Enter the Bass Radius

Minke whales breaching: I will launch myself out of this ocean like a f***ing surface-to-air missile to seek and destroy my enemies

The Crunchyroll store will be paywall-locked to the top two subscription tiers of paying users only starting in August. Anime physical media will be cut off for purchase without a minimum of a $140/year subscription.

Currently CR is the only place selling Aniplex titles, and those are already horrifically expensive on their own. Now CR (owned by Sony) is saying you can't even spend that money without paying for the privilege of shopping there.

This is 100% another symptom of Sony's monopoly practices. 10 to 15 years ago we had a variety of distributors for physical media. RightStuf, Aniplex, Funimation, and Crunchyroll were all independent of each other and all of them offered different series. In the last decade Sony bought and merged them all, dropped dozens of Funimation titles when porting them to Crunchyroll, closed the RightStuf warehouse distributors, and has been clear-cutting the Crunchyroll store which had turned into the only distributor of all those previous sources. 90% of the stock of physical products has been cleared from the shop and what's left are slim pickings of a few massively expensive popular titles. This is the same Sony that promises that physical discs will not be offered for games for the PS6, so I don't have high hopes for their plan for continuing releasing physical media.

Anime is already harder to source, as buying directly from Japanese publishers often doesn't include English subtitles and certainly won't have dubbed audio. If a US licensing company's license expires, the series will go out of print and vanish from streaming with literally no warning and often never coming back. (Just this month Crunchyroll lost over a dozen titles, including Barakamon and Black Lagoon among others.) Physical media is also one of the only ways that older bonus content is preserved, like dub directors commentary or interviews with the cast, and sometimes if a series is relicensed for streaming, it has to be altered (such as Evangelion's rerelease losing the rights to play the original set of Fly Me To the Moon endings and the original dub).

Where do I get physical media now?

The r/AnimeCollectors and r/AnimeDeals subreddits share resources for sales, deals, and places to look to find a specific series you might be hunting for.

AnimeDeals specifically also has users that highlight ebay stores that often resell deadstock from Walmart/Target at steep discounts, so keep your eye out for those. Recently picked up the full series of Yuu Yuu Hakusho for a total of $35!

There are still some competing distributors of new-print anime. Sentai Filmworks, MediaOCD, and DiabolikDVD are all distributors that sell things CR won't. Sentai is currently running a summer sale and the subreddits will point out good prices when they come around.

Amazon (ugh) does often sell Crunchyroll series that CR's own store doesn't stock anymore. Recently the redditor Aside_Intrepid also released a guide on how to use Amazon's location data to find location-based coupons that apply to blu-ray as well. The same instructions can be found on blu-ray.com

Buy a regionless dvd and blu-ray player and buy Region 2 discs. They're usually still the US dub with English subtitles, but STEEPLY cheaper than US licensed releases.

Keep an eye on secondhand media stores, FB Marketplace, and animedeals for people destashing and selling their collections. Thrifting can land you some great finds, especially for harder-to-obtain older series.

But Is Jabba A Dragon Though?

he has the body plan of a lindworm. I suppose you could argue that he is too thick to be considered “serpentine”, but he is longer than he is wide, and not entirely unlike an especially chunky gaboon viper. his upright posture distracts from the fact that he’s built like an abbreviated mole lizard, which are lindworms.

and then of course he acts like a dragon. I don’t know if Star Wars uses gold or something else but whatever it is I’m sure he hordes it. eats people sometimes. disturbing taste for princesses. knights come to kick his ass.

And not all creatures under the broad category of “dragon” fly. Lindworms don’t fly, neither do wyrms, drakes, sea serpents, or hydras. Lungs/Chinese dragons can fly but they don’t use wings to do it. Jabba should not be disqualified as a dragon simply because he uses repulsor technology to achieve airborne locomotion.

Jabba is unlike a slug in so many ways. He has jointed limbs, a hard internal skeleton, a skull with fixed spherical eyeballs, and no sensory tentacles or pneumostome. He is capable of facultative parthenogenesis--like komodo dragons and other squamates--continuously growing larger and living for hundreds of years hoarding wealth and power and preying on princesses. His resemblance to a slug is superficial, though we may describe him as such in an insulting fashion... like how a dragon may be called a “worm”.

Also he can and does eat people.

Dragons are the same way. It’s an umbrella term, and while some irritating pedants insist that only a four-legged creature with words god can be considered a dragon, they only say that to make sure everyone in the room knows that they know what a wyvern is. Wyverns and lindworms and amphitheres are obviously all under the dragon umbrella.

If these things are dragons, then “dragon” is as fluid a category as “worm”:

Take, for example, the dragons from The Last Airbender. They’re clearly dragons, as they breathe fire and have wings, but they’re also more like elemental spirits that visually and behaviorally resemble lungs more than they resemble, say, Smaug. Do their similarities to lungs disqualify them from dragonhood?

Also, it’s not like the medieval Welsh concept of a “dragon” evolved in a vacuum. There are mythical creatures from around the world that bear strong resemblances to That Specific Creature Which We Are Apparently Now Inisisting Is The Only True Dragon. Welsh and British folklore was surely being influenced by mythology from disparate cultures. 

That thing does not have innate dragony-ness to me. It looks like a turtle with tentacles. 

But, while I think the answer to “can we consider Jabba the Hutt to be a dragon” is yes, no one has asked whether or not Jabba would consider himself to be a dragon.

i’m reading Maul: Lockdown by Joe Schreiber and

you make some good points and also I ABSOLUTELY HATE YOU FOR THIS

fine.

DRAGON LOCATED

This is exactly what I mean when I say "All Dragons Are Good"

Oldest human footprint discovered, made 153,000 years ago in South Africa.

Oldest human footprint in North America, made 21,000 years ago in New Mexico, USA.

1% …

2% …

Tea gown ca. 1875-80

Most of the critical complaints have been about the tone; in a review from 2005, Professor Victoria of Spagonia University said, "The constant self-aggrandizement undercuts the idea that its subject ought to be taken seriously. Also, wasn't the 'feminist' line from the Sonic Heroes manual a mistranslation of 'womanizer'?"

Ideas in the 1920s: We should make a new kind of plastic you can eat

Ideas in the 1960s: We should invent a new and more civil racism

Ideas in the 1980s: What if you could have sex with Hello World

Ideas in the 1990s: What if cars had TVs in them

Ideas in the 2000s: Is it gay to wash your hair?

Ideas in the 2010s: What if a refrigerator was made of goo