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.

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.

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.)

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.

25 years ago today, the 25th chapter of Dragon Ball was published in WJ #25. It featured the debut of Kuririn. I’ve decided to celebrate Kuririn’s 25th birthday by re-adding the relevant chapters and episode. I wish I could have done more, but I’m also celebrating someone else’s 25th birthday today. Eight years ago, that someone celebrated their 17th birthday by summarizing up to Volume 17 of the manga. Such youthful energy fades fast, apparently.

Long time no update! First of all, I’ve edited and added a lot to the manga and anime summaries, enough that both are completely up through the entire first story arc. I’ve changed my mind about a lot of translations (or lack thereof) since last time, so there’s also that.

I’ve also moved and consolidated all of the guidebook translations, so now there are less pages total, but more scrolling and more angry dialup users. In the end, I think it’s much easier for everyone, including me. But there is nothing new there, aside from one or two typos I happened to notice and correct. I haven’t even updated any of my name/term preferences to my current ones, because there are some other translation issues to fix as well, and the entire project is currently on-hold indefinitely. My motivation to finish it recently dropped a few notches, for probably obvious reasons if you view other Dragon Ball websites, but I certainly have not given up yet.

Oh, and I’ve made an RSS feed for easier tracking of updates. Hooray for modern web technology!