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I want to start by saying that I do enjoy the game overall. The data usage is basically negligible as long as you get game updates through wifi. It helps motivate me to do some of the exercising and exploring I ought to be doing anyway, and honestly enjoy doing anyway once I actually start moving instead of making excuses. There's just something about seeing these creatures from my childhood coming to life... more or less, anyway. And it's free to play!
That said, it definitely has its problems. ... Read more » |
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Today's issue of Parade has a 30th anniversary Marilyn vos Savant article that among other things revisits the Monty Hall problem (also known as two goats, three doors) that caused an alarming amount of controversy, including furor from a lot of from people who really ought to have known better. "Of the letters from the general public, 92% are against my answer, and and of the letters from universities, 65% are against my answer," she wrote in a follow-up, and many of these letters were condescending if not outright insulting. ... Read more » |
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I don't generally like to comment on politics, but this is more a social issue than a political one, so I consider it fair game. Anyone who's only here for the translations might still want to skip this one, though. "I don't have anything against the transgenders, it's about the perverts and predators who could abuse this," or so I often hear. ... Read more » |
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Part of the problem, if my school experience gives any indication, stems from confusion about what, exactly, passive voice is. Many of my teachers told us to avoid any form of the verb "be", and some even had us memorize a list of its various forms—I can still rattle off "am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been" without even thinking about it—as part of the effort to avoid it. At least one took it a step further and gave instructions to avoid words like "exist" and "become" as well! Even at best, though, looking for "be"s at most serves only as an aid to finding passive voice, not the definitive identification it was sometimes treated as. Not until taking college courses on the Japanese language (which has a verb ending specifically for passive form that gets regular use) did I correctly understand the concept of passive voice. Aside from not properly explaining what passive voice is in ... Read more » |
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It all started when a friend on Facebook shared an image macro with some unsettling implications. Well, no, it all started long before that, but the image is what eventually led directly to this blog post. "I don't care what your son 'identifies as'," it said, "he doesn't belong in the bathroom with my daughter." ... Read more » |
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It feels like I'm past due to make some sort of update, and I've been putting this list together on and off for a while, so here it is. ... Read more » |
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There's a parody of the Christmas carol "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" called "The Restroom Door Said Gentlemen". In short, the singer enters the wrong bathroom after some prankster switches the signs, where he finds "two nuns, three old ladies, and a nurse" who turn on him before he's realized what's going on. It's played for laughs, but considering he meant no harm and didn't even begin to do anything threatening, it hardly seems fair that he's hit with a can of mace and a handbag before he even gets half a chance to explain himself. Ending up with "two black eyes and one high heel up [his] behind" feels like something he ought to be pressing charges for. I get that men are expected to stay out of the women's bathroom, and vice versa (though apparently to a lesser extent, given that most people seem to be generally fine with women using the men's room when the women's room is crowded), but that r ... Read more » |
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Related to やっぱり, but subtly different, さすが is typically used when remarking on something that affirms an expectation or assumption based on a reputation or role that involves the object of the expectation being noticeably different from ordinary. It could be something good, bad, or just strange, but absolutely not commonplace and boring. It also seems to carry a sense of being impressed despite having already expected something impressive. ... Read more » |
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So I've finally gotten around to putting together full text dumps from the game, with everything decoded except control codes (movement, sound effects, music changes, and so on are all lumped in with the text, instead of the text being in its own block and called by reference like it is in most of the other games I've dealt with). Aided by a reasonably functional editor, and a gamefaqs message thread with a remarkable amount of technical data as reference, and BizHawk's RAM Watch functionality to test some things, the section is shaping up rather nicely. It's not ready to be posted yet, but for now, here's a list of some findings ... Read more » |
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An actual site update is in the works, with the largest part being alternate endings and other additions to the Chrono Trigger page, but in the meantime, have a blog entry. I've seen やっぱり all too often blindly translated to "as expected". While that isn't a bad approximation of the meaning, it's frequently unnatural in a sentence. So, that brings up the question of what exactly やっぱり is used for. ... Read more » |