What Even? 42

she/they Chaotic Bi catch of all trades blog: 90% fandom 9% art 1% useful shit. Rebuilding after 2017 deletion

[catchymemes]

[makahitaki]

[aquilacalvitium]

[quakerjoe]

[fnordseer5]

galadriel voice "things that were once $5 are now $20"

[1000-life-hacks]

[archeologist-prophet]

Lovely to see we have spaces where you can gain access to so much literature!

[hag-o-hags]

Don't sleep on @queerliblib the Queer Liberation Library for all your queer Libby needs!

[a-totally-reasonable-username]

@namelessennes

[avidreaderffn]

@sandstonesunspear

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

Jesus Tapdancing Christ... THIS is a good welt pocket and the people who designed Simplicity 2895 ought to be blasted well ASHAMED of themselves for the crap way THEY wanted a welt pocket made. *SNARLS*

[makereadgrow]

This is how I learned to do it and a good example of what you want to see in a short form tutorial: pinning, pressing, seam finishing, good fabric handling.

I would mention that you can make the pocket facing with a small panel of your matching fabric that is visible and the rest in a lighter fabric to reduce bulk. That's a lot of denim layers for comfort.

[teaboot]

HOT DAMN

[ao3commentoftheday]

I don't know if it's just me being in small fandoms, but fandom as a whole feels...really lonely as of late. People have split themselves up so much that they don't discuss things the way they did before, they just kind of post their stuff and leave and half their audience "consumes" it like "content". There's no comments, barely kudos, the only places fans talk with each other anymore are on private discord servers that no one ever finds out about...I don't know, I'm a bit of an old and I feel like I'm screaming out into the void for no reason at this point. Sure, "somebody" will like my stuff, but will I ever get to know about it?

I think about this kind of thing a lot, anon, and I think my generation (Gen X/xillennial) kind of did folks dirty a bit.

In our defense, we didn't know we were.

I'm an educator by profession, as well as on this hobby blog, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn things. A lot of learning is social, and a lot of it happens when parents teach their children.

When I was growing up, pre-internet, my parents taught me how to talk to other adults in our community, how to play with other children, how to order food in a restaurant, how to call a business and ask a question. They literally walked me through how to do all of that stuff and more because those were daily skills in the world at that time.

We've spent the last 20+ years talking about how kids today are "digital natives" - but have we spent enough time teaching kids how to keep a conversation going when you're not in the same room as the other person? How to leave a comment on a post by a person you don't know? How to show your appreciation to a content creator? What a content creator even is and how that differs from a fan creator?

I know there are a lot of jokes out there about different things that would kill a Victorian child, but I think what would actually be difficult for them would be the lack of rules and instructions that kids today receive from the adults in their lives.

I don't have kids myself, so maybe this is all just bullshit and I'm talking directly out of my ass. But a LOT of the time when I notice someone doing something 'wrong' it's because no one ever told them how to do it right.

I kind of suspect that might be part of what's happening in fandom these days. Combine the above with the fact that fandom got inundated with new members in 2020 during quarantine and lock downs, and it's not surprising to me that a large percentage of the people in fandom today don't approach things the way that we used to before.

i don't fault them for it. When fandom was smaller and the internet was new, we used to take the time to bring people in. But now, it feels like 'everyone knows XYZ' so why does it need to be taught? And with how fast things move, it's more rare for newcomers to lurk for a while before they dive into everything.

This is a very long answer to a problem that probably just needed a listening ear, but I hope what you take away from this is an understanding that you're not the only one who feels the difference. I see this same experience shared in the notes on my posts all the time.

There is no easy fix for the situation and it certainly won't be fast to change, but maybe if we mentor a bit more when we have the spoons to, we can shift the culture a bit? One fan at a time?

If you managed to get all the way to the end of this, do yourself a favour and leave a comment on a fic or reblog a post with some chatty tags. DM somemeone or tag them or send them an ask just to let them know you see them and you think they're cool.

Even if nothing happens as a result, you tried. And maybe you just made someone's day. 💗

[thecraftgremlin]

Where’s that one post that’s like Reasons Why My Wife Cried This Week and when are we gonna get a fanfic of that but Ryland Grace.

[stargirl-and-potts]

Reasons my human has cried:

* New student, very small. Grace said it was pebble. Pebble is small Earth rock. Pebble likes name.

* He found out Eridians have no gender rules.

* Students brought him mineral sample. After he stopped crying he said he loves show-and-tell game. Human naming conventions oddly literal.

* I told him Earthsun grew bright.

* I took him up atop atmosphere bypass elevator to look at stars.

* He woke up from nap and found me still with him. I did not wait on his chest; he says I am heavy like “elephant” and he “couldn’t breathe.” I laid my arm over him instead, kept him close, feeling safe. He said “cuddle” was warm.

