Well, we technically have two “anniversaries”. The day we founded this group, and the day we released our first chapter. While we essentially skipped the first, today is what we consider the real anniversary. Hooray!
A year ago today, we released our first release, a chapter of Hen-Zemi. Thus triggering the downwards spiral that then brings us to where we are today. A little wiser, a little better, a little faster, and a little larger. But still just as lazy, if not even lazier.
Because this is an rather important post, one I’ve actually written, rewritten, trashed, and wrote again, I’ll kind of merge our initial “founding” story, and the oh-so-fun numbers portion into one post. Just click whichever you want to read. The last one being the most interesting.
The story itself is actually pretty boring. One day I was on /a/ and found a thread by J who was dumping their latest Ika Musume chapter. Looking at it I realized that the number was abnormally high, and that it didn’t correlate to what it said on Mangaupdates at all. So I dug and eventually found raws and saw that they were in fact not translated at all anywhere. Suddenly I hatched the idea that I could translate these, except I
don’t like translating things, at all, so I needed a translator! And that is where the
real start began.
Having read scanlations before, and with a rather above average understanding of Photoshop, I tooled away at the first few pages of Ika Musume Chapter 48 and spun a tale of them looking for a translator. These are the first pages I ever “scanlated”. [Page 1] – [Page 2] – [Page 3]
The “Personthingy” in question is now known as にんげん to the internet. He found my edits to be comical at best, but was more moved by the chance to actually make use of his Japanese studies. With that we did in fact scanlate that chapter. But it was lacking…. Badly….
At that time I found out Simple Scans actually was looking for some staff. I ended up taking their QC test, にんげん took the TL test. Long story short, because it was the QC test, I had to learn how to actually scanlate properly in… about 24 hours. And it was hard. Very. Hard. But we both managed to get in, in the end.
Once we were in, the rather renown abcd9146 was to be our adviser through this whole ordeal. I told him that we wanted to work on Ika Musume and would just release it under SS, he agreed. Then I showed him our original cleaned, ‘finished’ chapter, and he laughed. It was shit. 2/10 was the best he could do.
My rudimentary 24 hour skills were more than enough to get in, but not anywhere close to their level of quality to release. にんげん and I took in his words of advice and went back to the drawing board and emerged with this glorious masterpiece of a chapter. Proper redraws and all. [YOU CAN DL IT MAN]
Then we basically quit. And never released that chapter (until now). J picked it up, and we disappeared.
Eventually we reemerged onto the scanlation scene again doing doujins at Kibitou4Life, now Life4Kaoru.
But that is an entirely separate arc, for another time. You could compare it to the Namek arc or something.
Having been itching to get back into manga scanlation though, we wanted to start fresh. But I didn’t want to use our original name, which was “HNNNNNNNNGH Scans”. This is actually how we came up with the name World Three. And that is the start of the “World Three” arc, in the timeline.
That wasn’t a very fun ride, I’m sorry.
What is a anniversary post without a bunch of rather useless data values? So I’ll break down most of that stuff here, but as I said this really will be the more interesting part. At least I think it will. I like numbers.
- # of series done: 6
- # of Volumes Completed: 4
- # of Chapters Completed: 48
- Total space used for DDLs: 995.42 MB
- Total bandwidth used for DDLs: 612.17 GB
- Total downloads served: 81,873 (Since March 12, 2011)
From there, people would usually go into actual web statistics. Page views, hits, visitors, etc. You know, the things people usually wave around like they’re important, or something. But in all honesty I, as the primary webmaster for the group, never set up anything to really track such things on purpose, because counting numbers is stupid.. The most I could do is “hits” via the access log. And that’s rather boring anyway.
Which, according to that, we have… 600,595 hits from 17/03/2012 – 20/05/2012. Yay?
Anyway, I’ll provide you the real meat of this section. If you’ve read our FAQ you would know that we basically handle all monetary things in house. No donations, no adsense. Like a lot of other groups. What a lot of other groups do not go into is how much goes into what/where. But now, you’ll know! For us anyway.
366 Days of Expenses
- $341.00 on…. importing raws
- $119.40 on…. the initial shared hosting plan (12 months)
- $241.21 on… the original reader VPS (11 months)
- $196.55 on… the new server we’re on now (04 months)
- $ 37.47 on… domain moving from stupid GoDaddy
- $ 83.99 on… a new scanner to scan raws
- $114.00 on… a Bamboo Capture so I can clean better
Total: $1133.62 USD
Yup. That’s how much was spent this last year. Do any of those involved mind at all? Nope. So please, don’t you worry about us when seeing these numbers. It’s just a small price we choose to pay to do the hobby we love to do. Seriously though, you don’t even have to spend any money at all to scanlate. Share raws exist. WordPress/Blogger/Tumblr blogs are a thing. GIMP/Paint.net are free (most people pirate Photoshop anyway.) There’s more than enough tools out there for anyone to get into this hobby, and hopefully enjoy it!
In closing, I personally would like to thank:
J for all that inspiration.
abcd9146 for teaching me a good deal of everything.
He Who Must Not Be Named for giving us a place at K4L/L4K.
sexy mahou shoujo from kyonkundenwa for all the good times we’ve yelled about this hobby.
Woxxy from FoOlRulez for dealing with all my stupid tech support questions.
WCW_TL, and
Yamada from 14BiQ, for their wise words of wisdom/advice. Of course
Twintail and the
Staff here at World Three for sticking through and translating/editing/cleaning/redrawing/typesetting/lettering at some of the most ungodly hours of the day just to finish a release. As well as all the hard working authors and artists that made the manga we scanlate in the first place!
And obviously, You. The ones that read, that have read, and that will read. Every single one of you.
Without you, none of this would be possible. None of this would exist. And for that…
ありがとうございます。 ♡（*´▽｀*）
Watamote 94: 
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Hello again it’s already February 2013. Since it’s slowed down (again) and the sticky is gone I figured I may as well post about how things are going around here. Which is actually a whole lot of everything, honestly. Since it’s kind of a lot I’ll just do it in a list or whatever.