One of the things I was most struck with in the US was that compared to Singapore, the bureaucratic maze which one needed to traverse before one receives a boon of some sort is far, far less onerous.

But this is merely a stopgap measure. I have managed to obtain a somewhat reliable means of accessing The Internets, but it is on an old laptop I have not used in a few years, and the haunting familiarity of the little sensations, such as the mere size of the keys on the keyboard (smaller than the usual desktop keyboard, obviously), leaves an odd feeling of unease that I would not be unhappy to see removed. To that end, I will either be using my desktop when it reaches its way to my doorstep via ocean freight, or buying a new and more powerful one. At this rate, what with Moore's Law, by the time I finally manage to settle down in one place for more than a few years at a time, I will probably be in possession of my very own Chobits.

The upshot of this is that while I may be in Singapore and technically able to resume my blogging schedule in a more rigid interpretation of ability, I would much rather be blogging on a computer I know that I will not be abandoning in a mere few weeks. And so I live in a sort of limbo, a digital purgatory where I can almost be able to blog to the full extent of my picture collection, but will still have the spectre of the looming move towards another computer, with only a CD-RW drive (no DVD burning capabilities, sadly) and a 128MB flash drive to mitigate the trauma.

Yes, I know I need to upgrade. That's why I got the new computer in the first place.

In any case, now that I'm back home in Singapore, I need to figure out what to do with this blog. (Well, I also need to figure out what to do with myself, but that's another matter, dreadfully lacking in anime concerns.) As previously mentioned, the large majority of my DVDs will be coming via ocean freight, and I am left with my CCS and Haruhi DVDs, which I did not want to leave to the vagaries of moving companies. Yes, they got severely banged about in luggage, but they're here and they're still quite intact.

After that, though, I am at a loss.

The primary obstacle, as many would probably already know, is the whole brouhaha over the currently infamous Odex vs Singaporean Downloaders spat. Now, I've made my views known many times before, to varying levels of interest, and so I will ennumerate them once more only if I were asked outright. It's all a matter of personal opinion anyway, considering it's not like I'm anything more than the ignorant prodigal returned to a troubled community, with strange ideas from foreign lands in his head.

But whatever my views, the fact remains that the wide and wondrous world of downloading the latest fansubs (or even just the raw shows) is, at least for the immediate future, closed off to me. Now, this blog, through more or less entirely faults of mine, does not, in fact, rely on having the Absolute Newest episodes from Japan, like a standard (by whose standard, I wonder?) episode summary blog. However, this does mean that my pool of sources of inspiration will turn rather shallower, as though the river has run dry, leaving mere puddles in the cracked riverbed. After all, I cannot really CHECK!Point pictures of characters I do not know willy-nilly, for fear that they may turn out to be something very much against my tastes. I am discerning with my CHECK!Points, which is why Tomoyo Daidouji from CCS gets the vast majority of them.

An alternative suggested to me is to purchase anime DVDs released in Singapore, which I deem to be unworkable. This is not because of complaints about the quality of the DVDs, which I have complained about and admit to be a major factor, but more because of the relatively more prosaic problem of region encoding. If there is a way to easily disable the region lock on a computer's DVD drive, please, please let me know.

So I am left with needing to buy DVDs from the US and importing them here. This results in a larger investment in time and money, which leads to a more stringent quality check of the series I wish to purchase. I have already set aside money for the last two Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya limited edition DVDs, but after that, I am at the mercy of others for reviews and personal impressions.

Also, it is rather difficult to talk about some particularly moe~ aspect of, say, Nanatsuiro Drops, if it has not been licenced and released in a Region 1 format.

The path I am considering quite seriously, in the manner of serious men in serious suits who speak seriously to each other about serious things, is of simply tapping down whatever observation I may have about some inane and trivial aspect of anime. This will likely lead to some post going "oh, don't you think that it's amazing how cute girls are so cute?" and then my readership will drop into negative imaginary numbers as regulars promptly sacrifice themselves to dark gods in order to wreak unholy vengeance upon my unworthy soul.

And updates will be quite sporadic, if that is indeed the path I shall tread. Very likely, if I were to continue my Two Posts A Week creed, I shall end up with eighteen posts with nothing but "hay guyz I found something cute on moe.imouto.org", followed by a five-page dissertation on the significance of hair ribbons which will amount merely to "hair ribbons are hair ribbons, and I find this fascinating." I doubt this is scintillating reading, but, as I have been told and reassured many times, this is My Blog, where I may write What I Want.

Overall, I suppose the entire point of all these ramblings is simply to say: I'm back. I'm in Singapore. I have no idea what I want to do now.

So it goes.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 8:32 am and is filed under admin, off-topic, ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.