Zakamutt

そっちとこっちは別腹だ！（指？ obligatory tl: they pull from different resource pools my dude

I tried Our Home and it had a grammatical error on like, line 4 or some shit Not sure why I bounced off quick but from what I remember, the art was less than optimal and the prose kinda lame

The original draft of the post I had in my head was more specific on noting that we should consider the archetypes more a "motivating quality" for inclusion or exclusion that would operate on a sliding scale. As such, you need to be able to assign some kind of intensity to every category to really make it work. Would be lit af to give myself the ol' Autist 9/10 tho The thing that motivated me to actually finish the post was unironically a philosophy-adjacent article, though I ended up realizing I was sort of incorporating the viewpoint anyway in my draft and not feeling like making the definition explicit. The starting motivation was another philosophy-adjacent article, fwiw.

I've always considered the Romancedude a subtype of the Moefuck that specifically wants the romance content in VNs. Part of the appeal for (western) men here is that the romance genre is generally either gender-neutral or female-centered, especially in erotica (or at least that is my perception - and that counts!). A lot of arrow gay are very explicitly male-oriented, which can be hard to get anywhere else. But it's not like otome/bl isn't a thing too — however the Otome/bl/yuri fan is Actually just a subtype of Romancedude (gender neutral dude, remember). That said, while there is so much overlap b/w Moefuck and Romancedude that I'm conglomerating them, we can see examples of the pure Romancedude that doesn't really care for moe that much. Possibly the preponderance of the Romancedude-Moefuck combination is due to the medium primarily offering just that! Yeah, but imagine how bad it could be if we didn't push back????????? Anyway, autism is actually pretty high on VNDB, which has pseudo-authority status, so I'm still hoping for AA to get taken off sometime. Any year now!!! The real solution, of course, is to just not be as engaged in a community of such plebs as would call AA VN to begin with. Considering that such a community will likely also be newbie-friendly and thus filled with such cringe as one so denoted brings, this is a natural motion as one gains experience anyway. It can even be fun to rally around how cringe all the dumb mainstream articles are.

I first started writing this in like 2018 and I finished half of it now but I didn't do it the way I was planning back then and it's a bit of a disjointed mess. I hope it's good enough anyway. - There have been some arguments as to what the definition of a visual novel should be, and that's well and good. But let's look at it from the other direction: what works should our definition of visual novels include? Let us begin our journey with a silly, myopic statement I will nevertheless repeat until @Palas finally calls a hit on me: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is not a visual novel. Okay, bullets fired, I feel better already. But why am I trying to define the boundaries of the visual novel category to exclude the pretty good adventure game series Ace Attorney, and what kinds of criteria am I using? Furthermore, why would anyone disagree with me when I am obviously right? ...Okay, let's back up a bit. Why do I care so much about categories at all? Categories Categories are useful because they allow us to make predictions about something assigned to that category. In the visual novel community, there are there are several important predictions to make: 1. I am likely to enjoy this work if it executes its aesthetic well 2. I would consider a person who reads/plays/likes this more a part of the community than one that does not 3. I would probably enjoy talking to someone who reads this work {about visual novels} We can see straight away that different parts of this would be important to different people. If you want to be part of a close-knit community, getting 2 and 3 right matters a lot. If you can find the visual novels you enjoy without community assistance, 1 matters little. The VN category helps us determine what things are acceptable to discuss, and what things are not our (main) concern. Similarly, the category helps us determine what people will be in our community, and what people will not. It's generally more entertaining to discuss things you care about, and it's better when the people you discuss with are more in tune with you. As such, there are real stakes, and real reasons to want to avoid being maximally inclusive. But what draws people to VNs, and what does that draw mean for their desired definition of the VN category? Let me attempt a list of categories: Archetypes of attraction to VNs Weebs The Weeb likes some part of Japanese culture. The Weeb is very skeptical and/or dismissive of visual novels not made in Japan, though the Weeb might make an exception for things made in Korea or China (Indonesia is probably too Western, however). If we asked the Weeb, the main problem with the visual novel category right now would be that too many people see fit to include a flood of shitty EVNs. The Weeb might grudgingly accept Katawa Shoujo depending on the Weeb's other preferences. Moefuck The Moefuck reads visual novels because they really like cute girls or boys. Often personal aesthetics play a big part here and specific preferences are hard to predict, for example certain Moefucks may reject an entire artist or company due to the artstyle in their works being unacceptable. The Moefuck cluster is often seen as an amorphous, rainbow-vomiting blob ruining visual novels by the more seriously afflicted storycucks, but in truth there is more variation in it than they may expect. Moefucks are not necessarily hostile to works with serious stories, they just prefer those stories to also have cute girls. Storycucks The Storycuck wants to experience good stories, and finds VNs to be a source of such stories. In terminal cases, the Storycuck may not be able to deal with the large amount of filler in many visual novels and bounce right out into the community periphery after initially being hooked by some particularly well-paced VN. The perfectly horrible case is the Storycuck that is too distracted to watch shows, unable to get into books due to lack of visual stimulus, yet also unable to deal with SoL content. Is there any being more cursed? Anyway, I digress. The Storycuck doesn't really care that much about medium conventions like moe or superficial presentation style or whatever: they want a compelling narrative. If we ask a Storycuck, one problem with the visual novel category right now is that it doesn't admit other related genres like walking simulators, or things like Actual Sunlight and To The Moon. Their perspective on more extreme extensions like Phoenix Wright or even JRPGs will depend on their evaluation of gameplay. Degenerate Fappers These gender-neutral guys just wanna have fun, in a way that generally requires at least one hand to be free for use. You're unlikely to actually see pure Fappers in the community as they don't really have stories to discuss. I'd try the f95zone or whatever if I were looking. In mixes with other types, this manifests as disinterest in anything that does not have porn. In their eyes, if it's got no ero, it has no place calling itself a VN — after all, if it can't be fapped to, there's no point in reading it! Ero-JRPG fanboys So now you're thinking to yourself - these guys (still gender-neutral) have got to have a lot of overlap with the Degenerate Fappers. I agree, but I think it's worth separating out the two. The Degenerate Fappers don't really have a need for the visual novel category because of their DF association — they'll be arguing mostly from another type's perspective, with a modifier of Horny — but the Ero-JRPG fanboys have a lot to lose if their objects of passion are cut out of the VN category. Why? Because the wider JRPG community often has a serious intolerance of porn in their games. There _are_ places that specify in just Ero-JRPGs [nekohen], but there aren't that many games in the category, and focus for some may be less on the story contents (often machine translated!) and more on the gameplay (ui only patches!) and porn. This leads to wishing to classify Ero-JRPGs like Toushin Toshi II, Evenicle, etc. as VNs despite them being basically equivalent to your average JRPG if one ignores the sex scenes. The pure Ero-JRPG fanboy doesn't really like to read for long stretches without interaction, and if it could remove something from the definition, it would probably pick first choice-free visual novels, then extensionally VNs with few enough choices to be bothersome. Autists The motivation of the Autist when it comes to the visual novel category is that it be clear and defined by a definition that is as Not Bullshit as possible. This is a meta-motivation that may cause people to go against the naive interests of their other types. For example, observe the Storycuck Zaka's high Autism interaction as he proclaims walking simulators should not be considered VNs, despite him having liked Gone Home quite a bit and being interested in more of the genre. The Autist's greatest gripe is when people goddamn try to shove things in the FUCKING category that obviously don't fit PLEASE STOP IT DAMN YOU. VN Evangelists The VN Evangelist wants to spread the word of visual novels by any means possible, and is not afraid to butt heads with some stuffy Autist if they have to. They can and will use imprecise language like "it's like playing an anime, man", wide definitions (expect Phoenix Wright to be on their list of 'VNs' to play for beginners), and such villainy to attempt to get more people into visual novels. A community member in favor of more exclusion may cringe at their methods and predict that they will overwhelmingly attract annoying orbitals who will finish DDLC or whatever and then fuck up discussion with their terrible, uninformed opinions. The Evangelist will tell said member to loosen the fuck up and not be so elitist, and who knows maybe DDLC-kun will be a productive member of the community one day NOT THAT THEY AREN'T ALREADY BUT ANYWAY. And so on. The VN Evangelist wishes more things were on vndb in general so it could have more arguments to get people to try other 'VNs' out. Artistes The Artiste is probably making a VN. Or two. It's got culture up to here. VNs are a medium, but it's so boring if you just take the conventions for granted, right? They want to break and remake in a Shivan storm of creation, never settling for the mediocrity of the established form. They resent criteria that restrict their medium-busting ambitions, and would like for you to abandon your silly notions of traditional presentation methods. The Artiste wants you to fucking chill out on insisting on any definition, but okay can we have like, The Walking Dead in the category please? (Zaka: No.) Oh and Actual Sunlight should definitely be in the category. (Zaka: Sure) Incredibly half-arsed conclusion Speaking as a person who is a Storycuck and Autist, but has low amounts of Weeb, Moefuck, and Horny, I think we should have a somewhat restrictive definition of visual novels, but we should welcome diverse artstyles and embrace EVNs. As I don't value gameplay highly, I consider the _choiceless visual novel_ the best way to ground the category, even though this is arguably ahistorical. Choices are fine, intrusive gameplay only good if it serves the narrative, and things that are OBVIOUSLY JRPGs FOR CHRIST'S SAKE should frankly just be taken out of VNDB right this minute. That said if something is very close to a VN and also story heavy and honestly it kind of reads like a VN? fuck it IS a VN fuck you include Actual Sunlight actually... then uhh yeah... Maybe we can compromise my ideals. —But your reasons for being into VNs may be very different. And this is why we must fight. I can only hope I will one day prevail, or at least see Actual Sunlight (kino) included on VNDB. Until then, I will attempt to appeal to the Autism in both of us to at least get a sensible — if fragile — boundary established.

