Watashiato
dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com
dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com
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.
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.
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.
Otherwise almost nothing is cause and effect.
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 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 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.
Correct, it's considered derogatory and antiquated: https://meng.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/meng-bill...
(Became U.S. law on 5/20/1996: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/4238)
> 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.)
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.
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.
Either way, basically it's a pun. Not the world's most amazing pun, but it's not gibberish like several commenters have suggested.
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.
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.