quixotic chaotic

I feel like we don’t talk enough about how having chronic illness and/or chronic pain makes you irritable. It makes you grumpy. It can make you a not very fun person to be around. 

We don’t talk enough about the ugly sides of chronic illness/pain. The parts where you feel like a bad person not because of the pain in of itself but because everyone else thinks you are pushing them away. The times when you don’t bear it like a saint and the roughest edges of your personality come out. Where maybe you do hurt other people’s feelings. Its a complicated side of the experience thats resists an easy answer. 

sudden urge to burst into tears. im not a toddler i just agree with their beliefs

Yeah, that checks out

Subtitles and Closed Captions that say things like “[SPEAKS GERMAN]” or “[SPEAKS NATIVE LANGUAGE]” are an accessibility failure and studios should do better.

I don’t care if the characters wouldn’t understand - a viewer who knows German will understand a German character.

Honestly, yeah. The only time captions should be doing this is if it’s a non-specific language (e.g., “alien language”) or a language that is not directly transcribable due to having no written form (e.g., Harsusi, pretty much any sign language, etc.).

You might be able to get away with this when using some fantasy languages too, especially if those languages really don’t have a set vocabulary or grammar (they’re just sounds being used for the sake of the story.) But if it’s a fantasy language that does have vocabulary and grammar, like Klingon or Sindarin, you really ought to be transcribing those word-for-word too.

Hi, caption writer here. And I want you to understand that IT IS NOT OUR FAULT. This is not a choice that WE make. This is not something that we are even allowed to change.

First of all, the entire caption industry is contractors, just like Uber. And each company has a specific way they want those caption to be written. One of the easiest ways to tell which company had the contract for an episode is to see what punctuation is used for sound effects and speaker tags, which should clue you in that we are judged even on something as stupid as when exactly an ellipsis is allowed.

We are not allowed to transcribe foreign audio, even if we do know it. Because of the rushed timetable we are expected to keep, it’s not like we’d have time to look up words even if we were allowed to. Heck, we aren’t even allowed to *label* the language unless we are absolutely positive and sure 100%. And that file is ours. We are the only ones who see it, because otherwise they’d actually have to pay wages to real employees.

And then we get graded. Not even by actual employees, just by other trusted contractors. If our ratings drop below the threshold, our account is closed and that’s it. Done. Try another company. And here’s the thing.

Captioning is work done by people who can’t get anything else. I’m disabled, I have the stamina to work 10 hours a week, and no one will hire me for that short a time at a real job. I’m not artistic and I can’t write my own words, which left me with transcription and captions. Transcription make 10 cents per minute of audio. Captions make 50 cents per minute of audio.

I use captions as often as I can, I love them. And it breaks my heart every time I see a set where someone decided to get through it as fast as possible and cut every corner they could get away with. But it’s the industry that is broken. The industry that set itself up to move things as fast as possible, take advantage of the community it was serving TWICE, and resist any change that did not directly relate to their profit margin.

Fuck capitalism, not captioners. Fuck America-centered English captions, not the ones who write them. Fuck tightwad companies treating subs as an afterthought and picking only the company with the lowest rates, but that just cycles back around to Fuck Capitalism.

me: *daydreams about opening a cozy bookstore that is also a bakery*

wishing a very bearable seasonal affective disorder to all who observe

Saw an op-ed that was on the surface a complaint about kids not wanting to take on family heirlooms but read like an elegy to dying traditions. The hardest part was the anxiety without recognizing that they didn’t pave the way for the decisions they assumed their kids would make.

(This is written entirely within the dominant white/western culture - about traditions that have neglectful stewardship rather than those actively suppressed)

The anxiety makes sense. You’re seeing, too late to do anything about it, that there’s no foundation - no space - for the traditions you expected to pass on. Your kids _can’t_ take your mom’s fine china. So now instead of enjoying what you have you worry about its future.

I see a pattern in these op-eds though - a pattern in what’s left unsaid. There were responsibilities tied to these traditions. You collectively assumed they _would_ be passed along. So collectively, what did you do to ensure those traditions _could_ be passed along?

Op-eds never speak for everyone, but it’s worth acknowledging the pattern in what speech is deemed worth sharing widely.  And in this particular pattern, there’s an answer: that answer looks like “nothing.”

You want the china passed down but your kids have no room in their rentals. You want grandkids but your kids don’t have the financial stability. You want that cross-country RV neverending road trip but you’ve had decades of wanting lower taxes more than you wanted infrastructure.

The bleak outlook for traditions is a direct result of the unmaintained foundations for them. The second best time is always now - if it’s important enough to op-ed about, what are you willing to change to get it back? What will you give up or re-prioritize?

I kinda think that world-defining assumptions are always gonna break without maintenance. So rather than getting mad at whoever’s next for not carrying on the norms we didn’t do upkeep on, when it’s my turn, I hope I’m introspective enough to help instead of externalize & blame.

Friends can break your heart too man and that shit hurts like hell

tumblr media criticism

Bad News, Stitchers by AsleepAtTheStitch

“Money can’t buy happiness!”

Me:

at the beginning of the pandemic we learned millions of citizens view washing their hands as ethically weak or clinically unnecessary

and now we're supposed to trust strangers are being honest about their understanding of basic hygiene and let everybody go maskless on a good faith basis

just return to raw public air on cramped trains, uncovered coughing fits in windowless spaces with no ventilation, during a pandemmy with new variants cycling

absolutely not lmao

is it about capitalism? Is it about mental health? Its both, its definitely both 😅 by etrius42

the unholy trinity of piss-poor caretakers, tag yourself:

lazy, meaning “clearly has adhd but is smart enough to get away with doing things at the last minute so we’ll ignore it”

it makes me uncomfortable how frequently attempts to raise awareness about adhd and autism in girls emphasize these kids as quiet, well-behaved, and not noticeably different from their peers. neurodiverse girls who successfully mask and suffer invisibly deserve empathy, of course, but so do the girls who grow up labeled aggressive, inappropriate, or “weird.” a lot of nd girls have meltdowns and social difficulties which are labeled as anger issues and behavioral problems. nd girls are often perceived as “bad kids,” especially if factors like poverty or race are already priming both adults and their peers to see them that way. i don’t think it’s honest or socially responsible to present silently blending in as the only or even primary way developmental differences manifest in girls.  

This is how botfa goes right 

I just really need the average person to understand the sheer stranglehold that Amazon has on book publishing. It’s so fucking bad, especially if you don’t want to get involved in traditional publishing and want to self-publish.

Self-publishing, by the way, is often the only option for marginalized authors, because the big publishing houses still don’t consider their stories “mass-marketable.” They acquire books by marginalized authors significantly less often, and usually for less money – women of color have especially talked about the way they’re underpaid by publishers.

Self-published books are also harder to get accepted by public libraries. Your mileage may vary, but it’s something to keep in mind. Those posts about “support authors by going to the library instead of buying the book on Amazon!!!!” don’t always apply.

I’ve tried to request self-published books before, only to have some requests denied for reasons such as the book not being well-known or in-demand enough to justify the cost, or for not having an ISBN. (Amazon, for the record, provides an ISBN for free as part of their self-publishing platform – if you self-publish through other venues, you often DO have to purchase the ISBN. It can get very expensive if you intend to publish multiple books.)

Sometimes, if you really want to support an author, you just have to buy the damn paperback on Amazon. If you don’t like it, direct your frustration at Amazon and the publishing industry, not the authors. Thanks.