#this is a line-by-line translation mostly for my own benefit

[survivetoread]

Natalia Lafourcade - De todas las flores (Marathi Translation)

नाताल्या लाफुरकादे - दे तोदास लास फ्लोरेस (सगळ्या त्या फुनलांमधून)

आपण लावलेल्या सगळ्या त्या फुलांमधून राहिलं फक्त एकच जिवंत रोज सकाळी ते विचारतं कधी येशील त्यांच्यासाठी गायला

आपण पाहिलेल्या सगळ्या त्या चंद्रांच्या राहिल्यात फक्त काहीच आठवणी आपण हसलो तेव्हाच्या आपण एकमेकांकडे होतो तेव्हाच्या नशेत दिशाविना माद्रिदच्या रस्त्यांमध्ये गेलो आपण नाचलो तेव्हाच्या आपण हरवलो तेव्हाच्या आपल्या त्या ��ाण्यात जे आपल्या जुन्या जगात आपण समजायचो आपल्यात वाटलेल्या गुलाबी बुगनविलांच्या बागात

आपण लावलेल्या सगळ्या त्या फुलांमधून राहिलं फक्त एकच जिवंत रोज सकाळी ते विचारतं कधी येशील त्यांच्यासाठी गायला

लुप्त होणारे ते चंद्र ज्यांनी आपल्याला पाहिलं पवित्र अश्रू गळणार्‍या सागरांच्या वर तुझ्या कुरवाळण्यासारखेच गोड तसेच कडू सकाळी स्वादिष्ट, पहाटे व्यूह तुझ्या कुरवाळण्यासारखेच गोड तसेच कडू उतरत जात आहे माझ्या छातीत ही सगळी खिन्नता या गुलाबी बुगनविलांच्या बागात तुझ्या सोबतीशिवाय

आपण पाहिलेल्या सगळ्या त्या चंद्रांच्या राहिल्यात फक्त काहीच आठवणी आपण हसलो तेव्हाच्या आपण एकमेकांकडे होतो तेव्हाच्या नशेत दिशाविना माद्रिदच्या रस्त्यांमध्ये गेलो आपण नाचलो तेव्हाच्या आपण हरवलो तेव्हाच्या आपल्या त्या गाण्यात जे आपल्या जुन्या जगात आपण समजायचो आपल्यात वाटलेल्या गुलाबी बुगनविलांच्या बागात ज्यात आपण हरवून गेलो त्या गुलाबी बुगनविलांच्या बागात

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Poor people pay higher time tax

Doubtless you’ve heard that “we all get the same 24 hours in the day.” Of course it’s not true: rich people and poor people experience very different demands on their time. The richer you are, the more your time is your own — not only are many systems arranged with your convenience in mind, but you also command the social power to do something about systems that abuse your time.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/10/my-time/#like-water-down-the-drain

For example: if you live in most American cities, public transit is slow, infrequent and overcrowded. Without a car, you lose hours every day to a commute spent standing on a lurching bus. And while a private car can substantially shorted that commute, people who can afford taxis or Ubers get even more time every day.

There’s a thick anthropological literature on the ways that cash-poverty translates into #TimePoverty. In David Graeber’s must-read essay “The Utopia of Rules,” he nails the way that capitalist societies generate Soviet-style bureaucracies, especially for poor people. Means-testing for benefits means that poor people spend endless hours filling in forms, waiting on hold, and lining up to see caseworkers to prove that they are among the “deserving poor” — not “mooches” who are defrauding the system:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

The social privilege gradient is also a time gradient: if you can afford a plane ticket, you can travel quickly across the country rather than losing days to the Greyhound or a road-trip. But if you’re even richer, you can pay for TSA Precheck and cut your airport security time from an hour to minutes. Go further up the privilege gradient and you’ll acquire airline status, shaving another hour off the check-in process.

This qualitative account of time poverty is well-developed, but it’s lacked a good, detailed quantitative counterpart, and our society often discounts qualitative work as mere anecdote and insists on having every story converted to numbers before it is taken seriously.

In “Examining inequality in the time cost of waiting,” published this month in Nature Human Behavior, public affairs researchers Steve Holt (SUNY) and Katie Vinopal (Ohio State) analyze data from the American Time Use Survey (AUTS) to produce a detailed, vibrant quantitative backstop to the qualitative narrative about time poverty:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01524-w

(The paper is paywalled, but the authors made a mostly final preprint available)

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jbk3x/download

The AUTS “collects retrospective time diary data from a nationally representative subsample drawn from respondents to the Census Bureau’s Community Population Survey (CPS) each year.” These time-diary entries are sliced up in 15-minute chunks.

Here’s what they found: first, there are categories of basic services where high-income people avoid waiting altogether, and where low-income people experience substantial waits. A person from a low-income household “an hour more waiting for the same set of services than people from high-income household.” That’s 73 hours/year.

Some of that gap (5%) is attributable to proximity. Richer people don’t have to go as far to access the same services as poorer people. Travel itself accounts for 2% more — poorer people wait longer for buses and have otherwise worse travel options.

A larger determinant of the gap (25%) is working flexibility. Poor people work jobs where they have less freedom to take time off to receive services, so they are forced to take appointments during peak hours.

Specific categories show more stark difference. If a poor person and a wealthy person go to the doctor’s on the same day, the poor person waits 46.28m to receive care, while the wealthy person waits 28.75m. The underlying dynamic here isn’t hard to understand. Medical practices that serve rich people have more staff.

The same dynamic plays out in grocery stores: poor people wait an average of 24m waiting every time they go shopping. For rich people, it’s 15m. Poor people don’t just wait in longer lines — they also have to wait for understaffed stores to unlock the cases that basic necessities are locked behind (poor people also travel longer to get to the grocery store — and they travel by slower means).

A member of a poor household with a chronic condition that requires two clinic visits per month loses an additional five hours/year to waiting rooms when compared to a wealthy person. As the authors point out, this also translates to delayed care, missed appointments, and exacerbated health conditions. Time poverty leads to health poverty.

All of this is worse for people of color: “Low-income White and Black Americans are both more likely to wait when seeking services than their wealthier same-race peer” but “wealthier White people face an average wait time of 28 minutes while wealthier Black people face a 54 minute average wait time…wealthier Black people do not receive the same time-saving attention from service providers that wealthier non-Black people receive” (there’s a smaller gap for Latino people, and no observed gap for Asian Americans.)

The gender gap is more complicated: “Low-income women are 3 percentage points more likely than low-income men and high-income women are 6 percentage points more likely than high-income men to use common services” — it gets even worse for low-income mothers, who take on the time-burdens associated with their kids’ need to access services.

Surprisingly, men actually end up waiting longer than women to access services: “low-income men spend about 6 more minutes than low-income women waiting for service…high-income men spend about 12 more minutes waiting for services than high-income women.”

Given the important role that scheduling flexibility plays in the time gap, the authors propose that interventions like subsidized day-care and afterschool programming could help parents access services at off-peak hours. They also echo Graeber’s call for reduced paperwork burdens for receiving benefits and accessing public services.

They recommend changes to labor law to protect the right of low-waged workers to receive services during off-peak hours, in the manner of their high-earning peers (they reference research that shows that this also improves worker productivity and is thus a benefit to employers as well as workers).

Finally, they come to the obvious point: making people less cash-poor will alleviate their time-poverty. Higher minimum wages, larger earned income tax credits, investments in low-income neighborhoods and better public transit will all give poor people more time and more money with which to command better services.

This week (Feb 13–17), I’ll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’re doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 13. Next are Melbourne (Feb 14), Sydney (Feb 15) and Canberra (Feb 16/17). More tickets just released for Sydney!

[Image ID: A waiting room, draped with cobwebs. A skeleton sits in one of the chairs. A digital display board reads 'Now serving 53332.' An ogrish, top-hatted figure standing at a podium, yanking a dollar-sign shaped lever looms into the frame from the right. He holds a clock aloft disdainfully, pinched between the thumb and fingers of one white-gloved hand.]

