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[ladyluscinia]

Even the smallest of words, like “even” (“per” in Greek), can create enormously consequential interpretive challenges for the translator. In Book 24 of the “Iliad,” the goddess Thetis visits her mortal son, Achilles, who is prostrate with grief for his dead friend, Patroclus. Achilles is still dragging the corpse of Patroclus’s killer, Hector, around the city walls every day, and still refusing to eat, drink or have sex — the normal activities of mortals. The goddess asks her son how long he will “devour” his heart with grief, rather than eating normal bread, and she reminds him that it is also good to have sex, or more literally (as I render it) to “join in love” — “even with a woman.” On the most linguistically straightforward reading, the phrase suggests that his mother thinks Achilles would prefer to join with someone other than a woman — such as Patroclus, his beloved dead friend. This may be a surprise, given that earlier in “The Iliad,” the two men were described as sharing their beds with enslaved women, and they are never described by Homer as having sex with each other — although by the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., readers such as Aeschylus and Plato certainly assumed that they were lovers. Is Thetis suddenly “outing” her son? Or is she simply acknowledging the depth of his desire to be with his dead companion? Translators sometimes leave the word out entirely (Fagles: “It’s a welcome thing to make love with a woman”) or apply the emphasis to the activity, not the partner (Lattimore: “even to lie with a woman”; Caroline Alexander, “Indeed, it is good to lie with a woman”) — although this is not a natural reading of the Greek word order. I do not think it is generally the translator’s job to correct or fight against the text; hence my decision to settle on the simple “even with a woman.” Readers can decide for themselves whether Achilles is yearning to “join” Patroclus in a sexual sense or to mingle with his dear ashes in the tomb.

- Emily Wilson on 5 crucial decisions she made in her ‘Iliad’ translation (link goes to the archive.ph version of the original washington post article due to its paywall)

[ladyluscinia]

x.com/arielvaale/status/1791980128043438391?s=46&t=N5drOJO_Cn8W9puT4aKCNw U SEEN THIS ⁉️⁉️⁉️ this challengers amv lives in my head rent freeeee

BROTHER. you know ive seen this. you KNOW the amv is gonna go crazyyyyyyyyy when op casually drops the fact that they get paid at their job to edit video. no one asked but these are my favs:

super graphic ultra modern tashi

idk what song this is but it rules

RIGHT! WHERE! YOU! LEFT! ME!

when they rerelease challengers in theaters in 10 year or whatever this BETTER be the video they use

classic. classic.

vids that make you go ack!

this ones sooooo fun.

like of course!!!! of course this exists thank god it does.

and then ten zillion tashi fancams. obviously.

[ladyluscinia]

s1 dean: it's not gay to suck a dick or three or ten you're just making sure you're not gay

s2 dean: getting notes from my team that sometimes it is gay to suck a dick . i would like to formally announce that i never did that. and i never would.and also i'm masc. i'm masc. i'm literally masc.

s3 dean: too busy with dying to think about being gay i'm pretty sure.

s4 dean: really enjoying that cas is unaware of social norms so that dean can oscillate between preening when he teaches him how to be a man (+1 masculinity for being more of a man than cas +1 masculinity for being so much of a man that you can teach others how to do it) and. taking advantage of the no social norms thing to rationalize his OWN behavior with cas because he knows cas isn't going to call him on it not being normal which MAKES it normal because there is no one to refute that.

s5 dean: much of the same but there are now emotional stakes in play because they Are friends he is now Emotionally attached in a real way to this man he was engaging in one way gay chicken with.

s6 dean: mfw my brother tells me to be normal so i marry a woman. ratchets him all the way back to i have never liked a man and i never will.

s7 dean: very similar emotionally to endverse dean / s14 dean in my mind. kind of in the same place as s6 dean but crucially s6 dean was sad and wet and s7 dean is walled off and apathetic. attraction to men does not factor into his worldview.

s8 dean: he literally was in a foxhole with benny and got a spraytan and had a gay thing. this man begrudgingly puts one (1) rainbow ornament on his christmas tree after sending out christmas cards of him embracing another man while their gay ass dog sits at their feet. the sticking point HERE is "cas doesn't feel stuff like that".

s9 dean: We Cannot Get Into All That but. they literallyyyyyyyyy had to make cas sleep with a woman and get banished forever to sidestep The Implications. which are. dean winchester would fuck the gay angel given the FIRST opportunity. i'd probably fuck cas but my brother is dying so idrc about that rn. etc. this is a man who is conscious of his attraction to 1) men and 2) cas and WOULD act on it given the chance.

s10 dean: this is where it gets love triangle-y with crowley and cas. this is because dean DID fuck crowley and WANTS to fuck cas. textually. this is where he stands. moc dean has sex with men and doesnt care because hes normal. POST moc dean is like. the same sex attraction was a metaphor to show that i was evil and corrupted by the mark.

s11 dean: i'll be honest. i remember fuck all about season 11.

s12 dean: his mom is around which means he will not be out. this is also. iirc? where dabb gets his grubby little showrunning hands on things. which of course. means dabbification. which of COURSE. means destiel eating plain toast and raising a baby domestically. which. of course. translates to dean using cas as a girlfriend stand in. which. imo. is reflected in dean's mindset. like s12 dean is aware that cas is the most important person in his life, and he is not interested in deviating from that formula with a woman at all.

s13 dean: gay man realizing the love of his life is dead and he never said or did anything -> gay man whose love of his life comes back so he doesnt have to grapple with the consequences of never saying anything and they can jump back into pseudo relationship.

s14 dean: this is a gay man coparenting with a gay man and telling his father that he has a family. has accepted his fate as a life long ambiguous bachelor who lives with a man and sometimes sleeps in his bed nonsexually. very much dead inside staring down the barrel of throwing himself on a grenade does not have Time to push the boundaries of his relationship.

s15 dean: too many twists and turns to get into in the stinger of a post.

[ladyluscinia]

answers/results to this poll isn't a judgement on whatever amv makers want to make btw! preference doesn't mean you can't enjoy a damn good video.

[ladyluscinia]

The way this movie has been inserted into my frontal lobe

[ladyluscinia]

Not having Challengers in front of me is really a problem right now because I know Art lost that last point. He touched the net pretty dramatically. But I don't recall what exactly the state of the match was enough to reference tennis rules and confirm if he lost the Challenger or if the ending was ambiguous and either of them could have gone on to win it.

And I can't trust other people because there's a near unanimous opinion that he won there and I know that's not what happened.

[ladyluscinia]

no one wants to talk about how much of a FREAK baby tashi is. she might look the part of a sporty 2006 it girl but she also canonically likes nin. she is sheltered and christian and very much alone, and she is horny as fuck and a virgin and she likes when boys kiss. you can be a beautiful 5’11” athletic prodigy with an adidas campaign and also be a total weirdo.

[ladyluscinia]

Ok so I was talking to @brigdh in this post about how Lily being a secret affair Zweig baby doesn't really compel me due to reasons BUT I do think rolling around the timeline more has given me an even better idea of how all the pieces can fit together so. Thoughts.

The Facts: In 2011 Atlanta (mid-late July) Tashi and Art are engaged with an unconfirmed length of time until the wedding (but the US Open Series is 7 weeks so certainly late-September is the earliest calendar availability), Art is on a winning streak toward the US Open that he will fail at some point after this, and Tashi and Patrick hook up (not realizing Art sees them together for a moment before they vanish). Lily is an unconfirmed age but can't have been conceived more than a few months out from this point, since if Tashi got pregnant in Atlanta that would put Lily a few months past 7 at New Rochelle.

Now, the timing here is a bit odd for several reasons. Tashi strikes me as pretty neutral on motherhood in her 20s/early 30s era. Like if she really didn't want a kid she wouldn't have one. She's not a bad mom. But at the same time she does have her mom in their entourage to do most of the childcare and is actively fuming about her husband wanting to retire to spend time with his family, so, like, I think you can reason motherhood fulfillment wasn't an urgent need for her (especially since waiting until Art's sports career 30s retirement would have been fairly normal behavior? I could easily see her actively wanting a kid when it becomes less a "not now" and more "not ever" decision, too). Art clearly wanted a kid, and that's exactly the kind of thing that couples vaguely discuss before engagement to make sure they are compatible.

