Author: Heather Meadows

I love stories like this.

From Japan Today:

A government panel on the Japanese language proposed Wednesday setting up the nation’s first guidelines on the use of the honorific and polite form of speech to counter its widespread misuse.

It would be interesting to study just how long keigo has been used in its current form. Many times, agencies advocating the regulation of language are blissfully unaware of language change. (It would also be interesting to study how and why keigo is being “misused”.)

I was also amused by a comment on the article.

Language elvoles

Well, yes, it does “elvole”.

….dinoasaurs didn’t.

Wait. What?

:D

Horribly titled Herald-Leader article: Depot’s weapons center of new furor

On Jan. 6, a train crash sent a poisonous cloud of chlorine into the sky over Graniteville, S.C. It took 21/2 hours for the first warning to be issued. Nine people died.

Some of the world’s most lethal chemical weapons are stored in earth-covered bunkers at the Blue Grass Army Depot near Richmond, protected from terrorists and monitored for leaks by the Army.

What would happen if those chemicals were loaded onto train cars or trucks and a similar crash occurred in Louisville or St. Louis? Exposure to a tiny amount of VX, one of the chemicals stored at the depot, can kill a person within minutes. No one knows how many people might die in such a situation.

Here‘s my previous post on the subject.

New Scientist: Solar super-sail could reach Mars in a month

Okay, so this is very, very cool. I do have a couple of questions, though.

First, would 60 megawatts of microwaves harm humans?

Second, how fast of an acceleration are we talking about? Would humans be able to withstand accelerating up to a velocity of 60 kps?

Obviously, my true concern is:

Will this technology get me to Mars?

Here’s a c|net article that completely misses the point.

The article concentrates on the US market, and fansubber ethics, and DVD sales in the US.

It fails to mention the obvious.

Japan is getting broadband.

Fansubbed anime is available on the Internet.

1 + 1 = ?

Japanese anime fans don’t have to buy the DVDs if they don’t want to. They can just download the episodes. And they get convenient English practice along with their favorite shows.

Broadband isn’t ubiquitous in Japan yet, but it will be. Media Factory is simply trying to nip a possible sales problem in the bud.

///

While I’m on the subject, I’m just going to throw out there an idea I had awhile back, for when I have a lot of money. I don’t mind telling people this idea, because if a lot of people did it, things could be very cool. Maybe.

Okay. So, a lot of people love Japanese animation, so much that they are willing to invest their time and equipment to produce and distribute subtitled versions. Often the work of these fansubbers is very good, on par with a professional release.

What if there was a company that acquired licenses for anime, then said, “Fansubbers, go at it. I’ll provide the raws. You do your best work on this series, and if I like what you’ve done, I will pay you to produce the professional release, and you’ll get a percentage of the sales.”

Fansubbers would be rewarded for their efforts with not only money, but experience they can use later to get jobs. And fans would be encouraged to buy the release, because by doing so they would be supporting the fansubber.

It would be contractual. The fansubbers would not become employees. Their releases would still be available by bittorrent or whatever–with a small resolution, in mono–until the official release was announced.

The resolution and sound quality of digisubs are the biggest problems, I think, with DVD sales. Why buy when you’ve got a perfectly good copy that looks and sounds fine on your computer burned to DVD-R? And sometimes the fansubber’s translation is better than the production company’s! We solve these problems by contracting the fansubbers to do a project and allowing them to release their work as they go along in a lower resolution, mono sound version.

Of course, this would require a lot of faith in the ethics of fansubbers. But the best fansubbers–the majority–are ethical. Plus, there would be a contract, so in a worst-case scenario you could always sue ;P

This company could also offer downloadable versions of the full-size, stereo/surround sound episodes, with a flat fee per episode. The fansubbers would obviously get a cut of this, too. The price would be less than the cost of the DVDs, because DVDs include special features and cases and art. I would never price an electronic version of something over a hardcopy version, because that doesn’t make sense to Webheads.

So, there’s this new anime coming out that looks promising. The company snaps up the license and asks all the fansubbers who have already started on it if they’re interested in continuing under a contract, with the possibility of getting paid, and with the bonus of having the actual raws to work from. (It has to be timely, to get the attention of both the fansubbers and the audience. A lot of the more fickle, new generation anime fans dismiss titles that are “old”–even from, say, 2000! There could be a snag here, depending on how the Japanese companies react to the idea of giving out copies of their raw that quickly.) The fansubbers who are interested sign up and begin subbing. They produce two versions of each episode–a low quality version which they distribute in the usual ways, and a high quality version which they submit to the company. The lower quality version could be minus the OP and ED. This would encourage anime completists to purchase the official versions when they are released.

Once the season was over, the company would select a victor and immediately give the fansubbers back pay for their time. The fansubbers would then go back through the series to correct any continuity errors (sometimes you don’t know what people are talking about until you’ve seen the whole series, and it’s possible to get a translation wrong that way), and prepare the final release version. (How this part went would depend on the fansubbers and their ability with equipment. Would they simply assemble a timed subtitle track and give this to the company, which would then sync it with the video? Or would the fansubbers be deft enough to put it all together? In the beginning, the company might have to contract the final production out to someone else. But as time passed, I could see the fansubbers attempting to get the proper equipment for the job themselves–more money in it for them that way.)

Once that set of episodes (the season, or entire series, depending) was ready, the company would simultaneously release the digital versions and the DVDs.

A big concern here is cutting down costs without losing quality. I think making the subtitling into a contest would boost quality and save money. Imagine the numbers of fansubbers who might be involved. You could have several different groups working for you at once, on several different series…meaning faster production and more revenue. (And you wouldn’t have to pay anyone until you’d decided you liked their work.) The company, rather than having to deal with translation, timing, titling, and personnel issues, would be primarily concerned with advertising and acquiring licenses, leaving the other tasks to the fansubbing group(s).

So yeah, I live in a dream world, where the creative energies of human beings are rewarded instead of legislated and litigated out of existence.

But wouldn’t it be cool?

[Update 2005/05/16 12:21 am: It seems that Roderick has recently had similar ideas.]

Apparently Saddam Hussein was eligible to vote in the Iraq election, as he has not yet been convicted of any crime.

I wonder who he would have voted for.

;P

Here’s a tale of a boy, his Powerbook, and the dozens of DVDs he will no longer be able to watch.

My lack of “experience” has cost me more than one job I wanted. This last time it cost me the job I have dreamed about for two years.

How am I supposed to get “experience” in living in Japan?

Now that this job, which worked to my interests and skills, is unavailable, the only options are:

1. Sean getting a job (military?) in Japan.
2. Me teaching English in Japan.

This is because teaching English is probably the only thing I could easily get hired for, and because there are literally no other companies (that I’ve been able to find) that offer what the company I wanted to work for offers.

The thing is, being an English teacher does not pay well. Not enough to support two people, anyway. Sean could teach English privately to make up the difference–as he doesn’t have a degree, he is ineligible to be hired for one of the larger English teaching programs–but we would have to hope we could find that kind of position for him. It wouldn’t be a sure thing. And because it wouldn’t be a sure thing, Sean would never agree to it.

He’s making good enough money right now. Really, we’d like more. We certainly don’t want less. It costs more to live in Japan than here in Augusta, Georgia. You do the math!

Concerning Sean’s option of getting a military job in Japan…there is no base near the company I want to work for. So, assuming he did get a job there, we would not be living anywhere near the job I want. This means that if, later on, I decided to reapply and actually got accepted, Sean would have to quit his job so I could take the new one.

The chances of him getting a job in the private sector in Japan, whether for an American company or a Japanese one, are extremely low because he doesn’t have a degree.

How am I supposed to do this? How am I going to find a way to live my dream?

I’m dealing with my crushing disappointment by alternately allowing myself to mourn, and pushing it completely aside. In order to do the latter, I’m keeping my mind occupied with RSS feeds.

I wanted to point out yet again that I love Mark Liberman. Lately he has posted about the new grammar tests on the SAT, leading him to a more general discussion of the “theory of mind”, and then back to how current grammar tests are flawed.

