@sparkylurkdragon / sparkylurkdragon.tumblr.com
Hello and welcome! I'm Sparky Lurkdragon.
This about page is intended to be more of a Before You Follow than a Do Not Interact. If I don't want you around, I will block you. This information is intended to help you make a decision that works for you personally. I will add to it as need be.
DESCRIPTION: Nomiani replies, "Tell me about some other gods." Pliyo-Fourth continues with their tales of Fress gods. "Some other gods? Certainly! You see, when Fress need more good luck, they seek out the Speaking Dark.
The Speaking Dark swims through the oceans of the night sky, and looks down on the land through the stars' light.
From this vantage point, foa can see the very balance of luck itself, both good and bad.
When we're unsure of what to do, we ask The Speaking Dark what actions will bring us good luck. If we're lucky, the answer comes in our reflections in the water during darkest night." CHOOSE ONE: 1) "Tell me about some other gods." 2) "Can I ask the Speaking Dark for good luck?" 3) "Tell me some other things about your culture."
Power
"All autistics have low empathy" - This statement is wrong.
"Autistics having low empathy is a MYTH, we actually have HIGH empathy!" - This statement is ALSO wrong.
Autistics can have low empathy, they can have high empathy, they can have learned empathy. The myth would be that all autistics only experience one end of the empathy spectrum.
In spreading around misinformation that autistics actually have high empathy, you are disregarding the autistics who do have low empathy. And vice versa.
from john ciardi’s translation of “the inferno” by dante alighieri
THANK YOU. MOSTLY? Like there’s elements of this even in a professional translation choosing not to localize something. It’s pretty much showing the seams of your work on purpose out of respect for the text. …Pivoted metaphors there but.
[image: the first paragraph of a page labeled “Translator’s Note”. it reads, “When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same “music,” the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.“]
#traduttore traditore #translator traitor #notice how the english words have fewer sounds in common than the italian words do #notice how the italian words have the same number of syllables and the english words don’t #every translation betrays the original somehow #I wonder how Ciardi betrayed Dante #that is one beautiful metaphor Ciardi is bringing in his own defense though
It has nothing to do with amateur translations. At least, not inherently. It’s also a major issue in professional translations, especially when the languages are very different or there is a massive gap in cultural context.
Localization is tuning your translation to fit the context you are translating it into, even if that means being less literally faithful to the original. In the original metaphor, localization is making that violin part the best violin part it can be instead of a shitty imitation of a piano. Sometimes you can do that and it works really well. But what if the piano is playing a chord? You usually have to pick only one note of that chord for the violin to play. In the same way, texts often have multiple layers of meaning to them, and by focusing on one and making it intelligible to the context you’re translating for, you have to leave out the other layers of meaning. You capture that one layer really well! but you have left out the others because there isn’t any way to have all of them at the same time in the language and context you are translating it into. Even if you accurately translate that one layer of meaning, leaving out the others can radically change the meaning of the work as a whole. (Usually be eliminating nuances.)
Then there’s the potential problem of what do you do if the cultural gap is too wide, if your target audience’s way of seeing the world is so different that you’d need an essay for them to grasp the meaning of a phrase, and even then they probably would miss some things. (Or sometimes the problem is that the translator doesn’t understand the cultural context they’re translating from or to–this is most common in people translating ancient texts, but sometimes happens even with modern texts, depending on what’s being translated and who is doing the translating.) How do you help the audience hear what the author was trying to say? What if there isn’t a way to make it be something the audience will recognize as “good violin music” without doing violence to the author’s intentions?
So sometimes translators intentionally don’t localize. They try to make their translation as much like the original as possible even if it makes less sense in their target language–even if, in this metaphor, that makes it bad violin music. What the tags call “weird and potentially shitty violin music that’s more like piano … pluck and whack those strings music man any instrument can be percussion if you’re willing to become an enemy of god.”
This is where you get debates about “word by word” translation (with lots of translation notes) as opposed to “thought by thought” translation. Are you going for something that replicates the meaning of the original as closely as possible even if the poetry is lost and your target audience finds it harder to understand and enjoy? Or do you go for something they’ll appreciate that captures the poetry of the original, even if meaning is lost or obscured?
Neither option is wrong; they’re trying to do different things.
