Ok, so people started talking about some of the ridiculous names some vehicles got in War! and other people started talking how this isn't new and et cetera, giving the prime example the names of the Japanacorps.

Ok, Renraku means 'contact' and Shiawase means 'happiness' (much to my surprise). I mean, imagine that the FIRST MEGACORP OF THE WHOLE WORLD IS CALLED HAPPINESS?!?!?!?!?

But, ok, apparently, Shiawase is the name of a family and we all know how family names can be ridiculous. Just to name a few ridicule portuguese surnames:
Pinto (chick)
Oliveira (olive tree) [actually, pretty much any tree that bears fruit is a portuguese surname]
Barro (clay)
Costa (shore)
Marinho (marine)
etc.

What more ridiculous names there are in shadowrun that people got used to it and don't raise eyebrows to them anymore?

Well the Fuchi in Fuchi Industrial Electronics has always been funny to me. It means stinky or stinks. So it was basically Stinky Industrial Electronics. Not something I would want to but I think.

Der Nachtmachen is so extremly anarchist it totally disregards proper grammar.
The dragon Haesslich apparently purposely chose 'ugly' for a name. Talk about issues. He only ever made it to middle management, making him one of the least successful dragon entrepreneurs in SR history, so maybe he was right there though.
Why a communist rebel movement would call themselves Herbstgeister (autumn spirits) is beyond me, but those groups sometimes DO have freaky names.

The Submarine freighter Wasserträger, the aircraft carrier Glucke, and other idiocy in War! have already been mentioned elsewhere.

Makes perfect sense to me. Even today we have large brands being named to inspire confidence and a promise of satisfaction. LG, for example, is for 'Life's Good' (or so we're told). PR fashion seems to be already moving away from the snazzy and towards the more dumbed-down style of 'we're niceness'.

Baby speak names are verycommon among tech companies, so Happyness, inc. isn't so out there. Clumsy, maybe, but not the kind of howler we find in War!.

Actually, "Happiness" is a great name for a world-dominating megacorp.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsiFbRkyUGI...feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ6tMjpfeNI...feature=related

Scaaary!

(Can s.o. do a voice-over of those vids with some Shiawase commercial's text and the Shiqwase logo? That would be awesome in-game material ).

Huh? Mind expanding on this one?

~J

Fuchi means Edge in Japanese not stinky.

Beaten to death in another thread, but... Shiawase and Koufuku share some kanji. Both kind of mean happiness, however only Koufuku is ever a family name, a very rare family name. The writer who used Shiawase probably didn't understand this. What does this mean for Shadowrun today? We have a mega Corp named Shiawase. No big deal. The earth's spin didn't reverse. I kind of like that it's literally Happiness Corporation and not a family name. It fits in a dystopic future. Besides, Shiawase sounds cooler than Koufuku which makes it more correct in SR.

Mesh

He's simply mistaken. Fuchi in Japanese never means stinky/stinks. In SR it is just a normal name. If you really really want to, you could read it as "incurable", but then you could also read it as margin, abyss, grouping, ignorance, and many more...

Don't know how he got to stinky.

I'd guess Fuchi was inspired by Fujifilm. There are other slightly changed names in SR. For instance the RL armament company's named Rheinmetall not Ruhrmetall.

The founder and many of the current shareholders do have Shiawase as surname.
Like I said, I don't care.
I just want to see what other ridicule names we have out there that "most" people just roll their eyes and let go (or not?)

That's what I thought, but I can't even find a plausible angle for this confusion to have been introduced by.

Ah well.

~J

"Life's Good" is just their current advertising tagline.

Their actual full name?

Lucky Goldstar.*

Remember Goldstar? The maker of crappy stereo equipment and other low end consumer electronics?

Yeah.



-k

*- This in turn was derived from "Lak-Hui", the parent company, and "Goldstar" it's electronics subsidiary.

i can actually make some sense of Herbstgeister if you change the translation to "Spirits of Autumn" simply because of the "October Revolution" since the Bolshevik revolution occurred in autumn a communist group would feel empowered by playing on that memory....

just a thought though...I named a custom bike i built during 3ed a Triumph Dragon, since we were starting year of the comet

Well, one Corp we had in a game was Blows Sound Systems, a Hong Kong Knock Off of Bose. Their motto was "Better Advertising Through Sound".

I also plan on using "Super-Ultra-Mega-OutSourceCo, Unlimited, Ltd." that's been bought and sold and taken over so many times over that no one knows who really owns it. (Being a Fuchi orphan doesn't help, either.). It hires SINless people around the world to work Tech Support and Phone Support lines. They are, literal, hell to work for, and the atmosphere around their call centers are toxic.

