Featured image: “Magical Girl OC” by Lighane
I am still out and about on my Christmas vacation, though I will be returning home shortly after the start of the new year, and then I’ll be able to return to more substantial posting. In the meanwhile, I’m still working my way through polishing and updates for the blog, including structured data and microdata for all the posts.
This is, admittedly, another update post. The reviews (and beatings) will continue once morale improves (and once I get home from vacation).
On the first interesting note, it appears that Amazon has recently dropped Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and its two sequels, which I have previously reviewed. I’m glad I watched them before they disappeared. At the time of this writing, the tangentially related semi-sequel ViVid Strike! is still available, but I figure I better clear that from my plate before I get to anything else in case they’re going to drop that as well, so expect that review before, say, Chobits.
I’ll have more to say in the future about problems with Amazon and streaming services in general, but that’s for another post.
In terms of updates here, I’ve taken some bells and whistles off of features that rarely get used. I have also finally managed to make WordPress and Disqus talk to each other. They integrated fine in this blog’s early days, but then there were updates and Disqus created the most esoteric and user-unfriendly means of syncing the two. It took me probably three hours today, but I got it done.
I’ve also been working on adding markup to improve search engine results. Again, you probably care about that less than I do, but I think it’s kind of interesting. I have a new plugin that adds structured data, and for whatever the plugin can’t do, I do by hand by putting microdata into the HTML code, thanks to yet another plugin that stops WordPress from stripping out code it doesn’t recognize.
One thing I have unsurprisingly discovered is that … this is a heck of a lot of work. I spent most of the day going back through my reviews and marking them up, and I’m not even half done.
You can kind of see how this works from this screenshot of Google’s structured data testing tool, which hunts for errors in the markup. This is for my review of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A’s (may it rest in peace):
As you can see, the search engine can extract a lot of the information from the blog entry thanks to the markup.
This has some slim chance of raising the site’s ranking on search engines, but the main reason for this is to get what’s called “rich snippets,” where a site’s appearance on Google includes such eye-catching elements as images and star ratings. These are not a granted automatically just because a site has the right markup: Google bestows rich snippets when, how, and if it wills. Legend even has it that errors in the markup are worse than no markup at all.
So structured data is like a ritual for a pagan god, the great god Google: get it right and you may receive blessings, but get it wrong and you might get blasted instead.
Get yours while supplies last.
Are you interested in a combination of uproarious humor and fast, bloody action featuring a bewildered teenage boy and a whole truckload of goofball girls? If you are, now’s the time to get you some, because the eBook version of Jake and the Dynamo: The Wattage of Justice is now on sale at Amazon for 99 cents.
Featured image: “Magical Girls: Chocoandvanilla” by hieihirai.
The end of the year is approaching. The second novel is coming along nicely, though I don’t think I’ll have the draft finished quite when I wanted. But I’m down to two major action sequences and the ending left to be drafted, so it’s drawing to a close. The draft of the second volume is considerably longer than the first book was.
Also, I’ve performed some of the much-needed blog maintenance. Hoping to make this blog a lot lighter, I’ve examined a lot of the scripts and such and determined that most of them are coming straight from WordPress. I lack the technical expertise to do much about it, though I did go through and delete various extraneous plugins while playing with the others to see if they were affecting content and load time. I managed to strip out some of the excess, but not as much as I’d like.
A few plugins I’d like to get rid of, but can’t; for example, I have a plugin for the “classic” editor because the new, much-touted Gutenberg editor is basically unusable. Whatever idiot thought it would be a good idea to remove the ability to insert special characters or indented text deserves a sound spanking.
Frankly, WordPress is going the wrong direction: it’s supposed to be the most powerful blogging platform, but it’s instead trying to be Blogging for Dummies. Their HTML editor even strips out most of the valid HTML I put into it—including microdata markup. It treats bloggers like idiots.
On the plus side, I test-drove some free plugins for structured data and found one I quite like. This means absolutely nothing on your end, since it’s invisible, but it (might) on my end mean more traffic and prettier results in search engines. One reason I’m writing this post is because I’m going to immediately turn around and run it through a validation service to make sure the markup is working properly.
This is your final warning: The festivities will continue or the beatings will resume.
Fiona of the blog Author Interviews graciously interviewed me, and you can go read the results.
Here’s a snippet:
Fiona: Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
I am wary of messages in fiction. Many years ago, I was tangentially involved with several authors in the Christian Booksellers’ Association; there are some talented storytellers in that set, but I got a sense that they tended to elevate message over entertainment, often to the detriment of their work. I drifted away from them, I think, because of a difference in artistic vision. In the broader publishing industry, we are now seeing something similar to what I saw in CBA, what with the heavy emphasis on social justice or inclusiveness or whatever you want to call it, where message is emphasized to the point that craftsmanship gets neglected.
The reader is free to find any message or none in Jake and the Dynamo. I am sure some of my opinions crept into the text, and anyone who wants to try to tease them out may do so. But the only messages I had firmly in mind were along the lines of, “magical girls are awesome,” and “being a teenager sucks sometimes.”
In regards to other business, I am soon leaving to join Family for a Christmas vacation. I’ll be taking my computer, of course, but my plan is to spend as much of my spare time writing as possible. I am ambitiously hoping to have a complete rough of the second volume of Jake and the Dynamo by the time my Christmas break is over.
While I am at it, I’d also like to do some maintenance on the blog. I habitually use an ad blocker, and it shows an embarrassingly high amount of blocked content on my own site, for reasons I know not. I’m going to try uninstalling and reinstalling the plugins and then deciding which ones I can remove, to see if I can cut down on this blog’s code, which is much heavier than it has a right to be.
