underneath the burnt orange sky

reflections

[fostershyperfixator]

My local library had a days since James Patterson last published counter.

[official-library-posts]

official library post

[intothestacks]

I need non-librarians to understand that this is not a celebratory counter. It's a plea for help.

[greetings-from-the-void]

Big fan of the official Ankh-Morpork Passport and the weirdly specific information it asks for.

Also, it appears I have been denied entry into Omnia.

[fangirlingpuggle]

SVSSS AU/fic prompt where due to system error as SQQ was no expected to be sucked into dream with MM every night SQQ has same dream of water prison and becoming a human stick. Every night the experience and pain.

It happens so often and is so tied to him that he's limbs start to ache and have pain even i day, vision sometimes going from one eye.

SQQ trying very hard not to sleep, especially after the abyss. The widow period is even worse and when Jin Lan city happens SQQ isn't so much scared after all the years with the dreams experiencing that fate every time he sleeps he's just tired.

He wants it to be over.

LBH seeing his Shizun who looks so broken and is clearly in distress and who doesn't run just says he's ready and wants it to be over.

He doesn't know what he means until he goes into SQQ dream and is horrified.

[fangirlingpuggle]

Thinking more about abyssal emperor SY and empress Binghe (Link)

SY talks about training Binghe with fighting and combat but Binghe just gives sad eyes and SY is like 'Binghe will have to do so much fighting later he should have times to rest, especially after all those years on that peak Binghe should be taken care of and chance to rest'

Binghe wanting to learn music and art instead and SY teaching because poor Binghe never got learn this before he'll teach him everything Binghe is talented enough to put all of those qing jing peak disciples to shame.

SY teaching Binghe all about abyssal creatures and other demons that Binghe will have to fight. Binghe is learning all about the subjects he'll rule over with SY and the creatures within their domain.

Binghe wanting to wear fancy robes and SY agreeing because of course Binghe should get the best and if that's when he wants then of course he should have it. It's different styles to the art less armor but Binghe wants it so who cares.

Binghe is pampered empress just relaxing and cooking and enjoying listening to SY talking about monsters and history.

SY is still like Binghe will soon be leaving to take his revenge until then he can rest the protagonist deserves a break he'll be gone soon so I'll make the most of my time to spoil little white lotus.

[fangirlingpuggle]

Yet another silly SVSSS AU/fic prompt where SY transmigrates into demon/creature within the endless abyss. He's been transmigrated there hundreds of years before the plot and decides to spend time making abyss a little awful and organized.

If he can fix some plot points and get things less chaotic (airplane seriously just crept adding stuff that made zero sense to get more sex scenes) so SY will fix that and make things less bad for Binghe...

He ends up taking over the entire abyss without realizing. Man is emperor of the abyss.

Xin Mo has been begging SY to wield it but SY is like 'i'm not touching the protagonists golden finger, why would I do that i'm just an NPC'

SY has not realized he's the feared emperor of the abyss, tales of his power have even reached outside texts, he is the great terror that rules over all others and untied all the creatures under his power.

He just keeps thinking this is just to make things easier for Binghe... he's mentioned a few times about LBH and his subjects have heard a heavenly demon hat will fall in who SY talks about with adoration.

Clearly they all decide SY is a seer (it would explain a lot) and LBH is their future bride.

LBH falls into abyss ready to start revenge arc... only to get scooped up by first demons who see him and take him palace to apparently 'future husband' LBH is ready to start killing... until he meets SY.

Empress of the abyss suddenly sounds very appealing.

SY: I can help Binghe go though this arc with less trauma and then i'm sure he'll leave and become emperor

LBH: I am empress of the abyss and I am never leaving.

[fangirlingpuggle]

SQH has been waiting for protagonist to get out of the abyss and plot to start in earnest.. only it's been 5 years and nothing.

No takeover in any demonic lands, no plots as cultivation sects and no wives appear to have been acquired.

He has no idea what's happening, where's the plot? where's the revenge? wheres the harem?

Stallion protagonist is missing in action and SQH is confused. The script is out the window and his system seems to have just given up? No missions or anything.

MBJ is taking over territory and expanding power... he no longer wants a spy (he has no need for one since the sect isn't of any importance to him without LBH revenge) SQH thinks he's gonna die earlier... only MBJ just scoops him up and is keeping in in North permanently... (he's been bridenapped and hasn't figured it out yet)

It's only when SQH is arranging meeting with abyssal emperor (who SQH is 99% sure he never wrote but he didn't have a lot of lore in notes that he had to throw out because the lore wasn't selling with anyone other than peerless cucumber)

When in meeting he sees emperor and his empress... who is his stallion protagonist.

He's so shocked he almost misses that he's introduced as queen of the North.

[sunderwight]

Somebody tells Shang Qinghua that Mobei Jun dresses in his revealing plunging necklines and high-slit side skirts and etc for him, and Shang Qinghua is just like uhhhh no? That's ridiculous? Like come on why on earth would his opinion have any influence on how his king dresses?

But once the idea has entered his head, he can't quite shake it. See the thing is, the Mobei Jun he wrote in PIDW actually did wear whole entire outfits most the time. As the pinnacle of masculine ideals he was more into the high collars and buttoned buttons and cool armor that actually covered his vital points than his SV counterpart.

Shang Qinghua's just never really focused on the discrepancy because, well, most of the time he's around the Moboobs he's not thinking critically about anything at all. But, yeah. Even though ice demons don't have a problem being scantily clad in the cold, it is kind of weird that Mobei Jun dresses like a total harlot?

Not that he's shaming his king! Mobei Jun can dress however he wants and Shang Qinghua will enjoy the view!

He starts to think that perhaps he should figure out how he butterfly effected this particular change, though. Mysteries are dangerous. Obviously it's not actually his gaze that Mobei Jun is trying to draw, but there has to be some reason for it. Maybe he just spends so much more time in the human realms getting overheated that he needs the extra ventilation? Shang Qinghua decides to test a few theories, jokingly telling himself that the first thing to do is eliminate the assertion that the all you can eat beef buffet is being set out for his enjoyment.

It'll probably be easy to debunk. He just finds a way to shoehorn in some compliments on Mobei Jun's looks into their next few interactions, totally bracing himself to get his ass kicked the first couple of times for even mentioning anything at all. At the very least he's expecting his king to maybe take some of his outfits out of rotation, like he is not expecting a positive reception to his observation that "this mantle really emphasizes my king's broad shoulders and powerful chest, he should try wearing it shirtless" to result in... Mobei Jun showing up forty-eight hours later in the mantle and a loin cloth and precious little else?!

Then it keeps happening. Shang Qinghua decides he must have chosen the wrong kind of debunking test. Clearly, his king's a little starved for compliments! It's getting a bit absurd!

He decides damage control is in order before he accidentally praises Mobei Jun into becoming an exhibitionist (if it's not already too late...) and he pivots to... well. Leering, a bit. He spreads his compliments out more, also being sure the compliment Mobei Jun on wearing, like, actual coverage, and looking cool in armor and furs and etc (not hard, because he does). But he lets his king catch his eyes wandering a few times.

He's fully prepared to get his ass kicked for that, and he does. Not as badly as he'd feared, but it does net him some impressive bruises. It doesn't seem to deter his king from dressing how he pleases regardless, and Shang Qinghua despairs. Well of course some wandering eyes wouldn't turn Mobei Jun off of his preferred wardrobe! He's a grown ass demon king, not some uncertain youth who would blush and cover up!

Damn though, refuting this whole "he's doing it for you" theory is more complicated than he thought it'd be. Maybe he should move on to just, figuring out the actual reason, rather than attempting it process-of-elimination style...?

Meanwhile Mobei Jun is getting increasingly impatient. Qinghua has finally started signalling his interest in taking their very respectable slowburn courtship to the next phase, so why is it stalling again...?

[ajaxgb]

Okay no I need to talk about the book version of Howl's Moving Castle. I love the movie but the book has such a different vibe and you, yes you, should read it.

Movie Howl is a soulful and quiet. Book Howl is a drama queen and Causing Problems and has a long string of jilted exes and couldn't shut up if you paid him.

Sophie and Howl drive each other up the wall at the beginning and it's really funny. Sophie and Howl are (despite themselves) very much in love by the end and they still drive each other up the wall and it's even funnier.

In the movie, Howl has been ordered by the king to participate in The War, and Howl is avoiding it because he is a brave conscientious objector. In the book, Howl has been ordered by the king to rescue his lost brother from the Witch of the Wastes, and Howl is avoiding it by any means necessary because he is a cowardly weasel who wants to stay as far from the Witch as possible.

