Last stage in Super Mario 3D Land.
I died thirty seven times.
I did beat the level. But it took my hearty 187 lives down to a mere 150. And it felt fantastic finally beating that level.
Along the way a little box popped up. Nintendo was telling me that my handling of Mario was not up to par. “Here is a white leaf. It will help you,” they said. I acknowledged it. But I refused to take it.
A few deaths later another box appeared. Continue reading »
iOS5 came out today and not updating my iMac in time made it impossible for me to do the upgrade before I went to work. I had been meaning to do the swap over from the iMac to my new MacBook Pro but had kept putting it off.
It’s scary. Losing all that data. Just having it be completely gone would be like losing a part of myself. My data! My game saves! Oh god, the game saves! If I lost my visual novel progress that would be absolutely crushing!
What has happened?
Continue reading »
Responding to my father on Facebook, I quoted my wife and when it came time to punctuate the sentence, I paused.
My parents are going to look for a Halloween costume in the States and send it to us. The asked what kind we would like. My wife replied “A cute one” but when typing it on Facebook, no punctuation seemed to match the way it had been said.
A period felt a little too command like. An exclamation mark, however, felt like it was conveying more excitement than intended. I needed punctuation that hit about halfway between the power that a period and exclamation mark give.
Now, it could be said that from context, it would be understood that my wife was neither issuing a command nor way too excited about this. But what if one of those was the reality? In that case, more words would have to be used. This of course is not an issue at face value, but it changes the words used which could then imply other meanings, right?
As text has been used in difgferent ways over the years, we as people have been finding different ways to use it to represent the variety of tones in languages. Caps lock, short hand, smilie faces, all of these things have an impact on how our written word is understood. However, we have not really started using different punctuation on the keyboard as sentence delimiters.
Even if we did, it would take time for things to catch on and then not everyone would use it the same way.
When I first came to Japan, I emailed someone several times to ask how to get to a location for a party. Their last email ended with “…” which, to me, signified a bit of annoyance for all my emailing. But when I talked to the directly about it, they said that was not the case at all.
That very “…” often shows up in video games (Japanese RPGs) and was a joke amongst my friends and I in college. “Dot, dot, dot” is how we would read it, but we just assumed it was meant to indicate silence. Which didn’t particularly make sense, but we just kind of went with it.
Flash forward to me playing some Japanese sound novels and every time “…” showed up there would be a sigh, or a grunt or some sort of exhalation. The key was that it was not silence, and I had never realized this. That punctuation had more meaning than I was giving it.
Which is why the voice acting that is now more prevalent in video games helps to get the text across to the player. But we still will lack this in our own text messages, doing our best not to cause confusion or be misunderstood.
It’s been a hell of a week.
I was scheduled for a full week, but due to the typhoon, Monday’s classes were cancelled. Due to the damage done to one of my schools, Thursday’s classes were cancelled.
It seems unlikely that that school will ever open again.
I’m lucky, and I know that. With the natural disasters happening all around the world, I have yet to be hit directly. It was very close to home this time, but still, I got nothing. It really has made me more thankful.
And given me a bit more of a rambunctious feeling.
We all hit points in our lives where we feel the need to mellow down a bit. Ryunosuke being born definitely did that to me. But these events this past year have made me think again about that. I need to live more, on my own terms.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to be traveling the world searching for myself.
It’s time to do things I want to do, not things because they pass the time or things because they are there. I don’t care for traveling, so I won’t. I do want to play video games and read books, so I will. I spent too long in my life listening to other people telling me that what I enjoy is wasting my life and it took me too long to realize that I was wasting my own not doing the things I really enjoy.
なんか、データベースの問題があった。Godaddyと話した、問題はなおったみたいだけど。。。前の日本語が入ったポストはちょっと悪くなった。
読めへん。
直せへん。
でも、新しいは？
Friday night around dinner time I unexpectedly arrived at a surprise party in celebration of my recently becoming a father.
I was the third person there.
Well, tied for second. When my friend brought me there, there was only one other person there. His girlfriend.
I was confused at first.
Being greeted with “This is a surprise party for you, but everyone else is late!” was much more hilarious than sad. People did show up eventually. And when they did, I was the one who got to yell “Surprise!”. That seemed fitting somehow.
One time when I came back from the bathroom, everyone shouted surprise. That was also unexpected. The party had already been going on for a good hour or two. I liked that. These friends of mine have a good sense of humor.
It was a wonderful time.
Well, the Japanese one, at least.
I try to read more Japanese, I really do. But there is just something about the almost lack of pictures and “clump” that the Japanese text tends to do on the site that just drives me insane. It’s like how 2ch is just a bunch of text with maybe a bar here and there to separate things.
I know it has often been said that the simplistic web design of Japanese sites is to favor browsing on cellphones, but with the advent of smart phones I can only hope we get more and more into decent looking sites.
It’s not just Wikipedia that is bothering me recently, though.
Try to find a good GameFaqs-like resource in Japanese. It doesn’t exist. That’s fine, except then you are browsing wiki-like sites that have the guides for the games broken up into sections which are then further broken up into parts. Trying to find anything ends up taking more time than it is worth.
Am I just not used to these sites? Am I complaining too much? Am I browsing the wrong part of the web? It always seems that if I look up something in English, I get current results. Japanese results can be from a decade ago.
The only reason that I know about two weeks have passed since my son was born is because my library books are due today. Time has been funny recently.
I don’t know if it is the frequent naps, the hectic lifestyle or a slow onset of crazy, but it really feels like a year has passed by in these two weeks.
At this point it has become even more apparent how useful organization is. The problem of course is keeping up with it. I found a pretty good to-do app in Quickie but the issue as always is to remember to actually look at the to-do list.
The issues of the modern man here, I swear.
First, all the proper congrats, おつかれさま and all that should go to my lovely wife. My son was 3520 g, 51 cm and apparently had a head much larger than the average baby.
Or so they tell me.
Continue reading »
Our son’s due date was Thursday.
My wife didn’t start getting pains until yesterday afternoon. They got pretty consistant around 11 pm, so we called the clinic and they told us to come in. They checked her up and said she was still a good ways off from giving birth. Better safe than sorry, I guess. Today has been a bit painful for us though.
More for her, I’m sure.
I heard that giving birth was tough. I never doubted it. But for the past day it’s been like watching my wife being punched every ten minutes by the Invisible Man. It’s grueling to watch, and while the hand holding and massages seem to help her a little bit, I can’t even imagine what it must feel like.
Everyone has been telling me to rest. Well intended advice, I am sure. I can’t, though. Well, I have been laying down next to my wife and reading when I’m not massaging or helping time the contractions. But I’m definitely not ‘at rest’. Tense would be the word. While I slept last night, and for a good number of hours, I definitely do not feel like I did. Not sure how I’m going to go to work tomorrow.
Completely drained and this is only the beginning!
