M&Ms

January 15, 2009 at 7:51 pm | In Analysis, casual observations | Leave a Comment

I have decided that dark chocolate M&Ms are vastly superior to milk chocolate M&Ms. This is because they make the dark chocolate just sweet enough that, when combined with the candy coating, they are neither too dark nor so sweet that they make you get sick of them quickly (as I feel milk chocolate M&Ms have a tendency to do).

This is, of course, my own opinion and not meant to be a statement of fact. I just like making very definitive statements and then ruining it all by writing these wishy washy little notes at the bottom.

Here’s to posting more this year!

Drink the water?

June 9, 2008 at 8:28 pm | In Analysis, casual observations | Leave a Comment

Today as I was buying my water at the DC, I overheard one of the employees saying that Aquafina was owned by the Pepsi company. My immediate thought was, “Hm. Maybe I should drink more Pepsi.” I do not know if Aquafina is actually owned by Pepsi. It’s kind of irrelevant. My point is that I would want to support a company that sells water without anything added to it. That probably seems silly until you realize that Dasani, the Coke brand of water, had salt added to it “for flavor.” I think that’s BS. I think they add salt so you’ll get thirsty and buy more water from them.

This sort of thing initially led me to avoid Fiji because they don’t use the standard nutrition label and all I could find on the bottle was that it had extra minerals in it. That sounded suspicious. Forget for a moment that there’s this stuff called mineral water, because I do all the time. Anyway, after more bottle-reading I found out it’s all stuff that naturally filters into the water and that it’s all pretty good for you. I also doubt any of it’s salt since the PH is slightly basic (yay chem knowledge). There’s also the fact that it actually tastes good. I don’t mean I think it tastes good because I like the label, I mean it actually tastes more like nothing than any other water I’ve ever tasted.

This whole thing probably sounds like a commercial, but that’s not the point. The point is that you should be aware of what’s in your water. Especially tap-water. My mom’s a tap-water drinker, and even she is afraid of what’s in the water these days. I’m not saying you need to buy bottled water – just get a filter or something. Knowing is half the battle and all that….

Final Fantasy, Old and New

June 24, 2007 at 3:30 pm | In Analysis, review | Leave a Comment

My first Final Fantasy game was FFX, which my grandmother bought for me when I was in middle school. I knew little to nothing about the series beforehand, and I was completely blown away. I absolutely loved that game, and I still do today. I got interested in checking out the other Final Fantasy games after watching my friends play FFVIII. Unfortunately, the games tend to be both expensive and hard to find, so it wasn’t until this last Christmas that my grandfather managed to find me FFVIII, and not till recently that I ordered myself a memory card from online (since it’s pretty hard to find those too these days).

I’m only on disc two so far, but I’ve found the differences between the older and newer games interesting. Obviously there are some expected differences like the graphics not being as good and the characters not having voices, but there are also ones I hadn’t thought about.
For one thing, the pacing of the story is slower in FFVIII. I’m not completely sure why this is, but it seems like you have to do a lot more in between plot development than in FFX and that when plot development does occur it happens in much smaller increments. It’s possible this was done to make the RPG more story-based, which is supported by the fact that there’s a lot more non-combat tasks you need to complete. It would also make sense since the other thing I noticed was that the combat aspect of the game (aka, the ‘don’t die’ aspect) is really easy. I’ve only died once, and that was against something that could kill me in one hit. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be much strategy involved since you can take out anything with a few hits from the GFs. As I said though, I’m only on disc two, so perhaps this will change later in the game.
The last thing I noticed was that the gameplay tends to be a bit vague and confusing at times. For example, a character will tell you to do something and then walk away, and because nothing suggests you should talk to the character again you try to do the task and wonder why you can’t. I’ve also spent a few times running all over the map looking for a place I’m supposed to go to before discovering the map button (which was never introduced to me) and realizing my destination was right next to my starting point the whole time.

Neither of the games can really be said to be better than the other. There aren’t any bad points I’ve found in FFVIII that I wouldn’t attribute to it simply being an older game, and you can’t hold that against it. After all, for its time it was pretty darn awesome. Personally I’m more a fan of FFX, but that’s based heavily on the story and my history with the game.

Now I’ve got to go figure out where that darn Captain is sleeping.

