Today I’m proud to officially announce our newest reviewer here at Kuriousity: Jaime Samms. She’ll be covering a sorely-lacking-until-now portion of the site – boys’ love light novels! You can read her first review of Digital Manga’s Caged Slave.
“Hi! I’m Jaime Samms, also known as dontkickmycane in live journal land. I’ve been writing gay romance and fiction for quite some time now, and reviewing it for almost as long, since I tend to have lots of opinions… …My love for all things Yaoi is what brought me here, and I’m so pleased to join the team. I have no complaints about all the reading I’ll have to do, either!” – Read more…
Welcome to the team, Jaime!
Kuriousity has landed itself in a momentary hiatus the last week - my apologies to readers for the sudden lull! Life has thrown more than its compacted share of curve balls that’s for sure. But rest assured we’ll be back after the holidays with new reviews, news, thoughts on the past year and the introduction of Kuriousity’s newest reviewer!
But until then -
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
May everyone’s days be full of smiling faces, seasonal cheer and good times all around with friends and family :)
Today I’m officially cutting the proverbial ribbon on Boys-Luv.com – a sister-site of sorts for Kuriousity that focuses on just what the name would imply – boys’ love and yaoi! If you want to learn more or share some ideas of what you’d like to see on Boys-Luv.com, by all means please head over to the official launch post and let me know what you think.
On the Kuriousity side of things, I have a few questions for my readers. While working on Boys-Luv.com, which has a different layout and font structure than Kuriousity, I came to find that I really like the larger more spaced-out font – but before making any big changes on Kuriousity, I’d like to know what you think as far as readability goes (plus I know myself well enough that I’m often biased to whatever’s new and different).
Is the font size and style easy to read here? Would you prefer something a different size, style, colour…?
Also if there’s any other content you’re interested in seeing here on Kuriousity please let me know as well. With the new year coming up, it’s the perfect time to make some fresh changes around here and I’m open to people’s thoughts and suggestions. I’ve gotten positive feedback regarding the recent upgraded release schedules and I’m always happy to hear visitors come here because they find the content useful.
In the meantime I hope boys’ love fans will take a gander over at Boys-Luv.com and enjoy the new format (and gorgeous header image).
Here at Kuriousity we do our best to cover as many manga releases and genres as we can but it becomes more than apparent with so many great books out there to read that there’s just not enough hours in the day! So as of now we’re officially looking for a new reviewer to add to our team.
We’re currently looking for a Yaoi/Boys’Love Light Novel Reviewer. Chosen applicant(s) will not be expected to solely review light novels but that will be the focus of this position.
The role of reviewer is not paid but you will recieve copies of books to review and they’re yours to keep! All applicants must currently reside in Canada, be 18 years of age or older and of course have an interest in boys’ love, manga and writing.
Interested? Send your name, e-mail and an example review to reviews (a) kuri-ousity.com
One part suggestion-implementation and one-part not being able to stick with one thing for too long, I’m both relieved and pleased to announce the new release schedule format here on Kuriousity!
Manga Release Schedules
Starting with January 2010 you can view the list of releases scheduled for that month and sort the list either by name, creator, publisher or rating. Also instead of posting one month at a time, I’ll now be updating the year’s worth of release lists as the information becomes available. It’s still got a few gaps in the info but it’ll be a continuously updated feature so drop by every now and again and see what new goodies have popped up!
Having spent today compiling these lists, I can definitely say that my paychecks have never been planned so many months ahead. My thanks to those who shared their thoughts regarding the previous incarnation of my release lists and to the creators of the incredibly useful plug-in that saved me hours of time on this format. Enjoy Kuriousity visitors – I hope it proves useful in all your purchase-planning endeavours :)
My little background edits to Kuriousity are just about complete! Apologies for the lack of posts the last couple days because of it. Worry not – there’s plenty of news and reviews on the horizon, plus I’ve been helping on another side project this weekend that’s turning out pretty neat as well (though let it be known that Drupal is not as user friendly as I would like!).
Most changes shouldn’t be evident to visitors but some may notice the new URLs (goodbye, ugly =?/ symbols!) and that the review index page has received a much needed overhaul. This includes the addition of some missing reviews, link corrections and all the genres have been combined to one long alphabetical list.
