So, I’ve been working a lot on the manga translations link page of the Himechan pages:
http://www.wizardmoon.com/himechan/other_translations.html

All the other compilation pages out there are out-dated by about one to two years, ie. no one has maintained them or kept them up to date for the last one or two years. Now, these other compilation pages only had about 100 or so links at the most, so I thought there weren’t very many manga translations out on the net.

Boy, was I wrong about that.

Three days of intensive work later, I have over 1100 entries on that page! I had no idea. I mean, I know the internet is vast, but I still didn’t realize manga translation sites were so popular.

However, that wasn’t the biggest revelation during this project. I realized that I was not keeping up with current net hipness and available technology. I first had an inkling of this when I would talk in-person with fellow anime fans here in Austin. Everyone is talking about digisubs. Apparently, VHS fansubbing is going out of style, and now everyone is downloading digisubs off the net.

I don’t know where you download these, what the format is, nothing. I think you can find them on usenet, irc, ftp… I don’t know. I’m behind. But I was already aware of that and had a tickling at the back of my mind that I had to research this new source of fansubs.

Well, these kids are also doing fan-translation manga where they actually scan the manga in and replace the Japanese words with the English words. They are called “scanlations.” And they are beautiful. They obviously take a lot of work, but they have the work all divided out. One person does the translations, one person does the scanning, and another person does the editting.

And the sites are really lovely! These people do really great website design. Don’t believe me? Check out a few:

These are a couple with scanlations. There are a lot more than just these two.
http://www.anime-anime.com/
http://www.studiorobb.com/manga.html

Anyways, here are a couple pages with beautiful layouts:
http://haneoka.net/
http://www.amalthia.net/literalx/

People had “blogs” and were using Streamload to share files. All these things that I never heard of. I felt so behind… me! I love the internet. I surf the internet on a regular basis and play with it, and I still am not keeping up.

I wondered how my kids would be different than me. I mean, I listened to heavy metal and wore awful metalhead clothes when I was a rebellious teenager. As I got older, I started hearing heavy metal as my mom did (loud annoying crap) and I quit dressing in rags. So I expected my kids to listen to some loud annoying music and dress badly.

Life is never what you expect, is it? Kids are internet-savvy and have their own internet shorthand and language. They talk to each other through their blogs or on IMs with their kid-like shorthand and create webpages to showcase their creations and thoughts. That’s how my kids will be different from me.

Looking at all those pages while creating the manga translation compilation page was very sobering. My design is weak. There are some really lovely non-professional pages out there. In fact, I would say that the best pages are non-professional because they don’t have to stay within a corporate look and feel which always has the feel of white bread.

It’s been educational and cold splash in the face.