Fred the Barber

That'll get you a like... but I guess that's not surprising since I linked the very same song four posts up from yours.

Ilya is possibly the best character in the game. That probably won't become apparent until subsequent routes, though.

I only played maybe one or two of the Tiger Dojo segments when I was playing the game, but I kinda regret it. It's a tough call - on the one hand, I expect they hurt the serious mood a little bit. On the other hand, the tiny bit of them I've seen was pretty hilarious. Definitely do it without a walkthrough. This is a good game for that. There are two additional endings you can go back for later, for both of which you'd want a walkthrough, but personally I didn't even enjoy them. The true endings for each route, which are where you'll end up when you don't get a bad ending, pretty much guaranteed, are better.

Neil Patrick Harris

Just read the update about the $5000 tier reward. It's actually a little bit crazy. If you've got $5,000 to burn (plus airfare to Japan...) and always wanted to shoot the shit with the Presidents of AkabeiSoft2 and Frontwing, now's your chance.

sudden-onset salmonella.

respectable upstanding gentlemen.

and hopelessly contrarian

had been replaced

only to find

was wearing galoshes.

Umm. I could probably find grapefruit ice cream somewhere in the vicinity if I tried hard enough, so I guess true? I've never tried it and probably won't, though. Grapefruit is too bitter for me. Next person likes sour things more than bitter things.

I got dragged into it back when half of Fuwa was reading it and the boards were alive with the sound of PE chatter. B++++, might've actually been more entertaining if the package contained a bobcat. Will not play again.

This is fair. One big difference, which I forgot until just now, between Sharin and both Root Double and Libra is that this game already has a translation (albeit a much-benighted one). Have we yet seen a Kickstarter (successful or unsuccessful) for an already-translated game that wasn't also able to pull in the anime audience? I can't recall any. Clannad and Muv-Luv are the only VN Kickstarters I can think of for already-translated games. It's also possible that Decay was onto something a little while back when he suggested that we may already be at market saturation for VNs in the west. I'm still on the fence about that one, especially in some areas: for instance, I'm pretty sure if a F/SN localization KS materialized, it'd rake in the dough just like Clannad and Muv Luv did.

I guess it's not that surprising. The US VN market just isn't that big; you should really need to pull in the anime market to get that level of funding. I don't know how Sekai Project managed to get > $150,000 for Root Double.

Sadly, I don't read moon runes, so I have no idea what they're saying about it either on Twitter or their website, aside from "Virtual Reality Story". The announcement tweet got retweeted by Sekai Project really quickly, and of course they brought over World End Economica (or, you know, mostly brought it over...) so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they're picking it up for an English release. Whatever it is. http://spicy-tails.net/index2.html

Agreed (and voted) on preference for all resources up top.

No. It's a conscious decision based on reasonable understanding of the source and target material, so I don't think you can call it a translation error. You can, if you like, criticize the decision, though.

Don't get trapped forever, Eclipsed. Nobody else has a cute Louise avatar. We're counting on you to come back alive!

The struggle to use UK English was real. I corrected dozens of my own mistakes like that while editing, but I'm not surprised there were still many, many left. I was still occasionally spelling words using the UK spelling in other writing for weeks after handing the scripts back to you.

