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