the thoughts and experiences of Heather Meadows
Paula finds Judy, who is “unhurt but frightened.” That’s one way to interpret it. Another title might be: blow-up Love Doll is strangled by psychopathic glee-gibbon as they drive thorugh the blank, red expanse of Hell itself.
James Lileks is a fucking genius. (Via BoingBoing)
I mean, oh my god. Just read this. An excerpt:
These word sequences are not prepositions (they are not words at all), and they are not phrasal (they are sequences of independent words that are commonly kept adjacent, and in some cases they are associated with special meanings, but they don’t make up a single part or constituent of a sentence: some bits are in one phrase and some in the next). If that does not suggest to you that talking about “phrasal prepositions” is the wrong way to talk about them, then I hardly know what to say, given this new and unfamiliar policy of keeping a civil tongue in my head.
I adore this man.
God. I’m a fangirl of linguistics professors.
Dalton Hammond has written a brief, beautiful, and surprising tale about a fiddler crab.
Lots of cool/bizarre/interesting stuff in the news today.
Via Slashdot, a guy who makes sushi with an inkjet printer.
Via BoingBoing, a mermaid baby.
Also via BoingBoing, strappy shoes with spring-loaded heels. I like these!
I am offended! I bought this painting, maybe 10 years ago! It’s in my parents’ family room at this very moment. “Thrift store painting improvement”, says Mark Frauenfelder. Improvement? Bah!
Oh my god, moles are ugly.
Just shut up, Crown Prince Phillipe. You’re a hood ornament! How dare you interfere in the affairs of your country?
So there’s a guy who wrote a book about the Age of Anxiety:
His often acerbic dictionary-style guide is an indictment of the self absorption of the affluent West, and the growing tendency to categorize rather than celebrate eccentricity.
“In this country, we just have so much of everything and so much time to analyse ourselves. We seem to medicalise oddity and quirkiness.”
In other news, Japan rules. I want to go to the observation bath! (Hmm…is it co-ed?)
It’s Setsubun, so let’s scatter some soybeans around and eat some futomaki.
And that’s it for now :>
From “Let Me Explain Something“, Penny Arcade, February 2, 2005 (why don’t webcomic authors use blogging software for their rants?!):
Tycho seems near death which is a real problem since he is my gravy train. There has been a lot of talk recently about creative teams breaking up, but I assure you that will never happen here as long as I can help it. It’s really not even fair to describe us as a creative team since that implies a level of comradery that just isn’t present in our relationship. You see I recognized his talent for writing years ago while the two of us were still in high school. It seemed that his suicidal pessimism and fierce inner demons drove him to create some pretty incredible creative works. It was then that I developed a plan to harness his crippling depression and ride it to financial success, even if it killed him in the process. For the twelve years that I’ve known him I’ve treated him like a powerful creative furnace that I must feed with insults and contempt in order to produce clean, warm creativity. My greatest fear is that he will one day die or feel true joy.
:D :D :D :D
(Also, Linguistics Nerd Alert! See Gabe’s eggcorn? …no? Okay, fine, I’ll tell you what it is. He’s transmogrified camaraderie into comradery!)
I was depressed yesterday, and Monday. Really depressed. But last night I decided I wasn’t going to just roll over. I wrote back to the lady who rejected my application and expressed to her passionately that Sean and I are committed to living in Japan. I illustrated for her how I grew to love Japan and to think of it as a home. When I was finished with my arguments, I stated that this would be the last such message I sent her, unless she had questions for me, and I apologized for taking so much of her time.
When she wrote back, it was not to dismiss me outright. Instead, she actually asked questions!
They were hard, pointed questions, but they were good questions, and I was impressed by her frankness. The questions were about Sean, how he feels about Japan, whether or not he speaks Japanese, what he does for a living, and how we felt about living on minimum wage. (She cited a figure in a later message…it’s actually more than minimum wage, but it’s not a princely salary.)
I told Sean what she’d asked and he said, “She’s smart.”
After the questions she elaborated on her point. Many employees have been lost because their families were unhappy living in Japan. She went on to say that I did not really have the experience and skillset she was looking for. She said I was a “potential diamond in the rough”, and that she would prefer that I be chipped out of the rock first, so that her company could then do the polishing.
As you may be able to tell, I’m trying not to quote her directly, as this was a private conversation between the two of us. I’m also not going to say which company it is. But I have to quote one thing that absolutely made my day.
I only gave you consideration at all because you wrote a damn fine cover letter and that’s a rare thing to find. I respect the ability to make a case in writing, it’s what I look for and you have done it well.
Ah, my ego, she is satisfied…
I responded to this letter thanking her for her honesty and answering the questions she put to me. By that point I knew I wasn’t going to get the job, but I still wanted to answer her, to keep myself in her thoughts. I was frank in my response, as she was to me. I didn’t shy away from truthful responses, even when they hurt my case. But I did go into Sean’s personality, job, and habits a little, to try and explain why he is willing to move to Japan.
She surprised me with her response.
Rather than simply saying, “Well, thank you, but you’re not the candidate we’re looking for,” she responded to my thoughts with suggestions about how I could parlay Sean’s and my experience into jobs in Japan. Her tone by this point had become very friendly. She told us to enroll Sean in Japanese lessons and get him up to intermediate level within a year, and that if we were able to get over to Japan for a year she would happily reconsider my application at that point. And in her PS, she listed literally dozens of websites that help people get jobs in Japan.
I was amazed and touched by her generosity and kindness. While she couldn’t hire me, she treated me with the utmost respect. She was honest. She told me exactly where I was lacking. And she gave every indication that she believed I am worth something, that I can bring myself up to the level the company needs.
She closed the letter with the following: “in time, maybe we’ll see a good position that matches you open up at [our company]”. I don’t believe that was flattery or an attempt to placate me. Not from someone as frank as this lady.
This is the first time I have ever been rejected for a job and yet felt good about it. I feel like I know where I’m strong and where I need to improve, and I feel that my abilities have been recognized.
It’s a great feeling.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to apply for another job. Local this time…extra income so we can afford those Japanese lessons ;>
I just said aloud to myself, “I wish people would stop thinking I’m stupid. I’m the only smart one here.”
God. :>
Well, not here.
Joanne has a beautiful post up today about snowfall in Nagoya, where she lives. All her posts are beautiful, really; I’m going to have to get out of the habit of highlighting them, or I’ll have to highlight them all. But I had to mention this one.
I miss snow.
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