It's fair to say I've been (ahem) primed to see it, but I'd have hoped that even a total non-gamer looking at chaetopterus pugaporcinus could have been reminded of something more dignified than a pig's hind parts. The monsters will remember the insult, along with all mankind's terrible meddling, when the hatchlings escape the laboratory...
A copy of Cultural Appropriation and the Arts has fallen into my lap, so that will occupy me for a while, and for today's post I've decided to dig something out of the depths of my hard drive. The name of the lady who inspired it had better remain undisclosed.
How hard to write romantic verse!
Each heartbeat will confirm
That mine are feelings quite perverse:
I love to see you squirm.
Each wary glance, each nervous twitch
Invigorates my lust:
That scolding in discomfort which
Reveals your shocked disgust.
Of course I love your blushes too;
I live to see you smile;
So many lovely words from you
Are in my stalking file;
And so my arms ache most of all
To hold you and caress:
To hold you by the graveyard wall,
And savour your distress.
GlitterBerri asked me to have a go at translating Advent Children's The Promised Land. As it turns out the Final Fantasy VII Citadel has a good annotated translation (I wish I'd known about their treatment of Advent: One-Winged Angel when I was working on that), but still, why not...? (I shall probably go on and do Ormus and Somnus Nemoris, but not in immediate succession.) With the standard 'I'm no classicist' disclaimer, then:
Why do we hesitate in the womb?1
Why do we punish a little heart?2
The Planet3 yielded4 not, yielded not to us;
The Planet yielded not, yielded not to us.
The streams'5 pulse flowing into the earth, flowing into the earth:
A tiny, tiny6 pulse,
A heart ?drawing forth7 death.
Tender life ?returns8 to the Planet.
Is there need to sacrifice the soul?9
Why do we hesitate in the womb, in the womb?
Why implore10 pardon
In a fated land11?
A couple of days ago, when I decided to add yet another rendering into English of Advent: One-Winged Angel to an already moderately diverse selection, I told myself I certainly wasn't going to attempt Liberi Fatali, the FFVIII song Square mistitled to begin with, notoriously intending 'Fated Children' (Liberi Fatales)—hence the post title. I'm still not going to go to the same lengths to explain why existing translations have me perplexed in places (it'll be apparent enough where we differ), but having scanned some I do feel inclined to have a go at this one too. Standard disclaimer: I'm really no classicist.
I've started with the following transcriptions/translations, FFLyrics.com plus three from the first page of Google results for 'Liberi Fatali lyrics'...
...and need to comment on transcription differences. Non sunt vs. sunt non: after listening to a couple of recordings I'm fairly sure the choir sings sunt non, so I suspect someone edited that as an assumed error to make it look less grammatically odd. Non est vs. est non: I'm fairly sure non comes first this time. Vow instead of vos is an error; I recall a magazine article that translated the first line as 'Kindle a vow from a dream, my children', and it's disappointing to see that it isn't.
There seems to be a transcription, possibly an official one, which contains omissions (and uses eat; see note two). These features are referenced with a †; AnimeLyrics.com seems to use this transcription. [Update: was this meant to coincide with a Japanese rendering...?] The lines Veni hortum veritatis / Horti verna veritatis make me wonder very much about transcription accuracy (see notes), and having one of them missing from some transcriptions makes matters worse.
[Update: I have just checked the sheet music on the fan site NobuoUematsu.com. It has est non; it also has Veni hortus veritatis / Horti verna veritatis.]
Awaken yourselves from sleep, my children:
There is no cradle1.
Awaken yourselves from sleep, fated children:
There is2 no slumber.
Arise!
Discover3 [it]!
Come4 [?thou5] to the garden6 of truth,
?To the garden7 of vernal truth8.
With blazing truth,
Burn9 the evils of the world;
With blazing truth,
Set the darkness of the world alight.
Farewell, O children,
In the fated days10.
Faulty male introspection may explain why men so often misinterpret women's indirect messages to stop or slow down the escalation of sexual intimacy, according to new research by UC Davis communication professor Michael Motley. "When she says 'It's getting late,' he may hear 'So let's skip the preliminaries,'" Motley says. "The problem is that he is interpreting what she said by trying to imagine what he would mean—and the only reason he can imagine saying 'It's getting late' while making out is to mean 'Let's speed things up.'" Motley calls it the "introspection" explanation: "Males' inferred meanings for women's indirect sexual resistance messages are more similar to the meanings males would have intended by those same messages than to the meanings women intend."
Science Daily
Then of course there are those whom years of philosophical education have taught to interpret 'It's getting late' to mean 'It's getting late'.
On the basis of this article I suspect Motley may be a little too ready to treat this as a game of 'pin the performative semantics on the utterance'. If I form the hypothesis that someone is trying to hint, that may trigger a request for clarification, but if that fails a basic principle of charity in thinking of my interlocutor as a rational agent and competent English speaker will tend to balance the scales towards assuming I was just being jittery.
Moreover, as a general principle rewarding obfuscation is counterproductive, since it moves further from clear, mutual understanding—and it's a reasonable assumption that, if one's interlocutor goes out of his or her way to avoid uttering the intended proposition (X) as a declarative sentence, in favour of uttering some other statement (Y), then if one did acquire 100% competence at inferring (X) from (Y) uttering (Y) would in fact have become functionally equivalent to uttering (X), and hence the would-be hinter would be driven to ever more confusing obfuscation (Z). So there's more going on than case-by-case head scratching; and to achieve the best outcome for everyone through practical education, one should take the 'just desserts' route and consistently penalise wilful failure to optimise the probability of successful interpretation, though not necessarily with sexual harassment.
Previously on the lunar surface: the philosophy of hinting.
The UKIPO's Annual Review for 2007 partly takes the form of a comic whose protagonist is decidedly tall and slender but regretfully comes only that close to emulating my dashing looks. He also lacks a basic sense of caution:
In the past I've made some efforts to learn some Latin, and although I never acquired a great deal of knowledge and have let that get very rusty during my student years, I do sometimes find uses for it. These include blinking at translations of 'Advent: One Winged Angel' (the Advent Children version of the song; the original 'One Winged Angel' took its lyrics from the Carmina Burana). So, inspired by GlitterBerri's commitment to linguistic precision, and reasoning that I can't muddy the waters much further and it'll be good mental exercise, I'm going to have a stab at the job.
[Update: see also the rather good annotated translation at the FFVII Citadel, something I wish I'd known about when writing this.]
A quick Web search gives me four existing variations...
...each of which does one or more of the following things to make me wonder what the translator's reasoning was:
Noli manere as 'won't remain' or 'I do not wish to remain', rather than 'Don't remain'. This probably arises from the odd way in which Latin handles negative imperatives: nolle (noli is the imperative) is a combination of ne, 'not', and velle, 'want/wish', so noli manere = 'don't wish to remain' and grammatically there is a component of wanting or willing in there.
Qui mortem **invitavis as 'By death's invitation' or 'He who calls forth death'. Qui = 'who' (subject); mortem = 'death' (object); invitavis = nothing, as far as I know, but invitavit (in Lyrics Mania's transcription) = 'he/she/it has invited'.
Ille iterum veniet as 'The second advent'. Ille = 'he'; iterum = 'again'; veniet = 'he/she/it will come'.
