Francesca Forrest's Blog

Was feeling somewhat November down but cheered myself immensely by watching Bad Bunny in an SNL skit about K-Pop Demon Hunters (which film I watched to keep up with the under-twelve crowd and ended up taking a shine to). I followed this up by getting some of the tracks from the film and then had my day completely made by the fact that I could also purchase the songs in Portuguese. So now I can listen to "Golden" ... or I can listen to "Brilho." {~ ~WINNING~ ~} I didn't care so much for the demon...

One clear day the novice asked the master, What is the meaning of blue?

The master said, Look up.


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Wakanomori shared a PDF of this (probably paywalled) article from the Atlantic, "The Costs of Instant Translation," by Ross Benjamin. This guy expresses so eloquently a lot of what I was reaching for in this post.

(  extensive quotes  )

I'm not a literary translator, but I definitely am drawn by the cultural specificity of languages, the "shimmer of ambiguity," as Benjamin puts it. The creation, together, of meaning when the languages don't line up.

P.S. If the article is indeed paywalled and you'd l...

I watched the documentary El sendero de la anaconda (The path of the anaconda, 2019) over the weekend, mere days before it's set to leave Netflix, mainly to feast my eyes on the sweet, sweet drone shots of the Colombian Amazon, not primarily down where I was, but up further north, where lie the absolutely stunning waterfalls of Jirijirimo and the massifs of Chribiquete. (The subtitles were not crooked; it's that I was taking snapshots of my computer and then I cropped the photos, etc. etc.)

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The ...

As a kid, I learned English from English language cartoons on FilmNet. I learned from German TV shows. My passion for Swedish crime series taught me Swedish.

But now, the largest tv medium of our time, YouTube, has begun auto-translating everything. Future generations will not be exposed to foreign languages and be inspired to take an interest. (Source)

Apparently the poster is talking not about auto subtitling but auto dubbing. Auto subtitling would be bad enough, but auto dubbing? Terrible. I ...

Wherein I manage to answer every question with a No, I don't have one of these, but how about this tangentially related answer? (Via sovay and osprey_archer )

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

There aren't any of these right now, but back when I was a kid, I picked up Patricia McKillup's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld because of this cover. I loved the evening sunset glow of it, very Maxfield Parrish-esque.

2. Pride, challenging books I finished.

When we're talking about reading for pleasu...

I added two new books to my reading mix: Breath Warmth & Dream, by Zig Zag Claybourne. I enjoy the author's social media posts (when I happen to see them, which isn't that often), and he and C.S.E. Cooney are big mutual fans. So I decided to try something of his, and so far, I'm enjoying it. It's told in a leisurely way, and I like the characters. Here, Khumalo, a powerful witch who's waiting for her daughter to return from a sea journey, talks with a beggar woman at the harbor:

“You’re so tall,”...

wakanomori ran in the Cape Cod Marathon over the weekend--in the teeth of an approaching nor'easter! While he was slogging it out, I wandered the coast, nibbling rose hips and admiring plants like this one, with soft, enticing seed heads. I fount out it's called "groundsel bush," also sea-myrtle or saltbush (Baccharis halimifolia)



These patent leather shoes grabbed my attention, tucked just so on the other side of the wall separating the beach from the sidewalk. No one was walking barefoot on t...

The plaque beside this painting says that it was created by students at Easthampton High School in 2019.

Nice job, students! Very evocative painting you've made.

The stars that were seen as bears in parts of Eurasia were also seen as bears among North American and Siberian peoples, and the brightest stars in the Great Bear have also been seen as a ladle (or dipper), a plough, a wagon, a rudder, a shrimp, and a crocodile, among other things. (These facts brought to you courtesy of Wikipedia .)

An ear...

A couple of weekends ago was the B'town fair. I didn't get to see the parade, but I did seize some time to go to the exhibit hall and the 4-H tent. The theme for the fair this year was "Shake, Cattle, and Roll" (lots of good entrants for the brochure cover contest...), and inside the hall was this poster with cow** facts:



(You can click through to see it bigger)

These are amazing! Cows only sleep three hours a day? They are great swimmers and can swim for miles? I had no idea ...

Though ... it gi...