The Vineyards

“Moving on”. Whenever I heard it, it meant I was losing a friend, or at least someone who thought like me.

It started to show up a lot on Nexus and Dark Ages. Friends would eventually quit and say they were “moving on”, often to another game. The company changed something, suddenly the game was bad and people would “move on” instead of staying in the world I loved and fighting for it, or adapting to it so they could stay with their friends and with me. Whenever someone “moved on”, they were just saying everything they meant to me was one-sided, that I meant nothing to them: everything we agreed on, all we enjoyed together and fought for together – everything I loved – was unimportant, and they could just set it aside like that and go to the next thing.

A lot of people “moved on” around me and hurt me tremendously, and I vowed to never do the same. I can “let go” after trying a lot, or I can gradually break away from things so when I do leave my absence is barely felt, but I will never make anyone feel the way I did.

Uma coisa que me irrita profundamente no Brasil é a mania de pegar um termo composto em inglês e dizer só a primeira palavra. Naquele contexto específico funciona, mas em qualquer outro não faz o menor sentido.

Depois de comprar uma TV “HDTV-Ready” (com 768 linhas), querem um sistema de som que combine – vão atrás de um “home”. “Home”! É um lar que você quer, pra colocar sua TV nova? É um motor-home, pra andar pelo país mostrando a TV nova? Não, é um “home-teather” – mas, veja só, em inglês a parte que importa é a segunda palavra.

Mas as crianças não se importam muito com o tamanho da TV, e preferem brincar no parque. Vão no “play”. Parque, parquinho? Não, “play-ground”, como se português não tivesse uma palavra adequada pra descrever uma área com areia, balanço, gira-gira, gangorra, trepa-trepa. Sai o parquinho, entra o “play-ground”, e com isso sai o “ground”. Traduzindo mecanicamente, o “chão de brincar” passa a ser só “brincar”. Vamos todos descer pro brincar! Ao menos o balanço ainda não teve o destino do parque, ou logo as crianças sairiam do trepa-trepa pra se jogar num swing.

Os pais, ocupados, precisam trabalhar enquanto as crianças se divertem no “play”, então levam o “note”. Um papelzinho com uma anotação? Uma cópia do programa Microsoft Note? Não, é o “notebook”. Poderiam dizer “laptop”, daria na mesma – mas em pouco tempo viraria “lap”. “Vou levar meu lap”. Vai? Eu prefiro deixar meu colo em casa quando saio. Também não gosto de tomar voltas de quem está na frente quando aposto corrida.

Aqui cabe um em português, também: “micro”. Supostamente de “micro-computador”, mas a última vez que ouvi “micro-computador” foi em referência a um Apple ][e, com tela verde, 16 kilobytes de memória e disquete de 5″1/4. Poderiam dizer “computador” ao invés de “micro”. Poderiam dizer “PC” que todos os envolvidos saberiam o que é. E o que é pior, eu já vi “micro” ser usado pra forno de microondas.

Falando em “PC”, no Brasil o PlayStation (1, 2 ou 3), diferente de todo o resto do mundo, e igual ao parquinho, chama “Play”. “Destravei meu Play2″. Fico feliz de o PSP não ser popular por aqui, ou viraria “Play-Pê”. “GameCube” é muito complicado, então os poucos que o tinham jogavam “Nintendo”; problema algum, até há pouco tempo, porque o NES nunca foi popular aqui, mesmo, e o SNES era o “Super” – disfarçado, virava o Nintendo Clark Kent -, mas agora saiu o DS: como ninguém disse que significa “Dual Screen” (ou viraria “o Dual”), chamam de Nintendo também. Brasileiro só fala letra se é nome de partido.

O que me consola um mísero pouquinho é que em Portugal videogame (aliás, como não abreviaram isso pra “video”, aqui?) é feminino. “Estava a jogar minha PlayStation”. Vá lá, “station” é estação e “box” (do XBox) é caixa, mas é muito estranho. “A GameBoy” simplesmente não presta, e GameCube não traduz pra “Cuba de Jogo”.

Abro exceção pra “shopping” (center), porque existe há mais de vinte anos. Mas se continuar assim vou começar a aplicar ao português também: pra não molhar a mesa, coloque seu copo sobre esse porta; se está chovendo, leve um guarda.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, the PSP version of FFT, is among the best writings I have ever seen, in a game or otherwise. A few very rare mistakes overlooked, it is spectacular: the plot is better explained, the characterization is far more fitting, even the sometimes overly poetic lines look perfectly in place:

“Back whence you came! Quick as shadows, or this one’s blood makes crimson snow! Do not think to try my patience! This keep packs such a store of powder as you could scarce imagine! More than enough to deliver the lot of you to the Father’s keeping, should your feet lack proper haste!”

The original PSX game was grand on its own. The PSP version is grand twice, and part of the reason is the new translation. Another part is the inclusion of animated sequences in place of some cutscenes, with English dubbing far exceeding any expectations and a beautiful style of animation and coloring. I would happily watch a movie or anime series of that. Square should make an anime of it indeed.

Another game that should be made into an anime is Xenosaga – the whole trilogy, in fact. Not because it is as good as FFT, but to spare players from it. I tried the third installment, despite having never played the first two: after sitting in front of my TV with the control-pad in my hands for around four hours, I had played effectively for less than one hour. Dismayed, I looked around the web for information, to see if the whole game was like that, and found it was worse: I do not remember exactly, but I recall something about a special edition of the third game bringing DVDs with cutscenes from the previous two games, totaling over twenty hours of animation. That is over 40 episodes and they were only 2/3 into the story! Why not just release an anime series instead?

Back to the PSP, however. Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth is the PSP release of the PSX’s original. In all honesty, I never quite understood the success of the original. If you land in any town in search of plot, you waste a tick of the timer, and each tick lost is less experience you gain, less chance to please the gods with the warrior you send. With this, only each character’s personal story gets told, with Lenneth’s set aside most of the time. One secret character in special, whose background relates to the Valkyrie’s, requires completely arbitrary order of visits to places the player would never otherwise visit. It makes me wonder how anyone ever found the best ending.

Other than that, though, Valkyrie Profile is good, yes, albeit repetitive at times. Chaining long combos with multiple finishing strikes breaks the monotony now and then, but even that can get old. “Purify Weird Soul” is funny the first few dozen times, but moments later the horrid dub comes up with the same voices that dubbed Pokemon in the US; the guy that says “W-w-wow, everyone’s so tough!” at the end of each battle is said to have played Ash Ketchum – I wonder how Pokemon has any fame at all in the US with a protagonist dubbed like that.

(Which reminds me: in the American dub of Pokemon, they always stress the beginning of words. “PI!-kachu, THUN!-dershock!”. I wonder if Americans normally yell like that. “MA!-ry, WHE!-re are you?, CO!-me back here!”.)

Still, not only does Valkyrie Profile punishes the player for trying to go deeper into the plot, what it does deliver is translated very poorly (dubbing aside). The fairy Freya leaves behind in the cave as a tutorial for Lenneth even has notes and doubts from the translator! “If you have any doubt, ask HIM/HER.”, “(should I talk about whipping a dead horse?)”.

Like Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP, Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth gained new animated sequences, but they add nothing but eye-candy. I believe they have no dialogue, even, and exist only to justify a re-release of the game and show the PSP’s UMD can store more pre-rendered video than the PSX’s CD. “But surely the bad dubbing was redone for VP:L”, I thought, and I was wrong. “At least the horrid fairy translation notes must be fixed!”, I hoped, but to no avail at all. Everything is exactly the same as the original game. Even the characters’ menu appear stretched, because the PSP is in widescreen format – faced with that, I actually wonder if the scenes and game sequences they did convert to widescreen format indeed got wider or simply got cut above and below.

Back when VP:L was released, the PSP needed good games, not direct PSX ports with a handful of new CGI animation. FFT offered many improvements over the original; VP:L just exists to prevent a proper PSP version from being released.

As webpages evolved, we learned that centralized text, blinking text, animated .gifs and image-links with borders are not the way to go. At the same time, internet advertising became a bigger business and the abundance of broadband connections allowed all sorts of new content, notably video.

Big deal. The web today wastes more of my time than the centralized blinking text did.

I sometimes visit digg.com or check Firefox’s included Headlines live-bookmark in search of something interesting to read, some news that I may mention during a meal (“I read an article” is how I begin a lot of my conversations these days).

Then comes the first annoyance. I open the titles I find interesting and check the size of the scrollbar: if it is small, I read it right away; if it is long, I save it for later or just scan the document quickly in search of the most important information in it. Sometimes the bar is small and I start reading, reach the end of the page and see a “Next”. I had my mind set to read a short text, not two short halves. Worse, I reach the end of the page and see this article is five pages long – most of the time I just quit reading. For this, some are certain to call me lazy, say I have a short attention span, etc. Nonsense, and unfair. I quit reading for two reasons: first, I was set on reading a short text, not a long one – if I knew it was long, I would have simply saved it for later and read it then; second, I know one of the reasons websites do this is to show me twice (or five times) more ads. I fully understand server and bandwidth do not pay for themselves, but fooling me into seeing possibly the same ads five times will not make me any more inclined to click them; fooling me into seeing five different ads (and probably an interstitial between some pages) will just annoy me – enough that I sometimes click the “Print version” button right away just to get everything in one page.

