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.

Aural Love

http://prankstgrup.com

the most hilarious set of pranks!! And also something I feel like doing all the time. ...maybe.

(it would explain why I'm always singing random songs, eh?)

Go enjoy. :)

"men"

Japanese men are incredibly feminine by North American standards, or so I've noticed.
Of course, this only applies to the current young generation, as the older generations are more traditional.

All japanese male youth have perfectly shaped eyebrows as a result of tweezing and waxing. They also take extremely good care of their skin, and carry handbags instead of backpacks because it's more convenient. It is also commonplace here to wax any leg and facial here, if you're a guy. Fashion is also significantly more feminine than in America, which is proving to be a most interesting experience for me.

And women are more-or-less the same.

Now to find me some Yakuza...

Sinophilia

Random observation. I was just thinking about languages and linguistics (which isn't too hard to believe when you consider that it's I who's doing the thinking) earlier today.

And I thought about language pairs and relative difficulty: e.g. English phonetics is hard for Japanese speakers, but Japanese logographs are difficult for English speakers. So it's a bit of a trade off, I guess.

Anyways, I was thinking how most people don't flinch when a person of asian descent speaks fluent English. And yet, most people are shocked when a person of european descent speaks Chinese. Is this an example of unidirectional racism? Or is just simply because most white people who bother to learn to speak Chinese also come with some of the hugest egos known to man? It's as if they need this extra ego as some sort of overcompensation for self-confidence or something.

But I guess, anyone who does anything outside of his demographic norm would carry some pride for being able to do something outside his expected experience at all. So in that sense, it's normal. Just damned annoying.

Equality

me: blahblahblah feminism.
her: you mean equal rights and opportunities.
me: why would you want to lower yourselves to our standards?

Poetry

Long discussion about morality with friend. Hopefully still friend. Distress = no grammar.

I really ought to learn when to keep my trap shut. Or in the words of Murasaki Shikibu, "in few people is discretion stronger than the desire to tell a good story".

*burrows back into the abyss of obscurity*

Freedom

Yay! Back in school, which normally would be a bad thing, but in this case, I'll be happy to finish my degree. :)
Aaaaand, it means no work. Yay.

Believe

Short, simple thought. I was recalling a conversation with a coworker on the subject of religion, it basically got broken down to the belief in God (or some other higher all-powerful deity).

The statement "I believe in God" implies that one is religious, tries to be good, do good, etc. Or at least, that seems to be the commonly accepted understanding among [North American] society. But let's think about this a little bit deeper. In the case that one believes in [the existence of] God, one must also believe in the devil, right?

In this system, the devil is in direct opposition to God. It would therefore logically necessitate that the devil has no doubt of God's existence. And yet, for the devil to be in direct opposite to God, he would also have to oppose everything God does and wishes.

Having said that, the statement "I believe in God" says nothing about how I am as a person, or whether I'm even moral. In short, in the context of religious discussion, it's practically a meaningless statement. (Well, not really, but it's pretty close.)

Me: Are you religious?
Coworker: well, I believe in God
Me: So?

Lent

Not that I've been regularly updating this site anyways, but yah. School work, deadlines, aspirations of graduating, etc. So I'm going to disappear from the online scene. ...sorta. Mostly from dA and here. ...and xanga. Maybe LJ. Hesitating about MSN; got some very informed contacts on me list...

Anyways, wish me luck on my translations and other outstanding projects. <3

Normal and Regular

I think ppl who only read this blog of mine might start to think that I'm becoming some sort of Grammar nazi. So, here's a post on some lighter, meaningless things in life.

It's always fun to spend a weekend away with a group of friends in a chalet in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere without even going skiing on the skiing slopes on the mountain 50 metres away.
Seriously, though, it's always interesting to learn about how the differences in one's situation either help shape their character, or simply make them different without affecting anything.
For example:

Single children cannot brush their teeth while sharing a sink with someone else. I learned this when I was brushing my teeth (with the washroom door open) and my friend walked in. I motioned that he could share the sink, but he's like, "what? at the same time? but like, wouldn't it interfere...?"
I paused for a bit then asked, "are you an only child?"
"yeah..."
"Ah, that's why. Trust me, it's not too hard."
"Just the same, I think I'll wait 'til you're done."
And at the time, I knew to ask that because logically, only people without siblings [close to their age] would have any chance of having no experience with brushing their teeth with other people while sharing a sink. Not that it makes a marked difference in daily behaviour, but it just means that the maximum number of minutes that the washroom is used is raised because of those single children.

Some other minor things that I've learned is that people squeeze their toothpaste tubes differently. Guys tend to just grabble the middle (perhaps from habit of handling some other shaft-like object?) while girls tend to be more neat and push from the ends. Of course there are exceptions, and those exceptions are reflected in their personalities - the neater guys tend either to be the engineering type (maximize resources, efficiency, etc), and the 'exceptional' girls are the messy, raucous, random types.

Also, people pour their cereal differently. I haven't found any *real* difference here, but from what I've seen, most people keep the bag of cereal in the box as they pour into the bowl, but one person I've seen, at least, pulls the bag out. But another thing is that while some people cut it and then clip it (to preserve freshness?), others rip it open, then crumple it back in the box, while others fold it neatly, etc...

Some people need to wear slippers while on hardwood/tiled floors, while for others, socks are as good a barrier between the soles of their feet and the floor as any pair of slippers would be.

And boy, when you live with a group of post-teenagers, you REALLY learn who's a morning person, and who isn't.

Yah, no deep thoughts here, just some causual observations.