JOURNAL: Arigatomina

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  • gagh 2007-06-02 16:24:08 My other forum is down. I'm between translation projects and unwilling to start a new one. I've been refreshing the org forum every thirty seconds looking for new posts to read. I just finished a chapter of my only really 'in-progress' fic so I have to wait at least two more days before I can work on it again. I have that Gravitation project sitting in Premiere that makes me squee every time I think about it up until I open Premiere....then I get bored, shut it down without laying a single clip, and look for a forum to hop.

    This sucks. I guess it's time to go back to playing Dragon Warrior 3. I'm still waiting to see if I can turn my Sage into a Soldier...about eight more hours of building up before I'll know. >.<; 
  • hmm... 2007-05-31 23:43:45 Has the 'voice of the org' become female? Compared to two or three years ago, it seems to have shifted from obviously male to predominantly female.

    Points supporting this hypothesis:

    -the most active members of the site are female
    (excluding doki and unseen admin guys)

    Maybe they always were on the forum. I remember plenty of girls posting in 2004 to 2005. But I also remember a lot more guys posting at the same time. Now they all seem to be female. Every thread with three or more pages has more females posting than guys (generalization).

    -the banners are girly

    They've always featured female characters, but now they're cutsy baby pastel female characters instead of hot seminude pinups. We have a flower on our new logo so we can expect even more pretty girly banners in the next year. Are there any guys making banners or have they been run off by the pastels? I like pale blue and lavender, myself. Girls make the banners and girls do the voting (fact).

    -more girls announce videos than guys

    This statement has not been verified. But every time I randomly look in the announcement forum, most of the names are recognizable females (either regulars who I know are girls, or new members with girl names).

    -more girls make popular videos than guys

    Based off the top 10 list for the last year versus previous years (generalization).

    -we're nicer and more tolerant to trolls

    Kickass31~~ & Hatter's recent reappearance compared to the reaction to Sammy and other foregone trolls (fact). Whether or not this is because of the prominent female presence is debatable.

    -we're all about loving wmm users to their faces, though few of us actually use the program

    This is a fact. It used to be the only people who defended the program were people who were still using it. Now we have a forum just for that program, where everyone who's never used it stops by to tell newbies how it works. Instead of encouraging them, try sending a PM and telling how you got a copy of the program you're using. The real way you got a copy, not the way you state in the open on the forum. We're nicer, but we're no more honest than we ever were. I blame this on the decrease in testosterone because most of the people posting in that forum are female.

    -females rule the MEPs

    I can't remember any MEPs from two years ago that were predominantly female, let alone run by a female coordinator. Most of the MEPs that came out in the last 1.5 years were run and filled by females (fact).

    -females give more ops

    Collectively this is a fact. Whether it's an increase versus previous years, I don't know. We can't sort the op lists by date. I don't remember there being so many girls so high on the lists two years ago.

    Points against the hypothesis:

    -guys still win the VCAs, with one token female per year (on average)

    Fact. With girls doing the majority of the active forum-posting, the MEPs, the banners, the vid announcements, and the ops, it's interesting that guys are still the ones doing the successful videos. I'm curious to know who voted for the vcas - a list so I can see how many were male versus female. Maybe the guys still outnumber us, or maybe girls are more active in voting and they just happen to prefer videos made by guys. Or maybe the guys here are just better at making amvs than the girls. I have no idea.

    I've always thought of "The Org" and amvs in general as a "guy thing." It's amusing to see how female it's become. And the big question - are there more girls, or are the girls more noticeable because the active guys are disappearing?

    I'd like to still be here when the day comes where the winners of the VCA are girls with a "token guy". Then the female takeover will be complete. ^_^ 
  • yeah? 2007-05-26 21:31:07 I bought a new car yesterday. My mom told me she saw one that was a good deal, the same type as my current car - a Dodge Intrepid. But it's seven years newer than mine. I agreed to go look at it. It was pretty and I liked that the radio worked. I told her I'd get it if she bugged me enough. She took me to the bank an hour later and cosigned for a loan. A 4 year loan. To buy a car I don't need. When I'm doing a job that barely makes enough to cover my current insurance. I have to get full coverage on the new car because of the loan. No more liability only is nice, except for the extra large bill three times a year. The loan payments are pretty cheap. When I get a real job I'll be grinding my teeth wishing they were higher so I could get it paid off. As it is they'll be taking the amount out of my checking account once a month. I'll have to start depositing my checks now. I hate that.

    It drives great. It's pretty. The radio works. It's parked right behind my old car. My sister's boyfriend wants to buy the old car for $500. I'm very annoyed by that because the old car works fine and has a good two years left in it if I'm driving it. He'll kill it the first week. He'll never finish paying it off whether he kills it quickly or not. But my mom paid for the car, so she gets to pick who buys it and how much she sells it for. She doesn't care. She just wants it out of my name as quickly as possible (she bought it but legally I own it).

    I wonder what's wrong with me having two cars in my name. Maybe it's an insurance thing. She's really antsy about me getting rid of that car asap. Suspicious. >.>

    I drove the new car today, a good hour of driving. I liked it. I'll still miss my old car.

    I shouldn't have to get a new car until my current car starts coughing up blood. She did the same damn thing to me when I had the Caddy. I *still* miss my Caddy. Now that was a real car. ~_~ 
  • double yay for being stubborn ^_^ 2007-05-20 03:27:46 I got a sudden idea and jumped on it. It was the first time I tried to use my cdr drive in a very long time. Naturally it worked for about an hour and then locked up. Permanently. I tried everything I could think of: system restores, hitting the eject button before windows starts up all the programs, jamming a paperclip in the little manual eject hole, checking the drivers.

    Finally I just disabled the drive. That disc will sit in there for months until I get around to taking it to radioshack. It's the same cd/dvd drive I've had replaced there six times for free because it refuses to work. This time I'll have him take the computer apart, retrieve my eaten disc, and sell me either an external cdreader (if those exist) or another external harddrive I can hook up to my old windows 98 computer. The cd drive on that computer works just fine, the same as it did n9 years ago.

    Anyway, the yay is because I tried my other two drives. They're both dvd/cd drives. Technically they're both supposed to be able to read cdrs. Neither of them have ever been able to. The guy at radioshack has no idea why they don't work. Even when they were brandnew they didn't work with cds.

    I tried opening my new dvd/cdrw burner drive with IsoBuster. That was the key. It read the cd. Very cool. Now I'm faced with the prospect of replacing all my old cdrs with dvdrs so I never have to mess with cd readers ever again. It's such a recurring problem I don't want to mess with it anymore.

    And now for the reason I pulled out the cdrs despite knowing they'd kill my computer. Vid idea. Yeah. We'll see where that goes if my dvd burner continues to read the cdrs. ^__^ 
  • Ya~ay! 2007-05-19 21:18:37 I finished translating my second doujinshi. It's getting easier. ^__^

    I still have to look up every single kanji - I only seem to remember one in every fifteen that I look up. Basic stuff like person, the "object/thing" ones (why are there so many kanji that translate into object/thing I have no idea), above, below, tree, divide (which I can't find in my Japanese-English dictionary, so weird), to see, to read, to speak, to hear - really basic kanji. There are a few extremely complicated ones, way too many radicals, that I don't remember the meaning of, but I remember exactly what stroke count and radical number to plug in so I can look them up. That comes from looking the same darn ones up every single time. You'd think I'd remember the meaning if I remember how to look them up so well.

    The part that's getting easier is the hiragana/katakana part. That's what scared me to begin with, since I can't just look them up in a multi-radical search engine the way I can kanji. A lot of the words and phrases aren't in my dictionary, either. But, you know, I remember hearing them in anime. Yeah, you're not supposed to learn Japanese from watching anime because that make you a nasty otaku creepy nerd. Whatever. It's true. I watch anime without subtitles all the time and I can understand almost everything they're saying. So when I try to figure out what they're saying in the doujinshi, I just write down the romanji and say it out loud. That makes it a lot easier to figure out where the word breaks are. And since the doujinshi are based off the anime, they keep a lot of the "pet phrases" of the particular characters. Naruto's "tebayo" still doesn't translate. I just left it as is - it's like Kenshin's "de gozaru" or Chichiri's "no da" - the literal translation doesn't matter because they use the phrases without any attention to context.

    The actual scanlating part is slower. I'm so frickin lazy I don't even bother rescanning the books. I just take the raw scans, stick the words in the bubbles, and resave. I can't help it. ^^; Unless the original scans are messy, there's no reason I should have to scan them all over again. The hard part is translating the books - once I have a translation on hand I'm ready to plug it in so I can read it already.

    So far I have scanlations for NaruSasu and KakaIru. I still want to do that really long One Piece "manga-size" book, but I found out the prequel was scanlated by an actual scanlation group. If they're still active there's a chance they'll want to pick up the second book. Much better for them to translate it than me. I don't like hard work, and I guess more than I know when it comes to translations. ;p

    On a related note, I found a few more NaruSasu djs. It's so frickin hard to find them. Everything is SasuNaru, like Naruto was actually *girly* in the anime. Say what? He wasn't even cute most of the time. He's always squinting and making faces and looking chubby and boyish and loud. Sasuke's a total uke from the very first scene he's in. Hell, just his name says it all. SasUke? Yeah, that's what I thought. Now that he's all evil "Itachi-Jr" with his band of villains, I guess he could be seme once in a while. But he's still way more girly than Naruto ever was. Not to mention dark broody uke's are classic. Hiei? Yeah, that's what I thought. ;p

    The new books are in the mail. I had to wait till I got my credit card statement from last month before I could buy anything new. One of those "make sure the money's in the bank before you charge it to the card" deals. Otherwise I'd max out my limit and be paying it back for the next two years. ^^; I just hope the person selling the books didn't mislabel the pairings. Most of the store was SasukexNaruto and KakashixIruka so those three "NarutoxSasuke" books really stood out. They better be NaruSasu. I'll complain if they aren't. I'll mope, too. Maybe I'll tear something up to vent. It won't be pretty. Let's hope that doesn't happen. I'm already looking forward to translating them as soon as they come in. ^.^ 
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