Aino Minako-chan

Question for work (and I am unfortunately not even kidding you, this is actually for work):

What anime, manga, or cosplay-related sites (informational or sales related) that are only available in Japanese would you like to see in English? (Or any similar sites that just have, say, an incomprehensible English HP would be fine, too.)

(No seriously, this is for work. Don't ask.)

Holy cow, I'm exhausted. The filming today took no time at all, but I still spent half of the day in either a car or train, so I chugged a very sugary latte in an attempt to wake up. (Note: Backfired big time. Caffeine is a total crap shoot with me: I'm either insanely wired for the next 6 hours, or I immediately want to curl into a ball and go to sleep. Guess what happened. >_<) Anyway, the video was pretty hysterical; it involved me 10 seconds of me pretending to take money from an ATM, and then getting into a tug-of-war fight with my co-worker Miokawa-san (dressed in all black and looking hysterically suspicious) over my bag. It was pretty awesome. After some debate over when I should shriek and how long we should wait until Miokawa-san started attacking, we got it done pretty much in one take, so I went back to work. (Well, I took the train for an hour and THEN got to work.) But luckily, I had plenty to keep me occupied! And with that, here are my three big video game news items (because good things come in threes):

1. Final Fantasy VII (PS3/PSP). They just brought this out on the Japanese Playstation Store, so I was able to download the game. Now I can play it on the go with my PSP (as I did today), or at home on my PS3 (note: FFVII on a large high-definition TV is HYSTERICALLY overkill; each pixel is like the size of my thumb). I played it during my long travel time today, so I just got Tifa in my team and we're about to go off to take down Tower 5. It's pretty darned awesome, and I'm totally excited to get further along so that I can just run around and level-slut on my commute. Good times!
   
2. Final Fantasy XIII. FFVII:AC comes out on Blu-ray on... Wednesday? Thursday? In any case, I've got a copy on reserve with the FFXIII demo, and I'm totally excited. It looks very very purdy and lots of fun and it's going to be pretty hysterical to play it back-to-back with FFVII. ^_^
   
3. Valkyria Chronicles. I had been interested in it when it first came out, and then I forgot about it, but recently I picked it up due to a recommendation from kinomakoto. And, well, I adore it. It's a turn-based RPG strategy game with surprisingly little actually strategy required (lol). Essentially all you need to do is accomplish your goal (normally a capture-the-flag type deal), but you're mainly graded on speed. You can get bonus points for killing leaders and tanks and getting aces and all that, but your main points come from your rank in the battle, and your rank seems to mainly depend on how fast you capture the flag. So while you have five classes of soldiers and a tank, essentially all you really need is about two good soldiers to carve a straight line through the enemies and get to the flag as quickly as possible. And to be entirely honest, plowing through the enemies while attacking like a mad-woman, completely ignoring defense, and focusing solely on the end goal is how I normally play strategy games, so this is a perfect match for me. Add in the beautiful artwork made to look like painting instead of CG and the somewhat hysterical storyline (as Mako-chan described it to me, "It's set in Gallia, a neutral country stuck between warring NotRussia/Germany and NotBritishEmpire. (By location, it would be Poland, but it acts like Switzerland and the people are Austrians. Large plotpoints center on Edelweiss.)"), I really love the game. Two thumbs up so far!
   

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In non-video game related entertainment news, johnabe dragged me to "Frost/Nixon" totally against my will, and would you believe it, it was an awesome movie. I thought it would be rather dry and dull, but instead it's suspenseful and exciting, and despite the fact that it's based on true history, you still spend the movie on the edge of your seat. "It's the final interview... will Frost get a leg up over Nixon!? I just don't KNOW!" It was suprisingly good. Recommended!

Apparently, I get to play "frightened businesswoman A" in a promotional video that we're shooting for someone's security camera product on Monday. I'll be pretending to take money out of an ATM, when Something Scary comes up behind me, and I scream in fright. Seriously. >_< SO HORRIFIC. I don't know know if there's some sort of "after" scene, in which I happily withdraw money from an ATM with said security camera; said scene would presumably involve me happily waving a stack of 10,000 yen bills in the air with glee. "No one can steal from me now that there's a SECURITY CAMERA!!"

