“Meta’s own research suggests its products have become a pillar of the global fraud economy. A May 2025 presentation by its safety staff estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the U.S.”

jesus

So while I cannot concretely prove it, I like to believe that the Q&A question I made during my once in a lifetime appearance at AX was an extremely fortunate case of being the right person in the right place at the right time to make a meaningful difference for English titles of JP properties! 5/5

They gave a vague "respecting original JP" reply, but not long after there was a significant change for the better in the quality of EN titles that Yen Press came up with. Even the most oddly titled license of that panel got renamed to "May These Leaden Battlegrounds Leave No Trace" for release! 4/5

There was a Q&A section toward the end, so I asked Yen Press a question: "Why are the EN titles of your licenses so bland, even more so than the JP originals?" I brought up Cautious Hero and its Ore TUEEE original as an example. (Incidentally, they handed out free copies of its LN vol 1 later!) 3/5

During the panel in question, one of the LN licenses announced by Yen Press was "The Penetrated Battlefield Should Disappear There: Bullet Witchcraft & Ghost Program", with words along the lines of "we know the title is kind of weird but that's just how it is in the original Japanese too!" or so 2/5

I have received a lot of shocked and surprised comments from peers in the industry over how childish and petty the treatment I have been subjected to from ANN has been in recent times. Trying to pretend like I'm somehow in the wrong here is not just disappointing but frankly outright insulting.

I did not receive any sort of communication from moderation or anyone else that would have given any kind of reason or justification as to why my account was placed in such moderation jail, it just silently happened after some extremely dubious previous moderation on my posts. It is not a good look.

It also does not help that my ANN account has been placed into some sort of moderation jail where anything I post requires manual approval from a moderator to appear on the forums at all, for reasons that seem to amount to nothing beyond an extremely dubious personal grudge on part of some ANN staff

And not to mention, how often do the forums receive such "common spam posts" from accounts registered in 2009, with over a 100 previous posts on the forums, and with clear signs that no, no-one has taken over the account from its previous owner? It is very hard to take this moderation in good faith.

The forum rule in question has very clearly laid out exceptions that I imagine literally any moderator should have been able to quickly verify. My site doesn't even have comments on it, I posted about it on ANN specifically because I wanted to facilitate discussion on ANN. bsky.app/profile/daiz...

Also we should definitely bully people so weeb that they inspire others to make comics like these lol bsky.app/profile/daiz...

Also a bunch of older Yen Press licenses especially have English titles about as exciting as wet paper paste. Like "The Hero Is Overpowered but Overly Cautious", which completely fails to deliver on the vibes and energy of the original JP title with its "Ore TUEEE" memery

Well, at least you're not as bad as this one person I once came across at a con who just referred to the series as just "Boku no" and nothing else. That one required a genuine double take to even figure out what the hell dude was talking about, because seriously??? Just "Boku no"???

Also back in my old fansub days we subbed this series called Gen'ei wo Kakeru Taiyou and I continue to hold that the English title we came up for it (The Phantom-Piercing Sun) is still way cooler than the official English title it ended up getting (Day Break Illusion... wtf were they thinking)

It's not enough for a JP-EN #translation to be accurate (though MTL has plenty trouble there already), it also needs to read well in English! This is all the more true for light novels, which are 99% text - you won't have any visuals to distract from poor language when reading. Text quality matters!