errare humanum est

http://commiesubs.com/the-age-of-fansubbers-and-money/#more-5662

Just want to respond/add to some of what Commie’s leader says here.

First off, Commie is an odd group. They’re relatively new, and I’m not sure how exactly they became so popular. I always thought they were sort of a gg-in-its-trolling-prime ripoff. They freely do more or less straight CR rips, but they also do actual fansubbing at the same time. I have a weird theory wherein leechers judge a group’s quality by the amount of shows they do each season. It was true for Shinsen (who were popular when the work was shit but there was lots of it and unpopular when they did fewer series at much higher quality), and it was true for gg (who seemed to sub all the “best” shows each season, had all the “best” resources, trolled the hell out of people and still got all kinds of downloads, which has seemingly caused their demise now since they don’t do simulcasts and almost everything is simulcast, so leechers don’t seem them as the go-to group anymore). Formula has never been that popular because, even when we were doing four series at a time, none of them were that popular.

Anyway, I’ve never watched a Commie release and don’t ever plan to. Not because I don’t think they do decent work, but because I was around before any of their main staff was, I watched them start off as shitsubs and evolve by emulating gg.

The point he raises about Commie not caring about streaming sites uploading their works: Streaming is not an exact replication of a video file. The quality will never be equal. Perhaps if manga sites uploading LQ jpegs, reproducing the scanslators’ works at a lower quality, they would be less upset, but an image file has a tiny filesize. Manga sites have exact replicas of a scanslation group’s work.

The point he raises about fansubbing being more work: Yes and no. It’s a lot easier to proof 12 pages than to QC 22 minutes, sure, but stuff like encoding and cleaning are things that take time. They both can come from sources of varying quality and must be made better by the encoder or cleaner. Both become easy when one knows what one is doing through experience. The amount of work is quantifiably smaller for scanslators, yes. The medium they choose to work with makes it so. But take, for example, Elfen Lied. 12 anime episodes, 107 chapters. Yes the stories don’t line up properly (with the anime’s story ending way before the manga’s story), but do you think leechers will be happy if the scanslators just stop where the anime stops?

Fansubbing is alive because of donations? BULLSHIT. I haven’t spent any money on servers or whatnot for more than a year now, and the group isn’t in any worse condition for it. We have no problems with just staff members seeding a release from our homes. Perhaps their data usage would be lower if they didn’t have 40 staffers downloading shit all the time. But fansubbing is NOT based on donations. While Formula did take donations for a couple years, we never had “donation drives” or had little bars on the side of the front page with the amount of money we needed each month to “break even.” If you’re spending money on fansubbing, don’t expect it to be subsidized by your viewers, period.

The fact that a site is paying ad revenue to host scanslations is very odd. I can’t see it lasting very long.

So one of the dudes I work with is on the committee the bank uses to field questions from the staff that they aren’t really able to ask themselves due to working in different departments, etc. He shared some with us, and they were pretty ridiculous, like “can we automatically have our birthdays off?” or “we should be able to wear jeans every Friday.”

So I felt like my question was somewhat decent. Basically, I work 30 hours a week and only accrue 27 hours of PTO in 52 weeks, assuming I usually end up actually only working 29.75 hours per week. I should also mention it’s also policy for every employee to take a mandatory week off in case they are doing something dirty. Full-timers accrue a higher percentage of PTO per hour worked, plus they work 10 hours more per week, which ends up being around 140 hours, or 18 days. Oh, plus full-time employees get paid holidays while part-timers do not, so there’s that.

This was probably acceptable several years ago when the part-timers were mostly college students working ~20 hours a week and each branch had two, plus 4 floaters. However, these days all the part-timers work 30 hours a week, and we basically can never take a sick day since we just don’t accrue enough PTO.

