Discommunication Seireihen chapter 3

It feels like I've been working on this chapter for a long, long time. And indeed, it's been over half a year since chapter 2 was released.

I discovered that the burn/dodge tool is really good at getting rid of JPEG noise. Now, when I started this gig, image quality wasn't my highest priority, but I'm the sort of guy who has the bad habit of wanting to do the best job he possibly can. Even with the right tools, cleaning still takes a considerable amount of time, though, which is why I need to suppress the unhealthy urge to make things as perfect as possible. For this release I used 4-bit PNG, which cuts down the filesize quite a bit. If you have a good monitor you may see some unevenness in the blacks; that's the sort of thing that I've decided I don't have the time to spend fixing. And though the internet's tubes are getting wider every day, going from 20 MB to 8 MB is a big difference.

The other thing is, I've been trying to make this less of a procrastination activity and more of a leisure-time activity. Thanks to /sci/ and /lit/, I've already fallen behind this semester. In a few weeks, though, I should be caught up. KnI and a few other interesting things are in the pipeline.

Railgun ch2 v2: What a difference a year makes

It's been over a year, but I finally got around to making a new version of Railgun chapter 2. I had known that there were a few mistakes, but when I actually sat down and started looking things over, something quickly became apparent: at the time I produced the first version, I had very little idea of what I was doing. The result, of course, was an atrociously off-base translation. I'm not going to go into details, but you can do a comparison if you feel like a good WTF. Aside from a corrected translation, spiffy "new" raws were used. Some things are a bit less weeaboo, for better or worse. I also decided to utilize more punctuation, since I've found that it tends to make the flow of dialogue more coherent. Finally, I changed the filename scheme to roughly match what that anon fellow uses.

Anyway, here's to a new year. Hopefully it will be a productive one.

Wintering

It's winter here, and there too, but it's probably not as cold here as it is over there. I'm rather glad for that. Things seem slow lately; perhaps the weather is a factor. Things are always slow on this blog, though, so offering a status update feels a bit needlessly narcissistic.

I had been planning to make use of the few days between the End Of Finals and Flying Home to edit a few things. First of all, a revision of the Railgun ch2 release, with fixes and whatnot. Second of all, I thought I'd throw out that old chapter of Sing 'Yesterday' For Me that I'd been working on, since that seems to be the popular thing to do these days (cough). Finally, at the very least I was going to do this really short one-shot, a whole five pages, before going home. But no, I ended up spending my time cleaning my room and hanging out with friends. Terrible, I know. So all that will have to wait until next year.

In the meantime I am reading things and translating things, and thinking about how to streamline my process. For one, is making up a script beforehand more efficient than translating just-in-time while editing? I tend to obsess over flow and phrasing when doing it just-in-time; doing it the other way might help.

I also want to make some long-overdue posts: 'Buying Japanese-language Manga in the USA', and 'Results of Book Off Grand Tour 2009'. Perhaps 'A Year in Manga' or 'A Year in Alcohol', we'll see.

New project: Kabu no Isaki

This has been in the works for a while now. I won't have time until the weekend to write the blurb I've got planned, but for now, have some links.

Two weekends later, and here we are. I know I promised a blurb, but now I realize it might not be a particularly cohesive one. I'm no Herb Caen, but hell, let's give the Herb Caen format a shot.

KABU NO ISAKI: Hitoshi Ashinano's latest work, serialized in Kodansha's Afternoon magazine. It seems to run every other month, and currently there are two collected volumes out. It's about a young man, Isaki, who flies his neighbor's plane around.

TEN TIMES LARGER: For unclear reasons, the earth has become ten times larger. That's what the back cover of the manga says. So everything is ten times farther away than it used to be, and mountains are ten times taller. The Tokyo Tower is ten times taller, but it's unclear (to me at least) why and how the human habitations are still normally sized.

Shichirigahama from Inamuragasaki. By WP Commons user Urashimataro. Public Domain.

SHICHIRIGAHAMA: A beach that actually has an article on Wikipedia: Shichirigahama. Evidently it's a decent surfing spot. What's interesting, though, is that the place is literally named "Seven Ri Beach," where a ri is an archaic unit of measurement equal to 3.9 kilometers. Thus you would expect the beach to be 27 kilometers long, but as Wikipedia notes, it's only one-tenth of that length. Blow up the world by ten, though, and the name becomes accurate.

MOUNTAIN FLYING: In chapter six, Isaki catches some major air. From reading around, mountain flying is not for the faint of heart; and it probably killed Steve Fossett. A phenomenon that's particularly interesting (and particularly relevant to this chapter) is the so-called lee wave. Also known as mountain waves, these are wind currents that form downwind from a mountain range. Gliders catching such waves can attain amazing heights, reaching altitudes of tens of thousands of feet. Reading about these waves has been quite fascinating. First there's the Sierra Rotors Project, a NSF-funded study to determine the characteristics of the waves that form over the Owens Valley; as Shiro-san notes, they're not always there. Then we have writer Nate Ferguson's article on Soar Minden, an outfit closer to Lake Tahoe that puts you in a glider. (Naturally there are Youtube videos of everything these days.)

PIPER SUPER CUB: I don't know a whole lot about these planes, but the internet sure does. There's a Wikipedia article, as well as a surprisingly active enthusiast website. A few data points: introduced 1949, cruise speed 185 km/h / 115 mph, range 735 km / 460 mi.

GEOGRAPHY: Japanese geography is also something that I don't know a whole lot about. We have a few data points to work from. In the first chapter, Isaki flies to the Tokyo Tower, having just returned from Jogashima in the first pages. And in chapter six, Isaki and Shiro-san go to Shichirigahama.

That's a static map with locations pointed out. I haven't figured out how to get a dynamic map with multiple locations, but here's a dynamic one anyway.

View Larger Map

DISTANCE: Where do Isaki and company live? The most pertinent datapoint comes from chapter one, where Isaki says that he went 120 km roundtrip to Jogashima. That makes for 60 km one-way, which we then divide by ten to get the "unstretched" world distance. Looking at the map, the folks in KnI live somewhat north of Miura City, south of Mount Ōgusu. Café Alpha is somewhere around there too, as we can tell from chapter one of YKK:

PROJECT PLANS: Volume two is out, and I have it in hand. The plan is to read and translate the entire volume over winter break, and then start the editing process. I also would like to produce a HQ version of volume one, but naturally that's a lower priority.

Beaten again

I was beaten again. It's a bit scary; I get a chapter to 75% and bam, someone else makes a release. Last time it was Sing 'Yesterday' For Me, this time it's Kabu no Isaki. Anyway, chapter 5 of KnI will hopefully be done and released this weekend. [Edit: 5 is done, but I think I'll release it together with 6.]

Mhmm

Just registered for the JLPT, level 3. I hope I won't be taking N3 next year, as that would be kinda sad. I better study now ;_;

Aha

"Universal Century" is literally "Universe Century" in the original Japanese. I laughed and I cried.