My luck. My /luck/.

We've been apartment hunting, about 9am to 3pm yesterday (and yes, I am ridiculously sunburnt and sore), and weird shit be happening.

See, while coming out of our first apartment showing of the day (which I swear was done by the Landlady from Kung Fu Hustle), my roomie and I were discussing the validity of the options we'd seen so far. Three feet ahead of us is a woman carrying her groceries home, who later she said when she heard us talking about money her ears perked up a bit. So she apologized for listening in but she a building manager was trying to rent out this apartment and if we'd like to come by and look at it she'll be home most of the day oh yes two o'clock would be all right...

After other apartment related shenanigans, including being stood up for the second time and instead spending that time playing with Hydra the ridiculously excitable weimeraner and her owner, we decided we might as well swing over and see the place. Well, not actually the place, as that was being lived in and the tenant didn't want people just coming in when she wasn't there, but the building manager lived on the floor directly below and said her apartment was structurally identical so we could see that.

It was the Apartment of Win. The priciest, about 1100 and then utilities (although she said we might be able to talk it down a bit with the owner), but it was a three-bedroom the same price as a lot of two-bedrooms and my roomie-to-be is in love with it and if we can get a third after we move in (roomie wants to meet and vet all applicants first, so we can't advertise yet) we'll be in pretty good shape. There's big windows and plenty of room and the neighborhood appears to be an okay sort of neighborhood and all the necessities are there and it's got a breakfast nook.

And as we're leaving my roomie comments on the building manager's cookbooks, and she replies that she bakes often and may share what she bakes. Such as homemade biscuits. As we walk away my roomie and I have twin eyes of O_O and 'what the hell is the catch with this place, it's perfect'. The price is really the only thing making us look a bit askance, and we continue on to our final viewing and back to our hotel to rest our sore legs and troubled brains.

seiber: So it's like fate wants us to have this house.
aranamitouma: And also to have biscuits.
seiber: It's like...we left wondering what the catch was.
seiber: I mean, great apartment, options for a third, friendly landlord, serendipitious encounter, and as we're leaving she mentions she likes to give out her extra baked goods. It was what pushed it over into disbelief.
aranamitouma: She is secretly Granny Goodness.
aranamitouma: But it's okay, Darkseid will only come to hang out on your couch every once in a while.
seiber: Well, if he'll lower the rent a touch, I can deal with that.

After sending us the application papers and some sample bills so we can get a feel for what utitilities costs are like, the building manager emails us again last night saying she's gotten the owner to drop the price.

To $980.

At this point we started outright panicking because it just felt too good to be true. But we looked over scams and such and when we've actually been in her bedroom it's a bit hard to successfully scam someone, and it's just so...wow. Huh.

I hope this place is legit. It's lovely.

Not what I need after my plane ride back from the glorious City of Wind.

Oh, for god's sake. I love the PW kink meme, I really do, but by law of averages it can bring some very dramatic fail.

Yes, but Japan is perfectly capable of drawing people who look Japanese. They chose to portray "themselves" as un-Asian.

Where do I even begin with these two sentences? It's rather notable in the wake of the racebending scandal around the The Last Airbender where that same argument was used to annoyingly bad ends, but in the Phoenix Wright fandom it is even stupider. The Ace Attorney series was made in Japan, by Japanese people, and original set in Japan. This isn't even a racism issue, this is a 'how stupid are you' issue.

Good grief. I mean, let's look at some of these un-Asian people.

( Cut for pictures. )

For additional interest, I dug up an interview with one of the localizers for Justice For All.

Lost: Conversely, what sorts of stuff do you add to give the Phoenix Wright dialogue a bit more of a Western flavor? Can you give an example of that?

JH: I think what makes the dialogue more Western are things like colloquial phrases, sayings, and even the odd reference to a Western movie or show. The dialogue for the most part, in my opinion, is not really country-specific, so I think what lends the feeling of where a game takes place are the little things, such as Maya liking hamburgers instead of ramen, and using American law terms, such as “pleading the 5th”. Also, the inclusion of characters of different races makes it feel more like America to me, since Japan is pretty homogeneous.

Bolding mine. The bulk of the Ace Attorney characters were drawn, originally, as Asian. They're not all Asian in the localization and some of them aren't even from countries that actually exist, but they weren't drawn specifically un-Asian. How you could so badly miss that in a series where Japanese-style spirit mediums are core to the plot is completely beyond me.