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btsqualityy · 3 years

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Fools Rush In: Chapter 4

Jungkook x Reader

Genre: Strangers-to-lovers, age gap!AU (reader is 30, Jungkook is 23), Angst, smut, fluff

Summary: You have your first doctor’s appointment, and you and Jungkook come to an agreement.

Warnings: Protected sex, dirty talk, slightly dominant Jungkook, slightly submissive reader, big dick!Jungkook as always lol

WC: 2.4K

That Thursday, you stood outside of the obstetrician’s office, bouncing on the tips of your toes as you waited for Jungkook. He was running a little late and you tried not to think much of it as you sucked on a ginger lollipop.

“Hey!” You heard a sudden voice shout and when you looked to your left, Jungkook was running down the street towards you. You stood up straight, taking the lollipop out of your mouth as you turned to face him. “I’m so sorry I’m late, I overslept.”

“It’s 11am,” you deadpanned, sighing heavily when he just shrugged sheepishly. “Come on, let’s go.” He held the front door open for you and the two of you stepped into the building, where you immediately went over to the front desk to sign yourself in with the receptionist. Once you had done that and received some forms to fill out, you and Jungkook took a seat together to wait for the doctor to see you.

“You know Korean?” Jungkook asked as he watched you fill out the form that was a mix of English and Korean with relative ease.

“I can read it and understand it, but I can’t speak it worth a damn,” you chuckled as you took the lollipop out of your mouth. “I know a few languages though.”

“Yeah? Which ones?”

“Well English, Korean, French, Japanese, a little Spanish, and some Portuguese,” you listed.

“Accomplished,” Jungkook chuckled, making you do the same.

“It has it’s advantages when you play in different places and do interviews and stuff,” you said as you finished writing on the form. “Here, hold this.” You handed him the clipboard, reaching into your purse and pulling out another ginger lollipop.

“What’s up with those?” Jungkook wondered as he watched you unwrap it and stick it into your mouth. “Is that ginger?”

“Yeah, it��s supposed to help nausea,” you explained. “I’ve been puking my guts out for weeks now and I’m willing to try anything.”

“Damn,” he murmured. Just then, a door opened and a short, grey haired woman stepped out.

“Y/N L/N?” She called out and both you and Jungkook stood up, walking over to the door and stepping inside. The doctor led you down the hallway to an examination room, waving both you and Jungkook inside before she shut the door behind you all.

“I’m Dr. Na Da Rae, nice to meet you both,” she introduced herself, stepping over and shaking your hand before moving over to Jungkook and doing the same. “I’m assuming you’re the father?”

“Yeah, Jeon Jungkook,” he smiled.

“So, how have you been feeling Y/N?” Dr. Na questioned as she sat down on the stool that was placed in the room while you hopped on top of the examination table.

“Mostly ok,” you began. “I’ve been having some lower back pain, as well as some terrible headaches. Oh, and the nausea.”

“Explains the ginger lollipops,” Dr. Na laughed. “Well, why don’t you get undressed from the belly down so that we can do an ultrasound?”

“Sounds good,” you agreed easily.

“I’ll be right back,” she said before getting up and walking over to the door, pulling it open and stepping out.

“Uh, should I..maybe leave too?” Jungkook wondered and you shook your head as you got off of the examination table.

“You’ve seen my vagina Jungkook, remember?” You giggled as you unbuttoned your jeans, pushing them down. “That’s how we ended up here.”

“Yeah but still,” he mumbled as he averted his gaze and looked down at the ground, making you smile as you pulled your jeans off of your feet and left them folded on the chair next to Jungkook. You then grabbed a thin sheet, placing it over your lap for modesty as you got back onto the examination table.

“I’m done now,” you called out, giggling when Jungkook lifted his head but still didn’t make eye contact with you. A knock sounded on the door and Dr. Na peeked inside as she pushed it open.

“All done?” She asked and once you nodded, she stepped inside and paced over to you. “So, what we’re going to do is a transvaginal ultrasound. I’m going to put this transducer inside of you and we’ll be able to see the baby. Lay back for me.” You did as instructed, laying back on the table and setting your feet in the stirrups as Dr. Na put some gel onto the transducer.

“It’ll be cold and it might hurt a bit,” she warned you, and you winced as she pushed it into you. She then pressed a few buttons on the machine while you watched the screen next to your head.

“Jungkook, you can come closer,” Dr. Na smiled and Jungkook got up out of his chair, coming over to stand next to where your head was laying. “Do you see this black area here?”

“Yeah,” you and Jungkook replied at the same time.

“That little white spot inside of it is your baby,” Dr. Na revealed and your eyes widened as you looked at the screen.

“They’re so tiny,” Jungkook chuckled in disbelief.

“Y/N, you’re measuring right at 11 weeks,” Dr. Na said. “Does that sound right to you?” You did the quick mental math in your head, nodding your head once you realized that 11 weeks was three months ago.

“Will I be ok to play tennis on Saturday?” You questioned hesitantly.

“The Korea Open?” Dr. Na murmured and you nodded your head. “You should be just fine. The baby is positioned well and everything in your uterus looks great. Of course, you should listen to your body if anything pops up but as a medical professional, I can tell you that you don’t have anything to worry about in regards to the baby.”

“God, that’s a relief,” you sighed happily.

“Would you like to hear their heartbeat?” Dr. Na offered.

“We can hear it already?” Jungkook gasped and Dr. Na nodded, reaching over to press a few buttons on the machine and suddenly, a loud whooshing sound followed by steady pounding filled the room.

“It’s so strong,” you whimpered, tears welling up in your eyes as you listened to the boom, boom, boom.

“It’s the most beautiful thing I think I’ve ever heard,” Jungkook murmured, tears already slipping down his cheeks. He reached down, grabbing your hand and intertwining your fingers with his and you looked up at him, the two of you sharing a silent look as the sound of your baby’s heartbeat surrounded the two of you.

..........................................

“Jungkook, fuck,” you moaned, clutching the sheets beneath you as Jungkook plunged his cock into you from behind. After your prenatal visit, your emotions, as well as Jungkook’s, were running high after seeing your baby and you ended up inviting Jungkook back to your place. Once you got there, it didn’t take long for that same sexual tension from the night that you two met to show up again and that’s how the two of you ended up in bed together.

“So tight Y/N-ah,” he grumbled, palming your ass cheeks in his hands, his grip on your skin tight. You hadn’t had sex with anyone else since the night that you met Jungkook so you thought that maybe that was the reason why he felt so good inside of you, or maybe even because you being pregnant was making you more sensitive than you usually were.

The truth was though, Jungkook was really fucking good at fucking you. He was just so intuitive, knowing exactly how to kiss, touch, and fuck you in a way that had you falling apart in his hands and feeling like you were loosing your mind.

“Yes, right there,” you gasped as you felt the tip of his cock nudge against that spot inside of you. “There, just like that.”

“God, come here,” he grunted, pausing his thrusts as he reached down and grabbed the backs of your arms, pulling you up so that your back was pressed against his chest. He wrapped one arm across your chest and stationed his free hand on your hip as he began to thrust into you again, and your body shivered from the change in position and from how much deeper you could feel his cock inside of you.

“Holy fuck, that’s so good,” you whispered, your head falling back to rest against his shoulder.

“Such a good girl baby,” he murmured into your ear, panting heavily in between his words. “Taking my cock inside of you so well.”

“Feels so good Jungkook,” you purred as you reached up, clutching onto his arm that was stationed on your chest. “So deep.”

“I know baby, I feel it too,” he groaned. “Give me your hand.” He took his hand off of your hip and held it out to you, waiting until you had placed one of your hands in his before he trailed them down your body, settling right below your belly button.

“Fuck,” you blurted, feeling the small curve of something moving inside of you. “Is that,-”

“That’s my cock inside of you baby,” he finished for you. “Feel it? That’s how good you are for me, letting me get so deep inside of you and fuck you the way you deserve.”

“Shit, I’m gonna come,” you announced suddenly, the mix of Jungkook’s cock and his dirty talk rushing you towards your orgasm.

“Come on my cock baby,” he whispered and you clutched onto his hand tightly, your other hand digging into the skin of his arm that was on your chest as your orgasm slammed into you. Your body convulsed against his, small yelps escaping you as he continued to fuck you hard and deep.

“Oh, there we go,” he moaned as the walls of your pussy clamped down around his cock. “Keep coming for me baby, don’t stop.”

“I-I can’t t-take it,” you stammered as your body jostled up and down in time with his thrusts.

“I’m almost there baby, don’t move,” he said through grit teeth and you just held onto him, moaning as another smaller orgasm hit you. When it did, it triggered Jungkook’s orgasm as well and he came into the condom that he was wearing.

“Holy shit,” you sighed as you slumped back against him, letting your muscles that now felt like jelly relax and sink into your post orgasm haze.

“Wait, let me pull out before you get too comfortable,” Jungkook said and you whined as he gently pushed you forward and helped you lay down before looking back down at the condom. “No fucking way.”

“What?” You asked as you watched him pull the condom off.

“It fucking ripped,” he chuckled and your eyes widened as he held up the condom so that you could see the small amount of his cum that was escaping it. “It must’ve happened like this the first time too.”

“You fuck me too hard, that’s why they break,” you commented as you made yourself comfortable against the pillows.

“That’s your fault,” he replied as he moved to throw the condom into the trashcan that was next to your bed.

“How?”

“You always sound so pretty moaning for me, it makes me want to make you come,” he smirked as he laid down next to you and you just rolled your eyes at him. The two of you laid there in a comfortable silence, basking in the post orgasmic glow and feeling of satedness.

“You know, it’s rare that someone here gets to look over the whole city,” he spoke up after a few minutes and when you looked at him, you saw that he was looking out of the window, where the balcony and your picture perfect view of Seoul was.

“The company that sponsors me puts me up in this condo whenever I come here and it’s easily my favorite part about coming to Seoul,” you told him.

“And meeting me isn’t?” He joked as he turned his head to look at you.

“Keep fucking me like that and maybe it will be,” you teased him, making him smile as he reached over and grabbed one of your hands in his.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” he began. “Maybe we should give this a try.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, being together, in a relationship,” he elaborated.

“Are you serious?” You giggled. “We hardly know each other.”

“True, but we’re having a baby together,” he pointed out as he reached over and set his hand on your stomach. “We’re gonna be co-parents so we might as well try a real relationship out.”

“Jungkook, this is exactly what I was talking about when I first told you,” you said. “I don’t want you to feel forced into having to do anything. You don’t have to force yourself into being with me because you think that’s the best thing for the baby.”

“I’m not forcing myself,” he rolled his eyes. “After you disappeared that night, I always thought about you but I had no real way of contacting you without seeming like a creep. In some weird way, I think that maybe the baby was a chance for us to reconnect.”

“A really extreme chance, huh?” You joked, making him chuckle and nod his head. “So what are you saying? You like me?”

“Wow, real mature way of putting it,” he teased, wincing when you reached over and pinched his thigh. “But yeah, I’m interested in you and I’d like to see where this goes.”

“Jungkook, I’m interested in you too and I do find this chemistry that we have between us intriguing but I don’t think we should really be rushing into anything,” you explained.

“God, are you always so logical?” Jungkook asked.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Do you remember when I talked about how people should follow their instincts?” He wondered and you nodded your head. “Do me a favor and stop listening to what your head is saying and listen to your instincts. What are they telling you?”

“To say yes,” you admitted. Jungkook then took his hand that was on your stomach and grabbed onto your hand, pulling on it and bringing up to his lips.

“Then say it,” he whispered, pressing a few soft kisses onto your skin. You and Jungkook had already done so much out of order, so you figured that it wouldn’t do any harm to actually try this with him.

“Yes,” you stated.

“Yes what, baby?”

“Yes, we can try,” you agreed and Jungkook didn’t hesitate to lean over and kiss you passionately. As you wrapped your arms around his neck and opened your legs for him to slot himself in between them, you figured that it definitely wouldn’t hurt to try if it being getting fucked within an inch of your life on a regular basis.

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spanishskulduggery · 3 years

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Hi! I'm very curious about something regarding the Spanish language. I'm currently studying A2 Spanish but I had this question and my teacher did not seem too willing to discuss it. Here it goes:

I know that Spanish has, something my Spanish teacher says, linguistic gender. I was wondering how do the people who don't align themselves with the gender binary (masculine and feminine) speak/write in it? I have read this article about Spanish speaking people from US adding "x" Or "@" and people from Argentina using "e" to make the words gender neutral.

Thank you so much for responding, whenever you get to it. Also love your blog. ❤

Short answer, in general speaking terms people are tending towards the -e now because the other two are very hard to actually speak, and because Spanish-speakers feel the -e is more authentic

What you're most likely to see in Spanish is masculine plural as the default, or in written things you might see todos y todas or like un/una alumno/a "a student", or like se busca empleado/a "employees wanted" / "looking for an employee"

If it's something official or academic you typically include both [todas y todas] or you go masculine plural [todos] unless it's specifically feminine plural

Related, linguistic gender applies to all things, not just people. Why is la mesa "table" feminine, but el libro "book" masculine? Just linguistic gender. I can tell you that most loanwords (that aren't people) in Spanish are masculine, and that there are certain words that come from Greek are masculine, and that -ista words are unisex most of the time... And I can tell you there are some words like testigo or modelo that are unisex and don't change for gender. Aside from that, speaking about nouns and grammatical gender... those particular things are harder to parse for regular people, but if you go into the field of linguistics you can explore that more deeply. Some of it is source language (i.e. "it came from Latin this way") or things like that. And in general when talking about nouns it's unimportant and not considered sexist, that's just how it is.

There is such a thing where it gets a little too far the other way and people will say "history? what about herstory" which is a nice thought but the etymology has nothing to do with gender there

When it comes to people - and when it comes to gendered attitudes - that's where it gets more confusing and more complicated.

I believe there was an experiment where people had French and Spanish speakers [I believe it was Spanish] try to identify how a "fork" would sound. French people gave it a more feminine voice because "fork" is feminine in French, while Spanish speakers gave it a more masculine voice because it's masculine in Spanish.

Whether we like it or not, certain gendered things do influence our thoughts and feelings and reactions. A similar thing in English exists where the old joke was something like "There was a car accident; a boy is rushed to the ER and the surgeon but the father was killed. When they got to the ER the doctor said 'I can't operate on him, he's my son!'" and it's like "well who could the doctor be?" ...and the doctor is his mother. We associate "doctor" as masculine and "nurse" as feminine.

There's a gender bias in our language thought patterns, even though the language changes. And that does exist in Spanish too, to different extents.

There are certain cultural and gendered stereotypes or connotations attached to certain words, many tend to be more despective or pejorative when it's women.

For example - and I know this has changed in many places or it isn't as prevalent - el jinete "horseman/rider", while the female form is la amazona "horsewoman/rider". Because la jinete or la jineta was sometimes "promiscuous woman".

There were also debates about things like la presidente vs. la presidenta or what the female version of juez should be, whether it should be la juez or la jueza

Most languages with gendered language have varying degrees of this, and all languages I'm aware of have gendered stereotypes related to professions or cultural attitudes in some way, and not just for women, and not all in the same way with some of them being very culturally based

The longer answer involves a bit of history, and I'll be honest, some of it is contested or considered a little controversial in Spanish-speaking countries particularly in the conservative parts (which honestly should come as no surprise)

The first symbol that I know of that came about was the X

First piece of contested history: As far as I know, it was the trans/queer and drag communities in Latin America who started the trend of X. When there were signs or bulletins that had the gendered endings - specifically masculine plural as the default plural - people would write a big X through the O. This was a way of being inclusive and also a very smash the patriarchy move.

Some people attribute this to women's rights activists which may also be true, but a good portion of the things I read from people say it was the trans/queer/drag communities in Latin America doing this.

I've also read it originated in Brazil with Portuguese; still Latin America, but not a Spanish-speaking country.

Where it's most contested is that some people will say that this trend started in the Hispanic communities of the United States. And - not without reason - people are upset that this is perceived as a very gringo movement.

That's why Latinx is considered a very American-Hispanic experience

The arroba (@) is relatively new. I remember seeing it in the 2000s. I don't know if it existed earlier for gender inclusivity.

People used it because it looks like a combination of O and A, so it was meant to be cut down on saying things like todos y todas or niños y niñas in informal written speech

I remember quite a few (informal) emails starting like hola tod@s or muy buenas a tod@s or things like that

I think of it more as convenience especially in the information age where you never knew who you were talking to and it's easier than including both words, especially when masculine plural might be clumsy or insensitive

Still, it's practically impossible to use the @ in spoken Spanish, so it's better for writing casually. You also likely won't be allowed to use the @ in anything academic, but in chatrooms, blogs, or forums it's an option

I love the E ending. And the gender neutral form in singular is elle... so it's él "he", ella "she", and elle "they (singular)"

The -e ending is I think became more common within the past 10 years though it might have existed longer than that. These sorts of changes tend to come from the queer or trans communities and tend to be more insular before becoming more of an outside thing that then the general population finds out about

It came about because there are some adjectives in Spanish that end in -e that are unisex. It's not an A, it's not an O, but it's something grammatically neutral for Spanish

It's not as awkward as X, and E exists very firmly in Spanish so it's not perceived as some outside (typically gringo) influence

The good news is, it's pretty widespread on the internet. Not so much in person (yet), but especially in Spain and Argentina at least from what I've seen, particularly in the queer communities and online culture.

The only issues with it are that for non-native speakers, you have to get used to any spelling changes. Like amigo and amiga, but to use the E ending you have to add a U... so it's amigue.

That's because there are certain words where you have to do spelling changes to preserve the sound; gue has a hard G sound like -go does [like guerra]... but ge has the equivalent of an English H sound [gelatina for example]. Another one is cómico/a "funny" which would go to cómique. Again, because co has a hard C/K sound, while ce is a soft sound more like an S or in some contexts TH/Z sound; like centro is a soft sound, while cola is a hard sound

Unless you make it to the preterite forms where you come across like pagué, alcancé, practiqué with those types of endings... or subjunctive forms, pague, alcance, practique ... Basically you'd have to be exposed to those spelling rules or you'd be really confused if you were a total beginner.

