Super-Expat faces a real dilemma here. Super-Expat loves comics... *ahem*, graphic novels. Yet Super-Expat also loves the money for which he works somewhat diligently. But comics... *ahem*, graphic novels cost much monero. Thank God who may or may not exist for scanners and scanslaters. Super-Expat promises to support creators as soon as he earns enough to support himself. And while free comics usually makes Super-Expat creepily happy, last week Super-Expat found a free comic website that made him very angry.
Said website is stealing the illegal work of scanslators for hundreds, nay thousands of Japanese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong and other manga / comics, and posting them online in an attempt to make money from the ads. Getting to the comics means navigating through several website address jumps with each page doing its best ad-pimp impression. And then rather than a download, each comic page must be loaded one by one in an attempt by the naughty site to maximize page clicks. And of course no contact information is available and a whois domain search is completely useless. GRRRR....
But of course, Super-Expat has no right to be angry. Super-Expat may not try to make money off of illegally-scanned and downloaded comics, but Super-Expat isn't helping solve the problem by participating in the free exchange of comic bits and bytes. Inevitably this was going to happen. Perhaps the only thing to do is to not download the comics from that particular site. The Pirate Bay it is!
Those interested can visit the site by solving this wonderfully annoying code:
wwwdoteveryone'sfavoritevowelandromanizationofchineseforcomicdotcom
(Warning, if successful, link may direct to a site with content inappropriate for those under 18-years of age or get off uncontrollably at the site of scantily clad manga women. Site is also in simplified Chinese.)
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Or to be more accurate, fourth. As in fourth attempt to maintain a social-networking tool. Friendster, Xanga, Facebook... tried them all. All have died tortured, unrefreshed deaths. Actually the Facebook account still lives, albeit only in a lonely, unfeeling coma.
Undoubtedly maintaining this social web would be pretty helpful for Super-Xpat in this new "networked" society--in the long run. Especially if Super-Xpat plans to quit Expat's day job. It just seems strange to obsess with blogging, twittering, texting, plurking, deifying Al Gore and so on, instead of really doing stuff to help the world. But Super-Xpat is no liberal hippie. Only self-hating, conservative, expat supremacist.
So Subscribe to Super-Xpat Feed! Be My Friend!
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