(no subject)
A) So I've been assigned to give a 2 hour speech comparing Japanese and American cuisine in early July. This is probably the very first time I've been asked to do something I really really didn't want to do, considering my complete lack of knowledge of cuisine in general as well as American cuisine's generally eclectic nature. I've lived most of my life in California, meaning I'm probably more familiar with Asian cuisine than I am with anything "American." Anyway, I'm not looking forward to working on that speech and will probably procrastinate writing it for as long as possible (like right now!). On the other hand, I have little to nothing to do this week so I might end up writing part of it tomorrow. Not today though. Nope. I'm lazy that way.
B) I went ahead and requested Thursday and Friday off this week so I can take a trip up north to the northernmost city in Japan, Wakkanai 稚内市 and the spectacular landscapes of Rebun Island 礼文島. In particular, there is an 8 hour hiking course that goes from the northern tip of Rebun Island down to the southern coast and the town of Kafuka 香深町 where most of the people on the island live. Obviously it's a pretty long hike, but the route is apparently so incredibly beautiful it usually takes people 10 hours to make the whole trip, because they keep having to stop to catch their breath at the superb vistas spread out before them. Unfortunately, everything I read suggests that you really ought to go hiking in a group, since the path is long and lonely. Then again, I'll have my cell phone with me, and it's not like I don't have hiking experience. These are just hills too, not mountains, unlike for example my 7 hour hiking trip through Dewa Sanzan 出羽三山 in Yamagata Prefecture, where I was alone on a mist-covered mountain for a long time without ever seeing another soul. I was fine then so I should be fine now.
More concerning than being alone on Rebun Island will be being alone in Wakkanai. The people of Wakkanai are said to be among the most xenophobic in Japan thanks to their less than amicable relationship with the many Russian fisherman that call to port there on their way south from Sakhalin Island (サハリン州, formerly known as 樺太島 or Karafuto Island when it was under Japanese control). Foreigners are frequently refused service at restaurants and hotels, and they are in general treated with annoyance and contempt. Even so, JET still sends foreigner English teachers there, some of whom I know. Unfortunately, their stories match up quite nicely with the prevailing negative image the city has, and even native Asahikawans say they do their best to avoid the chilly winds and chilly stares of the people in the north. As far as Wakkanai is concerned, the Cold War never ended and any foreigner could be a Russian spy.
Then again, could they really mistake a nerdy Anglo-Saxon American translator for a Russian sailor? I don't know. Maybe they could, or wouldn't take the risk anyway. So I am a bit nervous. If you don't hear from me next week, assume I'm being kidnapped and tortured by the Wakkanai Government XD.
C) After beating Tales of Rebirth and taking a break from video games for a while, I decided to dive back into the games I was working on, like Suikoden Tierkreis and Tales of Vesperia. At least, that was the plan. Instead, I suddenly got the huge urge to keep going on the original Grandia for the Playstation, which came out 10 years ago. Like Grandia II, which I played and beat several years ago, Grandia features a semi-real time battle system which, when moves are timed correctly, can be used to cancel enemy attacks and magic spells, as well as a cliche-ridden but thoroughly entertaining plot. It is an enjoyable game, to be sure, but I put it aside because it just didn't have anything that grabbed me quite yet. However, upon getting back into a second time, the plot has started to turn in very interesting and unique directions, suggesting that the cliches were merely the prologue, and some of them perhaps were far less cliched than they first appeared. Also very welcome is the addition of non-human characters, the first of whom was the adorable beast-boy Rem レムwhom you meet outside of the Dom Ruins ドム遺跡 and who eventually leads you to his hometown, Luc Village ルク村. Up until this point everyone your characters had met directly had been human, and I vastly prefer non-human characters to human ones if I have any choice in the matter.
The game also gets bonus points for having the villains call Rem variously an Ajin 亜人, usually translated as something like "demi-human" or "beastman," and a Kemono 獣, which simply means "beast" and is used as a term of contempt. Hilariously enough, both of those terms would, several years later, be incorporated into a Japanese subculture based around characters like Rem and others like him who are even more bestial. The Western equivalent would be the furry fandom, but I hesitate to equate the two because there are many differences. If anyone is interested, I can try to explain the differences as far as I see them, but otherwise I'm not going to go into things here.
