A wild Snorlax editor appears!

どうも初めまして！　（◕ ‿‿ ◕ ）ノ

So on April 2, 2011, Nek0 (aka. xgmf@*$%, but Nek0 is the sn I know him by) MSNs me with the following message:

[11:13] Nek0: i made a blog to officially start the translation sh*t

...and my first thought was "a chance to troll his terrible grammar?! I'm in!"...but in all seriousness, I offered to edit part-time for him because I have nothing better to do with my time he promised me lolis...and the rest was history.

...anyway...I go by DrkMercenary (暗闇傭兵) or DrkMerc/DM for short.
I'm in college and is currently enrolled in some university I don't feel like disclosing. :<

I've taken two years of Japanese in the (distant) past and have been watching anime for about 15 years. This equates to me being able to understand most conversational Japanese but not being able to write much. I've also made a hobby of playing visual novels (most of them are all-ages...shh...), so by now I can recognize a lot of the commonly used kanji. On top of simple grammar fixes, I'll be helping Nek0 with misc. terms and other stuff in JP (since some of the story-specific vocabulary might be lost after being translated twice).

My objective is to see LN translation sites in general succeed. I'm sure whatever anyone decides to translate, there will be demand for it; but if no one translates anything, the existence of a well written LN would never even be recognized. With that said, I'd be glad to help out someone I know if they decide to start a translation project (especially if it means I can troll him about his poor grammar along the way; more funny stories for me to tell in the future).

While I'm at it, I might as well say outright that I approve of the decision to not work as part of Baka-Tsuki. I personally think they have a good site, but if I were to translate a light novel with a couple friends, I would want full control of our work, both the content and the context in which it is presented. I also wouldn't want a group of supervisors/moderators, who have contributed little or nothing to the project, to have any control over our work.
I also feel that when Baka-Tsuki releases a piece of translated work, there is no realization by the reader of who actually did the work (this isn't really that important, but still). Rarely would people scroll down to the bottom of the project main page to see who translated/edited. Go ahead and ask anyone that reads anything at Baka-Tsuki, chances are they don't know who the translators for the project was. Working as a smaller operation will at the very least get readers to recognize what they read as this blog's release as opposed to "something I read at Baka-Tsuki".

This is totally getting tl;dr as far as intros go so...
改めて、これからもよろしくお願いします。