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Noteshappy 3-year anniversary to this iconic video :)
Forever love having on-recorded-media the moment Tom Hardy realized his inside thoughts became outside thoughts and did so ON CAMERA.
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Notesit just hit me why translating corporate talk is so tricky. translation is really an extra step after paraphrasing. first you have to say something with new words, but you can’t paraphrase corporate talk because it means fuck all. it’s hard to change the syntax if there is barely any meaning to the words. every sentence feels empty.
I translate news for a living and my God do I feel this
Also a lot of political and business news are like that. Not all of them, but so many.
I mean almost every corporate term in french are just english words untranslated and said with a french prononciation
Le quarterly growth?
With the heaviest french accent you can imagine:
“le networking”
“hard skills et soft skills”
“du merchandising”
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Notesi just rediscovered the pelican spider. give me 1-2 business days to stop laughing at how they’re shaped and ill be normal again
the reviews are in
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Notesi do think it’s interesting that in less than a decade after reviving both the jurassic park movies and star wars franchises, universal and disney, respectively, have fucked up what could have been never-ending theatrical cash cows to the point where the jurassic franchise is ending in critical disgrace and star wars has been relegated almost exclusively to disney’s streaming platform. how badly do you have to fumble bags that are mostly just “people and aliens in a far off galaxy and space” and “dinosaurs! what would happen if dinosaurs?” that the franchises became so devoid of any redeemable value that people are eh about seeing a cultural icon like darth vader wield his lightsaber or a website like rotten tomatoes, which grades on a heavy curve, especially for nostalgic projects, has your film at a 37% critical favorability and is being accused of making dinosaurs “uncool”. it’s fascinating. i hope the bubble bursts for marvel next.
they each had a goose that lays golden eggs and they butchered it to get the eggs out instead of feeding it and now they’ve got a dead goose, some tremendously shitty and underdeveloped eggs, and a lot of angry fans who were hoping for golden omelets and perhaps some golden goslings but are now covered in entrails and the little feathers that get everywhere, and are somewhat miffed about the whole situation
it is a beautiful day, and you are a dead golden goose
an undead golden goose of a fandom laying golden fanworks all over the place and honking before running off with the shattered remains of copyright law in its beak is a wonderful and amazing image, thank you so much for taking the post in this direction
Corporations hiring people who hate your favorite franchises to make your favorite franchises for people who also hate your favorite franchises.
MCU golden goose is also dead and decaying but people eat these rotten eggs covered in glitter out of habit.
Once they realize what they’re being fed they will abandon the franchise hard.
MCU has serious writing issues as with each new addition the contradictions and stupidity keeps piling up. The writers that come in are not required to know what work was done before and it shows. They just keep adding stuff they want with no care for how it affects the entire cinematic universe they were invited into. This is the same issue as with Sequel Wars and to lesser extent the Jurassic World additions.
Nah, the MCU has been slowly losing audiences since Endgame. Audiences are no longer content with “this is all a lead up to Thanos”, and instead have to judge the films of the franchise on each own merit. Some were fine, but it feels like there have been more duds. Considering that the recent strike has revealed that the MCU shows have been running without a bible or much pre-production and instead relying on post-production and whatever merry-go-round of writers/directors to take on the task, it seems like Disney/Marvel had been taking the franchise for granted - seeing it as nothing more than a dollar-printing machine.
They say that they’ll considering following the typical television approach of long-running seasons as opposed to mini-series formats (which is hilarious that they hadn’t done so, but then again streaming had really fucked with how people do shows these days so it’s not a surprises) but I don’t think that that will really save it. Disney, through its mass releases and churned out CGI department (that is now in the process of unionizing), has flooded their audiences with too much Marvel (as well Star Wars). It used to be that these two franchises (among others) were such big spectacles that you had to make a special date to see - but now have lost that. They’re no longer special.
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i am totally going to come across as a boomer in this post but as an engineer it’s common sense to not build systems with a single point of failure. and i’m starting to realize that our usage of the smart phone is exactly that. a single point of failure. the calling/texting is the implied function of the smartphone, which is fine. that’s what it’s built for. but nowadays we don’t think to keep a physical map or atlas or gps unit in our car because our phone has google maps. we don’t keep address books anymore because it’s all stored in our contacts. i serve customers who no longer carry a wallet/physical card because it’s all on their phone. this is literally a single point of failure. if you lose or break your phone when you are in a foreign place you are fucking screwed. maybe you’re still screwed even in your home town because so many people have become accustomed to using a smart phone to take them anywhere.