Poena funesta natus as 'Painful tainted birth'. Natus (masc. s.) basically means 'born' as an adjective, and it can mean 'son', but here everyone seems to have favoured the meaning 'birth'. Poena is a noun (as an adjective it apparently means 'Carthaginian'); funestus is the adjective ('calamitous, deadly', etc.). That fits with the House of Lyrics 'birth of polluted punishment', except that poena funesta isn't in the genitive; it must be nominative ('born [a] tainted punishment'?) or ablative ('born [by means of] tainted punishment'?). [Update: oh, I get it—natus as 'birth' is in the fourth declension, so it's genitive.]
I'm assuming the AdventChildren.net variation between manere ('to remain') and manare ('to flow') is just a clerical error. Like everyone else, I'm taking it that terribile (neut. s. of terribilis, 'terrible') in ferum terribile is acting as the substantive; but 'the terrible [thing]' doesn't mean the same thing as 'terror'. (FFLyrics.com in yet another variation suggests 'a fierce, terrible man has a terrible fate', but I take the neuter to imply 'thing'. [Update: I get it: they're reading ferum as masc. acc. (following other lines where acc. nouns show up) and as a substantive, which is where they're getting 'man' from; but terribile is acc. neuter too.] Incidentally, the FFRepublic transcription actually writes terribilis, presumably in error (or maybe they should get together with the FFLyrics.com people), while Lyrics Mania and FFLyrics repeat terribile in place of ferum, hence their translation 'terrible fate'. [Update: careful listening tells me they were the ones who got it right, so it is ferum terribile, terribile fatum.]) Again like everyone else, I read veni as an imperative, although 'I have come' would also work grammatically.
Stay not, stay not1 in memory;
Stay not, stay not in memory:
Sephiroth! Sephiroth!
Furious wrath, wrath and anguish;2
Furious wrath, wrath and anguish:
Sephiroth! Sephiroth!
A savage, terrible thing—a terrible fate.3
Stay not, stay not in memory;
Stay not, stay not in memory:
Sephiroth! Sephiroth!
Come, my son; come, my son;
Come here4; give me death again.
Come, my son; come, my son;
Come here; give unto me5.
Stay not, stay not in memory;
Furious wrath and anguish;
Savage, terrible fate:
He will come again.
O my son, come, come, come, my son;
O my son, come, come, come, my son;
O my son, come, come, come, my son;
O my son, come, come, come, my son;
O my son, come, come, come, my son
(He who has invited death);
O my son, come, come, come, my son
(The deathly6 penalty of birth);
O my son, come, come, come, my son
(Call not [upon] the name);
O my son, come, come, come, my son
(He will come again):
Sephiroth! Sephiroth!
Sephiroth!
I don't, on the whole, comment on 'religion causes $malady'-type assertions—reasoning that any reflective person, irrespective of what place if any is occupied by religiosity in his life, will be already fairly susceptible to unease about taking this term 'religion', with all the complexities and diversities involved in its usage, and inserting it into a brash causal proposition. I'm not going to embark on an essay on historical causality just now either; instead, on reading Daniel Dennett's contribution to the 'religion causes...' genre (opposed in the same article by Lord Robert Winston, who also rather underplays the complications of the term 'religion'), the question that came into my mind was, why is one of the star philosophers of mind slumming it by churning out tabloid atheism?
Insofar as academic philosophy has enfants terribles, Dennett gets to be a contender thanks to his rather deflationary views about consciousness (his book Consciousness Explained is unofficially known as 'Consciousness Explained Away') and being the man who proclaimed that 'we are all zombies'. Expertise in one field doesn't help much with another, but he's clearly a sharp and lucid thinker when he pleases, and could no doubt do a tolerable job of critiquing those species of religious adherence with which he's familiar if he set out to do so. And certainly one would expect him to combat a perceived danger with a fervour which would lead him to aim to find the strongest arguments possible; I have no reason to doubt that he sees his task as a nobler one than that of accruing column inches. (If he did make that his aim, he'd probably devise something more diverting and original.)
So what does he think he's doing? At a guess: pursuing rhetoric, a rhetorical sociology, in the hope that shouting loudly enough to attune the reader's mind accordingly will engender greater receptivity purely to 'the wonderful world of goodness we and our ancestors have made'—in accordance with his characterisation of 'religion' as distracting 'make-believe'. It's perhaps cynical to imagine that what lies behind Dennett's failure not to say that 'in a single cataclysmic day [his] side could be proven by one fanatical act' is an understanding of the statement, not as an epistemic one about the role of evidence, but as loaded with moral portent; however, if nothing else it appeals to my sense of mischief.
After one of the world's greatest grumbles opened its doors to journalists and anyone expressing an opinion, postgraduates and lecturers say that competition in the rush to complain about undergrads is now intolerable. Newspaper editors stand accused of increasing anti-undergrad complaint numbers to boost funds and performance bonuses.
Adapted from The Times
Okay, I'm not going to quibble with concerns about less-than-diligent patrons in a research library. Mostly I'm finding my tear ducts dried by this assertion in the Grauniad: 'it is not progressive if you are an academic coming in from Southampton, Nottingham, Oxford or Norwich for the day (having waited after 9am for the off-peak train ticket) only to find all the seats taken by pass-holders who don't need to be there.' This turns my reaction to the story into something of a 'Four Yorkshiremen' moment:
The Chocobo's Dungeon 2 debug room is basically as the FAQ describes it: a rectangular map with an empty expanse to the right. (Incidentally, the 'bunch of Japanese options' is headed 'town flag' in katakana, which expains the lack of any obvious effects.)
Translation of Mog's text below courtesy of GlitterBerri:
'Changing
Changing
Testing Message'
Talk to this NPC (or vehicle...) and get the next transformation in the sequence (with only three shown here):
 |
 |
 |
 |
As far as I can discover there's no way to cancel the magic effect test, so you'll be stuck watching an apparently infinite loop.
GlitterBerri translates this menu as follows:
D5:10F (Green stone)
D5:22F (Eyes in/on the wall)
Other: Sea bottom
Other: Only a mythical beast
Other: Only a demon
Cancel
The word she renders as 'mythical beast' is genjuu, which is what the Espers were called in the Japanese script of Final Fantasy VI, so it's possible this was going to be some sort of in-series reference. As the FAQ notes, the first two options lead to levels of the fifth dungeon.
The 'Other: sea bottom' map. A FAQ file mentions a secret passage to a 'completely submerged floor'; presumably this is it.
Disappointingly, 'Other: Only a mythical beast' is apparently incomplete. There are no enemies or objects, and the level exit causes a crash.
'Other: Only a demon' has enemies wandering around, but what should be the level exit does nothing at all.
This isn't a working debug menu; functionally it's the Item menu, but with some text replaced. What I did involved cancelling the Item menu but forcing the game to remain on it rather than returning to the main menu – while apparently ending up with some text from a different memory location – so it's possible (but far from certain) that this text is associated with the main menu somehow.
At least some of the game's development took place at Square's Honolulu studio, but 'conversion' suggests a revision; maybe this is a version identifier. (It's the translation beta ISO again, so 'conversion code' would make sense.) Nearby text in memory suggested a party change menu (maybe the fabled 'Party Select or Party Macro'), but my semi-complete text table couldn't decipher it properly.
Discussing whether their demographic penetration might count as evidence of items' cultural significance, I wrote that 'someone seeking to justify the view that the Beatles' place in musical history has a greater cultural significance than that of, say, Instant Sunshine would doubtless point out their enduring popularity as well as their influences on other musicians'. Mostly I talked about the former, the easier thing to measure; but I have previously suggested that where work β borrows elements of work α this may increase the value of α, by constituting its absorption into the creativity of a wider culture, and it increases the value of the cluster(s) of ideas within which α and β are both included, by virtue of their connection. Consequently it's a small and ready step to wondering how we can discern just how much value is accrued in such cases.
