Saturday, December 26, 2009
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Proofreading a legend
Today I bought the Classic NES Series version of Legend of Zelda, and I am welcoming the almost impossible challenge. If you needed any proof that gamers in the 80s are more skilled than we are today, just insert this cartridge into your Game Boy Advance.
I did notice something, though, that was different. If you refrain from pressing the Start button at the title screen, the game proceeds to tell you about the "Legend of Zelda". It's a short legend whose gist is as follows: the prince of darkness steals the Triforce of Power; Princess Zelda, hoping to keep him from getting the other Triforce (of Wisdom), shatters it into 8 pieces, and is herself captured; and Link, the controllable character, must reassemble the Triforce and defeat the prince to save the princess. Sounds easy, right?
Well, when I first saw this game played (on an NES emulator), the text went like this:
When I fired up my Classic NES Series GBA cart and looked at the same text, this is what I saw:
Here are images of the Original Legend, and afterwards the Classic (Revised) Legend.
Different! Obviously, there were obvious flaws in the original text--the name of the prince of darkness has changed from "Gannon" (a spelling that never caught on) to "Ganon", the grammar was much improved, and the idiosyncratic quote marks were removed.
However, upon some reflection, I decided that the "revision" was not perfect. The most radical change in the new revision is the loss of urgency of the message. The original message says to "Go find" the 8 units, Link, to save her, but the revision just says that we "must find" the pieces. Also, I think the revision changed things that really didn't need changing. For example, it adds the detail that it was Ganon's minions who kidnapped Princess Zelda. This may or may not have been the intent of the original version (perhaps Ganon did it himself).
So, I decided what anyone with some proofreading experience and a couple of minutes of time would do: I created my own proofreads of the Legend. They are shown below.
The above was my first attempt. In this I tried to veer not too far off from the wording of the original legend, for example, keeping the words "units" and "divided" the same. I also sought to retain (and maybe even amp up a bit) the urgency by saying "Link! Find the 8 units" in this version.
This second proofread, instead of trying to keep the words of the original, tried to keep the spoken cadence, or rhythm, of the original. The pauses occur more naturally on this one, but I had to sacrifice absolute correctness to keep it in the 24-character line limit. For example, I had to say "breaking it in/8 pieces" instead of "into/8 pieces" which would have been more correct. I also commit the act that led me to denigrate the Classic rewording--I attributed the capturing (here Zelda was "taken") to Ganon's "forces". However, where my first attempt had lots of "holes"--unnecessarily large spaces in order to justify the text, the second attempt was more pleasantly dense.
What do you think? Could you do better? Hermeneutics on a short video game text--hey, so what? How else would you have spent your half an hour? ^_^ The rules are: 1) Don't change the story! 2) You have 10 24-character lines to work with (a total of 240 characters, or roughly one and a half SMS text messages), 3) it should look good with all caps. Submit your answers as comments.
Thanks for reading.
Song in my head: Augustana, "Sweet and Low".
I did notice something, though, that was different. If you refrain from pressing the Start button at the title screen, the game proceeds to tell you about the "Legend of Zelda". It's a short legend whose gist is as follows: the prince of darkness steals the Triforce of Power; Princess Zelda, hoping to keep him from getting the other Triforce (of Wisdom), shatters it into 8 pieces, and is herself captured; and Link, the controllable character, must reassemble the Triforce and defeat the prince to save the princess. Sounds easy, right?
Well, when I first saw this game played (on an NES emulator), the text went like this:
MANY YEARS AGO PRINCE
DARKNESS " GANNON" STOLE
ONE OF THE TRIFORCE WITH
POWER. PRINCESS ZELDA
HAD ONE OF THE TRIFORCE
WITH WISDOM. SHE DIVIDED
IT INTO" 8"UNITS TO HIDE
IT FROM " GANNON" BEFORE
SHE WAS CAPTURED.
GO FIND THE" 8"UNITS
" LINK" TO SAVE HER.
When I fired up my Classic NES Series GBA cart and looked at the same text, this is what I saw:
LONG AGO, GANON, PRINCE
OF DARKNESS, STOLE THE
TRIFORCE OF POWER.
PRINCESS ZELDA OF HYRULE
BROKE THE TRIFORCE OF
WISDOM INTO EIGHT PIECES
AND HID THEM FROM GANON
BEFORE SHE WAS KIDNAPPED
BY GANON'S MINIONS.
LINK, YOU MUST FIND THE
PIECES AND SAVE ZELDA.
Here are images of the Original Legend, and afterwards the Classic (Revised) Legend.