This but with so, so, so many things
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NotesHow old were you the first time you KNOWINGLY encountered a queer person?
5 or younger
6–8
9–11
12–15
16–18
18–25
Older than 25
e.g. you knew/learned that someone was queer the first time you met them, or you learned that someone you already knew was queer. If you don’t remember just take your best guess.
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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.
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[translation of tags: “but they don’t buy yuris????? ffs the sexism in france is unbelievable”]
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Notesi have to carefully avoid thinking too hard about any time period before like the 1900s because i start thinking about all the dead babies and i fucking lose it
like!!!! i trully cannot countenance any argument that the past was better when nearly HALF of all young children died.
whenever I wonder about why humanity started getting so much nicer in the second half of the 20th century I conclude that it may be related to the fact that we weren’t constantly surrounded by tiny skeletons.
yeah.
the messed up thing is that I’ve heard literal history teachers (and my own parents) say that the people of the past were used to it and that it didn’t have as big an effect on them as it would have had on us…which is absolutely untrue and so, so freaking dehumanizing - see the 14th century poem ‘Pearl’, in which a father mourns the loss of his infant daughter, with palpable pain
Since in that spot it slipped from me I wait, and wish, and oft complain; Once it would bid my sorrow flee, And my fair fortune turn again; It wounds my heart now ceaselessly, And burns my breast with bitter pain. Yet never so sweet a song may be As, this still hour, steals through my brain, While verity I muse in vain How clay should her bright beauty clot; O Earth! a brave gem thou dost stain, My own pearl, precious, without spot!
I think…that some people have difficulty comprehending the sheer scale of death in the past and so, choose to believe that the ones experiencing it were different from them
oh man, Pearl fucked me up so bad when I first read it in university. We know nothing about the Pearl poet (who also wrote Gawain and the Green Knight, plus two other poems, called Patience and Cleanness), though we have four of their poems, and based on the vivid language and the subjects of the poems it’s tempting to infer things about the poet’s life. and I have a really really hard time imagning the Pearl poet was not a parent, bc Pearl is this beautifully wrought poem, with intricate alliteration and repetition and a really thoughtful exploration of the theology that is supposed to comfort us (was supposed to comfort them) when contemplating the death of someone beloved–and at the end of the poem, in this vision where the father is beholding his dead daughter in the paradise of the New Jerusalem in heaven, when she turns to go he can’t help but dive into the stream that separates them, whereupon he suddenly wakes and finds himself alone.
Sometimes the values of the past are a bit strange to us and we have trouble imagining ourselves caring about the things they care about, and sometimes the common bond of humanity shines through in medieval or ancient literature so bright that it astounds you. Pearl definitely belongs in the latter category for me.
By the way, if you’re ever wondering why subsistence farmers of the past tended to be conservative and resist revolutions even though they were getting the worst possible end of the stick, it’s related to this.
Because a bad harvest or a famine didn’t typically look like people starving. That happened when things were apocalyptic, but it was much more common to simply have bad years where there was enough for everyone to survive, but not quite enough to be healthy about it. And do you want to know what that looked like, for subsistence farmers who had to do hard farm labor to grow their food?
It looked like the adults in their prime having to eat their fill while they watched their children and elderly parents not get enough. It meant watching your parents nobly turn away half of their portion, and eating a full hearty meal while you watched your three year old kid beg for more food. Because if you were an adult in your prime and you didn’t eat your fill, you would not have the strength to work the fields, come planting and next harvest and grain preparation. And your entire family would surely die the next year.
But eating that much less typically would not kill your parents or your kids. Typically. It didn’t cause them to keel over and die of starvation directly. What it did was make them more vulnerable to disease. So every year your town had a bad harvest, every year war meant you lost food to the army, whether your own or a hostile one? You were rolling dice. Was this the year your youngest kid would get a winter cold and not have the strength to fight it off? Was this the year your mother finally caught a fever and didn’t wake up in the morning? Maybe, who knew.
