Do You Remember?

"No matter how old we are, there's a kid deep inside our own heart" - Vaux


Recently, I watched something that makes me remember my sweet childhood memories. Those days were fun, playing hard all days long and couldn't care any lesser with life problems.

Back then, playing games refers to an actual physical activities. I've played lot of games in the past such as tag, spinning tops, marbles, baling selipar, konda-kondi, lawan pemadam and lot more that I can't remember the names.

Then, comes Dash Yankuro's racing cars that runs using small magnetic motors. Tamiya is expensive so I bought the cheap RM 7 Audi brand instead. I still remember the time when my friend and I tried to make the car runs faster by tweaking the engine - adding more wires and put extra magnets inside it but the truth is, we don't even know what we're doing. It's a miracle the car still works after all that so called 'upgrades'.

We don't have cool handphones like kids nowdays but there's Tamagochi and the famous 1st generation Digimon device. It's a must have item for kids that time. Well, at first I do raise my digital pet carefully but there's a time when I just slide the plastic strip that can reset the device repeatedly, press the 3 buttons randomly and taaadaaah - a new fully grown up digimon appears.

TV shows such as Gaban, Showa era Kamen Riders, Cybercops or even cartoons like Doraemon, Dragon Ball, Voltron, Captain Planet are a must watch even if I had to secretly skip my afternoon Sekolah Agama session and watch it at my friend's house.

I know that my childhood and yours might not be the same but if you're born in the 80s, this is roughly what you went through for your childhood.

Now, kids prefer to just stay at home watching TV or goes to Cyber Cafe playing games but not all of them are like that. I personally never see kids playing games like I used to back when I was a kid myself. Maybe, the new technology age changes the kid's preference and the old games only alive in our memories.

This Is War !!

"I'm hoping that the manga publisher team won't hunt down every online manga sites and shut them down as well or else, I won't be able to read my mangas anymore!" - Vaux

Yes, I've said that on my last blog entry. Looks like I'm right, again. The 36 publishers in Japan's Digital Comic Association and several American publishers are forming a coalition to combat the rampant and growing problem of scanlations - illicit digital copies of manga either translated by fans or scanned directly from legitimate English releases.

If that's not enough, the coalition reportedly threatening legal action against 30 scanlation sites just to make their point crystal clear. Few of the scanlation sites has been taken down, willingly or not.

My favorite site, One Manga willingly removes all their series content but not all sites are doing so, thus comes the legal action. Few sites such as Mangatoshokan already removes their licensed series just to be on the safe spot, for now. Nagareboshi that serves mainly shoujo manga already raise their white flag.

The coalition asserts that scanlation aggregator sites now host thousands of pirated titles, earning ad revenue and/or membership dues at creators' expense while simultaneously undermining foreign licensing opportunities and unlawfully cannibalizing legitimate sales.

Sure, we can just obey and start buying legitimate manga release but how many of us are actually willing to do so? As I always practice - why pay if you can get it for free? There'll always be a hardcore who'll find a way around, but the appeal of these aggregations sites isn't just that they are free, it's also that they are easy. The question is, will this just be aimed at the aggregators or will they also try and cut off some of the more popular scanlations at the source?



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It was a great run and it was fun while it last. Like those cliche' movie lines - "You can run but you can't hide".

They can't stop the internet, but they're welcome to try!