Procrastination Report №5

Perhaps I need to emphasize that this is a procrastination report, essentially a blog about what I’ve been doing instead of writing, not just a series of reviews. I just happen to read a lot, so it includes a lot of reviews.

Secrets of the Silent Witch (サイレント・ウィッチ 沈黙の魔女の隠しごと) is a fantasy anime, adapted from a light novel, about a traumatized, socially anxious girl named Monica Everett who learned to cast magic without incantations to avoid speaking in front of others. I’ve only watched up to ep. 5 as that was all that’s available at the time, but it’s good so far. It is odd having the narration expound on Monica’s greatness as the “Silent Witch” for her ability to cast silently while showing a scene of her killing several dozen dragons simultaneously, like that’s supposed to be my takeaway from that sight. Supposedly, it’s a romance series, reviews complain about how reliant it is on otomege isekai tropes, but I’ve yet to see any of that. The soundtrack and the art have been very good so far, so I’m giving a tentative 6/10.

Escaping Corruption: I’m Not the Dragon King’s Little Darling Wife! (远离恶堕:才不是龙王的小娇妻!) is a gender-bender yuri isekai web novel where some guy, after completing the highest difficulty of a certain game, unlocks an even harder difficulty that is just being transported into the game. The key point of the premise is that the Dragon King (a woman, by the way) actually retained memories of all the previous playthroughs, including the last one in which the main character, now Reina, seemingly promised to be together with her. It’s a sort of “pursued by a yandere” ecchi series, with Reina trying her best to pretend she isn’t the guy the Dragon King knew. It’s hot if you’re into the sort of falling into corruption yuri, I’ve only read up to ch. 7 though. I dunno, give it a 5/10 and put it on hold.

Allow me to digress here about the rates that translators charge per reader per chapter for access to their translations. I’m all for paying people for their work but I highly doubt any of these translators, except for officially licensed ones, are paying royalties to the original authors. At the low end, sites charge 15¢ ea. and the highest I’ve seen is a site charging between 75-95¢ ea. The average chapter on SFACG, since they charge per 1k words, would be somewhere around 2-3¢ with a VIP account (discounted after paying a certain amount). A lot of translators don’t even buy these chapters on their own, they source them from their community, many of whom likely source the raws from pirated sites in the first place. Then let’s talk about the actual overhead, a good amount of translators are in groups that use WordPress (\$4-25/mo., \$48-300/yr.)¹ sites with Themesia’s LightNovel theme (\$18) and myCred for payment processing and “gamification” (\$99-299/yr. or \$249-699). On top of that, many of them still have ads on the site, often using AdvancedAds (€59-89/yr.) or just Google AdSense (\$0), as well as requesting additional donations with services like Ko-Fi or PayPal. Some additionally use PMPro (\$0-597/yr.) for membership access, allowing the user to remove ads or the like; similar functionality is sometimes implemented with Patreon, which is also frequently used to replace the “point” paywalls on chapters.² Community interaction, that is functionality traditionally offered via forums, has at this point been completely superseded by Discord servers, which offloads any overhead onto the users via “server boosts.” Of course, comments on the site itself are supported by WordPress plugins, such as WPDiscuz (\$0). Then there’s domain names, a few of the LightNovel themed ones seem to be using Hostinger (\$10.99-25.99/mo.) as both registrar and WordPress host, but you can generally get a decent domain for about \$30/yr. otherwise. All in all, I’d guess the actual site overhead is somewhere between \$50-150/mo. So what about paying translators? They probably do some amount of that, given that a lot of the translators are actually just neural networks with their own subscription costs.

A couple months ago, I loaded about \$3 for SFACG points so I could keep up with Is It Weird for a Guy to Apply to a Witch School? (身为男生志愿填魔女学院很奇怪吗 [10/10]) and after unlocking two chapters a day amounting to something around 150 chapters I still haven’t burned through it all. If we convert that 2-3¢ from USD to RMB it’s about 14-21¢, but that’s just forex markets talking. Actual cost of living, by my estimate, would be best to convert that to about 10¢, assuming the author gets about 40% that’s 4¢ per reader per chapter. They upload twice a day³ with a minimum of 1k readers,⁴ which amounts to about \$80/day. You could probably live off that, no? None of that money comes from translations, though! Point is that if someone is charging you 15¢ for their ChatGPT translation why not just spend 2¢ and Google Translate the original chapter? So that’s how I’ve been reading series I actually want to keep up with.

Kabushikigaisha Magilumiere (株式会社マジルミエ) is a magical girl anime, adapted from a manga, about Sakuragi Kana, a recent graduate struggling to find a job until she finds herself entangled with the titular magical girl startup. It’s one of the more modern magical girl setups where being a magical girl is simply one of many career options. I have read a number of these, such as In Order to Repay the Debt, I Became a Magical Girl (为了还债我成为了魔法少女 [8/10]), As if I’d Ever Be a Magical Girl (我才不是魔法少女 [6/10]), and Ore to Hero to Mahou Shoujo (6/10)… obviously, I do like the gender-bender ones. Anyway, AniDB recommends Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department (怪人開発部の黒井津さん [7/10]) as a similar series, girls at work but the work is magic. I do like girls at work, Shirobako (9/10) is one of my favorite anime, but I just can’t seem to get into this one despite the fact that the opening is sung by Mafumafu! So, putting it on hold at ep. 2 with maybe a tentative 5/10?

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover, Unless… (わたしが恋人になれるわけないじゃん, ムリムリ! (※ムリじゃなかった!?)) is a yuri anime, adapted from a light novel, about a girl who’s never had friends before struggling to distinguish between a best friend and a girlfriend. I watched up to ep. 4 with my wife the other day and she made a comment about it being rare to see yuri where it’s actually hurts seeing them kiss. She immediately corrected herself that Citrus (5/10) is much the same way, interrupting my attempt to introduced her to How I Lose Bets with My Sadistic Gifted Childhood Friend and She Steals All of My Firsts (性悪天才幼馴染との勝負に負けて初体験を全部奪われる話 [6/10]). I don’t really have much to say about the series, it’s just yuri. I tried reading the novels once while on a plane, I think I got most of the way through the first volume? It’s alright, 6/10.

I’ve been thinking a lot about number sequences lately. For context, a while ago the power in the Seattle area went out for like a week, right? During that time I didn’t really have consistent internet access, so when I did get a connection I immediately sought to copy my wife: downloading a collection of mini-games so I could play Water Sort. This isn’t about water sort, the specific collection, called Offline Games, includes a Flappy Bird inspired game called Flappy Jump.

Unlike Flappy Bird, which sees the player hopping through gaps in vertical walls, Flappy Jump’s gameplay is of a winged basketball jumping through hoops. There are additional obstacles: changes in the hoops’ orientations, moving hoops, hoops that require jumping up through them, and hoops whose rims are covered in instant-death saw blades. To balance all that out, the game does occasionally provide one-time use shields and, more important to my thoughts here, bonuses for consecutively hopping through the hoops without touching the rims (termed “splash”).

The first “splash” provides the player with $2$ points rather than the default $1$ point acquired from each hoop. Each “splash” thereafter adds $1$ to the number of points it gives, e.g. the second splash is $3$ points, the third is $4$ points, and the fourth is $5$ points. The number of points given for “splash” $n$ is then $n+1$, so we can express this as a sequence where $a_n = n + 1$, essentially counting up the integers with an offset of one. Compare this then to the sequence of points gained without a “splash,” $a_n = 1$, and you can see that it’s definitely more efficient! Let’s consider then the number of points gained after $n$ “splash”es by adding together the terms:

\[\begin{align}a_n&=\sum_{i=2}^{n}i=2+3+4+\cdots+n\tag{1a}\\ &=(2,5,8,12,17,23,30,38,45,55,\ldots)\tag{1b}\end{align}\]

Interesting to be sure; however, if you check OEIS, you’ll find it isn’t even a known sequence! I mean, that isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does mean there’s no fun facts out there already… or are there? Consider that we’re just adding the integers in order, there has to be a sequence like that, right? There’s factorial (A000142) for multiplying numbers, so would there be one for adding if we started from $a_1 = 0$ instead of $2$? Turns out, yes! They’re called “triangular numbers” (A000217):

\[\begin{align}a_n&=\binom{n+1}{2}=\frac{n*(n+1)}{2}=0+1+2+\cdots+n\tag{2a}\\ &=(0,1,3,6,10,15,21,28,36,45,\ldots)\tag{2b}\end{align}\]

Since OEIS provided us with such nice notations, we can easily apply the same format to our little sequence by shifting the beginning from $a_n=0$ to $2$ by simply adding to those $n+1$ terms:

\[\begin{align}a_n&=\binom{n+3}{2}=\frac{n*(n+3)}{2}\tag{3a}\\ &=\frac{1}{2}(n+3)(n+2)=\frac{1}{2}(n^2+5n+6)\tag{3b}\end{align}\]

I took the liberty of expanding the formula out a bit there, just to give a clear view of the fact that this is a parabola. It’s exponentially more efficient! Anyway, in light of this, I decided to give myself a challenge mode where I can only score with a “splash” and if I don’t “splash” then I just drop the ball and lose. This is mathematically very exciting. If we were to express our sequence in terms of the triangular numbers, $T(n)$, we would find that $a_n = T(n+2) + 1$. What this means is that each potential score from consecutively “splash”ing is only $1$ away from a triangular number, that $1$ then being provided by the final hoop where I missed the “splash!”

Solo Leveling Season 2: Arise from the Shadow (俺だけレベルアップな件 -Arise from the Shadow-) is an urban fantasy anime adapted from a Korean light novel or web manga. It follows a typical Korean urban fantasy setup of a modern day setting which has somewhat recently been encroached by portals to other worlds or their own pocket dimensions, simultaneously granting humans some fantastical power to challenge them. The protagonist, Sung Jinwoo, is given a system to enable him to gain further power, particularly in that most “hunters” upon awakening stagnate at their initial level whereas Jinwoo is capable of leveling up by gaining experience points in the “gates.” I have completed the manhwa, it’s only about 200 chapters, so I can review this as an adaptation: it’s alright, the opening theme is better than season one’s and the action scenes are pretty excitingly animated, 5/10. As a side note, for some reason it took me until watching the Jeju Island raid arc animated to think about the optics of a South Korean “raid” on Jeju, given the history of Korean occupation of the island. The history between Korea and Japan, of course, makes the Japanese intervention throughout the arc definitely more acceptable, where Japan is portrayed as a calculating military rival attempting to use the raid to show their power while diminishing the influence of Korea. Just questionable that it happens on Jeju.

How Could the Villainous Young Master Be a Saintess? (恶役少爷怎么可能会是圣女?) is a gender-bender yuri possession-type isekai web novel about a guy becoming the male villain, Winnie Varelis, in a yuri VN. Winnie is the last descendant of the goddess Varelis, his family traditionally producing the church’s saintesses up until his great-grandmother. By his grandparents’ generation they’d been expelled from the church, and with the death of his parents the church went so far as to “reclaim” the artifacts of previous saintesses from their manor. He’s characterized as a victim of circumstance, pushed into villainy out of necessity for some powerful group. With this reincarnation, however, he gains a system which requires him to earn “virtue points” by either fulfilling the duties of his lineage (giving alms, helping strangers, praying, &c.) or causing emotional fluctuations for the heroines and protagonist of the “original” story; these “virtue points” then unlock his inherited power… obviously that of the “saintess,” at which point Winnie becomes Vanessa. It’s the sort of gender-bender setup where the main character can more or less swap freely between identities as a man or woman, the main motivation for the latter being some power rather than comfort in the role. It reminds me a lot of The Paranoid Elf Queen Turned Me Into Her Sister (被偏执精灵女王变成了她妹妹 [5/10]) as Vanessa is compelled to act “proper” and meticulous about cleanliness, Winnie being able to switch to the Vanessa form, and the desire to keep that form secret due to complex lore reasons. Winnie’s turmoil over whether he possessed the character at the beginning of the story or he simply awakened his past-life memories at the time also reminded me more of Fake Saint of the Year (理想の聖女？残念、偽聖女でした！[5/10]), though there’s much less evidence of it being the case here. It’s take on a class system, where people are limited by their magic potential to choose a “Soul Armament” which becomes a permanent basis for any skills they learn thereafter is fairly interesting, I suppose. I’ve read up to ch. 103 so far and it’s alright, I don’t really like class systems and I prefer my trans-ings of gender to be less burdened by them all the more so, but the perspective as a “villain” is interesting enough to keep it at the average 5/10 thus far.

Reading aside, I have been working on more world-building stuff, trying to come up with other languages/scripts for regions outside of the main one I’ve already figured out. This has thus far involved things like converting Japanese kana to Kannada script (I’ve uploaded the PDF for that here) and matching Nüshu and Xi-Xia (Tangut) characters to every Toki Pona word. All this weird linguistics work and I still haven’t touched an etymology article… maybe I’ll do it when I get bored of trying to read! Yeah! Also, it is officially the Minecraft⁵ phase in my circle, so I might actually be busy with that instead.

Footnotes