Nigorimasen! Blog

Since today is July 1st (Happy Dominion Day?) and other bloggers are reporting their monthly statistics, I figured I would relay mine to exhibit some sort of transparency and let you, the readers, know where I stand in readership and how a single news event post kind of made up for only composing 14 other posts the rest of the month (for an average of 0.5 posts/day).
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This afternoon I finally decided to roll out a new look for the blog - it comes with an extra sidebar as well an option to shove aside both sidebars. (BTW, the theme is called Mandigo.) I’ll try to repopulate the header folder with fresh images but for now, you get the buggy from Pumpkin Scissors. In the meantime, you can suggest topics for me to write about using the Skribit box or update your Gravatar since apparently the comment system now utilizes that feature.

Oh, and for posterity’s sake, here is a screencap of the previous design. It lasted me over 17 months and hopefully I won’t get bored of this one because it took a while for me to find another theme that fit my tastes.

Last night, I finally got around to signing up for RightStuf’s affiliate program and retroactively inserted links into posts from the past three months. I also submitted something to AnimeNation’s similar program but I haven’t gotten a reply from them yet - I also think I need to include a banner graphic as my link so I’m currently preferring the simpler method of linking to the TRSI listing. So don’t be surprised if I attempt a weekly “this week in releases” segment in the near future and I’ll try not to be a total sellout.

Also: I have begun to grow tired of my current, year-old design, especially since I started using a widescreen monitor. Currently my blog is 800 pixels wide with the sidebar taking up about 230 pixels of that space. I’m tentatively interested in fluid width so it’d fill up the screen but I would definitely like a main base width of 950-1000px including one right column. (I’m also thinking of making some header banners that use “Nigorimasen!” for this new look.) I think both a left and right column would make the actual posts in the middle seem “crunched” and two side columns don’t seem too necessary but I’m not ruling them out. Unfortunately I don’t have a good idea of what kind of color scheme I’d want so I suppose I’ll try out a bunch using Kabitzin’s experimentation method and hopefully develop something over the next couple months I will be satisfied with well into 2009.

Over the next two weeks starting tomorrow the 14th up to Christmas Day, I will posting a daily reflection on a particular event in anime or manga that had a lasting effect on me in the past year. (Look for the tag ‘12daysofchristmas‘.) This effort will be part of the general ABC postings Owen mentioned in his post yesterday. I might include some of the anime I watched into the list but in recent brainstorming sessions, I’ve come up with more things I did than things I saw so I’m proceeding more down that path.
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Even though my Internet access right now is limited to use of university computer labs on weekdays and Internet cafes at the rate of €1 per hour, I am still trying to keep up with my usual information absorption methods through podcasts and RSS feeds. I was not particularly aware of the recent “anime is just entertainment” discussion that happened over the past week and frankly I didn’t really care about it. (My short response: anime is entertainment by definition. It is the viewer that chooses to see depth in it, if any in fact exists with the work in question.) Same goes for the “anime is dead” and “how does one define anime” discourse of the last month or so. I felt that if I happened to fashion a post on the above topics and those of similar ilk, it would get lost in the noise and not get read with as much credence or attention as the first couple people who chimed in. Though I probably would have written a “What are you talking about?!? Anime is alive and kickin’!” post if I had thought of it at the time instead of just now.

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If you’ve visited this blog the past day or so and clicked on most images, you likely have noticed that a “lightboxed” version of the full resolution lays over the page and fades out the actual page. I ended up installing the Lightbox 2.0 plugin earlier this week and have been quickly appending as many previous entries as I could with the extra image code. The main reason I did this was so I could post thumbnails of screenshots and let readers see the fullsize images without having them open new windows or tabs.

I made a decision to not add the functionality onto images larger than 1024×768 because I don’t want someone’s screen to be overwhelmed. So far, I have adjusted entries as far back as October and plan to be done by Monday. I hope this addition enhances the experience and doesn’t slow things down too much. (Posts that were written in the PTO days either have their images still on WP.com or Photobucket so they may load a little slower than those from January 2007 and after.)

A more cosmetic update is rotating banners, something I have wanted to do for a while now. (I actually got it to work with the Dark Ritual theme when I was still figuring out the initial look for the domain move back in December but the categories weren’t the way I wanted so I chose what I’ve got now.) The plugin I am using is called Header Image Rotator, created by Matthew Hough, and I have set it to change switch out headers every minute.

Currently I have four banners uploaded including the one with Edward that has graced the top of the blog for the past six months and I’m trying to make that total reach about twenty in the next couple weeks. More variety is better! One gripe I have with the settings is that the interval choices are Minute, Half-Hour, Hourly, Daily, and Weekly. I would rather have 15 minutes as an option because that’s not as often as every minute but shorter than a half-hour. Other than that, it was relatively easy to set up with a couple of CSS edits so my next task is to make more banner images!

If you have been unable to access many aspects of this blog for the past couple days, that problem was fixed this afternoon when I upgraded the blog’s software to Wordpress 2.2. (It was previously on version 2.1). I made a post last night (please go back and read it!) and then realized I couldn’t access my own stats page or users online page so I decided to upgrade and although that happened to solve the problem, I doubt that was the actual issue.

Next, a little bit of personal news: I hurt my left elbow while biking to campus today and my left arm is now in a sling and my wrist in a brace with what the doctor at the student health center called a “radial head fracture”. I will attempt to continue making posts over the next couple weeks but it will take longer than usual as I will be typing (read: pecking at keys) using only my right hand. Perhaps I should try some voice recognition software…or just scan in handwritten stuff… Anyway, I hope that recovery will be quick so I can get back to my normal way of life.

Finally, I’ve come to the conclusion that I likely will not be able to finish the manga reading project that I set upon a couple months ago but I’ll try to read as many volumes as I can and write mini-reviews for whatever I end up completing.

OK, on Friday I turned into the Education Abroad Office at my college my enrollment packet for a summer abroad program (Japanese Culture in Film) to take place in Kyoto, Japan, from June 29 to July 28. I was told I am fourth on the waiting list since it filled up quickly so I’m hoping people drop in the next couple months. Not damn likely but I can still hope.

So my backup plan for overseas learning this summer is Düsseldorf, Germany, during the month of August and taking a course called “Germany under Hitler’s Third Reich”. And I know a good amount of German so that might help me get around there better than not knowing kanji and walking around Japan. Still, I know a friend who was the first one to sign up for the Kyoto trip so I’d prefer to go there than Deutschland, at least for this summer.

Anyway, I set up a separate blog to document my attempts and experiences with the study abroad program. There’s only one post there now but it should pick up around mid-April as more stuff happens. Wish me luck, guys (and gals)!

Maybe the pure power of the aniblogsphere can influence the situation…or not…

For a while now, even before I started blogging, I wanted to have my own domain for hosting AMV’s, short movies and other kinds of stuff. I had decided a couple months ago that I would use one of those $97-off promo codes for Dreamhost and work during winter break on setting up my new website. Hitting my image quota has just quickened my resolve to go ahead with it but I’m slightly reluctant because of all the connections I’ve built while at this URL. I suppose another reason could be hitting the milestone of making 100 posts but whatever.
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I’ve decided to start a sideblog to this one and have already made a couple of entries on it. My reasoning was that I have many non-anime interests and I want to talk about them without disturbing this blog’s focus. So, if you want to read about my take on other stuff, hop on over to ptosideblog.wordpress.com. I might cross-post if it’s something really interesting but only occasionally. I’m also putting a link to it in the sidebar under “Other Links”.