As the title says, we at FoOlRulez have been bought out. Our old “competitors” at Yen Press finally realized how much quality we offered our readers and offered us money to do their work for them.

What does that mean for releases?

• We will now require a subscription to access our FoOlSlide. We’re currently working on the access system, so the Slide will remain free until development is complete.
• We can now pick up any Yen Press-licensed series we like. Yes, this means we’re doing Spice and Wolf again.
• Releases will be delayed even further. There is a good reason why Yen Press requires six months to release a new volume, but I’m not allowed to tell you why. Just trust me on this one, okay?
• Our releases can no longer be hosted by aggregators. At all. Period. No questions. We’re official, you’re not. Deal with it, MangaFox and such ilk. (We are currently negotiating with Batoto about a “special exemption,” but no promises.)
• All releases done after the Yen Press buyout will be watermarked. We will not be retroactively watermarking our old releases. We and Yen Press are all lazy. (If this bothers you, I recommend using FoOlUnwatermark)

Finally, all of our backlogged releases will be dumped over the course of the next 24 hours. This includes things we started but never released for REASONS. Since they were produced before this buyout, the watermarking will not apply to these releases, either. I will list them below as they are made available.

• Seitokai Yakuindomo
  • Volume 7, chapters 170-178
  • Volume 7, chapters 179-180, and Volume 8, chapters 181-189
  • Volume 8, chapters 190-199 (delayed 24 hours for Hayate on Batoto)
• Spice and Wolf
  • Exclusive YenRulez Announcement Special
• Iincho
  • Chapter 1
  • Chapter 2

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!

On the 27th of next month, July, Kannagi will restart serialization. As the article says, three chapters will be released month by month, and then, due to the conditions of the author, it will slow down to a chapter every two or three months.

Also, since it’s been licensed by Bandai, we will have to block visualization and download from USA, in order not to damage the publishers.

Personally, I can’t wait to work again on my favorite manga. We will deliver as soon as possible.

Well, we did an april fool two years ago, and today it was added to the danish wikipedia page for scanlation.

Også scanlationfolk kender til aprilsnar. I 2009 forsøgte gruppen FoOlRulez sig således med en oversættelse af Hayate the Combat Butler kapitel 130, hvor der skiftedes mellem en række forskellige sprog som tjekkisk, tysk, nederlandsk og fransk. En spøg der dog ikke rigtig vandt gehør hos læserne, der havde forventet et kapitel kun på engelsk. At den velbesøgte side MangaFox først fik kapitlet 2. april gjorde ikke just sagen bedre. Så da FoOlRulez kom med den rigtige oversættelse et par uger efter, måtte man da også meget undskylde.

Which Opera-Translates to:
Also scanlationfolk know about April Fool. In 2009 the group tried FoOlRulez itself with a translation of Hayat the Combat Butler Chapter 130, which turns from a variety of languages ​​such as Czech, German, Dutch and French. A joke is not really met with sympathy from readers who had expected a chapter in English only. To the popular page MangaFox first got second chapter April did not exactly improve matters. So when FoOlRulez came with the correct translation for a few weeks after, it was necessary because too much apologizing.

Yeah, we had published a chapter of Hayate without announcing it, and people ran over to upload it everywhere. It featured every page written in a different correctly written language. I think you can still download it from the download section.

Troll successful, but I would have never guessed this would put us on Wikipedia two years later.

Gave us a good laugh.

MangaFox opens an online shop with unofficial merchandise.
Here’s the thread on MangaFox. And here’s the link to the shop.

In page 5 the author confirms that they’re “advertising” the manga by making their own merchandise. In other words, they’re stealing character designs and making money out of it without giving mangakas a cent.

We were going to allow MangaFox host our projects again from next month, until I saw about this. Without asking my team about it at all, I just won’t let them host our work anymore, forever.

Now, care to give them your credit card details?

