#where have I heard that line before

[hotvampireadjacent]

I’ve been reading king Leopold’s ghost. One line stands out to me

“After the protests against Leopold’s rule began in Europe, the Congo state had periodically made a big show of prosecuting low ranking white officials for atrocities against Africans. Occasionally the convinced men were sentenced to prison terms, although most of them were released after serving only a fraction of their time (219)

[trans-androgyne]

It is honestly starting to feel like y'all using transandrophobia are actually just girls that wanted to feel extra special. Stopped experiencing misogyny so now you need a new problem. Get a life.

This is such low-grade anon hate, I was just making fun of another anon for doing the whole worn-out “you’re just girls who want to feel special” thing in my inbox. I’ll still post this for documenting purposes as well as because it’s really funny you’re saying I don’t still experience misogyny while being misogynistic to me. Thanks for the example of transandrophobic rhetoric, but be more creative next time.

[eggtrolls]

haiku misinformation: a fact check

there's an post going around about haiku that has a lot of incorrect information about haiku, its terminology, history, etc. I will try to debunk some of the biggest inaccuracies here. everything in quotes is a direct statement from the original post. this is also really, really long.

"Haiku are made of 14 on, which are essentially the equivalent to Japanese syllabic structures, except the nature of how Japanese as a language is constructed versus English means that any given proper haiku could be translated in extremely and intensely different ways, each giving a subtle but distinctly different meaning."

Starting off strong - haiku are (usually) made of 17 on. It's the classic 5-7-5 pattern! 5+7+5=17! [possibly this is a mix-up with wakiku (脇(わき)句(く)) which is another type of Japanese poetry that does use 14 on but who knows.]

Definitions: an on is a phonetic unit, the equivalent to a mora (pl. morae) in English. this concept a) exists in English and b) like on, is related to syllables but distinctly different from them (i.e. ba is one mora but baa with a long vowel is two morae). On can be counted using the number of hiragana (phonetic syllabic characters) when the text is transliterated, so a word like Osaka that has the long O sound (made up of 4 kana) would be 4 morae or 4 on (o-o-sa-ka; おおさか). it's not really a syllabic structure at all, and more importantly has nothing to do with translation. idk where that last part comes from because that's really...not the point here. Yes, any given "proper" haiku could be translated in different ways with a subtle but distinctly different meaning but that's true of just...translation, period. check out Deborah Smith's translation of The Vegetarian by Han Kang for more on that.

Furthermore, haiku were/are not rigidly locked into the 5-7-5 on pattern. That's just not true, which is why I said usually above. Easy example: a 1676 haiku by Matsuo Basho that uses 18-on:

冨士の風や　扇にのせて 江戸土産; ふじのかぜや おうぎにのせて えどみやげ; the wind of Fuji /I've brought on my fan/a gift from Edo <- that first line is 6-on!

2. "The best way I can explain what I mean is that in English a good poem can be defined as a shallow river, whereas a good haiku is a deeply-dug well."

Not dignifying this with a response. Deeply incorrect and untrue. @bill-blake-fans-anonymous can handle this assertion.

3. "The presence of the kigu. There is a specific series of characters/words which are used to imply a season, and specifically a specific aspect of a season which the haiku revolves around. The creation of a haiku is often done as a meditative practice revolving around the kigu--you're essentially contemplating on this particular natural feature (nearly always the temporal aspect emphasizes either ephemerality or the opposite as well bc Buddhist ideas of enlightenment and beauty begin coming into play) and building an evocative and purposeful point that revolves around it like a hinge. It functions as both ground and anchor."

First (and largest) problem: the word. is. kigo. kigo. It's ki (季; season)-go (語; word) = 季語. Both the English and Japanese language Wikipedia, or a 3-second google search, will tell you this immediately. I have no idea where the term kigu comes from.

