Category: Pointless Ramblings

YouTube Channels I Support

Posted on by Nimgimli

I watch a lot of YouTube. Since we “cut the cord” I surf YouTube the way I used to flip through channels watching TV. We pay for YouTube Premium so we’re not constantly watching ads (@partpurple watches a lot of YouTube as well).

Just to change things up for today, I thought I’d share some of my favorite YouTube channels. Maybe I’ll do a few of these posts but to get started I’ll cover the cream of the crop. Or at least, the three channels I support monetarily through Patreon or through YouTube itself.

NoClip

Probably of most interest to readers of this blog is NoClip, a channel that focuses on documentaries about video games. With Final Fantasy XIV being so hot right now, maybe a good first watch would be their series on that game. The 3-part documentary is 4 years old at this point, but if you want to see how FFXIV came about and was then reborn as FFXIV A Realm Reborn, get comfortable and give it a watch:

Here’s links to Part 2 & Part 3.

Townsends

Next up is Townsends. Townsends is a store that sells items for historical reenactment, specifically the 18th and early 19th century. The channel started as a way to promote the store’s products but took on a life of its own. Lots of the videos are about 18th century cooking, like this 300 year-old fried chicken recipe cooked outdoors over an open flame:

I just kind of randomly grabbed that video; I don’t really have particular favorites, I just find this a very relaxing channel and I’ve learned a bit about our history from watching it. Host John Townsend refers to himself as a history enthusiast rather than a historian. The store was started by his father and John just enjoys research and reenactment and shares that with us.

Food Wishes

Last up is a more traditional cooking channel, Food Wishes. Chef John covers all kinds of recipes, from the fairly complex to topics as simple as his recent tips for reheating French fries. He makes everything seem really easy and has a genial nature that I find very enjoyable. He also isn’t afraid to share his failures, like this one. I mean, the title (“Baked Cauliflower Fries – How to Waste a Day Making Crappy Cauliflower Sticks”) pretty much says it all.

Just to be clear, MOST of his recipes come out great, but I appreciate his honesty when they don’t.

Actually I feel bad just sharing one of Chef John’s failures, so here’s a recipe that is decidedly more mouth-watering (to me at least, vegans probably won’t be nearly as impressed)

I’m always on the lookout for new YouTube channels to watch, so please share your favorites in the comments!

Final Impression: AC Valhalla: The Siege of Paris

Posted on by Nimgimli

Well that didn’t take long. Not sure I’ve ever written a First Impressions one day and finished the content the next.

So nothing has really changed. The rat swarms continued to bug me. I guess the Francia countryside grew on me a little more as I got farther from Paris. Paris itself was a place I didn’t want to spend my time in. I still haven’t done another Rebel Mission (there is a quest to rank up to level 3 in them which maybe I’ll do).

I’m not really too much of a fan of the new abilities. There’s one that summons a swarm of rats to a spot, and another that creates a poison that causes enemies to start vomiting all over the place. I haven’t used either of them…they just seem dishonorable and don’t feel like something my Eivor would use. There’s a head-butt ability I do use, though. It’s kind of fun. And while also not super honorable, an ability that places a sticky bomb on your enemy is pretty useful.

Narratively, the story felt rough. There are individuals who are urging for peace and for sparing the lives of women and children in one scene, then cheering maniacally at their leader’s urging to burn an entire city and to ‘leave none alive’ in the next.

Eivor’s actions seemed chaotic as well. She goes to Francia at the urging of another Norse clan, but then tries to broker peace just to convince the Francia king not to invade England, and even after being double crossed she continues to try to make deals with her double crosser. Basically she felt like she’d say “Yes” to anything anyone suggested.

I guess Eivor is now a diplomat rather than a warrior. In some sense that’s OK and while it wasn’t really satisfying, the ending felt kind of authentic in that no one really got what they wanted. Isn’t that what diplomacy is all about? Everyone compromises. No one really wins but everyone is grudgingly accepting of the final situation.

Also worth noting that the game did do what Assassin’s Creed games often do: they make me interested in the historical characters they depict. I had never even heard of Richardis (or Charles the Fat) before playing the game and now I want to learn more about what actually happened with these characters.

