When it comes to the Naruto anime, I'm still an ennuyée.

Still in Filler Hell. I haven't seen any episodes of Naruto for months. I've forgotten why I loved this series. I'm sure I must've had a good reason, because I don't think my past self was a person of poor judgment.

Also, a few of you may have noticed the site being "hacked". It was no big deal; all pages containing the phrase "index" in their file names were overwritten. Naturally, I keep a copy of all files on my harddrive, replacing the altered files was a minor inconvenience. The attempt was not directed at this site in particular; many sites sharing the same hosting company were similarily affected. The security breach has of course been fixed. A big thanks to bihira.com for promptly emailing me about this, otherwise it could have been days until I'd have found out. :P

I'm bored with a lot of things and busy with others, so I don't foresee any significant updates to the site in the near future.

The future.

Renewed the hosting for the site for the next half a year.
Feel guilty about not updating - I did some work before running away on a short vacation in May, but didn't complete it, so I never uploaded it. And June is almost over. I'm an experienced procrastinator.

I'm also planning to be on vacation for most of July - I might have a laptop by then, so I could perhaps work a little during the inevitable rainy days.

I haven't watched any Naruto lately - I have almost 30 filler episodes yet unwatched, and I'm reluctant to do so. Will the fillers ever end? I'm just waiting for the mission that requires an all-female team, so they send Ino, Tenten, and, oh, we're out of female genin, let's send Naruto since he's good at transforming.

I actually had this strange dream about a week ago, where I dreamed I watched a stupid filler episode that explained why some characters wore their forehead protectors on backwards. -_-'

Well, that's one quarter of 2006 gone already.

Happy April Fools' Day!

It's not much, but I hope you enjoy it.

The sad truth is: I've lost interest in Naruto. Endless filler episodes does that - I'm sure many of you feel the same way.

Most days, I don't even think about the fact that I have a website.

Perhaps I will rediscover what passion I used to have if I continue reading the manga. I stopped after Kakashi Gaiden, because I kind of prefer getting the story in anime form first, then reading the manga and seeing all the small differences, and thinking to myself that the manga is better.. but the anime has good music and voice acting. I like hearing the Japanese voices. I'm not that good at reading Japanese yet, and in reading a translation, there is always something lost.

I probably won't work much on the site until these horrible filler episodes come to an end. Maybe I can work on the Master List.. I have this idea for a page where I'll list all characters, their voice talent, and which episodes the character appears in. I saw one such page once, in Japanese Only, without the episode numbers. It is theoretically possible for me to make such a page, but it will require much work, not to mention motivation. And time. Expect it to take at least a couple of months, if I work on it regularly.

and this time it's been over a month.

Can't shake the feeling that the site has already hit its peak and it's a slow and boring downhill ride from here.

I'm not going into detail here, but my life sucks quite a lot these days, and I've lost much time to depression. But these last few days I've been able to work again, and have caught up to a little bit of the recent backlog.

I knew all along that it was too large a project to take on.

But, rest assured, I'm not giving this one up just yet. It's fun to work on. I consider it training that will benefit me later, assuming I ever realize my dream of becoming a translator.

So it's been a month since I updated again.

Life's been more than I can handle lately. There are days I don't even remember that I have a site, and I've been doing this for over a year now.

It's not fair, but that's the way it is. Even now, updating the site isn't a priority. But I've gotten a couple of messages lately I'd like to answer here.

One visitor wrote and asked what the deal is with the episode-by-episode seiyuu credits.

I've sometimes wondered that myself. :)
It's a sort of reference library. I use it myself frequently. It also serves me as good practice in becoming familiar with many kanji commonly used in Japanese names.
The episode pages also get a fair amount of visits from search engines, particularly from users searching for the lesser known seiyuu. The episode list may be unique in that it lists names both in the original Japanese and in romaji, and that it lists each episode individually. What help is it to know that seiyuu A played character B when you have no clue who character B was? Knowing which episode they were in can be a great help.


Then another person wrote and called me a "big headed idiot" for calling "someone who just wants to look at a picture" a "damned thief".

So I'm going to take this time to explain these things called bandwidth theft and hotlink protection.

So I have a lot of pictures on my site - one for each character in the character list. And the character list gets several visitors a day, and once in a while, someone decides that "Hey, that picture there of Orochimaru would make a great forum avatar," and they put in the URL to the picture of my site in their forum control panel or whatever.

So every time someone on that forum sees a post by that user, they load the image off my site, and approximately ten kilobytes of my site's bandwidth is used. If it's a forum with a lot of visitors, it can add up to quite a bit. And while my bandwidth is being used, I don't get any visits to my site.

Now, this part doesn't apply to tokubetsu-jounin.net because we are still a small site. You may have noticed that there are no ads. None. That's because I don't need to have ads. My host is cheap. I pay $2.50 a month for hosting. And I've never used more than 2% of my monthly bandwidth allowance. (Don't you just hate it when you get "bandwidth limit exceeded" errors?)

So, say that sometime in the future, traffic grows so much that I have to start paying more for my hosting. (Somehow I don't see that happening..) So I decide to put up ads - maybe those not-so-annoying Google AdSense ones. For every visitor to go to a page with an ad, I'd get a tiny bit of money, and the site would pay for itself.

But for every time an image of mine loads on another site, I'd get nothing. Maybe someone even copied my site, loading the images off my host, incurring great bandwidth usage that I'd have to pay for, without me getting any revenue. That is theft, pure and simple.

Of course you can argue that I have more bandwidth than I know how to use, and it makes no difference whatsoever if you use a little bit. Well, here's one thing. It annoys me. I look at the access logs for the site quite often, and I see that an image on my site is being used on some other site. That just annoys me beyond belief.

So I did the only thing I can, I turned on hotlink protection. Now whenever an image of mine is loaded from a site that I haven't allowed, instead of the image loading, it is replaced by an image saying "tokubetsu-jounin.net does not allow hotlinking. Use your own bandwidth, damn thief."

All's good so far, right?

Except that this person who was upset at being called a damn thief didn't view an image of mine on an unauthorized page. They looked at the character list as cached by Google.

This caused the images to be loaded from the cached page located on a Google server rather from tokubetsu-jounin.net, and thus, hotlink protection was invoked.

I'd like to allow this, because I know how useful it is to have words highlighted, or how utterly hilarious it is to run it through google's translator service (my favorite is "flying bamboo dragonfly"). So I've added the IPs I know of to the list of allowed referrers, but I do not have a full list, and they seem to be adding new ones. So I add them as I become aware of them. There's no need to call me a big headed idiot just because I'm not psychic and can't guess which one of Google's servers the page is cached on, and which IP address it has.

And just to make something clear.. If anyone wants an image off the character list, for a forum avatar or whatever, just take it. Save it to your hard drive, upload it somewhere on the 'net. As long as you aren't using my bandwidth for something that has nothing to do with my site, it's fine. I don't have any more right to the images than you do; they are just screenshots cropped and resized to 100x100 pixels. Anyone could make them in less than a minute. But I do own the bandwidth.

And don't forget that I can replace any image on my server with whatever I want. You'll think twice about hotlinking to my image of Orochimaru when your forum avatar suddenly turns into a teletubby.

Small update

Haven't been motivated to work on the site.. until I got an email. Someone wrote me a mail~
I'm so happy. I've been running the character list for over a year, and had this domain since the end of January, and finally, someone wrote me!

And about a minor character I like, too. That character now has his own page here. Will update the extremely minor characters page with a link there later.

Also added episode credits for episode 142, maybe the longest one ever. Figuring out the seiyuu for those two idiot filler characters was hard, but fun. The rest was a very boring cut and paste job.