Rocket Bomber - site news

There’s this poll I’ve been running (look left, sidebar… no, just a bit further down… there it is) because while there is a lot I could be doing for the blog there are only so many sober hours in my week, and I have to prioritize.

One Brave Soul has placed his vote for an Online Anime Sales Rankings, to match my manga charts.

I *can* do that. With the current spreadsheet, it doesn’t matter what the data are, it chugs along just fine so long as it has input. I can squeeze in a few more hours of data entry this week (…if that is what you demand. the anonymous public is a bitch of a taskmaster) but my sacrifices are secondary in this case:

Are you fully prepared for the porn?

No, honestly. This is a real question.

Sure, you want to know how [series x] compares against the field. We all like to see how our favorites perform. But did you know how a goodly chunk (it used to be half; but as porn has diminished so has the industry) of anime DVD production is financed? Have you heard of Critical Mass and Kitty Media?

(One could argue that ADV only ran into trouble when they closed their Soft Cel division. Just sayin’. Porn, for all of it’s icky connotations, pays the damn bills — and so falls ADV. Don’t knock porn; hundreds of horny nerds will pay your damn bills)

Anyway: Right now, all this is way beneath your radar. You float along, watching what you will — buying some, pirating others — thinking the industry is so damn popular — particularly with internet-savvy geeks, domestically and in Japan — that it must have a healthy online sales presence, one that will offset any losses in this tough retail market.

I can run these numbers. I can leave your impressions intact, or I can drop some science on ‘em.

I’m teetering at the moment — but only briefly. Yes, I Am Nuts, and for at least this one week I’m going to run an anime chart. I’ll start working on it tonight. New Anime Charts will drop Tuesday of next week.

Online sales of Anime DVDs: Parsed, sorted, scored, ranked, and reported.

Sounds good.
But, Are you fully prepared for hentai DVDs that outrank Miyazaki?

You Have Been Warned.

There is of course what might be called the raw feed: www.rocketbomber.com/rss, an option one can always link to as its output is a hardwired part of my CMS. Now, however, there is a better option if one cares to update one’s RSS:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/RocketBomber

I say “better” in that it is much better for me. FeedBurner offers lots of charts, tables and statistics tracking readers and subscribers to my RSS — a chunk of data that isn’t covered by Google Analytics. (…but Google owns FeedBurner so it’s all part of the same benevolent empire)

If you already subscribe to my RSS feed, nothing is changing. Do nothing. Just keep reading and we’re good.

I’ve changed the links in the chicklets at left to point to the new FeedBurner RSS though, and you are certainly welcome to update Google Reader, Bloglines, Yahoo, or other links and clients on your end to reflect the new status quo — and add your own little significant +1 to the new subscriber tracking chicklet in the sidebar.

This week I decided to inaugurate a new feature here at RocketBomber (not related to the poll in the sidebar to your left; please vote — right now “More Drunken Ranting” is winning with one vote. Mine.)

Here’s the thought process:

Do you know what I miss most about the manga market circa late 2006, though 2007? Manga on the shelves.

More stores carrying manga, more shelves in the stores, more manga — right there, new titles every month. Back in the day [*chuckle* false nostalgia for a time just one year ago] I wouldn’t be visiting the shop looking to buy… but then I’d see a book and something about it would make me pick it up. I’d get out of the store 5 books richer and $50 lighter.

The stocking trend has reversed, it’s a sales dynamic that is lost. It’s close to impossible to replicate browsing (in the walking-by-shelves-full-of-books sense) with an online retailer and while I know the sites are trying, no one has managed to emulate this to my satisfaction.

I do end up looking at an awful lot of web pages full of manga titles, though — easily more than the next 50 people combined — so if anyone can take a stab at it, then I can. I must. It’s not a replacement for insightful reviews or recommendations based on my own readings, but then again it’s not meant to be.

Manga is still available at retail. Physical books sit in brick-and-mortar stores — and the staff of your local comic shop would love to meet you. But so much falls through the cracks

— and unless some obsessive manga nut steps up to fill those gaps, many many books will continue to languish in anonymity. I can’t say my mere mention of a title should be considered a recommendation — I mean, the book might not even be out yet so I can’t have read it to recommend it — but the idea isn’t to rate, review, and rank the manga, just to bring it to your attention. Just like if the cover caught your eye in the store: Pick it up, take a look, and then maybe you read the back cover blurb or flip to see the art.