It all makes sense when you speak it, but spelling might be harder before you learn those rules

The other drawback is that the E endings are sometimes not applicable. Like in damas y caballeros "ladies and gentlemen" there's not really a gender neutral variation on that, it's all binary there. And while la caballero "female knight" does exist, you'd never see a male variation on dama; the closest I've ever seen is calling a guy a damisela en apuros "damsel in distress" in some contexts where the man needs rescuing, and it's feminine una/la damisela, and it's very tongue-in-cheek

There are also some contexts like jefe vs jefa where I guess you would say jefe for "boss" if you were going the neutral route, but it's a bit weird because it's also the masculine option.

I can't speak for how people might feel about those if they're non-binary or agender because every so often you kind of get forced into the binary whether you like it or not

I totally support the E, I just recognize there are some limitations there and it's quirks of the Spanish language itself

Important Note: Just to reiterate, E endings are the ones most Spanish-speakers prefer because it's easiest to speak and doesn't have the American connotation that X does in some circles

Where it gets very "Facebook comment section" is that you'll see many Latin Americans traditionalists and conservatives claim that "this is just the gringos colonizing our language" and "grammatical gender doesn't matter in Spanish". They'll say that the "gender movement" is an American feminist movement and that it's a gringo thing and doesn't reflect actual Latin Americans or Spanish-speakers

Which on the one hand, yes, English does have a lot of undue influence on other languages because of colonization, and American influence and meddling in Latin American politics is a big important issue

But as far as I'm aware of the X (and especially the E) were created by Latin Americans

The other issue I personally have is that any time this conversation comes up, someone will say something like somos latinOs and claim that masculine plural is gender neutral

To that I say, first of all, "masculine plural" is inherently gendered. Additionally, there is a gender neutral in Spanish but it's lo or ello and it's only used with "it" so it sounds very unfriendly to use on an actual person... and in plural it looks like masculine plural and everything applies like masculine plural

Second, the reason masculine plural is default is because of machismo. It's more important that we don't possibly misgender a man, so it has to be masculine plural. It's changed in some places, but growing up when I was learning Spanish, if it was 99 women and 1 man you still had to put masculine plural

I'm not opposed to there being a default, and I understand why it's easier to use masculine plural, but some people get very upset at the idea of inclusive language

...

In general, my biggest issues with these comments come when people act like non-binary/queer/trans people don't exist in Spanish-speaking countries, like English invented them somehow. So it's nice to see linguistic self-determination and seeing native speakers using the E endings.

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gringolet · 4 years

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INTRO TO ARTHURIANA MASTERPOST

under the cut for absurd length

HOW TO GET STARTED WITH ARTHURIANA

The Arthuriana fandom is very broad and there's no one piece of media, which can be confusing for people just getting into it! There’s no right way to engage with arthuriana, and no minimum level of knowledge or reading you need to attain to qualify.

The basis of the Arthurian Legend is a body of hundreds of texts written across the medieval and early Renaissance period in dozens of languages and cultural traditions. Which can seem pretty overwhelming, but there are a lot of modern vernacular translations-- you absolutely don’t have to learn old French or anything. I’ll go more in depth on where to get started with texts further down.

You also don’t have to read texts at all. As I said, there is no minimum basis-- if you prefer to engage with modern adaptations, or want to engage with medieval arthuriana outside of reading texts, that's also cool!

In terms of modern adaptations there is a wealth of choices, which I am very much not an expert in lol, so I’m afraid I can’t give much in the way of reccs. Books I have heard good things about are, Exiled from Camelot, Idylls of the Queen, The Buried Giant, the Squire's Tale series, and Gawain by Gwen Rowley (warning that this one is apparently erotica? Good for him). I trust @princesslibs for modern book reccomendations. and if you speak French Kaamelott is purportedly a very good tv show. Frankly no modern adaptation will ever be better than Spamalot to me, but that's just my personal take.

If you are curious about engaging with texts but (understandably) don’t want to read a ton of dense medieval literature, one really cool resource is Norris J Lacy's New Arthurian Encyclopedia, which you can pick up at most used bookstores for under ten bucks. It’s a very thorough easy to look through reference of characters stories and texts. I know a lot of people like the Nightbringer wiki, though I personally am wary of it because it basically never cites sources. It’s a good quick reference though and a lot of people like it, I’d just take it with a grain of salt. Sparknotes also has a lot of summaries of the major texts like Le Morte D’Arthur and the romances of Chrétien De Troyes. You are not a fake fan for doing this I promise. And of course you’re always welcome to send me an ask <3

Finally, getting started with texts. Quick glossary of terms:

--Verse Romance

A verse (poem) story which can vary a great deal in length. These deal with the adventures of individual knights, usually Gawain, and tend to have a great deal of magical elements and the stereotypical monster slaying, questing, damosel rescuing knight adventures.

--Prose Novel or Romance

A non poetic narrative, more like a modern novel, more likely to deal with the fall of Arthur, sword in the stone, Mordred, fall of Camelot sort of affair. They are usually quite long. Most famous of these are Le Morte D’Arthur and the French Vulgate, but there are a slew of late medieval Prose novels floating around. Eluding Rey.

--Pseudohistory

I’m gonna b real these are boring I think. These are, as the name suggests, written as accurate depictions of history. They very much are not, but they claim to be. Most famous of these is Jeffrey of Monmouth, Mr Jeff Mouth himself, and his History of the Kings of Britain, which I haven’t read because it bores me. You can if you want. It’s in Latin. Whatever. These tend to be some of the earliest texts, and include the “lives of saints” stories. Life of Gildas is the only funny one.

--Ballads

These are only arguably texts, as most of them were written after the time of the “canon” being composed. But I like them. These are songs telling stories, recorded by people like Francis Child and Thomas Percy. They are very short and fun and include stories like The Boy and the Mantle, Kempion, and King Arthur and the King of Cornwall.

--Lai

A specific type of French verse poem, usually quite short. The most famous collection of lais are those of Marie le France, including things like Bisclavret and Lanval.

--Traditions

Since Arthuriana was written all over, there are different literary traditions across time and space. The French tradition is one of the most famous, including works like the vulgate, Chretien and a lot of verse romances. The English tradition is one of the most influential on modern adaptations, including the Morte D’Arthur and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There are also Welsh, German, Dutch, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Tagalog, Greek, Belarussian, Scottish, Irish, Breton, and probably even more. There’s a lot. It’s very cool and sexy.

A note that there is also a big tradition of Victorian revival Arthuriana. I wrote a starter guide to that here, it’s all very fun and like, aesthetic.

Alright, now, which texts do you start with?

If you’re a little intimidated by long texts or medieval lit, starting with short verse romances in modern translation is a great place to start. These include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is very good and gay and well known, Lancelot and the Hart With The White Foot, which is very good and gay and underappreciated, or Lanval, which is homophobic but funny.

If you want to start with what is considered the oldest King Arthur Story, Culwch and Olwen is short and fun!

If you want to read about the grail quest, you can start where it started with Story of the Grail or Percival, then the four continuations, Essenbachs Parzival, the vulgate version of the Grail quest which you can buy paperback for like 5 bucks (I can also scan my copy for you just shoot me an ask <3)

If you want to read about the fall of camelot, I have the Vulgate death of Arthur section scanned here. There’s also the Alliterative and Stanzaic mortes, which are in middle English. I have scanned Simon Armitage's Alliterative Morte translation here. I’m working on my own translation of the Stanzaic but it’s not done lol. If you want the first third or so DM me lol. King Artus is very short and readable and it’s a Jewish text which is really cool.

If you want to read about Lancelot, Chrétien de Troyes Lancelot is his first text. He also has a whole long vulgate section, the first part is scanned here by val <3, and there's Lanzelet, Sebile is in it so it’s probably very good. He’s also basically the main character of Le Morte D’Arthur which I might as well talk about here uhm. It’s long and fun in places and boring in others but it does have like the version most modern adaptations take from and tells the whole story of Arthur and Camelot from beginning to end. The Keith Baines version scanned by val is the most readable but it is an abridgement I believe. people who like le morte usually read this version so its probably the best choice lol

If you want to read about Gawain, good news! He’s in basically everything. Even texts that aren’t supposed to be about Gawain are doomed to become The Gawain Show Featuring The Protagonist Of This Text As A Sidekick. Which is so funny of him. The Roman Van Walewein is very funny and long and Gawain™. I also recommend, L’atre Perilous, Diu Krone, Sir Gawain and the Turk, and I could go on but for brevity's sake let's start there.

If you want to read about Tristan, go shoot an ask to Valentine @lanzelet on tumblr because Tristan scares me.

Thank you to rey @gawain-in-green for helping me find links and put this together! They are also a super great resource for stuff and very cool and nice <3 They have a tag on their blog for full text resources so deffo look at that if you want more scans and links, and an info tag and tons of cool shit that is way better organized than my blog lol

Okay finishing this off, if you want content warnings for any texts, feel free to shoot an ask! I know medieval lit can be A Lot and there aren’t a lot of good warning systems, so if I’ve read it or know someone who has I can give you warnings if you want to read something but are understandably wary . <3

In terms of tagging, Arthuriana and Arthurian Legend are the main ones on tumblr. Arthurian Mythology is also used but tbh shouldn’t be. On Ao3, we’re trying to get our own Arthurian Literature tag but <3 its a whole thing. Anyway the tag is Arthurian Mythology, but I’ll b real, it’s kind of flooded with stuff that doesn’t really belong there, because even though it’s a fandom tag other people unknowingly tag stuff as Arthurian Mythology when it’s like, a knight au. Which is not their fault bc it’s confusing but, ah, alas. ANyhow, feel free to drop in my inbox anytime with questions, suggestions, reccs, etc!

Okay godspeed!! Have fun reading, watching, browsing, etc!

#arthuriana #arthurian legend #arthurian literature #arthurian mythology #:/

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thewidowsghost · 4 years

Text

Fox - Chapter 21

Previously on Fox:

"We need you two to escort a nuclear engineer out of Iran. It will need to be an undercover mission. Leave the Quinjet about a hundred miles from the facility, and drive the engineer back to the Quinjet," (Y/n) nods. "You need to get there as soon as possible, but tonight if you can," Hill says. "Try to have him here by Sunday."

"Yes, ma'am," Natasha and (Y/n) say in unison, standing up.

"Good luck," Hill says, nodding to dismiss the two women.

With a nod from (Y/n), her and Natasha run back outside to their Quinjet and pull it into the air.

3rd Person POV

That night, (Y/n) and Natasha land the Quinjet in Odessa and get a car before starting to drive to the facility in Iran.

"If we pull an all nighter, we could be ten minutes from the facility by 7:30," (Y/n) says. "It doesn't open until 10:00, maybe we could get breakfast," (Y/n) offers.

"As long as we get there in time to get the engineer out in time," Natasha says and (Y/n) nods.

"Of course," (Y/n) answers. "I'll take the first shift, then I'll wake you when I'm ready to sleep. That good?" she asks.

"Okay," Natasha agrees.

"I'm going to get some coffee first," (Y/n) glances over at Natasha, a smile on her face. "To, you know, fuel that addiction." Natasha rolls her eyes and smiles.

"Of course," she says and (Y/n) pulls over at a coffee shop.

"You want anything?" (Y/n) asks. "Pumpkin spice is in season now," she offers.

"Sure," Natasha says and (Y/n) smiles. (Y/n) pulls her wallet out of the middle console of the car and opens the door.

"See you in a minute," (Y/n) says, jumping out of the car and walking into the coffee shop.

(Y/n) walks in and up to the counter. "Могу я получить две большие латте из тыквенных специй, пожалуйста?" Can I get two large pumpkin spice lattes, please? (Y/n) asks the women at the counter.

The women smiles, "Да, мэм," Yes, ma'am, the women answers. She bustles around behind the counter and after a minute, she sets two large coffees on the counter.

(Y/n) hands the women 271 Ukrainian Hryvnia, "Здесь, сохранить изменения." Here, keep the change, the women smiles and nods.

"Спасибо," Thank you, the women says, and (Y/n) nods.

"нет проблем," No problem, (Y/n) picks up the coffees and walks out the door to the car. Natasha rolls down the window and (Y/n) hands the redhead one of the lattes.

(Y/n) gets in the car, setting her cup in the cup holder. "That women was surprisingly nice," (Y/n) says, backing the car out of the parking lot and continuing on the road. Natasha sends her a strange look as she takes a sip of her coffee.

"Why's that?" Natasha asks.

"She understood my awful Russian," (Y/n) says and Natasha looks at her again.

"You speak Russian?" Natasha asks interestingly.

"Я могу говорить кое-что обо всем на самом деле. Испанский, французский, немецкий, латинский, китайский, португальский, польский, итальянский, немного греческий.," I can speak some of everything really. Spanish, French, German, Latin, Chinese, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, some Greek. (Y/n) says and Natasha looks over at her, impressed.

"I'm impressed Stark," Natasha says and (Y/n) rolls her eyes.

"What can you speak Agent Romanoff?" (Y/n) asks, glancing over at the redhead.

"French, Russian and Latin," Natasha answers. "Not as much as you, but I could learn. How do you keep that much information in that brain of yours?" Natasha asks, then adds teasingly, "Doesn't seem too big."

"Haha, very funny," (Y/n) answers. "I have a photographic memory, so I remember just about everything, from anytime." Natasha suddenly looks guilty, "What?" (Y/n) asks, concern evident in her voice.

"You remember me shooting you?" Natasha asks softly.

"Nat, it wasn't that long ago, and I'm fine," (Y/n) answers, taking a sip of her latte. "If you're really that concerned," (Y/n) pulls her shirt up and with one hand, points to where the bullet had struck her, just above the scar from the spear in Budapest. "See, nothing there, except the stupid spear scar," (Y/n) says, dropping her shirt. "Get some sleep, Nat. I'll wake you when I'm ready to switch out."

"Okay (Y/n)," Natasha says softly and (Y/n) summons a blanket out of nowhere and Natasha relaxes underneath it.

(Y/n) drives all night, careful not to wake the former assassin. She knew that if it came to a fight, she would need Natasha's skills.

Around 7:30, Natasha wakes up, seeing that (Y/n) is still driving. She sits up, and annoyed look on her face.

"(Y/n) Stark!" Natasha yells and (Y/n) turns to her. "Why didn't you wake me up?" she asks.

"One, you seemed tired, two, I sleep to much, three, I had coffee, four, I figured if something led to fight, you may as well be well rested," (Y/n) says, and Natasha scowls at her.

"I hate you," Natasha mutters and (Y/n) raises and eyebrow at her.

"Yeah, love you too, sweetheart," (Y/n) teases and Natasha raises and eyebrow at her. "Hate me enough that you don't want breakfast?" (Y/n) asks.

"No," Natasha mutters.

"Thought so," (Y/n) smiles pulling into a parking lot in front of a restaurant.

"I still don't like you," Natasha says as the two get out of the car.

(Y/n) sighs and rolls her eyes. The two walk over to the door, and (Y/n) opens it for Natasha.

"Thanks," Natasha says, walking in.

"Привет дамы, сколько?" Hello ladies, how many? A host asks.

"Два, пожалуйста," Two please, (Y/n) answers in Russian.

"Ладно, следуй за мной," Okay, follow me, the man says, picking up two menus and leading the way to a booth. Natasha and (Y/n) sit down. "Американцы?" Americans? the man asks and (Y/n) nods. "I do speak English if that helps," the host says in a heavy Russian accent. "What can I get you ladies to drink?" the man asks, pulling out a notepad.

"I'll take -" (Y/n) begins, but Natasha cuts her off.

"Two coffees, please," Natasha says and the man sends the two a knowing look before walking away.

"Romanoff, you know me so well," (Y/n) says, smiling at Natasha, but the redhead frowns back.

"Doesn't mean I hate you any less," Natasha says and (Y/n) sighs.

"I'm never going to win you back, am I?" (Y/n) asks sadly.

"Nope," Natasha says and (Y/n) leans back against the back of the booth, and crosses her arms.

"Here you ladies go," the host says, setting down the two coffees. "Now, what can I get the two of you?" he asks in his heavy Russian accent.

"I'll take the pancakes," (Y/n) says uncrossing her arms and sitting up and Natasha nods.

"Same," Natasha says and the man nods, walking over to the kitchen and relaying the orders of pancakes in Russian.

(Y/n) leans back, recrossing her arms, her biceps flexing as she does so. "So, I guess we're not talking anymore?" (Y/n) asks, looking at Natasha. "This might make this mission slightly awkward."

Natasha doesn't answer and that seems to be (Y/n)'s answer. After a couple of minutes, the man brings out the pancakes and (Y/n) smiles.

"Thank you, sir," (Y/n) says and the man nods.

The two eat their pancakes in an uncomfortable silence. After about an hour and a half, the two pay the man, leaving a generous tip, and walk silently out to the car. (Y/n) hops into the driver's seat and finish the drive to the facility.

"We've got about fifteen minutes to kill, so..." (Y/n) trails off, a hurt look in her eyes when Natasha doesn't answer. "I guess I'll go scout the perimeter before we get the engineer out of here," Natasha nods and (Y/n) gets out of the car.

Natasha watches (Y/n) as the women walks behind the building. (Y/n) climbs up the back of the building, making sure to keep out of sight as she moves towards the edge of the building, senses on high alert. She reaches the edge wall, making sure no one suspicious was around. After checking all around, (Y/n) stands up nodding to Natasha who was looking up at her, then drops down from the roof, landing in a crouch on the ground, about a hundred feet below.

(Y/n) walks back over to the driver side door and opens it, getting in the car. "I couldn't sense anyone around, but I feel that there was a reason they chose the two of us to escort the nuclear engineer out of here. We should be on alert when getting the engineer out of here," Natasha nods in agreement. "You drive, I'll keep watch out the back window?" (Y/n) offers and Natasha nods. "Good," (Y/n) answers. "From what I remember from the file, the engineer is always the first one here. His name is Alistair Fitz," Natasha nods. "I guess if your not going to talk, I'll wait outside." (Y/n) gets out of the car and leans up against the back of the car.

A few minutes later, a car drives up and parks outside the facility. (Y/n) nods to Natasha and walks over to the car, standing about ten feet away. She waits until the man exits his car to walk up to him.

"You must be my escort," the man says turning to (Y/n). The man has curly blondish-brown hair, blue eyes, and is about six feet tall. "I was told that there were two women here to pick me up. Where's the other?" he asks.

"She's in the car," (Y/n) says, pointing to the car.

"I suggest we get moving now," the man says and (Y/n) nods.

"Sorry, sir," (Y/n) says. "Is there anything you need me to grab?"

"I just have a suitcase in the back, if you wouldn't mind," he says and (Y/n) nods.

"Go ahead and tell my partner to get out of your seat and into the driver's seat," (Y/n) says and Fitz laughs before making his way over to the car. He says a few words to Natasha and the redhead moves over to the driver's seat, and Fitz moves into the passenger. (Y/n) grabs Fitz's suitcase and puts in in the truck before getting in the back seat.

"Natasha, drive," (Y/n) says, and Natasha backs out of the parking lot, (Y/n)'s senses on high alert for anything that seemed out of the ordinary.

A few hours later, the trio are just outside of Odessa when something awful happens. Someone shoots out the tires as Natasha is driving around a cliff side. (Y/n) makes a split second decision and punches through the passenger side window. Natasha grabs Fitz and dives through as (Y/n) burns a hole through the side of the door and jumps through it. The car goes over the edge of the cliff.

(Y/n) jumps to her feet, her senses on high alert. She looks around, and catches a flash of silver in the corner of her eye. (Y/n) whirls around and catches a metal fist, the force sending her back a few feet.

(Y/n) grabs the other fist and turns to see Natasha covering the engineer, "Nat, take him, and run," Natasha meets (Y/n)'s gaze and Natasha sees something that she wishes she could never see in those usually gentle (E/C) eyes - pure, unguarded terror. "Go!" she yells and Natasha reluctantly grabs the engineer's arm and begins to lead the engineer away.

(Y/n) focuses on the man that she was struggling to contain. He was tall, brown hair, blue eyes, but clearly trying to kill her, Natasha, and the engineer so she doesn't hesitate to light her hand clenched around the metal fist on fire.

Instead of reacting, the man takes his a leg and sweeps (Y/n)'s out from under her and pinning her to the hard asphalt underneath her. There is a strange metallic grinding noise and (Y/n) rolls out of the way as the metal fist comes down and breaks the asphalt just where her head had been. (Y/n) rolls far enough away and jumps to her feet, her muscles tensed for a fight, keeping part of her mind fixed on Natasha and the engineer behind her.

The man stares at (Y/n) as she slowly moves closer, one hand on fire and the other crackling with lightning. Then, the man pulls out a gun, and (Y/n) stands where she is, remembering once again that Natasha and the engineer were behind her.

(Y/n) charges at the man and he fires two shots before (Y/n) reaches him, one in the right shoulder, and the other in her left hip, but (Y/n) doesn't break the sprint, landing a lightning surrounded fist on the mechanical arm which makes the arm freeze for a minute before landing a fire punch at his head but the man dodges, grabbing her right arm and pinning it behind her back, spinning her towards Natasha. (Y/n) meets Natasha's green gaze.

"Go! Leave me here! Finish the mission!" (Y/n) calls out, flipping onto the man's back, ripping her shoulder out of it's socket with a loud pop. (Y/n) uses her left arm and pulls the man into a choke hold, slowly pulling the man down to the ground, her right arm hanging uselessly at her side. The man pulls up his metal arm but (Y/n) uses a leg to pin the arm back. (Y/n) meets Natasha's gaze again and the redhead sees something else there, determination.

The man struggles underneath (Y/n)'s strength but (Y/n) locks her left arm in. The man seems to make one last desperate attempt to kill the engineer and fires a bullet, straight through Natasha's upper left hip, killing Fitz, who was cowering behind the former assassin.

Natasha, her green eyes widening, crosses her right arm across her body, clutching the bullet wound.

(Y/n), who's gaze had been fixed on Natasha, loosens her grip slightly, giving the metal armed man the chance he needed to grab (Y/n)'s right arm making her cry out in pain. He flips her over his shoulder, grabbing her left arm and kicking her in the back, sending her sprawling onto the ground.

Natasha slumps to the ground, her face pale, but she meets (Y/n)'s (E/C) gaze once again. (Y/n) kicks the man in the stomach and he stumbles before grabbing her left leg, snapping it in two, or rather, four, each of the main bones being snapped in half.

Seemingly satisfied, the man leaves the two women lying on the ground.

(Y/n) drags herself over to Natasha and Natasha, realizing what she was going to do, tries to drag herself away, but (Y/n) reaches her first.

(Y/n) grabs her ankle and Natasha screams at her to stop but (Y/n) just says, "Nat, I would give my life to save yours. You have so much more good to give this world. I did my part, now it's your turn," she just concentrates on healing Natasha's bullet wound.

It drains her and before the wound is completely healed, her head cracks against the pavement, black spots swimming in her eyes, she weakly snaps her fingers and a SHIELD COM appears in Natasha's hand. The only thing running through Natasha's mind is the hurt look (Y/n) had had on her face earlier, and it was tearing Natasha apart.

Word Count: 2624 words

Forget me saying that I'm no good at writing fight scenes, I think this one was pretty good. I mean, I think it was good. What do you guys think?

I also hope I wasn't making Nat seem helpless here. The whole premises was that (Y/N) was keeping the man at bay while Natasha got the engineer.

Side note, I didn't know who the engineer was so I made up a name, well not really. I took the name of a SHIELD engineer and searched up his dad.

Okay, Imma go now, see y'all in the next chapter!

Love, Kaitlynn ❤😍

Imma tag peoples now: @confusinggemini612, @gay-disaster826, @thelastavenger-3000, @osugahunnyicedtea, @night-howl199, @minicastle, @happilyeverafterfantasybooks, @billiebanner, @me-and-sweatpants, @scottjudah, @scarlet-raccoon, @whore-for-charlynch, @nyx-aria, @night-howl199, @brittanyrenne2004, @juegamiri29, @minicastle, @peggycarter-steverogers, @gay-disaster826, @guitargodme, @avengers-avenging

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cdelphiki · 4 years

Note

So, I have a couple of question about Jason and the 3 terrors: 1) What inspired the name of the fic? 2)Will you write a sequel/another part of the story?

Oops I forgot a 3rd and 4th question does Attie know English in Jason and the three terrors? What languages do the kids(all of them, including Jason) speak?

- - -

Ooh, thanks for the questions! I LOVE answering questions about my WIPs lol.

1. It��s what I originally named the project file on scrivener just as a place holder name, similar to how the pennyverse’s project file is called “Baby Damian AU.” When I first got the prompt I imagined all three kids were going to be hellions like Damian was during his introduction to Bruce and the batfam. Screaming at everyone who looks at them. Stabbing everything that movies. The whole nine yards. I got attached to the name and couldn’t think of anything better, so I ran with it when I started posted. The kids, thus far, have been much less subdued than that, but they’re still little handfuls and it’s not going to get easier for Jason once they make it to Metropolis.

2. It’s a three-part story that will all be in the same fic on Ao3. Right now we’re in part 1 and have probably around 5ish chapters left, then we’ll move into part two. I don’t know how many chapters either 2 or 3 will have. I do have a more detailed summary of both on my WIP page here on tumblr. I think after the three parts are done it’ll be a complete story and won’t need a sequel.

3. Yes, Attie knows English! That’s sort of established in the first few chapters where she talks to Jason in English. I try not to harp too much on which language are they speaking at the moment, and obviously always write dialogue in English (with a tag, he said in Arabic, or whatever), but in general they were talking in English while alone in the desert and Arabic while in Kabul where others might hear them.

4. I’m not 100% on what Jason speaks. In canon I believe he speaks English, Spanish, German, French, and Russian. I just peeked at his wiki to confirm, and it also includes Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese, thanks to his training with Batman. I added Arabic in there due to his time with the League, and am not sure if I’ll be including all those languages in his repertoire. We’ll find out as I keep going! I might, though, I do typically write Jason as a person who can just soak up languages like a sponge. So far he’s shown fluency in English, Arabic, and German in the story.

Damian and Mara both know English, Arabic, and Dari(Persian/Farsi are also names for it. One of the official languages of Afghanistan). Some people have been annoyed I put Nanda Parbat in Afghanistan when it’s named after a mountain in Pakistan, but but because it’s named after that mountain doesn’t mean it’s actually that mountain, you know? I had figured out which mountain range canon places Nanda Parbat, because they are never more specific than that, and decided to run with Afghanistan because I knew a bit more about the country. Right now I think I’m going to limit the kiddos to those three languages.

Attie just knows English and Arabic, having no formal education like the other two. She is not uneducated, Talia and Ravi have taught her as they could, but she did not have outside tutors to help her along.

#jason and the three terrors

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najatheangel · 4 years

Text

Written Ship 💕💕

hii!! i was wondering if i could get a written ship for NCT, BTS and (G)-IDLE. thank you in advance! 💕

i’m overall quiet laidback and low-energy. i often come off as aloof and standoffish due to my quiet and very, very (very) introverted nature. i’m deadpan and unenthusiastic, both in my humor and overall communication skills, so it’s very hard for me to express my affection (without dying of embarrassment).

i’m a devoted nerd and really enjoy learning. i spend a lot of time broadening my knowledge in anthropology and personality theory, as well as spiritually and astrology. i love reading and writing, spending my time (that i’m not randomly reading someone’s astrological chart or typing every single living being with personality labels) writing new drafts for fantasy books i can only wish to publish.

i’m a libra, INFJ and ravenclaw. i speak fluent portuguese, english and spanish, and am learning french and chinese mandarin — i study linguistics in college. i love conspiracy theories, and have full length 12 pages theories of my own. i also love fashion and dressing up, often getting comments on my “preppy” style. i’m not that in tune with the physical world, so i can often forget to “live” outside my head.

thank you so much for reading this far!!! 💘

Hello honey boo, thanks so much for requesting and telling me about yourself. Your a very interesting person. Anyways here’s your ship...😊😊

From Nct(ot23), I ship you with...Kun

Positive Side: When I read your description, for some reason I just felt like someone like Kun would be the perfect fit. Although your personalities and energy levels are very different, Kun can motivate you for simple things like waking up early in the morning, do something productive and even try new things you’ve never done before. Don’t worry about embarrassing yourself sometimes Kun has his very corny yet cute moments so, he has no shame in feeling embarrassed with you. As we know, he’s the ultimate mama/husband material for you and the Wayv members so sometimes he’ll need someone laidback as you to help him relax, get good sleep and talk about his day with. So this opposite attract situation works for the best! As far as hobbies, you both have a lot of interests and share your love for knowledge on certain topics. Kun is very wise and is willing to read the latest books you recommend to each other and later on will have discussions on them. He would send you his secret cooking recipes to let you cook by yourself if he wasn’t around to eat together with you. While he was off on his comebacks, backstage he would read up on personality types and his astrology natal chart that you have sent him so he would discover more about himself. He’s very fluent in Chinese and Korean, but he would also want to learn other languages from you since ten be teasing him like crazy so he decides to take weekly language lessons from you. Overall you both can learn to adapt to each other’s personalities yet at the same time bring the best versions out of yourselves.

Negative Side: Once you two started getting serious, the scarier it got for the both of you because now friends and family were involved in learning more about your relationship together. The pressure got to you not only because you wanted to make a good impression on them, but it was all starting to move too fast for you. Kun asked you out after 4 months of being with you and you didn’t want to break his heart by saying you need more time or this is moving too fast, so you just rolled with it. Knowing how introverted you can be, the anxiety started kicking when you were meeting his family. They seemed very sweet and supportive, but they were asking a lot of questions and it started to get to your head. You panicked and decided to leave early not wanting disappoint Kun. “Kun, I think we’re going to have to slow down a bit. I’m not ready to face your family yet.” He tries to grab your sleeve to keep you from leaving his parents house, but you ran off shedding a tear. “I guess she’s going to need some more time.” Leans against the door looking up to the ceiling sighing.

But...: After a few weeks of not speaking or visiting Kun, you’ve decided how much you wanted to be with him and are willing to face through this awkward moment with him together one last time. Once you’ve called him you didn’t even have to tell him where you were, he was already behind the door and ran upstairs to your room to pick you up bridal style spinning you around. You were home alone for a split second enjoying your long awaited reunion until you hear your parents knocking on your door dropping off some food for you. You were a bit nervous, but more confident than the last time to let Kun meet your parents first. You walk down stairs hand in hand smiling at each other before opening the door. “Let’s invite them in and eat together Kun.” “There’s no turning back after this are you sure?” You kiss him on the cheek and then on the forehead to calm the nerves. “Oh I’m sure.”

From Bts, I ship you with...RM

Positive Side: You two are unstoppable together, the beauty and the brains couple. You were infatuated by each other the more you get to know each other by the minute. Although your a ravenclaw and he’s a griffindor, you both compliment each other very well and adore each other’s characteristics. He love how intelligent, sharp and creative you can be when you put your efforts into your writing and your ability to learn multiple languages which is a used skill to have. Just like Kun, you can learn from his leadership skills and you love how caring he is amongst the people around him. RM loves his alone time when it comes to reading a book to find inspiration in the mountains or traveling to different art exhibits to take his beautiful photos, but the he’s much happier bringing you along. He was your biggest inspiration and you wanted to follow in his footsteps which along the way developed into a romantic relationship. He also had that ability to help you achieve your dreams by sending you motivational quotes, giving you advice and giving you feedback on your writing so you can publish your books with his help. Although he has his clumsy moments and might makes mistakes every once in awhile, he still wishes to do his best to be your life partner and mentor for the long run until you both retire.

Negative Side: It was a tough process trying to make it official with him, because most of your conversations were about astrology, conspiracy theories and hardships you’ve experienced throughout your pasts. You saw him as a mentor and a reliable resource and you thought that was all he would ever be. However, he was the first one to fall for you and worked really hard to make you notice, but never out right said. When you even started going on blind dates, he was still being the sweet man supporting your love life. This one time you even introduced the guy you were dating for awhile in front of him and he was trying his best to smile and be happy for you, but it was obviously getting to him. “Y/N, I think I’m going to head back out to the dorms, I’ll see ya later.” He tries to reach out to hug you, but the guy your with clings you closer to him glaring at him. Ever since it was awkward for the both of you to face each other.

But...: After months of being with your current boyfriend you start missing RM and you start feeling bored with your relationship. The excitement, feeling and passion just wasn’t the same without being with RM. You decided to meet up with now to be your ex and told him that you should see other people because how you fallen in love with RM. For the most part he expected that to happen and offered you to drive you to the airport to catch up with RM before he flies away to L.A. for his album promotions. It was like straight of a k-drama, you ran as fast as you can to find Bts and as soon as they were going to walk inside the airplane, you saw them and screamed “Namjoon!” to get his attention. He was confused at first, but as soon as he heard your confession he cut you off with a kiss. “You don’t even have to say it. I love you too. I have for a longtime.” He looks down at you smiling, but realizes he has to leave in 1 minute. “Go ahead Namjoon, I’ll be waiting for your return.” You both wave at each other blowing one last air kiss each other waiting for the next reunion.

His future wife is going to be sooo lucky. ✨

From (G)-IDLE, I ship you with...Yuqi

Positive Side: She was your saving grace. This is another opposites attract situation where your personalities oddly blend so well together. While your more introverted and prefer to stay in small groups, she’s more on the extrovert side and prefers to hang out in big groups. Since she likes you so much, she doesn’t mind being alone with you and spending quality time with you. Once again she can be very funny and sometimes have her clumsy yet cute moments just like RM which makes you fall in love with her even more. When you show her your stories and need feedback on it, she reads it over as many times as you need to with her deep satisfying reading voice. She might not know a lot on your subject as far as astrology, personality types and linguistics, but she’ll know what study tools that’ll help you pass your exams, take time out of her schedule to help you finish your papers and reward you with a good meal with her members after your done. Lastly she would love to learn multiple languages from you and even ask you how to say certain words so she can say things like “I love you” or “I want to cuddle”, but when’s she’s away she wants to say “I miss you. I can’t wait to see you again”

Negative Side: For the most part Yuqi is very sweet to you and there’s barely any arguments about anything, but except when you have your days when your stuck in bed or prefer to have some time alone. Yuqi is very friendly and would want to spend as much time with you as possible, because of her schedule so when your not in the mood to hang out or prefer to sleep on your own it does upset her a little. She would be a little irritated for the most part, but she wouldn’t try to have a full outburst over it because she has other things to worry about. She would even tell her members about it which would upset you, because you feel like she’s fed up with you and cause a misunderstanding.

But...: After talking it over with the members, she realizes that sometimes you just need your time alone to rest from school, writing and doing research all day. Just like for her when she had to be in the studio and practice her choreography all week for her comebacks, she needs some time to rest, but have her members if she can’t reach out to you. You both apologize for upsetting each other and for now on will work the issues out by talking to each other. Your both also very forgiving and don’t dwell to much on the past so it’s best to focus on the future.

Out of everyone, I ship you the most with...RM💜

@nephilete Thanks so so much for requesting love and I hope this somewhat made your night/day. Feel free to request again.

#submission #kpop ships #written ships #nct 2020 #nct ships #nct ot23 #Kun #bts ships #Bts #rm #(g)-idle ships #(g)-idle #yuqi

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ivyglow · 5 years

Text

SOFTBARZAL PROMPT LIST

Just some notes as usual:

(when you send the number/s tell if it’s supposed to be angst, fluff, smut, etc.)

you can request any hockey player and I’ll answer if it’s one I’m okay writing about

I took these sentence from a lot of others prompts here in the site, editing the ones I felt like would be easier for me to write, so yeah, that’s it

I understand not only English but Spanish, Portuguese, a little bit of German and even less French, so feel free in case you want to ask for some reference in the idiom or country.

1. “what if I kissed you right now?”

2. “this is where we kiss, right?”

3. “I’ll go home, but it’s not home unless you’re there…”

4. “I miss sleeping with you”

5. “I can’t do this without you”

6. “I’ve made so many mistakes...but you’re not one of them”

7. “promise me you’ll come back...I need you to promise me”

8. “I love you and I’m terrified”

9. “this is why I fell in love with you”

10. “for some reason, I’m attracted to you”

11. “we’re not just friends, and you know it”

12. “but do you love me the same way I love you?”

13. “just say it is okay. I just need to hear you say that”

14. “I had a nightmare about you, and I wanted to make sure you were alright”

15. “despite being younger, I am completely capable of taking care of myself”

16. “you’re worth any fight”

17. “wait a second..are you jealous?”

18. “I didn’t realize I needed your permission”

19. “I don’t love them. I love you”

20. “you’re too damn overprotective”

21. “I just want to be alone right now”

22. “what are you doing here, it’s 3 in the morning. Get out!”

