#lol i got a 20th anniversary one and it's so much fun

[citrus-cactus]

Otakon 2023 Wrap-Up Post!

Otakon 2023 was this past weekend, and I gotta say I had a great time! (if that wasn’t obvious. From the deluge of posts about the digimon movie redubs). That was the main reason I went this year, and the screening took up a significant portion of my time there (WORTH. EVERY. MILLISECOND.), but during my one day I was able to blitz through the main halls as well. And I met @ahiddenpath ! That was AWESOME!!! She’s incredibly sweet, and we got to walk through Artist Alley together and talk (irl!!!) about Digimon, fandom, and life ☺️

My con haul!! I was like, “eh, it’s not that much” but some might beg to differ, including me, now that I look at it all together 😅 Most of it came from the Dealer’s Hall. There is one vendor who is a huge Digimon fan herself and sells a TON of amazing digi-merch, and that’s where most of my money went, ahahaha. She not only had some amazing hard-to-get figures and blind boxes (the Adv. kigurumi figures and Piedmon keychain set), but some Frontier 20th Anniversary merch as well! HOW CAN I SAY NO TO THAT??? That is a GIANT TAKUYA ACRYLIC STAND (which I would prefer to be a bit smaller), but aaah!!!! 🤩 I randomly got Sora from a blind box (💖), as well as Koji-in-pajamas (!!), and spent a little extra to get Takeru unwrapped. Unwrapped Jyou was the same price as a random blind box, because she said no one wants him and she always has extras! Can you believe it?? JYOU! 😭 Hidden and I agree that she’s not reaching enough of this audience on Tumblr, because HOW DO YOU NOT LOVE JYOU? Look at his face! He HAD to come home with me 😤

Ahem. Anyway, I found those oldschool Fox Kids-looking vinyl clings at a separate stall that sold a lot of vintage 90s stuff. Dub merch!! I do have a small collection of that.

The pencil-board… folder… thing… is two-sided and I believe it was originally an extra with a specific issue of Animedia that covered both tri and Appmon! I had to. Because APPMON (also I do love that tri art) 🥺

Some close-ups of the small stuff! The resin statue of the mountains came from Artist Alley (actually, a friend of Hidden!) because it reminds me of home. I also really liked the moon-shaped pendant. And a citrus pin! MY BRAND!! I have a shirt with Togemon on it (the cactus), but I have a hard time finding citrus merch, so YES, I can now rep my full screen name in an outfit 👍👍👍 One lone Goomy pin is my sole Pokemon purchase this year. “Hen with a Tie” cracked me up (if you’re an anime dinosaur like me, you know), and the Mimi button was actually a gift from Hidden! 😭

Finally, Takeru and Jyou side-by-side, where they belong ☺️ The contrast of their poses/expressions cracks me up!

Takeru: I think I’ll cause problems on purpose.

Jyou: NOOOOO PLS MY BLOOD PRESSURE!!!!

So there you have it: the results of an intense and incredibly exciting digi-day! I’m still so shocked that my local con got this amazing premiere, and I got to watch the whole thing (er… when I wasn’t live-texting information to certain people who couldn’t be there in person, lol!). I’m SO incredibly grateful to the Discord group for notifying me about it, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have even gone to the con at all this year!

Really hoping I can see my OG con buddy either at Otakon 2024 or her local con, so she can take a well-earned break from being a new mom and join in on the fun! 🤞🤞🤞

#digimon adventure #digimon frontier #appmon #appli monsters #otakon 2023 #con wrap-up #the cactus speaks #I know that’s not how being a parent works but I can dream!!

[cursedbluebird]

Celebrating TOA and the people who contribute to make our group what it is.

Repost, don't reblog. Only fill in what you feel comfortable sharing!

Happy anniversary, TOA! Here's to many more years spent together.

tagging: you

---

Name: Rosie

Pronouns: she/her

Birthday (no year): March 24

Where are you from? What is your time zone? Nebraska, CST

Roleplay experience: since 2009

Got any pets? Freya and Bast the naughtiest kitties in the universe

Favorite time of year: Fall

Some interests and things you like: sewing, thinking way too much about clothes

Some funfacts & trivia about you: - I wrote my undergrad thesis on the progression fashion of the 20th c, but I am terrible about keeping up on modern fashion

What non-Fire Emblem games do you play? L E G E N D O F Z E L D A.... I love Majora's Mask... Hero of Time my beloved baby boy..... I also love Okami so much. I'm a sucker for fairy tales and mythology.

Favorite Pokemon type & Pokemon: I'm actually not a big pokemon person! I started with Y. Ghosts and Psychic are my faves, particularly Mimikyu, Meowstic, and Hoopa. Gengar is also shaped like a friend :)

How did you get into Fire Emblem? I had been interested in the series since the GBA days but it wasn't until I got my 3ds and awakening that I got the chance to play a game.

What Fire Emblem games have you played? Awakening, Conquest & Birthright, 3H, Shadows of Valentia

First Fire Emblem game: Awakening

Favorite Fire Emblem game: Fates or 3H

Any Fire Emblem crushes? Oh my God Niles hi tee-hee... Tho Seteth damage art did get me into playing feh... And uh... My husband does look like Xander ...and his name is.... Alexander........🥴 I've posted my questionable taste in fe characters you can find it in the chat if you search

If you’ve played the following games, who was your first S support? - Awakening: Chrom- Fates: oh good God idr.... Kaze? I know I did Niles in one run... Did I do Stahl in Birthright? Kaze in conquest and Stahl in Birthright sounds right- Three Houses: Dimitri - Engage: haven't played engage. Place your bets for fun

Favorite Fire Emblem class: I like the magic classes! Healing and attacking! Tho Camilla's malig knight does have a special place in my heart 💜

If you were a Fire Emblem character, what would be your class? Dark magic user...I do not escape the goth aesthetic.... Unfortunately I am too much of a noodle to be a malig knight 😞

If you were a Three Houses character, what would be your affiliation? Fear the Deer!!! (Side note, bless my luck bc when I ordered a leftover bundle from fodlans fables I got the deer. A cosplayer I look up to also offered me her deer pin from the fe3h preorder bonus which had me 🥹)

If you were an Engage character, which Emblem would you Engage with? I don't know what this means but I copied this from Erica and her answer was funny.

How did you find TOA? I track the Marianne tag on Tumblr and saw the previous Marianne drop. The old shit post emblem group I was in was falling apart and I thought it would be nice to join a new one.

Current TOA muses: Marianne, Camilla, Triandra

Who was your first TOA muse? If you don’t have them anymore, could you see yourself picking them up again? Marianne my cursed little blue bird 💙 I've thought about dropping her, thinking that maybe someone else would do a better job, but I just can't let her go.

Have you had any other TOA muses? Other than cami and Tria nope

Do you think you have a type of character you gravitate towards? Um??? I don't know? I got told that Tria was a Rosie muse when I reserved her so I guess y'all know better than me lol

What do you believe you enjoy writing the most? I like writing horror and setting the scene :) my favorite part about combat events is describing the creatures we're facing from my characters pov

Favorite TOA-related memory: What Kent told Mari in her first lore event about the importance of healers have lived rent free in my memory since it happened. Also Griss trying to blow himself up in the arena and despite his best efforts not succeeding.

Got any delusions that didn’t see the light of day in TOA that you’d like to share? Charlotte is one I've thought about and is the one most likely to send Triandra packing....there are an awful lot of men at the academy who would do a great job taking care of her and her family 😏

#dash games #This was fun!!! I can't wait to get home and read everyone's responses #I love seeing all the muses y'all have written in the past #And I like seeing what others like to write bc it makes it easier for me to approach you for threads

[fairyeunji]

Another list of groups/soloists who need a comeback immediately (as of Feb 2024):

Alice/Elris - Not only have we not had a comeback since APRIL of 2023, but Do-A and Yeonje are still on hiatus with basically no updates????? Ngl, I'm getting a teeny tiny bit worried about them

AOA - .....wishful thinking. never gonna happen. just leave me to cry

Apink - Not too worried about this tbh, even their last comeback was April of 2023, it's natural for a group that's lasted so long to focus more on individual releases and solo work. I don't think they're going anywhere anytime soon, and I'm happy with a yearly album. Still, I do think it's time for the comeback lol

Apink CHOBOM - Again, wishful thinking. One of the best sub-units of all times, I NEED another Copycat

ARTMS - They are preparing for their debut, but I just need it to happen quicker

Billlie - Hear me out, this one is specific - OT7 comeback or nothing. Sua and Suhyeon come back, the kids miss you....

Blackswan - Karma and Cat & Mouse were 10/10, DR is literal dogshit but cmon, Blackswan go viral on twitter every five minutes

BB Girls/Brave Girls - I feel like they re-debuted/re-launched and disappeared???

bugAboo - never taking them off this list, idc if they're all doing separate things and have re-debuted, i am putting my hands over my ears and closing my eyes so that i can live in delusional peace

Cherry Bullet - Going off their once a year comeback strategy, this should actually be happening sometime soon. Cherry Dash was March 2023, so who knows?

Choi Yoojung - if Weki Meki aren't allowed to have a comeback, give Yoojung something, I'm begging

Chung Ha - this is long overdue, I need her to release bare & rare pt. 2 immediately

CLASS:y - I know they released a barely-promoted winter single a while back, but their last proper comeback was October 2022. That's so fucking long ago.

CLC - CLC reunion??? who said that??? pls i'm begging

CSR - Not too optimistic, most of the members have been shipped off to a survival show. Sucks cause CSR had a really strong start, but their promotion went really quickly downhill after Shining Bright

DreamNote - I'm just tired..... please.... I'll take a digital single atp

EL7Z-UP - Hasn't been that long since they debuted, but I still would love a comeback lol

Everglow - my ult of all ults do something. Me and every other forever on twitter are rocking in the corner and predicting april for the next comeback

Fifty Fifty (the ACTUAL group, not the brand) - 3jeong return pls. not to attrakt, just to releasing music. keena pls leave that company, i'm literally begging.

Fromis_9 - Unlock My World was June, Hybe it's been a while. We all know you hate Fromis, but do your job. Give the people what they want

Geenius - They debuted last month lol, but I just can't wait for their first comeback. I loved Voyage so much, so I'm definitely tuning in for any comebacks whenever they may happen

Gfriend - I will beg.

Girls Generation - again, delusion. 20th anniversary???? please???

Girls Generation Oh!GG - why did they evaporate into thin air, sm.

GOT the Beat - bring them backkkkkk

IOI - there's always more room for delusions guys. they're totally gonna have a comeback guys. it'll happen i promise, i saw it in a dream

Iz*One - same here. a talking cat told me they would have a comeback.

