I realize that fun with Babel Fish translations is old news, but I’m really enjoying how it handled this Russian review of “Ice Station Santa”, the first episode of Sam & Max season 2.

The only part that I can read is the reviewer gives a 55% (yikes! whatever happened to glasnost?), but the translation makes it sound so much worse. It’s not a game review, it’s prophecy, or the Book of Revelations. I recommend listening to Carmina Burana while reading the translation:

They rose from the ashes. They replaced measurement. They returned in order to take vengeance upon nasty, unreasonable lyudishkam. They will stop not before how. Name by them — the not on the staff police.

Telltale is today proposed to love and to respect, as almost the main stronghold of classical kvestostroya. I love it for a feeling of humor, respect for the rich dzhedayskoye past and blame for the excess regalias. Disorderly to poke by mouse is accepted in fleshe — where here classics?

Division on “good” and “poor” is terrifically popular in Americans. Good Lincoln — poor Lincoln, good Hugh Bliss — Poor Hugh Bliss, Good Santa… Certain, to always simpler translate the kept balance means from the feet to the head, having at one stroke overcome division between reality and absurdity, than to stretch the chain of analogies, to harden natures. Although it is complicated to require depth from the comics, it will not injure to adventure. Alas to me, alas.

Whom now you will astonish by evil Santa By klausom? Why not Iisus, not mother Theresa or check, at the worst? Idea to scrape the favorite of the children Of grincha with the pot-bellied grandfather, who spoils flues, zalyapana by the hands of lazy scenarios. Telltale — not of the squeamish. They began from the robot- philosopher, set By klausom to the house of detectives. Hopes, that house will destroy, and the detectives remove- after all of vosvoyasi, were not realized. Familiar views cut eyes. Finally darkens the mood of rendezvous with Soda Peppers, by debilovatymi Fricks from Season 1. Trinity lurked in the cottage in the region of the north pole, where heroes it will bring in in to the flame of retribution. And instead of the brutal handling above bezdaryami max it fills up by their snows. On whose it to side?

But the gone balmy old man sat down inside and he allows to approach no one to himself, firing from the automaton. In order to banish its seized demon, for associates it is necessary to find… not priest, no. Four riders of apocalypse, four tiny figurines. Rejoice, reactionaries, sobiratel’stvo returned.
[...]
Azh it was wanted filth to make ready. It heard, sent to kopam and President rat with the beetle after the cavity was capable to the coup d’etat… Probably, they will lie.

How to undertake the baking of means, developers decided to probe the related connections. Here to you, if you please, the entire family of beetles in the collection. In rat also it did not manage without the wife and the son. Son, by the way, is sick with the strange matershchinnoy misfortune and pours “pipami” through each word. To crown it all us they will introduce to the daughter To lefti, and at the same time also by its bar. Thus boarded up bar, where they released earlier not for what honey cakes. Excess occasion four additional series to hold pigeons more closely for the apartments.

What point-and-click horrors hast thou wrought, Telltale?

I found out too late that this year’s Whiskerino had already started, and I was ineligible on account of being goateed at the time.

Cause I totally would’ve been up for a four-month beard-growing contest. There’s no part of that that doesn’t sound like a straight-up fun time explosion. Two or three weeks of being all itchy, followed by at least two months of not being able to wear shirts with collars or jackets with zippers. Getting hairs in your mouth. Finding stray threads, or bits of lint, or crumbs. Possibly grossest of all: beard dandruff.

And in my case: spending a few weeks looking like a werewolf in mid-transition, and then having half your face come out solid Gandalf-white before you’ve even hit 40. I usually can’t last more than three weeks before it drives me nuts and I have to get to trimming. And I think the longest I’ve gone is three months before I have to shave it all off. I spend the whole time being reminded that man evolved to use tools for a reason.

Of course, I suspect that the thing is really just an excuse for talented photographers to take wacky pictures of themselves. There’s some hilarious stuff out there; my favorites are from wiseacre photo (plus the official entries) and dubstyle (more here).

And really, isn’t it every guy’s right to make an ass of himself on the internet? Maybe next year I’ll have the stones to step up.

