New Year's Eve and we release for you Battle Programmer Shirase 05-1; why watch the Apple drop again when you got this fresh encode right out of the system? Probably because the tracker is down and you can't get at the file just yet. Animesuki is convenient, but it forced the release....

Oh well...

(Edit: scarywater's back up. So release has finally begun, after I woke up)

PS: there appeared to have been some data corruption on scarywater that caused torrent-file tracker urls to be in error. If you get such an error when working your torrents, please redownload the torrent files. Thanks to unlogisch for pointing this out.

(Edit 2: not sure whether it was me or scarywater, but the Popotan script package torrent went awry completely. Will put back up in two or three days.)

As an early Christmas present to the masses, Battle Programmer Shirase 04-3! Run out to the streets, exclaiming Joy to the World, and enjoy this marvelous work of art!

It's the season for holiday wishes, so from all of us at We Suck, Happy Birthday Emperor Akihito. For those of you unaware, Emperor Akihito is Japan's 125th emperor, and he celebrates his 70th birthday today. The Emperor's Birthday is one of Japan's national holidays.

Q: What happens when you decide to eschew inconsistent spellings of a term used in a show in favour of one you haven't used before, but fits how words usually get converted into Japanese?
A: They prove you wrong soon thereafter.
Thanks to Yoriko pulling out a laptop with an ASCII terminal window, we now know the spelling is KyaraTech. Which would have been just about the simplest way of spelling it, but it disn't seem right at all, considering 'kya' is rarely used in english, and hard 'c' sounds like Character, Cat, and Canberra get converted to 'kya' in Japanese. So I suppose we'll be spelling it like thus from now on.

My exams are now finished, so I can do whatever I want with my sleep schedule for the next week. This means I was able to stay up until... well, now, preparing the scripts for Popotan eps. 5 and 6 for release, and the fruits of this labour are now on the torrent page. So, if you've been picking up the DVDs, or were thinking of it, have a blast. I know ~250 people downloaded the last script file, so hopefully at least as many will get this one. Oh, and you should just replace the old popotan.zds with this one--this file contains the scripts for all three discs, including some small changes to the previous discs' scripts. Oh, and Popotan vol. 4 comes out next week, but all bets are off concerning when it will show up.

Tomorrow!? You mean NOW! Battle Programmer Shirase 04-2.

It was an apparition that told Shirase to get all his stress out. Don't ask us. We don't see dead people.

If you've come here from the torrent page regarding Popotan, let me explain: Our group policy is that once episodes are available on legitimate Region 2 (or whatever their region of origin is) DVDs, we stop distributing those episodes, and instead release DVDSubber files containing our timed scripts, which will allow you to watch the DVDs with the same subtitles as appeared on our original release. (Plus, of course, corrections we have become aware of since that time. ) This requires that your DVD-ROM drive be region-free, which can be accomplished with a firmware patch for some, or with the DVD Region Free software for the rest. (Or you can set your DVD-ROM drive's native region to region 2, if you don't plan on watching things from region 1 on it.) You will also require DVD playback software, such as WinDVD, PowerDVD, etc. Your video card may even have come with suitable software. Also, you will need to set DVD Region Free (if you're using it) to recognize DVDSubber (available from the link to the right) as an application which needs to be made region free. There's a tab for "Applications" in the DVD Region Free options; choose "Add..." and find the executable for DVDSubber, and it should work fine. To watch the DVD, download the script, preferably to a scripts directory which you've set DVDSubber to look in by default, although you can just use any directory. When you insert the DVD, DVDSubber may load the profile automatically (ie. if you've set the directory); otherwise, click 'Load' to load the .zds file for Popotan (or, in the future, for other shows we release the scripts for). Once the disc starts playing, choose the correct disc from the Right-click menu. (It doesn't always choose it properly by itself.) Then, make sure that "Show Profile Subtitles" is checked, and away you go.
The terms and conditions of release: The scripts are not to be distributed or made available on any page other than those on which we make them available, nor are they to be sold, incorporated into a video file, or used in any way other than to add subtitles to a legitimate copy of the Popotan DVDs which you are in possession of.
If you're interested in buying the Popotan DVDs, we recommend YesAsia (links in sidebar). They have free shipping to the US and Canada, and purchases you make through our links support future script releases. If you have any concerns, I lurk as Torgen on #animecentral@irc.enterthegame.com; I respond to private messages as quickly as possible.

If you're curious about BPS 04-2, it seems we all had exams which got in the way of getting BPS out as quickly as usual. (This is also why scripts for Popotan disc 3 are not available yet.) Expect a release tomorrow.

For those of you who were fans of Takahashi Rumiko Theatre before we dropped the project, Live-eviL has released their scripts to the series over on Script Club. The R2 DVDs come out this month, both in a box set and in four separate discs of three or four episodes each. You'd have to make your own DVDSubber profile out of the script files in order to watch the episodes with the subtitles, unless L-E themselves decide to make a DVDSubber profile out of the scripts, but if you like the show and want subtitled DVDs, it's probably a small price to pay... especially compared to the larger price of the actual DVDs.

This no-ad thing is nice - stupid pirate anime DVD web shops. Those owners should be shot. (Opinion only, this is not a death threat for those shopowners.)

Battle Programmer Shirase 04-1 for the masses - like we needed to announce it. You leechers noticed and got it onto Animesuki before we even announced on #animecentral. Must be really excited about Charatech's next diabolical scheme - or just wanting to see more of Sae-sensei... drunk.

Blogger gave us a free upgrade to Ad-free because their pay-us-to-upgrade link was broken. Of course, I was going to upgrade to a version with some webspace so I could put scripts here, instead of on BitTorrent (which I think you all agree is silly for such small files), but free is free. Now I have to figure out why the CSS stuff has such strange issues on the live version of the site, and not on the preview version I get when I edit the template. (The links on the right are supposed to highlight to the full width of the sidebar, and when you hover over a link other than the first, it shouldn't trim the whole page to the size of the sidebar.)
(EDIT: Apparently IE won't render a page's CSS correctly if it claims to be XHTML 1.0, whether or not it actually is XHTML 1.0, which ours is.)
(EDIT 2: ...but it works fine if you convert to strict XHTML 1.1, so we have. Yay standards compliance icons!)

All that errata, eh?

Some of it shows up in our latest release, Battle Programmer Shirase 03-3. Enjoy your leeching. Yoriko kawaii~!