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.

Long time no talk?

Yeah, I know, I'm bad about keeping this blog updated...  As I said at the scanlation blog though, I'm finally home, so maybe stuff will all get a little better organized now.  Someone asked whether I bought anything at AX over in the main blog comments, so I figured I ought to give you guys a breakdown on the rest of my Cali trip and perhaps discuss AX a bit.

I stayed with Gief, one of our typesetters, for the majority of my trip, down in SoCal.  I did go visit my grandmother in the valley for a while though, and it was over a hundred degrees there...  seriously, fuck that weather, I'm looking out my window at a rainy July day here in WA, and I'm perfectly happy with this.  Other than the weather though, the whole time between Fanime and AX where I was just kind of hanging out and vacationing in California was pretty fun.  It wasn't terribly eventful though (my birthday fell during that part of the trip, I think I wound up playing League of Legends and going to bed early that night), so I'll skip over talking about it too much.

AX was... interesting.  Allow me to open by saying that I had heard stories about how bad line management was at AX, and had a long-standing promise with myself not to go to AX.  Well, then they announced the Miku concert, and I had to go and break my promise.  I think I've been to enough cons at this point to be justified in making some generalizations.  Anime Expo is the first con I've been to that didn't feel like it was being run by fans for fans.  Every time you turned around, they were gouging you for more cash, the way events were run was counter-intuitive to the thought of making things the most fun for the most people, and they had the same problems with lines that I've been hearing about for at least 5 years.  I won't go into gory details on the negative parts of the con unless someone really wants me to, I'll just leave it with what I said already.
The Miku concert was fantastic.  The models were better than any of the ones used at the previous Japanese events, they had extended and improved a lot of the dance choreography, and the setlist had been updated a bit (huge improvement).  When they intro'd Uraomote Lovers and later World's End Dancehall, I pretty much couldn't contain myself, I'm a pretty huge Wowaka fanboy, and two Wowaka songs at the concert was two more than I was expecting.  The official Miku merchandise was marked up to hell and back, but I did get a free concert poster that's really nice, so at least I did walk away from it with something to remember the event by.  I think they did a pretty good job of recognizing that a lot of the attendees were there because of Miku, and the other Vocaloid panels and events were all pretty interesting, and we got some cool sneak peek stuff (KAITO Append is going to be amazing, the song made with the beta version that they played was really good already).
Other events were a much more mixed bag.  It was next to impossible to get autographs, so I didn't bother waiting in the massive lines for the guest Q&A stuff.  I always go to some of the industry stuff, I find it interesting, but not to the point of being able to go to all of it and work for a 'news' site or anything.  Viz should have been the highlight, but it was a shit panel.  I went in hoping for some mention of corporate stability in the wake of Tokyopop shutting down, perhaps some discussion of the licenses Tokyopop left behind, and maybe some new announcements.  What we got was a low-level staffer who wasn't allowed to answer questions talking about properties like Naruto and Bleach that we already knew they held, and a massive push for their iPhone/iPad app stuff, which also isn't anything new.  Honestly, that panel flowed more like a 40 minute commercial than an industry panel at one of the largest conventions in the world.  In contrast, we went to the Wakfu panel directly after the Viz panel.  They opened the closed beta for the mmo for us, showed us gameplay, discussed their vision for the game, asked for feedback from people who had played already...  and then, they answered the question "are there any plans to bring the Wakfu animation to the US" by showing up episode 9 dubbed.  That was a hell of a panel, and it was put together by the US rep for a French animation company that's done a mere handful of projects.  The Touhou panel was the same presentation by the same guy from Fanime.  It was kind of fun, I dunno...
Alright, now to address the dealers' hall, since that's the question that prompted this...  I didn't get anything for WOW!scans, yet again...  Even at a convention as big as AX, there's little to no josou/otokonoko/trap/whatever stuff.  To add to that, there's very little in terms of non-H that isn't already covered for scans either by us or by some other group.  Doujins, I wish there was wider availability, but the closest you'll get to our demographic at a con is two bishounen going at it.  What I did end up getting though, is a Suwako fumofumo plushie and a little piece of Suwako fanart.  That makes my haul for this year's conventions: 10 figures (Asuka, Miku nendo and figma, Dead Master figma, 2 Sheryl figures, Klan Klan figure, the poseable Suwako figure, a Suwako mini figure, and an Arcueid swimsuit figure), 4 autographed Yoshitoshi ABe books, 9 Touhou doujins (no big name stuff, just fleshing out my collection, all non-H, one of them was made in the west and sold in the Artists' Alley, which was pretty damn cool to see), 3 Miku albums (Vocarock 2, Vocalonexus, and Cinnamon Philosophy), the Exist Trace album, 2 pillows (an Asuka daki and a mini pillow with Sheryl on it), one bedsheet (trap Hayate, too good), the plushie, and the concert poster.  Time to let my wallet hibernate for 6-8 months, I think.  I'm fairly happy with the purchases this season though, some of the things were just such amazing finds...  Anyway, I'm going to go take a shower and hope it washes away my hangover so I can get to work on some WOW! stuff.

