When I first watching Lucky Star, I simply couldn't get into it. I know its akin to American shows like Seinfeld where it's practically about nothing and I got behind that, but I simply couldn't got to be invested after the first four episodes. Decided to give it another go after watching clips on youtube and finding Izumi practically adorable after all this time.

Had also finished Area 88 (2004,) and despite its mild ending and how it directed itself, I enjoyed it for what it was.

Another Anime with a cute protagonist I'm trying out is The Great Jahy Won't be Defeated (or something like that,) which so far it's entertaining, and Heatguy J, which I'm sure I've watched some episodes of it before. Best way I can describe it is like Inspector Gadget if he were badass.

Will update on more progress on said titles.

I'm even not bad at decluttering, so long as it's okay to literally throw everything out. (They'll sooner or later send another copy of that late bill, don't worry! And you can always order another birth certificate, probably.)

But I'm not so good at routine maintenance. Does anybody have any already set up daily/weekly/monthly/periodically checklists for various areas of the house that they can recommend?

This post covers planting the candy jar terrarium. Begin with Part 1: Setup.

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Today I assembled the large candy jar terrarium. Continue with Part 2: Plants.

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I'll try to remember to upload the pic later. It's not a very good picture, but then, I was wary of trying to get too close.

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Preludes and Endings (Arr. for Piano) (1854 words) by thawrecka
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Pluto (Anime)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Paul Duncan/North no. 2
Characters: Paul Duncan (Pluto), North No. 2 (Pluto)
Additional Tags: Missing Scene, Canonical Character Death, Angst, First Kiss, Robot/Human Relationships
Summary:

Paul Duncan uses the time they have to reach out for North no. 2's hands.

Beautiful weather and all.

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Kodansha is teaming up with Humble Bundle once again to bring you the Fall In Love With Shoujo collection!

This collection includes:

Shugo Chara!, volumes 1 thru 12

Shugo Chara Chan!, volumes 1 thru 4

Peach Girl, volumes 1 thru 18

Mars, volumes 1 thru 15

Say I Love You volumes 1 thru 18

A Condition Called Love, volumes 1 thru 16

You can get the entire bundle of manga for only $30 USD. That said, you can also get the first volume of each series for only $1 USD! All items are available as ePub and PDF.

This bundle supports Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which has helped bookstore and comic book store employees and owners who encounter unexpected financial crises. The Binc Foundation works to keep book people in their homes, in their jobs, and with their families – stabilizing the brick and mortar bookstore community. With some bundles, you can pick which charity you want your donation to go to, but that doesn't seem to be the case with this one. If you scroll down on the right hand side of the Humble Bundle page, you can also find an area where you can adjust how much of your purchase goes to which organization (the charity, the publisher, and Humble Bundle, respectively), with a minimum mandatory amount to Humble Bundle as the host.

With most manga ebook volumes costing around $7 USD (sometimes fifty cents less, sometimes a few dollars more), you only need to be interested in five of the volumes available in the complete bundle to justify the cost—and the total bundle has 83 volumes! That's just over thirty-six cents per tankoubon.

You can find out more information about the various series at the Humble Bundle link. Definitely worth checking out if even one of the titles catches your interest, IMO.

This bundle will close in about three weeks.

Edit: Everything except "A Condition Called Love" is a complete series and is included in its entirety. "A Condition Called Love" is still ongoing, and, at this point in time, has another volume available from Kodansha.

So this zine show happened! And it went pretty well, considering everything! Gonna do it again, I think!

This whole thing came out of us moving to Toronto right out of publishing JUKU and being accustomed to regularly getting behind a table and selling our comics and zines. It's easy when you're the con chair, or you know the con chair, or your convention has a table at the convention, you have an automatic "in" and can make it happen easily. When you are new in town, it's not so easy.

