All of our proofreaders are stuck with personal issues, so we can’t release unless we find some fresh blood.

We have at least a dozen chapters that need to be reviewed, and we will not release them without proper proofreading.

If you care about reading these, please help us out, even if it’s just for a couple weeks. We really need to get a grip on things so we can restart recruiting regularly. To do that, we have to start by attracting people with regular releases.

Our requirements are:

• Not already being in a scanlation/fansubbing group (ask us for joint work if that’s the case).
• Having a good eye for detail and a good grasp of English.
• Being available most of the time and staying idle in our IRC channel for easy access.

You can contact me (Woxxy) via the usual email: recruiting ATTO foolrulez DOTTO org. I will give you an offer you can’t refuse… and a test to pass.

Now it’s too late.

If you think you are beaten, you are:
If you think you dare not, you don’t
If you like to win but think you can’t
It’s almost a cinch you won’t.

If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost:
For out in the world we find
Success begins with a fellow’s will
It’s all in the state of mind.

If you think you’re outclassed, you are:
You’ve got to think high to rise,
You’ve got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.

Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man;
But sooner or later the man who wins
Is the man who thinks he can.

-Anonymous

I’d like to call your attention to the second stanza. In particular, “Success begins with a fellow’s will – it’s all in the state of mind.” For years we have stressed the difficult nature of our proofreading test, and for years we have had numerous people try it and fail – myself included. I have come to believe that this unhealthy habit of promoting the test’s difficulty has caused a great many potential staff members to feel they have no chance of joining our team.

Thus, while the test and the grading have not changed, I will change the way it is presented to you: You can pass this test. You can pass any of our staff tests. All it takes is dedication – and a little bit of thought.

However, I’m not saying that you can just approach a test after convincing yourself that you can pass it and magically succeed; you do need the abilities and knowledge to pass a test. Consider your skills before applying. So, with that said…

We’re recruiting!

As usual, we need translators, proofreaders, and editors. To apply, send an email to the address at the end of this post.

The general requirements for staff members are as follows:

• You must not hold the same position in any other group or team. Doing something extra as a hobby, so long as it doesn’t involve another team, is fine.
• You must be able to communicate decently in English. If you can’t understand your assignments or what the proofreaders are asking you to fix, you’re unfortunately not going to be much help.
• You must be 16 years of age or older. Many of the manga we scanlate have adult themes, and although it’s possible to dodge this by not working on said series, our IRC tends to foray into the NSFW territory.

While not a requirement, it is a good idea to idle with us in our IRC channel. This allows us to communicate with you much faster. A solid internet connection is also helpful, especially for editors – we sometimes ask that you upload PSDs, which have notoriously large filesizes.

Also note that we won’t drop a heap of work on you if you don’t want it. We know that you enjoy having free time to read and watch this stuff yourself, as we enjoy it as well. We let you work at your own pace, and you can choose which series you work on. After all, a happy team makes for better quality.

Here is a brief description of each staff position.

Translator
Your job is simply to translate the Japanese into a passable English script. Due to how rare translators are, we are willing to accept those still learning so long as you can produce a passable script – our proofreaders will attempt to find any mistakes you make.

Proofreader
Your job is to look over the translated script for typos, grammatical errors, possible inconsistencies, and to make the dialogue flow smoothly. Knowing the English language is definitely not enough for this position, as actually catching and fixing another’s errors is quite different from simply communicating in the language. You will be given a test upon applying and will have two weeks to finish it.

Editor
Your job is to clean and typeset the pages of the manga. You’ll normally work on a few chapters a month, depending on your availability. You must use Photoshop CS5 or newer, as it has many features that will save you much time and stress. Our standards for editing are described in the readme file that accompanies the test. The test is to edit four pages to look better than our release.

Applications should be addressed to recruiting ATTO foolrulez DOTTO org. Some good things to mention in your application are the position you’re applying for, your experience in the position, your age, and how much free time you expect you’ll have. You can also send a simple “I’d like to apply to be a [position]” email as well, as all that really matters is the result of the test.

To all applicants: good luck. I think you’ll do quite well.

