Greetings ~

Im rarely on here nowadays, but god knows ill never delete this app

[ibajo256]

[fineillsignup]

How to Compliment Chinese Artists!

So Chinese artists, like artists everywhere, are wonderful and amazing and need more love. So maybe you have seen an awesome art by a Chinese speaker on Pixiv, Tumblr, or elsewhere and wow, you want to tell them how cool their art is, but you don’t speak Chinese. You could go to Google translate but don’t. Just… just don’t. Google Translate is so awful for Chinese.

Option 1: Just use English.

Almost all artists would rather get a comment in a language they don’t speak than get no comment, I think! If you keep it to a one word, clear adjective, then a dictionary can help the artist understand. Words and short phrases like “beautiful, cool, amazing, I love this” can be easily translated this way by even someone with no knowledge of English. Avoid slang, especially internet slang!

Option 2: Copy/paste some of this!

NB: There are two kinds of Chinese writing, so-called traditional vs. simplified characters. Simplified is used in mainland China and Singapore and thus is the most common, however, in my experience, simplified readers are more likely to be able to understand traditional characters than the reverse, because [reasons that are too complicated to explain succinctly, just trust me]. It is also easy to mechanically convert traditional characters to simplified, but not the reverse because there are some instances where two different traditional characters have a single simplified one. If you’re sure the artist is from the Mainland or Singapore, by all means convert to simplified.

我不會中文，這是從短語手冊來的。I don’t know Chinese, this came from a phrasebook.

很XX。It’s very XX (replace XX with an adjective below) 太XX了！Too XX!/So XX!

漂亮 - pretty, beautiful 可愛 - cute 醒目 - striking 好笑 - funny 傳神 - vivid, good resemblance 有意思 - interesting 有意義 - meaningful 性感 - sexy 動人 - moving 精緻 - intricate, exquisite 帥 - handsome, hot (in a masculine way)

XX特別好. XX is especially good 你／妳／您把XX畫得特別好。You (generic/male)/ you (female) / you (very formal) drew XX especially well (you can also put a character’s name in here)

[您選擇的]顏色 - the colours [you chose] 構圖 - the composition 型態 - the shape 圖案 - the pattern/design 衣服 - the clothing 手 - the hands 背景 - the background 表情 - the expression(s) 身態 - the pose(s)

我很喜歡這CP! - I really like this couple/ship! 他／她／它是我最喜歡的！He/she/it is my favourite!

你／妳／您的藝術越來越好啦！Your (generic/male)/your (only females) /your (very formal) art just gets better and better!

雖然我看不懂，我還是覺得藝術很好看的！Even though I can’t read this, I still think the art is great!

Please let me know if there is anything else that would be useful! I am also planning to write a brief guide to Lofter (a Tumblr-like Chinese website). Edit: Edited to add the various “you” pronouns, I have a habit of using the most formal you with people I don’t know. Fair warning that using the most formal “you” online is very unusual! It’s just kind of my personal style, IDK? My Chinese-speaking friends have told me they think it’s cute but they could be bullshitting me. You definitely won’t offend someone by using the “regular” you!

[fineillsignup]

LOFTER Guide

Okay, so LOFTER is a Chinese language website, it’s a lot like Tumblr.

AFAIK, the only way to create an account directly with LOFTER requires a Chinese cellphone. It is possible to make a Weibo account outside China, but QQ or WeChat is probably easier. So make an account with QQ or WeChat and log in that way.

Ok cool you’ve got an account now. Let’s check this bish out: 

Here’s a screenshot of a portion of my LOFTER dashboard (in Chinese, 首页). You can see my icon and some pretty self explanatory icons to make a text post, photo post, music post, video post, and then the last one is for a long text post (such as for fanfic).

