#software checks

[mashkaroom]

Translation thoughts on the greatest poem of our time, “His wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floor”

It’s actually quite tricky to translate. Because it’s so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. “Chintz” is a word with its own set of associations. Chintz is a type of fabric with its origins in India. The disparaging connotation is from chintz’s eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldn’t compete.

Keep it real” is tremendously difficult to translate -- it’s a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to one’s roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:

“[K]eeping it real meant performing an individual’s experience of being Black in the United States. As such, it became a form of resistance. Insisting on a different reality, one that wasn’t recognized by the dominant culture, empowered Black people to ‘forge a parallel system of meaning,’ according to cultural critic Mich Nyawalo...The phrase’s roots in racialized resistance, however, were erased when it was adopted by the mostly-White film world of the 1970s and ’80s....Keeping it real in this context indicated a performance done so well that audiences could forget it was a performance.This version of keeping it real wasn’t about testifying to personal experience; it was about inventing it.”

One has to imagine that jjbang8 did not have the origins of these phrases in mind when composing the poem, but even if by coincidence, the etymological and cultural journeys of these two central lexemes perfectly reflect the themes of the poem. The two words have themselves traveled away from the authenticity they once represented, and, in a new context, have taken on new meanings -- the hero of our poem, the unnamed “him”, is, presumably, in quite a similar situation.

Setting aside the question of register, of the phonology, prosody, and meter of the original, of the information that is transmitted through bits of grammar that don’t necessarily exist in other languages -- a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these -- how do you translate the journey of the words themselves?

In my translations, I decided to go for the most evocative words, even if they don’t evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that there’s more than just what you see, whether that’s the details of the story -- what’s happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? -- or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.

Yiddish first:

זייַן ווייַב האָט אָנגעפֿילט זייַן הויז מיט הבלים

צו בלייַבן וויטיש, איך שטוף אים אופֿן דיל. zayn vayb hot ongefilt zayn hoyz mit havolim.

tsu blaybn vitish, ikh shtup im afn dil

This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish -- tsits -- but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means “vanity, nothingness, nonsense, trifles”. In Hebrew, it can also mean breath or vapor. I chose this over the other competitors because it, too, is a word with a journey and with a secondary meaning. Rather than imagining the bright prints of chintz, we might imagine a more olfactory implication -- his wife has filled his house with perfumes or cleaning fluids. It can carry the implication that something is being masked as well as the associations with vanity and gaudiness.

Vitish -- Okay, this is a good one. Keep in mind, of course, that I’ve never heard or seen it used before today, so my understanding of its nuances is very limited, but I’ll explain to you exactly how I am sourcing its meaning. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CYED) gives this as “gone astray (esp. woman); slang correct, honest”. I used the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition software, which allows you to search for strings in their corpus, to confirm that both usages are, in fact, attested. It’s a pretty rare word in text, though, as the CYED implies, it might have been more common in spoken speech. It appears in a glossary in “Bay unds yuden” (Among Us Jews) as a thieves cant word, where it’s definted as נאַריש, שרעקעוודיק, אונבעהאלפ. אויך נישט גנביש. אין דער דייַט��ער גאַונער-שפראַך --  witsch -- נאַריש, or “foolish, terrible, clumsy/pathetic. not of the thieves world. in the German thieves cant witsch means foolish”. A vitishe nekeyve (vitishe woman) is either a slacker or a prostitute. I can’t prove this for sure, but my sense is that it might come from the same root as vitz, joke (it’s used a couple of times in the corpus to mention laughing at a vitish remark -- which makes it seem kind of similar to witty). I assume the German thieve’s cant that’s being referred to is Rotwelsch, which has its own fascinating history and, in fact, incorporates a lot of Yiddish. In fact, for this reason, some of the first Yiddish linguists were actually criminologists! What an excellent set of associations, no? It has the slangy sense of straightforward of honest; it has a sense of sexual non-normativity (we might use it to read into the relationship between the narrator and the husband) -- and a feminized one at that; it was used by an underground subculture, and, again, the meaning there was quite different -- like the “real” in “keeping it real” it was used to indicate whether or not someone was “in” on the life (tho “real” is used to mean that the person is in, while “vitish” is used to mean they’re not). It’s variety of meanings are more ambiguous than “keep it real”, which can pretty much only be read positively, and it also brings in a tinge of criminality. Though it doesn’t have the same exact connotations as “keep it real”, I think it’s about as ideal of a fit as we’ll get because it’s equally evocative of more below the surface. I also chose “tsu blaybn vitish”, which is “to stay vitish”, as opposed to something like “to make it vitish” to keep the slight ambiguity of time that “keep it real” has -- keeping it real does< I think, imply that there is a pre-existing “real” to which one can adhere, so I wanted to imply the same.

