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On Tentative Mother 3 Naming

Note: this was originally written some years back, then pulled for Unspecified Reasons.1

First and foremost, you should probably read Tomato's official MOTHER 3 translation notes, because he is a consummate professional. This also, unfortunately, means that he is often too busy being professional to do write-ups on personal side projects, especially ones that are finished. I myself would love to see notes covering beyond the beginning of the game. On the other hand, his site is still awesome overall. Gotta love stuff like the Super Mario Bros. manual write-up. Fascinating stuff.

So yeah. Please allow me to lay my credentials on the table. I was the translation guy for the now-long-since-defunct mother3.org translation, which got started a good bit before Starmen.net decided to enter the game and essentially blow us the hell out of the water. Long story short, most of our team was frankly not ready for the project, though the hacking talent (Jeffman, if memory serves) turned out to be super awesome at things. I emailed the project leader at the time, volunteering "I'm majoring in Japanese here in college," with all the linguistic skill level that that level of confidence would imply, and that was essentially enough for the project at the time. It wasn't an especially fancy group at the time, and they were looking for pretty much any talent that could conceivably help out on basically any level.

A word of caution: none of this is organized in any meaningful way, and my memory of a project that was now about half a decade ago3 is gradually fading, so I may have some factual errors or conflations. There are almost certainly cases where I take credit for something that wasn't, strictly speaking, me, but I'm not in contact with any member of either translation team at this point, and much of the pre-merger stuff was pretty much just me translating and/or tossing out ideas to the rest of the team. I do apologize in advance if anyone else from either team sees something I inaccurately take credit for. Furthermore, I think that it's been long enough since the release that I can probably safely talk about What Could Have Been without having to worry about sparking any alternate-continuity concerns, given that the Starmen.net translation patch is very nearly official canon at this point, at least among the people who actually care about the series in non-Japanese-speaking countries.

Also, I make no guarantees that any of this will be even remotely interesting.

So here we go.

Enemy names

A lot of people seem fond of a lot of the enemy name translations, and they're generally among the things I'm proudest of. A lot of them were just plain tough to translate, because, despite the overblown stuff you've no doubt read by Tim "I'm in love with my own importance for Living In Japan" Rogers and decided to think better of,4 Itoi really is a pretty good writer and likes to play with portmanteaus and other wordplay.

These aren't in any real order other than when my memory gets jogged. It's also partially that I'm looking at them in the order they're stored in the game data, which is all jumbly.

Mr. Generator was, at one point, going to be called Gene Rator. This was kind of a tough one for us5, as the name in Japanese, Jenetta-kun (ジェネッタくん) was kind of a play on words inasmuch as it was a modification of "generator" but done so as to sound like a name or something.

The Oh-so-Snake was going to be the Vanelizard early on. This requires a bit of explanation: there was never any real clear indication of what "Osohe" (オソヘ) in the original was intended to mean, so we interpreted it as a sort of inversion of "navel" (おへそ), and wound up with "Vanel." This also worked nicely, because the boss enemy was named the Osohebi (オソヘビ), with "hebi" meaning "snake" in Japanese. In the end, though, "Vanel" was nixed and it's unclear whether that's even a bad thing. Granted, this is all what-could-have-been stuff, since a large part of this stuff has essentially become canon by this point.

While everyone seems to love the name "Navy SQUEAL," the fact is that the Pigmasks don't really have special names at all in the original Japanese. This guy was originally just something along the lines of "Submarine Pigmask," which obviously isn't memorable or delightful at all. In the mother3.org days, we were going to use "Pork Trooper" (you know, like storm troopers) instead of the more literal "Pigmask" (ブタマスク) and have different names for the different ranks rather than the eventual, more direct translation. The change back to "Pigmask" was probably for the best in the end, though I'm really glad they kept "Navy SQUEAL," since that was one of my favorite name change ideas in the whole project.6

A lot of the enemy name translations were just things that fell into place. There's nothing in the Japanese that would suggest "Top Dogfish" ("Nushi Wanwan"/ヌシワンワン) for the tougher version of the Dogfish ("Wanwan Fish"/ワンワンフィッシュ), but a bit of knowledge of common (if slightly outmoded) English expressions leads that sort of thing to seem a natural fit.

Another one that seemed only natural was the Beaten Drum, which (if memory serves) translates more accurately as "punctured drum." On the other hand, I was too enamored with my own cleverness to realize that my original "Wailing Guitar" was nowhere near as good as "Gently Weeping Guitar," given Itoi's fondness for the Beatles. Tomato definitely made the right call on that one, unambiguously.

One enemy that I'm not really satisfied with the name of, in either my own stuff or the final translation patch, was the Bitey Snake ("Kamu toki wa kamu hebi"/かむときはかむヘビ), which I'd translated as "Snake that Might Bite." Both of these have issues in terms of accuracy of the translation, though given the actual picture of the Bitey Snake, that seems almost fine. The issue is that the name translates most accurately to something like "a snake that will bite when it's time to bite" or "that bites when the situation calls for it" or something equally unwieldy to express in English. That one was frankly a mess and I can't really think of anything that would have actually worked better than Tomato's "Bitey Snake."

One that I still actually prefer my original name for is the Ten-Yeti, which I'd originally translated the name of as "Cowabungable Snowman." Yes, the word is kind of dated (to say the least) but I'm apparently not the only one to have missed the intended wordplay involving "ten-eighty" (which, to be fair, works better in Japanese: compare テンエイティ and テンイエティ, though that didn't stop me from missing it entirely in Japanese too). Maybe it was meant as a nod to Nintendo's now-essentially-defunct snowboarding game series.

Speaking of silly and awkward puns, the Boa Transistor is victim to those on both ends. Obviously the English name is a play on "boa constrictor," but for the longest time it was just such a challenge to think of a decent translation for the Japanese "Hebii Metaru" (ヘビーメタル), a play on "hebi" (snake) and "heavy metal." Eventually I decided to pull the trigger and write in "Boa Transistor," which I'd thought was just unforgivably contrived, and it was received way better than I'd expected by basically everyone.

Barrel Man ("Taruman"/タルマン) was originally going to be "Casked Man," because, once again, I was a little too in love with my own cleverness. You see, because it is a play on "masked man," and there's a masked man in the story, and oh I'll just show myself out

The Pseudoor basically named itself — the Japanese name ("Tobira-modoki"/トビラモドキ) basically translates to "pseudo-door" and it was only a small jump from there.

The Sara-Sara-Sahara was frustrating, because it was clearly meant to resemble plates ("sara"/サラ) but the silliness of the name was just lost in English. The mother3.org translation had been using "Desert Plate" but that name is arguably hard enough to catch at a glance that it probably wouldn't have been much better in the end.

The Artsy Ghost was originally going to be the Abstract Ghost. The name ("Geijutsu na obake"/げいじゅつなオバケ) really does translate to "Artistic Ghost," so "Artsy Ghost" is a more accurate name overall, but I just liked the ring of "Abstract Ghost."

The Whatever was originally going to be called the Halfhearted Attempt. Probably a better translation of the original "Tekitou" (テキトウ) in the end anyway.

The Really Flying Mouse is worth noting just because of the Japanese name, which took a minor liberty with grammar to be pretty clever ("tobimasu tobi-mausu"/トビマストビマウス — literally it means "flying flying-mouse" but it's fun to say).

The Return of Octobot was one of my favorites (and I was glad that it got kept for the final). The Octobots all have weird names in the original Japanese, and the Japanese name in MOTHER 3 ("Tako Fu Tatabi"/タコ・フ・タタビ) basically translates to "Octopus Again," though with needlessly weird spacing to make it look/sound unnatural or foreign or something. I figured that "The Return of Octobot" was sufficiently cool-sounding, and I guess other folks agreed.

I'm ambivalent whether the change from our "Loose Screw" to "Screwloose" even makes much of a difference. In the original Japanese, there wasn't any pun of the sort involved, so it's not like either one is more accurate.

On the other hand, the Punk Rock Lobster became the Rock Lobster, making the clearly intended pun more obvious, though I still think those sunglasses are less rock 'n' roll and more punk rock.

Items

The Pasta with a Past is just about the only food name worth mentioning, really.7 The original Japanese "Wake-ari Pasta"/わけありパスタ wasn't really a joke in the name: the phrase "wake-ari"/わけあり refers mainly to the sort of mildly damaged goods you'd find at a store with a handwritten price tag and a minor discount. It literally means, essentially, "there's something about this item." On the other hand, the item's description is where it becomes a joke, stating that an "unspeakable circumstance" surrounds the pasta, rather than the usual meaning. While the innocuous name couldn't be translated while keeping the joke, a bit of wordplay was entirely within the bounds of possibility for the English version.

The Bufferizer and Defense Spray were originally named the Beefener and the Turtler, mostly because the actual items were named like energy drinks and there's no clear right choice. "Turtler," incidentally, was derived from fighting game terminology (e.g. to turtle, being the action of playing very defensively). On the other hand, the final version's Defense Spray is a neat call-back to EarthBound/MOTHER 2.

Characters

First and foremost, the mother3.org team had noticed that the game, much like EarthBound/MOTHER 2, allowed for a substantial number of "Don't Care" names to be stored. In the final game, this was only used for favorite food and your special PK power's name, but all of the characters had the same number of slots available for "Don't Care" names; they were each simply filled with a bunch of copies of the official name. We basically tried to take advantage of this as a sort of personalized easter egg, with each member of the team basically getting their own "set" of names to assign. These were generally named after friends and family, though I tried in vain to use my own set to follow a clever theme of some sort. Naturally, I never thought of anything particularly good.

