#Which is a good thing I don't translate things English it a separate category in my head. But it also means a lot of embarrassing things

[kjzx]

I live translated Deltarune cause I played it with someone who doesn't speak English very well for both ch1 and ch2 right when they came out, and I'm nervously awaiting ch3-4 both because. Well. I'm excited to learn what's gonna happen next and I hope to not see many spoilers online. But also because I'll have to translate it once again, I'm very excited to play the game with the person though. Both mine and their English has gotten better since ch2, and while they still need some sort of a translation, I hope I'll be able to do it better this time

This post is inspired by the let's play I watched recently, it was about a hard route of a game I don't feel like doing rn, and the man playing the game had an amazing skill of live translating dialogue and descriptions in a fast and eloquent way. Which reminded me of another let's player I watched years ago who was also good at this very thing, interestingly enough he played a lot of these fanmade fights and fangames for UT.

That is to say, live translating things is a very impressive skill. And it feels like people who have it don't see it as a big deal. While it is very much a big deal and you're very cool if you can do that

#Utdr #Deltarune #The genre of phlegmatic men playing games and translating them like it's nothing >> #For reference the lang is russian (didn't feel like mentioning it in the post) and if you want me to link you any of the ppl mentioned lmk #//rambles #I'm curious if you know of any other people like that especially in other languages #I bet it's a big thing in latam countries I've seen a lot of people speaking English well over there #// #My English is. Decent. Better than a lot of people I know at least #And the thing I noticed was that the better I got at it the worse my rus word/eng word association's become #Which is a good thing I don't translate things English it a separate category in my head. But it also means a lot of embarrassing things #Like when I'm asked to translate something and I'm trying to explain the word boat in my native language because I forgot it

[stoopid-turtle]

Hey loving your blog so far , am a new turtle just recently watched the untamed with my best friend. I'm 100% convinced they were definitely a thing during filming even now I still believe they are still together. My bestie on the other hand doesn't think they were anything more than friends. I tried my best to convince her but she thinks I falling to separate the actor's from their roles they were playing. My question to you is that do you ever sometimes think us turtles overthink too much or misinterpret what was going on between them ? Forgive my grammar English isn't my first language

Hi there! (Your English is perfectly fine!)

Yeah, I do think turtles overthink some things. There's a lot on YouTube that falls into this category, tbh. I can see how it happens. With all the bts, it feels like its own show that we can pore over, slow down, watch from different angles, decipher the TRUTH from it to reveal that bjyxszd.

But the bts aren't scripted. While they're endlessly rewatched by us, they were one moment in time for the guys. One moment in a long, exhausting day of work. Stuff we may think of as being intentional and meaningful may just as easily be random, off-the-cuff, and ultimately meaningless. Think about jobs you've worked where you get bored and tired during a long day. If you're like me, you and a coworker/friend will start talking nonsense to each other to get through it.

One friend/coworker and I made dinosaur noises at each other between taking calls in a call center. Yeah, idgi either. And because I'm a flirty bisexual, we'd make lewd gestures and kissy faces at each other sometimes for fun. She's straight, so it wasn't serious. I am aware that this dynamic is different between guys than between girls (in the US. I can't speak to China.), so I'm not saying that what happened between gg and dd is like me and my friend. Just to show that...sometimes stuff just gets weird. I wasn't nursing a secret crush on my friend or anything. It was just random time-wasting.

So yeah, I do think some stuff is misinterpreted. As I've noted, we see very little of what was happening bts, and there was a lot going on outside of whatever was happening between gg and dd. It's inevitable that some stuff will be misinterpreted.

This is why it took a while for me to come around to bjyxszd. And I resisted HARD. I'm skeptical by nature and I'm double-skeptical of things that sound too good to be true (like that a popular BL couple was played by actors who actually fell in love and are now together).

But at the same time, I came around. It took me spending many hours reading, watching, trying to translate, etc. Even then, I had to write out a novel in tumblr posts to lay out my thoughts to establish to myself that I'm not crazy on this. Like you, I'm 100% convinced that they were an item during filming.