The last really great thing the game has, connected to the deepening story, is a willingness to have long and complicated NPC dialogue, frequently eliciting comments and responses with characters currently in your party. NPC's in Luc Village go into detailed descriptions of the creation myths of their people, explain the various rituals they perform to their gods, and of course spread rumors about other residents of the village. A good amount of NPC dialogue is related to the plot, but a lot isn't, but nonetheless remains important and interesting and serves the purpose of breathing life and character to the setting and people of the village and the game as a whole. And if the conversations are clever and entertaining, that makes playing the game all the more worthwhile. It's a shame so many RPG players nowadays ignore these conversations in favor of propelling the plot forward, because they will be missing out on much of the text in the game, which is oftentimes better than that which appears in the story sequences. Okay, I'll stop now on my NPC dialogue rant because I've said it all before and everyone knows how important it is to me.
So what's the catch? And believe me, there's a catch. Grandia crashes constantly! Apparently the problem stems from attempting to play the PS Grandia on a PS2 system. At any rate, the game has crashed 4 times in the past 2 days, causing me to lose hours upon hours of playtime. At first I thought it might just be my copy of the game, but searches online indicate that it's a problem inherent to all copies of the game, and seems to affect most game owners. Posts on forums suggest that turning the sound to monaural and avoiding using the analog sticks on the PS2 controller vastly reduces the incidences of crashing on the game, but I'm skeptical. It sounds very much like what I call video game voodoo, the various rituals we would all perform on our old NES's to try to get our games to work. Admittedly, some of the old techniques actually seemed to work, but many of the other ones probably were no more effective than if we were to just chant the sutras over the games to expel the evil spirits which had clearly infested them and were interfering with our gameplay. Maybe a few chants of Namu Amida Butsu 南無阿弥陀仏 over my PS2 will solve the problem! (No offense intended to any Pure Land 浄土宗 believers out there.)
So anyway, I don't know if I have the patience to suffer through constant crashes as I crawl through Grandia's massive dungeons or if I should just wash my hands of it and go back to Tierkreis. We'll see what happens over the next couple days.
Anyway, that's my long procrastinatory Monday post. Look forward to my recap of my trip to Wakkanai and Rebun Island as well as pictures posted up to Facebook sometime next week!
B) I went ahead and requested Thursday and Friday off this week so I can take a trip up north to the northernmost city in Japan, Wakkanai 稚内市 and the spectacular landscapes of Rebun Island 礼文島. In particular, there is an 8 hour hiking course that goes from the northern tip of Rebun Island down to the southern coast and the town of Kafuka 香深町 where most of the people on the island live. Obviously it's a pretty long hike, but the route is apparently so incredibly beautiful it usually takes people 10 hours to make the whole trip, because they keep having to stop to catch their breath at the superb vistas spread out before them. Unfortunately, everything I read suggests that you really ought to go hiking in a group, since the path is long and lonely. Then again, I'll have my cell phone with me, and it's not like I don't have hiking experience. These are just hills too, not mountains, unlike for example my 7 hour hiking trip through Dewa Sanzan 出羽三山 in Yamagata Prefecture, where I was alone on a mist-covered mountain for a long time without ever seeing another soul. I was fine then so I should be fine now.
More concerning than being alone on Rebun Island will be being alone in Wakkanai. The people of Wakkanai are said to be among the most xenophobic in Japan thanks to their less than amicable relationship with the many Russian fisherman that call to port there on their way south from Sakhalin Island (サハリン州, formerly known as 樺太島 or Karafuto Island when it was under Japanese control). Foreigners are frequently refused service at restaurants and hotels, and they are in general treated with annoyance and contempt. Even so, JET still sends foreigner English teachers there, some of whom I know. Unfortunately, their stories match up quite nicely with the prevailing negative image the city has, and even native Asahikawans say they do their best to avoid the chilly winds and chilly stares of the people in the north. As far as Wakkanai is concerned, the Cold War never ended and any foreigner could be a Russian spy.
