silicon5

A metaphor: I once played in a D&D campaign where a player tried to create an extremely overpowered but technically legal character. His justification was that he would only use the extreme powers in moderation, so it would not be unfair or unbalanced. But why would he ask for such unprecedented powers if he didn't intend to use them?

Most fans I saw called it by the Japanese title, Shingeki no Kyojin. You could almost tell whether someone watched the official licensed translation or not, based on what they called the series.

Actually, another quirk is the German lyric in the first season's opening theme. Crunchyroll doesn't usually translate opening or ending lyrics, but translating the lyrics was standard practice in the fansub era, so the. However, they misheard the lyric as "Sie sind das Essen und wir sind die Jäger" - "You are the food and we are the hunters" - as if the line is spoken by the Titans (perhaps the English-speaking audience is primed to the Germans being the bad guys in movies). The actual lyric was revealed in official Japanese sources as spoken from the perspective of the humans: "Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind die Jäger!" - "Are we the food? No, we are the hunters!" However, the incorrect lyric persists among fans because the second opening theme superceded the first before the error was widely noted in the English speaking anime community.

*their

AI is not immune to accusations of political bias, as we've seen recently from Grok.

A while back there was a story going around that licensors were replacing human translators with AI to prevent political bias. It seems clear that the real reason they're doing this is to save time and money. Having used Japanese AI translation casually, it's definitely not accurate enough for professional use. Even the unofficial manga scanlators who use it will apologize profusely and use it only as a last resort when a human translator isn't available.

As accusations of translator bias go, other than the Dragon Maid debacle, the big one at that time was the Zombie Land Saga, where they were accused of changing the script to Hoshikawa Lily transgender. What they failed to notice is that the character was always transgender - Hoshikawa Lily being a stage name, her birth name is revealed in one episode to be Masao, a male name.

There are some instances of dubious translations that fail to accurately convey the author's intent, but at the same time, part of what we're seeing is just pushback to increased LGBT representation and feminist themes in anime. Translators are sometimes being blamed for inserting modern or western values into works that already reflected those values.

The Crunchyroll/Funimation merger was a really bad deal for fans, in that a huge number of series were never ported over to Crunchyroll before the Funimation shutdown.

Initially, the two had a deal where Funimation would allow subtitle-only versions of series to appear on Crunchyroll, while Funimation would focus on the dub audience. In November 2018 some corporate hijinks happened, and the alliance was considered no longer viable. Funi pulled about 240 series from Crunchyroll, amounting to nearly 20% of Crunchyroll's library at the time.

When the merger happened in 2024, Funimation's shutdown FAQ implied that Funimation's content would be available on Crunchyroll, and even encouraged users to cancel their Funimation subscription and subscribe to Crunchyroll going forward. However, there are still some 182 series which never made it back to Crunchyroll, even though they had been there before. There are just a bunch of anime that aren't legitimately available on any streaming service any more.

Most anime on Crunchyroll are softsubs. There's a single video file for each supported resolution, an audio file for each language, and a subtitle file in the highly versatile .ass format (Advanced SubStation Alpha). There are some anime in hardsubs, but usually older legacy series such as were originally DVDs.

Why don't they take the timings from the closed captions of the original Japanese broadcast?

Getting proper nouns wrong is a flaw I thought we left behind in the fansub era.

The official translator should in theory have the Japanese closed captioning and copies of the anime's original manga or light novel to work from, as well as a direct line to the original studio for clarifications on spelling. In practice, I suspect they aren't given enough resources (particularly time) to do this, and the exact romanization of fictional names is not always clear from the katakana or so. Lately there are so many fantasy series where characters have made-up European-sounding names which don't translate unambiguously from katakana - is it Chilchuck or Chilchack, for example?

Perhaps this is going to go like in the UK, where Palestine Action was proscribed, with the secondary effect that anyone who expresses support for Palestine Action is designated a terrorist even if they're not formally a member.

The term has become genericized, like Kleenex or Hoover.

Commodore's strategy was to sell an entry-level computer as cheaply as possible, whereas the Amiga's initial selling point is that it was cutting-edge but still somewhat affordable. If you want to see what Commodore's answer to the Amiga would have been, look at the Atari ST: cheaper, still using the 68000, but lacking the advanced features which made the Amiga special.

I think the future is in curating trustworthy websites. A current popular strategy is to append `site:reddit.com` to guarantee human-generated answers. I don't search Google any more so much as searching Wikipedia or some topic-specific wiki or database.

AI is occasionally useful for answering questions, but I don't trust its output without fact-checking with an independent source. Even some of wikis are filling up with AI-generated junk, if the admins aren't dilligent.

In the late 90s and early 00s, blogs were originally "weblogs" or "web logs", just a sort of online diary. It was mainly something you wrote, rather than something for others to read.

Over time, the most interesting blogs became the most popular, and these were generally blogs on a fixed topic. The meaning of "blog" shifted to refer to these high-quality regularly-updated article sites, more like a magazine. It became highly commercialized as people tried to turn blogs into careers or side hustles. The original use of blogging, as a personal journal that only your friends care to read, was supplanted by social media.

Nowadays, pro-blogging has been supplanted by YouTube, since the ad revenue on video is much higher and the audience and discoverability much better. Not every blogger was able to make this transition, however, because the skillsets of a magazine writer and a television host are different.

Note to others: This comment made more sense when the title was "Does anyone still use Morse code?"