The rest is straight-forward. “Shtup” is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for “fuck”, and I think it has a nice sound.

Ok, now Russian

женой твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками

чтоб не блудить с пути, ебемся на полу

zhenoy tvoy dom napolnin fintiflyushkami.

shtob ne bludit’ s puti’, yebyomsya na polu

In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here -- since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, it’s harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:

“Your house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, we’re fucking on the floor”

So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for “chintz” and “keep it real”. To preserve the iamb, I changed “his” to “your”. This changes the lines from a narration of events to some outside party to a conversation between the two men at the center. Russian also has both formal and informal you (formal you is also the plural form, as is the case in a number of other languages). I went with informal you because I wanted to preserve the fact that his wife has filled his house not their house, as someone pointed out in the original chain (though I don’t think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because it’s unlikely you’d be on formal you with someone you’re fucking (unless it’s, like, a kink thing). I honestly didn’t even consider making it formal, but that would actually raise a lot of interesting implications about the relationship between the speaker and the husband, as well as with what that means about the “realness” of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth -- that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that he’s betraying -- is obscured? that this intimacy is just a facade? Is there perhaps some sort of power differential that the narrator wishes to point out? Or perhaps is the way that the narrator is keeping it real by pointing out the distance between the two of them? there is no pretense of intimacy, the narrator is calling this what it is -- an encounter without deeper significance?

Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history --  i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only “his house” and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also don’t know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you. 

Ok moving on, I originally translated it as “твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками жены”. Honestly, this sounds more elegant than what I have now, but I ultimately though removing the wife from either a subject or agent position (grammatically, I mean) was too big a betrayal of the original. The original judges the wife. She took an active role in filling the house. If she were made passive, that read is certainly a possible one -- perhaps even the dominant one -- but it could also read more like “we are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they share” -- the action of filling is no longer what’s being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because it’s almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. “Zhenoy tvoy dom napolnen” is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means “Your house is filled by your wife” -- as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps that’s even good -- we focus, for good reason, on the relationship between the two men, but in a translation, the wife is able to draw more attention to herself.

Ok, chintz: I chose the word “финтифлюшки” (fintiflyushki), meaning trifle/bobble/tchotchke, because it, allegedly, comes from the german phrase finten und flausen, meaning illusions and vanity/nonsense. Once again, I like that the word has a journey, specifically a cross-linguistic one.

Keep it real: this one, frankly, fails to capture the impact of the original, in my opinion, but allow me to explain the reasoning. “Stray off the path” implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz -- and one they intend to continue taking, one that this act is a maintenance of. It brings in a little irony, since the husband very much is straying from the path of his marriage. “Bludit’“ can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can “stray”). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch -- they want to do the latter but not the former.

As for register -- “shtob” is a bit informal. I would write the full version (shto by) in an email, for example. The word for fuck, yebyomsa, is from one of the “mat” words, the extra special top tier of russian swears, definitely not to be said in polite company (and, if you are a man of a certain generation or background, not in front of women; it’s not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if we’re already thinking that deeply about it. But while we’re on the topic, i will say that in my circles in the US, women use mat much more actively than men (at least in front of me, who was, up until recently, a woman and also a child).)

Ok i think that’s all the comments i have!

[canon-gabriel-quotes]

Only the most important bits of the dev stream (trust me) with subtitles!

[mathysphere]

do YOU want to cross-stitch like it's 1992? through the magic of emulation, now you can!

I found a copy of Cross Stitch Master (Commodore Amiga pattern program) in a giant ROM dump on the Internet Archive, and got it working! and honestly it kinda rules

[valyrfia]

i might be pulling this out of my ass so i’m open to correction if someone knows better than me but i do believe they can turn down engine power from the pitwall? sorry for indulging in conspiracy theories but this just makes no damn sense how it’s always him and never teammate

It’s controlled via driver input on the steering wheel (so if Charles requests more power Bryan will give him directions to change “modes” on the steering wheel). No part of the car can be controlled remotely from the pitwall (breaks FIS regulations) HOWEVER I will say that the anti stall will have set parameters which could be so easily altered by changing one line of code…..I’m not sure whether the software for this is universal across all teams or whether each team builds their own but if I were to run with a sabotage conspiracy theory, I’d be looking at the software rather than the hardware.

[executables-sims]

PSA for anyone that uses Photoshop Elements for CC-making and was thinking of upgrading— from Elements 2025 onwards, licenses are no longer perpetual, being replaced by three-year licenses instead.

For a paid alternative, I highly recommend Affinity Photo (currently 50% off for Black Friday– £33.99 in the UK).

Affinity was acquired earlier this year by Canva, so there's every chance it will move to a subscription itself in the future, but I always cursed myself for never getting CS6 back in the day (hence why I'm making this post! xD).

Of course, there's also the free, open-source alternatives Krita and GIMP- the latter of which is currently testing what may become version 3.0.

(Whilst I'm on the subject I might as well also mention 3D Coat Textura– Pilgway usually has a Black Friday sale too, but it's a bit pricier and more of a niche program than the ones listed above.)

[d8tl55c]

scene of programmer021 throwing together the code for the first TCOs: "what if i just give them 100% in all stats lmao."

releases one into a sandbox*

sandbox bricked irretrievably within 3 minutes

ho-ly shit.

..... that's hilarious.

they try like ten more times, each with the same outcome. the little worm is good at what it does, scary good, and programmer is grateful that they went the extra mile with the sandbox layer of protection from it.

at a safe distance, the TCOs are brilliant sparring partners.

*(basically a mini computer running inside of (but held separately from) another computer) (used to test new features without risking a whole system)

on the twelfth go, they've learned enough of its tricks to have more of a chance. both of them take a moment after a long scuffle to catch their breaths. the stick figure gasps on the floor - it's amazing! so lifelike! and programmer is celebrating this little victory for the field of recreational AI right up until

it looks at them.

TCO #12 turns its hollow face out through the screen, looking at them.

programmer is unsettled.

can it see them?

their webcam is off.

surely it's impossible?

right?

and yet, it seems to see them regardless, because not only does it react to their reaction (little twitches eerily realistic, how did their program know to do those things), it capitalizes on their shock. it springs to its feet while they're still open-mouthed and reaches the walls of the sandbox window (which programmer had been herding them away from at all costs), crashing against the side, rebounding, and hitting them again and again.

programmer flails to reconnect to their Cursor (you know when you forget where it is and have to wave it around before you can use it again? like that, but with even more panic, confusion, and imminent peril).

there are cracks in a multitude of funny colors forming at the edge of the sandbox instance. pieces of the window dent out of its normal bounding box. The Chosen One adapts instantly, focusing its hits toward the weak points.

WTF! this has gone way too far.

programmer's Cursor swoops around from out of nowhere and catches the TCO by the base of its head. it tries to breathe fire and only manages strangled puffs of smoke. its legs kick the air. where once it was so elegant and poised it twists and writhes-

programmer drops it.

they feel cold.

their Cursor retreats outside the walls of the sandbox PC, clicking into the main system's File Explorer. already open is the folder with this sandbox, its partition of storage, and setup files inside.

they click it. press Delete on their keyboard.

the TCO tries to stand. it pushes through a dizzy spell, one hand holding the spot under its head that must be its neck, and sprints toward the breach it was working on.

a confirmation pane appears, from the process responsible for running the sandbox.

its arms are strong, but the more TCO_12 struggles the more it's clear that this wall would need way more firepower and concerted effort... and time... to break. it's out of time. it realizes this.

are you sure you want to end this process? ALL data will be lost.

programmer sees when it loses hope, because it abandons the wall. it abandons the whole game: the pride and dignity it fought with, the play-pretend that it held any real power here. it turns outward again, toward the screen. small hands slam against the barrier between them, knock-knocking faster, faster, please please please, its legs shake and give out but it keeps knocking, on its knees, please please please please PLEASE

the sandbox is deleted.

the window that displayed it freezes, lighting up too-bright and desaturated.

a snapshot of the TCO is frozen in place, begging for...

begging for what? it was never meant to know anything. to want anything. how did it know there was anything outside its reality to want?

or was it simply afraid to die?

Windows catches up, and sweeps the frozen program away.

programmer021 is left alone with the spot where TCO_12 used to be.

their friends want to play with their latest stick figures. they were supposed to update today.

programmer numbly uploads the most recent release build they have. killer and BEAST were fun to work on. they'll warn everyone not to touch TCO until.... until programmer works out how to... until ever, and if one of them does, it'll be their own fault.

[aturnoftheearth]

people in the sims 4 modding community are fightinggggggg bc one of the build cc creators is paywalling their stuff for months before releasing it for free to the public when most cc creators range from like. 2 weeks to a month?? anyway it’s a fight to the death between people who say anyone having a problem with it should just make their own and is automatically entitled and get ur bag know ur worth etc and people who say yeah sure but don’t be so rude to people asking why you’re releasing holiday content to the public in february. anyway i see elements of both sides so im watching the arguing like a cat watching christmas tree ornaments

[krash-8]

save me fukase and piko, i’m rotating your dynamic around my head ……… like …….. enter the prettiest boy you’ve ever met who happens to have been doomed from the start, and then you as one of the lucky ones. you can probably save him a little while. (he’s slowly falling behind, falling behind.) you can pretend it’s not the case. (if you don’t look back, you can both make it out.) this is a post about computer software someone needs to put me down

[veveisveryuncool]

starving artist episode was a banger i need 20 more

kirbytober day 20: castle/fav episode

[kuromi-hoemie]

you have 7+ computers ? ? i am so curious about the uses for them o_o

linux:

drawing laptop

older laptop w shitty battery

mini PC i use to clone a bunch of laptops in my home office (work related)

windows

work laptop

gaming PC/general use

old art mini PC, i don't rly use this much bc drawing worked nicer on Linux and I'm on hiatus w music for the foreseeable future

mini PC mounted to the ceiling by a projector in the living room, for movie nights n stuff :3 this is the one that could be moved to Linux

[nycticore]

This Papyrus certificate™ is proudly presented to:

Untitled Tile Painter by Ivan Khoroshew

for being an excellent tool to make a Papyrus (and sans) with.

[bmpmp3]

sourin

[sincerely-sofie]

Check-in for 01/28/24

It's been a while since I did one of these. Time to remedy that!

I've been doing well in my assignments, but due to some registration issues at the start of the semester I was unable to sign up for any web development or programming classes :< It's nice to take a break, but I'm really worried about getting stagnant in those skills, and maybe even losing what I've learned over time.

This is where a couple of new projects come in: A blorbo database and a tool for drawing pokemon from memory. These things are going to keep me avoid stagnancy and help me develop my web dev and Python programming skills, and I'm real excited to talk about them.

First up, let's talk about that tool for drawing pokemon from memory. I love drawing pokemon from memory, but it's a bit of a struggle to find tools online that work well for a solo experience when you're doing this challenge alone. So I made a program in PyGame to solve this problem, and I've actually already completed it! It was a great learning experience when it came to getting a taste of APIs, and PokeAPI really helped me do all the heavy lifting with it. I also ended up using ChatGPT to help me understand how to phrase my questions and the things I needed to research. This is the end result:

If you click "Get Random Pokemon", the program will provide a pokemon's name. The point of it is to draw the pokemon as best as you remember it, and then click "Show Pokemon Image" to see how you did. You will then have the option to get a new random pokemon, which clears the image from the window.

There's a lot of stuff I don't understand about how the program works--- APIs evade my understanding, and Tkinter is a dark art beyond my comprehension. But I was able to make a program that solved a genuine problem for me for the first time, and that's super exciting to me!

Now, for web development--- long story short, I'm making a website dedicated to cataloguing my OCs that's very much inspired by tumblr user @snekkerdoodles's personal site on neocities, which I regularly stare at in an effort to motivate myself to make cool things like it (everyone reading this should check his page out IMMEDIATELY and tell him how cool it is). Here's the screenshots of the WIP I'm chipping away at right now:

I don't have much to say about it, as the interesting stuff will really be the content of the pages, and I still have yet to finish the template page I'll be filling with my OCs' information. However, I can say that I'm very upset with the lack of proper teaching that took place in the first (and currently only) college web dev class I've taken. I spent an entire semester doing my own research to learn everything they were supposed to be teaching us. I'm still very peeved about that.

To summarize this very rambling post I'm too sleepy to edit properly, I'm making a digital blorbo encyclopedia, and I finished making a little desktop app thingy, which means I need to summon a new programming project. I'm tempted to make it a video game... maybe I should turn back to that visual novel idea I had ages ago and boot up RenPy!

[pandakong]

My Splotch Summer entry #2 - A rough but happy fish and worm on a string!

The original splotch below:

Splotch Summer is an event where I make and release paint splotches for anyone to turn into something new. @ me and use #splotchSummer if you participate!

[plottwiststudios]

If you think the very existence of visual AI doesn’t actively make development for Indie developers even more difficult, here are some of the things we have to consider now:

Art thieves AND folks who rely on AI RNG are now for hire

Have a discerning eye for the advancement of the technology

Being "overly” cautious over new portfolios made after 2020

Failure to hire an actual artist means assets are not legally protected

If you miss the AI in the art, the audience surely won’t.

We have to maneuver around AI users lying about using AI

Steam will not accept games made using AI. (Good)

That billionaires won’t just make a base model that won’t rely on scraping

It’s the petulance of the last one that gets me. So from a small business perspective, visual AI only made commissioning artists outside of my circle harder. Because there’s no way I’m paying someone to use AI when it can’t even understand the prompt “dark skin” a lot of the time.

[feverdreamsandlucidnightmares]

Would be funky and fresh if I could go to sleep but instead there is molten lead in my joints