ELSEWHERE

Just finished the Undertale Legends of Localisation book, it was about the quality I expect from that series, which is to say it's really interesting but gets repetitive (there's not a lot of different ways you can say 'Japanese people won't understand this cultural reference, so this line was changed to a reference they would get', and so on) and is geared toward an audience that is just a little less knowledgeable than me. I'd love it if Mato wrote a book (or a series on his website) that went a bit more nitty gritty, but the audience for that is going to be even smaller than the audience for localisation anecdotes to begin with, and that audience ain't huge. These materials hit that same, 'I own every book related to conlanging' thing for me - I don't love them but there's not a lot of competition, so I take what I can get

I also got the "passport" companion guide, that allegedly will let me play the game in Japanese! That will be interesting to see how it goes, and I'm going to fire the game up tonight or tomorrow and try it out

 
There is a style I've wanted to try with longer hair since before I started growing it out again, and I finally had some spare money to get the materials to give it a shot - I bought Nothing last month and that's made this month very comfortable, it's been very nice. But so I wanted to bleach the hair under the top layer and dye it a dark but vibrant blue, and got bleach and dye to do that, plus black dye to cover the previously-bleached section on the top layer.

I am not really happy with how it turned out - four hours of bleach and my hair was still pretty dark in parts, and the blue dye was not very strong, so the result is a sort of muddled green and I don't expect it to last very many washes. My options are to get yet more bleach and dye and see if it'll work better on already-dyed hair, or to just go through with cutting it all off and give up on the idea.

I sometimes like having longer hair and sometimes don't, but I also don't really do anything with it - I have it in a pony-tail 99% of the time I'm outside - and if it's going to be tied up all the time then I may as well not have it. Current plan is to cut it when I run out of conditioner, since I don't really use it when my hair is short

 
I need to get up and eat a lunch, so I'm going to go do that

My opinion on enabling the computer to type in japanese has been "but I don't waannnnaaaa", but I also want to copy these entries from the Undertale Passport book into anki and don't want to spend ages copying and pasting characters back and forth, so. I just spent way too long getting it working, でも それは動作します

I have no idea if that's grammatical, it probably isn't. Anyway!

I did poke at using the passport while playing the game and, it's doable but janky, which is pretty much as expected. In theory over time I'll learn the language and have to look up fewer things, and therefore it will be less janky, but what I'd rather do is painstakingly copy 200 pages of Japanese into a flashcard website so I can a. quiz myself on the meanings, and b. be able to search the cards on a computer instead of flipping through a book.

I admittedly am also not really in a mood to study right now -- I haven't been for a few days. I'll get back into it, but right now data entry is more appealing than actually learning the language.

I had hoped the passport would be less a mini dictionary and more a, walkthrough of the game, at least in part. 'This is the first screen you'll see, these are the words on it, these are what the words mean and how the grammar works. Advance to your left and this character will start talking to you, this is his dialogue, what the words mean, how that grammar works. Here is some trivia about the language being used!' Like that. Possibly that would get into copyright issues

Undertale is a very text-heavy game, so it may be that it's not a good choice to start with. Legend of Zelda 1 is also available, and I may pick that up and give it a shot -- I will ideally eventually own the entire collection of books. The Zelda pair had not been very high on my list to get sooner than the others, but I may bump it up.

I need to start heading to bed, but I also need to eat more dinner first

Truly baffles me when people don't understand why wikipedia doesn't just let you, as a famous person, personally correct mistakes in articles about you. It's because they don't know you're that famous person and not just someone pretending to be a famous person. The standard of proof is a source-able article, so they can point to it if anyone disagrees with the correction

Like this just seems really basic and obvious? Do you want random people to be able to forge a plausible 'No, really, I'm Dolly Parton' and be able to edit whatever they want into Dolly Parton's wikipedia page? Wikipedia is ridiculous about some things but this is not one of them

I have successfully copied fifteen pages of kanji from the passport into anki, leaving about fifteen pages of kanji to go, and then close to two hundred pages of hiragana. The hiragana will be easier, because I can just type those -- I have no idea how to pronounce pretty much any of the kanji it's teaching me, so don't know how to type them and have to copy them off of google. It is nonetheless going pretty smoothly

I also did some work on teket registers, there's now a spectrum of formality and familiarity that affects manner of speech, with formality largely affecting grammatical features and familiarity largely affecting referents. I don't want to go too complicated with it, but I do want to tweak things a bit more

However, it is now 2:30 and I need to eat something quick and go to bed.

