Fred the Barber

Just finished up Guy Gavriel Kay's Sailing to Sarantium, the first book in a duology called "The Sarantine Mosaic." It was really good! And at $4 for a long, high-quality fantasy novel on the Kindle, it's a steal. It's got a lot going for it: I think I must like historical fantasy. This is only the second historical fantasy series I've read (the other being Elizabeth Bear's "Eternal Sky" trilogy), but they both really spoke to me. There's something fascinating about the overlay of a familiar world and familiar cultures (in Bear's case, Mongolia, when men and mares conquered half the span of the world; in Kay's, Byzantium at its decadent height, on the eve of collapse) with fantasy elements (gods; spirits; magic) which apparently really pulls me in. It's a decently long book, and the writer is definitely not shy to go to the wall on writing elaborate descriptive prose, but even so, the book never once dragged. There was always something interesting happening, someone I wanted to see doing something I wanted to read about. It didn't fall victim to the typical long fantasy novel problem of having a giant, easily forgettable cast: I never once had a "wait, who are you, again?" moment with a character, and in fact, almost all the characters were pretty dear to me. In spite of it being a pretty misogynistic historical setting, the main female characters play big roles, and they earn those parts. There are some interesting male characters around, including the main character, but the women are the reason it's fun to read. Can I say "characters" a few more times? There are a lot of them, from many walks of life: slaves and emperors, chariot racers and mosaicists. And they're all worth reading about. Anyway, I really enjoyed it; highly recommend it, especially if the idea of historical fantasy seems interesting to you.

If we're nitpicking (I love nitpicking): Your "can play that game" version of the idiom has a weird feel to me, compared to the "can play at that game" in the Libra TL. Apparently your choice was nearly on an equal footing in the early 2000s, but then the gap widened again: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=can+play+that+game%2Ccan+play+at+that+game&year_start=1800&year_end=2018&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccan play that game%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccan play at that game%3B%2Cc0. Alas, Ngram doesn't have data beyond 2008... I thought maybe it was a regional difference, but hell, apparently there's even a US English movie with your version of the expression as its title, so who knows. Edit: Just noticed NGram actually has a little box where you can select American English vs. British English. If anything, "two can play at that game" looks to be even more consistently popular in British English.

But KonoSora is actually a good game.

Having recently finished it, I can attest that Saya no Uta is not shy about doing verbose description of things, but that it doesn't waste lines or scenes, which is a lot more than I can say for most VNs. So, it's very likely what you're looking for, in that sense. A lot of ADV-style VNs, especially, have a tendency to dedicate entire lines to shit like (completely made up example), "Having said that, she looked at me and tilted her head. I shrugged," which, while not a lot of words, is a totally wasted line and is obnoxious when you just want to get to what happens next. Similarly, said games will then dedicate lengthy scenes (or arcs) to relatively minor things which, in the grand scheme of things, I don't give a shit about. Sometimes I'm okay with that, but most of the time I want nothing more than to get through it so I can see the real meat of the story. Saya no Uta, at least, certainly doesn't suffer from that problem. Looking through VNs I've played for other things which don't have that problem... maybe the Steampunk series? Despite being pretty long games, I think they do a good job of making each arc self-contained and interesting on its own merits. Maybe try Gahkthun? Sekien no Inganock is certainly a better story, but dat fan TL...

Today, we learn that some numbers rise faster than others, especially when your TLC is between paying gigs and thus spending most of his time working on your project. Translation: 35175/40208 (87.5%), +251 (0.6%) Edit: 34230/40208 (85.1%), +64 (0.2%) TLC: 20425/40208 (50.8%), +11098 (27.6%) No, that TLC progress is not an error. That's actually all new progress in the past week. TBAC tells me, "It's mainly just reading," which I'm taking to be good news for the current script quality.

This one never really clicked with me. I don't even remember the ending, TBH (it's been a while, though, so I might be doing that specific of it a disservice). My biggest problem was always that the characters felt a little thin (especially Tohru), even for a reverse harem; I'd rather watch Ouran any day, for the more interesting characters. I never really got the name either.

