About
Quad Cities Anime Rentals
-- OR --
About
-- OR --
This is basically just a database. Specifically, it's a hopefully somewhat comprehensive listing of what anime you can rent in the Quad Cities on the Mississippi. Not terribly useful to the world at large, I'll admit, but hey...
And, no, I don't sell any tapes, nor do I work for any of the places listed.
I was introduced to anime in college -- Penn State, University Park, to be exact -- and life was pretty good. The SF club had a large percentage of otaku members (many involved with Otakon), and after the weekly meetings we would watch a few episodes of something, usually fansubs from someone's collection. Every semester we arranged a public marathon somewhere on campus, in order to "expose people to this fascinating medium". And if that wasn't enough, the local rental places had around 400 commercial titles to choose from.
Then I graduated. So I'm in the Midwest, have some free time on my hands, and a distinct lack of new anime. I was curious to see what I could get a hold of here. Well, I could always special order something, but I'm usually reluctant to spend money on something I've never watched before, so I decided to see if the local rental places had anything of note.
Then I figured, well, might as well share the info...
The results were somewhat better than I had expected, actually. Even though the chain stores seem oddly adverse to completing series, there seems to be a fair chance that at least one of the stores here will get a hold of the newer titles. Still, no Allen Street Video, but better than nothing.
And if you don't mind a drive to Iowa City, things are even better. SWAMP gives two (7-hour!) shows a month, on alternate Sundays. And Daydreams, the comic store there, looks to have a nice selection of thing to rent or buy.
And Anime Iowa is in Cedar Rapids this year...
Actually, no. Almost all of these places are pretty much on the way to someplace else, and it almost takes as long to upload the pages as it does to update them. I wrote a little parser program that reads in the format I have the information stored in, and spits out the html'd listing files. Easy.
As you've noticed, this uses tables. A lot of tables.
Why so many?
Apparent speed of loading, mostly. Since I'd probably have to repeat the column labels anyway, I might as well break them up -- browsers tend to want to load the entire table before they begin rendering it. And, at least on my computer, that can take a while. I hate looking at a blank page while I'm waiting for something to load, so let it load the page in chunks. (Why not break it up into several pages? Simple: one page is easier to search.)
And on the off chance that anyone's tried to print these pages, you might have encountered a slight problem... If most of the printed page appears blank, it's a result of trying to print white text on white paper. Brilliant, no?
To get around this, either override QCAR's colors (under the Preferences menu, probably -- but you'll probably still have problems), or try printing out this text version of the main list instead (about 25k).
BACK to the main QCAR page...
BACK to the anime page...
BACK to Only Zuul, my so-called homepage...
email me... (does anybody actually find this useful?)
These pages are copyright 1999, G. E. Hagen (excepting the 'Trixie Turnpike' logo, which was created by Hans Raillard). Feel free to link to them, but please do not distribute their contents without permission.