What's with the community these days?

There's a rant down below, but I thought I'd throw out the typical tidbits of a progress update that I put over here as motivation to bother visiting before I hit you with that:
Kawase sequel chapter - ready to release
OtoBoku 16 - typesetting
Anal Angel 5 - typesetting
Mei is next in my queue, and Reversible! is after that.  Near Equal is being ground away at by a new guy, I'm using it as a project to kind of test him out and train him as a translator.  mosco is working on Maid in Japan, as always, and also as always, I don't get status reports from him and a script will just fall in my lap some day hopefully soon.  Kaichu! is still a joint, hopefully they're working on the script/TS for a release someday soon.


If you don't live under a rock, you've heard about some of the drama going on between scanlation groups these days.  It always bugs me when this shit happens, since (despite an influx of chapters at the start) it benefits no one, and readers always come away with a shitty impression of the scene as a whole.  There's a pretty solid example recently (perhaps more to come, I've heard stirrings), so I'll just use what's public knowledge about that to share my thoughts on all this.

Alright, Nozoki Ana.  This was the big shitstorm recently.  Apparently (I'm not following the series, so the history is a bit secondhand) a group called Blackwing was working on it, and experienced a period of slow releases.  Someone talked another group called XscansX into working on it, and they picked it up with a statement along the lines of: "We don't really want this series, we're doing this as a favor until the original group gets moving again."  Well, following that, Blackwing came back to life, released a full volume over the course of a day or so, XscansX got upset (I thought they didn't want it?), there was drama, and eventually things got settled into a joint-project agreement of sorts.  This, on the surface, seems like it turned out well for the fans, right?  They got a volume over the course of a day after having had slow releases for quite a while.  However, the guy from Blackwing was apparently still a little upset, and a (somewhat) unrelated thread on MangaFox going sour was enough to get him to rage quit, dropping eight series, and five more after another release or two.  The motivation to scanlate is tenuous enough for some people that causing a big shitstorm like that just leads to one less scanlator.

Now, I'll try to discuss my thoughts on this kind of shit while also responding to the typical counterarguments. Stealing other people's series' is a dick move, and that's usually what causes this kind of drama.  The response is usually "you can't steal something (pirating the manga) and claim ownership, that's stupid."  No, but what people can claim ownership over is the time that they've sank into the series already.  They can also claim ownership over their time in the future, and stop scanlating simply because that series was what they were interested in working on, not scanlating as a whole.  Any response to calling it a dick move to take a series out from under someone is silly in the first place, because the solution to the problem is really simple, it's called email.  Seriously, if people would bother to send emails and get in touch with other groups, 90% of this kind of shit would be prevented.
There's also the argument that it's alright to pick up someone else's series if they're going 'slowly.'  I've never heard a more vague word used as the basis of a self-justification.  Beyond the issues with that statement on it's own, the answer is as simple as the one I presented before: send an email.  You know, I really like Ookiku Furikabutte, and I heard that the scanlations had stalled out.  You know what my response was?  I emailed them, asked them what they needed in terms of help, pointed out to them that people are trying to get the series picked up by other groups due to the delay in releases, and loaned them an editor part-time.  They seemed grateful, I now feel more interconnected into the scanlation community (which I think is a personal quirk, lots of groups seem to dislike transparency and being connected with other groups for some reason), the fans will be happy once releases start rolling out - rather than jumping on their series, overtaxing our group, pissing them off, and slamming out releases as fast as possible and compromising quality just to spite them.  It's everyone wins vs everyone loses.  Simple to see which option is better.  Don't take any of this to mean I condone people quitting or raging due to that kind of drama, that's just silly - but in the end, it's their time, and it really isn't our place to demand that they spend it doing something for us in the first place.
I think my biggest issue with all this kind of shit is that it's a respect issue.  Getting worked up like this is disrespectful to the readers.  Taking on someone's project without saying anything is disrespectful to the other group.  Racing for releases and sacrificing quality or personal time is a lack of self-respect, and a lack of respect to the readers.  It's so fucking easy to send an email, I don't understand why so many people just can't muster up that effort.
Anyway, don't take this discussion to mean that we're interested in anything he dropped or anything like that.  I just felt like all the drama lately was frustrating me (there's been several smaller bouts, and a few clouds on our horizon that I managed to dismiss before anything happened) and felt like sharing my thoughts might get it out of my system a bit.

