[January 5th, 2026]

New Year, Same Shit

Happy New Years, y'all. This isn't going to be much of an update.

Moving back into dad's house has been slightly delayed even more because my dad had a stove fire potentially caused by an electrical malfunction over Christmas, so most of my free time and energy has been eaten up by cleaning the house up (my dad is not a smart man and decided getting one of those big-ass ventilation fans that're used for post-flood ventilation was a good idea instead of renting a commercial air purifier and ozone generator, so now there's a layer of soot covering everything). These past couple weeks have been A Fucking Chore.

Despite this, I have found some bits of time here and there to work on translation stuff: I've gotten back into doing my OCR work and have worked my way up to Chapter 1 Part 2 of Chronicle of a Small Village, and the author and illustrator credits, inner dust cover flaps and prologue have been translated. It will be some time before I push the translations to Internet Archive, I spent several hours on the 4th looking into various publishing softwares because I want to eventually make a physical hardcover bind of not just Chronicle of a Small Village, but also for the Ring of Fates light novels for my personal collection. So far, I'm testing ghostwriter out but I think eventually I'll move onto using LaTeX (currently eyeing up LyX and TeXworks with pandoc as a companion program to convert PDF to ePub).

Currently this is all I have to show off right now:

I'm hoping to get my workstation set back up relatively soon so I can go and rescan the first few pages of Chronicle of a Small Village in 600dpi because I for some reason didn't do that, I need those scans to edit and translate and I only have the 300dpi quick scans I made on-hand.

In slightly better news, I got 2 more magazines in the mail (they were routed to my dad's house and I got to look at them briefly today while cleaning the house up). The most important one is the February 2004 issue:

It has another colour page for Beyond the Endless Sky, and a full page spread advert for the 4koma manga:

We might finally be able to see the 4koma manga cover fully unobstructed for once! I plan to finaggle the original cover scan and the scan for this specific page and merge them when I get the chance. Now, if I could only find the rest of Ichikawa's FFCC artworks to give them a similar treatment... I still have yet to poke through the rest of the magazines in full as I haven't gotten the chance, so I actually don't have any idea if there really are more Ichikawa illustrations hidden away, though I sorta doubt it.