• Pixel Ellipsis was featured in Digital Vanity (technically I think this happened sometime in 2010, but anyways ) as well as Socksoff – much thanks!
  
• January: Celebrated Hayao Miyazaki’s 70th birthday by proclaiming 2011 as the year of Studio Ghibli on Pixel Ellipsis. I spent a good chunk of the year blogging and tweeting about Studio Ghibli – learned a lot about Miyazaki through the process! I didn’t produce quite as many Ghibli walls as originally planned though – sad…
  
  
• February: Entered and won the C3 Winter Wallpaper Contest w00t! (Also fell in love with Nujabes, one year after his death.)
  
  
• April: Started Six for Tea with co-conspirators Gideon & Jay to fundraise for Japan in the wake of the devastating earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. We raised just over $250 for Mercy Corps’ Japan relief program!
  
  
• August: Pixel Ellipsis turned 5! I posted my 100th wallpaper to Pixel Ellipsis to celebrate the occasion and show my continuing love for CLAMP. I also made the executive decision to start posting (most) wallpapers exclusively to Pixel Ellipsis.
  
  
• November/December: Added a new site affiliate: The Forgotten Lair! Also started taking wallpaper requests through Twitter, mostly from Miss @Maria_Francisca

Thanks for all your support in 2011 ♥ Here’s to another great year in 2012!

January wall: Akashi-san
February wall: Reach for Love
March wall: Destructive Aftermath
April wall: Cranes for Japan
May wall: N/A
June wall: N/A
July wall: N/A (wow I was dead for quite a few months there)
August wall: CLAMP Mascots Party Wall!
September wall: Himura Kenshin
October wall: N/A (thanks to work)
November wall: Tokyo Babylon – For Tomorrow
December wall: Howl and Sophie – Flight of Fancy

…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

…I seriously should’ve remembered I was dealing with CLAMP. The CLAMP who gave us all sorts of twisted relationships in Tokyo Babylon and X, delighting in surprise twists a la RG Veda style (even though I sadly don’t remember much of the plot of RG Veda, having read it last while I was in middle school? I still remember being damned surprised when that freakishly bloody ending came around)… Being a long-time CLAMP fan, right around now in my Tsubasa reading I’m kicking myself for not having expected something like this to happen. But then again, it’s really the power of CLAMP to reveal and surprise. This kind of messed up yet utterly addicting stuff is partly why I love them so much ; D;

I also found it really fitting that the big reveal about Syaoran’s character and the huge influx of violence came in the world where all the X characters were popping up like mushrooms. THAT should’ve been my first warning sign, given how screwed up the X world was! And CLAMP didn’t throw any punches in the introduction of the world… there was a lot of blood and a lot of dead bodies fairly early on. CLAMP just seems to love certain themes – eyes (or eye exchanges), severing of body parts, pinning body parts with a variety of sharp objects… all abound. Actually I was really struck with the sharp object pinning during Kurogane’s back-story; the reveal of his childhood past was definitely a fairly telling precursor to the violence. Given Kurogane’s personality though, it wasn’t as unexpected. Or maybe it wasn’t as unexpected as it should have been? ;P

Given that Subaru has been one of my favorite characters from Tokyo Babylon/X, and CLAMP really built up the similarities between Subaru and Kamui, I was really tickled to see the two of them come back in Tsubasa as twins. Vampire twins to boot lol. But yeah, Subaru’s whole story since Tokyo Babylon on has trampled all over my shoujo sensibilities while ripping my heart out.

Since I’m now in this semi-delirious love-hate-love state, and probably will be for the rest of the night, I’m not going to try to write up a proper ending for this post. I won’t be able to stop reading Tsubasa now since I seem to enjoy being in this kind of masochistic/melodramatic mood. Again, THIS is why I love CLAMP so much! T xT