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.