Category: general

And it’s not Ninja Burger! It’s Ninja, in Akasaka. Via Japundit.

The entire restaurant is designed in the image of a ninja house, complete with secret passageways. Food is served by “ninja” who also perform magic tricks for diners. The restaurant also prides itself in the unique presentation of its dishes.

I have got to go!

My love/hate affair with Carson Fire’s Elf Life continues.

The site continues to change, every week it seems, as Carson comes up with new ideas to try. Currently he’s got a daily strip, Sprite Life, that updates on the main page…plus a section called “What’s new in Elf Life…”, wherein updates to the Elf Life saga are listed. He seems to be trying to concurrently write Babes in the Woods (a prequel story) and Wedding Night (the latest story). He also uses this update section to remark on Elf Life related news and to post sketchbook scans.

I actually like the new incarnation: it’s clean and things are easy to find, plus I get the feeling that Carson (rather like me) tends to work in creative bursts rather than cranking things out every day, so having multiple concurrent projects means there’s more of a chance that there will be some new content when people visit the site. (Now, if only the store was functioning!)

While I approve of the current site design, that’s actually not why I’m writing. Today, there’s a huge link up reading “Now you can read the comics online or offline!” In the archives, Carson writes this explanation:

What’s the deal with the downloads?
HTML editions. Read the comics offline — collect the comics offline. And purchase goes towards production of new comics!

How it works: purchase, download, and unzip anywhere. The folder is clearly marked. For instance, Elf Life – Babes in the Woods 02 (here come the mermaids!) or Sprite Life 01 (the first set of Sprite Lifes). Inside that folder will be one easy-to-spot HTML file called START. Hit that and start reading in your default web browser!

Because it’s HTML, there are a lot of loose files. But all the files you need are inside other folders that you never have to open if you don’t want to.

I’m not sure if there’s really much demand for the PDFs that I’ve tried in the past. I’ve continued to have technical problems creating them, so I’d like to hear from anybody who prefers them.

Meanwhile, the HTML editions can be updated fairly easily. Some updates, bonuses, and corrections will be offered from time to time (Babes in the Woods, for instance, needs a few more comics converted from black & white to color in one issue — an update file will be provided later at no extra charge which can just be dropped into your existing folder).

He’s also added the note “Ad Supported” to the online archives, which are all still available to read.

I think this is pretty clever. The archives are still there, so people (like me) won’t freak out, but there are easy-to-save copies for people who want to own something. The prices are pretty reasonable, too: $2 for a chapter. Using HTML means the archives have navigation, so people can easily read his work–just like they can online, only without any ads.

Right now Sprite Life and Babes in the Woods are the only archives available to purchase. I’m looking forward to buying the original series and Wedding Night :)

Is this guy (subtitled “Dorcas” by AonE and “Dakaskos” by Geneon)

named after this guy?

I was thinking today, “Do I really need to switch to WordPress? Sure, having categories would be nice, but the great people at Blogger keep adding cool features, and I like the fact that Blogger stores my posts in its own system as well as producing the html pages–it’s like a backup system. Maybe they’ll add categories eventually. Maybe I should just stick with what’s comfortable and easy.”

Of course, on the day I’m thinking this, I have three posts in the queue that can’t seem to publish for whatever reason (four, if this post doesn’t go up). I hate it when Blogger does this. I don’t know why it happens or if there’s anything I can do to fix it, so I just have to wait until my posts magically appear later on.

How annoying.

Looks like our parents were right! (Or, you know, Gen Y‘s parents were right…whatever)

This is awesome.

I assume it’s a virus…I’ve not been stupid enough to actually click the link. It’s typically an email claiming to be from “postcards@postcards.org” or something similar, with a subject like “You just received a postcard from a friend !”

I just got another one. It’s supposed to look like this:

You can pick up your postcard at the following web address:.

http://www.postcards4u.com/?a0190313376667

But note that the code actually looks like this:

<p align=”left”><font color=”#FF0000″ size=”2″ face=”Verdana”>You can pick up your postcard at the following web address:</font></p><p align=”left”><font color=”#FFFFFF” size=”2″ face=”Verdana”>.</font></p><p align=”left”><font size=”3″ face=”Verdana”><A href=”http://61.197.218.236/yamamoto/postcard.exe” target=_blank><strong>http://www.postcards4u.com/?a0190313376667</strong></A></font></p>

(Emphasis added.)

Sneaky, aren’t they? A lot of the time you can’t tell where a link is going in your email client until you click on it…

Sean and I had a talk last night about what to do.

Interest rates are going back up. They aren’t too bad right now, but we missed the best rate. We could wait until interest rates lower again, which could take a decade, or we could hurry up and get a house now.

We’ve decided to hurry up and get a house now, and lock in our interest rate before the Fed meets again in December.

