Probably best viewed on my wordpress blog given the gallery element used.
Academically this year has been a meme. I’ve managed to fail both courses I tried due to Not Doing Work, and also somehow bricked on getting an actual CV to apply for thesis projects. Twice.
More importantly though, in February this year Tadoku added any-time tracking. While there are many tracking platforms and systems, Tadoku is likely the only one I will ever use semi-seriously: the minimalism appeals to me, and there are basically no features I personally need that are missing. In any case, if you’re not aware of my journey I’m an enlightened man who decided to slack as much as reasonable in my Japanese learning, eschewing all SRS and hitting a magnificent 30 minutes per day of input on average1. One might call this unenlightened, but consider: the reckless desire for learning exhibited by many individuals is clearly the very mirror of samsara. The wise man knows that he has many years to live, and has no rush to achieve his goals. Well, if the wise man is as lazy as me anyway. And if he’s not trying to escape himself/his country/his Mafia pursuers by passing JLPT N1 and moving to Japan, of course (many such cases). What I’m trying to say is wisdom comes in many forms, but mine is clearly the best.
In any case, January started out with a month-long contest. Looking back… wait…. did I even read in this thing, I’m on page two and I’m still not… ayyyyyyyyyy I’m in place 120 with 9.1 points! My stellar performance here is due to reading part of this nicovideo article and all of 「意外に」と「意外と」に違いはあるのか――辞書の個性. That’s all I have logged. I think this shows that I have a certain comfort in reading things in Japanese for information when I actually want to, even if I’m not going hard. Also that I’m a fucking nerd that will read about minuscule language differences and the interpretation of legal terms2, but we knew that already.
Having successfully avoided reading during actual contest time, I picked things up in February. The bulk of my points this month are from watching Okayu stream Minecraft precisely once for 80 minutes, and this one LN. Sometime in the month, I picked up and eventually read 80% of 男子だと思っていた幼馴染との新婚生活がうまくいきすぎる件について, which apart from hitting approximately every emotional fetish I possess in its setting also had ok tier writing and even a decent mildly dramatic plot development toward the end. I finished (well, logged…) the last 20% at a totally not sus timing, just late enough to add it for the March contest. I’m often not super diligent about logging my progress, and for books read on my Kobo I will just log at 10% progress intervals based on the LN physical page count; maybe I only ‘legitimately’ read like 11% of the book that first day starting at 89% : >. In the end, I get like 300 points during February. Acceptable.
Anyway, March. It looks like I’m trying to actually score some points for this one, because on the 3rd I start up 戦国の黒百合～ふたなり姫と隷属の少女～ for 12303字. On the 4th I even log 383字 of a script I was reading in preparation to translate it! Honestly I have this perverse urge to log the weirdest things on Tadoku, which is why I’ll definitely log 10 minutes of bad little sister ASMR I didn’t even enjoy just to épater la normaloisie or whatever. Anyway, After this I start up book two of the osananajimi 云々 LN series with a valiant 10%, start legendary eroge Cross Channel and read like 6k/hour due to Romeo’s many references and occasionally otherwise dense prose, some story about how a mangaka was screwed by their publisher or something (I think I saw the manga in mudaebot or whatever and wanted to look it up and shit just happened, but god knows), part of an article about piercings not being accepted at a Japanese school, listened to vtuber and good voice haver polka read a literal story for children and immediately made connections to James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (don’t get me wrong, I only know of it from Scott Alexander’s review and have never bothered to read the original). Also I actually listened to more than the story I guess since she spoke a lot more as it was so short but I didn’t log that because uhh whatever you’re not the master of me!
I returned to the osananajimi story with 20% more for 59.2 points, then Shoui posted a rec and acquisition method for 子猫を拾う、子猫の癖に in The Moe Way’s discord and I ended up reading it pretty quickly. Is there anything better than edgy yuri? Okay, your mom is better specifically in bed, but that’s an unfair comparison. She is truly unbelievably experienced. Anyway, I also read some of あさにゃあ, a cute TS nukige, recorded a whole story arc porn image series for 45.6 points, this random chiebukuro question text because it amused me, 50 whole minutes of Okayun stream, read 20% of お姉ちゃんといっしょに異世界を支配して幸せな家庭を築きましょ？ before concluding the writing was trash and I didn’t want to continue (the Zaka rare drop with malice!), 10% of TRPG before concluding the writing was trash and painfully repetetive… look, it’s a coincidence okay? Anyway, dropped with extreme prejudice. Not feeling like the feelgood moment of osananajimi LN, I picked up 転生王女と天才令嬢の魔法革命, also known as tenten. This one also has bad writing, but it’s mostly in the exposition rather than normal dialogue. Why the writer decided to create a setting where a lot of exposition is practically required despite sucking at it is beyond me, but the other parts of the setting weren’t too bad. The worst thing I subjected to wasn’t even in techno-exposition though, it was this inexplicably redundant pair of lines found on two successive pages:
I’m still mad
I only read 5% of tenten in March, on the 31st — probably to try and keep my position against someone, though in the main contest my 40th place ended up >100 points away from the next person. Maybe I just wanted to hit 1050 points? Maybe it was for a side contest? Could it be I was simply reading it because I wanted to??? Madokami knows.
March was the first contest that admitted listening content, and initially it might have been a little overtuned. While I was a bit annoyed until it got a minor adjustment downward, the truth is that for my own purposes anything that incentivizes listening is probably to my benefit: I very rarely do any of it, and I still only got like 400 minutes logged for this whole year. Sure, there was probably a little more unlogged, but not much. I still wish the site had a UI option to see only a reading leaderboard, but the Tadoku admin and dev io needs more motivation so we’ll see if he ever gets to it.
Anyway, at this point Tadoku has gotten off-contest tracking, and I don’t really slow down that much in April. After hitting 90% on tenten, I don’t quite feel like getting it done and am a little disappoint (but haven’t dropped it with malice!), so I manage to acquire and read 8000字 of the obscure doujinge with known writers 魂々, make a quick patch to fix their miserable scripting, then never read it again. Honestly when I make a patch for something to make it better to read, it’s a bad sign for my reading progress. That’s kind of scary. At least a guy I know actually ended up using it later… So after Kon Kon, I get to Voynich Hotel, which I have imported physicals of. Despite the many cultural references I autistically researched, I make it through volume 1 and 2 from April 13-15, then hit volume 3 and suffered my fear of actually finishing things, ending up even how having just 30 pages of volume 3 read. It wasn’t the easiest reading, but it’s pretty fun and definitely out there. You see why it’s a cult classic — I actually read quite a bit of it in English back in the day, but true to form I didn’t finish then either! Ah well.
I eventually (April 19) do finish off tenten 1, and the last 10% actually makes me feel a bit better about the book as a whole. I immediately start on tenten 2 and by April 23 I’m 60% into it. Unfortunately my feeling-bad-guard activates and since nice characters are in grave danger at this point I stall it and still haven’t read more yet. This volume actually ended up a lot better than vol 1 for the most part, as it focused on characters more than the whole thing about developing magical artifacts that’s half the premise. Since the writer is actually kind of decent at writing this, the quality instantly goes up. Maybe the narration also got a minor upgrade, but who knows. Anyway, I finish 9th in this totally legit user contest for April with 615.3 points.
May. Tadoku constest season again, but now it’s a quirky 14-day one. I start out strong with 120 minutes of Okayun for 48 points, read way too much (17k!) of a Japanese interview, and write a summary for another writer to use in a Fuwanovel article. Though I manage to meme it a bit because technically the damned vague Japanese never says they’re using 2d sprites for the new Ever17 release, just that they’re going to “refine” whatever they did with the crappy 3d sprites for the xbox 360 release. Also, I fucking hate Japanese interview-type stuff. Maybe I’m just not used to the domain, but these motherfuckers barely commit to anything if you really read what they say. Swear to god it drives me nuts.
I try Okayun again but it turns out she’s actually shit at the video game she’s picked this time and I cannot bear to watch longer than 30 minutes. Shoutout to me literally logging 369字 of some amazon description on the 7th; I also read 3 whole chapters of 日本人のための日本語, a Japanese-language Japanese grammar introduction using a modern grammar framework for Japanese that includes such exotic (for traditional Japanese grammar) terms such as na-adjectives and the topic-comment structure. That’s like 29k字. It’s kind of fun but it does do the “wow we Nihonjin so special” thing a bit which is kinda cringe. I’m sure you can find some other language that likes describing things as passively occurring rather than being actively done a lot, nerd! Oh well.
On the 9th I give Sengoku no Kuroyuri another shot for 25k字, mostly because I desire to ejaculate and it’s supposed to have quite a bit of sex. I kind of succeed in finding release eventually, but I also realize that the cold, unironic sadism of the protagonist just doesn’t appeal to me and semidrop it. Maybe I’ll read some more sometime though… On the 10th I pick up the above-average and emotional-fetish-fulfilling 不登校の幼馴染が学校に行く条件は、毎日俺とキスすることだった. I enjoy it but a shocking development later on makes me not quite want to see the end… but that’s later, I only hit 40% during the contest! Also I logged 2980 characters of a rather voluminous tweet thread by famed eroge writer Sca-ぢ. I just wanted to say that. 361 points that month, for 22nd. I only beat the 23rd guy by 1.8 points, which is kind of crazy because I didn’t log on the 14th and he did. I guess the 22nd isn’t really significantly different from 23rd in terms of placement, but he could have sniped me so easily…
I spend the rest of the month reading volume 1 of instant bullet (manga) on the 20th, then nothing but two little net pages.
The next entry is on June 25th, somehow. I’ve decided to start reading Oshirabu, and manage to read like 60k字 before July 1st brings with it the next Tadoku contest. Sometimes the perversity of specifically reading right before or after Tadoku just inspires me. Still, July has the next contest, and I start with getting the true end in Oshirabu on the 1st for a bit, then on the 7th realize Suou Patra is actually broadcasting content I vibe with and get 85 mins / 35 points of listening in. Next I read some chars of single-heroine eroge Aibeya 2, which I had read sporadically before and was in Real Coomer Hours after its less porny moege start. Anyway, I read enough story to get to the porn, coom, then finish (wait, aren’t those the same thing?). 24k字.
After that I pick up the edgy and weird horny adult yuri novel 焦点深度 on July 9th, read to 40% the next day, take a break to finish off different endings of Oshirabu as well as the porn addition (that turns out to have a lot of emotional development to it and seems basically mandatory to have a satisfying ending so it confuses the fuck out of it that this isn’t in the all ages version at all probably) on the 13th, then eventually hit 100% on 焦点深度 on the 18th. I doubt I read all of the remaining 60% the same day, I was just chilling on the log because it doesn’t really matter, does it? Anyway it’s a bit harder to recommend than 子猫を拾う, but it was kind of fun and definitely a little unique. Not very yuri genre, but who needs that? The first lesbian romance I saw was Fucking Åmål (on Swedish public television!), in which one of the girls fucked a guy and realized she didnt really care for it before getting together with the other girl. I was always hardcore, okay.
Anyway, it seems like I didn’t care to read more after finishing 焦点深度, leaving me with 404.6 points for 28th place.
August. No contest means no motivation, but also there’s probably some creeping academic deadline I’m not dealing with that’s killing me inside. On the 13th I pick up ロンリーガールに逆らえない (漫誤) and read 2 volumes, if only to feel something again. Another volume falls on the 16th, but then the next volume I don’t finish because an unpleasant (though interesting) development of the plot occurs and suddenly I can’t bear to see what will happen. Damn, is that three times this year now? I can’t believe I’m letting my own entertainment cuck myself like this. That’s all for August. Damn.
September. Normal length contest, but I’m clearly not trying hard as my first entry is on the 10th with this live2d loli nukige that exhentai gifs couldn’t do justice. However it has 3 h-scenes in a row which shows the writers don’t know how to pace their illustrated pornography, so I bail after like 22k字. At least the intro was entertaining for the most part…
Having gotten beaned by mismanaged coom material, I pick up the interesting old-school lowtech scifi キーリ series. I think these are technically published as LNs, but the anime-style tropeyness is low and while I only read 10%, I kind of liked it and would recommend anyone that finds that description interesting to try them. It’s available wherever TMWs are present. It wasn’t easy, mostly due to longer sentences I think, though not crazy hard either; maybe not for the beginner. It looks like I’m still on life support, as the next entry is me reading 10% of アオハルデビル on the 27th (picked up after seeing it come up in TMW sharing mostly because it had a short, effective title). My 200.7 points still got me to 21st place. Truly the Tadoku has fallen.
October 10th. I read the last of that vjedogonia script I was going to translate and it’s a whole 7k characters. I guess sometimes it pays to log random shit! I also read 16k of the fast-paced, entertaining start of eroge 空のつくりかた, get text hooking working for and quit reading 背徳シレネ after 7.7k on the 21st, then read 2 manga volumes on the 26th. It is very 惜しい that I can’t find more than volume 1 of 夢でフラれてはじまる百合 for free, but I survive by moving to volume one of 世界で一番おっぱいが好き！, which ends up being really meme and god knows how yuri it’ll even be. Probably eventually. Until then girl semiconsensually grope girl boob, I guess.
November. Another 2-week round. I read to 40% of アオハルデビル (it’s actually quite fun — it looks like it will basically be (I think this is kind of spoilers because if you actually hit it blind it’s kind of cool to go wtf, but I can’t really sell it otherwise) :
Anyway I watch Patra (who I have by now realized has become one of the few big vtubers playing actually interesting games rather than the corpo flavor of the month) for some time playing an interesting retro rpg. The same day, I read some of apparently not very pure yurige 早咲きのくろゆり (12k), and dip for the month. 143.3 points gets me 20th. Retvrn! What manner of competition is this! …Okay it was a 14 day one whatever.
December. No Tadoku. You know it’s time to actually read. Early on I pick up 飛び降りる直前の同級生に『×××しよう!』と提案してみた。 I kind of hope they’ll fuck real quick because I want to coom but this doesn’t happen as it turns out this wasnt a nukige book oops. I think I’d class this one as “good anime” in that the insane main character is part of what makes it entertaining, but then it goes pretty hard into darker territory (well, the girl is about to off herself, it’s warranted). Honestly not too bad, happy to have picked it up after some TMW guys reported enjoying it.
But I get to 30% and I realize that I should just read what I really want to read: motherfucking yuri. My roots. I don’t know what exactly brought 私の推しは悪役令嬢 to mind, but apart from having planned to read it for ages based on reputation, I think the anime was also running at the time. December 7th, I hit 10%. December 8th, I take a brief detour because my recently discovered kami 女性実況 Sayaka has a collab out that’s reasonably short for a horror ge. 72 precious listening minutes, 28.8 points. December 10th I hit 20% in wataoshi. and then…
At the end of the year I realized 4k total points this year was close, so I worked a little harder… and 4k I now have. A modest amount, but it does mean like 12 books of modest Japanese size read. To be honest as I realized going through the scores, like 50 of those points are doubled because I couldn’t edit entries and I wanted to enter them to a private contest or some shit like that. So I guess my cope is clearly my untracked input would be enough to hit 4k anyway, and fuck the haters.
I hope I do better in school next year. However have no plans to get more serious about Japanese, because I am an enlightened gigachad and simply don’t need to.
Thanks and thats all nerds.
year score during contests: 2169.1
year score full: 4014.6
[1] Estimated based on 1 tadoku point = 400 characters and a 10k/h reading speed. I actually think I read a bit slower than this most of the time, but it’s actually lower than 30 mins a day naively calculated, so heck it. Of course, this also doesn’t count casual reading of a few lines from someone’s VN screenshot, or whenever someone consults me on translation for a few lines, or when some dude starts playing some VN on stream to show me the “funny moments” with some two-dimensional bishoujo he is particularly fond of. Life is full of surprises, much like your rectum after excessive chili ingestion. Will It Burn? Truly a pertinent question for this age.
[2] Though this one’s very relevant for eroge: I was looking it up in connection with its use in agreements on how to use for example royalty free resources. From what I remember, the legal meaning is generally seen to narrowly protect citizens from entering contracts to do unreasonable or illegal things, but maybe there’s more, I’m not very sure. The more widespread folk meaning would be anything “obscene”, with all the vagueness that term would imply in American law. I’d look it up again, but I don’t think I found a very conclusive answer and besides I’m way too lazy.
meow
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It's partly my fault this time, but hata said today was the deadline and I handed in at 20:49 so really it's his fault COPIUM.
Contains my extended opinion on the F/SN re-tl (not particularly positive, regrettably).
---
「Greetings, fuwans! I hope you're enjoying the influx of new posts we are at last achieving. Not so much of an influx of translation progress this week, regrettably, but we do have one notable release: Aokana Extra2. While this is nominally labeled a "fandisc" focused on Misaki, my understanding is it's fairly long and worth reading for fans of the original. Though Misaki's rabid fanbase may just take any excuse to spend more time with her. One day I will play Aokana and see if she's all she's hyped up to be. Maybe.
Other than that, the Gin'iro project continues to provide good progress and successive partial releases, with Mizuha coming up on the 26th. As with any good capitalist, Bee is neglecting his company to do what brings him self-actualization: translating moege for clout. Let none of this be construed as a detriment to the VN fanbase: he'd be working on some cringe light novels or whatever otherwise. Personally I am currently fulfilling the role of a good _student_ by neglecting my assignments. Very good at that one. Neglected this one until today too, so now Hata gets to meme on me instead. Thank god I put all those caveats in about my own performance when memeing on him earlier.
Now to something more interesting than moege: Fate/Stay Night. When I saw [the post about the retranslation][https://forums.fuwanovel.net/topic/25889-fatestay-night-a-new-translation], I mentally went "wait, is this the translation me and my JOP elitist friends were memeing on like a year ago?" — yes, yes it was. Oh dear. Here's one of the pictures we posted in our session of totally-not-toxic disadulation:
[Image: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/569475300413669376/888691063341060116/E_gQJ1yXoAge1Xg.png?width=776&height=582 (please to god reupload it rather than use Discord as a CDN)]
The problem I've got with the retranslation is clearly visible here: keeping way too much of the original Japanese sentence structure for comfort. Now, there are _some_ places where this may be justified as making it easy to use the direction of the original. Though the translator admitting this is basically [due to it being more work to change it][https://medium.com/@batesfredt/editorial-decision-making-or-translation-is-tricky-and-also-interpretative-97d269c2cf39] sure is an... admission. Then again, F/SN is 3.82 MB, sacrifices will have to be made to ship this decade. But there's way too much of it, and it really can't all be motivated by reasonable choices. Lest this be seen as a perhaps outdated, cherry-picked example, in the very text [the translator chose][https://medium.com/@batesfredt/re-translating-fate-stay-night-98b9cadff967] to exemplify the changes between the (often bad) TakaJun translation and his new translation, there are definite and difficult-to-motivate inelegancies. Consider these two:
俺には見慣れた店、見飽きた景色を、イリヤは目を輝かせて駆けていく。
1: Ilya runs through the familiar scenery with lit up eyes.
2: The stores that were familiar to me, the view that I’d grown tired of, Illya ran through them with sparkling eyes.
We can see that translation 1 has cut out the explicit contrast between how the MC feels about the scenery and how Ilya is treating it. That said we know it's the shopping district from an earlier sentence, so it didn't really lose much from using "scenery". it also uses "lit up eyes", which I have to admit is a bit weird to me. Meanwhile, translation 2 finds a very wordy and unnatural way to near exactly copy the original structure. I have to say, this kind of translation takes little literary effort, bar the pain of your soul escaping your body writing such terrible prose (maybe that last part is just me). There is no bold dedication to preserving the poetry of the original: all I can see is a slavish avoidance of actually writing in the English language. Honestly, translation 1 is better. Which is that one? Mirror Moon's, of course. And unfortunately given what I see in the examples provided, I can't see this translation being anything but a sidegrade. Perhaps the best comparison is Hoshimemo by Insem versus Hoshimemo by Sekai, though TakaJun actually knew Japanese quite well as a native. In the end, they're both bad. The new translation may sometimes achieve higher accuracy, but it loses itself in unmotivated verbiage with depressing frequency.
Now, how would I do this? Let's try to keep the contrast found in the original while using more natural phrasing:
俺には見慣れた店、見飽きた景色を、イリヤは目を輝かせて駆けていく。
The district is nothing new to me, but Illya dashes through the familiar scenery with sparkling eyes.
I'm not entirely thrilled with how long it went, but I guess it's within 3 characters of the new translation KEKW. Meanwhile, we're using a more natural sentence structure, conveying the meaning in different words, and using a fun verb (dash) versus a normie one (run). I actually had a different idea first, but I had to scrap it for context reasons:
Illya dashes through the familiar scenery with sparkling eyes, finding delight in a place I've seen a million times.
