Failure...

I wanted to be a lot more active on here, but obviously I've failed at that.  Pretty lame, I know.

I've also been slacking on translating, getting 5 scripts ahead of the editing side always does that to me, but now that they're almost caught up I guess it's time to kick my ass into gear.  Time to do the last chapter of Anal Angel and say goodbye to that series after working on it for so long...  I dunno, I'm glad we did that series, but it also leads to a lot of awkward dynamics being a primarily non-H group and having something as smutty as that alongside our other releases.  It's certainly one of the most fun series I've worked on, since Sanpei writes such awesome dialog, and I'll probably miss having it in our roster once it's gone.  Mei is 6 chapters away from completion, so I'll slam out a bunch of that this week too, hopefully our editing side moves along on it a little quicker than the last chapter (I can't really blame them too much, Mei has such long chapters, two full spreads to stitch each chapter, and a lot of redraws and shit).  I know what I'm picking up next, people who visit /a/ frequently might have seen me commit to one of them, but I'm not really going to announce the new series until later; possibly as part of our 14th day stuff this month.

Anyone who likes J-core, hardcore, HHC, any of that stuff should check out the following link:
http://www.mediafire.com/?uv07nyniyxecy#myfiles
Really good stuff.

Part of the problem I have with translating on a regular basis rather than in spurts is that I can't keep a circadian rhythm.  Just a few days ago I was going to bed at like 2 am, and now it's 5 am and I can tell I'll be up for a few hours more...  It's hard to keep a routine when your sleeping pattern won't keep one, it's like sabotaging yourself on a daily basis.

I was thinking of doing some top 5 anime lists by genre or something, hopefully I'll do that in the next few days, it'll give me something to post about that might actually possibly be interesting to someone.

Blah.

Yeah, so I know I said I was going to try and update daily, but stuff got busy for a while, and I fell off my routine.  I guess I'll give the scan-side lowdown up front this time, and then ramble about random shit afterwards for a change.

Anal Angel 6 is on the verge of release, look for it tomorrow after final QC.  6.5 and 7 of the same series are at 100% on translation side.  Since we bottlenecked on the editing side of that series, I started working on the next Mei chapter, chapter 11.  Cleans on Mei 11 are at 100%, script is at 50.235978016345897% (half the pages plus one bubble).  Look for that chapter later this week hopefully.  Really hoping we get the editing side moving a bit quicker, it's kind of depressing having scripts pile up without enough people to work on them.

Alright, now that that's out of the way...  My family likes to drink.  A lot.  Saturday night we had a St Patrick's Day party, and as usual my family bought a keg.  It's always interesting to go to these parties, since I'm in that fun age (mid-twenties) where you're an adult, but you don't quite fit into the conversation with the 40-60 year old crowd.  It's always a really cool mix of people, but weird conversation dynamics come up rather frequently.  One gem was a guy (about 60) telling us about how when his son was born, he didn't have him circumcised, and he was worried that he'd be pissed at him when it came up later.  Apparently he wasn't.  I'm not sure what the point of the story was, but I did get to hear a 50ish year old guy make comments about dick cheese.  I also got to hear really odd stories about a road trip that my uncle and his cousin took when they graduated from high school, including the time where they passed through Utah.  This one small town was really friendly, but (found out after the fact) had some issues with too small of a gene pool.  They were invited to stay in someone's home, and they were really congenial hosts - to the point of telling them that they could fuck the hosts' wives, with the stipulation that the women have a sheet over their face.  The thing that struck me as strangest about this was that not only did they make this offer, but it was front-loaded to the point where the rules were already in place...  Anyway, I'm sore as fuck from doing a bunch of yardwork yesterday (my parents had a tree cut down in their yard, I got to go over and chop all the fucking logs up) so I'm out for now.

