#like i guess german is a more precise language maybe?

[petermaximoffsrealwife]

Jealous

“Please do pablo gavi x reader where he gets jealous because you're talking to your idol football player (like jude, mbappe, trent, etc..)”

Quick disclaimer: English is not my first language so please keep that in mind when judging! I am fluent in Spanish so I will be providing a translation after every Spanish phrase.

“I'm so nervous, I don't exactly want to meet your teammates and all of their footballer friends”

“Yes you do amor, you're just nervous because there will be a lot of people you don't know”

“Wow, thanks for the affirmation babe” You were nervous. Since your boyfriend played for Barcelona, he had a lot of footballer friends who also have footballers friends which meant that he was obviously invited to Robert Lewandowski's annual Christmas party. Not only were you terrified because it was your first impression of his teammates, but you were afraid to be compared to everyone else's fabulous model girlfriends. To make it short, you were not excited.

“Look, it's going to be fine, they're going to love you and I know you're going to love them, even Manuel might be there.”

“Manuel… as in Manuel Neuer. He's going to be there! No way, no way. Oh my god, now I'm even more scared than before. I have to make a good impression so he doesn't hate me while also realizing my presence and the fact that I exist.”

And that is when Gavi realized his mistake. He had always known you had loved the German goalkeeper, even going as far to attend all of the Bayern FC games as much as possible, including the ones where they played Barcelona, and managed to root for Manuel and his team instead of your boyfriend and his team.

“Oh, I guess but you know he might not even show up. He could be busy or whatever.” Gavi tried to deflate your emotions by hinting that he might now show up but he knew he would show up, after all, he and Robert were friends and teammates for years. He had to prepare himself for a night of you ignoring him, and not being jealous. But he wasn’t jealous, maybe envious, but definitely not jealous.

“Okay maybe he might not, but now that I think about it he probably will show up. He's been friends and teammates with Lewandowski for years and I still think they might be friends. They were really connected during their time at Bayern. Okay, so I just need you to introduce me to him, and then I'll connect with him because I know everything there is to know about him and Bayern…” You went on and on about your plan to impress Neuer and Gavi just sat there listening. Well, not precisely listening. He was just staring at you pretending to listen to you, he couldn't precisely stand to listen to you rant about your favorite player of all time (which was not him). But no, he was not jealous. At all.

You two had finally arrived at Robert’s house and it was beautiful, the whole house was decorated with wonderful lights and cute decorations. Gavi had parked and was now getting out of the car so that he could open the door for you and lead you into the house, like a gentleman.

Standing outside of the door you stopped, which worried Gavi.

“Qué te pasa? Porque parastes? ¿Estás bien?” (What happened to you? Why’d you stop? Are you good?)

“Si, si estoy bien solo estoy nerviosa. Qué pasa si a ellos no les gusto?” (Yeah, yeah I'm fine I'm just nervous. What happens if they don't like me?)

“Amor, te digo otra vez, ellos te van a amar. Tu eres perfecta en cada aspecto tuyo y no tengo duda que te van a amar.” (Love, as I tell you once again, they will love you. You are perfect in every aspect and I have no doubt that they will love you.)

“Okay, okay. I think I'm ready, let's go in.” You assure Gavithat you're ready. Not really, but he doesn't need to know that. As soon as you ring the doorbell the door opens and reveals Robert.

“Gavi! Ay, my favorite youngster come in come in!” Robert exclaimed cheerily with an expression only defined as one thing: drunk. “Oh! This must be your girlfriend, the big Bayern fan. Come in there's food and drinks at the table.” He points to a long table filled with all kinds of food and desserts as well as a big variation of drinks; both alcoholic and non-alcoholic.

You both made your way around, Gavi introducing you to his teammates and their girlfriends/wives. After you had been properly introduced to everybody you both sat down on a couch calmly talking. “Wow, Gavi! This is great! The house is so big and beautiful and your teammates are all so nice and friendly! You were right, there was nothing for me to worry about.”

As you finished talking, Gavi had stopped paying attention and instead stared intently at something. You had noticed he wasn't listening to you anymore and turned around to look at whatever he was staring at when you saw him, your idol: Manuel Neuer. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…” you trailed off as you stared at him.

Gavi realized that you had noticed him too and cleared his throat which brought your attention back to him. “What, what were you saying babe,” he asked to try and deflect your attention back to him and not Manuel, to add effect he kissed you deeply and held your hand.

“Oh it's nothing, did you see him? I am freaking out, I made eye contact with him, and I'm about to have a panic attack.” You confess, thinking nothing of Gavi's sudden jaw clenching. You knew that there was no one in your heart except Gavi, but getting him jealous was always a harmless game he didn’t realize he was playing.

“Yeah, I saw him.” He replied shortly. Realizing you had already gotten him jealous, you decided to go and meet Manuel. Yes, you were afraid to meet him, he was your idol, after all, but riling up your boyfriend seemed more exciting. Getting up from his lap, you headed over to where Manuel was. “Wish me, luck babe.”

“How about I go with you? I would like to meet him as well.” Gavi suggests. He knew that if he was there by your side then Manuel would get the idea; keep in mind, Manuel was married with kids, in which he showed no romantic interest towards you but for some reason that was not clicking for your boyfriend.

“I would love that, it would really make me feel better.” And with that, you both stood up and made your way over to where Manuel was standing with his family. Yiu stopped in the middle of walking to turn around and talk to Gavi. “You know what maybe this isn’t the greatest idea.”

“Babe as much as I dont want you to meet him-“

“…Wait what?”

“I-I mean as much as I know you want to meet him-“

“Heard you the first time. Got you babe.” You laughed at him while Gavi slowly opened his mouth very clearly indicating surprise.

“Wait, wait wait wait… what.”

“You are so easy to make jealous and this was the perfect chance to get back at you for your prank the other day. I knew we would be going here, I knew he would be here, and I knew you would have no choice to endure it or lose your pride.” You admit.

He just stares at you. “Estas diciendo la verdad?” (are you telling the truth?). He can only make out a few words because he’s truly in shock. He can’t beliege you would jonás far as making him jealous just to get him back for scaring you one time. It wasn’t even that bad.

“Claro que si! Tú crees que iba a dejar eso así? And I thoight you knew me better than that.” (Of course! You thought I was gonna key that go?)

“Oh.” Was all Gavi said. safe to say he had learned his girlfriend never forgot even the smallest of things and would go as far to prey on his ego. “Okay lesson learned.”

“Good now let’s go get some drinks.”

“Wait. you don’t want to meet Manuel? He’s your idol?” He asked.

“Oh no I do! I’m just scared so I won’t.”

And that was when Gavi realized he could prank you: again. “Hey Manuel!” he called out to your idol. “So nice to meet you this is my girlfriend y/n and she’s such a big fan of yours.” He told Manuel. You were so shocked and amazed that no words came out and just shook Manuel’s hand with a smile on your face and revenge on your mind.

“So nice to meet you I always love meeting a fan!” Manuel admitted. He had heard the conversation leading to the interaction so he knew that you truly were a fan of him and that this was a way of payback for your boyfriend.

“So nice to meet you too! Would you mind excusing us for a minuet?” You asked nto sticking around for an answer as you grabbed Pablo and dragged him outside.

“I will kill you.”

“Mierda.” (Shit.)

Guys ik ik this took so long but to be fair I did have a research paper assigned the day I got back. I have so many requests and I ahve started on each one so there probably will be so many posted at the same time. Requests are close for the moment but will be opened up again once I finish every request.

#gavi #pablo gavi x reader #gavi x reader #barcelona #fc barça #fc bayer münchen #chelsea #pedri #pedri x reader #mason mount x reader #jude bellingham x reader #spain

[asitrita]

Hello there! I'm sorry for the random ask but I've been wondering: what got you interested in Spanish history?

I love your blog! It's very informative and it's always nice to hear historical events featuring Spain from a Spanish perspective :)

-Cheers!

Long answer because I just can't summarise even if my life depended on it.

First of, this was very nice of you. And I'm sorry I took a few days to answer. Thank you so much for your ask and sorry for the testament you're going to read next XD

Just to give a short version (long answer below), it was basically thanks to my History teacher at the conservatory, an English teacher (both him and the subject XD), and I must confess Hetalia also played a small but significant part in my liking for history.

--------o--------

In all honestly it was a process. I think it was actually my professor of "History and Evolution of Music" who first sparked the flame. Though his purpose was to teach us about the evolution of music since ancient times up to jazz and blues, focussing mostly on Medieval, Renaissance and Classical works, he would throw in pieces of historical information in his explanations. Mostly about the wars and battles Spain had against England. The ones we won, obviously (so most of them u.u lol). He used to talk very dirty about the English hahahaha But he actually had an English (boy)friend, who of course was also a musician and played the lute, and he invited him over one day and they would have discussions about composition none of us were actually able to follow XD. But I think what sparked my interest for history was the day he brought an actual cannon ball to classroom. After telling yet one of the many battles Spain took part in, he started complaining about how little did Spanish people knew about Spain's history, and even looked down on it. He rambled about how young generations knew nothing at all (as if he wasn't in his 30's and was already and old man lol) due to Hollywood and films portraying everything the wrong way, mocking the way everything in the big screen was about explosions and fire everywhere. So yeah, next week he came to class with an actual cannon ball and made a very graphic (and maybe unnecessary gory) description of all the possible wounds it could inflict to the person it hit, and all the damages it could do to a ship.

Then came Hetalia. Actually, yet again, it was really Spuk, but long story short, Hetalia did "brought to life" my interest in history which for a couple years had muted down.

And what finally made me love history (more precisely Spanish history, but I do find history in general interesting) was actually a teacher I had in England, in one of these immersive summer courses in which you go to a foreign country to live with a host family for a number of weeks, you have intensive English lessons in the morning and activities in the afternoon. This teacher had been living in Spain for 7 years in the late 80's and early 90's and he knew much more about Spain than I did. I was the only Spaniard in my class, the rest of the students were all Germans,Swish and Italians, so i guess I stood out a little bit more because he was familiar with my country. Thing is, he would mention stuff I didn't know about my own country. Usually in a positive light. And he actually told me off a couple of times I complained about my country's doings (for example, I was once explaining how foreign languages in Spain are not taught well and that's why we struggle with English). He disagreed and he actually was so convincing in his arguments (no, we did not have a shitty education system, teachers were not bad, nor were we lazy nor bad students, problem was somewhere else) that I actually changed my mind completely. Now, quite a few years later, I am still convinced he was actually right and I was just repeating the same things I heard adults around me say without really analysing the matter objectively. To sum it up, he thought of my country better than I did, not because I intended to think bad of it, I just had a lot of prejudices. And he also knew a whole lot more about Spain than I did, and I sometimes almost felt embarrassed by this fact. He spoke so nice of certain aspects of Spain's society and history and I could do nothing but nod and say "if you say so it must be right" cause I had no idea about it nor had ever even thought of it in the way he did. I think he was the reason I started getting more interested in Spanish history in particular. Yes, I previously had an interest a bit more focused on Spain because it was my country, but I wouldn't really actively research anything but in some very scarce occasions.

To be perfectly honest, I was always good at history. I've always liked legends, cultural stuff, myths, heroic epics, etc. Sure, history is more complex, but chivalric tales are a nice start XD I always had a soft spot for foreign cultures and always tried to link the dots. I have French family, and there's always a bit of bickering over historical and cultural stuff, so when I learned about the age of 5 about the Roman Empire I was all "oh, so French were Roman like us?" and had a Roman phase, so to speak. Thing is, though I showed a liking for historish and culturish stuff in general, I never liked history lessons. My grades in History in primary and secondary school were 10/10, but I hated the subject itself XD. I think I had to get out of school and have some non-school exposure and approach to history to actually learn to appreciate it.

#asks

[wh0lemilk0vich]

what's you're favorite word or saying in Irish, polish, German. And russian?

Languages are so cool butt I get mixed up enough in english. I could never grasp more than hola, bonjour, and guten tag.

-🌊 aka enn-glay

Ooh tough one

I guess I'll say in Irish I love it's kennings. A kenning is a compound expression that is used to name something metaphorically like Mac Tíre for wolf (lit. Son of the land) Bóín Dé for lady bug (god's little cow) madra crainn for squirrel (dog of the tree)

In Polish I love the nasal vowels and hushers which are the particularly whispery consonants like 'sh' in English so I like the word for beetle - chrząszcz it's one syllable

I like Wortbau in German basically Morphology which is my favorite linguistic discipline. With enough knowledge of words and morphemes you can create really precise and easily understood words in German i suggest looking up Verschlimmbesserung

I like a lot of grammatical features of Russian but I don't know that I have a favorite word, maybe Достопримечательность which means sight (like sight seeing) or attraction and morphologically is like a thing worthy of being noticed

#misha speaks #ling things #🌊 anon

[rosalinastan]

If Heidegger's ideas were actually good maybe he would have figured out a way to say them that literally made any sense at all. Sorry king, workshop this bad boy a few times and then maybe we'll publish :/

#this is funny to no one #also! I'm not just stupid! #this shit can make sense but only if you try really hard to forget how language works #and i think if your goal is for people to understand your ideas #you should be saying them in a way that follows the rules of literally any language #pick one king #theres no way this made more sense in german #like i guess german is a more precise language maybe? #but like #it takes so many words to say like #not even that much #fuck heidegger #or at least fuck his translator #philosophy #being and time

[ricky4479]

First, hello. A few facts about me: I'm German, currently still living in Germany, going to school, 10th grade and am somewhat interessted in history. As it is in Germany you can't be interessted in history without at least knowing more about World War 2 than the average person, although I believe that Germans tend to see the horror in it, yet still make jokes and laugh about it more than other nations. There also are a lot, and I mean a lot of movies about WW2 or set in WW2. One of these is my number 3 favorite movie, Inglorious Basterds. Now, when I first watched IB, I immediately (as so many of us probably) fell in love with SS-Colonel Hans Landa, whom I'll just be referring to as Hans from now on. I wondered about something everytime I watched him though and that was what exactly made him so terrifying? What makes our blood run cold the moment we hear this abstract, weird version of Für Elise, or at least this abstract song with the Für Elise beginning? What makes us feel as if we're in serious danger everytime Hans is on screen? It couldn't just be the uniform or his obvious Nazi typical mannerisms, no, otherwise we would have been just as scared of Gestapo Major Dieter Hellstrom and I don't know about you, but the more I watch IB, the more I think Dieter is just hilariously failing at trying to be like Hans.

So, what made Hans so different? Well, in my opinion you can already see that in the first scene.

Let's make one thing clear here, I'm a writer, I want to become a psychologist, I can't and won't talk about this in a cinematography kind of way, but rather on a people level. Also, I'm a theatre kid, so I'm gonna use some of the shit I learned in drama class and all in all this is just a lot of rambling and me fanboying over Nazi Daddy Landa, so don't take everything I say too seriously.

The first thing I want to briefly touch upon is the music. The iconic intro of Für Elise, a song that screams German and what is it followed by? Abstract, not at all fitting notes, making you feel uneasy because something isn't right at all. LaPadite and his daughter also show this perfectly. She sees the car driving their way, the music sets in, their erratic, nervous and you as the audience don't know why. You can guess why, a German song in the background, a movie set in WW2? This is going to be Nazis, no doubt, but you're still uneasy because something just doesn't seem right. Not one bit.

And then Hans arrives, open top car, showing that he's not at all scared about what he is doing. He tells his men he doesn't want to be disturbed and walks up to LaPadite, asking if this land belongs to the LaPadites, fully aware that of course it does, but still being polite, asking questions, introducing himself and shaking LaPadites hand. This handshake shows perfectly that from that moment on Hans has full control over the entire situation. Hans is the one initiating the handshake and he holds it. If you look closely you can see LaPadite trying to take his hand away, but Hans doesn't let him. He looks into LaPadites eyes, holding the stare, his hand still firmly gripping LaPadites. Hans politely asks if he could be invited in, a clear order disguised as a polite question and when LaPadite agrees and wants to walk off, Hans lays his hand on LaPadites upper arm, showing that he has a higher status than LaPadite, that he is in control and they both know it.

The next bit that just makes you hold your breath is when Hans meets LaPadites daughters, mesmerized by Charlottes beauty, her having blonde hair and blue eyes, the Arien norm the Nazis were so fascinated with. She is the only one he pays attention to, staring at her even after sitting down, his face devote of emotion, just an emtpy stare that you're unable to read. When another of the daughters was asked to get him a glass of wine, Hans gripped her arm, soft, yet clearly in a threatening way. We know he has power over everyone in that room, but we don't see him clearly abusing this power, we only see small motions like that and that makes us nervous, because we wait for the moment he snaps but it just doesn't happen.

When he tells LaPadite to sit down with him and tells him to send his girls outside, we see that this is Hans' stage. He decides who goes where when and you follow those orders.

Next Hans asks to switch the language to English because his French is exhausted and he would only embarrass himself if he kept on talking, but once you have seen the full scene, you know this was only so that he could have a full conversation with LaPadite without the Dreyfuses underneath the floorboards knowing too much and making a silent escape.

From here on it gets really clear that Hans doesn't accept a simple yes or no as an answer, or any answer that he deems as too vague. He asks LaPadite to „please tell me waht you've heard“ after asking him if he's familiar with who Hans is, reminding LaPadite of the monster that is sitting in front of him. He wants LaPadite to talk, to slip up and reveal himself so that Hans can get the job done with and leave.

Hans smiles when LaPadite tells him that his visit may be pleasant, but LaPadite doesn't know why Hans is there. Hans smiles because he knows LaPadite is lying and we know that Hans knows. That's a terrifying thought. We don't know how he knows, all we know is he does. Hans entire preperation happened off screen, we know exactly nothing about him except for the fact that he knows. That he has power and knows the secrets hanging heavy in the air.

He drags the entire process as long as he can, doing everything neat and tidy, getting LaPadite to talk, asking him questions, still accepting no vague answers. When LaPadite asked if he could smoke his pipe, Hans reacts in a sort of „don't be silly“ demeanor. As if he isn't the one in control of everything, but just a mere guest in LaPadites house out of pure friendliness from LaPadite.