23. “you don’t need to protect me”

24. “stop looking at me like that!”

25. “I’m not the one that’s always leaving”

26. “oh my god, I don’t care!”

27. “please don’t argue with me”

28. “what more do you want?”

29. “I almost forgot you only come around when you need me”

30. “a date? An actual date? To an actual place?”

31. “it’s hard to believe you actually care about me when you’re so hell-bent on keeping this from all your friends.”

32. “It just feels really shitty, to be the secret boyfriend/girlfriend.”

33. “they didn’t just find out. They already knew!”

34. “do you regret getting involved with me?”

35. “I don’t want to be just friends with benefits anymore.”

36. “I told you not to fall in love with me.”

37. “go on, tell me. Tell me you don’t love me.”

38. “jealousy isn’t cute on you.”

39. “well. Yell, scream, say something, anything.”

40. “do you think at all before you speak?”

41. “are you high or just stupid?”

42. “you’re so fucked, you know that?”

43. “we’re not going to be like them.”

44. “do it, I dare you.”

45. “quit moving, I’m trying to sleep. Wait… are you… what?!”

46. “you have no idea what you do to me.”

47. “just marry me already.”

48. “I just want to help you relax”

49. “oh don’t mind me. Just enjoying the view.”

50. “damn that’s hot.”

51. “I think you’ll be happy to know that I’m not wearing any underwear.”

52. “Take off your clothes.”

53. “we haven’t had sex in like a month, you’re just going to tease me like that?”

54. “quiet, they can hear us”

55. “say it again”

56. “you can stay but your clothes must go”

57. “do you like it when I touch you like that?”

58. “is that your hand on my ass?”

59. “ha! I found a weak spot on you, didn’t I?”

60. “can you/we do that again?”

61. “do you think if we met differently, we’d be friends?”

62. “quit hogging the blanket.”

63. “are you throwing rocks at my window?”

64. “I’ll go if you go.”

65. “you called for backup?”

66. “give me back my phone!”

67. “hey have you seen my- Oh.”

68. “I can’t believe you talked me into this.”

69. “if my parents knew what I was doing they’d kill me.”

70. “hold my hand, we have to make this look convincing!”

71. “are you sure you two aren’t married?”

72. “ask me tomorrow, maybe you’ll get a different answer”

73. “i wanna know just how to love you”

74. “what would you have said to me?”

75. “why didn’t you wear it?”

76. “is that cute or something characteristic of a psychopath”

77. “maybe i should have lied”

78. “would you want to stay for a while? just to look at the moon?”

79. “can you check my essay?”

80. “I’m not waiting for a reply back, though”

81. “just the two of us?”

82. “you’re stained with my lipstick”

83. “isn’t that dangerous?”

84. “i guess I’m not experienced in any of this”

85. “you know i can’t be found with you”

86. “could we pretend that we’re in love?”

87. “well, this is a first”

88. “i guess i was wrong about you”

89. “do you think we’re meant to be?”

90. “won’t you sit next to me?”

91. “listen, it’s for science”

92. “keep it”

93. “can you dry my hair? it looks better when you do it”

94. “would you let me?”

95. “you really didn’t realize it was me all along?”

96. “we’re lucky it’s dark outside”

97. “you know i love it when you call me that”

98. “don’t you make me wait too long”

99. “it’s just a kiss”

100. “you are such a sight”

#hockey blog #hockey imagine #nhl imagines #nhlfanfic #prompt list

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loptgangandi · 5 years

Text

so! literally no one asked, but these last 3 weeks have been a hell of a ride let me TELL YOU

so happy mun-day now you get to hear all about it!! (with pictures, I’m not a monster)

here’s the cliffnotes version:

december week 1: simultaneously moved back into a place and took classes then moved out of that place while taking classes and planning a 2-day overland trip from sweden to madrid. took said trip.

december week 2: attended the unfccc climate conference COP25 in madrid, got kicked out for protesting in solidarity with indigenous ppl & kids, got let back into COP the next day & proceeded to go to more panels and also protests. no i did not see greta thunberg but she was there. I did not see harrison ford either. I did shake al gore’s hand tho.

december week 3: week #1 with my mom’s new twin one-eyed cyclops kitties (yes both of them), spent the week frantically writing 2400 words of nonsense that hopefully resolved themselves into two coherent enough papers to snag me a nice grade then took a 36-hour trip up to london to see my sister perform at her bitchin new job.

elaboration under the cut.

Hell Week (or) Why You Sometimes Should Fly to Climate Conferences

So, after the nonsense with The Roommate From Hell (reddit rant here), I moved out of my room at her place and back into the dorms (where I still had a lease through the end of December). That required a fair bit of effort, but I moved things bit by bit over the course of about a week, and it was manageable.

But I had to be out of the dorms and have the place clean by the time I left for the climate conference, which in itself was a whole lot of coordination. Wednesday the 4th of December was probably among the worst, most frustrating days I have ever had, and I desperately hope I never have to deal with that level of fuck this fuck you fuck me fuck everything for a very, very long time. Somehow -- by some miraculous act of the gods -- I pulled it out, and managed to get my stuff into my friend’s basement, my plants into another friend’s apartment, my bags packed, my room clean as a whistle, my self moved into my hostel, and to every damn class that week. My interrail tickets came the day I planned to leave -- it was a tight fit -- and I managed to book trains and busses from Uppsala to Madrid with half an hour to spare, and get on the first train (Uppsala to Stockholm) in good time.

The next 48 hours went like this:

Stockholm -> Copenhagen (by train): uneventful, but Copenhagen train station on a Friday night is a little dicey, especially when you’re dragging around a 45 lb suitcase and another 15 lbs on your back

Copenhagen -> Hamburg (by overnight FlixBus): Uneventful, and I was sitting by a window with no one sitting next to me, so I was able to doze a bit on the trip.

Hamburg -> Basel (by high-speed rail): This one I should have booked. The website said that a reservation was recommended, and I understand why. If I’d had a quiet cabin -- or even just a consistent seat for the whole 7-hour journey -- I’d have been able to get a decent night’s sleep. Instead, I kept having to move to give people their reserved seats, and didn’t get more than an hour of uninterrupted sleep.

Basil -> Olten (train): this one was a mistake

Olten -> Brienz (train): where the fuck am I

Brienz -> Lausanne (train): oh right yes that’s the direction I want to go yes good get on that one

Lausanne -> Geneva (train): oh thank fuck, I 100% know where I am and am back on track. Sunglasses & 30 hours without sleep is a Look.

Geneva: Spend 3 hours with my mom, put a week’s worth of clothes into a considerably smaller suitcase, eat dinner. meet mom’s new kittens, Saga and Luna

Geneva -> Lyon (bus): Get confused about which bus to get on, get told off by the bus driver we were trying to convince to let us on his bus, realized mom had been trying to put me on the wrong bus. Get on the right bus. Go to Lyon with bus driver who speaks no French or English, only Spanish.

Lyon -> Barcelona (night bus): Hell. Just. Absolute Hell Bus. Wanted To Die all night. Assigned to aisle seat just before the very back next to a very, very tall man who was quite polite but had no room for his legs. Behind us were two men, one of whom was loudly chewing gum until he took off his shoes and fell asleep, the other of whom snored like a gd bulldozer. Aisle seat and wailing baby a few rows down meant that my chances of sleeping comfortably were 0. I did manage to doze off a bit, but only because I was so strung out from not sleeping the night before. Eventually made it to Barcelona alive and lent my phone to the very nice lady with the wailing baby (plus like 5 other family members, none of whom had cell service).

Barcelona -> Madrid (train): Absolutely gorgeous train ride through the Spanish countryside that I really did want to stay awake to enjoy. Managed to do so until we got to an elevation where it was just thick, dense fog and I let myself fall asleep.

Madrid: I arrived at my hostel groggy, dazed, and in pain from two bad nights in a row. I considered a nap, but also considered that I’d need to wake up early the next morning and would need to fall asleep. Opted to try to set up my COP25 blog instead. Failed due to aforementioned grogginess. Walked to the corner to get some food and tried to pay for it with Swedish kronor, which didn’t work. Apologized, explained to the amused man that it had been a long weekend, paid him in Euros instead. Used the hostel’s dry sauna (!!!!), took a shower, and went to bed.

COP25 - The Old White Fuckening

So, listen, I’m not going to go into detail about COP. If you want to read about how much of a tonedeaf clusterfuck the negotiations were (as opposed to the really interesting, inspiring stuff happening in the side sessions), BBC has some good articles.

If you want to listen to some of the press conferences and plenaries, here they are. I especially recommend the ones by the Women’s Earth and Climate Caucus, Fridays for Future, and as many of the Indigenous Peoples’ statements as you can (most of them are in Spanish and/or Portuguese. Because the COP was supposed to be held in Chile, many of the registered Indigenous participants were from Amazonas because it was supposed to not be far to travel).

If you want to listen to some of the side events, the webcasts have been recorded here. Click the link, and then click “Join the event.” I again recommend the ones by Indigenous groups (if you can understand them -- we all had translation headphones in the sessions, but I don’t speak Spanish, so I can’t really go back and revisit them). Also, this "feminist attempt at connecting the dots” on “climate crisis, corporate power, and climate finance” and this one session from a Nigerian NGO and the government about One Health and the connection between climate change, disease, and other health risks -- and how badass Nigeria is at tackling them.

On the subject of tonedeafness, some absolute bullshit went down on Wednesday, December 11th.

Here is the article on BBC, but it’s a bit incomplete.

Here’s what happened.

COP25 2: The Old White Fuckeninger (Starring Military Police!)

So on Wednesday, December 11th, Greta Thunberg -- environmental wunderkind with truly glorious bitchface -- sat on a panel before a hall full of condescending adults in which she demanded accountability and immediate action from national leaders.

At the end of her speech, the delegation of Fridays for Future -- Greta’s own youth movement, which has become a global phenomenon -- stormed the stage. Representatives of Fridays for Future admitted that they knew what they were doing was against the rules, and they were ready to face the consequences: having their admission badges taken away (being “debadged”), and not being blacklisted from future UNFCCC events.

Neither of these things happened. Instead, UNFCCC praised the young activists, and let them keep their badges.

A few hours later, another activist group in attendance -- not an Indigenous one, a point that was raised by a young Native American man during the Fridays for Future press conference -- staged a sit-in outside the main hall where a large plenary meeting was scheduled. Said meeting was full of gimmicks, including a live call to the International Space Station so an astronaut could talk about the view of climate change from space.

I was going to attend the plenary. I joined the protest instead.

Admittedly, the decision was partly made for me by security. After pushing, shoving, and jostling the (mostly adult, heavily Indigenous, mostly PoC, heavily female, heavily Queer) protesters, as well as violently snatching their badges off their lanyards, security started herding them -- as well as anyone in proximity -- out into the open docking area outside the hall. One woman nearby, who hadn’t meant to join the protest and who had just been filming, tried to duck out of the group and got sternly told by a security guard “No. Keep going forward. No turning back.” A similar thing had happened to me -- I hadn’t made up my mind about joining the protest, because I didn’t have all the information -- but security made the decision, and in the end, I’ll always prefer to be with the people facing the police rather than those they’re protecting.

It was... furious. It was emotional. The leaders of the protest had us form a circle and turn our backs on security and the door. WoC -- many of whom were Indigenous -- led not just standard protest chants, but songs. Renewal songs, fight songs. The common theme was the intersection of environmental justice and femininity, queerness and suffering under colonization, anti-capitalism, anti-exploitation, and a call for colonizers to repay the colonized for all of the loss and damage already caused by climate change (climate reparations).

Eventually, UNFCCC made a decision. They decided to close the door on us. Security “escorted” us to the docking bay entrance, and the military police took over. Fortunately, none of them started anything. Obviously, none of the protesters did either. We made it back to the venue entrance eventually, but only those with journalist/media badges were allowed back in; the rest of us were not. Even people with Observer badges (like mine) who hadn’t been part of the protest weren’t being allowed in. But some people who were panelists, delegates, etc. came out to stand in solidarity with us.

Once it became clear that no more joint actions would be taking place, I went home, and waited to see whether the negotiators would be able to talk UNFCCC into letting us back in.

They did. Can you imagine the headlines? “UNFCCC Kicks Out Protesters, Bars Civil Society Observers From Climate Talks.”

Talk about going down like a lead balloon.

Which is about what the conference in general did. I was able to go back and get some more stuff out of it... including another big protest, this time led by Fridays for Future and sanctioned. It was so, so good. Many of the people from Wednesdays protest were also there, and while spirits weren’t exactly high, the emotions being expressed were more along the lines of determination and tenacity than fire and fury. Both are valid, and both have their place, and it was nice to have a balance -- especially at the end of the week, when we were all flat-out exhausted.

The Aftermath

And then I just didn’t stop moving. Saturday and Sunday I spent exploring Madrid and staying out late, Monday I flew back to Geneva from Madrid (because absolutely fuck Spanish busses and also absolutely FUCK FRANCE’s weeks-long general strike that I’m sure was for something very important. I’m sure. Because France never strikes over trivial things).

Tuesday-Friday was a takehome exam that I swear to god was more labor-intensive than my actual undergrad thesis, and Saturday-Sunday I flew to London to visit my sister at her new job as an actor in Shrek’s Adventure. Mom was supposed to go with me, but she has a slipped disk and sent me up alone. Which was nice -- my sister and I almost never hang out just the two of us. But that’s another thing I’ve been dealing with -- quite a bit of extra Stuff To Do that Mom Can’t Do because Back Hurty and there have been days when she literally could not move.

But now I am here! I still have work to do, and it’s holidays so there’s Holiday Stuff happening, but I’m hoping to get back to writing here in the next few days.

And if you’ve read all of this, you’re fucking incredible and I love u and here are some one-eyed black babie kitty gremlins for ur viewing pleasure.

<-Saga | Luna ->

They’ve got little bare patches on their tummies because bbies gotta be spayed

They got this tower two days ago and have learned to share, but the learning curve was steep

Saga doesn’t like cuddles but she likes pats and being in the vicinity of humans

Saga says hello

Pictured: Luna in my arms, Saga in Proximity

Luna stole my Spot!! >:C

If Saga steals something and then tells u to answer a riddle to get it back pls let me know. she does that sometimes. it’s very naughty.

#ooc tag #long post #if u read thru to the end there's kitties :3 #or you can just look at the kitties #it's not like I'll know #anywhere that's where I've been #I have literally Not Fucking Stopped for like a month

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nobodies-png · 5 years

Note

If each member was a language, what language would they be and why?

I’m assuming you mean from the OrgXIII so here you go ! This was an interesting question lolol - I had to look up and read a lot of articles on wikipedia to make sure I didn’t end up saying bad or weird shit bUT IT WAS SUPER FUN

Xemnas :

Greek, probably ? The language and culture that rivaled Latin and Rome throughout history and despite it’s age, it MANAGES to still be a living language (if you think I overthink too much about metaphors and shit just wait till you read the rest of answers). It also fits all Scala Ad Caelum’s aesthetic inspired by Greece and all the shenanigans with the Norts !

Xigbar :

LEET Speak just to give every homestucker a heart attack. Maybe just surfer speak, if it counts. Xigbar would fit Latin perfectly - it’s a dead language and the source of many other languages just like Xigbar is the fucking source of many things that go down in KH. Cryptic and old, like him ! And considering his ties with the KHux Foretellers and such, it makes sense for him to be Latin, right ?

Xaldin :

I literally have no idea why but I think of Portuguese when I think of Xaldin. I havE LIKE NO ARGUMENTS OR EXPLANATIONS, IT’S JUST A THING (tm) SO YOU’RE FREE TO ADD TO THIS. Or give him a different language to be w h e e z e.

Vexen :

You know when old people try to be hip and come up with shit like How o You Do Fellow Kids / I’ll Krump With You Sweetie ? Yeah that’s him Okay but honestly, when I was a kid I really liked the idea of Vexen just screaming shit in Latin whenever his experiments went wrong. Now that i’m older, I like to imagine the same thing except now he speaks a Slavic language. I wouldn’t be able to tell you e x a c t l y which one, though. But I guess also a language from north Europe would work, like Finnish or Swedish - mostly because the countries remind me of cold weather lol

Lexaeus :

Nghhhh, I wanna say either ASL/Sign Language or Braille - but i’ll go with Braille ! Lexaeus is a quiet man of a few words, so I think it suits him just fine to be a language that doesn’t need to be spoken. And we know he’s tactful and gentle, considering he does a lot of puzzles in his free time, so Braille seems perfect for him ! While he might not actually need Braille, Lexaeus would be that kind of guy who just teaches others how to read and tries to normalize the use of Braille !

Zexion :

A lot of people might give me shit for not making Zexion Latin bUT LIKE LISTEN. THIS SMART BOY WOULD BE SOMETHING LIKE CHINESE/MANDARIN. Think about it, we’re talking about a super flexible language whose entonation can change the meaning of a sentence completely - yes, i’m talking about that one poem that only has ONE word and it still manages to be a fully fledged story. Like, i’m an artist, not a literary major but I still think that’s super smart and dope and i’ll gladly compare that to magic anytime. In retrospect, it matches Zexion’s illusion motif and complex character !

Saix :

Uhhhh, i’d say either Japanese or Russian. Cause both are languages with strong accents and pronunciations which suit Saix’s strong and firm character - and also because Russian reminds me of NASA and space for some reason and Japanese makes me think of that one tale about the rabbit on the moon. Also Japan puts a lot of emphasis in discipline, honor and loyalty too, traits that Saix shares.

Axel :

Axel is definitely Spanish. Not to be confused with the latino dialects from South America ! I’m talking Spain’s spanish ! And no, I didn’t choose this one because it’s an “exotic sexy firey language”, tRUST ME IT’S MY FIRST LANGUAGE AND IT’S ANYTHING BUT THAT - I chose spanish because it’s an abrasive and brash language. Most words (and the insults specially) give the feeling you’re about to spit on someone’s face and be a cocky disrespectful brat OR you’re just a super friendly and extroverted fella - it suits Axel’s previous ruthless mercenary personality with his current and contrasting kind, outgoing self. 50/50.

