& StarCraft 2

I really should have posted this weeks ago, but IskatuMesk (user mancatcher, on YouTube) has being doing a series of YouTube posts of SC2 games with commentary. Many of the replays are in 1080 high-definition, although I only watch the 480 resolution versions, as that's all my 1.5 Mbps DSL can support in real-time, and it's okay, clarity-wise. I've been watching just about everything he's posted since he started covering it.

The vast majority of them are of high or mid/high-level players. A lot of them are games (usually free-for-alls) he plays in, himself. He's in the platinum league (currently the highest, with gold, silver, bronze, and copper below), which puts him in the mid/high skill category. Others, however, are commentaries on replays of really famous SC1 pro players, frequently obtained from Team Liquid's forum.

On one or two occasions you see him getting in-game messages from me (some of which make absolutely no sense, like when I was testing out what the mature language filter blocks - e.g. "XonX" and "came" - which he had disabled). One replay, however, is a 2on2 I actually played. Now, I'm in the silver league, so this is not exactly a replay displaying master strategy (and I get my ass handed to me by Mesk's commentary of the match, which is kind of amusing in its own way). It does, however, have an absolutely hilarious ending, as indicated by the stuff people have said about it (e.g. "oh god im dying over here", "Holy shit. I teared up at the end there", "dear god that was amazing", "Most hilarious ending evar"). Amusingly, this replay has proven his most popular, and has almost 3x as many views as almost all of the other replays of the same age; I wonder if it got posted on a forum with a couple thousand users, somewhere.

Part 1
Part 2

Oh, and since the ending is kind of ambiguous: my team won.

Q's Squishy Thing of the Day

One of the manga series I've been waiting forever for an English translation of (to buy, that is; fan-translated versions have been around online for years) is Elfen Lied, which I mentioned being fond of in the past. Well, there's still not official English translation, but I just learned something very interesting: there's an official Spanish version (also German and Taiwanese Chinese, for speakers of those languages). So I can own the series I've wanted for a long time, while practicing my Spanish.

I mentioned a ways back that I was reading the Spanish version of the Trique grammar book (as there wasn't an equivalent English version), and I was surprised how well I could read the Spanish, without even looking things up. However, a part of the reason this went so smoothly was that most of the unknown words in that were linguistic jargon that I was able to figure out from context very quickly.

Actually, my very first exposure to Trique, prior to that, also involved Spanish. It all began with a Spanish/Trique bilingual Bible I got from my grandpa. I started by comparing the text in Spanish and Trique to attempt to figure out the grammar by example. This was somewhat more difficult than the grammar book. It had a much broader array of words used, so it was significantly harder to figure out unknown words from context. Still, I made a respectable amount of progress, given the method.

If I'm lucky, reading Elfen Lied would be closer to the former, as the illustrations give some context. But even if I infrequently need to look things up it wouldn't be too bad. And it would very likely improve my ability to read/write Spanish in general by a noteworthy amount.

So, I'll probably buy that after money is no longer so tight.

Q's Squishy Thing of the Day

Just saw this today. Perhaps nobody else will find it interesting, but I do.

Essential WoW terminology in other languages