Of course, Oz has been sleeping all day and now, at 3:AM, decides it's time to play

The cat managed to pee on the electric blanket this morning and I am extremely frustrated.

She also peed through four other blankets to get to it so those need to be washed so I don't freeze tonight, which as has been noted will take hours

https://twitter.com/mekkitymek/status/1638705024527380480 wrote:

Today @_knight_of_cups
and I went to see a genderbent stage production of Sherlock Holmes! They did some Study in Scarlet and beyond that I do not know enough about Sherlock Holmes to say. It was good, though --

Sherlock was played very manic and excitable, which was a refreshing change to how he's usually portrayed, and was very fun to watch. Watson was a former medical worker with COVID-related PTSD, which was also a neat take. It was also pretty gay!

The genderbending was also done well, characters were just 'themselves, but a woman', there was no 'but a woman who can solve crimes???' or trying to push characters to be more feminine, so that was nice.

The genderbending was also done well, characters were just 'themselves, but a woman', there was no 'but a woman who can solve crimes???' or trying to push characters to be more feminine, so that was nice.

Of course by the time we got home we were both very tired, very hungry, and really needed to pee, so I disappeared into my room for a while to do the latter, and eat a sandwich, and pill the cat, and then curl up with a book for a few minutes. ash then wanted some help making dinner, so I went to do that, and we watched some youtubes on city planning, and then a Breaking News, and then ash was tired and went to bed.

When I fired up the desktop computer it ran into a booting issue, which is to say it wouldn't. I did eventually get it to do so, but I'm now worried that the hard drive is failing and will need replacing. This is fortunately not a huge problem, touch wood, because the drive that computer boots from is not the same drive that has all the precious files saved onto it -- so, unless they both go, which would be extremely upsetting, it would be annoying for the HDD to fail but not life-ruining. It's just a matter of affording to replace it.

I do also need to finally get around to getting the external so I can upgrade the laptop -- it's now complaining about how out of date the OS is every time it starts up.

Anyway, I internetted for a while and copied six more pages of the passport into anki, and also did a few lessons there while I was at it. I mostly remember the japanese I've learned! Very exciting.

Oh, also I did laundry during the evening to get those blankets that got peed on, washed (and I cleaned out the cat's litterbox after I got her dinner). The laundry went much more painless than it usually does, I only needed two washes and two and a half drier cycles to get everything done.

So, I remain pretty tired on all three levels (physical, emotional, mental), and it is almost two now, so I'm going to go get ready for bed, then read a little bit more, then go to sleep. Tomorrow I have a solo arcadia I need to record, but otherwise don't think there's anything specific going on, so I'm going to let myself rest, mostly

GUYS I JUST READ JAPANESE IN THE WILD

I can't read the kanji at the bottom and this doesn't really count because it's sort of actually in English, but the top line says "paraniasuteeji" or, what I'm assuming is "paranoia stage", below that is "taagetto:", or "target:", then "kuriichaa", or "creature"

Then "[something]furippatto", "[something]bouruno", "[something][object marker][something]seyo!", and I'm making an assumption on "bou" because I'm only mostly positive that's a way of writing "bo". And "[]bouruno" might be something about bones? No idea on "[]furippatto" or the last line, although the "yo" at the end might be emphasising the statement or indicating that it's informative

 
Letting the episode play a little further, Arin says it says "Target creature, learn how to use skeleton paddles", so that confirms I was on the right track!

taagetto:
maddosaientisuto

[]kini[]wasareruna
hasemi, []ni
[]sayo!

maddosaientisuto = something about medusa? Wild guess -- it should be some kind of loanword in this context but I can't quite put my finger on it

I'd thought I'd learned that little mark did something but I might be wrong -- in trying to figure it out I did learn that google says hasami is scissors, and there's that 'sayo!' at the end again. The 'ni' could be a few different things and I'm not completely confident on any of them either in general or in this use, but I want to say it might be like "with" or something

The last level turned out to be Arin using skeleton/bone paddles/flippers -- OH "furippatto" IS FLIPPERS!! -- to hit uhhhh snot/ghost things? So my wild guess now is going to be hitting some kind of snake creature while avoiding scissors. Let's see what Arin's translation is

 
Arin has "target, mad scientist, watch out for misleading movements of the scissors and syringes". "Mad scientist" does make sense for maddosaientisuto

Incidentally Arin has been on-and-off trying to learn Japanese for years and I'm kind of proud of him for suddenly being able to read it? Good for him