10th Anniversary, 21st Budoukai
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.
Name/Term Spellings
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.)
Big/Small Manga and Anime Updates
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.
Happy Birthday, Kuririn
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.
Manga and Anime Updates, Guidebook Rearrangement
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!