Following any slow period of work, you can expect a busy one - not too much work if it were spread out, but it usually isn't. Planning a vacation in the middle of next month too, so the next week or two is really going to be nose to the grindstone.

Finished the second path of Fate/Stay Night. Definitely fun - there's a lot more plot divergence in this game than in most visual-novel types, so it's not really the same story twice in a row. This arc is Rin-heavy, which is good, as I definitely prefer Rin as a character to Saber... spoilers below.
more...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:08 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Took a few days to relax after that busy stretch. Man, this lifestyle... sleeping in every day and staying up late every night. It's kind of idyllic and pathetic at the same time, right? But I'm more or less spinning my wheels, Dad's still recovering, and so long as the money's coming in...

Played some of the Utawarerumono visual novel / tactical RPG. The anime seems to have been very faithful to the game storyline, which is a little bad, since I've seen the former - so there's not really any surprises there. Hakuoro, the player-character, remains the world's most unlikely pimp. As a visual novel, it's almost completely non-interactive - there's not even "routes" or choices of which girl to focus on, but basically a single path with the occasional chance to see different scenes that don't materially affect the plot.

There are a few differences. Touka, who's always something of a fun character, is much more of a comedic character in the game than in the anime. (Turns out all the hilariously-inappropriate omake from the TV series were scenes straight out of the game... heh.) And, of course, the visual novel has porn included, though it's basically "one token scene with everybody" (except the loli) (unless you play on hard... ugh). Frankly, it's not adding much to the experience. Porn is porn; it doesn't work in non-porn contexts, and the work to porn ratio is terrible if you were just approaching the game as a porn container.

The tactical RPG portion is kind of fun, mostly because it's a "click to extend your combo" type. Not too challenging, strategy-wise, though a bad selection of units can hurt you on some stages; if you're heavy on ranged attackers with low defense on a level where you can't set up a chokepoint, it's gonna hurt, and there's at least one example of a waterfront battle where Aruruw is at a huge disadvantage. So if you're looking for a big challenge (or, ew, Aruruw porn scene), try it on hard.

I won't be finishing it anytime soon, however, because Mirror Moon just finished their translation of the second path of Fate/Stay Night. I'm going back through the first path (Saber, basically), partly because I enjoyed it a lot the first time, though also because installing the translation patch wiped out my saved games, and so I have to anyway. ;p Virtue out of necessity, and it's not like the Saber route isn't good on its own.

It's interesting to have played the two in close proximity, because Fate/Stay Night has much better presentation. It's still fundamentally a visual novel, so there's not full-motion video or anything fun like that, but Type Moon didn't skimp on the video and audio effects; the fight with Berserker -felt- like something huge and powerful and dangerous was happening, even if there probably weren't more than six unique pictures through the entire thing.

More Fate in the future, to be followed by the newly-translated Unlimited Blade Works (Rin route, basically.) And to hear tell, the third path, Heaven's Feel (Sakura route, dark x e¹⁰⁰) should be finished soon too. I tried to convince Author to try it out, but it seems he won't run it if it won't run under Linux. Definitely a mistake, I think - if you like the concept of visual novels as a format, you owe it to yourself to at least look at the best examples thereof. Makes me wish that this was a commercial product, so I could BUY it - but at the same time, it's pretty hugely translator-intensive and a tiny niche market to boot, not even considering the expense of licensing (and apparently Type Moon aren't the easiest fellows to deal with either...), so I can understand why that's not going to happen.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:07 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Been running myself ragged this week. Monday was Dad's regular checkup, then across town to help a friend who just had surgery. Wednesday, Dad got his cast off, and immediately celebrated with an hour-long shower and a drive in his old Mustang. Today was Dad's annual cancer screening (his bladder was replaced ten years ago - a neat trick, that), also across town.

On top of that, it's been pretty productive for work as well. Aika R-16 extras done, Lucky Star vol. 2 extras done, and I'm absolutely running through Ayakashi, which I'm enjoying well enough so far. Dunno if the gimmick of "combat etymology" will be enough to hold it up for 30 episodes, but what hey, what hey...

It's amazing how much faster it is to work with a good translation, as opposed to a bad one, as well.

Not much else going on, though lots of work and lots of doctors will do that for you. Hopefully it'll stop raining by Saturday - I'm helping with traffic control for the Buffalo Bayou Regatta, along with some other guys from the radio club. Should be fun stuff...

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Megan McArdle is subbing for Glenn Reynolds, and posts on pharmaceutical advertising expenses here.

First, I have to respond - that argument assumes that all doctor-oriented advertising for medication is an unalloyed public good, which is not necessarily the case. Obviously, the intent of such advertising (even that which involves giving free samples to doctors) is to encourage those doctors to prescribe that medication to their patients more often. Thus, the advertising is only good to the extent that said increase in prescriptions meets the patients' needs. It has no effect when the medication only performs as well as another brand-name drug, and a negative effect when the doctor prescribes that medication in lieu of an older-but-effective generic medication or a non-medication treatment, or when the patient fails to respond to the medication.

It's like a doctor writing an antibiotic prescription when you have the flu. It cannot possibly cure what ails you. It's actually bad to take antibiotics when you don't need them - the risk of a pathogen developing antibiotic resistance and knocking you (and everyone you spread it to) flat on your ass is small, but present. And shoot, you could just as soon not spend the money!

I'm hardly anti-medication; better living through chemistry is fine by me. But all that advertising isn't being done to inform doctors about new medicines, and it's not just promoting the best ones; it's encouraging doctors to prescribe certain medications over other ones with the same effect (or for conditions where they wouldn't have prescribed one before.) We shouldn't kid ourselves and say that there's no distortion of medical outcomes going on.

I could expand this post into "what's wrong with pharmaceuticals in the US" and further into "health care in the US in general", but I need to work on Aika instead. Serious policy discussion and excessive panty shots don't go together well in the same thought process...

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Figures I'd come down with something right as I needed to get the first volume of Lucky Star polished off. Fever's jumping around from my normal not-even-98 to a robust 102. At least the secondary effects are pretty mild - a bit of a sore throat from drainage, and the aches that go with the fever. Picked it up from Dad, and goodness knows where he got it from - it's not like he's been getting out much with his broken leg!

It occurs to me that one of the biggest problems with Lucky Star is the first half of the first episode. It drags. It has a few funny moments, but really, they're all just sitting around talking about food. You can do that if you've established the characters and the audience is comfortable just having them interact, but it's a crummy way to lead off the show. If you find yourself asking, "Why did I pick this thing up, anyway?", skip to the next chapter and things should improve somewhat. ;p

At any rate, generating DVD subtitles is something you shouldn't do unless you're completely lucid, so I might be running a day behind or so. Ah well...

Also picked up the contract for Ayakashi Ayashi, which looks like it might be interesting... More on that once I've spent some time with it.

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Don posts about the (insane) pricing on Shigofumi and True tears here. Pete comments here.

I fundamentally don't understand BVUSA. Seriously. I mean, I can see where it's coming from - it's the spitting image of a Japanese company coming into the US market with no local staff and trying to do things their way.

But what FOR? This isn't any Japanese company. It's Bandai, right? I mean, they already have a US company that's releasing anime here, right? Setting up a second independent company to compete with it seems... well, it's pretty stupid in the first place.

The only scenario I can think of is total dissatisfaction somewhere in the Bandai chain of command with BEI's performance - "we should be making way more money if only we did things the Japanese way!" That's the only possible way I can consider a sane person setting up a second company to compete with the first, and then essentially ignoring everything that first company has already learned about the market, at high cost to themselves.

But what about distribution? BEI distributes anime. BVUSA, well... it doesn't. They had commercial distribution for a short time from Geneon, but we all know what happened there. Since then, the only way to purchase their products (assuming anyone ever wanted to, heh) has been to go to the dot-anime online store. So they're dead to start with - there's no theoretically possible way that they could be making their money back with that method, none at all.

That, however, is the dumbest thing of all. BVUSA's business model is iffy anyway, but without commercial distribution, it doesn't have a chance in hell. They're not going to get distro through ADV or Funi, that's for damned sure. So there's only one big distributor left... and it's one that can't say no! BEI would have to distribute BVUSA's product if the company upstairs told them to, right? So why haven't they done it? It's like being homeless when you own an apartment complex in the neighborhood!

