How pretty do my products look? I got a sneak peek at this photoshoot which will feature in the debut issue of Wish, a new independent magazine from Carrie, the girl behind the beautiful WishWishWish blog.

Wish is full of what matters in life: charm, love and nostalgia, without the usual advertisements and mindless ramblings found in most modern magazines. It features illustration, lifestyle, travel, music and interview along with fashion and shopping ideas with sensible prices, all presented in a perfectly pretty way.

Sounds good, right? Then pop over and pre-order your copy for £5. I hear they’re already selling fast so you better be quick!

Despite being an adult, I still enjoy colouring in. I’ve always wanted to make my own cute colouring book and now I have! It features the Look Around characters and there’s illustrations to colour in, suggestions of things to draw and a little guide to drawing your own Look Around characters. Perfect for Summer!

It’s not printed yet but I expect to have them up for sale in the next week, plus I’ll have a special free download for you! Make sure to check back for that.

The Japan posts have been a bit sparse of late, I know. I shall try and find some more things to blog about. Ideally, I’d be planning another trip to Japan but I don’t think I’ll be able to afford that for another year or two.

One thing I have been doing is restarting my Japanese alphabet learning using the Dr Moku apps. I got a free copy of the Hiragana version to review on Super Cute Kawaii last year but I picked it up again recently and after a couple of days I was back up to speed. The apps use mnemonics to help you memorise the characters, using puns and illustrations, so RA looks like a rabbit and YA looks like a yak. Others are a bit more tenuous but it isn’t hard to make the connections. I then bought the Katakana app (Japanese has 3 alphabets) which is a little more complicted, but it only took a few days to commit all those to memory too. I can now figure out quite a few simple Japanese words and it’s pretty awesome.

I really recommend these if you’re interested in learning Japanese. There are quizzes to test your memory (I find it best to cover up the multiple choice answers to make it harder), a reference guide and some tips on how words are put together. Obviously, this only helps you translate the characters into words – knowing a set of characters says ‘neko’ won’t help much if you don’t know that neko is a cat. However, you can use it alongside a Japanese English dictionary.

Without learning Kanji (which has over 50,000 characters!), these 2 apps aren’t going to help you read a magazine in Japanese but might at least help you decipher things like foods and brands, which is pretty helpful when you’re on holiday.

If you fancy a go, you can find out more at the Dr Moku website. There are also free Lite versions to let you try out how it work., which you can find in the app store. Android users can buy a joint Hiragana/Katakana version.

Are you learning Japanese? Any suggestions for learning Kanji? I feel like I should give it a go, but there are so many ways to learn it.

It was the end of an era recently, as I moved diskant.net off to a retirement home. Having been my first website, almost a full-time job for many years and my main email address it’s been an enormous changeover. It was time though, as not only have all the diskant writers moved on to their own new projects and lives but my relationship with music has changed a lot. While I still listen to music every day, I no longer read any music blogs or magazines, don’t buy many new records and there are only a very few bands I make the effort to go and see live. I even threw out my barely-functioning stereo a year ago and packed away my record player leaving me with just my laptop and iPhone.

But with all the diskant moving, I suddenly missed listening to records so badly. Unfortunately, I still don’t have room for a proper stereo setup so instead I picked up one of these. Yeah, that’s a £30 record player with in-built speakers. As you can imagine it’s terrible. However, it’s perfectly decent for listening to lo-fi indie records, which make up the majority of my collection and it handles 80s pop pretty well too. And for anything else, stick some headphones in and it’s much better.

And so I totally feel like a teenager again. I’ve been playing all my favourite 7″s when I get up in the morning and rummaging through my shelves of albums for things so obscure you can’t even rebuy them as mp3s. It’s been glorious. And then last night, I remembered I’d packed away a selection of special records in to my carry box! So many things I’d forgotten about.

I realise this all makes me sound horribly old, but there’s really nothing like putting a 7″ record on repeat. iTunes just can’t compare. If you’ve never tried it, maybe you should!

There’s a bit on my shop homepage where you can click on your favourite character to see all the products they feature on, and I’ve had a hard time deciding who to get rid of to fit in the new Look Around characters. Instead, I’ve expanded it to two rows of characters. Seeing them all together makes me pretty happy – that’s not even half of the full cast of characters so that’s pretty good going for 5 years!

Now that’s done, you can go check out everything new with your favourite character, that is if you can pick just one.

Look who arrived in the post this week? A happy pancake brooch! He’s the latest in my wooden brooch collection and possibly my favourite. You can pick one up now in the shop for £8.

Since I’m no longer doing my monthly updates, I thought I’d start a new irregular series of posts about stuff I am currently liking. This one has TV and tunes.

Watching

Fringe
Fringe! I love Fringe. It’s definitely in my top ten TV shows ever. Season 5 has been great, especially impressive since they rebooted it in a way that made all the characters unlikable for a while but turns out they knew what they were doing. This was possibly going to be the last season ever and so they’ve added a lot of callbacks to previous seasons in a way that’s awesome and not ‘sideways world in LOST’. I guess what makes Fringe so great is that for all the crazy plot twists and gruesome weirdness, it’s so good at bringing in multiple versions of the same characters and making you love them all in distinct ways. Anyway, I’m super happy it’s been renewed for a final short season next year, especially since (vague spoiler) they got all the happy ending stuff out of the way this season and can go nuts next year.