I felt this was a valid question. HR did not, citing exit interviews as sources who said the PTO policy was most generous. It should be noted that I don’t think any part-timers have quit since I’ve worked there. It just must be hard for a salaried person to understand that A) getting paid less, B) not getting paid holidays, and C) accruing only the minimum amount of PTO makes me a little upset.

It should be noted that I have applied for several FT positions when they came available but didn’t get any due to insufficient experience. This includes one position where the person hired had literally no banking experience and another IT help desk position where they guy had an A+ cert and nothing more.

I have a small glimmer of hope, though, as a FT position opened at our main office. I have no desire to apply for it since all the bigwigs have their offices right next to the teller line and I stress out enough at work as things are, but the FT dude who got hired into our branch last summer wants to transfer since it’s closer to home for him. I’d love to stay where I am but just go from PT to FT. That said, the chances of all this happening are slim to none as my luck is rated E-.

Also I get the impression that my dad is going to throw me out soon, which sucks since there’s no possible way I can afford to move out right now.

I have come full circle.

Start watching anime
Start watching fansubs
Start fansubbing
Stop watching anime
Stop fansubbing
Re-start watching anime
Re-start watching fansubs…

Watching Carnival Phantasm and loving it!

I recently did a from-memory write-up of Formula’s history for our fifth anniversary, and I was bored this evening and ended up sampling several episodes of my previous work. It’s funny how many emotions come flooding back just by watching. I wanted to journal those emotions and thoughts here.

For some reason I still have Sakameki Koto’s folder named the way it was when we made the batch (starting with a bracket) so it’s on top of my HDD’s listing. I watched the last episode and I was still able to connect with the characters, probably better than when we subbed it. I wish it had a sequel.

Next I watched episode 7 of Arakawa UtB since that’s the last one Formula subbed. The way it’s timed and edited is still my preferred way of viewing fansubs, though there were a couple lines I would edit differently now. I wish we could have finished season one although the show was quite a task and we were sick of the humor by the time we dropped it.

Next were the Votoms OVAs, which were kind of odd for me because I remember being assigned to the Pailsen Files by Vincent and wondering what the fuck was going on. I watched and came to enjoy the original series sometime around the middle of the Pailsen Files, so doing Big Battle and the Last Red Shoulder were fun. I still remember watching the first HD episode of the Phantom Arc on my PS3 and gawking at how lovely it looked.

Next was Casshern SINS. I watched the second to the last episode since the final one is the denouement and not as action-packed. I think this was my favorite TV series I’ve ever worked on. The staff got along great, the work had very few delays, the show had very few typesets (lol), and in general I very much liked the series. Still do, though I have yet to watch the official Blu-rays. Yes I did buy them.

I sampled CODE-E but was disgusted by my typesetting, haha. But it is a good reflection of that period in fansubbing right before anyone had transport streams.

I caught the last episode of Gundam 00 Season 2. I have mixed feelings about the series. I still don’t have any copy of our version of Season 1 since Edward_K’s 180MB “HD” encodes were so terrible (the Xvids were pretty shit too, to be honest). I wish we would have simplified the font styling, but I think our work still stands well. It should be noted that the same team who worked on Casshern SINS was working on 00S2 at the same time. We did not “compete” to release first like we did in S1 and I think our work shows it, though I do remember that I had to be around every Sunday(?) night to get the styling and QC done.

Kyou Kara Maou! R… Terrible show. I had no clue what was going on and no desire to watch the original series. I remember at this point that Vincent still thought I could make karaokes, lulz. If you mean shoving a bunch of things into the automate thing and hoping they all worked together, then sure… This was Aegisub 1.10.