I apparently forgot to mention this, but last month, I was kinda stressed from work and had a day off on Feb. 11th, so I decided to make red velvet cupcakes for Valentine's Day. I'm really not a domestic type, but I'm Virgo enough that things like cleaning and baking relax me. They were slight failures (I don't have a mixer, so the frosting ended up with small lumps of cream cheese that I couldn't quite smooth out, and I didn't put enough food coloring in (liquid food coloring is nearly impossible to find in Japan, so I just added powdered red color until the batter looked vaguely bloody), so I ended up making plain chocolate cupcakes instead of red velvet). Still, they turned out well. (I assume. I made ALMOST enough for everyone in the company, male and female, but I was two cupcakes short, so I rather apologetically informed my fellow translator Horinouchi-san that neither of us were getting cake. She didn't seem to mind, but I was honestly a big upset. lol)

Anyway, today (tomorrow, technically, but it's a Saturday) is White Day, so I ended up getting swag from the guys at the office: a bag of cookies, four small chocolates (from 2 different co-workers), a little box of 4 truffles, a little box of chocolates (which my co-worker hysterically hid in a work envelope in order to hide from prying eyes), and apparently some cake from the guys in the Engineering department. \(^o^)/ Hurray! I am the winner!



(No, actually to be entirely honest, it's pretty embarrassing. I wanted to bake because I was bored and stressed; Valentine's day was really just an excuse and a good way to make sure that I didn't scarf a sheet cake by myself. Next year, I'm pooling my money with the other women to buy chocolates. If I want to bake, I'll make sure to do it on a non-reciprical-gift-giving holiday.)

( ETA under the cut )

I love my job. I really do! I will not strangle anyone over the proofreading that I'm doing!!

Okay, so my boss is still sick and will (hopefully!) come back tomorrow, which means I was asked to do the last-minute proofreading of an instruction manual before it's delivered to the client. Final check? Fine with me. A little brush up here and there, I can finish it pretty easily.

It's normally cool, but here's the thing. This manual sucks. It's seriously horrible. First of all, the DTP is a horrible experience in eye-strain city, literally using (I checked) 5.5 pt font. That's right! It's a font so small that they don't even offer it as a default option on Word! Charts use an astounding 4.5 pt font. I'm reading this crap on 150% magnification and I'm getting eye strain. 16 pages of sheer printed hell.

And that's not even getting into the actual text. Even beyond the normal spelling, punctuation, or grammar errors, we had baffling errors like +24 V split into two lines after the plus sign (?), the word "short-circuit" hyphonated and split into two lines as "short-cir-cuit" (??), and an entire page where there weren't spaces after the periods at the ends of sentences (...Seriously!?). Plus, the text was apparently a mix of reused text from a previous manual, corrections from the US office, and new text from the Japan office, leading to paragraphs full of sentences like "You should make sure the external device" or "[The wires] is necessary to be grounded." I was seriously near tears trying to get through this thing, but since I figured there wasn't enough time, I tore through it in 2-1/2 hours (for 16 pages!!) and made the most necessary changes and tried not to feel total shame at the fact that the entire troubleshooting section was worded in terms of "You should XXX."

So anyway, the writer (editor/producer, really, since he didn't actually write anything) in charge of the job came over to check how I was doing, and I was only about 11 pages in at the time. Our conversation went like this:

Co-worker: Oh, you're doing it manually. I thought you'd just run a program, you know, perform a spell check and look for missing periods.
Minako-chan: Yeah, but... When is it due, anyway?
Co-worker: Oh, originally today, but I got it pushed back to tomorrow. It's pretty bad, right? Like, the style totally changes constantly [due to the multiple sources of text].
Minako-chan: Exactly.
Co-worker: Exactly! That's why you shouldn't check the whole thing; just run spell check or whatever. If you actually tried to fix the whole thing, like, it'd take you forever! [laughing]
Minako-chan: [jaw drops]

Screw you! Screw you a lot, writer dude! It's called pride in your freaking work! I realize that no manual has "Proofread by Aino Minako-chan" scrawled in big letters across the front, but I know! And the client at least knows that it's the work from our company. If I turn in some shit with weird spacing and words hyphonated willy-nilly, then our client will just assume that we're all a bunch of freaking morons. I should further mention that this particular client is one who's kinda mad at us right now, and that this particular writer is one of the major reasons why they're mad. AND SUDDENLY I UNDERSTAND. If the text that you receive from the client sucks, you FIX it. THAT IS YOUR JOB. I have FOUGHT for translations when the clients didn't understand how bad it sounded. Because that's my JOB. My job isn't to sit here running Bablefish and Word spellchecker for Christ's sake. I'm seriously furious.

