#am i another person in another language google search

[poetessgio]

being bilingual doesnt mean i can write in two languages it means i have two languages fighting inside my brain when i try to write and by fighting i mean blood on the floor of the halls in my mind

[anitalianfrie]

Hi hi I’m relatively new to MotoGP so I don’t know if you maybe made a post about this before already but! What’s the accent variety like in the Italian lads? Bc I learnt Italian for a year and I loooveee love picking apart accents and silly lil language things but I’m just not used enough to spoken Italian to identify any variation from the standard. I’ve been told tho that Bez has a notable accent but do any of the others as well?🤔

accents ask accents ask stay calm! (sorry i am. very passionate about accents) also disclaimer: i am very much not an expert! i'm just having fun here

okay so, all the italian riders (that are important to me) come from one of these three places: Emilia-Romagna, more specifically Romagna, even more specifically near Rimini*; Lazio, more specifically from Rome; Piemonte, more specifically from around Turin.

*only exception is dovi who was born a leedle more in the inland. but only a leedle.

Here's a map where I have circled the zones of interest

(yes the circle around Turin is enormous it's because I'm not searching on google maps the minuscule ass place cele lived in)

You can hear the Romagnolo accent in Bez, Vale, Enea, Luca, Dovi, Mig, with various degree of intensity. Luca is probably the one with the less strong accent, but it's still very identifiable. There are of course still some differences in the way they speak (i noticed that for some reason Vale tends to open his e more than bez, sometimes making a ⟨ɛ⟩ sound rather than a ⟨e̞⟩ sound). Their accent is caractherized mainly by the way they say the s, the z and the c, that they tend to almost hiss. Here's an example of Bez saying his surname, and somebody from another region saying it. (first the person with the other accent, then bez)

In the audio you can also hear the e thing i was talking about: in Romagna they tend to close it more then they do in some other places in the north (for example the other guy is from Lombardia)

Between all of them, Bez's accent is probably the strongest. I once said that hearing him talk feels like being slapped in the face by a piadina, and I will repeat it.

Both Franco and Diggia are from Rome, but to be honest, Franky's accent is almost unperceptible. Really difficult to clock. Diggia has a stardard Rome accent, but not that strong. People from Rome have a very distinct accent (and also probably one of the easiest to do) characterized by the frequent use of dialectal terms. You can hear it for example in the c and g, that tend to be a bit more guttural, and the l tends to become a r. Also, due to the dialect thing, they tend to cut the verbs: for example fare becomes fa', andare becomes anda'.

For the Piemontese accent, we encounter a slight problem: I am also from Piemonte, and therefore it's harder for me to clock how strong the accent is. The main thing that you can hear about this accent is the o, that tends to become more of a ou. Prime example in this baby cele clip, when he says 'porte'. Adorable. Also, around Turin they tend to close the e (while we, from the secret location i'm blogging from, tend to open them). People from Piemonte also tend to say 'neh' a lot, but I don't have clips of Cele saying it because it's quite informal. I might try do to a deep dive later. And I can't say much more about this accent because as I said, I can't really hear it.

You might have noticed that pecco is nowhere to be found in the list up until now. That's because his accent INFURIATES me. He's from Piemonte but doesn't have the accent, and instead has a slight Romagnolo accent. Here's a clip from this year's Sanremo that made me cry in pain.

Another thing you might have noticed is that the guys from the northen regions (Emilia-Romagna and Piemonte) will frequently put an article in front of people's names, even if grammatically incorrect. Il Cele. Il Bez. Il Pecco. L'Enea. Il Vale. We just do that. You will not catch Diggia ever saying it, because people from the centre and south of italy just don't. do it.

I hope this was somewhat idk. interesting? useful? if you have some more questions do ask i love to talk about these things

[the-converse-high-top]

Another Käärijä Research Project

aka: käärijä style-shifting project

as a preface, here are my (non) qualifications for this project and the circumstances under which it happened:

I am a linguistics student, and this past semester I took a course on sociolinguistics. the goal of this project was to become familiar with the concept of and analyze style-shifting (it's more commonly known as code-switching online but theres a difference and this is style-shifting), specifically by analyzing the speech of one person. We had the option to study oprah or to have someone else approved by my prof, so you know I had to ask my prof if I could study jere. This project is solely my intellectual property; even though I had a tutor help me a lot, everything written in this paper and on this post was my work alone.

now, on to the actual findings! the full paper and transcripts will be linked at the end :D

the actual variables (words or sounds) that I studied were the pronunciation of r, and use of the word "the".

to make things a lot easier from the get-go, i'm going to introduce you all to one of my favorite websites, ipachart.com (the international phonetic alphabet [ipa] chart is a big chart with an entry for every sound that exists in a language. this handy dandy website has an audio recording for each one of those sounds).

go to this website, and then scroll down to the table. go to the column labeled "post alveolar" and then click on ɾ and ɹ. those are the sounds i studied in this paper! ɾ is the finnish r and ɹ is the american r :)

so basically what i did to find instances of my variable was i just looked up a bunch of esc interviews and listened out for use of the different r sounds. i also transcribed the entire dinner date live because i love torture apparently :) the specific interviews and lives/stories are in the bibliography of the paper :p

after i transcribed all the interviews and lives/stories i went through and highlighted every instance of the r sound. then i calculated the ratios of ɾ to ɹ based on the context they were spoken in. the two contexts i looked for were formal contexts (sit-down interviews) and informal contexts (literally anything else).

i found that jere uses ɹ WAY more often in formal contexts than he does in informal contexts, and the same in reverse with ɾ.

i then went back to the transcripts and looked for all instances of the word "the". i also looked for instances where i thought it should be present, but was omitted. i calculated the ratio of present vs omitted "the"s in formal vs informal contexts and made some charts.

the graph with the smaller black section is "use of 'the' in formal settings" and the one with the smaller green section is "use of 'the' in informal settings" (the images are transparent, sorry)

i found that jere uses "the" WAY more often when in formal settings! there were also some instances where he added a "the" where it was unnecessary, which is studied at length in this wonderful paper by @alien-girl-21

something i also noticed that i elected not to study because this paper took enough energy on its own was that in formal contexts, whenever the "or" sound came in the middle or at the end of a word, jere wouldn't pronounce the r. it stuck out to me mostly because i heard words like "performance" turning into "perfomance", which i thought was an interesting quirk.

unfortunately i was somewhat limited by both my brainpower and capacity to do more work on this paper in the relatively short timeframe i was given (2 weeks) and the fact that i was given a 5 page MAX for this paper (not including a bibliography). i had a lot of fun doing this though and am definitely planning on studying jere for for academic credit again in the future if given the chance!

also i would like it to be known that i spent an hour searching for that 5 second clip of the urheilucast where jere said that he used to sell kitchens and understands english better than he can speak it.

link to a google drive folder with the actual paper i wrote and the transcripts of the interviews with notation:

please feel free to send me asks and dms with questions or comments about this paper! i absolutely love rambling about linguistics :3!!

[seekers-who-are-lovers]

Some thoughts about things on Bang Bravern… (bit long, sorry)

Why do I clock the German major general Heidemarie as a lesbian?

