[Kino] Campanella (Complete)

Hi everyone.

Really long time no see this time. And that's because, besides IRL stuffs (that for me at least are finally freaking improving, THANK GOD!), we decided to tackle another monster release! 

This one was an adventure in and outside the actual work. Hunting the books, scanning and re-scanning and re-scanning again, revision over revision over revisions... it sure was a lot of work. We wanted to get this done before Kaiten's release, and as Kaiten kept on being delayed that gave us more time to really to get trapped into revisions. But as Kaiten is finally upon us (!!!), we had to let go and put our foot down and finally release it.  

Now, onto a message from our resident translator, Citlalin and a new massive helping hand Oak:  

Hello everyone, buenos días a todos. I hope everyone's doing well, as well as one can be doing in times like these. It was hard to decide what to even talk about in the post for this release, because we've been working on Campanella for so long (to be fair, it was mostly just sitting there being stalled by me) that I feel in a lot of ways like a different person from who I was when we first started. I checked and the first time we mentioned the name was on 2024-10-15, although we'd probably been talking about it since a bit before then. There's been some ups and some downs in my personal life since our last release, a lot of downs actually as I'm writing this, but on the whole, things have mostly gotten better, if that's any consolation to pitiful little things like us living under this sky and on this earth. At least it's finally done. I'll probably never be totally satisfied with it, but at some point you just have to let things go.

This time I'm really not sure what we're going to work on after this, but fortunately Kaiten is coming out soon so there'll definitely be no shortage of new doujinshi to work on. (We definitely were just hard at work on it this the whole time and didn't need Kaiten's impending release to light a fire under our asses and get us to finally push this over the finish line.)

No book list this time, just a broad list of topics:

• *Your most duly employed friend on a weekday voice*: been getting really into some of the "new" (as in like, since 2000) work on Binding recently. 男の子は知らないけど (🎵 the boys don't know this but 🎵) Binding Theory has actually continued to evolve and account for new data since LGB, and the response to seeing that the Binding Theory of the 80s had problems was not just to throw our hands in the air and declare that Binding is just Vibes or whatever, never to be understood, as it turns out! Isabelle Charnavel and Sandhya Sundaresan have some really fascinating work here.

• I actually haven't started reading any of the entries to this year's toxic yuri jam because of several huge TL projects I'm (supposed to be) working on, but this year's lineup seems truly stacked with a huge number of very cool entries. It's been really beautiful and encouraging to see the scene coming up and blossoming and each year's entries getting more impressive and ambitious than the last.

• This year I continued breaking my self-imposed precept against gaming and made my way through (most of) the Towelket series and the rest of Kanashimi Hotchkiss's obra. Extremely mixed bag with high highs and low lows, but absolutely every minute spent slogging through TK6 was worth it for Warau Warawau and the last act of Dekapari. On the whole though, to be honest... I think the removed entries were removed for good reasons...

Anyway, it still feels kind of surreal that there's going to be new stuff in the PMMM world soon after all this time. (I did not play Exedra or Magireco, although parts of the anime I did really enjoy). Pour one out for the fans that didn't live to see it. I wasn't really old enough to be in the fandom when Rebellion came out, so I don't know what the atmosphere was like back then, but the reception in the lead up to Kaiten has felt decidedly... uneasy? No one I know is really confident they'll be able to pull off something that makes continuing the story past Rebellion actually worth it. Let's hope they're wrong though, and at least even if it is bad, we'll still get lots of doujinshi out of it, and some of it is practically guaranteed to be good.

And now a message from the wanderful Oak, who helped us with QC this time:

If you want to check out some lighthearted mahou shoujo anime with yuri elements, try Mahoutsukai Precure. It has something of a laid back SoL pacing with two magical girls who raise a fairy child together. The manga adaptation is also worth checking out. Or if you want to see a dog be a mahou shoujo, try Wonderful Precure, also ft. an angsty cat mahou shoujo who says things like その必要はないわ (レズビアンのセリフ). Her owner's mother is voiced by Chiwa Saitou, though she gets unfortunately little screentime. Or watch the current season Meitantei Precure if you want to enjoy watching an ongoing series with an angsty lesbian who eats ice cream and slacks off at her job. If none of the above sounds appealing try reading all 22 volumes of Rozen Maiden and enjoy a battle royale between dolls. 

