WALLS OF TL;DR

Recently, I read some manga (whoa, yeah, really). More specifically, I read Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture volume two, which came out in English about a month ago. It’s really fucking good (you should read it) and the only manga I’m actually following these days, but it’s impossible to explain why it’s good. In sort, it’s about this dude who goes to an agricultural university to study microbiology and the oddball students and professors and other people hanging around there. Oh, and he can see germs with his bare eyes. Just read it, it owns.

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.