Supermeow!

It is no secret that I have dolls on the brain. I still have every Barbie, Jem, Maxie, and a zillion other fashion dolls from my childhood and I have tons of dolls accumulated during this, my adult-childhood. After years of dismissal, I have finally come around to Pullip.

Pullip as Audrey Hepburn

She's simply strawberry-inspired.

Their giant heads turned me off for a long time, but who’s going to say no to a doll that pays homage to Audrey Hepburn? Not me! Sometimes, they’re just cute.

Even more intriguing to me than Pullip is Dal. She looks pissed off, and I adore that. She’s got a great petulant little face. I am the owner of one and only one Dal at the moment.

Dal Dotori

However, I am crazy about:

• Dotori
• Sakura
• Maretti
• Chanti (who was a limited edition of 300, i.e. fat chance)
• Milch (who is gorgeous in person)
• Charlotte
• Hanaayame (wish I’d got her when I had a chance)
• Hangry (also cute in person; wish I’d got her when I had a chance, too)
• Furara AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
• Sooni slightly less enthusiastic AAAAAAH

Not to be neglected is Pullip’s BFF Byul, coming at you in such cute editions as Hermine.

You can keep Pullip’s boyfriend/Dal’s big brother Taeyang, though. Zero interest. Here’s the full Pullip Family Profile.

As for the Little Pullips I own:

• Cheshire Cat
• Swan
• Aggonya

Also, all of these Pullip family members were obtained from Animadness in beautiful Waltham, MA. Animadness: for all your anime goods and doll needs.

In closing, this is a much cheaper interest than Super Dollfies.

I heard today that Sasuga Japanese Bookstore will be closing down as of tomorrow. This bums me out to no end.

Back in my senior year of high school in 1995-1996, my interest in Sailor Moon had reached fever-pitch and I would literally buy anything that bore the mark of Sailor Moon. Looking at the yellow pages (because there wasn’t easily-accessed internet for me in those days; it was my buddies with computers and AOL/Prodigy who got to go online and look at stuff), I discovered that there was a Japanese bookstore right over in Cambridge. Excited, I headed out there alone after school one day in the winter. Not knowing how to read Japanese, I asked someone if they had Sailor Moon comics and where they might be. They showed me and I was overwhelmed: twelve volumes of comics?!? Who knew?!!? Not me! I bought volume 12. I’d return back to fill in the gaps; I think nearly all of my Sailor Moon manga (save volume 2; I bought that at Million Year Picnic) came from Sasuga. I’ve bought a lot of comics from them over the past 14 years, mostly when they had a brick-and-mortar store in Cambridge (and their short-lived store in Brookline; I bought Codename wa Sailor V volume 2 there). When I’d see them at anime conventions, the fellow who runs their booth and co-owns the store would always recognize me and wave. I mean, hey, I’d been buying books from him and his wife since I was 17.

Anyhow, I’m pretty sad to hear this. Granted, the Boston area’s been without a brick-and-mortar Japanese bookstore for a few years (they shut down their store to concentrate on online sales and sales at anime conventions as the nerds became their main customer base- like me!), but I always knew that if I wanted to find Dolly Dolly or artbooks at an anime convention, I knew where to look. Man, this sucks. Their prices were pretty god, they had good selections, they would special-order for you (this is how I acquired all of The Big O comics in Japanese, plus The Big O novelization) and they were just overall pretty great. Keep your Kinokuniya: I and many other nerds and native Japanese speakers in this area had Sasuga. Now we don’t have them after July 5.

Sasuga, you were great, and I will miss you. I feel very guilty for not buying stuff from you at Anime Boston this year. Thank you for making it easy for nerds who don’t know a word of Japanese to acquire Japanese comics easily!

Work in progress...

I’ve recently picked up the necessary skillset needed to make my own WordPress themes. Having done a couple for work, I’m now ready to do one for myself. It’s going to make heavy use of CSS3 stuff and will probably look like ass in Internet Explorer, but you know what? I don’t care. Barely anyone looks at my blog anyhow, haw haw. Except me, and I look at it in Firefox or Safari. Nobody should be using IE anyhow; it’s a piece of garbage full of security holes and has shitty CSS support. Ridiculous.

Here’s a sneaky preview of what I’ve got done so far. I’m working on the codin’ part. Next, I’ll slice it up for WordPress, enter additional bits of PHP needed to make it work, and hopefully: voila! My very own fancy customized WordPress template. It will make use of stock imagery and the world’s most favorite typeface, Museo, and its many variants (slab, sans) as well as Museo’s BFF, Calluna. The cats are from istockphoto.com (one download credit per cat; I had bought credits a while ago for a freelance job and I had some to burn). Still have a bunch to do, but it’s taking shape quite nicely. I’m hoping to finish it up over the weekend. That’s how I celebrate American independence: with website work!