1433: Search This

In the absence of anything particularly interesting to talk about today, I once again braved the pit that is this blog’s search terms to see exactly how people are finding me.

Yesterday’s search terms were less than enlightening, consisting of one instance of “your minge smells”, one instance of “ayakashi ghost guild hot girls” and twenty-two search terms that the search engines in question didn’t pass on to WordPress.

I’m not entirely sure how the first one led someone here, since actually searching the site itself for “your minge smells” reveals that, as I suspected, I have never used that particular combination of words in any of the 1,498 posts I’ve written on here since July of 2008. I can’t think why I would use that particular combination of words on a post here, save for the fact that it’s an amusing way to tell someone they have an unpleasantly fragrant vagina. That said, there aren’t all that many people I feel comfortable enough with to comment on the scent of their lady-parts, so I don’t honestly see myself breaking it out all that often.

As for “ayakashi ghost guild hot girls”, I can only assume this was a reference to the time when I briefly tried to understand the Japanese card-battling phenomenon by spending a bit of time with Zynga’s take on the genre, the aforementioned Ayakashi Ghost Guild. While noting that most of these card-battling games are full of hot girls in various provocative outfits isn’t entirely inaccurate, it’s not something I commented on in my original post, nor is it a game that I’ve returned to or deemed worthy of further discussion since then. So to the person who came here searching for the hot girls of Ayakashi Ghost Guild, I can only apologise and send you on your way. (And if you’re after sexy pics of anime girls, believe me, there are a lot better places to look than a mobile card game. Uh, apparently.)

What about those mysterious hidden search terms, though? I kind of want to know what they are now, though there’s no real way of finding out as far as I can tell. I do know that for some inexplicable reason the top search term on my blog of all time is “BioShock”, a game I didn’t like all that much, closely followed by “teaching sucks”, a viewpoint I still very much stand by.

But then “monster cock” is pretty high up the list too, so I don’t really know what to think any more.

Anyway, I’m getting tired and slightly delirious so I think that’s a good place to leave that.

1432: They Don’t Look Like That Any More

Hello.

Video games today look like this:

Or this:

Or, indeed, many other things besides.

So why, then, any time some switched-on young advertising executive wants to, for some inexplicable reason, make use of the idea of “video games” to advertise something completely different — like, say, shoes — it ends up looking like this?

I have… quite a few issues with this campaign. First of all, why the hell does it even exist? It sort of looks cool, I guess, but it has nothing to do with Schuh’s stock in trade which is, unsurprisingly, shoes. I get the impression that someone just thought “hey! Video games are cool and popular! Let’s do something with them to advertise our product!”

Actually, having inadvertently stumbled across the agency that came up with this bizarre marketing effort, it seems that, unless “Isobel” isn’t telling us something, that pretty much is all there was to it.

“Schuh’s ‘Start Xmas’ Christmas campaign was inspired by the retro theme of 1st Generation arcade games,” Isobel explains. “We won the creative pitch against several other agencies earlier in the year.”

Um. Well done? As I say, it looks cool but has absolutely fuck all to do with shoes. The main concept appears to be the word “start”, which is a button commonly found on video game controllers and arcade machines, and then they’ve just gone and run with it. “Start” Xmas. Geddit?

The problem is, though, that as I mentioned at the beginning, video games don’t look like that any more, with the exception of some indie games that are deliberately channelling the super-pixelated styles of yore. This style of video game is not something that is massively culturally relevant to the sort of person who would fall for a marketing campaign based around video games — namely, a young and rather stupid person. A young and rather stupid person who likes video games probably plays stuff like Halo, Battlefield, Call of Duty or FIFA — no judgement on older, wiser people who also play those games, naturally — and not Space Invaders.

Ultimately the whole thing comes off as a bit desperate. It caught my eye when I walked past the store earlier today, but it certainly didn’t make me want to buy shoes. It did, however, make me want to write this blog post, so well done for that. It also made me feel that the people from “Planarama” behind the campaign haven’t actually played a video game ever. Can you name any games that actually say “game on” when you start them — even games from the ’80s? I can’t.

