#New Year 2014 English Quotes

[tinydeskwriter]

Cosmopolitan:Behold, Y/n and Harry Styles’s Relationship Timeline

A/N: I wanted to try my hand in a Harry Styles/Royal Family Member situation. I ended it in the year 2020 because it was getting to much. There is no faceclaim, I just choose the pictures that fitted better into the narrative. Please, If you enjoyed, comment, I would love to hear your thoughts and I am always open for new ideas.

word count: 4807

Much like a rich old man and a dusty bottle of port on a yacht, Princess Y/n and Harry Styles are a match made in heaven. There was drama, a lifetime of rumors, sweet reunions and, of course, that Cartier engagement ring. 

This couple’s love story was one for the ages. From meeting on the backstage of a One Direction concert to getting married, leaving royal duty, having a cute baby, and becoming the power couple the whole world has been obsessed with, they’ve being through it all. And after a whole decade of on and off, facing tons of unfair scrutiny, they only seem stronger.  On that note, let’s walk down memory lane through a timeline of their romance—including it’s ups and downs.

Circa 2012

Harry and Y/n met for the first time in early 2012, a the backstage of a One Direction’s concert in London, according to one of Harry’s close friends from Holmes Chapel, ‘Harry must have been mind-blown to meet Y/n, he always had a crush on her’.

The first photo we can find of Harry and Y/n ever being in the same place is from November that same year at the Royal Variety Performance, where the princess attended alongside her grandmother, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. 

In December 1, the One Direction boys shared on their personal Twitter accounts about Princess Y/n’s cookbook, with the aim of raising funds for the Red Cross and for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. The book sold out on pre-order. Two days later, Y/n was spotted on the band’s Madison Square Garden Concert.

The two of them reportedly exchanged phone numbers to ‘keep tabs on each other’ ~ even though Styles was already rumored to be dating TS at the time~. 

Arabella Ferrer, Y/n’s roommate at the time, said later to a tabloid ‘they are both dating other people, but you could see that there was a mutual crush’.

 In 2012, Y/n was rumored to be dating on and off  ‘for a couple of years already’, billionaire Hugh Grosvenor, son of the Duke of Westminster and godfather to her nephew Prince George.

2013

By January Harry and Taylor were already old history, and Y/n was no longer with her billionaire boyfriend.  

Y/n was photographed by paparazzi attending Harry’s 19th birthday at the private members club Groucho. 

On Valentine’s Day, Y/n shared a picture of Richmond Park on Instagram with her thousands of followers, with the caption ‘LOVE’. 

Princess Y/n became a Oxford University graduated with a dual degree in Business and English Literature. And it was reported that the singer attended the private party throw by her older brothers in Highgrove, the Prince of Wales private residence in Gloucestershire. A guest was quoted ‘from the moment he arrived Y/n glowed, she introduced him to everyone at the party as her ‘special friend’ which is the royal family code for ‘boyfriend|girlfriend’, they gravitated around each other, nailed at a few karaoke duets, but I don’t believe it’s that serious’.

Days later, on June 1st , Y/n reportedly attended Harry’s mom’s wedding.

By July they’re in the first of many ‘off-time’ in their relationship. Harry’s busy touring with his boyband, and Y/n’s juggling her professional career and royal duty. 

2014

The couple was pictured with friends on the 24th  of January in Verbier—only a few weeks after it was reported that Styles were dating Kendall Jenner—.

Though  paparazzi weren’t able to capture the couple in any major PDA—apart from a few hugs on the slopes—. Y/n’s cousin, Princess Eugenie, and her boyfriend, Jack Brooksbank, were among the group, as well as the princess older brother, ~another~ Harry, with his then girlfriend, Cressida Bonas. 

The Daily Mail  reported that according to one source, “Y/n and Harry are pretty serious about each other, she knows his entire family and is close to his mother and sister, Harry already met both her brothers and cousins Eugenie and Beatrice”.

Y/n was spotted at the One Direction concert in Amsterdam, the particular date coincided with the state visit of the princess to the country.

The same month Y/n visited Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and Luxembourg, rubbing shoulders with the other Royal Families of Europe—their are kinda of all related we’re sure… in some way— ‘Doing a Social: Royal Edition’ .

Due to Harry band commitments and touring, the couple didn’t see each other until October, when Y/n visited Styles in Los Angeles, the mood between the couple seemed to cool off after pictures surfaced of Harry out in a pumpkin patch with Erin Foster.

The couple was pictured—in two separated occasions— in heated arguments around LA ~in public~ and we can only guess why…

When asked about his ‘royal romance’ by interviewers Styles standard answer was ‘We are just really good friends’ but that cheeky grin in his face didn’t fool anyone. 

Later in November Styles is pictured by paparazzi going out with Victoria Secret’s model Nadine Leopold in LA, while Y/n is tagged on a Instagram post attending a friend’s wedding in San Francisco… on the same night, and is safe to say that they aren’t ‘on’.

2015

Early January, Y/n is living to the fullest, enjoying single life around the globe with her inner circle of friends~and her ex, no, not Harry, Hugh!~.

She started in the Mediterranean and went on to …Verbier.

On February 01, Styles 21st birthday, Y/n went to her instagram to share a heartfelt message… about Maritime Life and the Health of the Ocean,  illustrating her love for the sea and all it’s creatures with personal photos ~or thirsty trap~.

Which Harry liked, as fans noted. 

And all this just a day after the princess being seen attending Styles birthday bash in LA.

A source told The Sun: “The moment she arrived, red lipstick, high heels and a little black dress, all eyes were on her, including his, poor Nadine, his rumored girlfriend, was completely forgotten on the side, Harry was all over Y/n”

“There’s nobody else he’d rather be on his birthday.”

That was the last time we saw Harry alongside Nadine: ‘they claimed schedule conflicts, due to tour, but Harry made it work once before, dating and touring, the truth, pure and simple is: Harry saw Y/n, and he saw what was missing in his life. He’s blowing up her message box with texts, but she’s keeping her foot on the breaks, Harry’s in the doghouse for now”. 

Around the same time Y/n was spotted out and about in London, partying around with her inner set—which includes her ex, and a few rumored flings—, dressing what we’re calling ‘the revenge wardrobe’.

‘It’s a punishment, she’s showing him what he’s going o lose if he can’t keep his wandering hands to himself’, the source claimed.

They are off again by the end of the year, not long after Y/n was spotted attending One Direction’s last concert before hiatus 

2016

Harry, his family and the Azzof’s were spending the first days of the year in St’Barts, and Kendall Jenner  was there. Khloe Kardashian declared  that Jenner and Styles were hanging out and quote: ‘Do I think they’re dating? Yes.’

Rumors about Jenner and Styles are put to rest later that month, when Y/n was spotted celebrating Styles’s 22nd birthday earlier in London. The ‘on-again’ couple  traveled together to Los Angeles—With sources claiming the couple is serious and happier than ever—.

March was definitely a month for rumors surrounding this couple.

There was the rumor that Harry had been casted in the new Christopher Nolan blockbuster —which turnout to be true—, that he was writing a new album. British tabloids started to run a story that either they are secretly engaged or almost there.

Rumors that they’re buying a house together. All this fueled by the fact that Harry and Y/n are no longer hiding their relationship or shying away from PDA.

May came with ~ goodbye long hair~.

The Palace announced on the 20th  that Princess Y/n would undergo a FOUR month long tour in the name of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Y/n was to represent her grandmother in engagements around Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Jamaica from 4th June to 14th October. 

After months apart, the couple were spotted at Heathrow in a ‘warm embrace’ and the singer turned actor welcomed his lady with flowers, ‘it was definitely two lovers reunited after a very long time, it was like watching one of those post-war reunion: They are very much in love, they spent far two much time apart, and they don’t car for who is witnessing.

Later that year it was announced by the Palace that Y/n would be moving to New York for professional reasons, but would continue her work in the name of Queen Elizabeth II.

2017

Y/n and Harry are spotted around New York, Los Angeles and London on the early months of the year, after vacationing together in Jamaica in the end of 2016. 

It was one his ‘secret gig at The Troubadour that the twenty-three years old singer, alluded to his relationship with Y/n for the first time since they have first being linked back in 2012. Before performing the soft ballad ‘Sweet Creature’ the singer addressed the crowd ‘I would like to dedicate next song to the girl that has been my muse since before she can even imagine’, Y/n, according to fans who attended the show, was in front of the stage singing along with her ~should we call him her boyfriend?~.

He is her boyfriend! Styles avoided answering questions about their rumored on and off relationship, but didn’t shy away from calling Y/n ‘his girlfriend’.

During his July movie premiere, Prince Harry and Princess Y/n were the VIP guest in the event, bringing with them three Dunkirk Veterans. Prince Harry greeted Tom Hardy and Harry Styles with the familiarity of someone greeting a old acquaintance. According to The Sun  when it was his time to be greeted by the princess the singer bowed his head after the couple shared a smile and reportedly cheekily said ‘you look very beautiful today, ma’am’.

This couple reportedly took another step in their relationship when Styles was introduced to the Prince of Wales in August.

During tour, the rockstar’s fans seemed to have started a new game: Spot Y/n. 

 2018

During Harry’s tour break the couple once again was spotted out and about around London and Los Angeles.

We know Y/n and Harry spend Valentine’s Day together thanks to the Daily Mail publishing photos of them in the Caribbean.

In March Y/n was spotted around LA with A-listers Dakota Johnson and Kate Hudson, and rumor has it that the royal and her rockstar boyfriend bought a property in town.

In May Harry attends Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding in Windsor. The couple didn’t arrive together, as Y/n, in a break of tradition, was one of her brother’s ‘best men’. 

The children of the late Princess Diana cut quite the image while walking to the Chapel in military uniform. Princess Y/n has been appointed a Regimental Colonel by the Queen in 2017, and our girl slayed in that uniform.

That same month, GQ Australia  drops an interview with Harry where he’s asked about Y/n and dodges the question with “I don’t think there’s anything I want to share about that. But thank you for providing the space.” Lol, but fair.

On the 29th  it was announced that Princess Y/n had resigned from her finance job, but before engagement rumors between Y/n and Harry  started to fly around, Buckingham Palace stated that the princess would be embarking in a four months long Royal Tour visiting Australia, Fiji, Tonga and New Zealand, with official visits to Japan and China. 

Media outlets were quick to point out that the couple would be separated till October, with rumors of a possible break due to ‘conflict of schedules’

In October  Harry and Y/n attend a event together ~a royal wedding at that~ and they looked super coupled up. Styles reportedly was introduced to the Queen and Prince Philip, as well as other members of he royal family.  

November 14, 2018

But nothing in the world prepared us for the announcement released by Clarence Palace on the 14th: ‘The Prince of Waled is delighted to announce the engagement of Princess Y/n to Mr. Harry Styles. The wedding will take place in the Spring or Summer of 2019, in London. Further details about the wedding day will be announced in due course. Her Royal Highness and Mr. Styles became engaged on February during a private holiday in St.Lucia. Following the marriage, the couple will continue to live in their private residence in London.’ Her Majesty is said to ‘be absolutely delighted for the couple’, a the time of the engagement announcement, Princess Y/n was seventh in line of succession after the birth of Prince Louis a few months earlier, and no longer required the Queen’s formal consent to the marriage.

According to reports a formal engagement dinner party was held in Highgrove days before the formal announcement so the couple would be able to share their happy news with their nearest and dearest, ‘they didn’t want for those really close to them to find out through the media’.

November 15, 2018

Following the announcement, the couple gave an exclusive interview to Emma Barnett from  BBC, Y/n  revealed that the surprise proposal happened on Valentine’s Day, in St.Lucia, ‘It happened after dinner, there was a orchestra in a smaller boat besides ours playing ‘Young and Beautiful’ which I love, when I urn back o him, he’s smiling, he tells me about his feelings, and to this point  I wasn’t sure of  what was happening, then the exact moment the orchestra is playing ‘Can’Help Falling in Love’  he got down to one knee and asked me to be his wife’ the couple shared a sweet look, and then Barnett asked how she responded:  ‘Yes, please’.

