Random

Wildfires in Portugal

It seems most of the fires, at least in this region, started on Sunday, but by Monday things were already out of control. I was able to take two pictures during the day and, man, things were wild. I’ve seen the Sahara dust cover the country once or twice, but I’ve never seen the sun this way. This looks like …

Video Games

Under the hood: Pet the Cat

In my quest to better understand Decker and how some things work, I made a simple game called Pet the Cat. Pet the Cat by lokeloski It’s not overly complex in any way, shape, or form, but it’s something I did to test some systems that might be useful in the future. Before I get to that, though, I want …

Localization

How to save money on localization

If the head of a gaming company came to me and asked how to save money on localization instead of automatically going the “IA”/MT/LLM route, I would recommend to: Doing a bit of this prep work might seem expensive at the start, but it would save so much money in the long run while also making everyone’s life less miserable …

Random

European granularity

6 years living in Europe and the only thing I didn’t get used to yet is the granularity of everything. If I drive for 2h, I’m in Spain, and then if I go for more 8h, I’m in France. All fine and good, and different languages aren’t an issue. Services, on the other hand, can vary so much that I …

Localization

To be a good translator, you need to be a good writer

It’s fundamental to grasp your native language at a deeper level than any other so you can effectively communicate what the original text says Video game localization isn’t an easy job, be it due to the nature of the job itself —translating something without seeing the whole picture, because it doesn’t exist yet — or due to the nature of …

Rambling

I guess I don’t hate coding

Messing around with Decker and Twine is making me realize I don’t necessarily hate coding, I hate dealing with tables, arrays, matrices, and things like that. 20 years ago I got into a Computer Engineering major in a local college and, to be honest, it was quite alright. I was a good student and got good grades, but hated coding. I always liked the …

Rambling

Visual creativity

Over the last few months, I’ve started to realize that I’m a very visual person, which is funny for someone who’s nearsighted, has a bit of facial blindness, and probably has aphantasia or something similar. When I started making music as a hobby, years ago, I trialed many different DAWs. Almost all of them have the same capacities, with a …

Rambling

I miss my Mazda 323

It was not a great car. I mean, it’s a Mazda, so it’s pretty good overall, but it was a vehicle from 2003. That’s the last year Mazda made the 323 before switching to the Mazda3. So, great car all around, except for this particular one, which had gone around more than 200,000 kilometers before we bought it. We dipped …