The tools behind Manga and Stuff
In this post I will show you how I make this blog possible
Where do I get my manga:
My primary source for manga is Nyaa.si where I also upload stuff myself sometimes.
Viable alternatives I use include Mangadex and Bato.to. I also post manga on Bato.to myself. You can download manga from mangadex, Bato.to and many other sites like them with the Manga downloader by red Squirrel
The programs I use:
ComicSreen
I read all my manga with this Android app. There are countless other comic viewer apps on android and IOS, but this one allows me to save pages in full resolution which is kinda important for this blog and it’s just a pretty nice app overall.
Viable alternative for Desktop: Honeyview, but just like with Android, there are many others.
Advanced Renamer
A pretty simple program that allows me to rename thousands of files at once. It’s not really essential for this blog but it helps keep things organized and is overall a very useful program. It’s free for personal use.
XNconvert
XNconvert is an immensely powerful image editing program and the workhorse of this blog. I mostly use it to automatically crop out all the white spaces around manga panels (this used to take hours to do) but it can do so much more than that, from changing color depth to converting a picture into any format imaginable, and it can do it to thousands of pictures at once.
It was this program alone that made it possible for me to clean up 1000 scanned pages of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in like 2 hours, here’s a before and after:
This would have taken days without this free program.
Topaz Gigapixel AI
I used this program to upscale a few manga I upload here, including Fullmetal Alchemist, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō and the recently added Chainsaw Man. Here’s a preview of what this program can do.
This program needs a pretty beefy PC and it costs around 80-100$. And remember, upscalling is not magic, upscaled manga will never look as good as high resolution scans.
Waifu2x is a free alternative, but not really a viable option for doing whole manga.
Photoshop
I don’t think I really need to explain this one...
Free, and nowadays actually viable alternative: GIMP
AutoHotkey
AutoHotkey is a very easy scripting language that allows me to caption and tag my posts like this:
And it can do A LOT more than this.
Here’s the basic code I use for captions and tagging, with basic explanations of what everything does, but its far from a tutorial.
While AutoHotkey is free, it’s only available for windows and I don’t know of any alternatives for Mac or Linux.
One important tip for tagging:
Only the first 5 tags you add to any post are searchable. So if you have “Art” as your sixth tag your post will not show up when searching the art tag. This is why the manga title and the Author’s name are always the first tags on my posts.
The whole process briefly explained:
I am always on the lookout for interesting manga, so feel free to post suggestions.
When I do stumble across a manga that seems interesting I download it from my sources mentioned above. I then read it on my Android tablet for the first time, only after reading the entire manga once I decide if I want to upload it here. If I decide to upload a manga here I read it for a second time, but this time I focus on what pages and panels to capture. In my experience doing this on your first read isn’t a very good idea. You can’t really focus on both the story and the capturing at once.
Then I move all the caps to my pc and rename them with Advanced Renamer. I then make a backup of everything before cropping it with XNconvert.
I then add them to my queue here on tumblr, this step is also where I do all editing of the caps, like cropping out single panels or more substantial stuff. I also throw out a lot of caps in this step for various reasons.
There are usually around 50 posts queued which gives me a 5 day buffer to queue more posts.
I never do all these steps at once. There are sometimes month between me reading and capturing a manga, the processing of the caps and the eventual uploading.
Some fun stats about this blog:
This is the second iteration of Manga and Stuff, the first version was deleted by accident (by tumblr) when it had around 400 followers.
This iteration of Manga and Stuff started out in January 2017.
This blog has 100 times the follower count of my personal blog even though both blogs are the exact same age and have roughly the same number of posts... the main difference is that I don’t put any effort whatsoever into my personal blog...
As of right now there are 12600 posts on this blog, around 1500 of which are reblogs.
This is my most popular post of all times... by a wide margin... and it’s not even really about manga... and I uploaded it for a laugh...
My posts get 107.33 notes on average... but my most popular post mentioned above probably inflates this number a bit...
As of right now this blog has close to 1,2 million notes in total.
I still have every single unedited mangcap ever uploaded to this blog, dating all the way back to 2017... the size of this backup is 94 gigabytes and it saved my butt a number of times.
