Moroha 諸刃

A few weeks ago we got a letter from Nielsen Media Research, the company that has done the TV ratings for almost 50 years here in the U.S. It said that they had randomly selected my household to participate in recording our TV viewing over the course of a week. Scanning the letter I got two other important pieces of information:
1.) They would call us in a few days to finalize the details (this is important because as soon as I hear the familiar [pause …. click] of a telemarketer’s call-routing computer I immediately hang up), and
2.) They would pay us $30 in advance to participate.

I figured, why not? So when they called a couple of days later I agreed to participate. All they wanted to know was our willingness to participate, verifying our home address, and how many TV’s we had in use in our home. A few days later we got a small package in the mail from Nielsen, and it contained a ‘TV diary‘ for each of our TV’s, a short letter asking us to call if we had any questions or concerns, and $30 in cash!

If I were a jerk I could have just pocketed the money and thrown away the diaries, but I had agreed to help so I held up on my end of the bargain. The diary has a grid that is broken into rows representing 15-minute increments of time, and the columns are for the channel number and name, program name, and then who in the household watched it. A pretty simple setup.

I kind of feel sorry for Nielsen though, because we really don’t watch that much TV. Overall there was more time logged on that TV watching Japanese children’s shows via VCR or DVD than there was watching broadcast TV. The only shows I remember watching were:
1.) How it’s Made on Discovery Channel (with Ryoko)
2.) Planet Earth on Discovery Channel (with Ryoko)
3.) The Saturday morning lineup on Cartoon Network, consisting of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Ben 10 Alien Force, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and Secret Saturdays (sorry, no Bakugan crap for this household, I like my 30-minute commercials for children’s toys to be a little less explicit). My two girls enjoy watching these shows with me on Saturday mornings, and it let’s me relive some nostalgia of my own youth. Karisa is absolutely awesome in that she says she really likes Star Wars and Batman (she obviously hasn’t internalized it though, since when she draws pictures for us it is inevitably the characters from Pretty Cure 5 that she draws).
4.) I happened to run across an episode of Gurren Lagann on Cartoon Network one evening (muted, as I can’t stand the low-quality US dubs).

Ryoko doesn’t watch much broadcast TV either, as all I recorded for her was:
1.) About 5 minutes of The Weather Channel every morning to check the daily forecast,
2.) Half an episode of Alton Brown’s Good Eats on The Food Network, and
3.) For some inexplicable reason she watched 15 minutes of ‘Dancing With the Stars’ on Fox. This I found really strange since we never watch the major networks, when I channel surf I start at the top and go down, and stop around 34 which is National Geographic Channel. I know the major networks 95% of the time have nothing but reality show crap and inane dramas in the evenings, so years ago I stopped even flipping past them.

Besides videos on the VCR and DVD and what they watched with me, the only shows we logged for the girls were Curious George and Clifford, both early morning on PBS, and they only happened to be able to watch those because it was spring break last week.

So I think Nielsen is going to get some really strange statistics off of us, but I do enjoy the feeling that watching the shows I like (and not watching the ones I don’t) may contribute a small part in keeping them on the air. We’ll see though. The last time I enjoyed a show enough that I was actually willing to work my schedule around it in order to watch it was Firefly, and we all know how that turned out.

Back when I was a freshman in college, my roommate and I would often spend the entire day on Saturday playing X-COM and its sequel X-COM: Terror from the Deep. The premise is fairly simple, alien invaders of some kind have begun invading the earth, but on a small and fairly covert scale. To combat the threat, the powerful world governments have created a covert international strike force called (e)X(traterrestrial) COM(bat unit). It’s essentially a turn-based strategy game, where the units are actual individual soldiers rather than units or armies, which is more typical of turn-based strategy games. Also, it is just about the hardest frikkin game in the entire world. What makes it so hard is due to the complex nature of the strategy and battle. 1) The aliens you are fighting have superior technology from the get-go. That means they have weapons with better accuracy, range, and damage. 2) The worse you do on your missions, the less funding you get, so if you do badly it quickly becomes an irrecoverable death spiral. 3) The only way to improve your equipment is to capture alien specimens and technology intact, reverse-engineer them with your science staff, and then produce the new equipment. This all costs a lot of money. And since you’re trying to capture aliens and their artifacts intact, your battles are at an even larger disadvantage because the aliens don’t care if they kill and destroy everything, so they always throw grenades and rockets all over the place while you’re stuck with stun guns, stun grenades, cattle prods most of the time. You do have access to heavier firepower if you want/need it, but you recover less artifacts and specimens if you use it.

