bloodyrosemccoy | The Mysterious Language

Dictionary Day (Amelia sez: ironically enough)
National Boss Day
UN World Food Day
Hurricane Thanksgiving Day (Virgin Islands)
World Food Day

We join our hero after a particularly foul Utah swearing session* at her own homework and at the Japanese language in general, which is interesting but which has a writing system that’s impossible to read unless you’ve learned at least 1800 logographs which all have similar radicals, and you can’t guess at how to pronounce them based on looks alone. Our hero finds deciphering these runes fascinating,** but she also has the hardest damn time if she just see a character without any guide to how to pronounce it, because then our hero can’t look it up.

So our hero went on an online quest. A quest to find something that would allow her to easily look up kanji, and kanji compounds, if she didn’t know the Japanese pronunciation or the English translation. Our hero summoned the All-Knowing Google Oracle, but as so often happens with those tricky oracles, the Google requires the right question to provide an answer. But finally, our hero found the correct keywords to help her find what she was looking for—a magical device. Specifically, an electric translator, one of those fancy little gadgets that lets you write in the rune on the screen with a pen, and then it hazards a guess as to what you meant and you can find it a lot quicker.

And then our hero found out exactly how much gold it would take to get one.

Well, thought our hero, screw that. But wait! I already have a magical object—Bhelliom the tablet PC! Perhaps I could unlock Bhelliom’s power to help me decipher the mysterious runes!

And that is where our hero is right now. Looking for the legendary, perhaps nonexistent software that may allow her to read the inscriptions from the Far East. Will she succeed? Probably not, unless she finds a great big treasure chest in the near futuere. But at this point our hero is still on the quest.

We can only hope this doesn’t become a twelve-book saga.

*“Gosh darn dagnabbitall to heck!”

**What’s really cool is that our hero’s synesthesia is starting to seep into it. The symbol for woman, 女, is taking on a bright red with shiny yellow highlights.