Different! Obviously, there were obvious flaws in the original text--the name of the prince of darkness has changed from "Gannon" (a spelling that never caught on) to "Ganon", the grammar was much improved, and the idiosyncratic quote marks were removed.
However, upon some reflection, I decided that the "revision" was not perfect. The most radical change in the new revision is the loss of urgency of the message. The original message says to "Go find" the 8 units, Link, to save her, but the revision just says that we "must find" the pieces. Also, I think the revision changed things that really didn't need changing. For example, it adds the detail that it was Ganon's minions who kidnapped Princess Zelda. This may or may not have been the intent of the original version (perhaps Ganon did it himself).
So, I decided what anyone with some proofreading experience and a couple of minutes of time would do: I created my own proofreads of the Legend. They are shown below.
LONG AGO, THE PRINCE OF
DARKNESS, GANON, STOLE
THE TRIFORCE OF POWER.
PRINCESS ZELDA DIVIDED
THE TRIFORCE OF WISDOM
INTO 8 UNITS TO HIDE IT
FROM GANON, BEFORE SHE
WAS CAPTURED.
LINK! FIND THE 8 UNITS
TO SAVE PRINCESS ZELDA
The above was my first attempt. In this I tried to veer not too far off from the wording of the original legend, for example, keeping the words "units" and "divided" the same. I also sought to retain (and maybe even amp up a bit) the urgency by saying "Link! Find the 8 units" in this version.
MANY YEARS AGO GANON THE
PRINCE OF DARKNESS STOLE
THE TRIFORCE OF POWER.
PRINCESS ZELDA HAD THE
TRIFORCE OF WISDOM. SHE
HID IT BY BREAKING IT IN
8 PIECES, BUT SHE WAS
TAKEN BY GANON'S FORCES.
FIND THE PIECES, LINK,
AND SAVE ZELDA.
This second proofread, instead of trying to keep the words of the original, tried to keep the spoken cadence, or rhythm, of the original. The pauses occur more naturally on this one, but I had to sacrifice absolute correctness to keep it in the 24-character line limit. For example, I had to say "breaking it in/8 pieces" instead of "into/8 pieces" which would have been more correct. I also commit the act that led me to denigrate the Classic rewording--I attributed the capturing (here Zelda was "taken") to Ganon's "forces". However, where my first attempt had lots of "holes"--unnecessarily large spaces in order to justify the text, the second attempt was more pleasantly dense.
What do you think? Could you do better? Hermeneutics on a short video game text--hey, so what? How else would you have spent your half an hour? ^_^ The rules are: 1) Don't change the story! 2) You have 10 24-character lines to work with (a total of 240 characters, or roughly one and a half SMS text messages), 3) it should look good with all caps. Submit your answers as comments.
Thanks for reading.
Song in my head: Augustana, "Sweet and Low".
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
In passing
Today, my Geocities site, and perhaps millions of others' Geocities sites, some of them maintained and others not, quietly passed into history. The directories were destroyed, and any Geocities link now redirects to an offer for Yahoo! hosting.
Thankfully I was able to mirror my two sites in time (as Yahoo! sent all Homesteaders a cautionary email) and the sites now reside in my personal web space. But what of the others? What about that Led Zeppelin tribute website someone built in 1999 in honor for the first time she heard "Kashmir" as a pirated MP3 on Winamp? What about that site owned by a socially awkward teenage boy, who, since everyone else did, tYpEd LiKe tHiS and listed his top three school crushes but had to give them pseudonyms? (And before you ask, no, I did not do this... ^_^) What about what must have been thousands of resumes, hundreds of cookbooks, guitar tab sites, collections of pictures of precocious dogs, family trees, FAQs, tutorials for obscure programs, and the like, whose owners have moved on to other things like Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, or who have forgotten that they even had a website on Geocities? All that information--all that knowledge--is gone.
It would be foolhardy to compare the demise of Geocities to that of the Library of Alexandria. But it was the same kind of loss. Supposedly the Library had knowledge about anything and everything the Western civilizations knew up to that point in time, but groups of individuals who were misguided in their ideology (OK, OK, some of them were Christians) felt that its status as a pagan temple trumped its containing precious human knowledge, and so felt the need to take it down.
Similarly, homesteaders were allowed to post whatever they wanted however they wanted on Geocities, so long as you knew HTML and were willing to type into a text box all day to get it. But with the rise of social networking sites, where people are forced into talking only about themselves (and not what they know, for instance, about matrix algebra or what the Eagles were really saying when you played "Hotel California" backwards), Yahoo! had a change of heart:
To me, the closing of Geocities is an end of an era. When I started my "online presence", I came upon pages upon pages of people who were desperately wanting to share what they knew about the world. Now, I'm not saying that the websites were perfect, either; this was a time in the thick of the Browser Wars, before usability guidelines were agreed upon, and so people used rainbow text colors, large animated GIFs, black backgrounds beneath dark blue text (not unreliable markers for goth/emo sites), marquees, website layouts that shrugged off the boundaries of your 800-by-600 screen, frames vs. no-frames, and so on. (And plus, it was never more true then than it ever was that you shouldn't believe everything you hear on the Internet.) But you got the sense that people cared about what they wrote down, and they wanted you to know also. These were the days of free websites, visible counters, webrings, email pals, and the like, where it was the web developers who decided what you learned about, and when we said web developers, we meant all of us. And perhaps sometimes we talked about ourselves.
But the new paradigm--the new ideology--is to share things about yourself. You are the most interesting person you know... why would you not want to write about it? So the Web of today is cleaner, easier to read, more usable for keeping in touch with friends and colleagues, and a whole lot easier to use.
Perhaps it was a trade-off. But at least in my book, we end up on the losing side.
Oh, well, there's still Angelfire. ^_^ (Wonder when these guys will close, too?)
Thanks for reading.
Song in my head: Owl City, "Fireflies". I'm gonna write a "Why I like this song" on this as soon as I have time. But I guess you won't see it on Geocities.
P.S. The title of this post links to my homestead
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Code/4023
As you can see, you get the nag prompt to join Yahoo! hosting. I told you they're all gone.
Thankfully I was able to mirror my two sites in time (as Yahoo! sent all Homesteaders a cautionary email) and the sites now reside in my personal web space. But what of the others? What about that Led Zeppelin tribute website someone built in 1999 in honor for the first time she heard "Kashmir" as a pirated MP3 on Winamp? What about that site owned by a socially awkward teenage boy, who, since everyone else did, tYpEd LiKe tHiS and listed his top three school crushes but had to give them pseudonyms? (And before you ask, no, I did not do this... ^_^) What about what must have been thousands of resumes, hundreds of cookbooks, guitar tab sites, collections of pictures of precocious dogs, family trees, FAQs, tutorials for obscure programs, and the like, whose owners have moved on to other things like Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, or who have forgotten that they even had a website on Geocities? All that information--all that knowledge--is gone.
It would be foolhardy to compare the demise of Geocities to that of the Library of Alexandria. But it was the same kind of loss. Supposedly the Library had knowledge about anything and everything the Western civilizations knew up to that point in time, but groups of individuals who were misguided in their ideology (OK, OK, some of them were Christians) felt that its status as a pagan temple trumped its containing precious human knowledge, and so felt the need to take it down.
Similarly, homesteaders were allowed to post whatever they wanted however they wanted on Geocities, so long as you knew HTML and were willing to type into a text box all day to get it. But with the rise of social networking sites, where people are forced into talking only about themselves (and not what they know, for instance, about matrix algebra or what the Eagles were really saying when you played "Hotel California" backwards), Yahoo! had a change of heart:
However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. Beginning on October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online — but we're excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests. —Why is Geocities closing?In short, if you want a "presence online" but are not self-centered, then you're going to have to buy webspace.
To me, the closing of Geocities is an end of an era. When I started my "online presence", I came upon pages upon pages of people who were desperately wanting to share what they knew about the world. Now, I'm not saying that the websites were perfect, either; this was a time in the thick of the Browser Wars, before usability guidelines were agreed upon, and so people used rainbow text colors, large animated GIFs, black backgrounds beneath dark blue text (not unreliable markers for goth/emo sites), marquees, website layouts that shrugged off the boundaries of your 800-by-600 screen, frames vs. no-frames, and so on. (And plus, it was never more true then than it ever was that you shouldn't believe everything you hear on the Internet.) But you got the sense that people cared about what they wrote down, and they wanted you to know also. These were the days of free websites, visible counters, webrings, email pals, and the like, where it was the web developers who decided what you learned about, and when we said web developers, we meant all of us. And perhaps sometimes we talked about ourselves.
But the new paradigm--the new ideology--is to share things about yourself. You are the most interesting person you know... why would you not want to write about it? So the Web of today is cleaner, easier to read, more usable for keeping in touch with friends and colleagues, and a whole lot easier to use.
Perhaps it was a trade-off. But at least in my book, we end up on the losing side.
Oh, well, there's still Angelfire. ^_^ (Wonder when these guys will close, too?)
Thanks for reading.
Song in my head: Owl City, "Fireflies". I'm gonna write a "Why I like this song" on this as soon as I have time. But I guess you won't see it on Geocities.
P.S. The title of this post links to my homestead
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Code/4023
As you can see, you get the nag prompt to join Yahoo! hosting. I told you they're all gone.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Island-bowling, Frame 2
I was looking at the weather channel on TV earlier, and two thoughts suddenly occurred to me:
- The blue color that stands in for the Pacific Ocean in these loops is a false color. I mean that when the infrared data comes from satellites (or however they get the cloud info), they actually don't perceive the seas as blue. That's a color added to the map to make it seem more realistic. In a way I've known this already, but somehow I was alerted to it the last time I looked at it.
- The image of typhoons barrelling westward toward the Marianas Islands looks like a frame of tenpins. This is why my new term for the typhoon season is "island-bowling".
Batten down the hatches, ladies and gentlemen. I'll see you all after the all-clear.
Song in my head: Jason DeRulo, "Whatcha Say".
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Septemberians bash
This is the first post I am typing from my newest computer, an MSI Wind U123 netbook that I got for myself on my birthday. I really thought that I would use my old laptop until I graduated, but the “k” key on it gave out on me a bit too early… ^_^ Is it just me, or does my new netbook just pounce on my old laptop in performance and price? I thought so until I realized that my old laptop is more than three and a half years old!
I am trying to throw a party for myself and all those who were born in the month of September. If this describes you and you are free this Friday, please call or text or email me so that I could give you directions or a map. The two hardest things to do for a party are:
- to get enough people to come
- to make enough provisions (food, drinks, etc.) for all those people
September seems to be a really popular month to be born. Well, amongst my friends, at least.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. You know you’re in Agana when you find yourself having to parallel-park. ^_^
Song in my head: Kings of Leon, “Use Somebody”. I don’t know for certain whether I already had this song in my head previously, but I wouldn’t care too much as it’s a pretty good song.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Day # 9131, or, The Time Traveler's Dilemma
Actually, it's already Day #9132... ^_^ But day 9131 turned out to be so eventful that I had no time to post over here! Anyway, perhaps the pictures will do the talking.
Today I watched The Time Traveler's Wife with my family, and I have to say that it is an interesting movie. My favorite part of the movie was anytime anyone said the words, "Everything's going to be all right" (or "OK" or any version thereof). Normally, when someone says this to someone else who is having a tough time, there is no way the first someone could really mean it. I mean, really mean it. Sure, I can tell it to someone close I've known for a long time and whose troubles I am well aware of, and even perhaps whose troubles I've encountered in my life in the past as well. But when it comes down to it, I have zero authority to say those words, because I myself do not know how things will turn out. In the movie, though, whenever someone said those words, that someone had some authority over the statement.
Before I went into the movie, I thought the main conflict within it was going to be a series of tensions between wanting to tell the truth and wanting to reassure the other. But it didn't turn out quite that way at all. What was especially interesting was that the first time in the movie we hear the words "Everything's going to be all right" it comes from the (future) wife, the non-time-traveler. She speaks the truth, of course, because she has already met the time-traveler, but the one she met was older (and obviously wiser and doing better for himself).
One of the humanizing realizations of the movie occurs when you realize that the time-traveler is not much better off than we are--although he can see his future, he can do nothing to change it. But this also is part of the rules of the literary game, because everyone--wisely--sooner or later catches on to this fact really quickly and turn their energies towards the small things that make each other's lives more... what's the word? Livable.
The movie ends up having a different kind of tension--the characters end up in a balancing act where they try to prepare each other for the many eventualities of life. In this environment, "Everything's going to be all right" ends up being true, no matter who says it. And, paradoxically, because of this moral of consoling each other in the small things, the movie ends up teaching us that it's OK to say those words to someone who is going through a tough time, even though you have absolutely no idea how things will actually turn out--as long as you are willing to be part of the solution.
It must be nice to hear from someone who actually knows that "everything's going to be all right." Even if that someone knows he or she is lying.
Thanks for reading.
Song in my head: Broken Social Circle, "Love Will Tear Us Apart". This is a cover of a Joy Division song that was the wedding reception formal dance in the movie. Sounds imo.
Today I watched The Time Traveler's Wife with my family, and I have to say that it is an interesting movie. My favorite part of the movie was anytime anyone said the words, "Everything's going to be all right" (or "OK" or any version thereof). Normally, when someone says this to someone else who is having a tough time, there is no way the first someone could really mean it. I mean, really mean it. Sure, I can tell it to someone close I've known for a long time and whose troubles I am well aware of, and even perhaps whose troubles I've encountered in my life in the past as well. But when it comes down to it, I have zero authority to say those words, because I myself do not know how things will turn out. In the movie, though, whenever someone said those words, that someone had some authority over the statement.
Before I went into the movie, I thought the main conflict within it was going to be a series of tensions between wanting to tell the truth and wanting to reassure the other. But it didn't turn out quite that way at all. What was especially interesting was that the first time in the movie we hear the words "Everything's going to be all right" it comes from the (future) wife, the non-time-traveler. She speaks the truth, of course, because she has already met the time-traveler, but the one she met was older (and obviously wiser and doing better for himself).
One of the humanizing realizations of the movie occurs when you realize that the time-traveler is not much better off than we are--although he can see his future, he can do nothing to change it. But this also is part of the rules of the literary game, because everyone--wisely--sooner or later catches on to this fact really quickly and turn their energies towards the small things that make each other's lives more... what's the word? Livable.
The movie ends up having a different kind of tension--the characters end up in a balancing act where they try to prepare each other for the many eventualities of life. In this environment, "Everything's going to be all right" ends up being true, no matter who says it. And, paradoxically, because of this moral of consoling each other in the small things, the movie ends up teaching us that it's OK to say those words to someone who is going through a tough time, even though you have absolutely no idea how things will actually turn out--as long as you are willing to be part of the solution.
It must be nice to hear from someone who actually knows that "everything's going to be all right." Even if that someone knows he or she is lying.
Thanks for reading.
Song in my head: Broken Social Circle, "Love Will Tear Us Apart". This is a cover of a Joy Division song that was the wedding reception formal dance in the movie. Sounds imo.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Wikipedia random walk, no. 2
Black pudding
Bubble and squeak
Hash (food)
Steak sauce
Full breakfast
Philology
Time immemorial
Immemorial nobility
Hidalgo
Jugging
Kipper
Solomon Gundy
Solomon Grundy
Roud Folk Song Index
Scarborough Fair
Sark
The Elfin Knight
Elf
Williams syndrome
Argininosuccinate lyase
Urea cycle
Song in my head: Simon and Garfunkel, "Scarborough Fair".
Bubble and squeak
Hash (food)
Steak sauce
Full breakfast
Philology
Time immemorial
Immemorial nobility
Hidalgo
Jugging
Kipper
Solomon Gundy
Solomon Grundy
Roud Folk Song Index
Scarborough Fair
Sark
The Elfin Knight
Elf
Williams syndrome
Argininosuccinate lyase
Urea cycle
Song in my head: Simon and Garfunkel, "Scarborough Fair".
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Sleeplessness
Lately I've been skipping out on sleep for spurious reasons. It might actually be detrimental to my concentration to the rest of the day (which has already happened last week, more than once). So why do I do it? I don't know. Sometimes I get this hard-to-fight feeling that I might miss something. Unfounded, of course, but so are most irrational feelings.
In other news I am getting better at jump rope, but my gait is still the same idiosyncratic skip-kick my sister pointed out to me the first time I tried it. At least I'm clearing the ground enough to let the rope slip through. Hopefully I'll get good enough to last through "Jesus Walks". ^_^
Thanks for reading.
This post was brought to you in part by Microsoft's On-Screen Keyboard, because the "k" key on my laptop has ceased to function. It's spurred me on to move up my decision to buy a netbook. ^_^ Perhaps it's a good thing; Echo (the laptop I am typing this on) has hung on with me for more than 3 years now, which I'm told is more than two lifetimes for this kind of laptop. Hopefully I can still get it fixed; if and when this happens I'm loading Ubuntu on this.
In other news I am getting better at jump rope, but my gait is still the same idiosyncratic skip-kick my sister pointed out to me the first time I tried it. At least I'm clearing the ground enough to let the rope slip through. Hopefully I'll get good enough to last through "Jesus Walks". ^_^
Thanks for reading.
This post was brought to you in part by Microsoft's On-Screen Keyboard, because the "k" key on my laptop has ceased to function. It's spurred me on to move up my decision to buy a netbook. ^_^ Perhaps it's a good thing; Echo (the laptop I am typing this on) has hung on with me for more than 3 years now, which I'm told is more than two lifetimes for this kind of laptop. Hopefully I can still get it fixed; if and when this happens I'm loading Ubuntu on this.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Skip rope
I bought myself jump rope today, and up until now it still sits there, waiting for me to put it to good use. (Or, in this case, sitting on my shoulder--like I'm wearing it as an aiguillette.) It smells a bit too much like plastic, but it seems usable. I will have to try using it after my post.
Thanks for reading.
Song in my head: Hotdog, "Bongga Ka Day".
Thanks for reading.
Song in my head: Hotdog, "Bongga Ka Day".
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