Hell, I don’t know if he’s “brilliant” so much as he thinks like me, reacts like me, and writes like me. Regardless, indulging myself in his stuff always brings me a smile.

I’ve been signing some correspondence this morning at work. There’s a certain way I usually do it.

Today I can’t do it right at all.

My handwriting is too loose, too uncontrolled, too big, too curly. I try to get tight scribbles and instead end up with big loops. And they’re not even real loops, they’re more like shapeless curves. Big shapeless curves.

I applied for a job in Japan.

I didn’t want to tell anyone because I figured most people wouldn’t want me to go. You know, friends, family. I was superstitious about having negative energy directed towards the prospect.

It turns out that, as usual, I don’t have enough experience. This time, it’s a matter of not having enough experience living in Japan.

I was told that my cover letter was one of the better ones received in a long time, and that if I moved to Japan and stayed there for awhile I could reapply. They don’t want someone who will bail on them. I can understand that.

I worked hard in my cover letter to convey that living in Japan was what I wanted, but I guess that wasn’t enough.

If they could see my tears now, do you think they would reconsider?

So, overnight MSN seems to have updated their layout. It’s a little blockier, but it loads faster, and it’s just as easy to find things, so that’s cool.

A little pop-up window asked me if I wanted to take a survey, so I did. One of the questions cracked me up:

8. Please select the option below that most closely matches your opinion of the MSN.com homepage.

• Too conservative
• Too liberal
• About right for me
• No opinion

It’ll be interesting to see what people answered, assuming MSN makes the survey results public.

I’m not really sure how to answer it, myself. MSN/MSNBC seems to be incorporating news stories from the Washington Post, which I would describe as having something of a liberal bias, but I can’t say that about all of MSN’s stories. While the majority of them are cautious about saying anything nice about the president, I’ve grown to expect that from everyone. I’ll probably put “No opinion”…

There’s one nice thing about this page update. MSN’s old City Search was a useless piece of crap. It covered major cities only, so essentially it was irrelevant to a large portion of the population. (If I’m looking for a place to have dinner, I’m not going to drive two hours into Atlanta.) I remember sending MSN feedback about that a few months ago. Apparently others did too; now Citysearch is at least able to find restaurants in Augusta.

From the format of the data, I’d say they plucked it right out of the Yellow Pages. This is both interesting and annoying. Everyone seems to want to use Yellow Pages data rather than do their own legwork. It probably saves them money. But when you do that, what makes your service any better than just going to the Yellow Pages? (I was going to say that about the only reason I can think of to use someone else would be to avoid YP’s horrible popup and banner ads…but YP.com has been updated, and I don’t see those ads anymore.)

At any rate, Citysearch is still largely irrelevant, as its articles (Best Sushi, for example) again relate only to large cities. But it’s a start.

Going through the rest of the survey, I’ve come across a question that asks me whether or not I would recommend MSN to others based on

Unique content and information that you can’t get anywhere else

You know, I don’t think I would recommend any web portal at this point. They are all (essentially) the same. My coworker uses Comcast’s. I use MSN because it was set as the default homepage when I installed my browser. I’ve always kind of liked how it was set up. I don’t use it for news. Usually I read it when I’m bored; it has some interesting articles. Typically the news on MSN.com is dated. I’ve usually heard about something via my RSS feeds long before it shows up on MSN.

Speaking of RSS, why doesn’t MSN use it?

Wait a second…they do! But not the way I want. What they’ve done is added a tool to display RSS feeds on MyMSN. That is clever! It means people can route the news they want to one place, and it’ll appear next to news MSN wants them to see. I don’t think it will draw me away from Bloglines, but it’s an intriguing move for MSN.

In the comments/suggestions box, I put the following:

I would like RSS feeds for all information on the page. Just do snippets if you’re afraid of losing banner impressions. If the stories are good enough, people will follow the links and read them, and they will then see your ads.

Speaking of which…I got to answer questions about the ads.

