good news/bad news time

Bad news first because I believe in happy endings: I don’t have any new translations for you. I’m back to school, it’s busy, blah blah blah. It’s always in the back of my mind, though, so as soon as I get some spare time I’ll be on it.

Good news: while I was away I got an email from a lovely lady over at MangaScreener (I believe they’re more active on their IRC channel than the website would imply) who was interested in picking the I’ll project back up! If you’ve read the manga from the beginning you’ll know that they produced the first eight volumes in high quality and now they’d like to finish it the same way. So I have high hopes that in the future there will be much more, shall we say, easily read scanlations of our favourite manga available than I have been able to provide on my own. Of course it’s still a work in progress and I’ll in the meantime be working on finishing Volume 13 and 14 in my usual translations for those of you who have had the patience to keep up with those.

When I hear more news you guys will be the first to know!

volume 12 complete

Get out your tissues because it’s the end of Volume 12! I have a nice big release to celebrate the almost-end of summer, even if this volume ends on a heart-clenching note. Chapter 69 and 70 scanlated by zack z and translation of Chapter 71 and 72 close off Volume 12. I’m going away for a week without internet so I might get a start on Volume 13 while I’m trying not to die of heat, so if there are any problems I won’t be able to get to them until I get back, but leave me a comment and I’ll get back to it.

Also because I noticed that a lot of I’ll fansites have gone down, I reuploaded all the Hiroyuki Asada artwork I have in my folder to photobucket so that it wouldn’t be completely lost to the internet. You can find that here.

As always, releases can be found on the Download Page!

update: and because I’m an idiot, we also have scanlations of chapter 67 and 68!

Reuploading chapters & MangaShare

Hi guys, I don’t have any new translations for you today but I’d like it if you read on anyways. Especially if you arrived here from a MangaShare link (I’ve seen a spike in my visitors count so some of you must be drifting by).

I subscribe to the mangashare.com rss feed for new chapters of weekly manga. Recently I noticed that someone had been uploading chapters scanlated by “unknown” with links to an upload blog, so out of curiosity I downloaded a few to see whether these were entirely new scanlations, someone using my translations without telling me, or reuploads of my and others’ scanlations. As you can tell superficially from how many chapters they’ve uploaded, it is clearly the latter. Credits pages have been included, which is better than some do, but there’s no link back to this website or MangaScreener’s (who did the earlier chapters). So I left a comment asking for a link back to this site (actually, I left two, because I don’t know the language the blog’s system is written in and my comments have never appeared on the site nor received a reply so I assume they’ve been screened) and today I noticed two more chapters go up on MangaShare – Zack Z’s most recent scanlation efforts, which he told me explicitly that he wouldn’t be sharing anywhere unless I wanted to share them here. But now the download link is hotlinked directly to the original megaupload links I posted under Downloads with this site listed under “discussion”. Which is what may have brought you here.

I don’t want to sound bitter about this manga getting out and about and possibly picking up new fans, but it would be nice for all scanlators to get proper credit for their work and I, at least, on sites like MangaShare usually just click to the download and only know the groups behind the work through their names being posted alongside the file. It is common etiquette to link back to sites whose information or resources you’ve used and I’ve updated the Downloads page to better reflect my this expectation so we don’t run into this again. If you are the person who was reuploading my and other’s files, I would really encourage you to send me an email so we can talk this over and set up a better system.

Thanks for listening to my rant (or not), it probably doesn’t pertain to you so for those who are just here to read an awesome manga I’ll have to get some more chapters translated for you soon.

Scanlation of Chp 69

Reader Zack Z had generously provided us with a very nice scanlation of Chapter 69! There’s a link on the download page.

Chp 69+70

We’re doing much better this month, eh? And by we I mean I. Links are on the other page, as usual. Now we are moving into the more difficult stage of the battle, and get to know the great enemies, Hayamazaki, a bit better as they take the gloves off. Know thine enemy, know thyself, and so on. There will be more flashbacks to come, and it only gets more difficult for our boys, I’m afraid… /foreshadows

Scanlation update

We now have a new scanlation of Chapter 58 for you to add to your collection. This is thanks to Goh Mifune. Link on the download page, of course.

Chapter 68

Aah, so much dialogue… Gaku narrates practically this entire chapter. As a note, I started spelling Toru as Tohru just because I know that’s how it would have been transliterated from Japanese to English, but really it’s the same thing. Unless you’ve been pronouncing it Too-ruu so far or something.

Links are on the download page, of course.

While I am here, I want to put in a plug for one of my other most favourite manga-ka, Miyamoto Kano, whose birthday it was last week. I know not everyone who reads I’ll is a boy’s love fan, but if you don’t mind reading stories involving sex between two men, I feel like you would appreciate her writing. The main similarity, I feel, between Asada and Miyamoto is in the realism and the emotional connection with the characters. You feel, while reading, that this could have happened in a place not too far from home, to real people. You can get scanlations of nearly all of her work from the lovely ladies at Liquid Eros. Finding the thread of her work can be slightly confusing because the order they’ve been published in is not always chronological order within the stories, but the scanlators have done their best to keep things organized. I would recommend starting with the Rules series and working your way out from there. And though I assume that by coming here you don’t mind the uncertain legality of scanlations or translations, Miyamoto-sensei has been exchanging emails with Liquid Eros and encourages their work, which is always nice to know! Maybe if I knew Japanese I’d try that with Asada-sensei haha.

As always, I don’t really have a schedule for releases, so don’t bother asking… Augh how did it get to be the end of the month so fast… And I still don’t have a job… sob. If only I could get paid to translate manga!