Reader Spotlight: Amberlight

Today’s spotlight interview is with awesome reader Amberlight, who translates our comic into his native Russian and manages our Russian mirror 🙂

D: Tell us a bit about yourself.

A: Myself IRL: well, I’m 22 and I just finished my university two months ago and now I’m a manager with a diploma. Were the situation different, that would get me rather depressed as it is reeeeealy difficult to find a proper job for a newly-graduated manager here in Russia. But, fortunately for me half a year before that I met a great guy, a newly-graduated engineer with a neat project of a 3D-printer. So I, being a tech fan, rushed to offer my assistance in the business-related part of the project so he can focus on the technical part. So now I’m an entrepreneur. Sort of, because we are still in a development phase and I don’t have much stuff to do but it’s going to change in a month or two.

Speaking about my personality – I’m a fan of all high-tech, sciency and sci-fi, I spend most of my time playing PC games and being anti-social in the “real” world.

D: Where are you from?

A: Russia, Perm. A medium-sized city of a medium level of well-being. Nothing too cool, nothing too bad. Although wait, the two universities of our city are rather cool. At least they were before Russian education system was switched to european-type bachelor-magistrate system. Yes, I’m biased about it.

D: Wait, what’s the difference between these education systems?

A: Well, until 3 years ago a Russian high education was given in 5 years course and a graduating student was called a specialist and considered fully ready for work.

Now the european system was accepted, with 4 years bachelor program and 2 years magistrate program. And since the most important stuff was being taught at the 5th year I may assume that a bachelor is not really prepared to work properly. So it just adds one more year of studies. And it also adds a number of people who sort-of have the higher education but aren’t as professional as specialists.  Well, I may be biased and wrong but that’s what I think.

D: So what do you do at work?

A: Well, for now I’m mostly waiting for our prototype to be finished so I could go and show it to all the people who might be interested in our tech. If all goes well, I won’t have any free time left in a few months.

D: How long have you been reading TDA?

A: I think I was just scrolling TWC and looking for a new comic to read and TDA caught my attention – first with a high-quality drawing, then – with a high-quality story. As to when did that happen – well, your first mail to me was on the 15th of February – so I started reading the comic about a week before offering my assistance.

D: What are your thoughts on comics and webcomics in general?

A: Well, it’s like asking what do I think about literature. There is a lot of stupid crap that millions read and the works of art that are appreciated by no more than a hundred of people, just as in any other form of art. As for me, unless it’s a hentai, a comic should, above all, tell a story. You may have the best artist in the world, but if I wouldn’t want to read the story if it was in a book, I wouldn’t want to read the comic either.

An important thing I like about the webcomics is their interactivity – unlike with books or movies a reader can influence it to some extent. Like me with correcting Russian phrases and those guys on the Russian mirror with the FPS counter pointing out the technical issues.

Another important aspect is that the author(s) is not some person or a group of people in an ivory tower who, at best, sometimes do some Q&A on their blog, but an actual person you can talk to on a daily basis, tell your opinion and sometimes help out.

D: What do you as a reader like to see?

A: Well, MOAR updates, naturally. But being reasonable I know that you aren’t Studio Drowtales and you can’t make 5 updates a week (by the way, did you check them as I advised you to?).

Other than that, as I mentioned before, the story is the most important part, but the quality of the picture makes a lot of difference as well.

D: Hehe, I did check them out! Trying to see what we can apply from their successes to us.

So when you came to us and offered to translate the comic into Russian, I didn’t know that there was a market for that.  Care to tell us a bit more about the Russian webcomic crowd?

A: The Russian webcomic community is not as big as the one in US – there is no comics culture in Russia. When you say “comics” most of the people think about Super/spider/bat/X-man comics of 90s and discard them as the things of null artistic value made purely to entertain children and teenagers. And if you say that you are reading a comic people will respond by saying something like “A comic? What are you, too lazy to read a proper book?”. So I tend to say “graphic novel” when referring to the high-quality story-telling comics like TDA, Drowtales, Girl Genius, etc. and say “comics” when referring to Super/spider/bat/X-man thingies.

Well, that was about the general population’s opinion on comics. The webcomic comunity, however, is a whole different story.

An important difference about Russian webcomics is that it’s rather hard to make them profitable. Which means that authors don’t start making them with money in mind and they don’t need to care about making stuff that would attract the most amount of people possible. I don’t mean that making money of your artwork is bad, pretty much the opposite, but I fail to see a reason behind the existence of some looks-like-total-shit-but-updates-every-day-comics besides making money from advertisements on their websites.

So, my point is that Russian authors are working purely for the art itself, knowing that they won’t be making much money, if any. And that, at least as far as I can see, results in higher quality of the webcomics in general because only dedicated authors do it. The drawback is that there are way less Russian webcomics being made.

The readers community is, well, varied, but in general those are rather nice people who are ready to help with an advice and won’t be too shy to point out the things they find not good enough.

On a less cheerful side Russian readers are less numerous and less prone to spend their money on art which means that authors can’t really hope for a proper crowdfunding.

D: Any fun interests or hobbies, or anything you feel you are an expert in? Any fun stories?

A: What am i an expert in? Well, I work with and am a fan of 3D-printing, so although not an actual expert I know a lot about it. And I surely hope that food 3D-printers will be available soon 😀

Another fascination of mine is space tech and space in general. I enjoy reading articles about rocket engines more than talking to most of the people, so yeah 😀

While totally not an expert, I am relatively well-educated in the aspects of management, marketing, logistics and economics in general – I was studying those for 5 years after all.

So, that’s it for now – I don’t think I’ll be having a lot of stories to share, mostly because I rarely leave my home to get into a story 😀 I hope my replies weren’t too messy.

D: Two more quick questions! Tell us a bit about your process for translating the pages. Do you use any specific dictionaries, translation software, etc?

A:  No, I’m fluent enough in English to have no need for those. And if I run into an unfamiliar word I just use Google Translate to look it up.

D: What was the coolest thing you’ve ever 3D printed?

A: The coolest thing I 3D-printed is probably a plastic reprocessing unit, a little handy thing that lets you turn cheap plastic grains or previously printed things into a plastic wire which is fairly expensive to buy. Well, not all of it was 3D-printed, but some significant parts were.

Awesome.  Thanks so much Amberlight for sharing your thoughts and expertise with us 😀

If you think you have fun things to share and/or would like to be interviewed, just let me know 🙂  And if you have fun talents (like translating into Russian for Amberlight) you want to share with us, we’d love to hear it 😀