I used to play this MMORPG game when I was 14 with some school friends on voice chat. But there was one guy I made friends with in-game who I'd quest with when my real-world friends weren't online.
One day when I was playing with him I invited him on our voice chat and he started playing me some songs and asking what I thought. I never really listened to music back then, but some of the rock songs he played me really resonated with me so I downloaded them and would listen to them when I was gaming.
I think that might have been the only time I ever spoke to this guy with voice, but when I think about the songs he played me that night it's crazy how massive of an impact they had on the direction of my life.
After liking some of the songs he played me I started listening to more and more rock music. And back then teens were quite segmented by music taste so I found myself gravitating towards different friends who were more into my music taste. To this day I think this change of friends has had a noticeable affect on my personality and fashion sense. Also those friends were more "academic(?)" than my existing friends so that probably resulted me in studying computer science which resulted in a whole host of career opportunities that otherwise wouldn't have occured.
But there are some more subtle ways in which I think it altered the direction of my life. For example, when I was at university I used to like going to rock clubs and it was at one of those clubs I met my current partner. And then when I think about all the things I've done with her it's crazy just to think about how massive of an impact simply being at that club on that night had by itself.
It's funny though because I doubt he even remembers me, but I think about him a lot. And in turn it makes me wonder how I might have impacted people I don't even remember both for better and worse.
I'm sure everyone has a story like this, but I've always thought it was interesting how a moment seemingly so unremarkable with a guy across the Atlantic ocean had such a dramatic impact on my life.
To be clear I was a cringey teen lol, I don't listen to this stuff anymore...
But the song I liked was "Move Along" by the The All American Rejects. I think he also played some songs by Linkin Park too, but I remember Move Along because that was the song that got me into that genre of music. Then from there I started listening to Indie music which was more of a thing here in the UK in the late noughties - The Killers, Arctic Monkeys, etc. That later progressed into stuff like The Smiths and Joy Division, and to this day I listen to a lot of music which derives from the late 80s indie scene.
I guess you could argue I'd have found the same music another way because these were fairly common bands at the time. But I still think it's interesting that I can trace so many things in my life today back to that specific moment in time.
The game was Conquer Online. It's not great anymore but around 2006ish it was a pretty decent free MMORPG.
No offense intended, but it's worth noting these are all examples of coincidence, not cause and effect.
The same music and personalities would not have resonated with someone else, many people dislike computer science and switch majors, other people didn't match your partner as well, etc.
These life events were driven by you, not your environment. It's likely that in a different environment you would have found the same things, or moved somewhere else until you did. The heart wants what it wants.
Coincidence can still have conditions. Independent choices can still agree without implying causality. If you like someone and they like you back, that's a coincidence.
For many years I've been trying to find a word for the sorrow one feels when on reaching for a cup, we realise we finished our tea/coffee some time ago and the cup is indeed now empty. @dictionaryofobscuresorrows please help me.
This initially confused me. I assumed the dictionary of obscure sorrows was a list of existing words for obscure sorrows, but I know watashi ato means “I” “after” literally in Japanese so it didn’t sound like a real word. The words in the blog are actually invented to describe obscure sorrows.
watashi can be 渡し rather than 私, which means "to pass"
I can't find a dictionary definition for 渡し跡, but you can find a few blog articles talking about old places that use this word. I think it might be an older Japanese word.
https://shinsengumi-kanko.com/nagareyama-noda/yakkarawatashi...
Neither can I; there's no "わたしあと" in Jisho or d.goo. Just searching the net returns this page: https://www.kankou-gifu.jp/spot/detail_6769.html where it's written as 渡し跡, which would translate to something closer to "the ruins of a crossing" and seems to be used literally for a marker designating the former location of a river crossing ferry.
Maybe this isn't Japanese, or maybe it was made up by a non-Japanese speaker who searched for the words "me" and "after" in an E-to-J dictionary and then mashed them together. I'm leaning towards the latter.
I believe they all come from the single book, Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, referenced in the blog. All the terms in there are new words! (The breakdown you have is what I would've guessed too, though.)
watashiato n. curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.
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I don't do enough to express gratitude for the small kindnesses, the offhand insights,and the casual favors that opened doors and changed my perspective on possibilities in meaningful ways. I need to recommit to expressing appropriate gratitude. My resolution for Thanksgiving.
I've experienced this. I overthink things, and one day I was wondering if I ever altered the path of someone's life significantly due to my words / actions. I don't really mind if I didn't, but it would be nice to know.
I've often said something profound that shattered someone's illusions about a subject, but whether they're more enriched as a person because of that is hard to say.