Still on a California Adventure

So, a bunch of shit happened, and last I left off, I was at Geif's house.  Well, a bunch more stuff happened, and now I'm up at my grandmother's place in Visalia for a few weeks.  It's a much more work-conducive environment, since I don't have my laptop set up out in public space where I'm easily distracted.  This whole trip has been kind of strange though, since I'm bumming around, fairly broke, with only casual clothes like t-shirts in my suitcases, and I keep ending up in pretty upscale neighborhoods.  Gief's place is in a gated-but-not-really-gated community, and it's really nice, it has several parks within the neighborhood, and a pair of pools.  Then I came up to my grandmother's place, which is in an actual gated community, all the houses are huge, they all have their own pools...  Luckily my uncle is a slob, so I don't feel too out of place around here.

As far as AX goes, there's a handful of things I'm really looking forward to.  First and foremost is Miku, of course...  but they've announced some guests that are exciting as well.  I'm not sure whether I care or not yet, but they announced the producer of Saihate as a guest of honor.  Some VN guys will be there, and while they aren't the autograph kind of guests, I'll be interested to go to the Q&A sessions and stuff, since that industry is pretty interesting.  Miyuki Sawashiro will be there too, and she's voiced a million characters I like, so it's going to be hard to choose what/who to have her sign (I'll probably get a print of one of her roles from the artist's alley).  They've also announced that the mangaka who wrote Kimagure Orange Road will be there, so I'll have to get him to sign something as well, that series is one of the great classics of the shounen romance genre.

I guess my goals for AX are the same as any other convention.  I'll go to the events that seem cool, take pictures of cosplayers, and scour the dealers hall and artist alley for merchandise of my froggy waifu.  Cross your fingers for me, Suwako goods are fairly uncommon.  I think my focus this time around is going to be on digging through doujin bins hoping to luck into a copy of "King of Moriya" or something.

In terms of WOW!scans stuff, obviously I've had my nose to the grindstone lately.  At the moment, I'm waist-deep in the script for the Me and Kawase sequel chapter, and either Mei or Anal Angel is going to be up next.  Prunus Girl comes out around the 22nd, so I'm going to try and at least get one chapter of Mei and AA out before then, and maybe Reversible too if I have the time.  I don't know if people realize, but I put in three eight hour days to get this past weekend's releases out; scanlation is a major time-sink even when I'm not getting the translation credits for a particular chapter.  In any case, just wait patiently and things will keep coming out.

Where the hell have I been?

Well, you may have noticed that not only have we been short releases (due mainly to my classes and the unexplained mass staff exodus), but my blog has been pretty damn sparse as well.  This is due to a bunch of random stuff, so I'll break it into pieces, since some may be interesting to you all.

