#*frustrated rambling*

[sleepy-edits]

[ravenmccookies]

Weird phenomenon I've seen on tumblr

[antennatoheaven]

trying to sell the murderbot diaries to other robot fans is an uphill battle. yes, i also prefer it when my robots don't have human looking faces. i understand why you might not be happy with its appearance, but guess who's also not happy with having a human face

[bizarrelittlemew]

i can't wait to be 30+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 40+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 50+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 60+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 70+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 80+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 90+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to look back on my life and know that i loved things deeply and passionately and was inspired to create and was part of communities with incredible people from all over the world brought together by the stories that touched us

[all-my-ocs-are-evil]

Jason's been pestering Danny about why he looks like a borderline walking corpse for ages and Danny has decided to put his lying skills to the test. (he has none)

rambling below cut

I've been playing w the idea that the more Danny transforms, the more his ghost form gets "lively" while his human form gets weaker and more sickly. He knows that if he keeps transforming like this then, one day, he's not going to have a livable body to go back to, but he really doesn't want to think about all that. He's more interested in the weird "totally dead but not dead" Wayne son who may or may not have a thing for his sister.

everytime i do one these im like "this time I'll keep it simple so I don't have to suffer through colouring bc I have zero foresight—it'll be greyscale at most" and then all of the sudden its 4am and i'm trying to finish a stupid comic but i decided to add "some" colour to spice it up and hide my shitty ink job and then SOME COLOUR ALWAYS BECOMES FULL COLOUR WHY CAN I NOT ESCAPE THIS STUPID CYCLE!!

(did this all stem from me not being able to decide between a super pale character design and one w a vibrant tan bc I love white hair + tan but I also love extremely pale albino so I forced myself to find a way to make both work? never! that's absurd!)

[fury161]

portraits for a de au i think about a little bit

[om340700]

[sadgayeddie]

"Los Angeles was actually the job opportunity. Uh, but no ties here. Everything that matters is in Texas."

[miscling]

y'know what though...

it's really obvious when you meet someone and they clock you as a trans woman and immediately assume you've got a dick. like the basic assumtion is trans women = dick. like there aren't many things left that make us feel dysphoric these days, but that assumption still stings after all this time and pisses us the fuck off when you can tell that the only reason some folks are interested in us is because they think they're gonna get dicked down by us, and it especially sucks when you're trying to make friends and build community around yourself, and people immediately start making assumptions about you, and you know they're wrong, and it affects how they treat you.

we don't really want to start a new friendship with 'hey so we've got a cunt', and we don't want to feel like we need to make ourselves look as much like a cis woman as possible - the assumption that trans woman = dick means that it's impossible to be visibly trans without people making that assumption!

[foldingfittedsheets]

The kids. In our complex. Make me so crazy. So there’s like 16 townhome units. It’s a smallish enclosed loop. For this reason we have a ton of kids in the neighborhood who bike and play in the parking lot.

The PROBLEM. Is that they’re almost entirely unsupervised and do not follow any kind of safety rules. When cars come they do not pull out of the way and wait. They just keep riding erratically around.

One little unsupervised two year old just stood in the middle of the lane and held a hand up to stop my car. His parents came out after a few minutes and laughed and I’m like MY GUYS YOU JUST TAUGHT YOUR KID TO BE UNSAFE ASSUMING CARS WILL SEE HIM!!!

A different time a six or seven year old was gearing up to try to outrace my car instead of pulling aside. I flipped my car into neutral and revved until she zipped out of the lane in a panic. Like. Tiny one. You are infinitely crushable. You do not fuck around, you need to get out of the way because you are a tiny thing that not all cars will see.

Another four or five year old was sitting in a place yesterday where we could have and almost did back into him!! Like. Why are you sitting here with the cars and no supervision???? There’s grassy areas behind the units and as much as I loathe the kids staring in my sliding door I prefer it to them trying to get run over.

Today I got home and a maybe three year old girl was riding an electric bike around. When she saw my car she sped up like we were playing chicken until I honked. Then she sullenly got off and left the bike in the lane so I couldn’t go. I was gesturing for her to move it before she finally realized the problem and pulled it to the side. I finally got to proceed toward my spot, driving past her while she gave me a thumbs up.

I found another bike sat in my parking space. I am about to start popping tires.

[ratpoizonz]

ok!!!! my discoveries so far with the new spooky month episode!!!!!!!!!

first off, there's a qr code in one of the shots (i did what anyone presented with a mystery qr code would do and scanned it)

it leads to an imgur page with this image

there's quite a few things here, but mainly more stuff about bob, the cult, dexter, etc. my main point of interest is the three imgur links at the bottom, the fill-in-the-blanks for an imgur page, the morse code, and the symbols page

the three imgur links lead to these images (in order from left to right)

i'm not sure what the first image means or implies?? i think, for now at least, it might be a teaser for a future episode

i don't think there's anything super deep or lore heavy going on with the second one, just jack, patty, john, and the aftermath of moloch's destruction

now the third image is what interests me the most because ignacio has all these things (except for the image of john and his daughter, that's in the police car) in his house.

i don't think i could start to even try and unpack what the fuck the implication of something like this being in ignacio's house is. i think it's best to put a pin in this revelation for now.

moving on to the morse code, i translated it and it turns out as this???

this is the point where i'm at a dead end and i think this has to become more of a community effort, instead of just me. i KNOW this has to do with the symbols page and that what it translates to is to fill out the missing letters and numbers in the middle of the first image, but i honestly just can't understand it at all

any help with uncovering this is appreciated, genuinely!!

[bitter-hibiscus]

To be honest I think that a lot of people who share the anti Jason Todd sentiment don't even actually hate Jason. I think a lot of them hate what he forces the narrative to do.

Jason forces the subversion of the hero genre -- he's the single, most extreme proof that Batman's hero fantasy wouldn't be effective in real life, and therefore Jason showing up can take you out of the universe really fast really hard. A lot of people are here for what comics are meant to offer, the one man hero fantasy that makes you Feel Good, and Jason showing up doesn't Allow you to enjoy it! And if that's the case, you're completely justified in not liking Jason, he takes you out of the thing you enjoy.

I think a lot of you don't actually find his personality or acts annoying in of themselves, you just hate what those actions do to the genre itself. And I think once you realize that and start looking at comics like actual pieces of literature, Jason and shitty comics both will become a lot less rage inducing to you.

[lucabyte]

So does anybody else ever think about how Loop felt the need to demonstrate that the party's deaths wouldn't have any effect on the loops. I know I do but that's besides the point. Anyway I don't think Loop actually needs to bathe, they just like to feel included.

[the-worms-in-your-bones]

In trying times like these we must remember that we still have Gallifrey and Bernice summerfield and the edas and the vnas, new who can not hurt us, it is merely a spin off attempting to put that doctor guy on tv, don’t worry it’s not canon

[unforth]

As I deepen my study with Chinese, the more I'm struck by how word meanings work. The monolingual USAdians I know or encounter online, who studied only as much as needed to get through school, really do seem to think languages are plug and play: know the word in both languages, and swap.

But that couldn't be further from the truth. There's on Chinese word, 稳当 (wĕn dang), that's really struck me for that. Because my flashcards give three translations for 稳当: reliable, secure, and stable. And in English these words are all fairly different! Clearly related but very much do not mean the same thing. How can one Chinese word mean these three different concepts? Well, of course, it doesn't. 稳当 means 稳当, some fusion of those three concepts we have words for in English but not quite any of them, that makes it appropriate to use in places where English would use any of those three. There are surely shades of meaning, and which interpretation of the meaning is most appropriate to a given context will be understood upon reading.

Now, expand this understanding - that a word doesn't mean (exact direct swap in English) but rather the word means the word, and we approximate it to the closest English equivalent we can - to *every single word in every single sentence in an entire book.*

Then translate that book.

Translation is an art, not a science, requiring tremendous verisimilitude in *both* languages, and an understanding of the story, and a deep familiarity with the culture (social, historical, linguistic, etc.) of the original work, and often knowledge of the authors intent (if possible to ascertain), and a range of other skills. Translation will always be interpretive and transformative, because (word in one language) doesn't precisely mean (word in another language). They're not "the same." If I present you a sentence with 稳当 in it, does it mean stable, reliable, or secure? Well that depends. On what? How it's being used, the surrounding context, other factors, and of course... the reader or translators interpretation.

It drives me insane when I see people present alternate translations as some kind of "gotcha" that one translator got things wrong. And don't get me wrong - of course some translations ARE just wrong, obviously if I translate 稳当 to mean "goldfish" I'm not interpreting I'm just incorrect. But beyond obvious mistakes, a world of nuance exists, and different translators can in good faith reach different conclusions on the most appropriate translation. This is WHY famous books not in English get translated repeatedly by different people, and why a reader would want to read multiple translations of the same work - to see, in different translations, some shadow of the wonderful nuance embodied by the original words that do not, and cannot, simply be swapped 1 to 1 for a perfect English translation. And this is *especially* true of a language like Chinese, which is ancient and beautiful and deeply steeped in understandings of Chinese history and literature.

Why do you think I and many others are studying Chinese for years? For me, it's all so I can read the actual books myself and get that much closer to the story, that much closer to my own interpretation. I'll never have the skills of a knowledgeable translator - this isn't my profession, it's my hobby - but I'll gleen things nonetheless and it's important to me to try.

Too many of yall disrespect those skills so much that you'll throw a sentence of a language you know nothing about into Google translate and then declare the translator Wrong (and sometimes Bad and Malicious) based on that.

稳当 means 稳当. It doesn't mean "reliable." It doesn't mean "the exact translation of 稳" plus "the exact translation of 当". It's a Chinese word with a Chinese definition that we retrofit English on to.

And the hardest part? Look, I'm still a Chinese novice. For all I fucking know, 稳当 actually MIGHT have three distinct definitions. Everything I said about it above might be wrong. I don't know enough Chinese yet to know for sure, and that's a level of nuance and understanding I'll only reach by reading more.

Multiply that by *every single word in both the original language and the language it's being translated into.*

That's what translation is.

Good luck.

[rameiixo]

xiaolumi resurrected from my heart for the new year!!