The established big zine show up here was Canzine, run by the magazine Broken Pencil. Shain and I tabled at one pretty soon after I got up here. Might have been that first November. It was at either the Drake or the Gladstone; tables were in the tiny rooms and hallways of a downtown historic building. We had a third of a six foot table. Do the math. Crowded in like sardines, half of what was being sold was fabric art or crafts or, you know, not zines, it wasn't great. Hard to get attention or get your work noticed.

In subsequent years I went to other Canzines and they weren't as cramped, but still kind of small. TCAF started soon after we moved here and that was a much better show, in a better space, comics-focused, with guests and programming and everything. In fact TCAF became a world class event attracting talent from around the globe, and as such got real hard to get a table at.

We spent a while simply focusing on webcomics, so tabling at shows wasn't that important, but the thing about print is, people like it. We like to make comics, people like to buy print comics, it's fun to table at a show and sell comics and see the other work and talk to other artists.

So I started paying attention again to the zine world, to the shows, trying to find out when the upcoming shows were happening so we could try to snag a table. Tried to get into TCAF a few times and didn't make the cut. Began thinking about renting the back room at Eyesore, which can fit eight or ten tables, and doing a zine show there. Then COVID hit and nobody was doing anything.

After the lockdowns ended I says to myself, I says I need to do that zine show, and I need to do it in a larger space than the back room of Eyesore. So I did some research and found some community centers and event spaces and started sending out some emails. Most of those emails did not get replies. The one reply I got wanted to know my budget, to which I replied, well, I am asking how much your space costs, so I know how much to charge my artists for tables, which will determine my budget... and I never got an actual number out of them. So whatever.

COVID shook everything up and one of the shakeups was that when TCAF came back in 2022 we somehow managed to get a table. Well, half a table. I didn't need to start my own show any more! So that's what I did a week after my mom died, I was behind a table in the library at TCAF selling copies of that SOUVENIR comic. And it sold pretty well, it didn't look like anything anybody else was selling, nobody's working that 'war comic' angle in the self published comic field. I didn't sell enough to make back my table fee, which was $225 (!!), but I sold enough to be happy. If Shain's bicycle hadn't been stolen right in front of the library, the experience would have been wholly positive.

Still had that idea in the back of my mind to do a zine show, and I was still keeping an eye on zine shows, and Canzine came back around and we got accepted to the 2024 Canzine. And then the guy behind Broken Pencil / Canzine decided that the Gaza war was the hill he was going to die on and he made a huge unnecessary fuss about it and as a result most everyone else that was making Canzine/Broken Pencil happen said "we quit" and Canzine guy took his ball and went home. The longest-running zine event/magazine in Canada, one with a great deal of grandfathered-in arts funding that no organization will ever be able to get again, just out like a light.

So when THAT happened, I was like OKAY GODDAMNIT, IT'S TIME. And I mentioned this to Donald, who's on the team that runs Anime North. And Donald replied with the fact that there are hundreds of Anime North artist alley applicants that get turned away every year because AN simply doesn't have enough space, and that AN was thinking of doing a separate event just for artists. So we figured we could put the zine show and the artist alley show together, and (and this is the important part) Anime North could finance it.

We put a little team together, we came up with a name for the thing, which is Grafficker Alley, hopefully one that splits the difference between the zine world and the artist alley world. We looked at some locations, did the math, nailed down the Small Arms Inspection Building in Mississauga. I built a Google Forms questionnaire, a website was constructed, a domain was bought, social media accounts were acquired, and we went "live" in July, which was really too soon before a September show. Our social media guy had a heart attack while going to a Weird Al concert, and we really didn't want to bug him for passwords while he was getting bypass surgery.

We commissioned a poster and a logo and once we went live I printed some out and spent some time staple-gunning them to various notice boards around the city. We got flyers and postcards into some shops and we got out onto the social medias, and all 30,000+ people on the Anime North email list got emailed an email about Grafficker Alley.

Every single time I went out to do street postering I'd see even more places to staple flyers, every time I did a social media post I'd think of somewhere else I should be social-mediaing, it's a never-ending road of promotional work.

