Listen to the Rain

I was looking for the Myst intro to rewatch it this morning, and since my phone's system language is Japanese, the first result was indeed the Myst intro...in Japanese:

Watch on YouTube

I hadn't even realized that Myst had a Japanese translation, it makes perfect sense. Such a popular game, that singlehanded did so much to popularize the CD-ROM format and sold tens of thousands of CD drives to gamers, of course it's going to get a Japanese translation since there's barely any text or voice in the game so the cost of translation is minimal. So as I do with these things, I listened to the intro, transcribed it, and translated it:

この本は、私が計画したとおり、誰にも永遠に破壊することはできないだろう。それは星を散りばめたような空間を、さらに落ちて行った。結局どこに落ちたのか、もうそんな推測も無駄に思えてきた。

ただ、私の中に解決されないひとつの疑問が残る。それはいったい誰の手に「ミストの本」渡るのかということだ。この疑問に、終わりはないだろう。

だからエンディングは　書かずじまいで終わることになるかもしれない。

And here's my admittedly-clunky translation:

"The book, just as I had planned, could not be destroyed by anyone. It kept falling into that star-filled void, and to what ultimate destination it would fall would be pointless to guess.

"However, there was one unresolved question remaining to me. That was, into whose hands would the 'Myst Book' ultimately pass? That question still had no answer.

"And that is why the ending may not yet be written."

Most of it is pretty much the same, but that first line?! In the English version, Atrus expects the book to be destroyed until he's in the middle of enacting his plan, but in the Japanese version, the book was indestructible from the start. I'm not sure it actually changes the plot at all--I haven't played any of the games past Myst, so I don't know if this is a vital plot point--but I wonder why the change was made?

Also, I really like one of the comments on that video:

数十年前のwindows95のデスクトップpcを捨てずに取っといてある理由がこれがプレイできるからである
"I've kept my decades-old Windows 95 PC so I can keep playing this game."

I plan to replay Myst this year and finally beat it, since it's one of the few non-WWII-based games my father has beaten that I have not.

I've been trying to find a way to buy ebooks in Japanese for a while. At first I was using Ebookjapan.com, but they were bought out by Yahoo and their new reading app is only available on the Japanese iTunes store. It's possible to read purchases online, but that requires an internet connection and means that my usual way of reading ebook manga--on my iPad, on the train--wouldn't work unless I tethered my phone to it. And there's no way to download it using the internet.

Alright, lesson learned. Don't buy anything that's defective by design. But, I can't buy Japanese kindle books from outside Japan. What to do? Well:

1. Make a Japanese Amazon account.
   
2. Attach a US credit card. This works just fine--they'll take your money no matter where it's from.
   
3. Activate a VPN. I use the one run by the University of Tsukuba.
   
4. Buy a Kindle manga. This would have been impossible from overseas, but the VPN turns the "We cannot sell you this content" notice into the option to buy.
   
5. Download the manga after logging into Kindle with the Amazon.jp account. I did this on a separate computer from my main Amazon account, in a separate Firefox container, so there's no association.
   
6. Using Calibre and DeDRM Tools, unlock the manga.
   
7. In Calibre, convert it to PDF, the better to take notes on it for words I don't know.
   
8. Enjoy ebook manga that I now truly own.

I bought the first volume of Fruits Basket yesterday using this method, so tonight I'm going to try again and see if it still works. If it does--and I don't see why wouldn't--I'll buy more Fruits Basket, Peach Girl, Death Note, and BLAME! to practice my Japanese. And I can lend them out to other people, if they want.

Maybe they'll cut off my account at some point for whatever reason, but who cares? I own my purchases. It's mine and they can't take it from me. It's on my iPad in PDF right now.

Now to just get good enough at Japanese to read it without constantly looking things up.

This is it. The end of the road. The final step on the journey.

I replayed the original Legend of Zelda on a whim after beating Dracula's Curse, to see if it was a fluke or not and whether I really could play games in Japanese. Once Breath of the Wild was announced at E3 2016, that was when I came up with the plan to play as many Legend of Zelda games as I could on the way up to its release. Originally, I thought I would just play up to Ocarina of Time. Then, I thought I would play up to Twilight Princess. And once I got that far, I figured, why not see it all the way through?

Of course, it meant that it took me until almost a year and a half after the game came out before I got to it, and then seven months playing on and off to beat it, while I beat seven other games in the same time (including Darkest Dungeon, which itself took me 70 hours). All told, one third of the total time I spent playing Legend of Zelda to this point was spent playing Breath of the Wild, which took me 180 hours, compared to 365 for all other Zelda games combined.

But the thing is, I was having fun the whole time. That's a miracle for any game, and especially for a Zelda game after the series had gone in the direction of Skyward Sword and Tri Force Heroes. The games had taken the Ocarina of Time formula about as far as it could be taken and were getting increasingly ossified, and required something drastic to shake them up and provide something new and exciting. And, well. They delivered.

The Japanese is just a transliteration of the English "Breath of the Wild."


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CGDCT: Cute Girls Doing Cold Things. ❄️

I spent a chunk of today at an Anime Chicago discussion of 宇宙よりも遠い場所 / A Place Further than the Universe, which I watched all this week, much like my marathon of Violet Evergarden last month. I'm bad about that kind of thing.

Yorimoi is a great show, though, and I'm glad I went to the discussion because it pushed me to watch it, since otherwise I wouldn't have heard of it at all. And like every time I do this, took extensive notes that I'm saving for posterity here.

( Sora Yori Mo Tooi Basho )

I read an extremely weird surrealist manga recently for an Anime Chicago manga meeting and took extensive notes for the discussion. Here they are:

( This book is very odd )

So, the new era is 令和 reiwa, drawn from a poem from the Man'yōshū, the oldest collection of Japanese poetry, which reads:

初春の令月にして、気淑く風和らぎ、梅は鏡前の粉を披、蘭は珮後の香を薫らす

Or, in English

In the auspicious beginning of spring, the weather is fine, the wind's harshness softens, the plum blossoms open like powder before a mirror, and the orchids smell like sweet perfume.

So, the official meaning is "auspicious harmony," though there's a twitter thread here about the other possible meanings. I immediately thought "commanded to peace?" when I saw it, but "order and harmony," or "ordered Japan," and various other more nationalist meanings are also possible. It's a non-standard reading and it's not directly drawn from Chinese classics--the two characters aren't even next to each other in the poem--so it's very odd.

But, this post is about other possible era names that are also pronounced "Reiwa"!

• 零羽, "No wings."
  
• 涙窪, "Depressed."
  
• 礼萵, "Thanks for the salad."
  
• 冷話, "Cool story, bro."
  
• 鈴夥, "Gigantic bell."
  
• 励和, "Cheering for Japan."
  
• 齢和, "Aging Japan."
  
• 戻窊, "Back to the pit."
  
• 驪蛙, "Black horse-frog."
  
• 欐窳, "Cracked beam."
  
• 霝龢, "Peaceful rain."
  
• 沴和, "Utter chaos."
  
• 唳際, "Time of the cicada's cries," or poetically, "Summertime."
  
• 迣我, "Leapfrog."
  
• 昤倭, "A new dawn for Yamato."
  
• 霊蜡, "Ectoplasm."
  
• 麗婐, "Beautiful maid."
  
• 霊哇, "Disembodied children's laughter."
  
• 冷窪, "Ice cave."

Perhaps one of those will suit the coming era better.

My Japanese tutor and I get along extremely well, but we had a disagreement last class.

I lived in Hiroshima for three years, and my Japanese is flavored by Hiroshima dialect. Some of this is just word choice, like the words たいぎい (taigii, "exasperated"), or じゃけ, (jyake, something like "It's because of that"), which aren't in standard Kantō-ben. Some of it is minor pronunciation changes that slip out sometimes, like 知ってる (Shiteru, "I know") becoming 知っとる (Shitoru). And there's some elements I never picked up, like how the standard coupla だ (da) and its derivatives becomes じゃ (ja) instead.

But there's one very common pattern of speech I picked up based on formal vs. casual Japanese. In standard language, the formal negative is formed by adding ません (masen) to the verbal stem, and the casual negative is formed by adding ない (nai). In Hiroshima, masen wasn't used in daily non-business conversation; instead, everyone just conjugated all negative verbs in nai form and then slapped desu on the end if it was supposed to be formal, mirroring the way -i adjective works.

