- Luigi holding green shell
- Maleficent w/ Optimus Prime
- inflatable riding chicken
- inflatable riding pteranodon
- classic Link + BotW blue outfit Link (but w/ green hat)
- five witches w/ roving candy wagon. It was playing "Billie Jean" on a return trip and "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You" the next
- Luffy enthusiastically carrying Straw Hat Pirates flag + Usopp w/ that sun mask he wears; later on, they had some unbranded pirates with them
- pumpkin sweatshirt + pumpkin sweatshirt w/ hat and stroller + Red Riding Hood
- a handmaid from The Handmaid's Tale? That's dark. This was a kid
- friendly Dracula beanbag
- a cowboy. Not notable usually, but this is in Maine, not notably cowboy country
- inflatable Spongebob
- inflatable unicorn
- woman in fluorescent lime green fuzzy bear stole draped over her head + Kirby tee?
- '60s hippie with excellent flower power color + mod hat
- lite-up transparent umbrella w/ streamers that was unclear at first but turned out upon later inspection to be a jellyfish, since they forgot their googly eyes. The accompanying child had a sea blue towel wrapped over them, no explanation
- child in disturbingly realistic Donatello mask with protruding middle-aged jawline
- hunter, male
- baby skunk (being carried)
- family of bears. Watch out for the hunter
- a bunch of female boxers in matching pink satin robes. Is this a reference to something? Unclear
- Winifred Sanderson mom + sea turtle dad + baby pineapple
- girl in yellow raincoat w/ short bright blue hair? I feel I've seen this design before but can't recall what it is. Joy from Inside Out? This was a longer bob, though. It looked like Coraline, but I don't think she's one for primary colors
- a sea creature-themed costume with seaweed-color hair and iridescent blue tentacles at the bottom. She wasn't a sea creature per se but the costume looked good
- inflatable mummy (off, being dragged)
- mori kei Jedi (in beige sundress w/ sunhat + mushroom canvas bag) w/ rainbow lightsaber, take that
- a young Sailor Moon
- horse or jackal with flesh stripped from its face
- man in hardhat + jumpsuit with a sign saying "OIL/TEL TRASH"???
- cute little blonde pumpkin
- Grim Reaper w/ fashionable robe in red + black
- Hollow Knight
- Demogorgon
- inflatable sumo wrestler
- pregnant woman in sweatshirt w/ little skeleton on stomach; I thought that was good
- friendly blue baby robot that I thought I recognized but couldn't place and later realized kind of looked like one of PS3's dumb enemies
- two Lokis side by side, which is show canon accurate, I suppose
- tiny Charmander
- two Apes from the famed Planet, or maybe just Professor Bobos, holding out pillowcases for candy
- six of Snow White's seven dwarves, female and color-coded by neon-color stocking hat and tulle skirt
- Mona Lisa & Leonardo + little tree & Bob Ross
- beer, hamburger, pizza, taco, hot dog
- two adults in deely-boppers
- someone in a lime green pantsuit, glasses with thick red frames, and a shoulder-length blonde wig? I think they were mixing up Hillary Clinton with Sally Jesse Raphael
- also, man, referencing Sally Jesse Raphael in 2023
- lineman
- red M&M + defunct brown M&M
- Sans
- gentleman ladybug w/ bowtie
- adult Scooby-Doo standing on hind legs holding a poodle's leash; a Goofy-&-Pluto abomination against humanity
- killer Jawa w/ red light-up eyes, black robe, & machete
- inflatable...man in black? I don't know what this was. The costume had the some dimensions as the inflatable sumo, but it was completely black and featureless. I don't get it
- something I wrote down as "eyeball Michael Reynolds"; it was a ribbed seaweed-color bodysuit in a Michael Reynolds silhouette with a bunch of eyeballs gathered at the base of the stalk at the top of the head. Could have been a monster from a '70s Sid & Marty Krofft show
- hunter, female
- that Michael Meyers costume from the first movie where he wears a sheet with his victim's glasses, combined with a Blues Brother (the glasses were sunglasses, they were wearing a black fedora, and the sheet was shiny silver)
- hunter, late middle-aged male, w/ cat ears
- there were actually a great number of people who came just wearing their hunting camo & orange as a costume. At first I thought it was just a lazy costume but then recalled this hadn't happened at all in previous years; I wonder if there were some sort of weird point being made
- traditional Robin Hood
- great-looking young female pirate w/ tricorner hat, smart skirt, & cutlass
- Napoleon Dynamite? In this day & age? Plus the kid was like 8
- Starfire? Long red hair + magenta superhero outfit says "Starfire" to me, but the hair was Raggedy Ann-red
- Dad Shaggy carrying little Scooby-Doo
- John Deere tractor stroller
- Master Chief, still
- peacock in silk cape with peacock feathers painted on it; this was cool
- someone with a Ghostface purse
- the two puzzle pieces from last year. Of all the costumes to make a reappearance. Come on
- very small Jason; slightly larger Michael w/ bad Chucky-esque hair day
- mummy animatronic being carried by somebody
- someone walking backwards in an autumn-colored knit mask and orange felt shirt
- old-school Luke Skywalker (this was a kid)
- twin Alice in Wonderlands in matching sky-blue dresses
- furry gray spider w/ red legs
- toddler lions in circus cage stroller
- guy in Harley Davidson riding gear with perfunctory tiny pirate hat stuck on his head as a conciliation
- old-school Leia (this was also a kid)
- a Boston Bruin
- overheard: "'It's-a Mario!' It's just fun to say!"