How can we reckon the cultural value of an individual work which – precisely on account of its 'cultural' status – is bound up in complex relations with other works in and beyond the milieu that produced it? How about the value associated with exemplification of a cultural milieu itself, to which we presumably appeal if, for example, we think 'being a prime example of Dutch landscape painting' makes a painting worth preserving? The early Lovecraft drew more or less separately on two clear influences ("There are my Dunsany stories, and there are my Poe stories—alas, where are my Lovecraft stories?") and his mature style is more obviously descended from Poe than from Lord Dunsany; no doubt Dunsany's writing gains interest from his influence on Lovecraft, but how can any impact on its cultural heritage value as a result of the debt be assessed, in the context of the development of the two writers' careers as a whole?
The role of work α in the creation of work β may be more or less apparent: 'appropriation art' is overt to the point that it's questionable what's actually added, whereas the subtleties of one artist's general stylistic influences on another may demand the analysis of an art critic. I imagine digging around in the legal literature would produce ample prior work on questions of determining how much one particular work appropriates from another, for the purpose of deciding I.P. infringement cases; but it's more within the domain of the critic or historian of the arts to decide e.g. where sufficient connections appear to constitute a 'movement'. Moreover, in neither case is the objective one of assessing the value which the copied or adapted elements accrue.
The extent of derivation is not necessarily in direct proportion to its worth in the development of culturally valuable clusters; for example, Dryden's The Enchanted Island, an adaptation of The Tempest with some alterations, is principally vulnerable to unflattering comparisons with Shakespeare's mastery, whereas Shakespeare's own dramatisation of a story by Cinthio to create Othello has quite eclipsed the original. So the question then arises: is there any more than a weak connection between the extent of an act of borrowing and its consequences for the value of the cluster involved, or is extent a red herring for my purposes?
I suppose I latched onto extent because I was raising an epistemological question – how do we tell how much value is accrued? – and thought the extent of derivation might be helpfully detectable. What other indicators of value acquired by association might there be? Maybe not indicators of a kind I can examine within the scope of this project; æsthetic judgment may be involved, for example. Making matters worse is the counterfactual nature of the problem: where one work, one style, one movement influences or is made use of by another, we are in no position to imagine one of them out of history for the purpose of asking what value the other has eo ipso. (One can hardly appraise Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote apart from its debt to the Quixote; and the Quixote itself overtly draws on a whole genre of chivalrous literature.) We cannot very well be confident that we can now judge what value the older work possessed before the newer derivative came into being (if it matters), so it seems that we are poorly placed to reckon what value one of the works has in (artificial) isolation—awkward, given how often someone faces the question of what it's worth to preserve, keep publicly available or otherwise act upon some individual item.
So while this reinforces my inclination to think the 'cluster of ideas' is the primary value-bearer, it's still necessary to discover how valuable a given cluster is, and in practice it may well be necessary to speak of the value of discrete objects, even if with reservations. Partly the difficulty arises from changes in value over time: derivation falls problematically between transformation and addition, in that we retain work α but our relation to it may be changed by β. (Of course, our relations with things may change anyway—hence Hume's comment about the development of taste with age.) I'm inclined to think this will turn out to be one of the places where I simply have to leave room for people to combine my work with other premises in order to get a fully operative normative theory that makes practical recommendations; but I'm still left with the question of what a normative moral theory should make of the insights of the critic, the historian, etc.
Now that GlitterBerri has started her own weblog at Berri Blue her translations of FFVII's unused text will appear there as well at some point in the future, but I'll continue to publish what remains of this project for the sake of completeness and in order to add the usual commentary where appropriate. TIN_1, the first carriage on the Midgar train (apart from the Cargo van), is the last of the regular maps with decent-sized chunks of unused text; the material I have left to send to GlitterBerri consists of debug room text and miscellaneous snippets. One piece of dialogue in this file was actually moved around by the translators so that it wasn't on its own between blanked-out slots.
Another point of interest in TIN_1 is {0xFEDA}『ルートマップ画面へ』{END}, which corresponds to "To the Route Map Screen" in the English files: it's placeholder text from development, and so it never appears in the game. Consequently I had to dig around in emulator memory to find out what the otherwise unseen FEDA did: it causes text to flash alternate white and grey. There's another (glitchy) code, FEE0, which causes text to scroll upwards while the confirmation button is held down; according to the Loveless.exe help file both of these are operative in the PC conversion too, even though they're not used anywhere in the final game proper. FEDF produces the same glitches but no other apparent effect.
Other things I found while probing the dialogue memory: FC00 - FC18 replicate the kanji represented by FBE7 - FBFF for some reason. Elsewhere there are chunks of numbers which produce kana, but displaced downwards by several pixels (sometimes with the bottom of the character descending through the top of the line). Anyway, unused dialogue from TIN_1:
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「こ、こわいかい?{EOL} 大丈夫だよ、ぼ、僕が君を守ってやる。{EOL} (まいったなあ・・・こしぬけちゃったよ)」{END} |
A-are you scared? It's okay, I-I'll protect you. (I give up... I sound like a coward) [It must be the Shinra manager talking, but to whom...? Would he say that to Cloud?] |
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「(たのむ。あっちいって){EOL} きっと、いい人たちだよ。{EOL} し、心配ないよ・・・たぶん」{END} |
(Please, go away...) I think you're good people. I'm not worried... honest. |
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「キャッ!!{EOL} どうしましょう・・・。{EOL} どうしましょう・・・・・・」{NewScreen} (ちょっとしたスリルだわ。{EOL} このビリビリな緊張感・・・。{EOL} さっきの爆発事故より恐怖ね)」{END} |
Kyaa!! What to do... What to do...... (It's a little bit thrilling, this jittery feeling... It's even scarier than that explosion before.) |
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「キャッ!!{EOL} どうしましょう・・・。{EOL} どうしましょう・・・・・・」{NewScreen} 「(あ、いんねんをつけられてるのかしら。{EOL} からまれているのかしら・・・・・・?)」{END} |
Kyaa!! What to do... What to do...... (Ah, I wonder if they're picking a fight. Are they quarreling......?) |
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「ごめんよ・・・・・・ちょっと気分が・・・」{NewScreen} 「変なもん食ったからなあ。{EOL} あのミッドガル名物のプレートピザ・・・」{END} |
Sorry...... I feel a little off... I think it's because I ate something weird. That Midgar specialty plate pizza... |
Those lines, or at least some of them, presumably belong to the Shinra manager. Below is text that looks like placeholder or debug text; the two blank lines are an odd detail.
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{EOL} {EOL} {PURPLE}ドアロックまで{END} | Till the door lock |
ROOTMAP is the Route Map which Jessie shows to Cloud:
((Jessie's speech in this version ends at "Instead of names, we refer to them by numbered sectors. That's the kind of place this is." Then she asks...))
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ジェシー{EOL} 「ね、{Cloud}」{NewScreen} 「聞いてる?」{EOL} ☞ ああ・・・・・・{EOL} ☞ 聞いてない{END} |
Jessie:
Hey, Cloud! Are you listening? Option 1: Yeah...... Option 2: No... |
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((Option 1 response)) {Cloud}{EOL} 「なるほど・・・・・・」{NewScreen} 「ずいぶん{EOL} くわしいんだな」{END} |
Cloud:
I see...... It's complicated, huh. |
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((Option 2 response)) {Cloud}{EOL} 「聞いてなかった・・・」{NewScreen} 「もういちど{EOL} 聞かせてくれ」{END} |
Cloud: I wasn't listening... Tell me once more. |
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((Option 1 response)) ジェシー{EOL} 「え!・・・・・・うん」 {NewScreen} 「あのね、アバランチの規律があって{EOL} いろいろ暗記させられるわけ。{EOL} いちおう、大義名分ってやつなのよ」{NewScreen} 「{Barret}がよく難しいこと言うでしょ{EOL} 魔晄の本質とかなんとか・・・」{NewScreen} 「ああいうのもね、暗記したのがついね{EOL} でちゃうのよ」{END} |
Jessie: Uh huh! ......Yeah. Avalanche's rules say that we have to learn lots of things by heart. Anyway, it's for a good cause. Barret often tells us about difficult things.. the true nature of Mako, for example... I'm only telling you what I've memorized. |
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((Option 2 response)) ジェシー{EOL} 「はいはい。{EOL} まっかせといて」{END} |
Jessie: OK, you got it, Leave it to me. |
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「いい?{NewScreen} 「魔晄都市ミッド ガルは{EOL} 地上から約50Mの高さに{EOL} 建設された人工都市なの」{END} |
Ready? The Mako city Midgar was constructed 50 meters above the earth. |
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「最高水準の技術の結晶。{EOL} 人間の知と力のしょうちょうね。{EOL} このミッドガルは・・・」{END} |
It's a crystallization of the highest technology, a symbol of ((could also be "the prosperity and decay of")) humanity's power and wisdom, this Midgar... |
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「考えてみると、あらためてすごいよね。{EOL} 神羅の技術って」{END} |
Shinra's technology is amazing when you think about it. |
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{Cloud}{EOL} 「神羅か・・・・・・」{EOL} ☞ 神羅について聞かせてくれ{EOL} ☞ 興味ないな{END} |
Cloud:
Shinra, huh...... Option 1: Tell me about Shinra. Option 2: I don't care. |
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((Option 1 response)) ジェシー{EOL} 「え? {Cloud}{EOL} 私よりくわしいんじゃない?」{END} |
Jessie: Huh? But Cloud, don't you know more than me? |
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{Cloud}{EOL}
「昔のことなんか覚えちゃいない。{EOL} 俺は本社勤務じゃなかったしな」{END} |
Cloud:
I don't remember, it's been a long time. I didn't work at headquarters or anything. |
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ジェシー{EOL} 「はいはい」{NewScreen} 「神羅カンパニー・・・・・・{EOL} 私たち、アバランチの目下の敵」{NewScreen} 「この列車も、この街も{EOL} もちろん魔晄炉も・・・」{NewScreen} 「さいふからせいふまで{EOL} すべてをしょうあくする巨大企業」{END} |
Jessie: OK then. Shinra Company...... They're our current enemy. This train, this city, and Mako reactors, of course... from wallet to wallet they're all in the grip of this massive corporation. |
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「神羅カンパニーのトップ は{EOL} プレジデント神羅という人物よ」{NewScreen} 「魔晄炉建設を積極的におしすすめて{EOL} いまの神羅の地位をきずいたの」{END} |
The head of the Shinra Company is a man called President Shinra. He actively pushed the construction of the Mako reactors forward and helped to build Shinra's position today. |
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「私たち、無謀な戦いを挑んでるの。{EOL} 勝てるのかしら・・・・・・」{END} |
We're fighting a reckless battle. I wonder if we can win...... |
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ジェシー{EOL} 「はいはい」{END} |
Jessie: Alright then.. |
It's easy enough to see why that might have been deemed redundant. The following, however, is another example of Jessie's character development being cut back:
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「私たち、スラムの住人が{EOL} ミッドガルに上るには、この列車に乗るしかないの」{END} |
For us who live in the slums the train is the only way to get up to Midgar. |
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「スラムの街からミッドガルへ・・・・・・{EOL} なにもかも管理されたこの列車で{EOL} いろんなものが運ばれていくの」{END} |
From the slums to Midgar...... Many things are transported on this train. |
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「それにね、この列車に乗ってるとわかるの」{NewScreen} 「上の街が吸い取っていくのは{EOL} それだけじゃない」{NewScreen} 「やさしい気持ち・・・{EOL} ふわっとあたたかい心。{EOL} だんだんなくなっていくの・・・」{END} |
Riding the train makes you understand that. That's not the only thing the city above absorbs. Kind feelings... Warm hearts... They're gradually disappearing... |
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「そういうのって、やだな。{EOL} だから、私、アバランチに入ったんだ」{END} |
I won't let that happen. That's why I joined AVALANCHE. |
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「ごめんね、話、長くなっちゃったね。{EOL} でも、{Cloud}に私の戦ってる理由{EOL} 知ってほしくて」{NewScreen} 「私、ただの爆弾女と思われるのって{EOL} いやなのよ」{END} |
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to talk for so long. But I wanted you to know my reason for fighting. I don't want you to think I'm just a girl who's bomb-crazy. |
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{EOL} {EOL} 自主規制 {EOL} {EOL} {EOL} {EOL} {EOL} {END} | ((自主規制 is defined as "voluntary restraints"... confusing.)) |
Another place where we have odd blank lines; I wonder why some of them are shorter than the full 27 characters. Presumably the text is intentionally centred; this is how it looks in a monospace font. [Update: owing to problems getting it to look right with the kanji displayed, I've replaced them with alphanumeric characters to show the form the text box would take.]
Maybe it was intended as some kind of notice...
Square disabled their FFIX debug menu thoroughly, but some associated text is still there. Here's the menu text – the right-hand menu list, followed immediately by the helper messages – taken from emulator memory. (F929 and F928 are probably responsible for the red helper text.)
Item{END}
Ability{END}
Equip{END}
Status{END}
Order{END}
Card{END}
Config{END}
Save{END}
Debug{END}
Use and arrange items.{EOL}
View key items you have{EOL}
received in the game.{END}
Use action abilities.{EOL}
Equip support abilities.{END}
Change the character's equipment.{END}
View character's parameters{EOL}
and learned abilities.{END}
Rearrange the party order.{EOL}
Set battle positions.{END}
View cards.{END}
View the game configuration.{END}
{F929}This menu won't appear{EOL}
in the actual game.{F928}{END}
{F929}This menu won't appear{EOL}
in the actual game.{F928}{END}
So: one Save menu (for developers' convenience, or a relic of earlier stages of the design process?) and one Debug menu (distinct from the Mognet debug menu).
EU officials... described the Internet as a virtual training camp for militants, used to inspire and mobilise local groups.
BBC News
It feels as though only yesterday it was merely a series of tubes.
Looking at the Flash-ridden trainwreck that is the redesigned Dilbert site – on which I had to enable bits of Flash just to get textual pages to appear, including the legalese I'm about to quote – I found myself raising my eyebrow at the terms of use—not because of the notion that I need permission to make a hyperlink to the site, which one sees elsewhere, but because of the stipulation that 'you must be 13 years of age to use the Web Site and if not of majority (18 in most states) your parents must complete your registration and supervise your use'. Given the reference to registration, it's possible that 'use' is meant to refer only to that of registered and signed-in users posting comments, etc., but as far as I can see we're told simply that the 'Terms apply only to Dilbert.com (however accessed) and other interactive features or downloads... You agree to these Terms by accessing or using the Web Site.'
So if you're under thirteen, you may wish to avoid clicking on the above link to the site. Who knows what might come of children reading a strip cartoon about office workers...?
By chance I came across the work of, presumably, a distant relative: Susan Seddon Boulet (1941 - 97) was born Susan Eleanor Seddon in Brazil. Her work has an enthrallingly ethereal quality, sometimes as though it were painted with starry nebulæ, sometimes as though seen from underwater (with the composite style of some images being reminiscent of the translucency of jellyfish).
[Update, March 2009: this post originally ended with some rather snarky remarks about the Turning Point Gallery, because dedication to preventing any saving of their files, whether conceivably for defensible use or not, had led them to try to block the right-click menu; but happily, this policy seems to have been changed.]
Depending on whose appraisal one reads, the Music Business Group's submission to the UKIPO's post-Gowers consultation on format-shifting exhibits either 'reasoned and measured tones' or 'a plan to pervert language in order to achieve an otherwise politically unacceptable result'. The latter quotation is from William Patry, and his concern is animated by that ever-troublesome term, 'value'.
There is... a reverse value theory, one that has been invoked sketchily in the past... In the past, courts have on occasion found infringement based merely on the fact of copying: if defendant went to the trouble to copy something from plaintiff, then the copied material had value to defendant...
This caught my eye, because in pondering the epistemic difficulties of pinning heritage value scores on items I've wondered about the possibility of looking at what people do instead of asking them what they think: the value of Tolkien's legendarium, for example, would be reckoned not by the declaratory enthusiasm of fans but by the number of knock-offs the degree of indebtedness recognisable in subsequent fantasy literature. (So cliché is actually a mark of value—of the clichéd element as it appears in literature generally. It certainly doesn't guarantee literary merit in any given work.) I've suggested previously that clusters of items, e.g. 'original work of fiction + fanfiction', might be the primary value-bearers, and, clusters presumably having vague boundaries, this isn't going to make the epistemological questions any easier to address.
Interpreting cultural activity as evidence of cultural value at least offers something reasonably visible to look for, and indeed it reflects the kind of rationales given for attributions of cultural significance. Someone seeking to justify the view that the Beatles' place in musical history has a greater cultural significance than that of, say, Instant Sunshine would doubtless point out their enduring popularity as well as their influences on other musicians. (Adventurous types might appeal directly to æsthetic value too.) The degree to which an item (I use this term loosely here) becomes familiar throughout a given demographic then serves as both justification and evidence: popular familiarity justifies naming the item as (valuable) cultural heritage, by making it a commonplace feature of that demographic's cultural intercourse, and thereby also acts as evidence that it does have such a cultural role. (This avoids commitment to any economics-style identification of cultural value with exchange value.)
From an epistemological point of view, the advantage of looking to popular impact as a matter of observed fact is that we get rid of the messiness of testimony—perhaps. Influence and popular familiarity are matters of fact out there in the world, sometimes even measurable—so while the fact/value distinction still demands that we recognise a bridge between 'is valued' and 'is valuable', at least we don't have to worry about problems of self-knowledge when working out what people value.
We do, however, have the problem of working out what's valued/valuable qua heritage. The difficulty with 'popularity' is that people individually value things, and engage with things, for all sorts of reasons; even insofar as we can stack the implications of different people's actions, the resulting aggregate may not be 'heritage value'. So although we can and routinely do point out 'social trends', they aren't actually that promising as manifestations of moral value. Reasons raise their heads again: suppose, for example, that of some band's album sales 25% are to people immersing themselves in perception of the æsthetic worth, while the other 75% are to fashion-followers who'll adopt any trend going. Although the existence of the latter no doubt is of some sociological interest, it has only a coincidental link to the band and its music, so I think it's reasonably plausible that the quarter composed of connoisseurs carries an especial weight when the cultural value of the music is assessed.
Now of course one can respond to that that popular culture isn't just a matter of consumption: the band's music might become part of the defining backdrop of the era, their lyrics quoted by journalists trying to show they're in tune with 'the youth', their offstage antics filling the gossip columns, etc.—irrespective of how many people actually like their music. Fair enough, but again, we've got an aggregation problem: in practical terms, even if in principle we know how to determine the significance of each reference and each instance of usage, we're never going to be able to do the kind of mass-addition required to calculate the total in that way. So if appealing to the existence of social trends is important in working out the value of heritage, the method is going to be a much less fine-grained one, and that's where we run back into epistemological trouble.
When we look for 'social trends' as historical/sociological phenomena, what we're doing is, loosely speaking, putting narratives together: traces of complex interactions are apprehended as evidence to support or cast doubt upon our ideas about the growth of symphonic metal, or Blakelock's place in the development of American painting, or whatever. And in seeking to account for the view that a given narrative is worth telling – which in this case means, whether it has cultural value – we find ourselves moving away from an appeal purely to what people do, and we end up back where we started—this time with an abstract object, the cultural narrative, in place of the potsherd. The upshot is that between us and 'the culture' there stands this intermediary entity, the narrative, and so we lack a direct and uncomplicated view of cultural material through which we might reckon its significance.
Well, perhaps what we need is some more suitable way of looking at the use of cultural artefacts—much as economists look at recorded transactions in order to estimate GDP, etc. So if some specialised scheme of measurement were devised for the purpose of determining the popular impact of cultural artefacts, would we then be in a position to know their cultural value? My inclination is to doubt it, because as I've argued with respect to The Original of Laura, we can have genuine cultural links to objects without coming into direct contact with them. Earlier I suggested that a defence of the cultural importance of the Beatles would appeal not only to their enduring popularity but also to their influence on subsequent music. The 'influence' criterion reflects a kind of carry-over effect: if popular artist X is influenced by obscure artist Y, and we grant that X's work has cultural value (because of its popularity or something else), then we seem to have some sort of commitment to valuing Y's too, since it both shares elements with X's and is a condition for X's even existing in the form it has. (However, this criterion doesn't in itself explain why anything should be reckoned to have this sort of value.)
If the spread of items through cultural interchange isn't sufficient for telling us the cultural value of the items, is it nevertheless a component whose magnitude one needs to know and take into account in order to assess that total value (assuming the process can be made practicable)? I think what's probably of interest isn't the absolute magnitude of distribution but how widely known an item is relative to a given demographic. (Otherwise mass-culture in large, strongly interconnected civilisations would always have a boost over smaller cultures, and it seems at least questionable that this should be so.) Perhaps, within a given cultural demographic, an item familiar to 60% has a stronger claim to cultural value, ceteris paribus, than an item familiar to only 3%.
Treating this as an epistemic question, I think I can address it using a form of universal/parochial strategy: if an item has a high penetration amongst group A and in all others a much lower penetration, this suggests that the item is specific to the culture of A, a reflection of A's particular identity. On the other hand, if penetration is also high in group B, then at most this evidence points to the item's being culturally important to a combined group AB; its popularity within A looks less like evidence of significance for the culture of A.
On the face of it, the case being heard in court 24A of the US district court in Manhattan yesterday promised to be a dry affair: a dispute over copyright between an author and a publisher wanting to print an A to Z of her work. But things got interesting when the author, one Joanne Rowling, admitted from the witness stand that she was holding back her tears. "I really don't want to cry," she said, "because I'm British."
The Guardian
J. K. Rowling came to the edge of tears in a New York court yesterday as she defended Harry Potter from what she called 'wholesale theft'. The famously shy author, who had never testified in court before, had to ask for a glass of water to regain her composure when asked to describe what her seven-book series meant to her.
The Times
The author of an unofficial Harry Potter encyclopædia broke down as he faced JK Rowling in court in a battle over the right to publish his book... Asked whether he still thought of himself as part of the Harry Potter fan community, Mr Vander Ark struggled to speak through tears.
BBC News
The librarian at the heart of the Harry Potter copyright-infringement lawsuit stood up to J. K. Rowling on Tuesday in a Manhattan courtroom, and then broke down sobbing... On the witness stand in Federal District Court, he portrayed the famous writer as his idol, his true literary love, who had been unaccountably bewitched by the evil, money-grubbing forces of publishing, like one of Voldemort's vassals.
New York Times
The modern-day Greek tragedy has found its chorus.
University students are facing 'legalistic' contracts when they begin their studies—which can include requirements on dress and behaviour... These contracts could be one-sided and non-negotiable, warns the adjudicator... "I have seen one that even laid down that students should dress neatly when going to lectures. I don't know that that is enforceable," Baroness Deech added.
From Anthony Jordan's 2006 post in a Dunelm message board discussion on the lack of mortarboards at Durham:
The 1836 'Regulations of Discipline &c., for the Students at Durham' form a case in point. Under section 10, it is established that academical dress is to be worn at all times except a) in going to a gentleman's house more than two miles distant from Durham and b) on the River, 'and then the Cap and Gown must be worn down to the boathouse'.
[Update: Oops... Oh well, no doubt the same regulations were in force when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837.]
Mater tells me that librarians used to suspect that Catherine Cookson was really a cabal of writers working under a pseudonym, because she was so fearsomely prolific. Now we have an alternative explanation for such accomplishments:
Mr. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books..., making him, in his own words, "the most published author in the history of the planet." Mr. Parker... has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject... and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres... He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows. And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. "I’ve already set it up," he said. "There are only so many body parts."
Romantic indeed. Of course, accusations of formulaic plotting will be nothing new to the genre; Mills & Boon's corpus is said to incorporate two plot types (X and Y hate each other at first and finally warm to each other; X and Y are devoted to each other but some obstacle stands between them), which isn't actually so bad when people talk of all the world's stories in terms of 'the seven basic plots'. Meanwhile, legend has it that some decades ago a researcher previously focussed on chess programs tried to branch out into computer-generated Western writing (which, based on my memory of the book in which I orginally found it, may not have been entirely accurately transcribed on the site I got it from—but how can one really tell?):
Tex Doe, the marshall of Harry City, rode into town. He sat hungrily in the saddle, ready for trouble. He knew that his sexy enemy, Alphonse the Kid, was in town.
The kid was in love with Tex's horse Marion. Suddenly the Kid came out of the upended Nugget Saloon. "Draw, Tex!" he yelled madly.
Tex reached for his girl, but before he could get it out of his car, the Kid fired, hitting Tex in the elephant and the tundra. As Tex fell, he pulled out his own chess board and shot the Kid 35 times in the King. The Kid dropped into a pool of whisky.
"Aha," Tex said, "I hated to do it, but he was on the wrong side of the Queen."
The obvious question for my Cookson-as-computer theory is, what happened to the project after the Cookson era? My theory is that increasing sophistication enabled the program's operators to pursue an ever-growing stranglehold on women's expectations through a wider range of pseudonyms, thereby influencing the selection of mates and ultimately directing the development of the species. Perhaps Mr. Parker's practical, no-nonsense approach to romantic literature will provide a counterbalance, making him the inadvertent saviour of the liberty of humanity.
I wonder whether a revelation in Ghostology is a good or a bad thing:
Danmar explains why one of his most frequent spirit guides, Immanuel Kant, failed to say anything interesting or original: 'Kant had done his work when living in Königsberg; he was through with hard work, mental or otherwise. No new ideas of scientific value have come from the dead.'
A Critique of Ectoplasmic Reason would have been stupendous, but on the other hand – remembering that this is Kant, purveyor of torrid academic prose par excellence – we can surely live without a volume-length letter of apology to Emanuel Swedenborg.
The frustration of a will to knowledge on the global Internet: I find myself taken by some artist's rather beguiling knack for feminine expressions, idly wonder whose work it is in the hope that this person has a website, then spend a good half-hour establishing that ignorance of Chinese really is an insurmountable barrier on this quest. [Update: Shu-Fen Chen—got it at last.]
According to Google's translation: 'Taiwan's chicklit provided by the publisher of a series of hand-painted wallpaper. Oriental signed a painter, William, such as the shade of a tree. Aestheticism style, very popular.' (Rummaging around love.doghouse.com.tw suggests these are indeed book cover images.) Apparently chick lit. has brought something worthwhile into the world after all.
I was reminded about the problem of determining canon in Tolkien's legendarium while reading about his sketchy treatment of the Blue Wizards (which may itself have been superseded in his later writings):
What success they had I do not know; but I fear they failed, as Saruman did, though doubtless in different ways; and I suspect they were the founders or beginners of secret cults and 'magic' traditions that outlasted the fall of Sauron.
Quoted in Encyclopedia of Arda, 'Alatar', note #3
One way of interpreting this talk of suspecting and not knowing is to treat it all as equivalent to 'I haven't decided', on the basis that Tolkien could have laid either option down by fiat had he chosen to. However, that may not be an accurate reflection of his creative process: his project, through all its revisions, its discarded ideas and its growth 'in the telling', had a certain recognisable consistency, in that he laboured under certain chosen constraints—with the result that ideas conducive to the development of a self-consistent, epic, myth-like world-history in which pleasing languages could be spoken was 'good', or perhaps 'fitting'; ideas conducive to kitchen sink drama, for example, were the opposite. When people argue about the 'true' identity of Tom Bombadil, or whether Balrogs have wings, they're generally doing it already under the broad understanding that whichever interpretation they favour is fitting (although of course what's fitting is also up for debate).
Now before I get carried away with trying to retrofit the constraints of creation into constraints of interpretation, there's an obvious rejoinder to the effect that any possible 'author as supreme arbiter' criterion is untouched whether the scaffolding stays up or comes down: had Tolkien decided to pit his Blue Wizards against Great Cthulhu and Lord Palmerston in a Sherman tank, this would still be true in and of his fictional world, however much we might wish otherwise. We should simply have to concede that he had abandoned or modified his conception of the fitting, or that we had failed to perceive what it was to begin with—i.e. the superstructure of fit is inferred according to the written facts, not vice versa.
Certainly, the prospects for a full epistemology of fictional worlds along these counterfactual lines look pretty grisly. A hypothetical 'perfected version of the author's project' which perfectly fits its chosen constraints, though perfectly conceivable as the end-point of an uninterrupted series of revisions and expansions, and hence as the culmination of the author's project (if we assume, not always plausibly, that that was unchanging), remains an object of speculation and at best very little certainty—so we risk the conclusion that there are truths about fictional worlds, but we can't know them, and they may contradict actual published statements. (I've previously shuddered at similar prospects when wondering about how we identify continuity errors and other such mistakes.) I suspect a more likely view, however, is that even if there are truths about the perfected world-version, typically we're not talking about that world-version but about the imperfect version(s) we encounter in actual writings: just as something may be explicitly true in a draft but explicitly false in its revision, so it seems reasonable to deny that any hypothetical perfected world-version should have any bearing on truth and falsity in imperfect works.