When asked if he’d seek permission before proposing, Harry said: ‘I asked her for her hand, but after we announced to her family I privately asked the Prince of Wales for his blessing, as I know they’re very close, and it was important for her.’

This might have been the most shared Royal Announcement on social media and by the end of the day #harryandy/n were trending on Twitter.

Harry shared the news on his Instagram, posting three exclusive pictures to celebrate the occasion, one from the beginning of their relationship~with a tooth rotting sweet~, a peak of the gorges engagement ring he gifted his~fiancé~, and the third one: the precise moment Y/n said ‘Yes, please’. 

Rumor has it that the long wait for the formal announcement was due to the Royal Family disapproval, but Y/n stood her ground and won them over:’He comes from a working class background, he’s a rockstar, has all those tattoos, dated a fleet of lingerie  models, and dress quirky, while Y/n is the royal family ‘golden child’, she attended Oxford, balanced a professional career and royal duty, she’s a bit of a ‘rebel’ in some standards and she’s their most popular member, some years ranking even above the Queen,’ one royal correspondent said, ‘every time they need good press, they send her, she has that bit of ‘Diana-factor’, now she wants to marry his guy, who is a huge star on his own, and it is most likely that she will be withdrawing from royal duty to be by her husband’s side, as Mr. Styles is mostly based in Los Angeles.’

A source told the Daily Mail, ‘They used the same strategy in 1947, when the then young Princess Elizabeth wanted to marry the dashing Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, they sent her on a long royal tour, keeping them apart, and hoping that the distance will make her reconsider, it didn’t work then and it didn’t work now, (…)another factor here is that Princess Y/n is a very smart young woman, if she had announced her engagement earlier this year, at the time that she was proposed,  she would have needed royal consent, so she waited the birth of her third nephew by William and Kate, which pushed to seventh in line, and she’s no longer required to ask for formal consent per Succession to the Crown Act 2013”.

December, 2018

The couple was invited to the Queen’s traditional Christmas luncheon at Buckingham Palace on the 10th. 

On the 19th, the official engagement photographs were taken at the couple’s private residence in Hampstead, and were issued by the Palace on 19th, alongside the information that the wedding would be happening on 26 April 2019 in St.Paul Cathedral, the statement also clarified that the wedding would be privately paid by the couple, the Prince of Wales and the Queen.

About the couples choice a insider said, ‘they visited a couple of royal venues, but there was no doubt that it would be St.Pauls, it’s Y/n’s dream venue, she has put a claim in the Cathedral a long time ago, going as far a forbid her brothers to marry there’.

In a break with tradition the couple choose to celebrate Christmas with Styles’s family in Holmes Chapel instead of Sandringham.

January 2, 2019

The couple traveled abroad to reportedly escape the media circus surrounding their wedding, with rumors of a royal rift between siblings.

A source said to The Sun: ‘There is some discontentment over the date of the nuptials coming from the Sussexes, the date is very close to Meghan’s due date, and not only she won’t be able to attend the ‘Wedding of the Century’, it also it takes the shine out of the birth of their first child’.

January 6, 2018

Princess Y/n, labeled ‘the Rebel Princess’ and ‘the rioting English rose’, was cover of the January issue of Vanity Fair. In the interview the Princess discusses her upcoming nuptials with rockstar Harry Styles, her late mother, her place in the monarchy, climate change, and her (un)ordinary life. She also reveled that her wedding dress is in works.   

February 16, 2018

After celebrating the one year anniversary of their engagement on the 14th in the English countryside, the couple took their nearest and dearest friends for a combined ‘hen’ and ‘stag’ party. 

A party of forty made their way to Byron  Bay, Australia, a boutique hotel were closed for the occasion,  James Corden, Jeff Azzof, Adele and Dakota Johnson acted as the hosts of the week long celebration with Johnson reportedly welcoming guests with  a cheeky speech ‘If you need help to find your designated rooms, please go to Jeff, for our parting itinerary redirect to James or Adele, if you want to find the closest bar, I am your girl.’

‘The whole trip was pretty much organized by those four, who have been close to the couple for years, Blake Lively helped them, but was unable to attend, Y/n have been close for two years now, as Blake and Ryan are Harry’s New York neighbors.’ A source claim.

From Harry’s One Direction days, only Horan was in attendance. 

March 5, 2018

To mark the wedding of HRH Princess Y/n of Wales to Mr.Harry Styles, the Royal Mint produced an official UK £5 coin, showing the couple in profile. In May, a set of commemorative postage stamps, featuring the couple's official engagement photographs, was issued by Royal Mail.

Princess Y/n accepted the position of UN Women Ambassador in a private ceremony. 

Harry and Y/n also paid a private visit to the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

March 7, 2018

Y/n had her debut Vogue Paris cover, labeled ‘a Modern Princess’ , the royal talked about becoming a aunt for the fourth time ‘I’m so happy for Haz and Meg, I can’t wait to met my future new cuddle-buddy’; her choice of wedding date and venue:‘it’s a special date, my great-grandparents are married on the 26th of April, I was very close with my great-grandmother before her passing, I think she would have liked the sentiment behind, and the Cathedral is such a luminous place, and of course it’s where my parents got married, it’s a way to keep two very special ladies, that I loved very much, with me on that date’, about her wedding preparations: ‘I salute the brides that do it on their own, I have a wonderful wedding planner, Harry is being very present in the whole process, he can be worse than me sometimes, Anne, my soon-to-be mother in law is always with us’; and about being called a rebel: ‘Why a rebel? I am doing what many woman did and do, even in my family, it’s not really original, I’m not a trailblazer, Princess Margaret was the original rebel, auntie Anne too, I am just the 21st century version.’

April 21, 2019

It was reported that the couple attended a private luncheon to celebrate HM Queen Elizabeth II birthday.

Broadcast channels started o exhibit specials about the couple, including documentaries and two biopics: ‘A Modern Royal Romance’, and ‘How Harry met Y/n’. BBC reported that there already was people camping along the royal route.

