eBay scares me

Posted by Maegane on January 24, 2010 at 2:36 PM
Filed under:  Shopping, eBay

Over 10 years ago, I was a trading card addict.  I had entire sets of Sailormoon cards, including rares, and Magic Knight Rayearth, Marmalade Boy, Evangelion, etc.  That kind of stopped when I realized I wanted graphic novels more than cards.  Nowadays, though, I want all kinds of BL merchandise and the habit’s started up again.

Of course, BL isn’t nearly as popular as any of those series were and card collecting fervor doesn’t seem to exist anymore, so stores around me don’t carry them.  So I am left with these two choices: lazily scouring eBay for sellers with fantastic merchandise and 98-100% positive feedback or diligently scouring forums and personal sites for what seems to be a reliable person to trade cards with.  Well, to start out, I have to go with the former so that I actually have cards to trade should I attempt to do the latter.

Read More »

Tagged:  ,
Permalink | RSS feed | Comments (4)

the kind of BL I don’t own

Posted by Maegane on January 4, 2010 at 3:48 AM
Filed under:  Boys Love

A friend told me she didn’t like Boys Love by Kaim Tachibana at all, so I thought, “I’ll probably like it.”  It’s not that I automatically like things she doesn’t (although it just seems like that in some cases), it’s just that when it comes to the BL genre, I generally like everything.  I joke around and say I’m a Sony fangirl or a nook fangirl sometimes, but it’s not actually true.  I don’t buy all of Sony’s products, don’t even want all of Sony’s products, complain about Sonic Stage, and haven’t even ordered a nook yet; I’m just a normal fan of these things.  When it comes to boys love, however, I am a fangirl; there is practically nothing I don’t like and I will stubbornly defend the greatness of even the most generic or strange titles.  If it’s in English and I don’t own it, it’s because it is one of the following:

Part of the starring couple is so girly that he is indistinguishable from a girl unless naked. Okay, haha, yes, all of them seem girly to you non-BL fans; I’ve heard you snickering in the store.  Just imagine how feminine-like they’d have to be in order to make even a fangirl like me consider them girly then.

It’s too mature for me. By mature, I don’t mean there’s too much sex; the atmosphere of it is too adult.  I can’t feel the all-encompassing, fantastical love that I’m looking for when I read this genre, just the melancholy of life.  Est Em’s works, Let Dai by Sooyeon Won, and possibly Dining Bar Akira by Tomoko Yamashita (based on a quick flip at the store, I’m leaning towards “too mature”, but I’m still contemplating it) are a few examples.

That all being said, I’m not saying I wouldn’t read any of those things; I’m just saying I wouldn’t want to own any of it.  If I bought one not knowing what I was getting into, I’d probably sell it after reading and finding out.  I’d be disappointed, but more so that I spent the money to buy it and made shelf space for it rather than actually having read it.  After all, if I picked it myself, there must be at least a little something I liked in it and I am easily entertained.  If I bought everything that entertained me, however, I’d be more than broke and probably wouldn’t have any empty space left.

I am about to make a not-so-vague comment about the end of the Boys Love graphic novel, which is the same as the end of the Boys Love movie, so if you’d like to not be able to guess the end of either the manga or the movie, you shouldn’t continue reading this post.

Read More »

Tagged:  ,
Permalink | RSS feed | Comments (0)

I’d rather have a Borders e-reader

Posted by Maegane on December 28, 2009 at 1:19 AM
Filed under:  nook

Harboring a deep jealousy that B&N is more popular than Borders, I would of course prefer that the nook had come from Borders instead.  In fact, I even would have preferred that the Amazon’s e-reader was the nook instead of the Kindle because I like shopping at Amazon more than B&N.  Life never works out the way people want it to, though, so there won’t be any e-reader devices from Borders, just e-reading applications, and Amazon’s e-reader still refuses to work with any DRM but its own.

For just a few golden days, however, I thought maybe my favorite bookstore was finally going to make a device I currently crave.  Sure, with just the sparse information in that post, the supposed e-reading device could have turned out the worst of the bunch when it finally came about, but I was expecting a lot out of it.  After all, Borders has some great technological touches, such as the coupon text codes (before the service was “temporarily suspended”), e-mailed coupons (which B&N has, too), a way to track loyalty points and apply them to purchases in which people forgot their cards (which I think I saw at Best Buy or a similar store)…on second thought, the technological touches aren’t so great after all, but I still expected a lot out of it just for being my favorite bookstore.

