ark-shifter:

nostalgebraist:

waystatus:

nostalgebraist:

I was just looking over the various people who’ve translated FFVI into English, and it was fun seeing what people did with the opening narration.

Classic 1994 Woolsey:

Long ago, the War of the Magi reduced the world to a scorched wasteland, and Magic simply ceased to exist.

1000 years have passed… Iron, gunpowder and steam engines have been rediscovered, and high technology reigns.

But there are those who would enslave the world by reviving the dread destructive force known as “Magic”.

Can it be that those in power are on the verge of repeating a senseless and deadly mistake?

Tom Slattery’s translation for the GBA version, supposed to be more accurate on the whole:

The ancient War of the Magi… When its flames at last receded, only the charred husk of a world remained. Even the power of magic was lost…

In the thousand years that followed, iron, gunpowder, and steam engines took the place of magic and life slowly returned to the barren land.

Yet there now stands one who would reawaken the magic of ages past and use its dreaded power as a means by which to conquer all the world.

Could anyone truly be foolish enough to repeat that mistake?

Unofficial translation by Sky Render, which is widely viewed as awkward although more literally “faithful” than Woolsey (not least by the translator themselves, cf. their later LP of it):

Long ago, humans battled one another, and the world became a scorched wasteland. The power of “magic” simply vanished.

1000 years have passed… Iron, gunpowder, and steam engines have been developed. Machinery has been revived to replace magic.

The great magic war faded into a legend. But the power of “magic” has been revived secretly, by the powerful military empire, run by a man who wants to rule the world.

Would this man be willing to destroy the world again for his own greed…?

(Unfortunately, Lina Darkstar never translated this part.)

---

I can’t tell how much of this is nostalgia, but the Woolsey version seems best to me here.  For one thing, “dread destructive force” is a good phrase (though so is Slattery’s “charred husk of a world”), and I like “high technology reins.”

Just as importantly, the Woolsey translation avoids the blunt moralizing of the other two (which I figure must have been in the original script, since it’s in two out of three translations).  The other two mention an individual villain, and finish on a note of “fuck that guy,” which fees like putting the cart before the horse – it’s like a movie that starts by telling you “there will be a bad guy in this movie, and you should hate him, because he’s evil.”

Woolsey generalizes it to an unnamed plural group, and his last sentence lacks the exasperation of the other two.  It’s not “how could this one guy possibly be so evil?”, it’s “have today’s rulers failed to learn the lessons of history?”, which is a much more interesting question.  “Can it be that those in power are on the verge of repeating a senseless and deadly mistake?” sounds like something you could easily hear in real-life political discussion; the others sound like we’re reading someone’s story outline.

I also played FFVI (with the original translation, I think?) and I like the Slattery version best.

My problem with the Woolsey version is that it’s actually kind of awkward. The capital-M in Magic and the “re”discovery of technology that doesn’t seem to have previously existed both sound very odd to my ear. There’s also something that I can’t place about the overall structure of that paragraph which sounds off to me. It sounds like a lot of old game translations do to me, which is to say it sounds like they didn’t quite have the budget to hire a really good translator, so they settled for a mediocre one.

I’m okay with the moralizing based mostly what I remember from the plot. “Those in power” are literally Gehstal and maybe Kefka. There’s no other force that wants what Gehstal wants; there’s no other force that could do it if they wanted. The most important thing about a translation is that it not be misleading, and I feel that a translation that led me to think that FFVI was about anything approaching real life politics, particularly when it comes to Gehstal himself, would just not be true.

Yeah, that’s true, it’s not like the rest of the story is especially subtle.

I agree about the slight awkwardness of the Woolsey version, although I think the Slattery version is still awkward by the non-video game standards.  “The ancient War of the Magi… When its flames at last receded” is an odd way of introducing a subject.  (Compare: “The Second World War … when it finally ended […]”).

It is indeed odd that Woolsey has “rediscovered,” especially since he was trying to economize on character count (he kept editing his script down and still getting told it was too big).

Re: the last part, I agree that the passage is talking about Gehstal – the relevant text even plays over a shot of him addressing imperial officers.  But then, Gehstal himself isn’t all that big a focus in FFVI.  On the third hand, Kefka is more of a focus, and it makes sense to emphasize G over K at this point because the game is doing the usual villain fake-out thing, like with President Shinra in FFVII.

