Terry Poulin

Diacritics and homographs

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One of those occasions where I’m reading, and just go “oh” at a realization. Reading through Wikipedia’s article on diacritic marks, I couldn’t help but notice a superb example of both what sound diacritics represent and homographs in my language.

A homograph is on for more words that are spelled the same, but differ in the pronunciation or meaning. Something that, frankly as a native English speaker, I rarely notice. I’m not sure if that’s because of many fail to stand out that audibly when you’re been made accustomed to spelling our fucked up language from an early age, or not.

Loanwords that frequently appear with the diacritic in English include café, résumé or resumé (a usage that helps distinguish it from the verb resume), soufflé, and naïveté (see English terms with diacritical marks).

I have to say that résumé / resume is a great example of this in common English. The difference between ‘re-su-may’ and ‘re-zoom’ is spoken distinctly, but in writing is usually rendered the same leaving it to context to understand. Whether that happens to be the logical context, or you know the whole difference between nouns and verbs. Diacritics are increasingly less common outside of publications who care, and virtually unused by the common people writing shit be it by pencil or typed text.

I’ve always been kind of fascinated by such words in other languages, along with words where the distinction in pronunciation between two words are more subtle in how it alters the meaning.

In some ways, I think it is a little sad that diacritic marks are less common in actual practice because of the mess that is English spelling and its representation to how we pronounce words. Diacritics greatly help disambiguate sounds in ways that are less clear (at least to me) without relying on memorization; or as I remember it, literally having English all but beaten into my as a child. In English, we’re pretty much just forced to learn the various oddballs until we remember them. It’s a problem that becomes even more relevant when presented with loanwords and their bastardizations into the vernacular.

For example without knowing nor marking the sounds, the word ‘souffle’ is kind of a “What the fuck did I just read?” kind of word in English. I assume it makes sense in French. Perhaps in English, you might read it and think ‘so-uf-fle’ or ‘sou-uf-fle’ because of words like shuffle (‘shuf-fle’) and soup (sou-oup), which are frankly far more common words outside of the kitchen (and perhaps even within). Yet soufflé is clear as ‘sou-flay’, a word people will probably hear more often than see unless they study French cooking. Whether constructs like ‘ou’ or ‘o͞o’ or hell, even plain ‘oo’, would be a better way to spell a word like soup, are fair debate. Particularly if you discount the existing domination of how letters are input on computers and (gasp!) typewriters. But such things are unlikely to ever change that drastically, given how much now depends on relatively slow to change language practices. Diacritics are darn useful but underused IMHO.

Coincidentally, a lot of the constructs in American English that I find difficult to spell, often have relationships to old French and bastardized latin by way there of. The more germanic influences on English might be more gross in influence, but I tend to find more orderly. I suppose, I should just thank goodness that English has relatively simple constructs compared to more inflection heavy and gendered languages.

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Visiting the original mansion again for the first time in this millennium, it’s an interesting exercise in how much I’ve forgotten, how much I’ve remembered, and how much comes back to me when I’m there.

On one hand, after do many years it’s kind of hard to remember which door leads to zombie ridden stairways and which leads to almost becoming a Jill Sandwich in the name of acquiring a shotgun. Honestly, I don’t remember that horrible joke at all even though I still remember the distinction of Jill gets rescued from becoming a human pancake by Barry, while Chris has to bugger about looking for a broken shotgun in order to win.

Access to guides that have been around for years, and I can’t even remember the name of it, but there’s a wiki somewhere that goes into posting the maps and details (I’ve probably written about that here, regarding the RE2 remake); certainly make for a good augment to the old ‘what order should I?’ problem but not so much the minute directions.

The mansion has always been a hard place to navigate because of its size. It’s pretty easy to remember the general flow, especially easily reached locations like the hallway you meet Cerberus or the balcony where you acquire the grenade launcher. But smaller details like which door in the upstairs east hallway leads to the knights puzzle or what’s at the end of the ground floor dining room hallway, is a bit harder to remember.

This is kinda nice. Like one how it’s easy to remember there’s little point to grabbing the wooden emblem, but hard to remember when it’s time to bring it to the piano room. Couldn’t remember where the knight puzzle was but on the flip side once finding it, I did remember to avoid the poison gas on the first go, lol.

Some parts are a lot harder to remember than others. For example, I have pretty much no real recollection of the layout of the guard house. Just old mental images of things like pool tables and giant spiders.

But unlike the “Huh, what the frell is this?” feeling the GameCube remake always gave me, the GOG’ified PC edition is more like an old stomping ground. If one filled with zombies and horrors that want to decapitate you, lol.

