first finished chunk: the Hobbiton mill my kingdom for a thatched roof option!

>put packages inside neighbor's place, using her door code, for 3 years, mostly w/o being asked, often multiple per day, b/c I'm home all the time and she never is >do this b/c I know the misery of a stolen package >receive box of artisan cookies from her today >fetch quests are real, and rewarding

"senpai's back" is a ubiquitous trope in battle/sports shonen and shouldn't be translated literally b/c the gist is not intuitive and it makes for wonky phrasing in English ex: this chapter title "A Back I Want to Overcome" >"A Mentor to Surpass" mentor may not always be 1:1, but it works here!

well fuck! here I've been, writing "road race" for the past 40 volumes. wouldn't have happened if I'd had mangaka access... 😔

the grown adults who lived in this unit before us never emptied the dryer's lint trap, leaving the entire system gunked up with 2+ years' worth of a damp, semi-rotting, sludgy husky fur/dander mélange that triggered devastating allergies in me hot take: lint-forgetters go straight to jail

fantasy series where I had a literal alien say [i]magick(s)[/i] (vs. the standard "magic") for funsies, but now they're on the alien planet so I guess I've shackled myself to the magic<->magick(s) bit excuse-in-retrospect: it's like when JPN puts a key term in all-katakana to show unfamiliarity!

"Concerning Hobbits" (Shire theme) is done! Each of the 10 measures takes 32 units of track, so integrating it into the Hobbiton landscape wasn't realistic. Instead, it'll play before the cart emerges into the town. Hard to believe this music method was intended, yet, it's used on the dev island

music proof of concept! this is one measure's worth of Concerning Hobbits, out of a planned ~12 or so measures that will play as the cart roves about the Shire (the game offers 8 music mats (C to high C), each can play (X), (X)#, high-(X), or high-(X)# depending on its cardinal orientation)

continent 1 (the small one!) is mostly leveled and ready for construction of the Hobbiton -> Weathertop leg. back at my HQ, pokemon-staffed factories are busy pumping out in real-time actual mountains' worth of resources for this endeavor (label abbreviations spelled out in alt text)

big fan of this 図 the Porygon2 of 図s, if you will

Shuckle may be absent from this game, but not from my heart (you can create any image--and then place a screenshot of it in a frame or on a monitor--if you're willing to create it block by block)

at first I thought "game that pops open" meant...a standard clamshell game case? except that no modern games have *square* packaging? then it occurred to me- this is an ancient YowaPeda book from an age when the DS was still relevant (it's a "console" that pops open, not a game case). Hence "DSS"

human translation is knowing that this microscopic したァ is an otsukaresama deshita

need a way to activate the Eye of Sauron (a clear vessel that will fill with lava) upon stepping into Mordor, and it seems there's a solution—hundreds of laser sensors and sash windows, daisy-chaining up through the tower (proof of concept by someone on reddit: www.reddit.com/r/Pokopia/co... )

haha I'm in danger (of getting my 70 bucks' worth with this game after spending the next few years recreating Frodo's journey as an on-rails minecart thrill ride with fully-realized environments and motion-triggered setpieces, including note-by-note music and light-up Balrog)

manifesting a scene in the next Baki arc where Baki's dad throws this dude out a 10th-story window for mouthing off we need a little treat, Itagaki. a little wish fulfillment

Lately, I have so few words due to burnout but I have so much thanks for the mutual aid given to me so far. I'm still in need in order to secure my housing, but my gratitude for what's come my way is immense, and it's important to me too just my limited words to say that.

this one's me! also, now that I'm neck-deep in pokopia, this comparison seems so obvious that I have to wonder if "tiny ebullient femme blacksmith with twintails, pointy ribbon, and giant tool/weapon" is actually a trope

we get plenty of WcDonalds and Futarbucks, but rarer are the likes of PlayStage and Nintado (rest in piss xbocks)

rather than constructing towns and houses, I sure do enjoy silly shit like turning the Altar of Flame into a tourist trap. Moltres even showed up for the paid roller coaster photo at the end (everything here is bespoke besides the prefab pyramid itself)

on the one hand, bad loc makes a lot of TL'd JPN media unbearable, because the uninspired choices are transparent via translator x-ray goggles on the other, playing 100 hours of Pokopia (w/its fantastic loc) in a week is wildly inspirational. I sit down on Monday excited to level up my own work

obviously the criminals getting their sex crimes routinely handwaved by management don't deserve any success, but also imagine how many talented non-men/non-pedophiles over the years have been passed over by the boy's club in favor of propping up monsters. you can't! it's an unknowable loss of art

The Shogakukan editor came in with a proposal: create an official notarized document in which the creator pays 1.5 million yen ($10,067) and the victim agrees never to speak publicly about what happened to her. buff.ly/xZsWcD6

like all of us, porygon2 needs a better work/life balance...

