Welcome to Senshi Talk, a special feature in the Keep of Information.  This is a place for my personal Sailor Moon rants, basic information pertaining to things about the site, the world of anime and the like.  It could be considered the combination of a blog and site editorials in one.  Site news is not posted or archived here.  This is a place for thoughts and information directly from me.  Things here will be along the same lines as the long defunct SSS streaming radio program and the little information updates I would post in the guestbook.  As always, if you'd like to talk, debate, pretty much anything - just send me an e-mail.

New Senshi Talk:

09/04/2011 - These Things I Think About
    This one is going to be long.  Fair warning.  Since the relaunch of the site a couple years ago I really haven't done much here outside of some housekeeping and the laborious task of reworking and reinserting the background image. (This is a lot more work than it seems, this site still does have a fairly archaic design.)  However the site remains, much as I suppose it always has, constant in the back of my mind.  I have more heavily visited parts of classicplastic.net that I need to keep up on - and haven't.  I've been much better at meeting my obligation to an online gaming newsletter, Retrogaming Times Monthly, and recently launched a twice monthly quick video program.  Yet during all that, I still think about SSS and really sitting down to do some content additions here.  I truly understand that anime and manga have passed me by, that I'm firmly stuck in the 1980's - 1990's era; a few exceptions such as the more recent Galaxy Express 999 stuff and Black Jack notwithstanding.  I'm also not surprised that the American anime industry kind of collapsed under its own weight not all that many years ago.  These two events coincided at almost the same time.  I got tired of anime and manga, new / current anime and manga, and then the whole thing seemed to fall apart.  I wonder sometimes, if people that were heavy into the culture at that time feel about it as I do about the 80's and 90's.  If those people feel the way I feel, just about a different time.  In that way if we can truly relate, not about content, but about how losing something you enjoy can effect how you see the greater scope of that industry.  With this in mind I've actually thought about going to anime conventions again.  I guess I'm just having crazy feelings of nostalgia.

I also think about these same feelings when remembering the earlier days of the Internet and Web.  Remembering old websites, file depositories, forums, chatrooms and the like.  This is nothing new to me but instead of simply washing over me it instead hits like a hammer.  I used to have nothing to look at to solidly remind me of that era.  I do now, this site.  After I restored SSS I had my time capsule again.  Not through an Internet archive or some old cached files I came across somewhere - but by my own hand.  I guess I thought all the memories would come back with it, that somehow it would further complete my nostalgia.  It hasn't, if anything it's done exactly the opposite and made me just ponder the past even more with even less closure.

I know what it sounds like, no, I'm not shutting the site down or anything.  It took me practically FOREVER to get this relic operating again, it's not going anywhere.  The flip side however is that I need to actually do something with it.  Many generations of Sailor Moon sites have come and gone since the heyday of SSS.  You can find practically anything you may ever want to know about Sailor Moon elsewhere.  (I still recommend Hitoshi Doi's Sailor Moon page as the absolute best resource and it's been around for what seems like eternity.)  This is the primary reason the media archives have not returned and a big reason why I'm thinking of simply removing those sections.  If you want to watch a Sailor Moon video, you search for it on a streaming video site.  Sailor Moon music?  There are some great resources out there!  The Web has changed so much, so much content is now instant to find and free to view.  On the flip side it's true that there are some things that are very hard to find these days, with search overload hiding some great sites.  Factor in that some people simply grew out of their sites and they disappeared to the ever changing digital realm and you've lost the personal touch that used to bring you the information.  Going forward, here at SSS at least, I want to do a little of both.

More than likely the media sections for the individual senshi will be removed.  If at a later time I actually have some content that's worth putting there, they'll return.  However there's no use having a bunch of dead links active.  The image galleries will remain since what's a Sailor Moon site without them.  We're a little more than a week away from the English re-release of the Sailor Moon manga as well as the first time ever English release of Codename is Sailor V.  Yes, you're probably seeing where this is going, the media scans section needs a complete overhaul.

The Great Gallery needs to be completely reworked with a very few exceptions.  What has to be understood is back when I made those scans I was using one of the first affordable color scanners on the market.  While the quality wasn't superb back then, it was passable - this is no longer the case, not by a long shot.  The Japanese trading card scans are going to be completely removed due to poor quality and the availability of them elsewhere.  That and I have barely any recollection how to keep what series they are straight.  I simply don't know enough about that to even attempt to act like I know what I'm talking about.  The art book scans will be left alone since I really don't care to re-scan any of that stuff and the scans came out okay.  Everything else will be re-scanned or re-photographed from my personal collection.  While I no longer have some of the items, I'd rather all my scans be of stuff that I actually own and scanned myself.  An example of this is the English language book form manga, I sold it all off a couple years ago.  Those scans will not return.  The individual issues however, will be re-scanned and will remain.  All the video games will get new pictures / scans and if I don't own it, you won't see it.  Same goes with the music.  As the new English translated manga is released, I will do scans and upload them.  I also plan on doing nice, high resolution scans of every card in the Sailor Moon Trading Card Game - well, all the cards I have (only missing a few).  I play a lot of the Sailor Moon TCG / CCG, and there really aren't any current resources for the game.  This is something that is missing in the great archives of Web information and also something I personally really understand inside out - a perfect match for new content.

The full rework of The Great Gallery will take place in October, probably around the second full week of the month.  However you may see the wrecking ball in The Great Gallery before then, stripping the old out and getting what will remain into its proper place.  The media gallery links will probably disappear long before then but that's no big deal since they didn't point anywhere to begin with.  The Sailor Moon card game is the big thing with my moonie fandom right now.  I think it'll actually get its own section on the site, not just a scans page.  It's something I really enjoy and would like to get a revival going... and with the current state of the Sailor Moon manga days away from a fresh re-release, revival is the name of the game.

So keep a close eye on SSS as this October everything old is new again... or everything new is old.,. um... just keep an eye on SSS!!

Previous Archived Senshi Talk:

11/08/2009 - It Lives Again...
    Quickly I just want to say how great it really feels to have this site up and running again.  I also want to say that there is a lot of new content that I'm working on at present.  The new stuff doesn't just involve new scans of previously available stuff here, but rather totally new uploads.  It's a strange feeling to be loving Sailor Moon so much once again but this whole process has been wonderful.  Very difficult and a lot of hard work but absolutely wonderful to have this restored.  The memories that came back about the people and events of that time, the time when this site was originally created, were just the icing on the cake.  I do want to say that I deeply feel that Sailor Moon is going to become very popular once again world wide in the next few years.  So if there's anything you see that you want that's pretty cheap - get it right now, you might not have much time before new fans rush in.  There are some amazing deals to be had on stuff that would have been incredibly expensive a few years ago.  Of course, some of the previously cheap stuff is outrageous right now, so take from it what you will.

Questions, comments, suggestions?
Well then, e-mail me!