A real original RE at last

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Over the years, I’ve generally considered GOG a good thing but haven’t cared terribly much given my focus elsewhere. But much to my pleasure, it turns out they have a real nice treat that I never expected to find: Resident Evil.

While I appreciated the HD version of the remake, I also didn’t enjoy my childhood memories being made useless by the fact that it was built from the GameCube remake rather than one of the original PlayStation releases. Meanwhile, the version recently released on GOG looks like it’s a fairly vanilla build of the PC release of Resident Evil rolled up for modern machines without extra hackwittery.

I haven’t really played the original since the 1990s and the original PlayStation. Within moments of launching the game, I felt like a proper trip backdown memory lane — in just about every way, it’s how I remember it from almost 30 years ago.

Metal Gear Solid Delta Trailer

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I’m going to take this as a good sign that the remake of MGS3 will actually be released closer to ‘soon’ than ‘later’, as in we may actually get to see it this year.

The original Snake Eater was one of the more personally significant / formative video games that I played as a teenager, and remains my favorite in the series. Literally, if they throw modern controls in the sense of MGS5 at it and remain largely faithful, I’m likely to be happy. When I originally learned of Delta, my first words were probably in the vein of ‘Shut and take my money!’, so it’s likely I’ll be buying it and finding out 😀.

Playing Snake Eater in the 2020s has generally been a somewhat grainy problem. My Play Station 2 can only output 480i, which looks pretty damn grainy on a modern 2160p screens compared to ’90s era tube televisions. That’s sort of alleviated by the ‘HD’ release for modern consoles where we get progressive output, but there’s really no fixing the control scheme with that. It’s ingrained in the design, just like it was in its predecessors.

I love Metal Gear Solid 3 very much. But even at the time it came out, the choice to retain the control scheme (and I assume engine) from Sons of Liberty made the Snake Eater experience less than ideal for the jungles. The mechanics and such worked really well in the first two metal gear and virtual reality training missions, where the majority of your environments are close quarters or high octane. Creeping through the jungle would have been better served by an already then contemporary shooter control scheme, like that seen in SOCOM and many others. The controls never were the good part of MGS3, but yet the game was freaking brilliant and the story poignant. Everything else about the game was superb, and perhaps was Metal Gear Solid at its finest.

Here’s hoping for a solid remake, and that we don’t end up crying tears of blood.

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Dusting off the old iBook G4, I can’t help but wonder how the machine would behave with a solid state drive instead of its twenty year old 40G IDE drive. MacOS Tiger is surprisingly nimble except when it isn’t, and most of those involve impact to both the processor and I/O heavy operations. When I had ran OpenBSD on it, the key limits were the lack of SMP and modern javascript engines having moved on with a lack of 32-bit PPC support.

The ol’ PowerPC chip is about as impressive as a single core CPU can get, I suppose. But the hard drive is basically a potato. The trick however, is it would be a major pain in the ass to replace the drive even if one of my MicroSD to EIDE bridges would fit without a hub bub.

Ahh dang it, why is temptation such a problem when it involves old computers? SMH!

Daylight – 60 fps e-paper?

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Now that’s kind of impressive. The main negatives of e-ink is that the refresh rate is generally trash and the resulting flashing during bigger refreshes can be quite jarring on the eyes. But they work really damn well as long as you don’t need things to move or change on screen, thus they’re excellent for reading but terrible for scrolling.

The trade off for a more LCD-like “It’s off” when the power is off versus how e-ink holds onto its image isn’t that bad, and for such high refresh rates it would be more than worth it for a computer not so much for things like price tags on store shelves.

It’s also kind of interesting what they might come up with by trying to reimagine human interaction with computers, but I’d expect that to be a lot less successful than the display technology, due to the crushing weight of established conventions. But just the same, I’m kind of interested in what they might come up with. Ironically, I’m reminded of the Think Different speech.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Steve Jobs

Violet Evergarden: The Movie

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Last night, I finally got to watching something I’ve been putting off for a few years. Because on one hand, Violet Evergarden is one of my favorite anime and on another, the synapses suggest a box of tissues potentially required. Which is kind of true of the series as well, but also well worth it.

I kind of love how Violet’s story is overlaid with the future. A young woman named Daisy learns how her recently deceased grandmother Anne had received a letter from her own mother every year on her birthday for fifty years, and that they were penned by who at the time was a very famous Auto Memory Doll named Violet Evergarden. Reading them, she understands so much more about the one she’s lost and then she sets out to discover just who this Violet Evergarden was, and in turn manages to put her own feelings into a letter to her parents once she reaches the end of her journey.