[mamasparky]

hiii what if I said, I want to hear YOUR sallowgraham headcanons ☝️😽🤲

Oh shit- I’ve been Reverse Uno card

Ok, a good chunk of our hcs line up so I won’t repeat those but I’ll def tell the rest under the cut

Backgrounds:

I have a lot more about joshua than Edward he’s my fucked up guy

I’m a big transmasc joshua believer - I think his experiences of growing up in new Canaan really influenced a lot of his experiences with relationships in general

Takes a form of wasteland testosterone that is mostly just a low dosage of buffout

His family and the town loved him but they were never quite sure what to do with him and so was inadvertently isolated by them

He has several siblings but was never particularly close to any of them. He’s a true forgotten middle child

Looks a lot like his father

Was never really that close with anyone his age and struggled to find meaningful friendships

Probably travelled alone on his mission trip because they weren’t sure who to send him with

Was taught a lot of survival skills growing up and hunting game is second nature to him - when traveling with Bill and Edward he was the one to make sure they had protein in their diets

Edward grew up pretty easily with his mom but they argue a lot due to both of them being stubborn as hell

He was also every followers teacher worst nightmare and was kicked out the classroom multiple times

Grew up with Bill as his “best friend” and bill never really developed a proper backbone to tell him off and kind of just stuck around because they were mostly friendly

Edward really demeaned him and a lot of the others and was really not popular at all amongst the followers

Did a lot of boxing and loves to fist fight people even as he got older

Edward really got into trying to aggravate and embarrass him the whole time they travelled together and into forming the legion

Joshua hated it yet took the bait every time because Edward is so good at getting under peoples skin

Legion

They got “married” (probably just joshua saying it after they had sex for the first time) pretty young and within a year of the legion being formed

Now you’ll have to excuse me but I’m a huge truther of Vulpes being their bio kid. It makes no sense within actual canon but it is my hill that I will stand on because I think it’s funny

Edward doesn’t know this because Joshua fucked off for a few months under the excuse of “conquests” when he found out he was with child and because he was young and scared of what it meant. He couldn’t face becoming a parent when he was like 21-22 and abandoned vulpes with a tribe in Utah

Joshua never really accepted Vulpes as his own and found excuses to either ignore or mistreat him due to guilt

Edward and him fought constantly with one another and they never really forgave each other for certain fights when one dug into the other and hurt him

Joshua is the really blood thirsty of them two (and has been since a kid) and encouraged Edward to go further and further with his extremes

Edward (obviously) has issues with control and would use their bonded status as a way to control Joshua in a lot of ways.

Joshua was really encouraged through his religion to respect his spouse and be kind of subservient and that translate easily for their relationship. Joshua has a really hard time telling him no and Edward used that for his benefit when ordering him around and convincing him to do stuff

Edward once thought he could take Joshua down in a fist fight and was quickly proven wrong

Edward prefers physical touch as his way of showing love while joshua prefers acts of service

Both are extremely jealous lovers. If either cheated which Edward prolly did a few times- they always blame the affair partner and not each other

A lot of your post Hoover dam hcs overlap with my ideas so I don’t have too much to say there but I do have a bunch of post actual game things. This is all just based around very personal belief that I think they’re a extremely toxic relationship and terrible for one another. There is no canon bases for these but I like them 🤷‍♂️

Joshua wants so badly to come back to the legion despite the acceptance he has gotten from both his family when he came back to new Canaan and the Dead Horses

If given the opportunity he could and would rejoin the legion as Caesar’s legatus and would pretend as if little had happened the past like 6 years

Caesar would only agree to it within very specific circumstances but who is he to deny his very dangerous ex-husband?

Joshua is also a ghoul in very deep denial of it

Edward now has two extremely dangerous Legatus depending on if they won the battle of Hoover dam or not which he can use for twice the expansion

They both become the even worse versions of themselves

If this is a version where arcade is sold to the legion then joshua wants to strangle him for “tempting” his husband

There’s totally a lot more but this is the most I’ve been able to compile in like 30 minutes so you’ll just have to take my scrambled thoughts

[classicslesbianopinions]

Does one need to be smart to read classic literature by writers such as Homer or Virgil? I follow various people studying the classics because it's fascinating but half the time I don't understand what they are saying. Whenever I try to read any of the epic poems, for example, it just makes me feel very unintelligent because I have a vey hard time understanding what I'm reading.

i don't think you have to be smart-- you just have to be patient.

i'm about to do a wall of text, so here's the tl;dr: it's very common to feel unintelligent, but it makes sense to struggle when reading something so old, and you should not be afraid to use outside resources to help you understand the context of what you're reading. also, it might help if you start with shorter or abridged works.

"classics" is a really broad field, and even a highly educated classicist will have areas they don't know as much about. like, i also don't understand what other classics bloggers are saying a lot of the time. most of the people i follow have dedicated a lot of time to their specific interests, and if my own interests don't overlap, i'm not going to understand everything they say. but it's very easy to feel like you aren't as smart as others because you haven't read the same stuff or because you struggle to keep up. i feel this way often, even after years of study.

the other thing is that if you're studying classics in college/university, the standards are absurdly high. you're expected to learn both latin and greek, and you're expected to read a lot on top of that. it's very hard to keep up with, and there's often a sense that you are the only one struggling to keep up (even though that's not true). it's also hard to enter into if you haven't already learned some latin or greek, which are not often taught in public schools (in the us at least). so the field is genuinely difficult to enter into, especially if you are not wealthy, white, able-bodied, neurotypical, etc.

to the specific point of trying to read epic poetry-- it makes sense that you would have a hard time understanding. it is hard to understand! and there's a lot of context that you might be missing: it's a work from another time and place, and some of it might be completely unfamiliar to you. that's okay. it is unfamiliar to everyone, no matter how smart they seem. go slowly, and don't be afraid to use summaries and study guides to figure out what's going on. like, literally just read the sparknotes if that helps. (you can probably google "[title] sparknotes" or "[title] study guide" or "[title] summary" and find stuff that will help you understand. i also will sometimes just go to the wikipedia page for a work if i need to know or remember what happened in it. and you can google specific references, too, or lines. if you have a question about something, chances are someone has had the same question at some point in the last ~3000 years.) you might also try reading abridged versions of the texts to get an idea for what's going on, and then when you go back and read the actual text it will be easier to understand.

you might also benefit from starting with some shorter works. the iliad and the odyssey are really interesting, but they're also long and can be hard to get into. personally, i recommend plays, mostly because they tend to be short, and i find them more accessible. sometimes you can even find performances online, which can also help a lot with understanding. i also would recommend hesiod's theogony as an intro to epic; it's much, much shorter than the iliad or the odyssey, and it covers a lot of basic myth. ("theogony" literally means "god origin"-- it gives you the godly family tree.)

translation also makes a huge difference. if you're struggling to read something, you might want a different translation. there are a lot of translations free online, but they tend to be pretty old. if you have access to a library, see what they have to offer; if you want advice on specific translations, you can send another ask and we'll answer and/or publish it and get followers to recommend their favorites.

also, if you post a question to tumblr and tag it #tagamemnon, there's a really good chance people on here will help you answer it. a lot of us really love helping other people understand the stuff we're interested in! it's really fun to share information. (if you're wondering, "#tagamemnon" is a pun on agamemnon, a character from the iliad-- it's the tag classics tumblr uses because #classics has a bunch of other stuff in it.) or if you have a question about something someone posts, you absolutely can go into their ask box and ask for clarification. most people really really want to talk about their interests and are happy to give a basic explanation.

most importantly, though, don't let yourself be intimidated. i have been studying classics for years and i still feel not good enough or not intelligent a lot of the time-- the field has a long history of gatekeeping and elitism, and it's really hard to break out of that. but it's okay and normal to need outside resources to understand a text, or to need to read an abridged version before you read the original. there is no shame in not knowing stuff! and it's okay if it's hard to learn.

anyway i hope this helps. i promise you are not alone in feeling unintelligent. but if you're interested in classics i absolutely believe you can find ways to understand the texts you want to read. good luck! <3 our ask box is always open if you have questions or want to start a conversation about what you're reading-- we can't answer everything but we can publish the ask and see if followers can answer it. and of course if anyone reading this has any input or advice for anon, please reply or reblog!

[doberbutts]

Anyway I know it's not intended to be read like this but having been a dog trainer for tears I can honestly say that Firekeeper demonstrates the exact reason it's important to A: let your dog have some autonomy and B: not try to fight your dog.

Yes, the wolf pack politics are based off the incorrect alpha/beta/omega dynamic IN FAIRNESS it was written in the early 2000s.

But Firekeeper is much like a primitive breed dog here. She values her freedom and her autonomy. She is never not going to act at least sort of wild. She follows [incorrect] wolf rules- unwanted touch is warned and then punished if warning doesn't work. You can't force her to do things without breaking her. And her will is so strong that attempting to break her may end up with HER breaking YOU. If she really doesn't want to do it, she simply won't. Thieves are punished swiftly and immediately. Restricting her freedom just results in more creative ways to escape. She doesn't mince words, she cuts straight to the point. She gets frustrated and gives up easily if she feels overwhelmed or like there's not enough benefit in whatever task is bothering her. She watches the silly humans do silly human things and thinks it's all pretty ridiculous but is willing to play ball occasionally if she feels she'll get at least amusement out of it.

I swear she's my high school friend's pyr in human form.

And then re: don't fight your dog. At times Firekeeper is challenged. Someone has decided they WILL bring her to heel. She lashes out and hurts them enough for them to back off but not enough to kill or maim.

When I describe primitive breeds as being very boundary animals, this is what I'm talking about. Tater, my littlest chihuahua, is a very boundary dog. Now she's also a domesticated little thing intended mostly to sit on the laps of Mexican grandmas. BUT when she draws a hard boundary, hoo boy, come hell or high water she will make sure the line in the sand stays as-is. She has no problem dishing out appropriate punishment and does not suffer fools. And even the significantly larger dogs in the house respect that about her, and go out of their way to avoid a repeat once she's stated her opinion on their behavior.

And she gets that from her ancestry of being a feral little dog running around ruins in the Mexican countryside.

She's not an unpleasant dog to live with. Honestly she mostly just does her own thing and the other dogs enjoy her presence. Most of her time is spent curled up in one of the cave beds or sprawled in my lap. But when she offers an opinion about something, it's certainly a strong one.

Too many people try to fight their dog over something. They feel like they have something to prove. They say something about needing to be dominant, the alpha, the boss, or whatever. They talk about firm hands. Tater is a perfectly pleasant dog who is friendly and nonaggressive and honestly she would bite you if you tried this with her. She is not one to be trifled with when it comes to her autonomy or boundaries.

Anyway I'm reading this and I'm reading Firekeeper's behavior and I'm over here going "ok so the author is trying to translate the world's most annoying siberian mix into a 15 year old human girl"

[saint-sebastian-coded]

my notes from r.f. kuang’s talk about yellowface in edinburgh last night (31/5/23)

observation: why does everyone talk like they’re on tiktok all the time?

rf kuang: english-chinese translator, author and scholar. doing a phd at yale.

walking on to the theme tune from succession

said the best compliment about yellowface she’d received was a comparison to succession in that it was completely addictive and unbearably sweet

what was the idea for yellowface?

god called, i answered (laughter)

process was different from writing fantasy, in fantasy its a lot of zero drafts and like a sculpture coming out from a stone

she wanted something different after the sheer concentration babel took

says pandemic books all a) come out late 2022/early 2023 and have something deeply Wrong with them and have some unhinged quality

the book came ‘fully formed’

thinks this is normally a phrase

book came from conversations about the racial identity in the publishing industry especially in late 2020

timeline: george floyd murder -> protests -> talks about improvement in industry promoting diversity especially for black people -> publishing started promises about putting more bipoc writers on their lists but editors started offering black authors positions even un-agented (red flag) and now they’re being ghosted by editors and publishing houses and because of exclusivity clauses they’re extra fucked over. everything they did was performative

-

she wasn’t sure how ruffled feathers were at Harper Collins when she originally put it out

her agent immediately called her when she sent it over because she was worried she’d ruin her career by burning bridges in publishing that she needed

sent it to second readers who were more litfic than her agent who was fantasy and it worked: they loved it

quote: seems like everyone in the industry was on a masochistic streak when they published it

wasn’t until the NYT did a profile about the book and had a conversation with her agent about it and they took one quote from her at the end and it was ‘does becky even like us’

-

q: character questions: june and athena

june: ‘i know june, we all know june. i’ve been dealing with june for years’

diversity critic who thinks only bipoc writers got their jobs because they’re bipoc and not because they have any skill at writing. says that june was ‘super easy to write’ - thinks there’s something about characters like amy from gone girl, like june, like female characters from gone girl knock offs with the word girl in it. she has a voice like sitting in the pub with your meanest drunkest friends and they’re criticising everyone you know 

misogynistic and violent voice - are we all misogynists for enjoying this voice? no but assuming that is worst reading of yellowface and other versions of this voice

ire dealt towards not the women but instead the roles women take and fulfils the rage and condescension for the way women try and be the ‘perfect woman’ by fitting in boxes

june is out of line a lot of time but she’s right about some things - she understands the issue in the publishing industry but uses that to benefit her instead of fixing the problem

athena is dead for nearly the whole book, she’s a ghost. died by choking because: rf kuang is terrified of choking to death, choking is the form of death that robs you of your voice, you can’t call for help and athena can’t tell the end of her story because she’s (dead) robbed of her voice so other people tell her story

we only see athena mostly through other people’s perceived biases about her; no one even liked athena. a lot of people have a parasocial relationship with athena in the book

athena liked making herself the only one in the room - she didn’t want other asians criticising her or having other opinions or experiences from her

a lot of her own representation of asians is problematic and the question that gets asked about her is how do you deal with someone from your own community who is working as a identity broker

mentioned female chinese writers during the cold war who wrote about how good america was and served as soft power; even being sent on tours and funded by the state department because their experience as immigrants made america look very good against china

athena also writes about pale east asians but wants to take the credit for writing for all asians - she’s a cultural broker - wants to be the asian person to ‘explain’ being asian to liberal white people

rf kuang also wanted to explore why people do doomscrolling when they could do something they enjoy more like reading a book; what captures our attention about these scandals and people when we all hate it so much?

-

describes her father as having the diction of a ‘jane austen character’ and reading animal farm as a child and not understanding why people were so upset about these pigs

learned a lot of english from movies and ended up obsessed with the words ‘the force’ from star wars and when ‘chance’ is mentioned in Prince of Egypt

loved reading so much, had books in the bath, even read the back of shampoo bottles when there wasn’t anything else to read

-

next book?

taking a break to do exams and get married next year so katabasis has been pushed back to 2025 - about two phd students who go to hell to bring back their advisor so he can write them job recommendations - likes writing about teacher-student relationships (as seen in the poppy war and babel) and katabasis is about what happens when the trust there is violated. its her first love story and described as “a ‘light’ book about very dark stuff”

-

what’s is like as a multilingual writer?

multilingual writers have a thing of being able to bring a new perspective into the language they’re writing in

many things taken for granted in english as fact isn’t true objectively

‘time is money’ is deeply rooted in anglophone capitalist culture for instance

people move through the world differently depending on the language they speak: metaphors, concepts of time and space, imagery etc.

nabokov is partly an incredible writer because he’s a russian native speaker but writing in english so he lends a new perspective to the english language

-

does she know the answer to: who is allowed to write about suffering?

things like that are on a case by case basis and not all or nothing in reductive terms like june and other characters in yellowface seem to think

questions like this need to be solved in a seminar room not on a twitter thread

kuang personally treats it as making sure her ancestors are properly remembered, their stories told and preserved rather than being consigned to oblivion

treats it with an incredible amount of respect when she takes in her family’s stories rather than the more cynical opinion of diaspora writers accused of just repackaging trauma to sell

could june be redeemed?

anyone can be redeemed if they try but june personally would need someone she respected to come into her life and tell her what she’s doing is Wrong and one of her critical flaws is that she’s isolated from everyone etc.

[icarus-suraki]

Book asks: 8, 15, 42, 46, and/or 48

8) What is your favorite opening line? "A screaming comes across the sky" is iconic. The typesetting for "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan..." is iconic (in my edition of Ulysses especially because the S takes up the entire page, as it should). "See the child" is magnificent. But I really think the opening line of 100 Years of Solitude is my favorite:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Yeah, I'll play the 100 Years of Solitude drinking game (take a shot every time someone is named Aureliano) but I really love that novel and I really love that opening line.

15) What makes you close a book and walk away forever? Really cringy, weird, awkward phrases. Let me give you an example or two:

I tried, I really tried, to read the first Elric of Melniboné book (Michael Moorcock) but I got to this one line where the main character and his lover ride out to a cave on a beach whereupon "they tethered their steeds." I was just so done at that point. I tried, but I just couldn't do it.

Likewise! I was working at a Barnes & Noble starting around Thanksgiving 2004 (baby's first full-time job after undergrad) and that was the era of Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. We sold so many copies of Holy Blood Holy Grail--shit was so cash. So it seemed like it would behoove me, professionally, to read The Da Vinci Code. Once again, I tried. Oh my God, did I try. I even got ahold of a super fun illustrated edition with pictures in the margins like some kind of weird Eyewitness Book but for Paris and Jesus conspiracies. So I started reading and I got into the first chapter and it…wasn't great, but I was going to do my best because it would benefit me professionally. And then I got this one line--this is 20 years ago and I still remember it like it was yesterday--about the male protagonist which described him as having "a thicket of dark brown hair." And I close the book and I never looked back. It was just Too Much.

42) Do you read one book at a time, or several at once? Generally speaking, I'll read one at a time. I might fool around with another book or two, but I usually read one at a time, though not fixedly. I tend to get hooked on one book and not want to read others. It's not a conscious decision.