So bottom line, I didn’t enjoy The Siege of Paris as much as I did Wrath of the Druids, but I’m still happy that I played it. I have the Season Pass for Valhalla, though. It seems like Ubisoft is selling this DLC for $25 as a stand-alone, and that price seems quite steep. I started playing it Thursday evening and finished Saturday evening, and I wasn’t playing for marathon sessions. I’d estimate it took me 8 hours to rip through the storyline. So if you’re interesting in playing, at least wait for it to go on sale. You can play through it in a couple of evenings.

VR: I’m running out of time

Posted on by Nimgimli

My first VR experience was Dactyl Nightmare, somewhere around 1991. I went into an arcade and a technician was just setting the machine up. Since he was still tweaking things he let me play around in it for longer than my $5 or $10 was supposed to get me. I was astounded. I was swept away. It was like the best acid trip ever. I wanted more.

Over the years I’ve dabbled. At one point I cobbled together a home VR system using a Mattel Power Glove and Sega 3D glasses from… the Saturn maybe? I played handball in my bedroom. It was pretty neat but also pretty damned low-res/laggy. I think I was running this on a 386sx PC, if that dates it for you. Y’know that might have even been before Dactyl Nightmare.

Since those days I’ve mostly been waiting for VR to arrive. Last year I took the plunge and got a Playstation VR system and that has been pretty fun, but let’s face it, it’s a bit limited in terms of resolution, given the power of the PS4 driving it. Plus it’s a bit of a chore to set up since the PS4 is in the living room. There are cables that get in the way, and the camera needs to be just so which means perching it on a stool in the middle of the room. I enjoy it and don’t regret the purchase but honestly I don’t use it as much as I would like just because there is so much ‘prep’ that has to happen before I turn it on, and because of how intrusive it is (for Angela and the doggo) to have cables strung across the room.

Lately I’ve been looking to upgrade. Right now there seem to be three ‘active’ options: Oculus Rift, the HP Vive and Valve’s Index. Both the Vive and Index require setting up sensors around the room; this makes them less than ideal for our current living space. That leaves the Rift S or the wireless Rift Quest. The former would connect to my PC tucked away in a corner of the kitchen, out of everyone’s way. The latter is wireless and seems to be pretty much “pick up and play.”

Problem is, both these systems still have limitations and flaws. I keep thinking “I should wait for the next iteration.” The tech will improve and/or get cheaper, support will become more prevalent. If anyone were to ask me, I’d say keep on waiting for VR to ‘arrive.’

Problem for me is, I’m old. I recently had my eyes checked and the doc wants to bump up my prescription (which happens every year). Recently had my ears checked and confirmed that my hearing is going. It’s age-related so there’s nothing to be done to fix it. My body seems to get stiffer every day. My hands hurt if I manipulate things for too long. Getting old sucks, make no mistake.

So I’m wondering how much time I realistically have to enjoy VR since it is kind of an ‘activity.’ Can I afford to wait another 5 or 10 years for the next jump in VR technology? How much blinder and deafer will I be by then? How much worse will my arthritis be? Plus I don’t want to end up on a “funny” YouTube video titled “Elders Try VR.” I mean, I’m already as old as a lot of those “elders” are. /fistshake

I’ve been having these internal discussions with myself more and more as the fact that life is most definitely finite gets in my face again and again. Yeah its depressing but hey, this is my life. If I have things I want to experience, it’s time to set about experiencing them. But…what if VR tech leaps ahead two years from now? I won’t be much worse in two years than I am now. I can wait for that, right?

Hmmm. If anyone finds the fountain of youth, give me a call. OK?

Viral Questionnaire responses

Posted on by Nimgimli

So that rascal Belghast pinged me on a viral questionnaire that is making the rounds. His purpose seemed to be to poke me to see if my blog software still works, given how long it has been since I posted. It does!

The idea is that I answer 7 questions he sent, then I’m supposed to come up with 7 new questions and send them to 7 other bloggers. I’m not sure I know seven other bloggers that haven’t already been tagged, though, so I’m going to be a spoil-sport and just answer Bel’s questions. Also see question 2. Anyway, here goes nothing:

  • What is your earliest memory?

