What’s this graphic about?
This is how the channels on IRC.irchighway.net are related. In other words, how scanlation groups are related with each other. Channels that share admins, operators or half-operators are connected by an edge.

(Just click on it to zoom – Internet Explorer users won’t see it)

How to read:

• Not all connections are shown. Some are omitted to keep the graph more clear.
• The color intensity of the nodes are a hint on the the actual amount of shared operators.
• The node size correlates to the amount of users in that channel.
• Black connections are shared operators, gray connections are shared half-ops.
• Thicker connections signify multiple shared operators.
• If your channel is not in the graph, well… bad luck, the graphic is not exhaustive.
• #nowoxxyclub ~ bunch of faggots

Would have been pretty sad if I had missed this little gem, since it’s a real piece of art.

It is about a school-girl that lives on books. Literally, since she eats them. One day she finds a story which makes her fall in love with it, and soon after it’s becoming a great hit. But then she finds out that the author won’t write any more stories, only to see that he changed to her school.
It’s about the beauty of novels and poems, the scene when she first reads “Resembling the Sky” is one of the most beautiful scenes I’ve seen in a long time.

I think many people won’t like this show, or at least won’t find it as intriguing as did. It’s very slow-paced, gentle and sorta slice-of-life, though without the usual comedy found in these. Style and story will probably not be too interesting for many people, but it’s well worth a try.

There’s also going to be a movie of this later on, I think this time from the perspective of the young guy who wrote “Resembling the Sky”. There’s some sort of preview or trailer out for this already, though I didn’t watch that yet (I’ll wait for the movie).

If you can appreciate a little story about literature and the beauty that can be found in there, or just like the artstyle of this, you’ll very probably enjoy this.
If you’re looking for action or some exciting story you’ll just as likely be bored, though I’d still advice you to at least give this a try.

Well, all in all this is another one I’ll continue to watch. Despite being tagged as “ecchi”, the amount is still reasonable (no point in waiting for an uncensored version…), and it seems to have an actual plot. At least it has potential, I hope they make something good of this.

The only problem I have so far is that I hate almost all of the characters besides the two main characters…

Too bad they didn’t keep the art from the Light Novels though, this one is somewhat generic (though not bad).

Would have been nice if Eris wasn’t so… “busty” though…

Loads of more talk gonna be seen in the forum thread. Because fools like furry. Somewhat.

There was a splendid Rin Kagamine by the way. And, you know, we appreciate Kagamine Rin.

I’ll put here the pics that turned out to be decent.

By Woxxy:

[View with PicLens]

By GBolt:

[View with PicLens]

By Urielmatt:

[View with PicLens]

As seen on mangaupdates there was an answer by a person who would be the admin from MangaHelpers. This is as much believable as the original message, as we can’t ensure that the person who posted is the admin itself.

I’d like to believe that he is actually the admin though.

Here’s the post I wrote yesterday, untouched. I’ll leave it as it is for not being lame.

Indeed, Australia banned small breasted girls in porn like two months ago or less, and that’s just an example about how law is always ruled by moralists and by people who wants to pass as a moralist to get votes. It’s no secret that modern states always had the problem for which referendums are ridiculously piloted to get to the people’s heart rather than to the people’s rationality.

But, no new laws have come out in USA, yet, all at once, all these websites are cleaning all the mature content. Why?

Because Adsense, the internet advertising company by Google, is what makes the people leeching off our manga ridiculously rich. Google Adsense lives upon USA rules, and one of the points in their terms is that

“The content of the website must be viewable also by kids”

which makes all of that “material” we deal with, that is obviously meant for mature public, banned from the Adsense point of view. In fact, these websites are being blocked by Adsense and now they are sulking to get their money-flow from Google back.

I’m not going to say a lie: I don’t care in the least for the owners of those websites. They are after all not only leeching over us, but also stealing us page-views, which is what pays our pricey manga RAWs and our servers.

You could see mangaupdates (that aren’t leechers, so I care) doing the right thing: ask first the community if they should remove those mature titles from their database with a poll. In case the major number of people was to say that it’s alright to remove them, they most likely would be able to get back their Google Adsense account. But, as it seems, they will just keep going as the users like, which is the smart thing to do, both morally and for their pockets. Nobody likes websites with censoring.

