Otaku Summer Cleanup 2026
In the corner, by the door, the book shelves were reorganized to hold more DVDs instead of books and the bottom-most book shelves were replaced with a smaller chest of drawers. Holiday fare and a lot of British dramas are well represented in that cubby. Movies and TV shows are on two walls with one whole bank of shelves for anime and another for cartoons. Sharp-eyed viewers will note a genuine laser-disc hanging on my door as artwork along with an actual print featuring Alias of Westgate from the book Azure Bonds.
I've taken the liberty of repackaging many of the anime on multiple discs into mutli-disc containers. Way back in the misty dawn of time, when anime was new to the US, it was common practice for American anime distributors to release a series in five, six or even seven volumes. Where possible, I try to keep all of the inserts, so, that if someone where inclined, they could re-repackage them back into single-disc containers. This has been necessary as the amount of space allocated to anime is finite and the more I can squeeze things in, the better.
I'm not a big fan of the streaming-only era. Quite a few anime get streaming releases, but, actual physical media is lagging way behind. I'm a big fan of owning my anime, as well as movies and TV shows. At the present time, I have over 5200 titles in my archive, and, about a quarter of that is anime. Recently, I've put one of my most expensive single-purchase anime up for auction. At the time of this writing (August 2026), my Garden of Sinners box set could be yours for a measly $500. While, the series is available in much cheaper formats, the original imported set is still highly sought after and unlike most other anime, it has not lost any of its value.
Quite a few things didn't stay after the reorganization. I had binders full of old advertisements and other anime-related ephemera that I had collected over the years. One thing I didn't get rid of, were my CDs/ I have over 400 CDs, representing over 10,000 songs, hiding at the back of the top shelf where my Batman movies and superhero cartoons live. I use iTunes to store and manage my ripped CDs and believe or don't, I use WinAmp exclusively for playback. What can I say, it's easy to use and doesn't complain very much at all. I was using Groove Music Player and it was reasonably well-behaved, but, then it became Media Player and started misbehaving.
On the infrastructure side of things, with the economy being what it is at the time of this writing (August 2026), I wanted to keep my aging PC running a bit longer, rather than buying something new at this time. So, sometime ago, I cloned a hard-drive for the first time in my life and swapped out my dying hard-drive for a brand new one with all of my data and apps preserved. And, while I was at it, it expanded the memory -- total out of pocket cost was about $150. I managed to get my replacement parts just before the market for memory and hard drives went insane.
After consolidating the anime and reorganizing everything, I carved out a space for Star Trek and Star Wars, with Thundercats featured along with my burgeoning collection of handmade audio books and data and game CDs. I had an extra shelf leftover, so, I moved a few box sets there. Recently, I was visiting one of my favorite online authors and noticed that all of their work had been taken down. So, I decided to make some emergency audio books to preserve some of my favorite stories.
Life got complicated and I had to step away from some things for a while. Everything is still in a state of flux right now, but, I feel that I can finally get back to writing on a more regular basis.
As for Blogger, everything seems to be where I left it (more or less) and the platform has yet to throw any unusual curves my way. I've gone through the various posts and trimmed away some link rot. A lot of YouTube videos that I had linked were taken down or were set to only display on the author's site. There were a few others that were blocked from actually playing, but, as long as the title image displays, I left the YouTube video link in place.
I've started the process of refamiliarizing myself with the inner workings of the site. Case in point, recently, I spent a few hours trying to figure out why a new anime post wasn't showing up in the site's Anime web ring despite having all of its internal meta data, only to realize that I forgot to label the post appropriately and that the code I'd written years ago was actually looking for a specific post label.
I've also realized that the other two web rings: Mainstream and Other, need to be better defined programmatically. At the time of this writing (August 2026), the non-anime web rings are somewhat hazy with regard to why a post might fit in one ring and not the other ring. This came up when I noticed that the Anime web ring has its own link -- sort of, but, the Mainstream and Other web rings do not -- well, again, sort of, but, decidedly less so.
I maintain an actual database of the physical media in my collection. Sometime ago, when I worked for a print shop, I had made actual printed books, but, once the printed books began to exceed 200 pages, it just was no longer feasible to do that anymore, so I migrated from an Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint for the markup to an Access Database. The benefit to using Access is I can use the report functionality to markup the data and print preformatted reports as PDF files with the cover art, descriptions and even links to YouTube and store that PDF file on either a tablet or phone. On those rare occasions when I'm out on the road looking for physical media, I can refer to my list to see what I have and determine what I might need.
In the database, I have flags that I set for each of the three web rings. For off-topic posts that don't refer to anime, movies or TV shows, I have to create miscellaneous entries in the database that are kept separate from the list of physical media. Mainstream items refer mostly to movies, short films or commercials that may or may not be in the physical media list, but, definitely should not be on the Anime list. Anything else like Convention Reports and Site Revisions would go into the Other list. Since I have the data for all three web rings already loaded on the web site, I'm leaning towards creating a custom page to display the data -- not unlike what I did for the revamped Anime Rating List page.Sharp-eyed visitors may notice, on some posts, that there are icons either in gray (shown) or red that link to the Anime Rating List. These icons are the last surviving remnants of my printed movie list.
Long ago, this site was hosted on GeoCities. Just before the end, GeoCities began to make a fuss over bandwidth usage. Recently, Blogger implemented a new policy where certain pages that exceed a given size are made read-only or are unpublished entirely. Unpublished pages will need to be trimmed to a more respectable size and republished. While no one among the volunteers that staff the Blogger help forum actually knows what that size limit is, thankfully, none of my pages were affected. While, I'm not expecting Yahoo! to suddenly swoop in the buy Blogger, I would expect some limits on images to come at some point in time.
My only concession to the new policy was to experiment with migrating my custom CSS and JavaScript to external files using
I've been waffling on whether or not to reinstate the Page Numbering widget on the site. It was laying dormant in the layout (I had the SHOW toggle turned off) and when I was doing a bit of house cleaning, I decided to bring it out of retirement temporarily and kick it around for a bit. It works reasonably well with some limitations. I stripped out some of the functionality from the original author's code to force it to work as a stand-alone widget. My main concern is that the code occasionally throws a warning regarding script injection. The issue was in the original code, but, I don't really know enough about its inner workings to fix it, so I left the code as is. It's been so long since I last visited the author's site, that the original author has apparently taken down their content -- Web Archive Link.
Date stamps got a minor revision. All date stamps are now a lighter shade of blue and on the posts, date stamps are now slightly larger. In addition the purple-eyes prominently featured on the blog title graphic have been replaced with a close-up of Makima's eye from Chainsaw Man. I wanted the image file size to be about 4K, so the fuzziness is deliberate. I also made changes to the links that appear under the blog title graphic. It actually took quite a bit more effort than I'd care to admit to get the home page link to NOT show on the home page. I wasn't going to bother, but, every once in a while, a dropdown menu would show up and since I only have two links, the dropdown menu should NEVER appear. The solution required a bit of CSS and some JavaScript.
I've removed everything from my sidebar and exercised the so-called Nuclear Option by removing the sidebar entirely. Some of the sidebar content already existed in the footer and I added a few extra buttons for good measure. One of the things that I was concerned with, were my external atom feed link lists. They had apparently been set to read-only at some point, which meant that I could leave them be or delete them, but, I couldn't edit them. After some consideration, I decided that I didn't really need them and since they represented the bulk of the content in my sidebar, that was the deciding factor to remove the entire sidebar.
The Flipcard Gallery has been removed. It was misbehaving and I'm not confident that I could actually fix the gallery at this point. The most likely cause was a change to the inner workings of the theme code made behind the scenes by the Blogger team to address some other issue and that change just happened to break my edge-case usage of the theme.
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