It's just that, well, trying for a kid during your engagement is odd. Accident baby is a possibility, but Tashi has lots of money, access to birth control, and a highly regimented health and nutrition team living in her family's pocket and probably designing their life health plan + daily medication and supplement intake like a normal person could never dream of. It can always happen but like. The odds. So I don't see her getting pregnant in Atlanta in the first place (and as previously mentioned don't find Lily being Patrick's narratively interesting enough to one-in-a-million the whole thing either 🤷‍♀️).

What does happen in Atlanta? Art's first mental wobble.

He doesn't win the 2011 US Open despite being the favorite to do so. Knowing Art and the whole Art/Tashi/Patrick mess he probably got into his head, slipped into a downward spiral, and imploded dramatically. Tashi would have complicated feelings about that but also, crucially, she did just cheat on him with Patrick and even though she doesn't think he knows... Maybe it's possible she feels a bit guilty for the cheating and a bit more guilty for the undeniable possibility that she somehow threw off Art's game due to vibes or a distracted coaching slip up or something. Maybe this is complicated by their upcoming wedding which was going to be a celebration and turns into a consolation prize, and how this kind of loss cannot be good for Art's inferiority complex about how she is really bad at reassuring him she does love him.

Maybe Tashi is lying in bed just before the wedding or on their honeymoon or even on their actual wedding night and she's been thinking about Patrick and Art and how to say I'm sorry and I still love you without acknowledging she did anything wrong for days, you know, and maybe she finally decides this is the best idea she's got.

And then maybe she turns to Art (silent in the dark) and says, unprompted, "Let's not wait. Let's have that baby now."

[ladyluscinia]

louis was like "this is the love of my life...... the vampire armand....."

and I was like "girl...... you're both bottoms...... traumatized bottoms with daddy issues....... where are ur shitty boyfriends??????"

louis and armand out here having the world's most boring pathetic sex, they're like "we're so healthy, we have grown past our shitty-boyfriend-having phase, now we're always Safe Sane And Consensual 😌 we don't have unhinged sex anymore 😌😌😌" they are going insane. this is why louis is having a mental breakdown. he's been having intensely hinged sex for 77 years, like 100% slow lovemaking with clear communication and so much lube and always "one finger, two finger, three finger, cock" and the traffic-light consent system in place even though they don't practice any kinks that would involve words like "stop" and "hang on a sec" meaning anything but literally that. no one in this house has been rimmed in 77 years. Every night they have a very polite Discussion (it's not an argument, it's not) about whose turn it is to top because nobody here wants to. louis is not built to handle this psychologically. lestat's going to text him "hey mon cher miss u sooooo much i can't live without you, haha i got your number by killing some people at your phone company, actually several phone companies because i didn't know which network you're on, anyway come over and sit on my face WINK WINK i'll do that thing you like so much, you know the one!! the one where you're always like 'ew lestat you're so gross' but then it makes you come so hard you pass out [eggplant emoji, eggplant emoji, water drops emoji, blood drop emoji]" louis is going to see these texts and go into a fugue state and be OUT! THAT! DOOR! in nanoseconds. NANOSECONDS!!!! meanwhile lestat is double- and triple- and quadruple-texting about how he's always wanted to try roadhead and blithely using words like "pussy" in reference to louis' anatomy without asking if that's cool and also sending seven unsolicited dick pics clearly taken in an airplane bathroom

armand has never sent a dick pic in his life, even a solicited one, because it's "crass" and there are "privacy concerns" and he's "unsatisfied with the current standard of end-to-end encryption technology". lestat doesn't even know what end-to-end encryption is, and if he did he wouldn't care about it because "if a hacker is going to all that trouble to look at my nude photographs, louis, i think they've earned them :))) even though they could just follow me on instagram and tiktok or sign up for my onlyfans" this is why armand about to get dumped at terminal velocity. he doesn't even have instagram.

[ladyluscinia]

figuring out. day one 🏳️‍🌈

[ladyluscinia]

"i didn't like it" and "I think it wasn't well written" are different. i can personally dislike things that are not bad and i am being so brave about it

[ladyluscinia]

Hmm... Shorter version of previous post is they're all enablers. Tashi/Patrick both enable each other's "you think I give a shit about love? Ew" while Art thinks it's normal and probably good to tell your spouse you love them daily. Tashi/Art both enable each other in turning life into a ruthlessly optimized career plan while Patrick goes "is anyone having fun around here?" Art/Patrick enable each other by egging on their homoerotic fake arguments and meanness until it turns into real nastiness while Tashi is not necessarily fixing that but she provides an essential role as a sort of referee that can make it productive / horny instead of inevitably destructive.