So what if “ga-ga-pi” is some kind of a code, similar to Morse code or the binary code? Lulu has her “ga-ga-pi.” The other Deathdrive has its “ga-ga-ga. Pi-ga-ga-ga-pi. Pi-ga-ga-pi-ga.” The sequence is different in order to convey another meaning. The only solution is how to interpret it. Or perhaps, I am just overthinking.

So what are the Death Drives?

From the series’s glossary:

Death Drives : A mysterious mechanical life form that suddenly attacked the earth. Their goal is to achieve the best "death" that each of them wants. They came to this earth around all the galaxies in search of an existence that will fulfil their wishes.

Those drives sound like a part of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis’ theory, the theory of pleasure principle (Lustprinzip).

Did Masami Obari, the director, turn to the Austrian psychoanalyst to gather the blueprint for his latest work?

(I know that Freud doesn’t have many fans among the Tumblr folks. But he “is” my neighbour. After having seen “Freud’s Vanished Neighbors” and read an article that the Viennese didn’t accept him as part of the community because he was not born in Austria and had Jewish family, and was still referred to as “Zugeraster,” a derogatory term for an outsider, he earned my respect and like everyone who was born centuries ago had other mentality that was not at all fitting in the modern era.)

Deathdrives, or death drives, in Freudian psychoanalytical universe, mean Thanatos, Todestrieb in German, is a term that describes: the drive toward death and destruction, often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness.

From Freud’s book, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” :

Our departure point was the great antithesis of life drives and death drives. Object-love itself shows us a second such polarity – that of love (affection) and hate (aggression). What if we succeeded in connecting these two polarities, what if we succeeded in tracing one back to the other! We have always acknowledged a sadistic component in the sexual drive; as we know, this component can develop a life of its own and turn into a perversion that dominates a person's entire sexual life. It also occurs as a dominant partial drive in one of those forms of organization of sexual life that I have termed ‘pre-genital’. But how could we possibly suppose that the sadistic drive, which aims to harm its object, derives from Eros, the preserver of life? Isn't it altogether plausible to suppose that this sadism is actually a death drive that has been ousted from the ego at the instance of the narcissistic libido, and as a result only becomes apparent in conjunction with the object?

So you have the enemies, the Death Drives, ready to destroy the humans, and Bravern on the other with the quality of being the Eros. The sentient robot’s ethos is to save the humanity first. All the while obsessing with his pilot, Ao Isami. Obsession and kindness overlapping.

@whypolar analysed their names, then doing some googling of the meanings of both Isami and Lewis’ names, it seems the two share the same description. Yours truly is not at all a Japanese language expert, this website suggests that Isami has 21 variations in kanji.

勇 means "bravery, courage."

Brave - Showing courage and strength in the face of danger or difficulty.

Daring - Willing to take risks and try new things.

Strong - Having great physical or mental power.

Courageous - Having or showing courage in the face of danger or difficulty.

Resolute - Firmly determined to do something.

Soldier - A person who serves in an army.

It describes Isami’s personality perfectly!

Lewis, on the other hand…

From the celebrated author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, to lauded actor Daniel-Day Lewis, a boy called Lewis is in good company! Lewis is of German origin and means "Renowned warrior." It has many variations in Latin, French, and Gaelic languages that all point to the same sentiment of “strength” and “courage”. With the name Lewis, you can hope to instill your baby boy with a fearless optimism for life.

All three of them—Bravern, Isami and Lewis—are “strong and courageous.”

[marsupialmenace]

I am incredibly tired and unwell, but I think I've finally cracked so this is very much a vent post, BUT:

I desperately want to take "Romani Dick Grayson" away from fans until they can learn to be nice. Specifically non-Romani fans.

I've seen so many terrible, invalidating, frankly stereotypical and racist takes from people who are 'claiming to be sensitive' to Romani people.

I don't particularly get upset about peoples headcanons, or the desire for diversity (because I have those desires/HCs too!). It's when I see the 'has to' or people arguing their headcanons about Dick's Romani heritage without the experience or the knowledge to do so beyond their five-minute google search that I get upset.

I saw a nice piece of fanart before that had Dick drawn tanned, and it had a reply on it to the effect of "thank you for drawing Dick brown, he's romani." It makes me sad to see people say things like that, that 'Dick has to be brown', because my pale white ass is also Romani. However, on the flipside, if someone draws him too pale, I see people attack the artists and calling them racist in vagueposts for drawing him 'wrong' (white-appearing) despite it being completely possible for a Romani person to be white.

In another place I saw someone refer to the Graysons as 'definitely travellers, so they couldn't be Romanichal'. Are you saying that Romanichal (English Romani people) are less Romani? I don't really understand the need to exclude other Romani people from the 'list Dick could be descended from' based on...whether on not you (royal) consider them 'travellers'.

Not to mention, the word 'Travellers'. Travellers is used in a derogatory way to the Romanichal in the UK, or at least in my area it is, there is a turn of phrase to avoid calling someone a slur in public, people say "Oh, that ones a travelling girl" or "They're travellers" and it has all of the implications with it.

Romani people are diverse, and we're not limited to a skin colour or religion, we all have different culture and traditions and languages, yet I see people insisting Dick has to fit into a box of a 'specific Romani'.

I don't really care for it in fic, I filter out the 'Dick Grayson is Romani' tag. I don't care for it in comics, because it has always been done poorly. I don't care about peoples HC's, 'cause even if I disagree, they can't affect me.

But to see real people talk about a comic book character using words, stereotypes, and phrases that hurts other real Romani people to attack or build up their own worlds/HCs is just so frustrating.

[jess-moloney]

I just had an anon bring up a good point but I am not going to publish the anon. The reason being that some of the language used in it is not something I want to put on this blog. It's nothing that offends me. However, I get enough hate as it is and I think there are nicer ways to phrase what this person said. Since I'm trying to avoid hate at all costs I will just rephrase and address it as I think they made good points.

The anon pointed out that tattoos are expensive. They aren't wrong. I have a few tattoos myself. Not a tonne but enough to know they can get pricey. Even small ones are going to be $150 or so. Jess has almost her entire body covered (as the anon pointed out). This is going to range into the thousands or even tens of thousands all depending on where Jess got the tattoos, how much she was charged for them etc.

Then we have to look at the surgery she more than likely had done. A quick Google search says that buccal fat removal (on average) can cost anywhere between $2000 to $5000 dollars but it can go up to $20,000. This all depends on the place you go, if there are any complications, how much you want removed etc.

The average cost of lip filler injections seems to be around $1000 dollars and that's something she'd have to keep getting because over time filler migrates.

Cheek fillers which she's more than likely getting can be anywhere between $500-$1000 per syringe used. There could be multiple used to get the look she wants.

The total price of breast implants can range from $5,100 to $19,000 on average, but once again it could be a lot more based on what surgeon you go to and if there are any complications.

This is all just stuff that's kind of obvious that she's had done. She's also potentially done other things to her face like a facelift. It definitely looks like she's getting Botox. So we are looking a lot of money here just to transform her face. Then add that to the cost of all her tattoos and the fact that she will constantly have to get the ones on her hands touched up. Less than getting it the first time but still a couple hundred dollars every few months, along with the lip fillers and the other injections.

