Editorial Grab-bag: Birthday, Blog-facelift, Episodic Posts, more

Well, I’ve got quite a few things I want to talk about, and not a lot of time, so let us begin.

First, today is my birthday. Go me, survived another year :3 – For those of you who wonder, I’m 28 years old now. Plans for my birthday? I’ll go to a restaurant with my family next weekend, watch a movie with friends next weekend, meet with my grandparents some weekend. I’m busy this weekend with Aristotle, so no fun allowed! I did buy myself a thing or two on Black Friday sales online though.

Visiting Google, I was surprised seeing a personalized message.

This blog is nearly 5 years old now, and it was time for another face-lift. In order to make the blog’s content easier to read (and that is what this blog is all about, after all), I chose a slightly wider theme, with a more legible font, spacing, etc.  I modified the theme further with some CSS-changes to eliminate some warts related to images and links.
The blog-header is the same header I’ve used two themes ago (see this post about its creation).The header had to be created anew since the old resolution looked appalling when stretched; Neontaster helped me with adding shadow to the letters. In case you wonder, the image used is of roleplaying game books I own, that shelf looked like that back in June 2006. You don’t want to know what it looks like right now.
What do you guys think, do you like the new theme? Do you like the old-new header?

For those of you who hadn’t noticed, there’s a new page linked to in the blog’s upper menu – “Episodics” – I re-post my episodic observations there. It’s an ongoing project, and hopefully by the time next week ends I’ll have all Fall 2013 episodes for which I’ve been taking notes listed there, and as time permits I’ll also add some images to flesh them out. Spring 2013 and older seasons’ notes will take some more time to get uploaded, hopefully by the time the month ends it’ll all be up there.

I did consider posting these to the main site, which would certainly generate more readers and comments, since I write about 10 of these a week, but I’m just too fond of scrolling down my main page and in general seeing one “orderly” post after another, in the end, one of the most important thing about this blog is that I should be happy with it. For now, feel free to check some of these recent and what I think are more interesting notes:

1. Kyousougiga episode 5 – The last of the “background” episodes, beautiful imagery, exceedingly human.
2. Kyousougiga episode 6 – Where we reflect on the past, and then move forward. Along with episode 5, the thematic imagery used is thought-provoking and beautiful.
3. Kill la Kill Episode 7 – That might have been my favourite episode of the show, with an elaboration of Satsuki’s philosophy, and the show actually surprising me, not to mention some nice fight scenes.
4. Kyoukai no Kanata (Beyond the Boundary) Episode 9 – Where I discuss the nature of the story, and the nature of the love story, and compare them to Twilight – not as a dig, but because they both draw similarly from Romeo and Juliet alongside glamorous modern dark fantasy.

The most views my blog had in a single month up until this month had been back in October 2009, with 3,856 page-views. This November the blog had already passed 7,000 page-views. It also feels that comments are appearing on posts with some regularity. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who reads my (often rambling) posts, and took the time to engage in conversation. I’m unlikely to reply to comments on the blog until Monday, due to the aforementioned Aristotle papers I must read and then write. I hope to manage to maintain a 100 page-views a day average going forward – and yes, I’m an incredibly small-time blogger :3

Since lately I’ve been watching more films, and reading more books (3-5 books per month), now that I’ve dropped enough anime shows to finally assume my promised “no more than 10 shows during Fall 2013” situation, I’m thinking of resurrecting my Monthly Media Consumption threads, but they will return without purchases – I’m trying to move away from being a consumer-defined “fan”, which I still intend to blog about in the context of anime-figure reviews and blogs.

Finally, Markdown had been enabled in the comments, so if you’re used to reddit, you can now more easily add links, quotes, italicize your text, etc.