At the top, the thing between the dashboard tab and “APP” is kind of like the Explore function on Tumblr only not as useful IMO. None of the others are very useful if you aren’t in China/read Chinese except the last one, which has two things you need:

Logout is self-explanatory I hope. Settings, the only things you probably need are at the bottom:

From left to right, “blacklist (of people)”, “tag blocking”, “delete account”. Isn’t tag blocking a useful feature by the way? Wouldn’t it be nice if Tumblr had that??? You can subscribe to your favourite character and block your NOTP tag and basically never see it!

Ok. Time to look for a fandom! The easiest way to find the Chinese name of your fandom is to use Wikipedia. Look up your fandom in English, then change the language to Chinese on the side (中文). Another option is to Google “[fandom name] 是什么” which means “what is [fandom name]” and might give you a clue. Or, you can try searching for the English name directly in LOFTER.

Let’s try “Naruto” or 火影忍者 as it’s called in Chinese:

The top result is to search the tag “Naruto”, then there’s the option for stuff that includes “Naruto” but isn’t necessarily tagged, and then some related searches such as “Naruto mobile game” and “Naruto Shippuden”. Below that you can see people who have “Naruto” as their username.

Naruto is in the top 5 most popular Japanese media on LOFTER. Cool.

From left to right, you can organize by most recent, what’s hot now, and top all time. Unfortunately I haven’t yet figured out a way to sort by photos vs videos, text etc. The “+” sign icon is to subscribe to the tag for your dashboard.

Hopefully you find something that you like! Whoa, check this out:

Looking good Neji. (You can also see the tag 日向宁次 which is Neji’s Chinese name.)

The “heart” is an obvious way to show an artist your love and basically works the same as a heart on Tumblr. Directly to the left of the heart is “recommend”, clicking this will put it into the dashboard of people who follow you, but it will not go on your own LOFTER blog, to do that you have to do reblog. To the left of “recommend” is “share” and to the left of that is “comments”, all artists love comments! A single word adjective in English like “beautiful” or “cute” is easy to understand, or you can use this post I made to aid you in writing compliments for Chinese artists.

If you hover over the upper right corner of the post, there’s a little folded corner (it’s visible in my screencap), click that to go to the permalink version of the post.

Ok now in the top you should see these icons. From left to right, it’s “like”, “recommend”, “reblog”, “share” (via email etc), “follow this user”, “return to dashboard”.

Now we are getting to another exciting feature of LOFTER. Click “reblog” to see.

You see that circle in the upper left? LOFTER enables artists to opt-in to using creative commons licenses or not, as they choose. This screencap’s artist is not using any creative commons license, so you do not have any advance permission to use this work. You can still ask to reblog on Tumblr, just like you would someone on Pixiv or elsewhere! 

This artist is using a Creative Commons License! You can click the symbols and read an English version of it, but IIRC this one says you can share, as long as you give credit, don’t use it commercially, and share your work under the same terms.

Here’s another CCL! This one is freer than the above one–all you have to do is give credit and indicate if you changed anything.

The image I screencapped is released under this license, so here I’m going to say that the artist is Hanyijie and the only change I made was showing it in the context of a screencap.

So that’s the basics! Feel free to send me a message or ask if you have any questions!

For my next guide, I want to make a list of Naruto character names in Chinese and how Chinese pairing names work. :)

[zevveli]

I still think that my favorite urban legend/folklore fact is that there are certain areas in New Orleans where you cannot get a taxi late at night not because it isn’t safe, but because taxi companies have had recurring problems of picking up ghosts in those areas who are not aware that they are dead and disappearing from the cab before reaching the destination and therefore stiffing the driver on the fare causing a loss for the company.