Maybe it's just some sort of weird intra-company politics, and we're seeing the bizarre results. You'd like to think that people aren't really that dumb...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 11:44 AM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
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1 I think there's another choice. They could make a deal with RightStuf for distribution.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 01, 2008 12:43 PM (+rSRq)

2 Right Stuf uses ADV for their commercial distribution.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at February 01, 2008 01:08 PM (LMDdY)

3 I'll be damned. I didn't know that.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 01, 2008 02:02 PM (+rSRq)

4

Who, as a retailer (online or brick-and-mortar) is going to bother ordering any at these prices, knowing full well that they'll be lucky to move any of it?

Posted by: Will at February 01, 2008 05:28 PM (WnBa/)

5

In the short run, probably a lot of them. They can return unsold product for credit, you know.

But they're unlikely to order anything like as many as they would if the price was more reasonable.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 01, 2008 06:19 PM (+rSRq)

6 Since then, the only way to purchase their products (assuming anyone ever wanted to, heh) has been to go to the dot-anime online store.

I'll admit that I don't know squat about retail distribution and what it entails, but if they have no way of getting product to retailers, how are their new and upcoming releases showing up at Right Stuf, Animenation, and RACS, to name just three? Am I missing something?

So they're dead to start with - there's no theoretically possible way that they could be making their money back with that method, none at all.

They don't have a lot of money to make back, though; just about all of their releases have been stuff that the Japanese Bandai Visual had a hand in the production of, which (I think) means they're not paying exorbitant license fees. Reusing assets from Bandai Visual's R2 DVD releases and not producing dubs means that their production costs are probably relatively low. You get the sense that even if BVUSA crashed and burned, it wouldn't be a huge loss for their parent company.

Posted by: Andrew F. at February 01, 2008 07:06 PM (sUicM)

7 BVUS should just fold and Let Bandai Ent do what they have done for the last 10 years (founded 9 , Bandai's releases of late shows their ability to sense the pulse of the fans, BV should leave it to the experts........

-Gabe,

Posted by: firemage at February 01, 2008 10:12 PM (eXNHO)

8 Being able to return unsold product for credit is not universal. Particularly, you have to be careful with new/small companies on that score. If Bandai decides to fold up BVUSA, for example, it's highly unlikely that they'll make good on returns after that point.

It's also a big pain for the original company, who can end up with a huge whock of un-moveable merchandise to dispose of. Sure, DVDs don't cost a whole ton to produce, but they ain't free either...

Of course they have money to make back. The money that BVUSA isn't paying for licensing fees, Bandai Japan isn't getting for licensing fees. Opportunity cost and all that...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at February 02, 2008 12:12 AM (LMDdY)

9

Andrew, the "distribution" we're talking about is sales to Fred Meyers, and BlockBuster, and Best Buy, and places like that. Dealing with specialty mail order houses is only a small fraction of the whole: less than 20%, I'm told. And dealing with the mail order houses is easier precisely because there aren't very many of them.

Avatar said that RightStuf has been using ADV for distribution (e.g. for Ninja Nonsense). I believe that. But I'm sure the Ninja Nonsense DVDs that RightStuf sells on its own online store didn't get given to ADV and then purchased back again.

On the other hand, I went to Best Buy today, and saw Ninja Nonsense boxed sets. I'm sure those came through ADV's distribution.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 02, 2008 12:17 AM (+rSRq)

10 Yeah, I understand that you can't buy BVUSA's releases at brick and mortar places, or even Amazon. Just saying that dot-anime isn't the only place to get them.

The money that BVUSA isn't paying for licensing fees, Bandai Japan isn't getting for licensing fees. Opportunity cost and all that...

Only if the series in question could have been licensed in the first place, which I don't think is true for a lot of BVUSA's releases. They've put out a lot of niche stuff that would never get picked up in the current climate (Super Robot Wars, Gundam MS IGLOO, Wings of Rean), as well as older classics which would sell, but not well enough to cover Bandai Japan's asking price (the Patlabor movies, Wings of Honneamise, Gunbuster). Basically, stuff where there's an insurmountable gap between what the Bandai thinks it's worth and what American companies are willing to pay. Theoretically, they could lower the license fees until someone bites, but in practice there's a limit to how low they'll go before giving up and saying to themselves, "If those cheapskates don't want to release it in Region 1, we'll do it ourselves! How hard can it be, anyway?" Which may well be what led to the establishment of BVUSA.

Of course, that doesn't jibe with the true tears/Shigofumi announcement at all. They can't have given up on licensing those shows already, not when they're not even finished airing.

Posted by: Andrew F. at February 02, 2008 04:38 PM (sUicM)

11

It could be an experiment. There seems to be a lot of experimenting going on right now, between ADV experimenting with download sales, and Media Blasters starting to release a lot of titles sub-only.

I think this experiment's going to be a dramatic failure, but it's still worth trying, if for no other reason than to prove that this market won't stand that kind of pricing.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 02, 2008 05:53 PM (+rSRq)

12

I wouldn't be suprised if their "mother company" keeps it alive by pouring money to BVUSA, regardless of its sales.

Why would a company do that? BVUSA is a valuable tool to BVJPN.

How so?

By releasing their titles in the R1 region the way they currently release them, they are able to counter two things that have bugged the Japanese market: Foreign fansubbing and Japanese reverse importation.

By minimizing the delays in having a title licensed in the R1 region and releasing the DVDs quickly via BVUSA, they can deter fansubbers who take advantage of long licensing delays but also stop subbing a title after it's been licensed. I believe True Tears only has a license delay of 1~2 months, whereas normal licensing delays take up to a year; I haven't seen a single fansub for that title floating around. Doing this reduces the chance of having their titles being distributed via fansubs, and therefore reduces the risk of having said fansubs downloaded by Japanese audiences.

In a perfect world, the above could also be done by other companies, but obviously, this isn't the case.

BVUSA works better for BVJPN because their pricing also minimizes reverse importation. If an R1 DVD sells for the same astronomical price of its R2 equivalent, they can eliminate the risk of having of having a scenario where Japanese buyers opt out in getting the R2 DVD for a cheaper R1 DVD. After all, if the R1 and R2 DVD prices are exactly the same, why would a person in the R2 region have to spend extra shipping costs buying the R1 version?

As long as BVUSA continues to deter fansubbers and reverse importers, then BVJPN will keep funding them regardless of actual sales here. It's a brilliant scheme that kills two birds with one stone.

Posted by: grgspunk at February 06, 2008 01:25 AM (cubub)

13 One points out that most Japanese fans do not download US fansubs - they just get a Japanese copy with no subtitles or anything. In fact, the availability of those copies for download is a prerequisite for practically all fansubs to exist - what, did you think the US fans were copying off Japanese TV? ;p

It also makes no sense to lose money just to deter reverse importation. You could achieve exactly the same function by not releasing in R1 at all.

The only sane reason I can think of to explain their business setup is this - it's designed to fail. Someone on the Japanese side is convinced that this is the way to go; someone else approved the decision, not because they were convinced, but because they were sure it would crash and burn, and have given the first someone just enough rope to hang themselves with. The two US businesses are being kept strictly sequestered, so that when the BVUSA model inevitably craps out, BEI is left standing with no damage to its commercial reputation (and without its distribution arm having been trying to push tons of overpriced DVDs on retailers.)

But that's way too Machiavellian for me to consider seriously. It's much simpler and more plausible to believe that somebody is just a flaming idiot...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at February 06, 2008 10:16 AM (LMDdY)

14

Actually, there are fansubbers who copy TV broadcasts and R2 DVDs.  I heard from an ANN article that Japanese companies have complained about Japanese resorting to foreign fansubs as an alternative to DVDs, similar to irresponsible fansub downloaders in the US. That's probably one of the reasons why they urged foreigners to ditch their fansubs in the first place.  Though there are raw downloads are available for Japanese users, I think the companies have arrived to a weird conclusion that fansubbing has made anime downloads for Japanese fans far more abundant and that they're a lot more easy to go after.  It wouldn't be too far-fetched to assume that there would be some Japanese people who watch fansubs, especially if they're available in sites like YouTube.

As for deterring reverse importation, something similar can happen if you don't even release it in the R1 region, but that's going to give fansubbers an opportunity to distribute their titles. A lot of Japanese companies have suddenly become afraid of foreign fansubbing, especially with the C&D news in October/November.

I'm not exactly sure how that "designed to fail" model would work. What exactly is creating a subsidiary going to do if you've made it to fail and you've got another subsidiary who could've done the same thing?

Then again, this could just be a case of corporate idiocy.

Posted by: grgspunk at February 06, 2008 03:33 PM (cubub)

15 As for deterring reverse importation, something similar can happen if you don't even release it in the R1 region, but that's going to give fansubbers an opportunity to distribute their titles. A lot of Japanese companies have suddenly become afraid of foreign fansubbing, especially with the C&D news in October/November.