In the movie, the Witch cursed Sophie because she was jealous about Howl speaking to Sophie for five minutes. In the book, the Witch cursed Sophie because Sophie had been doing surprisingly powerful magic for years without knowing it and it was actually starting to cut into the Witch's plans. (Sophie does not discover any of this until nearly the end of the book, but the reader can start to pick it up much earlier and the way Sophie's magic works is pretty darn cool.)

In the movie, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens, but this is implied to be nothing but nasty fearmongering. In the book, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens because Howl started the rumor so people would stop asking him to do wizard junk all the time.

The book lightly parodies a couple of tropes from Western fairy tales. In particular Sophie has internalized that, as the eldest of three sisters, her "destiny" is to fail so that her younger sisters will look cooler when they succeed, which is why she's so resigned to the hat shop at the beginning. (Sidebar: Sophie's sisters come up much more in the book and they're great.) There's also a really funny bit where Sophie attempts to operate a pair of seven-league boots.

In the movie, the fourth and final location that the magic door connects to is some sort of black void / mindscape / time portal dealy. In the book the fourth location is Wales, in the UK, on Earth, so that Howl can visit his family, because from Howl's perspective this is an isekai story.

[mongeese]

The Murderbot Diaries are a power fantasy about being aromantic and still developing extremely important dedicated emotionally intimate partnerships where you are a top priority in a person's life, equal to their other family or romantic attachments despite your own emotional difficulties. And having guns in your arms

[tzikeh]

Maryland to Become First US State to Ban Surveillance Pricing That Charges More After Mining Personal Data

Maryland will become the first US state to ban surveillance pricing in retail stores, after passing Protection from Predatory Pricing Act.

Jesus fucking christ that this exists in the first place

[boyslit]

I WAS FUCKING WONDERING WHAT THOSE DIGITAL PRICE TAGS WERE ABOUT SUDDENLY i had hoped they were so the workers didn't have to finagle those little papers into the slider part anymore 😭

[eclipticasolaris]

Hi, yes, that is the OFFICIAL excuse made to me by the guy replacing the paper tags with digital ones at my local Walmart, but the end goal is to remove the numbers off the shelf entirely, replacing them with QR codes that you have to scan with the app…. Which requires your login information….. and also stores your card information so even if you didn’t use your Walmart account at the physical checkout, if you used a card they recognize, they assign that purchase to your Walmart account purchase history.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

Yes, call your reps. Yes, push for more legislation like this in more places. But also take an extra minute out of your shopping trip to MAKE IT HURT for companies to pull this shit.

[antisocialxconstruct]

I've seen some people in the notes express (very fair) concern that this is only going to inconvenience already under-paid laborers, and not have any impact on corporate. While I can't speak for every company or every store, I do work in a grocery store and I can tell you this is precisely the kind of thing that would have an impact, especially if people are doing it en masse. Stores absolutely track their shrink numbers, and they do draw distinctions between what gets stolen, damaged, or wasted for other reasons. If people are making it clear that the reason they're bringing things to the cashier is that the prices are not adequately represented on the displays, and rather than improving business it's wasting product, slowing down transactions, and causing confusion and mistrust in customers, that is a language that shareholders speak.

[asthedeathoflight]

Very funny to me that ART spends all of AC playing it cool and then just kind of gives up in NE. Like Rapport suggests this might be because it has been Processing its feelings since then but it's hilarious from MB's perspective. End of AC ART is like hm well if i ever see you again that might be cool otherwise goodbye forever and then in NE its like UnBlock Me I Am In Love With You???

[imonlyheretofollowyou]

Oh sure, Murderbot-who-permanently-keeps-ARTs-transponder-tucked-inside-its-ribcage. That's the individual who'll somehow consider this unreasonable behaviour.

[krakensdottir]

To be fair, Murderbot WOULD consider it unreasonable, but only because it's mastered cognitive dissonance. The reader can pick up (especially on the 2nd or 3rd or 10th read) that ART might be a tad bit smitten in Artificial Condition, and is definitely setting up long-term possibilities. But Murderbot picks up on NONE of that. It shoves its own feelings into a closet when ART leaves so it doesn't have to deal with them. Mfer fully did not realize how much it cared about ART in turn until it thought ART was dead. Like, that grief reaction took it totally by surprise.

