Print len(python) from datetime import datetime
9 years ago
Monday, July 12, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Also, quite obviously, I lost all momentum re: the Metal Gear thing. What was going to be a detailed look at every aspect of the franchise and how each insane facet reflected a brilliantly coherent whole (or vice versa) did not materialize. It was not to be.
I don't think anyone could do it alone. You'd need teams of people, working day and night, to map each subtle contour of Hideo Kojima's case of the raving crazies.
I don't think anyone could do it alone. You'd need teams of people, working day and night, to map each subtle contour of Hideo Kojima's case of the raving crazies.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Is Metal Gear Badly Written?
I'm just dipping my toes in the water with this post. I've been mulling it in my head for a few days, and this is a little venting of the valves! We'll see what comes of it.
Is Metal Gear badly written? Honestly, I can't answer with a simple 'yes' or 'no'. Can a narrative as a whole be serviceable though it be marbled through with cringe-worthy dialogue, like gristle and veins of fat in a decent cut of meat? Can the strength of characterizations carry the day when the chronology has been tweaked and retconned so many times that Hideo Kojima himself has admitted he doesn't know exactly what all went on? Can the hint of irreverent absurdity excuse a lot of the issues people have with the game, though that may be a disservice to those who want to treat it as Serious Business?
TV Tropes calls the dialogue, at least, "weirdly stylized" and that is about as neutrally as I've ever heard it described. The narrative's chronology suffers from constant reshuffling, overwriting, and retconning. The characters in the games can be ludicrously over-the-top in speech, action, and design, but more often than not they come across as completely and
believably human characters. The set pieces are epic while simultaneously being epically ridiculous.
The foremost target for complaint is the repetitive nature of the dialogue. I think there's two dimensions to this issue. One, the micro dimension, wherein characters will repeat phrases after one another with little variation, or a single character will muse repetitively. I believe this comes down not so much to Kojima's writing, but the localization.
An example, you say?! Sure! There's a reason L says 'dramatically' to Light: "I would like to tell you that I am L." Many English-speaking fans giggled at this moment, which is so dramatic
in Japanese, because of L's needless wordcruft. There's a translation issue at play here, though, that has nothing to do with L or the author. "Watashi wa L ('ellu') des" contains a lot more
phonemes than the English phrase "I'm L." His lips were still flapping, he couldn't just say "I'm L." and leave it at that. He'd look like a badly out-of-sync ventriloquist doll. A certain amount
of the awkwardness of the scripts - which are not written in English - can probably be attributed to these oddities that invariably sneak into dubbing.
Now I have to start to reach, not being a Japanese speaker. Forgive the foray into baseless speculation. I take this next line of thought from my own experiences translating between Old
English and modern English.
Some of the clumsiness may also be the result of trying to translate not just the discrete units of phonemes called words, but the constellations of connotations that words entail. When
there's no ready list of precise and appropriate synonyms, it's easy to fall victim to repetition. As well, even fluent bilinguals may have some blindness or clumsiness when it comes to transposing a linguistic symbol or spectrum of connotation from one language into another, like a square peg and a round hole. Maybe that's just crap. Who knows?
Time to go buy some scholarly books about bilingualism, language theory, and translation convention!
Next time - characters who are in on the joke. Stay tuned, or something.
Is Metal Gear badly written? Honestly, I can't answer with a simple 'yes' or 'no'. Can a narrative as a whole be serviceable though it be marbled through with cringe-worthy dialogue, like gristle and veins of fat in a decent cut of meat? Can the strength of characterizations carry the day when the chronology has been tweaked and retconned so many times that Hideo Kojima himself has admitted he doesn't know exactly what all went on? Can the hint of irreverent absurdity excuse a lot of the issues people have with the game, though that may be a disservice to those who want to treat it as Serious Business?