46) Who is your favorite author? This is tough because it has changed through the years. In high school it was mostly Ray Bradbury, and I like to joke that Fahrenheit 451 got me into college and I wept openly at my library job when he died. But J. D. Salinger started edging in there in high school after my mom gave me her copy of The Catcher in the Rye. By college it was J. D. Salinger, up to and including my senior project, but James Joyce was swiftly encroaching on his territory (a teacher got me to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and I was doomed). By college graduation it was definitely James Joyce, and he hung around through a decidedly disastrous trip through Europe until I got back to the States and started reading Haruki Murakami (in translation) and Murakami was moving up in the ranks. And then plucked up the courage to read Gravity's Rainbow (I bought it with my own money from that same B&N) and I think it was a tie between James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. I finally started reading Cormac McCarthy when I was in graduate school and Blood Meridian made me want to fucking bite things it's so good.

And this isn't getting into all my favorites as a kid (Roald Dahl, Norton Juster, Susan Cooper, among others) nor any of the poets I obsessed over in college lmao.

Right now I'm honestly not sure. I don't know that I have One Favorite Author. There are a lot that I really like. There are a lot that I'll read when they have something new published. I've been reading a lot of Japanese authors in translation. I wish there was more a works-in-translation market here in the states. Anyway, If someone mentions a book that's "really fucked up" or "weird" or "too hard to really read," I will seek that out. I love fucked up books. I love "transgressive literature." And if something wins the Booker Prize, I also will probably love it.

48) What line has stuck with you for years? "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."

Happy Bloomsday. This line is from the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are outside pissing in Bloom's back garden and they look up and witness the night sky. And that is a pale description of the scene, but you understand.

Like, I'm not into tattoos. But if I were to get a tattoo? It might be this line. (And/or the Doodles Family from Finnegans Wake and/or a Muted Posthorn. My mother would kill me and then disown me lmao.)

[haichihiro]

Thanks! Here's the example if you were curious - x

I'm 5'4 and I have strawberry blonde hair in a pixie. I'm a hufflepuff through and through. I enjoy baking for family and friends. I'm a dancer, I used to do ballet when I was younger. I love seeing people happy and I try to make that happen. I'm not very outgoing, I prefer to stay indoors mostly. I have a dry sense of humor for the most partI like watching cartoons and anime. I think my favorite color is purple. I enjoy gaming as well, my cousins are huge gamers and it's fun hanging out with them and playing stuff. I'm not very fashion forward, I mostly wear sweat pants and sweatshirts and get dragged for it by literally everyone 😭

 I'm practical but also a very optimistic person, I like giving people the benefit of the doubt. I hate changes to my routine it makes me v v nervous lmao. I like steady and grounded people I guess someone who is practical like I am. I have a dog I love. I like animals very much, not a fan of frogs tho, they scare me. I'm studying to be a nurse .

based on your qualities i think you’d work best with javi gutierrez!

warnings: NONE! just pure fluff <3 hope you enjoy

because of javi’s line of work, it gives him the opportunity to feed into his hobbies— as well as your own

javi can be very bashful at times when talking about things he loves but he’s also very sweet and outgoing

of course javi likes to use his wealth to his advantage and explore the world but he’s also a home body

he literally has a room dedicated to his favorite films? he definitely likes to stay home watching movies or even learning how to play your favorite video games

his type of work can make him very busy at times so the both of you dedicated a day of the week for movie/game night

during those days you’d always bake him sweet treats and he’d comment, “delicious as always, cariño.” (translation: love, darling, or sweetheart.)

ever since he met you, he knew you were the one for him. you had made him the happiest man in the world

he’s very supportive of your dreams and encourages you daily to fight for them

javi is also a very optimistic person and believes anything can happen if you take the time and just believe in yourself

for example, him putting himself out there and making his script a movie

although his work may not be on the practical side, his kind, heartwarming, funny personality is what pulled you into him

and who could resist that smile and fluffy brown hair?

[vlovers19]

Honestly, after reading your responses it feels like you are heavily projecting your feelings on vmin specially taehyung. Just say you don't like jimin's album because it goes against the narrative of vmin being real . Taehyung is already getting a lot of hate & you are only fueling it more by implying that he hated jimin's album.

chapter 2 has showed all of us that we know nothing about the members at all . If you are following BTS for a long period of time you will know that there is definitely a huge difference b/w there online & offline dynamics & their is no denying the fact that BTS do partake in fanservice. The only way we can tell if their bonds are geniune or not is by looking at their offline interactions, which we are privileged to see in the ch. 2 a lot more.

Based on what we have seen for the past month, it's clear that vmin are not in talking terms with each other at all . As heartbreaking as it is but it's the truth & we have so many evidences for that . Let me add jikook also. It's so ironic how vminkook used to be portrayed as the closest duo within the group on cam but the reality is jimin is more closer with the hyung line specially hobi. Acc. To jimin's own word after the break he was mostly in contact with Hobi & Yoongi & it actually shows .

It's not even about taehyung 's bare minimum support to jimin's album which borthered me the most, it was actually him admitting in the live that for the past weeks he was only doing Netflix and chill in his home ,which means he was free all this time but still chooses not to support jimin in any way. It's basically shows his priorities.He can go to concerts , meet wooga squad , visit jungkook's house at the middle of the night but supporting jimin is where he draws the line. Other members who are hella busy can show up to cheer jimin but his best friend who has all the free time would rather sleep. I mean i have no words & if this isn't enough taehyung doesn't even know about the jimin summoning dance, which by the way jimin has himself posted on Instagram. Goes to show that he was not even invested in jimin's content to begin with.

Vmin are also not talking to each other on phone. Why?? Because in the jhope's Bangtan Bomb jimin was caught asking taehyung that his hair got longer to which taehyung replied that he didn't cut his hair ( this & some other parts are not translated by the company but some Army's did it) This whole conversation is self explanatory i.e vmin are not in talking terms with each other. Also they were lowkey avoiding/ ignoring eachother in the video specially jimin.

All their interactions for the past months are pretty much one sided . Jimin never replies to any of the taehyung's comments but he did reply to other members.

Also the whole narrative that they are private cause of MS is bullshit because at the end of the day they are all publically friends, i don't get how you supporting your friend's album is going to be considered as romantic . Also if they really don't want any attention towards them , don't you think that acting normal with each other is the best option cause by deliberately ignoring eachother is getting them more attention by the fans. Honestly, i don't know what's happened b/w them but it is definitely not looking good at all .

I hope they overcome whatever they are going through.

Oh my Goodness. You really are invested in what you see on camera. I have been a fan of Bts since 2017. That's a pretty long time to know their dynamics especially in public. You obviously have your own opinions and, nothing can change your mind. You are head strong deep in your beliefs and from the way you sounded, you have not been in the fandom for long so there are certain things you don't know and if people want to miscontrue my words about Taehyung hating Jimin then they can do so for their own benefit. It's not my concern. I have already said what I said. It's up to them to interpret it how they see fit

But I'll tell you again, Jimin and Taehyung are private. They have not changed. Jimin hardly ever commented on Taehyung's live and it didn't start today. I can prove to you that these people aren't at odds as a lot of people would think. Now you said Jimin saw Taehyung and pointed out his hair had gotten longer. To you, it was proof they don't talk. Yet, it wasn't that long they all had dinner with the rest of the members when Jin was on leave. Are you trying to tell me he didn't notice his hair length then? Taehyung attended Celine event not so long ago and if you can notice carefully, the hair length isn't that different from now. Even if Jimin hadn't seen his pictures from Instagram, they went viral and of course, he must have seen them just like how a fan asked him during one of his recent live how he felt seeing Jk's calvin klein's photoshoot. He replied that he saw both Jungkook and Taehyung's photoshoots and they were both very handsome. This means he follows what they do. So are you saying Jimin wouldn't have noticed Taehyung's hair length?

I recently watched that vminkook live they did in LA. Taehyung and Jimin had nothing to talk about so Jimin just randomly commented on how Taehyung's hair had grown. I can't upload the moment because it would waste my time trying to find but if you have time, go check out the live. Jimin must have said that to find something to talk about with Taehyung.

Taehyung during his last live commented about how he worked out in the company. He has been into fitness lately which could mean it wasn't the first time he had worked out there. So in all that time, Jimin didn't see him. Come on. He doesn't know the Park Jimin summoning trend? Who is he decieving? Maybe others but not me! He probably must have misunderstood the sentence as people asking that they wanted to see Jimin.

