Straight Edge, Spartan Anime Mailing List

I was once active in id-anime IRC room at Rizon, a translator for an Indonesian fansub group, before being dumped for another translator with better command at Japanese (who pissed me off by stating that my translations were 90% incorrect). So, one day I googled for that keyword, hoping to find any update about them.

I found no relevant result, instead, I found a google mailing list that bears the name. As I checked out, this id-anime mailing list has nothing to do with my previous fansub group or the IRC room. I decided to join them, since I've felt I need more contacts from otaku community, and I've been rather distant from my fellow AOIndonesia mates.

My first post followed by a rather unpleasant respond, telling me to do 'nungging' (sorry can't find the English equivalent, I'm not that good in English). Well, this word has some negative (if not perverted) connotations. Fortunately, before I exploded my head out of anger, after a while I found what they meant by 'nungging' on their wiki, which means, self-introduction.

OK, I proceed with the self-introduction. Oh, I forgot to mention, this group has a strong resentment against bootleggers, in this context, those who make out money from selling fansub releases, and I've constantly accused of being one of them, because of my late self-introduction.

The next step, I have to submit my ID to them, as the prove of my identity. Hmm, pretty picky isn't it, for an otaku mailing list? To add up the mess, I've just lost my ID along with $12 in my wallet, still, they didn't like my story, and yet another flames followed.

On 2011年01月22日 01:56, si bloon™ wrote: 

>>>  >>> makin kliatan sebagai BOOTLEGER. >>>  >>> Semakin ngeles semakin anonim semakin BOOTLEG

Eww, can't hold this any longer. So I said this to them

2011/1/22 EIEN Mihoshi : 

>> KTM/KTP semua ilang. >>  >> Yg curiga saya bootlegger, silahkan tunjukkan buktinya.

and then another flame

On 22 Jan 2011, at 13:34, "."  wrote:  

> Yang mau masuk kemari siapa? Kamu itu bukan siapa-siapa demandnya > tinggi banget. Udah nggak baca wiki dan ga bisa googling panjang lagi > omongannya. Kamu pikir ini komunitas apaan? Kalau kamu pengen ngikut > Sam Ardi anjing itu ya terserah kamu, toh sampe sekarang dia bukan > orang dimari dan ga punya hak apa-apa. Kamu ga punya bukti diri ya > jangankan bisa join dimari. Kamu ga pantas tinggal di Indonesia. > Gantung diri sanah, dan jangan lupa minta maaf sama ibumu karna > mempermalukan beliau dengan lahir dari rahimnya.

A Little Bit of Words

If you're a member of this mailing list, please take this as your considerations. I'm not whining or begging you to accept me, no, not ever thinking about it. I've joined several other anime communities, and they're being more open and welcoming for their members. I'd be glad to share my collections with you, but now, I'm reviewing my plan to join the mailing list, if I still get those flame without any basis, certainly I'll unsubscribe it. I have no problem for getting any series I want, I have decent and cheap bandwidth, better than most of you, and on some occasions I've even had a greater-than-unity seed ratio while the download hadn't finished yet. I'm not joining the mailing list for getting free anime downloads, the torrent trackers out there are enough.

The reason why I join the mailing list is to share, either the goods or the ideas and love on this great modern visual culture. And the topics posted there hardly reflects your identity as the anime fans, i.e. there's no discussion about latest airing series, the favorite characters. All you talked about were only 'please mirror this to our server', 'HDD price listings' or 'hey, I've just watched this JAV, it's great!'.

You have an ideal that you're being proud about, but it never justifies your acts of flaming and accusing. It's always a good thing to cling to the old wise sayings, 'the presumption of innocence'. And if you say, 'this is just an initiation rite', then you're overdoing it. It was not funny at all, and it is certainly offensive for anyone.

As far as I can tell, the only thing you have is your excessive pride for not being a bootlegger, and yet still, all you have on your server, all you're being proud about, are illegal things, with the exception that you don't make money out of them.

Sabrina: Awful Female Covers for Alternative Rock Tracks

She has beautiful voice... she has the talent...

Too bad... they didn't write songs for her... instead, they put alternative rock repertoires in her album, and several other artists' songs.

And for the pop-arranged alternative rock tracks, they're just pissing me off... a blasphemy for both the original songs and Sabrina herself...

I hope she'll got her original songs for her third album.

Winter 2011 (?)

Got my unlimited broadband ready, well... not really unlimited since the ISP put 2.5GB quota for this month. Quick visit on animecalendar, anidb, some search on our favorite library... and get the torrent client ready.

As always, I searched for slice of life titles, preferring romance and comedy over action. But it seemed that the harem frenzy for this season hasn't been started yet. So far, I had bagged four titles, three of them had been downloaded and watched, and the last one is still being downloaded.

Maybe this is a little bit late, but at least, I've managed to watch them no later than one week after their premiere.

Here they go...

Gosick

Interesting heroine, a light story with a soft start. Sometimes I got lost within several long dialogs... can't get a grasp on their reasonings.

Freezing

The alien invasion theme failed to whet my appetite. I really lost my appetite thanks to those pants and boobs. Dropped out from this season's watchlist.

IS

Somehow it reminds me of Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou. Well, another school-life romance wouldn't hurt, although I don't really understand the meaning behind their existence, those gundam-like robots called ISs.

Mobi USB Modem, An Archer's Adventure

Foreword

Before knowing anything about bittorrent, or following the latest anime series, I think the internet connection from my campus is more than enough.

Yeah, you just pay $12.5 per month, and you got sonic-fast speed (at least, compared to net cafes in Indonesia), 2 MBps attainable from a good server with download manager (such as, sourceforge.net).

But, $12.5 a month comes with many restrictions. Most obvious, the proxy server only allows connections through port 80 and 443. That means, no IRCs, no torrents. Then, several sites, such as filesharing sites, rapidleech, and even 4chan are also blocked.

For the last couple of months, I managed to circumvent the squid's barricade using tor, and after running proxy daemons on my laptop, I could get the bittorrent running, as well as surfing on porn sites.... :p.

After a while, I decided to stop abusing tor for my own fun. I need to have a good internet connection with a reasonable price. And, after suddenly found out that $325 had been transferred to my account by an unknown angel on the new year, I made up my mind to get a CDMA USB modem.

Some Available Choices

Here in Indonesia, the most popular internet connections are ADSL from Speedy, and then several GSM mobile broadband services. The CDMA services are also getting more and more popular, and it's getting very good reviews, compared to horrible stories around GSM services.

So, I randomly selected a Pantech USB modem bundled with mobi broadband plan.

The Long, Winding Path To The Net

Now I'm ready to get started.

I unpacked the modem, read some instructions there. The installation CD shipped with the package is almost useless for me, since I'm running a vanilla-flavored Linux distro with a minimalist-window-manager-for-geeks.

First attempts with KDE's kppp, rp-pppoe and raw pppd ended up with failure. The user's guide said something about registering my number, by texting a registration message to the registration center, using the modem's connection manager. Unfortunately, my OS didn't allow me to do so, and from my experiences, the modem vendors were not very happy about giving customer support for those who run Linux.

I guess, it was because my number had not been registered yet.

So I dashed down to campus, immediately searched for a friend, and borrowed his Windows box. I sent the registration text to no avail, even after retrying that at least five times.

Nevertheless, I stubbornly tried to connect, using sheer brute force to modify the chat script. This is the first problem, pppd chat script.

The pppd specifies that a chat script for dialling the ISP to be made. Heck, I don't know anything about the login strings, and to add up the mess, there's no way you could 'talk to the modem interactively', I meant, sending strings to the modem and see how the modem would react.

kppp and rp-pppoe also failed. Anyway, kppp is only my temporary resort, and I would discard it as soon as I learned how to connect without a GUI. Yes, I will sometime leave my box running, downloading torrent, and it would be much more efficient for the system if I just run some torrent client without having to load the Xorg server. I could just spawn the client on screen, detaching it, and logging out from my box.

Googling out, I found an application, wvdial. It allows the user to connect via pppd without 'being forced to write the chat script'. From it, I learned that my mistake was not only on the chat script. I pointed the wrong device!!

dmesg output told that the device (modem) I've inserted is registered on ttyUSB0, but it was something other. The real address for the modem is on ttyACM0, as shown on dmesg output several lines above the very last line.

Next attempts were successful, except that, I could not get connected, surely because my number hadn't been registered.

The first day ended up without any success, but I've figured out how to use my modem without any help from GUI-based applications or distro-specific network management tools (which I really hate).

The next day (today), I went to the customer service center on BEC Mall, asking for activation. The customer support there said that they are on some sort of system migration, and several things don't work out correctly, such as registration via text messaage. After having activated my number, I filled $2.5 to my prepaid credit, with the preloaded credit and initial refill bonus, I have $4.2 in my prepaid credit. Before leaving the customer service center, I tried out the modem using wvdial, and... voila!!! I works!!!!

ｷﾀﾜァ*･゜ﾟ･*:.｡..｡.:*･゜(n‘∀‘)ηﾟ･*:.｡. .｡.:*･゜ﾟ･* !!!!!

And... finally, I got myself connected. At first I was afraid about the network coverage from my room, but it turned out to be excellent, at least for browsing (I haven't tried downloading large files).

Here are some images:

Speed test result from my area

New mobi USB modem package

Wvdial in action

Final Words

Yeah, it's no problem if you don't have Winsh*t or MacOS on your box, you'll be alright. Just make sure that you have a great amount of curiosity and patient, you'll get anything work.