Little things that annoy the hell out of you

[null1024]

Oh yeah, that shit is the worst.
Nothing like having someone with a pair of suns coming toward you on the other side of the road so you can't see anything.

[Mischief Maker]

Just when I thought I couldn't hate anything more than videos claiming to be reviews that are actually blind first impressions...

...videos of a guy stumbling and bumbling his way through a game's systems for the first time called a "guide."

[Marc]

Anyone had trouble with Retro-Bit controllers? Got the Saturn pad for Switch at Xmas, and while it was perfectly useable, there was an annoying creak when pushing right.

Went altogether last night, pushing one of the other direction, it feels like there's some sort of plastic cap pushing the pad back out when it hits a contact, that's gone on the right, so the pad doesn't register and also doesn't return properly. Maybe something and nothing, but I'm not risking them not sending me a replacement if I open it up and check. Fuming, don't think I've every had a piece of hardware fail on me so quickly.

[Blinge]

Just when I thought I couldn't hate anything more than videos claiming to be reviews that are actually blind first impressions...

...videos of a guy stumbling and bumbling his way through a game's systems for the first time called a "guide."

Haha yeah. Also people confusing " Walkthrough " and " Playthrough " is a pet peeve of mine.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

The constant barrage of pictures of people getting jabbed / injected by needles in regards to COVID-19 news coverage. I'm not squeamish about actually getting needles; they're usually painful and I'm not thrilled when it happens but I don't particularly mind getting injected or having blood drawn. But watching the needle go in or watching other people getting injected always makes me wince, and I hate being inundated on news outlets with pictures of this sort of thing.

[Udderdude]

Don't watch them poke you with it. Same as "Don't look down". Both good advice.

[vol.2]

Don't watch them poke you with it. Same as "Don't look down". Both good advice.

Oh god, I instinctively close my eyes and take a deep breath. I was traumatized by nurse when I 5yo. She was trying to take blood and couldn't get the needle into my vein; she just had the needle inside my skin, moving it around and around trying to get to poke into the vein. I started screaming and she held me down and kept going. I thought I was going to puke.

[orange808]

When people with potato machines complain about "poorly optimised" PC games.

They also post nebulous and nonspecific hardware. "Core i7" doesn't mean much if it's eight years old. You can't game at high settings in 2021 using a GTX 1060 and your ancient mobo, RAM, and CPU.

Buy a console.

[BulletMagnet]

Vol.2 Before Nurse Incident:

After:

[vol.2]

Vol.2 Before Nurse Incident:

Spoiler

After:

hahahaha.

[Mischief Maker]

Ever since that one game journo said they got a seizure from Cyberpunk 2077, a lot of people are crawling out of the corners of the internet claiming every bright and flashy game is a seizure risk or "hurts their eyes."

[Udderdude]

Don't let them anywhere near the versus series.

[lilmanjs]

Ever since that one game journo said they got a seizure from Cyberpunk 2077, a lot of people are crawling out of the corners of the internet claiming every bright and flashy game is a seizure risk or "hurts their eyes."

Remember when games with physical releases had manuals that would give you this warning all the time even if it wasn't a thing in their game? Amazing what most people going digital only for game buying has done.

[Durandal]

Ever since that one game journo said they got a seizure from Cyberpunk 2077, a lot of people are crawling out of the corners of the internet claiming every bright and flashy game is a seizure risk or "hurts their eyes."

Remember when games with physical releases had manuals that would give you this warning all the time even if it wasn't a thing in their game? Amazing what most people going digital only for game buying has done.

All Bethesda-published games have a seizure warning when loading up the game. They were seeing this debacle and probably going "who's laughing now"?

[Sumez]

I don't know about you, but my PlayStation also gives this warning every time it starts up.

Maybe this has been a thing for decades now because it's actually a genuine problem to people who suffer from it, and not just someone trying to stir up a riot or whatever is being assumed here.

[orange808]

"Rear facing buttons" is the subject of the day.

Explain this to me:
1. 2021 decision
https://kotaku.com/valve-fined-4-millio ... 1846185262

2. 2011 patent
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8641525B2/en

3. 1999 Gravis X-Terminator
https://gepachika.exblog.jp/20535/

4. Prior Art definition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art

Bollocks.

------------

Want more? Well...
Despite the existence of analog controllers dating back to the early 1980's, Gravis was granted a patent on the analog stick in 1990. Instead of patenting their new idea, they tried to patent shit that already existed. Although new, their idea for buttons on the backside of the controller was obvious. They knew it was obvious and that's why they didn't bother getting a patent. They still invented the idea, though.
Here's a catalog of their silly bullshit patents:
https://patents.justia.com/assignee/adv ... nology-ltd

[Sumez]

Being able to patent the placement of a button is pretty BS in itself.

[Sumez]

People posting popcorn GIFs in discussion threads anywhere

[vol.2]

People posting popcorn GIFs in discussion threads anywhere

even if it's about a movie?

[orange808]

People posting popcorn GIFs in discussion threads anywhere

Just GIFs?

__________██████████_______
________██__________██________
______██______________██______
__██████________________██__
██____██____________░░░░██_
██____██__________░░░░░░██
██______________░░░░░░░░██
__██░░__██______░░░░░░██_
____██░░__████░░░░████__
______██░░____░░░░░░░░██_
________██░░░░░░██░░░░██
__________██████░░░░██____
________________████___________

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Writing that either omits all capitalization, or worse, capitalizes the first letter of every word in a sentence. It's not a cute personal writing style; it makes the English language objectively awful and cumbersome to read. The person who runs Tower Reverse, a repository of Final Fantasy Legend / SaGa 1 info, chooses to write this way, and it's a shame because their knowledge is comprehensive, but it makes reading stuff like their info dump on the game's ingame event flags very difficult. It's some weird aggressive, nonconformist brand of illiteracy.

[kitten]

(:

[Vanguard]

Localizations where the translator makes random shit up for no reason. Only very rarely is it necessary to do anything more than extremely minor changes to the original meaning, but translators just can't seem to help themselves. Character renames in particular shouldn't happen without an extremely good reason.

Being able to patent the placement of a button is pretty BS in itself.

The insane overreach of modern intellectual property law definitely annoys the hell out of me.

[vol.2]

Localizations where the translator makes random shit up for no reason. Only very rarely is it necessary to do anything more than extremely minor changes to the original meaning, but translators just can't seem to help themselves. Character renames in particular shouldn't happen without an extremely good reason.

I'm convinced that these people are doing it out of a sense of self-importance. Taking matters into their own hands, so-to-speak, is their way to make the source material more theirs and less the author's. They see it as a right to own the interpretation as gate-keepers of the language. Some of them (many of them) go so far as to champion that point of view verbally and make veiled threats to their audience, implying that translations will go away if their views are not heeded. Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6weUDd ... 3SarahMoon

[Sumez]

It's a really tough balance that translators always face. Even though it's easy to say that a translation should always be literal, and it's up to the audience to apply their own knowledge of cultural differences, it's just never that simple. There's always some amount of localization necessary in order to grasp the correct tone and intent in a dramatic scene. And if there is voice acting too, it gets even more complex.

I agree that characters normally shouldn't be renamed, but there's still some context to consider. One example I always liked is how Terra from Final Fantasy VI was called Tina in Japan. They wanted her to have an exotic name and I think it goes without saying that "Tina" kind of has the opposite connotations in English.

[vol.2]

It's a really tough balance that translators always face. Even though it's easy to say that a translation should always be literal, and it's up to the audience to apply their own knowledge of cultural differences, it's just never that simple. There's always some amount of localization necessary in order to grasp the correct tone and intent in a dramatic scene. And if there is voice acting too, it gets even more complex.

Clearly that's true, and I wouldn't dispute it.

What I have a problem with isn't when translators change the translation in order to preserve the meaning, it's when they change the meaning completely in an attempt to introduce elements that would be more familiar to the target audience.

