#language solution

[aeturnum-mendacacium]

everybody has fics or headcannons that Bruce's speach was influenced by how he's such a dad, or batman, or a serving cunt but like what about how his speech Is influenced by how he talks normally as "Brucie wayne" to people?

I imagine he's got that posh accent when he's speaking when he's acting as Brucie Wayne and says 'darling' at the end of his sentences and it became a habit when he's not in the cowl

This is also partly because justice league's ears almost fall off when batman is scolding them( wearing a domino, cowl was damaged on mission,no voice modulation) because why does batman have a Italian-posh accent and who just called Superman darling.

[iamfuckingsorry]

So I've recently realized that murderbot's been translated into my native language and it's apparently a he in the translation (which admittedly makes sense, because it's a heavily gendered language and 1. gender-neutral language doesn't really exist in general and 2. "bot" and all the related words - I believe they use "droid" for mb in the translation - are grammatically masculine).

It made me curious how it's been handled in other translations though!

*e.g. being referred to by multiple gendered nouns/pronouns depending on the context, like both "bot" (masculine) and "machine" (feminine).

[cvntroach5000]

filling out the 1.5 survey was more stressful than any exam ive ever written

pls listen to the players infold pls listen to the players omfg

[bloggingboutburgers]

Tbh I feel like going to the US while the Nazis are in power is suicidal. So of course I don't understand your choice of going instead of your SO coming to Europe. But while I don't understand, I wish and pray for you to be safe. Whatever you choose, I hope you guys will be okay

You might be right. I have no idea what the future has in store or if I'll come to regret it. But I've already stated my reasons. As it stands, with the year-long process we've already started and that we can't just flip on a dime overnight, my partner can't come and stay in Europe legally just like that. Legal immigration is not that easy in one way or the other. Also... Yeah, I've stated that before, but one shouldn't underestimate how shitty things have been getting in Europe for the past few years as well, and how the influence of the US (which is huge) is likely to make things worse. So again I'm not 100% sure whether that'd have been better anyway.

Also also... Ima be real, I've shared that before, but the time where I was separated from my partner due to the travel ban was the only time in my life where I had actual suicidal ideation. I don't want this to happen again. That's why I'm making moves so it doesn't, first and foremost.

[ganondoodle]

Sorry ab the shitty English translations/localizations, it's bc they think that Americans won't get it otherwise (bc when we act stupid, we act REALLY stupid), our bad 💀

[rad-roche]

can i be a little petty. a little petty on the internet. with the preface that this is very much a me problem. i don't like it when like sci-fi or fantasy has in-universe equivalent swears but are otherwise speaking plain modern english. like i don't know the roguish hero bumps into somebody in the space market and goes what the fargle. in kids media i can understand it because very young children can go teehee swears but certainly not at anything targeted for adults. not even oaths like somebody yelling by the twelth moon! or whatever the hell. i mean fargle

[uncanny-tranny]

One thing I always appreciated about English is the fact that "love" as a word conceptually refers to all types of love - from familial, to romantic, to platonic, to sexual, to the love one feels for strangers - all forms of love are referred to with the same word. What I love about this is that love isn't placed on a hierarchy (in theory). To me, this feels almost egalitarian, where all forms of love can be valued in the same way

However, I think this is also a double-edged sword that works against how we express love. Because love so often is still viewed as hierarchical, the kinds of love we can express is narrowed. It's very normal to not express love unless it is familial or romantic, and thus, all other forms of love become unrecognized and unnamed. We've shut away part of humanity in the bid to emphasize certain behaviours and emotions, and I really think that works against us in the long run.

I don't necessarily think English needs new words for different types of love per se. I love that other languages have the distinction ("te quiero" is different than "te amo"), and I think that's a valuable communication device. What I think we ought to do, instead, is focus on emphasizing all love as intrinsically equal to each other. I think introducing new words without solving this issue will only introduce the same kind of strife we are experiencing now.

[captocie]

i've just seen another post asking what the gender neutral or nonbinary word is for "sir" or "ma'am" and i'd like to put forth "em" as a solution.

"sir" comes from sire, "ma'am" comes from "madam." "em" then, comes from "eminence" as in "will that be all your eminence?" or "will that be all em?"

it's short and quick to say, like both sir and ma'am, and it's gender neutral and stems from a word denoting nobility like both sir and ma'am

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

What happens to Ahti's lungs when he turns into a merman? I can just assume the gills just magically dissapear when he turns human but the human half is still there as a merman so,,,

Does he need to not speak underwater so stuff doesn't get in his lungs? Or is the top half of the body just doesn't have any organs?

Great question! Ahti gets to keep his lungs as a merman! When going from two-legged human to merm, he sort of gains a new, third bronchus that elongates down his body (that is rapidly growing in length), into the rapidly developing swim bladder. He doesn't really use his lungs while swimming underwater (parts of them may be collapsible, to avoid too much nitrogen intake? Well, in any case, practically all the air in his body while diving is in his swim bladder) but he can breathe air at the surface or on land if he so wishes.

And you're definitely right, talking underwater is really inconvenient! Humans talk by pushing air out of the lungs, and underwater it just makes a muffled noise, and you just keep spitting out bubbles.... how lovely, then, that at least the merfolk of the Baltic figured out a nifty spell for that millennia ago! "Waterspeak", as it is called, doesn't really have known origins, but it's very simple to perform and allows a person to speak underwater without actually expelling air out of their lungs. It kinda works in the same way that one can still speak if their lungs are practically empty, but also not really, and has more to do with changing how an air bubble in the water vibrates (and the bubble is on your vocal cords). Just remember not to inhale after each sentence, you'll only inhale water! And waterspeak also needs to be reversed with a separate counterspell when one is exposed to the air, because if one is on land and tries to talk in waterspeak.... their speech comes out as a really forced-sounding croaking. Water-only sort of deal.

Oh oh, he does also have his heart in his upper torso along with his lungs! But otherwise his torso is rather "empty". Lots of blood though. That boy can fit a ton of blood! And naturally he has such famous organs as "a brain" and "eyes" inside his head, among other things hehehe

[thetriggeredhappy]

before pride month ends im gonna take this opportunity to say. if a transfem corrects you for using ‘dude’ or ‘man’ to refer to her, and you reply that ‘actually dude and man are gender neutral’, consider that she knows this. and she’s correcting you because she doesn’t want to be referred to as gender neutral. she wants to be referred to as a woman. and perhaps - really stew on this one - your reluctance to refer to her with traditionally feminine language, and even to incorporate and co-opt traditionally feminine language into your casual gender-neutral usages in everyday life, are indicative of an internal sexist bias. this is not necessarily in itself a condemnation of your character - but if you feel perfectly comfortable calling someone (regardless of gender) ‘bro’ but not ‘sis’, that’s worth a smidge of introspection.

[indigostudies]

honestly i feel like i could make multiple levels of language lists. like “languages i’m actively studying” “languages i’d like to study in the near future” “languages i would like to study but i can’t justify putting them further up in priority because it’s mainly just an aesthetic/audio love” “languages i want to study but not as intensely so who knows if they’ll ever be touched” “languages i like on an intellectual level but will probably never be able to justify spending energy and time on” etc

[galaxywarp]

You guys know the little joke about fanfiction with like, authors losing track of what position the characters are in, so they end up moving all over the place throughout a scene?

I think I’m creating the exact opposite problem for myself rn. and I’m spending wayyyy too much time worrying about exactly how Mercy and Moira are circling each other around this room in this scene.

Like. DAYS worth of pondering.

[some-pers0n]

interesting ideas about AI art and by no means am I trying to send hate but I believe majority of people hate AI art is because it's truly just the byproduct of a giant plinko board bouncing through pieces of art made by artists who put love and care and SOUL into their work. A visual product of a math formula. While it's "art" in the most litteral sense, not having a true human behind it putting though and effort into its every detail, for many people (myself included) devalues it from a tradition artists work.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that AI art is inherently unequal to non Ai art, specifically for this reason. (Hope this made sense sorry if it's incoherent)

I agree in that sense there. I personally do not find myself wanting to engage in a work when I purposefully know the creator had used AI to create the entire product. Something something,,,I cannot find myself getting invested in something that is little more than a product. I don't wanna read a fic about my blorbos when it was written by Chat-GPT

I also agree with the idea that a lot of people hate AI art because of this heavily emotional, debatably reactionary mindset that stems from one thing: fairness. It's the same sort of emotion I find one gets if all of the work on a group project gets shafted onto them whilst their fellow peers sit idly by. It feels unfair to sink hours into your craft, spending all this time fighting to develop your skills and flourish as an artist, only to see someone type half a paragraph and have a machine spit back something that looks not half bad. Let's be honest with ourselves here and say that AI art, at least in a visual regard, has progressed quite a bit to the point where most of the mistakes people find can be dismissed as wonky perspective and the line art being a bit fucky, which is something a ton of artists struggle with too

