Last Saturday, the 2013 Awwnime Girls Bracket opened for business for the second year. The first phase of the brackets always sucks because it means a lot of tedious labor for me.

Phase 1 consists of people nominating the characters they'd like to see make it to the actual voting. This year, I put a lot of additional rules in place, limiting the time span from which somebody could enter a character. This was done to give new characters a fighting change, keep things fresh, and also (hopefully) shrink the pool.

Well, that didn't work.

As of me writing this, three days into the seven day long nomination period, there have been over 1500 nominations. I have had to go through each and every one of those and, for the 830 nominees that were eligible and not duplicates, clean up the name and create a thumbnails. A few things have made this slightly easier this year than last.

• Better admin tools
• A requirement that the user provide an image of the character so I don't have to go hunting for one
• A type-ahead field that pulls data from MyAnimeList that will prefill character name, media source, and image.

The MAL images always come in a 225x350 size, so I've gotten the cropping down to muscle memory; I can complete an entrants record in under 10 seconds. Which is good, because even at ten seconds per, that's over two hours of solid work. But, the average is much higher because I still sometimes need to find a better picture, figure out if the character is eligible if I'm not familiar with the source, etc and so forth. I've probably put five to six hours into just cropping those fucking pictures.

But, still, I'm happy with the turn out. To give you a bit of comparison, last year when there were no restricting rules, there were a total of 797 nominations of which 473 made it into the elimination rounds. I suspect part of that is due to the fact that this bracket is starting out with the traction we had at the end of the last one. But also, a lot of people are just nominating every female character from their favorite shows, regardless of how much actual screen time they may have had. I personally think this is a silly approach because only 256 characters will make it to the actual bracket and those will all be the heavy hitter characters. I mean, who seriously thinks that this will win against this on a battle based upon cuteness?

Not me, that's for sure.

I'm still reeling from the whole Florida trip thing, so instead of focusing on that, I'll post some old comic sketches that never got complete. Despite not having words, I still know the scripts and could complete these.

I meant to say east coast...

In trying to come up with a topic for today's post, I decided I'd post about the entertainment I've purchased and have yet to see to completion. It's become a bad habit for sure.

On the left is the pile of shows I've seen, but not from the versions I've purchased. To be fair, the Lucky Star and Haruhi boxes were double dips; I already owned the complete series sets, but Amazon was selling the big ones for $3 (thanks for going out of business, Bandai). On the right are the shows I've seen only partially or not at all. A bunch of it I got during RightStuf's Christmas sale last year (I'm a sucker for deals).

Moving on to games, there are far less than the above movies/anime. Granted, this doesn't take into account my Steam collection. Still, a few items here fall into "haven't completed on this particular media" category, namely the Famicom games. Lego Indiana Jones I only purchased to hack my Wii U, so I doubt I'll ever play that at all.

You may recall some of these from my no internet experiment last year. Well, many have gone unread and more have been added since. The Haganai book I only got a couple days ago, so perhaps that one counts less. Making matters worse, however, is the enormous stack of Japanese literature I've acquired for that magical day when I can comprehend the language. I can read most of these (when there are furigana for the kanji), but I can't understand 99.97% of them. I have leafed through them all a fair amount, though, and a couple are really only art books.

So, it appears I have a problem pouring money into my hobbies and then not actually following up on them.

Perhaps this should be my new years challenge... to have done before 2014...

Was flipping through old comps and ran across the initial comp for the current version of the music page:

Obviously there have been some feature adds, but I was a bit shocked to see that I was essentially pixel perfect in coding this (something I rarely bother with in personal projects). I did have to go in and add the album reflection, but it was fifteen minutes well spent. I looks fuckin' DOPE!

Now, I just need to get the app looking as cool...