So I was able to get past the stuff I think is a bit of a stretch to believe in it anyway. Now, it just means I smile at the stuff that does seem meaningful to me, and leave the other stuff for those that enjoy it. I don't want to single out any particular thing that I think isn't as significant as some people think it is, bc I don't want to ruin anyone else's fun. We're all turtles so regardless of what path we took or what convinced us, we're in the same boat. There's no point squabbling over the details.

Especially with the bts, which happened years ago at this point. Odds are, even gg and dd don't remember the context of any one clip at this point. So the TRUTH is impossible to know completely. It can be frustrating if you're like me and dislike ambiguity and uncertainty, but we're all in this pit together. We just have to enjoy what we've gotten and what we continue to get.

I'll also just say, don't stress too much about convincing your friend. I know it's frustrating when you want to squee about something but your bf isn't into it, but people tend to dig in their heels when someone tries to convince them of anything. There's also no need to do so. BJYXSZD regardless of if people believe in it or not. Find some other turtles and do your squeeing with them and when with your bestie, focus on what things you do share with them.

#asks #yizhan #bjyx

[oflightningandstars]

AO3 Tag Game!

I was tagged by @mvshortcut and @nobodysdaydreams, thank you both!

How many works do you have on AO3? 15! One of them is fanart, the rest are fics

What’s your total AO3 word count? 27,079

How many fandoms have you written for, and what are they?

3 (the obligatory 4 if you count MBS show and books separately). Nimona, Undertale, and Mysterious Benedict Society! (I've partially written or at least thought about fic in some other fandoms but haven't published anything).

Top five fics by kudos:

(Stuffed) Sharks Have No Bones

Strands of Dead Cells with Sentimental Value (tie)

This head is a hospital, someone please tend to it. (tie) (linked later in the post)

Mysterious Benedict Sleepover (fanart)

Kate comes out to their dad and it is wonderful

and because there was a tie and also one of the entries was fanart, Though heavy hang my eyes with sleep, my singing soul, it cries to thee

(Stuffed) Sharks is fun to me because it is my oldest fic, so it kind of makes sense for it to have the most kudos, but I wrote it several years before the Nimona movie was released and there was a noticeable uptick in people reading it, which was absolutely wild to see since typically I write for MBS which is a small fandom.

Do you respond to comments?

I try!

What’s the fic with the angstiest ending you’ve ever written?

Hmm. I definitely try to aim for hopeful endings, so even though things aren't fixed by the end of either This head is a hospital, someone please tend to it. or you're going too fast, you'll burn up soon, things are definitely looking up for Kate. I like to write Kate angst if you couldn't tell.

Do you write crossovers?

I haven't, but I'm not opposed to it! - that being said, I have some crossover-y art ideas that someday I will actually draw.

Have you ever gotten hate on a fic?

No thank goodness. I would almost certainly cry.

Do you write smut?

In theory I'm open to it, in practice I don't really.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not to my knowledge, and I very much hope not.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, it would be very cool. I have thought about trying to translate one of my own before but have never actually tried it.

What’s your all-time favorite ship?

I must say, I do enjoy a good ship, but I'm not sure I have an all-time favorite? Different ones are special to me for different reasons. But I might have to answer Korrasami because their relationship and the ending of the show were so so important to me as a queer kid who was just starting to figure that out.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish, but don’t think you ever will?

Ough. I don't want to put any of my Space Opera AU stuff in this category because that would make me sad. So I will just say I have a number of partially-written fics that I forget about and who knows if I will actually finish them.

What are your writing strengths?

I am contractually obligated to answer this question, I am contractually obligated to answer this question, I am contractually obligated...

Jokes aside, I think I have interesting ideas, and there are certain flavors/styles of description I enjoy writing.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Writing the fic. Getting into the writing zone, especially lately.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fics?

I think it's interesting! I would probably be too anxious to do it, no matter how well I knew the other language (though to be fair I google words and phrases in English to double check that they are things people say)

What was the first fandom you ever wrote for?

My friends and I plotted and partially wrote Doctor Who fanfic in the format of a season of the show/episode scripts, so I think Doctor Who. The first fandom I published a fic for was Nimona.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written so far?

oooh this is hard, I like so many of them for so many different reasons.

Every time I type out an answer, I go "wait, actually maybe a different one?"

Maybe 'you're going too fast, you'll burn up soon' because it took me so long to write but I'm so proud of it

Tagging: anyone who wants to!

#thank you both for tagging me #fanfiction #tag game

[kohlkopfus]

Picrew help, overview of limitations.

(Edit 27.03.23: I added something else to the bottom about folders and colors/the batch upload.)

(Edit 10.04.23: About Release status added to the bottom.)

Hello, I noticed these questions coming up regularly, so I wanted to provide an overview for people who are thinking about getting into designing their own picrew on the website.

First off: Try and use a browser that translates websites for you, like Google chrome, and look at the support/how to page on the website itself. A lot of things are explained there:

But, here are the basics:

Once you have an account you can create your own character dress-up maker (or randomizer).

On the main page is an overview of your parts and their settings. The preview image, if they're visible and how the user can manipulate the parts.

Inside each part section are buttons for the individual items and the settings. The settings are mostly for the positioning of the parts and to add new layers and colors.

On the top left of the website (in a fly-out menu) is your overall number of items and on the bottom/right side is your number of layers and their order.

Now to limitations.

________

50 Layers - That's how many different layers you can stack (think layers in an art program). For example: background (1), body (1), ears (left and right, 2) would be 3 "parts" categories but 4 layers in total, since you divided the ears into two separate layers. I don't know how many layers one part can have, but you can change the order of the layers independently of the parts position (so if your picrew order is "body", "ears", "background" then you can move the background layer to the bottom, ear 1 next, then body and then the second ear so they show up properly).

____

750 Items - That's the items you add to your parts. The different variations of hairstyles for example. I don't think there's a limit to how many items one part can have, but 750 is your overall maximum. I started running out of item slots and instead used the color slots to add different items instead. So there's not 1 item with 18 different colors but 18 different pictures with a similar theme on 1 item slot.

____

18 Colors - In the settings of each part there's the option to add a total of 18 colors to the parts, so they show up as color spots to upload your pictures to. I, for example, wanted to have natural skin color and fantasy skin colors, but had more than 18. That meant either reducing colors or making a second set of 18 colors available, which would also double every other bodypart. So I went with 10 natural and 8 fantasy skin colors instead. Keep this limitation in mind.

____

File dimension - The picrew canvas is 600x600 pixel big. Not much to work with and the quality won't be very good. If you want people to be able to resize the parts you need to save the picture as double size, so 1200x1200. Also consider saving preview pictures of small parts (dunno, moles?) in a bigger size so the preview isn't all pixelated.

____

File size - If you want to upload a very colorful png you might have a file bigger than 500kB, which is the limit. Tinypng.com and similar services can reduce the size losslessly.

__________________________

Self imposed limitations:

You can add your own filters based on color palette (changing hair to red changes the bangs to red as well), or undesirable item combinations (selecting horns removes hats and vice versa).

I like to have users figure that out by themselves, in case they want unusual combinations.

And that's it. Hope it helps.

Edit:

Batch/Bulk Upload - there are also limitations to the batch upload function. Instead of uploading every single picture at once you select one of your colors and fill the spots that way (You can switch over to that after going to your setting or item window. It'll show up as a third option on the top right).

Let's say we have the "Mouth" part with 4 items (neutral, smiling, pouting, screaming) and 5 colors. Black, Brown, Red, Pink, and Blue. To give every different mouth expression a different lipstick you first need to draw them and then divide the pictures you drew into folders sorted by color.

So your folders are called "black", "brown", "red", "pink" and "blue". Inside each folder are the four different pictures in the corresponding color.

(You can only upload 10 pictures at a time, in case you have more items than 10.)

For Picrew to know which picture to add to which item you need to name them according to their displayed number on the website. Ideally those would be "1.png" for the neutral expression, "2.png" for smiling, 3.png" for pouting, and "4.png" for the screaming mouth.

You can rearrange the order of the items by dragging them to different positions. The first can't be changed.

If you want to change the assigned number of the items to match their displayed position you gotta apply that in the advanced settings. I suggest experimenting a bit with those settings to not accidentally mess up.

Edit 2:

Releasing your Picrew - Picrew has two modes of viewing your maker. One is over the "Preview" tab and is only visible to you, the creator.

The preview version is always up-to-date and displays whatever you uploaded last to the website, but the published version (Where you pick from either public, secret or private publication mode) needs to be released every time you want a change to be permanent. So if you want the people with the link to your maker to see the newest edits, you have to make sure to press the "Release" button again.

"Public" is visible to everyone, "Secret" is only available to those who have a link (and the URL has "secret" in it) and "Private" is basically just the preview version (you can't check how your maker looks on the website).

#picrew #help #tutorial #limitations #dimensions

[linettefox]

How to watch Sally Bollywood in the 2020s?

TL;DR: I wanted to watch an obscure childhood favorite of mine but struggled to find it. Eventually found it right there on YouTube.

RAMBLING INTRO:

During my kid to early teen years, I was obsessed with a show called Sally Bollywood: Super Detectives. I made YTPs, wrote her into a butt ton of fanfiction, and made my PfP on Sonic Amino and Wattpad an image of her. But like most things for some reason I stopped watching it, this has happened a lot with my interests as a child I would make up an excuse like me growing up, worry people would judge me for it, or deem the series as being the devil? (I still don't know how that last one got into my child-brain, it was about Yokai Watch btw). But in the past few years starting from late 2020 onwards, I have started revisiting these things. Some I still have little interest in for actually valid reasons but the important ones have all stuck around. (I.e Yokai Watch, MySims, etc) So my next move is to let Sally back in. But without Quobo the channel it was most known for being on how was I supposed to watch it?

SENSICAL:

Sally Bollywood's first season is streamable in full on what claims to be "the safest free streaming service for kids" Sensical. At first, the layout of this site confused me but once I found the search bar I was good.

This is all well and good but how do I watch season 2? Sensical excludes the second season entirely and Wikipedia has little information on it besides episode names and a few air dates. At first, I thought this meant season 2 was lost media but I have actually seen episode 11 Night At The Museum on YouTube. How did they get the episode?

EDIT: The one I found on YouTube is actually season 1 episode 7 Trouble At the Museum not Night At the Museum. Still, there are season 2 episodes reuploaded onto YouTube so still, how did they get the episode?

PRIME VIDEO:

Likely this is how. In some parts of the world, I'm not sure where the series is available on Prime Video. If you have a VPN and know exactly where it can be found then you can watch it there, I unfortunately cannot. For some reason, they do appear to be missing episode 1 and likely a few others. This will not do.

🏴‍☠️:

The full series is available on a site, just out of order... For the most part, there is very loose continuity so I suppose it doesn't matter which order it is watched but I personally hate this! Everything I watch I strive to watch in chronological order oldest to newest so for me there is no way in hell I'm watching it on this site.

Episode 1 is supposed to be Cockroach Capers.

YOUTUBE:

Finally, after much searching, I found it where I should have gone in the first place, YouTube. The official Sally Bollywood channel has every single episode in both English and French separated in playlists but also combined into hour-long videos and mixed around into compilations. All the Sally you could ever want is right here.

Another thing I found particularly interesting is their affiliation with LoliRock. This is another nostalgic show I have always loved, never in my life would I have imagined Iris, Talia, and Aurianna being friends with Sally and Doowee. The category is translated via Google Translate to: "Other friends for more adventures!". They are also both now connected to Totally Spies which I have not seen but know some people may find that interesting.

IN CONCLUSION:

If you want to watch this obscure children's show after the death of Qubo, here it is! Qubo had a very diverse catalog of shows and when it ended these shows belonged to so many different people who know what happened to them! I hope that all of them at least found a home somewhere whether it's YouTube or a free streaming service. I was so worried this would be partially lost now but glad it is alive. This is off-topic but there are four Sally Flash games I'm not sure of the origins of, I'm not sure how to get them working so that is actually lost media right there.

I do have a plugin that can make some Flash games playable again but it only works for games that have been archived. Anyway, enough rambling I have a show to watch bye!

#sally bollywood #doowee mcadam #finding nostalgic kid's shows #rip Qubo #where did Qubo shows go? #How to watch #My journey #Thank you for reading #obscure media

[veliseraptor]

Hi, Lise......I can't help but want to ask (if you don't mind), what are your favorite (that you personally like) books or movies/ tv series that contains lesbias and gays? Thanks if you want to answer.....

wow I completely forgot this ask was sitting in my inbox and has been for a long while. and uhhhh the thing is here that I actually...feel like I don't have a separate category in my head, so much, for "media that has queer people in it" and "media that doesn't"? which like. feels weird to say, but when I get questions like this, or requests for recommendations, I always...struggle to parse these things out. and also to parse out, for instance, "books that read as having queer elements" from "books with explicitly queer characters."

but I guess if I'm gonna try...most of these are going to be books, with a few exceptions.

BOOKS

Doctrine of Labyrinths is a four book series that comes stamped with a whole list of content warnings (rape and child abuse chief among them, probably) but is also one of my favorite series of all time, so, you know.

The Masquerade series by Seth Dickinson also comes with a big "IT'S SAD. IT'S SAD AND DARK" warning, along with content warnings for serious societal homophobia, but is another one of my favorite series of all time. it's not that I hate happy queer stories or anything, I just tend to like stories that aren't happy

The Locked Tomb Trilogy by Tasmyn Muir which you've probably heard about by now, but honestly I think the common tagline of "lesbian necromancers in space" really doesn't...cover it? It's funny, it's weird, it's unique in terms of setting, story, and magic system, it's doing some very interesting things and I can't wait to find out where Muir is going with it. it's very much stylistically not something that's going to work for everyone, but I would recommend giving it a go and finding out if it works for you.

I loved the series by Lara Elena Donnelly that starts with Amberlough, but that one's definitely Rise of a Fascist State and therefore might not be everyone's cuppa right at the moment.

Oh, Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie is very queer, not in terms of, like, "these characters are explicitly gay" but more in terms of what she's doing with gender. I don't know that I'd say it's a central part of the book but it's an important enough piece of the worldbuilding at least that I'd put it here. I don't actually remember, textually, but Machineries of Empire also feels very queer to me in a similar sort of way. A queer theory sort of way, maybe? idk.

this one's a sort of...not for me exactly but it was cool rec, but The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon was very classic fantasy in a lot of ways, but gay, and with some fresh twists on old tropes.

COMICS

The Wicked and the Divine by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. look, it's just really good and not just for the queer. I need to do a reread from the top.

TV

I am really enjoying Motherland: Fort Salem actually, which I feel like people either aren't aware of or watch the first couple episodes and get turned off, but. one of the three main characters is lesbian, and sticks her hand down another girl's pants in like. the second episode? maybe even the first one, I don't remember.

Person of Interest doesn't introduce its gay until later in the series, but if you're anything like me as far as what you want in relationship dynamics you're in for a treat.

Yes, it is an animated children's show, but She-Ra and the Princesses of Power gave me such a gift it still makes me emotional because I'm going like. is this what it feels like to get what I want, canonically, in a piece of media? wow.

look, I'm putting The Untamed on here because (a) it is based on a gay webnovel and is pretty fucking gay considering the limits of censorship, everybody in the cast knows it and is playing it, and (b) some of the secondary relationships come off, I would argue, even gayer in the live action, probably because there are actor people putting them right in front of your face. (because the discourse is what it is: censorship isn't progressive, etc., but this is my list and I'm putting MDZS on here too.)

THOSE CHINESE WEBNOVELS I WON'T SHUT UP ABOUT

like, seriously. I mean, look, they take some work getting into because reading works in translation that come from a culture that you (general Anglophone you) may or may not be familiar with on one level or another actually does come with having to learn some shit and get used to some new things about genre and style, and reading webnovels maybe even more so, but as far as I'm concerned it's worth it.

so far the ones I've read are (titles in English, with common abbreviation, mostly from the Chinese) Heaven Official's Blessing (TGCF), Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (MDZS), Scum Villain's Self Saving System (SVSSS), The Husky and His White Cat Shizun (erha or 2HA), and (still finishing but at this point feel pretty comfy recommending) Clear and Muddy Loss of Love (JWQS).

there are several others on my list that I've had recommended and just haven't gotten to yet. my favorites personally are probably TGCF and 2HA, but I'm pending a reread of MDZS with a different translation to do my final assessment there and JWQS is giving me a lot of very good shit.

(I feel like I have to mention, because I'd be remiss if I didn't while I'm talking about ~personal preferences~, that the Coldfire Trilogy is astonishingly queer in my memory for one of the central relationships although it's been years since I read it, admittedly, and the Lymond Chronicles which is a series I love dearly is also incredibly queer, particularly for a series written in the 60s, and is like. juuuuust barely shy of having a canonically bisexual protagonist. and does have an explicitly lesbian secondary character, though fair warning, she, uh, does have it pretty rough.)

there's also some books that didn't make it on here even though they have queer characters because I felt like the queerness of those characters was not really key to the story, for instance the Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, which is fantastic in its own right and I would recommend to everyone, but didn't quite feel like it fit this post.

I'm almost certainly forgetting stuff, but I did my best.

#sometimes i read things #god making recs lists is always sort of stressful #conversating #anonymous

[muggle-writes]

Rules: Answer 21 questions and then tag 21 people who you want to get to know better.

tagged by @elizabethsyson

Nickname: Muggle is my nickname, but when I went by Muggle in person for more than a month at a time, it naturally got abbreviated, usually to Mugz

Zodiac: Aquarius

Last movie I saw: into the spiderverse (same answer as last time. I don't watch that many movies tbh except around Christmas. unless YouTube counts in which case... music of some sort? idk links for the next answer)

Favorite musician: changes by the day. I've kinda been in an acapella and/or folk music mood recently so the Maccabeats and Peter Hollens are in my YouTube and Spotify history a lot recently. also I'm eternally in awe of Forte Handbell Quartet (eta a longer video; i recommend skipping to the techno piece or the Jurassic Park theme)

Last thing I googled: "vine why are you buying clothes at the soup store" (my wife hasn't seen it; also i can't find the vine because apparently it's a much bigger meme than I realized). before that it was "chgrp not root" because work and group permissions are useful when they work

Song stuck in my head: well for most of the day when I haven't been actively listening to something, it's been the Pokemon RSE route-walking music. (but that somehow happens frequently when I'm in the no-music-no-internet room at work, as I was for most of the day, and I don't know how I accidentally trained my brain to make that connection). right now, surprisingly, I don't have any background music playing in my head. I think it's because the humidifier provides just enough white noise that my brain doesn't feel the need to provide its own

Other blogs: my main is @muggle-the-hat and I'm a mod on @why-do-neurotypicals but we've gotten one ask ever so that blog has been dormant for a while. I have a bunch of other sideblogs, but they're all small and I use different screen names on each of them (enby life: no idea which name suits me best so I may as well try them out) so i feel like it would just confuse things to link them.

Following: blogs matching all the themes of my sideblogs, (including this one, which is writeblr), korean langblr, jumblr, assorted fandom blogs, authors of my more favorite fanfictions (some overlap with other categories), and irl friends and acquaintances (including one fandom blog turned irl friend)

Do I get asks: on my main if at all, which isn't really surprising because i have hundreds of followers there and maybe 60 followers combined among the rest. but I get asks far less often than I reblog ask memes so... I'm always happy to get more. I do get tagged in ask games more on this one, but writeblr is actually vaguely organized about tag lists so that makes sense. also I used to get tagged a bunch on my main and I rarely could find the posts again to follow up when I had time to answer.

What I’m Wearing: pajamas. staying warm and cozy

Lucky number: I don't remember what I said last time, but I like a lot of numbers. 64 is a good number. recently I've been debugging software in which 0x3E is my lucky status number and 0x0E taunts me. (um, decimal 62 and 14). Also my other favorite number i can't share until it's no longer the combination to the lock to the Secret Room. (or realistically never because opsec and i shouldn't make public the types of parents we use for that combination lock), honestly I aim to be like.... ah, I'm sure the anecdote involves G.H. Hardy but i don't remember on which side. anyway one mathematician remarked to another about how the id number of the taxi he rode in was sadly uninteresting, and the one I aspire to be like, argued "what are you talking about, this number is interesting because ______" and I'd like to be able to do that for any arbitrary number thrown at me. (hi yes math is good, history is hard, math history is interesting yet i still forget the people even if i remember the math. except when things are named after people, but that tends to be, like, Euler and LaGrange and other people who did lots of cool science things so i remember the methods and the names of the methods separately which never helps)

Amount of sleep: ....depression both screws with my sleep schedule and means I always feel like I need more sleep except when I wake up at 5pm and feel like I've wasted the day. so yeah. I can never get enough sleep

Favorite food: yes (why do I have to pick a favorite?) uh, chocolate in most forms, many other sweet things, red meats (especially if served with potatoes), curry (especially if it has "too much" ginger), fresh-baked bread, chai the way my favorite local Indian restaurant makes it (spicier with just a little bit of sweet, which is the opposite of what i can get from the mocha machine at work which is wayyy sweet with a hint of spice but that inferior chai is still superior to coffee so i drink too much of it). also vegetables which I really don't eat enough of: sauteed zucchini and onions, roasted broccoli

Dream trip: dreaming requires creativity and tbh I funnel that mostly into my writing instead. I wouldn't mind going back to Korea for another visit though

Dream job: my current job is pretty good when I feel productive and when my debugging tools actually produce data maybe??? (they were not being helpful today. but i still mostly like my job.) dream job is probably this but with seniority and confidence and double the salary (while living in a similar area of the country; I wouldn't want to double my salary by moving to work for Google in California and having less available after rent than I do now)

Describe yourself as aesthetic things:

the smell of old books

the first glow of sunrise (the sunrise painting the mountains pink and gold)

a rainbow in the spray from a waterfall

the flicker of distant lightning (watching a thunderstorm fade into the distance)

this picture

Random fact: about me or about the world?

how about a combination answer: when we got our new handbell music this season, we only looked at half the pieces our first rehearsal and afterwards I tried to look up one of the pieces we hadn't gotten to on YouTube because it's got a weird time signature and I wanted to get a feel for how fast it would go and how strict the counting is...... except it turns out we're the first group to ever play the piece. it was commissioned recently but seeing my conductor's name on the page didn't tell me how new it was because he's super prolific. (the fact that it was on printer paper without the publisher's graphics should have been a giveaway but it's only the second time I've been among the first to play one of his pieces so I think I can be excused for not realizing)

Languages: mostly just English, but I took Spanish for years, so I can hold simple conversations in it. I can almost read sound out Hebrew fast enough to keep up in services, and I know some random Hebrew vocab but comparatively no grammar. and I took Korean in college, enough that I can recognize sentence structure but I can really only speak tourist-Korean, though I can sound anything out (if it's typed. handwriting is hit or miss.) in both Hebrew and Korean (and Spanish tbh but i don't often listen to Spanish music) I'm very proud when I can separate the words enough, listening to a song, to translate them without looking up the lyrics. also I tried to learn Japanese from Duolingo when it was new, but I still hadn't gotten the kana straight when it started progressing to kanji so that was a rough time and I went back to Hebrew.

tbh I "dabble" in "language learning" which really means I start a million courses on Duo and stick with none of them. with the notable exception of French, which I acknowledge is super common and probably a good idea to learn but the spelling and pronunciation seem so arbitrary I'm scared to look close enough to learn it properly, and I've never particularly considered starting the Duolingo course for French

I think I lost a few questions, because that's only 18 answers. whoops.

um... who to tag

@abluescarfonwaston if school hasn't drowned you in work yet and @copperscales I'm interested in both of your choices for lucky numbers especially.

... wow I'm blanking on other mutuals I haven't tagged recently. as usual lmk if you'd like to be edited in, or just answer the questions and tag me back, that's great too.

#tag games #i really like that 'describe yourself' question can we keep that around as a poetry prompt? #i think you also tagged me in a 'last line' tag game but i still haven't written anything #my creative energy has been (a) low and (b) directed specifically into generating matching titles for my purimgifts fics #i'll participate if i still remember by the time i'm doing 'real' writing again or you can just tag me the next time that game comes around