I try not to be judgmental about superstitions but my coworker adamantly believes in ghosts and was telling me a story about a haunted dollhouse his great aunt had that scared him even in adulthood. And I’m like. Buddy. If those ghosts are real then they’re mad small, I think you can take a 1:12 scale poltergeist.

“the lights would randomly go on and off”

1.) sounds like electrical problems 2.) what could possibly be scary about tiny ghosts getting up in the night to take phantom shits. coward.

I am stealing this for the next time someone gets freaked out about my doll collection.

My previous argument has always been "Yes, but I love them and make pretty dresses for them, so if they were haunted they're clearly not going to do anything to ME."

They're 18" tall. What are they going to do, bite your calves? You can kick them, it's fine.

While I do love this, it’s hilarious, and I generally don’t believe in ghosts anyways, but also hilariously this is kind of the plot of Grady Hendrix’s How to Sell a Haunted House. They’re kind of like the Compsognathuses from Lost World Jurassic Park (also Camp Cretaceous) in that on their own they’re no threat, but in a pack of hundreds you better watch out.

okay, but where is, “I’M THE SMARTEST RACCOON I KNOW”

better

Okay good i didn’t want to reblog this without the racoon one

the raccoon one tho

Favorite commercial thing.

These were what I lived to see as a kid. I loved these commercials

HES STILL AROUND, like two days ago I saw a new one where he was a glitch in a smart house’s system keeping the garage door from opening and he was LITERALLY GLITCHING, it was so clever XD

I no longer know how to make gifs so here’s the vid.

Also, another recent one, he’s your competitive brother, and the actors actual brother is in it

If you haven’t changed your url in years tell me why as someone in your same boat it’s for science

Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.

Ok so I know we want ofmd to come out as soon as humanly possible. I know we want season 2 and now rumors are saying October / Fall… this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Good omens comes out in less than a month with their season 2. If we had both come at the same time, we’d all be in a mad frenzy to watch both and we wouldn’t get a chance to enjoy either. This way we can savor our gay angels while we wait for our gay pirates.

And don't forget our gay vampires are back in a couple of weeks

thank you for all the preorders i am truly moved by the support, cant believe we are really doing this. BUCKAROOS ASSEMBLE bit.ly/CampDamascus

bog man! there's no need to feel down

i said bog man! sink deep into the ground

I said bog man! you will never be found as the fish and mud consume you

👋👋👋👋👋

It's fun to be in a state of decay!

It's fun to be in a state of decay!

rb with whether people assume you’re older or younger than your actual age

Before I was around 25 everyone *always* thought I was older than I was. Then around 25 that when people *always* think I’m younger than I am.

“The average US president has been charged with 1.54 felonies” factoid isn’t true. The average US President has been charged with 0 felonies. Donald trump, who has been charged with 71, is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted

Take this dialect quiz! X

Reminder that capitalism is the death of art

are you whiny bitches seriously acting like faster and more affordable and more accessible translation is bad? it’s a bad thing? it’s a thing we should be against now? is that seriously where we’ve arrived? can you people think for ten fucking seconds just ONCE?

machine translation is really good for many languages - esp the romance ones - and while its not perfect or anything, like.. i don’t know how to tell you it’s a good thing we’re able to instantly speak to people, 80% accurately, from anywhere in the world

I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and it’s a decent point for you, the person. But it’s also missing the info of the larger scale problem.

(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)

I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.

(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)

I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!

Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?

The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.

You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.

But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”

You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!

It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”

Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.

This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.

So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.

So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!

It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)

And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.

And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.

It’s not… it’s not great.

#excellent breakdown #i promise no translator worth anything is against individual people being able to use mt to understand texts and communicate #i’m a translator and i’m a big fan of machine translation in my everyday life but it should not be used commercially #machine translation in commercial products is at worst a health and safety risk #but NOBODY who actually understands the matter is saying that mt shouldn’t exist. for fuck’s sake

via @nailgun-nali

The client can also be (and often is) a government. For, say, translating interviews of asylum seekers. And it can be disastrously bad.

