The mystery of "Himmmm"

I'm not done crying over Cheese, but I'm probably never going to be done crying over Cheese. I still get teary over rats I lost years ago. If I ever stop sobbing when I lose a rat, I need to rethink getting any more rats. If you're going to be solely responsible for the health and happiness of another creature, you'd damn well better be emotionally invested.

In any case, an acquaintance and I are going out to Nevins Farm next weekend, where the MSPCA keeps the assorted small mammals, to get me some more critters. The MSPCA charges a very reasonable adoption fee of $10-15 per animal, which I consider a personal medical expense. It makes me untenably sad to walk into the room carrying food and not be met by a wriggling ball of fur that wants to know what it is and when they will be getting their cut. 

Frankly, they may elect to give me a discount if I tell them I want to abscond with half a dozen of the little buggers -- they don't often get adopters with that much room. Schloß Ratter is a Prevue Feisty Ferret Home with a livable space of about 20" x 30" x 40". It is free-standing furniture, and would comfortably house about six even if they're big squishy boys, possibly up to eight if they were all super-besties. Turns out it's also modular, and I could add another level to it if I were so inclined, especially since I've now learned the important lesson that a standard iFixit kit contains the correct hex driver for taking the damn thing apart. (I'm sure it came with an Allen key, but I'm not the original owner, so that thing is long gone.) 

I've also figured out what I'm doing for my birthday. It's the 9th of September, which is a Saturday, a day I mostly get to have off. I signed myself up for a Bollywood fusion workshop in the afternoon, but I'm going to spend the evening playing video games on Twitch.

You all may or may not remember that I am a screaming fan of the Ace Attorney games, with the detecting and wacky writing and Big Gay Lawyers and all. I check up on Capcom and Takumi Shu every so often, just in case they did another thing I'd care about. The latest branch of the series is a spin-off distant prequel series called 大逆転裁判 (Dai Gyakuten Saiban, "Grand Turnabout Court"), which fans have generally called "The Great Ace Attorney" ever since they started working on translating the first one. 

Given the crazy popularity of the series, I was curious as to why Capcom initially had no plans to localize that branch until I played the first one in fantranslation, at which point it became obvious. One, they were probably afraid of tangling with Arthur Conan Doyle's estate, as it involves a character who is plainly meant to be Sherlock Holmes. The official localization renames the character "Herlock Sholmes", which is itself a nod to Maurice Leblanc, who did the exact same thing when the detective crossed paths with Arsène Lupin.

The other reason is that the setting is Meiji Japan/Victorian England, and the script is stuffed to the gills with 19th c style casual racism. Not in the "the dirty [ethnicity] must be guilty, you can't trust any of them!" way, just in the general "this isn't your business/you can't possibly understand" way that showcases both the overbearing arrogance of colonial Britain and the pervasive xenophobia of Meiji Japan. It's not glorified or justified, but also not particularly scrutinized, just presented as a factual element of the setting. Which it kind of is, but holy moly, do I understand why they originally did not want to touch that with a ten-foot pole. Japan has a far better grip on the concept that characters in stories do a lot of things that would not be at all acceptable in real life than we do, and editing things to account for that is a huge time sink.

(Still got the Big Gay Lawyers, tho'. Seriously. I got like two minutes into the second case before muttering "Ryuunosuke, are you seriously smuggling your boyfriend to England in your stateroom closet?" The young lady assistant is delightfully not at all reliant on the opinions of the boys around her. She even wears sensible hakama, as befitting an independent city girl who works a job of her own.)

Anyhow, I ran across a mention that the thing had been officially localized a couple of days ago, so I nosed around a bit, fully expecting to find that the English version was still a Nintendo exclusive, as Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice were for quite a long time. I was already making a list of which friends of mine might own a Switch and like me enough to let me borrow it, when I found 

1. The Great Ace Attorney is now available on Steam,
2. bundled with its sequel
3. plus the HD remakes of the original Ace Attorney trilogy,
4. and it is on ridiculous sale right now.

Apparently I managed to check on this the week Steam slashed prices on all their visual novels by 30-60%. I would have been happy to find the one I wanted was $19.99 for a platform I own, but I am absolutely on board with giving Capcom $5 more for five full games that I will actually play, especially since at least the first three are playable in four or five different languages. And by sheer stupid coincidence, the first plot-relevant case in the first game happens to conclude, with a win for Phoenix, on September 9th. So stay tuned for details on time and URL.

I don't require birthday gifts from anybody, but if you have too much money and want to get me one anyway, here is a list of silly things that I do not in any way need, but would enjoy receiving in the mail. If you want to get something, but would rather see Jeff Bezos fired into the sun, here's the Steam list of visual novels I would also play the hell out of. If you'd prefer to send things to the critters, here's the list for the Ratswarming Party. (It doesn't matter if you read that as 'rats-warming' or 'rat-swarming'; both will inevitably happen.) And if you want to spend money but not on me, may I direct your donations to the MSPCA or Mainely Rat Rescue? Both of them do excellent work on behalf of rodents.