This grates on her because it sounds wrong, because it's a dialectical difference. It's the same way that Southern American English sounds incorrect to a lot of Northerners when actually it's just a different dialect, but Hiroshima-ben doesn't even have a big literary tradition or a lot of actors speaking it. It's also stereotypically rough or masculine, like a lot of men sitting around in an izakaya, so it doesn't have any kind of cool cachet. But dammit, it's the Japanese I learned! Tōkyō may be the cultural, political, and population center of Japan, but not everything good comes from there. I wasn't offended, but I'm sure not giving -ben up.

I found this sign that I remember from the train tracks leading out of Hiroshima Station, written in Hiroshima-ben. I'd translate it as:

When you think of Hiroshima, you think of the Carp, right?

The Carp is Hiroshima's baseball team, and they are much like the Cubs, both in their repeatedly losses and in the devotion they inspire in locals. And much like the Cubs, they've had a comeback in recent years, though not to the Cubs' level.

That same lesson, we talked about Japanese food for half an hour, so we still have plenty in common. And she was trying to think of a way to say "complex flavor" in Japanese and I suggested 味深い (ajifukai, "Deep flavor"), which she loved. And google searching later it is (one of) the actual terms, so.

Today I'm exhausted after even more insomnia. I went to bed early after a string of bad nights where I slept fitfully and woke up from nightmares--I called in to work on Friday because I woke up from nightmares feeling awful--and then I had serious insomnia. I went to bed forty minutes early and fell asleep two hours later, and then woke up an hour before my alarm from nightmares that I can't remember anymore.

I could really use something to drive away all these nightmares.

Saturday was going to be character creation for mutantur's upcoming Masks of Nyarlathotep game, but due to various circumstances we decided to delay it for a few weeks and play another game instead. I voted on The Quiet Year, a game of building out a single peaceful year in the hardscrabble life of a post-apocalyptic settlement, and when I arrived, mutantur mentioned that he had acquired Betrayal Legacy, the legacy game version of Betrayal at House on the Hill, for Christmas from fin.emery and maybe we could play that. Betrayal is one of my favorite board games (I've owned it since 2006), and I've always wanted to play a legacy board game, so I immediately and enthusiastically signed on. So mutantur, fin.emery, and I sat down to play.

( Spoilers for Betrayal Legacy )

After we finished our three scenarios, it was the time when we would have normally quit anyway, so I stopped by Whole Foods and picked up some ingredients before heading home to make dinner. Last time I went to my parents' house, they loaded me down with fish, including some fish they had gotten fresh from the local farmer's market. They told me one piece of salmon was sushi-grade, so there was no way I was going to salt that and make breakfast shiozake out of it. Before I left to play Betrayal Legacy I put the salmon in the fridge to slowly thaw, and when I came back I made some dashimaki, shaved some carrot, chopped up some shiitake, sliced the fish, added some vinegar to the rice, and put it all together:
( food photography )
It was incredibly good. Not as photogenic as I might like, since I'm not sushi chef and I'm no good at cutting raw salmon so it looks smooth and uniform. I added too much soy sauce to the dashimake and so it's all brown instead of a nice mottled golden-white. Whole Foods inexplicably stopped carrying daikon right when I finally actually needed it for something. There's obviously no way I can find shiso without scouring Asian markets. I should have overlapped the cucumber and not just dumped it all in parallel. But none of that mattered because it was delicious. I'm really sad that I had to cook the rest of that fish because it was already thawed and I couldn't just have it sitting around, and I was too full to eat like a pound of sushi fish.

Well, mostly thawed. Even after 10 hours in the fridge, the center was a tiny bit crunchy from ice. Maybe I should have taken it out the night before.

Still, this is the first time I've ever made chirashizushi and the third time I've ever made sushi (once when I lived in Ireland, once at a cooking class in Naperville with schoolpsychnerd, and now), and I'm happy with how it turned out. Next time I might wait until I have someone else to eat it with me so I can use the entire fish, though...

Today is the all-employee company meeting, and it's already had its running time cut in half. It's usually two hours but this year it's one hour, so that's a little concerning. On the other hand, maybe they're making the meeting more efficient to avoid the usual large meeting problem where most of the attendees don't care about any particular part of the presentation. And if we get cookies 🍪 like last year, then all is forgiven.

And hopefully I don't fall asleep with how tired I am...

Last year was a mild winter, and this year is off to make up for it. After an initial fake out--usually if Chicago's winter is going to be cold, it starts with a sudden drop after the new year--winter finally caught up with us. Today it's -19°C, or -30°C with the wind chill. It'll get slightly warmer through Monday and then drop again, since Wednesday is supposed to be -28°C, -42°C with wind chill. Hopefully my workplace will close, but if not, I guess I'll see how much frost giant blood I really do have in my veins.

I was going to go to the ukiyo-e exhibit at the Art Institute with lisekatevans on Monday, but she was laid up with a cold that had knocked her out all weekend. I wasn't going to miss the exhibit and it's closing this Sunday, so I took advantage of my day off and went myself. It turned out to be the right decision--even though the Art Institute was offering free admission to Illinois residents, crowds were light, and the exhibit was mostly empty.

And it was beautiful. I took a couple dozen pictures and would have taken a lot more except I just had my cell phone camera and I kept being dissatisfied with the pictures I took. There were pictures of courtesans viewing cherry blossoms; crowds at the Gion Matsuri (which I went to back in 2016); shots of the shichifukujin, the seven lucky gods, in an ordinary context like drinking at a brothel or attending a street festival; and a lot of women looking seductively over one shoulder.

My favorite picture was almost at the end, painted near the end of the shogunate by 河鍋暁斎 (Kawanabe Kyōsai), which depicts a courtesan... 🔥 OF 💀 HELL. 🔥

( It's metal 🤘🏻 )

Ukiyo-e is one of my favorite art styles, and a lot of my apartment decorations are modern ukiyo-e. I have The Hero Rests handing above the fireplace, and I have this piece of Princess Zelda commanding the royal armies hanging over the dinner table. I have another one of the Warriors of Light fighting Chaos, but I haven't gotten it framed and hung yet. Hell Courtesan would go perfectly in with all of that if I could get a print.

You have until Sunday to make it to Chicago and go see it! It's worth it.

I had lunch with lisekatevans on Tuesday at Ramen-san, which was nice. She said she was feeling a lot better but wanted something brothy to help her recovery, and while I was dubious of Ramen-san, with the weather this week I figured why not. This time I got the lunch set and liked it, and then I posted our lunches on Instagram and got a bunch of comments in Japanese on my post (I always tag and caption my Instagram posts in English and Japanese). My posts are way more popular with Japanese-speakers than they are with English-speakers, though maybe that's because I keep posting Japanese food?

People who love Japanese food: my natural audience.

Had a nice discussion with my Japanese tutor about yard sizes on Tuesday. All the time she lived in Japan, she lived in Tokyo, and her family's from the Tokyo suburbs, so when we got to the part of 世界の中心で、愛を叫ぶ that describes Saku-chan breaking into Aki's house, going through the hedge and past the garden pond, she couldn't wrap her head around it because she was thinking of cramped Tokyo apartments. I was thinking of spacious Chiyoda houses (you can see some examples in my Tour of Chiyoda tag), so the idea of a wall and garden made perfect sense to me. It's kind of neat how we can have such a different impression of Japan due to me living in a rural area and her living in an urban one.

I got an email from the JLPT yesterday afternoon, but I forgot about it until last night, and I finally checked it when I was lying in bed before I went to sleep. I didn't pass N2, which is what I was expecting. It's a little but I was prepared. What I wasn't prepared for is that I passed the listening section but not the vocab and reading sections. I get way more reading practice than listening practice, but maybe I was just having a good day? Or maybe I got lucky? Who knows. I guess I have to read more manga for more practice, which isn't really a hardship.

Tonight I'll brave the cold again and go to see Starlight Radio Dreams perform, and then I have two more events this weekend. I'll harden my flesh through exposure to the cold. That's how it works, right?

Not sure how much I'm going to be able to get into this in the review I'm writing, but this particularly struck me as I was playing.

One of the hardest things to translate from Japanese to English is the way that men and women have a different way of speaking. They use different words, they have different ways of structuring their sentences, and they tend to speak with different levels of formality. That means that when a woman talks like a man, or vice versa, it's meaningful. This is also why so many foreign men in Japan end up talking like women, because they start dating a Japanese woman and just mirror the way she talks.

