A book asks the reader to imagine any sensory input of the story, whereas a film or TV show provides both sound and visuals. Audio fiction lives in the space between these two approaches. I think there's a unique power to that middle ground. I love how audio drama asks the listener to co-construct their sensory experience of the story.
Audio drama allows me to simultaneously experience 'This character feels real to me because I've heard their voice' and 'This character feels real to me because I've pictured them myself'.
What the characters are experiencing is both directly presented to me and left to my imagination. There's no page or screen between me and the story. It's there in my ears. It's there in my mind's eye.
There's a strange sense of intimacy to that, the intimacy of feeling like a fly on the wall during a conversation or of hearing a character speaking as if directly to me. Perhaps it sounds contradictory to say that experiencing a story only through sound allows me to feel uniquely connected to that story, but that's one of the reasons why I love audio fiction so much.
363 notes
·
View notes
I have to wonder how many people celebrating AI translation also complain about "broken English" and how obvious it is something was Google translated from another language without a fluent English speaker involved to properly clean up the translation/grammar.
Because I bet it's a lot.
I know why execs are all for it—AI is the new buzzword and it lets them cut jobs thus "save" money and not have to worry about pesky labour laws when one employs humans—but everyone else?
There was some outcry when Crunchyroll fired many of their translators in favour of AI translation (with some people to "clean up the AI's work") but I can't help but think that was in part because it was Japanese-to-English and personally affected them. Same when Duolingo fired many of their translators in favour of LLM translation. Meanwhile companies are firing staff when it's English to another language and there's this idea that that's fine or not as big a deal because English is "easy" to translate and/or because people don't think of how it will impact people in non-English countries.
Also it doesn't affect native English speakers so it doesn't get much headway in the news cycle or online anyway because so much of the dominant media is from English-speaking countries and English-speakers dominate social media.
But different languages have different grammar structures that LLMs don't do, and I grew up on "jokes" about people speaking in "broken English" and mocking people who use the wrong word when it was clearly a literal translation but the meaning was obvious long before LLMs were a thing, too. In fact, the specific way a character spoke broken English has been a way to denote their native tongue for decades, usually in a racist way.
Then Google translate came out and "Google-translated English" became an insult for people and criticism of companies because it was clearly wonky to native speakers. Even now, LLMs—which are heavily trained on English compared to other languages—don't have a natural output so native English speakers can clock LLM-generated text if it's longer than a sentence or two.
But, for whatever reason, it's not seen as a problem when it goes the other way because fuck non-English readers or people who want to read in their native tongue I guess.
18 notes
·
View notes
Inspired by blakbonnet gifset from s2e2.
I've been thinking about how the showrunners decided Breakdown-Era Ed would be so hot. OFMD has things it is Looney Tunes about-- physics, abdominal anatomy, the historical record, the value of gaydar as a navigational device across large spans of ocean. But as many people have pointed out, it's pretty emotionally realistic, to the point where the fights Ed and Stede have are recognizable to many of us.
I don't know about you, but I find that crying all night on the floor results in blotchy skin, red eyes, a generally puffy face, a wicked dehydration headache, and a hoarse and adenoidal voice. The magic of fiction rescues Ed from some of that. But also: "I want my corpse to look fantastic" is absolutely a thought Ed would have at this point in his trajectory (and I think is one signal of how ambivalent he feels about dying). His depression hasn't blunted his emotions and convinced him that nothing matters: feeling abandoned still matters a great deal, even as he's starting to abandon the hope that he'll feel better some day. And he still cares about how other people perceive him-- which is frankly essential if he's going to goad crewmates into mutiny against him.
I've seen some great metas about how Ed wants someone to care enough about him to kill him-- or how he really wants to be talked out of wanting to die. Both those takes are even more plausible to me having watched season 2 in its entirety! In s2e6 Ed tells Ned Lowe "I don't respect you enough to kill you: you're not worth the poison." Ed thinks of killing as something that inextricably and intimately links two people. And at the beginning of s2e7 Ed credits the vision of mer!Stede with saving his life-- though I fully endorse the idea that Ed conjured mer!Stede up because of the persistent hope Ed so admires in Stede. Just as Ed's internal Hornigold pushes him off a cliff, Ed's internal Stede reminds him that he is capable of feeling something other than pain, and that there is reason to hope his life will not always look as bleak as it has been recently.
