What's Not Yours Isn't Theirs, Either
On the disturbing rise of LLMs and machine translation post-editing in fan translations.
Date 'em Ups
Tom's halfway house of posts and ruminations both old and new on Japanese games, the wider industry, and his work in it until he figures where he'll go next ...
Latest posts
You Can't Report on Hunger While Taking Bread Off the Table
On the proliferation of machine translation in video game outlets covering the effects of AI on labor.
A Decade in Game Localization
We meet again! Long time, no post, eh? I know this blog has been pretty quiet since I initially launched it late last year. It really was my plan to post a little more frequently to it, but between work happenings and just... y'know, The State of Things, I hope I can be forgiven for my diminished after-hours output. For those of you who don't already follow me on Bluesky (none of you?), I'll…
I want you to dream.
This post originally ran on Cohost on 2024/10/1 and is being reuploaded here for future posterity. The content has been lightly edited for enhanced readability. As the final piece I ran there prior to the site's shutdown, this is also the last post that will be mirrored here. Thanks for reading through this abridged archive and look forward to new entries from here on out! It's 12:15 in the early…
On Japanese Grammar
This ask originally ran on Cohost on 2024/4/14 and is being reuploaded here for future posterity. While I've decided not to bring over the majority of my asks since they were mainly casual posts, I'm making an exception for this one given the topic so these thoughts remain accessible to anybody else interested in learning Japanese. As usual, the content has been lightly edited for enhanced…
Natsumon and the Subdued Japanese Open World
This post originally ran on Cohost on 2023/8/8 and is being reuploaded here for future posterity. The content has been lightly edited for enhanced readability. I think it's fair to say that even in a post-Breath of the Wild world, for almost all intents and purposes, most people, developers and players alike, probably consider open world games to be primarily the dominion of western developers.…
Let's put more words to paper about an unlocalized Vita galge in English than anyone else on the entire Internet
This post originally ran on Cohost on 2023/2/21 and is being reuploaded here for future posterity. The content has been lightly edited for enhanced readability. You'd think that after recently obtaining some vintage, bona fide bangers like MGS1 and Ex-Ranza, both in Japanese, I'd be feasting on classic games right about now as my retro setup nears completion for the foreseeable future. You…
I modded a Neo Geo and maybe learned a (mild) life skill along the way.
Would you look at that? It's an original, brand spanking new post from yours truly and it's got nothing to do with housekeeping around here! Yes, it's true, I remembered that blogs are sometimes place where people actually talk about new things going on and not just places to re-run their old stuff in a mad dash before their previous host shuts down. I've still got more reposts to run on here for…
Bunny Garden [still] has no Metacritic score, so here's a pro datesimmer's thoughts on a kinda sorta dating sim taking Japanese vtubers by storm.
This post originally ran on Cohost on 2024/5/3 and is being reuploaded here for future posterity. The content has been lightly edited for enhanced readability. There's something to this game. For all the faults I'm about to list about why it isn't really worth your time, all the people who feel "seen" by its mere existence as a commercial product on one end versus a western critical apparatus who…
How to Play Your First Japanese Dating Sim
This post originally ran on Cohost on 2023/7/31 and is being reuploaded here for future posterity. The content has been lightly edited for enhanced readability. This was a question that I used to get asked on Twitter with some frequency. Seeing as it's been some time since I last really broached the subject, as well as the fact that I'm somewhere I don't have to worry about threading my thoughts…