i've zoomed in on images in my time etc.. x

It is actually way better for 100 addicts to get their fix on pain pills than a single person in pain go without. I call this the "Torture is bad" principle. You should be able to get the good stuff forever after a single doctor's visit. If you're worried about addicts fund rehab centers and needle exchanges instead of torturing people.

Among other things if you can't use the legit market you turn to the black market anyway.

if you're worried about addiction, build a society where people get their basic needs met, including pain management.

- the lady at the welfare office cancelling my benefits

- the lady at the welfare office cancelling my b

The lady at the w

Common tree shrew

GET HIS ASS

This animal looks fucking FAKE

the tree shrew is extremely similar in format to the 65 million year old mammals that survived the dinosaurs and their mass extinction to eventually became you and me.  

often referred to as a “living fossil” the little direct physical evidence we have indicates that they have undergone almost no evolutionary changes in at least the last 34 million years. One of gods perfect idiots, no need for revision

A woman whose epilepsy was greatly improved by an experimental brain implant was devastated when, just two years after getting it, she was forced to have it removed due to the company that made it going bankrupt.

Specifically, because she couldn't afford to buy the implant from the company. They basically took her implant back to recoup their losses. This is what happens when you privatize healthcare and health research. The group providing her with this implant should not have been able to go bankrupt in the first place, let alone repossess her implant to pay off their debts.

absolute nightmare blunt rotation

there's a tortoise at work and he's 30 years old and I love that he's 30 years old because I can look at this animal that is 3 years older than me and go "does the man want his appy slices??" and he hustles over cause the man do want his appy slices

Translation thoughts on the greatest poem of our time, “His wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floor”

It’s actually quite tricky to translate. Because it’s so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. “Chintz” is a word with its own set of associations. Chintz is a type of fabric with its origins in India. The disparaging connotation is from chintz’s eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldn’t compete.

Keep it real” is tremendously difficult to translate – it’s a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to one’s roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:

One has to imagine that jjbang8 did not have the origins of these phrases in mind when composing the poem, but even if by coincidence, the etymological and cultural journeys of these two central lexemes perfectly reflect the themes of the poem. The two words have themselves traveled away from the authenticity they once represented, and, in a new context, have taken on new meanings – the hero of our poem, the unnamed “him”, is, presumably, in quite a similar situation.

Setting aside the question of register, of the phonology, prosody, and meter of the original, of the information that is transmitted through bits of grammar that don’t necessarily exist in other languages – a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these – how do you translate the journey of the words themselves?

In my translations, I decided to go for the most evocative words, even if they don’t evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that there’s more than just what you see, whether that’s the details of the story – what’s happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? – or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.

Yiddish first:

זייַן ווייַב האָט אָנגעפֿילט זייַן הויז מיט הבלים

צו בלייַבן וויטיש, איך שטוף אים אופֿן דיל. zayn vayb hot ongefilt zayn hoyz mit havolim.

tsu blaybn vitish, ikh shtup im afn dil

This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish – tsits – but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means “vanity, nothingness, nonsense, trifles”. In Hebrew, it can also mean breath or vapor. I chose this over the other competitors because it, too, is a word with a journey and with a secondary meaning. Rather than imagining the bright prints of chintz, we might imagine a more olfactory implication – his wife has filled his house with perfumes or cleaning fluids. It can carry the implication that something is being masked as well as the associations with vanity and gaudiness.

