Stardust Magic

Minor update notice for the first of July! I've been working to get out as many new, updated gifs for the magic section as possible. I have about 1/2 of them done now, so there's only about 30 left that I need for the anime. Included in this update is gifs for some of the rarer attacks in Sailormoon; including Sailor Body Attack!, Sailor Moon Kick!, and Super Supreme Thunder!. I'm working on completing the entire set, though. I realize having 30 left seems like a high number, but really it is quite a bit fewer than before. The bulk of the ones missing are transformations, I have most of the attacks made into new gifs. After I've completed the general set, I'll go back and make gif files of secondary versions of the same attacks- for example, all the Starlights have two different transformation sequences and two different attack sequences. I'm putting the longer, more complete versions of these up first but plan on making the other versions on as a secondary link later.

The quality of these animations are higher than the previous ones were. I noticed on a lot of our old files, the whole thing was shortened significantly- like taking out all the ribbons in Moon Prism Power, Make Up! or leaving out the water vortex in Neptune Planet Power, Make Up!. All the animations I've made have the full versions and are also (fairly) large so that you can see everything much easier. The only down side to this is that the files are also larger, making them take a bit longer to load. This isn't a big deal for people with uuber-fast internet, but the warning is out there for people still stuck on dial-up.

Once the remaining gifs are created, I'll make up a policy for using them on your own sites. Until then, please just leave them be.

Detail work...

I've been working to make minor corrections to the site, but nothing too new is out. The summaries for the musicals have been updated with corrections for the titles of the songs used. I've also fixed some broken links and made some minor corrections on profiles (for a while Diana's information said 'Artemis' for some reason... -_-; probably just over-looked, I guess).

I'm tentative to choose a major project that I am working on specficially on the site. After busting so hard for over six months on the layouts and content update that we last had, I'm afraid to label anything specific as something I'm planning on getting done in X amount of time.

Things I'm hoping to accomplish, however, at some point:
1- Update the links out. Delete obsolete websites and add in some new ones. (For example, we don't even have a link to the Oracle on there yet, and that site is certainly the biggest Sailormoon-related website around today.)

2- Update animated GIF files in the magic section. This project is about 1/3 complete. I'm trying viciously to get all of them made by me so I can ensure the quality of the images and the length of animation. As a result, there are several new ones that have been updated that I created that are different and higher quality than previous ones. This project is tedious, however, because attention is paid to individual frames of the animation and I have to get screen caps myself. Some things aren't too bad (the inner senshi's attacks from the SuperS season, for instance, all were on average 6 seconds long.) but others are significantly longer (most of Sailormoon's attacks and transformations verge on almost 1 minute of length!) and just take a bit more time. An example would be these two recently updated GIFs - Mars Flame Sniper took about 15-20 minutes to complete, including screen cap time while Starlight Honeymoon Therapy Kiss took about 2 hours. The length is just that much different. I'm trying to get a bit done with this every day (I promised myself one a day at least, but lately it's been more like 4-8 done a day) so this should be done relatively quickly, unless I completely burn out on it (which is totally possible.)

3- I want to create new individual layouts for the for the shrines. The layouts that are out now aren't compatible with all browsers, so I want to make sure to fix that preferably sooner than later. However, since they also tend to be a bit stagnant this isn't a major priority to me yet. Eventually, the whole of the site should be bustling and awesome.

4- Places guide. This is something that we are, believe it or not, working on. The thing is that most of this is occurring behind the scenes in the form of snapping up images and filing them away. Eventually, information will be available for all locations and images to support them. This will include not just places as seen in the anime, but also in the manga as well.

And that's about it. Sorry about the long-winded posting with no real meat for updates. I just wanted to let you know that I'm working, at least on my end, to ensure that this site is shaping into the best that it can be. In the mean time, hopefully Hitsuji will be writing articles in bare-bones HTML and sending them to me via email. I figure that I don't mind doing the leg-work to find the images, etc, to back it up. That is my job, after all, to deal with the visuals of this site.