Dwaine

Quiet, you! I have teachers that are clients. Adults aren't much better. For all the mask touting, most people don't wear them right. Are you washing the cloth ones every day? No, of course not. Too many people wear the same blue n95 mask over and over and it shows! Y'all're gross. Even though I live in Texas, I really don't see that many far right types. In fact, I see more pro Trump and gun stuff in Washington and Oregon! But I was at the grocery store last weekend and discovered a treasure. It was a gentleman of considerable length and girth. He was wearing a shirt with a Trump logo on the front and an Infowars logo on the back. His mask? A full plastic face mask of a very angry Alex Jones. I hit the self-checkout. He did not. I imagine he makes a lot of Facebook posts about self-checkouts. Ran outside to see if I could get a creeper pic. By the time I saw him he'd already taken his mask off, but he drove a raised El Camino form the 70's! I can't be mad! This man was definitely unique! Afterwards I fired up the Google Machine to find the mask. Sure enough, the Infowars store sells them for $9.95. I don't want to give that awful man money, but if you buy one you get four free! With a deal like that I can't afford not to!

I don't like the whole "masks are a sham," but I don't like the whole, "WEAR A #$*!ING MASK REEEEEEEE!!" nonsense either. And I don't like how people are posting pictures of random strangers on their social media and going out of their way to attack them. On Friday I was sketching at Starbucks when this happened. Two groups of people came in - none were regulars. One was a couple in their late 40s/early 50s who didn't have masks. They opened and held the door for the other group, so they didn't see the sign on the door. They came in and the manager promptly told them masks were required. They didn't have any. He said that was OK, handed them a menu, and asked for them to wait outside. They obliged. He went outside, took their order, and brought it to them. After they left the manager came behind me and took a picture of their car. It really struck me as odd. If it was to report them, the state ordinance wasn't going to go into effect for another two hours. Or worse, post their license plate on social media, opening these people up to all kinds of trouble. There have been many stories from retail workers about customers fighting back against masks. This wasn't one of those stories. The couple was extremely polite and respected the store's policy. There wasn't a single furrowed brow or bad word uttered. Literally the ideal situation. I hope I'm wrong. What's the point of "saving lives" when you've made the world a hostile place?

PR people being sleazy? The DEVIL, you say?!

Last week I spent the afternoon with a friend and later that evening she texted me to say an extended family member had just been hospitalized with the waifu virus. So we waited a few days to see if we'd develop symptoms. We were fine, as was her family, but we still decided to get tested just in case. There have been a bunch of clinics and such that have been converted to testing centers. The one we went to was highly recommended and I was really impressed with the service. Super clean, efficient, and all the employees were very professional and kind. The test wasn't that bad. The doctor stuck a swab up my nose counted to five, then stuck the other end in the other nostril and counted again. We got the antibody test, too. We didn't have appointments, but that was actually good, because the non-appointment area wasn't near as crowded. We were in and out in about half an hour, and most of that time was just waiting in line. The tests only took a few minutes and the results were texted to us in about an hour. Thankfully nobody around us seemed sick either, so they were probably folks who needed a test for work and such.

While Abel was the first DQ anime, Dai was the first DQ manga. It appeared in Shonen Jump and ran for several volumes. Like many Jump comics, it was eventually made into an anime. Dai was broadcast in French and Spanish as "Fly." Quite a few non US and Japanese folks were introduced to DQ that way. Dai is mostly Jump property. Enix created the Gangan Comics and most of the DQ mangas were published under that label. Dai is a perfectly cromulent series, but it just doesn't feel like DQ to me. Y'know, as unique and varied as Toriyama can be, I wonder if he's purposely doing these sort of designs specifically to play to the Jump crowd.

Watched the trailer and thought, "What in the ever-loving crap is a "strash" So I looked it up. Strash: Strash is the most awesome diggity dank nuggs from Humboldt. It is also anything that is awesome and super sic.

欠 を 食べる - Pronounced "ketsu wo taberu." This is an essential greeting in conversational Japanese. If you learn nothing else, learn this. You'll get nowhere without it.

1993!

Yes, and here's the interview with Enix's former producer. Huge props to Heidi for landing this interview! He works for Microsoft now. It was a...preorder bonus? Yes? No?

It's one of those things where everything was a go, but their developer decided to split. Literally and figuratively. Thanks a ton for this. I remember Tom playing around with it back in the day. He said there's an option for the debug menu, but there's no button to map it to. Also, the demo still has "miniheal" instead of "heal." One of my goals for the new Shrine was to fill in those holes. I've been so incredibly busy and sometimes it can be tough to track all these folks down. Sometimes you contact folks and have no idea if your message made it or if it got caught by a spam filter. I feel terrible about it. The DS version was localized while the game was in development. They started doing this with VIII. The other languages were also in there, if I remember correctly. VII and IV were localized after the games were released in Japan. This was when Enix viewed international markets as afterthoughts. Heartbeat sort of split. The coding side was Genius Sonority. Manabu Yamana founded it, and was a key programmer since the beginning of DQ. If I'm correct, he formed his own studio after leaving Chun Soft and began development on VI. Artepiazza was the graphic design side.

Haha, not a problem! Coding can be pretty user specific. A coder has to learn how things were built, organized, and why. So a programmer would've had to learn Heartbeat's code then figure out how to insert an English script within the code's character limit. That takes a whole lot of time and money, which Enix just didn't have. Had Heartbeat not disbanded, they probably would've used the same method they did for DW VII since it's built off the same engine. Then again, it was their framework and would've known how to do that efficiently. They had everything ready to go until they dropped out, so I don't think any real translation work had even started.

No such thing exists. I've spoken to a few Enix employees over the years on several occasions. None of them ever mentioned of a build existing. This is likely because the coding company disbanded before any significant English work could've been done an inserted. Now...the translated Dragon Quest VI as Dragon Warrior V? THAT I want. It does exist! Probably only one test cart stowed away in a garage in Seattle, but it does exist.

I've got one! They're little books that listed all the different DQ merchandise. Awesome little bit of history.

You're right. I should've clarified that there's a difference between someone who was laid off and someone who chooses a sedentary lifestyle. If that's the lifestyle you want to live...cool...I guess? Just understand that there are people out there working to make that first world lifestyle possible. I'm just sick of leaches living very well off others and acting so entitled and ungrateful. "You want to work. You're stupid and want people to die!" If you don't want to work, then get out of the way of the people that need to.

A special shout out to the true heroes of this pandemic - the NEETs! Their efforts have not gone unnoticed. They play Animal Crossing for 8-12 hours every day. They eat nothing but junk food. They don't work, or contribute anything of value, really. And yet... these NEETs have achieved such sage wisdom they know how everyone should live their lives. They're so much better than us. We should really listen to them. Don't work. Don't worry about your family or your business. Don't think about how how you're going to pay bills or get food. Those will always be be there. Just stay home. Do nothing. Play games! Get fat! You're saving lives! Yeah, just kidding. YEET that NEET!