* Before class he heard younglings singing.

* He has plants in house from sprouts on ship. Plant grew “bud.”

* Engineers got seawater temperature right. He took off shoes and stood in water, sighing. He didn’t care about pants getting damp. Cried until shirt was also damp. Humans very endlessly wet.

* He missed “Doritos.”

* Adrian helped food scientists make taumoeba dried paste. Made it crunchy after heating. We fused it into triangle form. Told him it was Tauritos. That made him laugh-cry. Laugh-cry is rare and precious.

* He remembered Eridians have no gender rules.

* We made him celebration outfit. Used metals he calls pretty. He can see frequencies named “colorful” and “shiny.” These make humans happiest.

* I gave him hug when he wasn’t expecting it. Easier to hug close now with exosuit. Hug when Grace sitting down so he does not fall over.

* Told him to think long time, stay with me as long as he can.

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

Alt text is so incredibly useful when it comes to speakers of other languages. I follow a bunch of fiber artists from different parts of the world, Ukrainian fashion designers and Chinese antique garment collectors and Iranian university professors of textile art history. There are discussions happening in different languages, and resources like books and scholarship, simply not available in the English or French I know.

And a lot of them never even use the Latin alphabet a lot of the time! So sometimes I can photograph a book page or screencap an Instagram story and get my phone's OCR to give me text to paste into Google Translate, and I can sometimes use a Cyrillic keyboard to type out what I'm seeing, but but as soon as something is antiquated or handwritten or viewed at an angle, my goose is cooked. I can't even get the original phrase to try to translate at all.

Unless there's alt text. Because alt text gives me exactly the data I need in the exact right format to take to a dictionary and get the gist of what's going on.

It makes me reconsider how my own content is accessible or inaccessible not just to blind or visually-impaired people, but people who aren't perfectly fluent in English. Because I and a lot of my friends are native English speakers who usually only speak 1-2 languages total, I'm prey to assuming that everyone in my intended audience is like us. That of course everybody can easily process English text, whether it's printed or written in cursive or using some antique calligraphic hand. And of course, that's not true. Now when I look at my analytics for my business's rare medieval name, I occasionally see translation site traffic where people in Farsi or Ukrainian or Chinese have translated me in return.

The curb-cut effect is a wonderful thing, I think. The primary reason I've used alt text is a good one, and it also turns out that it's really useful for a lot of other people too.

[clockworkprism]

This is one field I think AI can actually help. Grabbing text from an image and translating it, would be a very useful tool. Screen readers that can automatically read text would be great.

But there's the down side that translation is a skill and this means displacing entry level roles. I have no doubt expert translators won't be hurt, because translating to a different language is more than copy pasting in a dictionary, but even that basic skill needs practicing that AI would eliminate. Still, on balance maybe it's better to have broadly accessible AI capable of doing that (and a more streamlined model wouldn't need to consume a household worth of energy per query)

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

I can't believe I'm speaking positively about AI, and yet...

It's my understanding that this is the area large language models and generative AI originated in, not a new area where AI could be introduced. And machine translation, optical character recognition, voice recognition, and text-to-speech functionality over the past 20 years have revolutionized adaptive tech for people with sensory disabilities or language barriers.

After all, that's how I do most of my alt text these days—screencap somebody's tags on my phone, press a button that recognizes text, and then select, copy, and paste the text I want into the alt text field. I specifically got an iPhone 13 so I could have that feature. (Well, that and dark mode, so I could take better pictures of my dark cat.) It's also how I read literal books in unfamiliar languages, with my phone hovering over the pages.

On the other hand, here's an NPR article from a month ago: If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?

Because actually, although the job has changed a lot over the past two decades, the demand for human translators is growing. The more people can cheaply translate things by machine, the more they see the value and possibility in translation, so they're more willing to try communicating across language barriers. The number of laid-off departments of translators is actually much smaller than the number of businesses willing to begin hiring translators for the very first time, since they don't need a department to laboriously rewrite everything; they just need a translator to proofread their foreign language materials for nuance and tone.

It does represent more of a shift to the gig economy, which sucks, but it's hard to lean against the prevailing wind of the times that far.

[iokheaira]

As a pro translator to and from Finnish (a fairly small, non-Indo-European language) who occasionally deals with AI, or machine translation, let me expand a bit: first, some things aren't worth the cost of money and time of being translated by a human person, even a rank n00b, so before they didn't get translated at all.

Second, the "new jobs" are often proofreading machine translation, commonly called post-editing. This ranges from genuinely helping translators deal with masses of text and making reasonable money, to causing a giant headache for shit pay.

