site Archive

Fantasy Gradients

We have a new section on the website! Now you can browse articles by series. Take a look here~

Most of the old thumbnails need to be replaced, so I’ve been working on that today. I’m a novice at photo editing software, so I spent a long time messing around with gradients to make this simple thumbnail for the Final Fantasy section:

That took longer that I was hoping, but it came out nice. Hopefully I’ll be fully done with thumbnails by tomorrow!

Now You’re Playing with Programming

I’ve been working on a pretty large coding project that will make the Info Dumps and side-by-side game comparison galleries easier for me to organize and comment on. I basically had to redo the research page stuff from scratch and write it all in a new language + write a back end organization tool.

I finally got it into an alpha state yesterday. Before, I had to manually edit dozens of .txt files and rebuild pages manually, but now I can just drag and drop and type text.

And here’s what that same stuff looks like on the front end, aka what ordinary users will see:

Once I have it in a more complete state I plan to do full side-by-side game comparison galleries somewhat regularly for Legends of Localization. They won’t be as info dense as my EarthBound, Zelda, FFIV sections but they’ll still provide lots of cool info for me and for readers.

You Are Involved in a Crie

Yesterday I was looking through server logs and realized I should probably prevent image hotlinking on all the stuff in the LoL research section – with something like 50,000+ images on there it was really bogging stuff down. I decided at the last minute to provide a replacement pic, so I spent 15 seconds finding something. That something is this:

Incidentally, if you haven’t seen the LoL 404 page you might enjoy it too: link

Please Excuse Our Mess

The main Legends of Localization site is finally getting treated to a spiffy redesign! There will be broken links and plenty of weird coding issues for the next few weeks. Mato and I, along with Fangamer’s web dev wizard, are working hard to iron out the kinks. So if you see something that looks weird on the site, please ignore it for now!

Back to the HTML Mines

Now that the latest book is done and out of our hands, it’s time for me to get back to something I’ve been meaning to do forever and ever: continue the main LoL site redesign! Tony the designer did some great mockups and our pal Brian C. has been implementing it in HTML, but it falls to me to do all the WordPress magic to work with my custom site voodoo I’ve made over the years.

It’s not a very exciting process of course:

I expect there’ll be a time in the coming weeks when the live LoL site will have the new design but be broken in many places. I’ll probably need help finding all the broken stuff when that time comes…

The Legends of 2013 and the Future of 2014!

It’s almost the end of 2013, so I thought it’d be neat to take a look back and see how the Legends of Localization site has done!

Legends of Localization used to just be a small section of my personal blog, but around March of 2013 I moved it and my separate EarthBound/MOTHER 2 comparison stuff to its own dedicated site. I also started doing smaller, blog-like articles around the middle part of the year – in fact, this is actually my 100th article! Man, I can’t believe I’ve written so many in such a short amount of time 😯

A Look at 2013

For fun, I decided to take a look at the site’s stats for 2013 – originally I wasn’t going to share this stuff, but for the sake of entertainment and future reference, here’s some of the more interesting data!

First, here’s a look at the site’s visitor count over the year:

I forgot what that giant spike was near the end of November, it turns out my article about the tourist lady in Pokemon X/Y hit the Reddit front page or some big sub-Reddit! I was mostly amazed that my site stayed functional; usually in the past Reddit would crash my other sites, even with caching plugins activated!

I’m 100% honestly amazed at how many people visit the site on a regular basis – thanks for always coming and commenting and sending in your interesting questions! It’s also incredibly humbling to think that this dinky little site got enough unique visitors to fill a couple stadiums!

Next, here were the most visited parts of the site:

Holy Giygas I had no idea EarthBound dominated the site so much 😯 I guess the fact that I run EarthBound Central plays a big part in that, but wow. It’s also interesting to see that Pokemon tourist lady post ranked so high!

And lastly, I was curious to see what the most common search engine searches were:

There are a couple eyebrow-raising entries in there, but I’m mostly surprised that so many folks were looking for Strawberry Tofu stuff on the site!

A Look at 2014

I’m having a lot of fun with Legends of Localization, and here are a few things I’d like to accomplish in 2014!

  • Continue to make small blog posts – these keep me from getting burned out on the bigger projects, and I enjoy finding answers to readers’ localization questions! Right now my update queue has about 100 questions in it, so already I got lots to write about 😯A few weeks ago I had a Twitter poll for what I should do my next blog update about, and it went over pretty well. It’s got me wondering if I should do similar things more often, or if there’s some way to help prioritize some questions that readers most want to see answered. I’ll have to figure something out.
  • Finish my thorough article about Vivian in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door – I love this game and this is a common question I get, so I’m aiming for a really clear and informative article.

  • Continue to update the Final Fantasy IV section at the rate of about one section a month, or more if a section is shorter. I feel that’s a good pace for the amount of detail I go into… I just gotta tell myself never to go into such detail again for future projects 😛

  • MOTHER 3 is in a really weird place for me right now, so I don’t know about the MOTHER 3 notes just yet. I’m not going to drop them, though.
  • Figure out how to speed up the comparison process to get a few more full comparison sections finished next year – right now I’m leaning toward something Zelda (a new-ish one probably) and/or Pokemon, but I’m planning to put up a poll later on. For now, if you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments or message on Twitter!
  • Maybe not in 2014, but someday I want to do a detailed look at some of my own early fan translations, as they’re full of funny bloopers and laughably amateur fan translator mistakes. It’s interesting, insightful stuff!

  • Get a new site design for the front page and the blog stuff – what I have now is pretty blegh. But I’m not sure who to ask about this, as being a gamer who understands the site is a big prerequisite, and if I ask around I’ll just get a bunch of marketing guys bugging me.
  • Create a section for really interesting external articles and videos – I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time but haven’t gotten around to it. There’s so much cool stuff here that I’ve never even touched on yet!
  • Create dedicated pages for control code mistakes in official games, games with untranslated lines in them, and more. Readers have been sending me these, so I need to compile them eventually!

  • Earlier this year I tried an experiment with progress meters and donations; I might try to improve that system to help keep things running smoothly and so I can focus more time on the site and update more!
  • I just remembered I still need to come up with a good hashtag for my updates on Twitter and Facebook. #lol obviously isn’t an option… but everything else I can think of sounds pretty wacky and unclear. #legofloc? Sounds like some kind of food or a badly translated wrestling move 😛
  • I’d like to at least publish one Legends of Localization book just to say I’ve done it. I think it’d be a neat experience, and it’d be fun to design!
  • Continue to get in touch with industry veterans and legends, maybe even do interviews with some of them – maybe I could even ask them some reader-submitted stuff!
  • I don’t know how yet, but I’d like to do some sort of videos. I think even just playing games side-by-side might be interesting, or at the very least they’ll be useful for reference. Videos take so much time that whatever I do will have to be something simple and light.
  • Give some more inside looks at how localization works and how you can get into the industry for those who are interested – which seems to be a lot of people, actually!
  • Similarly, for years I’ve wanted to come up with a small site or tiny page or book or something to help out a lot of the people who ask about how to start learning Japanese. If I can find the time, I’d like to finally make this happen!

There are a number of other projects and mini-projects I’d like to get done for Legends of Localization, but I don’t want to make any promises or get any big hopes up yet. I think some readers might already have some ideas about some of them, though, so mum’s the word!

This past year has been a blast for me, and I hope it has been for you too! Here’s to 2014 being even more legendary than 2013!

– Clyde