She neon my genesis till i evangelion my hand
Erika2rsis
I like languages. Alt accounts [email protected] [email protected]
she/xe/it/thon/ꙮ | NO/EN/RU/JP
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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
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17·1 year agoFrom Wikipedia:
“A bondage suit, also commonly called a gimp suit, is a form-fitting garment designed to cover the body completely […] A bondage suit is sometimes used in BDSM to objectify the wearer, or gimp, and reduce them to the status of a sexual toy, rather than a sexual partner.”
51·1 year agoI use the following addons:
- Media Bias/Fact Check
- Shinigami Eyes
- Search by Image
- Purple Private Windows
- 10ten Japanese Reader (Rikaichamp)
- Read Aloud
- NoScript
- Decentraleyes
- DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
- Popup Blocker (strict)
- Redirector
- uBlock Origin
- User-Agent Switcher and Manager
21·1 year agoFrankly, I’m not seeing any negative replies or downvotes.
I’m a US citizen myself, though I live in and am also a born citizen of Norway. So being in basically a quantum superposition between being and not being a US-American, you could imagine that I’d have a bit of a specific perspective about the country, that would draw me to using words like “Seppo”.
NZ and UK use it too. I think I first learned it from a Brit.
The word I use most often aside from American is Seppo, which is derogatory rhyming slang (sep + -o, from septic tank → Yank → Yankee)
“See, the problem is that you see everything as black and white.”
“SOMETIMES THAT’S HOW THINGS ARE!”
There’s no real consensus on translating neopronouns, so different translation approaches are used depending on the needs of the translation and its target language. It’s a good idea in any case to provide translation notes or glosses for anything that might get lost in translation.
What I’d personally recommend is this:
When writing about a real person, ask yourself:
- Can I ask this person for translation recommendations?
- If yes, translate according to the recommendations.
- If no, does this person also go by pronouns which are easier to translate?
- If yes, use those pronouns instead of the neopronouns.
- If no, use the “default” gender-neutral terms of the target language.
When writing about a fictional character, ask yourself:
- Can I ask the original author for translation recommendations?
- If yes, translate according to the recommendations.
- If no, use whatever feels right.
Avoiding pronouns entirely, leaving the neopronoun untranslated, or matching the neopronoun with one from the target language, are all translation approaches that may be more appropriate in some situations, but which also present unique challenges for the translator.
A ramble
I’m replying to my own comment to add: I’m barely even joking about this. Which is to say, actually having personal experience of living in a country can be very useful in discussions of it, but we also need to be aware of the limitations of lived experience.
For instance, I live in Norway, and I’ve met people here who didn’t know that they had suffrage in local elections, and who didn’t know the difference between national and local elections. I’ve met autistic people who know nothing about local autistic advocacy, trans people who know nothing about local trans advocacy, and I’ve met more people here who sincerely believe in “plandemic” conspiracy theories than who are even remotely aware of what Norwegian state-owned corporations have done in the global south. These people will go on and on about how “Americans are all idiots!” while simultaneously demonstrating a complete obliviousness to the actual political issues in their own backyards.
So sometimes people just don’t know what they’re talking about, simple as that. Lived experience should be respected, obviously, but it is not absolute nor immune from criticism. There are plenty of things that I’ve learned about the country where I live from people who have never set a foot in it — even things that feel so basic that I’m really embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know them.
And we need to be particularly aware of this effect with regard to those who were children and adolescents in the USSR. Those who turned 18 when the USSR dissolved would be 50 years old now. Those who turned 18 when Stalin died would be 88 years old now. This obviously doesn’t mean that you’ll have no opportunities to chat with people who lived a significant portion of their adult lives in the USSR, I have done this myself… And that guy basically said that living in the USSR was the time of his life. I suspect that this might’ve had something to do with how he was a popular musician in his home republic, and how he was a comparatively young adult in the 1980s. Nevertheless, it was interesting to learn how one of his songs was actually a load of anti-evolutionist nonsense, which to me indicated that Soviet censorship was perhaps not as strict as a lot of people say it was… And again, seeing a grainy video cassette rip of this guy on Sukhumi’s Red Bridge pointing to a giant monkey plush like a big ol’ doofus, shows how not everybody in the USSR was the sharpest tool in the shed (sorry, Anzor!)
So if you find some 30-to-50-something year old who says that thon actually lived in the USSR and is therefore qualified to speak about it… Asking for thons lived experiences of the USSR is like asking a zoomer today for sy lived experiences of Dubya and Obama. Not to say that a child’s perspective is worthless, just that it will be a child’s perspective. Meanwhile, ask a 60-or-70-something year old, and chances are pretty good that you’ll get nostalgia goggles of young adulthood. Ask an 80+ year old, and… Where the hell are you gonna find one of those? Especially if you can’t speak Russian, your access to authentic Soviet perspectives is going to be severely limited.
On the other hand, if you ask someone who left the USSR for political reasons for thons experiences, then that’s like asking someone who left the USA for political reasons for thons experiences: you’re gonna hear an overtly negative perspective, and maybe some of that perspective will be useful, but that perspective is also not going to be representative of the majority experience, and it could’ve even been twisted by outside factors (obviously praising your new country is gonna increase your mobility in your new country!). Paul Robeson said of the USSR that being in that country was “the first time [he] felt like a human being”.
So, the best way to be educated about the USSR is through scholarly analysis, which takes into account the lived experiences of a broad range of people as they recounted their lives at the time, and which also considers the factors that the individuals might not have been aware of. We should always be open to hearing people out, obviously, but we also always need to remember that nobody has all the answers — and so sometimes the 14 year old white Yankee really does know her shit better than the guy who actually lived in the country.
※The person who lived in the USSR was born in December of 1991
Honestly, I absolutely already believe that Wikipedia can be highly biased in those ways. The problem is really just with the liberal shaitan who whispers kapitalist propaganda into my ears. I should know better.
I don’t live in the US, but I’ll try to ask around about it anyways. It doesn’t really come up in real-life conversations for me either.
“MEN OTEMJEJ REJ ILO BEIN ANIJ” — “ALL IS IN THE HANDS OF GOD” — were the words uttered by Juda, leader of the Bikinians, to Commodore Wyatt when asked to exile his own people for the “good of mankind”. It is said that Juda’s words were intended to imply, “It would literally take divine intervention for me to agree to this.”. Nevertheless, the Bikinians would be taken from their homes, and as the ships sailed away, the Bikinians got to watch their many-generations’ houses and boats get burned down by the American soldiers. Many of the Bikinians wouldn’t eat after witnessing that, and they would live in poverty in their new homes.
It’s no wonder, then, that the Bikinian flag looks like a desecrated American flag.
This isn’t to say that Bikini was a more inhumane act than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hearing any recollection by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or seeing any of the artwork that they created to process their experiences, makes that much obvious. But you hear about Hiroshima and Nagasaki: it has a place in the popular imagination, even if it is a heavily sanitized version that portrays the annihilation as “necessary”.
In contrast, when’s the last time you met someone who knew of “Bikini” as anything other than swimwear?
Honestly, I read the above article a few months ago, and I think it is a genuinely good article that I would recommend others read. It was written nine years after Tiananmen by Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, who was in Beijing during the protests; and the Columbia Journalism Review is a respected publication written by and for professional journalists. So the article is basically just trying to disspell the dumbing down and memeifying and misremembering and making-into-propaganda that happened with Tiananmen, and which honestly tends to happen with any major loss of life. No conspiracy theories, no denialism or claiming that “they had it coming”, just dispelling misconceptions. It’s good stuff.
I can’t speak for Davel’s other comment citing Prolewiki, though — I’m pretty skeptical to any website that tries to be Wikipedia but for X ideology.
In any case, this “butthurt report” feels pretty unfair, although I honestly did kinda roll my eyes at how Davel’s comment said “6 out of 7 ain’t bad”, that was kinda cringe… But basically, what I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t fault someone for commenting under a “9/11 NEVER FORGET” post about the extent to which mismanagement and confusion contributed to the death toll of that, and likewise I wouldn’t fault someone for commenting under a Tiananmen Square post with more nuance about that event.
“Was there a massacre in Tiananmen Square?”
—“No.”
“Were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?”
—“…Ermh…”
“Ahem. I am asking you if people were killed in the area immediately surrounding Tiananmen Square, even if nobody was killed in the square itself.”
—“The protesters in Tiananmen Square left after negotiations with the PLA. There was no bloodshed in Tiananmen Square.”
“I understand that, but were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?”
—“Nowhere in Beijing were student protestors specifically targeted.”
“Well, were non-students targeted, and were any students injured or killed without being targeted?”
—“Hey did you know that the Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest—”
“Gongchandang, my friend, I am begging you.”
—“…Force may have been used when provoked by attacks.”
“May force have also been used unprovoked? Could it have been that the protesters felt like they were provoked first, because you were sending tanks past the barricades that they’d put up?”
—“I mean… you know… uhh…”
“Gongchandang. Were you scared that the occupation of Beijing and the potential of a workers’ revolt would threaten the survival of socialism in China, by presenting a still-socialist alternative to your rule, because societal division particularly among the less politically literate could be (and was) exploited by outside forces?”
—“OUR YOUTH ARE VULNERABLE TO IMPERIALIST PROPAGANDA, OK‽ ALSO, TANK MAN DIDN’T GET RUN OVER. SEE. HE WAS PULLED AWAY BY A PASSERBY. NOT RUN OVER.”
Thank you for your contributions.
That is how it works, yeah. Very good point. Nobody needs to be actively malicious or conspiratorial, and it’s silly to imagine people being that conniving: The most profitable matching algorithm on a dating app just happens to be ineffective for most people, and whoever happens to stumble on that algorithm first ends up making the most profitable dating app – no need to know why it works, just that it does.
LLM/AI tools can massively decrease the cost of dubbing media into smaller languages, including the cost of creating audio descriptions for the visually impaired. I don’t know the extent to which these uses are actually being implemented at the moment, but yeah. It’s by all means possible, and in my eyes pretty cool. These uses would not replace real people, would not require unethical practices, but would still reduce the workload.
I’m kind of disappointed by the ways in which AI is being presented as a “terk er jerbs” thing in fields where it has no rightful place, the ways in which AI is presented as a “procedurally generated Netflix and chill with my robot girlfriend” hyperreal horrorshow, the ways in which AI is being used for scams. AI absolutely has its places in society, and helping with accessibility and localization is one of them.
Edit: Yes, and also writing closed captions, and arguably even using deepfakes to “dub” shows and movies into sign languages could be potential uses.
There’s also how chatbots can be used as language study buddies for those without the ability to talk to actual native speakers, although I haven’t had much success with this, personally.