People develop a sort of a superiority complex over it. I can't blame them honestly. A number of times I've felt it too when people tell me they're using Chat-GPT as though it were Google and when I see my family members and friends playing around with AI art. I gotta bite my tongue and choke back a chortle, both because it's kind of a dick move and also because I don't want to relish in this feeling. It's infectious though to feel as though you have an edge over another person just because you abstain from using Chat-GPT or whatever. Not to be all "grrgrgrr you should LOVE Chat-GPT and if you dare to say anything bad then you are EVILL!!" of course though. It's emotions. They're messy, intense, and oftentimes you don't really realize when you're feeling since you get locked into your perspective. Yet, I think it's important to realize a lot of hatred of this generative AI stems from emotions. Reactionary ideals and claims stem from emotions after all

I think ultimately what the conversation about generative AI should revolve around is about the concerns of labour. The several strikes from a while back from VFX artists and scriptwriters come to mind. They are most at stake from generative AI as tools like Chat-GPT are cheaper and more cost-effective than paying an actual employee for their time and effort. I would also mention the environmental issues, but if we were to talk about that we would also have to acknowledge the fact that so, so much water is being used up daily to generate power for servers. Hell, this post alone will probably contribute to drying up some marsh in the greater scheme of things

Anywho yada yada TL;DR: I agree yes but I also think it's important to recognize that a good chunk of your hatred to Chat-GPT stems from feeling cheated and a sense of pride and superiority over others for simply not using it. There is no quality to Chat-GPT that makes it inherently evil. I can't get upset at my grandma for sending me a photo of her and her dog that went through an AI anime filter. I can feel maybe some exhaustion when seeing a fellow classmate using Chat-GPT to write their essay, but ultimately I write my own work for the love of the game. I can get upset however at those in higher power who use it to push artists out of jobs. Chat-GPT is a tool that has its pros and cons and I think it's reductive to just basically sit there and hiss like a vampire when presented with a cross when faced with the mere word "AI", especially when your only big argument for disliking it is based purely in feeling cheated when someone types a prompt into a program and art that would've taken you seven hours to draw gets spit out in about a minute or two

[cleromancy]

having a thought/worldbuilding experiment im rolling around in my mind about What Would It Be Like if taxpayers could choose what areas of infrastructure their taxes went to. like the total amount of taxes paid would be the same but you could go down the line and adjust how much of a percentage of what you pay you allocate to roads and transport, schools and libraries, post office... etc. the first thing is that most people would just leave it as the default/suggested allocation. the second thing is i think the impact this would have on propaganda would be so interesting. the third thing is that it would be bleakly funny if that shit was what actually got rich people to pay proportionate taxes (for the structures that reinforce hegemony at the expense of public welfare)

[girderednerve]

Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries via their digital catalogs, forcing librarians who are already understaffed to either sort through a functionally infinite number of books to determine what is written by humans and what is generated by AI, or to spend taxpayer dollars to provide patrons with information they don’t realize is AI-generated.

With Hoopla, librarians have to opt into Hoopla’s entire catalog, then pay for whatever their customers choose to borrow from that catalog. The only way librarians can limit what Hoopla books their customers can borrow is by setting a limit on the price of books. For example, a library can use Hoopla but make it so their customers can only borrow books that cost the library $5 per use.

“Investigating these authors, their book covers, their social media, etc takes A LOT OF TIME, especially with the volume of questionable material increasing month to month (and that's not including the sheer amount of legitimate books published each month in adult fiction that I'm looking at),” one librarian who asked to remain anonymous so she could talk openly about her job, told me. “Is it the best use of my time doing this work on top of my other duties when customers may or may not care? And with the rising multitudes of AI generated content, will there come a point where it just ‘is what it is?’”

This type of low quality, AI generated content, is what we at 404 Media and others have come to call AI slop. Librarians, whose job it is in part to curate what books their community can access, have been dealing with similar problems in the publishing industry for years, and have a different name for it: vendor slurry. While the term now encompasses what seems like AI-generated content as well, it predates the rise of generative AI, and also refers to the glut of low quality, often self-published ebooks or book “summaries” that are common on Hoopla. As some librarians told me, the sheer quantity of books in Hoopla’s service makes it seem more valuable because it offers such a large number of books, but in reality that number is misleadingly inflated by this slurry.

Several of the librarians I talked to said that they are worried about discussing [the problems raised by Hoopla's weak, unclear selection policies, including the 2022 inclusion of explicitly white nationalist texts,] because of the growing hostility towards libraries and groups like Moms for Liberty demanding that books about LGBTQ rights, race, and ethnicity be removed from libraries. One the one hand, librarians want to curate their collections and make sure their patrons are getting access to quality information. On the other hand, they don’t want people to think that they are trying to censor what materials patrons can access in way that’s comparable to what organizations like Moms for Liberty want. None of the librarians I talked to suggested the AI-generated content needed to be banned from Hoopla and libraries only because it is AI-generated. It might have its place, but it needs to be clearly labeled, and more importantly, provide borrowers with quality information.