I'm not a seer to know what is really going on with them or why Taehyung disregards Jimin according to you but one thing is for certain. Things are not as simple as one might think. I have already explained myself in the previous posts but obviously you must have skipped past them because you didn't get anything at all from what I said and simply continued with your own opinion. Anyway, I have nothing else to say about this. Thank you.

[thessalian]

Thess vs The Budget

So. The Budget.

There’s a lot going on with this budget, or at least it looks and sounds like there’s a lot going on with this budget, but the one important part is the “We’re all in this together” thing that ... well ... isn’t, quite.

GOOD THINGS, SORT OF:

They’re increasing benefits more or less in line with inflation

They’re preserving the pension triple-lock, which means pensions also go up more or less in line with inflation (the pension triple-lock means that pensions will go up by average earnings, inflation, or 2.5% whichever is higher, and with inflation having hit 11% recently ... well)

National minimum wage going up to £10.42 from £9-ish (which sounds great, but just wait)

THINGS THAT SOUND GOOD UNTIL YOU REALLY THINK

More money to the NHS - but it doesn’t begin to fill the hole twelve years of Tory austerity have left it and doesn’t even enable it to stand still, much less improve services

More money to schools - ditto

Basically anywhere they say ‘more money’, it’s not enough

THINGS THAT ARE ACTIVELY BAD DESPITE GOOD BITS

National Insurance threshold increase. Instead of simply increasing the amount we pay in National Insurance contributions, they’re increasing the secondary threshold at which you have to pay. So some people who are working part time take home even less of their paycheque because now they’re obliged to pay National Insurance contributions, where they weren’t previously. There’s a reason they see unemployment rising over the next few years - it’s because a lot of people who can only work part-time won’t be able to because they’d actively lose money doing it.

In these financially troubled times, they’re investing £280m on tackling benefit fraud. I mean, the DWP always errs on the side of “you’re faking” anyway, but now they want to make it even harder, apparently. This while they’ve apparently declared the billions they lost to Covid fraud lost without trace, even they know exactly who fucked them over and could easily reclaim our money.

Apart from the increase in secondary National Insurance threshold, every other tax threshold is frozen. See above re: the rise in national minimum wage. Basically, as pay has to rise when inflation gets this bad (even though it’s not going to be in line with inflation in most cases), that higher rate of pay will now push you into a higher tax bracket. Yes, this hits everyone, but as usual, it hits the lower paid first and worst.

Honestly, everything here is going to hit the less well off worst. Overall, it translates to a 7% decrease in living standards. The Chancellor is blaming the situation in Ukraine for all this ... or rather, “Putin’s illegal war”, which is correct but inflammatory in a way that is apparently supposed to make us feel better about the poverty that is mostly the Tories’ fault, between ‘Trussonomics’ and Brexit, not to mention badly handled Covid response that led to billions in fraud, with the war in Ukraine being just the cherry on top of this shit sundae - THERE IS A REASON WE’RE HIT HARDER THAN ANYONE IN THE G20, DIPSHIT.

Apparently I’m supposed to feel better about the fact that the rich are being hit too. Guess what? THEY CAN AFFORD IT. There was still no tax that specifically targeted the wealthy - windfall tax is easy to avoid, they still haven’t scrapped the non-domicile tax loophole ... in the end, a lot of this “filling in the economic hole” is falling on shoulders of those already bent double with the weight of austerity and economic downturn. I am lucky. I know how lucky I am. I own my privilege. I am fortunate enough not to have to pay rent. I mean, consider: disability not permitting me to work full-time. A horrific shortage of council housing. The price of food going up by something like 16%, and my dietary limitations. I don’t know what I’d do, I really don’t. It’s a hard enough slog as it is.

I’m going to try really hard not to think about it. There is literally nothing I can do about it. I will think about it on and off, in stages, but I have to pace myself on the fear and rage. It doesn’t help that I got woken up by some saleswoman banging on my door this morning. I get we’re in a recession and that people want to get their product out there by whatever means are available, but going back to the days of door-to-door salespeople is just not on. Besides, the whole point of the security doors in this building is that people aren’t allowed to just wander down the corridor knocking on doors like that. Blegh.

[goatsgomoo]

No tinfoil hat needed to explain the situation.

But first, on AI as a concept:

Artificial intelligence is when a machine makes decisions and/or performs actions in order to achieve goals.

AI as a field is so much older than the latest boom and broader than what the current big names are doing. There are a few AI developments (such as the chess-playing mechanical automaton El Ajedrecista (1912) and the electro-mechanical Nimatron (1940)) which predate programmable (as opposed to hard-wired) electronic computers. Once we had programmable computers, we got systems like Logic Theorist (1956) and General Problem Solver (1958).

We had ELIZA in the 60s, the rise of Expert Systems in the 60s through the 80s (until they became so commonplace that the name fell out of use), and once the Internet became public and the Web was invented, all sorts of AI systems that leveraged access to large data sets to make decisions, such as Google's search engine and Netflix's recommendation algorithm.

So yes, of course people are going to describe things older than the current boom as AI; that's an accurate description!

Translation algorithm? Nope. AI translation.

This is basically the ultimate example of a piece of software that is incontrovertibly AI! It's not just some lookup table where you find the passage of text you want to translate then grab the translated text in your target language; translation software has to handle text it's never seen before. It needs to "understand" grammar rules of different languages, it needs to "know" vocabulary, and it needs to make decisions on ambiguous text. Whether this is done through a large corpus of rules programmed into the software or through statistical modeling is irrelevant; it's AI either way. And if you think that the rise of machine translation didn't impact a whole lot of jobs, you're dead wrong.

My point here is twofold:

What you are calling "AI" is artificially narrow and doesn't really match with accepted definitions

The current boom didn't come out of nowhere, it's just the latest iterative improvements in a field older than you. So calling things that AI researchers in the 90s and 00s worked on "AI" is perfectly reasonable.

Second, on the explosion in the popularity of the term "AI" to describe software:

(And here's where I stop citing Wikipedia because I'm drawing more on my own observations and personal experience)

Sorry to say, but this trend is pretty much entirely consumer driven. People want the latest and greatest, people want the top of the line, people want things marketed as AI. And most of these people don't know enough to have a solid idea of exactly what functionality or performance they want; they just see "AI" and are impressed. The tech companies slapping the term on their products are mostly just meeting a demand and get rewarded immensely for doing so.

Now, of course, investors in tech companies are also exerting pressure to market themselves as AI or integrate AI into their products to capitalize on this trend. And a lot of companies who had been just quietly creating products with AI and/or ML (whether the AI is in the product or just used as part of its creation) are realizing that being louder about that fact will get them money. Because yeah, a red eye removal tool is absolutely AI, and if you can increase your sales figures by 10% by telling people that, you'd be a fool not to. And like everything else, this trend is older than the current big boom; when I worked at IBM my division got renamed to include the term "Watson" back around 2017-2018 despite nothing changing about the products we were making.

Now, all that leads up to my main point, which is not in fact about nit-picking language use. First, from your post:

my tinfoil hat theory is that they're trying to get the term "AI" to replace the term "software" to make the people who are opposed to the labor-rights-violating, job-stealing, "boss threatens to replace you with it if your wages and benefits prove too expensive" AI seem like backwards luddites who hate technology

Look, this has been going on forever, the "AI" term is irrelevant. The original Luddites were laborers who were seeing their ways of life destroyed by mechanization. The introduction of automation into manufacturing processes also impacted jobs. More recently, grocery stores and fast food restaurants have been replacing cashiers with touchscreens. And every step of the way, there's been a whole lot of ink spilled by people complaining about losing their jobs to more and more advanced tools, and by people telling the folks losing their jobs to shut up and get out of the way of "progress".

Zero jobs are stolen, zero creativity lost, zero labor issues at play, just VFX professionals paid to apply a digital effect.

So why decide that these latest developments is your cutoff for what is and isn't acceptable? Why is digital VFX, eliminating the jobs of people who would hand-paint individual frames of film, acceptable?

I ask because I want to encourage people to think about what exactly they take issue with here. If everything before you started paying attention is normal and fine and isn't a labor issue, but changes to the current situation are obviously serious problems, then you're going to sometimes find yourself on the side of people who've been making things worse for decades because their success is now "normal". And (this part isn't directed at you but more towards the people whose takes you were mentioning) if your opposition to things is based on what buzzwords are being used, that leaves you wide open to being manipulated quite easily into getting angry at something rather innocuous. While in this case that's a pretty minor impact, this is the exact same trap I see people falling into (or setting for others) when calling for online censorship or harassment.

Latest tech pet peeve is the use of the term "AI" to refer to basically anything that does any amount of automation or uses computers in any way

[mollytatlisu]

Love-cycled Analysis

In order to begin the production of my mood boards I need to do some research into fabrics, colours, and concepts in line with love cycled.

