Thanks to the generosity of Stewart and Tiny Speck releasing all the artwork and other assets for the game into public domain, a few non-Flash versions of Glitch showed up. One, Odd Giants (https://oddgiants.com/) is particularly successful and worth checking out if you're a Glitch Fan.
So does this include paying off all their past obligations, including, but not limited to: Rent(s), Vendor Payment(s), Employee termination and back pay, etc, etc?
And this are only the debts which have been talked about _publically_.
I often wonder if it's the writing that's bad or the translation.
I really get the impression lots of the sentences and paragraphs are stilted translations which don't succeed, either because of the translator of the inability of english to express the nuance of what the artist meant. To be clear, I think the latter limitation goes both ways, indeed any time you are translating between languages.
Ken Liu, who translated the first and third books, is a respected English sci fi writer in his own right, as well as being a native Chinese speaker.
I felt the same as you about the prose but, given Liu’s background and having read his other books, I assumed it was an intentional choice. Based on his other work, Ken is a good enough writer to know what he was doing, and the sentence structure was probably a balance between translating the ideas and translating the form. You can definitely argue with how it worked out but I do think it was mostly intentional and not a lack of writing or translating skills on the part of Ken Liu.
I will say, the middle book, “The Dark Forest,” was translated by someone else, and it felt way different to me. Sentence structure, pacing, themes, stuff that would be way out of scope of a direct translation. I always wondered how much of that was the original and how much was the translator doing more adaptation to make the whole book feel like a native English novel.
i read the three-body problem in chinese, but didn't read the translation. my impression was that liu cixin's writing isn't very literary - he rarely uses rhetorical flourishes or idiomatic expressions, and his vocabulary is very simple outside of technical language. however, it's very straightforward and accessible.
someone else i know described the novel as 'clearly written by an engineer rather than a humanities student,' and i think i'd agree with that description.
Engineers and scientists can be like that. Perhaps the most obvious English-language one is Andy Weir (The Martian, etc) where the characters can feel like they're agents implementing an story rather than part of it. But certainly author-first authors can lean into this too and end up writing basically a narrative report rather then a story.
Which is, to be clear, completely fine: sometimes the characters aren't actually the core of a story, especially when dealing with substantially non-human-scale subjects and abstract concepts. It's also much more of a challenge to keep characters front and centre when on a very large sci-fi stage. It's easy to concentrate on the people when it's just a few people in, say, a regular house, just doing human things. I think some of the genius of Iain M. Banks especially is that he manages to somehow place the people (and non-people like Ships) dead centre even though the stories are ostensibly on an incomprehensibly vast scale. It's one of the few sci-fi universes where I think first of the characters and not of the universe in which they exist.
The original Star Wars and Dune also had particularly good character-centrism, where the universes were clearly enormous and could be arbitrarily detailed, but existed to support the characters journeys rather then the reverse.
I ran into that issue when trying to read Yoshiki Tanaka's Legend of the Galactic Heroes. The translation for the first two books in the series was ok but not amazing, but for the third book they changed the translator and it became a complete and utter mess. I remember one part where a character says the complete opposite of what they said the previous sentence, and I'm 99% sure it was an issue with the translation and not with the original Japanese.
Still better than the copy of Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings that I once found that appeared to have been copy-pasted into Google Translate at least.
It may appear that this may get Musk off the hook for buying Twitter because "Look how bad they are!" but, as I recall, Musk's problem is that his offer with without contingency - e.g. "Yah, I'll buy it, whatever".
So it may just be another event which will drive Twitter's price down even further and make it a _worse_ deal for him.
From Bloomberg "The buyers could only back out of the agreement in the case of a material adverse effect, a high bar that excludes issues like market volatility or industry challenges." (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-07-13/elon-m...).
I suppose one could argue that the Whistleblower's report is "material adverse affect", something I'm sure will come out in the trial.
I figure that wouldn't do anything, so when I have the energy to even pick up the phone for these assholes, I usually just fuck with them. My favorite is the scam about renewing your car's warranty, because I don't own a car and never have. So I get them on the line and say, "Oh, no, my warranty is about to expire? Which car are you calling about?" And they pause, confused. "Well, I have two cars, which one is about to expire?" They always respond with, "The most recent purchase, sir." And then I go, "Well, I bought them at around the same time many years ago, I don't remember exactly which one was more recent. If you're calling about the warranty, surely you know the make and model, right?" That's about when they hang up.
One time I got a scam call trying to make me freak out by saying someone bought a $1,000 iPhone on my Amazon account and I needed to work with them to take care of the fraud. I just said, "Oh, no, I bought that! There's no fraud, nothing to worry about!" There was a very long (and amusing) pause, and then the click of disconnection.
> So I get them on the line and say, "Oh, no, my warranty is about to expire? Which car are you calling about?" And they pause, confused.
I'm surprised by that. Every piece of car warranty junk mail I've ever gotten had the exact, correct make and model of my car. I'm pretty sure there must be some database that sells that info at scale.
I did once spend a month arguing with a repeated spam callers who rotated their voip numbers around the globe about just how I knew it was a scam, it also didn’t go well… But they did eventually stop calling! So I’ll count that as a small victory.
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