Jungle Jims

I went to think crazy place called Jungle Jims in Fairfield, OH, which is a grocery store that would like to be a Disney Land attraction. It was pretty kooky, but one of the more astonishing things was this:

An entire isle freezer case of Japanese food, something I have never seen before in my life. I ended up getting Ume gum, Ramune soda and some strawberry milk candy. Oh, and Fizzl'd Fruits Skittles

Bulleted List: JRPS and America

After seeing a Nintendo roundtable discussion, Kotaku posed the decade old question, "Why doesn't America like JRPS? This is an old discussion, but now Japan is actually thinking about trying to care. Just like Japan culture at large, they were making things for themselves and that was enough. Making games solely for the interests of Japan was successful. Now it's not as profitable, and Japan's gamers are starting to like western rpgs. So what's the problem?

Why I Want to Learn Japanese

TO PLAY IT FIRST
This isn't as true as it used to be, but for games Japan has traditionally been the land of play it first. Square still releases games first in Japan, including Dissidia, Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy.

TO WATCH ANIME WITHOUT SUBTITLES
Just a matter of principle here

TO TRAVEL ACROSS THE GLOBE
I know they say you can travel anywhere with a book, but it's more of a fly over. If you can read the book in the native language, it's like you're walking the streets.

Japan and English

This, in no way, is about Engrish. Well, maybe a little. The tough thing about English is we like to keep all our sounds a secret, a code that we natives inherently understand but phonetically have trouble simplifying. We can pretend that it's just a matter of vowel shifts, but I have three words for you: tomb, comb, and bomb. It's probably not too hard to learn to read English, but speaking it has got to be a cruel joke for many non-natives. In Japan, English words that have become a part of Japanese vocabulary are often shortened beyond recognition. Japanese doesn't even contain dipthongs. But to be fair, it's rather difficult to become fully literate in Japanese, and their literacy rate is higher than America's. Despite what this map would have you believe, America's rate is probably closer to 80% for full literacy, if not much lower. But Japan? They're likely reporting a more accurate literacy rate. And they are smart. Not just "hopefully getting there". You just can't fake it with Kanji, I guess.

Some Projects

As my previous (or next, depending on how you read these) post indicated, I've got a lot of things planned for this year. Some of them involve gaming and my gaming lounge, some don't. Because it is mostly for my benefit, the list can be found after the jump.