I grew up in a fishing community. We ate a lot of shellfish and used the shells to “pave” the driveway. The adults would just toss the shells out there and drive over them and it was like poor-man’s gravel, I guess. Anyway, I was maybe 3 years old, walking across this (I guess I had tough feet back then) and I stepped on a shell that had a yellow jacket in it and got stung. All I remember is that I got stung, cried a bunch and got carried inside. My next memory is from years later so this must’ve had quite an impact.

  • What is something that you have lost in your past that you would love to have today?

This one hurts to admit, but it’s my imagination. I used to have a really vivid imagination but it has faded with time. In some ways I blame video games for that. A lot of my ‘imagination time’ was spent on making up some kind of story behind the games and activities I enjoyed. (I was effectively an only child — my brother left home when I was six — and there were no other kids in my neighborhood so I spent a lot of time playing alone.) Then video/computer games came along and they gave me both the activity and the story behind it. Or maybe it is just part of getting older? Anyway when I fire up Minecraft or The Sims (something that lets me create) I just tend to stare vacantly, devoid of ideas. And I could no longer write fiction if my life depended on it. I just don’t get the ideas like I used to.

Answering the same question from a completely different point of view, I’d say the ocean. As I said, I grew up in a fishing community but it was also in the Hamptons and we were in the ocean constantly during warm weather. I really miss that and would love to have it back.

  • What is the last piece of media (book/movie/video/whatever) that really moved you emotionally?

SPOILERS: Has to be Avengers: Endgame, for a couple of reasons (and I should point out that I just watched it last weekend for the first time). I’ve never been a HUGE comic book fan but when I was a kid I’d get Marvel comics mostly for Stan’s Soapbox. Stan Lee was the first adult that felt like he was talking to me, not talking down to me. My father died when I was young, my mom eventually re-married someone I never respected. In a weird way Stan Lee was my prevalent father-figure. When he died I was crushed, and somehow seeing some of the long-time Avengers being phased out kind of reinforced that feeling. So the movie both reminded me that Stan is gone, and removed from the playfield characters I’ve “known” since I was a boy.

  • What was your favorite childhood “character” (comic/movie/literary/etc) and has that changed over the years?

This one is tough. I guess I’d have to say James T Kirk. He was, at the least, the character that I watched over and over again. I mean look, he traveled through the stars, won every fight, got every woman he chased, but he wasn’t just a warrior; he was a diplomat, too. And having Spock as a friend, who I was also drawn to because he was so damned smart, just made him even better.

I dunno that I have a favorite these days. I am now more drawn to worlds and ensembles of characters than to individuals. I love Tolkien’s world, but I can’t point at a single character and say “THAT is my favorite.” I enjoy TV shows, even bad ones, that have a crew of characters who get along, watch each others backs, and have fun together. I think that might be a reflection of being such an introvert. I don’t have friends of my own so I enjoy watching other groups of friends.

  • What are you looking forward to the most in the second half of 2019?

Hmm, I can’t think of a damned thing. Getting closer to the election that has some small chance of turning this ship around. Gaming-wise, nothing has me really fired up. I’m looking forward to new consoles, but that’s next year. I guess I’m really curious about how well Stadia will work.

  • What is your greatest fear and has it changed as you have aged?

Jeez Bel, you don’t pull any punches, eh? My greatest fear is being helpless. Always has been. Like being broke and unable to provide for myself. Or having a lingering illness where I need people to look after me. Really I hate having to ask for help or HAVING to rely on others. (Which is slightly different from having people offering to help me with something just because they actually WANT to help.)

What keeps you engaged in a community over time and where do you feel the most at home?

I’ve yet to find a community that I can stay engaged in, so for the first part of that question, I just don’t know. I feel most at home sitting on the couch alone (well aside from my doggo) playing a single player game. Thankfully Angela gets this and is willing to give me that “alone time” on a pretty regular basis. I’ve tried, over and over, to get involved in online communities, but really most people irritate me unless I keep them at arm’s length, so thus far I’ve always failed to make the online community thing work.

