I got the remaining 75 reviews in the shorts section done, so that’s one more section taken care of. I then did some more manga reviews, but only a few as my evening was mostly spent catching up on anime and not the kind I want to be multitasking while watching. (You can look forward to more on that this weekend.) I’ll be cycling back around to the movie reviews, but I need to make some time for actual story writing if I want to get an update out. Stay tuned.

I only got 50 reviews done, mostly because it was taking so much time to go over the Kimetsu no Yaiba reviews. Then I go to the Fullmetal Alchemist reviews and its much more in line with my other reviews, a quick summary of impressions, generally spoiler-free, rather than what’s basically a full recap. One day I might go in and rewrite more summary-style reviews and make the recaps separate posts. Anyway, I’m going to switch over to the shorts section and hopefully wrap that up. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned.

I was reminded of how much time new review posts take as I’ve restarted updates. As a result, I didn’t spend as much time on restoration work as I would have otherwise, but it’s really high time I start moving things forward. I only got 25 reviews up. It’s something. Anyway, as there are more comic reviews to be done, I’ll go ahead and switch over to that. We’ll see how much progress I can make. Stay tuned.

I once again let myself get wrapped up on the back end (not to mention spending an hour making adjustments to the currencies of the Tellus Arc and researching Hellenistic warships), but I still got 75 movie reviews knocked out (making my current total of reviews uploaded 666, just in case you find that at all ominous). In the course of some of the adjustments I was making, I discovered I had three more movie reviews than I originally thought (due to a couple absences of linebreaks throwing off my count), so eagle-eyed readers noting the change to the count in my “What’s in a Name?” post now know the reason for it.

I’ve got some big plans for Easter, so I may not make that much progress, but what progress I do make will be in the TV section. Stay tuned.

I was rather overoptimistic, thinking I might have a shot at finishing the shorts section all in one day. In my defense, I was doing a lot of work on the back end, things like the spellcheck sweep and making the naming convention more consistent throughout (as the shorts section was particularly bad about inconsistent file naming). Of course, all this work you can’t see will ultimately speed up the work that you can, so that’s something, I guess. I managed to get 60 reviews knocked out, so that’s nearly half. Not too shabby.

One minor thing worth noting is that I reclassified the miniseries Childhood’s End to the shorts section because, well, miniseries get covered there and it never should’ve been filed in the TV section. It always stuck in my head, but I could never commit to changing it until now.

Tempting as it is to just go ahead and finish the shorts section, I think I’ll cycle back around to the movies and continue with the iterative model of reconstructing the remaining four sections of reviews one chunk at a time. I’m definitely not going to meet my previously stated goal of having the site fully restored by Easter, but as long as I’m still moving forward, that has to count for something. We’ll see what the new day brings. Stay tuned.

Not having to run around and such, I was able to devote a lot more time to my work and got a much more respectable 75 reviews posted. I probably could’ve finished another page, but in the interest of future efficiency, I decided to to do a spellcheck sweep of all the reviews to add names and such to the custom dic to ensure consistent spelling and whatnot. This will save time that would otherwise be spent correcting entries as I go. There will still be some of that, but now there’ll be less of it. Now, if you’re wondering why I didn’t spellcheck them in the first place, recall that I haven’t added terms to the custom dic in years (for reasons I’ve explained in a previous post), so I’m used to seeing tons of red squigglies that don’t mean anything, which makes it easy to overlook actual typos and such. Anyway, I plan on giving the shorts a go next. If I’m super efficient, I could conceivably finish the whole section in one day, but I doubt I’ll do that well. I may knock out the remainder Saturday if I’m fairly close. You’ll find out the plan in the next post. Stay tuned.

The day’s progress wasn’t all that impressive, just 25 manga reviews posted. I think I might spend another day on the manga reviews before switching over to the shorts, try to get a little more knocked out first. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned.

I decided to break into the TV reviews today and got 75 knocked out. I didn’t do quite as well as yesterday, but I had a couple big meetings at work and I napped a good chunk of the evening. Still, it was a respectable bit of progress. Next we’ll work on some manga reviews. Stay tuned.

Taking a day off from my labors should have hurt my progress, but I seem to have worked at double the pace of earlier efforts. I knocked out a whopping 123 movie reviews, and that was with some adjustments to multiple entries. Why, if I could keep up this pace it’d only take another… two weeks or so… -_- Yes, the load remains a heavy one, but there’s nothing to it but to do it. I’m thinking about rotating sections so I’m not just hammering away at the same thing, so maybe we’ll dig into the TV stuff for tomorrow. Stay tuned.

I didn’t do any work on the website, so I might as well talk a bit about what I did instead. You may recall that I mentioned doing some reworking of the House Wulf family tree. Of course, if I did it for one of the Eight Stars, I’d have to do it for the others, and some were a lot more effort than others. I was just kinda picking at it until I just went in full-bore and devoted a whole day’s efforts to it.

One of my dictionaries, one with encyclopedic material, included a section on the etymology of names and that was my first reference when it came to naming characters. I would go on to transcribe by hand a dedicated dictionary of names and compile numerous other sources as well. That being said, when I was first naming characters, I was only looking at the meaning of the name. I wasn’t thinking about the heritage of the character, whether the name was anachronistic or not, etc. I’ve gone through one or two passes of revisions over the years, but amid the reconstruction efforts (and my earlier campaign of proofing my manuscripts), I started thinking about these things even harder and working to amend incongruencies where I found them. While doing this, I was also painting a clearer history of the families. For instance, House Wulf was originally based in Gotland before moving to Skadia and later Titan (then to Gladius and ultimately back to Gotland). Despite the heirs of House Wulf ultimately becoming more Northman than Gotlander, they nevertheless maintain an old Germanic naming convention. Claudius is actually the first exception (which shows that Randwulf regarded his queen more than family tradition).

Anyway, it’s been a lot of work and the results are going to reverberate throughout the Gladius Cycle. Instead of making piecemeal changes here and there, I’ll just wait to fully implement the changes when it comes time to proof the manuscripts. Fun, fun, fun, but before that, I should get back to work on the site. I imagine other detours will crop up amid the slog of plugging in the remaining 1926 reviews, so I’ll be sure to comment then. Stay tuned.