Archives for category: News

Six for Tea: Wallers for Japan Disaster Relief

Join us in fundraising for Japan through Mercy Corps! You can help out in a variety of ways:

1. DONATE! Why? Because it’ll make you feel good, I swear. Plus, Mercy Corps is a reputable charity that’s doing great things in Japan, from delivering supplies and counseling children to issuing store vouchers to help kick-start the local economy.

2. Promote! Facebook! Twitter! Email! PM! Spread the word out about this project in any and all ways you can think of :D

3. Wall! We’d like to expand the collection of wallpapers that we’re offering to donors. Make a wall for the collection, or make a promotional wallpaper for the project and kill two birds with one stone!

We only just started officially promoting the project yesterday, but the show of generosity from walling community members has been astounding. Help us keep the momentum going – together we can make this fundraiser a success!

Madoka's Prayer

…the Madoka OP is probably the best OP ever for depicting things that “never happened.” :D

I hadn’t planned to watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica – it didn’t even make my winter 2010 wishlist because it looked so generic. But then everyone started making a fuss about it and I read this interview with Madoka’s director Gen Urobuchi (there are minor plot spoilers in the interview, so avoid as needed):

As a game scenario writer, Urobuchi is noted for heavy, often gruesome, storylines and a devoted following. I have been unable to tear myself away from this story of young girls facing hardship. Urobuchi said he was tasked with creating a serious anime that contained an element of surprise. He decided to apply his usual style to the often cliche magic girl genre.

So I checked out the series and was hooked, especially from episode 5 on. Madoka is certainly no generic magical girl show, and even though I spoiled parts of the plot for myself by reading the Gen Urobuchi interview before I started watching the show, each episode still managed to surprise me in some way. Underneath the pink frilly mahou shoujo cover is a really dark and devastating core, and the turn on conventional anime cliches is really refreshing to see.

Quick plug:

Six for Tea: Wallers for Japan Disaster Relief

Please give what you can!

Apologies if you’ve hit the ugly “under construction” or 404 pages on Pixel Ellipsis in the last day or so. With a little encouragement from the C3 community, I finally decided to take the plunge and request that my web hosting provider upgrade me from PHP 4 to PHP 5. This upgrade required a complete site migration to a new server, so that’s what’s been keeping me fretting with anxiety for the last two days! Slow internet here made backing everything up a drawn-out nightmare, and the re-uploading was just as bad. But just when it looked like everything ported over ok, WordPress threw me a white screen of death! Luckily with a bit of tinkering and a whole lot of googling, I found the naughty plugin that caused the error, so I’ve deleted the culprit plugin and we are now back online! :D

Please let me know if you run into any weird bugs on Pixel Ellipsis; I’ll be fine-tuning the backend over the next few days so please bear with me as I whip the site into optimal shape!

Update (3/12/11): Ok, back for real now after updating/re-hacking the Gallery WordPress theme ^^; The tweaking will continue, but the undercon cow *should* be retired for a good long while. Sorry about the extra downtime everyone!

I won the desktop category of the C3 Winter Contest with my Nausicaä wallpaper w00t!

Windrider

…I’m putting the $20 winnings into a personal tablet fund. I’ve been saying that I’d get a tablet for YEARS. Maybe this will finally get me over the line :P

C3 Winter Contest Award Banner

Much thanks to Rain for putting on a nice contest for us! The new C3 404 Page Contest is another fun one with a great theme, so definitely swing by and check it out!

I originally wanted to make January Studio Ghibli Month in honor of Hayao Miyazaki‘s 70th birthday, but as I started browsing through scans I realized that I had too many wall ideas and not enough time to deliver. So I figured, why not make this a year-long personal project? Expect to see a lot more Ghibli-related blog posts, tweets, and of course, Ghibli/Miyazaki walls from me throughout the year! This is not to say that I’ll only be making Studio Ghibli walls in 2011, but I will be prioritizing those WIPs. In the meantime, if there are any Studio Ghibli films that you’d like to see more walls for, please let me know!

P.S. Just realized that I’d forgotten to enable multiple selections – you can now vote for more than one Ghibli films that you’d like to see more walls of!

Studio Ghibli Logo (from theanimeblog.com)

Read the rest of this entry »

One of these days I swear I’ll stop texture whoring ; D;

Haku

Hayao Miyazaki / Spirited Away / Haku <3

Pixel Ellipsis was really dragging for me day before yesterday, so I went through the multitude of plugins that I had installed in my plugin-happy stage and killed a few of them. I think it’s helped with site performance, although my ISP also blocked me from accessing the site most of yesterday and part of today as well, so I’m not sure if it was just me. Let me know if the site has been excruciatingly slow for you!

On a side note, I missed Halloween and Thanksgiving while I was overseas (not that either is really celebrated here in Australia). But now that I’m back, I’m oddly addicted to Halloween scans like this one:

KH-Halloween Scan (from Minitokyo.net)

Clearly my raging addiction to Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days is still alive and well. I also managed to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas for the first time on the plane! :)

I’ve been trying to find a good search plugin that’ll buff up WordPress’ default search, which as most of you know isn’t the best search around. The Search Everything plugin looked like a strong contender, but I couldn’t get the multiple search term to work for unregistered users – which is everyone apart from me. I ended up opting for the Search Tags plugin, which includes post tags and categories to the search. So now if you search for “studio ghibli” or “Satoshi Kon” on Pixel Ellipsis, you should be turning up more relevant wallpapers instead of the nothingness or the crap based on post content that was showing up before. Looking back at some of my old wallpapers’ descriptions, I sure used to be awfully emo/verbose, which is a terrible combination right there that was sure to guarantee crappy search results…

Update: Also added the WP-PageNavi plugin for better pagination + easier navigation. Maybe I’m starting to get a little too plugin happy here…

Update 2: And, spiffed up the wallpaper category pages with plot summaries. I hadn’t realized how many (post) apocalyptic series crap had walled until now, like Eden, Texhnolyze, or Wonderful Days

I’ve been sneaking changes in to Pixel Ellipsis. Firstly, in single wallpaper posts I pulled out the “next post/previous post” navigational links and substituted in “related walls.” The relation isn’t always perfect, and sometimes it makes me go “huh?” But I think it makes for more interesting browsing, especially when it links to some of the older wallpapers in the pixel ellipsis trove.

The second change is pretty obvious. I removed the “Tweet This” link on single wallpaper posts since the shortened urls don’t seem to be working any more, and installed the awesome SexyBookmarks WordPress plugin to make sharing THAT much easier (and sexier) on Pixel Ellipsis. So share away, because it shows that you care :D

I was actually pretty excited when I saw that the Minitokyo Knockout Round 3 theme was Art Nouveau, since I’ve never tried the style before. And with the non-human subject requirement I immediately thought “YEAH MOKONA!!!” Gotta give loves to my internet alter-ego 8) The scan that I ended up using immediately struck a chord, not only because it puts Mokona up front and center, but also because of the heavy Japanese style which feeds directly into the Art Nouveau theme.

Mokona Nouveau (1920x1200)

Read the rest of this entry »