In 2020, Uma Mirkhail got a firsthand demonstration of how damaging a bad translation can be.A crisis translator specializing in Afghan languages, Mirkhail was working with a Pashto-speaking refugee who had fled Afghanistan. A U.S. court had denied the refugee’s asylum bid because her written application didn’t match the story told in the initial interviews.In the interviews, the refugee had first maintained that she’d made it through one particular event alone, but the written statement seemed to reference other people with her at the time — a discrepancy large enough for a judge to reject her asylum claim.After Mirkhail went over the documents, she saw what had gone wrong: An automated translation tool had swapped the “I” pronouns in the woman’s statement to “we.“

A program will only be as good as it is programed to be. Language is complex and varied, with hundreds of dialects and regional rules. And it changes constantly. 

When I was a kid, I regularly lost reading privileges for "having an attitude" and "acting out".

It wasn't as simple as being told not to read during other activities- one of the first times it happened, I remember being six years old, watching my stepfather pull fistfuls of books off my bookshelf and throw them to the floor in a heaping mess while I cried and asked him to stop.

It was weird. Every other adult I knew described me as exceptionally well-behaved, but at home, it was the opposite, and it was blamed on "learning bad habits from that shit you're reading".

Because I couldn't read at home, I spent all my free time at school in the library, reading with my friends.

When I grew up and moved away, I realized that my family life was toxic and abusive, and the "attitudes" I was being punished for were standing up for myself, standing up for my younger siblings, and resisting actual, real-life psychological abuse. Because I'd learned from what I'd read that my family wasn't normal, not like my parents said it was, and in my stories, the heroes were the people who spoke out when it was hard to.

It is insane to me that there are students right now who can't access books. It is insane that books are being outlawed. It is perverse that we are stealing away an entire generation's ability to contextualize their lives, to learn about the world around them, to develop critical thinking skills and express themselves and feel connected to the world or escape from it, whatever and whenever and however they need.

That is not how you raise a compassionate, thoughtful, powerful society.

That's how you process cattle.

It's fucking disgusting.

Penguin Random House? The ones who no longer sell ebooks to libraries; they now have 2-year expiration dates - so there's no ability to permanently have an ebook available; it's always subject to "is it still licensed (and available) in two years?" Oh, and those two-year rentals are $55. These are also the ones who tried to acquire Simon & Schuster and the US DOJ blocked the merger on monopoly grounds.

PRH is not your friend.

But as with Disney vs DeSantis:

Yes, but also like Disney v DeSantis we want the corporation to win. Because these laws and policies set dangerous precedent, and while the corporations are not our heroes nor friends, they *do* have the resources to go after these laws and make it painful for the fascists in Florida.

Just like with corporate pride, which is a cynical cash grab, but the fact that they have done the math and decided it’s better for their bottom line to court LGBTQ people than to not, that means the needle has pushed more in favor of marginalized people.

Fascism is creeping in, and we need every weapon in our arsenal to fight against it.

If my followers aren’t familiar with House on the Rock, the huge carousel isn’t even the most interesting part. It’s part house, part museum, part “how are there so many mechanical musical instruments??? WHY IS THERE A WHOLE ROOM OF WEIRD PIPE ORGANS?!” and toured in 3 distinct parts; the outer grounds are also *amazing.* I got to take my mum’s DSLR one visit, and some of the photos I took remain among the best photos I’ve ever taken.

The outside is normal enough (but absolutely gorgeous)

But then you get to the part where there’s a window in the *floor* because the cantilevered building is stretching something like 50 feet without support under it? And you can feel it moving and swaying as you’re walking out there. And because this is the Driftless Region of Wisconsin (so unglaciated), you’re just out over the top of the forest below...

and it’s called the infinity room because it uses the visual concepts behind vanishing points to give the optical illusion of going on forever.

Then there’s the decor, which is pretty but also “what is this supposed to be? just glass balls in a table??”

though another photo of that table is a play with depth of field I have to say I’m fair proud of:

But I mentioned it being part museum, right? That includes a showcase of weapons that *should not exist,* why did anyone ever make these?

And then there’s a section full of what are designed to look like storefronts on a a town’s main street, filled with all sorts of things, like fancy china and silver serving things...

And the multi-story tall model of a whale and a giant squid...

Oh, and the room with all the pipe organs also has this AMAZING clock

And there’s more, of course. The carousel is fairly famous, and you can google better photos of that than I was able to get with the gear I had. (and I have no photos without folks recognizable faces in them, and I’m trying to avoid that as much as I can). But there’s other amazing things too, like the most impressive dollhouse I’ve ever seen...

