#and they use auto translations for everything

[shouldprobablybereading]

You can kinda tell in each discussion page how many people are audiobook readers compared to other formats by how big of an opinion they have on the audible situation with the secret projects

I rarely use audiobooks and despise audible with a passion, so I am mostly kinda glad at the middle finger to amazon. But it is very interesting hearing from people who actually use it regularly

To be clear the reason I despise audible as a company is because it’s so tied to their subscription service

If I want to purchase a certain audiobook from them and not get the subscription service, it doesn’t show up in their app at all. Neither the books that I have paid for myself at full price or the books that other family members have and I should have access to through family sharing. Only through logging in on a specific website (not audible it’s some other library part of amazon that I can never find on the first try) on a computer is it possible to access the audiobooks and listen to them. Same website on phone or ipad gives you nothing. That is impractical to the point that I only ever do it when it’s something I need for school and have no other option, no matter how much I pay not only do I not actually own the product but I can’t even access it properly. It wouldn’t be a problem if they had competitors where I could buy them instead, but as established a lot of books are only sold through amazon. Kindle works fine with 0 issues so it’s very specifically audible that is trash in that department

[dharmafox]

Excuse me kind creature, I'm thoroughly behind on like everything and I wanted to ask, what's the deal with kusuriuri? Like, I assume, judging by things I see once in a while that they seem to be separate lads, but like... Where is it known for? What's going on? I'm a bit confused @__@;;;;;

No worries! This information was dropped on us without warning a little while ago. It came via a YouTube video released by the movie staff. Director Nakamura revealed that the two Medicine Sellers are different and carry different swords, and he released some backstory about the swords and the Medicine Sellers.

You can watch the YouTube video with auto-generated subtitles, but the quality of the translation is pretty bad. Fortunately, @kastellaran did some awesome translation work on the story bible page they showed in the video, which explains more of what they were talking about.

Just a warning: I don't think this backstory is what any of us expected, and the ideas behind it can get a little complicated. We've been doing a lot of processing since we learned all this!

Basically, the swords and Medicine Sellers are all different agents of a single cosmic force. They appear in the world as needed, up to a maximum of 64 at a time. These ideas are based on the Trigram and hexagram concepts from the I Ching, a Taoist philosophical text. @purplealmonds explained more about those concepts in a video here.

Director Nakamura also said a little bit about the two Medicine Sellers' personalities in an interview on Twitter. You can read an auto-translation of that section in the second half of this post.

There's been a lot of discussion since this info came out, but this is probably more than enough to process for now! If you'd like, come join us in the Mononoke community, where we've been posting all kinds of theories and speculation about the new lore and the movie.

[sasaranurude]

Okay. I've been playing Tokyo Debunker today, since the release happened to catch me on a day when all I'd planned to do was write fanfiction. I just finished reading the game story prologue (it was longer than expected!), so here's a review type post. If you're reading this post not having seen a single thing about this game: it's a story-based joseimuke gacha mobile game that just released globally today. It's about a girl who suddenly finds herself attending a magic school and mingling with elite, superhuman students known as ghouls. If you look in the tumblr tag for the game you'll see what appears to be a completely different game from 2019 or so: they retooled it completely midway through development, changing just about everything about it due to "escalating competition within the gaming industry."

I'll talk about how this looks like a blatant twst clone at the end.

Starting with the positive: The story is charming. I enjoyed it thoroughly the entire time and am excited to read more. The mix between visual novel segments and motion comics was really nice--it broke things up and added a lot of oomph to the action or atmospheric scenes that visual novels generally lack. I like the art in the comic parts a lot. the live2d in the visual novel parts is... passable. Tone-wise, I think the story was a little bit all over the place and would like to see more of the horror that it opened on, but I didn't mind the comedic direction it went in either. The translation is completely seamless. The characters so far all have unique voices and are just super fun and cute. Of the ones who've had larger roles in the story so far, there's not a single one I dislike. It's all fully voiced in Japanese and the acting is solid. (I don't recognize any voices, and can't seem to find any seiyuu credits, so it seems they're not big names, but they deliver nonetheless.) Kaito in particular I found I was laughing at his lines a ton, both the voicing and the writing.

He's looking for a girlfriend btw. Spreading the word.

The problem is like. The gameplay is the worst dark-pattern microtransaction-riddled bullshit I've ever seen. Hundred passive timers going at all times. Fifty different item-currencies. Trying to get you to spend absurd amounts of real world money at every turn. There's like five different indicators that take you to various real-money shop items that I don't know how to dismiss the indicator, I guess you just have to spend money, wtaf. Bajillion different interlocking systems mean you have zero sense of relative value of all the different item-currencies. I did over the course of the day get enough diamonds for one ten-pull, which I haven't used yet. Buying enough diamonds for a ten-pull costs a bit under $60 (presumably USD, but there's a chance the interface is automatically making that CAD for me--not gonna spend the money to check lmfao), with an SSR rate of 1%. BULLSHIIIIIT.

There's like a goddamn thousand-word essay explaining the dozen different types of character upgrades and equippables and equippables for the equippables!! Bad! Bad game design! That's just overcomplicating bullshit to trick people into thinking they're doing something other than clicking button to make number go up! That is not gameplay!

In terms of the actual gameplay, there is none. The battle system is full auto. There might be teambuilding, but from what I've seen so far, most of that consists of hoping you pull good cards from gacha and then clicking button to make number go up. There's occasional rhythm segments but there's no original music, it's just remixes of public domain classical music lmao. I'd describe the rhythm gameplay as "at least more engaging than twisted wonderland's," which is not a high bar

At least there's a cat in the rhythm bit.

And like, ok, I gotta remark on how derivative it is. Like I mentioned in my post earlier, this game is unabashedly aping twisted wonderland's setting and aesthetic. (That said, most of the stuff it steals from twst is magic school stuff that twst also basically stole from Harry Potter, so...?) However, it isn't exactly like twst: in this one, the characters say fuck a lot and bleed all over the place and do violence. Basically, the tone is a fair bit more adult than twst's kid-friendly vibe. (Not, like, adult adult, and I probably wouldn't even call it dark--it's still rated Teen lol. Just more adult than twst.)

Rather than just being students at magic school, the ghouls also go out into the mundane world to go on missions where they fight and investigate monsters and cryptids. Honestly, the magic school setting feels pretty tacked-on. The things that are enjoyable about this would've been just as enjoyable in about any other setting--you can tell this whole aspect was a late trend-chasing addition, lmao. So, yeah, it's blatantly copying twst to try to steal some players, but... Eh, I found myself not caring that much. Someone more (or less) into twst than me may find it grating.

Character-wise, eh, sure, yeah, they're a bit derivative in that aspect too, but it's a joseimuke game, the characters are always derivative. Thus far the writing & execution has been solid enough that I didn't care if they were tropey. If I were to compare it to something else, I'd say the relationship between the protagonist and the ghouls feels more like that of the sage and wizards in mahoyaku than anything from twst. There's some mystery in exactly what "ghouls" are and their place in this world that has me intrigued and wanting to know more about this setting and how each of the characters feels about it. I have a bad habit of getting my hopes up for stories that put big ideas on the table and then being disappointed when they don't follow through in a way that lives up to my expectations, though.

So, my final verdict: I kind of just hope someone uploads all the story segments right onto youtube so nobody has to deal with the dogshit predatory game to get the genuinely decent story lol. Give it a play just for the story if you have faith in your ability to resist dark patterns. Avoid at all costs if you know you're vulnerable to gacha, microtransactions, or timesinks.

[majimasleftasscheek]

alright since RGG seems bent on putting merch behind things like UFO catcher shit, here's my crappy how to use a proxy guide lol

gonna be using buyee as an example but most proxies are more or less the same so it's your choice on what to use. I look at fee prices and customer service reviews to decide on my proxies. sorry if it's wordy! but I think I cover the most important bits for general use.

so on the landing page you got all the goobly gook but what you'll mainly be looking at is the stuff in the red box. all the shops are listed there - the ones I mainly use are yahoo! japan auctions and mercari. the other shops are more like regular shopping sites. pretty much all proxies use the same sites as they're just a directory for wherever you wanna shop.

auctions are self explanatory - you bid on things till the time runs out or some auctions offer an immediate buyout price.

mercari is largely a secondhand seller marketplace but you can find companies on there as well.

when I search for stuff, I prefer putting in the actual terms for better accuracy over auto translating. so here I put in ryu ga gotoku (龍が如く). on buyee, I have rgg and dead souls as saved searches so I can just click on them to easily autofill the search bar which is handy.

items will populate and you'll see prices in yen and for me, usd. these are the *listing prices, not the *final price. since I'm using a proxy, there will be additional fees per item I get. also, the currency exchange rate occasionally changes so if something goes up or down in price, that be why.

💥 pls also note prohibited items that proxies cannot ship internationally such as items with flammable fluid which can include perfumes, lighters, etc. other things like alcohol, which may be okay for like 99% of countries is not okay, for example, in the US lol unless you go thru customs paperwork n shit. *ebay is usually where you want to go for prohibited items as those sellers *will go thru the process of filing the proper forms to send such items.

💥 pls be aware of scalpers! I tend to browse multiple pages and multiple listings of the same item to see what the prices typically fall around. if it looks too cheap, be aware of an item's description. if it looks too expensive, it probably is.

let's use this bad boy as an example. the main things you wanna look at on any item is the condition and the photos to be *sure* you are happy with what you're getting. if you see the same photos across listings, be a lil wary. you can see estimated shipping times and the seller's general ratings. always read item explanations if there is one in case the seller makes any notes of defects or other things.

you can add to shopping cart to keep browsing or you can go to the order page to immediately purchase.

so proxies typically have different plans you can choose when you buy items and that adds towards the fees. these can include inspections, insurance, etc of items when they arrive at the proxy warehouse (see your proxy's FAQ for plan descriptions). it's up to you what you deem worth choosing, if at all. for most things, I just go with whatever costs me 0 lol - especially if it's a cheaper item that I really don't feel needs to be inspected or insured, like a plushie or keychain. regardless of plan, you'll have to pay some proxy service fee (here the "buyee service fee"). in the top right, you'll see the total cost of everything. once you're happy, then you pick your form of payment. I usually go with paypal.

you can go to your page and see typical stuff like orders, settings, and the like. there's often specific tabs for certain sites like auctions so you can go there for anything you purchase in that way. the cart is anything you've added but haven't bought.

the orders tab is for anything bought and you may see the status of its shipping to the proxy warehouse which I'll get to in the next bit.

package information is everything that has arrived to the warehouse so here you can see I have 12 items currently waiting to be shipped to me.

user information, pretty basic but do MAKE SURE your addresses and things are 100% correct. it would really suck nuts if you pay out the ass for international shipping and it gets sent to the wrong place.

on the orders tab, you can see the status of the item. it contains important bits like date ordered and order # (I've blotted out mine). order received is *you* paying for the order. order completed is *buyee* paying for the order. shipped means the seller has shipped to buyee's warehouse address and arrived at warehouse is self explanatory.

*sometimes, a seller may cancel an order after you've paid for it and you will be refunded. this is often due to the seller unable to actually send the item for whatever reason or they don't sell to proxies. nothing you can really do about it but I've only had it happen a couple of times in dozens of purchases.

back to the package information tab, here you can see all the packages that have arrived at the warehouse waiting for shipment. proxies will store packages for free for a certain number of days - buyee being 30 while I've seen other go to 45 days, etc. after that time is up, you will be charged for storage per day so be aware of that!

here you can consolidate packages which means putting everything into one shipment instead of going individually. you can see estimated costs of shipping per item which, if you did each item individually, that would be mad expensive. when you consolidate, things can still be pretty pricey but imo better to pay idk 150 bucks in shipping for 10 items instead of 300 bucks for all 10 individually.

💥 shipping is calculated by weight so be aware of that when you buy items - however baseline costs will be the same for lighter items regardless of how much they weigh. baseline costs for me is around 15-30 bucks regardless of what I get. for example, I have a teeny tiny keychain in storage and several figures. the shipping for that keychain is the same cost as the figures so it's only sensible to lump them into one package cuz I ain't paying out the ass to ship 1 keychain lol.

you are free to consolidate what you want and how. if you wanna consolidate some packages to ship now and you wanna do others later, you are free to. just keep in mind your budget and storage time!

proxies also offer services to protectively wrap your packages. if you're concerned about damage, then choose that option when you consolidate. I don't often do it unless what I'm buying can break otherwise all my packages have arrived relatively unharmed.

💥 proxies will consolidate things AS IS so if you have a buncha figures that don't have their boxes, the proxy will put them in a shipping box just as they are, however they received them from the seller. so if the seller only bubble wrapped the figure, it will be sent to you just like that, no additional protection unless you pay for that option.

*consolidation can take some days and you'll be informed when items are ready to ship. at that point, you pay the shipping and that's it! you can choose what type of shipping you wanna go with (such as DHL, EMS, sea mail (if it's available), etc at differing prices and arrival times. pick what's best for you. *note, sea mail is often the cheapest but the slowest (like several months arrival time) and not available to every country (plus you'd want protective packaging for this just in case cuz boat rides be bumpy)

here are some examples of shipping costs for a single one of my items. some of these options will disappear when I consolidate cuz shipping a lil figure is very different from shipping a larger box full of multiple things.

💥 be sure to read EVERYTHING and make sure you know what options you're choosing to make sure it fits your budget and expectations of arrival time.

one more thing proxies can do is order from a number of sites that aren't on the main page. for buyee, you want to go to the other sites information tab and then click "purchase request for other sites."

here you can input the information of whatever site you want to see if the proxy can purchase it for you. this is how I buy things on ebten like the jpn only preorders. if the proxy cannot buy the requested item, they'll let you know.

if they can go thru with the order, they will confirm your payment and it goes thru the same process as any other order.

[a-memory-a-distant-echo]

it's time for the long-threatened post about how to get subtitles (including translated ones) for videos that don't have subtitles.

in my experience, the methods in this post can probably get you solidly 75% or more of the content of many videos (caveats inside). i've tested this on videos that are originally in chinese, english, french, german, hindi, japanese, korean, spanish, and honestly probably some languages that i'm forgetting. my experience is that it works adequately in all of them. not great, necessarily, but well enough that you can probably follow along.

this is a very long post because this is the overexplaining things website, and because i talk about several different ways to get the captions. this isn't actually difficult, though, or even especially time consuming—the worst of it is pushing a button and ignoring things for a while. actual hands-on work is probably five minutes tops, no matter how long the video is.

i've attempted to format this post understandably, and i hope it's useful to someone.

first up, some disclaimers.

this is just my experience with things, and your experience might be different. the tools used for (and available for) this kind of thing change all the time, and if you're reading this six months after i wrote it, your options might be different. this post is probably still a decent starting place.

background about my biases in this: i work in the creative industries. mostly i'm a fiction editor. i've also been a writer, a technical editor and writer, a transcriptionist, a copyeditor, and something i've seen called a 'translation facilitator' or 'rewrite editor', where something is translated fairly literally (by a person or a machine) and then a native speaker of the target language goes through and rewrites/restructures as needed to make the piece read more naturally in the target language. i've needed to get information out of business meetings that were conducted in a language i didn't speak, and have done a lot of work on things that were written in (or translated into) the writer's second or sixth language, but needed to be presented in natural english.

so to start, most importantly: machine translation is never going to be as good as a translation done by an actual human. human translators can reflect cultural context and nuanced meanings and the artistry of the work in a way that machines will never be able to emulate. that said, if machine translation is your only option, it's better than nothing. i also find it really useful for videos in languages where i have enough knowledge that i'm like, 75% sure that i'm mostly following, and just want something that i can glance at to confirm that.

creating subs like this relies heavily on voice-to-text, which—unfortunately—works a lot better in some situations than it does in others. you'll get the best, cleanest results from videos that have slow, clear speech in a 'neutral' accent, and only one person speaking at a time. (most scripted programs fall into this category, as do many vlogs and single-person interviews.) the results will get worse as voices speed up, overlap more, and vary in volume. that said, i've used this to get captions for cast concerts, reality shows, and variety shows, and the results are imperfect but solidly readable, especially if you have an idea of what's happening in the plot and/or can follow along even a little in the broadcast language.

this also works best when most of the video is in a single language, and you select that language first. the auto detect option sometimes works totally fine, but in my experience there's a nonzero chance that it'll at least occasionally start 'detecting' random other languages in correctly, or someone will say a few words in spanish or whatever, but the automatic detection engine will keep trying to translate from spanish for another three minutes, even tho everything's actually in korean. if there's any way to do so, select the primary language, even if it means that you miss a couple sentences that are in a different language.

two places where these techniques don't work, or don't work without a lot of manual effort on your part: translating words that appear on the screen (introductions, captions, little textual asides, etc), and music. if you're incredibly dedicated, you can do this and add it manually yourself, but honestly, i'm not usually this dedicated. getting captions for the words on the screen will involve either actually editing the video or adding manually translated content to the subs, which is annoying, and lyrics are...complicated. it's possible, and i'm happy to talk about it in another post if anyone is interested, but for the sake of this post, let's call it out of scope, ok? ok. bring up the lyrics on your phone and call it good enough.

places where these techniques are not great: names. it's bad with names. names are going to be mangled. resign yourself to it now. also, in languages that don't have strongly gendered speech, you're going to learn some real fun stuff about the way that the algorithms gender things. (spoiler: not actually fun.) bengali, chinese, and turkish are at least moderately well supported for voice-to-text, but you will get weird pronouns about it.

obligatory caveat about ai and voice-to-text functionality. as far as i'm aware, basically every voice-to-text function is ~ai powered~. i, a person who has spent twenty years working in the creative industries, have a lot of hate for generative ai, and i'm sure that many of you do, too. however, if voice-to-text (or machine translation software) that doesn't rely on it exists anymore, i'm not aware of it.

what we're doing here is the same as what douyin/tiktok/your phone's voice-to-text does, using the same sorts of technology. i mention this because if you look at the tools mentioned in this post, at least some of them will be like 'our great ai stuff lets you transcribe things accurately', and i want you to know why. chat gpt (etc) are basically glorified predictive text, right? so for questions, they're fucking useless, but for things like machine transcription and machine translation, those predictions make it more likely that you get the correct words for things that could have multiple translations, or for words that the software can only partially make out. it's what enables 'he has muscles' vs 'he has mussels', even though muscles and mussels are generally pronounced the same way. i am old enough to have used voice to text back when it was called dictation software, and must grudgingly admit that this is, in fact, much better.

ok! disclaimers over.

let's talk about getting videos

for the most part, this post will assume that you have a video file and nothing else. cobalt.tools is the easiest way i'm aware of to download videos from most sources, though there are other (more robust) options if you're happy to do it from the command line. i assume most people are not, and if you are, you probably don't need this guide anyhow.

i'm going to use 'youtube' as the default 'get a video from' place, but generally speaking, most of this works with basically any source that you can figure out how to download from—your bilibili downloads and torrents and whatever else will work the same way. i'm shorthanding things because this post is already so so long.

if the video you're using has any official (not autogenerated) subtitles that aren't burned in, grab that file, too, regardless of the language. starting from something that a human eye has looked over at some point is always going to give you better results. cobalt.tools doesn't pull subtitles, but plugging the video url into downsub or getsubs and then downloading the srt option is an easy way to get them for most places. (if you use downsub, it'll suggest that you download the full video with subtitles. that's a link to some other software, and i've never used it, so i'm not recommending it one way or the other. the srts are legit, tho.)

the subtitle downloaders also have auto translation options, and they're often (not always) no worse than anything else that we're going to do here—try them and see if they're good enough for your purposes. unfortunately, this only works for things that already have subtitles, which is…not that many things, honestly. so let's move on.

force-translating, lowest stress mode.

this first option is kind of a cheat, but who cares. youtube will auto-caption things in some languages (not you, chinese) assuming that the uploader has enabled it. as ever, the quality is kinda variable, and the likelihood that it's enabled at all seems to vary widely, but if it is, you're in for a much easier time of things, because you turn it on, select whatever language you want it translated to, and youtube…does its best, anyhow.

if you're a weird media hoarder like me and you want to download the autogenerated captions, the best tool that i've found for this is hyprscribr. plug in the video url, select 'download captions via caption grabber', then go to the .srt data tab, copy it out, and paste it into a text file. save this as [name of downloaded video].[language code].srt, and now you have captions! …that you need to translate, which is actually easy. if it's a short video, just grab the text, throw it in google translate (timestamps and all), and then paste the output into a new text file. so if you downloaded cooking.mp4, which is in french, you'll have three files: cooking.mp4, cooking.fr.srt, and cooking.en.srt. this one's done! it's easy! you're free!

but yeah, ok, most stuff isn't quite that easy, and auto-captioning has to be enabled, and it has some very obvious gaps in the langauges it supports. which is sort of weird, because my phone actually has pretty great multilingual support, even for things that youtube does not. which brings us to low-stress force translation option two.

use your phone

this seems a little obvious, but i've surprised several people with this information recently, so just in case. for this option, you don't even need to have downloaded the video—if it's a video you can play on your phone, the phone will almost definitely attempt real-time translation for you. i'm sure iphones have this ability, but i'm an android person, so can only provide directions for that: go into settings and search for (and enable) live translation. the phone will do its best to pick up what's being said and translate it on the fly for you, and if 'what's being said' is a random video on the internet, your phone isn't gonna ask questions. somewhat inexplicably, this works even if the video is muted. i do this a lot at like four a.m. when i'm too lazy to grab earbuds but don't want to wake up my wife.

this is the single least efficient way to force sub/translate things, in my opinion, but it's fast and easy, and really useful for those videos that are like a minute long and probably not that interesting, but like…what if it is, you know? sometimes i'll do this to decide if i'm going to bother more complicated ways of translating things.

similarly—and i feel silly even mentioning this, but that i didn't think of it for an embarrassingly long time—if you're watching something on a device with speakers, you can try just…opening the 'translate' app on your phone. they all accept voice input. like before, it'll translate whatever it picks up.

neither of these methods are especially useful for longer videos, and in my experience, the phone-translation option generally gives the least accurate translation, because in attempting to do things in real time, you lose some of the predicative ability that i was talking about earlier. (filling in the blank for 'he has [muscles/mussels]' is a lot harder if you don't know if the next sentence is about the gym or about dinner.)

one more lazy way

this is more work than the last few options, but often gives better results. with not much effort, you can feed a video playing on your computer directly into google translate. there's a youtube video by yosef k that explains it very quickly and clearly. this will probably give you better translation output than any of the on-the-fly phone things described above, but it won't give you something that you can use as actual subs—it just produces text output that you can read while you watch the video. again, though, really useful for things that you're not totally convinced you care about, or for things where there aren't a lot of visuals, or for stuff where you don't care about keeping your eyes glued to the screen.

but probably you want to watch stuff on the screen at the same time.

let's talk about capcut!

this is probably not a new one for most people, but using it like this is a little weird, so here we go. ahead of time: i'm doing this on an actual computer. i think you probably can do it on your phone, but i have no idea how, and honestly this is already a really long guide so i'm not going to figure it out right now. download capcut and put it on an actual computer. i'm sorry.

anyhow. open up capcut, click new project. import the file that you downloaded, and then drag it down to the editing area. go over to captions, auto captions, and select the spoken language. if you want bilingual captions, pick the language for that, as well, and the captions will be auto-translated into whatever the second language you choose is. (more notes on this later.)

if i remember right, this is the point at which you get told that you can't caption a video that's more than an hour long. however. you have video editing software, and it is open. split the video in two pieces and caption them separately. problem solved.

now the complicated part: saving these subs. (don't panic; it's not actually that complicated.) as everyone is probably aware, exporting captions is a premium feature, and i dunno about the rest of you, but i'm unemployed, so let's assume that's not gonna happen.

the good news is that since you've generated the captions, they're already saved to your computer, they're just kinda secret right now. there are a couple ways to dig them out, but the easiest i'm aware of is the biyaoyun srt generator. you'll have to select the draft file of your project, which is auto-saved once a minute or something. the website tells you where the file is saved by default on your computer. (i realised after writing this entire post that they also have a step-by-step tutorial on how to generate the subtitles, with pictures, so if you're feeling lost, you can check that out here.)

select the project file titled 'draft_content', then click generate. you want the file name to be the same as the video name, and again, i'd suggest srt format, because it seems to be more broadly compatible with media players. click 'save to local' and you now have a subtitle file!

translating your subtitles

you probably still need to translate the subtitles. there are plenty of auto-translation options out there. many of them are fee- or subscription-based, or allow a very limited number of characters, or are like 'we provide amazing free translations' and then in the fine print it says that they provide these translations through the magic of uhhhh google translate. so we're just going to skip to google translate, which has the bonus of being widely available and free.

for shorter video, or one that doesn't have a ton of spoken stuff, you can just copy/paste the contents of the .srt file into the translation software of your choice. the web version of google translate will do 5000 characters in one go, as will systran. that's the most generous allocation that i'm aware of, and will usually get you a couple minutes of video.

the timestamps eat up a ton of characters, though, so for anything longer than a couple minutes, it's easier to upload the whole thing, and google translate is the best for that, because it is, to my knowledge, the only service that allows you to do it. to upload the whole file, you need a .doc or .rtf file.

an .srt file is basically just a text file, so you can just open it in word (or gdocs or whatever), save it as a .doc, and then feed it through google translate. download the output, open it, and save it as an .srt.

you're done! you now have your video and a subtitle file in the language of your choice.

time for vibe, the last option in this post.

vibe is a transcription app (not a sex thing, even tho it sounds like one), and it will also auto-translate the transcribed words to english, if you want.

open vibe and select your file, then select the language. if you want it translated to english, hit advanced and toggle 'translate to english'. click translate and wait a while. after a few minutes (or longer, depending on how long the file is), you'll get the text. the save icon is a folder with a down arrow on it, and i understand why people are moving away from tiny floppy disks, but also: i hate it. anyhow, save the output, and now you have your subs file, which you can translate or edit or whatever, as desired.

vibe and capcom sometimes get very different results. vibe seems to be a little bit better at picking up overlapping speech, or speech when there are other noises happening; capcom seems to be better at getting all the worlds in a sentence. i feel like capcom maybe has a slightly better translation engine, of the two of them, but i usually end up just doing the translation separately. again, it can be worth trying both ways and seeing which gives better results.

special notes about dual/bilingual subs

first: i know that bilingual subs are controversial. if you think they're bad, you don't have to use them! just skip this section.

as with everything else, automatically generating gives mixed results. sometimes the translations are great, and sometimes they're not. i like having dual subs, but for stuff that Matters To Me, for whatever reason, i'll usually generate both just the original and a bilingual version, and then try some other translation methods on the original or parts thereof to see what works best.

not everything displays bilingual subs very well. plex and windows media player both work great, vlc and the default video handler on ubuntu only display whatever the first language is, etc. i'm guessing that if you want dual subbed stuff you already have a system for it.

i'll also point out that if you want dual subs and have gone a route other than capcom, you can create dual subs by pasting the translated version and the untranslated version into a single file. leave the timestamps as they are, delete the line numbers if there are any (sometimes they seem to cause problems when you have dual subs, and i haven't figured out why) and then literally just paste the whole sub file for the first language into a new file. then paste in the whole sub file for the second language. yes, as a single chunk, the whole thing, right under the first language's subs. save the file as [video name].[zh-en].srt (or whatever), and use it like any other sub file.

notes on translation, especially since we're talking about lengthy machine-translations of things.

i default to translation options that allow for translating in large chunks, mostly because i'm lazy. but since an .srt is, again, literally just a text file, they're easy to edit, and if you feel like some of the lines are weird or questionable or whatever, it's easy to change them if you can find a better translation.

so: some fast notes on machine translation options, because i don't know how much time most people spend thinking about this kind of stuff.

one sort of interesting thing to check out is the bing translator. it'll only do 1000 characters at once, but offers the rather interesting option of picking a level of formality. i can't always get it to work, mind, but it's useful especially for times when you're like 'this one line sounds weird'—sometimes the difference between what the translator feels is standard vs formal vs casual english will make a big difference.

very fast illustration of the difference in translations. the random video that i used to make sure i didn't miss any steps explaining things starts with '所以你第二季来'. here's how it got translated:

google: So you come to season 2

google's top alternative: So you come in the second season

bing's standard tone: So here you come for the second season

bing set to casual: So you're coming for the second season, huh?

reverso default guess: So you come in season two

reverso alternate guess: You'll be participating in season two

capcom: So you come in season two

yandex: So you come in the second season

systran: That's why you come in season two

deepl: That's why you're here in season two

vibe: So your second season is here

technically all conveying the same information, but the vibes are very different. sometimes one translator or another will give you a clearly superior translation, so if you feel like the results you're getting are kinda crap, try running a handful of lines through another option and see if it's better.

ok! this was an incredibly long post, and i've almost definitely explained something poorly. again, there are almost certainly better ways to do this, but these ways are free and mostly effective, and they work most of the time, and are better than nothing.

feel free to ask questions and i'll answer as best i can. (the answer to any questions about macs or iphones is 'i'm so sorry, i have no idea tho.' please do not ask those questions.)

[salemoleander]

So, apparently lacking enrichment, Cub posted this message to Twitter:

And I went 'oh, I know just the site for this,' because manual decryption can be fun but I cared more about having the answer. After moving between a few ciphers, I settled on Mono-Alphabetic Substitution. The auto-decryption got close-ish, and then I manually corrected letters to get to the message:

Okay, fair enough, tons of people solved it just as fast and I'm sure there's a dozen posts being made rn about it.

Except you may note that bit at the bottom. Okay so, to clarify, in a Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher, everything is 1:1 swapped (all Zs become Gs, all Qs become Ds, etc). And the original text includes . and ; as letters, they translate to L and P. Which means there are 2 letters omitted from the original alphabet.

Anyways, I am taking the wild swing at 'Skizz and Oli for HC10', because I'm biased and hope springs eternal.

Caveat: This could be nothing! Cub could've keysmashed to get the cipher, chosen randomly, or have left those letters out on purpose to fuck with us.

[hey-i-am-trying]

"Ok, I will be very honenst right now, you get used the opportunity and get a screenshot, fuck it."

"I understand that they want to restrict the information. Truly. I understand that the leaks situation, they wanted to put wall, smoke curtains e everything. The problem is that this walls affect the team. People not knowing the situation of their position, not being able to contact somebody, being investigated, etc. That hurts the trust of the workers."

"Like, leave the team on the dark for weeks, and then it is hard for the worker to be back and say 'kk Pretend that nothing happend'"

I didn't wanted to share this at first because I honest didn't want any whiplash to affect Xandão, but this screenshots has been circulating already, so I at least wanted to translate it and not leave to the auto translator to fuck with his words.

I was not watching the chat at the time so I am not sure of the whole context, I only know some people were asking him questions on Bagi's chat, which were mostly silly things about certain decisions he made with his characters and remembering funny moments with him and Bagi, but then some people started to ask stuff about the admin situation.

[hjemne]

look......... it's Knives..... I can't explain you just gotta trust me here

(auto-generated translation into English just doesnt convey anywhere near the correct tone. this is one of those poems where you really need to hear it read and feel the violent apathy spitting from it. but anyway AHH. it's knives)

some analysis under the cut:

It's written in the French alexandrine (12 syllables, usually split into 2 equal hemistiches of 6, with alternating 'masculine' and 'feminine' rhyming couplets). I can't quite explain the masculine Vs feminine rhyme thing to non french speakers, but it's the -ette / -ade / -iennent (t not pronounced) endings which contrast with the -vieux / -pu / -beau etc etc masculine rhymes. It just gives the poem a really gorgeous flow and structure and I'm sad that it's basically impossible to fully replicate in translation - if you want to feel the original, then maybe listen to a recording of it while looking at the English translation

the 'bed which transforms into a tombstone' is just such an incredible line I love it so so much. In the original, 'fleurdelisé' means 'decorated with the fleur-de-lis' (⚜️) which was the symbol for the french royal family. I just love the imagery around royalty and a place of rest being twisted into a grave. None of the riches of the world can save this king who cannot find joy or beauty (or any emotion, really) in the world, not even in bloodshed

ALSO the line 'ce cruel malade' (= this cruel sick [man]) is so so so interesting. In french you can use adjectives as nouns so 'malade' means sick/unwell, but also can mean a sick person. But here it reduces the entire person to their sickness, which is super fascinating because it suggests there's no possible recovery and it's something fundamental to who & what they are. AND THEN there's this 'cruel' added in front of 'malade' - normally in french the adjective goes after the noun, and putting it before (i.e. ce CRUEL malade) really emphasizes the adjective. And ahhh the image of this tyrannical sickness is so cool because we usually see sick ppl as helpless / victim to circumstance, and so someone being defined by their sickness AND cruelty is both unusual and emphasising their agency AND ALSO their lack of agency in their situation. It's SO fitting for knives because he is 'malade' in the sense that his trauma has defined and shaped everything about him, and he didn't really have any control over this 'illness'. BUT he responds to it with this cruelty and apathy that leaves him isolated from the world that he rules over and subjugates.

and also not to overthink things but 'les dames d'atour pour qui tout prince est beau' - there is NO real loyalty towards him from his inner circle. Every prince is beautiful for them, and so every prince is interchangeable. They are with him because he is a prince, and they don't actually value him beyond his royal title. The GHGs work for Knives because he's the most powerful guy, not because they actually are loyal to him or care much for his cause, with the exception of legato doing his grotesque song and dance trying to please Knives but never actually gets the approval and thanks from Knives that he craves

reading Conrad as the wiseman who can create gold (presumably via transmutation i.e. alchemy i.e. impossible) but still cannot cure the rot within Knives (l'élément corrompu)

[thewritingmagician2022]

Hi! I was wondering if you could write how the boys would react to an mc that don’t speak English very well? Spanish it’s my first language and it’s funny because some times I misunderstand what they say and I just stay like 🤷🏻‍♀️

Sorry for my bad english 😅 I hope you’re fine and healthy uwu

Ironically, I am not healthy - hence the really long delay. But thank you!

Lucifer: Lucifer is not impressed with himself; how did he manage to not realize that you didn’t speak English as a primary language? This complicates things just a little bit but he’s not going to feel too bad about it or give you any leeway.

His favorite thing to say is “you know what I mean!” when you act like you don’t understand what he’s saying. Sometimes you’re able to figure it out and sometimes you’re not but Lucifer doesn’t care. He pushes you to be self-sufficient; you better find a way to make it work while you’re down here.

On the low, he will sign you up for English classes at RAD or get you a private tutor to make sure you’re able to communicate well enough while you live down there.

Mammon: He is so confused sometimes. The two of you will go back and forth, just confusing each other more and more as you try to figure out what the other person said/meant.

Mammon is the kind of person who’s flipping through a pocket dictionary and trying to speak Spanish to you but he’s absolutely butchering it almost every time and ends up saying something rude/nonsensical by accident

It’s really cute that he tries though and he usually just finds it more funny than anything when you don’t understand him

Levi: Levi is embarrassed when you guys can’t fully understand each other. He feels ashamed that he obviously can’t communicate clearly and wonders why you would ever bother trying to talk to an otaku like him

He definitely hides away in the beginning because the language barrier bugs him

The more you talk, the more you both understand each other. He even starts speaking Spanish a little; he learned Japanese for anime so the least he can do is learn a little Spanish for you

Still, he much prefers texting because the phones can auto translate everything and he doesn’t have to worry about either of you being confused/a misunderstanding

Satan: Satan finds it funny in the “well, well, well, Lucifer finally screwed up” kind of way and he tends to dramatize how many misunderstandings there are just to spite Lucifer even more for accidentally choosing a human that doesn’t speak fluent english

With that in mind, Satan starts learning Spanish pretty much immediately and, once you two are on friendly terms, he starts tutoring you in English as well to make sure you can understand and communicate well while you live in the Devildom

Like Mammon, he carries around a little pocket dictionary; however, he’s much more efficient with it and can actually use it to translate

Asmo: Asmo doesn’t need to understand what you’re saying for him to understand you and vice Versa!

He thinks it’s so cute when you get confused and he loves to use gestures and dramatic facial expressions to convey whatever point he is trying to make - it usually doesn’t work well and ends up even more confusing but you both have fun the whole time

Definitely someone who will sometimes pretend to not notice you’re confused (or if he’s rambling about something he genuinely may not even notice) and he doesn’t need you to reply to keep the conversation going; he can talk enough for you both

Beel: Beel is confused and you’re confused

Like Levi, he may avoid communication in the beginning because Beel is usually quiet anyway but it sometimes feels like it’s not worth the hassle and confusion

Beel mimes things to you sometimes to try to better explain himself. He’s surprisingly good at charades and it usually clears things up well enough for you.

If he doesn’t understand you, he usually tries that nod/smile people do when they have no idea what the fuck is going on because he wants to be polite

Belphie: Belphie is too tired for this shit. You’re just going to have to figure out what he said for yourself; use your phone to translate or something

He will draw pictures sometimes, if it’s something he really wants to share with you and he can’t find the right words

When he doesn’t understand you, he doesn’t even pretend to. He just stares at you until you figure out a way to say it in English or make your point known in another way

Diavolo: Diavolo is entirely charmed by the language barrier. He loves that humans have so many different languages and loves how clever you all are about trying to understand each other

He does feel a bit bad considering it makes your life more difficult and miscommunications can be a pain in the ass

To rectify this issue, he tries to make all the demons learn Spanish and asks you to lead them in Spanish lessons and then everyone can speak your language!

Obviously that’s not realistic though and he settles for learning some Spanish himself and making sure all of your learning materials at RAD are translated for you to make things easier

Barbatos: Somehow Barbatos always knows how to say things in a way you understand and he’s always able to understand what you’re saying too

You have a sneaking suspicion that he may actually be fluent in Spanish but he refuses to admit it

Barbatos doesn’t even needs words; he understands your mannerisms and facial expressions well enough and he’s equally good about making himself clear to you

Solomon: Solomon speaks all human languages, both current and past. However, he’s not very good at it because he doesn’t practice the skill often so he’ll be a bit rusty in the beginning

Definitely uses spells and engagements to help communicate better and auto translates books and things for you so you have an easier time rather than struggling to read everything in English and he’ll translate any papers you write in Spanish to English too to make your life easier

Being the mischievous man he is, Solomon does love to laugh a little when you’re not able to understand someone, especially the brothers, and occasionally he may “misinterpret” what they’ve said to cause a bit more chaos

Simeon: Simeon actually already speaks some Spanish. He’s not fluent like Solomon but he understands enough to get by and he’s really good at helping translate between you and another person if there’s an issue

He’s asked you to teach him more Spanish so you guys can communicate better and he offers to help you with English as well

Simeon is a little ridiculous and loves playing the guessing game when he doesn’t understand something, rather than looking it up. He and Luke make a bit of a game of it to see who can figure it out first when there’s a miscommunication

[nattikay]

so these screenshots originally posted by Karyu Tekre over on Discord show why you should never use auto-translators or AI to translate Na'vi: it's pretty much always wrong.

In these images we see ChatGPT and Google Translate attempt to give a translation for the comment following comment:

ma Wllìm, pelun ngal zene Tekreti steykivi?

The correct translation for this phrase should be this:

Wllìm, why must you make Tekre angry?

(...or, well, technically the original sentence should've used nga instead of ngal; the -L ending gets dropped in modal constructions (with some rare exceptions), that's the grammar mistake Tekre mentions in the first ChatGPT image...which, as you can see, the AI failed to correctly identify.)

But instead of this, Google and ChatGPT give us a whole variety of incorrect answers:

"ma Wllìm, with whom do you stay?" "but Wllìm, where did you live?" "but Wllìm, with this zene Tekreti stayed" "William, why do you need to close the door?" "William, why do you keep telling the same stories?"

...as you can see, none of those are even remotely close to the correct answer, nor are they even consistent!

ChatGPT seems to do ok-ish when asked for single words—it got most (but not all) of the individual definitions correct—but once it tries to put those words into full sentences or explain the grammar, everything falls apart and it starts spouting absolute nonsense.

basically, it's absolute crap for translating full sentences or learning grammar, might be ok-ish for translating individual words but for that you can just as easily use any Na'vi dictionary and get far more reliable accurate results, so uh...yeah seriously, just don't bother with trying to use ChatGPT or other AI for this 😅

[macaiv]

Has anyone listened to this french podcast Esteban was on a number of months ago? I don't speak French so I had to get by using the auto-translate (while slowing down the video a bit) and the google translate app transcribe function. I think the translation was fairly understandable. Anyway, here are some parts I found interesting:

Esteban mentioned that included in his contract was that the team (Alpine) must not have a number 1 driver and that he doesn't want one side to be favoured over the other. He wants to have the same "weapons" to fight with his teammate.

His dad was a French Junior Cycling Champion when he was younger but was unable to progress further due to the lack of resources and lack of contacts. So his dad made a promise with himself that if he will have a child in a similar situation, he will do the maximum in order for their dream to happen. That's why he and his mum were so willing to sacrifice everything for him.

They were able to get Nico Rosberg to ask a question to Esteban. He, in true form, asked about teammate rivalry 😆 Esteban mentioned that Nico gave him a lot of support and advice when he arrived in Formula 1 in 2016.

His Dad also asked a question, "What was your best memory from the karting years?". "I remember we were parked on this mountain at the Monaco Karting Grand Prix in 2010. I will always remember waking up in the caravan every morning, opening the door and seeing the sea right in front." He would see other drivers going to the hotel while they stayed behind since they lived in a caravan. The hotel was more comfortable but because they slept on/near the track, it was to their advantage that they were able to work longer in the evenings making them more prepared for the race.

Besides these everything else discussed were already mentioned in his other interviews.

[stereotypicaljewishmother]

★ Navigation ★

Hello, I’m Sarah, and I use to run the account @/thatjewishzionistscout, but due to some terrible pregnancy hormones and stupid decisions, I locked myself out forever,

So this is my new account! - post all about my previous account.

So let’s do this again shall we?

Shalom, my name is Sarah, I’m 22, I’m a mother, a college student, a native New Yorker, and ethnically Jewish.

I stand with Israel, against the Israeli government, I stand with Palestinian civilians, against Hamas.

Former messianic ethnic Jew, link to previous post here.

I don’t support any messianic movement, especially stuff such as JVP, they just keep harming people. My family is still Messianic’s, and I haven’t told them I left, but they have kinda picked up on it. I either don’t interact or auto-block hate towards me and my family due to my messianicness.

Holocaust/Shoah studies major getting a minor in psychology. My grandparents were survivors and they have since passed away, so I don’t feel comfortable sharing their stories without their permission.

I have dealt with self harm (cutting) and eating disorders (bulimia), so please if those are very triggering topics for you, please be weary. I do also make some post about it.

Zionism

I follow the Jewish definition of Zionism, which is the belief that Jews are indigenous to the land, and deserve to live there.

I do not follow the goyish definition of Zionism, by that way of supporting Bibi, or the IDF, or West Bank settlers.

My stances

I believe in all Israeli and Palestinian Territories promised through the 1994 Olso accords, neither group should have the right to settle in either territory.

I do not believe most Palestinians are indigenous to Israel. I do believe they have the right to live there simply because I believe anyone has the right to live wherever they wish.

Both the current Israeli government and Palestinian governments should be cleared out, and replaced with better leaders.

This is war is not a genocide, it is a tragic war, but not a genocide. It is also not the biggest or most devastating conflict going on right now, and I believe media refuses to focus on our conflicts.

Rules for blog and Goys

For my blog:

- No goyspaining allowed.

- If you don’t agree with what I’m saying and you’re a follower, no need to cause anything, just quietly unfollow.

- Disagreement is allowed, but that doesn’t mean I owe you debate.

- If you have any hate, just send asks or anons, I don’t have time for that shit on my posts.

For Goy:

- Everyone is welcomed on this blog, no matter on Jewish or not, but if you’re not Jewish please don’t weigh in or inner jewblr community issues.

- You are also allowed to ask questions, but in good nature. I will delete questions I find to be antagonistic.

Example: *posts about the hostages, the war, or the Israeli government*-goyim allowed to comment, *posts about messianicness, Jewish Zionism and anti-Zionism*-goyim not allowed to comment.

Random

- Dni lists don’t work, unless you truly can’t deal with me.

- I suffer from dysgraphia which is a spelling disorder, so if I spell something wrong, that doesn’t take away from my points.

- Not a supporter of the IDF most of the time, mostly because it’s physically impossible to be a “moral army.”

- Anti-Communist, no I will not debate on that.

- Due to growing up a messy with my grandparents being the last “real jews” in my family, I don’t know everything, so if I make any mistakes please politely correct me.

- Everyone is welcomed here, but don’t expect me to agree to everything. But I’m welcome to everyone.

- Trying to be less active to work on my mental health.

- I don’t speak Hebrew, so if you send me any asks or anons in Hebrew, they will be translated by my friend @queenwille (if they’re okay with it.)

- If you want my fandom blog, you have to be a mutual and send me and ask!

- (Friendly) nosey anons

- I would gladly knee both Netanyhau and Sinywar in the balls.

Fuck Hamas and Am Yisrael Chai!

“This is me if you even care…”

[dharmafox]

Birth and Death: Thoughts on the second (yes, second!) Mononoke lore drop

Here is the second story bible page that's been released, along with an auto-translation and analysis provided by @purplealmonds. Check it out!

Here are my thoughts so far on the new concepts:

(1) Taoist Origin

The ideas in this doc are very familiar. They seem, again, to be drawn from foundational Taoist texts. Here's how Zhuangzi describes the Tao, or the Way:

It has reality yet there is no place where it resides - this refers to the dimension of space. It has duration but no beginning or end - this refers to the dimension of time. There is life, there is death, there is a coming out, there is a going back in - yet in the coming out and going back its form is never seen.(16) This is called the Heavenly Gate. The Heavenly Gate is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing.

The new doc talks about the "Peak of the Collected Self," and I think it and Zhuangzi are talking about the same thing. It describes this peak as, "The seat from which all things are born, the seat to which all things return. The seat of the origin." This is very close to how Zhuangzi describes the Tao: "There is life, there is death, there is a coming out, there is a going back in... The Heavenly Gate is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing."

("The ten thousand things" is a Taoist term meaning, "everything in the universe.")

The doc also describes this "seat" as beyond time:

Time is also folded in, so everything from the beginning to the end of the universe is there.

This is very similar to how the Tao is described:

It has duration but no beginning or end - this refers to the dimension of time.

The doc also equates this "seat" to Buddhist enlightenment and describes it as the goal of meditation.

(I talked about possible links between Buddhist meditation and the first lore that was dropped here, though I referred to the "ultimate truth" as "no self." The doc talks about "knowing the self" while Zhuangzi talks about "nonbeing"; I think we're all referring to the same thing, more or less: The Peak/Tao/origin.)

🧿Continue reading under the cut, because this got really, really long. 🧿

(2) Birth and Death

(a) The Mononoke series

To approach this origin, from which "the ten thousand things come forth," is also to approach death. It is "the seat to which all things return," and where there is "a going back in." The doc equates "sinking into the self" with the approach of death:

"The more the number, the deeper one is sunk into karma, which would be like being deeply dead and in a more decentralized state in human terms (the normal state). When a person approaches death, they embark on a journey that slowly sinks them into the self."

"The self," the origin, the Tao, the Seat of the Collected Self, is also the place "from which all things are born," where there is "coming out." Life and death, according to the Zhuangzi, are one: "Who knows that being and nonbeing, life and death are a single way?"

This union of life and death, yin and yang, could also be the "more decentralized state" the doc refers to. To return to the origin, to approach death, is to simultaneously approach birth. Or, more abstractly, it's to approach transformation.

Mononoke invokes every one of these concepts: birth, death, and transformation. I talked here a little bit about the Medicine Sellers as agents of transformation, but the first lore drop especially makes this clear: the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching all describe states of change (hence the text's use in divination). The Medicine Sellers embody these states of change as well as guide humans through them, to the point where those humans' identities, which have been warped into mononoke, are destroyed. They bring death, but they also bring release from death.

This is clear in nearly every Mononoke arc (skipping over "Zashiki Warashi" because it's kind of its own unique animal, in that the mononoke is exorcised more through birth than death and the Medicine Seller seems to barely have anything to do with it):

(i) The first "Bakeneko":

Killing the bakeneko frees Tamaki and the kitten from the Sakai house, and they return not only from death, but to the state they were in before the Sakais harmed and killed them. They are granted a new beginning.

💫🐈‍⬛spin 🐈‍⬛ 💫

(ii) "Umi Bozu":

The Medicine Seller effectively kills Genkei, an old man approaching death, when he exorcises the mononoke. Through being killed this way, Genkei is reborn into a young man.

(iii) "Nopperabou":

Ochou is in a never-ending, unchanging cycle, at the end of which she is condemned to death. When the Medicine Seller meets her, she wears a white kimono that marks her for death, and the Nopperabou warns her that she is very close to truly dying:

To free Ochou from this cycle, the Medicine Seller has to deconstruct the identity that's been holding her there—which allows him to, again, effectively kill her (and she again wears the white kimono that marks her for death).

And I could get started on the phallic imagery here but I don't think this analysis needs to be any longer.

This death, however, finally brings Ochou rebirth. Like Tamaki and the cat at the close of "Bakeneko," she is able to leave the house where she's been imprisoned. The sky she longed for and the bird that comes to life and flies away just before she finally disappears suggest that she's attained the "new life" she sought in vain with the Nopperabou.

(iv) "Nue":

This is definitely the arc where the death-to-life link is the most obvious, where in particular we see the Medicine Seller act as an agent of death that leads to transformation. As always, he destroys the mononoke, and we see the contrast between the wintery, dead world he enters and the world of spring and life that emerges at the end. But even more explicitly, we see the Medicine Seller, again, effectively kill three men whose endless cycles of death have sustained the mononoke's existence:

And have a fantastic time doing it.

These men not only finally "die" properly but emerge again, with all of their greyed, washed-out color restored, in the world of life that appears after the mononoke is exorcised:

I can never remember their names... angry cat guy, dead monk, nose guy, and hat guy.

(v) The second "Bakeneko":

From the start, this arc carries a theme of rebirth. Its major characters seem to be reincarnations of the characters in the first "Bakeneko," but these people are changed. Most especially, the characters who resemble Tamaki and Sakai are very, very different from their "originals." The extreme imbalance of submission and violence, of virtue and evil, has been corrected, resulting in two people who are neither especially good nor especially evil. Their transformations can be linked back to all of the transformations in the previous arcs, which involve the destruction of divided selves or natures—by returning them to the truth of the "origin,"; that is, to the "Collected Self."

Setsuko, like Tamaki, is ultimately freed from the bakeneko, but the rebirth in this arc is not so much of Setsuko as it is of the people whose lies fueled her revenge. Every person on the train is killed, one after the other, until only the Medicine Seller and Moriya are left standing. But when the bakeneko is exorcised, everyone except Moriya and the mayor returns—now with an understanding of their truths. They accept and make amends for their lies, and a few of them even find new connections with each other.

Interestingly, pretty much just the women and the kid.

Each process of death and rebirth that we see in Mononoke could also be seen as a process of "clearing the mind and seeing one's true nature," which the doc equates with "knowing the self" and "enlightenment." The people behind the mononoke are all trapped in states of delusion that blind them to their true selves: Genkei can't see that his sister is really part of him, his own heart and feelings. Ochou can't see that she lost her true self a long time ago and that the Nopperabou is part of what she lost. The men in "Nue" can't see that they've already died. All of the characters in the first and second "Bakeneko" arcs have been desperately lying to themselves about their roles in creating the bakeneko. These lies sustain the mononoke's existence, because the truths these people hide are the mononoke's truths as well, the ones the Medicine Seller must know in order to exorcise them. Clearing the mind of these delusions, returning knowledge of the true self, and bringing death and rebirth to the mononoke are all part of the same process: the return to the origin or to "the Collected Self."

(b) Karakasa

While the series focuses pretty heavily on death specifically, in the movie we're already seeing both birth and death as powerful themes. @purplealmonds here points out a strong connection between Shingi and death. These connections link Shingi so closely to death that he might even be implied to be a shinigami—in fact, all of the Medicine Sellers may be implied to be shinigami.

But in contrast to the series, the movie may be much more about birth than death. Way back when we were first learning about the movie's setting, I had a crazy theory that the Ōoku could be a metaphor for the womb. It seems now that that theory may not have been so crazy—we're seeing more and more implications that fertility and birth are hugely important here, and even that the Ōoku could be connected to a symbolic birth canal.

@purplealmonds (without whose insights my theories would be far shorter and less interesting) pointed out here that the water priest's two daughters appear to be associated with menstrual blood. Their clothing and body markings prominently feature red, and both have names that translate to "Crescent Moon." But both of these girls are also closely connected with water: they're the children of the water priest, their kimonos are patterned with waves and droplets, and they distribute the well water that the women of the Ōoku consume as part of a sacred ritual.

Their outfits are also very carefully crafted inversions of each other, down to every single detail except the blue cords at their hips.

When daddy makes you dress the same because you're twins but daddy is also a weird creepy priest guy.

So these children may also embody the union of yin and yang, of birth and death: interdependent inversions of each other. Their connection to water connects them to birth and life; their connection to menstrual blood connects them to death—because, as @purplealmonds points out, women go through menstruation when they are not pregnant. Menstruation is a cycle of death without birth, without transformation.

Based on these connections, and on the fact that wells are sometimes written in anime and manga (e.g. in Mushishi and (xXx)Holic) as portals between places or worlds, I think it's plausible that this "sacred well" symbolizes a birth canal leading from and/or to the "womb" of the Ōoku.

I'll... be taking some Dramamine before watching this movie.

Another subtle connection between Karakasa and birth is this image:

GIANT DEMONIC SKY VAGINA

If I'm not mistaken, this manifestation of the mononoke is appearing right above that sacred well.

All of the potential connections between birth and death are here. The mononoke appears in part as a symbol of birth, but it also brings death. Shingi, who must kill the mononoke, appears almost as an embodiment of death, but he co-exists with the Medicine Seller, a contrasting form connected with fertility, sexuality, and life. As with other mononoke, I think we can expect the destruction of the Karakasa to bring about the transformation of whatever truth lies behind it, and I suspect that truth to be the entire world of the Ōoku, which traps the potential for birth in an endlessly unchanging cycle. Exposing this world's truth will mean breaking through the delusions of all the men and women in it who have convinced themselves that they are acting for the good: serving the Shogun, serving the priesthood, serving Japan. When their delusions and the mononoke they created are destroyed, their world will be destroyed as well: returned to the true "Collected Self," and from there allowed to be reborn as a world where birth and death have connected again.

From there, the never-ending process of return to and rebirth from "The Seat of the Collected Self" will continue.

[the-sleepy-archivist]

Favorite Firefox Extensions

Firefox is a very extensible browser - through a combinations of addons and userscripts you can make it behave just about any way you want. The best part is, they're all free. Here are some of my favorites.

Note: if you have an Android device, check out my post about Firefox for Android's new extended support for addons!

Note: if you have an Apple device, check out my favorite Safari extensions here!

Last updated June 2024 (fixed link for Bypass Paywalls Clean).

Index:

uBlock Origin

Tab Session Manager

Sauron

Bypass Paywalls Clean

Auto Tab Discard

Video DownloadHelper

Highlight or Hide Search Engine Results

TWP - Translate Web Pages

UnTrap - YouTube Customizer

Indie Wiki Buddy

Cookie Auto Delete

ShopSuey - Get Rid of Ads on Amazon and Ebay

LibraryExtension

uBlock Origin

(compatible with Firefox for Android)

This is the first addon I install on any new Firefox browser. It's an adblocker, but at its core it can remove pretty much any HTML element from a website, and it comes with pre-configured lists for removing everything from ads to cookie banners to those annoying popups that ask you to sign up for email newsletters.

Tab Session Manager

Have you ever accidentally lost all your open browser tabs due to a computer update, or even just accidentally closing Firefox? With this addon you no longer have to worry about that - it automatically saves your open tabs and windows every time the browser closes, and autosaves a restore point of tabs every few minutes in case the browser crashes unexpectedly. Opening all your previous tabs and windows is a one-click deal.

Sauron

Ever wished your favorite website had a dark mode? With Sauron, now it can! Sauron attempts to intelligently figure out how to edit the color scheme of the web page (including text) to make it dark-mode friendly. It preserves the original color of images, but dims them so that they don't blind you. You can disable image dimming or dark mode on a site by site basis too. It's not perfect since it is making guesses about which colors to change, but it goes a long way toward making the internet an enjoyable place for me.

Bypass Paywalls Clean

This addon removes paywalls from hundreds of news websites around the world or adds links to open the article in a wrapper that provides the article text (like the Internet Archive etc.)

Auto Tab Discard

Ever wanted to keep a tab open for later use, but you notice the browser getting slower and slower the more tabs you have open? Auto Tab Discard will automatically "hibernate" tabs that you haven't used in a while so that they use less resources on your computer. It's smart enough not to hibernate pages that are playing media (like YouTube) or that have forms you haven't submitted yet (like job applications). You can customize how fast it puts tabs to sleep too and exclude certain websites from hibernating at all.

Video DownloadHelper

This addon can download streaming videos from most modern (HTML5) websites, and even finds soft subtitles that accompany the stream and downloads those too. Just browse to the webpage that has the video on it, click the icon in the Firefox toolbar, and select the video you want to download and click "Quick Download". For YouTube I would recommend using a YT downloader website (like KeepVid) to download the video directly, but Video DownloadHelper really shines for websites that aren't popular enough to have dedicated downloader websites like that. I've used it download videos from a Japanese film festival streaming portal, news websites, etc.

Highlight or Hide Search Engine Results

This addon allows you to blacklist websites and completely remove them from Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo search results. Don't want to see image search results from AI websites? Blacklist them. Searching for tech support advice and getting frustrated by all the auto-generated junk websites that stuff themselves full of SEO terms to jump to the top of the search results without actually providing any information at all? Blacklist them so they don't come up in your next search. Conversely, you can also whitelist websites that you know and trust so that if they ever come up in future search results, they'll be highlighted with a color of your choosing for visibility.

TWP - Translate Web Pages

(compatible with Firefox for Android)

Does what it says on the tin: auto-detects a website's language and provides a button that can translate it to a language of your choosing. You can also just select individual text on the page and translate just that. Note that this sends whatever text you translate to the servers of your selected translation service (Google, Bing, Yandex, or DeepL), so keep in mind the privacy implications if you don't want your IP address associated with having read that text.

Edit: As of version 118, Firefox now has the ability to translate text locally on your computer, without needing to send it to a cloud service. You can enable this in Settings -> Translation -> Install languages for offline translation. Note that at this time (May 2024), 18 (mostly European) languages are supported. More info here.

UnTrap for YouTube

(compatible with Firefox for Android and they have a Safari for iOS extension too)

This addon lets you tweak the YouTube interface and hide anything you don't want to see. For instance, I hide all the "recommended" videos that come up when you search YT now. They have nothing to do with your search, so they're essentially just ads YT puts in your search results. I also hide Explore, Trending, More from YouTube, and Shorts sections, but you can customize it to fit your preferences.

Note: depending on the particular set of tweaks you want to make to YouTube, you may prefer to use YouTube Search Fixer instead. User preference.

Indie Wiki Buddy

I loathe Fandom.com wiki sites - they are cluttered and filled with ads and autoplaying videos that follow you down the page as you scroll. The organization is also hostile - if a community tries to leave their platform and bring their content to a new wiki hoster, Fandom bans them from the platform and reverts all their deletions/changes. Indie Wiki Buddy attempts to find an independent alternative for the wiki you're trying to browse and automatically redirects you to it, and if one doesn't exist, it will redirect you to a proxy site like antifandom or breezewiki that shows the Fandom content but removes all ads/videos/background images so you can actually, you know. READ it.

Cookie Auto Delete

(compatible with Firefox for Android)

Websites store "cookies" - little text files with info about you - on your computer as you browse so they can track you as you browse the internet. This addon automatically deletes cookies from a website a short while after you close the last tab you had open for that site. You can customize how long it waits before clearing cookies too. Note that this can sign you out of many websites, so you can whitelist any site you don't want cookies cleared for.

ShopSuey - Get Rid of Ads on Amazon and Ebay

Removes the ads/recommended products that clutter up Amazon and Ebay search results and product pages.

LibraryExtension

This fantastic addon recognizes when you are viewing a book on many popular websites and can automatically check whether that book is available in any of the library systems or subscription services you have access to, including how many copies your library(ies) have and how many are currently checked out. The best part is it shows the availability for physical books, ebooks, AND audiobooks at supported libraries. The extension currently supports libraries in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, but it also supports some global repositories like the Internet Archive and subscription services like NLS Bard for the blind and print disabled, Kobo Plus, Libro.fm, Anyplay.fm, Bookmate, and Everand. Great extension for people trying to support their local library and also save money.

Filtering+ for Tumblr

This addon lets you add tags or phrases to your tumblr tag filters with two clicks, without leaving the dashboard. I've been asking Tumblr for this tag filtering behavior on their mobile apps (i.e. press and hold a tag to get a filter option) for at least a year now in asks and surveys, without ever stopping to see if someone had already implemented this on desktop. More fool me. This addon is from the author of XKit Rewritten. Note that the right-click tag filtering only works on the dashboard; it will not appear if you are on someone's blog. Right-clicking selected text to filter the phrase works everywhere based on my testing.

[thatbiqth]

COMO MEDITAR?/ HOW TO MEDITATE? ‎♡₊˚

a thread in English and Portuguese ! (translator was used, so there may be some grammatical errors)

Um evento canônico de qualquer pessoa é ter se deparado com a meditação em algum lugar, quando criança, por exemplo, é mostrado nos desenhos e filmes de forma totalmente estereotipada e cômica, onde você se senta no chão na posição de Lotus e fecha os olhos.

Mas agora você sendo shifter, não dualista ou praticando alguma lei deve ter escutado pessoas falando da importância da meditação, mas não sabe por onde começar, bem estou aqui para te ajudar!

Bem a resposta é simples, observe, não é um bicho de sete cabeças, observe.

"Mas como eu observo e o que é observar?"

Observar é como o nome já diz consiste em você observar os pensamentos do seu ego(seu corpo físico), pensamentos negativos, alguma lembrança, pensamentos positivos, basicamente tudo o que vier na sua cabeça, observe e não bloqueie.

"Mas eu estou pensando que não estou tendo resultado"

Caso surja um pensamento assim, observe silenciosamente e não faça nada, deixe com que esse pensamento suma sozinho e faça perguntas para si mesmo (irei fazer uma thread apenas falando sobre auto-indagação ou autoquestionamento).

No fim, meditar é mais simples do que você imagina e não é um monstro horroroso. Isso foi o jealous, math te ensinando cada vez mais, beijos💋

A canonical event of any person is having come across meditation somewhere, as a child, for example, it is shown in cartoons and films in a totally stereotypical and comical way, where you sit on the floor in the Lotus position and close your eyes .