Demyx :

Okay hear me out, it’s been like 45 minutes since I went researching to write Demyx’s answer and I still don’t know if I have a proper one. I wanted to say a language from India, since it’s where his signature sitar originates from and what else can accompany a sitar better than the language of the place it was pretty much created in ? So researched Ravi Shankar, the Sitar Maestro and a super important figure in indian classical music. But I know barely nothing about that side of Asia, so i’m NOT exactly sure what language he spoke or used in his music ! Like I looked for his songs and they’re in Gujarati, but HMMMM, NOT SURE CHIEF.

So if anyone feels like educating me on this subject, please go ahead. Otherwise I have to give Demyx the way us millennials talk and oH boy.

Luxord :

I’ll go with the obvious choice here : English. Like, back in the day, most people just HC’d Luxord as a britishman because of his mannerisms and etc etc - but like, it works for him ! He’s closely tied to Alice and Wonderland in both the game and the manga, as well as Pirates of the Caribbean like come on it’s rIGHT there. Also imo, british English just sounds like super polite and elegant, the way Luxord acts most of the time.

Marluxia :

Either German or the language of flowers. German because it’s That Type Of Language™ that seems to have a word for every specific thing, action and feeling no matter how obscure - which kinda seems to suit him somehow ? A language with a rough appearance, intimidating to most people due to the hard sounds but eloquent, deep and extensive ! The other option is pretty obvious, considering his power with nature and stuff - Marluxia is definitely the time to give bouquets and flowers as gifts with double edged meanings and intentions.

Larxene :

The only one that comes to mind is French. Just cause I think Larxene reads french literature in the 358Days manga - but like, dark and smart stuff only Intellectuals™ can understand. And also because it’s a tricky language to speak properly (LISTEN I TOOK 5 YEARS OF FRENCH AND I STILL DIE WITH ALL THE VOWELS). There’s just something about the way it’s spoken that screams her name. It’s fast paced, coquettish, sounds mature, there’s a lot of sharp sounds. Y’know !

Roxas :

Not specifically a language, but Roxas reminds me of the mix every bilingual person speaks sometime when they can’t remember a specific way of saying or explaining something. Or when your group of friends is mostly bilingual too and y’all just mix both languages and it’s a fucking mess for outsiders ? ( Like “Me cago en la fucking madre que te parió” o “I swear to god pOR QUE ERES ASI” are examples from the groupchat I am, wheeze). So probably Spanish and English !

Xion :

I’m torN AGAIN between ASL/Sign Language and Braille. But I think i’ll go with sign language ! Not to get Deep and Philosophical, but Sign Language seems to fit Xion, someone whose voice was silenced by those around her. We know she’s timid and quiet, but she’s also young and energetic, quick and witty around her friends - so unlike Lexaeus who’d calmly read using Braille, Xion is the type who’d sign at the speed of sound when excited or panicking and she’d enjoy sending secret messages to her friends.

#kh headcanons #organization xiii #Anonymous #xemnas #xigbar #xaldin #vexen #lexaeus #zexion #saix #axel #demyx #luxord #marluxia #larxene #roxas #xion

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mrsrcbinscn · 5 years

Photo

Franny Sor Framagucci Robinson Character Sheet

Dear Mom and Dad, I'll send money, I'm so rich that it ain't funny It oughtta be more than enough to get you through - (x)

Archetype — The Creator

Birthday — January 17, 1980

Zodiac Sign — Capricorn

MBTI — ENFJ-A (The Protagonist — 93% Extroverted, 56% Intuitive, 60% Feeling, 60% Judging, 83% Assertive)

Enneagram — Type 3w2 — The Charmer

Temperament — Sanguine

Hogwarts House — Slytherin Primary, Hufflepuff Primary model, Gryffindor Secondary

Moral Alignment — Lawful Good

Primary Vice — Pride

Primary Virtue — Charity or Diligence

Element — Air

Song — A Better Son/Daughter by Rilo Kiley

Overview:

Government name — Darareaksmey Francine Sor Framagucci Robinson Name — Franny Robinson/Franny Sor Robinson Mother — Sophea “Sophie” Sor

Father — Adrien Framagucci (stepfather, legally adopted her), Peter Boyd (biological father)

Mother’s Occupation — Restaurant owner

Father’s Occupation — Construction worker

Family Finances — grew up in poverty, insanely wealthy now

Birth Order — Youngest

Brothers — stepbrothers Gaston and Art Framagucci (mother legally adopted them, if you say ‘step’ Franny will kill you), claims no others but has biological half brothers from Peter Boyd; John-Curtis “JC” Boyd, Timothy “Timmy” Boyd

Sisters — claims none, but has biological half sisters by Peter Boyd; Sarah Boyd, Stacy Boyd, Shyann Boyd

Other Close Family — spreadsheet

Best Friend — Daniel Maitland, Molly Vaughn (deceased)

Other Friends — Lora Lopez, Serghei Anton, Delia Weiss, Vanessa Pham, others

Enemies — most men on principle

Home Life During Childhood — It was a good childhood. Working the restaurant was normal to Franny so she didn’t realize it was abnormal at first. Her parents tried not to let the kids realize how poor they actually were.

Town or City Name(s) — Payne Lake, Georgia

Any Sports or Clubs — In high school she was in drama, show choir, orchestra, National Honor Society, and on the quiz bowl team

Favorite Toy or Game — Franny honestly loved hide and seek well into her teenage years because she was small enough to fit it the weirdest places to hide, and in the 80s and 90s in a small town in Georgia there wasn’t much to do so her friend group played Extreme Hide and Seek. Everyone wears all black like some kind of cult. Turn off all the lights in the house. Go crazy.

Schooling — K-12 in Payne Lake, Georgia ; B.A.s. in Musical Theatre Performance and Jazz Studies at NYU; M.A. in Jazz Studies at Pride U

Favorite Subject — Anything that wasn’t math or chemistry

Popular or Loner — Popular, has always been magnetic

Important Experiences or Events — Her first time on stage, getting enough scholarship money to justify going to NYU, quickly growing to love the nerd she hit up to buy her waffles and never letting him go, the accident that changed her life, marrying Cornelius Robinson, finding the magic singing frogs, adopting Wilbur, discovering the severity of her fertility issues in 2008,

Nationality — American-Cambodian (born American, given Cambodian citizenship in 2019)

Culture — Franny identifies most strongly with Cambodian, followed by broadly Southeast Asian sometimes with Buddhist attached, and that’s tied with ‘Rural Southern (USA)’ sometimes with POC attached. Franny feels pretty detached from “American Culture” in general. She more closely would identify with Southern USA culture in general than with general American with no modifiers. She also feels a little detached from Asian American culture in general because even though she grew up right outside of Atlanta and is familiar with Atlanta, she didn’t grow up in one of the big hubs of Asian American culture like LA, San Francisco, or NYC. White American and Black American culture surrounded her, and the Asian cultures surrounding her were immigrant or first-gen cultures that hadn’t really developed an American flavor yet. Franny understood more about Vietnamese and Thai culture than she did about general Asian American culture for a long time, because immigrants straight from Southeast Asia were the only Asians she grew up around. And she grew up in the 80s and 90s where Asian representation was yellowface and Long Duk Dong. She didn’t meet any Asian Americans who didn’t speak or at least understand their heritage language until college. And the experience of POC as a whole in the South is very different to the experience of a white person, so sometimes Franny feel disconnected from her white southern neighbors and more closely relates to black or non-white Latinx southerners in ways she doesn’t relate to white southerners, or Asian Americans from LA or NYC.

Religion and beliefs — Buddhist

Languages spoken— Khmer, English, Vietnamese, French, Italian, (less fluently) Portuguese, Spanish, (can understand some) Thai, Lao, (impressive tourist) German, Dutch

Physical Appearance

Face Claim — Elodie Yung

Complexion — Tanned skin, pale brown

Hair Colour — Black

Eye Colour — Brown

Height — 5’5

Tattoos — Yes, a few. Wilbur’s adoption date over her heart, most notably

Piercings — Lobe, upper lobe, tragus, helix, and cartilage on both ears, and an anti-tragus on her left ear. And a nose piercing she got in college

Common Hairstyle — typically keeps her hair long and done nicely but she cuts it and donates it from time to time so will also rock short hair

Clothing Style — vintage-inspired but not proper vintage

Mannerisms — Biting the pads of her thumbs, gesturing wildly, narrating her actions sometimes in song, if she’s looking for scissors she walks through the house making a scissors motion with her fingers

Usual Expression — she’s got resting bitch face

Health

Overall (do they get sick easily)? — No, her immune system is the real MVP and when she does get sick she’s like ‘I’m dYING’

Physical Ailments — Infertility

Neurological Conditions — Depression, Cyclothymia (rapid cycles of depressive and hypomanic episodes)

Allergies — none

Grooming Habits — Typically rinses her body daily, uses soap on the armpits daily, but proper washes her body every other day. Washes her hair every two or three days as needed, but if she was extra sweaty that day it gets washed. Waxes leg hair and eyebrows.

Sleeping Habits — she generally gets a decent amount of sleep but it isn’t usually all at once. She’s a champion power-napper, and if she has three days cleared she’ll often sleep mainly all at once except have like a 2-3 hour period of wakefulness and productivity and then go back to sleep for two more hours, then take an hour nap later in the day.

Eating Habits — She’s a grazer. She doesn’t usually sit down and eat three times a day she’ll sneak like five small meals a day

Exercise Habits — works out at least three days a week somewhat because she’s really sensitive to when people comment on her body so she’s afraid to give people a reason to say a negative comment. Like. She’s body positive, big supporter of you don’t gotta be skinny to be beautiful or healthy. But when people say things like “oh Franny you got a little jiggle in those thighs” it’s never said like a good or neutral thing. She had a lot of body image issues throughout high school and college, and came dangerously close to developing an eating disorder freshman year at NYU but kind of logicked herself from the ledge

Emotional Stability — generally emotionally stable, like for someone with her mental illnesses she does great

Body Temperature — runs hot

Sociability — A social butterfly

Addictions — None; did abuse adderall in college but when she quit cold turkey she didn’t like. Suffer cravings. She wasn’t addicted, but she did abuse it to the point she realized “oh I need to...stop��

Drug Use — occasional use of drugs to make her trip, like acid, shrooms, but this is very rare, she doesn’t do it at home, usually if she’s on the road with other musicians or has gone to LA or NYC or London for a few days to have a songwriting session, the group will sometimes partake. Even then not every time. Used to experiment with drugs more in college, but still it was never...a TON.

Alcohol Use — More than occasional less than frequent

Your Character’s Character:

Bad Habits — swearing, next to no filter, temper when it comes to perceived injustices, tends to overload herself

Good Habits — Keeps a detailed planner, is a maniac about drinking lots of water, is vocal about her needs and boundaries

Best Characteristic — her warmth! She really is friendly and easy to get along with and wants to be nice. But she will not be walked over and will not allow her kind, marshmallow husband to be walked over so she will flip a switch to protect herself or her boys.

Worst Characteristic — unforgiving

Worst Memory — it’s a tie between her experience with sexual assault, and the time her biological father’s wife found out Franny was his biological child, and came into her mother’s restaurant when she was visiting with her pretty new HUSBAND, and Nancy Boyd proceeded to beat up Franny and her mother

Best Memory — Adopting Wilbur! It WAS marrying Cornelius but sorry Neil it’s her baby boy now

Proud of — Her husband, she is so proud to be Cornelius Robinson’s wife. She proud to be her mother’s daughter. And she’s proud of her accomplishments in music and philanthropy

Embarrassed by — Nothing, she’s great

Driving Style — Oh, aggressive. She’s an offensive driver. Cusses.

Strong Points — she doesn’t quit, she’s the walk through hell and keep going type of person

Temperament — generally she’s pretty even-tempered. It’s easy to set her off in an instant though if you’re being racist, sexist - any type of shitty person tbh, or being shitty toward her husband or son, but for the most part she’s pretty chill. She deff has crazy bitch energy just under the surface though and you can tell

Attitude — Franny’s not particularly bitchy, but you know, she can be

Weakness — can’t do basic math, very overly self-critical, perfectionist

Fears — Something happening to Wilbur tbh. That’s her greatest fear, losing her son.

Phobias — Franny does not throw up. She refuses. She will literally feel nauseous and horrible all day to avoid puking. It makes her so anxious, she will nOT.

Secrets — None really? Like she doesn’t blab her life story to everyone but Cornelius knows everything about her. She has no secrets from her husband.

Regrets — Not adopting more children when she and Cornelius got married knowing they both wanted a big family; ever meeting up with her biological father

Feels Vulnerable When — She cries in front of people. Franny hates doing it. She’d rather die tbh

Pet Peeves — when people are rude to wait staff

Conflicts — She sometimes feels a surge of resentment for her husband during her depressive episodes because she kind of feels like she’s pulled most of the weight in their marriage from Day 1 as far as running the home, and feels like although he purported to also want a big family he never even offered to take HIS turn pulling back from work so they could adopt a second child when it became clear it wasn’t gonna happen for them biologically, but then Franny hates herself for that because Cornelius is the kindest, most loving, most wonderful husband and father and she feels so privileged to call herself his wife and...yeah they just need to have a long talk about it tbh

Motivation — to be the best at everything she does; to force space for herself where she and people like her have previously been excluded, to be so great that you can’t ignore her

Short Term Goals and Hopes — have a baby, but she’s 40 now and knows its not gonna happen

Long Term Goals and Hopes —she’s...kinda done everything she ever set out to do other than have lots of children

Sexuality — Bisexual, leans toward women, but had more experience with men because compulsory heterosexuality in the US in the 90s and early 2000s, and genuinely fell in love with a man are has been with just him for twenty years now

Exercise Routine — Doesn’t spend much time on cardio because she gets enough cardio walking around town and Pride U. Mainly works on her core, legs, and strength training so if a man tries to grab her she can kick his ass

Day or Night Person — Would be nocturnal if she could be

Introvert or Extrovert — Extrovert

Optimist or Pessimist — She’s naturally pretty cynical but she’s worked for like twenty-five years to have a more optimistic outlook on things. It’s 50/50 now I’d say

Likes and Styles:

Music — there isn’t really a genre she doesn’t like - like her initial fame was in jazz, but she has an equal affection for jazz and bluegrass/classic country/folk music. She also is in an indie band, Seoul Hanoi’d. And like rap music - usually old school Atlanta rap, but she likes Kendrick Lamar and some other current rappers.

Books — She likes to read or listen to audiobooks about pretty much any subject except music and musicians.

Foods — Cambodian food!!

Drinks — She likes sweet tea, aaaand her alcohol of choice is Anything

Animals — Possums :3 She wants a pet possum so bad, she follows pet possums on instagram and cries at their cute posts

Sports — She played tennis in high school, that’s the extent of her sports knowledge

Social Issues — all of them. Climate change, racial justice, intersectional feminism, VACCINATE ALL THE CHILDREN UNLESS THEY MEDICALLY CANNOT BE, de-mining, Green New Deal, punch Nazis, hey maybe don’t put children in cages, Myanmar can you please not do that genocide you’re doing that would be swell, poor people deserve access to healthcare and education, housing-first approach to homelessness, the good stuff

Favorite Saying — “Hoes mad”, usually said dismissively when she receives a death threat after a political tweet, or after a racist one for just being an Asian woman in the public eye

Clothing — Franny prefers skirts, dresses, and jumpsuits/rompers to shirt + trousers

Jewelry — She never takes off her wedding ring. She’s married af

TV Shows — Schitt’s Creek, Kim’s Convenience, a lot of Canadian TV she really thinks is funny

Movies — She’s a big nerd that loves a good documentary or otherwise educational movie

Greatest Want — More children, including one biological child because her mother always talked about pregnancy and childbirth like it was the most humbling and empowering experience she’d ever had, and Franny wants that. But she’s 40 and knows she won’t have that.

Greatest Need — a baby lmao

Where and How Does Your Character Live Now:

Home — In a big-ass house in the wealthiest part of town, maybe even the biggest house

Household furnishings — Not overdecorated. A lot of people live there, but Franny’s very much the lady of the house, and even more so than her husband is the head of the household. She’s not a dictator, like her mother-in-law and other relatives have added their touches to the home decor, but it is very much Franny’s Home with notes of the others. She’s very particular about her kitchen, but is very flexible with the rest of the common spaces.

Most Cherished Possession — Family photographs of her mother and her family before the Khmer Rouge. Franny bears a striking resemblance to her Aunt Kesor, who was the older sister her mother had idolized, but who died during the Khmer Rouge years. Franny only knows of the resemblance from photographs.

Neighborhood — The rich people part of town

Town or City Name — Swynlake, England

Details of Town or City — lol

Married Before — Cornelius is her first and only husband and unless he cheats on her she’s never ever leaving that man

Significant Other Before — nobody important

Children — Wilbur Robinson, wants/wanted more

Relationship with Family — Close! Both to her in-laws, biological maternal family, and stepfamily

Car — 2020 Nissan Qashqai

Career — Singer, song-writer, musician, composer, musical actress, actress, university music professor

Dream Career — Musical actress

Dream Life — Married to Cornelius, with lots of kids, living her best life

Love Life — Happily married to the love of her life, her sunshine, the jelly to her fish, Cornelius Robinson

Talents or Skills — music, cooking, acting

Intelligence Level — High? Like she can’t do basic math but everything else. She’s a musical genius, is good with languages, and is pretty perceptive

Finances — Loaded

Your Character’s Life Before Your Story:

Past Careers — restaurant worker, event staff

Past Lovers — nobody worth mentioning

Biggest Mistakes — “I don’t make mistakes”

Biggest Achievements — Grammys, induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, being the first Cambodian person to win a Grammy, International Bluegrass Music Association awards, ASCAP awards, and being awarded the national medal of the arts by Barack Obama in 2015

#&&...hc #meet the robinsons

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official-portugal · 7 years

Text

A (long ass) guide to become a Friendly Tourist ™ in Lisbon

You know, I complain a lot about tourists and all and last night it got me thinking that there might be people out there reading these and wanting to visit Lisbon but feel self-conscious so I want to make one thing clear: we don’t hate tourists, we hate tourism as a phenomenon and the way it’s being dealt with. We also don’t hate tourists, we hate assholes. So I decided to put together a guide on how to become a friendly tourist in Lisbon.

- If you can, avoid AirBnB, although I understand for you guys it might be cheaper that way. But if you pick an Air BnB, chances are the home you’re staying in belonged to someone who got kicked out so you could stay there. So be fucking respectful. Don’t come home drunk at 3AM, don’t make any fucking noise at night. There might be children right upstairs and old people downstairs, so don’t do anything you wouldn’t want others to do to you. There are neighbors in that fucking building, people who have to go to work, so be fucking respectful.

