Many apologies for my slow releases. A lot of life-things have been holding me back from working on translating, like moving a roommate in on very short notice and applying for new jobs. In any case, I do come bearing good news- the translation for chapter 8 of Itoshi Koishi is done! It will take a few days of editing to get the chapter scanlated and uploaded, but know that more is coming soon! I plan to stream some editing/typesetting for the first time in ages either late Monday evening (starting 10PM-12AM CDT or later) or early Tuesday morning (starting 5AM-8AM CDT). I'd guess it'll probably last 4+ hours considering how much I have to do still, but who knows. I'll post a link whenever I get all that ready to go.

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First off, I'm extremely sorry. I have honestly no excuse why it's taken over a month to get chapter 7 of Itoshi Koishi out. Between stress from work/life and the correlated depressive episodes I've been dealing with, my motivation and ability to translate has been hindered severely. Honestly, my situation hasn't improved, but the guilt of taking so long is starting to get unbearable. I'm forcing myself to work on it again, so progress is being made, but at a horrible pace.

At this point, I have 6 more pages to translate, and then I'll have to work on editing. If I recall correctly, I haven't worked too far ahead on editing, so that'll take a few days more after the translation is done. In the unlikely event that I can push myself out of the bad headspace and create motivation from nothing, I'd guess it could be done by Friday. It's a tentative and very far-fetched goal, but it's my current goal nonetheless.

Again, many apologies for taking so long on chapter 7. It's been eating at me since I uploaded the last one, but when I have issues holding focus on easy things, there's almost no chance that I'm going to be able to comprehend what's on the pages.

As a final note, I'd still like to push out chapter 1 of BokuWata, but progress on that has halted completely. It's on the backburner, but it eats at me less than ItoKoi does.

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Progress on chapter 5 is going well. I took a few days off to relax, and so I took it easy today getting back into the swing of things. Chapter 5 is 26 pages (24 not counting the bonus pages), and so far I've translated 8 pages, edited 5. Assuming I can keep my focus for longer tomorrow, I can probably have most of the translation done at least. In short, Chapter 5 is on track for a release next week, assuming no road bumps.

Looking ahead from Chapter 5, there will be two sets of bonus chapters – a 5.1 with some short vignettes (10 pages), and a designated 5.5 which will include the tankoubon extras (~16 pages). Those will probably be roughly a week apart each, possibly sooner depending on scheduling stuff.

In response to the drama on MangaDex regarding the will of Takemiya-sensei, I've taken a few days to think the situation over. My decision is to continue translating the series so long as I get no formal complaints from Takemiya-sensei or an affiliated party. My reasoning behind this is as follows:

• After actually reading the Japanese portion of her Twitter bio, Takemiya-sensei uses “画像” (pictures, portraits, images), not say “漫画” (manga) or “作品” (works). This leads me to believe that she's more specifically talking about the sketches and/or teaser images she posts to Twitter and not necessarily an overarching, outright ban on fan translations.
• Other of Takemiya-sensei's works have already been translated in full and are still available on MangaDex. At bare minimum, this would indicate that there is no active policing of the supposed “no fan translations” rule
• Far more people have reached out to me to express their desire to see the series continue than have people who want me to quit until explicit permission is given
• Personally, I love this series and I want to keep translating it. If I ask for permission and am explicitly told “no,” then I will respect that decision. The translation would then stop and I'd remove everything I've uploaded to MD.
• Asking for permission after I've already done 1-2 chapters seems rather... hollow and pointless? Sort of an “in for a penny, in for a pound” situation.

Are they all good reasons? Probably not, but I tend to hope that giving the series some momentum in a previously ignored market without any compensation for the work put in would at least garner some sympathy?

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As I mentioned before, I've been working on a translation for a series I'd like to pick up. It's with great pleasure that I can now announce that my translation for chapter 4 of Itoshi Koishi is done! I have about half of the chapter edited, so I hope that within the next few days I'll have something to upload.

I have read through volume 1 already, and I have volumes 2 and 3 purchased and ready to read. In total, there are 15 chapters plus a few bonus chapters here and there, so there's plenty of content left to look forward to :)

I'm hoping that since the text is less condensed than BokuWata was, the translating will go quite a bit faster for this series (more on BokuWata in a minute). That said, this series has a lot of redrawing that needs done, and because I'm pretty bad at that, I don't expect the actual release rate to change much at all. The workload basically got flip-flopped. Comfortably, I'd guess that it'll be one chapter every 1-2 weeks, assuming nothing major happens to change that one way or the other.

To pivot back to BokuWata briefly, I do still intend to release my own chapter 1, however there were two major things that pushed me to release this first:

• As I've said before, I was going to work on Kagitsuki Terrarium after BokuWata, however the old SL group restarted their release right before I was able to start on my own. Due to fear that I'd lose my chance to work on a series again because of the old group returning, I wanted to press ahead with Itoshi Koishi
• The first chapter of BokuWata is actually very dense. I had gotten used to the few lighter chapters near the end, so going back to the heavy translation workload was demotivating.

With that out of the way, I will hopefully have that finished up before too much longer. I have no idea what kind of timeframe it will take, but from my eyeballing, 3 out of the remaining 10 pages to translate will be quick and easy. With splitting my attention between both series and Itoshi Koishi's allure of actually feeling like I'm making progress, I might guess two weeks from now or more? Who knows, it's not critically important anyway.

I think I've rambled on for long enough, so that will be all for today.

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