Yaoi Message Board

Well, somebody had to do it . . .

I wouldn't say I have a surplus on the bookshelf, but I do enjoy them when I encounter them, which is mostly on the Internet. I don't actually know what in this subgenre has been licensed yet!

I haven't kept up with the American licensing thing either, so I've been a little surprised to see what people have listed in among their books. (. . . I've been stalking people's catalogs . . . :)

And then there's the fact that one of my LT accounts is just to log what I read, so at some point I intend inserting some record of the scanlations that I've consumed.

That's actually why I'll be happy when they add the "wish list" feature one day. I also could put the ones that I'd like to get rid of in that section, and it might become Highly Useful thereby. (It's just ranked a -lot- lower in on personal priority scale than the unicode/UTF-8 support.)

I'd been mulling over whether it would be a good idea to start a diff account and move all the work-related books there. That way, they wouldn't have to rub virtual spines with a truckload of eyebrow-raisin' manga, AND I wouldn't have to look at them. The manga are way more interesting to me . . .

to be a bit more chatty, what are some of your favorite mangaka?

Oh, yeep, I had to peer at my tags to answer this question. I had no idea . . .

Going by sheer quantity, I seem to be fond of *Shiho Sugiura, *Kazuya Minekura, Ichiko Ima, *Shungiku Nakamura, *Yaya Sakuragi, *Hinako Takanaga, *Ayano Yamane, and Haiji Sakura. (*Current series that I'm following.) But I've also been having warm fluffy thoughts about other mangaka like Hyouta Fujiyama, Keiko Konno, and Taishi Zaoh; I just don't have any of their books. (And I think Fuuri Misasagi and Maki Naruto are funny, even if they are weird.)

lol, i should start tagging my entries with author names as well. i am slowly adding my manga collection and since i have to manually enter them, its taking forever. oh well! its kinda fun too! i also love hyouta fujiyama and haiji sakura, haiji sakura ones are so cute and hyouta fujiyama ones are very... sexy!!

i like shungiku nakamura's as well, hers are kinda sad too, so i like that. i also really love nase yamato and minami haruka, both are a bit shota in their styles but nase yamato is sweet and minami haruka is just... ero!!!

I wonder if LT is going to let me post now. Let's try!

Tags were a necessity for me; LT doesn't link author names unless they're romaji, so I couldn't sort my stuff at all. Now that the kanji and kana are trashed, I'm -really- glad I tagged. My mess is already overwhelming, so I'm not entering any more manga until the UTF8 issues get solved permanently. *sigh*

I'm fine with shota in general, actually. But I think so, too: even when their uke doesn't fall into the shota bin, Nase Yamato and Minami Haruka make 'em look like they just wandered off a playground. Of the two, I like Yamato better. Haruka's ukes not only look shota, but they also tend to look pretty and feminine and cry a lot, which I find an uncomfortable combination. Guess I prefer the grumpy, growly uke types. ^^;

(Ha. Maybe "disliked mangaka" could be its own a thread topic. There are some popular ones that I can't stand.)

I had to go look and see how you tagged your books, so I could copycat. From what I can tell, if I enter the ISBNs correctly, someday the text should straighten itself out.

Neat, neat, you're here as well. XD

Actually, there's a bug that applies to ISBNs and -only- Amazon.jp adds. So if you used the ISBN to search for the book on Amazon.jp. . .

1. Highlight and copy the ISBN you just typed -before- you click on the book to add it.
2. Click on the book to add it.
3. Click the pencil icon for the book you just added to go to the Edit screen.
4. Paste the ISBN into the empty ISBN box.
5. Click the submit button.

If you reenter the ISBN -and- an Amazon.jp cover is available, that should get it to appear for you.

If there's a user-uploaded cover that you'd like to use instead . . .
1. Click on the pencil icon to go to the edit screen.
2. Click on "(change book cover)" on the left.
3. Click on the cover you want to use.
4. Click on the Yes button.
Ta da!

Next week is supposed to be the big week for dealing with the UTF8 issue, so we'll see if some of the other problems get cleared up at the same time. Fingers crossed.

seriously, i hate to say it, but i don't really like youka nitta. i like the storylines but the art is just not my preferred style at all.

lol, don't you find minami haruka's storylines totally ridiculous sometimes?! i think that's why i like them, they just totally make me lol

I like the story lines and the art of Youka Nitta, but not enough to follow her stuff comprehensively.

I find her characters sometimes leave me rather indifferent to their fates, always fatal to my purchasing decision, so I tend to collect her art books and not her tankoubons. On the other hand, sometimes her work's just what I need as an antidote to syrupy, mind-numbing, emotionalism, obscure plots, obscure dialog, etc., or plot what plot? that many bl titles have. Her work can be refreshingly straight forward.

LOL! Yes. In the mean time, I'm keeping a text file of all my UTF8 titles just in case.

Do you know what a "work" is? Should all my Jinjuu's be a "work"? I don't think so, but I can't figure out how to turn the "@work" tag, on, off, or change it's name ...

I feel the same way about Youka Nitta as kalopsia. I find her art chunky and stiff, and her plot too didactic. It's like they're *too* straightforward, if that makes any sense -- the ones that I've glanced at were like occupational how-tos: "Let's all do our best and work hard! (And oh yeah, have sex.)"

I can't really figure out the whyfores and wherefores of my own preferences in this regard. On the one paw, looniness of the Nakamura Shungiku variety I find awfully appealing. But Sakurai Shushushu is just too much for me . . .

Re: files, there are export and import options for your catalog on the extras page (that "Joy" tab at the top of the screen). I tried the export (after the fact, unfortunately :P), and the tabbed file it produced worked in Excel or Notepad.

I can't really help with the "work" question because I'm not certain what you mean. D'you mean mass changing of tags? There's a "power edit" link for tags on the horizontal bar of the library view pages, if that helps at all . . .

Ah ha! Found it!

A work appears to mean different editions of the same thing. Unfortunately, the system had autotagged all my volumes of Jinjuu as one book, multiple editions, rather than one title, multiple volumes.

I don't know if I should have entered it as one book, and put the multiple volume information in the comments field. Since I have a lot of titles where I don't have all volumes, and I want to track how many volumes I have without having to open the comment field all the time ...

In any case, it turns out that if I go to the book info page, there's a way to separate the books from the "work".

I do understand how someone would find Nitta too straight forward! I found Nitta long before there was a fanbase here and just as I was giving up on trying to figure out Flowering. Nitta was SUCH a refreshing breath of air after Flowering ... (LOL! I was going to touchstone Flowering, but the system is finding all the wrong books!!! Though most of the books it's finding are about sex ... or at least reproduction ...)

I've got sort of a question for you guys, i was recently browsing my friendsfriends list on lj and this girl was talking about how she hated bl, and well, most erotica (inc. het) really, because she felt it had no plot. i wanted to argue and say, what? bl totally has plot! and though lots of it is really derivative of other plots that i've already read but it does have plot. but then i was like, nevermind, because really, while I do read some things to find out what happens, I mostly read it because I like the hot kinky smex, bwahahahaha

so er, question is, do you guys read bl for plot or for sex? and why either?

Well, why I read bl is different from does bl have plot.

Yes, some bl has plot. Longer titles, generally, minimum 3 books, from what I can tell.

I don't read for plot or sex, I read for emotional manipulation.

I don't know that she's wrong. After all, these *are* romance manga, spun off from the shoujo genre. So they resemble shoujo in that respect: for girl meets boy, substitute boy meets boy.

That is, seme and uke will wind up together. Inevitably. In that respect, you know what's going to happen, so it's just a matter of overcoming the impediments along the way. Even so, the impediments can get pretty darn creative. ^__^

As for the sex, I also think it's a (very!) Good Thing. But if it's not presented in the context of a story and/or relationship-type interactions, I get bored with it. As a result, I've wound up with a surplus of mangaka who tend to be long on the plotty, and short (to the point of nonexistent) on the sexy. Ah phoo. But I still like 'em.

(Shounen manga do have the same problem with formula, though. A typical Shounen Jump manga template: Our Hero progresses from fight scene to fight scene, thus powering up over the course of the manga. Impediments are generally a variety of villains, each having a Speshul Power! Etc., etc. So Bleach is like Black Cat is like YYH is like . . .)

Similar discussing going on elsewhere:

* khyungbird on LJ, Boku no shounen ai

This apparently touched off some discussion on various blogs. There's round up of links on the subject about halfway down the page on this entry.

