iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

A sincere wordless hug is what I would lean towards then, and/or "I promise I'll be safe/careful" or something like that. Even if the reassurance isn't guaranteed, I feel like that acknowledgement of his father's concerns is a way to express love, showing that he is listening.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

If he doesn't have a lot of time to prepare things, my guess might be to put on a brave face and reassure his dad that he'll be careful and be safe. Or just pretend that nothing's going wrong to not worry his dad (though in this case, I would hope he'd still try to prepare something just in case).

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Or if the dad has second-language difficulties, things like detailed letters or instructions to help his dad deal with the bank / the regular normal struggles first-generation parents often rely on their kid to help with.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Like if he's second-gen about to do something that might get him killed, my instinct is that it would be doing something like taking a bunch of his savings out to give his dad so that if he dies, things won't be as big a burden on the father.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I feel like no. "I love you" is more common as a romantic expression (but still not used that much), and the family dynamics of expressing love tend to be about doing things for their loved one. Closest to direct expressions of familial love I've seen were "I worry/care about you so much".

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I feel the same way, honestly. Social media is weird in that unlike dedicated forums where they act as social spaces (like a hobbyist club you join), and then you might have off-topic conversations and build relationships, social media puts the spotlight on YOU, screaming out into the public void.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I don't know how much the typical person trusts the convenient machine translations they receive (especially since a lot of the more recent models produce smooth, natural-sounding language), but this kind of thing always makes me keep my eyes open on the output that gets spit out.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It also reminds me of how for what feels like several months back in 2020, Google Translate inexplicably started translating "姉さん" (nee-san / Japanese for 'big sister') to "unnie" – the English romanization of the Korean word for 'big sister' (looking it up, it's probably idol fandom cross-wiring).

A screencap of a screencap, where a twitter user (December 2020) is sharing a screencap that shows how google translate has started auto-translating "oneesan" to "unnie" in Japanese to Englihs translation.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

(i.e. imagine a web page saying "Shipping Rates to China" and its Japanese-language-equivalent saying "Shipping Rates to Japan" - get enough datapoints in its corpus, and it'll build that correlation). I've seen this happen with text strings like "English" and "日本語" before.

Cases from a database where "日本語" (Nihongo - 'Japanese') and "English" translate to each other.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

My best guess as to why it's translating "In China" as "In Japan" is weird probability stuff about seeing Japanese writing and all the contexts in its corpus where "China" and "Japan" are equivalent strings

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

So I'm looking up the optional codecs to Metal Gear Solid (1998), seeing if I can find what Chinese proverbs were being mentioned in the original Japanese. When I run into this bit of curious machine-translation hiccough-ery:

Screencaps of an optional in-game codec conversation in Metal Gear Solid. The dialogue is in Japanese, with the character talking about a Chinese saying.

A person on twitter quotes/paraphrases the conversation, but the machine translation translated "In China" to "In Japan".

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I'm really impressed that she solo-translated Enter the Gungeon – that translation is well known for how charming and funny it is in JP. Example: the baseball item "Casey" (reference to Earthbound and "Casey at the Bat") was renamed "Suzuki" (after pro-baseball player Ichiro Suzuki).

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Wow, looking it up, she (Keiko Fukuichi) translated a lot of really big stuff. www.mobygames.com/person/42604...

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I subscribed to Unpacking Japan after they interviewed a guy who took over a traditional hand-made boat-making business, so when I saw that they interviewed the EN-JA translator for Undertale, my eyes lit up: www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7kg...

youtube.com

Undertale translator explains EN to JP localization

YouTube video by Unpacking Japan

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Yeah, back in the day, Red Hawk Scans bought their scans ahead of street date and would often release the English scanlation before the official Japanese release. The people they were buying from got busted, and then RHS disbanded to protect themselves. (anime.astronerdboy.com/2015/11/pira...)

anime.astronerdboy.com

Piracy Wars: A look at the recent Japanese manga pirate arrests - AstroNerdBoy's Anime and Manga Blog

Piracy Wars: A look at the recent Japanese manga pirate arrests As most of you probably know by now, there have been some recent arrests in Japan over manga piracy. Some folks have asked for my though...

