I Am Completely Serious

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The last class of my college career was Wednesday. ( Here are my notes in full. )

Continue reading “Studious”

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I appear to have thwarted a book-thief all by myself last night.

( The story. )

( How to rob me without being thwarted. )

Continue reading “How To Rob The Library”

I sometimes feel the urge to hurt Alanis Morissette emotionally.

I wish to point out the logistical inconsistencies in her songs, list all the GRE-words she has ever used incorrectly, and lay out all the evidence of her transparent emotional dishonesty. I also want to hit her.

I am aware that this interaction would do neither of us any good. Thus, if I were ever, through some bizarre circumstance, to meet Ms. Morissette, I would not attempt to harm her. I admit to this flaw in my psyche in an attempt to acknowledge its irrationality and, eventually, free myself of its toxic effect upon my soul.

From here I can only move forward.

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(What, is it the Feast of Boris again yet?)

In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I give you a thingie. It’s presumably not publishable-quality, seeing as no one’s published me yet, but I’m posting it anyway because I think I’m done with it for a while, and it’s distracting me from working on other things.

It’s the prologue to The Nebulous Video Game In My Head, “The Ashdocks”, which is kind of a puzzle-RPG - the plot involves boats, ghosts, swamps, fairies, and people being political, and the gameplay involves a few standard turn-based battles, and a lot of puzzles where you manipulate plants and fungi in various ways to affect the environment, hurt people, heal them, and create new items. You get a limited number of certain types of seeds/roots/etc per stage, and can buy more of others, and all that good video-game-economics stuff.

Because this isn’t Harvest Moon, you can also manipulate the passage of time to get the plants to grow immediately, though there are sometimes side-effects to doing that - grow too many explosive mushrooms in a certain place in such-and-such a space of real-time, and you wear out your soil so that it’s only fit for growing zombies for a while. Which you may or may not want, depending on who you’ve killed recently and what level you are.

(Except that I don’t know how this system works yet, hence the word “nebulous.” This is why I’m never actually going to be a video game designer. The “game” part kind of stumps me.)

( If this hasn’t all scared you away, the script is behind the cut. )

I hope you found that a nice, macabre way to start your Monday!

Continue reading “Happy Made-Up Internet Holiday!”

I just finished reading Bone.

What this means is that there isn’t any more of it.

And, I learn, Smith hasn’t really done anything else.

I am very, very upset right now.

I am all suddenly empathizing more with the opium-addict parts of the Lymond books, which-had-previously-irritated-me-so. I’m off to frighten abused children with my withdrawal symptoms.

eBay: It is weird.

“The trip to Putnam County Spelling Bee has been cancelled due to lack of interest!”

-

I have a job interview with Amity! After having been turned down by JET and ECC, this is very exciting! Exclamation points!

Angst.

On Monday, a bunch of us in Renaissance Lit took a trip to a prison to see the Shakespeare Behind Bars guys from this documentary rehearse, and talked to them afterwards. I didn’t find out about the shootings in Virginia until we got back at about 11:00 at night. I’m kind of assimilating the whole visit and probably won’t post about it more than this.

Apparently, though, I do feel comfortable talking about shitty news coverage of the shootings.

Professor Portentous let us get slightly off-topic in Confucian Classics today (yesterday), presumably because, you know, we’re mostly East Asian Studies majors in there, and we’d darn well better have an opinion. Inse said he turned Fox on to see just how horrible their coverage was, and apparently O’Reilly said something along the lines of, “Exactly how did a South Korean get hold of two guns?” O’Reilly is big on the gun control. He feels it is an important issue worthy of serious thought. He also knows the difference between South and North Korea, and the state of the US’s diplomatic relations thereto.

Prof. Portentous then got us back onto the subject of, you know, the Confucian Classics, and asked whether we could connect The Guy’s behavior to any specific failure to follow Confucian guidelines. Silence. I say, “No.” “No?” “No. We can’t know that. I mean, we don’t need to know that.”

I’d looked at some of the links posted on BoingBoing and suchlike, but - this is why I need to stop reading BoingBoing. It fetishizes tragedy the same way the mainstream media does - why did I say mainstream. This is BoingBoing. It is mainstream. There are always a few good links in there when they’re covering a developing story, but they’re mixed in with a lot of shit, some of it insanely journalistically irresponsible.

For instance, they linked to some poor guy with a slightly similar name’s Flickr page, and several students’ accounts of what had happened on their personal sites - and some of these kids were clearly pretty rattled and only really posting to let off stress and tell their friends they were okay. They don’t need this kind of exposure right now. And I like how, in the midst of her own reveling in tragedy, Jardin sanctimoniously links to this guy’s discussion of the harmfulness of obsessive television coverage of school shootings. Nary a synapse fires in her head.

