#published: 2010

[myfandomrealitea]

Wattpad's TOS are actually criminally hypocritical and ridiculous the more you read them. The website is literally just:

"Give us all your content for free to do with as we please and let us expose you to 493737573 website cookies and advertisements but also if you change the color of our logo we'll sue and if someone gets inaccurate medical advice from your fanfiction and sues we're also going to sue you for exposing us to risk."

Wattpad can mine your content but you can't mine Wattpad.

Wattpad can sue you for absolutely anything they perceive as "damaging" or "breach of terms" but the moment you make an account you release them of any and all claims, damages and responsibility.

If Anne Rice 2.0 does happen, Wattpad has so kindly declared that they reserve the right to be the sole defense, so they can throw you under the bus and then charge you for any and all fees incurred including legal and "related" costs. Oh, and you have to co-operate because, guess what? You agreed to!

In the instance you do wind up in a legal battle for your own content you're shit out of luck because Wattpad will have no part in it other than making sure its absolved of any responsibility and costs, and you're restricted to attending Court only in the Province of Ontario.

Like. How anyone still uses Wattpad is beyond me. Completely. It so obviously nothing more than a for-profit content theft facilitator. I feel like we've just moved so far beyond the need for Wattpad. Its so outdated even if you don't look at the TOS.

[renthony]

Sometimes I have to forcibly remind myself that I have been keeping up with the publishing & entertainment industries since I was 13, and that I started writing freelance for extra pocket money when I was still in high school. I was reading industry news, I was talking to industry professionals online and in-person, I was taking every possible step to become a worker in the field.

"How do people not know this [niche industry thing]?!" Well, sweetie, not everyone has been paying attention to the industry for over half their life. You read the goddamn trades. Of course you know shit.

Impostor syndrome so strong it makes you forget that you've been working your ass off for your entire goddamn life. Lord.

[sandwichsapphic]

“very amusing sir” DO NOT ENCOURAGE HIM. your boyfriend is making jokes during the apocalypse this is NOT the time

[garadinervi]

From: Giorgio Griffa. Works 1965-2015, Mousse Publishing, Milano, 2015 [BOOKS at, Amsterdam. Art: © Giorgio Griffa]

Editor: Andrea Bellini Texts: Andrea Bellini, Luca Cerizza, Laura Cherubini, Martin Clark, Suzanne Cotter, Chris Dercon and Hans Ulrich Obrist Design: Marco Fasolini, Fausto Giliberti, Matteo Gualandris, Niki Leck, Massimiliano Pace and Francesco Valtolina

Exhibitions: Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Genève, May 28 – August 23, 2015; Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, August 28 – October 18, 2015; Fondazione Giuliani, Roma, February-April 2016; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, May 14 – September 4, 2016

[immortalclarareborn]

Dredd (2012)

[whoify]

that article that’s like “doctor who might not come back guys it’s looking dire” can we be for real. overnight numbers are down but that’s bc overnight numbers for everything are down due to the way people watch TV now. it is not doing badly compared to other bbc shows and is in fact being referred to as “one of the most watched shows on iplayer” (x). i don’t think they’d be creating a whole new spinoff if they thought the main show was going down the drain. let’s think before we spiral into age-old “doctor who is getting cancelled” doomerism

[hedgehog-moss]

[1] `there are often translations available in other languages long before English ones` This is really interesting! I'm familiar with translation in games, where english is often a very early target (a small game might get 0-5 translations, depending on amount of text) because the size of the market is larger.

[2] Do you happen to know why this is different for books? Is it faster to come to a deal about publication rights for some other languages to get started on the translation? Is translation to english harder (at least from French) than to say, Spanish?

The literary translation situation has long been very dismal in the English-speaking world! I don’t know a lot about video games, but are localisations provided by the company that makes the game? Because if that's the case it makes sense that games would get translated into English as a priority. For literary translations which are imported rather than exported, other countries have to decide to translate a foreign author and anglo countries (US, UK and Canada at least) are not very interested in foreign literature. There's something known as the "3% rule" in translation—i.e. about 3% of all published books in the US in any given year are translations. Some recent sources say this figure is outdated and it’s now something like 5% (... god) but note that it encompasses all translations, and most of it is technical translation (instruction manuals, etc). The percentage of novels in translation published in the UK is 5-6% from what I’ve read and it’s lower in the US. In France it's 33%, and that’s not unusually high compared to other European countries.

I don't think it's only because of the global influence of English* and the higher proportion of English speakers in other countries than [insert language] speakers in the US, or poor language education in schools etc, because just consider how many people in the US speak Spanish—I just looked it up and native Spanish speakers in the US represent nearly 2/3rds of the population of France, and yet in 2014 (most recent solid stat I could find) the US published only 67 books translated from Spanish. France with a much smaller % of native Spanish speakers (and literary market) published ~370 translations from Spanish that same year. All languages combined, the total number of new translations published in France in 2014 was 11,859; in Spain it was 19,865; the same year the US published 618 new translations. France translated more books from German alone (754) than the US did from all languages combined, and German is only our 3rd most translated language (and a distant third at that!). The number of new translations I found in the US in 2018 was 632 so the 3% figure is probably still accurate enough.

