Wow… 50% Off Coupon at honto

honto is really pushing the digital books coupons lately… or maybe it’s because I buy so many of them, lol 😉 Anyway, I used a 30% off coupon on digital comics the other day, and today I received a 50% off coupon on all digital comics, books, and magazines! Yay! It’s only good for four days though, through 11:59 PM on June 28th, Japan time.

Check out this coupon!

So, hurry and check your email, if you are a regular honto customer… you don’t want to miss out on this special deal! 50% off is a rare thing.

Geez… not again

Another rant… sorry.

It happened again on Mangalator… but this time, I even sent the Chapter 1 raws to the site admin, since the manga series was missing both Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. I posted comments about translating the series, as well as sending the Chapter 1 raws, but once again, someone rudely jumps in without bothering to take a couple of minutes to read the comments first.

I got chastised by a reader who thought that I was being rude to the other translator for pointing out that they were rude about jumping in first to translate. Sure, I could have been more polite about it, but the direct approach seems to be more effective. I’ve tried polite before.

Anyway, I have the raws for Chapter 1 and 2 of a different manga series, but I think I’ll just scanlate them here myself.

I’m leaning towards less involvement on Mangalator as the current manga series that I’m translating wrap up. Then I’ll have less stress and more time to work on my own scanlation projects. 🙂

Asa Made Kimi to – Chapter 1

Yay, it’s finished! Phew, lol. It’s a lot of work to scanlate a chapter, but also pretty fun. 🙂 I added a new menu item, Scanlations, so you can select from the list of completed scanlations or click on this link: Asa Made Kimi to – Chapter 1. I will try to finish a chapter every 2 – 3 weeks or so, but I may get delayed due to real life stuff.

I tried to proofread and catch any mistakes, but if you see something that seems off, let me know and I can fix it, thanks.

Here’s a quick peek at a few pages!

Rant… and then Bliss

I’ve been translating a lot of manga on Mangalator lately, about 8-9 different series. I normally enjoy it because I can focus on the manga that I’m interested in. However, recently there have been a few cases where someone new jumps in and translates the chapter that I was working on before I can finish it, even after I said that I’m currently translating it. It’s frustrating because it’s a waste of my time to work on a translation for a couple of hours and then stop. I don’t understand why people lack the common sense or courtesy to check on whether a manga is already being worked on. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth continuing to translate manga there, but I don’t want to let the readers down (and the fansubs that use my translations). So I’ll continue for now, but if this kind of thing happens more and more, then I’ll probably rethink my decision.

So… while I was feeling a bit annoyed because of this latest incident, I received a package in the mail from CD Japan. It’s my Sakisaka Io Illustrations book (for Aoharaido and Strobe Edge)! Talk about good timing! My mood went from sour to happy in an instant, lol.

Aoharaido and Strobe Edge illustrations… kyaaa

Asa Made Kimi to… teaser

Here’s a quick teaser on my little side project that I’m working on! 🙂 I decided to scanlate some of Yamada Komomo’s earlier manga series, because I noticed that no scanlation groups have picked them up. I’m starting with Asa Made Kimi to… it will be easy to translate since I already summarized it. My plan is to release a new chapter every couple of weeks or so, but if not, I appreciate your patience since I’m a one-person shop, lol. Also, since I’m doing it all by myself, the final output will probably not be as nicely done as the scanlation groups, who have people assigned to do the different work (scanning, translating, cleaning, proofreading, typesetting, and QA).

A few quick notes about my scanlation project:

• Please don’t ask me for the raw scans of the manga. If you want the raw scans, please purchase the manga yourself (see Stores for information on where to buy print or digital manga).
• If you are interested in using my translation to re-translate into another language, please contact me first, thanks!
• I know that the size of the images is a little on the smaller side, but I believe that you can still read the text properly. To view the slideshow, click on one of the images. If the text is still a little hard to read, click on the full screen to view the image directly.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the teaser! I’ll try to finish the rest of Chapter 1 in a week or so.

