Camping- May 2023

Combining the last few days into a single entry since it's a weird flux time anyway. Only some of the days actually had camping. 

So Friday was a lazy day. I played Xenoblade DLC and generally did stuff at home. In the afternoon, I packed my bag, managed to get all my stuff on the back of my bike (including the tent) and went to meet up for a carpool. After getting to the site, we went to the lake and then started prepping the fire and getting coals ready. I did not help much, which was fine. Dinner was good, we had an annoyingly friendly racoon want to invade our campsite. Put up my new pup-tent a little before dark. Sat around talking and listening to people. It was nice.

Woke up with the sun and stayed in my sleeping bag for like an extra 40 minutes because it was cold outside. Went out of my tent around six, helped eat breakfast and then break camp. Most people left at that point but I went hiking with my ride. We went up to a little cave and saw some cool birds (Indigo Bunting, a nuthatch, maybe some Scarlet Tanagers) on our hike. I hiked well enough given my hurt foot and all. Got a ride home directly to my house, so after resting a bit (and playing Xenoblade) I took the bus up to campus. Since it was weekend schedule and my foot still hurt, I ended up renting an e-bike to go the rest of the way instead of walking or waiting for the last bus (about equal times either way). First time riding such a bike and it was heavy and awkward but also ran real fast and smooth. Got my bike, stopped in the arboretum on the way home to do a trail I hadn't done in a while. Saw a red-bellied woodpecker and heard either a pileated woodpecker (are those actually around here? I feel like I only see Red-bellied woodpeckers and hairy/downy woodpeckers) or a belted kingfisher (or possibly a flicker. Actually it was probably a flicker except that I was near water so kingfisher is a possibility). After getting home, I ate dinner and then caught up on Rick and Morty, watched the first episode of Unicorn Eternal Warriors (what beautiful animation) and then watched FLCL since I've been meaning to watch for like 15 years. By like two in the morning I was pretty tired, so I set aside the last half of the final episode for later. 

Woke up and finished FLCL. Good show, I love how it plays with animation as a medium while still delivering a solid story about growing up. I wish I had watched it 15 years ago when I would've been just a bit older than Naota. Not that things like "Nothing can happen until you swing the bat" don't still hit me now. Showered and got ready for church. Rode my bike up (it was a beautiful day), prepared the sacrament and church went as normal. Sunday school was good too. Since there was a watch party for the devotional, it made more sense to just hang out in my office until that (cut off about 7 miles from my total for the day). So I went to my office and read more of Infinite Jest. 2 and a half hours (with a tiny nap) got me like 90 pages further, what a dense book. I'm like a quarter of the way through now though. Rode 9 miles to watch the devotional and made good time. Felt really called out, especially given how I'm not answering the question and not doing a good job dating. Chat for a bit. Rode home, ate dinner and basically collapsed because I'm tired and did like 30 miles on a microwave burrito. Got up and wrote this.

Feeling fine to good emotionally. But not too good, I think. Hopefully I can stay this way a while longer.

Spring Day 30

 Got up. Lay around a bit (I think?). Showered and was gonna go on a bike ride when I remembered that I had a meeting at 11. So I listened in on that while preparing my chayote and beans. Went on a bike ride (the ride I had originally planned to do Saturday) and that was nice. Saw lots of birds. And people I guess. Since it was on my way, I went to the tool shop and got an impact screwdriver and hex bits for a ratchet wrench. Got home and actually managed to loosen that bolt! So I'll be able to finish fixing my bike soon. 

Cooked lontong sayur. Except that my lontong were an utter failure so it was just a coconut soup. Also it was green instead of red because no red peppers. Otherwise it turned out pretty well, I think. The missionaries ate it at the very least. Didn't seem like it would turn out good right till the end though. The visit with the missionaries was nice. Told them stories and they told me stories. Their lesson was a nice reminder of the importance of the restoration. I told them a lot about the sort of unique teachings that have helped me. Things like a truly eternal perspective, the positive view of the fall and the emphasis on agency. 

After cleaning up, I saw that a new trailer for the xenoblade DLC dropped. So that distracted me for a while and then I finally finished my homework. Fun stuff. 

I won't say I'm feeling ecstatic, but I also don't feel terrible. Or even bad. Which is good.

Book discussion: Paradise Reclaimed by Halldór Laxness

 So I liked this book but it's definitely a weird one. I get why the intro says that it's not for everyone. The characters can be a bit infuriating. At first glance, it literally goes nowhere. The writing style itself is a bit strange, like it is the transcript of someone telling a story, rather than the story itself being told (which I came to really like). I'm not going to try to avoid spoilers or anything, so adding in a jump break. Beware

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.