#SEMIOTICS

[prokopetz]

Some helpful tips for newcomers from Twitter:

Truch your eglevigater so people don't think you're a voke

The main way of planding wardic on Tumblr is merming, so always largan your spithers

You can shooth your resils and lentries to "quotte"

Nobody wants to get darrupted, so sten your correns offly

NEVER GREEB; it's bad hootrum

Remember: we're all in this together

[river-taxbird]

There is no such thing as AI.

How to help the non technical and less online people in your life navigate the latest techbro grift.

I've seen other people say stuff to this effect but it's worth reiterating. Today in class, my professor was talking about a news article where a celebrity's likeness was used in an ai image without their permission. Then she mentioned a guest lecture about how AI is going to help finance professionals. Then I pointed out, those two things aren't really related.

The term AI is being used to obfuscate details about multiple semi-related technologies.

Traditionally in sci-fi, AI means artificial general intelligence like Data from star trek, or the terminator. This, I shouldn't need to say, doesn't exist. Techbros use the term AI to trick investors into funding their projects. It's largely a grift.

What is the term AI being used to obfuscate?

If you want to help the less online and less tech literate people in your life navigate the hype around AI, the best way to do it is to encourage them to change their language around AI topics.

By calling these technologies what they really are, and encouraging the people around us to know the real names, we can help lift the veil, kill the hype, and keep people safe from scams. Here are some starting points, which I am just pulling from Wikipedia. I'd highly encourage you to do your own research.

Machine learning (ML): is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines "discover" their "own" algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. (This is the basis of most technologically people call AI)

Language model: (LM or LLM) is a probabilistic model of a natural language that can generate probabilities of a series of words, based on text corpora in one or multiple languages it was trained on. (This would be your ChatGPT.)

Generative adversarial network (GAN): is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. (This is the source of some AI images and deepfakes.)

Diffusion Models: Models that generate the probability distribution of a given dataset. In image generation, a neural network is trained to denoise images with added gaussian noise by learning to remove the noise. After the training is complete, it can then be used for image generation by starting with a random noise image and denoise that. (This is the more common technology behind AI images, including Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. I added this one to the post after as it was brought to my attention it is now more common than GANs.)

I know these terms are more technical, but they are also more accurate, and they can easily be explained in a way non-technical people can understand. The grifters are using language to give this technology its power, so we can use language to take it's power away and let people see it for what it really is.

[mulherergativa]

[haru-dipthong]

Did you know that the english word “star” and the japanese word 星（ほし）don’t actually mean the same thing?

Language does not simply name pre-existing categories; categories do not exist in 'the world'

— Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners

I read this quote a few years ago, but I don’t think I truly understood it until one day, when I was looking at the wikipedia article for “star” and I thought to check the Japanese article, see if I could get some Japanese reading practice in. I was surprised to find that the article was not titled 「星」, but 「恒星」, a word I’d never seen before. I’d always learnt that 星 was the direct translation for “star” (I knew the japanese also contained meanings the english didn’t, like “dot” or “bullseye”, but I thought these were just auxiliary definitions in addition to the direct translation of “star” as in "a celestial body made of hydrogen and helium plasma").

To try and clear things up for myself, I searched japanese wikipedia for 星. It was a disambiguation page, with the main links pointing to the articles for 天体 (astronomical object) and スター（記号）(star symbol). There was no article just called 「星」.

It’s an easy difference to miss, because in everyday conversation, 星 and star are equivalent. They both describe the shining lights in the night sky. They both describe this symbol: ★. They even both describe those enormous celestial objects made of plasma.

But they are different - different enough to not share a wikipedia article. 星 is used to describe any kind of celestial body, especially if it appears shiny and bright in the night sky. “Star” can be used this way too (like Venus being called the “morning star”), but it’s generally considered inaccurate to use the word like this, whereas there is no such inaccuracy with 星. You can say “oh that’s not actually a star, it’s a planet”, but you CAN’T say 「実はそれは星ではなく惑星だよ」 (TL: that’s not actually a hoshi, it’s a planet). A planet IS a 星.

星 is a very common word, essentially equivalent to “star”, but its meaning is closer to “celestial body”. I haven’t looked into the etymology/history but it’s almost like both english and japanese started out with a simple, common word for the lights in the sky - star/星 , but as we found out more about what these lights actually were, english doubled down on using the common word for the specific scientific concept, while japanese kept the common word generic and instead came up with a new word for the more specific concept. If this is actually what happened, I’d guess that kanji probably had something to do with it - 星 as a component kanji exists inside the word for planet, 惑星, and in the word for comet, 彗星, and in the scientific word for “star”, 恒星, so it makes sense that it would indicate a more general concept when used standalone.

This discovery helped me understand that quote - categories don’t exist in the world, we are the ones who create them. I thought that the concept of “star” was something that would be consistent across all languages, but it’s not, because the concept of “star” is not pre-existing. Each language had to decide how to name each of those similar star-like concepts (the ★ symbol, hot balls of gas, twinkling lights in the sky, planets, comets, etc), and obviously not every language is going to group those concepts under the same words with the same nuance.

Knowing this, one might be tempted to say that 恒星（こうせい） is the direct translation for “star”. But this isn’t true either. In most of the contexts that the word “star” is used in english, the equivalent japanese will be simply 星. Despite the meanings not lining up exactly, 星 will still be the best translation for “star” most of the time. This is the art of translation - knowing when the particulars are less important than the vibe or feel of a word. For any word, there will never be an exact perfect translation with all the same nuances and meanings. Translation is about finding the best solution to an unsolvable problem. That's why I love it.

[inkedwingss]

writing an article on the concept of gothic and the overlap with contemporary aesthetics such as dark academia etc, so listening to some nordic music seems appropriate

and that is why i have no friends bc this is what i do for fun on a saturday night xx

[thesirenwithnovoice]

Thoughts about how different mediums of a same story may give you different views (and rambling about the Tower of Heaven)//TW: violence

Lately I've been wondering about how manga readers might have very different visions than anime watchers of a same story, because althought the plot remains the same, some little details can change our whole perception of a story.

This reminded me of the first time I read Fairy Tail and how terrified I was at how cruel and dark the Tower of Heaven's arc is.

Jellal's face (that by that time, were only an 11-years-old kid) drippling blood while being tortured shocked me so much as a kid and I still find it one of the most disturbing scenes in the manga, lol.

In the anime, the content itself is the same. We know the kids are slaves that go throught different kinds of abuse, however, I find the manga way gloomier and more graphic. And althought part of it might be just a personal opinion, it's not entirely without basis: Mashima uses different techniques in his art to represent facts whitin the story than the animators, and it leads to a topic I really love: semiotics - how we interpret images, and how detais can be used to convey a certain felling throught art.

Colors and composition helps A LOT creating an atmosphere and causing a feeling on the reader. Proportionally speaking, a manga doesn't have colors, but it has it's own alternatives - the Tower of Heaven arc, in comparison to the rest of the manga, uses a lot more black and hatching.

One can argue some scenes are still "visually darker" in the anime, since it has the advantage of being able to play with shadows and colors in a broader aspect; however, since Fairy Tail is not an anime that changes it's saturation or colour pallete, the loud colors in most scenes end up not helping building the same dreadful atmosphere.

(It doesn't mean you can't make a scary story using bright and colorful tones, tho. A great example is the movie Midsommar. But it's not an easy task!)

Erza's childhood memories in the manga also carry a "dirtier" feeling; the kids are always covered by bruises, and the background is rougher. Also, the anime chooses to represent slavery in a more fanciful way: the kids wear stylized handcuffs and are assaulted with magic attacks, what inevitably softens the scenes by distancing them from real life slavery.

In a story, an act of violence will always be more shocking if your brain is able to automatically make a connection with real life. Seeing blood conveys a feeling of disconfort easier than a character being hit by a wave of magic, even if the author tells you "this is painful"; that's why some people say they started to find difficult to watch horror movies involving kids after becoming parents, because after experenciating something in real life, they connect with fiction harder.

The above scene causes me very different feelings in each media. In the manga, the despair in Jellal's face when seeing they removed Erza's eye is much clearer, and his skinny body, his eyes filling up with tears (he doesn't cry in the anime) shows not only a feeling of worry, but of utter dread and helplessness. All that helps endorsing the fact that, doesn't matter how brave he is, they are still just fragile kids, unable to protect themselves from the cruelty of the world around them.

I want to make it clear, though, that this is not in any way meant to be a critique to the animation team, or an affirmation that one type of media is better than another. We all have our personal preferences, but each media has it's target audience and objective. Fairy Tail's animators certainly do know how to convey the same feelings on the public, they just choose not to, for a variety of reasons. Probably because the anime is aimed for a broader and younger audience, many scenes have been softened or censored somehow. Also, animation consumes more labour than a manga page, so unless you have a lot of time and investment, the art tend to be simpler.

So do you think it affects the plot, Siren?

In my opinion, yes, even if just in a subtle way. In the manga, I think this raw brutality helps Jellal's character to gain a more interesting complexity. To me, he feels less like a hero and more like what he actually is: just a really kind and brave kid trying his best to protect his friends.

Another major change they made in the anime was removing the ambiguity (something that happened more than once in Fairy Tail's adaptation, such as in the famous kiss scene), leaving clear since the beginning that Jellal was a victim of a mind controlling spell; while in the manga, until Urtear's confirmation at the end of the arc, we do not know for sure if he have been brainwashed or just convinced to adore Zeref.

And as much as I can see why some fans might hate it because it leaves room for people to see Jellal as a bad man, I (as someone who is not afraid of loving evil characters, heh), find it interesting and somehow enriching to the plot, because it gives the whole arc a reflection: is extreme suffering, specially at such an young age, capable of changing someone so much?

We are left questioning what did "Zeref" say, or do, that made him change so much. And having so many real life examples where despair has made people easy victims of manipulation throught faith or falling into extremist ideologies, after we seeing Jellal's pain and fragility in a tangible way, it's not that hard at all to understand how he went insane and managed to drag all the other slaves along with him.

Also, I think it makes it easier to understand Erza's empathy towards him. Jellal and Erza are characters connected not only by the affection they nourish for one another, but also for sharing the same pain. She is the only person that fully understands the horrors he lived in the tower, since they were the only kids that have been in the torture chamber. And althought she never tries to justify Jellal's actions, Erza does not only show him compreension, but she feels guilty for not being able to retribute his protection and prevented him from losing his mind.

That doesn't mean, tho, that there weren't many other clues he was not acting on free will: be it his grotesque change of personality, his hysterical laughter out of nowhere or his motivations that doesn't hold (because they were never his to begin with). To me, all that at first glance makes him closer to Batman's Joker, someone that grew insane after so much suffering, than a villain that's genuinely just plain selfish and thirsty for power. And that only makes me find him a creepier villain, since personally, I find sadism and insanity way scarier than ghosts.

So this is just a looong collection of thoughts about how small choices can change a lot the "feeling" we get from a scene or a character. I hope someone can find it interesting too. There are many other examples of adaptations where it happened, and if you remember one you'd like to share, I would love to hear!

Last but not less important, all the love for Mashima's art, the Tower of Heaven arc (that is a personal favorite) and Jellal, a character I deeply love and one that holds for sure the strongest spirit in the manga for being able to become such a kind and mature man despite everything he has been thought. ♡

[olameni]

In the laundromat taking notes about semiotics and processual codes with what looks like a pen full of blood. I’m getting a few looks….

Ink: Noodler’s Fox Red

Pen: Moonman C1 with Fude Nib

[mumblelard]

for dinner i ate an apple, an avocado that wasn't going to last another day, and half a roasted acorn squash or mondays

[pratchettquotes]

"Hold on, hold on," said the Bursar. "Yes, indeed, figuratively a word is made up of individual letters but they have only a--" he waved his long fingers gracefully "--theoretical existence, if I may put it that way. They are, as it were, words partis in potentia, and it is, I'm afraid, unsophisticated in the extreme to imagine that they have any real existence unis et separato. Indeed, the very concept of letters having their own physical existence is, philosophically, extremely worrying. Indeed, it would be like noses and fingers running around the world all by themselves--"

That's three "indeeds," thought William, who noticed things like this. Three "indeeds" used by a person in one brief speech generally meant an internal spring was about to break.

