Americans making up the weird-ass fake name “Waldo” instead of using the real normal name “Wally” that the rest of the world uses is so strange
It’s German. The early population of America was heavily German – with no overseas colonies of their own, the German diaspora (starting before German unification, of course) spread through the Americas – the thing about Nazis expatriating to Argentina postwar was that was the most advanced Germanophone community outside the WWII combatants – but a serious ethnosuppressionist campaign around entry to WWI has obscured this ever since.
You’re saying that the name Waldo is German, and they called Wally that in the states because there are a lot of German-Americans? Huh, I had no idea.
Why not just call him Wally?
Oh, you mean the striped shirt “find him on this busy illustrated page” guy is called Wally elsewhere? I thought you were just dinging us for naming people Waldo in real life. No clue, I’m guessing there was already an American “Wally” of some sort to confuse the copyright. Also while it does exist in America, “Waldo” is rare enough that it’s more memorable than Wally.
Curiously, American localisation of a certain similarly investigation-themed board game took the -do suffix off the end, rendering it ‘Clue’. This is probably explained by the fact the original name ‘Cluedo’ was a play on ‘Ludo’, which as I understand it is only really known in the States as the slight variant ‘Parcheesi’.
Huh! Yeah, now that I think of it I can see the resemblance.
My prior experience was our neighbors with a British Colonial background (the Cold-Eeze family!) would play Parcheesi and Backgammon at the side of our development (normal cul-de-sacs but with houses with staggered shared walls, using the innovative 1970s “condominium” legal real estate form!) pool
Like, I always used to plan too long-term, in Spiderweb games (Exile/Avernum) I’d always clear out the first goblin caves and keep going back to pick up every least valuable loot, like the rocks that weren’t even ranged equippable until after Nethergate, to haul back to town and sell and then buy all the skills the pay-trainer offered up to full before I moved on
Which crosses very productively with the thing where I can game out contemporary trends to tell where they’ll eventually end up
Which is maybe part of how it works out that I am now more amazingly well-positioned than I could ever imagine.
Like, in 1999 I was like “anime, happy hardcore, JRPGs, and Daft Punk is the important stuff going on” and with the benefit of hindsight was I wrong?
Watching the USA Network Chucky (2021) series at this bar and they’re very good at recapturing the look – like, lighting and color processing – of ‘80s movies.
Microbreweries are largely the urban equivalent of “wine country” vineyards insofar as they’re split between alcoholic tourist destinations making adaptive reuse of economically obsolete regions that (barely) market a product as a side effect and actual businesses reinventing a market for the purpose of rediscovering scale always wins
Bartender tonight I’ve seen around since I first came to Portland, and on the one hand genuine honor and deference to him but on the other like, you’ve been a sempai the whole time but I’m 40 now and I’m here cause it’s the bar within walking distance of my house with the best burgers, what’s your excuse?
You know between the pressure tolerances of dolphins and those delicate “whisker” drones that stood in for sturdier but narratively uninteresting towed sonar arrays, the seaQuest probably had a shallower operating depth limit than modern military subs
While SeaQuest DSV is “what if the Enterprise-D was a submarine”, the 2000s Battlestar Galactica is “what if Star Trek: TNG was based on an aircraft carrier”
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