The littlest things we know to be small = debut literary fiction
The dark wife: thriller, adapted into a Hulu original
The mailman’s niece = historical fiction
The mailman of Warsaw = also historical fiction but about war
The gate of wind = fantasy
The gate of wind and bones = young adult fantasy
A gathering of pelicans = mystery, part of a long running series that takes up a whole shelf at the library
The Group Project Partner Gambit = romance with a cartoon cover
Wendy Jenkins is Scared of Commitment = romance with a cartoon cover of gay people
The little wedding cupcake shop of hopes and dreams - chick lit with a picture of a cute house or shop on the front, differentiated from romances because the heroine buys a small business first.
The Murder Killing - dark cover with all caps white writing book, sold to absolutely millions of middle-aged men who don’t read much, nobody you know will ever buy this book, but it has sold more copies than there are people in Europe. Life is rich, and full of many minds unlike yours, that you will never really know.
Twigged: the secret life of leaves and twigs - book with a linocut cover about natural history, containing three teaspoons of research, and a lot of the author sadly staring at a wet twig and thinking artistically about climate change. A scene where they watch someone drop a toothpaste cap in a forest and write six pages about how they felt while witnessing it (unclear whether the author picks up the toothpaste cap). The teaspoons of research are perfectly good, but are unmistakably the same exact spoonfuls as the ones in scat: the secret life of badger droppings and forage: the secret life of hidden snacks and landmarks: the secret life of things you see and bees: the secret bees of lifey bees. You don’t learn anything new about any of it, but you do feel like you reading the book was providing therapy for the author, in addition to paying their mortgage for them, which was awfully nice and charitable of you and gives a warm glow.
Scrambly Jones and the Rainbow Ring of Detective Witches - earnest early-reader book with thirteen charming, diverse, superpowered children and their quirky animal companions crammed in various poses onto the silver and black cover, with the paper edges in bright colors. They are all having a great time. Tumblr is too old to notice these, and they evaporate from public consciousness in about ten minutes - they seem to be generated constantly, appearing and disappearing in favor of The Twiddly Twins and the Bark of Whimsigoth Wangles or Calamity Clouds and the Vex Hex Codex- and from here, they seem to be what happens when you tell ChatGPT to change the names of the last one that was on the table five minutes ago, and feed the results to Midjourney for the cover. But there are ten-year-old kids out there, growing up now, for whom each one is the seed of some powerful childhood resonance, which will shape their destiny for years to come. We are not the audience: pass kindly by. Life is rich.
the gate of wind and bones and wendy jenkins is scared of commitment both have live action adaptations exclusive to amazon prime
I call them Ocira. They're a sort of combination of seals and octopus. They're eusocial and very kind
That wrinkly thing on their chest are their gills, which they can use to express certain emotions.
Their "teeth" are truly spines that can be raised to eat meat, or flattened to chomp plants.
To communicate, they do a sort of drumming and pinching of their swim bladders for different tones and squeaks.
They live on an ocean planet, in shallow, warm waters around reefs.
I might draw them more and tell more about them 😸
I present u with…Leopard Gecko Hydra: THE MOST FEROCIOUS(ly cute) variant 🦎✨
Drawing Venusaur with every Pokemon pt. Wailord
rat punk coming out of their bin to shame mankind
I would be the worst spy of all time because on one hand I overshare like hell, but on the other hand I also have THE shittiest memory so it’s really a lose/lose scenario for everyone involved.
guy interrogating me: What’s the passcode?
me: Ah fuck. I think it might be 792.....4?
me: Actually no I think it starts with a 2.
me:
me: Yeah I usually just rely on muscle memory for it. Do you think you could get a keypad in here? That might be faster.
guy interrogating me: who do you work for?!
me: Okay, so this is super embarrassing. I know he told me his name when we first met but I forgot and at this point it would be weird if I asked him for his name again, right? So I just kind of go with “sir” whenever I have to talk to him. It might be David though. He looks like a David.
me, after being extracted: bad news guys, I totally blew Dave’s cover.
my boss: Wait, what?
me: Yeah, like they had knives and shit and it was kind of stressful so I just told them that my contact’s name was David Johnson. Really sorry about that.
boss: We don’t have a David Johnson working for us. Are you thinking of James?
me:
me: Good news, guys, I did not blow James’ cover!
Enemy 1: So, how did the interrogation go?
