Tell you about a dream that I have every night. It ain't Kodachrome and it isn't black and white.

Naruto night (06-Jun-2007) photos are now online.

So there was a screening of the (now 5 years old) movie, Naruto the Movie: Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow. library_lynn and I decided to see the showing at The Block in Orange. ( They were a lively, enthusiastic audience. )

Many of us stayed for the featurette afterwards. They ended with a bunch of the cast and crew --including on the Japanese side -- thanking all the fans who watch the show "and sometimes dress like us." I hope that makes onto the DVD version!

We saw one or two fans dressed up in costumes. The photo shown here includes "Cigam" who is the lady now in charge of the Orange County Anime Meet-up, usually on the 2nd or 3rd Saturday of the month. (Picked not to conflict with the L.A. group, but ironically it means it's on the same day as either CFO or Cinema Anime's screenings at the LASFS clubhouse.)

I missed the meet-up this weekend -- did some chores at my folks' house, worked on Hazel's Picture Gallery, and went to the Hugger House potluck. But I'm hoping I can go next month, on the 21st.

This afternoon, Sunday (Father's Day), Lynn and I are going to a "Cosplay Ice Skating" event here in Anaheim. Mostly to support the event and take pictures. Next weekend is Stepfather's Day. Then the following weekend (yikes, it's coming up soon) we head out to Long Beach for Anime Expo.

I mentioned I've been working on Hazel's Picture Gallery. Specifically, I've been working on the restoration project. Matthew Randolph has been very helpful in finding thumbnails and whole images, and I've been matching up what he's recovered to files from the old disk. (There are thousands of JPEG images, so it takes time to go through all of them.) I am pleased to announce that we've been able to bump up the "Percentage Restored" figures. The thumbnail images are now 77% restored, and the large-size picture collection as a whole is 44% restored.

The damage, and the restoration, are not spread evenly over the photo collection. The section hardest hit consists of the photos from 2004. Those were too "new" to have been picked up by most of the archiving mechanisms on the web, but too "old" to still be sitting on my various computers. So I'm really pleased that a lot of the work that has been accomplished lately have been from 2004. (For example, I went to three weddings in 2004. Incidentally, if you invite me to your wedding, I'll probably go around taking pictures of everyone attending -- it gives me something to do, a purpose.) The thumbnails for 2004 are 49% restored so far.

As an example of how slow these things go, the jump from 43% to 44% represents about a week of hard work on my part, mostly hours late at night... I try to keep working on it -- and not let it go without progress for weeks or months at a time -- and the restoration percentage is one of the sub-goals I set myself. "I'll stay up until 2am again tonight, so maybe I can get it up another notch" is basically what's going through my mind if you happen to see I'm online late at night.

(I light up my AIM when I'm online -- my AIM handle is the same as my LJ handle -- and shut it down again when I'm done with my computer. So it's easy to see if I'm here at the computer, even if the AIM system times me out for inactivity and says I'm "away.")

( I made up ''I supported Hazel's Picture Gallery'' graphics. Here are, in no particular order, the faces of the first six people who contributed money to the restoration project... )

LiveJournal trivia question: Which five of these six have LJ handles?

Want to see more of them? (Warning: lots of images, takes some time to load.)

Incidentally, I'm not mentioning this because I'm passing the hat again. Donations are always a surprise when they come in. But throwing more money at the task will not make it go any faster -- it's almost all in my court, and it's mostly a matter of finding the free time. The donations that came in during 2005-2006 were enough to pay for the program used on the dead drive to recover the files and to pay for two years of professional hosting service. Donations received since then are going into the general fund, mainly for continued hosting charges and to pay to replace my digital camera when I lose it in a hospital room.