Sometimes, something lands on your plate that makes no sense. If you're lucky, it may be a single line that makes no sense as it is written, but you can figure it out and fix it from context. If you're unlucky, it might be a whole passage that doesn't fit together quite right, or something that just doesn't hang together to present a consistent plot. As the editor, it's your responsibility to turn that line or passage into something that makes sense. Sometimes you can manage it yourself with enough brainpower. Sometimes you should ask the original translator, another editor, another translator, or a TLC to help, if you simply cannot hit on an obviously-correct, logical interpretation. Ultimately, though, you are responsible for seeing it through. You have to land that joke. Nobody else is going to do it for you. I present to you the following independent, unimportant passage from the raw To Heart 2 translation. This is one of the night scenes, which are mostly short throwaway gags featuring the protagonist, at home alone, being silly. Full context for this scene: the protagonist can't sleep and has picked a 'difficult book' off his shelf to try to put himself to sleep. Wat What all needs to be done here: The joke doesn't make sense (at least, it doesn't to me; you might be smarter than I am and able to get it immediately). There's some Engrish to be cleaned up (That "What what...?" line, especially, which sounds like it's straight from an old hip-hop song, not the utterance of a donkan harem protagonist about to read a book on special relativity), and there's ample opportunity to make the phrasing more natural. Once the nature of the joke is understood, it turns out its timing can probably be improved as well. It actually took me a couple of rewrites before I finally grasped the nature of the joke, and then I was able to both clean up the language and land it properly. It's frankly still not all that funny, but hey, a not-that-funny joke is still better than nonsense. Okay, much more readable, and I think you can actually understand the joke when reading it (you can, right? please tell me you can.). Aside from making it understandable: I deferred the idiotic non sequitur to the last line of the text-within-the-text, since it's the setup for the punchline on the last line and I wanted to get them closer together, since any time between these two is time people will spend being confused. Being a geek, I also decided to add a little more to the special relativity explanation to try to make it more clear, mostly so that it didn't look like the idiocy was endemic to the text, but rather was isolated to that final statement. For that last part, I ended up shuffling some text around, but it's not voiced text so this is really no big deal. You'll probably want to shuffle around whole lines, rarely, so be prepared to do that, for reasons like this one. Lastly, and most importantly, I tried to make the whole book-inside-the-VN passage flow as though it were a single logical explanation (you know; like a scientific-minded book normally would deliver). This is crucial for making the non sequitur at the end more jarring, and thus making the joke work (to the extent that it does). That last one is really the key, and it's applicable to more than just jokes or short passages like this. It's easy to get hung up on fixing individual lines and then miss the big picture. Lines are connected to make scenes. Scenes are connected to make the VN. Each level of that chain needs to fit together to make sense, and as the editor, you're on the line for that. As I'm writing this blog post, I realize there's at least one error in the "final" text I delivered up above: inconsistent capitalization of Theory of Relativity. Possibly more problems as well that I'm not seeing, and certainly there's room for improvement. Well, hopefully QA caught that grammar problem. I wasn't delighted with the result, but nonetheless, this was a good time to move on. This joke isn't going to be winning Olympic gold with such a shaky landing, but at least it does land instead of flying off on its own somewhere, leaving us behind and horribly confused. That's good enough for this filler scene. Everything can always be made better, and you can spend an eternity making something a little bit better all the time, but then nobody will ever actually see your work. You need to realize when to step back from something and say "It's good enough; ship it." Bottom line, if you're playing To Heart 2 and you get to a scene where the protagonist is picking a book to put him to sleep, take the science trivia book instead. That joke was funnier to begin with.

Coincidentally, I finished the first series of JJBA today and watched the first two episodes of JJBA: Stardust Crusaders. First season really was amazing stuff; I love how they go to the wall, every time, no regrets. I'm still getting adjusted to all the changes in Stardust Crusaders, but I'm loving it, too; I wouldn't be surprised if I end up liking it even more than the first series. I also watched the first two episodes of Acchi Kocchi today, because @AaronIsCrunchy's avatars were too cute so I bought it on Blu Ray, and it finally arrived today (along with my full Yona of the Dawn set, yessss, I might just go rewatch that, maybe even watch the dub, who knows, could get crazy). Anyway, Acchi Kocchi is really sweet, and yet the characters manage to feel real, rather than being predictable tropes rendered into animation; a rare combination. I'm really enjoying it, looking forward to watching more. Edit: Just noticed I used three semicolons in this post. I may have a problem.

True, I suppose. I've only used them a handful of times while on vacation, though, way back before smartphones and data plans were a thing. Next person has cried for a pet that passed away.

I did a couple of gym battles today for the first time. I won both of them, but: 1) I don't understand how the combat works at all. All I figured out was dodging and tapping the other dude to spam a regular attack. How do I use special moves? 2) I think there were three Team Mystic hanging around the gym and just me (Team Valor, of course) successfully attacking, so they were able to build it up faster than I could knock it down The XP is fantastic, though, you're right about that. Will definitely go do some more gym battles early tomorrow morning, while all the other pokenerds are still asleep. Also, I used to live like two blocks from the Hancock building, two blocks up Chestnut in one of the condo buildings on Lake Shore: My older brother's old place, where I stayed for a couple of summers while interning at his company. Chicago's a great city, and that's a really fun area of it.

False. I'm rarely standing at my computer. Next person is not at home right now.