Hopefully our next release, whatever it turns out to be, doesn't take as long as this one did. That's all. Until next time.

One final story about this work. It was originally released as 4 parts and an epilogue. The author made raws available but they were tiny and bad so we went hunting for the books. Thanks to some very helpful and kind folks at the MUT discord we managed to find a place that had them. We found 4 books with two not marked with any numbers, so we ordered all 4, see what we get and go from there and hunt the missing part later. When I finally got them you can't imagine our faces when we found out one of the unnumbered books (a chunky one) turned out to be a compilation book with all parts! Talk about a lucky break.

Anyway, hopefully our next release, whatever it might be, doesn't take us 3 years to finish. Fingers crossed! And now, onto the link. Enjoy! 

MEGA

 

[Kino] Amalthea

 

Hello.

Welp, this year didn't go exactly as planned. Life decided to kick us in the face, over and over and over and...

 Anyway, our next series is not abandoned, just in the back burner for a bit. Need to regain the will to wake up every morning first. But as Citlalin mentions below, we managed to squeeze one more project before the year wraps up. 

Funny story, when I bought the Even the Stars are gone, this little book came along for some reason, so we decided to work on it as it was fluff, and god knows we needed fluff in our lives. Turns out it was a sorta wrap up to a larger saga by Kino, but it also works as a post-Rebellion story so, yeah. 

I just hope Kaiten can end on a similar note (unrelated, but I miss MagiReco so much ;_;), here's hoping. Now, let's hear some words from our resident blogposter.

Hello again everyone, buenos días, quēmmach huel amehhuāntin, nicītlalin. It's certainly been a year, hasn't it? I hope everyone is safe and happy, or doing as well as they can in these times. I feel like we (or I) say something like this at the beginning of every blog post around the new year, but what can I say, every year really feels like one of those years nowadays. 突然ですが I've been thinking I want to go see the ocean, or some large body of water. I'm not really sure why. I have seen oceans and big lakes before, but always from a distance, never up close. I've never walked right up along the shore of the ocean. I feel like maybe it's something I should do in this life. Maybe so I can come back and say 今日、海を見た。もう怖くない。 The Great Lakes are basically like the ocean right? Will walking out onto the ice fix me?

So as you may have noticed as an avid follower of our humble group, it's been a while since our last post, in which we very optimistically assured you all that further developments and releases were in the works. Things haven't gone entirely to plan but we did at least manage to crank this one out this year. We might end up working on a slightly more ambitious project after this one, so stay tuned.

This year has been a lot for us all. The things out of my control this year have been... decidedly bad, but the things under my control I think have surprisingly not turned out too badly, so I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about the coming year, probably for no good reason tbh. Sometimes the synapses just be firing in a certain way.

As always, thoughts on books and things to pad out this blog post:

Yes, And So Our Hollow Hearts Called For Love https://mismatched-wings.itch.io/hollow-hearts -- beautiful short vn I read as part of the menhera vn jam. Great character writing, some really inspired art, and a fascinating setting. Fans of PMMM I think will enjoy this one.

Dusk-Bound for Something Beyond https://snixiy.itch.io/dusk-bound-for-something-beyond -- another gem of a short vn from the same jam as the one above. Horrifying but also filled with human warmth. Bleak but because of that also incredibly tender. Beautifully written. Es is just like me fr fr.

Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology -- read this one cause I was feeling like I needed up to brush up on just the basics of autosegmental phonology to read more about tone but ended up learning way more about like the genealogy of ideas in the theory of phonology. The theories covered in this book I think are mostly if not entirely also covered in the Kenstowicz textbook but this book goes much more in depth into the theories it develops and apart from the first few chapters, is more of an exercise in plotting the development of AM phonology than a "textbook" aimed at learners, though it can certainly be used that way. This was supposed to be my year of Optimality Theory like I said in my last blog post but I ended up just going further down the rabbit hole of SPE style approaches as I'll touch on later... Maybe next year I'll study OT properly...

