Let's the procrastination over with, shall we?

I put the "pro" in "procrastination."

It's true and it's one of my favorite phrases. If I haven't said it before on this blog, I'd be surprised.

(<- btw, i'm trying to get in the habit of crediting images I use. I don't know where this originated; it was the second hit on google images under "video game," but I apparently I pulled this off a site called Elk Turd. Go figure. I know nothing about the sites I get images from, so I claim no affiliations.)

This morning Honey and I were going to go to church to hear a minister we really like who doesn't preach much here anymore, and who's actually moving soon. However, when I woke up this morning to feed the dog, I felt like really didn't want to go, even though I'd been looking forward to it all week. And I realize it's because I had a late show last night and had my dessert first, yesterday. (... and because Honey and I haven't attended church regularly for almost two years. You know how it is when you fall out of habits - you get flabby and lazy.) What do I mean by that? I used Saturday as my down day.

Tomorrow morning I have a meeting with my advising professor. Honey and I decided late last month that I should go ahead and continue with school this semester. After having bought our first (gulp) house and getting into the groove of the new "holyshitareyoukidding?" mortgage payments, we figured I should go ahead and continue - I'm close enough to graduation that pushing though makes sense at this point. So this week, I contacted my prof and the graduates coordinator at school to double check where I was in my degree. Turns out I'm one credit further a long than I thought I was. I'm through with my in-class courses, now it's the independent study before my thesis. So tomorrow, I have to give him my thesis proposal. Cool. ... and my proposed bibliography. Holy caca!

I'm less worried about my proposal than my bibliography. I figure he'll probably nudge me if my proposal needs narrowing or more girth. I probably shouldn't be so worried about my bibliography, but I am. There isn't much written on my subject: video game gibberish. And I'm really not a gamer, so off the top of my head, I don't know many games (aside from The Sims and the ones I'm focusing on) that employ gibberish.

So, once the university libraries open today, I need to spend a couple of hours there. I wrote my proposal yesterday; since it's just an expanding on a paper I did a year and a half ago, which he liked and which he thought I should expand into a thesis, I didn't have to do too much retooling. What I'll be looking for are books and articles on syllable structures of certain languages, dictionaries that have vowel inventories and preferably ones that have consonant inventories as well. ... and even though the libraries don't open until noon, I know I like my weekends to be lazy and restful (imagine that), so I'm choosing to forgo church today so that I get my procrastination done with before noon.

Allow me dear few readers - and my darling, phantom, Niamh - to ask your indulgence. I need help picking some games to focus on. (psst, I'm also talking to you ... presuming you're back from Guatemala.) Any suggestions?

My first paper was on the game Pirates! I compared the foreign language gibberish to the actual phonetic inventories and syllable structures of the languages they were supposed to be mocking. (Incidentally, their English gibberish was excellent; their Spanish gibberish was crap.) I chose that game because Honey was playing it like crazy at the time. Now, I need more games which utilize gibberish to stand for actual languages. I suppose I could use The Sims and compare Simlish to English if I had to, but when I was researching Pirates!, I came across a few articles which claimed the programmers of The Sims based the gibberish on Navajo. So it sounds like they wanted Simlish NOT to sound like English. ... of course I suppose I could lay Simlish against English and Navajo and see what I find. Hmm. ... moving on: for the purpose of the proposal, I figured I could also focus on Civilization and Colonization. We have the former at home, and while it is dialogue light, the characters who do speak (gibberish) are from specific cultures with specific languages. The latter however is old and frankly I don't know if it employs gibberish at all. I'm assuming it does, but ... quien sabe?

Anyway, that's my Sunday. Off to the library, later, to develop a bibliography and to cruise the web searching for gamer sites that can tell me what games employ gibberish to mimick existing languages. WISH ME LUCK!