Our home connection has been a nightmare for the past week. Slower than dial-up in the late afternoon to which it dies around 9pm until the next late afternoon.

Then two days ago it just stopped completely. Now, it's up again but still doing the zombie shuffle. Comcast finally is going to send a technician over on Sunday to check our cable modem, so hopefully there's a remedy in sight.

During this week I discovered the biggest internet addict in our house is my mom (Jes suffers too at home with chronic boredom--stop randomly popping up in my room, Jes! XD--but she's lucky she has internet at her office), as she has vocally confessed she can't live without the internet. She stays at her office later than usual to avoid the dead-zone we call home (once phoned me to ask if the internet is working--which I answered a negative--and went to stay until wee hours in the morning).

For me, I find that I can live without the internet, it's just... annoying. I've many things to do/draw but I find it difficult because I use the internet for reference so much. And even with my horrendous e-mail replying record, I do need to keep up with some (a shock, I know).

Also, while I'm not too antsy during the time of no-internet, I find I dislike the feeling of being overwhelmed when I get back on. What happened in the world? How is the campaign going? Georgia-Russia conflict? What's the newest tech buzz or interesting meme? The backlogs of blog posts remind me life goes on so quickly that just a week being offline would take hours of browsing and reading to catch up.

Funny thing that during this week of horrendous internet, I was unreachable by phone as well. My work cell phone has been uncharged for more than two weeks since my mom took the charger and lost it somewhere (it's back now) and my private phone expired while I was unable to get online to renew the minutes. Both are working again currently.

Aaaa, I hope this is fixed soon. I'm not even sure if I can post this...

School starts next week which will start my final year and concentrated foray into visual development. Yosh~ I can do this!

Best online game I've played since... the invention of the internet.

All the ladies, self-proclaimed or not, you must play this.

You must perfect the art of elegant feminine conflict.

(Hat tip Pau.)

How could I not b-rant-log as a fansub watcher? If you have no idea what it is about yet, a pro translator,  Paul "OtaKing" Johnson, made a video about the rise and fall of fansubs. Here's the first part:


(There are 5 parts in total, just go to the next in the related videos section.)

Now, be sure to watch through the whole thing. There are parts where I just wanted to stop because I found it a waste of time (and the snobby British accent annoyed me), but in other parts he makes good points I whole-heartedly agree with. First off, I'm in line with most of the comments fans have made at the Random Curiosity blog (where I first found about the "documentary") and at the Animesuki forums (for a more fansubber oriented view--OtaKing responded in the thread, which leads to quite an interesting read).

Of it all, my disagreement with his views can be summarized as this: he's painting with too wide a brush.

Now if you want my full rant, read on.

There are nightmare to superb fansubs. I got my favorites and there are ones I scowl at the sight of the group name. Favorites groups like Live-Evil for their consistent superb work and subbing of lesser known great anime, and Rumbel for how they handled Gintama--Ayu too, in the department of gag anime, for keeping Gyagu Manga Biyori watchable and still funny, a considerable feat. Then Your-Mom is the worse one I've ever had the misfortune to watch--I'm lucky that it's the only really bad group I've ever encountered (not only to do they skip lines, mistranslate, they also apparently haven't watched episodes closely enough to even guess by context).

I personally would even settle with a mediocre speed sub as long as it coherent and pretty accurate in it's translation. While I'm not passing in Japanese, I've gotten enough listening practice, and cultural knowledge, to know what's being said even without subs. And so, there's nothing more annoying than reading a translation that's way off on simple sentences even I know--this is my biggest gripe with subs in general.    

His video selects some of the worst offenders (I don't follow the One Piece anime, so wow, some of those examples of flashy text were surprisingly horrendous) and some I find unjustified for his complaints (Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei was one I really had to give kudos to the fansubbers--and for the person for invented the pause button). The stuff about fansub credits overpowering the original ones is a real problem, as is for too flashy text and way too much on-screen notes that could have been put at the end (a lot of subs I've watched put notes at the end, but I'm fine with short ones on screen as long as they aren't spoilers, sheesh). You can tell I'm fine with notes by my style of writing (with my many, many, many usage of parentheses--amazingly, I also speak the same way, with my bad habit of interrupting others and even injecting my own sentences with a random tangent).

Other stuff, I disagree with him. Like the switching firstname-lastname for the simple reason that it's jarring to clearly hear someone say "Kurosaki Ichigo" but read it as "Ichigo Kurosaki" (unless you're watching on mute). It's a pet peeve of mine in manga, but obviously manga won't create that audio-visual conflict so it's not so bad (oh, I will tie in this rant to manga translations, just you wait). Same for honorifics. While it's unfortunate there's no way to keep in the many "I" variations in an English text without making it incomprehensible, honorifics aren't that hard to learn and accept. And it really does show character relationships much more clearly--I certainly wish there were equivalents in English other than the few we have.

