satis
New Member
Posts: 21
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Post by satis on Jun 7, 2022 18:42:59 GMT -5
I'm Satis (they/them), and closer to 50 than 40 now so I guess I get to say "old as dirt" at long last? (I've been waiting for this moment for almost twenty years of online life! ) Apart from that, I'm in Germany (born and bred and still living there, too), in a small town in rural Franconia, which is northern Bavaria, which is southern Germany, and smack dab the middle of Europe. I work as a freelance literary translator of mostly trashy novels. I'm the manager of the town museum. I'm a writer, artist, sometime-scholar. Cat-friend. Garden hermit. Fancrone! I miss the olde worlde charm of Yahoo groups and internet forums, so I'm here to re-invent my aged online self and maybe get inspired to be more creative again while I'm at it. AMA.
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Post by sheydgarden on Jun 7, 2022 19:05:05 GMT -5
Hi Satis! Oh that's fantastic, as a mid-30s queer I am so excited to talk to folks in their 40s & up. What kind of museum do you manage? Or is it like a town historical society?
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Post by ray.kioti on Jun 7, 2022 21:07:31 GMT -5
hello satis! welcome! yay! ok, i guess maybe i am not the oldest person on the forum now. that's awesome. xd
i'm so glad you joined. garden hermits, unite!
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satis
New Member
Posts: 21
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Post by satis on Jun 9, 2022 14:13:52 GMT -5
Hi Satis! Oh that's fantastic, as a mid-30s queer I am so excited to talk to folks in their 40s & up. What kind of museum do you manage? Or is it like a town historical society? Nice to meet you! The museum is "just" a small town museum (small rural market town of around 8,000 inhabitants), so it's all about local history and crafts. Nothing really special. (A Hobbit from LotR would call it a "mathom house", filled with odds and ends and this and that.) But it is rather big, spread out across three floors, with hundreds of objects. Like a book with town council minutes/records dating back to the end of the 30 years war (1648), with the last entry from the 19th century. (The oldest written reference to this town dates back to 744, but that's like one line in a list of land donations in the bishop's archive. Everything's old in the middle of Europe...) Old tools of craftsmen, such as a barrel maker and shoe makers of regular and wooden shoes. Pretty much everything for beer making the way it was done in the 19th century. Or the interior of an old shop, exactly as it was when the last owner closed up in the mid-1980s, and dating back to the 1930s probably. The museum is in the old reeve's mansion (the current building mostly dates back to 1781), which was used for many different purposes in the course of centuries, so the building itself is maybe the best part of the museum. It was the reeve's (bailiff's) mansion, so the seat of local administration and police, it used to be a royal courthouse, an institute for the education of young teachers, a kindergarten and school run by nuns (who offered the first classes of continuing education for girls in this town! nothing grand, just some special knitting and sewing classes, a bit of home economics, but it was the first time that girls could do anything beyond elementary school here, so I feel that's worth mentioning), after WWII there were also apartments in the building and a doctor's office. Nowadays it houses the town library, the town museum, the community centre, space for events and classes (from a whisky tasting organised by the town twinning association to yoga and music for mothers and toddlers or various art or language classes).
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Post by sheydgarden on Jun 9, 2022 16:02:43 GMT -5
That's so cool! I live in a small rural town in western Massachusetts & we have a historical society museum with a lot of the same kinds of things (though obviously it only dates back to around the town's founding in the 1700s - I can't even imagine living somewhere with a recorded history and architecture going back much further than that!). We've visited it a few times & talked to some of the folks who work there about our house, which is a historic farmhouse (probably built around 1800). I bet the antiques in your museum are amazing!
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Post by grinn on Jun 10, 2022 8:04:50 GMT -5
Nice to meet you, Satis! All the work you do sounds really cool. What kind(s) of art and writing do you do? I am also a cat friend <3 cheers
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Post by uneide on Jun 10, 2022 19:54:47 GMT -5
Nice to meet you, fellow 40 something! Your work sounds pretty interesting!
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satis
New Member
Posts: 21
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Post by satis on Jun 11, 2022 14:19:24 GMT -5
Nice to meet you, Satis! All the work you do sounds really cool. What kind(s) of art and writing do you do? I am also a cat friend <3 cheers I've written quite a bit of fanfic for various fandoms, as well as two unpublished novels, one a classic epic quest fantasy, the other a queer story about mental illness, visibility, and the meaning of words and art. I should really, really edit that and finally do something with it. *sighs* Sometimes I also write poetry. Here are two of them: "birdsong" and " far away I will remember you" (My active blog is the Dreamwidth one, I kinda got lazy about crossposting during the pandemic. On the upside I do journal regularly again!) In terms of art I've focused on watercolours and ink, mixed with photography. But I haven't done any serious art in way too long. The only thing I've done this year so far is a bit of a calligraphic doodle, a loving kindness meditation. Cat tax:
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Post by prawnlegs on Jun 12, 2022 7:56:40 GMT -5
Nice to meet you, Satis!
Re. your reply to Ezra (sheydgarden), I've always latched on the idea of hobbit mathom-houses so it's neat to hear you work in the irl equivalent, haha. Our historical society museum does indeed seem similar. (I forgot to mention I'm Ezra's partner!)
Also I hope the translating job is amusing sometimes. One of our household pastimes is to read aloud bad porn novels that we find in free book boxes. We're terrible.
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Temiel
Junior Member
Posts: 50
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Post by Temiel on Jun 17, 2022 15:02:29 GMT -5
Hi Satis! Good to meet you, and I'm really curious to see more of your work- I love your calligraphy doodle! The lettering is so simple, but gorgeous. Your museum sounds SUPER cool, by the way. Weirdly, though, I'm curious about your translating work! I know you said you mostly do trashy novels, but are they like... FUN-trashy?
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satis
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Post by satis on Aug 4, 2022 18:01:38 GMT -5
Weirdly, though, I'm curious about your translating work! I know you said you mostly do trashy novels, but are they like... FUN-trashy? Well, they are generally too tame to deserve the label "fun" in capital letters. But it depends. Right now I'm translating a romance novel that features a pregnant foster dog, and hero and heroine are POC, which is refreshing in a predominantly white cis-het genre. One of the weirdest books I ever translated featured a nine months pregnant heroine who was on the run from gangsters and wanted to win a cooking competition. And I don't want to kink-shame the hero ... I know that some guys really love pregnant women. But that story was extra strange. Quite often mainstream romance novels are strangely misogynist. Which I still can't quite wrap my mind around, even after fifteen years of translating them. Most authors are women, most readers are women. So why do female romance authors often adopt a typical male gaze in their writing? What I like about translating trashy romance novels is that it's still working with words and stories, but it's not what I write or read in my free time. So work, while fun, remains work, and doesn't take over my life. That said, I've been toying with applying for the occasional translation gig with a queer publisher of novels that are a lot more "fun".
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Temiel
Junior Member
Posts: 50
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Post by Temiel on Aug 4, 2022 18:42:42 GMT -5
Quite often mainstream romance novels are strangely misogynist. Which I still can't quite wrap my mind around, even after fifteen years of translating them. Most authors are women, most readers are women. So why do female romance authors often adopt a typical male gaze in their writing? I wonder about this ALL the time, no lie. Maybe it's just that because we're trained that "good writing" so often requires the male gaze to be "successful" at its craft. Misogyny is baked into SO much of what we eat, sleep, and breathe that until you start reading queer romance written by non-men, it's legitimately hard to even imagine what media would be like without it.
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