#sound stylist

[woe-is-tuli]

These teasers are too much for my poor heart oml

[hedgehog-moss]

Writers who use imitative harmony + the movement of their language to evoke meaning are so great to re-read once you’ve learnt this language, if you’ve read them in translation before, it feels like the best reward. I’m reading Annie Proulx in the original for the first time, and so much of her writing style was just not salvageable by French translators (< my condolences), because she intertwines sound with meaning so often, at least in Close Range, and French just doesn’t sound the same! so by translating the meaning you’ll sacrifice a lot of the style... It reminds me of a haunted house book in French that also made me think “haha RIP translators” because it made great use of sound—a lot of “u / eu / ou” to create a sort of sinister howling effect in some sentences, and one sentence about a closed door used “i” and “rr” sounds to give an ominous “creaking open” sensation without actually opening the door in the text...

This kind of thing always makes me reflect despairingly on how many authors I’ll never get to appreciate fully as I can’t read them in the original, but I’m glad to re-discover Annie Proulx at any rate! I mean compare the sound of a phrase like “a hundred dirt road shortcuts” to the French “des centaines de raccourcis, des routes de terre”... First of all the English phrase sounds clippety-cloppy, it sounds like hooves on a dirt road in a way that’s very hard to preserve in a language without syllable stress, but also the French language demands that you turn it into ‘a hundred of shortcurts of roads of dirt’, so it’s best to dilute it into two phrases, and you just lose the clippedness. It sounds less tight, more leisurely.

Same for the phrase “the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts” vs. “la plaine fauve encore marquée des ornières laissées par les chariots des pèlerins.” That’s a 54% expansion ratio and once again you turn the tight clippedness of ‘grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts’ into ‘grooved with the ruts left by the wagons of the pilgrims.’ You just can’t avoid it, French words have to hold hands in a long procession rather than being stacked like pancakes on top of one another. And sometimes it makes for lovely stylistic effects too (*), but it doesn’t fit the style of a text like this one, which uses rhythm and sound in a very un-French way—rhythmicality in French tends to rely on long flowy phrasings rather than the potholed ruggedness this story demands. (I saw a NY Times article describe it as Annie Proulx “mining the ore of language out of a gritty Wyoming rockscape”)

The rhythm of this whole bit is so neat, you can snap your fingers along with it: “hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog...”

The French version is not finger-snapping material but you can tell the translator did her very best to preserve the author’s intention by creating interesting rhythms in French as well. For “hard orange dawn” she could have kept close to the original with, say, “la dureté orange de l’aube” but instead she chose to turn ‘hard’ into a four-syllable adjective (éblouissante / blinding) to end up with a noticeable rhythm—“les aubes orange, éblouissantes,” one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four (and she made ‘dawn’ plural for the same reason.) She wasn’t able to preserve the g/r alliteration of “GRooved with pilGRim waGon Ruts” (although her translated phrase also has a lot of R’s) but she did preserve the ‘sss’ alliteration of “Smoking Snaking duSt” (“pouSSière Serpentant Sur le Sol”). Even with languages as close as French and English, for every stylistic effect you can save you have to sacrifice a few, or replace them with opposite effects which align better with your language’s notions of literary style (like with the orange dawn bit, doubling the length of a tight phrase so it can sound rhythmical).

You can tell all throughout the book that a lot of thought and care went into respecting Annie Proulx’s writing choices and you still end up with sentences that sound and move so differently. You get to see the limit of translation when authors fully lean on their language’s syntax and melody to help convey meaning, like poets do!

(*) Re: English stacking words and French linking them—this reminds me of an essay I read by an English translator of Proust who despaired of this difference in the opposite direction—saying some long, descriptive phrases in Proust with articles & prepositions linking words, and commas linking phrases with regularity, read like telling the beads of a rosary. And the sensation (or a lot of it) had to be sacrificed because English just does not use as many linking words as French, information is conveyed in a more economical way, so a lot of these sentences with a hypnotic rhythm like “the A, of the B, of the C, whereby the D, of the E, on an F” were often not achievable with English syntax or created redundancy (e.g. having to use ‘that’ or ‘which’ 5 times when French used different tool words). But he said he did try to form sentences that had this continuity, and meditative quality.

