Why This Site Exists
Because I really love Paradox Live and I really hate using social media platforms for archival and information!I love DreamWidth as a platform for posting my translations -- translations will go there first, after all -- but recentlly, I've started wanting a bit more flexibility in the way I could present and organize information, especially as I've seen more people express confusion about what the franchise is comprised of and how to get into it.
I'm old, so I remembered spending hours poring over informational fansites for the things I liked and things I knew nothing about, and 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 mirrored most of my translations onto my personal site, but making a Paradox Live site unto itself gives me a lot more freedom to archive more information and make it a lot more digestible.
I think it's easy to forget how fragmented a lot of the information is for franchises like these, often scattered across a half-dozen platforms and buried in tweets and it's just assumed that you know where things come from. I'm hardly innocent of this tendency, myself. I've been trying to figure out how to consolidate things for a while, and it occurred to me on delay that this was within my power.
And then there's me and Paradox Live. I've been into the franchise since quite literally the day it was was announced in 2019, and it's completely taken over my brain. After a reread of Memory in late 2022, I decided that I had the skills and the insane passion necessary to translate content for it. I began to translate the cozmez chapter of "MEMORY", and... well, one thing led to another!
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. 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 that I already loved.
The 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!
If the Phanto.MOE domain ever expires, this site should remain functional at traumabutton.neocities.org.
What's with the name?
I asked my co-translator what I should name the site, expressing that I wanted to avoid anything that seemed too clinical or official; I wanted something that evoked the names of Pokemon fansites in the mid-2000s. Said co-translator jokingly suggested "Trauma Button", after the oft-clowned-on "trauma" button that is on all of the character profiles on the official Paradox Live site. It made me laugh. I had no choice but to go with it.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 a hobbyist translator and general cool guy. I'm an adult man and I live in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.I don't know that you should trust me (which is to say, trust my translations), but people who speak Japanese better than I can say I do a good job, and I want to trust them! I write and read Japanese much better than I speak it, but I also speak like a stumbling dumbass in English, so that's nothing new. In addition to being a native English speaker and passable at Japanese, I also speak some amounts of Spanish and French, and can read Latin. I love translation and localization.
I love joseimuke media in general, and tend to be very intense about my oshikatsu for my 2D boys. (I'm a cozmez oshi, by the way.)
I have an bachelor's degree in English literary criticism and also some other degrees in some other stuff, but I don't like to disclose online what I do offline. I'm a pretty private person.
Instead, please look at my cat. Her name is Paladin.
Credits and Acknowledgements
This is a fan site. A whole lot of the stuff it hosts is an unofficial reproduction of official materials that are the intellectual property of GCREST Co. and Avex. I do it out of love! (Don't be a snitch, please.)Almost all of the JP to EN translation work is done by me (Jakkal), and anything that isn't was probably done by Carp.
This site uses a lightly modified version of sadgrl.online's recreation of CreateBlog's Skyline theme. You can get it over here!
This site is hosted on Neocities. I pay for a premium account for reasons (personal site and the desire to use custom domain names), but you can host a site for free, and you absolutely should.