I've had a humble, disorganized, unnamed collection of "various Dragon Ball things" on the different incarnations of my website since March 29th, 2002, when my website was titled "Dragon Ball Daisuki." That's over nine years of running a Dragon Ball site, which is pretty rare nowadays. And that doesn't even include the "inanely written yet incredibly detailed 'Ma-jin Buu Spoilers'" manga summaries I did for an even older version of my website in Summer 2001, as a countdown to the premiere of those episodes on the American Cartoon Network. However, in my opinion, I don't have the notoriety to back up that longevity. You see, since summer 2004, I've added very little, and I've been meaning to clean up what I'd done before that. But time REALLY flew by, and suddenly many years have passed. Frankly, it's kind of embarrassing, because I'm a major perfectionist.
Now, in 2011, I've made it a point to finally put real effort into cleaning up my old Dragon Ball material and making something I can finally be proud of. I consider the biggest cornerstone of my Dragon Ball work to be my manga summaries, but it also happens to be the section most in need of clean up work. So I'm doing a half-old/half-new project, which uses my old summaries of the manga as a basis to do both manga and anime summaries, among other things that I'll add later. We'll see how things go from here, as there's still tons of work to do.
Summary Progress:
Manga: 5.97% (31/519)
Anime: 3.54% (18/508)
Movies: 5.88% (1/17)
Latest DB Updates
August 25th, 2011 at 04:53 PM EDT
Before I had a chance to finish the second chapter, I already had my copy of the third. So, here's both together: "Episode of Bardock" Chapter 2 and Chapter 3! That's the whole mini-series, so I can stop spending crazy import money on V Jump issues for the time being. And now I can get back to working on stuff from the 80's.
June 28th, 2011 at 08:16 PM EDT
Lots of little things today. First, I've started adding screenshots to the anime and movie pages! Just a couple of small ones per finished page, though. I don't want them to be too large, for copyright reasons. But there's a good chance I'll go larger and/or add more per page in the future, once I figure out how I'd want to implement that stuff (in-line images? fancy gallery thing?). I'd also like to do the same with the manga pages, but for the time being I can't use my scanner. (A reverse of the old days where I could scan but not do screenshots!)
Second, in addition to the two screens, I've (finally) fleshed out the miscellaneous section for the first movie. And third, I've added more to the terminology page. Not more people names, but place and thing names. Still not going past the revised/new summaries with it, or else that page would be the only thing I ever do.
On that note, there's something I forgot to mention in the "Episode of Bardock" update. None of the name spellings are exactly "permanent" yet (which is why I haven't added them to the terminology page). I'll probably try to decide something for the new characters after the series is finished, and the old characters probably not until I get to the Freeza arc. Not that any of my spellings are necessarily permanent, because I've changed my mind and gone through massive find+replace operations more than once.
June 25th, 2011 at 12:26 AM EDT
So here's something new and spur of the moment: a summary of the first chapter of "Episode of Bardock!" If you haven't heard, this is a new three-part series that just began publication in Japan this week. It also ends up being the debut of a new "specials" section I'd been considering, although I don't have anything else to put there right now.
I took a break from working on some other things to do this, which should be ready in the next couple days.
April 1st, 2011 at 03:18 PM EDT
Minor update today. I've made a page detailing some of my spelling preferences. It's not complete (only covers characters that have appeared in new/updated summaries), but I've been meaning to do this for a long time. It's kind of necessary just for personal reference, but maybe you'll enjoy seeing my reasoning too. This is definitely going to be updated a lot as I work on updating/creating more summaries. I was hoping to have another chunk of those ready today too, but things just didn't work out that way.
(If you want to know a secret, a lot of the stuff in that page was pulled directly from my old DB "Articles" project that I took down years ago. I'd be shocked if anyone remembers it.)
February 26th, 2011 at 11:36 PM EST
Since I've missed a lot of other important anniversaries, I wanted to do something nice for the 25th anniversary of the first episode of Dragon Ball. But due to my poor time management skills, I only came up with the final idea a few days ago: a summary page for the very first Dragon Ball movie. It's not as complete as I would like, but I'd hardly call it a rush job either. This is the first new summary I've done since 2004, and there are many, many words. (3,593 to be exact.) So for me, it's a big deal in more ways than one. But I plan to add a little more to it in the very near future (possibly some screen captures?), along with some templates for the other movies. Right now I just need to upload this as is before (my) midnight.
I'd love to do more movie summaries in the near future, but right now my highest priority is cleaning up the old manga summaries. Ideally there will be more updates to those soon, but I don't want to make any promises eight days before a new Pokemon release.
November 28th, 2010 at 05:04 AM EST
A relatively large update today, but most of it is meaningless to people who aren't me. I did finish the summary pages for the first training arc, but after that, you'll also find a lot of incomplete template pages for the subsequent chapters (32 and up) and episodes (DB 19 and up). Nothing on those template pages is finalized or confirmed; they mostly exist for my personal convenience. But they'll also make future updates much easier and faster. It's also worth noting that they contain nearly all the Dragon Ball content that was on the previous version of the site, which means nearly everything is here now, and that old mess has been rendered mostly obsolete.
There have also been some technical changes that results in a lot of new URLs, but everything should theoretically redirect automatically. You can read more about it on the site's main page in the near future, and let me know if anything's horribly broken.
June 3rd, 2010 at 04:03 PM EDT
25 years ago today, the 25th chapter of Dragon Ball was published in WJ #25. It featured the debut of Kuririn. I've decided to celebrate Kuririn's 25th birthday by re-adding the relevant chapters and episode. I wish I could have done more, but I'm also celebrating someone else's 25th birthday today. Eight years ago, that someone celebrated their 17th birthday by summarizing up to Volume 17 of the manga. Such youthful energy fades fast, apparently.
May 14th, 2010 at 2:56 PM EDT
Long time no update! First of all, I've edited and added a lot to the manga and anime summaries, enough that both are completely up through the entire first story arc. I've changed my mind about a lot of translations (or lack thereof) since last time, so there's also that.
I've also moved and consolidated all of the guidebook translations, so now there are less pages total, but more scrolling and more angry dialup users. In the end, I think it's much easier for everyone, including me. But there is nothing new there, aside from one or two typos I happened to notice and correct. I haven't even updated any of my name/term preferences to my current ones, because there are some other translation issues to fix as well, and the entire project is currently on-hold indefinitely. My motivation to finish it recently dropped a few notches, for probably obvious reasons if you view other Dragon Ball websites, but I certainly have not given up yet.
Oh, and I've made an RSS feed for easier tracking of updates. Hooray for modern web technology!
