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.

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.

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 :/

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.

Scanning and Drinking

Yeah, I haven't gotten many scripts worked on this week.  Between getting talked into socializing and having both Oto Nyan and Change H to scan, there just wasn't time.  The double edged sword to getting more people on the team and picking up more projects is that it increases the overhead in terms of time I have to put in doing things other than translating, which is frustrating.  Coordinating, scanning, checking translations, answering questions, all of it is stuff that needs doing and that I don't mind doing, but after a while I realize that despite having spent 6 hours on stuff for WOW!scans, I haven't translated jack shit.  Today or tomorrow I'm going to work on Anal Angel.  Fuck all this other stuff, I've been wanting to do some AA for like a week and it keeps getting put off since other shit needs my attention.  Expect some penises sometime this week.

Burnout and Gender Bending

This has been my (personally, not really the group) slowest week in at least a month or two.  I attribute it to a variety of things, some of which are fair game for discussion, and some of which really kind of aren't.  Suffice it to say, the burnout was fairly short lived, since I'm a very doting parent over WOW!scans...  I just kind of boxed myself in with weekly/near weekly deadlines on our joints, raws aren't coming in the mail, Koizumi isn't making progress on the special project I bought to surprise everyone with...  It seemed like stuff just wasn't going how I wanted, so I had to take a few days and just step back and recuperate a bit.  OverDrive is going to wait another week I think, since once I finish Houkago Play for this week I really need to work on something *I* want to work on - meaning it'll be Anal Angel, OtoBoku, or Mei.  I feel bad for OverDrive fans, but if I keep pushing through shit other people want and deprioritizing the stuff I have fun working on I'm going to burn right out again.  (Just a side note, one of the stranger things on my list for today was raw providing the new Prunus Girl for a French scanlation group...  we've also got Vietnamese groups working from our stuff...  kind of cool, and kind of odd in a way)

Also, if you're into porn (who isn't?), you need to go here: http://www.mangatg.com/
Download Market Showgirl, Becoming a Girl by ShindoL, Avatar Trance, and Trans Panic.  Thank me later.

Ugh, I felt like I had other shit that needed saying, but I guess it'll keep until I remember what it was, it's late here.

4komas and Joint Projects

So, now that the first chapter of the Houkago Play joint project came out without incident, I thought I'd share my thoughts so far on this and the Imouto wa Shishunki project.  It's really interesting to work on the two of them, especially since I started on them both at about the same time, because despite both being 4komas, they require wildly different translation styles.  Houkago Play is probably my most literal translations to date, since a lot of it is specific detail reference - ie, not much to do when she asks why the hell a PSP has a stylus in terms of style and prose.  Imouto wa Shishunki, on the other hand, is much more what I expected from working with a 4koma - this one is my most liberal translation I've ever done.  Preserving the essence of a sexual pun when translating takes... creativity.  For example, there's a word in Japanese that can mean both 'son' and 'penis,' while there really aren't any good direct translations that carry the same double meaning.  The chapters of Imouto are really short, but it ends up taking me forever, since I sit there and rack my brains for a way to stay faithful to the original and still have the humor carry over.  The other fun thing I've gotten from Houkago Play is lots of sites to look up Japanese PSX and PSP shit on, since I'm not much of a gamer in the first place, and the references a lot of times are talking about shit that never got ported over here...  yeah, fun...

These two joints are also the first time we've done a joint where I'm doing the translating, everything else so far has been our raws, image editing, qc, etc and the other groups' translation, so it's a bit of a different experience this time.  The one thing I've really learned so far is that despite disliking IRC, I am glad as fuck our group uses it, since it's a real pain in the ass to do everything over email.

I told someone I'd share my thoughts on this season's shows (at least the ones that fall inside our shared interest in TG/trap type stuff), so I guess I'll do that now before the season ends up halfway over without me getting around to it.

Kore wa Zombie-kun:
I'm not really sure what to think...  this show is such a mash-up of elements, it's kind of hard to figure out what to expect from it.  I guess it's supposed to be comedy more than anything else, and it makes me laugh, so I guess it's a success on that front.  As far as the trap content goes...  I wouldn't claim there is any.  The MC getting forced into a skirt in order to access his magical girl powers is pretty amusing, but he isn't passable and only does it out of necessity.  I'm going to keep watching this one, because I figure that even the worst case scenario is that this show turns into a somewhat less generic than usual harem comedy.

