Sachiko Updates

Well how about that? It seems the fundamentalist middle American churches have heard about me.

I’m sure that many of you who read my modelling web site‘s FAQ would’ve loved to have posted your comments on it. Well now you can, because I’ve re-posted it here! (You can see the link to it in the navigation bar at the top of every page.) I’ve only re-posted the actual FAQ though—I’ve left out the extensive sociopolitical commentary, because that’s what this blog is for! I will cover everything I discussed in my old FAQ in more detailed articles here—that way everything will be more focused.

Also, what did everyone think of the first Presidential debate? I was very disappointed that McCain accused Obama of being “naive” for wanting to engage in diplomacy wherever possible (including with Iran), and was even more disappointed to learn that the majority of Americans seem to agree with him! Surely if there’s anything we’ve learned from the screw-ups of the Bush administration, it’s that it is very naive not to engage in diplomacy, instead of shooting first and asking questions later?

The Photoshop mock-up is courtesy of OldiesLover.

Although I’ve really enjoyed all the quite the heavy and serious discussion we’ve had here so far, I thought it might make for a nice change of pace to post a video of me practicing piano—in the nude! (As with all of our videos, it is in ISO MPEG4 format, so you’ll need QuickTime 6 or later to view it.)

Of course, as we have to keep this blog strictly non-nude, we can’t show you everything here. But if you’re a member of my main web site, you will be able to see an extended, full nude version of this clip from the Audio/Video page there. You can also see the original, full length video from which this clip came on my raw demo DVD, which also features me singing in the nude (in full DVD quality)! Oh yes: as all the links in this paragraph obviously feature nudity, they’re definitely not safe for work!

Although we’ve been planning to launch this blog for some time, a major motivation in finally getting it up was the fact that I could no longer link to my main site from my MySpace page, as they are now blocking all links to adult sites. This is also one of the reasons we decided to separate my blog from my main site, and keep it strictly non-nude, so that I could reach as wide an audience as possible. However, even when I have covered up my “naughty bits”, I have still been subjected to censorship. One example of this was the removal of my contribution to The Blasphemy Challenge by YouTube.

The image above links to a high quality version of the video we originally posted (in MPEG4 format, so you’ll need QuickTime 6 or later to view it). As you can see, anything that might be considered “offensive” is strategically covered by my hair (we also posted an extended fully nude version on my main site). Yet YouTube took it down within hours of us posting it! In response, my webmaster Lee whipped up a ridiculously censored version of the video, and posted that on his YouTube channel. Read the rest of this entry »

In the past, I never used to publicise my birthday, as I felt I was imposing on my fans, and I never do anything to celebrate my birthday anyway. However, the feedback I’ve gotten from you has made it very clear that you’d like to share this day with me—and part of the point of this blog is to share more of my private life with my fans—so here I am letting everybody know: today is my birthday!

It was exactly two years ago today that I started my MySpace page, so it seems fitting that today is the day I am starting the process of winding it down. I’m really looking forward to never seeing “Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred. This error has been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group” ever again, not to mention the freedom from annoying ads and browser crashes! Hooray for having my own blog, so I can be sure everything works properly, and I won’t be assaulted by crap!

Alright, now that we’ve gotten everything on this blog working perfectly, I can finally bring you up to date on what’s been happening with me recently!

As my long term fans will know, earlier this year we sent out a manuscript for my first book (on health and beauty) to publishers. At the time, we had no idea how long it would take to get a response—apparently it can often take up to six months, and that’s just for the initial response! We are just starting to get some responses now, but at this stage, we are nowhere near making a deal, let alone knowing of it’s something we’ll be happy with!

As my long term fans will also know, we produced an exercise and yoga DVD to accompany my book, as we intend to sell them as a package to encourage sales of the book. The good news is, this DVD is finished—the image at the start of this post is a still from it. The bad news is, because we want it to accompany my book, we can’t sell it to you yet! We will have to wait and see what sort of deal we can make with publishers before we sell it to you ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry it’s been taking me so long to post an update on what’s been happeing with me recently (and what’s to come), but my webmaster Lee has been working on some usability enhancements to our site, which we wanted to test fully before doing another post.

Firstly, in response to a user request (thanks for the suggestion John!), we’ve now added the ability to edit your own comments, up to one hour after posting them. Secondly, we’ve refined the log in/log out process, so that you are instantly returned to the page you came from after logging in or out. And finally, we’ve refined the user registration process: instead of generating a random password, you can now choose your own password when you register. You will then be emailed a special link to activate your account. This will make it easier for us to manually activate your account if you don’t receive your registration email. If you’ve tried to register but didn’t receive your registration email, please contact us, and we’ll fix it for you. We’ll need a valid email address to contact you on though!

August 13 Update: In response to user requests, we’ve now added the ability for you to preview your comments, plus you can automatically quote from and reply to other people’s comments as well! Read the rest of this entry »

That’s right! After testing out a few different personal publishing/content management systems, we finally settled on WordPress, and made all the required modifications and additions necessary to make it work the way we wanted. Although WordPress didn’t have the power to do everything we wanted “out of the box”, it is so well supported by a vast array of plug-ins that it seems possible to make it do just about anything you might want!

The biggest difficulty has been making it absolutely secure against hackers and spammers, while not inconveniencing our users in any way. My webmaster Lee has put a lot of work into this, and he is confident he has achieved this goal—you won’t need to solve any captchas or anything like that.

We haven’t put too much work into the design yet—it is based on the very clean, elegant and functional Tarski theme, with only minor modifications. This is because we are intending to incorporate various parts of my main site (most importantly the FAQ) into this blog, so we will be redesigning both sites at the same time. We thought we’d better just get this blog up first!

One more thing: because we sadly live in a world where a web site is restricted simply because it contains nudity, in order to reach as wide an audience as possible, we have made the difficult decision to keep this blog strictly non-nude for now. Of course, for those who wish to see that side of my work, you can always go to my main site any time you want!