#thank you for reading lovelies <3

[beepboopappreciation]

Is this anything

[commsroom]

the u.s.s. horrible unending nightmare 💥 (once again from the incredible @hehearse)

[pato-roldnart]

Some friendly Quidditch match for @hdwickedwixen zine :3

He caught the snitch!

[ladyhavilliard]

mo dao zu shi tarot

wheel of fortune: good luck, karma, life cycles, destiny, a turning point

the tower | jiang cheng

death | wei wuxian

[basketobread]

my dumb fuck ass just spent 30 minutes trying to find Save Us White Girl and caved and "help white girl bg3" immediately returned it via google,,,,, had help white girl, white girl help stuck in my head,,,,,

THIS MADE ME LAUGH SO MUCH TBH I CANNOT BELIEVE IT CAN IMMEDIATELY BE FOUND LIKE THAT???? everyday this comic finds its way back to me and i'm unsure if i'll ever be able to outdo it... it might be my magnum opus, i fear... (this is a good thing)

[itsmariejanel]

happy three years, to this found family, and to us 🌵

to those who've been with me, reading, commenting, thank you mwah 💗

special thank u to ai @gunthermunch for making the pose for me, from the art she also did

[illogicalvulcans]

[Fic Book Covers 11+12/?] Integrative Approaches by Nnm / @mouseonamoose

Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma

As soon as Aubrey Thyme, psychotherapist, had opened her office door and seen her new client, Anthony J. Crowley, sitting in her waiting area, she was observing and assessing him. At first glance, she paid attention to the following: --His clothing was expensive and stylish; --He wore very strange but noticeable cologne; --His relationship to the seat he occupied could only, very loosely, be described as “sitting;” --He looked angry; --He was wearing sunglasses. What Aubrey Thyme, a professional, thought, upon first seeing her new client was: you’re going to be a fun one, aren’t you?

Angel-Centered Therapy Through A Multicultural Lens

“I’d love to meet with you,” Davey said, apologetically, when he had been called up by a fellow looking to initiate therapy, “but I’m all booked up for months.” “Are you sure?” The fellow said, through a poor connection that crackled. Davey had been sure. And yet. Right there in his calendar was a blank spot, just a few days away, which he had somehow completely overlooked before. “How about that…I’ve got Wednesday at eleven, if you can make that work.” “What a miracle,” the fellow said, “that would be just the perfect time.”

[boygirlctommy]

i love the bit from oct 17 2020 when tommy and quackity trapped wilbur in a cobblestone box to keep him from pressing the button... wilbur punching through the blocks with his bare hand to try to get to the button... tommy frantically replacing the block in front of him yelling for quackity to do something... the moment when tommy stops, blocks the exit, and tells wilbur to do it. press the button. but then theyd die with him. quackitys like "wait, wait-" but tommy holds his ground and wilbur. ohh wilbur. "why'd you have to make it so hard?"

[calmparticles]

Happy new year 1997! 🎉🍾

I'm meaning. 2023.9999999999999999999!!!!!!! 🎉🍾

[ganondoodle]

carefully attempted to draw (still sick); wanted to give Shargon another redesign, this is an older version of him but the basics should also go for his younger self (idk yet about his lung replacement design; arms are posed weird to make anatomy clearer)

(wip, oc art, Shargon, he/they)

[phykoha]

I feel like people should draw Frida however they like for forever. Crazy thought I know.

real and true. also speaking of Frida

[rendevok]

your narumitsu art made me weep with joy and I heard you want more requests 👀

idk if this is the right place to put them but I think phoenix coming with miles to try on his glasses for the first time would be sweet :,) miles asking how they look and phoenix being just smitten. the good stuff

Dear anon… you sure know how to pick em! Things got very out of hand very quickly while drawing, and well. You inspired me to draft a comic! I didn’t want to make you wait long, so here are the sketches for the pages relevant to your request <3

Thanks so much, and hope you enjoy~! 💜

[caitlyn-kirammans]

caitvi fix recs? 👀

Hi, hello! Oh gosh, there's so many great fics out there! Can you believe we have 6000+ caitvi fics and counting??? It used be like 100 lol. I personally have a very long list of backlogs too haha (staring at my 30+ opened fics who are mostly 100k+ words lmfao). I'll list down some that are, at the top of my head, my favorites!

Do note the AO3 warnings too. Some can be NSFW, or some tropes might not interest you, and that's okay! Fandom should be fun for YOU! And if they're not your cup of tea, you can always just read something else that might pique your interest.

With that, here are my two favorite authors: @sunsetsharkblog (AO3 link) and @unamedica (AO3 Link). All of their works are amazing, and you can read pretty much everything they've published. Reasons being:

They update and publish a heck ton of works that are consistently AMAZING

Even if some stories have tropes that I don't usually read (e.g. high school, ABO, royalty, etc etc), I end up loving them and getting into the tropes itself. It takes a great author to do that to me, personally.

My faves are King of Zaun and the Hunter and the Hunted series from Medica, and What a Week and the When we’re together series from Sunset, but ALL their stuff are great and you should definitely check them out.

And here are more other favorite works/authors:

thescriptorium's Where is Love?

hdsoull's It's reassuring (you keep coming around)

@linka-from-captain-planet's devil in disguise, a snake with blue eyes

@becasbelt's either way, we're not alone (I'll find a new place to be from) and you're a word that I can't forget

rosetattoos's lucid dreams about you

lorrxai's Vi's Guide to Not Picking Up Guys

all of @thehaakun's fics, with on your authority as my personal favorite

@connielingus423's late fine

wiseturtlebear's Plus One

KariAteRachel's Bloom for Her

@prettyaveragewhiteshark's you carry my fears (as the heavens set fire)

AmberZ10's All's Fair

JynErsoinNYC's Silver Spoons

cityseeker's the heart's epiphany

HaughtBreaker's Traffic Stop

@heymacareyna's bring me java, bring me joy

CashewNut_Cam's Total Immersion

MyrtenasterRose's The Ace Up Her Sleeve

p0etess's gray is not a real color

hellboy's for crown & country

RedPanda92's Even If Nothing's Certain, I'll Take a Chance With You

MagicBoot's It's about you and me

SarcastCity's Unexpected Chemistry

anyways to every single one of you fic authors ily all so much! thank you for the hard work you guys do for the fandom <3

[cockroachesunite]

In honour of this maniac’s birthday, here’s one of my favorite anecdotes, via Passages From The Life Of A Naval Officer, Etc by Edward Philips Charlewood

(Illustration inspired by this)

[lurkingteapot]

Every now and then I think about how subtitles (or dubs), and thus translation choices, shape our perception of the media we consume. It's so interesting. I'd wager anyone who speaks two (or more) languages knows the feeling of "yeah, that's what it literally translates to, but that's not what it means" or has answered a question like "how do you say _____ in (language)?" with "you don't, it's just … not a thing, we don't say that."

I've had my fair share of "[SHIP] are [married/soulmates/fated/FANCY TERM], it's text!" "[CHARACTER A] calls [CHARACTER B] [ENDEARMENT/NICKNAME], it's text!" and every time. Every time I'm just like. Do they though. Is it though. And a lot of the time, this means seeking out alternative translations, or translation meta from fluent or native speakers, or sometimes from language learners of the language the piece of media is originally in.

Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn't. To lots of people, it doesn't. People have different interests and priorities in fiction and the way they interact with it. It's great. It matters to me because back in the early 2000s, I had dial-up internet. Video or audio media that wasn't available through my local library very much wasn't available, but fanfiction was. So I started to read English language Gundam Wing fanfic before I ever had a chance to watch the show. When I did get around to watching Gundam Wing, it was the original Japanese dub. Some of the characters were almost unrecognisable to me, and first I doubted my Japanese language ability, then, after checking some bits with friends, I wondered why even my favourite writers, writers I knew to be consistent in other things, had made these characters seem so different … until I had the chance to watch the US-English dub a few years later. Going by that adaptation, the characterisation from all those stories suddenly made a lot more sense. And the thing is, that interpretation is also valid! They just took it a direction that was a larger leap for me to make.

Loose adaptations and very free translations have become less frequent since, or maybe my taste just hasn't led me their way, but the issue at the core is still a thing: Supernatural fandom got different nuances of endings for their show depending on the language they watched it in. CQL and MDZS fandom and the never-ending discussions about 知己 vs soulmate vs Other Options. A subset of VLD fans looking at a specific clip in all the different languages to see what was being said/implied in which dub, and how different translators interpreted the same English original line. The list is pretty much endless.