So that’s my questions answered! Hopefully I’ve been a semi-good sport. I just don’t know 7 other people to tag even if I HAD 7 new questions, which I don’t. Every chain has a last link, I guess!

A new identity

Posted on by Nimgimli

TL;DR version: I changed my identity to Nimgimli on a bunch of services so if we’re friends and you see that pop-up, it’s just me. Now here’s the LOOONG version:

Finding a ‘handle’ to use online can be tough. You wouldn’t think I’d be struggling with this given I’ve been online for something like 40 years at this point, but here I am.

Way way back on GEnie and Compuserve I had 2 handles: CaptCook and JadedGamer. The first was because at the time I was a cook and I admired the historical figure Capt. James Cook. The second was because I fancied myself a game critic and thought it made me sound edgy and authentic (hey, I was young).

Of the two, JadedGamer stuck. When the Internet started taking off as a mainstream thing I had a site called The Jaded Gamers Pub which I ran for years under the name Jaded and for a long while that was how I was known. When Xbox Live came online 16 or 17 years ago I grabbed that gamertag for continuity.

By the time the Playstation Network came online, this blog existed. I tried to get Jaded as my PSN name but it was taken, so I used Dragonchasers instead. The Dragonchasers name is intended to reflect both the literal in terms of the kinds of games I most played (fantasy RPGs where often a dragon was an ultimate baddie) and an homage to one of my favorite movies, Knightriders

Knightriders was about a group of people trying to re-live/re-invent Camelot in modern times. They were a traveling band that put on a jousting show, only instead of horses they rode motorcycles. It starred a young Ed Harris as Billy, their would-be Arthur and the person who most believed in the dream. In the movie at one point an exasperated Billy describes his quest as “chasing the dragon” which I adopted as an expression that meant searching for a nearly insurmountable challenge or dream and trying to attain it. [Of course these days Chasing the Dragon is a heroin term.]

Years went by and my “Jaded” tag on Xbox Live started to chafe. The gaming community changed and EVERYONE was jaded/cynical and I stopped seeing being jaded as a positive thing. At the same time I was constantly being hassled by people who wanted to buy the gamertag from me. One day I got a very polite request from someone and decided “Ah screw it, I’ll just give it up.” I switched it to “Traellan” which is the name of a character I had in Dark Age Of Camelot.

There’s no special meaning behind Traellan other than I liked the sound of it and it is easy to shorten to “Trae.” I got it wherever I could and tried to homogenize around it, with mixed results. Yesterday Sony finally started letting us change our PSN names so I charged off to get “Traellan” there too, but it was taken. Damn it!

So in a fit of pique I decided to change everything again. Now I’ve gone with Nimgimli which is, in my mind, based on a goblin character from an old fighting game. I had to turn to my old pal Irata to remember the name of it. The game was called Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft and the character I remember as Nimgimli was actually “Nym Pymplee the mad goblin” which is a less appealing name. But if you watch this clip, to me it still sounds like Nimgimli:

The good news was “Nimgimli” was available pretty much everywhere. I now have it on Steam, Xbox Live, Playstation Network, Twitter, Twitch, and Origin. So far. I like it because it’s a little silly, easy to shorten to Nim, and isn’t loaded with any kind of meaning. It’s just a name. So if you see a mad goblin show up in your game or timeline, it’s probably me.

So all this talking about me has me curious about you. Where’d your handle come from? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Anthem VIP Demo

Posted on by Nimgimli
In Fort Tarsis Anthem is single player 1st person

You’re probably going to be reading a lot of blog posts and seeing a lot of YouTube videos about technical issues with the Anthem Demo. That’s not what this post is. I generally had a good experience (a few glitches here and there) and I was playing the demo more to get a feel of what the gameplay loop would feel like. I’m also going to assume you know what Anthem is since it’s hard to avoid seeing articles about it these days.

All I’ll say about the technical stuff is, Bioware seems to be owning it and is communicating about it while fixing things. I’m glad these issues are being uncovered now instead of at launch.