Now, let's get to my favorite part of the scene, the rat speech. This entire speech is just so that we would agree with Hans. Makes us understand his position, maybe even feel sympathy for him. He says he loves his nickname „precisely because I've earned it.“, saying it as if he means „I worked hard for this“, trying to gather sympathy. „I don't consider the comparison an insult“ can be read as the typical „I'm not the bad guy here, I'm not like them, I don't have anything against Jews.“ and I'm pretty sure I am not the only one believes him with that, who believes him that he never had anything against Jews, but merely just followed the regime flooding the entirety of Europe. When he says he doesn't consider the comparison an insult, he puts a hand onto his chest, underlining this „it's not me who's the bad one“ meaning. He makes us agree with him through comparisons like the one between a rat and a squirrel, because it's true. He repeats certain aspects, making it clear that they are important, making us think about it and in the end agreeing. It's terrifying to realize how easy he can make you agree with something so atrocious. It's as if he gets into your head with complete ease.

I always felt as if the phrase „Because I'm aware of what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once they abandon dignity“ felt off. Just, not really fitting, but that's for another time. After smoking his ridiculous pipe, which, let's be honest here, was not intended to intimidate LaPadite further, but was probably just something Hans thought was fucking hilarious (it was) since Hans is someone with a sense of humor. A really dark and disturbed sense of humor, but he loves cracking jokes and this was one of them. Anyway, he emphasizes a lot on the word „dictates“. His job dictates that his men conduct a search. Hans doesn't want to do this but he has to. It's again this weird sense of sympathy we feel for him. When he talks about the irregularities and says that „rest assured there will be“ some, we have the last clue that we needed. Now it's obvious that Hans knows everything. He knows that the Dreyfuses are hiding beneath the floorboards, he knows LaPadite has been lying, he knows everything.

What he is doing now is disguising obvious threats as rewards, telling LaPadite that his family would be save if he told Hans everything Hans wanted to know, reminding him that his daughters were outside with Hans men and that with one word from Hans, they could be shot on the spot and by now not just LaPadite but also the audience know that Hans would indeed give them the order to kill the girls just to get the information he wants.

I believe that from here on it's very obvious why we're so scared of Hans, if you don't remember, go back and watch the scene again. Actually, go watch the entire movie, it's wonderful.

Now, this was just a short retelling of the first 20 minutes, a lot of the things I mentioned were repeated to enhance the feeling and of course I may be reading way too much into this, but honestly? I don't care. It was fun writing this, it was even more fun staring at frame for frame of those first 20 minutes for more than 2 days, talking to myself more than I talked to anyone else the entire past week, but I just love Hans on so many levels. Christoph Waltz acting is amazing, he is an amazing actor that deserves the two Oscars he won and even more and I hope we will see him in a lot more movies before having to part from him.

Please excuse any mistakes since it's fairly late, I'm dying on the inside (well, I'm already dead inside but you know what I mean), English isn't my mothertongue and all in all I'm just ranting as always.

Stay hydrated you wonderful human beings.

#hans landa #inglorious basterds #christoph waltz

[borisbubbles]

26. SWITZERLAND

Gjon’s Tears - “Répondez-moi”

*GASP* I DON’T LOVE GJON’S TEARS!!!! JK He’s perfectly fine, imo. You guys know that I like to divide my songs according to the trafflc light scheme (green = good, yellow = meh, red = bad). “Répondez-moi” is like a very, *very* pale shade of chartreuse - I almost like it. But I do have a few caveats that prevent me committing myself to it. 

Song Analysis

On the surface, this is a lowkey brilliant entry. “Répondez-moi” is very cleverly put together, using Gjon’s wide register to create a gender-ambiguous, emotionally ridden tone, further reinforced by a simple, yet effective flurry of guitar strings and edm percussive noises. 

Ho boy, two paragraphs in and I’m already otno the technical stuff - probably the biggest indicator of how unimpressed I am by this song. Good Music, snooooore where’s the funtrash at (safely tucked inside the upper half of the ranking, d’uh) I can appreciate “Répondez-moi”’s technical brilliance and I can appreciate it more here than I did with “Fai Rumore” or “Divilji Vjetre”, because unlike those two, Répondez-moi actually *is* contemporary and original. It accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. 

However, if I’m honest, the only thing I outright like is how you could argue GHOSTING as a narrative theme for this song - “I AM READY TO THROW IN THE TOWEL! ANSWER ME!!! :read at  22:23:” is a pretty fun pretend-meaning to be slapping onto this song. Sadly, I know French and I know that a lie, tragique, je sais. The real meaning, as far as I can gather is about ~the inability to come with the capriciousness of life and death~ or some pseudo-philosophical meandering spliced into the song to make it look intelligent WELL SORRY TO SAY YOUR SONG IS NOW ABOUT GRINDR GHOSTING, GJON, I HAVE *DECIDED*!!!!

“Répondez-moi” is absolutely one of those songs which are caught up by their own competency. You see, entries such as these come just barging in all “THIS IS HIGH QUALITY AND YOU WILL LIKE IT” and well, unlike the “I AM SOPHISTICATED, I USE *~*PITCHFORK*~*” crowd, I really just don’t care so long as the humanizing component I desperately need to cling to remains absent. 

 “Répondez-moi” feels like it is a good song, but at the same time listening to it also feels like sitting through a fucking TED-Talk. It’s the “How To Click with Everyone Every Time” amongst this batch of songs  and while I do feel like it accomplishes precisely what it sets out to be without ever being tedious or uninteresting, I don’t feel any sort of personal connection. Maybe if Gjon had some live charisma to show for (which is largely absent from the VC - maybe that’s just a Me Thing but Gjon’s muffin hair completely neuters his sex appeal for me), but alas. 

Oh and, there’s another reason why I don’t rly care that much about Gjon: This year had *so many* “Répondez-moi”s (many of which didn’t even win their NFs? Carrying that torch for Moniqué, Barbora Mochowa and Dotter), and I like the gross of them more. Downside of being an internal selectee is that the journey only starts once rehearsals do. 

Switzerland 2020 vs Switzerland 2021

Gjon fans claim that Gjon could’ve won ESC 2020 and well... not rly? First of all, Victoria and Roxen both exist and draw from the same votepool, so he would require better staging. Secondly, yes he got SJB, but everyone was already eating out of Victoria’s hand from the moment she was announced and besides, SJB was already busy working her magic towards making Tornike the break-out star of the year. Thirdly, BABY, I CAAAAAAAN’T WAIT TO KNOW WHADOYUTINKABOUTINGS ::twerks in teal tracksuit::

I do love the (only existing in the minds of clinically insane Eurovision nerds) pattern of “Switzerland wins every 32 contests with a French-speaking ballad” though. I guess we’ll never know :-) 

oh yeah and ofc he’s back in 2021, post-Zibbz switzerland aren’t dumb.

Congratulations top 25:

Freaky! Friday! Factor!

OMG I remember when the first rumours of Gjon’s Tears came around, and a preview spoiled the Swiss song *wasn’t* in English or German (but in a language a German-Swiss man wasn’t able to recognize), there was some RAMPANT wild spec that Gjon, who is Kosovar-Swiss, might be singing in ALBANIAN AND FRENCH. 😍

Imagine how SICK that would’ve been had this actually come to fruition. Gjon wouldn’t just have murdered Arilena. He would’ve molecularly disassembled her inside a gravitron collider and then would have force-fed the substrate to Mikaela Mingle herself. That shit WOULD have been hilarious, except, it never happened, kinda like how Eurovision 2020, and me having a career never really happened. 

I can (and will) hand out a few Senheads for Gjon though. Not only is “Répondez-moi” the first *truly* competent (as in: release me outside of esc and I survive in the hit parades) Swiss entrant since... idk...”Canzone per te”? “Io Senza Te”? “Ne T’en Vas Pas”??? A long, long time, probably before you and I were born. It’s also in FRENCH, not English and probably would’ve cemented Switzerland’s renaissance into a decent Eurovision country. The entry itself isn’t too exciting to me, but its potential place inside the canon definitely could have been. 

Score: 3 Senhits out of 5:

#Eurovision #Eurovision 2020 #Eurovision Song Contest #Switzerland #Gjon's Tears #gjon muharremaj #repondez-moi

[moirai-au]

16 with Henrik and Chase :3

Timeline: beginning of Arc 5: The Orator

Warning: this is Davil (dave x cecil). there are mentions of nsfw stuff, implied self-harm, and maybe a mention of homophobia??? but other than that it’s clean.

it was supposed to be a short and fluffy thing, but it turned into this absolute monster wtf. but you already know this tabby, my partner in crime! love ya

(if anyone wants to read the longer, nsfw version of this, head right over here)

“Mars almost lit the kitchen on fire again.”

Cecil blinked and turned to look at David; the other wasn’t looking at him, eyes set on the diminishing pile of clean laundry between them. His movements were swift and precise, folding the clothes and beddings with practised care, like he’d done it a million times before.

Which he probably had, being a father and all.

“Is that so?” Cecil mumbled, eyeing the black button-up shirt in his hands. Probably Mars’, he though. He hadn’t worn one of those in a long time, verdammt. How did they fold again?

“Yeaaah. I’m really starting to consider giving him cooking lessons.” Dave chuckled, his voice echoing slightly in the small room. “I swear this kid could burn water if we left him unsupervised.”

The doctor only hummed in response, trying not to get caught on the way Chase’s hands moved with rhythmic intent, or the way theauburn bangs peeking out from under his snapback made the blue of his eyes pop, or-

Nein.

His low hum died in his throat as he swallowed, painfully aware of the strangled sound that had escaped him, trying his very best to shake it off. He was almost scared to look up and risk making eye contact with Dave, to be confronted about what he knew was such a meaningless non-problem that it shouldn’t even be crossing his mind…

He bit his tongue, setting down the shirt he’d been holding idly for seconds, a small sigh escaping his lips.

They kept going as if nothing had changed.

Had it?

“I wish you the very best of luck,” Cecil muttered, picking up another article of clothing. “You should have seen the mess he created when attempting to bake me a Father’s Day cake when he was five…”

“Oh?” Dave asked, clearly intrigued. “Was it any good?”

Despite the unwelcome warmth and tingles spreading through his veins, Cecil let out a mirth-filled huff of laughter. “After I scraped what was left of it from the ceiling, it was… adequate. Certainly not winning any awards.”

David seemed to find Cecil’s response humorous, judging by the way his eyes lit up with mirth. He chuckled lightly, and the doctor felt his breath hitch at the sound. “Well,” the father said, “it’s the thought that counts, right?”

Cecil nodded distractedly, eyes trailing back to the lump of fabric in his hands, and cringed; the folding was all wrong. Scheiße. How was he supposed to focus with the other man babbling away next to him, the space between them so thin he could almost feel his warmth through his sweater vest-

“Um, Doc? Helloooo, Earth to Cecil, you with me?”

He tensed up, jaw tightening; He felt on edge, restless, filled with confusion and annoyance and something else that made his insides twist in the most peculiar way.

Dave leaned forward, catching Cecil’s stiff expression. His brow furrowed in concern; was the doc mad at him? It wouldn’t be out of character for him, David always seemed to get on his nerves for some reason, but still…

He looked down and spotted the black button-up balled up in the doctor’s clenched fists. “Oh, are you having trouble with that shirt?” he tried, treading carefully. He reached out, his hand brushing up against the German’s as he tried to grab the fabric. “Here, l can-”

Cecil flinched at the sudden contact, a sharp intake of air resonating in the room. Dave did a double-take, worry squeezing his chest at the other’s tight expression. “Ceec? Shit, are you hurt or something?”

“I am fine.” the German hissed at him, folding the black shirt frantically and messily. “I know how to fold a shirt, David. Mars was never good at taking care of his own things.”

“That’s not- I don’t care about the damn shirt! For fuck’s sake, right now the only thing I’m worried about is you!”

The doctor clenched his jaw, not responding and stubbornly keeping his eyes on the folding table. He wasn’t in the mood for this. He didn’t want to discuss this.

Problem was, it was becoming increasingly difficult not to out himself right there, right now, with Dave hovering so close he could almost feel his breath on his cheek…

The father shook his head. “You’ve been out of it all morning- c'mon Doc, for me?”

“No.”

“For you?”

”No.”

“Will you just tell me what’s wrong?”

"No! Nothing is wrong, I am okay.”

"Oh for the love of- stop telling me you’re okay! I’m here for you if you-”

That’s when Cecil snapped.

“How do you keep doing that?” he hissed between clenched teeth, suddenly turning around to take a step closer to Dave. The younger man’s eyes widened in surprise, taking a step back as the older man advanced on him; and ended up with his back flush against the wall. His expression was the textbook definition of oh god what did I do. “C-Cecil?”

“Why do I become such a mess everytime you speak to me?” the German accused, his voice seemingly on the edge of breaking.

That must’ve been the moment his brain decided to stop working, because the next thing he knew his lips were on Dave’s, his hands squeezing the other’s shoulders for dear life. The coil of anxiety in his stomach, instead of loosening up like he’s expected it to, was only getting tighter and tighter with each passing moment. He felt lightheaded, the chills coursing through his body colliding with the growing heat in his belly, the lightest touch from the younger man lighting a fire under his skin.

He barely registered the surprised sound coming from the other man as their faces collided, nor the feeling of warm fingertips tentatively settling on the side of his face, or the fact that the other was tilting his head to deepen Cecil’s clumsy kiss.

I want this I don’t want this

I want to hold you I want to run away

His body started trembling under the onslaught of conflicting emotions, and he let out a choked sob; he had no idea what he was doing, everything was slipping out of his control and it felt like tethering at the edge of a cliff, the smallest breeze threatening to push him over.

Gott, he hadn’t realized how starved he was for human contact. When was the last time anyone had touched him so gently?

At this moment, Cecil wanted so, so much. So much to say, to feel, to run his hands through that annoyingly messy hair and pull the other man flush against him and let him in give him everything he was and ever will be please please please something anything-

“Ceec? Cecil, jesus, are you okay?”

The doctor gasped, unaware that he had been holding his breath this whole time. He blinked back into awareness and found Dave staring at him with this soft, concerned expression of his, which only made Cecil’s heart ache more intensely. “I-” he started, only to devolve into a sudden coughing fit; his throat had seized up, making his voice come up in a broken croak.

“S’okay,” Dave whispered, running his hand up and down his arm in a comforting gesture, “It’s okay Doc. Take your time.”

The cap-wearing man moved his other hand to gently brush his thumb against Cecil’s cheek; it came back wet, to the doctor’s surprise and following mortification. Surely he wasn’t that desperate!

Was he?

He groaned and rubbed at his own face, wiping the tears away as he tried to gain a semblance of decorum back. “I… apologize. I don’t know- I’m not… usually like this.”

“Like what? Human?”

Cecil blinked; David was smiling up at him, his cerulean eyes crinkled up in amusement. “I’m not gonna get offended by you showing emotion, you doof. Do you need to sit down?”

He nodded, a shiver running through his spine when Dave grasped his hand to lead him out of the room, the unfinished pile of laundry left behind and forgotten.

***

“So. You have feelings.”

An eyeroll. “Hilarious. But yes.”

“Feelings for me.”

A nod.

“Romantic ones?”

“Among… other types, yes.”

They had moved into the living room, both of them sitting across each other on the plush red couch. Dave had kept a respectful distance between them, which Cecil wasn’t sure whether he hated or found comfort in.

The dad plopped his elbows on his crossed legs, resting his head in his hands. “I like the sound of that.” he winked, making Cecil groan in irritation. Why, out of all people, did he have to fall for such an aggravating little-

“But seriously though, you looked really freaked out back there. Did I do something wrong?”

Cecil lost his trail of thought; Dave’s tone had lost that teasing edge, and he was looking at him with genuine concern. The German took a deep breath, fighting off the anxiety swelling in his chest; guess there was no point in hiding it now, was there?

“I was… overwhelmed.” he began, scanning the other’s body language. Dave only nodded, silently prompting him to keep going. So he did.

“I had never really… felt for someone that way before. Not this strongly.”

“But weren’t you married once? That’s what you told us anyway.”

He shook his head. “Irrelevant. Vanessa and I- we wed out of convenience. And because it seemed like the most logical action to take at the time.”

“Waddaya mean?”

Cecil pursed his lips; this conversation was making him re-live a part of his life best buried in his subconscious, away from the surface. He took a moment to center himself, focusing on the way the couch felt under his fingers. And when he spoke again, his words came a lot easier.

“In my teenage years, I felt… alienated.” he continued. “Other boys my age were eloping left and right, while I just didn’t see the appeal.”

He folded his arms on his lap, rubbing them absentmindedly. “When I met Vanessa, we… clicked. Intellectually anyway. We agreed on a lot of things, and she ended up confessing to me.”

He rubbed his neck, grimacing slightly. “I was young and foolish. I thought that maybe this could work. We got along well, we shared common interests, and marrying her would allow me to get a US citizenship, which I’d been wanting for a while. I thought we could be happy, even without the more… physical aspect of a relationship.”

He sighed. “But… in the end, she wanted more out of this than I did. Things I couldn’t give her. So she grew bored.”

He hadn’t realised he had started trembling until he felt Dave grasp his hand, running his fingers along the palm and back. He didn’t try to pry it away, letting the soothing motions ground him again. “And-” he breathed out, voice strained and unsteady. He cleared his throat. “And even though I never loved her, I still cared for her. So when she left, I- it hurt. A lot. I thought ‘this is it. I’m the problem. Something’s wrong with me, I’m incapable of loving someone, so it makes sense than no-one could love me either’ ”

“Ceec, I-”

“So I shut down.” Cecil kept going, words tumbling faster and faster out of his mouth. He could no longer stop them, nor did he want to. “I became cold. Bitter. Angry. Gott, I was so angry, mostly at myself. I lashed out at my colleagues, I lashed out at my patients- that’s how I lost my medical license in case you were wondering, because why not get that truth out of the way as well, right?!”

He took a shuddering breath, grabbing the side of his face. It was wet again. He could feel the looming threat of a panic attack. “Everything fell apart around me. I was a broken mess, merely a shell of my former self- that’s why I could barely stand to look at you the first few days you spent here, it was like looking into a mirror-”

“Doc!”

“I’m sorry!” he cried out, curling into himself and burying his face in his arms. I am the worst kind of person. Dave stared in shock as Cecil devolved into full-blown, nearly silent sobs, choking out half-formed apologies; this wasn’t how he expected his day to go.

