III

I have made an error. I have erred because I haven not updated my blog in 5 days. By temporal standards that exist in the physical world, this is not a very long time. But I forgot that in the context of this blog, I was dealing with Internet time. In Internet time, 5 days ago I was an almighty deity, hurling down divine justice upon the world. 5 days later, true believers eagerly await my return, while most of society no longer believes I exist.

I made this error because I promised myself I wouldn’t post again until I actually bothered to do a ds106 assignment, since I had been kind of slacking in that area. The problem is that in the meantime I thought of a lot of different things I wanted to blog about, which I will now attempt to touch on in whirlwind fashion in no particular order:

I. I am not a particularly big fan of this iPhone 4S that I just got. While it performs well as a smartphone, it is not nearly as easy to use or clever as the LG Android phone that I had in the US. The phone’s main advertising point, Siri, was buried way deep down in the Settings menu, and I actually thought that it just didn’t come with the Japanese versions of the phone until I discovered it last night. You could say I should have read the literature, but my philosophy with regard to technology is that if I can’t figure it out just by looking at it, it sucks.

It would have been just as well if my phone didn’t have Siri, however, because it can’t give you directions in Japan, and therefore is basically useless. There’s more I don’t like about this phone, but I’ve spent too much time on this already.

II. If you had read my comments section, you would see that another member of the class mentioned something called RhyDin. Very briefly, this was a role-playing community that existed on AOL in the mid-to-late 90s. It was utterly ridiculous, cheesy, lame, and filled with morons. It was great and I loved it. I could write a whole blog about this, but I won’t tonight. So instead I’ll point you all to this link that I found which might explain to you what I mean:

http://www.angelfire.com/de/SCoR/rules.html

On to ds106!

The Assignment:

The ds106 assignment that I chose was “Google Translate Fail” from the “Web” category. The instructions of this assignments are as follows:

“Find something in a foreign language and use Google Translate and laugh about how awful it is. Its pretty easy to do if you use Google Chrome. Just go to a site in another language and select the translate to English button when it pops up (options – under the hood – check the box that says to offer translations). I think you can also use the main google.com to translate pages as well. If its a language you know, give an explanation of what it should be and list possible reasons it got messed up.”

The Process:

When I was ready to finally tackle ds106 for the first time, I was unsure which category I should pick from. Skill-wise, I definitely lean towards writing since I don’t have much artistic ability, photographic or otherwise. But on the other hand, taking a visual assignment could serve as a character-building challenge. The dark horse candidate was the “Web” category, which I had forgotten existed until I clicked on it and picked this assignment.

I decided to use Japanese as the language, because, even though I’m far from fluent, is it the language in which I have the most ability other than English. Then came a dilemma, as I didn’t really know of any Japanese websites other than mixi. I figured that something a bit strange could serve as the most verdant ground for mistranslations, so I typed “otaku” into a search engine, which yielded me otaku.com. However, the google translation wasn’t that funny. Keeping on the same train of thought, I thought maid cafés might do the trick. Typing “meido” into Google Japan took me to a directory of maid cafes, and finally to an advertisement for a place in Akihabara called “Garcon”, where dashing young men will accompany you for the evening.

The Story: