#i had to use google translate which isn't very accurate at all

[andthespidersfrommars]

you might not think it’s hard to be a soc fan artist on tumblr, but let me tell you about the time I called someone out for drawing inej with light skin, so they blocked me and then wrote a long post about me that I couldn’t see, along with colour samples taken from my art as examples of how inej is “too dark” in them, and then they end the post with “I’m disappointed in you” 💀

[pretty-little-mind33]

Kraven The Hunter x fem!reader

Summary: You meet a dangerous stranger in the woods...

Genre: SMUT (nsfm)

Warnings: kinda dark but still tame, cheating (reader), unprotected sex (pls use contraceptives in real life!), oral sex (m receiving), praise kink, degradation kink, rough sex, riding, he spits in reader's mouth 👀, kissing (duh), fingering, light misogyny, ik he has a name but i use Kraven in this, bad russian google translate maybe (I AM SO SORRY I DID MY BEST—if you speak Russian and have any suggestions… please 🙏 ) LISTEN…I'M SORRY LIKE I COULD NOT RESIST WRITING FOR HIM…HAVE YOU SEEN HIM? Probably NOT comic accurate…

SERGEI KRAVINOFF MASTERLIST

You don't know what you hate more at the moment—your boyfriend or the continuous sweat forming on your hairline from the dampness and heat. It's becoming dark outside, which should cool the air and help with the heat but not as much with how pissed you are at Chris. 

With a small squeal, you stumble on the roots of a tree, gasping as your ankle twists awkwardly in your hiking shoes and the buzz of an insect flies around your ear. You swat your hand near your cheekbone. You're holding the branches you'd found in one arm now as the stickiness of the air makes your skin feel heavy. 

Screw you bugs! 

Screw you woods!

And most of all screw you Chris!

You're too immersed in your hatred that you don't realize you've fallen into an animal trap until it's too late. You scream, the branches falling from your arm as your body folds and the net wraps around you, pulling you up into the air. The rope burns your exposed skin as you squirm. This had to be a nightmare, some sick cruel joke Chris is playing on you. You half hope he'll jump out from behind the bushes and laugh in your face. 

You wait in silence for a moment but your boyfriend doesn't show up. 

"Help!" You scream out helplessly, "Is anyone there? Please, I-I'm trapped," you call. 

"Hmm, yes, that is the point of one of those," a deep voice drawls from behind you and you wince. You try to strain your neck to look at the newcomer but you can't move enough to see who it is. It certainly isn't Chris. Chris doesn't sound like that.

"Please, can you help me?" you plead shamelessly now. 

Your heart is beating so hard. You hear the creak of leaves and dirt as whoever stands behind you walks closer to you. You feel them turn the entire net around and soon you're face to face with dark piercing golden eyes. A color you can only describe as supernatural. 

"Now why would I help you? You stumbled into my trap—that makes you my prize."

The man is tall and strong. His shoulders are broad and his hair curls messily across his forehead. He's wearing an open vest made of brown leather and adorned with fur, thick leather bracers, and a necklace where three animal teeth hang.

You concentrate on the sharpness of the teeth for a while, ignoring how very much shirtless the man is against them, but eventually you lose focus as with a swift motion, he uses a knife he'd taken from his belt to cut the net and you crash to the ground. 

Immediately, the dirt sticks to your sweaty skin as you scramble up onto your feet. You brush hair from your face and stumble back, almost falling again until the man's large, calloused hand finds your forearm and he holds you still. "Calm down," he says hoarsely, his eyes narrowing and his grip tightening.

"You don't wanna run from me, gorgeous. Clearly, you don't know your left and right around here but I do. So, stay still for me so I can think about what I'm gonna do with you."

He has a thick accent and you find yourself nodding. He drops your arm and you don't move. You look up at him as he looks around, rubbing his hand over his jaw like he's debating his next moves. You can see his knife, which he has secured into his belt again, glistens with blood and your stomach churns. 

"Please don't hurt me," you whisper.

The man stares at you blankly, his eyebrows crease as he looks you up and down. After a moment, the corners of his lips curl upwards and he moves closer. You squeeze your eyes shut, scared, and you gasp inaudibly as a tear escapes you. 

The man's thumb wipes it away, his hand cupping your cheek and he speaks a language you don't understand—russian you assume—"Я бы никогда не подумал причинить тебе боль, (I would never dream of hurting you)," His tone seems sweeter than how he'd spoken before but all hopes of him translating what he'd said disappear when he asks:

"Why are you out here all alone?"

You recover from his touch as it leaves you and you try and explain, "I'm not alone. My boyfriend," you turn to look behind you but all you see is the trees and hear the rustling of animals in the shadows, "is around here somewhere," you finish.  

"He left you? Alone? Now? It's almost dark," the man accuses as if it had been your choice.

"I- I was supposed to bring branches for the fire," you say quickly, gesturing to the branches that had fallen from your arms. The man looks where you're pointing and chuckles darkly. 

"Oh, милый (darling), those aren't branches. Those aren't even twigs."

You glare at him, not finding it funny at all, "Well, I couldn't carry the heavier ones," you defend and the man interrupts with another chuckle.

"Ah," he smirks, "so why was it you who went out? Can your man not care for you properly?"

You scrunch your nose, "What's that supposed to mean?"

The man's smirk turns into a smile, his teeth showing, and you can't help but feel butterflies in your stomach as he smiles. He's handsome—almost too handsome for someone who looks like they live in the woods.

"I mean," he drawls, leaning in even closer, "what kind of man allows his woman to do all his labor, leaving her on her lonesome and vulnerable to bad men like me?" Your breath hitches and your eyes widen when he finishes, "Your man is a pathetic little boy who doesn't deserve a woman like you."

Your mind races. You want to defend Chris, tell this man that Chirs is an amazing, loving, boyfriend—but another part of you can't deny Chris had basically coerced you onto this hike, on your birthday nonetheless, and then promptly abandoned you to fend for yourself.

However, those details weren't what your mind latched onto. No. As you stare at the handsome stranger, his words ring in your ears; "bad men like me"

The man can tell and he chuckles, "Don't look so scared. I like you. You're the most entertainment I've had in a while. Come," he beckons you over, turning around and gathering his net over his shoulder. When you don't follow instantly he calls out, "I can offer you shelter and food, and a fire," he adds with a glance over his shoulder, "Unless you'd rather find your way back to your boyfriend. Your choice, милый (darling)."

So, you end up in the man's home. The man—who had finally introduced himself as Kraven— lives in a small cabin that's obviously been worn out by time and weather. All the furniture looks barely used—as if there hasn't been life inside this cabin for a long time. 

Kraven's hospitality is coarse and oddly demanding as he pours you some honey tea he made himself and hands you some bread. You don't complain, you're starving. As Kraven makes a fire, he mumbles things in Russian and occasionally he'll look over at you, sending a shiver up your spine. Your hair is wet from the shower you just had and the strands stick to your cheeks.

Your mind wanders to Chris. Is he okay? It is a warmer night—so he really shouldn't freeze to death. You feel guilty for having accepted Kraven's offer but your thoughts are interrupted by the fire starting and Kraven stands. He runs a hand in his curls and drops his vest on the couch near you. You look up, suddenly extra aware of how shirtless and toned he is. 

"Продолжай смотреть на меня так, и у меня не будет другого выбора, кроме как трахнуть тебя прямо здесь и сейчас, милый, (Keep looking at me like that and I'll have no choice but to fuck you right here and now, darling)," Kraven says in a growl and the only word you recognize is the last one since he's used it a few times.

"What does милый mean?" you ask, attempting to pronounce the word but fumbling it. Kraven smirks and tilts his head as he walks closer until he's sitting next to you. 

"It's a term of endearment," he chuckles, "like darling—or honey."

You feel your cheeks burn. It's almost worse to hear him explain the term rather than just using it. You look down at your hands, feeling Kraven's warmth next to you. He smells like pine-wood and ashes and the scent is invading. You feel safer near him then you'd ever felt in Chris's arms. Guilt settles in your stomach again. 

"Ты так сладко пахнешь. (you smell so sweet)," Kraven says again and his hand comes up to move some stray hairs behind your ear. The air shifts and sexual tension settles around you and the feeling dances across your skin with fervor. 

You don't dare turn your head to look at him, afraid of how he's staring. "What does that all mean? The Russian?" you mutter.

"It means I want to kiss you, doll," Kraven chuckles and his hand cups your chin and he turns your head so you're staring at him. Your eyes are round and he chuckles, "what do you say милый (darling)? Will you indulge me? I wanna see if you taste as good as I think you do."

Your heart jumps in your throat and suddenly you feel very small compared to him. Your eyes flicker to his lips and then up to look into his eyes. They sparkle darkly and you wonder if anyone has ever been able to say no to those eyes. You surely won't be the first. You nod. 

Kraven leans in and captures your lips with passion so fierce you're afraid your lips will bruise. Still, they slide across his easily and it's as if you've been molded for one another. Kraven's hands tighten in your hair, bunching up the strands so he can control your head movements. Control. His entire demeanor screams control.

"Good girl," he mutters with a smirk against your lips and his hands move to grip your hips. You're wearing some shorts and a shirt you found in the bedroom when you changed from your shower.

You gasp as he helps you up and you straddle him now. With a humph, he lifts up his hips and slides his knife holster to the side so it isn't digging into your thigh or his. He grins wolfishly, continuing to kiss you. His lips trail up your neck and near your ear. 

It never felt like this with Chris. Sure, it had been fine—it had been good even in the beginning—but this? No, nothing could compare to this. 

Kraven's hands are large and strong against your skin as he kneads your waist and ass. "Ты такая хорошая девушка для меня (You're such a good girl for me)," he whispers, his voice hoarse, and as attractive as it is, you whine and furrow your brows.

"Please, don't talk in Russian anymore. I can't understand you," you pout, pulling him closer as you unconsciously grind your hips into his for more friction. "I wanna understand you," 

Kraven grips your hips harder and rolls them onto him, earning him a soft moan that falls from your lips. "Alright, darling, alright," he smiles and kisses you again. "Tell me, do'you want more from me? Seems like you do," he grinds your hips again, punctuating his words as he teases you mercilessly. 

You are at loss for words. This is wrong. You're cheating on your boyfriend, you try to remind yourself, with a man you met in the woods. But if this is so wrong, why does it feel so good? You moan. You desperately want to slide your shorts and panties down to allow even more friction on your clit. Your cheeks burn with embarrassment and you must look so needy. 

Kraven hooks his fingers in your waistband, running his thumb over your hip, reading your mind, "Is this what you want, darling? You wanna rub yourself on me like a little slut?" 

The insult shouldn't be as hot as it is, but when it's followed by a searing kiss, the word is honey on his tongue. You moan and drop your head in the crook of his neck, grasping onto his shoulders as you lift your hips so he can easily slide your panties and shorts down. "Please," you whisper, nails digging into the muscle of his shoulders. 

Kraven smirks and, as he holds your nape with one hand, he uses the other and finds your pussy. He explores your folds, wanting to make sure you're wet and ready for him. He rubs your clit, earning him smaller, more high pitched sounds from your parted lips as your wetness seeps over his hand. 

Kraven teases you for a little while longer, murmuring praises in your ear until he suddenly spreads his legs and you fall to your knees in front of the couch. You gasp, looking up at him from the ground. 

He looks majestic, sitting there, as if the couch was his throne and he was a King. 

Kraven's smirk widens as he fists one hand in your hair, using his other hand to lick his fingers clean of your arousal and then swiftly unbuckle his belt. He stares at you as he does this and tilts his head. "D'you do this for your boyfriend, gorgeous?" Kraven seems amused by the word boyfriend, as if it's some game to him. 

You nod, sinking onto your heels as you watch Kraven pull out his cock. He's big and hard and your eyes widen. "D'you like doing this?" he asks, his voice low. You catch his eye and shake your head honestly. You didn't like giving Chris head—but Chris's dick didn't look like this. Your eyes snap up to Kraven's cock. 

"You'll like it with me," he adds, smirking, and guides your head to his cock. You let him, having no complaints as you take him in your mouth. You're nervous at first, unsure of what to do, but soon you gain more confidence as you try and take him even deeper. 

You gag a little and Kraven just tightens his hand in your hair. 

"You can take it. I know you can, doll. There," he coos, clearly enjoying your work as you adjust your mouth around him. "There, yeah. That's my good girl." Kraven grunts out the word "my" and warmth pools in your stomach. You moan around his cock, sucking faster as if to respond yes, I am yours.

With a pop, he pulls your head away and tilts your chin. He helps you up to straddle him again, keeping you eye level as he positions his cock at your entrance. He squeezes your cheeks, opening your lips, and then spits into your mouth before claiming your lips again. Your eyes flutter shut as you feel him against you and he sinks you down onto him. 

"Can you feel me, милый (darling)?" he grunts, moving you on his cock slowly, torturing you. He chuckles darkly when you whine. 

"Mmh," is the only sound you make as he fills you up. It feels so good. 

"You feel full, hm?" Kraven taunts, moving your hips a little faster as his hands grip your hips hard enough to bruise. He pulls one away a moment and rips your shirt, attaching his lips to your hardened nipples as you squeal. 

"Yes, oh, I feel so full," you whimper, bouncing up on him, helping him so you can go even faster and deeper. "Shit, you're so big."