The average salary for a talent manager in the UK (when she'd have been working at Donna Management) is about $60,000 per year. Then, she left that job and was....well I don't know what she was doing but I doubt she was making millions. As the anon pointed out this leaves a big open question to how (in this period of time) did she afford what had to be hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of surgery and tattoos. On her former salary she couldn't have been saving much and living comfortably. She was probably making even less than that when she started her own company to "freelance".

So, as the anon also pointed out there's only a few options we can consider here. One of them is having a sugar daddy, another one is scamming people out of money, and yet another one is sleeping with people in exchange for money, goods, or services. I suppose it's possible she had something resembling a trust fund or her father gave her a bunch of money to ruin her face and body, so that's another option but she wouldn't have made the money herself. It would have had to come from another source.

Now we have to consider that she's had all of this done, all of the upkeep and management. Even if she still is a talent manager currently (and we know she's not because she doesn't even have a license to be one) we are looking at thousands a month in maintenance based on the injections she needs to get, the skin care products she apparently uses, the hair care and hair extension stuff, and the tattoo touch ups. Even if she is working some level of job she's not affording all of this by herself. There's no way Jamie isn't the one footing the bill for it now and god only knows what else she needs in her life.

Since we know Jess isn't a millionaire with a million dollar successful talent agency and she never was one with the jobs she had before this...it does make me wonder how she ever afforded all these body modifications in the first place, who paid for them, how, and why she went to such extreme lengths to make herself look less beautiful than she already did. I guess the take away point from all of this is Jess has set up her entire life to have other people buy her things. Jamie is more of a wallet to her than a boyfriend.

[isabelleffe]

my tumblr masterlist

sims 4

ellie williams & dina woodward in sims 4

tlou part 2 farmhouse progress

misc posts about palestine made by me

pro-palestinian music artists

list of pro-palestinian and pro-isnotreal celebrities (i’m trying to edit this post whenever i find out new information)

Fundraiser for Alaa Abu Matar’s family in Gaza

Video from Alaa Abu Matar

Second update about Alaa Abu Matar and his family

art

asking for help with watermarks (not a post of my art, just asking for tips)

general rules/DNI

DNI homophobes, transphobes (including terfs), misogynists, anyone who doesn't consider themself a feminist, zionists, racists, pro-shippers, neil druckmann supporters, AI "artists," doxxers, people who defend predators/abusers, people who sexualize minors/animals/violence, people who objectify characters/real people, people who write smut about real people, etc.

do not DM me anything sexual, it makes me uncomfortable (& i will block you).

my account is sfw so i do not mind anyone 13+ looking at my posts but if you're younger than that get off Tumblr (please).

do not re-upload my posts (unless they are the posts about Palestine, i do not mind if you copy and paste those elsewhere).

random post list & extra information about me/my tumblr under the cut-off!

random posts

random post about being at a wnba game

photos of emily engstler from wnba game

rant/asking for help about searching wnba on tumblr

phoebe bridgers sleep music

problematic tlou fanart

extra information about me & my tumblr

this is the only blog of mine that i am active on.

i speak english but can read a bit of spanish (i am still learning), however if someone sends me a DM in another language i will try and use google translate to respond (however that never seems to work well).

i am an artist but i don't post my TLOU fanart on social media anywhere due to mainly using my personal art Instagram (which is not linked anywhere on this Tumblr) for "original" art (aka not fanart). it also is hard to post art online now due to how many websites are stealing art to "train AI."

the majority of my reposts are about Palestine/Congo/Sudan and i do not think that will change any time soon (because i only want to repost information that i think is important). if you are uneducated about Palestine/Congo/Sudan, please look through the accounts i have reposted or look at journalists from those places. my intention is only to amplify their voices, not to speak over them. additionally, i intend to use the tags relating to those places so people have more access to information regarding them (via my posts that list journalists from palestine or reposts).

if i post something that sounds "weird" tone wise it may be due to my autism (because that makes it harder for me to read tone and express my feelings with the correct tone when writing & speaking).

i will edit this post over time (as most people do with their masterlists). all of my posts should be sfw (at least they are right now).

[stellerssong]

Hi again. I'm on some level here to ask for a complete explanation of every aspect of Hawaiian culture that is even tangentially related to your latest fic because I know absolutely nothing and there is the ever present concern that the terms run through cursory Google Translate and internet searching will lose nuance and implications. There were definitely some references to divinities and myths and such that went over my unenlightened head. The story you wove was rich and intricate enough to be held in the mind of someone who knows less than nothing and still have great meaning and truth, but I know that it will mean yet more if I can see the threads you used to make it. (On another level, I'm asking for the explanation because I am abruptly deeply interested in a topic I had previously not thought about very much, and you seem to be significantly more of an expert than the average internet search.)

first off! well first off i am blowing you so many kisses for this very kind ask, thank you so much for giving me an excuse to ramble at (great, great, great) length.

so second off! i would just like to stress that i am very much not an expert in hawaiian language, folklore, history, culture, etc. i am neither kānaka maoli (native hawaiian) nor kamaʻāina (born in hawaiʻi although not necessarily of hawaiian ancestry), and i have not studied these topics formally/in a setting that applies academic rigor. i am an enthusiastic amateur with a personal connection to hawaiian culture, the kind of brain that likes to fixate on areas of interest, and a willingness to scrounge around for reading material. i have, i think, a decent sense of what some of the baseline texts in the field are, and a fairly good bullshit detector (and the understanding/ability to dig into things when i can't rely on the bullshit detector), but ultimately i am a layman and an outsider with corresponding perspectives and biases. i also, i will admit frankly, have a pretty sharp knowledge cutoff corresponding to the time of first european contact, just because of my own personal interests and reading preferences.

read that whole disclaimer? let your eyes glaze over while you skimmed it? good! here's my real quick (lmao) rundown of Sum Things U Should Know If You Wanna Close-Read Kīpuka:

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi 101

Good grief when I put it like that I do NOT feel qualified to tell you any of this. Anyway. We can keep it basic just so you can get a sense of the mouthfeel of the words. And just fyi ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi is the proper name of the language; i'll be using "Hawaiian" as the adjective form, sans ʻokina, assuming an English-speaking readership.

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi as it is commonly rendered today has 13 letters: 5 vowels (A, E, I, O, and U) and 7 consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W), plus the ʻokina or glottal stop (that little apostrophe-lookin' dude at the beginning of the word ʻokina, also the source of most of my typesetting woes). Pronunciation-wise, there are no silent letters and no though/through/enough-type surprises: every letter is pronounced, and all of the vowel renderings are approximately equivalent to how you'd pronounce them in Spanish or Italian. Hence, the word kuahine = koo-ah-HEE-nay rather than, like, kyoo-ah-highn, which made me feel gross even just typing it out.

The ʻokina is pronounced, and bear with me here, like the dash in the english nuh-uh. or, if you're a try-hard vocalist—reattack the vowel after the ʻokina instead of eliding it to the vowel prior. So the place-name Kaʻū is pronounced ka-OO, as distinct from the word kau which is pronounced more like kow (which is a bit of an oversimplification of the latter word, but I'm trying to be efficient here).