Nevertheless, I think there may be a legitimate, though more moderate, role for criteria of fit in the assessment of truth in fiction. Rich Cochrane has suggested a 'possible worlds' approach to fiction which makes contradictions permissible; though in conversation with him I wondered whether this might oblige us to swallow a wildly divergent fictional world as a 'possible' version of a familiar one, such as changing enough properties of Star Wars: A New Hope to turn it into Blade Runner. I think shifting or expanding authorial intention from the product of the author's thought itself to the product's 'fitness' may be of help here. We may have different judgments – even if 'we' are George Lucas at different stages of his life – about whether Han's or Greedo's shooting first would be more fitting, but we can surely agree that both are far more fitting than their embracing like brothers. Worlds in which this happens are ruled out as possible Star Wars worlds: it's false that Han and Greedo hug.
I think there are two likely objections to this line of thought. One is that it's redundant, because it still boils down to counterfactual inferences about authors' likely intentions (and if anything it invites looser ones): 'If Tolkien had ever made up his mind about the Blue Wizards, he would have decided...' The other is that it's too demanding, in that it adds a new layer of things for us not to be certain about.
The reason it isn't redundant is that it resolves what would otherwise be paradoxical: a legislative statement (given the assumption that what Tolkien asserted about his legendarium is necessarily true, at least until he changed his mind) that incorporates uncertainty. Tolkien said the Blue Wizards may have formed cults. His statement presupposes an in-world fact of the matter, a (fictional) truth one way or the other for him not to know. However, if our rule is that 'if Tolkien reports P as an event in his legendarium, then it is an in-world truth that P happened', we run into trouble if we take it to be an in-world truth P that 'the Blue Wizards may have formed cults'. While it's of course trivially true that either they formed cults or they didn't, the uncertainty of the matter can't itself be the in-world truth of the matter, because then there's nothing for Tolkien to be uncertain about: according to this interpretation of the rule, he's legislated an in-world indeterminacy. However, this conflicts with the apparent presupposition of his uncertainty that there is an in-world fact of the matter, one way or the other.
Now the obvious move, for anyone not keen to abandon a binary legislative/non-legislative distinction, is to invoke multiple (possible) fictional worlds: there's a version of Tolkien's legendarium in which the Blue Wizards formed cults, and a version in which they didn't, and what Tolkien was uncertain about was not so much which was 'true' (for both sprung from the mind of the same author) but which to endorse as canon and continue developing. This is probably a reasonable characterisation of Tolkien's predicament, but it isn't wholly faithful to his words: he spoke as though there were a single fact of the matter which he had not fully uncovered—which of course suggests it as an in-world truth that there is (Tolkien being the legislating author). But how could there be, if Tolkien hadn't made up his mind about it?
A notion of 'fit' may help make sense of the matter. We ordinarily read with a certain imaginative grasp – reminiscent of Gadamer's 'fore-understanding' – which gives us some pretty reasonable prima facie assumptions, e.g. that a building described as a palace has more than one room. Authors may play games with our expectations, or confound them accidentally, but that doesn't render them unreasonable. Now of course, when it comes to wondering whether Balrogs have wings we find ourselves far out of our depth and have to rely on the wording of the text; and perhaps there are subtle questions of best fit which even the author behind the fictional world in question can't answer without exercising a measure of creative judgment—so in practice, I grant, the notion is of rather limited epistemic use. But it does help to explain Tolkien's uncertainty: there was a sort of hypothetical 'best fit' which had some shadowy reality, even though he was free to choose to overwrite it.
So as for its being too demanding—well, it does raise the spectre of there being facts about fictional worlds, albeit merely provisionary ones, which aren't wholly accessible even to the worlds' authors. That does seem quite a lot to swallow, but consider the case of video game worlds: one point I'm fond of making with regard to efforts to create a timeline for the Legend of Zelda series is that these efforts tend to assume the successful end of each game is the 'true' continuation of the storyline. (Whereas when considering games which are set up to offer 'multiple plots' one just has to deal with multiple possibilities. Given that one of Chrono Trigger's ending scenes is accessible only if the party loses to Lavos, the final boss, is that somehow more significant than a common-or-garden in-game death?) In fact, Link will be killed by some wandering Octorok far more often than he vanquishes all the game throws at him; the Zelda II death screen even gave a storyline hint with its 'Game Over—Return of Ganon'. Which is the 'true' outcome? One answer: all of them; they happened to us; we remember reloading our saved games. Another answer: the outcome which can best be called the 'true' one is that which continues the story of the hero to its 'proper' conclusion, rather than letting it be unceremoniously cut short.
Even so, I imagine that presenting anything as apparently evaluative as 'best fit' in fictional worlds as a kind of quasi-objective reality may very reasonably invite objections...
This is a memory dump from Final Fantasy IX (specifically, an ISO purported to be a North American beta, on the offchance) with a partly complete text table: as you can see, there's more debugging text present than the well known Mognet 'Debug' line, albeit nothing wildly exciting.
Some Mognet error text:
Error:Mog command
Old letter data.
Erasing...
Next, some general error text; I managed to trigger one of these messages during a map transition while mucking about making codes. (??? denotes a script variable.)
Test
Null
Error Set Scenario Counter()
Old=???, New=???
Choose Seq=???
Overwrite
Skip
Error Env Play()
Slot=???
Skip FMV
Party Del Error
You don't have anyone in your party
Switch all members or use
Party Select or Party Macro.
Text of unknown function, in the Mognet section:
table10
table11
table12
table20
table21
table22
In the list of Moogles' names – Mognet has to deal with various possible 'You have a letter from X to Y' scenarios, and anyway Square clearly still didn't go in for cutting out text not presently needed – I found two not listed in the Mognet FAQs I have: Mogrody and Mogribs. A Google search produces just one result... My guess is that either they were renamed during localisation (but in that case I haven't worked out what their final names were) or they were removed from Mognet during development but their names were left on the list. I'll have to check against the final version when I get the chance.
There are various 2KB DAT files in the Final Fantasy VII (PSX) FIELD directory that have no obvious function (2.00KB being uniformly small) and don't feature in the 7mimic map list. (I'm not even sure they use the expected headers or LZS compression.) It's possible that they represent the remnants of maps that were never to be.
Filenames permitting reasonable guesses based on similarities to known maps' names:
This cave (right) is from the game's development stage, reportedly released amongst press material (large image file warning); it isn't a HYOU# map (ice caves being GAIIN_#, presumably 'Gaia interior', or in a couple of cases ICEDUN_#, presumably 'ice dungeon', whereas HYOU# and MOVE_# are snowfields), so the most we can say is that some redesign is known to have occurred Up North.
I can't find the Watch Room in Fort Condor; I wonder whether CONVIL_3 is it, and 7mimic won't display it for some reason. Things get odder on checking CONVIL_2 in Loveless (below left): it looks as though it incorporates the Watch Room (and the text fits, not that that proves much), but the display is glitched. (One can see other glitches elsewhere using Loveless/Gast, so maybe it's caused by the program. 7mimic gives just the outdoor graphic, and doesn't register a second layer.) I wonder whether Square intended to have the Watch Room and outdoor views separate, then combined them into one map in a sufficiently unorthodox fashion to confuse the map viewing programs.
I also wonder whether the MON in JUNMON might refer to monsters. There's a place in Junon (JUNIN3 I think) where pressing a wall switch sets off an alarm, and then random battles can occur; I always thought that was a bit of an odd detail... Alternatively it might have the M from JUNMIN#, the troops' living quarters. (I'm guessing this M is 'middle'; L and R are also used.)