It had all started to normally: wake up, take his meds, have breakfast with the doc and Mars -if the kid hadn’t stayed up all night practising his magic again- and greet Ollie as he climbed in through the window with a fond hair ruffle, laugh as Cecil chastised him for “not using the door like a normal person”, help out Mars with his plants, look up jobs and schools, get a snarky remark from Cecil here and there…

Huh. He now realized the doctor hadn’t said much at all today. Hell, he’d been borderline cordial to him since this morning, if a bit… low. Careful. Like he was treading on thin ice.

Which, in hindsight, should’ve ticked David off as to what was going on.

Eyes going soft, the dad scooted over to Cecil, hands hovering just above the doctor’s shoulders. “Ceec… I’m going to touch you now, yeah? Tell me if that’s okay.”

The older man took a trembling breath, his thin frame still wracked with sobs, and nodded. Dave let out a relieved sigh and gently set his hands on the older man’s blue sweater vest, slowly moving them up and down his arms in a soothing pattern. “Cecil? I’m not mad at you. I don’t blame you for anything. I… get it. Really, I do. So don’t beat yourself up too much about our early days, okay? Look at me.”

He delicately grabbed the older man’s face, encouraging him to raise his head back up; he gave in after a few seconds, meeting Dave’s gaze with his own. 

The dad smiled at him, his expression radiating something Cecil hadn’t seen directed at him in a really long time.

Honesty. Warmth. Kindness.

“There you are,” Dave said softly, “There you are. If it makes you feel better… I forgive you. Even if I don’t think there’s not much to forgive in the first place.”

He hummed, tucking a strand of brown and grey hair behind Cecil’s ear. “And I like you too. A lot. I just assumed you weren’t interested, so I never said anything. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable…”

Cecil’s breathing slowed as he took in the words, mind switching into autopilot. He closed his eyes and focused on the feeling of Dave’s hands against the fabric of his clothes. The faint hum of the fridge in the kitchen nearby. The lingering smell of chamomile tea David had brewed not long ago.

Breathe. Five seconds. Hold. Seven. Exhale. Eight.

When he opened his eyes again, he felt… more or less in control. He wiped his face on his sleeve with a quick swipe, eyes red and puffy, but sharp once more. “…Thank you.” he grunted, voice hoarse and thick with leftover emotion. “I’m okay.”

The father raised an eyebrow, disbelieving. “…Okay-ish.” the older man relented, rolling his eyes. “How is that?”

Dave shrugged. “Acceptable. Can I hug you?”

“You may.”

The younger man didn’t waste another second, wrapping his arms around Cecil and pulling him into a tight embrace. The doctor stiffened slightly, still unused to so much human contact in one setting, but soon relaxed into the soft, strong body enveloping him. His hands tentatively crept up Dave’s back as his eyes fluttered closed, letting out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He basked in the feeling for a little while, his skin tingling in the spots David brushed against, while the other buried his face in his hair.

Cecil eventually let go, patting on Dave’s arm to make him release his hold. They pulled away, almost regretfully, and the dad smiled down at the doc. “How was that?”

“…Acceptable.”

Dave laughed. “Okay, I deserved that one. Sorry you had to relive all… that.”

Cecil shook his head, sighing. “It was… a long time ago. It shouldn’t affect me that much still…”

"You shut down and buried it for years, I think I can cut you some slack for not having processed it properly yet.”

"Hmm. I never thought about it that way.”

The dad waved noncommittally. “Eeeh. Been there. I know my way around trauma by now. So, you’ve never… you know…”

"No. I never desired women that way.”

"Yeah? How about guys?”

"I never thought about it. Never considered that I could be-”

"Gay?”

Cecil suppressed a wince, pushing down the unpleasant memories this word tended to bring up in him. “…Yes.”

“Well… do you have any gay cousins?” David asked, tilting his head to the side. The other just stared, failing to see how this was relevant. “No?”

The dad smirked. “And that,” he said, poking at Cecil’s chest playfully, “was your first clue. in this world, you either have a gay cousin, or you are the gay cousin.”

The doctor gaped. Then he let out an undignified snort, amazed at the nonsense Dave could spin on the fly. “That doesn’t sound very scientifically sound. Besides, I don’t know if it applies to me, considering I never felt any attraction to any man before you.”

“Aww.”

“Shut up. And stop making that face, it makes me want to punch it.”

“Kinky. But for real, there’s nothing wrong with the way you felt back then, you know that, right? You could just be ace.”

Cecil hummed. “I do know about asexuality and aromanticism. But by the time I learned of the concepts, I had stopped caring about labeling myself altogether.”

He looked up at Dave, eyes lingering on the gentle curves of his body. He gulped, lingering heat pooling in his stomach. “And… recent evidence suggests that I’m definitely not those.”

“So you got the hots for me, got it.”

“You’re insufferable, you know that?”

“So I’ve been told.” Dave chuckled. “But that’s okay too, y’know? Maybe you like men, maybe it’s just me. Maybe you’ve changed, maybe it’s always been this way. Maybe you’re demi, it fits what you told me at least.” he shrugged. “But who gives a shit, right? I know labels are important to a lot of people, they can be super helpful. But if you don’t care about them, that’s fine. You don’t need them if you don’t want them.”

Cecil processed the other’s words, the gentle yet determined tone soothing more and more of his worries. He offered the younger man an appreciative smile. “I suppose so.”

“Although… do you still want this?” Dave asked softly. “D’you still want, y’know… me?”

Cecil stayed silent for a few seconds, parsing the sensation, David’s earnest voice, his expression. “…Yes,” he realized, “Very much so. You?”

“God yes,” the other man breathed out, hands looping around Cecil’s middle with surprising gentleness. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve wanted to do this for?”

The doctor shook his head, eyes wide. Dave smiled. “Dude, I’ve been pining after you since the day we met.”

“You cannot be serious.”

“I am so serious. I mean, I didn’t realize I was until we visited Liz and the kids last week, but yeah. Though to be fair,” he continued, scratching the back of his head sheepishly, “At first it was purely… y’know, physical. A ‘oh no he’s hot’ kinda thing. And I liked the banter, a lot. But I think I really, really fell for you when- I think it was a few days after Marv went all supernova on us. Right before Ollie finally came back.”

He reached out, brushing his hand against Cecil’s. He looked wistful. “T’was the first time I heard you say you were sorry. About being an asshole.”

“Hey!”

“What? You were,” Dave laughed, “still kinda are. That’s okay though, you’re our asshole now.”

He sobered up, planting his gaze in Cecil’s eyes with rare intensity. “But seriously. You looked so earnest. I looked at you, and saw you. Really saw you. The version of you that you hide under all that snark and- and ‘oh look at me, I’m a genius slash doctor slash better than everybody else here’…”

“I do not sound like that.”

“Sure, keep telling yourself that.” the former vlogger rolled his eyes playfully. “Still. That uh, that was the moment that did me in, y’know?”

cecil was stunned- he could’ve hit himself. For a man of his genius, he was apparently blind when it came to those things. “I’m a dummkopf, aren’t I.”

David nodded, a shit-eating grin spreading across his face. “Yeah. But I kinda like that about you. When you drop the whole ‘cold-hearted science man’ thing and get all confused and clueless. It’s cute.”

The older man felt his ears heat up, resisting the urge to look away. “Don’t call me that.” he grumbled. “That’s not- I’m not-”

“How about you?”

Cecil stopped his muttering, focusing back on the other man. “I’m sorry?”

“You know, like… you being into me. When did that happen?”

Oh.

Cecil looked down, absentmindedly rubbing his calloused hands together as he pondered. This deserved a proper answer. He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the memories wash over him. Phantom images and words passed through his mind as he tried to pinpoint that moment.

“When Ollie came back,” he finally said, “After the whole… debacle.”

Dave made an oof sound. “You mean when he and Mars had an argument, and Ollie disappeared for weeks and spiraled into repressed anger until he almost killed a guy while Mars shut himself away and made the whole house float?”

Cecil groaned; those weeks had been rough on everyone, but he still remembered running himself ragged trying to keep everyone in the mansion from falling apart at the seams. “Yes, that. I wasn’t… present when the situation was sorted out, but Marvin told me how you successfully calmed him down.”

Dave nodded. “Yeah, the whole thing was insane. I still can’t believe you trusted me to go to him at that moment. Then again,” he smirked, “you were pretty concussed. Mars’ a great kid, but he’s got issues.”

“I know.”

“He needs therapy. AND better parents.”

“I know. That’s… kind of related to what I’m trying to tell you here.”

The younger man blinked. “What? Oh, oh, are you finally gonna adopt him?”

Cecil gaped, cheeks flushing in surprised embarrassment. “Was?!”

“I mean,” the other continued, seemingly oblivious to Cecil’s state of unrest, “I already heard him slip up and call you dad once, so I figured-”

“NEIN! Nein, Gott, that’s not what I mean!” the doctor sputtered, hands gesticulating wildly. “Can you just- let me explain? Please?”

David laughed, raising his hands in a placating gesture. “Sorry, sorry, I’m just teasing ya. That was way too good to pass up. But okay, I’ll shut up now, go ahead.”

Cecil spat out something in his native tongue that Dave didn’t quite catch, then cleared his throat. “Anyway. After all… that, when Oliver eventually came back, and I found him, you and Mars together in the living room…”

Dave’s eyes widened, leaning forward to show he was back to taking Cecil’s words seriously; he knew where he was going with this. He remembered holding the two in his arms, their exhausted sobs still resonating in his ears. Their quivering, trembling hands grabbing his clothes with desperate strength, his shirt growing damp from all the tears they shed.

“When they were at their lowest, when I proved unable to help… you were there for them.” Cecil continued. “They relied on you. Trusted you. And you told them it was alright, that they didn’t have to go through their struggles alone anymore.”

He chuckled, the sound jarring and unfamiliar coming from him. “I can only guess that’s when I started to… feel for you, one might say.”

“Wow.”

“Yes. I admitted it earlier, but before this moment, my opinion of you was somewhat different.”

Dave raised an eyebrow. “You thought I was an alcoholic bum, a neglectful father and a bad influence on Mars.”

Cecil cringed at that. “… Not the words I would’ve used, but I guess that is accurate.”

“It’s fine,” the younger man shrugged, “not like it was that far from the truth.”

The German shook his head, the heat progressing down his cheeks. “That’s irrelevant. I’m still sorry I thought so little of you, and hurt your feelings. A few times.”

Dave gasped in pretend shock, his face splitting into a huge grin. “Oh my! Three apologies in the same week? Who are you and what have you done with Dr. Edelheim?”

“Ha-ha,” Cecil rolled his eyes, “very funny. I am being serious.”

“And so am I when I tell you I forgive you. Hell, I wasn’t even mad at you in the first place.”

The doctor opened his mouth, ready to protest once more, but Dave beat him to it with a much more inviting prospect.

“Can I kiss you?”

Cecil’s words died on his tongue, the man taken aback by Dave’s sudden query. “Sorry,” the dad continued, “you just have that look on your face and- I think I’ll go insane if I don’t smother you in affection. Right now.”

The doctor observed David’s face, taking in his words; the man’s eyes were blown wide, shiny with something akin to desire. He was biting on his bottom lip idly, waiting expectantly for Cecil’s response, but searching for any sign of fear or discomfort in the older man.

“…Bedroom.” he blurted out.

“What?”

He flushed; that came out wrong. “I mean- What I meant to say is-” he sputtered, pausing to gain some composure back. “We shouldn’t- do this here. Talking. About things. Feelings. In the middle of the living room, where someone could walk in.”

He grimaced. “Like Aster.”

Dave’s face twisted, nearly perfectly mirroring the other’s expression. “Yeaaah, we def’ don’t want that happening. We’d never hear the end of it.”

He got up, reaching a hand out to Cecil with a small smile. “We can go to my room if you want to, like… talk. Or make out, or whatever.”

Cecil’s heart skipped a beat, anticipation -for what, he wasn’t sure- making him feel lightheaded. He took Dave’s hand and let him pull him to his feet. “Yes.” he said quietly, squeezing the warm hand in his grasp. Steady. “Let’s talk.”

#moirai au #schneeplebro #docaverage #david #cecil #davil #arc 5: the orator

[wilde-writing]

Easy Guide to Create your own Fantasy Language

It’s been an eternity since I announced I’d do a language post and guess what – I finally finished it. I had no idea how to properly tackle that topic and how to present my fantasy languages in a compelling way. So I decided to make a series of posts (you can thank @unfocused-overwriter​ for that :D) to hopefully help fellow writers who want to create their own languages.

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional linguist, so it’s possible, that I make mistakes. Feel free to correct me, I’m always happy to learn new things.

Part II, Part III

Part I: Phonology

1. Phonemes

Phonemes (basically the individual sounds of a linguistic system) are to most obvious difference languages have. If a non-native speaker pronounces a phoneme wrong, the reason why is probably that the it doesn’t exist in it’s mother tongue. So comparing your phoneme tables can also help you creating accents.

The most helpful tool for phoneme systems is IPA (= International Phonetic Alphabet). It’s a spelling system that shows how a word is actually pronounced. Wikipedia can help you figuring out the pronunciation of the symbols, Vulgar is a good tool to get your phonemes in a table (it actually creates whole languages, but if you use it for free it gives you too many restrictions for my taste and this side helps you write IPA.

A finished phoneme table might look something like this:

You actually don’t have to try too hard to give each of your languages unique phonemes. There are phonemes that are really common and appear almost everywhere like [k], [t], [m] or [n]. Especially when languages are closely related phonemes overlap a lot.

2. Length

Length can occur with vowels and consonants. It is a nice detail to individually shape your language.

Take my fantasy languages for my current wip as an example: Elikel and Watanè don’t differentiate between vowel length, although vowels in Elikel are preferably pronounced shorter and in Watanè longer. In Manthari vowel length can change the meaning of a word. However Elikel is the only language that also has consonant length.

Example:  German: Schal [ʃa:l] vs. Schall [ʃal] > scarf vs. sound

3. Diphthongs / Triphthongs

So what’s that? Most languages need at least least one vowel in each syllable. If a syllable has one vowel – monophthong. Two vowels – diphthong. Three vowels – triphthong. So which diphthongs/etc. does your language have? Are there any at all? 

Example:  English: shout [ʃaʊ̯t]

4. Syllable structure

To be more precise with the next to points let me give you a short roundup in syllable structure. A really basic structure looks like this: (C) V (C). The V (surprisingly) stands for the vowel. Like I already said, in most languages a vowel is obligatory. But how free is your language when it comes to its consonants (C)? Do your syllables have an onset (everything in front of the vowel)? Do they have a coda (everything after the vowel)?

Example: onset-less: ant coda-less: bee

4.a Consonant clusters

Means: At least two different consonants meet in the onset or the coda. Is that possible in your language? Take for example Japanese that is quite cluster-less.  

Example: Japanese: sakura  English: strong

4.b Restrictions

Do any of your phonemes only appear in certain positions? Or only with certain other phonemes? This also gets important if you want to create a writing system.

Fantasy Language Example: [ɲ] is word initial in Elikel [β] only appears in front of [i, e, a] in Watanè

5. Stress

Is there a rule where the stressed syllable appears in a word? First syllable, second, second to last… Are there exceptions? Or is there a marker in the orthography to show where the stress is.

Maybe you language doesn’t only have a primary stress but also a secondary stress.

5a. Tonal language

In tonal languages, like Chinese or Vietnamese, intonation is key. Depending on the intonation the meaning of a word changes.

Example: Chinese: mā – mother, mǎ – horse, mà – to scold

I’m not an expert here and there is probably a lot more to tell about tonal languages. But let’s leave it like this for the time being.

6. Graphemics

I love this category. Basically it’s about creating rules for your orthography. To make it short: Think about phoneme (sound) – grapheme (letter, sign) correspondence. What sound is represented by what kind of symbol? Maybe some phonemes share a grapheme or one phoneme is represented by multiple letters.

Example:  English: [ʃ] is <sh> German: <ch> can be [x] or [ç]

I’ll tag the people from my RotW tag list, even though this is only roughly wip related. So tell me if you don’t want to be tagged in the following posts.

@margaretcroftwrites, @kat2107, @kittensartsbooks, @oligopsalter, @siarven

#linguistics #language #fantasy #writeblr #langblr #writblr #writing guide

[garden-ghoul]

it’s Jingo! a book about xenophobia, racism, imperialism, and how being a cop makes you immune to the rules. here’s the article I reference at the end, about the 1914 Christmas Truce.

transcript under the cut.

Hello and WELCOME to episode 3 of my newly named podcast, It’s Critical Analysis All The Way Down. This time I pulled the number 21, so we’re reading Jingo. The title is a reference to ‘jingoism,’ which is sort of patriotic bullying on the national scale. I’ll go ahead and sing you the chorus of the 1877 pop song it came from, which is actually directly referenced verbatim in the book:

We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too We've fought the Bear before, and while we're Britons true The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

Anyway, I don’t remember this book very well because I never liked it much. As I recall it has a lot of tongue-in-cheek racism that’s still… well, it’s still racist. So if you’re not interested in hearing a LOT about racism, this isn’t the book for you! But let’s take a look.

Before we start, I’ll briefly explain Ankh-Morpork, which is sort of a cross between 1800s London and New York City, but rather than being the capital of anywhere it’s just a citystate. They own a lot of people’s debts. Then there’s Klatch, which seems to be an entire continent loosely representing the Middle East, originally named for a joke about coffee klatches, so the name is a German word weirdly enough. There’s also a place called Klatchistan, and I don’t know what that’s about.

We start off in the classic Pratchett style with a bit of a mystery. This one involves squid. We have a squid fisher and his son having a bad time in the sea precisely halfway between Klatch and Ankh-Morpork because it feels like a storm is coming though there’s not a cloud in the sky. Then that damned foreign bastard shows up, who we gather is a functionally identical squid fisher from Klatch. Note that although they’re equally mean to each other, we are solidly in the point of view of the white guy. Anyway the lost island of Atlantis rises up out of the sea and the two fishermen immediately start trying to claim it for their respective citystates. Their two sons would like to de-escalate, and seem to regard this as normal embarrassing dad behavior (?!) but their fathers aren’t listening. They both want to be the first back to land to declare to everyone that they own an island.

Now it’s time for a bunch of jump cuts that introduce our main cast.

First: back to Ankh-Morpork, where we find our protagonist, Sam Vimes, commander of the city Watch, striking a match on one of his sergeants. Yeah, his introduction is him being lowkey racist to a troll, although Sergeant Detritus makes nothing of it because it really isn’t worth the effort it would be to try to change his commander’s mind. Vimes and Detritus are listening to a ship captain yelling about how Klatchian pirates made off with his cargo (which he’s clearly lying about). Vimes knows everything and everyone in the city, so he quickly demolishes the guy’s argument, and he slinks off in embarrassment having been revealed as a liar. But this doesn’t change the fact that everyone on the street wanted to believe him. As Vimes and Detritus walk they see a lot more people doing street harangues about the same thing.

Second, the city Patrician, Vetinari, is having a meeting with some heads of guild, which Vimes drops in on ‘cos I guess the Watch is also a sort of guild. They’re all having a good old being racist party, except Vetinari is being ironic about it. Vetinari patiently explains that Ankh-Morpork’s history of slaughter and imperialism means they don’t really have any foreign allies and thus it would be pretty stupid to go to war. Also they don’t have a standing army. And absolutely none of the rich pay their taxes so the entire citystate is bankrupt. ‘We’ve got no ships, we’ve got no men, we’ve got no money too,’ Vetinari says. He can’t prevent the peerage from forming private militias, but his official stance it that he’s going to rely on diplomacy.

Third, Captain Carrot of the Watch playing some wholesome street football with a couple of urchin gangs who despise each other, in a clear metaphor for Klatch and Ankh-Morpork that foreshadows the finale. And under Carrot’s watchful eye they get along! Carrot’s brand of diplomacy relies on supernatural earnestness and narrative armor that causes people not to want to disappoint him. We follow him to a hostage situation that seems only to have the purpose of introducing Corporal Angua, who is a werewolf (both of them are foreign, in case you were interested, although the story doesn’t treat them as such because they’re assumed to be white).

Fourth, we have Vimes and Carrot skulking around in the rain at 3AM when they hear screaming and find that a Klatchian family’s house has been firebombed. Vimes reflects on the fact that he’s picked up quite a bit of dwarf and troll language but zero Klatchian and knows Mr. Goriff’s family only as food service people. In fact, in gratitude for saving them Goriff brings a bunch of food to the Watch, which is RIGHT nice of him, and someone does the old “oh no they’re the good sort of Klatchians” thing.

And finally, Vimes has got to go to a big fancy do the wizards are throwing and meet the Klatchian ambassador. The ambassador is Prince Khufurah, who is in the way of all ambassadors ready to play some mind games. He’s experienced quite enough racism already since he arrived in Ankh-Morpork and keeps pretending to try to buy people’s wives. I’m not sure it’s really a good joke if no-one else gets it. He also has a bodyguard named 71-hour Ahmed who is JUST a gross Arab murderer stereotype, but we find out later that this is a façade he likes to project to put people off.

And then we have the wizard parade, where the wizards remind everyone that they COULD turn them all into clams if they wanted, but don’t. The wizards basically have their own private enclave in the city, don’t pay taxes, and do absolutely whatever they want, and it’s yet another in the long list of parallels this book has for international politics.

During the parade someone is seen in an off-limits zone trying to snipe the Prince and Vimes has to go chase them because of course he does, he is rightly referred to as a terrier throughout the book. And when they get there they find a single clove, such as 71-hour Ahmed likes to chew. At this point in the book I didn’t actually remember the resolution of this plotline but I assumed someone was using racial stereotypes to try to frame him. But in fact we later find out that this is an intentional clue Ahmed has left to keep Vimes interested in him. No, I don’t know why he needed that. Maybe he’s just having fun.

But then they discover a Morporkian bowman who is being framed for taking Klatchian bribes to kill the Klatchian ambassador so Klatch has an excuse to go to war with Ankh-Morpork.

Meanwhile there’s a mob, supposedly because Klatchians have been killing people. Someone did get hurt, because Mr. Goriff’s family are really paranoid after the attack. Vimes escorts them to the watchhouse for their own safety, which is a little bit like arresting them. Some people come round to the watchhouse demanding the family’s release but it turns out Klatch is enormous and the rescuers are a different ethnic group and they get into a huge blazing row. In summary, everything continues to be extremely complicated and political.

SPEAKING of complicated and political, the Patrician has resigned and Ankh-Morpork is officially under military law. The entire command of the Watch quits because they don’t want to have to act as soldiers under the idiot aristocrats like Lord Rust who are forming private militias. And we get a little war gossip from Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs, who apparently very much enjoyed being soldiers in the low-stakes wars of Western Europe—I mean the Sto Plains.

I think it’s interesting that both of them seem to have served in multiple wars—they aren’t that old, probably not too much over forty, which means that the peace we see in Ankh-Morpork in the Watch books is VERY recent. Overall there are constant mentions of other wars in this book; Vimes’ wife Sybil also talks about how her aristocratic ancestors made sure to ALWAYS be fighting someone. And yet this is the only book where we see Ankh-Morpork actually at war, presumably because Sir Terry wasn’t as interested in writing about it as he was in writing about civic development.

This book also wants to emphasize that the peerage would rather most of their soldiers get killed, and that fighting is mostly carried out to engender patriotism. I don’t know that in real life commanders want their people to die, but I certainly agree with the second part.

And I want to read this good bit about Vimes thinking like a cop to avoid having a bad opinion of humanity, which is one of the main themes of the book:

Someone's behind this. Someone wants to see a war. Someone paid to have Ossie and Snowy killed. Someone wanted the Prince dead. I've got to remember that. This isn't a war. This is a crime. And then he realized he was wondering if the attack on Goriffs shop had been organized by the same people, and whether those same people had set fire to the embassy. And then he realized why he was thinking like this. It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people.

There’s a subplot where Angua does some inadvisable spying and gets stuck on a ship headed for Klatch, which I mostly mention because I want to tell Vimes off for stealing someone’s fucking boat to follow her. He is, really, SUCH a cop all the time. He tells the guy “oh the city’s under martial law and I have a militia so I can do whatever I like.” Yeah he threatens to drum up a mob and stone this boat captain to death if he doesn’t donate his ship and the weapons he was shipping. Sorry SIR what happened to serve and protect? Yes, he throws ALL of the captain’s cargo overboard and completely destroys his ship in a storm because he refuses to take precautions. I am really starting to dislike Commander Sam “Copaganda” Vimes!!

Due to a bunch of shenanigans he and his men end up being taken as prisoners-slash-guests by some D’regs, an ethnic group that is violently opposed to the idea of a united Klatch. And we get some fun Klatchian politics, which is all I have really been craving.

The D’regs release Vimes to the care of 71-hour Ahmed, who is famous for violating the three-day hospitality rule one hour before time to execute a person who poisoned an entire village, and turns out to have been educated at the Ankh-Morpork Assassins’ Guild. He and Vimes have kind of a cool conversation about being officers of justice:

Your beat is a city you can walk across in half an hour. Mine is two million square miles of desert and mountain. Oh, the towns and cities have their guards, of a sort. They are uncomplicated thinkers. But it is my job to go into the waste places and chase bandits and murderers, five hundred miles from anyone who would be on my side, so I must inspire dread and strike the first blow because I will not have a chance to strike a second one.

And Ahmed reveals that Prince Khufurah’s brother is the one who tried to have him killed: there is nothing that unites people like having a common enemy, and he thinks it will be easier than trying to ‘pacify’ outlying areas of Klatch. Vimes is being a bit of a hypocrite here about how awful it is to kill people as an officer of justice, just because he personally doesn’t have the stomach for it—he beats a lot of people up and threatens to kill people all the time.

Let’s take stock of how things stand, because this book has actually been extraordinarily complicated and I’ve been leaving out a lot of what seemed at the time to be fragmentary comic relief.

Lord Rust saw that Vimes was launching an expeditionary force and he has established an extremely ill-advised beachhead. His soldiers are about to start fighting a Klatchian force six times their number. Lord Rust is sure songs will be written about this. What? Everyone will die? But we shall have songs, so who cares!

Vimes is now allied with a small company of Ankh-Morpork soldiers led by his butler and a company of D’regs who are friendly with 71-hour Ahmed. For some reason this is presented as Carrot being in command of the D’regs through force of charisma, even though the books makes fun of “they’re fine men as long as they have a white commander.”

The Patrician (who has stepped down to make way for military rule of Ankh-Morpork) asked some of the more incompetent watchmen to help him get to Klatch for diplomatic reasons, and they have been posing as street performers. The Patrician is a very good juggler.

And so we’re up to date. Prince Khufurah’s murderous politicking brother is having a polite breakfast with Lord Rust before he totally destroys his forces, when up come Ahmed and Vimes to arrest the Prince. Vimes decides to round it out by declaring his intent to arrest the entire Morporkian army for behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace. VERY cute of Sir Terry to be so glib about the fact that in any reasonable legal system war is one of the worst possible crimes. I aaaalmost had some respect for him and then he turned right around and said that if he killed the Prince it wouldn’t be murder because their countries are at war. The sheer HYPOCRISY.

Captain Carrot goes outside to read the arrested armies their rights and, yes, in a lovely little callback he starts a football match. I think this is also pretty clearly a reference to the possibly apocryphal Christmas football match between German and British soldiers during WWI.

Anyway at this point the Patrician shows up with a treaty of surrender and sends Vimes outside to the kids’ table while the grownups commit complicated legal crimes. Vimes sulks and Ahmed gives him a bit of a pat on the shoulder as they commiserate about their inability to stop the government from committing crimes.

Lord Rust apparently considers the Patrician’s surrender to Klatch a crime as well, because when everyone gets back to Ankh-Morpork he’s apparently to be tried for treason. At the trial, however, it comes out that the Prince traded a valuable military installation for Atlantis, which has since sunk under the sea again. This is portrayed as something the Patrician arranged specifically to effect a coup against the Prince rather than something that will bring Ankh-Morpork future military advantage for some baffling reason. Anyway, now central Klatch has a leader the Patrician is happier to deal with. Sorry, what? Deposing heads of government in desert countries to install governments we prefer is one of the most classic imperialist tactics?

 And that’s the plot. Now, because this podcast isn’t just ‘I tell you the plot of a Discworld book and you go oh good that saves me the trouble of reading it,’ I have another thing I want to discuss here, which is the Nobby-has-to-disguise-himself-as-a-woman subplot. It’s intended to be nothing but comic relief: Nobby is so ugly people always add a caveat that they’re not sure he’s human, and throughout the book we hear about him trying to figure out why girls aren’t into him. The moment he experiences gendered ill-treatment he begins to fully inhabit the role of a woman, going so far as to say that men can’t understand what he’s going through. He hangs out with a bunch of Klatchian women who like him a lot, mostly because his being foreign allows him to express opinions they’re too polite to express. I find it difficult to interpret this as the transmisogynistic joke it is probably intended to be, only because I so earnestly like the idea of Nobby as trans, relating to women as a woman. We see Nobby’s male perspective bundled into the foreignness of being from another country: this willingness to speak your mind and attack men in defense of other women.  I’ll always be wistfully thinking, what if Nobby just hung out with the ladies forever instead of going back to being a watchman? Probably be more likely to finally get a girlfriend, too.

 SO. Themes of Jingo.

Nationalism is bad. I can agree with this one.

Racism is bad… but ooooonly racism against humans. Sir Terry definitely does have certain kinds of racism he considers acceptable.

Brown people aren’t stupid, they have their own politics, and they’re just as capable as anyone else of being real fucked up bastards.

BUT… if the right circumstances present themselves, people of very different cultural backgrounds can get along.

I actually want to go on one last little diversion because I was just reading a very cute article on the 1914 Christmas Truce, which I’ll link in the notes. According to this article, the high command of both the German and British armies was desperate to keep the fighting going on Christmas because they were aware that men from two Christian nations would find common ground in their most important holiday and they did NOT want soldiers to start to think of the opposite side as human. So that declaring a truce on that day was actually an act of insubordination. There’s an account in the article of one location where Germans started singing Christmas songs to signal that they didn’t want to fight, and then met the British in no-man’s land to offer to give them some beer as a gift. The Brits reciprocated with plum pudding. No, I have no idea why they had plum pudding in the trenches. But what this story illustrates is the contrived nature of animosity in war, and the fact that putting in the effort to see all humans as people is a radical act when jingoism is king.

 That’s all I have for you tonight. Be well, and remember to consider the humanity of your neighbor. Bye.

#is the telegraph 'a trustworthy source'? #well whatev #discworld #audio #it's yelling all the way down

[courtesan-of-garage]

Answer 21, tag 21 people you would to know better

I was tagged by @the-red-jhon and @flyawayboo, thanks! 

Nickname: I don’t think I have any, but my last name is really original and strange (well, at least in my country), so people often use it as a nickname. Also, every variation of my first name I can imagine. Yeah, I’ve already heard it all.

Zodiac: 100% Cancer. Everything you’ve ever read about cancers is probably also pretty good description of me.

Height: 167 cm (166,6 cm to be precise, but shhh. It will be our little secret.)

Hogwarts House: Quoting: ‘You Are 42% Gryffindor, 25% Hufflepuff, 19% Ravenclaw, and 14% Slytherin!’ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The last thing you googled: shrug emoji

Favorite musician/s: Oh God. Do you have time? I mean, like whole eternity? Because that’s how long it’s going to take to list them all. But, the most important ones: Trent Reznor, Yannis Philippakis, Nick Murphy, Syd tha Kyd, Klayton Albert, Maynard James Keenan, Kurt Cobain.

Song stuck in my head: lately I’ve fallen in love with retrowave/synthpop, so, Preturbator - Sentient

Following now: choices fandom mostly, some aesthetic photographs, poetry and short stories

Followers: 378 (geee, thank you all! NO, NOT YOU PORNBOTS)

Do I get asks: Rarely. Maybe rarely is even too big word. But I feel really insecure with my english skills and posting things where I have to write more than few words. But, of course, you’re all invited to use this knowledge against me.

Amount of sleep: Depends. Sometimes I feel really well rested after 4 hours of sleep, sometimes after 16 hours I wake up exhausted.

Lucky number: 7, 9

What I’m wearing: white t-shirt, black leggins

Dream trip: Russia! Especially, Sankt Petersburg. Also, one day I would love to visit Norway and Svalbard archipelago.

Favorite food: Pizza, lasagna, quesadilla. Girl can’t choose only one. Girl loves food.

Instruments: I tried to play on guitar, piano and drums, but never achieved satisfying results. When I will be grown-up and rich I want to learn how to play violin.

Languages: Polish, English, learning Russian. I can also ask you about your name in Norwegian, German and Slovak.

Favorite songs: ...Do you have whole eternity? I will try to pick songs that are really meaningful to me and probably made me a person I’m today: 

Nine Inch Nails - The fragile

Nirvana - Heart-shaped box

Mac Miller - Objects in the mirror

Oh Wonder - Technicolour beat 

The Glitch Mob - Our demons

New Order - Blue monday

... I tried really hard. Please, appreciate.

Random fact: I’m a huge fan of flowers and their names in latin. Also, I know meaning of many.

Aesthetic: Never done this before, so well, it’s shit. What I tried to do was moodboard describing me best. Guess there are hidden more random facts about me: I'm in love with hands, medicines, blood, scars, Polaroid cameras and typewriters. All pics I took myself, so I guess I'm a little bit into photography.

Well, it was fun! I'm tagging every person that survived reading this post. Love you all! ❤

#not choices #tag game

[aeide-thea]

the thing that's frustrating about trying to read german is that i'm so used to being able to precisely identify what's going on with each word in a sentence, and how all the parts stand in relation to each other, and i'm just not familiar enough with this language to do it yet! grr, argh, &c.

Erster Teil

Eine Art Einleitung

have we talked yet about how irritating it is that feminine forms in this language are so often so fucking vestigial? i didn't get tripped up by it here, but this whole ‘how would you like some words without any clarifying endings?’ thing is just. deeply offensive to my sense of order. anyway. ‘First Part. A sort of introduction.’

I

Woraus bemerkenswerter Weise nichts hervorgeht

so... ‘From which notable manner nothing results’? or ‘develops,’ or ‘emerges,’ or whatever you like for hervorgehen; i'm increasingly resenting having to try and select the correct nuance in a vacuum! also i didn't know you could use woraus as a determiner [q.v. usage #11, here], but that seems to be what's happening here? you learn something new every day.

the ~Wortstellung~ also isn't quite clear to me... or rather, it's clear from it that ‘Woraus bemerkenswerter Weise’ constitutes a single noun-phrase, and that the verb is behaving as if this were a dependent clause... which didn't quite make sense to me until i typed those last two words, because of course, it isn't an independent clause, is it? in the sense that while it may not have an explicit antecedent, it's also very much a phrasal clause, not a full sentence that stands on its own. so i guess that does make sense after all.

moving on to the first Actual Sentence, and discarding a number of ~humorously self-deprecating~ remarks about how long it has taken us to arrive there—

Über dem Atlantik befand sich ein barometrisches Minimum; es wanderte ostwärts, einem über Rußland lagernden Maximum zu, und verriet noch nicht die Neigung, diesem nördlich auszuweichen.

‘Over the Atlantic stood a barometric minimum; it moved eastwards, to a maximum settling over Russia’—i think the dangling zu here is actually a separable prefix belonging to wanderte, but i don't quite understand the comma after ostwärts or why einem... Maximum is in the dative, so i might be construing this all entirely wrongly! but: ‘it drifted eastwards, reaching a maximum where it settled over Russia, and did not yet betray the tendency to divert away from this’—what is ‘this,’ though? the Maximum?—‘to the north.' the definite article before Neigung is a little strange in english—i'd expect ‘a,’ or ‘its,’ or even ‘any,’ but maybe this is just an idiosyncrasy of the language? other than that—while i feel more than a little like a foal taking its wobbling, stilted first steps—the rest all seems more or less okay, as far as it goes...

okay. second sentence!

