Rileks yang Malah Jadi Nggak Rileks -- tl;dr

OK for this time I'll post in Indonesian. It's only something about my campus' local internet forum, and most likely won't be of your interest.

Buat yang pernah ikut forum internet macam Kaskus, Indowebster atau AOIndonesia tentu tau soal 'pangkat' dan 'jabatan' anggota forum. Ada yang bersifat fungsional seperti 'moderator' atau 'admin', ada yang berdasarkan reputasi, seperti 'newbie', 'addict', 'veteran' dan nama-nama semacamnya, biasanya ditentukan dari jumlah post atau kontribusi lain, misalnya donasi.

Kelas-kelas user di forum itu jelas, seperti yang kita ketahui, punya tujuan mulia: memancing anggota untuk meramaikan forum. Dan kita ketahui juga bahwa di dunia ini ada orang-orang yang haus kedudukan, haus akan reputasi sehingga mereka menghalalkan segala cara untuk meraih yang mereka inginkan.

Dan dari semua kekonyolan, ada orang yang hatinya terbakar hanya karena mengejar reputasi di forum internet, lokal pula. Orang itu adalah saya sendiri, yang menulis blog ini.

Fighting over Leprechaun's Gold.

Di kampus saya, ada sebuah forum internet bernama Rileks, yang hanya bisa diakses dari LAN kampus atau dari luar kampus lewat VPN (yang lemotnya minta ampun). Forum ini adalah ajang diskusi (sebagian kecil) mahasiswa tentang berbagai hal, mulai dari politik, olahraga, game sampai hiburan. Tetapi tak dapat dipungkiri, fungsi utama (dan daya tarik utama) forum ini adalah sebagai tempat pengumuman lokasi server (dan direktori) FTP dari sebuah file multimedia - dengan kata lain ini adalah versi lokal Indowebster di kampus saya. That's why I said something about Leprechaun's Gold before.

Seperti di forum lainnya, ada berbagai atribut member, beberapa yang istimewa adalah, Admin, Moderator, Veteran (member dengan post 1000 atau lebih), Sesepuh (Veteran yang sudah alumni) dan Tukang Upload. Saya akan fokus ke Tukang Upload, member yang berkontribusi meng-upload berbagai konten dari luar (jaringan kampus) ke beberapa server FTP yang ada di kampus. Sebetulnya ini bukan kewenangan mutlak, karena member biasa pun (yang punya akses upload ke paling tidak sebuah server) bisa meng-upload konten. Tetapi dengan peraturan yang berlaku sekarang ini, hanya Tukang Upload yang boleh membuat thread rilis film atau anime (thread rilis musik dapat dibuat oleh semua member). Jika ada member biasa yang ingin merilis film, pertama dia harus membuat thread di subforum 'Request', dan Tukang Upload yang akan memindahkannya ke subforum 'Release'.

Nah, apa keuntungannya kalau kita membuat thread rilis? Boleh dibilang, tidak ada. Yah, paling-paling kita dapat 'thanks' dari member lain. Lebih ke soal reputasi, ada kemungkinan kalau aktif bikin thread rilis akan direkomendasikan jadi Tukang Upload, dengan begitu jadi lebih mudah untuk membuat thread rilis (tanpa harus di-approve Tukang Upload) dan kesempatan mendapatkan 'thanks' lebih besar. Lain itu, tidak ada. Cuma soal reputasi kosong.

Itulah posisi yang saya kejar.

Karena itu, mulai winter 2011, dan spring 2011 ini, saya rajin membuat thread rilis di forum anime, melalui jalur 'rakyat jelata': upload ke server anime, buat thread rilis di forum anime, Tukang Upload memindahkan thread saya ke subforum Release, tunggu thanks dari member lain. Karena ini anime yang kebanyakan berseri, sebagai thread starter saya punya kewajiban moral untuk terus meng-upload seri tersebut. Yang terakhir ini menjadi awal sebuah masalah bagi saya.

Jaringan kampus saya dibatasi firewall yang hanya dibuka di beberapa port, dan proxy membatasi akses internet. Walaupun sebagian besar situs terbuka, adanya firewall dan proxy membuat mahasiswa tidak dapat men-download via torrent atau melalui situs-situs filesharing. Dengan kondisi koneksi internet di negeri kita yang masih nyampah, sharing konten melalui server lokal menjadi sesuatu yang sangat menolong, dan inilah salah satu faktor yang membuat komunitas Rileks berkembang, walaupun ini bukan satu-satunya faktor. Tetapi, beberapa orang (termasuk saya) bisa mencari celah blokiran proxy dan firewall untuk mengunduh konten multimedia dari luar, dengan kecepatan di atas rata-rata kecepatan koneksi internet di Indonesia. Ada yang memang punya 'posisi' - para admin jaringan kampus, tentu saja pemblokiran firewall tidak berlaku bagi mereka. Ada yang bergerilya dengan gigih, mencari situs-situs Rapidleech yang belum diblokir proxy - tokoh kita, 'T' menggunakan cara ini, selain tampaknya dia punya koneksi broadband juga. Ada yang menggunakan tools tertentu secara tidak etis untuk mengelabuhi proxy - saya termasuk golongan terakhir ini.