 

Calling All Yamada Komomo Fans!

Yamada-sensei’s new manga series, Zettai Toudou, started this month in Petit Comic… yay!!! You can see the raws scans and translation of Chapter 1 on Mangalator. I was so excited that I translated it on the first day it was posted, lol.

The story has a different twist than Yamada-sensei’s usual MO… I don’t want to spoil it and say anything more here, but I guess some people may not be comfortable with the story line. Personally, it doesn’t bother me in the world of manga. Of course, real life is different. Anyway, I like Yamada-sensei’s stories because they are usually on the sweet side with not too much drama. 🙂

I am working on a surprise concerning Yamada-sensei’s earlier manga series… I was hoping to show it by the end of the month, but it will probably be sometime in early to mid-June. It’s just my own little project that I’ve been thinking about doing for some time now.

Are Monthly Manga Magazines Worth Buying?

I have a love-hate relationship with manga magazines, so I end up purchasing them off and on throughout the year. If I lived in Japan, the answer to my main question above would be an easy, “yes”, since the magazines are so cheap for the number of monthly serialized manga chapters you get (usually around $4 – $5 for 600+ pages). Even though I end up buying the tankoubon for a lot of mangas, I still enjoy reading them first in the monthly magazines. However, because most manga magazines are the size of a Yellow Pages phone book for a large city, the cost for shipping them outside of Japan is pricey, adding about $8 – $10 per magazine.

It would be ideal if all manga magazines were available in digital versions, but unfortunately, there are still many popular shoujo and josei magazines that are only available in paper copies, mainly the Shogakukan ones like Petit Comic, Cheese!, BetsuComi, and Sho-Comi… come on Shogakukan, please jump on the digital magazine bandwagon! Hopefully they will eventually follow other companies, like Kodansha, which began offering digital versions of their magazines earlier this year.

Fortunately, the recent chapters of most of the current serialized shoujo and josei manga can be found at Mangalator, and the chapters are translated into a variety of languages by plenty of hard-working translators, including me. 😉

So, I’m back to my dilemma about buying manga magazines that are not available digitally… there are two that are in my CD Japan shopping cart, both featuring my favorite mangaka, Yamada Komomo, on the cover!  I will probably end up buying just one (Petit Comic Zoukan issue), since a lot of the manga chapters from Petit Comic are eventually posted on Mangalator, yay!

Which magazine should I buy? Petit Comic Zoukan or Petit Comic?

unENDing Bloody Call – First Thoughts

Phew, I finally finished my first route… it only took 2 years, lol. Of course that’s because I stopped playing the game 3/4 into the route back in June 2013. Life got busy and I was burned out on playing otome games. I did attempt to play a couple of games since then, but I didn’t get too far with them either. However, I just recently started playing unENDing Bloody Call again and it’s actually a pretty good game with a lot of bishies, good art and voice actors, and a decent story. My initial review is posted under the Games section.

Best Online Store for Manga (and other reading material)

Here’s the tl;dr version:

• Best online store for paper and digital manga: honto
• Several shipping options available.
• Site offers plenty of coupons, discounts, and points which cuts down the cost of your order, more for digital books but they do offer promotions for paper books as well.
• Helpful advice for registering at honto: Without Restraints
• Digital readers are available for PC, iPhone/iPad, and Android devices; however you need to register at iTunes Japan or Google Play Japan to install their digital reader.

Here’s my detailed post for anyone interested in the long version:

This is obviously just my personal opinion, but I highly recommend honto for buying both print and digital versions of manga, light novels, magazines, and other books. I’ve been a customer for almost three years now and have placed over 40 orders (printed materials)… yes, that’s slightly over one order per month, lol. It’s always a good day when my order arrives each month. 😉 Out of the 40+ orders that I’ve placed, only one got mixed up in the mail and I got a full refund when it was returned to honto.

My most recent honto order.