Violet, I think is a superb case of character development and the movie finally brings it full circle both as a character and as a story. In the series when we’re introduced to Violet, she’s like a void; an empty slate where human emotion should be. By helping other people express their true feelings, she grows as a person and manages to do some very good things along the way. The side story of the boy Yuris serves to show just how special the CH Postal Company is compared to simply scribing and delivering mail, and serves as a great close to the era of the Auto Memory Doll.

When unexpected means brings Violet and Hodgins to the Island of Ekarte in search of Gilbert, Violet very much captures human emotion and how much the character has grown since we first met her at the beginning of her story. Violet’s feelings about seeing Gilbert again, and her reaction when she finally does are beautiful renditions of what it’s like to be a human being. Violet’s reaction when a young boy on the island describes the nice man that serves as their teacher, who happens to be missing both an arm and an eye, are perhaps some of the best renderings of the character’s expressions–as she becomes certain that the one she loves still yet lives.

I mostly think of Violet Evergreen’s story as one about people’s true feelings reaching the people they wish to express them to and that’s why it’s so poignant. And with the movie, we finally have the chance to see Violet and Gilbert’s true feelings reach each other rather than being cut by loss.

Plus, the story deals with the most important words of all, 愛してる (I love you), so what isn’t there to enjoy? 🙂

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Federico Viticci’s Not an iPad Pro Review, I think is a scathingly well done piece.

Having used Android tablets as an all-the-things primary computer for the better part of a decade, I particularly found the problem of background processes to be a killer. It effectively relegated my iPad from a fully productive machine to a fully-everything-else machine that probably cost twice as much as the Galaxy Tab S-series it replaced. In fact, I virtually never reach for the Magic Keyboard and fire up a SSH client on my iPad. I’ll break out a heavy ass laptop or walk across my home if I need that, because it’s annoying as fuck when you switch apps and then it’s gone. By contrast, I readily used my Android tablets for SSH tasks both for programming professionally (ssh -> build server) and for local things (ssh -> my servers).

I also rather like the notion of Desktop-class apps as a terminology. Apple’s spiel about tablet optimized apps vs Android was largely full of bullshit and handwaving back in the day. But I think Desktop-class captures the distinction well. My aging iPad Pro grants access to a few professional quality apps like Working Copy, Procreate, and Lumia Fusion that are available on iPadOS, but relatively few Desktop-class applications.

By contrast, my Android tablets were often good enough for the dock to a monitor and have at it modularity, because guess what? Some crazy guy probably wrote a desktop class application worth paying for, or no one actually gave a fuck. iPadOS on the other hand, well the best thing I can generally say about most of the software is that app xyz is almost the same as xyz is on Android. There are a few that I miss even when using Macs and PCs. And as Federico notes, there’s basically a plethora of things that just can’t exist on iPad because there’s no support for building them.

Multi-tasking is kind of a more meh perspective to me, but I think his description of how it’s evolved is spot on. Personally, I like the more full-screen task centric nature of Android and iOS. I wrote about that plenty of times in the 2010s back when G+ was a thing, and even a few journal entries here. The whole floating window thing, I find rather nice if you have a 20″ to 30″ monitor but not so useful when you cut that screen in half, like a tablet or a laptop. I appreciate the ability to split screen or slide over or float windows on my tablet, but not as much as I appreciated Android apps allowing me to do things like switch between a terminal session and an email without fucking up what I’m doing.

Stage Manager kind of squeezes it in for me. On Mac, I enjoy Stage Manager because it helps organize and group windows effectively for working on tasks. On iPad, I mostly view Stage Manager as a sucks-less way of switching between applications when multi-tasking more than anything else. On the flip side, iPadOS did grow the ability to do external monitors far better. But of the actual multi-tasking experience, the most that I can say all these years later, is that I no longer have to reboot my iPad constantly whenever using slide over, because I basically never use it on purpose :P.

Or should we say, I enjoyed the quality of iPadOS’s launch version so much, if anyone ever bemoans the quality of my code, I’ll just ask if they ever did much with the first version of iPadOS 😂.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!

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It’s only taken 36 years, but it’s finally happening!

Considering I hauled my ass out to the theater some years back for the anniversary showing of Beetlejuice, I have a feeling the long overdue sequel will probably get me to go. But the real question is, will we see a Hawaiian cameo as a nod to one of the old script ideas? 😀