Jeon Soyeon - she's overworked as hell, so i do not want this, but i also really really really would love another solo album

K/DA - Riot stop picking random groups to release theme songs, bring back the mothers themselves

KARD - i just think it'd be neat

Kep1er - the fact that we only have 6 months left is sickening. genuinely. i need a full album

Kiss of Life - whenever they get around to it tbh, not too worried.

Kwon Eunbi - please please please go back to glitch and door

Lee Chaeyeon - I just love her songs, they're so fun. Let's Dance was September, so sometime soon???

Lee Hi - I am on my hands and knees please give us an album

Loona - delusions.... i think you mean truth

Loossemble - need this soon or else

Mamamoo - mothers come home

NewJeans - I was so surprised when I actually realised it's been a hot minute since Get Up came out... like 7 months is weirdly long

Pixy - an actual comeback pleak

Purple Kiss - can we go back to horror now, 7heaven was cute but not what we all love

Rocket Punch - yeonhee get back in that building and remember your roots

Weki Meki - not even gonna say anything...

Wendy - one of 3 people who can release a full ballad album that I will enjoy

WJSN - this is a need

Yuju - up there with wendy

#Alice #Elris #AOA #Apink #Apink CHOBOM #ARTMS #Billlie #Blackswan #BB Girls #Brave Girls #bugAboo #Cherry Bullet #Yoojung #Chung Ha #CLASS:y #CLC #CSR #DreamNote #EL7Z-UP #Everglow #Fifty Fifty #Fromis_9 #Geenius #Gfriend #Girls Generation #SNSD #Oh!GG #GOT the Beat #IOI #Iz*One

[octolingkiera]

5, 15, 16, 29

hi!! thanks for your ask!! :3

(the list)

5. What work of yours got more feedback than you expected?

so on the one hand, my danny phantom fics always get a lot of attention and it always leaves me a little surprised, but on the other hand, that fandom is very fic focused, so at the same time it Doesn't really surprise me when i get a lot of kudos for them. what surprises me more is how much other fandoms DON'T comment or bookmark or follow fics lol. i was seriously spoiled with those lol

as for a fic that's gotten more feedback, uhhhh hm. a couple of my dp fics have done better than i thought they would, yeah, but i also have this bleach fic that's in second person that seems to have come across really well, so i guess that one's the most surprising lol

aftershocks has done really well, but that's not surprising considering the talent that went into it, the fact we updated every week, and the word count, but it still baffled me as we were updating it how well it was doing lol

15. What WIP are you taking into next year with you?

definitely my rottmnt separated au (chapter 1 is posted on ao3 as sunset hues, jetpack blues (SHJB)) lol. ive been putting a lot of effort into it, more than i give most of my fics, tho i'm realizing now as i'm working more on planning i may have jumped the gun a bit and posted it a biiit early?? but also i wanted to post it on my birthday so i'm not so concerned about that kdshbfhdsf

when i post chapter 2 (which is basically done except for the final revision i need to give it), i'm gonna reread chapter 1 as well and make sure it's up to date with the minor stuff i left out bc i hadn't nailed down some specifics yet (but dw, it'll be Very minor and won't effect the plot lol)

besides that, i have oneshot prompts i wanna fill out and i have a fic in the works i'm calling Fallout, which is inspired by fall out boy songs (which ive been thinking about since like february/march when "love from the other side" dropped lol)

i also lowkey wanna try to get a fic done for danny phantom's 20th anniversary in april but idk how that's gonna go lol. i'm still very focused on ninja turtles

16. What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag?

of my 54 works on ao3 Fluff seems to be my most used tag with 10 times, which is. lowkey a surprise LOL. Hurt/Comfort comes in second with 7 (tied with "not beta read" and a tag for a danny phantom fic event) and Angst is in third with 6 (barring the two that i'm not counting lol)

going by just my rise fics, first place tag goes to Donatello and Leonardo are Twins (TMNT) with 6 of my 8 fics (ao3 says 9, but one of them is aftershocks, which i won't include bc it's a collab) and only reason it's not all 8 is bc i didn't tag it in fics where it's not a main focus lol

29. Favorite line/passage you wrote this year?

hmmmm let's see.... okay what have i written this year....

oh god that's a lot more than i thought, uhhhh

i have a lot of stuff i Really enjoyed tbh. there's a fun little action sequence i wrote for a later part of SHJB that i liked (that i'll prolly have to rework a little), there's a few Other parts of my prewritten SHJB stuff i enjoy, there's a bunch of stuff in my rise august fills i really liked...

but i think for a single line/passage, i'll go with this bit from the beginning of my fic what's in a name? (which is also posted here on tumblr!!)

Donnie, not bothering to look up from his phone, flaps a hand in the air dismissively. “I keep all my anger bottled up in here,” he taps his chest, “and hope one day it will just kill me. Like a normal person,” he adds, as if what he just described is unequivocally a universal experience.

this entire piece was a lot of fun to write and there's some more silly lines in this i really enjoyed but i think this is the one i think about the most, like the exchange directly after this lol

Leo purses his lips and steeples his hands, holding this fingers to his mouth. “So that’s a yes to the mad, then.” “Or it could be, like, the coo-coo for cocoa puffs type of mad!” Mikey chimes in, crossing his eyes and swirling a finger beside his ear. “Y’know, like British people say.” “Ew,” Leo says, because that’s all that needs to be said about that.

and this line a little bit down from that

Raph’s next exhale is heavy, the burden of Atlas in his eternal torment. “Pizza Supreme, I wish.”

thanks again for your ask!!! these were a lot of fun to answer. i love talking about my writing dfjghbdfg get me started and i'll never shut up lol

#thanks for the ask! #sometimes i like talking about writing more than i like actually writing #it's a lot of work and my focus and motivation don't always let me write much #but GOd am i excited for my sep au #it's taking a lot of work #and a lot of research #but i want it to be the best that it can be #at least some of this research is really interesting tho :0 #like this fic has me going insane and making a million notes #i even made little flashcards for the episodes so i could physically see where they might fit the timeline lol #ask #answer #and since they were all mentioned #rottmnt #danny phantom #bleach #aftershocks #i think i have this tagged??? #if not oh well lol #i do now

[natsukumo]

April 20th! What a special day. Today, I've known Asriel for a year now. It still blows my mind that we got this far. I honestly don't know what to say because I am just filled with so much love and other emotions that it's just hard to pump out words. But I still want to commemorate this day because it's just very special to me.

We decided to make an egg sandwich together to celebrate our friendship anniversary HAHA I was so scared that my eggs wouldn't boil, but they came out nicely! Asriel was so fast at doing his. He really knows stuff around the kitchen. It must be so nice living with him and being taken care of by him. It sucks that he doesn't live next door. Sometimes I would just daydream about knocking on his door, bearing his favorite snacks. We could just munch on it while watching and clowning movies. Life isn't a wish-granting factory though. However, I still feel lucky that despite the 13,000km between us, we still found our way to meeting each other. My skill issue on doing Eden really was a blessing in disguise XD

We love visiting OOBs together. Trying to go to places where we're not supposed to go while talking about life really built the foundation of our friendship. That's why I thought it was only appropriate to visit one today!

We still failed to do Sea of Stars, but this one is amazing too! It was a bit short lived though because I couldn't find a safe spot so we had to teleport back home after I took the screens. T'was still fun!! I really LOVE exploring places with Asriel. He is my four-eyed compass lol.

I just really love spending time with him. No riddles, no rhymes, no subtleties. Just the full honest truth XD We talk everyday but I still miss him and I find it not enough. Sometimes I worry that he will see right through me and find the damaged girl who is so needy that it gets a little suffocating. But he proves it time and time again that under his watch, I will be loved and cherished. That I will never have to doubt the tender and safe spot he laid out for me in the crevices of his walled heart. I feel lucky and privileged that I was given a space there because it is the warmest and safest place ever. I always joke about keeping him in my pocket, but I am the one who sneaked my way into his. I wish it's acceptable to just shout out how much I love him without scaring him away. It's one of those "i love them so much it hurts" case. I am just really filled with tender love for my dearest friend XD I want to say a lot, but it feels like my chest is about to explode and the words are all stuck in my throat. It's rare because I always have something to say, but right now I am just overcame with this flood of affection and it just will never run out. This much I know.

Sometimes I will wake up in the middle of the night and feel scared that one day all of this will be gone. That I will go back to waking up alone again. Giving this friendship with Asriel a shot was a gamble. I know anything could happen, but I didn't expect for it to matter THIS much to me. So I would lay there sometimes in the middle of the night and I would watch his Sky kid next to mine and say a silent prayer to the Universe, "please don't take this away from me. Please, please I will be good. Just don't take this away from me again." And I would drift off to sleep, my hands clasp together from praying so hard. Don't take this away from me.

We're still here though. I have a lot of anxieties, but right now, right here, we are existing together. We had a full trip around the sun together. Together, we are iridescent.

Still here.

#tegami

[threephantomrey]

i can’t believe next month is gonna be 5 years since i first made my fan account on instagram (May 20th is the anniversary)

like, not to get emotional about an instagram account, but it really meant a lot to me, and i didn’t think about that as much until it got hacked on January 24th 2022 and i lost all my edits, memes, and posts on there and my 600+ followers and all of the DMs that i cherished, etc.

idk man it’s just… i had that account since before i really started finding myself. i was a different person living a different life back in 2018. i remember i was a big Shaphne stan when i first made the account. i wasn’t hyperfixating on 13 Ghosts yet, didn’t like Fraphne yet, hated Fred for no reason, (wasn’t vocal about that online though) didn’t like Scooby Dum yet, etc. a lot of the Scooby opinions i had back then were wayyyy different from the ones i have now.

i had that account for such a long time (almost 4 years) and i met so many great people on there and made some of my favorite posts on there that i wished i had saved so i could show you guys. i changed so much within the time period i had that account, and my account also changed too. like i remember i had a Riverdale phase (it’s okay you guys can start booing me LOL) so in November 2018 after i made the account into my art account where i would post my art for a few weeks, i turned it into a Riverdale & Scooby Doo fan account. i changed the username to river_dale.scoob.fan.acc, and the account would be a Riverdale & Scooby Doo fan account for 3 years (with one username change to scooby_dale in August 2019) and then i made it into just a Scooby Doo fan account in December 2021, changing the username again to threedaysscooby.

but it was really fun. despite the fact that there are some things i regret, i loved having a fan account. i did find out what was done to my account after the situation in November 2022. and i remember when i DM’d the hacker on my personal insta to try to get it back the night i got hacked, they were like “send me $400 then” and they said all my friends were going to hate me if i didn’t pay so i eventually gave up and just let them have it because i knew i wasn’t getting it back and didn’t want to fight with some random person online about it. and after the situation, i lost all motivation to do anything for months because i was devastated and couldn’t stop thinking about what happened. and that situation was why i had to change my username to threephantomrey on everything because i didn’t want anyone thinking that was me behind the account anymore since i said i was threedaysrey in the bio of that account.

#a more personal post than most of the other posts i’ve made #fan account stuff

[britishchick09]

rapsittie street kids livewatch

welcome to the last livewatch of 2022! ...and probably the worst since we’re watching the infamous ‘rapsittie street kids’! i’ve seen countless reviews on this special, but i’ve never seen the full thing. today is its 20th anniversary, so why not watch it now? it’ll be bad, it’ll be cringe and it’ll be a whole lot of fun! ;D

the instruments at the beginning are really good! :D

...too bad the visuals aren’t :/

why does the bus sound like a clock?

ooh it’s rap time! B)

ricky: “but if you’ll kindly find the time to deliver gifts 7, 8 and 9 from my list!” rip gifts 1-6 :/

i’ve heard the beginning of the rap so many times that the part after sounds so weird! :o

aw he only has 3 coins rip :/

that could buy a book at st. vincent de paul’s! ;)

a car just slides out of frame lol :D

has he walked like that this whole time? :o

the voices in the music sound a bit creepy...

omg he kicks a basketball and it just  f l o a t s  lol! ;D

aww his mom died :(

she gave him a bear before she died... AND NOW HE’S GIVING IT TO A GIRL WHO DOESN’T EVEN LIKE HIM NOOOO :(

the bear just  f l o a t s

blue haired kid: “another day, another ‘d’ at rapsittie elementary...” says the teenager! :o

nicole got a dino bonk! :o

HOLD UP WHY IS ONE OF THE KIDS NELSON FROM SIMPSONS :o

ricky is talented! :D

the adults in the back tho...

he just throws ornaments on the tree like he’s in the charlie brown christmas special! :o

ok wow he’s just gonna rap and rhyme this whole special isn’t he :/

blue teen: “duuuude! that was soooo coooolll...” and that was so not cooollll... ;)

i’m pausing this to upload my new video and i guess this came out on november 25th not december 14th! the anniversary passed, but we’re in the middle of rapsittie season so i’m still watching it!

it’s all christmas and then  S U A R S

smithy: *sees the bear on the floor* ‘what’s that?” ricky: “that’s for nicole honey, i know she’s into money!” that bear is priceless tho! :o

smithy thinks liking nicole is gross lol! ;D

the teacher is fed up with everyone!

knockoff nelson: “hey ricky! let me know any time you want to fall down again! i’ll be sure to shove you in the right direction!” BUURRNNN!!!!! :D

ricky is the only kid to be bummed about recess ever!

teacher: “i said after recess BECAUSE I NEED A RECESS!” ricky: “oooohhhkayyy....” lol! ;D

ricky: “you won’t catch me.... hesitating!” lol! :D

the teacher needs a vacation...

oof this song is cringy! :o

when you wanna be the charlie brown christmas special...

omg nicole and glasses girl are doubling down laughing at that! :o

nicole: “watch what i can do!” ricky: “i’ll watch you nicole!” nicole: “not you, ricky!”

he’s the only one watching her tho...

also why is he wearing a short sleeved shirt IN THE SNOW???

ricky: “and i thought it couldn’t get any colder out here...” oof :/

omg knockoff nelson stole smithy’s sandwich! :o

and it just slides down smithy’s scarf...

the shot zooms out to the teacher and kids with presents but it looks slow mo?

lenee: “oh that looks really cool!” nicole: “here.” *drops it right onto her feet* lol!

nicole’s gift is the best because she bought it from the mall! ;)

OMG WAIT IS THAT JOHN DELANCIE AS THE PRINCIPAL???? :o

turns out it’s not but it sounds so much like him! :o

nancy cartwright, jodi benson, mark hamill and page o’hara are in this so there’s plenty of talent here already! ;)

he walks away slowly... (just like me seeing this!)

kids: “merry christmas!” blue kid: “principal dude B)” lol!

the kids ignore the teacher lol ;)

nicole thinks she’s sooooo perfect because she gets things at the mall?

oh no it’s the bear! :o

SHE CALLED IT A NASTY OLD THING YOU BISH!!!! >:(

ricky called her stupid yas you get her! ;D

why are lenee’s arms twitching?

lenee: “we go to this really big store and it starts with a ‘w’!” omg wallymart...? ;)

it’s the floating candle!! :o

AND THE GRANDMA YAAAS!!! :D

aww ricky has a santa letter! :D

grandma: “rdfgdjfdfjgh sendin’ letters!” lol!

it just... floats away from his armpit?

AND IT HAS AN @ SYMBOL???

nicole is insulting lenee AND HAVING A SEIZURE OMG :o

nicole’s mom: “has my princess been a good girl?” nicole: “i’ve been a good girl all year long!” YOU BISH! >:(

NO NO NO NOT THE SONG!!!!!

nicole: “♫ look at me! ♫“ no thanks!

the snowflake is traveling to lenee’s house!

this is a nice colored sky! :)

aww i feel so bad for lenee :(

her mom doesn’t nod... she bows!

mom: “come on, it’s christmas! cheer up!” that didn’t sound very cheery of you...

oh no nicole is reading the letter! :o

she feels bad... :/

YAS GRANDMA GIBBERISH!!!! :D

grandma: “dgdfgjjgsogisigsdfhsfdf christmaaaaas!” lol! ;D

OMG NICOLE THREW THE BEAR AWAY???? :o

nicole, smithy and lenee are in an abandoned building!!!! :o

smithy: “i can so blackmail you guys!” wtf lol?

they looked everywhere but alas! :/

omg dogs are chasing them!!! :o

bully: “look at the babies scared of little doggies!” i’d like to see you get at them! ;)

smithy threw his sandwich at the bullies... and they had their own chase! :D

yay they found the bear! :D

lenee: “let’s climb on that tree and jump over the wall.” nicole: “a lady does not climb trees!” smithy: “now is not the time to be a girl!” lol!

this animation is so awkward tho??

they made it! :D

aww nicole is giving ricky his bear! :)

nicole: “but doesn’t that mean a lot to you?” ricky: “yes. and so does................. friendship.” that pause tho! ;D

ooh lenee’s fam!

MARK HAMIL IS HER DAD OMG :o

lenee sees santa! :D

cloud santaaaa!!!! :D

omg lenee song! :o

WHY IS NICOLE’S MOM OBSESSED WITH THE MALL TOO

dad: “nicole has my good looks... and your spending habits!” lol! ;D

omg nicole’s grandma wanted a videobox... which is what ricky asked for! :o

ew nicole’s parents winked and it was weird :(

aww nicole gave her gift to ricky! :)

and lenee’s sister got... that...

ricky, grandma, nicole and smithy are visiting! :D

nicole apologized! :)

grandma: “dhdhhdfgfjfghg christmaaaaas!” iconic!!! :D

dad: “SHUT THAT DOOR!” the perfect way to end a christmas special! ;D

that was rapsittie street kids! it was just as bad as all the reviews say, but i still had fun watching it! visually, it’s the worst christmas special, but it still has good moments unlike other baddies (looking at you ‘the christmas tree’!) the plot was nice and so was the acting... mostly! i’m glad i got to finally see this special after hearing about it for so long! happy 20th anniversary, rapsittie street kids! :D

#livewatch #this will be fun... ;)

[bellmo15-blog]

I get wholesome stuff sometimes! I mean, not all the time but some of the time. And honestly, how much more wholesome could you get than Animal Crossing?

Original description: Just from the timing of me commissioning MallousCallous to do this pic for me alone I think you can guess why I’ve gotten this pic. Yup, it’s almost the two-year anniversary of a specific game that I think you all know. Fairy Tail!... Oh and also Animal Crossing New Horizons lol.

That’s right, on March 20th this game turns two years old and by extension my save file for the game. I brought this when it came out and haven’t stopped playing since. And I’m pretty sure most of you know why at this point. It was both my favourite game I played in 2020 and my favourite game that was released in 2020. Why was this my favourite in the same year I played other games that came out that year that arguably have way more to them such as Shantae and the Seven Sirens, No Straight Roads, DOOM Eternal and the remake of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 and 2 and even games that didn’t come out in 2020 that I still first played that year such as all of the Batman Arkham games aside from Knight since I played that in 2015, Indivisable, Call of Duty Black Ops and Watch Dogs 2? Do I even need to say it? It was 2020! You know, the same year that literally started with my own country being on fire in one of the worst country wide bushfires we had seen? The same year one of the worst pandemics ever reared it’s ugly head which for some reason people still personified as a f***ing waifu for some reason? The same year where we were forced to spend an extended amount of time in our homes and couldn’t go to work or hang out with our friends because of said pandemic? The same year where people willingly broke all the restrictions placed that were there to try and stop the spread while a vaccine was being made which resulted in extended lockdowns and more people getting sick!? I could go on and even talk about other stuff I hated about this year but you get my point by now!

Yeah needless to say this year sucked and my mental state at this point was not at its best. So since all I could really do at that point was stay indoors and play video games well, what else was there for me to do? I brought this game digitally from the Nintendo eShop day one and let’s just say the next few months after that were filled with Animal Crossing! So, so much Animal Crossing. I would play this every single day to check on my island and my villagers and it was fun for me! It was therapeutic. It was… you know what, let’s just cut the crap. It helped me mentally get thought what was one of the worst years I have ever had to endure! It had such a positive atmosphere compared to all that was going on in real life that I didn’t want to stop. I just wanted to stay in this world and be with these characters. Now obviously you shouldn’t spend every moment of your life in a fantasy and doing so can be quite unhealthy, but I mean, do I even need to remind you about what was going on in that year again? I’d rather not. Why wouldn’t I want to spend so much time in Animal Crossing?

And then there’s your character. This is probably the best Animal Crossing avatar customization we have gotten! Not just because for once you are able to select your appearance manually and not have it determined by some test which could lead to a face you hate, but because the hair styles look great, the clothing was amazing not to mention how it allowed you to wear all kinds of clothing regardless of your gender, they are very expressive which makes for fun screenshots and moments and also because they just look really dam good! Like this is no joke my favrotie avatar creation system in any game and the only other one that comes close are the Mii’s. So yeah, for this games 2nd anniversary I got a pic of my own villager who despite looking a bit like my own sona it technically predates him by seven months. Then again, he also has similar hair and glasses, the same love for Shantae, his favourite animal is snakes, even having a pot in his home as a substite for Tuki’s pot so it might as well be an Animal Crossing version of my Sona at this point lol. Either way, here’s to two years of one of my favourite games of the decade so far.

