Stupid restrictions!

[wiseheart]

Am so very, very sad. The most gracious lhun_dweller sent me a set of Andromeda DVDs to my rather forgottable birthday. The thingies arrived today, and I was beside myself with happines, as they contained episodes I didn't even have recorded in German!

Well, I hopped to my brand new DVD-player (which I happen to hate, because the VCR part of his is incredibly complicated to use), put in one of my newest treasures - and the evil machine told me: "This disc may not be played in your region".

I don't know who makes these codes that make us, Europeans, unable to watch American DVDs, but I hate this person and hope his DVD player will spontaneously combust while he is watching his most favourite movie.

Comments

[lhun-dweller.livejournal.com]

We finds them AGAIN, we doesss, yesss! Findsss the Preciousessss.... amazon auf deutsch has them, although the episodes are, of course, split up differently on DVD volumes numbered differently and even some of the titles are changed rather than direct translations. (How am I supposed to know that "Immaculate Perception" has become "The Messiah???) Or "Music of a Distant Drum" is "The Holy Grail?"???

You would have laughed your ass off watching me struggle with the German-language site, armed only with an online automatic translation website!

The funniest part was me skimming through the German reviews looking for one of the "Tyr's wife" episodes - I figured if I found the word "wife," I'd know I had the right ep. Well, I was slowly reading through the various volumes' descriptions, searching one review after another. Suddenly, it dawned on me that the word I was looking for - kvinde - is NOT German. It's the Danish word for wife! But it didn't matter: the review for the ep didn't mention Tyr or his wife!

And then I discovered I've left my wallet at home. Soooo... I have them all stuck in my cart section labelled "order later" (or whatever it's called on the German site). And when I, my brain and my wallet are all at the computer next, I will order Region 2 encoded DVDS. Although they are not the same as the DVDs I sent you from the US, they have German and English language options and they'd damned well better have the right episodes!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

The titles German dubbing gives to episodes - to any episodes of any given series - never cease to amaze me. The sheer badness of them can only be topped by the sheer stupidity of the episode summaries...

But you are really spoiling me. *blushes*

[lhun-dweller.livejournal.com]

I knew you would want to hear certain males' voices in the original, so I made sure they said ENGLISH and Deutsch. I figure the latter will help you sort out any lingering questions about the English dialogue, as German is your second language, right?

As for the episode names, I thought at first it was just my meager German. Now I see I was doing better than I thought: at least I recognized that the names were NOT the ones I was looking for...

As for my line about what Tyr will do to whomever thought up region encoding, I wish I could claim it for my own, but it's a direct lift from one of my favorite lines, delivered by none other than your Master Marsters. Tyr asks what he wants, and he replies with something like: "The usual. 100 wives. 1000 grandchildren bearing my name. And the deaths of all my enemies by highly improbably accidents that cannot be traced to me." And when he asks Tyr what Tyr wants, Tyr replies with a scary smile, "The usual."

It's in one of the episodes I'm sending you. Oops: spoiler alert...