Darklord Rooke

And with it, the amusement derived from Tay’s mailbox. Boo! A change which has been quite obvious and welcome. The increased discussion on the forums, and the increased translation projects and development on the boards have been fantastic. In the past a lot of the activity on the forums has been just people mucking around, which is not something that's sustainable into the future.

It's a fairly big problem and the only other way to get to the Reviews page is by going through the Fuwazette blog, which is incredibly counter-intuitive. Ideally there'll be a tag on the front site to direct people to the review page, but the redesign of the front site is taking a while due to RL stuff.

Sold *slams money on the table*. Oh… there’s no such game yet Take care of yourself, Bats. Your health is the most important thing you have, and If you die not only will it sadden us immensely... but I’ll take it upon myself to write your Eulogy. And I know everybody keeps telling me ‘NO!!!!!’ with much arm flapping but honestly you guys won’t be in any condition to protest, in fact I’ve already got Wink’s written and stored safely in a drawer *heh*.

If that were true... then that's REALLY annoying. Because it would impinge on my ability to be nosy, and I LIKE being nosy

The number of times you get sick and almost die… let’s put it this way. If there were any truth to that adage ‘what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’, you’d be the embodiment of all things Hulk, and would be wandering around Canada-land (or wherever you live, Canada’s close enough ) hulk-smashing everything around you. And you'd be doing it with a bucket of bourbon in one hand, and an incomplete Fuwa-review in the other. And every so often you'd roar 'Sakuraaaaaa' :3

On a related topic, Sekai has allowed Grisaia back on Steam Spy - I wonder when that happened. But anyway, 8,000 copies is pretty impressive for a 40 dollar VN, even if half of those people bought it on sale.

Heh, the cat's just there for food. You need to keep your energy up and all that... I have to admit, I've been quite happy about this.

Ah, a sense of community, that's a tricky business. I hope you don't mind if I ramble for a moment or two . I remember talking with quite a few people about group friendships, and feeling sad about people going their separate ways and how you deal with it, how you stay together, and etc etc. The fact of the matter is this - if a group of people only comes together to have fun and talk about hobbies, muck around, share a laugh, play a game or two, then that group of people will always split apart at some point in the future. The bonds forged between these people are too superficial to withstand any tension, or any semi-serious inconvenience. Let me quote a story from Jeremy Clarkson's past: "Back in the eighties I spent pretty well every saturday night with the same group of freind's in a King's Road basement bar in Kennedy's We laughed all the time, we went on stage with the band, we sang, we drank ourselves daft and we knew, with the sure-fire certainty that night will follow day, that we'd be mates forever. Had one of them been accused of gouging the barman's eye out with a lawnmower, I'd have told the police I was dead at the time and that I knew nothing. I would even have taken the heat on his behalf, had push come to shove. Which would have made me feel awfully foolish today because I have no idea where two of those friends are, and, for the life of me, I cannot even remember what the third one was called. How did this happen? Presumably, when I said goodbye for the last time ever, I really did believe I'd be seeing them all again the following weekend. It wasn't like we'd had a row, or that they'd all grown beards or moved to Kathmandu. We just went home and never saw one another again. And this happens all the time. I went throug my address book earlier and there are countless hundred of people, friends, muckers, soul mates and former colleagues who I never see." This indeed happens all the time. You’re friends with somebody when you’re 15, but when you’re 20 you suddenly meet up and find you no longer have anything in common. And the depth of the bond between you two isn’t strong enough to overcome this. Or you suddenly got busy, and you’re too tired to want to do anything, whether you continue to stay in touch will depend on the strength of that bond between the two of you. That is to say, is your friendship real or do you just meet up to whack out a rounds of Persona Arena at the local arcade every day? Because if it's the latter, then the slightest inconvenience or hardship will snap that friendship and chances are you won't even regret it breaking. Similarly, your forum games sometimes involve a bit of work and if bonds aren’t strong enough or incentives aren’t there for people to want to withstand that, then people won't participate. This brings me rather round-aboutly to my point (‘round-aboutly’ is a word… now *shifty eyes*.) You’re an exceptional entertainer, Ren, but you don’t build a sense of community through a mutual sense of having a good time, a community is built upon very real and deep bonds. I understand where you’re coming from though, the Members Lounge was supposed to be a place where members of the community could share real parts of their lives with other members, because this act of sharing is one of the ways people bond and grow close to one another. It was supposed to foster a sense of community before it failed spectacularly and hilariously, so that idea was my one attempt at that. You can’t shove a sense of community down people’s throats, so… not much you can do. This is kinda where I say ‘that’s life’, then I laugh nervously, give you a hearty whack on the shoulder, and offer you a strong drink . Anyway, Fuwa is surviving by being a place where people can come and talk about Visual Novels. So we may not be a close knit community, but it’s a place where people can relax and talk about common interests, or participate in projects, in a non-judgemental and respectful atmosphere. And maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe that's all it needs to be for now. Maybe it will be something more in the future.

Gate's a pretty fun anime. Kinda reminds me of 1632, a novel written by Eric Flint, but instead of modern Japan dominating a magical medieval world, a small group of modern Americans dramatically influence 17th Century Germany.

I don’t think Sekai expects big sales from Denpasoft. DS is probably there to appease the Eroge fanbase, yet they may be acknowledging that this fanbase isn’t going to generate a lot of sales. Compare the sales of MG titles before and after Steam - it’s this new audience Sekai is chasing, the old fanbase was barely moving a few thousand units. Yet on the flip side, it’s the old fanbase that predominantly funds their kickstarters. They may not purchase things in great numbers, but they have a passion for the medium which generates the high funds needed for these translations to be made. An interesting situation. Because of this, Sekai should be delivering an adult version of the game on DS at the same time as the all-ages version, but that doesn’t mean they should advertise the DenpaSoft store. It’s there for a specific section of the fanbase, a section which already knows about it, but advertising these releases in the public could shift their image in an undesirable way and also not generate enough buzz for money spent.

My biggest posts will only be seen by Tay, and they involve reefing Fuwa into a direction that will most certainly outrage everything and everybody on this board, for no other reason than to outrage everything and everybody on this board. The angst gives me fuzzies. But alas, it involves having a Front site that can be changed and so, until then, I'm taking a little hiatus from the internet to work on my writing and to catch up on my reading (Yay books :3) No point making plans when there's no front site. I'm not bitter about anything though, things will move at their own pace

Don't you love it when things go to plan? :3

It never really got up and running. Tay was, is, will be in the near or far away future, exploring possible power structures for when he leaves the site. Ignore the LC and just hit up Tay if you want something done. He loves both work and people flooding his various inboxes with queries, it gives him fuzzies and makes him feel appreciated. That day he had a thousand messages in his inbox he literally shed tears of joy.

I don't have any figures to back this up, but there seems to be more discussion in the VN forums than before. And of course there's far more translation and original development activity. So the guts of the forum is, imo, still going strong. [JK] Alas, Fuwa took a gigantic hit when the Long Life people moved their discussion to another site and Kaguya took his spamming to PMs, I doubt the forums will ever recover (post wise) from those colossal losses [/JK]

I’m pretty happy that publishers out there are pushing the all-age thing. Eroge fans have MangaGamer to pander to the traditional Eroge fanbase’s interest, to the point where visiting MG’s site feels like visiting a seedy adult store, and I’m sure it’s a feeling they actively cultivate. I’m pretty happy for Sekai to set its sights outside the traditional Eroge fanbase and to be focusing on the more all-age audience, Visual Novels are more than just Eroge after all. Sekai cop a lot of flak from within the traditional fanbase, but if they succeed in what they’re doing it won’t matter. Shedding core fanbases for the opportunity to expand has been done before *looks at Bethesda*

Don’t make me hurt you >:c

Aaaaaand… who else wants that school metaphor to be swiftly kicked in the vulnerables? Anyone? Anyone at all? It can’t just be me.

And what good taste Kyrt has - everybody knows that titles with gameplay are clearly superior, and Lightning Raidy is so VERY good. I'd advise him to stay away from Beat Blades Haruka though (heh), a little birdie told me that it's awful :3

There's more than one kind of meditation, mate There's mantra or Transcendental meditation, which helps you relax, and there's Vipassana which is what Buddhists practice. Vipassana is often called 'Insight meditation' because the idea is to develop insight into yourself, and the world around you. Buddhists are cool, so naturally Vipassana is the way to go

That's a shame, good VNs in medieval settings are in short supply

TiagFromVenice - (I don't intentionally muck up people's names, honest ) that reply is hella insightful, and is fairly on the money. VNs replace a lot of written narration with pictures, and most VNs are prose light, which could be a reason a lot of ellipses are used. The image you linked to features a voiceless protagonist (I'm fairly certain.) But you're right again when you imply that people are more tolerant of ellipses in dialogue, or internal dialogue, than narration. There still tends to be an overuse of ellipses in translations though, which comes from punctuation usage differences between the Japanese and English. Take the image you linked to, for example (WHOA that's an incredibly literal piece of translation.) The first 2 sentences. We have "..." followed by an ... in the narration. What is this actually supposed to denote? A pause ... followed by another pause? Wouldn't you normally just call this one long pause? In English you would, but in Japanese this sort of stuff is common, and you could have text box after text box after text box filled with nothing but ellipses. In English I'd suggest you'd just have one ellipsis here, and it would just be 3 dots, not 6. So you'd delete the ellipsis at the beginning of the second line, otherwise you get people wrinkling their nose. And if you look at the second set of ellipses, down the bottom of your linked image you'll find an ellipsis separating two sentences. Separating two paragraphs. That's really tricky, in English an ellipsis at the end of a sentence usually indicates you're trailing off, and yet I've never seen an ellipsis stuck at the beginning of a sentence in narration. Sometimes you see one at the beginning of a sentence when somebody intrudes on a piece of dialogue (or narration), so you're catapulted half-way into something. So either way you're doing something considered weird in English. I would probably suggest joining those 2 sentences together to form a single sentence, so the ellipsis would no longer separate two sentences, but rather parts of a single sentence. But that's not half as weird as that humongous dash at the end of the screen, what on Earth is that meant to mean? I dunno. Anyway, the point is that going from Japanese to English, punctuation, and even sentence lengths and structures, aren't fixed. This is because the language techniques of Japan are different from the language techniques of English. As a translator (and editor) there's a degree of latitude to fiddle with these language techniques as long as you keep tone and whatnot consistent, which a lot of fan-translators don't take up and unfortunately keeping things overly literal will result in abhorrent abuse of ellipses (along with other problems.)

Gift them ‘Sakura Spirit: Shiny boobies up the wazoo’ instead.