The short version is, I bought some anime.

I just finished my EA Sports Active custom workout for the night, so I am cooling off by letting Folding@Home run on the PS3 as I bang out a weblog entry. Folding is playing through my imported MP3s... currently that Monkees Greatest Hits album that ends with those three hilariously bad reunion tour songs.

By the way, the lyric is "disappointment haunted all my dreams." I always thought it was "hardened on my dreams."

I took a giant step last night and purchased some actual media for the PS3. As I've said before, I am not down with the $2 standard for downloadable single episodes, whether it be on the PlayStation Store or iTunes. $10 for movies I'm more cool with, as that can actually be a deal when compared to a new DVD release. The TV thing is a rip.

Now that I have a vastly improved storage drive, I was all over the PS Store looking for something that would be great to have forever stored on the PS3. This is all going to seem really silly in about five years when ALL of our TV shows and movies are stored digitally in PS3-esque devices. But today, it is a battle of value vs. convenience vs. price vs. entertainment as I ponder each downloadable offering.

Not to mention the SD vs HD quantification. If I really like something, and I can get it in high-def, that's going to be where I go.

So as far as a PS Store purchase goes, I'm looking for an item that:

- Is sufficiently rewatchable enough that I will likely view it multiple times, thus justifying having it take up space on the PS3 HD. This means it should be something Clark would dig. Also that it should probably be good.

- Is not going to make me feel like I let myself get ripped off. As great as it would be to have Season 1 of Batman: Brave and the Bold a click away from LittleBigPlanet, $2 an episode will end up being more expensive than the inevitable DVD release. Or even the blu-ray release, fingers crossed. And those will come with bonus features.

- Is perhaps something sort of hard to find? That would be a nice get.

Oh, and before one of you wags points out all the wonderful illegal sites you illegally download from in an illegal fashion: I'm not doing that. And not just because it's illegal, but because it's a dick move.

UNBELIEVABLY, I found something: the three-part Read Or Die anime. Adult Swim ran it as one single movie some time ago and I recall liking it. I liked it enough that I picked up the four manga volumes as well.

At $2 an "episode," that amounts to a rarish movie for $6. Which I'm guessing is cheaper than what Suncoast "Ripoff" Video would charge for it. And since this is the only anime featuring Yomiko Readman, it's not like I still have another hundred episodes to collect, shades of Naruto or whatever. (A sequel anime series was produced, but I gather it is about a different set of characters.) 90 minutes and I'm done.

So there we are.