Hey there, long time no update!

I’ve been making these “Stuff I Liked” posts on Tumblr and thought I should revive my personal blog with them too. I’m also hoping to make some regular art updates again, and these diary-like monthly summary posts are a good way to keep things personal, too!

Playing

Café Enchanté – Ohhh this is sooooo lovely!  My previous Switch otome game was Cupid Parasite and WOW the difference in color palette, even with the same illustrator/character designer for both games… (it’s hard to come back down to reality after the fluorescent neon fever dream that is Cupid Parasite).  I love the super sweet angel boy soooo much!  He’s such a nerd and the other characters baby him because he has an aura of endearing helplessness. 😆  And he’s sooo pwetty. 🥺  I can’t wait for the chapter where the heroine visits his heavenly home world, and ultimately to see what his personal route is like~

Reading

Miriya & Marie – Yeah, that’s Marie from The Aristocats haha.  This comic is sooooo cute!  It’s in full color and every page is sooooo piiiiink!! 🌸🩷🎀🍨  And the illustrations themselves are super pretty, with many beautiful fashions and accessories that the heroine wears. 🎀  I actually love that the whole story is contained in one volume.  It’s nice to read a full arc and be finished, sometimes!

Free Comic Book Day (thumbnail shows only a few, in actuality I brought home many more than just these 😄) – This was quite early in the month (on the 2nd) and I’m always super lucky that our friendly local comic book shop stocks plenty of freebies!  Apparently there was some hubbub around free comic book day this year, because the main publisher that runs it went out of business last year, but more publishers such as Penguin Random House (which owns Dark Horse, Tokyopop, Webtoon Unscrolled etc.) have stepped up to fill in the gaps.  I didn’t know about that at all when I went by our store, I only learned it after the fact when I saw that some of what I’d brought home had a different logo (“Comics Giveaway Day” instead of “Free Comic Book Day”) and did some searching on the subject after coming home.  I hope it keeps running for a long time, because I always love the excuse to drop by the store and buy a physical book or two, just in time for it to be getting warmer so I have something screen-free to read outdoors!

Out of the freebies I picked up, the Jem & the Holograms + My Little Pony combo is almost like it was tailored for me specifically LOL.  This Jem is only okay to me – I’ve actually already read this comic series before but I don’t physically own any of it so this is kind of just like a bonus goodie for me.  I like the 80s cartoon much more than this reboot, the truly truly truly outrageous fashion and hairstyles just don’t quite hit right.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a book that’s been sitting in my library holds for months, so I figured checking out the first chapter in graphic novel form would be like getting a preview, but I’m not sure that I like it. 🤔  I’ll still wait until I actually read the book before forming an opinion.

Sonic – I’m fairly familiar with the Archie Sonic series but these IDW ones are new to me.  More than the main comic content itself, a bunch of the ads in the back successfully hooked me lol.  Now I’ve got a few more IDW Sonic side-stories on my ComicsPlus shelf (the app my library uses). I don’t know who “Tangle & Whisper” are but I’m about to find out!

Mabel Mulligan – This is REALLY GOOD and I’m looking forward to when the full story releases in October!  Loooove the soft art style and coloring.  Easily my favorite of everything I picked up.

Also read some others like Street Fighter, Mega Man, and Archie.  Didn’t realize that recent Archie has a cast of modern new characters (there’s a nerdy girl that plays TTRPGs!) since I’ve only been reading vintage ones (I like the Betty & Veronica-specific books and have been sorting by oldest when I search them on ComicsPlus).  I’ll definitely sprinkle some of the more recent books into my reading now.

Princess Gwenevere & The Jewel Riders, Vol. 1 – Vol. 2 of this was my physical book purchase of choice when I stopped by the store for Free Comic Book Day.  I just needed to give vol. 1 a reread to remember what was going on here, which is fine by me because it just gives me more reading material for my time outside. 🏞️  I loooove the color palette of these books.  Every turn of the page is just delightful to the eyes.  The Jewel Rider outfits have very cool redesigns (Gwen’s in the original cartoon is a little goofy, this version looks much better), although, I wish they could have been given sparkly transformation sequences.  Exploring the backstory behind the Queen (Gwen’s mom) and Lady Kale (the main villain) is a worthwhile storyline!  Now, I can move on to the new purchase (vol 2) next month!