I’m going to post covers, with a link. (Some of these covers are beautiful, worthy of posting in and of themselves — Heck, that’s one reason I love manga.)

rocketbomber.com/category/found

2 weeks are down the tubes (gone and irrecoverable) but I’m back and there was a small stack of data still to be churned (charts, week ending 16 Nov.) and I’ll work as quick as I can to finish up current online charts (week ending tomorrow, 7 Dec.)

— and of course this gap will affect the quarterly and monthly charts that will eventually be posted — but that’s a commentary for another day.

Let me just say that the [*cough*] Estimated Online Sales Rankings (with the triple emphasis on estimated) is, data-wise, a big ol’ draught off of the firehose: oh, sure, I can’t manage a full body soaking this month but even at 50% your shirt, boxers, and socks are still wet and even if you can bring yourself to complain that I didn’t do your laundry this month — tell me:

Who else is posting?

…Watch This Space. Numbers to follow.

[edit 29 October: perhaps you have noticed yourself, that the best intentions for ‘getting some work done’ over a few days off are quickly subsumed and forgotten when presented with nearly limitless possibilities, like sleeping for 15 hours and re-reading Emma (seas.2 dvd’s aren’t out quite yet but are shipping any day now) and — oh, I don’t know… changing the colour scheme on one’s web site.

original post follows]

True to my word (though in fact much earlier than I thought I would have to) there will be no Weekly Manga Charts for your perusal today, or tomorrow, or ever — until Monday, but at that point the posted numbers will actually be this week’s chart (week ending the 26th) as last weeks chart was accidentally dumped in the firebox.

Irretrievable error. We let some drunk guy near the spreadsheet, and he messed everything up.

Console yourselves with the Huge Honkin’ Charts I Posted All Week and consider that if only I could do this as my full time job, rather than on the side after a 45 hour work week, then you’d get your numbers early, often, and with a side of reviews — maybe a weekly column for dessert. Alas, such is not to be.

(unless someone wants to Pay me to blog, hint hint.)

I’m not necessarily trying to make up for a late posting with a big ol’ block of data to assault your eyeballs — it’s just a coincidence. :)

New this week is the Emerging Trends Report: In much the same way that the weekly rankings summaries make sense of the looong boring lists that are the multiple charts of the Manga 500, this new weekly feature is a snap-shot of what’s new and what’s hot. (to the limits of my method)

Hidden underneath that chunklet is the full posting of the New Releases & Preorders for the week (with a slight change in format to accomodate the new summary report) and the index and estimated sales rankings for the week ending 7 Sep.

currently suffering from something pulled or slipped or dislocated in my spinal area, roughly in the lumbar, such that I can lay flat (or close to it) with little difficulty, other positions and motions become difficult *

[ * the dull ache with occasional twinge instantly converts into thought-shredding shocks ]

I can type, by bringing the laptop into bed with me, but the amount of typing needed for say, 3500 lines of data entry are a bit beyond my physical limits. Not only will last week’s chart be a smidge late (I’m thinking it will be a Thursday post, again) I will also have to stretch the definition as to when last week ended. Right now I think the chart may include data from wednesday, the day after tomorrow.

I guess I will just have to use this “down time” while I can’t really post to watch a few DVDs, and read manga. O, the hardships. ;)

….and that’s my limit: have to move now. hurts a tad too much

On the one hand, I could claim the banner as my own work (which of course it is, in the sense that a well trained monkey can cut-and-paste with the best of them, and so can I) but in providing due credit to the sculptor Hans van Bentem [*sigh*, like most artistes he insists on flash for his site; be warned] for his robot statue (that’s the 4th image right-to-left) it occurred to me that I should probably credit all the source photos.

It just took me a while to track all the breadcrumbs (or search blindly until I could rediscover sources) but if one were to glance to the sidebar immediately left, one might discover that it is awfully bottom-heavy at the moment with — while not up to legal or academic standards, still a better-than-average web attempt — actual citations

If you feel you are the owner of one of the said images (and in the case of the Soviet stuff, hell, I might take you to court just for kicks — I’m fully prepared to cite Marx & Lenin on the record in a court of law, in the face of your greedy grab for someone else’s work done under the guise of collective ownership for a country that technically doesn’t exist anymore, unless you’re the original artist which would be cool and in that case I’d take you to court just to meet you face to face and shake your hand) drop me an email at matt [at] rocketbomber [dot] com and after verification, I’ll remove your image (and the free link at left, and the free publicity, that you’re getting for free) and replace it something even cooler. Your loss, dude.

It seems the easiest way to register a blog on Technorati is to post a small chunk of html. And so:

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