Artist is MallousCallous

#Animal Crossing #OC #Wholesome

[twerkyvulture]

knowingly racking up care mistakes just to ensure you get a certain Digimon

#digimon #digimon v-pet #digimon vpet #lol i got a 20th anniversary one and it's so much fun

[trans-girl-sora]

ANYWAY here’s a HUGE write-up of the various stuff we saw in the Kingdom Hearts 20th Anniversary video

First, Dark Road Stuff: 

First: Xehanort KNOWS he was Player??? THAT’S fucked up lmao 

A new cast of Dark Road characters!! I don’t think any of these we saw previously, which is fun!

We see Xehanort’s keyblade armor, and it looks like the No Heart BBS fight! So it’s just always had the little crown motif which is kinda cute. Also one of the original capital-d Darknesses is there, and evidently killed all the other students l o l. 

God the jpeg artifacts on this game. It really was built in flash, huh

I’m curious to see who he’s mourning in this shot - is it his mom that we saw at the end of khux? Is it the master who maybe dies at the end? Who Knows

Missing Link Stuff:

As much as I’ve been wanting a khux mmo for a while, I wasn’t expecting............. this. Whatever Missing Link is. Because I have some Theories. 

Specifically this shot. This is definitely in the early alpha stages because beta signups are opening later this year but like... to ME, the overhead shots of this game feels. Like a augmented reality map game?? Like Pokemon Go or Pikmin Bloom?? I hope to GOD it’s not but it feels like a legitimate city with the little Large Body in the bottom right and the little green markers, it feels like a real life walk game and I’d HATE that. I’m sure it isn’t but. Man. Dystopian thoughts.

But hey check it out we get THREE new keyblades! A red and black one that feels like a gear, a green and gray one with what looks like a wire mesh around a lantern, and a sharp one that looks kind of between Starlight and Missing Ache. I have a feeling there’s some sort of class system that encourages the multiplayer that we see near the end of the trailer here: 

Also my boy Brain is there!! And I refused to call him Blaine, you can pry Brain from my cold dead hands. 

And now, of course, Kingdom Hearts 4 Stuff: 

So this feels deliberate, right? Like this is a very obvious message, displayed a couple of times in different areas, written in the in-universe KH alphabet. The first character in the first word is A, the last character is 7, and in the second word there’s a punctuation mark and then a 3. But a lot of it I don’t know, and people haven’t translated yet :( 

Also this is the first we start seeing of the dark force in the trailer, which I’m gonna tentatively call the “Heartless” for now. Which I have my doubts about. 

Also yeah that’s Endor LOL

MY SLEEPY GIRL also jesus her feet are big, I can see why her yellow shoes are so HUGE now, wearing Size 20s out here

MY OTHER SLEEPY GIRL who looks rough but she has been dead for like a thousand years so. Sleep it off, Strel

They feel TINY compared to the doors and deck lmao, like look how little bitty they are

THIS is interesting, we see English script alongside the Scala script. Which... is weird. Also the D-Dream and D-Eater is very interesting and fun lol, it’s another parallel to DDD alongside Missing Link using a cover of the DDD version of Dearly Beloved

And of course, our Baddy. Who actually looks a lot like Dark Inferno! There’s some differences - no weapons, no glow, no bandana - but it’s got a lot of visual similarities. Also, interestingly, Re:Mind’s Dark Inferno χ is stated to be a “Darkness” sleeping inside of Ven, maybe Vanitas, so it’s possible this is another original Darkness as well? We do see MoM and Luxu here in a second so it could track. 

The grapple is SICK and very interesting, almost a fleur de lis? 

SORA’S GOT HIS BUILDING SKATING POWERS BACK 

We see Luxu and MoM (assumedly, because of the posture? The rightmost one is at least MoM for sure)

And I really like the font!! It’s different, a little more clean than the one in the Dark Seeker Saga. 

And of course Goofy and Donald looking for Hades because Sora literally died. 

Also this is just a funny smear frame but it’s nice to see they’re embracing the more comical side of things too! They’re making sure it stays cartoony which I like 

Anyway that’s all I’ve got for now and tomorrow I’ll ramble more 

#kingdom hearts #kh4 #khml #khdr #missing link #dark road

[shima-draws]

2020 art summary...!! I know there’s a few days left of the year but I already had all the pieces I wanted to share in mind :’)

This year was so rough man;; but despite that I’ve managed to draw something every month, so that’s something to be proud of! I’ve definitely come a long way and have improved a lot compared to last year, so. Progress!!

Last few years are under the cut for comparison!

I won’t subject you to the horror of 2016 and 2015, but if you’re really curious and want to look at them, they’re over here.

And now, as per usual! A little recap of this year’s pieces.

January

It was PMD time again!! I think Rescue Team DX had just gotten announced so the hype was suuuper crazy. I did a lot of gijinka design revamps in January as well! I actually chose to show this one over everything else because I had Pip and Chim in my 2019 January art summary as well. It seemed fitting

February

Back on my Senyuu craze...it had been a little while since I’d been so into the series but yes it was definitely fun to revisit it and fall down that rabbit hole again lmao

March

The beginning of my crazy BNHA AU explosion. I got back into it this year and after that there was no turning back. Anyway Bottled Soul was a big one and is still one of my faves!

April

This one was actually posted in May BUT I did it for Mother 3′s anniversary (which falls on April 20th) so I had to put it in this spot especially since I’ve drawn an anniversary piece for the last 5 years :’))))

May

EOLYNE WAS ANNOUNCED AND I LOST MY SHIT. What a pretty mysterious boy. Please take off your mask so I can prove to everyone that my theory about you being Eugeo’s reincarnation correct

June

This is technically a preview piece LOL but yes for the Pokemon SwSh zine I was in! This was my first time doing a piece so massive with so many characters so it was a fun challenge. Hopefully I’ll be able to share the full piece soon!

July

Ah yes this was when my ATS obsession kicked back in and right after I’d made a design for Hiro and fully expanded on his backstory along with Kaz, Ginni, and Olivia! My babies. They are good boys please protect them

August

I definitely finished this piece before August but that was when I was allowed to post it so. It was for the Tododeku Sun and Moon zine! I had lots of fun doing this one and I think it turned out very well. I love them.

September

You guessed it more Tododeku is anybody surprised at this point. After the OVA dropped and I watched it I IMMEDIATELY dashed off to draw this and I don’t have a single regret

October

MY PROMARE PHASE........I watched it 9 times within the first week of seeing it and god I love it so much. I HAD to make an AU for it and I slapped it onto Trustedpartner because I love them and it fits them perfectly and you can’t tell me otherwise

November

BNHA movie teaser got announced! I ran off to draw more Tododeku! I experimented a lot with lighting and color in this one and I am very pleased with the result. It’s pretty. They’re pretty

December

I did a 6 fanarts challenge again! Dawn was my favorite of the batch, so here she is. I did more experimenting with lighting and had so much fun (tho it took forever lmao)

Thank you to all of you for staying with me and supporting me throughout the year...especially since it’s been so crazy! I’m sad I wasn’t able to draw as much as I wanted to but hey prioritizing mental health is important, I hope you all take care of yourselves as well and hopefully continue to stick with me in 2021 💕

#Art summary #Summary of art #Summary of art 2020 #Art meme #Art #Digital art #Drawing #Illustration #Summary of art meme #You can totally rb this btw! #Long post #Shima arts #shima-draws

[merry-kuroo]

Top 10 2020 Anime

Hello everyone! Its the last day of 2020, and like with every year, here is my top 10 anime list. This list covers anime that aired this year only :) Hopefully you can use this list as a recommendation for something to watch. But tbh this list is for me to remember which wonderful anime made my year a little brighter :D I apologize for any typos lol.

1.) Tower of God

AHHH! I love Tower of God so much!! So, I almost dropped it at episode 1 because I was really confused. But I stuck with it and I’m glad I did. Tower of God gave me HxH vibes, but it was still different enough where I didn’t need to compare the two. The opening and ending by Stray Kids was amazing too.

Because I loved Tower of God so much, I made a Webtoon account and ever since then I’ve been hooked on Webtoons. I’m really glad they partnered with Crunchyroll to bring us this anime!

I read the TOG Webtoon and it explained things a lot better. I highly recommend going to read it after watching the anime!

I hope there is a season 2, but I won’t get my hopes up :( I’m sure this anime was just advertisement for the comic.

So, yeah, go check out Tower of God <3

2.) Great Pretender

WIT Studio has done it again. First with Attack on Titan, then Seraph of the End. They keep bringing me my favorite animes.

I love animes that feature a found family, and cons. Great Pretender brought all of that and more. Great characters, jokes, missions, and music. The music in Great Pretender is fantastic (I mean the ending song is a Queen song!)

I still stand by my opinion that Part 1 was better. I wasn’t a huge fan of season 2 and the ending as well. I think they dropped the ball. But I still won’t let that stop me from recommending it to you! It was still fun to watch :D

I’m going to miss Team Confidence <3

3.) Weathering With You

So, I have been a fan of Makoto Shinkai’s movies for a long time (5 Centimeters Per Second will always have a special place in my heart). So, when I saw that Weathering With You was coming to the movie theater, I immediately purchased a ticket. It was such a surreal experience watching in the theaters.

This was the last movie I saw in theaters before...you know >.> I’m glad this movie was my last too. It makes it even more special.

Everyone, please go see this movie. It’s beautiful. It will make you laugh and cry. I left the theater with tears in my eyes. It was such a amazing experience. I’m patiently waiting for his next movie!

4.) Kaguya Sama: Love is War Season 2

My favorite rom-com returned with a season 2. The opening is still stuck in my head. It always will be lol.

Anyway, this season was not only hilarious, but there was development between Kaguya and Miyuki <3

Miko IIno was also a interesting character. She is so different from everyone else, so I’m excited to see how being on the student council will change her. Maybe she and Ishigami will start to get long lol.

Another thing that made this season special was Ishigami’s backstory, and how Miyuki saved him. I just really love their bromance, okay?

Please go check out Kaguya Sama: Love is War if you haven’t! It’s funny and heart warming <3

5.) Jujutsu Kaisen

I’ve been hyped for this anime for like a year! When it was announced last November, I was like AFJAIOFJAOGLJMAPOGJ

I love the manga, and the adaption is doing a fantastic job so far. I definitely ended up loving Sukuna more due to the anime adaption though lmaooo.

Not a lot to say here except, go watch Jujutsu Kaisen <3 and read the manga!

6.) Moriarty the Patriot

I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this anime or not. I only started watching it because people said Sebastian Moran was Daddy! Kuroo lmaooo

But I have to say...I do like that Albert was like “Oh yes lets bring William and Albert into our home” then William was like “Haha hey Albert do you hate the upper class and nobility too? You wanna murder your brother and parents, burn down the house, and reform society?” And Albert is like “DON’T MIND IF I DO!” (The Moriarty brothers are wild af, my God.)

I liked each individual case, and it got even more intense when Sherlock and John were introduced. Super excited for season 2!

