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Own Your Digital Manga (and Comics), part 3a

Part 1 discussed the Good Guys, digital comic services that let you own what you buy; part 2 covered services that let you take ownership of your purchases if you’re willing to do a little work (though maybe they don’t intend for things to work that way). What remains are the services that make it genuinely hard to actually own what you pay for; sadly that seems to be a lot of these services – too many for me to cover in one post. So this time I’ll talk about just one (even thought the backup technique I describe will be useful for a number of others) – the whole reason I’m rushing to write this series now: Jmanga.

Why is Jmanga the motivation for me to write all this down right now? Well, they’re a digital manga provider that 1) gave people access to a lot of titles we weren’t and aren’t likely to get otherwise, 2) provided access to read their comics only through a Flash app on their website (so there was no local download and no real mobile applications, and 3) announced 2 weeks back without any warning that they’re shutting down. In other words, this is suddenly kind of urgent. How urgent? Well, Jmanga required you to buy points with money and spend points to buy manga. Their shutdown dates are:

  • 3/13 no longer able to buy more points
  • 3/26 last day to spend points on new manga purchases; any remaining points after this date will be refunded as an Amazon gift card
  • 5/30 last day to read comics on the service

Yeah, “shutting down” means all the stuff you purchased goes away. Unless there’s a way to back stuff up. Also, if there’s a way to keep from losing access to the manga you bought, it might actually be worthwhile to spend your remaining Jmanga points instead of wait and get the gift card. But the time to make that decision is, uh, right now.

So there’s the question: is there a reasonable way to hold on to your Jmanga purchases? And the answer here applies to a lot of these digital comic services: yeah, kind of. UPDATE: the answer is “yes, install Python and use the script at http://pastebin.com/gbzdbaN7” (I’ll be testing it later). The process below may continue to be useful for other services.

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Own Your Digital Manga (and Comics), part 2

Picking up from part 1, we’re talking about the digital comic providers I thing of as Hearts of Gold, ones that sell you something that you can genuinely take ownership of and use as you will if you’ll just jump through a few hoops first. As before, I’m assuming the list below (and the instructions for jumping through hoops) is incomplete – feel free to let me know what services or steps for saving your stuff I should add.

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Own Your Digital Manga (and Comics), part 1

Jmanga just announced it’ll be pining for the fjords in the near future, and since it’s basically a viewer that lets you read but not download manga that means all the money people have spent on it “buying” manga is going to go away, along with the manga they supposedly bought. No surprise then that folks are looking at other digital manga (and comics) outfits they’ve bought into or been looking at and wondering if they’re all as ephemeral. They aren’t – I see 3 different groups here: Good Guys (who actually sell you something that you own regardless of what happens to the service afterward), Hearts of Gold (who also sell you something you own and can keep using…if you’ll just jump through a few hoops), and Problem Children (who make it as hard as possible to actually own what you’ve bought). I’ll only discuss the first group this time around.

Incidentally, I don’t think any of these lists is complete as-is: if you’re aware of more services that belong on any of them let me know and I’ll see about updating them.

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AnimeLA con report part 3 – Tokyopop panel

Guidebook lists the title for this panel as TOKYOPOP – Past, Present & Future. It seemed to me that the “Past” part was mostly an apologia for the company’s shutdown in 2011, and possibly to build up credibility for the idea that Tokyopop has a future given where they presently are.

I tried to get pictures of some of the slides just to be sure I wasn’t misrepresenting anything that was said, but smartphone photos from the back of the room aren’t the greatest. Sorry about that.

Past
Stu Levy was actually at the mike for the panel to introduce himself to the audience and do most of the talking (at least in the beginning). He had an introductory slide claiming, (on the first line of his bio) “Born in LA (1967), old-school geek cred.” He claimed that “[w]e had sort of the Myspace of manga before Facebook was even around,” which sounded like he was trying to sell the story of Tokyopop-as-innovator, but ended up sounding like a desperate attempt to claim credit for something they didn’t pull off successfully.

In regards to the shutdown, Stu argued that there were a number of causes: 20130216-135532.jpg

Discussion was focused on the last 3: the effect of the economic crisis was that Tokyopop went from a staff 90 people to 35 in a single day. With regards to scanlations, Stu didn’t seem to be interested in assigning blame: he admitted to reading them himself as a lead-in to asking for a show of hands from audience members who also read scanlations. He went on to pose the challenge that had stumped Tokyopop as well as other publishers: how do you sell a volume of manga to somebody who’s already read it digitally?

