Saku's AFK Corner » Site Announcements

Saku’s AFK Corner New Look

Saku — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 21:28:53 +0000

I installed a new theme for my blog and I am liking it so far. It’s thesame theme that is ued in ACG NA website. I may change the color scheme later on when I have a chance ^^;;.

I’ll appreciate any feedback about the new layout. Tell me what you like and what you don’t like.

Image via Moe Imouto

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Someone wants to buy my website O_O

Saku — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:05:56 +0000

Random post of the day. Someone sent me an email and said that he wanted to buy my website/domain ^^; and sad to say that it’s not for sale. Does this ever happen to you ?

My New Mascot

Saku — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:54:50 +0000

I had wanted a mascot for a long time since I started blogging last year and no doubt that seeing Danny has his own mascot, Mirai Suenaga, it can’t be helped that I wanted my own. I am no artist which means I need to commission someone to create one for me and the artist that I chose to create my mascot is no other than Chun from puppy52.com . I know she is a busy lady and Anime Evolution was coming up so I didn’t expect to get the mascot done before Anime Expo 2009 (if you haven’t checked my coverage yet ,please do so by clicking the following links: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and Loot).

Chun wasted no time and she started on my mascot as soon as she got some details what I want. Soon after, she sent 2 samples above for my preview. You all can probably guess which character she was referencing to ^^;;. Originally, I wanted armor dress like Saber (no surprise, eh) but then I preferred gown at the end so I told her that I like the look from the armor version and the gown. In addition, I prefer my mascot to be barefooted

The 3rd time is the charm. I think she nailed it with the above sketch and I also mentioned her that my mascot has to have a sword (yah I am into anime girls with a sword XD. It’s my sickness lol). Aside from her hair, pose wise is looking great since I am not a fan of short hair girls whether it is 2d or 3d.

After the character is finalized , she did some cleaning and prepared the mascot to be coloured.

Chun also added a bikini for her and did some touching up here and there. Note that the mascot still needs a gown ^^;;

I mentioned it to her that the sword looked kinda fat / short so I asked her if she could make it look thinner/long.

This sword version definitely looks better but the sword is too long but I think that should be ok since I don’t necessarily need to display all part of the sword.

Chun added the gown on her and she looks nice and sexy ^^

Since everything is finalized, she started the colouring process and sent me the first draft. I wrote back to her with some comments regarding the gown, eyes, skin and sword.

We had little bit difficulties with the skin shade due to monitors that we use because it looks different on different monitors depending on its settings so she sent me couple versions with different skin shade colour and eyes colour so I can decide which one looks the best.

After going back and forth between us, we managed to finalize the character as seen below.

The last touch up was the decoration of the sword since I mentioned it to her that sword was little bit too plain so she added red markings on it ^^.

Chun really did a good job on the mascot and I hope I was not too picky ^^;;. Now since the mascot has been completed, I still need to figure her name ^^;;. After much research and googling around, I narrowed it down to Yume Shizuka. Their kanji is as follow: Yume (夢) Shizu(靜) ka(夏). As most of you already know that yume means dream, shizu means quiet and ka means summer. The name is not finalized yet so I would like to ask my fellow readers for some suggestions for her name. Picking a name is not as easy as I thought it would be because I want the name to mean something. I like her first name Yume but it’s not the case with her surname. Kinda hard to look for japanese surname that has the meaning that I like ^^;; so if you have any suggestions , please post a comment ^^.

Website layout changes

Saku — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:09:09 +0000

Image via Gelbooru

Image is totally unrelated but everyone seems to adore Mio Akiyama from K-ON! ^^. Anyways, some small layout changes and additions as you may already notice:

5 latest posts in the header from Anime, Figures, Events and Otaku category.
Remove the Day/Month on the left side beside the post title and put it right under Author name.
Move RSS feed links to top right corner of the header.
Add ‘Links’ page and remove the it from the home page.

To do list ( When I am not lazy ):

Display list of posts on the homepage with thumbnails-like.
Display RSS feed for fellow bloggers randomly in the links page.
Redesign the whole website (sometime in the future >.>).
Increase the width for the post column so I can display somewhat larger images.

Updates:

Add rss feed link for each latest post category (you guys should see the rss icon right beside category name)

Upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1

Saku — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 12:09:05 +0000

I spent sometimes this morning to upgrade my very outdated wordpress 2.5.1 to wordpress 2.7.1 after a year since my last upgrade. The upgrade was pretty much painless and it took me about 1 hour from backing up my wordpress files and database to fully up and running with wordpress 2.7.1. I did one small mistake which was to deactivate all my plugins before I upgraded but luckily, all plugins seemed to be working fine (keeping my finger crossed). I followed exactly the WordPress’ guide for upgrading which can be found here.

The new design on the admin section is a lot nicer from before and I think it’s much easier to go from one page to the other. I haven’t played around with it much but I love the ‘Posts’ section since it utilizes the full screen of my monitor unlike before. I can easily see huge portion of my post ^^.

Anyways, let me know if you guys encountered some problems.