April 25, 2019

The day before. The Cathedral is being prepared for the ceremony, the public and the press were able o get a glimpse of the floral arrangements already coming in and the stand in rehearsing the ceremony and testing the cameras for tomorrow morning. 

The Duchess of Cornwall, the bride’s stepmother, hosted a Rehearsal Dinner & Welcome Party for around 150 guests at The Savoy Hotel. For the occasion the bride wore Valentino and the groom wore Gucci. 

Camilla hosting the night raised some eyebrows from the public—specially among those that still blame her for Charles and Diana’s divorce— but according to one royal correspondent ‘Y/n is perhaps the child of Charles who is the closest to Camilla, she was six years old when Charles introduced the two of them, and she lived with her father full time while her brothers were in Eton so she was the one that had more contact with ‘Pa’s new girlfriend’ she was only thirteen when they married’.

April 26, 2019

Princess Y/n married her long time love on 26 April 2019 at St.Paul Cathedral. It was a star-studded affair, with guests including he likes of the Beckhams, Stevie Nicks, Elton John, Kate Moss, Ronnie Wood, and Paul McCartney. It’s estimated that the wedding itself costed around £32million. With the palace later confirming that the couple and the royal family had paid for he core aspects of the wedding, including church service, associated music, flowers, decorations and the two receptions that followed.

Y/n stunned the crowds in her  silk and cotton organdy Vivianne Westwood gown, which featured a nine-foot-long train and cost an estimated £250,000, she was lent a sapphire tiara by her grandmother, and wore her late mother diamond wedding earrings and sapphire oval brooch. She also wore a 5 meters long silk veil, among the hand-embroidered flowers, were  guitars and pieces from Harry’s songs and the constellation of their ~very~ compatible zodiac signs.

The bride made her entrance in her father’s arm to the sound of Elvis orchestra arrangement of ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’, one of the many break in tradition in he couple’s wedding.

The wedding reportedly attracted a estimated 1.2 million people on the streets and broke records of broadcast. The couple shared a kiss at a balcony appearance.

Elton John performed at the garden reception hosted by the Queen and Ed Sheeran performed ‘Perfect’ and ‘Hearts Don’t Break Around Here’, at the evening reception the couple once again took to the dance floor, this time at the sound of ‘One Woman Man’ by John Legend. 

Princess Y/n, in a break of tradition, made a speech calling Harry ‘my Sun and my water, my stay and my strength, the absolute love of my life’, after Harry confessed that he wasn’t good at speeches but was a ‘okay singer’ the newly wedded husband sang a slow ‘jazz like’ cover of Jonas Brothers’ ‘Sucker’ for his bride.

Oh, did we forget to mention that HM made Y/n a Duchess? Our favorite princess new style is HRH Princess Y/n, Duchess of Albany, Mrs. Harry Styles ––AND SHE ACTUALLY PUT IT IN HER IG BIO—. Her title is suo jure, which means ‘in her own right’, so no, Harry isn’t a Duke.

The newly weds left for their honeymoon on the 27th, after a wedding breakfast for 150 guests at Buckingham Palace, Y/n wore a The Vampire’s Wife going-away outfit, they departed in Styles’s convertible vintage red Jaguar. The couple set for their six-week honeymoon on a private yacht.

May 6, 2019

The couple took a brief pause from their honeymoon to attend the Met Gala, where Styles was on of the co-chairs for the night. The couple wore Gucci, Harry looked dreamy in a black sheer shirt and his wife looked gorgeous in a diamond tiara and a Plymouth-pink feathered gown. 

The couple exchanged a kiss on the ‘pink’ carpet to the delight of photographers and fans on site.  Another Iconic moment of the night was Anna Wintour and Lady Gaga curtsying to Y/n.

Alessandro Michele described he young couple as ‘his muses’.

July 12, 2019

The world was shocked when Buckingham and Kensington Palaces released a joint statement in the name of the Queen and the Duchess of Albany announcing that Y/n has giving up her place in the line of succession in her name and that of her future offspring, but would keep her title, and would continue to privately serve the HM the Queen and carrying out charity engagements. 

In her Instagram the Princess shared the pictures of herself and Harry, in the caption she asked for respect of heir privacy and said that she was: ‘following her heart, and taking the steps (she) thought are better for herself and the future family she hoped to build with Harry’.

The announcement come ahead of claims that ‘senior members of  the palace staff’ had been critical of Harry’s Met Gala outfits and his ‘quirky and queer style’ and are trying to ‘re-brand’ him and ‘control’ what he could and couldn’t do in his professional career as ‘his image reflected on the family’.

Honestly, good for them.

September, 2019

Harry is the cover of The Face, and boy, he looks gorgeous, he talks about his new album, his relationship with LA and move back to London ‘I am not over LA (…) but the relationship changed’; his status as a sex symbol, and ~of course~ his wife of almost five month ‘I have never been happier, life looks beautiful’.

And no, there is still no plans for a baby Styles, ‘We’re young, there’s no rush, we just got married’. 

For the first time in… forever, Y/n took to the Instagram to jus share with the world how proud she’s of her hubby.

Caption: I am just so proud of being able to call this beautiful, amazing human being my husband.

December, 2019

Fine Line is released. And everyone in the world is losing their minds.

AND, V.L Roche published another bestselling novel, that everyone is recommending, from The Michelle Obama to Reese Witherspoon. And it wouldn’t be relevant if it didn’t turn out that V.L Roche has been Y/n pseudonymous since 2010, in a interview this month the royal admitted that she was afraid os public opinion but Harry convinced her to come out withe the publishing of her TENTH novel. ‘Pictures of Us’ and ‘With the Band’ published in 2013 and 2015 respectively, had it’s adaptation rights bought by Netflix and Amazon in 2017.

It’s mind blowing that she was able to keep it private for so long, and…Was any of those amazing characters she wrote inspired by Harry? Her answer? ‘Perhaps’

April 3, 2020

We are shocked when almost a year after getting married, Harry and Y/n announce that they welcomed their first child. The couple are able to keep their entire pregnancy private, their families were informed and Buckingham Palace, Clarence House and Kensington Palace public stated their delight with the new family addition and look forward to meet them.