IMO translation really shows the strengths and failure points of large language models (LLM) commonly known as "AI"; to wit, they're really, really good at predicting the most likely outcome based on known data, with occasional randomness that sometimes produces a genuinely great solution, and they're absolute crap at maintaining a consistent terminology and cohesion within a text, they can't know specialised terminology if it hasn't been scraped, and they just cannot deal with cross-references to other documents (because they often treat them as text strings, so instead of copying the translated name of an EU Directive or its common abbreviated name, available online in all of the languages of the Member States, the machine makes up a new translation which may or may not lead the reader to the correct document...)

The worst part is when the machine is good enough to sound confident but keeps generating errors in meaning or references or consistency, because then you need to read things through more carefully than when proofreading the work of a competent human, so that in the absolute worst case you spend as much time checking as you would've spent on translating from scratch - for half the pay. In the absolute best case? You can do a quick read-through, make a few corrections and you're done.

Note that specially-built translation engines can be made to work with glossaries and specific references, but 1. those only make sense for things that already generate massive amounts of text, like the EU, and 2. they're harder to retrofit to generic translators like DeepL at least without specialised translation software, which is another beast entirely.

Also... the gig economy has been present in the translation industry since at least the 2000s, or from what I've heard, maybe 1990s; most of it is outsourcing. You either learn to be a business or don't make a living wage. Entry level has always been full of random people who get a decent grade in high school or study literature in university and think: how hard can it be? And then end up reinventing the wheel. (I did an MA in translation studies and have found it useful, though I already started working after the BA like many others.)

Uhhhh... where was I?

Right! Go ahead and use Google Translate or DeepL to understand what a foreign website etc. is talking about, or turn on the automatically generated and machine translated subtitles on YouTube. No human would be paid to translate those anyway, so why not use the service? Just keep in mind that they are based on probability calculations, and nobody has checked that the text makes sense and uses accurate specialist terminology, or tried their best to make it understandable to you (because ultimately, the translator's job is communication).

[elfwreck]

AI translation is terrific for "I have a tourist brochure PDF for this city I'm visiting; I want to know which of these recommendations are cafes, bookstores, or clothing boutiques." You don't actually care about the advertising hype; you just want to know "does this place sell food" and "when is it open?"

AI translation is good for "someone pointed me at this news website in a language I don't speak." You'll get the gist of the headlines and the ability to understand the main points being made. You'll miss the nuances. If you're just trying to figure out "what did that guy say that everyone's celebrating?", AI will help with that.

AI translation is good for "I do speak this language and I want to translate this entire report so other people can actually understand it." AI will do the rough draft, and then you have to fix it--but it saves you hours of figuring out the basic phrasing and structure; you can focus on the technical terms and cleaning up the nuanced phrasing.

Note: This is faster than translation from scratch. It is not, however, just 10% of the time it would've taken to translate from scratch, which is what many employers want to pay for. "It's 90% done," they claim. They are wrong. It's 25-50% done. The fact that 90% of the words won't change doesn't mean that last portion is 10% of the work - and as mentioned, all the titles in the references will need to be reviewed and probably updated. And if the report mentions a Smith, a Smythe, and a Smitt, all of those names will need to be checked.

What AI translation should be doing, is freeing up translators to work on interesting jobs rather than endless boilerplate.

[jessaerys]

how do i say "horror novels these days are too woke" without sounding like a right winger. what i mean is: this one is about a woman serial killer who kills Bad Men, that one is about ~anticapitalist activists~, this one is ~queer~, that one is about *spins wheel* someone dealing with the ghosts of their immigrant roots, all of them are about intergenerational traumaaaaa. okay. cool. but is it good though. is it fucking scary

[jessaerys]

something something, losing the ability to convey horror through abstraction, through metaphor, through symbolism, through allegory, through raw unexamined un-psychiatrized feeling. if the real horror is.... dun dun dun! the patriarchy then i just feel preached to. don't use fiction as a vehicle for Saying Something About Society. write with total vulnerability and then see what it says. it will be probably be far more interesting and horrifying than what if the monster was uhh my mom's abuse or whatever. this brand of new horror writers are all so terrified of actually disclosing anything about themselves. it's like if an instagram infographic performance was a mediocre contemporary novel

[some-stars]

YOU ARE MAKING THE TEXT DO THE WORK OF ANALYSIS!!!!!!!