In Crystalis, there's a scene where the main character is infiltrating a village of women using a magical disguise, and he returns a particular herb that the leader of the village is looking for. After he does, he says this:


It means, "It's merely a trifle in recompense for the kindness I've been shown in this village," but the last line is the MC speaking as a man, realizing he's disguised, and then correcting his language to feminine speech. This wasn't in the English at all, because even ignoring text box limitations, how could they? All he did was change the way he said "is." There's no way to reflect that in English, so they just cut it out.

But among the things they did leave in, I learned the answer to a question I've been pondering for a long time. In English, the strongest armor set in the game is called the "Psycho Armor" and "Psycho Shield." I was always curious how it got that name. The other armors are named stuff like "Hide," "Bronze," "Ceramic," mostly based on the material they're made of. But psycho? What does that refer to?

Well, uh, it turns out that in Japanese it's called the 最高シールド (saikō shīrudo, "The best shield").

That's actually really clever localization! "The best shield"? Obviously they can't go with that as a name, so instead they transliterated the name and left kids like me wondering. Is it the "psycho armor" because it's so crazy good? Is it some mysterious metal? What is going on? It drew me into the world and it's part of the reason I still remember Crystalis decades after I first played it, and it turns out it's just an attempt to avoid a name that sounds dumb in English.

Localization is hard, but sometimes it pays off.

I generally don't write much, if anything, about games while I'm playing them, but Breath of the Wild is a special case. I've already spent three times as much time playing it as I have the single longest amount of time it took me to beat any previous Zelda game (Skyward Sword, 35 hours), and I've been spending the time exploring the whole map and tracking down shrines, visiting stables and doing sidequests, buying a house, tracking down Koroks, and otherwise avoiding all the vital tasks that I should be doing. But I finally got through most of the map and I'm close to getting all the Koroks I need to unlock all my bag slots, so I finally went to the Zora's domain to speak to the prince, like the various Zora scattered around asked me to do like eighty hours of gameplay ago.

That means I met the prince of the Zora, and now I understand the memes:
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That rhymes, when it's transliterated.

Today was the JLPT again. I took N3 last year and I passed, but I'm much less confident that'll happen this year. I went one step up, to the N2, and half the time I had no idea what was going on. The listening was the worst part, of course, but I didn't finish the grammar and vocab section within time and had to just guess on a few questions with one minute left and no time to read the page-long essay the questions were about. It's hard right now for me to take a particular message away from my performance, since I felt overwhelmed. I scored in the 90% percentile on the N3 and when I went into the N2 I felt like I didn't speak Japanese at all, and I didn't really have a particular area I should focus on other than "everywhere." I guess I just need to study more and step things up. At least I'm not alone--I overheard two people talking as I left about how confused they were most of the time.

Also, the man sitting next to me was coughing every twenty seconds or so for the entire 105 minute run time of the vocab and grammar section. I was really looking forward to the listening section, but fortunately they moved him to a corner away from everyone else.

Tonight is also the first night of Chanukkah, so I lit the candles. There's a picture here if you like.

This upcoming week might be the busiest week of the year for me. I have events every night through Saturday, including hosting a Chanukkah party on Friday night. I'm probably going to try making a test batch of latkes on Wednesday night to see if I can get the hang of it, but the sufganiyot will have to wait until Friday. Hopefully I can figure it out!

The Legend of Zelda series has gone through several strange shifts in its history. It started with Zelda 2, where the question was what Zelda would be like as a side-scrolling action RPG. Wind Waker asked what Zelda would be like if most of the land was replaced with a shining sea, and Spirit Tracks wondered what Zelda would be like if most of it involved trains. But admit, I never expected that the Legend of Zelda series would become a fashion simulator.

I had started to pay a bit more attention to games discourse when this game came out, and much like Four Swords Adventures, a lot of the talk was about how it was multiplayer. And not just multiplayer, it required exactly three people to play. Still, there was a lot of goodwill toward Nintendo after the success of A Link Between Worlds, so people were willing to give it a try. And while I didn't hear that much about it, I heard mostly that it was okay. Fun with the right people, extremely frustrating with random people, and not worth playing solo. That's pretty much correct.

The Japanese title is Toraifо̄su sanjūshi, "The Three Triforce Musketeers." Honestly, what a great title. I guess they couldn't resist the "tri" reference in the English.


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