On the fourth hand, though, the sheer destructiveness of magic seems even more important than these particular villains.  It’s hard for me to look at FFVI and not think of nuclear weapons and the Cold War; the later parts of the game feel much like a post-nuclear-war scenario, with the strange new monsters (mutants?) running around, and the way it all happens in one catastrophic blast that affects the whole globe.  And the scary thing about nukes isn’t that they might get used by an exceptionally awful ruler, it’s that they’re dangerous in the hand of the merely normally awful rulers who we take for granted on the global stage.  There have been a lot of Kefkas in the past (IRL and presumably in the FFVI world too), it’s just that this one got his hands on the nuclear codes.

So “this guy is so bad, we can’t trust him with magic” seems like the wrong emphasis.  Everyone is untrustworthy with nukes until proven otherwise.

Oh, hi! My ears were burning. In retrospect I really wish I’d had the sticking power to go back and translate the stuff I skipped over at the beginning, but… life happened.

Anyway here’s my thoughts, a good thirteen years later. Gosh, it’s so much easier now that I can just look up the original on flipping Youtube.

For the penultimate line, I favor “There are those who would reawaken the legendary power of magic, and with that dread destructive force, enslave the world.”

So, Woolsey’s plural indeterminate, with a dash of Slattery’s grammatical structure. 

For the final line, I’d go even more general than Woolsey: “Could mankind really be on the verge of repeating such a mistake…?” I would say it’s not just ‘have today’s rulers failed to learn from history’, but ‘have today’s people failed to do so’. 

I really like it for how that spreads the blame around to all the progress and industrialization of the FF6 world at the time. There’s an implicit question of whether Kefka and Geshtal are just the worst products of the entire industrial revolution. And I think that question is carried through a lot of the later game; Cid’s regret that he developed Magitek, say. Even Narshe wouldn’t have uncovered that Esper if they hadn’t been mining so deep.

(via ark-shifter)

waystatus:

nostalgebraist:

I was just looking over the various people who’ve translated FFVI into English, and it was fun seeing what people did with the opening narration.

Classic 1994 Woolsey:

Long ago, the War of the Magi reduced the world to a scorched wasteland, and Magic simply ceased to exist.

1000 years have passed… Iron, gunpowder and steam engines have been rediscovered, and high technology reigns.

But there are those who would enslave the world by reviving the dread destructive force known as “Magic”.

Can it be that those in power are on the verge of repeating a senseless and deadly mistake?

Tom Slattery’s translation for the GBA version, supposed to be more accurate on the whole:

The ancient War of the Magi… When its flames at last receded, only the charred husk of a world remained. Even the power of magic was lost…

In the thousand years that followed, iron, gunpowder, and steam engines took the place of magic and life slowly returned to the barren land.

Yet there now stands one who would reawaken the magic of ages past and use its dreaded power as a means by which to conquer all the world.

Could anyone truly be foolish enough to repeat that mistake?

Unofficial translation by Sky Render, which is widely viewed as awkward although more literally “faithful” than Woolsey (not least by the translator themselves, cf. their later LP of it):

Long ago, humans battled one another, and the world became a scorched wasteland. The power of “magic” simply vanished.

1000 years have passed… Iron, gunpowder, and steam engines have been developed. Machinery has been revived to replace magic.

The great magic war faded into a legend. But the power of “magic” has been revived secretly, by the powerful military empire, run by a man who wants to rule the world.

Would this man be willing to destroy the world again for his own greed…?

(Unfortunately, Lina Darkstar never translated this part.)

---

I can’t tell how much of this is nostalgia, but the Woolsey version seems best to me here.  For one thing, “dread destructive force” is a good phrase (though so is Slattery’s “charred husk of a world”), and I like “high technology reins.”

Just as importantly, the Woolsey translation avoids the blunt moralizing of the other two (which I figure must have been in the original script, since it’s in two out of three translations).  The other two mention an individual villain, and finish on a note of “fuck that guy,” which fees like putting the cart before the horse – it’s like a movie that starts by telling you “there will be a bad guy in this movie, and you should hate him, because he’s evil.”

Woolsey generalizes it to an unnamed plural group, and his last sentence lacks the exasperation of the other two.  It’s not “how could this one guy possibly be so evil?”, it’s “have today’s rulers failed to learn the lessons of history?”, which is a much more interesting question.  “Can it be that those in power are on the verge of repeating a senseless and deadly mistake?” sounds like something you could easily hear in real-life political discussion; the others sound like we’re reading someone’s story outline.