Hourou Musuko:
Really good adaptation.  Really good.  I'm still not sure how well it stands on it's own for people that haven't read the manga, since they skipped so much of the beginning and kind of rushed the character introductions, but since I did read the manga, that isn't an issue for me.  I'm still not fully on board with how shiny their heads are, but other than that the art style is gorgeous, and fits with the way Shimura draws the manga really well.  I'm not very critical of things like seiyuu, but I think they did a pretty good job casting for the adaptation, no one stood out as sounding off, really.  The OP sucks.  No real way around that one.  They cheaped out on the visual side of it, it's really boring and uneventful, and the song itself is somewhat of a failed Spitz knock-off.  The ED is ok, and next to that OP, it seems amazing.  I'm really disappointed that they only gave this 11 episodes though, I'm anticipating being ticked off at the way they end things, pretty much no matter what they do.

WOW!

>4 hours of sleep friday night due to translation shit
>get up saturday, finish translating, scan shit
>drink last night to make myself take a break from scanlation stuff
>wake up, check irc logs, I was actually still trying to do WOW!scans shit with a fifth of rum in me

I actually really really want to talk about how weird it is working on those two joint 4koma projects in a number of ways, but I'm going to wait until I'm not hung over any more so that the walls of text are at least coherent.  But yeah, I'm starting to realize that I don't have many hobbies other than scanlation any more, my free time is all scanlation, all of my minor daily worries are scanlation shit, etc.  Not sure whether this is kinda lame or kinda awesome, I guess at least it's something productive, right?

A New Day, A New Blog

Well, I'm going to leave this one really simple, since it's pretty much a combination personal/academic/scanlation-industry type of thing, and it's just my own thoughts, which don't really warrant a fancy layout.  I'm still not 100% sure where I expect things to go on here, but it'll most likely end up with irregular walls of text, rants, and shit that lots of people won't care about, so no claiming I'm boring or that I didn't warn you.  I think tonight I'll bitch about something that really annoys me about the scanlation community, and then we'll see if something slightly less snarky comes to me later.

So, a lot of the time that I'm looking at joint projects and potential new projects for WOW!scans, rather than think about stuff I like or browsing tags on aggregators, I dig around in the community and look for series that are dropped, have gaps, or where the groups are going really slow/using bad raws/otherwise screwing the readers.  In my opinion, it's a much better thing to bail out a series that has frustrated readers than it is to pick up some new series and create a new fanbase - you're not only creating the positive feelings in new fans, you're helping to cure that frustration that people get when a series they like ends up screwed up in some way.  So, that brings me to my issue...  I'm not sure what drives people to do shit sometimes.  Take Shiki for example, we almost picked that one up for a while, because two groups were working on it, but the second group had left a gap of several chapters when they started, and the group working in order up towards the gap in scanlations apparently didn't care to put out more than one chapter ever few months.  The first group, who knows, maybe they were on their last legs or understaffed.  The one that gets me is that second group that picked it up and knowingly left a gap in the scanlations.  I saw a thread earlier (which was being trolled, so I backed the fuck out) where some /a/non was working on Usagi Drop scanlations.  Leaving a gap of several chapters.  The solution isn't to troll him, but really, I don't know what the thought process is when someone decides to do that.  Scanlation takes too much effort to not do it for the pleasure of knowing people are enjoying reading your releases - so how does screwing the reader or doing less than your best effort ever make sense?  It's almost along the lines of those groups that don't QC (hours of TL and cleaning, just to put out a shitty Engrish scanlation...) or that use ugly, unreadable  raws.  It seems so counter-intuitive to me, if anyone can explain this kind of shit to me, please do.  Dropping stuff, going on hiatus, all of that makes sense; although it can be pretty screwy too, especially when one project is dropped to make room for some shit no one likes, but picking up a series and leaving a hole in the translations is just unfathomable for me.  Alright, rambling rant over.  More next time.