- Be fucking nice to every worker you come across. In Portugal, whether you’re at the checkout or having your order being taken by the waitress, when these workers approach you, you’re supposed to greet them. Say “good morning”, “good evening”, or just plain “hello”. Also, finish with please, always. If you don’t, I guarantee you, you won’t be treated differently because these people can’t risk their jobs, but you’ll be labeled a cunt. Like, it costs zero. You don’t just come up to someone and say “TWO COFFEES PLEASE”. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT SAY GRACIAS.

- Don’t fucking expect people to speak your language, but they will fucking try, so don’t be a cunt about it. Here’s the thing: in the public schooling system, the average portuguese learns two languages. We are taught french and english and the majority of kids even takes a third language in high school. We understand spanish and italian enough to communicate. So we understand what you’re saying, but it doesn’t mean we can speak it. But are you really demanding that we, who already speak 3 languages, speak yours as well you fucking dildo? Also, by “we” I mean naturally the youngest generation. Older people? Not so much. People working in tourism offices are making an effort, they know way more than you and they’re not there to cater to your needs. If you see them struggling with your language, help them. Also, if you disrespect them while you’re asking for directions, I can assure you they’ll give you the wrong advice out of spite, and you deserved it.

- We’re not a tipping kind of country but: we appreciate tips. What I am saying is, any tip is extra money, so it’s welcomed, but we are not culturally taught to monetarily award someone for their good services, instead we praise them. If you do come from a country that tips a lot, you should know we don’t have a “tipping rule”. Even if you leave just a couple of coins, it’s appreciated. But if you don’t come from a tipping kind of country, don’t feel obligated to do it. What you can do is praise their work. Thank them for their kind service. Tell them they’ve made your experience better. That means a fucking lot when you work in tourism because usually yall just see us as punching bags.

- There’s a difference between Pastel de Natal and Pastel de Belém. Both are custard tarts, both have different recipes. The first one, the Nata, can be found in literally any café. The second, the Pastel de Belém, can only be found in their official factory in Belém, across the street from Jerónimos. When you get there, you will see that the queue is super fucking long but don’t worry, they’re used to it and they have an efficient system. I promise you won’t be there for longer then like, 7 minutes.

- Canned sardines are not traditional. I don’t know who came up with this bullshit but I can guarantee you it’s just marketing. Sardines ARE traditional, just NOT canned. Canned sardines were the cheap, canned food the poorest of the poor ate back during the dictatorship. Usually, a whole can was shared by a family. So it kinda makes me offended that a symbol of poverty is trending, but aigh. The sardines we do eat traditionally are roasted outside on a cooker, sort of like a barbecue. THOSE are traditional. (By the way, you want to eat THE ABSOLUTE BEST, take the ferry across the river and pick a restaurant in Cacilhas, I guarantee you that’s the best place to eat sardines).

- Just because you can see the fucking Christ right across the river, it doesn’t mean it’s right there and that you can just get there. I can’t believe I had to explain this several times to tourists, but that Christ is standing on a fucking cliff. You can take the ferry, sure, but it won’t take you there, like, this is basic knowledge, I’d assume. There’s a service that cost 20€ and lasts for 2h and it stops there for a long time, if you’re one to complain about it a lot, take that. If you don’t mind grabbing your own ass and going there yourself, take the ferry and then take the 101 Bus, last stop.

- There are three ways to get to Belém: tram, train and bus. And yes, by foot is too fucking far. Like, 1h walk far. All of them will be super fucking crowded. You might get luckier with the buses, since for some reason tourists seem to avoid them. The queue in Cais do Sodré is going to be too fucking long, and I honestly do not care one fucking second that it’s an inconvenience for your vacation because we, who depend on it to go to work, take 2h for it as well. The tram is going to be crowded and it's going to take you some 45 minutes to get there on a very bad day. Live with it. That’s the reality of the city, and this is a reality YOU created by coming here en masse, not us. So don’t fucking complain that we don’t cater to your needs because, remember, your inconvenienced holiday means hundreds of portuguese people are getting late for work and taking 4h a day in public transportation. So again, I do not give one flying fuck.

- Tram 28 is a public transportation not meant for you. You, as a tourist, fucked it up, keep that in mind. If you want to ride the traditional trams, there’s a touristic service made specifically for you that works as a hop on hop off and it does a wider route than 28. My advice is take that one, it has no thieves and you can sit down, and it’s two different routes (green tram and red tram). But if you do want to take the public one, then my advice is: take the 12 instead. If you want to get on 28, begin the route from the starting point at Estrela. It will be calmer there. If you want to go to the castle, then no, the tram isn’t the only way. Bus number 727 stops right at its door and it’s usually super empty. Take that one.

- Saint Geroge’s Castle is completely fake. Not a fucking stone in there is real. There are real ruins there, of course, but they aren’t even of a castle, they’re of an “Alcazaba”, an administrative center back when the moors were in portugal. That’s why the neighborhood next to it is called “mouraria” - the moorish neighborhood. Yes, there was a castle there from the 14th century onwards, but very little was left of that. The whole thing you’re seeing? Completely rebuilt in the 20th century. It’s even fascist propaganda in a way.

- Tuk Tuk drivers don’t know shit of what they’re talking about. The chances of them making shit up for you are like, way higher than you can imagine. You can’t comprehend the bullshit I’ve caught them telling tourists, like the Lisbon Cathedral is from the 19th century. They’re not tour guides, they’re fucking drivers. The info they’re giving you is generic and easily obtained. they’re speaking to you as a portuguese person who knows their traditions, but they don’t usually know shit about history and art because they’re not required to. So if you get on a Tuk Tuk, keep that in mind and don’t demand too much from the driver. And also, chances are they’re bullshitting you. I know one Tuk Tuk driver who is an Art History graduate and masters degree and is a great tour guide, since he’s someone I trust a lot with the history of the city, so if you really want to get on one and be real about it, hit me up and I’ll hook you up with him.

- Don’t make a fuss about the supposed “drug dealers” selling weed in broad daylight in Baixa. First of all, literally everyone in the city except you, tourists, know that what they’re selling is not drugs, it’s bay leaf squished into a powder, and I have to give it to them, their scheme is pretty fucking brilliant because it’s prompted tourists to go to the police and complain that “the drugs this guy sold me aren’t real” lmao. But this is a situation that again partly resulted out of mass tourism. So shut the fuck up because I know damn well it would take me one day to find out where I could get high in your country. And also, me as a citizen can’t do shit about it (BECAUSE THOSE AREN’T DRUGS LOL).

- Don’t be fucking unpleasant about the homeless and the beggars. Fucking really? There’s a high level of poverty in here. We’ve been saying for years but if you choose to believe your Time Out articles, then that’s not my fault. But be fucking respectful. Life isn’t cheap here, and we’re having it hard.

- Please understand, once and for all, that Fado is pretty normalized. Like, it’s fucking everywhere. Every goddamn souvenir shop you’ll walk into, it’s gonna be playing fado. Restaurants, cafés, a fucking cab, same thing. I know it’s been sold as the traditional song of the people, poor and desolate living in the streets of Alfama, but that’s not it anymore. It’s been classified as World Intangible Heritage which means an incredible effort is being made to preserve it, WHICH MEANS the amount of Fado singers has increased incredibly. So there is no “real fado experience” anymore. The real fado experience is either a) a concert, or b) a dimly lit restaurant with a guitar player and a lesser known singer.

- Be careful how much you’re being charged by the taxi drivers. If possible, don’t take a cab at the airport. If you’re moving from point A to point B WITHIN the city, you shouldn’t be paying over 10€. The starting fee is NOT 20€, it’s 3,90€. There’s a little extra added if you call a cab (instead of finding one on the streets) or take it at night. If you can, install the app My TaxiApp, the drivers there are pretty honest. Or use Uber.

- Don’t get on the Hop On Hop Off buses. Personally, I can’t see what’s so appealing about these, but there are a lot of reasons why in Lisbon they don’t particularly work: 1) traffic. You’re gonna be stuck in traffic, it doesn’t matter what time of the day you got on. 2) The waiting period. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes for a new bus to come by, but with traffic, we don’t know, and I certainly can’t predict it, since I don’t have a fucking GPS in me. 3) The bus that goes to the Castle is much, much smaller and it fills up way quicker because double-decker buses don’t fucking fit those narrow streets. So chances are you’re gonna be there for a while waiting because they’ll keep coming full. Not my fucking problem. Take a walk instead. There’s a touristic bus called Caravel on Wheels which would be my advice for you. I worked for them, it’s a 1h45 long video tour. The audio is very well put together and explains the history of Lisbon incredibly well, and it has a shit ton of languages, and you can just ignore the goddamn video, trust me. The assistants are super nice and sweet and the driver is amazing. We made a huge effort to make sure you wouldn’t forget that experience, trust me. Also, it allows you to see the most important parts of the city and then decide what you want to see by yourself.

- Don’t disrespect the monuments. Don’t paint on walls. Don’t spit on fountains. Don’t lean on statues, don’t get close to statues, don’t even breathe on statues. Don’t fucking touch the paintings, the artworks, any fucking thing you find inside a museum. It sounds ludicrous that I have to point this out but you wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen.

- Mouraria, Alfama and Martim Moniz aren’t just the most traditional parts of Lisbon, they’re some of the most multicultural and poorest too. So don’t be a fucking racist asshole. There are indian, chinese, and sikh, among others, communities in there, including “illegal” mosques and chinese restaurants. Don’t be unpleasant to the locals. Don’t be disrespectful to the people who live there. The thing about the portuguese is we love tourists, we’re welcoming like that, IF you are nice. These people are happy to welcome you to their neighborhood, trust me, they are, but you gotta be respectful.

- Avoid eating at Rua dos Correeiros. If you don’t know what street that is, it’s the only one in the entire fucking Lisbon where every fucking restaurant will have a guy holding a menu approaching you and BEGGING you to eat there, and I mean every single one. Most of those restaurants are most likely schemes and one in particular, Made in Correeiros, has made the news for convincing tourists to come in while holding a menu where they show prices ranging from 10 to 20€ and then inside suggest something that is at the end of the menu (but they will make sure you won’t see it) and it turns out a dish of salmon costs 500€. That whole street is made of shit like that and not a single one of them is traditional in the least, don’t let them convince you they are because they have a bitoque and bacalhau à brás, those are dishes that any portuguese with half a brain can cook, so walk away.

- Don’t be fucking rude to the bus drivers, and I mean every bus driver, whether it’s touristic bus or city bus, cause they are not required to speak your fucking language. There are a million different tourist offices where you can ask for help. Have your money ready when you enter the bus or recharge your Viva card at the subway. A bus fare is 1,80€ within any point in the city.

- And don’t be fucking rude to the vendors. They don’t control traffic. Especially resellers who don’t represent one company but rather sell several companies, don’t yell at them. They don’t control traffic and they don’t control the bus routes. Explain to them you are disappointed by the service and they will take a note and I can guarantee you they will inform the company about the delay/problem and will exchange your money. They don’t think any less of you and they understand you, as long as you’re nice about it.

- And don’t complain to them the city is disappointing! I don’t give a rat’s ass that Barcelona was more beautiful, go to fucking Barcelona and shut up.

- Don’t walk around with 100€ bills. Use 50€ bills for large purchases only. Most vendors aren’t even allowed to accept 100€ due to couterfit problems. Exchange your money at the appropriate place. Don’t fucking buy 3€ worth of fridge magnets with a 100€ bill like I’ve witnissed, come on. That’s common sense.

- Things that ARE good, traditional souvenirs: porcelain magnets with sardines, tiles, bits of history and the black swallows you see everywhere. Bottles of wine, especially Port, too. Tawny being the best brand. Make sure it’s from Porto/Douro. The bags of salt if they come from Aveiro, otherwise I wouldn’t trust it. The famous red, green, blue or black scarves you see with floral motifs and fringes I guess can be considered traditional too, but be aware that 1) they’re mostly cheap imitations (the realest ones are really expensive) and 2) they’re traditional from way up north like, above Porto even. That’s a part of a very traditional outfit of a very specific region, linked to very specific traditions. Small portuguese guitars are pretty cute. Avoid the cork shit. Cork used to be our main export, now it isn’t and most of that crap I don’t even think it’s made here, it’s just a brand, but someone correct me if I’m wrong. Although the cork postcards are cute. Little stuff like notebooks, postcards and bookmarkers with Fado on it is cute too. A Vida Portuguesa is a store you’ll come across in Baixa that sells shit that looks cute and Art Neauveu-sy that recreates old stuff from the 40s and 50s.

- Things that aren’t traditional at all: canned sardines. Anything being sold on the streets. Certainly not the peruvian CDs on Terreiro do Passo.

- No, you won’t find random postmarks on the streets where you can slip in your postcards. There are a few, but are very scarce. There’s a post office in Restauradores, use that. You can usually buy stamps at any souvenir-looking shop or anything store that says “Casa da Sorte”.

- The green card you use for transportation is good for everything but you need to charge it either with money for all or in the appropriate machines that will give you the specific ticket you’re looking for.

- If you walk inside ANY restaurant or whatever and ask for a cup of coffee, this is what you’ll get. If you want a larger coffee a bit watered down, ask for an abatanado. Or go to Starbucks. A garoto is a strong espresso with a bit of milk, served in an espresso cup. A galão is basically the same, but in a taller glass that will, for 99% of the time, look like this, and the milk is stirred until it forms foam, like a cappuccino without the chocolate. So be specific about what you want. Our coffee is very strong. Ask the waiters, they’re used to the confusion, don’t worry.

- Here’s an important thing to you if you’re stopping by during a cruise: no, you can’t fucking visit the whole city in one day. The city is way bigger than you’re thinking it is. You can’t see it all in 5h. So pick wisely. Here’s how to pick it: Oriente is the modern part of the city, the main attraction is the Aquarium (Oceanário). Belém is the historical part, where most of the main monuments are. Downtown Lisbon is the place you can walk to and discover by foot. If you’re strict on mobility, a Tuk Tuk is the perfect choice.

- Maybe this is kind of asking too much out of a tourist, but it would be great if you had any fucking clue what Lisbon even has. Don’t just stand in Rossio looking puzzled and ask me where the famous tiles are. You should at least know you’re thinking of fucking Porto, which is some 300km away. The worst question you can ask touristic vendors is “so what can you do in this city?” bitch I don’t know. Make your goddamn research. You like art? Here’s a list: Berardo Museum (contemporary). Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (from 14th to the 18th century and colonial art). Azulejo museum (those famous blue tiles). MAAT (contemporary art, also a nice overview of the city). Gulbenkian (antiquity to the 19th century and also a modern art center, a beautiful museum with amazing gardens). The Fado Museum. You want history? Here’s another list: anything in Belém, you don’t have to pay for the tickets even, the tower is not that interesting anyway and you can visit the church of Jerónimos for free, it’s the whole monastery complex you have to pay for. Church of São Roque for the prime example of baroque. The Lisbon cathedral. The Church of Saint Vincent. Estrela Basilica. Ajuda Palace. I don’t know what else, at the top of my head, these are probably the most important.

- The train to Sintra is in Rossio train station, which is NOT physically connected to the subway station. Stop asking me.

- Sintra, Cabo da Roca and Queluz are outside of Lisbon. Yes, you have to get on a train. I don’t care if it’s an inconvenience, I didn’t fucking build it.

- No, the beaches are not exactly in Lisbon. The ones that kinda are, you go to Cais do Sodré, you get on a train and get off at Oeiras or something. Ask someone there. The other ones are around Sintra or across the river. If you want to go across the river to Caparica, there’s a service that costs 10€, picks you up in the morning, takes you back in the afternoon. If you think that’s expensive and decide to go there on your own, then be prepared to pay a lot more and have the worst bus ride of your life. I’ve been riding TST buses my whole life, you have no idea the shit hole they are. Pay for quality, it’s worth it.

- No, you can’t get to Freeport by bus. It will take you too long and cost you a fortune. Pay 10€ for the shuttle. It’s way less than any other means.

- No, you can’t take a cab to Fátima. It’s 127km. Also, don’t take the train there. The train station is 30km away from the city. Take a bus. Rede Expresso is your friend. You can charge your fucking phone in that bus! Also you have wifi.

- Yes, you can walk around holding a cup or a bottle of beer on the streets, nobody cares. Just don’t litter. Throw that fucking thing in the garbage, don’t be a pig.

- No, the guys wearing a black outfit with a cape are not celebrating Hogwarts. That’s a joke someone started that caught on. I never actually thought people would believe it, yet here we are. They’re just university students getting drunk lmao. If you want cheap booze, follow them.

- Just overall be kind, don’t bump into people on the streets, don’t stall, smile and say thank you and good morning/evening/whatever. Remember: say obrigado if you’re a man, obrigada if you’re a woman. We don’t care that your portuguese is shit, we love that you tried and that you ask how we say things. We also don’t care that you’re actually speaking brasilian portuguese. We love that you went through the effort.

- Portuguese people greet with a kiss on each cheek. A handshake is something more business-like. If you don’t like being touched, stay away and wave, we’ll get the message. But if you happen to meet an old lady, then you’re on your own, your cheeks are getting pinched, I can’t save you.

- We’re also incredibly loud. No, we’re not constantly fighting, we’re brutes towards each other. That’s how we show love. Don’t make a point of it.

- But remember: this city isn’t the hip, cheap, hot-spot you’ve been sold. It will look like that if you just wander around Baixa and Alfama and Mouraria, where mostly students and foreigners are. But that is not the reality. The “tradition” you’ve been sold, that supposedly lives in Alfama, practically doesn’t exist anymore. Any story that says “traditional” in it, I can guarantee you is not. The best restaurants are the corner tascas that smell of cooked potatoes and grilled beef. If the owner of a restaurant is fat, the restaurant is good, trust me this is a mnemonic that works. ‘

- Don’t act superior, don’t act like you know this city better because you’ve been here before or because you have portuguese friends. Or because you read this post lmao. Certainly, don’t walk up to tourist vendors and try to convince them YOU know more about traditions in their country than they do, like I’ve had people do with me. Cause you don’t lmao.

