“Oops, dropped your coat!” You cheerfully pick up the soft fur coat off the floor and carefully drape it back over the person’s chair. They stare at you with wide, stunned eyes. They’re remarkably attractive. You awkwardly wave at them and go sit down at your table.

They’re a selkie, you “gave” them back their coat, you now have a gorgeous and besotted selkie spouse. Hey, they don’t make the rules.

The next day, the attractive person you met shyly approaches you and gives you a little box with a ring inside. You blush, a little confused, and stare at them.

“I… Isn’t this… An engagement ring?”

“Well… We… We should get married by human customs as well.”

“… What?”

Happy new year 2023

If Fairy Tail was in the modern world and the characters were regular teenagers.

Everything about this post is perfect. Because growing up is for losers. 

I just want to hide from the world in one of these

solid heckin guide

This is so disrespectful. It should be illegal.

THAT IS A LIE!!!!

WTF?!

I’m not even from the US and know like three things about US history but I studied genocide at Uni and congrats guys this is genocide denial at its finest

….I think this is a Canadian textbook? I’ve never heard any textbook in the US refer to Native Americans as “First Nations” people.

Ah, yes, Snopes has it. Textbook is from Canada.

Which is absolutely not intended to exonerate American textbooks, which have done similar things. However, let’s also not forget that Canada treats their indigenous people the worst of any “developed” country in the world–yes, including the US.

お久しぶりです！

Seven said he doesn’t care about your feelings.

The Addams Family renting out rooms in their huge mansion cheaply to broke college students.

The students digging it because the craziness and the bugs are pretty much the same as any other dorm house. Also, Morticia and Gomez treat them all like visiting cousins, not like tenants to abuse and exploit. 

One young female tenant sees Gomez treating his wife with the utmost respect and affection and realizes that she’s been making excuses for her awful, obnoxious boyfriend for way too long and that she deserves better 

Another tenant is in a same-sex relationship and their homophobic family doesn’t know (the Addams do, and Gomez and Morticia sit their kids down to explain homosexuality to them) “Your father and I love each other very much, and so does your new friend and her lovely girlfriend…” 

Another tenant who’s being pushed through a college program they hate by their controlling parents gets the courage to stand up to them and switch majors, confident in the knowledge that if their family isn’t going to accept them as an individual with their own dreams and goals, the Addams family will 

i almost even feel like the kids wouldn’t even question it cuz like, it makes as much sense as anything else

two people playing ping pong on the middle of the stairs. are they college students during finals week? are they related to the addams? who knows.

Sliding down the stairs on old mattresses, an intense household-wide game of “the floor is lava,” burping contests, silly string, and games of twister where you actually get electrified if you touch the wrong circle 

Is it Frosh Week or family game night at the Addams mansion 

One theory I have to explain some odd choices made by translators (and my source for it is “it makes sense to me” so take it with a grain of salt) is basically that as human beings we share a common limit of linguistic complexity, so that languages that are simple on one level (like an alphabet with just a couple dozen letters) can afford to be more complex on some other level and conversely, a language with a more complex feature like thousands of ideograms or lots of grammatical cases will make things easier for itself in some other way.

A language like English which is quite simple in substance (easy conjugations, few verb tenses and moods, no need to remember the gender of every noun and modify adjectives and verbs accordingly, etc) can afford to be more complex in practise, for instance having a higher tolerance for implied meaning, ambiguity, syntactical flexibility, single-use neologisms, and so on. A language which is more complex on the sentence-making level (or word level, with non-intuitive spellings) will shun extra complications on the meaning-making level and demand more precise and codified phrasings, few neologisms, visible logical connectors, etc.

The example in my last post was really typical (though extreme enough to be funny)—where the English text said “the Haves vs. Have Nots vs. Have Mosts” the French translated the latter as “those who have more than all the others.” English went for ‘as concise as possible’ and French for ‘as clear as possible’. You could have said in French ‘ceux qui ont le plus’ (those who have the most) or even ‘les ayant-le-plus’ (the having-mosts) but the phrase with all the meaning out in the open was preferred. And although for specific examples you can argue that something else could have worked better, it still makes sense why each language made the choice it did when you consider the text in a holistic way.

A text translated from English to French gains complexity in some ways that are inevitable (e.g. verbs that are in preterit and indicative mood in English might have to alternate in French between imparfait and plus-que-parfait and indicative and subjunctive moods, with verbal structures that are longer or less straightforward) so the translator ends up lowering complexity on other levels, like choosing to spell out ideas more fully. It may seem like a small mental effort to deduce that “have-mosts” mean “those who have more than all others” but it quickly adds up when every sentence has vague or layered or innovative meanings. At the end of the day both the original text and the translation hit the same threshold of linguistic complexity, but the complexity is located in different aspects of language.

There are times when reading French -> English translations when you can see logical connectors being deleted for reasons that feel baffling to a French person (“it makes the structure of thinking less obvious? why would you do that”) but make sense if the complexity of the text has been lowered in some way that English speakers prefer (eg short, direct sentences instead of long meandering ones). Now that parsing the sentence and keeping track of clauses requires less effort, you can ask more effort of the reader by making meaning more implicit—and if the translator doesn’t readjust things in this way they’d be operating their language below capacity, and the English-speaking reader might feel like they’re getting bogged down in overexplained phrasings instead of walking at normal speed.

