bubble's Blog

So. Some anime and manga-related goals. :D
Some of them are stupid, some aren't. Most of them don't have a timeline... at least not yet.

First, one I made a while before:
Before school starts (late September) get the anime watching 'days' count up to 45. I made this goal when it was about 39, now it's 44.2. Very close.

Before the end of the year: finish reading at least one manga raw. Probably Penguin Revolution, but who knows (how I wish I could tag manga...)

Eventually:
Finish or drop for good everything on my 'on hold' anime list.
Watch more old anime (older than 90s). Especially MS Gundam and Rose of Versailles.
Catch up with everything on my Watching list (Detective Conan, I'm looking at you).
Finish the Fruits Basket manga in the original (so loooong... reading Japanese still takes me a long time).
Start reading manga that don't have furigana... Parasyte (寄生獣) I'm looking at you.

And of course, get so I can understand the darn things better! The road of language learning is long (but at least in the case of Japanese, well-paved!).

Okay, so I've been reading scans on my OS X Tiger computer, and it sucked. I had to resize and open each image separately. Too much clicking makes my wrist hurt. But here's the scoop, I figured out how it's done:

Open Preview and go to preferences. Under 'Image' select "open all images in one window" or "open all groups of images in same window". Doesn't matter much which - the first puts all images in the 'drawer' no matter if you open them separately or together, the second puts all images opened at the same time in the same drawer.

Under 'default image size' select "actual size". Uncheck the box that says "respect image DPI for 'actual size'". This way you won't have to resize unless you actually want the image smaller.

Next, navigate to a folder that has the scans you want to read... this next part is good if you want to read the whole folder at once. Hit command-a (command is the one with the weird thing and the apple) to select all, then double-click on any filename to open them all in the same window.

Alternately, you can select a range of files (file 1-9, for instance, or 4-15 or whatever) by selecting the first one, then holding shift while you click on the last one. Or you can hold command while you click to add/remove things from the selection one by one.

Once they're all open, you may or may not be able to see the drawer, but you can push up and down to select the previous or the next file, respectively (same order as in the folder, I think).

It occurs to me that I've watched a lot of anime, but not read that much manga. There are several reasons for this:
-before I was internet-savvy, it was much easier and cheaper to watch anime on TV than to read manga. My local library has very little, so I had to buy it.
-even now I find scans inconvenient, so I haven't used them much, and would tend simply not to read stuff until it hit store shelves here.
-if I'm in the mood to read, usually I'm in the mood for novels, which I consider typically better value for the money.
-certain things work much better animated than in comic form for me
-lately, I've been learning Japanese, and I find it takes much less concentration to watch raw anime or dramas than to read raw manga

Lately, this has been changing a bit, for the following reasons:
-I've developed more of an appreciation for clever page layouts and panel design - in general, for the cool things one can do with comics
-I'm trying to patch up the biggest hole in my knowledge of Japanese - reading - and find manga much easier than novels and more interesting than little kids' books
-some things are just better in manga form - including Fruits Basket, which I've been reading lately

Funnily enough, although I think Ouran and Fruits Basket are better overall, I've been reading Penguin Revolution the most obsessively, perhaps because the author is quite good at cliffhangers. Also, with the other two I'm still reading the parts that were adapted into the anime, so there aren't many surprises.