Information

What is this place?

It's basically my personal space online as well as a successor site to ultimaguil.org. There's content for you guys out here that I hope you'll dig and a bunch of things I'm keeping behind the counter for easy access. Please don't go rummaging behind there, not because there's deeply personal stuff back there because I didn't bother dressing up the UI.

What happened to ultimaguil.org?

The hosting service I used was a bit too costly for my taste for what I was managing on it and I found a much cheaper and much more flexible alternative in AWS so I figured I'd just start anew with a new domain instead. It never felt right to use ultimaguil.org for anything except hosting Ore Twintail ni Narimasu stuff so I didn't put my own stuff on it and I didn't want to double up on hosting costs.

What's on here?

Besides the Twintails stuff, you'll find some thoughts of mine, non-twintail translations for the ocassional series that pique my interests, recommendations for obscurer stuff that people will miss, some online tools I feel are worth sharing and hopefully some short stories I want to bring out of my vault of the various itt anime plot ideas I came up with in the threads over the years. My thoughts on translation work should be of use to those starting out in the scene so please do give them a look if you're in search of insight.

How do I reach you?

You can get to me by email by clicking on ✉. I also set up a commenting system for the article pages if you want to reach me through there.

What's the gear in the right corner do?

Click it and you'll find an array of options to enhance your reading experience. Choose the settings you prefer and they'll persist for about a month or so before you need to fiddle with them again to maintain the cookies involved. Incidentally, the style change from ultimaguil.org has been carried over down in the footer so feel free to switch to your favorite one.

Why does the home page disappear sometimes?

I honestly don't know. That's a bug on that particular page that just popped up at the tail end of developing the site's launch version. I've combed through the css and javascript that'll affect it but I can't find the red hand of the culprit anywhere. If you figure out what it is do let me know so I can take care of it.

What's the deal with the translation speed for Twintails?

I do it at my leisure and when I feel motivated to work on it - the latter of which is very important in delivering this particular work given how much the characters ooze with personality. Also, I may or may not have inadvertantly deleted some of the translation's txt files at various points in time whilst cleaning up my downloads folder. It's rare these days for me to get in the mood for it since I have a bunch of other things I'm working on. I do intend to finish volume 6 eventually and hopefully get to volume 8 someday but all I can say is have hope and wait for results. It's still my favorite light novel series and I absolutely still intend to provide summaries to its last volume so I hope you can bear with me till then.

Is Twintails a difficult series to read and translate?

Yes and especially yes. As stated above, the characters oooooooze personality. Twintails is the one series I never have to round back to figure out who said what. The author is especially particular about making everyone distinct in the way they talk and act so it makes for a terribly immersive read. I think I've come across every single japanese first person pronoun I have heard of outside this series and some I've only seen in this series so far. He's not on the same level as the thesaurus loving freak that is NisiOisin but Mizusawa Yume does spin an especially difficult work to translate faithfully into English. If you're just starting to get used to kanji, this is just a bit into deep end of the pool as far as reading goes. Translation-wise, it'd mark the point where the last stretch begins and you really do need a very strong grasp of both languages to do the series any form of justice and frankly I can't say that I'm doing it that 100% of the time. Don't let that intimidate you out of making an effort in reading raw though. After all, the only reason I started reading light novels raw is because of this series and I jumped right into the deep end for it. I can personally guarantee you that the effort is well worth it.

How can I help?

If you want to translate it, feel free to send me your work to host here and I'll credit and link you appropriately but you have to be confident in your work if you expect me to accept it. I will NOT accept machine translations, period. I'm sure I'll end up writing on the evils of WN translation scene in the future so I'll just say I can't accept half-assed disrespect to the source material. If you want to proofread it and turn it into an epub, go ahead and I'll place a link to your version of the volume. There was a guy who did step up to proofread vol 5 but I couldn't be bothered to keep up with his efforts after a while. I really am sorry for wasting his efforts but I've no motivation to go back iteratively rework on a translation that's done with.

Why did you skip the early volumes and where are the spoilers for volumes 7 & 8?

For similar reasons to not wanting to spend time on reproofing past translations, I don't want to spend time retreading ground the anime covered. Instead, I did write up the differences from the adaptation in those volumes' respective spoiler pages. As for why vol 7 and 8 don't have spoilers, it's because I intend to deliver proper translations for them at some point. Volume 8 is one of my favorite ones so I really do want to work on it.

Why not host on Baka-Tsuki?

There was a rangeban IP block that I couldn't get around that kept me from posting my work there. I don't think I ever got a response about fixing the issue so I decided to just build my own place and that's how ultimaguil.org came about.