WataMote Ch.94 / Status Update

Watamote 94: MEGA ★ Reader

World Three consists of only three members, and it’s been that way since 2014. While the group itself doesn’t see quite as many releases as it once did, amidst the hustle and bustle of our lives, we do still get together to release things. In fact, yesterday was the first time in over a month that all three of us were able to be online at once and talk to each other–about WataMote of course. This post is really to reflect on the last few month’s going ons.

• Ningendomo, the backbone of the the group, has been putting all his effort into school since he is slated to finally graduate less than a week from now! Aside from going to school full time, he is also a professional translator–with an entire VN under his belt–as well as budding an android developer. How he manages to make time to do anything is beyond me, honestly.

• dusthillguy, the stoic giant of World Three, has gone real deep on programming and music. Ever the silent protagonist, nothing more really needs to be said. Penis.

• Forever last is me, Meiru. The Big Idiot. I’ve been working hard on improving my quality of life in various ways. Every day is another step towards the end goal. There is something I really want and I’m stopping at nothing to get it. Also, while it may not reflect here, I do continue to scanlate literally everyday (213 days and counting), so if you want a daily morning read you can go check that out… Somewhere.

Well, that’s that. Thanks for your continued patience and support. Sorry we don’t have your much desired releases coming just yet, but hopefully soon™.

Dead Dead c10


ふふふ…
Okay so here is the 10th glorious chapter of DDDdDDDD/Dead Dead/デデデデ/Deeeeeaaaddd, the one where you find out more about Some guy nobody cares about.

I also have been scanning and uploading Murai’s anthology/art book. (from the guy who did Cathexis and Cat in the Car). Its my first time scanning and TLing all at once and my Japanese is very very basic and slow, so expect very slow updates and bad scans.

That’s the entire post, but Meiru is making wall of texts that are hard to follow, so here is a list of some albums from this year that I enjoyed:

Dead Dead Demons de DeDeDe Destruction c010 – Reader / DDL

From The Vault: I Love You!! Magical Angel Cosmos Ch.09 (2011-2014)

mfwDDL: [Mediafire]

I-It only took almost three years guys.

Today is my birthday. Another year closer to getting to Gensokyo.

The story behind this chapter is kind of funny. The last chapter released was in 2011, but we never actually dropped it until 2013. The chapter/volume itself has seen multiple cleaners, multiple scans, and multiple revisions across the years. The biggest reason for dropping it was that the redraws were harsh on everyone. At least, at the time I thought they were. (They aren’t anymore, as evident by my own personal redraw for this chapter that I did yesterday.) The redraws are dated. They were done by a redrawer for hire of sorts, where it was a doujin a redraw or so. Other than that, the chapter sat dormant for years.

Yesterday, I thought it would be funny to see how fast I can do the chapter from Raw to Release in the way I do manga now. Back in the first volume it took me around 12 hours to do ~60 pages with it all pre-cleaned. Raw to Release took me about ~8 hours, but most of it was spent idling around. It’s not the best looking release by any means, but if I conceded a little more I probably could’ve done it faster.

The script was terrible and left the way it was for the most part. Ningen’s evolved a lot since then, though that may be hard to tell. Looking at it now, I immediately remembered why this was so hard to work through. A lot of unforgiving screentones, a lot of small word balloons, and a hell of a lot of yelling for no reason. I love the series for what it means to me, but at the same time I loathe almost as much, but that’s how it goes. It was a fun exercise, but I definitely do not miss the grind of working on this series. Cosmos is dead. Long Live Cosmos.

To Sector89, I finished it. You can’t hold this over me any longer!

Handa-kun/Project Status

It’s late and I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Here is a piece of Handa-kun. (click image)

Dunno if we’ll do this. We’re all pretty swamped with stuff lately. I just scanned it because I like practicing cleans. Anyway, Project Status update time. Please click “Continue reading” to see literally everything. We could’ve dropped your favorite manga!!?!

Also, I’d like to get more involved with the people via social media. Going to [try] to tweet more about stuff/releases on the tweeter account. There is an ask.fm if you want to ask questions about (almost) anything, even stuff outside of scanlation. It’s easier than writing an email.

Read more

Watamote Ch.41 + Announcements

WHO-IS-SHE-ANONDDL: [Mediafire] | Online: [Reader]

After a good 7-8 hour marathon through this, it’s finally done. What a hefty chapter it ended up being. dusthillguy’s been working on redraws since yesterday but they proved to be plenty, so I offered to do the last few myself. It was tedious, and I ended up playing a game with my friends, but I got it done. [Here]

Which brings us to the announcements, I guess. So–the “big one”–after two years of beating around the bush and a bunch o’ staff discussions it was decided that we’ll open up donations. There was going to be a page to go along with how/why this became a conclusion, but it ended up being paragraphs with every rewrite so I opted not to do that. It’s just a button on the side. Not some fancy form, not some bar to guilt trip you into putting money to fill it up, just a button, with Mio. You can use it, ignore it, put it on your adblock forever, whatever you want. Any donations will primarily go towards getting raws that we need/use, mostly tanks, but also magazines nowadays too, as well as the occasional server upkeep. You have our gratitude.

