Another quick update & recruiting timers

I think I’ve written more apologies than release posts by now, haha.

In any case, as you might know I’ve started working fulltime two months ago, and it’s pretty stressfull. More than I thought it would be, in any case. The only free time I have (= time to fansub) is like two hours a day, so I rather spend that time playing games or whatever than fansubbing. I should be getting one day off a week soon though, so I’ll finally have some time to fansub Chi.

About Fairy Tail — we were planning to sub it because it seemed that no real quality subgroup was gonna do it, but it’s being oversubbed at the moment, and there are plenty of quality fansubs available so it’s dropped. Another reason for this is that Crunchyroll has licensed it, and that my ears start bleeding whenever I hear Aya Hirano’s voice. I don’t even think I’m gonna watch it.

Dragon Ball Kai is stalled at the moment, if things go right we’ll have bluray rips soon and then we’ll start subbing that. So the TV show is probably dropped as well, unless the bluray plan falls through. Will keep you guys posted about that, but it’ll probably take a while until we start with that (after we finish Chi, I think).

Sooo, to sum things up: Fairy Tail dropped, Dragon Ball Kai stalled because of possible bluray subs, and I will continue working on Chi when my working schedule clears up a bit.

In order to speed up the Chi releases: I’m looking for someone who can time Chi episodes! I need timings for episodes 52 till end (episode 104 I think?). If you wanna apply, please download this raw, time it and put some random stuff in the lines so I can see how it’s timed (it’s hard for me to check your timing if the lines are empty). I don’t care if you make every line say “sajsakdjadj” or something. You can then send it to kubuskwal [at] hotmail [dot] com, or tweet it to our Twitter account, or leave a comment here, as long as I can find it!

I hate timing stuff so if someone could do that for me, it would speed up things A LOT, I think <_>.

Thanks for your patience as always,

Kubus

Definite Decision

Hi guys,

First of all, thanks a lot for all your comments. I had expected only 10 comments or so, at most, because nobody would want to read through that wall of text. Well I guess I was wrong!

I’m really, really, really glad that you are all so understanding. I can make a decision without feeling incredibly guilty now, and without regret. I have been thinking alot about what to do with One Piece. For one, the motivation to sub actually came back to me when I was reading your comments. I had no idea that people liked my subs THAT much. I thought everyone went with Yibis’ subs, but downloaded mine because those were a bit faster. Boy was I wrong. So many people are archiving my subs, I really had no idea. So I was really flattered and felt like subbing it again because of that.

So, thank you! All of you =).

Secondly, in spite of the small “motivation-boost” I got from that, I am afraid that it wasn’t enough. Well, maybe it was enough, but I think I should look at this realistically. I may be motivated now, but after a few weeks, that’ll be gone again. And I would again ponder about dropping One Piece. I don’t have the time to work on One Piece whenever I want now, because I have a job now. I have to work on Monday too, so subbing will have to be done on Tuesday. That won’t work. Our strength lied in the balance between speed and quality. We always released on Monday, and sometimes even on Sunday. But that will be gone then, and KubuSubs would’ve lost it meaning.

And now FUNimation is streaming their subs again, which I think is great. I know that we said that we’d continue subbing One Piece because of their IP block. But it’s possible to get their streams through Horrible-Subs, and I’m sure that someone will find a way to get through their security. And then there’s also Yibis. There’s enough quality subs available for One Piece right now.

So, to summarize it… Yes, I will drop One Piece. We won’t release any more episodes of One Piece, unless I find myself picking up the project again in the future. Thank you for all your comments, all your support and appreciation during these weeks that we’ve subbed One Piece.

And lastly, I’d like to thank the KubuSubs crew members that have been working with me to bring you 15 episodes of quality subbed One Piece.

Powha – for his excellent timing.
FreakingWesley – for always supporting me with the project, and quality checking the episodes with me.
Jacques – for sending me the CCs of the episodes, and always helping out when I’m stuck!
Urya – For being our mascot (beside Choppa). You don’t know him but he knows YOU.

Aaand… Wait, that’s it! Yeah I know, small team :3.

Thanks SO much for everything, and I hope you will continue to support us with our other projects. We still have Chi and Dragon Ball Kai on the list, and I will work on them whenever I get the chance to. Chi will finish airing soon, and we’ll work hard on completing that project so we can move on to the next.

We are still definitely subbing Fairy Tail by the way! It’ll start on October 6, so look forward to it! I am going to try to finish up Chi before that, so we have enough time to work on Fairy Tail.

Thanks again, and I hope you’ll continue to enjoy One Piece!

Kubus

Update

Hey everyone,

First of all, I apologize for the enormous wall of text this is. However, it is an important notice about our releases of One Piece.

I thought it was time to give a small (cough, long) update on how things are going. As you might have noticed, we haven’t updated for almost three weeks now. When I came back from my vacation, I got pretty sick and haven’t been able to work on subbing. Of course, this didn’t take three weeks but I have been lying in bed for quite a lot of days.

After I recovered, it was hard to find a chance to work on One Piece. We were already behind two episodes at that point, so the motivation to sub these episodes kinda disappeared for me. Actually, this has played a role for a long time now. I started subbing One Piece as a hobby, or, actually, I never intented to keep subbing One Piece when I made our first episode. But that’s a story that you can read in the “About us” section. When we released the first episode, I got the hang of subbing again quickly, and for a long time, I really enjoyed subbing.

