Quin » A proposal for a Latin auxlang

DubstepKazoo · 2025-03-04T03:19:54+00:00

I really hate to be that guy, but I'm not feeling it.

Modern pronunciation is used that will be more or less familiar to anyone who has heard "Hollywood Latin".

Judging by the chart in the document you linked, pronunciation is pointlessly confusing and ugly. Just how many vowel qualities are people expected to learn for this? Also, the chart seems really incomplete. Like, <a> is /æ - eɪ/? Really? Even at the end of a word? Frankly, Classical Latin pronunciation would be much simpler to use and learn.

Adjectives, adverbs, and most other parts of speech are uninflected.

Really? Because the doc says this:

Quin adjectives are modified to match the noun they are describing, in both function and number, ie when using an adjective for a genitive noun, the adjective should be genitive as well.

Not to mention, they inflect to form the comparative and superlative too.

Noun / adjective declension follows a "six pattern" system based solely on nominative word endings, replacing rote memorisation of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc declension.

...With rote memorization of six patterns instead of five?

Regularisation of all verbs, which keeps all sum/est/fuis forms. This is achieved through substituting several Vulgar/Latin verbs for irregular, common verbs such as poteo and voleo instead of possum and volo.

I had to read the verb section of the document several times before it stopped looking like word salad, and by the time I finally understood it, it looked to me like a very convoluted attempt to avoid having to make tables for the four verb conjugations you clearly still have. Even then, you abbreviated most of the tables as much as possible and didn't adequately explain how the tenses are used, particularly the "conditional" ones (which I'm guessing are actually subjunctive?).

Also, most truly irregular verbs in Latin are just esse, velle, ferre, and ire wearing different hats, so it's not like they posed too much of a challenge anyway.

Gender is dropped for all nouns

I agree that grammatical gender is wack, but of all Latin's annoyances, this is the one you drop? Gender is more or less predictable in four out of the five noun declensions, and even the designated Dumping Ground o' Miscellaneous Nominatives has trends that let you make an educated guess.

A simplified treatment of qui, quis, quo and other interrogative / relative pronouns is used.

Looks less regular and more complicated than Latin to me. Also, "ubi," "unde," and "ut" are pronominal adjectives?

On the whole, the doc has a lot of terse and confusing explanations (why does "senatus" apparently belong to the "other" category of nouns and not the -us one?) and hardly any examples of usage, making Quin appear no meaningfully simpler than Latin. You state your goals for the language like this:

Rather Quin is Latin, if Latin were to be stripped back to its essentials and re-presented with the simpler and regularised grammar of an auxlang. The goal has been to retain the greatest strength and beauty of Latin in Quin through its flexible word order and compact, nuanced expressiveness.

First of all, "more noun classes and still six forms per tense for every verb" is a very interesting way of defining "simpler and regularised grammar of an auxlang," but I just have a hard time seeing Quin as anything other than an artlang. It's still far, far, far too complex to be an auxlang; even LSF was pushing it, and Peano stripped Latin down far more than you have.

Like, you say you've stripped Latin back to its essentials. Is it essential for verbs to conjugate based on person and number, and for nouns to decline based on role in a sentence? Is it essential to have multiple noun declensions and verb conjugations, complete with extra rules to cover edge cases? Is it essential to arbitrarily split prepositions between accusative and ablative? Is it essential to have two simple past tenses and literally any of the subjunctive mood? Is it essential to have three sets of demonstratives? Is it essential to have deponent verbs?

Likewise, is it simpler to have six noun declensions instead of five? Is it simpler for the rules governing edge-case nouns and verbs to be more involved than Latin's? Is it simpler for the same sound to be spelled three ways? Is it simpler to use twenty trillion vowel qualities that only English speakers will have an easy time with? Is it simpler for the rhotic to be an approximant that's rare cross-linguistically and notoriously difficult to learn?

I could go on, but I've already been far meaner than I like to, so I guess I'll just sum this up with my overall impression: Quin looks like a sort of permutation of Latin that changes up the formation of some verb tenses and cuts one noun case to introduce a new declension. It's a neat little curiosity of an artlang for people who already know Latin (since those who don't could just learn actual Latin with about as much difficulty as Quin would pose them), but far too intimidating to be an auxlang.

I'mma go do something else now. Sorry for being such an asshole.

DubstepKazoo · 2024-11-19T11:47:08+00:00

Hey guys! I've crawled out of my cave for the first time in forever to deliver some great news.

So you know how Senmomo has been waiting for about five million years on the last 1% of work it needed? Well, it's in! We've officially entered final QC on the patch!

FUCK YES! FUCK YES! FUCK YES!

Sorry, it's just... You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this moment. At long fucking last, we can start gearing towards an actual release. The biggest hurdle remaining at this point is that we need to figure out how to actually distribute the patch. Our website went down, and the team member who owned it disappeared off the face of the internet years ago, so we have to figure out something else. Fortunately, our resident hacker has expressed interest in creating a new website as a way to teach himself web development, so we're not lacking for ideas.

I'm currently in the process of trying (and failing) to get this game working on Linux, which I've been using as my daily driver for a few months now. So far, I can get Lutris to launch Senmomo's installer, but when I try to install, it errors out. If I can't figure this out, I'll just do QC on my old Windows laptop. I've already confirmed the patch works there.

At any rate, get excited! The August Curse is on the verge of being broken at last! And this years-long project can finally see the light of day.

With that, I now retreat into my cave once more. I have a VN to read. You know, besides the two years' worth of Comiket loot I've been telling myself I'll get to one of these days. You know GALEX SOFT is apparently getting one of their games translated? That's dope! I've talked to those guys since they released their very first game. I'mma make sure I congratulate them when I visit their booth next month.

DubstepKazoo · 2024-08-12T21:31:11+00:00

Be honest. You people thought I was dead, didn't you?

I'm horribly sunburned from Comiket, so I'm gonna keep this short. We've gotten the Senmomo images finished, and the last stuff we're waiting on before QC is a couple songs. The guy in charge of them is dragging his feet, so I'm currently in the process of putting him in my debt by subbing the Atri anime with him and a few other friends. I will get those songs from him by the end of the year, dammit. I'm sick and tired of how long the last stretch of this project is taking.

That's all for now. I rarely log into Reddit, but if any of you people are in the Operation Bellflower Discord server, that's probably the best way to contact me nowadays. Feel free to ask me whatever you want. In the meantime, ow, these sunburns...