We are honestly shocked, I mean, they did a better job than Kylie Jenner in hiding their pregnancy.

We wish the new parents the best of luck and can’t wait for the next chapters of what is definitely a modern fairy tale.

[wen-kexing-apologist]

Bengiyo Queer Cinema Syllabus

For those who are not aware, I have decided to run the gauntlet of @bengiyo’s Queer Cinema Syllabus and have officially started Unit 3: Faith and Religion. The films in Unit 3 are: But I’m a Cheerleader (2000), Prayers for Bobby (2009), Latter Days (2003), Blackbird (2014), The Wise Kids (2011), Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015)

Today I will be writing about

Latter Days (2003) dir. C. Jay Cox

[Run Time: 1:48 , Available: tubi, youtube premium, amazon but you have to get a free trial to something else…I tried watching it…somewhere else but they were updating the movie so I caved and went to tubi, Lang: English] 

Summary: Latter Days is a 2003 American romantic comedy-drama film about a gay relationship between a closeted Mormon missionary and his openly gay neighbor. (from wiki)

Cast: * Wes Ramsey as Christian Markelli * Steve Sandvoss as Elder Aaron Davis 

___

Content Warnings because I don't really write about those parts of the movie here: this film gets to a dark place, it includes self harm/a suicide attempt, homophobia, medical torture, and a story about being left to die by a parent. Alright, so after sufficiently crying my eyes out binging Eternal Yesterday, I decided there was enough time in the evening to knock out another film from the syllabus. Today’s film was (partially) about Mormons and Mormonism. My own personal understanding of Mormonism does not extend too far beyond The Book of Mormon: The Musical. Which gave me some impression that homosexuality is a sin, but only if acted upon. 

Which, is gonna suck for our poor dear Elder Davis, when he and three other Elders roll in to Los Angeles and in to a house across from our beloved booty shorts wearing waiter. The movie seems pretty low budget, and it’s from 2003 so there are some, what I would call cheesy camera effects happening at the beginning, but I still enjoyed the way the world seemed sped up and disorienting when Mr. Mormon lands in Los Angeles from his home in Idaho. 

I love our introduction to Christian as an unapologetically queer, slutty man and not only that, but Christian has his sex life together. He remembers who he has slept with, and when, and takes fucking notes and everything. Like, he’s truly impressive. 

gif from @bl-bam-beyond

Aaron and Christian make eye contact as every love at first sight story is wont to do, and then realize later they are neighbors. At which point a lot of decently subtle things start to happen. Aaron starts sitting outside to study his scripture in hopes of running in to Christian, Aaron and Christian talk about his mission trip, we get to see the four Elders interact, etc. and these subtler moments were aspects of this film that I deeply appreciated. 

Do not get me wrong, this film is absolutely critical of the Mormon church, (there is a scene near the end of the film where Elder Davis is getting excommunicated from the church for being a homosexual), but there are a lot of quite parts they do not say out loud around the intentional isolation that The Church of Latter Day Saints creates by sending their boys on missions trips in the first place. 

This film does not, in my opinion, explicitly discuss or state that mission trips really seem to be less to recruit new members and more to make sure their younger members don’t go running off to join the rest of society. The Elders are not allowed to see their family for two years, their families are not allowed to see them, they are not allowed to listen to music, to watch television, all the Elders in that location live together in one house, they share a room so there is no privacy, they go knocking door to door to try to spread the word only to have the doors slammed repeatedly in their face. These tactics exist to make these boys homesick, to make the outer world seem hostile, to bring the Mormon roommates closer together when the outsiders push them away. But the implication is there. 

I have to share the quote that comes with this gif: "You're gonna come in to my house and tell me God hates homosexuals?" || "And the French!"

And actually, the thing I appreciate the most about this commentary is the fact that the Elders are aware of this, and that they are allowed to be young men. I loved that one Elder was talking to Aaron about how mission trips were designed to be difficult, and that you can tell he is generally disinterested in spreading The Word. This Elder views his mission trip as the last major hoop he has to jump through before he can marry his girlfriend and “finally nail her”. Horniness fuels his motivation to get through this mission. 

These “Elders” (and I put quotes here not to strip them of their titles but to point out the irony) are nineteen or twenty years old. They are fucking gross. Their apartment is decorated like boys live there, with bean bag chairs and all, and they fart on each other, and wrestle, and bite their bedframes to try to stop themselves from jerking off. Hell, when they first move in, Christian mistakes them for a frat house. They are homophobic, and throw slurs around, but they look incredulous at the mere thought of consuming alcohol. 

The first time Aaron is faced with the potential to give in to his gay thoughts, he tells Christian he hasn’t done anything. When Christian says it doesn’t have to mean anything and Aaron says “yes it does”, he asks “my first time can just be a little fun for you?” like Aaron was fully planning on having sex with Christian. I like that Aaron, as a young man is going 0 to 100 with the physical intimacy. 

I often have difficulty with romance stories in movie formats because I have to push past how quickly two characters fall in love. Which is the case here that Christian is confessing his love for Aaron after they have interacted like…five times total. But, I appreciate the ways they show us that Christian and Aarong would be good for each other. We see them being absolute nerds, saying movie quotes to each other. I love that we know Aaron is going to break the rules and eventually give in to Christian, just based on the fact that he gives Christian his first name. Which he is not supposed to use when he’s on his mission trip.

gif from @bl-bam-beyond

I am not a religious person, so I don’t usually pay attention to whether or not a film that critics religion is going to take a hard atheistic turn or not. But I actually thought it was compassionate, kind, and in keeping with the nature of like, religion as spirituality, versus religion as control and fear tactic. I like that all these little coincidences happened, that Christian saw Aaron through his taxi cab window, that Aaron talked to and comforted Lila (Christians’ boss) when she was having a bad day and she gave him her card and told him to come to her restaurant for a free meal, that when Christian is looking for Aaron his random doodles end up being the phone number he needs to call, that Julie in stealing entries from Christian’s diary for her song allowed Aaron to hear it in the facility his parents put him in and return to LA, and that Aaron and Christian were reunited because Aaron cashed in on that free meal from Lila. 