* When I say it’s not just about the global influence of English—obviously that plays a huge role but I mean there’s also a factor of cultural isolationism at play. If you take English out of the equation there’s still a lot more cultural exchange (in terms of literature) between other countries. Take Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead; it was published in 2009, and (to give a few examples) translated in Swedish 1 year later, in Russian & German 2 years later, in French, Danish & Italian 3 years later, in English 10 years later—only after she won the Nobel. I’m reminded of the former secretary for the Nobel Prize who said Americans “don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature” because they don’t translate enough. I think it's a similar phenomenon as the one described in the "How US culture ate the world" article; the US is more interested in exporting its culture than in importing cultural products from the rest of the world. And sure, anglo culture is spread over most continents so there’s still a diversity of voices that write in English (from India, South Africa, etc etc) but that creates pressure for authors to adopt English as their literary language. The dearth of English translation doesn’t just mean that monolingual anglophones are cut off from a lot of great literature, but also that authors who write in minority languages are cut off from the global visibility an English translation could give them, as it could serve as a bridge to be translated in a lot more languages, and as a way to become eligible for major literary prizes including the Nobel.

Considering that women are less translated than men and represent a minority (about 1/3) of that already abysmally low 3% figure, I find the recent successes of English translations of women writers encouraging—Olga Tokarczuk, Banana Yoshimoto, Han Kang, Valeria Luiselli, Samanta Schweblin, Sayaka Murata, Leila Slimani, of course Elena Ferrante... Hopefully this is a trend that continues & increases! I remember this New Yorker article from years ago, “Do You Have to Win the Nobel Prize to Be Translated?”, in which a US small press owner said “there’s just no demand in this country” (for translated works); but the article acknowledged that it’s also a chicken-and-egg problem. Traditional publishers who have the budget to market them properly don’t release many translations as (among other things) they think US readers are reluctant to read translated foreign literature, and the indie presses who release the lion’s share of translated works (I read it was about 80%) don’t have the budget to promote them so people don’t buy them so the assumption that readers aren’t interested lives on. So maybe social media can slowly change the situation by showing that anglo readers are interested in translated books if they just get to find out about them...

[mildmayfoxe]

started a book yesterday where one of the characters is a figure skater in recovery after an injury & the other character is a rancher who lives next door to the place the skater is house sitting & the skater just heard the rancher say he doesn’t play the piano proficiently, just plays around & the skater was like “wow 😍 he’s got a big vocabulary 😍!” girl!!! proficiency????? that’s a big vocab word to you???? god forbid a farmer be educated in any capacity

[sleepnoises]

in like middle school i heard that art spiegelman did Maus in ballpoint pen and i fully went "wow!!! you can create incredible work with less than ideal tools! if I can't get the effects i want out of my bad tools it must be a me problem and there's nothing to be done!" and it was a lottle a me problem, due to i was 14, but that was the wrong thing to take from that factoid, and also i learned this very day that he did Maus with fountain pens. so this is a story about being wrong in middle school about many things

[allbeendonebefore]

picked up a book ive been meaning to read on the peloponnesian war thats been gathering dust on my shelf

author: ok so this is going to be very difficult for a modern audience to understand because keep in mind ancient greece is a very alien culture

me: go on

author: you have to consider the greeks thought of their city states... as people

me:

[mathsbian]

Megamind walked…

so Spider-Punk could run.

[moonrevolutions]

that goofy ass ' words to use instead of said! ' list and then mfs wanna give alternatives without contextual explanations, not to mention ppl that dont speak english as a first language.... etc etc..... its ok to use ' said ' it rly is cuz if u stray too much it looks and sounds a lil clunky....

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

I just looked at the price on the back of a book I’ve had for a bit over a decade and it was four. fucking. dollars. Just four with no taxes. No extra 97cents or something before taxes. Just a round number that you would add taxes to.

I googled the price of a new edition and it was almost thirteen! Not an even thirteen, it was like 12.96 or something. Close enough that it’s basically thirteen but if you’re adding multiple items together to try and get the price on a purchase with more items it would add more confusion.

[fleshadept]

really unfortunate that taika waititi is a zionist with his head up his own ass because boy (2010) really is a fucking brilliant film.

[garadinervi]

Vittorio Arrigoni, (2009), Gaza. Stay Human, With a Preface by Ilan Pappé, Translated by Daniela Filippin, Kube Publishing, Markfield, (2010-)2011, pp. 80-84 (pdf here)

[things-ford-pines-missed]

Things Ford Missed #73: The Twilight Saga.

yeah. he missed a lot.

also, while we’re here:

Thing Ford Missed #74: The First Four Twilight Movies.

(at least he gets to see breaking dawn part two with everyone!)