Update: Permalinks and E-Mail (aka Contact Form) don’t work yet, will get the operational later. Also, the comments from the past 12 months are gone. Maybe Google Cache can help out here, but :effort:

(Taken from cdjapan.co.jp)

23 episodes, aired 1971-1972

Starring: Yasuo Yamada as Lupin III, Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Chikao Ohtsuka, Yukiko Nikaido, Goro Naya

Starting with next release, all future releases will have full support for editions. Editions are awesome. More people/groups should use them.

Now, before we hit the next batch release, there’s some stuff that might or might not interest you. We’ll publish articles in the course of the next two to three weeks about following topics:

1. Matroska Editions
2. Why You Should Use CCCP Or Mplayer2 To Get Your Anime Fix
3. The Many Curses of Quality Subbing
4. Fixing Non-Fixable Interlacing (aka Why The TLR OVA Batch Will Be Delayed)

So be sure to check back. Oh, and spoilers, TLR OVA will be delayed (mainly due to a slow TLC, slow editors and 4.)

On other news, there’ll probably be some site updates too. Those updates will mainly include a separate page that lists all files ever released (all versions) which should serve as some sort of archive in case you need to identify your version of the file or whatever.
Secondly, we’ll see if we can get some sort of DDL server up and running (done). Or at least some links to One-Click Hosters. (Which one would you prefer?)
Last but not least, some sort of FAQ page. Stay tuned.

I’d also like to use this post to ask you guys how you like the idea of our roadmap. Any kind of feedback is appreciated!

Thanks to everyone who answered the questions in the last news post.

Some changes have been made to the website:
- Most notably there’s a Scripts section now which will redirect you to http://yabai.ulrezaj.com/public/
- A roadmap has been added. Don’t take the dates too seriously though.
- The RSS Feed for this site should finally be working properly
- Even though both Projects and Staff page stay the same (for now), I’ve at least updated them :P
- Some other small changes
.
Some other noteworthy stuff:
- The final S&W II and TLR batches will have editions rather than xdeltas and .bat files so you can easier switch between credited and creditless OP/ED
- I’ll document our work on TLR 18-21 18-22 and will release the article at around the same time that batch will get released (Jan 2011). Should make for an interesting read I think.

As you *might* have noticed the website was down the last few days. That is because it got flooded with spam and couldn’t keep up. It’s all good now; we switched the server and this shouldn’t be happening again.

All those dirty spam comments should be deleted too. If you happen to see any more, feel free to mention where you’ve found them down in the comments and I’ll see to it that they’ll get removed fast.

In other news, another release has been waiting in the release queue for quite some time now. It wasn’t released yet cause, well, the website was down. Now that this problem is resolved you can expect it to get released soon.

PS: Some might not be able to display this site for a few days, while others can. Try to suggest them to flush their DNS and try again (or use proxy software like TOR for the time being if they really have to access the site).

PPS: I know we’ve been treating our torrents pretty badly till now (as in, most haven’t been seeded well), but at least for the time being that shouldn’t be the case anymore. Every torrent should have at least 1 seedbox assigned to it now which will guarantee fast downloads.

I am going to talk a bit about the group’s past, as well as how and why it was founded. For those of you who don’t find interest in this, scroll down to the “Statistics” and the “Future of Yabai” part.

I think it was in  November 2007 when I joined a group called, “LostTreasure-Fansubs”. They hadn’t released anything up till then, but they were working on three projects at that time: Saiunkoku Monogatari 2nd Series, Himawari!! and Saint October. Yes, they actually worked on the 2nd season of Himawari, before even ray=out released their first episode. It was the beginning for me as a fansubber too (I got into fansubbing about 1 month before that); I only knew how to time back then. I kinda learned in that group how to ktime and TS, as the group leader — MuderousAngel — didn’t have any actual TSers. I put a lot of effort into the first 2 eps of both Himawari!! and Saint October, but we never got anywhere, staff constantly left, and in mid December we only had 1 translator left and no encoders at all.

So MurderousAngel decided to kill that group. She took all the members that were still active (Futamaru was one of them) and formed a new group: Nisemono-Fansubs (“Fake-Fansubs” ^^). At around New Year’s Day we formed a new IRC channel, website and ftp. I became the co-leader and started looking for fresh meat, mainly encoders. Both Saiunkoku and Saint October were dropped since we lacked translators and motivation for those series. Only Futamaru remained to work on Himawari. We somehow managed to get all positions covered again and decided to take up a new project which was one of the winter shows: Aria The Origination. One of the new staff members was coreym who wasn’t really doing anything except slacking. Actually, everyone but Lonyo (an editor) and myself were slacking. (MurderousAngel was “slacking” too, well, she actually was just the leader of the group, she didn’t fansub at all.) So not much happened in February and March except some staff issues, people quit and I had to look for new staff again. In the first two weeks of March, I recruited TGEN, Skyward and Ulrezaj. We were uber-slow and still hadn’t released anything by the end of March. About when episode 4 or 5 of Aria The Origination aired we dropped it. Coreym stole our scripts for ep 1 and 2 and released them with his group, Orange-Subs. I think we’re mentioned as “Nisemono-Fansubs” in the credits or something. Anyways, they totally butchered the quality of that script! (Timing was off, shitty video quality, shitty main styling, etc.) At the end of March, we picked up the Sumomomo DVD specials (ep 23 and 24) too, as a side project. (Yay for even more work when we couldn’t even release an episode of the other projects!)

