By now you’re probably asking yourself where I’m going with this?  Travel Channel used to show programming that actually was about travel; they’d send Samantha Brown to various interesting locations and she would tell us interesting things about them.  The kind of interesting things that you might expect to get from a travel channel…a brief glimpse of the local scenery and culture, just enough to make you want to…say…travel to some of these places.

Then there is the Travel Channel of now, which would be more accurate to call it the We Send Someone Somewhere to Overeat Channel.  Anthony Bourdain has the closest thing to a good show on that network, and he recently assailed Paula Dean for her horrible cooking style that makes people fat.  Around the same time his remarks were printed and were gaining traction, Travel Channel was airing a special about the best places to get fried foods, such as fried twinkies, fried ice cream, fried candy bars, and other such bastions of healthy eating.  Their other shows include such things as Best Places to Pig Out, Man V Food (which is the host going from city to city taking on how much can you eat challenges), Best Truck Stop Foods, etc.

When you look at the shows on Travel Channel, the one thing they have in common is someone going somewhere to see how much they can eat, and the one thing that they all lack is any travel.  I’m not sure how the rest of the world is, but I don’t really plan my vacations around where I can get a hamburger with 17 beef patties, so I don’t really consider that a travel show.  Seeing some guy try to eat a six pound burrito doesn’t draw me to Santa Fe, or really make me want to go there at all.

All that being said, isn’t it time for Travel Channel to change its name to The Gluttony Channel? To help them along their way, I’ve even come up with a couple of shows they could add to their line-up (assuming they can fit them in around their haunted this or that shows.)

• Best Places to Have Heart Surgery
• Top Places to Pig Out While Ignoring Scenery
• Bacon Sculpting
• Ghost Hunting At The Buffet
• Cellulite Masters
• Scariest Places (featuring Weight Watchers and Gyms)
• Deep Fried Vegetarian Foods
• Travel Tips for People Who Can’t Fit Into Normal Seats
• Making Surface Tension Work for You At the Soda Fountain

You're doing it wrong! OMG FAIL!

While I was sitting on a group call the other night with some of my classmates from Intro to Japanese and listening to this girl be obnoxious to the teacher, it occured to me that the internet has indeed made some people shockingly stupid.

The problem is that people are so used to flaming everyone on message boards and social media sites that they get a little too used to doing it and think that it’s okay to do it all of the time.  For example my teacher (keep in mind this is the first group session) asked if everyone was at a computer and had the class site open, and obnoxious weaboo girl says “we’re obviously at a computer, how else would be we on skype?”  She also proceeded to correct everyone on their pronunciation and inform everyone that she had been teaching herself Japanese for several years now.  (That always translates to: I totally fucking love Naruto and I made my mom buy me Rosetta Stone.)  After several more witty comments, the teacher finally asked her to leave the call (you know you’re off to a good start then) to which she said she didn’t mind staying on because she was used to having to go slower than she’d like because everyone else was so much slower than her.  She finally left the call after several rather unsubtle hints and things progressed normally after that, but that made me wonder why someone would be so overtly obnoxious to not just a teacher, but to a teacher that you’re supposed to be extra polite to in deference to her being a sensei in a Japanese class.

Then when you start looking at the way people generally treat each other on the inernet, where they don’t think twice about flaming someone for an innocent remark or for not liking Arashi as much as they do, someone who spends vast amounts of time on the internet would lose the ability to have a normal conversation with normal people in the real world.  I have often wondered what the truly obnoxious people are like in real life.  I know that some of them are really quiet and shy in person, then when they hop on the message boards they’re a bitter little flame thrower.  Some, as I found out the other night, are just unberable to talk to for any amount of time because they’re horribly obnoxious.

So here’s a little piece of advice; you’re really better off just not flaming anyone on the internet because it’s pointless and stupid in the first place, but if you are going to be that person, don’t actually do it in real life, because there’s a decent chance someone will punch you in the face repeatedly (and everyone around will cheer.)

Crappy Translation

Being the kind, thoughtful, otaku that I am, I always think that it’s better to go ahead and buy manga rather than just reading the scanslations online.  The problem with this is that some of the manga companies, Tokyopop being the worst offender, don’t do a good job.  While there are a lot of examples of this, the most recent one to irk me was Your & My Secret (also known as My Barbaric Girlfriend if you want to read the better version online.)  Here’s the setup of the story: a wussy guy and a girl who is beautiful yet brash end up swapping bodies through an experiment gone wrong.  So the guy you see in the picture is actually a girl and the girl in the picture is her best friend who she has started to like since turning into a guy.  In the scanslation she says that they are going to be late for “Anpanma Empire’s Counter Attack” which is obviously some form of martial arts / military / action flick.  Which is interesting because you have the girl inside of a guy’s body picking a very guy movie to see.  In the Tokyopop version she says that they are going to be late to see The Hannah Montana movie, which doesn’t fit in with her personality at all.  So why did Tokyopop decide to put in Hannah Montana rather than the original movie title?  If you think it’s because American audiences wouldn’t get what Anpanma Empire ‘s Counter Attack was, you’d be wrong as that movie doesn’t exist in Japan, either.  If you think it’s because Tokyopop just doesn’t care and is bad at their job, you’d be right.  One thing that Tokyopop habitually does is try to change the translations in manga so that it rings a bell with American audiences, but I don’t think they have any clue who their audience is.  Invoking the sacred tween name of Hannah Montana won’t cause tons of 12 year old girls to buy your manga, but it will cause the people who like and enjoy manga to cringe at something so obviously out of place.

Good Translation

You might think I’m being unfairly harsh about this, but this is just an example of something that Tokyopop and the others do all the time.  They try to make manga cool and edgy and trendy with the kids by putting in their own interpretations rather than translations.  In one scene at the beginning of the manga, the main character says “let’s go” and Tokyopop translates it to “let’s bounce.”  In the Tokyopop version of Boys Be, they have two of the characters checking a girl out and one says that she has a “badunkadunk butt.”  Boys Be is not a new manga at all; what are the odds that two Japanese guys 10 years ago were talking about someone’s badunkadunk butt?

So here’s what I want from you manga publishers: I want you to translate the manga.  I don’t care what you think tweenage girls might think it cool.  I don’t care what you think the characters might say if they were American.  I don’t care what you think they would say if they were on an MTV reality show.  I want to know what they said; I’d like to stress that I want to know WHAT THEY SAID, not what you think they might have said if they were this or that…just what they said.

All we have is the stupid clown and usually some dumb kids prancing around

“Exercise makes you hungrier” courtesy of CNN

“Gym killer a classic mass killer experts say” courtesy of CNN

“Man blames cat for downloaded child porn” the headline itself isn’t stupid, but the guy who came up with that excuse is.