Creator
Hello there. My name is Elly, and I created Ballads & Bows (though I am certainly not the only staff member here, haha) almost four years ago to show case my adoration for the music of a show called Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon. I began Ballads & Bows primarily as just a PGSM music review website, but after two years we simply ran out of PGSM music to review, and I lost interest in updating. So the site closed for about a year, during which time I was always very nostalgic for the great site that B&B used to be before I shut it down. But, with college going on, and various time constraints not only because of that but also to do with the sheer volume of time it took to hand-code each and every review (there were over 800 reviews coded in by hand using HTML before I stopped!) I just didn't have the time or energy to bring back the site.
Of course, technology has advanced in the four years since I began Ballads & Bows. Reviews are encoded automatically by a PHP script that our reviewers use to post up their reviews. You can now search reviews by song title, author, and series. It makes running the site on my end much, much easier. And of course, it makes the reviewers lives much easier too since they don't have to wait for me to get their reviews online for them after they've submitted them to me. The process by which reviews are done has been streamlined, which I think has been a benefit for everyone.
But, we're not necessarily talking about the history of Ballads & Bows here, are we? ^-^ Some more about me. Lesse, I'm 20 years old, married, expecting my first child, and have just completed my BA in East Asian Studies with a concentration in Japanese from SUNY Albany in New York. I currently live in Downtown Albany in an apartment with my husband and our cat. I am a big fan of Memoirs of a Geisha and run a website dedicated to it. My younger brother Maxwell lives in a small town in Mexico with his father, but I keep in touch with him through means of a weblog that you can visit. As you can probably tell by the lyrics archive here, I love translating music from Japanese to English, and I'm a huge fan of some JPOP, most notably Utada Hikaru and Fuji Fabric. On occassion I do translate some random stuff by various Japanese artists that I like, and I run a small JPOP translation website with my friend from college, Brendan. These days I'm something of a typical housewife with entirely too much time on her hands, which is probably why I have so many websites.
If you want to get to know me more, you can always drop me an e-mail (elly@reisei-sa.net) or hit me up on some kind of messenger (AIM: sassypants678; MSN: flutegirl87@hotmailcom; YAHOO: justinia_amaya@yahoo.com) or something. I am generally pretty friendly to strangers, but there are a couple of things that really irk me. I don't like being asked if I'll do a translation for you for free -- I have a degree, and outside of my hobbies I do charge for translation services. I don't like being asked if I'll create and code a layout for your fansite. I'm not very good at coding at all, and usually I have to pester poor Icera into helping me with a problem I'm having, but design is something I've spent years practicing. There are tons of websites, like Day Dream Graphics, that offer pre-made layouts for websites for free. Please use their service instead of asking me to make you a layout. Some other stuff...I don't teach HTML, PHP, or Photoshop skills online to anyone, ever. There are tons of tutorials online for that sort of thing, you just simply need to use Google. One last thing: I love to speak Japanese with people both in real life and over the internet, but please don't ask me for lessons in the language. I am not an accreditted teacher. I personally believe that you can't learn a language online; you need a real life teacher to speak to you. Language is primarily spoken, afterall, and speaking is not a skill you can learn by reading or writing. So if you know some Japanese and would like to practice, I'd be honored. But if you haven't taken even an introductory course in the language (web tutorials do not count) please let's just stick to speaking English instead. Nothing is more insulting to someone who has devoted years of her life intensively studying Japanese than to hear some Naruto fan say that they are fluent in Japanese because they know a few words like "kawaii" or "desu".
Whew, that was long. I hope I didn't scare anyone off! I am kind of a friendly person, I promise. Anyway, feel free to contact me for just about anything, I love to meet new people!
