Inspirations everywhere.

More than a week without updates. Busy, busy...

The title this time is taken from my tweet a while ago when I was watching MasterChef Indonesia Season 3. I remember watching MasterChef US with a participant being blind, and she was as awesome as any other normal participants -- if not better. That was something amazing. This time I saw one of our participants being someone deaf. I thought, in cooking you need sight more than hearing, but then if he couldn't hear the instructions or not knowing when the bell ended as a sign or when he couldn't hear the voice of something boiled as you cooked it... It sure is hard. So thumbs up for both of them. So much inspiration.

Life has been busy but slightly fun, I guess. Finished with the national biology competition yesterday. Not too tired since I didn't really do much, but I enjoyed it. After all it's the last chance to enjoy the competition as official committee members; next year I'd just be a visitor who decided to help.

Today I had my first TV shooting, whee! So my church was invited to join in a Catholic discussion program on TV. A choir group was selected, and I was asked to help to play the music. We recorded the sound last week, today we recorded the people involved, haha. It was my first time being recorded for playing instrument too, not singing. Just minor make-ups and our usual clothes. Looking forward for the result!

My tablet returns to life! After letting it die for a while, I pressed the power button for few seconds and it rebooted. I was sooo happy.

And ultimately exams are coming. What have I done? I know you can guess. Seventeen lectures materials to review for the exam, and not to mention that those were superficial so I need to read textbooks too...

Life is so cool.

Scanlators vs Online Readers

This is quite a neverending discussion topic, heated war in scanlation world, if you're following.

This is the latest hot topic at MangaUpdates since a while ago. It's talking about how an old manga scanlation group closed down because of a specific online manga reader didn't respect her wish not to host her scans. Nothing special? Yeah, nothing if the group is not a group as old as 11 years. Yeah, they have been scanning since 2002, I was still a crybaby.

The situation is nothing new. Our relationship with online manga readers/manga aggregators have always been like that. The same point from all of us is that we are doing something illegal. The scanlation groups are scanning and translating many mangaka's works without permission. And the online readers hosted them, acting as a database. The only difference I noticed so far is the fact that these readers got an income, while scanlators didn't. Even if we did ask for donations, it would be for buying raws and do yet another illegal work. And all these illegal things were born from our love and passion towards manga. We didn't get anything except the happiness and satisfaction of telling others that there are amazing titles you need to check out. While I have no idea of a specific online manga reader's income is enough as a job to feed someone on, I don't care and I don't want to know either; the fact that he and friends gained money by hosting our works (meaning we do the works, not he and friends is what I have a hard time accepting.

We are often called hypocrites. Probably we are. No, indeed we are. As I said, we're all doing illegal works here, we're going against copyright. So why are we still doing this? If you're often into manga world, you know what we say as "an effort to make less popular manga widely known to the world". From my current manga reading list, almost all of them I never saw published in my country, and probably never will. How much more out there, only God knows maybe. That's just one me. What about billions of other readers living at other countries but Japan? Who can't read Japanese? Who can't buy things online?

We are hypocrites. Whatever, I don't care. While I do feel bad for the mangaka, I'm not gaining any profit from doing this. Neither did readers/visitors who visit scanlators' website or the online readers. Heck, in fact we lose more than we gain. At least we stop scanlating when the series is licensed to be released internationally. At least we remove all those files when license comes around. Unlike some other bunch.

Inside Scanlation, a website dedicating itself to the history and development of manga scanlation world, wrote that some series and mangaka gained popularity because of online scanlations. I have no idea if that is true or not. And I have no idea if we're actually helping mangaka spreading their works too. I do believe it has an impact, a balance between positive and negative, because you can't achieve perfection of good things only in this world.

So I'll keep on going, until the day I'm too fed up with this to continue.