I also played FFVI (with the original translation, I think?) and I like the Slattery version best.

My problem with the Woolsey version is that it’s actually kind of awkward. The capital-M in Magic and the “re”discovery of technology that doesn’t seem to have previously existed both sound very odd to my ear. There’s also something that I can’t place about the overall structure of that paragraph which sounds off to me. It sounds like a lot of old game translations do to me, which is to say it sounds like they didn’t quite have the budget to hire a really good translator, so they settled for a mediocre one.

I’m okay with the moralizing based mostly what I remember from the plot. “Those in power” are literally Gehstal and maybe Kefka. There’s no other force that wants what Gehstal wants; there’s no other force that could do it if they wanted. The most important thing about a translation is that it not be misleading, and I feel that a translation that led me to think that FFVI was about anything approaching real life politics, particularly when it comes to Gehstal himself, would just not be true.

Yeah, that’s true, it’s not like the rest of the story is especially subtle.

I agree about the slight awkwardness of the Woolsey version, although I think the Slattery version is still awkward by the non-video game standards.  “The ancient War of the Magi… When its flames at last receded” is an odd way of introducing a subject.  (Compare: “The Second World War … when it finally ended […]”).

It is indeed odd that Woolsey has “rediscovered,” especially since he was trying to economize on character count (he kept editing his script down and still getting told it was too big).

Re: the last part, I agree that the passage is talking about Gehstal – the relevant text even plays over a shot of him addressing imperial officers.  But then, Gehstal himself isn’t all that big a focus in FFVI.  On the third hand, Kefka is more of a focus, and it makes sense to emphasize G over K at this point because the game is doing the usual villain fake-out thing, like with President Shinra in FFVII.

On the fourth hand, though, the sheer destructiveness of magic seems even more important than these particular villains.  It’s hard for me to look at FFVI and not think of nuclear weapons and the Cold War; the later parts of the game feel much like a post-nuclear-war scenario, with the strange new monsters (mutants?) running around, and the way it all happens in one catastrophic blast that affects the whole globe.  And the scary thing about nukes isn’t that they might get used by an exceptionally awful ruler, it’s that they’re dangerous in the hand of the merely normally awful rulers who we take for granted on the global stage.  There have been a lot of Kefkas in the past (IRL and presumably in the FFVI world too), it’s just that this one got his hands on the nuclear codes.

So “this guy is so bad, we can’t trust him with magic” seems like the wrong emphasis.  Everyone is untrustworthy with nukes until proven otherwise.

(via waystatus)

isaacsapphire:

truefactsaboutlies:

one of the best tips for Real Life that I’ve ever picked up is to always highball your estimate whenever someone asks you “when can you get this done by” by about 25% (if you can get away with it). that way, if it ends up being harder than you thought, you’ve got extra time to figure things out and if you were right about how much time it takes then you get to look like an absolute genius instead of just a simply competent person.

what you may not have realized is that I learned this crucial piece of life advice from an episode of Star Trek where Scotty is telling Geordi that whenever he told Kirk something on the Enterprise was at full capacity, it was always only ever a notch or so below full capacity so that Scotty looked like the god of all engineers when he was able to magically hack the warp drive to run a little beyond what he’d told everyone else was “full capacity” and honestly that one throwaway gag from Star Trek has changed my life.

This.

Seriously, how “reliable” I am massively improved simply by changing to always overestimating how long it will take me to do things. Because it’s way better to overestimate and deliver early than to give the exact earliest time you could possibly deliver at if everything goes perfectly and be “late” most of the time.

(via isaacsapphire)

video | The Making of Ramona documentary | KurzweilAI →

There’s a Potion in the bucket. Egads!

If productivity-enhancing techniques and other domain-general self-help stuff (e.g. CFAR) were actually useful, wouldn’t we see more successful people talk about using that stuff?  Not necessarily naming particular systems or productivity gurus, but crediting some of their success to domain-general life habits.

Maybe the techniques can help normal people get a bit more productive, but cease to be relevant at high levels of achievement (either because everyone is already as productive as they can be, or because at those levels quality of output matters more relative to raw quantity, since everyone’s already done lots of repetitive practice).  Still, that would be a problem for people who expect more out of these techniques.  For instance, I’ve heard people talk about the idea of powergaming your way to world-class achievement by “stacking” enough productivity boosts, perhaps exploiting some sort of compound interest.  (I don’t think I’m strawmanning this; yes, it sounds silly to me too.)  If domain-general stuff was this powerful, you would think it’d be widespread among successful people.