The greatest single factor that lead to Tokyopop’s closure was the end of Borders. According to Stu, Borders owed Tokyopop 7 figures when they shut down (they owed big publishers like Random House about $40M). The issue was ultimately about a cash flow crunch, coupled with the inability to find investors in a bad economy; excess debt was NOT an issue – as Stu pointed out “Tokyopop never went bankrupt.”

Stu also explained how Tokyopop as we knew it was done for even before the Tohoku quake; he had to travel to Japan to tell publishers there that Tokyopop would no longer be able to publish their titles. The trip was on March 9, 2011, the meetings were on the 10th, and the earthquake on the 11th, so it wasn’t a factor in the decision to shut down Tokyopop.

Present and Future
Because Tokyopop shut down rather than going bankrupt, it still exists as a “virtual company”. Once they got through 2011 they could start working on what they hoped would lead to the revival of TP; they mentioned (and pushed) the newsletter run by Nerdist: 20130216-141816.jpg

They also mentioned that there was a new Tokyopop website as of today (Sunday, Jan 6 2013); the site had been in development through the Friday night prior (1/4). Suggestions or requests for improvement can be send to info@tokyopop.com.

In terms of additional net presence, they’re looking at relaunching their Youtube channel in about a month and a half, probably partnering with Nerdist on that just as on their newsletter.

That’s all well and good, but what about the product people most associated with Tokyopop: manga? Stu discussed trying to continue manga via Print on Demand (POD), ebooks, and Kickstarter, but the first point he made was that there were rights issues that had to be solved first – when Tokyopop shut down back in 2011, they had to basically surrender publication rights back to the Japanese publishers. Getting rights back or getting rights to new series was difficult because relations with Japanese publishers were tricky now – they’d been stung once, and weren’t eager to take any more chances. Stu said that their best relationship at the moment was with Hetalia’s publisher Gentosha; discussions with them regarding Hetalia 4 and 5 were ongoing.

The manga portion is also where Stu brought co-panelist Daniela Orihuela-Gruber into the conversation. They discussed how Rightstuf had approached Tokyopop to start POD, and they talked about publishing digitally via Comixology (tried to measure support for the idea by taking pictures of a before-and-after show of hands: who uses Comixology now, vs. who would use it if Tokyopop manga were available there). It sounded like digital publishing would cover Bizenghast and other OEL titles as well as manga; more precisely, it sounded like discussions were ongoing and things weren’t settled yet.

Daniela fielded a few questions about manga in particular: what about cancelled series, will other series be brought back, and what about any new series? In regards to cancelled series – they’d be slow to be brought back, because as Stu mentioned negotiations with publishers would be needed for each title. In addition, licensing discontinuing or new series was dependent on Tokyopop finding some way to see there’s a demand for the title. Stu interjected that they were thinking about using Kickstarter in that role. When I asked how that would work, the process Stu described was that Tokyopop would get title requests from fans. They’d then go talk to publishers, and get the publisher’s permission to post a Kickstarter for that title, along with a commitment from the publisher to license the title to TP if the Kickstarter succeeds. Stu cited Digital Manga’s success with their Tezuka manga Kickstarter projects (as examples of how the process would work, and of its viability).

They also discussed a couple other things they were working on (some already mentioned above).
20130216-142439.jpg

They’re offering merchandise through CafePress. There’s a small boutique of items at the moment, but mentioned that they’d be happy if fans sent in any ideas for new items.

Film and TV projects would most likely be OEL, though they do have those rights for a very few Japanese series. Stu acknowledged that OEL titles mostly didn’t sell very well, but he said that film companies and TV networks saw story potential in some of them (he didn’t provide any specific titles).

And that was pretty much it for the presentation. After that they went to trivia for prizes and Q&A, but I had to leave at that point.

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Item Saving Throws Players Might Want to Use

Older editions of D&D bring up the idea that some circumstances can cause the items you’re carrying to be destroyed. Rather than track HP for each of your possessions, this was generally handled by having the item make a saving throw under certain circumstances against whatever threatened it; in 1st edition at least, items had their own saving throw categories, distinct from those used by creatures, and with target numbers dependent on the item’s composition.

This approach seems OK except for a few things: first, the amount of dice-rolling and tracking that has to be done can get overwhelming fast (since for a given attack you have to figure out what items might have been affected and then have to go through and make saves for each), and second because it makes certain types of attacks (especially large area physical attacks like Fireball spells) even more devastating, as they’re likely to destroy at least some of your (magic?) equipment as well as injure your character. 3rd edition tried to handle this by only having one item targeted, and then only on a botched save; that’s a bit of an improvement but it comes up rarely enough that its easier to ignore the rule altogether, and since the character has already failed their save it still seems like adding insult to injury.

Here’s another idea: whenever a character has to make a save against something, they can nominate a piece of equipment that could reasonably (defined relative to the campaign setting) take at least part of the attack and thus help protect them from some of the trauma (armor might protect from a Fireball, a Ring of Protection from a death curse, a metal weapon might take the Lightning Bolt for you, etc.). If the DM agrees, the player rolls 2 saving throws; the higher roll is used for the character, the lower roll for the item according to however item saves are handled. If the item fails its save it is visibly ruined (the silver Ring of Protection that falls to a curse may instantly tarnish and even fall away into nothingness, the sword into which the lightning bolt grounds may become a useless lump of metal), but if it succeeds then no significant harm is done.

The effect of this rule is to give a player something for risking their equipment, which means you’re more likely to see items lost or damaged even as the character lives on (though of course it’s possible for both saves to fail…); similarly it encourages PCs not to resort to just blowing up the enemy lest some of their own future treasure be damaged. It also keeps the dice-rolling and accounting limited without hopefully making it so rare that the rule is totally forgotten. The one thing it doesn’t try to handle is keeping players aware of the fragility of their equipment in general – of how a fall into a pit may cause potion vials to shatter, for example.

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AnimeLA con report part 2 – Funimation panels

I believe I’ve heard it said that one sign of a good con is how many different places you’d like to be at the same time throughout. By this measure, AnimeLA was pretty good: I often wanted to be in at least two places at once. So even though Funimation representative Sully held maybe 5 panels over the weekend I only made it to parts of 2 of them:

Funi industry panel (on Friday)
This was a pretty straightforward industry panel of the kind you’d read about at Anime Expo – talk up the company, show some trailers, talk about upcoming releases, Q&A as time permits. Points that stood out to me:

  • Kamisama Kiss is Funi’s most popular streaming title ever
  • Funi app in development for new Samsung TVs.
  • Funi is getting original Black Lagoon dub cast together for Roberta’s Blood Trail
  • Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine release due “before the end of the year”, featuring Sonny Strait as Lupin. No mention was made of other dub casting for the show.
  • Tenchi War on Geminar (aka Issekai no Seikishi Monogatari aka Saint Knight) probably out before summer
  • One Piece Strong World due out this year, per #AnimeLA FUNimation panel.

Funimation Town Hall (on Sunday)
This panel was a little more behind the scenes in terms of Funimation’s process, business philosophy, numbers, etc. – it didn’t seem designed to provide information for any press in attendance so much as to help fans get a sense for how things work (and so Funi could hear about fans’ concerns). Of course, all this was done in a fairly high-level and diplomatic no-names-will-be-named way. Here’s what I got out of it

  • On Fansubbers: “Even now, a lot of fansubbers aren’t breaking the law” – meaning that w/o a US licensor, only the Japanese can go after fansubbers, so it’s (effectively?) legal. The upshot of this is that Funimation tries to announce their licenses ASAP so they can keep fansubs for a show from getting entrenched.
  • Working with rights holders: Chaos;Head took a long time to release – that was apparently due to a horrific art approval process. Funimation’s philosophy is that they want to maintain a good relationship with rights-holders, so they’ll never jump the gun; if they license a show and are told to sit on it, they’ll do so indefinitely – they said something about always seeking permission rather than forgiveness, and how if told to jump they’d ask “how high?”. Funi views these good relationships as key to the reason they’re still around and some other anime companies aren’t
  • Workflow: Funimation is transitioning to getting more of their material digitally on hard drives and in native HD. Apparently upscaling SD video can cost months (because of quality check iterations? They didn’t explain how that worked). I noticed that even getting materials digitally still seemed to involve moving physical drives around rather than just setting up some sort of file transfer. Sully also mentioned that the dubbing process itself is about 60% of the production time for a show.
  • Releases: “Physical media is going to remain a large part of our business paradigm for a long time to come.” Funimation mentioned that they try not to release anything on HD unless it looks markedly different than on SD, so if they don’t have High Def materials they’ll only upscale the SD stuff if they’re high enough quality to support the upscale. Some shows aren’t – they were shocked that FLCL was worth upscaling. They’re also aware of issues with their streaming services, and are working out kinks with the Roku app in particular; they’re also in the middle of refactor ALL the Funimation apps (including funimation.com
  • Outreach: “Both Trigun and Summer Wars did very well theatrically” (meaning that they were profitable – Funi’s theatrical runs are usually more promotional than directly profit-oriented). As far as con support goes, they have a program called No Cons Left Behind, but even so the proliferation of conventions with 1000+ attendees is challenging to support – when Funi started trying to support cons they were looking at a few hundred of them nationwide, and now they’re apparently dealing with thousands (I’m not sure if I heard this correctly). Sully indicated that she’d personally attended something like 37 cons in the last year. She also said that Funimation hoped to be back at AnimeLA next year (2014).
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AnimeLA 9 con report part 1

