#a lot but in a doable way

[mariedemedicis]

today i will:

teach myself lcsh & take notes on that week’s class slides

start & finish my html part ii project

read a chapter of my joanna book

endeavor to write, even just a little bit

continue to read & come close to finishing (or finish if possible) nefertiti

write out my thoughts (review, kind of?) on friendlyspaceninja’s the vampire diaries: an iconic mess

[squirrelno2]

All right so I haven't been active in the Julie and the Phantoms fandom in a long time, and although I know there are definitely still people creating and reblogging in the fandom it tends to be a much smaller handful of people than it used to, which for me felt disheartening and was part of why I've backed off from it. I'd love to see new stuff more regularly and start recirculating older things just to remind myself and anyone else who needs it how much I love this silly little show.

All this to say, I am putting out feelers to see if anyone is interested in a blog that runs consistent, casual event-type things for the fandom to try and revitalize interest in jatp fanworks, like featured weeks for individual characters here, fic rec events, etc. I'm toying with ideas to inspire people to pick up their wips, spark new stories, and highlight older content that didn’t get much attention or would just be nice to see again. I’d like to create a community space to liven the fandom back up for people who miss the show or got into the fandom after the hype died down. Does that seem interesting to anyone?

[spockandawe]

Every so often I'm like hee hee hoo hoo i escaped the seasonal depression slump this year, and then I'll languish and languish until I abruptly do something objectively stupid, like deciding a week ago that i should actually do a full binderary or ill Die, and while i can tell that things aren't exactly working RIGHT, at least they're working at higher speed, and hello hi i just finished building 22 cases and casing in the associated books in one day

[vampirecatprince]

Wow- I slept 16 hours solid because of how badly the the fifth and sixth made me disoccociate. I think I can function today, but only time will tell. (Also- I really don't have much of a choice.)

Good news is it was payday and I'm now at $800/$2000 for my Leaving This Shithole Of A Job savings and if I do some work this weekend, maybe I'll cross that $1000 threshold. 🤞

[moe-broey]

Doing one of the scariest things an artist can do (draw a tree)

[lokh]

if i could choose a pokemiku to cosplay as without stopping to consider feasibility. probably steel miku tbh

[beatcroc]

listen. i love pizza tower with my whole heart & mind. you know this. you Know. but first and foremost i am a character design bitch, and the pizzas are, frankly, very bland. this is not a critique or a complaint, because obviously That's Not The Point and more importantly i would be horrified if anyone tried doing that much animation with anything more complex than what's there. but also it means when i get a taste of some truly whack ass insane design work again it is like fuuuucking catnip

[chisungie]

VITA 🥹🥹

[womanenthusiast]

finally got around to doing this! bambi's my mc for all yan games, but here's her design for @14dayswithyou specifically! more details under the cut (tw for burn scar) ♥

also rare jpeg of bambi when she finds out ren was just a persona and he's been lying to her the whole time:

[britneyshakespeare]

So yesterday I read "Slimed with Gravy, Ringed by Drink" by Camille Ralphs, an article from the Poetry Foundation on the publication of the First Folio in 1623, a major work without which most of Shakespeare's plays might very well have been lost today, possibly the most influential secular work of literature in the world, you know.

It's a good article overall on the history and mysteries of the Folio. Lots of interesting stuff in there including how Shakespeare has been adapted, the state of many surviving Folios, theories of its accuracy to the text, a really interesting identification of John Milton's own copy currently in the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the fascinating annotations that may have influenced Milton's own poetry!!! Do read it. It's not an atrociously long article but there's a lot of thought-provoking information in there.

There's one paragraph in particular I keep coming back to though, so I'm just gonna quote it down here:

...[T]he Play on Shakespeare series, published by ACMRS Press, the publications division of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University... grew out of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s plan to “translate” Shakespeare for the current century, bills itself “a new First Folio for a new era.” The 39 newly-commissioned versions of Shakespeare’s plays were written primarily by contemporary dramatists, who were asked to follow the reasonable principle laid out by series editor Lue Douthit: tamper in the name of clarification but submit to “do no harm.” The project was inspired by something the linguist John McWhorter wrote in 1998: “[the] irony today is that the Russians, the French, and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do … [because] they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak.”

Mainly it's the John McWhorter thing I keep coming back to. Side note: any of my non-native-English-speaking mutuals who have read Shakespeare, I would love to know your experiences. If you have read him in translation, or in the original English, or a mix of both. It's something I do wonder about! Even as an Anglophone reader, I find my experience varies so much just based on which edition of the text I'm reading and how it's presented. There's just so much variety in how to read literature and I would love to know what forces have shaped your own relationships to the stories. But anyway...

