#it's brilliant

[insanity-laughs-under-pressure]

#Ridcully unintentionally being a really good archchancellor will forever be hilarious #He sasses the Busar so much #it's brilliant #terry pratchett #discworld meme #discworld #reaper man #moving pictures

[musicandotherstuff]

The shuttle for fans at the end of the concert in Bristol

29/05/2023

📸: se4na

#arctic monkeys #alex turner #matt helders #jamie cook #nick o'malley #the car tour #the car era #the car #ashton gate bristol #it's brilliant #i love it hahahahaha

[padfootagain]

In case y'all were wondering...

Northern Attitude ft. Hozier has been on repeat for an hour and a half and I am not ever going to get over this...

#hozier #it's brilliant #andrew hozier byrne #god I loved this song before so much but now #crying throwing up #having a mental breakdown #god I love this so much #hozier was already my entire personnality and there is no sign of it stopping any time soon now... #not that I've ever been over anything Hozier ever made but still...

[landwriter]

PSA: The Death of Translation has been translated into Chinese! Go give it love, or read my rambling essay and then go give it love:

翻譯之死 by @thirrith

How do you translate a story where meaning hinges not only on the words themselves, but the meaning made by the reader's knowledge of their obscurity? Where misspellings aren't misspellings at all, but memories? Where sentiment is drawn from syntax differences? Well you start by being absolutely fucking brilliant!

I was so lucky to be able to hang around in the document while Eth worked on this. The level of creativity and diligence that has gone into this is mind-blowing. It is such a gift, and the process was incredible. It doesn't matter if you can't read Chinese - if you liked the fundamental premise of The Death of Translation, if you like language at all, you need to know how this was done:

Eth's translation is in Traditional Chinese characters with the addition of Classical Chinese and Cantonese to translate the Middle English. Classical Chinese - also known as Literary Chinese - isn't representative of how Chinese used to be spoken in the vernacular, which is why Eth chose it specifically for the written portions of Middle English...and those lines spoken by Dream, naturally.

Hob's Middle English lines are in Cantonese, which has the benefit of being older than and still at least a little intelligible to readers who only know Mandarin. Middle Chinese can't be used the way Middle English is used in the Sandman fandom (delightfully and gratuitously), because unlike the alphabetic characters of English, where words can be sounded out and phonetic spellings will exist in written record - a huge part of understanding how a language once sounded - logographic characters don't directly specify phonology. And even if they did, Middle Chinese spans from the 5th-12th centuries AD - making it contemporary of not Middle but Old English, and covered an area several orders larger than the parts of a small island where Middle English was spoken for about three hundred years - it's nowhere near as homogeneous(ish) or accessible(ish) as Middle English; Cantonese, despite being a different language, serves the same effect.

And then, the grocery list! This is where writing systems go ham. In English, it contains abbreviations, the medial s (ſ), archaic spellings/misspellings, and fancy old ampersands (one of the only logograms in the English writing system, I think, originally Latin's et and evolving over time into the shape of & - in Jane Austen's Persuasion you will find this aural history of 'et' instead of 'and', where &c is used to mean et cetera).

Eth used Cantonese, Simplified Chinese characters (a 20th century addition, faster to write, that Hob definitely would've embraced), variant character forms (which typically have a visual resemblance to each other), and 通假字, homophone characters that were conventionally used interchangeably with one another in Classical Chinese:

English and Chinese have such different writing systems and histories, and Eth has used all the compounding effects of that (upon things like phonology, modern-day intelligibility, writing system changes) to the absolute fullest effect and made choices that add invaluable implicit meaning to the story and characterization.

(As if that's not enough, the translation also features hot-linked footnotes that provide context for cultural references?! Literally everything a reader could ask for.)

And this is all super clever and fascinating if you're a big language fan like me, but the soft artichoke heart of my wonder can really be summed up best by this fact:

For many years I've loved the Jack Gilbert poem 'The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart', enough to put the first lines at the beginning of the fic:

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko we write, and the words Get it wrong.

And for just as many years, I assumed Michiko was a place name, or some classical reference to art or literature beyond my plebby ken - until I saw Eth's note in the translation document.

Michiko, in fact, was the name of his wife.

The whole thing is such a testament to translation: the true deliberate practice of it, not just figurative language imagining a fictional character and his long-lived idiolect. And Eth's translation has only underlined my conviction that there is, sometimes, I feel, deeper work of understanding done - greater art made - and lovelier agonies to be had - in carrying words across languages than there is in putting the words down in the first place, in a first language.

#the death of translation #TRANSLATED!!!! #it must be said i meant only to link the translation but the moment i began to describe what eth has done i absolutely could not stop #it's BRILLIANT #the sandman #dreamling #an essay #language i love thee so

[cassmouse]

Okay I have to say it

'Robot Hell' from S1 E9 of Futurama has to be one of the best spontaneous musical numbers from any series ever it is absolutely magnificent

#it's just excellent on so many levels #I absolutely LOVE ITTT #it's brilliant #Futurama

[explomb]

things just got a lot more lesbian around here, thank the lord

#nice to see the writer doing the good work #spreading lesbian properganda 🫡🫡🫡 #dungeon meshi #wait i dont know their shipname #marcille and falin they are gay #they are gay and in love #it's brilliant #marcille dungeon meshi #falin touden