I guess it’s sort of cool that video games have reached a sufficient degree of cultural penetration for a mainstream shop like Schuh to attempt to use them to peddle their wares, but it’s also indicative of the fact that the average person in the street likely has very little clue that video games have advanced significantly in the last 30 years — to such a degree that they’d be all but unrecognisable to someone from the ’80s.

Still, I guess the super-pixelated art style is a convenient shorthand for “video games” but that doesn’t really address the core problem I have with this campaign: it’s for a shoe shop’s Christmas sale. No amount of pixelated Christmas puddings or aliens in Santa hats will hide the fact that it’s a campaign completely irrelevant to the product it’s trying to sell, and just, in fact, looks rather foolish.

On the other hand, it compelled me to talk about it and mention Schuh several times, so perhaps it is doing its job after all.

1431: Relics and Rebirth

I must say, I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy it, but I’m really having fun with Final Fantasy XIV’s endgame content. Part of this is due to the fact the new content update that dropped earlier in the week added a significant amount of stuff to do for people who had hit the level cap, but I’m also enjoying working my way through the stuff that was already there. A lot of it encourages you to try stuff that you might have ignored throughout the rest of the game.

Take the A Relic Reborn quest, for example, which culminates in you getting your class’ powerful Relic weapon, which can subsequently be upgraded to a Relic +1, for those who just like to be slightly better than the best.

A Relic Reborn tasks you with a number of different things to do, the first of which is acquiring a specific weapon and melding specific materia to it. (For those less familiar with Final Fantasy, materia are things you can plug into items of equipment to improve their abilities; in Final Fantasy VII they determined what specific spells and other actions your characters could perform, while in XIV they tend to confer bonuses to various stats.)

I had gone through pretty much the whole game without melding any materia to anything. This was partly because I wasn’t able to do it myself — in order to meld materia to a piece of equipment you need to have one of the crafting classes up to a high level, and my efforts as a Weaver were stalled by my running out of lightning crystals — and partly because I’d been replacing my equipment reasonably often as I levelled up, and consequently didn’t see the value in upgrading an item only to discard it a few levels later.

I was hoping a member of my Free Company might be able to meld the necessary materia to the weapon in question, but no-one had the right skills, so I had to brave random strangers. As someone with social anxiety, the prospect of approaching a random stranger and asking for a favour is, as you might expect, rather nerve-wracking — particularly when you’re not quite sure of the etiquette for doing so in this particular community. Should I offer them some (in-game) money? Is it rude to ask them if they want paying? How do I find them in the first place?

As it happened, finding them was a simple matter of wandering into the Ul’Dah marketplace and yelling really loud. Virtually, of course; it’s a matter of typing “/shout [message]” rather than literally having to bellow your message into the ether. Just as well, too; if I was using voice chat, there’d be no doubt in anyone’s mind that my short-but-pretty female redhead character was being played by a big hairy bloke. Not that I think anyone would care; playing off-gender is pretty common if our Free Company is anything to go by. And occasionally, playing a female character can allow you to flutter your virtual eyelashes and get people who might not otherwise help you out to play with you. (Well, it worked in World of Warcraft; the land of Eorzea appears to be a somewhat more egalitarian and less sexually frustrated society, perhaps due to the fact that the player base is slightly older than that of World of Warcraft.)

Anyway, it took me a matter of seconds to be bombarded with people who wanted to help me. Eventually I picked someone whose name I’d seen in public chat before, and whom I remembered didn’t seem to be a jerk. I met up with him at the Goldsmiths’ Guild, used the game’s convenient “request materia meld” interface to indicate what I needed and offer him suitable compensation — my Free Company brethren had suggested 5,000 gil per meld was a good starting point — and within a matter of moments it was done. We bowed courteously to one another and went about our business.

That wasn’t so hard, was it? No, of course it wasn’t; as anyone with social anxiety will know, the reality of a particular social situation that gives you cause for unease is rarely as bad as what you build it up to be in your mind. And this is just as true in the online space as it is when you’re meeting people in reality — even with online games and virtual worlds’ capacity to let you represent yourself in any way you wish.

Anyway, the upshot of all that is that the quest to construct my Relic weapon is now well underway, and a big punch-up with Chimera is in my near future. But that is a story for another day.

1430: Step Into My…

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been watching the US incarnation of The Office recently. And I have to say, I’m a big fan — even more so than I liked the UK original, in fact. And I liked the original a lot — the three DVDs that made up the complete UK series in its entirety joined Spaced and Black Books as titles that were in my regular “rotation” for a while — things I’d watch over and over again when I just wanted to zone out and not really do anything.

I watched the first episode of the American The Office mostly out of curiosity. And the first episode disappointed me a lot, as it was little more than a word-for-word recreation of an episode of the original series.

However, clearly the team behind the new American version understood that this wasn’t good enough, because by the second episode, there was enough new stuff to distinguish it significantly from the original. And by partway through the first series, it’s a completely different show that never looks back.

For my money, it’s a better show, too. It still has the same kind of uncomfortable humour as its UK counterpart does, but it carries off better and more consistently. It makes better use of the “docudrama” format, with a lot more in the way of sidelong glances to the camera and otherwise acknowledging that the characters are being filmed going about their business, rather than gradually drifting into a relatively straightforward “comedy drama” format.

Michael Scott, the David Brent equivalent, is a much more sympathetic character, too. At least part of this may be due to the fact that he’s not played by Ricky Gervais. I personally have no issue with Ricky Gervais, but it’s sometimes difficult not to see him as just Ricky Gervais rather than David Brent. Perhaps it’s just because I’m not particularly familiar with Steve Carrell and there’s none of the associated baggage that comes with Ricky Gervais — whatever the case, I think Michael Scott works much better as a character than David Brent does, since although he’s obnoxious, stupid and utterly, utterly tone-deaf, there are numerous occasions when you will find yourself feeling genuinely bad for him.

The Tim-Dawn equivalent will-they-won’t-they romance between Jim and Pam is explored in much greater depth, too. The fact that nothing was ever really quite resolved in the UK version was one of its hallmarks, and indeed so far in the US version, nothing has become particularly “conclusive” as yet, but it’s already gone further than it did in the UK version. Their relationship is interesting, depicted — and rather familiar, too.

A real highlight is the supporting characters, though. In the UK Office, I’d be hard-pressed to name many of the supporting characters other than the fantastic Keith, of Scotch egg-eating fame. In the US version, meanwhile, each of the other characters is fleshed out rather nicely; we perhaps only see each of them for a few minutes in most episodes, but we start to get a sense of who they are and what they’re all about over time — and each of them has their own little story arc, too, which is nice. The focus is still very much on Michael Scott’s troubles as a boss and the relationship between Jim and Pam, but this bit of extra detail just helps to flesh everything out that little bit more.

I’m about into the third season or so now, I think, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes next. There’s certainly plenty of it to enjoy!

1429: Call me Farmer Heathcliff

Before we get started, a shout out to the person who found this blog by searching for “are there any games on facebook that arent crap” [sic]. In answer to your question, good sir and/or madam, the answer is “no”. Thank you for your time.

Right then, to business.

Tonight we played a game of Agricola: Farmers of the Moor, the expansion to Agricola. Agricola is still not my favourite game in the world, but the expansion does add some interesting new elements to it — and, crucially, multiple ways to do well. By way of example, the top two players out of our four-player game this evening scored 61 and 60, adopting two totally different approaches to one another. (I came third, with 27 points, but at least I didn’t come last, which I count as a personal victory.)

My difficult with Agricola is a matter of prioritisation, and of finding an efficient strategy to do the things I want to do. I get that you should spend the early game building a house, the mid-game building up your family and the end-game racking up as many points as possible, but I find it very difficult to determine what are the best possible actions to achieve those things, and on top of that, what the best Occupation and Minor Improvement cards to achieve those things might be. My tablemates are always talking about “synergies” and “combos” but I have real trouble spotting all but the most obvious combinations.

I know that part of the problem is that I just haven’t played it enough compared to them. I should get in more practice with my own copy — yes, I own a copy, despite having somewhat mixed feelings about it — or the iOS version. But it’s one of those things that when I consider actually sitting down to play it, I start thinking I’d rather do something else instead. Not in the “I’d rather light my own eyeballs on fire” sense; it’s just something fairly low down the list of things I feel like doing, somewhere behind “playing Bravely Default”, “playing Final Fantasy XIV until 5 in the morning” and “watching several episodes of The Office back-to-back”. (Incidentally, The Office — the American incarnation — is something I’d very much like to talk about, but I’ll save that for another day.)