So then, the spring season started and we decided to pick up two new shows: Nabari no Ou and Kure-nai. I enjoyed timing and TSing Kure-nai, even though every script had like 500 lines to time (comparison: Himawari only has about 250 lines) and lots of signs. Nabari no Ou was okay to work on too. On my request we picked up the Manabi Straight OVA, since Eclipse didn’t do that and there was only some low-quality anon version out there. By then, drama had already built up. For the last few months I had always been arguing with MurderousAngel about the group. She wanted to see releases, I wanted to make sure the releases had the highest quality possible (which they didn’t have then). It escalated on April 22 when MurderousAngel made Skyward leave the group. (She hated him for no real reason. :/) Ulrezaj quit right after that occurrence and I decided that it was time to leave too. MurderousAngel had already given up on the group too and so had everyone else, I guess.

But it wasn’t the end of Himawari, Manabi and Sumomomo. Right after I quit, I decided to found our own group. Actually, I’ve had that thought for a few weeks. So I asked the staff that worked on these three projects if they wanted to finish the projects in a new group, since at least I wanted to finish them no matter what. Thus, Yabai was born. The founding members were me, Juggen, Osaka-tan, Skyward, TGEN, and Ulrezaj.

We took all the Himawari- and Manabi-related stuff (and later Sumomomo-related stuff too) and moved it to our new ftp. I put up a wordpress blog, which is hosted on Ulrezaj’s site, and we concluded that all the public (anime) trackers available at that time weren’t living up to our expectations — so we got our own tracker thanks to TGEN. We decided that we wanted to sub animes which either hadn’t been subbed at all (like Himawari) or animes which hadn’t been done by quality groups (like Seto no Hanayome, which we decided to pick up back then). You can see the first post on April 27. Heh, that was pretty awesome. So we continued working on the animes and we finally released something on 5 May, 2008! It was so epic! We were so motivated that we released episode 2 nine days later. Work on Manabi was progressing somehow too. Soon after the release of Himawari!! episode 2, we were able to release that OVA episode.

After that we became slow. Really slow. ^^ TGEN was lazy/busy/whatever and so it took him nearly 2 months to edit episode 3 of Himawari. Eventually, we got there. On 16 July, 2008, it was time to release it. A month later, episode 4 followed. I started recruiting a few more people, mainly to get the Seto no Hanayome project moving. It was standing still for quite some time. When Himawari 4 was released, I felt relieved. During our days in Nisemono, we had translations for Himawari up till episode 4. Everything beyond that was done solely by Yabai, without involvement of Nisemono. It felt like I had finally closed a chapter in my fansubbing life. ^^

One day after episode 4 got released, I put some more effort into making the site look better. The result was a new theme which was simple and slick.

September was an epic month because we released an episode every week, which was pretty awesome. Starting with Himawari 5 on 6 September, 2008; continued by Seto no Hanayome 1 (I have to apologize for this release, we should’ve taken our time making it perfect instead of releasing something that doesn’t live up to our usual level of quality); then there was the big surprise, To LOVE-Ru 1 on 22 September, 2008 (which we started working on at the end of August, about 1 week after AniYoshi dropped it); and even a 2nd episode of To LOVE-Ru on 29 September, 2008. Skyward suggested to pick up TLR, since both he and I were working on it in AniYoshi. One month later, To LOVE-Ru 3 got released. At the same time, we were struggling to find a new encoder for Seto no Hanayome. We wanted to do a version 2 of episode 1 too. On 4 November, 2008, we were finally able to release the fixed version. By the end of October, Skyward vanished from IRC and the whole internet. We waited for him to show up again for several weeks, but he didn’t. As he was our only encoder at that time (we had skystrife to encode Seto no Hanayome, but he had to quit due to RL reasons), we were in a really unfavorable situation back there. He left 3 projects behind. Looking for a new encoder was what we were left with, which took a month.

Then Yumi joined and took over To LOVE-Ru. We also recruited limpakos, who’s doing a great job in QCing our projects. After about 2 months of nothing, we finally were releasing something again thanks to Yumi. To LOVE-ru 4 was out on 29 December, 2008. I found another good QCer on the internet, arcturo, who picked out some errors we hadn’t noticed in episode 4. So I offered him a position in Yabai and he took it. We released a v2 of episode 4 together with episode 5 a week later. Around this time we found an encoder for Himawari, Mandarink. Thanks to him, we were able to release Himawari 6 on 30 January, 2009. A month later To LOVE-Ru 6 followed, followed by Himawari 7 on 28 February, 2009. Things were looking good again. An encoder for Seto no Hanayome in mid February was found and one month later, episode 2 was released. I had to redo the TS for episode 2, which was a major pain in the ass. Just take a look at the amount of signs I had to do: http://pastebin.com/f458501ed, hence the stressed news post. ^^ To LOVE-Ru 07 & 08 on 3 April, 2009 and Himawari 8 on 10 April, 2009 are our latest releases as of now.

We’ve gone through much in this one year, but it was still awesome. Thanks to all the people I was able to work with and am still working with! Running a fansub group sure was stressful. On the upside, all the user comments in the IRC channel, on this site, on anidb, and all other sites kept us motivated. The fact that there were no other decent subs contributed a great deal to our fervor. If not us, then who? Someone has to do it! ^^

Here are some statistics that might interest you:

We released 8 episodes of Himawari since 5 May 2008, that’s an average of 45.625 days/release.

We released 2 episodes of Seto no Hanayome since 14 September 2008, that’s an average of 116.5 days/release (gotta speed this up :P).

We released 8 episodes of To LOVE-Ru 22 September 2008, that’s an average of 28.125 days/release.

And of course we released Manabi Straight.

And we’re still working on Sumomomo, even after over a year. ^^

We released 19 episodes in our first year, 21 if we count the v2s.

This post counts 2,082 words.

I installed a stats plugin in late August which since then tracked a lot of stuff, among other things how many people visit this site a day. When there is no release we usually have about 100-150 visitors a day.

And as you can see in this chart, we had about 5,000 visitors  in September. It then dropped to about 3,500 visitors/month  till December. After we’ve somehow filled the hole that Skyward left behind again, we were able to release more often from then on. The amount of visitors per month rose again and peaked at  about 7,674 in April. Of course, since it’s only 8 days in May and we didn’t release anything for a month, visitor count for May is down. But we’ll change that soon with more releases! ^^

Another interesting thing is the new function in Google which displays the amount of results for a term. So got “yabai fansubs” 9,440 results for example (as shown in the picture).

Future of Yabai

So with all that said, what’s the future of Yabai? Our policy is to never drop a project. So we’re gonna work on Himawari!!, To LOVE-Ru and Seto no Hanayome in this year too, of course. At some point we’ll release Sumomomo too. We’re definitely not going to pick up another show until we at least finished one of the three current main projects.

What we’re definitely going to work on at some point is Death Note. It’s been oversubbed, but no decent group finished it. Plus: it’s my favorite anime, so there’s really no way around this.

Status report (It’s been a long time since I last did this):

Himawari 09: sQC apply

Himawari 10: Edit

To LOVE-Ru 09: RC2 apply

To LOVE-Ru 10: sQC

Seto no Hanayome 03: RC1

Seto no Hanayome 04: TS

Sumomomo 23: done, will be released with 24 in a batch

Sumomomo 24: WR

Not related to Yabai directly, but you can find the torrents of my little side project on our tracker: I am working with arcturo on subtitles for The Leet World (click here for my forum post). If you don’t know this series, then you’re really missing out on something. It’s an awesome machinima: excellent setting, plot, voice acting, directing and music. I just released episode 3 and 4 of season 2 today. ^^

If you want to join our group (no matter what position(s)), pay a visit to our IRC-Channel and talk to me (jama). If I’m not around drop me a PM and I’ll respond to you as soon as possible.

Now, I hope you found this post interesting. Well, if you didn’t I guess you wouldn’t be reading this line down here anyway. There’s not much left to say now, except, of course: Long live Yabai!!

For all the people who are interested in the current status of our projects:

Himawari
Episode 03 – QCRC1
Episode 04 – Edit
Seto no Hanayome
Episode 01 – sQC/TS
Episode 02 – Edit/TS
Sumomomo
OVA 01 – TLC
OVA 02 – TL

According to this information Himawari 03 is close to release. (Well, close means “this week” at best ^^). So, here we are, waiting for one of our staff members who currently has problems with his internet connection to show up again and do some work. Until then please bear with our slowness. Eventually we’ll release something again! :p

1. Join our IRC channel on Rizon
2. Leave a comment somewhere in the blog (not appreciated)

Finally all the effort I’ve put into this blog paid off! *Takes a deep breath* . Even though this WordPress blog is really easy to set up, I am a total noob and did this for the first time, so it was kind of hard. Anyway, the blog is up, we have a nice theme installed (I think) and will hopefully release some Himawari!! and the Manabi Straight OVA soon.

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. We’re a fansubbing group, Yabai-Fansubs, currently working on Himawari!! (note the two exclamation marks; yes, it’s season 2) and the Manabi Straight OVA which wasn’t subbed by Eclipse for unknown reason(s).

You may want to visit this site every now and then if you are a fan of either Himawari, Manabi or both.

Well then, I’ll go back into the depths of the admin user interface and try to tweak this site a bit more. Stay tuned, you’ll hear from us.

P.S.: If you don’t know what Himawari and/or Manabi are about, check AniDB about Himawari!! and Manabi Straight.

P.P.S. Yes, jama is a total n00b.

P.P.P.S.: TGEN sucks.