Beloved Broadband and the Anime Craze

Once again I am home safely with Dustin. The visit with my family was nice, but I am very, very happy to be back into the world of fast internet connections. To all of you out there that are still using dialup, you have my sympathy. I almost think the week I spent with my Dad with no internet was better than the pain of having internet that was too slow to use. Maybe I’m just not a patient enough person or maybe I’m just spoiled into thinking when I click on a page, it should load sometime this century.

Anyhow, enough ranting. The real reason I’m so happy to be back to broadband is that I can once again get up to date with the anime I missed. I am not really one of those strangely obsessed, scary, anime-is-my-life fans, but I do have a couple of shows that I like. Seeing as how I am still able to communicate with the outside world, I feel that it is my duty to enlighten you to some of the great anime showing in Japan right now.

While I don’t really have a favorite anime, there are three currently airing in Japan that I’ve been sucked into. There are, of course, many more than three actually showing but these are the ones that caught my eye. I could give you a summary of the plot, but I’ve decided I’m just too darn lazy to do it. So you can do what I do when I want to know about a new anime. Go to http://www.animenfo.com/ type the name in the handy dandy search box and voila! information. If that anime hasn’t been licensed in the U.S., it’ll even tell you some of the groups fansubbing it (more on that later). Finally, what you have all been waiting for–the list: Chrno Crusade, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Inuyasha. If any of you happened to watch Inuyasha on Cartoon Network, purge that horrible dub from your mind and download it in the original Japanese.

If you don’t speak Japanese, don’t worry. There are hundreds of groups out there that will get the anime from Japan and subtitle it so all of us English speakers can understand it. Most, if not all, do it for free. Very nice of them, huh? The following are my current three favorite fansub groups:

http://www.animeforever.org/ (Chrno Crusade, beginning of Fullmetal Alchemist)
http://www.anime-kraze.net/ (Chrno Crusade, Scrapped Princess, Last Exile, Inuyasha)
http://a.scarywater.net/sonchou/ (later episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist)

Alright, now that you know where to begin, you need to know how to actually get the anime. The easiest way is to use bittorrent. My favorite bittorent client is TorrentStorm (http://www.torrentstorm.com/). Just look around on the sites above until you find the releases section and click the bittorent links. Easy as pie. The other way, and generally faster way, especially for newer anime, is to download it from IRC. If you have no idea what IRC is, then you probably want to stick with bittorent, at least in the beginning. For those who know what it is, the three sites above all have channels on irc.rizon.net and most have really fast xdcc bots.

On a totally unrelated note, Dustin and I have been playing a new computer game called Sacred. Dustin has written up a little review and it’s well worth your time to go read it:

Every Bug is Sacred

Edit: Updated Animeforever’s links to point to the new site at Animeforever.org.