#she texted me to wake up

[lumimis]

my sister called me twice and texted me 13 times in the span of like 3 hours all because she wanted me to wake up to play a game with her .awesome

[wrinkleintime]

enterprise text posts: featuring t'pol my beloved <3

+ BONUS

was a toss up on which screencap to use for girls night! so you get BOTH. ft. archer hanging with the girlies in the labyrinthine catacombs beneath the city <3

[tweetsofyj]

[nostalgic-suggestions]

humiliating myself so horrifically by sending 2 texts and the second one is i miss you and she only responds to the first one. i am prostrating myself at your feet

[r1-ka]

hi genshin fandom, i come in peace,NO NO DONT RAISE THOSE PITCHFORKS,EHEM,i dont like her at all, no it isnt about her skin tone(at this point im not even surprised by hoyo), its everything idk why but im hoping for her to be someone else then the pyro archon(im delusional) LIKE MURATA IS DEAD OR SOMETHING?shitty theory uhhh murata is a phoenix real so she comes back alive trust(i realy am delusional at this point)

the outfit does not match her at ALL!!!! go back to formula 1 or something dunno

sunset shimmer called‼️‼️🗣️🗣️ she wants her hair back!!!!!

anyways her and capitano have tea parties with those plastic cups and the small tables and chairs

[solace-seekers]

screaming into the void <3

[deepwoundsandfadedscars]

Me last night: hmm maybe I want another tattoo, I'm going to start talking to this artist *sends message*

My cousins wife: *sends an incredibly hostile message about how I've been ignoring her and she's gone above and beyond for me trying to be supportive of me, when in reality she hasn't texted me first since November and when I text her, she's very short with me and makes no effort to continue a conversation with me*

"Yeah hi, artist? Make that three tattoos"

[konfizry]

Nefarious, anti-Zelink localization choices in TotK

I would argue that they are not a thing.

So what I’ve been seeing, is mostly discourse around The House. 

Mainly, that one line in Zelda’s diary, where Zelda refers to the house as “my house” in the English text as seen below: 

The argument seems to be that she does not say “my house” in the original Japanese. I’ve even seen people go as far as to claim she wrote “our house”. Aight, let’s take a peek then:

So indeed, there is no trace of  私の家 (my house), but neither is there 私たちの家 (our house). It’s just 家 (”house” / “the house”). 

As you know.  Pronouns aren’t nearly as pervasive in japanese as they are in English. I do think it’d be strange for her to use a possessive here, like, you know. Given that we know that it’s this here house she’s referring to, y’know. And she’s writing in her own diary, there’s no need to specify. Like, It’s the house. This house. What other house is there that she had an extra room built at? None, of course, right. Right. 

So anyway, what’s the correct translation then? ~I don’t know.~ If you wanna stick close to the original jp’s lack of possessive here, you’d say “the house”, i guess, but listen: “my house” is a perfectly reasonable option, as well. I know some of y’all hate that it makes it sound like she’s excluding Link here, and sure you’re allowed to feel that way but. I. don’t think it’s wrong tbh honest??? 

And “our house” would have worked, too, probably, but then it would have leaned a littttttle too heavily on the Zelink and I can sort of understand that they want to keep it at least a little nebulous. (because 1. that is what they do and 2. it’s more fun that way)

And unfortunately “our house” would have also contradicted another little piece of info found in the Japanese version regarding... the well, again. more specifically what the game calls the well. 

In English it is referred to as Zelda’s Secret Well. And that is what it is. It is very much the well that was built for her own purposes, and it is a secret chamber. No complaints here.

The well is labeled a little differently in Japanese, tho. The game calls it ゼルダの家の井戸, which could translate to "Zelda's house's water well" or "the water well by Zelda's house" (or whatever else you can think of that has “Zelda’s house” and “well” in it, probably, im just giving examples so u get the idea).

(click here if you’re on desktop and can’t zoom in but want to)

So, in fact, you could say that in Japanese, the house is clearly stated to be Zelda’s house. Woops, back to square one it is, then. 

But do you see? Are you seeing? While Zelda does call it “my house” in the English text seemingly leaving no room for Link, you could also argue that the localization team went out of their way to not call it “Zelda’s house” when they absolutely could have. By calling the well “Zelda’s secret well” instead of going for a closer-to-the-original “well outside Zelda’s house”, they recreated a little bit of room for speculation. Wow!!!! Cool!! 

And this is just like. One little tidbit I decided to focus on, but my point is:

There is no secret anti-Zelink agenda in the localization team. Translating means making choices, you might disagree with some of them, but that does not make them wrong or vile, I don’t think. 

And the siege mentality I’ve seen some people adopt regarding Zelink strikes me as very misplaced. We are eating good. There is food aplenty. Why are you digging for extra scraps that may not even exist? 

Granted, comparing the original text with its translations can be super fun (heck I enjoy it, to an extent!), but try to think about your own attitude as you do so. Try to go into with curiosity and humility in your heart instead of righteous vindicativeness. You might find that more satisfying. 

Now of course, sometimes translation errors do occur, and criticism is warranted, but try to take a step back and ask yourself if this really means the localization team are a bunch of buffoons who either have no idea what they’re doing or are actively trying to ruin your Zelda experice, or if, perhaps, instead, sometimes people fuck up. For various reasons that you may not be aware of.

(Rereading this i now realize that i am tone-policing and. Yeah. I am. deal with it)

One more thing, you don’t have to believe randos who claim “X is canon in Japanese and they censored it in English”, especially if they’re not elaborating or providing evidence. (You can choose to believe them if you want to, at the end of the day, but just be aware that you believed without seeing. So think before you spread the word around, right?)

One final, final thing, you can always set your nintendo switch to Japanese and experience the game in its original language, for yourself. Isn’t that the coolest? I wish this was possible for all games. Thanks, Nintendo!

[stellerssong]

Hi again. I'm on some level here to ask for a complete explanation of every aspect of Hawaiian culture that is even tangentially related to your latest fic because I know absolutely nothing and there is the ever present concern that the terms run through cursory Google Translate and internet searching will lose nuance and implications. There were definitely some references to divinities and myths and such that went over my unenlightened head. The story you wove was rich and intricate enough to be held in the mind of someone who knows less than nothing and still have great meaning and truth, but I know that it will mean yet more if I can see the threads you used to make it. (On another level, I'm asking for the explanation because I am abruptly deeply interested in a topic I had previously not thought about very much, and you seem to be significantly more of an expert than the average internet search.)

first off! well first off i am blowing you so many kisses for this very kind ask, thank you so much for giving me an excuse to ramble at (great, great, great) length.

so second off! i would just like to stress that i am very much not an expert in hawaiian language, folklore, history, culture, etc. i am neither kānaka maoli (native hawaiian) nor kamaʻāina (born in hawaiʻi although not necessarily of hawaiian ancestry), and i have not studied these topics formally/in a setting that applies academic rigor. i am an enthusiastic amateur with a personal connection to hawaiian culture, the kind of brain that likes to fixate on areas of interest, and a willingness to scrounge around for reading material. i have, i think, a decent sense of what some of the baseline texts in the field are, and a fairly good bullshit detector (and the understanding/ability to dig into things when i can't rely on the bullshit detector), but ultimately i am a layman and an outsider with corresponding perspectives and biases. i also, i will admit frankly, have a pretty sharp knowledge cutoff corresponding to the time of first european contact, just because of my own personal interests and reading preferences.

read that whole disclaimer? let your eyes glaze over while you skimmed it? good! here's my real quick (lmao) rundown of Sum Things U Should Know If You Wanna Close-Read Kīpuka:

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi 101

Good grief when I put it like that I do NOT feel qualified to tell you any of this. Anyway. We can keep it basic just so you can get a sense of the mouthfeel of the words. And just fyi ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi is the proper name of the language; i'll be using "Hawaiian" as the adjective form, sans ʻokina, assuming an English-speaking readership.

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi as it is commonly rendered today has 13 letters: 5 vowels (A, E, I, O, and U) and 7 consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W), plus the ʻokina or glottal stop (that little apostrophe-lookin' dude at the beginning of the word ʻokina, also the source of most of my typesetting woes). Pronunciation-wise, there are no silent letters and no though/through/enough-type surprises: every letter is pronounced, and all of the vowel renderings are approximately equivalent to how you'd pronounce them in Spanish or Italian. Hence, the word kuahine = koo-ah-HEE-nay rather than, like, kyoo-ah-highn, which made me feel gross even just typing it out.

The ʻokina is pronounced, and bear with me here, like the dash in the english nuh-uh. or, if you're a try-hard vocalist—reattack the vowel after the ʻokina instead of eliding it to the vowel prior. So the place-name Kaʻū is pronounced ka-OO, as distinct from the word kau which is pronounced more like kow (which is a bit of an oversimplification of the latter word, but I'm trying to be efficient here).

That leads us neatly into the other diacritical marking used in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, the kahakō or macron which helpfully appears in its own name. No worries here; the kahakō just serves as a stress marker, so you'd say kahakō = ka-ha-KO instead of ka-HA-ko, or from the example above ka-OO rather than KA-oo.

There are a couple of other little pronunciation tricks here and there. The letter W is sometimes pronounced as a V, and unfortunately I can't really describe the rules for that shift; that is one I must admit I know mostly from vibes. For example, the correct pronunciation of Hawaiʻi itself is ha-VAI-ee, but I've never heard the place-name Waimea pronounced as anything but why-MEY-ah.

Occasionally you will encounter the letter K pronounced as a T, which I believe is an artifact of the morphological shift from older related languages such as Tahitian and Samoan which do preserve the letter T as a unique phoneme. To my knowledge, the Kauaʻi dialect (spoken today on Niʻihau) also preserves the T, but most spoken ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi heard elsewhere is based on the Big Island dialect, which lacks the T. One notable exception is the word tūtū (an affectionate/respectful term for a grandparent or elder), which you really don't hear pronounced as kūkū.

Really, though, listening to Hawaiian music is how I got the language in my ear and imo it's the best way to get it in yours. Can't go wrong with Israel Kamakawiwoʻole (of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" fame), but I have a personal soft spot for Kealiʻi Reichel, Weldon Kekauoha, Amy Hanaialiʻi, and the Cazimero Brothers.

The Place-y-ness of Hawaiian Literature

This is more of a sidenote than its own heading, but I'm the one driving the essay, and I think it's an interesting thing to point out, just because it helps establish a particular perspective I wanted to keep in mind while writing this fic.

Something you might notice as you start to look at Hawaiian oli, mele, and myth is the high level of specificity of place. Hawaiʻi is, let's be honest, not that enormous of a place when you consider it on a global scale—but the specificity of localities within Hawaiian literature is kind of astounding. Not only are there loads of place-names referenced in any given work, there are unique Hawaiian names for landmarks, cliffs, peaks, hills, streams, waterfalls—even rains and winds of specific locations merit their own names.

"kīpuka" is very specifically set on the windward side of Hawaiʻi island, so I made an effort to focus my references to place-names on that region—Hilo, ʻŌlaʻa, and Waiākea are all locations on the eastern side of the island, and the one reference to Kona on the leeward side reflects the coming of someone bearing grievances (in addition to eia aʻe ka makani Kona being an existing idiom warning the listener to watch out for an angry person, the windward and leeward sides of Hawaiʻi island have a long history of territorial warfare and jockeying for control of the island). I'd also considered having the bird discussed in the fic be a different species, the kākāwahie—but that species is/was endemic to Molokaʻi, and quite honestly my knowledge of the history and culture of Molokaʻi as a separate polity is not that great.

(This is partly due to sample bias—my introduction to Hawaiʻi was within a Big Island-based context. At the same time, another thing you may notice about the better-known source texts is that many of them center around Hawaiʻi island and, to a lesser extent, Maui, thanks to the political supremacy during the unification/post-contact era of Hawaiʻi island and Maui aliʻi. Ross Cordy wrote a whole ass book about the Oʻahu chiefdoms that is simply not to be had for love or money no matter how I search for it. I am THIS CLOSE to straight up cold emailing the man and being like I WILL VENMO YOU $75 USD DIRECTLY IF YOU WILL SIMPLY JUST SEND ME A COPY OF YOUR BOOK. PLEASE. SAVE ME ROSS CORDY.)

Girl (Gender Neutral), I Cannot Explain Hawaiian Mythology, Poetics, and Mythopoetics As a Subheading in One Post

Honestly. I can't do it. But some tidbits to assist your further research:

A great deal of Hawaiian literature and oral tradition hinges on kaona, roughly "allusion" or "metaphor." In a description that is useful to precisely no one but myself, it's not unlike the complex plays on words, puns, and deep well of references used in Heian Japanese epistolary poetry. Some of it is easy to grok for newbies: for example, the concept of one's lover as a lei adorning the body, or being splashed or sprinkled with water as a euphemism for sex. Some of it goes a lot deeper, relying on historical or folkloric place-name associations, puns, and ancient practices and superstitions.

The Hawaiian "pantheon" I place in scare quotes because ancient Hawaiian religious practices and superstition were highly syncretic, often extremely localized, and more contradictory the more you read into it. In a very, very, very, VERY rough and off-the-cuff sense, though, there were thought to be four major gods: Kāne (associated with dawn, the sun, the sky, running freshwater, and irrigation-based agriculture, among other things), Kanaloa (associated with the ocean, sea creatures, and sometimes death, as an opposing or complimentary force to Kāne), Lono (god of fertility, agriculture with something of an emphasis on dryland agriculture, rainfall, and peace as embodied in the Makahiki festival), and Kū (god of war, the deified kingship, fishermen, sorcery, and quite honestly a ton of other things in various manifestations).

There were also quite a large number of "lesser" gods, the word "lesser" used just in the sense that they weren't honored to the same extent as the four previously named in state-sanctioned religious practice. Probably the most well-known of these is Pele, the volcano goddess. (I reference another in the fic, Niolopua, god of sleep—but the jury's out on whether or not that refers to an actual god or is just metaphorical in the same way that most people think of "the Sandman" as a euphemism for sleep and not a literal guy who comes into your house and puts crusties in your eyes.)

The gods were thought to manifest in a variety of forms, called kino lau (literally "four hundred bodies"). You can think of this in the sense of "Lono takes on the shape of an albatross or a tropicbird to interact with mortals, while Kanaloa prefers to manifest as an octopus," and in stories kino lau are sometimes represented that way, but in practice it's less of a Greek myth-style practice of shapeshifting and more of an animistic religious belief. The kino lau in nature embody the god and in a metaphorical sense illustrate the interconnection between divine and earthly and the presence of the divine on earth.

(HUGE OVERSIMPLIFICATION. HUGE OVERSIMPLIFICATION. PLEASE DO MORE RESEARCH AND DO NOT TAKE ONE TUMBLR POST AT ITS WORD ON THIS.)

The Endless, in the fic, are very easy to loop into the concept of kino lau, because of their canonical universality. Danny appears as a shark (a symbol of chiefhood), a pueo, or Hawaiian owl (an 'aumakua, or ancestral guardian), a manu-o-Kū, or fairy tern (a bird associated with the god Kū, likely in his aspect as a god of fishermen, navigators, and wayfinders), a kalo plant (a staple crop of ancient Hawaiʻi, a kino lau of Kāne, and a symbol of duality and rebirth), and a snowcapped mountain (a sacred site considered kapu, or forbidden, to all but the highest chiefly individuals). Despair, meanwhile, appears as an ʻalae ʻula, or Hawaiian moorhen (another ʻaumakua, but also an animal whose cry was thought to foretell misfortune), a stingray (for her barbed tail), a hāpuʻu fern (in contrast to Dream's kalo, the hāpuʻu was considered a famine food), a lava flow and its first growths (acknowledging Pele as both a destroyer and a creator of land, just as Despair also embodies hope), and a number of other things meant to embody the devastation of Hawaiʻi (rats, feral pigs, and mosquitoes have decimated endemic birds and insects; the kiawe is an invasive plant species that forms dense, thorny, and difficult-to-destroy groves; light pollution affects behavior and migratory patterns of both avian and aquatic species).

All pretty simple, obviously!

Further Resources and Recs

Okay, so, obviously I'm not going to be able to explain every single reference in this fic in a single post, though I obviously tried my damnedest. In lieu of that, I'll offer some useful resources for further reading:

Stephen Trussel's Combined Hawaiian Dictionary is a fantastic resource for vocab that incorporates several major Hawaiian dictionaries in a straightforward (well, as straightforward as this gets) text-based web page. Ulukau also has a searchable interface, which is a little easier to interact with, but I like having the Trussel for reference.

Huapala is everyone's go-to for translations of Hawaiian lyrics. I've linked to it in the endnotes of the fic for readers interested in more on "Ka Ipo Lei Manu," but it's got nearly any ʻauana-style Hawaiian song you please, and if I recall correctly even a few traditional oli. Again, another slightly old-fashioned text-based site—but we all know how to use CMD + F in a page, do we not?

Native Books is awesome if you, like me, prefer reading things in print but would prefer not to feed your dollars into the maw of the Amazon beast. A lot of the lit on Hawaiʻi was printed either a long time ago or in very small releases and is now out-of-print and difficult to find even in libraries, so it rocks that there's an independent bookseller that specializes in getting those works to an audience in hard copy. @ NATIVE BOOKS PLEASE CONSIDER GETTING ROSS CORDY TO RE-PRINT THE RISE AND FALL OF THE OʻAHU KINGDOM THANK YOU SO MUCH. University of Hawaiʻi Press is also a good source for academic texts, although their website is...mm...difficult to navigate, and do be warned that they charge academic press prices.

In terms of who to read, you really can't go wrong with Mary Kawena Pukui, a Native Hawaiian scholar, author, composer, and educator whose work is the backbone of just, a fuckton of writing about Hawaiʻi, both academic and popular. Her book ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings is worth at least a skim just to get the feel of the Hawaiian mindset; it also contains a healthy dose of myth, folklore, and history in the explanations of the sayings. Absolutely adorably, I've found two books she edited that I read the absolute FUCK out of as a child available as PDFs through Ulukau: The Water of Kāne and Other Legends of the Hawaiian Islands and Hawaiʻi Island Legends: Pīkoi, Pele, and Others. Definitely worth a quick read if you want more on the myth side of things.

As a non-specialist, I've really enjoyed Patrick Vinton Kirch's writing on precontact Hawaiʻi. For a field archaeologist, his writing is both highly engaging and very respectful of the peoples he studies, and trust me, I do get my back up easily when it comes to white people writing about Other Cultures TM, so I'd posit it means something that he passes my sniff test. A Shark Going Inland is My Chief is a great overview of the history of the Hawaiian chiefdoms from the first settlement of the islands to immediately precontact, and Kuaʻāina Kahiko offers a bit of a closer look at everyday life in a specific locality in the islands (in this case, Kahikinui, Maui).

Kamehameha and His Warrior Kekūhaupiʻo by Stephen Desha (trans. Frances N. Frazier) began its life as a serialized Hawaiian-language history of the rise of Kamehameha I. It's a dense read, and it WILL test your ability to remember who the hell all these people are to its limit—it mostly discusses the lives and times of the major players of the aliʻi class in the late precontact–early postcontact era, and when you remember that a) a hell of a lot of personal names in this tale begin with the letter K and b) the aliʻi class of Hawaiʻi practiced a mindboggling amount of political marriage, consanguineous marriage, and sanctioned adoption between blood relatives, the family trees get real complicated REAL fast. If you can hang on through all that, though, it's an intensely detailed and very vivid portrait of a culture at a tumultuous moment, it gives a great sense of how the Hawaiians viewed themselves and the world, and it's an interesting exercise in the mythologizing of the Kamehameha dynasty.

Okay, So...?

So...if you hung on through all that, god DAMN are you dedicated. Have what is quite possibly my favorite Hawaiian song for your trouble. It is, funnily enough, about a bird.

EDIT: I am retroactively making this post unrebloggable. I'm really, really glad folks have found it interesting and are looking into the resources I shared, but I absolutely do not want this getting passed around as Hawaiian Culture 101. If you want to learn more about Hawaiʻi, I must stress that you should look to a reputable source and not some schmuck on Tumblr rambling about her effortposting fanned fiction.

[rustycottoncandy]

I somehow made it through the school day running on one hour of sleep

[kantraels]

I don’t have the screenshots to back it up rn because I’m getting ready to sleep but mfanatic really is just unimaginably gentle with fseer compared to some of the shit that comes out of his mouth at any other given time. i’m thinking primarily of the voice lines where he pushes back on fseer talking about their dream, when fseer chides him for drinking too much, that one bonding convo where they comment about how he’s always frowning, and again the fact that he tells them stories aboard the valkyrie

[goldensunset]

Good luck finding your keyring thing! If you haven’t yet at least idk when you posted that and I’ve gotten day+ old posts on my feed 😭

thank you anon

[coquelicoq]

Hi sweetie i hear you are sick i am so sorry! love grammy

text from my grandmother i thought was sweet, and then i discovered her cellphone has multitap texting, and now i think it's REALLY sweet. because this is what she had to "punch in" in order to send me this message:

44 444 0 7777 9 33 33 8 444 33 0 0 444 0 44 33 2 777 0 999 666 88 0 2 777 33 0 7777 444 222 55 0 0 444 0 2 6 0 7777 666 0 7777 666 777 777 999 0 555 666 888 33 0 4 777 2 6 6 999

and like if you've ever used multitap, you know that you have to get the timing perfect so that the phone knows you're trying to do, for example, "hi" (44 [pause] 444) and not "ggggg" (pauses between each 4). and she hardly ever texts anyone so it's not like she's super proficient, so it must have taken a lot of effort! i am feeling very loved right now!!!

[holdoncallfailed]

how it feels to be a mitski fan since puberty 2 came out

[salsflore]

everyday i wake up and have to start a new boss challenge called dealing with my mother