#I LOVE CITING SOURCES!!!!!!!!

[ikeameatballspoisonedme]

Dolltwt is very rude when it comes to supposed price surge after a popular video. Izzzyzzz have the rights to make a cancelled dolls video! Stop harassing them because the secondhand doll market is so volatile!! Even Lauren Faust appreciated them and even went as far as to send them the actual dolls. People are still blaming them to this day and god. Get a grip.

That being said... ModernGurlz video could've been more properly researched. I am annoyed with her using the wrong pics. Mistakes happen but you could've searched Bryant's actual name instead of "creator of Bratz". I always put 110% of my effort into researching so mistake this basic yet fatal is so annoying. Also cite your sources people!!!! Doesn't have to be properly formatted like a journal, just link them!!! I always do in my deep dives (so proud of my Banksy/Hewll video pls watch em xoxo). I get that dolltwt has wronged her before but these are very valid criticisms. Like sure it's not a massive James Somerton tier mistake (well maybe the citing issue is) but it just speaks on the lack of passion behind this video. How did you NOT SEARCH THE NAME!!!!!!

[goldxnfemme]

I finally found an essay that discusses the origins of the word "bulldagger" and its association with black lesbians, hell yeah!

[codacheetah]

Tell me your opinions on the stuff. Any stuff.

Grins. Smiles, even

I'm using you as an excuse to infodump my theory about the Island because I've had no in to do that, and my theory is pure opinion. Anyways:

THE ISLAND IS STUCK IN THE FUCKING FUTURE

(SCARE CHORD)

Hi so you might ask me. What the fuck do you mean by that. Well. Let's start with what we know about the Island, the King, and Wish Craft. (long ass post under cut. sorry)

The Island was redacted from the perception of outside world, via Wish Craft.

Wish Craft has the power to enable Time Craft. We see this primarily through Siffrin's timeloops, but also through the King's powers.

One of the King's powers is to show the saviors a "vision of the future."

...And this same attack is deflected back at the King by Mirabelle in ACT 5, in which the King is able to see the Island before being frozen in time.

...So. The King's "vision of the future." We're never told explicitly what this vision is. All we know is that it's apparently powerful enough to wipe the party in one hit, hearing it from a distance hurts your head, and that whatever Siffrin (and Loop) saw, they don't seem to actually be able to describe it. Even the King himself doesn't know what his vision entails.

We don't know whether the party all sees the same thing when struck by the vision, and Adrienne's answer to the question about it in the Reddit AMA is. vague? It's not a "no," and the specific wording makes me think the answer might be yes. But that's me reading into it.

Now. What do we know about the Island's redaction? The Island was affected by the wish recently, as in "like a decade ago" recently. We know that nobody in Vaugarde or the rest of the world is capable of thinking about the Island, anything closely tied to the Island's culture, or people on the Island for very long. When they do recall these things, they slip right out of reach. Particularly, the consequence for trying to think about the Island (or, more specifically, break the wish that forces the Island out of perception) is significant pain, localized in the head.

And that said pain is enough to become lethal, if pressed hard enough.

From here forward I'm running with the assumption that the King's "vision of the future" is not personalized to any individual, and is unchanging throughout the course of the whole story. Now. Remember the end of ACT 5, where the King gets hit with the deflected "vision of the future", and instead of dying, he recalls the Island and gets frozen in time? Very odd, yeah? Why wouldn't the King just die like everyone else does? He even does take 9999 damage when trying to say its name, like Siffrin does, and like the party does when they're hit by the attack.

Well. We know that he has a "true wish" that the ability to freeze Vaugarde in time grants. I don't think it's at all a stretch to guess that the King's "true wish" is to be able to remember the Island. My personal guess is that the King (and Siffrin) brought this "true wish" into effect via the "SAY ITS NAME" sequence- he even tries three times, a significant number in wishing.

The King (and Siffrin's) wish breaks, because it can't be fulfilled in this moment without breaking the wish to prevent the Island from being thought about. However. Consider the conditions at the end of ACT 5- the King sees the vision of the future reflected back to him, and what he sees is the Island. He remembers the Island, fulfilling his own wish, and is frozen in time. I consider this a compromise between his wish and the one binding the Island- the King gets to remember the Island, but nobody alive is able to think about it, because he's frozen in time; it's like the Universe is correcting itself (I WILL GET BACK TO THIS). The wish of all of Vaugarde to defeat the King is fulfilled, since he is no longer a threat, and Siffrin's wish wraps itself up soon after.

MY POINT BEING. The King's attack is a vision of the future. This "future" is of the Island, in some uncorrupted state. The saviors see it when he attacks them, and he sees it when it is deflected back to him.

The logical next question is "okay, so the Island exists in the future, but how do you know time shenanigans are even related to the Island?"

Recall a very odd series of interactions throughout the game, in which you try to interact with a piece of equipment that you already own.

The game rewinds slightly, before the item disappears, as the Universe corrects itself.

This is awfully similar to two particular events: looping back without seeing the death screen, and talking to the Daydreaming One about her sister. The latter is more interesting to me for the purposes of this theory.

In both instances, something is misaligned within the Universe (an item existing in two places, someone remembering something they're not supposed to) and it is corrected through some sort of rewind. Also compare the dialogue above to when you try to give Mirabelle the Stylish Bow when you already own it.

The world glitches, but Siffrin defuses the situation before the Universe has to intervene. Omitted from the screenshot is the fact that Mirabelle's portraits switch to happy from "catastrophically anxious" with no transition after Siffrin shows her where the bow is. Important to note is that when Mirabelle tries to recall receiving the bow, her head hurts, much like how trying to break the Island wish causes a headache.

The Universe leads you away from perception, and you can only follow.

My theory that I keep circling around is that through Wish Craft, the Island has been displaced temporally. The denizens of the Island, as well as the Island itself, still exist, but they are in the future. The Island is still loaded into the world, like how equipment is before you try to interact with it, and the Island cannot leave this quantum state, because it never actually went anywhere. The magnitude of the redaction event is so severe with the Island, because it is so much larger as an entity than a sword or a bow. There are of course things I don't really have pieced together, like why somebody would wish the Island into the future, how far into the future it is, or why equipment behaves this way. But it's the only Island theory I've seen that I have some level of confidence in, so I might as well lay out my cards for it.

[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?

[finngualart]

Gáttir allar áður gangi fram um skoðast skyli, um skyggnast skyli, því að óvíst er að vita hvar óvinir sitja á fleti fyrir.

At every door-way, ere one enters, one should spy round, one should pry round for uncertain is the witting that there be no foeman sitting, within, before one on the floor

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

question for academic discussion: when did mulder realize he was in love with scully? and when did scully realize she was in love with mulder?

[souheki-lovechild]

ethereal beautiful meaningful soukoku and cringe fail loser soukoku are two concepts that can and should (and do) coexist

[pigswithwings]

Sources: Wiktionary (Creation), Wikipedia (Creationism), Wikipedia (Adam), Wikipedia (Golem), Wikipedia (Homunculus), Wikipedia (Frankenstein), Wiktionary (Human), Wiktionary (Anatomy), Wikipedia (Citation Needed), Wiktionary (Frankenstein), Wikipedia (Kinship), Wikipedia (Belongingness), Wikipedia (Family), Wiktionary (Longing), Wikiquote (Imitation), Wikipedia (Template - Who?), Wikipedia (Asterisk), Wikipedia (Loneliness - Disambiguation), Wikipedia (Mimicry), Wikipedia (Personal Identity), Wiktionary (Kinship)

[getvalentined]

Getting back on my Zack Is Canonically Polyamorous soapbox because the people need to know and also the number of people accusing Aerith of being unfaithful in Rebirth is absolutely fucking ridiculous when taking Zack's romantic escapades into account.

There are spoilers here, and I'm tagging accordingly, but I'm not putting it under a cut.

We know for a fact that Zack is in a relationship with Aerith. We've known this since the OG, although we didn't know most of the details back then, just that they were together. In Remake, Aerith describes Zack as her "first love." In Chapter 11 of Rebirth, the first memories of Zack that Cloud reclaims are of him talking about how great Aerith is, and Cloud describes him as being "head over heels" for her. In Chapter 8, we found out that Zack's parents were able to recognize her based entirely on Zack gushing about her when he wrote home—and this is one of the most important parts, honestly.

Zack has a thing with Cissnei. We don't know how deep it is, but throughout Crisis Core (and even in the summer event in Ever Crisis) we can see very clearly that there is something between them, and it's never treated like a big deal. She's never completely honest about her feelings, so we can assume he didn't know that she saw him as anything more than a casual thing, but they have a relationship. It's made explicitly clear that this is the case when Zack returns to Gongaga and she lets him know that she's spoken to his parents, and he warns her that they're basically going to suggest that she marry him.

Zack's parents know about his relationship with Aerith and they also apparently know enough about his relationship with Cissnei to suggest that she make that relationship "official." They want her to join the family. They asked, she apparently reciprocated, and she lives in Gongaga after Veld is "killed."

