The Ducklings and Bill Bryson

Hello there!

Today is Christmas in my country (so I suppose to be in the rest of the world, lol), but I'm not really a religious person, so I'm not really celebrating it. The only thing I celebrate today is that Team Focata (my TF2 clan) has a new game server. If you play TF2, add this IP to your favourites: 85.234.148.41:27115

But today I don't want to talk about TF2 (the last two weeks have been exciting enough). Today I'm talking about University.

Exams have started for un poor students of T&I. The first we did was an English reading exam about one of these two books from Bill Bryson: Notes from a Big Country or Notes from a Small Island. I chose the latter.

This is the audio-book's cover, but I read the physical-book version.

I admit that it is quite a funny book. If I had read it for pleasure, without having to do an exam, I would really have enjoy it. But exams have the extraordinary ability of making the best novel into a tedious piece of crap. But, hey, now I'm finished with it, I think I liked it a bit. I recommend it, yes, why not. Anyway, the exam consisted just in writing an essay telling which places described on the book we'd like to visit the most, and a place that we wouldn't like to visit. You must be thinking you could answer it without actually reading the book. Well, I also think that.

Also, we did a linguistics exam. Everybody was terrified about this, I don't understand it. I almost didn't study, and I think I did it quite well. I think. Maybe I've got it all wrong, who knows. The syllabus, a big piece of boring crap. But, as I promised, I have to talk about one of the last lessons.

We were learning something about semantic roles (syntax), but that's not the important thing. The stars of the lesson were the examples. For the first semantic roles, the example was:

"The farmer killed the duckling."

Imagine how the class reacted to this sentence. Well, there was not a general reaction, but I bet everybody started to pay attention. Some people said "oh" and "ah". I would have liked to shout "Murderer!", but I just mumbled something about how sadistic university professors are.

Then, the next example outcame.

"The farmer feeded the duckling."

At this moment I thought "But the dickling didn't eat... because you killed it. Murderer!", and so I told my classmate Christian. I started to think that the professor has some kind of childhood trauma with ducks. The next example went as follows:

"The farmer saw the duckling."

At that point, I had the idea of murdered little ducks inside my mind, so I understood the word "saw" as "cut with a handsaw". "Oh, great", I said, "Now the ducklings had been shot and sawed. What will be next?"

"The farmer loves action movies."

That explains everything. That farmer is a heartless psycho who likes watching Chuck Norris films and killing ducklings with saws. Why the hell isn't he already in prison?

"The farmer gave grain to the ducklings."

Oh, I see. He has an alibi. He was giving grain to the ducklings when the crime occured. Yeah, nice. And then, what happened?

"The farmer gave the ducklings all the corn he could get."

But why? Is he trying to pretend that nothing happened? "The ducks won't eat that amount of corn. BECAUSE THEY ARE DEAD. Assume it. They are gone and you killed them. You are a killer. Now get rid of those duck corpses and leave the crime scene."

"The farmer got out from the barn."

"The farmer will go to the town."

And these were the last examples. After that class, nobody felt the same. We will always remember the poor duckling that was killed by the evil farmer. Requiescat In Pace.

Now, I could talk about other things that happened to me in this first term, but I am quite tired and tomorrow I have to eat out with other people who do celebrate Christmas. Poor folks.

See you! Have a happy consumerist craze disguised as religious holiday!

OVERTIME: The War Update, released!

Hi everyone! This has been an exciting week for TF2 players. I commented and recommended to follow the War Update of TF2, even if you didn't play the game, because it has been simply amazing. I know you ignored my advice, so I'm going to summarize the whole week in this tiny itsy bitsy post. Click all the links for more info (preferibly opening them in another window/tab).

The War Update presented the end of the friendship between the Demoman and the Soldier. As every TF2 update, it presented three new weapons for both characters, plus a fourth special weapon for the one who won the war. During the week, literally millions of Demomen and Soldiers perished, winning the latters by just a matter of 25000 deaths.

The three new weapons for the Demoman were something extraordinary in a FPS game: A longsword and a shield, and a new sticky-launcher.

The Soldier, meanwhile, recieved a new rocket launcher with more accuracy and power, a pickaxe which does more harm when the bearer is at low-health, and some kind of set of trumpet and flag, which seems to motivate your allies (I haven't seen it in action yet). The fouth special item resulted to be a pair of iron boots, to make rocket-jumping without damaging yourself. I also haven't seen them, but the description is quite clear.

All these weapons were crowned by 76 new achievements to unlock, which you can check at the bottom of these pages.

But the most eagerly awaited feature of this update was the Crafting System, which means players now will be able to transform their extra copies of items into metal to build new weapons or hats they don't have. You can't imagine how I regret having deleted my extra copies...

The last day Valve presented two new maps, CP_Gorge and CTF_Doublecross. They're fine. Also, a photo of the Heavy kissing the Scout's mother when the war came to its end.

