Told my husband about my XS retheme idea and it led to a debate about whether XS Tech is actually evil or just incompetent. He asked "what makes XS evil and not just incompetent?" and besides the fact that they hurt Skippy I couldn't think of any concrete evidence. Can you guys think of anything?
a few notes in particular: "Profit is simply a byproduct we've learned to live with." i don't think anyone with zero ulterior motives would say something like THAT.
S.I.R. is another example: it isn't just his actions, but also- who exactly built him? whatever team built him must have tweaked his allegiance to X-S enough to think organic lifeforms are one of two things. Customers, or in the way of progress
third thing, with the line "For your own safety, we must insist that you leave this area now. Move it!" quite possibly being the most aggressive a disney attraction has been to it's own guests
there's of course, no real proof of any wrongdoing besides skippy being put into limbo, but i think that's the point! it's mostly garnered from contextual clues- a corporation like X-S would want to hide anything too noticeable from the public, but overall "putting sales before science" is nothing lower than malicious in my eyes
I've never even considered this line of thinking before this post, but even what happened to Skippy isn't necessarily a reflection of X-S! How much of that is truly their own idea, and how much is just S.I.R. having enough free will to be a massive dick to the poor little guy?
Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
ANIMALS:
catenarwhal: #mandatory 'how cows produce milk' mention#i'll never recover from that one I fear
piromantic: #one time i saw someone fake their way through describing how spiders behave
pluto-lichen: horses
misskittypotter: #stardew valley faking its way through what fresh fish smell like
pa-pa-plasma: #saw someone faking their way through knowing what a seal is once #i still am fucked up over that one to this day. they just straight up did not know #& they were NOT good at guessing it either like it was clear they had never googled that animal ever #& was only just now realizing via answering questions from anons that seals are not!! what they assumed. initially
SEX:
dykevandyke: #what a prostate is #and where it is located #as in. external.
dreamyeyedrose: #I remember back in the ff.net days reading an Ichigo/Renji fic where the writer assumed the penises go inside each other #and I was like âI mean I don't know how it works for sure I don't have one but idk if that's how it worksâ
SOME OTHER FOOD STUFF:
thetrekkiehasthephonebox: #add another one to the list bloggers#this character is cooking a salad
shosta: #still baffled about the published work that didn't know food could freeze
sun-dari: #once i read a fic where the author didn't understand cinnamon
alto-tenure: #read something recently where the author was just. blatantly wrong about spices
dramatic-dolphin: #i saw someone try to fake their way through what ramen is once. like 14 years ago.#but i remember.#i was very confused about ramen for a few months. they were writing it so authoritatively.
the-celery-stalks-at-midnight: #i will never ever forget someone putting leftover fries in the microwave to reheat them and setting the timer for five minutes
typeghost: #this sparked a memory of a hannibal fic where the author had to fake their way through writing about gravy
draculin: #the one fanfic where the author knows about coffee only as a concept wrote a character as a coffee drinker#was very interesting#I don't remember the fandom or the plot but I was mesmerized by the coffee actions and choices
11235811235811: #there's a lot of faking their way thru congee in the svsss fandom i'll also note
fishali3n: #read one where the person clearly didnt know what tofu is
emmy-everafter: #in the aftermath of shadow and bone s2 i saw a lot of people pretending to know what stroopwafels are #babes they are more like cookies than breakfast waffles #like yes there is a waffle pattern but you're not gonna cut into a stack of them with syrup and sugar#đ€Łđ€Łđ€Ł
NON-FOOD STUFF:
red-umbrella-811: Shoutout to Dame Agatha Christie for faking her way through what a wrench is in a very popular published work.
bluebeetle: #once saw someone have a character put an entire phone book in their pocket
nonametis: #- sex talk in languages other than english #<- or just the petnames in a different language other than English
sadisticpony: #the fanfiction i saw this week where op DIDNT KNOW HOW AUTOMATIC DOORS WORKED #and that they arent in peoples homes!!! of course. also opening the automatic door for someone is unironically very funny but its not #its not like. grabbing the door handle to let someone in. helpppp
danmeichael: #reminds me of the fic with the figure drawing class where the character started with the feet. #i love you feet first figure drawing author
meowmix1100blr: #me watching this one fic absolutely obliterate what the board of directors does
vexedhexes: #one time i read an architect character making a doorway bigger by building a bigger door #what a beautiful world. #OH. also gravity falls fic where they go 'oh piedmont is in california so its warm all year round'
leveragehunters: #characters going to a beer garden #And it's literally a garden outside the pub#It was a very cute mistake
fitofpique: #yes! #grown men do not get blind drunk off two beers #but i am possibly guilty of the hypothermia one #assuming it does not make you very horny?
dadvans-likes: #always thinking abt the soup kitchen fic #the entire setting of the fic was 'soup kitchen' #and i very quickly realized #the author did not know what a soup kitchen was #and they thought that soup kitchens only served soup #fic
msmargaretmurry: #i love fanfiction #once read a fic where the characters played 20 questions #but the author seemed to not know how to play 20 questions and was just kind of winging it........ #immaculate
shakespeareaddict: #Look I know not all of us are hockey experts #But it takes about ten seconds of research or any attention paid to the show to realize #That the Stanley cup playoffs are not in fucking September
baejax-the-great: #the funniest one i saw #was someone faking what church is like #like 1. they really didn't have to write an entire church experience for their fic #and 2. they had clearly never even watched a show where people went to church #it was bonkers weird
twosunson: #things ive seen authors faking #knowing how to unclog a drain #knowing. literally any history #knowing what ketamine looks like (apparently- oregano) #(you know who you are)
waterhorseyblues-ao3: #beltane being celebrated in winter #wales being portrayed as a completely separated land from england (i wish) #characters getting up after weeks of bedrest like that dosnt completely fuck you up
violetfairydust: #i once read a fic where the flight time from london to seattle was 3 hours
purekesseltrash: One time, in a fic set specifically in Des Moines, IA, two of the characters casually drove 20 minutes to the ocean. The memory continues to delight me. I want to know where that author thought that Iowa was.
this is probably my favorite tiktok of all time and I finally got around to showing it to my dad the other day and now he comes home every day and tells me about all the places he saw crumbling concrete and says "guess they didn't add enough chinchilla flakes"
My dad has worked in construction is whole life, primarily with a company that does concrete foundations, and I immediately sent him this back when I first found it on TikTok, and he IMMEDIATELY shared it with everyone he worked with. They apparently still quote it on his job sites to this day.
dead tired today so I grabbed a coffee from the gas station & the guy greeted me by trying to say âis that everything â but fumbled and said âe ga thebythinâ and me trying to say âyeahâ or âyupâ just went âYIP!â in response. No survivors
I'm noticing some interesting choices with regards to pronouns in Laura Pohl's translation of All Systems Red. See, in Portuguese we don't have object pronouns like "it/its" and neutral neopronouns like "elu/delu" are considered more analogous to the English "they/them", so gendering Murderbot the way that it is gendered in the original was always going to be tricky. There's also the other difficulty that adjectives are gendered in Portuguese, so whenever Murderbot describes itself or it's emotional state or anything, necessarily it was going to gender itself grammatically in some way. What this translation does at first is that the Murderbot's internal dialogue it genders itself in the masculine which I assumed to be just sort of defaulting Murderbot to be a masculine character, but in reflection of a different detail, I think it's just defaulting to this formal almost archaic notion of the masculine as neutral. Now, the detail that made me rethink this is this line that I just came upon of Dr Mensah's:
[SecUnit, I need you to stay still (female form) until I arrive]
The reason that Mensah is referring to Murderbot in the feminine in this case is that it's referring to it as a security unit, right, and the word Unidade, Unit, in Portuguese, is a feminine word. So I just went back now and I found one other previous instance in which characters refer to Murderbot in the third person and, Ratthi, he calls Murderbot by masculine pronouns but that's when it's being referred to as a robĂŽ, robot, which in Portuguese is a masculine word. So I guess the way that Pohl found to express Murderbot's object pronouns is by just using whatever pronouns are in agreement with the word being used to describe it. Which to be fair makes a lot of sense for treating objects in Portuguese. If you call something a cadeira, chair, you're going to refer to it with feminine pronouns, but if you call the exact same object a sofĂĄ, sofa, you will be using the masculine pronouns.
okay I just realized the reason Murderbot refers to itself with masculine pronouns in its internal dialogue all the time is because it's referring to itself as a robĂŽ assasino, murderer robot, which is masculine okay this is kind of genius actually
hey, translator here! (: this was absolutely done on purpose. gendering Murderbot would always be a problem, so I, the copyeditors and the brazilian editors worked together to make sure that bots/constructs could be referred with both masculine/feminine pronouns, sometimes even in the same paragraph. same goes for ART in the second novella, who's also an It in english, but varies between nave (ship, femine) and transporte (transporte, masculine). it's an important detail and i'm happy it was noticed!
I read this post first like a month or two ago and it absolutely rewired how I thought about gender pronouns in French so thank you for that brazilian translator/editors.
That's not what the French translation of Murderbot does though, it uses "iel" which, while the most common gender-neutral neopronoun used by nonbinary French speakers I know, is also exclusively used by people. Like, a chair, table, etc can't be "iel", it has to be "il/elle". So "iel" preserves the gender-neutrality, but it's much less dehumanizing than "it" in English, something that I think the Portuguese solution does a particularly good job at.
The Japanese one is still really good and more people need to appreciate it:
Advice From a Librarian to Combat the U.S. Literacy Crisis #1:
If you don't read books: Read a book. Read any book. Read a book you loved when you were a kid. Read a book that interests you now. Read an entire collection of poetry or essays and think about why the author or editor arranged those works in that order. Read an erotic novel. Read nonfiction. Read graphic novels or manga. Read a kids' chapter book or a YA novel. Read a book digitally. Read a book on paper. Read an audiobook and really focus on it - if you notice yourself spacing out, scroll back to the last words you remember and try listening again. Read any book. And then when you finish it, celebrate for a minute (get those endorphins going!) and then read another one.
If you read books: Try reading a book that intimidates you. Maybe it's thick. Maybe it uses archaic language. Maybe it's a book that was translated from a language you don't speak into a language you do speak. Maybe it's a genre you don't normally read. Maybe it's the same kind of book as always, but you put your phone away and really focus on reading for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. (I know I've been struggling with this.) What scares you about reading? What challenges have you been avoiding? Try getting out of your comfort zone just a tiny bit, celebrate for a minute, and then try again.
Awesome video displaying phenomenal craftsmanshipâposted by one of my favorite Tiktok accounts: Tlingit_Haida
Aani (the land known as Southeast Alaska) has been home to the Tlingit and Haida Peoples since time immemorial
Edit: To clarify, this particular video features Git Hoan Dancers, of the Tsimshian Tribe. They say so in the video, but I realize my caption about the Tlingit and Haida Nations might cause confusion.
hua mulan: hey i respect MY father so much, and also yours
belle: i would lay down my life for him in an instant, so of course when his life was on the line i didnât hesitate to set aside whatever identity and thoughts of the future i had had to defend him
hua mulan: thatâs crazy i also did that
belle: i didnât expect that i would end up with more grandeur and authority than i ever could have accessed otherwise, but of course i didnât forget who i was doing this for or let the power tempt me
hua mulan: 100% with you sister
belle: also the giant bloodthirsty cat creature gives insane dick like you wouldnât even believe
