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. Repackaging my anime was 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 it 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, I 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 as part of a shadow ban. Later, when they were un-shadow banned, 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 to, 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 for various reasons, but, as long as the title image displayed, I left the YouTube video link in place.
I also revisited my scripts and found two did not age well. Specifically, the Unnecessarily Complicated Slideshow was misbehaving on devices with touch screens (phones) and had to be retired. And second, the Flipcard Gallery was misbehaving more seriously and I was 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. ☹️
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 GitHub. The only casualty that I've noticed with using external CSS seems to be the Flipcard Gallery. The externally-hosted CSS doesn't seem to load when called from a frame or when using the preview feature. As an exercise, migrating the JavaScript and CSS to external files was fairly trivial. Keeping the array data local and moving the code base seemed to be the best way to handle things. After checking with a web site analysis tool, it appears that making the switch only cost ne a few microseconds on the loading time and saved me about 130K in local storage.
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. Visit the author's site: Helplogger.
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 5K, so don't expect photorealism. I even added some animation to the eye. 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 elsewhere and I added a few extra links for good measure. One of the things that I was concerned with, were my external RSS feeds. They had apparently been set to read-only by Blogger at some point, which meant that I could leave them be or delete them, but, I couldn't edit them. My guess was either the RSS feeds as a whole class of content were consuming too much resources or the Blogger team made some changes to the feed gadgets. 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. I put a handful of links in the footer and added the About Me link to the header.
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