I’ve also been gradually learning about HTML and CSS, mostly for my job, and I’d like to try my hand at possibly adding some schema.org markup, which I know Google search likes. There are plugins for that, of course—but they probably stand a good chance of adding yet more trackers.
I’d like the code on this blog to be better than it is, but the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t do everything I’d like, and adding the code by hand takes so dang much time.
The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The god is named Abraxas.
Herman Hesse, Demian
Revolutionary Girl Utena, episode 17: “The Thorns of Death.” Directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. Character designs by Chiho Saito. Be-Papas, 1997 (Nozomi Entertainment, 2011). Approx. 24 minutes. Rated “16+.”
Watch for free.
After one of the worst filler episodes in the show’s entire run, Revolutionary Girl Utena is now back on track.
This episode finally introduces Shiori, the nameless purple-haired girl we had earlier encountered in flashbacks as the unrequited love of Juri. Shiori stole the man she thought Juri was in love with.
Shiori has enrolled again at Ohtori Academy after having attended another institution through middle school. The unnamed boy she though she had swiped from Juri is now out of her life for reasons we never learn.
Continue reading “A Thorny Problem: The ‘Revolutionary Girl Utena’ Rewatch, Part 17”
My nine-part series, “Why I Hate Cardcaptor Sakura,” is consistently the most popular thing on this blog. In the last essay of that series, I promised a similar discussion of the insanely popular and bestselling Chobits, which is CLAMP’s homage to—or possibly their sly takedown of—the magical girlfriend/robot girl genre.
I hadn’t got around to this for several reasons, the main one being that, due to life circumstances, I did not until recently have access to my two-volume omnibus set of Chobits. The other reason was that I detested the story so much that I was loathe to pick it up again. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it on my first attempt.
Of course, as an author, I’m not above swiping stuff even from things I hate. Readers familiar with my novel Jake and the Dynamo may have recognized that I borrowed from Chobits—or mocked it, rather—in my depiction of Grease Pencil Marionette.
This essay may take me some time to complete, not because it’s hard to express my hate (that part’s easy), but because it will take a lot of time to explain, thoroughly and carefully, exactly what’s wrong with Chobits, exactly why it is a failure as a story, a failure as a hamfisted and amateurish attempt at philosophy, and generally loathsome.
As I stated before, my hate for Cardcaptor Sakura is fanboyish hatred, the kind of melodramatic grousing that fans do about things they like. But my hatred for Chobits is the real deal. It is disgusting, wretched, and more importantly, stupid, in every possible way.
One thing about it, though, is easy to point out and mock, and I have done so in the little meme I put together above. The story is actually, I kid you not, about a girl robot with a reboot switch capable of reformatting her drive, located in her nether regions. And this isn’t some dirty little gag created for a cheap laugh, either: it is actually the centerpiece of the plot, leading to the burning question of whether the protagonist will be able to shag his computer console because of her stupid switch. The whole damn story centers around where this robo-chick has her on/off button.
And even though at least three of the characters are computer experts, brilliant enough to build their own hyper-realistic girl robots, not a single one of them, not one, suggests the simple solution of disconnecting or moving the damn switch.
I friggin’ hate Chobits, man.
I spent the evening working on Son of Hel, a novel about Santa Claus inspired by the famously bad movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. The following is the rough draft of the first chapter:
This was the End of the World. It was a place few mortals had seen—and most who had seen it had not survived to tell.
At the pinnacle of the Earth, the Arctic Ocean’s surface turned to ten feet of ice—but beneath the ice, the deep ocean still flowed. Thus it poured, in a vast circle ten thousand feet across, into a round hole penetrating the surface of the globe, forming the world’s largest waterfall. This was the Symmes Hole: The water that flowed into it, lifeblood of the planet, ran through unseen rivers and streams throughout the Earth’s hollow interior, thus becoming the source of the planet’s innumerable springs and wells before it at last exited at the South Pole in a geyser as enormous and deadly as the North Pole’s waterfalls.
In the center of this vast circle of tumbling water, jutting up from the Earth’s unexplored interior, was the Black Precipice, a mountain to rival Everest, made all of lodestone. This mountain it was that caused all compass needles to point inexorably north. Though enormous, the Black Precipice was invisible from the iced-over ocean beyond, shrouded as it was in a permanent cloak of white mist rising from the tumbling water around the Symmes Hole. Few men had glimpsed this terrifying mountain, and most who had, had soon met their deaths in the ten-thousand-foot drop of the vasty waterfalls. Man had not yet built the flying ships capable of crossing the chasm and landing safely on the Black Precipice’s craggy cliffs, so those who dwelt on its slopes remained, for the time being, unharried by the rapaciousness of human greed.
The queen of Elfland, in her chariot pulled by atomies, passed over the deadly falls with no difficulty. Even the terrible winds howling about the great mountain gave her no trouble, as her magical steeds could easily block the frigid gusts with their gossamer wings.
No taller than a thimble, she landed on a level spot overlooking one of the Black Precipice’s sheer cliffs, but as she stepped from her car, she grew to human size—and then grew taller still, at last stopping at a regal height of seven feet. Cloaked in white fur, with a tall crown of intricately intertwined crystal, delicate as a snowflake, atop her head, she walked accompanied on either side by two fairies in golden armor, who bore spears and bows.
All around the Black Precipice’s lower slopes stood a vast city of the elves. Because of the mountain’s extreme magnetism, not a speck of iron was allowed in this place, so the great and nameless city sparkled all over like burnished gold. Every roof was of shining copper, and the high walls around its greatest fortresses were of brass. Gold leaf adorned every doorpost, and the walls of even the humblest dwellings were of marble. Although the waterfalls encircling the mountain thundered perpetually, as the queen approached the city, the noise of the tumbling ocean was soon drowned out by the cacophony of hammers and saws.