Artistic Development: Avril Lavigne

June 17, 2007 at 5:50 pm | In Analysis | Leave a Comment

I think it’s interesting how an artist will change over time. Take Avril lavigne for instance. When her first album, Let Go, came out, the subject matter was very identifiable with teenagers. Change, uncertainty, questioning authority, and self definition were all themes present in her music, and since she was a teenager herself at the time, everything she sang about came from a teenage perspective. Overall, the tone was relatively light. There was idealism in her music, and if the songs weren’t outright positive then they at least had hope in them. When she sang about something unfair or frustrating, you got the feeling that she was taking a stand against it rather than falling into dispair. For reference, I’ll list some of the songs that were best known from her first album.

Complicated
Sk8ter Boi
I’m With You

Avril’s second album, Under My Skin, was noticably darker and seemed to have a lot of the cynicism of adulthood. Relationships didn’t work out, guys tended to be duplicitous and untrustworthy, and life was depressing. While there were some songs that retained the hope, individuality, and rebellion of her first album, the collection focused on the negative a lot more than the previous one. Instead of being a teenager getting into the hang of life, you got the sense she had more experience and was having trouble holding on to the positive idealism of her younger self. Again, here are some of the better known songs from the album.

Don’t Tell Me
He Wasn’t
My Happy Ending

The only thing I’ve heard of Avril’s recently is her song Girlfriend, and therefore I can’t really give much of an opinion on how she’s changed since 2005. I will give my opinion of the song, though realize that my opinon of it will be more biased because it’s an individual song.

When I first heard Girlfriend, I really liked it. The message was, to put it simply, ‘I don’t like your girlfriend. You can do better. I want to be your girlfriend.’ The song was upbeat, and the emotion was easy to understand. I didn’t even realize it was sung by Avril Lavigne until I read a comic that referenced the music video. However, once I watched the music video my perceived meaning of the song was completely changed. The message of the music video was essentially, ‘I think you’re hot and I’m going to steal you from your girlfriend, and since I’m cool and she’s dorky, you’re going to be a steriotypical male and let me.’ The singer was suddenly changed from the protagonist to the villain, and I found it rather upsetting. The music video didn’t give a positive message, and while I like the song, I have trouble enjoying it when that’s the image I associate with the lyrics. Like I said, I can’t make much of an opinion of Avril based on this one song. I would be interested to see whether this is a trend in her current music… though as I’ve expressed above, I’m hoping it’s not.

So WHAT is her name?

June 15, 2007 at 7:16 pm | In Analysis | 1 Comment

For anyone who’s read the manga Magic Knight Rayearth by CLAMP, you probably remember Caldina (also known as Kaldina and Gardina). Her name is switched around at least three times through the series, and as a child who knew little to no Japanese when I first read it, this frustrated me to no end. After all, why would you keep changing a character’s name? The reason, as I understood once I learned the hiragana alphabet, is that the name probably wasn’t changed at all, it was just translated differently.

The thing you need to understand is that the Japanese alphabet is made up of characters, and most of these characters are a consonant followed by a vowel. The only exception is n. Personally, I’ve always thought the Japanese language was easier simply because it’s phonetic. Each character makes one sound. However, it gets difficult when you try to translate between languages with different rules. Remember, other than n all consonants are followed by a vowel, so a Japanese spelling of mark would be maruku, arbate (german word for part-time job) would become arubaito, and ice cream would become aisukuriimu. Furthermore, Japanese has a sound between r and l, which can be romanized as either, and with some characters, such as ka, adding two small marks (ten ten) alongside it can change the sound. Translating from English to Japanese tends to be simple as far as spelling goes since Japanese is phonetic, but when you try to go the other way you suddenly have options.

This is what I believe happened with Caldina’s name. The romanization was probably Karudina. When it came time to translate, however, things became tricky. Do you translate the ka sound as ka, or ca? Is the ru sounds an r, or an l? Is that the font, or is there a ten ten next to the ka (making it a ga), because you know that would make it a completely different sound…
Considering these are the people who translate CLAMP, and considering CLAMP loves coming up with new words, you know they had more to worry about that just this one character’s name. The way I see it, they started with the more romanized spelling of Kaldina, then thought that maybe the name was supposed to be Gardina and switched it to that, before finally settling on Caldina.

I could be wrong. Maybe they switched the names because they thought one sounded better, or maybe CLAMP changed the names. Maybe it’s another reason entirely.

I think my version sounds cooler though.

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