Sheesh

Gave up eztv for being taken over by a scumbag, and now BTChat goes down.

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And this is your internet on Throttling.

At 5 AM, do they REALLY need to suddenly cut my bandwidth from 4 megabits to 50Kbytes. on one cell tower, and ONLY for BitTorrent?  Isn't that against the new Net Neutrality law?  So what difference does it make, a file transfer that was going to be done in 30 minutes will now run at a constant low level for several hours. What does that save?

Please Clearwire, lie to me and tell me it's Peak Hours.

Posted by: Mauser at 02:07 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Absolute Duo

Absolutely Awful.

I only finished it off this weekend because I wanted something short and I only had three episodes left to watch. I hate leaving stuff unfinished, and it was at the top of the list alphabetically.

There was one part though that had me yelling at the screen.

I'm going to assume you've at least heard of it, as if it's not enough of a standard story. If not, I think I started reviewing it below, so you can check that out.

So, there's one girl whose weapon manifests as a spear-like thing that almost resembles a folded umbrella, but it's so damned big, she can't normally lift it. There are also bad guys who wear techno armor, and they start attacking in earnest in the second half of the series. So Umbrella-girl gets captured during a raid, and they convince her to come to their side by promising to make her stronger so our Hero will like her, after he rejected her. This is by means of an exo-suit that resembles nothing so much as a unitard, but shows off her overdeveloped figure quite a bit  And the dose of mind-control that comes with it is an added bonus.

So when she shows up for the final battle, of course the heroes are conflicted. "We can't kill our friend, who's trying to kill us". There must be a TVTrope for that. Mostly she's focused on Our Hero, to whom she vows to show she she's strong enough for by trying to kill him, out of love, or something. And that's what had me yelling at them. Think! Turn this to your advantage! You've already figured out that she's brainwashed, but devoted to you. Promise her anything, just to get her to smash the hell out of the enemy forces.

Duh!

Japanese writers just don't think like us though. And there are story patterns to fill, and they followed them to a T.

Posted by: Mauser at 04:23 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Junk Files

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Yeah, so I'm the last to know.... The reason EZTV has sucked so much lately, and is carrying all these bottom-dwelling, hijacked and repackaged torrents is because it lost in a hostile takeover by scammers. Do not use it any more.

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One thing that really bugs me in some areas of the Torrenting world is this overwhelming urge some folks have to toot their own horn for things they really don't have anything to do with. You start with the group who digitizes a TV show, and they put their name on the file. Now, fansubbing is a different story, since they put some work into the job.

But what really gets me is the repackaging. Let's say I'm trying to watch The Flash. EZTV has been a little wonky since the move, and all the sources they have are repackagers. What I mean is, if I download the latest episode of The Flash and get the torrent from say, BTChat, I JUST get the show. But go to EZTV, and you get a directory, and there are worthless files like .nfo (which windows doesn't like) but even more worthless text files that say "Torrent Downloaded from Demonoid.com" which it wasn't, and then, some repackager takes that and throws in their OWN text file that says something similar. Some even chew up a few megs with a "preview" file. All of which is worthless. And it cuts down on which trackers you can add in (that may be why).

But even more irritating is, since each episode is now in its own directory, you can't just click the next file button in MediaPlayerClassic to get the next one.

I've tried looking for ways to relocate an individual file within uTorrent, but it won't do that.  The best I can do is tell it to skip files, but the tiny text files are usually included in one block anyway. The thing is, I also use uTorrent as a sort of video manager, so I can tag things I've watched by changing the label to (drum roll) "Watched". It's a first world problem, to be sure, but the motivation is so 80's Apple ][ game cracker, where they'd find a way to wedge their names into the opening screen. (Even back then, there were script kiddies running game cracking tools).

Posted by: Mauser at 05:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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