The second is just a call for recruitment again. Scorpian is looking for a Translator for his next Miyata Kouji project/joint here, and I’m (still) looking around for a Typesetter for Houkago Play because it warrants a dedicated one. Now that finals are over, hopefully all the other things can start picking up again. Please.

Also obligatory “come visit the irc” comment here. I usually can be found just answering questions in there.

Some kind of check in ・∀・

Hello again it’s already February 2013. Since it’s slowed down (again) and the sticky is gone I figured I may as well post about how things are going around here. Which is actually a whole lot of everything, honestly. Since it’s kind of a lot I’ll just do it in a list or whatever.

1. Cosmos — We did actually find a kind soul that is willing to help us out with all the redraws. Kind of teased that in the middle of nowhere a short while ago here.Thanks to all those that wrote in with various ways of helping out! We’re still open to more help on the redraw front, so feel free to give a shout out if you want to do so. Other than that, I just have to get off my butt and letter all the really long chapters.

2. Helvetica Standard — We get asked about this every so often. K, the main guy behind this (among many other things), has gotten increasingly busy with the things he does. It’s mostly translated and edited, but not cleaned, and definitely not lettered. Whenever he has a substantial break from things we’ll kick him about it.

3. Akatsuki no Memoria — This has been increasing progressively for the past week or so. One chapter is nearing finalization and two or three are just waiting to be lettered by me, because I’m dumb. Bit of a social experiment with it regards to cleaning, if you’ve got a little bit of time to answer a short question.
Choose which you prefer: [#1- Standard] | [#2 – ‘Digital Comic’] | [#3 – Full Retard] | [#4 – I Don’t Care]

4. Sorairo Square — This is another one in a weird space. We have currently one volume fully scanned, fully translated, and fully edited. But it always gets put to the side when the letterers want to do something. Ningen is always getting mad about this. Surely a new chapter will come out by the end of the month though. Surely.

5. Oh, My Sweet Alien! — One or two episodes left from being complete. Scorpian is actually out and about figuring out what project he’s going to do. Whatever it may be might not end up here, but we’ll post about it or something when it’s out. Because he does some crazy stuff.

6. Watamote Spin-off? — You may have caught word that a Watamote spin-off manga is out in an actual magazine staring the best slutty friend a girl could have Yuu. We’ve been asked if we’re doing this too, and frankly we can’t right now due to lack of raws. Watamote itself is from a online comic, and all the other things we do are from tank scans. If you do know of someone or somewhere that can provide raw scans of the magazine Gangan Joker, please do give us an email. I’m genuinely curious/interested in this.

7. Kyoukai Senjou no Limbo — There’s seriously like six scripts laying around here, but you know the story of Helvetica Standard, so they aren’t exactly being done posthaste. Thankfully it’s a 4koma so maybe I’ll do it is his stead. …After I finish all the stuff I have to do.

8. General Recruitment — So uh. Yeah. A running theme here is just lack of staff with time. Or rather, lack of letterers/typesetters with time. We have a fairly sizable staff, but the ratio of everyone to letterers is pretty low. Almost 1 to everyone most of the time. (Depending on who is online.) I actually have the most free time out of the three of us, but I’ve been spending that time trying to play silly video games, so nothing I work on gets done, which coincidentally, is three large things. I-If you want to help out feel free to check out the recruitment page for anything you can help out with. I–no, we–appreciate any and all help we can get!

9. Bonus Stage — Fun fact, right now we’re in the middle of planning for our biannual raw buy up, where we buy a bunch of things we need and might do in the future. If you have anything you might want to see done leave that in the comments too. Just remember: If a group is doing it already, make sure it’s been at least a year since its last release. Also doujins count this time. Throw up those sadpanda links for all I care. Just no hardcore scat please.

Until next release…!

A Year of Scanlation

Well, we technically have two “anniversaries”. The day we founded this group, and the day we released our first chapter. While we essentially skipped the first, today is what we consider the real anniversary. Hooray!

A year ago today, we released our first release, a chapter of Hen-Zemi. Thus triggering the downwards spiral that then brings us to where we are today. A little wiser, a little better, a little faster, and a little larger. But still just as lazy, if not even lazier.

Because this is an rather important post, one I’ve actually written, rewritten, trashed, and wrote again, I’ll kind of merge our initial “founding” story, and the oh-so-fun numbers portion into one post. Just click whichever you want to read. The last one being the most interesting.


The story itself is actually pretty boring. One day I was on /a/ and found a thread by J who was dumping their latest Ika Musume chapter. Looking at it I realized that the number was abnormally high, and that it didn’t correlate to what it said on Mangaupdates at all. So I dug and eventually found raws and saw that they were in fact not translated at all anywhere. Suddenly I hatched the idea that I could translate these, except I don’t like translating things, at all, so I needed a translator! And that is where the real start began.

