Friday, July 4, 2008

Bingo At Sea?

Under the G for Great Holiday. Bingo players can take their passion for the game to new heights by enjoying play aboard most of the worlds finest cruise lines. Now a featured form of entertainment, Bingo is offered day and night in many of the show lounges aboard ship with prizes ranging from cash jackpots to complete cruise packages.

In addition to being a standard offering on board, many Bingo players get together and cruise together sharing their passion on Bingo specific cruises. As an example, the 17th Annual World Championship Bingo Tournament and Gaming Cruise takes place in September aboard Holland America Line's luxurious new "Vista" class cruise ship, the ms Oosterdam, as it sails the Alaska "Inside Passage" from Seattle! Other Bingo groups may choose the west coast and a 4-day Baja Bingo cruise. Not only do the ships offer you fabulous Bingo but much much more.

Some cruise guests have won enough money in on board casinos to pay for their next cruise vacation. Even if you are not the gambling type, youll enjoy the excitement of these glittering ocean going casinos. With all the bells and whistles of their Las Vegas cousins, they feature a fair number of traditional games of skill and chance - blackjack, electronic slot machines, video poker, craps, roulette and Caribbean stud poker. Cruise Ships even offer tournaments such as a Festival of Slots with large cash prizes and cruise raffles.

You get all the excitement of the land based gambling halls combined with fabulous food, fabulous ports of call and a world of colorful entertainment and nighttime enjoyment! And best of all, there is no cover charge, no tickets to buy or reserve, no waiting in line. Dazzling musical revues salute the very best of Hollywood and Broadway, with advanced lighting and sound systems and spectacular special effects.

Your entertainment aboard spotlights a variety of marquee performers, including musicians and singers, comedians and magicians. Cruise lines recruit professional performers from some of the best-known stages on land. The entertainers vary from ship to ship and line to line however dont be surprised if Bill Cosby, or Bowser from Sha Na Na or jazz greats Manhattan Transfer is on your ship. The shows will easily rival anything you might see on land. Except that on-board your ship you dont have to remember your tickets or struggle to find a parking space.

Not only will you enjoy Broadway style reviews, musicals, stand-up comics, movies and specialty acts, and guest talent shows, many cruise lines including Norwegian and Holland America offer theme cruises from Budd Friedmans famous Improv at Sea to a Bavarian style Oktoberfest where, in addition to daily beer tastings, the staff host a Bavarian Beer Garden Party and an authentic German/Bavarian dinner.

Prefer country music? No problem, you can join top-act headliners and other guest performers aboard foot-stomping, knee-slapping country music cruises. Learn the latest line dancing or try not to smile as you two step your way across the Caribbean.

How much would you pay back home to catch a Broadway show, enjoy the midnight buffet and then head for late night comedy before you hit the disco? Its all included aboard your cruise ship.

Norwegian Cruise Lines treats you to extravagant, full-scale productions of classic Broadway musicals like Grease, 42nd Street, The Pirates of Penzance, The Will Rogers Follies, Crazy for You, and George M! And again, you dont pay for tickets! Just walk in to the beautiful theatre at sea, and enjoy the show.

Can theatres at sea rival those on land? A three-deck-high showroom, the Palladium, on Carnival Destiny, is home to two showstopping Vegas style productions that combine complex sets, laser technology and awesome talent that leave you spellbound. And there is not a bad seat in the house! After the show, visit one of the many lounges to enjoy a jazz ensemble, or 50s and 60s music or spend some fabulous times around the piano bar becoming a karaoke star.

Between your ports of call, you will be surprised how much there is to do on board your ship. When it comes to nighttime entertainment your choices are as diverse as you want to make them. From ballroom dancing to late night comedy, from first run movies to dazzling shows, all free and all with guaranteed seating.

Sid Kaplan

Cruise Vacations Guide

Sid Kaplan has extensive experience in the travel business. He owned and operated a large retail cruise only agency in Canada and his wife has 25 years experience working for major cruise lines. Their website is Cruise Vacations Guide which offers advice and tips to those looking to create memorable cruise vacations. Shore excursion and land tour information is also provided. Cruise, hotel, car rental and vacation adventure booking online.


Musicians - Building a Fan Base

Building a fan base is an important step for any band interested in elevating their recording and performing career. With attention and planning, even a modest following can become a powerful tool to support an artist's work and expand their popularity.