- a quite beautiful traditional flower princess, with a flower crown w/ veil in back and beautiful coordination of pastel colors
- the chrome Ghostface variant; he must have gotten pretty far in the Battle Pass
- mini Olaf the snowman, but in a traditional triple-snowball construction
- two commercially-produced, almost totally-gray bodysuits very lightly printed that most closely resembled that spider-webbed corpse in the gym from the School Scissors case in World of Horror? I very much doubt that's what they were referencing, but the actual decoration on the bodysuits (worn by two different people in two different parties) was so faint that whatever they were referencing was incomprehensible
- inflatable dino skeleton
- I was missing the guy with a giant stick on his back from a couple years ago, but we got bush man: a guy who just stuck chopped-off, dried-up hydrangea branches all over himself. Actually, this may have been the same guy. Unclear.
This seemed, overall, like the Halloween that wasn't. First, Maine was dealing with the situation with the unapprehended mass shooting suspect right up to just before the holiday. I live over an hour away from where the shooting took place, and yet there were a number of businesses - restaurants, lumberyards - that chose to close for a bit, and a number of events that were rescheduled, just to avoid tempting fate and giving the still-at-large suspect more potential targets by allowing large numbers of people to gather. After that situation resolved, such as it did, there was a cold snap, with temperatures below freezing at nighttime. This didn't dissuade Mainers from Halloween entirely - you gotta learn to do stuff in cold & snow if you want to survive in the state - but it did ensure festivities drew to a close earlier in the evening than usual.
On the personal front, my costume (Medusa) was a pain in the neck - endless accessories, a number of things that didn't work, and one crucial accessory (contacts) that didn't come in time, plus a neckline that wouldn't stay put. I also missed the Halloween weekend parade & party at one of the small towns on the coast I usually attend, as they chose to hold it one week earlier this year. I tried attending a block party they had later on Halloween evening, but as I started to explore what I thought, in daylight, was a rather small neighborhood, I found myself coming across landmarks I didn't recognize. I then found myself lost, wandering around in below-freezing temperatures in a thin pleather jacket for two hours. By the time I got back to my car, I had literally lost fine motor control in my fingers from numbness. If not for directions from a middle-school girl who came up to me, complimented my costume, and offered me some of her candy, I would've been frozen dead on the pavement. So, thank you, kind middle-school girl! You saved Halloween, or at least my incompetent Gorgon hide.
Then I fell ill from the meal I had the next day to celebrate being back in a relatively warm environment to which I was properly oriented, so this article was put on the back burner. Here's hoping next year's better.
I recently had the joy of revisiting FGC stalwart Maximilian's blind playthrough of the original The Legend of Zelda - assisted sparsely with a few strategic lifelines from friends when things got desperate. I don't play fighting games and therefore haven't watched much of Maximilian's output, but in these videos, he's very engaging and genuinely curious, doing a great job of reviving that sheer sense of discovery we all felt upon the game's original release. The first five minutes alone of his quest are a delight, particularly if you've already played the game. There's a YouTube compilation in two parts here and here (start at around 13:45 in the first vid if you want those first five minutes as a preview), but I think it's worth watching the unedited streams (Part 1, with gameplay proper starting at 37:46, and Part 2, with gameplay at 1:13:50). It's rewarding to see the problem-solving in real time - as well as the chat reactions, both from those in the know and those encountering this classic for the first time.
Watching Max make his way through Zelda's puzzles brought to mind some stuff I failed to understand when I played the game. And, uh, well beyond. No lifelines to Vermont used here!