First of all, there was the staff meetup at Fanime that we've all been looking forward to for quite a while.  Me and Holic got on the train in Washington on Thursday morning and rode for like a million years, finally arriving in San Jose on Friday morning.  The seats seemed comfortable at first, but by the ten hour mark, they may as well have been made out of concrete.  We actually were the first of the group to hit San Jose, and Yomi from our IRC met us at the station and walked us to the hotel so we didn't get lost.  Herp, who's QC'd for us under various names, flew in from Florida on Wednesday, and he, Koiz, Gief, and another friend from our ventrilo server all met us in the lobby.  The convention itself was kind of awful.  The cosplay, dealer's hall, and artist alley were all pretty good, but the organization of the convention was the worst I've seen yet.  In terms of content, things were pretty light from the get-go.  There were two good guests (well, FLOW was there, but the line outweighed my interest), and both got kinda screwy.  The Gainax founder who was supposed to be there cancelled.  Yoshiki's plane was late, but his Q&A was really awesome - but the dipshit staff wouldn't let him sign all the autographs, so only 40 (none of us) people got autographs.  The panels were really light on content and heavy on stupid stuff for 14 year olds like anime-themed games.  We almost got fucked on the one panel I wanted to go to (the Touhou panel) since they didn't have schedules printed for the first day, and when they finally got (not enough) copies made, they were inaccurate.  So, enough bitching and on to the highlights.  I mentioned that the dealer's hall was good; pretty sure everyone of us that has a waifu found goods to buy of our respective 2D spouses.  There was actually a small booth that was selling exclusively Touhou goods (we found out later that the guy running it went to Reitaisai earlier this month), so I was able to get a keychain figure of my frog waifu (Suwako) that I didn't know existed (amazingly well sculpted for such a small figure, too).  Then at the Touhou panel (which was really good, but ran out of time before the live mixset that someone was going to do :/) someone who apparently had been at the swap-meet on Friday was selling the rest of their Touhou doujins really cheaply, and I managed to get one of my waifu and 5 more for 7 dollars (all non-H).  Holic started out the trip with the statement "I'm not buying any figures, because I'm not a faggot," and ended the trip with 5-6 figures, a messenger bag, some art books, a poster book, and a few prints.  I was really happy to see him get over that hump and let himself really enjoy his hobby like that.  Other than the dealer's hall and the Touhou panel, the real highlight of the con was hanging out with everyone.  We all got along right off the bat and meshed really well, since we all act basically the same in real life as we have been for the year and a half we've known each other online.  All our inside jokes from vent worked just as well in person, and we had a shitload of fun even just during downtime in the hotel room.

So, I'm not writing this post from my house.  I'm still in California, staying at Gief's mom's house with him for the next month.  This was the part that actually threw a wrench into WOW!scans stuff getting done in a timely fashion...  Basically, we had talked about me staying down here until Anime Expo a while back, but decided it wasn't really worth the hassle.  Then they announced the Miku concert...  So Tuesday of last week I hammered out the details to make it a month and a half trip instead of a week long trip.  This meant that not only did I need to manage to pack for that long of a trip, but all that little shit that gets put off till "later" needed to be wrapped up before I left.  So now I'm sitting down here in Orange County, wondering whether I'll be able to get some shitty temp job through a temp staffing agency so I have reasonable spending money for AX...  I'll also see my grandmother that lives down here for the first time in a few years, so this trip should be pretty neato all around.  I'll figure out more that needs saying later, I'm sure I missed something.

Also, here's a bunch of pictures, sort by tags since I didn't bother to make volumes: flickr.com/photos/yamadaadtrapm6

Wah, what're we going to do on the blog?

So, life is busy...  On top of the class shit, I've got several things going on.  I'm rearranging my room, making room for a new computer desk, another figure display case, and hopefully another bookshelf.  Tonight I'm going to take measurements and draw things up in paint to see what all I can fit, tomorrow I'll prep and make room, then Sunday I'm going to Ikea.  An added perk is that I'm going to pick up a chair that won't make my back feel like absolute shit after a few hours.  In terms of WOW!scans, we've picked up a little help here and there, and things should start running a little more smoothly again here shortly, which makes me happy as a bifurcated mollusk.  Also, Sakuracon is in two weeks...  I have a room at my favorite hotel for that con (the Sheraton, it's a really nice hotel and it's directly across the street from the con, kicks the shit out of any of the others I've stayed in), get to see a friend I haven't seen in like a year, I'll have room at home to pick up new figures, and it'll be the first con I've attended since starting WOW!scans, so I'll be browsing the doujin vendors with a totally different mindset this year.  Should be fun.  On top of that, the fact that Sakuracon is only two weeks away reminds me that Fanime is only a month and a half away...  first trip out of state in a while, first time seeing several online friends and WOW! compatriots in person, first non-WA convention, a full week vacation in a place where the weather isn't perpetually shit.  That should be even more fun!  I'm more than willing to kick it with any of y'all who will be at either con, I'll probably say something on the WOW! blog about which bar I'll sit at on Thursday or Friday night for Sakuracon.

Well, life tends to have it's ups and downs

So, a little mostly un-wow-related life stuff, and then some ranting and explaining, and some news.

The first two quarters I was down here at Evergreen, the classes always had plenty of room, so I felt fairly comfortable waitlisting classes this quarter...  that turned out to be a terrible idea.  Apparently, due to budget shortfalls, they decided to let in an unprecedented amount of transfer students this quarter, and didn't bother to make room for them by adding more classes.  So, at the end of last week, I was at wit's end, scrambling to get into classes, even if they weren't the best fit with my area of study, so that at least I'd end up at full time status and get my financial aid for the quarter.  Things eventually kind of worked out, I'm taking enough credits now, but my schedule is pretty fucking terrible.  This impacts wow stuff in two ways - first, I'm still on the way out of being in a shit mood, and I'm not terribly productive when I'm in a shit mood.  Second, it'll probably take a week or two to figure out where translating fits into this new schedule.

Alright, so here's two things that bug me about people who read our scanlations (I love our fans, I really do, but come the fuck on).  First:  if I anticipated your question and answered it in a blog post already, do me the fucking favor of reading it rather than asking the same shit over and over.  Second:  if you don't like one of our series, I really couldn't give a flying turd in space less.  I love to hear about it when you do like something we're working on, but telling me which series you don't like just sounds like a passive aggressive way to whine that other things aren't coming out as quickly.  TL;DR, I love NEEDLESS, it isn't slowing anything else down, and if you still have an issue, I'm all out of tissues for you.

So, despite my bad mood, I haven't been entirely unproductive...  I haven't gotten much translated, but we've rearranged things and Kaichu! should be getting a lot more attention now, which I know is good news for lots of people.  We also picked up someone who's going to work on an amazing surprise for you guys that'll seem like it came out of nowhere.  On top of that stuff, we've got raws for a future project in the mail, raws for some upcoming doujin projects in the mail, and I've been getting us a bit ahead of the game in terms of scanning raws.  Even when I'm not directly working on a translation, I personally can spend 6 hours in a sitting getting other shit done for the group and still not make a dent in what all needs doing.  Anyway, more later, class is starting.

Life, WOW!, and Everything

So, if you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that our releases come in spurts now...  What happens is that we get some stuff close to release and then i end up coordinating all the release stuff and don't have time to translate that night (or those nights, in the case of the past several days).  I guess it's fine since we're keeping up a pretty decent pace, but I thought it was interesting how the dynamic has shifted lately...

Also, I'm going down to my campus today to sort out my classes for this quarter, so we'll find out how busy I'm going to be and how much scanlating time I'll have left over pretty soon.  Other than my 4 credit Japanese class, I honestly have very little idea what i'm going to end up taking this quarter, so it could go either way.

/tr/ is back up.  I'm kind of surprised that they didn't lose their posts this time around, since apparently it was hard drive failure again.  In any case, I'm glad it's back, since a lot of freelancing anons gather there and scan/translate/etc, and I'm not really sure whether they would easily find a new place to congregate.

IS is a lot of fun for a generic harem, and as with all generic harems, I've taken a much stronger liking to one or two of the girls in the show.  Somehow I've lucked out, and the bros at kibitou4life (http://kibitou4life.wordpress.com/) have similar tastes, and have been scanlating lots of France and Germany doujins.

So...

Well, we caught up on NEEDLESS already...  Spring Quarter starts this coming week, which gives me mixed feeling on where WOW!scans stuff is at.  I'm frustrated that Koiz and Gief are being lazy, but it's also nice that I'm ahead on scripts stepping back into being busy.  Ugh.

This shit's really good:
http://www.mediafire.com/?mg7tvangf1xglgn

I ordered the Senjougahara figure (you know which one) since both HLJ and GSC are donating to disaster relief, so I can feel a little better about spending 100+ dollars on a piece of plastic.  This reminds me, I REALLY need to clean my room, reorganize a bit, and buy another display case.  I've got 29 figures outside the cabinet I have already, and Senjougahara on her way.  It's time to go to Ikea, for sure.  Also, Black Gold Saw arrived today...  She's nice, but she really serves as a reminder than I need to find Dead Master, since I missed out on preordering her.  I really don't want to pay out the ass on auction sites, but having BRS and BGS and no DM just isn't right.