Mio is ridiculously adorable. Like, ridiculously. Have you seen a Mio recently? They’re so goddamn huggable, snugglable and cuddlable that I’m making up words. Christ in heaven. I’m not even one of those people who obssesses over the 2D world, but by Odin, Mio is stupendously cute.

Ok most of the people reading this will have immediately thought of the K-ON! Mio because you all worship highschoolers, black hair and KyoAni. There’s also Mio Aoyama, the Suzu Hagimura lookalike from TWGOK. Fanservice girl from this season’s Ano Natsu is also called Mio. They’re all nothing but eye candy though.

THIS is the greatest Mio in existence. Accept no substitutes.

If you disagree you’re a shame to everyone around you, a blotch on the face of what I hesitantly call modern society.

Edit: the new rule was vetoed, so the below doesn’t count much anymore.
Edit from M: LOL

Today, though, they really touched my heart.

In a thread commenting on our post about how some scanlators make profit, it was decided that from now on the redditors (is that what you call them?) will always have to link to the scanlators’ sites to talk about freshly released manga, and posting links to manga aggregators will be prohibited.

You can read about the new rule here.

Scanlation, more than getting traffic, needs popularity. This is in order to get more applicants, which was a problem last year due to other leech sites keeping readers uninformed about us. Of course, it’s very illegal for aggregators to make any profit (and such large profits at that) on the backs of mangakas.

Supporting us is the right move to get more quality and speed in our release. And possibly a more honest community of scanlators. Who knows.

Thank you, /r/manga.

Now I’ll introduce you to a new issue with scanlation.

Remember when, two years ago, scanlators asked you so frequently to buy the original copies of the manga? I hardly remember it now, as the panorama’s changed quite a bit.

Scanlation is becoming business. A profitable one.

I used to talk negatively about aggregators – I still do. The reason why aggregators are to be hated is that they make so much money on the shoulders of copyright holders and even on free labour. Scanlators don’t do that. Nor should they.

Back in 2008, we realized we would be able to afford the cost of our server if we provided what the aggregators did (free online reading), so we created the first “fast, high quality” manga reader on a scanlator’s website. Just as we had imagined, the income from advertising (20-40$ a month) allowed us to acquire a much better server, have more bandwidth and buy raws, all without having to ask for donations.

Fast forward to 2012.  We released two comic readers, Batoto was created, Filesonic is all the rage.

In this age, our income is steady. It’s the same that we had in 2008, but the servers have become cheaper over time. Look at our site for a second: can you find any ads? (there’s only one on the bottom of the reader)

Nightmare mode: have you seen the 4chan archives we host? Those get 1.800.000 pageviews a month, five times the pageviews of our team site. That’s over 400gb of content stored, and even there, we have no ads.

Of course, we offer the best online manga reader ever created, and we offer direct downloads off our server without ads or wait times. We can’t get any more open than this.

How is it possible to live without ads?

The answer is Batoto.

Batoto is a godsend for scanlation. Many scanlators can fund their own site thanks to them, and some quit having ads on their site. Batoto basically allows you to put your Google Adsense ads on their site, so the credit goes directly to the scanlator’s Google account. Very simple, very secure.

We had about the same amount of income when our site had ads on every page, and that’s quite decent, considering we release so infrequently.

Wait a second…

If FoOlRulez can afford all this stuff just on Batoto money, what’s going on with other scanlators?

They release several times more frequently than us, and their projects have many, many more followers than ours. By this logic, they should be earning several times the money we earn, right? Of course they do.

There’s more. They have ads all over their website, they ask for donations on their site, they ask for donations on their credit pages, and they use Filesonic (sort of dead now), which pays more based on how big the file is, and how many downloads it gets. Every time they add another scheme to make money, their revenue multiplies.

How much can such groups earn? Somewhere between $500 and $1000, basing myself on what we currently earn. That’s an incredible amount of money when FoOlRulez has probably some of the most powerful servers in scanlation, with the little we earn. If we wanted to have really nice servers, we don’t really need to go over $150 a month.

This is pretty new.

And that was all I had to say.

I  had to vent a bit about this issue. I’m not going to name any specific groups, because there’s lots of them involved.

We can’t go down this road. Scanlation is already in great danger because all the groups are lacking applicants.

