DICE, chapter 129 (reader)

If I had been able to leave for an appointment half an hour later, this chapter would have been released five hours ago, 'cause Fábio finished redrawing it in record time!

DICE 129

This time, due to space constraints, I was only able to run the typesetter recruitment ad and couldn't add credits, but you all know that Jin, Fábio and yours truly did this, right?

(Don't get used to early week releases. Freebies, remember?)

Ah, yes, one more thing: I wonder how many of you will take notice of the major plot development in this chapter. You can call it an Easter Egg by the author, it's well hidden.

Here is the original, which you should visit out of appreciation for the author's hard work; and here is LINE's latest official release.

DICE, chapter 128 (reader)

Here it is, early release! \o/

DICE 128

As far as redrawing is concerned, the author made it tough on Fábio (no surprise there). Next time he will throw the kitchen sink at us if things go on like this, because our peerless redrawer discharged his task wonderfully (again, no surprise there).

I won't promise anything, and we still reserve the right to use the whole week to make our releases, but from now on it is possible that we will be able to make early-week releases a little more often.

As for the Drudger position, we got two candidates for typesetting, which is the toughest part. While testing them, I have designed a typesetting test which all of you can find here. Just send me (don't pester Jin with it) the typeset PSDs bundled in a RAR or ZIP folder (the download link will suffice). The goal of the test is to emulate my typesetting style (or doing it better, I have no claim at perfection), so do your best!

(This is the first typesetting test I design, so I'm sorry if it isn't very user-friendly. In any case, I can perfect it on the go. Also, I have chosen only hard pages, so make sure to strive for the best results you can. I've also included some fonts, but only the ones that are harder to find. If you pass, I'll give you a full fonts folder.)

On unrelated matters, here are the author's original (pay him your respects) and LINE's latest official release.

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DICE, chapter 127 (reader)

Jin is back, and we are on track again!

DICE 127

Here is the original…

… and here is LINE's latest chapter. I've noticed that they save it as JPEG, which means artifacts accumulate during their edition, whereas we change everything to PSD the moment we retrieve the raws and save as PNGs for release. Oh, well, at least they don't resize anymore.

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DICE, chapter 126 (reader)

Thanks to our good friend Jay, who graciously answered our desperate call for help while Jin was sorting out private matters, here it is, to the delight of all heartless leeches of society!

DICE 126

Here is the original by the author. Do pay it a visit.

And here is the latest official release by LINE.

Jin will be back for chapter 127.

Delay notice

I know this is the third consecutive week and these notices will get tedious eventually, but I promised you we would let you know when the chapter was going to come out late, didn't I?

Well, Jin is buried under real life right now. I am awaiting instructions from her whether to mobilise our back-ups to translate the chapter. So hang in there a little longer, please.

All hope is not lost

I have decided to make a short post on something I've just learned while we wait for the next chapter.

Those of you who have bothered to read the comments in the update section are probably aware of a conversation Jin, myself and some visitors had on the likelihood (or lack thereof) of there ever being a DICE animation or K-drama.

There isn't any on the horizon, but… a Noblesse OVA has been released! \o/

I don't read Noblesse, but it is a webtoon from Naver just like DICE. The OVA came out on Crunchyroll. The production is Japanese, which is also the language of the voice actors in it. The animation is not stellar, but not shoddy either.

Naver, as some of you may know, has a Japanese subsidiary, Hangames Corporation, which owns Comico.jp, the source of many Japanese webtoons, including the super-popular ReLIFE (which is going to be animated soon, but then again, it's Japanese). I can only guess that Naver commissioned this Noblesse OVA from Japanese producers via Hangames. Or something like that, it doesn't really matter how.

This all looks very auspicious. Noblesse is one of Naver's flagships (at least in LINE Webtoons, I don't know about South Korea). So are a few other series - The Gamer, Tower of God, Girls of the wild, as well as DICE. I don't think DICE would be their next choice of an OVA - the story is challenging to animate well, in my opinion, and it begins slow. However, this is a huge development if we consider that very few of us held any hope that our favourite webtoon would ever be animated.

So I leave you now with this sliver of hope that one day we might see Dongtae, Eunju, Taebin, Mio and X talking and moving - albeit in Japanese.