I still get upset when I watch Macross F. We put a ton of effort into the first 8 episodes or so, doing karaokes for ALL the songs and such. I’ve never done so much karaoke timing in my life as I did on this series, and I believe it’s the reason Formula and Shinsen stopped doing OP/ED karaokes. The TLC was an asshole who handed in reports with a few good changes but more bad ones. Then he would check to make sure all his changes were applied, and if not, he’d apply them himself. Over and over. Many of the translation mistakes in the first dozen episode are his fault. It came to the point that the translator, who did not speak to me very often, told me of this and had me send him the TLCer’s list each episode to approve or deny any changes. This was after Vincent and getfresh abandoned the project after the halfway point. We switched most of the staff after episode 14 and stopped doing karaoke altogether. I still can’t watch the show without feeling upset that we wasted so much work.

Keitai Shouko? FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU, I used Comic Sans as the main font. PINK AND PURPLE COMIC SANS. And the wrong girl won.

Mai-Otome 0? Wish we could’ve done the other episode, but I had nfc what was going on.

Sword of the Stranger… The TLC who fucked up Macross F? He translated this and also tried to override me as timer and editor many times. Also there were hardsubs somewhere and martino had to reencode and remux over 9000 times. Bad project.

Occult Academy? My first CR rip sub. It was fun and pretty easy with just two people working on it.

Ookamikakushi? Shit show, but I remember being called out for having lots of errors in episode 1, and many errors in probably half the episodes due to rushing. I always meant to go back through the show and fix them all for the batch, but it wasn’t worth it.

Phantom? I wish it hadn’t got licensed, sort of. I wish Chibi had better translators. I was genuinely excited for the show and pirated the VN (eventually buying a legit copy). I only got as far as the equivalent of episode 4, though.

Shiki. I did this show with Umee as a rip, but it was a genuinely different show with some awesome moments. I had a good time subbing it.

I refuse to watch Shugo Chara, lol. Too many bad memories.

Tales of Symphonia? I watched parts of the first episode and it’s funny how the characters are so naive, with no clue what lie ahead of them, just like we were back then. Back in 2007, when I was only 23… damn.

Shin Mazinger was a bitter show for me. It was the last series I did that was just Shinsen, and it was when the group was dying. I was timing, editing and typesetting the show after Ruruka (editor) decided he didn’t like it after a couple episodes, and then I had to QC it myself too after episode 10 or so because the couple QCs Shinsen still had were not interested in the show. Vincent was gone by then so there was no one to rally the troops. Not to mention we were going against a group that had worse translation/editing but was faster, and therefore better than Shinsen. Plus people didn’t think it was real HD. I can’t remember which show it was but Shinsen really did release the first episode or two of a show that was really an upscale. It was before I was there, so like early 2007 or late 2006. Anyway, that was part of the shitsen legacy. I even went so far as to “anonymously” compare an episode of theirs to ours.

http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=cmt&id=16727#c100796

lulz…

Of course, this is just a portion of the crap I worked on… ugh. So much wasted time.

So earlier this year I thought it would be cool to “invest” in physical silver by buying pre-1964 American coinage. I got in late July and early August when silver was like $30-32 an ounce. I spent about $900 in all. Within a few weeks, silver was above $40 an ounce because of the “debt crisis.” I got antsy about selling on ebay since I didn’t know if prices would drop straight back down or stay afloat, so I just took them all to a local coin store. Made about $200 in the end, but I lost out on at least $400 more if I would’ve sold on ebay.

Ebay is kind of weird when it comes to this kind of thing. At times you can get silver at spot price all day long, sometimes for days on end. I did this in July and I did it again a couple weeks ago when silver was right around $30. Buying at spot price basically means going to coinflation.com, seeing what kind of coins are in the auction you see, add up the melt value and compare to the auction’s going price. Like I said, at times those auctions end right at or very slightly above spot. Most of the time, though, ebay is actually higher than spot, sometimes by as large as 10% higher. As silver goes lower, it attracts more people looking to do some short-term investing. They assume the spot will go back up soonish and therefore feel OK bidding higher than spot, which is something you can really only do on ebay. However, most of the time that cuts into the potential profits they could make by being pickier with their bidding– finding miscategorized stuff and whatnot.

