Happy birthday, blog!

Yes, today is my blog’s first anniversary.  Ooooh.  Let’s see…. I figured I’d have about four of my friends reading this a couple times a week but thanks to spammers and searches from people looking for illegal manga downloads, my numbers are much higher than I thought they’d be.  Kidding, kidding.  Sort of.  :P  Seriously, though people.  No downloads here, move along.  Sooo, for posterity, I have:

52 357 Total page views
205 Posts
859 Comments (but I answer all my comments, so about half of these are me)
2228 Spam comments  (go spam!)
7 Unfinished/Draft posts (which I will finish someday, I’m sure)

My most popular post by far is the first Ouran anime summary/screencap post.  People do love Ouran.   And I *will* finish the rest of the series.  I stopped screencapping half way through, but observers of my anime box on the side may notice that I’m still watching Ouran, even though it’s been finished for a while now.  That’s because I still haven’t watched the last three episodes.  Once I do it’s all over (sniff!) so I’ve been putting it off.  That’s kind of lame.  I should finish those up.  heh.

(Oh, God.  I’m listening to my Christmas music folder and “What Do You Get a Wookie For Christmas (When He Already Owns a Comb)” just started.  Apparently it’s love and understanding.  Please!  It’s Chewie!  Get him a sonic wrench or something.  Brain…. bleeding….)

Er.  Okay, what’s new with me.  Today at work I asked if I could go to the OLA Superconference (and got an immediate “go register!”) so that’ll be interesting.  I’ve never really gone to a conference before – if there’s one on in town and there’s a seminar on copyright I’ll usually go with the ILL person but that’s about it.   I ended up registering for two days and picked a mix of Library/Web 2.0, medical lit searching and a seminar for dealing with confrontational people.  There’s probably not much use for that one for the library (we rarely have problem people at the hospital) but I think it’ll be useful for me personally.  I don’t always deal with conflict well.  And I was good and didn’t sign up for any of the graphic novel sessions… though I’m sure they’re all teen oriented anyway.  sigh.  I want libraries to remember that adults read graphic novels too…

And it was obvious at the bookstore last week that Christmas shopping has officially started.  It was so busy, and so many people were walking around checking off lists.  This is the best time for dealing with Christmas shoppers.  Everyone is still relaxed, and vaguely smug about starting early and efficiently, so they’re all in a good mood.  :)  It helps that what they’re looking for is usually on the shelf or they have plenty of time to order what they want.  It’s much harder closer to Christmas when people are stressed from going from store to store trying to find exactly what they want but it’s sold out everywhere and it’s too late to order it in time.  I hate having the poor shoppers leave still unhappy and stressed because I couldn’t help.  Last year everyone wanted March of the Penguins, but it’s not obvious yet what the hot dvd of this season is.  Hmmm…..  I’m sure whatever it is we’ll be sold out of it quickly and won’t get it back in until two days before the big day.  :P

I myself started shopping two weeks ago and am about half done.  This is partly because I’m flying home this year and refuse to do so with a suitcase full of presents so have to mail them early, and also because I seem to have been hit by the Christmas spirit early.  It’ll be interesting to see how this will effect my usual Christmas freak out, which involves me being overtired, overheated and getting banged around in the Eaton Centre while having a really bad hair day.  It inevitably happens at some point and means that I end up at my hair dressers semi-tearfully begging for an appointment for the next day.  This year I’m not only going to be finished shopping early, but also kept my hair long the last time I got it cut so I don’t have the same issues that I usually do.  Do I mess with tradition and just go get it done early or do I wait for the freak out?

We also got tickets to go see the Nutcracker Ballet in December, and I’m really looking forward to it.  I’m familiar with the music and the story, but I’ve never seen the ballet performed before.  Actually I’ve never watched a whole ballet performance, period.   One of the doctors at the hospital was raving about the young people chosen to do the performance as well, which really got me interested.

Okay, now I’m babbling while tired (I just deleted an entire paragraph… be thankful) so I’m signing off.   I’ll do a new manga post tomorrow.  After more Christmas shopping.  :)

Crivins!

In lieu of posting, I have been reading Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett and The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones.  Neither one was a disappointment.  Wintersmith is the third Tiffany Aching book and seems a wee bit more mature than the first two, mostly because of a touch of romance.  Tiffany is brought along to see the Black Morris dance (which begins Winter) and breaks all sorts of rules by jumping into the dance herself.  This manages to not only bring her to the attention of the Wintersmith, who begins to fall in love with her as only an elemental spirit can, but also puts the coming of Summer in jeopardy.  A very good read for the beginning of Winter!

On Sunday I also bought Television Without Pity: 752 Things We Love to Hate (and Hate to Love) About TV and have been amusing myself reading it in bits and pieces.  Do yourself a favour and check out the sample entries in the book link.  I did the silent giggle thing on the subway for about three stops while reading (and not so silent when I read the entry for the A-Team) and when I got up to leave saw that some dude had been staring at me.  How embarrassing!  That didn’t stop me from continuing to read it on the bus afterwards, though.  Fun book.  I was sad to see that although Captain Kangaroo and Mister Rogers both made the children’s tv host entry, Mr. Dress-Up didn’t rate.  Or did they even air that show in the States?  Whatever.  I adored Finnegan growing up (the silent little puppet dog) but Casey freaked me out a little.  He was too much like the creepy puppets from Mister Rogers for me… and the puppets on that show were the reason I never watched it.

