#DragonsDogma2
So because I'll be absent, I don't have time for a video response to all this hand-wringing about Dragon's Dogma 2. Here's the message I want to say to people about where the first came from: IT IS ALL RIGHT TO FAIL. Failure is a temporary state. 1/ Failure isn't forever, unless you make it so by quitting. At worst, in the first, you messed yourself up by not saving well and have to go back to an inn save and lose progress. That's the worst case. The game is set up for you to fail, and by failing, to get better, 2/

What is a rate?

There's a really, really stupid argument between a conservative writer and @Slate magazine over an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle supposedly being able to fire 800 rounds per minute. (A rate.) The original writer probably went too far suggesting... 1/ ...a literal 800 bullets exiting a barrel across the course of 60 seconds and hitting innocents. So this rival writer has set up a bet that they physically test the theory. The context of this was bump stocks, you see. There's a really big problem with this.

What is a rate? 2/

Quick education in copyright. One party, Authentic, holds the rights to Sports Illustrated. Another party, called Arena, owes the first party $2.8m USD. So Authentic yanked the right to publish using the SI name, brand, trademarks etc. The union wants Arena to keep going. 1/ This is no longer Arena's decision. Now that the breached licensing deal has been revoked, Arena can beg/ borrow $2.8m and all that does is honor the debt, it won't revive the licensing deal automatically (I'm fairly sure). Arena is owed nothing. It can "fight" all it wants, 2/

This is where it's so hard to convey English to non-natives, k? There's a certain school board in Florida. Sites reported it had removed 1600 titles (of books) from school libraries to review if they were compliant with DeSantis-signed state legislation about edgy content. 1/ So people were raising a fuss about books being banned, including dictionaries and encyclopedias. I'd heard some quibbling to the contrary, that this law didn't apply to library books. So the school board comes out with a repudiation of the stories to the effect of.. 2/

I just added a new post on Ko-fi! ko-fi.com/W7W5KAPPI?view… Historically, the Japanese "tsurugi" was a straight, double edged sword derived from Chinese designs that, despite being edged, was primarily used for thrusting, similar to a great many European swords before and after that point in history.

This is #English #英語学習 material and a shining lesson in two wrongs don't make a right, Gun Control Edition.

In the middle of trying to one-up Rep. Cori Bush, I quote "First, there’s no such thing as an “assault rifle,” so since they don’t exist, you can’t ban them." There's a big problem. It has long been argued/ shouted that "assault weapons" is a made-up term constituting what politicians find sufficiently scary, or enthusiasts find sufficiently cool and desirable.

This is emphatically not true with the term "assault rifle".

#English #英語学習 I'm going to use this as a teachable moment. There's a website with a fat headline about Gen. Milley rebuking various presidential primary candidates by saying the US is an important national interest. They, said vital.

They are not the same thing. 1/ Vital US national interests are part of the traditional "tests" that generals and presidents have stated, or have been said to have, for committing US troops to combat. No literate person passingly familiar with these issues should be unfamiliar with the use of "vital"... 2/

#English #英語学習 "Two wrongs don't make a right." This proverb is fundamental to English-speaking civilization. You can't walk two feet and not see it in practice. "Just because someone did a wrong doesn't mean you are allowed to do your own wrong in return." 1/ Vendetta and vengeance is not allowed. The rule of law forces people to go to the state for redress: police, courts, trials, juries. Just because Person A got away with theft doesn't mean Person B is allowed to steal a pizza from a bakery. The principle is so fundamental 2/

OK, this is a "teachable moment". 教えるチャンス。#English #英語学習
A US federal magistrate judge nominated for a full federal district court judge position was asked about Brady motions. I think the judge was 100% truthful saying that it had never come up in court BUT! 1/ So the judge couldn't answer what a Brady motion was or how one is assessed. It's explained below, but to add, federal prosecutors have immense power. So, they're required to hand exculpatory evidence to the defense AT TRIAL. (Not for a grand jury.) 2/

https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1638606792505565196?s=20

OK. Let me break this down. A headline reads:

"Emmanuel Macron's government may be teetering"

Teetering is often swapped for the idioms "on the edge/ on the brink", and associated with wavering, rocking back and forth, moving or balancing in an unsteady way. 1/2 The actual content is the govt survived a no-confidence vote... but narrowly.
"The second vote is expected to draw less support, so a bullet has been dodged. And yet the President of France currently appears to be stuck between a rock and a hard place."

So more idioms. 2/

#English #英語学習 「ストレス」が悪いことね。しかし、英吾の言葉"stress"は複数のバージョンがある。一つはストレスの状態、日本語と同じ意味で。もう一つはemphasisと同様、意味は：強調。この場合、”to stress"の動詞です。例："Let me stress this point:" 1/ 英吾にとって強調は重要な事。この言葉が無ければ、発音の話は厳しい。例："Ahead". "HEAD" のシラブルが強調するべき。"AH-head"じゃない、"a-HEAD"です。これがシラブルの"stressing" -> "stressing a syllable". これは発音の基本。2/

So here's something I want to say without naming... shows, because normally I would never even remark on this, it's not something "this year" or even "the past few years", and I don't feel like it was someone's individual call. I saw an anime's final episode this morning. I liked the anime, won't name the show. I heard 愛 (ai, love) spoken. I saw "respect" written as the subtitle. It's a Japanese show, a Japan setting (of sorts)... to me there's no way you accidentally swap those two things.

#English #英語フレーズ "A little bird told me." 内部から秘密を明かした。A cute phrase for having some kind of "secret informant" tell you something. The modern journalism equivalent is "an anonymous source", but the expression can be used for gossip, not just pro news. Of course sometimes the person using this phrase *is* the secret informant, but chooses to imply someone *else* divulged the secret... that can happen too.

#英語 In the context of "tacit endorsement of Ukraine drone strikes in Russia," a blogger asked "What in the heck is “tacit endorsement"?" <- This is where more knowledge of ＃日本語 (Japanese) would have helped. 黙認 <- If I may, literally "silent consent/ assent"? 1/ So other cultures have an easy time understanding. The Pentagon didn't say out loud "We endorse this," but they declined to say "We DON'T endorse this". That is tacit endorsement. #English idiom: What you don't say speaks volumes. 2/

#English #英語 Of relevance today: the two versions of "conventional". A convention is actually a reference to something like the Geneva Conventions i.e. our current version of "the laws of war". A missile that "can" carry a nuclear warhead, or some other form of WMD... 1/ ...but which has been modified to carry high explosives (a high amount of them because nuclear warheads weigh a lot by nature), we will call this "a conventional missile" in that state. It's the same rocket, it's usually the same guidance system, but = "non-nuclear" *here*. 2/

I'm going to make a video summarizing this later but I've wanted to reply to a while re: a video saying "Stop translating English in your head!" to foreign English learners. I know it's with the best of intentions... but this is a goal, not something you achieve right away. "Not translating in your head" means you have all of the building blocks for sentences pre-loaded in your mushy brain like computer RAM and can call them up at will. It's a goal... not something everyone will be ready for. I don't want people to lose heart and give up!

So just to mention, I was one of the Westerners brought into anime by a "shoujo anime", none other than Sailor Moon (western dub). I had no warning, had no idea what it was and no idea why it was surprisingly good. That's when I found out what "anime" was. What I didn't know was that many of the cartoons I found to be higher quality than the rest were actually anime in disguise, with the animation done by an Eastern studio while the other elements were Western. I only found about that part relatively recently, decades later.

So today I did more help for this Ukrainian English learner... he can't afford paid tutoring but it's good practice for me. The final question he had to go through was a pretty tough reading comprehension one. I read the question out loud and worked it out in my head. 1/ So when I was done all that, I had done process of elimination to rule out which of the choices applied to none of the "three people" involved (four choices of "job ads", it was matching 3 to the 3 people). I'm a smart English native and I found it required serious thought. 2/

#English #英語学習 The US Congress is entering its "lame duck session". Since Congress' election terms are fixed, this is a period between the election and when at least some existing members are replaced with new ones in January. Until then, the old Congress is 100% valid. 1/ Meaning, any bill passed by a "lame duck Congress" is 100% as legal as any other, but purists see it as lacking true legitimacy, "sneaking in" legislation before changes take place. Again: It's 100% legal, Representatives are serving until the day and hour they aren't. 2/

I'll probably do a video on it later (was going translation work) but a "circular firing squad" in politics or business is "everyone blaming everyone else", so the "fire" from the proverbial rifles is hitting "friendlies" everywhere. We'll see a lot of this Nov 8? If the Democrats lose heavily as expected, Democrats will blame other Democrats in an effort to have rivals tossed/ lose political influence so they can gain influence and be in a better position for the next election... or just for emotional satisfaction. It's destructive.

#English #英語 We often see talk of "wave elections" involving major gains for a party (most likely the party out of power), and even of a "tsunami" (at the high end of a wave election). These idioms are normal and accepted in America. I'm not sure I'd use them in Asia. America's politics adopted a funny "color coding" 22 years ago. On maps, "blue states" were Democrat-voting states (for Al Gore) and "red states" were Republican-voting states (for George W. Bush). Red had been a left of center color for... decades? Centuries? No more!