Sunday, November 4, 2007

dling anime images from ?-chan

I download my anime images at miezaru.donmai.us (Danbooru), 2chan.net, 4chan.org and moeboard.net. Note that the 2nd is in japanese and the 4th in Korean. Among all the images that appear there, I don't download the ones I have seen too many of (Touhou, Lucky Star, Vocaloid, ???-tan, etc.), old images (mostly before 2006), ones I already have, decipt "strong adult content", and of course, (what i see as) ugly.

Among what have already downloaded, the nicest ones would appear on friendster image gallery and my imageshack profile, which is also used as my friendster profile background.

Danbooru: Recently, I have noticed that there are more ads on the site. One of them has adult content. Prior to about March 2007, you were able to create an account (which was on a different domain back then) and access to images with restricted tags and easier search. Now, all the accounts are deleted, porn removed (which means that they would be paying lesser for bandwidth) and no way to create new ones.

2chan/4chan: All in Japanese (except for 4chan, which is in english). Has a lot of nice photographs (mostly japan/north america/europe), sex-related images, edited images (like a certain guy's face placed on top of a woman's face; no idea why), drawings, trains, motorcycle, baseball, food, news/anime screenshots (with inapproiate comments), insulting of the koreans (for whatever reason. Maybe its because their names appear in ending credits of anime), talking nonsese, and beautiful girls. Hidden among all that junk are nice anime illustrations/graphics. Do note that the images do not stay for long: they are deleted from between 3 hours to 2 weeks, depending on the board. Except for certain boards, IPs from outside japan cannot comment/post on the boards, though they can view them.

Moeboard.net: A korean based website (e-shuu shuu was based on this) in forum style with high-res/wallpaper images that you would not find on sites mentioned above. The last I checked, there were about 4000+ pages with about 5-10 post on each (with the latest appearing on the 1st page). Images are added so regularly (especially between 4pm-2am Korean time/UTC+9) that when you go to the next page, some of the images you saw on the prevous page would appear on the page you are at. Also, since the images are not thumbnailed, that would mean waiting for a long time to load all the images on each page if you have a slow internet connection (about 512kbps or slower; 5Mbps or higher is recomended). As of 4 November 2007, the site appears to be experiencing server problems. An extract from the site regarding the problem:

모에보드 작업 중 사고에 관한 안내

모에보드를 사랑해주시고 아껴주신 여러분들께 감사의 말씀을 드립니다.
이번 커뮤니티 업그레이드를 위한 서버 공사 중 메인게시판의 데이터가 손실되는 사고가 발생하였습니다.
그로 인해 지금까지 작성되었던 수많은 게시물들이 날아갔으며, 또한 메인게시판의 서비스를 잠시동안 제공해드리지 못하게 되었습니다.
그로 인해 이용에 불편을 끼치게 된 점 사과드립니다.
현재 커뮤니티는 정상적으로 서비스 되고 있으며, 아래의 링크를 이용하시면 커뮤니티로 이동하실 수 있습니다.
곧 오픈 될 모에보드 시즌2에서는, 좀 더 빠르고 편리한 이미지 공유 및 활동을 하실 수 있도록 여러가지 불편한 점을 고쳐 새롭게 등장하도록 하겠습니다.
다시 한번 이용에 불편을 끼쳐드린 점 사과드립니다.

2007.10.26 Moeboard.net 운영진

It appears that I am banned from 4chan.net when I just clicked on the 1st image upon entering the site. It doesn't say how long or the reason, it just says "YOU ARE BANNED!" and nothing else before redirecting back to the main page. It can't be an April fool joke, can it? Or is it a misleading page when you encounter a 404 error? Either way, 4chan.net is no longer my primary source of anime images before the incident occured.