TV Tropes calls the dialogue, at least, "weirdly stylized" and that is about as neutrally as I've ever heard it described. The narrative's chronology suffers from constant reshuffling, overwriting, and retconning. The characters in the games can be ludicrously over-the-top in speech, action, and design, but more often than not they come across as completely and
believably human characters. The set pieces are epic while simultaneously being epically ridiculous.
The foremost target for complaint is the repetitive nature of the dialogue. I think there's two dimensions to this issue. One, the micro dimension, wherein characters will repeat phrases after one another with little variation, or a single character will muse repetitively. I believe this comes down not so much to Kojima's writing, but the localization.
An example, you say?! Sure! There's a reason L says 'dramatically' to Light: "I would like to tell you that I am L." Many English-speaking fans giggled at this moment, which is so dramatic
in Japanese, because of L's needless wordcruft. There's a translation issue at play here, though, that has nothing to do with L or the author. "Watashi wa L ('ellu') des" contains a lot more
phonemes than the English phrase "I'm L." His lips were still flapping, he couldn't just say "I'm L." and leave it at that. He'd look like a badly out-of-sync ventriloquist doll. A certain amount
of the awkwardness of the scripts - which are not written in English - can probably be attributed to these oddities that invariably sneak into dubbing.
Now I have to start to reach, not being a Japanese speaker. Forgive the foray into baseless speculation. I take this next line of thought from my own experiences translating between Old
English and modern English.
Some of the clumsiness may also be the result of trying to translate not just the discrete units of phonemes called words, but the constellations of connotations that words entail. When
there's no ready list of precise and appropriate synonyms, it's easy to fall victim to repetition. As well, even fluent bilinguals may have some blindness or clumsiness when it comes to transposing a linguistic symbol or spectrum of connotation from one language into another, like a square peg and a round hole. Maybe that's just crap. Who knows?
Time to go buy some scholarly books about bilingualism, language theory, and translation convention!
Next time - characters who are in on the joke. Stay tuned, or something.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Learning to be Succinct
Because I hate being one of those people on forums who drop walls of text all over the place. How shall I learn to be succinct? Reading books makes my sentences balloon, maybe reading Twitter feeds will help my prose shrink?
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Greetings, Futuremen
The minutia of day-to-day existence in the early 21st century will no doubt be of interest to all futuremen who will have access to the archives of Blogger. In the far-flung hundreth century, presuming these words are still intelligible, such a detailed account may be of interest to school children or historians wondering what a book was.
Today, I was awakened at eight o'clock (as determined by the timekeeping system we earthbound-humans adhere to, which was originally based on the sun, Sol) by the alarm on my cellular phone (a primitive interpersonal communications interface, held in the hand, and under the hegemony of the phone utility company known as US Cellular).
I did some laundry, which involves putting garments made of polymers into a "washing machine", a top-loading device with a spinning bin that floods with water and detergent, and unloaded some fresh laundry from the "dryer", a front-loading machine that heats up to assist in the drying of the garmets that are spinning around inside of it. I placed all of these fresh, dry garments into a basket with my own two hands, as we do not yet have the robot slaves that make your lives so easy and carefree.
Forgive my use of "robot", as I am projecting a 20th century vision of the future onto your time. Robots were mechanical devices that could be programmed to do certain tasks. We use them to build cars, explore Mars (in the days before it was terraformed and populated - you futuremen fellows have gotten around to that, haven't you?), and other such tasks that would fatigue our fleshy, weak bodies.
My breakfast was a slice of whole-grain bread with peanut butter, a substance made from grinding and blending peanuts with oil and salt.
I then got into my car, which is made of metals and plastics, has four rubber tires, and an internal combustion engine fueled by gasoline, and went to a library, a vast warehouse for the "books" we rely on so much, to return some already-read books and pick out some new ones. Books are dangerous and you are well lucky that you have done away with them - the pressed paper pages can cut one's fingers, and too much reading of a fixed-size font can cause eye strain and headaches. Reading was a much more exhausting physical activity. The first e-ink displays are on the market right now, but they are very expensive, rather like exotic spices to those of centuries past. It was and will be ever thus. I'm sure there are those among you who cannot afford brain-links to the core-hive.
When I arrived home, I had some homework for classes. How quaint it will seem to you all, to know that we one inscribed our homework on pieces of paper bound together in a notebook, and then brought it to the classroom the next day to physically hand over to the instructor, rather than just hyper-flashing it to their dedicated brainspace. I envy you futuremen, for ours is a cumbersome system and transporting notebooks in the rain can be a tricky business.
Then, of course, I got bored of homework - a form of electronic Attention Deficit Disorder seems to define our age, as having a whole world-wide Internet at our fingertips is still a new and shiny thing from a cultural standpoint - so I decided I would pen this record, just for you.
Today, I was awakened at eight o'clock (as determined by the timekeeping system we earthbound-humans adhere to, which was originally based on the sun, Sol) by the alarm on my cellular phone (a primitive interpersonal communications interface, held in the hand, and under the hegemony of the phone utility company known as US Cellular).
I did some laundry, which involves putting garments made of polymers into a "washing machine", a top-loading device with a spinning bin that floods with water and detergent, and unloaded some fresh laundry from the "dryer", a front-loading machine that heats up to assist in the drying of the garmets that are spinning around inside of it. I placed all of these fresh, dry garments into a basket with my own two hands, as we do not yet have the robot slaves that make your lives so easy and carefree.
Forgive my use of "robot", as I am projecting a 20th century vision of the future onto your time. Robots were mechanical devices that could be programmed to do certain tasks. We use them to build cars, explore Mars (in the days before it was terraformed and populated - you futuremen fellows have gotten around to that, haven't you?), and other such tasks that would fatigue our fleshy, weak bodies.
My breakfast was a slice of whole-grain bread with peanut butter, a substance made from grinding and blending peanuts with oil and salt.
I then got into my car, which is made of metals and plastics, has four rubber tires, and an internal combustion engine fueled by gasoline, and went to a library, a vast warehouse for the "books" we rely on so much, to return some already-read books and pick out some new ones. Books are dangerous and you are well lucky that you have done away with them - the pressed paper pages can cut one's fingers, and too much reading of a fixed-size font can cause eye strain and headaches. Reading was a much more exhausting physical activity. The first e-ink displays are on the market right now, but they are very expensive, rather like exotic spices to those of centuries past. It was and will be ever thus. I'm sure there are those among you who cannot afford brain-links to the core-hive.
When I arrived home, I had some homework for classes. How quaint it will seem to you all, to know that we one inscribed our homework on pieces of paper bound together in a notebook, and then brought it to the classroom the next day to physically hand over to the instructor, rather than just hyper-flashing it to their dedicated brainspace. I envy you futuremen, for ours is a cumbersome system and transporting notebooks in the rain can be a tricky business.
Then, of course, I got bored of homework - a form of electronic Attention Deficit Disorder seems to define our age, as having a whole world-wide Internet at our fingertips is still a new and shiny thing from a cultural standpoint - so I decided I would pen this record, just for you.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Hideo Kojima Respects Mr. Miyamoto Too
...As anyone who played The Twin Snakes with a Nintendo game saved on their memory card can tell you. And who wouldn't give mad respect? Miyamoto is the designer who invented many of Nintendo's beloved mainstays, and is as a god and father to those who grew up with a Nintendo as one of their closest friends. And he's always... always... grinning. ("Microsoft is unveiling Project Natal and somewhere, Shigeru Miyamoto is laughing. Of course, that's true as a rule.")
He is, in some ways, the anti-Craig. Scowly vs Smiley. I think he could take Craig's Bond. He'd even bring help. Perceive:
And here's a picture of Mr. Miyamoto with some candy.
How sweet it is to be smiled at by you, Miyamoto-sama.
Thanks for the pics, Google Image search.
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