At long last, I bring you the anime version of the 21st Budoukai. One of the main reasons for the delay is that I was timing myself, in the hopes of figuring out a reasonable pace to update regularly. And while I did figure out what a reasonable pace would be, I also realized I can’t justify the time required for it right now.

As you may have read elsewhere on the site, one of my biggest priorities right now is improving my Japanese. While reading and watching raw Dragon Ball is helpful toward that goal, all the writing and analyzing in English I do on the summary pages kind of eclipses all that. This doesn’t mean the project is dead; it just remains on the backburner. Which brings me to the other half of this update.

After all of the above happened, I realized it’s finally time to resume my guidebook translation project. Starting with something new to the site: Shen Long Newswire #7. I actually had the bulk of this done in 2008, but editing images for it (which I didn’t even use now) was extremely tedious, and then the whole guidebook project fell into the cracks before I ever got back to it. Although I’m still not perfect, I have improved considerably since 2008, so this is much better than anything you would’ve gotten back then anyway. I ended up revising and/or correcting pretty much every line (aside from the interview, which I revised last year, so I barely touched it this time).

On that note, before I start on any new pages or sections, I really, really, really need to re-do the stuff I did before. I have no idea how long that will take, but the rough plan is to update monthly with however much I can. So this time I’ll be timing myself more publicly, and we can figure out a reasonable pace together, I guess. So expect something or other (“Daizenshuu 7 Poster Revised!”) around September 15th.

And with this update, I can finally implement the new site news blog into the Dragon Ball section, so you can leave comments and whatnot. If not for the semi-urgency of getting that implemented, I probably would’ve waited until I had all my old guidebook stuff revised.

It was ten years ago today that I first started “Dragon Ball Daisuki” on Tripod. It was a place to put existing active projects, like my American dub edit list and Region 1 DVD charts. But I also started a new project there that day: manga summaries. Although I finished the summaries in 2004, they were a (somewhat intentional) mess, because I chose to write them in a very “casual” style full of my own commentary. But I was a silly teenager back then, and now I’m a much older and more boring person who wants to make things more formal and encyclopedic. Although it doesn’t show much nowadays, my love for Dragon Ball hasn’t changed at all, and I really wish I could devote as much time to writing words about it as I could back then.

But on that note, this update does feature something from the 80’s: improved summaries for Chapters 32-54, including additional analysis and whatnot. I wanted to have the corresponding anime summaries done too, but I haven’t had time to do them yet. I guess it’s fitting that this is manga only, all things considered. I don’t want to make any promises about when the anime summaries will come, but if it takes too long, I’ll try to add some other kind of bonus to go along with it.

Also, yes, I do know about the new Episode of Bardock pages, and I’ve had the V Jump issue with them for weeks already. EoB makes me feel like Sideshow Bob stepping on all those rakes. But I’ll get to it in the near future, after more 80s stuff, probably.

I really wanted my next update to be something from the 80s, but someone apparently told Shueisha I like importing magazines. So I just got the DVD and wrote up a summary of the Episode of Bardock anime. I wish it was just a simple copy+paste job from the manga summaries, but there were tons of tiny changes, and a few larger ones too. On the bright side, Ipana was voiced by Masashi “Andy” Ebara. Yes, that Andy.

Before I had a chance to finish the second chapter, I already had my copy of the third. So, here’s both together: “Episode of Bardock” Chapter 2 and Chapter 3! That’s the whole mini-series, so I can stop spending crazy import money on V Jump issues for the time being. And now I can get back to working on stuff from the 80s.

Lots of little things today. First, I’ve started adding screenshots to the anime and movie pages! Just a couple of small ones per finished page, though. I don’t want them to be too large, for copyright reasons. But there’s a good chance I’ll go larger and/or add more per page in the future, once I figure out how I’d want to implement that stuff (in-line images? fancy gallery thing?). I’d also like to do the same with the manga pages, but for the time being I can’t use my scanner. (A reverse of the old days where I could scan but not do screenshots!)

Second, in addition to the two screens, I’ve (finally) fleshed out the miscellaneous section for the first movie. And third, I’ve added more to the terminology page. Not more people names, but place and thing names. Still not going past the revised/new summaries with it, or else that page would be the only thing I ever do.

On that note, there’s something I forgot to mention in the “Episode of Bardock” update. None of the name spellings are exactly “permanent” yet (which is why I haven’t added them to the terminology page). I’ll probably try to decide something for the new characters after the series is finished, and the old characters probably not until I get to the Freeza arc. Not that any of my spellings are necessarily permanent, because I’ve changed my mind and gone through massive find+replace operations more than once.

So here’s something new and spur of the moment: a summary of the first chapter of “Episode of Bardock!” If you haven’t heard, this is a new three-part series that just began publication in Japan this week. It also ends up being the debut of a new “specials” section I’d been considering, although I don’t have anything else to put there right now.

I took a break from working on some other things to do this, which should be ready in the next couple days.

So far so good on my “once a month” plan, because Act 18 is up! Chiral and Achiral use all kinds of crazy science words that I only vaguely understand. If you’re a chemistry nerd and something they say seems wrong, it’s probably Takeuchi’s fault more than mine. Probably. But what isn’t Takeuchi’s fault are a couple of non-science lines I had trouble with. They’re probably easy to spot, because they don’t make a whole lot of sense. But I intend to correct them one day when I know better (which will hopefully be in the near future).

I also added a lot to the translation notes page, including a new section giving brief explanations of the astronomy/mythology references. I’ll add more as it’s introduced in the story (or I remember it), but I want to keep it strictly limited to the astronomy/mythology stuff, because A) these kind of references provide insight to the story that the uninformed might miss, and B) at the moment, I don’t want to make a giant etymology page where I have to start researching minerals and junk.

Minor update today. I’ve made a page detailing some of my spelling preferences. It’s not complete (only covers characters that have appeared in new/updated summaries), but I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time. It’s kind of necessary just for personal reference, but maybe you’ll enjoy seeing my reasoning too. This is definitely going to be updated a lot as I work on updating/creating more summaries. I was hoping to have another chunk of those ready today too, but things just didn’t work out that way.

(If you want to know a secret, a lot of the stuff in that page was pulled directly from my old DB “Articles” project that I took down years ago. I’d be shocked if anyone remembers it.)

Since I’ve missed a lot of other important anniversaries, I wanted to do something nice for the 25th anniversary of the first episode of Dragon Ball. But due to my poor time management skills, I only came up with the final idea a few days ago: a summary page for the very first Dragon Ball movie. It’s not as complete as I would like, but I’d hardly call it a rush job either. This is the first new summary I’ve done since 2004, and there are many, many words. (3,593 to be exact.) So for me, it’s a big deal in more ways than one. But I plan to add a little more to it in the very near future (possibly some screen captures?), along with some templates for the other movies. Right now I just need to upload this as is before (my) midnight.

I’d love to do more movie summaries in the near future, but right now my highest priority is cleaning up the old manga summaries. Ideally there will be more updates to those soon, but I don’t want to make any promises eight days before a new Pokemon release.

A relatively large update today, but most of it is meaningless to people who aren’t me. I did finish the summary pages for the first training arc, but after that, you’ll also find a lot of incomplete template pages for the subsequent chapters (32 and up) and episodes (DB 19 and up). Nothing on those template pages is finalized or confirmed; they mostly exist for my personal convenience. But they’ll also make future updates much easier and faster. It’s also worth noting that they contain nearly all the Dragon Ball content that was on the previous version of the site, which means nearly everything is here now, and that old mess has been rendered mostly obsolete.

There have also been some technical changes that results in a lot of new URLs, but everything should theoretically redirect automatically. You can read more about it on the site’s main page in the near future, and let me know if anything’s horribly broken.