help

[“Some parents seemed almost to fetishize the disparity between themselves and the children they sought to adopt. As one blogger wrote, “No one can get any poorer than our Bethie is. . . . We, by contrast, have all the power in the world.” That focus seemed to slide from acknowledging poor children’s struggles to denigrating kids the adoption movement kept referring to as “the least of these,” as when another adoptive mother to six described herself as “a dumpster diving orphan lunatic” who was still “afflicted with my Orphan Obsession” after adopting four kids and birthing two. “I am already part of a tribe of women that by much of the world’s standards have a disorder,” she wrote. “We wake up at night with visions of orphans going through our heads” and are fixated, she continued, on “match-making” their friends with orphans they had seen pictures of online. “Like the woman diving headfirst for the day old bread and barely ripe red bell peppers we dream and obsess over capturing and saving human treasures from being thrust into a decaying dump where they will be lost forever.”

(…) Some simply proclaim adoption as a great way to make converts. Adoption is better than simply sending money, followers have suggested, because adopting gives an opportunity to save a soul that aid alone will not. As one Christian blogger wrote when arguing against simply sponsoring children in their home countries, “You cannot make a disciple out of a child you barely see.” Cheryl Ellicott, an evangelical foster care proponent, goes further yet in her book, This Means War. A foster mother to more than fifty, Ellicott wrote, “Your main goal is not to raise well-adjusted children, but rather to bring the life-changing message of the Gospel to lost souls. If you work with a troubled, damaged child and he never becomes a successful or productive citizen, but he believes the Gospel and has a saving faith in Jesus Christ, you have succeeded. Adoption is a ministry to unsaved souls.”]

kathryn joyce, the child catchers: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption

Some stuff I haven't posted here before

The thing about Microsoft shutting down Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin is that it isn't really a case of finance bros not understanding how game development works. Sure, saying "we need smaller games that will win us awards" while shuttering studios which have a record of producing smaller, award-winning games looks dumb on paper, but you need to know how to parse corporate doublespeak.

In brief, they want the prestige of producing smaller, award-winning games, but not the risk. The way you get the former without the latter is by constantly buying up independent studios which already have successful titles in their portfolios, keeping them around long enough to provide post-launch support, crank out paid DLC for their already-proven properties, and finish development of whatever is currently in the pipeline, then dismantle them and shut them down before they get any funny ideas about risking your money on new, unproven projects.

If you're thinking "hey, that sounds a lot like a predatory business model", well, exactly.

@sketch-ee replied:

This practice of repeatedly buying up and subsequently shutting down one's smaller competitors arguably already is illegal under American federal antitrust laws. It's just that those laws haven't meaningfully been enforced in decades.

It's ok! Your body makes blood, so if you're coughing some up it's just your body making room for more! #health

Shut up m'dudes, it's a national holiday

HE'S 69 TODAY!!

they truly did Goku dirty

Ok, I did have this in the tags but I have seen the word 'localization' thrown around to just mean 'translation that I dislike' rather than actually meaning 'localization'.

Because this isn't a localization issue. This happened literally because they didn't bother to find a way to localize the joke. This is why some jokes need to be localized.

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Piccolo: "これから悟飯と いっしょにパンを 迎えに行く" (I'm going with Gohan to pick up Pan.)

Goku: "? パン?" (...? Pan?)

Vegeta: "サ･･･サイテー だぞ!きさまの 孫だろ!" (Y... You're the worst! That's your granddaughter!)

Goku: "え?! ああぁ! そうだった" (Huh?! Aaah! Yeah, that's right!)

-

They translated the bit almost verbatim. Piccolo says that he's going to pick up Pan (the granddaughter) with Gohan. Goku is written to have a zero-brain moment and assume that they were talking about getting 'pan' (as in bread), and then everyone else is shocked and Vegeta points out Goku's mistake, since Goku's real dumb in Super.

It just fell flat because the name puns don't translate smoothly into English. Gohan and Pan aren't 'Rice' and 'Bread' to English-speakers, they're just 'Gohan and Pan'.

If it was 'localized' then they would have tried to make the joke work with the name puns in the context of English-speaking readers, and Goku's mistake would be seen in good faith (if not still pretty silly) but it wasn't so the pun falls through and Goku looks more airheaded than he's already written to be in the scene.

The DBS manga has done Goku's character pretty dirty. It's just less a localization problem and more a general sort of writing issue overall.

UNWARRANTED?

— Mahmoud Darwish

i-

The President of Brown University, in response to the hunger strikes and protests by students on campus a couple months ago, said that it was inappropriate for the University to “use its financial assets… to ‘take a side’ on issues.” A maddeningly common refrain when you recognize that the current state of things is to be staunchly on the side of the apartheid state.