Amazingly, this update was combined with the release of the first official TF2 comic. A funny and interesting bunch of pages which explained some of the motivations of this update, including the origin of the friendship between the Demoman and the Soldier, and the beginning of the war. The comic has some "chapters": The Administrator, Saxton Hale, The Demoman and The Soldier. I decided to translate the whole comic into Spanish, but I only have the two first parts. I hope this weekend I'll be able to finish it. These are my translations:

The Administrator

Saxton Hale

The Demoman (coming soon)

The Soldier (coming soon)

When it's finished, I'm going to publish it as a whole with a nice front page and a big white-coloured title. Yay!

Talking about the weekend, last but not least, the news you have been waiting for. ONLY THIS WEEKEND (beginning last thursday, sorry for being late), Team Fortress 2 can be played FOR FREE! OMGWTFBBQ! And if you play it and like it, you can buy it at 50% the price! That is TF2 for just 7,49 €!!! What are you waiting for? Go now and download/buy it! You have only two days left! You don't have to move from your chair, you can buy it via Steam.

Well, now I'm leaving. If you need something from me, I'll be playing TF2. See you!

Mission ends in 3... 2... 1... Overtime!

OVERTIME: The Administrator and Demoman/Soldier Update

Hello there! This week I decided to create a new section in this blog. I once talked about Team Fortress 2, one of my favourite videogames, and I promised to continue talking about it. Well, now I will for sure, since it's going to be a whole section, titled OVERTIME.

I updated the other post with this new logo. Consider it the first chapter of this new section.

First of all, the name is chosen because of a funny glitch the game has. Sometimes, when both teams run out of time in their mission, extra seconds are added to the countdown. The Announcer (the woman in the section logo) warns this by saying "Overtime". But, there used to be a bug, in which sometimes the sound looped itself, and it couldn't stop saying "Overtime". This was quite a funny effect which you can see in this video. In the video, the player plays as Spy and Sniper, my favourite classes (but I'm better than him, hehe). When the creators of the game corrected this bug, many people found it a disappointment, so the glitch was put in again as a server command. If you run a server, just open the console and type "tf_overtime_nag 1" to activate it.



Well, after this explanation of the logo, let's start the actual post.



TF2 is a game which updates frequently. But not only patches that fix bugs, but great updates with new weapons, new maps, new everything. Players recieve these updates as if they were godsent. Well, next week is going to happen one of these updates. Their contents will be revealed within the week. We only know that is going to have new items for Demoman and Soldier, and a secret special weapon that will be awarded to one of the two classes.




Yesterday, this comic was published (read it before continuing). The Announcer o Administrator discovers that the BLU Soldier and the RED Demoman have become friends, and that is unacceptable. So in this upcoming update they are going to fight each other (read the darn comic, Jeez!), so the winner will recieve the secret special weapon. More explanations can be found here in the Official Page, I'm not going to tell everything.



The main reason because I tell you this is that I decided to translate the comic (yes, the one that you should have read by now!) and I published it at Half-Life 2 Spain Website. This is my first serious and professional(ish) translation (though I made it for free). I recieved some praise by a more experienced translator who I know in the forum, so you can imagine how happy I am now. Yay!



You can download my translation here. Yes, it obviously is in Spanish.



Just a pair of things I have to say. First, if you are a TF2 player or fan, you should keep an eye or both on this update (you listenin', Chris?).



AND, if you are not a TF2 player but are interested, I have a great new. In every update, the game's price is lowered, so it's probably going to be very inexpensive! If you want to buy it, this could be your chance. Or maybe, Valve make us a gift and activates a "Free Weekend". That means you could play for free during the update weekend.



Stay tuned to TF2!



Mission ends in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

Overtime.

Orthography on University posters

Hello there!

First of all, I have to apologise for being so late with this week's post. I also have to apologise because I'm not talking about what I promised. The reason is that I expected our Linguistics Professor to upload last class' powerpoint, and he didn't. So, the ducklings will be ready another week. [Insert sad emoticon here]

Instead of that, this week I'll talk about posters! Posters in the UJI, to be precise.

As I said in another post, I'm kind of a Grammar Nazi. In fact, I should, if I want to be a translator. So I have the obsessive craze of correcting all spelling mistakes I see on posters, notices, signs, even teachers' posts in forums!

I also tend to take the posters where there are the biggest mistakes. You will remember the poster of the MEC grants.



I also found this other poster. It's about the opening of a new music club. The funny thing is that, the class before seeing this, we saw some common spelling mistakes that people make, and among those mistakes there was the misspelling of the word"Inauguración". I bet the designer of the poster wasn't in that class.

Some of my translation collegues and I tend to correct all these posters, as I said. This week we saw an interesting and amusing one. It's the following.

The image is quite disturbing, but that's not the main point of this. On the lower part it says: "¡¡Ahora con un 50% menos de faltas ortográficas!!", which means "Now with 50% less spelling mistakes!!" I find this extremely funny, but I don't really understand why. I like to think that it is a message for us Grammar Nazis, to keep correcting other people. Or maybe it's just on the contrary, and it means "Stop correcting me".

Anyway, I left my mark in another of these posters, correcting the spelling mistakes I saw (50% than usual), and below, where it says "Criticize here" I wrote the following words:

50% are still too many.

P.S. I hope next week I'll be able to write about the ducklings, as I promised!