I don't know Japanese, but it's quite similar to Watanagashi in spelling, sound, and theme. Watanagashi is a festival in the anime series Higurashi: When They Cry - kind of the ultimate murder mystery spread across 4 seasons.
The book covers many invented words, based on many languages. Modern English is full of loan words, or anglicised words from a foreign root. Why do you get upset when the word is invented from Japanese? I didn't think words deriving fom "oriental" like "orientalist" were in vogue.
Because in japanese the new word makes no sense. If you’re borrowing or creating new words, it would be nice if they would somewhat sensible and not just be the typical “wow japanese is so mystic language”.
There's no reason to believe this is just another case of "wow Japanese is so mystic". Lately, I'm seeing more and more people with a sort of imagined or conjured offense that someone is unduly appreciating a culture. I don't really get it.
It seems roughly analogous to wasei-eigo[1], Japanese terms derived from English words that may not match up with how you'd typically form words or use them in English. Examples include cosplay, from cos(tume) play, and pasokon (PC), from perso(nal) com(puter).
> In art history, literature and cultural studies, Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects in the Eastern world.
GGP is not using a slur, they're suggesting that this is an inappropriate use of Japanese culture as an aesthetic by a Western writer. Reducing a culture to an aesthetic is harmful because it essentializes and stereotypes a culture and those in it.
(I don't know if I agree about this particular example or not, I'm still pondering; only explaining.)
I think the reaction is stronger when borrowing the foreign bits just feel like "cheating".
If they were borrowing words with meanings that are specific to that language are hard to convey in other languages it would make more sense. Here the new word is basically "me-leftover"; it feels exactly the same in Japanese than when spelled out in English, so either the author could accept the cheesiness in English and run with it, or choose a better fitting word in a different language that actually brings nuance to the thought.
Just borrowing another word to make it look mystical isn't wrong or forbidden, it just feels lazy and a waste of good words. Also we're in a connected world, and there's enough people speaking multiple language that "exotic" words have a way lower chance to be actually exotic anymore.
Sure, the word here is presumably meant to be a portmanteau of "watashi" (私 I, me) plus "ashiato" (足跡 footprint). The ~ato suffix refers to the remains or evidence of something no longer present (e.g. the site where a castle used to be), so the word could also be read as "watashi" (me) + "ato" (evidence left behind).
Either way, basically it's a pun. Not the world's most amazing pun, but it's not gibberish like several commenters have suggested.
I don't think anybody's called it out and out gibberish, just awkward and unnatural because The reading watashi for 私 is rarely if ever used in compounds.
If I was asked to invent the word I'd read the same characters as shiseki (私跡), or go with something like 自跡 jiseki "self-tracks". Although even that sounds more like "ruin of self" than what the author is trying to convey.
Hmm, I don't agree at all on the reading - for an ad-hoc coinage, ～跡 is realistically always going to be ~ato. Like if you jokingly referred to a paw print as 犬跡, saying inuato would be clear to any listener, and saying kenseki definitely wouldn't.
But more to the point, the person I originally replied suggested that the coinage in TFA just used Japanese to sound exotic, so that's what I was replying to. It may or not be great wordplay, but it's certainly Japanese wordplay.
One day when I was playing with him I invited him on our voice chat and he started playing me some songs and asking what I thought. I never really listened to music back then, but some of the rock songs he played me really resonated with me so I downloaded them and would listen to them when I was gaming.
I think that might have been the only time I ever spoke to this guy with voice, but when I think about the songs he played me that night it's crazy how massive of an impact they had on the direction of my life.
After liking some of the songs he played me I started listening to more and more rock music. And back then teens were quite segmented by music taste so I found myself gravitating towards different friends who were more into my music taste. To this day I think this change of friends has had a noticeable affect on my personality and fashion sense. Also those friends were more "academic(?)" than my existing friends so that probably resulted me in studying computer science which resulted in a whole host of career opportunities that otherwise wouldn't have occured.
But there are some more subtle ways in which I think it altered the direction of my life. For example, when I was at university I used to like going to rock clubs and it was at one of those clubs I met my current partner. And then when I think about all the things I've done with her it's crazy just to think about how massive of an impact simply being at that club on that night had by itself.
It's funny though because I doubt he even remembers me, but I think about him a lot. And in turn it makes me wonder how I might have impacted people I don't even remember both for better and worse.
I'm sure everyone has a story like this, but I've always thought it was interesting how a moment seemingly so unremarkable with a guy across the Atlantic ocean had such a dramatic impact on my life.