Starting with materials; hemp is an essential and is shown through its reoccurring appearance in the imagery on the WGSN trend board. As well as this, according to Tidswell (2022), hemp massively aids soil regeneration, which feeds into the circular nature of interdependence and decay. As well as this it has many other sustainability benefits with it using less than 50% of the water in the growth process than cotton does; whilst lasting 3 times as long. As shown through my initial research that touches on significant events around the world, the current climate change crisis is encouraging young people to live more sustainably; which should be reflected in future fashion trends. Secondly, despite the fact its not included on the trend board I think animal free leathers could be a large part of this trend. I found a company that are striving for cyclic manufacturing processes that optimise waste as oppose to linear processes that create waste; which they are aiming to achieve through the production of leathers utilising fruit waste as they explain on Unknown (2022). This also ties together nicely with the concept of decay and regeneration; showing that the decay of natural elements doesn’t have to become waste but can be regenerated into something new. I think the use of sheer and thinner fabrics with weaker structural properties are key, because they act as a visual of the natural decayed “look” of fruits and plants etc. For example when a leaf begins to decay, it becomes delicate, frail, almost translucent and the veins become more prominent. As this trend glorifies decay I think this could be translated to delicate looking sheer dresses and line detailing. In line with this I think the key shapes will be dresses, distressed knitwear and some denim. From my initial primary research I’ve also come to the conclusion that the increased knowledge in todays generation is making for much more conscious choices in the products we buy, with a huge surge in thrifting and charity shopping. As clothes become naturally “worn out” over time distressed looks will become essential and therefore are a vital part of this trend. Not only are these specific materials relevant but the treatment these materials undergo has a huge significance also. This includes naturally dyed and printed fabrics and the way pieces are patchworked together; also acting as a symbol of the reconnection of our society with nature.

As you can see here the Care Culture colourway is described as “grounded” but I think many of the colours here are too intense e.g. Crimson and Candied Orange and I think the palette in general is too varied. I am going to create my own colour scheme consisting of mostly neutral, muted and earthy tones because I think they will best represent the natural theme engrained into love cycled; whilst keeping in mind and taking inspiration from Chalk, Sage Leaf and Sepia on the board above.

Different yarns are an essential; they allow for distressed looks, and production processes that don’t require energy wasting machines, e.g. crochet and knitting. I think this will be combined with lots of 3D textures to create shapes that portray plants, e.g. circular domes to represent mushrooms, or even just accentuated lines, waves, curves etc. some textures could almost resemble that of the netting on fruit packaging that’s less consistent; achieved through knitting and crochet.

I also think lots of garment outcomes will be dictated by material and material processes, making for one off, unique designs. This intertwines nicely with the idea of embracing imperfection and allowing the design process to take its “natural” course.

[visuallanguage-kadriyezorlu]

Evaluation

In response to both modules, I began thinking about my experience with cultural hybridity and my relationship to cultural identity. My initial notions on this topic centred around the struggles of being third culture (or cross-cultural), meaning that I was born of a Turkish father and Scottish mother and how the distance to my Turkish heritage created a void in my identity.

I decided early on that it would be more valuable for me to utilise a unified conceptual framework for both Process and Enquiry and Visual Language – I believe this allowed me to broaden my scope of research and really expand my own understanding of these ideas. I primarily used online platforms like JSTOR for academic journals and book reviews for my research – I put an emphasis on the quality of the texts I was consuming in this project. Some notable texts I read were: “The Crucible Within” by Ruben G. Rambuat; “Adult Third Culture Kids” By Ruth Hill Useem and Ann Baker Cottrell; and “Third Culture Kids” by David C. Pollock and Ruth Van E. Reken; to name a few. There were a few central ideas in these texts which informed my practice further: third culture is a shared experience; third culture kids experience the world in a truly unique way, even differently to their parents; experiences related to cultural hybridity - such as self-identification, aspirations, discrimination and assimilation into culture are more objective markers of development of these children.

I really valued the workshops provided - I developed my own work using practices from multiple workshops including: bone china burnout; paper vessels; envelope poems and folded forms.

Within Visual Language, I considered both the Index and Stranger briefs though workshop activities and additional reading materials – through this I made the choice to pursue the Index brief. I found Rosalind Krauss’ Notes on the Index to be engaging, particularly her ideas on pronouns as ‘shapeshifters’ – to understand language as signs was a new concept to me and one that I wanted to delve into. Furthermore, Krauss’ discussion of the ‘mirror stage’ whereby a child experiences themselves as a being which is physically distant from themselves though their own reflection resonated with my own ideas of feeling distant and alienated by my own identity. Krauss’ ideas informed my own practice by giving me a new perspective of my culture and upbringing – that these experiences could be viewed as indices.

               Folding, dipping and firing my poems became the focal point of my practice. This process is inherently indexical as the final stage of the process (the firing) left traces of the original objects, tangible fold lines and unfold lines are perfectly preserved in the objects. I let these objects be what they are, without judgement or preconceptions of what they would be. Through this I learned that my actions and intentions hold more significance than the aesthetic outcome.

Initially I struggled to understand what Process and Enquiry was asking of me. I found it particularly important to discuss the brief and module in tutorials. I learned that being honest in these discussions was for my own benefit and ultimately the only solution in moving forward.

               In this module, I tried to simplify my ideas into specific areas of interest as my subject matter was incredibly broad. I learned of a Turkish phrase which perfectly encapsulated the feelings I was trying to convey; ‘Ait olma’ which translates to the feeling of longing for belonging.

Overall, I believe I used my time in studio to the best of my ability – I have mostly been in 5 days per week, with few exceptions. I have a challenging home life being an unpaid carer for my chronically ill and disabled partner and having my own challenges with ADHD and so I am proud of my commitment to this course. I have made a considered effort to expand my understanding of contemporary art by visiting exhibitions in Glasgow however, I would like to build on this and make this a more habitual practice. I Something I would also like to improve on is my time management – I have access to help with this through learning support but I have not taken full advantage of this. I can manage this on my own however I have learned that in degree level study I should absolutely be making full use of the resources I have.

[processandenquiry-kadriyezorlu]

Evaluation

In response to both modules, I began thinking about my experience with cultural hybridity and my relationship to cultural identity. My initial notions on this topic centred around the struggles of being third culture (or cross-cultural), meaning that I was born of a Turkish father and Scottish mother and how the distance to my Turkish heritage created a void in my identity.

I decided early on that it would be more valuable for me to utilise a unified conceptual framework for both Process and Enquiry and Visual Language – I believe this allowed me to broaden my scope of research and really expand my own understanding of these ideas. I primarily used online platforms like JSTOR for academic journals and book reviews for my research – I put an emphasis on the quality of the texts I was consuming in this project. Some notable texts I read were: “The Crucible Within” by Ruben G. Rambuat; “Adult Third Culture Kids” By Ruth Hill Useem and Ann Baker Cottrell; and “Third Culture Kids” by David C. Pollock and Ruth Van E. Reken; to name a few. There were a few central ideas in these texts which informed my practice further: third culture is a shared experience; third culture kids experience the world in a truly unique way, even differently to their parents; experiences related to cultural hybridity - such as self-identification, aspirations, discrimination and assimilation into culture are more objective markers of development of these children.

I really valued the workshops provided - I developed my own work using practices from multiple workshops including: bone china burnout; paper vessels; envelope poems and folded forms.

Within Visual Language, I considered both the Index and Stranger briefs though workshop activities and additional reading materials – through this I made the choice to pursue the Index brief. I found Rosalind Krauss’ Notes on the Index to be engaging, particularly her ideas on pronouns as ‘shapeshifters’ – to understand language as signs was a new concept to me and one that I wanted to delve into. Furthermore, Krauss’ discussion of the ‘mirror stage’ whereby a child experiences themselves as a being which is physically distant from themselves though their own reflection resonated with my own ideas of feeling distant and alienated by my own identity. Krauss’ ideas informed my own practice by giving me a new perspective of my culture and upbringing – that these experiences could be viewed as indices.

               Folding, dipping and firing my poems became the focal point of my practice. This process is inherently indexical as the final stage of the process (the firing) left traces of the original objects, tangible fold lines and unfold lines are perfectly preserved in the objects. I let these objects be what they are, without judgement or preconceptions of what they would be. Through this I learned that my actions and intentions hold more significance than the aesthetic outcome.

Initially I struggled to understand what Process and Enquiry was asking of me. I found it particularly important to discuss the brief and module in tutorials. I learned that being honest in these discussions was for my own benefit and ultimately the only solution in moving forward.

               In this module, I tried to simplify my ideas into specific areas of interest as my subject matter was incredibly broad. I learned of a Turkish phrase which perfectly encapsulated the feelings I was trying to convey; ‘Ait olma’ which translates to the feeling of longing for belonging.

Overall, I believe I used my time in studio to the best of my ability – I have mostly been in 5 days per week, with few exceptions. I have a challenging home life being an unpaid carer for my chronically ill and disabled partner and having my own challenges with ADHD and so I am proud of my commitment to this course. I have made a considered effort to expand my understanding of contemporary art by visiting exhibitions in Glasgow however, I would like to build on this and make this a more habitual practice. I Something I would also like to improve on is my time management – I have access to help with this through learning support but I have not taken full advantage of this. I can manage this on my own however I have learned that in degree level study I should absolutely be making full use of the resources I have.

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giventakes​:

hyunsoo gyo is a bit annoying; to everyone besides those that benefit from his work, it seems. but that’s only because he’s trained in paying close attention when people least expect it. he’s witnessed firsthand how many people don’t care to do the same, or use their brains to think about what they’re doing in public. it’s left him with the mental image of one too many adult booger eaters to count. same with card counters and petty thieves and —

pretty little things that can never truly figure where their looks will land them in most cities. (insert julien im.) hyunsoo will give it to this particularly pretty one, though— so far he’s been good at backing up his boasts and not just running his mouth for the sake of it. the same can’t be said about his comments (of which hyunsoo happily returns), nor his material over-extravagance (which is compensating for something, but hyunsoo’s not sure what). but, when paired right, both these… qualities simply translate to the guy having not just a brain, but the efficiency to put it to work, too. and most importantly, he can get results.

don’t tell julien, but hyunsoo can (and does, often) appreciate that.

mostly when said brain is asleep and not drinking before the night of a job, but, hey, what can you do?

“only a few?” he inquires, a smug grin spreading as he ‘dares’ to cross the line separating him from julien’s soirée en terrasse. his steps fall assured, less in the hopes of entertaining julien than in the hopes of getting bored enough to sleep, maybe. might’ve picked the wrong person to do that, but he’ll deal with that later. “did you miss something the first few times?” hyunsoo teases as a hand lifts to assist in resting his weight against the terrace’s railing. “can’t sleep.” his shoulders shrug before he leans to let his weight rest on his elbows, instead. “probably had my coffee too late.” not the whole truth, but he doubts even that much matters to the other. “purposely not thinking about the plan, but to each their own,” his voice slips into a jovial tone, unable to help it when he’s quite sure any attempts at friendliness will be brushed off here. such aversion only makes it that much more amusing. to him, at least.

“are you not cold?” his brows lift as he looks over his shoulder, of course bringing his attention to julien’s bare one. “you look like the wind could carry you away if it blew hard enough.” his lips quirked up at the thought— he’s not immune to finding humor where there is none, obviously. “i hope that’s not the reason you’re out here, as opposed to in there?”

while his gaze never strays from the scene splayed before them, julien watches hyunsoo move in the fringe of his vision. at this angle, the city lights work in his favour, illuminating hyunsoo’s figure in a way that allows julien to observe quietly, easily. even as he takes another sip of wine, he can spot that irritatingly smug look on the other’s face. it forecasts yet another conversation that will leave julien, who ordinarily thrives on social interactions, just a bit exasperated simply because it’s hyunsoo gyo. still, it’s with extraordinary patience that julien keeps his own expression schooled into one of indifference, even bordering on nonchalance. just the right level of calm that ordinary people allow at this time of night.

“i just like to be prepared,” he answers evenly, bare shoulder lifting in a half-shrug. there shouldn’t be anything wrong with reviewing the plan on his own time, but julien suspects hyunsoo is trying to get some sort of reaction out of him. for what reason, he doesn’t really know, but he also doesn’t care all that much. it’s none of his concern what stray dogs do in alleyways when he drives through the city. best to simply leave them be; keep a safe distance. even the sweetest dogs can turn vicious when provoked. or threatened.

“thank you,” comes the first response, paired with a pleasant curve to his lips. it’s mostly sincere, too. with a diet as strict as his, there is some satisfaction in knowing that it hasn’t been for naught. even if the wind doesn’t actually sweep him away, julien still smiles and shifts his weight ever so slightly to lean back against the sofa. the wine goes with him, and he sips at it again with a fleeting glance towards hyunsoo.

“kenny’s snoring is a bit distracting, don’t you think?” a playful glint appears in his eyes, but julien says nothing more of keniichiro furuta. the man does his work, and he does it well, so a bit of snoring is a microscopic price to pay for a job well done. if kenny can sleep like a bear, then julien can have a glass of wine before bed. “i don’t mind the cold, and the view is nice. reminds me of the ocean. maybe if you look at it, too, you’ll start feeling tired enough to sleep.”

[shihalyfie]

What went down with the DigiFes situation, from the community and translator perspective

I think the events of the last few days have gotten everyone in a huge fuss, and because everything got caught up in a lot of chaotic social media stuff, there’s been a lot of questions about what came from what and who knew what at what time. Fortunately, I happen to be:

Someone who’s a veteran in this fanbase and thus has a small handful of friends in this community, who also have their own friends

Someone who understands a little Japanese (although not as much as others in this community do) and therefore can read things in Japanese myself to some degree without needing someone else to translate it for me

So hopefully I can shed some light on what kinds of things were being discussed, and what was known and not known at what time in this fanbase with all of this.

The most important thing I want to establish is that there was no organized coalition or smear campaign. (Kind of ironic I have to say this when the topic at hand has so much to do with conspiracy theories.) I’m a veteran, I know friends who are veterans, they know other friends who are veterans but don’t know me at all. My friends usually agree with and like the same things I do, and I give them advice and assistance with my skillset when I can, and they return the favor. We pass things along through the grapevine, not through some super-secret club grapevine, just via the nature of social relationships and some Discord servers (multiple; again, not everyone knows each other). So these are my impressions of what happened, based on said grapevine.

How it all started

Konaka’s blog is long. Like, really long. Which is only natural, because he was recapping basically the entire 51 episodes of Tamers in excruciating detail, so no translator in this fanbase would be able to translate all of that and not lose their mind! So for the most part people who couldn’t read Japanese had pretty much given up on reading it (with maybe a few dedicated people using machine translation), and some people who understood Japanese would point out parts they found interesting, but for all intents and purposes it remained untranslated and not super-accessible to the mainstream. (Even the Japanese fanbase itself wasn’t super aware of the blog’s existence.)

So when that first post in May about 9/11 dropped, the people who did read Japanese started going “uh...”

At the time, the DigiFes stage reading hadn't been announced yet. So, in other words, everyone reading it only knew it as, functionally, him namedropping an alt-right YouTuber and praising his observations. The reaction from anyone reading the blog at the time was something along the lines of “disappointed and mildly concerned.” (Note the mildly.)

The posts in June about the Great Reset and the anti-vaccine sentiment were when people keeping an eye on the situation started to get really worried about how far this was going to escalate. At this point, I want to make something clear that may not be apparent to those who weren’t keeping up or who are outside the fanbase: Most of the translators and Japanese-reading people deliberately chose not to be too public about this at this time.

Why?

This is the irony surrounding the fact that said translators are now being accused of trying to further “cancel culture”: cancellation was absolutely not what anyone wanted back then! If anyone wanted to create a smear campaign, 9/11 conspiracies, the Great Reset, and anti-vaccine statements are already more than enough to make a starting case. But at the time, this was a blog that very few people (Japanese or otherwise) knew about, translating it would basically just boost its platform more than it would have had in the first place (which would be counterproductive), and -- well, let’s be real, it’s not hard to imagine that people might get reactionary over it, and people would go nuts. Was there any real benefit that would come out of that? Not really, no.

So at the most, those keeping an eye on it might have vented a bit on their personal accounts, but some even tried to self-censor with “[redacted]” or vagueposting, because this was a matter that needed to be handled with delicacy. Thus, there were “mild rumors through the grapevine” about what was going on, but those who knew were trying to hold back with restraint and mostly inform people quietly in the hopes of this not needing to become some kind of huge social media campaign.

(Also, to be a bit blunt about it, it’s really hard to be in front of someone who loves Tamers and is gushing about it and showing admiration for Konaka, knowing all of this and wanting to say something, but feeling like a jerk if you pop their bubble like “also, he’s probably an alt-right conspiracy theorist now.” Not to say that the ignorance-is-bliss concept is always a good thing, but...)

But since the blog posts in question were discussing the prospect of having his sentiments in fiction, everyone reading them was on edge anticipating what might be in store for DigiFes. The hope was that it might blow over. Hopefully, everything would be in the form of subtle themes with plausible deniability, it would all stay within the realm of “it’s not worth causing a fuss over this,” that would be the end of it, and we’d all move on with our lives.