"Шлюха (slut)," he groans, the word slipping past his lips in ecstasy as he kisses and sucks across your chest. You whine, wanting him to tell you what the word means so you can understand him but Kraven smirks. He kisses your collarbone and then, using his strength, he easily flips you over so you're laying on the couch and he's on top of you now. 

Kraven sinks his cock back into you as he snaps his hips hard. You gasp, wrapping your arms around him and your nails slide up and down his back, and he groans with pleasure at the sting. 

"Fuck, fuck, fuck please," you plead, eyes rolling as your body shivers.

"You're so tight around me. As if you were made just for me," he says as he continues to fuck into you. "Does your boyfriend fuck you this good?" Kraven asks, his accent thicker as he loses himself in the pleasure. His hand comes to wrap around your jaw as he holds you in place under him. 

You shake your head. 

"Слова (Words)," he growls but then curses and says, "Words, darling. Tell me."

"N-no. He doesn't fuck me this good," you whisper as Kraven's cock slides into you. You're so wet and he's so hard and this is so so wrong. 

"Yeah? You gonna run back to him now, bunny?" he snarls and nips as your earlobe. He thrusts harder and smirks at the pet name. "Hmm. run little bunny, back to your poor excuse of a boyfriend? No," Kraven grunts, as if he's made a decision, "I'm keeping you, doll. I can take care of you better than he can."

You moan at this and nod, "Please," you whisper, feeling your thighs clench around him as you can feel your orgasm approaching. 

Kraven feels it too. "You're squeezing around me, Шлюха (slut), do you wanna come?" Kraven teases and his thrusts slow. You whine and look at him, your eyes becoming teary from need. You nod.

He laughs and kisses your lips with a grin, "Alright, you can come. Go on, let yourself come all over my cock," he smirks against your skin as his sharp teeth nip at your neck. 

 You whine, letting your body finally relax as you come. You gasp, your eyes rolling from pleasure as your legs feel like jello. Kraven finishes inside you with a grunt and you whimper at the feeling.

He smiles as you sink into the cushions and your eyes flutter. His large hand comes to hold behind your head as he pulls you up and leans you against his chest. 

While Kraven's touch is comforting, it's also possessive and claiming. His thumb strokes over your hair and his lips kiss your head. He's holding you so close you're almost afraid he'll never let you go. You sigh when he slides out and picks you up in his arms as he stands.

"Good girl," he mutters as he walks you to the bathroom and adds, "You did so well for me." You let yourself relax in his arms as he promises he'll be here from now on. You're his now. 

You're so blissed out from your orgasm that your mind doesn't understand what that truly means. Instead, you shut your eyes and let him take care of you and, with a small smile, you think,

Happy. Fucking. Birthday. To. Me.

[dedalvs]

can you make a translator for firish i want to use it in my rps i have with friends

I've actually gotten this question a couple times, which is great! But this type of thing just isn't possible with a conlang. It has nothing to do with the quality of the conlang or the level of completion (i.e. the amount of vocabulary, how much of the grammar has been recorded, etc.), and I'll tell you specifically why.

First, you may have seen "translators" for various languages online like LingoJam. LingoJam not only has translators for a bunch of different languages, but allows you to make your own translators. The way these work, though, is you write down a word in one language and write its translation into another—something like:

English > Spanish

I > yo

am > soy

to > a

the > el

store > tienda

going > yendo

That is, you put in one to one correspondences, and that's what it has to work with. Once you're done, if you ask for a translation, it looks up the words and sees what's available and it spits back what it has, in order. If we had this very minimal English to Spanish dictionary (which is 100% accurate, by the way! That is, all of these English words can be translated as all of these Spanish words), you could ask LingoJam to translate the following into Spanish...

I am going to the store.

...and you would get...

Yo soy yendo a el tienda.

Now, if you speak Spanish, you'll see all the places this went wrong. (Short version: You don't always need subjects pronouns in Spanish; you use a different helping verb for "to be x'ing" in Spanish; you rarely actually use this "to be x'ing" construction in Spanish; the present tense is sufficient; though el means "the", it's the wrong gender for tienda—analogous to saying "an store" as opposed to "a store" in English.) And you can actually avoid this in LingoJam by adding phrases on top of single words:

English > Spanish

the store > la tienda

I am going > voy

But you can imagine how much work that would be...

The reason why things like LingoJam are so popular, though, is because imagine if you knew nothing about Spanish. Typing in "I am going to the store" and having it instantly spit out "Yo soy yendo a el tienda" is pretty darn satisfying! If you don't know it's wrong but you're happy with it, what's the problem?

Now, a language like Spanish is huge, so it's easier to get accurate Spanish translations online than it is to get accurate Korean translations online—and it's easier to get accurate Korean translations online than accurate Tigrinya translations online, etc. The reason for that takes us to Google Translate.

I think most people know that with LingoJam, you get what you pay for. Google Translate, on the other hand, is much more sophisticated, and much more accurate. It's not 100%, but it's pretty darn good—for widely spoken languages. This is why.

Way back when, Syfy facilitated a chat between me and the folks at Google Translate because they wanted to see if Google and I could work together to create a translator for a couple of my Defiance languages at TED in 2013. After all, we had a full two weeks. We could bang something like that out in two weeks, right? (lol no)

I learned then how Google Translate works. Google Translate doesn't actually know anything about the specific grammar of a language—maybe a couple language specific tweaks, but it's not as if you can go under the hood and find a full grammar of Spanish that tells you when to use the subjunctive, what all the conjugations are, etc. Instead, what Google Translate has is a database (i.e. Google, along with Google Books, Google Scholar, etc.) with tons of, presumably, fluent documents written in the various target languages offered on Google Translate. They also have faithful translations of those documents—not all, but a percentage. Google Translate uses that information to predict what a given sentence in one language will turn into in another.

In order to do this successfully, Google Translate needs BILLIONS of documents to troll. And it has that. It has BILLIONS of articles written in Spanish and translated to English. That's why the English to Spanish translation is as good as it is.

Now, having said that, anyone who's bilingual in English and Spanish knows that Google Translate isn't perfect. Sometimes it's pretty good, but sometimes it produces a lot of clunky, unnatural, or even incorrect translations. This is because there isn't a human back there calling the shots.

But that's its best translator. Now imagine translating between English and Samoan (one of the other languages it offers). There are EXPONENTIALLY more online articles in Spanish than Samoan. Consequently, the translations you get between English and Samoan on Google Translate are absolutely no guarantee.

And bear in mind, there's a kind of minimum threshold they work with before adding a language to Google Translate. If Samoan is on there and not Fijian, it's because there's that much more Samoan online than Fijian.

Now let's go back to conlangs. What Google Translate wants is BILLIONS of articles written online in the target language. Forget how complete the grammar of a conlang is, whether you can find that description online, or how many thousands of words the conlang has. How many fluent articles are there written in that conlang that are online? How many can one person to? How about a team of people? And how many conlangs have that?

This is why Google Translate has Esperanto and nothing else. Esperanto has been around for 136 years, and in that time there have been a good number of people who have learned to speak it fluently, and have written things (poems, articles, books) that are now online. It is as much as Spanish? Certainly not, but it is enough to hit Google Translate's minimum threshold, and so it's available.

Assuming you have a conlang with a full grammar and a good amount of vocab, if it were popular, it might have enough available material for Google Translate to work with 125 years from now. But at the moment, it's not possible. That says nothing about the language: It's about how Google Translate works.

And bear in mind, Google Translate is, at the moment, our best non-human translator.

If predictive-AI gets good enough that it can learn the grammar of a language, then it may be possible to produce a translator for a new conlang. That, though, is not the goal of Google Translate. Maybe ChatGPT and things like it will get there one day, but even that isn't a dedicated language learning AI. We need an AI that doesn't work with billions of fluent articles, but works with two books: a complete grammar and a dictionary. If an AI can one day work with those two tiny (by comparison) resources and actually produce translations that are as good as or better than Google Translate, then we'll be at a "translation-on-demand" place that will be good enough to feed a new conlang to. At that point, it will simply be a matter of producing a grammar and lexicon of sufficient size for the AI to do its thing.

So, no, right now we can't do a Ts'íts'àsh translator. :( We can go over things like the sound system and basic grammar and you can create your own words to work with it... A lot more work, but hey, we don't have to churn our own butter or milk our own cows anymore! We've got time!

[indigozeal]

Game translation project delay

Earlier this year, a game translation project which I had been trying to get off the ground for a very long time was surprise-announced by another team member, with a release implied to be imminent. I'm not going to mention the name of the project in the body of this post for Woolie Madden reasons—I don't think we should have tempted the Fates then, and I don't think we should any further—but if you've happened across this page, you know what it is. I had myself mentioned that I had already translated 90% of this game's Super Famicom script, a number the team member making the announcement quoted, and one which I stand by. Yet here we are several months later, and I'm still deep in work.

In short: the translation's the holdup. I'm informed that technical reasons make using the original SFAM game for a patch prohibitively difficult. However: the version of the game I understand we have to use has expanded greatly on that original SFAM game, adding a number of events and much more text—plus a second protagonist choice with mostly unique events and dialogue—while revising some of the existing script. Translating & editing all this new material, in addition to editing the entire script, old and new, for length and inserting it line-by-line, is unavoidably taking a good amount of time. While I've been presented with a method that attempts to create a script for the game using a combination of Google Translate, what I translated for the SFAM version, and guesses from non-translating members of the team, I strongly felt that the results did not deliver in terms of quality, accuracy, fluency, or characterization, so I asked, and was promised, complete responsibility for the script side of the project.

That's the reason for the delay. I, as the translator, am the rate-determining step. That's due to a decision I made for the quality of the project—I want to deliver a good patch, one that reflects the game & characters accurately and of which everyone can be proud—and the consequences of that decision are my responsibility. Given my current work rate, I'm going to shoot to complete the translation side of this project six months from now; emergencies or unexpected developments may change this, but I think it's doable.

That's the nutshell version, and I apologize to anyone whose hopes were gotten up by the announcement earlier in the year. There really isn't a way to short-circuit the time investment required for the translation, for reasons explained at length below. If you'd like a more in-depth explanation, please proceed past the cut.

A bit of background

I've been a longtime fan of a romance-oriented Japanese game & media franchise aimed at women that founded an entire gaming genre but, except for one TV series, has never had any sort of official release outside Japan. There'd been some talk in the fandom of how nice it would be if the franchise's foundational, genre-defining game, for the Super Famicom, finally got an English patch—for historical purposes; to give the franchise a bit more recognition outside Japan; just so that the English-speaking fans could play. However: the game's script was notoriously huge, and no one wanted to climb that mountain. (The game's lovey-dovey, frilly subject material also doesn't typically appeal to the folks who fill up romhacking.)

I was exactly the type of unreasonable person equipped for this task, however. I've been involved in hobby game-translation projects for…well, decades now. I also translate professionally and have worked in game translation on projects for Square, Sega, Bandai Namco, Koei, and others, as chronicled in part on this blog. I also had one huge advantage for this game: the publisher had released a book containing almost its entire script. It took a great deal of time, but a few years ago, I finished and posted a translation of the script book.

Attracting someone to insert this script into a patch, though, proved a problem. One obstacle, I learned, was the immediate lack of a file pairing the English translations with the Japanese lines; I'd thought I'd attack this once a patch project started and I got proper script dump files, but not having a paired version of what had been translated immediately prepared was a turnoff, I guess. I therefore set to work producing one. In the meantime, I was indeed contacted by a few folks with some interest in producing a patch, but I didn't subsequently hear of any progress.

About a year ago, though, shortly after I started on that "paired" version of the script, I was contacted by a very interested and motivated individual who claimed they could use the script to produce a patch for the game. One thing, however: there were issues with the coding of the SFAM version that made producing a patch for it prohibitively difficult. (I know very little of the tech side of producing patches and am not equipped to provide an explanation, but this was not the first time I'd heard this about the SFAM game. I had persisted in translating the SFAM script in the hopes that the issue was resolvable, as the SFAM version is the historic, genre-founding title and the folks with reservations self-admittedly hadn't looked very deeply, but evidently, the problem is indeed a serious obstacle.) As a solution, this person asked if I'd be willing to work on a patch for a later, more-technically-manageable rerelease of the game on the DS. I readily agreed.

A while after, two more folks joined the project on the tech side, evidently with a solution to an issue that was frustrating progress on the DS version. They offered to produce a version of the patch for the PS1 version alongside the DS version; I agreed. (I eventually learned, however, that this would involve extra work, that of producing a second version of the script to accommodate the PS1 version's different per-line character limits.)

What exactly are you doing right now?

In brief: when agreeing to produce a version of the script for the rereleases, I didn't anticipate how much they expanded on the original game.

While the original version has a single, set protagonist, the expanded versions allow you to choose to play as her rival. The choice isn't limited to a simple swapping out of names in dialogue; each protagonist has her own unique versions of events, plus unique dialogue from the nine love interests. (Some dialogue is shared, but about two-thirds of it, I'd say, is tailored to the choice of protagonist.)