I don't keep track of what's being translated, but I noticed that one point that was being brought up again and again among these bloggers (and in their comments) is that the sampling of books that are translated into English aren't necessarily representative of the whole genre. They tend to be . . . I guess you could call them "safety picks." That might change a bit more in the future, but I feel pretty confident in thinking books by mangaka like Dr. Ten will never be imported.

So, I'm trying to decide, do I enter my bootleg manga in LT or not? There being many of them in Chinese, and it's not always clear if something is a bootleg or not.

I think not. I think the smart thing is to only to enter things that have ISBNs. That way, as I work on replacing bootlegs with licensed copies I won't create confusion about whether I already own a book or not.

How are other people handling this issue?

(This doesn't hold true in general for non-manga, as much of the non-manga is very old, before ISBNs or LCCNs were invented.)

Well, I certainly haven't been adding my doujinshi? *laugh* God, what a headache THAT would be.

I don't _think_ I've got any bootlegged books or manga. (Though I could be wrong.) I guess, if there aren't that many, you could always tag 'em "bootleg" to create an easy access list. :D

I do have duplicates of some books (argh). I put both in the catalog with a "duplicate" tag on one of them. (If you enter an ISBN that's already in your catalog, LT does tell you at point of entry, in big bold letters.)

Doujinshi are different, though. Anthologies done by Hiland (for instance) do have ISBNs; before the Big Bankruptcy, you could buy them via Amazon. (And now? Um, I dunno.) But I've only got two of those.

I also have a smattering of the spiffy doujinshi done by pros, and I expect I'll be (manually) adding those in someday; I've already got one or two up that were packaged as tankouban.

I don't think I'll worry about the non-pro djs . . .

Ohhh, I hadn't even gotten around to thinking about djs!

In Chinese, there are a lot of official looking bootlegs of complete series. I was in the process of replacing Love Mode with officially licensed copies when the legal publisher went bankrupt.

i am totally adding my doujinshi, bwahahahahahahaha

i figured i might as well use this as a tool to keep track of my unwieldy collection, i keep buying doubles of some titles because i forget that i already have them XD

does anyone read bl novels? i was thinking of translating them but i don't know if there's as much interest in them as there are in scanlated manga

I think there would be a lot of interest! Porn is porn. ;)

"Porn is porn" would be a good group title . . .

Re: doujinshi, I should go look at yours again. I was mulling over this last night, where to put the circle name, since I was using the artist name in the author slot, and how to do the publishing information part. I guess listing the paper sizes would be good . . . I need to think about it more.

Re: novels, um, I flip straight to the "ah ahhh!" part. But I always have good intentions about tackling the rest of it later! But, yeah, I think there's interest. ^^;

Re: Chinese, oh, I'd forgotten about the couple artbooks here in Chinese (which I can't read at all, at all). It is possible they may not be kosher. So to speak.

You can tell because there will be a copyright page at the back on Chinese publications if they are ligit.

I read BL novels. Most of them are ehhhh.

Why, yes, I am replying to a message posted 3 weeks ago.

I'd been mulling over whether it would be a good idea to start a diff account and move all the work-related books there. That way, they wouldn't have to rub virtual spines with a truckload of eyebrow-raisin' manga, AND I wouldn't have to look at them.

This account is for manga only (the user name is pretty transparent), but I'm fascinated by mixed libraries because they give a more complete picture of the person cataloging the books.

Or a more complete picture of utter weirdness. I've started becoming chotto uneasy over how easily identifiable I am by a handful of my books, provided someone knew which books mattered.

Anyhoo, I did start the separate library after posting that, one that's devoted to work stuff. ^^;

no one's chatted in awhile, i haven't had reliable computer access but now i do! my computer crashed and i'm going through the tedious process of trying to recover all my files from bad hard drives. booo... all my poor blcds, it makes me so sad!

I really, really hope you have more success than I've had with old hard drives. :D

You can always start a new top-level thread for a topic, too.

me too! i was able to recover one drive and though some of the files are all screwy, i can at least go through them and have an idea of what needs to be re-dled.

one of the drives is a big 250gb drive though and the recovery software is still scanning it to see if there's anything salvageable. hopefully there is.

i really need to start getting the rest of my manga into this thing, it will be really nice to have this as a reference of my collection