You will all be overjoyed to know that this was apparently a commercial pattern… in like 1993. If you can find the out of print booklet, this glorious specimen of fashion can be yours.
Due to the exciting successes of ‘weird horror’ and 'hopepunk’, we’re happy to announce a new slate of literary genres for release in Q3 2023. From now on you can expect to start seeing marketing TikToks and insufferable thinkpieces responding to marketing TikToks about:
Nicepunk
Eastern Orthodox Fantasy
Old Adult
Cosmic Horror But Without The Racist Parts
Yiffbong
Ahistorical Romance
Political Snoozer
Erotic Mystery
How Does This Have A Netflix Show It Just Came Out?
when i was a kid I was really bad (or really good depending on your definition) at hidden object games. which is to say that I would not specifically search for the objects the book asked me to look for. no. that would make no sense. what i instead did was open a spreadsheet
i then proceeded to list every single object in the image in my excel spreadsheet, highlighting the objects the book asked me to find in red as i went. Then, by the end, not only had i found the objects, I had also found and categorized all of the other objects as well. This way, if anyone asked me to find any other objects in that image, i was fully prepared
on an unrelated note i was diagnosed as autistic before third grade
You used the letter a 46 times!!
And 555 letters, so the letter a is about 8.29%
The letter a is on average used about 8.2% of the time, which means you used it more than average!! :)
a-counter you are my best friend and greatest ally
I don’t think this needs to be said but I really need neurotypicals to realize driving is super hard for neurodivergent people and that driving under the speed limit is ableism
We don’t speed because we think it’s fun, we speed because we woke up 30 minutes before work(depression, minimum wage, texting girled friend, video game) and it triggers our anxiety when they are driving within the limit
Likewise when I’m driving double the speed limit in a residential area it’s because I’m on my way to fuck your mother who is also my girlfriend
Recent Supreme Court decisions also reminding that to properly understand the Trump presidency and its relationship to the Republican Party and conservative movement you’ve got to keep in mind that it’s going to keep paying out in major policy wins for a while.
As vs. President Hillary Clinton filling the Scalia and Ginsberg seats (and Breyer but maybe not Kennedy), earning a lifetime of wins off that
So, Michael Crichton wrote plots about the dangers of amusement parks (Westworld), the underwater (Sphere), wildlife parks (Jurassic Park) and airliners (Airframe)
…did the Florida tourism industry do something to hurt him?
Anxiety receding now creating the hilarious effect that I am still concerned enough about how concerned I am to feel really relieved that I’m feeling less concerned
Those who claim that the dollar is in decline often argue that for the last 600 years, reserve currencies have risen and fallen in tandem with their home economies. As the United States’ share of the global economy diminishes, they claim, the dollar’s role will also diminish. But the truth is that there were no dominant global reserve currencies before the U.S. dollar. It is the only currency ever to have played such a pivotal role in international commerce.
Even in a precious metals-backed era China and (proto-)Germany used silver rather than gold
(This is why the Nevada Silver Rush and the Opium Wars were contemporary – the China trade was draining European silver, so a new source was a major prize AND the British cultivated [Company-sourced] opium as a counterbalancing export to China AND they turned to force to turn terms of trade in their favor )
Recent Supreme Court decisions also reminding that to properly understand the Trump presidency and its relationship to the Republican Party and conservative movement you’ve got to keep in mind that it’s going to keep paying out in major policy wins for a while.
virgin airlines isn’t a great name for an airline, but imagine getting on a virgin galactic flight. christ alive. there’s a new inherent risk that simply doesn’t exist with earthbound flights: you might have to explain the concept of virginity to aliens, and then explain why you’re on a spaceship named after it
if they don’t have a concept of virginity, you’re now stuck explaining to the aliens why it does or doesn’t matter to you, which would just be an incredibly uncomfortable situation for everyone involved
after you spend several hours spent explaining things, the tall one bows his head. “I see,” he croaks in a murky voice, “but what is sexual reproduction?”
and if they do have a concept of virginity, what if they make fun of you for flying on the virgin spaceship
“we have heard of your kind only through your stray communications. would it be presumptuous to assume there is also a chad galactic we might speak with?”