Brief update since I am excite

We're picking up NEEDLESS.  Yes, that NEEDLESS.  Also, it's an outside translator, so it doesn't add to my personal workload.  So fucking stoked.  That's all.

A scanlation life has ups and downs

Treat this as half status update and half bitch/brag session, since that's what it is.  Mei is still in typesetting, and I'm getting antsy since it's a good chapter and I love that series so much...  can't blame Koiz for taking a few days though, it's a typical 40 page chapter :/  Anal Angel chapter 4 is translated, and the cleans/decensoring are done already, so it should be a fairly short wait on that release too.  We've got a joint project doujin release coming soon too, with Kusion from UTW/[gg] making a guest appearance as TLC.  I love doing joints, I love having people from other groups lend us a hand, and I love the feeling of community that comes from stuff like this, and I always feel like WOW!scans has actually become a legitimate part of things when we work with a big name like this.  It isn't really an e-peen thing or anything, it's just that feeling of accomplishment, knowing that we somehow made it from where we started to being a "real" group.  In other, more depressing news, /a/ had a string of about 800 posts about Houkago Play, one of the joint projects that I don't particularly enjoy working on and that keeps falling through the cracks.  I feel bad, but on the other hand I do this for fun, and being insulted for taking my time on a series I don't enjoy is kind of lame.  The other interesting thing is that there's a few people willing to work on translating the series - but they don't want to make any committments, they don't want to contact the editors to give them the translations, and they only want to do certain chapters out of order...  I'm really depressed and frustrated over the situation, and now I really feel like I HAVE to sit down and force my way through a chapter of HP soon.  I think I may make an official drop announcement after that chapter, depending on how much I hate the process of translating it this time around...    Maybe one of these other people will commit to something once I'm not on the hook to scapegoat when releases are slow.

What's going on, baby, what's goin on

So, finally had a chance to sit down and translate again.  That means new Mei no Naisho within the next few days, depending on how quickly koiz gets it typeset.  This chapter has what a lot of people were demanding - male love interest, another trap, all that jazz.  Also more misunderstandings and Sera being the coolest character ever.  Honestly, I don't think it comes across on a casual read through, but spending as long immersed in each chapter as I do, Sera is hard to read - on the one hand, she's a pervert and a cunning bitch who likes to see Fuuka squirm, but on the other, she's the only one who sees right through Mei and makes sure she gets the support she needs.  I'm thinking we may get more Sera backstory down the road, she's a pretty complex character for the amount of screentime she gets.  Reversible! is somewhere near 50% done in TL, and it's already cleaned, so anticipate that fairly soon as well.  The joints with Hachimitsu are all in his court, we've done our side on them.  DEB joints, I'm never 100% sure what's going on, but hopefully Suzunone should come soon...  No comment on the 4koma joints, I'm aware I'm being a piece of shit on those.  My next project is going to be Anal Angel, since people are getting pretty impatient for that already.

Life is going pretty meh for me personally.  I think the adjective that fits best is 'lukewarm.'  Nothing much specific to comment on, good or bad, and I'm not in a particularly good or bad mood either.  I'm becoming better friends with some people, which is nice, and some people have shown their fucking annoying sides and I'm getting a little distance, which counterbalances the former.  All-in-all a boring past few weeks.

I've been playing SMT:Devil Survivor before bed lately, it's a pretty fun game...  I'm not sure why I didn't give it a try sooner, for some reason I thought it wouldn't be any good.  No comment on the earthquake, other than that it's annoying that all the worst anime of the season are on regular airing schedule while Reitaisai 8 got cancelled, fucking up all the music releases :/

Stuff, not WOW!