They're beyond therapy but they could totally live this way as long as there's three of them 😘

[ladyluscinia]

Tashi/Patrick + No Art = disaster fling. Tashi withholds easy (non-sexual) affection like vulnerability will kill her instantly. Patrick has massive commitment issues and defensively frames everything as a joke that he can pull back from at any time. It's impossible to resolve how your relationship is failing to meet your emotional needs if both parties are allergic to treating it more seriously than fuck buddies who could go find someone else at any time. They are constantly on the edge of a blowout fight because they understand each other instinctively but use that understanding mostly for sex and knowing who wins more points in the argument. On a tennis level, Patrick gets it but he is too comfortable as is and lacks a guiding reason to strive, which is even more infuriating than if he didn't get it at all because the wasted potential is constant. And Art in this situation is swallowed by jealousy, like a big ugly pit in his center. His inferiority complex is at an all time high (the second choice twice) and while it does give him some motivation to improve, mostly the spikes of envy/rage derail his focus and trap him in his own negative spirals. He seethes at tennis because he feels like he's always losing before he even steps on the court.

Tashi/Art + No Patrick = cracking under pressure. Tashi's withholding becomes a long term problem when pitted against Art's inferiority issues because she won't be able to stop doing so when it slips over the line from giving him something to strive for to enabling his negative spirals when he really just needs some reassurance. Art is pliable and willing to take direction, but he's also prone to being passive and simply losing energy when Tashi wants him to push back. His quips rarely turn into rallies. He builds low-grade resentment for decisions he's not willing to actually challenge. Tashi likes control but loves a certain kind of adrenaline-junkie spontaneity that gets ground out of Art the longer they are locked in on enabling each other to tunnel vision on optimizing him into the best tennis player ever. On a tennis level, Art is an eternal exercise in frustration because his emotional investment and technical skill are usually a trade-off instead of Tashi's ideal harmony, and she's constantly (and increasingly resentfully) fighting his mental fires for just a spark of real tennis to make it onto the court. Patrick, meanwhile, goes into near permanent flop era because he can't admit he's emotionally starved and his issues make him refuse to chase their coattails out of spite. He embraces the carefree loser persona and lets his own, smaller inferiority complex tell him he won't ever catch up, so why try?

Patrick & Art + No Tashi = I knew that guy in high school. Both deciding against pushing their homoerotic thing too far, and different life goals would probably have just drifted them apart.

Patrick/Art + No Tashi = potential murder-suicide. Patrick is once again non-committal and joking, and Art once again has a lot of jealousy and needs reassurance in the security of his relationship. But where Tashi's withholding at least has an element of she would just leave him if she wanted to, Patrick's eternal hints that there could be a punchline dropping any moment makes Art angrier, not depressed. Art is inclined to compete with Patrick but he doesn't find it as fun and low stakes, and also how do you meaningfully "win" against the guy you are dating and who refuses to take you seriously as a competitor or partner (bringing out the uglier side of the inferiority complex again). Patrick doesn't meaningfully distinguish between when Art is playfully mad at him and genuinely mad at him until he gets his feelings hurt about it, and he still can't talk about those feelings directly. Either a fight goes ugly and they have a messy breakup or Art gets mad enough to kill them both and Patrick just dares him to do it. Tashi probably continues with her life trying to find some other tennis player that can understand the convoluted prism through which she expresses love, but odds are not great because usually romantic partners like it when you can say the words "I love you" and not sound sarcastic about it.

[ladyluscinia]

I'm gonna be your bubblegum bitch 💥

watch it on youtube

[ladyluscinia]

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

[ladyluscinia]

Romeo + Juliet, 1996 | Supernatural, 13.06 “Tombstone”

[ladyluscinia]

Whoops. Looks like if you install a keylogger (oversimplification) on all your devices it's very easy to exfiltrate all of that info