But those are just my own creations...

The German November Revolution, the Russian October Revolution, depending on how radical they are the German Autumn...maybe the name is supposed to reference the spirit of those times.


And two names from Arsenal to add to that list:
Conestoga Dust Devil: Sounds like a vacuum cleaner, the kind you can get RIGHT NOW for just 99.99 if you call 1-800-HORSEPOO in the next ten minutes. Can you believe it, Bob?
Messerschmidt Kinder: Literally "Messerschmidt children". Since it's a variant of the Piper Brat, I guess somebody just put "brat" into an online translator

Also, Arsenal has a lot of names which are not technically wrong, but simply generic descriptions of what the vehicle is and not names:
VW Stadtbus: City Bus
Saeder-Krupp CV-11 Vogel: Bird
BuMoNa Rettungswagen: Ambulance
Saeder-Krupp Heimdrone: Household Drone
Seader-Krupp Wartungseinheit: Maintenance Unit

I think those are probably just to make it easy on us English speakers who can't even try and figure out the mega-syllabic words that German is infamous for.

A few nice WWII examples: "Feuerleitpanzerfahrzeug für V-2 Raketen auf Zugkraftwagen 8t" and "leichte Schützenpanzerwagen (schwere Panzerbüchse 41) Sonderkraftfahrzeug 250/11".

When a friend of mine was training on the Leopard 2s he was very thankful that the manuals were in English. And can confirm from first-hand experience that the Anti-Mine/IED upgraded armor plating works like a charm.

Also, never piss off a tank when all you have is a clay wall for defense. The infantry will fan out and find you, and the tankers will want revenge. And they have a much bigger boom than some speaker wire and a nine-volt battery.

While FASA had a habit of inserting jokes and pop culture references back in their day, its not like modern manufacturers are any better.

Look at car names. Sonata? Fusion? Edge? Regal? Fiesta? Cube? If they weren't followed up by a slick advertising campaign we'd roll our eyes at them.

I can easily think of a few words which are actual names and do not require an Extended Volume implant to pronounce.

And conversely, "verbrennungskraftmaschinenbetriebenes Landfahrzeug" (ICE-powered land vehicle) also is a completely generic word and certainly not easier to pronounce


PS: Speaking of jokes, my favourite "joke-name" still is Badr al-Din Ibn Eisa, the guy behind the new Islamic Jihad who came back from the dead. "Ibn Eisa" is a patronym declaring his father to be a guy called Eisa, or Jesus in English

As a side not, I don't find WAR!s "Glucke" any more "stupid-sounding" than RL's "Super Stallion".

About my post on Fuchi meaning stinky. I don't know how well spread it is, but in San Diego where I live the word fuchi is used to mean stinky when I was younger. I always thought it was slang based on the spanish spoken in Mexico as they were the group of people who used it the most around here. Have not heard it used much recently, but it is still in use as far as I know. I did not even think at the time about Fuchi being a Japanese mega and that the word means something in Japanese. So it could be a cultural/language thing about what the word means or maybe its just a regional meaning. I know several of the people I played with when we first started long ago made jokes about this name meaning stinky.

c-c-c-combo breaker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrnHY2KcEwM
i'll never ever respect that name again i am afraid.

Point being: Americans would name military equipment like that. It's totally bonkers from a German perspective. And Wasserträger, good god. I realise you want to sell a few copies of War!.de, but really, wouldn't it be better to that end to just ditch the worst crap?


That would be "Target designation vehicle for V2 missiles on an 8 tons truck" (Zugkraftwagen is the kind of word you'll have a hard tiome to find outside judical or military texts), and "Infrantry fighting vehicle (heavy material rifle Type 41) Special Road Vehicle 250/11". Militzary German is the best. Especially the really easily spoken Acronyms like PzH2000.


Sure, car names can be bad too. Like the Suzuki Pajero (that was a howler in all spanish-speaking countries). There're quite some consulting companies built to help car companies do not embarass themselves with names such as those mentioned above, though. Because fact checking is such a nice thing to do.


Didn't think of that. That actually makes a certain kind of sense. It's still a bit weird, but given they're a bit mystical and whatnot it's off the stupid list now.

You spend about 20 minutes doing company name searches on google, and you can get some really amusing names for big corporations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pharm...l_companies#E-J

Stupid names are really par for the course.

Where is there no company named Evil Inc. yet?

That's your chance!

Americans tend not to think in anything but American perspectives.