Not many fansubbers are deterred by a C&D letter these days, and if one group stops subbing a series because it's been licensed, others will continue to sub it or pick up where the first group left off.

It wouldn't be too far-fetched to assume that there would be some Japanese people who watch fansubs, especially if they're available in sites like YouTube.

The thing is that Japanese-language raws also get posted to YouTube. Not to mention that there are Japanese video-sharing sites out there as well--maybe you've heard of Nico Nico Douga? I do often see Japanese IPs downloading fansub torrents, and can guess why--finding seeded fansub torrents is much easier than finding raws on Japanese P2P networks (yes, there are raw torrents, but those aren't well seeded after the first few weeks). Still, the convenience factor has got to be pretty high to justify watching a show with unnecessary subtitles in a language you don't understand, and even if fansubs for a series were to dry up I doubt most Japanese fansub watchers would run out and buy the R2 DVDs.

Posted by: Andrew F. at February 06, 2008 08:58 PM (sUicM)

16

Personally, I don't see it as all that crazy or even necessarily doomed to fail, even if the current experiments seem destined to sell like rocks.  With Blu-Ray now firmly on the horizon (which eliminates the region code barrier with the U.S.), Internet distribution an unchangeable fixation, and the overall DVD market continue to flounder, Bandai Visual probably figured that the only way to address all these issues (or "issues") was to merge the Japanese and North American markets.  Unfortunately, at the moment there's a huge value/pricing disparity on the DVD front, but I assume BV believed that by getting into HD releases before all their competitors, they would be able to help set the trend for how Japanese/English HD releases would be marketed and priced in the future.  The True Tears/Shigofumi experiment is to work towards shortening the release gap, moving eventually towards a reality (a few years from now) where the primary Blu-Ray releases of titles will contain English subtitles and be marketed in both regions at once for the same price from day one.  (I expect Gundam 00's Blu-Ray release this summer will be like this (even though it'll be many months after the DVDs), but we'll see...)

I suspect the reason they're keeping Bandai Entertainment seperate is because they recognize that, during this transition period, there's still a need to release the more mainstream shows the old way.  And since the market is still in flux, they're hedging their bets on the way things will go.  That being said, I certainly think it's likely that they'll merge the two groups down the road.  (And I'm not sure why they haven't relied on them for distribution... unless, I suppose, they just want to try to see how possible it is to go Internet-only...)

In any case, I think they're working towards an objective that's many years out.  So the steps they're making at the moment seem illogical on their own, but if they're able to achieve their ultimate goal (simultaneous "global" releases at one common price point), it'll make a lot more sense.  They're just taking an extremely long-term point of view.  We'll see if it works out, of course...

Posted by: relentlessflame at February 07, 2008 10:11 AM (2GAbp)

17 I'm absolutely certain that the one thing that won't happen will be merging the groups.

Leaving aside all other areas of contention, BEI has the distribution that BVUSA needs; even if BV's model is doomed, without distribution it's doomed whether it ever had a real chance or not. BVUSA isn't using BEI's distribution. Why the hell not? We've speculated above as to a couple of possible reasons. But whatever those reasons are, someone at the top had one... and to later merge the companies to take advantage of BEI's distribution for BV releases would be a direct admission that the person who made the original decision was completely, utterly wrong.

I would be flabbergasted if that happened. It's completely against the Japanese style of management. I would expect BVUSA to go down in flames before such an admission was made. Or rather, if they had the sort of management that could make that decision, surely they would have already done it!

Of course, if BVUSA were to take off with wild success, then a merge could happen. But that's even more impossible. ;p

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at February 07, 2008 08:10 PM (LMDdY)

18

Just to add my completely uninformed opinion, actually the licensing of true tears and Shigofumi has not stopped fansubbing of the series. Whether it's ethical or not. Which I think is the real danger of BVUSA's business model, is that it actually encourages people to download the fansubs.

Just a thought.

Posted by: Cameron Probert at February 21, 2008 03:59 AM (+Xvl6)

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So ADV's got folks all in a tizzy, death of the industry, yadda yadda. Not really; things are way too optimistic there for that. On the other hand, that certainly won't stop me from taking advantage of the recent Right Stuf 25 discs for $100 sale. If you can't support commercial anime at those prices, you're in the wrong hobby. ;p

(The pickings will be considerably slimmer now, so it's not like I'm saying "thou shalt go buy" or anything. But at least take a look...)

Two of the discs were filling holes in my collection. Angelic Layer vol. 1 was a huge hole - I had 2-7, but I never got the first volume. Didn't do any work on it beyond helping with the DVDs and the proofing I did for every damn thing, so it's not like they owed me one or anything. At the same time, I've never gone back and rewatched it because of that missing volume, which wasn't a good situation. Ah well, now they're all sitting in a nice art box on display instead of being stuffed in one of the overflow boxes in my closet.

The other disc, Cromartie v.4, I probably should have received in the first place. I didn't actually do the subs on that volume - that was right at the layoff. ADV was nice enough to send me a lot of comp discs for series I was currently working on, even beyond the work I'd done on the series, but for some reason that didn't show up. However, a volume of Cromartie for four dollars is a ludicrously overpowered humor/price ratio! That box is now full too.

Picked up five complete series aside from that. I always liked ZOE TV - it's a story about family masquerading as a show about giant robots with incredibly phallic designs - so picking it up was easy enough. I also enjoyed Aquarian Age's art style, and virtually everything about Area 88 (I've been a fan since UN Squadron for the Super Nintendo, even if I didn't know it!)

Took a stab at two series they'd produced since I've been gone, too. Godannar is pure silly giant robot cheese, but that's okay; I happen to be fond of pure silly giant robot cheese, and the people working on it enjoyed it thoroughly. The other was Ugly/Beautiful World, mostly because I wanted to round out the 25 discs - no real illusions that it'll be good. What the heck, it might surprise me.

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Absolutely blew through Aika R-16 yesterday. Fun little show, as it turns out; it's definitely a spiritual successor (predecessor?) to the original.

The first episode's level of fanservice is definitely toned down a little bit, as the show goes around establishing the characters - Aika as a newbie salvager, the rich class prez Eri, mysterious almost-ditz Karen, and their needlessly curvy teacher. Up until 15 minutes in, it's only gone with a couple of pointless panty shots, a little bit of exposed breasts, and the funny sight of Ms. Risako's bikini causing a cabin-boy Gusto to go completely unhinged.

Then we get some action, and yeah, it's the good old Aika we remember - exposing white cotton at every possible interval, and every defeated enemy (or friendly!) ends up either butt-to-the-sky or spread-eagle with an extra helping of camel toe.

Second episode is fan service the whole way in - straight from beach party to beach battle, so it's swimsuits for all sides. The final episode tries its best to keep up the score, but the demands of plot resolution means that a lot of time is spent looking at outside shots of a mini-submarine. The show does its best to pack in as much panty in the remaining amounts, so it's a bit forced, but not excessively so.



One nice thing about the show is that they've put a bit of effort into costuming - instead of yet another Delmo, we have a pretty good variety. (Even, as in the third episode, when that makes precisely no sense...) So long as they're pandering, right? Average age of the fan-service targets is a little lower, but they manage to avoid creeping loli-ism - nothing worse than all the Rion fan-service from the original. Downside, there is no transforming magical girl sequence in this one; Aika might as well be 100% normal, aside from the submarine license and the martial arts and all that...

I'm not as sure about the dynamic between Aika and Eri. At its best, it seems to click pretty well, but it degenerates to "did not" and "did too" on more than one occasion. More like "frequently", really, which was a tad too often for my tastes.

Overall, I wouldn't have minded seeing more of the show, but I can definitely understand why this is all there was. It's just not that deep a premise, and unlike the first series, which was continued with added Delmogeny fun, there's not really anywhere to take R-16. That said, it felt like the initial arc in a story, where the characters get something non-serious thrown at them so that you get an idea of their interactions before they're too busy saving the world...

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General catch-all post here.

Nanoha A's is completely finished. Insert song sequence with dialogue and captions is evil! Took five pages of notes on which subtitles needed to be photoshopped... ah well, it's done. No word on when/where/how it will actually be released, I'm afraid.