Die Isothermen und Isotheren taten ihre Schuldigkeit. Die Lufttemperatur stand in einem ordnungsgemäßen Verhältnis zur mittleren Jahrestemperatur, zur Temperatur des kältesten wie des wärmsten Monats und zur aperiodischen monatlichen Temperaturschwankung.

...i love (““love””) when german uses very precise, very esoteric technical terms very casually, as if they weren't deeply jarring to encounter in a scene-setting paragraph of a novel! i mean, don't let me pretend i'm knowledgeable enough to understand style or tone yet, but. ‘The isotherms and isotheres did their duty. The air temperature stood in a proper relation’—god, ordnungsgemäß is my new favorite word maybe, there's just something about compressing ‘in accordance with the regulations’ into a single adjective that... i don't know, it just feels like there's a lot of iceberg below the surface there. anyway—‘to the average yearly temperature; to the temperature of the coldest, as of the warmest, month; and to the acyclic monthly temperature variation.’ wow, this is riveting. sure am feeling glad i picked this novel to work laboriously through!

Der Auf- und Untergang der Sonne, des Mondes, der Lichtwechsel des Mondes, der Venus, des Saturnringes und viele andere bedeutsame Erscheinungen entsprachen ihrer Voraussage in den astronomischen Jahrbüchern.

‘The rise and fall of the sun, of the moon, the changing phases’—lit. ‘the light-shifting,’ but i get the impression this is all supposed to be boringly technical rather than poetic so it seems like smoothing it out auf englisch is the way to go?—‘of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn and many other important phenomena corresponded to their forecast in the astronomical almanacs.’

at this juncture we find our hero increasingly missing the readings A— came up with, and thinking glumly, maybe i should've tried kant or something, instead of this enormous Midcentury Modernist Novel... but then, i haven't even read a paragraph yet; there's no english classic i'd be giving up on this quickly. courage, dear heart, & onwards—

Der Wasserdampf in der Luft hatte seine höchste Spannkraft, und die Feuchtigkeit der Luft war gering. Mit einem Wort, das das Tatsächliche recht gut bezeichnet, wenn es auch etwas altmodisch ist: Es war ein schöner Augusttag des Jahres 1913.

‘The water vapor in the air had its highest’—i don't really understand Spannkraft here. ‘concentration,’ maybe? ‘saturation’? or actually, let's try: ‘pressure, and the humidity of the air was slight.’ ...okay, here's a dumb science question: if there's a lot of moisture in the air, wouldn't that translate to high humidity, not low? color me confused. anyway: ‘In a word (which describes the actuality quite well, although it is also a little out of fashion): it was a beautiful August day in the year 1913.’

i! hate! having to look up so many words! this is like greek all over again, & without any beaux yeux to gaze upon my efforts approvingly, even—not to disparage the yeux of those of you who have been kind enough to engage with my deutschposting, which i am sure are perfectly beaux! but you know. ughhhhhhh. okay. paragraph zwei:

Autos schossen aus schmalen, tiefen Straßen in die Seichtigkeit heller Plätze. Fußgängerdunkelheit bildete wolkige Schnüre. Wo kräftigere Striche der Geschwindigkeit quer durch ihre lockere Eile fuhren, verdickten sie sich, rieselten nachher rascher und hatten nach wenigen Schwingungen wieder ihren gleichmäßigen Puls.

‘Cars’—or no, that isn't right, is it; we're in 1913 still, it ought to be ‘Automobiles darted down narrow’—wow, tief is remarkably hard to translate here! streets aren't ‘deep,’ so i imagine the image is one of overhung dimness... maybe ‘plunging streets in the shallowness of bright’—places? squares? spaces? when in doubt, go generic: ‘places. Pedestrian gloom formed cloudy strings.’ okay, okay, i'm sorry i was catty about how unpoetic i found the previous paragraph—peccavi, domine, miserere mei! ‘Where bolder streaks of speed drove straight through their nonchalant haste, they clotted, subsequently trickled faster, and had, after some oscillations, their regular pulse once more.’

an odd place to stop, that—mid-paragraph, even!—but i think that's all the focus i can muster for the night. stay tuned and idk, maybe we'll meet some characters eventually? looking back on what little i have so far, i can at least see that in a language i read more fluently i might find it charming, which goes some way towards my finding it charming in this one...

#this is decidedly a Process Post and part of my ~process~ is apparently... a lot of whining... #so like. caveat lector lol #translation #auf deutsch #i should probably have a tag for #musilblogging #if i'm going to keep doing it; that one will do for now‚ until i come up with something cleverer

[docholligay]

The Cat Came Back

This is a replacement of a tiny, old ficlet, and by replacement I meant there’s at least 2,000 more words in this one. Ana returns! Yay! This is gonna go great! My entire OW universe is here. If you specifically enjoyed this, I’d love a comment!! Or, contribute to my ko-fi, or help me pay my bills on Patreon!

Author’s note: All dialogue in italics is in Arabic

It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but maybe that had been the shrapnel in her head talking. Things had been a little muddy at that moment.

Even she was never sure why–had it come from her own self-pity, a sniper sniped because of her own hesitation, a hesitation that never should have happened, or was it, as she had often told herself, a desire to protect her daughter, to show her that the military life was not for her, could only end in sorrow?

If that had been her noble intention, it had very nobly not worked, as the little girl she had raised was now some sort of stand-in commander for this new, cobbled-together Overwatch.

She had never meant any harm, she thought, in allowing the world to believe she was dead, but what she had hoped would soften Fareeha had hardened her instead.

She had never understood Fareeha very well, by her own admission.

And now, called back by some unseen force, she stood in the extended driveway of a large mansion, where the core of Overwatch now lived. They had never lived here in Ana’s time–it was still being built, or just a rumor, or both, but the large expansive home on acres of land, new and different and nothing like what Ana had known, seemed right. It was a new Overwatch, her daughter’s Overwatch, as much as it pained her to admit it.

She knocked on the door, the sound of it echoing through the house. She held her breath as she heard the quick step of someone coming to the door, and as it swung wide.

“Tracer.” She drawled, and watched as Tracer’s eyes grew wide and her smile faded, her skin growing even paler beneath her freckles. Ana smiled. “I thought I saw your little pla–”

And Tracer slammed the door in her face.

There was a beat of a few seconds before it opened a crack, and Tracer stuck her head out, hair bobbing with each word.

“You’re dead.”

“So were you, once upon a time.”

“‘Missing in action, presumed deceased’, isn’t precisely the same thing as ‘shot in the face,’ love” She sighed heavily. “Wake up, Lena, come on.”

Ana pushed against the door. “Is Fareeha here?”

Tracer took a step back into the home, moving into the large living room where there was a soccer game on TV, a bottle of beer and a sandwich sitting on the coffee table. Ana followed, and Tracer’s mind flipped, in the way it often did, from one emotion to another, her disbelief having been quite quelled by the way Ana moved through a space as if it belonged to her. Ana was the way she had always been, even if she looked a bit different, and was supposed to be dead.

“Fareeha owes SOMEONE an apology.” Tracer placed a hand on her chest. “That someone is me, if you’re wondering.”

Ana snorted. “Oh?”

Tracer flopped down on the couch. “She cracked me bloody skull. Still ‘ave the scar on the side of me head, Winston and Mercy both had to tear us apart to keep one from killing the other,” she pointed to Ana, “But Fareeha started it.”

Winston walked out of the kitchen into the living room, turned around, and walked right back into it.  

Ana looked at her skeptically. “Why?”

“Because—“

“Because I caught her sleeping with the woman I thought killed you.” Pharah’s voice echoed through the large living room, and everyone stood a little straighter.

“Widowmaker?” Ana hissed and narrowed her eyes at Tracer.

“Oh now, this isn’t about me, love.” Tracer gave a chuckle that may have been enjoyment, and may have been fear, and most likely was both.

“Fareeha.” Ana looked up at her as she came down the stairs. She had planned what she was going to say over and over again, but standing her, looking at Pharah, it all seemed rather weak. Ana would rather be silent than weak. “It’s good to see you.”

“It is surprising to see you.” Pharah kept to her father’s language, not wanting her mother to come out of her mouth, not wanting to connect herself to the lie. “Though I heard a rumor, I thought it could not be true.” She looked Ana up and down. “I see you have found religion.”

“Of a kind.”

Tracer sat on the couch, eating her sandwich and drinking her beer, her eyes never moving from Ana and Pharah, even as she groped for the remote and clicked the button, the Hammers game fading from the room. She took another bite as Pharah dismounted the final stair, Ana and Pharah’s posture straight and perfectly matched as they looked at each other.

“You did not think to tell me you were alive?” Pharah broke first, anger and pain in a single terse line. “All of these years?”

“It was complicated. It remains complicated.”

“Everything is when you are involved.”

There was a loud crunch, and they both turned their faces to the couch, where Tracer had a mouthful of potato chips, the pink bag ruffling in her hands.

Winston scampered out of the kitchen and scooped her up, throwing her over his shoulder as he tried to avoid their gaze.

“Win, come off--two Amaris are angry and neither one at me, this is the best day of me bloody--”

“Lena you are gonna die.” He whispered quickly, tossing her into the kitchen at Mercy and Dva’s feet.

Pharah turned back to Ana. “I suppose you have a reason for coming here.”

“I came to tell you, I had heard of your work. That I was alive.” Ana took a controlled breath, not wanting to betray her guilt, her feeling that Pharah’s anger was what she deserved. “I see you were going to join Overwatch whether it existed or not.” She gave a laugh. “My Fareeha, so--”

“I am not your Fareeha, I am my own woman, and I have built my own life, without your help or consideration.” In her anger, the first language came out. Her mother tongue.

“You are always so dramatic when it comes to the subject of me.” Ana dropped into herself, into the way she did not want to be, the way that played off everyone’s concerns as small and their pains as mere annoyances. “You were a grown woman. You certainly seemed not to need me.”

“You must be the Shrike I heard about. I didn’t think it could be true, even if it sounded like you, because you were dead.” Pharah shook her head, and walked to the middle of the room, looking down at the remains of Tracer’s sandwich. “You had been dead for years.”

“I am.” Ana said in her frightening calm.

“I was a grown woman, that’s true. I was a grown woman who was promoted to a special command. I was a grown woman who married. I was a grown woman who lost her arm.” She looked coldly at Ana. “But I guess you thought I didn’t need you for any of that, either. I certainly thought you could do that. But I did not think you could do that to me.”

“When have you ever listened to me anyway?”

Tracer peered out the edge of the kitchen door. “God, I wish I could tell what was ‘appening.” Tracer looked over at Mercy. “Don’t you speak Arabic?”

“I speak Arabic as Fareeha does German: Badly, and for love.” She shook her head. “I have no idea about what is happening.”

“Oh, i’ve an IDEA, it’s the particulars I’m missing. Anyone? Win?” She looked back at Winston, who shook his head. “‘Ana?” Dva looked at Tracer as if she’d lost her mind. “Well, come on then! Not a bloody one of you?” ”

“Lena,” Winston looked at her quizzically and adjusted his glasses, “You know that you’re the only one that is..uh..monolingual.”

“What?” Tracer looked at the group huddled with her in the kitchen. “Well, there’s Jack.”

“Who speaks Spanish, as well.” Mercy corrected.

Tracer stared at them all and then turned around, hands on her hips. “I mean, I took French in school!” She pointed to herself. “Je suis la jeune fille! Innit?”

Pharah huffed. “Don’t try to make this my fault.” It was building in her, the sadness, the betrayal, the feeling that she had always known Ana was able to keep herself removed, but never imagining she could do that, not to her, even if their conversations were brief and terse, Pharah had always hoped that Ana would be proud of her, that Ana would see how she excelled.

“I mourned you. I mourned that I would never get to apologize to you, for being so sure of my own mind that I didn’t listen to what you were trying to tell me, for thinking of heroism as a goal to be reached and not a horizon to work toward.” She shook her head angrily. “I cried for you, on my wedding day. That you could not be there. Where were you?” She snorted. “Taking odd jobs in Morocco.”

Ana sat, watching her. “I was not the only one. Jack and Gabriel--”

“ARE NOT MY MOTHER!” Pharah slammed her fist down on the coffee table, and the assembled group in the kitchen winced.

Pharah stepped back, and waved her away. “Get out of my house, Ana Amari. The Shrike.”

Tracer looked up at Mercy. ‘Didn’t need to know Arabic to understand what ‘appened there.”

Mercy stood with her hand on the door, wanting desperately to run to Pharah’s side, hearing the hurt in her voice that lay beneath the anger. Wanting to scream at Ana, that she had no right to do this to Pharah, that she was tired of the way Ana took liberties with everyone’s feelings, that she would fight her, and lose, but she would give her some hurt in return for the hurt she had dealt Pharah.

Ana backed away. “Congratulations on your wedding and your command, Overwatch Agent Amari. Pharah.” She turned away and threw open the door to the kitchen, Tracer’s nose only saved by a sudden backwards blink.

She walked through, not acknowledging a single one of them, and opened the back door out toward the garage.

Mercy did not wait for the door to stop swinging as she rushed to Pharah.

“Nice to see you too, Ana!” Tracer called, waving to her, as Winston put his head in his hands and sighed.

---

He wasn’t sure why he bothered flipping through the TV channels. There was never anything on. It was another day in 76’s lonely second life, and he thought to himself that maybe today was the day that he would wander down to the animal shelter and get a cat. A turtle. Something to fill the time.

There was a knock at the door, and 76 walked toward it, putting the visor over his scarred eyes as he did so. It was unusual for one of the team to come out to his apartment, they seemed to prefer him as disconnected as he preferred himself, and they had found a peace with that, with keeping the past above the garage.

He opened the door and Ana breezed past him.

“Jack.”

He was surprised to discover how unsurprised he was to see her. And how happy.

Ana walked into his small kitchen area and pulled out a mug from the cupboard, knowing where he would keep it, even after all these years, and for a moment he felt young and again, when he and Ana and Gabe sat around the tiny barracks and laughed and talked about how they would change the world. If only they could have seen how the world would change them.

“Can I get you a drink?” 76 moved toward his small cabinet in the living room. “I don’t keep arak around anymore, wasn’t getting drunk without you.”

“Not anymore, Jack.” She went to the other cupboard and smiled. “You still keep my tea around.” She was polite enough not to mention the Abuelita next to it.

“Took a liking to it.” He sat down with a glass of whiskey. “You talk to Fareeha?”

“You might call it talking.” She put a kettle of water on the stove. “You might call it, what is that, breaking the ice. Breaking something.”

“None of us are very good at staying dead, looks like.” He took a sip and looked over at her.

“Take off that visor, I don’t care how ugly you are.” She scooped the tea into the ball. “It has to be uncomfortable.”

Ana had never been a gentle soul by anyone’s measure--it had been such a strange match when she and Reinhardt had taken up together--but 76 was reminded in that moment of how she could be loving in her own way, when the mood suited her.

“Did you really think she wasn’t gonna be mad, Ana?” He tossed his visor to the coffee table in front of him.

The kettle screamed impatiently, and Ana shrugged. She poured the hot water into the mug and watched the dark brown of the tea slowly unravel into the water, whirling and turning like the hands of fate.

“You make a decision for long enough, you decide the only thing to do is keep making it.” She said, finally. “It was...it was the choice that I made, and however I live with it is my business.” She picked up her mug and sat next to 76, both of them sitting there quietly as a channel nobody watched flickered onscreen.

“You heard about Gabe?” 76 looked at the screen without seeing it.

“I did. It made me choose to return.” She stirred her tea. “I was sorry to hear about it.”

The electric buzz of the TV and the years slipped between them, both wanting to say something, and both wanting to be silent, and both afraid to do either.

“I’m glad you’re alive. Hasn’t been the same without you.” He took another sip of whiskey and leaned back into the couch. “You can stay here, if you want.”

“The two of us, again.” She chuckled. “It could be worse. So, Tracer and Pharah have brought up everything that should have died.”

76 sighed. “I guess. I guess I threw in my lot with them, too. They’re, they’re trying, Ana. They want to do it different from us.”

“And how do you find it?”

“They do all right, Ana. They do all right.”

___

Pharah sat on the edge of her bed, Mercy’s arms around her, wordlessly trying to reassure her. There was nothing to say, and perhaps that was the worst of it. Who could prepare for such a moment, even knowing what they did about 76? About Reaper?

Pharah let out a sob, and it took Mercy by horrifying surprise, and she drew Pharah closer, as if she could take the hurt into herself, as if she could suck it from her body like a syringe and protect her.

“Fareeha.” She rocked her, saying the only word she knew. “Oh Fareeha.”

“I--” Pharah sniffled, trying to regain her composure. “It was so easy for her..”

Mercy though for a moment, trying to say the right thing, not sure there was a right thing, her own anger at Ana burning in her heart, her same desire to banish Ana from their house and life itself churning.

So she simply stroked Pharah’s hair gently.

“Every,” she choked back another sob, refusing to let her mother get anything else from her, “every adult who raised me is a liar or worse. All of them are,” she wiped her eyes, “are monsters.”

“Fareeha,” Mercy kissed her forehead. “Your father is a good man. Reinhardt is a good man. So, you are two for five.”

Pharah laughed in spite of herself, in spite of the growing dark in her mind. “I hate her.”

“I am not so much feeling a fan of hers.” Mercy pulled her back onto the bed and curled around her. “She never has to be coming here again, Fareeha. I will tell everyone to keep her out. Lena never liked her anyway, and Winston was afraid of her.”

“Everyone is afraid of her.”

Mercy sat up. “I am not. I will fight for you, Fareeha,” she began to tear up herself, “I will, always, always be fighting for you, any day.”

Pharah smiled. “You are my family. You are the family I need.”

“And Sam!” Mercy gave a laugh. “He is my favorite.”

“And Sam.” She took Mercy’s hand.

“Overwatch is not your mother’s to own.” It surprised even her, when she said it. “It is yours.”

Pharah closed her eyes, trying not to let herself cry again. “It is ours.”

“Ours.”

#a holligay joint #HON HON HON #I hope y'all like it's been kicking around FOREVER

[aion-rsa]

Doctor Who: What Do We Actually Know About the TARDIS?

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We all know the TARDIS. Blue box. Travels in space and time. Bigger on the inside. May contain a hat stand. For the Doctor and her friends it is home, it is a safe port of call from monsters and cracks in time and the combined hordes of Genghis Khan. But how well do we really know the TARDIS? In many ways it is the most mysterious part of Doctor Who lore. After all, every other mystery in the universe is one the Doctor quickly sets about trying to solve- even those about herself. The TARDIS, however, is just how she hops between mysteries. The Doctor has no time to worry about the inner workings of the TARDIS because she’s always leaving it to go somewhere else.

However, over the years we have gleaned some tidbits about the workings of this marvelous time ship, so let’s answer a few of the big questions.

What’s it called?

Let’s start with what it’s called. That’s “the TARDIS” which stands for “Time And Relative Dimension In Space”. Or sometimes “Time And Relative Dimensions In Space”. The name was coined by the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan, although also we’ve seen people refer to TARDISes by the name before Susan could have come up with it. The Big Finish audio “The Beginning” tries to reconcile this by having Susan come up with a name herself that coincidentally is also the name Time Lords used for them anyway.

Only as Bill points out when she first learns about the TARDIS, the acronym “Time And Relative Dimension In Space”, spelling out the word “TARDIS”, only works in the language of English on the little-known planet of Earth. In German, for instance, it would be called the ZURDIR, so goodness knowns what Gallifreyans actually call it.

So the answer to our first question is “We don’t know”.

Why does it look like a police telephone box?

All TARDISes (or whatever they’re called) come equipped with a Chameleon Circuit as standard. As the Doctor explains in one of the TARDIS minisodes from the Season 5 DVD box set, “Every time the TARDIS materializes in a new location, within the first nanosecond of landing, it analyzes its surroundings, calculates a twelve-dimensional data map of everything within a thousand mile radius, and determines which outer shell would blend in best with the environment… And then it disguises itself as a police telephone box from 1963.”

This has been a long-term problem for the Doctor. The TARDIS transformed into a police telephone box when it landed in London in 1963, and remained that way when it was discovered by first companions Barbara and Ian in “An Unearthly Child“. When the TARDIS teleported backwards through time, however, the Doctor and his granddaughter were confused to see it was still the same shape. It has stayed that way ever since, despite some attempts to repair it, and we largely get the sense from the Doctor these days that she prefers the TARDIS that way.

But there is still some puzzlement over why the TARDIS got stuck that way in the first place. One theory has been presented in the 50th anniversary comic story in Doctor Who Magazine. In “Hunters of the Burning Stone”, the 11th Doctor goes back in time to the events of “An Unearthly Child”, sneaks into the TARDIS and busts the chameleon circuit so that the “blue box” would become a recognized image throughout history.

Except, now we’re thinking about, if you were a super powerful alien AI landing in a junk yard in Shoreditch in 1963, and you wanted to seem as inconspicuous as possible, you’d probably look like a dustbin, or a wrecked car, or just “some rubbish”. A police telephone box… stands out a bit?

Only it gets weirder. The events of “The Fugitive of the Judoon” and “The Timeless Children” introduce us to Ruth, or “the Fugitive” Doctor. Some have suggested this might be a secret Doctoral incarnation between the first and second Doctors, but it is looking increasingly likely that this Doctor is one of the previously forgotten versions that predate William Hartnell.

And she travels in a TARDIS shaped like a police telephone box, years before it ever landed in Shoreditch 1963. So the answer to our second question is “We don’t know”.

Read more

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How big is the TARDIS on the inside?

We know it’s bigger on the inside, but how much bigger? Most of the time the only room we see of the TARDIS is the Console Room (or one of the console rooms, anyway). This can vary between being the size of a cathedral, to the size of a soundstage in Wales.

But we also know, either through seeing them directly, as in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, or through hearsay from its passengers, that the TARDIS contains many other rooms. These include an unknown number of bedrooms for the Doctor’s companions (some with bunkbeds), a library, a swimming pool, an enormous walk-in wardrobe, a garage, the cloister room, a “Zero Room”, squash courts, a kitchen, a garden, an art gallery, a salon, a sick bay, a boot cupboard (that is enormous), water slides, boating lakes, a rainforest, and perhaps most bafflingly of all, some bins.

These are all handled by the architectural configuration system, which as near as we can tell allows the Doctor to add and delete rooms at will, like a house in the Sims. So any of these rooms might have been deleted, or deleted and re-added later, any number of times. So we don’t know how many rooms are inside the TARDIS, but we should at least be able to guess at the dimensions, right?

Fan-favourite companion Sarah Jane Smith asks this question in “The Masque of Mandragora”. The exchange goes:

SARAH: Just how big is the Tardis? DOCTOR: Well, how big’s big? Relative dimensions, you see. No constant. SARAH: That’s not an answer. DOCTOR: How big are you at the moment? SARAH: Five four, just, and that’s still not an answer. DOCTOR: Listen, listen. There are no measurements in infinity.

And then the Doctor goes on to insult puny human minds, because he’s like that. But the trouble is, he’s right. As far as we know, the TARDIS interior exists in its own pocket dimension, outside of our universe. Which means there is nothing to compare the TARDIS interior with. That, or maybe the Doctor is just covering up the fact that he doesn’t know. So take your pick. “There are no measurements in infinity” or “We don’t know”.

How many people can the TARDIS transport?

The Doctor famously nicked her TARDIS all that time ago, when it was in a scrapyard waiting to be decommissioned. At the time its passengers were the Doctor, the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan, and according to the Big Finish audio mentioned above, a guy called the Quadrigger who was a sort of TARDIS mechanic.

This is not even close to a full crew complement. As we discover in “Journey’s End”, the TARDIS console is hexagonal precisely because there should be six people manning it at any one time, explaining why the Doctor pilots it by running around like a headless chicken, occasionally having to resort to pieces of string or an outstretched umbrella to activate controls on two sides of the console at the same time.

But in “The Invasion of Time” the Doctor’s TARDIS is able to transport a full Sontaran army, while in “Revolution of the Daleks” the Doctor tricks an entire Dalek army into trapping themselves in another TARDIS.

As we’ve already said, the interior of the TARDIS has unknown and possibly unlimited dimensions, so there’s no reason we know of why you couldn’t fit an entire civilization in there. It does make you wonder why more Doctor Who episodes don’t feature the Doctor organizing an entire planet’s population into an orderly queue to evacuate. So once again the answer is “We don’t know”.

What powers it?

Sure, why not. We’ve failed hard at what it’s called, why it looks like it does and how big it is. Why don’t we just flat out ask what powers the dimensionally transcendental spacetime machine? That’ll be an easy one.

Well it’s the Eye of Harmony, an exploding star preserved at the moment it collapses into a black hole. The Fourth Doctor story, “The Deadly Assassin” revealed that it can be found hidden under the floorboards of the Panopticon on Gallifrey, except that Gallifrey has blown up (at least) twice, and in the Doctor Who movie we discovered that actually the Eye of Harmony is on board the TARDIS under a big stone trapdoor and can somehow be used to steal all of a Time Lord’s remaining regenerations, but then in “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” we find that actually its just hanging in this massive space void inside the TARDIS with a walkway going through it. Are these all the same Eye of Harmony? Did the Doctor pinch it, or were all the TARDISes connected to the Eye of Harmony through wormholes or subspace or something, allowing it to be in multiple places at once?

I will let you guess.

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Doctor Who Series 13 will air this autumn on BBC One and BBC America.

The post Doctor Who: What Do We Actually Know About the TARDIS? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[fatechica]

100 Questions

Whee, I was tagged by @janes-mike and @dancingskygreen! This is a good distraction for while I’m sick, lmao.

1. What is your nickname? Jules or JP

2. How old are you? 34

3. What is your birth month? November

4. What is your zodiac sign? Sagittarius

5. What is your favorite color? Burgundy

6. What’s your lucky number? 1123, if pressed (it’s my birthday, lol)

7. Do you have any pets? I do! I have one cat who’s 15 years old and a curmudgeonly princess.

8. Where are you from? California (the SF area, to be precise, tho I live up in Sacramento, now)

9. How tall are you? 5′3

10. What shoe size are you? 7

11. How many pairs of shoes do you own? Ok, so I’m the person who buys shoes but never wears more than, like, 3 pairs ever? So, I have, like, 20 pairs of shoes and my husband gets so mad that I mostly never wear them.

12. Are you random? What does this even mean? No? I feel like I’m too logical to be random.

13. Last person you texted? My friend about how awful my voice sounds rn.

14. Are you psychic in any way? Nope, not in any way, shape, or form.

15. Last TV show watched? Requiem

16. Favorite movie? Empire Records and Pacific Rim

17. Favorite show from your childhood? Out of this World (god, aging myself. does anyone here even know that show?)

18. Do you want children? Maybe? I still don’t know the answer to this question (and, as my mother likes to remind me, the end of my fertile years is coming up, so time may answer that question for me)

19. Do you want a church wedding? Haha, already married and we did not have a church wedding

20. What is your religion? I’m agnostic, but my husband is Buddhist, so...also Buddhist?

21. Have you ever been to the hospital? yes. the last time was when I sprained my elbow so bad I lost feeling in my fingers

22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law? Haha, NO

23. How is life? Eh? It’s ok rn. I’m sick and I have work tomorrow, but otherwise pretty good

24. Baths or showers? Showers

25. What color socks are you wearing? Haha, socks? LOL, no. It was 100 degrees today and I don’t like having my feet covered even when it’s cold.

26. Have you ever been famous? Nope

27. Would you like to be a big celebrity? Yeah, no, no thank you. I like the anonymity

28. What type of music do you like? I’m a musician, so the answer is “everything”. Like, you hit shuffle on my iphone and you’re just as likely to hit Beethoven’s Sonatas as you are Notorious B.I.G. and everything in between. I’m the least partial to country, if I had to pick something I didn’t like (or, at least, don’t often listen to).

29. Have you ever been skinny dipping? Yep!

30. How many pillows do you sleep with? Two

31. What position do you usually sleep in? I can’t fall asleep any other way but on my stomach, but I often wake up on my back, which is hilarious since I can’t fall asleep like that at all.

32. How big is your house? idk, normal size-ish? Like, 2000 square feet? We have a large lot, so it feels bigger than it really is.

33. What do you typically have for breakfast? Cereal (I’m a whore for cereal)

34. Have you ever left the country? Yes! Last time was a couple of years ago when the husband and I went to Puerto Vallarta

35. Have you ever tried archery? I have, back in summer camp ages ago (and, also, I could try it again any time I want since my husband does archery and there’s an archery target set up in our backyard. imagine my complete lack of surprise when he came home with 4 hay bales and was like “babe, i’m gonna build a target!”)

36. Do you like anyone? Lol, I’m married, so I sure hope so!

37. Favorite swear word? Hands down, it’s “fuck”. I use it all the time.

38. When do you fall asleep? Around midnight if I’m being good.

39. Do you have any scars? Yeah, I was a really active kid and got in a lot of scrapes and whatnot. My most notable one is the scar on my chin from where I split it open and had to get stitches.

40. Sexual orientation? Pretty straight.

41. Are you a good liar? Fortunately or unfortunately, yes.

42. What languages would you like to learn? I want to learn German and Mandarin, and I seriously need to re-learn Japanese and Spanish (I used to be mostly fluent in both).

43. Top 10 songs? Oh shit, uh...crap. Pass on answering this question unless you want me here all night figuring this shit out.

44. Do you like your country? I’m in America and...in theory, yes. At the moment? NO.

45. Do you have friends from the web? Oh yeah, absolutely!

46. What is your personality type? I’m super extroverted and assertive and headstrong (my MBTI is ESTJ and I have never related to a personality type SO STRONGLY).

47. Hogwarts House? Ravenclaw

48. Can you curl your tongue? Nope

49. Pick one fictional character you can relate to? Um, since most of my friends here are in the ST fandom, let’s go with that and, in that universe, I’d have to say Mike Wheeler. His sense of responsibility and knack of putting everyone else ahead of him is something I relate to so very much.

50. Left or right handed? Left

51. Are you scared of spiders? I have legit arachnophobia.

52. Favorite food? Macaroni and cheese (I’m such white fucking trash)

53. Favorite foreign food? Pho or (and I’m cursing my inability to add accent marks here)  Bun Thit Nuong Cha Gio, which is vermicelli noodles with bbq pork, eggrolls, veggies, and fish sauce and it’s so good (ok, i’m craving it now) (also, lol, can you tell my husband’s Vietnamese, or what?)

54. Are you a clean or messy person? Dude, I’m messy as fuck.

55. If you could switch your gender for a day, what would you do? Figure out what it’s like to pee standing up.

56. What color underwear? Like, right now, or in general? Because the answer to right now is “nothing” (because i’m in my pjs and i don’t wear underwear to sleep), but in general, black because i don’t like having to match anything.

57. How long does it take for you to get ready? 15-20 minutes

58. Do you have much of an ego? Situationally, yes. Like, when it comes to things I’m good at, oh hell yes. 

59. Do you suck or bite lollipops? Suck. I have an oral fixation.

60. Do you talk to yourself? All the damn time.

61. Do you sing to yourself? Yep!

62. Are you a good singer? I like to think that I am.

63. Biggest Fears? Spiders and the depth of the ocean (what’s down there?!?!?!)

64. Are you a gossip? Haha, yes.

65. Are you a grammar nazi? Oh yeah.

66. Do you have long or short hair? Medium-ish? It goes right past my shoulders, so I guess on the shorter end.

67. Can you name all 50 states of America? I can.

68. Favorite school subject? Math

69. Extrovert or Introvert? Extrovert!

70. Have you ever been scuba diving? No, but I want to so bad.

71. What makes you nervous? Not being able to live up to expectations.

72. Are you scared of the dark? No, I love the dark. I have really good night vision.

73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes? All the time. I’m annoying that way.

74. Are you ticklish? Yes, yes I am (unfortunately)

75. Have you ever started a rumor? Nope...at least, not on purpose.

76. Have you ever been out of your home country? Yes!

77. Have you ever drank underage? God, all the time.

78. Have you ever done drugs? Yes, but only pot.

79. What do you fantasize about? Having the freedom to travel and do what I want without having to worry about money.

80. How many piercings do you have? Three on each ear (though I’m planning on getting a cartilage piercing soon).

81. Can you roll your R’s? Lol, I only took 10 years of Spanish, so I certainly hope so.

82. How fast can you type? Pretty fast

83. How fast can you run? Um, I average about a 13 minute mile, so not super fast.

84. What color is your hair? Auburn-red

85. What color are your eyes? Hazel

86. What are you allergic to? Mold and mildew

87. Do you keep a journal? Haha, I gave up that ghost years ago. The closest I get to that is this blog.

88. Are you depressed about anything? Not particularly at the moment (though I suffer from anxiety and that can quickly turn into depression if I don’t watch it)

89. Do you like your age? I do, I think. I can’t say I didn’t wish I was in my late 20s again, mostly because there’s the pressure to have done certain things by the time you’re in your mid-30s (like, have kids and whatnot), but I certainly don’t feel my age most of the time, so *shrugs*

90. What makes you angry? When people aren’t given a fair shot, or unfairly treated. I’m real big on equity of respect and it makes me so angry when I see people getting treated like shit or disrespected (bigots and racists and misogynists really piss me off). In that same vein, people not doing their fair share of the work also really piss me off.

91. Do you like your own name? Yeah, I do. I mean, I’ve had it for 34 years.

92. Did you ever get a foreign object up your nose? thankfully, no.

93. Do you want a boy or a girl for a child? I think, if I have kids, I want a girl.

94. What talents do you have? I’m a fast and adaptive learner and I have a near photographic memory.

95. Sun or moon? Sun.

96. How did you get your name? Ok, I’ve asked this question and the only answer I can get from my mom is “I don’t know, your dad and I just liked the name.”

97. Are you religious? I like to consider myself a spiritual person, but I’m not particularly religious. I’m fascinated by religiosity and tradition and I like participating in religious ceremonies, but I don’t know if I believe in a religion enough to be religious.

98. Have you ever been to a therapist? Yes, I have. I developed anxiety a few years ago and I saw a therapist for a few months to help with my issues.

99. Color of your bedspread? White with blue and turquoise dots.

100. Color of your room? Grey

Alright, then, I tag.... @mikeywheelerr, @formerlyjannafaye, @el-and-hop, and @linachupi

#whee! #this was fun! #i like answering questions about myself #i'm an open book

[theattainer]

The Most Amazing Books People Found in a Dumpster

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https://theattainer.com/the-most-amazing-books-people-found-in-a-dumpster/

The Most Amazing Books People Found in a Dumpster

I spent a long time thinking about whether I really wanted to write this post. A very common misconception about old books is that you can divide them up into two categories: 1) rare and valuable books, and 2) everything else. The first category needs to be given special attention, preserved, and protected; the second category is literally trash. You often encounter this dichotomy in online discussions of old books, and even many of the professionals embrace it uncritically. To give an example, there is an apparently popular TV show about searching for antiques at yard sales, which regularly regales its viewers with a quiz titled “Dumpster or No Dumpster;” the implication being, of course, that if a certain item isn’t fit for Sotheby’s, it can safely be thrown away.

I worried that by focusing on a select few items that somebody had trashed and that turned out to be valuable, I would just be feeding this misconception. If everyone is aware that a tiny percentage of old books can be very valuable, this might get people to research their books more carefully before trashing them. However, once the appraisers predictably discover that 99% of their books have little value, they will nonetheless proceed to throw these books out. While better than nothing, this is not exactly a huge improvement of the status quo.

Pictured: The 99%.

If my readers forgive me for stating the moral of this post in advance, I would like the post to instead help inculcate a deep agnosticism with respect to second-hand books. Yes, some items are obviously very valuable, but even for most books that seem unimpressive at first glance, there is a collector somewhere who is searching for this exact copy. Even when the book itself is common, the signature, library stamp, marginalia, or merely the level of preservation can make it very rare or unique, and even if nobody is interested in it now, somebody might covet this exact copy 50 years from now. Hence, please be nice, help preserve old books even if AbeBooks says they aren’t worth much, and don’t be the person whom future collectors will curse. Well, now that I’ve stated it, without further ado:

1. Tartars in the Library

To get an overview of the insane stuff that can be found among the trash in rich countries, there is probably no better resource than Garbage Finds. This Montreal-based blogger earns a living from the stuff he finds in his city’s trash cans, with the most interesting pieces being posted online. From the dumpsters, he regularly hauls jewellery, gold and silver items, antiques, valuable art, as well as bags of (still valid) coins and rolls of (still valid) banknotes. There doesn’t seem to be a single item out there that would be too valuable for people to throw into the garbage. And while one could use this as an excuse to sneer at Canadians, there is no particular reason to expect Americans, Germans or Japanese to behave much differently.

Our blogger regularly finds books as well, though only the most impressive items make it into his posts. Perhaps the record-holder here is a book he casually mentions in one of the posts, tucked between a spate of other antiques he found in a single dumpster, among them pre-Columbian pottery and a number of 19th century photographs and art. The author of the post is no book expert, so he guessed that the volume might be from the late 19th century as well, but his commentariat quickly set him straight and explained that the year 1610, printed on the last page, is very likely genuine.

It’s hard to be certain based on the pictures that were included into the post, but it seems that the leather-bound volume found in a Montreal dumpster includes at least two separate works which were bound together not long after being printed. The first is a historical work printed in 1610 and dedicated to the elector John George I of Saxony. Since the title page is missing, so is the title, but the last page says that the book was printed in Leipzig by the printer Henning Grosse Jr.

The second book was printed at the same location in 1611, and this time the title page is present. The book is a German adaptation of the travels of Marco Polo, or Chorographia Tartariae, as the book’s Latin name is spelled. At least one map is present, depicting the island of Rhodes, which definitely increases the value of the book. Of special interest to me, however, is the dedication immediately after the title page. Even though the work was printed in Saxony, it is dedicated to Hans Jakob Khisl and Karl Khisl, two members of a Carniolan noble family that was of paramount importance for Slovenian history.

Left: title page of Chorographia Tartariae. Right: coat of arms of the Khisl family and the dedication to Hans Jakob and Karl Khisl.

The Khisls gave their name to Khislstein castle in the centre of Kranj, and they played a major part in the Reformation movement in Slovenia, during which time we got our first printed books. Of interest to book history, they also opened the first Slovenian paper mill at Fužine near Ljubljana in 1579. Next to the former mill, there still stands a castle which used to belong to the Khisls and now houses the Museum of Architecture and Design. I regularly pass by the castle on my strolls down the Ljubljanica River. Fortunately, the castle is too big to fit into a dumpster.

The entrance to Fužine castle. Above the portal is the Khisls’ coat of arms.

The reason why the book was dedicated to the Khisls is that the translator got to know them well during his career. Hieronymus Megiser was born in Swabia and studied at Tübingen, but he spent a big part of his life in Carniola and Carinthia, where he became well acquainted with the Slovenian language. He put this knowledge to good use and brought out the first Slovenian dictionary of all time – more precisely, a huge German-Latin-Slovenian-Italian dictionary – in 1592. Apart from Slavic cultures, he was also interested in lands further east, which led him to compile the first ever Turkish grammar in German. It’s thus no surprise that he was also the first person to translate Marco Polo into German – in the 1611 volume that ultimately ended up in a dumpster.

Megiser look as angry as you’d expect from someone whose books are getting trashed.

In the end, our blogger sold the book to a friend-of-the-blog for 30 dollars, which is a very modest sum even considering the missing pages. However, the whole point of my writing is that when looking at old books, one shouldn’t focus on their monetary worth. Hence, if the book arrived into good hands, then the founder of Garbage Finds did the right thing. I checked online and there doesn’t seem to be a copy of this edition of Marco Polo in any Slovenian library, despite the Megiser-Khisl connection. I know that our National Library looks out for interesting Slovenian books being offered by foreign booksellers, and occasionally buys them for its collection. Maybe it would be a better idea to establish relations with foreign dumpster divers and buy interesting books from them. A lot more could be acquired that way, and for much less money, too.

This particular example bothers me even more than all the others below, and the reason isn’t just the book’s historical importance or its Slovenian connection. I guess the main reason is that (ironically?) I’m kind of thinking like a librarian. Preserving old books isn’t a passive process that just happens, you need to actively make it happen by safeguarding the books from damp and insects and dirt and little children, year after year after year… When you look at a book that’s 400 years old, what you’re looking at is the effort of over a dozen generations to preserve the book against an onslaught of calamities that could easily turn a volume into dust in a matter of days. That alone should give every booklover pause when handling a truly old item. But at the end of all these centuries, some idiot had to come along and chuck the book into the trash. If you’re reading this, f**k you.

2. 1812 All Over Again

There are two factors which make the following story unique: 1) the absurd importance of the salvaged books and 2) the fact that one of the first places where it was announced was Reddit. Just like electronic media have slowly supplanted printed ones as the primary means of record-keeping of our age, they are in turn being replaced by social media platforms such as Twitter and Reddit. Perhaps 22ndcentury historians will have special citation styles for Tweets and Facebook posts, just like we now have special styles for journal articles and conference abstracts.

Back to the story. It doesn’t say whether Max Brown often dumpster-dives for antiques, but at least on one occasion in 2014, he was distracted by a bunch of old cassettes lying inside a dumpster near his California home. Thank God for those cassettes – under them turned out to lie a bunch of old books. Brown pulled out a handful of these, but then, according to the story, it started to rain, so he packed up what he could – 15 books altogether – and headed home.

Once he was home, he took a better look at these books and found out that they were in fact really old, dating to the 18th century and even earlier. What especially caught his attention, though, was an inscription in one of the books, “From the Library of Thomas Jefferson.” I don’t know what went through his head at that moment, but my guess is that it was a feeling not unlike drunkenness. Each collector dreams of such moments, and Brown, if not perhaps a collector, found his.

Left: the inscription on the book’s inner flyleaf. Right: title page of the book in question, On Wisdomby Pierre Charron.

He contacted antiquarian booksellers, who at first told him that the inscriptions connecting the books to Jefferson were not authentic. Not entirely convinced, Brown did some additional research of his own, tracing down the owners of Jefferson’s books after the death of their famous owner. Jefferson, an inveterate collector of books from an early age, had offered his library to the US Congress after the original Library of Congress was burned down during the War of 1812. After some wrangling and debate, Jefferson’s offer was accepted. However, after the transaction was finalized and the books were transferred in 1815, Jefferson’s collecting did not grind to a halt, so he continued to acquire new books for himself until his death in 1826.

This second library of Thomas Jefferson was dispersed after his death. Brown checked out the 19th century sales catalogues of Jefferson’s books and found the same titles that he had recovered from the dumpster. He sought a second opinion about the books’ provenance, and this time, he was told that the inscriptions were genuine. In the meantime, however, Brown had been strapped for cash, so he sold most of the books for 8,000 dollars; not a small sum, but probably only a fraction of what the books would have fetched at a major auction.

Jefferson as a pensioner in 1821. He probably never had more time to read in his life – the biggest distraction were all the tourists who had already started flocking to his Monticello home.

The story, as Brown and the journalists who interviewed him eventually pieced it together, is as follows: one part of Jefferson’s library ended up in the possession of the Kellogg family soon after Jefferson’s death. The ownership of these books can then ultimately be traced down to a descendant of the family by the name of Violet Cherry, who died in 1976. After that, the trail officially goes cold, but it seems that Brown also figured out who the subsequent owners were. Unfortunately, he isn’t sharing names. All he divulges is that they are themselves descendants of Ms Cherry, that they threw the books away during a remodelling in 2014, and that, extremely ironically, they are historians by profession. I hope he changes his mind and makes their names public one day. The very least these people deserve is a proper public shaming.

As the story is presented online, it still leaves a few unanswered questions. How is it possible to have such a priceless book collection at home and not know it? If I had Thomas Jefferson’s books in my collection, there’s no way my kids, or anyone else I know for that matter, would be able to not be aware of this. The descendants of Ms Cherry might have hated books, but it’s really hard to imagine that someone would prefer to throw these books away than to exchange them for a Mercedes.

Also, how many books did Brown leave behind him in the dumpster? It’s possible that the other books inside were not from Jefferson’s library (he also salvaged some old photograph albums of the Kelloggs), but it’s also possible that the story is ultimately a very tragic one. I can’t really understand how one could find such beautiful books and then be put off from rescuing them by the rain (even if one didn’t yet know whom exactly these 18th century volumes belonged to), but let’s give Brown a break here. I’m sure he has had enough moments of remorse as it is, and the next time he comes across a pile of discarded old books, he’ll know what to do.

Perhaps the saddest part is that the story was only reported by a handful of regional media. If these same books were stolen from a library or an auction house, I’m sure that the story would hit the headlines the next morning, and scores of policemen would be assigned to the case.  When reporting about major book thefts, journalists often stress that the perpetrators had assaulted our common cultural heritage, and should consequently be given be given exemplary, harsh punishments. But when books of equal value are literally destroyed, nothing happens. Whoever threw these into the trash does not need to fear any sanctions.

3. What does Montaigne know?

Most stories about amazing garbage finds never become public, so the only way to come across them is by word of mouth. I can only guess at what the most valuable thing is that anyone ever found in the trash. We know about this present story only because the finder told it to his friend, a blogger, who in turn wrote a post about it, titled “What Can Be Found in the New York Trash.”

Both the blogger and his friend are Russians living in New York. One day, the friend was going from his house to the store and passed by a large open dumpster which was evidently filled with the contents of someone’s apartment, covered with a layer of snow. There was plenty of furniture and clothes, but also a lot of books, many of them quite old. The passer-by filled a box with books and other items that grabbed his attention, and once he was home, he had a better look at them.

One of the books was an edition of Montaigne’s Essays, printed in 1957 and illustrated by the “great American artist” Salvador Dali. What’s more, the book was a bibliophile edition, produced in 1000 numbered copies that were signed by the illustrator. Even though the outside of the book was scratched, presumably a consequence of having lain in the dumpster, the inside seemed to be very well preserved. When copies of the same edition reach the market, they tend to sell for 1000-2000 dollars, though this one might fetch a bit less due to its imperfect condition.

The inside of Dali’s ilustrated version of Montaigne’s Essays.

Our blogger heard about the amazing find from his friend that same day, and rushed to the dumpster to see for himself what lay inside. He took a number of photos, in which we can see the gigantic dumpster in question, about as long as two of the cars parked next to it. The blogger also took plenty of photos of the finds that he himself brought home, which included paintings, vintage clothes, different paper ephemera, as well as a number of books. He didn’t find anything as valuable as Montaigne’s Essays, but he did salvage several well-preserved turn-of-the-century children’s books. It’s unlikely that our blogger, or anyone else for that matter, managed to get to the bottom of the dumpster and inspect all of its contents. Hence, it’s hard to say whether Dali’s book was indeed the most valuable object to have lain inside.

The dumpster from which Dali’s Montaigne was rescued.

For the first two stories I presented above, we don’t know what the dumpsters in question looked like, or how many people passed by them. In this case, however, we can see clearly from the photos that the dumpster was located at the side of a main street, that plenty of cars and people passed by, and that any pedestrian could see that the container was filled with books. Judging by the layer of snow on top of the books, it also seems that they were left standing inside for quite some time. If a few random people throw valuable books into the trash, this can be shrugged off as an aberration, but when hundreds of passers-by do nothing about it, then that is worrisome. If it weren’t for two Russian immigrants, nothing would remain of the cultural heritage packed within this NY dumpster.

4. Accio Rare Book!

The previous three stories suggest that if a book is old(ish), it might also be valuable. This is not a necessary condition, though, and dumpsters can also yield valuable books of a more recent date. In this last story, a book that would at first glance appear to be the most common item in the world turned out to be as rare and as precious as very few other bibliophile gems. The story also illustrates that it’s not just dumpsters in front of mansions that one should be attentive to.

The book in question is a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which came out in 1997 in a tiny print run of 500 copies, around 300 of which were bought up by libraries. Given what a success Harry Potter became afterwards, this is probably the most sought-after modern first edition of all, with even tattered library copies fetching significant sums. It’s great that libraries support fledgling young authors by buying up their books, but it would be even better if these books weren’t ultimately trashed.

This one was thrown out, along with a few other (less rare) Harry Potter first editions, by a school in Buckinghamshire, which unfortunately remains unnamed, in 2008. The occasion for the trashing was an incoming visit by Ofsted, the school-inspection body of the UK Department of Education. Apparently, the school wanted its library to look pristine for the inspection, and plenty of other items had found themselves in the dumpster. If Ofsted has a policy that libraries aren’t allowed to carry rare and valuable books, then I hope the inspectors never find their way to Oxbridge colleges…

The battered first edition of Harry Potter recovered from the trash (center), along with two other early Harry Potter editions.

The Harry Potter books were taken by a then-teacher at the school, who apparently had to fish them out of the dumpster. Sometimes libraries will at least offer these sort of discarded books to employees before trashing them, but apparently this institution has an uncompromising policy of destruction. As it happens, the teacher brought all of these books home, but at first didn’t consider that they might have any particular value – she simply wanted to have them around for her children and grandchildren to read.

About eight years later, her son noticed that the books, especially the first edition of Philosopher’s Stone, might indeed be valuable. He offered them around to antiquarian sellers, who offered to buy the books on the spot for several thousand pounds, but he figured that the books’ real value might indeed be much higher, and resisted the temptation. Finally, he contacted the Hansons’ Auctioneers auction house, where Philosopher’s Stone went up for auction in 2020 and reached the sum of £33,000, despite being an ex-library copy with significant damage to the spine.

The saddest part of this particular story is probably that when the unnamed teacher was interviewed about her finds, she sounded almost apologetic for having rescued the books from the trash. She explained to the journalist that “it just seemed awful to throw them away” and that taking them home for her grandchildren was “better than seeing them go to waste.” Perhaps the biggest problem, when it comes to books in the trash, is that people are so squeamish about dumpster diving. Even the few who salvage books from trash bags often later feel the need to ask forgiveness for their good deeds.

***

When Rebecca Rego Barry wrote her Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places, she included 52 stories into the volume, gathered from fellow collectors and book dealers whom she had gotten to know over the years. Of all these stories, however, only one involves a book that was literally found in the trash. Even then, the book in question, a rare 1920s driving manual for New Yorkers, is not quite as “fantastic” as many of the other highlighted finds.

I was rather surprised by this omission, and I would like to use the opportunity here to publicly invite Ms Barry to focus a future volume entirely on books found and rescued from the trash. I’m certain that there are many stories similar to the four above that haven’t yet been published anywhere, in print or online. Admittedly, most antiquarian dealers are probably too haughty to sift through the trash themselves, but I’m sure each of them has now and then acquired a rare book that, according to the seller, had come from a dumpster. If such a collection of stories helped motivate some of its readers to take up dumpster diving, then that would be the biggest service to book collecting I can think of.

At the end of all this, the reader might ask whether I also have any similar stories of dumpster finds of my own. I definitely do, and at least one of them can compete with the four I have selected for the present post. However, I’ll probably use these stories for blog posts of their own – and I can’t post everything at once. Stay tuned!

Sources:

Что можно найти в нью-йоркской мусорке. January 24, 2014. Accessible at: https://samsebeskazal.livejournal.com/292125.html

Armitage, Stefan. Teacher sells first edition ‘Harry Potter’ book for $40,000 after finding it in school’s trash. May 21, 2020. Accessible at: https://vt.co/lifestyle/teacher-sells-first-edition-harry-potter-book-for-40000-after-finding-it-in-schools-trash

Cutler-Tietjen, Jordan. He found 15 books in a Sierra dumpster. Then he found out they belonged to Thomas Jefferson. July 29, 2018. Accessible at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article214992280.html

Rego Barry, Rebecca. Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places. Beverly: Voyageur Press, 2015.

So I found these books in the dumpster while taking out the trash…August 27, 2018. Accessible at: https://www.reddit.com/r/BookCollecting/comments/9ar8vf/so_i_found_these_books_in_the_dumpster_while/

The enigmatic dumpster. February 11, 2015. Accessible at: https://garbagefinds.com/2015/02/11/the-enigmatic-dumpster/

What do you think?

#All #Books

[bubblegum-switch]

Kitziwch – Human Things

Anonymous asked: i've got a request! I honestly just want something with lance getting reCt tbh, so uh. They're in the castle and so, allura and coran are like "lmao whats ticklign" and they want someone to demonstrate it, so they chose keith and lance to do it, first lance is all like scared n, stuff but then keef breaks the awkwardness and just pouncess on lance and coran is there just taking notes with allura And when they're done pidge says something like lmao good blackmail material and they're both SHOOK

Ask and you shall receive, friend :) I hope I did it justice

Title: Kitziwch – Human Things (b/c I can’t title for shit)

Word count: app. 3.6k (Side note: holy shit that’s longer than I anticipated)

Rating: it gets a b i t suggestive at one point but nothing more than like PG-13

Time: Before the end of season 2 I guess maybe, Shiro doesn’t have his Bayard so…

Characters: The main 7 (Keith, Hunk, Lance, Pidge, Shiro, Allura, Coran)

Pairing: pre-Klance

Genre: so fluffy it gave me cavities

Themes: Ticklish!Lance, Pining!Keith, ticklish!Keith, brief ticklish!Shiro to kick off the plot, this scenario is such an oldie but a goodie and I feel honored to write it, f u c k I’m so weak for Lance getting reKt you have no idea, I don’t know what “““correct form””” is but I needed a good opportunity so I could be very wrong but fuck that I don’t really care, it takes like over 1k words to get to the meat of the story I’m so sorry but I needed enough exposition for this prompt, I love using personal experience for help with writing haha…, am I minorly projecting my synesthesia onto fictional characters now is that what is happening, I’m writing this whole thing while over-tired over the course of several late-nights at like 11pm-4am and I think it shows, Ernest Hemingway Mr. Write-Drunk-Edit-Sober would be proud but then again what is editing, my tired ass decided to just fuckin give Lance a special kind of love for it which is why it gets suggestive *winks with both eyes*, fuck I need sleep, I did a surprising amount of research for the title, don’t ask me why Keith is so skilled he just is, Lance is literally a ball of ticklishness help him it’s adorable, I had so many options for endings  I hope I did this one right, there will likely be a part 2 b/c of another prompt I got that this can lead into so…

A/N: Ok so “Kitziwch” [kind of pronounced kitzee-ucx I think] is a word I created to be the Altean word for “tickle” out of the German word “kitzeln” and the Welsh word “Ticiwch” because of reasons you’ll find out at the end of this

---

At the training deck, Allura was trying to get a better feel for each of the paladin’s combat strengths and weaknesses. She was going to have each one go up and complete a relay of sorts – which was made of an opaque maze (unlike the electrified invisible one), fighting several types of drone-bots, and testing the accuracy of their Bayard. Coran was watching as well, taking notes on each round.

Pidge was up first, and she made it through the maze quickly, but lost time at the flying drones and accuracy due to the short range of her Bayard.

Then it was Lance’s turn. He didn’t get through the maze as fast as Pidge, but more than made up for it with accuracy.

Hunk was about in the middle so far for the maze time-wise, but was able to quickly obliterate the drones. However, his Bayard was not as precise as Pidge’s or Lance’s due to its comparably wide damage-field.

Keith practically danced through the maze, even though he got hung up a few times. He slashed through the drones and had a near-perfect score on accuracy.

Shiro was last to go, and after getting through the maze and the drones he was getting ready for testing the accuracy of his arm.

“Hold it!” Allura rushed to him. “I can’t ignore you Earthlings’ improper form any longer. I have held my tongue but I’ve had enough.”

“Aw, why didn’t you tell us? I would’ve fixed it,” Lance said from the sidelines.

Allura smiled apologetically. “You were all on a roll. I didn’t want to interrupt you, but I just can’t let this finish uncorrected.”

Shiro relaxed his stance. “Sure, Princess how do I stand?”

“Alright Shiro, hold your back in a straight line – don’t hunch over,” she said casually, circling him as he followed her directions. “Hm, good. Now, keep some bounce in your knees – you look too stiff, and if you can’t move freely you can’t evade.”

“Okay,” he replied, trying his best to follow suit. “Am I doing it right?”

She paused behind him. “Here, let me help you angle yourself a bit better.”

She reached forward and put her hands on his sides to adjust him. He jumped a little, but Allura credited it as surprise and shrugged it off. She tilted him to the left a little bit to balance himself, pressing her fingers into his ribs accidentally, and he involuntarily snorted out a surprised laugh.

This time, she quickly retracted her hands. “Everything alright, Shiro? Are you hurt?”

He rolled his eyes good-naturedly and smiled at her. “I’m fine, don’t worry, it didn’t hurt.”

She looked at him quizzically and tilted her head. “Then why did you make that noise? That was a laugh, right?”

“I guess I’m a little ticklish, that’s all,” he chuckled, shaking his head. “That shouldn’t get in your way again, I just didn’t expect it… Allura?”

She looked like she was deep in thought, trying to remember something that was forgotten a while ago. She looked to Coran, who looked back at her, just as confused. “Do you know what he’s talking about, Coran?”

“No, I’ve never heard of that before either. I don’t know what he means.” He turned to the other four paladins. “Can any of you translate? Altean often overlaps with your language, but there’s no word for that.”

“I can try to explain,” Pidge volunteered. “Basically, someone is ticklish, you can tickle someone, and that someone gets tickled. Linguistics aside,” she adjusted her glasses, “basically it’s when someone is touched in a way that makes them laugh. Some people like being tickled, some people hate it, and there are people that are more ticklish than others.” Pidge smirked, “for example, I’m not that ticklish. Shiro, on the other hand… well you’ve seen that he is.”

“Thank you, Pidge,” Allura said, still confused. “I think that helped, but I still don’t really understand it. How can touching someone make them laugh? And can everyone do this?”

“I agree, I’m still confused as well,” Coran piped up. “Can we have a demonstration? I think that might clear it up.”

“Oh yes, I think that would be great, Coran!” Allura agreed. “But how do we get someone to demonstrate it?”

“Well, if you want two people to show you what it is, I recommend some people who you want to see laughing, or to get revenge on. Tickling can be a great form of revenge, sometimes. It can also be a good bonding experience.”

“Alright, Pidge, then I think it should be…” she thought for a moment.

Lance’s eyes were wide, and he was trying to act like he wasn’t affected by this when every iteration of the word made him want to crawl out of his skin. He noticed Keith hiding his face behind his hair a little more than normal. Hunk, however, was completely fine through the whole conversation so far – not even blushing (like Shiro was, oh boy his face was pink).

“Lance and Keith.”

“What?” Lance shrieked, and then cringed at how terrified he sounded. Keith turned his head away so no one could see the grin that was beginning to invade his face, as well as the blush that sat upon his skin.

“Well, I think you two have some differences you need to work out, and Pidge said that tickling can be used as a bonding experience. Plus, Keith never laughs, and maybe I’m considering this revenge for you constantly flirting with me, Lance,” she said brightly, laughing at the end and showing she wasn’t actually upset.

“Yes, I think they would make a good match-up for this ‘tickling’ thing,” Coran agreed. “I can take notes on this to better understand it.”

Allura walked over to where the red and blue paladins were inching away towards the door. “Come on you two,” she chirped, grabbing their wrists and pulling them into the center of the room. She stood them face to face – or as good as she could get them since neither one would meet the other’s eyes – and she retreated back to where she previously stood next to Coran. “Alright… now start… tickling each other?” She glanced at Pidge to see if she had used the word correctly, and was given a thumbs-up in return. She smiled satisfactorily, and waited.

Lance shifted uncomfortably where he stood. Neither paladin moved or looked at the others.

“Why aren’t they doing anything, Number Five?” Coran whispered to Pidge, pen poised above his notepad.

“They must be shy about this, but don’t worry. Maybe they need incentive to get started.” She smirked, before shouting “if neither one of you starts tickling then someone else will tickle both of you!”

She grinned broader when she saw their faces turn redder and Lance nearly squeaked at the threat as Keith huffed through his nose.

Allura whispered to Pidge that she had an idea. “Keith, Lance was complaining about your mullet again yesterday!” she yelled to them in a sing-song.

Keith’s eyes snapped to Lance’s in an instant, biting back a grin. Thank you, Allura, for giving me an opening. “Again with the mullet?” He started inching towards the blue paladin. “When are you gonna let it go?”

Lance began protesting as he inched backwards, hands raised in defense. “No no no she’s lying Keith, I didn’t insult your mullet yesterday… to her anyway!”

“Oh, so you did?” he cracked his knuckles, and Lance squeaked.

“W-well,” Lance’s voice was unnaturally high. He gulped and steeled himself, stopping in place. “It is pretty terrible…”

That was the final straw. Keith yelled “enough with my hair!” and pounced onto Lance, knocking him to the ground.

Keith lay on top of Lance for a moment, blinking down at him and realizing Lance could’ve gotten hurt from that.

“Did that hurt you?” he asked quietly.

Lance fought back a smile, “no.”

Keith’s face finally split into that large grin – one of the first Lance had ever seen on him. “Good, because then this definitely won’t.”

The blue paladin’s eyes grew wide and his face grew pinker as Keith’s words fell from his lips. He didn’t have time to dwell on it much, however, as soon all thoughts were abandoned as he felt hands on his hips and two thumbs brushing over the skin. His breath hitched in his throat as he bit his lip and began to smile.

The pressure from the two digits increased, and he began squirming and laughing in little breathy huffs. “K-Keith come hahahon buhuddy…”

“So you remember me being your ‘buddy’ but not our bonding moment?” he teased, changing to squeezing Lance’s hips causing sharp, shrill laughs and him to buck up and down.

Lance felt what seemed like electricity shoot through his body, and his mind went blank. “NOHOHO KEIHEEHEETH,” he pleaded through laughter.

“If you say so, I’ll stop with your hips…” the red paladin near-growled (which made the boy underneath him blush even harder), and, in keeping with his word, shot his hands to Lance’s stomach. In desperation as his laughter reached a fever pitch, he reached to grab Keith’s hands. Keith was having none of it, grabbed them, and pinned them above his head. Keith held them with just one of his own hands, putting enough weight on them both to not hurt them but keep them in place. He tsked down at Lance before returning one hand to his stomach and scrabbling his fingers wildly, causing the blue paladin to dissolve into hysterics.

Lance couldn’t even protest anymore, for a few reasons (one of which he’d explain to Keith later, much to both of their delights), but mostly because he couldn’t physically form words with Keith’s hands there. However, it became even worse(?) for Lance when the red paladin decided to take it up a notch and stick his hand underneath his shirt to tickle Lance’s bare skin.

Lance’s vision erupted into brightness as his laughter turned silent from the fast, firm fingers digging gently into his stomach.

Keith’s face dusted pinker as he marveled at how soft Lance’s skin was, before realizing that Lance probably needed more air than he was currently getting. He let him laugh silently for a few more moments before letting up.

Lance panted, catching his breath and smiling largely. His relief was short-lived, however, as Keith’s hand crawled up his side, on top of his shirt once again. Lance was back to squirming as he felt his fingers walk slowly up his waist, and ribs, and then finding their target in his left underarm. Lance shrieked as Keith’s fingers danced in the hollow, and skated around the edge.

“KEIHIHTH COHOHOME OHOHON YOU’RE MEHEHEAN”

The red paladin laughed. “You think that’s mean, I’ll show you mean.” Keith let go of Lance’s hands, which instantly shot to grab him again. Keith stopped tickling for a moment to take one wrist in each hand. He maneuvered them under Lance’s back so his own weight was holding them down, allowing Keith to use both hands. He pressed his knees on either side of the blue paladin to keep him in place, and sat on his hips. Keith reached behind him and squeezed Lance’s knees, extracting deep belly laughter and causing his legs to flail around to their maximum allowance.

Keith inched his hands up to Lance’s thighs, and alternated randomly between squeezing and fully tickling and lightly tracing them. Lance dissolved into uncontrollable giggles at the latter two techniques, and let out yelps interspersed with short, barking laughs when he dug his fingers in. The layer of denim was no match for Keith’s teasing touches.

Keith’s fingers drifted from the top of Lance’s thighs to his inner thighs, but due to the quick change in his laughter Keith moved back to save him any embarrassment. Well, any more embarrassment. Keith didn’t fail to notice the… *ahem* lengthening of the individual laughs and how they seemed to become more throaty and less… less like laughs and more like something that under other circumstances he would be thrilled to hear.

Lance didn’t notice.

Keith hoped none of the others did, and he filed it away in his mind for later. He figured it was probably best to move his hands somewhere else.

He brought his hands to Lance’s sides, spidering from his waist to the middle of his ribs as best he could. Lance’s belly laughter returned, but he wouldn’t look at Keith – he kept turning his face away to try to hide – which the red paladin thought was adorable.

“MEHEHEAN”

Keith laughed along with him. “Alright, I think I can live with that,” he smiled down at him. He wanted to kiss Lance’s blushing cheeks, and he almost did before remembering the other 5 in the room.

He felt Lance’s ribs under his fingertips, and he dug into them a little more, making sure to press in-between the bones. He used both hands to play Lance like a twin piano with keys to the left and right. The blue paladin’s laughter became shrill at his upper ribs, and Keith was a little resentful that he couldn’t really get at Lance’s underarms while he was in this position.

Although, there was a place Keith wanted to try. He moved his hands slowly to Lance’s neck, dragging his fingertips gently the whole way. He began wiggling his digits against the soft skin there, causing Lance to scrunch up and start giggling. He tickled the right side of his neck, and watched Lance try to trap his hand between his head and shoulder. He tickled the left, and Lance did the same. When he tickled both sides of his neck, however, Lance tried to pull his head into his body like a turtle and wrenched his eyes shut.

Keith laughed again. He didn’t think Lance would’ve been able to be taken down by a few light touches on his neck (or his thighs, but that was another matter).

He didn’t want to keep at his neck too long, since that was a dangerous place to linger for a few reasons, but he didn’t want to be done quite yet. He decided to give his neck a break, and figured that it was a gamble for the next spot. Either it wouldn’t be ticklish and he’d have to move fast, or Lance would be even more adorable just by default.

Keith brought his hands to Lance’s ears and lightly brushed his fingers on their undersides on the thin skin and around the outside ridge of each one.

He played his cards right.

Lance’s giggles became effervescent as he scrunched up his face and turned his head from side to side as Keith’s heart melted.

“Nope, you can’t escape it now,” Keith teased quietly.

“Kehehehihith cohohome ohohohon…” Lance whined, but not for him to stop. He just… he couldn’t handle being teased.

Keith stayed tickling his ears for a few moments, before deciding that there wasn’t enough of a canvas to work with. He withdrew his hands, trying to figure out where to strike next. Hm.

“Do you think he’s done?” Keith heard Coran whisper to Hunk.

“He shouldn’t be, he’s forgetting a couple key spots,” he said back.

Keith grinned. Right. He slid off of Lance, who didn’t move right away.

All he did was ask, “are you done?” But not even in a tone conveying annoyance, just simply a question posed as if asking the time.

“Not yet, turn over,” Keith told him, and Lance froze, blush returning to his face.

“Come on, Lance!” Hunk encouraged.

“Yeah, it’s for science!” Pidge supported.

“And inter-cultural studies!” Allura chimed in.

“I’m writing as fast as I can!” Coran yelled in a hurry, apparently marking down everything that occurred.

“Come on, Lance, do it!” even Shiro was getting in on it.

Keith smiled down at him. “Come on, either you turn over or I go back to your stomach…” he raised a claw-shaped hand over him.

Lance groaned and flipped himself over, but Keith caught the smile on his face too. Lance was even biting his lip to keep from grinning more.

Keith sat on Lance’s thighs, facing his feet. He grabbed one of Lance’s legs and pulled his foot back towards him, eventually grabbing onto his left ankle. He pulled off Lance’s sneaker, and held it tighter before descending five wiggling fingers onto his upturned sole.

Lance erupted into laughter the instant Keith made contact.

“AHAHAHA KEHEHEHIHIHITH WHAHAHA—COHOHOME OHOHON”

The red paladin shook his head, chuckling and smiling fondly. He spidered his fingers along Lance’s arch, sliding farther down his legs so he could put more weight on Lance’s calves so he wouldn’t need to hold onto his ankle.

Lance felt fingers dancing as close to the base of his toes as they could get with how tightly they were curled. He shrieked with laughter as he tried to kick his foot out of Keith’s grasp, but it was held tight.

Keith smiled, and laid his leg over Lance’s spare one, holding it down with his weight. He leaned forward, and with the hand that was tickling his foot Keith pulled his toes back and held it in place. He was practically sitting on the back of his knees as he took his now free hand and tickled his stretched-out sole.

Lance continued his high-pitched laughter as he began clawing at the cool tile of the floor. Keith scratched along his cotton-covered arches, and Lance went limp with loud giggles bubbling out of his mouth as if he was a popped bottle of champagne.

Keith could’ve tickled him there forever, if only just to hear him laugh like that until the end of time.

He moved his nimble fingers to his heels and brushed around the edge, and Lance’s laughter became fuller again as he shot up, propped up on his elbows, eyes wrenched shut and face flushed.

Keith snickered at the instant reaction, and he was amazed that Lance hadn’t even said the word “stop” at any point. Keith knew that they were about equal in strength, but Lance never made a move to push him off…

Keith’s thoughts were interrupted as he felt clumsy fingers at his sides. He fought back his own laughter as Lance tried to retaliate. He had managed to bring himself up far enough so he could reach Keith, but he could barely do so.

However, it was enough for Keith’s incredibly sensitive sides. He started losing focus from the light touches, and as he arched his back and removed his hands from Lance’s feet, beginning to laugh himself, the tables were turned. Lance was able to roll out from under him and tackled him, situating himself on top this time.

“Write that down, write that down!” Allura was lightly smacking Coran’s arm out of excitement.

“Is that legal?” Coran asked Pidge and Hunk.

Pidge smiled, “all is fair in love and tickling.”

Coran nodded seriously, and continued jotting it down in his notepad.

Lance smirked down at Keith, who was sprawled out on his back with Lance pinning down his legs with his own. He was panting heavily and his face was deeply colored red, but his eyes were bright and happy.

“You know…” the blue paladin began quietly, and Keith had the impression that the words were not meant for the others to hear. “I could get my revenge right here, right now.”

Keith would’ve been worried, if not for the fact that everything other than Lance’s voice was conveying pure joy.

“Or… we could run back to my room and I could tell you things that would probably be good for both of us.”

Keith nodded quickly. “Yes. Let’s go do that.”

The two jumped up and began running out of the room before they heard—

“Think that’s good blackmail Shiro?”

Lance and Keith froze, and looked back at Pidge with wide eyes.

“I wonder what I can use this for…” she pondered aloud with mock-innocence.

“You were recording that?” both paladins asked simultaneously in embarrassment.

She smirked. “Remember that the next time I ask for the cookie jar,” she laughed. “Because who knows… it might just get broadcast to an entire planet, then they’ll know that the great Blue Paladin of Voltron is incredibly ticklish.”

Lance began walking towards her. “You wouldn’t…”

“Oh, I think we both know I would, and that I’ve had enough of your discrimination against people under 66 inches tall,” she teased in a sing-song voice.

Lance cracked his knuckles, walking closer to her, who didn’t back down. “Keith? Wanna help me here?”

Keith grinned evilly, “it would be my pleasure.”

“Oh my gosh!” Allura cried out, smiling largely and stopping the two in their tracks. “I just remembered something, Coran!”

Her advisor looked at her as well. “Kitziwch, right?”

“Yes!” she smiled, and the paladins could see right through her act. “We do have a word in Altean for that, it’s ‘Kitziwch’.”

Lance and Keith blinked at each other.

“You know, Keith, I think she knew all along. I think she tricked us into this!” The blue paladin said with mock-surprise.

Keith fake-gasped in return. “I think you’re right! But what do we do about Pidge and her blackmail, and Allura?”

“I do not know, there’s only two of us…”

“But there’s also two of them…”

“Fair point, buddy, so what ever shall we do?”

Keith grinned. “I think we have one clear option.”

“Shall we attack to defend our honor?” Lance readied his stance.

Keith followed suit, “absolutely.”

#voltron tickling #klance #tickling #tickle fic #ticklish!lance #ticklish!keith #filled #lance mcclain #keith kogane #vld tickling #mine #jeezus there's so much tickling in this #a good thing abt not being able to say the word and not always being able to type it: #is that i have to get creative with my descriptions lmao