And that's … idk if it's fine, but it's what happens! A lot of the time, concepts -- expressed in language -- don't translate 1:1. The larger the cultural gap, the larger the gaps between the way concepts are expressed or understood also tend to be. Other times, there is a literal translation that works but isn't very idiomatic because there's a register mismatch or worse. And that's even before cultural assumptions come in. It's normal to have those. It's also important to remember that things like "thanks I hate it" as a sentiment of praise/affection, while the words translate literally quite easily, emphatically isn't easy to translate in the sense anglophone internet users the phrase.

Every translation is, at some level, a transformative work. Sometimes expressions or concepts or even single words simply don't have an exact equivalent in the target language and need to be interpreted at the translator's discretion, especially when going from a high-context/listener-responsible source language to a low-context/speaker-responsible target language (where high-context/listener responsible roughly means a large amount of contextual information can be omitted by the speaker because it's the listener's responsibility to infer it and ask for clarification if needed, and low-context/speaker-responsible roughly means a lot of information needs to be codified in speech, i.e. the speaker is responsible for providing sufficiently explicit context and will be blamed if it's lacking).

Is this a mouse or a rat? Guess based on context clues! High-context languages can and frequently do omit entire parts of speech that lower-context/speaker-responsible languages like English regard as essential, such as the grammatical subject of a sentence: the equivalent of "Go?" - "Go." does largely the same amount of heavy lifting as "is he/she/it/are you/they/we going?" - "yes, I am/he/she/it is/we/you/they are" in several listener-responsible languages, but tends to seem clumsy or incomplete in more speaker-responsible ones. This does NOT mean the listener-responsible language is clumsy. It's arguably more efficient! And reversely, saying "Are you going?" - "I am (going)" might seem unnecessarily convoluted and clumsy in a listener-responsible language. All depending on context.

This gets tricky both when the ambiguity of the missing subject of the sentence is clearly important (is speaker A asking "are you going" or "is she going"? wait until next chapter and find out!) AND when it's important that the translator assign an explicit subject in order for the sentence to make sense in the target language. For our example, depending on context, something like "are we all going?" - "yes" or "they going, too?" might work. Context!

As a consequence of this, sometimes, translation adds things – we gain things in translation, so to speak. Sometimes, it's because the target language needs the extra information (like the subject in the examples above), sometimes it's because the target language actually differentiates between mouse and rat even though the source language doesn't. However, because in most cases translators don't have access to the original authors, or even the original authors' agencies to ask for clarification (and in most cases wouldn't get paid for the time to put in this extra work even if they did), this kind of addition is almost always an interpretation. Sometimes made with a lot of certainty, sometimes it's more of a "fuck it, I've got to put something and hope it doesn't get proven wrong next episode/chapter/ten seasons down" (especially fun when you're working on a series that's in progress).

For the vast majority of cases, several translations are valid. Some may be more far-fetched than others, and there'll always be subjectivity to whether something was translated effectively, what "effectively" even means …

ANYWAY. I think my point is … how interesting, how cool is it that engaging with media in multiple languages will always yield multiple, often equally valid but just sliiiiightly different versions of that piece of media? And that I'd love more conversations about how, the second we (as folks who don't speak the material's original language) start picking the subtitle or dub wording apart for meta, we're basically working from a secondary source, and if we're doing due diligence, to which extent do we need to check there's nothing substantial being (literally) lost -- or added! -- in translation?

[janearts]

I know Roisia didn't think much of Gortash's offer to rule the world together, but what were her thoughts on the Steel Watch? Using humanoid brains to power robots seems at least a little necromancy adjacent

[Ask refers to this previous ask.]

At some point I'll need to distinguish that Roisia is not a Dark Urge character. Her dark urges cackle and gurgle and trot along behind her. Anyway, the whole Steel Watch is not just necromancy-adjacent, it is Myrkulite necromancy... just flavoured with Illithid psionics. Reanimate a corpse, tadpole the poor sod, cut off its head, put the reanimated body into a Steel Watcher shell and the tadpoled brain into a jar, and wham, bam, thank you ma'am you've got yourself a Watcher.

Just because it's necromancy doesn't mean it pleases Roisia, though. Roisia is all about the wondrous nature of the organic form. The meat, the guts, the nerves, the intricate and complex systems that allow a body to function. Despite the fact that it was a Necromancer (Balthazar) who helped design the Steel Watch, she would think he missed The Whole Goddamn Point of necromancy and, essentially, nerfed the most powerful organ in the body and implanted a sophisticated organism into one that, while stronger, is far more primitive. She didn't feel there was anything particularly Myrkulite about the construction of the Steel Watch, but what the hell does she know?