Here is the complete lineup of Deans. That’s 34 Deans presented in chronological order!
This is gong to be one of the pieces on display at PixelDrip’s Six Seasons and a Movie art show happening in LA June 23-24!
Starting today I’ll be taking preorders on a poster print of the image above.
It’s a 36 x 24 poster on 100lb glossy cover stock for $40
You can purchase it among other prints at my Big Cartel shop:
http://dennisculver.bigcartel.com/Posters will ship the week of June 18th. Preorders will help me determine the production run so please spread the word!
Source: dennisculver
Leap Motion, essentially Kinect on steroids?
I’m just ridiculously curious about the potential of this thing. I can’t imagine it’ll become a standard item unless a major company buys them and starts building them into computers or something, but the possibilities for very specific applications are ridiculous, even if you consider that it can only look directly above itself in a sort of plane — the idea of a surgeon using it to manipulate 3D medical models or charts without touching anything (and thus needing to re-sanitize) alone is worth this technology existing, regardless of anything you might be able to do with it in an everyday “civilian” context.
"Creating the Windows 8 User Experience"
It is with absolutely no irony that I say that I’m legitimately and authentically interested in the direction Microsoft is going with Windows 8 and the newly overhauled interface. The candidness of the developers’ blogs when they write about the process involved is great, too.
I mean, I’m unlikely to wind up switching back to Windows in the end, but it’s still really great seeing a legitimately original approach to a UI from Microsoft for what is arguably their first time.1
Of course, the UI designs and ideas in Windows Phone are really cool and impressive as well, so it’ll be interesting to see whether Microsoft stands a chance in this crazy new computer market where Google is now the new Microsoft2 and Apple is still Apple. Would certainly be nice to at least see worthwhile competition in the iPad market, though.
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You could perhaps argue that pre-95 Windows was at least reasonably original, but Windows 95 was the first Windows to be designed to be booted into for full-time use, and Windows 95 was a pretty direct cloning of most interface elements of the older Mac OS, with minor changes like icons being shifted to the left edge instead of the right edge of the desktop, and all the disk drives being lumped inside the “My Computer” icon instead of showing up on the desktop directly. Skip ahead to Windows 7, even, and you find that the Exciting New Taskbar is literally just the Mac OS dock with the serial numbers filed off. It’s kind of incredible, actually. ↩
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Well, somebody has to copy Apple’s UI designs, right? ↩
On further untranslatable Japanese nuance.
Coming hot on the heels of a previous bit about untranslatable fun things you can do with Japanese, it’s about time to try to delve deeper into the sort of thing you can only do in Japanese and is, as such, completely untranslatable into English, no matter how you try.
First off, while it seems to be low-hanging fruit, the extremely pronounced differences between masculine and feminine speech in Japanese are way beyond the scope of anything I’d be planning to write, and move into matters of not just vocabulary (up to and including first-person pronouns, themselves already another deeply complex topic) but even sentence structure and usage. If you’re really interested in this sort of thing, but you’re okay with a more academic approach, I really recommend checking out Haruhiko Kindaichi’s The Japanese Language sometime. It’s a fairly interesting, if comparatively dry, read on the sorts of thing that these essays have been about.
So let’s just skip to the stuff that can be covered reasonably succinctly here. Since, you know, this is basically turning into a one-note blog about Japanese nuance and the like.
This is cooler than it should be.
Agloe, New York, the Fictional Town that Just Couldn’t Stay Fictional. Yes, it’s just a link to Wikipedia.
On epiphanies, minor.
I’ve finally cracked it. After all these years, I’ve finally worked out why it is that it feels so much better when the person at the barbershop and/or salon shampoos my hair than when I do it on my own, and it’s because when they do it at the barbershop, they use a lot more shampoo than I do (which is actually the less significant portion) and they use their fingertips, rather than their palms, the way I do.
I tried it tonight with my fingertips in the shower, and it felt as good as it should have.
If you’ve ever felt like the barbershop shampoos feel a lot better than when you wash your own hair at home, give this a try and see if it helps at all. I know it worked for me.
On comedy, alleged.
Q: How many McSweeny’s writers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Well, first of all, we absolutely have to establish that we have a light bulb. I seem to recall, in my formative years, that a light bulb was once a primary and defining feature of a room at times, and thus in changing it we could discover that it was not only the light bulb, but also ourselves, that we were changing. Especially the color, because sometimes the light bulbs weren’t quite the same shade of orangey white.
Q: Seriously, though. How many?
A: The question gnaws at my subconscious, as though there was a joke that I’d laughed at in a dream but now the setup and punch line are both forgotten, leaving me only with the vaguest notion of humor, experienced at a point in my past, but now only just tantalizingly out of reach, like a toilet paper roll mere inches beyond the radius of my arms’ length while seated.
Q: So is it, like, one? Five?
A: I don’t know. To hell with it. Am I up to a thousand words yet? I don’t know how much more I can pad this.
On Japanese names and wordplay.
Easily my favorite family name that I’ve ever been exposed to is Japanese’s Igarashi (五十嵐) because it is literally impossible to even try to invent a cooler last name than one that translates unambiguously to “fifty storms.”
Japanese has a lot of cool things that you can do with the language that are legitimately unique and difficult to translate.1 You’ll find lots of uncommon but cool last names if you meet enough people, from Tabakoya (煙草屋), translating essentially to “tobacconist” — take a wild guess what her ancestors did for a living! — to Wanibuchi (鰐淵), meaning basically “alligator depths,” to the more or less inexplicable Takehana (竹鼻), translating — again, unambiguously — to “bamboo nose.”2 There’s a huge amount you can do with names in Japanese that you simply couldn’t in English, if only because English names just plain don’t mean anything. And before you bust out your mead and cloak and tell me, “Oh, but Greg, your name ‘Gregory’ means ‘plower of chariots’ or ‘lion champion’ ” or some similar a-guy-on-the-internet-or-maybe-in-a-book-said-it researched bullroar, we’re talking about a language where a number of common and popular names are actual straight-up words, like Tsubasa (翼 — “wings”), Hikaru (光 or 晃 — “light”), or Tsutomu (勉 — a literary form of tsutomeru/つとめる, “to strive”).
As a result, it’s no surprise that, for example, you’ll see lots of clever wordplay with names in Japanese works. Basic puns are of course de rigueur,3 but there are probably two places that go to extents that are useful to show just how far you can go with Japanese writing in ways that are simply impossible in English.
The first, and altogether more complex, example is the character Cherry from Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura (うる星やつら).4 The character’s name is Cherry, yes, but it’s also written as the reading for his name as written in kanji,5 which is 錯乱坊 (pronounced sakurambo, which is the indigenous Japanese word for the fruit of the fruiting sakura cherry trees). The thing is, it gets REALLY confusing when you add in the fact that his name isn’t written with the kanji that mean “cherry,” but rather with kanji that mean, basically, “deranged monk” (which is a fairly apt description of the character, suggesting that, perhaps, Takahashi found her inspiration by working from a clever pun name and basing the character around this, rather than developing the character first).
The other example that leaps to mind is the original Japanese script of the — let’s be honest — unbelievably well-localized Phoenix Wright series. Looking at just the names of the characters, you have English names like “Winston Payne” (an ineffectual early rival), “April May,” “Redd White,” and “Lotta Hart.” Their names in the original Japanese, though, were actually really close to the puns they used in the English (again, hats off to the localization team). Winston’s name was 亜内, Auchi (based on the well-known-even-in-Japan English “ouch”), April’s name was 松竹 梅世 Shochiku Umeyo (based on Shochikubai/松竹梅, a sort of ranking or grading system), Redd was 小中 大 Konaka Masaru (the kanji for his name literally just say “small medium large”) and Lotta was 大沢木 Ohsawagi (meaning “a big commotion,” basically. She also speaks a lot, and with a thick Osaka accent, keeping with stereotypes of the city that are WAY BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THIS ALREADY FAR-TOO-LONG BLOG POST). Seriously, there is scarcely a single name in the franchise that isn’t some sort of wordplay in Japanese that’s difficult to translate (but, as we’ve seen in the English versions, still possible to substitute). Incidentally, I hear tell that the rather confusing nickname “Nick” that Maya uses for Phoenix Wright in the English version is meant to be a shortening of the second syllable of “Phoenix,” minus the “s” sound. Yeah, there’s a reason a lot of people seemed to have been confused by that.
At a later point in time, I plan on going into further detail about other tricks that basically require Japanese writing to be able to work beyond simply names. Look for that in about eleven months, given the exponentially-increasing lengths of time between legitimate updates on here.
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Yes, I am aware that I mocked mercilessly the sorts of people who gush about this sort of thing, probably on the internet, almost certainly with beards, but those people are still wrong because they are generally still trying to justify a preference for subtitles over dubbing, which still requires a translation of the Japanese into English, thus losing all of these things anyway because they simply can’t work in English in the first place. ↩
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These are all people I’ve met firsthand, although in the case of “Takehana” it was technically a maiden name that is no longer the name she goes by. ↩
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One example that comes to mind is an elementary-school informational comic-poster about proper nutrition or something that featured some stocky kid named Ohmori, or 大森, because it’s a reasonably normal name that sounds identical to 大盛り, meaning “large” in the sense of portion size when ordering. This kind of thing is so common as to be virtually not even worth mentioning. ↩
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Damn it, even the title of the comic is a pun that doesn’t work in English. “Urusei” is a common slurred pronunciation of “urusai,” meaning “noisy” or “annoying” or anything along those lines, but written the way it is in the title, it actually means “planet Uru,” meaning that the title of the comic, as written, means “guys from planet Uru,” but when said out loud, basically means “friggin’ JERKS.” ↩
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Kanji, or Chinese characters, can be a challenge at times, especially when using uncommon ones. They nearly all have at least two readings — one based on the indigenous Japanese word they correspond to, and one based on the dialect of Chinese they came from Back In The Day — and the former reading is literally impossible to guess unless you have some context and you’re feeling lucky (the latter can often be sussed out as an educated guess based on its components, but that reading is rarely used outside of multi-kanji compound words). As a result, sometimes the readings for kanji can be sticking points for readers, and so you’ll find the reading written real tiny either above (for horizontal writing) or to the right (for vertical writing). These are perhaps the foreign learner’s favorite crutch, and guiltiest indulgence, because it’s easier to just let your eye take the path of least resistance, much like reading the romanized town names on road signs. ↩
Really cheap Wacom-equivalent tablets!
If only I actually had a need for such a thing, given that I can’t don’t draw. Still, though, that is an OUTSTANDING value, especially given how good the reviews for it are. The fact that the 12”x9” drawing tablet is only $90 is INSANE.
“Categorization of baked goods (and pancakes) in English and Chinese” - from my blog ‘haonowshaokao’
-James
Isn’t language acquisition fun! Seriously, though, this stuff is fascinating.
Source: ilovecharts
Source: omocat
A somewhat different take on the thing we reblogged earlier, but it shows two very interesting things: First, Tumblr and Pinterest are timesucks in equal measure, and second, nobody’s actually hanging around Google+ once they sign up. The latter is the subject of this super-interesting Wall Street Journal piece. (EDIT: A good point: Don’t take that Twitter number at face value, as this graphic skips two key elements of the Twitter experience — mobile and third-party apps.)
So the average user spends nearly three times as much time on MySpace per month than Google+? Sounds about right from what I’ve seen with myself and virtually everyone I know.
(via ilovecharts)
Source: The Wall Street Journal
On the difficulty of explaining or translating Japanese comedy.
Leaving aside the really obvious tripping points like wordplay,1 Japanese comedy is difficult to translate largely because you’re working with a completely different set of cultural and pop cultural reference points. It’s sort of like how it’s harder for non-Americans to enjoy, say, The Simpsons (or especially something like Pete & Pete) nearly as much as natives do, because of the sheer number of pokes and prods and references to distinctly American things.2 On the other hand, the US shares a lot of cultural heritage with other countries, both in origins (the UK and Europe, with a lot of shared cultural heritage like Shakespeare and artists and wars and religion and all that) and in exports (mostly movies and TV shows, allowing the US to basically impose a very significant portion of worldwide pop culture essentially by fiat).
Japan, on the other hand, has a really insular sort of thing going on, because it’s an island country that speaks a linguistic isolate,3 and it has a really strong domestic entertainment industry comprising books, movies, music, and TV. With the exception of really over-the-top slapstick like Hard Gay (who is gone and largely forgotten nowadays), or really nichey guys like Game Center CX’s Shin’ya Arino,4 Japanese comedians don’t really get any foreign recognition because it’s really hard to translate jokes that require awareness of things that just don’t happen in other countries — you can’t very well expect Americans to understand a funny story about, say, preparing middle school lunch (which is done by the whole class, together, in the classroom, and eaten at the desks) without a bunch of explanation of the whole kyushoku concept for foreigners trying to follow along. You can’t make reference to Takahashi Meijin, spokesman for the video game company Hudson back in the day, and expect average people in any other country to know offhand that he was at least briefly famous for his record-setting ability to hit a button on a Famicom controller 16 times in a second.
Probably the most glaring example of this “comedy gap” in overseas exposure is Beat Takeshi, who is known as a comedian in Japan and as a movie director everywhere else. Imagine if Terry Gilliam were better known for Brazil than for Monty Python and you get an idea of what we’re up against here.
Interestingly, animated stuff in Japan tends to stay relatively non-topical in its humor, though there’s often a good bit of absurdity and silliness involved anyway (c.f. Nichijou/My Ordinary Life for a popular contemporary example). Live-action comedy, though, is a wholly different beast in Japan, with the American sitcom structure literally limited only to American imports.5 Most Japanese comedy shows are essentially panel-based and largely unscripted — these often revolve around riffing off of each other’s comments, and more generally involve telling stories or making funny comments on others’ than telling scripted jokes. They also often involve reference to famous people, whether politicians or entertainers, and virtually none of these people are known overseas.
In other words, Japanese comedy is hard to translate for the same reason that any other really specialized knowledge base tends to lead to difficult-to-explain inside-joke-based comedy: you need to know a lot going in, and the odds are that based on where you grew up and live now and your interests, you simply won’t share the same awareness and experiences that the audience can safely be expected to. It just happens to be a much bigger specialized-interest group than you’d generally have surrounding a specific hobby or interest.
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That’s going to be the case even for different dialects of the same language — the Melbourne-based TISM uses rhymes in their songs that simply wouldn’t rhyme in my native northeast US English, which can make singing along to them a bit of a challenge at times. ↩
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This is why Japan is basically the only market in the world that completely and utterly failed to “get” The Simpsons — they’re better known as characters used briefly to market a lemon soda or something than as an actual television show. Sort of like if they were known in America mostly as the characters from the Butterfinger commercials. ↩
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Yes, I know that Korean grammar is nearly identical, to an eerie and fascinating degree, but there’s still no actual evidence that Japanese has any languages related to it beyond a few now-minor languages down in the Ryukyu islands near Okinawa. ↩
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He’s kind of an interesting case, actually: he’s fairly well known as a comedian throughout Japan, but in a sort of “oh yeah, I remember that guy” way, but his current fame centers around Game Center CX, and he’s developed a following overseas for that show as well. GCCX is nominally about retro-gaming and the culture that surrounds it, but really, Arino is the show. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as entertaining with anyone less persistently good-natured about being kind of bad at what he’s trying to do. ↩
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Full House and Friends still retain some popularity in Japan, though dubbed over, and there’s a whole other treatise that could be written on the woeful utilitarianism of Japanese subtitles and dubs of English-language movies and TV shows, since they tend to go straight for the bare meanings of each utterance, with little regard for the “flavor” of slang or register. There’s so much intellectual wankery that goes on with people — mostly fans of Japanese animation, let’s not mince words — going on about losing the “flavor” and the nuance of the language that Japanese is so allegedly rich in (and to be fair, it is, in some regards), but it’s kind of disheartening to see an American movie with Japanese subtitles and see character-refining phrasings like “sounds swell to me” and “then let’s take that option” both rendered as essentially “yes, let’s” with no real concern given to how characters can often talk very differently. This laziness in translation may be part of why the domestic film and TV markets are so strong — perhaps people get this feeling that the dialogue in foreign films is “flat” and just don’t bother. ↩
My inner science geek is laughing like a maniac right now
FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING, WHY ISN’T THIS TAGGED SCIENCE?!
(via areasofmyexpertise)
Source: okaythatwasfunny
I like to think of myself as creative and insightful but deep down I secretly know that's not actually true.
