I think we've spelt the name of King of America's terror company about 4 different ways now, so I checked the official site. Our official spelling will now be Charatech, with the hard 'ch' from 'character'. Also, apparently his position is CEO--Cool and Excelent(sic) Oze.

Well, the Amagata Naomi album has shipped, but since the other half of the order isn't here yet, I bet the album half won't arrive by Monday, and since that's when we've been releasing lately, it's a pretty safe bet there'll be no OP translation until 04-1.

Some unfortunate news. YesAsia has shipped half of the order containing the Amagata Naomi album. Unfortunately, it's not the album half. Since I didn't request a split shipment, I suspect this means that they don't expect to be able to get it to me in a reasonable amount of time. Therefore, I'm going to say that it won't be here in time for 03-3. Hopefully we'll have it for 04-1.

We've released BPS episode 3 part 2. Suffice it to say, Yoriko has a dirty little mouth for a pre-teen.

I've seen some discussion in the forums of other anime sites regarding people being disappointed in groups releasing a version 2, or sometimes a version 3 or higher, of an episode. Rest assured that we will not release a version 2 unless there is a drastic problem with our version 1. The file we distributed not being a valid AVI file is a drastic problem. Just about any number of lines being incorrectly translated is not. Even a line being entirely missing wouldn't warrant a recall, since we could just post the translated line here as errata. It's not like we don't know that some of our episodes have translation errors, where those errors are, and what the correct translations are, although we avoid releasing until the ones that we know about at the time are fixed. We don't don't have any particular qualms about admitting to our mistakes, either--you may remember our correction in 01-2 regarding the name of the company Akizuki was working for. I'm not even the only translator who had a chance to catch that mistake, although I'll spare the other(s) the embarrassment of being named. This also points out our basic policy on the matter--each episode is at least internally consistent, so we'll correct the mistake in a later episode if the same topic comes up again, as Eibin Electronics did. We also do fix translation errors when we release the scripts to go with the DVDs. If you've watched your Popotan DVDs with our scripts(And we hope about 200 of your have), you may have noticed some translation differences between our TV versions and our scripts, including the OP and ED, which were in one case wrong, and in the other case absent from the original release.
To this end, as errata to episodes 01-1, 02-1, and 03-1, in the previews when Misao and/or Yoriko introduce themselves, their school is not High Average Academy, but Greater Narashino Academy. Narashino (習志野, if you have asian text support enabled) is a city WSW of Tokyo in the Chiba prefecture of the Kantou region of Japan. Even before releasing 03-1, I had become suspicious that this was in fact where Shirase and Misao live, but because I wasn't positive (The show's official website is not too helpful in this regard, plus it uses a positively horrid font in the information sections, which use flash; also, we've never seen the school's name plaque, even though we see Misao outside the school a few times) I was reluctant to change it, because I was worried I might have to change it again later if this too turned out to be incorrect. I only reconsidered after 03-1 had been released, by which point it was too late. There is an error in the preview attached to 01-3 which is obvious if you've seen any of 02 (I chalk this up to the announcer not being a very clear speaker), and in 02-3 I confused yuusei (遊星, wandering star or planet) with Akizuki's actual line, ryuusei (流星, shooting star or meteor), when he speaks after Shirase describes his Meteoric Three Sisters attack. Akizuki simply repeats the attack name in Japanese, although we might have put Three Shooting Star Sisters to distinguish it. Also, the opening monologue by the announcer in 01-1 has a mistake which we later fixed, I think somewhere in 02, when we noted that it was transcribed on the show's website. I think that's most of what we know about.
An advance warning: Due to two exams in two days with a family event between, episode 04-1 of BPS may be delayed until hopefully the Tuesday of that week at the latest. Don't think that we're falling behind and use that as an excuse to download another group's version when they started six weeks after us instead of subbing one of several shows currently airing which no other group is working on. (I hope that was subtle enough.) The 60 hours following BPS's air time are in general the hours when I'm most free to work on it.
The Amagata Naomi album still hasn't shipped, making it basically impossible for it to arrive in time for 03-2 unless there's a tremendous delay in us getting the raw episode. I'm still hopeful that it will arrive in time for 03-3.
Dear BlogSpot: Please let us pay you money to remove the banner ads from our blog. Sincerely, We Suck.
(edit: wow, did blogger not like Kanji.)
(edit 2: wow, I must have been Mr. Typo that day. Note that v.3 of a Blog post is a lot less troublesome than v.3 of a 100M file.)

I hope we didn't keep people waiting on the seat of their pants in hot anticipation of Battle Programmer Shirase 03-1, which was just released. What crazy plan will BPS scheme next? With whom will BPS be caught in an inappropriate situation today? And how much will it cost?

On a more serious note, it looks like we have some competition from Anime-Influx. I say to them, Bring it!