Game of Thrones
I’ve been slightly concerned at how not totally over-excited I have been about the return of Game of Thrones. It’s still better than 99% of things on TV and I still usually end up watching it at 10am ‘cos I can’t wait any longer but being a book reader and seeing scenes and characters combined and condensed has been getting in the way of total enjoyment. However, they went totally off book this week and I’m actually enjoying that a lot more since I don’t know what they’re up to now. Either way, the actors are still keeping this awesome every week. Big question though – baby direwolves vs baby dragons? I can’t decide.

Homeland
This was good too, although for a few horrible moments it felt like it was going to go all 24. There’s a mole in CTU etc. Actually a lot of the situations were very 24 (some of the same writers involved) but they managed the plot twists really well in that while I had no idea what was going to happen, it did at least feel like the writers weren’t making ut up as they went along. Or, you know, having to blow up a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles to outdo themselves. Interested to see what happens next season.

The Bridge
I wasn’t going to get into this, since there’s so much else on at the moment and I’m wary of turning into someone who watches any Scandi-drama BBC4 throws at us. But I did like The Killing a lot and I did love Borgen even more, and The Bridge is great, if also fairly ridiculous. While still basically a serial killer police procedural, the dual Denmark/Sweden stuff and the great leads are making this very watchable. I fully expect to dislike the ending though – these red herringy shows never end well. It’s all on iPlayer if you want to catch up.

Mad Men
I get the feeling I’m doing Mad Men wrong. I always enjoy it but I only ever love it when it tips over into comedy. All the symbolism and drama is way less interesting to me. Luckily, there has been a fair amount of hilarity this season so as long as that keeps up, I’ll keep watching. Glad that means I don’t have to worry about spoilers either.

Listening

Some tunes I can’t stop listening to.

Watch this video on YouTube.

I heart Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. Looking forward to her new album.

Watch this video on YouTube.

New Errors album isn’t quite as immediate as their previous ones and really needs headphones. Good Glasgow walking music though, as always, and they were awesome at The Arches last weekend.

Watch this video on YouTube.

I’ve mentioned my love of the Pet Shop Boys’ ballet before – I picked up the soundtrack thinking it would be good background/working music but I am totally obsessed with it. So many great tunes!

Watch this video on YouTube.

Veronica Falls were a timely reminder to pay attention when my friends start new bands as quite often they are amazing and I feel like an idiot for not checking them out sooner. Such a Glasgow band, even if they did all move to London first.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Blood Red Shoes are getting a little bit stadium rock for my tastes but there’s some good stuff on this album and I will never tire of watching Stevipus be a proper rock star celeb.

I am not enjoying May very much so far. The weather has been ridiculous, I have too much to do and then I also got a jury service citation. I’ve always wanted to do jury service, up until I got another letter saying we might have to do an EIGHT WEEK trial. Can you imagine? Even if I had a low paying job I hated, that would be a bit much. I had to go along today and luckily, they told us that particular case has been postponed. There was an audible sigh of relief through the jury area! I may still get to do a short case but I’ll be just as happy to get sent home again tomorrow.

Anyway, with that possible doom ahead of me, I figured I should get out and have some fun. Emma notified me about a huge book sale in Edinburgh (what an enabler!), and it was the first sunny day in ages so I had a jaunt. The book sale was pretty amazing – so much stuff! It filled the whole church, the whole outside area and a garage around the back. I was fairly restrained and only bought 6 books, for a mere £8. There wasn’t much of interest in the travel section or it could have been worse. Amongst my finds were the next two Wheel of Time books, which I was just planning on restarting, for 50p each and a 1930s edition of The Kangchenjunga Adventure with awesome library sticker. I also bumped into Emma who found some amazing stuff.

I then hiked up the hill to Hannah Zakari to drop off some more product, say hello to my bread slice brooches and buy a cute booklet by Naoshi. And then I popped into the National Museum of Scotland to see the train posters exhibition. I was looking forward to this and was a little surprised to find it was only about 15 posters in a tiny room, along with a few other train-related exhibits. What was there was amazing including some of the original artwork, but I could have looked at ten times as many posters before I got bored. They did have some good stuff in the shop though so I picked up some great postcards.

And then I went home and started reading my books.

As a “serial entrepreneur”, I’m rarely short of ideas, but sometimes people suggest stuff that is both a great idea and easy to do and so yesterday found me attempting some simple origami to illustrate my new origami paper packs! I am not awesome at origami but these all turned out okay. That’s a swan, because I threw my crane in the bin when I couldn’t get it to work.

Anyway, if you like origami, you can now buy packs of 8 15cm square sheets in my usual wrapping paper designs and get folding. I’ve already sold some so clearly this was a good idea. Thanks to Chrissy at Paper Kawaii for the suggestion – check out her site for some great crafty projects.

Meanwhile, other great ideas of mine and yours are continuing production.

Thanks to everyone who came along to the bookfair. It was a fun weekend and sales were pretty good. I was slightly miffed when I realised I hadn’t sold a single copy of my book zine I made especially for the occasion but at least it’s selling online! I’ve also put together a pack of all four Oddments zines in PDF format so you can download the whole lot in one go for just £2.50! And if you couldn’t make it, I’ll also be selling zines at the Glasgow Comic Mart at the Panopticon in June.

In boring postage news, I’ve now increased the postage on all my shops to cover the recent price changes, (apart from Folksy which I have put on holiday as it needs an overhaul and will take ages). I do apologise to my international buyers for the huge increase – I wish there was a cheaper way. I have added flat rate discounted shipping for orders over £20 so it’s worth making a big order. Here’s the new shipping rates page.