Well, it turns out I’m still a deadbeat after all. But even when I’m lying in a gutter addicted to Star Trek or Pokemon, I still love Dragon Ball. And thus I bring you revisions of the remaining timeline pages. I was surprised to read that I stopped at 19 in the last update, because I only started at 22 this month. I must have done 20-21 last year. Either way, I plan to quickly go over the previous pages again to check for inconsistencies, because three years is a long time. But I wanted to get this online first, since I set a deadline of April 18th, and somehow I actually made it. Even in JST!

So I don’t want to make any big promises, but as I worked on this, I was simultaneously working on something else that you could call future-proofing. It will make more sense to explain it once I get to the character bio section again, so stay tuned, I guess.

In the more immediate future (all four of them), I have some images to edit, and/or some weak attempts at text alternatives to make. I may even do newer, slightly better scans, but it’s still the same scanner I used 7-8 years ago to do the first versions, and I’m not interested in replicating the book in pristine quality. Tackling this issue is the next thing on my agenda after some other site projects, but I can’t say how soon that will be. Definitely before 2018, at least.

It’s been a long time. I shouldn’t have left you without an update to check to.

Well, January 2015 is actually the 15th anniversary of this site. I don’t have an exact date beyond “January,” although I didn’t exactly intend to wait until the 31st to do this. Ideally I would have done this on the 1st, along with updates to each section and layout changes and everything. Big anniversary stuff. But that didn’t happen because of a problem.

Below the cut I’ll give you fifteen whole excuses about why I’ve been so terrible and bad. But before that I’ll give you a quick status update on each section:

Sailor Moon: I did manage one update last April, after a year long gap. The plan was to update the other sections before resuming it regularly (since they had been neglected even longer), and I haven’t finished either of those because reasons. But it will take a major disaster to keep me from breaking my promise to update again in less than thirteen months.

Words: I have a rather large update coming that is nearly complete, but I wasn’t able to finalize it before I hit my personal deadline with this status/anniversary post. It will definitely be done in the next couple weeks, barring death or disaster.

Dragon Ball: So I was working on some more Daizenshuu 7 revisions, but I haven’t finished the section yet because of reasons. In fact it’s been months since I last worked on it. I ultimately ended up focusing on the big blog project instead, though I use the word “focus” loosely. Odds are DB will have to stay in the backseat a bit longer, because I’ve just given public deadlines for the other two sections. However, I will give a deadline here of “before Fukkatsu no F hits theaters.”

All this new deadline pressure should keep me in line. Now here are some reasons/excuses.

Read the rest of this entry »

2013 already. I don’t know where the time goes, but I hope I find it while I’m still young and ambitious.

Well, to start, I did just update the agenda page, which gives a brief summary of my current site goals. I’ve also been brainstorming the previously mentioned layout tweaks for months, though the only part I’ve actually gotten done so far is changing a few filenames (and thus Shinken Red and long-haired me are temporarily back). January is my site anniversary month (13 years!), so if nothing else I plan to at least update the banner by the end of the month.

As for actual content, I’ll expound upon the updates to the agenda page. Right now, the Sailor Moon scripts are the highest priority, since A) I’m getting pretty close to the end, B) roughly 100 pages of comic per month is a relatively easy goal to meet, and C) staying ahead of the official releases helps ease my guilty conscience. Resuming Dragon Ball guidebook translations is right behind it, but between the recent flood of Sailor Moon double chapters and side stories, and various poor life decisions, I ended up having to put it on hold again. However, I will resume it as soon as I get through my Moon backlog, which will likely be next month.

I believe that covers the bulk of the current content and goals. But I also want to give an update on my Japanese ability. There is definitely progress, but no matter how dedicated I might be, true fluency is not something that will come easily. As far as I know, I don’t have any particular disorders or anything, though I’ve had annoying issues with concentration and short term memory since my early teens. And throughout my adult life, I’ve never been able to do anything quickly or efficiently. There are only so many hours per day, and I can be really bad at managing time, but this is definitely an attainable goal… eventually. TLDR: It’ll be a long ride.

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.

On April Fools (Fool’s? Fools’?) Day, people usually like to play pranks on others. But I prefer to just poke fun at myself. So the joke this year was that I didn’t have any jokes ready in time. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Actually, I did have the usual Sailor Moon update on the 1st, and with it came the subtle debut of the new on-site news blog. That’s something I’ve been meaning to do for months, but I put off setting it up for various foolish reasons. This means that you can now comment on Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon updates, and the general status updates can be commented on locally. But the journal will still serve as an off-site mirror for news, in case of potential problems. I’ll likely do the same with other, more relevant social sites in the near future. I think the site Twitter is going fairly well, but does anyone have any particular requests for other social sites I should use?