First release, first 14th, first Yamada's Playlist upload

So, if you're here via 14BiQ's stuff (which I assume you are, I don't say interesting enough stuff to draw people without that crutch), you're aware that we're doing shit on the 14th of each month.  We'll have releases, possibly stuff like podcasts, raffles; whatever we think up down the road.  On my end, I thought it'd be neat to do some sort of thematic playlist each month via this blog.  The first one is pretty random, as I decided to do an A-Z playlist by artist name.  There's some rough transitions for sure, and I didn't transcode anything, so there's a few files in there that I had as m4a, flac, or ogg rather than mp3, but I'm fairly pleased with the end result overall.  Check it out, lemme know what you think~
http://www.mediafire.com/?mucajguu8m5x492
http://www.mediafire.com/?5lm3tmmisr445w0
(It's a split archive, you'll need both pieces to extract it)

Other than that, Mei for our first release, several chapters of Anal Angel have been translated already and are just waiting on the editing side, partial script for Near Equal and IS already floating around.  Lots of shit in the works for you guys.

Something every day

I dunno, I wanted to talk about music today, and that's seeming a bit intimidating with how tired I feel.  I've been listening to an awful lot of stuff, and I'm not really sure which direction to broach the topic from...  I guess I'll just talk about what I listened to today while I was working on Anal Angel.  Here's the title track off of the first album I queued up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfzuhW-2Kis

Old Man Markley has enough of an alt sound to the bluegrassiness that it didn't feel really off.  The playlist kind of unintentionally faded to a more... rustic (I guess that's the word I want to use) sound.  I hit The Pines at the end of my playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Juc6JKuFhqk&feature=related

And at that point the contrast between what I was working on and the music I had on for background noise was a little too jarring.  I love the shit out of bluegrass, folk, alt-country, and similar stuff, but something just feels way off about listening to that style of music while translating lines like:
"This isn't good...
Fingering my ass is something I could get used to..."

I'm not the kind of person who has any one particular sort of music they listen to while working though.  Sometimes I listen to more upbeat stuff with a little more bass presence to keep my pace up, sometimes I listen to really unobtrusive stuff like ambient just to have a little bit of background noise.  The one and only constant, I guess, is that there's always music going on in the background.  If anyone's interested: http://www.last.fm/user/kyonichi

In terms of 14BiQ business...  our first release is out, or will be out shortly, idk, it's past the point where it's in my control, and we're getting really close to release as I type this.  It's a really nice feeling releasing something after so long.  I'm pretty far ahead of the pace I wanted to set myself for the initial burst of motivation, too.  Not to give too much away, but I'd expect quite a few releases in the near future as long as the editing side can keep up with me.  :9

Doggies and Boats

So lately I've been watching a ton of anime in my downtime (up until relaunching over the past few days, that's eaten up most of my free time, lol).  Every once in a while, you watch a show, good, mediocre, or bad, that gives you an aha! moment.  That moment where you think to yourself, 'when I rate something an x/10, THIS SHOW IS EXACTLY WHAT I'M APPROXIMATING."  You can watch a show that's really fucking good and realize that that show is what you'll be measuring future 9/10 ratings by.  Or, you can watch Dog Days.  Dog Days is exactly what I am getting at with a 7/10 rating.

This show exemplifies "entertaining with no substance."  Plot holes, cliches, very little about this show to make you recommend it to anyone...  however, while you watch it, you genuinely enjoy it, because they knew they were making a mid-tier fluff show, and it's entertaining for what it is.  I dunno, I don't have much to say specifically about the show, but I thought the notion of exemplifying a certain rating was kind of interesting and thought I'd share it.  (It's horseshit who he ended up with at the end though, not to spoil anything, but you can't pile the development on with one character and then just hook up some other pairing with an "I like you" "I like you too" at the end out of nowhere...)

So, a little off the record personal statement about Anal Angel and all that.  I've been through this shit before...  the whole "I know it was dropped for 9 months, but it's coincidence that we pushed a release out the moment you said you were going to do it" horse-and-pony show.  I'm not going to bother getting upset, I just don't have the rage in me anymore to respond the way I did the first time it happened when we were starting Wow!scans and Prunus Girl got snatched out from under us in a somewhat similar situation.  Like I said in a more official capacity, my policy this time around is going to be to just ignore other groups in regards to stuff we're working on.  If they drop it, fine.  If they don't, fine.  It doesn't need to affect my enjoyment of a project in the slightest if I don't want it to.  That'll be how we go forward with everything: if we say we're doing a project, we're doing it.  Forget everyone else.  They have nothing to do with us.  Nice, clean, simple, drama-free.

