kitsunebi's talking to himself again

[Phillyman]

3 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

OK, so, uhh...why are those mags not allowed here again?  Based on what you assume are lies? 

 

Err...

(Mind you, I've never read an issue of GameFan in my life, so I couldn't care less, but it seems like you're sort of contradicting yourself here. 

I can only assume that it was fake, I mean why not show me the source of those conversations? Why not include me? There were always these conversations happening that I of all people was excluded from......just seems fishy to me. As I stated above, I need proof to remove anything further from Retromags. A simple email from SMiyamoto@mail.ru is not gonna cut it, nor is a tweet from anything but an officially recognized company account. I pulled the Game Informers just because a single employee tweeted at us. But to be honest, I have a job that is on my mind for 55 hours a week, I have a wife and daughter, I have friends and family, I have hobbies.......Retromags does take a priority in there somewhere, but then within the Retromags stuff that I need to concern myself with, the "possibly" of reinstating Game Informer/GameFan is really really really (insert some more really s) low on my list of things to do/think about.

 

3 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

I think when he said "content restrictions" he was also including RM quality control.  And we definitely HAVE had people be turned away for imperfectly edited (or unedited) scans.  So anyone not wanting to go through that step (the most time-consuming) will choose to go with a different site.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  If quality scans are to be our trademark, then that's our stand. 

It's honestly the worst part of running Retromags, is enforcing rules and standards. I have had this battle since Day 1! Back in 2005 I had KMFDManic and Fusoya wanting to only share magazines with people who contributed. Then I had those two guys telling me that scanning the advertisements inside of the magazines was a waste of time and that if I wanted them to contribute to Retromags, that I had to accept that.

So yeah, sometimes people will leave when they disagree with us. This is a god damn hobby website, we have very few rules and restrictions. If I go onto Wikipedia and start creating crappy pages of content and some moderator over there deletes them.....I have three choices.....elevate my contributions, don't contribute....or start my own Wikipedia. Every project worth its salt has quality checks, doesn't matter what it is.....could be coding emulators, dumping roms, scanning manuals, subtitling Anime episodes, fixing up manga scans......sure the easier way would to just accept anything in any quality.....but Crooked-Uncropped-Mags.com is a mouthful .....but it is available from Godaddy for $21 if anyone wants it!

By no means am I asking anyone to spend months or years touching up a magazine and redoing it until it is immaculate, but if we are going to ask users to download and spread our releases.....should there not be some level of quality that we will not accept?

 

[Areala]

*yawns, stretches, rubs the sleep out of her eyes*

Huh? Somebody mention me?

I don't mind having Admin status, but I feel like I don't do much to earn it. If the bug is fixed and you want to bump me back down to Team Member and give my Admin slot to somebody else, I'm fine with it. I mostly contribute the occasional cover scan and index an issue here and there when I have the time. I'm cool with whatever.

With regards to the GameFan question, all I know is my brother did some work for them a few years ago, wrote a bunch of stuff for their website, and some of his stuff appeared in print in one of their magazines...then never got paid a cent for it. He's far nicer about shrugging it off than I would have been, so my reaction is to say, "Screw them," and upload whatever, but that's not very kind. I recall Triverse (and maybe Meppi too) working out a deal where they were assisting with scans of the magazine that Dave Halverson was selling, either through GameFan's website or OoPA, but I'm pretty sure whatever thing they had going fell through, since I can't find them available for purchase anywhere, either the old school issues from the 90's or the new rebooted version that my brother wrote for. I've no idea what the status on GameFan itself is, except that it seems to have zero authentic presence online and I think they stopped printing the reboot after the rest of the staff left/quit/got fired. All I know is stuff I learned third-hand though, so take it with a grain of salt.  

*huggles*
Areala

[Phillyman]

1 minute ago, Areala said:

*yawns, stretches, rubs the sleep out of her eyes*

Huh? Somebody mention me?

I don't mind having Admin status, but I feel like I don't do much to earn it. If the bug is fixed and you want to bump me back down to Team Member and give my Admin slot to somebody else, I'm fine with it. I mostly contribute the occasional cover scan and index an issue here and there when I have the time. I'm cool with whatever.

With regards to the GameFan question, all I know is my brother did some work for them a few years ago, wrote a bunch of stuff for their website, and some of his stuff appeared in print in one of their magazines...then never got paid a cent for it. He's far nicer about shrugging it off than I would have been, so my reaction is to say, "Screw them," and upload whatever, but that's not very kind. I recall Triverse (and maybe Meppi too) working out a deal where they were assisting with scans of the magazine that Dave Halverson was selling, either through GameFan's website or OOPA, but I'm pretty sure whatever thing they had going fell through, since I can't find them available for purchase anywhere, either the old school issues from the 90's or the new rebooted version that my brother wrote for. I've no idea what the status on GameFan itself is, except that it seems to have zero authentic presence online and I think they stopped printing the reboot after the rest of the staff left/quit/got fired. All I know is stuff I learned third-hand though, so take it with a grain of salt.  