On the whole, we had a decent game this evening and I was reasonably pleased with most of my game — right up until the last turn where my lack of contingency plan was brought into stark focus by someone taking the one space that would screw me over almost completely. Consequently, I spent the last turn frantically gathering the food needed for survival rather than racking up points — and even then, I forgot the fuel needed to heat my home and took a two-point hit for having a sick person. Bollocks.

Oh well. Fortunately, I managed to get Yeoman Farmer (take no negative points, except for unused farmyard spaces and Begging cards — of which I had neither) out when things looked like they might go a bit pear-shaped. If I hadn’t managed to get that out, my pathetic farm at the end of the game would have had a truly embarrassing score; possibly my worst of all time.

Still, as my tablemates say, it was a training game — it’s only the second time we’ve played with the expansion — and so we all probably have a lot to learn, still.

1428: …Of the Year

2013 is coming to a close, and with it, most people’s thoughts turn to the “best [x] of the year”. Gamers this year have a double-dip in the form of also being able to indulge in some “best of the generation” talk, even despite the fact that the PS3/360 generation is clearly far from over. (That said, I anticipate a quick death for the 360; the PS3, which is where all the Japanese developers are, is likely to cling on for a lot longer due to Japanese devs’ propensity to continue with old tech rather than immediately embrace the latest and greatest.)

Looking back on the year, it’s hard to pick out exactly what, if anything, was my absolute favouritest gaming experience I’ve had. Thinking about it, I have fond memories of pretty much everything I’ve played.

My feelings on Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory are well documented, for example, but I also had a lot of fun with Time and Eternity and Tales of Xillia. Final Fantasy XIV also proved to be an immensely pleasant surprise — and with a significant new content update coming tomorrow, I’m looking forward to seeing how that game’s going to continue developing over the coming year.

Then there’s smaller experiences that I’ve had, not all of which actually came out this year. Sweet Fuse, which I’m yet to clear all the paths on, was a particular highlight, as was Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, though the latter was left frustratingly unresolved with no word on if or when we’ll get an English version of the sequel. 999, too, was absolutely fantastic, and I’m currently really enjoying its sequel Virtue’s Last Reward, which is shaping up to be a real mind-bender.

And then there’s last minute entries like Bravely Default, which is looking rather marvellous so far. Really looking forward to spending lots of time with that — I’m going to be reviewing it for USgamer in February, but since the game came out over here in Europe well before the North American version, I have the rare opportunity to get a significant head start and play it well ahead of having to review it, rather than being obliged to rush through.

One thing I’ve been particularly conscious of this year, though, is that a great game is always a great game, regardless of how long ago it came out. There’s an immensely frustrating, irritating trend in today’s games industry to brand something a “success” or “failure” on nothing but its opening week — but taking just me as an example, I think there are maybe one or two things in the whole year that I’ve bought in launch week, the rest of which I’ve purchased down the road when they’re either significantly discounted, or when I know I’ve got time to play them. Does me buying a game well after release not “count” or something? Apparently not, at least in the eyes of the “analysts”. Grr. Fuck analysts.

Anyway, I’m getting a bit distracted by Andie having a video call on her phone in the other room — there’s no way of doing those quietly. As such, I’m going to sign off for now, and stick my head into a good video game for the remainder of the evening, I think.

1427: RPG With a Stupid Name

Nearly forgot to write something today. But here I am at 2 in the morning having just finished a lengthy session of Bravely Default in bed.

(Yes, as promised, I finished Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory earlier, and it was awesome. But I’ll save further discussion of that for another day.)

Bravely Default, meanwhile, has been a very pleasant surprise so far — though at least part of this is due to the fact that, as I mentioned before, I knew very little about this game going into it.

Bravely Default, then, is a new Final Fantasy game. I don’t just mean that in the “it’s a bit like Final Fantasy” sense, I mean that it is Final Fantasy — right down to the item names, abilities and Job system. Quite why it doesn’t carry the Final Fantasy name is anyone’s guess — perhaps Square Enix wants to continue to take the Final Fantasy brand in a different direction, while Bravely Default will pick up where the more old-school installments in the series left off? I can’t say I’d object to that situation all that much; I like the new Final Fantasies for sure, but playing Bravely Default has reminded me somewhat that the older entries had their charms, too.

It’s closest in execution to Final Fantasy V, in that you have a four-character party, each of whom has a character level and a Job level for each of the available Jobs in the game. Both level up independently; levelling up your character improves your base stats, while levelling up your Job gives you access to better abilities and passive skills. You can also make use of the abilities or passive skills from Jobs you’re not currently equipped with, but there are limitations and the stat changes that come with a Job change may make some abilities impractical — while it’s cool to have a heavily-armoured knight that can fling black magic spells around, for example, he’ll never be as good at magic damage as a dedicated black mage.

There’s some interesting modern systems at play amid the traditional RPG mechanics, too. The game’s use of the 3DS StreetPass system allows you to summon other players’ characters and make use of them, and to “link” with your 3DS friends to borrow their abilities — particularly useful if they’ve levelled up a Job you haven’t and unlocked access to a useful special ability.

Less thrilling is the “Bravely Second” system, whereby you can tap the Start button in mid-battle to interrupt whatever’s going on and sneak in an extra turn, with actions in this bonus turn costing “SP” rather than the usual “BP” to perform. You can only “carry” up to three SP at once, and they’re acquired at the rate of one every eight hours you have the 3DS asleep and running Bravely Default — or, alternatively, you can pay for them. Ugh. Fortunately, so far I haven’t seen any need to make use of this system; it mostly seems to be a “panic button” system whereby you can get yourself out of a sticky situation should the worst happen. If you play well, you shouldn’t need to use it at all, I hope.

There’s also a strange real-time building minigame where you reconstruct a village, and the more players you StreetPassed with, the more workers you have to devote to projects and, consequently, the quicker they can complete their work. Working on the village unlocks shops, special abilities and new items; it’s a neat use of real-time mechanics without it feeling like a means of extracting money from you, because there’s mercifully no monetisation option to speed things along. What it does mean is that you can make some sort of “progress” on the game even if you don’t have a lot of time to play; simply flip open your 3DS, start your workers on a project, then put it to sleep and come back later — when you do have time to play the game proper, you’ll have some handy extras.

Mostly, though, the emphasis is on a beautifully presented old-school role-playing game with some excellent mechanics, some stunning music and a pretty cool augmented reality opening cutscene. I’m looking forward to playing more, and I anticipate it stealing a significant proportion of my time from hereon.

Lucky I finished Neptunia Victory, then, huh?

1426: Day of Rest

I have done absolutely nothing “useful” today, and instead spent most of the day playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory in an attempt to actually finish the bloody thing before the year is over.

Thankfully, it finally seems as if I am going to succeed, since I’ve successfully attained every single one of the trophies except the three that relate to the three endings. I’m on course to complete the “True” ending in this first playthrough, then I’ll race through and get the Normal and Good endings in subsequent playthroughs. If Victory is anything like its predecessor, the actual “game” side of things will end up being extremely short if you’re not doing any side content and skipping story scenes you’ve already seen. Despite this, however, I’ve somehow now spent over a hundred hours on this game — so I think I can definitely say I’ve got my money’s worth.

I’ll be sorry to see the back of it when I’m all done, to be honest, because the Neptunia cast, while tropetacular, is immensely lovable and has a wonderful chemistry between them. Mostly I’m impressed that they’ve managed to spin out what I imagine probably began as a bit of a joke — hey, let’s imagine the “console wars” as if they were actual wars between goddesses — for three games, with more on the horizon. Oh, and I’m slightly annoyed with myself that I accidentally put myself on the “true” ending path first, because my brain always prefers saving the “best” ending for last. Still, it’s too late now, plus the “true” ending is the only path where you get certain characters required to achieve some of the trophies, so it’s probably a good thing: I’m getting all the “grindy” stuff out of the way now so my subsequent two playthroughs can be straight runs to the two respective finish lines.

While I’ll be sorry to see the back of Neptune and the gang, it’ll also be nice to be able to play other stuff without guilt. Neptunia Victory has been on my shelf since April of this year, though my starting to play it was delayed by quite how much I ended up loving the Ar Tonelico series. I was then further delayed partway through by reviewing Time and Eternity — a game that I maintain is nowhere near as bad as a lot of people made out — and Tales of Xillia — which was utterly fantastic. Both of those were lengthy RPGs — 40 hours or so in Time and Eternity’s case, nearly 100 for Tales of Xillia and consequently something had to fall a little by the wayside in order to play them and be able to review them in a timely manner.

