General Progress Report 03-29-22

March 29, 2022

Well, it's been a hot minute hasn't it?

First off, sorry to anyone who was reading Itoshi Koishi. I really have no excuses to offer other than I burned myself out. As much as I liked ItoKoi, the redrawing was just too much and got to be very un-fun for me. I was also just spending way too much of my free time on it, feeling like I owed it to the readers to crank chapters out as fast as I could. I don't think this excuses dropping it with no notice like I did, but it should at least give a little more context into what happened.

But that's enough of the failures of the past.

I only picked up KoeDasanai because it is a much lighter workload in general than any of the other series I've worked on. The chapters are short and the amount of redrawing is far less (it still has its fair share, but it's not every single page like ItoKoi was). This leads to being able to finish chapters much more reasonably for just me doing the work. I ended up timing myself while I worked on chapter 42, and in total it took somewhere between 7-8 hours of work to finish (I often got distracted by streams I had playing off to the side while I worked, so the time is a bit inaccurate). If most chapters only need 7-8 hours of work, then I'm optimistic I won't burn out so quickly.

In an effort to not burn myself out, here's my current game plan:

Only work on scanlation for 5-20 hours a week, and never go over 20. This averages out to <1-3 hours a day, which I feel is sustainable.
At most, upload 1 chapter per week. This will allow me to build a buffer and take more time off if I need to.
Work with my therapist to reduce the feelings of guilt and obligation should they start to flare up again.
If I end up having to drop the series, make a friggin announcement this time.

So that's where I'm at with that.

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On another note, I've updated the donation page. Before, I was using a very hacked-up version of electrum-payserver to manage generating requests and all that, but it kept breaking in very random and unintelligible ways. Instead, I decided to just write myself a script to update a static html page with the most recent unused address. There is a slight chance that multiple people may use the same address, but since I have it set to update every 5 minutes, I feel that chance is sufficiently low. I mean, to be fair I did just slap the QR code straight to the wallet for a few chapters when I was working on BokuWata, so I've done worse. Point being, it should be functional and unbreakable now... I hope.

I think that'll do it for this update.

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