And so too with the man Christian meets who is dying of AIDS, how he touches him and only sees snow. How he chalks that up to Christian being a blank person, shallow. The same way that Aaron has described Christian “there is nothing, nothing about you, Christian that isn’t skin deep”. And how we see Christian recoil from the touch, from the words ‘snow’ (and we will come to find out later, why that is the case).

Like these can all be coincidences, or they could be chalked up to fate, or a higher power, or whatever you want. Latter Days does not reject the idea of religion, it leaves room for a religious, higher power explanation to exist. Aaron and Aaron’s faith, the way he views the world, the importance that his values hold to him do still impact Christian. I don’t know how much he believes in God, but when Aaron calls him shallow, he takes that to heart, he really thinks about it, he realizes that what has been drawing him to Aaron is the depth, the conversations, they aren’t just gonna fuck. 

Not that I think monogamy needs to happen, or that Christian needs to have calmed down the sluttiness. Just, that in a film about religion and its intersections with sexuality, when you are going to be critical of a Church that has done very very real harm. That there is a mutual exchange here. Christian gets more depth as a result of meeting Aaron and Aaron (eventually) gets freedom as a result of meeting Christian. 

BL Side Note

I also need to say, since this syllabus is technically supposed to act as a lead up to BLs, that Latter Days has the sponge bath trope! Aaron wipes down Christian’s body with a washcloth after he faints from seeing blood. The sexual tension rises between Aaron and Christian, until they are about a fraction of a second away from kissing, and Aaron bails. 

For/By/About 

Gay Trifecta.

The director of Latter Days, C. Jay Cox is a gay man and a (former) fifth generation Mormon. 

This film did not hit me in the emotional place where I would normally say the films I rate as For The Queers go. But, this is a deeply personal film for the screen writer and Director who is gay and therefore it feels like it should be for gays. And, in addition I feel like they were enough casual references to things that don’t get full explanations that would read and be understood by a queer audience but maybe not by a straight audience. I think there are dimensional portrayals of the queer characters and they don’t succumb to stereotypes, and for those reasons I would categorize it as being for us. 

Favorite Moment 

The post-sex conversation that Aaron and Christian have, where Aaron asks if Christian has ever had the experience of being cut off from everything, and we finally get some more of Christian’s backstory. Now, like I said above, there are some understated aspects of this film that I do think are really smart. Aaron calls Christian shallow at one point, and my first thought was “oh honey, you are wrong” because of how Christian spoke to Aaron earlier on in the movie about being desperate to get away from home. Sure, Christian is generally now, emotionally reserved and has some growing to do. But, Aaron vastly underestimates the weight behind a gay man saying that he left home and never looked back. Because Aaron had a good relationship to his family (before he came out). 

If the monologue wasn’t multiple paragraphs I would probably put the whole speech as my favorite quote.  But, fundamentally what makes this scene for me is that Christian is telling Aaron this, while they are both naked in bed. Aaron has just had sex for the first time, and there is just this level of casual inclusion of nudity. I am generally an advocate for increasing the inclusion of non-sexual nudity on screen. I feel like people tend to spend a lot more causal time naked than they do sexual time naked, and I think Latter Days did a really phenomenal job of shifting between sexual nudity and casual nudity in the same setting, with the same characters, at the same time. 

When Aaron and Christian first enter the airport hotel, they are shedding their clothing with the intention of having sex. The scene is charged with sexual tension, shirts and pants are coming off as fast as they can, every movement brings them closer to the bed. But after they are done, Aaron, still naked, slides across Christian’s naked body to grab a watch off the floor, and Christian holds his leg so he won’t slide off the bed. It’s just comfortable. When Christian is talking to Aaron about his experience of being left in a snowstorm by his father, they are nude because they are being laid bare. I don’t know if I can describe it properly, but I just love that this really important conversation, where Aaron is learning that Christian understands far far better than Aaron ever could have thought about what you risk losing when you are queer, happens with literally everything out in the open. 

Favorite Quote 

“It’s early November, the same as now, and there's this storm rolling in. My dad was so determined that sissy boy was going to kill something. Snow came at us from all sides. The air, the sky, the ground they all became the same and horrible screaming white and I thought ‘we’re gonna be OK, right?” And then I saw my father’s eyes and they were that same white…and that’s when he did it.” “He did what?”  “Ran.” 

This quote comes from part of the monologue I mentioned in my Favorite Scene.

Score

8/10

Latter Days is an 8/10 for me for a few reasons, the acting was not always the best, it was clear they did not have either the time or the budget for perfection. There were stutters that read far more like actors forgetting their lines than they did like natural pauses. I also was not thrilled with the death fake out. Like, I am very much glad we did not see Aaron self-harm, and that some of the other torture he went through gets dampened a bit by dream sequence shenanigans. I figured that they were not actually going to kill Aaron off, but they do spend quite a lot of time letting the audience think he is dead, and I am not super appreciative of that.

[space-ninja-fashion-show]

All five languages in the game are just English slightly to the left, which makes them easy to generate but also just bad to deal with from a worldbuilding standpoint, so I've simply decided that I'm going to ignore that

Which means that everything is free game and I'm having a good time

(This isn't a comprehensive post on anything but! Here are some Thoughts on Orokin and Corpus for starters if anyone is interested in Pure Linguistic Nonsense)

The official source attributes what we know as the Orokin script* to Tenno culture (going as far as calling it Tennobet) but that source is from 2014, before most of the lore of the game was established at all. Also Orokin script now appears outside of Tenno spaces - namely in various void buildings, and on the Zariman insignia, which predates Tenno culture as a whole

*I'm calling it a script, bc it's technically an abugida, not an alphabet, since it treats consonant-vowel pairs as units and writes vowels over consonants akin to diacritics (accents and whatnot) instead of treating them as equal

So! I consider this script to have been the one in use by Orokin, instead of being Tenno-exclusive

Disconnecting the whole thing from English means i can do whatever i want vis a vis morphological typology (sorting languages based on how they form words) and I very excitedly landed on synthetic, occasionally polysynthetic for Orokin. Synthetic means that they glued together their words from a whole bunch of bits that didn't only mean one specific thing (e.g. a suffix didn't just mean "plural", it meant "plural, inanimate, belongs to the speaker" and if you wanted to instead say "plural, animate, belongs to the speaker" you'd need a completely different suffix). Occasionally polysynthetic means they sometimes took this to the level where entire thoughts could be compressed into a single word, and the suffixes used would sometimes affect each other as well

Reason? Some of the (if not the) only Orokin words with exact translations we have are the new names the Entrati family give each other. They all have their poetic meanings expressed as sentences in English and yet end up as only 2-3 syllables, which really fits with a synthetic/polysynthetic language to me

(You could make the argument that these were actually established names and they're all just quoting etymology, but that doesn't sit well with me for multiple reasons)

As for Corpus!

