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Wizard-san, Happy Birthday. I hope that you will have blessed and fulfilling year.

Yeah, same. Most of my extended family knows that I like anime and that I am very curious about Japanese culture. They always ask me about Naruto; that's the only anime they know of even though I watched that when I was 11-12 years old.

I have read that while Japan is nice as a tourist, it's hard to live there as a foreigner. It's a very homogenous and closed society. I think if you can speak the language and immerse yourself in that culture, you should be fine.

Which reminds me, do you watch Jdramas? I do. I used to watch Jdrama exclusively for a while, but then the fansubbing community basically died around 2013 or so? The last outpost of Jdramas was d-addicts but they closed down their fansubbing part very recently. It’s very sad. On the plus side, Kdramas are actually pretty good these days and Korean producers doesn’t seem to care that much about fansubbing. I believe it’s because anime and Jdrama, while popular outside Japan are very Japan-focused; the revenue comes from Japan. The Hallyu-wave is of course completely focused on outside Korea on the other hand.

There is a common joke online about college students that they can choose two of the three from [good grades, sleep, or social life] but never all three. I feel like my current situation is like that except my choices are pay off extra towards loan, save money, or move out of my family house. I can do two of them, but not all three. At this point, I want to at least knock out my high interest private loans and save up six months of emergency savings before I get more adventurous. I do occasionally talk with two of my close friends to get a three-bedroom apartment in one or two years. I want to move out and become a more mature person. Until now and even now, I can’t do many basic things without my parents. My parents just do everything for me, and I am just missing out on developing myself to be more responsible adult. Eventually, I will get married, have kids, etc. so I can’t continue this. I need to take responsibility for my life.

I live in a fairly big city (6+ million), but we live in the outskirts, so it feels like a small township than a city. My friends and I are planning on getting an apartment in the core part of the city where the 23-30 years old crowd lives. I don’t know how I will be able to handle that with my withdrawn personality, but I do want to come out of my shell.

Yep, Zoro is different. When you think about it everyone else followed Luffy after a whole arc of their story and back story. Zoro, on the other hand, joins Luffy rather quickly right there on episode one or two (can’t remember) and it’s a relatively light situation. Zoro could have defeated Axe-Hand Morgan easily, but he just chose not to. It wasn’t a dramatic situation like Nami and Arlong or Chopper and Wapol or Robin and World Government (that’s where she really joins the crew), etc. It’s like Rayleigh’s flashback of when he meets Roger for the first time – it’s basically pure fate. I don’t know if Oda-sensei planned it like that from day one or it just happened to be like that.

Business people, program managers, etc. love to be in eight-hour long meetings with each other and decide to pursue random features without consulting the people with the actual technical knowledge on the software. A lot of ‘simple’ changes turn out to be extremely complex due to how the software was architected (or lack thereof) and its various quirks. There was an interesting comment on Hacker News recently on Oracle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

I have a weakness in that I seek too much perfection. I tried to create a simple Blackjack program in Java a lot time ago, but what should have been a simple 20-minute planning session turned into days because of my personality. I over-engineer and over-complicate things. I can’t easily fix it because it’s part of my personality and then I get frustrated and rage quit. I don’t think I have ever finished a programming project in my life…
Tooling and configuration languages, libraries, database, frameworks, what-have-you is another massive pain the neck. It just takes so much time and sucks the motivation out of your soul.

Oh man, you made me miss One Piece. I haven't read past the end of the Zou arc. I decided to wait for a year or two and read everything at once. I might start the anime back from the start of Punk Hazard arc.. like right now. At least for two hours before I have to sleep. It must be amazing to be able to work on manga and On Piece of all mangas! If we lived in an anime world, I would say something cheesy like "the manga chose you because you loved it. Trust in the cards Yugi.. I mean manga." I wish you good luck with your translation work! And thank you for dedicating your free time to help fellow manga-lovers!

