All Form is Formless!

Happy Halloween! To celebrate the annual Halloween release, here's Kanoboku chapter 31. May your day be filled with tricks, treats and candy.

Kanojo ni Naritai Kimi to Boku ch. 31: Mediafire, Drive

Friends You Can't Live Without!

Nettaigyo chapter 24 is out, completing what will be volume 6 to be released in late December. And as per the usual custom, the series is taking a break next month to return in December. Thanks as always to the anonymous donor of these raws.

Nettaigyo wa Yuki ni Kogareru ch. 24: Mediafire, Drive

For the Peace of You I Hold Such Strife!

Sorry about the slight delay, but here's Kanoboku chapter 30.

Kanojo ni Naritai Kimi to Boku ch. 30: Mediafire, Drive

The Changing Ups and Downs!

Finally we come to the end of Lazy Guy volume 1 with two bonus chapters at the end of the volume and a one-page afterword. The series will be continuing from the serialized chapters via the Manga Up! app, and it looks like a new full chapter gets released every 2 or 3 weeks, with chapter 9's second half coming out in a couple of days.

Edit: On closer examination of the raws obtained from the Manga Up! app, they are of a suitably poor quality compared to the raws from the first volume that it is not worthwhile to work on the raws from the app. That, and obtaining the raws via the app may prove difficult and/or impossible in the future. It would perhaps be different if it was distributed via a different app, and certainly if the manga was in a normal black/white format, but the colored format makes the raws from different sources look very different, and even if the color can be tweaked to a point, there are unwanted artifacts that show up, in addition to some blurring that occurred as a result of the pages being uploaded onto the app in the first place (so even before attempting to rip the raws), all of which makes the prospect of working from the app's raws very unappealing.

So I would rather prefer to work from the volume raws, although I don't know when the next volume would be expected to be released. Even if the schedule of 2-3 weeks per full chapter remains, the next volume probably won't be released until next spring or summer, so anytime between May and August as a rough estimate. So it's unfortunate, but it will be better in the long run.

A Lazy Guy Woke Up as a Girl One Morning extra 1: Mediafire, Drive
A Lazy Guy Woke Up as a Girl One Morning extra 2: Mediafire, Drive

Somewhere Over the Rainbow!

And now here's the latest Fukaboku release with chapter 15. The next chapter is scheduled for release on December 6, so it's going to be a long wait.

Fukakai na Boku no Subete o ch. 15: Mediafire, Drive

Edit: Typo on pg. 9 fixed and reuploaded. Replace with this.
Edit 2: Typo on pg. 11 fixed and reuploaded. Replace with this.

Change Never Felt So Sweet!

Here are Lazy Guy chapters 7 and 8, corresponding to chapters 11 and 12 from the web series, meaning that we're now caught up to what had already been released, so everything after this point is totally new content. For these two chapters though, there is very little new content, excluding a couple of pages from chapter 7, and obviously the two title pages above.

Today also happens to be October 5, the 9th anniversary of Hachimitsu Scans. It has really been a wild ride over the past decade scanlating tons of manga for your reading pleasure, from the golden age of genderbending manga around 2010/2011 in terms of its breadth and diversity, all the way to today where (good) genderbending manga is relatively few and far between, or even if there are some good ones, other groups pick them up first. That is generally a very good thing for readers obviously, since more groups interested in doing that sort of manga will mean more of a chance to read such series in the future, unlike how it was a decade ago when very few groups would do any genderbending manga at all, which of course was the whole reason for Hachimitsu Scans to be created 9 years ago.

But things have changed, and will continue to change. The most welcome change has to do with the digital availability of raws nowadays compared to a decade ago, either from free online magazines/websites that post the raws (Niconico Seiga, Comic Walker, Pixiv Comic, etc.) or from digital sales of manga volumes or magazines. So now it's a lot more inexpensive to legitimately obtains raws. For comparison, on average, it would cost around $10-15 per physical volume when buying them from Amazon, but with digital releases for the Kindle, each volume costs around $5-6 on average, so around half the price of what it used to cost, making it even easier to support the authors directly from digital sales. Plus, you don't have to wait for it to be shipped (although that was really fast through Amazon, even if not instant as with digital sales). This is why the era of physical raws has now pretty much officially come to an end, and going forward, I expect almost all the raws I work from to come from a digital source.

Regarding the availability of new manga I would want to scanlate, that has generally been hard to find over the course of the past year or so, which is why Kanoboku has been the only new series I picked up earlier this year. Still, if I do find a new manga that I'm interested in, or if one of the authors I like starts a new manga I'm interested in, I'll probably end up scanlating it if another group doesn't do it first. So I'll see what happens in the coming months.

But 9 years is still something I would have never imagined back in 2010. Life expectancy for translation groups generally isn't that long for any number of reasons, and being one of the "established" groups that is still around feels pretty weird, but my attitude towards Hachimitsu has largely stayed the same over the years, and I still enjoy the work involved as long as there are people who enjoy and appreciate that work. I know I did towards scanlation groups long before I started learning Japanese, and that appreciation only grew once I realized how much effort goes into doing a proper job at scanalating. That support I've received has mainly kept me going along with the love I have towards the series I work on, even if working on them can sometimes get really annoying, but it's all worth it in the end.

So thank you to everyone for all of the support over the past 9 years, and I hope to keep going for a good while still to come.

A Lazy Guy Woke Up as a Girl One Morning ch. 7: Mediafire, Drive
A Lazy Guy Woke Up as a Girl One Morning ch. 8: Mediafire, Drive

Edit: Typo on pg. 12 in ch. 7 fixed and reuploaded.  Replace with this.