...Because the overall passage is about Illya actually faking it, and MC-kun noticing. Life is hard sometimes. I could maybe even have used this one with other changes in the text, but I'd rather not put something so sus as my example translation. Ah well.
Anyway, idk shrug just learn Japanese 4head. Either that or hope the translator hires some talented editor boy to sort out this mess.
Oh, and H2O has reached 69.3% progress. Nice.」
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Since it's not really a serious translation comparison without the Japanese, have these segments that I wrested out of a script collection I found. All commands are removed, so for some of them I'm not quite sure if they were actually contiguous ingame:
Ilya scene
イリヤの願いは、本当に些細なコトだった。
“買い物に連れて行って”
Since Hata has been rip for various personal and emotional reasons this week, he ended up not being able to post the VNTS. I, however, was not so encumbered, so I wrote my commentary Monday night. Rather than lose it to time entirely, I'll post it here. No, I'm not doing the formatting. You can have the vnts data if you must though. I'll throw in bolded tags for the new stuff but no headings for you! This is a low effort post.
「Hello everyone. I am again writing this on Monday so that Hata can delay it to Friday or so purely on his _own_. Though given how often I was late when I did this solo, it's very hard for me to blame him.
I'm doing weirdly okay today, maybe because I turned in an assignment on time yesterday that I half thought I was going to let myself miss the hard deadline on. It really is "let myself", to be honest. Thankfully I have the faculties required to just knock stuff out like a god when I need to. And I suppose I can't wax nostalgic about the period of my life when I had such high baseline anxiety from GERD and shit that I actually did all my assignments early, because, uh, I wanted them done in case I died or had to go to the hospital or some shit. Not particularly logical, anxiety thinking. Anyway, visual novels.
This week feels a bit slow. We do have one release in Maid for Loving You, but I have to admit I cannot muster any enthusiasm for it. Though I didn't exactly hate Azarashi Soft's work on Aibeya 2, even as I have it stalled after getting to the more porny part of the thing. That said, who gives a crap about maids? Give me the osananajimi variant of this setting! ...Or don't, Aibeya 2 is osananajimi too and I didn't finish that. Look I just like childhood friends okay. I may have [a bit of a complex][https://disearnestlydisearnest.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/幼馴染の居ないヴァルパージス炎/]. At least 10% of my brain is convinced our fateful reunion is just around the corner. The rest of my brain is engaged in forcefully suppressing the NTR感 of thinking of her with someone else. This is the only way I can understand NTR bois, actually. It scares me. Why did I start on this topic? Fuck. Anyway, I do like the single heroine game concept though. It's cozy.
It looks like this will be a December without angels yet again, if anyone remembers the 4chan ritualposter — but perhaps next December will not be so. Yup, someone's started up a project for Leaf's Tenshi no Inai 12-Gatsu. Which they're calling "[December when there is no angel][https://mercurialtapestry.net/2022/11/27/december-when-there-is-no-angel-translation-announcement/]" which sounds kinda garbo in English to me so I hope they think of something better. On the other hand the rest of the attitude on display in the post seems promising enough, so hey. I wish them luck. For some reason I thought this was just some generic moege, but it looks like it's actually a messy drama or something now that I actually look at the description on vndb. The EGS median is at 78, so it's not too badly rated by our Nipponese brethren.
Sona-Nyl is yet again showing minor signs of progress. One day it will actually be out. Probably. Imagine getting a translation by one of the finest writers on the scene and just slowrolling it to all hell. Ah well.
JAST Blue announced a new upcoming title: [Sorcerer's Choice: Angel or Demon][https://vndb.org/v21661] (_Mahoutsukai to Tenshi to Akuma_). I'd say something about it but even their [official promo page][https://jast.blue/detail/sorcerers-choice-angel-or-demon] has very little content, so I'll just say have fun BL squad. Where Lamento though?
Mahoyo is releasing 8 December. This is not a drill. It's going to be annoying to emulate it to play it, though. Maybe when I actually get to it I'll be be-jobbed, rich, and thus suitably be-consoled. I remember an old semi-shitpost podcast I did with the BOYS about [all the different mahoyo fan translations][https://forums.fuwanovel.net/topic/22460-mahoyo-translation-overview-podcast-w-zakas-mutts/] that are now probably going to be irrelevant. What a time.
While not listed on VNTS, Umikara is at 14/138 scripts done as per the translator's Discord. Hope KKHimawari has been having fun.
Oh, and Akagoei 1 is [getting a full re-edit][https://daybreaktl.wordpress.com/2022/11/23/november-update/] by one of the people on the team it seems. It's going to be released together with Akagoei 2, which might take some time, but is still worth thinking about if you were going to try it and have the needed patience. I wonder if the shape of any of my lines will be left in there by the end of it; I've helped Bee a few times when he was having a hard time getting things right. Which is actually a way of contributing I've settled on for a few projects (really just one right now): I'm a lazy fuck, but tackling a few difficult lines every once in a while isn't so bad. Not to mention giving general style advice, of course. It's probably made me a slightly less spicy person when it comes to translation criticism, to be honest. While I still will meme on people that are clearly not trying, or leaning on the ol' technological 'wonders' that DeepL and Google provide, it's different when you're on the team. Though I've only joined groups with at least some good feels to begin with, so who knows? I suppose it is better that I remain blissfully unaware, so that the implacable force of my scorn remains at a manageable level. Lives may be at stake.」
Original: https://watanabefuckin.fanbox.cc/posts/4653898
Watanabe Ryouichi is the idiosyncratic writer of several well-known visual novels like the -kuru series, parts of Aokana, and many others, but did you know that he also has a fanbox where he just writes random stuff? I was strangely inspired by this umbrella story when I read it this morning, so here’s a translation. Let us hope I managed to capture at least some of his style. Or at least supplanted it with another fun style. Either works for me COPIUM.
This kind of seating arrangement seems more common on Japanese commuter trains specifically.
Why does this umbrella haunt me?
By Watanabe Ryouichi
I boarded a mostly empty train.
Sitting down at one edge of a sofa seat with my back to the window, I noticed a cheap vinyl umbrella hanging from the handrail at the other edge.
Someone had to have forgotten it there.
Or was I wrong? It looked very worn. The usual transparent vinyl had been blackened throughout, and at the edges muddy water pooled. Was someone trying to make a larva breeding ground? I had to wonder.
It felt like some new breed of flesh-eating maggot could jump out of it, hissing, at any second…
…And it was occupying the seat right next to me.
It was one heck of an umbrella. You had to wonder at the mental state of whoever had used it hard enough to leave it in this state. Still, it wasn’t my umbrella. —In an instant, my curiosity waned.
As I was about to get off the train, an old lady called out to me:
“Hey, hey you! You forgot your umbrella!”
The doors were about to close again. I had to get off!
“O-Oh yeah,” I said, hastily picking up the umbrella.
The old lady beamed magnificently at me. “Good that I told you!” she said.
I didn’t want to wipe that smile off her face, so in the end, I got off the train with the mystery umbrella in the crook of my arm.
…What am I supposed to do with this thing?
I suppose I could just hand it to the staff at the ticket gate, but considering how beat up it was, they’d probably think I was asking them to throw it away rather than genuinely turning in a lost item.
“Does this guy think we’re a landfill?!” they might think, and I wouldn’t blame them.
So in the end, I went through the ticket gate without speaking up.
—I’d stolen the umbrella!
Yeah, I thought it must have been thrown away deliberately. But that was just my opinion: perhaps its worn-out state was a sign of love, not neglect?
And what was I supposed to do with it now?
In the end, I got home without reaching a decision. One year later, it’s still with me.
—Seriously, what am I supposed to do with it?
If only I’d had the strength to tell that old lady it wasn’t my umbrella back then…
For any fan translators unfamiliar with the jargon: source language/text = language/text being translated from target language/text = language/text being translated into
While writing sufficiently well in your target language is important to ensure both that the finished product is a smooth read and that no errors occur because of you being misinterpreted by your editor or audience, it’s all for nothing if you didn’t interpret your source correctly in the first place.
Reading a source text without making errors can be surprisingly difficult even with a decent grasp of both your source and target language. Certainly most fan translators, and more professional translators than I’d like, are lacking in at least one of those two areas: personally, I am objectively significantly worse at Japanese than the average native Japanese high schooler¹.
There are more ways than one to avoid mistranslations, and often you can compensate for lacking in skill by being more cautious while reading the source text. Personally, I like to focus on two basic principles: always trying to detect possible gaps in your knowledge, and always considering whether your translation actually makes sense.
Does It Make Sense?
Bar things that are written specifically to evoke surrealism, writers usually try to avoid things that obviously make no sense. This is a pretty general principle and editors and proofreaders can both use it even if the translator does not, so it’s always a bit strange when I see some weird-ass obviously illogical mistranslation pop up. Theoretically QA/proofreading is extra powerful in this regard for games, as they will usually play the game as they work, so they can spot backgrounds or character movements contradicting the text too. For a subtle example of this, have something from a translation I love to hate on, Seabed:
Now when I saw this ingame it made no sense at all. Why would it be darker after you turned on the light? Part of this is probably just questionable doujinge graphical accuracy (and maybe needing the emphasize the light / mimicking how it would actually look as your eyes adjusted), but I would still make a note on this line were I QAing this². Now the Steam release of Seabed happens to let you switch to Japanese…
壁のスイッチを押して、ナツメ球だけをつける。
I flipped the switch on the wall, turning on just the nightlight (ナツメ球）.
Well, that makes a lot more sense. The second background was probably going for an adjustment effect where everything but the light looked darker, but it wasn’t showing a bright light. Well, that or background 1 was a sort of generic movie-darkness-but-not-really kind of deal. The point is, we have a solution to the puzzle.
If your translation is contradicted by other parts of the game, whether it be the situation the characters are in, the lines before it or after (painfully common), or something else, you should look at those line extra damn hard. Writers do sometimes make mistakes, but it’s probably you. If you know someone with higher Japanese ability that can help check your translation of the line, ask them (make sure to give sufficient context if at all possible. I can’t believe how many people seem constitutionally unable to do this, though the worst offenders are learners rather than translators). Until the line makes sense or you’re confident it’s not supposed to, I recommend leaving the line/section blank or at least leaving a strongly worded note to come back to it later.
Always Be Suspicious
When I was still a high school kid, a freelance literary translator did a presentation at our school³. One thing she said really stuck with me: the principle of always keeping a careful eye out for anything that might not mean what you think it means.
The example she used was of a translator that had managed to get toy shaped like a dog from a lady walking her toy poodle, a small poodle breed, in English — leading to a rather surreal mental image⁴. I suspect this line wasn’t very important, but that’s not always going to be the case, and this kind of mistake is always an embarrassment.
One key skill to avoid that embarrassment is to grow an intuitive sense of what you don’t actually know — if you’ve hung out in some environments, you might actually already have gotten a slice of this with your English, or another language you know well. For example, did you know that strictly speaking bombastic is only to be used for things that are flashy but have little substance? I myself find myself googling words I only sort of know sometimes (…usually after unwisely pressing the enter key in some chat. At least I edit myself quick!). It doesn’t always go well. Ask me about the time I subtly misused reticent sometime… or don’t, actually. A soul can only take so much.
Either way, that same nagging feeling — that maybe you don’t actually know this — can be a valuable ally to maintain the proper level of suspicion when translating. You’re looking for when the structure isn’t quite like what you’ve seen before, or when you’re thinking you can figure out the meaning of something from its parts — look up とてもじゃないが for a real mindfuck of a phrase. And as above, you’re also looking for things that don’t make sense.
Always be suspicious of things that don’t make sense
Showing the interlinked nature of all your guards against mistranslation, the earlier example with the nightlight might also have been prevented by being suspicious. If it was a translation-side error, going deeper than a cursory google images search might have helped get it right — looking at the page, you’d think to yourself: do I really know this is just a normal lightbulb? Looking at ナツメ fruits they look kind of red, too. I’d better look further…
More examples
I was going to review Seabed for Fuwanovel, which is part of the reason why I took a lot of screens going through it. It fell through because I simply could not complete it: my examination had turned me hypercritical and practically every line bothered me — mostly for clumsy flow rather than translation oddities, though there were more of those too. But hey, I got some pictures for this post for all the trouble. Anyway, have another example:
Okay, so this doesn’t make sense. How are you seeing things in pitch black darkness? Let’s look at the Japanese:
すんなりと入国を済ませて空港を出ると見通しの悪い夜ではあったが、コンクリの壁の落書きや広めの道路、湿った空気で異国だと直ぐに分かる。
見通しの悪い isn’t pitch black, it’s just the dark of the night making it hard to see. Now it makes sense that you can see the graffiti again, nice. It’s possible this was some kind of botched adaptation due to the background being solid black, but I don’t buy it.
For my last example, lets use this line from 新説魔法少女 (Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo), an SRPG/VN hybrid with an ensemble cast of Japanese students, mostly in middle school. Moka is a first-year high school student who used to be in the swimming club last year. Before she graduated she was in the same club as Nagato, who is being discussed here due to her habit of not showing up for things (she still gets good results academically, and is also very strong athletically).
悪化してたか…… 試験だとか総体だとか 大事な時にサボる癖は治したほうがいいよ。
Huh, I guess it’s gotten worse… She should really fix her habit of skipping important events like tests and… 総体?
I was actually just reading this right now, and at first it didn’t make sense, or at least sounded extremely strained, with any of the definitions of 総体 in edict⁵. So I checked kenkyuusha (shin waei daijiten) and a J-J dictionary and they still had nothing illuminating. Now I was starting to think it could be some of my more unlikely interpretations. I checked out そうたい without the kanji to see if it might be using the wrong kanji; 相対 seemed more plausible in the sentence, but I was still not feeling it; my Japanese ability was telling me it wouldn’t look like that grammatically and the interpretation felt strained. My intuition told me that 総体 would be an event somewhat similar to a 試験, maybe sports related given who the speaker was. So I googled 総体 and the second result is a Japanese Wikipedia disambiguation page.
全国高等学校総合体育大会の略称の一つ。高校総体、インターハイ、インハイも同義。 An abbreviation of the Interscholastic Athletic Meet. Synonymous with [various katakana words on the theme of “inter-high”]. Well, that confirms my suspicions. It’s some kind of sporting event. This definiton actually specifically mentions high school events, but there’s nothing saying you can’t have them in middle school.
This interpretation makes sense; a swimming club member would want gifted other club members to be at their competitions. Even if I didn’t use that principle, suspicion could also have saved me and made me actually google the word. But Japanese knowledge also helped me: Japanese often shortens longer terms into a word using some of the term’s kanji; for example 自動販売機 becomes the probably more familiar 自販機, and I knew to suspect this. In the end, the more Japanese you know, the less errors you’ll catch with these methods… but remember, kids: a totally radical book once said that pride comes before a fall. It had a point⁶.
To tie this up, I think my soul has recovered from the baring some time ago, so let me tell you of another English-related fuckup: for the longest time I used to think “craven” was related to “craving”, and none of the times I’d read it had disabused me of this notion. I then saw it used in the Tokyo Babel translation in a way that was clearly incompatible with craving anything, so I looked it up… and was enlightened. It was a sad moment, because at the back of my mind I knew I’d misread it like 10 times by now. With that said, I kinda blame the English language for this one. That, and not having dictionary lookup just by hovering over the word. Man, the browser addons we have these days are pretty dang good...
Footnotes
¹ The JLPT N1, well known for not being particularly indicative of ability but seen as a decent anchoring point nevertheless, is apparently supposed to be easily passable to any student that has finished Japanese high school. I originally wrote most of this essay in ~2017, when I didn’t think I would pass it — I now think I have a decent chance, with pass/fail mostly down to listening ability (not very relevant for text translation) and if a lot of media-obscure grammar points I don’t know happen to show up. I’m still much worse than a Japanese high schooler, though — you’ll have to believe me on this one.
² It’s hard to know where exactly this went wrong, and it’s possible only QA could have saved it from what could be both a reasonable editing decision or a translation oversight. Maybe the translator used google images and saw the bulbs looked more or less like normal bulbs and just went with that; ナツメ球 is in edict, but edict is unreliable and a professional translator might understandably avoid it (I wouldn’t – it has better coverage on a lot of random more contemporary/obscure stuff, though I if I were truly high effort I would probably get access to more updated online daijirin/shinwaei dictionaries).
³ Among other language pairs she was a JP->SE translator I believe, but I can’t remember if she did it firsthand or second. I also remember the title of one book she worked on, Shine, a localized title she didn’t pick or particularly like and which seems to be entirely impossible for me to find anywhere. I also don’t know if she was entirely a literary tl, it’s not like those get paid a lot, though I guess probably more than VN translators (let it be known that the muffled crying of our industry professionals can be heard in the background of this sentence).
⁴ It’s possible she was actually just holding it or something and I’m misremembering, but this way the example has more of the dimensions I want to discuss in this post.
⁵ At the time, Translation Aggregator with JParser and mecab was my first-line lookup choice. These days I have to look things up infrequently enough that a browser addon that has shinmeikai and shin eiwa daijiten 5th ed EPWING dictionary lookup in addition to JMdict (basically fancy non-boomer edict) serves my needs better. Those did not help me here, though.
⁶ In keeping with the principles of this post, I ended up checking out the origin of the proverb. The passage used to read “a totally radical guy once said…,” since I was assuming it had been directly said by Jesus (also, it was funnier that way). At least it really was from the Bible! Though the fall implied is supposed to be “calamitous”, apparently, so maybe we’re using it a bit lightly here. Then again, a bad enough mistranslation really could cause a disaster… though if you’re translating the nuke launch protocol, I really hope to whatever deity will still give me the time of day that you actually know what you’re doing. The rest of you, feel free to muddle along doing your best like us other mortals.
View the full article
For any fan translators unfamiliar with the jargon: source language/text = language/text being translated from target language/text = language/text being translated into
While writing sufficiently well in your target language is important to ensure both that the finished product is a smooth read and that no errors occur because of you being misinterpreted by your editor or audience, it’s all for nothing if you didn’t interpret your source correctly in the first place.
Reading a source text without making errors can be surprisingly difficult even with a decent grasp of both your source and target language. Certainly most fan translators, and more professional translators than I’d like, are lacking in at least one of those two areas: personally, I am objectively significantly worse at Japanese than the average native Japanese high schooler¹.
There are more ways than one to avoid mistranslations, and often you can compensate for lacking in skill by being more cautious while reading the source text. Personally, I like to focus on two basic principles: always trying to detect possible gaps in your knowledge, and always considering whether your translation actually makes sense.
Does It Make Sense?
Bar things that are written specifically to evoke surrealism, writers usually try to avoid things that obviously make no sense. This is a pretty general principle and editors and proofreaders can both use it even if the translator does not, so it’s always a bit strange when I see some weird-ass obviously illogical mistranslation pop up. Theoretically QA/proofreading is extra powerful in this regard for games, as they will usually play the game as they work, so they can spot backgrounds or character movements contradicting the text too. For a subtle example of this, have something from a translation I love to hate on, Seabed:
Now when I saw this ingame it made no sense at all. Why would it be darker after you turned on the light? Part of this is probably just questionable doujinge graphical accuracy (and maybe needing the emphasize the light / mimicking how it would actually look as your eyes adjusted), but I would still make a note on this line were I QAing this². Now the Steam release of Seabed happens to let you switch to Japanese…
壁のスイッチを押して、ナツメ球だけをつける。
I flipped the switch on the wall, turning on just the nightlight (ナツメ球）.
Well, that makes a lot more sense. The second background was probably going for an adjustment effect where everything but the light looked darker, but it wasn’t showing a bright light. Well, that or background 1 was a sort of generic movie-darkness-but-not-really kind of deal. The point is, we have a solution to the puzzle.
If your translation is contradicted by other parts of the game, whether it be the situation the characters are in, the lines before it or after (painfully common), or something else, you should look at those line extra damn hard. Writers do sometimes make mistakes, but it’s probably you. If you know someone with higher Japanese ability that can help check your translation of the line, ask them (make sure to give sufficient context if at all possible. I can’t believe how many people seem constitutionally unable to do this, though the worst offenders are learners rather than translators). Until the line makes sense or you’re confident it’s not supposed to, I recommend leaving the line/section blank or at least leaving a strongly worded note to come back to it later.
Always Be Suspicious
When I was still a high school kid, a freelance literary translator did a presentation at our school³. One thing she said really stuck with me: the principle of always keeping a careful eye out for anything that might not mean what you think it means.