*huggles*
Areala

And I will give credit to OOPA on that, I am not saying that there was NEVER any contact between them (Meppi/Triverse) and Dave, I am just saying I never was included on any of it. So I have no way to know what was actually said. It would be like E-Day telling me tomorrow that I need to remove all Konami advertisements from our releases and Gallery because Steve Sutherland sent him an email requesting it. 

[E-Day]

By the way, we need to remove all Konami advertisements from our releases and Gallery because Steve Sutherland sent me and only me an email requesting it. 

I don't remember how we found out about Dave Halverson, but something tells me it was traverse that told us he said to remove them otherwise Dave would speak to his lawyers. This was before Game Fan started selling scans of their initials issues on their site. So maybe it was true, or maybe it was a ruse. I also don't remember seeing anything directly from him, and I was an admin at that point before they got me demoted

[KiwiArcader]

36 minutes ago, E-Day said:

I also don't remember seeing anything directly from him, and I was an admin at that point before they got me demoted

ROFLMAO. They got YOU demoted?  Pfft .... they banned my ass back to the stone age. Then I logged under a new name and rubbed their noses in it and they banned me again. I think Phillyman had no control over those two at all in those days. They just made up whatever rules they felt like and you toed the line or got shafted. OldGameMags came into being partly because of that sorry mess of a time so I guess something good came out of it. 

[Phillyman]

2 minutes ago, KiwiArcader said:

ROFLMAO. They got YOU demoted?  Pfft .... they banned my ass back to the stone age. Then I logged under a new name and rubbed their noses in it and they banned me again. I think Phillyman had no control over those two at all in those days. They just made up whatever rules they felt like and you toed the line or got shafted. OldGameMags came into being partly because of that sorry mess of a time so I guess something good came out of it. 

I had just banned KMFDManiac and Fusoya for them going on power trips, and then 420 got pissed at me for getting rid of a Casino game in the Arcade that paid out huge amounts of "points" on Retromags......so he up and stormed off to UnderGroundGamer with all his Nintendo Power Guides and asked me to remove his stuff from Retromags. So yeah, I wasn't trying to be the Admin/Site Owner that just bans everyone.......so I let them ban you guys and I just looked the other way

But hey, I have not banned anyone since Nirv, and that was what......7 years ago or so? So I am getting better ......maybe?

[E-Day]

4 minutes ago, KiwiArcader said:

ROFLMAO. They got YOU demoted?  Pfft .... they banned my ass back to the stone age. Then I logged under a new name and rubbed their noses in it and they banned me again. I think Phillyman had no control over those two at all in those days. They just made up whatever rules they felt like and you toed the line or got shafted. OldGameMags came into being partly because of that sorry mess of a time so I guess something good came out of it. 

Yup. I remember two instances where I butted heads with them. One was when a member asked if a scan was available of a page from a magazine what was beyond the cutoff date for some research they were doing. I said that we don't have it available because of the cutoff, but it might be available on some other site, or some member might have the issue and might be willing to scan that page for them; something to that effect Well, Abbott and Costello lost their minds, saying I shouldn't have said anything like that and that I should have said users aren't allowed to ask for stuff beyond the cutoff and could be banned for it.

Mind you, nowhere on the site at the time did it state that you could be banned for that. On top of that, it was a new member looking for information from one page of a magazine. Nothing like making it seem like a welcoming community where you instantly act hostile towards a new user who broke a rule that was nowhere to be found on the site.

The second thing that I think sealed the demotion was after meppi came back. He had been absent for a while, and it turned out he was sick and nearly died. So what is one of the first things he does after coming back from that? He uses his admin access to go into my profile and change my signature; something along the lines of the U R MR GAY from the Super Mario Galaxy cover. I can't remember exactly. So I lost my shit on him in the shoutbox or in a forum post tearing him a new one for being an immature baby. Using your admin access to mess with someone's profile was over the line for me. That's when they cornered Phillyman to demote me from the admin group. I didn't mind because I was not fond of how they were doing things, or trying to do things. So I got to sit by as a regular member and watch everything come tumbling down because of them.

[KiwiArcader]

Well, in my particular case things got fairly heated and Phillyman was fairly absent and they were running around as if they were in total control at the time. The ONLY reason I even knew they had parted ways with them was when I said something on another site ... TheCoverProject ... as I recall and Phillyman popped up there and posted about the site so I had a PM conversation about things.

