Crazy rush housecleaning! Lunar Week! DbD anniversary! Clock Tower project collab! Translation job for a company that hires a lot of uncles, that probably will come to nothing, but we'll see! Hey: did you know the guy who runs your local puppy mill wants a seat on the state Animal Welfare board?! Also: that dentist who said you needed two crowns was apparently lying, but this new dentist says you have six cavities! Is this dentist lying? Is she including spots that could remineralize? Was your old dentist not actually monitoring your tooth health during those six-month checkups? Isn't this a problem you wanted to try to solve while making major life decisions?!
Oh, and there's also a Clock Tower revamp coming.
And to top it off, a few days ago, I hear this paleontological bombshell:
Woman at taco restaurant shepherding about 5 first-graders: We're going to see the dinosaur museum on Friday. They died out millions of years ago.
Kid: Yeah! The dinosaurs got shot!
I'm currently playing around with a Ricoh/Fujitsu SV600 book scanner, a device that, combined with its software, is supposed to produce flat images from books laid open in front of it, correcting for page distortion. It allows you to make scans of books without having to guillotine them or break their spines, in theory. I haven't had enough time with the device to decide whether I want to keep this extremely expensive machine, but right now: I think it does its job well enough to disappoint that it doesn't do it better, if that makes sense.
I tested it with three materials: a) the Ghost Head manga, encased in phone book-thick issues of Fantasy DX; b) a volume of the Cloister of Heaven VHM fan doujin; and c) an issue of LoveLove Tsuushin (I had an idea of scanning the entire run). The tests for b) and c) were extremely brief, but the machine seemed to have problems with the tight binding/low page count of b), and the glossy pages and relatively complex visuals of c) (color magazine layouts vs. B&W line art) seemed to result in washed-out visuals and more-noticeable waviness. I'd heard about the SV600 having problems with glossy pages in reviews of the machine; there was no blanking-out due to glare, but less color depth was apparent.
There may be settings to correct all this in the software. I haven't had time to play around with it sufficiently, and the documentation and software tutorializing is wanting due to poor translation that gives the machine the impression of a chintzy product, despite being produced by a reputable firm. I know it has an option, for example, to remove the traces of your fingers holding down the pages, but I can't get it to work. This is likely in great part my failing due to time crunch, but the finger thing is going to become pertinent in the next paragraph.
Because: I've made some provisional PDFs of the Yun Kouga The Struggle Within/Ghost Head manga here and here. Note the word "provisional." THESE ARE NOT THE FINAL VERSIONS OF THESE PDFS. As threatened in the title, the tips of my fingers are lovingly detailed in almost all the images (but do not block out art; I took care to hold down on white space). The unrelated pages facing the first and last pages of the manga have not been excised from the PDF. For some reason, the software adores eating the frontispieces for each of the manga's two parts. (The art is visible but blurred & cropped at the edges in a minimally-impactful but weird way.) And there's a bit more waviness remaining after page correction than I'd like, though I think that if will serve in a pinch if it has to be the archival edition of this previously-dropped-off-the-face-of-the-Earth manga. It will not be, barring me dying in the next few months, my copies of the manga exploding, or my means of scanning disappearing, but I'm entering a stretch of time where I'm going to be taking care of business for a while, so I want to have something up there just in case.
I have more to say about this manga, and I will be translating it. I'd had dreams of releasing a PDF of the original and a scanlated version side by side, but I think I know my limitations regarding image editing, even at this manga's thoroughly-handleable length. Until then: enjoy Kouga's popped-collar, cool-as-fuck Shou:
ETA: Text translations now available, using both Japanese and English names. In further news: we are delivered from my image-editing ineptitude, as another trusted party within the CT fandom has approached me with plans to create a finger-free scanlation. The scanlation may be using some, all, or none of my translation, with my blessing - the team has an in-house translator who's produced their own translation of the manga. No competition here; after being lost for 25 years, this manga deserves all the attention it's getting. It's surprisingly good! I plan to write more about it, and I'll link that scanlation when it's available.
I've been working on the translation team for this. Toriyama! Feels like the big time.
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