Over the past few weeks (perhaps since the start of August) I've had some strange things going on, and with the silence of my personal blog, it only looks even weirder. In this post I will answer questions that surely have arisen in your minds at some point.
Q: First off, wasn't your page hits over 40,000 before? Why is it in the 30's?
A: That is an interesting question I was going to address immediately after fixing that, which I'm sure you've heard of my internet connection woes. In a nutshell, the old Statcounter.com setting (40K hits) was visitor clicks. Funny, I know, which is why I decided to change it to "unique visitors", which is where we're at with the current number (30K+). The reason why I changed it is obvious enough, I've been getting a lot more readers than 2 years ago, and I decided that tracking uniquely instead of clickly was a better way to show the impressive numbers I managed to pull in solely on my antics (as I'm a little slow on the episode summary uptake). And, I prefer "30,000 visitors" instead of the more questionable "40,000 clicks". Sounds better, ja? Not bad having 30K visitors click through my blog 10,000+ times :D
Q: So page hits are unique now. What does that mean to visitors?
A: It basically means that, as long as you allow cookies for "statcounter.com", if someone visits my blog, the counter will go +1. If they click a post to view the full page, the counter won't go up, because the stats only track when the person visited, and not what link they clicked. This is why I added Google's "hits for the last 7 days" to show the traffic that happens the last 7 days, which is a feature which only appeared earlier this year, I believe. Oh, and I activated Statcounter's blocking of tracking my visits, so no matter how many times I try to visit my blog, it won't count me :(
Q: With that out of the way, let's talk about that Summer 2011 poll on the right. What's with the options?
A: It is strange, isn't it? It's not a secret that I think very much more complicated than the average person, and that poll is no exception. 5 choices now instead of last season's poll of 4, I think the one option everyone is thinking about is "Why didn't Kanade remove all of Subaru's clothes?". That option sticks out like a D-cup booby, especially since it breaks my usual "yes" and "no" options I always put. But there's a reason for that option, and surprisingly I know not many people will get the joke behind that. You see, at the start of the Summer 2011 Anime season, there was that scan released of Kanade stripping Subaru, which is the image you see in the above banner. Animesuki member Dahak86 was kind enough to pass me the nude filtered one, which bared Subaru's innermost... beauty XD. Naturally, I used that in the prototype banner testing, which I will give an example below (NSFW):
Q: Ha, always the hard way. Let's talk about RE: the controversy, and where are they?
A: This is probably the most noticeable change recently, especially since they're rather popular and fun, yet the last one I did (for Ro-Kyu-Bu) was so long ago. As Animesuki member Malkuth put it, I went from troll-subs to photoshopping. Again, always a mysterious reason to that, and that has a lot to do with: time. Doing my troll sub series of humor isn't hard, well, some may find thinking up that insanity impossible for the normal mind, but the troll subs become hard when I edit the scenes rather heavily. As evidenced by the last Dog Day's jokes, that took a lot longer to edit than I thought. Meaning I apparently became lax with my Photoshopping skills. So over the past few weeks I've been working that skill, seeing how many minutes/hours it will take to perform various levels of editing in various resolutions. For RE: the controversy, you will notice I make each frame 480x272, which is because I wanted to make it easier to edit the details. The larger the image, the more refined the details have to be to be convincing, and that's what the past few weeks have been, as you can see my Mayo Chiki endeavors, there are varying levels of resolutions and quality of the 'shops. Take for example the hilarious uncensoring of Mayo Chiki ep 05 that I did, in the order that you see them, I went with 'quick', 'complex', and 'full edit', and my opinion is clear as day that 'full edit' was my most favorite 'shop of those 3 (Usami's high-jump). I seemed fine with a smaller resolution, but enter that Kanade filtering I did, which shows I need to work more on the rush strokes, especially when the res gets higher.
As you can see, the reason behind my erratic level of skill is primarily the bad combo of bad-wrist + travel-mouse. I've used trackball mice for 10 years, having experienced 4 of them (3 different designs), and due to the injury on my wrist I have to use a conventional mouse for everything computing. It's no doubt I was much better with a trackball than I am with this tiny mouse that's barely 3 inches long, and the photoshopping I've been doing for this month of August is about me not running away from the pain, and training myself to work those skills again.
Q: But it's not just the 'shopping. You've been rather hyper the past few weeks.
A: Well, I always am, but yes this month there's a reason for that too. I mentioned it earlier at Animesuki (I think it was the Ro-Kyu-Bu thread) that my health has been acting up again, and I had to apply external remedies to ensure I don't fall into a fever like last time. That included treatment for migraines and headaches, and inhaling menthol to cool my lungs. I'm sure everyone's aware that a person on meds is a... rather edgy person, but the mangatron on meds = hyper waifu lovin maniac. That is definitely the reason behind the sudden shift in hilarity in the Ro-Kyu-Bu thread, but I'm clear off the meds now so don't go expecting me to do more of this again :P
Q: A song you keep singing lately is "My connection Sucks", how bad is it?
A: Terrible. Atrocious to say the least, last Thursday there was a network-wide downtime of their internet from around 7PM till after midnight, and then that Saturday it was more like Saturd-day, and then Sunday, it was so unusable I said forget it, wait till Monday, but cheeze whiz they totally funked my subscription plan and now I can't even browse, despite having more than an hour remaining in my subscription plan. Just to be sure, I fired up another SIM card and what do ya know, it works, so I know they conned me out of my other SIM card. But that was just last week. I've been singing this song for months now, one just needs to search online to see how bad this country (PH) is when it comes to cellular service:
This is just one of the many horror stories of the other wireless carrier in this country.
Two days ago, I hit this data cap, and this is the part where they failed to lift it even though it's well past a full day already.
They have a 4G network? Fix your freakin 3G/Edge/GPRS first you morons.
See the date of this post? It's still like this for Smart and sometimes Globe.
That's not really all there is, since most of these sites are in a language I cannot understand, and the Philippine Undernet (yeah seriously, there are forums dedicated to sidestepping wireless carrier restrictions) is entirely in their language and they blocked out foreigner registrations. Funny country this is.
Q: Something else that's weird, and that's your episode summaries. You seem to start at ep 01, and then fall back completely.
A: That's something I can attribute to my internet connection. I'm sure you'll know how bad it is to upload a few pictures, and then getting that darn gateway timeout will just make you wonder "is it done uploading yet?" And to compound the problem, the more acceptable internet data plan is time based, meaning you just wasted precious time there. There is still the 800MB up AND down daily data limit, meaning even if you choose their "unlimited" data plan (I know, the irony), you still wasted TIME "UPLOADING" something that ended up becoming useless. I do some work over at the XDA-Developers forum, and 4 out of 5 times I get my ROM uploads cut off. The same holds true when downloading anime, you have no idea how idiotic it is getting your download (a 300MB file) get cut off at 98%. That sets me back several days when viewing Anime (for example, I have a 4-5 day delay when watching idolmAster, from it's airdate to my eyes). Of course, there are other things like generally visiting any site out there, program updates (I didn't update my anti-virus for over a month ~__~), pretty much the entirety of browsing is totally messed up. I've made mentions already that I cannot use the other 2 wireless carriers in this country, one has poor signal and the worst rated internet, the other has too much of a throttled service. Picked my poison, but even the citizens of this country agrees; the internet in this country sucks.
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