None of this is targeted at Phillyman personally. While I thought he wasn't keeping those guys under control at all they were the ones causing mayhem, not him. Water under the bridge now anyway. They've moved on,we've moved on but it's always nice to reminisce on the good old days occasionally  

[Phillyman]

20 minutes ago, KiwiArcader said:

None of this is targeted at Phillyman personally. While I thought he wasn't keeping those guys under control at all they were the ones causing mayhem, not him. Water under the bridge now anyway. They've moved on,we've moved on but it's always nice to reminisce on the good old days occasionally   

Has he though, seems he still loves to spout about us whenever given a chance. I mean its been a DECADE.....and this showed up on my feed last month....

I mean seriously I am done apologizing to him and trying to reconcile, Its apparent that nothing short of a 404 page when hitting the Retromags homepage will ever heal his poor little heart.

[KiwiArcader]

Not sure what you should be apologising for to be honest. As far as my Retromags experience goes they were the ones giving people grief. Very weird!!

[kitsunebi]

I'm totally jealous that I wasn't around back when Retromags was just a bunch of squabbling assholes (present company excluded, I hope.)

It sounds like every day must have been a flamewar.  Interesting times...

[kitsunebi]

Here's the guide to the first of four games in the Mobile Suit Gundam: Gihren's Greed series of turn-based strategy games from Bandai.  This one was for the Sega Saturn.

https://archive.org/details/MobileSuitGundamGihrensGreedCompleteGuide

[Areala]

17 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

I'm totally jealous that I wasn't around back when Retromags was just a bunch of squabbling assholes (present company excluded, I hope.)

It sounds like every day must have been a flamewar.  Interesting times...

It really wasn't much like this, just a few people who were a lot touchier about their particular hobby than most, that's all. Occasionally they got poked, sometimes on purpose, usually by accident, and words were exchanged. It wasn't all that exciting, just made me steer clear of a few threads, that's all.

*huggles*
Areala

[KiwiArcader]

I'm sorry but there was absolutely no excuse for their actions. Banning people over differences of opinion on things like submitting PDF's rather than CBR files was an abuse of their positions. End of story. Unfortunately, with most other people not wanting to voice opinions on their behavior it spiraled out of control for the people they took exception to. I say it as I see it so and I'm pretty sure I was the single most affected by it but then again, I got banned and decided to never come back until Philly showed up on the other forum and gave me the good news re their departing to "greener pastures" so I might be wrong in that regard

I don't actually bear any grudges with them nowadays. However, it's a shame that the niggling between sites has dragged on like it has for years. It's okay for Meppi to make comments on Twitter about Retromags but when someone questions his ability to scan all the mags people have donated to him he comes in moaning about how everyone is downright nasty behind his back.  

[kitsunebi]

4 hours ago, KiwiArcader said:

I don't actually bear any grudges with them nowadays. However, it's a shame that the niggling between sites has dragged on like it has for years. It's okay for Meppi to make comments on Twitter about Retromags but when someone questions his ability to scan all the mags people have donated to him he comes in moaning about how everyone is downright nasty behind his back.  

I don't even know those guys, so I've got no problem saying stuff behind their back.  Like look at this post I found on their site from 2009.  That's pretty soon after they broke off from Retromags to do their own thing in a far superior way to the terrible way we do things around here.

http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articles/features/out-of-print/Mega_Donation.html

To anyone that doesn't want to look at that, it's about a single donation of 350+ magazines they received.  I sure hope the guy who donated them doesn't mind that 10 years later, they've scanned less than half of them (that's assuming that every single magazine they've ever scanned came from that one donation.)

Seriously though, that's their business.  I'm sure they made it clear to that guy before he donated that they probably wouldn't finish scanning them for 25 years, so no harm, no foul.

[kitsunebi]

Here's another strategy guide for Mobile Suit Gundam: Gihren's Greed for the Sega Saturn.  This would be the main guide, while the one I posted above was published afterwards as a companion guide of some sort.  I'm not going to study them to determine what differs between them, but since both guides are labeled as a "complete guide" I have to call them on false advertising.

https://archive.org/details/MobileSuitGundamGihrensGreedCompleteGuide_201901

[E-Day]

On 1/29/2019 at 8:09 PM, Phillyman said:

I can only assume that it was fake, I mean why not show me the source of those conversations? Why not include me? There were always these conversations happening that I of all people was excluded from......just seems fishy to me. As I stated above, I need proof to remove anything further from Retromags. A simple email from SMiyamoto@mail.ru is not gonna cut it, nor is a tweet from anything but an officially recognized company account. I pulled the Game Informers just because a single employee tweeted at us. But to be honest, I have a job that is on my mind for 55 hours a week, I have a wife and daughter, I have friends and family, I have hobbies.......Retromags does take a priority in there somewhere, but then within the Retromags stuff that I need to concern myself with, the "possibly" of reinstating Game Informer/GameFan is really really really (insert some more really s) low on my list of things to do/think about.

Ponder this: Davey Halverson also published Gamers Republic, and owned the publishing company that produced it. Unless he sold that off to someone, why was not magazine not mentioned with GameFan?

