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.

http://foolrulez.org/blog/2012/02/think-recruiting/

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.

But this is about anime.

Have you seen what the hell is going on out there? It’s like, the best season the past three years.

We’ve got Nisemonogatari that is a better made Bakemonogatari, we have Ano Natsu that it’s like killing your heart strings every five minutes, there’s Louise and Shana every week for ten more weeks, and there’s actually plot in both shows.

JC Staff is being glorious airing Shana, Louise, Ano Natsu, Kill Me Baby and Milky Holmes all at the same time. And, for how in my opinion Ano Natsu is the best show of the season, the one everybody should watch is absolutely milky holmes. It’s the second season, and it’s again the sleeper hit, with over the top retarded characters, detectives that blow up prisons and become farmers.

Ano Natsu, this is instead original work by JC Staff. If you wonder why many JC Staff shows are horrible, it’s because they mostly adapt for other companies, with really small budgets. Sometimes JC Staff risks their own money, and when they do, you get incredible shows. Ano Natsu is a sequel (or same universe) of Onegai Teacher and Onegai Twins, romance with some sci-fi elements. We’re currently on episode 4, and it often made me want to jump on the chair with the briefly-solved misunderstandings and confessions. The most amazing part, at the end of episode 4, the anime admits that it was just a prequel, and that from episode 5 begins the Natsu (tl note: natsu means summer). I am not sure how much better it could get, because I hardly watched anime with such fast development and well inserted comedy.
This is the anime every normal person watching anime should watch, and then watch Milky Holmes.

Nisemonogatari (Impostory?) is the second best anime of the season for sure. I don’t think I should make introductions, considering it’s the Bakemonogatari sequel. It’s the peak of SHAFT shows, with their crazy architecture, 300 square meters baths with petals on ground, tons of fanservice, head tilts, NTR, vampires living in the protagonist’s shadow (and talking a damn lot this time around). It’s actually better than Bakemonogatari up to this point, the production quality especially (not a slideshow!). There’s no need to introduce characters again, so everything progresses fast, fanservice as much as the plot.

Papakiki instead… Papa no iukoto wo kikinasai (You must listen to your father). Sister had married with a guy who had two daughters, had another daughter with him, then sister and husband die in a plane crash. Therefore, our protagonist RUNS AWAY with the three girls into his single room house, and has issues with having to take more jobs to pay for the food, leave alone that the girls are spoiled as any third millennium child. OF COURSE, the parents seem not to have had any money, the airplane company paid no money for the deaths, welfare doesn’t exist at all and 20 years old boys can run away from family with three kids.
It’s all pretty stupid, but the way it’s dealt is really lighthearted (there is the fact that parents just died to be dealt with, especially making understsnd the 3 years old child that mama and papa won’t come back). It’s about the hardships of living together and having to act as a father, not about fanservice or romance.
I really wish this anime had a more realistic setting, but, lookie lookie, there’s a whole franchise of stories around the anime story, completing with romance. It’s about how it’s narrated, which saves it from being horrible, unsatisfying, soulless, and makes it so light despite the issues of the characters that in any other anime would be cliched.

I don’t think there is much more worth to be watched this season, at least for the taste people browsing this website. I watch all JC Staff anime because I am a huge fanboy after all.

Outside the snow started sticking to the ground. Glad I don’t have to go anywhere this month beside when there’s exams!

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.

There is, of course, the overarching truth, which is that we always knew these services weren’t for permanent storage. Whoever uploaded files there did it with the knowledge the download would expire eventually. Surely they also knew there were better alternatives (or DDL from their servers when possible).

Realization

Yesterday I was, as usual, playing with entertaining myself on 4chan, when someone pointed out that “on the Internet, when something goes down, someone will replace it”. I answered “You must be new to the Internet”, as it hardly ever happens that an equivalent service is born immediately or at all after the old service is killed, leaving us moaning about the old days forever and ever.

Then I realized how there’s no need for alternatives yet, as there are plenty of file uploading services.

Moeney

The upload sites gave money to uploaders. Why would they do that when they can keep everything to themselves?

Fact is, there’s just so much competition, and pleasing the Downloaders gets very difficult. When everyone is driving the same car, the only solution is to steal the fuel of the other websites – the Uploaders.

It doesn’t matter if they put more ads or if they request money for faster and/or consecutive downloads. If they grab all the Uploaders, they will be getting all the Downloaders onboard anyway.

Greed wins over Quality again

I love when people upload to sites like MediaFire. There’s no wait times, there’s no bandwidth limits, no simultaneous download limits, the download button is green and very visible and it starts the download without a hassle. The ads are irritating and everywhere, but we can’t exactly ask them to give us their time and bandwidth for free.
Moreover, the people who have to pay for the accounts are Uploaders, not the Downloaders.