Hinawa is named after a type of gun, along with Flint (Flint being named for flintlock guns, and Hinawa being named for matchlock guns, in Japanese). Obviously, while Flint is a nice, manly-sounding name in English, Hinawa is simply a no-go. Until the translation patch projects merged, the plan was very definitely to rename Hinawa to Amber, in order to provide a name that was actually a name in English, as well as keeping to a motif of some sort (in this case, types of stones). Un(?)fortunately, in the end the official translation wound up being Hinawa, though this was, in fairness, because the Starmen.net translation team preferred, whenever possible, to keep the names accurate to Nintendo's official translations they'd made public at various points.8

Ocho the octopus was originally Hachi (ハチ) in the Japanese. While the story of Hachiko is famous enough (and was even made into an American remake-of-a-movie movie starring Richard Gere), we9 figured we could do better for the English release. For one thing, the pun between the name "Hachi" and the fact that it means "eight" would be lost. For a while we just sort of hoped that maybe "Octo" would be an acceptable name, but it was pretty obvious it was kind of lazy and didn't have much cleverness or even giving-a-crap to it. As luck would have it, I stumbled upon an Addams Family retrospective around this point, and found out that, at least at some point, Pugsley had a pet octopus named Ocho. Perfect!

Following this "replace one old pop-culture reference with another" pattern, a lot of people have noticed that Achato and Entotsu (アチャト and エントツ, with the latter literally meaning "chimney") were renamed Bud and Lou, after Abbott and Costello. Incidentally, the original characters were also named after comedians from the early to mid 20th century: Achako and Entatsu.

Fassad's English name has a surprisingly unexciting origin. The Japanese name Yokuba/ヨクバ is basically derived from the word for "ambition" or "greed" ("yokubari"/欲張り), and that just didn't work in English. So I asked a friend of mine, one night, to help bounce ideas back and forth. I figured he was studying Arabic in college and could help out, so I asked him what various words were when translated into Arabic. After a couple of nonstarters, I tried, "What's 'corruption' in Arabic?" and his answer, "fassad," sounded sufficiently Arabian-y (given the character's appearance), as well as just being ever so perfect on multiple levels (given its Arabic meaning as well as the fact that it sounds a whole lot like "façade," which is ridiculously appropriate on, itself, at least two different levels). And that's why Ben Cocchiaro is credited under "Special Thanks." Thanks, Ben.

Frankly, we never had anything good lined up for Kumatora. We had her name as "Jackie" for a while, since it kinda sorta sounded like maybe it could also be a guy's name (c.f. Jackie Gleason), but we never felt particularly confident in it. "Violet," though, was picked for her cover identity later on, because we figured it had a "good, diner-y sounding" ring to it. We kept that in the end.

Salsa's name was kept, though the pun on "saru" ("monkey") was lost, so we figured that we should probably keep to some sort of name motif for his girlfriend-monkey too. "Saruko" just didn't work, so I wound up suggesting "Samba" for her name, partially inspired by Samba de Amigo. This is another case where one motif was switched out for another with the translation, though this one was kept in the end by the post-merger team.

There was a brief time when we considered changing Lighter's name to "Bic" or "Vic," but we eventually thought better of the idea. It's not as though EarthBound/MOTHER 2 wasn't full of silly names like Mr. Spoon, either.

Places

For the longest time, the Sunshine Forest was just called the Terry or Telly Forest, because of the way the Japanese name was written ("Teri-no-mori"/テリのモリ). At some point along the way, I got bored and looked up whether "teri" was even a word, and it turned out that it meant "sunshine" or "clear/dry weather," and there was a sort of collective OHHHHHHH among the team. Given the idyllic setting of the prologue, it seems only natural that that was the intended meaning. Tomato initially opposed it, but eventually relented, since it did make more sense as the name of a place.10

A lot of the other place names were way more contentious, though. The name of the town was the source of some reasonably substantial debate within the post-merger team, since the mother3.org team had been using "Dragonstep" for its translation of the admittedly fairly ambiguous "Tatsumairi"/タツマイリ. Tomato vetoed it based on the fact that the Japanese is far from 100% clear on what the name's derivation would be, and looking back the "Tatsu"="dragon" thing really only applies to very limited contexts in Japanese. Still, between that and the money being called DP (for "Dragon Points") Tomato thought it was just too blatant as dragon-related foreshadowing, and I eventually conceded the point, since he was the guy with professional experience and who could actually, you know, speak Japanese fluently at the time.11

Most of the place names were, at one point or another, going to be translated into at least some semblance of English. Tanetane Island ("Tanehineri"/タネヒネリ) was going to be something like "Twisttrick Island," given that "tane" can mean "a secret" or "a trick," and "hineru" can mean "to twist," or "to puzzle over something." On the other hand, Twisttrick kind of sucked as a name, so the Starmen.net team rightly chose to discard it. Plus, in the debug menus it was already referred to as Tanetane anyway — the final Japanese name appeared to be a fairly late change.

The Sunset Graveyard was, in the mother3.org translation, going to be the Chowding Graveyard, because of the original name "Misoshire" being an apparent play on "miso-shiru" (miso soup), treating it as a verb instead of a noun. If memory serves, this is another case where we wound up going with an internal debug name instead in the end. "Chowding" wasn't very good anyway.

Looking back at the notes, it's clear that we just didn't have any good ideas for a lot of the places in the game, though we probably would have worked something out in the end. Honestly, though, the Starmen.net team's approach of leaving all but the most egregious obviously-meant-as-wordplay names intact was probably the best option in the end.

So that's about it, really.

I just want to finish this up with a big ol' THANK YOU to everyone who did the real work and heavy lifting on the patch, especially Tomato for his insanely great translation work, and the hackers who found a problem that we thought at first would be literally impossible, and then fixed it, to a degree that their fix went beyond the impossible. Thanks again to Ben Cocchiaro, all-around swell guy and owner of an Arabic-English dictionary, for helping to provide the ridiculously appropriate name of a major character in a cult hit, and thanks to @gigideegee, whom I promised via Twitter that I would actually write all this stuff up, and that gave me the motivation to do it because TWITTER PROMISES are SERIOUS BUSINESS. I also highly recommend her great webcomic, Cucumber Quest, especially if you liked her older "Let's Destroy Metal Gear!" and the like.

Thanks for reading.

I applied for a job at Nintendo of America, and hoped that they wouldn't find out about my Sordid Fan Translation Past, so I pulled the page. Given that they just sort of suddenly stopped responding to emails at one point in the application process, TECHNICALLY they have not turned me down for the position. ↩︎

"Localization" is a fancy term that means changing a name or a joke so that it makes sense in the target language, especially when it comes to wordplay in the source language. Sometimes the changes are also just kind of arbitrary, though that can at times be in order to avoid potential lawsuits and the like. ↩︎

!!!. Actually, looking at the files I still have on my computer, they generally show a "last modified" date in April of 2007, so that'd be about five years ago now. Dang. ↩︎

Factual errors I can think of off the top of my head in his EarthBound/MOTHER 2 article alone: the phone call asking for your name happens on a specific tile in Summers, not "at a number of steps that's about halfway through the game," and there's no obscene pre-set name set. The guy's a prolific writer but he needs an editor and a fact-checker, because the editor will already be busy enough trying to cut 60–70% of the length of any given article he writes. TAKE THAT, FAMOUS PERSON! SAYS RELATIVE NOBODY ↩︎

By which I mean, over the course of this write-up, primarily me, because after the projects merged Tomato basically took over all translation duties, and before the merge I was basically the guy doing all of the translation stuff for the mother3.org project, if memory serves. ↩︎

Your run-of-the-mill, never-studied-Japanese anime fan will probably pitch a fit for my suggesting this, but English is a WAY richer language for nuance, wordplay, and just generally enjoying words. Japanese nuance can be hard to translate in certain circumstances, but 90% of English-language movies are subtitled into Japanese with what are basically just factual translations of the content of what each character said, with virtually no effort taken to preserve nuance and color. In other words, you're damn right I'm proud that I made a pun that was impossible in the native language, but that works perfectly. ↩︎

With the possible exception of the Fizzy Soda, which was called the Extreme Soda in the mother3.org translation at the time. There, now you know the entire story of that one. ↩︎

This includes places like Nintendo Power previews of the then-not-yet-canceled 64DD release, as well as the bits and pieces of text in Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii. ↩︎

See footnote 4. ↩︎

Have I mentioned what a consummate professional and just generally swell guy he is? ↩︎

Whereas now I look back on my attempts at translation in the various files I still have stored on my hard drive, wondering what on earth was I even thinking? at roughly one in three lines. Funny thing, language acquisition. ↩︎

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Game Center CX's producer says goodbye to Satoru Iwata.

With the shock of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata’s sudden death earlier this month, it’s understandable that some things might get lost in the shuffle. The producer of the show Game Center CX, Kan Tsuyoshi, wrote an editorial column a week later, reminiscing about the time that Iwata visited Game Center CX himself. Here is a translation. I hope you find it satisfactory.

— — —

Last Friday, I attended the funeral of Nintendo’s corporate president, Satoru Iwata. It was the same day as the Yamahoko float procession of the Gion Matsuri,1 and a typhoon was passing through at the time as well. I must admit, despite the fact that I was attending a funeral, I did secretly have my 3DS with me.

President Iwata’s various contributions and his charisma have been well covered in various media by this point, so I feel that there’s no real need to write about them here. Instead, I’d like to share a little story about the time that he visited our TV show.

Three years ago, an interview between President Iwata and Arino was arranged for our show, for viewing on the Nintendo eShop.2 Naturally, being us, we assumed that it would obviously be shot at Nintendo’s corporate headquarters in Kyoto, so we were shocked to find out that he was going to be coming here.

“…What? We don’t even have our own building!”

Our organization, Gascoin Company, was located in a pretty small office at the time (I say as though we’re in a large office now…), and the office was full of the specialized equipment you’d expect to find scattered around a production company — just a hair’s breadth away from a hoarder’s house. The thought that the head of a world-class company would be coming to visit a place that looked like this was enough to cause an uproar throughout our entire staff.

“We’re really going to do this here?”

We checked to make sure time after time, but every time we asked, we were told that President Iwata thought that it would be fine for everything to just be the way it usually is for when he visited. And, on top of that, he wanted us to keep his visit a secret from Arino. He always seemed to be thinking about how he could surprise people and make them happy. In the end, our plan was this: we would rent the entire vacant office downstairs for one day, for him to use as his waiting room.