Alternating between Lucky Star and Aika work. Curious to see if the modern R-16 lives up to the fanservice of its spiritual predecessors. ;p

Went to the local ham club banquet last Friday with Dad. Yeah, I have a ticket, though it's just Tech class... now that they have no-code licenses I really ought to sit down and study up for the Extra class. I had all the physics back in college. Dad's ham license kept him out of Vietnam... long story for another day. Anyway, we go to the NARS club annual banquet, have some fun with some old friends of Dad's, ate some frankly lousy chicken... and won one of these ICOM IC-V8 hand-held units! I've been fond of them ever since I got the IC-2000 for my mobile rig ten, eleven years ago, and it's still hanging in there strong, even surviving a theft attempt. (Go go chaining it under the seat...) The ironic thing is that we won the handy-talky with Mom's raffle ticket, even though she couldn't come because of the flu.

So today Mom's recovered and back to work... and Dad promptly slips and breaks his foot at a chemical plant in Lake Jackson. Clean break of the tibia right near the ankle. He'll be home for a while, and none too happy about it, but at least I'll be here to help him out...

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Workin' through Lucky Star volume 2. Fun stuff, by and large.

Only one snag so far... I'm poking at the ending song for ep 5, which is the venerable "Cha-la Head Cha-la!" opening from DBZ. As near as I can tell, it wasn't ever used on the domestic releases of the TV series, even the "uncut" versions, but it -was- used on Pioneer's release of the first movie. Anyone seen that release and know if the song has official lyrics out there? I'm not particularly dissatisfied with what I have, or anything, but if I can look up the official lyrics for Fumoffu, I can do it for DBZ...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 05:58 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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There are a couple of lines in Lucky Star 5 that look somewhat funny on their own (in a net-speaky kind of way), but as it turns out, they are actually meant to ape the speech mannerisms of Naitou the stereotypical awful FFXI paladin. Quite funny, but how do you translate it?

Well, when it comes to famous idiot American paladins with quotable lines, there's only one, right?

"All right, let's do this!"

Man, so tempted. SOOOOO tempted. Not even tempted, really, as it's actually quite a good translation method. But oy, I mean, is it all right? Is it really all right to quote Leeroy Jenkins in a professional subtitling job?!

Update:

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:32 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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1

"At least I have chicken."

It's hard to say. There is quite a bit of overlap between the anime and WoW crowds, but you would be setting things up to thoroughly confuse anyone who hasn't been exposed to the Leeroy Jenkins phenomenon (and surprisingly, I've run across WoW who are completely ignorant of it).

Posted by: Will at January 11, 2008 02:40 PM (WnBa/)

2

Of course I managed to leave the word "players" out of my paranthetical...

Would it be bad form to just insert the audio of Leeroy's lines into the dub? Or you could pass the director a note to have the VA's immitate the Leeroy's voice in their delivery.

Posted by: Will at January 11, 2008 02:45 PM (WnBa/)

3 I know who Leroy is, even though I never played WoW or any other MMORPG seriously (I made a small dip into Legends of Kesmai).

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at January 11, 2008 03:18 PM (cFJHG)

4 Unfortunately, there's no dub audio involved - just reading text on Konata's screen.

On the up side, one of the lines could be reasonably reinterpreted as "All right, let's do this (lol)"... so I'm not really stretching it that far to make it work. Mentioning fried chicken would be going too far, though...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 11, 2008 05:03 PM (LMDdY)

5

I had to go back and watch the scene in question...

Are you talking about "gatango" with the mi...na...git...te...ki..ta... line?

I haven't played any FFXI to recognize the reference.

Maybe you could just slip in a small reference like,

"All right, let's do this!!1!LJ!!1!"

Posted by: Will at January 11, 2008 08:27 PM (E3UGR)

6 It's okay, I would never have recognized it myself either, and I played a great deal of FFXI back in the day. (As a pally, for that matter.)

Apparently it isn't an actual person, but a character from a famous 2chan thread.

But that's not the specific line I was thinking about putting the Leeroy in, though...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 11, 2008 10:52 PM (LMDdY)

7 It's a line where if you get the reference, it's hilarious, but it's still fine without knowing about Leeroy Jenkins.  I wouldn't see why there would be a problem with this.  

Posted by: TheBigN at January 14, 2008 10:06 AM (0MzVG)

8 So, uhh... Did you implement the Leeroy Jenkins line in the subtitles yet?

Posted by: grgspunk at January 19, 2008 11:53 PM (cubub)

9 Uh, yeah. I posted a pic already, check it out.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 20, 2008 01:48 AM (LMDdY)

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Pocky pointed me to a gallery of car mods, photographed at Comiket 73 (which occurred just before the new year) and posted by the Daily Mainichi here. (warning - 180 thumbnails!) Some good, some scary, some "holy hell, you can't even see out the rear window!" The Hayate Yagami van mod was pretty nice, though...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 12:49 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Linked from Omo. Was going to write a big long reply, but the last time I did that, Pete poked me and said "why not just put that up as a post on your own blog?" So let's see how that works.

You just can't come at anime and manga from the same perspective [on copyright].

Manga is a great environment for fan works. There are plenty of one-man doujin operations. A good idea, a bit of talent, a little bit of cash, and you too can set up shop at Comiket. I hear of some official grousing, some "we wouldn't put up with it if we could stop it", but at the same time there's several pro artists who still play around with doujin too, and others who went from the doujin environment to the pros (sometimes not even changing their characters!)

There's still the moral rights issue, of course - who wants to draw a magical girl series only to see a ton of porn for it? (Niven's comments on fan-produced Kzin erotic stories are also relevant here.) But by and large, the entire thing operates in the lee of the law, as it were. The companies retain the rights to come in and drop the hammer, sure, but so long as the fans keep it to a dull roar, that hammer is not dropped. The "standards" that fans are expected to keep it under (mostly having to do with number of copies sold/printed) are well-published, so by and large nobody gets surprised.

(As an aside, that's harder in the US environment, because the authors aren't worried so much about the damage done by the fan work as they are the legal challenges it might present; nobody wants to have some fan write a story that's close enough to the one you've been working on for a year that they'll sue you for stealing THEIR idea! So authors here don't perceive that they can afford to let a fan community flourish in the same fashion. Were there a law stating that the original creator of a work cannot be sued by people who've created unauthorized derivatives of that work, this threat would be removed, and we too might have a Comiket...)

Anime is just plumb different. There is no fan anime. It doesn't happen. The creation of anime requires, to put it bluntly, a tremendous amount of scut work. Not only that, but it's not the kind of scut work you can farm out to unsupervised workers, because if it's not done to some fairly exacting standards, the result looks terrible. It can't be done open-source. You need to have someone with a creative vision (small group is fine, so long as they can come to agree) and a whole ton of people who adhere to that vision in the in-betweens.

That sort of project can't be done by the bazaar. You can't open-source it. Basically, you have to pay people to do it. (Yes, yes, Makoto Shinkai. He's the iron man! But it took him two years to produce ONE episode, and the moment he could set up a studio and get other people working with him, he did. Should tell you something about the feasibility of doing it solo...)

What all that means is that to get anime, you have to pay people to work on it. Anime is inherently commercial. It does not exist outside of the commercial market. If anime in general cannot make money, it ceases to exist wholly. No more 26 episodes of anything, ever. So keep that in mind - in a copyleft, non-profit environment, anime dies. The whole industry packs it in. Still with me?

That doesn't mean that every anime project must be profitable (they aren't) or that anyone watching a fansub is a baby-raping murderous bastard (they aren't). There's no point in talking about the jackboot of corporate influence in copyright enforcement when it comes to anime, though. There's practically no enforcement! They can't even afford to do it, so why trip out about it? It's not like the companies are consumer-unfriendly in other aspects either. ADV's probably responsible for releasing more unencrypted DVDs than -every other source of DVDs put together-, for example.

Where the US companies use DRM, keep in mind that you guys aren't the target. They're essentially resigned, by this point, to any US consumer who wants to pirate a show being able to do so, well before the US company could possibly stop you. That battle is -over-. What DRM there is, is there for the ease of mind of the Japanese. That's why you have region codes (so their gouged consumers don't buy our relatively-cheap discs) and the like.

The real danger is that you'll get a concentration of anime fans who not only pirate stuff, but for whom buying anime is utterly alien. There's always going to be a few cheapskates and a few broke kids, and they don't represent lost sales, really, because they were never going to make a purchase in the first place. But when you get entire communities of fans who don't buy, when pirating becomes something with no social stigma attached to it whatsoever... surely I don't need to go on about why that would be a bad thing? Not just for the US market, but for the Japanese producers who are relying on foreign licensing to make their budgets?