Silver at this moment is down below $29, but people are paying more on ebay than I was when I did some buying at $31. Weird.

And don’t even get me started on gold. I tried looking at “smaller valued” gold coins. The premium on gold must be crazy, because everything I saw was at least 50% over spot…

So in the past few months I’ve played and beaten Fallout New Vegas (plus all the DLC), Mass Effect 1 & 2, Half-Life Episode 2, Deux Ex HR, GTA4, FEAR 1&2, Portal 2, and almost beaten Skyrim. All on PC. How much have I played consoles? Uh, my PS3 hadn’t been turned on before yesterday since right after PSN went down in April. I did play some emulated SMW, but probably like 4 hours.

So why do I seem to enjoy PC gaming more? It’s more expensive — yes, the games are generally cheaper and Steam has awesome sales, but one must keep upgrading a computer as newer games come out. I built my current PC a year ago and I’ve already upgraded the RAM and video card. It’s arguably less comfortable, too, sitting in an office chair at a desk, with my face 18 inches from the screen.

I wonder if I like the ADD-ness of playing a game, being able to quickly shift+tab and check a walkthrough, look at my other monitor to check IRC or whatnot, plus have the TV on a few feet away. Most PC games I play allow for quicksaving anytime, rather than just at save points or checkpoints.

Then there’s the raeg. I very rarely feel the need to ragequit PC games. Dunno why, it just never comes up. I play stuff at a “normal” difficulty most of the time. I tossed in Mirror’s Edge today and found myself ready to tear the controller apart in the second chapter. And then more in the third chapter. And even more in the fourth chapter. I had to quit after that for fear of really breaking the controller.

Later I popped in FF13 since I never got very far in it (about 25 hours, it seems) and I want to finish it by the time 13-2 is out. I picked up the nuances of battle (i.e. switching paradigms a billion times) again pretty quickly. Except battles are maddening. I either 5-star smaller enemies or have to spend an hour beating the huge ones. And God help me when I get one of those down to like 20% health and it one-hits me. Since the game has no obvious leveling and I struggle only at times, I have no idea if I should proceed with the storyline or grind.

I almost bought a 3DS recently. Then I stepped back. Why? I have like 8 games for my fat DS, which I bought right before the DS Lite came out. In my mind, when I have an apartment of my own, I’ll have my PS3 and a Wii U hooked up to my HDTV and my SNES and Gamecube hooked up to my tube TV in another room. I have a Gameboy Player already, so I want to upgrade my DS at some point, either to the 3DS or DSi XL. However, I should probably get an apartment before I spend more money on another handheld I’ll rarely play.

So if you read back far enough, you’ll see that I overbought an ’06 Mustang GT back in 2009. I was paying $375/month for the loan by itself when I was only bringing home about $1000 on a good month. After 10 months of happiness and paying the minimums on all my other debts, I had decided I was going to quit my job soon and needed to find something cheaper. I ended up with an ’01 Ranger even though I had no need for a truck and the gas mileage was roughly the same. It was only $244 a month, which I felt was cheap enough for me to make some headway on my credit cards. Unfortunately my new job pays about $150 less per month than the old one, so the money saved on car payment was moot.

After driving the truck for five months and a little over 1500 miles, it threw the accessory belt on Thanksgiving 2010. Luckily I was only a few miles outside town, but it was a major inconvenience. The tires were also shit, and I had trouble getting around in rain, let alone snow. So it got new tires to the tune of $600 delivered/installed. In February of 2011, I took it to a local shop to see what it needed after hearing a noticeable clunking in the suspension. Turned out to be a broken sway bar endlink, but the truck also needed a couple new gaskets, new timing belt and water pump. Ended up being around $1500. At that point I’d spent more on fixing the truck than I had on payments.

I’d been considering a new car since last winter, as the truck was almost impossible to drive with any snow on the ground, even with 400+ pounds in the bed and new tires. In July I test drove a Nissan Juke, It was awesome, but it was too small for a crossover and the gas mileage was terrible for a 1.8 turbo. Plus it was way too expensive.