Personally, I’m having a blast with the demo and I can’t wait to get my hands on the full game. I’m not sure how ‘hardcore’ Anthem is going to be but I’m not hardcore. A casual-friendly game where I can fly around in an exo-suit and explore and harvest and fight is just fine with me. In fact it is ideal.

The Bioward Codex returns only this time it’s called the Cortex

I’ve been jumping between Xbox One X and PC, and on PC between mouse and keyboard and controller. For me, controller is the way to play. Flying with the controller feels intuitive and fun while I keep flying into walls using the keyboard. Probably just takes practice. If you play I would urge you to wear headphones because the soundscape in this game is amazing. The “whomf!’ of your suit’s jets when you dash really adds to the experience and headphones convey it best.

So far I think my favorite way to play is on PC with controller but streamed to the Shield and the 60″ TV, though that only works for solo/PUG stuff since I don’t have a voice channel playing like that.

There are a few interesting design decisions that Bioware made that I wanted to highlight. First, while you’re out in the world, you don’t see the experience you’ve acquired and when you get loot all you can see is what rarity it is. It is only when you get back to base that you’ll find out what you’ve earned in that mission. Bioware made this decision to help with the pacing of MP; basically they wanted to help the ‘flow’ of the mission by removing a reason for players to stop and rummage through their inventory every time they got a drop. I’m fine with this decision but have seen some folks who are frustrated by it.

Sweet, sweet loot

The second decision I’m less sure about. You don’t get experience from randomly killing stuff. You get experience from accomplishing goals and earning Feats. Feats can and often are connected to combat — stuff like “Shoot 20 enemies in their Weak Spot” — but you can only earn a Feat once per “Expedition” (which is a catch-all phrase for any thing that takes you out into the world).

I’m unsure about this system because Bioware has built this huge world that is positively crawling with dangerous enemies, but there’s no real reason to fight them (remember, you can fly away from anything). The ‘smart’ way to play is to just fly past everything to your objective and fight only what you need to fight. There’s nothing wrong with this; it’s just not my personal ideal way to play a game. I love roaming around ‘grinding’ experience by fighting random things. So we’ll see.

I know Bioware is most known for its single player game and the company has said that Anthem can be completed solo. I did try this out. It’s a little weird because you have to set your session to Private in order to solo a mission, but when you do the game scolds you, telling you Anthem is best played Multiplayer. After you insist that yes, you really DO want to play Solo you can. I personally found Normal difficulty tough but do-able Solo (the Demo is fairly early in the game, I should point out, you start at level 10) and am happy to report Easy difficulty is, well, Easy to solo.

Anyway I’ve been looking forward to Anthem for a long time and I’m happy to say the demo just has me even more excited. I feel like this is going to be one those games that I play a bunch at launch, then return to whenever a big content update drops. That’s kind of my pattern with Destiny and The Division and I feel like Anthem is going to go into the same ‘bucket’ as those games. Can’t wait for launch!

Doing an about-face on social media

Posted on by Nimgimli

For the last few months I’ve been really down on social media. I found that too often spending time on the various services wound up depressing me rather than being a positive experience, so I vowed to give it up. I checked-out of Discords (where I’d been most active), stopped logging in to Facebook, vowed to never read comments on articles and avoided Reddit. Twitter was the only network I stayed active on and I tried to do my best to pull away from that.

At first I felt great. I had a lot more free time and felt a lot less stressed. I became an anti social-media zealot, telling anyone who would listen that it was toxic.

Except there was one catch. Without social media, there really was no one who would, or could, listen. As time went by I started to feel cut off and kind of lonely.

See, I’m more or less a recluse, by circumstance rather than design. I work from home, 100%. I don’t make friends easily and since moving to North Carolina really haven’t made any. I have Angela of course and she is terrific but other than her I can go days without talking to another human being (depending on how many work meetings are happening at the time). Since I work and she doesn’t, her job is to do the shopping and run errands so I never really have reason to go anywhere. I walk the dog, of course, but in the winter it’s generally dark and we don’t run into other dogs and their people as much as we do in spring/summer/fall.

Anyway, point is without any social media I was feeling really isolated. So I’m re-thinking my plan.