Having read scanlations before, and with a rather above average understanding of Photoshop, I tooled away at the first few pages of Ika Musume Chapter 48 and spun a tale of them looking for a translator. These are the first pages I ever “scanlated”. [Page 1] – [Page 2] – [Page 3]

The “Personthingy” in question is now known as にんげん to the internet. He found my edits to be comical at best, but was more moved by the chance to actually make use of his Japanese studies. With that we did in fact scanlate that chapter. But it was lacking…. Badly….

At that time I found out Simple Scans actually was looking for some staff. I ended up taking their QC test, にんげん took the TL test. Long story short, because it was the QC test, I had to learn how to actually scanlate properly in… about 24 hours. And it was hard. Very. Hard. But we both managed to get in, in the end.

Once we were in, the rather renown abcd9146 was to be our adviser through this whole ordeal. I told him that we wanted to work on Ika Musume and would just release it under SS, he agreed. Then I showed him our original cleaned, ‘finished’ chapter, and he laughed. It was shit. 2/10 was the best he could do.

My rudimentary 24 hour skills were more than enough to get in, but not anywhere close to their level of quality to release. にんげん and I took in his words of advice and went back to the drawing board and emerged with this glorious masterpiece of a chapter. Proper redraws and all. [YOU CAN DL IT MAN]

Then we basically quit. And never released that chapter (until now). J picked it up, and we disappeared.

Eventually we reemerged onto the scanlation scene again doing doujins at Kibitou4Life, now Life4Kaoru.
But that is an entirely separate arc, for another time. You could compare it to the Namek arc or something.

Having been itching to get back into manga scanlation though, we wanted to start fresh. But I didn’t want to use our original name, which was “HNNNNNNNNGH Scans”. This is actually how we came up with the name World Three. And that is the start of the “World Three” arc, in the timeline.

That wasn’t a very fun ride, I’m sorry.


What is a anniversary post without a bunch of rather useless data values? So I’ll break down most of that stuff here, but as I said this really will be the more interesting part. At least I think it will. I like numbers.

  • # of series done: 6
  • # of Volumes Completed: 4
  • # of Chapters Completed: 48
  • Total space used for DDLs: 995.42 MB
  • Total bandwidth used for DDLs: 612.17 GB
  • Total downloads served: 81,873 (Since March 12, 2011)

From there, people would usually go into actual web statistics. Page views, hits, visitors, etc. You know, the things people usually wave around like they’re important, or something. But in all honesty I, as the primary webmaster for the group, never set up anything to really track such things on purpose, because counting numbers is stupid.. The most I could do is “hits” via the access log. And that’s rather boring anyway.

Which, according to that, we have… 600,595 hits from 17/03/2012 – 20/05/2012. Yay?

Anyway, I’ll provide you the real meat of this section. If you’ve read our FAQ you would know that we basically handle all monetary things in house. No donations, no adsense. Like a lot of other groups. What a lot of other groups do not go into is how much goes into what/where. But now, you’ll know! For us anyway.

366 Days of Expenses

  • $341.00 on…. importing raws
  • $119.40 on…. the initial shared hosting plan (12 months)
  • $241.21 on… the original reader VPS (11 months)
  • $196.55 on… the new server we’re on now (04 months)
  • $ 37.47  on… domain moving from stupid GoDaddy
  • $ 83.99  on… a new scanner to scan raws
  • $114.00 on… a Bamboo Capture so I can clean better

Total: $1133.62 USD

Yup. That’s how much was spent this last year. Do any of those involved mind at all? Nope. So please, don’t you worry about us when seeing these numbers. It’s just a small price we choose to pay to do the hobby we love to do. Seriously though, you don’t even have to spend any money at all to scanlate. Share raws exist. WordPress/Blogger/Tumblr blogs are a thing. GIMP/Paint.net are free (most people pirate Photoshop anyway.) There’s more than enough tools out there for anyone to get into this hobby, and hopefully enjoy it!


In closing, I personally would like to thank: J for all that inspiration. abcd9146 for teaching me a good deal of everything. He Who Must Not Be Named for giving us a place at K4L/L4K. sexy mahou shoujo from kyonkundenwa for all the good times we’ve yelled about this hobby. Woxxy from FoOlRulez for dealing with all my stupid tech support questions. WCW_TL, and Yamada from 14BiQ, for their wise words of wisdom/advice. Of course Twintail and the Staff here at World Three for sticking through and translating/editing/cleaning/redrawing/typesetting/lettering at some of the most ungodly hours of the day just to finish a release. As well as all the hard working authors and artists that made the manga we scanlate in the first place!

And obviously, You. The ones that read, that have read, and that will read. Every single one of you.
Without you, none of this would be possible. None of this would exist. And for that…

ありがとうございます。 ♡(*´▽`*)