The example she used was of a translator that had managed to get toy shaped like a dog from a lady walking her toy poodle, a small poodle breed, in English — leading to a rather surreal mental image⁴. I suspect this line wasn’t very important, but that’s not always going to be the case, and this kind of mistake is always an embarrassment.
One key skill to avoid that embarrassment is to grow an intuitive sense of what you don’t actually know — if you’ve hung out in some environments, you might actually already have gotten a slice of this with your English, or another language you know well. For example, did you know that strictly speaking bombastic is only to be used for things that are flashy but have little substance? I myself find myself googling words I only sort of know sometimes (…usually after unwisely pressing the enter key in some chat. At least I edit myself quick!). It doesn’t always go well. Ask me about the time I subtly misused reticent sometime… or don’t, actually. A soul can only take so much.
Either way, that same nagging feeling — that maybe you don’t actually know this — can be a valuable ally to maintain the proper level of suspicion when translating. You’re looking for when the structure isn’t quite like what you’ve seen before, or when you’re thinking you can figure out the meaning of something from its parts — look up とてもじゃないが for a real mindfuck of a phrase. And as above, you’re also looking for things that don’t make sense.
Always be suspicious of things that don’t make sense
Showing the interlinked nature of all your guards against mistranslation, the earlier example with the nightlight might also have been prevented by being suspicious. If it was a translation-side error, going deeper than a cursory google images search might have helped get it right — looking at the page, you’d think to yourself: do I really know this is just a normal lightbulb? Looking at ナツメ fruits they look kind of red, too. I’d better look further…
More examples
I was going to review Seabed for Fuwanovel, which is part of the reason why I took a lot of screens going through it. It fell through because I simply could not complete it: my examination had turned me hypercritical and practically every line bothered me — mostly for clumsy flow rather than translation oddities, though there were more of those too. But hey, I got some pictures for this post for all the trouble. Anyway, have another example:
Okay, so this doesn’t make sense. How are you seeing things in pitch black darkness? Let’s look at the Japanese:
すんなりと入国を済ませて空港を出ると見通しの悪い夜ではあったが、コンクリの壁の落書きや広めの道路、湿った空気で異国だと直ぐに分かる。
見通しの悪い isn’t pitch black, it’s just the dark of the night making it hard to see. Now it makes sense that you can see the graffiti again, nice. It’s possible this was some kind of botched adaptation due to the background being solid black, but I don’t buy it.
For my last example, lets use this line from 新説魔法少女 (Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo), an SRPG/VN hybrid with an ensemble cast of Japanese students, mostly in middle school. Moka is a first-year high school student who used to be in the swimming club last year. Before she graduated she was in the same club as Nagato, who is being discussed here due to her habit of not showing up for things (she still gets good results academically, and is also very strong athletically).
悪化してたか…… 試験だとか総体だとか 大事な時にサボる癖は治したほうがいいよ。
Huh, I guess it’s gotten worse… She should really fix her habit of skipping important events like tests and… 総体?
I was actually just reading this right now, and at first it didn’t make sense, or at least sounded extremely strained, with any of the definitions of 総体 in edict⁵. So I checked kenkyuusha (shin waei daijiten) and a J-J dictionary and they still had nothing illuminating. Now I was starting to think it could be some of my more unlikely interpretations. I checked out そうたい without the kanji to see if it might be using the wrong kanji; 相対 seemed more plausible in the sentence, but I was still not feeling it; my Japanese ability was telling me it wouldn’t look like that grammatically and the interpretation felt strained. My intuition told me that 総体 would be an event somewhat similar to a 試験, maybe sports related given who the speaker was. So I googled 総体 and the second result is a Japanese Wikipedia disambiguation page.
全国高等学校総合体育大会の略称の一つ。高校総体、インターハイ、インハイも同義。 An abbreviation of the Interscholastic Athletic Meet. Synonymous with [various katakana words on the theme of “inter-high”]. Well, that confirms my suspicions. It’s some kind of sporting event. This definiton actually specifically mentions high school events, but there’s nothing saying you can’t have them in middle school.
This interpretation makes sense; a swimming club member would want gifted other club members to be at their competitions. Even if I didn’t use that principle, suspicion could also have saved me and made me actually google the word. But Japanese knowledge also helped me: Japanese often shortens longer terms into a word using some of the term’s kanji; for example 自動販売機 becomes the probably more familiar 自販機, and I knew to suspect this. In the end, the more Japanese you know, the less errors you’ll catch with these methods… but remember, kids: a totally radical book once said that pride comes before a fall. It had a point⁶.
To tie this up, I think my soul has recovered from the baring some time ago, so let me tell you of another English-related fuckup: for the longest time I used to think “craven” was related to “craving”, and none of the times I’d read it had disabused me of this notion. I then saw it used in the Tokyo Babel translation in a way that was clearly incompatible with craving anything, so I looked it up… and was enlightened. It was a sad moment, because at the back of my mind I knew I’d misread it like 10 times by now. With that said, I kinda blame the English language for this one. That, and not having dictionary lookup just by hovering over the word. Man, the browser addons we have these days are pretty dang good...
Footnotes
¹ The JLPT N1, well known for not being particularly indicative of ability but seen as a decent anchoring point nevertheless, is apparently supposed to be easily passable to any student that has finished Japanese high school. I originally wrote most of this essay in ~2017, when I didn’t think I would pass it — I now think I have a decent chance, with pass/fail mostly down to listening ability (not very relevant for text translation) and if a lot of media-obscure grammar points I don’t know happen to show up. I’m still much worse than a Japanese high schooler, though — you’ll have to believe me on this one.
² It’s hard to know where exactly this went wrong, and it’s possible only QA could have saved it from what could be both a reasonable editing decision or a translation oversight. Maybe the translator used google images and saw the bulbs looked more or less like normal bulbs and just went with that; ナツメ球 is in edict, but edict is unreliable and a professional translator might understandably avoid it (I wouldn’t – it has better coverage on a lot of random more contemporary/obscure stuff, though I if I were truly high effort I would probably get access to more updated online daijirin/shinwaei dictionaries).
³ Among other language pairs she was a JP->SE translator I believe, but I can’t remember if she did it firsthand or second. I also remember the title of one book she worked on, Shine, a localized title she didn’t pick or particularly like and which seems to be entirely impossible for me to find anywhere. I also don’t know if she was entirely a literary tl, it’s not like those get paid a lot, though I guess probably more than VN translators (let it be known that the muffled crying of our industry professionals can be heard in the background of this sentence).
⁴ It’s possible she was actually just holding it or something and I’m misremembering, but this way the example has more of the dimensions I want to discuss in this post.
⁵ At the time, Translation Aggregator with JParser and mecab was my first-line lookup choice. These days I have to look things up infrequently enough that a browser addon that has shinmeikai and shin eiwa daijiten 5th ed EPWING dictionary lookup in addition to JMdict (basically fancy non-boomer edict) serves my needs better. Those did not help me here, though.
⁶ In keeping with the principles of this post, I ended up checking out the origin of the proverb. The passage used to read “a totally radical guy once said…,” since I was assuming it had been directly said by Jesus (also, it was funnier that way). At least it really was from the Bible! Though the fall implied is supposed to be “calamitous”, apparently, so maybe we’re using it a bit lightly here. Then again, a bad enough mistranslation really could cause a disaster… though if you’re translating the nuke launch protocol, I really hope to whatever deity will still give me the time of day that you actually know what you’re doing. The rest of you, feel free to muddle along doing your best like us other mortals.
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To procrastinate doing anything productive, I have decided to write a summary of what I did last year.
GENERAL
During the early parts — months really — of the year I was kind of reeling from having had a very frightening GERD — acid reflux — flareup. It’s fairly hard to tell the symptoms from a heart attack, and paranoia about the whole deal caused anxiety issues. In the end it receded… when I started eating less and barely eating at all when I was not very hungry. Would’ve been nice to have tried that earlier. GERD and anxiety seem to feed into each other in weird and fucky ways and the literature associating them interests me because I have to wonder if GERD might actually be the egg and not the chicken (the egg came first[1]).
To this day I sort of have a trigger-adjacent thing for hearing ~120bpm music with a steady beat — disco speed — where my heart will like go along with it like what disco music does to you and that will trigger warning signals from somewhere and seriously what the fuck? It’s slowly getting better though, idk.
Relatedly, I’ve discovered that my issues with various chest skin pains and neck pains are all due to me having absolutely awful ergonomics for any position I can take while using my computer in bed, and I don’t like using it anywhere else, thus I’m fucked. No longer worried about the various pains, but very annoyed by them.
I’ve gotten a new wider bed, a data plan for my smartphone, and at the end of the year, a new smartphone that doesn’t suck massive dick (poco x3 pro). I also got my first taste of imported Japanese manga, which has been pretty pleasant compared to scans.
I’ve slightly re-intensified my guitar playing habit, and I don’t occasionally hate myself for not playing enough to ever play well any more. Maybe one day I’ll actually record that one tune I don’t have a good recording of yet. I’ve also started using a guitar with lower action since the one I was always using before has VERY high action and is hard as fuck to play.
I’ve also started enjoying minecraft speedrun streams (RSG 16.1, anything Elysaku does). This started out as me watching SmallAnt and him doing mc speedruns, after which I branched out to Couriway watching his 1k seeds challenge as well as various other lesser known but more cracked runners like crookst. Overall I’ve branched out a bit from mostly watching hearthstone streams.
MEDIA
In January I finished watching the FFVI translation comparison by Clyde Mandelin / tomato, which I had started watching the month before. I watched the entirety of every video and counted the Japanese lines read for Tadoku[3] purposes using the Microsoft calculator as a makeshift clicker. I guess I’ve sort of finished a playthrough of the game now Kappa. At this point I was really fucked and couldn’t make myself read a vn due to anxiety issues or neck muscle posture issues or both but I could watch a video, or something. This ended up being most of my tadoku contribution for the month, which was certainly weird. I do recommend the series if you can read Japanese, it’s interesting. Not sure how it’s like to watch as a pleb, maybe it’s still cool? Lots of plebs do like mato’s site. Also I’m sorry, the whole JOP bit I’m doing will unfortunately not improve much as I carry on writing. You have been warned, &c.
Pre-edit opening screen. Note “radiating humming” instead of “radiating hum” or whatever and the lack of commas and stuff.The first VN I completed in 2021, in February, was Digital Seclusion, a rather doujin EVN created by a member of a forum I still haunt, ghostlike: Fuwanovel. I liked it, but thought the prose could use about five or so editing passes, besides needing another proofreading pass. I ended up doing my usual bit where I comment that the writing is all cringe and needs an editor and I expect no response, but instead the writer, Zalor (whom I had some rapport with, admittedly) said that it would be helpful if I could proofread/edit — so I did, through the medium of screenshots and text in his discord DMs.
And that’s the first screen done.In the end while I think I helped improve the text a decent bit, it was also clearly a bit of an auteur work with a distinct (if perhaps not optimal) voice and I didn’t push too hard for changes, opting to just suggest stuff (and a lot of suggestions there were). Thus while I allowed myself to be named in the credits in the end, and it’s certainly nice to be in the credits of a cool VN, I always have mixed emotions about it — maybe someone will discover my name in there one day and think it’s representative of my writing abilities? I have the dumbest fears. Sometimes I try to imagine what gender dysphoria would be like and apparently “someone has the wrong opinion about you” is a vague match so then I imagine being in a room and knowing someone incorrectly thinks I’m a trash writer or translator and it’s actually extremely uncomfortable where the fuck am I going with this. I mean I think there’s even a disclaimer in the credits too. Really this will never be a real problem for me.
Kinda waifu nglI started reading 12riven in February (also read in March and April). I didn’t finish, as is my stalling wont, but I got some endings and got some distance into the true route. I found it very enjoyable, and the pacing nice and tight most of the time, but I do worry about whether it can tie it all together. Also the basic mechanism of the in-universe psionic powers is, I must admit, pretty dumb. It’s given to you in a scientific manner but it basically precludes a materialistic outlook. I mean R11 has this too I guess but it’s more blatantly cringe in this. Anyway if you can go along with the dumb the rest is pretty entertaining. EOPs are missing out! They’ll probably remain missing out even if it ever gets translated (rip lemnisca tl) because Uchikoshi is a fucking memelord and loves adding plot relevant puns all over the place. It’s going to be hard to get all of them to the level of the original, but who knows?
Definitely a shimaisou lineI also tried out Shimaisou 2 (1 is a cool dark yuri utsuge) for a few hundred lines and then stalled it because idk. I tried continuing my long stalled playthrough of zanane but the common route kept on being boring and unfunny and very ドM when I am ドS so I stalled it again after a few thousand lines. I might never come back.
Nothing strange going on here at allIn April I read a chapter and a bit of the slow-start fucked up yuri yandere mystery-ish game Hitofuta. I then stalled it, though it was definitely an interesting experience after the initial SoL of like 1000 lines was past. Ask me for a download if you want, there’s some fuckery where non-jp IPs can’t access the download page for it (but it’s free doe!).
I also started Sutekano which was kind of interesting, partly picking it up because so many people seemed to hate it for whatever reason, and stalled it after a bit.
yeah right JinI also tried Asanyaa, which made me realize I found TS content strangely enticing. Going to chalk it up to autogynephilia or whatever just being a normal thing in a subset of non-trans men tbh I think Ozy did a survey and it showed something similar ignore selection effects. Anyway I stalled it after the first h scene. Apparently it’s a moege not a nukige somehow? Idk man. Anyway, when’s the glorious transhumanist future with effortless bodyswaps?
The second VN I completed – also in April – was Tsukiyo ni Otome wa Tegami wo Nurasu, which is a horny-ish spooky mystery yuri game that actually sort of plays into a “predatory lesbians” meme, though not in a way that really bothered me. Not that things bother me in general. It’s weird but was fun enough to read. It would be an intresting translation challenge, as you’d want to write in like 7 different styles for the various letters at the start!
Apparently it was created by two het women who flatly deny any homosexuality whatsoever in the afterword-y extras. Also, those same women created a doujin otome game called Toki-Hako (toki-bako? who knows…) that has an insanely high rating on EGS and a rave review, but there are like 3 votes total so who knows.
May saw me playing Makoto Möbius (given the メ I reject the vndb romanization, but not with enough fervor to actually change it). It’s my first CHARON game, and I guess it does interest me in other games by the writer but not massively so. It’s a neat plot with the CHARON signature menhera girls and some other funky plot twists included. That said you can just up and miss endings that really matter to the plot with ease, even after having gotten the true ending, so it’s a good thing I checked a guide. Bad design imo. I played in Japanese but to my understanding there is a translation, on whose quality I cannot comment other than my usual prior[2] of translations being bad.
I’m pretty sure I took this screen purely because of its amusing content out of contextI also started on Aibeya 2 in May because I was testing it to see if it would hook or something because someone was having trouble with it, and caprice directed me to read it for a bit because the heroine was pretty heckin kwi. I read until it started to turn from moege to probable nukige in regards to h-scene density and decided I was done with it. For once, it’s more dropped than stalled… though you never know!
And for my last May ge, I read most of Sakyuseka after a friend recommended it as being not quite the nukige it looked like, and in fact a pretty good plotge with a romantic core (that just happened to have a lot of porn you could skip if you wanted, I guess.) I got until the best part of the game according to said friend and stalled it because LOOK I DO NOT NEED A REASON IT WILL HAPPEN. Anyway, recommend I checking it out, it’s cool and there’s some decent porn too if you’re into that. Very high production values for a doujinge.
In June all I did on the VN front was a read of a few hundred lines of Kira Kira, since it was being used to demo the japanese VN streaming site OOParts and could be tried for free. I concluded that I liked Setoguchi’s writing style and also that it wasn’t something incompatible with English or anything, just would take a decent writer with enough time to work on their wording enough, so basically any translation of his works is likely to be a failure in this industry. As shown by the Musicus TL getting disowned by most JOPs, but I digress. Really when he’s not doing a stream-of-consciousness thing (which I didnt see in kira kira but have seen in Carnival screenshots) he’s just doing moderately complex sentences with good imagery and effective prose. There’s no magic nipponese essence of whatever he’s just kind of good! It’s totally doable! Urobuchi is the same except maybe when he’s doing Chinese kanji autism shit! I totally know this 100% from having read like 200 lines. Anyway. Pity the actual Kira Kira tl out there is much worse still than even the Musicus tl, which is, I understand, merely not all that well written in comparison to the original.
In July I played the bit-more-spice-than-usual yuri VN Tsuyuchiru Letter. It has really nice sprite direction and it fairly easy to read, so do read it in Japanese if you wish as a beginner. The spicier elements do bring enough excitement and delicious suffering to the table to make it an enjoyable read, though perhaps the most interesting characters are the ones they’re clearly hoping to include in a sequel (the game folder is even called “tsuyuchuri1” but they haven’t announced number 2 yet ree). The novel ends somewhat conclusively, but has sequel hooks for other couples, so if you hate even the sequel hook thing you might want to avoid the title.
The translation by Meru should be mostly solid, I trust Meru to not suck (but apparently she wasn’t looking at the sprite direction when translating, not having been given the actual script, so it’s possible some of that is off in English given that a lot of it is midline expression changes etc). Also there’s a plot CG in it that’s edited with chinese text in the CN loc but doesn’t have an English version as far as I can tell (though you get the text read in the normal textbox too so you’re not really missing crucial information). Modestly recommended for yuri fans.
Secondly, I started on Hotel., a VN which exemplifies the infuriating Japanese habit of ending the names of works with periods. Other than my rage at its typographical inconvenice, Hotel manages to be very different from any other VN I’ve read, feeling more like a… sitcom? than anything else, though the plot does hint as something a bit darker than just comedy.
It follows — in sort of ambiguous third person-y view, sometimes first — the daily lives of the quirky employees of the titular hotel, from its clearly autistic manager to its whimsical owner to the couple that keeps having arguments about their upcoming marriage to the be-afroed black guy speaking simultaneously in kansai-ben and engrish that tried to make everything a manzai scene to the mysterious loli on a mission with an eyepatch and insane guitar chops to the nocturnal, bisexual and horny bartender woman who keeps trying to unsuccessfully woo the manager, along with also trying to get at the cute cook girl just in case. And I’ve only covered half of the colorful array of characters in this thing! Nor do I know much about the mystery it’s building up to yet, but the Hotel clearly isn’t normal in any way! Anyway, stalled as usual, but maybe I’ll read more of it.
Third, I read like half of chapter 1 of Mememasa. It’s ok I guess.
In month 8 (I refuse to fuck with month names above July. Fuck the roman emperors who fucked up all the names). I read Trash Waifu. It was a qt enough short vn that fulfilled personal emotional fetishes of mine, and surprisingly ok for a random EVN I picked up because it had a meme title. I still haven’t read the sequel. Read it if the concept more or less laid in the description appeals to you I guess.
Good osananajimi. Naturally, she probably likes you but ur donkan.I also started on My Merry May using a ps2 emulator and the combined orig+sequel release My Merry May with be. For the most part it’s a galge, but apart from the sci-fi elements which do end up mattering for the plot somewhat, what really struck me was the unusual and rounded feel of the characters.
Apart from all the sci-fi aspects of the setting, you also get forced into being the effective parent of a little robot girl that learns REALLY fast. Also she’s pretty hot and calls you oniichan but there is no porn in this game oh well.Unlike a lot of arrow gay THESE DAYS (I feel), each character is in service to themselves, not to their archetype, and won’t always act the way you expect – but the way they act will always make sense, in the end. I picked up the title because it was super high rated on EGS and the (a?) writer had also worked on Symphonic Rain, which has the same nuanced characters I like in this.
My queenShe can cook too, so we know she’s not born after 1993I actually read pretty far into the game, getting into the route of the one middle-schooler girl in the game (I just really vibed with her she’s a dandere and mature please understand). Just after I got to some realdeal plot in her route, I had to get my laptop fan repaired and it took a month. Maybe I’ll actually go back to this one, I may have found a waifu in Misao. Also there really doesn’t seem to be a single ingame hint that the 13-16 relationship is considered weird by anyone yet. Funky from a contemporary Western perspective. But I enjoy it.
I guess there is thisI also also started on Despiria, a Dreamcast (as you can see the theme of this month is I emulate shit) Atlus RPG. It’s a kind of sci-fi cum catholic cum biological horror setting where you’re a nun with psychic powers.
Narration text. Text presentation is cool and varied in general in thiswhat a cutieDive text is heavily animated, fragmented, the works. Good luck JOPs(?) You can “dive” into objects or perople to read minds or in the case of objects, leftover emotions, which helps you gather information on dangerous heretics pushing drugs and other unchristian nastiness.
