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Head a farewell-to-Sawer's FoKN'A (Friends of Kirk's Nintendo Association, the goofy name for my video game get-together group) yesterday....Sawers and Cordelia were there, Andy and my cousin Ivan, Rick showed up as well. A fun group and we had a lot of laughs and played a lot of games and ate a lot of strawberries and other great stuff.

I'm really wanting to try to revive the group, or even expand it a bit especially since some people are gonna be leaving. 4 player games are just the bomb-diggity, though sometimes if its only like 4 or 5 people you don't have quite enough because someone doesn't like that game's genre. I don't know how to expand it properly though...I guess I should make sure it's open to any gamer friends I can think of before doing something weird like posting on Craig's List.

Forgot to haul out the new "Star Fox" before everyone but Ivan left...it was a good head to head deathmatch, might've been tons of fun for four.

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Anecdote of the Moment
The other week I was over at Ksenia's family's friend. At one point the TV was on a Russian cable station. At one point I saw a dubbed show which was odd for two reasons...one was I think it was a German show, some 70s detective or action drama (taking place at a small amusement park, I think part of the plot was about sabotage or poor maintenence of a small roller coaster leading to one of its cars being thrown into a concession stand with a guy in it.) And of course it was being dubbed into Russian. The other thing was the dubbing method...it wasn't subtitles or attempted lip-synching...instead, the original audio track was on low (which is how I knew it was in German) and a guy repeated what the actors just said in in Russian, and I think did any other needed translations, like of onscreen text. It wasn't quite as simple as one guy acting as the translator/narrator, they also had a woman who would repeat the women's dialog in the show...but besides that there was no attempt for the translators to switch voicees.

I know I'm horribly conditioned to think of English as a default, either for translation to or from for media, but still there's something odd in hearing two different languages you don't understand piled on top of each other on TV.

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Videos of the Moment
Kind of like porn for people who are into car accidents, Crash Test Videos from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. If you're in a hurry (and using Windows, I guess) check out 2005 VW Beetle Side Impact...multiple camera angles and everything!