Translator’s Nightmare?

Posted on June 19, 2007 by baudattitude

I watched the 2005 movie “Linda, Linda, Linda” tonight.

It’s Ouendan’s fault, by the way.

I got hooked on the Blue Hearts song in the game so I looked it up on stage6 to see if there was a video, wound up bumping into the movie trailer instead, watched that, decided I needed to see if anyone had translated it, went to google and found that it was licensed for the US… and several months later, it’s been released and I’ve seen it.

Lots of fun, very slow paced in parts but definitely worth seeing. Nice mix of a buddy movie, a nostalgic high school movie, and a band movie.

Anyone watching this who can’t tell when the speech switches to Korean, which it does a couple of times during the movie, is going to miss part of the experience. The subtitles don’t mention it when it occurs, and you wind up not really “getting” a couple of the funnier bits.

That said, I have no clue how they COULD have made it work so I will cut them slack.

I’m not really a person that follows actresses, well, except for a quite understandable fixation on Drew Barrymore, but when I saw on the back of this that Maeda Aki had also been the heroine in Battle Royale I went looking to imdb and found that somehow, without trying, I’d wound up owning five of her movies. One of those weird coincidences…

“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 2/52

Posted in movies & tv, 日本語 | Leave a comment

Goals for the summer

Posted on June 18, 2007 by baudattitude

The big goal for the summer before school begins in September is to be good and ready for Japanese 201. Unfortunately I have the problem that, while I have a pretty decent vocabulary built up, a heck of a lot of it is “anime Japanese” which is… overly dramatic, at best, and flat-out rude at worst. I can filter out the rudeness pretty well, but toning down the drama level and beefing up the grammar are my priorities.

To that end, I’ve decided to try to, if nothing else, finish the entire Japan Foundation “Let’s Learn Japanese” video series and get through at least one first-year Japanese textbook. If I manage to do an episode a day of “Let’s Learn Japanese”, I shouldn’t have any problem hitting that part of the goal by September. I’ll be tracking them here to help shame me into not skipping days.

Current progress: 1/52.

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An unfortunate pattern.

Posted on June 17, 2007 by baudattitude

When something happens only once, it’s possible that it’s a unique event.

When something happens more than once, it starts looking like a pattern.

That’s about as “deep” as I get in the morning.

At any rate, the pattern in this case seems to be: My wife suggests we go to an outlet mall. I grouse about the inconvenience, the crowds, the lack of parking, the sheer banality that the very concept of outlet malls embody. Eventually I break down and we go to the outlet mall, wherein somehow I wind up walking out with a shopping bag of my very own.

In this case, she wanted to go to the “LeSportsac” company store in Tulalip, WA. Since we also have a good friend who lives in Seattle, we had two reasons to drive up north (about 220 miles, each way, a bit rough for a day trip but doable)

I groused, I kvetched, I tried to get the “outlet mall” portion of the trip canceled in favor of spending more time hanging out in Seattle. I did not prevail.

The LeSportsac store was a scary place, but I have to admit that the prices there were only mildly insane as compared to the full-on-insane prices that Tokidoki products command at regular retail establishments. My wife wound up with two bags, and since I do not remember the names other than that they were italian sounding and started with a “C” and a “T” I will name them after pasta. If you are, like her, a twisted Tokidoki fan, you will know what I am trying to say when I say she bought a “Cannelloni” and an “Tortellini”, in “Paradiso” and “Inferno” respectively. If you are not, then the actual product names won’t matter and the only effect this should have on you is to possibly make you a little hungry.

Moving right along…

I have an unfortunate attraction to the combination of “black” and “shiny” objects and as a result I have been lusting after a Movado watch since I first became aware of their existence. This is something of a sad comment on the effects of advertising on the weak masculine mind.

The downside of course is that, since the Movado people are apparently well aware of the effects of “black” and “shiny” on the weak masculine mind, they charge a bloody fortune for their watches. I am not going to say they’re overpriced or anything, because that’s a judgment call I don’t have the authority to make, but they’re well outside my price range.

