Ad Astra v6 (complete)

I was fortunate enough to have Nixbrod the editor quickly respond to my help-wanted post, so here it is. Chapter 32 of Ad Astra, which starts off volume 6. My planned pace is just to do one chapter a week until we wrap up this series, so we can't beat the frogs who will very soon have the final 13th volume translated officially in just a few months. Still, it's better than having this series be stuck without a translator for the English-only speakers.

*I am resuming work on Kamui-den so don't think I've forgotten about that series.

Download:
Ad Astra v6:   Mega

Ad Astra v6 c32:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c33:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c34:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c35:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c36:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c37:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c38:   Mega

Ad Astra Help Wanted

I remember being asked to translate Ad Astra, the manga about the 2nd Punic War, a looong time ago when only the 1st volume had come out and there were no English translations. At the time, I had my reservations about the series quality (not really a fan of its art style) and I also didn't feel like picking up another ongoing manga. However, since it's now complete in Japan at 13 volumes and there seems to be a lot of history fans wanting to see this get picked up by somebody ever since Turnip Farmers dropped it, I thought I might give it a shot. So if there's someone experienced/competent at cleaning (with the occasional redrawing) and typesetting, contact me here or via email if you want to help out.

Historie 105

Sorry this chapter took so long for me to do. This was actually last month's chapter, meaning the next chapter will come out in Japan around this time of the month in August. But yeah, exciting chapter. Can't wait to see what future chapters will hold.

Download:
Historie c105:   Mega
Previous Historie Chapters:   Mega

Some Thoughts on Diplomacy and War (An Exercise in Literary Chinese - Part 5)

At the end of part 4, we finally managed to cover the Zhanguo Ce chapter in which Yan Lu's diplomatic finesse managed to save Zhou from a Qin invasion and protect the nine-ding. I assume for many people, their first reaction to this story might be a minor nod of interest and then to move on. However, I think there's a bit more to mine from this story on the relationship of diplomacy and war. Or at least, I'm going to over-analyze it so I can fill out this post. So for the conclusion of my 5-part series on literary Chinese, I'll make an argument that to conceive of diplomacy and war as mutually exclusive alternatives to each other is to limit the effectiveness of both.

An Exercise in Literary Chinese - Part 4

Alright, I was initially planning to end this series with the 4th part, but it looks like it'll be a 5-parter. For this part, I'll quickly wrap up translating the remainder of the story. By now, I've covered most of the main grammatical rules we need to know so I'll be covering the sentences much more quickly.

The concluding part 5 coming later this week should be much more interesting as I turn away from the grammar-lessons and comment on the intersection of diplomacy and war in history in order to appreciate this story.

*For any nerds interested in learning more about literary Chinese, or are planning to major in that area, there are a lot of readily available resources to be found on the internet. You can very easily find pdfs or ppts put up by university professors as part of their classes on google. I will upload a zip file containing 5 helpful textbooks that I'm slowly working through myself.

Download:
Literary Chinese text/workbooks:   Mega

An Exercise in Literary Chinese - Part 3

Open this in a new tab to look at it while reading this post.

Now that we've covered most of the background, in part 3, we'll focus mostly on translating the next 9 sentences.

Be sure to read Part 1 and Part 2 before this.

An Exercise in Literary Chinese - Part 1

Zhanguo Ce (Strategies of the Warring States), chapter 1.
It looks intimidating, but trust me, it's not so bad.

Instead of talking about manga, current events, or books I've read, I'm going to do something very different in these posts. You see, I once listened to a particularly inspiring presentation in which the lecturer did a combined history lecture/primary source analysis/language lesson on a passage from Shiji to an audience that largely knew neither Mandarin nor literary Chinese. So today, I'll attempt my own version of this. I'm going to assume you know little to nothing about Mandarin, literary Chinese, nor ancient China in general. And I'm going to decode that wall-of-text you see in the image above, line by line, while giving necessary background info and interesting historical tidbits. I've only actually started self-studying literary Chinese myself with no Mandarin background so I know I'm not the best teacher. Still, I hope this will be a fun post for anyone curious about ancient China or who ever wondered what kind of language literary Chinese is.

This will be a multi-parter, since it's too damn long to fit in one post.

Futago no Teikoku v2 (complete)

Here it is, a project I meant to start last year but ended up getting delayed until now. This is Futago no Teikoku (The Twin Empires), by Kitou Mohiro. I haven't really done any Kitou-stuff since I finished up Bokurano over 8 fucking years ago, with the exception of that very short Ekrano oneshot. That's partly because I wasn't really interested in his other works since then, with the massive exception of Owari to Hajimari no Miles. But for some fucking reason, Kitou blueballed us all by not continuing that (I have no reason why).

Fortunately, all was not lost as Kitou seems to have been playing around with the idea of flying naval warships and seaplanes since then, resulting in this manga. Or more accurately speaking, he's apparently been thinking about the storyline to this new manga for a whole decade before he finally started in 2015. As a fan of both sci-fi and history, I can't help but like the plot and setting, considering it basically involves  Imperial Japan Kou Empire's imperial expansion into China "the continent" set in an age where battleships dominate and aircraft-carriers are in their infancy (think 1920s~1930s). There's even an equivalent of the Washington Naval Treaty in the story! It's quite nice to see the pseudo-IJN be portrayed as the villains, unlike certain anime/manga/video games that just jerk off to battleships like the Yamato all the way to the bank. I expect I'll later end up doing a few other more historical series based around this time period.

The guy at Breading Bad scans was the first to pick this up, but I later got into touch with him(?) and he said he was more than willing to scan the raws, edit, and typeset while letting me translate. So here we are at last. There's currently 3 volumes out in Japan, with the 4th volume coming out in the near future. Breading Bad and I will try out best to catch up to Japan soon enough.

Download:
Futago no Teikoku v2 [Breading Bad & Hox]:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c07:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c08:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c09:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c10:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c11:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c12:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v1 [Breading Bad]:   Mega

Shiji v03 (complete)

Volume 3 is complete at last. Although Sima Qian deliberately selected his stories in Shiji to provide a moral lesson for future generations and so we should be somewhat skeptical of how certain events really happened, I love the ironic element in volume 3's stories. Especially Shang Yang's end. His rise and fall is sort of a parallel to Qin's own rise and fall, which is quite apt. As an aside, readers of the Book of Lord Shang will recognize many of the conversations in vol.3 chapter 4 are lifted from that text.

In any case, the stories about the reformers in this volume is one of the reasons that make the Eastern Zhou period such a fascinating historical period to read about. There are few examples in world history where there was a multi-state system marked by increasingly intense interstate conflict that led to developments in almost every aspect of society (warfare, philosophy, government, economy, etc) that would provide a civilizational foundation that would endure for more than 2000 years. Actually, if you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend checking out Dingxin Zhao's The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History, which I just finished reading and will probably talk about in a later time.

Download:

Shiji v03 c04:   Mega
Shiji v03:   Mega

Some Thoughts about Adults in the Room

The year is not even half-done, but I'm quite confident that Yanis Varoufakis political memoir, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment, will be one of my top-3 reads for 2018. Now I've been aware of Varoufakis since 2015 when Greece's bailout referendum was all over the news. So I was already aware of common arguments Varoufakis and other economists cited on why austerity was bad economic policy, or why the EU was making a colossal mistake in its handling of the Greek debt crisis. But to vicariously experience that fateful 2015 through the eyes of an insider as Varoufakis is something else entirely. So whether or not you're familiar with the Greek debt-crisis, I highly, highly recommend reading this book. Sure, given that it's a political memoir written by a "loser," it's hard to tell just how objective and truthful of a writer Varoufakis is, but if even only half of the things he tells in this book are true, it still makes for a shocking read. Like my other Some Thoughts posts, I don't mean to do a proper review or a convenient summary. Instead, I'll ruminate on some tangential ideas I had while reading this book.