I watch plenty of fansubs these days. There's no point in my abstaining from them. I carried the company bucket on this issue, for a long time, in a more direct way than moralizing about it on a blog. It's a thankless task for which I received no thanks. So forget that. But even then, conflating the people in the anime industry with the *AA crowd is just stupid. These guys aren't evil. They don't act in evil ways. They don't screw people (at least, not with the judicial system, heh.) Nobody sits around and says "if we announce this title this weekend, they'll stop fansubbing it and nobody will get to find out how it ends, heh!" All they'd like is that people buy shows that they enjoy, and that's not so wrong, is it?

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 04:59 PM | Comments (27) | Add Comment
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1 I'll post the more detail response here, but maybe tomorrow. I do like what you are saying but you should stop carrying that chip on your shoulders as this is not about you or anime companies. It's about Washington DC and Tokyo (and Paris and wherever Canadians live and wherever else it matters). It's about the minds of everyone who have a say in all of this (people who vote, namely; and people who pay out; and people who educate and mobilize). It's the public perception of these issues. Hey, what exactly did your employers do to affect the public perception of fair uses of copyrighted work in Washington? Gave money to politicians? Maybe you guys did and I just didn't hear about it. But I get the feeling that wasn't the case. And they're really in no position to do this anyways, right? You do make the good point about this ISN'T against lol RIAA or whatever, but tell me, did you even read the journal article I linked?

Have you changed the way the North American anime industry practices itself? Have you demonstrated to your employers to pay attention to the situation, on a serious, vision-casting way? I don't know how you carry that bucket but by the way you put things in your blog I don't know if you're even carrying the same bucket I'm talking about. Good luck carrying your bucket Mako-chan.

Posted by: omo at January 08, 2008 07:05 PM (KTrQC)

2 To answer your question, yes, I did. I got laid off for my troubles. ;p Obviously that wasn't the only factor involved, but on a personal level, I don't feel like I owe the US companies any further on the topic. They've essentially abandoned the field of copyright enforcement - why should I try to hold the line on my own?

To be blunt, it isn't about any of those things that you mentioned. Copyright enforcement is a federal responsibility. Thus, copyright cases are federal cases. Copyright enforcement requires going to federal court. This is not cheap. The law compensates by offering large statutory penalties, but that doesn't do any good when the person you're suing has no assets worth naming - i.e. the vast majority of anime fans. Winning a $30k judgment against a poor person does not make money.

Anime companies aren't rich. They can't afford to spend money on copyright enforcement without the prospect of recovering some as a reward. The RIAA can say "eventually we'll cow enough people into submission that the increase in sales will compensate us", but they have several orders of magnitude more revenue to do it with (and, to be sure, profit margins that an anime company would commit murder for!) The RIAA hasn't had notable success in their legal campaign; it's foolish to think that anime companies would have greater success with their meager resources.

None of this is a result of late-breaking developments in Washington. It's basically an unintended consequence of having federal jurisdiction of copyright law; the federal judicial system is not well-equipped to deal with traffic-ticket sized offenses. It's not going to change either. You'd either have to set up a completely separate federal judiciary for copyright enforcement (huh, no), or amend the Constitution in order to change enforcement jurisdictions (even more unlikely).

I know that you think it's important that people get educated on the issue, and I do not disagree. But once you've done that, a certain amount of cynicism sets in. Nothing's going to change on these fronts - the problem with enforcement is systemic and a side-effect of a much larger issue that's totally unrelated - so why sweat it? The people in charge aren't, so I certainly shouldn't bother.

I didn't read the journal article, of course. You said its reasoning was nonsense. I don't believe that you're an idiot, so you're almost certainly right. Why waste my time? Rather than wade through dense political philosophy from an idiot's standpoint, shouldn't I work on Aika subtitles for your fanservice pleasure? ;p

And finally, my point is that I don't carry that bucket. I don't work for them these days (well, I do contracting work for other people, heh.) I'm not interested in being an apologist for the anime companies on the copyright issue. It's something they don't care about - or more bluntly, something they'd like to care about, but that they can't possibly afford to actually do anything about, so beyond a bit of complaining for public consumption, their hands are essentially tied. So if they won't put their money where their mouth is (and they have good reason not to, mind), why should I?

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 08, 2008 08:14 PM (LMDdY)

3 I'm just confused as to what you are ultimately trying to convey. I understand the points you are making, but I don't see the connection of how anime companies can't afford to care about stuff with the stuff I'm really talking about--the changes of copyright law in relation to the internet; the erosion of uses of IP unregulated by copyright law, and ultimately that there is still no indication, pragmatically, in terms of a lack-of-harm to profit in light of certain "illegal" uses.

Are we just trains passing each other on parallel tracks?

And lastly, I suggest you give Creative Commons a look. That is really Lessig's baby. In light of the doujinshi situation, especially, that could be something really, really daring Japanese manga authors can do...in a few decades. We have to realize stuff like CC is not an answer to problems we have right now, it's a total new way of doing things going against the customary practices of today. And that's what we're fighting for. I was not talking about watching fansubs and the odds of being sued. It's about the right to do it outside the shadow of the law.

Posted by: omo at January 08, 2008 10:16 PM (KTrQC)

4 I think we're arguing past each other to a certain extent.

My contention is that anime is uniquely difficult to make in an open/creative commons/whatever way, because in-betweening is different from most of the jobs that go in to making a video production or what have you.

Let me contrast with subtitling. Of course you can get a show subtitled for free - it happens a lot even now, right? ;p If I felt that I wanted to help a project out, I could subtitle it and it wouldn't be too much of a big deal. Even if I was doing it for the pride of subbing, well, there's still that.

In-between work is not that nice. Nobody does it for free. It's not creative in any way - in fact, creativity specifically makes it bad. You have to follow along exactly with the key frames, or the show ends up getting off model and looking ugly. So it's skilled work - I sure as hell can't draw - but it's as close to being a human robot as you get. There's no room for your individual expression AT ALL. There's not even the pride of doing a clever hack that you'd get for, say, writing a module for Linux.

How the hell do you get someone to do that for free? That's why most fan-made animations are quite poor - they can get the key frames drawn, but you'd have to be an obsessed monomaniac to do the in-between work.

There's the stumbling block. If you can get software tools that make the in-betweening easier or faster, then you could get a few artists and a few actors and a few tech specialists together and make an anime. But for now, you need a horde of actual people to do it, and the only way anyone's ever assembled such a horde is to pay them.

If you have any ideas about this, share! Please. You could become rich! ;p

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 08, 2008 11:58 PM (LMDdY)

5

I have written a post about this here.

Omo, yes, you and Avatar are arguing past one another, and I explain how and why.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 09, 2008 01:03 AM (+rSRq)

6 I agree that computers are the way out of the in-betweening grind, but having played with some 3d software over Christmas (I bought a copy of Carrara on sale) I find that while the results are everything you could ask for, the process needs another decade or so of effort. Or to put it another way: Gah! This is just what I had on my Amiga, only four times the resolution and a thousand times faster!

Not that I'm really complaining about it being a thousand times faster, but that's not something the software gave me.

Unless high-end packages like Maya are way easier to use, I expect a whole lot of manual effort to be involved in anime production for years to come.

And then there's the voice acting. Not as mind-numbingly labour intensive, but certainly talent-intensive (there's a reason there's a huge fansub community and no fandub community) and not something one super-talented person can do for an entire show. Progress in speech synthesis has been absolutely glacial compared even to user interfaces for 3d modeling programs, so voice actors will continue to earn their pitiful wages for the forseeable future.

I'd comment on the main topic of the discussion, but it's late, I'm tired, and I've forgotten what it is.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at January 09, 2008 05:54 AM (PiXy!)

7 This comment fits SDB's blog post more, but I think I'd have to register to post there, so here it is:

I would have to contest that even if fansubs are legal there will still be anime. Perhaps there will be a serious cutback to the current situation; less anime will be made (and that's not necessarily a bad thing...seen the new GSG anime? There's more anime now than ever, and the 90% SNR ratio holds true), but it'll still exist since far majority of anime made today are still based on a business model financed by, primarily, domestic Japanese consumption. It will require a change in business model (GASP!!) where they aren't relying US and oversea licensees as much as they do now. Or maybe they still will, when home video distribution model changes to provide an economically viable alternative to fansubbing?

Do you really think the typical Japanese TV viewer cares about fansubs? How about even the average Hapanese otaku who watches or stick those late night shows on their DVR, and lines up at Comiket and buy 6000yen/2ep DVDs? Do people really think if fansubs are legal, Japanese companies will stop making anime? Do you really believe Japanese anime industry will go belly up if Americans stopped importing their media? Sure, things will change, but its potential demise is drastically overstated.