Even worse, some online magazines now make slideshows instead of articles – lots of pictures, each in its own page, with a small paragraph next to it – and present it as news articles. I am not here to look at pictures! I want information, not screenshots, pictures of an event, montages representing each topic being talked about – “talking about” very little, too, since the spotlight is on the image. Unless it is exceedingly necessary to present something as a slideshow, give me text, preferably all in one page.

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That is another annoyance. Newspapers and magazines used to do this, though I was never quite sure why – you reach the end of the page and instead of a conclusion there is a “Continued on page…”, often half the magazine ahead (and often in a page not numbered); you have to skip half the magazine and keep a finger marking the page you were on to come back and read the rest once you are done with that one. No idea why, as surveys show a majority of people never bother to go to the next part [citation needed]. On the web, this jump just means “There is a box-ad between this and the rest of the text”, and it will keep flashing and moving while you read the text to distract you.

Finally, there is video. Why is video used at all on news, other articles, tutorials? If I follow a link to an interesting story and instead of a text I am presented with a video box, I close the tab, simple. If I go to YouTube, CollegeHumor, 5min or Metacafe, I expect to sit here and watch videos from beginning to end; if I want to read a story, article or review or follow a tutorial, however, I prefer that it is presented as text so I may evaluate its length and scan it quickly if I want to, take a break at the end of any paragraph knowing I am not in the middle of an idea, an explanation or a joke, read slowly or fast, follow the steps calmly at any pace. On the other hand, if I am given a video, the website is telling me it will take that specific number of minutes from my time, that I would rather wear earphones if I prefer not to bother people around me, that copy-pasting from what they wrote is prohibitively complicated, that my choice of pacing or even of quick-scan is pointless because they choose how long the video will take and when they give me the important information I want. All that consuming several orders of magnitude more bandwidth than text and, if the server or my connection is in a bad mood, several times longer to load. Screw it, I will not have that.

Granted, video may add to text or even be the entirety of content, if in proper context. If an article is about an old cartoon and provides a video-box for it, that is all good; if it is to mention a TV interview or a filmed presentation, fine; if you saw something really funny on YouTube and think I may like it, great. Just do not provide all your content in a video.

Speaking of annoyances, there are blogs that update about once a month. Those are the worst.

“Into the Night”, a song by Benny Mardones, gets a lot of heat for being “about a pedophile”. It starts with

She’s just sixteen years old
Leave her alone, they said

And then

If I could fly, I’d pick you up
I’d take you into the night
And show you a love
Like you’ve never seen, ever seen

At sixteen, Ariel, the Little Mermaid, was old enough to get married. His father’s objections were about her going to the surface and loving a human man, not about her getting married. Seen through the mentality of people who say “Into the Night” is about a pedophile, Disney promotes pedophilia. Unless prince Eric is seventeen or at most eighteen (despite looking older than twenty), in which case Disney is only promoting teenage marriage and pregnancy (Ariel has a daughter in “The Little Mermaid 2″).

Among dozens of “he’s a pedophile” comments about “Into the Night”, I found one convincing explanation:

The song is about a young girl who lived in Benny’s apartment building in Spanish Harlem. The father of the girl ran out on her and her mother was never around. Benny felt bad and hired her to walk his dog. The song was inspired to be of a parental love, not a pedophile.

I loved reading that; even if 90% of people who hear the song still think “he is a pedophile”, I can at least silently say “Tut tut, what a dirty mind you have” at them in the knowledge truth is far kinder and more beautiful.

Regardless, if the song said “She’s just six years old” I could understand people thinking that way, but sixteen? Disney says it is perfectly alright. Americans are so terribly paranoid about that – as if girls were pearly white damsels of unscathed purity and innocence until the exact day they turn eighteen. If “Rock and Roll Lullaby” was recorded today, saying “she was just sixteen and all alone when I came to be”, they would say it was an immaculate conception by the Holy Spirit, because a girl of sixteen and all alone could never possibly become pregnant. That, and the Holy Spirit is a pedophile.

I have plenty of trouble telling the difference between a girl of sixteen and one of twenty. If the comparison is seventeen against eighteen, it is virtually impossible. Girls seem to develop earlier nowadays; I have been fooled by girls of fourteen. Pedophiles are not attracted to ID cards showing an age below an arbitrary number that changes between states and countries – they are attracted to undeveloped bodies.

Americans are paranoid about the strangest things.