Numbers go up, numbers go down. You can't explain that.

At the request of our lead translator, I have reset the TLC progress from our previous TLC. So, +a few hundred (some lines got TLCed this week), minus a few thousand (I removed the annotation from the ones that were TLCed previously, since they were all going to need another round of TLC anyway), and lo and behold, you have this week's actually-positive-but-apparently-negative progress, yay! Others unchanged TLC: 9327/40208 (23.2%)

Keep fighting the good fight, Flutterz, one day at a month.

I finished this last week, actually. Overall it was an interesting experience, but didn't do all that much for me. I'm glad I read it, but with the benefit of hindsight, I'd probably rather have spent the time reading something else, I guess? I feel like the combination of amateur writers and grand aspirations really shows: it's got a real Chekov's Gun problem, where it keeps introducing important-looking stuff that doesn't matter at all, and in general an issue with leaving loose ends all over the place (and not in an "open ending" sort of way, but more in a, "we just plain didn't care/forgot about all this shit we introduced" sort of way). It could definitely be more compelling if it were a little leaner, and if it had taken a few of the apparent ideas it had and ran with them. For instance, here's one regarding Yulya: Or consider the fallout shelter: Also, when I was done with Lena's route, I loathed her character because she had no character anymore. The game has too much forced-reread-that's-insignificantly-different content. I don't mind that the overall game is short (I actually kinda like short games), but that I spent about a third of the time on each route rereading the same scene was annoying. Anyway, lots of complaints, but the game certainly had its good points as well: a difference in setting and plot alone is nice, the art was pleasant, and the music was alright.

I finally played Saya no Uta yesterday. It was very good; not like exceptional or earth-shattering, but very good. Just as importantly, it was also extremely different from what I usually read, and it's nice to have a change of pace every now and then. My favorite part of it was how the game simultaneously made certain characters both repulsive and sympathetic. That's not a common or an easy thing to do, and it leaves you in a really strange mental place, which is a feeling I'm kind of savoring. That said, I'm looking forward to playing something more straightforward. I've been wrapping up things I wanted to do, lately, so I'm either going to read WEE Episode 3 or, more likely, finish up Fruit of Grisaia. Both have been hanging over my head for a while, especially the latter. Plus, that'll give me an excuse to read the common route again...

FWIW, Vokoca's fix does indeed seem to have solved things for me. So, don't worry, you don't need to uninstall Office and install any of Rooke's programs, just disable that task

Just little bumps to both TL and Edit progress this week. Some folks have been busy on other tasks, and some are still ramping up on the project; nothing to be done about it but be patient. Also, we fixed up the TLC calculation, which is why that number changed back to roughly what it was before. TL: 34924/40208 (86.9%), +103 (0.3%) Edit: 34166/40208 (85.0%), +123 (0.3%) TLC: 13670/40208 (34.0%)

Did you even read all the posts in the thread? I noticed the same problem fairly recently (and find it super annoying), and found this well-timed post on Tom's Hardware suggesting exactly what Vokoca said, so I'm trying it out without reasonably high hopes.

Yeah, this is something I was well aware of, but which probably isn't well known in general. I had a friend in college who insisted on importing the British version of the Harry Potter books, rather than reading the American localization, as if there was some joy to be had in hearing people say "Happy Christmas" to each other, and generally sounding like space aliens. I meant more like modern world literature, which I presume is predominantly translated into intentionally neutral English so as not to alienate Americans, Canadians, Brits, etc., though I could be wrong and maybe non-Americans find that all translated world literature reads strangely. I expect it makes the most sense, economically, to ensure you don't alienate Americans primarily, and then try to not alienate those other markets as a secondary goal. The best equivalent example I can find is translations from Japanese world literature: I've read tons of Murakami, a fair bit of Mishima, a couple of Kawabata novels, and an Oe novel. I don't recall any of those featuring British slang, and while I don't know if there was a separate translation for Britain vs. for the US for those, I'd be kind of surprised if there was.