In my daily email update today, I am totally complaining to Shachou. Shachou LIKES me. (And he's currently got the flu, too, so he's probably in a pretty crappy mood.) Screw you, writer dude. If our client complains, I am totally laying the blame on you.

Reason that I cried yesterday: I went to see Okuribito (Departures), which is the Japanese film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. (Fun fact: I looked at the list of Oscars nominees and discovered that I've only seen two other nominated films: The Dark Knight and Iron Man. Isn't that really sad? And this is even an Oscar year that includes movies that I'd actually want to spend money on!)

Anyway, it's a comedic story about the funeral business, or more technically, noukan, which is the traditional Japanese act of preparing the body for burial/cremation. After losing his job with an orchestra, Daigo goes back to the country and accidentally gets a job working as a noukanshi. (He thinks he's getting a job at a travel agency, due to the newspaper ad that talks about helping people with their precious departures. As it turns out, this was a misprint; it was supposed to read "helping people with their precious departed.") It's a very funny story about life and death and family, while still making me cry like a little baby. (Seriously, it was almost funny! There were points in the movie where all you could hear was people sobbing and sniffling into their hankies.) I don't know if it deserves the Oscar compared to the other films, but it is a very good, very Japanese movie. ( Cut for a very minor spoiler from Okuribito, although technically, I have a feeling that this wouldn't be a spoiler if I were Japanese. )

Reason that I'm going to cry today: My boss came down with the flu, so I came in to work only to discover that he'll be gone for the next two days. This means that I'm now in charge of my own work (still slightly behind due to the training session last Friday), plus half of my boss's work. My coworker will likely take on the other half, although she's currently moving and therefore taking a half day today. Seriously, I'm going to cry. Get better soon, Yagi-san! We miss you!!

I haven't actually made a real post recently, so here's what I've been up to for the past month.

• A group of wonderful folks came to visit Japan. We shopped and went to the Winter Comiket and ate parfaits the size of my head and went to the hot springs in Hakone and wents to the Ghibli museum and had dinner with various members of the anime industry. (It was a very amazing night that involved me trying not to pass out when I discovered that I was having a conversation with a guy who worked on animation for Macross 7 and Animaniacs, and then watched a Sailor Moon director down a series of penis themed novelty drinks. Seriously, it was a weird night.) It was an action-packed, exciting New Year's for me.
  
• Unfortunately, I was sick almost the entire time. I caught a cold, which then refused to go away due to long days, late nights, and too much talking and singing. It eventually progressed into a horrible cough that caused me to pull at least two muscles around my ribs and wake up during the night with my general inability to breath. The cold has basically gone away, but I still have a couple of coughing fits every day that sent me gasping for air. It's not been fun.
  
• Oh, and then there was my migraine a couple days ago, which literally occurred less than a week after we exchanged all of the lights in our office for even brighter, shinier ones. I nearly brought my sunglasses out; it was pretty bad.
  
• Work is slightly stressful in general. I had a busy but manageable schedule, carefully planned out through next Monday. Which is why I nearly had a panic attack when my boss informed me on Wednesday that that we'd be having a mini-training seminar for a new translation server system today, lasting from 10am to 5pm. Seriously, I didn't know whether I wanted to cry or strangle someone. It turned out that we finished around 3pm, but I'm still kinda stressed and behind schedule. T_T
  
• On the plus side, I bought "Civilization Revolutions" for my PS3. It's pretty fun, actually, and I've been having a good time blasting through the games. And although I haven't bought anything yet, I've downloaded a couple of pretty awesome mini-games from the PS3 store. I'll probably end up buying them one day when I get bored; "The Last Guy" is loads of fun when you're in the mood to save the citizens of Tokyo from evil roaming aliens.
  
• Oh, also on the plus side, the latest trailer for "Final Fantasy 13" just came out, and I'm extremely excited about it. I'll definitely be picking up the demo that comes with Advent Children on Blu Ray, so I guess I'll get to see some of it for myself in a few months! Doki doki!!

This happened sometime last week.