Dialogue from the love interests has been greatly expanded to flesh out characterization. For example, in the original game, if you asked one of the love interests his opinion on one of the others, he'd respond with a generic message of approval, disapproval, or indifference based on his current regard for the other man. In the remakes, however, each love interest has a unique set of approval/disapproval/indifference messages for each of the other eight suitors. In other words, where there were once three different messages, there are now twenty-four, each on average significantly longer than the originals.

There are numerous new events and activities: cafe and skygazing dates, letter-writing, cooking, finding lost objects, etc., all with unique dialogue for each protagonist and love interest, making for a base of eighteen variations. Many have additional variations based on other parameters.

Some of the dialogue that's still present in the remake has been revised from the original.

Again: what I had originally produced was a text translation of the script book to the Super Famicom version of the game. The script book was not complete—it focused on exhaustive enumerations of love interest dialogue and elided NPC dialogue—but I believe it has about 90% of the original game's text. With the remake, though, there's a lot more work to do.

My tasks are numerous. The script files I've been given generally sort dialogue by event. For each file, I have to identify the specific event they concern, then go line by line to ascertain the speaker of each line and the circumstances under which each is said from context (as this information isn't marked) as well as determine if the text is old or new. If it's old, I have to find the translation in the script-book file and match it to the source text; if it's new, I have to translate it—and also check it against a new script book for the new version, as certain changeable or user-definable proper nouns, such as protagonist names and various locations an event can take place, are for tech reasons not reliably represented in the script dump files. For all dialogue, I have to edit translations to match character and line limits, putting in line breaks and sometimes rewording text or, as a last resort, cutting it—and since the character limit per line is different for the PS1 and DS versions, I have to produce two versions. (In fairness, I don't have to, but the extra space in the DS version is useful on occasion, and dialogue boxes might look odd if I don't use real estate properly.)

It's a lot. However: it's not that different than what I do as a professional game translator (with extra steps), and I'm uniquely equipped to tackle this particular job thanks to having translated the SFAM script book and being very familiar with the characters from following the franchise for years.

I can do all this, but it takes time. That's what holding up the patch.

No, AI can't help

Not long after the announcement, one of the team members informed me that they intended to produce the patch using a method where Google Translate versions of the script files were combined with parts of my original translation and guesses from non-translating members of the team as to what lines meant. They shared an example—an attempt at an English-language version of the introductory segment of the DS game produced using this method. (I had translated the SFAM introduction, but, as with all matters, the DS version greatly expanded on the SFAM version.) I had not been informed previously about this plan.

I took a look, and I felt very strongly that the results did not live up to the standard I wanted for this franchise's English-language debut. There were numerous errors in translation, spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The English used wasn't fluent. Characters no longer had unique voices—they all sounded the same, and characterization was completely absent.

(I have to say: despite the importance of the other issues, the gutting of characterization was the biggest knife for me. The game was so successful in pioneering its genre due in great part to its attention to characterization, which I worked hard to reflect in my translation. Seeing all that work torn up in favor of an AI translation that was not only not up to the task linguistically but torched everything that made the game unique frankly hurt.)

The Google Translate script is not exactly usable.

This isn't Google Translate's fault. The script files are typically formatted to present, line by line, just one side of a conversation in all its numerous variations—either for one love interest in all possible permutations (variants depending on your affinity with him etc.), or for all love interests who can have this conversation. There's no overt signal in the file that the speaker or scenario is shifting; you have to realize who's speaking and in what circumstances from context and speaking style. Google Translate can't glean the context it needs to deliver an effective translation when dialogue is presented in this manner, and you can't infuse it with the franchise or script knowledge it needs to make the right calls about speaker/scenario/etc.

Other obstacles: The dialogue is presented line by line, so Google Translate is going to translate line by line, which leads to choppy dialogue. Characterization is frequently communicated in elements like verb endings and sentence-ending particles that Google Translate overlooks or doesn't convert well or that can be translated in multiple ways depending on context. Conversations also have a number of short lines that are also heavily context-dependent, where trying to translate them context-free via the line-by-line method leads to inane translations. There are more; any experienced translator could probably expound further on why using Google Translate in this scenario is a bad idea. You need an experienced translator with franchise knowledge to tackle this project.

I also don't expect the folks on the technical side of the team to attempt to translate—it's not their job, any more than romhacking is my job.

I would have been derelict in my duty as a translator if I let the patch go forward in this state. I didn't, and don't, feel that a Google Translate patch would deliver any value—there are programs out there that can Google Translate dialogue boxes in roms automatically, if that's what you want. This is a historic game, and I feel it deserves a patch that showcases the qualities that made it special for its English-language debut. If we delivered a patch that was incoherent and characterless, the franchise would be tainted in the English market, and the team would be nailed to the wall. From my job, being the one equipped to gauge quality in this department, I knew what public reception of a patch in this state would be, and I didn't want the rest of the team or me to suffer that. (To be selfish, a poor-quality patch would also have professional repercussions for me, as pros do watch the fan scene, and trying to pass off AI, much less AI that's not up to the task, as your own work is, rightfully, a huge black mark on your reputation.) Also, to be blunt: I didn't start this project years ago to spit AI all over this game.

I sent them an email explaining the issues above to the relevant team member, and I asked to have full responsibility for the script side of the project. They agreed.

There was also an attempt by a team member to use AI to help with editing that didn't bear fruit. One of the non-translating team members tried to help with my workload by taking the lines I'd edited for the 38-character DS line length and trying to re-edit them for the 33-character PS1 line length with AI assistance. I was not initially informed of this difference in line lengths or the need for two scripts. I discovered it only upon accessing the group versions of the script files on the cloud drive and discovering that a number of formatting and translation errors had been introduced into files I'd previously edited, some rather basic: the Japanese verb for "to eat" had been mistaken for the one meaning "to rest," for instance. Upon inquiring, I discovered what had happened, and as a result, it was clarified that I would be handling editing for both versions and reworking the files affected to restore the translation and remove the errors produced. I appreciate the attempt to alleviate my workload, but there's by nature a hard linguistic wall involved with editing, and the attempt just created more work.

So the other team members have experimented with using AI, but it hasn't produced anything usable—honestly, it just kind of screws up everything it touches. (If I'd been aware of the attempts to use AI on the project beforehand, I would have reached out and explained why they wouldn't have worked.) I'll state right now that my vision for this patch absolutely does not, and never did, include Google Translate or other AI or LLMs: as a professional translator, I have no need to use AI to translate; it would not expedite the translation due to the particulars detailed above; and I care too much about the quality of this project to farm any part of it out to AI. I mention it because a lot of folks, particularly tech folks, have more confidence in AI than I do, having worked with it extensively for my job and knowing well its capabilities and limitations. It can be useful in certain situations, but it's not omnipotent, and it's not suited for this project.

"Hey, would it help to get an additional translator?"

Honestly, not at this point, no, for several reasons.

One, the work to be done requires a great deal of previous familiarity with the script. Remember, the script for the roms exists in a bunch of files with the lines are generally (but not always) sorted by event, where the individual speakers and the nature of the event itself have to be inferred from context or just plain recognized from experience. The lines also aren't typically organized to present a complete conversation, usually going through all the iterations of one side of the conversation character by character. A good deal of the work is recognizing context and speakers for the lines and whether they're already-translated material or entirely new or old lines that have been changed, so that existing translations can be matched or new, context-appropriate translations can be written. You really need to know your way around the script to do that. I'm equipped to do that, since I've translated the script book for the SFAM version; that's a tall ask for someone coming in cold. We tried it previously, and it didn't work. (It also helps if you have previous familiarity with the characters and how they speak, not only to identify when they're speaking, but to translate what they're saying in a character-appropriate manner. The latter isn't impossible without that familiarity—it's how games are typically translated—but it's way easier if you come in with that knowledge.)

Two, this is a character-intensive game with a huge amount of nuanced character writing to reflect in the English translation, and that calls for a certain degree of translation and just plain writing ability. Many of the devices used to communicate that nuance are easily overlooked unless you have a lot of translation experience. (I'm speaking from my own development as a translator here: you can reach a point where declarative sentences like the narration in a world guide or Ultimania are within your grasp but the nuances of conversation are just going to elude you.) Plus: even if you identify and understand the Japanese text, you still have to be able to phrase it in English fluently, in an accurate and character-appropriate manner. This whole set of skills is another ask.

Three, this is a niche title for the West whose massive script was notorious for repelling translators. "Hey, guess what! I'm working on a version that I've discovered is even more massive and interminable!" does not make the project more enticing.

Four, it's way harder to vet translators nowadays, and it would consume resources on my end I'd rather put toward getting the dang thing done. The rise of LLMs has given rise to a number of folks eager to take over translation duties on a project who have just one or two semesters of Japanese but think Google Translate can make up for the rest. (You might say, "hold on, you just mentioned that this project repels translators; why would someone like that sign up for this?", but that's kind of the thing: it'd attract those who don't know enough to know what they're getting into.) In a conversation- and context-heavy project like this, where AI is going to fall down hard, those people are going to hit a wall very quickly, which leads to difficult conversations that I'd really rather not have—but would have to have, since I'm the translator who started this whole thing, and it's my responsibility to deliver a quality product.

Furthermore, a lot of this can be difficult to communicate to the type of people who would be most enthusiastic about AI at the present moment. I love you, tech people. I love you. But I have gotten the impression over the years that some tech folks in the rom-patching scene regard translators and translations as kind of valueless and interchangeable because, you know, words are all the same, who really cares. It's already an uphill battle to convince some folks that words, the type of words you use, matter, and I'm afraid my forces are already fully engaged on one front (the script itself).

Even if the volunteer were heaven-sent, due diligence in ascertaining their divine status would take a lot of energy, and after the stumbles we've had, I just want to get this done, and just want to rely on a method I know from experience will work instead of chasing down more blind alleys.

Real-life issues! We've got real-life issues here!

I will also note, by way of explanation, that I have had a number of personal things happen that have resulted in delays on my end, which I will recite here for entertainment's sake: I got bronchitis twice in succession (I had it for a week, got better for a week, and then got it again, worse, for another week) and became as sick as I've been in my adult life. There's been an issue with a property in my family to which I've had to tend, involving lawyers extensively. I got an opportunity this year to work professionally on one of the most storied franchises in gaming, to which I had to dedicate a suitable amount of time, as well as other professional translation projects that demanded my attention. I've had to travel extensively for personal reasons, and not fun, vacation-type travel—travel that involved a good deal of work, physical and professional. I had fallout from a client who wanted me to cheat on my taxes to cover for an accounting issue on their end and submitted falsified documents to the IRS. Also, after a lifetime of avoiding, by luck or otherwise, such situations, I have had a problem with being harassed by not one but two completely unrelated individuals, one of whom became physically violent with me. (Not very successfully, but the attempt itself was disturbing.)

To paraphrase from Jurassic Park, I'm sure, dear reader, you are sorry for my problems, but they are my problems. But I recite this to communicate it's not been all Lazy Translator Fun Time over here, and at times, though my spirit has been willing to work on this translation, my schedule has been weak. Or too strong, rather. This doesn't make the delay go down any more easily, but it has been a practical concern.

---

So that's the status report. In brief: I'm asking for six months to get this done, AI-free, and I thank you for your patience (both with the delay and in reading this).

[lunarsilkscreen]

Techno-Baffle and the lie of AI

"Whatever you want it to do, it can do it." - The Promise of *EVERY* new technological advancement.

Sweet, have it mine the ore, smelt the titanium, and build a rocket by next week.

I used "Baffle" not "Babble". Yes.

We all want to believe in science fiction, and that the technology of tomorrow is here today. And if you look at history's idea of what "tomorrow" looks like, you'd get a bunch of vaguely accurate guesses, and a bunch of ideas that look either stupid, or very far off to what we have today.

Gilded Time Machines that look like Santa's Sleight written by H.G. Wells. Or Orson Wells describing a socio-political machine that was already in place when he wrote the book. Which happened to coincide with some ideas today.

Ah, remember when screen savers were a thing that didn't waste energy and computer monitor life?

Look at something like "Steam Punk" which is a dedicated genre of science fiction to yesterday's future today. Which serves to bring those fantasies to the modern day, and you can see just how far off our ideas actually were.

Sometimes not far off, other times, *very far off*.

Cyberpunk is the genre that describes today's socio-political machine with the same premise as yesterday's steampunk. Today's future, right now. And in a few years time, some of those ideas are gonna look pretty stupid. And there's gonna be some new form of discopunk or something that idolizes the lost future of today.

The question you are being asked is "What Exactly does AI do?" And the buzzword of the day is "AGI". I hate to tell you, we've had AGI. We've had it for decades. Maybe even centuries of you ask sociologists and data scientists.

Search engines like Google are a form of AI. They collect a bunch of data together, so you can ask Google to return some resources about a topic.

One of those is Wikipedia, a bunch of those are trash-ads. And a bunch more are other resources and descriptions by other people. Sorted by theoretical relevance. (They say if you ever go past the 3rd Google page, you've gone too far, but I find--on some research projects; you need to go deeper. Because the topical things replace the most relevant things.

And that's the exact same thing that happens with ChatGPT today.

Instead of giving you the resources it used, it just compiles them together. Usually stopping at the Wikipedia entry. And oftentimes rambling auto-complete, usuallly like "type 'women are' and then have auto-complete complete the sentence."

"women are women and women are women and women are women and women are women and women" - my phones auto-complete. Which sounds suspiciously like queer Twitter...

