Why This Site Exists
Because I really love Paradox Live and I really hate using social media platforms for archival and information!In my time around the block, I had seen 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 stuff can be for franchises like these. Information is often scattered across a half-dozen platforms and media types, from a dozen different sources, and tweets by other explaining things quickly get lost in the shuffle. Older fans just assume that you know where to look when it's often not clear at all.
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 one thing led to another, with me translating the entire book and then deciding I wanted to tackle the drama tracks.
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 posting them so that the links wouldn't get buried.
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 from there, I was rapidly translating all kinds of Paradox Live content in all kinds of formats, mostly using DreamWidth posts as my medium.
So why did you move off DreamWidth?
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), and you are much more restrained in terms of what you can do in terms of layout and how media is presented.
And why not a wiki?
Simply put, I don't like the way wikis organize information.
If they are not heavily moderated, thnn they rely on dispersed volunteer labor, which makes them inconsistent and extremely vulnerable to being vandalized. If they are heavily moderated, they are prone to abuses of power and are often reliant on the whims of the kind of person who wants to run a wiki, and the less I say about that, the better.
(I know that it may seem weird that I am against wikis run by one or a small group of people, when this site is exclusively run by me, but there inlies the difference: I am not claiming to be a wiki, you do not come to this site expecting a neutral and crowdsouced authority. If it's on my site, you know it's mine.)
But either way, wikis are also just an atrocious format for meaningful archival of any kind, they are a horrid platform for story content, and all of this is disregarding how nigh-unusable Wikia/Fandom is as a platform.
So with this bouncing around in my brain, I had for some time been trying to figure out how to consolidate things.
And then I had the realization that I could just... make a site.
I'm old, so I remember spending hours poring over informational fansites for the things I liked, and for things I didn't know the first thing about but had discovered through one passionate person's archive on the internet. So between my troubles with organizing information on DreamWidth, my intense dislike of wikis, and my grievances with social media as an archival platform, 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?
And so here we are. Trauma Button at Phanto.MOE is a place for me to consolidate information about, and my unofficial translations of content relating to, a franchise that I love. I hope that it is formatted and presented in a way that makes everything a bit more accessible and comprehensible, whether you're a longtime fan trying to hunt down specific information from a niche source, or a total beginner trying to figure out where to start.
I don't expect to solve all of your problems or to be the final authority, but my goal was and is to make the kind of site that I would have wanted to stumble upon back in the day.
The ethos driving the mechanics is that you should never have to worry about if the site will break. This site is constructed with basic HTML and some very basic Javascript, and will never contain advertisement, tracking, or anything that should affect performance on the lowest end devices.
(Though sorry if some things scale weirdly on mobile, I'm a dinosaur and I'm used to optimizing for desktop.)
What's with the name?
I know I could have just gone with something like "Jakkal's Paradox Live Translations", but that's no fun to me.I asked my co-translator what I should name the site. I specifically wanted something that evoked the names of Pokémon fansites in the mid-2000s, where every other site was named something like "Sneasel's Cave" or "Razor Wind" or "Dizzy Panda"-- names that clearly referenced the official material, and weren't as dry as "Gump's Unofficial Pokémon Fansite Archive", but that you'd still never mistake for being official. My co-translator jokingly suggested "Trauma Button", after the "trauma" button that is on all of the character profiles on the official Paradox Live site and that I and many other people have found very funny as a concept. The suggestion made me laugh, so I had no choice but to go with it.
Phanto.MOE as the domain name is another thing that just makes me laugh. I was sifting through top-level domains for a possible domain for this site, and when I saw that .moe was an option, I knew exactly what I had to do. I think it's easy to remember, too, which helps for purposes of typing it in or looking it up.
But 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 Jakkal, a hobbyist translator and general cool guy. My real name is Ken. I don't particularly mind being called that -- after all, it is my actual name -- but unless we know each other more personally, you should probably stick to "Jakkal". That's my fursona, also named Jakkal, either above or off to the right depending on your screen size. (And he's a goat/chupacabra hybrid, not a jackal.)
I'm an adult man. I'm an American expatriate living in Hokkaido, Japan, working at a day job entirely unrelated to translation-- this is purely hobby to me.
English is my first language, and in addition to Japanese, I also understand Spanish (haven't spoken it in ages though-- if you write to me in Spanish I will understand it, but I may reply in English) and can read Latin. mi li toki pona kin!
I've been making web 1.0 sites since my early days on Neopets. 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.
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, and I currently live in Japan.
Though I don't have certification, I'd say my comprehension is around N2 (with infinite time to look things up). 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 specifically 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(/2.5D) boys.
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!
I am a cozmez oshi and I have been since the day the project was announced.
I also generally count Saimon, Aoi, Haruomi, and Iori as my other top faves (roughly in that order, descending); but truth be told, I'm remarkably close to a hakooshi, and I do genuinely love the entire cast. However, at the end of the day, all my dope points go to cozmez. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also have lots of other pursuits and things I do offline, too. Again, my day job is completely unrelated to translation, and I am a serial hobbyist who always has a personal project or two in the works.
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. Don't be a snitch, please. Snitching is how we all lose our nice things.With extremely few exceptions, I purchase all of the material that I translate, and I pay for my hosting and domain; the only exceptions are when friends have purchased things for me (ex: gifted ebooks through Bookwalker and in-person magazine pickup from within Japan). 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.
Specific Credits:
- This site uses a lightly modified version of sadgrl.online's recreation of CreateBlog's Skyline layout.
- Client-end includes to simplify menu updates 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 Pokémon 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.