When the day of the interview came, we put a table and a chair in this big empty office, and the head of Nintendo just waited there, with a great big smile on his face. I still feel bad about that, but it was also a really happy, triumphant moment. My impression of him was one of generosity and refinement, and I still remember his slightly high voice, and the incredibly smart and funny things he said.

At the beginning of his conversation with Arino…

Iwata: “As president and chief…3 [shacho-kacho]”

Arino: “Even better than Assistant Manager and Chief [Jicho-kacho]!4” [laughs]

The two enjoyed playing Balloon Fight. President Iwata enjoyed seeing Arino’s unsuccessful tries. When he told us about how, if he had the chance, he’d like to make a game by himself one more time, you could really hear the game creator in him talking. I still remember Arino talking after we finished about how, even after almost ten years of making a show about video games, he could still have a great time like this. It was such an incredible encouragement to us, that President Iwata would come visit us at our little company, where we make our little TV show.

Mr. Iwata,5 I’m so sorry about how we made you wait in that office when you visited. At the same time, though, our whole staff was so happy. It was shortly after your visit that our company moved offices, because we wanted to make sure that the next time you visited, we could have a proper waiting room ready for you. We really wanted you to drop by again to play games with us, and it’s an incredible shame that it’ll never be able to happen. These games that we get the chance to play will be your legacy. Thank you.

Gassho.6

Kan Tsuyoshi, producer of Game Center CX.

A major festival held in Kyoto every July. ↩︎

A number of Game Center CX shorts were produced for the Nintendo eShop, viewable in Japan only on the 3DS and Wii U. ↩︎

Arino is often referred to as kacho, or “department chief,” due to the conceit used early on on Game Center CX that he was an employee of a company called Game Center CX, being promoted or demoted based on his results playing games. This has largely been dropped in more recent years. ↩︎

A Japanese comedy duo. ↩︎

At this point in the essay, he switches from referring to him as “President Iwata” to a much more friendly “Mr. Iwata,” or “Iwata-san,” as Iwata famously preferred to be referred to within Nintendo after being promoted to company president; the social nuance is comparable to Steve Jobs going by his first name within Apple. ↩︎

Literally, to put one’s hands together in prayer. In this case, because this is essentially a eulogy. ↩︎

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On US Tax Preparation from Abroad.

So you need to do your taxes, but you're on the JET Programme or something and are just crippled with anxiety about dealing with a prescription-strength 1040.

Here's the secret: it really isn't very difficult, and it shouldn't even take you an hour. Note that this is primarily meant for people who have been abroad for the entirety of the tax year they're filing for.

First off, get yourself a 1040 and a 2555-EZ from the IRS (google "1040 form" or something and you should be hunky dory) and download those bad boys. Also, grab your gensenchōshūhyō (源泉徴収票), or that little white paper you got in January with your income for the past year on it. I'll call that your "earnings form" from now on because it's a nuisance to type those macrons over those vowels.

Before we do anything, it's time to make an annotated copy of your earnings form for the year. The easiest way to do this is to grab your phone, take a photo of it in acceptable lighting, and plunk it into Pages or something. I then put numbered circles next to the following, with footnote explanations at the bottom:

Current year (平成26年), which I explain is "Heisei 26," which corresponds to 2014 CE

My name (because it's not necessarily romanized on there)

Gross income for the year (which will be the largest value on there).

I always make a point of also including in the footnote what the year's gross income actually works out to, using the IRS's annual average exchange rate page to work it out. You're going to want the 2014 rate (¥110.101 per USD) if you're reading this right when I wrote this. Either way: bookmark that page. It will be SO NICE to have it this time next year.

Now you have your converted income (make sure to print it and include it with your tax forms), so it's time to get cracking on the ol' 1040.

The 1040

Fill out your personal information at the top based on your current address in not-the-United-States and then check your Filing Status (Single, probably, unless you're married to an American or someone else who might otherwise have to file their taxes with the US government). Check off your exemptions for item 6, too (probably just yourself, unless you're married and/or a parent) and then count the number of checkboxes you checked (probably 1) and write it to the right.

If you don't have any kids, just write that same number again in the bolded box below.

Next, on the "Wages, salaries, tips, etc." line, write your converted income from the annotated earnings form.

It's time for a little detour to our buddy, 2555-EZ.

2555-EZ Detour

The form is actually pretty self-explanatory. Write your name and social security number at the top, because you don't want the teacher to come back later and ask "is this your handwriting?"

The first potential stumbling block is the residence test. If you aren't on your first year on the JET Programme and have thus established a life for yourself in your current home in Foreign, you can basically just check off the "Yes" for the bona fide residence. If this is your first year outside the US, then it gets a little hairier: you'll need to look at the Physical Presence Test (which is measured as being EITHER you've been out of the US for 330 days of 2014, OR you've been out of the US for 330 of the past days AS OF FILING). If you do go with the Physical Presence Test, write the obvious answers in part b (i.e. if you're filing at the end of the free two-month extension you get, basing it on the past 12 months, you'd write "from June 2014 to June 2015" or whatever you want).

Then we move to Part II: General Information. Your foreign address is what it was on your 1040. Your employer's address may vary, but if you're a prefectural ALT on the JET Programme, you'll probably want the prefectural board of education. Your occupation is probably "teacher." Your employer doesn't have a US address (leave it blank or write "N/A") and you can probably track down their local address.

Question 9: Employer is… for the JET Programme, you'd want to check "other" and write in "a foreign government organization" or something similar. For 10a, fill in that date (but you probably won't have one, or else you'd just be copying what you did last year), check "no," and move on to 11a. Write the country you live in, and when you moved there ("Japan, as of 2008"), and move on to 11b, the Who's Your Daddy question wherein you are obligated to remind them that you are only going through this asinine process because you're a citizen of one of the very few countries that taxes income earned overseas.

We're most of the way there by now. I promise. It really isn't so bad! Seriously!

Let's move on to the second page of the 2555-EZ. If you've spent any time in the US or a US territory (like that trip to Guam), list the dates there. Move on to Part IV and write in $99,200.00 in the "Maximum foreign earned income exclusion" if you're doing your 2014 taxes. That figure comes from this other useful IRS page that you should probably also bookmark.

Rock on along to line 14 and do a little bit of quick math (in my case, my qualifying period was just Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, so I wrote 365) and just do what the thing says for lines 15 and 16 because you can read and you are not an animal, like at the zoo or something.

Line 17 is where your converted income goes. Even on a really great year (remember back when it was ¥80 to the dollar? Those were the days), JET Programme pay is pretty unlikely to bump you into the $90,000+ range, so you don't have to worry about needing a full-size 2555. For line 18, do what it says (hint: copy your income to this line) and then it's time to head on back to the 1040 for the home stretch. We can do this! YOU HAVE ALMOST JUST FILED YOUR TAXES, LIKE A GROWN UP

So: Back to the 1040

Go down to "Other Income" (line 21 on the 2014 1040) and write your converted income on that line, but in parentheses, and write "2555-EZ" on the dotted line to the left, like it said to on the 2555-EZ. On the next line, write 0, because that is how much you owe unless you are a super outlier, in which case you should probably be consulting someone who is something like a tax attorney or a dad or something.

Fill in the bottom line of the first page of the 1040 with another 0 because you still owe nothing, then go to the second page.

Top line of Tax and Credits (38): 0 Last line of Tax and Credits (56): 0 Last line of Other Taxes (63): 0

Last line of Payments (74): 0 Amount you owe (78): 0

Third Party Designee: If you want, you can let someone in America act on your behalf for tax stuff. Put their information here if you'd like.

Finish up by signing your name at the bottom, dating it, and writing in your occupation and daytime phone number (including the country code if you'd like).

Print up the 1040, the 2555-EZ, and the annotated income form, put 'em in an envelope, and send it to:

Department of the Treasury Internal Revenue Service Center Austin, TX 73301-0215 USA

Tell 'em Greg sent you.1

If it's your first year outside of the US, and so you owe taxes on the part of your income from the part of the year you spent in the US, then it's going to be a little more complex and frankly I am just not up to that part of things. Ask a person with actual qualifications, perhaps? Ask your mom maybe, if your mom is an accountant perhaps or well-versed in the ways of numbers and instruction-following.

Please do not actually tell them that Greg sent you. ↩︎

[g-r-a-g]

On Beloved Worlds, Revisited

Having watched George Lucas try unsuccessfully to turn Star Wars into Star Trek in 1999, J.J. Abrams decided to one-up him and turn Star Trek into Star Wars, and with far more success.

It took years to finally get over that feeling that Star Trek and Star Wars, despite their fandom rivalry, really weren't all that comparable. I mean, sure, they both took place in outer space and came out of the, but there was always a huge gulf between the two that couldn't simply be explained by the decade between them nor the difference between working with TV and working with film.

The issue, it turned out, was partially one of lack of fine detail in genre classification. Star Wars was never really science fiction, at least no more so than Harry Potter is.1

And, in fact, much like Harry Potter, Star Wars does try to add a sense of consistency and rules to what is still fundamentally magic, yet there's no tying The Force to what actually exists in any meaningful sense, and that is in fact why it is so cool. In a nutshell, Star Wars is a fantasy adventure series that just happens to take place in outer space; the mere presence of spaceships no more inherently defines it as "science fiction" than the presence of drift racing makes The Fast and the Furious a treatise on the physics of cars. It is, unapologetically, a world built on the Rule of Cool, and it's a lot of fun for exactly that reason.

Star Trek, on the other hand, always at least aimed for a veneer of scientific — or, perhaps more accurately, sciencey — rigor. One of the show's trademarks, in fact, was a sense that there was a road map, however vague, from Here to There, even if the technobabble that resolves the episode's space-travel-related conflict was essentially made up, a kind of magic incantation all its own.

The thing is, though, Star Trek isn't really about solving the ship's engineering problems, at least not at its best. It always aspired to something nobler — Star Trek is supposed to be a character-driven drama that is built around the premise that if we all work together and put aside our differences, we can do great things, and that we can resolve our problems diplomatically if we can just talk them through.