Everyone in this Bank is a Thief – The fourth in the Ernest Cunningham series which I like quite a lot – every book in the series has been very exciting, and that can’t be said of a lot of other series.  (I’ve posted about previous books a couple of times!)  Btw, read them in order and don’t skip ahead.  Personally, I love the cheeky foreshadowing on just about every page; the writing style is very ‘Did you notice the important thing that I just mentioned, reader? 😏’, which negative reviews always highlight as being grating, and I totally understand that, but idk something about it in these particular mysteries is very enthralling to me.  I’m always like “What do you mean we already learned the laptop password, where was it? 😲” and I go scan the previous passage that listed all of the details in the office to try to catch where it might have been hinted. I always speed through these in just a few days because they really hit the ground running and keep you captivated all the way through, with cliffhangers that make it hard to put down between chapters, and again, all of that delicious foreshadowing.  They are great books for trying to puzzle out the secrets and mysteries on your own before it’s officially revealed, and the whole point of the hint-wink-nudgey writing style is to encourage you to do so.  I can highly recommend this series for Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie fans – they’re filled with direct references to both – BUT just know that the violence is much more grisly and gory than any of the old golden age detective stories ever depicted it; these are not “clean” murders, and poor Ernest gets mangled in some horrific new way in each entry so far.

Watching

Tokyo Mew Mew – YO THIS RUUUUUUULES!!!!  Would you believe that I call myself a magical girl fan, despite that I’ve NEVER watched this before?  Remedying these gaps is exactly the point of this habit…  Up until I actually started watching, I thought that all of the girls were cats.  What do you mean they have mutated genes from endangered animals?!?  Now, I know that there is a pretty recent ‘Tokyo Mew Mew New’ that I could have watched instead, but I deliberately wanted to go back in time and see the old English dub by 4Kids, where its title is actually “Mew Mew Power”.  Sure, the modern version or an authentic subbed version without all of 4Kids’ editing and cuts would be “better”… but I’m not here for “better”. 😄  I frickin’ love the catchy “Mew Mew power IN YOUR FACE!” slogan with the super-obviously edited-in-post hip hop-style backup jingle.  Absolutely nothing is “better” than that. lmao. Alas, this is in the same situation as Corrector Yui and Saint Tail, where only about half of the episodes were dubbed into English and if I want to see the conclusion, I have to carve out time to watch the subs (can’t multitask when you gotta read 😔).  But at least once I move onto the back half, I’ll be able to hear the unedited music and see what the full transformations look like! 👍

Sailor Moon Super S – Things are Fully Weird in this season, which I’ve always heard is because Kunihiko Ikuhara had a lot of creative control at this point in production (can anyone confirm?).  Like yeah the monster-of-the-week designs have always been Out There, but now they are REALLY, REALLY Out There.  Even so, this is another season that I like a lot, because the shenanigans that the Amazon Trio get up to while in civilian disguises are super fun and it reminds me of Jedeite & Co. from the first season.  But more than anything else………… the pretty unicorn boy is one of my all-time favorite characters!!! 🦄  I know it’ll be a while before we see him in pretty boy form but I can wait!!!

Whew…  Okay, so I piled a bit too much on my plate and almost burned myself out for a minute there. n_n

I jumped into the Hatoful Boyfriend guide without being finished with the other overhauls I had planned for the site, and those efforts in conjunction with the daily work I put towards my Kawaii Shopping and Finer Fashion Shopper blogs as well had me feeling so overwhelmed, I could barely accomplish anything at all!

So I’m slowing down for a bit.  Hatoful Boyfriend posts are going to be put on hold until I finish posting all of my completed pony plushes, which I’ve gotten reeeeeaaally far behind on.  There are THIRTEEN more ponies I’ve finished since I last updated!  So I’ll be spending the next day or so putting my photos of them together in neat little images and uploaded straight into the gallery that’s on this page (also on DeviantArt).

Then I’ll hurry along through Shuu’s path in Hatoful Boyfriend and get those posts up in the coming days after that!  Ideally, we’ll have the Hatoful Boyfriend posts finished with before this week is up.

And THENNNN I’ll get back to work on the other projects I’ve mentioned here and there in my posts.  The book about sewing cute plushes and things will be resumed, as well as the packages of downloadable items such as icons and wallpapers.  I still have a lot of irons in the fire, but I need to keep reminding myself not to try to accomplish them all at the same time!  Doing so leads only to exhaustion and disappointment when I inevitably don’t accomplish the far-too-many things that are on my to-do list.

