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Filed under: Fun, Text, Time-Wasters, Web, Humor

Translation Party achieves hilarious results using Google Translate - Time Waster

Translation Party is a site that automates the old trick of running a sentence through machine translation until it's humorously unintelligible.

Instead of manually copy-pasting into Babelfish or Google Translate, you can just put in a phrase once, hit enter, and watch as Translation Party passes it back and forth between English and Japanese, getting further from your original meaning every time.

The translation doesn't stop until it reaches equilibrium, meaning that it repeatedly gets the same English result every time. Some phrases never achieve equilibrium, but Translation Party knows when that's happening and gives up after a while.

As an example of the strange results you might end up with, check out what came out when I put the first sentence of this post into Translation Party: "Party, machine translation, translation SAITOYUMORASU, perform the most common way to get to know me."

Filed under: Design, Photo

Try out an "old photo" effect that works like magic

Although I don't read Japanese, I know how to use Google Translator well enough to tell you about this awesome photo effect at Wanokoto Labs. There are plenty of tutorials out there about how to create an "old photo" effect in Photoshop, but this site does it for you in one step.

The effect basically seems to desaturate the image, add some grain, and smudge it up. This results in something like an old newspaper photo. In case you have trouble with the Japanese -- and you probably won't, the layout is pretty intuitive -- the upload feature is the blue tab on the left, and the URL feature is on the right. To activate, click the button below the address of your photo.

UPDATE: Hey, look at that. Once again, the readers are way sharper than I am. There's an English button in the corner. I'm not sure how I missed that, but thanks to John and Chris for pointing it out.

Filed under: Fun, Macintosh, Apple

Apple's Japanese Mac ads

Imagine you were unexpectedly thrust into a world where those same cute Mac-and-PC ads were on TV, but they were in a language you couldn't understand!* That world is, well, Japan, and those ads are right over here. They're just like the American ads we're used to, except with two funny Japanese dudes, and they're in Japanese. You can check out the ads in their full-resolution glory at Apple Japan, or you can just look below, where low-res but English-subtitled versions away.

Funny, but it's just not the same without our national treasure John Hodgman. You can find the other two ads after the jump.

[Via Offering Booze via TV Squad]

*Also, imagine that it's Friday and a slow news day.

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Filed under: Windows

Knuckles RPG to help you learn Japanese

Knuckles in China LandI'm not sure why this game is called Knuckles in China Land, but it's a learning game for practicing your Japanese characters--Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji--or your Japanese, Indonesian, or German vocabulary. The game stars Knuckles from the Sonic the Hedgehog games (unlicensed, I'm sure) and takes the form of a traditional RPG, except that instead of fighting battles with monsters, you must master characters and vocabulary words. It comes with libraries which include thousands of characters and words, but if you want more it also has a Vocabulary Editor to add your own.

Filed under: Fun, Games, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Time-Wasters

War of the Hell - Today's Time Waster

War of the HellTo call War of the Hell bizarre would be an understatement, as would calling it addicting. The object of this Japanese Java game is to capture the flailing stick figures with the rope that dangles from your cursor and drag them from the ground—hell, presumably—up the the top of the screen—heaven. Unfortunately for you it's a bit like capturing epileptic geese with fly paper. The object is to get as many people to heaven as possible, in as large groups as you can, but as with yesterday's time waster there's no real end to the game, but War of the Hell is strangely entertaining throughout.


[Via Weblog Wannabe]

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With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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