Dog Days 17, 18 and 19

So I've been lazy and staying up far too late, hence the delay. Just the important stuff follows.

Wednesday: Ran as normal. Met with a professor about some temporary work. Played a very long game of Catan (cities and knights, so there was a lot of new stuff to learn). Got dinner with friends. On the way to institute, found a portable record player on the side of the road. Worked on DnD stuff.

Thursday: Not much to report in the morning. In the afternoon I continued to work on DnD stuff. Made monster cards to help me with tracking initiative and make combat go faster. Drew a map and keyed in parts of the hex map. Ran the session, with 7 players and 10 enemies at parts (actually I think the other battle had 11 enemies at one point). So I spent way too much time afterwards reading up how to move combat faster. Seems like narration is important.

Friday: Big thing today was getting my new computer (which despite being cheaper than my current laptop, has more memory and RAM because it is much newer). Couldn't go to the office until it arrived because it was being delivered to the door, not the mailroom. Anyway set up was easy and then I immediately downloaded Risk of Rain 2 to try it since I haven't actually played it. Having both a windows computer and a mac is weird. Anyway, once I get dropbox, stata and word working on that computer, I'll use that one as a work computer (but also some games) and this mac as my hobby/general use/home computer. I definitely like the mac more from a general use perspective. These retina screens are something else. Then in the evening I went to a friend's house for pizza and smash. Made it home just before the thunderstorm (a stick actually hit me on the hand as I was coming up my street), unplugged everything because there was a lot of lightning and waited around. Eventually I could plug things back in and thus I worked on this. Oh and I bought Impossible Creatures because I've been wanting to play it since it came out 20 years ago and it was 75% off on steam (so 2 bucks). So I'm gonna do that.

 I need to get up early tomorrow to go shopping (didn't today on account of threatened rain and the laptop) so I can make cheese (and eventually saag paneer) for Sunday's potluck. And that's about it. 

On tubers and how to translate them

 I've been playing a lot of xenoblade recently and have many thoughts about it, as can be seen on my reddit profile. As much as I like it, there's something extremely immersion breaking for me: taro is referred to as potatoes.

If I remember correctly, spongy spuds are first introduced around when the party's food gets stolen. At the very least I saw a bag full of them at some point in Maktha Wildwood and I recognized them right away as taro. Which was cool because taro is not a commonly seen plant, especially for westerners. It's only later on we get to the problematic part. See, Zeon's ascension quest is about growing crops, specifically "spongy spuds" for his colony. The name spongy spud itself is fine, it's a fictional world after all. However, they are also referred to as potatoes, taters and other less ambiguous names. This is despite both the tubers and the plants are clearly modeled after taro. Even the advice to harvest after the leaves start wilting is a taro trait (though potatoes do have similar advice. I wonder if cassava does as well, it might be a general root crop thing). So that was pretty frusterating.

Now, localizing taro as potato isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, most English speakers aren't going to be that familiar with taro. But it does become a lot worse when you're localizing something that has images along with the text, since even if you don't know what taro is it is pretty obvious that those aren't potatoes. It reminds me of the "jelly donut-onigiri" controversy from the Pokemon anime way back when. The idea of turning onigiri into jelly donuts to make it more relevant to the audience isn't a bad thing. Doing that when it is clearly referencing an image which is not a jelly donut is an issue. (Funnily enough, onigiri does play a minor role in Xenoblade 3 and its name is not translated). 

Anyway, I actually went to the Japanese version of the game to see what the original text called them. Spud, potato, tater, etc all seem to be used as translations for the same word imo "tuber". So while the original text doesn't seem to explicitly label it as taro (as far as I could tell), it doesn't explicitly call it potato either. Localizing this to a bunch of words for more variety is reasonable enough but again, the translators should've looked at what it was referring to before making some of these translations. 

You know what the worst part is? I seem to be the only person to notice this and care enough to complain! At least, I haven't encountered anyone else yet who was like "yep, that's clearly taro."

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In other farming related video game news Harvestella looks pretty awesome but I hope it doesn't neglect farming too much. And someone needs to make a farming sim that caters towards caters towards my desire for complex agronomy and agricultural markets while still maintaining the sort of whimsy often found in these games (that is, I want more realism but don't want to play John Deere Combine Simulator 2022: Deluxe Edition). Maybe I'll rant about that some day.