So keep an eye on the Pony Plush Commissions page for the newest ponies!  After that will come all of the other fun stuff I just mentioned. c:

 

Hey everyone! 😀

I know I haven’t been blogging here as much as I keep saying I’d like to, but I have a reason! I have so many cool ideas planned for this site this year, and they’re all being worked on EVERY DAY! We’re still only just getting started in 2012 and I can’t wait to see what kinds of other developments occur through this year, besides the neat things I have planned~

Here’s something exciting: What with January ending and February beginning, payments and checks have all been sent out by all the online affiliate networks I’ve joined and made a secondary income out of. And while I first started getting tiny trickles of payments in November (I started affiliate marketing in October), this past January marks an important landmark: I made my first $100 entirely from commission-based revenue!!

Now, I read up a lot about affiliate marketing before and as I first started monetizing my Web site and blogs. And so many of them stated that your first goal to work toward is that first $100. That first $100 is your sign that you’ve done it – you’ve got a blog with traffic coming in to it, some regular readers, and now it’s just a matter of keeping it going with more products and promotions, and soon you’ll have another $100, then $500, and even $1000 is an eventual certainty as long as you keep at it – and those higher numbers are so much easier to attain now that that uphill climb towards your first $100 is reached.

If you’re a little confused and find yourself asking, “Wait, what’s affiliate marketing? What blogs are we talking about?” that’s okay! I’ll give you some quick background info. There are a toooooon of informative articles you can read about affiliate marketing itself so I won’t go hugely into it here, but basically affiliate marketing is advertising products and linking to them using a code that is unique to you. When someone else clicks that link and looks at that product, or any other products from that site you linked them to, there’s a cookie there that remembers that YOUR LINK is the one that led them there. If they purchase something, a percentage of that sale gets paid to you! You can basically think of affiliate marketing as getting paid by commission to advertise products. The two blogs I have monetized to specifically work as affiliate blogs are both on Tumblr – Kawaii Shopping and The Finer Fashion Shopper.

And here’s the very best part – my sales in January were so good, I actually reached WAY over $100! My total cumulative earnings from all of my affiliate programs across these few months actually totals to closer to $200! Remember how I mentioned I first started getting payments in November? My first paycheck (it was from my favorite affiliate program so far, LinkShare!) was for only $34. And I’d previously received a $50 payment for referring someone to use my Web hosting provider, Hostgator. I was already at $84! So close to $100 after only one month of affiliate marketing!

My sales seemed to decline in December, and I barely made any sales. I think I stayed teetering at that $80-90 range that month. But that was fine, as the holidays were very busy and I didn’t have a huge amount of time to dedicate to my blogs. When January came around, I became aware of something I had seriously neglected to address – I hadn’t implemented any SEO techniques to my two Tumblr blogs! Was it even possible to optimize Tumblr blogs for search engines? All I had to do was Google “Tumblr SEO tips” and there were my answers! I’m thankful I’m already so familiar with HTML and a small bit of the SEO I’d worked on for my own personal site (the one you’re reading from right now!), because that knowledge made it easy to implement H1 headers and turn post tags into meta keywords, and those kinds of things.

Well, immediately after implementing those SEO techniques, I witnessed a significant spike in the traffic my blogs were getting, which in turn led to a DRASTIC increase in clicks through to all of the products I was promoting there. My sales through LinkShare jumped from $20 that month to nearly $40, and then finally reached $50 right before January ended. Holy cow! From that program alone, I’d MORE than reached my first $100 earned online!! 😯 And as if that weren’t enough, on the very last day of January, I received a surprise e-mail from Amazon Associates stating that my payment for the month had been processed. Since I haven’t promoted products from Amazon as much as I have from other sites, I’d nearly forgotten all about them! When I logged into my Amazon Associates panel, I was beyond ecstatic to find that I’d accumulated $55 in sales there – all from links I’d created back in November. The SEO techniques I’d only implemented in January had even brought traffic to some of my much older posts!

So those two payments from LinkShare and Amazon alone would have gotten me to my $100 goal, but don’t forget that I had nearly reached $100 beforehand! I absolutely owe this spike of success to search engine optimization. If this past month’s increase of traffic and sales are a reliable indicator, it isn’t unreasonable to anticipate making at least $100 a month from these blogs, regularly. And if traffic and sales continue to increase, well then… I am certainly incredibly hopeful for the future! And what’s even more – I also spent some time in January joining even more affiliate programs! I also have tricklings of earnings from Share-A-Sale and Google Affiliate Network, and I’m hopeful that those will blossom into larger earnings in the coming months, just like LinkShare and Amazon Associates did after only a few months. c:

I can’t complain at all about my experience with affiliate marketing and encourage others to use their blogs for the same. If you want to get started just like I did, join LinkShare and search through their categories of merchants to find some online retailers that fit your niche. Other programs to check out are Share-A-Sale, Amazon Associates, and Google Affiliate Network.