Regretfully, the reasons for why am I subbing One Piece have disappeared over the time. I didn’t really like ACSF’s releases of One Piece when we started subbing. They were pretty fast, but their quality was lacking in some parts (such as, translation). The only other group releasing was Yibis, and their quality was really good, but they weren’t fast. Sometimes, you could even say they were slow. So I was actually filling a gap back then. We were pretty fast, for the first weeks we were even faster than ACSF, and our translation was better than ACSF, as they took their translation from the manga, as opposed to our translation by ear.

However, ACSF has become a better group now, especially now they’ve renamed themselves “UTSF”. Their translaton has become better, their overall quality has too. Even Yibis has become faster now, and they have even released faster than us sometimes. In other words: KubuSubs had lost its meaning. Every week, the number of downloads of our releases had gotten smaller. We had 20.000 downloads at first. Now, we get 5.000 at best. That’s a huge difference. And although I’m definitely not someone who just wants the most amount of downloads, it is a very demotivating thing for a subber.

Additionally, I have become busier these days than I was before. My summer break has gone by, and tomorrow I will have my first day at work. I was busy with job hunting the past weeks, and it has finally paid off. I got a parttime job now at a gamestore in the middle of Amsterdam, and the time I have for subbing isn’t as much as before. Actually, it isn’t really much now. I only got two days for it, instead of seven as I had before.

When I was talking about subbing with my boyfriend today, I realized that I didn’t even enjoy subbing [One Piece] anymore. While at the beginning, I was really enjoying it and was looking forward to the next episode. Now, it has almost become a chore for me. I’m doing this at my free will, I’m not getting paid for it, so… why the heck am I still doing this?! That’s what I thought to myself. I have been pondering whether I should drop One Piece for a while now.

It just feels so bad. If I drop One Piece now, I’d feel really bad for the people who have been supporting us from the get-go. And especially since we haven’t subbed that much episodes, I would feel like a troll if we’d drop it now. The guilt almost makes me want to go on with subbing One Piece, but that doesn’t work either, of course.

We’ve been updating less frequently for a while now. Instead of catching up to Dragon Ball Kai, the gap has become bigger. I keep promising to release more Chi’s New Address, but everytime something else comes inbetween and I fail to keep my promise. Life’s become more busy for me now, and I feel like the current amount of projects is too much for me to handle right now. I REALLY want to finish Chi though, and I still love subbing that series, so we will definitely not drop Chi. I’m going to sub it till we finish that project, no matter how long it takes.

Dragon Ball Kai is a series that I really want to sub. I’m not pleased with the current subgroup for DBK, and this is a project that’s really close to me. The episode gap has become too much though. So I’ve been thinking about subbing the blu-ray episodes instead of the TV episodes. The blu-rays cost a lot of money though, so I would need some donations or something like that to support that project. I’m still thinking about it, so please tell me if you would be interested in this.

Anyways, for now, One Piece is on hold. I’m not sure if I’m dropping it. The chance is pretty big, though.

Please voice your opinions on this matter, I’m really curious if there would be a lot of people who would miss our releases (of One Piece). Do you archive our episodes? Or do you watch our releases and then archive an other group’s release? Do you wait for our releases instead of grabbing the fastest release? Please tell me, I’m interested.

And please also tell me if you would be interested in seeing subtitled blu-ray Dragon Ball Kai episodes, and if you would be willing to make a small donation to help us make it happen.

I’m very sorry for being away for so long, and thanks for your understanding.

Kubus

Release: One Piece 411

This week’s episode’s highlight: Yoko cameo?!

Sorry for releasing this late, was busy the whole day with a job interview and packing my stuff for my vacation tomorrow. I don’t know if I’ll be able to post a SD version on time (probably tomorrow morning… at 5 AM when we head for Paris), or a MegaUpload link for that matter.

So once again: I’m on a vacation from tomorrow to Monday next week. No releases during that time.

And I’ll try to put up a MU link for HD up tomorrow, and possibly a SD torrent. But I gotta get up reallly early so don’t count on it.

edit: It’s 4:30 here and I uploaded the SD to megaupload. Can’t do a torrent because we have to go in 30 minutes and I can’t seed in that short period of time.

Torrent:
[KubuSubs] One Piece 411 [1280x720].mkv
NO SD TORRENT!!

Direct Download:
MU: [KubuSubs] One Piece 411 [1280x720].mkv
MU: [KubuSubs] One Piece 411 [704x396].mp4

Script:
[KubuSubs] One Piece 411.ass
(For use with [Mujiwaras Raw] One Piece 411 (1280×720 X264 AAC).​mp4 raw

Release: Chi’s New Address 045-048

And here’s the second half of our eight-episode batch-release of today.

I’m starting to feel more and more insecure about my cats. Do cats really need to have their teeth brushed? >_>;; Or are the animators starting to get out of inspiration?

I hope to finish up more Chi later this week. Once we’re a little caught up, I will work more on Dragon Ball Kai. Monster Hunter 3 is coming out on August 1, though… So there may be small delays >_>… Oh, and I’m going on a vacation on August 5 till August 10. So One Piece might be a little late too. Sorry for all that!

Once we got episode 52 released, I will create a huge batch with episodes 1-52. The series will span 104 episodes, so it’s half of the total episodes. The current batch torrents don’t have a lot of seeders (for some of them, I’m the only seeder) so I hope this will help. Please help us seed if you can!

Torrent:
[KubuSubs] Chi’s New Address 045-048

Direct Download:
MU: [KubuSubs] Chi’s New Address 045-048.rar