All this is to say that Avatar's line of thought is one that is already victim to the status quo and the brokenness of the way today's copyright industries operate.

Posted by: omo at January 09, 2008 08:55 AM (hKoFz)

8 The thing about DRM and putting the japanese minds at ease reminded me of why Bandai was forced to release the R1 gundam 0079 dvds in dub only. Mainly because there were no R2 japanese dvds and even more than normal they feared cheep US dvds........ Ya know i never realized the irony of this, we get cheated by their cheep cars (i'm a detroiter) and they fear when we can make something cheaper than they can.

-Gabe

Posted by: firemage at January 09, 2008 09:47 AM (oUslv)

9 Omo, you're suffering from a lack of imagination, or just a plain failure to take things to their logical conclusion.

For fansubs to be legal, that implies no copyright on the actual Japanese production, or an unlimited permission to copy that anime extended from the Japanese company (i.e. some sort of "open" release). Under those circumstances, not only is there no foreign licensing money, there's no domestic DVD sales. (Who's going to plunk down that 6000 yen if you can just copy the result and distribute it freely, legally? A very small number of otaku, sure, but enough to pay to even have the DVD authored?)

This means the entire budget is coming from the TV studio. But wait! Another TV channel can also show the same show - they've got the same right to freely copy and distribute it as everyone else, don't they? So which TV network is going to pay for the production, when their competitors will just free-ride off of them when it's done? (No, they won't make it just to fill time. Anime's relatively expensive to produce compared to, say, a game show...)

So -every- revenue stream has died screaming. How do you propose to pay the production staff? Is there another possible source of income I've neglected to address? Merchandising rights sure ain't going to cover it...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 09, 2008 12:24 PM (LMDdY)

10 "For fansubs to be legal, that implies no copyright on the actual Japanese production, or an unlimited permission to copy that anime extended from the Japanese company (i.e. some sort of "open" release)."

Uh, no? All you need is a limited license for noncommercial use.

Posted by: omo at January 09, 2008 12:54 PM (hKoFz)

11 For what possible reason would an anime company issue such a license? (And it'd still kill DVD sales and foreign licensing...)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 09, 2008 01:16 PM (LMDdY)

12 Omo:

All you need is a limited license for noncommercial use.

Which reduces the damage from instant death for all the anime studios to just mortally wounding them.

Copyright is intended as a contract between creative artists and the general public. Artists get a period of exclusive rights to the commercial benefits of their work (the right to produce copies); the public gets artists who don't quite starve to death.

There are two problems with this today: One is that the rights have swung too far in favour of the creators (with copyright terms being extended faster than the years pass). The other is that many content-creating industries have been utterly bypassed by technology. The music industry is the prime example of this; the entire studio contract and album release business is already dead and just hasn't stopped moving around yet. (Which is why the RIAA is so litigious; the clock is running down and they know it, so they're milking it for every penny.)

The anime (and TV and movie) industry isn't in as dire a situation, but they're tied up in a distribution structure that is decades old and inflexible. It would take very little actual work for the Japanese studios to release subtitled versions of their shows online for a dollar or two an episode, but the red tape would likely be horrifying.

Even so, that's almost certainly where things are headed as the internet swallows up every other form of communication. And explicit legalisation of fansubs will kill that future almost before it's born.

Without that, the only things we're going to be watching in 2018 are Hello Gundam 0084 and Squidashimon, a promotional series from the Japanese Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture about marine cephalopods.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at January 09, 2008 06:16 PM (PiXy!)

13 You don't have it down quite right, but it is close.

Copyright is not just a mechanism between the creator and the public. It's a mechanism between the creator and the publisher, with a promise to the public. A full picture of how copyright works involves those three parties. I recommend you actually read my post and read the book I linked by Jessica Litman, called Digital Copyright. It's a measly 200-odd pages and you can read a good bit of it for free on Amazon.

I get the feeling a lot of people didn't understand my post. That's fine, I write like ass backwards anyways. (Or is that Avatar's dayjob? I kid.) But the greater sin is not read what I linked and then proceed to criticize my position, I think. My position is a pretty popular position but rarely stated because, well, there aren't a lot of people with JDs wasting away at dead end jobs that allows them the time to blog; plus it's a hard topic to fully grasp anyways, lawyer or not. I don't even know the half of it. However there are a fair amount of literature (albeit mostly academic) about these things, written by people who can actually write, and have first-hand dealing with all these issues. Go read that book.

Avatar: "For what possible reason would an anime company issue such a license?"

Why would they need to when the fans are already doing it? I mean, that's how it is. The line is drawn; you either sue, and if you can't, you might as well give it away. It's probably worth at least the good will and positive press it generates among the hardcore fans.

A lot of media companies are just panicking because they "can't" give it away. Sometimes the best way to adopt to changes is to embrace it, you know? They're going out of business one way or another unless they do something different. If they are satisfied fading into history with a finger pointing to blame piracy, so be it.

And please read up on creative commons before you reply. Namely creativecommons.org/about/

Posted by: omo at January 09, 2008 08:22 PM (KTrQC)

14

Copyright is not just a mechanism between the creator and the public. It's a mechanism between the creator and the publisher, with a promise to the public.

To be more clear, copyright is a social contract between creators and the public. The concept of a publisher as we understand it today exists in light of that social contract.

But the greater sin is not read what I linked and then proceed to criticize my position, I think.

Sorry, but your links suck. The first three contain nothing of interest, and after that, people tend to stop bothering to click. I clicked on the link for the Lessig presentation, and waited for it to load, and waited, and waited, and then closed it.

However there are a fair amount of literature (albeit mostly academic) about these things, written by people who can actually write, and have first-hand dealing with all these issues. Go read that book.

What good is that? The problem isn't academic, the problem is commercial.

It's probably worth at least the good will and positive press it generates among the hardcore fans.

Which is of little interest to a company that now has no income.

And I know what Creative Commons is. And as soon as you explain how it can directly generate revenue for an anime studio, it will become relevant.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at January 09, 2008 08:44 PM (PiXy!)

15

Omo, here's the key question:

Where does the money come from?

Until you offer a satisfactory answer to that question, all the rest of your rhetoric and links are obfuscation. You're still making an argument based on perceived morality and a feeling of entitlement. Until you address the fundamental economic issues, I won't take you seriously.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 09, 2008 09:44 PM (+rSRq)

16 Omo, you'll do better in this conversation if you quit assuming we're not up on these issues. I've been reading Lessig's blog for years. I'm fully familiar with what Creative Commons is. I'm thoroughly familiar with copyright law and how it affects the anime community. I -wrote the FAQ-. Then I spent years working for an anime company. Hell, even my degree is in political science - I was writing papers on the DMCA before it even passed! Seriously, I grok what you're trying to get at, I did from the beginning. My criticisms of your position are not caused by ignorance, they actually do represent weaknesses in your position. ;p

The difference between "och, we can't sue because it's expensive and the people we could sue don't have any money" and "well, we'll just give the anime away" is simple - in the first model, you still have some revenue, and in the second, you don't. Not having revenue is bad, because that is how you are paying your in-between crew (and the rest, of course, but theoretically you could get other jobs filled in with volunteerism.)

I'm not trying to knock CC as a matter of course. I'm fully aware of the power of giving away something and then getting people to buy it if they like it. Baen Books has made -so- much money off of me that way! But I also like anime, and the CC model cannot be made to work for anime, not without some sort of nifty-keen advance in automation that makes in-between work a thing of the past. If you don't mind me saying so, I like anime more than I like esoteric copyright licensing schemes. I hope everyone here does - this is, more or less, an anime blog! ;p

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 09, 2008 11:27 PM (LMDdY)

17 <b>Where does the money come from TODAY?</b> Certainly not by suing people and collecting. Money will come from the same places it always have been. Selling DVDs works just fine if that's what you're looking for.

I don't know if you know marketing, but when someone shows you a survey about microeconomics and social purchasing behaviors, you read that and you apply it to how you sell your product to max profit and min costs. It's just that. I don't know (highly doubt this) if any of the US based anime companies would pull a survey like the one I linked, which took 2 years to make. But somehow if these companies think they're making informed business decisions and still comes out condemning fansubbing, I'll defer to their NDAs and behind-door methodology. Just don't mind me when I laugh at their appeal to honest fandom and alienating their greatest supporters. Seriously. If you want to stop fansubbing, you might as well take an AK-47 and start shooting, if you're too poor to sue. Short of those alternatives, you just have to do the best you can. And sometimes it means getting your MBA and read what academics have to say, because it might help manage your business.

