I had been getting a little burned out on eq2 at level cap, and the guild I’d been in had exploded in a beautiful starburst of drama, meaning that it was either start the interview process with a new guild or try something completely different.

This is how I wound up starting a new character on Sebilis, the Japanese-localized eq2 server.

It was a bit of a harsh awakening at first. See, eq2 has this mechanic where every max level character you have gives all your other characters an experience boost. With 3 level 90s, that meant that any new character got 60% more experience for free.

This normally works even for characters on other servers.

It does NOT work cross-region.

I also don’t have any way to transfer money or items to Sebilis, though that wasn’t a surprise. It was, however, a little weird to actually be poor. That’s a sensation I haven’t had in eq2 for quite a long time.

Fortunately, my account has all of its expansions and veteran rewards unlocked on Sebilis. That lets me take advantage of a couple of features from the latest expansion that are making the whole process much easier. I’ve been making use of a mercenary since I was able to scrape together the money to hire one, and, even if the upkeep on it is actually a bit of a drain at my level, it is making the grind much more palatable. I’ve also been making use of the Dungeon Maker – this is a feature from the most recent expansion where you play one of a handful of premade avatars through player created dungeons, and it’s been widely panned because most people would like to use their actual characters instead.

My “actual character” is an undergeared pauper made of tissue paper, so the avatars are actually quite nice from my perspective.

So, with the mechanics of leveling sorted out, I am cheerily grinding up through the levels and actually progressing very quickly. I hit level 51 this morning with about 20 hours played and I’m heading into some content that is famously good for getting XP in a hurry. Level 90 – the cap for now – shouldn’t be too difficult to reach, which is good inasmuch as that’s where the rest of the community is.

Speaking of community, Sebilis is pretty quiet. It doesn’t help that I am playing in the evenings on US time which means that it’s the middle of the work day in Japan, but I get the feeling that it’s a pretty dead server with a few die-hard players remaining.

That’s actually a good thing from my perspective. Anyone left on this server is likely to be more mature, which is going to be good since I expect that I will be fighting a heck of a language barrier to find groups etc.

As an aside, figuring out how to do kanji input in eq2 was its own special challenge. I will leave it at that because the alternative is a rant of inchoate rage.

I have had one fairly long chat with a Sebilis native and they seemed pretty bemused to have an American on their server. I’ve heard horror stories in the past about non-Japanese players on Japanese servers in MMOs, so “bemused” is a pretty good start.

That is to say, both Windows (since Windows XP) and Mac OS/X (since I dunno when) come with an IME built in and a set of Japanese fonts.

It’s a lot better than the old days when you needed to install Win95/J, for sure.

Anyway, there are a bunch of symbol characters in the Japanese fonts, useful stuff like • and ★ that you can get by typing in てん and ほし (“dot” and “star”), respectively.

On the other hand, if you can’t be arsed to learn all the different shortcuts for getting the symbols, I JUST learned that you can type in きごう (“symbol”) and you get this awesome chooser.

So if you want to put an onsen mark into your document ♨, you can of course type おんせん, OR you can type きごう and look through the list.

Also, if you use a particular symbol a lot, say that onsen mark there, you notice how it’s moved over to the left column to make it easier to pick.

Life just got more symbollific.

And yes, damnit, that’s a word.

Not the picture itself, that is, but the associated text.

It says “mofumofu shitai? dame!”

Which I would translate as “Do you want to (mofumofu)? No way!”

“mofumofu” is, it seems likely, one of the many Japanese onomatopoeia, like “zakuzaku” for the sound of rustling or “dokidoki” for the sound of heartbeats,which pack a ton of of – culturally encoded -  information into four syllables

This particular one is presumably suggestive to some level, but no dictionary I can find has any translation for “mofumofu”, and while searching for it turns up plenty of instances on google, none of them feel compelled to translate it, so I have no idea exactly how suggestive this is trying to be.

But, you say, it’s just a cute picture of a fox-girl, what does it matter?

It doesn’t RIGHT NOW, but I have two years to go until I’m done with my Japanese degree and looking for translation gigs.  If I’m translating manga or games, “mofumofu” is the sort of vocabulary that I’m presumably going to run in to and be expected to be able to translate, and I had better figure out what it means sometime between now and then.

Edit:  It seems that “mofumofu” is a word that means the texture of being fluffy.  I suppose that makes sense.

This, then, would be turnabout.

My wife has gotten rather hooked on the TV program “Bones”, which features a weekly dose of blood, gore, and oozing dead people.  It is, however, a network program, so it’s very careful with the language the characters use; it tends to stay firmly in the PG realm.

Anyway, we don’t actually WATCH weekly programming, as a rule, but we’ve bought the first two seasons on DVD and we’ve been watching them.

The other night, we’re watching this program, and after a family-friendly 40 minutes of the main characters trying to track down the killers of a guy who was found mostly dissolved in a bathtub full of …I want to say acid, but I think it was actually a strong base.  Lye’s a base, right?  “Acid” sounds cooler… anyway, after the main story is resolved, Angel Booth and Temperence are talking in her office, and  I notice that Angel Booth’s shirt is written in Japanese, and then I have to pause the episode and go back to make sure that it says what I thought it said.

”ファック　ザ　世界”

“Fuck the world”

I’m going to guess that nobody on-crew could read the shirt they put on him, and just figured “Hey, Japanese looks cool, we’ll go with this one.”

Score:

Kanji & Vocab : 41/55

Listening: 15/23

Grammar & Reading: 37/50

These are not great scores.  They ARE passing scores, but not by much.  I don’t know how much I can do on the listening portion, but I can certainly work on the other two over the next week.

I look it up. It’s the kanji for “who” (だれ)

I think to myself… I’ve never seen “だれ” written in kanji… why on earth is this guide using a kanji for something I’ve always seen in hiragana?

As an unscientific experiment, I google “だれ” and it comes back with one million, nine hundred thousand hits. Hah, I think to myself, obviously the hiragana is the right way to write this word and the guide is just being picky with using the kanji which obviously nobody in the real world ever uses.

I google “誰”

Two hundred million hits.

I’m flipping through a volume of “Honey and Clover” today, and I see “誰”, “誰”, “誰”, over and again.

So, yeah, I’m not as smart as I thought.

I know it puts me squarely in the tinfoil-hat-crowd to avoid Valve products because they require Steam to work, but I’m OK with that. Saves me money.

Anyway. Portal. Damn fun game. I get the cake jokes now, AND the obsession people have with Weighted Companion Cube, and the ending credits / song are all kinds of awesome.

Video game rentals are mighty pricey these days – playing Portal set me back 8 bucks for about 4 hours of portal-hopping puzzle fun. I suspect that will go up to six or so before I take it back, as I suspect I’m going to have to replay through the second half, the half that my wife couldn’t stay awake long enough to see, at least one more time.

“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: Episode 40/52. Episode 39 featured “Yan goes out, gets drunk, and gets in a fight.” I do love this program. I kind of wish they’d kept Mary Althaus as the host for the second season, but I’ve slowly gotten used to the new instructor.

In the meantime I am faced with a conundrum.

On the one hand, I should take this opportunity to study for the JLPT.

On the other hand, after finishing Exit, I decided to give Brave Story a spin in the PSP.

Inside the first half hour of Brave Story, you meet your first companion.

mmm nekomimi

So I’d like to play Brave Story for a half hour or so.

On the other hand, if I study Japanese, then I will be better able to understand future nekomimi-inside games, even if they don’t get translated.

So really I’m faced with the concept of catgirls-in-actus vs catgirls-in-potentia.

I DID have to look up what the opposite of “in potentia” was. I’m freely admitting that I’m not that big of a geek without reference materials.

I have to give the character designer credit for realizing – leather armor: not cute. Leather armor WITH A BOWTIE and a pink skirt: cute.

Maybe I’ll crack the JLPT book open and do ONE chapter.

Also, since I haven’t been tracking this every day: “Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 36/52.

Edit: One hour later: TWO chapters read and a self-test administered. Brave Story played: Zero. The things I do for education.

Then, I hit a word spelled in katakana, like, oh, I dunno, “ホーム”, and this of course makes perfect sense. Ho-mu. Home.

And then I hit a sentence in my JLPT study manual like “ホームにならんでいます” which means “Standing in line at… home(?)”

I’m standing in line at home? What does that mean?

And after trying to figure out if there’s a different meaning for ならんで that would possibly make this make sense, I find out that the Japanese use ホーム for the English word “home”, yes, as in “home plate” or “home base” but they ALSO use it for “train platform”

Standing in line at the train platform. That makes sense.

“ホーム” instead of “乗り場”, that doesn’t bloody make sense. I just have to remember it and it will all be good in the end. Right?

Having the ending credits song be… admittedly, a horribly sung version of… the ED from Beautiful Dreamer, which is one of my all-time favorite movies, was a nice touch. I was a little annoyed, though, when I put in the US-released Beautiful Dreamer DVD and found that the ending credits were actually cut a little bit – you hear the ending song, but you don’t hear the Tomobiki high school bell ringing. As a result, if someone hadn’t ever seen the movie on VHS or laserdisc, they wouldn’t understand why the heck Minoru is making bell sounds at the very end of the Lucky Star ending credits.

OK, so, minor quibble that doesn’t have anything to do with Lucky Star so much as it has to do with a very early domestic anime DVD with a bit of a sloppy release. I understand they even re-released the DVD, maybe the newer version has the full ED. I don’t think it’s worth buying it to find out, though.

“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 32/52.