AGI isn't exactly far off from early video game AI enemy bots. Or Animal Crossing NPC behaviors. You give it a task, say "accomplish this goal in this way as quickly as possible" and it fails at that until it figures a way to fail successfully.

Sometimes, it's better than a human. It most often isn't, because the parameters humans give it are shit.

"Needs more Buckets"

If you say "okay track mania and finish this course as fast as possible" it'll map a pretty solid route. If you tell it play Super Mario World, for some reason... It sucks at that. Really bad.

I know why; it's because the parameters are "Go forward until you reach the end. Press jump sometimes" which could definitely be improved if the AI had a way to understand what those buttons did, and a way to understand what it was seeing on a screen.

You ever blindfold a friend and try to dictate commands to them so they can play Super Mario blinfolded?

As any 90s Mom will tell you though; Video Games don't translate into real life. You need better parameters for that.

AI also can't create anything new. It can solve problems that humans haven't been able to solve, or to come up with recipes that haven't been tried before that might be better than what we're already doing.

It can be incredibly precise.

It also can't make entertainment that hasn't already been made. If you think Simpsons has been going on long enough, just imagine it running forever with AI writers.

I'm sure the neverending Seinfeld channel already burned a lot of watchers out on AI-Media.

What is AI good for? What is it Used for? Learning models aren't new, but they are faster and easier to use on cheap tech. Even still, like the industrial revolution, and every technological advancement, it just makes monotony easy and quicker to do.

That's it.

And I hate to say it; the people currently using the AGI buzzword... Don't know how to give it parameters, and they don't know how to make it productive, other than for it to write essays like a high schooler: Copy it from Wikipedia, and change some things so it's not obvious.

That's also how you get around the plagiarism filters without trying too hard my guys. Don't even need to pay the $30 for ChatGPT.

The fact is; AI is dumb. All it is. All it ever was; is a search engine coupled with AutoHotkey.

The same two things your average hardcore gamer already knows like the back of their crumb filled keyboard.

[embervoices]

Questions for Fic Writers

from @clumsyclifford

(Note: All my fics are accessible to AO3 members only, sorry!)

What fic of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read any of your work? (In other words, what do you think is the best introduction to your fics?) Probably CHEESE! or Initial Summoning for Dragon Age and Good Omens, respectively.

Go to your AO3 “Works” page, to the sidebar with all the filters, and click the drop-down arrow for “Additional Tags.” What are your top 3-5 most used tags? Do you think they accurately represent your writing habits? Unsurprisingly: Self-Insert (12), Humor (10), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence (10), Fluff (8), There's also: Modern Girl in Thedas (12) but that's because 11 of them are from one series. I'm bemused that "Silly" only has 4 entries. It really should probably apply to almost all of them. To be honest, I think I'm spotty at best at tagging.

What are some tropes or details that you think are very characteristic of your fics? Religious themes, especially polytheism and spirit work. Unapologetic self-insert. Silly humor.

What detail in your fic are you really proud of? I'll have to think about it. I'm often surprised what lands well despite my thinking it would be horrible… The two things that come immediately to mind I don't think I've shared yet. First is that I experimented with writing the same paragraph of Solas' thoughts, first in prose, then Iambic Pentameter, and to scan with Leonard Cohen's Halleluia. That was because people were conflating the ballad meter of Halleluia with "Iambic Pentameter" because they noticed the Iambic part. But I just thought it was really pretty. I haven't had any reason to share it, though. Maybe on Tumblr now I'm back, I dunno. Second is in a self-indulgent fic I was writing with my co-writer Cowoline. If we ever get around to posting any of it remains to be seen, but there's one scene where one character is reading to another character some terrible purple prose, translating out of Orlesian on the fly. To get that text, I took some of my own romance scene writing from an earlier story and shoved it through at least French, and then back to English via Google Translate. The results were indeed appropriately terrible.

What do you wish someone would ask you about your fics? Answer it now! Nothing comes to mind. I am not sure I'm reticent enough for this to be a big problem. LOL

What’s one fact about the universe of The Canticle of Dreams that you didn’t get a chance to mention in the fic itself? EmberQuizzy isn't actually human. Her soul/spirit is made of Vanic material, not human material. She only appears human because it's what she expected to look like. Thus it's quite possible her and Solas' children will indeed have pointed ears.

Any worldbuilding you’re particularly proud of? Mostly whenever it catches me by surprise that some arbitrary decision early on actually clicks perfectly info place later.

What song would make a great fic (to either write or read)? I have a whole series of images in my head for making a Good Omens comic out of Ghost by the Indigo Girls, but I don't have the artistic chops, nor the patience to do it myself, and it's too much to commission another artist to do. So it'll have to wait until/unless I can find someone who will do it as a collaboration rather than a commission, which seems… unlikely, and possibly unfair. Mind you, if I had the spare money lying around, there are several GO Fan artists I'd commission to do it in a heartbeat!

How do you find new fic to read? Mostly, by filtering AO3 searches. Occasionally one or another fan group I'm in will post a rec that gets my attention, or a friend will ask me to read their thing.

How do you decide what to write? It attacks me in my sleep!

[loominggaia]

Una pregunta, ¿Cual es la ascendencia racial de los ciudadanos de drifter's hollow?

(Translated via Google Translate)

"One question, what is the racial ancestry of the citizens of drifter's hollow?"

It's hard to say what a characters' exact racial ancestry might be, especially the villagers of Drifter's Hollow. Most of them are poor and backwater, so they don't have detailed information about their ancestry like wealthy people do. We can only make assumptions based on their appearance, birthplace, and their own word (which may not always be accurate).

Gwyneth: Based on her appearance, she has strong Marienna ancestry. She also claims she was born on the Noso Peninsula, which is close to the Marienna's motherland.

Brogan: He was born to a gang of pirates on the sea, which doesn't tell us anything. But he appears to have Bluelander and Archtop features.

Che: Che was born in Southriver Wood, but his mother seemed to be an escaped slave or nomad of some kind, so it's impossible to say where her native land was. He knows nothing about his father. Che appears to have a mix of Rocknock and Spotted features, which would make sense because those satyr races originated close to where he was born.

Flora: All limniads manifest from a type of plant. Flora manifested from a white daisy. (Random trivia: she has pink hair which is very unusual, because limniads usually share their body colors with their flowers. This helps them blend in with their environment, but Flora's hair makes her stick out like a sore thumb. Other daisy nymphs have white, green, or blonde hair--never pink. This could be a random pigment mutation, or maybe she just dyes her hair to feel more unique? She's very mysterious!)

Olof: He says he's from Kaldenfel, which is near the Patchbacks' native land. He also appears to have strong Patchback features. He may have some distant Shaghoof ancestry as well because his tribe was close to Elska's.

Frederick: Like his father, Frederick has strong Patchback features. But his darker hair and solid-colored hide are more of a Claycoat or Ebony thing. His mother Haldora probably had one or both these races in her ancestry.

Ginger: Ginger has the red hair and fair skin of a Bluelander, but the big teeth of an Archtop, the freckles of a Craghopper, and the upturned nose of a Twister. Her green eyes could be either a Bluelander or Craghopper feature. I think her ancestry is very diverse.

Itchy: His mother had gold eyes, which is strictly a Goldengaze feature. We also know that he's a distant relative of Erasmos, so he must have Lovetop in his lineage too. Itchy himself has gray eyes, which isn't a feature of any satyr race, it's actually a rare mutation of blue eyes...who has blue eyes? Only the Archtops, and there are also strong Archtop genes apparent in his face. His skintone and hair texture match the Rocknocks. Honestly I think Itchy's ancestry has a little of everything.

Tomato: Nearly identical to his mother.

Cinnamon: Between Ginger and Itchy's rich ancestries, she probably has all of Gaia's satyrs in her blood.

Tojum: There has only ever been one race of kobolds, and Tojum descends from these.

Philippa: Philippa's case is interesting because she states her full name is "Philippa Sand-Crosser of the First Claycoats, Daughter of Y'tan"...yeah it's big mouthful, but that's how traditional names are in her homeland. These long names give information about her peoples' ancestry. The "Sand-Crossers" were an ancient Claycoat tribe that crossed the Serkel Desert from the Midland Jungle and eventually settled on Serkel's northern coast. Today this settlement is known as Y'tan. Based on this and her appearance, we can safely assume that Philippa has very strong Claycoat ancestry. But it's possible she has Striped, Ebony, and Dappleback genes too because those tribes had a lot of interaction with the Sand-Crossers.

Lilian: Someone asked about Lilian's ancestry before actually! I explored that in this older post.

Azadora: She was born in the Matuzan town of Rodanga. Most of the human population there has Lagaal, Odazi, and Solra ancestry. Her appearance matches up with this.

I think that's it, hopefully I didn't forget anyone!

*

Questions/Comments?

Lore Masterpost

[and-231-others]

adua, factually, is a good book

this post isn't trying to hate on Adua or anyone who worked on it, people who are represented by its characters, or people who may relate to/be like in any regard the characters in Adua. or english teachers. or teachers in general.

I just have a lot of thoughts about how we're (me and my classmates) are being told to read it in our english class and how it's given to us

Adua is the kind of book that I would read during a long car ride with absolutely zero/spotty reception, meaning that I would very rarely ever actually choose to read it. but I would read it and I would read all of it and I would read it in one sitting (which is better than some books)

Adua, however, is not at all the kind of book that I would ever suggest somebody read in an advanced high school english class. if you really want me to sit down and read this in a very not at all comfortable space, you better give me twenty bucks. I'll do it, but I'm not going to like it

and if you want me to take note of historical and cultural allusions on paper or computer, you better give me five more bucks

and if you want me to do any level of research on any of the allusions that I'm not genuinely interested in and actually write that down, you better give me at least five bucks per chapter because it's absolutely insane (/pos) how much is included. I know that it's kinda stupid that I'll research only what I'm interested in, but I do that all the time anyways and I'm not making myself do it. with google at my fingertips its like a second instinct

so kudos to the author and all for writing a really accurate book (as far as I know), but buddy this book is literally so hard to read with the amount of stuff I don't know and have no context for

I feel like the very bare minimum that a school can do is provide books that can be read easily (ie the formatting throughout the entire book is all uniform and the translation is done in a way that you can actually read it so it's grammar isn't really choppy (that being said, if the version we're reading is true to how it was originally written in italian... that's actually interesting and I would totally look up more about the italian language))

I do understand that this is kind of a high bar because teachers realistically are not getting paid that well at all, but if you're expecting us to do this much work for a book please make it easier for everybody

also I think just universally everybody should be putting trigger warnings at the beginning of chapters and stuff like, yes english teachers should do it because I high schoolers in this day and age have a much more intrinsic knowledge of what will trigger them and is therefore safe for them to be able to read without having actual issues go on during class. but also- just, anybody can get triggered by stuff, therefore ADD MORE TRIGGER WARNINGS AND IF YOU THINK THAT THIS WILL SPOIL A SURPRISE OR RUIN IT FOR PEOPLE, MAKE TWO VERSIONS OF THE BOOK, ONE WITH TRIGGER WARNINGS, AND ONE WITHOUT. MAKE THEM BOTH AVAILABLE FOR EVERYBODY (same price, same locations etc etc) (obviously making clear if a book had them included or not)

on another note, I think that if we're going to be doing something in class, especially if we're required to do it, you should make it interesting. that's not to say that Adua isn't interesting, I just think it's really hard to get into and once you're into it, it's really hard to get out of it. HOWEVER there's just too much going on to easily get into it into the first place (aforementioned lack of trigger warnings (read about my experience with some below), bad formatting etc etc)

in chapter 12, right at the end, there is just absolutely random smut that comes out of literally nowhere. I had no warning for it for it and that kind of thing really gives me the heebiejeebies, in a "gotta shake out the body" kind of way. it completely shuts me off from being able to finish anything for the next hour and (I've learned this because I read a lot of fanfiction. if you know anything about fanfiction, it's that eventually you're going to find a lot of untagged smut)

so I know that this is something that (while it doesn't exactly trigger me) bothers me immensely

and as I mentioned, there is absolutely no warning for this, so all of a sudden all this book that I'm supposed to be putting a lot of work into reading and taking notes on is completely near-impossible for me to do. because I can't focus on the book. because "oh my god what did I just read, I need to change my music, talk to a friend, scroll on my phone, read something else, and change my music again just to ask my friend to read to where it ends so I can finish the chapter because DAMN this is a large portion of my grade"

however... Adua is good. I think it's really informational because of how accurate is and how many historical and cultural references there are in it. and if I was going to be interacting with people from Somalia that were now in Italy and would have like been alive during the events that are talked about or happened in the book? I would totally read this if I knew that this was kind of similar to what they may have gone through

but I'm pretty sure that nobody in my english class is Italian. and I'm pretty sure that nobody in my english class is Somali (but I mean... I don't know that for sure, just a rough guess I've made based on how long I've known these people for and the one discussion about the book I've actually made it to so far). so all twenty-five of us that are reading this have absolutely no context for any event or allusion in the book, which means that we have to put a lot more work into this. also, all the historical background stuff is at the end of the book, so 1) I didn't even know it was there and 2) that's super inconvenient because you're literally flipping through the entire book trying to figure out what they might be talking about (and during the pre-reading that I missed, where this historical context thing starts. because you skip through the whole book to find it leading to spoilers)

a psa to teachers to close this off. if you're printing off a pdf of a book for students to read, please include page numbers because or else you're stuck telling people "oh just look at the online pdf of it for the page numbers" instead and (that's complete bs, that's way too much work on top of what we're already having to do)

[lee-hakhyun]

orv is the first and probably only time i'd ever translate something. i just figured out everything on my own, so it's probably a mess, but here is the stuff i use (under the cut, because it's quite a lot)

for unedited mtl, i take screenshots, upload them to discord, download them on my phone, translate with papago's text on img, and then upload them back to discord to read (you can skip this if you just want to read the images on your phone instead). the translation is rough but it is readable.. though it may take a bit to figure out what terms are which.

make sure the text on the screenshots are spaced out enough (or the ocr will combine lines into a mess), and it'll end up looking something like this

these are the visual settings i use, theme colour doesn't matter but dark mode is easier on the eyes. this takes like.. 5 minutes. it's quite easy (but tedious haha)

now if you want to edit mtl. i'm not sure how it is for others, but it takes me a while. hours to days for a single side story chapter depending on complexity ^^;

while you could just ocr the images to get the text, i've found it to be pretty unreliable. for any sentence that doesn't feel right, i find it easier to just type it out directly into the translator (papago mainly, deepl if the sentence still comes out weird). learning hangul is really not that hard! here's a good video that you can start off with

and for diphthongs specifically, this video explains it really clearly

if you'd like to start learning korean, this guy has a lot of good beginner videos too (the playlist is in the description). it's not needed for editing mtl, but knowing basic words and grammar helps a LOT

for typing, i used a website that had the korean keyboard up first. i copied the sentences, very slowly. and eventually i memorized it. at that point i ditched the website and downloaded the korean keyboard layout. for windows at least it's windows key + space to switch language to korean, then right alt to swap between hangul and english, and right ctrl after typing out hangul to bring up hanja

i work with the korean and mtl side by side, and bounce back and forth while going sentence by sentence. sometimes you don't need to do anything other than just rewording the sentence to sound more normal, but when it doesn't make sense that's when i start typing it into the translator

so. you throw a sentence into the translator, and you still can't figure out what it means? mirinae!

this breaks a sentence down, explaining the grammar and you'll be able to tell if there's any words that are werid

here's an example. now when doing this, there might be a word or phrase that stands out. that's probably what's wrong with the sentence. either you typed something wrong, or it's something that a translator can't pick up. google it :) there's probably someone else who already asked what is means, or it's a term that namu.wiki usually has. namuwiki is like a less serious korean wikipedia, but it usually has the terms you need. do look for other sources though, because namuwiki isn't the most accurate sometimes..

add en. in front of a namuwiki link to get a mtled page (example)

if it's a standard word though, just use naver dictionary :)

and for hanja, i look at this as well as googling

if i'm still confused on how a word is used, i'll go to twitter and look at how it's used in different contexts

and finally. keep a note of those terms that are book specific or that the translator have problems picking up. it will help so much when you don't have to go down a hole every time that term comes up again. or just terms that come up a lot. it helps to keep things consistent :)

here's a snippet of my notepad. there's definitely a better way to do this. but i don't feel a need to find anything else right now

how do u set up machine translation?

OK SO

First of all, I downloaded a website translator. I use mate translate, a firefox extension. It's an absolute lifesaver for navigating ANY site not in English.

Using that I made an account on Munpia and bought the sctir chapters as I translated. Munpia doesn't let you select text, so I used an OCR website! (Aka sites to get the text from images)

Now the two that I used were imagetotext, which is quite fast, but likes to fuck up and malfunction, forcing me to restart the process a lot. Bc of that I switched to prepostseo, which works well enough, but does require you to do a captcha test every. single. time. And I am SO FUCKING BAD at those that I went half insane.

So what I would do is to take a screenshot of whatever page I'm on, get the text through the OCR and paste it into Obsidian (I make two separate files for each chapter - RAWs and TLed) until I have the whole chapter.

Now, the formatting does get kinda fucked up. While I use the text on Munpia as a reference, I fix up the formatting of the text.

This is where it gets a little complicated: I like to use Azure to translate. It's a service offered by Microsoft, which includes a translator that, in my experience, is a little better than other machines. And since I don't edit the text this has proven to be VERY useful to me.

But setting up Azure is an absolute bitch and a half so I could also recommend Papago. They include definitions of certain words too, which is really useful. You're just gonna have to do it bit by bit.

Lastly? I recommend learning hangul. It's super fuckin fun (to me, but im a huge nerd) and it will help you with understanding when something's mistranslated a LOT.

The translations are pretty.. Well, they're unedited machine translation. But at least you won't have to wait 12 years for all 870 chapters to get translated. I say that you enjoy the process (It's very very repetitive and I highly recommend putting on a show in the meantime!) and just.. well, just have fun.

I've found that I really enjoy some of the descriptions even when they're not the best. And good grammar gets overestimated anyways. Talk to any older immigrant and they'll tell you the most fantastic stories while inventing sentence structures never before seen (Speaking as a child of immigrants here lol)

And gosh even with the translations being fucked up I've still had so many moments where I got so emotional I cried. The author is a wonderful writer and I can't wait to learn korean enough to be able to read the original text

That's all for now! If it sounds complicated, thats because I do NOT know how to keep myself short ^^

[weirdmarioenemies]

Name: Ink Theory

Debut: Splatoon 2

You know, for all the months I’ve been writing for weirdsplatooncharacters.deviantart.gov, I’m surprised it took me this long to get to my absolute favorite Weird Splatoon Characters, Ink Theory! Now, as we all know, it is a scientifically proven fact that Splatoon music slaps. Anyone who’s played Splatoon knows that, and anyone who disagrees is a coward who has never heard of taste. How disappointing!

But can you boil down music that slaps to a science? In-universe, the band Ink Theory decided to put that to the test, blending “academic music theory with modern sensibilities” to create what, in theory, should be the jamminest music of all! So what does the jamminest music of all entail?

Being able to shred a trumpet, apparently! I did not know that was possible, but then I played Splatoon 2, and learned that everything is possible. That’s Great!

Some people, again, cowards who have never heard of taste, might say this music sounds bad, but personally this is my favorite music in the game! I love the diversity of the Splatoon soundtrack, and I love the absolute chaos that seems to unfold whenever one of these tracks is playing. Is it just me, or are matches where Broken Coral plays the most chaotic matches of them all? And by extension, the best matches?

I am glad that Splatoon has frantic jazz tracks, and even more glad that there’s a canon in-universe band that produces these frantic jazz tracks, and even MORE glad that said jazz band consists of six lesbians. Don’t believe me?

Well then believe this Splatoon art posted on Valentine’s Day! That’s an entire day dedicated to romance! We have a whole triple date worth of lesbians here! It’s weird, there was an entire Nintendo Direct on that day, featuring Mario Maker 2 and a new Weird Mario Enemy, and yet somehow, this image is what stood out to me the most.

But enough talking about the band as a whole! Let’s talk about the six individual members, because they each have a whole lot more to talk about. All of this is under the cut!

Name: Yoko

As the band’s trumpet player, and focus of their sound, Yoko serves as the band’s frontman, though, from what I can gather through “translating her bio in google translate,” her relationship with the other members of the band is a little bit distant. In fact, it’s not just that, it seems she just. Has depression! Her bio more or less mentions her feeling a bit dreary regardless of the weather, though nonetheless, she is always to give a solid performance on the trumpet, so that’s good I suppose!

You might notice that as an Inkling, Yoko has four differently colored tentacles, which is not really a common thing! Apparently, she has a mutation that causes her tentacles to appear different colors, which might sound cool, but it’s also likely to draw unwanted attention, and apparently, if my translations are right (they probably aren’t) leave her susceptible to atmospheric pressure.

Yeah, it’s a bit unfortunate that Yoko lives such a terrible life. They could write anything they wanted for this weird squid girl, and they decided to give her depression! But it’s not all bad! Let’s zoom in on that Valentine’s Day art!

Apparently, her hat doesn’t have gibberish Splatoon characters, but actual Japanese kanji! Kanji that spell out “Karen.” And who’s Karen?

Name: Karen

The band’s pianist, and from all logical evidence, Yoko’s girlfriend! While Yoko is the band’s frontman, Karen is the band’s founder, and she is (currently) the only Nautilus we’ve seen in the Splatoon universe! While squids, octopuses, and apparently cuttlefish are all pretty heavily anthropomorphized and humanoid in this world, nautiluses are more-or-less exactly the same, just larger and with longer tentacles. In fact, can we focus on that for a second? I love that Karen’s entire body is like, 85% tentacle. If she wasn’t wearing a dress, Karen would mostly just be a writhing mass of tentacles.

But Karen isn’t a nudist! She’s a pianist! One time she listened to the music of Hightide Era (another obscure Splatoon band) and said, “wow, this slaps,” and after that decided to start her own band! She graduated at the top of her class, and combined with her positive attitude, she’s been able to get a lot of moral support from her bandmates. Karen’s life is fortunately, nowhere near as difficult as Yoko’s, but she does occasionally worry about the band lacking proper motivation, which I suppose is a fair enough thing to worry about if you’re leading a band.

And this might just be me, but I feel that Karen is totally the mom friend of the group. Like, this was something I thought before I knew the names or personalities of any of them, but all official information is completely backing me up here. I mean, her name is Karen for crying out loud! If you have that name, you’re probably either a mom or a computer.

Name: Bibi

Okay, let’s get this all set straight. Bibi is cooler than any of us will ever be. I mean, look at her. You could say anything you want about Bibi, and not only would she be able to blow it off, but she’d probably make you look like a fool for saying it in the first place, and to make it all the more humiliating? She does this all while playing the kazoo.

Shredding the trumpet? Playing a kazoo and looking cool? I mean, Ink Theory is full of all sorts of impossibilities, and I am here for that.

Bibi’s bio was unfortunately kind of hard to translate, but I was able to pick up that she’s the member of the band that gets the most mainstream attention, and is kind of sick of being swarmed by the paparazzi all the time. Also, she’s never struggled much financially. Oh yeah. She’s rich and fabulous. Again. While playing the kazoo. I’m usually not a fan of rich people, but I don’t know if the law legally allows me to say anything bad about Bibi. I fear the repercussions for that.

Name: Aachin

Alright, so what species do you think Aachin is? Any guesses?

Three.... two... one...

Okay! Time’s up! She’s an urchin! A very specific type of urchin, actually,  Hemicentrotus pulcherrimus! No common names in English over here, I’m afraid! But if you didn’t figure it out already, Aachin’s name is really just “urchin.” Because she’s an urchin! Look at her hair, it’s based on a test of an urchin, rather than the spikes we are used to seeing, but don’t worry, if a spikier urchin is what you want, we still have that! I guess Aachin just likes to go around with a shaved head.

According to what I translated, Aachin grew up in a strict household, always appreciating contemporary music herself, but as time passed, she grew to appreciate modern music as well. Now! The last sentence of her bio actually threw me for a bit of a doozy a few months back, as after trying to figure it out like seven times with no better tools than Google Translate, I believed that Aachin had fallen in love with someone depraved! Did they seriously just put this funny urchin in a toxic relationship?

Nope! I’m just terrible at translating things. Apparently the gist of that sentence is just that she’s a bit shy and inexperienced when it comes to romance, and she admittedly falls for people who are “bad,” in some nebulous sense of the term. Are we talking like, 1950s cool biker bad? The person that corrected my mistranslation said “slobs,” so maybe she just falls in love with people who are really messy.

While it’s good that this lovely urchin is not in a toxic relationship, I still think she deserves better, on sheer account of being Aachin. She always deserves better. Even if she has it good! She deserves better. Because I love her.

Name: Mayaya

Up next we have Mayaya! Mayaya is a sea anemone (not a sea cucumber as I previously believed) whose facial anatomy slightly baffles and scares me, but that’s okay, because I still love her.

Another top-of-her-class graduate, Mayaya’s own professors said she’d be best teaching music herself, but Mayaya decided she’d rather have fun making her own music, and decided to join the band! She plays “percussion,” which seems to suggest any percussion instrument other than drums and cymbals, and she doesn’t just play for Ink Theory! While Ink Theory is her main squad, she apparently freelances percussion for other bands in her free time. Which bands? We don’t know! It’s never specified! But any time you hear any percussion ever, just know it might be Mayaya herself playing.

Name: Kitamura

And last, but not least, we have Kitamura, the band’s drummer, who might just be the most adorable character design I have ever seen in any piece of media ever! And that’s saying a lot, considering all we’ve covered on this blog. Urchins are hardly ever unlovable, and the little ribbons simply make her all-the more adorable, but what really draws me in here are those eyes. Now, urchins don’t technically have eyes (though their spikes can function as a makeshift compound eye) but as far as eyes go, Kitamura might have some of the most precious looking eyes they could give an urchin. They almost look scrawled on! Heck, part of me wonders if Kitamura just draws on her own eyes to look cute. It’s either that, or her eyes just naturally look like that, and I am personally fine with either possibility.

