About the Webmisstress and the Page

How can I contact you?

My email is at the bottom of every page of my site, but if you've missed it, you can always send me an email at: li-izumi@comiku.com
also, you can always send me a guest book entry, leave a comment either on the comiku main page or on my Live Journal.

What does your name mean?

no, "li izumi" is not exactly my real name. some might remember that previously I called myself "li inverse," as I fancied myself to be rather like Lina Inverse of Slayers. but with the passing of time, that name wasn't quite me anymore.
thus, I changed my online name to be "li izumi." the "izumi" comes from "Izumi Shikibu" a prolific and incredibly gifted poetess from the classical Heian Era in Japan. I studied her poetry for my undergrad senior thesis, and found myself feeling very connected to her. Thus, I took on her name for my own.

what the hell does "Hana to zo Yuki" mean and why did you name your page something weird like that?

"Hana to zo Yuki" is a line in an Izumi Shikibu poem, the same poetess i took my name from. in the context of this poem, it sort of means "Snow that is like flowers." (or more literaly, "the snow that is called flowers")

the full poem goes like: Ume wa haya / saki ni kieri / ore ba chiru / hana to zo yuki / huru wa mie kere

the general gist of the poem is that the snow on the plum trees made it look like the tree was in bloom.

i thought that this was a very beautiful poem, fitting for me for several reasons. first, the Ume of this poem calls to mind the character i use for my name ('ri', also read as 'sumomo', a slightly different type of plum). then there is the fact that i was born in the heart of winter, when one starts to hope for signs of spring, which is an aspect of this poem.

didn't your page used to be called "Hunter's Gathering?"

yup. but i changed it.

^.^;; care to explain why?

i got tired of it. i still like the name very much, but i was ready for a change. for one, i was a bit tired of always being mistakenly called 'hunter' even though i say clearly on my webpage my name is 'li'.

also, i found it a bit silly that as the Japanese speaker of the two comiku girls, i had the only webpage out of all our webpages that didn't have a japanese name. (there's our joint page, Comiku, Akiko's personal page: Unmei no Uta, our former joint page: Bijutsukan.) it just seemed silly for my pagename to be in English.

but really, i was just ready for a change.

tell me more about your webpage

The first "Hunter's Gathering" was a geocities page created around March 1999. (no, unfortunately I don't remember exactly when I started it). I didn't have much of a design sense at first

I soon grew tired of geoshitties and moved onto my page onto my college server. The notable thing about this version was the "Bishonen Harem" that I created to showcase my favorite bishie boys.

In fall 2000, I redesigned my webpage, but had problems because my college buckled down on the size of webpages on its server. My page exceeded the limit by a large margin.

Returning to the States, Akiko suggested I join her on her university server. Besides having my page and her own page, we also did a joint page: Bijutsukan. I dropped the harem, but began my (somewhat) monthly mp3s.

In January 2002, we moved onto our own domain and server, creating Comiku.

In the spring/summer of 2002, I created the green nebula design. And in the fall 2003, I learned xhtml, leading to the recoding in valid xhtml and a reorganization of the page january and february of 2004.

finally, in the end of September 2004, i renamed Hunter's to "Hana to zo Yuki" and gave the page a facial, changing the green nebula to green bamboo, but otherwise keeping the layout and color scheme the same.

tell me more about your artwork

i got into comics the end of 1993 by discovering a couple of ElfQuest comics and falling in love with those. the summer between my freshman and sophmore year, i got into anime when a friend asked me to tape Ronin Warriors for her while she was on vacation. soon after, she got me into the Ranma 1/2 manga, and i was hooked. i quickly started to site-copy my favorite pictures, a practise i still enjoy today, though i mostly draw from my head these days. i took a couple painting classes in highschool and a couple college drawing classes, where i learned basics of figure drawing and had still lifes shoved down my throat until i choked on them. i hated my prof, and didn't take anymore classes after my first year.

tell me more about your writing

i wrote my first story in first grade. i've been writing ever since. i'm very much mused-inspired. i can't write if my muse isn't present. i get most of my story ideas from dreams. i tend to have very strange, rather plot-complex dreams. i have a tendency to start a story, then put it aside, sometimes for years. i used to have a lot more fanfiction, but for the most part, they weren't particularly good, so i have decided to focus more on my original stories.

i started writing poetry in high school, as a means of release for my rather typical highschool/teenager angst. by college, i got into classical Japanese waka poetry, and that has greatly influenced my writing style. i'm mostly inspired to write poetry about love and relationships. usually, my poetry is either: 1) i'm depresssed cuz the guy i like turned me down. 2) i'm depressed cuz the guy i was with dumped me. 3) the rare, i'm with someone and happy. 4) anything else. i was most prolific while taking the 3 poetry workshop classes i took in college.

can i link to you?

sure :). you don't have to ask permission, (though i'd love to know of course).

just d/l the image to your own webspace, since it would be rude to direct link it on my site.