But, the rest? Just look at how MangaFox and OneManga and many others now will just go and remove what Google thinks is wrong in order to keep their money flowing in their pockets as fast as possible. This is how much these websites care about our manga culture. Hope you like it, guys.

What if the FoOlRulez scanlated manga will be removed from those websites? Just come directly on our website. We can release that adult stuff, any time, without censoring.

Dollars Chat

What does it have to do with me? Well, I made the cool avatars that you’re already (if you’re not, get moving) using. But this wasn’t enough, so we though we’re going to give you even more.
*APPLAUSE*

We are going to make more (yes, more) cool avatars and you are going to choose what’s next. Your favorite anime waifu? The most badass video game character? The dog-belonging-to-the-secondary-character-that-was-in-one-chapter-

of-that-one-manga-you-don’t-remember-the-name-of-but-probably-dealt-with-high-school-students? Just post your suggestions in the comments and we will check them and see if they’re viable to become Durarara-like avatars. Please note that the subject must not be too complex (not because I’m too lazy, but because the graphic style isn’t suitable for complex designs). Also note that the chat is still in sort-of-beta, so there may be bugs or or traits to be improved. Enough chitchatting (did you get the pun? :D), we want you to comments, so post feedback about the chat (what is missing and what could be improved), suggestions about the next avatars to come and your opinion on this project. Thanks for the attention.

Disclaimer: FoOlRulez is in no way affiliated with Ryohgo Narita, Dengeki Bunko, ASCII Media Works, Brain’s Base, Dullahans and/or Vending Machine companies. It is indeed affiliated with me, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this post, you dummy. Also, we won’t  really do any avatar about that dog-that-was-in-[...]. That was a lie.

Here are the avatars.

http://foolrulez.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/tanaka-taro.png

http://foolrulez.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/setton.png

http://foolrulez.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/kanra.png

Don’t worry, Saika will be coming soon.

Some people might argue that GIMP as an open source alternative is just as good, but most people who have had in-depth experience with Photoshop know otherwise. It’s the usability and lots of small yet crucial features that makes Photoshop the favorite among scanlators. Some groups even go as far as requiring their editors to use Photoshop. While GIMP certainly will get the job done, it will do so by consuming a lot more time, and time is a precious good when a single manga chapter averages out at 30 pages and involves a lot of routine tasks to be carried out.

CS4, the currently latest version of Photoshop, already brought a few great features. The support for hardware acceleration based on the graphics card not only improved the performance, but also allowed better preview scaling and most important of all (at least for scanlators), preview when using clone stamp right on the drawing cursor. While content-aware scaling is a cool feature, I personally almost never use it.
So what’s so special about CS5 that I dedicate an entire blog post to it? Watch and be amazed…

What does this mean for scanlators? You might already know that FoOlRulez puts a lot effort into editing, not only translating the text in the bubbles, but also replacing sound effects, however large it might be, with understandable English equivalent. That requires something we call redrawing: large chunks of what was japanese sound effect text have to be replaced by what we think might have been the original picture behind the sound effect. That, sometimes, takes a lot of time, depending on the size and the content to redraw.

See what my point is? Exactly, this time-consuming part of editing might be shortened a lot, if the feature shown on the demo video works as perfectly as we all are hoping it would.

Stay tuned and just maybe, FoOlRulez might be able to churn out fresh scanlations at an even faster pace, at the same high quality standard.

Rin and Len (more Rin) are the ones I prefer out of the VOCALOID characters. Oh so lewd.

On April FoOls you’ll have a very nice surprise by us if you’re a VOCALOID lover, by the way!

1)A Rin solo. Awesome rythm is awesome. I wish I could listen to this on the train I take every day for commuting to Universty. I’d need the MP3.

2) This is a duo with Rin and Len. It’s a classic and just sounds right.

3) This one is incredible. The best of the 3 I am listing It can bring you to tears in 4 minutes. Just read the subtitles, the music will do the rest.

And if Z-Virus likes it, you will love it too.

It’s called *checks title* Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu.

Thanks to Scorpian from the IRC (and lots of other places related to scanlation) for taking the orders and scanning the pages for us.

UFO LOLI OR LOLI UFO!?

You’re all over her, aren’t you?

We’ll start scanlating this as soon as we’re done with Hantsuki. Why Hantsuki? Just wait for a month FILLED with Hantsuki!