Vitish – Okay, this is a good one. Keep in mind, of course, that I’ve never heard or seen it used before today, so my understanding of its nuances is very limited, but I’ll explain to you exactly how I am sourcing its meaning. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CYED) gives this as “gone astray (esp. woman); slang correct, honest”. I used the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition software, which allows you to search for strings in their corpus, to confirm that both usages are, in fact, attested. It’s a pretty rare word in text, though, as the CYED implies, it might have been more common in spoken speech. It appears in a glossary in “Bay unds yuden” (Among Us Jews) as a thieves cant word, where it’s definted as נאַריש, שרעקעוודיק, אונבעהאלפ. אויך נישט גנביש. אין דער דייַטשער גאַונער-שפראַך –  witsch – נאַריש, or “foolish, terrible, clumsy/pathetic. not of the thieves world. in the German thieves cant witsch means foolish”. A vitishe nekeyve (vitishe woman) is either a slacker or a prostitute. I can’t prove this for sure, but my sense is that it might come from the same root as vitz, joke (it’s used a couple of times in the corpus to mention laughing at a vitish remark – which makes it seem kind of similar to witty). I assume the German thieve’s cant that’s being referred to is Rotwelsch, which has its own fascinating history and, in fact, incorporates a lot of Yiddish. In fact, for this reason, some of the first Yiddish linguists were actually criminologists! What an excellent set of associations, no? It has the slangy sense of straightforward of honest; it has a sense of sexual non-normativity (we might use it to read into the relationship between the narrator and the husband) – and a feminized one at that; it was used by an underground subculture, and, again, the meaning there was quite different – like the “real” in “keeping it real” it was used to indicate whether or not someone was “in” on the life (tho “real” is used to mean that the person is in, while “vitish” is used to mean they’re not). It’s variety of meanings are more ambiguous than “keep it real”, which can pretty much only be read positively, and it also brings in a tinge of criminality. Though it doesn’t have the same exact connotations as “keep it real”, I think it’s about as ideal of a fit as we’ll get because it’s equally evocative of more below the surface. I also chose “tsu blaybn vitish”, which is “to stay vitish”, as opposed to something like “to make it vitish” to keep the slight ambiguity of time that “keep it real” has – keeping it real does< I think, imply that there is a pre-existing “real” to which one can adhere, so I wanted to imply the same.

The rest is straight-forward. “Shtup” is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for “fuck”, and I think it has a nice sound.

Ok, now Russian

женой твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками

чтоб не блудить с пути, ебемся на полу

zhenoy tvoy dom napolnin fintiflyushkami.

shtob ne bludit’ s puti’, yebyomsya na polu

In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here – since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, it’s harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:

“Your house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, we’re fucking on the floor”

So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for “chintz” and “keep it real”. To preserve the iamb, I changed “his” to “your”. This changes the lines from a narration of events to some outside party to a conversation between the two men at the center. Russian also has both formal and informal you (formal you is also the plural form, as is the case in a number of other languages). I went with informal you because I wanted to preserve the fact that his wife has filled his house not their house, as someone pointed out in the original chain (though I don’t think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because it’s unlikely you’d be on formal you with someone you’re fucking (unless it’s, like, a kink thing). I honestly didn’t even consider making it formal, but that would actually raise a lot of interesting implications about the relationship between the speaker and the husband, as well as with what that means about the “realness” of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth – that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that he’s betraying – is obscured? that this intimacy is just a facade? Is there perhaps some sort of power differential that the narrator wishes to point out? Or perhaps is the way that the narrator is keeping it real by pointing out the distance between the two of them? there is no pretense of intimacy, the narrator is calling this what it is – an encounter without deeper significance?

Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history –  i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only “his house” and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also don’t know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you. 

Ok moving on, I originally translated it as “твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками жены”. Honestly, this sounds more elegant than what I have now, but I ultimately though removing the wife from either a subject or agent position (grammatically, I mean) was too big a betrayal of the original. The original judges the wife. She took an active role in filling the house. If she were made passive, that read is certainly a possible one – perhaps even the dominant one – but it could also read more like “we are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they share” – the action of filling is no longer what’s being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because it’s almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. “Zhenoy tvoy dom napolnen” is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means “Your house is filled by your wife” – as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps that’s even good – we focus, for good reason, on the relationship between the two men, but in a translation, the wife is able to draw more attention to herself.

Ok, chintz: I chose the word “финтифлюшки” (fintiflyushki), meaning trifle/bobble/tchotchke, because it, allegedly, comes from the german phrase finten und flausen, meaning illusions and vanity/nonsense. Once again, I like that the word has a journey, specifically a cross-linguistic one.

Keep it real: this one, frankly, fails to capture the impact of the original, in my opinion, but allow me to explain the reasoning. “Stray off the path” implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz – and one they intend to continue taking, one that this act is a maintenance of. It brings in a little irony, since the husband very much is straying from the path of his marriage. “Bludit’“ can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can “stray”). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch – they want to do the latter but not the former.

As for register – “shtob” is a bit informal. I would write the full version (shto by) in an email, for example. The word for fuck, yebyomsa, is from one of the “mat” words, the extra special top tier of russian swears, definitely not to be said in polite company (and, if you are a man of a certain generation or background, not in front of women; it’s not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if we’re already thinking that deeply about it. But while we’re on the topic, i will say that in my circles in the US, women use mat much more actively than men (at least in front of me, who was, up until recently, a woman and also a child).)

Ok i think that’s all the comments i have!

Ok this was fascinating and looks like fun so I tried to translate it to French.

French is my first language but I kinda hate it, it’s complicated and annoying. This took me hours and I’m sure it would’ve been better/easier if I didn’t live my life in English 75% of the time.

Sa femme envahit son chez-lui. Je le mets à l'aise et le baise par terre.

I kept the number of syllables of the original. Apparently French is an unstressed language! Cool.

I chose to use “envahit”, meaning invaded, because “filled his house” really struck me. The speaker emphasizes the (in his eyes) overbearing nature of the wife. I couldn’t work chintz in there because it busted the syllable count.

I wanted to keep the husband in a passive role, so the only reference to him in the first line is “sa” ans “son”, or his, and “chez-lui”, meaning his place.

Keep it real was a pain in the ass. I went with “je le mets à l'aise”, or to put at ease. I like the idea that the speaker makes the husband comfortable and reveals his true self. Se mettre à l'aise can also mean to undress oneself (cheeky) which I liked. I feel like it also implies the narrator seducing the husband, and I liked that too.

Baise is, I think, the perfect equivalent to fuck. It’s vulgar and implies casual and/or rough, quick sex. And it’s only one syllable and every other synonym was like, a whole phrase.

I loooved giving translation a try and I don’t know how people can translate whole books.

Okay, this has nerdsniped me. I feel I am cheating a bit by getting to use German, but here goes:

Die Frau hat sein Haus mit Kitsch beschlagen

Um echt zu bleiben, ficke ich ihn am Boden.

(dee fraoo hut sine house mit kitch beshlugen

oom eht tsoo bluyben, ficke ich in am Boden)

The wife has dressed his house with kitsch

To stay real, I fuck him on the ground

Die Frau: i felt picking “the wife” instead of “his wife” matched the meter better. It also evokes more distance between the woman and the husband.

Kitsch: is the fairly known word for tchotchkes.

Beschlagen: I took a bit of liberty with that one. It comes from “schlagen” (to beat, see also the English word slog) and has several meanings related to “cover something up forcefully”. “beschlagenes Glas” is fogged-up glass. A “beschlagener Sessel” is a studded chair. “Hufe beschlagen” means “to shoe hooves” (i.e. put horseshoes on them). It also sounds a bit like “geschlagen”, which can mean “struck [with an illness]” or just “beaten”.

Um echt zu bleiben: closest I could get to “to keep it real”. Very difficult to translate, as others have remarked.

ficke: nicely enough, “ficke” and “fuck” (as a verb) has pretty much the same connotations.

Am Boden: ordinarily you would say “auf dem Boden” if you want to say “on the floor”. I chose this for several reasons. There are mainly two contexts where you would use “am Boden” - one, as opposed to “in the air”, as in “Das Flugzeug ist nicht gestartet. Es ist noch am Boden” - “the plane has not started yet. It is still on the ground”. Second, there is the expression “am Boden der Tatsachen”, which translates literally as “down on the ground of facts”, and roughly as “down to earth”. I thought this was appropriate.

Also, Boden is a word that can mean “floor”, “ground” or even “soil”. (If you want to make clear it is floor and not soil, there are ways to do that, but I like to leave it ambigious here.)

(By the way, OP, love your use of “блудить”. I gasped in amazement when I read it.)

Anyway, that was a fun translation challenge, thanks for that :3

New cryptid

Toby the Sapient Pig

New type of weird girl just dropped 💕⛺️

Flawless.

New Steely Dan shirts, hand screen printed by yours truly :^) ( available on my shop, yowcho.com ) 

Gabriel surprising Aziraphale in the middle of sushi like WHAT ARE YOU DOING and Aziraphale panic eating like

this is crazy this is the only time i've seen an online boycott actually work. and the entire fucking reddit website is broken rn

here is where you can see the status of the boycott btw

it might be broken bc reddit is broken rn

it's also the fact that so many different communities with wildly differing userbases have come together for this that's wild to me. like you have r/gaming fighting side by side with r/legaladvice and r/furry 😭