Despite the fact that older houses are cheaper, we’ve decided that a new build would be best. This way we won’t have concerns about bad windows leaking out heat in winter and cold in summer, and we’ll have all-new appliances and such. Plus, Sean said he would get the builders to run CAT-5 cable throughout the house, which would rule. (I’ve always imagined a totally wired house like that!)

In order to manage this, we’ll be scrimping and saving. No more “I don’t feel like cooking” or “I don’t feel like getting up to make Sean a lunch” from me, and no more “I don’t feel like eating this lunch Heather packed” or “that doesn’t sound appealing, let’s just get Wendy’s” from Sean. :> We’re going to throw every penny we don’t absolutely need into savings.

I will also (as always) continue the job hunt, and take freelance jobs wherever I find them.

It’s looking like we’ll live in Grovetown, since that’s where all the new builds in Columbia County in our price range are, and because it’s close to Sean’s work. (We are also looking in South Augusta, but not too seriously.) I hope this doesn’t mean I’ll never see my friends again, but you know how that goes. You don’t think to invite someone who lives all the way on the other side of town to an impromptu gathering, and when you live all the way on the other side of town you can’t spontaneously show up, because if the person is busy or something you’ve just wasted a hell of a lot of gas. It’s hard to get past the feeling that it’s wasteful to visit friends who live far away without a good reason for the visit (like a party or something). But it’s important to see the people you love, and if I do end up in Grovetown I will make a stronger effort to stay “in the loop”.

(I will keep pushing North Augusta, but honestly the prices aren’t any better there, and Sean is not a fan of the long commute.)

We’re going to be meeting with a realtor Cheryl knows to discuss financing options other than NACA. Then we’ll decide what route we want to take for financing, and then we’ll start the housing quest.

I’m more excited than stressed now :) It will be great to finally have my own home again.

(Apologies to Reader’s Digest for the post title.)

So I’m feeling outright shitty, and what does Magazine Man do but write an infinitely fun story, from three different perspectives, the last of which is hilarious!

Thanks, MM, I needed that.

I’ve had a fair level of stress since the fire, naturally. While I don’t try to make myself miserable, I do accidentally think about the things I don’t have anymore pretty much every day. Something will remind me of something else. Today I almost burst into tears in the middle of Wal-Mart because they have Christmas stuff out, and I don’t have a home to decorate for Christmas or a kitchen to make cookies in or a table to build gingerbread houses on.

I’d been doing better recently. I have, for the most part, settled into life at the in-laws’. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. I’m doing my part to cook and clean and otherwise stay out of the way, and it’s going okay–pretty good, actually, since Mom got me the laptop desk and I got myself a bike. Having those things lends my life a sense of normalcy. (Plus the bike’s good for working off nervous energy.)

However, I still don’t have a good schedule for myself, and I still don’t have a job, and those things are worrying me more and more.

You’d think with all the generosity of our friends and family, and with the fact that we are living rent-free, that we’d have a sizeable sum saved up by now, and that we’d be well on our way towards buying a house. This morning Sean said to me, “We’re not managing to save any money. We might have to go back to an apartment.”

Where is all the money going? This is what concerns me, because we lived on Sean’s salary in the apartment for nine months of our marriage–we were able to pay rent and utilities and still feed ourselves, though we couldn’t do much else. Now we have far fewer expenses and more money (Sean’s had a raise since then), so why are we struggling?

Part of it is that we bought laptops. Last month we used much of Sean’s paycheck and some of our savings to pay them off completely…which of course meant that rather than saving money, we spent it. This month I bought my bike.

To be fair, I did some freelance work that covers both the bike and a small but unexpected medical bill. The deposit hasn’t cleared the bank yet, so maybe that makes it look like we don’t have very much money. I don’t know.

What I do know is I am growing more and more unhappy and feeling more and more like a loser. I do “contribute to the household”: if I didn’t cook, Sean would eat nothing but ramen and fast food. And I run all the errands and do all the shopping. But I’m not doing enough…what I really need to be doing is working.

So I’m feeling more and more stress about finding a job, even though I have been sending out applications left and right. Meanwhile, I’m having trouble concentrating on my three new freelance projects.

Hell of a time to try to write a novel.

Have you guys seen this?

I feel bad because I didn’t recognize one of the games ;_; But the Zelda part was hilarious :D

Here’s where the NaNoWriMo magic will occur.

I meant to write the prologue today, but instead I wrote two character sketches. Ah, well. I may write the prologue later tonight. I kind of know how it’s going to go, anyway…

I don’t think I’m going to stick with that title, but it’s the closest thing I could think of to what I’m going for at the moment.

At six years old, Paige will soon enter Samuel F. Gordon Basic School, where she will spend five years studying general life skills before graduating to Directional School and narrowing down her Profession for high school. As such, she has not yet felt the pressure of making major life decisions.

A very quiet, timid child around most people, Paige comes into her own when she’s with her big sister. She often has bad dreams and becomes ill very easily; doctors haven’t isolated a genetic predisposition for either, so they all simply say she’s “unlucky”. Her father treats her like a porcelain doll, afraid of the damage her mother’s abuse might have done. Often Paige can’t feel at peace unless she’s with her sister.

Natalie is a fifteen-year-old junior at Marirene Wyman Magnet School for the Arts in Trindle, Tennessee, a thirty-year-old New Community about an hour’s drive from Knoxville. She studies music, specifically singing and playing classical instruments. However, her true interest lies in electronica, which in 2062 has surpassed rock as the “fringe” music of choice. Natalie admires radical ‘ronics who reject instruments entirely in favor of the “pure” experience one can only achieve when removing all variables from the production of one’s music–creating exactly what they envision through the use of computers. She finds her studies dull and pointless, but as she has a talent for it, she manages As and Bs without having to try very hard.

Natalie’s parents were divorced six months before the opening of the book. Natalie and her sister were both verbally abused by their alcoholic mother, who now lives in Wisconsin with her parents and is being treated for her addiction. Natalie thinks her mother is pathetic and has no interest in ever seeing her again.

Since the divorce, Natalie’s father has become very protective, to the point that Natalie finds every excuse possible to avoid him and his questions.

Natalie, like virtually everyone born after the Last Disconnected Generation, has neural implants through which she can perform advanced computational tasks and connect to the Internet. These implants are directly tapped into the central nervous system, giving modern physicians unprecedented ability to diagnose illness. In the last decade, this connection has been reverse-engineered to allow the production of artificial sensations, though this market is highly regulated by most world governments.

(Most ronics compose their music entirely in their heads–often they don’t physically hear their own work until it’s debuted at a gazz, the 2060s term for a house party or rave. Some fringe artists refuse to have their music played at all, instead sharing it with a group at a Download, in which all participants “listen” to the music in their heads.)

Natalie feels somewhat protective towards her younger sister Paige, but she also feels a certain amount of antipathy towards the child who likes to follow her around. After all, she gets enough of that from her father.

Natalie is a beautiful young woman who developed early. She has shoulder-length straight blond hair and hazel eyes.

Miss Em turned me on to another way to evaluate one’s blog. Never one to pass up a chance to evaluate myself (yes, I should be NaNoing right now!), I’ve answered it!

Audience: What words would your readers use to describe your blog? What do they like best about your site?

Well, I don’t know. I’ve had some preconceptions about what people like about this place that were totally shattered when I actually asked. I’d like to think that people think my journal is: interesting, intelligent, entertaining, funny, and thought-provoking. I’m afraid people think my journal is: boring, self-serving (well, it is), unorganized, poorly written, unfocused, and in a rut.

As for what people like best…I would have to assume they like the personal anecdotes and the photos. The few times I’ve tried to be funny have only been met with silence or derision. My regular readers typically don’t comment on my politics or culture stuff (unless, paradoxically, I say something funny), so those usually only get comments from random passersby who I suspect have just been googling their cause-of-choice and commenting everywhere about it.

Purpose: What is the purpose of your blog? Why does it exist? Is the purpose stated plainly where your readers can see it? How well does your blog meet that purpose?

I do not have a clearly stated purpose anywhere on the site. I think I will try to incorporate one into the redesign (you know, that mythical creature powered by WordPress).

My purpose is to share my life and to open up opportunities to discuss things. That’s pretty broad, but I don’t want to pigeonhole the blog or I won’t write anything. I imagine this means I probably won’t have a huge readership, ever.

Content: How well does the content support the purpose? Is the content readable, interesting, accurate, entertaining, and appropriate for your audience?

All my content is readable, because writing is one of my talents. I can phone it in and still end up with something above comprehensible. (Readers, meet my ego. Oh? You’ve already met?)

All my content is interesting…to me. But I’m weird. I don’t know what’s interesting to other people. That people other than my friends and family read this thing indicates that at least some of what I write is interesting to some portion of the population. I’m just not sure how sizeable a portion it is.

I strive for accuracy. I don’t just make shit up and post it. I don’t like misrepresenting people or ideas. Sometimes I’ve written whole posts and then removed them because they weren’t supported by facts (and I was too lazy to find any).

Entertaining…well, I like to think that my writing voice is at least somewhat entertaining. It’s the content that’s the sticking point. I write about what I care about. There isn’t going to be a single reader who cares about everything I care about, but hopefully enough people care about enough of what I write about to find reading this thing enjoyable.

As for being appropriate to my audience, well, my audience is friends, family, and random passersby. I know, I know, in writing you are always writing to an imaginary audience, and you should keep them in mind at all times. Well, I imagine that my audience is a group of intelligent, confident, witty people who like learning and sharing knowledge, especially about the things that interest me (Japan, language, culture, travel, personal and community responsibility, family, writing). So yes, I think what I write is appropriate to this hypothetical audience. I just don’t know if those people actually exist.

Design: How well does the look of the blog communicate the kind of blog it is? Is navigation easy and intuitive? Do items flow naturally from the first to the next? Do the color palette, image, and type choices support the content or call attention away from it?

I corrected a spelling error in this one. Can you spot it in the original article?

Well, let’s start with my title graphic. When I created it, I added the subtitle “an online collection of works” because I intended for the journal to be simply one subsection of a greater site, filled with all kinds of writing and art. Now I sort of see the journal as being the backbone of the site, and I don’t think the subtitle makes sense the way it is. I’d edit it, but I don’t have the picture I used to create the image anymore. It was one of a series of spring shots around my apartment complex, taken (I think) in 2003. I guess I never uploaded those shots to smugmug.

The navigation sucks. There are no categories, and you have to scroll way down the page to get to the archive lists. I do like that I have the archive pages listing the post titles only, because that makes it a little easier to scan for a post you’re looking for, but that’s about the only good thing. Ultimately I need categories and perhaps a section highlighting some particularly good posts (whichever ones those might be), and I may even want to have “previous post/next post” navigation on individual post pages. All of this will be possible with WordPress, so I haven’t bothered seeing if I can accomplish it in Blogger.

My menus are a little hard to navigate because they aren’t bullet lists. It’s hard to tell where one link ends and the next begins without hovering the mouse over them.

As far as the general design, I think it’s pretty, and while it’s unique, it’s similar enough to normal blogs that people can find their way around without too much difficulty. I have an easy to read sans-serif font, and I don’t apply too many styles to the text. When I created this design I wanted the words to be paramount. I’m still not perfectly happy with my link colors and style, but I’m not sure what to do about it.

Posts: Do you post on a consistent schedule the information readers came to find? Do your posts reflect the unique purpose and style of your blog? Do they offer variety and interest within your blog’s purpose and theme?

Assuming readers come to find what I currently think is worth writing about, yes, I do post that consistently! But otherwise, no…while I post a lot, I don’t post the same way all the time. I’ll have a streak of anecdotes, then a streak of news, then a streak of self–indulgent crap that no one cares about…

Comments: Do you read and respond to comments to form a sense of community? Consider which posts get most comments and which get none. How does that effect the topics that you’re posting on?

I love comments! I respond whenever I have something to say. I think it’s dumb to respond if I don’t have anything meaningful to add.

Sometimes comments inspire me to write new posts. It hasn’t happened a whole lot, but it has happened. I would like it to happen a lot more.

However, just because a post hasn’t gotten any comments doesn’t mean I won’t make another similar post. I’m stubborn like that :>

Technical Issues: Have you checked lately to see whether and how fast your blog loads in other browsers? Have you overdone the use of plug-ins and gadgets, making the experience more confusing than fun?

Hmm. I don’t check the blog in other browsers much. I did notice a table error that shows up in Firefox, but I haven’t tried to do anything about it because it won’t exist when I shift to WordPress. (Any aeon now…)

I don’t have plug-ins and gadgets, but I do have a lot of pictures. Especially lately. It has occurred to me that people might not appreciate that…

Writing: Is your writing clear and respectful of your readers? Have you established a writing voice that lets readers know who you really are? Is the blog essentially free of errors in grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation?

Hahahaha, do I even have to answer this one? Well, maybe the respectful part. I think my writing is kind of jocular, treating the readers as equals yet joking around with them.

Organization: Have you set up your categories to draw readers into your backlist? Do you feature “Golden Oldies” that new readers would have interest in? Do you name your Categories things that readers can understand?

No categories ;_; And I need to feature old posts, as mentioned above. I FAIL!

Marketing: What are you doing to let readers know that you are here? Are you listed in the right directories? Do you read and comment on other blogs within your readership? Have you included feeds?

There are directories?

:>

I read and comment on my readers’ blogs, in general, if I’m grabbed. I wouldn’t want someone to read me out of a sense of obligation, and I don’t read other blogs out of a sense of obligation either. If I’m reading your blog, it’s because it’s good enough to hold my interest.

That may not be the best mindset for gaining a readership, but hell, I don’t have time to read mediocre blogs. (And I don’t have the patience for it anyway.)

///

So that’s how I shape up. It looks like my biggest issues are categories and a featured posts section. Maybe I’ll do something about that before I shift to WordPress, or maybe I’ll resume work on the WordPress thing. (It’s a good thing the work I was doing on that was online, or I would have lost it all in the fire…)