Kembali ke masalah Tukang Upload. Selama beberapa lama, rutinitas saya - membuat thread rilis serial anime baru, meng-upload kelanjutan serial yang sudah saya mulai thread-nya - berjalan lancar. Tetapi saya mulai merasa terganggu sejak 'T' mulai meng-upload kelanjutan serial yang thread-nya saya mulai. Dia selalu berhasil mendahului saya karena dia bisa men-download lebih cepat. Bagi saya, ini sangat menyebalkan karena (paling tidak menurut pendapat saya) merusak reputasi saya sebagai thread starter, dan menunjukkan saya belum cukup mampu menjadi Tukang Upload. Pada puncak kemarahan saya, sebuah thread di JP (subforum untuk diskusi nyampah) saya tulis, meminta agar 'T' menghentikan aktivitasnya meng-upload kelanjutan serial anime yang thread-nya saya mulai.

Saya belum pernah ketemu dengan 'T' waktu itu... dan pertama kali saya samperin orangnya setelah thread unlimited rants work itu, orangnya terlihat menyenangkan dan kalau saya kenal lebih awal, tampaknya bisa jadi teman akrab saya. Tentunya dengan masalah ini hubungan saya dengan dia sudah nggak enak.

Terakhir, saya membuat thread rilis anime Denpa Onna, seperti biasa di subforum Request. Saya tidak memberitahu 'T' karena saya pikir tentu 'T' akan memindahkannya ke Release, lagipula 'T' pernah bilang dia tidak suka dapat PM.

Dan waktu saya cek Rileks, kaget saya melihat 'T' membuat thread rilis anime yang sama di subforum Release, sementara thread yang saya buat masih tidak tersentuh di subforum Request. Waktu saya coba login, akun saya kena suspend. Saya jadi paranoid, jangan-jangan ini memang disengaja agar saya tidak bisa bikin thread rilis lagi...

Dengan akun lain saya bikin thread keluhan (sampai saat ini belum saya cek bagaimana responnya), dan lapor ke seorang teman yang sudah Veteran di Facebook. Keluhan saya di Facebook bikin 'T' mencak-mencak, sementara kawan Facebook saya itu mencoba menenangkan, katanya hal ini sudah biasa terjadi pada dia dan dia nggak pernah mempermasalahkan itu. Pada akhirnya dengan jengkel luar biasa 'T' memindahkan thread yang saya mulai ke Release, dan balasan yang ada di thread buatannya digabungkan dengan thread saya.

Masalah selesai, dan memang tidak pernah ada rencana menyingkirkan saya.

Hanya karena soal forum internet yang bahkan cuma sebatas lingkup kampus.

Jelas saya sudah menjadi terlalu ambisius sampai ke tahap paranoia, berburuk sangka pada orang lain, marah-marah untuk hal yang tidak penting. Saya lupa tujuan awal masuk Rileks, untuk sharing secara enjoy dan rileks.

Tampaknya, saya akan mengurangi laju membuat thread rilis, paling banyak mungkin satu atau dua seri anime lagi untuk spring 2011 ini. After all, saya tidak suka dimonopoli, dan saya harus memberi kesempatan member lain untuk eksis juga, seperti halnya saya ingin eksis di Rileks.

OK, saya akui kesalahan saya yang tidak kontak ke Moderator/Tukang Upload untuk menginformasikan thread yang saya mulai, dan bikin rants nggak jelas di forum dan Facebook. Mudah-mudahan ini nggak terjadi lagi, supaya saya dan semua member Rileks bisa dengan enjoy menikmati forum kampus tercinta itu.

Dan saya harus mengalihkan tujuan saya untuk hal yang lebih bermanfaat, ketimbang sekedar mengejar reputasi di sebuah forum lokal yang nggak akan menambah nilai plus untuk mencari pekerjaan.

Commando Girl Homura Magika

Best show for this week.

This tenth episode from Puella Magi series recounts Homura's struggle to save Madoka, and it reveals much of the unexplained parts from the canon.

OK, here's the spoiler in short:

Before she became a puella magi, Homura was a sickly girl. It happened one day, shortly after her discharge from the hospital and her transfer to Madoka's school, she was rescued by Madoka from a witch's attack. Homura was very grateful, and she adored Madoka, being a strong fighter who protects the world from evil beings. Sadly, Homura witnessed Madoka's death after battling a witch (maybe in Walpurgisnacht event). Wanting to save Madoka, she wished that she could go back in time, to fight alongside Madoka, to save her from her death. She leap back through time, over and over again, never succeeded in saving Madoka. Even she learned the bitter truth of being a puella magi (guess you should know what it is already, if not, better not reading this post). She resolved to prevent Madoka from being a puella magi (which explains, why, in this story Madoka hadn't became puella magi so far).

