Update on the toddler’s current favourite animal:
It’s narwhals.
If you want to add context, reblog with where you've mostly lived and/or why you've had to move in the past.
Can’t believe a Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom sidequest made me cry
I ordered a really pretty dress and it’s comfortable and beautiful and the colour is gorgeous and it’s very flattering on me, except I would need to get parts of it fitted (it’s way longer on my 5’2 self than the model lol) and it’s so obviously a black-tie type of dress and I have no idea when I would get to wear it without feeling overdressed af. I should return it because I’ll probably never get to wear it but…
What should I do?
I want to cosplay as Purah TOTK so bad
#i never feel comfortable with the idea of cosplaying#because i feel like my face doesn’t suit it?#but this one - yeah it would work for purah I think#but i need to not look at cosplays of her#to not start feeling like my features aren’t conventionally attractive enough and I would just look awkward lol
The highlight of my week so far has definitely been playing Tears of the Kingdom with my dad, a mechanical engineer for over 40 years, and him just laughing at my unhinged and neither functional nor solid creations :’)
Most of the time I hate toddler girls clothes, but then sometimes I find this:
Animals that she likes (dinosaurs): check!
Her favourite colours (pink and purple): check!
Cuts and fabric she will wear (cotton tshirt and shorts, no frills no bows no buttons): triple check!
Can’t wait for her to wear it 🥲
I have about 10 hours in Tears of the Kingdom and I gotta say, I love the puzzle solving. It doesn’t play to my strengths at all - I did not miss my calling by not going into engineering - but it makes me feel like a damn genius when I figure it out. It’s such a fun challenge!! I didn’t expect this kind of thing from a video game.
Toddler has been talking about how “the big moon makes noise” when she’s in bed, for months now, and I have no clue what she’s talking about
But! I finally figured that when she talks about “yesterday”, she means any time before right now. Something that happened months ago? Yesterday. We literally just finished moments ago? Yesterday.
Happy to report toddler’s Disney princess of choice is Moana
fever -> cold -> croup -> fever again -> ear infections
there have been easier weeks for toddler!!
I made another animatic with Temenos and Crick!! This one is the Library scene in his chapter 1 hehe
things I love about RE4R (bullet point edition)
- emphasis on Leon being like ‘uegh ugh guh eugh’ about everything, he doesn’t need to vocalise like that but he does because he’s Leon and his life sucks
- the developers having fun with the existing fans by messing with their expectations of how things will happen, feels like we’re sharing an inside joke while newcomers also get to enjoy themselves
- leaning into the actual horror of the Plaga messing with your mind, your free will, and your humanity (both being human-shaped and also ur sense of compassion)
- variations in the little video calls and how the characters speak into the camera (Ada’s ‘looking down on you’ pose, Luis’ myspace selfie pose)
- stepping up the visual horror of what you fear you might become with all those god-awful cultist variants. the one that suction cups to the ceiling? piss off so much. that’s so cool. please stop
- stumbling onto scenes of cult activity around the village that aren’t relevant to the main plot but make the place feel more ‘lived in’, in a bad way
- the whole knight section and how it ties into the history of the location, the themes of autonomy/obedience, the cross-section of the military and religious evils that are so relevant in RE4, and specifically Leon and Luis’ relationship to duty and selflessness (as well as Princess Ashley)
- the controller refusing to let you aim your weapons at civilians/companions vs. the enemies frequently mowing through their own ‘comrades’ to get to you
- Ada and Leon acting like super agent runway models whenever they see each other
- tightly written narrative that optimises all the pieces of the original game and ties it together thematically with the broad question of ‘what it means to change’ for better or worse
- Ashley’s little skort
- Luis
#re4r#resident evil 4#i finished it twice alresdy lol#i loved it so much!!#i played the original a lot on the gc#so i extra appreciated the little things that subvert your expectations#like how you think you know what’s coming from the original#but they twist it just enough to be like - hey that’s different!#in a way that feels almost playful?#idk how to describe it#but they did a good job
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
#translator things#there are tons of scenarios in which 80% accuracy doesn’t cut it#and at worst can be life-threateningly dangerous#i use ai in my own job#but i feed my own tools with my own work#and the content my clients provide#it helps when I can target the terminology context public etc of the text#otherwise it’s a mess
woman-inside-water
I never want to eat bland buttered toast ever again
Because it’s been a while since I shared Adorable Toddler Moments, here’s one thing:
We have a plastic poop emoji, I don’t remember from where, but she adopted it and pretends it’s a chocolate cake. Here’s the nice meal she just made from me in her play kitchen: