a silky smooth start to Web Woods, generally thought to be the most miserable level in a speedrun (it killed an attempt last night, ~70 minutes into the run)

it came to me and compelled me to do a doodle

never miss a chance to translate a chapter title as if it were an alliterative Donkey Kong level this being Downhill Downpour, obviously

some of my funnest current loc work is getting past the no-fun-allowed forces and smuggled out to the public via Tokyo Fears Rhapsody this dinky 10-page chapter is full of jokes/whimsy from a minor character named Ignitor (the name itself loc'd from the Japanese "Chakkaman"—big toku naming vibes)

to the credit of Kaiser (not oft said) here in Oregon, their covid clinic form was like: "check here if you're 65+ or have a preexisting condition that the CDC says you have to have to get the vax OR check here if you don't meet those reqs but want the vax anyway, we're fine with that too"

also, I've been translating 亜人(種) (ajin) as "demihuman," so there's a thematically apt transition from demi to double in ENG, which incidentally reinforces the shirking of haafu (surely intuited by JPN readers as subtext, from "double") (also glad they kept my choice of hand wave(d) for ぼかす)

a biracial friend once ranted to me about the vaguely dehumanizing microaggressivity of the "haafu" ("half") term for mixed-race Japanese people the fictional Bureau of Anomalous Fauna Information Management in RuriDragon apparently agrees! (the JPN version straight up uses the ENG word "double")

between a possum playdate and some grave-cleaning, it's been a weekend for touching grass

people always seem bewildered by this, but it's really quite simple There's 'Stache Drac, Nekomimi Baby Drac, and Michael Dracson, in that order. Going by Freeza logic, his next form will be the smoothest and baldest yet.

one fun part of translating period pieces (or even alt history) is etymology research to figure out what idioms are appropriate for one-off lines

incredible, how these clowns have fully drunk the piss they're failing to convince us is rain. would've been so easy to script this and make the robo voice spit out some coherent instructions, but nope! fuck it, they're doing it live! such laughably unfounded confidence in their world-ruining gadget

>sign up for rewards at Michael's arts and crafts store >get 60%-off-one-item coupon in mail >get master grade kit for 20 bucks haven't done one of these in 20 years! the microscopic stickers and newfangled press-on decals almost killed me

the Squawks half of Toxic Tower isn't anything nuts on a technical level but it's level 37 out of 39, so the BPM is kinda up there at that point in the run

looks like I would be 5th in this category if I owned a capture card (one is in the mail) and had recorded this run (this is largely because most people submit for SNES, so the virtual console leaderboard is ripe for the picking. This time would earn me 57th place on SNES!)

Politics reporter from Deseret News:

today's translation highlight: ...だって言ってやりたい >I need you to hear that. When the literal feels wooden ("I want to tell you this"), the natural phrasing can often be found via the ol' polarity swap.

was dreading having to learn parrot-less Parrot Chute Panic, which can be summed up as "fall very fast, precisely" but it's not that bad!

This survey is drop-dead easy, just go tell them you want a tax filing program that's easy to use.

saw a post about how the AI-slop (wrt art, writing, creation) embracers lack the fortitude to be (really) bad at something for a (long) while yeah- everything I'm proud of has inherently been a grind, and thank fuck I grew up without this mind-addling tech, since there but for the grace of god

me, a bread guy: Mapo Joe my gf, a rice gal: you're on the couch tonight

this invisible barrel trick to skip the (otherwise very slow) final ~third of Klobber Karnage by manipulating the properties of that one barrel is inscrutably technical, while somehow being easier than it looks (vine clip in Bramble Scramble took so much longer to learn!)

AI advocates have warned that if every author in the class action filed a claim, it would "financially ruin" the entire industry.

Also people keep asking me if I find AI translation helpful in my work and AI TRANSLATION IS NOWHERE NEAR COMMERCIAL QUALITY and NO I DON'T EDIT AI TRANSLATION BECAUSE IT'S MUCH FASTER FOR ME TO JUST DO THE ACTUAL TRANSLATION THAN EDIT CRAP because PAINTING CRAP WITH GOLD DOESN'T TURN CRAP INTO GOLD

other details: -Sean Astin liked my Narsil tattoo -Craig Parker appreciated that we composited both Haldir and Gothmog for the signing photo -Bruce Hopkins (Gamling) wanted a photo with *us* when he learned we were just engaged -David Wenham told us Sean Bean finds conventions overwhelming (fair)

and frankly, it's a "t-shirt raising questions answered by t-shirt" deal. proclaiming you don't peddle in gen(ichiro)-AI when it's loudly part of your mission statement? oh okay hmmm the scrutiny NEEDS to be relentless