you can actually learn japanese if you use the dictionary lookup a text hooker gives you access to recommend trying that tbh also, translation sucks

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. 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 prefer this brief guide

> a teenager crumbling under pressure from her toxic and demanding family I feel like this is a poor description because it misses the class aspect of Lynne I thought was somewhat obvious (and calling her family toxic feels overly reductive). It feels clear to me that she's written to be lower class and part of her struggle is dealing with a sense of low worth that brings (cf. her comparisons to Lynne), apart from her generally grimy (in all senses) surroundings. anyway I guess maybe I'll read this ge later if I can acquire it, idk tho

It's very hard to quantify how many VNs' worth of stuff I read before I was a decent translator because I have partially read then stalled innumerable works, but I'm pretty sure it'd be below 10. I would definitely advise trying to find someone to check your work, though it might be hard these days. One thing I would really advise is starting small, though this is partly because I'm personally so bad at doing things consistently. There are plenty of good VNs hovering around 2 to 3 thousand lines that represent something you can actually complete in a reasonable amount of time while paying attention to quality (warning: opinions ahead - https://disearnestlydisearnest.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/how-good-should-your-translation-be-before-editing/). Being a short work will also make people much more willing to invest time into helping you, as they're not signing up for something huge. Start looking for an image editor early. If there is a lot of work do be done for that, it can be a massive bottleneck.

Don't talk to people except in category 3 when not shitposting and all ur problems will be solved tbh I would try to rec true remembrance to a normie I guess

that's why you learn it first, as mentioned in my post.

these days the hot new thing is mouseover lookup with a browser plugin. since lookup starts where you put your cursor, you can mostly avoid the problems of misparsing. however, this is doable in TA's JParser (and afaik chiitrans) as well; in TA you edit the text in the "original text" window, adding spaces, and click a button to reparse, and chiitrans, uh, you do something I don't use it. the original text edit in TA also lets you try manual substitutions (ねー or ねぇ to ない,てきとー to てきとう, changing particles from が to を or adding を to make phrases parse and so on (though if you're suspecting an idiom maybe you should google it in Japanese instead))

The newest Japanese version works on win10. I thus recommend you learn Japanese, avoid the probably bad Ixrec tl (literally his first), and read it in Japanese w

While I generally agree with you, I thought the analogue gameplay was nicely inserted and fun, not to mention thematically appropriate and immersive as you play an investigator and there's data to be found with the commands. However, I'm used to using command line interfaces, which I imagine is a rare quality these days. Personally I'd like to extend your sentiment even further though. A lot of visual novels created EVN wise are (at least in marketing) incredibly and unhealthily obsessed with frequent choices (when they're not kinetic... but I'm fine with that extreme, so whatever). I don't think they ever really deliver on the freedom they pretend to be giving, and even if they did I'd rather not have to replay a zillion times to see the full text. Especially if there's no flowchart to use as a guide. I'd rather people focus on making good stories than providing unneeded agency. On a vaguely related note, Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo is p good gameplay hybrid w

Luckily I have no NDAs binding me, so I can post various VN TL rates I may or may not have been told about: First of all we have Arunaru when quitting MG who says the max rate at MG is now 1.75 cents per moji. I've heard 1 cent per moji quoted a lot as the lowest MG rate, but it's possiblE they've went up to 1.25 or something. https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sr1tu4. I believe editing rates are generally ~1/4 of tl rates at MG while they might be 1/2 at other companies, but this might have changed. Sol Press pays 1 cent per moji as far as I know. If you ever needed another reason not to work for them... JAST is afaik at least 2 but might be 3. Could go to 4? Frontwing used to pay a whopping 6 afaik, but I'm not sure if this is still true. Sekai is 2 or 3 I believe. Again, could go to 4? —but you'd be working for sekai project. I don't think any vn tl company bar frontwing pays 5 cents or above on any kind of regular basis. Maybe Aksys? not sure. I think Aksys has unusually high editor pay to go with their "have translators translate literally (badly) and punch it up later" approach where they expect semi-heroic editor efforts. But I haven't heard a number for Aksys I don't think.

wasn't there a fan tl project for this by some group on tumblr? no idea what happened to it I feel like there was some drama but idk edit: oh the drama was for a different tl (of starry sky in summer) by the same group due to getting C&D'd, but I guess you can probably count them out given that the tumblr is wiped and this is the latest progress report I can find:

11eyes

it's in (((technical issues))) land

I'd like a translation of Kodoku no Yurikago, a denpage obscure enough to not have had a vndb page until.... just recently, oh well, I was going to style on you by linking the jp dlsite page but whatever. I added some screenshots! I stalled it partway through because I have chronic stalling disorder. From what I've read it's a mindfuck with a distinctly unreliable narrator that had a terrible incident in his past which haunts him to this day. A lot of the story is told through non-chronologically ordered (dates shown in binary code half the time...) flashbacks that reveal what could have caused the incident, what it was, and what might be happening to him now. Also lots of nausea and depression and hating everything. The non-recollection part of the plot seems to be centered on protag-kun meeting a girl that triggers him immensely just by being around, to the point where the story goes entirely off the rails and whoops a lamp post is telling him about how science can only really remark on past events - the future is only predictions, and were the laws of the world to change entirely one day all science could do would be to record the new rules.

I think Lynne might have some of that grimy urban atmosphere, not sure if it's what you're after though lol since this would be a musical descendent at best - you can listen here https://sleepyagents.bandcamp.com/album/lynne-ost Beside the musical aspect, it's set in rundown, low class England and you can feel it. The graphics match as well.

as a symbolic downvote I will upvote this post

o/