Also the battle system – though it doesn’t get used that much in the excellent opening area – has you use two persona-ish things with a persona crafting system.
It’s text-heavy and unhookable, and worse, has time-limited text display that you also can’t repeat. But it’s pretty cool and I can see myself returning to it from its stalled state at the third area. It would be cool to see a translation of it… even if it would be shit as usual.
He doesn’t like the psychic nuns. He’s kind of just a dick in general, though.After this I get fucked by lack of laptop and when I finally get it in December I don’t really do much except read Hotel for a short session in The Moe Way’s discord server.
I could list LNs and manga I read as well but I’ve been writing for hours oh god oh fuck if you want it ask me. Read Urasekai Picnic and Yagakimi!
ACADEMICS
Background: you need 180 ECTS (hereafter points) to get a Computer Science BA in Sweden. This is my current goal, though since I am lazy as fuck I have been doing it at a modest pace of 5 credits per quarter – the usual pace is 15 per quarter. I had ~115p in partial credit and ~95p in completed credit at the start of the year. The partial credit thing will be explained later.
The year started off with a fat L as I managed to fail a 10-point (double length course, started in late 2020) in calculus. This was basically self-inflicted as I studied approximately fuck all for the latter half of the course. Essentially every failure I perform is self-inflicted. That’s how it goes.
I then went into the second quarter of the year and bullshitted my way into the statistics course that required me to have passed the calculus course, because my exam results weren’t in yet so I couldn’t know that they wouldn’t pass my obviously-failed exam out of clerical error (I never technically lied in any official communique). Anyway I passed the statistics course, so KEKW I was right about doing fine in the course anyway. 5 points to the Zaka team.
For third quarter I signed up to ONCE AND FOR ALL catch up on a course I half passed 10 or so years ago. The course has changed massively since then and the written exams I had failed were now replaced with coding assignments. This was actually quite fun, if a lot of work. First, I had to write a generic hash table in C, with various utility functions, auto-resizing, function pointers for element comparisons, lots of really annoying but also cool stuff. Also a lot of tests for it.
I then mailed the instructor about it and he didn’t respond because he was sick. I mailed him again and microshit office decided that THAT specific mail was the one damn mail it was going to put in the spam folder. It hasn’t put anything in the spam after that. At the same time, my laptop fan was dying and I killed it dead trying to fix it (HP laptop design is SHIIIIIIIIIIIITTT ree). Thus I was limited to a 5-year-old smartphone to check basically everything, and if I wanted to code I had to either use university workstations (that unfortunately are FUCKED half the time and near unusably slow) or an old laptop that was already crappy when my mom got it five years ago. I discovered many fascinating bugs and difficulties trying to navigate the world with 25gb of disk space and 4gb of ram on a win8.1 machine. For example, booting a vagrant VM for c coding was so slow I had to increase the timeout or it would fail. Good stuff. The laptop redeemed itself later when I didn’t have to use a VM, though.
Anyway so about the mail to the instructor about presenting my assignment completion – I send another mail saying wtf do you have a spam filter on links and he says “uhh I replied earlier” and im like “no I did not see that but ok when do we meet”. Eventually I notice it’s been in the spam for a week plus. FUCK. But yeah, I do the presentation and it goes well.
Unfortunately the lack of instructor response demotivated me, so I lost 2+ weeks of time mostly not working on the second assignment I needed to pass, a Java assignment to create a symbolic calculator (but not the parser). In the end, combined with the miserably slow university systems fucking me over, I don’t get the Java assignment done until way into the last period of the year.
The last period, I’m without a laptop and have to somehow manage an algorithms course with a coding assignment component. I sign up to be randomly assigned a partner after briefly considering partnering up with someone I actually know and not doing it because I am a fuck. Anyway my luck ends up pretty decent as I hit a competent enough partner that doesn’t mind being a bit chill (though we somehow end up getting 29/30 points for the assignments – which meant we were guaranteed a grade bump on the exam – which will never not amuse me, since this was described as “going all out” but I certainly did not feel I did. Maybe my mediocre LaTeX skills and good English writing ability is rarer than I thought…). We have some tough times with the assignments sometimes, but we get through it.
The lectures are not that great and I end up slacking off on attending them after a while (my sleep schedule is also fucked in said period making it harder), but unusually for me I did eventually catch up on them using online material. Having a lab partner to be accountable to certainly helped. The exam is on the 3rd of jan 2022 and the last lecture is on like the 14th, so I manage to sneak in a presentation of the last part of the programming course I was trying to finish in last period. It ends up being pretty last-minute, I think on the 22nd, but I pass without much issue. Now this is VERY SIGNIFICANT because the course I have at last completed is a 20-point course! My official points fully gained thus increase by 20, and I am now safely above 120 points, which lets me take advanced courses. This is important for my future planning. But back to the algorithms course.
I take the exam with a bit less prep than I should have but certainly some prep, and the professor has decided to make the kind of section I do worst at double the points it notmally is, use even more obnoxious notation for it than usual, and use a problem I barely remember anything but the greedy solution for but ask about a dynamic programming algorithm. Despite this convocation of fuckery, I give myself a 75% chance of having passed the exam — it was multiple choice, so there’s little subjectivity involved. The results still aren’t in despite having sat it on the 3rd of Jan and it being fully computerized. Whatever I guess.
[1] Let there be an assortment of DNA features resulting in what we would call a “chicken”. Then this assortment must have been produced by mating two non-chickens, or they in turn would have been produced by a chicken egg as described next. This assortment will first exist as gametes or whatever, then as a fused egg, then as a chicken. Since egg happens before chicken, the egg comes first. QED fuck any philosopher that goes against me I’m 110% right.
[2] “What I expect” in Bayesian statistical terms, because I have read too much LW-style rationalist writing. For questions of something happening or not, this is just the percentage of the time that you would expect something “like that” to happen or not – give me a coin to flip and I’ll give you 50% for any one side to show up. For evaluating a number like an expected score for a vn (like how vndb does it in its Bayesian rating) or my estimated “translation quality” rating, it’s the average you would expect given no other information – a good prior would be the average of everything you’ve seen before in the category. Since most translations are bad (fan translations a bit worse on average), I expect this one to be bad also, in a purely dispassionate way that doesn’t actually give you, the reader, any useful information and could well be wrong. Also my standards are really high. Anyway, this digression has gone on long enough and made me look enough of an autistic dickhead to satisfy me, plus the more I talk about bayesian whatever the more formal error I’m going to introduce since it’s not like I really know it much other than in intuitive terms.
[3] Friendly challenge to read as much foreign-language (mostly Japanese) text as possible in a month. Goes by the honor system.
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To procrastinate doing anything productive, I have decided to write a summary of what I did last year.
GENERAL
During the early parts — months really — of the year I was kind of reeling from having had a very frightening GERD — acid reflux — flareup. It’s fairly hard to tell the symptoms from a heart attack, and paranoia about the whole deal caused anxiety issues. In the end it receded… when I started eating less and barely eating at all when I was not very hungry. Would’ve been nice to have tried that earlier. GERD and anxiety seem to feed into each other in weird and fucky ways and the literature associating them interests me because I have to wonder if GERD might actually be the egg and not the chicken (the egg came first[1]).
To this day I sort of have a trigger-adjacent thing for hearing ~120bpm music with a steady beat — disco speed — where my heart will like go along with it like what disco music does to you and that will trigger warning signals from somewhere and seriously what the fuck? It’s slowly getting better though, idk.
Relatedly, I’ve discovered that my issues with various chest skin pains and neck pains are all due to me having absolutely awful ergonomics for any position I can take while using my computer in bed, and I don’t like using it anywhere else, thus I’m fucked. No longer worried about the various pains, but very annoyed by them.
I’ve gotten a new wider bed, a data plan for my smartphone, and at the end of the year, a new smartphone that doesn’t suck massive dick (poco x3 pro). I also got my first taste of imported Japanese manga, which has been pretty pleasant compared to scans.
I’ve slightly re-intensified my guitar playing habit, and I don’t occasionally hate myself for not playing enough to ever play well any more. Maybe one day I’ll actually record that one tune I don’t have a good recording of yet. I’ve also started using a guitar with lower action since the one I was always using before has VERY high action and is hard as fuck to play.
I’ve also started enjoying minecraft speedrun streams (RSG 16.1, anything Elysaku does). This started out as me watching SmallAnt and him doing mc speedruns, after which I branched out to Couriway watching his 1k seeds challenge as well as various other lesser known but more cracked runners like crookst. Overall I’ve branched out a bit from mostly watching hearthstone streams.
MEDIA
In January I finished watching the FFVI translation comparison by Clyde Mandelin / tomato, which I had started watching the month before. I watched the entirety of every video and counted the Japanese lines read for Tadoku[3] purposes using the Microsoft calculator as a makeshift clicker. I guess I’ve sort of finished a playthrough of the game now Kappa. At this point I was really fucked and couldn’t make myself read a vn due to anxiety issues or neck muscle posture issues or both but I could watch a video, or something. This ended up being most of my tadoku contribution for the month, which was certainly weird. I do recommend the series if you can read Japanese, it’s interesting. Not sure how it’s like to watch as a pleb, maybe it’s still cool? Lots of plebs do like mato’s site. Also I’m sorry, the whole JOP bit I’m doing will unfortunately not improve much as I carry on writing. You have been warned, &c.
Pre-edit opening screen. Note “radiating humming” instead of “radiating hum” or whatever and the lack of commas and stuff.The first VN I completed in 2021, in February, was Digital Seclusion, a rather doujin EVN created by a member of a forum I still haunt, ghostlike: Fuwanovel. I liked it, but thought the prose could use about five or so editing passes, besides needing another proofreading pass. I ended up doing my usual bit where I comment that the writing is all cringe and needs an editor and I expect no response, but instead the writer, Zalor (whom I had some rapport with, admittedly) said that it would be helpful if I could proofread/edit — so I did, through the medium of screenshots and text in his discord DMs.
And that’s the first screen done.In the end while I think I helped improve the text a decent bit, it was also clearly a bit of an auteur work with a distinct (if perhaps not optimal) voice and I didn’t push too hard for changes, opting to just suggest stuff (and a lot of suggestions there were). Thus while I allowed myself to be named in the credits in the end, and it’s certainly nice to be in the credits of a cool VN, I always have mixed emotions about it — maybe someone will discover my name in there one day and think it’s representative of my writing abilities? I have the dumbest fears. Sometimes I try to imagine what gender dysphoria would be like and apparently “someone has the wrong opinion about you” is a vague match so then I imagine being in a room and knowing someone incorrectly thinks I’m a trash writer or translator and it’s actually extremely uncomfortable where the fuck am I going with this. I mean I think there’s even a disclaimer in the credits too. Really this will never be a real problem for me.
Kinda waifu nglI started reading 12riven in February (also read in March and April). I didn’t finish, as is my stalling wont, but I got some endings and got some distance into the true route. I found it very enjoyable, and the pacing nice and tight most of the time, but I do worry about whether it can tie it all together. Also the basic mechanism of the in-universe psionic powers is, I must admit, pretty dumb. It’s given to you in a scientific manner but it basically precludes a materialistic outlook. I mean R11 has this too I guess but it’s more blatantly cringe in this. Anyway if you can go along with the dumb the rest is pretty entertaining. EOPs are missing out! They’ll probably remain missing out even if it ever gets translated (rip lemnisca tl) because Uchikoshi is a fucking memelord and loves adding plot relevant puns all over the place. It’s going to be hard to get all of them to the level of the original, but who knows?
Definitely a shimaisou lineI also tried out Shimaisou 2 (1 is a cool dark yuri utsuge) for a few hundred lines and then stalled it because idk. I tried continuing my long stalled playthrough of zanane but the common route kept on being boring and unfunny and very ドM when I am ドS so I stalled it again after a few thousand lines. I might never come back.
Nothing strange going on here at allIn April I read a chapter and a bit of the slow-start fucked up yuri yandere mystery-ish game Hitofuta. I then stalled it, though it was definitely an interesting experience after the initial SoL of like 1000 lines was past. Ask me for a download if you want, there’s some fuckery where non-jp IPs can’t access the download page for it (but it’s free doe!).
I also started Sutekano which was kind of interesting, partly picking it up because so many people seemed to hate it for whatever reason, and stalled it after a bit.
yeah right JinI also tried Asanyaa, which made me realize I found TS content strangely enticing. Going to chalk it up to autogynephilia or whatever just being a normal thing in a subset of non-trans men tbh I think Ozy did a survey and it showed something similar ignore selection effects. Anyway I stalled it after the first h scene. Apparently it’s a moege not a nukige somehow? Idk man. Anyway, when’s the glorious transhumanist future with effortless bodyswaps?
The second VN I completed – also in April – was Tsukiyo ni Otome wa Tegami wo Nurasu, which is a horny-ish spooky mystery yuri game that actually sort of plays into a “predatory lesbians” meme, though not in a way that really bothered me. Not that things bother me in general. It’s weird but was fun enough to read. It would be an interesting translation challenge, as you’d want to write in like 7 different styles for the various letters at the start!
Apparently it was created by two het women who flatly deny any homosexuality whatsoever in the afterword-y extras. I didn’t catch any hint of this being ironic, though it of course could be over 9000-bit encrypted Japanese. Also, those same women created a doujin otome game called Toki-Hako (toki-bako? who knows…) that has an insanely high rating on EGS and a rave review, but there are like 3 votes total so who can tell?
May saw me playing Makoto Möbius (given the メ I reject the vndb romanization, but not with enough fervor to actually change it). It’s my first CHARON game, and I guess it does interest me in other games by the writer but not massively so. It’s a neat plot with the CHARON signature menhera girls and some other funky plot twists included. That said you can just up and miss endings that really matter to the plot with ease, even after having gotten the true ending, so it’s a good thing I checked a guide. Bad design imo. I played in Japanese but to my understanding there is a translation, on whose quality I cannot comment other than my usual prior[2] of translations being bad.
I’m pretty sure I took this screen purely because of its amusing content out of contextI also started on Aibeya 2 in May because I was testing it to see if it would hook or something because someone was having trouble with it, and caprice directed me to read it for a bit because the heroine was pretty heckin kwi. I read until it started to turn from moege to probable nukige in regards to h-scene density and decided I was done with it. For once, it’s more dropped than stalled… though you never know!
And for my last May ge, I read most of Sakyuseka after a friend recommended it as being not quite the nukige it looked like, and in fact a pretty good plotge with a romantic core (that just happened to have a lot of porn you could skip if you wanted, I guess.) I got until the best part of the game according to said friend and stalled it because LOOK I DO NOT NEED A REASON IT WILL HAPPEN. Anyway, recommend I checking it out, it’s cool and there’s some decent porn too if you’re into that. Very high production values for a doujinge.
In June all I did on the VN front was a read of a few hundred lines of Kira Kira, since it was being used to demo the japanese VN streaming site OOParts and could be tried for free. I concluded that I liked Setoguchi’s writing style and also that it wasn’t something incompatible with English or anything, just would take a decent writer with enough time to work on their wording enough, so basically any translation of his works is likely to be a failure in this industry. As shown by the Musicus TL getting disowned by most JOPs, but I digress. Really when he’s not doing a stream-of-consciousness thing (which I didnt see in kira kira but have seen in Carnival screenshots) he’s just doing moderately complex sentences with good imagery and effective prose. There’s no magic nipponese essence of whatever he’s just kind of good! It’s totally doable! Urobuchi is the same except maybe when he’s doing Chinese kanji autism shit! I totally know this 100% from having read like 200 lines. Anyway. Pity the actual Kira Kira tl out there is much worse still than even the Musicus tl, which is, I understand, merely not all that well written in comparison to the original.
In July I played the bit-more-spice-than-usual yuri VN Tsuyuchiru Letter. It has really nice sprite direction and it fairly easy to read, so do read it in Japanese if you wish as a beginner. The spicier elements do bring enough excitement and delicious suffering to the table to make it an enjoyable read, though perhaps the most interesting characters are the ones they’re clearly hoping to include in a sequel (the game folder is even called “tsuyuchiru1” but they haven’t announced number 2 yet ree). The novel ends somewhat conclusively, but has sequel hooks for other couples, so if you hate even the sequel hook thing you might want to avoid the title.
The translation by Meru should be mostly solid, I trust Meru to not suck (but apparently she wasn’t looking at the sprite direction when translating, not having been given the actual script, so it’s possible some of that is off in English given that a lot of it is midline expression changes etc). Also there’s a plot CG in it that’s edited with chinese text in the CN loc but doesn’t have an English version as far as I can tell (though you get the text read in the normal textbox too so you’re not really missing crucial information). Modestly recommended for yuri fans.
Secondly, I started on Hotel., a VN which exemplifies the infuriating Japanese habit of ending the names of works with periods. Other than my rage at its typographical inconvenice, Hotel manages to be very different from any other VN I’ve read, feeling more like a… sitcom? than anything else, though the plot does hint as something a bit darker than just comedy.
It follows — in sort of ambiguous third person-y view, sometimes first — the daily lives of the quirky employees of the titular hotel, from its clearly autistic manager to its whimsical owner to the couple that keeps having arguments about their upcoming marriage to the be-afroed black guy speaking simultaneously in kansai-ben and engrish that tried to make everything a manzai scene to the mysterious loli on a mission with an eyepatch and insane guitar chops to the nocturnal, bisexual and horny bartender woman who keeps trying to unsuccessfully woo the manager, along with also trying to get at the cute cook girl just in case. And I’ve only covered half of the colorful array of characters in this thing! Nor do I know much about the mystery it’s building up to yet, but the Hotel clearly isn’t normal in any way! Anyway, stalled as usual, but maybe I’ll read more of it.
Third, I read like half of chapter 1 of Mememasa. It’s ok I guess.
In month 8 (I refuse to fuck with month names above July. Fuck the roman emperors who fucked up all the names). I read Trash Waifu. It was a qt enough short vn that fulfilled personal emotional fetishes of mine, and surprisingly ok for a random EVN I picked up because it had a meme title. I still haven’t read the sequel. Read it if the concept more or less laid in the description appeals to you I guess.
Good osananajimi. Naturally, she probably likes you but ur donkan.I also started on My Merry May using a ps2 emulator and the combined orig+sequel release My Merry May with be. For the most part it’s a galge, but apart from the sci-fi elements which do end up mattering for the plot somewhat, what really struck me was the unusual and rounded feel of the characters.
Apart from all the sci-fi aspects of the setting, you also get forced into being the effective parent of a little robot girl that learns REALLY fast. Also she’s pretty hot and calls you oniichan but there is no porn in this game oh well.Unlike a lot of arrow gay THESE DAYS (I feel), each character is in service to themselves, not to their archetype, and won’t always act the way you expect – but the way they act will always make sense, in the end. I picked up the title because it was super high rated on EGS and the (a?) writer had also worked on Symphonic Rain, which has the same nuanced characters I like in this.
My queenShe can cook too, so we know she’s not born after 1993I actually read pretty far into the game, getting into the route of the one middle-schooler girl in the game (I just really vibed with her she’s a dandere and mature please understand). Just after I got to some realdeal plot in her route, I had to get my laptop fan repaired and it took a month. Maybe I’ll actually go back to this one, I may have found a waifu in Misao. Also there really doesn’t seem to be a single ingame hint that the 13-16 relationship is considered weird by anyone yet. Funky from a contemporary Western perspective. But I enjoy it.
I guess there is thisI also also started on Despiria, a Dreamcast (as you can see the theme of this month is I emulate shit) Atlus RPG. It’s a kind of sci-fi cum catholic cum biological horror setting where you’re a nun with psychic powers.
Narration text. Text presentation is cool and varied in general in thiswhat a cutieDive text is heavily animated, fragmented, the works. Good luck JOPs(?) You can “dive” into objects or perople to read minds or in the case of objects, leftover emotions, which helps you gather information on dangerous heretics pushing drugs and other unchristian nastiness.
Also the battle system – though it doesn’t get used that much in the excellent opening area – has you use two persona-ish things with a persona crafting system.
It’s text-heavy and unhookable, and worse, has time-limited text display that you also can’t repeat. But it’s pretty cool and I can see myself returning to it from its stalled state at the third area. It would be cool to see a translation of it… even if it would be shit as usual.
He doesn’t like the psychic nuns. He’s kind of just a dick in general, though.After this I get fucked by lack of laptop and when I finally get it in December I don’t really do much except read Hotel for a short session in The Moe Way’s discord server.
I could list LNs and manga I read as well but I’ve been writing for hours oh god oh fuck if you want it ask me. Read Urasekai Picnic and Yagakimi!
