The Twilight Realms

This random list of pointless things is actually something of a tribute - there used to be a page about this on TVTropes, entitled "It Was His Sled", but while the trope still exists, the examples have been deleted. So these examples below are all "plot twists" that aren't really twists at all nowadays. Oh, and obviously, spoiler alert. Or not, as the case may be. The trope name comes from Citizen Kane - "Rosebud", the word spoken by Charles Foster Kane on his deathbed at the start of the movie, turns out to be the name of his sled when he was a child, an allusion to the only time in his life when he was truly happy. This was spoiled (not too long after the movie first came out) in a Peanuts strip, and a few years later in an episode of Family Guy. The Sixth Sense -"I see dead people" was supposed to be a twist originally, explaining to the audience what the hell was going on for the first half of the movie. Of course, now it's the ...

Fair Duel - Jōunouchi Katsuya (Joey Wheeler) vs. Kaiba Seto Q: What is "Fair Duel"? A: "Fair Duel" is my attempt to fairly create a duel between two characters of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime. I construct decks for them based on cards they have been shown using in the anime, until they have 40 cards each. I number each of the cards and use a number randomisation program to simulate the random nature of drawing cards. I do my best to imagine how the respective characters would react in various situations in the duel and script out the results below. Note: My naming rules for Yu-Gi-Oh! cards - If the card's name was originally in English, I will use the original name for the card (i.e. "Black Magician" instead of "Dark Magician"). However, if the card's name is in Japanese, then I will use the official English name for the card. Duel Standby! Kaiba: I have to say I didn't expect a rematch so soon, Wheeler. What's the matter? Couldn...

Yet another "no one actually cares about this kind of stuff" journal. This one doesn't really have a "theme", it's just random stuff that I'm writing as a short break from trying to get 1000 on the jump-rope minigame in Final Fantasy IX. The Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy, or a series, or anything of the sort - it's a single book, subdivided into six volumes and published in three parts initially because the publishers couldn't afford to publish it as a single book. It was initially intended to be a SHORTER sequel to The Hobbit, but as J. R. R. Tolkien famously said, "the tale grew in the telling" and we ended up with the epic we have today. Speaking of The Lord of the Rings, pipe-weed is not marijuana - it's the Middle-earth counterpart of tobacco. In fact, in early versions of The Hobbit (made before Tolkien decided to tie that book into his Middle-earth mythology) it was actually called tobacco. He changed the name becaus...

Translating from one language to another is hard work, and even the best translators sometimes let things slip through the cracks. Video games are notorious for having poor or somewhat awkward or incorrect translations, so in the interests of having nothing better to do I'm going to list some of the ones I know here. So let's begin. In the Pokémon games, several moves had names in Japanese that could be translated in two ways in English, and many of them picked the wrong way. One of these was the move Thunder, whose Japanese name - Kaminari - can mean either "thunder" or "lightning". In this case, it was supposed to refer to a lightning strike. Another case was the move Splash, which is called Haneru in Japanese. This can translate as either "splash" or "hop", and the latter meaning was the intended one - this is why the move is Normal-type and not Water-type, and why Hoppip and Buneary can learn it despite neither having anything to do...