/ya/ - Waifu Culture

I considered a few things for today, and decided to talk about waifus a little before these Valentine's day pictures become any older...

I think the term "waifu" is very easily misunderstood, but it's really due to the etymology of the word in the first place.  It's almost like saying "comfort food" and expecting everyone to imagine the same food.  "Waifu" is one of those concepts, that if taken at all seriously, is wildly different from person to person.  Lots of people treat it as a joke, only have a waifu when a holiday comes around and they want to be in the collages on 4chan, or the word waifu to them only really means 'favorite character,' so it changes every season.  I think that those kinds of definitions are pretty pointless, since there's no need for a special word for things in those categories, it's kind of redundant for waifu to be a synonym for favorite character.  That isn't to say that I am in the camp that intentionally seeks out schitzophrenia by talking to my fumofumo of Suwako and pretending she talks back, but I certainly feel a deeper bond than I would with a character that could be described as simply my favorite character.  Real or imagined, I feel certain obligations in terms of keeping up with her merchandise releases and putting on the show for her at holidays and such that I wouldn't ever really feel with anyone else.  Whether it makes sense of not is kind of irrelevant in my opinion, since it's something personal that I enjoy, so why overexamine it?  I'll leave it at that, since I kind of feel like in these cases less explanation can be more explanation, since it's such a slippery concept in the first place.  Feel free to comment with your thoughts, pictures, or whatever.

In terms of scanlation (since I'm not an interesting person, that's probably why you're here), I'm feeling really good about the amount of momentum we have right now.  My only real concern is that my editing side manager will get tired of 'filling in' on actual cleaning and typesetting if we don't get a couple solid editors, but it's really too early in the game to worry about whether or not recruiting is working out (we haven't even put out our first release (it'll be Mei, and it'll be really soon) to get real distribution of a recruiting page going yet).  I feel slightly split in terms of projects, but in a much better way than before, since I've limited myself personally to three projects, so they're all labors of love rather than things I feel obligated to do.  More tomorrow.

Hmmm

Well, looks like I'm scanlating again.  I never really intended as long of a break as I ended up taking, and I didn't really intend to not blog here at all in the interim either.  There's quite a few things I missed about scanlating, and only a few things that I didn't miss (and will probably try my best to keep out of the process this time around).  Scanlating necessitates a certain amount of social time, both with people on your team and with readers, as you announce and publicize releases, answer questions, and all that.  It forces you to hone and practice skills, in my case both Japanese and clerical/managerial type stuff, and that keeps your brain working just a little better than spending all your free time fucking around with video games and cartoons.  Best of all, every time a chapter comes out, you have the feeling that you actually did just accomplish something, something fairly tangible even despite its digital form.  It's easy to fall into a rut of non-production in today's society, especially in my case because of the presence of bigger projects that are easier to put off (a handful of people want to translate a nitro+ game with me once their Japanese is at a serviceable level, having that on the back burner made it easy to forget that I shouldn't be putting off scanlation along with it).  Anyway, some specifics.  I'll be translating Mei no Naisho again, I love that series too much to let it die.  Not sure who's editing this one.  I'm doing Anal Angel again, Sampei is fun and people seemed to really be sad that this got dropped.  I need an editor for this one, we don't have someone with the proclivities to make zooming in on little boy cocks for long enough to do the decensors a pleasant process.  I'm also finally doing the Intersexuality/Aiesu/that long name for it remastering project that I've wanted to do for a long time.  It turns out that JanimeS's translations are such that it's turning out to be a full retranslation rather than a sort of TLC/re-editing with better raws, which was what I thought it was going to be.  IS is too good of a series to only have that quality of scanlation though, so we're getting this rolling (holy shit the raws cost more than they should have, too, after spending that much, this has to get done).  IS has an editor, luckily (you thought that role would be empty for everything, didn't you?).  Holic seems actually motivated this time around, and is going to pick Near Equal back up.  This is also missing the editing side.  I think we do have more labor on the editing side yet to be allocated, but we certainly do need to recruit at least one more motivated individual.  I'd really like just the one more person though, as keeping things small is kind of a goal of mine this time around...  it's much nicer that way.  I'm going to make it a goal to post here daily, we'll see if it works.