Gotta say, it is rather frustrating to see a Japanese person with at least some grasp of English say "EN-JP machine #translation is total trash" but then in the same sentence go "but JP-EN MTL is totally fine most of the time". How do you not realize how obviously mirrored something like this is!

A good showcase of how rich people threatening to leave because of slightly increased taxes are simply full of shit most of the time. Applicable to anywhere in the world pretty much

Happy to lend my expertise to this article. Light Novels are already being pirated with machine translation. Publishers have been beaten to the punch — and will need human translation to earn their readers’ dollar.

Something worth noting: Rockstar is leaning HEAVILY on the excuse that the unionising employees were "leaking private company information" They want people to assume this means game info or assets. But I will bet you CASH MONEY this translates to: 'they were comparing salaries and work contracts"

All that would happen if the EN publishers used AI to translate light novels, is that they would have a much worse product that STILL would come out later than the serialized version, AND it would cost $$$--whereas the fan/AI-translated serialized episodes would be free and faster.

The idea that EN publishers would use AI for speed is hilarious, because most LNs start out serialized as web novels or published in magazines. They're already pirated and fan/AI-translated by impatient fans long before the JP side even publishes them as novels.

Game company sows misinformation to cover up union busting, fans fall for it, actual employee posts explaining the employees were fired to prevent the studio unionizing This is *unacceptable*

ken just sent me this please enjoy

Because SE's QA people are probably not in a position to defend themselves and their jobs in public, I want to spell out some of what it is they specifically do for us localizers, because nothing I've written here is rhetorical. SE QA acts as a final check on our work after translation and editing.

rkgk

Seconding this. The OG X-Com has seen an ENORMOUS modding renaissance in the past few years thanks to the OpenXCom engine. The best way to play it vanilla, as it fixes a ton of bugs and improves the UI. Some of the biggest mods dwarf the original game by a factor of ten times the content or more.

Amazing that this is a real image and not a joke edit

You don't need me to tell you this is yet more good money being burned after bad. But as someone who's worked with that QA team, I'll say they're unsung heroes who truly play a huge role in maintaining SE's reputation for high quality locs and to attempt to replace them with AI is deeply insulting.

Oh hey there's a Firaxis sale on Steam at the moment! If you haven't already got them, you can now grab some of the greatest strategy games the medium has ever created for a very small amount of money: store.steampowered.com/bundle/20109...

If you aren't seeing skeets from some of your fave people, they might have been labeled "Rude" by bsky mods. Idk what they are thinking, I don't need a mommy to tell me who to be buddies with. Anyway, go into Settings > moderation > bluesky moderation (advanced) and turn Rude off.

The primary gameplay loop is "second to second", like how you move and interact in the game The secondary gameplay loop is "minute to minute", short-term goals like defeating enemies etc The tertiary gameplay loop is is "hour to hour", like beating levels, grinding for high scores, longer term stuff

Gameplay loops only really make sense to talk about if you are explicitly talking about the primary, secondary, and tertiary gameplay loops of a game. Talking about "the gameplay loop" of a whole game is kind of nonsensical, at a general level it's better to just use "gameplay" on its own.

it's never about kids it's never about safety it's always about money it's always about control

I think it sums up AAA video games that I feel like we've experienced a 100 duke nukem forevers at this point

You want a drink too? 🍸🐇

Japan’s METI is really not happy about the payment processor censorship situation automaton-media.com/en/news/no-i...

Gotta say, digging up accurate copyright information for anime is a royal pain in the ass

#透明水彩 #東方Project 図書のパチュリー

How poor leadership slows down game development

So while we have seen some shows on Crunchyroll get updated with better subtitles, I would like to remind everyone that many shows haven't. I also reached out to some insiders, and so far there has been no clear internal communication about changing course back to comprehensive typesetting either.

An important addition to this: if you are a person of interest in smaller circles, have a publicly available email address that people can send mail to! I made sure to include one on my website and have already had some pleasant email exchanges due to my recent CR article, which has been very nice!

If you’re upset about this (as you should be), pick up the phone and call stop-paypros.neocities.org

So the Simpsons Theme cover in Fortnite was made in 2019 by a random non-union orchestra, right? It turns out... Disney has made a whole SLEW of non-union ripoff song covers for licensing. You can even select "non-union" when you search for songs on their website

Honestly, this one isn't even bad, but Final Thing is definitely the one with more impact

Update on this: per suggestion by the ANN bsky account I sent a message to moderation asking why my posts got deleted. I was told I broke the rule of "Self-promotion is only allowed if it has value, is relevant, and creates discussion for this forum" despite my posts easily clearing those conditions

New article on ★ daiz.moe ★ Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles for no good reason daiz.moe/crunchyroll-... A ton of research and effort went into this one. This is the article to read to get to the bottom of Crunchyroll's subtitle changes! Replies here will show up as comments (eventually)

Once again:

An important corollary to this is that you must often actively fight for life to get better, because there's no faster way for things to get worse than by giving up and not even trying Which is what motivates me to keep fighting for consumer rights even in a world increasingly stacked against them

happy birthday to bill watterson who gave me the gift of encapsulating my entire ethical approach in one comic panel.

まひろ

Trick or drink...? 🎃

if youre canadian, its a very good idea to be contacting your representatives in govt about Bill S-209, and stressing that age verification policies do not protect people, and in fact make them less safe.

If there's one thing we can learn from Ea Nasir, it's that writing is the gift that keeps on giving

仲良く不思議の国のアリスコスを 楽しむまひろちゃん＆もみじちゃんで、 ドキドキハロウィン💞 HappyHalloween～!!!🎃👻🍭 #ハロウィンイラスト2025 #おにまいお絵描き #onimai #絵描きさんと繋がりたい

I guess this is a bit of a blind spot for me - when I write about things like Crunchyroll issues, I do it with the mindset of spreading consumer awareness. Buyers beware, etc. With that, wording like "Crunchyroll is doing this for no good reason" implicitly means "for no good reason to consumers".

As I've been saying: real money to random reward pipelines should always be classified as gambling. Doesn't matter if we're talking digital or physical, it should be considered gambling and heavily regulated accordingly. Can't sell for anyone under 18, can't be advertised in most places, etc.

Fun fact: I wrote the whole Crunchyroll subtitle article without using a spellchecker, save for manually checking the spelling of some words. I just pored over every single paragraph so many times while writing it that come release time it had just a single typo left in it (which has been fixed now)

ハロウィン👻👮🔗✨ #おにまいお絵描き

How many layers of weeb are you on?

Made an update to the first section of the Crunchyroll subtitle article based on some feedback from people unfamiliar with anime and subtitling. Should clue people in better now, and I even found a reason to include some Yuzuki Family carcinogen as a result of it too. Good job, me.

Really happy with how many comments I've been getting about people enjoying the (wait for it) typesetting and formatting of my article about Crunchyroll's lack of the same in subs and how it kept them engaged despite the long length It's almost like presentation quality really matters or something!

ooh an email titled Important information about your subscription, I wonder if the price is going down

Tried to post a link to my article in the ANN comments for the latest This Week in Anime which is about the exact same subject of Crunchyroll subtitles. My account is still in forced moderation queue, but I would have expected the post to be approved eventually. But nope, got deleted instead. Laaame

Got a comment from someone about how they don't usually have an attention span for big articles but that my CR subtitle article was a "good one", and wow, isn't that just the nicest compliment considering how long that thing ended up being lol