[KiwiArcader]

6 hours ago, E-Day said:

Ponder this: Davey Halverson also published Gamers Republic, and owned the publishing company that produced it. Unless he sold that off to someone, why was not magazine not mentioned with GameFan?

He also produced the U.S multi-format Play magazine.

[kitsunebi]

Unless I misunderstood, Phillyman said the ban on GameFan doesn't exist, since he would only ban magazines that he had been personally asked not to post (by the rights owner.)  Since no one involved with GameFan has ever contacted him, it's allowed here just as all the rest of Halverson's publications are.

He just said he couldn't be arsed to go about officially reinstating it because it's not a priority.

Of course, when it comes to adding them back to the site, the question is, how many of the dozens of issues available at the Internet Archive were scanned by Retromags members?  And do we still know who those people are?

[kitsunebi]

Here's one last Gundam guide, this time for Mobile Suit Gundam: Gihren's Greed: Blood Of Zeon, the second game in the Gihren's Greed strategy series, released on the PlayStation and Dreamcast in 2000.

https://archive.org/details/MobileSuitGundamGihrensGreedBloodOfZeonPlayingGuide

[E-Day]

16 hours ago, KiwiArcader said:

He also produced the U.S multi-format Play magazine.

Going through the index tables on the publications pages for US magazines, his name is on several magazines.

If Phillyman says okay, I can easily upload the issues I have and put them back on the site.

[kitsunebi]

I don't know how many people actually read their magazines in two-page view mode.  I certainly don't, since my monitor isn't so large that I can easily read the text at that size.  And if it WAS that large, I probably wouldn't want to be sitting close enough to it to read anyway.  Neverthless, perhaps some of you out there don't actually read your magazines and prefer to just flip through them in two-page view mode, absorbing all of the pretty colors through your eye-holes.

For the benefit of those people, I had decided to try my hand at editing all facing pages so that they joined seamlessly.  I had always done this with advertisements or images that stretched across both pages, but what I'm talking about is aligning non-essential things like page borders.  Take for example, the file I just uploaded to RM (Super Chinese 2).  Every single page has a patterned border which I took the trouble of joining with the border on the facing page.  These things never actually align on their own, so they require a bit of work to fit together, particularly when the border is a pattern and not just a solid line:

 

I've tried this method for my past few scans.  However, two things have made me decide that this is the last scan I'll ever edit this way.

1. Several of the mags I've released lately, including this one, have to be viewed in Japanese mode for the pages to align correctly.  As you can see, page 12 is on the right and page 13 is on the left.  I suspect that many people have no idea that their CBR reader is capable of switching to this mode with a simple hotkey press, and thus even if they're viewing it in two page mode, their pages will be displayed in the wrong order and thus my work will go unnoticed, anyway.

2. Time.  Two-page ads are one thing, but when every goddamn page of a mag has a border, it takes 5 times as long to edit if you're trying to align everything since you have to edit two pages into a single image and then split them apart again before saving.

I ultimately don't feel like anyone really cares, so it's just a waste of my time.  I know I certainly don't give a %#$^ if other people's scans are aligned like this (I'm strictly speaking about page borders - not ads and images.)  So from now on, I'm going back to my old practice of only joining images, not page borders.  If that bothers anyone, Amazon is a pretty good place to find a decent scanner, and you can find editing software for free if you look.

[kitsunebi]

This is a Very Cool Guide.

Rogue.  If you don't know what that is, or have never played it, then please educate yourself so you won't appear to be a casual gamer whose only knowledge of 80s games begins and ends with the NES.  Originally released in 1980, Rogue was one of the first games I ever played on a PC, back when they were all called IBM PC/compatible.  This guide is from 1987, which coincidentally is about the same time I first played Rogue.  Never beat it, of course.  Damn vampires...

https://archive.org/details/RogueHandBook

[Ethereal Dragonz]

14 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

This is a Very Cool Guide.

Rogue.  

 

Wow! I never knew they made a printed guide for this anywhere. This is really cool.

[MigJmz]

On 2/1/2019 at 2:52 PM, kitsunebi77 said:

 

2. Time.  Two-page ads are one thing, but when every goddamn page of a mag has a border, it takes 5 times as long to edit if you're trying to align everything since you have to edit two pages into a single image and then split them apart again before saving.

I ultimately don't feel like anyone really cares, so it's just a waste of my time.  I know I certainly don't give a %#$^ if other people's scans are aligned like this (I'm strictly speaking about page borders - not ads and images.)  So from now on, I'm going back to my old practice of only joining images, not page borders.  If that bothers anyone, Amazon is a pretty good place to find a decent scanner, and you can find editing software for free if you look.

I feel your pain. This Gamest edit is whipping my butt with its funky blocky border design. This will be my last time merging these pages like this too.