All sort of randomness

It’s been a very long time.

What I’ve been doing? Practically nothing except for what I’m supposedly notorious for, calling others out on their TL errors, with the most recent one being Norway Scans and their SaeKano ~egoistic lily releases. Anonymous preferred, the group leader, have been very cooperative in working with me to better the quality of the release – and accepting of my rather frequent disappearance – although, there are still some chapters of said manga are still left unchanged and my name being in the credits of chapter 12&13 despite the fact that I wasn’t available to QC those chapter.

To get straight to the point, my computer’s PSU killed my motherboard when it tried to switch to stand by. That’s what happened to me recently. So both my moods and motivations is at a rather low point which resulting in me saying whatever and decide to just release all these things in their current rough, work-in-progress projects/releases:

First up, is my Editor Guide PDF Rev0.52 (Feb 15th 2015).

Since I’ve been away from scanlation for quite some time, things may have changed from when I wrote the text in the guide.
Any issues, mistakes, comments or contributions are to be sent to FAD2Raptor[at]live[dot]com
Although as mentioned above, due to the current condition of my computer, I will be rather late to respond to your emails so please be patient when trying to contact me.
There is an extra blank page in the file resulted during the convert to PDF process; no actual info was lost there.

Together with the release of this Work-in-progress Editor Guide will be the passwords of all my PSD:
Akira to Hiyori: b*7nGbWU@h
Mizuho Ambivalent: a#yJxB32cY
Yosuga no Sora: ZT_-A?rA1e
Bungaku Shoujo: @Q2MV$RV4j
The IDOLM@STER: 5_zdz2B&2+
Amagami: B?4AZ&=kuz

Feel free to download them and see for yourself the PSD of the manga that I released over my manga scanlating career.

And now, for the new releases & PSD of them:

Amagami VA Vol3 – Be my steady:
Release

PSD

Hana-kun to Koisuru Watashi Vol1 Chapter 1 & 2. While these 2 chapters was released by other groups a long time ago, their translation is marred with issues. Hell, if you’ve been watching anime or reading manga for long enough, you should be able to at least understand “janken” & “omiai” but in a baffling manner, on of those group managed to turn the above 2 japanese word to “finger guessing game” & “exploring”.
Release Chapter 1

PSD Chapter 1

Chapter 2 is especially rough as the last 16 pages was done, translated & edited, in ~4hours.
Release Chapter 2

PSD Chapter 2

Although this will be the only chapters of this manga that I will release as this is, for me, a manga that started out well but its concept has been stretch way longer than its worth, and the direction that it took make little sense other than for the mangaka to drag this manga on without giving it a conclusion.

Finally, I decided to venture into LN Translating with this translation of chapter 4.5 of the short story compilation volume of the series Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata:

SaeKano “FanDisk” chapter 4.5 PDF

This short story take place after LN Vol4, and does feature spoiler for Hyoudou Michiru’s story.

While there are many releases in this post, this does not mark my return to scanlating world however.

Reserving Space for Bungaku Shoujo Ghost’s Scanlation Releases’ issues

Personally, I don’t want my first post after about a year of disappearance to simply just criticizing stuff, but the fact is that they’ve ignored my 1st email notified them about the issues in their release back in November 2012. And in the 2nd email, sent on the 7th of March, I’ve told them about the simplest error to find in 2 of the currently released chapter of Bungaku Shoujo Ghost, missing pages, and explicitly asked them to reply to that email for further conversation on other issues; but so far they’ve stayed silent.

The missing pages are on chapter 02 & 05.

I’ll be away from the internet for about 1 week, and if they still refuse to reply by then, the list of errors shall be disclosed.

Late edit 14-Nov; so basically this is what happened:

Below is the rest of the email with the errors listed:

It’s February the 21st… not.

First up,

Yeah, talk about being late… I was only reminded of Ai’s birthday when the Official Amagami’s twitter tweeted about it the day before (Feb 20th), therefore I didn’t realize in time to marathon the ~100 remaining clips of Ai route in Amagami or to do an Ai’s chapter from Various Artist. I’ll probably see to that soonish™, so please excuse the image which does not match the release.

