The internet (or as some like to say: the Internet) has spawned a number of interesting things. Amazon made it unnecessary to leave your home to get books, eBay helps you get rid of your old crap, and Google helps the Chinese government keep its citizens in the dark about the massacre at Tianenmen Square (ooh look, they “fixed” that a bit), and the Wikipedia lets knuckleheads like me write entries as if I knew something. Then there are the imageboards.

Imageboards are websites that let anybody that browses to them post content, including the attachment of binaries (specifically images). This can lead to the sharing of original artwork, photographs, and such in a way that makes services like Flickr look totalitarian. This also means that under the cover of perceived anonymity you can get some of the craziest nonsensical chaos. There are several out there, but which one should you waste your precious time, bandwidth, and fragile sanity on? For your consideration, I give you 4chan and Wakachan, two english-language knock-offs of Futaba Channel.

4chan is overworked, overpopulated, and rather seriously insane. New content appears in its various categories (most of which relate to the work-appropriateness of the content) almost continuously, including some rather remarkable photography. The bulk of the material, however, is provided for and by anime and manga fans, many of them clearly deranged. If you have a strong stomache and a tolerance for the utterly-inappropriate, check out their “random” channel (/b/). Its current operator goes by the name “moot” and has had to repeatedly reminding his users that the whole operation is a charity case teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Wakachan, on the other hand, has nimble load times, has its anime content neatly organized by topic. I have generally found the participants of this imageboard to be far more tame than the lunatics at 4chan, which naturally means that its “random” channel is far less interesting. Management-wise it seems pretty stable. It’s like a calmer, more sane and stable 4chan, and might be a good place to get your toes wet.

Both of these systems have discussion boards incorporated, but I cannot speak as to their character. Having seeing some of the stuff these people are willing to put in public, I strongly doubt anybody should be reading what they have to say. Enjoy your intarnets.

This season’s anime offering has been pretty slim on watchable content, hence a severe slowdown in updates. Additionally, the propensity for scanlation groups to go shoujo on me has me rather discouraged. There is a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Shakugan no Shana, a title with heavy Mahoromatic influences (without the meido costumes).

The story revolves around an unremarkable high school student (stop me if this sounds familiar) that encounters a cute girl with crazy magic powers that is fighting the forces of darkness… No, it’s not quite like it sounds. The unremarkable high school student doesn’t have fifty beautiful girls corresponding to the twenty-odd harem-anime stereotypes trying to woo him. The unremarkable student, Yuji, is caught up in a strange shadow-reality in which supernatural beings are consuming the very existences of mortals and replacing them with temporary placeholders called “torches.” It it very quickly revealed that Yuji himself is just a “torch,” and that he had died some time prior to the start of the series. He finds himself oddly allied with a Flame Haze, a supernatural being that hunts down and destroys the villainous supernatural beings that are consuming folks’ existences.

Once the basic premise has been roughly established, Yuji grapples with the nature of his existence as a temporary replacement that is doomed to fade away while the Flame Haze deals with a succession of supernatural opponents in big, flashy battles. At least two fansub groups are bringing this title to the English-reading world, so give it a shot.

Things have been pretty dry in the world of Japanese animation and comics for me these days. Speed Grapher, a new title by Gonzo, has been good so far, but most of the emphasis in the fansubbing and scanlation communities seems to be on high-school romance (read: harem) comedies and shoujo, both of which don’t hold a heck of a lot of appeal to me. I tripped across a pretty good new manga this week, however: Densha Otoko.

The basic premise is that a typical male geek, socially-inept and utterly lacking in self-confidence (an easy sympathetic match for your average scanlation reader) is on a train, wallowing in his state of lameness , when a belligerent drunk starts yelling at the other passengers. The geek, reluctantly, stands up to the drunkard, winning the momentary adoration of the middle-aged ladies that were being verbally abused, as well as the appreciation of a pretty young lady. The rest of the series largely revolves around the geek (we never get his name) looking for advice from total strangers on 2chan as to how he should handle his prospective relationship with the young lady. Supposedly this story is based on an actual thread on 2chan, which was fictionalized into a book, this comic, and a television drama.

It’s very funny, especially if you happen to be familiar with socially-retarded computer geeks. Unlike most romantic comedies that are circulating in the scanlation community, it is heavy of character development and very light on titillation and cheap “harem” tactics. Of course, I write this having only read 8 chapters of it, so it may yet take a turn for the worse. Check it out.

(Drama Wiki Entry regarding the TV show)