Came across these awesome One Piece bento pics on matome.naver.jp:
…and wanted to see if any enterprising chefs had decided to make similar bento based off Studio Ghibli’s films. So I did a quick google and found the delightful blog of Anna The Red, which not only featured beautifully crafted Ghibli bento, but also Ghibli-inspired snacks and “feasts.” Here are some of my favorites!
Felt compelled to toss together a quick wall before I jump back into the full-time workforce, and decided to make something that satisfied my simple + bishie cravings 
This is my first time using borders in a wall! To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of borders in wallpapers, but this wall called for them and I love how everything turned out.
I also ditched my old signature for something a bit more stylish and streamlined. It’s a good time for new changes!
Gotta love creative bookmarks that turn (note)books into delectable looking sandwiches! From Spoon & Tamago:
Talk about delicious bookmarks! Sandwich Tag is the latest work of Japanese design trio Yuse Design. The sandwich ingredients, which function as bookmarks or post-its, come in a variety of “flavors” including the standard B.L.T., or the veggie version. But, you are also given the awesome option of loading up on just bacon. The more notes you take, the more appetizing your book becomes!
Slightly belated happy 5th birthday, Pixel Ellipsis!
…as much as I wanted to come up something special for the occasion, this wall took way too long to make. Nowadays I’m really far too lazy to attempt scenic walls – although gradient meshing the crap out of everything was fun. The practice that I got from my Kimi ni Todoke wall really paid off! The perspective of this wall is a bit wonky – I used way too many scans – but I LOVED making the floor, it was probably the most gratifying part of this entire project. I am definitely going to reuse that floor again at some later point in time 
Need proof of Princess Jellyfish‘s awesomeness? You needn’t look further than its epic parody-laden OP! Sex and the City, Star Wars, Singing in the Rain, Mary Poppins, James Bond/Kill Bill… I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed a few other references there
I’m a huge fan of the original wallpapers from The Fox is Black (formerly Kitsune Noir). The illustrative pop style of many of the wallpapers rather reminds me of Threadless designs, which is a very good thing! With many beautiful wallpapers from different artists, you’re sure to find something unique to dress up your desktop.
I’ve hoarded many a wallpaper from the TFIB Project, but here is a quick overview of the results from my recent forage:
The Desktop Wallpaper Project featuring Philipp Dornbierer
The Desktop Wallpaper Project featuring Jared Chapman
Sights & Sounds Presents Broken Social Scene: ‘Broken Social Scene’ by Matias Palacios-Hardy
I was fiddling around with Pixel Ellipsis and decided to try displaying related walls as thumbnails instead of text links. So I installed a new plugin, Related Posts Thumbnails, set featured images for all the old posts in the archive, and said goodbye to Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Hopefully this enhances the browsing experience without adding too much visual clutter! If you feel strongly about the change either way (awesome? terrible?) drop me a comment 
I also did a little CSS/general debugging and the site should be running a bit faster now, yay!
Didn’t mean to blog again before leaving on vacation, but this was too good to pass up. Via The Ghibli Blog – Joe Hisaishi, the brilliant composer behind classic Studio Ghibli soundtracks, conducted a live charity concert on June 23, 2011 in Paris with the Star Pop Orchestra and a full choir. The YouTube videos of the concert were sublime – the Princess Mononoke theme that Daniel Thomas MacInnes had linked in The Ghibli Blog was very good, but my favorite piece from the concert has got to be the My Neighbor Totoro theme:
When Joe started playing the piano around 2:40 into the video, I went “HOMG MAESTRO!” The children’s choir added all the right notes, and I just love how this arrangement manages to be wistful yet playful and grand, all in the same piece. Truly beautiful. And the Totoro theme is just so iconic, it makes you want to clap along with the audience and burst into rapturous cheers!
Things have been pretty quiet around here, mostly because I went on a month-long vacation, came back for about two weeks, and will be off traveling again tomorrow for a week Can’t complain, for sure, but all this fun has killed off most of my motivation to wall. Anyways! Pixel Ellipsis will be down for a brief period of time after July 10th. Hopefully it won’t be longer than a day at most, but I’m not exactly sure how long it will be. The reason for this downtime is really silly – my hosting provider assigns “free domain credits” on a yearly basis, and for some reason they can’t give me the new credit for the next year until the day AFTER the domain expiration date… I don’t know why they can’t just give me credit for the whole 3 years if I’ve signed up for a 3 year hosting package, but anyways, that’s that. I’ll be back from my trip on July 10th so I do plan to monitor the situation closely.
On a more cheerful note: Miyazaki Lego awesomeness by Ochre Jelly
And “Steampunk Raku Howl’s Moving Castle” by lizzomarek
Yay for epic Ghibli-inspired works! More photos and behind-the-scenes notes available via the original source links, so definitely give those a look!