The opening and ending songs are also fantastic. Go give them a listen!

7.) Digimon Adventure 2020/Digimon Adventure Tri/Last Evolution Kizuna

Tfw you go to buy tickets Digimon Last Evolution Kizuna, but all the movie theaters shut down :(

ANYWAY

I was super hyped when Last Evolution Kizuna was announced, and then the reboot of the 1999 anime. I finished up Digimon Adventure Tri...which could’ve been better tbh. I only liked the first three movies, so at least I got some good content out of them lol.

I like the new spin on the new Digimon anime, and I’m excited to see what they’ll do next. I kinda want a reboot of 02 Digimon...and Digimon Tamers and Frontier, but that may be pushing it lmao.

Last Evolution Kizuna was absolutely phenomenal. It was the perfect 20th anniversary movie :)

8.) Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun

Another show I started at the beginning of the year! I read the manga in 2019, and I was happy to hear it was getting a anime adaption! I enjoyed this series a lot, and I really want there to be a second season. I feel like some stuff was left out. But the anime might have been created just to promote the manga.

The opening song, the different wonders of the school, and the art style quickly made this one of my favorites!

9.) Idolish7 Second Beat

Idolish7 is vastly underrated. It’s more than just pretty guys singing and dancing. Every character in the show has gone through their own hardships, and all the characters are fleshed out well.

The second season did not disappoint. It still served me with a good dose of angst, drama, and comedy.

And season 3 was announced!!! I wasn’t expecting that, so that surprise made me really happy <3.

I was really sad when Idolish7 stopped airing back in the spring, but I’m glad they were able to finish up the season this year :D

10.) Haikyuu!! To the Top

Alright, so my excitement deflated when Part 1 aired back in January. I hated the new art style and while Part 1 did have some good character development moments, I was really bored :/

The OVAs were really good though >.> I love Nekoma and Fukrodani so those were fun to watch.

Part 2 was a 100 times better. I accepted the fact that the art style wasn’t going to change and we wouldn’t have those cute breaks where the volleyball players would serve the ball and hit the water bottle. Once I got over that, I found myself enjoying part 2.

The two Nekoma episodes,the episodes focusing on the Miya Twins and Kita were my personal favorites. But overall, Karasuno vs. Inarizaki was fantastic and I enjoyed it a lot!

I need season 5 to be announced already!!!!!!! PLEASE!!!

#tower of god #kami no tou #great pretender #the great pretender #weathering with you #tenki no ko #kaguya sama love is war #jujutsu kaisen #jjk #moriarty the patriot #yuukoku no moriarty #digimon adventure 2020 #digimon last evolution kizuna #jibaku shounen hanako kun #toilet bound hanako kun #idolish7 #idolish7 second beat #haikyuu!! #top 10 anime #anime #2020 #my top 10 anime list #tumblr diary #12/31/2020

[spongebob-connoisseur]

What are your thoughts on the Birthday special?

I had to rewrite this because tumblr deleted my answer like 3 times. I hate this shit app but here we go aaaagain.

I really adored it because it introduced us to Slappy my beloved💗🌸💗🌸💗🌷💗🌷💕💖🌸💗🌷🌷🌸💗💕💗🌸🌷💗🌷💕💗💕🌷🌸

My heart beats for youuuuu✨

Jk jk but I do remember my initial reaction to him was basically "tf is that thing" oh how times have changed.

Spongebob's Big Birthday Blowout is easily the superior anniversary special. Truth or square kinda sucked ass (no offense to the people who enjoyed it tho) When Patchy said he hoped to see us again for the 20th anniversary special, my 9 year old self was like "you better because WHAT WAS THAT"

anyways they well delivered with this special.

I really enjoyed this episode, it was amazing because you don't see SB and friends interact wirh the human world. Yeah they've been to the human world surface for the SB movies but often times just for a mission. They never had a chance to really interact and explore with the human world which is what makes this special so enticing. The bikini bottom is a reclusive world with no contact with the outside so its their first time encountering human culture and contact. Like aliens in a way.

Its also really amusing that they're getting wrong information from the tour guide since it shows how fish folk makes sense of things they don't quite understand about the surface world. It's just guesses, even though those guesses are very wrong.

Also I've really grown to like Rube. He's AMAZING✨

It was also very cute how the tour bus trip is just Sponge and Patrick. We need more episodes of their friendship!!

I also think it takes place from the fishes's POV and the human world isn't that weird. There probably isn't a gorilla mask office meeting😔

That's just how they make sense of the hustle and bustle of the human world. Which is a bit obvious enough. Either that or this is an alternate reality where the weirdness properties of random land leaked into the human world as well.

Anyways shout out to can-o beans. A true icon.

Oh also this episode raises the morality question of if its ethical to own fish. Probably as a joke but it was unusual. I actually wanted to talk about it! In the episode Feral Friends, Neptune's moon turns the fish folk of the bikini bottom into less evolved versions of themselves which is pretty much the realistic versions of fish in the wild. In SB's Big Birthday Blowout, they end up at a place that sells pet fish, those fish also look really realistic. Which was basically like encountering a horror show for the fish in the tour bus. They recognize the fish in the tanks as their own people. Despite looking different. Patrick even has a crush on one of them. How does that work??? I have a lot of questions about that scene. I'll dig into it another time.

The Trusty Slab is the best part of the episode. They are exactly the SB characters. Tom Kenny really embodies Spongebob (which is obvious since he's been playing this character since before I was born) This is the most acceptable Humanbob out there. Nothing can top this. The energy is unmatched.

Same goes for all the characters. It's kinda funny how the voice actors all kinda look like their characters. Rodger Bumpass looks like Squidward. it's too funny to unsee.

Also Charlton (human Plankton) is adorable and the icing on the cake! Trying to rob the Trusty Slab but failing. This wouldn't be complete without Plankton. Though I wish Karen could have been there too :(

Though how would human Karen work? Why am I imagining one of those AI gf app thingies. That's a terrifying thought.

B plot for this episode is where a lot of the flaws come in. It falls pretty flat because it's just Sandy dealing with people fighting and causing a mess for the party which gets old fast. I liked seeing everyone's different ideas for the party and certainly they'd disagree but often times it feels like it's only Sandy holding this party together and dragging everyone around since they're so nonfunctional. Sandy deserved better.

I did enjoy the fact that they brought back old characters whether nonverbal or whatever. The guy from rock bottom, the whale from ripped pamts. Even princess Mindy! I wish they brought back Stanley though. There was a lot of guest stars in this episode too! Though unlike Truth or Square, they don't take much of a huge focus of the story. If you notice them then its just a fun thing to see. If you don't then you didn't really miss anything.

Spongebob's parents also wondered about Spange's huge array of friends. They barely know their own son lol

Regardless of the B plot, the episode was still really enjoyable. When spongebob came back from the trip and the end of the episode where they sing happy birthday to him was so so adorable!! They even redid the theme song just for his birthday! I love it!

Oh also! It was so satisfying to see Patchy meet spongebob. I've waited my whole life for this. But it does raise a question. Patchy is a spongebob (the tv show) super fan. Patchy actually got to visit spongebob (the character) so in universe there's both a show and the real character existing at the same time? I feel like this would fit into skin theory 🤔

This episode was such a joy to watch. They didn't reveal spongebob's age but we know it since his birthday was revealed on his drivers license. He's getting old. this episode actually aired the day before SB's actual birthday. Mainly to avoid it conflating with Bastille Day for international releases. But that also means this episode aired on Tom Kenny's birthday. Think of it as a birthday present to the irl spange. I think that's just a neat fact to share.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the special too!

#Ask #Princess-Unipeg #spongebob #spongebob squarepants #sb #spongebon squarepants #the spongebob connoisseur #spongebob meme

[ehbunnehsblog]

First off I just wanna say holy shiz! My last post did really good! So thank you guys for the support, liking, reblogging, following me and my content. I know it's just a basic nostalgia blog but it's really cool to know that some really like the stuff I post.

I always try to post stuff that is nostalgic to me but also stuff others might find nostalgic as well because this blog isn't just about me it's about you as well but anyways I saw this post a while back about what you searched up on YouTube as a kid and I thought hey why not do this myself! I thought it would be a neat little idea that would bring us together more and let you cool dudezzzzz get to know me so with all that said let's get to it! (Also I apologize if its absolutely cringe lol!)

1. Salad fingers

So pretty much everyone knows who and what salad fingers is we don't really have to get into it but idk how but I was just never scared of it. I remember as a child one of my friends was terrified of salad fingers yet I somehow was okay with it. I remember seeing a fake episode of it and it being a rickroll because that was sorta popular back than. I think salad fingers is pretty cool tbh its neat.

2. Wasabi Productions

This was a channel I frequented quite a bit. It had some really funny humor at the time I mean I was a kid so really anything was funny most of the time. The channel imo was just sorta random and the humor was pretty random. Humor in this era of YouTube was just something else lol.

3. Simply Spoons

Don't remember this one as much tbh but my friend at the time loved like absolutely LOVED One Direction and we would sometimes watch this channel and this person would do prank calls while trying to impersonate Harry Styles and etc. Because my friend at the time was super into 1D we checked out a lot of 1D content.

4. The Adventurous Adventures of One Direction

Another gem of 1D content was these videos. We watched them a lot everytime a new video came out we would check it out. I don't know if I have a lot to say about this channel except for that most of the content was 1D and cartoons. I think the person still posted some 1D videos so if you want to check it out I will leave links below.

5. SophieGTV

Okay imma get to it because I know what some of you guys are thinking yes I absolutely loved LPS Popular lol but actually just Sophie's stuff altogether I really liked also SHES CANADIAN LIKE ME! Not many youtubers I know are from Canada so that's really heccin cool but anyways I loved her channel as a kid if you were talking to lil me I would probably say shes my favorite YouTuber. Sophie doesn't post much anymore but I remember when EVERYONE wanted a face reveal but I hope she is doing well now. She posted one year ago but hasn't posted since.

6. LPS popular

Hunny you know it. You know it. *insert will Smith that's hot that's hot* I know i just posted that i loved this series but really though this was my YouTube childhood I was absolutely in love with this series. The tea! The tea! I can't I used to binge this series all the time I remember my old friend absolutely loved this channel. Dude I miss being a kid sometimes with a wild and wacky imagination if I were a kid again I would totally rebinge this series lol!

7. LPSHannah

This girls channel was also amazing I didn't watch her videos a lot but I definitely liked a good handful of em. Her channel was just really cool and she did a face reveal! I don't know when but its definitely surprising! She sadly stopped making videos though (just checked big sad) do to coppa but I hope what she is doing is making her really happy and all the best to her. You can now find her posting on Hannah's Haven.

8. NamanthaSuxx

I wanna say she is also Canadian but honestly I have zero clue. I used to watch her channel sometimes when she would post videos about Monster High because at the time I was into those dolls which idk for sure but I think might be coming back? Anyways i wasnt as into the channel as my friend who introduced me to Namantha's channel.

9. Jpopluvr1000

Okay idk if this persons channel was always named this but I remember looking at their channel because they made a lot of Bratz themed videos and well me I am a Bratz fan and I remember this person got I think all or almost every 10th anniversary Bratz doll and making a video on it. I was really into Bratz maybe even more than Monster High tbh like those dolls were made the year I was born. Getting real for a moment but it is crazy knowing that they will be having their 20th anniversary and I am really hyped for the new dolls like honestly I love the screening and it might even be better than the last dolls lol but anyways I loved this persons channel it was great.

10. Webkinz, LPS, Bratz and monster high pool party videos

This one is just one big group because all were under the same thing. I really liked and still like swimming and so that's probably why I liked these videos as a kid there are some I watched but can't remember the name of at the moment and YouTube doesn't let you make it so you can find old videos easily especially if you can't remember them. I did remember I watched StarryStarr33 and I think strawberry516 but I don't know about strawberry for sure.

11. Smosh

The duo Ian and Anthony were sorta like a must watch on YouTube back in the day. They were just really big and it was difficult to ignore how popular they were on the site for a while. I loved their Honey Boo Boo video and I also remember watching Ian and Anthony open things on another channel. The humor was also very YouTubery it probably wouldn't be good in professional stuff but for teens and kids at the time most of us thought it was pretty funny.

12. Bratz collection

Just like jpopluvr1000 I just really liked Bratz dolls and collections of them.

13. LPS music videos

Didn't matter what it was I loved LPS as a kid so I was willing to watch anything with them.

14. KyleMonkey

My sister showed me this weird dude who made a video with him just eating chapstick and another of him farting, spitting out grapes and just being crazy and yeah honestly idk what to say about this dude lol

15. Key of Awesome

Didn't check them out a whole lot tbh but I enjoyed some of their parodies

16. Fred

Everyone acts like the didn't watch him but you know some of them have. I liked watching his videos as a kid I remember when one of them was rated for older people for no reason. Also is it just me or did anyone else like his songs?

17. The Annoying Orange

Same deal just orange and an orange. These videos were cool I remember when Fred and him had that lil vs battle thingy you kinda just had to be there to understand the hype about the annoying orange. The humor has died out but it was a nice thing while it lasted unless you got easily annoyed.

18. Wafflepwn and the greatest freakout ever

I remember watching these videos with my friend at the time we just thought it was the most hilarious thing honestly the first video where the dude stick a remote up his butt still makes me chuckle somehow but I remember my dad being very upset when he saw I watched these videos and also having a difficult time coming to the fact that SPOILER ALERT!

It was fake all along. If people didn't know that you know these videos would be extremely problematic.

Conclusion: YouTube still felt so new and different at this time and things were growing although a lot of the humor would not fly for understandable reasons I feel like it was charming and I was very lucky I got to be on YouTube. I was very young so a lot of the channels I watched were more kiddy and childish but it felt sweet and nice. A lot of these channels were so cool and sometimes I would stay up late and watch them. With all that said I will probably make a second one of these. I was very unsure whether or not I wanted to post this because a part of me thought it would be cool but another felt like it would be cringy and wanna know what? It's both lol that's my entire conclusion this post was cool, fun and very very cringy but hey why not make another again sometimes? It will be cool to look back on and maybe if I forget something I can just come back here and remember it! Do you have anything you searched a lot as a kid? Comment below!

☆With all that said if you like what you see please give me a follow and a like I make many more posts like this☆

#salad fingers #nostalgia #2000s kids #2000s nostalgia #nostalgiacore #nostalgic #fashion dolls #toys #kids toys #youtube #videos #internet videos #bratz doll #littlest pet shop #old youtube #2000s #the annoying orange #webkinz #monster high #lps popular #sophiegtv #lpshannah #kid toys #mga dolls #bratz #cringe? #growing up #mga entertainment #mga #hasbro

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 49: How translators approach a text

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 49: How translators approach a text. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 49 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the relationship of the translator and the text. But first, we’re heading into Lingthusiasm anniversary month! This is our fourth anniversary of doing Lingthusiasm, and we’re really excited that we’re still doing this four years later.

Lauren: We love a bit of reflection and nostalgia. The month of November is always an opportunity to be grateful that we have another year of Lingthusiasm. We have a whole 12 great main episodes. We have 12 more bonus episodes. As with every year, if you want to share a link to your favourite episode, November is an especially nice time to do it.

Gretchen: There are still people in this world who don’t know that they could be listening to a fun podcast about linguistics that makes them feel like they’re at a linguistics party instead of doing the dishes. You could help people find them. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth. Every year we’ve done this in November, we see a big spike in people listening to the show and finding the show. If you wanna share on social media, we are very happy to thank you if you tag us in things.

Lauren: If you want to share off social media, please accept our deepest gratitude non-publicly for sharing shows as well.

Gretchen: Or, if you share Lingthusiasm privately and you still wanna be thanked, feel free to tell us about it on social media. We will still give you a little heart thank you comment. Yes, thank you already for all of the support that you’ve given the show over the years.

Lauren: If you like things additional to podcasts, because we are coming up to the holiday season, it’s also a good time to think about some Lingthusiasm merch or a copy of Because Internet. It’s a pretty great book. I like it. It’s available in paperback now. These things make great gifts.

Gretchen: We now also have annual memberships on Patreon. That could make a great gift to gift somebody to listen to more Lingthusiasm episodes as well as access to the Discord for an online linguistics community.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was about honorifics as a way of being polite to someone either through the title you choose or a variety of linguistic strategies.

Gretchen: You get access to the honorifics bonus as well as 43 other bonus episodes and new bonus episodes every month by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, Lauren, I’m gonna talk to you about Beowulf.

Lauren: I know this because you have been messaging me for weeks about how we have to talk about Beowulf.

Gretchen: There’s a new translation of Beowulf. I’m really excited. This made me want to build an entire episode around the translator’s relationship to the text because this new translation of Beowulf does a really cool job of it, and I wanna talk about it.

Lauren: I don’t think you’ve been this excited about a translated text since Emily Wilson translated The Odyssey. I’m pretty sure that’s what motivated our 18th episode on word translation.

Gretchen: You are not wrong about this. I think there’s a similar excitement that I have which is old texts – texts that are a thousand-plus years old that have been translated so many different times by so many different people – it feels like it’s hard for someone to do something new with a translation of them. And yet, here people are doing that, which is exciting to me. This is the new translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley. She’s done some really cool things with translating Beowulf as a feminist text. It’s a text that uses very modern style language in this thousand-year-old epic poem of Old English literature.

Lauren: I feel like when it comes to translating, before you even translate one single word, there’s all these decisions that a translator has to make. In Episode 18, we looked at translation, but we looked at word-to-word translation. And that’s definitely one part of a translator’s job, but they have so many more decisions to make. It is such an impressive job, and it’s why it’s as much an art form as it is a technical skill to translate something well. So, what are some of the big decisions that Headley made before even starting to translate Beowulf?

Gretchen: One of the things about Beowulf is, as an oral poem, it has this intricate rhyme scheme. The Old English rhyme scheme is based on half lines. Each line has two halves and there needs to be an alliterative bit in one half that is repeated in the second half.

Lauren: So, Old English is way more interested in alliteration compared to our modern English obsession with rhyming. That’s one of the stylistic features you find in Old English.

Gretchen: It’s all about the beginning of the words rather than the ends. Trying to figure out, okay, how much am I gonna use alliteration? How much am I gonna try to represent – because we can do alliteration in modern English – how much am I gonna try to represent the existing rhyme scheme? Where am I gonna try to put it in actual rhymes like you would do in modern English – if you’re writing a poem, you might rhyme it? What am I gonna do with the metre? She’s produced this really oral text that uses a certain amount of modern slang as well in ways that are really effective. One example is there’s a dragon in Beowulf, and the dragon at one point is described as “Putting the world on blast.”

Lauren: Nice.

Gretchen: To some extent, this is modern slang, but it’s also a very literal thing that a dragon can do. It’s not using modern slang for gratuitous – like, there’s no “lols” or “omgs” in this text. It’s not like here’s this facile text-speak version of Beowulf. It’s what are the bits here that actually work with the metre and the rhyme scheme but also not shying away from using a modern idiom where a modern idiom really works.

Lauren: It’s interesting to put this in contrast to the other most famous version of Beowulf in translation that I know of which is Seamus Heaney’s from somewhere in the middle of the 20th Century where I feel like he tried to capture the mythical grandeur of Old English and chose very stoic, solid sounding Old English words. I don’t think he would’ve had the dragon “putting the world on blast.”

Gretchen: Well, I don’t think he would’ve – I think it came out in 1999, this translation. In some ways his translation is fairly vernacular, but he tries to do that in a different sense. Can I read you the first bit of the Headley translation and the Heaney translation?

Lauren: Yeah. This is super fun.

Gretchen: Okay. A big thing about Beowulf translations is the first word which in Old English is “Hwaet.” That has gotten repurposed as a meme, which we’re not gonna get into much detail about. Some people translate that as like, “Lo!” or “Hark!” or “Listen!” or something like this. Heaney translates that as “So,” which has already got a certain level of vernacularity to it. His first three lines go, “So, the Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.” This is very stately and like, “Here’s this thing you’re gonna do.” If you compare that with the first three lines of the Headley translation, the new one, she translates this “Hwaet” as “Bro.”

Lauren: Hm, that’s a very different tone.

Gretchen: It’s a very modern tone. I mean, you could pick a whole bunch of very modern things like “Yo” or “Hey all,” but specifically the reason she picks “Bro” is because she wants to highlight the bro culture-ness of this entire story. You can see that in the next couple lines which is, “Bro, tell me we still know how to speak of kings. In the old days, everyone knew what men were – brave, bold, glory bound. Only stories now, but all sound the Spear-Dane song, hoarded for hungry times.” It just leaps off the page in a way that really excites me.

Lauren: Yeah, no “princes” there.

Gretchen: Right. “Kings who ruled had courage and greatness” – “The men were bold.”

Lauren: The thing I always love about Beowulf is that it’s a millennium-old oral poem that happened to be written down, and a millennium ago people were like, “Let me tell you about the olden days.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: Right, it still takes place in this semi-mythic space, and it uses a certain stylised language that we even think was stylised at the time. You’re always picking between some kind of stylisation. There’s no neutral choice that exists. All of the choices are recreations at some level.

Lauren: I mean, it is kind of weird to think you’re translating from English into English, but it just shows how much the language has moved on because reading Beowulf if you don’t know Old English is an incredibly uncomfortable attempt to just guess some words that have retained some familiarity. I always find it interesting that you have to translate. And then because English went through enough changes by Shakespeare, we kind of put up with all of the features of Shakespeare that aren’t immediately obvious to us.

Gretchen: Right. But Beowulf is really this alien text. Like, “Hwaet. We Gardena” – and “Gardena” is “Spear-Danes,” but we don’t have “Spear-Danes,” and “Gardena” is not obviously related to those. There’s this great miniseries from The History of English Podcast that does a very in-depth line-by-line reading of Beowulf which I enjoyed a while back.

Lauren: My one semantic anecdote from that series is “Gar-Danes” as in “Spear-Danes” – garlic is the “spear-leek.”

Gretchen: Yes, it is!

Lauren: Because it’s like a little spear.

Gretchen: It’s like a little spear-leek. I love that anecdote. It’s interesting to be reading Beowulf at the same time that my book club is actually reading The Tale of Genji.

Lauren: Ah, from like a similar – Genji’s also a millennium old, yeah?

Gretchen: Yeah! In some sense it’s like Beowulf and Genji are kind of contemporaries.

Lauren: But they’re very much not contemporaries. Beowulf is about warrior bro culture in the Old English setting, whereas Genji is a Japanese court drama.

Gretchen: I don’t think they would’ve gotten along. I think they would’ve just found each other completely incomprehensible. Genji’s also one of those classic texts that’s been translated a whole bunch of different times in a whole bunch of different ways. For one thing, you’re translating from a much older version of Japanese. There are modern Japanese translations of The Tale of Genji as well. And then you’re also translating into a different cultural context. But the cultural context for Beowulf is also very weird. Like, I don’t do going and fighting monsters under lakes any more than I do writing haikus about the moon. In fact, I’m probably more likely to write a haiku about the moon than I am to go fight a monster under a lake if we wanna talk about relatability.

Lauren: Everything I know about Genji is because one of my colleagues in the Languages Department at La Trobe is a Genji studies scholar. It’s one of those pieces of work that is so big and so canonical that it has its own literary studies tradition associated with it. I also really love my colleague because the other part of her expertise is cosplay studies. I think it’s such a great combination of Japanese cultural experience there – Genji and cosplay.

Gretchen: I mean, what more do you want? The neat thing about reading Tale of Genji at the moment is because I’m reading it as part of a book club through Argo Bookshop – which is a bookstore that did the book launch party for Because Internet and I really like them – they’re having this Tale of Genji book club, and we’ve been reading it throughout the year a few chapters at a time because it’s over 1,000 pages. It’s huge. So, we’ve been reading it section by section, and different members of the book club have picked different translations into English of the same work.

Lauren: Ah, cool! Are there radical differences between the translations? Or do they all try and go for a literal approach?

Gretchen: They’re really different. One of the big things with Genji is at the time in 11th Century Japan it was considered very rude in the court to refer to people by their actual names. None of the characters in the original Tale of Genji manuscript have names, except for maybe Genji. So, you can imagine reading a thousand-page book where none of the characters have names is a bit of a feat of the imagination.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: Different translations – and a lot of them have conventional names that literary scholars have used to talk about the characters. For example, Lady Fujitsubo lives in the Fujitsubo, which is the western pavilion, and so she gets called in the tradition “Fujitsubo” because that’s where she lives, and this kind of stuff. Or Murasaki gets called that after a flower, I think, the character. In some translations, they just use these conventional use names as if they’re the actual names of the characters. In some translations, they just use descriptions like the original text did, and they don’t really refer to characters by even pretend names or use names.

Lauren: So, one of them is trying to strive for cultural authenticity, and the other one is trying to just help the poor confused reader a little bit more, and that’s choices that each translator has decided to make.

Gretchen: Exactly. You also have other types of decisions like, “Are you going to try to” – because it’s a court drama, you have all these court positions. Are you going try to map those positions onto a western court so that people understand what a chancellor is? Or are you going to try to use those as a more direct translation of what the specific terms were at the time? That’s just different decisions that different translations can use.

Lauren: When you meet as a book club, is everyone following along, or is there a lot of clarifying across translations? Such an interesting little exercise.

Gretchen: Well, the nice thing is, is the division into different chapters is very constant, so we can be like, “Okay, we’re reading Chapters 6 to 10 now. We’re gonna talk about what happens in those.” But sometimes you do pull something up, and you’re like, “Okay, so this bit where this thing was said, do we think Genji is kinda misogynistic here?” And somebody will say, “Well, in my translation, it doesn’t actually seem like he’s misogynistic.” And here’s what’s going on in this particular translation versus that particular translation. And how much of it is the translator bringing their own preconceived notions of how people relate to each other? Because some of these translations are from the 1920s or something. People may have had different politics there. And how much of that is in the original text which was composed by a woman who we don’t know that much about? But it’s the first modern novel. It’s an interesting like, “How much are you going to try to westernise this book for a western audience?” Which some of the older translations do a bit more with the westernisation adaptation because people in the west hadn’t heard of Genji very much before. You do all this adaptation for your English-speaking readers. Whereas, more recent translators, people tend to have a higher degree of expectations of fidelity when it comes to a more modern translation. Sometimes they try to do that. And, you know, how many footnotes do you have? How much do you try to explain additionally? How much do you try to just make the text stand on its own as a story?

Lauren: So many choices to make as a translator. I’m eternally grateful to people who do this and make it appear so effortless while doing so much work bringing all of this context together.

Gretchen: It’s really neat. I’m not gonna read this 1,000-page book five different times in five different translations, but being able to experience portions of those translations vicariously through other people talking about, “Oh, here’s what happened in this one, here’s what happened in this one,” it does let you do this interesting comparative textual study.

Lauren: I’ve been thinking about translation in practice a lot lately because having worked with P. M. Freestone on their Shadowscent books, “The Darkets Bloom” and “Crown of Smoke,” these books have gone into translation in a whole bunch of languages, mostly European languages to date – Spanish, German, French, Russian, and Polish. I’m very excited about the upcoming Hungarian translation which will the first outside of the Indo-European language. But these translations involve a couple of things that are really interesting in that, in these books, I worked on creating the Aramteskan language, and for this language to work across different languages, sometimes it gets technically transliterated, or you need to add a different type of plural. For example, Russian has a different alphabet to English and so you need to fit this language into the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

Gretchen: You’re not trying to pretend that Aramteskan is always written with the Latin alphabet. Even when the book itself is in Russian, you’re like, we’re gonna transliterate it into Cyrillic?

Lauren: No, translators have very much done what they think is most appropriate. I have a habit of buying these translations now and checking out what they’ve done because they’re not just translating from English into another language, they also have to translate this completely fictional language and this fictional world into that language as well. It’s one thing to maybe study in-depth Old English warrior culture or Japanese court culture and decide what to bring across, but with a fantasy world, there’s all kinds of choices you have to make as a translator as well.

Gretchen: Yeah, like what are you gonna do with the magic system? Or if you’ve invented all of these words for different scents or something, then they have to figure out some sort of equivalent of inventing those words for the other language.

Lauren: There’s a lot of scent vocabulary even in the English that P. M. Freestone has written in, so really taxing that part of the translator’s repertoire. One thing that’s been particularly interesting and that there’s been some discussion on how to manage is that in this world, both in the historical part of the world and the contemporary part of the world, the culture and the grammar allow for gender neutral third person like the English modern use of “they,” which Kirby Conrod gave a great interview about how that works in contemporary English. In fact, I did a little historical evolution of the pronoun system that fits with the story of the world where originally there was no gender distinction in the pronoun system, which fits with the old religious system of the world. And the religious system evolved younger gods that are all gendered, and the pronoun system evolved genders at the same time while still having that scope for gender neutral. Without spoiling too much, but a character that pops up in Book One and is much more a part of Book Two is gender fluid within the world. That works for current English because we have gender neutral singular they, but there are some languages like Czech or like Russian that the book’s being translated into where there isn’t that flexibility in the linguistic system. So, decisions have to be made about how that is negotiated in the translation.

Gretchen: Do you know what they did?

Lauren: I don’t know what they did for Russian yet, but I believe the solution in Czech is at various times this character is overtly identified using masculine and at other times using feminine – being much more flexible about the duality of their relationship with gender.

Gretchen: This reminds me of a thing that I heard Ada Palmer talk about at a conference panel with her book “Too Like the Lightning” and the sequels, which are set in this far future of English – well, far future and they’re written in English – in which singular they is used for everybody except when you’re writing in this faux-archaic style with “thous” and “thees” and “hes” and “shes.” It’s very marked at that point. Ada Palmer was talking about how this was translated into French where in modern English the progressive thing that people do is like, “Oh, we can use singular they. That’s very progressive.” In modern French, the progressive thing that people do is they make feminine versions of all of the professions.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: You have feminine versions of “professor” or “doctor” or these kinds of things to try and make the gender more visible. And so erase the gender in the French version wouldn’t have the same effect – where you’d end up using the default masculine or something in the French version – it wouldn’t have the same effect as using singular they all the time in the English version. There are modern French pronouns like “iel” that have been coined to solve this problem of using a gender neutral third person pronoun, but it wouldn’t work to use them in this particular case because the style is supposed to be faux-archaic. What the translator ended up doing was digging out this French pronoun “on,” which in the modern form “on” is used like “we” or like “one does this.” It’s related to like, “One does this.” There’s an older usage of “on” which is like a non-specific third person pronoun as well that – I speak French, but I didn’t know about this archaic form. And the translator went and looked for what other historic pronoun things could I do and ended up doing with “on” thing, which is a really interesting adaptation.

Lauren: The thing I find interesting is if you were – 50 years ago, you didn’t have the grammatical resources in English to use singular they for a specific person. It’s something that’s really only emerged in the last couple of decades. I think the translator has felt frustrated to not have – you know, you sometimes feel like you’ve got this road block because you don’t have resources in one language that you have in another and you have to innovate. I did have a colleague in Italian studies tell me that they read a whole novel once where the gender of one of the characters was deliberately written around and avoided in a way that was an incredibly artful, thoughtful translation. It is possible that you could maybe do this with this character in the Shadowscent books, but it would be such –

Gretchen: But you couldn’t do it with the whole world in the Terra Ignota books because all of the characters would have to have that.

Lauren: Yeah. And you could do that amount of heavy lifting at the cost of some other things, but when you’re doing an efficient translation for a commercial novel, you don’t have the resources to really max out your art and strategy in that way. It’s interesting that, you know, translation is a really resource-intensive activity even to just do a good translation, let alone an incredibly strategic and thoughtful translation.