Tagged:  , , ,
Permalink | RSS feed | Comments (0)

I want a nook, so I almost ordered a Kindle

Posted by Maegane on December 13, 2009 at 8:03 PM
Filed under:  nook

Before the announcement of the nook, I didn’t want a dedicated e-reader.  Well, that’s not true; I kind of sort of wanted one, but I kind of sort of want a lot of things, such as a Hello Kitty TV.  Doesn’t mean I’m going to go out and buy one, though, since hundreds of dollars can buy a lot of things that will entertain me for more than the ten minutes of fascination I would have with the kittyfied TV and bowified remote.

Then nook came along, looking cute, shunning the need for connection software, and equipped with a user-replaceable battery.  My “I kind of sort of want an e-reader” attitude turned into an “omg nook is awesome and someday I will have it” attitude.  That “someday” was supposed to translate into “whenever nook 2 comes out and original nook gets a price drop”, but that’s now changed to “whenever a NYC B&N has it in stock”.

Read More »

Tagged:  , ,
Permalink | RSS feed | Comments (0)

T> Crisis Core PSP for Nook

Posted by Maegane on November 30, 2009 at 12:29 AM
Filed under:  nook

Please don’t take the topic title seriously.  I mean, yes, I’d seriously trade it for a Nook, but I’d do so by selling it on eBay or something, not ask that you trust me enough to send me a payment on a generic blog post.  (By the way, I’d also trade it for a Makoto Tateno limited edition cell.)

The ballpark release date for the first wave of Nook is tomorrow/today, which raises my desire for this non-ebil device significantly.  It connects via USB as mass storage!  Okay, so I’m probably the only one that really sees this as an exciting feature, but after finding a lot of good reading apps for eBiLpod and then having to pass on them because they required wi-fi to upload the files I wanted to read to somewhere else first and then to eBiLpod, it’s thrilling to think of being able to just get my files from my computer to my device.  Wi-fi should be a supplemental feature, not a required one.

Going totally off the topic of Nook for a moment, the lack of simple features, such as USB transfer of files for ebil apps and being able to save and view offline webpages on eBiLdevice is one of the newer reasons I hate Apple.

Back to Nook, I can’t justify spending $260 since it’s not something I need nor does it enhance my hobbies.  Yes, reading is a hobby of mine, but unless I borrow 10+ books every time I go to the library (I don’t…anymore), it’s not that big of an improvement.  If all the major publishers of BL started releasing their graphic novels as e-books (proprietary Kindle format doesn’t count, DMP), then I might give up the money because I’ve run out of shelf space several times and had to reorganize, but for now I’ll wait for the price to go down to something more fitting of a person who mostly just borrows all her reading material from the library and has bought maybe two non-graphic novels in the past five years.

Nook alternatives I’ve considered:

eBookwise 1150–Rejected because I suspect it doesn’t look as paper-like as the newer e-readers.

Aluratek Libre–Same as above, except replace “newer” with “more expensive”.

Tagged:  , , ,
Permalink | RSS feed | Comments (0)

eBiLpod’s makeover

Posted by Maegane on November 23, 2009 at 3:30 AM
Filed under:  eBiLpod


When iPods first came out, I actually wanted one.  Now, I hate iPods and most things Apple.

Analyzing myself in a faux psychological way, it probably all goes way back to when iTunes was bundled with Quick Time and would take up most of my tiny hard drive’s space with its lengthy, many megabyte install.  Then I’d have to do a lengthy, many megabyte uninstall just to get my hard drive space back.

Some time later, the Shuffle came out and the iPod was hyped almost more than I could bear.  ”Oh, I don’t need to see the screen anyway, this is a brilliant idea!”  Hey, I don’t disagree on that point; a player that does away with non-essential features for a cheaper price, great.  However, it wasn’t really a cheaper price.  Other players from other companies offered the same capacity and same size with a screen and for the same price.  So really, people were paying the same amount of money for less features, yet still calling it great.

Coming around to present times, iTunes has gone DRM-free, yet I still can’t purchase music without having to install the behemoth that is iTunes, whether I use an iPod or not.  Yes, behemoth.  Compared to the tiny, unobtrusive thing Amazon makes me install, iTunes is Godzilla.  Sure, iTunes does things, such as actually play music, but I already have a program that plays music just fine and doesn’t take minutes to open on an old laptop.

It’s for all that, plus a few miscellaneous reasons, that I call it ebil and I can’t bring myself to say that I actually like the iPod Touch, even though the custom skinned thing you see up there belongs to me.  In fact, I refuse to even acknowledge I own one.  It’s not an iPod; it’s an eBiLpod!

By the way, the whole point of this post was really just to show off the skin that I custom ordered from GelaSkins; the rant is a bonus.  Consider the cute case under eBiLpod from Smile Recipe a second bonus.

Tagged:  , , , , , ,
Permalink | RSS feed | Comments (0)