Stars Of Chaos 杀破狼 Vol 1, Notes 1

There are Reasons for the Lan Rules! Imagine how crazy GuSu would be if they all roamed around wantonly like WWX…

lan xichen was really like *traumadumps the weirdest fucking story you’ve ever heard* *flute solo* “do you know my brother is in love with you?” at like 2am in the span of five minutes and no one stopped him

Regarding May 12 Dracula Daily / Re: Dracula,

SO! Cloaks do not “spread out like great wings” when you’re crawling face-down the side of a building UNLESS you have arranged some hooks or clips or some such to keep the cloak in place.

I wanna see Dracula getting annoyed at his cloak, which keeps falling over his head when he’s climbing downward head-first, Until he finally devises some method to attach the cloak to his wrist and waist / thighs / ankles, which cleverly keeps the cloak spread out on his back despite the best efforts of gravity.

Can anyone here draw? Or has anyone already done this? Please point me to the right place!

So, I’m getting to the very end of the novel 镇魂 Guardian by Priest, and I know that everyone is super worried that Chaos 混沌 is about to envelop the world, but the more I read, the hungrier I get…

What a difference one radical makes.

So, in Chinese, idioms are often allusions to historical events or short metaphors to vividly describe a situation. They pack a ton of meaning and imagery into 4 little words. They’re awesome. They add color and depth to the language, and show that the speaker/writer is highly educated.

So, in Chinese, using idioms makes you sound very smart.

In English, using idioms does not make you sound very smart. It may make you sound cute and funny and colloquial, and in the right context it can work very well, but when you hear, say, “let the cat out of the bag,” you don’t think “Wow. That person is such an intellectual.”

Admittedly, some idioms are relatively culture-neutral, like “call it a day” or “read the room” or “see the light.” I’d say that those are fine to use in translations. They don’t evoke cowboys or baseball players or midwestern farmers or anything else unique to English-speaking culture like that.

However, I feel that culture-heavy English/American idioms should be avoided in translations, especially of Chinese wuxia/xianxia novels. No one in XianXia-land knows American boxing — why the heck would someone be “down for the count?” Sword Cultivators don’t hang out a lot with fowl farmers — where would they have picked up the usage of “gander” as slang for “to look?”

Idioms are hard. Be careful.

I’m doing my first re-read of Mo Dao Zu Shi, and would like to complain very publicly to a sympathetic audience that I Don’t Want to Read Song Lan’s Death again. It hurt the first time I read it, the first time I heard it on Audio Drama, the first time I watched it on CQL. (Now I skip that chapter in Audio Drama). I don’t want to experience it again; but I’m over halfway through ch 40 already and can’t abandon WWX’s POV via A-Qing.

I’m just looking forward to Drunk Lan Zhan #2. The promise of Drunk Lan Zhan will get me through this. Yes.

Now you know — view on Instagram https://ift.tt/3AGm34f

The Husky and His White Cat ShiZun, volume FOUR 四

So, again, the translators Rynn and Jun have amazed me with their prowess. I have all of three notes for this entire volume, and two are just extra cultural background for kids who didn’t grow up in Chinese culture.

So, yah - Chu Wanning put this hand in the window frame, then he heard a crack sound, and then he realized that he had broken the window frame. Oops.

If you grow up around Chinese people, you might hear them talking about some foods being too cold or others being too hot, but they’re not talking about temperature, they’re talking about the effect of the food on the body.

And once you’ve lost your internal health-balance and are experiencing the negative effects of being too “hot,” you explain away your weird symptoms of not sleeping well, sore throat, acne, etc as being the result of eating too many chili peppers or chocolate muffins the day before.

It’s strange, but it all makes sense. Just eat your chocolate muffins in moderation.

If you watch enough period dramas, you see a lot of saluting, often but not always accompanied by a bend at the waist.

And in case you didn’t remember: -xiong means “brother.” Polite way to address a man of roughly even status.

Here is Part 7 of 7 of my annotations of First Edition MDZS, Volume 1 (one I missed the first time I posted):