In the future I might post a bit about the techniques I use and precise strategies that I implement in each of my Tumblr blogs when I make posts about products. c:

Thanks for reading!

January 5, 2012

Hello once again, all of you lovely persons!! I hope that all of you had fantastic holidays and a wonderful New Year, and haven’t broken any resolutions yet!

I posted a small announcement on my commission page that I was going to be on break for a couple of weeks there, and had every intention of writing a full blog post announcing my absence as well, but then an INCREDIBLY-POORLY-TIMED INCIDENT OCCURRED: the charger for my laptop shorted out and so I had no power and could not access anything. D8 So, I am terribly and deeply sorry if anyone tried to contact me and I could not get back to you.

Right now, however, it’s time to go through all of my messages and comments and get back to everyone!! And then it’s back to work on sewing up everyone’s ponies!!

FURTHERMORE, what with it being a new year and all, it’s time to pave a new path for myself and really offer some substantial things to this blog. I know I keep talking and talking about this Boutique idea of mine, and it was my resolution last year to get it going. I still wanna do that, but we’ll likely see some other immediate things I can offer here before then. c: I’m thinking of downloadable packages of icons and desktop themes, some with licenses included so you can use the graphics in your own design endeavors – Web design of your own, independent games, and the like.

Would you believe that I intend to publish a book soon, too?? I’ll self-publish a physical copy through Lulu but also have a downloadable PDF ebook available on this site (cheaper alternative). It will be on the subject of sewing cute, tiny things.

Other thing I need to do on this site: post the photos of finished ponies that I’ve already submitted to DeviantArt.

*cracks knuckles*

August 31, 2011

Holy cow! I did not expect such a MASSIVE reaction from everyone on that Lolita post!

You are all so beautiful and wonderful! ;~; I tried to thank everyone individually who commented and gave me such awesome feedback and encouragement. <3

But I also just now put this quick gif together. This is a shout-out to all of the beautiful people reading this blog right now!

I couldn’t be any happier. 8D

Soooooooooo anyway, just thought I’d fill everyone in on what my next plans are for this blog. <3  I am RAPIDLY filling up the shopping pages for the Boutique portion of the site. Hopefully I can open it soon! I know I keep saying that, but it’s because I really do get a little bit closer every day. XD

Fashion posts seem to be a big hit, so I’d like to share some more outfits and coordinates and stuff. There are a couple of category links on the Home page that still lead to 404 pages because there aren’t any posts in that category oAo So, I’ve got to get to work on those. Fashion posts it is!

Also, cartoons! I have not even touched on this blog about how much I love cartoons and toys. With My Little Pony Friendship is Magic’s second season just around the corner, I want to highlight some of my favorite episodes and toys that have been released so far. 😀 ALSO I have just gotten into the new Thundercats cartoon and want to review it briefly. Maybe I’ll do that one tomorrow. Yeah. We’ll see a Thundercats post tomorrow. BD

ALSOOO fajsldkalf did you guys know that Natsume is releasing two Harvest Moon games in mid-September, within a week apart from one another? O_O The first is Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns, which I’ve been greatly looking forward to because it looks sooooo pretty and has some seriously cute characters. 😀 The announced release date is September 20 but the guy at Gamestop said they’d have it on the 21st (this seems to be normal for HM games).

The other game is Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny on the Wii. I loved Rune Factory Frontier to bits and I’m a huge fan of the RF series. I might have to skip on this one since I don’t really have the funds to spend on a big game like this, nor the time to sit down and immerse myself in a console game, but I want to keep my eye on it anyway just because I adore the series so much. It ALSO has some pretty rad characters, and the game world is gorgeous. <3 Tides of Destiny’s release date is Sept 27 (which probably means Sept 28).

Hummmmm I think that’s about all the updates I can think of for now. o3o Yeah. Will talk about Thundercats tomorrow and after that I’ll work on filling out all of this blog’s category tags so there won’t be any more 404 errors. Woo!

Btw I totally meant it when I said you all were beautiful. 😀 I could never properly express how much I appreciate you awesome readers. ; 3;~ HUGS AND KISSES FOREVERRRRRR