Download links for Fukigen Cinderella ch03:
MediaFire
Minus
Skydrive Folder – somehow unable to upload to SD at the moment.

ef – a fairy tale of the two – ch40 – Knight

Let’s see, about Fukigen Cinderella, since right now, the number of pages in ch09-13 are totaling at ~100 pages. With the average ~20 pages per chapter meaning that it needs approx 3 or 4 more chapters to have enough pages for a tankoubon and the series runs monthly, then adding the time from when there are enough number of pages to when the tank is released & scanned ~~ 3 more months. So we’re looking at around half a year until 2nd volume is out, so I’m in no rush to finish up vol1. And besides, I came to a conclusion that quickly get vol1 done, and then make the readers wait for vol2 will very likely to result in more people dropping this series since there are at least 1 point in vol1 that will make you hate the protagonist with passion, and another that will leave you wonder if what he had done is ‘too much’ and is ‘a disproportional retribution’. Since the protagonist of this series is not the usual high school guy, so with him spending a longer period on this sinful earth… there are obviously more things that he had experienced that affect how he is “today”, so until those unknown bits of his past are revealed, it’s very likely that you’re going to hate him a lot.

That and the issue that manually cleaning a FC chapter took 3 times the amount of time spent on translate plus redrawing.
(And yeah, I am seeing myself at the beginning stage of scanlating fatigue, based on the fact that this release is basically at almost ready to be release since ‘last year’ and is only finalized a few days ago.)

Now, about anime…

Amagami SS+ has aired its 1st episode, and just based on this episode alone, it seems like they’ve decided to include the other characters that is voiced in the game but has yet to appear in Season 1.

Kurosawa Noriko, not in any clubs, her birthday is on the 10th of March, blood type: A. Sign: Pisces.
– favorites: ‘the protagonist’ – authority – money – people who is nice to her – daydreaming
– dislikes: Tsukasa – Things don’t go her way.
– family: both parents. – method of commute: Trains.
– her father is a member of the city council.
– she is in class 2-B, Rihoko’s classmate (in game Risa -stalker-chan- is in 2-C, the anime changed her to 2-B).
– she is in love with ‘the protagonist’ and therefore, due to assumption & negative thoughts, she sees Tsukasa as a (love) rival.
– she is of the typical bully girl type, will stop at nothing to lower Tsukasa’s reputation, and remove Tsukasa’s position in the Founder Festival Committee.

That is basically her description for the game version. Anyway, in Haruka’s arc, there are 2 characters that did not appear in S1: “Mike Kid” & “Kisato Romio”, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing either or both of those 2 appearance in SS+.

To wrap up my talking, today’s the day the anime ‘Papakiki’ airs and while you may be tempted to check out the manga (the main series) either before or after you watched it, I’ll go ahead and ask you to wait for Japanzai to update their released 5 chapters before reading them. Details of what is wrong are currently under wrap at this point and I just got the reassurance from the TL at Japanzai that the update to tank RAW is still ongoing, so a little bit of patience will earn you a wholly better reading experience.

Finally, the download links:
Mediafire
SkyDrive Folder

Fukigen Cinderella ch01-02 + Bungaku Shoujo Drama CD – Ue Kawaku Ghost arc (RAW)

First up, random Amagami news, the Amagami+ 2nd season Opening theme is named “Check my Soul”, the Ending is named “Confession”(kokuhaku).
And the heroines order will be: Tsukasa – Rihoko – Ai – Kaoru – Sae – Haruka, a small variation has kept it from being a complete reverse order of the 1st season, but still one less change of what I’d hoped (to pair them up and highlight the similarities & differences between them; Sae/Haruka in differences between 2 rich girls, Rihoko/Kaoru in differences between turning 2 long-term friendships into something more, Tsukasa/Ai is the gap between the ‘front’ that each of them presents to the public and how they actually are).

