I am fully aware 2005 was a year of few posts, but in the now traditional spirit of explaining each quote used as a title on the last day of each year - or the first day of the new year (the Vineyards' anniversary), I feel I should write it, despite having little to explain - and little to talk about. In fact, 2005 was a lousy year, as clearly reflected in the infinitesimal number of posts I wrote, and the infinitesimal number of everything else I did. But a year is not complete without this post! Therefore, here it is.
(Third year I do it and I call it tradition. Exactly the same as the British Monarchy. No doubt.)
January 1st - "And we've made it tooooooooo year two!"
That is from Sluggy Freelance, as mentioned one year ago. Now we made it to year three. Barely.
January 8th - "Drei Drachen kriechen in meinen Schlaf."
I had mentioned in the post before this that I had started taking German classes, a revelation that probably made Justin either spit juice over his now retired CRT monitor or drop on his keyboard whatever it is he was eating (which was not cake, as his most recent memorable quote, "To hell with cake!", leads me to believe). It was fair, then, that I threw in a quote in German, one I had been meaning to use, regardless. Writing a post about jazz and New Orleans and Gabriel Knight had been on my mind for a very long time (like the post about the word "whatever", now). I am slightly glad I wrote it before that diselegant wind made that fuss all over the city, too; now I will have to wait some ten years for the city to be rebuilt before I can visit it and see all those things I so dreamed about when I played Gabriel Knight. Yes, yes: the verse in German is from the game, more precisely from a book he randomly picks up in his bookstore; it relates to a certain clock in his grandmother's attic.
Ah, of course, this post includes what is probably the best moment of the Vineyards in 2005: the chat between the true Jazz Players and the powermusickers.
January 20th - "Don't Walk Away From Love"
Maybe I should not had done it. This is actually the song's title, I broke my own rule once again, etc etc, because it was supposed to be a "special" post. It actually is, it reached its purpose: now the site's stats show about 70% of visitors get here while looking for the lyrics to that song. Nearly one year later I still get an eventual "thank you" comment from a listener of Antena 1, the radio responsible for the dissemination of this song in Brazil. This post really did its job. Honestly, however, I am not terribly proud of it.
February 17th - "shutdown -h now"
This is the command used to halt a Linux system immediately. It is the one command I remember without even having to think twice about it (that and cd, actually; moving and copying files still make me pause for a second). Shutting down Linux systems was exactly how I felt like when I wrote that, having gone through countless attempts at installing countless distributions of Linux on Midgaard, which I later found out to be suffering from faulty hardware. Regardless, it was not the moderately fried CPU that made Slackware give me a list of kernels to choose from when I booted it up. I promise to give Linux another try, however, when I have Valhalla (or any replacement for Asgaard). I am just not very sure why I would want to run Linux, though.
March 12th - "One, two, three, four, five, and six. Six, the perfect number."
A quote from "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", a classical western movie (in the sense of cowboys, not in the sense of "opposed to eastern"). I was talking of six subjects and I needed a quote about the number six, I went to IMDb and found that one. Yes, it was that disappointing - I never even saw the whole movie, actually. Shame.
May 12th - "I thought three was the perfect number."
From the same movie, same scene, it is the next line. I was talking about three subjects this time. There is a pattern, see? It is not all that bad. And if you only read that post when it was originally, hm, posted, I will have to say I later edited it to include a third "worst song". Dear gods, those are songs I refuse to even capture.
May 26th - "This 'X' is... considerably to the North, and... to the East."
From "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis", the LucasArts classic PC adventure game, when he and Sophia are looking for an X in a map of the desert, but it is hard to figure out; the local nomads (paradox, heh?) give better indication. I doubt, however, they ever say "considerably to the North", as the X is very close to the bottom right corner of the map. However, I wanted to give the slight impression I was talking of Europe, perhaps to move the focus away from the United States. I had not given much thought to these matters in a long time, really.
June 30th - "What you say !!"
The classical response, italic exclamation points and all, to "All your base are belong to us". The shiniest pearl of Engrish (on its shinier dialect, SNK-Engrish), used in the post that shows Engrish turned around: Babelfished into Portuguese.
August 22nd - "How are you gentlemen !!"
The explanation of the previous post deserved a quote from the same source, no?
September 29th - "Hi, Honey!"
The most famous post of this whole year, second only to those lyrics, of course. This one was actually printed and shown around to people who would otherwise never come across the Vineyards (not my doing, no less). It is all in the map, really. "Aquatic Ocean", "Here there be monsters". The quote comes from the only full sentence the characters from the soap opera managed to speak in English, "Hi, honey!". A shame the post is in Portuguese; a full explanation in English was written, as an e-mail to Justin, who wanted to know what was going on that so many comments seemed to find it so funny. Unfortunately, no one else asked about it, so I never posted this explanation. Perhaps it can be added as an appendix at the end of "The Vineyards: Hard Cover Special Anthology (2003-2013 period)". Or I can post it sometime later.
October 12th - "We'll surely avoid scurvy if we all eat an orange."
Monkey Island, though I fail to remember if "Return to" or... I forgot the other name, too. Well, third or fourth game. It is the ending verse of "A pirate I was meant to be", the song improvised by Guybrush's slacking crew. Because I wanted to be a pirate, and a good man, and a Pokémon trainer, and look like Legolas.
October 27th - "Words communicate to things the spirit that the society imposes upon the words which have come to be the names for them."
This post is a major bash on that thing where I studied in the past five years - and where I will spend at least another six months, but the post about this was destroyed by a power failure, perhaps for the best. The gigantic words about abstract theories that talk about other people's theories about gigantic words and so on, a spiral of pointlessness. I just picked some random big words relating to the field of "communication" and threw them into Google, he sent me to this page and from it I picked what seemed to be the most pointless. Later, after pondering for a while, the sentence started making some sense. Still - honestly, really: bah.
For the record, the author is Kenneth Burke; a more precise source can be found by following that link.
October 28th - "In the 2921st year of Danaan, Tenes was overthrown."
That is from my own "L'Imperatore", a Dark Ages History contest entry, Kingdom Award (second place, Courtney is declared guilty). I just wanted a nice quote that would be immediately recognized as a Dark Ages quote (by those who knew the game, at least) and not be the "Every light casts a shadow" quote (see how it got these thinner spots from overuse here, and here? The color is faded here, too). I quoted myself, then. Har.
And that is all. 2005 was a bad year for the Vineyards, aside from Gloria Perez's map and the Jazz chat. I hope 2006 will be better. On to it, then. Happy New Calendar Day to everyone.
Posted by Etienne at January 1, 2006 12:10 AM