That leads us neatly into the other diacritical marking used in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, the kahakō or macron which helpfully appears in its own name. No worries here; the kahakō just serves as a stress marker, so you'd say kahakō = ka-ha-KO instead of ka-HA-ko, or from the example above ka-OO rather than KA-oo.

There are a couple of other little pronunciation tricks here and there. The letter W is sometimes pronounced as a V, and unfortunately I can't really describe the rules for that shift; that is one I must admit I know mostly from vibes. For example, the correct pronunciation of Hawaiʻi itself is ha-VAI-ee, but I've never heard the place-name Waimea pronounced as anything but why-MEY-ah.

Occasionally you will encounter the letter K pronounced as a T, which I believe is an artifact of the morphological shift from older related languages such as Tahitian and Samoan which do preserve the letter T as a unique phoneme. To my knowledge, the Kauaʻi dialect (spoken today on Niʻihau) also preserves the T, but most spoken ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi heard elsewhere is based on the Big Island dialect, which lacks the T. One notable exception is the word tūtū (an affectionate/respectful term for a grandparent or elder), which you really don't hear pronounced as kūkū.

Really, though, listening to Hawaiian music is how I got the language in my ear and imo it's the best way to get it in yours. Can't go wrong with Israel Kamakawiwoʻole (of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" fame), but I have a personal soft spot for Kealiʻi Reichel, Weldon Kekauoha, Amy Hanaialiʻi, and the Cazimero Brothers.

The Place-y-ness of Hawaiian Literature

This is more of a sidenote than its own heading, but I'm the one driving the essay, and I think it's an interesting thing to point out, just because it helps establish a particular perspective I wanted to keep in mind while writing this fic.

Something you might notice as you start to look at Hawaiian oli, mele, and myth is the high level of specificity of place. Hawaiʻi is, let's be honest, not that enormous of a place when you consider it on a global scale—but the specificity of localities within Hawaiian literature is kind of astounding. Not only are there loads of place-names referenced in any given work, there are unique Hawaiian names for landmarks, cliffs, peaks, hills, streams, waterfalls—even rains and winds of specific locations merit their own names.

"kīpuka" is very specifically set on the windward side of Hawaiʻi island, so I made an effort to focus my references to place-names on that region—Hilo, ʻŌlaʻa, and Waiākea are all locations on the eastern side of the island, and the one reference to Kona on the leeward side reflects the coming of someone bearing grievances (in addition to eia aʻe ka makani Kona being an existing idiom warning the listener to watch out for an angry person, the windward and leeward sides of Hawaiʻi island have a long history of territorial warfare and jockeying for control of the island). I'd also considered having the bird discussed in the fic be a different species, the kākāwahie—but that species is/was endemic to Molokaʻi, and quite honestly my knowledge of the history and culture of Molokaʻi as a separate polity is not that great.

(This is partly due to sample bias—my introduction to Hawaiʻi was within a Big Island-based context. At the same time, another thing you may notice about the better-known source texts is that many of them center around Hawaiʻi island and, to a lesser extent, Maui, thanks to the political supremacy during the unification/post-contact era of Hawaiʻi island and Maui aliʻi. Ross Cordy wrote a whole ass book about the Oʻahu chiefdoms that is simply not to be had for love or money no matter how I search for it. I am THIS CLOSE to straight up cold emailing the man and being like I WILL VENMO YOU $75 USD DIRECTLY IF YOU WILL SIMPLY JUST SEND ME A COPY OF YOUR BOOK. PLEASE. SAVE ME ROSS CORDY.)

Girl (Gender Neutral), I Cannot Explain Hawaiian Mythology, Poetics, and Mythopoetics As a Subheading in One Post

Honestly. I can't do it. But some tidbits to assist your further research:

A great deal of Hawaiian literature and oral tradition hinges on kaona, roughly "allusion" or "metaphor." In a description that is useful to precisely no one but myself, it's not unlike the complex plays on words, puns, and deep well of references used in Heian Japanese epistolary poetry. Some of it is easy to grok for newbies: for example, the concept of one's lover as a lei adorning the body, or being splashed or sprinkled with water as a euphemism for sex. Some of it goes a lot deeper, relying on historical or folkloric place-name associations, puns, and ancient practices and superstitions.

The Hawaiian "pantheon" I place in scare quotes because ancient Hawaiian religious practices and superstition were highly syncretic, often extremely localized, and more contradictory the more you read into it. In a very, very, very, VERY rough and off-the-cuff sense, though, there were thought to be four major gods: Kāne (associated with dawn, the sun, the sky, running freshwater, and irrigation-based agriculture, among other things), Kanaloa (associated with the ocean, sea creatures, and sometimes death, as an opposing or complimentary force to Kāne), Lono (god of fertility, agriculture with something of an emphasis on dryland agriculture, rainfall, and peace as embodied in the Makahiki festival), and Kū (god of war, the deified kingship, fishermen, sorcery, and quite honestly a ton of other things in various manifestations).

There were also quite a large number of "lesser" gods, the word "lesser" used just in the sense that they weren't honored to the same extent as the four previously named in state-sanctioned religious practice. Probably the most well-known of these is Pele, the volcano goddess. (I reference another in the fic, Niolopua, god of sleep—but the jury's out on whether or not that refers to an actual god or is just metaphorical in the same way that most people think of "the Sandman" as a euphemism for sleep and not a literal guy who comes into your house and puts crusties in your eyes.)

The gods were thought to manifest in a variety of forms, called kino lau (literally "four hundred bodies"). You can think of this in the sense of "Lono takes on the shape of an albatross or a tropicbird to interact with mortals, while Kanaloa prefers to manifest as an octopus," and in stories kino lau are sometimes represented that way, but in practice it's less of a Greek myth-style practice of shapeshifting and more of an animistic religious belief. The kino lau in nature embody the god and in a metaphorical sense illustrate the interconnection between divine and earthly and the presence of the divine on earth.

(HUGE OVERSIMPLIFICATION. HUGE OVERSIMPLIFICATION. PLEASE DO MORE RESEARCH AND DO NOT TAKE ONE TUMBLR POST AT ITS WORD ON THIS.)

The Endless, in the fic, are very easy to loop into the concept of kino lau, because of their canonical universality. Danny appears as a shark (a symbol of chiefhood), a pueo, or Hawaiian owl (an 'aumakua, or ancestral guardian), a manu-o-Kū, or fairy tern (a bird associated with the god Kū, likely in his aspect as a god of fishermen, navigators, and wayfinders), a kalo plant (a staple crop of ancient Hawaiʻi, a kino lau of Kāne, and a symbol of duality and rebirth), and a snowcapped mountain (a sacred site considered kapu, or forbidden, to all but the highest chiefly individuals). Despair, meanwhile, appears as an ʻalae ʻula, or Hawaiian moorhen (another ʻaumakua, but also an animal whose cry was thought to foretell misfortune), a stingray (for her barbed tail), a hāpuʻu fern (in contrast to Dream's kalo, the hāpuʻu was considered a famine food), a lava flow and its first growths (acknowledging Pele as both a destroyer and a creator of land, just as Despair also embodies hope), and a number of other things meant to embody the devastation of Hawaiʻi (rats, feral pigs, and mosquitoes have decimated endemic birds and insects; the kiawe is an invasive plant species that forms dense, thorny, and difficult-to-destroy groves; light pollution affects behavior and migratory patterns of both avian and aquatic species).

All pretty simple, obviously!

Further Resources and Recs

Okay, so, obviously I'm not going to be able to explain every single reference in this fic in a single post, though I obviously tried my damnedest. In lieu of that, I'll offer some useful resources for further reading:

Stephen Trussel's Combined Hawaiian Dictionary is a fantastic resource for vocab that incorporates several major Hawaiian dictionaries in a straightforward (well, as straightforward as this gets) text-based web page. Ulukau also has a searchable interface, which is a little easier to interact with, but I like having the Trussel for reference.

Huapala is everyone's go-to for translations of Hawaiian lyrics. I've linked to it in the endnotes of the fic for readers interested in more on "Ka Ipo Lei Manu," but it's got nearly any ʻauana-style Hawaiian song you please, and if I recall correctly even a few traditional oli. Again, another slightly old-fashioned text-based site—but we all know how to use CMD + F in a page, do we not?

Native Books is awesome if you, like me, prefer reading things in print but would prefer not to feed your dollars into the maw of the Amazon beast. A lot of the lit on Hawaiʻi was printed either a long time ago or in very small releases and is now out-of-print and difficult to find even in libraries, so it rocks that there's an independent bookseller that specializes in getting those works to an audience in hard copy. @ NATIVE BOOKS PLEASE CONSIDER GETTING ROSS CORDY TO RE-PRINT THE RISE AND FALL OF THE OʻAHU KINGDOM THANK YOU SO MUCH. University of Hawaiʻi Press is also a good source for academic texts, although their website is...mm...difficult to navigate, and do be warned that they charge academic press prices.

In terms of who to read, you really can't go wrong with Mary Kawena Pukui, a Native Hawaiian scholar, author, composer, and educator whose work is the backbone of just, a fuckton of writing about Hawaiʻi, both academic and popular. Her book ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings is worth at least a skim just to get the feel of the Hawaiian mindset; it also contains a healthy dose of myth, folklore, and history in the explanations of the sayings. Absolutely adorably, I've found two books she edited that I read the absolute FUCK out of as a child available as PDFs through Ulukau: The Water of Kāne and Other Legends of the Hawaiian Islands and Hawaiʻi Island Legends: Pīkoi, Pele, and Others. Definitely worth a quick read if you want more on the myth side of things.

As a non-specialist, I've really enjoyed Patrick Vinton Kirch's writing on precontact Hawaiʻi. For a field archaeologist, his writing is both highly engaging and very respectful of the peoples he studies, and trust me, I do get my back up easily when it comes to white people writing about Other Cultures TM, so I'd posit it means something that he passes my sniff test. A Shark Going Inland is My Chief is a great overview of the history of the Hawaiian chiefdoms from the first settlement of the islands to immediately precontact, and Kuaʻāina Kahiko offers a bit of a closer look at everyday life in a specific locality in the islands (in this case, Kahikinui, Maui).

Kamehameha and His Warrior Kekūhaupiʻo by Stephen Desha (trans. Frances N. Frazier) began its life as a serialized Hawaiian-language history of the rise of Kamehameha I. It's a dense read, and it WILL test your ability to remember who the hell all these people are to its limit—it mostly discusses the lives and times of the major players of the aliʻi class in the late precontact–early postcontact era, and when you remember that a) a hell of a lot of personal names in this tale begin with the letter K and b) the aliʻi class of Hawaiʻi practiced a mindboggling amount of political marriage, consanguineous marriage, and sanctioned adoption between blood relatives, the family trees get real complicated REAL fast. If you can hang on through all that, though, it's an intensely detailed and very vivid portrait of a culture at a tumultuous moment, it gives a great sense of how the Hawaiians viewed themselves and the world, and it's an interesting exercise in the mythologizing of the Kamehameha dynasty.

Okay, So...?

So...if you hung on through all that, god DAMN are you dedicated. Have what is quite possibly my favorite Hawaiian song for your trouble. It is, funnily enough, about a bird.

EDIT: I am retroactively making this post unrebloggable. I'm really, really glad folks have found it interesting and are looking into the resources I shared, but I absolutely do not want this getting passed around as Hawaiian Culture 101. If you want to learn more about Hawaiʻi, I must stress that you should look to a reputable source and not some schmuck on Tumblr rambling about her effortposting fanned fiction.

[gisellelx]

Voice Lessons, Part 2: That's Intense

Voice Lessons, Part 1

One of the fastest changing parts of English are intensifiers. This is probably not a category you learned in English grammar; if you learned them at all, they were under the general category of adjectives and adverbs. Intensifiers are the way we indicate how "intense" a particular thing is: you can run kinda fast, or you can run very fast, or you can run extremely fast, and in each case, the intensifier is telling you just how fast you're running.

So voice tip 2: using different intensifiers can drastically change the age, gender, ethnicity or other social group of the character you're writing

Intensifiers vary a lot across regions and language varieties—if you're a southern Californian, for instance, you might have encountered hella, an intensifier which had a brief spread further north and throughout the USA, but which has ultimately stayed pretty focused among a particular subset of southern Californians. Or if you are a speaker of African American English, you might have encountered mad in constructions like, "That's mad cool," or "That movie was mad popular."

They also vary a lot across age. Older people are more likely to use certain intensifiers and younger people use different ones. For instance, one that is currently being charted as on the rise is super, which is an intensifier I use extensively--I come home and my dog is "super happy to see me" or I'm "super excited" about what I'm going to teach this week. But someone much older than me (and I'm not particularly young!) is not super likely to use super; they are much more likely to use something like really or very.

Picking the right intensifier for the character you're writing is an instant way to make them sound like they are from the age or region you want, or part of the community group you want. Conversely, picking the wrong one, even if everything else you write sounds on point, can throw a reader out of the character's voice.

Intensifiers are the #1 thing I edit after writing a post on the ole' sideblog. I am a user of so, really, and very often these days, super. But none of those are right for a nearly 400-year-old person who is a different gender than I am. So I often go back in and change things like really and sometimes even very to older intensifiers like quite or rather. (Rather is also more common in British English, and so it rings a little differently to an American reading ear.) Contrast that to if I am voicing Renesmee in 2023, who is a Gen Zer—she's going to be a super speaker or a so speaker, more often than not, and she needs to sound a little younger than I am! So I use the intensifiers that are most on the cutting edge. It's a very easy, and subtle, way to make a speaker sound like they are from the group they're from.

How do you figure out what intensifier a character would use? There are also a couple of tools you can use. A favorite free one is Google NGram, which will show you the frequency of words in books published since the 1800s. It can give a quick view of a flipping point, such as with really and rather which switched top spots sometime in the 2000s.

The Corpus of Contemporary American English/Corpus of Historical American English is another great source for finding out how words are trending: a free account allows you a few limited searches for trends, like this one for really that shows it's mostly used in spoken language, and is on a slight rise since 1990.