I see "mud-stinkin' eel" so often in JPN media, it basically reads as a winedarksea epithet barely even pejoratively sometimes; just a fact of eely life that must be dealt with via jellying or kabayaki'ing

what a privilege to witness this at the convention

a shared interest in LoTR brought my gf and me together in 2019, and last week, I proposed to her in Oxford, at the grave of Tolkien and his wife, whose headstone reads "Beren" and "Luthien" (romantic!) the next day, Gandalf and the four hobbits blessed our union

made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of my favorite comma and the Tolkien bench and grave

>out dining in London >ask waiter for water >"boh'o o' wo'a?" >about to force a laugh, assume he's doing a meme/bit for the Americans >realize that actually, no, he wants to upcharge us on water >"no, thank you. tap, please."

the 4 hours grinding this 4-second sequence to internalize the inputs/spacing/timing/muscle memory to execute the DaBigBoi team-throw to pull off the Vine Clip skip in Bramble Blast even three times in a row and then consistently in a playthrough to skip 20+ seconds of the level was time well-spent!

gf's nails, in preparation for the convention in London with all the LoTR people

started tackling dkc2 speedrunning (102%- full clear) on a whim and have been learning some of the wild techs/skips/glitches like an invisible barrel spawning the goalpost in the middle of the level (in Castle Crush)

from Black Mirror, we've now had -UK PM does stuff with a pig -weaponized robot dogs -apps for rating people -the dead brought back as chatbots Coming up is probably: -app runs dating sims using chatbots modeled on users -incels imprison chatbots made from real people in roleplay campaigns forever

anyway I like how the dialogue made it possible to provide genuine characterization for four characters in ~15 words, carefully selected so as to suggest distinct voices. authors don't always do the utmost to distinguish their characters, but when they do, the translation had better reflect that.

fun Ruri panel, translation-wise (-"yay or nay" communicates "this is an opinion poll," versus, "are you, right now?" -"omigosh" to indicate exasperation beyond just "be quiet." -"TMI" for キモ; would be too literal as "gross.") also love the charging phones next to pillows. just like me frfr

from my cold dead hands I've been em-dashing professionally since 2013, and if I'm ever hooked up to a captcha polygraph—because surely that's coming down the road—I've got MS Word docs dating back that far as proof

on a less doomer note, I got my comps for Adabana v1- my first title with Dark Horse, out in September can't show interiors yet, but I do appreciate the slick credits page at the front of the book, and the classic parental advisory stickers (only on the plastic wrapper- not the book itself)

*squints* these are just Harlequin Romance titles, a bunch of which got manga adaptations, which I then translated back into English at trash-tier rates from DMP

I’m not one to have confidence in expressing myself, but this is what I came up with for my message to Viz.

Kept quiet about this for a bit so nobody thinks I'm subtweeting them in particular, but: I think it's ultimately self-defeating when localizers try to financially justify their occupation against AI by only saying our work is "cheap" anyway relative to other dev costs with a higher quality return.

personal grievance sidenote: I partially blame the ironfisted silo'ing that prevents the boots-on-the-ground loc team from communicating more directly with mangaka. if we had decades of that precedent, then an author suddenly told "no more human team; only robot" might feel some sort of way about it

So upon further investigation: Viz Media added an AI Translated manga to their Viz App • It’s listed as “TL & Lettering Provided by Shogakukan” but it’s the exact same version that’s available on Emaqi

>gf and I walking down street >three besuited corn-fed Hitler Youth enforcer types clomping toward us >by the pricking of my thumbs, proselytism this way comes >"How do you two feel about ~church~?" >w/o missing a beat, raise my arms to form a big X and go "boo-booo" like a Japanese quiz show

meanwhile, after almost 20 years of wondering if K.Rool being married was a throwaway line by the cheeky lads in Twycross, Wifey Rool is real, and canonized by Nintendo

it only took a ~decade, but I've internalized that freelancer admin work (invoicing, bookkeeping, misc. emails) is work, and it's wrong to feel that only work-work can assuage the gnawing Calvinistic guilt over sinful non-productivity. anything that greases the wheels of me-getting-paid, is work!

Beyblade X volume 3! This was actually significantly more time consuming than the the previous volumes and volume 4. But I also pushed my craft harder, so I think some of my best stuff is in here. Let's talk about it!

on twitter, the number of likes that prompted me to delete a post was about 1k here it's 150. nothing good lies past a post's intended audience. only weirdos, pedants, and notif-induced stress (thank you Minovsky for demoing this philosophy)

look what they need* to mimic a fraction of our power *the power grid of a small city and a football stadium's worth of water to fuel the LLM garbage machine that did this, instead of paying a TL + letterer a few hundo for our years of skills and expertise

clouds are bananas, sun is banana cross section anyway, tired: standard flanderization inspired: a character's hyperfixation extends to the world around them. either their clinical mania is well-justified, or they've altered reality itself through manifestation