The honto site has an extensive variety of manga, light novels, and magazines, both print and digital. Not everything is available digitally, but it seems like the trend towards digital is starting to catch on. Several shoujo and josei manga magazines, including Dessert, Bessatsu Friend, Be Love, Aria, and Kiss are now available in digital, yay! The digital version of Nakayoshi starts in June.

There are several different shipping options available, so you are able to weigh the shipping cost vs. the delivery time and decide which option works best for you. I started off with the cheapest option, shipping by boat, but I now use SAL instead. It’s about double the shipping cost, but a lot faster than by boat, which took around 6 – 8 weeks to arrive. On average, I pay around 1200 – 1400 yen to ship 6 – 7 manga/light novels and my order usually arrives in 10 – 14 days (I live in the United States).

I buy a lot of digital books as well… latest count is 539 books, lol. Well, some of them are free, promo versions, so the count is probably closer to 450. Besides saving on shipping costs, the digital books are usually cheaper than the same paper version and honto has so many discounts, coupons, and points tied to digital orders which can really bring the price down. For instance, several months ago, they ran a 99 yen special on light novels (digital), so I ended up buying over 20 books for the cost of less than $18. Right now, they are running a Golden Week special, where you can earn 20x the points each day from May 1 – 7 (different category of books is selected every day). If you purchased books on at least three different days, you will get another coupon for 50x the points to use later in the month. Normally, it’s 1 point for every 100 yen, so 50x the points adds up! 🙂 You can use the points you earn as “cash”… if your total order is 2500 yen and you have 800 points, you can deduct that from the total amount to equal 1700 yen. So what are you waiting for? lol

I heard that it can be tricky to register at honto, because you need a Japan address. I was a former bk1 customer, so when bk1 and honto merged, my account info carried over. Fortunately, there is a very helpful guide on how to sign up at honto, which can be found here: Without Restraints.

As for reading the digital books, there are readers available for PC, iPhone/iPad, and Android devices. Installing the PC version is a no-brainer, just download from their site and follow the installation instructions. Unfortunately for iPhone/iPad and Android devices, the digital reader is only available for download in their Japan stores. However, there are ways around that! For iPhone/iPad, you need to set up an iTunes Japan account… you can do that by signing up with a different email address from your regular iTunes account. I forgot the exact instructions, but if you Google how to set up another iTunes account, there is plenty of helpful advice available. For Android devices, I downloaded the TunnelBear app (easy-to-use VPN client) to access the Google Play Japan store.

Happy reading! 🙂

Completed Series… not L-DK

Wow, so many series that I posted about have finally finished, like Aoharaido and Hirunaka no Ryuusei… but not L-DK. That series is going on 17 volumes, wth!? I really thought that it would have finished by now. I actually stopped reading this manga a while back. However, I’m still buying the books, so one day I will start up again. I may just start from the very beginning to enjoy the whole series from scratch.

Aoharaido: It ended… even though I hoped and suspected that Futaba would end up you-know-who (don’t want to spoil it for the one person who may not know yet, lol), I did worry about the outcome. Strobe Edge is still my favorite manga of Sakisaka-sensei, but Aoharaido is a pretty close second. I am looking forward to her new series, and hopefully we will hear more about it over the next couple of months. Speaking of Strobe Edge, I ended up buying the April 2015 issue of Betsuma… why? because of the Strobe Edge special chapter. 🙂 I am such a sucker when it comes to Strobe Edge, lol. I can’t wait to watch the Strobe Edge live-action movie online. If it’s a pretty good adaptation, I may buy the DVD version. Plus it doesn’t hurt that Sota Fukushi, who plays Ren, is easy on the eyes. 😉

Hirunaka no Ryuusei: I kind of lost interest in this manga, but I do have all the volumes through 11. Since volume 12 is the last one, I will buy it to complete the series. I accidentally found out who she ended up with though, so unfortunately the ending won’t be a surprise when I finally read it. However, I am somewhat interested on what occurred up to that point, so I plan to continue reading the manga someday soon. I’m not sure if I will keep the series though… maybe I will try to sell it on eBay.