Anime director Masaaki YUASA was at AnimeLA on Saturday as an industry guest and the highlight of a couple panels. Since a lot of folks can’t exactly make it out to Los Angeles immediately after New Year’s for a mid-size con, I figured I might as well write up what little I could remember of his panels. It’s worth noting that Yuasa-san was in town around this time for the dub recording for his crowd-funded short Kick-Heart and that his ability to be at the con was more of a happy coincidence.

His first panel of the night was Anime Production in Japan. Other guest were Eunyoung CHOI (color coordinator and an animator on Kick-Heart), and Maki TERASHIMA-FURUTA, Vice President of Production IG, LLC (Production IG’s US branch). The panel itself was mostly a Q&A session after a few initial announcements – that Yuasa-san was at AnimeLA on Saturday only, but that he was in the US through next Saturday, and that IG hoped to bring him to the US for another convention this year (they weren’t ready to announce which one just yet, though after the panel Maki did seem to spend a fair amount of time talking to SPJA CEO Marc Perez, so perhaps Anime Expo is under consideration).

  • The goal was to have the Kick-Heart premiere for backers be the world premiere (meaning among other things that it hasn’t premiered in Japan yet)
  • On animation production (not a big part of this panel, despite the title): some amount of animation work in Japan is done by people working from their home rather than in the studio, but they collaborate by mailing around pieces of paper and the like rather than by emailing files
  • Yuasa-san said that as a child he was inspired by shows like Yamato and Mazinger Z and Castle of Cagliostro. He wanted to be an animator even as a child, and can’t imagine what he’d want to do if he hadn’t become one.

The panel was well-attended: with perhaps 37 of 45 seats filled. At the end of the panel Yuasa-san signed some autographs and drew a few sketches (though this had to be cut short due to time limitations), but he did manage to get his picture taken with some of the Kaiba cosplayers in attendance:

20130127-014304.jpg

Yuasa-san’s second panel of the night was Kick-Heart Crowd Funded Anime

20130127-011538.jpg
left to right in my poor-quality photo above: Stephen Weese, Maki TERASHIMA-FURUTA, Eunyoung CHOI, Masaaki YUASA, Richard Epcar, Ellyn Stern. Also sort of in the photo in the front row are some of the backers who were selected to be in the fan dub, though you probably can’t identify the back of their heads…

This panel was more panelist-driven, with the discussion largely driven by Richard and Steve (who worked on the dub along with Epcar Productions). I apologize that my notes from the panel are so fragmentary, but here’s what I remember:

  • Paypal pledges to Kick-Heart after the Kickstarter closed are still coming in even as of the time of the panel; the total amount of money raised at that point was about $230-250K
  • One of the issues encountered with Japanese backers interested in backing the project is that they aren’t used to entering their credit card information for online orders (I understand they often use some other form of payment for ecommerce). Kickstarter requires credit cards through Amazon, but Paypal doesn’t so it seems like Japanese backers were more likely to pledge via Paypal than through Kickstarter.
  • From what Maki said, it sounds like the 10-minute Kick-Heart film (now 12 minutes) was originally intended as a trailer to raise money for a feature-length film. This might explain why early stretch goals for the project had held out the possibility of extending the film to 40 minutes or even a feature-length production if enough money could be raised.
  • Asked about what creative freedom crowd-funding provides, Yuasa-san said that it didn’t alter any decisions he would have made; it just made it possible to produce an animated short film, which is quite hard to do in Japan these days.
  • Richard asked Yuasa-san if he got the idea for Kick-Heart by being a fan of pro-wrestling…or perhaps of masochism? Yuasa-san said that as a child he watched and was a fan of Tiger Mask, and that although he isn’t personally interested in S&M it fascinates him as an idea.
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Doors and locks

A poster at RPGNet asked for ways to describe certain types of challenges in-setting, rather than with just game statistics. Since all this was for a D&D(-like) game, the discussion was mostly for concrete descriptions of dungeon obstacles. I contributed these ideas:

Door materials

  1. Glass
  2. Wooden, flimsy – a door whose strength is compromised due to thinness, poor construction, weak materials, existing damage, etc.
  3. Wooden, sturdy
  4. Wooden, reinforced – a door of superior strength owing to some factor like some slightly exceptional wood, excessive thickness, metal banding, or the like
  5. Stone (you can probably apply the flimsy/sturdy/reinforced modifiers here under some circumstances)
  6. Concrete (useful in Roman-like settings, where stone is desired but too expensive given demand)
  7. Bronze
  8. Iron
  9. Mithril
  10. Diamond
  11. Adamantine (you may want to swap these last two)

As a general note I’d assume most doors in day-to-day life are wooden, with the door being sturdy if it’s intended to secure rather than merely partition one area from another and if material circumstances permit it (for example, exterior doors of dwellings would ideally be sturdy, but in the slums things may be run-down or otherwise of low enough quality to be considered flimsy).

On the Diamond/Adamantine order – I think D&D would like to hold adamantine as being at least a peer to diamond, if not its superior. Personally I prefer a sort of medieval way of thinking about it, where diamond is sort of like “true gold” (which was supposedly transparent and lined the streets of Heaven IIRC), or the noblest alchemical material, or something like that. Well, and I’m also nostalgic for the materials in Bard’s Tale, where the progression went MTHR -> ADMT -> DMND.

Lock types

I spent a while reading up on these via Wikipedia and some short histories of locksmithing, and one of the first things that was brought up is that locks mostly serve to buy time; a lock may be difficult to bypass surreptitiously, but if you don’t have to worry about the disturbance you create brute force can defeats all sorts of clever lock design (by e.g. drilling out the lock). So these entries are in order of increasing difficulty of surreptitious entry – blocking forced entry is a matter of special material, traps, or other circumstances.

  1. Warded lock (can be bypassed by a skeleton key – this is basically the type of lock that anybody with proper equipment and basic training should be able to bypass by Taking 10). This would be the Rusty or Worn Lock category suggested by Frecus
  2. Pin tumbler lock (the usual type of lock that everyone thinks of picking; Frecus’s Simple Lock)
  3. Disc tumbler lock (can’t be bumped, so much harder to pick than pin tumbler locks. Intricate Lock)
  4. Double acting tumbler lock (series of internal levers – the tumblers – falls into a slot on the bolt; bolt yields only if each of the tumblers is raised to the correct height, neither too low nor too high). Masterwork lock?
  5. Detector lock – designed to detect attempts to open it with incorrect keys or by lockpicking attempts and to take a specific action (this could be used to trigger various traps – comes from the Chubb detector lock, which historically was a Masterwork lock or beyond (it took over 3 decades for the first successful picking attempt; many other locksmiths were unable to do so); its “false key” action was to jam in a locked position until a special key was used to undo the jam.
  6. Bramah’s Safety Lock – I’d have to read about the mechanism more in order to describe it (see http://www.lockpicking101.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=47793), but among other things it removes feedback from individual pins. Over half a century passed before first successful picking attempt, despite a large prize offering; the attempt took 51 hours over 16 days; this would make it even further beyond a Masterwork lock than the Detector lock. Edit: the specific instance of Bramah’s Safety Lock that took all this time to pick was the Challenge Lock; if you want a more generic name (one that doesn’t involve a proper noun) you might use that.

That’s as close as I can find to a progression of lock-picking difficulty. You can create variations by coming up with complicating factors, e.g.

  • Time-lock clock: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_lock) – some measurement of time – or perhaps another external condition – is taken, and the lock can only be operated when the condition is met. This is a good place to put magic in a lock, since the magic just detects a condition; simply nullifying the magic means the condition isn’t detected and the lock remains inoperable.
  • Biometric lock (measures some biological qualities/quantities of the person opening it – perhaps the hand is used as a key, with certain finger lengths being used to lift pins; one might imagine a lock that assumes polydactyly, perhaps one for members of the royal family)
  • Magnetic-coded lock – in addition to mechanically-operated pins, there are permanent magnetic pins matched to magnetic bits in the key. These bits drive the pins purely magnetically – they’re mechanically isolated. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-coded_lock). Note that keys for this sort of lock can’t be reproduced by taking an impression or otherwise by sight (unless you can see magnetic fields)
  • Combination lock (no exposed keyway = no lock picking per se, though these are by no means proof against surreptitious entry)
  • Multiple locks – specifically, a set of 2 or more locks where the key has to be operated simultaneously (as seen in Wargames, for example). Quite difficult for a human to pick if the locks are far enough apart or if there are more than 2 of them.
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