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jackinalex · 6 months

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Would love to hear your thoughts on Glitter & Crimson. It’s about Jalex isn’t it

I really gotta stop mentioning things I'm afraid people will latch onto. Sigh. But tbh, I've been wanting an excuse to use my English teacher knowledge to analyze the shit out of that song in particular. If you took an AP English class, you know that it's 90% bullshitting you're way through claims and that is absolutely why I am who I am. This is so fucking long, dude.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time on this. Like I literally printed out the lyrics and annotated it like I was in college. But this is my shit, y’all. I love to analyze things. So, there’s a few different ways that I went about this: what the literary devices mean vs. what Alex (the liar) says the song means vs. the Jalex conspiracy theories that keep me in Delululand. Please scroll on if you don’t want to read about me being delusional about Jalex. Also, the very, very last of this is where we get into the absolute most delusional theory I have, so scroll to the bottom if that’s all you want.

Let’s start off with what Alex has said about the song so that it can provide us at least a little context. Alex told Apple Music: “To me, this song is about two characters who are deeply in love, whose love is not allowed to be that by [a certain] society. They’re gay, and they don’t feel like they’re accepted in their own skin for who they are, or for who they want to love. It’s a cry out to seize that power back and saying, ‘No. You don’t get to dictate how we live our lives.’ Obviously, I can’t speak to that, being a straight guy, but I know a lot of people who live that experience every day. And it was something that felt very meaningful that I wanted to address for them because they can’t [in this way]. They aren’t songwriters.” This is less helpful context-wise, but he also told Kerrang: “This was dramatic to record (laughs). It was one of the last songs we wrote – in fact, it might have been the very last one. The record was almost done, but I felt like there were a couple of missing pieces. We actually went out to Big Bear [Lake, in California] – me, Jack, Zakk and Andrew. We rented a cabin and locked ourselves away for a minute. As we recorded Glitter & Crimson, it was one of those moments where we went, ‘Oh, thank god! We’ve got the thing that we were missing!’ I think the performance in the bridge is me almost knowing that it was the last take. It’s like when the director is about to call, ‘That’s a wrap!’ and everybody is like, ‘Holy shit!’ You feel that swell of relief and appreciation for getting through it.”

Most importantly, during the Wake Up, Sunshine Twitch Listening Party, Alex literally says he wrote G & C about Jack (starts at 1:36:26). Idc if he's joking, bro. It's good enough for me.

I guess the best way to go about the analysis is just to go lyric-by-lyric. Then, I’ll go a bit deeper into more of the bigger symbols. I want to preface this by saying that Alex probably did not mean for a lot of these things to mean what I’ve interpreted them to mean. And when I say I interpreted them, I mainly mean that I took what was given to me and recalled the connotations that these words carry (that was so wordy; idek if that made sense).

It’s a typical story, three in the morning

You’re holding my head.

To me, this seems fairly literal. Sitting with another person at 3 in the morning with them holding your head is really intimate. It could be after sex or just an intense conversation. I think that this is one of the lines that points toward this song being about a gay couple the most. I know he doesn’t specify what gender the couple is, but since Alex simply cannot write a song without inserting himself, I’m guessing they’re dudes. The holding my head kind of gives off that vibe to me, too. Anyone can hold anyone’s head, of course, but something about it just gives me the image of a guy holding a guy’s head. No matter how you spin it (head on the shoulder, head on the lap, etc.) it is super intimate, which means that this is a situation between two people who are very close. It’s vulnerable, too. There’s also the idiom “to hold something over someone’s head,” but I do think that the meaning here is literal. The idiom doesn’t make sense here. We gotta remember that Jack and Alex (and Zakk and Andrew) wrote this song together at a lake house. Every time I hear the opening lines, I think about Jack and Alex being together at 3 am in the lake house in one of those bedrooms, Jack holding Alex’s head. 🥺

Caught in the tension, silent confessions

At the foot of your bed

The tension line could be in reference to the relationship, which we know is not accepted by those around them. It could also just be another reference to sex lol. I’m leaning more toward the former, though. I think the silent confessions depend on where the couple is at in their relationship. If they’re established, I think it’s probably a confession of love (like, we’ve been seeing each other, but I’m actually in love with you). But if it’s in the very early stages, the confession could be the confession of feelings. These two people are really close, so if they’re not yet a couple, then they’re definitely best friends. “At the foot of your bed” makes me think about sex again lol (specifically head because…Yeah).

Glitter and crimson, fighting the friction

What a perfect mess

Glitter and crimson are massive metaphors/symbols in this song, so I’m going to hold off on going too far into that just yet. For now, we can discuss how the two are contrasting. Glitter is pretty and can symbolize the beautiful things in life (it can symbolize a lot of other things, too, which we will get to, promise). Crimson, on the other hand, often represents blood and violence (and a lot of other things, too), so this is one of the first instances of conflicting ideas and feelings. The two ideas come together despite being opposites. “Fighting the friction” could be another reference to tension, whether it’s conflict brought about because of societal pressure, or sexual tension. It could even be both.

While I know that Alex definitely wasn’t trying to reference pride or the history of it, the mention of glitter was an excellent way of doing so. Glitter has a rich history with the LGBT community. It is tied with queer nightlife and the performance arts of drag, burlesque, and cabaret. In the past, it was a way to signal queer identity to other queer people, a practice that some people use to this day. It was also used as a kind of beauty and/or gender defiance when men were ostracized for presenting femininely and women were ostracized for presenting masculinely (Dorwart). Overall, glitter can also symbolize fakeness, materialism, greed, treasure, and excitement. In the instance of the lyric, I tend to think that the glitter is representative of the beauty of the situation, but also having to hide the relationship (the “characters” are being fake by hiding their relationship.

While crimson can symbolize blood, violence, anger, warning or revenge (which is what I believe its main purpose is with the lyric), it can also represent vigor, passion, love, and courage. I definitely think that love and passion are an important part of this, too. Every facet of this relationship is intense, whether it be a negative or positive thing. This is also hedging into Delululand, but crimson (it’s called red in the flag, but the shade is definitely crimson) was one of the colors of the original pride flag, representing life. I’m certain that Alex was not thinking of the pride flag when he wrote this song, but there are so many references that he did accidentally that this song could be a gay anthem tbh.

With the “perfect mess” line, Alex has given us an oxymoron and another example of contrast. The two words are technically opposites, but when they come together, they create a new meaning. In the narrative, this refers to the relationship feeling so good and right to the guys, but not allowed by society, those around them, and even maybe themselves. If we look at it through a Jalex lens, the “mess” could easily be the conflict between them having feelings for one another and the pressures of the band and their friendship (a very classic fanfic trope for a good reason). There’s a lot to lose if things don’t work out, so there’s a very real question of whether pursuing a relationship is worth it. As we’ll get to later, it definitely seems like it is to them.

I wonder if you feel kinda like I feel

Temporary

These lines feel fairly literal to me. To feel temporary means to feel impermanent or uncertain. I think that both could be prevalent here. I also think that those feelings pertain to both the relationship and just their lives in general. It feels like the relationship can’t last because that’s what society tells them, and the uncertainty comes from not knowing if they even want it to (because they too are influenced by society). Alex has always written a lot about existentialism and these two lines strongly evoke that concept (which, to me, is more proof of the song being written from his perspective vs some “character” but we’ll get into more instances of that later).

Fixed on a moment just out of focus

And we can’t quite see

Being us ain’t good for us

I put these three lines together because they finish out the first verse and because there is significant enjambment, too. The first line is literal in the sense that the two characters (air quotes) in the song are trying to imagine what a good life together could be like, but they’re struggling too because that future seems so impossible (as we see with the second line). However, “and we can’t quite see” also brings into the second idea here. They can’t see the future and it also seems like being themselves and together isn’t good for them (probably because it’s dangerous for a lot of queer people in the world, even still). That leads us into the chorus, which is where we get to the cry out of the chorus.

And I don’t wanna wait till the sunshine fades

And bury our love in a shallow grave

Sunshinesymbolized happiness and life, so by the sunshine fading, that has to do with the beauty and goodness of the relationship wearing off (whether that be due to societal pushback or just conflict between the two guys). Sunshine is also what the yellow represented on the original pride flag. Again, I do not think that Alex ever intentionally referenced the flag, but…Anyway, it could also just be a little wink to the album itself “Wake Up Sunshine” or the song on the album. That song is also about existentialism to a certain extent, though it’s directed toward someone else and not about the narrator’s issues with it. Meanwhile, typically, shallow graves are done hastily by criminals (not always, but that’s what it is most associated with) because they don’t take much time or effort to dig. Alex (and Jack; Jesus, I keep forgetting he helped write this song) probably chose to pair these two lines because they almost have the same amount of syllables (11 vs. 10), but it’s also possible that he chose this specific phrase because being gay was a criminal offense for years. A shallow grave also indicates urgency and haphazardness, which would mean that the burial would probably be unplanned and quick. The narrator (Alex) is clear about not wanting that.

Cause the world could be cruel to us or

We could live for the dangerous so

Let’s start, let’s start a riot

Just like a few lines ago, I included these three together for the enjambment. The first line is straightforward, supporting the idea of society being unaccepting to the couple. When we put it with the second line, it’s reiterating that though the world is cruel, they could live for it instead of being afraid of it. When we pair the second line with the third, the narrator is saying that he wants to stop being afraid and instead embrace and fight for what he and his lover have. It is impossible for me to ignore the term “riot” being used here in a queer context because the first pride was a riot! I’m sure most of you know about the Stonewall riots, but if not, here’s a bit of background: there was a small dive bar in NYC called the Stonewall Inn, which LGBT+ frequented. In an article entitled "The First Pride Was a Riot: The Origins of Pride Month” for American University Washington DC, Patty Housman writes:

At the time there existed outdated “masquerade” or “cross-dressing” laws that suggested a “man” or a “woman” must be wearing a certain number of clothing items that matched the gender on their state-issued ID. The police took advantage of these laws to raid drinking establishments and arrest transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. Just after midnight on June 28, 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn like they had many times before. Only, this time, something unusual happened: Stonewall patrons fought back.

There are conflicting stories about what actually happened, but essentially queer people fought back against the police brutality that had been plaguing them for quite some time. They were targeted, attacked, humiliated, arrested, and even worse, and they were fed up. Since this event took place in June, we now celebrate in America every June. And again, I’m sure that Alex and Jack didn’t intend to reference Stonewall, but I’m deep into queer theory now, so there’s no going back. Sometimes meanings can appear in works without the original composer even realizing it. Long story short, the riot is a way to take power back, whether it be the metaphorical riot in this song or the proverbial riots at Stonewall. And since this is supposed to be a queer song that references a riot, Stonewall must be discussed.

Hard to sit still when your head’s on fire

Oh, oh yeah

The saying “my head’s on fire” means that one is stressed or overwhelmed. However, “your head’s on fire” indicates that someone is lying. Therefore, I think this line has a dual meaning. I think that it references both here because a) the narrator is frustrated with having to hide his love from society, but it can also indicate that they’ve been lying (i.e, hiding their relationship). “Hard to sit still” calls back to the riot idea. It can be difficult to sit idly by when you know for sure that something is wrong. The narrator is tired of sitting around and hiding their relationship.

‘Cause I’m a supernova

And you’re my four leaf clover

These two symbols are the most important (besides glitter and crimson) in the entire song. This is entirely metaphor; there’s nothing literal in these two lines. The narrator compares himself to a supernova, which is the greatest explosion humans have ever seen. They are the “extremely bright and super powerful explosion of a star.” Supernovas signify destruction and renewal, so the narrator is seeking a new beginning of some sort. On the other hand, four-leaf clover have always symbolized luck, but they can also represent protection and the uncommon. Traditionally, each leaf of a four leaf clover signified something different: hope, faith, luck, and charity. Therefore, the narrator sees his lover as somewhat of a good luck charm. He’s different from others, but he’s everything to the narrator.

This is where I get the most Delulu, so just keep that in mind as you’re reading. I’m now going to argue that the supernova represents Alex and the four-leaf clover represents Jack. I’m not pulling this completely out of my ass, I promise. Alex is obsessed with space. He brings it up every chance he gets and if you listened to Full Frontal, you know how annoying it could get lmao. Point is, the man loves some fucking space, okay? To Alex, Jack has always represented goodness. Nothing sums it up better than his birthday post for him here. He literally sees him as a “bright light in this weird world” and loves him “times a million.” But there’s been countless instances of Alex singing Jack’s praises (and even more of Jack singing Alex’s). This last tour, Jack’s been spending every moment trying to make Alex happy and keep him laughing, and ya know, Alex can lie all he wants and say that “Kill Ur Vibe” isn’t about Jack, but it absolutely fucking is, even if he doesn’t know that. Alex sees himself as a supernova and Jack as a four-leaf clover. Jack is not only a rarity, but also just a constant sign of goodness in Alex’s life and that, my dudes, is fucking beautiful.