And now it’s back to working on some actual content updates. Keep an eye out soon for the beginning of Kuriousity’s countdown to Halloween and in a couple weeks the company news from Yaoi Con.
Hey all – this is a quick warning that I’ll be doing some site work this evening. This will include some optimization for faster loading, far prettier URLs and a revamped review index.
This also means that things could be a little rocky around here until I smooth out all the bumps, inparticular with some broken links. Please bear with me as I do my best to get everything tidied up. If you come across something that seems more broken than it should be, please don’t hesitate to utilize my contact form to let me know. It’s much appreciated!
Thanks for your patience and please keep checking back for more news and reviews :)
Hello readers, I want to take this post to let everyone know of some small review changes here on Kuriousity and, even more exciting, a new face joining our review team!
On the review format-front, future reviews will no longer see the distinction of Guest Review and Reviews in their titles. The info bar beneath the headers will now include the reviewer’s name and a link to their bio so you can easily see who’s written the review. Also, Kuriousity will no longer have my so-called Mini Reviews either, which started out as a good idea until I finally had to come to terms with the fact that they were rarely ever very mini! Plus they lacked the book information that came with full reviews, which always bothered me, so now, no more!
I’d also like to give an official on-site welcome to Kuriousity’s newest reviewer! Already a manga reviewer at Manga Life, and the now defunct AnimeFringe.com, fellow Haligonian, journalism grad and manga lover Shannon Fay joins the Kuriousity crew. You can check out her bio on the About page and read her first review for the weirdly sci-fi yaoi, The Way to Heaven.
With lots of books to be reviewed and even more to be enjoyed, readers please join me in welcoming Shannon to the team! I’m super psyched to have her and I hope you are too. Until next time, readers, keep fulfilling your Kuriousity :)
As some of you may have noticed, updates have been less than their usual level of consistency here on Kuriousity the last week. A frantic moving day (is there any other kind?) mixed with some issues getting internet set up in my new place had left me offline for the last while.
But, internet has graced my computer yet again, so without further ado, let’s get those updates flowing again, shall we?
First to start off my upcoming updates, I want to thank people for their response to Kuriousity’s new layout. I’m glad people find it loads smoother and has easier navigation. Of course it still stands that any issues, comments or suggestions you have are more than welcome!
And on that note, it seems I wasn’t the only one looking to do some springtime clean up and site tinkering in recent weeks.
Check out the spiffy new looks some of my favourite sites are now sporting (and new blog on the block, Manga Critic, which is well worth a visit):
Admist my graduating from school, finishing the last days of my current part-time jobs and packing in prepreation for my move at the end of the month (so many books but so worth any pain, spare any potential broken backs), I’ve been toiling away at this new layout. Yay!
I’ve been thinking Kuriousity needed an upgrade for a while now and in this new layout I hope to have addressed most of the different requests and issues my site visitors have brought up. Credit for the design’s base goes to Bingo Web Design (edit: link added). Along with the new look, there’s now a variety of new additions:
- The post share feature, which allows you to easily share what I’ve posted on a variety of different network sites
- A handy little e-mail form for those who’d like to make quick contact
- A new sidebar addition where you can view the most recent posts and comments, along with see what posts are currently the most popular
- Reorganized and nested Category list
- Post comments have been overhauled to include Gravatar-powered avatars and nested administrator replies
The About and Review list sections have been tidied up and I’ve added the most popular current categories to the top of the site’s navigation to make finding what you’re looking for all the easier.
Also, since April’s Book of the Month, Winter Demon (Vol. 04), went up a little early and I’ll be busy moving at the end of the month, May’s Book of the Month is going up a few days early. Welcome to the sidebar for a month, Pluto (Vol. 01)! Well worth a read.
I hope people like the new look as much as I do, and that it works well for everyone. Though I’m still doing a few tweaks on pages, I can only do so much troubleshooting on my end so I’d greatly appreciate it if you could let me know if there’s anything that doesn’t seem to be working right. :) Thanks in advance and enjoy Kuriousity’s new look!