Kanda-san: Excuse me, has anyone seen the computer that we keep here? We're missing a computer.
Satou-san: Please tell me that he's talking about a laptop.
Kanda-san: There used to be a Windows PC, right here!
Minako-chan: (????)

Apparently someone took it home with them. To get some work done. Without asking anyone. It was weird.

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I was doing a proofreading job with no Japanese text to fall back on. From what I can tell, a Japanese company wrote the previous English-language catalog, and our company was supposed to create a new catalog based on the old one. Therefore, there was honestly NO Japanese text available. Perhaps the biggest sign of Japanese-English came from katakana words that were hysterically not written into English correctly (such as "dorill" instead of "drill" or the constant use of "magneto", which made me want to say, "I seriously doubt that your product includes a high-powered Magneto.").

Anyway, there was one part in the catalog under flags and banners where they listed one product as "Paul (for burner)". I had no idea what it meant, but I assumed that it was the name of one of their flags, so I didn't think about it. Today I was doing the second check, and I nearly killed myself laughing when I realized what they were trying to say:

Paul (for burner) = バーナー用ポール = Pole (for banner)

Yes, they were just selling a pole that you could hang your flag or banner on. Seriously, HILARITY. I nearly killed myself trying not to laugh hysterically. And this, people, this is why you hire me.

Two of my recent obsessions:

1. Little Big Planet
   I bought myself a PS3 and Little Big Planet this weekend. ^_^ Little Big Planet is pretty darned fun; I've been playing it nonstop and I like to amuse myself by creating hideously tacky Sackpeople. It's easy enough that I can beat levels (eventually), but tough enough that I spend time trying not to scream and throw my controller at the screen as my stupid little Sackgirl gets herself blown up AGAIN. But I'm having a blast and I may actually need to try multiplayer in order to get some of the extras... Anyway, it's really fun and I give it two thumbs up. b(^_^)d
2. セレブと貧乏太郎 (Celeb & Poor)
   This is a silly romance/comedy show running right now in Japan about Alice, a super-rich super-celebrity who grew up with ultimate wealth and now runs her own fashion brand. (She's also the daughter of a rich hotel magnate. Any similarities to current celebrities living or dead is, er, totally implied.) When she needs a new driver, she ends up hiring Taro, an unlucky, working-poor stiff who's trying to raise three young kids by himself after his high school sweetheart dies. And when Alice needs a fake boyfriend to piss off her ex, who better to play the part than Taro! It's a very stereotypical "pretending to be together" romantic comedy mixed with a "the poor, but kind and happy person teaches the rich, but cold and miserable person how to be a decent human being" heart-warming tale, but it's really fun and surprisingly addicting. WILL ALICE AND TARO HOOK UP AND HAVE A WACKY OPPOSITES ATTRACT ROMANCE!? (Probably. I mean, this IS just a cheesy J-drama after all.) I'm sooper excited to see the next episode tonight. Seriously, it makes my week.

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And in completely different news, the big story in Japan is that Komuro Tetsuya was arrested. Yes, THAT Komuro Tetsuya. Long story short, KT has apparently had debt problems, so he offered to sell the rights to his songs to an investor for about $10 million (USD). He got half up front, but then it turned out that he doesn't actually own the rights to his songs. The rights all belong to AVEX, and KT gets paid yearly royalties. But KT either couldn't or wouldn't pay back the $5 million advance, so he was arrested today for fraud. It's a HUGE scandal, as you might imagine.

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And on a very side note, I'm currently proofreading a document translated by an outsourced translator. He's American and therefore my proofreading should theoretically only be for technical terms and adherence to basic style, but it's simply so hideous that I almost want to print it out, rip it to shreds, and then rewrite the whole thing. It's simply HIDEOUS. The document is release notes for an updated version, so there's lots of information about new features and bug-fixes, stuff like that. It should be a simple translation, but it reads horribly. I mean, every SINGLE sentence reads like, "It is now compatible to the Web function" or "It is possible to communicate between multiple points" or "It makes possible to input a 720p format video." Every SINGLE last freaking sentence; out of a list of 11 additional functions, a 9 of the descriptions started with "It is" (and a 10th was completely wrong due to an addition of the word "not"). I'm going to kill someone. I've proofread this guy's translations before, and it all smacks of the same horrible writing. He's either the world's most incompetent writer, or he's outsourcing the outsourcing work. >_< Seriously, it shouldn't be this hard to find good translators. Help me Obi-wan Kenobi! You're my only hope!