Portland takes pi day and line-waiting to olympian level got on line at 830 (line already down and around block) in 38 degree weather, shop opened at 9, placed my order at 1135. Dude was wheeling a cart around selling coffee and breakfast burritos. Portlandia brunch sketch is real!

started manga translation in 2013 some pubs never give across-the-board rate bumps, some do, but even with those, it's rare/sporadic/doesn't keep up with inflation. the majority of boosts I get come from negotiating on a project-to-project basis Otherwise, more money has to come from more series

def recommend putting a security camera 100 pokefeet in the air

Now that it's out, I can finally share that I had the pleasure of working on the English localization of the wonderful Pokémon Pokopia alongside a fantastic team! I've been waiting a looong time to see what people think of this one, and we are unbelievably proud of how it turned out!! HAVE FUN!

Apropos of "nothing," the refrain of "English lacks our pronouns, therefore any loc is compromised" is such a cliched one monolingual Japanese creators trot out when they're disconnected from the process. And as a translator who Gets It, like, it's just not usually a huge creative hurdle day-to-day?

taxes submitted

Tokyo Fears Rhapsody loves brutal joke names for its monsters of the week, and chapter 20.1 had two first was "バン・dead" >>a play on undead + bandit, which only makes sense in kana I started with the obvious- "Rob Zombie"- and did a Sham Hatwitch spoonerism to keep it legally kosher

my gf's white grandpa, Bruce, was an OG proto-weeb who would've made Lafcadio Hearn proud

Media-Do recently published the Investor documents about the Seven Seas Acquisition which includes a lot of information that I've seen that hasn't been reported on yet So here's a thread breaking down what I found & what it could mean for the future of Seven Seas Entertainment (Long Read Warning)

avenging 10-year old me, who was stuck on 149/150 in gen1 for so long because of this fucker (4% appearance, 45% chance to flee on turn 1; got this one in 1 bait + 2 balls)

With all the recent stuff going on, I do want to affirm here that all of the localization for @mangamavericks.bsky.social titles are done 100% by humans. We have no interest in using AI for any part of the localization/production process.

Shogaku(chi)kan's twofer special in their rehab program for heinous sex criminals sure doesn't make me regret shifting away from the bad-vibes SJ boys' club the past few years doing a fist pump when I realize that the latest gay mermaid joint I'm TLing is helmed by some li'l bespectacled lady

my heart breaks for any fellow freelancers currently relying on 7S, and for any in-house principled creatives but we have to hope for this publisher's complete (self-inflicted) destruction via loss of sales. nothing less will serve as an essential stove-touching moment for the vile corpos in Japan

AAAAAAAGHHHHHHHH

>me triumphing over Kaiser Permanente's obnoxious reluctance to give me a colonoscopy despite microplastic butt cancer killing my demographic in horrific numbers, now at age 36, after three years of dogged requests >2.5 days no food man can ill survive on lime jello and chicky broth alone 🥲

for v-day I gave my gf a drawing I did of her favorite hockey players

happy Zelda 40th I'm a MM guy till I die

ancillary project count: 9 (Vigilantes, Smash!!, light novels, Team-Up Missions, data book 2, box set 1, box set 2, how-to-draw book, art book) That's 39 spinoff books/booklets; dangerously close to the core series' 42. had to do a chunk of this work on the Osaka -> Yokohama shinkansen 🫤🚄

v5 of The Bugle Call was just added to the SJ app, if you're subscribed, and the speedster sequence is probably my best sales pitch for the series, despite it not involving much translation on my part CW: graphic decapitations

Hey!! So it looks like I've got a gap in my schedule coming up, so if you ever wanted to hit up your boy for manga lettering work (or comics, in general!) now is the time 👀

❌"Hi—" ⭕"Hina—" have to consider the splice point when translating a word/name that's cut short, especially when -the isolated chunk constitutes an ENG word on its own ("Hi!") -the vowel of the chunk could mistakenly be read with ENG pronunciation solution here: add more of the full name (Hinako)

did a lil metroid in crochet (bananas for scale, pattern by MadeleinesMonsters on etsy)

my gf's v-day card selections are unmatched

on my first go through, it eluded me that "Meryz" and "Goraz" are obvious Mezu/Gozu (Horse-Face and Ox-Head) allusions, b/c they show up pages apart. only caught it on the edit pass doesn't affect the loc, except to confirm that my chosen spellings should deffo have those "z"s in there

"It's no skin off my jaw."

I'm doing a new series for Yen out in May (Every Adventure Needs a Weapon!: weapon-smith girl with chuuni design sense in a fantasy world much more akin to Delicious in Dungeon than isekai slop) and it really grabbed me when she invents the chainsaw(man) from first principles