S.S.T.Band

To do

• Blind Spot stuff! If this were a company we'd rename the article Blind Spot, but even if it's the same band getting together again, they decided to name it something new and even do different things, so we definitely need a Blind Spot article. But we can do one of those fancy infoboxes with the left/right arrows that shows how a company/group evolved from entity to entity etc.
• Everything from this interview. And get a proper Interview article up.
• http://sisilala.tv/myarticles/384
• https://www.inside-games.jp/article/2015/11/07/92796.html

CartridgeCulture (talk) 05:10, 30 November 2021 (EST)

Localization, definitions, and names

So this is kinda just me rambling, and this def doesn't need to happen anytime soon, but- Hm. As someone who's personally a stickler for accuracy when it comes to Japanese vgm, and one that understands the difficulties encountered when localizing this stuff... Okay so, most of the time, the way to be most accurate is to write exactly what's on the packaging, mostly. There are some exceptions: A lot of times, when an album title is officially written and promoted in ALLCAPS, we'll still generally reduce that down to normal capitalization. That's the biggest example people will know, and that's done as kind of a counter to artistic license. Because obviously it's just "Soundtrack Title" and not "SOUNDTRACKTITLE", and if we didn't do that we'd have all of our music in allcaps.

So we recognize there's certain situations where we have to step in and say "This is just an artistic interpretation, the ACTUAL title is this." Should that ideology be applied to the lack of spacing between S.S.T. and Band? Again, I absolutely understand why we wrote it like this (and it appears VGMdb, the main originators/solidifiers of these kinda ideologies, writes it this way too, but they could just be copying us/vice versa), but we have to keep in mind: These are Japanese speakers using an unfamiliar language. There's no question they always meant their title to say "this is the band of S.S.T." or "S.S.T.'s band". Someone just made a mistake early on and forgot the space. Which happens a lot, and a lot of times it doesn't get changed later and that's fine, that's just another interesting facet of the Japanese game industry's use of English.

But S.S.T. Band corrected it later. And it appears the majority (?) of the work we have listed here credits them with the correct spacing. In the same way that, if a company changes their name and releases another Sega product, we use the most-recent name (and most-used version of that name) as the article title, should this article name be corrected too? Again, this all comes down to how far you want to take localization and interpretation of artistic license. Again, none of these needs to be looked into now, but it would be interesting to take another look at the exact writing of how S.S.T. was represented, because it seems to be very heavily weighing towards "yeah they're obviously S.S.T. Band in most of their credits, and we know that's what they meant, so this is a case where we can undo ALLCAPS and make a correction."

I don't know, lots of words. Words words. But maybe thoughts for later, and determining how to approach this can help us with similar issues in the future too :) Thanks for any insight.

As I'm doing more research, the formatting "S.S.T.Band" is coming up a lot in modern news articles, but not from the band members themselves. I wonder if these articles are copying the formatting from somewhere else, which sourced THEIR information from the same ideology (or just VGMdb/us.) Either way, again I can def understand both angles. Should probably remain what it is, but something to, again, think about down the line. CartridgeCulture (talk) 22:01, 12 December 2021 (EST)