Tag Archives: susan boyle

The Problems with The Problem of Online Manga

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If you haven’t heard the news, a international coalition of 36 publishers and distributors are going to band together to take legal action against illegal manga distribution websites. You can read up on the story at Publishers Weekly. If you have no idea what a scanlation is, I highly suggest you visit http://insidescanlation.com for more information.

Online manga: where is it? Some would say it’s passed around via the Internet as scanlations. And that’s a problem.

That problem, though, is two-sided. The obvious first side is that scanlations are technically illegal. But the second — and more important — side is that legal alternatives to online manga distribution do not exist. Yes, you can say that there are experiments with online distribution (such as Viz’s online Signature Ikki magazine), but the fact remains that a universal and ubiquitous legal alternative for online distribution of every English-language manga published in the United States does not currently exist.

There are some subsequent problems as well, and I would like to take the opportunity of this post to go through them. I feel like these issues have not been addressed, particularly since no alternative to illegal distribution websites has been offered by the Coalition as of this writing.

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Internet Culture Research: New (?) Thoughts on Memes

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This article is highly experimental and has been published merely as a thought-provoking piece; therefore, please forgive any rambling that takes place throughout. – The Management

Ever since I got involved with ROFLcon (I attended the very first one and have been working with the team on hosting the smaller ROFLthing events since), I have had Internet culture research on my mind. Tim Hwang and I have talked over potentially writing co-writing a book on Internet memes, but recently the project has sunk below our interest in meme research, specifically that of engineering. But ever since “meme” because the Internet buzzword of our generation, I’ve constantly been at odds with the odd term. What exactly is a meme? Why are we using that specific word? And what do we learn about the Internet by studying memes, or vice versa?

If you haven’t decided to discover the term’s etymology, I’ll try to provide a basic explanation. Trying to explain the meaning of meme by looking at Wikipedia illustrates the issue of defining the word: throwing “meme” into Google provides you with both two articles on Wikipedia, the first entitled Meme and the second, Internet Meme. The discussion of meme here draws from the article Internet Meme; however, we cannot ignore the history behind the former article, especially since work around Internet memes borrows heavily from studies of memetics.

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