I was looking up the correct title for Summers at Castle Auburn for Melrose earlier and saw that Sharon Shinn has two books that I missed: Dark Moon Defender (the third Twelve Houses book featuring the King’s Rider Justin) and Dream-Maker’s Magic which has been out for months.  I somehow never remember to check Sharon Shinn for new books… and she seems to put them out faster than I expect.   It feels like I just read The Thirteenth House!

I’ve also been updating my new manga list from a few days back with very mini-reviews and I put the new manga from the TPL October release lists on my manga-at-the-library post.   I don’t think I ever mentioned it, but one of the behind the scenes things I did in August was run another set of publisher searches and pick out a batch of new titles that were in the catalogue.  As always, the list is not complete, only what I’ve found, blah blah.  Although I discovered (to my vague annoyance) that this is how they list the Fushigi Yugi manga if you do a title search:  Fushigi yugi (Television program).  I thought it was the anime series, but no.  It’s manga.

Bye bye YouTube videos!

I read in the papers today that YouTube removed over 30 000 clips and videos at the request of The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers.  I was curious to see how that would affect the videos I had put on my site (mostly opening credits of different anime or previews) and I’d say maybe 6 of the ten are now gone.  I’ll leave the empty video windows there for posterity.  :) 

It makes sense.  American studios were having clips pulled, it was only a matter of time before other countries followed suit.  Perhaps there are more people out there today who have learned a bit about copyright.  Or… perhaps not.  I’ve been to a few copyright seminars through work for interlibrary loans and it can get pretty confusing between standards for different countries and different publishers licensing agreements.  For example, it’s legal in the States to email articles to patrons but illegal in Canada.  So we have to attach copyright sheets to all of our articles asking the borrowing libraries to print the article and destroy the file and hope they follow through.  Thinking about copyright issues gives me a headache.

Grr… stupid spam!

You know, up until recently spam comments getting caught in the spam filter were vaguely annoying but no big deal.  I got, on average, about 10 a day.  I have now passed 1000 spam comments here (I know, low for some but too high for me) and in the past two days have gotten over 300.  Seriously.  Over 300.  Do they think their nasty pr0n comments or ads for casinos are ever going to get published?  Do people who blog really keep that little control over their sites?  arg!

On a completely different note, today I went to a departmental staff meeting at the bookstore which was a first for me.  We don’t get together as a group that often, but the inventory for our section has been getting screwed up with every attempt so we had a meeting to figure out what we could do to make it run smoothly when they do another count in a couple of weeks.  Or even correctly, which would be nice.  I ended up volunteering the information that I was taking a few vacation days from the library and could pop in to help out and my manager responds with, “Okay, I’ll probably put you on for all three days then.”  Damnit!  I don’t think I meant to work that much.  But, I will do almost anything for my two managers if they ask and I’ll have to keep a steady “think of the $$, you’re getting paid twice for today and Christmas is coming” chant running through my head.  That’ll get me through.

I also discovered that what was supposed to have been my last DMP manga list (TWO YEARS I’ve been trying to get this stuff in to the store…) somehow got misplaced.  Or at least the manager I meant to have it never saw it.  Soooo now I get to make another one, and this one is going to be called “Cathy’s last DMP list FOR SURE this time.”  Ha.  I like making ultimatum lists.  Heck, it worked with my anime section.  Which has apparently been doing very well and getting many compliments.  sniff!  I tried, and worked very hard making lists and going through hundreds of entries at Amazon to pick out titles and box sets.  People used to make fun of our anime section.  It made me sad and annoyed, so it’s nice to see it going over so well.

Back to the afghan now.  I’m 1/2 done and it’s looking pretty good so far.  Yay!

It seemed like a good idea at the time

Today’s blog thing is my new header.  This is one of those ideas that I came up with at three in the morning after being awake for about 30 hours.  I know it’s weird, but it stuck in my head so I’m getting it out of my system.  Indulge me.

Manga fans should recognize the new header.  :)  It took me forever to find this pattern, even though it’s one I see a lot while reading.  You never find stuff once you start looking for them.  One thing it’s done is make me a lot more aware of the kinds of stock backgrounds manga authors use.  (Hana-Kimi, for instance, uses a lot of flowers…)

I hadn’t anticipated how colourless my layout would look, however.  My Ouran roses added a much needed splash of colour at the top, and that’s gone.  I might experiment more with the background colours available, but I’m a blue girl at heart…

BTW, I chose this pattern because I’ve always liked it.  The cactus reminds me of Digimon (always, every time I see it I think of that darn show) which in turn reminds me of my nephew.  It’s always been one of his favorite anime series so I used to watch it in a show of solidarity.  Plus, it really wasn’t that bad.  :)

I’ve never quite understood the point of this background, though.  Some are for texture, like dots or lines, some are pretty or cute, like flowers or bunny heads with bows.  Why cactus (cacti?) with faces though?  Is this a thing in Japan I’m unaware of or is it really just for the randomness and weirdness of it?  If anyone knows, please enlighten me.

Apologies to anyone browsing here while I mess around with my theme and such.  I'm trying to find a good picture for my header, the problem being my title text stays white which has been blending into the images I've been picking.

This may not be obvious, but the roses I have up right now are official Ouran Host Club anime screen cap roses.  I wouldn't just pick any old random flower…  :)  I'm shooting for a good pic of the twins, but it's getting late and I think I've done enough fiddling for tonight.