Shimeji Simulation -- almost a perfect 10/10 on every criteria for me. Cried reading the final volume. Pure kino. Kinísimo. I think I still prefer Girls' Last Tour's setting and overall vibe somewhat to Shimeji, but it's so exciting to see tkmz tackling something different while feeling like they're still carrying the DNA of what made GLT so great. The use of panelling in particular was incredibly inspired and clearly a step up from GLT and (please do not roast me for saying this) often feels like of Calvin and Hobbes in its mature stage in how free form its panneling can be and how it lets its art sometimes burst out of the panels' confines to show its characters' imaginations literally escaping the dimensions of their world.

Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness -- timely and incredibly incisive reappraisal of the sort of dominant interpretation of Nāgārjuna's work in the current Buddhist- analytical philosophy syncretism space, as first and foremost a religious thinker. Ironically as the author goes to pains to show again and again, for all the talk of trying to take Nāgārjuna at his word when he claims to embrace contradiction, almost all of the philosophical interpretations of his work have taken the task of philosophizing away the contradictions in his claims through parameterization of one kind of another as their main aim. The one negative thing I will say about this book is that it's written in an extremely abstruse style that makes its already complicated argumentation just incredibly hard to read for no good reason. If I ever have to read the phrase "eisegetic catachresis" again I think I'll just evaporate in a cloud of smoke.

水草物語 by 麦牛乳 -- Weird but also delightful little doujin manga I picked up on a whim. Made me remember my early childhood which is something I haven't done in a while. Mixed feelings on that experience tbh but the book itself was very good. Eagerly awaiting the next volume.

Introduction to Element Theory -- Very "smooth" introduction to a theory of phonology that almost feels too elegant to be real. Manages to capture so many phonological generalizations in a purely formal way that other theories often have to resort to phonetic explanations for. That said, it is like an "intro to ~" that picks all the strongest evidence and cleanest arguments for its theory, and as we see in other approaches that go even further in radically minimalizing the set of phonological primes like RCVP, what complexity you eliminate in the set of features you often just end up paying for with a more and more articulated structural representation of the "phoneme", though not being like a working phonologician or w/e who am I to say what the theoretically parsimonious balance of primes and structure is?

Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind Manga -- read this over the summer. Ever since a few years ago, every time the peak of summer has rolled around, I've always found myself overcome with a strange urge to read or watch post-apocalyptic media. Something about living in our slow motion car crash pre-apocalypse I guess. It's not really possible, or responsible I suppose, to recommend this manga to people who enjoyed the movie Nausicäa -- speaking as someone who grew up with the movie -- not just because of how different the two are, but because recommendation aimed at "enjoyers" of one piece of media carry the implicit assumption that the recommended piece of media can likewise be enjoyed in a similar way, and I just don't think the Nausicäa manga is a manga one reads to enjoy. For one thing, it's just not paced very well and is incredibly mucho texto, with lots of meandering plotlines that while adding a lot of depth to the world also feel like they just go on for too long. But pacing issues aside, the manga is simply just very bleak in contrast to the movie, and this is where I think the value in reading it is. The movie I think for better or worse, is a nice little fairytale about living in harmony with nature. The manga's thesis I think is much bleaker, and more radical.

And without further ado, the link.

 

MEGA

Collab release - Magica Baby Complex Girls+Bonus

Another cowllaboration, many thanks tor our resident land mammal and to TFO!

MEGA

MF

And a special bit for the current rate up!

 

Don't let them tempt you! They want your resources, don't let them win! 

See ya!

Collab and Oneshot

Hi everyone and happy New Year! Just dropping 2 small things today, because it's always time for MadoHomu and you can't go wrong with dorks in love (that is, unless they commit horrible crimes in future chapters)

 

Amanecest

MadoHomu

Also, we've seen some errors pointed out in previous releases. We're working on fixing them and will issue V3 as soon as possible, thank you for your help Mutopis!

See ya!

Merry MadoHomu Christmas!

One way or the other, we are still here. And, there's nothing better for Christmas than HomuMado! So here we have a short comic from pixiv.

And we got our volume of Kirara 16, soon we'll be publishing the raws, look forward to it.

Mefiafire

Original at pixiv