This is a bit out of order in terms of the poll, but since my mother is one of the readers who most wanted to see this post, I’m going to let her trump all. :)

Lissa Pattillo recently blogged about manga publishers and bloggers/reviewers she’s found on Twitter, and as one of those I felt a bit inspired to talk about my own experience there, especially since the thing I hear most from non-users is, well, “Why?”

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Just a couple of things for today. First the good news, PopCultureShock is having a Naruto giveaway, mainly to help jump-start our new discussion boards over there. Here’s the announcement from Manga Recon with links to the PCS announcement and the boards. It’s always tough getting new forums up and running, so I hope some of you will go join in!

Then for the bad… AmazonFail. Wow. Having just signed up this blog as an Amazon Associate maybe three days ago, I was pretty dismayed to discover that I was inadvertently promoting a corporation that would do something like this. For the three people left on the internet who don’t know, Amazon has stripped its sales rankings from what appears to be mainly LGBT-themed books, labeling them as “adult” content, despite the fact that many of the books contained little to no sexual content at all, and plenty of books with explicit (heterosexual) content remain ranked. What this means is that these unranked books do not come up through their search engine, and in fact, if you do an Amazon search for “homosexuality” now, most of what comes up are books on how to “cure” or prevent it. Amazon claims this was a “glitch,” despite the fact that people were initially told that this was new official policy.

Obviously this is disgusting and if they don’t turn this policy around very soon I’m going to remove every link to Amazon from this blog, because there is no way I’m going to support that. Fortunately, the entire internet is outraged, which may hopefully effect change. Over at AnimeVice, Gia has a post about how/if this affects the manga industry (ETA: check out Kuriousity’s as well). I also liked Danielle Leigh’s message to her students, EREC’s response to Information Week’s statement, “…it’s premature to blame Amazon” (thanks, gloss), and this article from Jezebel. ETA: Also, this is pretty interesting, and makes me think I’ll be switching away from being an Associate really soon. Sad.

For now I’ll say, don’t click those Amazon links. Hopefully I won’t need to say it for long.

One quick link to start off with: I have a review in today’s Manga Minis, for volume four of Go!Comi’s Ultimate Venus. It’s a fun little manga that I’ve enjoyed so far, and I’d recommend it as light shojo fluff. Now on to the real topic of this post.

So, over this past weekend, I attended the first annual (yes, they said so!) New England Webcomics Weekend at the Eastworks building in Easthampton, MA, just a couple of towns over. I read a few webcomics regularly, but my husband is the real fan, so though many of the panels sounded interesting to me, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. It was, however, an exceptional weekend, and I came away a fan of many more webcomics than I’d been when I arrived.

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Thanks to Brigid Alverson’s recent interview with Matt Thorn, I got inspired to read some Moto Hagio, beginning with her short science fiction manga from 1975, They Were Eleven. Last night I wrote up a review, which you can find today at Tokidoki Daylight! I’m afraid my lack of background in manga shows terribly in this review, despite my ongoing quest to become more knowledgeable, so for further reading, I’d recommend going through Matt Thorn’s website, where he has many articles and resources chronicling the history of shojo manga, all of which are much smarter than anything I could write. My review, however, does include some nice images I scanned in from my copies of the manga so it’s worth checking out if you’ve never read it! They Were Eleven is unfortunately out of print here, but the Viz pamphlets can be picked up very reasonably on ebay, which is how I got them. Don’t even think about trying to get Four Shojo Stories, though, unless you’re a lot richer than I!

Over the next couple of days, I’ll be pretty much occupied at the New England Web Comics Weekend, which is conveniently located just a couple small towns over! My husband is a huge fan of webcomics, and I keep up on a number of them myself, so it should be an enjoyable event all around. There are quite a few interesting panels being presented, and you know I’ll be at the print vs. web discussion, right? :D I’ll try to report in at some point with any interesting news.

A million thanks to those who have chimed in with recommendations over at my Let’s Talk About Manhwa post! I’m so excited to find new things to read! Please stop by if you have anything further to add!

So, just a week after I made a post about this subject, Sam started a roundtable discussion for Manga Recon about digital comics. And here it is: Manga Recon Roundtable: Digital Comics. Everyone has very good points to make, and it’s a much better (less whiny) read than my entry, so go see!

On a related subject, is there anyone who hasn’t been following the stuff about the text-to-speech capabilities of the Kindle, and how some folks are up in arms about it violating the copyright of audiobooks? Neil Gaiman has made some awesome posts about this, and in his most recent one, he links to Wil Wheaton’s post too, which includes a side-by-side comparison of a human voice (his) reading a passage from a book (also his) and a computer voice reading it. I think his point is well made.

I realize this is hideously mainstream of me, but… wow, I love Google. I’m not talking about the search engine (though I love that too). Lately I’ve become so dependent on a few of their web applications, I am not sure how I got by without them all this time.