And also amazing stained glass, and so much more but tumblr only allows so many photos, so here’s my favorite photo of the stained glass:

If you’re ever in the southwest corner of Wisconsin (near Spring Green) and you have a couple of days to do tourist stuff, I can’t recommend House on the Rock enough. I’ve been 3 times and could go back again and see things I missed. (If you’re there in summer, also look up American Player’s Theatre and go see a lovely play, they’re amazing at Shakespeare.) And I guess if you’re into architecture, you could go by Taliesin (Frank Lloyd Wright’s home) which is near enough to Alex Jordan’s House on the Rock. (No. HotR is NOT Wright, and people seem to want to think it is??? But it isn’t.)

One of my favorite aspects about the House on the Rock, is that the original house was (allegedly) a giant FUCK YOU to Frank Lloyd Wright. Specifically HOTR architect Alex Jordan idolized Wright, got to meet him and show some of his plans, and Sempai was not impressed.

“Both of Jordan's biographers relate a story told by Sid Boyum, which places the inspiration for the house in a meeting between Alex Jordan Jr. and Frank Lloyd Wright, at some unspecified time between 1914 and 1923. Jordan Sr. supposedly drove with Boyum to Taliesin to show Wright the plans for a building, the Villa Maria in Madison. Jordan idolized the famous architect and hoped for his approval. Wright looked at the plans and told Jordan: "I wouldn't hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop. You're not capable." Fuming, on the drive back on Highway 23, Jordan pointed to a spire of rock and told Boyum: "I'm going to put up a Japanese house on one of those pinnacle rocks and advertise it". Balousek says Wright "apparently didn't forget the incident", noting that Wright "complained publicly to Iowa County officials about the house the Jordans were building" and bought a nearby piece of property, "perhaps as a way to get back at Jordan".”

Never give up a chance to talk about my bitch Artemisia Gentileschi. Now this is actually a Caravaggio painting, and it fits into the accepted iconography for this subject. Judith is bathed in light, her face angelic, as she delicately holds both Holofernes’ hair and the sword. Her haggard, old maid servant awaits with a cloth. Holofernes, while in agony, is also a perfect masculine specimen. It is a beautiful study of light and shadow, and a technical masterpiece.

But compare it to Artemisia Gentileschi's version.

Artemisia is most known for two things. 1) Being a famous female painter, and 2) Having been raped, and her rapist brought to trial. However, the trial was brought about because her rapist had agreed to marry her, since he stole her virtue and this would restore her family’s honor, but he reneged. It was discover that he had also planned to murder his wife, had an affair with his sister in law, and plan to steal some of Artemisia’s father’s paintings. He was sentenced to exile from Rome, but it wasn’t carried out. Artemisia had been tortured with thumbscrews to make certain her testimony was truthful.

This painting, like many of hers, while covering familiar subjects, subverted the many tropes used in those depictions. Here Judith is more than a passive vessel, she is an active executioner, aided quite actively by her maidservant and they saw Holofernes head off. 

Similarly look at the difference between her version of Susanna and the Elders

 and what other (male) artists did. 

This is a bible story of a married woman bathing, and two elders spying on her and demanding sexual favors from her, threatening to ruin her reputation if she refused. These are just a couple examples, but it’s a subject that many, MANY artists covered, and generally Susanna looks kind of shocked to not seeming to mind these two creeps. Artemisia’s painting, in contrast, shows her disgust and fear. There is a richness to her female subjects that tends to be absent of her male peers and predecessors. 

It is very reductive to label her as a Girl Boss™ getting back at the patriarchy through her art. But as people are people, not matter the time period, we can intuit that her experiences likely colored her art. She had insight into some of her subjects that male artist just didn’t, and her work is all the more interesting for it.

reminder since we're gettin another wave of bots:

if you don't distinguish yourself from a bot, just any sorta indication that a human made the blog, like a funny pfp or description, or even a disclaimer that you're a lurker, then you're almost certainly gonna be blocked n reported for spam when you follow people

Having a good URL is no longer an excuse. We shoot on sight, it's up to you to warn us you're real.

Emphasizing that this isn't just a quirk of Tumblr Culture--we've had active malignant bot invasions before and we'd like not to have that again