But the top tool is one is a good rule for writing more generally—make sure you listen! Take note of the way that people around you sound, and think about it in relation to the characters you are writing. If you're writing an older character, well, you want to think about the things your parents or even grandparents say that confuse you or doesn't sound the same way that you do. Those are the kinds of things you want to put in as a writer—they'll give your character a sense of remove or age. Same thing in the other direction—a younger character right now might be "super into that" whereas an older character might be "so into that" and a really old character might be "very much into that." (And probably doesn't use into that at all.)

Intensifiers are a super fast (see what I did there?) way to change the voice of a character from young to old, from one gender to another, from one ethnic group to another. They are well worth paying attention to so that you end up with a voice that makes sense for whomever you're writing. And if you just went "hmm that's weird" when you read "whomever you're writing"...well that's going to be Voice Lesson #3.

[tmarshconnors]

100 questions Q&A about me

Now, I thought it would be a good activity to do 100 questions Q&A about me so I searched on Google "100 Questions For Your Get To Know Me Tag"

Are you a morning or night person? Night. I hate mornings.

Are you afraid of the dark? No. Never have been.

Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Introvert.

Are you double-jointed? No.

Are you left or right-handed? Right-handed.

Are you more of a tidy person or a messy one? Tidy. I am pretty much OCD if something isn't in the right place.

Are you on time or always late? On-time. I am normally early by about 10 mins or so.

Are you ticklish? Ticklish.

Can you curl your tongue? Yes.

Can you ice skate? No.

Can you wiggle your ears? No.

Coffee or tea? Tea.

Cookies, cake or doughnuts? Cake.

Did you ever participate in a talent show? No.

Did you go to prom? No.

Did you like school? No.

Do you believe in ghosts? No.

Do you bite your nails? Yes.

Do you consider yourself a good cook? No.

Do you enjoy dancing? No.

Do you enjoy DIY or crafts? No.

Do you forgive easily? No

Do you have a nickname? Yes. I have two. Apple and Phoenix

Do you have any allergies? No

Do you have any phobias? No

Do you have any piercings or tattoos? No

Do you have children? No

Do you have pets? No

Do you have siblings? No

Do you prefer dogs or cats? Dogs

Do you prefer Mac or a PC? Mac

Do you prefer the beach or the mountains? Mountains

Do you prefer to bathe or shower? Shower

Do you sing in the shower? No

Do you smoke? No

Do you speak any different languages? No

Do you still have your wisdom teeth? Yes

Do you still watch cartoons? No

Do you/have you played any sports? No, I don't play sports anymore but I use to play Golf.

Does your name have a special meaning? No

Have you ever been hospitalized? Yes. I had my appendix out a few years ago.

Have you ever been on a diet? No

Have you ever been to a concert? Yes

Have you ever gone camping? Yes

Have you ever met any celebrities? No

Have you ever skipped class? Yes

Have you ever won something? Yes

Have you had braces? No

How are you feeling right now? Tired

How tall are you? 5.6

If money were no object what would you get for your next birthday? Another custom Xbox controller

If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be? Japan

Were you ever a scout or a brownie? Scout

What city were you born in? Chichester 

What did you last eat? Corn flakes

What did you want to be when you were younger? Fireman

What do you do on a typical Friday night? Gaming

What is one food that you refuse to eat? Squash

What is one item on your bucket list? Visit Japan

What is one item you can’t live without? My glasses

What is your shoe size? 7

What movie have you watched repeatedly? The Great Escape

What phone do you have (Apple or Android)? Apple

What should you be doing right now? Going to bed it's (5.10am)

What’s one goal you would like to accomplish this year? Read a few books.

What’s one of your pet peeves? Gate Lice

What’s the last song you listened to? Jan Hammer - Crockett's Theme

What’s the most expensive item of clothing that you own? One of my leather jackets

What’s the thing you can’t leave the house without? My iPhone

What’s your best physical feature? My eyes

What’s your Chinese sign? Roster

What’s your current obsession? Battered Mushrooms

What’s your dream car? 911 GT3 RS - Porsche

What’s your favourite animal? Don't have one

What’s your favourite book? Don't have one

What’s your favourite colour? Blood Red

What’s your favourite dessert? Raspberry Cheesecake

What’s your favourite drink? Lemonade with ice.

What’s your favourite food? Anything spicy

What’s your favourite foreign food? Chilli Chicken

What’s your favourite gadget? Currently, it's my Macbook Pro

What’s your favourite hobby? Gaming

What’s your favourite movie? Lost In Translation

What’s your favourite restaurant? Don't have one

What’s your favourite sandwich? BLT

What’s your favourite season? Winter

What’s your favourite series? House Of Cards (US)

What’s your favourite snack? Chocolate Digestive Biscuits

What’s your favourite sport to watch? Hockey

What’s your favourite thing to have for breakfast? A full English or egg on toast

What’s your full name? TMarsh-Connors

What’s your longest relationship so far? Eight Years and 2 months

What’s your lucky number? 7

What’s your star sign? Pisces

When is your birthday? 4th March 1993

Which city did you grow up in? Arundel

Which city do you live in now? Littlehampton

Who do you miss right now? My girlfriend

Who is your celebrity crush? Don't have one

Who’s your favourite fictional character? Frank Underwood.

[arecaceae175]

Serious question ( and I hope it’s not offensive, I certainly don’t intend to be offensive…)

As a person with a native language that doesn’t offer many gender neutral terms or pronouns ( German) would it be okay to just use the first name/pseudonym instead?

For example:

Mel likes flowers, Mel likes roses more than other flowers.

What other options would you prefer?

( again, I don’t intend to be offensive, I just want to know what people that have pronouns that won’t work in my native language would be comfortable with me using instead. And I realize that may be different from person to person.)

Hi. I only fluently speak one language so I am not the expert on this topic. I have done some research and I will include other sources to back up what I’m saying here. If anyone who speaks multiple languages wants to chime in on this I would greatly appreciate your input!

So, first of all, there is no good excuse to not use someone pronouns. If someone exclusively uses my name solely to avoid using my pronouns, I find that offensive. That tells me the person either does not believe or support me and my identity, or they are not willing to put in the small effort to learn a new set of pronouns. It can be as simple as googling pronoun usage if you’re unsure about them.

If you’re speaking or typing in English, you should be using someone’s pronouns.

Now, I don’t want to diminish the difficulty of speaking in a language that is not your first. I understand that it is very difficult and it is especially difficult to use neopronouns in another language if you have not been exposed to them before. But you should still try. The easiest way to be an ally to the queer community is to use the language we use for ourselves.

I don’t know how my specific set of pronouns would translate to German because I don’t speak German. Since German and English use the same alphabet, I would recommend just taking the English pronoun and using it in the place where you would use a German pronoun.

There are neopronouns and gender neutral pronouns in German. Again, I do not speak German so I am not claiming to know more than you or to be an expert in this. But I did some searching online and I found multiple sources talking about alternate pronouns in German. I can’t read German, so I am not 100% sure what they say. Some of the websites have an English counterpart that explains neopronouns, so I assume the site is doing the same thing when I switch to German. I am sure there are more German sources for gender neutral pronouns if you look at German queer sources.