Okay. Anyway, I’d looked at some of the stuff posted on BoingBoing, but only some, and wasn’t totally sure what the guy’s nationality was. I did look at some of his creative writing. It looked like something the Something Awful guys would write.

In an attempt to change the subject (because I did not want to sit there listening to people vaguely talking about mass murder in terms of “ritual propriety”) I brought this up in class. I said that whatever his ethnic background, his writing style indicated that he was “pretty assimilated into American culture,” and that therefore the journalists who felt it necessary to constantly refer to him as “the South Korean shooter” were engaging in “rash speech” and “careless thought,” and thus were failing to uphold their responsibility to society.

It’s weird using Confucian vocabulary to say stuff, you sound very glib. (Unless you’re Professor Portentous, of course.)

Aside from asking me to explain Something Awful, and asking for the URL on learning that it “satirized American culture,” he then let me off the hook for a while, and other people cheerfully expressed their own dubiousness of Bill O’Reilly’s chances of achieving authoritative conduct at this late point in his life (see Analects 9.22), and the sadly low likelihood of Fox president Rupert Murdoch’s being recognized by all men as a sage king, and being followed as water follows the slant of the earth.

But I was serious.

(On the subject, I’m glad -ing Imus got fired. Mom, tell Dad I’m glad -ing Imus got fired. Dad did stop listening to him, like, a couple years ago, right? Tell him I have expectations of his taste.)

Graduating seniors who work at the library are supposed to pick out a book to be put on display at the end of the year, with our photo and an explanation of why we think the book’s important. When they take it down, they put a little plate in it with our name and year of graduation. It’s kind of stupid, because they don’t let us pick out a book for the library to buy - we just choose one they already own - and nobody can check out the book we recommend while it’s on display.

But, yes. I decided to donate my copy of A, A’, by Hagio Moto for my book. I gave it to the woman in charge, let her take my picture, wrote my little tagline, and left.

That was a couple months ago, and it’s only in the past few days the books actually went up. So I have no recollection as to why “my” explanation of the manga’s import might read thusly:

A,A’ Prime: a Graphic Novel. It’s the only book by Moto Hagia, without whom, modern Manga, wouldn’t exist in English.

…I WILL KILL YOU SO HARD WOMAN ohhh this is character assassination.

Even if she can’t form a coherent sentence, she could at least have made the effort to spell the author’s name correctly.

My assumption is that she had a comma spasm and lost the meaning of the original sentence, which I guess was something like, “It’s the only book by Moto Hagio, without whom modern manga wouldn’t exist, available in English.”

I got my supervisor’s permission to make myself a new sign. I’ve got a fairly well-behaved version finished - it’s slightly snazzier than the original, with a less clashing color scheme and a better photo of me (that’s important, too!), which I think I deserve after having such words put in my mouth. But I’m still teetering on the edge of adding something horrible. I wonder if they’ll take it down if I use one of my Nekozawa Halloween photos. Or just a screenshot of Haruhi’s mom’s iei. Or a picture of Hunter S. Thompson.

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For the last few months, when I type a new kanji into the RTF files I’m doing my translation projects in, 90% of the time it comes out pointing left. My kanji do not know which way is up.

I thought at first that the problem was only with @SimSun, which is apparently intended mostly for Chinese, not Japanese, but switching to MS PGothic, which actually has “Japanese” as a language option, doesn’t fix it. Anyway, they both used to work. And I’ve saved and restarted and reopened trying to right them, but nothing changes. This isn’t disabling, since I’m lazy and I either romanize or kana-ize everything before I start the actual translation (the kana work properly), but it’s really irritating.

Since I haven’t installed any new Japan\China\Korea\etc.-related software or fonts during this time, I’m going to assume this is something one of the Windows updates did.

( Image behind cut )

(Edit: And if anyone reading this can tell me what the spine of the book in this image says, and what that title would probably be in English, I would be extremely happy. From the context it’s obviously a children’s book involving talking animals, and Charles Perrault’s name is on the cover, and there’s the phrase “boy(s) and girl(s)” in there.

Edit again: Okay, yeah, the book is “Puss in Boots,” so the spine is probably a series name. (This is important, okay?!)

)

Continue reading “Microsoft!”

Bring this up in Christian Ed next week! Your teacher will surely have many insightful things to say!

(Or you’ve got to at least leave a copy of the article on his desk, if you’re worried about the whole grades thing.)

I know that it is spring because there is a large stinging lump of unknown provenance behind my left ear.

And the huge furry yellow millipedes are back and dodging under my bed again.

And my face is breaking out.

I HATE EVERYTHING

I went down to the grocery store to purchase two items, and two items only: dishsoap and alfredo sauce. I returned with two bags of other stuff, and no dishsoap.

So I washed the dishes with alfredo sauce.

-

Murgatroyd doesn’t like Ouran. This is a problem for her, because she was the only holdout vote. It is also a problem for the anime club as a whole, because she refuses to recognize the democratic process, and she and I are the ones who run the meetings.

We duel. The time: midnight. The weapon: listing manga transvestites really fast. The conclusion: foregone.

If you consistently react enthusiastically to bad weather, people begin to decide that it is somehow your fault. Particularly people with cars.

I’m somewhat less than halfway through The Sharing Knife, by Lois McMaster Bujold. And, goddamnit, Lois McMaster Bujold! How could you write something this stupid!? Are you or are you not the person who wrote A Civil Campaign? Rotate your left hand for me. Did you hurt yourself somewhere? Do you want us to call 911?

It’s kind of a romance novel, with necromancy. Really pallid necromancy. And a really pallid pseudo-medieval setting. And long explanations of the workings of the magical systems and history of said pallid pseudo-medieval setting. And long, pallid conversations between the hero and heroine, who are going to fall in love and save the world (the two being presumably mutually dependent), in which everything they say is an irritating metaphor. And all the minor characters are awkwardly symbolic to the point that they should have names like Sir Xenophobius and Lady Glory-Of-Sisterhood, and despite all the awkward chunks of exposition I still am not sure, you know, what the “Farmers” are farming, and what sort of government any of these places we keep comparing in value-laden terms has, or even what the weather’s like.

I am feeling very betrayed right now. I think I’m going to have to stop reading this.

Professor Portentous: Now if everyone will look at passage 20 -

1: I don’t think it would be very authoritative (ren) of us to have class today.

Prof: You don’t?

1: I think it would better demonstrate our love of learning (haoxue) if we went outside and applied our concentration (zhong) to, you know, watching the pretty birds and refining our empathy (shu) for them.

2: Yeah, that would be pretty appropriate (yi), you must admit.

3: And also sweet.

1: Possibly even exemplary (junzi)!

Prof: Well, as Zhu Xi says, study for class should only account for twenty percent of your learning as a whole. Right now it’s time for that twenty percent. Now everyone turn to passage 20.

2, stage-whisper: I thought that that suggestion was very much in line with ritual propriety (li).

1, stage-whisper: So did I!

For whatever reason, reading this finally convinced me to start reading Kare Kano a few weeks ago. Maybe I have self-destructive impulses, I don’t know. I’m now up to volume 10.

Reactions in order of intensity:

1) AWWWWW CUUUUTE possibly too cute

2) Oh my god this is edited badly. There are repeated pages, obviously-missing pages, misnumbered pages, Japanese text left in untranslated, text bubbles left empty, translated text misaligned so that it’s printed over dark screentone and unreadable - ugh.

3) AWWWWW POOOOOR ARIMA/ASABA/MAHO/TONAMI

4) Oh, god, there are translation mistakes so glaring that I can spot them without access to the original Japanese text. Asaba is obviously referring to Arima in that sentence! He is not calling himself cute! There is clear visual evidence to support this in the form of Arima and Yukino’s reaction to the statement!

And Son Goku is not a priest! Sanzo is the priest! You can tell this even without recognizing the cultural reference (which you should know if you are translating manga for a living), simply because one of the two of them is dressed like a priest! Bad translators, very bad!

5) OMIGOD MOOMINS REFERENCE I don’t think Snufkin would really have a scimitar but WHATEVER MOOMINS REFERENCE VOLUME 8 PAGE 63 TOTALLY TRUE

6) Oh, geez, Maho. That’s gross. (Why is it simultaneously “grown-up” and “disgusting” for a high-school girl to date a man twelve years her senior? Is the girl “grown-up” and the guy “disgusting?” How misogynistic is this, on a scale of Princess Tutu to Platinum Garden? (Answer: a lot.) Just what is the cultural dynamic that makes this paradox possible?)

7) ARIMA’S ANGST IS SO LOVELY yet strangely abbreviated

I really hope ILL doesn’t start failing me now that I’ve pushed this far in. I’m not going to be happy until Arima’s angst gets at least a volume to itself.

(It just doesn’t mean what I’d like it to.)

I ended up doing both this one and this one (PDF).

MephistoPhair doesn’t really look as Designed By An Evil PR Firm as I’d like, but I didn’t start on it until late at night. The grammatically problematical sentence is a direct rip from some signs for a job fair we had Wednesday - I tried to put MephistoPhair next to those signs, when they were still up.

Sarah Anti-Proliferation Week went up in the bathrooms, next to some histrionic yet fabulously uninformative primers on human papillomavirus.

Naturally, I had a bunch of great ideas after I’d printed them out, dug out my tape, and stepped out to introduce them to the world. The big one was Yellow Question Marks. I should have printed out some dwarf and night-elf heads, put yellow construction-paper question marks over them, stuck them to the outsides of buildings, and sent people to mine for styrofoam ore and bring me 157 penguin ventricles, and then maybe I will give you a shield you can’t equip, and some SCALDING MORNBREW pfa.