Unfortunately, “Political Correctness is activating Cancel Culture” isn’t exactly subtle.

DigiFes and the aftermath

I think it’s too easy to assign too much responsibility to the fansub group that was indirectly responsible for breaking the news for all of this, but actually, the truth is, this would have gotten out anyway.

Even when the stream itself was going on, there were Japanese livebloggers, and there were also English speakers who caught on that something was happening with “the Tamers fighting political correctness”. Some hours later, an upload of the stream went live on YouTube, and quite a few people started watching it and caught onto what was going on. If the fansub group that released the now-infamous version hadn’t done it, I’m absolutely certain someone else would have eventually (perhaps in a different language first, but nevertheless). And even before then, information about what the hell was going on was already starting to circulate in broken and incomplete forms. That fansub solidified what was going on, and perhaps accelerated the moment the bomb dropped on everyone, but if it hadn’t been there, it would have happened much more gradually and chaotically.

On top of that, while the use of Western alt-right rhetoric (seriously, please do not try to bring the “injecting Western politics into Japanese media” argument here when all of us are asking him to take the Western politics out) meant that it went over most of the Japanese audience’s heads (hence your answer to “who approved this?”), there was at least one Japanese person who was politically savvy enough to call it out for what it was in disgust. (I’m not linking them here because I’m not dumb enough to fling them in a place where some of you trigger-happy people will go after them.) They didn’t even need to be super in-tune with Western politics to get it; they understood enough to tell that there were some pretty alarming extremist views in there. If they understood that much, it was naturally going to follow that the Western side was definitely going to become aware one way or another.

Even all that aside, at the very least, said fansub is accurate; imagine how much worse this situation would have been if someone else had taken it up and confused things further with a misleading translation, or, worse, deliberately messed with the contents. Basically, this debacle could have easily been a lot worse.

I don’t think anyone expected this to get as big as it did (as in, to the point mainstream anime reporters outside the fanbase picked up on it). There was a similar tri. reading back in 2016, but even a lot of the hardcore fanbase barely remembers it exists! These aren’t even supposed to be canon, either! But when you have that disclaimer at the front, and the contents are really like that, it was probably inevitable for it to become a social media sensation. I mean the contents...sure are a thing.

One thing I should point out about the disclaimer is that it only mentions the program itself. It doesn’t bring up the blog, and it doesn’t bring up who wrote this scenario, just the fact that the program contains alt-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Because it does! It’s not even technically praising or condemning the content within, it just says “we don’t agree with it”! What the group did condemn was...approaching staff about it (and especially starting a fight). Because, in the end, that’s what the disclaimer was for: a heads-up about what was in there, and an added reminder that the people translating this are just translating it for the sake of informational purposes. Or, in other words:

It was a content warning. Even without the disclaimer, there were many, many people who would have recognized the contents for what they were and been caught by it unawares, and become upset by it. There were many people who said that they were glad to have that there because it at least gave them some time to mentally prepare for what they were about to be slapped with!

It really, really was a disclaimer. When you have something that level of extremely politically charged stuff, it’s only natural to start suspecting that the translation group had an agenda (official translations tend to get this a lot when content is remotely political). But no, the translation group did their due diligence, even if their opinions were starkly opposed to what was in there.

I was not personally involved in that translation, but I’ll give you this (copy-pasted with permission, from someone who wasn’t technically involved directly in it but was privy to discussions while it was being done):

no we brought up all of those questions like the fact that Yamaki's clearly off his rocker and this isn't supposed to be taken seriously in the first place or that maybe if we're lucky he'll just sound like a fake woke boomer but no matter how you slice it the plot is about him "convincing" the unbelieving Takato and co. into rallying up against the true enemy of Political Correctness and that's just literally the alt-right playbook in a nutshell

the thing even made it to YouTube, we were basically racing against the clock

I mean I really want to say this is plausible deniability but I don’t know how you can get any less subtle than this, this is not something you can mince words

like I really wish we could pass this off as “as long as you don’t know the blog you can take this innocently as political commentary or something” but I honestly don’t think this is something you can take innocently even without context

tbh the Political Correctness part is the most cringeworthy but Yamaki’s rant about fact checkers being evil and all that is probably a lot more worrying when you think about it

tbh I’ve never felt as conflicted about what’s the right thing to do as I do now

So in other words, it was not a reckless decision to just tack on a political label; it was done after a lot of consideration about the consequences to put the label on and what people would think of it with or without context, whether there might be a glimmer of light possibility to try and pass this off as more innocuous as it was, and eventually a determination that, in the end, there was indeed alt-right rhetoric in the program, and should be labeled accordingly.

The result was that, of course, everything broke out on social media, chaos burst out, a lot of hearts were unfortunately broken, and a lot of alt-righters started invading spaces accusing people of proving him right with cancel culture. Ironically, my personal observation is that, while there were exceptions, most people in the actual fanbase did honor the requests to not harass people about it, and this may actually be the most solidarity I’ve ever seen from the Digimon fanbase in my life, which is saying a lot considering how we usually tend to be a drama magnet most of the time. The ones who were actually directly messaging him were his newfound supporters locking down on offering him “support against people trying to cancel him” (I think they were more heartbroken and upset at him than anything...), and most of the harassment came from alt-righters not even in the fanbase, namesearching and sending harassing, accusatory messages to anyone involved for as much as expressing mild dismay. (You want to talk about harassment and being attacked for having an opinion? Pot, meet kettle.)

This leads us back to the question of the blog: if you’ll remember, I just said that the fansub in question did not bring it up at all. That’s because, at the beginning, there was no intention to bring it up if it wasn’t necessary; this was not intended as a smear campaign. The warning was attached to the DigiFes program because it was about the DigiFes program. But the resulting chaos had a lot of people bring up the blog because it better contextualized what was going on, and discussion led to people looking it up themselves and posting fragments of it on social media, sometimes even using machine translate.

Ultimately, that’s the reason this document was released: it was the same reason as the fansub being released at the time it was, which was “if it hadn’t been released, the alternative was watching things get disseminated more slowly and chaotically.” I will say outright that I was one of the people who got to lay eyes on that document before it was publicly released (and even helped out with some advice here and there); it’s no secret that it was being quietly passed around as an internal memo prior to the outbreak. The original version of the document had a request to not post it on public social media because of the chaos it would cause, and while I don’t know how many people got to see it before it was released, I’m under the impression that it was enough people that I was quite surprised everyone who saw it respected that request.

Why does the document contain a ton of analysis and debunking on top of just the translations? Well, when you’re translating those blog posts, you’re technically giving it a bigger platform (which was one of the reasons it was originally considered better to not post it publicly). Since the document exists primarily to inform people, especially about why certain things that may seem innocuous actually have wider context behind them, it’s going to need to contain an analysis like that.

The summary

There were a lot of decisions involved by a lot of different people through all parts of this ordeal. I think it’s fair to criticize whether they were the right decisions in retrospect or whether certain things should have been done slightly differently (including my small role in this), but nevertheless, it was one where the risks involved were thought through and taken into account in every step of the situation, with a desire to avoid chaos, or at least prevent it from getting too much worse. When you have contents like this, a controversy honestly is inevitable -- how on earth are you going to be able to put contents like Yamaki reciting off all the typical alt-right YouTuber talking points and ending in Political Correctness activating Cancel Culture and not expect that to make a stir at some point? -- and so, in the end, this wasn’t so much a conscious attempt at stirring the pot as much as it was the dam finally breaking, and a desire to keep it from spilling over too much. Nobody coordinated this! I think everyone just really hates drama.

Knowing all the steps and thoughts that went on behind all of this, I think being reactionary or accusatory for clout is the last thing anyone involved wanted to be. Considering just how many of these steps above could have easily been made into exposure, from the posts all the way back in May and June to the internal memo document that was made to keep friends quietly informed but could have been leaked to the public with only one bad actor, there was an active, common desire among people who didn’t even know each other to try and minimize the potential damage as much as possible. When you look at the situation now, of course it looks awful and hardly like something that came out of “trying to minimize damage”, but in reality there’s only so much you can do when the contents really are like that, and I personally believe everyone involved was doing what they thought was their best option as the situation kept changing.

I can’t speak for anyone else, especially since I don’t even know most of the people involved, and I didn’t have much of a role in all of this, but I think everyone involved, myself and my friends and everyone who’d been keeping tabs on this situation for months, has been going through a lot of heartbreak and conflict over what to do next, so please understand that there was a lot of thought put into all of it, and that it really was a difficult situation no matter how you look at it.