Anyway, read more for Fukigen Cinderella chapter 01 & 02 DL links.

As promised, without any “Casuality”. Had ‘they’ just accepted their own incompetency and typed/copied&pasted what PROzess typed, their idiocy wouldn’t have shown. The 1st time this “Casuality” appeared was on the Table of Contents in chapter 01. If it was only this instance then they might be able to attribute it to typo, but when the title of ch02 stayed as “Casuality” when the TL for both ch01 & 02 by PROzess did have it correctly as “Causality”. Moreover, this error still persists after a v2 of ch02, and even after v3 the error is still there… (and it’s still there as the title of ch02 on Batoto throughout all 3 version that their QC uploaded himself) then there’s no other explanation than sheer incompetency. Not to mention the absolute abomination of a cleaning job that they’ve done to chapter 02.

And here I thought that you just can’t do worse than the crappy cleaning/editing that was done in Japanzai’s Amagami Dreamy Forever ch01v1…
Oh boy, how wrong I was…

**I had tried to insert thumbnail/preview images into the post but the width of this WordPress theme doesn’t make it even remotely presentable… So please excuse the link to images style.**

** Someone needs to pull their Cleaner/Editor out to see the sky on this Earth because he’s been living underground for so long that he forgets how it looks like at noon:
Pinoy version /// Mine.

** They’re so throughout with their cleaning, they erased even the screen-tones:
Pinoy version /// Mine.

** In Pinoy world, outside of a few limited exceptions, you’re either black or white:
Pinoy version /// Mine.

** More of their throughout “cleaning”:
Pinoy version /// Mine.

** Notice the excessive cropping in the last image? That add to the list of proof that their cleaner/editor/QC is/are as incompetent as they come:
Pinoy version /// Mine.

Guys, even if you’ve just start learning how to clean/edit, don’t just blindly follow the guide. Many of the popular guides have been written so long ago that some steps in them are only for HQ-privately-scanned-RAW or crappy-weekly-magazine-scan, and will make the medium-quality-public-RAW(and yes, by approximation, 50~70 MB per volume @1400px height is still average grade MQ; has to be ~90-100 MB per tank @1600px height to get actual good tier MQ; higher than that and you’re getting the rare very-good-quality-scan) that many of you use look much worse. Use your own eyes to see for yourself if whatever steps that you had just applied to the RAW have or have not improve the image quality as well.

** And final proof that they didn’t proofread or QC at all:
Pinoy version /// Mine.

PROzess committed a TL error in the 2nd to last panel. I’m guessing he just mistyped it and then fix it as per auto-correct or similar suggestion without looking back at the RAW where it clearly stated: “くそ。。。耳に水が入ったのか。。。” ~~ (kuso… Mimi ni Mizu ga Haitta noka…; where “Mimi”, as many of you long time fans would have already known, means “ears” not “eyes”).

The RAW image of the said panel.

NOTICE – IM@S relations – DROPPED

So basically, I’m dropping “Idolmaster – relations”, and will be picking up Fukigen Cinderella in its place.
I know that Pinoy has released ch01 with Prozess TL, but that won’t affect my decision on picking it up.

And it’ll come with my usual mantra of ‘better in both TL & Image quality’.

In fact, ch01 is basically done for 2 days already, but after having to look through many pages of Bungaku Shoujo to finish the dust check, I’m not in the mood to get get back on manually wiping out the dust (which is incredibly prevalent on the RAW of this series; Pinoy’s cleaner decide to use de-noiser to automate the process but at the cost of img quality) right now, so may be I’ll get to finish chapter 2 sometime soon and release them both at once.

And there’ll be no “casuality” this time.