Next on the schedule once Victory is down for the count is the highly anticipated 3DS RPG Bravely Default, which isn’t out in America until February, so I’m going to get a head start on it ahead of reviewing it for USgamer. To be honest, I know absolutely nothing about Bravely Default save for the fact it’s by Square Enix, it’s a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy: The Four Heroes of Light (which I never played) and that it has distinctly Final Fantasy Tactics-esque art. Beyond that, I’m going in with complete beginner’s mind, which I find is often the best way to be, as it minimises the possibility of disappointment and maximises the possibility of pleasant surprises. We shall see, I guess; doubtless I’ll have a few thoughts to share on here ahead of the official review closer to the North American release date.

1425: An Open Note to @Twitter

[Note: Since I wrote this post this morning, Twitter has reversed its policies on blocking. That was fast!]

I’m not normally one to jump on the controversy du jour and add my voice to the throngs of people yelling about a particular issue, but in the case of Twitter’s recent changes to its “block” system, whereby blocked users are now effectively “muted” in only one direction rather than truly blocked, I feel it’s important I share my experiences.

Earlier in the year, I suffered an organised campaign of harassment that was enough to drive me from the Twitter service and completely close my account. I only returned a while later for professional reasons — in my occupation of online journalist, Twitter is a convenient means of both getting in touch with people and promoting content. Were it not for my job, I doubt I would have returned.

The harassment stemmed from a single word in my profile: “Brony.” Lest you’re unfamiliar, this term describes an adult-age fan of the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic by Lauren Faust and her team. The “Brony” community is a large and active one on the Internet, and for the most part a hugely supportive one, with its creed being “love and tolerate”. It accounts for a significant proportion of creative derivative works such as fan fiction, artwork and music videos, and is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. I always considered myself somewhat on the periphery of this fandom, since although I liked the show I wasn’t so deep in that I was making these creative works; I included the word in my Twitter bio as a means of showing my support for the community, however, and acknowledging something I found to be enjoyable.

What I wasn’t aware of until my harassment incident was the fact that there are people on Twitter — and the Internet at large — who specifically seek out self-professed “Bronies” and torment them, usually through repeated and public accusations of paedophilia. In my case, this began as a series of Twitter @mentions that grew in frequency and intensity over the course of several days; I quickly blocked the main instigators without engaging with them, but more and more people came as the situation escalated and the group responsible for the harassment — known as the GNAA — came together against me.

I changed my Twitter username in an attempt to deter the attackers, but all this achieved was causing them to take over my original username, pose as me and post links to pornographic content.

The harassment went a step further than just Twitter @mentions, however. My Twitter bio also linked to the Twitter account of my brother, and to the video games website I was, at the time, managing editor of. The instigators of the harassment followed these links to my brother’s personal website and the site I worked for, trawled the WHOIS records to find the phone numbers of the owners — my brother himself and the person who was paying for the hosting of the games site respectively — and then called them to make further accusations of paedophilia against me.

These calls continued for several days, and prompted me to contact the police to find out if there was anything I could do. Unfortunately the police were unable to do much save for keep the incident on file, and recommended that I work with Twitter to resolve the situation.

I contacted Twitter to explain the situation and point the support staff in the direction of the accounts that had been instigating most of the trouble, and which had hijacked my original account name to pose as me. After several days of waiting, during which the harassment continued, Twitter’s response was that those responsible were not in breach of Twitter’s terms and conditions because it was a “personal dispute”. It took another round of contacting them to convince them to suspend my original username, at which point I decided to leave the service entirely, and had no intention of returning unless I absolutely had to.

Without Twitter’s Block function allowing for forced unfollows and true blocking of troublemakers, this incident would have been even worse than it already was. Moreover, Twitter has shown itself to be either incapable or unwilling of dealing with persistent and organised harassment that spills out into the non-online sphere.