If money becomes a part of the equation, we will seriously think about quitting scanlation. We don’t want to be involved in what may as well be an organized plot to earn revenue from someone else’s work. Compared to the mangaka’s work, ours is a shitstain, only worth minor credit and a read. It’s the mangaka’s effort that should be loved, you should make a shrine for him/her (and you should totally buy the official volumes!)

You would expect I’d have done this post a bit earlier, but I was wasted from the long night, so I relaxed for the rest of the day and watched the first season of Tantei Opera Milky Holmes. I must say that the villain is amazing…in many ways, yo.

We’ve had quite a situation down at FoOls’ scanlation department, considering several crucial members in the team weren’t available to finalize the chapters. In the end I kept back an SYD release for a rainy day…like, the first few days of the year. Seito and Alphonse be workin’ fluently as usual. Hopefully, we can clean up our priorities list in the next days, so when the majority of us return to work/school, we’ll have the big stuff comin’ back out, yo.

My New Years’ resolution is to answer all the email I receive. Seriously, I forget to answer a lot of email, and I think I really need to get a grip on it, yo.

For FoOls, I hope we’ll be as stable as we ever were. I think the most stable period was near the end of the last summer. I hope we can get things back together next month, before exams begin. I don’t really play a big role in scanlation anymore, so it’ll be fine if we can just fix some things up and get the queue cleaned up, yo.

Now I’ll get to packaging SYD, yo.

Did you guys have some silly New Year’s resolution? Yo?

There were some people that lived four houses down from me. Our families were kind of close. We sent each other food from time to time. They had two daughters, whose names I will not disclose.

A year before I knew I was going to move to Alberta, they were expecting a baby. I was happy for them. And I was pretty excited, too. I couldn’t wait to go and see the baby, play around with it, and watch it grow up. I had siblings of my own, but our ages were far too close for me to be anything but annoyed with them most of the time. I couldn’t wait.

The baby was born. It had kidney failure. It died within a couple of days.

I was shocked. I was sad, but I didn’t cry. I had never seen the baby. It hadn’t even been alive for 48 hours.

The family held a funeral for the baby. I went to the ceremony, and there it was, in its tiny coffin, looking for all the world as if it were asleep. It still had a red tinge in its ears, and it looked just like any other sleeping baby. I wanted see if it was cold or not, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. Someone gave me a nudge, and I moved along.

At the graveyard, they lowered the tiny coffin into the tiniest grave I had ever seen. They filled up the hole. The baby was buried. Everyone moved on with their lives. I could only stare wide-eyed at the marker, and moved around in a dazed shock for a week.

And I’ve been scared of graveyards ever since.

The End.

It’s Woxxy the richfag FoOl, blogging from his new 800 euro iPad (bought with meal tickets).

Donations are a serious matter, so let’s keep it serious.

FoOlRulez, with its extremely popular projects and blockbuster-level software, makes over 3000 dollars a day of revenue. This might look like a real lot of money, but there’s a lot of expenses involved, like paying for the protection to the Italian mafia, buying the new Nymph figures for all the team, 70 Euros of electricity every 74 hours, the unlimited Internet connection for all the team, Apple computers for the editors…

But we’re not going to ask you to pay $38.234 Euro a month. No, we’re decent(?) people and know that’s all for our own pleasure.

I’ll ask you one thing: the server leaks around 20€ a month, all from my pocket. While it is a huge server, costing us 60€ a month, we need it because our software, our releases, the 4chan archives and the API calls for a lot of power and bandwidth. The point is, we aren’t wasting the money. I’m actually working hard to cut the expenses, often harder than I’m working on the projects.

I wish I could say software success was making us money, but it’s all open source and used by other scanlators, who, like us, don’t have money to lend anyway. Even though nearly 200 sites use FoOlSlide, for us it’s the biggest expense of the year – in manpower and server power.

Therefore, if you like our releases, our software, or are an user of the 4chan archives, consider rescuing my pocket from paying the remaining server costs. We will then, as per usual, be able to keep working, keep our software updated, keep the releases flowing and publish the new software we have planned (which will be simply amazing stuff: the IRC bot for FoOlSlide, FoOlFuuka and more).

Thank you for your support, both now and in the past. The money we gather will be used strictly for our server costs and possible expenses incurred by our projects. We will, of course, remove the button if we start getting too much.