The last post was all WOW! shit, and I said I'd talk about other stuff next time...  So, first up, conventions season's coming soon.  I'll be at Sakuracon with real life friends (yes, I have a few of those), and at Fanime with Koizumi, Gief, Holic, maybe some other WOW!scans folks, a handful of friends from 4chan's /a/, and who knows who else.  So far I have a commissioned cosplay of Yamada from NEEDLESS just about ready to be shipped to me.  I'm considering picking up a Taokaka cosplay, since a few other people are probably doing BB cosplay and I've always thought her outfit is kind of nifty.  Here's the Yamada cosplay, sans wig:

Also, depending on whether you're a tl;dr kind of person or not, I have a sci fi short story you may be interested in.  I'm not one of those folks who tries to push all their amateur fiction on any unfortunate people who pass within range, but this story's kind of about a hikki in the west, so I thought it might resonate a bit:
http://www.mediafire.com/?o21nybx6d9849gv

I've started playing LoL, kind of as stress relief.  If you play and would like to add me, I'm YamadaADTRAPM6.  I'll warn you up front, I'm level 21 and play like I'm level 21, so no bitching that I'm not super pro.  Also, I really only play ranged champs, mostly because I hardly ever play online games or RTS, so keeping the amount of mechanics I'm trying to master down is a big plus.

My spring break is coming up, and it's nearly a month long...  I'm not planning anything big, but between WOW! stuff and getting drunk a lot (this quarter's been rough, so I've only drank like twice in the past month and a half, and I enjoy my drink) I should manage to keep myself occupied.  I'm really excited to be a NEET for a month.

This season's anime have hit me kind of oddly.  I dropped several shows I was excited for, and lost most of the anticipation I held for the others.  Kimi ni Todoke moved too slowly so I dropped it and started reading the manga, and Hourou Musuko I'm for some reason having trouble following as well.  Two shows I wasn't planning on watching, Dragon Crisis and Yumekuri Merry, turned out to be the ones I wait impatiently for each week.  I don't know what to make of that other than to say that it's a good thing I keep an open mind and don't lock myself into judgments on things too firmly.

Ugh

Been busy.  Very busy.  I'll report on a bunch of shit though, so you know where we're at, and so I can vent about Eien 02 a bit.

Prunus Girl 21 raws showed up yesterday, so I stayed up all night to make sure it was ready for typesetting whenever Koiz wakes up.  Pretty good chapter, 23 pages this time, some fanservice, lots of teasing Maki.  As per usual lately though, no overt relationship development.  I think there's too factors at work here- first is that romantic comedy series pretty much end once the relationship hits a certain point, and Tomoki wants PG to keep rolling for a while longer.  Second, I really think he wants to let their relationship grow organically a bit more so it feels natural when there's some more overt shift in how they relate to one another (it's been reminding me a bit of Toradora and how comfortable Ryuuji and Taiga were with each other long before they realized that they had feelings for each other).

Waai coming very soon.  That means more Reversible!, Sazanami Cherry, Devil-chan, Past Future, etc.  Since we've been busy (literally everyone on the team, not just me and Koiz), Oto Nyan and Change H still aren't fully under control yet, so this should be a fun balancing act until we get things settled.  I'm guessing that the times around the quarterly releases are just going to be retardedly hectic every time, since we've pretty much committed to making sure Waai and Oto Nyan get fully scanlated one way or another and we've picked up the handful of Change H series.  Pray for my sanity over the next few weeks.

Eien 02 came out yesterday.  I bought and scanned it well over a month ago.  I'm rather displeased with how the sfx were handled, especially since we had long discussions with eXtreme and his crew on multiple occasions about it and they apparently didn't value our input at all (it's annoying that the first joint project that turned out with me feeling irritated towards the other group was one where I spent 60 bucks on a low page count book, too).  I think in the future, especially with groups we haven't worked with before, we'll take control of the typesetting step just so that we have more control over the final product.

My plan at the moment is to get more Mei out, then more Anal Angel, along with focusing on getting the logistics squared away better since we've been slipping in that department with all of us busy in real life.  If you don't pay attention to credits pages, I tend to only do translation on one or two things from each quarterly, since I like the consistency of working with series where we have raws stretching ahead indefinitely, so the goal with Waai and Oto Nyan is to get things whipped into shape and get our other translators back on a faster release pace.  I honestly have no idea where the two 4koma joints I've been slacking off on fit in to things, it's the end of the quarter and I've got all that shit to handle on top of it being a busy period for WOW!scans stuff, so we'll just see what happens there.

I have some non-WOW! stuff I wanted to post about, but this one's pretty long already so I'll save it.