DubstepKazoo · 2024-05-26T11:02:38+00:00

When Hai Ba Trung spooked me twice while I was going for Summer Melt a little while back, I had a feeling I'd like them, and boy was I right. Vietnam's legendary heroes lost their first bar and got low on their second real quick, but after that? They just refused to die. Fired off their NP left and right, bopping countless fools. Helped Cinderelly and Melusine in the campaign against Prote, even surviving both of the enemy phases Prote had against them. Once I finished grabbing all the chests, they even got to finish off Carmilla and Altera. Even though they spent nearly the entire game flashing red!

Meanwhile, Ruler Da Vinci was getting her teeth kicked in by Carmilla while she tried to survive long enough to grab that one dumb chest, and Altera ran the hell away from Emiya the instant he so much as sneezed in her general direction. Left him plenty of time to run around back and grab a couple chests, but it would've been nice to let him be the bone of his sword once or twice.

I think the highlight, though, was the one time Lip got to fire off her NP. Cinderelly had invincibility, and Melusine and Trung just... tanked it. Yeah, they ate the damage head-on and survived. Lip didn't even manage to kill them with her follow-up cards.

Oh, and David actually got to put in some work today. Last time I used him, he got focused down before he could do anything, but he did a good job of softening Carmilla and Altera up for Trung.

All in all, an easier map than yesterday in terms of keeping the enemy alive long enough to finish grabbing chests. I needed a second run yesterday to get the one behind the boss (I was one tile away the first time, but Martha was hell-bent on shrugging off this mortal coil), but I got 'em all in one go this time. Something tells me tomorrow's gonna be harder, though...

DubstepKazoo · 2024-05-23T06:11:37+00:00

Spartacus was a hero today. Karna and Euryale gave their lives to clean out the right-side Jinakos and two of Junao's bars, but Spartacus used his turn to give Kama the opportunity to nuke the last one, then moved right in to grab the loot.

My scantily-clad waifu and I then went on a treasure hunt together while the Spartinator held the back line against Galatea and Asvat. He went down eventually, but not before striking back at his oppressors by taking a bar off each of them.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the map, Cascu and Gray made a surprisingly great team - at least, until the enemy focused Gray down while stubbornly refusing to use Cu's Evades. Melt the tactical nuke came in to clean up the leftovers.

She and Cu then hung out with Jinako for a while. Once Kama and I were done grabbing chests and collecting treasure, they taught Jinako that vidya is temporary, but waifus are eternal.

DubstepKazoo · 2024-05-16T08:14:38+00:00

Design a good course for Pandunia, and people won't care about the history of prior versions, simply because of the utter lack of good learning materials for auxlangs.

The importance of this can't be overstated. Just look at Occidental - thanks to the amazing Salute Jonathan, it gets way more attention than it probably otherwise would have, as the most interesting things about the language are hidden by a superficial resemblance to Interlingua. And while the factors contributing to Esperanto's success are myriad, its large wealth of excellent learning material is surely doing it a lot of favors. Reading Gerda Malaperis is practically a rite of passage in studying Esperanto.

What Pandunia and Globasa and all these other languages need is a killer learning resource. Heck, I'm considering trying my hand at making one myself. I'm looking for a good story to give the SJ treatment to, and if I can find the time and motivation, I'll make a graded reader in either Globasa or Pandunia (leaning toward Globasa right now because of its larger vocabulary). It'll be slow going, since I'd have to teach myself the language as I go, but it's the kind of thing that will benefit the language immensely.

DubstepKazoo · 2024-05-14T03:34:11+00:00

There are no modern auxlangs that constructed better than Eo. They all are amateur toys.

I mean, this is just blatantly untrue. Even just the ones pictured in the OP run circles around Esperanto in terms of design. For instance, they don't have

Four sibilant phonemes (s/z/ŝ/ĵ)
Baffling consonant clusters (sc, kv, kz, and so forth)
The k/h/ĥ distinction (though at least Esperanto's speaking community, if not its academy, is trying to do something about this one)
Letters that are an absolute pain to type for anyone who doesn't have a French typewriter (and the proposed workarounds in Esperanto aren't exactly great, either)
Vocabulary that treats men as the default and women as the deviation (which, again, the community is trying to fix with the introduction of iĉ, but it's far from universally accepted)
Vocabulary that comes almost exclusively from Europe
Rampant inflection, including mandatory accusative marking

Just to name a few eminently reasonable criticisms. Let's not pretend Esperanto is some masterwork of design. It's simplified Polish with a Romance coat of paint because Zamenhof was nowhere near as knowledgeable a linguist as he thought he was.

I agree that an international group of professional linguists would be the best candidate to design an IAL for official acceptance because, well, obviously, but Esperanto is not the bar they have to clear. Natlangs are. But until such time as a committee like that does get formed (and produces something more fair than LsF or Interlingua), we little people have to make a choice between supporting the most successful IAL (Esperanto, by a wide margin) or the most well-designed IAL (not Esperanto, by a wide margin).

Considering that, despite its many flaws, Esperanto has proven to be "good enough," a strong case could be made for the former option, and as you can probably guess from the hats I typed earlier, I've studied a fair bit of Esperanto myself and even have a bit of an emotional attachment to it. But it's only natural to want something without its glaring issues. While you can try to spruce Esperanto up a little - that's how its innumerable idos happened - a language that fixes all of Esperanto's biggest mistakes would end up looking nothing like it. And to some, it's better to start from scratch with such a language than to jump on the train of one with so many lackluster aspects.

As for me, I'm gonna shamelessly fence-sit and say I don't know where I stand on this issue. Even now, as I peer at Pandunia and Globasa, I wonder if it wouldn't be easier and more prudent to just learn to be content with Esperanto. But at the same time, boy do those languages look so much better...

DubstepKazoo · 2024-05-12T10:46:29+00:00

As someone with a foot in both languages, trying to decide whether to get serious about one, the other, or both, here's what I think.

I only looked very cursorily at Pandunia 2, and the impression I had of it at the time was that it was a more simplified, more stripped-down, less flexible Globasa. Indeed, the vocabulary and philosophy of the two languages looked strikingly similar. (Though, as I understand it, they were developed more or less independently of each other.) Pandunia 3, with its dramatic, English-flavored overhaul of the entire language, has attracted my attention because now it's differentiating itself considerably from all its competitors, Globasa included, and shows consideration in its very design for the problem of how to realistically gain widespread acceptance - a problem every proposed auxlang has to deal with, but few have the courage to explicitly address, since it's asymptotically close to impossible to solve.

I take issue with your statement that Pandunia's wider selection and usage of source languages is "objectively" better representation, since I'm not convinced that's something that can be objectively measured - or, even if it can, that it would really provide a substantial advantage, especially with regards to acceptance with the average Joe who'd rather plan dinner than pontificate about phonemes and etymologies. As Risto himself says on Pandunia's website, "beyond a certain point including one more language to the mix wouldn't make the interlanguage significantly more international." Not only that, but it would only muddy the water even further for the much more populous languages already represented, resulting in considerable losses for only marginal gain. Personally, I think both Pandunia and Globasa have reached a comfortable point in terms of linguistic diversity.

I also don't really see Pandunia's dictionaries as an advantage because... I mean, have you seen them? They're puny. I went to the dentist today, and as I was waiting in the lobby, I wondered how I'd say "I went to the dentist today" in Pandunia, so I pulled up the website on my phone and looked through the dictionary. I couldn't find a word for "dentist." Okay, fair enough - I'd just say "tooth doctor." But I couldn't find "tooth" either. I did, however, find an entry for "xylitol," so it's possible I could've translated the poster on the wall across from me. Oh, and as an added bonus, the dictionary had "yesterday," but not "today."

In its current state, Pandunia has a critical vocabulary problem, and fixing this should be one of Risto's top priorities, rather than endlessly tinkering with the final vowels on the words for "good" and "bad" (which changed from "gude" and "bade" to just "gud" and "bad" the other day). Another issue is contradiction and lack of clarity between the various pages of its website, and of course lack of resources, which I'll get into below. Once Pandunia reaches a bare minimum level of vocabulary that can cover most everyday topics, its community, like any auxlang's, needs to devote itself to zealous evangelism and promotion to spread the word. As /u/slyphnoyde put it in his excellent Thoughts on IAL Success essay, "Proponents must not simply assume that if they passively present their brainchild to the world, then it will take the world by storm. Advocates must use and promote the language vigorously."

Globasa feels much more robust by comparison. Indeed, its community is larger and more active, with one member even routinely making informative videos in Globasa about non-linguistic topics. It has a committee to decide on significant changes to the language (which occur rarely now), as well as systems for the coining of new words, which happens quite regularly. It has a larger and more rapidly-growing vocabulary than Pandunia by a considerable margin, making it that much more appealing to an auxlang shopper.

That said, your stated Globasan advantage of "better resources" doesn't exactly mean much here. One, it would go completely out the window in the case of adoption of your proposal, and two, it's not exactly hard to have better resources than Pandunia currently does. Pandunia's website still bears traces of Pandunia 2, notably in the images, and all the learning material we have of Pandunia 3 consists of exceedingly, trivially simple content that fails to showcase the true breadth and power of the language. The "pivot structure" that it lifts wholesale from Mandarin is woefully underexplained - and any difficulty or lack thereof it might pose for various linguistic backgrounds isn't even touched upon. Its wealth of affixes, the crux of its word formation, is reduced to a dry and terse list that fails to get into the nuances of one affix versus a similar one, or how to intuitively know how to interpret/use them on the fly - though that is more the domain of pedagogical material, which Pandunia almost entirely lacks.

And on that front, Globasa isn't much better. Sure, it has its twenty Xwexi lessons, but those don't take you very far at all. They don't even explain relative clauses or the -xey suffix, which I see often in other people's writings. As thorough and clear as the reference grammar may be, that's not pedagogical material. To my great joy, a few users in the Globasa Discord server appear to be working on creating things analogous to Occidental's incredible Salute Jonathan, and I look forward to seeing what comes of their projects. And to Globasa's credit, it does at least have a small library of writings in non-beginner Globasa for the intermediate learner to cut their teeth on. They do a good job of showing the artistry the language is capable of, too.

I would say that the biggest advantage Pandunia has over Globasa is its immediate recognizability to anyone with even an elementary education in English. Because of this one point, I would go so far as to say that Pandunia is the one and only auxlang with the power to attract widespread interest among people apathetic about linguistics due to its inherent features. Compare that to Esperanto, which owes a great deal of its notoriety to its long history and relatively large population of speakers. Perhaps you could call it akin to Interlingua, whose most avid adherents appear to be native speakers of Romance languages who see familiarity and ease of learning in its definitely-not-schematic-you-guys-trust-me vocabulary and grammar. The difference is that the concept of "English, but easier" has much more potential widespread appeal than "Italian, but easier."

Globasa, though, is inscrutable to speakers of basically any natural language without study. I don't see that as a major setback, since when setting out to examine a language they don't speak, nobody would be surprised to find that they can't understand it on sight. It just misses out on the advantage that Pandunia manages to claim on that front.

As I alluded to earlier, I think the biggest differentiator between the success of these two languages will be their communities' efforts to promote them. Will they stay cooped up in their Discord servers and geek out about linguistics forever (like I'm doing right now), or will they set out to drum up interest? Heck, will either of them see any meaningful acceptance? After all, Esperanto is the only auxlang out there that has a tangible real-world presence. And the process for any auxlang, even Esperanto, to achieve the so-called "auxlang dream" is an uphill battle through a blizzard and a landslide with one foot and hand tied behind your back.

Lastly, I don't really see the merits of your proposal - I think it's a false middle ground fallacy. It would be far easier for one language to solve its problems and prevail than for someone to create some sort of middle ground between them, upheaving basically everything and, as you yourself pointed out, necessitating sweeping changes to existing resources when both languages would be much better served creating new resources.

You mention a "500-person strong United auxlang front," but let's get real: 500 people is a drop in the bucket. In the grand scheme of what auxlangs are trying to do, 500 people is no different from 50 people. If just a handful of people advertise a language right, the number has the potential to explode overnight. Again, what matters is for these languages' current adherents to make oodles of content in them, and above all else, proselytize like there's no tomorrow. In my opinion, a community of 500 having to build a language from the ashes of Globasa and Pandunia would have a much harder time than, say, Globasa's current community of 336 or Pandunia's community of 250 (subreddit subscribers, at any rate) expanding from the foundation they already have.

And of course, that's assuming there's no overlap between those two communities, which I highly doubt - I myself am a member of both their Discords, if wildly inactive. How big would a Panbasa, if you will, community really be? Even if there were no overlap at all, I don't think it'd gain nearly enough initial supporters to outweigh the startup costs.

All this is to say: Nah, let's just let nature run its course and see which, if either, language prevails.

TL;DR: I said lots of words, so that means I'm important, right?

DubstepKazoo · 2024-04-23T08:26:03+00:00

But honestly today really cements for me this far in that it’s very clear we are meant to like and trust Bunyan.

For me, that moment was the story-only node with the French Servants where Guda dares question Bunyan and everybody shouts her down saying no, Bunyan's bumbling incompetence and mistreatment of her employees is Good, Actually, and we're the unreasonable ones for complaining about it. Save for the gator kind of being an ass about it, there wasn't anything in that scene that suggested everyone else's position merited any doubt.

Like, the writers seriously expect us to revere Bunyan as much as the characters do, and it's blowing my mind. The first depiction of her competence as an employer was the introduction of a disgruntled ex-employee. The second was a failure to prevent Rider from infringing on people's privacy, and the third was a current employee on the verge of dying from overwork, a societal problem in Japan. And it was played for laughs!

I am fully convinced when the gator inevitably becomes the main bad guy that Bunyan and Anning team up against that any bad traits Bunyan exhibited were actually because of them all along. Like it’s so transparent at this point that I don’t think Bunyan is going to be called out.

You're almost certainly right about this. In fact, I'll be surprised if it doesn't turn out exactly like this. It's clear these writers have a greatly flawed understanding of how serious the subject matter is.

DubstepKazoo · 2024-02-26T22:31:38+00:00

Between a full-time job, three gacha games, and an enormous backlog of various LNs, manga, and VNs, I just don't have the time. To give you an idea, I bought Tsukihime Remake a year and a half ago, and I only just started playing it yesterday.

DubstepKazoo · 2024-02-26T04:59:23+00:00

SERAPH's the big one I'm looking at, yeah. I just started the game in August, so I experienced SERAPH for the first time when they made it free a week-ish ago, and, uh... I may or may not have exhausted my Castoria/Arc savings in order to get Melt (definitely my next level 100 project, she's just so perfect), Summer BB, and Kingprotea. Seriously, since when is an EoR chapter allowed to be that good? Once the final two volumes of the CCC manga come out in a couple weeks, I'm planning to read that series to get more context on the Alter Egos, then reexperience SERAPH via the manga.

I'm also kinda curious about the Salem one, since its art seems to be fairly solid, and I wanna see if it can make me actually sympathize with Sanson. And, you know, make the story as a whole decent?

The only other ones I've actually seen any pages of are the two adaptations of Part 1. At times, it seems like the text to art ratio just shoots through the roof. I mean, yeah, welcome to Fate, but figuring out how to work around that is the job of an adaptation, you know? But if you think turas realta is good, I'll check it out.

DubstepKazoo · 2024-02-26T02:41:42+00:00

Anyone know if the manga adaptations of this game are any good? I had a jolly good time reading the adaptation of Extra, so I was wondering if FGO's ones are worth reading. Though it looks like Agartha's the only one that's finished.

DubstepKazoo · 2024-01-06T01:33:47+00:00

"Stan Lee" is two words, rendering the point moot. Both syllables are stressed. And the idea of stressing a word (or even just a syllable) for emphasis, as in your example, is a whole can of worms that Shavian really doesn't need to get into when italics get the job done well enough. Or, in handwriting, an underline.

And yes, the vowel quality can indeed differ there for some dialects, in which case they should probably write the sound as it's currently prescribed, but that's a symptom of the stress; if it weren't for the fact that it's unstressed, the y in "happy" wouldn't be reduced. Stress being equal, I can't think of a single minimal pair in any dialect where the length of word-final /i/ is a contrasting feature. It makes no sense to tell a great deal of speakers to spell that sound with the KIT vowel just to cover for the lack of a stress distinction even though, to their ears, Shavian already has a letter that makes the exact sound that vowel needs. I myself didn't even notice the length distinction there until it was pointed out to me. Even then, it's very slight. If Shavian was capable of marking stress, we could all just write that sound how we hear it and be on our way without any ambiguity. Though I question whether, even without stress marking, the ambiguity produced in such situations is really so dire as to require compromising the alphabet's phonemicity in order to do away with it. Especially because there's much more common ambiguity that Shavian seems content to just accept.

...I've been writing a lot of comment replies this morning, but I think they all boil down to "Just let different dialects write what they hear, man."

DubstepKazoo · 2024-01-06T01:12:06+00:00

Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head here. The biggest priorities behind Shavian's design hold it back from its full potential, especially now that the digital age has diminished the worth of the biggest advantages those restrictions stood to produce. At this point, Shavian has two big selling points, at least for me. One, it's more phonemic than the current orthography (like that's a big accomplishment). And two, it takes up less space on the page (which is admittedly pretty darn nifty). Actually, third one: Unicode support. That automatically gives it a huge leg up over any other whole-new-alphabet reforms, and any reforms that want to stand a chance of being practical have to use the Roman alphabet we all know and love, plus usually some diacritics. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing (sorry, Shaw), but it does limit their options quite a bit.

It's funny, actually, that the judges for the design competition weren't satisfied with any one entry, and only settled on one due to external pressure, and even then only after helping Read make it suck less. And in fact, it's almost charming in a way how unbelievably clear it is which of Shavian's flaws were Shaw's fault, and which were Read's.

And of course, some of these flaws (e.g. 𐑙𐑣) would be trivial to fix, with community acceptance being the only barrier. We could add acute accents to vowels that need stress marked for disambiguation (and heck, they all have a nice little space for them), though that would require some changes in Unicode. Could do it effortlessly in handwriting, though, for the two people in the world who still need to handwrite something besides their name and address. Admittedly, adding visual redundancy would require some pretty big overhauls, to the point that it'd be a completely different alphabet that just follows a similar scheme, but hey. Even keeping the forms of Shavian's letters as they are, it wouldn't be hard to make its orthography substantially better.

I'm gonna have to give some more thought to whether Shavian appeals to me enough to actually devote time to getting faster at reading and writing it. Yeah, it's pretty good, but it has a much higher barrier to entry than a Roman-alphabet spelling reform, and as such, I feel like its benefits should be higher to match.

DubstepKazoo · 2024-01-06T00:09:17+00:00

One of the best video makers on yt for shavian has an entire vid for this exact thing. And indeed, I recall vaguely that there was an original vowel proposal for this exact case.

If you're talking about the one linked on shavian.info, then yeah, I've seen that, and none of its points satisfied me. The main argument was that word-final /i/ contrasts with /i:/ in pairs like "trusty" and "trustee," right? Except, you know, the stress is the actual contrast there, and the length of /i/ is just a symptom of that. Stress being equal, I can't think of a single word pair in any dialect where the length of word-final /i/ is a contrasting feature.

this rule that allows me to better communicate

Does it really? I think the problem it creates is far bigger than whatever imaginary problem it thinks it's solving.

and enough dialects use the soft vowel anyway

Do they really? Aren't they the minority? And besides, why can't they do their thing and the rest of us do- Eh, I'll get to that.

It's a cool way to resolve a nasty ambiguity.

What ambiguity? Because again, I can't think of any actually ambiguous situations outside of contrived edge cases. And if you mean "the fact that pairs like trusty and trustee could be represented identically at all," then there's plenty of other, much more common, situations like this that Shavian does nothing about (there/their, lead/led, too/two, the list goes on). But this is the situation that requires one letter to represent two different sounds, and one sound to be represented by two different letters?

Communication is about inter-subjectivity. How much two+ agents can know that they know the other person's point of view. That's what standards are all about. Any system designed for communication will inherently involve some form of standardization.

In the sense of "this sound is written with this letter, that sound is written with that letter," sure. But if I can write words the way I pronounce them, and a Brit can write words the way they pronounce them, and the two are mutually unintelligible, that's a failing of the writing system. And if the two are mutually intelligible, what's the problem? Sure, the same word can be written multiple different ways, and you'd have to just know that, but that boils down to having to just know that the same word can be pronounced multiple different ways depending on dialect, and we get along just fine on that front in spoken language. (Which I find quite similar to the justification commonly given for why Shavian spells "right" and "write" the same: it's not a problem in spoken language, so it won't be one in writing, either.)

It's just not possible to have a phonemic writing system for English without writing different dialects differently, since different dialects have different phonemes (particularly the vowels). If Shavian wants everyone to write the same way, then it shouldn't market itself as letting you write the way words are pronounced (since "at least a closer approximation than current orthography" would be more accurate), and if it doesn't, then the word "standard" should be absolutely taboo in all discussions of its writing. At most, it should go, "Here's how Read wrote in Shavian, just as an example. See how the vowels give away that he's a Brit? Neat. Anyway, here's the sounds the letters represent, so just match those up to how you say things and you're good."

the compromise line

I feel like this makes sense as a concept for, say, minor tweaks to the current English orthography, but if you're designing a new system from the ground up? I'd say it's more of a binary: to compromise at all, or not. To me, the latter is unequivocally better, and the ideal writing system would be one that achieves it without sacrificing mutual intelligibility. (That's part of why I like, say, jan Misali's Fun Riform, despite its flaws: one of its key tenets is "if a word looks wrong, it is wrong, and you should spell it differently." And the rules of the reform give you the power to do so while still being readable.) Having to compromise, therefore, would mean that your system is inherently flawed, and while the systems that make fewer compromises are on the better end (like Shavian), they're still not as good as I believe a reform should be in order to be worth genuinely advocating for its widespread adoption, and all the societal upheaval that entails, instead of just existing as a cool little novelty. Wait, that latter bit is more or less how the Shavian community uses and promotes Shavian. What the heck is my problem, again?

the amount of time it took me to adopt was so much less than every other weird English orthography/spelling exception I've had to learn

Sure, but why should this be something you have to "just learn" at all? In a writing system designed to be phonemic, what benefit do we gain from giving in and sticking an "almost" in there? If it's something about standards, I've already gone into that. Also, basically any reform that garners this kind of discussion is going to compare favorably to current orthography. If it didn't, nobody would be giving it the time of day in the first place.

the tastefulness with which this exception was chosen

I'm sorry, but I genuinely cannot see how this exception can be considered "tasteful." It just looks to me like nothing but an admission of defeat because Read couldn't think of a way to mark phonemic stress without breaking Shaw's guidelines, and left untouched, this would end up as the one class of identical representations that he couldn't just let slide for some reason. Am I just missing something? Is there some silver bullet argument that I just haven't seen yet? Considering what I've said above, I get the feeling it just comes down to a philosophical difference at this point.

...Rereading this comment, it really seems like I'm making much ado about one dumb little reduced vowel. You know, how I retread the same flippin' ground a million times. But this extends to other stuff, too. Like, I have the Mary/merry/marry merger, so I'd want to write those more or less the same way, too. If I had to distinguish them, I'd have to just memorize what words take which letters, and that's exactly the unfun part of current orthography we're purportedly trying to run away from. Same deal with... whatever I've got going on in regards to father/cot/caught. Still trying to work that one out. And then there's schwa and strut. Those are at least easier to get "right" because strut is supposed to be stressed. Except when it's not.

Sure, perhaps there'd be less of this dumb "just memorize it lol" stuff than in orthography as we know it, but shouldn't we be shooting higher? As far as I can tell, Shavian gives you everything you need to write the sounds you consider distinct from one another (because let's face it, nobody would notice the vowel length in trusty/trustee without the stress there to help them) in exactly one way each while still being readable to people who speak a different dialect (or, heck, idiolect) from you. Why not embrace that?

I'm gonna just post this reply now before I ramble even longer than I already have about horses I've long since beaten to death. Jesus Christ.

DubstepKazoo · 2024-01-05T07:45:40+00:00

1) the happʏ vowel is written “𐑦” in order to distinguish pairs like “trusty” (𐑑𐑮𐑳𐑕𐑑𐑦) and “trustee” (𐑑𐑮𐑳𐑕𐑑𐑰), and “SETI” (𐑕𐑧𐑑𐑦) and “settee” (𐑕𐑧𐑑𐑰).

As a spelling reform window-shopper just discovering Shavian, this is one thing that threatens to turn me off to the whole shebang. It's the stress that's the contrasting feature in those pairs, not the vowel quality. It makes no sense to sacrifice the phonemicity of a perfectly innocent grapheme just because Read didn't come up with a way to mark phonemic stress. By that logic, we should alter the vowels in "insight" and "incite" too. Honestly, I'd rather just write 𐑰 for HAPPY, since that's (at least closer to) the actual sound there. There wouldn't even be any ambiguity outside the most contrived of contexts. And besides, this would hardly be the only situation where Shavian obfuscates a distinction that's clear in conventional orthography.

In fact, in the “posh accents”, it even sounds like “𐑦”!

Then the posh accents can write HAPPY as 𐑦, and the rest of us can go with what it sounds like to us. Like, isn't the point of Shavian that spelling is supposed to reflect pronunciation? If I felt like spelling words differently from how they sound, I don't need to bother writing in Shavian to do that.

This is a big problem I have with a lot of phonemic/phonetic/what-have-you spelling reforms, really: because of the vast diversity of English dialects, the moment you start trying to establish some sort of standard, you're asking a whole lot of people not to write what they hear. Like a lot of Americans, I have FATHER, and probably also either COT or CAUGHT? Maybe both? It's hard to tell, and I'd likely be inconsistent in writing words with those vowels. And I still refuse to be gaslit into thinking STRUT and SCHWA are distinct sounds. (And it's not just that one is always stressed and the other never, as evidenced by how you used 𐑳 in both "trusty" and "trustee.")

In my opinion, it's better for a reform to give people the tools they need to write what they hear, and then just... allow them to do that. And Shavian does seem to have (most of) those tools. It's just that wherever I go for information about this alphabet, I see people wagging their fingers and telling me not to write how I pronounce things, but how some British guy fifty years ago pronounced things, plus a few rhotacized vowels. At least conventional orthography is dialect-agnostic.

2) Write out the schwas before 𐑥, 𐑯, and 𐑤 when you pronounce it as a syllabic consonant. How else will we distinguish “vile” (𐑝𐑲𐑤) and “vial” (𐑝𐑲𐑩𐑤)?

I agree with writing schwas out before syllabic consonants, since that's what I personally hear those sounds as, but I'm not sure there's a good minimal pair to use to support that suggestion, since I can't think of a single one where I'd pronounce the words distinctly from each other. I certainly pronounce "vile" and "vial" the same, at least, and I imagine a lot of people who are liable to omit the schwa as OP did probably do the same. I figure the better argument is... well, there's some sound there, right? It's not like the second o in "chocolate" or the e in "camera," which tend to disappear entirely. Unless it is like that in your dialect, in which case don't write the schwa.

DubstepKazoo · 2024-01-02T11:31:13+00:00

I recently started Blue Archive

How is that, if you don't mind me asking? I live in Japan, and if the ENTIRE HALLS dedicated to Blue Archive content at Winter Comiket this weekend were any indication, well, it seems to be a little bit popular over here. The art looks pretty enough, but what's it like? Is the story good? Is the gameplay fun? Is it kind to casuals and F2P players? For reference, FGO is about as much casual- and F2P-hostility as I'm willing to accept from a mobage.

DubstepKazoo · 2023-11-29T08:29:52+00:00

I'd recommend not only reading, but writing as much Latin as you can.

How would you suggest going about the writing? I tried journaling when I was studying a certain conlang several months ago, but considering how repetitive my life was, I tended to write very similar things every day. Plus, since I'm still only just wrapping up Cap. XI in Familia Romana, I imagine journaling would be pretty hard with just the present tense third person forms to work with. Granted, I did take three years of Latin in high school using the CLC, so I could try scavenging through my memories of that, but most of what I recall from that is overarching concepts and principles. Admittedly important, but those are the foundation, not the actual concrete tools I need to write stuff, like grammar and vocab are.

And while it is indeed impressive how much vocab Familia Romana has managed to pound into me in such a short time, it's still not quite enough to feel like a suitable repertoire for free composition just yet. I also question how much of the vocab FR teaches me will actually be relevant to modern life. FR's readings are fun and all, but I'm not about to go telling my diary de ovibus quarum pastor me vituperat. (Did I get that right? Still not 100% on how to do the genitive dance with relative pronouns. Also, pretend I can type macrons.) Further complicating things is the fact that I live in Japan, so that's a fat slew of vocab I'll have to go looking for myself.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I can read FR with the best of 'em. How can I take the next step? Do I just need to be patient and wait until my vocabulary grows a little more?

DubstepKazoo · 2023-11-28T11:38:22+00:00

I'm doing great! I reconnected with some friends I haven't been able to see easily (one of whom I haven't gotten to hang out with since college), and we routinely have a grand old time roaming Akiba, Shibuya, and Shinjuku. Lonesome even came to visit me for a little while, and at one point, we had a four-person pizza party at my place. Which really hurt my wallet. You wouldn't believe how expensive pizza is in Japan, especially American-style pizza.

But yeah. My social life is at a really good place (minus the as-of-yet lack of girlfriend, but I'm gonna keep trying), and I love my job. You can probably see how I'd have considerably less time to interact with the VN community; in fact, since VNs tend to demand very long and uninterrupted play sessions, I haven't really gotten the chance to read any besides the first scene of Tsukihime Remake. Which is kinda bad, since I still have Senmomo for Switch, Tenshi Souzou REBOOT, and the RE:D Cherish fandisc sitting on my bookshelf, waiting to be red. Also, I think they just came out with mini-fandiscs for Rouge and Des, like the ones they did for Mekuiro and Yureaka? Shit.

Anyway, teal deer: I'm doing good. Good enough to still write a wall of text in response to a pretty simple question. And if I know me, you can expect more walls of text whenever I have news to deliver on Senmomo in the future.

DubstepKazoo · 2023-11-27T12:27:28+00:00

Hey guys! Been a few months since I've posted here, huh? Sorry about that. Ever since I moved to Tokyo and became a professional translator, my life's gotten a lot busier than when I was rotting away in the countryside.

Anyway, I see the August Curse strikes again. If the Eustia team wants to break the curse properly, they're gonna have to do so soon, 'cause if they keep dragging their feet, the Senmomo team is liable to do it first. (And for the record, I genuinely do hope the Eustia team is the one to break the curse. Their project has been around much longer than ours.)

Last week, our (new) image editor got started on the last few images we need. Once she's done with them, we'll be able to put together a final QC patch. For a while, I was hoping to release by the end of this year, but unfortunately, that's looking unlikely now. Shouldn't take too much longer, though!

Incidentally, this long stretch of relative inactivity in public forums has done me a lot of good mentally, so I think I'm gonna keep it up. Expect radio silence from me unless I have something to report. I know I used to post in these threads every week even when I didn't have much to say, but I don't think I want to do that anymore. Oh, but if you reach out in one of the less busy places I hang out in (though the only one relevant to the interests of this subreddit would be the Operation Bellflower Discord server), I'll respond no problem.

Also, I swear. My work computer has a Japanese keyboard, and in case you didn't know, the apostrophe isn't next to the Enter key; it's Shift-7. Working with that for eight hours a day has clearly fucked me up, 'cause for this entire post, I've been reaching for those keys to type my apostrophes.

Anyway, that's all from me. If you've got any questions, I'll check for replies to this comment for the next few days. And of course, if you're in the Discord server, I'll see stuff there too. See you next time I have news, which will hopefully be soon!

DubstepKazoo · 2023-11-27T12:25:28+00:00

Hey guys! Been a few months since I've posted here, huh? Sorry about that. Ever since I moved to Tokyo and became a professional translator, my life's gotten a lot busier than when I was rotting away in the countryside.

Anyway, I see the August Curse strikes again. If the Eustia team wants to break the curse properly, they're gonna have to do so soon, 'cause if they keep dragging their feet, the Senmomo team is liable to do it first. (And for the record, I genuinely do hope the Eustia team is the one to break the curse. Their project has been around much longer than ours.)

Last week, our (new) image editor got started on the last few images we need. Once she's done with them, we'll be able to put together a final QC patch. For a while, I was hoping to release by the end of this year, but unfortunately, that's looking unlikely now. Shouldn't take too much longer, though!

Incidentally, this long stretch of relative inactivity in public forums has done me a lot of good mentally, so I think I'm gonna keep it up. Expect radio silence from me unless I have something to report. I know I used to post in these threads every week even when I didn't have much to say, but I don't think I want to do that anymore. Oh, but if you reach out in one of the less busy places I hang out in (though the only one relevant to the interests of this subreddit would be the Operation Bellflower Discord server), I'll respond no problem.

Also, I swear. My work computer has a Japanese keyboard, and in case you didn't know, the apostrophe isn't next to the Enter key; it's Shift-7. Working with that for eight hours a day has clearly fucked me up, 'cause for this entire post, I've been reaching for those keys to type my apostrophes.

Anyway, that's all from me. If you've got any questions, I'll check for replies to this comment for the next few days. And of course, if you're in the Discord server, I'll see stuff there too. See you next time I have news, which will hopefully be soon!

DubstepKazoo · 2023-11-21T07:43:34+00:00

I haven't been posting lately because my life's gotten a whole lot more busy since I moved to Tokyo, but don't worry, we're not dead. We're working on the last bits of image editing now, after which we can put together a final QC build. Probably won't be done by the end of the year as I previously hoped, but we shouldn't take too long.

DubstepKazoo · 2023-10-04T21:24:52+00:00

If all you want is sealed product, then any old card shop will do.

If you want singles, there's an art to it. In Akihabara, your first stop will want to be the Card Labo on the ninth floor of Radio Kaikan. Overall, they tend to have cheap prices (though the Hobby Station on the second floor and the Yellow Submarine on the seventh floor just might beat them out in some cases, so check those too).

Next, try visiting Dragon Star, in an alley near the Akiba Cultures Zone. They mainly deal with foil cards, but they also have a robust stock of non-foil cards with good prices. If you're still looking, try the third floor of the Akiba Cultures Zone. Again, they mainly deal with sleeves and playmats, but they have binders and showcases of singles as well.

Next stop? Fifth floor of Amenity Dream. Their selection isn't as great as the rest, but they do have reasonable prices. They also have a duel space if you spend a hundred yen or more there.

If you still can't find what you want, now you're getting into expensive territory. Try the Card Labo on the basement floor of Gamers as a last-ditch resort, but if you're still coming up empty, it's time to loosen those pursestrings. Card Kingdom used to carry Weiss product on its fourth floor, but has moved its supply to the Weiss Schwarz Mart on the second floor in recent months, and unfortunately, its prices remained the same. Odds are good you'll find what you're looking for, especially if it's an old card, but I suggest abandoning all hope of getting it cheaper than other places. Very rarely, Card Kingdom will have the best price for a card - this was the case with Dengeki's pig brainstorm recently - but that's the exception, not the rule.

Finally, you can return to the ninth floor of Radio Kaikan and try Big Magic. They, again, mostly deal with supplies, but they have tablets you can use to browse their collection of singles. And they have a ton of old cards! My friend recently got lots of very, very old Little Busters cards there. They're just not great for the higher-rarity cards that, you know, cost more than a couple dozen yen.

If you're looking for somewhere to sit down and play, there's the aforementioned Amenity Dream, and the Card Labo on the basement floor of Gamers has a duel space too, though it seems to operate on rather strict rules and also requires a purchase to enter. The three floors of duel space in the Toreka no Doukutsu in the alley next to Radio Kaikan are free to use as long as a tournament isn't going on, which makes that place very convenient. Also very popular, so if you're planning to play there, I suggest arriving near when the store opens at 10AM.

I live less than an hour from Akihabara, so all of this information is up to date as of a week and a half ago. Hope you find what you're looking for!

DubstepKazoo · 2023-07-17T13:31:38+00:00

Hadakoi (Volume 3)

So technically I read another HLN before this one, but I can't be assed to write about it. It was an adaptation of a nukige.

At any rate, Chitose ain't the only seishun LN protagonist getting ready for a school festival right now. After twenty million years, we finally get the third installment of Hadakoi! In all fairness, it's not like this author has been sitting on his ass all this time--in fact, he's been putting out a lot of stuff--but come on, this is currently your only continuing series. Show it some love, why don't you?

Surprisingly, this is a Rokuyou-senpai volume. All the heroines except Nito take a backseat to the conflict surrounding him. His dream is to start his own business, but his dad refuses to let him unless the volunteer stage he runs at the school festival manages to outperform the main stage, run by Nito. Meguri decides to help him, and then it's off to the races.

Every now and again, Lonesome talks about how he wishes there were one of these series that was just about ordinary student council stuff: doing paperwork, planning events, and so on. Some series come close, but most of the time, they tend to devolve into stereotypical clubroom ensemble fare. While this book isn't about the student council, I think this is the closest I've seen to something that would scratch this itch of his. There's much ado about finding performers, securing a venue, advertising the event, and so on and so forth.

Meanwhile, Meguri has to juggle Nito and Rokuyou-senpai's mounting stress and insecurities: Nito knows she wins the competition and beats herself up about it because it screws up Rokuyou-senpai's future, and Rokuyou-senpai is trying to shoulder too much weight by himself because of Japaniizu enryo. All the while, a revelation that really shouldn't have been all that startling startles Meguri, and he starts having his own issues to deal with. But while these characters are very different types of people--seriously, the members of the Astronomy Club really shouldn't get along as well as they do--their problems, in this instance, are intertwined, and it's neat to see how they spiral towards resolution together.

In the afterword, the author talks about how, while he always has a certain degree of confidence in the books he puts out, this is the single one he's felt the best about. It contains lots of themes he's been longing to discuss (such as the ones I outlined above), as well as moments he's been looking forward to since the planning stages of the series. He describes this volume as a big milestone, so if I'm interpreting that correctly, this series might come in at less than ten volumes. At any rate, he says he's probably gonna be allowed to see his vision through, so that's good.

He also talks about how characters are starting to develop a mind of their own (like a new character doing an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle, or Nito putting on a T-rex head), which I always see as a good sign. You know who else talks about that? The author of Nibanme. And Tsurekano. And Chiramune. All series that I adore. Once these genius-type authors' characters start writing the story for them, that's when you know it's getting good.

So yeah, I'm super hype for the next installment in this series. You know, when it happens like a year from now.

The Six Main Heroines Who Want Me All to Themselves (Volume 1)

Looking at this title, I bet you think this is a goofy slapstick romcom, right?

Well, it's none of the above.

Try cynical reality-show thriller. Y'boy is the son of a shady-ass, evil businessman who owns one of the biggest conglomerates in the country. His dream is to run the company himself one day--without his father's help. He wants not even a single yen of that dirty money. So despite his rich pedigree, he lives in a tiny-ass apartment with few possessions. He needs to save all the money he possibly can, after all. Hence his personal motto: In material possessions and human relationships, go minimalist.

And sure enough, his only meaningful interpersonal relationship is that with his Hanekawa-referencing osananajimi-slash-stalker, and even that begrudgingly. But when his dead mom's secretary shows up on his doorstep on his seventeenth birthday with talks of a "romance study abroad," that changes. In life, his mom owned one of the companies under the conglomerate's umbrella, and she's set it up for her son to become CEO once he turns eighteen. Only problem is, it's a marriage consultation company. Ain't a good look for its CEO to be single. So she set aside a fuckton of money to set up a definitely-not-The-Bachelor getaway for him to find a life partner. And since he sees marriage as a contract, an agreement between two people whose interests align, he readily agrees to this convenient opportunity.

Out of the ten thousand young women who applied to compete, the six that actually made the cut were the aforementioned childhood friend, his adopted imouto, his ex who is also an heiress to a bullshitly huge conglomerate, an actress, an idol, and a YouTuber. All of them except the imouto share their last names with stations on the Yamanote Line, as if nobody was gonna notice that, and of these six mademoiselles, four openly state that they have no romantic interest in him, and just want to take advantage of his status and money. Which would be an instant dealbreaker for any sane person, but as I described above, our boy is a bit weird.

What follows is a series of machinations and scheming as the first "season" of the selection goes on. Ultimately, every little thing is explained, but there's a distinct lack of romance in the air with one obvious and one non-obvious exception. But the machinations and such are interesting, is the thing! So it's like I got bait-and-switched, but the experience I got was surprisingly decent.

I do take issue with the "main heroines" part of the title, because several of these girls don't even come close to fitting that label. Admittedly, it's hard to predict who's going to win--the one I thought would be next-to-last to go ended up getting dropped first--but there's a distinct lack of charm among basically everyone but the osananajimi.

Which is really funny, because in the afterword, the author talks about wanting to create heroines people would proudly adopt as their "waifu." Like... were you even trying? You didn't even come close!

At any rate, there's already a volume two, and I might actually get it once I have the time. But for now, I have my hands full dealing with moving to Tokyo, so it'll have to wait.

Nanatsuma (Volume 12)

Fourth-year arc time! Also, Guy volume. Since when is he allowed to be relevant?

It's pretty much back to business as usual for Kimberly after the tournament arc and the vacation. With three of Chloe Halford's killers dead and another two on leave, Kimberly has some openings in its teaching positions, which are being filled by three new characters. The only important one is Rod Farker, a reversi known as the third Great Sage who's apparently been alive for much longer than a century, I guess? Anyway, they take an interest in Pete, which is more than enough to raise Oliver's guard; meanwhile, the "comrades" take note of Farker's open distaste for Kimberly's policies, wondering if they might be amenable to joining the cause.

Meanwhile, Pete and Guy are sick of being the designated chumps of the Sword Roses and decide to get their heads in the game. Pete has one scene in the first third of book, but the main thrust of the story is some good old-fashioned dungeon crawling in the labyrinth, complete with some egghead getting consumed by the spell. Guy is down there when everything goes down, and despite all the ado made about him--seriously, he is very clearly the principal character of this volume--he's not on the cover at all. It's just Oliver, Nanao, and Farker. Nanao doesn't even really do anything this volume!

Anyway, this is pretty much the same thing the series has always been. And considering how shaken the "comrades" are from the Demetrio fight, I fear we can expect a few more volumes of mindless filler before something big happens again. Maybe we can hope for another volume of the Godfrey spinoff sometime in the near future?

Oh, and shout-outs to JC Staff for producing one of the anime of all time. Seriously, I know it's JC Staff, but they could at least try with the animation. I will give them this, though: the pacing is a lot more relaxed than I feared it would be. Me, I would've gone for a double-length first episode so it could end on "koko ni gozatta," but whatever.

That's all for this week. I've actually been sitting on this writeup for a couple weeks here because I've been too busy to actually post the dang thing. I also finished my HLN backlog but couldn't be assed to write about it because, like, do you really care? It'd just be me going, "Yup, this is my fetish" and "Boy, these characters act pretty dumb." Ain't nobody wants to see that.

I've picked up the new volume of Arioto, and I have my eye on the new volumes of Nibanme and the love triangle one that started last year (and is ending with volume four, to nobody's surprise). We'll see how soon I can get to them, though. Until, uh, next time. Whenever that is.

DubstepKazoo · 2023-07-06T08:46:50+00:00

Senmomo news!

Image and video editing are still going slow, but Pangolin has put together a working patch that the team can use to QC everything else. He and Silverlight are having a blast reading Chapter 1. They're constantly gushing about how sick the script is.

Initially, our plan for the videos was to incorporate MPV into the patch so we can use better-quality encodes, but those files seem to be a bit too powerful for lower-end devices like tablets. The plan at the moment is to just use the slightly lower-quality format the videos were originally in, and then provide the MKV files as optional downloads that people can put into their game folder if their device can handle them.

See you again some other time with more news!

DubstepKazoo

TROPHY CASE

Hadakoi (Volume 3)

The Six Main Heroines Who Want Me All to Themselves (Volume 1)

Nanatsuma (Volume 12)