- "Master using it and you can have this." I understand now, late in life, that the intent here is: "Get good enough and you can have this sword." As a kid, though, I read the first word not as a verb, but as a noun: "There are two people who can have this sword: a) the Master using it, and b) you." Needless to say, this hint was completely incomprehensible to me, but gifts of cool swords don't need coherent greeting-card text.
- "Secret is in the tree at the dead-end.": I didn't make the connection that the "tree at the dead end" with the "secret" was the burnable tree hiding Level 8. I thought the man was talking about the tree with the "money-making" (uh-huh) game in it. I did find Level 8 on my own, because the location of the tree seemed conspicuously off and a departure from the usual map design.
- "Spectacle Rock is an entrance to death.": I never interpreted "Spectacle Rock" in the sense of glasses (or, more properly, spectacles, plural) but as the place where something big and important happens - you know, like the climactic showdown of the game. Nintendo USA must have known the in-game hint was not on the up-and-up, as the English-language documentation helpfully tells you something to the effect of: "The two large rocks atop Death Mountain are called 'Spectacle Rock.'"
Of course, no one understood "10th enemy has the bomb."
- "Hey, thanks for printing out and signing and scanning back in those NDAs and work agreements and getting them back the same morning! Unfortunately, your scans are missing our decorative black-fax cover, which has no contract text whatsoever! Can you do everything completely over?"
- "I have a three-page document with barely any text that I want translated for half the market rate! Could you send over your CV *and* introduce yourself to me professionally before I consider hiring you to translate next to nothing at half what I should be paying? Be ready to sign an NDA!"
- "Thanks for agreeing to - wow, less than a third of what our company should be paying for this work?! Whoa, are you intoxicated? Anyhow, you passed the test! We think your English could use a little work, though. Here's some actual feedback from our Senior Linguists: '6,12,17, and 19 are put checkpoint incorrectly. 20 needs to be inserted puncuation. 13 and 15 need to be added one more translation.' We hope you strive to reach their level of literacy!"
- Having to do tedious captchas that teach AI to recognize stairs and cars and crosswalks every time I log into Proz, then having to do them over again immediately, because the AI cannot yet recognize stairs or cars or crosswalks and therefore cannot recognize the correct responses. While this is the least of the frustrations here, it is the most frequently-recurring and is symptomatic of this vital website's completely-unnecessary insistence on frustrating any attempt to use it efficiently, even if you are a paying member. (See also: voiding your login if you attempt to open more than one page on the site at a time.)
- "Thanks for taking 2389471234 hours of training courses uncompensated for our company! Oh, wait; we don't actually have any thanks for that. Instead, we're angry that you didn't tailor your test work to a completely different set of guidelines that aren't detailed in that course at all! How could you fail to follow the instructions and guidelines we never gave you? No, that's an actual unironic question somehow! In any case: could you do it completely over again?
Oh, great; thanks for responding to our completely-unreasonable request! We'll get back to you with work!
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That last problem is by far the most prevalent among (nominal) employers in translation: demands for extensive, uncompensated testing, followed by no work whatsoever upon passing. I've been attempting to expand my client base, and in doing so, I've been a bit more tolerant of behaviors I perhaps shouldn't have been. I don't have a problem with brief uncompensated tests, which are de rigeur when collaborating with a new client, or interviews via phone or Skype, or a number of things that are verboten among other translators. I have a problem with putting forth an honest effort in good faith and not seeing that reciprocated, be it through not offering work or not providing the information necessary to fulfill client expectations or not holding your editors to the same standard of fluency that you do your translators.
I've met a number of great people in translation, and I've had a lot of great professional experiences. It seems, though, that the great people are getting scarcer and scarcer lately. Perhaps this is in part a personal perception, colored by recent experiences; I've had a number of people and aspects of my life let me down recently, to the point where I'm having to rebuild everything from scratch. (I've also let a few people down myself in the process; I apologize if you're one of them.) It's gotten to the point, though, where translation just isn't reliable for me anymore.
The easy explanation would be to blame AI, but AI's been in translation for several years, and I've worked with it extensively. A bigger problem is the increasing number of bad actors in the industry, coinciding with the rise of AI in the popular consciousness. I hope it's not a permanent change and this is just a bad spell - one that'll break, if this theory holds, when the new entrants move on to the next hot thing, as they did from NFTs to AI. The translation industry, though, has gotten so unreliable (I keep coming back to that word) that I've been training in another field.
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