I don’t have a conclusion to this post other than to say something precious will be lost if human translation is replaced by AI translation, because literary translation involves creativity and ambiguity and aesthetic considerations and a dimension of instinctual feeling for your own language and the original style, and I don’t think any amount of data and processing power and artificial neural networks will yield the flavour of literary quality that emerges from human sensibility and care, from someone reading a sentence and thinking “this feels like hooves clippety-clopping down a dirt road” or “this feels like rolling the beads of a rosary” and starting from there...

[chaika-jpeg-shitpost]

Alcyone and Elias forged a deep bond over their shared struggle to communicate with people, but each of them has precisely what the other lacks. Alcyone has only lips, Elias has only eyes. Alcyone can smile at or kiss someone, but Elias can't. Elias can look someone in the eyes, but Alcyone can't.

[zombzgutzz]

concept art of a regretevator oc based on my very own roblox avatar 🔥

hes a Famous Singer™ and hed come from a floor where you do a dance battle against him by pressing buttons fnf style :) he gets on the elevator Every Single Time it arrives at this floor (except if its full or mr is there ofc) and is so so so niceys to every npc and every player. yayyyyyy yay

[yellowjackets-1996]

takin' your chance, it's a big mistake. i said, "it might blow up in your pretty face." i'm not sayin', "do it anyway!" but you're going to.

[clownsuu]

Are we allowed to write fan fiction??

LmAOOO yeah of course??

just think of anything I make for the fandom as free real estate that is (other) clown compliant of course-

[descendantofthesparrow]

another thing that i hate about the ROR designs is that for all the young villains-they all look-modern-everyone is designed to be in the same era when thats not the case! if Chloe and Red go back in the past when their parents/the villains were teens-it should be like-the 80s at the very LEAST!!! like half of those fukin villains shouldnt be in school together anyway becuase HADES IS A 1000+ YEAR OLD GOD FROM THE OLD GREEK AGE, Maleficent is like-from the middle ages!!!! they shouldn't be teens together, and oh FG WAS AN OLD LADY WHEN SHE MET CINDERELLAAAAA at the very least, if you're going to put time travel in a movie, DESIGN UR OUTFITS APPROPRIATELY. the teen villains all look like teens of the 2020s! they should look, older than that!

[eri-pl]

MitVD 1: the War of Wrath

For @morgoth-into-the-void-week A fic-thing. Surprisingly non-Morgoth-centric and very normal. Character study without plot. (The character in question is Manwë.)

"War of Wrath, they shall name it," said Námo, when the trumpets finished their fanfare.

Manwë closed his eyes — a Children's way to express emotion. He enjoyed those. It might have been due to the amount of conversations he'd had with Ingwë.

Now his Vanya friend sat silent while most of his people marched onto the ships in the Swan Haven. As Manwë's heart and hope told him, this would go better than the other journey that had started there. But still, many would die. This didn't need much foresight to tell.

But what else could they do?

When the ship came, with the shining, scared, somewhat lost half-elf and one of the three hallowed jewels of holy light, there was no other answer. Manwë had tried explaining it to Ingwë, but the Elda asked questions. Why? Why solve the problems of the Noldor, after all they had done? And if so, why only now?

Explaining the first proved near impossible, because Manwë could not understand Ingwë's question well enough.

The Noldor did ask for help. At least Earendil had been one of them, partially, and heir of a king. So this meant the Valar were allowed to intervene, without disrespecting the freedom of the Elves. The Sindar too, as Elwing was a Sinda. The Noldor did ask for help, despite it not being possible after all they had done.

But this apparently wasn't the question Ingwë was asking. What was it then?

"Why now?" was easier to answer. It felt right. Like the right note in melody. Something about how Earendil came fit into… into the Music. And now the sailor's parents, having been long lost in the Shadowy Seas, landed not long after him, confused, but happy. Ingwë asked many questions about them too, especially about Tuor. The questions were polite of course, and pleasant to hear. The king of the Vanyar was inquisitive like a child. It was sweet, even when Manwë did not know how to answer him.

And now the Vanyar, the lovely, curious Vanyar, sailed to a war with Morgoth.

"His wrath shall be terrible, but what else could we do?" asked Manwë.

Námo did not move, and spoke dispassionately as usual. "They shall say that it was our wrath."

Varda, as often, said nothing, but her pain tugged at the edge of Manwë's spirit, adding to his own.

Our? They had for long thought how to stop Morgoth with as little damage to everyone else as possible. Manwë had counseled with Eonwë about how much Maiar were needed in the army, with Yavanna and Aulë about how not to break the entire land and all that lived there. And yet, there was no way to win without grave consequences.

Did he feel wrath? Was this feeling of inevitability it? Or this decisive pain of something ending? This moment when he looked upon Morgoth's empire, and knew that so much evil had been done that something broke, something new needed to be done? Was this wrath?

Manwë did not know. His herald maybe would, but the poor boy had enough hardships awaiting him already, and never liked such discussions anyway.

"I hope they will forgive us, then," he replied to Námo, and Ingwë narrowed his lips, but said nothing.

The war went on, in blood and burning flames, year after year. The army reached Angband, and Eonwë had to watch, had to witness all of it, especially in those days when Manwë channeled his power through his poor, somehow still too young for this war, herald, and as it cleaned the earth, they both felt the anguish of countless prisoners and slaves, the pain that had seeped deep into the stone for centuries. He didn't do as much as the others, and yet, what Eonwë had to stand was too much. Still, it was better this way than if Manwë himself went there. It did less damage than his mere presence would.

And then, sfter Angband had been torn apart, the thing that had been his brother was dragged out, crying and pleadings and screaming, and Manwë couldn't say anything. What was there to say? What was there that hadn't been said already?

He felt a gentle and sorrowful question tugging at his spirit, and as he replied with an invitation, Nienna came into his throne room, and without saying a word stood in front of him, crying, understanding even those feelings he could not explain to his own wife (and she deserved better than having them explained to her). Shock and disbelief, even after millennia. Relief that it's finally over. Pain. How was this even possible, to lose someone so entirely? And yet it was.

He sat in silence, then turned to Ingwë. "You braid your hair for mourning, don't you?"

"We do, my lord." The king's own hair was braided, which made this question moot, but even so, Manwë would rather seem as slow as some Noldor called him in their whispers, than skip the politeness of starting a conversation gently, especially with a Vanya, who valued politeness and kindness so high.

"thou art free to refuse me if so thou willst, or if it is not proper for someone other than the Eldar to use your custom, but canst thou teach me that braiding?"

Ingwë blinked. He had learned to somewhat accept the concept of the Valar needing to learn things, especially about the Children, but it was still a difficult concept for him. "If you wish so, my lord... There are different braiding for different occasions. I suppose you want one for the loss of your subjects, as I am currently wearing?"

Manwë took a deep breath — another expression he'd learned from his Vanya friend — and the room filled with gusts of wind. "Yes, but also, forgive me that I don't know how to say it more gently, for my brother. He was my brother. And that I cannot change, even if I wanted to."

He cut those braids off later, looking at the closing rectangular darkness in the sky, now heavily guarded.

He didn't feel anything.

Maybe it was because this body wasn't really him, not in a way like— like the Children. Maybe it wasn't at all supposed to make the feelings pass. One way or another, the pain was still there, accompanied by the relief and disbelief.

He turned to Varda and saw her smile, and felt her smile deeply, for the first time since Ages.

Manwë smiled too and finally felt that something new has truly begun.

[binch-i-might-be]

I'm sorry but that song featuring odysseus' kid from the next epic saga is so Blow Us All Away coded

[woe-is-tuli]

ATEEZ(에이티즈) - 'Ice On My Teeth': Seonghwa

[bmpmp3]

thank god for indie devs making like tiny little maximum 10 megabyte freeware games on itchio keeping the art of filesize optimization alive. ASSET REUSE FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[cuntdevil]

hey my last ask was no hate. i understand that a lot of writers don’t have time or money for editors or proofreads. it was just a suggestion to make your work more readable. take care!

and no malice towards you, love, but im pretty anti-ai and it says that in my rules. not even just with character ai, but just in general. yes, i can see the pros of ai but i can also see its many faults and i dont really trust it when it comes to my writing, yk?

and im ngl, "... to make your work more readable," rubs me kinda the wrong way. it basically sounds like you're saying that it's not readable just because i made a mistake every once in a while? i can be reading too deep into it but bleck!

