Kinda lost on what to say for my birthday (last week lol) as it doubles as as end-of-year summary. What a strange year. XD

Started out on a mindless detour while I was sorting myself out, only to fall into a rabbit hole that actually reminded me what I really wanted to do.

This fight still sucks, especially in Tactician. But it made me who I am today, because nothing is sacred and exploits are fair as long as you win. XD

The ghost haunts these skies again! 👻 Good Morning!

By right, I mean properly dated, organized, classified, segregated, even named at points. And internally, that their records don't wind up into recursive rabbit holes where you have to dig deeper than you should to get to the resource.

I know there's no financial incentive, but I do wish anime distributors like CR handled their metadata better. Going through their titles for the sub archive, I ran into so many external and internal inconsistencies that I'm truly surprised they got at least a handful right.

I had to learn Rust but I finally rebuilt my CR subtitle pull program for SubArchivist, which means this project is back in action!

This had to be done to reduce tedium for my own sanity and to streamline some steps my Python glue code can't accommodate.

Oh yeah. NTFS is no bueno for linux gaming. You pretty much stumbled into the reason why. That and differences between naming standards (caps sensitivity) messes up Windows once both OSes share the drive. Basically, better to just reformat to ext4 or btrfs for sanity.

Looks like search algorithms did their thing and now lots of people have found SubArchivist.

That's nice, but uh... guess I have to include last season's subs and to do it more efficiently, I really should fix up my code. XD

Oh yeah. It sorta goes downhill from here too depending on how you interpret the locked route because that's another doozy. XD

Nice. Shuten is strange when I think of it as a Kodaka game. Focused in a way I never expected him to manage, yet it feels very much like 2nd Scenario in hindsight.

Really though, kudos to Tookyo for doing their thing just making stuff. There's a scrappy spirit in their scenario writing that doesn't always land right, but the creative intent is there. Hundred Line is fun and as scattershot as can be. Shuten was more focused with a stronger payoff.

And somehow, it's rather 2000s coded as a VN. Just the vibe and the latter half events reminds me so much of how VNs during that era finished their stories in a strong melancholic manner. There are no big winners, and everyone's a loser at the end of the day.

As a mystery game, I do appreciate how cozy it feels. The answer's fairly obvious yet understated that it expects you to be aware enough to fit the pieces together. So it's pretty satisfying when you get it right since it all makes sense in hindsight.

Just finished Shuten Order. Despite the scuffed localization and some jank ideas, you wouldn't think this was a Kodaka directed game with how coherent and clear its message and execution is.

Hell, if anything, he did a Kojima and expressed the same sentiments as HL if you look past the wackiness.

This did feel like the one essential route with how meaty it is, but I'm glad I did this after clearing the top half because it would be hard to traverse those routes in hindsight unless you're aiming for the locked route.

Still though, between this and Shuten, Kodaka really wants to say something.

Might be a crazy thought, but I think a lot of us in our late 20s onward are probably as old or older than our parents on a mental level. We've been forced to process so much on our own because it wasn't a thing then and it's not as easy anymore to simply look away and pretend it doesn't involve us.

It's all good because I see the intention to make art for the heck of it. Whether it's meant to be read into or not, appreciated or not it simply exists and it's something I wish people did more.

As a player, you can hop off at any point and it doesn't care. It'll welcome you back when you feel like coming back.

You can go though all that effort to open the locked route and it doesn't care. The endings there might not even be for you. None of them might be. Really.

And it's all good.

Don't get me wrong, it was meant to sell and the team hoped it would.

But that's why it's so compelling how indulgent the game is as you finish a couple of runs and eventually try to find a good ending only to realize you're being taken for a ride and it doesn't care. It's so ballsy. XD

Finished Hundred Line. The best games for me are ones whose ambition crosses over to excessive indulgence and somehow finds its way back again.

It makes the art human as we're not meant to make art for others. We do it for ourselves first and hope that others can relate.

This is one of them.

Actually, this looks like a copy of the spreadsheet that was going around twitter at the time that I used as the nucleus of this glossary, so these entries are in there. XD

Got it. Thanks!

I know this is gonna sound out of the blue, but I appreciate a lot of the work you do to demystify how the sausage is made and the short and quick #amtranslating posts. If it's not too much of a hassle, do you mind if you can also add them to the J-E media glossary I built? Thanks!
yakuaru.com/add

And yes, for those who have submitted at the start of the year, it's in there now. Sorry. Life came up and I figured I should spend the time making sure this iteration is good so this won't happen again. Thanks for submitting!

Regarding Adding terms, it's more restrictive than before but ensures a good level of consistency. The previous method gave a lot of freedom at the cost of stressing me out whenever new entries came in and it's not fair to hold them there.

Frontend-wise, I've done a few changes here and there, removed Genre since it's clutter and additional complexity, and updated the Resources section.

Backend-wise, I changed how data is handled. It used to be a giant JSON file that slowly became harder to work with and also rather error-prone. So I switched it to a postgres db, which involved quite a lot of work to make sure it's seamless.

Major Yakuaru 3.0 update. Streamlining aside, you can add terms independently now! This is fully automated as long as the submission rules are follow.

Been a long time coming with a database migration because the previous manual method became too unwieldy as it hit 600 terms. Enjoy!

Was gonna soft-launch it yesterday and finalize some stuff, but somehow Docker couldn't read secrets and I had to go to sleep. Also remembered some stuff to include. Today, then. XD

And I'm not talking strictly about bad submissions. There's also wrong encodings, malicious attack/hacking attempts, intentional duplications, etc.

Can't realisitically cover all of them unless they're a real possibility, but I will for the more common cases.

Almost done with the Yakuaru rebuild, then I realized I need to implement more validation checks for submissions.

Of course, it's not like people are gonna submit garbage data, but it's easy to do accidentally, hard to clean up when it goes through, and people are people and do weird stuff.