If the Phanto.MOE domain ever expires, this site should remain functional for the foreseeable future at traumabutton.neocities.org.

Why This Site Exists

I've been into this franchise since quite literally the day it was was announced in 2019, and it's completely taken over my brain since. After a reread of Memory in late 2022, I realized that I had the skills and the insane passion necessary to translate it. I began to translate the cozmez chapter of "MEMORY", and... well, one thing led to another! I posted these translations on my personal twitter at first, but I decided to do a full translation of the main story and some songs as personal projects, so I began posting chapters on a DreamWidth community (which allowed my co-translator, Carp, to post her song translations too, without needing my oversight) and then created a twitter account (@snakebrainTL) dedicated to it.
I originally just posted links to my larger translations, but when Google Translate led to an extremely bizarre mistranslation of a Satsuki tweet in summer of 2023, I decided to start doing character tweet translations, and one thing led to another, and I was rapidly translating all kinds of Paradox Live content in all kinds of formats.

(Fun fact: snakebrainTL was originally a side account that I intended to use just to retweet fanart, and is the account that I did the 3rd anniversary DM campaign on, but I quickly fell off of maintaining it and didn't want to make a new account for translations, so I just repurposed it.)

Now, don't get me wrong; I love DreamWidth as a platform, but as I started translating more content, I started needing more granular ways to organize. I wanted way more flexibility in the way I could present and organize information. DreamWidth is great, but blogs just do not work for me as an approachable archive format (even if you use tags, you're often forced to scroll backwards through reverse-chronological posts-- not great if you want to find a specific song or find where you were in a story spread across 50 posts).

Moreover, in my looking around, I saw numerous people express confusion about what this franchise is and where to even start getting into it. I think it's very easy to forget how fragmented a lot of the information is for franchises like these; information is often scattered across a half-dozen platforms and media types, and tweets explaining things quickly get memory-holed, and older fans just assume that you know where to look for information and where things come from. I'm hardly innocent of this tendency, myself.

So I had been trying to figure out how to consolidate things for a while, and it occurred to me (on delay) that just making my own website was within my power.

I'm old, so I remembered spending hours poring over informational fansites for the things I liked (shoutout to Chris McFeely's Digimon Encyclopedia, the gold standard in its field as far as I care-- humble, readable, in depth, and maintained by one intense lunatic) and for things I didn't know the first thing about. So, in my troubles with organizing information on DreamWidth, I thought... well, hey, I enjoy making simple websites, I enjoy organizing information, and I have all this translation work I've done. So why don't I just... put it on my own site? I had already sloppily mirrored most of my translations onto my personal site, but making a Paradox Live site unto itself gives me a lot more freedom, and makes it a destination rather than an afterthought, so I moved everything over to its own site and started work.

And so here we are. Trauma Button at Phanto.MOE is a place for me to consolidate information about, and my translations of content relating to, a franchise that I love-- in a way that, hopefully, makes it a bit more accessible and comprehensible, whether you're a longtime fan or just trying to get into it today. I don't expect to solve all of those problems, but I hope to make the kind of site that I would want to find for a franchise I was trying to get into or for one that I already loved.

The foundational idea is that you'll never have to worry about functionality breaking because the platform made some pants-on-head stupid decisions. This site is constructed with basic HTML and some very basic Javascript, and it should work equitably on just about any device! (Though sorry if some things scale weirdly on mobile, I'm a dinosaur and I'm used to optimizing for desktop.) The backend is me and my Neopets-honed Web 1.0 sitebuilding skills, baby!

What's with the name?

Phanto.MOE is another thing that just makes me laugh. I find the .moe top-level domain very funny. I was sifting through TLDs for a possible domain for this site, and when I saw it, I knew exactly what I had to do.

Basically: I thought it was funny. Being funny counts for a lot, to me.

Who's this clown and why should I trust you?

I'm an adult man and I live in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, but I've got a severe sleep phase disorder that makes me basically nocturnal, which works out for translating stuff on Japan time. I'm a serial hobbyist who's passionate about doing and sharing cool things, and also ruining my friends' abilities to spell the word "jackal" correctly.
English is my first language, and in addition to Japanese, I also understand Spanish (haven't spoken it in ages though) and can read Latin. mi li toki pona kin!

I've been making web 1.0 sites since my early days on Neopets, and I've generally had at least one independent project that's had a site active pretty much non-stop since 2011. I don't fancy myself anything more than "passable for a hobbyist in the 90s" website builder, but I enjoy being able to share what I make and what I love on my own terms. My belief is that if I'm going to make a site, I should always know how to fix anything that breaks, and that means only code that I can personally write. (And lemme tell you, none of my degrees are in computer science.) I have a lot of very grumpy feelings about WYSIWYG editors.

I took two years of Japanese at a community college in the early stages of getting what would eventually become an unrelated master's degree, and from there have continued to learn and practice on my own time basically non-stop. I don't claim to be a proficient speaker, and my translation work is done with a lot of dictionary-thumping, but people who are smarter and better at speaking it than me say I'm pretty good at what I do.

I got interested in translation thanks to the MOTHER games, between MOTHER 3's infamous lack of official translation and subsequent fan translation, and Clyde Mandelin's book on EarthBound's localization, and it's become a long-standing passion.

I love joseimuke media in general, and tend to be very intense about my oshikatsu for my 2D boys. I'm a cozmez oshi and I have been since day 0, I also generally count Saimon, Aoi, Iori, and Haruomi as my other top faves; but truth be told, I'm remarkably close to a hakooshi, and I love the entire cast.

My other adjacent fandoms include (but aren't limited to) A3!, Touken Ranbu, Mahoutsukai no Yakusoku, 18Trip, Idolish7, and The Idolm@ster SideM. There's a nonzero chance you've stumbled across my translations for some of those serieses, but I generally only translate for my oshis in other franchises. So let that be testament to how much I like everyone in Paralive!

Credits and Acknowledgements

With extremely few exceptions, I purchase all of the material that I translate, and I pay for my hosting and domain. I do not accept tips or donations except for legitimately gifted copies of official material. I do not in any way financially benefit from this project.

Almost all of the JP to EN translation work is done by me (Jakkal), and anything that isn't was probably done by Carp.

Site credits:

• This site uses a lightly modified version of sadgrl.online's recreation of CreateBlog's Skyline layout.
• Client-end includes were done using Ikewise's client-side JS tutorial.
• Style switcher uses Paul Sowden's style switcher script.
• Favorite Character Picker uses the omnipresent Bathkame sorter code. Favorite Song Picker uses Butterfree's Favorite Pokemon Picker script.
• Hosting provided by Neocities. I use a premium account, but if I ever stop paying (either for my hosting or for my domain), this site should remain up for the foreseeable future at traumabutton.neocities.org.