[elsajeni]

An occupational hazard of cab driving I had not previously considered

[princessnijireiki]

I love that the nola problem here is not “ghosts in my taxi cab,” but “ghosts are FUCKING BROKE DEAD BASTARDS & I GOT BILLS”

[siderealsandman]

Horror is when ghosts get into cabs and scare drivers Magical realism is when cab companies have to develop policies to prevent ghastly fare-theft

[kc749]

In a book about the tsunami in Japan in 2011, the writer talked about how there was a huge increase in reports of ghostly activity. Apparently in Japan treating ghosts rudely is basically considered the stupidest thing you could possibly do. For months after the tsunami, taxi drivers would pick up a passenger only to have them give an address in one of the devastated areas. The cab driver often looked up halfway to the destination to find their fare had disappeared. Not wanting to be impolite to the person (even if they were dead) they’d drive to the address, open the door to let them out, then drive away.

[qwertyu858]

[louisegluckpdf]

i love hearing about the declining birth rate like yesss that is a major problem considering our dominant economic model. a problem i plan on contributing to 👍 joining the war on declining birth rates on the side of declining birth rates

[capacity2]

Okay but seriously… China gagged the whole world with this everybody else just pack it up it’s over

[unpeeled-human]

im sorry this is absolutely comical this is the type of shit some villain of shadow would say before being brought over to the good side

"light, shining in the darkness...? hah! preposterous"

[ex-riddlecats]

youre offline because you have an irl life and miss one load bearing post on here and all of a sudden you dont understand any of the vagues on your dash for the next week

[sigrid-of-solstheim]

Fanfiction writers be like:

"here's the immensely time consuming 100K word novel-length passion project I'm working on between my real life job and family! It eats up hundreds of hours of my one and only life, causes me emotional harm, and I gain basically nothing from it! Also I put it on the internet for free so anyone can read if they want. Hope you love it!" :)

[nudityandnerdery]

Congratulations to Brooke from Let's Not Date for winning Father's Day.

[cantanopeshitthatwastaken]

It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment. I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”

[thatgiraffebutt]

On my campus there tends to be a problem where even I you have the doctors note professors will still take points off of your final grade regardless of how sick you are. I’ve seen people show up to class with the stomach flu, pneumonia, respiratory infections and all sorts of other contagious ailments.

[literallyaflame]

Here’s a fun story:

The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.

So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”

So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.

A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.

So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.

The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.

This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.

And on top of it all, misinformation campaigns are encouraging people not to get vaccinations! It’s 2019 and we’re flirting with the plague! Next thing you know some blogger is gonna be like “actually we should all be fucking rats and eating our meat raw, death to all science and god bless america”

[madd-catter]

Many kids at my school will show up really sick because we only get like three days of excused absences without a doctor’s note.

[gen-is-gone]

this is what those in literary academia call “foreshadowing”

(note the dates)

[anarchistmemedistro]

this post aged like an ice cube in an oven

[hugbox]

I truly believe we could fix so many problems if the world wasn’t making us all so dang tired

[the-tree-line]

the problem with having a decade old tumblr blog is that there are posts on it from a decade ago

[the-tree-line]

i’ve become a completely different person like 5 separate times since making those posts and there are STILL people finding them somehow

[naamahdarling]

A 22 year old Livejournal is like a ticking bomb.

[woman-becomer]

tumblr users love reading. you literally stopped for this post just because it has words in it

[interpolationz]

this is one of my favorite bits about tumblr

the users seem to actually prefer text posts to anything else, and treat it as a chore to play a video especially with sound

[benzohoarder]

[figural]

#google translate does not capture the tone switch so i have to say. first two sentences are like. normal maybe kind of feminine posting tone #& the last is like. shounen manga protagonist. action movie hero. jojo's bizarre adventure character. #the tone you would use if you were holding a gun with the safety off (– @chadlesbianjasontodd)

[gay-fae]

a fun fact that people may not know about me is that i’m regular about media. i’m so normal about things i enjoy. i never ever get weird or obsessive about them and I consume and enjoy them completely normally. also im a fucking liar

[writer-psalmie]

Writers when it's time to write the story no one forced them to come up with in the first place 🙄

[starlitartworks]

Wake up babe, the time loop reset. It's time to go to Transylvania.