Terry Pratchett, The Truth

[tomorrowusa]

🦉 🌎 🌍 Happy Earth Day 2024! 🌏 🌻 🐝

Earth Day originated in 1970 when pollution was the biggest environmental concern. Air and waterways are undoubtedly cleaner 50+ years later. It demonstrates that progress can be made when there's a concerted effort.

A current problem which gets overlooked is the amount of environmental damage which the Russian invasion has caused in Ukraine. Environmental activist Greta Thunberg has called Putin's environmental destruction "ecocide".

Greta Thunberg denounces 'ecocide' in Ukraine

Just about every aspect of the environment has been worsened by Putin's illegal military action.

After Two Years of War, Ukraine Sees Deepening Environmental Wound

A consortium of agencies called EcoDozor has put together a map graphic showing the environmental consequences of the invasion.

Ecodozor

I feel strongly that Russian state assets should be impounded to pay for the damage. Contact your representative at your national parliament and insist that Russian assets be seized to be used to repair environmental damage done in Ukraine by Putin's Russia.

On a historical note, here's a cartoon done by American-Australian underground artist Ron Cobb. It gave rise to the use of the Greek letter Theta 𝚹 to symbolize environmental protection.

In turn, high school students in Springfield, Illinois were inspired to turn that into into a flag for the first Earth Day.

This Homemade Flag From the ‘70s Signals the Beginning of the Environmental Movement

Being mindful of the power of semiotics, it might be useful to revive Theta as a symbol of environmental action. It already exists as an emoji and most of us have devices which can access a Greek font. And at Tumblr we can make stuff green. 𝚹 Θ

[prokopetz]

These are opposite poles of an extremely specific spectrum.

[pclysemia]

The classical dictum also attributed to Heraclitus: "...you never step twice into the same river..." is also essentially pragmatic, presumably pointing out to the ever-changing context -- time, the river, the self.

Mind, Code and Context: Essays in Pragmatics, by Talmy Givón (1989)

[mkhancock]

Eurydice’s Memory

by M.K. Hancock

I’ve been through 

Meaningful connections

Among life’s mysteries

A cycling and unorthodox

Series of complexities

Misery in memories

Unresolved grief

My moments

Fragmented to bits

I decode to know

And over the years

With learning and tears

I’ve found them whole again

French Philosopher

Jacques Derrida suggested 

deconstruction

As a manner of viewing

Signs and Sign Processes

(What Semiotics calls

Communication)

Deconstruction

Is a form of Semiotic Analysis

AKA a way to see

What’s deep underneath

Communication

Disassembling

Something as

Significant

As the abrupt

Quiet

Behind Orpheus

Who misses

Eurydice

With every shadow 

He sees

But his heart

Learns to love

Her memory

Always incomplete

But there in his mind

In each moment

He recalls as a

Widower Twice

To one woman

The day is different

And so is he and

Traces of her linger

However incomplete

The memories

Guide his heart

Her words

His mind

Their love

He takes the grief

As a sign it happened

That his loss, as mysterious

As it was, was truly

Real

That one day

He may hold her again

When it is his turn

To cross the Styx

A final time

Until then

The stones may weep

To hear his grieving

Soul release through

Music

His sweetest songs

Gone with her

[haru-dipthong]

A prime example of words being only translatable within a given context is the word 国語. It's the word for the literary studies subject in Japanese schools, similar to the subject called "English" in english speaking schools. The question is - when you translate it, which part is more important? The fact that 国語 means "literary studies" or the fact that it means "japanese studies"?

Similarly, with the word 英語 (which literally means "the english language" and is the name of the english language subject at Japanese schools), you could choose to preserve its literal meaning as "english studies" or its meaning from a Japanese student's perspective as "foreign language studies".