In 2018, I tried, with modest success, not to engage in topics that frustrate/annoy/sadden me. And by “engage” I mean that literally. I wrote plenty of irate responses but never hit “send” on them. I wasn’t 100% successful with this but I feel like I did OK about it.

In 2019 my goal is to try to find a way to just let these topics slide past me without them bothering me. Because I was bothered in 2018, I just didn’t get into arguments about things. I still felt down about them, which is where my ‘toxic social media’ feelings were coming from. I’m just not quite sure how to accomplish this “let things slide” idea.

In the past week or two I’ve tried to be more chatty on Twitter and tried to engage people on topics that I take delight in. Suddenly Twitter is becoming a source of pleasure again. Maybe it’s just a matter of having more good stuff than annoying stuff in my timeline?

I mean, I don’t want to seem like I’m sticking my head in the sand here, but the things that used to get me riled up were often really trivial. I’m cautious about giving an example because I don’t want to start a debate since that kind of defeats the purpose, but here is one that I don’t think I saw any of my friends said.

There was a thought circulating before the holiday that said something like “If you’re depressed and alone this year, don’t worry, things WILL get better.” So that seems like a positive message to a lot of people I guess. To me it just seems dismissive. You (random person who sent this) can’t know what the situation of the person reading your message is. Maybe they’re losing a battle with cancer. Maybe they’re older and have been watching friends and relatives die off. At some point in life, things will probably NOT get better. Mostly I think my problem with this ties into ageism (an issue I’m getting more and more passionate about). Young people think everyone has all the time in the world and it isn’t so.

Anyway, not to go into a long rant about that. My point was, I didn’t engage in any of these discussions because I KNOW that the people saying this were trying to be kind and positive, so what benefit could come from me going after them? But it did get to me. In 2019 I need to learn to just let stuff like this wash over me and not get me riled.

If I can do that, I think I can use social media as a way to feel more connected to other people. I still need to find “my tribe” but that’s a topic for another post.

Xbox One X and my weird graphics fetish #FirstWorldProblems

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m in a tough spot. You see Assassin’s Creed Origins launched today. I pre-ordered it on the Xbox platform to get the pre-order goodies (I love the Assassin’s Creed games, aside from AC 1 — yes I know its cool to hate the series but I’m too old to be cool), but the reason I chose Xbox over PlayStation was because I wanted to use it as a test platform for the Xbox One X. How much better will games look on the XBX than on the PS4Pro? I need to know.

Problem is, XBX doesn’t come out until a week from Tuesday. Now I have to either not play my new game, or play it on a less than optimal system. Decisions, decisions.

Look, I’m not a hipster millennial. (Is that a thing or do you have to be one or the other?) I LOVE great graphics. I remember when EGA was a big deal and no, I don’t want to go back to those times and play pixel-art indies. Fie on that. I say again, FIE! Give me gorgeous high resolution graphics AND gameplay I love. It’s not too much to ask, at least not until single player games die.

And yes, let’s nip the inevitable discussion in the bud: I realize PCs offer the very best graphics available. For reasons that could occupy a whole other blog post, I am no longer interested in gaming on the PC. Please just accept and understand that everyone is different and for ME personally, PC gaming is off the table.

Meanwhile, I have Middle Earth: Shadow of War on the PS4 Pro. Love the game. But then someone did a comparison of it on the XBX and the PS4 Pro and it looks better on the XBX. This was from a demo at a show so it’s hard to say if it plays better, but it clearly looks better thanks, presumably, to the addition video ram in the XBX (as compared to PS4Pro). You get higher detail textures on the XBX; the Digital Foundry guys suspected they were loading in 4K textures created for the PC that the PS4Pro didn’t have the memory to handle.

So now I find myself not wanting to play Shadow of War on the PS4Pro anymore. I keep thinking I should rebuy on XBX…but I want to play it now. Plus I had a Nemesis to import on the PS4 since I completed Shadow of Morder on that platform (got the Platinum for it, in fact).

So now I find myself replaying Shadow of Morder: Game of the Year edition on the Xbox One so that I can have a nemesis to import into the Xbox version of Shadow of War IF I decide to re-purchase.

