A girl gets not-human powers from a cat and a stick.

Translation disasters...or miracles: lots of facepalm-y mishaps ("Kings of Leon" turned into "The Lion King"), but also some solid cross-language puns.

Mash up two canons based on their titles. The Golden Compass Girls...Ender's Game of Thrones.

Change one letter, get a new canon. Star Bars...Evolutionary Girl Utena...Post (about an island of misplaced mail).

Fusion between things with similar names: Mad Men: Fury Road...The Boardwalk Empire Strikes Back To The Future...The Princess Tutu Diaries.

Invent a crossover by title: Dancing with the Star Wars...Jurassic Parks and Recreation...Guardians of the Galaxy Quest.

Change a letter, get a new work: The Vorkosingan Saga (it's a Eurovision AU)...Les Minerables (a Steven Universe AU)...Person of Pinterest...Loft.

Change a letter, get a new work: Sass Effect...The Block Jewels Trilogy (it's a Tetris crossover!)...Funding Dory.

Change a letter, get a new work: The Imperial Ranch series (Anaander Mianaai retires to Wyoming and raises cloned sheep)...The Neverending Store (like Costco or Sam's Club, but more)...Captive Pince (the harrowing account of a siege in the Hogwarts Library).

"On Sunday, May 8, Germany hit a new high in renewable energy generation. [...] Power prices actually went negative for several hours, meaning commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity."

Animal eyes span an incredible variety of weirdness. Also coolness. This mollusk has eyes made of rock!

"It may be that different animals arrived at different times. A 2008 study of Movile's only snail suggested that it has been down there for just over 2 million years. When it entered the cave, the ice age was just beginning, and the snail may have escaped the cold by going underground." (That's, uh, the species of snail, not a single really-old individual.)

"Psychologist Jackie Andrade of the University of Plymouth in southern England showed that doodlers actually remember more than nondoodlers when asked to retain tediously delivered information, like, say, during a boring meeting or a lecture."

"How many other people are learning Spanish, and where do they live? Duolingo recently answered such questions by running the numbers on their 120 million users, spanning every country on the planet."

"Coming to terms with the fact that he couldn't outrun a volcano, Landsburg decided to make his last moments on Earth count. He documented the eruption until the last possible second, then carefully rewound his film, placed his camera in his backpack, and lay down on top of it, shielding the equipment from the encroaching shower of magma and ash with his own body."

"Thanks to the colossal changes humans have made since the mid-20th century, Earth has now entered a distinct age from the Holocene epoch, which started 11,700 years ago as the ice age thawed." With a gorgeous gallery of ways we've altered our own bedrock.

"A giant pothole, the Devil’s Kettle, swallows half of the Brule and no one has any idea where it goes. The consensus is that there must be an exit point somewhere beneath Lake Superior, but over the years, researchers and the curious have poured dye, pingpong balls, even logs into the kettle, then watched the lake for any sign of them. So far, none has ever been found."

An animal shelter that used to have "unadoptable" cats now has a 30-day waiting list, thanks to hiring them out as mousers.

"As you can see from these pictures, Smoothie knows how to pose for the camera. Then again, it’s pretty easy for her. After all, while most of us have a best angle, EVERY angle is Smoothie’s best angle." This is a magical elf cat, you guys.

"I'm a regular commenter on a long-running fic, but some of the author's recent choices had turned me off of the whole thing. [...] I have two choices open to me: (i) vanish from the comments box with zero explanation; or (ii) explain to the author why I'm no longer feeling a fic that I once loved. If you were the author of that fic, would you want to know?"

(iii) Leave comments that bring up the issues, but gently. Err on the side of positive reinforcement of the parts you liked. Keep the criticisms in-universe when you can. "Tony, no, don't do it!" is more palatable than "Tonyfan89, no, don't write it!"

Especially if the author turns out to be more self-aware than you think. I remember reading a fic where a main character was getting hostile and angry to OOC levels, and it was really uncomfortable to read...five or six chapters of this, and it turned out she'd been possessed. She was going grimdark that whole time - in a believable, canon-compliant way, even.