So the event did happen on September 6. It went... really well, I think. We sold 107 tables. Everybody got set up without too much hassle. The event was never crowded, but there was a steady stream of people coming through the building all day long. I sold more than enough zines to pay for my table. And here's the big thing, the table fee was $50, for a full six foot table. You don't have to sell a lot of zines to cover your table at that price point. I think this is why a lot of the artists seemed happy with the day; they covered their investment and had a pleasant afternoon in a pleasant space with fun people.

Grafficker Alley 2025 was a first time show that got a late start. I think when the show comes back in 2026 we'll have a proven track record, we'll be something people remember and have had in the back of their minds for months, and we'll have more artists and more customers for those artists.

The one big quibble is that the area is kind of a food desert. The SAIB is in a former industrial neighborhood that is slowly turning residential. Two towers are going up across the street, and there's a convenience store a block down, and then that's about it for a mile or so. The food vendors we tried to reach out to simply didn't return our contacts, but we have some new connections and we'll make food and drink happen next year.

I had fun, sold some comics, saw some friends, and generally am still kind of stunned there wasn't some sort of last minute disaster or flip out. I'll admit the last minute email questions were getting to me on Friday, but that's why I took the day off work. Next year I plan to have more zines and better table displays (that easel isn't gonna cut it). Honestly all I want is a regular show where we can get together and show off our latest work, one without the distractions of big name guests or big-time publishers, one where we aren't jostling against each other crowded into a too-small venue, and I think that's what we accomplished.

Seems one of my top favorites has gotten its third season. Crunchyroll unveiled the trailer a day ago and was wise not revealing much in terms of spoiling it the context. I can't wait to watch it all when I can see it.


Here's the link for said trailer

Spy X Family season 3 trailer

And they now expect the part in tomorrow, at which point we should be able to make an appointment to repair.

As I reiterated - but briefly, because the person making the call was not responsible for this situation - a delay in shipping is one thing, but lack of communication is something very different.

I sent them another voicemail and email saying that a delay in shipping or even ordering a part may be acceptable, understandable, or forgivable, but lack of communication is none of those things and if they don't get back to me with an ETA on this repair then they'll have to refund our deposit so we can call somebody else.

Either way, I know how I'm spending the next few hours (laundromat) and how I'm spending tomorrow morning (phone).

I had a visitor this week: a very earnest German Shakespeare scholar and teacher who I met last year on a writing retreat. She was swinging through Oxford to attend a conference and stayed in my guest room for a few nights.

When she came into my sitting room she first admired my bookcases, as one does, and then did a double take: "Oh! You have a really big television! What do you watch?"

"Cycling, mainly," I said, but this didn't help. Didn't compute. I could practically see steam rising off the top of her head as the gears clashed. And actually she's the second friend of mine who's been visibly perplexed by my TV.

No doubt they had assumed I'd be the sort of elitist literary snob who wouldn't allow such a thing into the flat. Whereas in fact I am such a massive elitist literary snob that I don't feel any lurking status threat from the presence of a 55" flatscreen. (Plus my favorite cycling commentator is a devoted fan of Fitzcarraldo Editions, so.)

Very minor anecdote but I've never seen anyone so obviously realizing in mid-stream that they'd gotten their assumptions about my preferences and habits all wrong. Do you ever find that you surprise people by liking something that you "shouldn't" like?

(And who knew there was a whole event for skating in inflatables!?)



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Only two more episodes of this thrilling anime. I remember watching the OVA from the 80s after my first experience with it from the Capcom arcade U.N. Squadron which was later ported to the SNES.

I like the mix of dogfights and drama the anime incorporates. Not sure how it will end but I at least be happy that I've finished the 2000s version when I do.

I also dig its opening them Mission(Fugga), I feel that it sets the tone highly well.

Below a screencap of my favorite character who's also my favorite to choose in the videogame adaptation, Mickey Simon, who flies the ever awesome F-14 Tomcat.