Cissnei is also aware that Zack is in a relationship with Aerith, but that doesn't stop her from pursuing him anyway. She gets it and she's okay with it. She never, at any point, tries to push him away from Aerith—she's the one that tells him how special Aerith is, how important, how lonely. She's supportive of his relationship, and doesn't seem to feel that it makes her own feelings or their relationship any less valid.

Okay, so that's proof that the people around him are, at the very least, okay with him having multiple partners. That doesn't necessarily mean he's poly, though, maybe he's just a womanizer and everyone accepts it. Weird, but possible. He's really endearing so maybe they all give him a pass.

But no! No this isn't it at all! And we know it because of how Zack responds to Aerith being in love with someone else in Rebirth. When he finds out that Aerith is has feelings for Cloud, there's not a hint of jealousy in a single thing he does or says. He's disappointed when Marlene says it's because he wasn't there, but it's not disappointment in Aerith or in Cloud—it's disappointment in himself, because Marlene is right. He wasn't there. He couldn't protect her. There's also no spite there, he never responds like her feelings are wrong because he's here now and that means Aerith can rely on him again, and we know that because of how he responds to this information.

Zack finds out that Aerith has feelings for Cloud, and his immediate mission is to make sure that Cloud recovers as quickly as possible. Now it's not just for him, it's not just because that's his friend, it's because Aerith loves him (too) and that means he has to save Cloud for both of them.

He's fully supportive of Aerith and Cloud having a relationship, to the point that the last thing he says to Cloud when he gets thrown into a dying timeline is a request that he take care of Aerith. He's not exactly passing the torch here, because he's still alive—but he doesn't know if he'll be able to meet back up with a version of Cloud that is awake again, and he needs Cloud to know that he supports them in this.

And then, in the dying timeline where Zack is banished after fighting Sephiroth, he has the ability to synergize with Cloud from across the multiverse. The DMW limit break connected to Aerith is active in the space. All three of them are together here, just not physically; Cloud and Aerith are protecting Zack as much as Zack has been struggling to protect them.

Zack loves that Aerith loves someone other than him because that's how he is too. Zack has multiple relationships at the same time, he loves multiple people at the same time, he has emotionally intimate connections with multiple people at the same time. Why would he take issue with the love of his life feeling the same way?

Cloud isn't his replacement any more than Cissnei and Aerith are interchangeable, and Zack understands that, because Zack is polyamorous—and he's really happy that Aerith may be, too.

[guiltyonsundays]

In defence of Will Ladislaw

George Eliot's characterisation of Will Ladislaw is one of the few aspects of Middlemarch that is not universally praised, with no less a person than Henry James commenting in 1873 that he lacked “sharpness of outline and depth of color”, making him the novel’s “only eminent failure.” And while Will's character is certainly not as clearly defined as some of the other characters in the novel, I believe that this was absolutely intentional on Eliot's part. Middlemarch is full to the brim of characters who believe they know exactly what they want—not least among them, our two protagonists, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, whose ardent ambitions and inflexible attitudes lead them into catastrophic errors of judgement and unhappy marriages.

By contrast, Will's lack of strongly defined goals and his changeability are almost his defining character traits. He's aimless and pliable, prone to rapid mood swings and drastic career changes, with even his physical features seeming to "chang[e] their form; his jaw looked sometimes large and sometimes small; and the little ripple in his nose was a preparation for metamorphosis. When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light."

Will’s inscrutability is closely tied to his ambiguous status within the rigid class structure and xenophobic society of Victorian England, with his Polish ancestry and “rebellious blood on both sides” making him a target for suspicion. He is repeatedly aligned (and aligns himself) with oppressed, marginalised, and outcast populations—Jewish people, artists, and the poor.

He serves as a narrative foil for characters like Lydgate and Edward Casaubon, who prioritise specialist expertise above all and are consequently incapable of broad knowledge synthesis. He critiques Casaubon's life's work as being "thrown away, as so much English scholarship is, for want of knowing what is being done by the rest of the world." By contrast, Will serves as Eliot's defence of the value of a liberal education. One of the first things that we learn about him is that he declines to choose a vocation, and instead seeks to travel widely, experiencing diverse cultures and ways of life. He has broad tastes and interests, trying his hand at poetry and painting before eventually pursuing a career in politics.

He also functions as a narrative foil for Dorothea. Will is initially apathetic to politics, whereas Dorothea initially professes herself to be disinterested in art and beauty. This is perfectly encapsulated in their exchange in Rome, when Dorothea declares, "I should like to make life beautiful—I mean everybody's life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one", to which Will replies, "You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement [...] The best piety is to enjoy—when you can [...] I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.”

By the end of the novel, Dorothea unlearns some of her puritanical suspicion of sensual pleasure, whereas Will becomes more serious, compassionate, and politically engaged, dedicating his life to the accomplishment of humane political reforms. They are both flawed individuals, who ultimately become more well rounded through their relationship with each other. Admittedly, Dorothea's influence on Will is more significant than his on her—and once again, I believe that this was intentional on Eliot's part.

In my opinion, the negative response to Will Ladislaw at the time of Middlemarch's publication (and in the centuries since) was and is profoundly informed by gendered expectations of masculine dominance in romantic relationships. Will's marriage to Dorothea has often been described as disappointing, with many readers and critics viewing the ambitious Lydgate as the embodiment of the ideal husband that Dorothea outlines at the beginning of the novel—a talented man engaged in important work for the betterment of humanity, to whom she can devote herself.

However, one of the central themes of the novel is that people are often mistaken in their beliefs about what they want, and Dorothea's marriage to Edward Casaubon certainly demonstrates that she would not in fact be happy living her life in submission to a man who does not respect her opinions. I firmly believe that Lydgate's misogynistic attitudes and expectations would have made it impossible for him to be happy in a marriage of equals with a woman like Dorothea. He is explicitly drawn to Rosamond Vincy because she has "just the kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman—polished, refined, docile."

By contrast, George Eliot made a deliberate choice to pair Dorothea with a man who is not ashamed to be influenced by her, and indeed looks up to her as his moral superior. Through Dorothea's influence, Will discovers his life's work. In turn, by marrying Will, Dorothea is able to pursue her true passion. As a result of their influence on each other, these come to mean the same thing—reform. Thus, George Eliot grants Dorothea Brooke a subversively feminist, politically progressive, and profoundly cathartic ending: a life of companionate marriage, sensual pleasure, and meaningful work, in which Dorothea can devote herself (within the limited means available to her as a woman in the 19th century) to the achievement of just and compassionate reforms that "make life beautiful" for everybody—herself included.

[spanishskulduggery]

Me looking something up for Spanish grammar research and this blog is one of the first results

[jimmys-zeppelin]

led zeppelin, 1969* — taken from the booklet insert of led zeppelin - early days: the best of led zeppelin

(photos courtesy of jim cummins)

*these photos are labeled as october 16, 1970, however in my research I found the photos were actually taken in july 1969 at ahmet ertegun's home in new york, ny — source: jimmy page by jimmy page pgs 126-130

[marcusagrippa]

we are underutilising the possibility of agrippa/maecenas yaoi

[simplydnp]

char. realisation moment. the daniel song tiktok was posted all the way back in 2022. which means either 1. phil saved it for dan aall this time or 2. (most likely) a song of a different name came up on his for you page so he went onto the account specifically to find and save the daniel song just to show dan.........

this is the exact thing i want all of you to send to my inbox. what a beautiful rabbit hole you've fallen down anon, and thank you for taking me with you because now i'm going to stare at the ceiling and think about this for a week

[autisticaradiamegido]

*falls dramatically onto the floor of your askbox* kc dyou think aradia ever feels guilty for starting the apocalypse on her planet and getting a bunch of people killed or dyou think she even considered it her fault since she was urged by voices of the dead

nah i dont really think so. with her understanding of Timeline Stuff i think she probably gets that like, if she hadn't introduced the game to her friends, all that would have happened was that they would have been killed with the rest of their planet, creating a doomed timeline. I get the sense that the mere presence of the frog ruins on alternia indicates that the game was already there and already prepped to send the meteors, whether the game was actually played in a given timeline or not.

that said i think there are a few things she did in service of that end that she might feel guilty about, even if they were required to keep the timeline on course. biggest example off the top of my head is putting sollux to sleep, causing him to lose time, accidentally killing his lusus by falling in mind honey which gets in his mouth, and putting him in range of the vast glub, which eventually kills him.

like, in this convo with vriska, she seems kind of snappy and maybe genuinely hurt by the insinuation that she's trying to trick him or lie to him,

(even though that's like, sort of literally what she did in coaxing him to come to the window and not telling him that the game would cause the apocalypse, even though she knew that before they started playing.)

which, imo, speaks to a degree of internal guilt coming out as denial. not to mention that even though it obviously pushes sollux away from wanting to participate, in the end she can't help but be honest with him here anyway.

tl;dr: i think at the end of the day she'd realize that there wasn't any other way she could have done things without dooming the timeline, but that doesn't mean she doesnt feel bad about it AT ALL, or have ANY regrets. i just think she doesn't let them get in the way of doing whatever she needs to do to keep the timeline on track.