1. Google Reader: I have talked about this before, but seriously, Google Reader is solely responsible for my ability to keep up with what the rest of you are talking about every day. In the beginning, I actually used to just click things one by one from my blogroll, and when that eventually proved to be too cumbersome, I switched to using Safari to collect RSS feeds. But Google Reader… oh, Google Reader… it allows me to keep track of exactly what I’ve read and what is new from any of the three computers I use regularly, eliminating the need to add feeds to three different browsers or to waste time with things I’ve already seen. I’m also able to organize my subscribed feeds into different categories, such as “manga/comics” and “friends” to facilitate more focused reading. Google Reader, I love you.

2. Google Docs: It’s gotten to the point where I write basically everything in Google Docs, because it allows me to (again) access whatever I’m working on from multiple locations. It auto-saves every few minutes, which is awesome, and also allows me to share documents with others, for instance if I want someone to look something over for me, or if I want to collaborate on a document with another person (or multiple people). Yes, I still save copies of really important items to my hard drive (actually to more than one), but the fact that I no longer have to remember to carry a USB key with me everywhere I go is seriously awesome.

3. Google Calendar: This is a new addition for me, but boy has it become quickly indispensable! I use Google Calendar to keep track of important manga release dates, as well as all of my (largely self-imposed) review deadlines, for Manga Recon, Comics Should Be Good, and even here! I’m a person who works best if I have a firm deadline, so I tend to set them and stick to them almost 100% of the time. Also, I’m a fast reader but a very slow writer, so laying out my deadlines in a visual form helps me better understand and manage my time. Google Calendar lets me have a different color-coded calendar for each of these categories, which I can view all at once to see everything that I have coming up at a glance. Again, I can access this from any computer, and share each calendar with other users as desired.

Thus concludes my ode to Google applications. The day Google starts charging money for these things is the day I become a weeping puddle of goo. Let’s hope that day does not arrive soon.

I’m mostly recovered from illness, though I still want to sleep too much. My review wrestling is over, though, at least for the moment! That review I was having so much trouble with has gone up, for Vertical’s The Blade of the Courtesans in today’s Otaku Bookshelf column and Manga Recon.

The Blade of the Courtesans is a Japanese historical novel set in at the beginning of the Edo period by author Keiichiro Ryu. The book was nominated for a Naoki Award in Japan, but I found it incredibly difficult to review mainly because, to be perfectly honest, I really disliked it. You can find out why by reading the review, but… yeah. I try really hard to write balanced, objective reviews for Manga Recon, much more so than I do here where I figure it’s my place to talk about how things affect me personally. This time, though, it was really hard. Not that I had to scrape to find good things about the book to discuss. It does have good points. But the less good points were really difficult for me to get around, particularly those concerning the roles of women in the story.

Now that I’ve finished the review, I’ll be interested to look around online and see what other people thought. I really respect Vertical and what they put out there, so it actually quite pained me to grade this as I did. I wonder if other people would agree with my assessment, or if I’m just too picky about the wrong things. I guess I’ll find out!

This morning, I read a post by a good friend of mine, sistermagpie, over at LiveJournal, in which she talked about some conversations she’d seen recently revolving around whether academic analysis could ruin a person’s enjoyment of fiction. The crux of her post was that she couldn’t imagine that analyzing a story could ruin her love of reading, and when I first read her argument, I was in complete agreement. Wouldn’t analysis simply deepen my love for something, by helping me to fully understand and appreciate the depth of the material? Then I remembered my state of mind when I left the commercial theater business, and my brain said, “Oooooooh, that’s right.”

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I’ve been doing a lot of staring at the blank page lately, and it’s been apparent in this blog perhaps more than anywhere. I’ve been under an unprecedented amount of stress in both my personal and professional lives lately, and it’s definitely taking a toll on my productivity. This has led to such soul-soothing activities as media bingeing (lately that’s been NANA in all forms) and creating pointless blog pages with photographs of each of our pets (oldest-to-youngest): Dorrie, Lucy, and of course, Kino. I feel a lot of guilt, however, towards those of you who keep clicking over here in search of real content.

I may not be writing, but I have been reading a lot recently. I’ve started using Google Reader, which has made keeping up with my blogroll a lot easier. A few links to share:
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I saw this headline in the geeks group at Propeller, and it blew my mind for a few minutes.

Gene Hunt Hints at Cause of Bipolar Disorder

If you’re not a Life on Mars fan, that probably means nothing, but if you are, you may be able to imagine the several minutes I spent trying to figure out how Gene Hunt was involved with Bipolar Disorder. Heh.

Links! Johanna Draper Carlson reviews Kasumi vol. 1 at comicsworthreading. Now, you may remember back when I was lamenting on shojo manga (yes, this was before I lamented on boys’ love), I mentioned this comic as one that I’d looked forward to until I saw its official write-up. The review brings me back a little more toward hope. It still sounds fluffier than my original expectations, but maybe there’s a little substance after all? Or at least some genuine whimsy? I hope so! I’ll try to pick this up soon.

Rambling about OEL manga to follow:
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