Pixy Misa: if you still can't load the Lessig flash, let me know and I'll post it for you. It rephrases some of the stuff you're saying, with less inaccuracies. The problem is not just commerical. It's social and practical. And it's really something I care a lot about. But on the flip side if I'm having a conversation with someone who doesn't really want to put in the effort to read a chapter of a book online for free, I can't force you to care.

And as a side nitpick, copyright is not a social contract. It's something that only exists by statute--copyright under common law was expressedly rejected and it was always a codified matter since its conception both in England and even earlier in continental Europe. A bit of legal history for you. And it has virtually nothing to do with the public, really. It's just a justification publishers and some legal scholars use to make us feel good.

Posted by: omo at January 10, 2008 12:22 AM (KTrQC)

18 "The difference between "och, we can't sue because it's expensive and the people we could sue don't have any money" and "well, we'll just give the anime away" is simple - in the first model, you still have some revenue, and in the second, you don't. Not having revenue is bad, because that is how you are paying your in-between crew (and the rest, of course, but theoretically you could get other jobs filled in with volunteerism.)"

But who says about giving it away? There's no giving away. You're still selling it. Don't pull that "I know what I'm talking about" nonsense. If someone pulls out a HK bootleg you still can do what you can to shut them down today.

The difference is in how people who care about your product enough to fansub it and write you passionate email to get it licensed perceive your operation. It's a viable alternative and it can work.

Posted by: omo at January 10, 2008 12:26 AM (KTrQC)

19 You might have a rosy view of those e-mails, I don't know. I actually answered that box for a while. It ain't pretty. ;p

To put it bluntly, you're still not looking at it from a revenue perspective. There are plenty of fans who really like Geneon and wish they were still in operation. But they're not! At the end of the day, public perception is not as important as paying attention to your business fundamentals.

Seriously, though, where is the money coming from? If you're allowing people to distribute your product freely, what exactly are they paying you for? This ain't software, nobody needs technical support (even for Eva!)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 10, 2008 02:37 AM (LMDdY)

20 "At the end of the day, public perception is not as important as paying attention to your business fundamentals."

And I think that's sort of my point at the very beginning. Companies go out of business from a wide variety of reasons and fansubbing is just one of them. We need a lot of data to see just how that kind of substitution effect work in real life, to go by beyond just sales numbers.

"Seriously, though, where is the money coming from? If you're allowing people to distribute your product freely, what exactly are they paying you for?'

It's already being distributed freely, yet people still buy anime if you can differentiate your product from what is being distributed. Admittedly "legal" is distinct from "illegal" but there are other practical reasons why. We all know fansub viewing is likened to watching the TV by today's standards, and there's a point to be made that if DVDs of TV shows can sell as it is given away for free for all practical purposes, anime can fit the same model using fansubbing. The rest of the problem is one of marketing and not one of "we must make it illegal to force people to buy."

Posted by: omo at January 10, 2008 06:31 AM (KTrQC)

21 "To put it bluntly, you're still not looking at it from a revenue perspective"

What revenue? Companies that are making money go out of business too? I'm looking at a "what's happening today" perspective and trying to come up with (irrelevant to my original point in some sense) ways to help companies. It's totally plausible that it could work.

Posted by: omo at January 10, 2008 06:33 AM (KTrQC)

22 Avatar,
There are multiple ways to make money while your product exists for free.

1. Social Stature (have you watched Paris Is Burning?) -- buying the DVDs means that you are 'better' than the people who steal it . Or it shows that 'you are no longer a poor college student'. Or it 'shows your dedication to the show'. There are a variety of social ideas that would and do encourage people to buy Junk from popular shows (like posters. What good is a poster? you see it for a week, and never look at it again. In Reality, it shows your allegiance to a show, and your enjoyment of it). So, via merchandizing and the actual DVDs, you will gain a lot of money. Will it be the same amount? Probably not, but it might be more.

2. Building identification with the author. Somethingpositive.net, talesofmu.com, GirlGeniusOnline.com. The list goes on -- people who have created a fanbase that wants to support a particular author. Some subsidize by donations, others by selling print copies, and still others by selling plushies with switchblades. But the important thing is that all of these are feasible moneymakers.
I would pay twenty bucks that I don't have to see another season of Full Metal Panic.

Posted by: lbk at January 10, 2008 08:52 AM (xAAUf)

23 lbk, bingo! The former is quite important. I've mentioned that the worst thing that can happen to the industry is the evolution of a social base where nobody's buying anything, where the public perception is that you're an idiot to actually purchase anime. There's plenty of micro-cliques out there with that kind of attitude, but it's not too prevalent yet... though it's worse now than it was a couple of years ago.

The second won't work in this case, though, because of two reasons. First, you're talking about a LOT of revenue here - you're not just supporting one creator and his family, but the whole staff needed to make an anime. Second, there's competing sources of merchandise - especially notable is going to be the original manga, which people are going to (rightly) associate with the creator of most shows. I mean, it's good thinking, but no go.

Omo, biggest problem with the TV metaphor is the totally different revenue model. Those TV shows were paid for during their original TV runs; any DVD revenue they get is a tasty piece of profit. Nobody's making TV shows at a loss and counting on DVD sales to make up the difference! (This does happen somewhat with movies.) Additionally, the difference in viewers is multiple orders of magnitude. Anime's still quite a niche product - even if you price it very cheaply, there's still a fairly hard ceiling on how many units you can possibly move. TV can live with a much smaller number of viewers purchasing, not only because they've already paid for the production of the actual show, but because a smaller percentage of viewers that purchase is still much larger in absolute numbers.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 10, 2008 12:25 PM (LMDdY)

24 I know TV shows, on the whole, are different. But enough examples of specific instances have shown that it can happen. Of course, all I am saying is that you can make money (many new TV shows make more money on home video sales than what they made from the initial run, much like some movies) either way.

Building a culture that encourage buying is something that giving away some of your rights can do. Think of it as a social contract, except explicitly stated rather than tongue-in-cheekily enforced by fansubbing nerds. I believe it's a powerful statement that costs very little on the behalf of the license holders.

Posted by: omo at January 10, 2008 01:03 PM (hKoFz)

25 Might as well just hire Blackwater and gun down all that lost revenue with hot lead, call fansubbers and people who don't want to pay for your products terrorists, and watch as your profits go up.

After all, it's all about making a profit, right?

Posted by: DrmChsr0 at January 13, 2008 12:15 PM (xRnpX)

26 That was uncalled for.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 13, 2008 03:13 PM (+rSRq)

27 Quite so. Doing it personally would be so much more satisfying! ;p

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 13, 2008 08:34 PM (LMDdY)

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Tree branch cut loose from the neighbor's tree this morning, whacked into the driver's side door of the truck I'd just stepped into. Thirty seconds later and it would have knocked me for a loop, at least - this was a lot of wood we're talking about. No injury, only a scratch on the (not my) truck, but oy! Hell of a way to wake up.

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When I first started this stuff, I hated power failures. I was timing with VCRs and a genlock, and so on my initial timing passes, I had to go through the entire show in a single pass - no pausing, no stopping. If I screwed up the initial sync (which was performed by me hitting a button), I either had to live with it through the whole proofing of that copy, or redo the whole thing from scratch. Pretty bad for a half hour episode of anime. But for a two-hour movie, a little glitch in the power feed could eat half a productive day. (Yeah, well, back then I was also a secretary-type, and spent plenty of mornings doing things like labeling tapes and filling out actor invoices.)

Even a UPS wasn't much help. Sure, it can keep your PC on long enough to save your work, but it can't keep on my PC, my television, and two running VCRs (plus the genlock!) for half an hour... at least, none of the ones we had could do that, and I wasn't paid so much that it was ever a huge deal to get one, I guess.

Things are a lot nicer these days. We got a bit of rain a couple of hours ago, while I was going through Nanoha A's 10, and the power hiccuped. No UPS here at home, of course. Total lost work time, two lines. Not only do I save pretty often, but Aegisub is downright paranoid in its auto-saving feature. Can't complain, I surely cannot...

Episode suffers bad from the previous problems in translation. Lots of lines where the translation isn't wrong, technically, exactly, but the way that they've put the line makes it so that it communicates the wrong thing to the viewer (or fails to emphasize the thing that the line was trying to emphasize... kind of the difference between "I'll stop you!" and "I'll put an end to you!", or between "Until then, we must do something." and "So until then, it's up to us to do something?")