(The really successful people I’ve known and read about have tended to live and breathe their work, in such a way that “productivity” didn’t seem to arise for them as an issue.)

I was just looking over the various people who’ve translated FFVI into English, and it was fun seeing what people did with the opening narration.

Classic 1994 Woolsey:

Long ago, the War of the Magi reduced the world to a scorched wasteland, and Magic simply ceased to exist.

1000 years have passed… Iron, gunpowder and steam engines have been rediscovered, and high technology reigns.

But there are those who would enslave the world by reviving the dread destructive force known as “Magic”.

Can it be that those in power are on the verge of repeating a senseless and deadly mistake?

Tom Slattery’s translation for the GBA version, supposed to be more accurate on the whole:

The ancient War of the Magi… When its flames at last receded, only the charred husk of a world remained. Even the power of magic was lost…

In the thousand years that followed, iron, gunpowder, and steam engines took the place of magic and life slowly returned to the barren land.

Yet there now stands one who would reawaken the magic of ages past and use its dreaded power as a means by which to conquer all the world.

Could anyone truly be foolish enough to repeat that mistake?

Unofficial translation by Sky Render, which is widely viewed as awkward although more literally “faithful” than Woolsey (not least by the translator themselves, cf. their later LP of it):

Long ago, humans battled one another, and the world became a scorched wasteland. The power of “magic” simply vanished.

1000 years have passed… Iron, gunpowder, and steam engines have been developed. Machinery has been revived to replace magic.

The great magic war faded into a legend. But the power of “magic” has been revived secretly, by the powerful military empire, run by a man who wants to rule the world.

Would this man be willing to destroy the world again for his own greed…?

(Unfortunately, Lina Darkstar never translated this part.)

I can’t tell how much of this is nostalgia, but the Woolsey version seems best to me here.  For one thing, “dread destructive force” is a good phrase (though so is Slattery’s “charred husk of a world”), and I like “high technology reins.”

Just as importantly, the Woolsey translation avoids the blunt moralizing of the other two (which I figure must have been in the original script, since it’s in two out of three translations).  The other two mention an individual villain, and finish on a note of “fuck that guy,” which fees like putting the cart before the horse – it’s like a movie that starts by telling you “there will be a bad guy in this movie, and you should hate him, because he’s evil.”

Woolsey generalizes it to an unnamed plural group, and his last sentence lacks the exasperation of the other two.  It’s not “how could this one guy possibly be so evil?”, it’s “have today’s rulers failed to learn the lessons of history?”, which is a much more interesting question.  “Can it be that those in power are on the verge of repeating a senseless and deadly mistake?” sounds like something you could easily hear in real-life political discussion; the others sound like we’re reading someone’s story outline.

The other day I learned what thermoluminescence dating is, and man it is cool

Crystalline materials, like everything else, are constantly bombarded with ionizing radiation from cosmic rays and stuff.  This transfers energy to electrons and moves them to excited states.  Most of them will find positive ions to recombine with, but some get “trapped” in lattice imperfections and just stay in the excited state for years / millennia / hundreds of millennia.

But when the material is heated, that gives the trapped electrons enough energy to escape, letting them recombine with ions, which releases photons.  So the amount of light energy released when you heat the crystal is proportional to the number of trapped electrons it has stored.

So far, not too thrilling – but think about it.  If you heat the material, you’ll see all the energy it’s stored, because all that energy leaves upon heating.  So what you’re seeing is the energy stored since the last time the material was heated.  Since this energy at a (roughly) known rate, you can determine how long it’s been since the last time it was heated.

And people actually use this, successfully, to date ceramics and other human-made objects.  They were heated when someone made them, long long ago, and if you heat them you release all the energy they’ve stored up since then.

I guess I find this so cool because it depends so directly on the act of creating the material.  You’re establishing this bridge across time, between now and some day millennia ago when some forgotten human being used a kiln or something.  (The same is true of carbon dating, except there you’re linking with a natural phenomenon.  This is more … intimate?  "Hi neolithic potter, you don’t know me but we are the only two people to have ever heated this thing”)