Manga

A couple of weeks ago we had big problems with the LoLBase.net database. We had to basically start it over which required us to "recreate" all of the data in a new database. There were over 400 MB of data in the old database that needed to be restructured and reduced. It takes a shitload of time to do so and we had to do it in small steps to make sure everything were done correctly (and to make sure the server would not get overloaded). This meant we (or more precisely me) needed to manually change some starting values and run a script once or twice a minute. With two half-hour dinner breaks and a two-hour major fixing, the whole process took around 18 hours straight - from early morning to late night.

I had Opera opened throughout the whole 18 hours, including during the major fixing where it where used heavily to dump and upload data. At the end it used almost half a gigabyte of memory and started to make some weird black graphic errors on the script starting page. So a good advice to anyone, is to close your browser completely once in a while ;) . Would be scary if I had used Internet Explorer or one of the earlier versions of Firefox which had memory leaks o.0 !

To avoid just sitting and waiting for the script to finish so I could start the next iteration I had to find something else to do. That is not easy, since I would get interrupted at least once a minute. That ruled out pretty much every game I have, except for Peggle! So I played a lot of Peggle that day... but 18 hours of Peggle would just be insane, so I needed to think of something else from time to time.

Usually I would start programming something, but that is damn hard when you cannot keep focus on the task at hand for more than a minute at the time.

A few days earlier I had finished seeing the second season of School Rumble for the second time, damn funny stuff! I were about to start on the third season when I remembered that they totally forked it up by only creating the last two episodes (25 and 26th). What were they thinking :( ! I then read some forum threads and they reminded me that School Rumble were originally made as a manga and apparently the anime followed it pretty closely. So I decided I wanted to find the manga and read that instead.

I quickly found a website that had plenty of mangas, including School Rumble. But I also found that there were no clear separation between the manga chapters that would tell me where season two of the anime would end and season three would start. So instead I started to read some other mangas, basically just picked some random ones. Got through more than two (with ~30 chapters each) on this day!

The site I found were called One Manga. I highly doubted it would be the only site out there and a simple Google image search on a popular manga revealed several others: mangareader.net, mangafox.com, manga.watchanimeon.com, manga.animea.net, mangavolume.com, mangachapters.info and ourmanga.com ... just to name a few. I have not analysed all of them so I have not uncovered all the differences and figured out which might be the best. They all have ads when you are reading the manga, and some are quite annoying - but of course these can be blocked by Opera. Most of them are updated at the same time with the exact same scanlation (as the scanning and translation of a manga is called) so none have better quality than others, and they use basically the same way to navigate through the manga pages. I think I will stick with One Manga though, as I like its simple design and navigation when reading.

When browsing the mangas I quickly found three mangas that were everywhere and usually also marked in some special way (one site even have them in the main menu!). These are Naruto, Bleach and One Piece. All of them I knew about from anime, but have, however, never seen any of it. Both as manga and as anime they are of the "never-ending" kind. Naruto have 490+ chapters, Bleach 390+, and One Piece have 580+! That is just way to much to follow at this point so I doubt I will ever read these three, despite their popularity. If you have any recommendations for a manga I should look at please let me know, as I am currently shooting randomly here :) .

Reading all of this manga have done two things to me: First, since Japanese manga is read from right to left, it have forked up my reading direction - I even tried reading an xkcd comic from right to left which is not as funny :P . Second, I have been greatly inspired to start drawing again - so hopefully I will release some drawings in the near future, and you cannot stop me!