[king-midas-fortnite]

☭

@antonia-fortnite

Battle Theme: The Matrix - Chateau

Battle Intro: “You were part of that ‘heist crew’ that tried to hit Kado. If you didn’t succeed then, how do you expect this to go?”

Victory: "I did try to warn you."

Defeat: "Hell of an introduction..."

Assist: "Mind if I cut in?"

Dual Strike: "Strike swift, and don't miss!"

Defending: "I'm putting an end to this."

Taunt: "Weren't you dumped by Nolan Chance? Yikes."

Reacting to Taunt: "I put very little stock in your judge of character, given your track record."

Flee: "I'm afraid I'm needed elsewhere."

Reacting to Flee: "You shouldn't start things you can't finish."

Tie: "Interesting...Who's your stylist?"

Perfect Victory: "I don't know what I expected, but not that."

Finishing Move: "In case you get any ideas about stealing from me!"

[widevibratobitch]

deh vieni non tardar remains the most beautiful aria ever written. to me. but ONLY when performed in a very specific way. otherwise it is absolutely unbearable.

[thelostgirl21]

Radovid singing about finally getting together with his crush...

And feeling his rock hard...

[avephelis]

MUTANT MAYHEM THOUGHTS IT WAS SUPER AWESOME LET'S FUCKING GOO

BANGER BANGER BANGER FILM. definitely the thing i liked most was the visuals - the style is SO UNIQUE (with the deliberately misshapen designs and grungy colours with harsh neon contrast and the FUCKING !! SKETCH/SCRATCH LINES DUUDE), and the animation was just so full of personality and an absolute joy to watch.

AND SHOUT OUT TO THE EFFECTS AND LIGHTING ANIMATION ESPECIALLY HOLY SHIT ??? every time they had the scratched on light rays or scribbled smoke and dust i started like DROOLING dude.

the cinematography was also just absolutely amazing - incredible use of the medium to do these fantastic running shots with complex angles. favourite sequence was definitely the side shots of the boys fighting and interrogating people (SO smooth and the fighting choreography was incredible and showcased their styles and personalities so well, and the intercut sense of MOTION. dude. banger.)

AND !! THE FUCKING SOUND DESIGN!! especially the score dude MY GOD i loved the use of pitchy and unconventional instruments it fit the movie to a tee.

LOVED THE CHARACTERS! particularly the boys and the other mutants (mondo wingnut and leatherhead especially). all the interactions were super sweet and well-written and i just LOVED the VA performances - played off each other immaculately. i love how cringe and unapologetically TEEN the turtles are. and adored splinter too.

i think i'm glad they focused more on developing their relationship as a family than individual character arcs, because it helped reduce any bias or favouritism for specific turtles (COUGH leo and raph ahem), and also worked best with the super fast pacing, i think. didn't feel too cramped in all the busyness.

that said, i did struggle with the comedy a bit? particularly the reference humour. NOT THAT IT WAS ALL BAD! quite a few got a laugh out of me, but there were so many packed into such a small amount of time that it ended up getting a bit distracting. felt a bit like "let's wave all our properties in your face" and kind of out of place at times (i would've preferred for them to be less frequent, or for the references to be knock-offs)

i don't think the plot was the MOST compelling, either, but really that's fine, because it wasn't trying to be. the focus was on the art and action and dynamics and it is completely fine for it to focus more on that than thematic and emotional beats.

oh also i can't decide whether i love or hate the milking joke. funny at times but the more they retreaded it the more uncomfortable it felt lmao.

overall i think it is the most technically impressive tmnt movie, that i've seen at least, and from a cinematography point of view? ABSOLUTELY MIND-BLOWING. but it isn't necessarily the most emotionally compelling tmnt movie, and you know what? that's okay! because is wasn't trying to be, and it absolutely excels at what it aims itself towards.