Mizuiro Jidai 01-02 - A Journey to the Old School

Now here's something that maybe only a handful of people expected: Mizuiro Jidai, AKA the Blue-Green or Aqua Years. Take a trip back in time with this Spring 1996 shoujo coming-of-age/romance anime, to an era when not every teenager had a smartphone and an online social media presence. Though as a freshman in high school at the time, I do recall that some upperclassmen had pagers, and some of my more tech-inclined friends did have primitive homepages.

This release is a companion/supplement to the KiteSeekers release, which begins at episode 11. As such, I will only be doing the first 10 episodes, hopefully in a few multi-episode batches like this one. Wherever possible, I'll maintain consistency with the KiteSeekers version. Original translations are from Lunar, though with some edits of course. And like Iriya, this is a beneficiary of the March 2006 Lunar script leak -- it included mostly-untimed MiJ translations through episode 35. When I saw that another fansubber, namaiki, wanted to continue subbing the series, I passed him the scripts I had. He in turn passed them along to the folks at KiteSeekers, who recruited back one of the original Lunar translators, and began a formal release. On my end, I only had to transcribe a few episodes, pasteover Russian timings for ep 10, and go through my usual retime/edit/QC treatment.

Torrent (+more technical details)

On a technical note, I went against one of my own tenets, and created typesetting that lags my ancient system for the title screen. I just couldn't resist the allure of fabulous moving/transforming rainbow text against a bit of karaoke. As I'm still using my old PC for now, I'm guessing it won't be a problem for modern systems with xy-vsHostageTaker installed. If you have such a setup and you still get lag there, let me know and I'll release v2s with more simplified TS.

Lovely Idol 12 - The Elements of Harmony

And at long last, we've come to the final TV-aired episode of Lovely Idol. With Mizuki's mommy matters mostly mollified, all that's left is to pull off the debut live show for tens of thousands of idol fans. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell if Sweet Fish's business model relies on a few hundred fans buying thousands of CDs for popularity contest votes and handshake tickets. We can only hope not. Other than that, look forward to some rare non-lazy typesetting from me. The preview features original translations, as it was not in the TV broadcast or the WinD release.

Batch (Nyaa) || Batch (BakaBT)

I may put together a few v2s to fix inconsistencies in the previews in the early episodes. If you've spotted any other errors throughout the release, like typos, wrong/missing words, lines with the wrong character style, etc., please let me know. Also, any suggestions for improving the typesetting of episode titles (in terms of fonts, colors, border/shadow setting, blur values, layering...) are welcome.

As for the never-before-available-in-English episode 13, I do plan to release that in some form at some point.

Saint October 12 - Shocking Revelations

A new episode of Saint October brings with it a new confrontation with some old foes from Reverse, and not everyone is getting away unscathed this time. But before that, there's some exposition on the true nature of the Goth Lolis' allies and enemies, one that truly sets the tone for where the show is going to go.

Torrent [CRC=8A274A86]

This is one of two episodes that were originally subbed only by Dyslexic. While their English was relatively error-free, and contained a number of clever phrasings, some of the translations were misheard or completely off-base, often resulting in lines that were the complete opposite of the intended meaning.

Lovely Idol 11 - The Big Push

We're almost to the finish line, and the Gen-3 Lovedols are pulling out all the stops to self-promote their event. Luckily, they've got some powerful allies who command a lot of fanboy attention. There's also a culmination of TEH BIG DRAMA arc, and sadly... it doesn't make a lot of sense. I tried, I really did.

Torrent [CRC=8E69DD13]

One area where I didn't try too hard is the typesetting. If you look at the styles in the script, you'll see that I fully admit it's lazy. Unfortunately, the wrong framerates of these raws wreak havoc with any efforts to do frame-by-frame/moving signs. Even if I were skilled enough to typeset them quickly and correctly, they still wouldn't look good. So enjoy your \an8,\an7,\an9,\an4, and so forth.

Maybe I should've gone for those .wmv raws while I had the chance...

Saint October 11 - The Enemy Within

Ah yes, "creepy," everyone's favorite meaningless word for "someone who likes me more than I like them." But there's more important things afoot in Saint October 11, such as another confrontation between Sophia, Kafka, and the Goth Loli Detectives. But, both sides have their internal struggles to deal with. For Reverse, it's dissent over the corporate chain of command. And for the detectives, there's a little mistrust developing towards the mysterious boy with no memories, whose appearance just happened to coincide with all these dangerous incidents.

Torrent [CRC=CE99F5A1]

Other things to note:
* They randomly decided to use a later verse of the OP against a voice actress dance video, rather than the ED.
* I turned up the liberalizing in some of the subtitle lines, but I think they still fit with Saint October's aggressive absurdity.
* I'm hoping these guys continue with their Spanish subbed release (which mostly uses my karaoke and is likely re-translated from my subs), as their encode is higher-resolution, lower file size, and better quality.

Lovely Idol 10 - Ghost of Mother

The drama with Mizuki ramps up even more in this episode, while her fellow five idols struggle to endure Training From Hell(tm) without her. Though if Where the Heart Is taught me anything, it's to always be suspicious of parents who suddenly reappear when you've attained fame and fortune.

Batch (Nyaa) || Batch (BakaBT)

An Exciting Retirement?!

If you saw this post title in a feed somewhere, never fear -- I am NOT retiring from fansubbing or anything else. However, I am retiring something. Back in March 2005, I did something wrong to blow up, short out, or fry the motherboard of the aging HP Pavillion PC I'd had since September 2000. As memories go, it provided a platform for most of my college schoolwork, and the first downloaded anime I ever watched -- old .avis of Trigun, Chrono Crusade, Fruits Basket, Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), and others, all watched via CD-Rs borrowed or copied from friends.

Luckily, I salvaged relevant files off its 10 GB HDD and transferred them to my new purchase, a Gateway 504-GR. With its blazing 1-core 3 GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB of RAM, and 1024x768 CRT display, it has mostly served me well for the past 8 years and 1 month, including:

Saint October 10 - Love is a Shuraba

In this episode, Reverse strikes Kotono on two fronts, with both involving food supply attacks and two sides of a love triangle Kotono never even knew she was in. More of Saint October's heartfelt absurdity abounds, and remember folks, the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference!

Torrent [CRC=]

Only one episode of mbt&l-w translations to go, then it's two Dyslexic-only episodes.