Closing on Bungaku Shoujo Pierrot

-First up, WordPress, for a short period of time, was filtering all Megaupload and Mediafire links, so in the event that they happen to do that again, use the SkyDrive folder link. If they decide to go through with that, I may look to url shortener for MF/MU links for new releases, but I won’t update the links in older posts. The SkyDrive links are suppose to be long-term-archiving links, since I don’t think MS has an “inactive-files-get-deleted” policy for SD; while MF should be the link that most ppl use and MU as the other more stable mirror.-

Now on to Bungaku Shoujo,
– You may have noticed this before, but in middle of Pierrot ch04 & the beginning of Pierrot ch05, the translation was done as if it was Shuuji who was doing the narrating, but the narrator could just as easily be Chia instead of Shuuji. This vagueness is reinforced with the bare & genderless drawing of the narrator character in those sequences.

For ch23, other than the dust have now been cleaned, there are 4 changes in the dialogue to fix typos and ellipsis, etc…
But lots of changes for all the other chapters, ranging from just simply change from PNG 24bit -> PNG 32 colors; to some of the old messier re-draw get re-drawn to look better; to TL fixes and style standardization.

One thing I had noticed with the event that caused me to change my monitor, is that the texts that read just fine on my old 1280×1024 17″ CRT might turn out to be quite difficult to read on the 1600×900 20″ LCD, so the fonts have now been standardize, so that it should be easier to read now.

While I’d like to write up something interesting for the closing, but the time spent working on this series has dragged on for way longer than originally expected. Since my head is blank right now, I’ll present to you some vector that I did about a year ago in preparation for the then ‘upcoming ending of the series’. Links to Bungaku Shoujo Folder below the images.

Status Update…

So finally, I got a new monitor, a 20″ Samsung A350, finally joining the 16:9 ratio screen res…

And my 1st impression about it is… the color/brightness/contrast feel off…

So it’ll probably take me a day or two adjusting those settings & the PTS workspace to the new ratio/screen res, then I’ll get back to finalize Bungaku Shoujo & continue with ef.

Now, as for the 2nd arc of Bungaku Shoujo manga… unfortunately, I can’t commit to do it.
It’s estimated to take another 2 years + additional time for the RAW to show up (if you had noticed, ch23 of Pierrot was published way back in 22nd of Oct, 2010. And it takes nearly a year after that for the RAW to show up.) So it’s impossible for me to make that kind of commitment to it.

The last of Amagami Quiz

Take the quiz here to get the 2 wallpapers of Ayatsuji Tsukasa & Sakurai Rihoko.

1. In episode 2 of the Ayatsuji Tsukasa’s arc,
– What type of stuffed animal were there above Tsukasa’s bed?
a. Blue elephant
b. Pink bunny
c. Black cat

2. In episode 3 of the Ayatsuji Tsukasa’s arc,
– The names of the 3 girls who were attacking Tsukasa are ‘Yayoi’, ‘Yuuko’ and?
a. Misora
b. Misa
c. Miyuki

3. In episode 2 of the Sakurai Rihoko’s arc,
– The color of the gloves that Rihoko gave Junichi is?
a. Black
b. White
c. Blue

4. In Sakurai Rihoko’s arc,
– The hanging scroll in the Tea Ceremony Club wrote?
**All 3 answers have similar general meanings of ‘perseverance through hardship’; correct answer is A**

5. In Kamizaki Risa’s arc,
– The dialect that Kamizaki Risa used when she was about to part with Junichi was?
a. Touhoku-ben
b. Kansai-ben
c. Okinawa-ben (*)

Bungaku Shoujo Pierrot ch23 – [v0]

After ~8 years of service, my monitor is crapping out. It’s currently showing colors incorrectly. While the image editing part couldn’t be completely done, but it’s been ~1 year since ch22 was released so this is the not final version, dust-cleaned version of this chapter and final version of all released chapters by FAD2Raptor will be available at a latter date when my monitor issue is resolved.

Download links:
MediaFire
SkyDrive Folder link

Unrelated news update, Amagami SS+ plus (Season 2) is scheduled to air in Jan 2012 on TBS & BS-TBS stations, with each heroines have 2 episodes dedicate to them with original elements that will show the events following what happened in Amagami SS (Season 1).