So I stumbled across this site yesterday called Let’s Play. Basically it has walkthroughs of all sorts of older computer games, but unlike most walkthrough sites (i.e. gamefaqs) it is mostly screenshots with minimal text. It’s a very interesting style and it makes the walkthrough more of a comic book-style narrative as opposed to just a list of necessary steps in order to beat a game.

Along this thought, the author for the X-COM walkthrough said the following:

X-COM (eXtraterrestrial COMbat unit) is a simple game with almost no plot – There are aliens invading earth, you don’t know why yet, you kill them, take their stuff and then kill them better. Battle sequences are done the way it’s supposed to be – turn based – None of this real time nonsense that every game nowadays has.

The lack of plot is just asking for someone to come along and write their own little story about it. I’ve already done that to the second sequel, X-COM Apocalypse. That thread can be viewed in the LP archive or the SA Goldmine.

I won’t be directly explaining the game mechanics for people who haven’t played before, but you can infer some help with my strategies and tactics as I write them in-character. I can however direct you to a download link somewhere. This really is a great game and has a very small learning curve. If you do have any questions about the game, post in the thread, everyone loves coming into these things and trading tactics, strategies and war stories.

And so the story starts here. It’s quite an interesting way to present a story, and I think it’s done quite well. Evidently when he first did this it was on a forums for Something Awful, and other people could include their characters into the write-up, so it became almost a role-playing game. The author would include the other character’s names into his roster of soldiers, and then the other people would write up their soldier’s point of view to what happened in each mission. If you have time, I recommend reading through it. I’m finding it quite entertaining.

Or even better, download a copy of the game and play it! It’s old abandonware now, so it’s easy to find and no one cares if you do. The two links above in the quote are perfect places to find it.

For the three of you that read this blog (considering I generally update it about monthly), you may remember my posts in the distant past about founding your own martial arts style here and here. Well, that second post still gets a new comment every once in a while, and the most recent comment is this:

# Master Van Says:
November 28th, 2008 at 6:59 pm e

i have a new style of martial art that im working on am i supposed to register it somewhere to be accepted or can i start teaching people?

First of all, this question seemed like it might be a dupe or something. It seems overly simplistic, and if it is legitimate, why would he be asking me of all people? So as a small experiment, I tried a google search for How to Start Your Own Martial Arts Style. Lo and behold, the very same blog post that this comment was posted on was the very first hit. Well, I never thought anything on Moroha would ever be the first hit on google on anything. I suppose the question could be legitimate.

The wordpress software that runs this thing also records the IP address that the connection came from. A quick search revealed that it was from Costa Mesa, CA, part of the greater LA area. That doesn’t instill me with a whole lot of confidence that it’s legit, but it isn’t inflammatory or trollish, so I figured I would go ahead and answer it. Here’s what I said (the link is to the actual comment I posted, I copied and pasted it below for your viewing pleasure and to pad my blog entry):

Well, assuming this is a legitimate question and not a dupe or some such, here goes:

First of all, I would be careful calling your style a new art right off. If you’re to the point where you feel you can open a dojo and teach people professionally, you should have at least 20 years or so experience in regular and intense martial arts training. That would probably mean you are 4th dan or higher if you’ve been practicing the same art the whole time, or maybe 3rd dan or less in more than style.

I’m going to assume that what you are teaching is a mixture of what martial arts you’ve studied over the past decades, with your personal interpretation on application and usage of what you’ve learned. That’s pretty much what every martial artist does, so that’s fine.

