FoOlRulez » scanlation

SCIENCE. Weird colors. Scanlation. And irchighway.net.

woxxy — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 11:07:00 +0000

First thing you might have asked yourself, is who is the girl in the picture. Well, that’s guorbatschow while doing SCIENCE, mind you.

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

MangaHelpers might be back at trying to pull a stunt on fan scanlation.

woxxy — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:40:00 +0000

NOTICE: As the person who makes the accusation over the link I provided is not trustable, I’d like you to take this piece of news with a grain of salt.

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.

Do you remember some months ago, in September, how we’ve made a post about MangaHelpers? It was about MH wanting to make scanlation “legal” through getting rights by VIZ Media to sell fanmade scanlations. The idea was basically paying little amounts to scanlators, so MH would become a shop to buy translations made by fans. There’s still all the material available if you want to check it out, within the manga reader.

First, some good music: Triangular, sung by Rin Kagamine. Be ready for this addicting song. If you got a nicovideo account, listen to this in a higher quality here.

An obvious uproar, and negative comments against MH were shed, as such an action would be changing the whole scanlation scene at its roots, intimidating a large number of groups, bringing money in a ecosystem that doesn’t need money to exist. And that wouldn’t work if much money was to be spent by the readers. In the end it was just a plan to make MH owners richer, despite the readers and their community in particular.

Well, I found more fresh news while browsing randomly websites that were linking to FoOls. I can’t say anything for sure regarding the person who shared this, as this person posted in various forums to “share” this info. There are few chances that this news might be just a troll. Just as much as past time though.

Here’s the link to what I’ve found and is what the person who leaked the information the first time said:

[The post in the link asked to share, I hope I am allowed to steal this pic]

Kodansha would be now the group acquiring MangaHelpers itself. It’s the same Kodansha who C&D’d MangaHelpers about their manga in that same September 2009. Maybe it’s even more interesting that Kodansha would be persecuting groups not quitting scanlating their manga “legally”. Which is indeed a pretty heavy statement, as this would be not just a friendly “C&D”. But still, the plan would be to change MangaHelpers in a shop, just like last time.

As a member of a scanlation group I would actually worry about how the environment in which we “play” would change. Truthfully, all scanlators (98% of us) work completely for free, if not even lose money into it. The true money makers are websites that store loads of work made for free, while we just live with it, losing most of the glory. And still, most of the people do it both for the fun of it and for the sense of contribution to the scanlation scene, don’t care much about these lucrative websites .

What MH seems unaware of (or rather, doesn’t care about) is that by doing that they will destroy this ecosystem. Because, truly, do you think people would read stuff randomly like people do nowadays? I am quite sure most people first will enjoy a whole series before buying the manga “in order to possess it and contribute” (heck, I do it too), and that way the publishers will make moar money as well, without even needing to sell licenses.

Money doesn’t belong in scanlation, despite what few black sheep says. Indeed there are people in scanlation groups who think they deserve being paid, but let’s remind them: the material we work on is not ours. So that’s why you shouldn’t moan for more money than for what you need for your server (and don’t go buy a 400 € a month server, kids!) and for the RAWs you need. And you should get that money through ADs on your blogs and some donations. Remember also that you’re much more prosecutable if you earn money off it.

As that post in a forum calls: keep your eyes open, because such a change at MangaHelpers might hurt the scanlation scene. In case, make your voice sound.

Photoshop CS5 and the Impact on Scanlation

guorbatschow — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:41:12 +0000

It’s hardly four days till Adobe launches the next iteration of its – I dare say – most successful and most pirated piece of software. Here is the perspective and expectations from someone who had experience with Photoshop since version 7 and who avidly uses it for tasks involving images, including of course, scanlation.

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.

Wikipedia does not recognize the fact that scanlators exist.

woxxy — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:29:40 +0000

This is one of those controversial problems that show how information is curved by morals that aren’t shared by everyone.

I’ll be honest, in FoOlRulez we perfectly know what are we doing with scanlation, and how the law is being really “nice” to overlook scanlators, as only the companies publishing official mangas can start the action, and not anyone else. We also know, the companies use the mangas scanlators make famous in order to sell more.

Now, what is happening in Wikipedia (or at least, thanks to its members) is simply ridiculous: scanlation groups shouldn’t be mentioned, no, not even by scratching the limits. The only reasonable story is about Snoopycool being C&D’d (what happens before legal action, asking to cease the work on a manga).

One of the members (not a team members, yet an old user) of FoOlRulez planned to try making a FoOlRulez page in wiki, according to purely real informations and statistics, giving also a decent number of sources, that can’t be called officially reliable, yet solid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoOlRulez (the article might be already deleted once you broswe it). The article is of course, beside the really logic request of deletion for lack of notability (basically, being named on magazine or newspapers), it’s also been tagged as made by the owner of FoOlRulez (which is not, I am not on Wikipedia) so not a reliable person, and has been called out for illegal material on this website.

I have a precise point of view on the fact that wikipedians are trying to avoid scanlations and fansubs, after I read few discussions.

Scanlation (and anime fansubs) are a great share of today’s internet’s band use, and seeing Google trends and Alexa, one can easily say that it’s more than 5% of the overall. Five percent is a real lot on the internet, and it’s going to grow steadily by going down with the age of the users, and most likely around 13-24 years old there will be a heap of anime watchers on the internet over 15%.
There are groups, king on all Dattebayo (talking about fansubs to not be in conflict with scanlation groups), with millions of viewers every month, but since it was never mentioned on a newspaper, or magazine, or notable blog, they are noone. Who doesn’t know Dattebayo here? Do you even watch anime? Dattebayo for sure deserves a post, as it has been a really influential group not only into fansubs, but also to millions of watchers. Also if not all groups should be named, there are some who signed a age.
Anime/Manga news websites aren’t notable, none of them. Anime News Network too, it’s not a reliable source for Wikipedia, and furthermore, will never talk about fansubs or scanlations. Being there no sources considered reliable for Wikipedia, there’s no chance something about anime/manga that is beyond the episode/chapter and official news from the mangaka/studio will get into it. We know what’s behind the curtain, and it’s far bigger than what’s written.
Notability rules promote the bad guys: what’s Crunchyroll doing there? They make people pay for fansubs, and there’s a wikipedia about the controversy. It feels like a newspaper: the bad things are highlighted, and criminals are far more known than who does a (more) honest life. This is all because Crunchyroll was for negative reasons on the newspapers.
Dealing scanlation like a taboo, where an encyclopedia should be open to including anything, shall it be legal or not. Not linking to (suspectedly) copyright infringing websites can be understandable, but not even mentioning is not a valid reaction to the phenomena that has spread in last six years, counting over 800 active scanlators in the last 6 months. Is it a lot? It’s a lot more if you scan all the years.

I honestly think Wikipedia users in manga/anime section are misbehaving, bringing up a flag of cleanliness while dealing with Wikipedia like their blog instead of a website where facts should be told, and not only the nice side of the world. Yes, even if this is the world of Otakus, there should be maximum seriousness, as we know there’s a “dark side”, that, supposedly, is in FoOlRulez too.