anime

Last night I wrote a rather long rant about the effect bad translations had on my enjoyment of an adult male targeted comic book series called "Rozen Maiden". In the 20-odd hours since then, I found scanlations of that series and completed it. The translation quality was terrible, and I even spent some time shocking some of the Telefang translators as to what the fanbase does with clearly translatable vocal tics.

So, I need to confess something - I've been putting off work on the Telefang patches. I originally planned to release patches on a monthly basis, but after rolling out v111, I moved onto another Smilesoft game in need of hacking. I assumed other adjustments would come from other members of the project to justify v112 in July, but it didn't happen. Bugsite is it's own can of worms, but yet another thing has interrupted that project for something else.

Let's talk about the Japanese animation industry for a moment. It's... really, really not what it used to be. There's a big misconception outside of Japan that they somehow have a completely accepted "nerd culture" (insamuch as a "nerd culture" exists), because up until today they were very much a huge driving force in the creation of videogames and cartoons.

Grey-market importation is a very important right of consumers which allows them to purchase and view works not available in their own territory without the permission of the copyright owner. This is a good thing, especially when there's no real reason for a delay between countries. Many times regions get delayed or inferior releases of content simply because of arbitrary reasons put in place by the owner. This is most a concern in countries like Australia, which are treated like the rest of Asia despite not having any language issues which would preclude a more prompt release.