So in this light the wordiness of French makes sense for French and the pithiness of English makes sense for English—of course there are many factors at play but there’s one common motivation behind these opposite choices, and it’s balancing the different layers of complexity of each language (some of which are a matter of preference eg sentence length, while others are more hardwired) to try and situate your text at the level of complexity that is both hard enough to be interesting and easy enough to be comfortable for the human brain.

Okay fuck it if this post reaches 666k notes by the end of 2023 I'll practise basic self care

Why 666k? Because it's funny and impossible so good fucking luck

Well, OP, I’m officially invested in this shit. Your whiny ass is doing self care if I have to drive to your goddamn house and do it for you.

By Talos this can't be happening

reblog this everyone i wanna see what happens when op’s reverse-hubris forces them to practice basic self care.

why? because it’s funny and completely possible actually so good fucking luck op

I figured out roughly how many notes it's been getting per day and multiplied that by the number of days left until the end of 2023

If we keep it going at this rate we'll be far past 666k

IMPORTANT

Okay so clearly I've underestimated y'all

So how about we make this more interesting?

I will practise self care if this post reaches 666k BY THE END OF 2022

Op you have fuckethed with the devil this post has gained 30,000 notes since I reblogged it last night

How to protect yourself during stampede

this isn’t the usual thing I’d share on my stupid nerd blog, but this is SO important. I was nearly crushed in a crowd like this once. It was terrifying because you have NO control over the panicking mass of humans around you. you are just at the mercy of all this chaotic force. this is a real thing that can happen very suddenly! it did happen in the news recently! My situation was, the olympics was happening in my city, I was on my way home from school, and a crowd of people suddenly flooded into the street around me. in seconds it went from, busy-city-street-crowded, to, wtf I can’t even move crowded. I was so pressed against the backpack of the man in front of me, my feet lifted off the ground a moment. People were climbing lamp posts, signs, bus shelters, trees, everything to get up out of it. it was like the street became an ocean of people, and all the people’s survival instincts were making them dumber. everyone was yelling. no one knew how to solve it. police, fire fighters and medics saved us by breaking the locks on the inside of the mall we were trapped next to. a huge group flooded into the building, releasing a bit of the pressure on the people outside. I was in that group that got in.

We were trapped in the mall awhile. Because the olympics was on, they had big screens in a few sitting areas of the mall that would normally be showing the games. but now the coverage was focused on this crowd surge. They showed a helicopter shot of the building we were now in, totally surrounded by colorful dots. a solid mass of humans with no space between.  I know someone was partially trampled and needed medics, because I saw that, but i don’t know the statistics on who else was hurt, hopefully no one killed! I don’t know if these methods can definitely save you, but they might give you a better chance. so watch and share!

Sharing to my own stupid nerd blog for the same reason, this is SO IMPORTANT. Human crushes are one of the most unexpected ways to die. People go out to a show or a sports game, and make it there, but they never come back. Other strategies include staying away from large obstacles (like fences) that you could get crushed against, and doing your best to stay above the crowd. Try to climb onto something if you can.

And also — not to get nitpicky with deadly tragedies, but they’re called “human crushes,” not “stampedes.” It’s an important difference in description and also in respect. The deaths usually happen because the victims are pinned together in a tight space, they can’t breathe (as in the video) and they suffocate. “Stampede” doesn’t convey what actually happened to those people. The crush that happened in Seoul recently wasn’t because people “stampeded,” it was because they couldn’t move at all and they suffocated. But calling it a “stampede,” you’d think it was the people themselves that ran over each other, like wild animals. It’s disrespectful and untrue.

Horrifyingly, the victims of many human crushes have been blamed for their own deaths, which are usually purely accidental or due to criminal mismanagement from authorities. If you’re in a mental place to read about tragedies and police corruption, check out the Hillsborough Disaster, in which 97 people died due to the incompetence of the police, who then blamed everything on the victims: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster

If you can’t play the video:

1. Stand like a boxer. Nice wide stance, arms up like you’re preparing to either throw a punch or shield against one, i.e. elbows bent by your waist and fists by your shoulders. That will keep some space around your chest

2. If you fall and can’t get up, roll onto your side and curl up in the foetal position

Xenoblade 3 ending in a nutshell (Heavy spoilers)

Xenoblade: “So Noah and Mio finally kiss 🥹“

The fans:

Xenoblade: “Also Rex had kids with Pyra, Mythra and Nia-“

The fans: “THAT’S MY BOY! WHAT A CHAD!!!”

2002 & 2022

hiromu arakawa is a genius because she made a huge muscular angsty warrior priest with an intensely tragic past who uses alchemy to murder war criminals in revenge who's so badass he doesn't have a canon NAME and is just called SCAR and she looked at him and said "you know what he needs? fatherhood" and decided to make his canonical best friend a four foot tall princess who wears pink and braids her hair and has a baby panda and thinks her life is a YA paranormal drama series