(iv) Vanish from the comments box for now. When the final chapter is posted, leave a general comment recalling the things you liked. That'll give the author (and you) closure. Don't spell out that it stopped working for you. They can probably figure that out for themselves. (Does not apply if the fic got irretrievably offensive at some point.)

"How do you define canon? Is canon just the source text itself? Or does it include fictional characters' social media accounts and other things outside the text (interviews with the author, etc)?"

"What indicates the "worse" head writer/producer/creator? One who made you suddenly rage quit cold turkey because of a simple storyline? Or one where gradually over time things got less interesting until they got to the point where you just stopped caring and couldn't bring yourself to watch or read your canon?"

Fannish terms in non-English-speaking fandom spheres. Lots of Japanese, plus a few ways English terms get adapted into Anglo/Romance languages.

"If you have consumed a canon in its original language and then picked it up in another, was there anything that stood out to you that the translator put in?"

Meme: When you see this, make a post in your journal or in a community. It can be anything: a crosspost something you've posted on Tumblr, a few words about the last thing you read/watched, or just a "Hi, how is everyone?" Then go read your f-list and leave at least one comment.

People talk trigger/content warnings, including how to make them most useful and how to reasonably approach the fact that they can't cover everything (nor should have to).

Recent-upload statistics for both AO3 and ff.net. Interesting to see what older fandoms are still churning along (Harry Potter: of course, Sonic the Hedgehog: wow, tween furry fandom is a powerful thing), and which are more popular on which site.

How people write and release WIPs. (Guest-starring my praise of Microsoft Notepad as a fic-writing program.)

The Best Writing Advice You've Ever Been Given. Lots of it is general, but it's good and thoughtful.

"Let's talk about works that used language barriers or linguistics to good effect. And about works that really should have but didn't. And works that tried and failed."

Related: writing fic for multilingual canons.

"What is your opinion about the use of italics for “foreign” words in fiction in general? How do you determine which words to italicize? To what degree it is a stylistic or political choice?"

The article there has a bunch of opinions from pro writers. Fic writers, what do you do?

Me, I'm thinking I'll keep using italics, and there's one reason carrying most of the weight: because on the Internet, not all your readers are going to have English as their first language, and ESL fluency levels will vary. If the second language coming up in the fic is one that they speak, great. But if it's not, they might just end up lost.

Anecdote 1: One time I had on Radio Junior, a kids' radio/streaming station that broadcasts primarily in French. My brother and I were both taking French in school at the time. The station changed songs, and he said, "You know, I was recognizing some of the words in that last song, but now I'm not getting anything at all." The new song...was in Italian.

Anecdote 2: Another time I went to the wordreference.com forums seeking help with a word I couldn't find in any dictionaries. Turned out it was a typo.

So it seems polite to signal "hey, don't stress about not recognizing this phrase, or not being able to find it on your translation website of choice -- it's a different language from the main text, and there may even be a translation at the end of the chapter."

Other fannish people, how do you handle this? Especially those of you who regularly read in a second language: what do you prefer?

How does character synning work on the AO3? Particularly when characters are shared across adaptations, or even used in multiple fandoms.

Tag indexing on Tumblr with Tumblr tags, as compared to tag indexing on AO3, and how it handles Tumblr-style tags.

Another round of A/B/O discussion, this time with Punnett squares. Social worldbuilding and genetics discussions alike.

Drop a letter from the name of a fandom returns. Featuring such classics as His Ark Materials, Petty Soldier Sailor Moon, and an outright poem for Rime and Punishment.

"Have you noticed any changes in fandom over time, i.e. certain types of stories becoming more popular, particular writing styles being in vogue, specific issues being addressed repeatedly, etc?" Reflections on the evolution of fic.

On various canons that include second languages (mostly with English as a first language, but there's some anime and others too): "So for those of you nonnies who actually speak the languages being portrayed, how well/badly do the shows/actors do with those languages?"

"Most grievous cases where the author clearly doesn't speak whatever language they decided to use for effect or for their exotic foreign character?" Some fandom, some original (looking at you, Dan Brown).

"The SJ crowd don't care about you unless you have the "right" kind of disorder. Anyone else believe this? I'm thinking about language policing in particular." Discusses how anxiety and some forms of OCD are badly served by the current standard of Internet Social Justice discourse.

The whitewashing of characters of color is a serious problem, but that doesn't mean you'll never see the backlash go too far (discussing Legend of Korra fanart).

Characterization discussion, with a lot about AUs: "How do you decide what's essential to a character, what traits they absolutely must exhibit?"

"I'm in a terrible mopey mood, somebody talk femslash with me. Unsolicited recs, tropes you want to see, favorite ships, ships you wish people shipped, fandoms you miss, trends in femslash fic and potentially how they differ from yuri fic, sob stories about how no one writes what you want them to write, success stories about how everybody ships the ship you ship, femslashers you love, wanky femslashers, secret opinions, etc." It's like a mini-girlgay anon post.

Warning policies on kink memes: what to require, what to let slide, how much leeway to give for choosing not to warn.

"Do you care about what gender takes which roles in BDSM fic or fiction (F/m, M/f, M/m, F/f)? Why or why not? Does it matter what kind of BDSM -- if women submitting isn't your thing, is it a different matter if there's no D/s involved?"

Disney's representation of various non-white cultures, discussed by members of those cultures (with some non-Disney animated movies thrown in).

Religious/mythological utopias other than "Eden" and "Arcadia".

Nifty worldbuilding thread: information for engineering fictional continents' population density, geography, disease resistance...

A thread on China turns up some fascinating thoughts on how the Western media deals with the country versus how it actually works.

Found a text translation by superlink@tumblr of this doujinshi by MURA@pixiv, so I went and did a quick typesetting job. Homura/Madokami, magical fempreg.

Full download

( Sample page )

A race-based casting criticism that takes on the wrong targets, including The Middleman. Awesome background info on Wendy Watson makes me love the series all the more. (Plus a hefty subthread on one of the weirdest misunderstandings of the Bechdel Test I've ever seen.)

Speaking of the Bechdel test, how many of your fics pass it? Skewed by the fact that the source often doesn't.

Enthusiastic critique from CLAMP readers over this post about CLAMP and adult women. And from the opposite hemisphere, a long chewy debate over race, gender, and Disney princesses.

Random moments of bilingualism. Goes well with this epic compendium of bilingual puns, jokes, and ridiculous strings of homophones. And don't miss dealing with gender in different languages, where a lot more of the words may be gendered...or, in some cases, where not even the pronouns are.

Does the contours of your native language shape how you think? No in some ways, but definitely yes in others, including some very surprising ones.

As a sidebar, this amazing chart contrasts the meanings of over eighty colors across ten different cultures. For instance, black is the color of mourning in the West, but if you're Chinese it's white, Eastern European it's yellow, and South American it's purple. Purple also has connotations of insight in Japan, whereas the same is green in Hindu culture, and yellow in Native American. (Incidentally, red signifies passion just about everywhere.)

When translating involves more than two languages: dealing with the Greek and Latin in Negima!, and trying to keep it all consistent. Here's a bit of straightforwardness about the process in general, and here's a bit about the editor's job, including the history of the industry.

An opera written and sung entirely in Klingon. And the reviews say the music and performances are actually good. What's Klingon for "FTW"?

The importance of baby babbling, and how to encourage it.

Somebody went and uploaded the entirety of The Story of English on YouTube. It's an Emmy-winning documentary from the '80s, with enough breadth and depth that it doesn't date itself in embarrassing ways - only in interesting ones. (Which is to say, it's more "this is a snapshot of the world at the time" than "this is a laughably inaccurate declaration about how language will work in the far-off year 2000".) Including glimpses of speculation for the future of computer communication, long before the Internet came into its own.