YesAsia found the new Amagata Naomi LP, so that's on order. It has the BPS OP, Suddenly, but it's not a single--it's a 6-song LP with all new tracks. If you like the song and would like to hear more from her, feel free to pick up the CD, which is linked from the sidebar.
Because the album is available, we will have access to official lyrics as soon as it arrives, which if we're lucky will be in time for ep 3pt2, but more likely will be in the timeframe of 3pt3. Official lyrics, by the way, means translated lyrics follow soon after. (Although we're still not going to do anything silly like Karaoke. At the outside, we might have the romaji version a different colour from the translation to make them easier to distinguish.)

A little on the late side but here's the conclusion to Battle Programmer Shirase Episode 2.

We apologize for missing the name of Takahashi Hiroki, who did not appear in this episode but was listed in the Japanese credits, and not in our translated credits. Bonus points to anybody that noticed.

Scripts for Popotan DVDS 1 and 2 -- that's episodes 1-4 -- are now available on the torrent page. Yes, it does seem a little silly to use a torrent for a 35k file, but this the the distribution method we've chosen. I haven't translated the PopoRaji extras yet, although I do plan to eventually. If there are problems with the file or typos/other mistakes, I'll be hanging out in the usual location of #animecentral on ETG. The convenient thing about a 35k file is that I can just replace it with an updated version and I don't screw up anyone's download.
So, if you were holding off on buying Popotan because you weren't sure if we were serious about releasing the scripts, here you go. Also, the scripts are released under the condition that you use them only with legitimate Popotan DVDs, and not with TV-Rips, DVD-rips, or in any other way. You may not encode the translation from the scripts into any video file, nor will you upload the scripts to any other website or service from which scripts or translations are distributed. And selling things with the scripts on them is right out. As stated before, the software to use with the file is DVDsubber, linked in the sidebar.

We're now a YesAsia associate, so if you buy stuff at YesAsia, please use the links at the side to get there. It doesn't even cost you anything. We've removed the donation box, since it wasn't getting any play--we think this will be a better way for our script releases to be supported. Also, there's now a pre-order link for Popotan disc 5.

Battle Programmer Shirase Episode 2 Part 2 has been released to the masses!

On the Popotan front - we're still waiting. Be patient.

Some of you may be curious as to the whereabouts of the scripts. Trust me, when the Popotan discs arrive, we'll fix them up and give them to you. In the meantime you may want to pick up DVDSubber, which is the program we intend to release our scripts for. It requires you to own a software DVD player already, but it's freeware and does the subtitles-over-dvd job nicely. In the Popotan DVDs arriving departrment, YesAsia says they've shipped, so hopefully early next week.

Battle Programmer Shirase, Episode 2 Part 1 is now out for you leechers everywhere.

Thank you for not using ports 6881 to 6889 - distro performance is greatly improved. Yay!

It took forever and a half but we have released the "exciting" conclusion to Battle Programmer Shirase, Episode 1.

For those that are actually reading this, please see if you can have your BitTorrent clients use ports other than 6881 to 6889. Our school's router doesn't like them any more and we like to distro from school since it's much faster.

I asked YesAsia to get Popotan so I could buy it from them instead, and they did, so I did. You have to love that level of service. It's backordered, but it costs less than it would have from CDJapan, and it's going to ship for free, and it meant that a CDJapan order that had been waiting on Popotan could ship, so it's all good. Just so you know, a single R2 DVD is enough to make a YesAsia order ship free to the US. (Some are enough to get free shipping to Canada.) Anyways, I've added a sidebar with links to where you can buy DVDs of stuff we've subbed.
On another less pluggy and more ranty note, Korean animation is as cheap on legitimate R3 DVDs as legitimate R1 DVDs are, and they usually come with english subtitles. (While there are often typos, they're not bad enough that even a single sentence will be unintelligible.) [EDIT: Most doesn't mean all. Check that there are english subs before you buy. Remember that Korean versions of non-Korean anime are less likely to have english subtitles, although they will probably still have their original language track.] Region Free DVD players aren't that hard to come across, and if you split the price of a DVD with two or more friends, it costs less to own the movie and watch it together than it would have cost to go to Loews or what have you. (Convenience store popcorn and Coke are cheaper too.) My recommendation in the links section in the sidebar is a good place to start. If you experiment and find something good, do let me know. Please don't support people who rip subbed K-DVDs and release them as their own. And if you do download a rip of a Korean DVD and you like it, I hope you buy it.
It's not like I have any vested interest in Korean animation doing well, but both of the Korean animated films I have seen so far have been great (In fairness, they probably wouldn't have been brought to my attention if they were bad), and I think they deserve a chance to succeed.

As of right now, I don't have a BPS ep 1 part 3 raw, so a Monday release is pretty unlikely. We'll see about making predictions about when we'll release when I have some anime to translate.

It looks like with Live-eviL having completed Takahashi Rumiko Theater, in combination with our regular school, that project will now be discontinued. Sorry to anybody waiting on that and we hope to not disappoint with our future works.

Blame Blizzard for Diablo II and Warcraft III.

Part II of the first episode (story arc?) of Battle Programmer Shirase has been released on the torrent pages. Happy leeching!