On the other hand, when your wife takes you by the hand and drags you into the Movado company store at the same time as they’re having a 70% off sale on watches…

Look, even 30% of the regular price of one of these is 3 times as much as I’ve ever spent on a watch. Since I’ve bought one other watch in the last 15 years, that means that this one has to last me 45 years:

movado.jpg

But it’s …black AND shiny…

After putting that on the Visa bill – and I’ve already logged on to my bank account and sent Visa the payment, first thing I did after having a nice cup of yogurt this morning – we finally drove back to Seattle to meet our friend and check out her new house, which is a really amazing 1920s era house that she’s turned into half living quarters for her / half a day care / preschool center. Both sides are really impressive – The amount of space she has gave us some serious apartment-dweller-envy and the school looked like the best parts of every kindergarten classroom carefully cut out and assembled into one space.

We hung out for a while, I did my best to break her computer in the name of being “helpful”, we went out for some rather nice sushi at “Blue C” sushi near UW, then we drove home, arrived at 2AM, and crashed in the manner of hard crashing things. Good times.

Posted in gadgets, tokidoki, travel | Leave a comment

I don’t (heart) LA

Posted on June 13, 2007 by baudattitude

But we lived there for five years anyway.

If you’re a fanboy, LA is like a giant box of things you probably want.  Honestly, it’s no Akihabara but  it’s full of stores that want to sell you cool things.

That aside… well, you’re in this giant town with lots of cool places to go, but if you want to go from, say, Santa Monica to, say, Five Star Laser in San Gabriel (which we did), it’s a 90 minute trip.  Both ways.  3 hours of sitting in traffic burning $3.50 gasoline.  I have a good friend down there who buys almost everything he owns from Amazon – I didn’t get the point when I lived in LA, I mean, he was buying stuff online and waiting for it to be shipped when he could just have gone to the mall…

…Now I understand, and see the wisdom of his ways.

Still, we were down there, and I had forgotten just how long it takes to get anywhere, so we went to the aforementioned Five Star Laser and picked up some DVDs.  All Region-3 releases, and they look fairly legit.

(Ye gods, though, there are a lot of bootlegs out there these days, it’s really bad. Even stores on Sawtelle, which wasn’t a big bootleg district before, had lots of bootleg DVDs.  I didn’t expect that.  Still, they’re blatantly obvious and fairly easy to avoid.)

We got Shimotsuma Monogatari (Kamikaze Girls) because the US release, while it claims to be anamorphic, isn’t, Gamera The Brave because I love me some giant flying turtles, Green Snake because we still needed to replace the laserdisc, Wheels on Meals (another laserdisc replacement), Twin Dragons, because if ONE Jackie Chan is good, two must be better, “The Lucky Guy” because it has Stephen Chow AND Sammi Cheng, The God of Cookery because it has Stephen Chow, The Diary of a Big Man because we decided we wanted to see Chow Yun-Fat in a romantic comedy, and Ayumi Hamasaki Arena Tour 2006 because, well, the wife likes her some weird costumes and Ayumi live shows tend to be packed full of weird costumes.

We also went to an anime store in Westside Pavillion and bought a couple of figures, then realized they needed to be shipped because we’d packed really light for the weekend trip and wouldn’t be able to get them home in luggage.  Pictures when and if they arrive.

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Osu! Tatakae! Obsession!

Posted on June 12, 2007 by baudattitude

Yes, I know, Ouendan 2 is already out, and if I were a true fan I’d have it already, but for now, for now I am going back to the original game with a mission.

You may have noticed, if you have read earlier posts on video games, that I (a) have a weird fear / love association with forklifts and (b) tend to call games “finished!” and move on to the next one as soon as I’ve beaten them on the easiest possible difficulty setting.

Ouendan was one of those. I beat it on Easy, got as far as Ready Steady Go on “regular”, and hit a brick wall there and decided to stop and call it good.

I picked it up again this weekend and got hooked again… My new goal is to try to complete all the levels before RSG with at least a “B” rank and then see if I can’t break through that brick wall and unlock the “hard” setting.

I’m down to about 4 levels on “regular” to beat with “B”… It would be 3, but somehow I managed to get a crazy high score while at the same time earning a “C” rank on “Linda, Linda” and so, even though I’ve gotten “B” grades on the level, they’re not saved because I’m not beating the high score for the level.

No, there’s nothing special about “B” rank, it’s just a personal goal. I understand that the sequel actually unlocks some new stages for you based on rankings, though, so it’s not a bad idea to get in practice before I get a copy.

I’m not mad enough to shoot for “A” rankings, though I’ve gotten 3 of them on easy level, which I am inordinately proud of. If I ever see an “S” rank I think I’ll have to be one of those people who records the replay and puts it up on Youtube just to prove they’ve done it…

Osu!

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One class down, one to go…

Posted on June 12, 2007 by baudattitude

Due this Thursday, by 11:55PM: My Technical Writing term paper and my English Literature term paper.

I turned in the Technical Writing one Tuesday at around 10:30PM, so I am completely done with the class – just have to wait for the grade.

It’s good to see it in the rear-view mirror.  There were things in it that I actually applied to work and felt like were valuable to learn, but I could have saved myself a lot of stress by taking a more fluffy writing class instead.  For now, though, I have all my writing requirements for the Oregon Transfer Degree taken care of and life is good.

Now, if I can manage to apply all the edits the instructor suggested for the literature paper tomorrow, I might be done with school for this term and ready to start busting my arse on my Japanese self-study that I’ve neglected this year.

Yay for another term winding to a close…

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More phone lust

Posted on June 12, 2007 by baudattitude

Before the Nokia 6630, I had a Motorola RAZR V3.  I confess that I chose it largely because, well, it looks really neat.  Also, it’s a quad band phone, which the T-Mobile guys assured me meant that I could use it anywhere in the known world.

That “anywhere in the known world” excludes Japan and South Korea.  I’m not real likely to go back to Seoul any time soon (Although I did enjoy my trip there in 1994), but I rather like visiting Japan, so it rather irked me that I’d fallen for the salesguy hype without doing adequate research first.   It still looked really neat, so it had that going for it.

The Nokia, well, it doesn’t have the instant recognition factor of the RAZR or a Blackberry – it’s not going to turn any heads.  On the other hand, the keyboard makes text entry easy, it has a pretty nice web browser – so I can actually check traffic reports and look stuff up on Amazon – and it has an email client build in so I can check gmail from wherever I happen to be at the time.  In short, I feel DISTURBINGLY connected, and I haven’t even started loading it up with applications.  I am, however, sending enough text messages that I might want to drop the extra 5 bucks a month on the cheapest texting plan T-mobile offers.

I got my 1GB MMC card from Newegg today, which went right in and formatted nicely and in general was as invisible as you want a hunk of flash memory to be, and I got a Jabra BT350 headset that was DOA.  Thing won’t even charge.  It was just cheap enough that I don’t know if I want to bother trying to get a replacement, but just expensive enough that I’m rather vexed with myself for being willing to write it off.

With the MMC card, the not-bad-for-a-cellphone camera becomes a viable option.  It takes 1280×960 pictures, nothing in comparison to the Sony DSC-W55 but four times better than the RAZR’s camera.  I can even apparently record up to an hour of postage-stamp-size video should I go that route.

When I first started trying to get pictures off the phone, I was rather annoyed because I couldn’t browse the phone FROM the Mac mini.  That’s what I did with the RAZR, after all.  I didn’t realize that I could tell the phone to send them TO the mini over bluetooth.  It was quite a surprise when I tried it and the mini popped up a dialog telling me that it was receiving a file, and did I want to allow the transfer?

The advantages of being a diehard pessimist is that when things actually work in a reasonable manner it’s a really nice surprise.
My sole justification for ending this with yet another picture of the phone is this: I found a cool wallpaper for it.  Nobody I work with and nobody I’m likely to be around will ever “get” this wallpaper.  By putting it up here I assume that someone out there will see it and say, “Hey, cool Haruhi wallpaper!” and I will have found the self validation I so desperately crave.

6630_2.jpg

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Reflections on (abusing) trust.

Posted on June 7, 2007 by baudattitude

So I’m about 3 weeks in to the new job and starting to build a rapport with our development staff.  It really is a pretty decent place to work, and they’re all pretty pleasant which is fairly unusual for coder types.

Yesterday afternoon about 4 one of my new co-workers gets up to leave, but stops in another developer’s cubicle on the way out and makes some comment about having the worst desktop he’s ever seen.  This piques my interest, so I walk over and butt in.  The desktop in question is covered with icons – there’s maybe enough room for two more down in the very bottom right, but… it’s a mess.

In a joking way, I say “I bet you won’t hit two keys for me.”

“What are those?”

“Control-A.  Enter.”

About 40 minutes later he was finished closing everything.

What made it extra fun was:  Opening that many applications at once makes them start to crash pretty quickly.  The machine had visual studio on it.  Visual studio tries to launch a debugger when something crashes.  So, on top of trying to open dozens of documents and applications, the machine was trying to launch a development environment every time one of them went foom, which was pretty often.

Apparently he’s never doing anything I tell him to do ever again.  Oops.  🙂

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New phone!

Posted on June 6, 2007 by baudattitude

Well, new to me anyway. eBay angst is over as I have now received the Nokia 6630 I bought about a week ago. No box, mind you, and the manual is in Danish, but the phone itself is in fine shape – the previous owner had it in a protective, if rather ugly case and had a screen protector on besides – I left the screen protector on if you’re wondering why the screen looks so dodgy in the photo.

The QR code recognition app is … well, it’s not been perfect but it may just be that I need to tweak things. It reads QR codes off computer screens just fine, but it has problems reading them off paper.

It took me a little while to get it paired with the Mac mini, but now that I have, it talks to iSync just fine and I can send it files via bluetooth – so I have my hamamatsucho station ringtone and life is good. Can’t seem to browse it from the Mac to get photos off but that will come in time, I’m sure.

Newegg is hooking me up with a 1gb MMC card for $14.99, and when it gets here I guess I get to experiment with the wide world of Symbian OS applications. Anticipation swells…

Posted in gadgets | 2 Comments

Giant bugs and hoppy bunnies

Posted on June 3, 2007 by baudattitude

I came *this* close to having another game on the “played through” pile Saturday.

I don’t often have people over – I have lots of friends who I’ve known for years and share interests with, but most of them live nowhere nearby anymore. We’ve all spread out across (mostly) the Pacific Northwest and keep in touch via the normal chain of cc:’d emails.

That portrait of a hermetic otaku lifestyle aside, however, I do have a good friend nearby who comes over every 3 or 4 weeks so we can play co-op games. This is how I finished Battlefront II this year. Since Battlefront II, we’ve played a couple of other games but the one that’s really stuck recently is Earth Defense Force 2017. This is a glorious game – short on plot, heavy on explosions and full of lots of unintentionally hilarious NPC dialog. We play through usually 8 or so levels per session and we’re even very proud of ourselves for playing on NORMAL difficulty level – not easy! We are real men, doing real men things.

Anyway, last visit, we’d gotten to a level in the high 30s and gotten stuck, so we started there and for some reason it just clicked with both of us and we started blowing through levels – all the way to level 53, the final level in the game.

At which point, it was well after midnight, so our shooter fu deserted us. Two losses and we needed something to wind down with.

Spoke he, “I don’t care what we play or what system.”

Hmm. Something I bought to play with the wife was an old PS2 title, “The Adventures of Cookie and Cream”.

It’s about bunnies. Cute, hoppy bunnies. So cute, in fact, that my wife took one look at it and refused to play it. It’s designed expressly for co-op play, so I’ve never felt like popping it in for solo play and had no idea how it played, but what the hell.

That consumed the next two hours.

That is one unforgiving game. We died FAR more often than I would have expected from the cutesy visuals and kid-friendly story, but it never got really frustrating – what finally made us shut it down was a puzzle that we couldn’t quite fathom at 2AM, and that it was also 2AM and he needed to drag himself out to his car so he could go home and feed the dogs and collapse.

Damn fine way to spend a Saturday. Doing real men things. Like real men do.

Posted in PS2, videogames, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment