mello hates you

Hello! If you've come here looking for essays on manga layout and art and links to other sites that talk about it, you're in the right place. I've written some articles for Tokyopop, and these are the essays that started me out in this strange business of being a Web pundit.

Feel free to add me to your friendslist without asking - I don't get offended by that. :D Please excuse me if I don't add you back - it's not because of you, it's because I've got too many journals on my friendslist to keep up with right now and adding more would completely overwhelm me (I do try to at least go and look at your LJ occasionally). You're perfectly welcome to come in, hang out, read, and comment as you choose.

One request: if you comment and you're not a Livejournal member and don't have an OpenID to identify yourself with, please leave a name. I get lots of anonymice making comments on these, and some sort of name or nickname separates your anonymous comment from all the other anonymous comments and makes all of us take you a bit more seriously. ETA: Anonymous commenting is now off, thanks to anonymous commenters who never leave any way for someone to reply to them. It's easy enough to create an LJ for commenting purposes, and if you don't want to, my email address is posted on my LJ profile page.

I, and the other people who comment here, do tend to reply to comments because we're interested in talking about manga with other people, and presumably you are also. Leaving a way for us to discuss with you is common courtesy.

( Click here for the manga analyses and other links )


I'm willing to listen to suggestions for future essay topics, but you'll have a better chance if you ask a question about the process or techniques involved instead of asking for a particular series, since I tend to pick a series that serves as a good example for the subject and not the other way around.


 

wintersweet I FINALLY FOUND THE FILE.

My order of 18x24" mats and backing boards arrived from Bags Unlimited. Minus the backing boards. This happened the LAST time I ordered these from them, too. And this is a BAD time for it to happen, because it means I have to cannibalize the prints I'm sending to AWA for backing boards, and I was GOING to mail those on Tuesday. Which I won't be able to until the backing boards come in, dammit!

Left cranky message on their website contact form. Last time it got replied to and the boards sent out the next day. Hopefully they can do it to arrive Tuesday - if they did a super-speedy overnight thing to arrive on Friday, UPS would just leave it outside the door and I'm afraid the trash people would pick it up on Sunday night. I'll be at the con from Friday morning until Monday afternoon. ARGH

I just went through and worked out which of my prints in my DA gallery can be sold, and at what size. :) Also: free shipping to the US and Canada for now! ($5 for all other countries.) Check it out!

I also have some of my Japan photographs for sale here. (They can do better sizes at a better price than I can.)

Database of female scientists in fiction. You're encouraged to email suggestions for additions, and to flesh out current entries.

OMG one more print, and I'll have all my prints done for the con and it's only TUESDAY.

It's not THAT impressive, as I'm only filling in the ones that were low or sold out from A-Kon, plus a couple of the new pictures since then. But still: TUESDAY.

But you wanna know what's REALLY impressive? I ran out of two tanks of ink in the middle of a large print - it stopped the print, I replaced the tanks, and it CONTINUED PRINTING WITHOUT LEAVING A SINGLE MARK WHERE THE INK ORIGINALLY RAN OUT.

...please pick a manga or anime character you're familiar with and head over to the Universal Mary-Sue Litmus Test and score him or her, and put the results in the comments. Thanks!

( characters so far )

I applied the universal Mary-Sue Litmus Test to Drizzt Do'Urden...

( Read more... )

ETA: Starting to apply the test to manga/anime characters in the comments. So far I predict that the standard shounen heroes will all be Stus, because that seems to be a prerequisite for that sort of character. OTOH, Gary Stu and Mary Sue characters tend to appeal directly to the target demographic of 14-year-old boys and girls (the age at which most of you confess to voraciously reading Forgotten Realms novels XD), so there's really no surprise in that.

#1. Mr. Salvatore, plz to be noting that when you have a number of lightning bolts hit the ground within yards of your characters, they should all be DEAD OF LIGHTNING because they travel through the ground. There's a reason you're supposed to crouch to minimize your contact with the ground when caught in a storm instead of lying down.

#2. Streams of Silver, p. 139: "Her nose was broken and disjointed, splayed across her cheek." EUW!

#3. I found a boarding pass in the book, obviously used as a bookmark, for a flight on December 29th, which is my birthday. Amusing coincidence, until you realize that the last time I found a boarding pass in a used book, it was for a flight on ... December 29. OOooOOOOoooOOOoOOOOO

See? This is the reason I need to catch up on the last few months of the Bleach anime,e ven though I know it's gotta be mostly filler eps...

( Read more... )

Lots of great Olympic photos from The Big Picture today. WARNING: there's a couple of you here sensitive to blood, and there's a shot of someone after he took a spill from his horse with blood on his face. Minor injury, though.

I have now finished Sojourn, the third book in the Drizzzzzt origin trilogy, and I have a confession to make...

( Read more... )

'...the dilated orbs of his eyes...' DEAR GOD KILL ME NOW

...in the continuing RPG tie-in novel saga. I'm going to be doing art for the rest of the evening instead of reading this book and thinking about all the skeevy gender and racial politics in the series, but I thought I'd let this part of the book speak for itself:

( Read more... )

I invite you, if you dare, to enter and meet the...

( LINEN CLOSET MONSTER )

Entire campvs network down as thousands of students arrive and try to set up email and wireless access! Fun times!

Aaaand Gmail tanks (or perhaps just my access to it tanks) as I'm attempting to reply to batwrangler's email. *sigh*