Then again, could they really mistake a nerdy Anglo-Saxon American translator for a Russian sailor? I don't know. Maybe they could, or wouldn't take the risk anyway. So I am a bit nervous. If you don't hear from me next week, assume I'm being kidnapped and tortured by the Wakkanai Government XD.
C) After beating Tales of Rebirth and taking a break from video games for a while, I decided to dive back into the games I was working on, like Suikoden Tierkreis and Tales of Vesperia. At least, that was the plan. Instead, I suddenly got the huge urge to keep going on the original Grandia for the Playstation, which came out 10 years ago. Like Grandia II, which I played and beat several years ago, Grandia features a semi-real time battle system which, when moves are timed correctly, can be used to cancel enemy attacks and magic spells, as well as a cliche-ridden but thoroughly entertaining plot. It is an enjoyable game, to be sure, but I put it aside because it just didn't have anything that grabbed me quite yet. However, upon getting back into a second time, the plot has started to turn in very interesting and unique directions, suggesting that the cliches were merely the prologue, and some of them perhaps were far less cliched than they first appeared. Also very welcome is the addition of non-human characters, the first of whom was the adorable beast-boy Rem レムwhom you meet outside of the Dom Ruins ドム遺跡 and who eventually leads you to his hometown, Luc Village ルク村. Up until this point everyone your characters had met directly had been human, and I vastly prefer non-human characters to human ones if I have any choice in the matter.
The game also gets bonus points for having the villains call Rem variously an Ajin 亜人, usually translated as something like "demi-human" or "beastman," and a Kemono 獣, which simply means "beast" and is used as a term of contempt. Hilariously enough, both of those terms would, several years later, be incorporated into a Japanese subculture based around characters like Rem and others like him who are even more bestial. The Western equivalent would be the furry fandom, but I hesitate to equate the two because there are many differences. If anyone is interested, I can try to explain the differences as far as I see them, but otherwise I'm not going to go into things here.
The last really great thing the game has, connected to the deepening story, is a willingness to have long and complicated NPC dialogue, frequently eliciting comments and responses with characters currently in your party. NPC's in Luc Village go into detailed descriptions of the creation myths of their people, explain the various rituals they perform to their gods, and of course spread rumors about other residents of the village. A good amount of NPC dialogue is related to the plot, but a lot isn't, but nonetheless remains important and interesting and serves the purpose of breathing life and character to the setting and people of the village and the game as a whole. And if the conversations are clever and entertaining, that makes playing the game all the more worthwhile. It's a shame so many RPG players nowadays ignore these conversations in favor of propelling the plot forward, because they will be missing out on much of the text in the game, which is oftentimes better than that which appears in the story sequences. Okay, I'll stop now on my NPC dialogue rant because I've said it all before and everyone knows how important it is to me.
So what's the catch? And believe me, there's a catch. Grandia crashes constantly! Apparently the problem stems from attempting to play the PS Grandia on a PS2 system. At any rate, the game has crashed 4 times in the past 2 days, causing me to lose hours upon hours of playtime. At first I thought it might just be my copy of the game, but searches online indicate that it's a problem inherent to all copies of the game, and seems to affect most game owners. Posts on forums suggest that turning the sound to monaural and avoiding using the analog sticks on the PS2 controller vastly reduces the incidences of crashing on the game, but I'm skeptical. It sounds very much like what I call video game voodoo, the various rituals we would all perform on our old NES's to try to get our games to work. Admittedly, some of the old techniques actually seemed to work, but many of the other ones probably were no more effective than if we were to just chant the sutras over the games to expel the evil spirits which had clearly infested them and were interfering with our gameplay. Maybe a few chants of Namu Amida Butsu 南無阿弥陀仏 over my PS2 will solve the problem! (No offense intended to any Pure Land 浄土宗 believers out there.)
So anyway, I don't know if I have the patience to suffer through constant crashes as I crawl through Grandia's massive dungeons or if I should just wash my hands of it and go back to Tierkreis. We'll see what happens over the next couple days.
Anyway, that's my long procrastinatory Monday post. Look forward to my recap of my trip to Wakkanai and Rebun Island as well as pictures posted up to Facebook sometime next week!