ART knows what it wants, and is unapologetically intense in its declarations. It decided they were friends as soon as they started talking. Murderbot doesn't realize they were friends until it's tearing apart the people who 'killed' it and goes oh, wow, I am really angry about this, huh.

[lexinaava]

The Untamed, if Mo Xuanyu had a peanut allergy:

[necromancelena]

Die temu ad die

[necromancelena]

Hmm. Accidentally looks like latin.

[chef-boy-ar-girl]

It accidentally is latin

[saanah]

Accidental latin is my new favourite thing.

[santapau]

Found this in the margins of a medieval manuscript.

[qqueenofhades]

This is a very charming illustration and I do approve of Accidental Latin, but unfortunately, that is not what this (Fake) Accidental Latin actually says. Google Translate seems to think "temu" is identical to "timor" (infinitive, "to fear"), which would then be conjugated in first-person singular as "timeo" ("I fear"). "Temu" is not a word in Latin. So that is a very weird leap on Google Translate's part to turn gibberish into... something vaguely etymologically similar sounding? Hmm.

Next, "die" does mean "day," though nominative singular is "dies," i.e. "dies irae." It could be conjugated "die" if it was in ablative or locative case, but "die ad die" would mean something more like "day to day." "Ad" is in a "to" direction and "ab" is from, i.e. "ab urbis," and ablative case is used to indicate the movement of a thing. In short, "by" is not really a way to translate "ad"; we might want "per" here? (Through, by means of, etc.)

Not to mention, it would be weird to put one "die" at the start and another at the end The verb also usually goes at the end in Latin sentences, just for that extra bit of fun. So yes, in short, this is not actually Latin, and Google Translate is very bad at Latin in particular. Nonetheless, still charming.

[nudistcat]

@theshitpostcalligrapher

[sekkitsune]

Agree, @qqueenofhades, except on the matter of breaking “die ad die” apart. It’s a common structure in poetic and oratorical Latin to jam one phrase in the middle of another. I can’t think of an example exactly parallel to this construction, but I could believe a Roman poet would write it!

[qqueenofhades]

Ah, that is true. My Latin is of the reading-medieval-documents (particularly charters and/or chronicles) variety, where the sentence and usage structures are often more formulaic and there is less poetic license to move words around. There is obviously far less fixity for word order in Latin, since the conjugations explain how they grammatically relate to each other rather than placement in the sentence. (Coincidentally, this is why I used to say that the best feeling in the world was walking past a Latin classroom and not having to go inside it. Ahem.)

So yes: true that poetical Latin might be more at liberty to split the "die"-s up that far, though "timeo" (verb) is still more likely in most cases to go at the end, which would place them together anyway ("die ad die timeo," "day to day I fear" if translated in strict word order, which would make sense to an English speaker and sound more poetic anyway). Keep in mind, however, that my Latin is a) fairly rusty and b) mostly used for said formulaic legal document reading rather than freeform verse, so don't super-hard quote me on this.

[sekkitsune]

I saw that ablative “die” and that final -u on “temu” and thought of the ablative supine (as in “mirabile dictu”) but as you observe, there isn’t a verb that “temu” could be, and then also, the ablative supine requires an adjective, as far as I know.

But perhaps “temu” is a hapax legomenon (in which case we would need the rest of the text to gloss it) or a scribal error for temeratu, from temero, “I defile or disgrace”. In that case, and in true Tumblr form, I might translate it as “daily I disgrace, in the manner of the day”, with some errors attributable to the scribe.

[qqueenofhades]

....oh my god. You might be a genius. Because what else does Tumblr do but daily disgrace [itself, oneself, and/or numerous others] in the manner of the day, and make numerous scribal errors.

[laurenthemself]

how dare you say we error on the scribes

[jtimu]

this is what happens when you buy your latin on temu

[thoodleoo]

oh so when other people call a baby "cute enough to eat" it's sweet and charming. but when i, cronus,

[brainstreams]

[oreocean27]

The only thing keeping me sane about qijiu is the headcanon that SJ transmigrated into SY's original body with his own system to save SY from becoming a salted fish. He gets to complete quests (extensive therapy) and do his hobbies without the looming threat of cultivation and sect politics. By the end of his missions he can take one person back into the modern world with him (Qi ge would say yes 0 hesitation)

[depsidase]

[depsidase]