I even enjoy honorifics in Indonesian: I really like being called "cici" by my little sister ("onee-san", if we were Japanese-- maybe more fitting would be "onee-chan" since "cici" is a familiar term rather than formal) and had always wished I'd been addressed with a "Kak" honorific by an overly-enthusiastic but endearing underclassman (when used in a school setting, "Kak-" would be the equivalent of a "-sempai" honorific in Japanese). A good friend of mine actually addresses me as "Ann-san" during high school, and I got a few "Ann-sempai"s and "Ann-sama"s in my years among fellow anime/manga fans (and a couple of "Ann-chaaaaaan~<3"s by a certain Papi and group of girls which I would punch shortly after)--let me tell you, I love honorifics, no matter the language.

And as many people have pointed out, fansubs are usually geared towards fans and not a general audience. Most of these fans would have known about, and prefer, the original Japanese honorifics. The audience would eventually dictate the process, which is why we have the flashy karaoke and instances where certain terms aren't translated (One Piece and the whole "nakama" thing, as is "shinigami" for Bleach. I personally can live with those two translated--though I prefer shinigami the way it is in Bleach translations--but stuff like "genin/jounin/chuunin/whatevernin" that was translated in Viz's Naruto manga was unbearable. Thank goodness they're back.)

The typesetting translations into the art complaint is just nit-picking something that's actually a nice feature. Sure, there are badly done ones, but then there are non-intrusive examples that work better than a "*blabla*" somewhere that might mess with dialog text. The few instances when I watched the Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo dub on CN, I really missed seeing translations of the japanese text like what there were in the fansubs (one example is still an ongoing joke between me and Jes for a few years now... it's the part where a box of cookies is dropped then started squirming with an arrow and text going "Cookies?"-- Jes and I would go "Cookiiiiiiies??" for any unidentifiable food-stuff when appropriate).

Sometimes it's impossible to not translate, on-screen, certain signs and words without losing some of effect--particularly true for comedy. And his point about "why would a Japanese whateverwhatever have an English name right next to it?" is stupid and frankly condescending in that it implies a viewer wouldn't get that it wasn't there in the original Japanese video. Unless he meant it as a joke, which would then mean he's for typesetting translations into the art? Man, I need an editor's note for his video.

And localization... you all know that I hate localization unless it's absolutely needed and well-done. Maybe it's because I can be considered a senior reader/watcher and so the Japanese jokes and cultural style isn't so foreign. Or maybe it's just that sometimes there is so much re-writing that a sub/dub/manga trans is no longer a work of the original and can be considered an adaptation. "More flowing English," "familiar jokes/puns/terms," yeah yeah, but not when it comes to point you instinctively know there's no way the original said something that way.

Cursing is a great example where I find translators of all kinds (fans or pros) tend to go overboard. A particular dislike is when the curse "Jesus Christ" (aaarrrghh) is used in a translation. What the hell? Seriously, what the hell, Translator Person? And guess what? I've seen this used not only in mangascans, but in the Dark Horse version of Blade of the Immortal--a professional, legal, U.S. version. What makes the usage of my Lord's name as a curse even more ridiculous in this example is that BOTI is set in feudal Japan. See, even professional translators can be complete morons in attempts to localize. If you need me to explain why similar usages of "Jesus Christ" as a curse in manga/anime translations is stupid (unless they used the exact same thing in the original--which unfortunately does happen), then please look elsewhere because I will hurt you.

Oh, I recently finished reading Viz's version of Ultra Maniac. My goodness, I never wanted to white-out whole speech bubbles and write my own in before. It's a complete train-wreck. The script was re-written to sound like all readers were incredibly dumb teenagers that need emphasis on the important words so they won't miss it. It's like everyone is drunk by the way their speech fluctuates up and down--is that it? Is everyone high or drunk?? (This is typical in American comics I observed--I still don't know why and if this is common pratice.) And the localization of honorifics... "Ayu-chan" was translated as "Ayu dear"--URG. Yes, it's totally natural that high-schoolers call each other with the suffix "dear", even in Japan, apparently. I can go on and on about this travesty.

Gosh, I don't read much of the US version manga, but I hope this isn't wide spread. So far, my favorite publisher is Del Ray for their policy of keeping in honorifics, original sfx, and original jokes/terms/cultural stuff with nice notes at the end of the books.

I'm abruptly stopping here because I'm hungry and I've forgotten all the other things I want to say because the post went on too long.

*shuffles off*