[continued from previous message]

NPCs, but what are skins?" [-ecl]

A skin, in an online RPG, is a character's appearance, whether
face, body shape, costume, or some or all of the above.

The game I play, Lord of the Rings Online, has a choice between
two faces per species/gender. I've looked at the choices of
faces available to many of my characters, and I can't for the
life of me tell the difference, but many players vehemently assert
that they can.

Player characters can also go to a barber NPC and change their
hairstile.

Finally, there are lots and lots of clothing choices. A
character can be equipped with the highest-level armor or
clothing they can wear, with more armor value and other buffs;
but they can also wear "cosmetic" armor or clothing that will be
seen by other players. This also works for weaponry.

[Evelyn writes,] "It's got some clever ideas particular to video
games, and even with my inexperience with video games it was
enjoyable enough, if not up to many of the 'this is not the real
world' movies." [-ecl]

I liked it a lot. My daughter warned me that a lot of the
magicalish weaponry would be borrowed from other properties that
Disney has absorbed, and so it was. [-djh]

===================================================================

TOPIC: Bibles (letter of comment by Jim Susky)

In response to the comments on Bibles in the last several issues of
the MT VOID, Jim Susky writes:

Thanks for publishing McGath's, Dormer's, and Kerr-Mudd's responses
re: Bibles

A follow up may be of interest.

Mr. Combs also recommended Kingdom of the Cults that summer (1976),
much of which was interesting to my young self, and which was my
sole reference for a paper I wrote the following spring about the
LDS church (the teacher was a "lapsed-Mormon").

Kingdom seems to be a perennial best-seller which has outlived its
author (Walter Martin). Few years back I got another copy and gave
it to my sister who was then actively recruited by a Jehovah's
Witness. Thus inoculated she steered clear.

To close the loop: I commented to Mr. Combs that the Christian God
seemed not so compassionate--in that He would subject a man to
Eternal Suffering for a seventy-year error--this was greeted by
silence. [-js]

===================================================================

TOPIC: Latin, SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, and SHIVA BABY
(letter of comment by John Hertz)

In correction to Evelyn's typing of John Hertz's comments on Latin
in the 11/05/21 issue of the MT VOID, John writes:

Thanks for printing my pome [sic] about Latin (MT VOID 2196,
11/05/21)--but alas--with two garbles.

I said it was "acrostic, in unrhymed 5-7-5-7-7-syllable lines like
Japanese tanka." You misquoted that as "acrostic, like Japanese
tanka." Tanka are in 5-7-5-7-7-syllable lines*. Only some are
acrostic.

You misquoted my pome as

Later it would fall,
Although its power, beauty,
Took evil no turn.
In its day our minds, our speech,
Nourished, seemed universal.

transposing two words in the third line, making nonsense (and a
nonsentence). The pome is

Later it would fall,
Although its power, beauty,
Took no evil turn.
In its day our minds, our speech,
Nourished, seemed universal.

In response to Evelyn's comments on SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT
in the 12/24/21 issue of the MT VOID, John writes:

More happily, applause for E's comments on Simon Armitage's 2009
rendition of SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: both E's faultfinding
and her praise. Too many folks make "criticism" the same as "look
how bad this is".

I single out E's "This is like comparing William Faulkner and
Ernest Hemingway (or Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges).
Just because two works are in the same language does not make them
equally accessible.", a fine response to Touchstone's "Instance,
briefly; come, instance" (Shakespeare, AS YOU LIKE IT, Act III,
Scene 2).

In response to Mark and Evelyn's review of SHIVA BABY in the
11/12/21 issue of the MT VOID, John writes:

In MT VOID 2197 (11/12/21) when you started reviewing a movie
called SHIVA BABY, I for a moment thought it might be about
Ganesha. At the end of that issue you attribute to Ben Franklin "A
full belly makes a dull brain." I've also seen attributed to him
"Hunger never drove a good bargain." My 14th ed'n BARTLETT'S has
"Necessity never made a good bargain" (p. 421) but not "a full
belly"; it cites "A hungry stomach cannot hear" to La Fontaine (p.
359).

*Actually, in Japanese they're often written as a single line; the
nature of the Japanese language shows the 5-7-5-7-7-syllable
elements (they aren't really syllables either, but this glossing of
glosses begins to resemble GILES GOAT-BOY ([J. Barth, 1966--oh,
dear, I'm doing it again]) [-jh]

===================================================================

TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)

I am currently reading DISCURSO E HISTORIA EN LA OBRA NARRATIVA DE
JORGE LUIS BORGES by Nicholas Emelio Alvarez (Society of Spanish
and Spanish-American Studies, ISBN 0892950927) and naturally this
entails reading FICCIONES and LABYRINTHS by Borges. There is a
lot of overlap between the two collections, but though the same
story may be in both books, they were translated by two different
people. (And both books were published in 1962, which makes them
one of the more peculiar pairs of the publishing world.)

Anyway, the story "Funes the Memorious"/"Funes, His Memory" is in
both of these, and in COLLECTED FICTIONS (with yet a third
translator). And of the three translations, Anthony Kerrigan's
(in FICCIONES) is by far the worst, and makes me suspicious of all
his other translations. ("Death and the Compass" also has three
translations, though none by Kerrigan.)

What first made me suspicious was the phrase "a rectangular
triangle." Was this a reference to some sort of Borgesian
"impossible object", like a Penrose triangle or something? I
decided to double-check this. (Why hadn't I one this before?
Or had I, and had just forgotten?) The Spanish is "un triangulo
rectangulo" (which has a nice rhythm to it in Spanish). It
*seems* like "a rectangular triangle" would be the obvious
translation, but as the maxim goes, "Ropa isn't rope and sopa
isn't soap." The correct translation is "a right triangle."

Then Funes says, "Mi memoria ... es como vaciadero de basuras."
Kerrigan translates the last phrase as "garbage disposal," which
conjures up the image of a machine grinding up Funes's memories
in the sink. James E. Irby and Andrew Hurley both translate it
more accurately as "garbage heap," implying the accumulation of
memories rather than their disposal.

I didn't do a thorough comparison of all three translations with
the original Spanish and each other. But I think I will either
read the Spanish, or a translation other Kerrigan's. [-ecl]

===================================================================

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net


... Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject
in which we never know what we are talking about,
nor whether what we are saying is true.
--Bertrand Russell

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