This was an honest-to-god conversation that I had today with Ueda-san, the cute young girl in the creative department who is quitting the company and making both me and my fellow translator Horinouchi-san very sad:

Minako-chan: So, Ueda-san, what are your plans now?
Ueda-san: Um, Ethiopia?
Minako-chan: ....Ex-squeeze me?

So it turns out, she signed up for a two year volunteer stint with a non-profit agency in Ethiopia. Between her and my awesome boss, I honestly feel like a slacker because I'm only living in Japan. BTW, this is an awesome way to leave your current job and guarantee no hard feelings. Because when you say, "I'm leaving my job to volunteer in Ethiopia for two years," there's really no way in hell your boss can hold it against you without sounding like an asshole. The only drawback is that, well, you'll be volunteering in Ethiopia for two years. Apparently one of the big packing tips that they gave to Ueda-san was "wear really cheap looking clothes, because this will greatly reduce your chances of being mugged". She is seriously way more hard core than I could ever be.

• OH SWEET BABY JESUS I JUST GOT PROM PHOTOS FROM MY LITTLE COUSIN. I AM OFFICIALLY OLD. Honestly, if you had asked me how old he was last week, I would have said 11. It's SCARY.

• I've also been in bodily pain a lot recently. (lol) Ever since high school, I've had an unfortunate tendency to hyperextend my left knee if I overstretch, and that's exactly what I did at the gym last week. (stupid knees...) Then we had our annual bowling tournament at work (okay individual score; top team score for the win!), and then yesterday I ended up wandering all around Tokyo looking for a birthday present for my Mom. (Well, present for Mommy, from Daddy. I still have to get my own present tomorrow. ;-_-) And did I mention that I was carting books around all day, too? Long story short, I woke up sore all over. Tomorrow's a holiday, but I need to do more cleaning and shopping for Mommy's visit, so I don't think there'll be much relaxing. Le sigh... It's so tough being a grown up. ^_^

• I was trying to come up with a name for a color at work, so I ended up visiting the Crayola homepage, followed by a brilliant Wikipedia page showing all of the Crayola crayon colors, and I gotta tell you, I was kinda shocked. Did you know that they got rid of Raw Umber? (I fondly remember organizing Raw Umber and Raw Sienna next to Burnt Sienna and Burnt Orange, even though the colors really weren't close enough in appearance to warrent such an order...) Or that they replaced Maize with Dandelion? (Dude, the only reason why I knew what maize was as a kid was entirely due to my love of the color!!) And the new colors introduced since the 90's tend to have horrible, HORRIBLE names like "Wild Watermelon" or "Mauvelous" or "Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown" (SHOOT ME NOW). There is also, interestingly enough, the horrifically named color "Beaver", which just makes me bite my lip and try not to giggle. What are you doing to my childhood obsession, Crayola?

Update on my previous complaint about the company who insisted on correcting my corrections, even though they're wrong wrong wrong:

No matter how many times we tried to explain that we MADE THE CORRECTIONS FOR A REASON, the company refused to accept them and told us that we had to correct the document the way that they wanted.

Minako-chan: But... these were, like, GRAMMATICAL mistakes.
Boss: Yeah, and the spelling mistakes, too. But...
Minako-chan & Boss: [sigh]

None of us can understand it, seriously. So we're making all of the corrections, but we're sending comments for the places that are just plain wrong wrong wrong. That's not counting sentences that are awkward or written with poor style or technically not wrong but not 100% correct either (I could argue that jewelry goes around your wrist or neck, not your wrist and neck [unless, of course, your company is in the habit of producing combination bracelet-necklaces] but I really can't be bothered to nitpick at this stage in the game, so they can keep their stupid "and"). So I'm not entirely happy. But by focusing on areas that are blatently wrong, this will hopefully drive home the idea that, surprisingly enough, we know what we're doing when we make corrections, and hopefully they'll cut us more slack in the future. SIGH.

An open letter to the people who hired my company to do localization work:

Thank you for choosing to do your business with us. As I'm sure our company president has informed you many many times, our company has its very own in-house native English speaker/translator/proofreader. Namely, obviously, yours truly. Although I prefer translating to the mind-numbing work of proofreading, I am more than happy to proofread anything that crosses my desk. If you feel that my additions still don't quite meet the image that you are trying to project, I am more than willing to accept your corrections to my corrections, or to rework my own corrections for you.

Last week, you gave us a list of corrections, which either came from your clients or from previous catalogs. Understandable reasons for wanting corrections in a language that, if I do say so myself, you are likely less fluent in than I. However, since you are paying us, and therefore indirectly paying myself, I thought it wise to make some minor amendments to your corrections. When you broke grammatical rules, I corrected them. When your word choices were redundant, I spruced them up. When you randomly started a sentence with "it" without ever specifying a specific noun, I rewrote it. Good times were had by all.

However, today we received the latest corrections from your company, and it appears that almost all of your so-called "corrections" are asking us to undo the changes that I made last week. Unlikely as it may seem, I do not actually make these changes for my own health, or because I think I'm so so sooooo much smarter than you, or because I just want to fuck with your mind a bit. I made the changes because "an unique" is not English, or because the phrase "the necklace can be wore" makes me want to vomit a little, or because you used prepositional phrases starting with "with" twice in a 10 word sentence. I don't care if you received this English copy from your clients; your clients are idiots. That is why they are paying you to handle localization for them, and that is why you are paying me to correct you. If you actually think that your high-school English textbook and Babel Fish could do a better job than me, feel free to save yourself the money.

In conclusion, please let me do my job. I beg of you. Freaking let me do my job.

Sincerely with hearts and kisses,

Minako-chan

• I'm working on the world's saddest rewriting job right now. Basically, some poor woman at Company A worked super hard to put together an English Power Point presentation, complete with narration, to be used for sales to potential foreign buyers. They sent it to us in hopes that we could spice it up a tad, and our overwhelming response was, "This is the worst Power Point presentation in the history of Power Point presentations." It's literally a textbook example that could be included in a guide entitled "How NOT to make Power Point presentations for Dummies". We've got 0 animation or even transitions. We've got bad English. We've got pages literally crammed with detailed information on complex charts while the narration goes "This is a chart. Next page." The narration itself, in poorly pronounced and difficult-to-understand English, is even bracketed by loud "clicks" when the recorder was turned on and off. It's almost horrifying, only made more fascinating by the poor woman's apparent denial. She apparently wants us to change "as little as possible", since she plans on re-recording the narration herself. Lady, I will throw in the narration for free. Please, for the love of god, just let us do our jobs. Or, at the very least, never ever mention our company's name in conjunction with your product. Thank you.
• In better news, the Senshi Gakuen is back online. Yeay! If you're really curious it was basically a super-lame computer goof where our provider's system didn't send all of the required information to the bank when charging us for renewal, which obviously caused the bank to reject the shady shady attempt to squeeze money out of kinomakoto, which caused the provider to cut off services for us deadbeats. It's all fixed and it's actually kinda funny, so it worked out in the end.
• Now that Mako-chan finally got her super sekrit gift, I can announce that "Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side 2nd Season" came out for Nintendo DS on Valentine's Day. It's SO EXCITING like you wouldn't believe. Skinship is back and better than ever; I had forgetten how much the lead guy Saeki-kun cracks me up; you can totally sexually harass your underaged next-door neighbor. It's a weirdly awesome game and anyone who enjoyed "Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side 1st Love" needs to check this out. Srsly!

Okay, so I'm translating a catalog right now, and one of the items for sale is 500 ml of Scotch sold in a plastic water bottle. I'm supposed to be writing this crap about how it's so nice and convenient in a trendy portable size, but all I'm having trouble coming up with a way that doesn't make it sound completely cheap and sleazy. "Comes with free paper bag to hide your shame from the world as you glug your cares away in the middle of the park!!" I'm sorry, but it's a freaking plastic bottle of Scotch. It doesn't get much tackier. At least it doesn't come with one of those squirtable sports drink tops. THAT would be awesome-tastic.

FYI, as some of you may have noticed, Senshi Gakuen is completely down. Yes, we know. No, we don't know why. I can't really help from Tokyo, so poor kinomakoto has to try and fix things all by herself. Ganbare, Mako-chan! Faito, Mako-chan! I will, of course, post something once I know what's what. We've never had major problems with the web site before, so it's really strange to have everything crap out within the past few months. ^_^;

Vacation is almost here, and I'm so excited!