Certainly Magica Quartet did a good job for the flashback. It was an excellent breakdown, explaining some unanswered questions in a breathtaking way. It also washed away the horrible 'Archer Hypothesis' (this is a bizzare speculah that says, Homura is a future version of Madoka, much like Archer and Emiya Shirou).

The most memorable part is Homura's evolution here. She was not a strong puella magi to begin with, outperformed by Mami and Madoka in every occasions. But she had a strong will, and seemed that she was a geek too. She began to learn to make improvised explosive devices, which she would insert into her time-frozen targets, or firing assault guns. This is something that makes her unique, while other puella magi relies on their magical attack, she uses standard military armaments (although on her character design, she is depicted as an archer with a black bow).

As she went over the time loops, we see the weak, clumsy girl transformed into an elite commando with plus time manipulation ability. The emotional pain she went through forged her into a steel-cold girl, almost never showing her emotions, although deep inside, she truly cares about everyone around her.

Just can't wait the next episode.

Plans... Plans... It Will Remain Plans....

As long as I'm alive, there will always be desires, infinite number of them; but the time and chance I have will always be finite.

My life will always be limited by constrains...

翼がなくても

この呪文がある

僕たちならば昨日よりも

高く飛べる

Here's a random rant about many things I wanna do in this so-called ten thousand dimensional net.

Well, reading on anime blogs, and seeing how the writers become popular and 'looks intellectual' makes me tempted into writing them too. So far, I've managed to write few entries on an anime episode, J-music and otaku subculture. The latter had been the most successful so far, calling out rain of flames and insults from those mentioned in that post. I didn't care about them anymore, there's a very slim chance for a single writer to stand against the whole community (yea, it's my stupidity after all) insisting that they're the good guys and the writer is just an illiterate, ignorant fool who didn't comprehend their social codes; and unfortunately, I'm not that smart to write a brilliant argument that could knock them out of their shoes. -- Enough with the rants on that community.

There are many excellent anime bloggers out there, and with my slightly below average intelligence, inadequate English, not to mention blogger.com's failing WYSIWIG editor that keeps complaining on it's self-generated HTML codes (yeah, I always write straight on the web editor, I never use any word processors except that legendary LaTeX), I was discouraged. It doesn't mean that I'm giving up, I'm gonna post my thoughts on recently watched anime episodes or on my beloved waifu singer, I just haven't got the mood. Perhaps I'll write them out just for my personal archive; aiming to be an anime blog celebrity is thousand years too early for me.

Mmm... have you ever see a rainmeter with cute anime character (usually moe-blob anime girl) display? I always want them to sweeten my almost-barren desktop. Too bad, AFAIK those cute little sisters only available for Madobe Nanami and her sisters. Rainmeter's *NIX counterpart, conky, offers only texts and bars by default. Maybe with few lines of Lua scripting and animated moe-girl artworks forked from rainmeter, I could transform conky into a cute little sister I've been dreaming about. I would host my project on code.google.com or sourceforge instead of those crappy filehosting services that constantly extort you into paying for their service. Alas, I've always been too lazy to read the long, almost incomprehensible manpages or their API documentations. Well, I might work on that project in the near future, if something motivates me.

I also have a non-English fansub project (sorry I won't give the link here). Currently I have a total of three staffs (including me) and the group had released three episodes, two first episodes of AIR (by myself, single fighter) and the first episode of Kore wa Zombie Desu ka. My motivation was disappointment I felt seeing so many groups releasing fansubbed anime in my language simply translate their script from English fansubs (doesn't mean that I'm good at Japanese, I could barely understand a dialog in Japanese without repeating them at least one hundred times and consulting to my software dictionary). Thanks to my laziness, the group is now at hiatus once again. I feel sorry for the two staffs that has just joined in eagerly. For now I'll just concentrating on improving my Japanese language skills and maybe, I'm gonna do small projects such as translating various anime OP/ED clips.

Yes, even without wings, there exist a spell that can make me fly higher than yesterday, higher than everyone.

But,

ただしかし、しかしである、

小さな星の、小さな秘め事

誰も知らない秘密のキーワード

To me, it still remains a mystery, at least for now.

Sakamoto Maaya: 奇跡の海 (Kiseki No Umi)

This really beautiful song, from Record of Lodoss War anime series.

You can watch the TV-size version below, along with the original footage from the anime.

This song starts off with something like an African tribal chant (which continues just before the beginning of the verse), and then aura suddenly switches completely into Japanese.
Here, Maaya Sakamoto sings the distinctively Japanese melody with her falsetto voice. This style is much similar to Shikata Akiko's in 片翼の鳥 (Katayoku no Tori) or VII, minus the hectic atmosphere and intense-ear-exhausting choir from the latter two songs.
An image of a small, isolated island in Japan, with its forest and hills, and traditional Japanese houses, came into my mind the first time I hear the verse. Going further into the imagination, I could easily pictured out a Japanese girl on her kimono looking into the endless ocean. The refrain brought me on a journey in the high seas with her, into a far away land, where much more stories and dreams awaits.

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.

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.