Ah, guys, just to be clear, I realize most of you probably know this but I’m seeing it framed….weirdly, so –
Tumblr is not $30M in debt. You can’t get Tumblr out of the red by giving them $30M. I mean you can, for a bit, but Tumblr is operating at a $30M deficit. That means yearly, Tumblr is spending $30M more than it earns.
None of this is to say we can’t have a Crab Day and try to get that $30M covered, sounds like fun! But that just means Tumblr breaks even for the current fiscal year. Tumblr has investors that want profits (or, well, I guess it’s Automattic’s investors, but regardless they want profit), so in order for it to continue operation, it has to either become Genuinely Profitable Very Quickly, or it has to do a fundraising round of some kind and get even more investors on board, which is really just kicking the problem down the road a year or two.
And either way, the extremely slick and semi-alarming pitch Tumblr is making about all the changes it’s going to make to increase engagement and such is still going to be necessary, because that’s where the money is, unfortunately. I don’t like it either (my favorite bullet point from that pitch is that they will email people who have their notifications turned off, because sure, that sounds like it won’t annoy anyone who like me was already overly inclined to be annoyed) but like. Baby needs a new pair of shoelaces.
None of this is to be alarmist or anything, I just got a bit worried about all this talk of $30M in debt, because this is not a one-time deal.
Posting this ahead of the crab day posts but also. We should do a crab day anyway.
As we now know, Tumblr is $30 million dollars in debt. Oops. Tumblr has announced some major (and unpopular) changes to the site in their attempt to get back above water. The alternative is that Tumblr ceases to exist. But maybe we can change that…
How:
There are 327 million unique tumblr visits per month, and almost 500 million active accounts. If 10 million unique users (or less, if we bought more than one) bought or gifted Crabs from the Tumblr store, we could knock out Tumblr’s debt easily. Buy crabs!
When:
July 29, 2023 is Crab Day, running through August 5 (for anyone who can’t log on that day) as Crab Week!
Who:
Everyone!! If you truly can’t afford to participate with a $3 crab, (or other item from the shop) post crab memes!
Time for Tumblr users to rise again and surprise everyone…
Please I need their next financial report to have a header that says ‘Crab day’
“It’s really important to respect the labour of translators, who are often erased in publishing and academia,” Wang said. “Publishers neglect to put the name of translators on covers, book reviewers forget to name translators, and now, this happens.
She added: “Translation is an art, and it takes me just as long to translate a poem as it takes for me to write an original one in English. I have to work hard to research the poet, the times they’re living in, and the literary forms they’re working in, then find creative ways to convey the spirit of their work in English. Classic Chinese poetry has many cultural idioms, archaic diction, and completely different grammar and syntactical structures to English.”
[…]
“If you don’t know that a book has been translated by a human being, you won’t even begin to think about what thought processes and how much work went into producing the translated text,” she said.
According to DeWald, the debate around AI in translation was emblematic of this misunderstanding. “Languages do not relate to one another in straightforward, one-to-one equivalences, not even the most cognate ones, so they cannot simply be plotted in a table of x in this language equals y in the other.”
Which means the translator always needs to activate their skill in crafting texts the reader wants to read. “It is a different kind of creativity to coming up with the plot for a novel or short story, which involves the imagination of inventing worlds that didn’t exist before. Translation is more closely related to crafting poetry, in that sense, as it is predominantly concerned with language itself.”
The problem with Batman in his present incarnation is that we need simultaneously to believe that this is a man who can effortlessly ninja his way through dozens of gun-toting mercenaries, and that this is a man to whom Danny DeVito with an umbrella is a credible threat.
Okay, that was glib – let me expand. I’m fully aware that Batman comics generally don’t have him fighting guys like the Penguin one on one these days. That’s not the problem. The problem is that superhero power creep has rendered Batman functionally immune to hired goons, but owing to his roots as a street-level vigilante, like half of his classic villains are guys whose primary threat vector is the ability to field arbitrary numbers of hired goons. There just aren’t a lot of ways to work around that without either doing violence to the villain’s idiom or making Batman carry the idiot ball – though I’ll grant that some of the attempted workarounds have been very entertaining!
You joke, but that’s literally one of the workarounds I’m referring to. One of the reasons that recent Batman stories keep looping back around to ancient ninja conspiracy stuff is that an answer to “how do we make hired goons a credible threat when Batman is an invincible ninja?” is “the hired goons are also ninjas”.
Imagine turning to crime out of financial desperation and you can’t even land a job as a dumb knuckle cracking brawler anymore without five years of martial arts training, a CDL in evasive getaway driving and a hand written recommendation from an active member of The Court of Owls.
Writer-in-progress. Likes: snakes, frogs, cuttlefish. Dislikes: bedbugs, mosquitos. Humans are on thin ice. I'm an adult and will probably assume anyone interacting with me is an adult; if you're not comfortable with that or if you're a kid, let me know.
