Nonsequittal Rumblings

Several things have been going on around me this week.

First, on the fansub front.
Froth-Bite took a semi-break during the month of March – we made 4 releases during the entire month. Now, as of April 6th, we’ve already released more than double of that number already for this month, and more are on our way. The Leiji joint project has finally got their senses together, and started working on Space Symphony Maetel again. Finally released first 4 episodes again after taking 6 months break. Some of our own projects had some progress too. Then there is the new joint I’m doing with another group, Minor ja Nai. They’ve lost their translator for MAJOR. And I love that series. So it felt natural to step in and give them a helping hand. They didn’t coordinate the release effort with us very well… They released it while I was still sleeping. But oh well. We’ll live. Sounds like they will be ready with next MAJOR by this Sunday. I better pick my speed up on their project.

On to the music scene.
The leader of the jazz band I belong to has decided to make a career move. He has decided to move to Seattle. So someone had to take over his duties… I was chosen as one of those people. Even though it’s Cessna Jazz Band, there are only 6 of us who actually work for Cessna. We are minorities. Oh well. Poor Carl is brand new to the group, and he picked up co-leadership as well.

And tonight is our first gig under the new management. There are many uncertainties. Will we really survive? We’ll see.

On the different music front, I went to a first music concert in ages. Rajaton is a Finnish a cappella group. It’s a somewhat jazzy, very contemporary, fun group. It was $15 well spent. I love finding all these small, unknown gems. They reminded me of The Real Group – another a cappella group from Scandinavia. I later discovered that I’m not alone having such opinion. They have their similarities, but also differences as well. The Real Group likes to do traditional jazz standards (It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, Come Sunday) to some pop hits (Drive my car)… Rajaton likes the pop covers (Ticket to ride) and their original tunes. It’s fun to listen to all these Beatles tunes a cappella. Hehehe.

I just ran a quick update of fansub translation log this morning. I just noticed that I’ve hit 301st translation this weekend with the translation of Mahoraba episode 11. 300th was Mahoraba 10.

Series	episodes TL’ed	total count
Android Ana Maico 2010	1-24	24
Black Jack Special	1-4	4
Black Jack	1-2,4-17	16
Captain Tsubasa 2002	7-12	6
Chrno Crusade	1-15	15
Cinderella Boy	1-13	13
Final Approach	1-13	13
Galaxy Railways	1-12	12
Gear Senshi Dendoh	1-10	10
Godannar	1-26	26
Great Teacher Onizuka	37-39,43	4
Hajime no Ippo	8-34,36-76, Special, OVA	70
Hi no Tori	1-13	13
Kita-he – Diamond Dust Drops	1-5,7-8,12	8
Last Exile	3-26	24
Licensed by Royal	1	1
Lupin III Episode 0		1
Lupin III Operation Return the Treasure		1
Lupin III Stolen Lupin		1
Macross Zero	2-3,5	3
Mahoraba	1-11	11
Nanami-chan	1-12	12
Peacemaker Kurogane	19-21	3
Saint Seiya OVA	5-6	2
Space Symphony Maetel	1-8	8

And I’ve done this many in about 2 and 1/3 years? I need to get out of my house more. No wonder I’m still single.

October of this year was a crazy month for the anime lovers, and it continues to be. This fall, there were TONS of new anime starting up. Along with all these new shows, there were also numerous new fansubbing groups popping up on the net. I gotta say… wow… more people are bored out of their mind than I thought. Well, it’s a good thing – keeping them off of the streets, at least.

Anime Suki forum‘s help wanted section has lots of these new groups, looking for new members. And what’s the most sought after position? Translators. What else?

Wait.

That’s a strange thing to look for. Yes, I know that translators are NOT available in abundance. But in my mind, people shouldn’t even be thinking about forming a fansubbing team without first having a translator or two to start with. Some of these groups gets lucky and find someone who has taken about 3 semesters of Japanese in high school or college, and… *sigh* those subs really irks me. They often miss the fine nuances during its rough translations. Even those people who have Japanese parent(s) have problems with their Japanese skills. As a native speaker, it still is difficult at times. I just can’t stop think that this fansubbing business is really getting crazy.

There’s some reason to it though. As recently as a year ago, there were very little resources that taught people how to fansub. With the maturing of digital video (thanks to MP4 and its alikes) and broadband internet, fansubbing on the internet is easier than ever. But there were very little “howto” documents on line. I’m not sure how different people got started back then… Then came bunch of these “howto” documents. Timing Guide on AnimeSuki, my own typesetting guide, Doom9 for encoding, etc, etc… It’s just easier than ever to get started with the fansubbing business, except when it comes to finding the translator.

I won’t go flame those people who are starting a group up. But I can’t help myself but to just think lowly of those people…

I just fell prey to a simple worm… How could I allow myself to such an easy pitfall? I feel like an ass now. I’m going to stay out of IRC for a day or so…

When I do a lot of things, I go through the phases. Like dinner for instance, I go through the noodles phase, rice & stir fry phase, spaghetti phase, etc. Well, on the technical side, I’m going through the RSS phase. It started with a discovery of the convenience RSS brings. Find the RSS feed I like, and just drop it in the aggregator, and I’m done. Neato!
Then came the re-build stage. When certain aggregated announcement site took a plunge recently, I decided, I will make my own script, so 1) the stuff I create with Froth-Bite will be on our own feed; 2) to take the data displayed at another web site (baka-updates.com), and create my own feed. Both of them were pretty simple task, and the effect is great. I love doing the simple programming that simplify the life.

For the first time in almost 3 months, I finally was able to bring my daughter, Evan, to my apartment. The last time I had her was the weekend after Thanksgiving. Phew. It was good to be able to spend a whole weekend with her, instead of just spending half a day with her, which is what I did during January. Things just didn’t work out in December, and I got sick in February. Meh.
I took her to the Exploration Place on Saturday. Evan gave me the annual membership for it as Christmas gift this year. I was hoping it would be lots of fun… We just couldn’t find ourselves with the kind of fun we were expecting. I just don’t know what went wrong… Hrm.
The return trip to take Evan back to her mom was interesting… we hit a few hail storms while we were on the turnpike. Riiight… it had to happen today. Sure. But it wasn’t too bad this time. The last time we hit the hail storm, the car actually got a few hail damages. Not this time. The hail never got really big. No bid deal. It was just a bit loud sometimes. That’s all…
Good news: she loves Emily!

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On the fansub side of my life… Yay! We had a Feb 29 release! We only get to do this once every 4 years. So that actually felt pretty cool. The new tracker is working good for us. Yup, I like hosting our own tracker. I can make tweaks and stuff to my stats page, etc. Yup. I like tweaking things.

The IRC portion of mIRC-X network was shut down 3 days ago.
Now their BitTorrent tracker is not accepting any more new torrents.
Hrm… They sure are falling off of their glory fast.