Apparently, today some people got upset that I made an innocent subtweet calling them "makura gatekeepers" celebrating the H2O FanTL which I was extremely sure would be commented on by them. It was @Koyomi_ who did so actually. Obviously, a few people started flocking there again to say how I'm racist and how their place is so much more open than ours. Frankly, I got extremely bored at the exchange and I'm going to suggest not talking about them again in public.
In the end we should be working on our own microcosms and make them as a great as possible for the community to benefit from them. Even if they think I'm some boogieman nazi groomer community overlord that wants to spam people with his "ego" then that doesn't mean I don't appreciate their community building efforts.
So yeah, this is the last negative word I will lose about Keromakura's Community called Moekko and their users:
You suck, but I still appreciate what you are doing.
Moekko Invite: https://discord.gg/F79q4dp
If this doesn't help the pointless flinging, then people cannot say I didn't try.
So it has been a whole month since we started the Fuwanovel revival as intensively as we do it right now and so many amazing, but also some frustrating things happened. The peak of frustration obviously is the occasional interference by third parties (mostly the Gambs-adjacent circle) into our affairs who for some reason presume we are either deceitful or harmful to the community as a whole due to taking some things out of context - as usual. They also seem to have some obsession with the algorithm of Twitter. Whatever, I know what I'm doing and what intentions lie beneath what I do. Those people involved in the process or who know me longer than 5 minutes also do. Even if we consider all things and assume malice in everything I do, people cannot deny that I'm putting a lot of time, effort and typing time into getting everything in line.
Anyways, whatever happened yesterday and also happens with the gambsbot and gambs_v_cumtannia accounts is nothing more than a tempest in a teapot. While the hata last year would have been shaking and quaking right now, the 2022-freshly recovered one is calm and collected.
Now let's get to the positives. Fuwanovel has managed to bring a lot of cool people on board including old veteran posters, many new ones and also content creators. In this first month there was basically almost no moderation necessary as well, since there are not that many frequent posters yet and thus the amount of cognitively dissonant posters is also low. This might change in the future, but we'll see what the next steps will be afterwards.
In real life we are currently pursuing talks about a Logo for Mimir Translations, and we're soon ready to launch the website as a whole. The German industry will finally have a dedicated VN translation group and not just individuals who do developers a favor. Obviously, this is a business and we have the necessary professionality in place. Additionally, we would need to build another social media account - leading to me running 4 of them + my own!
I'm super glad about the friends that we could make/bring together through Fuwanovel and how I could diminish a large amount of my friendlist for more relevant people. I have 1000 friends as you may have seen in an earlier post, but this does not mean that every single of these account is either VN-related nor that we are still talking frequently. I simply find it tiring to clean up, especially because once you remove a single person the discord window closes for a sec and you have to scroll down again - boring and repetitive tasks are nothing for me.
The Fuwanovel discord has quickly developed into a place that I cherish as much as VN.Info's Hub. Maybe even more because so far the amount of politics and history talks that were so aggressively prevelant in VN.Info Hub's #general chat, are really low. This is not a signal to start up those talks again, however!
Lastly, I'm glad for the partnerships we have been able to quickly forge and the secret cabal discord chats were we plan pouring over the entire visual novel scene with peace and harmony. While meta talks about "wokism" are in vogue in multiple places of the community right now (1/2) we will just talk about VNs instead. Seems to be a better deal for everyone.
Today was another super exciting day full of even more exciting events. This morning we handed in one of the first translation projects for our newly founded German translation company "Mimir Translations". I look forward to the QC run that's going to follow once the new build is returned. This marks the first actual time we earned recognition and money while operating as a three-pronged company. Once the website is live, more details will follow.
We also made some new plans to take VN.Info into another direction and Fuwanovel's successful launch obviously will be included. Tomorrow morning, I will probably craft a post so masses of innocent sheep from the VN.Info Hub (Our beloved VN.Info Hub) can also contribute to the glory of this place. GLORY TO ARSTOTZKA, oops, wrong game.
Now, let's get to the topic I want to talk about. Apparently, there is a way to show the memberlist in Invision and when @Sinnedtold me how to do it, my jaw dropped. It is a three-step process which I will detail in the following images:
Who the fuck came up with this nonsense? Apparently, you first go to the search console, click the lens and enter nothing. Then you arrive at a bigger search interface, choose Member search and type nothing again. Then you arrive at the insanely big userlist of 20215 people. I honestly did not expect Fuwanovel to have had this many members. As you probably know a lot of the new people you meet here are handpicked and grabbed by your's truly. Once they hear how cool we all are on Fuwanovel they simply want to join back - so far there has been no one that was able to resist the allure of this place. And this is all due to you guys, you're amazing. I can already tell that our future will be bright.