I am not the only person who has suffered such abuse at the hands of online bullies, but everyone who has has something in common: all they are doing is attempting to be their true selves, unashamed of who they are, what they do and what they like — and attempting to engage with like-minded or supportive people. Harassment on the grounds of something that you are — or, in my case, something that you like — is completely unacceptable, and it’s not at all appropriate to just brush these levels of personal attacks off as personal disputes, then do nothing about them.

The changes to the Block policies do not encourage a change in behaviour on the part of the bullies. If anything, they punish the victim more by forcing them to take their account private when they may wish to remain public in order to meet new friends. Twitter is taking its policies with regard to harassment and bullying in the wrong direction — and these policies weren’t in a particularly good place to begin with, as I can say from first-hand experience.

I would encourage Twitter to rethink how it is handling this situation, and to ensure that more robust solutions are in place for blocking and reporting persistent offenders. Twitter is an enormously useful online communication resource, and the means through which I have come to know a significant number of friends a lot better. But it needs to be a safe place; for marginalised and vulnerable groups, those who have suffered previous harassment or those who simply suffer from social anxiety, these new changes are not a step in the right direction.

Please consider the good of the community that has been built and not just the supposed needs of the business. When you build a social network, both aspects are important; without the former, the latter simply ceases to exist.

1424: わたしはいぎりすじんです。(Or Something.)

Last Japanese class before the Christmas break this evening. I’ve been quite pleased with my progress to date, though there are still things I struggle to remember — and the second half of the hiragana table continues to elude my memory. I’ll get there in the end, though, particularly if I make some time to revise over the Christmas break.

One thing that’s really struck me after each session is how much I get into the “other language” mindset when I come out of the class. Immediately after finishing a session, my brain is still in “Japanese” mode and I find myself having to stop myself saying ありがとう rather than “thanks” when someone holds the door for me, or attempting to respond to someone’s initiation of a conversation with some random Japanese phrase. (“So, how did you like that?” ”スミスさんのほんです。”　”That’s… nice. See you later.” ”おやすみなさい！”　”Yeah, whatever.”)

This is a positive sign, I guess. And more and more phrases are coming readily to mind, too. Not necessarily enough to make a conversation flow particularly naturally, mind, but enough to be able to state some basic things and ask some basic questions.

Japanese is a challenging language to learn for sure, but the fact is it’s perhaps not as challenging as its crazy non-Roman alphabets might suggest. In fact, grammatically speaking, it’s a lot simpler than English, and its pronunciation — reading kanji aside — is very straightforward, since there’s only one way to pronounce each hiragana/katakana character. Once you get your head around the correct pronunciations of the vowel sounds in particular, it becomes very easy to read Japanese words and phrases out loud — if they’re in romaji, anyway; deciphering hiranaga and katakana takes a little longer to learn, but once you get your head around it, it should be reasonably straightforward.

I have no idea how long it will take to get my use of the language to a functional standard for something useful, such as going to Japan, speaking to a Japanese person without the aid of an interpreter or even seeking a career that makes use of said knowledge.

Actually, the latter point is an interesting one; I’ve mentioned a few times on these pages that over the years I’ve realised I don’t have a whole lot of “ambition” to be a particularly successful, well-known or famous person. I have accomplished one personal goal by becoming a professional games journalist — and believe me, there are days when that isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — but beyond that? Who knows.

Well, that’s not quite true; since getting considerably more interested in Japanese entertainment — video games, anime and other related material — I’ve found myself thinking that a career in translation and localisation would be something I’d really enjoy doing. I’m under no illusions, of course; I follow a few localisation specialists on Twitter, and they put in long hours, do hard work and regularly have to deal with some of the more idiosyncratic aspects of both English and Japanese… but that’s the sort of challenge I think I’d enjoy. I can see myself poring over the script for, I don’t know, a Legend of Heroes game and mulling over the best possible translation of a particular idiom; arguing with fellow localisers about whether or not it should be a straight translation that keeps the Japanese character intact, or an Ace Attorney-style localisation that transplants the overall narrative thread to a situation that’s a bit more “Western”.

Anyway, that’s at least a few years off yet, but it’s something to potentially aim for, anyway. And in the meantime I can satisfy myself with starting to understand more and more of the unsubtitled battle callouts in JRPGs and fighting games, or recognising particular common words and phrases in anime.

わたしはうちにかえります。

おやすみなさい！！

Or, you know, something.