Proper Pauper

I haven't blogged here in quite a while, it seems, and what better time to blog than just after your immediate discharge from employment?

On Thursday, my boss called me in private for a short meeting, opening with, "well, it's not good news!" Thus, "effective immediately" I was asked to leave. Why? "it's not relevant," he says. "Was it because of me, or my work ethics, or ...?"
"No, nothing like that."
O.K. ...

The weird thing is, I'm not feeling as emotional about it as I think most people would imagine I should be. I think this partially stems from the simple fact that I was planning of leaving the company soon anyways, but the other half is that I wasn't having fun working there. All the people I worked with there were either of extremely low intelligence/education, or otherwise pretentious with delusions of grandeur. (One is so full of herself that she feels it's beneath her to take public transportation, or go shopping at a normal mall.) Sadly, she lacks the pedigree and erudition worthy of such pride. (Assuming that such pride can ever be validated.)

Anyways, with (essentially) a bonus free week off from work, and since I've already finished my christmas shopping, there was really nothing left for me to do other than sink into a pit of hedonism. Which, for me, is video games, movies, books and piano. Quite possibly in that order, although not quite in that priority. (Sad, that even in entertainment, I don't do what I feel is more important.)

So, it was during this time (within the last 3 days), that a friend suggest that I watch the movie Deathnote, a Japanese film based on a manga series in which Death, as an entity is very real. He also wanted me to see it because the subtitles were "t3h sux0rz".

Within the first twenty seconds, I caught on to exactly what he was talking about. noun/verb case disagreements everywhere, and superfluous commentary from the hack-translator, who felt in the opening (where nothing was happening), that the rest of the world would just *have* to know about his sick obsession with female Japanese celebrities.

And that got me thinking about the whole legalicy and legitimacy of the industry of translation in general, and bittorrent. On the one hand, it's a free service provided "from fans, for fans". But what that also means is that, much like the ability for a professor to teach, the range of quality is extremely wide, with an average that sits lower than everyone would prefer.

But, unlike that classical story of engineering (the one behind the whole iron band/ring thing when one graduates in engineering), nobody's going to die from a poorly translated movie or book. And, unfortunately, that means that some people will just continue to abuse both the English language as well as the title of translator, ruining the experience of foreign media and translations in general.

But on the other hand, we're met with the alternative -- legal, proper translations that are usually over-priced, and ironically, partially because they have to compensate the amount of sales that they're losing to illegal distributions on the internet.

What is the moral consumer to do? Choose between an over-priced, yet perfectly legal issue, or an illegal, but justified copy? Personally, I've been maintaining a sort-of partial morality with this issue. Ever since my purchase of a PS2, anything game-related has been legal. Movies and manga, on the other hand, are still behind downloaded (and deleted) on my computer.

(On a side note, I'm suddenly extremely conscious of my use of the phrases "on the one hand" and "on the other hand".)

So basically, this is all to say that while the internet provides a nice, free alternative to expensive legitimacy, it also comes with a lack of standards that may ruin one's experience.