It almost feels like there's a layer of editing that hasn't happened here, which is bad (because it's being left to me), but also good (because I'm up to it, so far, and it gives me a better idea of how on-the-ball the translator is, i.e. not very.) There's also some pretty basic mistakes, words wrong, a few lines that just aren't there (simple stuff, but still), and all the other hallmarks of a script where I need to disregard the translator's sensibilities and just make it work. I shouldn't really blame the translator, we're talking a low-budget production with a short time frame, and it's entirely possible that it got the shaft in favor of something more lucrative. But what the hell, I'm managing, right? (Managing to delay finishing it until all the more lucrative shows are done, true...)

It's also a little frustrating, though, because I know competent translators who don't have enough work; rather than pay this person good (well... not good) money to do marginal translations, there are other translators who could give me much better value for dollar. But it's a very, very small industry, and honestly, people don't like changing who they deal with. I wouldn't have the contracts that I have now if other people hadn't taken other jobs, flaked out and disappeared, or come in months after deadline. I can say "employ this person, she is good at this stuff", but it doesn't get them hired...

The show makes up for all of it, though. The very end of A's was a bit anticlimactic, but getting there is several episodes of full-power fighting, Nanoha burning ammo like there's no tomorrow (accurate under the circumstances, heh), Fate moe, and things going boom. There's worse ways to make a buck.

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Just finished timing Nanoha A's volume 2. Damn, it's a good show. And I can get rolling right into the finale, which is pretty nice, as there's a hell of a cliffhanger. Should have the whole thing wrapped up by the end of the year.

One thing I've tried to keep in mind is patterns of speech. Not just between characters, but between those characters' moods. Nanoha talking about becoming a demon is not the same Nanoha as the Nanoha who's talking about cell phones with Fate. (But the characters are still important. Signum with her hair down is much more straight-laced and formal than Nanoha in the middle of dramatic soliloquy.)

Mind you, playing a little fast and loose with the translation in places can be a great help. Most of the time, your translations are either too stiff everywhere, or too loose everywhere. Too stiff is a lot easier to deal with than too loose, at least for me; if I have a literally-correct translation, and it's not some kind of weird metaphor, I can do something with the English. Not much I can do if I can't figure out the original intent of the line, though...

There are two places where it's important that the English work, even at the cost of a bit of the Japanese flavor. The easy bits are the casual conversation ones, since most of the time you're just changing tenses, eliminating some of the passive voice (man, that's a full-time job when you're going through the script), minor stuff like that. The hard part comes on the big, important lines that people are going to be quoting around. These take a lot of thought, because you need to be careful to stick with the original intent pretty closely... but if it's clumsy, your bad-ass hero sounds like a dork.

That's one of the fun parts about the job. Of course, in a sense, I'm thinking way too hard about something that doesn't matter too much, and would only be appreciated by a tiny fraction of the people who're reading it. At the same time, it's a pretty nice world, where I can sit back and spend time thinking about that kind of thing - where there's no momentous decision to be made and you can put the effort into carving each little wave in the sea, so to speak.

(On the gripping hand, there are still deadlines... heh.)

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From Steven's blog, commenting on the -tan profileration...

It's gone well beyond the Strike Witches phenomenon - now everything is up for -tanning. A few examples...

Presumably, from the "Big E" patch, the USS Enterprise
Maid Spitfire, with incongruous Bren gun
A slightly loli Tiger
The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot
Twin Danish battleships, the Peder Skram and Niels Juel
EDIT: Just saw this and had to add it... the Weighted Companion Cube!

I remember once coming across a picture of Enola Gay-tan... complete with stuffed Little Boy. Kind of a haunting image, really, and I wish I'd saved a copy of it. Anyone know where one may be found?

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And volume 1 is done. Lots of work, of course, but the biggest challenge was catching references. Some of these were easy, some of them were slightly obscure, and some of them were really freakin' obscure (Akumaizer 3? Kyoudain?) A lot of the heavy lifting for this was done already - I've got a thick pack of notes that came with the translation - but we should have everything covered now.

Thanks to TentonTim for the help getting the official lyrics for the Fumoffu OP. I don't need to thank anyone for the Wedding Peach because I had that DVD on hand... which would be pretty embarrassing, except that I can excuse it as a comp copy for a series I worked on.

The OP, "Motteke! Sailor Fuku", is a trip all by itself. It's mostly comprehensible in this translation, though it's one of those songs that was written with multiple possible interpretations from which the listener can choose (this is a nice way of saying "it's pretty close to random nonsense at points.") Looking forward to seeing it on DVD, as the video I have for the OP looks terrible...

I also finished timing the last bits of Familiar of Zero. Still some DVD work to be done, but what hey, huh?

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1 Is there going to be an additional subtitle track explaining the references a la ADV's VidNotes, or are they going with something else? Personally, I'd like to have comprehensive liner notes like Azumanga Daioh's, but given how rare paper inserts of any kind have become these days I'm not holding out hope.

Of course, I watched the a.f.k. subs, so almost anything would be an improvement reference-wise.

Posted by: Andrew F. at December 20, 2007 06:29 PM (sUicM)

2 I assume u got the beta tape masters with the luckystar reference notes the japanese put into the dvd . Perhaps you could sub those >.>

If all else fails . get the Luckystar Official anime guide in japanese. I browsed it at my bookstore recently . Filled with all the references.

Posted by: shia at December 20, 2007 07:13 PM (HeGm2)

3 No data on there - just the contractor. I suspect paper notes, as I haven't been asked to do a vid-note track. (Thank goodness!) "You can't pirate paper", my boss always said. Well, I mean, you can, but you probably wouldn't...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at December 20, 2007 07:57 PM (LMDdY)

4 Well I'm watching volume 1....Fine job! 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at May 13, 2008 07:43 PM (V5zw/)

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Managed to knock out two Lucky Star episodes yesterday (well, today, as I haven't slept yet...) That's a good pace for a normal show; for Lucky Star it's almost taxing. Not necessarily a super-complicated script - they don't run up over each other all that often, really - but chatty, as chatty as they come.

Spending that much time with the first episode, I can see how it turned some people away from the show. The food conversation went on, and on, and on, and while it was mildly amusing, it wasn't anything particularly special - just a bunch of jokes, and only the ghost of Konata's half-old-man personality. And no Kagami! The show's driven off the interaction of Kagami with the rest of the cast - in a very real way, she's the show's Kyon, in that it's her job to puncture Konata's otaku point of view, or Tsukasa's fluffy pink world, or to invoke the Miyukipedia. Konata can play this role to a certain extent, as she has an endless supply of cynicism where other people are concerned - but Konata and Miyuki and Tsukasa sitting at a table just isn't that interesting. The show needs Kagami to function.

I'm leaving "moe" alone in the subtitles, as they make a point of explaining the phenomenon (somewhat) in later episodes. This seems to coincide with something that was said at a past convention panel, but I'm not really sure, and honestly I haven't been given a whole lot of instructions in how to proceed. Not that I'm terribly worried or anything, but that's one of the problems with contracting - you don't really have a connection with the client who's ultimately producing the work. But if we're both going to come to the same conclusions about the best way to proceed, what the hell, right?

I can also spot the parts of the episode where KyoAni decided to save some money. They're a little bit more subtle about it than in Haruhi - and it's not like the rest of the show is tremendously detailed, gorgeous artwork, aside from a few unusual sequences. But even so, there's still a couple of sequences where the frame doesn't change for a minute (plus the first batch of endings, which are almost all stills, though the concept of the karaoke box ED was brilliant!)

The only part I don't really enjoy is the Lucky Channel segment. Akira was mildly amusing the first couple of times, but now she just grates. Yes, yes, it's a cute loli that acts like a chain-smoking bitch when she's not "on camera", except when she acts like one while the camera's rolling. I'm over it. It's just not funny the next time you go through the show. Even when Konata or Kagami or Tsukasa have a stale joke, it's generally at least endearing. But Akira's not endearing, not in the least. Yes, yes, I know I'm supposed to be rooting for Shiraishi, but I got a bellyfull of him in the second batch of ED songs, all of which lie before me (though at least they won't be overlapping like mad, as the karaoke ones are, so probably by then I'll rather appreciate them more!)

Not a bad way to make a living, overall. Now to do it again tomorrow and knock out the whole volume! (Or I could take it easy and still make the deadline... but no, still got Nanoha to work on afterwards, might as well go full throttle...)

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From my last post:

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