70s movieception in that the Close Encounters of the Third Kind-ass musical tones that guide us to First Contact turn out to be in fact “Tubular Bells”, the release and popularization of which after use in The Exorcist was the foundation of the entire Virgin empire
You see where the culture’s head is at with all the stuff about the affirmative action case being read in terms of the old black-white conflict and ignoring that the actual case is probably the most important Supreme Court decision regarding specifically asians since Korematsu, and represents another in a recent series of high-profile moves of Asian-American political identity away from that paradigm and it’s Dem-liberal administrators in ways similar to “white ethnics” of the 70s.
That’s actually a good point: Costco has famously continued to sell a hotdog for $1.50 all this time, but have they continued to sell the same hotdog?
@eurydices-ghost said: Independent of the quality of the hot dog itself, a possible contributing factor is that Costco has reduced their condiment options. As a kid I remember getting sauerkraut and fresh chopped onions. I think they still have onions at some locations if you ask, but without sauerkraut it’s much less satisfying imo.
We (somewhat rightly) mock the 2000’s era fansub translation notes for their otaku fixations and privileging of trivia over the media, but they should be understood as serving their purpose for a bit of a different era in the anime fandom. Take this classic:
Like, its so obvious, right? Just say “pervert”, you don’t need the note! Which is true, for like a ‘normie’ audience member who just wants to watch A TV Show - but no one watching, uh *quick google* “Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne” in 1999 is that person. The audience is weebs, and for them the fact that show is Japanese is a huge selling point. They want it to feel as 'anime’ as possible; and in the west language was one of the core signifiers of anime-ness. 2004 con-goers calling their friends “-kun” and throwing in “nani?” into conversations was the way this was done, and alongside that a lexicon of western anime fandom terminology was born. Seeing “ecchi” on the screen is, to this person, a better viewing experience - it enhances their connection to otaku identity the show is providing, and reinforces their shared cultural lexicon (Ecchi is now a term one 'expects’ anime fans to know - a truth that translator notes like this simultaneously created and reflected).
But of course your audiences have different levels of otaku-dom, and so you can’t just say 'ecchi’ and call it a day - so for those who are only Level 2 on their anime journey, you give them a translation note. Most of the translation notes of the era are like this - terms the fansubber thought the audience might know well enough that they would understand it and want that pure Japanese cultural experience, but that not all of them would know, so you have to hedge. The Lucky Star one I posted is a great example of that:
Its Lucky Star, the otaku-crown of anime! You desperately want the core text to preserve as much anime vocab as possible, to give off that feeling, but you can’t assume everyone knows what a GALGE is - doing both is the only way to solve that dilemma.
This is often a good guideline when looking at old memetically bad fansubs by the way:
This isn’t real, no fansub had this - it was a meme that was posted on a wiki forum in 2007. Which makes sense, right? “Plan” isn’t a Japanese cultural or otaku term, so there is no reason not to translate it, it doesn’t deepen the ~otaku connection~.
Which, I know, I’m explaining the joke right now, but over time I think many have grown to believe that this (and others like it) is a real fansub, and that these sort of arbitrary untranslations just peppered fansub works of the time? It happened, sure, but they would be equally mocked back then as missteps - or were jokes themselves. Some groups even had a reputation for inserting jokes into their works, imo Commie Subs was most notable for this; part of the competitive & casual environment of the time. But they weren’t serious, they are not examples of “bad fansubs” in the same way.
This all faded for a bunch of reasons - primarily that the market for anime expanded dramatically. First, that lead to professionally released translations by centralized agencies that had universal standards for their subs and accountability to the original creators of the show. Second, the far larger audience is far less invested in anime-as-identity; they like it, but its not special the way its special when you are a bullied internet recluse in 2004. They just want to watch the show, and would find “caring” about translation nuances to be cringe. And since these centralized agencies release their product infinitely faster and more accessibly than fansubs ever did, their copies now dominate the space (including being the versions ripped to all illegal streaming sites), so fansubs died.
Though not totally - a lot of those fansub groups are still around! Commie Subs is still kicking for example. They either do the weird nuance stuff, or fansub unreleased-in-the-west old or niche anime, or even have pivoted to non-anime Japanese content that never gets international release. But they used to be the taste-makers of the community; now they are the fringe devotees in a culture that has moved beyond them. So fansubs remain something of a joke of the 90’s and 2000’s in the eyes of the anime culture of today, in a way that maybe they don’t deserve.