12. How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the following aspects of the MSN.com homepage?

I had to choose from “Very Dissatisfied, Dissatisfied, Neutral, Satisfied, Very Satisfied, Don’t Know”. Here are the actual items, and my responses:

• Amount of space for ads versus other information: Very Dissatisfied
• Can tell the ads apart from other information: Satisfied
• The relevancy of the ads to you: Dissatisfied
• The quality of the ads: Dissatisfied
• Ads that cover the page, then disappear: Very Dissatisfied
• Large, animating, graphical ad near the top: Very Dissatisfied

I hate animated ads, and I hate ads that cover the content I’m trying to read. Hate hate hate!

In all, I guess the updates make MSN a little better, but it’s nothing to get excited about. I was just happy for a chance to give them my feedback, especially concerning RSS and ads.

Clive Thompson at Slate has an interesting piece about why video games should not be like movies. From Oughtta Stay Out of Pictures:

Playing a game, any kind of game, is inherently open-ended and interactive. Whether you’re playing chess, Go, or Super Mario Bros., you don’t really know how things will wind up or what will happen along the way. Narrative, on the other hand, is neither open-ended nor interactive. When you’re watching a story, you surrender masochistically to the storyteller. The fun is in not having control, in sitting still and going “Yeah? And then what happened? And then?”

That’s why cut scenes are such a massive pain in the neck–they enforce passivity.

It sometimes happens that I read an article and feel that I could have made the author’s point better than he did. This is one of those times. Still, it’s a good read.

I was wondering why this article was in Yahoo! News’s “Oddly Enough” section, until I came to the very end of the piece.

The canned mackerel from the World Food Program was not to be distributed Monday, but put into storage. Crowds watched as boxes of food were shifted to trucks by local residents under the supervision of troops carrying automatic rifles.

Is it just me, or is that a little scary?

I understand not wanting people to riot and/or take all the food…but automatic rifles?

Here’s an article from Japan Today about the film.

“It was an exquisite journey making this film,” said [director Rob] Marshall [imdb entry]. “We had to film most of it in Los Angeles because we couldn’t find any places here that still looked like 1920s and 1930s Japan. We ended up building a little Japan in Ventura, California. For the final scenes, we filmed in Kyoto temples that had never allowed filming before.”

I remember when I mentioned Memoirs of a Geisha to my Japanese instructor. He was so angry that Arthur Golden, the book’s author, had betrayed the trust of the geisha whose story he’d rewritten for his novel. I had been wondering whether others in Japan shared his sentiments. If they do, I presume they swallowed their pride for the sake of good PR. The movie is sure to turn even more attention towards Japan, boosting tourism and trade. That would explain why a film whose beginnings were so controversial could ever be filmed in temples that had never before allowed filming.

I found this bit interesting:

“We talked with Rob in great detail about whether this would be a culturally and historically accurate film or a concept film,” [Ken] Watanabe [imdb entry] said. “Since it is a fantasy world, the details were not as important as they would have been in something like ‘The Last Samurai.'”

[Kaori] Momoi [imdb entry] was at first shocked when she found out the leads wouldn’t be Japanese actresses. “Then I realized that the book is told through the eyes of an American and for the film, further filtered through an American director’s lens,” she said. “I wanted to play up my nationality. There were some details that were wrong, such as the makeup wasn’t thick enough on the geisha, but in the end, I think this modern twist on geishas will appeal to younger audiences.”

Marshall hastened to add that he tried to pay great respect to Japanese culture.

Perhaps they’re going for an air of mystery and fantasy, claiming that no one will ever really know “The Secret Life of Geisha“. At this point, I’m just going to throw up my hands, and go see the movie.

It would be cool to see it in Japan, wouldn’t it?

Some handwriting analysts got a hold of a piece of paper that they thought was doodled on by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Their analysis?

Experts who examined the tangle of boxes, circles, loops and notes on debt and trade variously described Blair as “struggling to concentrate” or “not a natural leader” and “stressed and tense”.

Too bad the scribbles weren’t written by Tony Blair! It turns out that Bill Gates was probably the person doodling on the paper.

“We look forward to psychologists reassessing their conclusions of how these characteristics ascribed to the Prime Minister equally apply to Mr Gates,” [a spokesman from Blair’s Downing Street office] said.

Indeed.