you can’t always get what you want

but if you try sometimes

you’ll find

you get what you need

Protip: read Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. You will now be smarter than literally anyone who took this person’s course.

Hey folks, did you know that if you post your password, it shows up as asterisks?

hunter2

Anime

'Tis Time for Torture Princess - The One Joke Show is back. Guess what, the One Joke is still funny. If you’re not watching this, it is very high quality. Better than it ever had any right to be, credit to the original author for committing to the bit in the most earnest way possible. Highly recommended to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, you will either love it or hate it, but you should definitely try it.

Frieren S2 - Still batting a high average, and I like the SOL stuff

Oshi no Ko - Having read the manga, this is mostly just for a giggle, but I do like the continued jaundiced look at entertainment/idols/etc.

Jujutsu Kaisen - I love some battle shounen slop. So far this has been fun.

Manga

Hyakkano/The 100 Girlfriends who Really Really Really Really REALLY Love You - The manga continues to deliver, Nozawa and Nakamura are truly incredible. As the cast grows, so do the best chapters (the daily life ones), so I’m here for the long haul. Excited to see who voices Naddy in the next season (which is supposedly later this year).

So the characters are named after “foreign” words, yes, but those words aren’t completely arbitrary and meaningless to Japanese ears, so I don’t see how it is that different from Serena and Usagi.

I think the main difference, if I had to articulate what I’m going for, is just that the English words/names were chosen in contrast to the “home” language of the author. If you wish to retain the sense it might be more appropriate to translate to Swedish or Finnish in lieu of Norwegian (I hope I didn’t step on some landmine there).

Basically, if you’re translating the Japanese/Chinese names to Norwegian, you should find another linguistic home for the other characters to preserve the contrast. Obviously this is all ultimately arbitrary, but when you’re creating a set of characters and explicitly marking some as “foreign” or “other”, the issue in translation is how to achieve that sense. I’m not going to opine on the value of this, just that Japanese structurally has a script for foreign loan words and the creator has chosen to use that for these names.

Thus if you’re going for a translation of Remilia you might actually consider French if you want to preserve that difference.

I’ll say, if you’re explicitly trying to flatten cultural differences in ZUN’s magical land, that’s totally fine, but I think if your trying to do a localizing “translation” that retains some fidelity (i.e. the sense the “meaning” and “history” of a word as used by the author), simply converting everything to Norwegian misses something.

Hell, translating Remilia and co. into French (and I say this as an avowed French hater) would be more suited in some ways.

I will say this is me also nostalgically thinking about how Kansai-ben was always given American South (to incredible cringe) or other translation conventions that get ruined in English (100Kanojo’s Naddy-sensei is actually the hardest to translate to English because of her butchering of both English and Japanese - Spanish translations have it very easy with her character since they can keep using the English loans). It’s obviously a tricky art, and just choose your choices intentionally and that’s what’s important. If you want to flatten the Japanese/other distinction inherent in the work that’s fine!

I mean, something to consider here is the role of Katakana in Japanese. Not to be too reductive, but when the name is already a “foreign” name (e.g. Letty Whiterock or Mystia Lorelei), then it’s kind of strange to double-translate. Just my .02, but I feel like the places to translate names would be when the Kanji characters have literal meaning (and thus, simply phonetic translation actually “loses” meaning to a degree).

This might be a very rough heuristic, but it’s something to consider. Obviously names are all somewhat arbitrary, but in some ways the “Usagi->Serena” actually makes sense - it’s evoking the moon associations of the Japanese word (moon rabbits) in its context. There’s no similar “history” (to be materialist) to “Remilia Scarlet” or “Patchouli Knowledge”.

I will say, I don’t know the particulars of Norwegian and the ability to pronounce .en, so YMMV. But I don’t see much reason to further translate what’s fundamentally a phonetic name attempting to evoke “foreignness” (again, whatever that means).

As a perhaps too absurd example: would you want to re-translate Stand names (especially once they become band names) into Norwegian (are they? I’m curious!)? I mention this also because the irony is, many names aren’t directly translated by the “official” JoJo translation because of rights issues (thus, “Sticky Fingers” becomes “Zipper Man” or “Sex Pistols” becomes “Six Bullets”. I found most of Part 5 pretty annoying watching the subs). This produces an extra absurdity since the names are really bullshit already (love me some Crazy Diamond shouting). There’s obviously some degree of play here (e.g. スタープラチナ is technically “Staa Purachina”) but when there’s an official romanization, I don’t see much need to move from that. We know what the bands/words are generally. If the creator is a fan of Western slop, the further translation seems a bit much, but this is just my .02.

