by Dan Bednarski, October 19th, 2020

Hello everyone! Today is a special day, as this is the 10th anniversary of Miss Dream being brought online! I can’t believe that we have hit such a big milestone and am still in awe of everything that’s been accomplished over these years. Today is a day of celebration, as well as looking towards the future. Ten years ago, sassypants678 started Miss Dream as a simple translation site taking requests for doujinshi and lyrics and the like. At that time, you could count the contributors on one hand. Over the years, this count is at nearly seventy. When we add in those who have donated to us via scan materials and financially, this easily clears one hundred. We are very honored and blessed to have had such an outpouring of support from so many people, for which we would not be the resource powerhouse that we have grown into. Thank you to everyone, this has been a big team effort of which all y’all should be proud.

Stats Summery

When I say Miss Dream has become a resource powerhouse, I still can’t believe the degree of which this is true. However numbers don’t lie, and over the summer, I endeavored to seek out said numbers. It has been tough to keep track of as we have continued to do our best week after week to add new content. Scanlations of manga, fansubs of the live action show and musicals, and a massive raws section containing official and fan-produced doujinshi, with a plethora of odds and ends.

We currently host content that covers twelve languages! Yes, we have broken the double-digit barrier in that regard. The content count clocks in at a whopping 2,450 individual items! Our translated downloads take up 130GB of space, with our raws downloads, and I’m just amazed at this, practically hits 1TB on its own, with 1,004GB of space! The gallery images used throughout the whole site clocks in at 167GB of storage. There are 2,235 individual gallery albums, with a total of 263,524 individual image files across the board!

Revamp Plans

With so much content, keeping things in a nice, organized structure has been a hassle. We had never anticipated such growth, and therefore the site has had its pains with its maintenance. Most of the content here is organized manually, and while we have been able to keep what all y’all see passable, we have outgrown our system. This brings me to our first announcement.

We will be doing a massive overhaul of everything currently in Miss Dream. When we see those numbers above and how they spread out, it’s been decided that we will be attempting to create three portals. One will be just of our translated work, and another for just our raws section. The third portal will have our Nakayoshi and other phone book publications. We are looking to have our content fully reorganized in our back end, while providing a more intuitive interface for browsing and searching. The data collection I had mentioned earlier was my first big step, ensuring that I could see all of our content in a database easily to better plan and develop with. Planning is now going on, still in its early stages, there is no date set for when these portals will go live.

Besides the improvement in organizational structure and performance that will be seen, I am also very much looking forward to all of the analytical data to come. We will be able to bring up loads of statistics seamlessly that we just can’t do now and will have a data warehouse helping make this all possible. sassypants678, who currently works professionally in reporting while also working on getting a master’s degree in data science, will be getting this going.

I am also honored to announce another person who will be involved in this undertaking, Lisa Lam of three-lights.net! Lisa has worked professionally in UI/UX for years, and will be bringing her expertise in that field for this project. She has run three-lights.net for many years, adjusting the site with the changing times. Fun fact: Lisa’s adoption of gallery pages many years ago inspired sassypants678 to do the same when she started Miss Dream! It’s amazing how things come full circle, and we’re looking forward to working with Lisa

Artbook Announcement

Our second announcement today is one we’ve been teasing on social media each step of the way, is in the very near future, we will be releasing very high-quality scans of all five Sailor Moon Original Picture Collection volumes! And I do mean very high-quality, as where most of our downloads were scanned in 600dpi, these books have been scanned at 1200dpi! Over the summer, Katie came across a lot sale with all of these books. We consulted with merchandise experts to ensure these were legitimate (unlike what we eventually learned with our current offerings of the first volume), and after some back and forth with the seller, made the purchase! I finished scanning these a couple of weeks ago, we are in the process of finalizing these now and plan to release one per week any week now. I enjoyed scanning these very much, each individual scan took three minutes. I can’t wait to make these available to all, and I’m especially looking forward to what creative things are made from them.

Summary

Once again, thank you to everyone. It’s been a wonderful experience with so much accomplished. Not even just here in the web site, but even outside of the web with the Silver Millennium Masquerade Ball held in March 2017. What started as a ghost of an idea manifested itself into a gathering of 400 Sailor Moon fans that was enjoyed by the community. We look forward to being a community resource for many more years to come and are grateful for this wild ride we’ve been on together these past ten years.