ACADEMICS
Background: you need 180 ECTS (hereafter points) to get a Computer Science BA in Sweden. This is my current goal, though since I am lazy as fuck I have been doing it at a modest pace of 5 credits per quarter – the usual pace is 15 per quarter. I had ~115p in partial credit and ~95p in completed credit at the start of the year. The partial credit thing will be explained later.
The year started off with a fat L as I managed to fail a 10-point (double length course, started in late 2020) in calculus. This was basically self-inflicted as I studied approximately fuck all for the latter half of the course. Essentially every failure I perform is self-inflicted. That’s how it goes.
I then went into the second quarter of the year and bullshitted my way into the statistics course that required me to have passed the calculus course, because my exam results weren’t in yet so I couldn’t know that they wouldn’t pass my obviously-failed exam out of clerical error (I never technically lied in any official communique). Anyway I passed the statistics course, so KEKW I was right about doing fine in the course anyway. 5 points to the Zaka team.
For third quarter I signed up to ONCE AND FOR ALL catch up on a course I half passed 10 or so years ago. The course has changed massively since then and the written exams I had failed were now replaced with coding assignments. This was actually quite fun, if a lot of work. First, I had to write a generic hash table in C, with various utility functions, auto-resizing, function pointers for element comparisons, lots of really annoying but also cool stuff. Also a lot of tests for it.
I then mailed the instructor about it and he didn’t respond because he was sick. I mailed him again and microshit office decided that THAT specific mail was the one damn mail it was going to put in the spam folder. It hasn’t put anything in the spam after that. At the same time, my laptop fan was dying and I killed it dead trying to fix it (HP laptop design is SHIIIIIIIIIIIITTT ree). Thus I was limited to a 5-year-old smartphone to check basically everything, and if I wanted to code I had to either use university workstations (that unfortunately are FUCKED half the time and near unusably slow) or an old laptop that was already crappy when my mom got it five years ago. I discovered many fascinating bugs and difficulties trying to navigate the world with 25gb of disk space and 4gb of ram on a win8.1 machine. For example, booting a vagrant VM for c coding was so slow I had to increase the timeout or it would fail. Good stuff. The laptop redeemed itself later when I didn’t have to use a VM, though.
Anyway so about the mail to the instructor about presenting my assignment completion – I send another mail saying wtf do you have a spam filter on links and he says “uhh I replied earlier” and im like “no I did not see that but ok when do we meet”. Eventually I notice it’s been in the spam for a week plus. FUCK. But yeah, I do the presentation and it goes well.
Unfortunately the lack of instructor response demotivated me, so I lost 2+ weeks of time mostly not working on the second assignment I needed to pass, a Java assignment to create a symbolic calculator (but not the parser). In the end, combined with the miserably slow university systems fucking me over, I don’t get the Java assignment done until way into the last period of the year.
The last period, I’m without a laptop and have to somehow manage an algorithms course with a coding assignment component. I sign up to be randomly assigned a partner after briefly considering partnering up with someone I actually know and not doing it because I am a fuck. Anyway my luck ends up pretty decent as I hit a competent enough partner that doesn’t mind being a bit chill (though we somehow end up getting 29/30 points for the assignments – which meant we were guaranteed a grade bump on the exam – which will never not amuse me, since this was described as “going all out” but I certainly did not feel I did. Maybe my mediocre LaTeX skills and good English writing ability is rarer than I thought…). We have some tough times with the assignments sometimes, but we get through it.
The lectures are not that great and I end up slacking off on attending them after a while (my sleep schedule is also fucked in said period making it harder), but unusually for me I did eventually catch up on them using online material. Having a lab partner to be accountable to certainly helped. The exam is on the 3rd of jan 2022 and the last lecture is on like the 14th, so I manage to sneak in a presentation of the last part of the programming course I was trying to finish in last period. It ends up being pretty last-minute, I think on the 22nd, but I pass without much issue. Now this is VERY SIGNIFICANT because the course I have at last completed is a 20-point course! My official points fully gained thus increase by 20, and I am now safely above 120 points, which lets me take advanced courses. This is important for my future planning. But back to the algorithms course.
I take the exam with a bit less prep than I should have but certainly some prep, and the professor has decided to make the kind of section I do worst at double the points it notmally is, use even more obnoxious notation for it than usual, and use a problem I barely remember anything but the greedy solution for but ask about a dynamic programming algorithm. Despite this convocation of fuckery, I give myself a 75% chance of having passed the exam — it was multiple choice, so there’s little subjectivity involved. The results still aren’t in despite having sat it on the 3rd of Jan and it being fully computerized. Whatever I guess.
[1] Let there be an assortment of DNA features resulting in what we would call a “chicken”. Then this assortment must have been produced by mating two non-chickens, or they in turn would have been produced by a chicken egg as described next. This assortment will first exist as gametes or whatever, then as a fused egg, then as a chicken. Since egg happens before chicken, the egg comes first. QED fuck any philosopher that goes against me I’m 110% right.
[2] “What I expect” in Bayesian statistical terms, because I have read too much LW-style rationalist writing. For questions of something happening or not, this is just the percentage of the time that you would expect something “like that” to happen or not – give me a coin to flip and I’ll give you 50% for any one side to show up. For evaluating a number like an expected score for a vn (like how vndb does it in its Bayesian rating) or my estimated “translation quality” rating, it’s the average you would expect given no other information – a good prior would be the average of everything you’ve seen before in the category. Since most translations are bad (fan translations a bit worse on average), I expect this one to be bad also, in a purely dispassionate way that doesn’t actually give you, the reader, any useful information and could well be wrong. Also my standards are really high. Anyway, this digression has gone on long enough and made me look enough of an autistic dickhead to satisfy me, plus the more I talk about bayesian whatever the more formal error I’m going to introduce since it’s not like I really know it much other than in intuitive terms.
[3] Friendly challenge to read as much foreign-language (mostly Japanese) text as possible in a month. Goes by the honor system.
View the full article
Over time, a bored translator tends to accumulate random pieces of translation they never went that far with, or did in 10 minutes for the shitpost for whatever reason, etc. Apart from that, I’ve personally done some scattered work for fan translations that may or may not ever see the light of day, some (very modestly) paid in ebooks. Anyway, here we go:
1. Random demonbane fight/action scene
I think this is from an expanded rerelease or something. There’s an absolutely meme error left in here where my brain read 拳 as 拳銃, even noticing my confusion in the comments but nevertheless failing to see the actual problem. I generally prefer translating directly in the script for VNs, so that’s what you’re getting. I did this one FOR FREE. I think this is about 3k-4k moji?
2. Phantom of Inferno h-scene except there’s a lot of plot too
This one’s funny because I was initially contacted about it because the guy thought I was a coomer translator doing mostly nukige. Ironically my actual skillset turned out to be very applicable to the script I chose to work on though, so whatever xD.
Unfortunately I wasn’t doing the whole commenting out lines thing (and I changed the structure in places), so you can only really read this in something like a multi-file viewer. I promise the rest is better, okay? Anyway, here’s a zip with both the unaltered script and the translated script. I got paid for this with an ebook of shimeyuri, which I actually read afterwards. There’s a possible mistl in the script where 失禁 most likely (based on my expansive experience with illustrated japanese pornography) actually means wetting yourself and not “loosing your bowels” as I put it. I just couldn’t find as good a line that was more yellow than brown at the time so I coped. But it legitimately could mean both, so I leave the final decision up to someone who actually looked at the scene ingame.
3. New tl for the subahibi soapbubble poem that’s actually from cyrano
So yeah, this was originally French. And then through some route, it became Japanese, and was used in Subahibi. The current official localization uses a french to english translation, which is fair enough. But, well, the english translation, and espcially the lines chosen from it that I saw used in screenshots (idk I didnt actually read the english tl tho), seem to me to not quite be as clear as the Japanese. Since poems and such often change shape with translation, and Subahibi definitely wants to say something with its poems, I had to wonder if doing a translation from the Japanese might not be a better solution than merely choosing a translation from the French. Well, I could also consult the english translation too… Oh, and then I decided to specifically make sure to use words that would resonate with wittgensteinian thinking or whatever (“name” specifically. In formal logic you put “names” to stuff. Uhh anyway…). I haven’t actually finished subahibi, I stalled it in insects because the first part was really boring. ANYWAY, the poem, entirely devoid of annoying stuff like actually rhyming:
Zaka adapted tl:
We yearn
Building castles of air from but a name
Pining for a lover made of fantasy
Take it, now
This fantasy I made
And make it into reality
My romantic laments I have scattered far and wide
Only you can give them a home at last
Take them, now
One day you will know
I was not sincere; I was eloquent alone
Original jp tl:
ボクたちは
ただ名ばかりでシャボン玉の様にふくらんでしまった……
そんな空想の恋人に恋いこがれている……。
さぁ、君、取りたまえ。
この空想を、
そして本物に変えるのは君だ。
ボクは恋の嘆きとか書き散らかしたけど……、
彷徨う鳥の留まるのを君は見る事が出来る人なんだ。
さあ、取りたまえ。
実はないだけ雄弁だと……
君にも分かる日が来るから……。
Fr->en (brian hooker, not the one used in the official tl):
I have amused myself
As we all do, we poets–writing vows
To Chloris, Phyllis–any pretty name–
You might have had a pocketful of them!
Take it, and turn to facts my fantasies–
I loosed these loves like doves into the air;
Give them a habitation and a home.
Here, take it– You will find me all the more
Eloquent, being insincere! Come!
—
Is this good? …Well my tl could probably use some polish, but I think the approach is interesting. Then again, apparently subahibbers goes and explains the poem later on, so you could probably insert your explanation then and be more pure (as pure as a fr->en tl is, though!) to the original, I guess. Overall it’s a wash but I’m happy I got to shitpost.
4. The two first pages of Hige wo Soru, Soshite Joshikousei wo Hirou (LN)
I was originally going to translate 10 pages as a work sample to troll one of my friends who was looking for people to translate LNs at the time, but I got too lazy to continue after finishing 2 pages. C’est la vie, innit? Also, the title given is my personal stab at a sensible title. Unfortunately the events in the book do not match the straightforward “X, then Y” structure of そして as commonly used, as Y actually happens before X in-story! Thus I choose to interpret it as listing two things that happened in no specific order.
I actually translated this from scans, which is how I read higehiro 1. I have ebooks now to copy from though, so I’ll spare you the scan reader experience. Also maybe I should have used “beneath” instead of “under” the telophone pole? Whatever, man.
ひげを剃る、そして女子高生を拾う。
I took in a runaway girl and shaved my beard
Page 10:
失しつ恋れんをした。
二つ年上の、同じ会社に勤める女性だ。名前は後ご藤とうさんといった。
後藤さんは面めん倒どう見みが良く、研修の時から俺に良くしてくれた。笑え顔がおが淑しとやかで、気配りができて、社畜と化していた俺の心の支えだった。
「男がいるなら最初から言えやァ……」
もう何なん杯ばいビールを飲んだか分からない。向かいの席で他人ひと事ごとのように笑う同期の橋はし本もとの輪りん郭かくもぼやけて見える。
そう、デートに行ったのだ。後藤さんと。勤続５年目にして、ようやく彼女をデートに誘さそった。快く誘いを受け入れられて、これは行けるのでは！ と期待を膨ふくらませながらデートに行き、動物園を一いつ緒しよに歩いた。正直、動物よりも後藤さんの横顔ばかり見ていた。ときどき、乳も横目で見た。
とにかく、このチャンスを無む駄だにしてはならないと、俺は張り切りに張り切っていた。動物園を回り終え、オシャレなフレンチの店で夕食をとった。味はもう覚えていない。
プロローぐ
電柱の下の女
Prologue
The girl under the telephone pole
My love was unrequited.
Gotou was two years older than me, and my superior at work. She took good care of her coworkers; ever since I was in training, she’d always treated me well. Her smile was graceful, her attention to others’ needs palpable — she was always there to support me as my threw myself into the life of a wage slave.
“If she had a boyfriend she coulda told me from the start, man…” I whined.
I’d already lost count of how many beers I’d downed. My coworker Hashimoto was sitting across from me, his profile peeking out of the dim barlight. He chuckled briefly at my outburst, clearly amused.
We’d been on a date all right, me and Gotou. First we’d gone to the zoo. To be honest, I’d been looking less at the animals, more at her. Sometimes, I’d snuck in a sideways glance at her breasts.
Anyway, I wasn’t about to lose my shot, so I’d gone all out afterwards. I’d taken her to a fancy restaurant for dinner. I can’t remember what it tasted like at all.
Page 11:
「このまま、俺の家に来ませんか」
お互たがい大人である。この言葉の意味くらいは、すぐに理解できるだろう。期待と不安の入り混じった目で後藤さんを見ると、後藤さんは困ったように笑っていた。
そして、首を横に振ふったのだった。
「会社では秘密にしているんだけど、私、恋こい人びとがいるの」
＊
「じゃあなんでデートに来たんだよッ!!!」
「ああもう吉よし田だ、それ今日六回目だから」
「一万回でも言ってやるよぉ……」
「一万回も同じ話聞きたくないんだけど」
俺がビールを呷あおるのを、橋本は苦く笑しようしながら見ていた。
「そのへんにしときなよ」
「馬ば鹿か、こんなんで俺の怒いかりがおさまるかってんだァ」
「酒が回ってきた後の方がキレてるじゃん。埒らち明かねぇって」
橋本は他人事だからそんなことを言えるのだ。今日は飲まないとやっていられない。
後藤さんにフラれた直後、俺は茫ぼう然ぜん自じ失しつで小さな公園のベンチで項うな垂だれた。
訊きくと、五年前から彼女には恋人がいたのだという。
つまり、俺が彼女と知り合った時にはすでに男がいたということだ。
「馬鹿みてぇだ……」
男のいる女に五年も思いを寄せてしまっていた。
I’d waited for the right time, and then I’d asked her: “Hey, would you like to see my place?” We weren’t kids — the implication was obvious. I had looked at her with uneasy anticipation as she gave me a troubled smile — and then, she had shook her head. “I’ve kept it a secret at work, but I’m afraid I’ve got a boyfriend.”
＊＊＊
“Then why the hell did you agree to the date?” I exclaimed.
“Jeez, this is the sixth time you’ve said that today,” Yoshida said.
“I’ll say it a thousand times over, damn it!”
“I really would rather you not.”
Yoshida watched me with a strained smile as I downed another swig of beer.
“You really shouldn’t have any more to drink,” he said.
“Dude, d’ya think I’m gonna forget how angry I am with just this much?”
“Aren’t you just going to get more pissed off if you keep drinking? There’s no point to it.”
—
5. Purposely bad “accurate” tl of song lyrics that I was going to show myself fixing in a blog post discussing kinda lame “accurate” lyric translation but I never did the work oops totally not coping no really I’m serious though
Hahaha funny how things turn out right? anyway uhh
カプチーノ ともさかりえ
This is purposely sloppy and sort of meaning-only because I was going to write a post titled ‘how to make a typical youtube jp lyric tl’
which then was going to feature a refinement of the lyrics
or something to show the adaptations you actually
should be doing if you’re subbing fucking songs
I mean I’m not actually a god though so who knows
if it was even a good idea
but yeah that’s why this is garbage even if it is prolly ‘accurate’
あと少しあたしの成長を待って
あなたを夢中にさせたくて
藻掻あたしを可愛がってね
Wait for me to grow a bit more
I want to make you enchanted with me
So please spoil me while I struggle to do so
今度逢う時はコートも要らないと
そんなに普通に云えちゃうのが理解わからない
・・・ミルクの白に茶色が負けている
I don’t get how you can just say
You won’t even need a coat on when we next meet
–The white of the milk is stronger than the brown
何よりもあなたに逢って触れたいの
全て味わって確かめて
イーヴンな関係に成りたい
変わりゆくあたしの温度を許して
もし我が儘わがままが過ぎて居てもても
黙って置いて行ったりしないでね
I want to meet you, want touch you most of all
To know every part of you
To have an equal relationship between us
Forgive me for running hot and cold
I know I might be too selfish sometimes
But don’t let that make you leave me on my own
コーヒーの匂いを間あいだに挟んで
優位の笑みを隠し切れない様子で居る
・・・苦いだけじゃ未だバランスが取れない
The scent of coffee hangs between us
And I can’t hide my overbearing smile
–I’m all bitter, haven’t found the right balance
梅の散る午後にもちゃんと二人は
今日と同じ様に人混みを
擦り抜けられるかしら
それぞれがただ忙しくしてたら
引く手の加減も曖昧に
忘れちゃいそうで不安なのに
When we next meet early spring afternoon as the plum blossoms fall
Will we easily slip through the crowd
As we were able to today?
We just get busy with our own lives
And I don’t know how hard to pull you towards me
But I’m worried you’ll just forget me
あなたが此処に居る約束など
1つも交わして居ない
いつの間にか淡色が当たり前に香り
二人を支配しそう
We never promised to meet
Anywhere or anytime
And the sense that our feelings will fade
Is all around us
誰よりもあたしをちゃんと見透かして
口の悪さや強がりは”精一杯”の証拠だって
See through me more than anyone else
That I talk rough and act tough is proof of how serious I am
何よりもあなたに逢って触れたいの
全て味わって確かめて
イーヴンな関係に成りたい
変わりゆくあたしの温度を許して
もし我が儘わがままが過ぎて居てもても
黙って置いて行ったりしないでね
I want to meet you touch you most of all
To know every part of you
To have an equal relationship between us
Forgive me for running hot and cold
I know I might be too selfish sometimes
But don’t let that make you leave me on my own
—-
Very sorry about that one, folks.
6. Literally just this one excerpt from the adashima LN (idk what volume anymore)
I picked this as an interesting translation “challenge” for a server I was semi-active in at the time because the excerpt referenced a distinctly Japanese cultural thing in the kuroneko delivery service and I wanted to see different approaches to it. The rest is just general writing skill I guess. Nobody else submitted anything because THEY ARE COWARDS ahem. Anyway this has an official tl but I’ve never looked at it (yet, growth mindset) to compare. The official tl is done by my friend and actually good translator Verde though so it’s probably cool.
鞄を机に置いてから、しまむらが布団の上に座り込む。先程までしまむら妹の使っていた黄色いクッションを「はい」とこっちに投げてきた。受け取って絵柄を見ると、宅急便のイメージキャラクターの黒猫と白猫が手を繋いでいた。その場に置いて、まずは座る。
Shimamura laid her bag on the desk, then sat down on the futon. “Here,” she said, throwing me the yellow cushion her little sister had been using just before. I caught it and glanced at the motif: the familiar white and black cat mascots of the Kuroneko Yamato delivery service, holding hands. I put the cushion on the floor and sat down myself.
7. Random line from I think dies irae or some other masada shit
I was challenged for a take on this by a friend so I did. Then I did another take which was better so I’m listing both here. The context I was given was “context is, guy is standing on the bow of a magic warship during a big chuu2 battle and this is a description of what he looks like”.
鋼鉄すら沸騰する灼熱地獄の只中で、吹き荒れる熱波に大外套を翻しながら口元を弦月の形に歪めている。
Take 2 (better):
He stood in the midst of a raging firestorm, giant cape battened by its roiling currents. Unmoved by heat that could boil steel, his lips twisted into a crescent grin.
Take 1 (does other stuff better maybe tho):
He stood in the midst of a firestorm of ferocity sufficient to melt the toughest steel; his cloak billowed, spurred by the raging inferno, as his mouth crested unto a twisted smile.
8. Mememasa poem with very little context because I shitpost hard okay
This is pretty bad not going to lie. Anyway it’s a quick tl of part of the poem that is shown in the muramasa prologue (and presumable afterward as well?). Also it has a tl error where I should have said it’s the saint cursing the god and not the other way around oops.
