When You Actually Have To Do The Job You Applied For After Lying About How Capable And Great You Are

To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don't need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don't try to be a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.

— Thích Nhất Hạnh

If I see one more motherfucker comment on a post about how “Audrey should get with Kathryn now!” I will be in your walls. Under your bed. In your closet. Real life people dealing with their own tragedies don’t wanna hear about your ridiculous out of line fanfic and neither do their friends and family. This is why friendships end between celebrities.

What they don’t tell you about speaking multiple languages is that your brain does not in fact have a box labeled Spanish and another one labeled German. Instead it has a box labeled “Not English” and sometimes when you’re talking or writing in one of the languages you speak it will just start pulling random words from that box.

they said this is the cheapest marvel series ever produced. see, this is what happens when you focus on storytelling instead of unnecessary stuff no one cares about. i loved this episode so much. please, give me more low-budget marvel shows that care about the plot, the characters, and their target audience. i don't need another rdj blockbuster marvel movie. you can have that. give me meaningful stories with a low budget, made by people who truly believe in what they're creating.

STOP SHOWING ME VIDEOS LIKE THIS OR I'LL GO ON ANOTHER RANT ABOUT WHY LANGUAGE DIFFICULTY CLASSIFICATIONS ARE ANGLOCENTRIC AND FRANKLY OFTEN RACIST BULLSHIT

have you ever read a fanfic so good that you wanted to write a fanfic about that fanfic, but was too shy / too intimidated to ask for the author’s permission and too afraid that your writing wouldn’t be half as good as theirs and that it would be an insult to their work that was basically a literal masterpiece, so you just sat there fantasizing about their work and how beautiful it was and how you wished you could just eat it and how you wished canon could write your blorbos half as good as this writer did and how you just wanted to cry because you just loved that fic so much????

agatha going from:

to:

you-know-what-that-is-growth.jpg

The Japanese language is one of the most indirect languages in the world. There are the obvious examples of this, such as when some customers try to enter a busy restaurant without a reservation and the staff say 難しいですね (”this is tricky…”) instead of simply telling them that there are no seats. However, I've noticed that Japanese’s indirectness may go much deeper than simple euphemism.

Japanese seems to come built-in with ways of avoiding directly addressing your conversation partner.

The Japanese way of expressing things often involves voicing your internal monologue, which means people will say things ostensibly to themselves, even though what they really want is to communicate to the other person. When I first noticed it, I thought it was a bit similar to how some (western) cartoons occasionally handle exposition by having a character mutter something to themselves so that the audience can hear. This can be seen in the following extremely common forms of expression:

Using adjectives as an exclamation

うま！Literal translation: “Delicious!” Semantic translation: “Wow, this is really good”

怖い！Literal translation: “Scary!” Semantic translation: “I’m scared!” or “This place is giving me the creeps”

It could be argued that these single word exclamations may not always be “talking to yourself”. But imo more often than not, they are spoken with the vibe of “I felt this adjective so strongly that the word just slipped straight through my internal monologue and out of my mouth”.

Wondering aloud (かな)

雨降るかな？ Literal translation: “Hmm, will it rain or not?” Semantic translation: “I wonder if it’s gonna rain.”

今夜来るかな？ Literal translation: “Hmm, will [they] come tonight or not?” Semantic translation: “I wonder if they’ll come tonight.”

Compared to the adjective examples, this is less ambiguous. There’s no direct translation for the verb “to wonder” in Japanese - you just wonder aloud! The literal translations sound funny because they only make sense if the speaker is talking to themself.

Explaining stuff to yourself (んだ)

あそこにあったんだ！(context: the listener has just shown the speaker something they were looking for) Literal translation: “There it is!” Semantic translation: “There it is!”

In this example, the literal and semantic translations are the same, because this is a case of talking to yourself in English! If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense to say “there it is” when the person you’re talking to clearly already knows that’s where “it” is. Instead, the phrase serves to convey satisfaction and surprise.

まだ20歳なんだ！(context: the speaker has just found out from the listener that a friend of theirs is younger than they expected) Literal translation: “[She’s] only 20!” Semantic translation: “She’s only 20? That explains so much!”

In this example, んだ is used to mark the sentence as an explanation of something. The listener already knew the friend was only 20, so the aim of the sentence is not to convey new information, it’s to show that some sort of internal reasoning is happening within the speaker’s mind.

In the immortal words of Carly Rae Jepsen:

🎶 Do you talk to me, when you're talking to yourself? 🎶

For every Japanese speaker, the answer is yes!

ppl talk about the difficulty of writing characters smarter than yourself, but the real challenge is writing a character who is funnier than you are

"My mother needs me home." (x Agatha All Along, S01E09)