Imagine the following exchange, where character A is being characterised as liking foreign language learning.

A: 次の授業なんだっけ？ B: 国語だよ。 A: えー　まじ？英語かと思った、国語は最悪。

Translation where 国語＝ "japanese studies", 英語＝"english studies"

A: What's our next class? B: Japanese. A: Seriously? I thought it was English, I hate Japanese.

Translation where 国語＝"literary studies", 英語＝"foreign language studies"

A: What's our next class? B: English. A: Seriously? I thought it was Spanish, I hate English.

It is impossible to choose which of the above translations is better without context. Even worse, without context, one of those translations will be objectively correct and one will be incorrect!!

Let's say the above line is from an anime set in a Japanese high school, and we're translating for subtitles. In that case, doing the literal translation of 国語 -> Japanese/英語 -> English is the only option - the characters are clearly Japanese, in a Japanese school, and literally speaking Japanese. This makes sense.

But on the other hand, let's say the above line is from an anime set in a US high school, and we're translating for dubs. In that case, translating 国語 -> English/英語 -> Spanish makes sense: these words don't represent the literal ideas of "Japanese" and "English", they represent the US equivalents of "literary studies" and "foreign language studies". Plus, since it's for dubs, the characters are speaking English - here 英語 means "foreign language" so it wouldn't make sense for it to be translated as "english".

This creates a weird situation in which a word can have two equally valid translations that are the complete opposite of each other, and which one is correct is entirely dependent on context.

The above two scenarios are quite unambiguous as to which translation should be used. But what are you supposed to do when it's less clear? What if the anime set in Japan was being dubbed instead? The characters and setting look Japanese, but they're literally speaking English. Does it make more sense to translate 国語 as "English" or "Japanese"? What if the setting isn't on earth? What if the characters aren't even human?

This word is an extreme example, but I wanted to use this to show how no word can be translated properly when taken out of context. Words ALWAYS appear in some sort of context, and you need to know this context to understand what the word means. Something to keep in mind when using multilingual dictionaries - in a dictionary every word is out of context, so tread carefully and make sure to check example sentences.

[blazingrain]

In Stars and Time: In Craft and Semiotics

I rambled about this a little in ISaT's official discord, but one thing I've wondered about is, with Craft's hand gestures being Rock Paper Scissors, if that is an inherent or learnt meaning. Semiotics, the study on the creation of meaning, generally makes a distinction between the signifier, that which denotes something, and the signified, that which is being denoted. Together, they form a sign. So, in Rock Paper Scissors, making a two-fingered hand gesture is the signifier to the signified of 'scissors'. Notably, in ISAT, 'Rock', 'Paper' and 'Scissors' are colloquial terms for the actual crafts (Protector, Creative and Piercing), which makes sense. Culturally speaking, different languages would at minimum have different names for RPS, but Paper and Scissors haven't always existed. Now, Saussure (I think) states that the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary. 'Tree' is only the word for trees because it happens to be, not because of an inherent connection. Similarly, I think we can argue that RPS as an assignment is probably only human words for the concept, right? Perhaps it was Leaf, Gem and Spear craft at some point. Still,that brings me to a question: Did the hand signs always exist, or were they created to accomodate craft in its modern concept? I'll say we probably don't have enough canonical information to make a definitive decision, but I think it's worth thinking about for the sake of fanon at least! Both ideas have a lot of potential to them.

Say that the hand signs were created to accomodate the existing craft. That might mean that, throughout history, craft may have differed significantly based on what humans knew and had access to! And, in the future, we might have additional craft types that use other kinds of potential. Much like how body craft and healing craft are separate from the trifecta, small variations might flower into big ones! On the other hand, if the hand signs were always a thing, there is a strong question about 'inherent meaning'. What does it mean that these signs have always existed as-is, and how do humans perceive it? Scissors were invented based on piercing craft, but was paper? And how does this inherent meaning affect the human lexicon, if at all?

That's the ramble, hope it gave you some ideas!

[dustrial-inc]

IEYEI Biblically accurate understanding