Look forward, what we got for you on the blog. Our team of talented writers is ready to mesmerize you all!
It is not surprising that after the 5 years I'm already in this scene (it is probably more, because just 5 years ago the whole VN.Info thing took off and I oddly played some VNs earlier too) I met many people in this scene who came and went. After living for 3-4 years as a total meme, but totally unobstructed by whatever stood in my way to essentially shape VN.Info into what it is now, I had a big public fight with some people that left some psychological damage and required some introspective. I decided to completely switch my personality to someone who is just striving for harmony, does not get triggered at the occasional idiot anymore and is just focused on his goal to be "Making VNs popular in the west" or by extension probably due to my illusions of grandeur "Making VNs popular in the world".
In order to achieve this goal, I have had the pleasure to meet a lot of special people from the scene and the VN community who carry somewhat an influence in companies, fan projects or generally the western VN world. I believe that Fuwanovel (the community we are currently in and that is trying to drag its body out of its coffin after it laid idle for effectively 6 years or more) can achieve everything that we desire from the VN community. I wish to create a society where ppl are not gatekept for external reasons, where fanTL and official TL can thrive in parallel and where a healthy blog scene is nurturing.
In order to do that I sacrifice my time and effort to connect people who have otherwise never met in the hope they can create something great when working in collaboration with others. Many fan translation projects have failed not necessarily because the staff was incompetent, but because they either lacked the social skills for HR/management or their ego stood in their way of achieving greatness. Fuwanovel houses about 10 years of history and back in the day so many things were posted here where the githubs are still alive and still offer opportunity for the new generation of VN fans to learn how to deal with VN engines and how to start their own translation projects. The FanTL still scene has so much potential. I can see and 95% when I decide to hop fresh into someone's DMs and they get surprised like "who the fuck are you?" it still ends up being a nice talk. Mainly, because we all share the same passions.
However, to get to the point of this post's title. Due to this "dancing on every party" that I perform day after day in my mission to lay bridges for people, I ran into an interesting roadblock that I was not aware existed.
Discord only allows you to have exactly 1000 friends, an arbitrary limit that obviously now tugs on my heartstrings because it forces me to delete some people from my friendlist. I'm convinced that these people will eventually prove useful in some particular project and then I have to wrack my brain to recall their usernames. I can already see it...
Someone from JAST once said that he knows what "type of person" I am. I'm a person that enjoys being the well connected one and would bask in being the go-to guy for the fandom I occupy. Indeed, I enjoy that very much. But as long as it contributes to great projects being realized, no one can say I'm doing this out of malice, can they?
It is not easy to be a blogger, especially not when you start working for multiple blogs at once, try to raise translation company with your best friends and do a lot of management stuff on your own. Thankfully, Zaka is a super helpful person who even shocked me today by throwing a script that was almost ready-to-publish right in my face. I remember that back in the day I loved checking out the fuwanovel VNTS post and it deeply saddened me when it suddenly ended somewhere around the time where Eiyu Senki GOLD released. Funkily enough, Eiyu Senki GOLD was my first project I have ever worked on for JAST and it was to this day one of the funniest and simplest games I played. I should eventually review it, but then.. so far there is not a single of the 6 games I QCed for JAST that I have played privately... maybe I should do Majikoi: Love me Seriously! again with full-voices... I don't really know. I think I missed a lot of entertainment factor that this game loses when you are only playing with the 7+1 voices that JAST could ship it with - bless the Majikoicord overlords.
And here we have it again, I went on a tangent. This is actually a statement that someone made about me today after reading my musings on the VNTS post. They're totally right, but my brain operates differently. It operates at double the speed and this is not necessarily good. Well, let's get to the point of this post:
When writing for the VNTS I realized that fuwanovel does not use the Gutenberg-Editor, which I have gotten used to while writing more than 500 articles for VN.Info. This means that I had to look at the questionable deception of a WYSIWYG editor again today. Unfortunately, such an editor definitely lies to you, because when making THICC H2/H3 headings it looks bigger and less orderly than it ultimately looks in the published post. Also I got memed by the fuwa Wordpress backend being setup to follow U.S. timezones so my suspenseful hitting the publishing button with my big left toe did not work...