Often times, the rationale for this is that "the animation or game company in Japan told us to change it as much as possible in order to create maximum engagement. If they had their way, these games and programs would resemble the source material even less." Or something like that.

Honestly, I don't care that much for myself. I don't watch dubs (which this is most relating to), and I speak/read well enough to get by without subs anyway. I have absolutely no skin in the game at all. Regardless, I don't think they should be changing the meaning of things to cater to western audiences. Changing things to make the original feeling more clear is correct, but rewriting things to be westernized sucks. I grew up with the Robotech and Voltron bastardizations in the US, and it was a revelation when I finally was able to see the original shows and understand what was actually going on.

What's been going on in the translation world (at least in the japanese one) recently is a trend towards more heavy-handed localization to the point where things are sliding back towards the 80's again, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

The whole experience of learning about a new culture and understanding those differences is embedded in the experience of deciphering mysteries in the dialog. If I had watched all of those 90's anime with seamless, localized dubs, I never would have wondered what things meant and never looked any further. I would have been robbed of the important part of the experience.

[orange808]

Black eyed babies making guttural noises. It's not scary. It sucks.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Localizations where the translator makes random shit up for no reason.

Agreed, I've seen enough bad attempts at localized translations that frankly I always prefer a literal-as-possible translation at this point in subtitles except where it's something that literally cannot be translated such as Japanese wordplay (where a literal translation loses the joke). I appreciate it when subtitled episodes have pre-episode notes when this sort of thing comes into play.

Even worse are fan-translations of games where the translators clearly did not know or did not care and inserted their own jokes (that infamous Tales of Phantasia SNES translation that renames tofu to Twinkies despite the picture clearly being tofu, adds wildly sexual commentary to a specific scene, etc).

[Vanguard]

It's a really tough balance that translators always face. Even though it's easy to say that a translation should always be literal, and it's up to the audience to apply their own knowledge of cultural differences, it's just never that simple. There's always some amount of localization necessary in order to grasp the correct tone and intent in a dramatic scene. And if there is voice acting too, it gets even more complex.

I agree that characters normally shouldn't be renamed, but there's still some context to consider. One example I always liked is how Terra from Final Fantasy VI was called Tina in Japan. They wanted her to have an exotic name and I think it goes without saying that "Tina" kind of has the opposite connotations in English.

I think that small changes to the meaning to better capture the tone are not necessarily a betrayal of the original work. Say you have a some dialogue that's supposed to come across cool or charming or funny, and the translator translates it as literally as possible and the end result sounds awkward and unnatural. In attempting to be as loyal as possible to the literal meaning of the dialogue, the translator has thoroughly betrayed its spirit, which imo is an even more severe abandonment of the original work than slightly rewriting a line or two would have been.

But that sort of thing is not really what I'm talking about. The more annoying problem is that translators just love to make things up with the most tenuous justifications imaginable, sometimes there's no justification at all. Sometimes they inject a bunch of memes into the writing just because they can. I don't know if these people really wanted to be writers themselves and weren't creative enough to succeed on their own or what, but it's pretty irritating.

It isn't always an option, but most of the time I'd rather see a translator note explaining any relevant cultural differences over the awkwardness that comes with turning Japan into California and onigiri into donuts.

[Sumez]

I know it's not what you're talking about, and I don't think your point is invalid in any way.
I just figured it might be worth playing devil's advocate and realise that the distinction between the two might not always be as black and white when looking at it from the perspective of the person working on the translation. There are so many factors that you might not see when you are only looking at the finished product, as with most other creative work you notice it better when it is done poorly than when it done well.

Of course, there are completely outrageous examples that I can't in any way justify. But I also imagine especially going back to the 80s and 90s that there have been many cases where the translator maybe "wanted to" do it right, but maybe didn't have the confidence to go through with it. Even today I often hear Americans saying that they hate it when a Japanese video game or movie only has Japanese voices because they can't be bothered to read subtitles. That kind of mentality is frighteningly common, and a professional translator will often have to set aside their professional pride, and cater to that sort of audience as well.
I'm sure whatever profession people here work in have encountered comparable situations in their own line of work.