YouTube user StSanders has been posting some rare concert footage of the world’s finest guitarists just tearing it up. I may not be all that excited to see the new Van Halen in concert again, but there’s no denying that back in the day, Eddie was a god of the axe:

Carlos Santana isn’t bad either, but that’s mostly because of his backup band.

Also: Aa-HAAA!

Hay guyz does anybody has seen that hilarious Hampster Dance page?!?

Nothing can make you feel like a dinosaur faster than trying to keep up with the internet memes. The people already have a dozen parodies out on the youtubes before I’ve even seen the first one.

Luckily Ape Lad is on top of the situation. His great-grandfather eerily predicted the internets with his “Laugh-Out Loud Cats” comic strip. It’s impressive enough that grandpa was able to predict so many fads with Nostradamus-like accuracy, but even more impressive how quickly Ape Lad is able to dig through the archives and find the relevant one.

Most recent is this strip, which if you’re lucky enough not to get, references this video.

My favorite parody of the moment (already a month old, and based on this):

And my other favorite: (It’s only funny after you’ve seen the original, and watch it at least until 1:30).

This isn’t just a rehash of already-outdated internet memes. THIS IS SPARTA!

This video from SarcasticGamer.com has already made the rounds in the real blogs, but it’s just too well-done not to pass on:

You don’t have to have seen the original promotional video to be able to tell that they got the music and the intonation of the voice exactly right. Brilliant.

And to prove this blog’s total lack of bias (in addition to its total lack of content), here’s my other favorite parody of the moment:

It feels wrong, somehow, to find fault with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because at least in principle, its existence is essential. The internet has gotten to be so ubiquitous so quickly, that we need an advocacy group to make sure that technology doesn’t outpace practical concerns like consumers’ rights. And we can’t leave it all to the big corporations and telecommunications companies to control, if only because it would prove all those smarmy cyberpunk and sci-fi authors correct, and they’d be insufferable. Besides, the EFF does more good than harm: while Greenpeace is conducting eco-terrorism and PETA is breaking into companies and freeing test animals, the worst the EFF usually does is whine incessantly about digital rights management.

But sometimes that’s enough. The latest “issue” is the new release of iTunes, which introduced all those promised EMI-published tracks in higher-bitrate, DRM-free forms for 30 cents more a pop. Ars Technica and others pointed out that while the files are without DRM, they do include personal data about the purchaser: your name, and the e-mail address used for your iTunes account. The EFF dug through one of the files and found additional “mystery” data attached.

This alarmed “privacy advocates,” a group which before the ascendency of the internet were known simply as “crazy people.” How dare the Big Brother at Apple insert MY PERSONAL INFORMATION into the Kelly Clarkson White Stripes tracks that I PURCHASED and should have the RIGHT to do WHATEVER I PLEASE with them!

Which is, like so many of the “privacy concerns” vectored by EFF through BoingBoing.net and into the collective paranoid subconscious, so much bullshit. But this is actually harmful bullshit, instead of the typical roll-your-eyes-and-ignore it variety. Because DRM does suck. It’s not the baby-raping, digital ebola virus that Cory Doctorow and his ilk make it out to be, but it is an unnecessary inconvenience. And it does punish the majority of honest people because of the actions of a dishonest minority.

But the latest round of complaints just throws doubt over all of the legitimate complaints about DRM. Because there is absolutely no rational objection to embedding a name and e-mail address into a music file bought over an online service. None. Period. Exclamation point. The only way you could object to this is if you planned to “share” your music with a stranger. And as one of the comments to this post about the non-issue puts it so well: when you agree to the iTunes Store’s EULA, you agree not to distribute your files to anyone else. Don’t like it, don’t buy it. End of story.

The only argument in the DRM “war” that was gaining any traction was the one that said you should be able to listen to music you buy on any device you choose. That’s a totally valid concern, and something worth arguing in favor of. The new scheme lets you do that (almost — the files are still in AAC format instead of the more common MP3). And by complaining about the new scheme, they’re just revealing their earlier arguments to be a lie. “Okay, yeah, we said we just wanted to be able to listen to our songs on non-iPods, but what we really wanted to do was put the songs up on BitTorrent. Which should be OUR RIGHT!!! Information wants to be free! Also: Screw the RIAA!”