Add anything you might think is necessary and sorry for the long ass post

#long post

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dontcallmesensei · 7 years

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The Truth About Learning Japanese

(I’m going to start with a random side note: If I ever get a book deal to write Japanese primer, I’m going to call it I Eat Cake Everyday: A Complete Guide to Japanese with Stupid Sentences.)

It’s been a while since we’ve just talked, so I wanted to just take a moment to do that.

I think every Japanese platform at one point write an article about “the deep truth” of learning Japanese, claiming to give you the golden key that you need to become fluent in only 6 months or 1 year or whatever.

The argument for those kinds of posts isn’t hard to understand: People are fundamentally similar. If people are fundamentally similar, it is very likely that works for me will will work for you. Thus, if this works for me, it will work for you. This does work for me. Therefore, it will work for you (most likely.)

This is why all articles start with something like, “I guarantee you that I’m no genius. [Insert daily task that the writer struggles with on a daily basis.] I’m just a regular person that tried out a few things until I found a winning formula.”

I, personally, want to do my own take on this kind of article. I won’t offer a golden key, but I’ll talk about learning Japanese.

1. Japanese is Coded in the Most Inefficient Writing System in the World

Kanji, the logographs that are the bane of all Japanese-learner’s existence, comes from China. Kanji itself, 漢字, means “Chinese characters.” Kanji were invented to suit the needs of the Chinese language (from way back when, before Mandarin/Standard Chinese was a thing.) Japanese, on the other hand, is a language isolate, and it is not related to Chinese. So the use of these Chinese characters has over time been used in different ways for different words and with different readings- for Kanji tend to have multiple readings, sometimes being just 2 and at other times 8.

In Eastern Asia, the use of Chinese characters was widespread. It was used in Korea, in Vietnam, in Japan, to some varying extent in Malaysia, and the territories these nations conquered.

Korea developed an ingenious writing system called Hangeul, which now has all but totally substituted Chinese characters. Vietnam adopted the Roman alphabet with many diacritics. Japanese, well, Japanese developed two writing systems based on morae. These two writing systems could be used to write out the entirety of Japanese. Kanji is not really necessary. Further, there is no evidence to suggest that there are so many homophones such that even with context one could not make head or tails out of what was being said.

So, Japanese does have a potential unique writing system that is easy to learn (it’s easier than Hangeul in my opinion), but it does not use it exclusively because of cultural reasons. Kanji is just hardwired into the culture.

But here’s where my personal opinion and advice come in: If you have to choose between loving Kanji and hating it, hate it. Don’t romanticize it. Don’t go “above and beyond” what you have to know because of your love for Kanji. Just learn what you have to learn, and leave it at that.

“How many Kanji must someone learn?” The official common use Kanji list (the Jōyō Kanji) lists 2,136 Kanji. How many readings are among these Kanji? Somewhere around 3,869. There are also some variations on Kanji that one should keep in mind and some Kanji that one sees only in names, so add around 400 Kanji to the official list and about 400 new readings.

“How many Kanji must I learn for my first year of Japanese?” All of them. That’s my honest advice. Don’t aim to learn only a few Kanji. If you’re going to learn Kanji, learn them all. Think in that mindset. As soon as you decide you want to learn Japanese, work on Kanji. Before you enter a classroom and learn your first few greetings and whatnot, make sure you know all the common use Kanji, or at least that you’re well on your way to knowing all the Kanji.

2. Language Learning is an Intensive Process

Learning a language is a process that scientists haven’t quite been able to describe accurately. We do know, nevertheless, that it’s a heck of a lot different from learning chemistry or carpentry or bicycling.

In the Western world, there is this idea that one can learn a language in a classroom, normally as a subject period, with periods lasting somewhere from 50 to 70 minutes. Here’s the truth: it doesn’t work very well. (There are historic reasons for this way of learning a language, but we can talk about that some other time.) The success rates of language acquisition in classrooms is ridiculously low. This does not mean that language classes are bad: but it means that it just isn’t enough.

There are many reasons why learning a language in and of itself may be hard. It’d take forever to talk about all of them.

But let’s talk a bit about lexicons. A lexicon, here, refers to the dictionary in your brain where you store the words you know. If you’re monolingual- you have a standard dictionary in your brain with a word and definitions. If you were raised bilingual, then you have one lexicon with two words and definitions. That is to say, if you’re an English-Spanish speaker, then you have “cat” and “gato” in the same space in your brain and you know that what applies to one applies to the other. Then, depending on your fluency and use, you may have two supplementary dictionaries where you store all the information about words that don’t exist in the other language and idioms and expressions and things like that.

Now, if you’re an English speaker and, say, you want to learn German, part of what you’ll learn to do is to process your English lexicon entries into German. What that means is that you learn to engineer English words into German. “Father” turns into “Vater,” “to drink” turns into “trinken,” “Love” turns into “Liebe,” etc. So the words that have no relation with English (the non-cognates), turn into a supplementary lexicon and everything else is put through a mental processor.

Because the brain can do this is the reason why many people in Europe can speak many languages. The fact that someone can speak Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, and French is not terribly impressive. The overlap in words (and in grammar) is so immense that what you’re doing is processing one language into another and you’re guaranteed an astonishing success rate.

Japanese, however, is different because it’s a language isolate. You can’t process one language into another. You have to learn words one by one. That takes time. It takes repetition. Memorization is as much an active process as it is a subconscious process. When people talk about the benefits of “immersion,” what they’re talking about most of the time is putting your brain into survival mode, i.e. either you learn all these words (and grammar stuff) or else you will not be able to survive and thus you will die. That is one way of doing it, and if you do not choose this path you have to commit some serious time to this. I believe that if one knows around 5,000 of the most frequently used words in any given language, one is guaranteed to know at least 95% of all the words one will hear/read in a day (given that one doesn’t go read a super technical manual on how to calibrate a nuclear reactor or something like that.) So, the question becomes how will you memorize 5,000 words? How long will that take? If one learns 10 a day, then it’s 500 days, and if one learns 50 a day, it’s 100 days.

The tradeoff when it comes to speed is that the faster you learn something, the faster you forget. (When you relearn something, it should be faster nevertheless.) So how much time will you commit to learning a language? How will you follow that up? These are important questions.

3. Japanese Media is Considerably Insular

Japan isn’t like the United States. The United States wants every nation to know what music it likes, what fashion it wears, what it believes ideologically and socially, etc. The U.S. is everywhere.

South Korea, recently, is everywhere. K-Pop, K-Dramas, K-SNL, K-Beauty. If you want to know what Korea is up to, it’s pretty easy to find out. They want you know!

Japan... eh. Japan is pretty good at making anime available globally. People know about Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon and the Mighty Atom and all that. When it comes to dramas and movies and tv shows, they’re not quite interested in that. Ages ago I wrote a post on the misconception of “Whacky Japanese Game Shows,” where I basically explained that most of those shows aren’t game shows but segments on variety shows, the only person in my mind having totally insane game shows being Beat Takeshi.

Okay, fine, what does this mean? This means two important things. First, one’s expose to the language outside of going to Japan or talking to Japanese people will be based highly on anime, which is fine but there are other styles of expressing oneself. One needs a bit of variety. If one goes the information/news route, then one is exposing oneself to something very formal and literary, but dull. Second, it means that when people teach Japanese, they’re going to assume that one wants to speak Japanese for business purposes. This sounds strange to say, but let me put it like this: Japanese is an important part of the world economy and STEM and anime, on the other hand, is not a sufficiently large part of Japanese culture so that the Japanese can figure you want to learn Japanese for that sole purpose. If you want to speak Japanese, then it must be for business purposes (and we’ll consider academics to be within business.) So you learn Japanese through the perspective of honorific and respectful language. This isn’t a bad thing either, but the desire to make you sound nice will often lead to lies about how Japanese actually works at a grammatical level.

(On the other hand, in South Korea the K-Pop/K-Drama boom is such a big deal that people around the world start learning Korean in hopes of auditioning for the big production companies in hopes of becoming actors, singers, dancers, and hosts.)

So here’s my advice: Once you have your feet wet with Japanese, once you know your Kanji and you know how to analyze a sentence (even if the lexicon isn’t all there yet), look at something that isn’t anime. I recommend movies, a lot of which are quite nice. Okuribito (Departures) was a great movie. An (Red Bean Paste) is a more recent film that was wonderful. Look up some movies. Sit down, and watch them. Watch it with subtitles, so you know what the movie’s about. But watch it a second time and a third time without subtitles. Try to see if you can make out a few sentences, read a few signs that appear in the background, take note of expressions or words you keep hearing. No, you won’t be able to understand the whole film all of a sudden, but it’s something new and something good and the more Japanese you learn, the more you will be able to return to the film and make out. Eventually, you will be able to listen to a sentence, pause the film, and look up the words you don’t know.

4. Learning Japanese Doesn’t Happen with One Method Alone

This is rather obvious, but it’s worth finishing this off with. There is an abundance of book series, CDs, cassettes, and even online resources (our own included.)

A language is greater than any method, than any curriculum, than any teacher. No one source has all the answers. One has to be encouraged from day one to look at many resources.

A library is a language learner’s best friend. Why? Because books can be expensive, and you will probably not need all the resources you dabble into for a long time. So, when you begin learning Japanese, look at the entire Japanese section, order a few famous books through InterLibrary Loan, if you have access to that, and sit down and just read the books, as if they were novels. Don’t memorize a thing. Don’t do the exercises. Just figure out their style, their aims, their perspective. Do read the footnotes! The more footnotes a book has, the more useful it tends to be in the long run. Information that isn’t relevant in Lesson 1 may be absolutely vital in Lesson 10.

Check out some old books if you can. The way people learn a language today is not the same way they learned it 50 or 100 years ago. The most useful Italian grammar book I ever read was written in the 1800′s. Japanese books published before World War II may have some slightly outdated things, such as the /we/ and /wi/ morae, but they will be good for most of everything else. I’m personally dying to get library privileges again somewhere to be able to look into these, so if I find some good book titles I’ll let you know.

Because a lot of language instruction was, until recently, modeled after the way Greek and Latin was taught, reading some of our own material gets you familiar with the lingo, should you heed my advice. So people like to talk about cases and declensions and conjugations and moods and all that. The works of William George Aston are some of the most important books on Japanese historically. So, if you can find originals of those, please do read them.

So yeah, food for thought

#Japanese #Langblr #Studyblr

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clockworkdryad · 7 years

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Why Portuguese?

Of all languages in the whole world, why Portuguese?

I just finished my daily practice in the Duolingo app, and now seemed as good a time as any to self examine my choice. What is my motivation for learning Portuguese in the first place, and what will that do for helping me follow through? There are so many other choices.

If I had decided to study German, I could practice with a friend I met while playing Final Fantasy 14. She’s a native speaker who has learned English and I’ve always tried to be there to help when she has a question about words. It would make sense to ask her to return the favor.

I could have decided to study Japanese. I’ve always liked how it sounds, and there is more than enough media readily available that I could practice immersion in an entertaining way. I even have a friend who, while not a native speaker, speaks fluently and has been living there for years.

How about French? I know quite a few people who speak French in one form or another. A close local friend of mine studied it for years in high school and while I don’t know if she’s out of practice, we could practice together. Plus, I know a ton of people from Canada and while I know that the French they speak there isn’t identical to that of France they’re still related languages.

So why Portuguese? The only person I know who I believe speaks the language I have not spoken to in over a decade, and we were never very close to begin with. Even if I manage reconnect with him, it’s not easy to find movies or television in the language to immerse myself in. So why Portuguese?

Because I play Dungeons and Dragons.

If you’re wondering what the heck I’m thinking, or your reply is a resounding “…what?” then… well, that sounds about normal. Also, for the impact of that statement, I left off some of the supporting details. I play Dungeons and Dragons, and I am very serious about my RP. I love to inhabit my characters, to really get into their heads and their motivations. My gaming group values in-character interactions over kick-in-the-door style gameplay, and apparently I’m a method actor.

The character I’m playing is a tabaxi (feline humanoid race) rogue who has traveled from a far, far away land. I wanted to emphasize this “outsider” status, so whenever I spoke in character, I would skip words or mess up phrases. That’s how it started, but I didn’t have much direction. It was a super generic, stereotypical, and probably racist rendition of a “person who doesn’t speak English very well.”

Naturally, I didn’t want to stay there. I wanted to have a solid accent, and to pepper my speech with words from her home language. I discussed it with the DM of the game, and we tried to get a good picture of where my character was from and what sort of culture there might be there. We decided that the continent she was from was likely very similar to Central or South America. A very important geographical feature was jungles, and so I was leaning towards the Amazon.

So I looked at Brazil. A lot of the continents in fantasy worlds are based on real world analogues, after all. But wait! Portuguese wasn’t originally a language in the Americas, it only showed up there due to colonization! I could try Nahuatl. It’s not uncommon for fantasy jungle continents to have the races that live there be based on Aztec culture and construction, but that’s more Central America. Since I was thinking Brazil, perhaps study one of the Tupi languages spoken by the original native tribes there.

When it came down to it, a compromise had to be made. I was literally going to learn a whole new language just for a character. It needed to be accessible, and I needed tools that would help me accomplish my goal. I needed one of the languages that an app existed to help me study in my spare few minutes every day.

Portuguese is far from the perfect language I could choose to adequately represent my character’s origins, but it will help give her a solid feeling of foreigner amongst the other characters in the game. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll actually be able to learn this language with a motivation that I actually care about: gaming.

Though… once this game ends, I’ll have to make a new character. Who knows what language I’ll want to study then!

Addendum: Between writing this and posting it, I discovered that the Duolingo app does have one of the indigenous languages of South America, Guarani. There’s just one problem: it’s only offered in Spanish…

#portuguese #português #language learning #roleplaying #dungeons and dragons

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everyonethinksmynameiskayla · 7 years

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Eggs & potatoes in a tropical paradise

Last week Brittany and I took a “ladies vacation” as my mom called it to Cabo Verde (until recently “Cape Verde” in English although it’s “Cap Vert” in French which is how I think of it since all the planning was done here). You could be forgiven for not knowing anything at all about Cabo Verde - it’s a tiny country made up of 9 also tiny islands off the coast of Senegal, just south of the Canary Islands. We visited three of the islands throughout the week, so I’ll divide this post up by island. I made a video compilation of all the little clips I took of the landscapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVfdJw9M1Pw (set it to high resolution so you can see the images better).

1. Santiago - Praia side

Santiago is the biggest island (it takes two hours to drive from top to bottom and about an hour to do the width) and we flew from Dakar to the capital, Praia, which is on the south side of the island. We took the Cabo Verde national airline, TACV, which I was expecting, given that the flight was about $100 round trip and was going to be an hour and TACV mostly does island hopping within Cabo Verde, a puddle jumper plane with a bring-your-own-folding-chair to sit on type deal but boy was I wrong. The plane was the size of a regional jet in the US and pretty new and they even served us all sandwiches, which blew me away. Granted, the sandwich was a hotdog bun with some cheese slices, but still, I was so impressed.

We arrived in Praia in the evening and quickly made friends with a French guy who was in our hostel and he explained that apparently Praia is dangerous at night because of gangs so we went the three of us to get some food at a restaurant near the hostel. I was blown away by how dead everything was. It was only 8 PM and there was almost no one outside and practically every shop was closed. It was the quietest city, even during the day, that I’ve ever been in. The next day as we were exploring the city, I was struck by how small it felt, especially coming from Dakar, and how orderly and calm it was. It almost felt European at times, and occassionaly even kind of reminded me of Goa in India (Portuguese colonization being what the two places have in common). We went and explored the ruins in the old city where the Portuguese had first arrived and walked up to the fort. We came across an old abandoned bar/restaurant, which was wild - it's state wasn’t so dissimilar from the ruins of the old cathedral which were several hundred years old, but it was probably only a couple of decades abandoned (I would imagine that has something to do with weather wear). You could see all the old spots where there used to be a bar and bar stools and the bathroom, but it was totally gutted.

^The abandoned bar/restaurant

We ate dinner at a jazz club/restaurant downtown which was great because Cabo Verdian music is lovely and we got to try homemade “punch” which was everywhere and was basically rum with honey and coconut and tamarind (there are other kinds too, every sort of flavor you could imagine) and it’s so good. However I was massively annoyed because we both ordered the “vegetarian” dish which I was expecting to be like a vegetable curry of some kind which sounded good and I asked if it came with rice (the waiter told us he spoke French and seemed to be telling the truth) and the waiter said yes but then it came out and it was a plate with like 10 slices of raw vegetables on it and nothing else and I was absolutely furious because it was like 8 dollars which is completely insane given that most dishes in restaurants were in the $3-5 range.

2. Sao Vicente

The next day we went back to the airport at 5 AM, which, armed with the unfortunate knowledge that Praia is not a good place to be hanging out in the dark, was not fun because we had to stand around on the empty street waiting for a cab with our phones and passports in our underwear like idiots because the hostel owner never showed up the previous evening so we couldn’t ask him to call us a cab for the next morning (not that this was a surprise, he had messaged me before we left Dakar asking if we wanted to be picked up at the airport, to which I said sure, and no one showed up to pick us up). We found another woman standing waiting for something and waited with her, luckily only for about ten minutes before a cab drove by. We felt bad leaving her on the street but with the language barrier (Cabo Verdians speak Creole and Portuguese) we couldn’t get across that she could come in our cab to wherever she was going also.

Just as in Praia, when we arrived in Mindelo, the cultural capital and the only big city on Sao Vicente, the cab that the hostel was allegedly sending us didn’t come. I was still stoked about the hostel because it’s also a cat shelter so there were cats everywhere.

^ Some of the cats at the hostel; they had their own special area and every time I came in they would go nuts and start chatting away and meowing like crazy and trying to climb up me

Mindelo is much bigger and more alive than Praia and also absolutely gorgeous. The city is nestled in a half-moon cove with a lovely marina on the most perfectly blue water that looked more like the light blue Gatorade than the ocean. We spent most of the day sitting in the floating cafe we found in the marina enjoying the view and the perfect weather and tranquility and then Brittany went to nap in the hostel and I walked up to the old fort that looked like it would have a good 360 view. When I got to the top I discovered that it was private property but that sign was accompanied by only about 5 feet of fence so I just walked right by it to do a quick round and take some pictures, since there was absolutely no one around. Those pictures are on the photo blog. Then we went to the store and bought a bunch of chips and snacks and went and sat on the beach. We swam but neither of us had bathing suits so we wore our PJs, which was bizarre because that meant wearing shorts in public which I would never dream of doing in Senegal, but in Cabo Verde most of the women were wearing mini skirts and short shorts most of the time.

^ From the floating café. We stole the label off our Cabo Verdian beer

We had been trying to taste the national dish, catchupa, which appeared to be some sort of beans and rice deal, but every time we ordered it they came back and said “no catchupa” (we were mostly getting by with Brittany mumbling in Spanish and hoping for the best, but sometimes when that didn’t work I would try French and then we would speak to each other in English and people would just stare at us in utter confusion and back away slowly). So for dinner we went into this little local looking restaurant and ordered some catchupa and Brittany was trying to explain that she was a vegetarian, but apparently the Spanish mumbling didn’t work because we thought we were getting catchupa with egg and potato instead of with meat - we were sitting there waiting and laughing about how funny it would be if we ended up with just eggs and potatoes when she came out with two plates of french fries and a fried egg. She looked really confused when we both broke down laughing. Every time we ordered in a restaurant after that we were half expecting to be served a plate of eggs and fries.

3. Santo Antão

The next morning we took the ferry from Sao Vicente (the island Mindelo is on) to Santo Antão, which was easily one of my favorite parts of the trip - I already love boats, plus the islands are so close together and both so mountainous that at any point throughout the hour long ride you can see both (those views are in the video I mentioned at the top of this post). Plus the early morning light on the water and the cool breeze, and there was a cafe/bar thing on the boat so Brittany and I were even able to get some coffee.

^ Coffee on the ferry

When we arrived we grabbed an aluguer, amid some confusion. The aluguers aren’t taxis but they aren’t buses either, they’re generally big Toyota 15-seater vans (in fabulous condition, we couldn’t believe it - and the taxis in Praia were late model Toyota Corollas which for some reason was hilarious to us…not quite as much character as my beloved dilapidated Renaults with weird furry seat covers) and you pay your spot like in a bus but unlike a bus they don’t all have a set route. Some do, some have names of towns and/or cities painted on the side and they just go back and forth between those places but others just go where they decide they’re going to go that day and pick up people along the way. Anyway, we were jostled around a bit by the competing aluguer drivers but eventually got one to Paul, the city on the coast at the foot of the valley that we were planning to hike. It was a striking drive, the edges of the mountains of Santo Antão are baren and dotted with dramatic cliffs and drops into the ocean below, which was raging and wavy like I’ve never seen. But in Paul, it starts to get really green, palm trees start to pop up and I’ll get to it in a minute but once on the interior of the island its lush and green everywhere you look. Paul, or Vila das Pombas, I never figured out why some people called it one thing and some the other, is a tiny but nice little town on the water that stretches the coast before shooting up into the hills directly behind it.

^ Vila das Pombas

Our hotel was a few minutes up the hill and owned by a really friendly Italian guy who spoke no English or French but enough Spanish to sort of communicate with Brittany. Despite the language barrier he tried really hard to be helpful and answer our questions about the hiking etc. and his little hotel, with just two rooms, was absolutely adorable. Plus I was excited because he had a cat, one of the cutest most beautiful cats I’ve ever seen, who was super duper pregnant - it looked like she had swallowed a football. She would come sit outside our room and purr so loudly the floorboards would shake until I opened the door and then she would dart into the room, much to Brittany’s dismay.

We got a different kind of aluguer, kind of like a bush taxi here in Senegal, just a pickup with some benches in the back, up the mountain(s) about an 45 minutes (it probably would have taken twenty if we didn’t keep having to stop and reverse for 100 meters down the tiny narrow mountain road to accommodate the occasional car coming the other way, once we had to do it three times before we rounded a single bend).

^ In the aluguer

The hills just kept getting more and more massive - I suppose in some circles a “massive hill” is known as a “mountain” - and steep and green and there were little villages here and there but mostly just lots of banana and sugar cane and what I think was maybe corn and of course palm trees. We hiked the rest of the way up (about 2 hours of basically walking straight up on this absurd winding path) to Cova Crater, which is nothing special but the view from up next to it is extraordinary, especially since you can look down over the hills you just crossed through and see the ocean where you started and all while you’re above the clouds. Saying that walking back down was harder than going up would probably be overstating it, but it was not easy. In most places it was so steep that you couldn’t help but run down it failing your arms around like an idiot, and as we got closer to the bottom the dirt got looser and looser and there weren’t rocks and roots anymore and we were sliding around almost breaking our ankles every five seconds. But we made it down, exhausted and sunburnt (I put on so much sunscreen, religiously reapplied, and still got burnt to a crisp). We found a pizza place in town and basically dragged ourselves inside but it was totally empty and smelled like weed and then the Italian guy who owned it (I’m not sure why there are so many Italians living in Cabo Verde) came out from the back and told us that they didn’t start making pizza for another two hours because island time so we went back to the hotel and laid prostate on our beds half conscious until it was time and then we sprinted back to the restaurant and seriously contemplated getting two pizzas each. The pizza was great (Italians) and the owner, who spoke only Italian and Portuguese (it’s amazing how far one romance language gets you with the other, I understood almost everything that was said in Spanish and Italian throughout the week but since Portuguese has a totally different sound to it the same did not really apply) was so nice and served us some homemade “punch” and also gave us free shots of some sort of Italian lemon-y liquor.

The next day was quite relaxed because we were both basically zombies. We went to the edge of the island and did a short hike along the coast to a small village built into the cliffs called Fontainhas and then drank some coffee by the water before getting the aluguer back to the port city to get the ferry back to Sao Vicente. This time I stood all the way on top the whole time and it was so windy that I couldn’t wear my hat and I was half convinced that my face itself was going to be blown off. It was so windy I was terrified to take pictures and videos because I was worried about the genuine possibility of the wind blowing my phone out of my hands, so I white-knuckled it whenever I took any pictures.

4. Santiago again - Tarrafal side

We flew back to Santiago and stayed in Praia just for the night since we arrived late and couldn’t keep traveling until the next day. So early the next morning we got an aluguer to Tarrafal, the biggest city (which is not saying much at all) on the far north of the island. When I say we got an aluguer, I really mean we found one going to Tarrafal and sat in it falling asleep for two hours while we waited for other passengers and these two guys used some weird blue filmy material to tint the windows of the van. The drive was about two hours through rolling baren hills and dramatic peaks and then about halfway there the hills grew into mountains and we reached a certain point where you could see Tarrafal on the coast below but unfortunately it was quite overcast so none of my photos from the drive came out. We had been planning to hike in the nearby national park but we were so beat that we ended up just wandering around the tiny deserted city, or town really, sitting on the beach and going to bed at like 8:30 PM. We finally got to try catchupa, after a great deal of confusion and negotiations regarding Brittany’s vegetarianism, and while eating it it was good but it was perhaps the heaviest thing I have ever eaten in my life, I can’t understand how Cabo Verdians eat it for breakfast every day. It literally felt like someone had opened my stomach, placed all of the catchupa into it and then closed it again, and then it sat there like that for 24 hours. For dinner we had a plate of plain rice and some mild cheese cubes because we were incapable of eating real food with the catchupa still in us and I think our waitress thought we were insane.

The next day when we felt like real humans again we finally went to the national park, and even though it was a bit overcast (which did not prevent me from getting sunburnt again) the hike was beautiful - I love green mountains but I almost like bare ones more, because the closest ones look sort of brown but then they fade to purple and then to blue and the clouds cast crazy shadows over them that you can clearly see since there are so few trees. We were just congratulating ourselves on how easy the hike had been, since we started already high up and basically just walked straight along the top of the mountain ridge, when we got to a sharp turn downhill and a sign introducing the new trial which included the qualifiers « Difficulty: Hard » and « Path quality: bad ». Both of those things turned out to be true. Mostly because the path was in many places about as wide as one of my feet and it was basically three hours straight downhill. When we finally reached the town at the bottom where we could allegedly get an aluguer back to Tarrafal, we were disappointed to discover that our excessively vocalized fantasies about going to a little boutique in the town and getting some chips or a Kit Kat bar (which were strangely ubiquitous even in small stores) and some cold water were not going to be realized as the tiny town/village that we ended up waiting an hour in had no stores and also for some indistinguishable reason smelled so bad I thought I was going to pass out while we waited. But eventually and aluguer passed and we hopped on - when we got back to Tarrafal we bought chips and Kit Kat bars and then got another aluguer back to Praia and got cheeseburgers (and a veggie burger) and ate way too many french fries before packing up our stuff in preparation to fly back to Dakar the next day.

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airlinepolyglot-blog · 7 years

Text

another infrequent update

NOTE: a few links and whatnot are missing from this post, several YouTubes, etc. I will add them very shortly, and if I do not, then please remind me!

Hello everyone, I know it’s been awhile once again. It’s not that I haven’t been doing language things (quite the contrary), but rather that I don’t have time to tell you about them. A quick rundown of what I’ll be talking about here:

Travels and how language related:

-my trip to Toronto

-my trip to Hong Kong

-a brief mention of my trip to Cancun

What I have learned, language wise, since my last update:

-Norwegian

-German

-Welsh

-Hungarian

-Russian

-Turkish

I went to Toronto with my girlfriend Marisa since my last update. Toronto is of course an English majority city so there isn’t a ton to write about that, but it’s worth noting just how bilingual Canada is in many ways. Most people in Toronto can’t speak French, or rarely speak it, but it’s as prevalent as Spanish is in the US. Everything is cosigned in both languages, and of course the government enforces Canada’s bilingualism, which was extremely interesting. I’ll be interested to visit a really bilingual city in Canada, like Ottawa or Montreal, where everyone can speak both languages.

Hong Kong had been one of my top cities to visit after I got the airline job (and before that, too). There was obviously absolutely no way it was going to disappoint, and luckily it didn’t in the slightest. Definitely the best place I have been to to date (lovely English right there!), on so many levels. It’s extremely welcoming and inviting to an outsider, insanely easy to get around, very safe, etc. But to the world tourist, the level of English spoken in Hong Kong is extremely impressive. Literally everyone in Hong Kong spoke English that I spoke with, to a very good degree. Curiously, the Filipino domestic helpers spoke some of the poorest english (they stuck to Tagalog), and more obviously, the mainland tourists spoke very little (if any) English. I used Mandarin a few times, but interestingly I used German quite a bit (there’s apparently quite a bit of German expatriation in Hong Kong). I was caught off guard with the German, considering I was fairly out of practice (but usually made out just fine!), but I came armed with the Mandarin. Using HelloChinese and a few audio resources (Living Language) I had a conversational amount down, though I never used it to that degree (it would just be pointing someone in the right direction or making small talk), after really seeing Mainland Chinese in action in Hong Kong, I felt very motivated to really work on my Mandarin. Sadly, I haven’t much since my trip ended, but I’m sure I’ll pick it back up at some point - I love Mandarin and always preach how simple it is to everyone and tell people it’s far easier than people think. Because it is...once you accept that the characters are an “over time” thing. And as expected, the little Cantonese I spoke (“ni ho”, “mh’goi”, “ching”, etc) was received very well, but considering how widely English was spoken, it was just my sign of gratitude to the natives.

I did visit Cancun, Mexico with Marisa as well, because it was affordable, accessible, and warm. While it wasn’t great (we had a good time together though), I’ll of course cover the language situation there. Largely of course English to cater to tourists, a few people did indeed lead with Spanish, which was surprising. I had an Uber driver who only spoke Spanish and so he and I pieced through a conversation together, and he was helping me learn. But still, the Spanish language and I don’t really click sadly. A shame, as I want to visit Madrid, Colombia (any city), Santiago de Chile, and of course return to Buenos Aires. But luckily Marisa knows and likes Spanish, so she can come with me and help out with that until I’m back on track.

Okay, now an update on my language study stuff. I could post Duolingo stats but eh I don’t think those give as accurate an estimation as me describing my progress. So, I’ve been focusing on Norwegian a lot recently, which is without question my favorite language. I’ve been really focused on finishing the tree, and am at Level 17 on Duolingo. Admittedly, Duolingo is the only resource I’m using for Norwegian right now. No books, no YouTube, no audio, just Duolingo. So the terrible robot voice that Duo uses is my only way of hearing the language at the moment, but I’m doing that on purpose. Going to finish the tree and really have this language down, and then see how quickly I really pick up on it when I hear it spoken by actual people. It’s such a simple and logical language on almost every level that it’s amazing. The grammar is just so much more simple than any other language. The verb conjugations (or relative lack thereof), definite articles (which are suffixes), word order, negation (just “ikke”) just all make so much sense. The amazing Paul (Langfocus) did an awesome video about Norwegian and its relation to Swedish and Danish, with a lesser extent Faroese and Icelandic (both of which are far more complicated grammatically than the other three). In an ideal world, the Vikings and their successors would’ve pushed for Norwegian (or Swedish, but I like Norwegian and the culture of Norway just a bit more) to be the universal language of the world instead of English. Norwegian is an easier and better language than English, and it’s far more logical in ways (grammatically and pronounced) than English ever could be. It (as well as Swedish and Danish) also lacks the case system that comes along with German, which makes it much easier to learn than the main language of its family. Through Norwegian, you can almost fully understand Swedish. I haven’t done Swedish on Duolingo at all, but I can read Swedish text incredibly well, point out and translate words in IKEA, and breeze through Memrise and Tinycards decks, thanks to my understanding of Norwegian. I can understand written Danish to the same degree, but it’s a wildly different language when spoken. I haven’t studied Danish much, but I’m sure once you’re used to how they pronounce things (like Spanish/Portuguese differences), you’ll be in great shape. I can’t wait to hopefully visit Oslo this summer, as I still have not gotten to speak Norwegian in real life at all yet, but am confident I can do so….well, confidently. We will find out soon.

I am returning to Germany in a few weeks, and in preparation I’m of course going through my German resources again. Reguilding Duolingo, going through some advanced levels on Memrise, playing around on Babadum, and things like that. German is annoyingly difficult/tricky in so many ways (and after learning one of the North Germanic languages, it will frustrate you more once you’ve learned just how simple it all can be!!!), but I’m convinced the language runs through my blood and is almost second nature to me at this point, which I’m extremely grateful for. I can jump into conversations often, understand it when I hear it (even Swiss German!), and generally carry myself along. I just wish it wasn’t so difficult for new learners who aren’t picking it up in a classroom setting - it really is a difficult language to teach yourself, especially if you’ve never dealt with a three gender language AND one that has a case system, no less. Plus, “sie” can mean she/formal you/they, which I’m sure can certainly trip anyone up. That’s just a bit impractical, but luckily I have that advantage I guess.

I dabbled briefly in Welsh on Duolingo. A very fun and surprisingly simple language, I put it on hold temporarily due to my desire to focus on other languages. Nonetheless, I found it super interesting, though of course often difficult to pronounce. The “dd” sound in Welsh is maybe the most difficult thing I’ve ever attempted to pronounce, and I’m convinced only natives will ever master it. I want to see this language kept alive, so certainly give it a shot - the Duolingo course is wonderful and very well designed, and this YouTube video (linked within the course) will teach you how to pronounce the language very well.

My last three languages I’ll sort of talk about together. They are Russian, Hungarian, and Turkish. Three languages from different families (but I guess a similar part of the world), but damn are they a lot of fun to me. I’m actually glad I waited a week to write this post, as I attempted to look at Turkish again last night for the first time in ages and it suddenly made tons of sense to me - being an agglutinative language and all, just like Hungarian and to a lesser extent Russian. All three of these languages are pretty “out there” for an English speaker, and I’ll agree, some of the trickiest for an English speaker to learn, as they have a lot of rules. But honestly that’s a lot of the fun, once you get the rules down and can form sentences and work with the case system (all three languages feature a case system), you feel really accomplished speaking these beautiful languages. Russian always tends to amaze me, the amount of loanwords and similar vocabulary in Russian will really surprise you. Once you master the Cyrillic alphabet, I bet you could look at a Russian text and point out so many words that are similar to the Romance or Germanic languages. This makes for fun learning once you figure out the Slavic twist to put on each word. The lack of articles in Russian and verb “to be” is of course a massive advantage - once you dig into the language you realize just how much of a blessing this is. I’m really enjoying Russian, and while I still make plenty of grammar mistakes and still struggle to pronounce some things, I can’t wait to really get this language down and be able to speak it with confidence. While I won’t be able to speak Hungarian with sure confidence probably for a long time, it’s an extremely fun language to me. It has something like 15 cases - definitely an extreme amount, and not a language for the faint of heart, but if you’re really into this kind of thing you may want to look into it. The alphabet and pronunciation are quite simple once you get them down, and word order is very free thanks to the case system (similar to Russian!). Plus, the Hungarian people are great and amazed anyone attempts to learn their very hard language. I’m going to see for myself when I go to Budapest next month and attempt to drag some Hungarian out (they’re also attempting to learn English widespread, as tourism in Hungary amongst Europeans is climbing), and we’ll see if the rumors are true about how happy Hungarians are that we even let out a “szia” (hello/goodbye) or a “köszönöm” (thank you) in conversation. If you’re scared off by Russian’s foreign alphabet and Hungarian’s crazy amount of cases, then maybe Turkish is a good place to start if you’re interested in an agglutinative language that differs wildly from English and the languages similar (romance/germanic). Turkish follows a Subject+Object+Verb order which is kind of fun because you know the action is always at the end, and the vocabulary is very cool (and apparently features tons of Persian and Arabic loanwords). While I haven’t dove too deep into Turkish, by the time my next update rolls around, I believe I will have more to tell you, as I plan to get right back to Turkish on Duolingo once I’ve posted this. While neither Turkey (political situation) nor Russia (complicated visa issues) would be suitable to visit now, Azerbaijan would be a good place I think, as a large part of the population still speaks Russian, a lot speak English (thanks to all the expats), and their native language, Azerbaijani (or Azeri Turkish) is apparently very close to Turkish, so someone who knows Turkish well can quickly pick up on Azerbaijani. I wonder if the differences are as close as Norwegian to Swedish or more like Spanish to Italian. Maybe I’ll know by the time I write here next.

I also am attempting to learn the Greek alphabet because why not (the lowercase letters are throwing me off big time - why must they be different from the uppercase?!) and of course still looking at Italian, French, etc from time to time. I don’t have any decent observations on these developments.

Hopefully I’ll write to you all again soon. Follow me on Instagram or something if you’d like more frequent updates about my life.

#langblr #langblog #norwegian #russian #german #hungarian #magyar

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