The difference between the two series, then, was not just one of genre (space fantasy versus science fiction), but in fact one of premise. Star Wars is for the id. Star Trek is for the super-ego. And both series featured notable steps away from these extremes, to varying levels of success.

I think we can all agree that "the Star Wars prequels kind of sucked, a lot" is not an especially controversial statement for a number of reasons. An awful lot is out there about how bad the prequel trilogy is, in tremendous detail. Sure, the stiff, wooden dialogue and endless series of shots of characters walking side-by-side down what are fundamentally CGI hallways are major issues, but the bigger issue is one of story and atmosphere. Somewhere, Lucas apparently got it in his mind that there was something less noble about space fantasy adventure than Proper Science Fiction, and thus we were treated to a wildly tone-deaf Phantom Menace featuring such mind-blowers as a subplot about trade route taxation and Darth Vader using the word "yippee."2 For this reason, among others, the prequel trilogy is often merely tolerated at best, and by far the best proposed viewing order for the Star Wars series skips The Phantom Menace outright, because it literally added nothing. Even the much-hyped whatever-Episode-III-was-called3 didn't add much to the mythos, doing little more than connecting the absolutely unnecessary prequel trilogy to the original Star Wars for reasons limited, essentially, to "I guess we might as well at least see this thing through to the end." On the other hand, with the upcoming sequel trilogy, there's actually — dare I say it? — a new hope for the series, if only because we already know that they _literally cannot be worse than what has already happened._4

J.J. Abrams took essentially the opposite approach with the new Star Trek film franchise, taking what used to be a Solemn, Dignified, and Kind Of Boring But On Purpose5 franchise and injected Action Movie Formula directly into some important vein or other. Gone from the films is the notion that things really can be resolved if we just talk them through and don't resort to anything as undignified as violence unless absolutely necessary.

In fact, as has been pointed out by others, 2009's Star Trek was fundamentally a superhero origin story, up to and including a Supermanesque baby-being-sent-away-from-the-end-of-the-world and subsequent growing up in a sleepy Midwestern small town. While the Captain Kirk of the TV show was a larger-than-life figure, the character in the Abrams films comes across as not so much a cocky ship captain as he does Zapp Brannigan's daydreams.

The new Star Trek films are tremendously entertaining, but in a large sense they suffer from the same issues as the Star Wars prequels: they have sacrificed their uniqueness and defining characteristics in order to become something they are not, and the only things really tying them to the older works are that we are told that they are, both directly (by the makers) and indirectly (through character names and places). The main reason that the new Star Trek gets a pass on this by the public in general is because it at least wasn't actively dull.

“Yer a Jedi, Luke!” ↩︎

Lest you mistakenly think that Lucas somehow lost his way, bear in mind that this is the same man who gave us Howard the Duck, the Star Wars Holiday Special (which was pretty much entirely what he wanted), and, once he was freed of anyone working with him to do him the favor of telling him "no," the second half of Return of the Jedi. For all his worldbuilding visual design chops and merchandising savvy, George Lucas is a man profoundly lacking in good taste, Microsoft in human form. ↩︎

A few moments after typing this I remembered it was called Revenge of the Sith, or Attack of the Sith, or something like that, but the point stands: what an appallingly unmemorable snoozer for all the excitement built around it before its release. Much like the two movies that came before it, in fact, neatly tying the trilogy together thematically. ↩︎

A few wags expressed Leno-monologue-caliber guys-I-thought-of-the-obvious-joke-too concern that Disney was going to somehow screw up the franchise after they bought Lucasarts, but it's worth bearing in mind that Disney, much like Apple, is no longer the disaster it was for much of the '90s; the contemporary Disney is the studio that gave us The Avengers, which for any complaints you may toss its way was still an exceptionally entertaining film. ↩︎

Though of course not to the same extent as 2001: A Space Odyssey, which rather effectively used its exceptionally long running time to give the audience a sense of the vastness and dullness of outer space. ↩︎

[g-r-a-g]

On the best video game of both 2012 and 2013.

Because it came out in 20121 and was then ported to the PS3 and Steam a year later, Spelunky holds a pretty solid claim to the title of "best video game of 2012 and 2013." Ever since it came out on PS3, I've been playing it. A lot.

Like, seriously. A lot.

While most challenging video games of the sort temper their difficulty with the possibility of memorization,2 Spelunky offers no such reprieve, as the levels are all procedurally generated, and thus essentially randomized.3 The only way to get better at Spelunky, thus, is to actually become better at it. This stands in stark contrast to basically any video game that features "experience points" or stat boosts or anything else to artificially change difficulty level.

Spelunky features a robust XP and leveling system, but it happens inside your heart.

— Ben Kuchera (@BenKuchera) August 8, 2013

This has certain advantages in its way, which I'll come back to in a bit. For now, though, let me direct you toward Polygon's fascinating writeup on Bananasaurus Rex's solo eggplant run, easily the most interesting moment of the year in video game news, but similarly the least obviously so.

I won't rehash the article, because it's already an outstanding piece of writing that explains everything you need to know, but the main takeaway is this: Lots of people play a game called Spelunky, and yet very few of them are playing the same game. The learning curve for Spelunky looks much less like a single-player video game or a puzzle than it does a highly competitive endeavor like chess, Street Fighter, or tennis.

In a way, this is because, more so than in almost any other extant single-player game of any sort, you are actually playing against the game. A beginning player will be playing a version of Spelunky wherein the main goal is simply to delay death for as long as possible, hoping, perhaps, to achieve a glimpse of the Jungle beyond the Mines. An intermediate player will still be playing against the game, but with the goal of making it all the way to the end, trying to finally win, rather than simply trying to not lose for as long as possible. An advanced player will have likely learned from someone, somewhere, that the end they'd made it to was only nominally so, and instead hunt down the obscure methods and steps required to make it through a much harder game, to a much harder ending.

Bananasaurus Rex, as demonstrated in his videos, is no mere advanced player. He is a Spelunky god — he is The One — playing not so much against the game but against the designers themselves. The game he's playing is as different from the advanced player as the one the advanced player is playing is from the beginning player. Not satisfied with simply finding what was planted there to be discovered, the solo eggplant run takes someone dedicated enough to discover errors in the programming and other oversights and to then incorporate them into a game plan. He has essentially found holes in the Matrix that can be manipulated to his advantage, allowing the previously thought to be impossible to become feasible (if extremely exciting and tense).

Seriously, go read that Polygon article.

Now, fans of roguelikes are no doubt familiar with the nature of this skill progression. Spelunky is arguably simply the most accessible roguelike, being not just fascinatingly complex as the genre tends toward, but legitimately fun, and this is of course a valid argument to make. It is also neither here nor there, of course.

The important thing is that Spelunky is accessible enough to serve as an introduction to the roguelike mindset, and there's a lot to learn from Spelunky.

You see, when you play a game of Spelunky, the levels are procedurally (read: randomly) generated on the spot. That means that there's no "design" to the layout. There's no — if you'll pardon the expression — intelligent designer's hand at work. Like certain tongue twisters,4 this is something that actually winds up being more of a tripping point the better you'd otherwise be at video games. Spelunky involves — requires — unlearning a whole host of assumptions you never even realized you held.5

For instance, it takes a new player a minimum of a few days to really grasp the fact that there is no guarantee of anything worthwhile, nor even safety, at the end of that path that branches off to the side, away from the path to the exit. It takes much longer to get into the habit of making sure you aren't on top of a jar when you whip it open, because often enough it contains not valuable gems, but instead a snake or a scorpion.

Spelunky, in short, can teach us about life. Nothing is ever guaranteed, players learn if they choose to. Good habits are developed through consistency, not through the choice to make a conscious effort when it "matters."6 Confidence without competence will ruin you. Proper use of limited resources is key. No matter how good things get, they can't last forever, and it rarely matters anyway unless you have a goal in mind. Don't mess with scorpions. Sometimes, there's nothing to be gained from not running away. Sometimes, there's a lot to be gained by building the skills to no longer fear what would otherwise be dangerous.7

Because Spelunky offers only a single chance in each run — no way to continue, and no way to save your progress — death is simultaneously cheap and yet painful, coming generally either due to immediately obvious player error or immediately obvious bad luck. It is willing to give ourselves as many second chances as we are willing to give ourselves. It is remarkably fair, but never actually kind.8

And if we choose to, we can learn to handle ourselves better in our lives by putting into practice what it teaches us. You can choose to beat yourself up endlessly for accidentally dropping onto spikes, dying instantly, despite having that jetpack and a fantastic $80,000 accumulated right before getting to the Black Market,9 filled with regret at a plan that very suddenly, through no fault of anyone else's, collapsed right when everything seemed to be going so well.

Or you can choose to pick yourself up, take a deep breath, and start again, a little wiser, no worse off, in the end, than just after waking from a wonderful dream.

Or at least the HD remake; the original version for Windows was and still remains free. ↩︎

Turns out that while I can't quite absolutely nail level 1 of Ikaruga from memory anymore, I can still do a pretty solid job on it after years of not playing it, as I learned several months ago when it showed up on the Nesica multi-game cabinets. ↩︎

The layouts themselves, rather, are essentially randomized, but after a few times around, players will begin to recognize reused set-pieces within the levels, but these are still connected by randomized tunnels and corridors. ↩︎

My favorite in Japanese is "surgery room," or "手術室" (shujutsushitsu). ↩︎

Which is what makes them assumptions, of course. ↩︎

Yes, I'm looking at you, everyone who can't be bothered to do things like basic punctuation and spelling on, say, Facebook. When you actually need to not look like an illiterate fool, like when you're producing writing of any sort that will be seen by anyone who matters to your future, it's really best that it come naturally without thinking about it, rather than being closer to "my cousin taught me how to drive stick one afternoon when I was in high school, so I think I should be able to handle this half-hour drive." ↩︎

After 150 seconds, or two and a half minutes, the Ghost will appear when playing Spelunky. It is, as the name suggests, a large ghost that will enter from either the left or right edge of the playfield, whichever is closer, and proceed toward the player character at a slowish but very consistent pace, passing through walls when doing so. Up to an intermediate level of gameplay, the Ghost presents a sort of implicit time limit, discouraging players from spending too much time and being overly cautious all the time. With practice and a bit of boldness, though, the Ghost can be taken advantage of: it moves slowly and predictably, and if the player avoids getting cornered, the Ghost can be more or less indefinitely avoided. More importantly, though, when the Ghost passes over a large gemstone (usually worth in-game money, used to buy things at stores), it turns into a diamond, significantly increasing its monetary value to the player. Consequently, high-level players will deliberately set up the stage to maximize mobility when the Ghost is around, as well as avoid picking up large gems, in order to pick them up afterward. Bananasaurus Rex's run in the linked article features this in a few of the earlier stages, with some fantastically dry commentary by the player in response to inexperienced viewers who may not know what he's planning ("Does anyone know how to pick up gems?" "If you walk over them, they disappear, so don't do that."). ↩︎

I'd describe it as a Libertarian video game, except that its world is internally consistent and makes some sort of sense when examined critically. ↩︎

Not that I am bitter. ↩︎

[g-r-a-g]

On the first and only Apple software update I immediately regretted. OR: On the impressive potential of iWork's future.

The new version of Keynote is great. I hate it.

Let's back up for a moment, because now that the needlessly contrarian shock opening is out of the way, we can get a little more into details.

First of all, today's Apple keynote was really interesting, inasmuch as the software announcements really drove home the point that Apple is a hardware company. Wait, what? More accurately, perhaps, the number of software updates and upgrades being announced and released, coupled with the fact that nearly all of them are being made available for free (such as Mac OS X 10.9, or iWork/iLife for people buying new computers and iOS devices), suggests that Apple's marketing plan really does essentially regard the software as an integral product, but still fundamentally just a part of, or perhaps an accessory for, their hardware.

So. Keynote.

I have a tendency to really be on board with the notion that it's valuable to keep your software up to date whenever possible, and indeed, I'm no stranger to running beta software and dealing with bugs simply because I'm fond of the newest and shiniest things in software. I've gently berated people for having never updated their computer's OS in years, which is going to be even easier to do now that the new version of Mac OS is out and is completely free.

I've used Keynote '09 basically since it came out in early 2009. I've used it more in the past couple of years especially because of the quiz nights I've been putting together, and I've grown really fond of it. I like a lot of the build animations and slide transitions, and it's just generally worked very well for me. So here's how this morning played out:

Watch Apple keynote ("Hey! New updated iWork! Nice! It's been four years, after all.")

Download new version of Keynote

Open giant slideshow of quiz night questions that will be used in about three weeks, and has been worked on, at this point, for about two months off and on

Discover that easily half of the slides have had the transitions and animations they use simply removed outright from Keynote

"Whoa, to hell with this."

Delete new Keynote in an irrational fit of pique

Try to restore the old version of Keynote and the old version of the slideshow, only to discover that my backup disk's eyes have glazed over and that Backblaze doesn't back up the /Applications folder

Pirate a copy of Keynote '09 and download the old version of the slideshow from Backblaze

Make two discrete backup copies of the old Keynote, just to be absolutely safe, and then cautiously re-download the new Keynote

Let's try that again.

I'm tentatively considering switching to the new Keynote for future projects, as it's a rather nice piece of software overall, but in some regards I simply can't, as I've grown too fond of a feature bug in Keynote '09 that's since been removed, and I'll have to essentially work around that restriction if I do switch to the new Keynote.

All that said, the new Keynote is a very interesting piece of software. The new interface is hugely, fundamentally different from the old one, and actually seems to be an active shift away from the traditional Mac OS model of floating windows for things like the Inspector, what with the giant panel along the right side of the window. There's absolutely no mistaking it: this is a step toward trying to at least partially unify the Mac OS and iOS interfaces. It may also be, interestingly, a decision influenced by the choice to make iWork also run in a web browser. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Whether the new interface works is a somewhat different story, and it really doesn't lend itself to a black-and-white yes-or-no answer here. Common settings are more readily available, and advanced settings (like kerning) are hidden, but in different places from before.1 As a Power User™ I find this frustrating. As someone who's helped someone learn brand new software they're completely unfamiliar with, I find this admirable. I'm not especially fond of the things that have been completely removed.2

On the other hand, while I miss the things that are gone, some of the new things are really nice. The different shadows are really cool, and the little set of preset options are a great way to get a sense of the kind of depth illusions you can produce with them. The new Magic Move can do the sorts of things with text that it always seemed like Keynote should have been able to handle from the day they added the feature.3 The centered canvas is another one of those "Finally, finally" changes that is long past due. Collaboration with other people is also a big deal.

So there's a whole lot to like about the new Keynote. It's just that, much like the Final Cut Pro X transition, the decision to start over with a brand new code base has necessarily meant that not every single tiny feature has made the jump intact, and at the moment, I can only hold out hope that the old transition animations start to show up again, or perhaps even brand new ones.

Here's the thing.

The new Keynote feels a lot like a web app in a lot of regards, due to a combination of factors. The interface now neatly fits within a single window. The built-in animations no longer feature 3D effects, and feel a little "stiffer" than before. Keynote now features hyperlinks between slides and to external web pages or email, which could make for some very interesting HyperCard-like usage cases. Even the help is entirely stored on the internet, rather than locally. There seems to be, on the whole, a big push toward making Keynote-the-web-app and Keynote-the-Mac-and-iOS-app converge.

On the face of it, this isn't by any means necessarily a bad thing. The issue is that the balance seems to be coming down on the side of the feel of a web app, and so as a result iWork on a Mac begins to feel like the local version of a web app, rather than the icloud.com version feeling like a web version of a native app. Or, to put it differently, the new iWork feels at times like it's competing more with Google Docs than Microsoft Office.

It's a very interesting update, perhaps in the sense of "May you live in interesting times." It's clearly meant to lay the groundwork for a much more cross-compatible future of iWork,4 but in the meantime we're left in a sort of gray area that shows lots of potential but also frustrating new limits in many regards. If the new iWork starts to see a regular update schedule akin to what Final Cut Pro X has seen since its release, with re-added and new features, I can breathe easy. If the new iWork sees an update schedule akin to the past four years of, well, iWork? There's a reason I've made multiple backups of the Keynote '09 binary.

In fact, I actually thought for a while that it was simply impossible to adjust text spacing now, and what was the case in the slideshow I'd opened had simply been grandfathered in. It turns out that it was simply hidden under a "gear" button, rather than with the basic "text" panel like it had been in '09. ↩︎

Turns out that in the new version of Keynote, you can no longer make a table's grid lines cast a shadow of any sort. Go ahead and try. I brought a snack. ↩︎

Astute viewers of the Apple presentation may have noticed that they were using this in their own slideshow for when certain features grew and turned white in the slides that just had features listed. If you're a Keynote fan, you knew well before they announced it that there was a new version at least in use on Apple campus. ↩︎

It's worth noting that this is one of the very few full-featured Apple products that is now more or less fully Windows-compatible, at least in a sense. This is a pretty big deal that got kind of glossed over fairly briefly in the presentation, because it means that anyone with an iPhone and a Windows computer can now essentially use Keynote in their web browser instead of having to rely on that hateful and expensive PowerPoint. ↩︎

[g-r-a-g]

On the Implacable Difficulties of Unpacking Racism and Cultural Baggage.

There is a pachinko chain that airs commercials on local television featuring a Japanese man pretending to be, for all apparent intents, a black DJ. Fluffy afro wig (though not comically large), moderately dark skin makeup, you know.

Is this racist? More to the point, is this harmfully racist?

Obviously this isn't exactly the classiest move nowadays,1 though it certainly does raise the question of whether this constitutes "blackface," whether it matters, and whether it's just Liberal Guilt2 manifesting itself and overstepping cultural boundaries.

First, a tangential diversion.

A tangential diversion.

Several weeks ago, there was some controversy over the use of "blackface" on Quebecois television. In a nutshell, an actor was impersonating a black French celebrity, and this entailed skin makeup and the like. There were a few of the trademark unnecessary racist touches, too, like a fake gap-tooth prosthetic.

There's also the simple matter that, in French Quebec, they don't really have that cultural baggage in the first place. Like, to the extent that people from Quebec simply don't even understand what blackface is nor anything associated with the cultural history of American racism. This may be partially because slavery was banned across Canada in 1834 and that the number of slaves owned by settlers north of the United States likely numbered in the under-ten-thousand range.3

In the end, everyone just sort of went their way, unconvinced of anything new, and given that the comedian in question is widely regarded as being, at best, Billy Crystal caliber, it wasn't particularly difficult to just sort of dismiss him as clueless rather than racist.4

The thing here is, Jim Crow and the history of comedy that "punches down" (to steal a turn of phrase from the thoughtful comedy world) don't really resonate with Canada (and especially not Quebec) the way they do in the US, where they were (and are) very much a thing. It also complexities matters that Quebec is a place with a majority population that is still a minority on the national scale. It is a place where it is literally possible to be clueless about institutionalized racism of this sort, too (and is also, apparently, just stunningly white, especially outside of the cities). Oddly enough, even the impersonated comedian himself apparently didn't take any offense at it, suggesting that there may be something to the idea that in Quebec it didn't read as "blackface" so much as "he's French and happens to be black, so obviously you need the makeup if you're going to impersonate him."

Not that this really excuses any of it, of course. At best, we can only hope to explain and maybe, maybe give the benefit of the doubt.

Back to Japan

If the US's closest neighbor can be that unaware of the past hundred years of race relations just south of the border, then what about Japan?

Japan, of course, is ahead of the curve as far as Asia goes on a lot of things, like banning smoking indoors (it's actually happened, anywhere, at all!), or women being able to work (sometimes women return to the workforce after becoming mothers, now!). On the other hand, when it comes to race relations, Japan isn't really the Pacific rim's shining star.5

Here is the thing: Japan has its share of casual racism. There is absolutely no missing it when China is being referred to in pop culture. It's not quite as overtly dehumanizing as the kinds of stereotyping you'd see in North America a half-century ago,6 but you're invariably going to hear an erhu, see a panda, and at some point see a woman wearing what is literally called a "china dress" ("チャイナドレス") in Japanese. Like most of Japanese TV, all subtlety is lost much like the realization that, no, you don't have to project to the back rows.

Here's the thing about the commercial in question, with the Japanese guy with the kinda-dark face makeup and wig: it's not especially classy, but there's nothing to be outraged about in this commercial other than the simple fact that they put a guy in makeup to make him look like he's not Asian. There is no "punching down" involved, unless you oppose the stereotype that black people are sometimes DJs, or maybe that DJs are sometimes black people.

Had this guy been wearing a blond wig and blue contacts, I suspect that nobody would really care at all, outside of the usual bemused awkwardness or perhaps the sort of people who think it's a grave insult that they're regularly complimented on their ability to use chopsticks so well.7

In other words, it kind of winds up boiling down to the sort of thing that has no clear right answer or even anyone we can cleanly assign blame to. Japan never had America's history of Jim Crow and institutionalized segregation (of black people) and so a lot of things — like "mammy"-type kitsch or just the black-face-with-white-lips inverse-clown look that's so representative of minstrelsy and all it did — simply don't register on Japan's cultural baggage radar the same way. And it's hardly limited to Japan that we see people completely miscategorizing or misinterpreting relics of history.8

Please Check Your Baggage

Cultural and historical baggage is one of those really tricky matters where you eventually have to draw a line regarding what's okay to get upset about other cultures doing and what isn't, but the line is invariably going to be fuzzy and indistinct. In the US in particular, race relations over the course of the twentieth century were complex enough that, in the end, we all just sort of came to the conclusion that it generally wasn't cool to pretend to be a member of an ethnic group that you don't physically resemble.9 As a result, nowadays it's okay to make fun of the Irish or Italians (they're sufficiently "us" that it's All In Good Fun), not okay to make fun of black people (it's recent enough that the systematic discrimination is still in living memory for an awful lot of people, and arguably is still around in a lot of harmful ways10), and as a country we kind of haven't even gotten to that discussion regarding any other visible minorities like people from Asia, the Middle East, or Latin/South America.

Japan never really had this cultural conversation about race relations, and part of that is apparent in Japan's notions of black people, or at least the African-American variety. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, informed more by Jimi Hendrix than Martin Luther King.11 As a result of this, there's a whole lot of Quebec-style racism that's based more on ignorance than malice.

On the Other Hand

On the other hand, Japan does — or at least did — have its own cultural baggage regarding a systematically discriminated against underclass. There were — and arguably, still are — people who are considered members of an "untouchable" caste, often with certain hometowns or parts of cities being used as signals for this. These are the people who were to do jobs related in some way to death, such as animal slaughter, and as such rendered them ritually "unclean," especially back in the day where religion in Japan was more than simply a collection of vaguely-adhered-to superstitions.

A number of decades back, there was some mild controversy in Japan when a film depicted a shoemaker as a sympathetic protagonist. To the foreign viewer, this characterization seems almost irrelevant, simply a matter of "well, he has to work somewhere." To the Japanese viewer, though, the signal — and it was a deliberate choice on the part of the creator — was unambiguously clear: shoemakers were associated with leatherwork, which was associated with animal slaughter, which was something that rendered one "unclean."

In other words, it was a minor scandal that a shoemaker was depicted in a positive light in Japan. That someone had opted not to depict an assigned discriminated-against class negatively.

Which raises the question again, I suppose: is there really much to be gained from outrage against insensitivity toward the unfamiliar that doesn't contain anything malicious?

Where do we draw the line between "they did a thing that makes us uncomfortable for history-related reasons" and "they will be scandalized if what we think of as an innocuous profession isn't properly looked down upon by us"?12

Where can we draw the line between suggesting that a culture with no real experience in the matter develop some better race relations13

And if you want clearly-actually-racist, the same chain also occasionally airs a commercial featuring actual Africans (or at least actual people of African descent) in grass skirts, with a ridiculous "dub" voiceover in Japanese about how much they want to go play pachinko. Even so, this is arguably not more than a couple steps removed from what The Daily Show does with news footage from non-English-speaking countries on a fairly regular basis. If you'd like to Go Deeper, Inception-style, it's also worth noting that the vast majority of pachinko chains in Japan are owned by people who are ethnically North Korean, who have themselves been the victims of at least social discrimination, if not necessarily systematic persecution. I mean, nowadays their children and grandchildren, who were born and raised in Japan and speak only Japanese, can even become Japanese citizens sometimes. This is considered progress for race relations in Japan. ↩︎

Imagine you're walking along, when from across the street, unprovoked and apropos of nothing, a man yells to you, "Hey! You're an asshole!" Liberal Guilt is what causes some of us to react not by ignoring him or telling him to take off, but instead to find ourselves stuck in place, dumbfounded, wondering: what if he's right? ↩︎

Interestingly, Canada does actually have some degree of history of slavery, which is generally completely glossed over in at least the US. This may be partially because the right to own human beings wasn't a major political platform for half of the country for nearly half of its history. One can't help but imagine, as an American, that equal rights in Canada were granted at some ambiguous time before it happened in the US, with a tremendous amount of falling over themselves apologizing on both sides of the matter. As it turns out, apparently Canada never had any explicit prohibition against people of African descent, say, voting, but it wasn't until the late forties that Asians could vote and not until 1960 or so that First Nations ("Native Americans" to those south of the border) members could vote without renouncing their First Nations status. Women's suffrage came at about the same time as the US, around 1920. Canada's generally been ahead of the curve on this stuff, but it's had its less proud moments as well. ↩︎

Actually, the whole MetaFilter comment thread on the matter made for some pretty interesting and fairly nuanced reading on the matter, especially as concerns what constitutes dog-whistle politics in Canada. ↩︎

Taiwan is fascinating in this regard, as they've generally been pretty progressive on matters related to the people who already lived there when Chang Kai-Shek and his faction arrived from mainland China a century ago. This may be partially just due to the nature of a country that founded itself on what was readily apparent as land already inhabited by others, but it's certainly leaps and bounds better than, say, Japan's treatment of the Ainu and Ryukyu people. ↩︎

I tend to use the word "chinky" to refer to said stereotypes, the point of which being to make overt the fact that they were deliberately over-the-top and dehumanizing. They weren't stereotypes of actual people; they were stereotypes of stereotypes. This is of course by no means meant to be construed as anything other than a mockery of the stereotyping itself, though admittedly there have been moments of moderate misunderstanding. ↩︎

Yeah, it can get a little annoying, but at least the things that strangers say about/to you, unprompted, don't pretty openly suggest "you don't belong here" in the way that non-whites get treated in, say, most of the US. Privilege is calling foul when you have to play by the same rules as someone else. ↩︎

Take, for example, the war flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, which has mistakenly been reappropriated as the "Confederate flag." To fly the flag we think of in the popular imagination as the "Confederate flag" in honor of Southern history and culture is literally akin to flying a flag with an eagle perched upon a swastika in honor of German heritage. The actual flags of the Confederate States of America, while in some cases incorporating this as a design element, were completely distinct. It says a lot, perhaps, that an awful lot of people don't seem to mind this mistaken identity. ↩︎

The in-group and out-group dynamics of the US are fascinating to look at — they're set up as essentially a series of concentric circles getting progressively compressed inward, with groups like the Irish or Italians (pizza was considered "ethnic food" until the middle of the 20th century in the US!) progressively gaining "in-group" status as a more overtly "different" minority gains visibility. It's to the US's shame that that's only really starting to happen fairly recently for black people, and nowadays Asians are, depending on where you are, right on the border of that in-group/out-group distinction. For the most part, of late it's turned to — to put it bluntly — "are they Brown People, but not the kind of Brown People that we've decided as a culture that we should probably be nice to occasionally?" I mean, hell, people still think that turbans are associated with Muslims in some way. These are the groups that the US, as a whole, hasn't even gotten around to wondering if maybe it'd make more sense to view them first as people and then second as whatever the stereotype du jour is. ↩︎

One could pretty easily argue that the US farming industry, especially in the southern half of the country, still essentially relies on slave labor to pick crops. ↩︎

Strangely enough, it's easy to get this impression from Japanese media that, while black men are around, if in short supply, black women simply do not exist, as though men of African descent simply reproduce asexually. ↩︎

You think I have the answer to this or something? If I did, I'd be out making a difference in the world instead of writing 2,500 words of stream-of-consciousness fluff about the difficulties of resolving the difficult problem of race relations and related issues in cultures with very different histories and cultural assumptions. ↩︎

And this really does need to happen, especially given Japan's age distribution over the population, because this is an economy that's going to need immigrants as soon as people figure out that the robots they're working on aren't going to cut it in the end. ↩︎

[g-r-a-g]

Following the rules.

Let's talk sports.

Except that you and I both know this isn't about sports.

But let's talk sports.

I feel like it is a fairly safe assumption that most of us grew up in a place. I, for example, grew up in Football. It has a lot in common with Soccer, of course, and with a bit of getting used to I'm sure I could just as easily get by in Basketball, Rugby, or Hockey. I mean, they're all pretty similar on the whole — you just have to get the ball (or whatever) to the other end, and then get it into a thing of some sort. Maybe things stop from time to time, but it's all variations on a theme.

Occasionally on TV, they'll show people from out in Tennis or Badminton, or perhaps Volleyball. You know, out where people got this notion of just hitting the ball back and forth, instead of having the good sense to hold on to the thing. I mean, you barely even move around.

And then there are the really weird ones, like all the bowling sports like Bocce or, well, Bowling. There's Golf, too, though I've never met anyone from there. I've heard that some people will claim they aren't even really sports.

Perhaps the strangest, though, is Baseball. Baseball tends to show up on TV a lot these days, sometimes even without ridicule, and it's been getting more popular with the younger generations. Something about how exotic it is, really. Or maybe, more to the point, how different it is. You play with a ball, sure, but you only ever have it when you're on defense, which seems a bit odd, to say the least. There's this obsession with getting back to the starting point, too — the ball always goes back to where it started, and the players want to do that too. I hear Cricket's even harder to figure out, but I've never met anyone from there either, and it doesn't really show up on TV for very long at a time. Maybe for a minute or two on the news, tops, and that's only if something big happens there.

Well, at some point along the way I figured it was time to broaden my horizons, filled with the sort of confidence that comes from not really understanding quite yet how little you understand the world. On a whim I decided to step out of my comfort zone and try living in Baseball for a while. I certainly wasn't the first, and I always had a few friends who always seemed like they were just a little too into Baseball, but only superficial stuff, like the hats or the long socks. But hey, I figured, the economy's down, and it could make for an interesting adventure to give me stories to absolutely rivet all around me for years, especially since it's tough finding a job pretty much anywhere but Footy these days.

It was, to say the least, something of a heady experience, and it helped to be prepared. The first few days in any new sport are always exciting and confusing. I'd read a bunch beforehand about Baseball to prepare myself, though there's really only so much you can actually plan for. I picked up the general gist of the rules so that I'd at least know what was going on when I got there.

Naturally, there are tons of weird, situation-specific rules in Baseball. It took me two solid books and an evening of drinking with locals and long-term expats to really, fully grasp the Infield Fly rule, and even now I'm still not sure I could adequately explain it. To an extent, you just sort of have to get used to things. I learned to tell myself that different is not the same as wrong. This took longer than I'd anticipated.

Oh, keeping this in mind was a challenge at times, to be certain, and I'd remind myself over and over that the challenge was part of the value of it whenever I'd talk to my other friends from Football and Soccer, or that one lady from Team Handball who mostly kept to herself except to complain on Facebook. "Why can't they just go in a straight line and keep moving forward?" they'd ask, as though Baseball had missed something vital yet obvious along the way. "I just don't understand how they got this idea that the team on defense should have the ball." "Nothing happens at all for the longest time, and it's just so boring." Or, of course, the perennial "Nobody in Baseball can drive!"1 I never really set out to be the voice of reason — that road leads only to insufferableness — but maybe that's just the result of trying to accept Baseball on its own terms. I mean, who were we to come and tell Baseball which team gets the ball at any given time? You have to pick your battles, and it's way more valuable to focus on serious problems like Baseball's issues with drug use and historical treatment of minorities than the obvious yet superficial stuff.

I mean, imagine Soccer tells Football that they need to be more careful about the really high rate of concussions. Can you even imagine Football's response being anything other than, at best, "you guys aren't much better"?

For the most part, my expatriate friends I made here went back home after a year or two, generally changed in at least some way, though by no means was it guaranteed to be one that involved positive personal growth: a dispiriting number of them returned home more confident than ever in the comforting rectitude of the familiar. A few of them kept at least a passing interest in keeping up with Baseball, their curiosity at things like "balking" keeping them intrigued by the notion of mysteries of near-infinite depth. A couple even began to sort of advocate for a greater understanding of Baseball elsewhere, opting to try to teach their friends in Basketball or Badminton how to play, at least the basics, and often wound up finding themselves working with people who'd grown up in Baseball and were similarly struggling to navigate the just-as-foreign-to-them world of, say, Football.

More than a few wound up making a point of defining themselves primarily through their experience of living in Baseball for a year or two. These folks generally weren't really very interesting nor doing much with their lives to begin with; in the end, it was no great loss to society for them to find something so trivial to anchor their self-image to, though as a result we certainly have no shortage of boorish self-appointed "experts" on Baseball.

As it stands, I've gotten kind of used to Baseball, and find myself learning to appreciate its idiosyncrasies. Of course, every time I feel like I've got a really solid grasp on the rules, I find out I'm off by just enough to be a problem, but on the whole it seems that people are forgiving enough if you seem to be making an effort to meet them on their terms.2

I've even met a couple of other people from Football and Basketball here who make passing reference to that sport nearby that they think is even stranger than Baseball, having apparently spent a couple of weeks there, though it does apparently bear at least a bit of a resemblance to Baseball. Maybe this summer I'll hop on a plane and visit Cricket for a week or two, and give culture shock and the novelty of the unfamiliar another try.

"People who look dissimilar to me can't drive" is one of the few documented universal traits of culture and language, and it is worth noting the following: 1: Everyone in the world, in aggregate, drives about as well or as poorly as anyone else, and it is conditions such as width of roads or pedestrian congestion that inform the impression of driver ability. 2: The above-average driver virtually never makes this generalization. ↩︎

Except in Football. ↩︎

[g-r-a-g]

On computer history, personal.

I used to be a die-hard Windows-and-especially-DOS-are-the-way-and-the-truth Computer Guy. I did things to my computer like disk compression from the DOS command line in elementary school, back in the nineties. There was, in fact, good reason to be contemptuous of Apple's products at the time, because it was the nineties, and they were run by buffoons who had no idea how to do anything right, and (though I didn't really realize it at the time) Windows 95 did a good enough job of copying Mac OS with the serial numbers filed off that it seemed the right option, because frankly it was at the time.

Fast-forward to college (including the frankly-embarrassing self-superior condescension toward Mac users one associates stereotypically and, honestly, pretty accurately with anyone who knows a lot about computers, plays a lot of computer games, or, on rare occasions, someone who actually does both). Mac OS 10.4 shows up with x86 support, and as I am by this point someone with a track record of installing OSes for fun (literally — I tried Linux for a while before getting sick of the need to babysit it constantly to prevent pointlessly frustrating things like Mandrake's 20,000-pixel-wide system settings window bug), I find out that Mac OS has been modified for installation on commodity hardware. I figure, hey, this seems like a good chance to confirm my biases and my deep-seated belief that Windows XP is the One True Operating System, now and forever, amen. I fire up the installer, put that OS on a fresh partition, and am INSTANTLY blown away by how much better the experience of simply using my computer is than the suddenly-extremely-primitive-feeling XP (this was after Vista came out, but also after everyone sort of agreed that nobody in their right mind would deliberately use it). It was UNIX that could dress itself in the morning. It was an operating system with things like security policy consisting of something other than the extremes of "sure, whatever" or "HALT WHO GOES THERE AND DARES TRY TO ADJUST THE VOLUME SETTING," and it appealed very much to the part of me that wanted to use my computer like an adult, to actually PRODUCE things, instead of like the kid who broke and unbroke Windows for fun and called that "being good at computers."

This is of course leaving aside entirely the later discovery that computer hardware could likewise be something actively enjoyed and a source of delight, rather than merely tolerated (anyone else remember back when laptops were creaky plastic, before everyone decided that whatever Apple does is the only option and started making metal-body laptops? That is sort of an industry trend of late, really).

So yeah, there's a reason a lot of people (take a look at any given photo of a programming conference and do your best to find even HALF as many laptops without glowing Apple logos as with) decide that maybe there's something to be said for buying a new Camry instead of a '94 Geo, even though they both have four wheels (identical specs!) and go from point A to point B.

When you spend a lot of your time using something to do work, sometimes it pays to not just go with the cheapest option, but rather one made by people aiming to please those who understand that it's even possible to be pleased.

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Cool facts you might not have known about Apple's Lightning connector.

• The Lightning connector has eight pins on each side of it, but there's no paired set of receiver pins inside the port for it — only on the one side. • The Lightning connector is rated to safely carry 10V, double the 5V Mini-USB and its ilk are rated for. • The Lightning connector specification actually calls for the connector itself to be essentially waterproof. • The Lightning connector is designed to be able to withstand a direct blow from a hammer, and at the factory no fewer than 15% of all Lightning cables are tested by hammer-wielding workers. • The Lightning connector is so named because of its ability to produce the electrical charge needed through amplification (this is why the iPad Mini doesn't need the larger charger). • The Lightning connector is so carefully designed that data transfer and electrical charging rates actually accelerate as it is used in a given sitting. • The Lightning connector specification originally, before finalization, called for the central part with the data transfer pins on it to be made from, quote, "sanded-down frozen treat sticks." • The Lightning connector doesn't have to take any of your guff. • The Lightning connector is made from materials so rare that they actually have to be mined from the _air itself._ • The Lightning connector demands your fealty, and will systematically destroy one other cable per day from the drawer you keep it in until shown the proper respect. • The Lightning connector's favorite band is Van Halen, though it had a phase where it got really into Coldplay. • The Lightning connector donates a great deal each year to charitable causes, but insists upon only ever doing so anonymously. • The Lightning connector refuses to drink alcohol as a matter of principle, up to and including that used in cooking or cough medicine. • The Lightning connector once saved a frontier town from a group of bandits who would attack the farmers, and in doing so learned the true value of friendship. • The Lightning connector is only one or two stages away from getting a perfect 100-point score on every level of _Yoshi's Island_ for the SNES, and insists that one day it'll "get around to finishing that." • The Lightning connector is sneaking up quietly behind you. • The Lightning connector plug actually contains a processor that detects which side's pins are in use and routes data signals through them.

[g-r-a-g]

On Keynote wizardry.

# Or: how to hack Keynote builds to do even cooler stuff So for a while I found myself wanting to do things like actions DURING build-ins and the like. You know, things like simultaneous movement or scale along with the actual build-in animation. Keynote usually says it's impossible (sort of like making an object grow more than 200% as an action) but it turns out that there's a workaround (sort of like making an object grow more than 200% as an action).[^1] So here's how you do it: 1. Build in for your desired item with a cool animated build-in. 2. Build in for a dummy or other item of some sort that is faster (if you're using a dummy object, you can just set it to "appear" since that's fastest). This is set to "Automatically with Build 1." 3. Desired Action for your desired cool item. This should take long enough for the two to overlap to some degree. What is *crucial* is that you set this to "Automatically after Build 2." This is the hacky bit where you fool Keynote into thinking the original build in is already done. 4. [optional] If you want to do a build-out for your original item, you can do a "disappear" build-out for your dummy here, set to "Automatically with build 3" 5. In that case, put your build-out here for your original item, set to "Automatically after Build 4," though you'll probably want to put some sort of delay on it. You can figure this out. Have fun! [^1]: The secret to this is that you're going to need one of the gesture-supporting trackpads, and then you just keep on unpinching and unpinching for all you're worth until your object has reached whatever ungodly size you were aiming for. Just don't try to adjust it manually in the Inspector, or it'll just go straight back down to 200%.

