beforebreakfast.net

Phew, I’ve been so busy this week I’ve scarcely thought to post at all! I just finished a huge video game translation project (I’ll tell you about the game soon), and now I’m starting yet another huge one! Most of the games I work on are RPGs, so that means a lot of text (and therefore, a lot of work!). I intend on posting about video game translation in depth sometime soon, along with mock-up examples of files required in the process! Let me know if that would interest you.

Now, I know a lot of you are anxious to hear the answer to Special Delivery, the puzzle I posted last time. Well, I’m gonna give it to ya! Please note that I can only read a little Chinese, and I can’t speak it at all. But I’ll do my best to explain to you what’s going on.

The steps are spoilered, so that you can get the hints one at a time if you still want to solve the rest of it for yourself. For reference, here are the menu scans again: First page, second page
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What’s the weather like where you are?

Here in New York, it’s cold and clear, with whipping winds that sting your face. No snow (yet), but I’m hoping there’ll be some soon. On a cold winter day (or night), there’s nothing like staying inside in the warmth and relaxing.

Today’s poem is about precisely that, and it’s a short one: a 俳句. The poem was written by an anonymous 俳人 (haiku poet) at the 秀石句会, a likely otherwise unremarkable meeting of Go players to compose poetry about their most beloved game. Yet I somehow stumbled upon this poem and liked it, so I’m now sharing it with you. You should know all of the words in this poem, but I’ll give you a few grammar notes and my translation after the poem itself. [Read more →]

My neighbor has started with his incessant, repetitive drumming again, so I’m taking a break from my translation crunch time to share some puzzles and puzzle solutions with you. Today I have a Chinese puzzle for you (for a nice change of pace!), as well as solutions to the Japanese astronomy crossword I shared a few days ago as well as the Japanese puzzle from Mystery Hunt. I’ll try to come up with a nice poem to share on Friday.

First of all, I’d like to share the Japanese astronomy crossword solutions. It looks like several of you managed to solve it, and I hope you learned something from it. I may post interesting snippets from Japanese space websites or books in the future, so this may be vocabulary you’ll see again. [Read more →]

I’m writing this from Boston, where I just spent three whole days with friends as we racked our brains solving all manner of crazy puzzles for Mystery Hunt. I’ll post the answers to the astronomy crossword next time.

The puzzles really ran the gamut, as they always do. There were all sorts of crosswords, foreign language puzzles (including one Chinese puzzle and one Japanese puzzle, both of which I helped to solve), and tons of puzzles were so bizarre that they don’t fit into any particular category of puzzle type. All of the puzzles share a few things in common, though: it’s usually unclear what you have to do to solve the puzzle (sometimes it’s completely unclear where you’re even supposed to start), and every puzzle will yield, in the end, a single, usually short, answer in English characters.

Our team didn’t win, and we didn’t sleep very much, either, but we had a good time, overall! And now, for your benefit, I’d like to share the Japanese-related puzzle that we got. It’s called Kana Game, and I hope you like it as much as I did. [Read more →]

I’m doing an early post tonight, because I’m gearing up to go to Boston tomorrow for MIT’s puzzle-solving competition, Mystery Hunt. I’ll be gone all weekend, but I should be able to eek out some sort of post for Monday morning. I’ll be away from all of my books, though, so it’s anybody’s guess what I’ll post about. I may end up posting one of the puzzles from Mystery Hunt this year if any of them involve Japanese, as they have in the past. We’ll see.

Today I have another crossword for you. I was reading my favorite space-related blog, Bad Astronomy, when it occurred to me that a crossword based on space and astronomy vocabulary in Japanese would be pretty fun to make. So I made one!

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I’ll cover many of these words and concepts in greater depth in a Japanese astronomy-related post in the future. For now, have fun with this vocabulary! Enjoy, and let me know if you solve it!