[felizusnavidad]

rhyming burr with sir 184747488383 times is just A++++++ and so funny, let's not forget that

well, yes! absolutely! one of my favourite rhymes for sure! thank you for reminding me about it (it's not like i listen to hamilton every day so...).

also, i'm just gonna drop these here:

(this is from hamilton book btw, i especially love the second one because i'm fucking dumb & i haven't even noticed he rhymed sister with if, burr, i had to read about it to find out lol. but also this rhyme reminds me of pubwe/rugby soooo)

#cool right? #i love the way his mind works #it's brilliant #give this man every award possible i'm being serious #i fucking love him #lin manuel miranda #hamilton #anon #i saved every letter you wrote me*

[dirtboy-merc]

one of my favorite things in cyberpunk 2077 is the tense power-walking NPCs will do when they sense danger. like, sometimes you'll fry someone and people start screaming and running which is fun and all, but it's so much better when they see you doing something not so chill and they just start power-walking in the opposite direction like "nopenopenope not today satan i'm peacing the fuck out"

much more realistic lmao they're just tryin to mind their own business and go about their day

#cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk2077 #johnny silverhand #its just so funny #they put their head down and just walk the fuck away #or when you do something and they're like #not again! #fuck this city!! #it's brilliant #also i never kill npcs btw #i only kill assholes #okay i will kill an npc if they hit me with their car #but that doesn't count

[ladyminaofcamelot]

The foreshadowing of Royce being represented by the stray dog who isn't actually a stray because he has a collar only for it to turn out that he is a stray because the woman who loved him enough to give him a home and care if he dies has died herself and now he's just sitting by her grave and growling at anyone who tries to reach out for him... brutal. Absolutely gut wrenching.

#riyria #riyria spoilers #riyria chronicles #riyria revelations #royce melborn #gwendolyn delancey #royce x gwen #disappearance of winter's daughter #I just #ow #and the way it feels so dissonant with the hopeful themes of the rest of the book too #it's brilliant #it hurts #i'm gonna go cry now

[mtab2260]

I absolutely love the fact that Thrawn is this amazing tactician, the galaxy's best, and yet he was outsmarted by an eighteen year old

Like... It's just so funny to be

#it's brilliant #grand admiral thrawn #ezra bridger

[yanderemommabean]

MOMMA! I need you to see this shirt I found via Twitter. I think it is a perfect representation of everyone who follows this blog (bc I know I HEAVY relate to it.)

You're not wrong, I just feel completely called out.

-Mommabean (its entirely accurate, I love it! ))

#Bean asks #bean confessions #mommabean #it's brilliant #i love it

[thequeenofsastiel]

It is admittedly surreal to watch Off and Gun in such a gritty, award winning, profound political thriller, and then see this:

#not me #cooking crush #offgun #not that I dislike cooking crush #it's quite cute #but not me is on another level #it's brilliant #probably the best bl I've ever seen

[nostalgic-shamefest]

I LOVE the lacho hivemind!

Like this ship comes from essentially nothing and the fandom version is the best written, most detailed, complex love/hate story I've ever experienced

(courtesy of insanely talented people who for some reason lend their gorgeous gorgeous minds to creating media, headcanons, fanart, writing, humor, analysis etc.)

we're like those people who danced themselves to death in France

We're crazy but we are free!!!

#anyways not to get sappy but this shit supreme #like I don't deserve most of you #I'm beyond thrilled to have found this collective delusion #it's brilliant #lacho #i got sappy on main #bcs #better call saul

[baronessblixen]

Your tags on my fictober entry almost made me tear up.

The tags on yours tipped me over the edge.

Thinking of you and sending you as many good vibes as possible~.

Oh no, I'm sorry 😅 didn't mean to make you tear up!

But thank you ❤️ for reading and the tags and the good vibes. Very much appreciated. And mostly for the story you wrote today.

It was just so touching. In many ways, it makes things even worse. Because Mulder didn't just lose his sister. He lost all of that. Watching baseball with his dad, his mother being his mother, and that certainty that he was loved. I can't stop thinking about the story.

#lovely asks #instant new fave #it just touched me somewhere in my soul #it's brilliant #and thank you for being kind ❤️

[briwhosaysni]

Tumblr I am begging you to let us reblog ads

#yes that is a skunk and a possum running on a cat exercise wheel #there is in fact not a single cat in this cat exercise wheel ad #it's brilliant #funny #i had to do a double-take at first to see if it was an actual ad

[briefcasejuice]

GOD OKAY JUST FINISHED JAZZPUNK AND HOLY HELL IT WAS SO FUCKING GOOD OMG OMG OMG I LOVED THAT GREAT RECOMMENDATION. I'M SO GUNNA HAVE TO REPLAY IT IN A FEW MONTHS

^ us watching jazzpunk every few months

#LITERALLYYYYYY IT'S LIKE SO GOOD #AND SO MUCH HAPPENS AND IT'S SHORT SO IT'S LIKE THE PERFECT MEDIA TO EXPERIENCE AGAIN CAUSE U FORGET SM OF IT #also listen to the soundtrack on its own (i can link a yt playlist if you cant find it) #it's BRILLIANT #it's literally jazz + punk #THE GAME IS TOO OBVIOUSLY BUT THE MUSIC IS SUCH A PERFECT REPRESENTATION OF IT #LITERALLY PROBABLY MY FIRST EXPOSURE TO EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA #answered