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I don't really have a preference, I can basically adapt to whatever the tense they put it in. Also, I've got a sweet spot for the rare second-person narrative POV in non-interactive fiction.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

For TWGOK in particular, you'll see a lot of different shifts in image quality over the course of the RHS scanlation, but by the end there's an impressive amount of institutional knowledge gained that results in the scanlators having impressively beautiful images.

An example of a cleaned image from TWGOK magazine version circa-2013, where the image quality is very crisp and clear.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

These are some relatively typical examples of the type of image quality you'd see from people scanning these magazines.

A scanned page from TWGOK in Weekly Shonen Sunday 2009 issue 52 with significant dust and grain.

Another dusty, grainy scanned image from the magazine printing of TWGOK, from the same November issue of Weekly Shonen Sunday.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

There are old dead forum threads with scanlator tutorials where people shared tips on better ways of cleaning up images, but the person(s) who did the cleaning for this part of the TWGOK scanlation overset the strength of the cleaning/denoise effect.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Random person here just because I like TWGOK, but that's not actually AI, that's 2008-era Topaz Denoise being used to turn cheap 2008 magazine paperstock from a 2008 scanner into a less grainy image.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

MGS1 was was Jeremy Blaustein (www.polygon.com/2019/7/18/20...) MGS2 was Agness Kaku (web.archive.org/web/20120125...)

polygon.com

The bizarre, true story of Metal Gear Solid’s English translation

Written by the man who did it

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

e.g. I watched Squid Game in French, and in a scene where a character has second thoughts about telling his friend-competitor information about the game. In French he swaps out what he was going to say by saying "...bon chance" (good luck), while in English he goes "...it's nothing".

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

I'm glad other people feel the same way. I love comparing translations (both different translations into the same language and translations into different languages). For me, it's both seeing the individual creative take on the same material, and the linguistic breadth of how something can be said.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

I have a theory that the immediate launch-day recall of Mario Party 8 over the word "spastic" (a slur in the UK equivalent in strength to r*tard) is at least partly responsible for Nintendo's separate NOE and NOA English localizations during that time period. www.mariowiki.com/Mario_Party_...

mariowiki.com

Mario Party 8

Mario Party 8 is the eighth home console installment of the Mario Party series and the thirteenth overall. It was first released in North America on May 29, 2007 for the Wii. It is the last Mario Part...

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

We'll see if I actually keep this up.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

I don't really like making a bunch of posts on social media, so I've decided to try being a little archaic and just make a weekly blog post about random interesting things I came across recently: nomansguy.wordpress.com/2026/03/14/i...

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

www.reddit.com/r/ranma/comm...

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Also: while I haven't watched the Ranman 1/2 remake's dub myself, I ended up learning that apparently the Shakespeare episode had its dub script adapted by an actor who previously toured in the UK performing Shakespeare, so the dub script is filled with nods and allusions to Shakespeare:

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

It's not something I think most people would think as being a phonetic component of languages, so it blew my mind when I saw it confirmed that it's also a component of speaking a language and linguistic diversity.

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1615035/ medium.com/japonica-pub...

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

www.reddit.com/r/linguistic...

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Something that came up in your video: if you ever need to explain to someone about why a female English performance might (or even should) have a deeper voice than the Japanese performance, the relevant phonetics-linguistics concept is "fundamental frequency" / "F0."

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Aquason @aquason.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

While looking up the line "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, or whatever Shakespeare said" from the 1987 Devilman OVA English dub, I found a cool thread about added Shakespeare references in the dub of the Ranma 1/2 remake's Romeo & Juliet episode: www.reddit.com/r/ranma/comm...

reddit.com

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