Status updates and Plans for 2016

Yes, it's time for the annual update Post!

I need to make these more regularly




First off, thank you everyone that watched the show in 2015 and before, and Special thanks to those who sent me things OR supported me on patreon.

Shift Deadheat got me on a Shift Car craze.

Second, Yes, the Patreon-funded reviews are Coming in the next Year, They're in progress, more details below.

I have plans, see.  Plans.

However, This Past year I manged to avoid doing something I said may need to become necessary; Skipping on Posting videos some weeks or staggering my release schedule.
While I Was amazed I managed to not end up doing that...that is going to end up happening the first half of 2016.

It's the first Day of January, and I have almost nothing done with respect to what's scheduled.

Since I started regularly doing the show in 2012, that has not happened ONCE.

Seasonal work at work hit HARD, and we kept losing associates, so Since October I've been working near daily, and it's been very exhausting.  And When Tired, I get too lethargic to really put the effort in that I should to the show.  And by trying to wait and let my mind clear, I end up wasting time I could be doing other, more productive things.
So I haven't had a chance to record much gameplay footage, or take many notes on Movies or television series, let alone write them up, record audio, record video, and Then edit it all together.
And what I have gotten done has taken me more than three times what I've allotted myself to give to it due to forcing it through exhaustion, and thus has not been meeting my own standards

The grand Prix videos an example of what Things look like when I do these tired.

Worse, what I do have planned necessitates me building Props and materials, which is also a time-consuming activity that, though I enjoy it immensely (I LIKE making things), takes Up time That would otherwise go to the show.  These things ARE needed for what's being planned, and are thus unavoidable.  And getting them made by someone else if vastly out of my price-range if it's not already a Tokusatsu toy.

Though, speaking of?  the Signal axe that appeared in the Grand Prix videos?  No Kidding, I got that for a steal.  tempted to take the time and upgrade it to full size from Fun-size, and learn how to do that with other toys I have obtained.  But that would set things even MORE back.

So the first half of the year is going to have staggered releases of Content; One scripted video scheduled every two weeks until I can get a proper buffer built back up, so I can hopefully make these a bit better.

it's that, or me going on hiatus for 3-4 months.  And I would prefer to Not do that.

Fourth;  Since I will not be having scripted content every week, I'm going to try streaming more on weekends I don't have such a release for people.
And I don't mean JUST my Group Duel networking let's plays, but actual video games in my collection, some RPG's I can just go casual through, some not.
There are also a Bunch of games getting released in February I intend to play heavily, and thought some might like to see played.  Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth and Kamen Rider Battride war Genesis being two such titles.  I will be streaming both of them on The days I obtain them, and will be testing my PS4 before then to make sure it'll work
Thus, the Let's play streams will be a pseudo-replacement for scripted content, and will be set up to be done Saturdays on my Youtube channel...unless something goes wrong and I need to head to another site like livestream or something.

The first stream Will be Banjo Kazooie, and take place Saturday, January 8th if everything goes to plan, feel free to join the fun, and these streams will be more about the enjoyment of the games than my critical analysis.

Fifth; From February 18 through Feburary 21 , I will be attending MAGFEST 2016 in scenic National harbor Maryland.  I will be filming at minimum 3 reviews at it, and I've requested to host a panel which Will review 2 standalone episodes of toku shows.
I've not heard back yet about whether my panel's been approved, that will go through in a few weeks.
I will be going in costume some days as well, Just try and guess who I will be.
If you are attending the convention, I hope to see you there.
I apologize in advance If I end up acting like a Dick.  In person, I can kind of be an Asshole, but that is never my intent.

Sixth, I'm betting you all have questions about what's going on, so Let me get some out of the way.  If anyone has any additional ones, I will answer any comments replying to this blog post as both a reply and as edits to this post.

When are you doing Kamen Rider Blade?
2017.  I'm burned out on Kamen Rider thanks to Grand Prix.
Plus, I am NOT looking forward to Kenzaki-Speak.  Dude made his own meme-worthy language 'cause he kept botching his lines.

What happened to The reviews of Kamen Rider Black, Black RX and Chojin Sentai jetman?
Content takedowns due to Toei Copyright claim abuse  I will be reposting them eventually, Jetman as it is (after I figure out how to stop it from being taken down again), but black and RX will take a bit longer.
see, I REALLY like Black and to a lesser extent enjoyed Black RX, and recently I manged to discover that I still had the edit source files on an older computer I'd managed to fix.
With those files, I can recreate the review for re-rendering, so I decided I'm going to try something I normally can't do with other, older reviews as I've lost those files.
I'm going to remaster them; re-record the audio, and make them Youtube compatible, like I've been doing for the .hack//G.U. reviews..
that is one of my current projects I'm working on getting off the ground, and why I need that slower release of new material, as such is going to be as time-consuming as producing a normal review. But if it works, I believe it will be SO worth it.

Why are your reposts of videos Toei's tried to take down so slow?  What's with the color-changing background? And why are they under different names now?
The renames are an attempt to not get copyright bots Dailymotion's recently let have fair game get the videos so I don't have to reupload stuff all over again.  The same with the background, to dissuade copyright bots.
As for why it takes so long, there are two reasons:
1: dailymotion has a video upload limit.  I hit or surpass that limit, it prevents me from doing so for another day after that.  Most of my videos are between 1 and 2 gigabytes for them to be HD720.
I don't do 1080, that filesize is just plain ridiculous.
2:  With videos I have the source files for, I have been reediting them in a way that makes them youtube compatible; the moving/colorchanging backgorunds letterboxing the video footage for starters, and then I've been re-editing them so as to have no clip longer than 10 seconds.  While Dailymotion has less strict rules and I'm very certain that what causes the takedowns are copyright bots Dailymotion has recently had infiltrate the system that are giving me problems, It's a habit I should try to get into regardless.
It's just very time-consuming, and takes me an hour to re-edit one video before I even get to rendering it.

What are your thoughts on the Kamen Rider Ichigo movie that's replacing this years Taisen movie?
It better not be written by Shoji Yonemura or produced by Shinichiro Shirakura.  If it is, it's replacing what would have been a Taisen film on the blacklist.  With those two on the project, There are Good odds it will be WORSE than Kamen Rider The First.  Past that, I think the artistic rendition of the redesign of Ichigo looks...well, stupid.  Then again, I kind of thought that of the original suit until they got the upgrade for it.

What's planned for next Year?
First off, a Patreon-requested Review of Avatar the Last Airbender.  THAT one at the very least is nearing completion.
Also expect at some point a review of the shyallamalan movie.
Patreon has now also funded remakes of my first 3 episodes; Onimusha warlords, Batman Arkham Asylum, and Gojira/Godzilla king of the monsters, so that is also upcoming.
More normal things related, I am doing Ultraman Tiga (finally, that's fallen off the schedule for three years now), Zyuranger/MMPR season 1, Digimon world 4, and mass Effect 3.  I'm going to also try to do either Persona 4 or a tales game, not decided yet.  I'm not committing long-term to much, due to my scheduling and time difficulties, but I hope to do at least one other Sentai/Ranger series/season, Rurouni Kenshin the legend ends, And Garo Makai Senki.
God I wish I'd gotten to that one this year.

When will the Yugioh reviews begin and how are you approaching that?
Right now we are funded through Toei season Zero and the Meteor dragon movie.
I'm doing everything Subbed, so it's going to take some time.  The thing with the Yugioh Dubs is that, while Yugioh Duelist is 4kid's BEST dub, they go downhill quickly in comparison to the original material, and to understand a lot of what happens later on in the anime, character intricacies and a lot of other subtextual material, you need what they removed in the dubs to make sense and fit the bigger franchise picture.
There was a lot more to Seto Kaiba, Jun manjoume and Jack Atlas than was allowed to be portrayed, to say nothing of the rest of the cast or the entire CHUNKS they didn't even bother with importing.
And yes, We WILL be doing GX season 4 and the final arc of 5D's when we get to them.
Arc-V, from what I've seen, is probably the worst of the Dubs thus-far, and From the responses I've seen about their choices in alterations said by the actors on behalf OF those doing the translating...they're talking out of their asses worse than I have ever seen with respect to justifying such localization's.
4kids was, is, and their successors continue to be proof positive that they are the worst in the industry.
As these are going to be my 'shinta's take on' videos, I'm not going to get that in-depth like my other reviews, but I will take at least two episodes (or around 20 minutes) for each arc of each show, so I'm not going to summarize it down to just a single video for each entry or movie, this'll be an ongoing project.
Not decided on whether I'll review the AU manga like R or the other ones past the original series.  I'd need scans.  Though I am collecting the books in the event I decide to.
AS for when they'll start, Season Zero is intended to be one of the reviews I will get to before June, so not that much longer before they'll start showing up.

With The .Hack//Retrospective completed, will you review any shows like it, such as Sword Art Online and Log horizon?
At some point Yes.  I'm also considering Serial experiments Lain (Chiaki J Konaka is God, suck it Lovecraft), Summer wars, and Ghost in the Shell. Pretty sure there's other cyberpunk series that address the narrowing boundary between the real and the virtual, but it's kind of a Niche thing.
Oh, Tron.  Tron is also on the list.

Why do you Use TV-Nihon Translations for some of the shows?
I like Literal translations, I find them the most accurate with respect to the content.  While they are not for everyone and some can be problematic in phrasing, that is my interpretation of things that informs my opinion.
TV Nihon is one of the few literal translation fansub groups for Tokusatsu, most others preferring to be liberal translators, which makes them comparable to Good, quality Dubs, but tend to thus be less accurate with respect to full context or series subtext despite endeavoring as best they can to retain such.  And Subs should not try to be Dubs in the first place, in my opinion.

There is nothing wrong with Liberal Translations nor liking them, it's just not my first choice if I have another option.

People say TV Nihon is a terrible translation group, but most evidence I get cited (when people even Bother to reply with more than a re-utterance of 'TVN is Shit' and refuse to validate that opinion) is the typesetting (Which is NOT a valid critque to Judging translation quality, though I will agree some of the time it gets hard to read due to how small they can be set), and it's "Frequent" errors.
Except...most of the 'errors' are cited to be their stylization of leaving in suffixes (which often can help in contextualizing characterization otherwise absent from the dialogue and portrayal, Kenshin Himura a classin citation of such), the translator notes (which help provided cultural and situational context and often are in reference to things that do not translate properly.) Or just straight Typo's (And EVERY translation group has typo's).  Any more egregious legitimate errors they either (like every good group) seek to correct, or cataloged in their wiki when that's not possible.
Really, most of the argument over 'who's a better translation' I find comes down to politics and personal preference That I try to not get involved with anymore, as It's like speaking to a brick wall.
But I think This quote from Fate/stay night Kind of Covers most of what I call the 'fansub preference wars' condensed to one statement.

And yes, I will agree some of their earlier stuff is not the 'ze-best-thang-EiiiiivAr', and they've pretty much agreed to that themselves (I've been recommended Over-Time's Re-sub of Dekaranger over theirs for example, Dekaranger being one of their first works), but often the issue is, there is no Better option for many of the series they've subbed; or the alternative is worse, but not recognized as such because the mentality that 'at least it's not TVN' has become gospel in some sects of the fandom.
A Fandom that also uses the saying "HK (Hong Kong) subs are better than nothing."










I hope You can see why I kind of 'gave up' on this whole thing, and try to stay out of it.
That said, before I review something, I do check all available translations for it, and watch a selection of each to come to the judgement of what I use, as Evidenced in my Agito and Megaranger reviews where I talked about multiple groups releases of those shows.
And Frankly, I will always rate a translation that completely alters the character of a member of the cast (yes, this has happened in recent years) worse than one that can be a little clunky as it's taken in literal form.
For there are Fansubbing groups that take the 4kids approach to things (I refer to them as 'localized fansubs').  And Those are the translations that should be condemned, and thus will never appear on the show.  That is the only kind of translation I will blacklist.

If you don't like TV-Nihon; you are free not to, there is no reason why you would need to conform to my preferences, and I highly recommend Over-time for Shinkenger And Kamen Rider W onward for Sentai and Rider series.  Bar some quibbles over their own typo's ('Ji' does not always equal 'Zi', would you listen to the dialogue for once when it comes to translating that one specific kana?  'z' sounds and 'j' sounds ARE pronounced differently!  It's not like with L/R, B/V and 'Ce/Se' sounds!), I have no significant issue with them.

From Jason Hunter:  So if your doing a yugioh retrospective dose that mean you'll someday do a Digimon one?
I at one point considered it, and I may end up doing one in the future. But my opinion on the franchise Is kind of well-known; Tamers is best, Liked Frontier for what it was, have still not seen Savers, hated Xros Wars and 02, and have Enjoyed what's been released of Tri thus-far, bar some quibbles over yamato being an Ass Unfairly to Taichi when Taichi was acting like a concious, Mature, self-aware adult and the movie was trying to unjustly stuff him back into the box of the dumbass red with it's contrivances.
Possibly after I run out of digimon games to do.
How can I help the show?
There are two ways to do so.
First: consider supporting my patreon page.  You get access to episodes a week early at the lowest tiers, and on the high-end side you can even request reviews of material yourself.
Second (and this is the easier of the two as it doesn't require any money to be spent), whitelist Dailymotion so ads run at least once while you're watching the video (if you need to turn it back on due to DM's other ad-nonsense making things work so atrociously your computer can't respond, that's perfectly understandable), and  Keep circulating the links.  I do not E-beg for views like most struggling internet personalities (aside from the patreon bit in the opening card) simply because I know that annoys people.
But for a lot of us, it's more that we're unheard of instead of we lack talent at doing this.  So, for fans or those who like a video to share or mention us...it really means a lot in the grand scheme.  I link to the videos of those who get even fewer views than me quite often on twitter that deserve recognition, and every bit in the end helps.

Also Consider following me on Twitter to keep up with what's happening as it happens.