I continued looking, but not seriously. About a month ago I tried to get a good price on an ’08 Altima coupe that had spent half its 3 year life on dealer lots, to no avail. I had my eye on cars here and there, but they would get sold before I could convince myself to test drive one. I almost went to drive an ’08 xD with like 50K that was priced at $11K-ish, but the deal was too good and someone grabbed it quickly.

Suddenly a trifecta of Hondas appeared — an ’04 RSX with 46K miles, an ’05 Accord V6 with 67K miles, and an ’07 Fit with 50K miles. All of them were black, and all were manuals. The RSX eventually got pinned with a pricetag of $11.5. It sold quickly, and rightly so, since it was a smoking deal. I decided to give the Fit a go. If I liked it, it got way better gas mileage than my truck, had half the miles, tires would be cheaper, etc.

I test drove it and loved it. The transmission was just the right amount of notchy, it had nice power for being a 1.5L, and it handled great — plus it had half the mileage of my truck and was a Honda.

This is where things get odd. I told the salesman that I was interested in the car, and that I’d come back after work and talk about a price. I came back, filled out the credit app, and the salesman immediately asks if I have another job or source of income. Now, I know I make shit for money, but I don’t technically pay any rent/mortgage, my credit usage % is lower than it’s ever been, and my credit scores border on excellent. Plus a good price on the car, an OK deal on my trade and a decent interest rate would only get me paying like $40 a month more. So we go to the main showroom where the finance guy is and I get to play the waiting game. Salesman comes out and tells me the Carfax for my truck is good — no prior accidents, good maintenance records, but four previous owners. $4000, they say, despite the fact that I bought it with only 7K fewer miles 18 months earlier for $6500. Plus I owed about $200 more on the truck than I’d calculated. I wondered if my most recent payment hadn’t been applied yet, though it had been received and processed more than two weeks earlier. I asked with some uncertainly if the price of the car was negotiable at all. Salesman said they will lower the price of the car if it’ll help the loan approval…

I went home with a sour taste in my mouth and didn’t expect to hear from them again. Lo and behold, the next day I get a call and the saleman says they got me approved. Didn’t mention any numbers, though, so I was not all that interested. I didn’t sleep well for the next three days as I pondered over the situation. I thought it was odd that no one called and bugged me again.

The following Tuesday, he calls back. Out of town for the weekend, wanted to tell me again that I got approved. I told him to get back to me with the numbers. He comes back and says $260 a month for 72 months. All my figuring had $280 a month for 60 months, but I guess they did not budge on my trade-in price. It was raining that day, and my truck likes to lock up the rear tires whenever it’s humid out, plus it had been developing a rather sticky gas pedal lately. Ultimately, I nearly rear-ended someone because of these factors. My mind was made up. I justified the 72 month thing by telling myself that my credit cards would be paid off soon, I’d have my dad paid back after another year, and I’d be saving a lot on gas. Ended up getting the car itself for $11.3 (marked at $14K), with a total of $14.8 financed.

Went in before work Wednesday, signed the papers and drove to work in my new Fit. Drove it home and back for lunch, then home after work. Drove it back to work. No issues.

Got in to get something to eat for lunch. It makes a terrible noise when in neutral with the clutch out, goes away when I push the clutch in. Makes a weird whining noise when in gear and moving, but the car drives fine. Hard to shift into first and especially reverse. I’m pissed. I’ve driven this thing less than 30 miles. I drive back to work (just over a mile) and call the sales guy. He says he’s off for the day, but he’ll make arrangements for me to take it in tomorrow and get a loaner car. He’ll call me in the morning and leave me a message so I can do this on lunch. He’ll take care of me, he says. This is Thursday at like 1:30.