奇跡を行う聖人は衆生を赦い神を呪って嘔吐する
黄金の兜の覇王は万里を征し愛馬と供に川底へ沈む
湖の美姫は国を捨て愛を選び糞尿に溺れて刑死する
孤赤児は蚯蚓の血を母の乳とし三夜して腹より腐る
生命よこの賛歌を聞け笑い疲れた怨嗟を重ねて
生命よこの祈りを聞け怒りおののく喜びを枕に
百年の生は炎と剣の連環が幾重にも飾り立てよう
七日の生は闇と静寂に守られ無垢に光り輝くだろう
獣よ踊れ野を馳せよ唄い騒いで猛り駆けめぐれ
いまや如何なる鎖も檻も汝の前には朽ちた土塊
The saint performing miracles set to save mankind was cursed by God, to nausea
The gold-crowned conqueror who ruled vast plains met his end when he drowned with his beloved horse, in the river
The lady of the lake who forsook her country for love drowned in excrement, sentenced to death
The orphan babe who drank maggotsblood for mother’s milk took three days to die, rotting from the inside
Life, let my eulogy reach your tired ears and deepen your fury
Life, hear my prayer and sleep soundly in thrashing joyous rage
A hundred years’ worth of life was lost to fire and blade
Seven days’ worth of life let to shine in innocence, guarded by stygian silence
Frolic upon the fields, O beast, let loose your savage song
No chain nor jail can stop you; all before you shall fall to dust
—
ok so that’s all I can think of right now. I’m sure there’s more somewhere. I hope you enjoyed it if you actually read any of this kuso shit
View the full article
Over time, a bored translator tends to accumulate random pieces of translation they never went that far with, or did in 10 minutes for the shitpost for whatever reason, etc. Apart from that, I’ve personally done some scattered work for fan translations that may or may not ever see the light of day, some (very modestly) paid in ebooks. Anyway, here we go:
1. Random demonbane fight/action scene
I think this is from an expanded rerelease or something. There’s an absolutely meme error left in here where my brain read 拳 as 拳銃, even noticing my confusion in the comments but nevertheless failing to see the actual problem. I generally prefer translating directly in the script for VNs, so that’s what you’re getting. I did this one FOR FREE. I think this is about 3k-4k moji?
2. Phantom of Inferno h-scene except there’s a lot of plot too
This one’s funny because I was initially contacted about it because the guy thought I was a coomer translator doing mostly nukige. Ironically my actual skillset turned out to be very applicable to the script I chose to work on though, so whatever xD.
Unfortunately I wasn’t doing the whole commenting out lines thing (and I changed the structure in places), so you can only really read this in something like a multi-file viewer. I promise the rest is better, okay? Anyway, here’s a zip with both the unaltered script and the translated script. I got paid for this with an ebook of shimeyuri, which I actually read afterwards. There’s a possible mistl in the script where 失禁 most likely (based on my expansive experience with illustrated japanese pornography) actually means wetting yourself and not “loosing your bowels” as I put it. I just couldn’t find as good a line that was more yellow than brown at the time so I coped. But it legitimately could mean both, so I leave the final decision up to someone who actually looked at the scene ingame.
3. New tl for the subahibi soapbubble poem that’s actually from cyrano
So yeah, this was originally French. And then through some route, it became Japanese, and was used in Subahibi. The current official localization uses a french to english translation, which is fair enough. But, well, the english translation, and espcially the lines chosen from it that I saw used in screenshots (idk I didnt actually read the english tl tho), seem to me to not quite be as clear as the Japanese. Since poems and such often change shape with translation, and Subahibi definitely wants to say something with its poems, I had to wonder if doing a translation from the Japanese might not be a better solution than merely choosing a translation from the French. Well, I could also consult the english translation too… Oh, and then I decided to specifically make sure to use words that would resonate with wittgensteinian thinking or whatever (“name” specifically. In formal logic you put “names” to stuff. Uhh anyway…). I haven’t actually finished subahibi, I stalled it in insects because the first part was really boring. ANYWAY, the poem, entirely devoid of annoying stuff like actually rhyming:
Zaka adapted tl:
We yearn
Building castles of air from but a name
Pining for a lover made of fantasy
Take it, now
This fantasy I made
And make it into reality
My romantic laments I have scattered far and wide
Only you can give them a home at last
Take them, now
One day you will know
I was not sincere; I was eloquent alone
Original jp tl:
ボクたちは
ただ名ばかりでシャボン玉の様にふくらんでしまった……
そんな空想の恋人に恋いこがれている……。
さぁ、君、取りたまえ。
この空想を、
そして本物に変えるのは君だ。
ボクは恋の嘆きとか書き散らかしたけど……、
彷徨う鳥の留まるのを君は見る事が出来る人なんだ。
さあ、取りたまえ。
実はないだけ雄弁だと……
君にも分かる日が来るから……。
Fr->en (brian hooker, not the one used in the official tl):
I have amused myself
As we all do, we poets–writing vows
To Chloris, Phyllis–any pretty name–
You might have had a pocketful of them!
Take it, and turn to facts my fantasies–
I loosed these loves like doves into the air;
Give them a habitation and a home.
Here, take it– You will find me all the more
Eloquent, being insincere! Come!
—
Is this good? …Well my tl could probably use some polish, but I think the approach is interesting. Then again, apparently subahibbers goes and explains the poem later on, so you could probably insert your explanation then and be more pure (as pure as a fr->en tl is, though!) to the original, I guess. Overall it’s a wash but I’m happy I got to shitpost.
4. The two first pages of Hige wo Soru, Soshite Joshikousei wo Hirou (LN)
I was originally going to translate 10 pages as a work sample to troll one of my friends who was looking for people to translate LNs at the time, but I got too lazy to continue after finishing 2 pages. C’est la vie, innit? Also, the title given is my personal stab at a sensible title. Unfortunately the events in the book do not match the straightforward “X, then Y” structure of そして as commonly used, as Y actually happens before X in-story! Thus I choose to interpret it as listing two things that happened in no specific order.
I actually translated this from scans, which is how I read higehiro 1. I have ebooks now to copy from though, so I’ll spare you the scan reader experience. Also maybe I should have used “beneath” instead of “under” the telophone pole? Whatever, man.
ひげを剃る、そして女子高生を拾う。
I took in a runaway girl and shaved my beard
Page 10:
失しつ恋れんをした。
二つ年上の、同じ会社に勤める女性だ。名前は後ご藤とうさんといった。
後藤さんは面めん倒どう見みが良く、研修の時から俺に良くしてくれた。笑え顔がおが淑しとやかで、気配りができて、社畜と化していた俺の心の支えだった。
「男がいるなら最初から言えやァ……」
もう何なん杯ばいビールを飲んだか分からない。向かいの席で他人ひと事ごとのように笑う同期の橋はし本もとの輪りん郭かくもぼやけて見える。
そう、デートに行ったのだ。後藤さんと。勤続５年目にして、ようやく彼女をデートに誘さそった。快く誘いを受け入れられて、これは行けるのでは！ と期待を膨ふくらませながらデートに行き、動物園を一いつ緒しよに歩いた。正直、動物よりも後藤さんの横顔ばかり見ていた。ときどき、乳も横目で見た。
とにかく、このチャンスを無む駄だにしてはならないと、俺は張り切りに張り切っていた。動物園を回り終え、オシャレなフレンチの店で夕食をとった。味はもう覚えていない。
プロローぐ
電柱の下の女
Prologue
The girl under the telephone pole
My love was unrequited.
Gotou was two years older than me, and my superior at work. She took good care of her coworkers; ever since I was in training, she’d always treated me well. Her smile was graceful, her attention to others’ needs palpable — she was always there to support me as my threw myself into the life of a wage slave.
“If she had a boyfriend she coulda told me from the start, man…” I whined.
I’d already lost count of how many beers I’d downed. My coworker Hashimoto was sitting across from me, his profile peeking out of the dim barlight. He chuckled briefly at my outburst, clearly amused.
We’d been on a date all right, me and Gotou. First we’d gone to the zoo. To be honest, I’d been looking less at the animals, more at her. Sometimes, I’d snuck in a sideways glance at her breasts.
Anyway, I wasn’t about to lose my shot, so I’d gone all out afterwards. I’d taken her to a fancy restaurant for dinner. I can’t remember what it tasted like at all.
Page 11:
「このまま、俺の家に来ませんか」
お互たがい大人である。この言葉の意味くらいは、すぐに理解できるだろう。期待と不安の入り混じった目で後藤さんを見ると、後藤さんは困ったように笑っていた。
そして、首を横に振ふったのだった。
「会社では秘密にしているんだけど、私、恋こい人びとがいるの」
＊
「じゃあなんでデートに来たんだよッ!!!」
「ああもう吉よし田だ、それ今日六回目だから」
「一万回でも言ってやるよぉ……」
「一万回も同じ話聞きたくないんだけど」
俺がビールを呷あおるのを、橋本は苦く笑しようしながら見ていた。
「そのへんにしときなよ」
「馬ば鹿か、こんなんで俺の怒いかりがおさまるかってんだァ」
「酒が回ってきた後の方がキレてるじゃん。埒らち明かねぇって」
橋本は他人事だからそんなことを言えるのだ。今日は飲まないとやっていられない。
後藤さんにフラれた直後、俺は茫ぼう然ぜん自じ失しつで小さな公園のベンチで項うな垂だれた。
訊きくと、五年前から彼女には恋人がいたのだという。
つまり、俺が彼女と知り合った時にはすでに男がいたということだ。
「馬鹿みてぇだ……」
男のいる女に五年も思いを寄せてしまっていた。
I’d waited for the right time, and then I’d asked her: “Hey, would you like to see my place?” We weren’t kids — the implication was obvious. I had looked at her with uneasy anticipation as she gave me a troubled smile — and then, she had shook her head. “I’ve kept it a secret at work, but I’m afraid I’ve got a boyfriend.”
＊＊＊
“Then why the hell did you agree to the date?” I exclaimed.
“Jeez, this is the sixth time you’ve said that today,” Yoshida said.
“I’ll say it a thousand times over, damn it!”
“I really would rather you not.”
Yoshida watched me with a strained smile as I downed another swig of beer.
“You really shouldn’t have any more to drink,” he said.
“Dude, d’ya think I’m gonna forget how angry I am with just this much?”
“Aren’t you just going to get more pissed off if you keep drinking? There’s no point to it.”
—
5. Purposely bad “accurate” tl of song lyrics that I was going to show myself fixing in a blog post discussing kinda lame “accurate” lyric translation but I never did the work oops totally not coping no really I’m serious though
Hahaha funny how things turn out right? anyway uhh
カプチーノ ともさかりえ
This is purposely sloppy and sort of meaning-only because I was going to write a post titled ‘how to make a typical youtube jp lyric tl’
which then was going to feature a refinement of the lyrics
or something to show the adaptations you actually
should be doing if you’re subbing fucking songs
I mean I’m not actually a god though so who knows
if it was even a good idea
but yeah that’s why this is garbage even if it is prolly ‘accurate’
あと少しあたしの成長を待って
あなたを夢中にさせたくて
藻掻あたしを可愛がってね
Wait for me to grow a bit more
I want to make you enchanted with me
So please spoil me while I struggle to do so
今度逢う時はコートも要らないと
そんなに普通に云えちゃうのが理解わからない
・・・ミルクの白に茶色が負けている
I don’t get how you can just say
You won’t even need a coat on when we next meet
–The white of the milk is stronger than the brown
何よりもあなたに逢って触れたいの
全て味わって確かめて
イーヴンな関係に成りたい
変わりゆくあたしの温度を許して
もし我が儘わがままが過ぎて居てもても
黙って置いて行ったりしないでね
I want to meet you, want touch you most of all
To know every part of you
To have an equal relationship between us
Forgive me for running hot and cold
I know I might be too selfish sometimes
But don’t let that make you leave me on my own
コーヒーの匂いを間あいだに挟んで
優位の笑みを隠し切れない様子で居る
・・・苦いだけじゃ未だバランスが取れない
The scent of coffee hangs between us
And I can’t hide my overbearing smile
–I’m all bitter, haven’t found the right balance
梅の散る午後にもちゃんと二人は
今日と同じ様に人混みを
擦り抜けられるかしら
それぞれがただ忙しくしてたら
引く手の加減も曖昧に
忘れちゃいそうで不安なのに
When we next meet early spring afternoon as the plum blossoms fall
Will we easily slip through the crowd
As we were able to today?
We just get busy with our own lives
And I don’t know how hard to pull you towards me
But I’m worried you’ll just forget me
あなたが此処に居る約束など
1つも交わして居ない
いつの間にか淡色が当たり前に香り
二人を支配しそう
We never promised to meet
Anywhere or anytime
And the sense that our feelings will fade
Is all around us
誰よりもあたしをちゃんと見透かして
口の悪さや強がりは”精一杯”の証拠だって
See through me more than anyone else
That I talk rough and act tough is proof of how serious I am
何よりもあなたに逢って触れたいの
全て味わって確かめて
イーヴンな関係に成りたい
変わりゆくあたしの温度を許して
もし我が儘わがままが過ぎて居てもても
黙って置いて行ったりしないでね
I want to meet you touch you most of all
To know every part of you
To have an equal relationship between us
Forgive me for running hot and cold
I know I might be too selfish sometimes
But don’t let that make you leave me on my own
—-
Very sorry about that one, folks.
6. Literally just this one excerpt from the adashima LN (idk what volume anymore)
I picked this as an interesting translation “challenge” for a server I was semi-active in at the time because the excerpt referenced a distinctly Japanese cultural thing in the kuroneko delivery service and I wanted to see different approaches to it. The rest is just general writing skill I guess. Nobody else submitted anything because THEY ARE COWARDS ahem. Anyway this has an official tl but I’ve never looked at it (yet, growth mindset) to compare. The official tl is done by my friend and actually good translator Verde though so it’s probably cool.
鞄を机に置いてから、しまむらが布団の上に座り込む。先程までしまむら妹の使っていた黄色いクッションを「はい」とこっちに投げてきた。受け取って絵柄を見ると、宅急便のイメージキャラクターの黒猫と白猫が手を繋いでいた。その場に置いて、まずは座る。
Shimamura laid her bag on the desk, then sat down on the futon. “Here,” she said, throwing me the yellow cushion her little sister had been using just before. I caught it and glanced at the motif: the familiar white and black cat mascots of the Kuroneko Yamato delivery service, holding hands. I put the cushion on the floor and sat down myself.
7. Random line from I think dies irae or some other masada shit
I was challenged for a take on this by a friend so I did. Then I did another take which was better so I’m listing both here. The context I was given was “context is, guy is standing on the bow of a magic warship during a big chuu2 battle and this is a description of what he looks like”.
鋼鉄すら沸騰する灼熱地獄の只中で、吹き荒れる熱波に大外套を翻しながら口元を弦月の形に歪めている。
Take 2 (better):
He stood in the midst of a raging firestorm, giant cape battened by its roiling currents. Unmoved by heat that could boil steel, his lips twisted into a crescent grin.
Take 1 (does other stuff better maybe tho):
He stood in the midst of a firestorm of ferocity sufficient to melt the toughest steel; his cloak billowed, spurred by the raging inferno, as his mouth crested unto a twisted smile.
8. Mememasa poem with very little context because I shitpost hard okay
This is pretty bad not going to lie. Anyway it’s a quick tl of part of the poem that is shown in the muramasa prologue (and presumable afterward as well?). Also it has a tl error where I should have said it’s the saint cursing the god and not the other way around oops.
奇跡を行う聖人は衆生を赦い神を呪って嘔吐する
黄金の兜の覇王は万里を征し愛馬と供に川底へ沈む
湖の美姫は国を捨て愛を選び糞尿に溺れて刑死する
孤赤児は蚯蚓の血を母の乳とし三夜して腹より腐る
生命よこの賛歌を聞け笑い疲れた怨嗟を重ねて
生命よこの祈りを聞け怒りおののく喜びを枕に
百年の生は炎と剣の連環が幾重にも飾り立てよう
七日の生は闇と静寂に守られ無垢に光り輝くだろう
獣よ踊れ野を馳せよ唄い騒いで猛り駆けめぐれ
いまや如何なる鎖も檻も汝の前には朽ちた土塊
The saint performing miracles set to save mankind was cursed by God, to nausea
The gold-crowned conqueror who ruled vast plains met his end when he drowned with his beloved horse, in the river
The lady of the lake who forsook her country for love drowned in excrement, sentenced to death
The orphan babe who drank maggotsblood for mother’s milk took three days to die, rotting from the inside
Life, let my eulogy reach your tired ears and deepen your fury
Life, hear my prayer and sleep soundly in thrashing joyous rage
A hundred years’ worth of life was lost to fire and blade
Seven days’ worth of life let to shine in innocence, guarded by stygian silence
Frolic upon the fields, O beast, let loose your savage song
No chain nor jail can stop you; all before you shall fall to dust
—
ok so that’s all I can think of right now. I’m sure there’s more somewhere. I hope you enjoyed it if you actually read any of this kuso shit
View the full article
I wrote earlier about how I thought when translating a few lines in Shinimasu. This series is going to be in that vein, with an eye to explaining translation decisions and highlighting unusual takes. I’m going to try to make it interesting for people not knowing Japanese, but to save effort I’m not going to be providing literal translation equivalents to lines.
Why am I doing this? Because my brain is a fuck and producing blog posts is an interesting motivation for doing a second pass on my translation.
Unfortunately for those expecting worthwhile content I feel like digressing a bit into history and methods for this first post, though. This is what my TL setup has looked like for most of the time I’ve worked on the project:
I started out doing 64 lines in December 2017, this got Asonn involved, and he introduced me to Porygon, who set up a git repository* and provided the tool you see. My brain swears I tweeted this pastebin, and I know I at least got some comment, but twitter search can’t find it so who the fuck knows? Anyway, I probably did 129 lines just copying from the game or script (can’t remember), then I copied them to the tool and worked there. One of the joys of working with porygon is that he has highly motivating auto-updating progress pages for you to fap to after pushing your new lines. This probably helped me more than I’d really like to admit.
Either way, apart from being convenient for reinsertion later**, the tool has rudimentary edict-lookup of the (autoparsed) tl lines, which is convenient if you’re extremely fucking lazy. I’m not going to say I never used it (I am extremely fucking lazy), but going j-j definitely was needed more than once. Other than that I guess it’s ok, though it does have a still-unfixed bug where it’ll fuck up and display too few lines of text in a box due to some miscalculation.
It’s certainly missing some features my dream tool would have, though. Personally I’d love to be able to see the script commands surrounding a line through some UI element to expand, as this could partially substitute for actually having the VN open for visual/scenographic context. It doesn’t have EPWING lookup, but that’s high effort since the format is bullshit apparently. It also doesn’t let you play voiced lines associated with spoken lines, though Shinimasu is unvoiced so I guess it doesn’t really matter for this project.
Today I had to contact pory since it had stoped working properly; it turned out my build of the tool was old enough that a bug with java 9 (I had recently updated) was making it unusable. He quickly got a fix for the tool, but it took enough time that I lost the energy for revising my tl. Or that’s my excuse, anyway.
See you next time for actual tl discussion w
*What’s a git repository? Well the long answer is long and full of programmer-speak, but basically it lets you keep an online backup of your files, preserving older versions each time you decide to add a newer version to the server. You can do this while multiple people are working on the same file sometimes, though it can get hairy. I ended up not needing this much, but it’s been good insurance against data loss (and I have changed laptops at least once during translation, also had to reinstall windows once…). Really if you don’t have a backup for any translation of length, you’re probably doing it wrong (but also I am a CS student so it’s… not as hard for me w)
**By virtue of saving the line number in the original script where the Japanese line was and associating that with the eventual translated line. I used a simplified version of this myself based on google sheets columns when I did tech for the ichigo & kyuugo tl.
View the full article
I wrote earlier about how I thought when translating a few lines in Shinimasu. This series is going to be in that vein, with an eye to explaining translation decisions and highlighting unusual takes. I’m going to try to make it interesting for people not knowing Japanese, but to save effort I’m not going to be providing literal translation equivalents to lines.
Why am I doing this? Because my brain is a fuck and producing blog posts is an interesting motivation for doing a second pass on my translation.
Unfortunately for those expecting worthwhile content I feel like digressing a bit into history and methods for this first post, though. This is what my TL setup has looked like for most of the time I’ve worked on the project:
I started out doing 64 lines in December 2017, this got Asonn involved, and he introduced me to Porygon, who set up a git repository* and provided the tool you see. My brain swears I tweeted this pastebin, and I know I at least got some comment, but twitter search can’t find it so who the fuck knows? Anyway, I probably did 129 lines just copying from the game or script (can’t remember), then I copied them to the tool and worked there. One of the joys of working with porygon is that he has highly motivating auto-updating progress pages for you to fap to after pushing your new lines. This probably helped me more than I’d really like to admit.
Either way, apart from being convenient for reinsertion later**, the tool has rudimentary edict-lookup of the (autoparsed) tl lines, which is convenient if you’re extremely fucking lazy. I’m not going to say I never used it (I am extremely fucking lazy), but going j-j definitely was needed more than once. Other than that I guess it’s ok, though it does have a still-unfixed bug where it’ll fuck up and display too few lines of text in a box due to some miscalculation.
It’s certainly missing some features my dream tool would have, though. Personally I’d love to be able to see the script commands surrounding a line through some UI element to expand, as this could partially substitute for actually having the VN open for visual/scenographic context. It doesn’t have EPWING lookup, but that’s high effort since the format is bullshit apparently. It also doesn’t let you play voiced lines associated with spoken lines, though Shinimasu is unvoiced so I guess it doesn’t really matter for this project.