In this moment, though, before Ed comes up for air and life begins again, Ed goes to Izzy with a loaded gun. Why Izzy and not Fang or Archie? I think Ed sees Izzy as the QAR crew member with both the most reason to kill him and the most reason to talk him out of wanting to die, due to a combination of toxic masculinity and what I see as frustrated romantic obsession. In the "Izzy probably cares enough to kill me" column:
s1e10: Izzy threatens mutiny: "I serve Blackbeard, not Edward. Edward had better watch his fucking step."
s2e1: Izzy blames the "fucked" atmosphere aboard the QAR on Ed's "feelings for Stede Bonnet." Ed hasn't talked about those feelings because that's not the relationship he has with this crew. From Ed's perspective, Izzy is publicly calling him out for not having rid himself of those feelings. Which means somehow Ed hasn't watched his fucking step enough, despite throwing himself into raiding. Izzy's threat from the end of s1 still echoes.
s2e2: Izzy's gunshot wound has gone septic. Even if he survives having had his leg removed? Izzy lashed out at Ed at the end of s1 for being soft. He's got a very calvinist understanding of where human worth comes from, not just incompatible with a disability rights framework but also incompatible with accommodation and support from the crew. All Izzy's emotions convert to anger.
In the "Izzy might try to convince me not to die" column:
s1e10: The torture scene in s2e6 established in canon something that many viewers intuited at the end of season 1, when Ed lashed out and choked Izzy, and then again when he fed Izzy a toe: Izzy finds pain arousing. Izzy manifestly gets some satisfaction out of Blackbeard's attention even-- and maybe especially-- when the terms of that attention are painful for him. (It doesn't seem to matter to Izzy whether Ed enjoys causing him pain or whether the dynamic between them compounds Ed's suffering.)
s2e1: Izzy told Ed-- in a voice that made it absolutely clear how much he resented saying it-- "I have had ... love for you."
I think Ed's presentation in most of s2e2 sets up the scene where Ed hands Izzy the gun and plays on both his anger and his love. The Ed of "Red Flags" is simultaneously Peak Outrageous and Peak Hot, and that's why many of us reacted to the stills the studio released from this episode with variations on "s/he's so gender," long before we knew the context in which those stills would appear. Ed's wearing the leather that's his longtime crew's shared signature, calling to mind the history he shares with Izzy. But he's also wearing the pearls and the dangly sword earring, and he's got soft strands of hair framing his face that an early 2000s sorority girl would envy. And, well, we know that a silk gown to Izzy is like a Red Flag to a bull: he seems to find femme touches in menswear infuriating.
Seriously bbg, wild to say to someone who's romantically obsessed with you that *anything* they did in your dream last night was good for you, even if it was murder.
Ultimately, Izzy refuses both to kill Ed and to talk him out of dying. He acts neither on his femmephobia nor on his need for Blackbeard to stay around and satisfy some fraction of his obsession. "Clean up your own mess," from the person on the QAR who both loves and hates Ed the most, must sound to him like "You're not worth the poison." And coming from someone whose tolerance for poison is astonishingly high? Ouch.
23 notes
·
View notes
Wait you know how to make butter??? That’s incredible!! When you’re feeling up to it, could you share your secrets? Cause your hair is so big it’s full of them yes?
The thing about making bread and butter is that it is VERY easy. 0 skill required, I PROMISE. Bread is as old as humanity, and butter is right behind it.
All you need is heavy cream and some sort of mixer (or the will to shake a jar). Take however much heavy cream your heart desires, pour it into a bowl and mix.
Mix it until it looks like whipped cream and then keep going. Mix until you have both a liquid AND a solid in your bowl. It'll be yellow and look chunky (but like butter and not cottage cheese) + a milky white liquid. SAVE IT. DONT GET RID OF IT. THATS YOUR BUTTERMILK FOR SOME OTHER THING (biscuits perhaps???).
Once you have your solids and you have SAVED THE LIQUID OH MY GOD THIS IS SO IMPORTANT TO ME, smush it all together and rinse the butter out under cold water which just helps the shelf life. You can keep it in the bowl and use a spoon or my method, in your hands- whatever feels most connected to your angry ancestors. Rinse out the remaining buttermilk, though, and then you have plain butter.
I like to salt mine but do you. Put garlic in it, if you want!
22 notes
·
View notes