Here are some sources you can read to become more familiar with neopronouns in German:

Non-binary pronouns

Pronouns page

Exploring Genderqueer Identity Within Gendered German

It is always best to ask someone directly if you have questions about their pronouns. Some people might be okay with you using their name instead, but I am not. Also, some people prefer no pronouns, so in that case you would use their name like that.

Here is a guide to neopronouns I made to help you learn about them and learn how to practice them.

As long as you’re genuinely trying, I will not be offended if you mess up my pronouns. I know mine can take some time to learn if you have never seen neopronouns before.

But I deserve your effort, and so other queer people.

[ly0nstea]

i actually am irish 😹 irish isnt a race and therefore cannot face actual racial oppression at least not since nearing a century ago; and even then i wouldnt have considered it racism, just prejudice. irish people have always been white even if deemed lesser than due to heritage. it isnt american to say white people cannot face racism

Congrats you know nothing about your own history heres a quick google search for you seeing as you cant do it yourself

Irish people werent always considered white, A) because whiteness is only a few hundred years old and B) because its factually untrue, irish people werent white till the ~60s. Also "its not racism just prejudice" is a weird hill to die on minimising your own historical marginalisation? Bootlicking behaviour. Why don't you go lick Charles' boot while your at it if you want to do so much British Apologeia.

what is the prejudice based on? If not race and ethnicity?

"Not since nearly a century ago" lmao alright what about the famine? The penal laws? The 700 years of british oppression before your arbitrary cut off point?

You seem to be under the false assumption that race is a real thing that exists when its not, no one has "always been white" because whiteness didn't always exist. The spartans and gauls and no notion of whiteness, who is part of what race changes based on location and time. Is turkey asian or european? Is russia asian or european? Is someone who's half white considered white enough to get the priveleges of whiteness? What about 25% or 75%? At what point does their whiteness disappear? Are the Spanish white? All geographical notions should tell you yes but they aren't pale at all a lot of spaniards don't look very white, not as white as a german or brit. Is there degrees of whiteness? Can one person be more white than another? 0 of these questions have a consistent answer, ask 100 people youll get 100 different responses because its not a real things that actually exists, that goes for all classification of anything, what diffrentiates species of ants? Its arbitrary. Whats the difference between a language and a dialect? Politics and borders. They only exist because we say it exists and to a degree ant species and language vs. Dialect distinctions are useful to us. Is whiteness useful? Just because youre white now doesnt mean youll be white forever, Irish people, like Jews and Roma and Travellers are conditionally white. We're white now, at this very moment, but the moment it become disadvantageous for us to be white you'll lose all the privelege you're trying to cling to.

What do you have in common with a white person in Germany, or America, or France? Nothing more than melanin levels. What do you have in common with a non-white Irish person? A common home, an interest in making that home better. Ask yourself which one of those matters more to you we'll see how steadfast you are in wanting to be white so badly.

[bestanimatedmovie]

Sorry in advance for dragging on the Wes Anderson discourse, and sorry if this is the wrong place to send this!

I am definitely not here to try to defend his honor or something - even as a kid I found it weird how his live action films seem to be filled with white people - but I finally read that Isle of Dogs article you linked and found it… strange.

The author of the article critiques the supposed disregard for the Japanese language demonstrated by the title, when plenty of articles written by Japanese journalists point out it’s a pun referencing a demon island in a well-known folktale. She has also decided that there is a racist stereotype that Chinese people eat dogs, and China is also in Asia, therefore Anderson can’t differentiate between Asians and that the film portrays the Japanese as dog-haters? (It doesn’t.)

The sushi preparation scene appears to be pretty much universally praised, with comments in the youtube clip linked in her article even pointing out cultural details foreigners might have missed, but the author seems to believe the scene portrays the Japanese as “cruel savages”. I don’t know, a lot of the points in the article, at least in its Isle of Dogs part, feel like weird projection.

The more general criticisms – the white savior stuff and not subtitling Japanese – I get, even if I don’t completely agree with them (Tracy felt more like a self-deprecating stereotype of an American busybody who accomplishes very little, and the fallibility and subjectivity of translation is a major theme of the movie. International audiences get the basic dog story with some simple outside exposition, while Japanese viewers also get a ton of extra stuff the core audience is not expected to pick up on.)

Anyway, these articles by Japanese-American journalists convinced me to watch the movie when it came out (they are both also at least somewhat critical of the film, but seem much better informed):

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-isle-of-dogs-gets-right-about-japan, https://www.vulture.com/2018/03/what-its-like-to-watch-isle-of-dogs-as-a-japanese-speaker.html

Don't apologize, I love having these conversations, and you certainly raise very interesting points. I already said what I personally felt watching the movie here.

Here are the articles you sent for those who want to read them, and I decided to do a quick search on my own of Japanese articles.

The Japanese wikipedia article briefly mentions criticism of stereotypes, whitewashing, insensitive (specifically the mushroom cloud) and "English supremacy". Sadly the article linked in the sources no longer exists. Reading reviews I found mixed impressions, but from what I read a lot of people did feel a lot of love for Japan from the movie. The fact that the dogs spoke English was one of the things I found people disliked the most, and I also found several people mentioning stereotypes and in general a bad feeling (as well as people saying it didn't feel like stereotyping). Several people also said it felt more retro than futuristic, but not necessarily as criticism.

That said, everyone praised the stopmotion, which I agree was something impressive. Another thing many people praised was the music (the Japanese drums, the Akira Kurosawa homage).

So yeah, mixed impressions but I'd say more positive than negative.

These are the articles and reviews I read, you can run them through google translate.

[lediableblancdotcom]

I need some help! I am pretty sure I know the answer to this question, but I need someone to confirm or deny. Has anyone seen this set of trading cards in real life? They are said to be "Marvel Ultimate" released in 2019, 120 cards in the set, and are in Spanish language. There are only two sellers that have sold these cards, single or by set, and I am beginning to believe they are the same person. I think they are fake AF, but I could be wrong, them being released in another country from my own and all. I have seen slightly different images for the same card and the names are not consistent throughout the set (Gambit on the front, Gambito on the backs). I am about to scrap them, but if they are confirmed real, I would like to add them to the database. Anyone know? Update:

So I asked the guy selling these straight up if they were real or not and he told me they were distributed through the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio. He said they did several sets in the 2019 time period.

I am still skeptical.....

Now, El Comercio newspaper is the biggest newspaper in Peru and has released Marvel Books and materials, but those were all copyrighted and produced through DK. So you would think the cards would have some markings. Still searching with this "new information" NO ONE on the internet has heard of these cards EXCEPT for this one guy. Peru is a big country and El Comerico is a big newspaper, so you would think someone out there other than this guy would know about or be selling these cards. Also, Peruvian cards, especially Marvel, are released under Pepsi Cards....so you would think they would have a hand in something they have copyrights to.

I am still thinking these are SUS....I am going to hold on to them and not put them up on the database until I have some confirmation.

