Campaign RetrospectivePart 1: Personal Barriers

I did mention that I was helping out with the Obama campaign just recently. Well, I'll share with you... I guess it's not exactly a secret, but one would think I wouldn't want it shared widely.

I really wasn't very good at campaigning.

That isn't to say that I wasn't helping out that much. In the role I eventually found myself in, I was doing a great deal of work! Then again, the role I found myself in was to be in charge of data entry for a specific (fairly small) area. It was an important job, there's no doubt about that, and it meant that I had to be an effective manager as well, unless I wanted to be doing all of the data entry myself.

I wouldn't call it "campaigning" though. Not in the sense of going out and talking to people about how they're voting, or whether they'd be willing to volunteer for the campaign. I did small amounts of the latter, with people who had already expressed an interest with data entry, getting them connected to the team I was building and ensuring that they were trained in the system we used. There's quite the difference between that and calling people who have perhaps expressed an unspecified interest in maybe volunteering sometime in the future. The days I tried the latter, earlier in the campaign...? Let's just say they were not pleasant ones.

Admittedly, talking to people about how they're voting went a little better. It helped that the area where I was working was heavily Democratic to begin with; there was very little of trying to convince people to vote for Obama and a lot more of making sure that people already predisposed towards voting for Obama actually got out and voted. As far as I'm concerned, the latter is a lot easier than the former. Either way, though, while it wasn't as wildly uncomfortable as asking people to volunteer, it had all too many unpleasant moments as well.

I think part of this has to do with my personality. I'm a lot more comfortable supporting from the rear line, so to speak. I'd rather work to enable everyone else to do their jobs more effectively. Certainly I'd take that over chipping away at a job which I'm simply not as good at. Which is how it ended up working in the end; my focusing on getting data entered left everyone else with more time to handle the rest of the things that needed doing. (I think, anyway!)

The other part of it, though, is the way in which the campaign conducted these operations. This is something which I'm a little more reluctant to talk about, in part because I'm not sure if I'm allowed to. The kinds of information connected to the campaign that were not to be shared honestly surprised me a little. Whether it should be proprietary or not, well, that's a matter for an entirely separate post. For what it's worth, there were good reasons for all of those decisions, to the best of my ability to tell at least. (And lest anyone think "the election's over, it doesn't matter anymore", I have no doubt that there are people already preparing for 2014 and 2016.) It is possible that I'm being overly cautious in this respect, but I'd rather err on the side of caution.

Re-framing it as a matter of my personality, though, I will say that I find it very hard to ignore it and keep going once someone's told me "no". There are a lot of reasons for that which I think probably should be much more widely held, in all honesty. The most basic way to put it, though, is this: that a person who says "no" is establishing a boundary, one that the rest of us are obligated to respect, not tear down or ignore.

Obviously someone's personality will play a part in determining at what they are and are not effective at doing. Just as there are times when it's a good thing to step outside of your comfort zone and try something new. In the end, though, I think the line I just laid out is an absolute one, not to be crossed under any circumstances, as far as my personality is concerned. And I don't regret the effect that had on my role within the campaign. Indeed, in some respects I'm more disappointed that I would be asked to cross that line in the first place.

A Little Housekeeping

So... yeah.

I got just a teensy bit caught up in the recently-concluded political campaign here in the United States. As in, full-time volunteering kind of caught up. Oh, and when I say "full-time", that actually worked out to be ten-hour days more often than I might have liked!

Not that I have any regrets. As it happens, I don't regret it at all. Not one bit. In some small respect, the work that I did with the Obama campaign probably helped contribute to his successfully winning Virginia for the second time in two presidential elections. Which, even if Ohio was the state that "decided" the election, was certainly part of the dominant electoral victory that ended the presidential race (very) early on the morning of the 7th, rather than weeks later after all the recounts were in. I'll take that.

Anyway, posting's been nonexistent because of the amount of time that's been demanding from me. Hopefully that will change now that the campaign is over... but then again, it's National Novel Writing Month, which is also one hell of a time sink. *sigh* Well, at least I won't be short of things to talk about. And I'll probably try to look back on the campaign in more detail, too, although given my track record on that kind of promise, I wouldn't blame anyone for not believing that that will ever happen.

About the only other thing I'm changing is the sidebar, where I'm cleaning up the list of tags a little to make that easier to navigate and adding a list of blogs that I read. I can't control the content on any site other than my own, of course... and at any rate I need to work a little harder on adding content notes to my own blog, much less keeping an eye on anyone else's.

Well, that's about it for the moment. As always, thanks for reading my blog.

Internet Society

I am, perhaps, one of the few people of my generation to have never touched Reddit. And I do mean never. I've found my way there from the occasional link, but only in the context of another story, and I've not spent any time looking around Reddit, itself. Nor do I have an account there. So perhaps I'm not the best person to be commenting on this story, seeing how the vast majority of it took place on Reddit.

But, it is a story about someone's online identity. Or rather, it's a story connecting someone's online identity to someone's offline identity, attaching a real name and face to what was formerly nothing more than a line of text, a pseudonym. And given what this particular online persona (Reddit's Violentacrez) has been responsible for, there can be very little doubt that this particular revelation is intended in large part for its value as intimidation or punishment. That's what's known as "doxing" (a word I had not known until I read that article), and to Internet society, it is a severe crime.

It's not something I, personally, have worried too much about. By and large, I go by two pseudonyms on the Internet - older accounts as Counterpower, newer ones as Zankou. I don't go to any great lengths to hide connections between those names and my real one, or between those names and my appearance; if Gawker wanted to do an expose of me (highly unlikely at best!) the necessary research would probably take about ten minutes. I haven't (yet?) openly revealed my real name here on this blog, but that's really the only concession I've ever made to "hiding" my real identity.

By and large, that's because of one simple reason. It's because I try to conduct myself, in any public space, in a way that I would not be ashamed of, were it to become widely known. As far as my online persona is concerned, that mostly means this blog - when I post here, I think about what I'm posting, and why. More than that, I think about how it will be understood, how those whose opinions I respect would react to what I write. And whether or not I would like those reactions.

That doesn't mean I haven't made my mistakes. We all have. That's what apologies and changes in the way I act are for.

Nor does it mean that I don't do things that some people might find questionable. I don't talk about them online. Or, you know, at all. Mostly I examine myself (internally) and what I'm doing, comparing my actions to my principles and determining whether or not they're in conflict. Sometimes they are, at which point I've determined that I've made a mistake in the way that I act... and then, well, see above. (Or, more rarely, that I've made a mistake in formulating or holding a given principle.) Sometimes, I decide that they aren't, despite the disapproval of those whose opinions I would otherwise respect.

But you know... if the day ever comes when I am called to account in public, I'm not going to complain about how I should be allowed to carry on without censure. That isn't how society as a whole works. I am accountable to the people around me for the way I act, and as long as their responses are in and of themselves legal, they may react as they desire.

Apparently the rules change on the Internet. As the Daily Dot puts it, "At Web communities like Reddit, which thrive because users are free to say and do anything they want, doxing is a severe crime, both to users and the site’s staff." (Emphasis mine.)

I don't agree. As it happens, I think Reddit can thrive perfectly fine without its jailbait subreddits. I don't think that the freedom to do anything you want is an integral part of Internet society. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say this: if Reddit in specific or Internet society in general does actually rely on its users' ability to say whatever they want without being called to account for it, it should not exist.

The Power of a Story

I'm often met with skepticism when I start talking about the kind of world that I'd like to build.

And you know, going over those goals myself, I can agree it's one hell of a daunting list. As a progressive, as a feminist, I've set my sights on no less than changing the culture in which we live. Perhaps it would be better to say that I want to create entirely new cultural expectations and norms. Well, yeah, not exactly "entirely new", but there are days when it seems like even suggesting that women should not be generally treated as eye candy in the media is a radical proposal. (To take one example.)

But then there are also the days when I feel... well, confident. I won't go on overmuch about what particularly sparked my latest round of that confidence, for a number of reasons. I'll just put it this way: I'm feeling like I have the power of a good story on my side of this one.

It seems impossible to believe, even to me. Wasn't I the one that was just complaining about the way women are portrayed in the media? (Yeah, that was definitely me.) And yet, I see the same messages that I believe in, repeated from the characters and stories that I enjoy. In the mentor explaining that those who commit an action are the ones responsible for it, not the people that they commit that action upon. (Numair, from Tamora Pierce's Wild Magic. If anyone was curious.) In the song that defiantly howls, "even if it's an impossible future, we'll set it in motion." (Nana Mizuki's Young Alive!, originally in Japanese.)

Surely some of this is confirmation bias. I ignore (or at least, fail to remember clearly) the stories that don't align with my world view. And there are certainly no small number of those - my earlier critique remains a problem area, even today, even with some of the stories that I like!

And yet, there's one last point to be made: we're the ones that acknowledge the power of these stories in the first place. How many times have I been rebuked with "Lighten up, it's just a story" or some variant thereof...? Dismissing the power of a story to affect the way we think, the way we act, is all but willful blindness to the way people react to the world around them. Acknowledging that power is the only way I'm ever going to succeed in changing the culture in which we live.

Democratic National Convention 2012

One of the things that President Obama does very well, and has always done very well, is to remind me (and everyone else) that the Republican Party does not have a monopoly on soaring rhetoric and claims to moral purpose. Perhaps it was the song they started playing after the speech that sums it up best? "Wherever this flag's flown, we take care of our own."

We take care of our own. Listening to the President speak, listening to all of the different speeches at the DNC these last few days, I am reminded of why I support this party in the first place. I am a liberal, a progressive, a Democrat, because I believe that government can be part of the solutions to our problems. Because I believe that some of the problems we face are best addressed at the federal level, that government is the best solution for issues of health care and can do a great deal of good for the economic situation.

And on these issues and more, President Obama's speech reminded me of why I'm not only going to vote for him in December but also why I'm now putting in my time and effort to volunteer, to ensure that he is re-elected. I can't say whether or not I would have written this last night, immediately after the speech... but it became a moot point, since I was tasked with running the computers and projectors displaying the speech at a watch party in Alexandria. Kept me more than busy enough to ensure I didn't get home until very late. (Doesn't help that I live an hour away from Alexandria...)

I could recap the main points - highlight the idea that a plan that forces seniors to continue to deal with insurance companies is a travesty, point out the need to improve and modernize our infrastructure and education, emphasize the importance of continuing to support veterans. I could even go over the things I didn't like about the speech; listening to it, I was struck (again) by the idea that I'm honestly to the left of the President on a surprising number of things. But in all honesty, that's what watching the speech is for. I can't possibly do better than his own words. (Although if people want to have that discussion, have at it in the comments.)

So all I truly have to offer is the feelings that the President evoked. The idea that "we take care of our own", as the song puts it. Or, to quote a song even closer to my heart (well, quote my translation of it, anyway), "those who chase their dreams will shine."

More than anything else, I am going to be voting for President Obama in November because I believe that his is that path. That he is the President under which we will take care of our own. That he is the President under which we will be able to chase our dreams... and not just chase them, but reasonably expect to reach them, with the support from the people and from the government that is part and parcel of living in a place like the United States of America.

Chained Girl Lyrics Translation鎖の少女歌詞英訳

The notes for this translation are here. Please direct any comments about this translation to that page's comment field.

翻訳のノートはこちらです。コメントしたい場合にはそちらにコメントしてください。

Chained Girl
鎖の少女

Lyrics/Composition/Arrangement: Noboru ↑
作詞・作曲・編曲：のぼる↑

Vocal: Miku Hatsune
歌：初音ミク

Chorus: Luka Megurine, Gumi
コーラス：巡音ルカ・GUMI

Lyrics:

もう何もかも嫌になる前に
ホントノ愛ヲクダサ…

Before I come to hate everything,
give me your honest love...

今日は少し下がった　破り捨てたい評価(テスト)
期待を超えられず　傷が増えてく

I back off slightly today, a test I want to toss aside,
unable to surpass your expectations, my wounds multiply.

振り向けば捨ててきた　友達とか夢とか
自由を奪われて生きるどうして…？

Behind me, the discarded friends and dreams,
my freedom stolen away, why do I live...?

ココロを鎖で縛られた　あやつり人形
わたしはアナタの装飾品(ジュエル)
もっと輝ケリクルケリクルケ

My heart bound with chains, a doll under your control.
I am your jewel,
here to shine more brightly...

誰ノ偽ニ生きているのでしょうか
”ジブン”と言えないままで
もう何もかも嫌になる前に
ホントノ愛ヲクダサイ

For whose sake am I living,
still unable to say "myself"?
Before I come to hate everything,
give me your honest love...

希望とか指先で　砂に書いても消える
笑顔の子供たち　遠くに見えた

Even if I write "hope" in the sand with my finger, it vanishes...
I watch the smiling children from afar.

歩むべき人生(みち)を決められた　束縛人形
アナタはわたしの操り師(あくま)
ずっと見えない鎖(いと)で動かすの

With the path I am to walk already decided, I am a bound doll.
You are my devil,
setting me in motion with your invisible threads...

こんな作られた物語ならば
全てを塗りつぶしたい
夜中に抜け出すことみたいに
逆らう勇気が欲しい

If this entire story is created for me,
I want to repaint it all.
As if to break out of this dark night,
I want the courage to defy you.

街行く人の影追いかけ　留まるカケラ一人
このカラダ　意思の無いままに生きてきた

Chasing the shadow of those out in town, restrained to this fragment of a person,
this body lived on without a will of its own...

嘘だらけの言葉で　惑わすのはもうやめて
あなたの言いなりなんか　もうやめる
わたしのこのココロは　お金じゃきっと買えない
世界で一つだけの…大切なモノ

Don't deceive me anymore, with your words filled with lies.
Don't make me do everything you say anymore.
This heart of mine surely can't be bought with money,
it is the one and only precious thing in this world...

誰のために生きているのでしょうか
コタエは目の前にある
わたしの未来を奪うなんて
そんなの許さないから

For whose sake am I living...?
The answer is before my eyes.
To steal away my future,
that is something I will not forgive.

もう何もかも嫌になる前に

Before I come to hate everything,

鎖の鍵を解いて

release these chains...

Translation notes: Chained Girl

There are a number of Vocaloids songs for Miku that have similar titles, something followed by "shoujo". The first of those was Giant Girl (巨大少女, "kyodai shoujo"), which I found in the second Project Diva game, and then eventually I tracked down Deep-Sea Girl (深海少女, "shinkai shoujo"). Now I've found Chained Girl. (The title structure is slightly different - "kusari no shoujo" - but I feel comfortable grouping these songs together anyway.)

I translated this song for one simple reason: I listened to it, read the lyrics out of the CD booklet as I listened to it a second time, and realized I had a powerful song on my hands. All three of the songs I mentioned did that to me, really. Giant Girl is a song about wanting to be noticed. Deep-Sea Girl is an allegory for depression. Chained Girl is a song about feeling imprisoned by the expectations of others.

Neither was it a song that was particularly difficult to translate. I do still need work on the vocabulary I have memorized, since it's not really practical to pull out a dictionary in the middle of a conversation. But that wasn't a concern in this case. And in between my ability to listen to the song and the kanji I can read out of the CD booklet, getting the lyrics wasn't a challenge either.

The one interesting point that I'd like to highlight this time around, from a technical perspective, is the ways furigana (the characters used as a pronunciation guide, printed above certain kanji) are used in situations like this one. In the first two instances, they're simply "converting" the reading from Japanese into English; the word "hyouka" can be translated as "test" (or perhaps more accurately "assessment"), while "soushokuhin" can mean "jewel" (again, more accurately "ornament" or "decoration"). So those aren't a challenge to translate, particularly.

Later, though, there are three more in quick succession that are a little more complicated. In those instances, the kanji in question are being "pronounced" as entirely different words. It leaves open the question: do you translate the word printed in the book or the word actually sung in the lyrics? Which is closer to the meaning you're trying to capture? Is there a way to account for both intended meanings in the translation?

In this case, I translated all three as the lyrics that were sung, and I'd like to think it works out so that all of the original meaning remains. The first is the reading of "jinsei", "life", as "michi", "road" or "path". Honestly, though, that's not difficult either; it makes perfect sense in English just as well, in the sense of "the path we take in life" or something like that. Calling it "the path I am to walk" says effectively the same thing as "the life I am to live", and I think the former captures the poetic manner of communicating that thought more effectively.

Second, we have "ayatsuri-shi", which would be a person who controls a puppet, read as "akuma", a demon or devil. In this case, I felt that the element of being controlled was adequately represented in the following line, and that the song would not suffer greatly from me focusing on the "devil" aspect of the translation. There are ways to account for both by extending that line in the translation, but I felt that none were wildly effective, and I did want that line to parrot the similar line from earlier in the song.

Finally, "kusari", the focus of this song ("chain" in case it wasn't obvious) read as "ito", "thread". In that sense it's just a matter of picking one of those two words to put in there - is the singer being controlled by chains or threads? Again, with chains being prominent elsewhere in the song, and with thread making more sense as a method of puppet control (especially an invisible one), I felt the song didn't lose anything major by translating as "threads".

I probably could go on, but I think I'll settle for talking about that one issue and opening up the floor to comments, questions, complaints, what have you. Let me know what you all think.