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I'm not really much of an artist.

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I visited the Ikeda-cho Eco-Candle light-up last night. These are animated. Feel free to click to view them at full size (and also not as static images).

[g-r-a-g]

On Terrible Japanese Comedy Films.

The nicest thing I can say about the movie _Swing Girls_ is that it is not literally the worst movie I've ever seen, though it's pretty close.[^1] The second-nicest thing I can say is that the Japanese market Region 2 DVD contains English subtitles, though unfortunately that robbed me of the excuse that I was simply not familiar enough with their accent when the movie turned out to make virtually no sense at all.[^5] Everyone is constantly a terrible human being to everyone else, in the fashion of a 1990s sitcom. There are no actual characters; there are only lazy-Japanese-writer stock high school caricatures and clichés. Virtually nothing happens for any reason at all other than "because the script calls for it to," and a number of storylines are simply abandoned outright, presumably because the scriptwriter simply forgot about them. It is a movie that utterly lacks denouement, with credits rolling literally at the climactic scene. It is a movie where a group of girls appear to learn how to play musical instruments primarily by *clapping.* Imagine fairly unexperienced college students writing and putting on a stage play, except with cameras, if you want an idea of the level of quality we're talking about.[^4] Most of the alleged comedy appears to be intended to come largely from "they're from up north, so they talk funny," with no actual *humor* involved (with perhaps two major exceptions: one being reasonably well delivered with actual comic timing, the other being physical comedy so unimaginably inept that I had to rewind the movie simply to see it again[^3]). Most of the time, everyone just says horrible things at everyone else, including strangers, and we are supposed to laugh at this for some unfathomable reason. Even the much-vaunted soundtrack was a massive disappointment, with there being precious little actual big band jazz played during the movie (despite the name and premise). I could only recommend this movie to someone for one of two reasons: 1. "It is the second piece of pop culture to contain the song 'Mexican Flyer,' and explicitly references the first."[^2] 2. "It is a movie so unthinkably bad that you absolutely must see it for yourself, because it's often hilarious but never for the right reasons." If I were to sum it up in a sentence, I would probably describe it as something like "*School of Rock*, except bad in every possible way." It is up to you to decide whether that sounds like a good way to spend 100 consecutive minutes. As for me, it is a movie that was so unremittingly awful that even now, a full day after watching it, I am still thinking about it constantly. [^1]: That dubious honor would probably have to go to *Spider-Man 3,* a movie so aggressively mediocre that even RiffTrax couldn't render it possible to slog through. [^2]: "Mexican Flyer" is perhaps now better known as "the theme song from *Space Channel 5*." [^3]: The latter, if you're keeping score, is the scene with the Stock Fatty Who Is A Fatty And Has No Other Personality Traits eating ice cream on a hillside for no reason, when a bicyclist slams on his brakes after going behind her, for no reason, and then the rear end of the bike jumps up for no reason, and then *everything else for no reason*. There is literally no reason for the scene. *Literally no reason.* Needless to say, this was probably my favorite part of the movie. [^4]: The movie had a total budget of ¥500,000,000, or about $5,000,000 at the time. This is perfectly all right, because it's not like throwing more money at it would have made the writing any better. [^5]: The third-nicest thing I can say about it is that GEO only wanted ¥80 for the rental.

[g-r-a-g]

Unsure if this works better as a series of thumbnails where you click through to see the "facts," or the other way round. Either way: delightful!

Today over on Twitter I presented many facts about owls. I hope you find them informative (click the images to see the respective facts).

[g-r-a-g]

The Tragedy of the Hardcore

As someone who is fairly infamous for being outspoken about things he's fond of, I've gotten a reputation as someone to consult when interested in buying something that I myself am interested in,[^1] and that seems to have worked out pretty well for those who have done so overall. Looking into a new computer? Unless you make money by using your computer, the MacBook Air is almost certainly right for you![^2] You know, that sort of stuff. There are, however, some situations where the advice that I, myself, would give to others conflicts with the decisions I've made. In some cases, it's simply 20/20 hindsight, especially when comparing past options with present options.[^3] The more difficult situations to rectify dissonance with come when I'd give advice to someone getting into a field, fresh, that I'm familiar with and just *ever so hardcore.* It is for this reason, for example, that as much as I adore my Canon 7D, I'd never recommend that anyone just getting into photography even really consider going with Canon, nor Nikon for that matter. I'd at least _strongly suggest_ that they give Panasonic and Olympus's Micro Four Thirds mount offerings a very solid look, because they're well enough designed that I've found myself at times tempted to switch over. I generally find myself telling myself, "if only they just offered that _one lens_ you want, *then* it's worth considering making the switch," but I know deep down that I'll probably just stick with what I've got and am familiar with. The main benefits involve being smaller and lighter, and the 7D hasn't caused any permanent damage to my body yet. But really, that's just another case of past vs. current options. There's also the matter of learning how to distinguish personal preference from objective superiority. A while back, I picked up and became very fond indeed of a Kyocera ceramic knife, and I couldn't be a bigger fan. That said, it's also not something that I'd ever actually recommend to someone nowadays who doesn't know enough about cooking to have independently considered it at some point. I'd be much more likely to recommend, say, something (everything?) made by MAC Knives,[^4] because they're just objectively *better* in many regards. They're incredibly good all-rounder knives; what I like about my ceramic knife is that it _isn't_ an all-rounder, but is instead skewed dramatically toward sharpness, hardness, and lightness. Unlike the camera and computer examples before, this is one case of diverging preference and recommendation that I have absolutely no regrets about; I'd even expect, in the future, that I would probably wind up owning another MAC knife or two, but still keep the ceramic knife around for what it's good for. One other particular interestingly difficult situation to make recommendations about, as it turns out, is when people say they're interested in getting into fighting games (i.e. *Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Marvel vs. Capcom,* and the like) and ask for a good place to start. As big a fan of *3rd Strike: Street Fighter III* as I am, I would never recommend it to anyone who isn't already fairly hardcore, because it's just a brutally competitive game, and the competition is generally only getting stronger. As a result, I find myself having to make the sort of recommendations that I myself don't follow. Of course, this is partially circumvented by the fact that there is now the card game *Yomi*, which so brilliantly boils down essentially to "enjoy dealing with the mindgames and opponent-prediction of fighting games, but without having to worry about any reflexes or execution skills whatsoever." I suppose I need to start making more recommendations of that game to more people, so I get more chances to play it. [^1]: Interestingly, I would argue that, despite what I've heard a number of people say in so many words, someone who used to work selling a given product probably *isn't* a better source of advice overall, because they're more familiar with the techniques of *getting others to buy* the products, rather than necessarily being intimately familiar with *using them themselves.* By no means is this meant to be a comprehensive discrediting of salespeople, both former and current, as a source of advice, but the advice you're likely to get is at least liable to contain some degree of upselling bias. [^2]: Unless, of course, an iPad would be even *more* "right for you," as is very demonstrably the case for both of my parents and my grandmother. [^3]: I own a 13" MacBook Pro, the Most Useless Mac™. More money than the white plastic MacBook available at the time, but same specs outside of being 10% lighter and having an SD card reader built in, which I *can't even take advantage of* because my camera uses CompactFlash cards. I'm not really sure what I was thinking anymore, because I frankly should have either gone with the 15" model or the regular plastic MacBook. *C'est la vie.* [^4]: My bias toward recommending their products has nothing to do with the name, despite how obviously it may appear at times that I derive all, or nearly all, of my self-worth from Apple products.

[g-r-a-g]

On iOS 6 security.

I've yet to see this written up anywhere on the internet, so I figure I may as well make a note of it. If you're using iOS 6 on an iPhone 4S (or, presumably, 5, because this involves Siri), then you may be aware of the newly added Find My Friends integration with Siri. However, I seem to have discovered an interesting and moderately (though not severely) concerning bug that allows a degree of privacy circumvention by circumventing the need to actually type in a password in order to see your friends' locations: 1. If you're set up with no passcode to unlock your phone, Find My Friends requires a password entry each time you start it up. If you try to ask Siri, say, "Where are my friends?" or "Where's such-and-such," it'll tell you that it can't search for them because you aren't logged into Find My Friends. 2. From the fact that FMF is 100% opt-in for tracking, we can assume that this is just because Apple wants to protect the privacy of your friends, should someone else grab your phone and want to take a look (or, perhaps, something more dangerously private, be it political or amorous in nature). As a result, Siri requires that you log in to FMF from the app itself in order to answer questions about people's whereabouts. This renders that feature sort of useless, frankly. 3. It turns out there's an exploit to get around this limitation, and it's absolutely trivial both to do on iOS 6.0.0 and, presumably, to fix in 6.0.1. On your passcode-less iPhone, go into the Settings an enable any sort of passcode in there, *without logging into FMF first.* It can safely be the four-digit simple passcode once every four hours, just so long as you're enabling some sort of unlock protection on your phone. The important thing to note, here, is that this is something that can easily be done by someone who has access to a dropped or borrowed phone. 4. Simply by enabling any sort of unlock password/passcode, Siri suddenly considers you to have logged into Find My Friends, and will gladly answer questions about your friends' whereabouts that seconds before it would not, *without your ever having to actually log in to the service.* While you can't actually get into the app itself without typing a password at least the first time you run it with a passcode on, you can still pull up fairly detailed maps of your friends' whereabouts without any password. This could almost certainly be trivially fixed in 6.0.1 by having Siri actually check your logged-in-or-not status in Find My Friends, rather than simply assuming you are the moment an unlock passcode is enabled. For the time being, though, this is something to either be aware of (in case you find it a tremendous pain to repeatedly log in to Find My Friends) or to be very careful about (in case you have permission to track anyone whose location could be sensitive information if your phone fell into the wrong hands).