Penny started waking up around 5:30, and by 5:45 it was obvious she was not going back to sleep. So I got up, and Matt got up, and we wound up leaving the house fifteen or twenty minutes ahead of our usual schedule.

Which is fine with me. My car is due for inspection this month - which is to say, today. So if I can get all my work done, I'll be leaving a bit early to take my car down to the shop. (Won't that be fun?)

Shall I tell you about my most recent example of extreme dorkitude?

Of course I shall.

Quite a while ago, I was surfing the web, and I happened (in the "how the heck did I end up here?" way that lots of surfing happens) across a translation for a Japanese manga.

Now, I'm not usually much of an anime/manga fan. I was, briefly, at one point, but that was back when I was a broke student, and when I realized just how expensive a hobby it was, I pretty much let it drop. I have friends who are fans, so I've seen quite a few of their favorite pieces, and I'm familiar with some of the standards and language. Matt's collected a few manga (Lone Wolf and Cub and Vagabond, if you're curious) and I've perused a few issues. That's about it.

Anyway, I found this translation. It was a really fantastically-done website, too - the girl who did the translations formatted the text neatly, and everything was grammatically correct and spelled correctly, and she included the occasional clip of an image from the manga itself. (I wish I could link it, but it has since disappeared. Alas.) So I started reading.

Reading a text translation of a comic, even a very well-done one, is a little like reading a play... It loses some impact because you can't see what's going on. But I still found myself rather taken with the story. I thought it was really well-made. Funny and poignant by turns. (Well, after the first chapter or so, which included a bunch of rather awful clichés.)

So I did a little more poking around online, and found some pictures, and the artwork is really beautiful. (The artwork is one of the things I like best about anime and manga. More manga than anime, usually, but there's a fair amount of overlap. For the artwork alone, I collected two whole issue-arcs and both OAVs of Vampire Princess Miyu.)

Anyway, I hunted around online and wound up buying the first few books. Well, book 2 is still on backorder, but the first and third books came a couple of days ago.

I like to read. I don't generally buy or keep books unless I intend to re-read them. And I don't usually have a problem, when reading manga, flipping my brain to go from right to left... But I don't, alas, read Japanese, and although I found another (less attractive) site with the translations, flipping back and forth was making me a little nuts.

And here's where I turned into an enormous geekdork.

I downloaded the translations. Stripped out all the stage directions and cultural notes (leaving just the actual translated bits) and slapped them into Excel, which put each line in its own cell. I mussed with the cell sizes and the font, until each cell was about the size of a text/thought bubble on the printed page.

And now I'm cutting them out and taping them into the manga.

Told you it was an act of extreme dorkitude.

I suppose it could be worse. I could be scanning in each page and photoshopping it to replace the Japanese with English. It would be prettier than the print-and-tape job. But then I'd have to print the pages back out to be able to read them offline, and they wouldn't be bound, which invalidates half the reason for buying the books in the first place.

(And anyway, we don't have a scanner at home. And this is a yaoi comic - if you don't know what that means, let's just say it involves adult themes and leave it at that - so I definitely couldn't use the work scanner for it.)

K.T. laughed and called me otaku. Karen was horrified by my mistreatment of the books (tape???). And Matt laughed and called me a loser. (Good-naturedly, of course. I think.)

So if you want to laugh at me, too, go right ahead. I'll just be sitting over here, reading.

--Liz