People are attracted to bands on musical, cultural, social, sensory and spiritual levels. While fitting in to current trends may result in a rush of flavor-of-the-month fans, the artists who pursue and stay true to their own musical vision appear to have a greater chance at creating a broad, dedicated fan base. Rolling Stone contributed Kentucky-based band My Morning Jacket's broad success to their unique musical vision, noting "The band's ecstatic, spacey records and improv-heavy live shows are as popular with Bonnaroo hippies as they are with New York hipsters." Frontman Jim James told the magazine, "We love that...Looking in the audience and seeing frat boys, indie rockers and maybe some sixty-year-old women."

In the digital age, artists shouldn't be afraid to give music away in order to reach more people. Andrew Dubber of NewMusicStrategies.com wrote an article titled "The 20 Things You MUST Know About Music Online" which counsels musicians to "forget product--sell relationship." In a recent interview, Dubber told HomeTracked.com: "I recommend (musicians) recognize that their recordings are not the totality of their economic value. Recordings are idealized performances that show musicians in their best light. These are the best promotional tools available...And if records are the way you want to make your money, just think of it this way: it used to be that youd press 1000 copies, give away 200 promos, and hope to sell the other 800. Now you can press 1000 copies, give away a million copies and sell the thousand."

Once a band has earned a few fans by playing shows and giving away music, it's important to retain their interest and encourage networking by keeping them up to date with current songs, concerts and a steady flow of appealing merchandise. The digital age presents a number of ways to accomplish this, with maintaining a web site, posting profiles on social music sites like Echoboost.com, email, internet radio, podcasts and social video sites. Performing Songwriter suggests networking through cell phones using fan club text messaging services like Broadtexter, which "enables North America-based musicians to create free Mobile Fan Clubs which easily allow them to use regionalized text messaging to stay connected with fans."

At the end of the day, it's vital for bands to take their relationships with fans as seriously as their music. The acts who consistently provide people with appealing music, quality live performances and a steady stream of positive interaction will undoubtedly increase their chances of long-term loyalty.

To read other music-related articles visit http://www.echoboost.blogspot.com and http://www.echoboost.com


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Where Movies and Video Games Collide

Hollywood and the video game industry have never been more closely linked than they are now. In the multibillion dollar entertainment industry, the producers of both media are looking to each other to maximize the profit that can be realized from a single idea.

Research seems to indicate that Hollywood was the first to dip into this incestuous pool. Super Mario Bros, the first major commercial success for a home gaming console in the mainstream, exploded onto the scene when it was bundled with the original Nintendo Entertainment System. While there had been some direct to video or TV movies made from video game titles previously, Super Mario Bros was a major studio blockbuster. It was unsuccessful at the box office, as fans of the game found it to have been an unfaithful adaptation of the games' storylines and characters. The mid-90's also spawned movies based on the era's most popular fighting games, such as arcade favourites Double Dragon, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. None of these movies did particularly well, and it was 2001 before Hollywood had a bona fide success in the video games to movies gamble with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Lara Croft, a sort of sexy, young, female Indiana Jones type of character with a penchant for high-tech gadgets and short shorts came to fame in video games designed for the PC and the Sony Playstation. The Tomb Raider movie, produced by Paramount, is still the highest grossing movie based on a video game to date. The reason for the sudden success of a video game based movie seems clear: the Tomb Raider games had cinematic storylines and a leading lady that seemed made for the big screen. The filmmakers didn't have to force her into the format - video games had started to become more sophisticated. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was followed by movie versions of major game franchises like Resident Evil, Alone In The Dark and Hitman, to name a few, and even more are currently in production.

As video games became cinematic in their own right, it seemed natural that the adaptation bandwagon should go both ways. Particularly now, with video game consoles that have graphics that rival the best digital effects found in Hollywood's bag of tricks, there doesn't seem to be a major blockbuster release without an accompanying video game. Action movies, specifically, seem to be tailor made for the format and if you check the shelves of your local video game shop, you'll find familiar titles like Spiderman, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter and Star Wars. In most cases, the game is an adaptation of the plot of the film, but some movie franchises have video game offshoots whose content is only based on an aspect of the films and includes elements or characters only alluded to in the original source medium. Some examples of this are games like Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup, which is based on the flying broomstick sport from the popular series, and several Star Wars titles that expand the universe of the films, including Knights of the Old Republic and Battlefront.