Oh! Right! Her lore! There’s actually not too much about Kitamura that we know, but we do know that she is fittingly, the band’s mascot, lives on her own, and pays close attention to her curfew. She apparently has a high singing voice also, but we never hear it because none of the Ink Theory songs have vocals. Maybe someday! Maybe someday...

In the Valentine’s Day artwork, we see Kitamura getting to eat a whole lot of ice cream. Do you think Kitamura deserves that much ice cream? Because I do.

This is far from all I have to say about these characters, but there’s not much more I really can say without diving deep into headcanon territory, so I suppose that’s all for now! I hope you appreciate this deep dive into Splatoon lore, and have a wonderful day!

[triviareads]

An Investigation Into How the Name "Kathani Sharma" Came to Be

Thanks to @jeanvanjer and @margoshansons for helping me research!

So here is the original article where Chris Van Dusen discusses Kate's name, among other things, and here's the pertinent bit:

So notice that CVD actually does not state the literal translation, and the link at the phrase "literal translation" takes us to this extremely dodgy website:

Notice that anyone can edit this, and it had a bunch of numerology BS too so... not the most accurate website, I think. But based on this, I Googled "Kathani Tamil" because the name ostensibly has a Tamil meaning, but the only meaning I found on multiple websites (including Google Translate lol) was "earring" or "ear ornament", and it was notably not featured in any name websites; all dictionaries. So Kathani isn't a name with any proper meaning (and by proper I mean having a religious or cultural meaning); it's just a word.

Kathani in Hindi, means "statement" or "utterance", that being said, it's not really a name from my understanding, and in addition, Chris Van Dusen said in this Bustle article that the Sharmas were South Indian, which begs two questions:

Why on Earth would any Tamil/South Indian family, especially historically, give their daughter a Hindi name? If you know anything about the pride South Indians, particularly Tamilians, have for their mother tongue, you'd know it's highly unlikely they'd do something like this. Like, it's one thing to speak Hindi (like Kate does in the first episode which, still, you'd think based on where she's been and what her family background is, it would be more likely she speaks in Tamil or Marathi), but it's another thing to have a name with a meaning that is not Sanskrit or Tamil based on the fact that they're South Indian.

Why would a Tamil family's last name be Sharma? Sharma is mostly a North Indian last name with a few minor exceptions but for the most part, it is very North Indian.

Ultimately, it is obvious no real research was done into the cultural mores of Indians at the time, particularly the fact that names are chosen for their religious and cultural meanings. Names often are connected to Gods, Goddesses, and other words of significance, and they were done more so historically, and especially in the South where you still see evidence of this (my own grandmothers have the rather lengthy, very meaningful names Satyabhama (after Krishna's wife) and Bhagya Lakshmi (after the goddess Lakshmi)). Clearly, the name "Kathani Sharma" was chosen for its proximity to "Kate Sheffield", and I don't like the fact that the Bridgerton showrunner is attempting to shove it down our throats as in any way honoring Indian traditions or historically accurate.

[meetmyglowinthedarkboyfriend]

RR CRIT: East Asian Representation

I'm not sure whether or not this is the right time to jump on the bandwagon of RR Crit when there is already so much being debated, but as an East Asian, I have definitely noticed several things this fandom and Rick might have got a little off or wrong about our cultures, or just portrayed them in a negative light which may fall into stereotypes. Please note that this list may not cover every single point worthy of criticism regarding the East Asian characters of PJO/HoO/ToA.

Note: I live in Hong Kong and am ethnically, culturally and nationally Chinese. The Japanese aspect of this post may not be 100% accurate and I rely on my limited knowledge and TV Tropes on this part. I also rely on the Traditional Chinese translation to help me.

Chinese

FRANK ZHANG

The renditioning of his Chinese name is incorrect. In SoN, his grandmother calls him “Fai Zhang”, which is incorrect on several different levels.

The name order: Chinese names are presented as surname first, given name last, not the Western order. Japanese names are also rendered this way in Japanese (but in Western order in Western media), Korean names are rendered the same way, and even Hungarian names are like this. Dude had one job and couldn't even do it right.

The romanization method: Zhang is obviously a pinyin/post-PRC takeover rendition of 張/张, while Fai is likely to be in either Wade-Giles or isn't Mandarin Chinese altogether - I suspect Cantonese, which I made a theory for. The “different romanized topolects in one name” thing is not unheard of in Hong Kong, where I've seen “Mando-surname, Canto-given-name” combinations (disregarding the form of Mandarin romanization used - I've seen both pinyin and Wade-Giles), but it most certainly is uncommon. I can get more into this later per request - send in an ask and I'll give all the legal name combinations for romanization in Hong Kong that I've seen.

It is more of a consistency issue than anything, but in-universe, Frank apparently didn't know how to read Chinese more than his own name. With a grandmother like his, how did he go over fifteen years without learning to read Chinese? He also lived in/near Vancouver, a city with a large Chinese population. How could he not know!?? And within two weeks, he somehow knew enough Chinese to read off a tourist Google Maps in Rome. How did he teach himself to read Chinese, a difficult language for Westerners to master, within two weeks? Even if many foreign names are transliterated into pinyin in Chinese, he would have to recognize the characters used in the transliteration, know the pinyin for the words, be able to transliterate the name, then guess the Western name of the place, all without the use of a computer? That's not possible if you're a newbie to any form of Chinese, in spite of what I wrote in Remembrance (my fanfic).

The “Amazhang” Pun: This is more of a fandom issue than anything, since it's never used in canon. The “a” in Zhang sounds more like a non-rhotic “ar”, and the “zh” is like a nasal “j” sound with rolling tongue. Whenever I see that pun, I have to force myself to say it in the Western pronunciation to get the pun - it's more of a pet peeve than anything, but still.

Why is he so underrated? Once again, a fandom thing. Why is he the least popular out of the Seven in the fandom? I'm not sure if racism has anything to do with this or not, but my point stands. Why is he so underrated in the fandom? But then again, he is underrated in canon too, sometimes the inadvertent butt of jokes and gags. Dude, uncool.

The whole Love Triangle From Hell thing… still not cool.

The “Ghost Month” thing: I as a city person… don't care about the Ghost Month as much, and neither do much of my family, and we are “Westernized” Chinese people at that. The quote “Tell me it's a coincidence we're searching for the Doors or Death during the ghost month” (HoH Ch10) seems a tad ooc and superstitious. Some Chinese people are very superstitious, but for someone who was primarily raised in Western and not Chinese culture, that is just… weird. Contradicts previous characterization. Dude can't even stick to one characterization, even if it's a shitty characterization. And ANOTHER point regarding the “ghost month” is that it refers to the seventh month on the LUNAR calendar (Western calendar - starts in mid to late July or even August), not July (Gregorian calendar). Specifically in 2010, the so-called Ghost Month wouldn't start until 12 July because that's the first day of the seventh lunar month, but the conversation where they talked about the Ghost Month took place on 5 July. Gods, I thought being raised in a place with such a large Chinese diaspora would have taught you the difference between the two calendars. At least the celebration of Tuen Ng Festival, aka Dragon Boat Festival needn't be brought up in canon as it took place days before SoN began, instead of during the bulk of the plot, or I'd have to register another complaint.

(taken from the post of @queenangst) His arc: The bigger part of his HoO arc is becoming more confident, yes, but it also involves getting pretty buff and tall. (Personal jealousy because I am also Chinese and am very, very short - maybe it's the northern genes? Northerners are taller than southerners, but Frank would be tall even for a northerner…) Slight fatphobic implications here because he basically “lost his fat” to become buff so as to get his character development (physically). I don't deny his character got some development, but the way it was physically represented is kind of fatphobic AND unnecessary.

(taken from the post of @housemartius, specifically from the reply of @pipersgay) Descriptions: “Baby man” and “panda”… yeah, that's not very nice in hindsight. And I'm quite sure 16yo Chinese folks wouldn't have much of a baby face, especially when they're raised in a healthy environment where their growth wouldn't be stunted by poor nutrition and therefore puberty would start earlier. The best canon-compliant explanation would be that he's a late bloomer, but I don't think late bloomers mean THIS late in most cases (taken from the post of @lesbiansism). Also, Rick… sumo wrestlers are Japanese, not Chinese. Stop promoting Interchangeable Asian Cultures.

(taken from the post of @housemartius, specifically from the reply of @alfie167) Despite having Western relatives, he has little to no on-page interaction with them in BoO - everything takes place off-page and honestly, it would have been interesting to see their interaction, because family really matters to the Chinese.

His lack of dyslexia: Yeah, it's cool to know it is possible that some demigods don't have dyslexia, but he is East Asian… maybe you should have picked a different and/or another demigod of a different ethnicity to play this part (as well). Also, in case you are wondering, East Asian kids can get learning disabilities too and in Hong Kong, kids with dyslexia receive some forms of support like more time to finish their exams and printing assessments and maybe assignments in larger font for easier reading, or so I vaguely recall.

Being raised more Western: Chinese people, especially in the diaspora, are pretty proud of their heritage overall. And Vancouver, a city where Frank and his family live in/near, houses a large part of the Chinese Canadian diaspora. Dude was basically raised in Chinese culture and/or multicultural society and hardly talk about it. How Frank managed to not go 16 years without much regard for all of THAT Chinese culture exposure and not mention it before MoA (starting with the Chinese handcuffs thing), I have no idea. Dammit, Rick, you did something similar with Piper, so no wonder you messed up here.

GRANDMOTHER ZHANG

The lady interchangeably uses Mandarin and Cantonese. She seems to mostly use Mandarin, but there was one point in SoN where she calls Juno a gwai po, which is an explicitly Cantonese way of derogatorily referring to a white woman who is middle-aged or older. How the lady came to know Cantonese, a southern topolect, when her ancestors are from Gansu, a northern province where residents speak Mandarin, I cannot be certain. I made a theory on this months ago, where I use immigration patterns to suggest she is descended from Gansu residents on her father's side and Cantonese immigrants from her mother's side, but it is definitely not canon and I would like Rick to explain. Refer to my Chinese Culture tag for the theories and headcanons about Frank's name and family history.

Her name: Disregarding even the immigration theory, it is not possible for Zhang to be her maiden name, or at least, it probably isn't. This implies that her husband is surnamed Zhang, and presumably died before he made an impact on Frank's life or even before he was born. But most Chinese people still go by their maiden names after they get married, so I might be able to get away with this by citing Carrie Lam, current Chief Executive of Hong Kong (and hated by a decent chunk of the population), as an example - Lam is her married surname, while Cheng is her maiden name, and she has chosen not to go by it, and that is understandable. But I am not a big fan of this because of how uncommon it is in real-life usage (as well as the example mentioned above being a possible contributing factor), so we are back to square one for this. [On top of her maiden name debate, we don't know her given name either. It is understandable that Frank exclusively refers to her as “grandmother”, even in narration, because that's the respectful thing to do - always call someone of higher standing than you (Confucianism is a huge part of Chinese culture and hierarchy is a big thing) by their title. But you can't live with someone for 15 years without knowing their real names. And funnily enough, no one in this fandom has given her a fanon name. I've definitely thought about it and cannot decide on anything.]

Her encouraging Frank to pursue a (future) relationship with Hazel: It's not really about Hazel's age here, but Frank's - the old lady is really traditional, but where I live, where ethnic Chinese people make up over 90% of the population, dating before university is frowned upon, because it takes time away from studying (education is highly valued in the Sinosphere), making dating a very 18+ thing, while Frank was 16 in SoN. The best explanation I can give is her being raised in a Western country (Canada) affecting her view on romance, when in Western countries, teenagers dating is perfectly acceptable behaviour. Even now, I have reservations on most of the cast being in a relationship at all - I made a post on this a little while back.

Her unknown current status: Is she alive? Is she dead? Who knows! Canon never says.

She reminds me of Mulan's grandma in Disney (1998 movie), and it's a little discomforting in hindsight because of the Expy trope.

(taken from the post of @lesbiansism) She's more stern and cold. Though there definitely are Chinese parents and guardians who prefer to practise tough love, it's about time to quit the stereotype, because Chinese parents and grandparents do come in all shapes and sizes - loving parents, abusive parents, stern parents, entitled parents, parents who aren't perfect but try their best, parents who are obsessed with their kids' grades, parents who are human.

Comparison with Aunt Rosa: This happened during Chapter 10 of HoH, referring to the death honouring customs of different cultures. Saying that the two would have got along… well, Rosa was literally abusive to her nephew. Not a great comparison, in hindsight.

EMILY ZHANG

We don't know much about her.

She is a minority, and she is dead. Not exactly great.

We don't know her Chinese given name either. It's not as important of a point, but as a Chinese person, it matters. And I don't see anyone giving her a name either… if anyone wants to give these two Chinese ladies Chinese names, I can definitely give a couple of pointers.

SHERMAN YANG

Only assumed to be Chinese from his surname.

From the little we know about him, the dude tried to bully a 12yo girl. Doesn't make a good impression at all, even if you're just a minor character.

Once again, surname pronunciation, where “Yang” in Mandarin sounds closer to “Young” than “Yank”.

BILLIE NG

Why I put her as Chinese is because of her surname, Ng, which is a rendering of several surnames in southern China, depending on the topolect. The traditional Chinese translation uses 吳, which is a Cantonese surname, and I headcanon her to be a Hongkonger like me, but it would also be interesting if she were from Macau, because Macau is more underrepresented in media than HK. She also happens to be a fairly overlooked character and has very few fanfics about her. But canon never states her to be Chinese, which is disappointing.