The even more bullshit response from the aforementioned privacy advocates just comes across as desperate and silly: “what if somebody steals your iPod?!? They’ll have your e-mail address!” Of course, having a $300 piece of property stolen is more a concern to me than getting some spam e-mail. But wait: “what if they then put the unprotected files up on BitTorrent? I’ll be liable!”

Which as anybody can see is a perfectly valid claim, except they just don’t take it far enough. What if somebody steals my iPod, gets my personal info, then goes and makes a snuff film and puts it up on YouTube, using the song as its soundtrack, then puts “THIS PERSON WAS KILLED BY” followed by my name and e-mail address? Then I’ll be the victim of theft, sued for copyright infringement, and put into prison for murder! And all because of Apple’s greed!

The one thing that becomes clearer and clearer to me is that as fast as technology is progressing, the real advancements are being made in rationalization. I keep reading comments in blogs and message boards making unfathomable leaps in logic, twisting basic ethics to such an obscene degree that it’s unrecognizable as something real human beings would say. And all to justify getting something for nothing — wait, scratch that, not justify it, to make it out as if it were somehow noble. It’s the big corporations who’re to blame, for invading our privacy! If companies didn’t charge so much for this stuff, then we wouldn’t have to take it! It’s not hurting the artists, it’s only hurting the people who are making money off of those artists’ effort! We’re sticking it to The Man!

My favorite of the moment is the argument that because digital media is infinitely reproducible, making a copy of it without paying for it is not stealing. You can try to point out that while the song/videogame/TV show may be infinitely reproducible, the work that people put into paying for it, making it, and distributing it is not. And when honest people pay for a CD, DVD, or download, they’re compensating the creators for their effort, not for the actual physical media. But we’ll have none of that! Now that we’re in the digital world, the rules have changed, and your 20th century notions of theft and property and copyright and even currency are no longer valid!

At least, until it comes to them. Then the old rules apply. It doesn’t matter what the EULA says, they bought that CD, DVD, or download, so they own it. All of a sudden, it goes from being infinitely reproducible to being very tangible, and they’re entitled to do whatever they would do with a bookshelf or a car, like re-sell it to somebody else or let someone else “borrow” it. The thing that had no value when it belonged to the publishers, suddenly has a very real value.

And at that point I just get frustrated and give up, before the more traditional attempts at justification (”the people that pirate software wouldn’t have bought it anyway!”) set in. So I just have two things to say:

1. If you’re going to take something without paying, a.k.a. steal, then just do it, dammit, and then shut the hell up about it. Don’t try to couch it in bullshit about your rights as a consumer, or as an attack on an unehtical publisher, or say that it’s okay because it doesn’t really hurt anyone else. Hurting artists’ & publishers’ financial livelihood is one thing, but the damage you’re doing to the public perception of ethics is even worse.
   The one thing everybody can agree on is that there’s no 100% fool-proof technology against piracy. So the only real defense we have against it is the fact that most people are honest and will pay for good work. Don’t try to chip away at that.
2. When I’m doing a vanity search on Google and come up with entry after entry after entry with a “cracked” version of a game that I invested months if not years of my time and huge chunks of my sanity into creating, I don’t think, “Ha ha, way to stick it to those greedy publisher fatcats!” or even “Oh well. You probably wouldn’t have bought it anyway.” I think that I want to start punching you in the face and never stop.

Disclaimer: That picture of the Hamburglar is copyrighted by the McDonald’s corporation. Fair use! I know my rights!

Via BeaucoupKevin.com, here’s one of my new favorite video clips:

It’s from a camera placed on the conveyor belt at a sushi bar in Tokyo. This is exactly the kind of video that they should’ve put on the Voyager probe. If they’d had video sharing back then. Or video. Or sushi. Or Japanese people. (Japanese people weren’t invented until 1982, right?)

From the My Yahoo! page:

“Uh hello I am not an amputee I prefer to be called a Stump American thank you very much. And I don’t see why you gotta be making fun of my cancer and shit. Bad enough I gotta be drinking all this water without you talkin’ shit about my stump.”