From the first time I played Super Mario Bros., I’ve always loved platform games. Unfortunately, the genre has been pretty dead ever since Gex. Fez, from Montreal-based start-up Kokoromi, looks ready to change that. The game is so creative that words just don’t do it justice.
Related: Lead designer, Phil Fish gives an interview on Fez.
One peculiarity about Chinese ESL learners is that they usually want “English” names. Back when I was learning French, I didn’t take to calling myself Jean-marc; when I was learning Japanese, I didn’t call myself Taka. I just used my English name phoneticized into Katakana. I saw no need to change my name to learn a new language. Maybe I’d change the pronunciation, but no more. Most of my foreign friends from back when I was in the states were the same. Try telling my Japanese buddy Tomohiro that he should adopt an English name, like Tom and he’ll tell you he’s Japanese and that Tomo’s his name. The same went for my other friends, Yoshi, Naoki, Tadashi, Tomohiko, and even the notoriously unpronounceable Ryuta.
Chinese people aren’t like that. To suggest to a mother that she just allow her child to be called 專文 (zhuān wén) in my class, is blasphemy. She’ll insist that without a proper “English” name, the chance to “soak American culture” just won’t be the same. I’ve heard this opinion from dozens of parents. Heck, I even saw one kid who didn’t want an English name get in a yelling match with his dad over it. Nearly all the kids want English names, though. Some even want two.
Naturally enough, a lot of the “English” names they pick aren’t very English at all. I don’t think I ever met or heard of a single Coco before I came to Taiwan (though I did know a dog named Cocoa), but I must have taught or met at least 30 Cocos since coming here. The same goes for Kiki, Yoyo, Mimi, and several other popular “English” names here. I’m not really a big fan of these names, since they AREN’T going to familiarize the kids with commonly used English names. But, hey. If it makes them happy, then why not?
There is one kind of “English” name, though, that I can’t stand. It’s the mis-spelt name given by Taiwanese teachers from the public schools. My new students of this type have included an Anterny, a Cynphia, an Avy, a Jesper, a Weever, a San, and a Weanston. The problem with these “English” names, beyond the fact that they aren’t English, is that English speakers (including myself) always think that the kids are mispronouncing real names. I already have a lot of names to remember, and it really sucks trying to remember if Jesper is the one who insists that is name is pronounced as “Jeesper” or if it was Cynphia that insists she’s “Seenvia”. Worse yet, after practicing with each other for a few years, the kids will have the exact same problems with real English names. I don’t really want to be some sort of “cultural imperialist”, but there is a point at which I can’t take the Engrish. I sat the parents down and explained that their kids’ names were the result of letting non-natives with really screwed up phonics try to remember real names. At first they were incredulous. “Are you sure Weanston’s not a popular English name?” Fortunately, by the end, I got Cynphia to become Cynthia, Avy to become Amy, Jesper to become Jasper, Weever to become Webber, San to become Sam, and Weanston to become Winston. Anterny isn’t budging, though.
There are tons of ways to try to absorb American culture. Aside from Hollywood, there’s great access to US video games, children’s stories, American restaurants, American music… the list goes on. I’m not sure if picking an “English” name will help students assimilate any more of the culture or not, but I’m positive picking a name like “Weanston” won’t.
Avid investor that I am, I’ve been reading quite a bit about investing. Especially over the last year, I’ve been trying to read at least one or two investing books each month. I’ve finally gotten around to one my friends have been telling me would be just my type. Not only that, but it’s a book famous enough that I’ve seen hundreds of websites refer to it- One up on Wall Street
For those of you who don’t know who Peter Lynch is, he’s was the former manager of the Magellan Fund. It averaged a 29% return over 14 years, and did so without a single down year. Interestingly, Lynch crushed the market by investing in literally thousands of companies, many of which were picked due to his own (or his wife’s) personal experience with their products or services. He invested in things like L’eggs, Taco Bells, La Quinta Inns, and countless other “boring” businesses.
I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed at all. I can see why so many of my friends have been recommending it. Peter Lynch advocates exactly the kind of investing I believe in. There isn’t any technical analysis, there any convoluted models for determining the “resistance” of a stock to pass certain price thresh-holds. No, the whole book is about making long term investments based on the idea that one is buying a piece of a company as opposed to a lottery ticket. Lynch clearly beleives that despite short term price fluctuations due to hype or fear, the market does reward performance in the long run. Once, the great investor Benjamin Graham said
“In the short-term the market is a voting machine, in the long-term, a weighing one.”
Peter Lynch expressed the same sentiment as:
People may bet on the hourly wiggles in the market, but it’s the earnings that waggle the wiggles, long term.
Beyond being a long term investor, there are several other things Lynch talked about that resonated strongly with me. He noted that there are many ways in which individual investors have an advantage against Wall Street. First of all, since we aren’t investing billions, we have more companies in which to choose from. I can put 20% of my savings into a stock with a market cap of $100 million; most fund managers don’t have that option. Even if there weren’t usually restrictions on what percentage of a funds money can be put into any one stock, most funds are big enough that they’d wildly distort the price of whatever small-cap they tried to invest heavily in. Beyond this, most fund managers have to try to beat the market every quarter. We don’t. They have to worry about buying things that are defensible, when they do lose money. We don’t.
Besides talking about general investment ideas, Lynch also laid out the six general types of companies a person might want to invest in:
He then went into dozens of examples of various investments he made during his career and explained why they were or weren’t successful. The story is pretty much the same, buy companies that offer a some combination of strong earnings and/or growth relative to their price and wait. Don’t try to time the market, don’t buy or sell based on movements in the price of a stock, and don’t pay attention to what the analysts are saying. The book had great, great advice, and it was a pretty good read, too. It also had one unexpected and likely unintended gem of Engrish.
Diworseification: making one’s business (or portfolio) weaker by diversifying into markets one doesn’t sufficiently understand.