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And now it’s time for me to go to work.

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For the rest of December, I will be releasing sporadically instead of on Mondays.

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Turkey day bonus because the holiday gave me some time off.

I have four days of PTO that I can either use by the end of the year, or carry over into next year. I’m not sure if I should be trying to turn Christmas into a weeklong vacation, or if I should be distributing them over the course of now -> March.

The last of my new computer’s parts should be arriving tomorrow. Time to see if anything was DOA.

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A full week later, and I’m still salty about Pokemon. In fact, I think I’m feeling even saltier.

I guess I’ll just go back to playing RDR2 while keeping an eye on black friday sales, mostly since my current set up doesn’t let me run the game on ultra. I know the 2080 Ti won’t drop in price, but I’m crossing my fingers and hoping it does.

The TL rant(s) that I mentioned last month are now a WIP. I’ve constructed a list of things I want to tackle and left it below. Feel free to suggest additional topics in the case that you want to see something specific covered.

Topic List

• The Goal of Translation
  • Aka: Novels should not sound like they’ve been translated
• Novel Translation vs Document Translation
• Pitfall: Literal Translation
• Pitfall: Honorifics Are Meaningless
• The Do’s and Don’ts of Localization
• Conveying Intent and Nuance
• Portrayal of Tropes
• Invalid Stylistic Choices
  • Includes commentary on writing styles
  • Includes case study on “So I’m a Spider, So What?” (Probably a separate article.)
• Case Study on some of JNC’s titles. (Many of these are extremely well done, but some others, not so much. This mini-series would likely dive into both.)
• Case Study on Overlord (Yen Press Version)
• Ideal Workflow and Pipeline

Is it just me, or is this is starting to sound more like a textbook than a series of rants? In that case, the case studies may work better as something within a relevant chapter. Hmm…

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New Pokemon games are shit. I’m so tired of literally everything about them that I’m not even going to post a real rant. Just a quick tl;dr.

Why the hell would they remove most of the stuff in the mid-high power tiers and then focus their additions on the two ends? Hidden Power is gone now too, so rip bolt-beam coverage for most electric types. I guess they’ve got no choice but to just be sad now.

Every excuse they made about not putting in all the mons was pure BS. The music is absolutely terrible and the game poses no challenge whatsoever other than some early game shenanigans in the wild zone that you can easily avoid. Most of the popular things were cut, and I feel like the monster designs are getting worse every gen. The detail that does exist went into all the wrong places.

Hop and Leon are the most annoying characters I’ve seen in a while, and I wish I could feed both of them to my brain-damaged rabbit.

I can see how a child or someone that hasn’t really been exposed to an excess of Pokemon could enjoy these games (music aside), and I’ll at least give them that. Maybe cynical adults just aren’t their target audience anymore.

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Red Dead Online on PC is fun. I’ve already maxed out my Collector rank. Trader is next.

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Food poisoning is “fun.”

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The Outer Worlds is actually a good game. It’s also a big fuck you to the face to Bethesda.

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I think the “E” button on my keyboard is starting to break. It’s dropping inputs every once in a while, which is really annoying when I’m playing a MOBA. Kind of need my QWER for that.

Speaking of games, I decided to get Little Town Hero on Friday. I already regret my decision.

Battles take way too long and aren’t even the slightest bit exciting. It honestly feels like I’m playing a shitty, drawn-out version of Hearthstone without the whole PvP aspect. Not exactly the type of game I’d call entertaining. If that wasn’t bad enough, the music is dreadful. Just last week, I was thinking that nothing could possibly be worse than Dragon Quest 11’s soundtrack. I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

I don’t really want to go back to playing NG+ in Fire Emblem Three Houses with all its terrible level up RNG, which really shouldn’t be a mechanic in the first place. Seriously. They really need to actually scale enemies properly instead of relying on bad level-ups to make the game more difficult. I’m assuming that gameplay is supposed to be what the game is selling itself with, because the story is god awful and about as deep as a kiddy pool. “Oh look, suddenly an extra enemy out of nowhere to extend the game.” “Oh look, suddenly this person that has been your ally the whole game suddenly isn’t anymore just to give the game literally one more chapter!” To add insult to injury, even most of the waifu CGs at the end of the game suck.

Okay, that’s enough ranting for one day. I swear that I end up saying nothing but negative things about games lately. I’m not sure if I’m getting old and cranky, or if the games in question are actually just bad anymore. Probably both. Well, at least I can get RDR2 on PC next month.

I’m contemplating starting a series of rants on how translation differs from simply understanding a second language and regurgitating what you read. I’m not really sure if I want to go through with it though, as it’d probably just end up coming out as another mountain of salt.