But now, if you are a shifter, non-dualist or practicing some law, you must have heard people talking about the importance of meditation, but you don't know where to start, well I'm here to help you!

Well the answer is simple, observe, it's not a big deal, observe.

"But how do I observe and what is observing?"

Observing is, as the name suggests, consisting of you observing the thoughts of your ego (your physical body), negative thoughts, some memory, positive thoughts, basically everything that comes into your head, observe it and don't block it.

"But I'm thinking I'm not getting results"

If a thought like this arises, observe silently and do nothing, let that thought disappear on its own and ask yourself questions (I will make a thread just talking about self-inquiry or self-questioning).

In the end, meditating is simpler than you think and it's not a horrible monster. That was jealous, math teaching you more and more, kisses💋

[desultory-novice]

Nintendo Dream May 2023

Return to Dream Land DX Interview w/ the Staff

[Note: This was 8 pages long. I bought it the moment I could and wrote down/quickly summarized everything I could find that was of interest while reading through it. I didn’t even edit it or spellcheck it ^^ It’s not a full translation, there could be some bits I misinterpreted, and there’s some technical stuff about the development and staff that I left untouched, but this should be all the good stuff!]

---

They spent a long time debating whether the game (in Japanese) should still be called "Kirby Wii" but decided that since it WAS "Kirby Wii" it should keep the name.

They originally thought of giving RtDL a title like the novel version had.

Giving the characters the outlines took a hefty amount of processing power.

Even among the staff, RtDL is considered the origin point of modern Kirby.

Kumazaki's keyword to the staff was "nostalgia filter" - to not just remake the game as is, but to add enough features that it was even better than how people remembered the original.

They didn't force themselves to release all three games (Forgotten Land, Dream Buffet, DX) for the 30th anniversary, but they considered being able to do so ideal. As such, they began working on it while FL was still in development.

As to the borders, they knew it was difficult to introduce a new visual element to a series midway through, but they regretted how easy it was to loose sight of the characters in Star Allies, which is why they added them in. That and the fact that it make the characters look more like they were artwork, as well as fitting in with RtDL's naturally more fantastic and cartoony look, which also helped visually distinguish it from SA that used a lot of similar looking locales to RtDL

As for Dedede's redesign, they mention that he's partly redesigned to best represent what he's used for in each game. In TDX, he was an enemy and an ally, so he was meant to look cool. In Star Allies, he was friendly and a bit goofy. In FL, he was designed to fit with the look of the Beast Pack. DX's Dedede is meant to kind of mix FL and Star Allies, partly because FL Dedede became so popular and had such recognition. (They also note that, regrettably, RtDL's original Dedede had to have his body made smaller because of bounding box issues.) They weren't able to make him the "large and in charge" powerful type they wanted before now.

All the voices were rerecorded for this game, including the masks.

In regards to the opening animation, they talk about how there was no specific situation in mind, but note that Waddle Dee looks like he was sent flying. The reason is because Waddle Dees were still considered generic enemies at that point, and so it made sense that something had sent this random Waddle Dee flying off, which is why it happened. (They also note that because of the timing, it looks like Meta Knight was the one responsible, but it's just a random enemy thing.)

"Helper Magolor" started out from the idea that Watanabe and Tanifuji both had young kids and they wanted a game that their children could play, without sacrificing the depth that veteran gamers enjoy. Kirby is made as an entry game for gamers of all levels, and they feel they opened it up to even more players with this. Really young kids, and people who aren't good at action games but want to enjoy the story. (They were a little surprised at how much the little kids struggled with FL's 3D action elements. While it's natural for us to use inhale and then swallow for a copy ability, little kids and gaming newcomers would forget about that, thus, the auto-copy feature.)

It made sense to make Magolor the helper because he was the key character in the story, and that it would seem he was giving you assistance for you helping him fix his ship.

They debated between some 60 different ideas for new copy abilities before settling on the two that they did. The deciding factor was abilities that seemed like they would belong in Kirby but also be fresh and new.

"Festival" is back not just because it's an anniversary game, but because it fit the feeling of a 4-player adventure. (And also, with Helper Magolor on, it gives a way to increase Magolor's presence in the game.)

They mention that Kumazaki rewrote all the ability descriptions and added all the pause screen lore. That they did like the figure-based methods of lore in FL but wanted to stick with the classic style for RtDL DX. (Also, Watanabe mentions that Kumazaki is a very fast writer. What Watanabe would've taken a day, Kumazaki finished in only an hour. Maybe even faster than than that, Watanabe adds!)

Originally, they only planned for about 40 dress-up masks. Then Kumazaki decided to ask for 86, mostly to please the fans. They choose things that would be easiest, such as characters who already had a 3D model, characters that would make fans the happiest to see, or characters who were simple to make. They chose masks instead of just making them playable because they didn't want to disrupt the setting of RtDL. (And also, because souvenirs like that are a staple of theme parks.)

One question is "Why did Magolor build Magoland in Dream Land?" (For those wondering if it was really in Dream Land or not. Kumazaki answers that you  have to understand Magolor's character. He's someone that loves making things and also loves surprising people. When the idea of turning the sub-games to attractions came up, and which Kirby universe character would be responsible, it just had to be Magolor who made them. Magolor has become a character that's really easy to involve in the series. "If something is making something particularly entertaining in the Kirby series, it's Magolor's turn," says Kumazaki. "Magolor has both magic and technological abilities, which he uses to make things with."

As for the "when" and "where" of Magoland, Kumazaki notes you can kind of get the real picture if you play the game till the very end, but if you're not too concerned with the details, it's okay to just think "So, he made an amusement park at some point!" That said, he implies it supposed to be a bit of a mystery/a bit up in the air. Did he want to make something Kirby and the others would enjoy after all his experiences with them? It's up to the player's interpretation.

The possibility of putting Magolor on the original box art existed, but since he was "just a one game character in a series of games" they left him off to focus on the four person appeal of the original game. But Magolor appeared in more and more things and became popular enough that he finally earned his place on the box art.

Kumazaki mentions that every character starts out as an unknown. Even mega popular characters like Meta Knight were once just a lone boss in a "new" game. His becoming a major player thanks to "Revenge of Meta Knight" and being a character who fulfills an important role helped him to become more recognizable. Magolor has stopped being one of these "newcomer" characters and evolved into his own fully-fledged character with this game.

Kumazaki confirms that in general there's not a straight, forward-flowing timeline in Kirby as much as there is a series of loose connections. And that in-between events, the characters are generally imagined to be living peaceful, ordinary lives - just like in the opening movie. "There, Kirby has a cake and is being chased by Dedede. There were all sorts of fights before then. And maybe King Dedede was causing trouble again and Kirby had to stop him and that led to them running off with the cake...The details are left up to the imagination."

The interviewer mentions that competing over cake makes it seem like it's continuing off of Squeak Squad. Kumazaki notes that though Kirby and Dedede fight with each other, generally speaking, they get along well. As far as the relationships with the characters and how they interact, Kumazaki says, "there are times where, if the Halberd becomes necessary for a game, it's more natural to just make it the Halberd than to have a brand new unknown battleship appear out of nowhere."

"We don't have a story/timeline" he quotes himself, while noting that the truths that have spread among the players as well as the relationships between the characters and their quirks have to be preserved to a certain degree or it's like you're meeting a new cast each time. So they DO keep certain truths and relationships in mind as they make the series. Sometimes this means putting the role of the "bad guy" on King Dedede, but that doesn't change the fact that he and Kirby are "rivals." (But that he will occasionally be unfair too...) That's a fairly recent, "unchanging fact" of the Kirby world. They mention that even Bandanna Waddle Dee goes from being Dedede's vassal to a friend of the group. though recently he's been recognized more and more as "one of the group."

Meta Knight is the same as Dedede. He's someone who will fight Kirby if circumstances call for it. Like how here, in the opening, he's calmly reading a book in between his sword-training, but he pauses to see if Dedede is causing trouble, or if something threatens the peace of Dream Land.

Kumazaki says, noting the inclusion of Magolor's theme park in this game technically makes RtDL DX an alternate universe to the original RtDL. But the information you learn after 100%ing the game challenges the idea of a single flow of time. With the existence of "Another Dimension" that can cross over both space and time, players are free to see that the passage of time does not lead to one single result. That should also help explain why Kirby and the others are able to warp between Magoland, which exists in its own faraway universe, to the main game.

He adds that this is mostly for people who are concerned about the fact that main mode Magolor is depressed about his ship but Magoland Magolor is happily running his theme park.

There's also a note at the end that Landia was named "Landia" instead of something like "Dark Dragon" to make it seem more natural that they could become an ally. They were also designed to look like they could be friendly. (There's also a comment - not from the dev staff - in the "Games Magolor has been in" page that "Magolor uses the same sword as Kirby! Proof that they're friends?!)

Finally....

THE INTERVIEW WILL CONTINUE NEXT MONTH! (Where they'll discuss more about Merry Magoland and the Magolor Epilogue!! Also, Kumazaki will be looking back over the 30 years of Kirby!)