#[ so in the meantime while y'all wait for me to pretty up the blog and post a carrd... ]

[mlssworld]

🐑 🍦 updates below.

[dialovertoenglish]

Yeah uh, so much for the "I'll get back to translating".

TL;DR: I probably won't do more translations, but this blog will stay and remain available.

I'm stubborn and HATE quitting something when it's not done, which is why I kept saying "I'll do it, it'll take a while but I will". I very much meant to do so. And translating is fun! I do enjoy it!

But there's also many other things I enjoy that I want to spend time on. I ended up in the DL fandom when I was 17; I'm 24 now, and pretty much entirely out of the fandom. Lots and lots of things have happened in the meantime (figured out I'm bi, finished high school, started studying, spent a semester in Korea, started writing original fiction more regularly, figured out I'm genderfluid, had my internship, and now I've gotta do my bachelor's thesis and finish studying. Unless I decide to do a Master bc I don't really wanna deal with being a Functional Adult With A Job yet.)

And I'd rather use my free time to write and get into making video games and playing them than use it to translate for a fandom I'm not interested in anymore. You all deserve to know this blog is gonna be inactive, and I deserve to stop stressing myself that people are waiting for my translations.

As I said above, the blog will stay, so you will NOT lose the translations I've already done. Have fun with them - I can still reply to asks if there's something, but in general: Yes you may link them, yes you may translate them into more languages, yes you may use them in fanfics etc, yes you may use them in patches, yes you may use them in pic edits, yes you may use them for DL videos. Really, do whatever; all I ask is that if you copy-paste them word for word onto your own blog/website, credit me. For anything else (fics, videos, further translations, etc), credits are appreciated, but not necessary.

I wish you lots of luck that other translators will finish everything that's still left to translate.

Take care of yourselves, be nice to each other, and thank you for your interest in my translations. It was fun being here with y'all.

[violetganache42]

I HAVE RETURNED FROM TENNESSEE!

God, this is like, what? The second time I've used this GIF?

Man, these past few days have been an enjoyable experience for me. I don't even know where to begin! Oh, wait… I actually do. I think it’s best for me to break it all down day by day.

* * *

Friday

As previously mentioned, Thursday night marked the start of the mini-hiatus because Mom and I had to make sure we could catch our 6:55 AM flight to Nashville on time. Needless to say, we only got a few hours of sleep; however, thanks to us getting the caffeine from our colas and trying to nap on the plane, we were awake enough to explore the downtown Nashville area.

As you may have guessed, Nashville is a popular place for country music and a lot of the attractions in the Lower Broadway area is full of clubs and honky-tory bars. No matter where you go, day or night, there is always a bar where people perform country music live for the patrons.

Nashville also happens to be the place that harbors the Johnny Cash Museum, which was the first stop of the weekend.

As you can tell from the first image, this artifact was made entirely out of steel that was salvaged from the destroyed World Trade Center, which is where the One World Trade Center/Freedom Tower currently stands. The second image is a piece of memorabilia: the Martin D-35 guitar Johnny Cash used when he was alive as it was his favorite Martin guitar to play on stage for two decades.

Speaking of country music, Nashville had recently hosted this year's CMA Music Festival and Garth Brooks took home the award for Entertainer of the Year. I wasn't even sure if it was coincidental or not since this weekend in Tennessee was primarily about his concert, but I'll get on that later. In the meantime, another neat place we checked out was the Country Music Hall of Fame… well, specifically some of the gift shops.

Yes, one of the gift shops has a wall filled with nothing but records from all kinds of country artists.

Outside of the country-related sights, we also checked out a couple more places within the Nashville area like a local candy store called the Candy Kitchen. Everywhere you look, there were all kinds of store-brand and local candy, caramel apples, fudge, ice cream, etc. Combine that with the aroma of pure sugar and you end up either feeling like you've gone to candy heaven or your teeth ended up rotting because of how many sweets this place had.

They even have giant ass Dum Dum lollipops for crying out loud! Like, how the hell are you supposed to eat something that huge?!

Later that afternoon, we weren't sure what to do in Nashville between the bars, party tractors, and what not, mostly because we weren’t in the mood to check everything out due to the little amount of sleep we got. As a result, we did a bit of online searching and found a pretty cool mall not far from the state's capital.

Yep. That's right. That is what this mall is called. The name alone was enough to give me Sonic vibes and I'm certain y'all know why. Hell, they even had three parking lots each labeled emerald, gold, and ruby; I lowkey wished they added four more parking lots and have them named after sapphire, amethyst, diamond, and aquamarine just so it can keep reminding me of Sonic, you know? Specifically the seven Chaos Emeralds? ...*coughs*...

Anyways, that's kinda how Mom and I spent the rest of our Friday: having dinner at the Cheesecake Factory and poking at some shops they had before returning to Nashville to see what it was like at night. I will say this right now: they fucking love partying.

Saturday

The next day of the trip was mostly spent driving up to Knoxville for the Garth Brooks concert, which I was able to get a decent number of photos because it was crazy. When Mom got the tickets, she said it was going to be a stadium concert and I thought it was going to be similar to Taylor Swift's concert at Gillette Stadium in terms of crowds, but holy shit! Was I wrong! When you've got a college football stadium filled with 84,000 people attending, it's bound to get fucking cramped, so comparing both stadium tours, this easily takes the cake for the wildest concert I've ever been to thus far. Nevertheless, I still managed to have fun.

Because the Tumblr app—as far as I know—only allows 10 photos per post, I decided to condense some of my favorite photos I've taken for the rest of the trip into collages to try and satisfy the limit, but it appears I may have made more collages than I anticipated, so the rest of this post will be typed via laptop. To kick off the series of collages, here are some of my favorites pictures I’ve taken of Garth.

Sunday

Sunday was the last day of our weekend in Tennessee, so having done the stuff mentioned above, how did we spend the majority of yesterday? By driving through Sevierville and Pigeon Forge, with the latter being the home of Dollywood!

Before going on this trip, Mom and I discovered Dollywood wasn't far away from Knoxville, the same town where the concert at the University of Tennessee was held. She tried to figure out ways to make additional plans to go to Dollywood to see their Christmas traditions, but we ultimately chose to save it for another time because we wanted to make sure we arrived at the airport early enough to board.

On that note, what proved to be the icing on the cake for this trip was what Mom would call a happy accident: viewing the Great Smoky Mountain Range.

The collage with the light blue background is a portion of the several photos I've taken of the Great Smokies as we were driving through a road in Sevierville that offered wonderful views from the distance. The one with a wooden background is during our trek through the mountain range; on top of the photo of the national park sign, we made a few stops along the way because those stops had some marvelous views.

And now comes the pièce de résistance. The happy accident of this trip. While taking pictures of the views at the first stop, we noticed some buildings down below; a couple of them resembled hotels, but we weren't sure what the rest were. As we were leaving the mountains, we immediately entered what we saw from above: Gatlinburg.

We didn't take a lot of pictures there because we were too mesmerized with what Gatlinburg had to offer as we were driving through: shops, an aquarium, museums, ski lifts, hiking, and so on. Everywhere we looked, there was nothing but endless entertainment, just like Pigeon Forge! They are even all decorated for the Christmas season, and honestly, I definitely wouldn't mind spending Christmas in Gatlinburg in the foreseeable future. Renting a cabin, seeing what the resort has to offer, my sisters and brother-in-law joining with Mom, my brothers, and myself to celebrate the holidays. That would be super amazing. ☺️

* * *

Anyways, that pretty much sums up the major events of my weekend hiatus. Posting and queueing on my main and Sonic blogs respectively will return to its regular schedule. Plus, a little something I've been thinking about doing, but what is it? You'll have to find out when the time is right. ;) Until then, see you guys later!