Look, a journal!

Right, I've been meaning to post about various things for a while and haven't gotten around to it. So I could probably write a whole entry on any of these things, but I'm going to try to be brief.

- Went to see the new (well, new-ish) Harry Potter movie last weekend. I thought it was an improvement, actually. Or rather, I should say I enjoyed it more than I remember enjoying the book. I don't actually remember DH well enough to know what was changed -- besides the dance scene, since people made such a fuss over that. Personally, I have to say I don't really care whether the movies are pushing Harry/Hermione or not. I did think Nick Cave was kind of an odd choice of slow-dance music, but I like that song, I'm not complaining.

The Japanese subtitles were pretty cool -- the translators actually made up their own words for the spells and other invented language instead of just putting it all in katakana, which kind of surprised me. I can't remember any of it now, though.

- ... so I bought myself a PS3, finally. I waited until there were a bunch of games for it that I wanted, and I saved up for it and shopped around to find the lowest price, so it's not like it was some stupid impulse buy, but I'm still going "aaah I spent money oh god I hate spending money" about it. It's just kind of sitting there because I don't have any games for it, though at least now I can play my Japanese games without using SwapMagic.

- I bought the first volume of this old, obscureish manga called Leviathan (mostly because Sound Horizon did an album based on it) and, despite its... problems ("Evil foreign immigrants will destroy Japan!") I enjoyed it enough to want to keep reading. I couldn't find it at bookstores, so I Googled it hoping to find raws. Instead I found a scanslation, and now I'm wondering if this one is exceptionally bad or if I'd just forgotten how terrible scanslations usually are. Actual verbatim line:

"He was first and had a normal of pro-wrestling debut, then he was became stronger! I'm happy it was cool."

I kind of doubt this translator speaks either Japanese or English. I did find raws eventually and am kind of tempted to translate the thing myself, but this is a bad idea because (a) no one cares and (b) I like to start ambitious projects with great enthusiasm and then abandon them a couple of weeks later. This is why I'll never be a professional writer or translator. Well, that and a lack of skill and an inability to self-promote. Is it stupid that I still find that disappointing? I mean, naturally most people who want to do some kind of creative thing professionally don't succeed, so it's just a function of my white middle-class "you can be anything you want to when you grow up!" upbringing that I ever thought I could. Oops, tangent. Moving on to more positive things:

- My trip to the US is less than two weeks away! Exciting, though there are still several things that need to be sorted out. I'm going to be in New Jersey and then Washington DC and then New Jersey again, so if you're going to be in either of those areas and not horribly busy, let me know. Maybe we can hang out.

And if you guessed "writing that final paper that's due on Friday," you'd be wrong. No, rather than waste my time on something as silly as that, I spent my evening... scanslating a manga. To be precise, it's a two-chapter manga based on the song "Ark" by Sound Horizon.

It's a bit sad, really, because after spending all that time translating and editing it, I have no idea what to do with it. I don't have a website, I'm not working with a scanslation group, and apparently the online manga-reading sites (onemanga et al) don't let random people upload stuff to them or anything. So I will post it here, even though I don't think any of you guys are into Sound Horizon (not that you need to be to follow it), in the hopes that someone will take pity on me and read it so I won't have to feel like my efforts were for naught. Or something.

It's... difficult to explain what it's about, really. The first chapter is about the relationship between two siblings, a pretty normal brother and his increasingly-unhinged cult-member brother-complex-having sister. Then in chapter two it takes a detour through WTFville heading straight for Gainax Ending Land and I spend the last ten pages or so going "What? ... What?" It's also science fiction(ish), not that you could really tell from that description. ... It's better than it sounds, I swear. Though I will concede that it's not for everyone.

So here's the manga (both chapters are in the zip), and as an added bonus, here's the original song and the translation thereof (from which I cribbed more than a bit when translating the manga -- hey, it's my own work, I'm allowed to recycle it).