Gretchen: Even translating one word, like that word at the beginning of Beowulf, involves thinking about, “Okay, what kind of relationship do I want this word to have to the rest of the text? What am I trying to set up here in relationship to the whole text? Where do I see this attention-getting word as going?” Like, what the text as a whole is doing, which is this interesting question. I should say, speaking of translation news, this is very hot off the presses, but I have received news that there are gonna be translations of Because Internet into Persian, Chinese, and Japanese. So, all – well, Persian is an Indo-European language, but it has a different writing system, and then two non-Indo-European languages. I don’t know anything else about the details yet.

Lauren: This is news that I didn’t even know. This is very exciting.

Gretchen: It’s very recent, yes. It’s not – I dunno. I will have official links when they exist. They won’t exist for, I dunno, probably a couple years. I dunno how long it’ll take them to do. I know nothing.

Gretchen: The surreal thing about translation means that you will see you work and not be able to read it. There’s something so amazing and magical about that, that words you have created are finding new audiences – you know, there’s a lot of trust in the translator in those contexts.

Gretchen: Yeah, and I don’t know if I’m gonna get to have any say in who they get to translate it and how much they know about the internet or things like that.

Lauren: Translating non-fiction is an entirely different process because you’re not translating an internal narrative world as much as you are potentially translating something that explains how this world that we live in right now exists, or how a set of historical realities existed. That also takes deftness and skill.

Gretchen: And you’re potentially trying to translate technical vocabulary between one language or another, which isn’t necessarily the same as, “Okay, we need to keep the characters’ names consistent. It’s like, “We need to use this word that has a technical meaning in its technical sense.” Speaking of non-fiction translation, I dunno if you’ve been following in translation news relatively recently, there’s been a lot of things going on with the Scots language Wikipedia.

Lauren: Yes, I did read about this. So, Scots language is a language in the same family as English. It has a lot of similarities with English but is considered its own “variety,” using that very deliberate linguist term where you don’t commit to just how much it’s a dialect or its mutual intelligibility with other varieties that its related to. And it has its own Wikipedia.

Gretchen: Scots is kind of like, as an English speaker, I’ve always been kind of jealous of people who speak Dutch or German or something because they can kind of understand each other a bit. Or Spanish and Portuguese and Italian because they can kind of approximate understanding each other to some extent even if they haven’t formally learned the languages. I’ve always been like, “Why doesn’t English have some closer neighbours?” But I hadn’t been thinking about Scots when I was thinking that. Scots is probably English’s closest neighbour but is still a distinct language and, especially, there are grammatical differences and there are a lot of political reasons as well why people consider it its own language. However, [laughs] the Scots language Wikipedia, which has all of these articles written in Scots, had apparently been being edited for the last seven years by an American teenager who didn’t know any Scots and was just looking up the English articles in a Scots-English dictionary word-by-word and just picking the first word of the translation and subbing that in for the Scots word.

Lauren: This has been such a difficult story to read because everyone throughout this process has acted in the best faith. This teenager wasn’t doing this for any reason other than a passion for sharing knowledge on Wikipedia and a passion for seeing the Scots Wikipedia grow but with a really uncritical approach to translation. You can see where translation really does require this understanding of vocabulary choice and style choice and how it can all go really, really wrong.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s really painful because this person started when they were, like, 12, and we have all believed very foolish things about the world when we were 12. It’s just many of us didn’t write thousands of Wikipedia articles in a language that is just really not the way anybody who actually speaks this language actually writes because it’s cobbled together badly from a dictionary. It’s this very painful, “Oh, no! You thought you were helping.” And yet Wikipedia is used as the basis of a lot of machine translation, and language detection, various natural language processing tools, and so this has been potentially sabotaging the efforts to try to create other machine tools in Scots because they’ve all been in this weird dictionary-a-fied version of English.

Lauren: It’s been really heartening to see the Scots language community and the Scottish Wikipedia community come together to figure out a strategy for how to approach cleaning house – I guess it’s the biggest spring clean ever, right – how to approach this, like, thousands and thousands of articles with this very strange approach to translation.

Gretchen: It illuminates one of the issues with smaller language Wikipedias in general which is that they may only have a few active editors because to be a Wikipedia editor is to be a volunteer. It takes a long time to translate things or to write articles. If you’re a language like English, you can have tens of thousands of editors. But if you’re a language like Scots which has many fewer speakers, you may only have a dozen active editors of which maybe one of them is a well-meaning but very clueless American teenager.

Lauren: We’ve both done lots of Wikipedia editing. We have run LingWiki events to improve linguistics content on Wikipedia. It’s challenging enough to write these articles in one language that I am proficient in. I’m always in awe of people who choose to translate and support content in their second or third languages because it is a non-trivial task to translate really complicated information in a way that is really clear.

Gretchen: Translation is a technical task that is one of those things that looks at all of the different levels of language where you have some things at the individual word, or even sound, or if you’re trying to translate poetry and you wanna make it beautiful in a very aesthetic sense with the physical properties of language, all the way up to words and sentences and structure and these discourse-y particles like “Hwaet” at the beginning where you’re trying to picture a whole framing device for the structure of an entire tone of a narrative. Or if you’re trying to pick, “Okay, how are we going to treat technical vocabulary that maybe has been borrowed from English?” because its scientific vocabulary that was invented from English, how are you gonna treat that when it gets borrowed into Scots? Trying to figure out how to make these technical decisions is non-trivial. It’s this very interesting train wreck. It can go spectacularly right when you have this very clever decision for a dragon to put the world on blast, and it can also go spectacularly wrong when you just say, “Okay, I’m gonna look through a dictionary and then pick the first word I encounter.”

Lauren: One of the great things about appreciating a good translation is that language never takes a break. Culture continues to change, and we move further away from the era of Beowulf. We move into new cultural settings and new cultural expectations. It means that there is space for new translations that bring new approaches, or try something different, or aim for really capturing something about the language of the era it was created in, or set an old story in a radically new setting. Even when you find a really satisfying translation, you know there’s still possibilities for finding other interesting ways to engage with the text.

Gretchen: I think that’s a thing that’s exciting about both the translations of these thousand-year-old texts, whether Beowulf or Tale of Genji, where they go through lots of different authors who put their own spin on the translation. And also thinking of Wikipedia as a place for translation where you have multiple authors working together on the same shared text, and a bunch of different people – like Scots Wikipedia has been having these Wikipedia edit-a-thons to try to clean the place up. You have a whole bunch of contributors that are finding out about this need because of this story and coming in and working on the text together and contributing to the shared text. In many ways, even though each of these editions of the translations are published as their own book for book-length ones, it’s this very intimate relationship that you can have with a text when you’re trying to render it in a different language or in a different textual interpretation.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can access to 44 bonus episodes right now to listen to at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patron also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards as well as helping to keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include pangrams, honorifics, and linguistics with kids. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life, especially as it’s the anniversary month.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 49 #transcripts #translation #translations #beowulf #tale of genji #maria dahvana headley #shadowscent #p m freestone #wikipedia #scots #japanese #old english #scots wikipedia

[zathechaosgod]

Favourite Stream Moments!

Philza’s stream on Friday 20th of november

Returning to hardcore and getting reminded that he really just logged out on the spot last monday lmao

Phil is honestly just teasing us at this point with his refusal to mine his diamonds :(

Catching up on the gapple gang from last stream

He’s almost out of gapples!

Reminder to myself: you can dry sponges just by placing them in the nether lol

Kristin didn’t wear a proper winter jacket on a walk and get really cold so Phil gave her his jacket lol

chat (and Kristin): simp confirmed

From the 3min that was forced by a viewer on Wednesday Phil earned a lot of money lol

He might raise the pizza points required for the ad thing lol because people are saving up for it to spend it when Phil reaches viewers the way he did the past week and it sucks for everyone who isn’t subbed

“chat should we tell him?” at someone who is planning on dedicating a drained ocean monument to theri girlfriend for their 2-year anniversary

marriage season 2

“THAT SHIT WAS TRASH” “the respons time was pog tho”

New minecraft thing learned: you can get apples from a farmer villager!

*opens block* “Hey guys! oh, it’s jeff” *places block back*

“He should lose his job!” (while yoinking a villager he hadn’t traded with yet)

lmaooooo the zombified villager despawned bc Phil didn’t realise that the sword he picked up/spawned with wasn’t given to him by Phil

(This happened less than ten seconds after he just gave a talk on how “zombies and other mobs don’t despawn when they’ve picked up they usually won’t”)

Chat spamming “BLINDZA” and “OLDZA” because he didn’t see that it was an iron sword and thought it was a stone sword the entire time

Tommy&Tubbo are Pinky & the Brain?

Zombie pulled a Techno (the slowly turn and stare lmao)

“This is fine.” as he gets damaged by the zombie villager number 2 sitting in the back of his boat

Phil clutching while getting a roof above number 2’s head as the sun rises

“Gib me apples.” actually gets apples

“apples” does not look like a realt word today and I do not know why

Phil is so good at minecraft that when he tries to take fall damage so he can test suspicious stews, he still falls in the water lol

Ear check! Aka first Endlantis for a lot of people!

Gapple gang can be unworried for a while, got over 2 stacks of gapples made just now

Someone asked if Phil has dolphins in Endlantis. Oof

Points for Chaotic!Phil: in SMP Earth, Techno is the one who just brought unwanted villagers to some other place, Phil called an airstrike on them

Back wall of the Quartress is finally getting done!

“where did the child go” *murders the baby piglin that spawned* chat: nooooooooo the child

so many people are just now realising that it’s really not that surprising how the boys turned out lmao

am I gonna be impressed by Phil placing sealanterns at the back of the fake portal while flying or am I gonna make fun of him for misplacing one mid-flight?

both lol

BONE ZONE TIME

I love the “poor man’s quartz” it fits so well

“more bones required!” *fills entire inventory* “this is too many bones!”

personally I am anti railings, if you fall off that’s on you

When Phil joined the discord and got asked when he was joining he just went “idk” so the reactions to him joining on stream are like, actually real lol

S P L A S H

Phil has slept in a bed exactly 1200 times???

The roof is finally getting fixed! I’m so happy

Phil going “lemme up!” every time he like, elytra jumps up 1,5 blocks reminds me so much of the “let me iiiinnnn” meme lmao

I’m actually really curious about Yorkshire pudding, it sounded gross but it looks kinda good actually

Kristin is making Phil make the pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving

Phil has no confidence in his abilities to do so (seeing as he has never even eaten one, let alone bake one lol)

Kristin wants to see him mess up

As long as the rest is good it’ll fine tho

Chat is suddenly being wholesome and it’s suspicious

Phil will finish the last bits of room off stream probably

(and think about plans for dreamsmp!)

Shorter stream today bc last streams were long (thank you phil! i can actually go to bed at a reasonable time now)

Also WEAR YOUR MASKS

We’ll see whether it’s gonna be hardcore or dreamsmp on monday!

#mcyt #philza #sbi #sleepy bois inc #ph1lza #minecraft #livestream #philza livestream