thenamelessone

thenamelessone's diary
2022-07-09 23:52:00 (UTC)

July 9

When I meet with family members, sometimes we play board games. I used to play a lot, I know a lot of games, but I only have a few of my own. There’s one that we play the most with family, I like it but it’s fairly simple and I became bored of it. I only have the base game, but there are a lot of expansions for it, so I thought I would buy some of them. But only the base game was released in my language and my father doesn’t know English. So then I thought I’d translate them and print them, because it’s actually a card game. I can do it easily and in good quality because that’s exactly my job. Well not the translating part, but part of my job is editing printables and printing some of them. I actually already did some of the work a few weeks ago. Now that my brother and his family is staying with us, I thought I finish it and we can play.

So in the morning I went to my workplace. The translation was fun, I enjoyed it. Translating for a board game turned out to have unique challenges. Sometimes a straight translation would have been ambiguous in my language, so I had to use different wording. I have a lot of experience teaching games to new players so I have some ideas what wording tends to cause confusion. But I had to pay attention that the card still does the same thing in every imaginable scenario. Also, some game terms didn’t sound right if I just used the usual translation, I had to change them, it was not easy coming up with the right term.

To put the new text on the cards, I needed high quality images of the cards without the text. I managed to find high quality assets for the cards, I had to assemble the cards from these, then put on the translated texts. I do similar things daily as my job, and usually I don’t really enjoy doing it, but now I did. The difference is that now I had a completed design that I had to replicate as closely as I could, it is rare that I get to do this, but I like it. Then I printed the cards. Other times my job ends here, any additional work gets done by someone else. But this time I wanted to do everything myself, since I was making the cards for myself, and it would give some feeling of accomplishment and pride. So I cut them up myself from the A3 sheets of paper it was printed on. We have a large industrial cutting machine, it is very old, so it’s not that complex, I used it a few times before. But I don’t have much experience with it, so it wasn’t trivial, and I had to be very careful not to lose a finger to it. In the end it turned out perfect, I’m very satisfied with it.

By the time I finished it was the afternoon, and unfortunately my brother and his family had already went home. Originally they planned to stay till tomorrow, but they had to leave early. So we didn’t get to play the new game, but it’s not a problem, we’ll play some other time.

So when I got home, I decided to go take some photos. It’s been a while since I did that, I haven’t taken any photos since I started writing this diary. There’s a lake near my town, that used to be popular among local people during my childhood, but ever since, they maintained it less and less, so less people go there now. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, there’s no crowd, and there’s more birds. So in the last few years I went there quite a few times to photograph birds, the nature and even to make portraits of girls. A few weeks ago I went there to take photos of birds. I recently changed my camera, it was the first time using my new telephoto lens, I wanted to test it. The lake was in a sorry state, in recent years it had less and less water in it, and now it was the least water I’ve ever seen there. But it was expected, there’s a pretty bad drought in my area right now. Despite this, I was happy to discover that there was a lot of birds there, even new ones, I’ve never seen there before. However I was not satisfied with my new lens. I used the camera a lot before, and I’m very happy with it, so I knew it was the lens. I didn’t take any pictures that I liked. A few days later I tested the lens at home, and I figured out what the problem was, it was just a configuration error on my part, and now it takes amazing pictures. I’m not a very experienced photographer, so these things happen. So I decided to go back to the lake someday soon, and take better photos of those new birds. But then I started this diary, and I was busy with other things. A few weeks passed, and a few days ago the lake was in the local and even the national news, because it completely dried out. I was very saddened by the news, and I knew that I was late, those birds probably also went away.

Despite this, I decided to go there today. Even if there are no birds, the empty lake bed would be interesting. Apparently other people thought this also, because there was an unusual number of them, walking in the dried up lake bed and taking photos. It was a very sad sight. I went to a farther, empty part and took some photos there. I don’t really like them, I don’t think I will share them anywhere. While I was there, I had some ideas for future photo sessions there, so maybe I will go back. Thinking about those ideas put me in a good mood. It’s a bad thing that the lake dried up, but every change brings new opportunities, so I was in a good mood while I was there, because I was thinking about these opportunities with anticipation and excitement. However, now when I’m writing this, it makes me very sad thinking abut the lake, I’m even welling up. I loved going there sometimes, taking photos of birds, trees, flowers, insects, the landscape. I even saw deer one time. Every time I discovered something new. I can still go there, but it will be different, and I suspect the wildlife will be less diverse. I also doubt the water will ever come back, the climate here just keeps getting drier in the long run.




Ad: