actuallyaltaria

[actuallyaltaria]

Do you wanna see something really really bad

[actuallyaltaria]

Not perfect and not always right but basically:

Is it a screen shot?

Is there a link?

Did you click/read the link?

Was it a real source (AP wire, local news, the original online post - not Fox, not the Sun, not NY Post, etc)?

Did you find any confirmation?

Did it strongly confirm a bias or suspicion?

Did it make you feel angry, smug, disgusted, superior, and/or helpless?

Is it important enough to you that you think it needs to be shared?

Do you have the energy, time, ability to research, confirm, and provide sources, links, and some additional clarifying details?

Generally I have this in mind, not necessarily always and not always observed, and I forget and blah blah. But it's a pretty simple guide to remember, and honestly items 1 and 9 cover me most of the time.

[actuallyaltaria]

My secret is that my wife was in an extremely bad period in her life when she entered into a contest for knitting supplies. She loved knitting as a teenager and wanted to get back into it as an adult, but felt like we couldn't afford it. She wouldn't buy anything, and wouldn't let me get anything for her because it would be "a waste of money." So when she got an email from a knitting newsletter she followed talking about the contest, she entered and won third place - a little basic kit that got her excited to start and started pulling her out of her dark place.

This is when you go "aha. You cheeky devil. Did you cheat slmehow? Is that your secret?" But no. My secret is, I faked it all. I created a fake knitting blog, and sent it to her as "something I found." I ran it for a few months talking about made up craft projects with photos off the internet and things. Then I faked the contest, sold some of my possessions to buy the "prize" and let her win. Six months later I stopped posting and she didn't even notice. She still talks about that prize she won as turning her life around, and she'll never know I invented the whole thing.

Now this is some real lover shit!!!

[actuallyaltaria]

i’m going to burst into tears. such a hauntingly stupid and wonderful phrase to immortalize somewhere. LOOK AT PIttbert!

[actuallyaltaria]

so as you might have guessed because I said I was camping in the woods to avoid getting sick (lol):

someone in my household has covid unfortunately but we did manage to get them a Paxlovid subscription. they’re uninsured, and even GoodRx coupons only brought the cost down to $1,300 USD.

I thought to check the drug manufacturer website and quickly signed up online through its portal and received a pharmacy card by email that lowered the cost to $0

There are also options for insured patients to dramatically lower their copays. I’m in the U.S., and I’m unsure whether this is applicable elsewhere, but I wanted to share this info on access to potentially lifesaving medication, for anyone it may help!

[actuallyaltaria]

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[actuallyaltaria]

Bead Embroidery Kits // Craft Artist Studio

[actuallyaltaria]

are you eating poisons? deadly poisons? and youe didnt share? can i have some of your poisons. Can i have some of your deadly poisons

[actuallyaltaria]

So wait are livestock guardian dogs to their flocks like… Clark Kent among the residents of Smallville? He’s been here since he was a baby, we all know him, and he’s… generally one-of-us shaped, uh, approximately. And then when something goes wrong he suddenly leaps into action and does some terrifying impossible shit none of us could do. And then comes back home and settles in like nothing happened and he’s one of us again.

[actuallyaltaria]

I DESPERATELY needed someone to tell me this as I grew up in leftist online spaces. So now I am going to tell YOU:

If you

Check what you sent over and over to make sure you didn’t say a slur instead of “hello how are you”

Fear that someone will find you thinking not-leftist-enough thoughts and will call you out and ruin you

Feel you have to make your intentions clear and over-explain your actions

Find yourself consistently resisting the urge to engage in reassurance-seeking WRT being a good enough ally to marginalized people

Stay up late endlessly debating political ethics in your head

Have a set of actions that you take after discovering you made a morally wrong decision so that you can atone, which you rely on for reassurance that you are not a bad person

Would rather not make a decision at all than make a decision that is the lesser of two evils, but is not morally pure

then I am gently, but firmly, requesting that you look into moral scrupulosity OCD.

[actuallyaltaria]

To reduce my screen time, I have weaponised my overactive and entirely impractical levels of empathy for inanimate objects. Wym you’re picking it up again? While it was sleeping? You complete and utter monster, let it rest!!

And it works. It works like a CHARM. Silly problems require silly solutions!

[actuallyaltaria]

[actuallyaltaria]

I copy pasted parts of this but I do hand letter everything, because while I'm trying to work easier as I'm chronically ill, I am still chronically stupid

[actuallyaltaria]

Okay now we're REALLY getting into Incredibly Niche Hyperfixation Detail Headcanons.

I'm gonna talk about Aku's name now ok. You're gonna learn more than you ever wanted to know about how the word "aku" is pronounced and spelled in Japanese. Come with me on this journey through an essay with the most unbalanced word-count-to-actual-importance ratio of any essay you'll read this year.

First: syllable stress! In English language, you give one syllable more emphasis by pronouncing it a little harder, louder, longer, and/or higher. Ex: "emphasis" is pronounced EM-pha-sis.

Japanese also has syllable stress, but stress is conveyed only through high/low pitch, which is called a pitch accent. So emphasis would be pronounced ᵉᵐ-pha-sis.

I figure most of the fandom already knows Aku's name is just the Japanese word for "evil", right? 悪 = あく = Aku.

In the show, the emphasis on Aku's name is clearly placed on the second syllable, ah-KOO. Aku says it that way in the intro, on the phone (obligatory EXTRA THICC) and talking to the gangsters; Jack, the high priestess, the scientist, the gangsters, and Scaramouche pronounce it that way... Interestingly, the emperor is a rare exception who pronounces it two ways ("a-KU" but then "A-ku has returned")—but pronunciation is usually pretty consistent.

However, that's not the way 悪 is pronounced. In Japanese the pitch accent's emphasis is on the first syllable, ᵃ-ku.

You could just chalk it up to "well, it's an American cartoon, obviously they just changed the pronunciation to something they thought sounds more natural in English"

except, the Japanese dub pronounces Aku's name the same way—and in a single sentence you can contrast that against "aku" pronounced the right way.

遥か遠い昔さる国で､ 我アクは変幻自在の悪の権化、恐怖の大魔王として蘇った

haruka tooi mukashi saru kuni de, ware a-ᵏᵘ wa hengen jizai no ᵃ-ku no gonge, kyoufu no dai maou to shite yomigaetta

Long ago in a faraway land, I, Aku, the shape-shifting embodiment of evil, was resurrected as a terrifying demon king.

So what gives?

Now, "Aku" not spelled 悪 is actually used as a Japanese name. And I was only able to find audio recordings pronouncing the name of one person with the name Aku, Aku Yuu 阿久悠, but it was indeed pronounced a-ᵏᵘ.

(I don't wanna link videos for a Japanese lyricist with only a few hundred views on my nerdy fandom post that has nothing to do with the lyricist himself, so if you really wanna hear how his name is pronounced search 阿久悠 on youtube and click a few shorts and squint your ears to pick his name out from the rest of the speech.)

Spelling variations I've found on more than one site that looks halfway reputable include 阿久 (that one's legit, that's the lyricist's family name), 安久, 渥, 亜久, 吾久 and spellings I've only seen on one site so they're more dubious are 圧, 顎, 安駆, 愛玖, 愛紅—so like, there's a handful of actively used spellings. Doesn't seem to be a super popular name but there are indeed people somewhere out there in Japan who have been named Aku, as a first or last name, with some of the spellings seen above.

So obviously Mr. Shogun-Of-Sorrow Master-Of-Darkness named himself "Evil"; but like, evil-pronounced-like-a-name. Like how Cruella's last name is pronounced de-VIL instead of DE-vil but we know what it is.

Was this the show's artistic intent? I don't know. Am I having fun overanalyzing it anyway? Yes.

Since I'm assuming that in-universe most of the characters are speaking Japanese and we're just magically hearing an English translation, presumably by changing the pronunciation Aku can make it clear when he's talking about himself (like if he says "Aku will reign over this world!" there's a subtle distinction between "I will reign over this world" vs "evil (in general) will reign over this world").

And also, by pronouncing his name Like A Name he's emphasizing that He's A Person, and not just, like, the abstract concept of evil given anthropomorphic form. Like yes sure fine ok he is literally the embodiment of evil, but he's not some kind of walking symbolic metaphor for evilness, he's also a whole-ass guy. Who happens to be made out of evil. Considering that he names himself Aku moments after being born and thanking the emperor for "freeing" him, I imagine that emphasizing the thing that's new and different about him—his personhood—is a high priority.

(It also gives an in-universe explanation for why the emperor pronounces it both ways: he's straddling the line between referring to "this dude named Aku" and "the concept of evil itself." I kinda feel like the emperor isn't fully convinced that Aku's a person, given that he was first acquainted with Aku as a puddle of hungry goo and he has no qualms about telling him he wanted to kill him when Aku's a mere—I counted—one minute and thirty seconds old.

Was this the artistic intent behind that voice acting decision? Probably not. But I like it.)

"Hey why did you go through all this insanely nerdy effort to figure out why Aku's name is pronounced the way it is?" Because I have an even deeper insanely nerdy goal: I want a headcanon for how he spells his name.

In Japanese sources on Samurai Jack, Aku's name is spelled アク. That's "Aku" in katakana, the character set used for things like transcribing foreign loan words and onomatopoeia—so it's suggesting that within the framework of the Japanese dub Aku's name is being treated like a foreign word/name.

However: this sometimes just kind of happens in anime/manga to make characters seem Slightly Not-From-Here And Therefore More Interesting. It sometimes happens if a series has characters with fully & obviously Japanese names but the story's not set in Japan (like, it's an alien planet or something). And in the dub, "Samurai Jack" is spelled サムライジャック (also katakana) even though "samurai" is literally just the word samurai being used with the same definition it has in Japan.

So I'm making the executive decision to discard the katakana spelling アク as simply a stylistic decision for the dub and not an actual literal indication of, like, how Aku would sign his name on an official document.

From here we're drifting from "rigorously-researched reasonable conclusions" and into "rigorously-researched subjective personal taste" so this is like, what I vibe with, you don't have to embrace my kanji choices.

Okay so the first thing to know about Japanese name spellings is that they're sort of vibes-based. There are common spellings for common names, but there are also the "his name is 'rainbow' spelled Reign-Beaux" parents who just pick out a couple kanji they like with the right pronunciation and stick them together. One name pronunciation might have several common spellings, one name spelling might have several common pronunciations, there are some kanji that have a common pronunciation used only in names and the kanji is never pronounced that way when it's not used as a name. Sometimes the kanji used in a name will have a specific meaning, and the pronunciation of that name will have a completely different meaning, because the concepts in the two meanings are tangentially related to each other.

Bottom line is, as long as there's some sort of logic to it—in how the kanji sounds, or a pun on the meaning, or something—you can do just about whatever with the spelling.

Okay so let's look at the word aku. Look at it:

悪

The kanji is made of two other kanji stacked on top of each other:

亜 心

亜 means "second-rate, inferior" and 心 means "mind, heart, spirit." (In the original Chinese character, the 亜 helped indicate how the word is pronounced and the 心 helped indicate the word's subject matter, so don't read too deep into the definition of 亜.) but anyway

it turns out, both 亜 and 心 are used in Japanese names!

When used in names, the character 亜 is usually pronounced "a". Promising!

The character 心 is not pronounced "ku".

However! The combination 亜心 has been used as a name a couple of times—pronounced "Tsugumi" and "Ako." So like, it's a rare but known name spelling. (and "Ako" is so close.)

And, just, straight up inventing pronunciations to go with the kanji you chose is legal with names. Especially if it's punny. I think "stretching one kanji out into its two base kanji to turn it into a name" ought to count as punny, I've seen Japanese puns constructed by squishing separate kanji into one kanji.

And at any rate, I think the guy whose name is literally evil-but-pronounced-wrong is probably enough of a dick to write his name as evil-but-spelled-wrong—literally just, take the character 悪 and stretch it out so it's twice as tall—and go "okay you all just have to remember how to spell my name. Deal with it."

So there's my headcanon. In the hypothetical not-magically-translated version of Samurai Jack that exists in my head, Aku spells his name—lemme see if I can trick tumblr into letting me stack the characters on top of each other without making them separate paragraphs:

亜 心

Close enough!

The overlap between "people who might conceivably someday run into Aku" and "people who don't learn how to spell their dictator's name at like age 5" is probably very very small.

But Jack's probably one of them. He was sent away from his home before Aku would have even had an opportunity to decide how to spell his own name and there weren't exactly a lot of reading materials laying around when he got back 17 years later.

So at some point Jack catches sight of Aku's name written down somewhere and squints at it and goes wait hold on all this time have I been hearing his name wrong. Is it actually A-ko. Isn't Ako a girl's name.

Or else for some reason Aku has to, like, send him a letter or something with no context (extremely important death threats maybe?) and there's no other indication of who it's from except the signature so Jack's staring at it like who the fuck is Tsugumi and why does she hate me.

"Okay now that you've come up with this big elaborate incredibly detailed headcanon for why Aku pronounces his name the way he does and how he spells it, what are you planning to use it for?" Nothing, actually. I just wanted to have a headcanon.

"So why did you spend your whole evening researching and writing this?" i d. i don't know.

[actuallyaltaria]

i taught a baking class for 12 year olds today and we made your garden variety chocolate chip cookies, but i’m a big believer in Questioning Everything and the who/what/where/why/when/how behind things, so the first part of the class was purposely letting the kids do things the wrong way, to show and explain why we do things the way we do.

“why do we bake cookies at 180 for 9 minutes when we could do 400 for 2 minutes?” -enter the godawful lump of coal with a still gross wet and uncooked inside

“why do we have to scoop out little cookies instead of doing the whole tray?” -ok well that one you can technically do if the spread is even. you just end up with one giant, structurally unsound cookie. “PLEASE CAN WE MAKE GIANT COOKIES” (we did make 1 giant tray cookie)

we talked a lot about why consistency is important, but i don’t think it really hammered home until i said “okay everyone gets ONE cookie, that’s fair, right?” and then handed out cookies of hugely varying sizes. + baked one fat lump of a cookie that still wasn’t done at the 9 minutes, vs the regular one i put in that came out charred by the time the first was actually done.

we also made a row of cookies where each one had one single differing ingredient omitted, like a cookie with no flour, or a cookie with no butter, and laid them all out on a single tray to bake together to see how each ingredient affects the outcome.

two of the little girls added cocoa to their cookie doughs until it matched the colour of each others skin to make best friend cookies, and that almost made me tear up a bit 🥺

got briefly distracted (…for over half an hour…) talking about how eggs form when someone cracked an egg and it had 2 yolks

expertly tolerated being asked how old i am (just turned 31 the other day) which was immediately followed by asking if i watched the moon landing live on tv

was so focused on keeping track of all the kids that in the end i forgot to make a cookie for myself, but it’s ok because one of the girls gave me this

tiny……….

[actuallyaltaria]

theres too many pokemon games where you play as a kid whos full of life and full of potential. there needs to be a pokemon game where you play as a college dropout who lives in a shitty apartment

[actuallyaltaria]

Maw-rch art challenge: Drednaw! 4h41! Little details I'm proud of here: neck slightly extends for extra snapping turtle-ness, all the little toes, the shell ridges, has a little tongue that can go blehhh!

This is probably the last pokemon I'll be able to make this month which would mean 3 Maw-rch March pokemon 😵‍💫