Enemy 2: We got nothing. All they did was ramble on about their childhood trauma for two hours.
Enemy 1: Hmm. maybe lower the dose of the truth serum next time.
Enemy 2: We didn’t use truth serum.
If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:
These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:
But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.
Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.
If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.
Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.
Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.
Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.
What I have gleaned from Cattle Plague: A History so far:
Still deep in the trenches of "and then this guy invaded those guys who were displaced into these guys' country, and later on they re-invaded. Forty bazillion cows died. NAPOLEON"
I suspect someone more into military history than me would get more out of the minutiae here, but I'm still plodding through and learning, despite my eyes glazing over a little at all the invasions and counter-invasions. Like I said: wars sure are great at spreading disease!
There's also a heaping side of "we still don't quite have germ theory figured out. Do we need to strangle the culled animals so the blood doesn't get anywhere?" And, "Probably it isn't contagious and is just some kind of poison? Oh wait. Yes it is contagious, whoops, we just killed six fucktillion cattle," as well as "fuck quarantines we have cows to sell. Smuggling it is. What do you mean they were sick and we just killed every cow for tens of miles?" (The last is of course frustratingly familiar in the Age of COVID.)
There were also, historically, some problems with compensating farmers for culled cows, because some farmers would take the opportunity to slaughter older animals that didn't have rinderpest, then collect the compensation.
Man, and this is all still while it was restricted to Asia and Europe...
Getting to the section where the plague was spread by commerce is honestly refreshing. Particularly since it seems the outbreaks in 19th Century Britain were better documented than a lot of earlier outbreaks, judging by how exhaustive the coverage of them is. These were the final European outbreaks, too.
Anyway, it is, uh. Hilarious? Darkly? To see so much of this dude John Gamgee, a veterinarian who correctly identified the risk of importing cows from Russia and the Baltics where rinderpest was enzootic without quarantines in the age of steam boats, get yelled at via letters to the editor.
Like. For context, bear in mind that the outbreak started in 1865, and that Louie Pasteur's experiments with flasks and broth were in 1859.
Gamgee: Guys could we. Could we not. It's clearly spread by contagion and if we take quarantine and sanitation precautions we won't have to kill or see die a bunch of cattle-
Letters to the Editor: CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS RUSSOPHOBIC IDIOT. OBVIOUSLY IT'S SPONTANEOUSLY GENERATED SO QUARANTINES ARE A WASTE OF TIME. GIVE ME THAT SWEET SWEET BUY-LOW-SELL-HIGH COW MONEY.
(The reason the Russian cows were low-priced was because of All the Disease. Foot-and-mouth and pleuropneumonia, too!)
Anyway, later...
Gamgee: Well. It appears we now have rinderpest. Told you so. Anyway on the Continent they stamp it out via immediate slaughter of infected animals and their contacts since the disease kills 50-90% of infected animals; we don't have any reliable cures and no vaccine-
Letters to the Editor: FUCK YOU I'M GOING TO GIVE MY CATTLE [I'm sure bizarre attempts at cures that I haven't got to yet]
Though, that's at least a lot more understandable to me, both from an affection for the herd perspective and from the cold business perspective. People have been unwilling/unable to take one for the team re:infectious diseases for a long time...
They did, eventually, adopt slaughter-on-sight policies. Which stamped out later-occurring epizootics before they got too widespread.
Gamgee: I told you!
Gamgee was also apparently a pretty wild dude outside of being correct about cattle plague. Wikipedia tells me he was an early proponent of refrigeration, and he also claimed to invent a perpetual motion ship-propulsion system that US President James Garfield was hoodwinked by. Might need to read more about this fella.
"The Commission [to investigate the origins of the 1865 rinderpest outbreak and recommend courses of action] consisted of 12 men who knew nothing of animal diseases in general, let alone rinderpest."
- from Chapter 14, "The Royal Commission, Legislative Failure, Insurance, and Government Actions in 19th-Century Britain"
From the Commission's First Report, concerning the strict measures taken against rinderpest on the Continent, in particular slaughter: "They are measures indeed which could never be enforced - they involve sacrifices to which no people could reasonably be asked to submit - unless in the presence of a dreaded enemy, and under a sense of overwhelming necessity."
YOUR DREADED ENEMY IS A FUCKING VIRUS CONTAGION
Item: Flame Organ