Today I had to contact pory since it had stoped working properly; it turned out my build of the tool was old enough that a bug with java 9 (I had recently updated) was making it unusable. He quickly got a fix for the tool, but it took enough time that I lost the energy for revising my tl. Or that’s my excuse, anyway.
See you next time for actual tl discussion w
*What’s a git repository? Well the long answer is long and full of programmer-speak, but basically it lets you keep an online backup of your files, preserving older versions each time you decide to add a newer version to the server. You can do this while multiple people are working on the same file sometimes, though it can get hairy. I ended up not needing this much, but it’s been good insurance against data loss (and I have changed laptops at least once during translation, also had to reinstall windows once…). Really if you don’t have a backup for any translation of length, you’re probably doing it wrong (but also I am a CS student so it’s… not as hard for me w)
**By virtue of saving the line number in the original script where the Japanese line was and associating that with the eventual translated line. I used a simplified version of this myself based on google sheets columns when I did tech for the ichigo & kyuugo tl.
I wrote earlier about how I thought when translating a few lines in Shinimasu. This series is going to be in that vein, with an eye to explaining translation decisions and highlighting unusual takes. I’m going to try to make it interesting for people not knowing Japanese, but to save effort I’m not going to be providing literal translation equivalents to lines.
Why am I doing this? Because my brain is a fuck and producing blog posts is an interesting motivation for doing a second pass on my translation.
Unfortunately for those expecting worthwhile content I feel like digressing a bit into history and methods for this first post, though. This is what my TL setup has looked like for most of the time I’ve worked on the project:
I started out doing 64 lines in December 2017, this got Asonn involved, and he introduced me to Porygon, who set up a git repository* and provided the tool you see. My brain swears I tweeted this pastebin, and I know I at least got some comment, but twitter search can’t find it so who the fuck knows? Anyway, I probably did 129 lines just copying from the game or script (can’t remember), then I copied them to the tool and worked there. One of the joys of working with porygon is that he has highly motivating auto-updating progress pages for you to fap to after pushing your new lines. This probably helped me more than I’d really like to admit.
Either way, apart from being convenient for reinsertion later**, the tool has rudimentary edict-lookup of the (autoparsed) tl lines, which is convenient if you’re extremely fucking lazy. I’m not going to say I never used it (I am extremely fucking lazy), but going j-j definitely was needed more than once. Other than that I guess it’s ok, though it does have a still-unfixed bug where it’ll fuck up and display too few lines of text in a box due to some miscalculation.
It’s certainly missing some features my dream tool would have, though. Personally I’d love to be able to see the script commands surrounding a line through some UI element to expand, as this could partially substitute for actually having the VN open for visual/scenographic context. It doesn’t have EPWING lookup, but that’s high effort since the format is bullshit apparently. It also doesn’t let you play voiced lines associated with spoken lines, though Shinimasu is unvoiced so I guess it doesn’t really matter for this project.
Today I had to contact pory since it had stoped working properly; it turned out my build of the tool was old enough that a bug with java 9 (I had recently updated) was making it unusable. He quickly got a fix for the tool, but it took enough time that I lost the energy for revising my tl. Or that’s my excuse, anyway.
See you next time for actual tl discussion w
*What’s a git repository? Well the long answer is long and full of programmer-speak, but basically it lets you keep an online backup of your files, preserving older versions each time you decide to add a newer version to the server. You can do this while multiple people are working on the same file sometimes, though it can get hairy. I ended up not needing this much, but it’s been good insurance against data loss (and I have changed laptops at least once during translation, also had to reinstall windows once…). Really if you don’t have a backup for any translation of length, you’re probably doing it wrong (but also I am a CS student so it’s… not as hard for me w)
**By virtue of saving the line number in the original script where the Japanese line was and associating that with the eventual translated line. I used a simplified version of this myself based on google sheets columns when I did tech for the ichigo & kyuugo tl.
View the full article
The story of how I came to read this EVN is kind of like Countdown to silence itself. It started out with a bit of comic relief mingled with human drama (The dev came in and posted a link on the Fuwanovel discord and I grilled him for a bit because my ego is large and my opinions voluminous, but he managed to at least catch my interest). Then trouble struck (My Internet’s been down for hours now and it’s doing a number on me), but this led to some exciting events (I played the VN on a whim and it turned out to actually be good). The ending… well, my Internet’s still not back on, can someone tell the wankers over at Comhem to hurry up and get my router a bloody IP address? Thanks in advance.
13 hours later, I finally have the connection necessary to post this. Holy fuck.
Countdown to Silence takes place in a world where (entirely benevolent and harmless) experiments intended to give humans superpowers have succeeded, but in an unexpected fashion: only their kids got a splash with the supe brush. This ability is called IO for “Information Overlay”, and true to its name it presents itself as an overlay showing you certain information – with varying levels of usefulness depending on your specific ability. The protagonist and (voiced!) narrator, Josh, didn’t get particularly lucky with his: all it shows him is a countdown to when people will speak to him next. While there are _some_ uses for this, it mostly doesn’t give him much benefit. His best friend Kyle has a much better ability: seeing potential conversation choices when talking to people, potentially revealing their secrets but also making him a great guy to talk to. The setting and abilities are used surprisingly well in the story, but don’t expect anything about uncovering government conspiracies or rebelling against society or whatever, it’s just accepted as a Thing in universe. You could probably rewrite the thing without the abilities, but it wouldn’t have the same zing to it, so I can’t say I’m bothered.
No, but self-isolation does, so basically half of us are in the system now.
The VN walks a delicate line between drama and comedy, and will frequently take the edge off tense moments with a comedic segment before ramping up the tension again. Thankfully, it succeeds in the balancing act; neither the comedy nor the drama are cheapened too much by its counterpart. The humor does have indulgent parts; the main character is a weeb into magical girl shows for kids. This doesn’t get too grating in my opinion, and it’s only mentioned in like three scenes, but after reading this many EVNs I still feel it’s a bit cliché. Otherwise, I would describe it as… a bit camp, I guess? On the low end of the scale though. I swear to god if the creator of this isn’t British I need to get my tea-dar fixed.
Nisemonogatari >>> Bakemonogatari
So why do I like it so much? Well, first of all, the plotting is tight: it doesn’t waste time, keeps you interested, and things slide into place from foreshadowing in pleasing ways.
Second, the voiced narration actually adds a lot for me. There’s a constant echo-ish effect to it, it’s clearly not a super high quality recording, but I find it charming. Combined with the rest of the voices in this fully voiced VN (not badly acted, but certainly not recorded with the best equipment), the weird style convention of leaving off most ending periods in text boxes, and the uhh, funky backgrounds, it feels very doujin. Alone, any of these elements would be less than ideal, but together it forms a gestalt I find strangely palatable. Though I still must insist that you really should still end your text boxes with periods – I got used to the style because it was consistent and repetition legitimizes, but it’s not going to be a good fit for most stories and arguably made even this one worse. Anyway, the aesthetic fits the drama-comedy flow of the story pretty well. I’m left with the impression that it all shouldn’t fit together so well, and yet it just does.
So yeah, I really recommend this for a fun and engaging 30-60 minutes or so of content. Extremely positively surprised.
Download free at: https://plotline-progenitor.itch.io/countdown-to-silence
–
Okay, but as we all know I have autism, so let’s nitpick the craft a bit instead as I think the writer has potential and might read this. If you’re not into that, feel free to skip the rest of this.
Hotkeys:
Page up/down do nothing, despite the fact that they’re listed on the Help page! No hotkey to show message history, the SUPERIOR history function.
UI:
There’s no way to replay voice lines besides going back from a later line with rollback (and then they always play due to renpy rollback.) Rollback is the default backlog for mousewheel (my JVN soul cries for it to activate the backlog instead and then have scenario jump and voice replay buttons in that history). Uses default UI rather than anything custom as far as I can tell, though at least the modern Ren’Py default doesn’t make me want to tear my eyes out.
Sound:
Some voices are too hard to hear at the default music volume (full) while others are perfectly fine. I remember a scene where this made me have to go into the settings and lower the music volume to like half (which I left it at). I feel like this could have been avoided with more careful sound design.
Why put this on your download page when you can just change the default settings???
Music doesn’t fade out, it just cuts, which makes scene transitions feel unnecessarily and jarringly sudden. Especially the final line of the game suffers from this – it really needed a soft fadeout to mimic the emotion at that point. Overall, think about transitions more when scripting.
Voices sometimes do not fully match the written line, though the wording is often better than the actual text. One voiced line even adds a word that was accidentally omitted in the text!
Text:
Apart from the aforementioned thing where sentences just end without punctuation half the time, there’s a few typos that could’ve been caught by a careful eye. The phrasing style, and well, the style in general is unusual and feels like veering into the relaxed conventions of, I don’t know, fanfic writing? With everything else it kind of works, but it certainly won’t work for just any tone, and you’ll need to be careful with this in the future. The voiced narration does help sell some fairly long sentences without punctuation, so it’s good we have it.
…And that’s about it, I think.
The story of how I came to read this EVN is kind of like Countdown to silence itself. It started out with a bit of comic relief mingled with human drama (The dev came in and posted a link on the Fuwanovel discord and I grilled him for a bit because my ego is large and my opinions voluminous, but he managed to at least catch my interest). Then trouble struck (My Internet’s been down for hours now and it’s doing a number on me), but this led to some exciting events (I played the VN on a whim and it turned out to actually be good). The ending… well, my Internet’s still not back on, can someone tell the wankers over at Comhem to hurry up and get my router a bloody IP address? Thanks in advance.
13 hours later, I finally have the connection necessary to post this. Holy fuck.
Countdown to Silence takes place in a world where (entirely benevolent and harmless) experiments intended to give humans superpowers have succeeded, but in an unexpected fashion: only their kids got a splash with the supe brush. This ability is called IO for “Information Overlay”, and true to its name it presents itself as an overlay showing you certain information – with varying levels of usefulness depending on your specific ability. The protagonist and (voiced!) narrator, Josh, didn’t get particularly lucky with his: all it shows him is a countdown to when people will speak to him next. While there are _some_ uses for this, it mostly doesn’t give him much benefit. His best friend Kyle has a much better ability: seeing potential conversation choices when talking to people, potentially revealing their secrets but also making him a great guy to talk to. The setting and abilities are used surprisingly well in the story, but don’t expect anything about uncovering government conspiracies or rebelling against society or whatever, it’s just accepted as a Thing in universe. You could probably rewrite the thing without the abilities, but it wouldn’t have the same zing to it, so I can’t say I’m bothered.
No, but self-isolation does, so basically half of us are in the system now.
The VN walks a delicate line between drama and comedy, and will frequently take the edge off tense moments with a comedic segment before ramping up the tension again. Thankfully, it succeeds in the balancing act; neither the comedy nor the drama are cheapened too much by its counterpart. The humor does have indulgent parts; the main character is a weeb into magical girl shows for kids. This doesn’t get too grating in my opinion, and it’s only mentioned in like three scenes, but after reading this many EVNs I still feel it’s a bit cliché. Otherwise, I would describe it as… a bit camp, I guess? On the low end of the scale though. I swear to god if the creator of this isn’t British I need to get my tea-dar fixed. He’s Australian. Close enough.
Nisemonogatari >>> Bakemonogatari
So why do I like it so much? Well, first of all, the plotting is tight: it doesn’t waste time, keeps you interested, and things slide into place from foreshadowing in pleasing ways.
Second, the voiced narration actually adds a lot for me. There’s a constant echo-ish effect to it, it’s clearly not a super high quality recording, but I find it charming. Combined with the rest of the voices in this fully voiced VN (not badly acted, but certainly not recorded with the best equipment), the weird style convention of leaving off most ending periods in text boxes, and the uhh, funky backgrounds, it feels very doujin. Alone, any of these elements would be less than ideal, but together it forms a gestalt I find strangely palatable. Though I still must insist that you really should still end your text boxes with periods – I got used to the style because it was consistent and repetition legitimizes, but it’s not going to be a good fit for most stories and arguably made even this one worse. Anyway, the aesthetic fits the drama-comedy flow of the story pretty well. I’m left with the impression that it all shouldn’t fit together so well, and yet it just does.
So yeah, I really recommend this for a fun and engaging 30-60 minutes or so of content. Extremely positively surprised.
Download free at: https://plotline-progenitor.itch.io/countdown-to-silence
–
Okay, but as we all know I have autism, so let’s nitpick the craft a bit instead as I think the writer has potential and might read this. If you’re not into that, feel free to skip the rest of this.
Hotkeys:
Page up/down do nothing, despite the fact that they’re listed on the Help page! No hotkey to show message history, the SUPERIOR history function.
UI:
There’s no way to replay voice lines besides going back from a later line with rollback (and then they always play due to renpy rollback.) Rollback is the default backlog for mousewheel (my JVN soul cries for it to activate the backlog instead and then have scenario jump and voice replay buttons in that history). Uses default UI rather than anything custom as far as I can tell, though at least the modern Ren’Py default doesn’t make me want to tear my eyes out.
Sound:
Some voices are too hard to hear at the default music volume (full) while others are perfectly fine. I remember a scene where this made me have to go into the settings and lower the music volume to like half (which I left it at). I feel like this could have been avoided with more careful sound design.
Why put this on your download page when you can just change the default settings???
Music doesn’t fade out, it just cuts, which makes scene transitions feel unnecessarily and jarringly sudden. Especially the final line of the game suffers from this – it really needed a soft fadeout to mimic the emotion at that point. Overall, think about transitions more when scripting. I checked and there is a fadeout on the last line at least, so I’m not sure what I was smoking. It feels way too short however, so I’ve advised the guy to make them longer.
Voices sometimes do not fully match the written line, though the wording is often better than the actual text. One voiced line even adds a word that was accidentally omitted in the text! After this he DMed me, so I went through the thing and sent him a QA report with ~50 spots of (mostly) voice/text inconsistency but also a few genuine textual errors. Apparently he doesn’t have his main computer available right now, though, so there might not be any fixes for a while.
Text:
Apart from the aforementioned thing where sentences just end without punctuation half the time, there’s a few typos that could’ve been caught by a careful eye. The phrasing style, and well, the style in general is unusual and feels like veering into the relaxed conventions of, I don’t know, fanfic writing? With everything else it kind of works, but it certainly won’t work for just any tone, and you’ll need to be careful with this in the future. The voiced narration does help sell some fairly long sentences without punctuation, so it’s good we have it.
…And that’s about it, I think.
View the full article
The story of how I came to read this EVN is kind of like Countdown to silence itself. It started out with a bit of comic relief mingled with human drama (The dev came in and posted a link on the Fuwanovel discord and I grilled him for a bit because my ego is large and my opinions voluminous, but he managed to at least catch my interest). Then trouble struck (My Internet’s been down for hours now and it’s doing a number on me), but this led to some exciting events (I played the VN on a whim and it turned out to actually be good). The ending… well, my Internet’s still not back on, can someone tell the wankers over at Comhem to hurry up and get my router a bloody IP address? Thanks in advance.
13 hours later, I finally have the connection necessary to post this. Holy fuck.
Countdown to Silence takes place in a world where (entirely benevolent and harmless) experiments intended to give humans superpowers have succeeded, but in an unexpected fashion: only their kids got a splash with the supe brush. This ability is called IO for “Information Overlay”, and true to its name it presents itself as an overlay showing you certain information – with varying levels of usefulness depending on your specific ability. The protagonist and (voiced!) narrator, Josh, didn’t get particularly lucky with his: all it shows him is a countdown to when people will speak to him next. While there are _some_ uses for this, it mostly doesn’t give him much benefit. His best friend Kyle has a much better ability: seeing potential conversation choices when talking to people, potentially revealing their secrets but also making him a great guy to talk to. The setting and abilities are used surprisingly well in the story, but don’t expect anything about uncovering government conspiracies or rebelling against society or whatever, it’s just accepted as a Thing in universe. You could probably rewrite the thing without the abilities, but it wouldn’t have the same zing to it, so I can’t say I’m bothered.
No, but self-isolation does, so basically half of us are in the system now.
The VN walks a delicate line between drama and comedy, and will frequently take the edge off tense moments with a comedic segment before ramping up the tension again. Thankfully, it succeeds in the balancing act; neither the comedy nor the drama are cheapened too much by its counterpart. The humor does have indulgent parts; the main character is a weeb into magical girl shows for kids. This doesn’t get too grating in my opinion, and it’s only mentioned in like three scenes, but after reading this many EVNs I still feel it’s a bit cliché. Otherwise, I would describe it as… a bit camp, I guess? On the low end of the scale though. I swear to god if the creator of this isn’t British I need to get my tea-dar fixed. He’s Australian. Close enough.
Nisemonogatari >>> Bakemonogatari
So why do I like it so much? Well, first of all, the plotting is tight: it doesn’t waste time, keeps you interested, and things slide into place from foreshadowing in pleasing ways.
Second, the voiced narration actually adds a lot for me. There’s a constant echo-ish effect to it, it’s clearly not a super high quality recording, but I find it charming. Combined with the rest of the voices in this fully voiced VN (not badly acted, but certainly not recorded with the best equipment), the weird style convention of leaving off most ending periods in text boxes, and the uhh, funky backgrounds, it feels very doujin. Alone, any of these elements would be less than ideal, but together it forms a gestalt I find strangely palatable. Though I still must insist that you really should still end your text boxes with periods – I got used to the style because it was consistent and repetition legitimizes, but it’s not going to be a good fit for most stories and arguably made even this one worse. Anyway, the aesthetic fits the drama-comedy flow of the story pretty well. I’m left with the impression that it all shouldn’t fit together so well, and yet it just does.
So yeah, I really recommend this for a fun and engaging 30-60 minutes or so of content. Extremely positively surprised.
Download free at: https://plotline-progenitor.itch.io/countdown-to-silence
–
Okay, but as we all know I have autism, so let’s nitpick the craft a bit instead as I think the writer has potential and might read this. If you’re not into that, feel free to skip the rest of this.
Hotkeys:
Page up/down do nothing, despite the fact that they’re listed on the Help page! No hotkey to show message history, the SUPERIOR history function.
UI:
There’s no way to replay voice lines besides going back from a later line with rollback (and then they always play due to renpy rollback.) Rollback is the default backlog for mousewheel (my JVN soul cries for it to activate the backlog instead and then have scenario jump and voice replay buttons in that history). Uses default UI rather than anything custom as far as I can tell, though at least the modern Ren’Py default doesn’t make me want to tear my eyes out.
Sound:
Some voices are too hard to hear at the default music volume (full) while others are perfectly fine. I remember a scene where this made me have to go into the settings and lower the music volume to like half (which I left it at). I feel like this could have been avoided with more careful sound design.
Why put this on your download page when you can just change the default settings???
Music doesn’t fade out, it just cuts, which makes scene transitions feel unnecessarily and jarringly sudden. Especially the final line of the game suffers from this – it really needed a soft fadeout to mimic the emotion at that point. Overall, think about transitions more when scripting. I checked and there is a fadeout on the last line at least, so I’m not sure what I was smoking. It feels way too short however, so I’ve advised the guy to make them longer.
Voices sometimes do not fully match the written line, though the wording is often better than the actual text. One voiced line even adds a word that was accidentally omitted in the text! After this he DMed me, so I went through the thing and sent him a QA report with ~50 spots of (mostly) voice/text inconsistency but also a few genuine textual errors. Apparently he doesn’t have his main computer available right now, though, so there might not be any fixes for a while.
Text:
Apart from the aforementioned thing where sentences just end without punctuation half the time, there’s a few typos that could’ve been caught by a careful eye. The phrasing style, and well, the style in general is unusual and feels like veering into the relaxed conventions of, I don’t know, fanfic writing? With everything else it kind of works, but it certainly won’t work for just any tone, and you’ll need to be careful with this in the future. The voiced narration does help sell some fairly long sentences without punctuation, so it’s good we have it.
…And that’s about it, I think.
View the full article
If you’ve been on the boorus lately, you’ve probably seen a few ghastly failures at animating 2d porn. In the VN sphere, from what I’ve seen Damekoi’s H scenes were basically ruined by bad, forced animation, and even things people seem to like are not really more than passable. Honestly, most of them are so bad I wonder why people even bother.
Well, this game is Not That. It originally got on my radar because someone retweeted some animations the creator had extracted from the game onto my timeline. Once I’d checked them out, and realized there was some kind of game released, I knew I had to get it.