Update Update:

I talked to a few card dealers that know their shit and none of them have ever heard of this set and doing more research with the info I have pulled from the ONE person that has the set (the dealer selling them) I can find NOTHING that is outside his own auctions. There are not even images on google of this set that do not tie back directly to this ONE seller. So I am going to deem these card fakes made by the dealer or at least bootleg release. Either way they are not going on the site as legit cards. I will save the images and info I have collected, just in case something else pops up later that confirms there authenticity, but for now, no go.

FINAL UPDATE!!!!

Yes, they have been confirmed as really good bootleg cards! A wonderful man named David gave me the skinny on these cards. They are unlicensed, but good ones (which is surprising they put this much effort into bootlegs). They were released in Peru through newstands in card packs of 30, and marked Vol 1-4, making the 120 card set when finished. There was also a set of DC cards that was released the same way. So, all those that are unbothered by buying unlicensed goods, buy them if you want, but being unlicensed they will not be making up onto the lediableblanc database. Mystery solved!

[auranovabloggers]

Hsien-Ko and Mei-Ling Official Lore Project

Ever since I had watched this video, I have become inspired to make a video of a similar style and vibe:

First of all, please watch this video and check out Dan's other videos. Funny guys with a passion for Fatal Fury and SNK as a whole.

With that said, I want to discuss what I am planning and working towards in the future. I want to deep dive into making a detailed character essay video regarding both Hsien-Ko and Mei-Ling of Darkstalkers. While video making is not new to me as I did so in the past (roughly +10 years ago on Youtube), this will be the first time I have made a lore/character essay. Research to a higher caliber and script writing will be first times for me in video making. Understandably, there is very little in the Darkstalkers games to work with and many would say to look at the Darkstalkers wiki. However, from initial searches beyond the Fandom site, there appear to be errors or straight up made-up information on there. Not only that, but some information is also missing... which is not the fault of the people there.

As it turns out, a lot of the lore and biographies in the series are behind a language barrier that those outside of Japan can't easily access. While some would suggest using Google Translate and image recognition to get the job done, that is out of the question. That program is quite flawed in catching the nuance of the language that only a native speaker would know.

You might be asking, 'Aura, what are trying to say?' Well, what I am in the works of doing is gathering all the Japanese text from scans of official Darkstalkers guidebooks in order to fully get the scope that the developers intended for Hsien-Ko and Mei-Ling. I will do my best to detail all that is uncovered to help portray a cohesive narrative about the background and story of these two sisters in Darkstalkers. But not only that, I want to also head canon and analyze that information and every aspect of them to also draw out ideas. Their style of clothing, their names, their Chinese background, etc.

But not only will I use the official lore from Japanese texts, I also intend to use this:

'What is this cover?' you may be asking. This is 'Vampire Hunter Gaiden: Lei-Lei Hen - Owaranai Haru (ヴァンパイアハンター外伝 レイレイ編 終わらない春)'. Translated as 'Vampire Hunter Tale: Hsien-Ko~ Endless Spring', it is written by Akihiko Ureshino (嬉野秋彦) with illustrations by Kohime Ose (桜瀬琥姫). While this is not canon to the games, it is a licensed light novel released back in 1996/1/1 that initial Google translations from Japanese wiki pages lead me to believe that I need to look into this story. There are mentions in how the personalities of the sisters, especially Mei-Ling, are similar to the Darkstalkers OVA versions of them, another licensed piece of media that released months after this novel and is one of the few rare pieces of media to leave Japan and be translated. To build a cohesive idea of who Hsien-Ko and Mei-Ling are, I feel it is important that I get this novel translated and read to figure out what the writer came up with for Hsien-Ko and Mei-Ling, one of the first pieces of licensed media to do so. It will certainly cost a lot of money as I have over 224 pages worth of text that must be translated, but I am willing to do it for these two characters I cherish dearly.

That, for personal Cryas Darkstalkers reasons, and because this novel inspired a doujin that means the world to me, 'Share':

Overall, the scans from the official lore, the games, this light novel, and the OVA will be used to help try to build upon 'Who are Hsien-Ko and Mei-Ling? What are they like? Where did they come from? Their goals and thoughts, what are they?', along with other bits I wish to convey as I find them fun to bring up and discuss.

Hsien-Ko and Mei-Ling mean the world to me, and I wish to finally give them both the justice they deserve after nearly 30 years. Speaking of 30, I am planning to try and get this project finished by March 3rd, 2025, as that is the anniversary of Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge releasing into Japanese arcades.

I'll update of my progress as time goes on, so I'll leave you with what I have so far and my other plans for the video:

The scans of the novel have been fully finished and am in the process of getting a quote.

If you wish to see the novel yourself, whether out of curiosity or because you are fluent in Japanese, I'll let you have a look:

I am intending to commission artists to help illustrate aspects of the script when the time comes. Make it feel like a group effort by the community. 😊

If any of you are aware of good video editing programs that are cheap or free, please let me know.

For now, that is all I have for you. Cheers peeps. 😎✌️

[carriesthewind]

Continuing to feel grumpy due to moving (and re-reading terrible, infuriating caselaw), so Flamethrower snark below the cut, feel free to skip.

So let's open up google in a new private window (to avoid biasing my search results toward legal sources). Search "allegation".

First result: Google's default on-page answer, sourced from Oxford Languages.

I'm going to skip this one in my final count b/c you shouldn't trust google's default answers, kids. It's just here for completeness.

Second result: the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Third result: the Cambridge Dictionary.

[Due to the page formatting, the different definitions won't fit into a single screenshot, so I am putting them in separate screenshots below and skipping the examples]

Fourth Result: Dictionary.com

Fifth result: Vocabulary.com

Sixth result: Cornell's Legal Information Institute

SEVENTH RESULT, WE FOUND IT: Collin's Dictionary

...hey wait that's not what her screenshot says.

hmmm.

Let's scroll down...

...past the examples...

...past the multiple video pronunciations...

...past the "You May Also Like"....

oh hey there it is!

...wait except where did that fourth definition go in her screenshot.

Just. My god. Even assuming that she already had Collin's definition bookmarked or her google search was different and she didn't scroll past five separate entries to find a definition that she could crop, she still had to scroll past another definition and several screens of videos and ads to crop this screenshot, which again, she literally had to crop to prevent even the suggestion that an allegation doesn't mean "a fake statement no one can prove."

P.S. It's especially funny b/c she keeps putting on this veil of legal authority and she specifically crops out the legal definition. Also, where's my citation to the U.S. Code to tell me what "FEDERAL CRIMES" she alleges have been committed.

P.S.S. the reason people use "allegations" is because many of us are referring to incidents we did not personally observe and that have not been proven to a legal standard. This is partially out of habit of concerns about legal threats, but mostly (at least in my case), out of a concern for precision of language: I believe that she abused jabberwockypie. I say these are allegations, however, because I do not feel comfortable claiming personal knowledge of their veracity. For example, I do not allege that she is currently behaving in an abusive way toward her followers (e.g. the way she is engaging with and presenting anon hate): I assert it because it is a claim I have the personal knowledge and experience to back up. Furthermore, even by the highest legal standard (in the american legal system), no more proof is needed to "prove" an allegation than the testimony of a single witness. Jabberwockypie's word is the "proof" of her own allegations - whether you choose to believe that proof is up to you.