This hasn’t been directly implemented into the Dragon Ball section yet, mostly because I wanted to save it for the next update, since it also involves redoing RSS stuff. And the next update might be a while, because there’s something I want to try. If it works, it will be super awesome.

But as for general stuff, I really want to tweak the layout, partly because everyone has fancy little phones with internet now. And along with that, I’d like to make the banner look a little more professional. But that’s all low priority while I focus on content. On that note, I think the agenda page is way out of date, so I should fix that soon.

Oh, and if you’re curious about the Japanese thing: it’s going well, but I still have a lot of work to do. Ideally, I’ll have something nice to show for it in the next few months.

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.

So obviously a lot of my projects involve translating Japanese to English. But I’m not yet an expert or a professional at it. I often try to explain this in casual conversation, but I feel like I should finally explain it in detail somewhere publicly.

Back in roughly August or September 2000, I started teaching myself Japanese because I wanted to play some video games with no existing translations (at the time, anyway). A noble endeavor, right? Anyway, it wasn’t long before I’d mastered the grammar basics and learned to read kana almost as well as I can read the Latin alphabet. But that’s the easy part.

Fluency is about vocabulary and ease of use. Eleven years would sound like plenty of time to gain that fluency, wouldn’t it? Except that I did not spend the full eleven years actively studying. Probably not even a fourth of that. It’s not that I’ve been lazy about it so much as I’ve been undisciplined and unfocused for most of the past decade. I’ve also been hindered by the fact that I haven’t had a teacher to guide and correct me, or a pen pal or someone to converse with regularly.

But I have learned a great deal. Far more than the average fanboy. And I constantly see improvement in myself whenever I look back on old translation attempts. (The fact that I can go back and correct my old errors is the main reason I pretty much only do translation work on my site, rather than in any outside group projects.) So I’m confident that my unorthodox learning methods can work (along with some new study methods I’m trying). I’ve also recently gained the focus and discipline I need, so I’m going to bump up my immersion in the language.

Which finally brings me back to the website, and that stuff I mentioned a couple weeks ago. You’ll be seeing an increase in translation projects, as part of this increased focus. I know people would prefer that I went back to the Dragon Ball guidebook translations, but frankly I think it’s a little out of my league at the moment. Instead, I’ll be focusing heavily on my Sailor Moon projects for the next few months, until I feel more confident about going back to the guidebooks. I need to surpass myself and climb over the wall of Super Translator before I can defeat the Daizenshuu.

2011 sure is flying by. So much to do, both on the website and in my personal life. I did find time for a few updates this week, but I was hoping it would be slightly less few than it actually is. I’ll list them all here.

-A new banner for 2011. It’s pretty much the same as last year’s, but it has a more recent picture of me (still grayscale, for stealthiness), and GoukaiRed instead of ShinkenRed. Sidenote: One of the people in the banner is currently competing on Dancing With The Stars, and doing a pretty good job, so you should vote for them. It’s not Cell, although now that Dragon Ball Kai is over, he’s free to compete next season.
-A Sailor Moon news feed, so now all the big sections have their own feeds, for people who don’t like all my stuff. I also reorganized that section quite a bit, so now it has much better navigation.
-I also added a script for Sailor Moon Act 17, which I think is the first new one in at least two years. Oops.
-And I added a Dragon Ball name/spelling preference list, which is probably more useful to me than it is to anyone else. But hey, it’s there.

All of this is completely real and not fake. No lies. Only truth. If I wanted to play a joke, wouldn’t I have pretended to do even more updates than this? And had this ready at midnight?

2010 is almost over, and though I haven’t accomplished nearly as much on the site as I’d planned, I think it has been my busiest year since 2004. Maybe 2011 will be even more productive, but I don’t like to make promises.

I recently started using PHP everywhere, although so far, there haven’t been any interesting new features because of it. It removed the need for JavaScript on the main page, and made a couple of server-side things more convenient for me, but that’s about it. Maybe I’ll try something fancy later. But most pages have a new filename because of it, so there could be some errors or broken links. I think I’ve accounted for all of them, but tell me if you do find any.

I’ve made lots of blog posts, most of them forgettable, and there are many more unwritten ones to cover the near the future. The news makes me want to write lots of political rants, but I fear that would alienate more people than my WWE or 90210 posts already do. I also continue to chug along through old Dragon Ball content, at a theoretically much better rate than I had been, thanks to making lots of template pages. (That was the “big but not really” update I’d previously mentioned.)

More things will happen if and when they happen.

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.