There is also a specific species of clover called crimson clover. I doubt that Alex thought about this while they were writing this song, but when I started working on this analysis, it occurred to me that I’d heard the two phrases before in a Lana del Rey song. And if you guys know Jack, he loves Lana. In “Venice Bitch,” she has a line that says, “Me myself, I like diamonds//My baby crimson and clover.” This line is a reference to the song “Crimson & Clover” by Tommy James and the Shondells. It’s a song about the potential for loving someone and what a relationship could be. I don’t know if there was any thinking about this song during the writing of G & C, but it’s interesting how the two songs are essentially about the same thing (just in different contexts). G & C is about the potential for loving someone and what a relationship could be, but through a more cynical lens (at first). The use of the ampersand in both songs is curious, too. I don’t doubt that Alex is aware of this song, but I don’t know that it had much of an influence on it. I do love the idea that Alex wrote about crimson and clover in the same song for Jack (who loves Lana) or even that it was Jack’s idea in the first place. It’s just cute.

Crimson clover doesn’t have a ton of ideas associated it with it, but some people tend to see it as a sign of growth, resilience, love, and affection. The latter two are probably related to it being red and I would assume that the Tommy James and the Shondells song helped with that connotation, too. It’s the growth and resilience that really intrigues me, though. They grow throughout the winter, which is fascinating and definitely lets that resilience ring true. If we’re to link those concepts to the song, the narrator believes that their relationship is resilient and growing, maturing in a way that it necessary for them to thrive. Winter can symbolize hard, rough times, and so the narrator views their relationship as troubled (whether it be because of the way they’re viewed or because of their own issues), but resilient and able to survive the difficult times.

Time to stop being insane about the last two lines and get into the second verse and bridge.

Heavy as ever, light as a feather

I’m caught in between

“Light as a feather” is a common idiom (and synonym) for having very light weight and/or being light and free. Here, the narrator is contrasting the feeling of being free and light because they’re so happy with their lover with the fact that he also feels “heavy,” which means hard to endure or emotionally taxing. When used literally, heavy refers to something being hard to carry because of its weight. So while the narrator is happy, he is also sad and probably anxious and unsure because of the oppression he and his lover are facing. The second line is telling us that verbatim; he is torn between focusing on being happy with his lover and the negative feelings associated with their sexualities and relationship.

Hard to stay focused, process the progress

How long can we be

Happy if happy ain’t meant for us

This calls back to the lines before it. Again, it’s hard for the narrator to focus on how happy the relationship makes him because of how bad society and oppression makes him feel. “Process the progress” probably means that it’s difficult for him to focus on how much their relationship has grown because of how anxious he also is. Progress is also a term used frequently with LGBTQ+ issues. We use “progress” to describe how things have improved for queer folks in the last few decades. I think the narrator could be referring to that, as well, that it’s hard to look at how much progress has been made as a society when things are still bad (especially for trans folks). The second and third lines see the narrator expressing his anxiety again. Yes, he’s very happy with his lover, but society is constantly telling him that they won’t work out, and he’s worried that some part of that is right.

Cause being less ain’t good enough

But being us feels good to us

To be less means not as good or esteemed as someone else. In this sense, I take it as the narrator saying that he has been suppressing part of himself (his sexuality and relationship), since to suppress part of yourself makes you “less,” in a way (I hope that makes sense). Essentially, if you’re not presenting all of yourself, part of you is missing, hence “less.” The narrator says that being less isn’t good enough, which I take as meaning that not being their full, authentic selves is not enough, and by enough, he means he doesn’t want to settle for hiding their relationship in the way that they have been. And besides, with the line, “being us feels good to us,” the narrator is expressing that being with his lover feels right despite all of the anxiety he feels.

I’m skipping the chorus, obviously, so let’s get into the bridge.

No compromise, no second best

There’s no stopping now, this weight on my chest

This is the beginning of the cry out in which the couple takes their power back. No compromise means no more suppressing themselves, which reminds me a lot of the old idea of gay people being allowed to exist and be with their partners at home and in LGBT+ spaces, but nowhere else. The narrator is saying that he’s not doing this anymore. This could be what “second best” is, whereas the best situation would be where they are accepted and allowed to be themselves everywhere, though I do wonder if second best could also refer to the concept of “playing straight,” which is where queer people date only people of the opposite sex in order to fit societal norms. People have historically done this to stay alive. It’s not as common anymore, but it’s definitely something that still happens. This could be a reference to the men dating (or even marrying) women in order to hide their sexuality and not ruffle society’s feathers.

The narrator is putting an end to whatever the compromise and second best are, though. He’s going to be open and honest with himself, his lover, and the world, and that’s what the “no stopping now” refers to. He’s done pretending and making himself lesser to make other people comfortable. “The weight on my chest” is the huge uncertainty and anxiety of his relationship. He’s getting rid of it. It could also be anticipation, though, which would be the anticipation of taking his power back. It’s an important, hard thing that is going to change the course of his life forever.

I won’t settle down, won’t settle for less

I won’t settle for less, I won’t settle for less

I think this is pretty literal. The narrator is not going to sit down and be quiet (and thus, hide his authentic self), and he’s not going to settle for anything but being his authentic self. I do think that the “won’t settle down” could be read as an allusion to Stonewall, since the queer folks that protested those three days were constantly told to just calm down for many years before they finally fought back. “Settle down” could also be a reference to playing straight since settling down often entails getting married to someone of the opposite sex and having children (*I look into the camera like I’m on a mockumentary*). This could also mean that the narrator is not going to be with a woman to appease society. They utilize parallelism (and thusly, repetition) here. Repetition is almost always utilized to emphasize a feeling or idea, create rhythm, and/or develop a sense of urgency. I definitely believe that the use of repetition here is used for emphasis. Not settling is an important theme of the song. Parallelism is also used to create emphasis, but also to create flow between lines, which is always necessary for songs. I’m sure there’s probably more literary devices in the song, but I doubt you guys want me to go too much farther into that lol.

To sum up, the song is rich with metaphors and allusions (even if Alex wasn’t aware of the latter when they were writing it). I think it has the potential of being a great queer anthem. I don’t know that it will ever become that, but all of these possible references to pride and Stonewall are so fucking good (even if it’s just from happenstance). This may make me totally fucking insane, but I can’t ignore the fact that Alex wrote this song with Jack at a cabin in Big Bear, the album was released, and then like eight months later, Alex and Lisa were split up. Then, like another month passed, and Alex was living with Jack. I’m aware that I’m delusional, but this isn’t even me speculating; I’m just reporting events in the order they happened. Take that as you will.

Works Cited

Dorwart, Laura. “Inside the Fascinating History of Glitter and Gay Culture.” Byrdie, 15 February 2022. https://www.byrdie.com/history-of-glitter.

Patty Housman. “The First Pride Was a Riot: The Origins of Pride Month.” American University Washington D.C.,10 June 2022.

“What Is a Supernova?” NASA, NASA, 23 July 2021, spaceplace.nasa.gov/supernova/en/.

#please forgive me for taking forever #also this is not proofread bc like #i'm lazy #anyway? i hope y'all can get some kind of enjoyment out of this?#kalina answers #jalex #jack #alex #glitter & crimson #wake up sunshine

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mantis-a-shrimp · 2 years

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I'd like to start this off by saying I absolutely fucking love Klavier Gavin, he is one of my favorite characters and I am overjoyed every time he is on screen. However, I have many thoughts, and I cannot let them rot in my brain any longer.

Firstly, this has got to be the worst fucking picture of him ever. No shade to the artist, it was probably just an off day, but holy shit. His hands are the size of watermelons and it looks like he's about to be consumed by his own neck.

Next, let's analyze his dumbass outfit. A popped collar that's making queens of the English renaissance jealous. Not to mention he only has half of his buttons buttoned, and they're all in the fucking middle. Why. As for his accessories I have no notes that haven't been beaten into the ground by hundreds of people who said it better than I ever could, except for the fact that he's going to trip and stab himself in the throat with that sharp ass G necklace, and somebody's going to get accused of murder.

Now, his goddamn office is impossible to use, and I'm convinced it's because he can't put together an ikea table or office chair to save his fucking life. The purpose of desks are to sit AT them. You cannot do that with a solid fucking speaker and a massage chair on the other side of the room. Who let's you live like this??? That is the office of a man that cannot boil water.

Another wack ass thing about Klavier is that this bitch is very clearly doing a terrible job of hiding the fact that he's a walking disaster, and it's working. Not once does anybody clock that this man lives off of cup noodles & takeout and doesn't know what fabric softener is. Maybe they're too enchanted with the rockstar thing to be like "you are a human and you're not doing good" which is sad as fuck honestly and since I'm trying to keep this light, I will skip over my analysis of his trauma and my wish for a backstory. Maybe I'll go over that in another post, idk.

WHY the fuck is his name piano. Is his birth name piano? Did he name himself piano in/after Germany? He doesn't even fucking play the piano!

Why, when creating a rockstar schtick, was "pretend to be German" the winner????? And WHY, does he keep it up with people that are actually German?? HIS BOSS GREW UP IN GERMANY. And does he ever let the persona drop? He has to right? Like imagine this bitch chilling at home with nothing but a bag of cheetos and 90 day fiance to keep him company and he's still going "Ach nein fraulein! er hat dich nicht verdient!" (Google translated I don't know German sorry bros)

Ngl I have more, but this is a long ass post and I'm sorry to whoever had to scroll past this lol

#long post #ace attorney #aa #aa4 #klavier gavin #text post #i really do love him lol I swear #I've been posting a lot of klav lately #sorry dudes I've been playing aa4 and he's been on my mind

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thelauracampbell · 2 years

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Meet Dr. Sergey Lapin

The Media Lab Show: Meet Dr. Sergey Lapin

Laura Campbell

October 17, 2022

Assignment #3 Audio/Radio

MUSIC INTRO

Campbell: Welcome back to the Media Lab Show, I’m your host, Laura Campbell. For today’s segment of Character Development, we meet Dr. Sergey Lapin. He’s a professor and the associate director of the newly created Data Analytics Program at WSU Everett. Here’s a little bit about his journey to becoming a professor and some projects he’s working on now.

Lapin: If we are talking about elementary school, I wanted to be a person who made cartoons first.

Campbell: As a young boy growing up in the Soviet Union, Lapin initially wanted to be a cartoonist, then considered being a taxi driver, then shifted gears entirely towards learning coding.

Lapin: In that time computer science didn’t exist, at least in my county. So the closest thing to doing some kind of coding would be computation mathematics. Slowly but surely, things started evolving and I became a professor.

Campbell: In the late 90s, Lapin moved to the United States to attend University of Houston for both his Master’s and PHD.

MUSIC FADES OUT

Lapin: I realized my English is not good, so I try to write on the whiteboard as much as I can so they will understand what I am saying.

Campbell: And that’s how you pushed yourself to practice?

Lapin: And then also, another thing is like, I will have accent. I will have always because I came here as an adult but I tried to reduce it. I tired to gain fluency and tried to gain vocabulary. So two things I did for that: I talked, talked, talked as much as possible. I got myself an American girlfriend and that helped right away. The casual kinds of conversations, you know?

Campbell: Currently, Lapin is in the beginning stages of putting together an initiative where WSU will collaborate with STEM curriculums in other countries. He is creating a partnership with universities in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. He also just recently travelled to Brazil.

MUSIC FADES IN

Lapin: Brazil was a different story. For Brazil, I had a travel grant from the Honors College. That was an exploratory trip to prepare for faculty, that trip.

Campbell: Patrick Frielinger, a senior in WSU Everett’s software engineering program, shared his experience being a student in one of Dr. Lapins classes.

MUSIC FADES OUT

Freilinger: I took MATH 448, Numerical Analysis with Sergey which is a class all about taking math problems that would otherwise be difficult for a computer to handle and modeling them using clever methods. Sergey is without a doubt a great instructor but also a strong leader in his field. As many know, he has been working on an ongoing initiative to modernize STEM curriculum abroad, especially in Central Asia, which shows he is not only committed to making learning better for his students but also better for everyone.

#SoundCloud

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slytherinsnekxvii · 3 years

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let's talk about severus snape. he's one of the most controversial characters the internet has to offer, with several blogs, channels and pages dedicated specifically to hating him, despite him having one of the most—if not the most—intriguing character arcs the series has to offer. so, as a result of me coming across far too many of said blogs, channels or pages, here's an extremely detailed explanation of why i like him and think he's easily one of my favourite characters :)

1. he's not that bad of a teacher.

just so you know, i'm a teenage girl fresh out of high school. so, my experience with teachers? still keeps me up at night :)

my family is pretty strict about religion. you can guess what that means. anything that was magic-adjacent, especially something that, god forbid, had an entire school dedicated to witchcraft and wizardry was a hard no if i wanted to have any sort of freedom over the media i paid attention to, and any opportunity to go about my life without being monitored to make sure i wasn't suddenly possessed or something. thanks to this, i ended up secretly reading the philosopher's stone in my last year of primary school. i would've been 11 at the time, just about to turn 12, so a little bit older than harry and co. going on what i'd heard from those who had already read the series, i went in expecting to absolutely despise this man. i went in expecting to read a demon. i finished the book and came out thinking... that really wasn't that bad.

my mom found out, so i didn't get to read the rest of the series until i ended up on the executive committee for my school's book club and my friends were appalled that i'd only read the first book. at this point, i'm still expecting him to get worse and... he just doesn't. when i was in primary school, i had multiple teachers break wooden meter-long rulers across my classmates' backs. the first time it happened, i was in infant year 2 (about 6/7 years old). i had teachers who would insult us, based on anything from hygiene to behaviour to intelligence if you looked at them wrong. my sister (who was three years ahead of me) had a teacher who kept her in hours after school was over because the teacher had a written a note in her workbook upside down, and when my sister corrected her, the teacher made her rewrite it, turning the book each time the note was written so it would never be done the correct way.

in secondary school, i had teachers who would actively humiliate us in front of the class if we didn't do as well as they wanted. i had teachers who would throw markers and whiteboard erasers at us if we did something they didn't like during class. i had a teacher who looked for a friend of mine who was petrified of attention and then mercilessly picked on her until she went to the bathrooms to cry. these are the kinds of teachers that i was used to. so, when i read harry potter and read snape, who would have probably been one of the nicer teachers i met in my lifetime, i thought to myself, he's really not that bad. he's just... strict.

antis claim that he traumatised every kid that ever went through his class, that he straight up abused them and... no. he didn't. all of them are comfortable talking back, they talk during his class, no one trembles when he walks past, except for neville, who usually bore the brunt of snape's anger because he was consistently messing up in a potentially lethal class.

after school, i hated the thought of formal education, so now i'm working until i feel ready to do university. coincidentally, one of my jobs is teaching maths and english to kids writing the end of primary and secondary school exams. given the sheer amount of annoyance i feel sometimes, i actually respect him for not being more harsh with them, especially when they're all running off into danger or exploding cauldrons.

he really isn't that bad of a teacher, and we know this, since his classes' owl results are said to be consistently good.

plus, he was written in the 90's when all this was okay behaviour for teachers. hell, compared to some of the teachers in text, given that he goes out of his way to make sure the students are always protected, he's a lot better than most people give him credit for.

2. i relate to him.

come on, the man grew up to be a dramatic, queer-coded, petty bitch who wears all black all the time and likely has at least one mental disorder. i'm a petty, emo bisexual with (actually diagnosed, don't worry) depression and anxiety and I'm in a theatre group. what did you really expect from me?

on a serious note, both of the schools i went to were considered "prestigious". i got into my primary school because of a teacher's recommendation (she was a family friend). the second school i got into was because i scored ridiculously high on the placement test that would determine which school i went to. in primary school, i was the poor, really awkward, really smart kid who got left out of everything, and my best friend was the only kid who was worse off than me.

in secondary school, i was just as smart as everyone else... but i was still poorer, and still more awkward and still got left out of everything.

i got that isolated feeling, that feeling of not being good enough, that feeling where life always seems to have it out for you and that's even though i still got dealt a better hand than snape ever did. so, i get it. i'm never ever going to have it as bad as he did, but i acknowledge what he went through and i sympathise, because i have a chance, but it only ever got worse for him.

3. i genuinely enjoy his character.

this dude went through absolute hell for basically his entire life. the best years he had were probably when he was neck-deep in the group of people who hated witches and wizards like him, but somehow managed to treat him better than the good guys.

all of that, and he still manages to be one of the most entertaining motherfuckers in the whole series, with one of the most interesting character arcs ever. it's the witty lines, the sheer dynamic of his character, the change from the twitchy, hypervigilant kid from the slums to the adult that managed to spy on the Dark Lord himself and save the wizarding world in the process, while still being a hot mess of a person. it's the managing to get shit done while everybody hated him and everything was going to hell. it's the everything, and i haven't even talked about how badass he is.

come on, potions prodigy turned master, exemplary duellist (cough, cough, winning 4-on-1 vs McGonagall, Flitwick, Sprout and Slughorn, and leaving a scratch on nobody, while managing to not take a single hit himself, cough, cough), spellcrafter, spy and one of the only wizards to ever figure out unaided flight. dark arts master, proficient at healing (dumbledore would've been dead a lot sooner, if it weren't for him, most likely). he's one of the most powerful wizards of his time. i've said that any universe where he's actually a bad guy—or just legitimately loyal to the death eaters—is a universe where voldemort wins and this is why. if he was motivated by literally anything other than lily, the wizarding world was more than likely fucked.

the point is, i just think he's neat.

4. spite.

every time i appreciate snape, a snater feels like someone is walking over their grave. every time i appreciate snape, a snater turns blue out of sheer rage. every time i appreciate snape, a snater loses their mind looking for their non-existent reading comprehension.

the spite in my veins is tempered only by the broth of instant ramen and ungodly amounts of sugar, and i'm going to use them all in my mission to cause antis pain when they refuse to acknowledge their lack of critical thinking and analysis skills.

so, yeah. why do i actually like snape?

tl;dr: he's not that bad. for a teacher written in the 90's and compared to teachers i've had within the decade, the guy's just strict. sure, he's a dick (who i personally think is hilarious), but he always makes sure the students are safe and he didn't leave any lasting effect on any of the students. he's really not that bad of a teacher. and hell, he's not even that bad of a person. i fully admit that he was an asshole and i entirely believe he was prone to self-destructive behaviour, but he still tried to atone for his mistakes and he did, is the thing, even though the odds were stacked more or less completely against him. i like him because he entertains me, and because i relate to him, as a teen who went through some shit and probably would have joined up with some bad people if it weren't for my friends and family, and as a teacher who really can't stand my students sometimes. i also like him because it irritates people who don't like him :)

also, istg if any of you respond to this with "bUt hE was ObseSsED with LiLY and just WAnTEd to FUCK hEr," i'm crawling into your bedroom window with the most unrealistic, mangled interpretations of your favourite characters and making sure they haunt you in your dreams. meet me in the fuckin' pit, babe. reread the series, actually think about it and come with receipts that aren't Voldemort, because i don't think you want to have the same opinion as the character who canonically doesn't understand love, now, do you, sweetheart? when you do that, then, and only then, will i consider entertaining your bullshit :)

that's about it from me, thanks for reading!

#severus snape #pro snape #why do people like snape?#i can't speak for anybody else but here's me #i probably left something out since i haven't written a good essay since my literature exam #but it's fine #let me like my chaotic bastard son in peace please #snape #snapedom

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softpine · 3 years

Note

Wait but isnt Stevie a freshman? This may have just been my school but dont you have to take certain base credits before taking APs or IB classes? We couldnt take AP till sophomore year and even then we werent in the /really/ advanced APs until Senior year and people would have to like double or triple their lets say english credits to take AP level english classes. Was Stevie doing canterburry tales analysis in 7th grade? I dunno why im taking this so seriously so you can ignore this but now im just curious about Stevie's academic history dksbfkd not to mention her chances at being a future cum laude just because of the SHEER AMOUNT of extra credit a1md grade cushioning she has with those APs she's probably got a 4.5 even tho she's like a solid mid 90s tier student because who has time for straight 100s these days lol

i guess my high school didn't take academics nearly as seriously as yours did because i have no idea what half of this means lmaooo but i'll try my best 😅 she's not a freshman!! ages are..... well we know how i feel about ages & timelines here fjksjd but she is, at the very least, a sophomore (stevie & elaine are a year older than asa & jada) so she did already take the base classes during freshman year! she doubled up on a few of them to get them out of the way, like algebra & geometry (matt mentions that they've taken math classes together & he copied off her, so we know she did take the base classes with everyone else), but after that she basically started taking as many AP classes as she could. it's not always required to take the base class first; at my school you could take most AP classes in place of the equivalent courses. clearly she doesn't have a good advisor though, otherwise they would've told her to only take a few at a time. her GPA is not very good because she's taking all these advanced classes and just barely passing them. she takes them because she likes to learn, not for the grade, but that will surely cause problems for her in the future :( but yeah she's just vibing lmao! she's not a super genius & school doesn't necessarily come easily to her, she just has a passion for STEM ;-;

also i think it's important to remember that this is just an average high school in Middle of Nowhere, USA. she's not shooting for ivy leagues here, she just wants to follow her dream!

#this will actually be relevant later though!!#asks #anonymous #nonsims #brandi answers

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troop-scoop · 3 years

Text

Youth I

Chapter One - Pilot

Word count: 2k

Series Summary: On a family trip to your dad’s home town of Hawkins, Indiana, you make a series of decisions that result in you ending up in the year 1983 with more questions than there are answers presently available.

Pairing: Steve Harrington x Female Reader ( slow burn )

Chapter Summary: You go through what’s become your new ‘normal’ at Hawkins High School

⟛⟛

Nothing about your current situation was settling right in your stomach. There were no answers as to how you got here, and you didn’t have any questions that could easily be answered. A series of unfortunate events resulted in the attitude you carried. You used to be sweet, all smiles and laughter unless someone did something to make you upset.

What happened to that girl? The girl who grew up never experiencing fear to the point where it worried her parents and made teachers concerned because she’d climb so high on the playground that if you fell, you’d surely break something.

You’d climbed so high on something, and you fell into this situation, and something did break. Your bravery, your fearlessness, nothing physical, but those two things were shattered, and your ego bruised.

Nothing was like what you were used to. To you, everything in this school hallway was dated. The fashion, the haircuts, the textbooks, and the tech.

The stereotypes.

“L/n!”

You shook your head, already knowing whose voice that was. A teenage boy who fit the typical ‘jock’ stereotype that everyone knew. The kid who hated his small town, he got around, played a sport his father probably hated, who would likely never get out of said small town he hated. Yeah, you knew the pattern. Everyone, where you were from, did.

“No.”

You continued on your trek to the locker, but you could hear the slight squeaking of the soles of the older boy’s Nikes on the linoleum floor trying to catch up. Where you were from, people would be staring at this type of occurrence, but because none of the students surrounding you even batted an eye at the basketball player or you for that matter, told you that it wasn’t abnormal for him to be audacious.

“Hey now, I just wanna talk.” He defended, finally catching up to you, walking alongside, but a little bit behind so he didn’t get in anyone’s way.

“Harrington, the last time you wanted to ‘talk’ was when you needed my math homework.” A chuckle escaped you as you said it, finally stopping at your locker.

“In my defense, you don’t look like a sophomore.” He tried, standing next to you as you were spinning the knob in the locker to get it open.

“Whatever, what do you want?”

“Wow, you’re grumpy. Anyways, Tommy H, Carol, and I wanna hang out but my parents don’t leave for another week, and we can’t be at Carol’s place because her mom hates Tommy, and well, you know how Tommy’s dad is.”

You hummed in amusement. “Yeah, he’s a dick, how does that involve me?” You had your binder and pencil case in one arm, staring at him with your hand inside of your locker, holding onto the cup of coffee.

“Can we hang out at your place?”

Rolling your eyes you kneeled down, placing your things down on the ground before standing upright, grabbing the collar of his jacket and pulling it towards your locker, placing it inside before closing the door on it. “Not happening.” You responded, a bright smile on your face as you grabbed your things, taking a step to walk away.

“Y/n! This isn’t funny!”

“I’m gonna correct you on that, it’s not funny to you.” The situation was probably the funniest thing you’d encountered in weeks, and considering your day to day life before used to be full of laughter and playfully teasing, that then went to quiet days spent alone and pondering, this was a nice change.

“Unlock it or I’ll tell Mrs. Jensen!”

Steve’s threat caused you to laugh, holding your things closer so you didn’t drop any of them. “A tattletale? You always did strike me as the type to tease kids in elementary school, but you never did seem like a snitch, you do know the saying right? About snitches?”

“Yeah, from you!” he responded, and although he had a serious face, you knew he was fighting back a smile as well by his voice and how his brows weren’t furrowed in frustration or anger.

“Snitches are bitches, who get stitches and end up in ditches.” it wasn’t intentional for both of you to say it at the same time, but you had, but in two very different tones of voice. Your’s was more ‘matter of fact’ and he was amused.

You stared at him for a second, your smile remaining before you stepped forward, turning the dial of your lock to open it, and once you lifted the lever for the door, Steve got himself out, standing up straight and staring down at you, his hands finding the pockets of his jacket as you closed the locker door again. “That wasn’t fair, you look innocent,” he mumbled to himself.

“I’ll see you later?” Steve asked after a second.

“We have study hall together, so. . . maybe,” you told him, stepping away from the locker and heading down the hallway to your English class.

Bulletin boards on the walls, spaced out between each other, with thumbtacks keeping flyers and announcements up for students to see, lockers for students to keep their things throughout the day. It was all odd.

At your previous schools, lockers weren’t available. That was until your freshman year where you had to pay five dollars a year if you wanted one. And instead of bulletin boards, flyers and announcements would just be taped to the walls, or given during morning announcements, or emailed to students and parents. You were pretty sure your previous high school got rid of lockers in the late ’90s when drugs became prominent in your area and then got rid of bulletin boards when one student sent the other to the hospital with a thumbtack to the wrist, but those types of stories always had a few details in them that never made sense, allowing you to cast doubt on them. But maybe the story had just been told so many times that detail got twisted, the truth of what happened got misconstrued. Like a game of telephone.

Reaching the English classroom, you found your seat, with your anxiousness rising as you sat down, placing your coffee at the upper corner of your small desk, keeping your school supplies close to your chest.

You’d been a happy kid growing up. You didn’t have very many friends, but you had your parents, your little brother, and a condo that you’d been brought home to as a newborn that you knew was a safe place. Unlike the few friends you did have, you never really experienced anxiety or symptoms of depression, but you knew the signs, your closest friend, Mandy, dealt with it, and she confided in you often about how it felt and what it was like, and you often did your own research on it to know what you could to help her.

There were weekends where you spent a good few hours learning different breathing techniques to help her whenever she would have a panic attack, but now that you were dealing with moments where your heart sped up, your hands shook and you felt like something was terribly wrong, it was like all of those hours had been a waste because you couldn’t use them without getting more anxious.

“You okay?”

Looking to your left, you were met with a curious glance from your partner on the English project. Giving an unconvincing nod, you looked down at the top of your desk, eyes tracing over the wood pattern, lines connecting that looked like they shouldn’t, forming shapes and allowing you to distract yourself as Jonathan set his things down as well, taking his seat next to you.

Mrs. Jensen went over the usual, giving instructions for the project that everyone already knew, before leaving everyone to work, with her sitting behind her desk, a book in hand and a container of what you assumed were grapes by the purplish color. Though they could have been large blueberries.

“What’s so important about a quote?” Jonathan mumbled to himself, though it caught your attention from your own worksheet, looking over to him.

“In what context?” you asked, taking a sip from your drink as he began speaking.

“We’re talking about Romeo and Juliet, everyone knows what it’s about, you don’t really need a quote to explain things.”

You nodded when he looked over to you. “A lot of people only really know that it was written by Shakespeare and it’s about two star crossed lovers who kill themselves in the end. Mrs. Jensen probably knew that’s all anyone really remembers, she wants to make sure people know what’s actually happening.

“It’s pretty obvious, ‘Romeo, oh Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ she’s asking where he is.” He shrugged a bit, placing the book down on the desk, pages open and light reflecting off of the glossy pages.

“No, she’s not,” you told him, getting an odd and questioning look from him. “Well, this was written in the 1500s, English is practically a new language at that point, getting its own footing for once, paintings of historical figures wouldn’t have the English spelling of their names, and English is a language that’s taken a bunch of different parts from other languages, mostly german. If you ever see a period piece that’s set around this period of time, if a child says ‘lady mother’ when they’re addressing their mom, they’re not acknowledging that their mother is a female. They’re acknowledging her title. So her husband is likely a lord of a piece of land, which makes her the lady of that land as well. It was an archaic way of showing respect to their mother by also saying she had a title.”

“How does that relate to the quote?”

“Well, early modern English had many different phrases, and things have changed, we’ve come up with ways to say things that are far more simple. While we think she’s asking where Romeo is, she’s actually asking why he’s Romeo. Why out of all the people she could have fallen for, it had to be him. The enemy. You could use that in the analysis, a bit of how it shows we don’t choose who we love, even if we know we shouldn’t love them.”

Jonathan blinked before looking at his worksheet, picking up his pencil and writing something down, paraphrasing what you had just said and only moments later the bell rang, signaling the end of the class period.

You grabbed your things, leaving as quickly as you could without looking like an idiot, trying to get away from what caused you to be so nervous and make you feel like you could be sick at any moment.

Growing up, you weren’t afraid of many things if any. But maybe you just needed something like this to make you afraid of everything and anything around you. To make you jump at the sound of a drop of water from outside your motel window landing on the metal railing of the stairs and walkway.

But you were terrified, and you wanted to wake up in your own bed, at home, with your dad gently shaking your shoulder to get you up and out of bed. You were terrified you’d never see your parents again, that you’d been too mean to your little brother growing up, and that the last memory he’d have of you was you being mean.

You hadn’t even been afraid to sleep on your own as a kid, and all the things that you weren’t afraid of as a child that you should have been, always seemed to worry your dad. But what would he say and think now? Would he be worried now that you lived in a constant state of fear? Just looking at clothing racks scared you.

Since July you’d been trying to act normal, trying to pretend everything was okay, trying to be your normal self, but your normal self would be odd to everyone else, you knew random things no one else did, you liked things no one even knew about yet, and if you tried to talk about those things, you knew it wouldn’t be a good outcome, not a sour one, but not happy.

⟛⟛

Add yourself to the taglist!

tagging who i know would want to be -

@stonersteve @ilovebucketbarnes

#steve x reader #steve harrington x reader #steve harrington one shot #stranger things x reader #stranger things fanfiction #steve harrington x you

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creativityobsessed · 3 years

Text

Be Brave Adachi, or the musical shaping of episodes 1-4

Part 1: Episode 1

Ok folks, buckle up. @ohmypreciousgirl asked me for more music meta and I need exactly ZERO arm twisting for that to happen, so I immediately put on my listening ears and musicologist hat and started my eleventy first rewatch. Since I’m currently only through episode 4 on this rewatch, and I have a page and a half of notes, I’m gonna put in a Read More so that I don’t take up the next 5 miles of the tags. You might be interested if:

You like music

You’re interested in detailed analysis of character development

You’re wondering why the heck those scenes where Adachi is having all the anxiety are so dang effective.

The answer, of course, is that the music helps to shape the exact moments that Adachi makes steps towards character growth. Under the cut, you’ll find out exactly how it’s doing that.

This will be a 4-part series, running over the next 4 days because I got halfway through episode 3 and realized that yall did NOT want a 10 page paper in a single tumblr post. Plus then I can extend the series to include the rest of the episodes later.

So. Without further ado.

Episode 1 (If you’d like to watch/listen along, cue up 19:45 in episode 1* now.)

At the beginning of the show, we’re introduced to Adachi, the shy, introverted, anxious klutz. He tells us lots of things about himself, most of which include some reference to either his lack of bravery or his self-esteem which is currently so low that it seems to be floating somewhere in the Marianas Trench. Aside from the opening scene with the bike (which many of us, myself included, have hypothesized comes from some kind of future) the music is mostly laid-back, a little jazzy, and repetitive. Adachi’s office scenes come with a walking bass/guitar line that never really finds a melody, and reminds me of nothing more than generic 90s/early 2000s slice-of-life “this is every day” music. His Adachi-at-home music is gently strummed guitar, slow and kind of lethargic, mirroring the way Adachi just floats through life. The main exception is Adachi’s monologue on Kurosawa, which is fast paced, march-like, and jaunty - a reflection of how Adachi sees Kurosawa before the events of the show.

And then, at the end of the episode, that changes, and we get something new for the first time. Adachi is processing the new revelation that Kurosawa actually does like him, and he has just finished telling himself that Kurosawa must have gone crazy to like someone like him. There has been no musical accompaniment since they were in the office together. Kurosawa wraps the scarf around Adachi’s neck and Adachi hears Kurosawa’s inner monologue, cataloging the things he likes about Adachi.

This speech is obviously a turning point for Adachi, but we can be more specific than that. For Kurosawa’s first couple of points, we’re still in silence, and Adachi is looking down. We can imagine that he’s doing his own mental list that starts something like “yeah but…” But after the line “He’s actually an extremely kind and nice guy,” Adachi looks up at Kurosawa, and finally, after two whole minutes of silence in the soundtrack, a new kind of cue comes in.

This new cue is the antithesis of the rest of the soundtrack. It’s fully acoustic (with a little bit of reverb) and played on the piano, an instrument that the composer has not yet used. What’s more, the fragment that the piano repeats is completely unstable. We have no idea what key we’re in (yet. Spoiler, it’ll be A-major, eventually). [warning: technical stuff starts here, if you don’t care about specifics, jump to the /endTechnical tag] It starts with a first inversion D-major chord (in later iterations, IV^6) that attempts to resolve to G-D-A which is NOT a chord, or rather, it could be any number of chords but without a 3rd somewhere in there we don’t know which it is.

Ok, ok, so, resolution failed. Let’s try again! D-major^6 and then instead of going down to D, the A goes up a M3 to C-sharp, making G-E-C-sharp - WHOOPS that’s a tritone, less resolution than the first time. To be fair, the tritone is pretty far apart, and there’s an E floating around in the middle, so it doesn’t feel as teeth grinding-ly gross as your average Danse Macabre, but it SURE AS HELL doesn’t feel resolved either. [/endTechnical]

And we go back and forth between these two VERY unresolved phrases. It’s like we’re (read: Adachi is) stuck asking new questions that he doesn’t have any answers for. It’s unsettling and we spend almost 30 seconds just sitting there feeling unresolved, trying again and again in different octaves, with slightly different notes in the (almost inaudible) string parts-- nothing works. Adachi is not ready to move beyond the questions themselves, so the music doesn’t either, ending on a high unresolved note with Kurosawa’s “Wait.”^

And that’s IT. No resolution. The next musical cue is after enough dead space that our metaphorical ear palate has been cleansed (which is good, cause we jump from quasi-A major to a sequential figure with at least FOUR FLATS - about as distant a key as you can get). To get resolution for the Questioning cue, we’re going to have to wait.

And wait and wait, because that’s it for tonight yall! Episode 2 coming tomorrow!

Continue to part 2

[Although, real quick, before we move on to Episode 2, I just wanna mention that I love that Adachi’s fears about Kurosawa’s crush are scored with a very speedy bebop style cue while Kurosawa’s actual fantasies might as well be a Bach Oratorio COMPLETE WITH METRONOME, because if you needed to shorthand “antithesis” musically I’m not sure I could think of a better way of doing it, short of using screamo metal and Hildegard von Bingen lol.]

*All video timings and quotes are from Irozuku Subs videos. If you’re watching somewhere else, your mileage may vary slightly.

^As an English speaker I love the parallelism in how American English speakers use a rising tone to indicate questions, but I don’t know enough about Japanese to know if that transfers.

#cherry magic #cherry magic! thirty years of virginity can make you a wizard?!#adachi kiyoshi #music meta #someone: can you tell me more about the music? Me: OH BOY CAN I!!!#Look if Ao3 had an audience for ACTUAL ACADEMIC ANALYSIS PAPERS that I don't have to do footnotes and academic english for #I would be the most prolific author they ever had #(not really but also yes really)#acafandom

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bigbatlittlebat · 2 years

Note

Hey there! Hope I'm not bothering you, I was wondering if I could ask for a romantic batfam matchup if you have some time? I'm thanking you in advance and do not forget to take time and rest!

So to start with, I'm a Scorpio (sun) , Virgo (moon) and Libra (rising) and an INTJ, my personality type is 6w7, I'm heteroromantic and I go by she/her.

About my appearance, I have brown curly shoulder-length hair and brown eyes. My skin color is in between light and tan and I'm quite skinny and petite (5'1) which makes me quite insecure since I'm lacking curves and it tends to make me feel less feminine. Plus being just short can be annoying sometimes. But since, to make me feel better about myself, my style is in between elegant and rock.

Basically, I act like an extrovert at first, I'm mostly seen as friendly and I joke around a lot with people but in fact I'm nervous as hell ; too scared to bother or being annoying. And overthinking everything do not help, in this case mostly. When I get comfortable with someone, I'm still joking around but then unconsciously I tend to show all my flaws because either with friendship or love I guess I prefer to show people what they get into. So yeah, I have some trauma because of my father, which cause me quite a lot of problems with my emotions (can't control my anger and sadness,) I also tend to have some paranoia (giving me nightmares and lack of sleep from time to time) and I can't stand it when someone is too controlling with me (I end up being rebellious and sneaky.). I put on a shield to protect my feelings and not get hurt. After this stage of trust, I am much more jovial and protective towards them (like for instance I scared off some loosers who were bullying one of my close friend in middle school and since I have quite a reputation of being a « doberman »), I still have anger problems but less frequent because I end up adapting to people. However, in case of lack of respect, I don't hesitate to stand up for myself. In short, I act like a happy tough girl 90% of the time while I'm in fact an emotional mess. I'm also quite the hardworking type plus a perfectionist... (see the workaholic things coming) I suffer from anxiety too. I'm extremely scared of failure, and it makes me overthink everything.

I love to read novels and stories in general and write from time to time, I draw too and listen to music a lot (Rock, punk, alternative... Mostly sad songs with good rhythm), I exercices when I can and I take care of my pets. I'm super fond of animals and I babysit kids from time to time when I'm not on campus and love to take care of them. I love to debate and analysis humans behavior. I'm keen on rainy days. Currently I'm studying foreign languages (English and Spanish) in univ as a French student and have to master them but before I did two years of law studies.

I dislike people who don't have their own personality and change their behavior depending on people. But also crowds are a big no for me.

Things I have difficulties to assume, I just want to feel protected and I'm a bit of a hopeless romantic. I guess that's it. I wish you a nice day/evening 💕

Man I really need to brush up on my sexualities but I think I know what heteroromantic is? I hope I got it right...

Jason Todd (Red Hood)

Okay so I pretty much went to him as soon as I read that you like people with their own personality. Like yeah most of the bat boys are very unique and themselves but Jason definitely has a certain level of not giving a shit that really adds to this

You can not tell me that a man who loves books is not also a hopeless romantic too. His definition of romance is mostly quoting classic literature to you when ever it makes some sort of sense and maybe you quoting it back if that's your jam

He definitely quotes that sonnet from when Romeo and Juliet first meet. I would put it in this but I can't find it

Being with Jason would be a really good chance for you to let your self go for a little bit and not have to be a tough happy girl as you put it. He would be so happy for you to let those walls down and let him be the tough one for a while.

Also cute rainy days inside cuddled together listening to the rain or late afternoon walks around the outskirts of Gotham in the pouring rain with out an umbrella. Jason offering you his jacket 🥰

#dc match ups #dc matchups

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andmaybegayer · 4 years

Text

Long Poetry Wallowposting

One of my favourite poems is William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow” (or “XXII” if you’re being dipshit about it), not because it’s an exceptional poem, but because of the circumstances surrounding the first time I read it.

In 2015 I convinced two of my friends to join me for a multidisciplinary academic competition thing. One of the rounds was the independent essay, which has an interesting twist: your team of three gets all three essay topics (critique a given essay, write an essay on a topic, and analyze a poem) and you have 30 minutes to discuss and split the topics before a 90 minute solo writing period.

(I could write another extended post about the bureaucratic shenanigans I went through surrounding that competition, someone remind me to tell that story sometime.)

I don’t remember what the other two topics were, but the poem was to analyze William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow”, a poem which looks like this:

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

Now, I got roped into this competition by a teacher who I did not know and who gave us no more detail other than “Get a team of 3 together and I’ll vouch for you to skip a day of school and attend this competition” so we did not know that there was actually a published list of poems, books and artpieces that you should have studied before coming to this competition, including John Campbell’s “Hero with a thousand faces” and Jeff Koons’ “Puppy”.

So we were in for this Sight Unseen, No Background. We didn’t even know who Williams was.

Fortunately for me, my friends are horrible nerds. We’re not the dead poets society but we were still the kind of people who, bored in the back of english class, would write short poems and read each other’s shitty writing and who had fun proving that the integral of e^x was e^x and we took part in OTHER competitions and would show off obscure academic skills to each other and we thought that was cool. We were not lost at sea here.

So we stare at this for a second. With zero context, what the hell does this mean. Chicken is an implicitly funny word, of course, but that’s the 2000′s talking and this must be the 1900′s sometime. The enjambment is interesting but nothing crazy here, this isn’t e.e. cummings (not a fan by the way) and so, there’s really not a lot to look at. We spent ten minutes throwing ideas back and forth before almost simultaneously coming to the conclusion. This is just a scene, being described in poetry.

We discuss this idea for a few more minutes, and we allocate the actual writing of the essay to a friend (I messaged him about this to make sure I had my story straight) and then time was up, and we turned to our individual essays.

Reader-response analysis is a school of literary theory that is, some would say, kinda garbage. It asks the reader “what did that work make you think of, what did that work make you feel” and treats that as ground truth. The reader is an active element in this, and the way the reader feels is of course very flexible, leading many people to conclude that it is useless, since the reader is an unknown quantity here. Well, reader-response analysis is not actually garbage and can be a very useful tool in your literary toolkit if used appropriately. We all found we had the same reader’s response: a clear mental image of a scene. Maybe the floor is gravel, maybe it’s grass. There is a wheelbarrow leaned up against a shed, gleaming with the last drops of rain. A chicken pecks around nearby, with more close at hand. The smell of a heavy night of rain persists, the light is the bright cold glow of a wet morning that can shine without burning off the dew just yet.

So, that’s what we found. There’s no deeper meaning here. This poem is simply conveying to you the idea. We, of course, being dweebs, took it further. Attempting to find deeper meaning in this poem demonstrates an inability to take information at face value. Sometimes the pipe is just a pipe. Sometimes the red wheelbarrow is just a red wheelbarrow.

Turns out, that analysis is correct. At the time this was written, Williams was busy doing Imagism, which means he was being economical with words and precise with meaning. The poem is short because it needn’t be long. There’s some chickens and a wheelbarrow. The Wikipedia article for this poem is hilarious, there’s a section of quotes from people who believed there was a deep hidden meaning about a dying child Williams had cared for (he was a doctor) who had a red wheelbarrow as a toy. This explanation is nonsense, and I have rarely enjoyed reading someone being wrong as much as I have enjoyed reading phrases like:

At the time, I remember being mystified by the poem. However, being properly trained in literary criticism, I wondered what the real meaning of the poem was, what it was really about. ... What is left out of Williams' poem is the fact that when he conceived that image he was sitting at the bedside of a very sick child (Williams was a medical doctor). The story goes that as he sat there, deeply concerned about the child, he looked out the window, saw that image, and penned those words.

Of course you can't figure it out by studying the text. The clues aren't there. This poem was meant to be appreciated only by a chosen literary elite, only by those who were educated, those who had learned the back story (Williams was a doctor, and he wrote the poem one morning after having treated a child who was near death. The red wheelbarrow was her toy.)

and knowing that, you’re all wrong, get fucked. It’s just a wheelbarrow. According to Williams himself, he just saw this scene in a fisherman’s backyard and wrote a poem about the scene. I looked all this up the day after the competition, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt as good about a literary analysis.

Now don’t get me wrong, the curtains are sometimes blue for a reason. But in this case, absent any information indicating otherwise, the wheelbarrow really is just red because that’s what the author saw. In some cases you can draw additional meaning out of a work but it requires just as much discipline to read deeply as to prevent yourself reading too deep. We avoided the trap.

I think about this poem infrequently, maybe once every couple months. I can still recall it from memory. It is still an influential point of reference whenever I try to write something. I tried writing some Imagist works in high school, and I had those same friends read them. They thought I might prefer realism instead. Unfortunately it turns out that most of the time, I don’t find realism to be the best fit.

XXII by William Carlos Williams is a good poem, but maybe, not for you.

#poetry #literature #the red wheelbarrow #kali's life #william carlos williams

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four-loose-screws · 3 years

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I have a another question about localization since you say all of the FE localizations are good but then there's the localization I hear about of FE fates a localize game that I hear so many Nintendo and FE fans say really bad things about it such as a lot of Mistranslations, Big Script changes, Memes being add in, etc also there was some censorship that got some of them really mad and with some of them saying that it's the wrost localize game of all time is it really that bad as they say?

Whew, this ask has been sitting in my inbox for actual months! Sorry for taking so long to respond! It’s probably unsurprising, but there’s so much to unpack here, and just deciding what to write had me going in circles for a long time.

I’m not entirely satisfied with this answer, but if I tried to discuss everything I have in mind about the Fates localization at once, I’d never be done. So I stuck to 5 topics to give a basic summary. If anyone wants to follow up on one particular issue for more info, or know more about something I didn’t discuss here, please do! I’d love to round out my argument.

First off - a little history just to get our minds situated into the history of localization. Bad localization has always existed, in fact that’s pretty much all we had in the 80’s and somewhat into the 90’s until it became clear that video games were going to become very complex in story and text going forward. Even a surface look into old localizations like this one tells a very long story. We have to remember that “bad” localization is everywhere, and it’s just always going to exist, even now that we have professional teams dedicated to localization, so long as humans aren’t perfect, time crunch is standard in the gaming industry, and we all have our own definition of “good”.

Next, here’s the short answer to the question:

When I say “overall” good, I do stress that pretty heavily, because of course there are plenty of changes that each individual player of the game will have their own take on. The Fire Emblem games simply have so much text in them that even a hundred small mistranslations or changes are just a drop in the bucket.

But I do agree that Fates is one of the worst of the FE localizations, if your terms are in number of changes from the Japanese. Awakening’s is up there too.

Yeah, Awakening’s localization has a lot of questionable moments too. I know this take isn’t a surprise to all fans. But ever since Fates came out, I’ve seen people praising Awakening’s localization, and saying that 8-4 (an outside studio often hired by Nintendo, they localized Awakening) is an amazing localization team and Treehouse (Nintendo’s own team, did Fates) is garbage. TBH… They both did a job that has huge ups and downs. Are people really doomed to always forget the flaws that the previous installment in a series had as soon as something new comes out? Ha ha.

I think it’s common knowledge at this point that localizations are not made for the people who want a more direct-to-the-Japanese version. And that sucks, and the feelings of anger, disappointment, etc. in those who wanted a more direct translation are perfectly valid and entirely understandable.

But we really, really need to understand and accept that localizations are made for the target audience/culture as a whole, and to sell to the most people possible. By getting angry and rejecting the entire game’s script as “total changes,” “butchering,” “changing the games to fit the localization team’s motives,” and all sorts of other toxic nonsense, we miss out on all of the nuance that actually exists. We rob ourselves of the fun that could be had analyzing whether or not the localizers did their job of adapting the game to the target audience, and how they might have done it better. And we can’t notice and appreciate all of the times the team did do a great or good job.

In the vast majority of cases, localizers only want those who play their games and read their scripts to have fun! To imply anything else is just wrong.

What I feel I can do here, to define if “the localization is as bad as they say,” is debunk these “all or nothing” arguments, and show that the changes aren’t usually anywhere near as drastic or simple as people make them sound.

Now let’s goooooo!

I read these two articles to prepare myself to write this, link here, and link here, which I got off a quick Google search. They are from the time of Fates’ release, and report on how a lot of people generally felt back then, so I found them to be good references to put myself back in time with the thoughts people had then.

Character Changes

These often tend to be the biggest topics of conversation. Hisame will be my topic of more detailed discussion today, but I’ll bring other characters up for a hot second too.

I can never stress this enough, but Hisame made pickles in the Japanese. He was always talking about them in the Japanese, too. (Fates loves supports revolving around food in general, really.) I think people generally know this to be true? But I did read some comments saying that the pickle love was totally made up in the localization, you can see the proof above, so I had to point it out.

I don’t think a lot of people who have talked about his character picked up on this - admittedly, I didn’t until someone close to me explained it - but the main gag of Hisame’s character is that he’s young, but already acting like an old man. He lectures his own father on how to behave, etc., and makes pickles. And the “acting like an old man” is not totally lost in translation, with him still acting serious and lecturing his father. But the making pickles trait… I’d never pin that as an “old man” stereotype as a US American. Well, now I would, because I know Japanese culture well enough… but anyway.

And this is where the cultural differences come in. The number of people farming and making traditional foods from scratch is dwindling fast in Japan. In just five years there, I watched countless rice paddies and other small produce fields be turned into houses or apartment buildings. The elderly farmers are becoming too old to care for their crops, and their kids choose to pursue other careers, so the family sells off the farmland. Following along this trend is traditional pickle making. You can just buy them ready to eat in the supermarket, so why make your own? Most people don’t even have the space to be making them if they wanted to. And so, pickle making has come to be seen as something old people do. It fits in with Hisame’s “old man” character perfectly.

But again, as an American, I never would have figured that out without knowledge about Japan. Of course you could argue that the localizers didn’t need to change anything about him. The making pickles was quirky and unique, and would give you a chuckle as is. But there was space to make him funnier, so they did. That is, after all, was what the Japanese intended, for it to be funny. It’s not funny in the same way… but sometimes it’s impossible to be.

And that is what is most important in localization between two wildly different languages like Japanese and English - not retaining the same words, but the same intention or mood. The same words can convey a totally different meaning or mood, or make no sense, because of cultural differences. So localizers need to achieve the same mood, not the same words. I have come to see people understand this much better as the years go on, and the general gaming population becomes more learned about what localization is.

Of course, that’s a pretty simplified way of looking at it. But that’s how I summarize localization as a whole, in an easy way to understand. You might not agree with exactly how the localizers did what they did, but I think we might all be able to agree that they were trying to do their job and had no malicious intent to butcher the Japanese original or something absurd like that.

One more thing that’s relevant to this - Japanese people don’t care about repetition so much. The same character tropes are repeated over and over, the same lines are repeated over and over… In the US, we don’t like that! It’s boring and dull! This cultural difference is a constant struggle in localization. A lot of the people who think they want a direct translation don’t realize that it will be boring to them… So localizations alter and add details and lines here and there to give some more variation. This also helps to explain Hisame’s changes to talk even more about pickles.

And I’ve seen many a comment from people saying they liked Hisame in the localization. They found his exaggerated pickle lines fun, and enjoyed many good laughs. How can we call his new characterization outright bad when it worked for some? When they like it more than a straight Japanese translation? He’s still essentially the same guy… just some of the things he says are different. That’s not much of a change at all.

...And back to that original screenshot I showed. Isn’t Hisame still serious in the localization? His lines are funny, but I’m under the impression that he himself is still dead serious. ...Anyway. That’s about all I have to say about Hisame.

Many characters have changed lines. There’s no disputing that. But something to always question is how far do these changes go? Did the localizers completely change the intent or tone of the original? Or are they playing up certain character traits the characters always had in the Japanese? Or is something else going on?

This is also a prime example of how shallow some articles or “analysis” into the Fates localization are. You can’t look at one line change and make a sweeping conclusion about an entire character. Always be suspect of stuff like this. Kana ALWAYS acted like a little kid. That’s their entire schtick. They are your cute little mama/papa loving kid. That one line may have changed that scene significantly, but Kana’s whole character? No, not at all.

Even Kana’s S support changes aren’t as simple as it seems. They aren’t all changed. The 2nd gen characters that Kana is close in age to retain their romantic endings, such as Midori. Only those considerably older than Kana turned platonic.

And Effie, another character commonly cited as changed? She wasn’t radically changed from some deep character to a one-note workout buff. If only a conclusion could be that easy to reach. Overall, on this specific aspect of Effie, the localization simply added in extra strength or workout jokes when the opportunity arose. Some workout jokes were in the Japanese! She was always an extremely devoted retainer who was always working out and training to get stronger so she could better fulfill her duties.

What is MUCH more interesting in my opinion is the issue of her femininity. In the Japanese, her speech nearly always trailed off with ellipses, and she had feminine voice acting. Whereas in the English, all of that femininity is stripped away with a deep voice, and virtually no ellipses. How refreshing it would have felt in English for Effie to have retained that femininity! Women can bench press trees and be feminine! It would be unique to see a female character like that. ...Or so a US American might think.

But from what I understand, strong female characters in Japanese entertainment are nearly always very feminine. They send a clear message: “You can be whatever you want in private, so long as you still fit the girly-girl mold in public and fulfill society's expectations for you!!” In the Japanese, Effie is fitting their stereotype.

So in one way of looking at it, Effie wasn’t really changed, because in both Japanese and English, she paints a stereotypical and the most socially accepted image of a physically powerful female in each culture. ...That’s an interpretation of mine, anyway. I’m not sure how many people would agree with it.

...See what I mean, that the answer of “changed or unchanged” really isn’t as straightforward as “are the lines translated directly?”

Looking into the deeper details creates a much more interesting picture! You come to paint a picture in your mind, without even thinking about it, of what the localizers intended to do, and you can at least understand what they were thinking. This forms a much more accurate conclusion on whether or not the team achieved a good localization, and whether or not that sacrificed the intent of the original.

So as you can see, few issues are as bad as they’ve been blown up to be. None of the characters are completely different from their Japanese counterparts, or anything so extreme. They were just localized. Whether or not they were localized well, is up to each person’s opinion.

...I do want to write about Soleil, as an example of someone who I think could have been localized better, but I’ll save that for another day. It’s gonna get long. If anyone is interested in seeing this post, just remind me every couple of months or so until I find the time and write it, thanks in advance.

Memes

Since I mentioned Kana’s dragon speak in the last section, this is a perfect time to transition into my feelings about memes, aka context-specific humor. I agree with the most commonly shared opinion: memes don’t belong in localization. Though it’s not just because of a simple “change from the Japanese is bad!!!!” approach. In my opinion, the best localizations will be as timeless as possible. I want my future self and everyone else who will play the game in the years to come to enjoy the game as much as possible.

Memes come in and out of fashion so quickly that they’re almost guaranteed to be out of date by the time they release. And only the most popular of popular stories will be widely-known enough for most everyone to get the reference. Of course, it’s pretty difficult to know what expressions and such people will remember and use 10, 20, or 30 years down the line. Some language you think will be timeless will fall out of style. But using memes and references that are not likely to appeal to as many people as possible… that’s one of the few things I can almost universally call “bad localization.”

Unless, of course, the game was intended in the Japanese to be a product of its time, and used a lot of references. That’s a whole different ball game.

Accurate translation, much less full localization, requires creative thinking to recreate the tone and intent of the original.

Here’s another example that showcases another couple of things I find really important to localization.

Number 1: The writer of the article said “The American localization … gives her silly lines that aren’t in the original.” But does it really “give” her anything new at all? I’d argue not. Tottemo is commonly translated as ‘really’ or something like that… but doesn’t ‘super-dupity’ convey the same meaning as ‘really’? Just because an English word isn’t given as a common definition for a Japanese word, doesn’t mean it can’t be a definition. Sometimes… a word we don’t commonly think of as a translation for the Japanese, can still be a perfectly valid translation. This is not an addition. Just an uncommon translation of the Japanese word.

Number 2: Japanese has a wide range of “I” and “you” pronouns, sentence endings, and other little things that define character age, personality, gender, and more, that simply don’t exist in English. To not use similar features of English when localizers find opportunities to do so, would just take away that sense of nuance the Japanese had in utilizing their language’s own unique features.

Of course it’s one possibility that Sophie uses kiddy words. She’s not a little kid, but she’s still pretty young! To have everyone use the same word choice, because that’s how the words translate into English, is not only inaccurate to how real people talk, but also inaccurate to how the original Japanese was used. Since many equivalents for Japanese word and grammar choice that define personality do not exist in English, the localizers have to use what does exist in English in new places. I think that makes sense, and creates a much closer script to the Japanese than just translating the words.

Again, it’s all about how we look at the lines!

I see a lot of people define “translation” as “one-to-one recreation of the Japanese words.” To reinforce what I said in the first section, I do not think this is true. To me, translating is recreating the same tone, mood, meaning, and message of the original. You CANNOT achieve that just by translating the words and grammar alone.

Different words conveying the same overall meaning.

This section is really just a continuation of the previous one. But reinforcing central arguments over and over again is the core of good essay writing.

So this is one of my strategies for deciding whether or not a script is a good or bad translation/localization: “Does the script convey the same basic meaning?” (or tone, etc.)

Changes, adding detail to what the Japanese said, and “playing-up,” are all wildly different things.

So first, I break down the bit of dialogue into as few words as possible.

-Nohr royals inherit dragon blood.

-So they have superhuman power.

...And then I look to see if the localization conveyed that same basic meaning. Which, in this case, I think it did. Your mileage may vary, but I think I’ve made my point at least.

I wanted this scene to be one of the five I addressed because I think it exemplifies yet another of the fascinating differences between Japanese and English. Japanese is a language that likes to be vague, and leave out context that is already established. Speech can seem super boring as few characters say anything unique. (At least… that’s how us English speakers see it! Japanese people think they are just being normal, and not vague or boring at all!) ...English, not so much. So much as leaving out the subject of the sentence is chastised as incorrect grammar. And we like unique dialogue and prose more than most other languages.

I saw one person in the comments of the article I got this visual from argue that the tone is totally different, that the Japanese was more of a history lesson, but the localization is trying to pump Corrin and Leo up for battle, but… eh, I just don’t see it. The English also just feels like he is describing the powers of their bloodline to me. Again, that’s why this is so complex and fascinating, because everyone has their own viewpoints they are coming from.

The “direct translation” and “localization” reach the same message. This isn’t a big change in my opinion at all.

Sometimes mistakes happen...

These interpretations of Saizo and Beruka’s C Support have always boggled my mind. Coming up with all these explanations as to why the omission was done on purpose to completely erase the support when… it just seems… obvious to me… that the localization team never wrote or programmed a translation and shipped the game with the placeholder?

After all, if the localization team felt they had to remove or change content that might be questionable for the target audience, wouldn’t they alter or rewrite the conversation, like they have with Soleil’s supports, for example? This very game has multiple examples of proof that the localizers will rewrite entire chunks of script if they feel it makes the scene better fit what the target audience be more comfortable with.

Mistakes happen. That’s all I think Saizo and Beruka’s C Support is. We probably never got an update just because Nintendo doesn’t have a track record of being the best with those.

Of course, I may be wrong. Nintendo and Treehouse keep pretty much all of their processes a secret. But I never, ever would have imagined on my own that Saizo and Beruka’s support was omitted on purpose. Citing this as a reason why we need to be up in arms about bad localization is so absurd to me.

Mistakes happen. It’s not like the Japanese creators didn’t have embarrassing moments with underdeveloped content in this game either… they didn’t even name the continent in this game!

Sometimes, “bad” localization is just human error. It’s something we can’t eliminate entirely, and will just have to accept.

Final thoughts:

I realize that this analysis, for as long as it is, is very short, and still leaves out so much that could be talked about.

But what I hope that it did was not really help convince readers that the Fates localization is actually good, exactly… but helped to create some more balance in how we look at the Fates localization and localizations as a whole. All localization changes have a reason and nuance to how they ended up happening, and it’s important to be thinking from that perspective when we discuss them!

Since I know I may have created more questions than answers, again, feel free to keep the conversation going through more asks! I’ll answer them in time!

#fire emblem #fe #fe14 #fates #fe fates #nintendo #2ds #3ds #nintendo 2ds #nintendo 3ds #japan #japanese #translation #localization

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immortalsins · 3 years

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... what genre is the untamed? i literally have like. no fucking clue. sometimes the gifs make it look like a horror movie. sometimes it looks like a fantasy type thing, sometimes it looks like a romcom and sometimes it's like??? game of thrones except like. not european obviously jansjjeje. but i just watched that video, is it a comedy???? please help me i am so confused????????

DHGVCHDS bro i’m losing it that’s so funny i’m really sorry for putting so much of it on your dash-

where to begin

it’s based on a bl .... which i didn’t know when i started watching it and i’m glad i did watch it but i probably wouldn’t have had i known because the source material is. well . hmmm

the show is obviously censored so they make up for this by adding so much romantic tension its insane

to paraphrase a friend..... u hear it’s a romance and then watch it like oh i didn’t realise it was a ROMANCE romance

it has good comedy moments which are randomly and sometimes jarringly put in the middle of scenes but somehow it works

the ridiculous comedy music from that video just cuts in out of nowhere when you least expect it and then stops the moment they decide it’s a serious show Actually

has good horror imagery despite the terrible cgi (the only thing they can do well/have the budget for is spooky black smoke and my god do they go off with the spooky black smoke)

‘horrific scary blind girl bleeding everywhere in a foggy place called coffin city’ starts out as a comedy moment. ‘the main pair are trapped in a cave with a massive tortoise that’s also a snake and to kill it one of them has to go inside the tortoise also the english translates it as tortoise of slaughter’ is an extremely serious scene

u start watching it and think it’s going to be so bad it’s good but then it’s actually good

the game-of-thrones-y aspects are definitely there and it’s intense but overshadowed by the romance 90% of the time

it’s the most emotional thing i’ve watched all year

this is only the surface ... the tip of the iceberg of what i could say

i don’t like romances much and i really don’t understand how this got me so invested

idk how i found myself in this situation i blame @astorically and 50% of the tolkien fandom

i’m realising now i didn’t actually answer your question .... What Is The Untamed ................. historical fantasy romance (but not romance if the government asks) reverse murder mystery family drama- basically u are completely right in your analysis well done

its good i recommend

tl;dr, yeah im confused too

#the untamed #mdzs #asks #reedstorm #THERE IS . SO MUCH #i'm sorry about all of this u are strong for not blocking the tag tbh #side note i'm not judging anyone who likes bl/the source material its just Not my thing and would have been offputting had i known #which i didn't #and finding out was #as event

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handeaux · 3 years

Text

Prince Trampantogo: The History of Cincinnati’s Longest-Running Hoax

Imagine Cincinnati as the undisputed gambling capital of the United States, eclipsing any meager efforts by Las Vegas or Reno to aspire to that crown. Imagine the Statue of Liberty – the real thing – towering over Central Parkway. It might have come to pass, if only Prince Trampantogo had made good on his promises, if only Prince Trampantogo had been real.

Prince Trampantogo has been among the most enduring hoaxes ever perpetrated on the gullible citizenry of Cincinnati. We were fooled by his first appearance in 1883, and bamboozled again in 1943, again in 1950, again in 1974 and again as late as 1980.

The Prince’s name should have been a giveaway. Trampantojo (note the j instead of a g) is Spanish for an artistic technique better known by its French translation, “trompe l'oeil,” or “fool the eye.” Prince Juan Pablo Trampantogo most certainly fooled the eye of readers of the Enquirer as they read about his 1883 arrival in Cincinnati. The Prince allegedly had deposited $90 million in gold at the Citizens’ National Bank. The leading men of Cincinnati were summoned to his rooms at the Grand Hotel. Reporters swarmed like moths around an electric bulb. Finally a doughty Enquirer scribe managed to enlist artist Francis Pedretti as translator and breached the walls of discretion surrounding the Prince – who spoke not a word of English. To this enterprising reporter the Prince outlined his scheme:

“I propose to keep continually on hand, deposited in the Chemical National Bank of New York City, the First National Bank of San Francisco, the Boatmen's Bank of St. Louis, and any Bank in your city, having a capital of $5,000,000, the sum of $50,000,000 in cash as a guarantee, that for a period of ninety-nine years, I shall thoroughly clean, pave, and tunnel for telegraph and telephone wires and sewerage purposes, the entire City of Cincinnati; in return for which I am to have the privilege of purchase of the four squares in the city, extending from 7 to 11 on Vine, and from Vine to Elm, at the rate of $1,000 a foot for the bare land, paying damages for the buildings thereon, as may be estimated by 3 disinterested parties, or an equivalent amount in Lincoln Park, to build the largest, finest, and most complete gambling establishment in the world, to which the crowned heads of Europe and the entire sporting world shall throng with perfect freedom. It will enrich your city beyond comparison, and make Cincinnati the only spot in the world where spendthrifts will come and throw away their loose change; it will give employment to millions of .laborers, artisans, and workmen.”

Decorating this massive casino would be Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s “Goddess of Liberty” which, according to Prince Tampantogo, “I notice the New Yorkers cannot raise money enough to procure.” The prince itemized the plush carpets, marble pillars, brass statuary and other decorations for his Temple of Fortune, devoted to roulette, rouge et noir, faro, keno, poker and “all the games of every nationality and people of the face of the earth.” Exhausted by his interview, the reporter made his farewell to the generous royal just as the cathedral bells struck the hour of midnight to begin the day of April 1, 1883.

If the Enquirer readers of 1883 did not immediately comprehend that this was an elaborate April Fool’s joke, surely their suspicions must have been aroused when none of the other daily newspapers printed anything related to the plans of the munificent Prince Tampantogo. On this amazing story, the Times-Star, the News Journal, the Gazette, the Commercial Tribune, the Penny Post, the Volksblatt, the Freie Presse and the Volksfreund were silent.

In 1943, the long-awaited “Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors,” researched by the Ohio Writers Project and financed by the Works Progress Administration, landed on local bookshelves. Contained within (page 186) is a description of the Prince’s proposal, with this curious dénouement:

“This was too good to be true and, in point of fact, nothing ever came of it.”

Apparently, this uncritical repetition of the 60-year-old hoax inspired the venerable Alfred Segal, columnist under the nom de plume “Cincinnatus” at the Cincinnati Post, to revive the prank. Segal wrote [4 May 1950] under the headline “Cincinnati Could Have Been A Reno But Officials Snubbed Prince’s Offer”:

“A friend of licensed gambling has dug up some facts of local history which suggest what Cincinnati might have been if it hadn’t missed the boat back in 1883.”

In Segal’s analysis, Cincinnati’s corrupt government rejected the Prince’s offer so as not to offend the many local gamblers.

“It may be that the prince got nowhere with his proposition because what he was thinking of was practically a gambling monopoly for himself. The city authorities couldn’t let the local boys down that way.”

The Enquirer delighted [15 May 1950] in tweaking the completion. In a harrumphing column opening with “Come Now, Mr. Segal!” the Grey Lady of Vine Street chastised the evening paper’s correspondent:

“If the date of the issue (April 1, 1883 – April Fool’s Day to the commoner, Mr. Segal) in which Prince Juan’s story appeared didn’t signal caution to its reader, there were certain irregularities, to say the least, that should have.”

Forgetting that old saying about people in glass houses, the Enquirer itself revived the Trampantogo hoax in 1974, reprinting the Prince’s offer verbatim in a Sunday Magazine walking tour. Despite an editorial caveat buried in the article’s subtitle, authors Mary Gustafson and Barbara Jo Foreman seem to accept the tale at face value:

“The proposal was not accepted by the city fathers and the prince left Cincinnati in disgust. So fashionable townhouses instead of a gambling palace came to line Garfield Place.”

The hoax returned in 1980, when City Councilman Joseph M. Decourcy proposed a gambling casino on Cincinnati’s riverfront. His colleague, David Mann responded that the idea was neither new or original and cited – in detail – Prince Trampantogo’s 1883 designs. No one appears to have enlightened Councilman Mann about the spurious nature of his source.

As the Enquirer’s Owen Findsen pointed out in 1995, the Prince Trampantogo story was not only an April Fool diversion. It was also a biting satire on City politics of the day. A February 1883 flood had slathered Cincinnati streets with muck. The Ohio General Assembly offered a million dollars in repair funds. Republican representatives vetoed the relief, worried that such a package would imply the Republican machine in charge of Cincinnati at the time was incompetent. The veto backfired. Democrats swept into power in city elections a week after Prince Trampantogo made his satirical appearance.

#prince trampantogo #cincinnati hoax #cincinnati gambling

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marinetteplztakeabreak · 4 years

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Desperada rewatch summary because I need to lighten up

I’ve watched Desperada way too many times and I’ve probably written like 30 pages of angsty analysis so I’m balancing it out by writing a summary of non-angsty things about the episode that are being criminally forgotten

The flirtiest thing Luka does in the beginning is playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on his electric guitar in Marinette’s general direction while smiling at her

Adrien is carrying both his and Kagami’s fencing supplies when they walk into the boat. It is implied that they either made it all the way to fencing practice before meeting up and driving away, in which case the “oh no this is the wrong address” is hillarious, like “we were two feet away but oops oh nOoOoo, I accidentally took a wrong turn and headed back into the car, and then told my driver to come completely out of his way, whoops” or they are regularly carpooling to fencing practice which means they get to actually hang out more, I don’t know which I like more

Kagami asks Marinette if she’s there to watch her boyfriend rehearse, as Marinette and Luka are hugging and joking together. Marinette blushes and does not say no. Adrien, who is awkward and missed a lot of his friends interactions, has no reason to beleive that Luka and Marinette are not currently dating

Kagami is super awkward and physically used Adrien as a shield between her and the other girls, until the second Desperada shows up, at which point she instantly leaps in front of him to protect him.

I’m 90% sure that the first thing Marinette does when she sees Kagami and Adrien appear is rush to get them some orange juice, this is probably where Kagami got the orange juice idea

Marinette apperently plays the flute? This is never mentioned again

The SECOND that an argument starts up outside, every single person in the boat drops what they’re doing and RUNS outside to see what’s about to go down. No one thinks this is odd

the reason that Vivica got into drama with Jagged Stone is because she ate Jagged Stone’s cereal “and drank Fang’s milk.” He is still upset about this at the end of the episode

Jagged is not at all worried for his safety, his only concern is that Desperada “is giving rock and roll a bad name” in her murderous rampage. He also follows after her and tries to stop her, genuinly thinking that this argument will work

“I may not play the guitar but I do play the yoyo!” = actual Ladybug line in the English dub. I’m still uncertain as to what this means but she sounded really smug when she said it

Ladybug pulls Adrien and Luka into the sewers to hide and starts talking very quietly so Desperada doesn’t find them. Luka immeditatly starts to loudly play the guitar for no reason. This is never addressed and Ladybug says nothing about it. Desperada is actively searching for guitar players so she can attack them. This is not a good way to avoid capture.

before the timeloops start, Ladybug just takes down an entire bridge causing Desperada to fall several meters and be covered in heavy cement rubble. She is only mildly inconvenienced by this, and it barely distracts her. However, Luka playing a few notes on the harp at the end of the episode makes her completely unable to focus, because she’s so upset at Luka for playing music in the middle of a battle. Desperada represents my deepest inner emotions

Adrien knows his way around the sewers and immediatly finds a locker room to hide in. Luka does not question this

Adrien, being smart, closes another locker door to make Luka think he’s hiding in there. Also Adrien, being an idiot, is whispering to Luka for this entire scene so Desperada doesn’t find them, as he’s stomping around and slamming doors. No one sees an issue with this

Desperada destroys a flock of pigeons because they’re bad at playing guitar. I am not making this up

Marinette falls off the sewer ladder and almost drops the snake Miraculous into the sewer. The episode would have been very different if she had

Chat Noir, being a genius, takes away Ladybug’s suspicion by pretending to have magical smell that leads him directly to Adrien. He reaches exactly the locker where Adrien should be, then says “oh no he’s not here, lets team up with Luka and split up” and as soon as Ladybug’s out of the room, he shoves Luka back into a locker before he can join the search effort. Points for making an attempt to strategize I guess? I don’t know what he thought he would accomplish tho

If you follow the time frame, Luka stays in the locker for maybe 90 seconds before running out to look for them. What was he doing? He clearly had no intention of following Chat Noir’s order to stay put, which leads me to conclude he spent the entire two minutes just flustered because Chat Noir shoved him in a locker and winked at him

Luka walks in on Adrien and Ladybug talking and asks “did I miss something?” Ladybug laughs as if this is a joke. Luka never gets an explanation. I feel almost bad for him

Viperion’s solution to the problem is to start playing music in the middle of the battle. This works.

Desperada falls off the Eiffel Tower and it’s not enough to break her focus or make her angry at Chat Noir for cataclysming the ground she’s standing on. However, Luka plays maybe 4 notes on his lyre and she shoots off towards him in a blind murderous rage.

I think the literal reason that Adrien kept failing was because he never would’ve just started playing guitar in the middle of a battle like Luka was already doing.

If they spent any timeloops together in the sewer for the whole 5 minutes, Luka would’ve shown up before the time even ran out, and probably would’ve immeditaly started playing the guitar given his characterization in this episode

Jagged Stone is still upset about the cereal thing but he does his best to apologize anyway

When Kagami asks “I was wrong about you and Luka, wasn’t I?” she’s literally saying she was wrong about thinking he was her boyfriend because that’s what she thought at the beginning of the episode.

When Kagami kinda tried to pressure Marinette into love triangle mentality, Alya literally just bursts into the conversation and tells Kagami to knock it off in the nicest way possible

Jagged Stone cradles his crocodile in his arms at the end of the episode, not in a “I was worried about you, Fang” way, but in a “yep, this is a normal way to interact with a crocodile” way. Neither Vivica not Anarka bring it up

Jagged Stone is definitely related to Luka based on everything about his characterization in this, he doesn’t even stop playing the piano when Desperada shows up, his main priority is music, he speaks in musical metaphors, and his priorities make no sense. I’m trying to decide if this makes Fang Luka’s brother.

Anarka’s whole issue was that she doesn’t want to be Jagged’s “second choice.” This is clearly a pun. Luka, on the other hand, doesn’t have any capacity to care about anything that isn’t his guitar, so he doesn’t have this kind of rage

The freakinf cereal thing, you guys, Vivica got fired over eating Fang’s cereal, and Jagged only feels the slightest regret at firing her for this. He also may or may not have thrown her into a literal lake when he did this, the dialogue makes it unclear where the metaphors end

Jagged Stone’s music seems to have had both a piano part and a guitar part, so if anyone had been thinking at all, then Adrien could’ve come in as his pianist and Jagged could’ve taken pn the guitar

“You can come back but get your own breakfast, ok?”

#miraculous ladybug #mlb #desperada #adrien agreste #luka couffaine

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tenchiforum · 5 years

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For the first time ever, the Toonami versions of OVA1/2, Universe, and Tokyo are available online! On their respective archive.org pages you can access each episode easily.

Watch now: OVA1/2, Tenchi Universe, Tenchi in Tokyo.

For users who keep up with contemporary anime communities, we also have an upload for the entire run available on Nyaa.

It’s been quite a journey in getting these episodes from analog to digital. If you’re interested in reading about the process of how these almost lost-to-time edits came into our hands and how we’ve gone about preserving them before the tapes rot, then sit back and enjoy the story below!

Part 1: Toonami – A Love Story.

Tenchi Muyo! and Toonami are tied together like the red thread of fate often times referenced in many East Asian myths. For those who aren’t aware, Toonami was a programming block on the Cartoon Network channel. Starting in 1997, it did one thing for anime that no other channel in the English-speaking world had ever done: showcased anime during “PrimeTime” (In North America at least, this was 4pm to 7pm Eastern Standard time). Before the internet, having this block of time meant having the most eyes on your product, meaning exposure was huge. Oftentimes whoever got on this block, regardless of the channel, was “made.”

However, it wouldn’t be until mid 1999, with a soft-rebranding, a new host, and an almost entirely anime-focused block, that Toonami would take over the world.

And on July 3rd, 2000, an entire generation was introduced to Tenchi Muyo! for the first time.

youtube

- The now legendary two minute Toonami promo.

Thanks to the efforts of Jason DeMarco, Sean Akins, Gill Austin, Sean Polinski, and the rest of the Toonami crew, the “Toonami generation,” still to this day, is the largest block of Tenchi Muyo! fans. Whether it was Toonami US, UK, or Australia. Tenchiforum is a testament to this fact. I personally would not be here were it not for Toonami, so to say that fans of Tenchi Muyo! hold Toonami in a high regard is an understatement.

I had always wanted to somehow, some way, get the Toonami version of Tenchi up for everyone to see again, but my old Toonami VHS recordings were long gone, and I figured trying to piece together the Toonami version from other people’s tapes would just be too hard with how many episodes were broadcast, that was until… 2012

In mid-to-late 2012, I found out that Pioneer actually released a home video version of what was shown on Toonami. It was simply released as “Tenchi Muyo!” in those big, white, clam shell VHS cases (that most people probably remember for old Disney movies). I felt as though I had struck gold! I was able to get a hold of the first two OVA, and was able to rip them to my computer.

- Vol. 1 & Vol. 5 of “Tenchi Muyo!” – No distinction was made that they were separate series.

Though I was high on my endorphin-induced nostalgia, I ran into a couple of unforeseen problems.

First and foremost, the equipment I was using was not great. I used an old StarTech composite to USB dongle and the software that came with it. While this isn’t necessarily bad at first glance (it doesn’t support Windows 10), I had no experience whatsoever in the field of digital transfer. While I think my rips were okay for the time, I knew even then that they were too low of bit-rate and the quality of the rips suffered for it.

Because I also had no VCR at the time that had S-Video output, I was only able to output from composite, which meant the whopping 240p equivalent VHS tapes look fuzzier than they probably should. (I realize that VHS is technically an analog format, meaning that a 1:1 equivalent digital representation is hard to pin down or that someone might argue that it did technically output 480i over composite, but basically it was 240p.)

Another problem was the software itself, I had no idea about Virtualdub, AmaRecTV, or other helpful capture software, so I only recorded at a lower bit-rate, again producing an inferior quality rip.

I also ran into the problem of showcasing the videos. Funimation (who now owns the vast majority of the Tenchi Muyo! franchise in North America) had finally started really cracking down on people uploading videos to Youtube. Even though my videos were not completely the same, the algorithm immediately flagged and blocked them. This led me to uploading the videos to Facebook. I had to cut them in half because of Facebook’s restriction to roughly only 12 minutes of video. Somehow in the process, some of the videos had audio drop out for a minute or two, and for some the audio dropped out completely.

Arguably the biggest blow though, was when I learned that this set of Toonami tapes was incomplete. Pioneer stopped producing the Toonami version for home video after they finished releasing Universe. Meaning, the only way to get the Toonami version of Tenchi in Tokyo, was hope that someone, somewhere, had taped it 11 years earlier.

While Tenchi in Tokyo has been getting more appreciation from fans as of late – thanks in part to most newer entries in the Tenchi OVA sucking harder than a vacuum – in the year 2000, it was the black sheep of the Tenchi Muyo! franchise. So expecting fans to have recorded any of it, let alone the entire series, was the long shot of all long shots. But even still, I made a post on the forum in 2013 asking if anyone knew anyone that might have anything.

Naturally, no one had any leads, and all of these previous problems meant that this project would, frustratingly, have to be shelved indefinitely.

Or at least, that’s what I thought.

Part 2: Deferred Dreams Don’t Die.

On April 5th, 2019, a person by the name of Talos dropped into our Discord server, and posted an introduction. Like so many, they had gotten into Tenchi through Toonami, but what would change everything, was this.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading, someone actually had it!

Instinctively, I reached out to Talos via PM to ascertain how to go about acquiring these tapes, and admittedly, to see how legit this claim actually was. Because the fact of the matter is, when you’ve been around Tenchi fandom as long as I have, you’ll quickly realize the best bullshitters in the world come from this fandom.

But Talos was more than the genuine article! They sent over pictures and an incredibly detailed analysis of the quality of their tapes, watching through them all again to prove to me that their claim was valid.

It can’t be said enough that this all would not be possible without Talos, their willingness to work with me and send me their own personal tapes that they’ve kept for almost two decades just goes to show how awesome they are and how much they care about the fandom.

So the deal was struck, and the dream that laid deferred for almost six years lived again.

- A time capsule from another era.

But with dreams from the past, come the demons that plagued them way back when. I still only had the setup I once had, and at this time I was really trying to be tight with my finances for a number of different reasons, but this opportunity was too good to pass up, I wasn’t going to let this dream go, even if it wasn’t perfect.

Talos’ tapes showed up, and I rolled up my sleeves.

So I put in the first tape, the first seven episodes of Tokyo, into the old VCR I used to originally rip the Pioneer tapes, a JVC HR-VP650U….

And static…

Or rather, a tape that would play for 3 seconds, then immediately drop to static.

This wouldn’t work.

I then tried my other VCR, a Sony SLV-N50 from the mid-to-late 90’s that I was able to “fix” by removing the old Android Kikaider tape that got stuck in there many years prior.

It worked!…..but…..not all that well.

While it did actually play the tape relatively smoothly, the colors were completely washed out in comparison to the JVC, and it had this weird color flickering that was particularly noticeable when black backgrounds were on screen. (This was not unique to this tape, it did it with everything I put in there.)

As much as it pained me, there was no way I was going to rip it with this setup.

So the hunt began for not just a replacement VCR, but one that was high quality and recommended among enthusiasts for digital transfer. Which meant research and long winding rabbit holes of non-answers and vagueness, and unfortunately, money.

Without a doubt, the de facto list of best VCRs for transferring comes from digitalFAQ.com. This list is not only informative but gives you a broad range of ones to look for in the event you can’t find an “elite” one. However, this list has also become the de facto list used by people who are hawking their sets on eBay to try and get every penny from enthusiasts and new-comers as possible.

After three frustrating weeks of losing bid wars on eBay, someone finally put up one of the good sets, the JVC SR-V10U. I quickly sent them what I thought was a reasonable but not bank-breaking offer….

And they accepted! The beast was finally mine.

Immediately upon unwrapping and testing it, the quality difference between what I had then and what I was looking at now was staggering. The SR-V10U had beautiful color, while having the incredible ability to stabilize the old tapes with its TBC (Time Base Corrector), as well as onboard Video Stabilization option. Combined with the ability to output video via the superior S-Video cable, I now had something that, despite its age and typical old VHS wear, was way better than I could have imagined.

Part 3: No Need for Nostalgia.

You’re probably thinking to yourself “Dagon, why go through the trouble? The OVA has a beautiful Blu-ray release, and Universe and Tokyo have pretty decent DVD releases. Why would you ever want to rip old VHS tapes of an inferior quality release that was in some cases censored?”

- The now famous Toonami “bikinis”.

Because this version of Tenchi Muyo! is a piece of history. Not only is it a piece of Tenchi history, but a piece of Toonami history as well. Being able to preserve this in the best quality possible is being able to point to future generations and say “This is why I’m here.”

For a lot of us it’s about taking us back to a simpler time, grade school, high school, university. Taking us back to a time before the internet was what it is today.

So now we can, after almost 20 years, re-watch the version of Tenchi Muyo! that brought so many of us joy and wonder.

#tenchiforum #tenchi muyo #toonami #toonami promo #cartoon network #tenchi universe #tenchi in tokyo #toonami tenchi muyo #anime nostalgia #90's anime #vhs #vhs anime

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mycngs-blog · 5 years

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it’s ya girl 𝒅𝒓𝒊 (nineteen — twenty next week !, she/her, pst), a soft edgy born with a name that means "dark one of the lord" on friday the 13th ! some fun facts are that i have the incredibly dangerous combo of high ambition and poor time management and i’d Risk It All for a.c.e, ateez, and loona ! so, anyway, here’s my girl olivia ! if you’re interested in plotting connections, feel free to im me or ask for my discord (where i would be Way easier to reach) !

𝐉𝐔𝐍𝐆 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐄𝐘𝐄𝐎𝐍. 𝐒𝐇𝐄/𝐇𝐄𝐑. 𝐂𝐈𝐒𝐅𝐄𝐌𝐀𝐋𝐄. ╱ was that 𝐎𝐋𝐈𝐕𝐈𝐀 𝐌𝐘𝐔𝐍𝐆 i just saw in the hideaway lobby ? i hear the 𝐓𝐖𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐘-𝐓𝐖𝐎 year old spends most of their time 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐀𝐒 𝐀 𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐇 𝐓𝐔𝐓𝐎𝐑, but i’ve always just seen them 𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐘𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐑𝐇𝐘𝐓𝐇𝐌 𝐆𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐒. they live in 𝐀𝐏𝐓 𝟓𝐂 and i often see them in the halls. they always give me a vibe of 𝐃𝐎𝐆-𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐃 𝐏𝐀𝐆𝐄𝐒, 𝐂𝐔𝐅𝐅𝐄𝐃 𝐉𝐄𝐀𝐍𝐒, and 𝐀𝐑𝐌𝐒 𝐅𝐎𝐋𝐃𝐄𝐃 𝐀𝐂𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐒𝐓.

* ╱ 𝒒 𝒖 𝒊 𝒄 𝒌 𝒔 𝒕 𝒂 𝒕 𝒔

𝗕𝗜𝗥𝗧𝗛 𝗡𝗔𝗠𝗘: olivia clarisse myung

𝗡𝗜𝗖𝗞𝗡𝗔𝗠𝗘𝗦: vi, oli, no one calls her liv tho

𝗔𝗚𝗘: twenty-two

𝗗𝗢𝗕: january 12, 1997

𝗛𝗢𝗠𝗘𝗧𝗢𝗪𝗡: santa clara, california

𝗭𝗢𝗗𝗜𝗔𝗖: capricorn sun, pisces moon

𝗢𝗥𝗜𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: bisexual

𝗢𝗖𝗖𝗨𝗣𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: tutor

* ╱ 𝒃 𝒂 𝒄 𝒌 𝒈 𝒓 𝒐 𝒖 𝒏 𝒅

originally hailing from santa clara, california, the myung family was nothing short of a series of tech success stories. her father a machine learning engineer and her mother a user experience architect, it was to no surprise when olivia's older siblings (a sister 6 years older and a brother 4 years older) followed suit and found themselves pursuing similar careers. they were coded to be a stereotypical silicon valley family, so growing up, expectations were high for olivia, the last of the bunch.

olivia was that girl in school who knew she was smart and made sure everyone around her knew it as well. in high school, a lot of people didn’t really like her because they perceived her as a show-off, which she totally was, but she’s aight once you get past her insecurity-generated superiority complex. her parents were overprotective and pressured her to do better than her classmates, so she just grew up conditioned to be super competitive because she was kind of scared of her parents and therefore scared of failing them.

she majored in statistics at uc berkeley and ended up finishing in three years with plans to go into data analysis (she’s really good with numbers and doesn’t quite understand how people have trouble with math… Nerd).

a few months out of college she got offered a position with a startup company in seattle that she had interned for remotely in the past, so she made the trip to washington!

however, the company later began to experience major losses and had to let go of employees, which unfortunately included cleo, before dissolving completely. she had only been working there for about half a year.

olivia wasn’t ready to return home, wasn’t ready to break the news to her parents that she — in her mind — had failed, so she remained in seattle and kept up this lie of being a successful data analyst for a rising company, when in reality, she put all of her marbles in the wrong bag. she didn’t want to be the one to fail when everyone else in her family was succeeding, she didn’t want to be the disappointment, so she lied. she wasn’t that close with her family, so the vague information that their daughter was making Big Moves would suffice for them to sprinkle into conversations with their colleagues.

currently, she’s trying to get back on her feet and secure a stable position of a similar caliber, but in the meantime, she’s been back and forth between different jobs and also getting paid to tutor people (mostly over skype, sometimes irl). not being certain of what she’s doing terrifies her and Sucks because she’s not used to the feeling of not being good enough.

* ╱ 𝒑 𝒆 𝒓 𝒔 𝒐 𝒏 𝒂 𝒍 𝒊 𝒕 𝒚

olivia is like... accidentally blunt a lot ?? not even gonna lie, she really does not think before she speaks sometimes (book smart but not street smart Big Time)

i don't think she ever really had a Solid friend group growing up; she was the type to be on the border and never really belong to any specific set of people

she has, like, Zero patience and a low tolerance for stupidity, so how she manages to tutor people is something many people cannot comprehend

olivia's like the gordon ramsay of academia: rude if u act like u know everything, kinder and understanding if u genuinely want to learn something or get better

her demeanor is so deceiving i would say ?? she's the opposite of someone who looks intimidating but is actually really sweet — she's like a siren or some shit, seemingly approachable but once u do approach, u regret

despite the fact that she's quite cold 90% of first encounters, over time, she does warm up to people, which bring the coldness probability to about a 50% depending on how she feels about u

she’s not heartless i promise !! it’s mostly a front bc she was Played a lot growing up and has some trust issues :// when ur smart n want friends sometimes it’s ok to be used right ?? haha ?? :(( ??

her way of caring for people is .. tbh .. kinda awkward ?? she has compassion but she doesn’t really know how to express it without feeling kinda weird about it KSDLHDS she’s the type that wouldn’t be comforting emotionally but she tries .. her Best in her own way

did i say rly guarded ?? superiority complex turned impostor syndrome ?? someone PLEASE validate this girl , living in her siblings’ shadows did Not do her well

secretly a romantic but she thinks love is a privilege she hasn’t quite earned yet

in short, i’d say she could be classified as a Classic Tsundere

i feel like i didn't list that many redeeming traits DSGJSDG but she's got some !! she's dependable and a hard worker !! if ur close to her it's ride or die !!

* ╱ 𝒇 𝒖 𝒏 𝒇 𝒂 𝒄 𝒕 𝒔

can speak english, korean, french, spanish, and knows asl

owns a large collection of books; really into personal essays

has never been in a serious relationship; claims she’s too busy but really just lacks the ability to be vulnerable so she prefers things to be non-committal

when she was 14 she had a crush on this guy but then people found out and it eventually reached him ;/ he asked her out after school with some people around ;/ she accepted ;/ turned out he was joking ;/

can play the viola, clarinet, and piano

really really really good at rhythm games, especially osu !! played local tournaments before but when her parents found out she was investing a fat chunk of time into the activity, they had her stop ;/ now that she doesn’t live with them anymore, she’s taken it up again

surprisingly holds her alcohol well and is an affectionate drunk; perhaps if u met olivia when she's drunk she wouldn't be as intimidating

incredibly bad at responding to text messages !! it's like a roulette, she either replies within seconds or the text is lost forever and suddenly it's been months

#hide.intro #me . unoriginal . recycling my self intro but yk it rly b like tht sometimes #ya girl seein monsta x today so she'll be on and off depending !

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