Japan. Man, you are living the life. I wish I could go to Japan, but I need to pay my loans, save up enough money to move out of my parent's house, get a Master's degree, etc... But one day, I will visit Japan. Everyone I know who visited Japan says it's amazing, but Tokyo is expensive. I hope you have enough money saved! You might spend your life savings on everything! I know I would. But you worked hard for seven years. You deserve it, so go enjoy yourself!

Zoro is such an amazing character. I really loved the moments when he acts really serious and mature like a First Mate. Do you remember the scene in the Alabasta desert where Chopper asks Zoro about why he follows Luffy? Zoro replied that everyone follows Luffy to achieve their own dreams, but since they have stuck together for a long time another purpose emerged (which would be helping Luffy achieve his dreams). At the time I watched it for the first time, like ten years ago, I didn't think much of it, but now I know how much of a true friend he is to Luffy. Same with episode 378 and also at Punk Hazard when he screams, “Get a grip. The New World is just beginning.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHeNHJSFVdc

I did a couple of internships in software development (enterprise web applications) during college and seriously considered it as a career. I learned at the end that while I enjoy programming as a hobby, I don't like doing it as a career. Programming is only fun when you enjoy creating things. What I enjoyed is spending a week hunting down the odd behaviors. Most people would hate something like that, but I enjoyed digging deep and understanding all of the complexity. That’s why I want to eventually move on to analysis and planning areas. I do not really like creating things per se, but I enjoy figuring out how others have managed complexity and created something interesting.

My coworkers have known each other and worked with each other for a long time. I believe some of them know each other from their college days. It's hard to break into a clique like that. To their credit, they are nice people, but it's hard for me to really connect with them. Conversations are about shared interests, so it's hard to connect with others when you don't really have any shared interests other than work. I am also the kind of person, like you, who sees people at work as colleagues and not friends. My friends are the people who I grew up with.

Thankfully, my department doesn't have any outside events except for the few holiday lunches/dinners. I think the culture of the company is very no-nonsense, work-focused. It's probably due to the nature of business (power company). My division supports operations, so everyone is busy solving real-time issues and working on something. I always see the Japanese and Korean company drinking parties in dramas, but we don't have anything like that. Most people are workaholics; some people work even during holidays and vacations.

I am little hesitant of continuing in this sort of operations support role though. Eventually, I want to transition into planning and analysis domains. For now, I have to be patient and expand my knowledge of the company and the power industry.

Damn, that's the dream job for all of us. How much time does it take you to translate a chapter? I imagine you learned Japanese professionally? I took one Japanese class in college but could not continue with the second and third classes due to time constraints. I really regret that.

Anime, manga, and now dramas and light novels are what keeps me alive. My life would be empty without them. I was thinking about it and a lot of the anime and stories I grew up (One Piece & Naruto are the big ones) really influenced my perspective and world-view in a philosophical way. I enjoy listening to my favorite quotes over and over again everyday. They are what forms the basis of my principles. I just fell such an emotional connection to my favorite characters. To this day, I shed a honorable tear whenever I think about Marineford Arc. That was the absolute best of OP and absolute best of anime for me.

I just finished six months, but it feels I've been working for ages. I can't imagine what seven years of work would feel like. My mood at work swings from one extreme to another depending on how I feel about my co-workers. Sometimes, it's fun to deal with people but most times it's not. I am not really the social type who is comfortable with striking up and keeping a conversation going. I need the other party to carry the conversation.

I also like to take things slowly and go at my own pace at work, but you can't do that when you are part of an organization. I am often forced to switch focus to work on supposedly high priority tasks.

If I remember correctly, you did CS right? Do you work as a programmer in your main job?

The effort was worth it though, because I really miss the times I was active here. That was when life was nice and easy. I wake up, go to school, come back and watch anime. Now I have worry about loans and bills and work responsibilities.

I was surprised to see you logging in to MAL occasionally. I randomly remembered about MAL last December and tried furiously to get back into this account. It took some effort to hunt down the chains of emails I used over the years to get back into this account.

It's been long time. 8 years. So much has changed within these starting. I graduated from college last June and started working.