The article then goes on to talk about how the anachronistic language in Shakespeare will only fall more and more out of intelligibility for everyone because of how language evolves and yadda yadda yadda. I'm not going to say that that's wrong but I think it massively overlooks the history of the English language and how modern standard English became modern standard English.

First of all, is Shakespeare's language completely unintelligible to native English speakers today? No. Certain words and grammatical tenses have fallen out of use. Many words have shifted in meaning. But with context aiding a contemporary reader, there are very few lines in Shakespeare where the meaning can be said to be "unknown," and abundant lines that are perfectly comprehensible today. On the other hand, it's worth mentioning how many double entendres are well preserved in modern understanding. And additionally, things like archaic grammar and vocabulary are simply hurdles to get over. Once you get familiarized with your thees and thous, they're no longer likely to trip you up so much.

But it's also doubtful that 400 years from now, as the article suggests, our everyday language will be as hard to understand for twenty-fifth century English speakers to comprehend. The English language has significantly stabilized due to colonialism and the international adoption of English as a lingua franca. There are countless dialects within English, but what we consider to be standard international "correct" English will probably not change so radically, since it is so well and far established. The development and proliferation of modern English took a lot of blood and money from the rest of the world, the legacy of which can never be fully restored.

And this was just barely in sight by the time that Shakespeare died. This is why the language of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans is early-modern English. It forms the foundations of modern English, hence why it's mostly intelligible to speakers today, but there are still many antiquated figures within it. Early-modern English was more fluid and liberal. Spelling had not been standardized. Many regions of England still had slight variations in preferences for things like pronouns and verb conjugation. We see this even in works Shakespeare cowrote with the likes of Fletcher and Middleton, as the article points out. Shakespeare's vocabulary may not just reflect style and sentiment, but his Stratford background. His preferences could be deemed more "rustic" than many of his peers reared in London.

Features that make English more consistent now were not formalized yet. That's why Shakespeare sounds so "old." It's not just him being fancy. And there's also the fact that blank verse plays are an entirely neglected art nowadays. Regardless of the comprehensibility of the English, it's still strange for modern audiences uninitiated to Elizabethan literature to sit there and watch a King drop mad poetry about his feelings on stage by himself. The form and style of the entire genre is off.

But that, to me, is why we should read Shakespeare. We SHOULD be challenged. It very much IS within the grasp of a literate adult fluent in English to read one of his plays, in a modern edition with proper assistance and context. It is GOOD to be acquainted with something unfamiliar to us, but within our reach. I'm serious. I do not think I'm so much smarter than everyone else because I read Shakespeare. I don't just read the plain text as it was printed in the First Folio! The scholarship exists which has made Shakespeare accessible to me, and I take advantage of that access for my own pleasure.

This is to say that I disagree with the notion that Shakespeare is better suited to be enjoyed in foreign tongues. I think that's quite a complacent, modern American take. Not to say that the sentiment of McWhorter is wrong; I get what he's saying. And it's quite a beautiful thing that Shakespeare's plays are still so commonly staged, although arguably that comes from a false notion in our culture that Shakespeare is high literature worth preserving, at the expense of the rest of time and history. It is true that his body of work has such a high level of privilege in the so-called Western literary canon that either numerous other writers equally deserve, or no writer ever could possibly deserve.

The effort that goes into making Shakespeare's twenty-first century legacy, though, is a half-assed one. So much illustrious praise and deification of the individual and his works, and yet not as much to understanding the context of his time and place, of his influences, forms, and impacts on the eras which proceeded him. Shakespeare seems to exist in a vacuum with his archaic language, and we read it once or twice in high school when we're forced to, with prosaic translations on the adjoining page. This does not inspire a true appreciation in a culture for Shakespeare but it does reinforce a stereotype that he must be somehow important. It's this shallow stereotype that makes it seem in many minds today that it would be worth it to rip the precise language out of the text of a poet, and spit back out an equivalent "modern translation."

[cactusringed]

a lesson in knowing your rights and knowing to stand your grounds is that i got to convince my landlord to reduce the 650£ fee they tried to deduct from my deposit for 5 chips in the walls to 150£ (which honestly is still far more than it should be, but showing good will made it more likely that I wouldn't have to go through an annoying dispute that I don't have the energy for). lol. im really hot and sexy btw

[iniquity-fr]

wait i forgot to complain about something. it sucks supremely that once again just like with ancients they didn't bother giving hatchlings separate cheaper blueprints WHY does the ONLY form of customization for these things have to be so heavily paywalled that's fucking stupidddddd

[gaybd1]

What do you think of korvira ?

Hell yeah they could both throw each other around and then team up to come murder me and I’d thank them for it

[sonechkaandthedynamos]

why is having a social life so expensiveeee

[tiberius-kirks]

this is your sign to read through one of your forgotten cookbooks !!

[zincbot]

beat undertale yellow!!