[transfagrified-in-the-void]

Here is a free pdf of the players handbook

Here is a free pdf of xanathars guide to everything

Here is a free pdf to monsters manual

Here is a free pdf to tashas cauldron of everything

Here is a free pdf to dungeon master’s guide

Here is a free pdf to volo’s guide to monsters

Here is a free pdf of mordenkainen’s tomb of foes

For all your dnd purposes

[zxiqky-wicky]

Reblogging for other dnd nerds

[demon-rum]

>^>

[jacobtheloofah]

also here is a whole website that not only has a shit ton of adventures and such but lets you search for any item or npc or whatever and see their stats and info at your fingertips

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

and here is the same version of the above website except it uses the 5e rules as they existed prior to the 2024 relaunch, which is what you’d prefer

[jvlianbashir]

my friend's discord server has a "proof of touch grass" channel where they post pics of them doing regular activities outdoors/in public. i think many online spaces could benefit from such a thing

[weaselle]

when i was super depressed - like struggling to eat anything barely able to get out of bed to pee depressed - my good friend asked me every day to send her a picture of me holding a leaf and a picture of a meal i was eating and it helped me significantly

(also, she was never judgey - if my meal was a single potato chip she would simply say good job eating a potato chip today <3 )

which is to say, i agree proof of touch grass is a good idea for online spaces

[yadelah]

This kinda required my brain a bit

[grumfy]

yeah actually we removed the big bad wolf from the little red riding hood story because portraying violence against minors is really messed up. yeah. yeah also the wolf narrative was really predatory and had had some icky grooming vibes and a fable meant for literal children shouldn’t have implied p*do shit and grape so now little red riding hood goes into the woods and nothing happens and she goes to grandma’s house. don’t worry our kids will still stick to the path and know not to follow to wolves implicitly because we told them to and children should always do as their told. just like little red riding hood does now.

[waywardworldhopper]

#this was very effective op because I read the word “grape” and started shooting lasers out of my eyes peer reviewed tag from @thetrekkiehasthephonebox

[ellewantsrevenge]

aadam jacobs's archive

[mysteriouspersonrambles]

Truthfully one of the most insane things to me that tumblr users have ever done is transform Dracula from a book about the Victorian scooby gang trying to defeat a vampire into a tragic time loop (which in turn makes the story even more of a gothic horror in my opinion) via the existence of Dracula Daily

Like what do you mean every single year the Harkers, the suitor squad and Van Helsing are forced to relive the worst year of their life

Sure they win in the end but over and over they are forced to loose the people they love, be striped of their personhood and fight what must have seemed like an impossible battle.

And nobody is even aware of this time loop except us and we just feed into this narrative. “Oh my friend Jonathan has just sent me another letter let’s hope this goes better than last year ;)”

And from a literary analysis standpoint this whole change is inane because it frames the book in an entirely new light. There is a meta layer of horror being applied to the book that was never possible before.

How many years will they suffer like this before someone realizes something is wrong? Before someone gets déjà vu just a few too many times?Before Jonathan and Mina realize they don’t know what their son looks like all grown up? How many years before they are free?

[shutyourmoustache]

Making exercises more accessible to the disabled? Fuck yeah!

[mswyrr]

just learned that in this the 250th year of our rebellion against King George the literal current King of England gave a speech like: tsk tsk, don't you lot believe in democracy and rule of law anymore? Have some pride in yourselves, my good chums!

[mswyrr]

I'm fucking dying here. The Founders would shit themselves to know it came to the point where the United States Congress needed a history and ethics and religious tolerance lesson from the literal King of England:

The Founding Fathers were bold and imaginative rebels with a cause. Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago — or, as we say in the United Kingdom, just the other day — they declared independence by balancing contending forces and drawing strength into diversity. They united 13 disparate colonies to forge a nation on the revolutionary idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They carried with them and carried forward the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment, as well as the ideals which had an even deeper history in English common law and Magna Carta. These roots run deep, and they are still vital. Our Declaration of Rights of 1689 was not only the foundation of our constitutional monarchy, but also provided the source of so many of the principles reiterated, often verbatim, in the American Bill of Rights of 1791. And those roots go even further back in history. The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances. This is the reason why there stands a stone by the River Thames at Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed in the year 1215. This stone records that an acre of that ancient and historic site was given to the United States of America by the people of the United Kingdom to symbolize our shared resolve in support of liberty and in memory of President John F. Kennedy. Distinguished members of the 119th Congress, it is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s founders is present in every session and every vote cast not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States in both of our countries. It is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength, including to support victims of some of the ills that so tragically exist in both our societies today. And Mr. Speaker, for many here and for myself, the Christian faith is a firm anchor and daily inspiration that guides us not only personally, but together as members of our community. Having devoted a large part of my life to interfaith relationships and greater understanding, it is that faith in the triumph of light over darkness which I have found confirmed countless times. Through it, I am inspired by the profound respect that develops as people of different faiths grow in their understanding of each other. It is why it is my hope, my prayer, that in these turbulent times, working together and with our international partners, we can stem the beating of ploughshares into swords.

[palamedeez-nuts]

"the most unrealistic thing about project hail mary is that a woman is in charge" WRONG look up the glass cliff. women are much more likely to be promoted to positions of power when things are going poorly and people need a woman to blame. she refers to herself as the "world's whipping boy." the person put in the position to have to commit ecological and humanitarian crimes of that scale in order to save the earth would only ever be a woman.