#ryan bloom

I usually have one, max two, OC for each game. But well, in the Wayhaven Chronicles, I totally need one for each path.

I have already played Book 2, like 6 times to see different paths and I regret nothing! Oh wait... I regret invite Bobby to my flat, and didn't have options to punch him. 

It is with bloodshot eyes I submit to you my Game of the Year 2013 video. A month (almost to the day) of production went in to this, so it'd be really nice if you watched all the way to the end (and maybe reblog or whatever). I'd hate to work myself to a bloody stump only to not be appreciated for the effort. I've said it a few times over the last month, but I better understand why GiantBomb sort of abandoned formally produced "shows", because this stuff is legit hard work.

You'll have to click through to the video itself for the show notes, if you're interested in that sort of stuff.

If you have feedback on the video, I'd be greatly interested. Do I sound okay? Did my jokes land? Did I fall flat on my face? How can I improve? I want to make videos you want to watch, and I can't do that unless you tell me what I'm doing wrong.

And now, stat porn!

Script

3680 words

21047 letters

185 sentences

44 paragraphs

7 pages long (single space, 12pt font)

Data

262 video files (119gb, XVID compressed)

394 image files (190mb)

373 audio files (1.4gb)

Media

Dialog: 57 minutes recorded (20 minutes used)

Video: 4 hours, 53 minutes recorded

Music: 104 songs totaling 4 hours and 25 minutes (14 songs used, 44 minutes total)

Art: 15 hand-drawn pictures, scanned and digitally colored

Project

"GOTY2013" folder created December 26th, 2013 at 6:13pm

149 audio/video layers

720 pieces of project media

Size of "goty2013-jan2014-8-HD.veg": 1.11mb

Total Video Runtime: 23 minutes, 26 seconds

Resolution: 1280x720

Framerate: 30fps

Video Codec: X264 @ 5530kbps

Audio Codec: Uncompressed ADPCM WAV @ 44.1khz

Time to render in 720p: 2 hours, 24 minutes (estimated: 4 hours, 15min)

Final File Size: 927mb

Oh man, I just discovered this wonderful, albeit concise, piece on favorite first lines.  Guy Dammann wrote it for The Guardian in 2007, and Ryan Bloom referenced it in his New Yorker piece on the often mistranslated first line of Camus's The Stranger. The sentence he cited caught my eye:

Some openers are so prescient that they seem to burn a hole through the rest of the book, the semantic resonance recurring with the persistence of the first theme in Beethoven's fifth symphony.

Here's an excerpt from this article in The New Yorker by Ryan Bloom:

What if the opening line had read, “Mommy died today”? How would we have seen Meursault then? Likely, our first impression would have been of a child speaking. Rather than being put off, we would have felt pity or sympathy. But this, too, would have presented an inaccurate view of Meursault. The truth is that neither of these translations—“Mother” or “Mommy”—ring true to the original. The French word maman hangs somewhere between the two extremes: it’s neither the cold and distant “mother” nor the overly childlike “mommy.” In English, “mom” might seem the closest fit for Camus’s sentence, but there’s still something off-putting and abrupt about the single-syllable word; the two-syllable maman has a touch of softness and warmth that is lost with “mom.”

So how is the English-language translator to avoid unnecessarily influencing the reader? It seems that Matthew Ward, the novel’s most recent translator, did the only logical thing: nothing. He left Camus’s word untouched, rendering the famous first line, “Maman died today.”