While many video game purists decry these movie adaptations as rubbish, for the most part, they still sell very well and are popular among more casual gamers. As such, it looks like video games of movies are here to stay... just like movies of video games.


Easy Methods To Learn The Guitar

If I had any talent in the world at all, I'd be a star. But I have close to zero talent. And still, I was able to learn to play the guitar decently enough that I actually have people fooled. It's really not that hard if you take it one step at a time and follow a simple plan that won't get your discouraged from the very beginning. And no, you DON'T have to take formal lessons from some dull instructor. I didn't and I'm doing just fine. I'm going to share with you what's worked for me.

The first, and probably most important thing, is to do something that you enjoy doing right from the start. And for most people, that's not going to be learning some boring scales and finger exercises. You'll be discouraged in no time. I know I was when I first started learning when I was a kid almost 40 years ago. That's why I quit. But when I picked it up again, almost at middle age, I decided I was going to have fun with the guitar. I wasn't going to make it a chore.

So I hit the Internet and started looking up some chord charts of some of my favorite songs of years gone by. I started with easy ones so that I wouldn't get discouraged. CCR is a great group to start with. Most of their songs are three or four chords and very easy to play. So I started with those. I then gradually added some songs to my collection as I went along. Once I began to master one song, I went on to the next, but always making sure to practice the songs I had already learned so that I didn't get stale.

Then I made myself a little schedule once I hit about 70 songs because it was starting to become a little tough keeping up with all of them. So I practiced about 10 songs a day, 7 days a week. This made it so that I got through my whole collection in a week. Once I was sure that I had them down cold, I started on a few more songs, rotating my schedule as I went along. Today, I could play two hour long sets in a club with no problem at all.

In my signature you'll find a video of a song that I actually wrote myself. It's kind of a goof, but you can see how well I have progressed without having to take boring lessons. Plus, you'll also find a great resource that will make learning the guitar even more fun. I just wish I had found it when I first started out. It is really that good.

To YOUR Strumming Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to hear a middle aged rocker who never took a formal lesson a day in his life? Watch my video at http://myguitarplaying.blogspot.com/ and then check out the best home study course ever created...hands down. You'll be playing like me (or better) before you know it.


Cheap Mp3 Players - Two Best Buys For Less Than $100

As you are possibly aware from my previous articles, I have a shortlist of my top six favorite cheap mp3 players on my BuyCheapMp3Players site.

A couple of my top six are lower end of the price range machines from brand name manufacturers (Apple iPod and Sony).

Most people will be pretty familiar with these two companies and the quality of the products that they produce. Also, most of mp3 players that they have produced have been covered in some depth elsewhere, on review sites, in press reports and the like.

I therefore see little point in recovering well trodden ground by describing these machines in any detail.

What I would like to do instead is go into a little more detail with a short comparative review of a couple of cheap mp3 players from lesser known manufacturers.

Both of these machines, in my opinion, beautifully encapsulate the reasoning behind my impartial recommendation to buy a cheap mp3 player, rather than perhaps wasting our money on an expensive brand name machine.

The simple fact is that there are many cheap mp3 players that offer great quality at exceptional prices, and why pay more than you need to?

In other words, the two players that I have highlighted below simply provide tremendous value for money, and who amongst us doesn't want that?

iRiver iFP-700 (780T model - 128MB - @$60)

The first point to note about this player is the great sound quality, and my previous articles have all attempted to highlight how important this is. The bass response, in particular, is simply outstanding, making this a very good choice for those who will use their mp3 player mainly to listen to rock music, hip hop and the like.

The 128MB available to you translates into something like four hours of music, well within the lifespan capacity of the battery, which can easily last twenty hours plus in normal use.

It will play MP3, WMA & OGG music files, and can record from any sound source, not just through your PC. It also features an FM radio, is pretty resistant to the skips and jumps that are often a feature of Flash based players, and weighs in at just 3 grams!

So, there are a heck of a lot of good things that you can say about the 780T, making it an outstanding buy in its class and price range for me.

I do, of course, have a couple of small gripes!

First, the radio reception is often not particularly good. Obviously this is only relevant if you are interested in listening to radio, but, it is something to be aware of.

Second, I found the earphones a little difficult to use, and pretty uncomfortable into the bargain. Not that the 780T is unique in this, and, of course, earphones can be bought separately, but I didn't really like the standard phones that come with the 780T.

That being said, it is still a very, very good example of what you get if you buy a cheap mp3 player, and for the price, it is exceptional value for money.

SanDisk Sansa e100 (e140 - 1GB - $80)

This one comes with 1GB memory, so it obviously has the ability to load up considerably more music than the 780T above.

Again, this is five star mp3 player, great quality from a lesser known name, that can play mp3 or WMA files, weighs in at 0.4ozs and has a battery life of 15 hours continuous playback.

Also like the 780T, this one offers terrific sound quality, with its TruBass feature again adding considerably to the response at the lower end of the tonal scale.

The controls are extremely ergonomically laid out and are simple to use, and the backlit LCD screen, allied to the detailed album and/or song information shown on it, make this a very easy player to actually operate.

It has the added advantage that there is no requirement for special software to load songs on to it - simple Windows "drag and drop" is all that is required - and for pure functionality, the Sansa e140 is pretty hard to beat.

Again like the 780T, downsides are very few.

There does seem to be a noticeable (and slightly irritating) gap between tracks playing on the e140, but this seems to be a feature (or fault) that I have found with some other Flash based players a well, so maybe it is an inherent fault of the technology, rather than the manufacturers.

I also, once again, found the earphones uncomfortable, but (given the frequency that this appears to be the case) maybe I should blame that on the shape of my own ears, rather than on the phones!

In conclusion, the iRiver 780t and the SanDisk Sansa e140 represent all that is good about the idea of buying a cheap mp3 player!

Both retail for well under $100 in the high street or local mall, but, before buying, dont forget to check the special eBay deals from my signature at the bottom of this page for extra cheap prices!

Both offer great sound quality, excellent functionality, light weight and good looks.

So, your choice is pretty simple.

Do you want to pay the extra $30 or so necessary to move up from four hours of music with the iRiver 780T to the fifteen hours or so (before a battery change becomes necessary) with the Sansa e140? Otherwise, there is so little to choose between them.

As they say, you pays your money, you takes your choice!

Steve Cowan is an avid fan of both music and spoken word mp3's. Get his "fabulous 30" free audiobooks at http://www.TalkAlive.com, then download his own unique free report Top 99 Free mp3 Downloads at http:/http://www.BuyCheapMp3Player.info

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The Portland, OR, band Heatmiser was best known for launching the career of singer/songwriter Elliott Smith, but other members of the group went on to have successful music careers long after Heatmiser's demise. Singer/songwriter/guitarist Neil Gust went on to form the pop/rock band No. 2, while bassist Sam Coomes formed the popular indie pop duo Quasi with his then-wife, Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss. Drummer Tony Lash, who produced some of Heatmiser's material, went on to do production work with a variety of artists, including the Dandy Warhols, Death Cab for Cutie, and the Minders.

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Room Escape Games

Hero trying to break free and escape from trapped room. The plot seems straight from any Hollywood blockbuster. Remember film "Saw II," where unlucky targets in a booby trapped shelter find a way out before they die.

In the similar line "Escape the Room" belongs to the genre of adventure games and are created for Adobe Flash. Room Escape games have a pattern of a locked room or a place which consists of hidden clues to gain points and is manipulated with secret doors, compartments, tunnels and several confusing objects. You have to clear your way to exit. It is a point and click style of play. The only way to play these unpredictable, quick and pacy games, beating all the odds depends on your adroitness and reasoning.

'Yuria Room', is a point and click escape game. One has to find items and collect clues to escape from the room and in 'Pizza Shack Deluxe' computerized player serve orders to the customers, one at a time and get stuck in this food chain. He prepare burgers, French fries and fill the drinks. Don't forget the order of your customer and amidst all this use the keyboards to search the way out.

To play your favorite game on computer all your need is a keyboard. XBox, Playstation have mind-blowing range of Room Escape video games that will lave you awe-struck. Or go for Internet, just click an online game site and play games of your choice by paying few bucks. Various sites offers free Downloadable games and users don't have to pay a dime. Just sign up and play for free.

