Bay 12 Games Forum

... well, with thomas, gorsuch, and alito on the dissent, I'd imagine that's probably going to end up a good thing, heh.

E: Oh, yeah, that thing. Decision in question makes it a lot less likely republican malfeasance will manage to steal an election through some of the horseshit they've been trying to push through to fuck with the federal election process. Broadly speaking, definitely a good decision for the country's general health.

... so I've been doing some off and on MTL attempts sorta-lately and, just. I've always respected the amount of effort that goes into translation, y'know? Ever since I had any particular exposure to it, decades ago. Even as disparaged as machine translation often is, I've long been at least somewhat aware that even as relatively easy as it is, it's not easy, and even half-assing it takes a fair amount of effort, nevermind actually making a decent try at it.

But I'd never actually been directly involved in trying it on anything even a little sizeable, and... well, now I have, having a go at translating some steam workshop mods from chinese to english, mostly just 'cause I wanted to play the ruddy things.

This shit is a lot of work, especially without sinking money into anything, bloody hell. The freely available tools are not conducive to translating a few lines per file in several hundred individual files. One mod (for rusted warfare... haven't published it anywhere 'cause I haven't heard back from the original devs, but still, I finished it up enough to be much more comprehensible than the previous attempt at it) I actually managed to get through over the course of a couple days, but the current one (the most subscribed pokemon mod for Legend Creatures) is... I've fixed up-ish nearly 300 files since I started with any seriousness about 13 hours ago. There's still around 200 to go, and then making sure nothing got overtly broken in the process (this is joke, I'm 100% sure I broke the hell out of some shit from testing part way through to see if what I was doing worked at all) and maybe doing an actual editing pass.

It's just. One of those things, where you don't really grok how much of a pain in the ass this stuff is until you've actually done it, or meaningfully been involved in the process as something other than a spectator. Shit is hard, I have a new respect even for the MTL efforts that don't even bother with an editing pass or making sure anything makes sense. At some point during the process you end up wanting to just go, "Fuck it, google-sensei knows best even if it is calling umbreon "evil evee"."

E: Hell, ballparking it at 30 hours total effort between the remaining translation bits and troubleshooting the code I screwed up, at US federal minimum wage you'd be looking at like 218 USD worth of absolutely bottom barrel effort at the least if it was paid for, and this is notably more technical than your average bottom barrel minimum wage work. Just for some fiscal perspective.

Good luck MZ! Here's hoping it goes well and the recovery smoothly.

fastfood joint forgot the ' on "we're hiring", I'm just like... so what, the masquerade has been broken oh noyou only hire on full moons, how's this work exactly

... anyway, it wasn't much but it was a chuckle

Hey, that's pretty decent. The Eschalon line's a nice enough CRPG thing, kinda' in the same general direction as some of the Spiderweb Software stuff (Avernum, Geneforge, etc.). Not the most amazing thing the world's ever seen, but especially for free it's a good get.

I think that large portion of people you meet online with extreme views are often young people who are still figuring out stuff and insecure in their beliefs, but they usually grow out of it.

I can guarantee you a great deal of the folks being referenced are neither young nor particularly online. Fundamentalist christianity in particular is bleeding youth demographics like a stuck pig, and continuing to radicalize rather than moderate as its average age grows older.

Some portion of the online nuts are young and will grow out of it, but I wouldn't be comfortable calling that portion "large".

So far as personal experience offline goes, it's been a lot less common for extreme beliefs when relatively young to moderate as the person ages. Generally it's the exact opposite, beliefs further radicalizing as accumulated wealth and social connections/political influence brought on by age insulates them from meaningful pushback or consequence.

Eh, it didn't bother me, exactly, at least once I figured out what the blazes was going on. It's not a bad sound in and of itself, just something I can't recall ever encountering before.

Wound the dog up into a terrified barking mess for a bit, though, heh.