Yeah, it’s rather interesting they couldn’t get all 6 names. HMMMMMMM

Times like this being a Marxist with crude class reductionist tendencies feels good, since it really is simple to understand (versus libs who, for a long time, saw shit like this as the peak of wokeness

The Deserter, vindicated again.

Yeah I still love coffee because of the flavor, but cut my intake from like 30oz a day to a far more reasonable 16-ish.

The one joke manga/show is amazing. Do not sleep on the one joke.

It really is great, truly a master class in the art of the gag.

No worries. I’m mostly influenced by the account of more anarchist led movements in Brazil from Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn. Basically, I really appreciate the local efforts and ways that direct action can foster change, but in Bevins’ account at least, those protests and actions, without a turn to more structured ML approaches, basically just opened the door for Bolsanarism. Now, this is just a journalistic account so YMMV but it really feels like there’s certain hinge points in movements where you need to use representation, authority, and for lack of a better word, power and violence to both continue to achieve goals and prevent cooption.

Again, I have tons of respect for anarchist approaches and have nothing against them as tactics and even a strategy in local contexts. However, (and this is just me vibing, I have less theory for it), it feels like there’s a point where a movement gets to a size where you can’t just rely on mutual aid and decentralized approaches without opening yourself up to wreckers in a really dangerous way.

I don’t want to dismiss it - direct action and mutual aid build org cohesion, preserve our members, and allow for us to produce meaningful changes on a small scale.

But the only way that change happens at scale is when those smaller pegs cohere into the mass movement that can go beyond just shutting down one node in the system of death. And that’s going to require the takeover of current institutions of power (e.g. the military, police, etc) to both push the movement further and/or preserve it.

I’m sure electoralists might chime in here, and I don’t want to entirely dismiss it but electoralism should be aiming to take over and use those institutions of power as well (e.g. the chapo take about using ICE to arrest and try everyone involved in the trump admin).

Needless to say, the only way we survive as a movement or species is through solidarity. But these are tactics for survival, and without an eventual turn to usurp the state monopoly on violence I sadly feel that’s all they’ll ever be.

A general strike is obviously a great goal but even that, absent inaction from the military or a revolutionary vanguard, would just eventually lead to the use of police/state forces to compel work through violence, no?

I basically agree with everything here. The comparison is just that it can’t be the structural approach or goal. Obviously it can and should be done, but with recognition the real goal is to (in the case of charity) make it obsolete. I suppose it’s almost the reverse with mutual aid (a ‘withered state’), but in that case I think it’s because at least as long as imperial forces are driving society no amount of mutual aid is “enough”. Even well intentioned direct action, absent a mass movement, won’t stop it.

However as you note, connected to a workers org makes these things more powerful and useful strategies of resistance. However they aren’t the be all end all, and in the near term I want state distribution of resources. I think ’s take at the end of bullshit jobs is instructive here where he frames ubi as a way to expand the state to allow for more flourishing of creativity and mutual aid. Ubi, a jobs guarantee, healthcare, housing and food would make for a world where further mutual aid can be celebrated and cultivated, but I want a world where those things are ensured by some state apparatus

Folks, it’s every day here.

I’m not a teleological Marxist (e.g. communism will necessarily grow from capitalism), but I do think my utopian society is closer to anarchism than any AES. However I fully believe AES and state centralization is the only way to get there (and once we have global communism the state can finally wither away).

But that’s just my take and I really do respect our comrades who do direct action and mutual aid. Those are important and meaningful individual actions one can do now, but ultimately I diverge in that I think you can’t win against the great Satan through individual action. It’s the same reason charity is ‘good’ but I don’t actually fight for it on a systemic political level.

I’m fine with nuking this thread. It’s not really /c/theory discussion. I am not up on wisconsincom but it’s really just site spam rather than actual theory reading.

Release order is the only order. Publication date is everything. Anything else is just fans being silly.

Funny thing: my life MIGHT have been able to have been better. I managed to land a FT job that paid 2.5x what I was getting. Had my partner and I been able to stay in our shithole apartment 1 or two years we might have been able to put together enough savings to get a down payment.

However our old lady landlord died who hadn’t raised rent in 10 years died and her son sold the place. So all that income basically went to pay rent at a new place 2.5x more than what we were paying. So it’s been. Barely keeping up with cost of living, getting by, but not thriving.

The pure joy of the Charleston scene (and its physical comedy as they dance closer to the edge), or the fact that every little character in Bedford falls matters - there’s so many great little bits in the film.

It helps it has good politics as well, but it’s the way that it creates a world that you inhabit for a few hours - how could it not be popular