The gameplay is very basic; it’s basically a mildly interactive animation viewer. You can pick between 5 different scenes, which have 4 levels of intensity – the final level fades out the UI until it’s done, then resets to the lowest level (because you/loli just came). There’s a few neat touches: once you’ve cummed on the loli’s face in the dick lick scene it’ll be there for the other scenes, and cumming in her pussy (heretics will be furious to know this is the only option) will have her in her cummed-inside state for the other scenes as well.
There’s 5 scenes to choose from; missionary, a dick lick (the dick never goes inside the mouth), a remote-controlled dildo with only the girl in frame, a piledriver scene, and a hugging/lotus scene. I kinda wish she’d pee in a more discernible way in the vibe scene (what’s shown barely registers as piss for me) and oral on penis was never my thing, but the other three are very good imo. I imagine opinions might differ though, lol. I also really like the voice acting, though I imagine a few people will think it’s a bit overdone.
The animation loops a bit unsmoothly and transitioning between modes could be better, but it’s not _that_ jarring, and I found it extremely fappable. If you, much like me, would rather skip to the 30 seconds of the porn video with the actual good content than watch all of it, this is basically the perfect implementation of that concept.
All in all, I highly recommend this thing out; it’s restored my faith in the possibility of actually hot animated h-scenes in a non-hentai style.
You can buy it at DLsite here: https://www.dlsite.com/maniax/work/=/product_id/RJ256315.html
English version: https://www.dlsite.com/ecchi-eng/work/=/product_id/RE256315.html
And Fanza here: https://www.dmm.co.jp/dc/doujin/-/detail/=/cid=d_156467/?dmmref=ListRanking&i3_ref=list&i3_ord=2
I haven’t tried the DLsite English translation but it’s kind of hard to fuck this one up too hard since it only has like 10 lines of text in total.
Misc links:
Creator patreon Pixiv
View the full article
If you’ve been on the boorus lately, you’ve probably seen a few ghastly failures at animating 2d porn. In the VN sphere, from what I’ve seen Damekoi’s H scenes were basically ruined by bad, forced animation, and even things people seem to like are not really more than passable. Honestly, most of them are so bad I wonder why people even bother.
Well, this game is Not That. It originally got on my radar because someone retweeted some animations the creator had extracted from the game onto my timeline. Once I’d checked them out, and realized there was some kind of game released, I knew I had to get it.
The gameplay is very basic; it’s basically a mildly interactive animation viewer. You can pick between 5 different scenes, which have 4 levels of intensity – the final level fades out the UI until it’s done, then resets to the lowest level (because you/loli just came). There’s a few neat touches: once you’ve cummed on the loli’s face in the dick lick scene it’ll be there for the other scenes, and cumming in her pussy (heretics will be furious to know this is the only option) will have her in her cummed-inside state for the other scenes as well.
There’s 5 scenes to choose from; missionary, a dick lick (the dick never goes inside the mouth), a remote-controlled dildo with only the girl in frame, a piledriver scene, and a hugging/lotus scene. I kinda wish she’d pee in a more discernible way in the vibe scene (what’s shown barely registers as piss for me) and oral on penis was never my thing, but the other three are very good imo. I imagine opinions might differ though, lol. I also really like the voice acting, though I imagine a few people will think it’s a bit overdone.
The animation loops a bit unsmoothly and transitioning between modes could be better, but it’s not _that_ jarring, and I found it extremely fappable. If you, much like me, would rather skip to the 30 seconds of the porn video with the actual good content than watch all of it, this is basically the perfect implementation of that concept.
All in all, I highly recommend this thing out; it’s restored my faith in the possibility of actually hot animated h-scenes in a non-hentai style.
You can buy it at DLsite here: https://www.dlsite.com/maniax/work/=/product_id/RJ256315.html
English version: https://www.dlsite.com/ecchi-eng/work/=/product_id/RE256315.html
And Fanza here: https://www.dmm.co.jp/dc/doujin/-/detail/=/cid=d_156467/?dmmref=ListRanking&i3_ref=list&i3_ord=2
I haven’t tried the DLsite English translation but it’s kind of hard to fuck this one up too hard since it only has like 10 lines of text in total.
Misc links:
Creator patreon Pixiv
View the full article
I’m not writing this for you. I’m writing it for myself.
今年もとある滑稽な癖に従い、伝統ありのヴァルパージス炎を観に行った。別にその滑稽な想いだけが理由でもなくが、正直な所、その想い未だ持っているだけは情けないと思う。
I met my soulmate about a week before I started the first, transitional year of elementary school. I guess that means we were like, six or seven years old? She was sitting on the swing in the playground next to an apartment complex, and for whatever reason I was drawn to her instantly – I broke off from my parents and greeted her, and we got along like a house ablaze.
The next time I saw her was at school. She was in my class, and it was only natural that we’d be inseparable from that point on. Or was it? There was another boy who by now I barely remember who used to be in the picture, but he moved away. I think at one point she – I guess I’ll call her M – told me I was actually her second choice, but that other boy had left, so she’d picked me. Looking back I find myself analyzing this interaction as heckin’ weird, but at the time I accepted this without feeling bad about it. I guess I used to be even more obviously autistic than I am now.
Soulmates, for those reading who have had the misfortune of never having had one, are a real thing. It’s hard to describe the feeling of absolute, utter 乗り, of flow, I felt in her presence. Sometimes I doubt myself – did she feel the same? – and I guess by now I’ll probably never know. But there was something there I have never felt interacting with anyone else in my life.
She and I were best friends for I think five years. For most of them, as far as I know, I was essentially a donkan eroge protagonist, going as far as openly telling other people ‘she loves me, but I don’t love her’. We were officially boyfriend and girlfriend to each other for a little while at the end, but the most intimate thing that ever happened was a hug. Technically we got best couple at a dance or something, but frankly what I did there was a performance, not *real*. So I’m left with the curious feeling that while I may have unlocked the achievement ‘kissed a girl’, though we never did do it in the French fashion, I have never done it when it truly meant something to me. I think it’s fair to say I was a late bloomer when it comes to emotional maturity, if I ever hit it.
Eventually we slid apart, gradually, seemingly as naturally as we were first joined. Different classes and different friend circles meant we rarely met. We actually did happen to join up once again after having slid apart, however, and it felt just like to old times to me as we took a walk together. But that was it; we went to different high schools, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her since then.
今でも彼女を会いたいなぁっと想い、毎年あの炎に行く。 Mum told me she went to IT-Gymnasiet. 毎年「やっぱり居ないなぁ」って感じで炎の原始的な美しさを楽しみながらちょっとした悔しい思いも含む状態でいる。 She talks to M’s mum sometimes, I guess. 必死染みた所もあり彼女を探して失敗して、毎度悔いの有る想いを持ちながら火を観るのも飽き、家を向いて戻り始める。
今も会いたい。それだけだ。
I’m not writing this for you. I’m writing it for myself.
今年もとある滑稽な癖に従い、伝統ありのヴァルパージス炎を観に行った。別にその滑稽な想いだけが理由でもなくが、正直な所、その想い未だ持っているだけは情けないと思う。
I met my soulmate about a week before I started the first, transitional year of elementary school. I guess that means we were like, six or seven years old? She was sitting on the swing in the playground next to an apartment complex, and for whatever reason I was drawn to her instantly – I broke off from my parents and greeted her, and we got along like a house ablaze.
The next time I saw her was at school. She was in my class, and it was only natural that we’d be inseparable from that point on. Or was it? There was another boy who by now I barely remember who used to be in the picture, but he moved away. I think at one point she – I guess I’ll call her M – told me I was actually her second choice, but that other boy had left, so she’d picked me. Looking back I find myself analyzing this interaction as heckin’ weird, but at the time I accepted this without feeling bad about it. I guess I used to be even more obviously autistic than I am now.
Soulmates, for those reading who have had the misfortune of never having had one, are a real thing. It’s hard to describe the feeling of absolute, utter 乗り, of flow, I felt in her presence. Sometimes I doubt myself – did she feel the same? – and I guess by now I’ll probably never know. But there was something there I have never felt interacting with anyone else in my life.
She and I were best friends for I think five years. For most of them, as far as I know, I was essentially a donkan eroge protagonist, going as far as openly telling other people ‘she loves me, but I don’t love her’. We were officially boyfriend and girlfriend to each other for a little while at the end, but the most intimate thing that ever happened was a hug. Technically we got best couple at a dance or something, but frankly what I did there was a performance, not *real*. So I’m left with the curious feeling that while I may have unlocked the achievement ‘kissed a girl’, though we never did do it in the French fashion, I have never done it when it truly meant something to me. I think it’s fair to say I was a late bloomer when it comes to emotional maturity, if I ever hit it.
Eventually we slid apart, gradually, seemingly as naturally as we were first joined. Different classes and different friend circles meant we rarely met. We actually did happen to join up once again after having slid apart, however, and it felt just like to old times to me as we took a walk together. But that was it; we went to different high schools, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her since then.
今でも彼女を会いたいなぁっと想い、毎年あの炎に行く。 Mum told me she went to IT-Gymnasiet. 毎年「やっぱり居ないなぁ」って感じで炎の原始的な美しさを楽しみながらちょっとした悔しい思いも含む状態でいる。 She talks to M’s mum sometimes, I guess. 必死染みた所もあり彼女を探して失敗して、毎度悔いの有る想いを持ちながら火を観るのも飽き、家を向いて戻り始める。
今も会いたい。それだけだ。
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I’m not writing this for you. I’m writing it for myself.
今年もとある滑稽な癖に従い、伝統ありのヴァルパージス炎を観に行った。別にその滑稽な想いだけが理由でもなくが、正直な所、その想い未だ持っているだけは情けないと思う。
I met my soulmate about a week before I started the first, transitional year of elementary school. I guess that means we were like, six or seven years old? She was sitting on the swing in the playground next to an apartment complex, and for whatever reason I was drawn to her instantly – I broke off from my parents and greeted her, and we got along like a house ablaze.
The next time I saw her was at school. She was in my class, and it was only natural that we’d be inseparable from that point on. Or was it? There was another boy who by now I barely remember who used to be in the picture, but he moved away. I think at one point she – I guess I’ll call her M – told me I was actually her second choice, but that other boy had left, so she’d picked me. Looking back I find myself analyzing this interaction as heckin’ weird, but at the time I accepted this without feeling bad about it. I guess I used to be even more obviously autistic than I am now.
Soulmates, for those reading who have had the misfortune of never having had one, are a real thing. It’s hard to describe the feeling of absolute, utter 乗り, of flow, I felt in her presence. Sometimes I doubt myself – did she feel the same? – and I guess by now I’ll probably never know. But there was something there I have never felt interacting with anyone else in my life.
She and I were best friends for I think five years. For most of them, as far as I know, I was essentially a donkan eroge protagonist, going as far as openly telling other people ‘she loves me, but I don’t love her’. We were officially boyfriend and girlfriend to each other for a little while at the end, but the most intimate thing that ever happened was a hug. Technically we got best couple at a dance or something, but frankly what I did there was a performance, not *real*. So I’m left with the curious feeling that while I may have unlocked the achievement ‘kissed a girl’, though we never did do it in the French fashion, I have never done it when it truly meant something to me. I think it’s fair to say I was a late bloomer when it comes to emotional maturity, if I ever hit it.
Eventually we slid apart, gradually, seemingly as naturally as we were first joined. Different classes and different friend circles meant we rarely met. We actually did happen to join up once again after having slid apart, however, and it felt just like to old times to me as we took a walk together. But that was it; we went to different high schools, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her since then.
今でも彼女を会いたいなぁっと想い、毎年あの炎に行く。 Mum told me she went to IT-Gymnasiet. 毎年「やっぱり居ないなぁ」って感じで炎の原始的な美しさを楽しみながらちょっとした悔しい思いも含む状態でいる。 She talks to M’s mum sometimes, I guess. 必死染みた所もあり彼女を探して失敗して、毎度悔いの有る想いを持ちながら火を観るのも飽き、家を向いて戻り始める。
今も会いたい。それだけだ。
View the full article
This article contains major spoilers for Saya no Uta, gratuitous re-interpretation of canon, and probably a lot of words. Be warned.
When Saya no Uta first started showing its true colors – when Urobuchi first decided to throw a spanner of Lovecraft into a work that had been entirely plausible as a sci-fi story – I was a bit disappointed. Sure, the old L-C is cool and all, but the whole going mad from the revelation kind of thing never felt right to me. And honestly, don’t you think the “true” ending is kind of unsatisfactory? The aftermath is certainly implied to be a horror by the tone of the novel, but we’re never really shown its effects in detail to let us judge by ourselves. Let me fix that, and give you one heaven of a take.
But really though, scale back the layers and think of any magic you see as merely technology you cannot comprehend. How did Ougai contact Saya? Through some kind of communication unknown to current science, accessed by the occult artifacts and knowledge he gathers. The transport of Saya to Earth? Through that same network. Her home planet’s motivation? Efficient spreading of their superior culture throughout the universe – the ends very much justifying the means for the dull, foolish population of the planet we live on.
Let us ponder the method: detecting an occult signal is a surefire sign of intelligence, which indicates habitability by an intelligent species; genetic modification of the host species ensures ability to keep unique environmental modifications (though terraforming also occurs). It is also possible that teleportation is only possible through occult conduits, and Transformer probes such as Saya can only be sent if the other side invites them.
Modification is also significantly more humane than another viable choice: eradication and founding of a new colony. While it can be argued that some of the humans transformed by the gene-modifying spores released by Saya in the good ending would consider themselves to have “died”, and the transformation process is likely to be distressing (though likely tempered by its relative rapidity in most locales as well as communal development), I cannot agree that the elimination of 7 billion humans through some means is preferable.
As for any generations birthed after transformation, there should be no argument that them being of Sayan heritage is preferable to them being human by any sane measure. From Ougai’s notes as well as her own feats, Saya’s intelligence and ability to learn is markedly superhuman. Saya’s species is also sure to be able to create supertechnology far beyond the reach of our current civilization if they are able to precisely teleport anything.
There’s only one conclusion: Saya no Uta has only one good ending, and it’s the one where humanity is turned into tentacle monsters from beyond the void. The two others are horrible losses of potential, and we can only hope that a world-conquering probe such as Saya will be summoned to Earth once more, this time to succeed.
…And you probably know about it already if you know me, but anyway, my own #brand is Memeshii Translations apparently. Since you’re here, have some information on the experience of working with the paltry tools available:
*The linecount had to be the exact same or the insertion tool would crash with an unhandled exception.
*Some lines had a linebreak in the original; these were joined together engine wise so they had to be line broken no matter what. Usually this wasn’t a problem, but some lines ended up short in english but still needed a linebreak so they look wonky, and the second line in-game had two lines that wanted to be long and couldn’t be split so it was kind of hell to fit.
*Weeb quotes 「」 had to be used or the engine wouldn’t read it as a spoken line.
*One line was turned from speech to narration for flow reasons (it was like suu haa or some shit) by removing the speechtag annotation in front.
*There was no manual linebreak code I could use (mandated ones were just CRLF linebreak, and could only been used for that specific line). However, the engine does automatically line-break on a character level, and seems to be more or less monospace. So I ended up doing some of the line-breaking in this truly kami manner, checking it manually ingame over like 5 iterations:
す＠ is Sumire; あ＠ is Azami
*The extracted yscfg.ybn file had the window title at the end in plaintext. But the title seemed to be read in 2 char blocks or something which meant the title ended up as either “The world ends tomorrowA” or “The world ends tomorrowb” after insertion. I fixed this by adding a space after the name.
*The nametags were in a different script than the scenario but they were just text strings, so I could just edit them
*Same for the exit message when pressing the cross at the top right
*Since we used the “spoken line” format I had to convert this to the japanese quotation brackets. Kotlin code for you to meme at:
oh, java strings are immutable, fuck… fiiine I’ll your it your goddamn way
This is probably half the reason why any in-line quotes ingame are single quotes; I actually edited a pair of doubles because I couldn’t be arsed to clean up the script after the fixer code worked on it… or something.
Okay since you read this far some stats; I used Mediafire for the release because it gives download counts. It seems to update daily or something. First update was 63 downloads. Second was 89. I had 66 pageviews the blog release post on feb 14 and have 178 so far for feb 15. 89/244 gives us a ~36% download rate per view, not too bad. The About page seems to have gotten like, 8 views. The dedicated asuowa tl page has 7.
So uhh I guess I have to tl more shinimasu now.
fuck
…And you probably know about it already if you know me, but anyway, my own #brand is Memeshii Translations apparently. Since you’re here, have some information on the experience of working with the paltry tools available:
*The linecount had to be the exact same or the insertion tool would crash with an unhandled exception.
*Some lines had a linebreak in the original; these were joined together engine wise so they had to be line broken no matter what. Usually this wasn’t a problem, but some lines ended up short in english but still needed a linebreak so they look wonky, and the second line in-game had two lines that wanted to be long and couldn’t be split so it was kind of hell to fit.
*Weeb quotes 「」 had to be used or the engine wouldn’t read it as a spoken line.
*One line was turned from speech to narration for flow reasons (it was like suu haa or some shit) by removing the speechtag annotation in front.
*There was no manual linebreak code I could use (mandated ones were just CRLF linebreak, and could only been used for that specific line). However, the engine does automatically line-break on a character level, and seems to be more or less monospace. So I ended up doing some of the line-breaking in this truly kami manner, checking it manually ingame over like 5 iterations:
す＠ is Sumire; あ＠ is Azami
*The extracted yscfg.ybn file had the window title at the end in plaintext. But the title seemed to be read in 2 char blocks or something which meant the title ended up as either “The world ends tomorrowA” or “The world ends tomorrowb” after insertion. I fixed this by adding a space after the name.
*The nametags were in a different script than the scenario but they were just text strings, so I could just edit them
*Same for the exit message when pressing the cross at the top right
*Since we used the “spoken line” format I had to convert this to the japanese quotation brackets. Kotlin code for you to meme at:
oh, java strings are immutable, fuck… fiiine I’ll your it your goddamn way
This is probably half the reason why any in-line quotes ingame are single quotes; I actually edited a pair of doubles because I couldn’t be arsed to clean up the script after the fixer code worked on it… or something.
Okay since you read this far some stats; I used Mediafire for the release because it gives download counts. It seems to update daily or something. First update was 63 downloads. Second was 89. I had 66 pageviews the blog release post on feb 14 and have 178 so far for feb 15. 89/244 gives us a ~36% download rate per view, not too bad. The About page seems to have gotten like, 8 views. The dedicated asuowa tl page has 7.
So uhh I guess I have to tl more shinimasu now.
fuck
…And you probably know about it already if you know me, but anyway, my own #brand is Memeshii Translations apparently. Since you’re here, have some information on the experience of working with the paltry tools available:
*The linecount had to be the exact same or the insertion tool would crash with an unhandled exception.
*Some lines had a linebreak in the original; these were joined together engine wise so they had to be line broken no matter what. Usually this wasn’t a problem, but some lines ended up short in english but still needed a linebreak so they look wonky, and the second line in-game had two lines that wanted to be long and couldn’t be split so it was kind of hell to fit.
*Weeb quotes 「」 had to be used or the engine wouldn’t read it as a spoken line.
*One line was turned from speech to narration for flow reasons (it was like suu haa or some shit) by removing the speechtag annotation in front.
*There was no manual linebreak code I could use (mandated ones were just CRLF linebreak, and could only been used for that specific line). However, the engine does automatically line-break on a character level, and seems to be more or less monospace. So I ended up doing some of the line-breaking in this truly kami manner, checking it manually ingame over like 5 iterations:
す＠ is Sumire; あ＠ is Azami
*The extracted yscfg.ybn file had the window title at the end in plaintext. But the title seemed to be read in 2 char blocks or something which meant the title ended up as either “The world ends tomorrowA” or “The world ends tomorrowb” after insertion. I fixed this by adding a space after the name.
*The nametags were in a different script than the scenario but they were just text strings, so I could just edit them
*Same for the exit message when pressing the cross at the top right
*Since we used the “spoken line” format I had to convert this to the japanese quotation brackets. Kotlin code for you to meme at:
oh, java strings are immutable, fuck… fiiine I’ll your it your goddamn way
This is probably half the reason why any in-line quotes ingame are single quotes; I actually edited a pair of doubles because I couldn’t be arsed to clean up the script after the fixer code worked on it… or something.
Okay since you read this far some stats; I used Mediafire for the release because it gives download counts. It seems to update daily or something. First update was 63 downloads. Second was 89. I had 66 pageviews the blog release post on feb 14 and have 178 so far for feb 15. 89/244 gives us a ~36% download rate per view, not too bad. The About page seems to have gotten like, 8 views. The dedicated asuowa tl page has 7.
So uhh I guess I have to tl more shinimasu now.
fuck