MOTAS is credited to popularize the term "escape the room." Reportedly, there are other older examples like 'Noctropolis' in 1994, Japanese 'Crimson Room' in 2004 which had a breakthrough in the Internet and gained rave reviews, and then there's a Submachine Series. Popular games keep adding installments to already existing plot and interesting storyline. Some commonly played games are Crimson Room, The Doors, Monster Basement, Trapped, Muse Lock, Prism Core, Icescape, The Unforgiven room.

In the current scenario, Room Escape games are in great demand. They are made mass appealing with nice graphics and sound effects. With the fast-changing gaming technology there seem to be no full stop to this gaming madness.

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Otaku Nation: Anime's Effect on American Pop Culture

The modern age of Anime arrive in Japan in the 1960s, and over the course of the next decade or so boomed into the giant robot, space battle genre bender that we would soon recognize as the anime of today.

Evolving over the next 30 years or so, it reached a peak where it could begin to overtake and become an integral part of other cultures, much like the Hollywood of the 1930s quickly grew to encompass the rest of the world and inform their pop culture. In the same manner, American pop culture becomes increasingly informed by the trends and cult response to anime.

Anime first appeared in the US market in the 60s with shows like Kimba the White Lion and Astroboy. However, the national consciousness as to where these shows came from as well as the poor marketing of the shows made them forgettable and rather than a jumping in point, they act as a nostalgic reminder.

When Speed Racer arrived, the beginnings of a true consciousness that Japan was creating something new and exciting began to set in. The popularity of Speed Racer was never that of its American contemporaries, but it created in a set fanbase the willingness to devour newer offerings later on in Starblazers and Robotech (a convoluted perversion of multiple animes, but still a relative success in the states). Still, the affect was mostly underground.

In the 1980s, the introduction of Beta and VHS made it possible to join together with friends and watch more varying forms of anime. Truly it was the technological revolutions of the coming years that would make it truly possible for anime to perforate the American entertainment bubble. When Akira arrived in 1989, the effect was palpable. Receiving only a limited American screen release, few saw it in initial release, but the copying of VHS tapes and word of mouth made it something of a cult sensation. Those that knew of Akira were fans for life, eagerly awaiting their chance to partake more and more of the growing trends out of Japan.

For Japans part, this era was a period of major expansion, a veritable boom in the business. The 1980s saw the success of shows like Gundam and Dragon Ball overgrow the national consciousness and become runaway sensations. The explosion of the manga industry before hand, with serializations of works by Akira Toriyama and Katsuhiro Otomo in the early 80s simmered in the youth of Japan and finally seeing the commercial possibilities of these works, creating in the process a major conglomerate of companies in the Akira Committee to bring the massive budget of Akira to fruition.

By the 90s anime was the mainstream in Japan, and the result was the ramping up of production and increased output of shows. In part because of the simple, streamlined art style, multiple artist were able to work on a single project and create on episode a week for years at a time, resulting in monumental runs such as the case of Dragonball (156 episodes) and Dragonball Z (276 episodes). The ability to serialize and turn a story into something that millions of youths would tune into each and every week made companies billions (of yen) and secured the kinds of commercial sponsorships and funding necessary to undertake incredible projects that would require vast sums of money to complete.

Back in America, a few executives were beginning to see the effect these shows were having in Japan. Slowly and very carefully they began taking the most popular, Dragonball Z and Sailormoon for example and finding timeslots very early in the day, before the daily retinue of American cartoons, testing the waters of marketability. In 1995, the trickle of anime into the states was just that, a relative trickle. Sailormoon aired every morning in syndication, but chopped up and missing key seasons to relate the endings of important storylines. Dragonball Z ran an equally mild run early on Saturdays in syndication that was abruptly cut when the rights to the show were lost by the initial company and purchased by Funimation.

All the while, works from Japanese masters like Hayao Miyazaki were being overlooked, passing unnoticed through limited release in the states, while making him a God of his craft in Japan. All the while companies like Manga, Funimation, and Viz were buying up licenses and releasing little known, untraceable shows that no one knew the origin of. The shows were treated poorly, often dubbed and cut up to match American audiences. Viz even launched the first Anime magazine in 1993 with Animerica, primarily reviewing their own products but still giving a view of the culture that no one knew anything about.

But, in 1995, the release of the shows in America along with the premiere and rave reviews of Neon Genesis Evangelion in Japan, Otaku interest abroad began to spike. Otaku is a bid of a misnomer as its a bit of an insult in Japan, a mean spirited way to call someone a nerd. Here though, it generally means a purveyor of Japanese pop-culture and with the Otaku so in style right now its less of an insult than a clique. The import and fan subbing of shows began in earnest via VHS editing software that few if anyone had access to. The early 90s was a time of massive growth of interest in the little known import of Anime though, and the American marketplace wasnt slow to react.