However if you start right off calling your art some new name that no one has heard of, you are going to have a big problem with credibility. My suggestion would be to keep your affiliation with at least one of your parent styles and first build up your dojo. For example, if my art were Aikido but I had also studied a fair amount of Kung Fu and Tae Kwon Do, I would advertise my dojo as an Aikido Dojo and maintain my affiliation with the Aikido Association. I would then point out in class that I had also had a lot of training in other styles and that I incorporate a lot of that into my Aikido technique. Perhaps on the side I might also teach Tae Kwon Do or Kung Fu classes, but I wouldn’t necessarily maintian a formal affiliation with them (this is because a ‘formal’ relationship to a martial arts style inevitably requires a financial obligation, and I wouldn’t want to be paying dues to multiple organizations).

After my dojo is well established and I have a regular and loyal crop of students, then I might start thinking about ‘going it alone’. This is generally done for financial reasons, as it allows me to keep more of my monthly profit without having to send a cut back to headquarters.

Even then though, I don’t know if I would ever really start calling my style something unique and original. Probably the best thing to do would be to advertise yourself as a sub-style; i.e. Gracie Ju-jutsu, Seidokan Aikido, Shotokan Karate, etc. I think the last person that got away with naming their art a completely new style was Ueshiba with Aikido (You might include Bruce Lee with Jeet Kun Do, but I feel he died too early to really establish his martial arts well).

I also wouldn’t start calling myself Master, Grand Master, or some such because I feel that these are titles that are bestowed upon teachers by either their students or by the martial arts community in general in recognition of their skill and mastery. You might hold a rank of ‘master’ in a reputable style, but that would be about it I think. Otherwise stick with Sensei, Sifu, or just ’sir’.

A couple of years ago I made a post about making Japanese subtitles for the the 1978 British cartoon Watership Down, based on the book by Richard Adams. Back then I had actually finished 3/4 of it when I made a mistake backing up my work and accidentally deleted the whole thing. I was really ticked off, since I had just lost several weeks worth of work. I was so frustrated with myself that I ended up giving up on the whole thing.

Just a few days ago though, I was going through some old files of mine on my computer at school and found a backup copy! I was ecstatic and decided to finish the subtitles. Some interesting parts:

I mentioned Cowslips gothic poetry in the last post, here is my translation.

谷川よ、どこへいく？
遠くへ、遠くへ。
谷川よ、連れて行ってくだされ。
暗い旅に連れて。
主フリースよ、光の心へ連れてくださらん。
沈黙よ、意気を下す。
命よ。沈黙よ。

There is also one scene that I cannot figure out what to do for the life of me. It’s towards the end when Hazel is running to try his desperate plan to save his warren from the General Woundwort. As he’s running, he says a prayer to Lord Frith:

Hazel: Lord Frith, I know you’ve looked after us well, and it’s wrong to ask even more of you. But my people are in terrible danger, and so I would like to make a bargain with you. My life in return for theirs.
Frith: There is not a day or night that a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla, his life for his chief. But there is no bargain: what is, is what must be.

I cannot figure out for the life of me what Frith is really saying here. How I’m interpreting the rhetoric just doesn’t make sense. Is he saying that mother deer don’t sacrifice their life for their young and that honest captains of Owsla don’t sacrifice their life for their chief? That doesn’t make any sense at all. Or could the sentence be interpreted to mean the opposite of that? Which one makes more sense given that Frith tells Holly there will be no bargain? I’m not sure.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in checking out the whole translation, I’ve zipped both the English and Japanese subtitle files here. In order to view both files at the same time, I would suggest using Subtitle Workshop. It’s freeware (but Windows only I think, however there are similar programs for viewing and editing subtitle files on other platforms) so there’s nothing to worry about downloading and using it. Be sure to set the Japanese subtitle file to ShiftJS encoding or you won’t be able to see the Japanese.

As a final treat, here’s a screenshot to remind you why Watership Down is not for kids (click for full-size goodness):

I ran across this flash game while I was killing some time during lunch. It’s quite addictive (and frustrating), and really appeals to the engineer in me. What I really like about it is the open-ended nature of it. There are only five building tools, and other than that you can do whatever you like to solve each puzzle. It’s not like most puzzle games where you have to work out the one and only one meticulous solution that the creator had in mind. Still, I can’t get past puzzle 16: Awash. If someone else figure it out, let me know.

Also, if you’re like me and want to play it full-screen, you can do it with this link here.

Update: I beat #16. You can see the machine I built here.