Second problem: plenty of haiku, both traditional and contemporary, do not use kigo. these are described as muki (無季; seasonless). Matsuo Basho, the haiku-writing poet non-Japanese people are most likely to know, wrote at least ten seasonless haiku that exist today. Masaoka Shiki, the Meiji-era haiku poet and reformist, wrote hundreds of kigo-free haiku and as an agnostic, tried to separate haiku from Buddhism and focus more on the shasei, the sketches from daily life. you can actually, today, buy what are called saijiki, which are lists of words and terms that refer to specific seasons (in the traditional Japanese calendar, so there are actually a lot of "micro" seasons as well). some saijiki include a whole section of "seasonles" words - here's an article about non-season kigo in a saijiki.

so the claim that English-language haiku are invalid or not "real" haiku because they lack a kigo doesn't hold up, unless you invalidate a whole bunch of Japanese haiku as well. the op also claimed they would categorize a lot of English "haiku" as senryū which is...an opinion. Yes, haiku tend to be focused around nature (more on that below) and senryū tend to be more comedic or about human foibles but...that's it! it's a tendency! it's not a hard and fast rule!

Third problem: the claim that a haiku is as meditative practice revolving around the kigu kigo...yeah, no. the earlier form of haiku, the hokku, were the introductory poems of the longer poetic form, the renga and the hokku gradually became a standalone poetic form known as haiku. the hokku had a lot of purposes and we have a historical record of them going back ~1000 years to Emperor Juntoku where they were declamatory poems tied to events (births, deaths, etc.) or social events (moon-viewing parties) - not really meditative. haiku, if a genre can focus on a single idea, focus on an experience and that can be real or imaginary, direct and personal or neither.

Here's another Basho poem for your consideration:

夏草や 兵どもが 夢の跡 (natsukusa ya tsuwamonodomo ga yume no ato; summer grasses--/traces of dreams/of ancient warriors)

both the dreams and the grasses are those of Basho (contemporary) and of the warriors (ancient); it's about travel, it's about connecting the present to the ancient past, it's not really so much about the summer.

(Fourth, minor problem that I'm not really going to get into: you'd have to take this 'Buddhist ideas of enlightenment and beauty' up with haiku scholar Haruo Shirane but he explicitly says in the Routledge Global Haiku Reader (2024) that "pioneers of English-language haiku [such as D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and the Beats] mistakenly emphasized Zen Buddhism in Japanese haiku".....so.)

4. "The presence of the kireji...it's a concept borderline absent from English because it's an intersection of linguistics and philosophy that doesn't really exist outside of the context of Japanese."

Let's begin with clarification. What is kireji (lit. a 'cutting word')? It's a class of terms in Japanese poetry that can do a few things, depending on the specific kireji and its place in the poem. In the middle of the poem, it can mark a thematic break, a cut in the stream of thought highlighting the parallel(s) between the preceding and following phrases. At the end of the poem, it provides a sense of ending and closure - it helps mark rhythmic division, to say the least, and it is seen as the 'pivot' word.

Two problems with claims above:

a. there are haiku that do not use kireji. For the hat trick, here's a Matsuo Basho haiku from 1689 AD that is kireji-free: 初しぐれ猿も小蓑をほしげ也 (hatsu shigure saru mo komino wo hoshige nari; the first cold shower/even the monkey seems to want/a little coat of straw) <- NB: I love this haiku so much

b. the idea of a kireji, as in a pivot word that provides an inflection point with rhythmic division and structure, exist not just in English poetry but in multiple different types of poetry across time and space! The caesura in Latin and Ancient Greek! The volta in sonnets! Whatever is happening in the third line of the Korean sijo!

final thoughts:

the op included language, which I won't quote here because it was messy and tied into other rbs, about Orientalism and appropriation in English-language haiku, which is definitely a real thing. but this blanket statement ignores that the relationship between haiku and "the West", much like Japan and "the West", was and is not a one-way street. Western writers were influenced by haiku and, in turn, those writers influenced Japanese writers who wrote haiku inspired by these influences - this process has been going on for well over a century. Furthermore, English and Japanese are not the only languages in which haiku are written! Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore was writing haiku in Bengali; other Indian poets were and are writing them in Gujrati and Malayalam, particularly by the poet Ashitha. the Pakistani poet Omer Tarin has written haiku about Hiroshima! The Spanish poet Lorca published haiku in, get this, Spanish, in 1921 and the Mexican poet José Juan Tablada published more in 1922! Italian translations of Yosano Akiko were published in 1919! any discussion of the idea that English/non-Japanese-language haiku aren't really haiku because they don't hold to the "rules" (which Japanese authors have been revising, adapting, critiquing, and/or straight up flouting for centuries) or because English/non-Japanese poetry is "a shallow river whereas a good haiku is a deeply-dug well" just shows a lack of knowledge around traditions and depths of...well, poetry itself.

my god this is so long.

in summary: this is a complex topic. If anyone would like some actual information about haiku, its history, common themes and forms, or a collection of good poets, the Routledge Global Haiku Reader (2024) and Haiku Before Haiku : From the Renga Masters to Basho (2011) are great references and really accessible in their language! hmu if you're interested and I can send you some pdfs.

[sailforvalinor]

Watching Bumblebee (2018) suddenly made me remember my favorite moment in all of Transformers media and now I cannot stop thinking about it:

(MAJOR spoilers for Transformers: Prime, but honestly, it’s worth it)

[video-violet]

Sherlock "oopsie..there's a lie" Holmes 🤝 Jonathan "Helen...was that a lie?" Sims

[sovonight]

;

[5eraphim]

Hind of an odd question but how did you get into tf2 in the first place

i can actually tell u exactly when i really got into it bc i so vividly remember the exact day it clicked with me-

November 15th, 2022

i was having a mental breakdown in a roach motel (all i could afford on my own at the time) in austin, texas and i was going through a post-manic depressive episode, hadn't slept in 3 days straight, and was feeling all scared about the future, a romantic relationship was falling apart, and i was so far away from home, austin is literally on the other end of the country relative to home (and like it's a long story but by GOD was i goin through it-)

anyway, it was late at night and i was curled up in the fetal position in bed sort of staring at the wall while youtube was playing on the desk in the background. a video from a channel i followed for ages was talking about overwatch two bombing hard, and kept refrencing TF2 as a good counter-alternative and, by chance, youtube autoplayed a compilation of the "meet the team" videos after and like, watching that was the first thing to make me laugh audibly since i got to austin.

i deadass had NO idea TF2 was one of the biggest video game franchises of all time (somehow) and fell down rabbithole of lore videos, twitter meme accounts and like, really found this beautiful little community and one i wanted to join when i got access to my pc again.

like i realize this might sound kinda pathetic, but it was something i could hold onto, if that makes sense? and remind myself "life isn't pure hell, there are more good things to discover and enjoy" and it's what finally got me back into posting fandom writing on tumblr since a 3 year hiatus.

and heeeere we are today :')

[caterpillarinacave]

my world has been flipped over

[ratatatastic]

our beat baiting guys to praise other guys on this edition of lets get the rookie in on this and can you fucking guess who he brings up

vegas golden knights @ florida panthers pregame interview | 10.19.24 (x)

[suffercerebral]

i wonder if my ex best friend remembers my birthday every year the way i remember hers

[diluc33rpm]

the romance/relationship system in bg3 is genuinely some of the worst designed shit i've ever seen in any game with that feature but at least the memes we get out of it are funny. once saw someone comment something along the lines of 'patch note: waving at gale will no longer cause him to buy a house for the two of you to retire in' and i've never recovered since

[blujayonthewing]

justin and I were talking the other day about whether/ how melliwyk might fit in and interact with other parties, and it was just a silly passing concept but I realized it's really hard to transplant melliwyk into another dnd setting because she's so fundamentally built into hers

she'd dedicated her life to artificing specifically because it wasn't possible in her world! she's a wizard and a transmutation specialist because it's the field of magic that deals the most with imbuing mundane objects with magic, even if temporarily; she took up adventuring because she'd hit the limit of what known history and theory and experimentation could teach her, and was hoping to make some discovery in fieldwork that would lead to a breakthrough; she's only now An Artificer [player class] because she invented it herself after having someone from a lost world teach her how to craft magic items

'would simon and melliwyk get along' hang on I can't even play in this space because I LITERALLY don't even know whether she's also an artificer in this context

[my5hiningstars]

.

[ereborne]

Song of the Day: March 17

"I Like It" by Cardi B, Bad Bunny, J Balvin

[hella1975]

listening to call your mom rn (god it feels wrong spelling it like that)

gripping u by the shoulders. this song is everything to me.

[miraculousbohemian]

"Until next time, Xena"

"Oh, you think there's gonna be one?" -Ares and Xena, S6EP20

vs

"You were lucky. Next time-"

"There won't be a next time, Xena." -Tony and Gamora, S2EP4