Largely opaque filenames:
There's another 2KB DAT, FALLP.DAT, which does show up in 7mimic (right), with no dialogue; I assumed it had something to do with the FMV clip FALLPL.MOV, which is the destruction of the Sector 7 pillar, but in fact it's a still from the parachuting clip... on Disc 2. This gets a raised eyebrow, not least because FALLP.DAT consists almost entirely of 00s; maybe FALLP.MIM was meant to be some kind of static backdrop without a walkmap, etc.
There's an indication that Square did get completely rid of files in at least one case: the sewers under Don Corneo's are made up of COLNE_B1 and COLNE_B3. There is no COLNE_B2, but it's a reasonable guess that there was once going to be.
Having decided that just asking groups of people what they count as valuable heritage won't do, on the other hand I'm also inclined to doubt that one can dispense with interested parties' testimony altogether. The complication here arises, I think, with the question of whether, and if so how, propositions of the form '$object is x's heritage' can be uttered mistakenly, and what difference it might make should they be in the first person ('$object is our heritage').
I asserted previously that 'my invocation of reasons commits me to the view that values aren't sheer gratuitous mental phenomena, and hence that it's possible to be mistaken about them'. Suppose I stipulate that this should mean, mistaken by virtue of erring in judgment, as opposed to being ignorant or misinformed in some relevant respect. Is that sort of mistake possible? There's room for uncertainty and disagreement about what the word 'heritage' picks out, certainly; but if one has a concept which one associates with the word 'heritage', then picking out items of one's heritage appears to consist of applying that concept to items in the world. So assuming the concept is basically coherent and not terribly vague, the margin for error looks fairly small.
Suppose that of some group of people, presented with a potsherd from the civilisation of their ancient ancestors, fifty percent agree that it's part of their valuable heritage, while the other fifty percent think it's just an old bit of broken pottery. (Assume that all agree that their ancestors have left valuable cultural heritage, and the disagreement is merely about whether this particular potsherd qualifies as part of it.) Presumably our (most likely) options are to conclude that the potsherd is the heritage of half the group, or that it's the heritage of all the group even though half don't realise it, or that it's the heritage of none of the group even though half of them think it is.
Well, now I'm delving into social epistemology the first question I probably face (though not necessarily the first I'll be able to answer) is, does it all have to boil down to individuals, or can some relevant kind of group have knowledge of this kind?
Many contemporary philosophers argue the case for treating institutions, organizations, and associations of individuals as proper subjects of intentional and epistemic states... In common parlance, certainly, organizations are treated as subjects for knowledge attribution. In the wake of 9/11, there has been much commentary on what the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. did or didn’t know about terrorist plans before the event itself.
Alvin Goldman, 2004, 'Group Knowledge versus Group Rationality: Two Approaches to Social Epistemology', in Episteme 1: 11 - 12
I'm toying with the idea that a community might have a kind of self-knowledge which would involve some knowledge of its culture. By self-knowledge I mean simply that every member of a community knows himself and some other members (note the shift to 'community' from 'group'), and so within the community there is a substantial reservoir of knowledge about the community—probably a greater one than outsiders could accumulate, although one can conceive of cases in which that isn't so.
It's a reasonable expectation that this self-knowledge will involve knowledge of whatever counts as the community's culture—although this may be inexhaustive; a historian may have better knowledge of our ancestors than we do ourselves, and certainly few of us know much of ancient potsherds. A conception of transgenerational community, as in de-Shalit's claim that 'cultural interaction not only extends into the past but into the future as well', and 'the existence of a transgenerational community... elicits obligations to future members of one's community' (1995, Why Posterity Matters: Environmental Policies and Future Generations, London: Routledge, pp. 50 - 51), might help avoid this problem – assuming there's no Brave Officer problem – but then, it also introduces a further epistemic difficulty: how well do we know what departed generations knew?
In the potsherd case, each community member is asked to pass judgment not on his own (direct) relation to the artefact, but on the community's as a whole: is it or is it not their (valuable) cultural heritage? (Knowing what I value is less epistemologically problematic than knowing what is valuable for my group—and Young's conception of heritage value presumably requires the latter.) This creates complications. Margaret Gilbert has discussed cases where, she suggests, the collective belief of a group seems not to be the aggregate of its members' beliefs:
Suppose the members of a certain court also constitute a poetry discussion group. (The justices decided it would be a good thing for them to get to know each other better outside the courtroom and since all liked poetry they decided to form such a group.) One day the court has to decide the merits of a certain poem, in conjunction with a certain legal action. While in session it brings various expert witnesses before it, and so on. At a certain point it may be reasonable to judge that the court believes that the poem has great merit. The justices' poetry discussion group, meanwhile, has not yet discussed the poem. Failing special circumstances, then, it may not be reasonable to judge that the poetry discussion group believes the poem has great merit. (If it ever does come to discuss the poem, it might come to a different conclusion. That would not necessarily affect the opinion of the court.) In short, one group believes that such-and-such, another doesn't, and the members of both groups are the same. That these members personally believe that such-and-such, if they do, cannot be what determines the beliefs of either group, logically speaking.
2004, 'Collective Epistemology', in Episteme 1: 98
Is there any opportunity to ascribe an attitude regarding its cultural heritage to a group which doesn't amount to being the dominant view among its individual members? It seems reasonably plausible that sometimes, for example, the outcome of a negotiated consensus will differ from that of a majority vote—and that seems to indicate that mistakes about a group's own heritage are possible.
So, are there any grounds for thinking some decision procedures are better suited to the task than others? Although we can talk about more and less cohesive groups here – e.g. the close-knit village community or ecclesiastical hierarchy versus a sprawling nation with complex internal cultural variations and porous borders – none of these examples particularly has a decision procedure concerned with heritage (though we can make allowances for national ministries of culture and so on). Now certainly an organisation essentially concerned with making judgments regarding cultural heritage can exist – the UNESCO World Heritage Committee springs to mind – but it would seem odd if such a body didn't give regard to the testimony of those groups whose particular heritage an item under discussion was supposed to be. (Imagine if some specialist committee laid down its judgment: 'Dear people of England, after careful consideration in our experts' conclave, we have discovered that Stonehenge is not part of your significant cultural heritage after all...') So even in a situation where all the members of X community are also members of the X heritage board, perhaps they will wish to let the outcome of their ex officio deliberations depend at least in part on their lay judgments.
I'm uncomfortable, however, with any sort of 'intuitionism for (one's own) heritage'. Certainly it doesn't seem to fit with notions of 'cultural heritage' standing in objective public relations with people: recalling 'cultural property', it would seem odd if property disputes were decided in the absence of any claimants who could be found, but I suspect that that arises from the importance to justice of giving each side a hearing, rather than from any belief that testimony is anything more than a not altogether reliable form of evidence.
Perhaps instead of expecting judgments about one's own heritage to look like recognition of matters of fact about the world out there, I should look to the territory of 'what it is like' or 'how it feels': perhaps I've been downplaying the ethical significance of affective responses to heritage. The sense of voices from antiquity speaking from the pages of old manuscripts, quiet awe at the traces of generation upon generation in a centuries-old building, and so on—maybe these indicate that our ways of encountering heritage aren't limited to making judgments about its worth in some abstract sense. However, since such attitudes depend on beliefs which certainly can be mistaken – is this artefact genuinely of antiquity, or a modern forgery? – it's still questionable whether they make any epistemic difference.