I’d noticed that I wasn’t recieving many pingbacks or comments here at Kuriousity in recent weeks, coincidentally since I updated to the new Word Press at the time. Well today I upgraded my WP yet again, only to discover the option to splunk through the comments that WordPress automatically labelled as spam. And splunked I did! And found many comments left by people that I had never seen :( So if you’ve left a comment in the last month or so and wondered why I didn’t respond or approve it, I apologize! I spent a good while clearing them all out today and approving around 30 comments. Many thanks (and apologies) to you all!
And saddly, if that wasn’t enough, I decided that if the lack of comments was weird then my e-mail slump may’ve been too. Thus I discovered that my kuriousity e-mail wasn’t working either! So after much testing, that’s fixed as well. Unfortunately I have no way of retrieving e-mails that may not have reached me, so if you’ve tried to contact me at my lissa@kuri-ousity.com e-mail and recieved no response, there’s a good chance I never recieved it.
Hopefully that shall be the end of my communication woes and I can yet again be reachable. Sorry for any percieved rudeness of my behalf over the last while and I look forward to reading future e-mails and comments from my visitors without issue :)
Well, not exactly, but while doing some recent (and much needed) tidying up around here, I’ve also created a LiveJournal account specifically for my updates here at Kuriousity. I get a lot of hits from LJ, mostly from links and feeds from other sites who utilize LJ in this way, so with a good audience using the site, I thought it’d be a useful feature to get in on. So if you’re a LiveJournal user, and like following site updates through it, you can now use that handy little stripbutton on my side bar, or click right here, to go to Kuriousity on LJ. Shorter posts will be seen there in their entirety (some of you may even be reading it there now, hmm?) but longer articles and full reviews will remain exclusively posted here, with links on LJ leading you to their full versions.
Tidying-wise for the interested, my sidebar now looks much less cluttered with the archives smushed down into a handy little dropdown menu (it’s so beautiful…) and some new links have been added to the Blogroll. There’s also a banner link to Tina Anderson and MTCopyright’s webcomic, Whore of Turfan (updates every Friday! 18+ only) and a link to my Twitter account, for any who like my random ramblings enough to see them in frequent, tiny form.
And finally, though completely unrelated to my website in anyway, here’re a few fun links of the day:
Manga Recon Roundtable: Rescue Me!
AnimeVice: The Winter 2009 Preview!
New Manga Release List, Dec 17, 2008
A little semi-hidden section of my website is a listing of places across Canada where people can go and find themselves a fix of their everyday anime and manga. I’ve recently gotten to check out a few more of the places during a recent trip (with fun results in some cases) so I’ve now added my impressions of them. You can check those new ones out for my take on some comic book shops in Moncton, New Brunswick. I’ll be adding my reviews for the shops in my home province of Nova Scotia in the near future. Anyone who’s visited the stores on my provincial lists and would like to contribute their thoughts, or knows of a place I’ve missed, please feel free to send me an e-mail :)
Just a note to point out a few small changes around the website. I’m currently going through all my reviews and adding in links to Amazon.com purchase pages to go along with the Amazon.ca ones already present. A couple people had asked me about it so here you go! See, never hurts to ask ;) This is a bit of a project for me, with over 250+ pages to go through, but soon enough they’ll all be changed!
I’ve also finally set myself up a new e-mail address for my Kuriousity questions, submissions and inquiries. So, if you’d like to get a hold of me, then you can now drop me a line at lissa @ kuri-ousity.com (removing the spaces). Those who’re already in contact with me now, feel free to keep using the same e-mail address for me you already have.
And finally, there’s a new bio picture up on the About page for Gizmo, a friend of mine who has graciously been helping me out with some review writing! Bio coming soon. Between her, Marsha and I, you’ll always have something new to read everyday here on Kuriousity!
What’s Halloween if not a chance to dress-up, decorate and appreciate some spooks, ghouls and chills? So from now until Halloween (October 31st), Kuriousity is going to have this Halloween make-over! Along with that, reviews from here until then are going to be for books I think manga readers would enjoy in the spirit of the day. Expect some witches, ghosts, creepy murders and other supernatural mysteries to keep you on your toes this Halloween ‘08!