When you grow up constantly being told you're the most powerful important people on the planet, whether or not it's true, you tend to be that way.





-k

Can someone explain why Vogelhund sounds so stupid if you're German? It looks, from my perspective, like it means "bird-dog", and that doesn't seem too off. So I must be missing something.

Then please tell me why bird-dog does NOT sound dumb in english/american . .

Seems like. Yeah, probably we should focus on other, far worse things about War!, like David Hill's nascent Nazism (no he did not mean villagers, it's painfully obvious), aaron's craptacular rules, or Michael Wich's lack of understanding how maps work (are we to assume the only acceptable part of War! is Filamena Young's?).

It is a Horizon Subsidary, specializing in PR for despots.

Because a bird dog is a description of a dog used to retrieve downed birds when bird hunting.

Typically game birds, it's too much trouble to go and scamper all over the fields yourself trying to find the bird you just shot, so you train a dog to do it.





-k

I had thought about evo. but make it evil inc. and have it only do good.

But why does it not SOUND dumb to you people?
Also, do you have Rabbit-Dogs that go after rabbits too?

Right, but fiction is held to a higher standard—being realistic doesn't suffice, it needs verisimilitude. Just because a real-life corporation gets away with calling itself "Verizon" doesn't mean you can name a fictional corporation that and expect people to take you seriously.


I'd say it's probably a mixture of things—in addition to what you mention, there's the fact that the US does dominate in a number of ways, and then on top you can mix in the fact that the majority of the population lives over 400 kilometers away from the next nearest country's soil. Builds a mighty strong habit.

~J

Eh. English speakers have a habit of shoving any old words together to make a new combined meaning. Americans especially.



No, because rabbits have a tendency to fall down right where they've been shot, and not go careening into the brush and trees where you can spend sometimes hours locating the damn thing.

But if it WAS common practice, I'm sure it WOULD be called a "rabbit dog" or similar.



-k

We do name them 'Retrievers' as well.

And you're surrounded by countries almost like you on top of that (Canada being a slightly more European version of the US, and Mexico being an unlucky, spanish-speaking version of the US where everything that went well for the US went badly).


Always thought that's what a blood hound is for.

Retriever is usually used to refer to a type of dog bred for that - the Golden Retriever. While correct, it is not often used for dogs in general who fetch game.

One of the primary reasons dogs are used for this is not finding the game, but getting the duck out of the water after you shoot it. A Bird Dog is also called a Gun Dog or Gundog.

Just so you know, Rich Burlew already had this idea.

That's terrible.

Regarding the Vogelhund: why do people get so upset about it? It's a bird-hunting related name for a vehicle used in AA activities. Seems reasonable to me.

Btw, what's the "Catalyst" in "Catalyst Game Labs" supposed to tell us? Is there any deeper meaning I've missed?

A catalyst is an agent of change.

A bloodhound is a tracking dog, not a retriever.

There are Fox Hounds for hunting fox but the Germans seem to have schweinhunds where we don't have pig dogs.

No, but we have animals colloquially called sheep or cattle dogs. The trick is not giving a shit followed by reveling in the convenience. I mean, really, there's no such thing as a dog that is also a sheep, so it'd be dumb to infer that the phrase sheep dog means some theoretical dog-sheep hybrid. This assumption means that we can just go ahead and say sheep dog instead of cramming together every linking word until you end up with dogthatherdssheep like some other languages do.

So, what new and freaky name will Richard Villers come out with next for his Mega after he has to reform it. In a cave. With a box of scraps!

Word of Dick, inc.

Triathlon Shipping?

None, he will come out, kill some people with it, rebuild it in a better, sleeker version of it's former self, have some fun with it and people will give it a name.

Here's a lot of why "bird-dog" doesn't sound strange to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-1_Bird_Dog - and was the callsign for Danny Glover's character in BAT21, since he was flying the plane in question.

It just doesn't sound like a strange compound in english, since foxhound & bird dog - and even by extension foxbat, which I suppose is a nickname for fruit bats - are real things, and such are also real-world NATO code names for various aircraft. Of course "Fishbed" is one that DOES sound odd, and was used for the MiG-21, because it's like, "What is a fishbed, anyway?" It's probably based in the fact that English doesn't use linking words to form compounds.

Some other odd names we've used that don't seem to mean anything or refer to real things include "thunderchief" (WTF is a 'thunder chief'?), seabee (there are bees that live in the ocean?), and the X-20 Dyna-Soar, which is just a terrible way to make a play on "dinosaur", which everyone knows is awesome.