So when some revolutionary came around asking you to risk disruption and chaos and possibly war to improve things … what’s going through your head? Trauma. You’re thinking of the two kids you already lost, the bad winter where your father passed, and this fucker is asking you to roll those dice again.
And tradition was so important for the same reason. These subsistence farmers relied heavily on horizontal social ties to get them through individual bad harvests. If you had a good year, you contributed to festival feasts and feted your neighbors, so they would do the same for you if you had a bad year. You did everything you could to ensure that a bad harvest had to occur to the entire town to make you roll the dice. And that meant participating in all of the local traditions, and being on good social terms with your neighbors, and it often meant being in good standing with the local religious organization. Tradition wasn’t just a set of obscure actions, it was a necessary component of not rolling the dice on withholding food from your suffering kid while you rolled dice in your head about whether or not they would die.
There’s a line in the Two Towers movie that wasn’t in the original: Theoden saying “No parent should have to bury their child.”
It wasn’t in the book. It couldn’t be. Because Tolkien wrote the books between 1937 and 1949. And while parents grieved horribly for their lost children… everyone just knew that parents buried their children. A lot. That women bore three or six or eleven children, from when they were 16 or 18 or 20, until they were about 40, and buried almost half of them.
The line wouldn’t have been in the book, not because parents didn’t grieve, not because 1/3 of all people’s children died (of course, wealthy families were much less prone to infant mortality), but because at the time, nobody could imagine a world where it was unnatural for parents to see their children die.
By the time LotR was written, infant mortality had improved greatly. But that’s not the world he grew up in, and he wrote LotR after serving in WWI. As far as he could tell, “more children are living through their first few years” could just mean “there’s been a war so fewer children are being born.”
It’s not that Tolkien couldn’t write about a deeply grieving parent. It’s not that Middle Earth is so directly based on European middle ages that he designed that same level of child mortality into the background of his worldbuilding. It’s just that, he wouldn’t have that parent even imply, “it’s against the natural order of things,” because such a concept was outside of his experience. (It’s not against nature. The natural order of things, for a couple million years, has been that about 1/3 to ½ of all human children will not live through puberty.)
Grief was constant.
So was callousness developed to stave off grief.
So was mourning so deep it was almost catatonia; people got lost in their thoughts and just… stopped interacting with the world around them.
Part of the industry and productivity changes in latter half of the 20th century was due to communities not spending so much time either grieving or panicking about who would be gone tomorrow.
Fathers mourning their sons is, in fact, a big part of Tolkien’s work.
But not in shock; In despair
Fathers mourning their
sons is, in fact, a big part
of Tolkien’s work.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Vaccines work.
I’m sorry, Tolkien could VERY well have said “No parent should have to bury their child” in 1937 or 1949, since that line in the movie, preceded by “Alas, that these evil days should be mine, the young perish and the old linger”, is a direct reference to Herodotus (5th century BCE, with child mortality in the nether regions):
“No one is so foolish as to prefer war to peace, for in peace sons bury fathers, whereas in war fathers bury sons.”
It’s not about losing a child to disease or hardships. It’s about war. No matter how bad things are, war is always worse. Theoden lost his only son because war came and upended the natural order: “the young perish and the old linger” is exactly what that Herodotus quote says.
See, even when people were accustomed to death by account of its sheer frequency, they DID conceive of a natural order. It involved losses of course, and it was by definition a cycle of life and death, since at the end of the day everybody dies. But it also had survival, children growing to adolescents and youths at which point their odds improved dramatically, and perhaps more importantly, continuity: under normal circumstances, generations succeed each other.
War is NOT normal, and people have known that for ages (not that it ever stopped them). It’s on another scale, for one, but that’s not all of it. You know how it’s different than other disasters like plagues, famines, earthquakes? Battles only kill en masse the young. (Sacks are another matter, but also much rarer.) And the old stay behind, bereft, and nothing makes sense any more. What’s worse than losing a child? Losing all of them and living to see it, that’s what.
Tolkien was acutely aware of all that, it’s basically plastered everywhere in LOTR. The unfathomable grief of war’s consequences echoes in the pages louder than the clamour of all the battles combined. So I think he would greatly approve the movie’s addition – and he wasn’t a man who easily approved anything.
tl,dr; this is a very poignant graph, but it doesn’t explain on its own all cultural attitudes in all human history re: the death of one’s children; shit’s complicated
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