Pokémon manga blog

My main Pokémon manga tumblr. I blog about my personal Pokémon manga collection at mrxpokemonmanga.tumblr.com.

[mangareaderx]

jb2448.info web host transfer update

I thought that I should make an update regarding the transfer of jb2448.info from Bluehost to a better web host. At first, we were pretty excited about FastComet (which was our go to host), but, as I would learn as I kept researching hosting options, there is no such thing as “unlimited” hosting, especially on a shared server where many customers share server resources. It’s just a marketing pitch that pretty much every web host uses, and the web host will deactiveate the site if it impacts the performance of other sites on the shared server negatively due to heavy load. The site, which consumes about 1 TB bandwidth per month, was too much for FastComet’s shared hosting to handle. Actually, it’s too much to handle for almost every shared hosting plan of all of the web hosts I looked at. The best solution is to get a VPS, a virtual private server. That gives the site a lot more resources, provided that the right virtualization type is chosen for the VPS. At FastComet, a VPS that could handle the site would have cost $79.95 (~74.5€) / month, so that was out of the question. Back to searching.

That’s when I remembered that a bunch of techies on IRC had recommended Scaleway, which would have charged 15.99€ (~$17) per month for hosting the site on a dedicated bare metal server. They build their own servers to keep down costs and are backed by Online.net, which is the second largest hosting company in France. That is why they are so crazy cheap. So, having a dedicated physical server for just 15.99€ per month with the option of adding 50-150 GB partitions of SSD storage for 1€ per 50 GB sounded great. We started setting up the server, but after a while I found out the catch with Scaleway, and there are many: The servers are made of sub-par components and don’t perform to what is expected of the server specs; also, their transfer speeds are slower than their competitors. SSDs are not physically attached to the servers, but instead are attached via a network, so they are slower than what they would be otherwise. No RAID, so if the SSD dies, there won’t be any way to recover the data. Minimal to no support, which is to be expected when it comes to VPS hosting (since it is kind of a self-service business), but you’d expect that they’d at least be able to get servers back online again after server downtime (and you'd expect them to have better customer service in general). The general consensus on Reddit seems to be to not use Scaleway for hosting anything important or resource intensive. I should have researched them more throughly and not just trusted techies on IRC, so the Scaleway sidetrack is my fault.

The search for a good and decently priced VPS provider continues, and I actually found two potential candidates:

Hetzner is the largest web host in Germany and hosting with them would cost 23.68€ (~$25.4) per month for their vServer CX40 VPS. However, support there is minimal to non-existent, with the only guarantee basically being that they’ll keep the server online.

BuyVM is a web host with a great reputation on Reddit, LowEndTalk, other web hosting forums, and the Internet in general, and while it is generally not a VPS provider’s job to help beyond keeping the server online, they will help with stuff like installing software if asked. Hosting would cost $30 (28€) per month for their dedicated SLICE 8192 VPS server. Another very nice detail about them is the offshore hosting that their Luxembourg data center offers. The Luxembourg data center does not care about DMCA notices, since DMCA doesn’t apply in Luxembourg. Luxembourg is also one of the eight best countries in Europe to host websites in from a privacy standpoint (the other ones are Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, and Romania). The SSD is 160 GB, so it is 40 GB smaller than Hetzner’s 200 GB SSD, but it should be enough for hosting the site. Right now, it looks like the site is moving to a BuyVM VPS server in Luxembourg.

Now we will have to rebuild the site on BuyVM’s VPS server, which will take a while. Stay tuned.

[mangareaderx]

i dear you can translate the manga movie of pokèmon? the pokèmon movie 1,2,3,4 and 5 in your site jb2448 is in japanese, please translate that special manga i hope you can answer me

About movie manga 1:

There is some interest within the group of eventually scanlating it, but with the currently available RAW not being debound and being magazine RAW at that, it’s going to be a pain in the a** to clean. There are still a bunch of series we will prioritize before it, but there is chance we might get to scanlating it at some point.

About movie manga 2-5:

We would consider scanlating them once everything else of value has been scanlated.

[mangareaderx]

Do you guys currently plan on translating Réburst at some point?

We have discussed it and there is some interest within the group, but it’s a very long manga and we want to start out with a few shorter series. It is a possibility that we might pick up Pokémon RéBURST at some point, but probably not within the forseeable future.

[mangareaderx]

How about Pokémon Horizons? It looks interesting but there's 0 information about it.

I forgot to mention that one in the recruitment post since it’s still pretty early in the works. Pokémon Horizon has been imported and debound, chapter 1 has been scanned and we have a translator for it. I’ve added it to the recruitment post now.

[mangareaderx]

llluminate Scanlations is recruiting staff for other Pokémon manga scanlation projects

I and some other people have been putting together a scanlation team for Pokémon manga besides Pokémon Special and it has taken shape quite nicely recently. We just joined llluminate Scanlations as an independent sub-division. Currently we are working on Mobilise!! Pokémon Ranger and Pokémon BW: Good Partners and we will eventually pick up Pokémon Zensho as well as some other Pokémon manga series. We are currently recruiting translators, translation checkers, cleaners, typesetters and quality checkers. If you’re interested and want to apply, send me a message either via my ask page or via Tumblr’s messenger feature.

P.s. reblogging and sharing helps and is appreciated.

Edit 1: I forgot to mention that Pokémon Horizon is also an active project.

[pokescans]

Keep reading

[mangareaderx]

I have submitted pokescans.tumblr.com to ArchiveBot, which is an IRC bot that can archive entire websites. The site will be archived and automatically uploaded to Internet Archive where it will be browsable. I am also batch downloading the entire tumblr blog to my hard drive.

Once jb2448.info has moved hosts - we’re currently setting up its own dedicated bare metal VPS server - we’ll be more than happy to host all of your Pokémon manga scans. We don’t normally host non-manga stuff, but if your blog is taken down we will definitely consider it.

If your blog is taken down and you want to continue you can get a domain name and then self-host the blog on an offshore server. I’ve read that AbeloHost is a good offshore hosting provider. If you still have access to your Tumblr when you move your blog it is possible to import your Tumblr posts into WordPress. I and JB2448 could try to help you out with setting that up if you’d like.

United we stand, divided we fall.

[pokescans]

Keep reading

[pokescans]

Keep reading

[jb2448]

We set up a Patreon for PokéSpe.

https://patreon.com/user?u=4871271 This is for both @illuminatescanlations and my website. @ilovecrt wrote out everything. I was originally going to write a long-winded post here, but I figured short and sweet would be more in line with how I’ve used Tumblr so far.

I’ll be 100% up front with everyone here. I’ve paid for my web hosting for six years now, sometimes at the cost of things that would have been more worthwhile from a human capital improvement standpoint. I decided to forgo all of that because of my love for this manga and for all of the people that either don’t have access to or can’t afford purchasing copies of it.

It’s been my pride and joy for six years, and I’ve never been more proud of it and the fandom it’s been able to support.

At the same time, I’m in a more financially fragile situation than I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’m in my final year of my undergraduate degree, and I’ve been exercising more fiscally conservative behavior than I’ve ever had to. Even so, I’ve been doing the math, and I’m not sure I can possibly afford to keep the website going unless this Patreon works out.

I would never ask you to give money if you yourself couldn’t afford it. I’ve been there. I’m there now. No matter what, I’m going to do my best to continue to keep the gallery online and supported with the latest chapters in this series.

However, if you have the ability to give even a dollar a month to this, it would alleviate such a profound burden for me and everyone else that works to bring you fan translations of this wonderful series quicker than official releases ever could.

So much for short and sweet, huh?

tl;dr If you feel like supporting quick scanlations and uncompressed hosting of this series, it would be incredibly, incredibly appreciated. This team won’t let you down.

Thank you all so much for being fans of this series and a part of one of the best fandoms in Pokémon.

[mangareaderx]

I thought I’d give you guys a rundown on our plans as well as what we’ll do with the money from our Patreon campaign.

We have a source in possession of a decent amount of English Chuang Yi exclusive Pokémon manga which will all be scanned eventually.

We have a RAW provider that will debind and scan all of Pokémon RéBURST, as well as all new unscanned oneshot Pokémon series published in volume format.

In February, I’m going to return to a more active role at the site after being away for most of the past two-and-a-half years. I will reupload all the old scans that used to be at the former site but haven’t been reuploaded yet. I’ll also start scanning again. If I remember correctly, I have around 400 pages of debound magazine-exclusive Pokémon manga to scan, of which the vast majority has never been seen outside of Japan (I don’t even want to think about how much money I’ve paid in shipping and deputy service fees). I also have a debound English Chuang Yi exclusive Pokémon manga volume to scan, so that’s another 200 pages. Realistically, it will probably take 1-2 years for me to get it all scanned; as always, real life is a bit busy and my scanning process is a bit slow in order to get the best possible quality. I’ll let most of the manga series that are going to be scanned remain a surprise, but I’ll give you one teaser: The creator of How I Became a Pokémon Card - Kagemaru Himeno - did a one chapter long Gold & Silver oneshot manga, which I have bought, debound and will scan at some point.

When it comes to the site itself, we will in February move from the insanely overpriced and not very good web host Bluehost. We will move to FastComet, which is ranked at 1st place among the 3443 listed hosting companies on HostAdvice and has legendary support. As a comparison what JB2448 has paid for hosting at Bluehost during last year is enough for 3-4 years of hosting at FastComet’s best shared hosting plan.

When we switch to FastComet the site will also be entitled to an auto-renewing, free, and open source Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate which will encrypt all site traffic.

We will switch to a much better looking website theme. We are planning to hire an expert to pimp the shit out of the site if the Patreon campaign does well. One of the main priorities with this will be to get public zip downloads of albums to work. Currently Piwigo - which is the content management system the site uses - does not support zip downloads of albums at all by default. This is fixable with a Piwigo extension, but the downloads are then only accessible for registered users. So to get public zip downloads we will have to have someone code that functionality for the site. As for who this expert would be: Pierrick Le Gall of PigoLabs, who is the founder and lead developer of Piwigo and literally the only freelancer on the entire Internet that specializes in Piwigo development. Good talent isn’t cheap though, as he charges 100€ / ~$106 per hour for custom coding, so this is only possible if the Patreon goes well enough.

That’s about it for our current plans for the site. It turned into a bit of a wall of text since I geeked out a bit, but perhaps some of you are interested in the specifics of the plans.

[mangareaderx]

An update about Pokémon + Nobunaga's Ambition ~ Ransei's Color Picture Scroll ~ scanlations and an apology

I recently realized how long it’s been since the last chapter (chapter 3) of Pokémon + Nobunaga's Ambition ~ Ransei's Color Picture Scroll ~ was released. Two years. Two whole years. Holy fuck. The reason chapter 4 has not been released yet is because I never finished QCing it. School started and I was exhausted and had lost a lot of motivation after all of the work I had put into the Team Special Scans scanlation group - which ended up collapsing, but that’s a story for another post - and I needed to work on jb2448.info, scanning RAWs and some other projects so I just kept pushing the dates forward telling myself and petermueller88 (the typesetter) that I’d fix it on the fall break, on the Christmas break, on the spring break, on the summer break and so on. Then last year I got a part-time job, which made it even harder to make my schedule work. And since February of this year I’ve been going through a really tough time. February to May of this year was without a doubt the worst period of time in my life. Due to certain events I could barely bring myself to do the things (school, work) that I had to get done during that time and even less the non-compulsory things that I used to enjoy, like fan projects like this.

I’d like to apologize to everyone who has been waiting for chapter 4-6 to get released, especially petermueller88 who has been waiting on me forever.

I’ll get my shit together and finish this.

[mangareaderx]

Pokémon Special fanart archivation

Now that the site has been relaunched using the much more stable Piwigo CMS system, I have an announcement. The fanart will not be returning to the site, with the exception of the doujinshi, which will be reuploaded to the new site when we have enough time to do it. Around 20% (457 / 2306) of the Pokémon Special fanart images have been uploaded to the Pokémon Special Booru. (The albums which have not yet been uploaded are Gold, Green (male), Red, Ruby, Yellow, and Group art.) Here is a list of what should be all used tags (minus artist and character tags), in case anyone wants some inspiration for tagging images. Account registration for the booru is now open to the public, so anyone can upload fanart there, but there is still no moderator for the booru. So, if someone wants to moderate the booru, please send me a message or an ask. Until there is a mod to manage the booru, if you see images or comments that breaks laws and / or The Booru Projects’ terms of service, please contact the webmaster of Booru.org via the e-mail address found here, as I have no intention to manage this booru now that it has been handed over to the public. Whatever happens to the booru is up to the users. The sky’s the limit. The Pokémon Special fanart is downloadable in zip format from MediaFire and Mega. The fanart from other Pokémon manga won’t be posted on the booru, but it is available for online viewing on Imgur (compressed) and Veuwer (lossless) and is also available for download as a zip file from MediaFire and Mega. All of the Pokémon Special fan videos (that haven’t been removed from YouTube) have been embedded on this Fanpop page. The videos are also available as a downloadable 7z file from MediaFire and Mega since YouTube has a tendency to take down the AMVs or mute them down due to copyrighted music or the channel closing down or getting banned. .7z files can be extracted using a free open source software called 7-Zip. The reason I couldn’t put the videos in a zip file is because zip files don’t support Japanese characters. 7z files are pretty much the same as rar files in terms of compression and other features, but the file format is open source (unlike rar), and the software is free and open source unlike WinRAR. TL;DR: 7-Zip > WinRAR. The fanart section has been archived by Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, so it can still be viewed here and the fullsize version of the images are available here. However, the download links weren’t archivable because of the way the Gallery CMS system the old site used generates zip files, so you’ll have to download the zip files from the MediaFire or Mega links instead. Those zip files have been organized better than the original album downloads anyway. I removed a bunch of duplicates and fixed some naming to make it more web friendly, among other things.

[pokescans]

Hi, please forgive me for asking this, but what does the Special art book contain exactly?

It’s all right! It contains mostly color artwork from the Pokémon Special manga, also known in the US as Pokémon Adventures. I bought it the day before I left Japan so I only skimmed it so far, but it looks like a gorgeous book and I’m excited to share it! :D

[pokescans]

Say, did you got the Pokemon Special art book?

Yes, I did get it, and I will start scanning it soon!

[mangareaderx]

Psst. Do you happen know something about an upcoming Pokespe artbook this March?(according to amazon and cdjapan) There's no preview photo of it yet though.

Sorry about the delay. The art book is available on Amazon.co.jp and CDJapan now. Shipping on Amazon is cheaper, so that should be the overall cheaper option. Here is a guide for buying from Amazon.co.jp.

The art book is also available on almost all regional Kinokuniya sites, but it’s quite overpriced on most of them.

[pokescans]

This is a scan of a Pokémon Special XY postcard that was included in CoroCoro Ichiban! 2013/12. Thanks to pokemonspecialgerman for editing the scans for me.

The fullsize scan is available on jb2448.info. The mostly blank back of the postcard has also been scanned and is available at the same site.

Submitted by @mrxpokemonmanga

[salmanstar]

Is it me or didn’t most fans said manga are better than pokemon anime then why i don’t find it subtitled

[mangareaderx]

It’s quite easy to find in English online. jb2448.info is the best place to read it. Try reading some other Pokémon manga series there while you’re at it. Most of them are also really good and they are usually forgotten in Pokémon Special’s shadow.

The fact that a series is better than another series doens’t automatically mean that the better series will be easier to find online. The Pokémon anime is more popular and hence easier to find online.

[pokescans]

This is a scan of a Pokémon Special XY postcard that was included in CoroCoro Ichiban! 2013/12. Thanks to pokemonspecialgerman for editing the scans for me.

The fullsize scan is available on jb2448.info. The mostly blank back of the postcard has also been scanned and is available at the same site.

Submitted by @mrxpokemonmanga

[mangareaderx]

Pokémon Special fanart gallery update #1

I haven’t gotten any applications yet for modship for the Pokémon Special fanart gallery I made, so if there is anyone that is interested in moderating Pokémon Special Booru, please send me an ask.

If you are interested in the idea of a community driven Pokémon Special fanart gallery, please reblog and help spread this post. I also tweeted about this, so if you have a Twitter account and want to help spread this, retweeting is helpful as well.