In 1997, television networks made broad sweeping moves to bring shows to the mainstream. The Sci-Fi channel had always had a small niche in its latenight line up for cult classics like Vampire Hunter D, but Warner Bros finally brought the genre to primetime. Funimation finally got their licensing figured out and Dragonball Z saw its triumphant return to the Cartoon Network, with new episodes to follow a year and a half later. And in 1998, a little known video game for the Gameboy exploded in the American market, bringing along with it its entire arsenal of marketing ploys, including the overwhelmingly childish, but enormously popular Pokemon anime. Finally, children across the nation were gluing themselves to the television set as earnestly as their Japanese counterparts had for nearly a decade before hand.

Miyazakis new film played to better reception, receiving a proper release via Miramax. Princess Mononoke was a success in the terms of the time, even receiving the coveted two thumbs up (let alone a review at all) from Siskel and Ebert. Films began to arrive in America more liberally, still finding limited release, but release at least. And the shows began to pour in. At the time, the fansub scene was more or less the only way to get access to some of the more obscure titles being released in Japan. But as the market boomed, so did the licensing by major companies, and it actually started to become illegal to fansub certain shows because they might be released by a company eventually.

Thus began the final and full assimilation of Japanese pop culture into American. The DVD format sped up the process, as more episodes of a show could be packed into a disc than a VHS and production costs plummeted, removing a lot of the financial risk of an untested foreign product in the American marketplace. Cartoon Network debuted its Toonami afternoon cartoon slot, in which they featured anime that had been around for a little while, but managed to appeal to a much larger demographic and spread the word about these great story driven cartoons from across the ocean. An entire generation grew into the growing popularity and became entranced by the epic storylines, amazing storytelling and ability to show in a cartoon what many considered adult themes and much more mature perspectives on things like competition and personal success. The Japanese ability to cross genre and the extremely high production values that started to go into shows made in the late 90s and beyond meant amazing shows that appealed not just to children but to adults and beyond.

What started as a crossover, slowly began to actually change the way in which Americans marketed their television to children. Shows with more adult content appeared, and in some cases emulated the Japanese format. The writers at Pixar crafted brilliant, more maturely themed cartoons without the silly musicals of Disney past, and Disney even dissolved their tried format in favor of more mature, complete stories. The devolution of American quality in cartoons though as they attempted to match the output meant even more Japanese entries in the market. Now, if you turn on Fox kids in the morning youll find over half of the shows on are animes. And Cartoon Network still presents multiple entries themselves, with more mature offerings in their Adult Swim block late at night. Spirited Away won the Oscar for best animation in 2003 and South Park, the quintessential American barometer of cultural trends at first knocked the trend with their Chinpokemon episode, later to embrace it (while still mocking it) via changing their own art style in the Weapons episode just a couple years ago.

Nowadays, youll find anime oriented t-shirts everywhere, an entire aisle devoted to DVD releases in Best Buy (compared to the one row only seven years ago) and the success of the Anime Network, a channel solely devoted to Anime programming. Magazines like Newtype, a Japanese trade magazine for the Anime industry is now translated and released in America every month with previews of new shows, and American directors like James Cameron are looking to direct live action versions of manga like Battle Angel Alita.

Now, we see new releases from Japan within six months, and the fansub community has to scramble to keep up with whats legal and whats not legal to offer via their online services. The internet itself has made it a huge community, where a show can be recorded on Japanese television, ripped and subbed, then uploaded within a couple hours for the world to view. Theres no lay over, and new shows are immediately available. And its evident in the universities too. Japanese is one of the most sought after languages, filling up immediately with a yard long waiting list every year, and more sections being added every year.

Japanese pop culture managed to tap a certain perspective that American counterparts were unable to do themselves and in so doing, cornered and grew in a market that few thought existed in America.

I'm a self avowed unemployed writer, working on semi-constant basis to try and overcome the need to go and work a real job. I've written more than 200 articles and reviews and am constantly scouring the internet for any and all excuses and methods to make myself less dependent on corporate pay days. Visit my website at TheChatfield.com


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