Friday morning passes, no phone call. My lunch break passes, no call. My shift ends, no call. At this point my car has been sitting at work for half the time I’ve owned it. I get my dad to follow me there in case the transmission grenades. Get there, find the nearest salesman, ask where my dude is… Oh, he just left, he had a death in the family, the guy says. Now, I’m not a cold person, but it’s bullshit that he couldn’t call me and get this five minute transaction done. I tell this other salesman the story, he gets his manager on the phone, I get an ’11 Elantra to drive while my car gets looked at. Other sales guy tells me he will call Saturday regardless (the Honda shop is only open 8-12 Saturdays, apparently). He never calls, but whatever, I’m driving a car they could be selling and I’m not really his problem anyway.

At this point I am very conflicted. The interwebs tell me the problem more than likely is the input shaft bearing, a cheap part that is conveniently buried deep inside the transmission. I’m worried that I’m going to be forced to pay for this, even though I had the car for a day when the problem developed, because I bought the car “as-is.” My only recourse to this is that the dealership did a “100 point inspection” which was invalidated — as I was leaving the dealership they flagged me down. A passing tech noticed I had a brake light out. I’d noticed this when I did the original test drive, before the inspection was done. Since this one point was not truthfully checked, who’s to say the tech actually checked anything? Or if he too experienced the issue and did some minor fix hoping that it would last longer than it did?

In the worse case, I’m prepared to ruin my credit. If they say I bought the car as-is and won’t fix it for free, I’ll proceed to tell them to go fuck themselves. I’ll then leave the car wherever they leave it after it’s been fixed and never pay the payments. It’ll get “repo’d” and I will have gotten out of the contract, if only by fucking my credit for the next seven years and having to pay whatever fees are involved. I don’t want it to come to this, of course, but I’m not paying for repairs on a car I owned for one day.

The key to medium-term financial security is the ability to claim several children on your taxes while working a job with shit pay or no job at all, preferably with some sort of “disability.” Your state will pay you for food and a faux weekly paycheck. The national government will pay you another faux monthly paycheck since you’re “disabled,” plus refund all of your income taxes once a year and pay you five grand yearly just for having your kids living with you half the time.

Yeah, I jelly. I do work a shitty paying job and wouldn’t be able to support myself even if I had no debt, but I’d never take government handouts unless it was life or death.

Are extended console development times giving us shittier hardware in the end?

Think about it. Sony and Nintendo split ways on the CD-ROM attachment for the SNES in 1991. PSX came out in 1994; so, there were four years when Sony was developing the console. It was well outdated by 2000 when the PS2 came out. PS2 games still look pretty good today on tube TVs, although anti-aliasing often left room for improvement. PS2 development probably started 96-97ish (too last to actually find it).

PS3, though is where things have changed. Nowadays game consoles are more or less purpose-built PCs. This presents a problem, however, since PC development is still cruising on with faster CPUs, RAM, graphics cards and file transfer rates. The PS3 came out in 2006, and it was already outdated in terms of graphical power and RAM speed. The Cell processor was hailed as something out of a supercomputer.

But today we have publicly available 8 core processors. There are graphics cards with 2GB of DDR5 RAM and 1500+ stream processing units. Most mobos support up to 16GB of RAM. And all of these will be outdated in two years.

Although game developers won’t make games that only the top 5% of PCs can play, being forced to make games that will easily port over to an aging PS3 with a ten-year lifespan can only be called a hindrance to the developer.

Then there’s the price thing. A top end PC will run you $1500 easily — talking mobo, CPU, graphics and RAM only here. Add a couple hundred for an SSD, and a few hundred more for a couple 3D monitors. PS3 was $600 when it came out, mostly because of the Cell and Blu-ray. It was a calculated risk by Sony, who was still battling HD-DVD back then. It makes sense now, when a new PS3 is half that price with a better form factor and more HDD space, but by now you can upgrade to a CPU/graphics card/BD-ROM drive for almost the same money.