One negative thing about MediaFire – it’s a little harder to keep content online… what have you been uploading again?

The other popular sites on their download pages beside captcha and wait times, will instead give a list of options to get subsequent, simultaneous and wait-time-free downloads. This is how these sites are able to multiply their income: disregarding the Downloader in order to attract the Uploaders.

This is a well-wrought cycle that will kill the more honest upload services.

Uploader’s fault

Choosing a service to get money from pirated content is pretty despicable.

I believe the recession, financial crisis and number of jobless young people is making this a more widespread problem than it should be. The full-time job of many is to upload pirated content on these sites to make money through the downloads. The earnings that can be made through uploading for few hours a day are comparable to the wages of a proper job – minus the taxes of course.

The issue isn’t that pirated content doesn’t give royalties to the copyright holders, the issue is that it is now used to increase downloads and money.

This is making pirated content more widespread thanis requested or required, and the easier it is to reach, the more “normal” it will be considered by the Internet population. My “real life” friends wouldn’t know how to use torrent or p2p services (poor fools), but they know all about the direct download sites like… what MegaUpload was.

Final thoughts

I haven’t uploaded to services like these for 2 odd years. I download off them a lot though, stuff from SaHa and circles like that, doujins basically. Sometimes I happen to download MineCraft stuff, but that’s it.

I believe the ones who don’t distribute money or try too hard at getting Uploaders onboard will be the sites that will stay up… the longest. I seriously hope so.

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!)

We were down for one and a half days. Over 50.000 users raged hard. Don’t do SOPA. Or PIPA. They’re bad for your health.

I am a ferret.

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?

Let’s talk about it.

1. What’s new?
2. What’s missing?
3. When will it be public?
4. How will development proceed?

What’s new?

First of all, no HTML tables. We’ve removed them because tables are evil. This led us to a complete rewrite of the theme, which now looks more similar to Yotsuba than the original Fuuka.

We know that we broke all the userscripts like this, but we did some forward thinking. We’ve decided that we’d deal with userscripts ourselves, which translated into us rewriting the functionalities of the userscripts inside of FoOlFuuka, so they will always be updated without requiring a third party to fix your userscript.
Currently, the functions are:

• Localization of the timestamps into your local time
• Real time reading of threads
• Quick reply (no reload when posting)
• Quotes and backquotes show the post quoted/quoting when hovered
• thread-O-matic 2.39b (name subject to change)

These are the most important userscript functions. We plan to improve these functions and add more. This also allows us to use the integrated API to make the lightest requests possible and give you the snappiest experience we can provide.

That’s right, we have an API. We’ll make a page with examples when we can say it’s solid enough (read: not anytime soon).

The page loading seems incredibly fast, considering we’ve fiddled a lot with the SQL and we have a ton of PHP threads running. The main page doesn’t show the latest threads anymore, but the threads with the newest replies. It also shows how many images have been omitted. There’s SauceNAO support, and the images are stored on server until they hit certain limits, keeping them up for a few days.

What’s next?

We still have to finish the statistics. I am currently considering which plotting Javascript plugin I should use for the graphic ones, while the rest is working already (though not publicly).

We’re still using the Perl fetcher. The Java fetcher coding came to a halt while we were focusing on the PHP part of the software. We’ll first get the PHP done, then work on the Java.

We plan to create the thumbnails on FoOlFuuka instead of fetching them from 4chan, because we can achieve better quality at a lower size if we use our own software.

When this is done, we’ll get some rest and work on FoOlSlide again for a while.

When will it be public? What is missing?

FoOlFuuka is already public – open-sourced under Apache 2.0 – but it’s still missing a few parts.

What is missing are a more solid database structure (so we don’t need to mess with it too frequently), the Java fetcher that I am working on, some solutions for creating more boards without having to do so manually, and a way to automatically update the Sphinx search definitions.

I suppose we could be done within a month. After you’ll have it installed, you can use the autoupgrade function from the admin panel to stay updated.

There’s only one column to be added to each of the original tables, and while we’re still filling it, the _local table is not used anymore. For the rest, FoOlFuuka can use two separate databases, one for the internal functions and one for the original tables, or it can keep it all in one database.
It is easy to fall back to the original Fuuka. Just delete a column.

How will development proceed?

We will use the same method as we do for FoOlSlide: the most mentioned bugs and the most requested features will be fixed or added first. This allows us to keep high quality software suited for the majority of users.

Go ahead and ask for features or notify us of bugs. Just a reminder: bugs aren’t there to irritate you, nor are they “nasty”. We are not withholding features to get reactions out of you. Try not being too personal when pointing bugs out or requesting things, and you’ll get the most out of us.