They trace their roots back to the Orokin, but that's, y'know, thousands of years ago, so A Lot Has Changed. Most of the Corpus language has been artificially made analytic (meaning you don't slap affixes onto words most of the time but simply line them up one after the other) for sake of��let's call it ease

But they still retain traces from the old Orokin ways! They have quite a few root words that can still be traced back to their Orokin counterparts. With how obsessed they are with Orokin shit, I imagine Corpus-Orokin Comparative Linguistics is a well-researched field. Interestingly, despite being mostly analytic, Corpus retains some odd bits of polysynthetic behaviour without joining their morphemes together at all! Meaning sometimes you have a word that means "spaceship" and then you add a separate word that means "<- whatever that inanimate thing is is owned by the speaker", and suddenly the "spaceship" word has taken a completely different form! It's a bit of a mess

(I'm aware that this is also a thing that exists. Russian does it, kinda! But I don't know where Russian gets it from, and I'm telling this this way bc I do know where Corpus gets it from)

There's also some words that have held onto their Orokin roots so much that they still behave as synthetic/polysynthetic! Notably, Orokin has affixes entirely unique to specific words denoting high social class (to use them for any other words would've been a grave insult, and to use anything else for these high class words would've been the same. Unless you're high class yourself, then the first instance can be a joke). One such word has evolved into the Corpus word for "CEO" and retains synthetic behaviour with affixes entirely unique to it

The language has been carefully trimmed to become more impersonal. Not entirely of course, but the average Corpus is a lot more sparing with any words and phrases that aren't objective. They also rarely use diminutives and shortenings of any kind

We only have one example of handwritten Corpus (the John Prodman poster), which is such a neat thing to have! But the Corpus alphabet is clanky as hell to handwrite and I refuse to believe that even in an age of holo-tablets and combat-magic humans have abandoned pen and paper entirely

So how is Corpus handwritten? In shorthand! Shorthands are writing systems (not necessarily alphabets) made to be written as fast as speech or thought, and are usually Very simplified and contain many abbreviations (both official and personal) to achieve this. Corpus handwrite pretty much exclusively in shorthand - handwriting their standard, printed alphabet is more akin to trying to mimic a specific font or do calligraphy if you were to do the same in English. While widely used, shorthand text is considered unprofessional and private, and is overall something that a lot of non-Corpus aren't even aware exists (hence the John Prodman signature mimicking the standard alphabet as well. You want that shit to look nice and be legible)

Okay I'm gonna go rest now, thank you for your time

[mariacallous]

As the new year started, a correction appeared below a story on the Guardian’s website that left some readers baffled and amused. It read: “This article was amended on 3 January 2023. The original furniture said the fireworks display was on Christmas Eve.”

“Oh, please do put a correction beneath this correction,” wrote one reader, “Unless you actually have a talking armoire in the Guardian offices.”

Another message, headed, “Please correct today’s fab Grauniad bloomer!”, went on to guess at what was meant: “‘Furniture’, should read, I surmise, ‘feature’.”

Actually, no. “Furniture” was exactly what was meant by the journalist who added that footnote, since it is a term (fully “page furniture”) used to describe the various elements on a print or web page, such as headlines and picture captions, apart from the article text and photos. Whether the word ought to have appeared is another matter. In writing corrections and corresponding directly with readers we usually avoid industry jargon. We also aim to be more precise. Accordingly, the footnote was revised to say: “The original subheading said the fireworks display was on Christmas Eve.”

Clarity does nonetheless mean readers are deprived of some colourful vernacular, and for those who would enjoy greater familiarity with it, here is a bit more.

Individual items of furniture have their own names. The explanatory text below a headline – described in that footnote as a subheading – is typically referred to between journalists as a “standfirst”. Or it is in the UK, at least. Naturally there are differences between nations and news organisations in the English-speaking world, so in Australia, for example, I’m told it is more commonly called the “write-off” (aka “woff”) or teaser, while in North America it is more likely to be the “deck”. On that side of the Atlantic, the caption below a picture also becomes a “cutline”.

Other bits of furniture include the dateline, which says where a journalist is reporting from – historically with the date of dispatch, eg “Buenos Aires, 1 March”; the pull quote, which is a quote extracted from an article and displayed prominently in the layout; and the crosshead, a short heading between paragraphs that breaks up a long piece. Fear not, there’s one coming below.

But “furniture”, although well used, is not known in all newsrooms, and I am curious to know whence and when it arrived. Tony Harcup enshrined the term in 2014 in his comprehensive A Dictionary of Journalism, and it is certainly referenced as though established in media books from the mid-1990s. Some earlier sources I have seen suggest it had been a phrase used for non-text elements of page design, such as rules and symbols, but no doubt someone with a long memory will set me straight.

Harold Evans’ five-volume Manual of English, Typography and Layout, published in 1972, has an extensive glossary that makes no mention of page furniture. Instead, it has an entry for “furniture” with quite a different meaning back then: it was the little pieces of wood or metal used to fill in blank spaces between the type in the days of hot metal printing.

Some language from a bygone age happily endures: the term “off-stone”, the time at which newspaper pages go to print, is still in daily use here and derives from the large stone (later steel) surface on which pages were once made up.

