The Vineyards

Only ten posts last year; clearly a reflection of a generally rather bad year.

January 1st – “Oh, dash it all!” “Here we are again!”

GEN. And do you mean to say that you would deliberately rob me of these, the sole remaining props of my old age, and leave me to go through the remainder of my life unfriended, unprotected, and alone?
KING. Well, yes, that’s the idea.
GEN. Tell me, have you ever known what it is to be an orphan?
PIRATES. (disgusted) Oh, dash it all!
KING. Here we are again!
GEN. I ask you, have you ever known what it is to be an orphan?
KING. Often!
GEN. Yes, orphan. Have you ever known what it is to be one?
KING. I say, often.
ALL. (disgusted) Often, often, often!

Pirates of Penzance, the dialog right after “I am the very model of a modern major-general”, which I first came in touch with thanks to a Babylon 5 episode. “Would you like me to sing?” I think I told about this some three or four times.
All in all, the quote seemed fitting, as we were at the New Calendar Day post again. The single time of the year you know there will be a new post here – even if I cheat and post it late with an edited timestamp!

February 28th – “Kay-lay lam. Lam piki-piki. Lam eensy weensy. Lam say-say… eunuchy. Snip-snip.” “Ahhh… eunuchy!”
From “Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Chest”. A post about movies and series deserved a quote from a movie (even if Dead Man’s Chest pales in comparison to the other two). I just thought I could pick a funny one.

March 31st – “It just works.”
I believe “it just works” refers originally to BSD, not Linux, but it serves its purpose either way. Irony that the most user-friendly and the most driver-loaded Linux distributions would fail me, while Vista would “just work”. Sometime this year I will try to conjure myself a Hackintosh by installing OSx86, if my processor can handle it. I rather doubt it, but at least I do not expect it to just work.

April 6th – “I’m not walking funny.”
The post itself explains the quote, unless the reader was using a text-only browser like Lynx, an old wap-enabled cellphone, Opera with images turned off, an extremely slow dial-up connection that failed before loading the comic or a command-line wget.

April 12th – “The tyrant Mordea has no birthright!”
From Ultima VIII, the entire reason of this post. I really liked Mordea; it is a shame she indeed had no birthright, being the younger sibling. The funny thing is saying this line about her birthright means instant execution, and it appears as an option in each and every step of the dialog tree in this scene. Instead, the Avatar should say “Devon is also a Tempest! I have proof!”; said proof is the journal of Bentic the librarian, which was kept in a secret room in Tenebrae castle’s basement, accessible only by using a Secret Door Scroll, which is stolen by the Avatar and, upon this mention during Devon’s execution, has its existence confirmed by Salkind the Seneschal with the line “Impossible, the book is well hidden.”, but I deviate from the point – and I wrote it all from memory.
In any case, after writing this post, I did check if anyone was making ports of U8: Pagan into another engine. I am not sure, but I think a NWN2 port and a TES3: Morrowind port were in the works, a TES4 port was in its early stages. I need to check these again sometime.

July 23rd – “But why the big production number? What’s the point?”
The line is from “Bitter Suite”, the first musical episode in Xena: Warrior Princess, spoken by Xena in the middle of the first part of a song I think is called “War and Peace”. The origin is unimportant, however, as the idea is what counts in this: people who take little meaningless things way, way too far, especially in academia.

October 9th – “And once again I’m left behind.”
To announce the new version of the Vineyards, now in Word Press instead of Movable Type, I used a quote from Loom. “My name?! But I have nothing to do with this! Wait! Where are you going? [Sigh] No explanations, no goodbyes, and once again I’m left behind.” Bobbin Threadbare, after the Elders tried to cast a spell on him and it turned against them, turning them into swams, who them flew to the Shore of Wonder. I wish my memory for practical things that make money was as good as the one for game quotes and scenes.

October 28th – “I think that our foreign policy effects the situation.”
About overused, misused and forgotten words in Portuguese. Specifically, for the record, about how the verb “to influence” is being replaced by something that sounds like “to inflow” (I am surprised to find out that word exists in English). The quote is from xkcd again, here.

November 12th – “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.”
A Chinese proverb, or said the page of quotations about names from which I got this line. About how communists and academia refuse to refer to anything from the United States as “American”, choosing instead the Spanish term “estadunidense”, which sounds rather like “unitedstatesian” to ears of Portuguese speakers with any self-respect. Coincidentally, the very same complaint was made in a famous blog days later, something I mentioned in the post right after this. Another coincidence that went unmentioned, there was a thread in 4chan about that on some day between my post and the famous blog’s post, where many Americans noted they would not mind being called “Statians” – which is rather agreeable, in my opinion.

November 28th – “Children always know when company is in the living room: they can hear their mother laughing at their father’s jokes.”
The site where I found the proverb from the post before had another page dedicated to quotes about jokes, which I reached by random browsing; lucky. Another complaint post, about a trend in Brazilian blogs and discussion groups: people add a (rather untranslatable) remark after each and every word that may have a remote relation to sex, like “The market penetration (oops!) of our product” etc. I like to think the quote refers to these men, who in their teenage years would go “he said penis lol” during a Biology class.

So, in 2007 I wrote ten posts and half of them were complaints. What a bad year. 2008 has got to be better.