Because 4K! And HDR! And better textures! Also, for AC Origins, Dolby Atmos, but I need to buy the $15 headphone app for that since I don’t have Atmos audio in the room.

I mean, let’s be clear. These are nice problems to have. Too many great games that look too good. Am I right? I just really want to get the XBX in my hands to make sure I like it. Mostly I worry about how loud it is, and if the UI is finally snappy. Though already the most recent update to the Xbox UI seems faster than the old one.

Eh…. maybe I should play the Switch until November 7th. Ha! That’s a joke. I was being silly. I don’t play the Switch. The Switch collects dust.

Learning Japanese (sort of)

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They (I don’t actually know who ‘they’ are) always say that learning a second language is supposed to be a good brain training exercise and a few times over the years I’ve made a half-hearted attempt to learn Japanese. Mostly it was because I wanted to play imported games and/or watch anime in the original language, but I never got very far. Japanese is HARD (for me at least). First of all they have 3 (maybe more?) written languages: hiragana, katakana (??) and kanji. So before you learn what the words mean, you need to learn the ‘alphabets’ so to speak.

Disclaimer: I am not a linguist so it’s almost 100% certain I will get some/all terms wrong in this post.

About a month ago Duolingo added Japanese to its Android app and kind of on a lark I downloaded it and started ‘learning Japanese’ and I put that in quotes because a month later I know some of the hiragana and if a Japanese teacher said to me — very slowly and with perfect enunciation — “Nice to meet you” I would probably understand. Or maybe I’d just think “I know that phrase but can’t recall what it means.” More likely the latter.

Still though, I’m actually enjoying the process. My latest project is figuring out the Japanese eShop on the Switch. Next week there’s a demo of Monster Hunter XX hitting the Japanese eShop so I set up a Japanese Nintendo account so I’ll be able to download it. Of course the store is mostly in Japanese. I’m sure I could stumble through it but just for grins I decided to try to translate some of the words.

The first word on the left menu was “NEW” and I translated that one pretty easily.

The next word was ランキング

I knew I’d learned some of these characters but couldn’t bring them to the front of my brain so I went looking at hiragana charts and couldn’t find any of them. Y’know why? Those are katakana symbols. In fact that was when I learned that katakana was different from hiragana. So once I knew that, it was pretty easy since katakana is used for ‘borrowed’ words from other languages. The characters in order are pronounced RA N KI N GU. It means exactly what it sounds like: ranking. So basically this is a listing of games my ranking, or most popular. (What helps a lot is I know pretty much what to expect because this is an e-shop for games.) I was pretty proud of that.

The next one was harder: もうすぐ発売

So the first thing is, I’m copying and pasting these characters from other websites. Different websites in this case which is why they’re kind of mis-matched. The characters on the Switch aren’t exactly the same. I guess fonts are a thing no matter the alphabet you’re using. So this one is a combination of hiragana and kanji. The hiragana part was pretty easy for me. Translated into romanji (Japanese sounds spelled out in the Roman alphabet) it says mo u su gu. Then I put mousugu into a romanji to english translator and I get “soon.” Given that this is the eShop it’s pretty obvious this is the “Coming Soon” list already but I want to do the full translation.

Looking up the kanji characters is HARD. I mean it isn’t hard if you look them up from this blog post because you can cut and paste them, but I was looking at them on the Switch, which may as well have been a piece of paper. I found Jisho.org which is super cool. It lets you look up kanji characters by ‘radicals’ which are the parts of a kanji character.

So for the first character, I first selected the “legs” from the bottom half, then the crossbars. That narrowed the selection of potential kanji characters down enough that I could find the one I wanted. Here’s a pic (click it to make it big enough to see):

You can see that those two ‘radicals’ were enough to help me find the character, labeled #3 above.

But here was a curious thing. Once I found it I looked it up and translation was “departure; departing (from …); departing (at time …)​” [Definitions are coming from Jisho too.]

Was I wrong about this being a Coming Soon section? Was it a “Leaving Soon” section? I pushed on!

I used Jisho again for the last character and it means “to sell” which made sense in the context.

But here is where it all got trippy. So literally this string is saying Soon Departing Sell. But why would Nintendo be removing games from their store, that doesn’t make too much sense so early in the Switch’s life. So I dug a little further, and it turns out those two kanji characters together have a different meaning. 発売 = “sale; offering for sale; release (for sale); launch (product)​” If you think about “departing” and “releasing” you can kind of wrap your head around how these could be so similar. If you release something it departs from you, right?

Anyway so now we have confirmed what I initially suspected, that this says “Coming Soon” or I guess more technically “Releasing Soon.”

What I don’t know, though, is how I would have figured this out without the context of this being the Switch e-shop. If I’d just read it on a wall somewhere I would have translated it as something like “Won’t be on sale for much longer” which is pretty much the opposite of what it says.

I just find this all super fascinating. Will I ~ever~ be able to read/understand Japanese (I don’t even dream of being able to actually speak it)? Probably not. But just translating words is turning out to be one of the most interesting ‘puzzles’ I’ve encountered lately.

2017 Gaming Resolutions

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m not generally one for New Year’s Resolutions but this year circumstances are kind of guiding my hand. 2017 is going to suck for us. First our lease is up in July and we’re going to have to move since they want to renovate the apartment. They’ve been going through the entire complex doing this, dislodging some residents who’ve lived here for decades, so while I’m not taking it personally, it’s a major inconvenience. I’m old enough that moving means hiring someone. My days of humping heavy furniture up and down stairs are behind me, and Angela is in even worse shape for that kind of thing. So moving is going to be both a headache and a big expense. In fact we’re going to start packing up some stuff as soon as the Christmas decorations come down just in case we find a new place before July and have to move in a hurry.

Money is going to be tight this year because of that, and because our health insurance is going through the roof. Between the two of us we’re paying about $800/month on health insurance now. Mine is through work and went up about $40/month this year, Angela’s is through the ironically titled Affordable Care Act, and it jumped $125 or so from 2016 to 2017. So now we need to cut $165/month from other areas. We’re going to cancel cable and that will cover about $75/month of it, but the rest will have to come from cutting down on fun stuff, including games. Of course the big wildcard in all this is: how much will our new rent be? We’re looking at moving to a town outside the Raleigh area to see if we can save that way, but we can’t go so far out that we don’t get decent Internet since I need that for my work. It seems like rents go up just outside the city and then start going down as you move further out into more rural areas.

So enough depressing myself, here’re my fairly un-specific gaming resolutions for 2017:

Play games longer — I’ve already started doing this. For years I’ve been a real ‘grazer’ when it comes to games. I buy a ton of them and play most of them for a short time, basically until the novelty wore off or until some new shiny caught my eye. I very rarely finished games. I’ve been changing that habit in 2016 though. I’m not only finishing more games but in some cases continuing to play past the end of the narrative. I’ve found that many games seem to have 3 stages: The shiny new game phase where you’re learning the major systems and everything is fun. Then the ‘mid-game’ phase that can feel a little rote (and that’s where I previously would bail). Then finally the “Expert” phase where you’ve played enough that you start picking up on subtleties that you missed earlier, or maybe enjoying aspects that you’d kind of overlooked… I’m finding it hard to quantify this, but I know that I’m finding my interest in games seems to start high, then fall, then ramps back up the more I play.

Buy fewer games at launch — I need to resist the hype surrounding new games and buy far fewer at launch. Not only will this save me money since prices drop so quickly, but these days many games improve in the months after launch as the developers fix bugs, tweak performance or add features. Since I virtually never play games twice it just makes sense to wait for these improvements before purchasing and playing a game. I’ll still get a few titles at launch: stuff that is primarily multiplayer for instance, since you want to be competitive and play when the community is most active. Also a few select titles that just feel special to me: Horizon: Zero Dawn for instance.

Blog when I have something to say — This is a bit of a tangent, but I just recently re-opened this blog and already I’m feeling a little like I’m in a rut, mostly because I’ve been trying for daily posts even when I’m not really feeling it. So in 2017 I’m going to cut back and just do posts when I have something I want to share

And that’s about it. Here’s hoping 2017 sucks less than I expect it to. But I doubt it will.