hadassah

I see many well-meaning non-Roma using (poorly translated) Romanes in their writings.

Even worse, I see (poorly translated) Romanian used as a placeholder for words not found in dictionaries.

Now, Vlax Romani does borrow some words from Romanian, but I've seen fanfics use Anglo-Romani (the tongue of the English Gypsies) and then switch to Romanian out of nowhere.

Not only is it inaccurate, Roma who have been in England for centuries would have no ties to Romania or the Romanian language.

It's disappointing to see a character switch from dialect to dialect with no regard for their country of origin and vitsa.

A Rom/ni from Czechia would never speak Angloromani as their mother tongue and I doubt English Roma speak Vlax/Carpathian Romanes.

I think a lot of people who do this stuff genuinely want to help represent Roma, but the representation is wrong (and sometimes disrespectful). You wouldn't portray an American using British slang/accents/culture/etc. so why do this to Romani people?

Google Translate is also hilariously wrong when it comes to certain words/phrases, and it only worsens when used for complex sentences. It also meshes dialects with no regard for understandability. It's so clearly meant for bored gadje who want to seem cool by having a foreign language in their IG bio.

I've seen people put English sentences in italics, with the implication being that the character is speaking another language. I think this approach is better when it comes to an endangered (and closed) language like Romanes.

If I go spend 20 dollars at a restaurant we wouldn’t call it a micro-transaction, but if I spent the same amount of money in a video game then it is a micro-transaction?

Then they made their way to video games. And it used to be that they presented a reasonably comprehensible bargain:

You get to play a full-featured videogame for free, in return for which the game will occasionally advertise a premium cosmetic or unlock of some kind, for prices like $.99 or a couple of dollars. This was considered slightly annoying, especially in the mobile gaming space, but the trade-off was clear. Free game, paid optional content for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

The absolute maximal price you'd pay for a League of Legends skin was about $30, and those skins were considered an absolutely outrageous expense for totally dedicated League of Legends lifers, and were expected to be the absolute peak of technical possible quality. And those were still mocked as ridiculous expenses for weirdos, the sort of thing that no normal or average player should ever be expected to blow money on.

Bethesda was mocked for MONTHS for trying to sell $2.50 horse armor cosmetics in Oblivion. Microtransactions? In a premium product? In a sixty dollar game? Absolutely unacceptable! That was a breaking of the bargain!

But Bethesda's transgression was the thin end of a wedge. More and more of those post-launch monetizations started creeping into premium products, and by sheer erosion, by sheer slow grinding normalization, they started to multiply and the prices started to creep up and up and up, and day 1 DLC became normal, and ultimate and premium editions and super ultimate exclusive digital deluxe collector's editions and battle passes and lootboxes and... yeah.

It used to be a... not amazing, but at least a reasonably fair bargain. A transparent bargain. You get to play a game for free, and the price you pay instead is the soft pressure of microtransactions—actually micro transactions—being advertised to you.

You do not get to profit, financially or attention wise or another way, off of a *potentially* queer jew whilst we are banned from pride events.

We do not know if she was questioning her sexuality but ultimately straight or if she was actually queer because she was killed for the crime of existing as a jew before she could come out. Queer rights obviously matter. Anne Franke is not the person you should be using.

You need to protect alive queer jews. You need to love all jews, not just the dead ones.

For starters the blogger can just delete and ignore it. And given tumblr’s penchant for eating asks I think it would drive some hate senders a little insane if they keep checking back in wondering if their ask got eaten.

For second the anon ask format guarantees the blogger gets the last word in every time. Even if anon sends a follow up message they will never get the last word. And tumblr for better or for worse seems to run on this currency of “whoever expressed the last opinion in a post is the one we’re supporting”