are other doors to the building.

The second analogy is with a library, which has a well-known street address. Each book on the shelves of this library also has an identifier, composed of its title, author, call number, shelf location, and so on. The library certainly will exercise access control to the individual books; but it would be counterproductive to do so by forbidding the publication of their identities.

These analogies are compelling in the context of the deep linking issue. A provider of Web resources who does not make use of the built-in facilities of the Web to control access to a resource is unlikely to achieve either justice or a good business outcome by attempting to suppress information about the existence of the resource.

Edit edit edit: When they went to repost the FMA streams they also “accidentally” posted Phantom episode 10, at least 18 hours before it was supposed to air in Japan. Someone immediately downloaded and torrented it, of course. :golfclap:

It also appears that instead of actually implementing security measures, Funimation seemingly found it sufficient to add 16 characters of pseudo-random garbage to the end of each filename so it isn’t possible to just guess the URL’s anymore. GUYS GUYS LET’S CONTINUE WITH THIS SECURITY THROUGH OBSCURITY THING I HEARD IT WAS THE COOL THING TO DO, IT HAS WORKED SO WELL FOR US IN THE PAST AFTER ALL LOLOLOLO

ETA to someone figuring out that the seemingly random stuff really isn’t all that random and leaking something again? Not very long, I’d bet.

Claiming ANN does journalism is like claiming fansubbers create anime. ANN:

• Copies R1 industry press releases; usually verbatim, without comment or criticism of their content
• Translates 2ch gossip and Moonphase comments and reports them as “news”
• When they do the above, they invariably cite the source as “2ch” or “Moonphase comments” and link to the respective site’s front page, which makes it about as easy to check the source as if they had cited “the internet” as the source
• Bowdlerizes English blog posts/other news site posts and reports those too as news
• Trolls people in general and fansubbers in particular with snarky comments in the Answerman column
• Makes unpaid volunteers earn advertising money for them by maintaining their anime database
• Writes season previews that are obviously based on warez/fansubs (don’t try to tell me all of your season preview writers live in Japan and speak Japanese, ANN) while having an official position amounting to “fansubs are the root of all evil”
• Builds the entire site layout around gigantic R1 industry ads
• Refuses to publish anything remotely industry-critical since it would hurt their advertising income (for example, they have not published anything about the fact that Funimation outright lied in a press release recently)
• Accuses people calling them out on their bullshit of being tinfoil-hatting conspiracy theorists (Danish)

Most news sites would at least try to pretend they are neutral and independent. ANN does not. Most news sites would be at least vaguely ashamed of doing very little but bowdlerize second-hand sources (blogs, moonphase comments, 2ch gossip, etc etc). ANN does not seem to be.

If you look at the last ten main news items at ANN’s front page right now, you get the following:

• Moribito Returns to Adult Swim — At Least in Repeats
• Vaguely rewritten English livejournal post plus some links to older ANN news. Original first-hand source linked to inline but not cited as source.
• Japanese Box Office, May 9-10
• Translation and currency conversion of a Japanese box office listing plus some very brief comments.
• Fullmetal Alchemist Not Streaming from Funimation.com (Update 2)
• Information about a link on Funimation’s webpage is not currently working plus some links to older news items. Updates with more information and the fact that the link is working again contributed by people who seem to be volunteer outsiders.
• Funimation Cancels One Piece Simulcast (Update 2)
• Verbatim copy of a Funimation press release. No mention of the fact that said press release contains at least one blatant lie. Updates contain reports that links elsewhere are broken, too.
• Key’s Angel Beats! Anime Promo Videos Streamed
• Presumably a translation of a 2ch post plus some links. Source cited as “2channel” with link to the front page and nothing else, so original source is impossible to check.
• GTO: Shonan 14 Days Marks Return of Great Teacher Onizuka (Updated)
• Another presumed translation of a 2ch post plus two sentences or so of background and licensing info. No useful source, as usual.
• M and N, Heart no Kuni no Alice Listed by Amazon.ca
• Bowdlerized English blog post that states that Amazon is listing something that may or may not be released by Tokyopop. No link to original firsthand source (Amazon).
• One Piece’s Newest Episode Leaked Before Japan’s Debut (Updated)
• A considerably more accurate portrayal of the “Funimation debacle” events. No mention of Funimation’s lie about “strict security measures”. No source cited other than Tofusensei and some other third party; presumably because the actual source (Tokyotosho/word on the IRC street) is unquotable by a Serious Business news outfit since they couldn’t possibly have contacts with those dirty fansubbers.
• Anime Network Taken Off Comcast, Put on DirecTV (Updated)
• Rewritten press release/official forum post plus a few sentences of background info.
• Gokusen the Movie’s Trailer Streamed Online
• Slightly rewritten notice about a new trailer, taken from an English news/blog site (including the exact same original source links), plus the usual three sentences with background info.

In summary: maybe two of these news items contain any actual journalism. The rest are copypasta and rewriting/translating news other people wrote about. The citing of sources is really wobbly at best; in several cases you either get no reliable source at all, or at best a link that gives you a link that gives you a link to something that could be a first-hand source.

Why is this shit so popular? Pure momentum? Probably. I guess once you’re big you don’t really have to do anything but sit on your butt, receive news tips, browse 2ch, check RSS feeds and rewrite stuff other people researched for you.

When I accepted that interview offer I had mostly one thing in mind, namely to troll Funimation. I could not in my wildest dreams have imagined how hilarious it would actually end up being given Funi’s amazing screwups, but neither could I have imagined what a golden opportunity of trolling ANN it would give me, either. At least that’s one thing I suppose I should thank ANN for.

Edit: by the way, I should mention that all of this raging doesn’t have anything to do with ANN’s apparent (apparent because they still haven’t replied to emails) refusal to publish that interview. I never really expected them to, given what I said in it.

(Oh, and by the way, the worst anime site on the internet is Sankaku Complex. Nothing else even comes close.)