( Flying Excitement! )

( Family Excitement! )

( Work Excitement! (Part I) )

( Work Excitement! (Part II) )

( Variety Show Excitement! )

( Net Excitement! )

As most of you probably already know, I'm going home in a week, and I am soooo excited. I realize that I'm probably talking about it too much, but not only is my first Xmas at home in 4 years, but it's also the first reunion of our immediate family in, like, ever, so I think I get some slack. ^_^ In celebration(?), here's some news from the past week.

Hard Core Christmas Spirit
On my morning news program, they did a little segment about Christmas decorations in Japan, and how people save on electricity bills and all. One of the methods was using non-light-related decorations, like little balloon-type lawn figures and that sort of stuff. But one of the sample houses they showed? One wall of the house featured a giant picture of Mary holding baby Jesus. I thought it was hysterical. That is seriously hard core Christmas spirit for Japan.

My Niece Rocks (Part 1)
I mentioned previously that Detroit Niece started wearing glasses, and she looks too cute for words. She's an active three-year-old, so I was hoping that she wouldn't be bothered by things on her face. But word is that she LOVES her glasses. See, she doesn't know anyone else with glasses at her preschool. And the only other people she knows are adults. Therefore, she has come to the conclusion that glasses are big girl accessories, and that she is obviously far superior to her peers if she gets to wear glasses and they don't. It's rather hysterical toddler logic, and I absolutely adore her super-positive spin on the situation.

My Niece Rocks (Part 2)
Yet another story about why this niece of mine rocks. They've apparently got a fake Christmas tree at their house, so my niece has never been to a tree farm to get their Xmas tree. Therefore, when she first saw a car with a Christmas tree strapped to the roof, she apparently started shrieking, and told her parents very excitedly, "Look! They have salad on their car!!!" Everyone in the family thinks it's a hoot, and no one can figured out why she called it salad. My own attempt at decoding toddler logic says that A) Trees and plants stand upright and B) The thing on the car was not upright, therefore C) The thing on the car cannot be a tree or plant. But D) It was still green and leafy, ergo E) It must be salad.

My Boss is Cooler Than Your Boss (Part 64)
I've mentioned the awesomeness of my boss and his many hobbies before, but after learning Arabic last year and starting to make his very own Middle Age-esque sheepskin book, he decided that it would be fun to learn Arabic calligraphy. And since he's my boss, he doesn't just go at it half-assed. He's apparently in some sort of correspondance course with a calligraphy master living in Israel. It sounds like this calligraphy master is a good teacher, and my boss doesn't want to let the guy down, so he's started practicing during lunch. I have no idea what anything means, but everything that I've seen is pretty impressive. Seriously, I want to be my boss when I grow up.

Danger: Avoid Death
Some of you might have heard of this, but I read an article about some organization chose the best idiotic warning labels of the year. As someone who ends up translating warning labels many times a year, I can honestly say that some of it is pretty detailed. You can see the winners on the web page here, including the best warning label of the year: Danger: Avoid Death. Now, that's a pretty wacky warning label, but seriously? Visit the web site and check out the picture that goes along with it. That's the actual highlight of the warning. I nearly choked on my lunch when I saw it. Ohhh, you gotta love the American legal system that necessitates this sort of stuff....

An Open Letter Symantec Endpoint Protection, the New Anti-Virus/Firewall Program that We Are Required to Use on Our Work Computers After We Started Having Virus Problems Upon Moving Email Servers,

I hate you. I hope you die.

Sincerely yours,

Minako-chan

( Cut for those who don't want to see me virtually punch out my computer. )

Somewhat hysterical news item today (well, hysterical to me, at least): Inocchi and new bride Seto Asaka were apparently coming home from a play, when they happened to notice an old man collapsed and bleeding on the street corner. (They were driving down a busy street at 8:30 at night, so it actually is quite amazing that either of them noticed.) So they pulled over, Inocchi called an ambulance, and the two stayed and talked to the old man until help arrived. The news program this morning even did street interviews and stuff, and everyone seemed to agree that, well, of course Inocchi helped, because he's just a Nice Guy. See how V6 contributes to the community?

In other news, I'm possibly going to have to kill the president of my company. Just so you know. (lol) To back up a bit, during the past year or so, the president has become obsessed with mind maps. I remember using mind maps during creative writing classes as a way to brainstorm, and I quite liked them for those types of creative/free-thinking purposes since my mind has a tendancy to jump from "kangaroo" to "fish" to "salt" rather quickly (seriously, my mind just went there; I swear it makes more sense than it sounds, but it's a long story that involves monkeys and dragons, so I'll save that one for another day), so mind mapping helps me make sense of my random trains of thought. However, despite this tendancy for my mind to wander (or perhaps because of), I like my notes and finalized thoughts to be extremely organized. I like outlines and columns and indents and straight lines, perhaps even organized by different color ink or highlighting. So while messy spiderwebs are okay for disgorging all of my ideas on paper, I can never make any sense of the ideas again unless they're organized in a cleaner form.

Now, my company president adores his mind-maps and takes all of his notes in mind-map format and hands out company plans drawn as mind-maps. (Luckily, he color-codes them; otherwise I probably wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of anything.) He loves his mind-maps so much that he's taken classes to learn how to teach the concept to others, and has said for a while that he wants to do a company-wide mind-mapping seminar because he's convinced that mind-mapping is the most natural form of note-taking available and that everyone is bound to adore mind-mapping as much as he does. (It's kinda like he's been absorbed by an organizational cult. I somewhat fear that we'll be instructed in the proper use of Post-it Notes next. Seriously, he really loves his mind-maps.) So finally, he decided that this upcoming all-company meeting, we'll be learning mind-mapping. Y-yeay?

But wait! The story gets better! First, our all-company meeting was supposed to be last Saturday. About 2 weeks ago, the company president changed it to this Saturday, and finally settled on next Saturday a few days later. But then, on Tuesday morning, he informed us that he went to another mind-mapping seminar over the weekend that lasted ten hours (!!), but all of the participants agreed that it wasn't nearly enough time to fully appreciate the glories of mind-mapping. So the president wondered if maybe we should do it two Saturdays in a row, or perhaps stay somewhere overnight and do mind-mapping the whole weekend long. Yesterday, we got the final decision: Next Saturday, we'll have a one hour all-company meeting, followed by 10 bloody hours of mind-mapping. We will then be forced to stay together at a hotel overnight, so that we can get in another 4 hours of mind-mapping on Sunday morning. You have no idea how horrified I am by this turn of events. Not only does it seem like a horrific waste of time and money, but it reduces our weekend to about 8 hours. Plus, as I've mentioned before, I don't even like mind-mapping (I've tried it! I swear! And in the end, I still like outlines the best!), and mind-mapping in Japanese is sure to be hell. I'm seriously considering faking my own imminent death. Literally the only thing keeping me going is the knowledge that I will finally have a perfect application for my erasable Frixion pens. (lol)

Most people wouldn't know this about me, but I spent all four years of high school as an active member of the Speech Team. I wasn't great, but I wasn't bad either; I even won tournaments. But at the very least, during those four years, I learned how to be an attentive listener (or at the very least, fake it extremely well), and I learned what types of elements make up good speeches.

Which is why I'm pained to tears every Monday when the company president delivers his little "beginning of the work week" speech.

Seriously, it hurts me physically. It's not just that the speeches are boring, or painfully repetitive, or in Japanese (although those factors certainly don't help), but they're not particularly good speeches, and it's starting to drive me up the wall. Although there are many many things that I could criticize, these are the parts that drive me up the freaking wall:

( A. The ability to talk for a long period of time does not correspond to good speaking skills. )

( B. Be aware that, for better or worse, people tend to remember repeated ideas. )

In other language related news, I was reading up on some recent studies in the field of linguistics (fierce academic rivalries = so freaking hysterical), and I ended up finding a blog about recent linguistics gossip and stuff. It looked fun and not overly academic, so I was thinking about reading it on a more regular basis... until I scrolled down a bit and found an entry pondering the use of the phrase "an hypothesis". The author was actually waffling about whether it was correct or not. I nearly choked. [FYI, "an" versus "a" depends on pronunciation, not spelling, so unless you like to say, "an ai-pothesis", you should use "a".] And this was on a linguistics blog, written by a guy who was apparently studying for his masters. Needless to say, I didn't visit the blog again.