As we’ve reached Milan, and went for a cappuccino… I messed up.

Awww look at that. ;_; Also, now my Mac is coffee flavoured.

Lately, some sites have been misbehaving, haven’t they? It’s time to start taking action.

Today it’s the turn of Mangafox, the biggest manga library on the internet, run by the NOEZ Group, people making money on the back of publishers and scanlators, some of which lose money.

FoOlRulez does not have policies about aggregators. We are against sites that profit from scanlations, but we aren’t usually active about it, and we let everyone outside our site do their own thing. At most, our credits page links to the source (foolrulez.org) with the manga available for download or through a manga reader.

This ends now, because Mangafox, currently the 1,154th biggest site in the world, has started going against the scanlators’ and publishers’ wishes by reuploading manga that had been taken down after explicit requests from either. More precisely, the NOEZ administrators reuploaded what the honest voluntary moderators locked to respect the scanlators’ or publishers’ wishes. An example everyone can understand is how MangaStream (who doesn’t allow anyone to rehost their series, mainly Bleach, Naruto and OnePiece) does have their series hosted on Mangafox.
Why is this? Because the visitors going on Mangafox were decreasing, which means less DLING DLING in their pockets. You read that right: they weren’t profiting enough from the scanlators’ and publishers’ work, so they decided to reupload what was requested to be taken down too.

Therefore, I will now ask for all of our chapters (something around 350 chapters currently) to be taken down, even though we have never requested such a thing before.

If you want to find more rageworthy material about Mangafox, look no further than here at reederforum, where they tracked down a bit of information about NOEZ, a group that has even has an office in New York, and owns various sites related to pirating, some of which offer premium services, that happen to not work. There’s further indepth analysis about the Mangafox management on reederforum, so make sure to read.

I’ve repeated many times that we don’t mean for scanlation to be profitable. If an aggregator can’t comply with the common rules of scanlation, they shouldn’t be allowed to be hosting our material. In fact, if you consider the facts you can read about in this very post, the situation is even worse than Tazmo, as Mangafox certainly is dozens of times more remunerative than Tazmo ever was. What happens when you Google the name of a manga? First result is Wikipedia, then AnimeNewsNetwork, and third is Mangafox most of time. They are not for nothing the 1,154th most visited site in the world, that basically means thousands of dollars a month. Right now, I haven’t enabled any advertising filter. It’s very possible that a Mangafox ad will come up. That’s advertising to get even more people, and even more money, simply said.

I hope you agree with us in wanting to let control be in the scanlators’ and publishers’ hands, and not in the hands of people who control aggregators without respecting the same honour follows scanlators apply to.

Further reading (will add as scanlators come up):
http://fth-scans.com/2011/03/12/i-give-up-already-_/

FoOlRulez, being deep in relation with the community, has a pretty straightforward take on what is happening. We’re very careful of the state of the scan-o-sphere, and have a lot of contact with other groups, be it because we shared projects now or in past, or because they use our software. We know at all the times what is happening.

I’m not the kind of guy who’ll write a rant, unless his computer broke.

I’ll just state explicitly what some of our rules are:

• Never involve money in scanlation, unless it’s just enough to support expenses.
• Never advertise ourselves. If people are eager to read, they’ll find.
• Never ruin each other’s fun. Scanlation is fun and contribution.
• Respect the projects of other scanlators, and always find dialogue.
• Contribute, with a thanks, with giving strong-hand, or, by respecting.
• Respect the author’s work, by not ruining the image for your own profit.
• Respect the author’s work, by publishing high quality material, if possible.
• Respect the publishers, and their requests. It’s their manga.

It’s our own decision that we don’t ever put a limit to who hosts our manga, and we won’t start doing this now. Anyone can host them, whenever they want.

Yet, we’ll be offended when someone profits from it, and tries making even more profit off it.

If you’re smart, don’t point out that you’re profiting from our scanlations.
We absolutely don’t like that.