Hello everyone, it’s been way too long. Good news incoming on two fronts, but first a quick bit of a life rant / explanation for my frequent absence from my own site… As I mentioned in my last post, almost two years ago, work dominates my life and leaves precious little free time. Having a toddler at home and parents in their 80s who need a lot of help (I am “sandwich generation” defined!), and also having to work twice as much to make it as I did living in Japan… Well, all that eats up said free time and doesn’t leave me really any chance to make my own art. All my creative energies are pushed into publication design work, and after the kind of long hours I have to put in sometimes (I did several 70-80 hr weeks last year in a row) the last thing I want to do is look at a screen more when I’m finished. (often I’m sick from too much screen time.) On top of that, my horrendous attention span (getting worse all the time!) kind of further puts a wrench in my gears across the board in life. ANYWAYZ… Enough negativity, this is supposed to be a fun and exciting announcement!
I started the new version of my site two years ago, and it was supposed to be a small refresh of things (a “version 3.5” if you will) but it turned into a giant project. I dumped about a week into it – adding tons of new stuff, mostly manga lettering work – and redesigned all the pages, but then I decided I was feeling lukewarm on said redesigns, and started redesigning it again. Then I got buried in work for a couple years. 2023 has started with a little less work than normal (troubling for my bank account, obviously, but it’s nice to have a break) so I decided to finally finish this damn redesign! That’s the first point of good news I was referring to. Version 4.0 looks on the surface like a refresh of the last version, but there’s a lot changed under the hood, coding-wise, and I also added a lot of stuff, consolidated a lot of stuff, moved a lot of stuff to the archive, and deleted a lot of stuff. Also there’s more video now, scattered throughout the site. I’m hoping to add more and more video stuff in the future. As far as new work I’ve added, since there’s too much to mention here without making this blog post unreasonably long and self-indulgent, I’ll try to make some posts soon to showcase some of it. In the meantime, just go look around! There’s a lot that has changed.
There are a few incomplete areas, which I’ll get to when I have time. Despite doubling the amount of books shown in the manga lettering gallery, (and adding a ton more content to the existing pages), there are still some newer books, from 2022, that I haven’t uploaded yet. Just not enough time. That will come soon.
Oh, about the blog… I’ve never known how to really make my site mobile-friendly, and had for a long time been keeping that blog as seamlessly integrated with the rest of the site design as possible. I eventually put in some code I found to make the mobile version of said blog switch over to a more stripped-down smartphone friendly design. Problem is, that broke somewhere along the line, and the blog looked all kinds of messed up on a phone. (As in – the right side of the page going off the screen and unreadable!) Then, after updating WordPress, the desktop version of the blog broke too. I decided to just throw in the towel and not even try to match up the design of the blog with the rest of the site. It’s good enough for now, looks decent, and most importantly, works well on mobile! (finally!)
Anyway, the other good news I mentioned, and the reason I “ran out of time” to add 100% of what I planned on – I’m speaking at a couple panels this upcoming Saturday (1/21/2023) at Ohayocon in Columbus OH! That coming up made me decide to hurry up and finally finish (to a “good enough for now” state) this perpetually in-progress beast. I also made new business cards for the first time in ages, hehe. I don’t traditionally get a ton of traffic on this site (nowhere near as much as I wish I did), but I imagine there will be some influx of new visitors soon (hi!) and I didn’t want the site to be too out-of-date. I’ll post more about the Ohayocon thing in my next post. I’m really excited about it, because I’ve never paneled at a convention before! Kinda nervous too, but I imagine it’ll go just fine. I’m looking forward to meeting some of Ohio’s fellow manga maniacs there.
Ok talk to you soon! I hope sooner than two years this time. Best believe I haven’t abandoned the site. Life just keeps getting in the way of art.