Hair dye: Many of us do not dye our hair, or not to her extent. Hair dye is sometimes used to lighten our dark hair to brown or reddish brown, or is used to hide greying hair from ageing; and hair dye is already frowned upon in Chinese culture by some because it “damages” the body given to us by our parents (ancient Chinese philosophical stuff, which is also why many Chinese people refuse to donate their organs after passing away). Her dying her hair BLUE is already unusual, and she is just in her teenage years! I do strongly support self-discovery as a teenager, but for this girl, I really hope that the dye is temporary and not permanent.

Makeup: It is not to say that the use of cosmetics is discouraged in modern China, since many skin-lightening products are sold (pale skin symbolizes being rich enough to not toil in the fields and get a tan, back in the old days), but makeup is usually to look natural and subtle and not be say, a clown. Seeing a likely East Asian girl with golden makeup is definitely a tad jarring, to say the least.

Apparel: Most teenagers do not dress like K-pop stars, not in the US, not in East Asia - we wear normal clothes like jeans and T-shirts. If they want to emulate pop stars, fine, they might go and learn Korean to understand their songs and stuff, but they wouldn't really do so in garish, “weird” ways like wearing a freaking silver coat. Also, wearing that in a Death Race? Impractical as heck - it might get dirty, and it would practically be a monster magnet since it's so distinguishable. [And since HK is farther south than most of the US, it is definitely less cold here and I'm surprised she's not kitted out in parkas and/or down coats if she hasn't lived there for long, though NYC being less humid than HK might make winters more bearable.]

The whole K-pop thing in general: Timeline wise, I don't think K-pop gained traction in HK or the world in general before 2012 (Gangnam Style), and ToA presumably took place in 2011. The gap isn't as big as other things like Love is an Open Door (2013) and Hamilton (2015+), but it's still there, but even I'm not so sure of this point, as I can barely remember anything from my childhood in general (I was about 8 when Gangnam Style became a thing). Culture wise, Rick might have accidentally helped promote Interchangeable Asian Cultures - for the record, South Korea is a three-to-four hour flight from Hong Kong and/or southern China. It's a whole different country. Implications are not really good here, okay? Someone even assumed that she's Korean when she “dressed like a K-pop star”, but her surname indicates that she's a Chinese person who speaks, or is descended from someone who speaks, a topolect/regional speech/“dialect”!

“Wisp” of a girl: It could imply being a “soft and delicate” Asian girl (stereotype).

We barely know anything about her.

Note to the fandom: I did not feel that represented with Frank, mainly because he's a canonical northerner, and one not as connected to his heritage at that. As a Chinese southerner… this is why I basically adopted Billie recently and have been part-time using her for projecting into the Riordanverse, partially because she barely as a canonical personality.

Japanese

GENERAL ISSUES

Do the Japanese characters in the series also have Japanese names? Many Chinese people take on Western names because it functions as a nickname and is more convenient for Westerners who cannot speak Chinese, but Japanese people rarely do this and many stick to their Japanese names.

All these characters have Japanese surnames but are not confirmed to be Japanese. Smh…

ETHAN NAKAMURA

He is not necessarily good rep for East Asians entirely, because he functions as an antagonist, and though “diverse” antagonists is always a bonus, being the one (1) East Asian in a book series with a mostly white cast while also being antagonistic carries some pretty unfortunate implications. And he also died. Not cool.

DREW TANAKA

Another East Asian with antagonistic tendencies. The most we know of her is that she is the go-to mean girl with the vanity and the heartlessness, which doesn't paint a very nice and sympathetic picture. She also doesn't have a lot of brains, which definitely goes against the “nerd” stereotype, but falls into the “Asian Airhead” trope. Also, her trying to get together with Jason, a guy who is most likely white… more unfortunate implications come flying out of the woodwork. And her lack of character development is… a little disappointing, tbh.

ALICE MIYAZAWA

We barely know her. The little we know about her is that she's a daughter of Hermes who enjoys pranking. Yeah, that might subvert traditional Japanese values, which places emphasis on hard work and persistence, and I am not sure if it is Rick's place or mine to break the party up. [I do not speak for Japan, and I am 100% not sure how accurate this is for Japan, but here in HK, we aren't big on pranking.]

Unclear

MICHAEL YEW

We don't even know if he is East Asian or not, since Yew can be a Western surname as well as an Eastern one, but for this, I am going off of the traditional Chinese translation again, which renders his name like an East Asian, and his surname with the specific transliteration of 尤, and the physical description of his hair and eye colour (dark hair, brown eyes) definitely sounds East Asian to me. Which begs the question of what kind of East Asian he would be - Han Chinese (specifically from Fujian, another southern Chinese province), Han Taiwanese, Mongolian, Miao (a subdivision being the Hmong people as Westerners would know them), or even Taiwanese Aboriginal. Personally, I am inclined to go with the non-Han minorities, because they are also underrepresented in media - archery is a traditional sport in Mongolia, some Miao people wield crossbows, etc. but I am not certain if this would help enforce stereotypes rather than break them. Personally, I would want more input from the fandom over this issue.

Also, he's kind of dead. That speaks for itself, and worse still that he is the first named casualty of the Battle of Manhattan.

MRS. CHASE

She is not exactly portrayed as sympathetic when concerning Annabeth and her childhood, not with disregarding her fears and not treating her equally like her blood children and stuff. And also the evil poc stepmother of our white protagonist - even more bad implications.

Conclusion

While any prejudice against East Asians in the Camp Half-Blood Chronicles is not as apparent as other cultures, there are definitely points in time where I would raise an eyebrow at Rick's decisions in regard to them.

On top of this, in this entire effing list, only 3/10 of the characters are confirmed East Asian. THREE OUT OF TEN. It's like queerbaiting but with racism instead of homophobia. At the same time, other than one (1) East Asian protagonist with less development, insight and attention placed on him than the rest of the cast, all the other East Asians are either dead, antagonistic, and/or minor characters to the point few acknowledge their existence. As Oversimplified would put it, “Dude, uncool.”

I personally doubt this list is complete, so if anyone wants to point anything out to me, I would gladly respond via inbox or notes section, and add any other suggestions given. Also, even if this list contains many headcanons and theories and canon complaint reasoning, it does not excuse Rick's bad writing on his part - as a canon-sympathetic person, I try to explain things in-universe, while as a canon-critical person, I criticize the meta reason why I had to explain such things in-universe and more.

I hope you gained a little more insight on the situation from this post. Even if the East Asians of the Riordanverse are more overlooked, being overlooked by itself is a form of racism and I seek to help correct all of this. My East Asian fam has been done dirty by Rick, though perhaps to a less significant extent than many others, but I believe it's about high time someone pointed this out.

[meiusoo-twistedtwst]

[Twisted Wonderland Theory] ''Absolutely Beautiful'' had Spoilers the Whole Time

(Snipped from YouTube, please don't sue me.)

Like what I did with my one on ''Piece of My World'', I'm doing ''Absolutely Beautiful'' now. Next will be ''Everybody Yahoo'' if the lyrics have a meaning, and also if I can even find a translation of the song, otherwise I'll have to use Google translate as my last attempt. I don't look forward to using it though because we all know Google translate isn't very accurate.

English Lyrics:

I'll erase the brilliance that seems to break

Vil was brilliant until he broke his shell and overbloted

Hey so Absolutely Beautiful

Wants the audience to see them as beautiful

No chance to beat us

Confidence in winning

There's no way, no way

Can't believe they lost to Neiges' group and/or don't believe others can beat them. I think Vil was confident, but also had a feeling they would lose to Neige

Hey so Absolutely Beautiful

No chance to beat us

There's no way, no way

How about a sweet poison, does it fit your mouth?

Literally a spoiler that Vil attempts to straight up poison poor Neige. Also, ''Does it fit your mouth?'' is a weird way of saying, ''Does it suit your taste?'' Weird...

I'm holding everything, that's absolute

Vil is holding on to anything that can help him win

Ah-

The buzz of my heart

Following your heart instead your head, which is a stupid move if your heart tells you to poison someone! (No hate on Vil, I'm just saying)

Someday red like an apple will decay

Vil is beautiful now but knows he will be overshadowed by Neige, people will forget about him (decay) and he doesn't want that.

No one can overcome

I'm so

Weird lyric, what??

It's not just strength

Pomefiore not only relies on physical strength, but also beauty, a different kind of strength, like how intelligence is also a strength.

You also have the power to kneel, right?

Two ideas for this:

1. Pointed towards Neige, Vil knows people love Neige, he has the power to make people kneel down (respect and like, worship him)

2. Pointed towards Vils' group, he's sort of asking them to be powerful to make people like their groups' performance that way they vote for them

Hey so Absolutely Beautiful (the best)

No chance to beat us

There's no one, no way (it's showtime)

Done! Tomorrow is the first anniversary for Twisted Wonderland, I kind of expect the Twst community here on Tumbler to go crazy with fanart and stuff. I look forward to celebrating virtually with you all! (Even though I know none of you personally, lol)

[koheletgirl]

Sarai = Princess: Reverse Engineering

Okay this has been bothering me for the past few days, so i have been reading about it and will now try to make sense of this.

When you google "Sarai name meaning", the first result will say "princess". the explanation under it is that it's a biblical hebrew name (which it is), form of Sarah (kind of*), meaning "princess" in hebrew (no). this search result comes from a baby name website, and as far as i can tell so do the other search results and they all say the same thing. now, personally i came across this "name meaning" while reading about tdp characters (some of which have jewish names), and i can only assume this is where they got it from. i don't know how widespread this conception is, but i remember reading (like, 10 years ago) that tom cruise and katie holmes named their daughter Suri, thinking it was the hebrew word for princess. [here is the first article i could find about it, that was indeed published 16 years ago. also Suri in hebrew literally means "move out of the way"].

The hebrew word for princess is נסיכה (pronounced ne-si-kha). נסיך, the hebrew word for prince, does appear in the bible, but i couldn't remember or find instances of נסיכה. it originates in the act of anointing someone as king, which in hebrew comes from the same root (נ.ס.כ).

So, these are all facts. from here on out i will be trying to reverse-engineer how we got from Sarai to princess (נסיכה), with the help of one thread from 2006 (which i only used for clues since the link in it is broken). i'm sure this had been discussed in the past, but when something isn't within the reach of one google search i write it myself apparently. so again, this is mostly speculation, some of which is mine.

There was a woman in the bible named Iscah (יסכה). she was the daughter of Haran and the niece of Abraham, and is only mentioned briefly in one passage:

"וַיִּקַּח אַבְרָם וְנָחוֹר לָהֶם נָשִׁים שֵׁם אֵשֶׁת אַבְרָם שָׂרָי וְשֵׁם אֵשֶׁת נָחוֹר מִלְכָּה בַּת הָרָן אֲבִי מִלְכָּה וַאֲבִי יִסְכָּה"

"And Abram and Nahor took themselves wives; the name of Abram's wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor's wife was Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah and the father of Iscah." [translation from chabad.org]

Rabbinical scholars have developed theories to explain it, typically adopting the claim that Iscah was an alternate name for Sarah (Sarai)*, the wife of Abraham [wikipedia].

When you read the passage it does seem like a reasonable interpretation, especially considering it would mean both Abraham and Nahor married their nieces (Abraham, Nahor and Haran were all brothers). So. Sarai and Ischa may have been the same woman, and regardless of whether or not it's true (which we don't know), it's a fairly popular theory.

Rashi's interpretation of the name Iscah ("יסכה לשון נסיכות") ties its etymology to the word נסיכה. again, there are other interpretations (as there usually are in Judaism), but this is one of them.

So that's how נסיכה and Sarai could both be related to Iscah. and if Sarai is Iscah, and Iscah means נסיכה, you could say that Sarai means נסיכה. which means princess.

But not really, right? even if she did have two names, that doesn't transfer one name's meaning to the other. it's kind of like taking the meaning of the name Chloë and applying it to the name Grace, just because they're both the names of Chloë Grace Moretz**. that's a reach. but it is the best explanation i could find, and i enjoyed doing it so that's what really matters.

TL;DR: Sarai does not literally mean princess in hebrew, as far as i can tell. if you want to be entirely accurate when discussing Sarai as a hebrew name, just say it comes from the bible. also read about her, she is interesting and very important in Judaism. and personally, i think using the princess-google-result-name-meaning kinda takes away from that.

*Sarah was originally named Sarai, and her name along with Abraham's (originally named Abram) was changed by God: שָׂרַי אִשְׁתְּךָ לֹא תִקְרָא אֶת שְׁמָהּ שָׂרָי כִּי שָׂרָה שְׁמָהּ [Bereishit 17:15].

** While trying to think of celebrities with two first names, i thought of Sarah Jessica Parker. Jessica is believed to be a version of Iscah. so. that's fun :)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING TOPLEVEL

Object-oriented abstractions. Incidentally, nothing makes it more patently obvious that the old chestnut all languages are equivalent is false than designing languages. 80% of the time you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences.1 These people's opinions change with every wind. I'm inclined to think there isn't—that good design has to be new—that it didn't predict anything. A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions. What can't we say? But, as in more recent times indecent, improper, and unamerican have been.2 A friend of mine asked Ryan about this, it was even better than C; and plug-and-chug undergrads, who are amazed to find that there is something wrong with you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud.3

I'm just stupid, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. This second group adopt the fashion not because they want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. Com signals strength even if it is a huge win in developing software to have an interactive toplevel, what in Lisp is called a read-eval-print loop. In the process of developing the pitch for the first conference, someone must have decided they'd better take a stab at explaining what that 2. No one does that kind of thing for fun.4 Back in the days of fanfold, there was a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy individual songs instead of having to buy whole albums. But it's harder than it looks. They let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably take the organic route, because it enabled one to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting of NEPLS.

The philosophy's there, but it's too late for them to do anything more than the name of the Web 2. And why? Now it means a smaller, younger, more technical group that just decided to make something great. The first sentence of this essay explains that.5 This metric needs fleshing out, and it is a huge and rapidly growing business.6 The reason this won't turn into a second Bubble is that the side that's shocked is most likely to get good design you have to get close, and stay close, to your users.7 If you can think things so outside the box that people call innovative.8 There's no other name as good. Com of your name is that it lets you jump over obstacles. The 2005 Web 2. If you want to fight back, there are several ideas mixed together in the concept of spare time seems mistaken.9

If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. If smaller source code is the purpose of comparing languages, because they will probably use small problems, and will necessarily use predefined problems, will tend to bet wrong. This is an interesting question. Type of x first. Sun now pretends that Java is a grassroots, open-source language effort like Perl or Python.10 Blasphemy, sacrilege, and heresy were such labels for a good part of western history, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders.11 Explaining himself later, he said I don't do litmus tests. 0 applied to music would probably mean individual bands giving away DRMless songs for free. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist. And when you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a good idea. Suppose you realize there is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is even a saying among painters: A painting is never finished, you just stop working on it. But it's not enough just to tell people that.12

When people say Web 2. Who will? The m. Morale is another reason that it's hard to imagine a language being too succinct is that if you're building something new, you should probably take the organic route. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed. Their only hope now is to buy all the best Ajax startups before Google does. Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for seem harmless now. The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid.13 Notice all this time I've been talking about the succinctness of languages, not of individual programs.14 You might find contradictory taboos. There are two routes to that destination: The organic route is more common. But it was also something we'd never considered a computer could be: fabulously well designed.

For example, it is a bad design decision. It seems so convincing when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic substitute your current values of x and y, whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong.15 As far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not accurate ones. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them. Bolder investors will now get rewarded with lower prices. Does Web 2.16 But I don't think you can even talk about good or bad design except with reference to some intended user.17 But these words are part of the reason I chose computers.

And if you're ambitious you have to like what you do? If you expressed the same ideas in prose as mathematicians had to do before they evolved succinct notations, they wouldn't be any easier to read, because the paper would grow to the size of a book. What do you do with it? Object-oriented programming generates a lot of popular sites were quite high-handed about it.18 You can stick instances of good design together, but within each individual project, one person has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo.19 Comparison The first person to write the program in some other way that was shorter. Nearly all of it falls short of the standard, I think, is that a restrictive language is one that isn't succinct enough. The programmers I admire most are not, on the whole, captivated by Java.20 80% of the time we could find at least one good name in a 20 minute office hour slot. When you hear such labels being used, ask why. It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. I've already said at least one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is that source code will look unthreatening.

Notes

When Harvard kicks undergrads out for doing badly and is doomed anyway.

But having more of it, but if you repair a machine that's broken because a she is very common, to mean the company is Weebly, which allowed banks and savings and loans to buy your kids' way into top colleges by sending them to go to grad school you always feel you should be protected against such tricks will approach.

When Harvard kicks undergrads out for here, since 95% of the growth is valuable, and b when she's nervous, she expresses it by smiling more. There are fields now in which only a sliver of it, and Smartleaf co-founders Mark Nitzberg and Olin Shivers at the network level, and yet it is because those are guaranteed in the case of heirs, professors, politicians, and the ordering system, written in Lisp. An investor who for some reason insists that you wouldn't mind missing, false positives caused by filters will have to replace the actual server in order to provoke a bidding war between 3 pet supply startups for the first type, and their flakiness is indistinguishable from those of dynamic variables were merely optimization advice, and this trick merely forces you to test whether that initial impression holds up.

There were a first—. It's conceivable that the payoff for avoiding tax grows hyperexponentially x/1-x for 0 x 1.

The IBM 704 CPU was about bands. This phenomenon is not the only way to fight back themselves. Why does society foul you? The reason Google seemed a miracle of workmanship.

If anyone wants to invest in your own mind. All you have is so hard on Google. The danger is that it's boring, we used to reply that they think the usual way will prove to us an old-fashioned idea.

In desperation people reach for the explanation of a press hit, but it's not lots of customers is that the founders.

Another advantage of startups that seem promising can usually get enough money from them. According to a super-angels. But it turns out to be low. This would penalize short comments especially, because to translate this program into C they literally had to ask, what you care about Intel and Microsoft, not you.

The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups. He was off by only about 2%.

Since most VCs are only slightly richer for having these things. There is no longer written in C and Perl. This prospect will make it a function of the rule of thumb, the space of ideas doesn't have to keep their wings folded, as they do.

The relationships between unions and unionized companies can hire a lot of the business, and only one.

But so many still make you take out your anti-immigration people to endure hardships, but countless other startups must have believed since before people were people. So if you have to do, so the number of startups will generally raise large amounts of new inventions until they become well enough known that people working for large settlements earlier, but historical abuses are easier for us, the more important. Which OS? He devoted much of the 1929 crash.

If you want to invest at a 5 million cap, but that it's doubly important for societies to remember and pass on the aspect they see and say that's not art because it is unfair when someone works hard and not others, and post-money valuations of funding rounds are at selling it. Surely it's better if everything just works.

On the way to pressure them to. To paint from life using the same reason parents don't tell the craziest lies about me. The word regressive as applied to tax avoidance.

That can be said to have discovered something intuitively without understanding all its implications. But what they're capable of. SpamCop—. A larger set of good ones.

But let someone else start those startups. In fact, change what it would certainly be less than the previous round.

Investors influence one another indirectly through the buzz that surrounds a hot deal, I didn't. At any given person might have 20 affinities by this standard, and one VC. They'd be interchangeable if markets stood still.

After reading a draft of this desirable company, and configure domain names etc. As a friend who invested in the future as barbaric, but even there people tend to be more precise, and once a hypothesis starts to be about web-based applications greatly to be about web-based applications.

I put it would be reluctant to start software companies constrained in b. Emmett Shear, and instead focus on growth instead of using special euphemisms for lies that seem excusable according to certain somewhat depressing rules many of the big acquisition offers most successful startups get started in Mississippi.

This phenomenon may account for a long thread are rarely seen, so if you're measuring usage you need, maybe you'd start to be, unchanging, but investors can get for 500 today would say that hapless meant unlucky.

[creatikermit-ar-ts]

GUILT: A Plausible Option for the Next "Dark Side"

@alltimevirgilant made a post about how Guilt could definitely be the next "Dark Side", as it follows the lines of the plot of the latest episode (Selfishness VS Selflessness - so obvious SPOILERS AHEAD if you haven't seen it yet). As stated in the video, Thomas is a very empathetic person and with choices influenced by empathy, or, in fact, choices that sometimes are made without empathy in mind, often come with guilt. @/alltimevirgilant continues to explain how the idea of guilt fits into the character of Thomas in their post, so you can click here if you want to read that.

Now, I want to follow on from their original point because there are actually quite a few hints from the video that may allude to Guilt being the next "Dark Side" (and if not a new Side, then perhaps a possible video topic).

So far, we only know of one definite "Dark Side" - or, very simply put, a new Side that was not introduced in the same way as Logan, Roman, Patton or Virgil - and that is Deceit. Our first (and pretty much only) hint to Deceit that wasn't in his debut episode was featured in MOVING ON: Part 2/2.

Roman suggests lying to Thomas's ex, which leads to these responses:

[P: Now, Roman, lying is wrong.]

[T: Yeah, that's a side of myself that I would prefer not to feed into.]

Other than the obvious hints to a trait that at the time had not been introduced to the series, I think there is one other thing important to note. Yes, the idea of dishonesty is being mentioned (and when placed in the context of Sanders Sides, I suppose that this is the personification of said trait), but what I think is more important in helping to find future hints to possible "Dark Sides" is the fact that through mentioning deceit, they want to avoid it. Both Patton and Thomas (and I suppose Virgil too) are making the effort to make a decision that does not feature deception in any way. They are trying to avoid deceit because they believe it is a bad thing or that it is unhelpful, as well as possibly hurting Thomas and the people he surrounds himself with. They mention and hint at something that we now know as a "Dark Side", but they also mention the idea of not wanting to "feed into" that trait or use it as possible option for solving the current dilemma. Still with me? Simply put, when searching for hints of new Side that we do not know of, we must also search for how they (the characters - whether it be Thomas or one of the Sides) want to avoid that trait/aspect of Thomas's personality/decision making.

So, now we've covered that, on to the new video!

Starting off, we get the first mention of guilt, where Roman is responding to Patton's scolding on the idea of lying:

[R: I would have stayed in my room if I knew Dad was gonna take us on a guilt-trip.]

Notice how Roman is saying he would have "stayed in [his] room" if it meant he could avoid feeling guilty, or at least, the talk about something that could potentially make him feeling guilty. Our key word is there: avoiding. Roman wants to avoid guilt.

Next point, which I think is rather interesting! The next mention of guilt is further on in the video, and a little harder to find. Again, it stems from Roman, when he is placed at the witness stand and Deceit is questioning him.

[D: Can you spell your name for the court?]

And, of course, Roman spells it correctly.

[R: R-O-M-A-N!] [D: Ooh, I'm afraid that's wrong.]

Deceit insists that Roman's name is in fact spelt differently.

[D: It's actually spelt W-R-O-A-M-M-I-N.]

Now, at first glance, it seems that Deceit is just messing with Roman, and, to a certain extent, he is. But, this joking doesn't serve Deceit's argument or point in anyway whatsoever. Nor does it really fit into the rest of the discussion or topic, so I think it has to mean a little more than what it does on the surface. Especially the way Deceit spells Roman's name. It seems rather specific, and certainly not just gibberish or random letters. So, I did some digging and found that when translated from Western Frisian 'wroammin' actually translates to 'remorse':

((Now, please keep in mind that Google Translate isn't always reliable, so this translation may not be accurate.))

Remorse is a synonym of guilt. We are missing the key phrase about avoiding said remorse and I think that this part could definitely be implying that Roman feels remorse rather than hinting at a new Side, but it is certainly too odd to be a coincidence. And it is certainly implying that guilt is playing a large part in this dilemma, whether just the emotion or a personified trait.

And the next mention of guilt is towards the very end of the video, where Thomas is giving his concluding monologue.

[T: Listen to your empathy because you might be sparing yourself some future guilt by doing good for someone else.]

This is very important because it is a concluding statement - it's the final decision. Here, Thomas is saying that empathy is a good thing to listen to and that you should allow it to influence your decisions because if you do you can avoid future guilt. Here, he is holding empathy as more important than guilt and shows guilt as a bad thing. Whether you believe that avoiding guilt and your actions taken in order to do so are selfish or selfless doesn't matter here. He has decided that guilt is bad a thing, and must be avoided.

But here's the thing, in both videos (for the sake of this argument) that we are going to assume hint at possible "Dark Sides" (MOVING ON: Part 2/2 and Selfishness VS Selflessness) decide that whatever trait they mention must be avoided at all times. The characters take one situation that is provided in the video and apply the exact same setting to any and all future situations. They say: lying is wrong and guilt is bad, so therefore they must be avoided. And not to mention, both of these principles, in fact, stem from Patton.

What I'm trying to say is that a "Dark Side" has always tended to come about or at least be hinted at when the rest of the characters are trying to avoid that trait. Even Virgil! The reason Virgil "lashes out" is because the others sometimes ignore him (paraphrased from EMBARRASSING PHASES).

Whether these mentions of guilt are to hint at a new Side or a future video topic (perhaps even the follow up video Joan was talking about? Empathy VS Guilt, maybe? haha), it's hard to ignore these subtle mentions or write them off as just coincidences. The reason for that being, is that guilt isn't actually brought to the viewers attention - or the characters', for that matter - until the very end, and even then it's not a large part of the video. Even though it's quite clear that guilt is playing a role in the uncertainty of the final decision and during the course of the discussion of the dilemma, none of the characters really outright say it. Perhaps this is why the video ending seems... unsatisfying, without sounding like I'm criticising the video harshly (it's actually my favourite episode to date) and why so many viewers found it hard to agree with the final decision. Because not all the points were really discussed (among other things that I'll talk about in other posts).

With the kinda cryptic post Joan made about the follow up episode and the original decision to name the episode Selfishness VS Selflessness Part 1/2, which was then scrapped to avoid confusion, all in the back of my mind, it's hard to imagine that this debate is over. Perhaps a follow up video won't link directly to this video, but I'm sure it will make reference to it.

And I think Guilt, whether as a Side or topic, is going to definitely play a part in it.