I am grateful to a number of journalists who responded enthusiastically when I sought help with this column (any mistakes are of course mine alone), and was especially taken with being introduced to “dinkus”, an Australian news industry term for the small photo of an article’s author, which in other places is known as a headshot or byline picture. (More generally a dinkus is a small ornamentation, usually three asterisks, that break up sections of a book chapter, article or other written text.)

In the UK, the first paragraph of a story is generally called the “intro”, while in the US and Canada in particular it is usually the “lead” or “lede”. Both give rise to expressions used on occasions when the most significant detail is lurking lower down the story: that is called “burying the lede” or a “dropped intro”. Either can be applied quite usefully outside newsrooms, I find.

But multiple terms for the same thing are not always helpful. The unbylined (no name attached) article that gives the opinion of the newspaper can be called an editorial, leader, leading article or leader column, and we have used all four terms in the Guardian’s corrections column. For consistency – and because it appears to be the most familiar internationally – we will from now on use only “editorial”.

For your information

As a postscript, I was fascinated when reading Evans’ glossary to find, just below “furniture”, an entry for “FYI”. He explained “for your information” was a wire service abbreviation. It had never occurred to me that this initialism, familiar from text messages and work emails, had its origins in news reporting. With help from archivists at Associated Press (AP) and Reuters, and a willing executive at the UPI news agency, I have been on its trail.

The earliest reference I can find is a 1915 cutting from the Salt Lake Telegram newspaper, where a business journalist dropped “FYI” into an article, then explained its meaning to readers, adding: “It’s just a little thing that saves space on a telegraph message”. (In those days telegraph companies charged by the word.) But he complained it “jolted” him when he first saw it, and that it was not “in the book”.

The book may have been Phillips Telegraphic Code, first published in 1879 to assist the rapid transmission of press reports from wire services to client newspapers. Francesca Pitaro, archivist at AP, kindly checked the 1914 edition and found no mention. Did the abbreviation arrive only in 1915, or did it spring independently? If we find out, I’ll report back; just FYI.

[booklovertwilight]

☕️ thoughts on different fanfiction sites perhaps? (AO3 vs Wattpad vs ffnet vs whatever else there is lol)

Hi friend! Sorry for the late reply, one of my posts blew up and the notification avalanche scared me off the site for a few days.

So I've been writing fanfic for *checks watch* 13 years now. I've posted it on AO3, Wattpad, FanFiction.net, Reddit, DeviantArt, YouTube comments sections, and blogs I set up myself. I'mma cover the first three individually, and do the others as a sort of collective.

I started off writing on FFnet back in 2009, and even back then I was aggravated by how much work it takes to do something as simple as post a new chapter. The UI to search for and read fic is fine, I guess, but as a prolific writer (I posted over a dozen stories on that site), the fact that it takes like ten steps to post a chapter is just Bad™. Like you have to 1) open your author profile 2) go to the side column and expand the 'works' tab 3) go to 'manage works' 4) scroll through your entire list of fics to find the one you want to add a chapter to 5) click the chapters list 6) click the add chapter button .... etc etc AAAAAAA. I have not written anything on the site in years and I still remember this stupid process. Btw the menus still look & act like this. In fucking 2022.

Wattpad is much nicer in terms of user interface. In fact it's got an option to add cover art which will be displayed front and centre along with the title and summary in search results, which, as a writer/artist who draws his own covers for his fics anyway, I thought was great. Generally, the process of posting new works / new chapters to existing works is a lot more seamless here than, actually, any other site on this list. It's also got this neat feature where you can comment on a fic line-by-line, by highlighting the text, which is a lot more user-friendly than having to copy the text and paste it in quote marks into a comment. But the nice UI/UX can't make up for the fact that -- at least in 2014, which was when I briefly tried writing there -- Wattpad was a cesspool of the most annoying human beings to ever exist. I wanted to post my writing to a community that would give me interesting comments and useful feedback, not write incoherently-spelled rants about how I was taking the source material too seriously. I lasted on Wattpad about 5 months.

After I quit FFnet and Wattpad I went around posting fic to a bunch of random forums, none of which really worked well because they hadn't been designed for that purpose. Posting long-form stories (which is pretty much all I write) to either Reddit or DeviantArt is an absolute nightmare of comment-section-linking. And posting fic to my own blog requires I have some way to bring people to see it, which is remarkably difficult to pull off and requires a lot of work. And on top of all that, there's no community, really, so you get whatever bottom-of-the-barrel internet trolls think it would be funny to harass you.

AO3 is where I post my fic now (@booklovertwilight on there too, in case there's still anyone following me who doesn't know that), and for good reason. I've tried a lot of stuff (perhaps too much stuff) and it's all-around better than anything else available. Its UI isn't the best, but it's manageable. Its site design is pretty good. But crucially, the community on there is just wonderful. Part of this is the fact that the Death Note fandom in specific is just a lovely place to be (nowadays), but even when I've posted fic for larger or more militant fanbases (*cough cough* Sword Art Online), even the criticisms have been coherent and well-thought-out. I felt less like I was being ridiculed in a school cafeteria and more like I was being given a constructive critique by a fellow english major.

There's also the factor of legal recourse. I used to write long disclaimers at the top of my FFnet stories saying things like "I make no money off all this, all rights belong to [creator of canon], please don't sue me I'm broke". Everyone did. I absolutely love the dignity in being able to post fic without having to grovel to the copyright overlords, knowing some lawyer I pay for with my yearly donations is doing it for me. The community is what brought me to AO3, but the legal safety is what's gonna keep me here.

Hope that answered your question, friend! Thank you very much for the ask, this was a lot of fun to think and talk about <3

[fictionfixations]

Inspirational Person Research Paper

bro i did a whole essay thing for Techno and I kind of just ranted for some of it because I really like talking about like the potato war especially and everything he did and just

A--- LOOK

“Technoblade never dies.” This is one of the most famous quotes from Technoblade ever, where he’s usually doing some cool thing in Minecraft, be it winning a duel, roleplaying in a server as an antagonistic-like character, or just saying it for the meme, it is likely that you have at least seen it once. Especially since according to YouTube’s tribute to Technoblade called “Technoblade Never Dies”, it’s stated that “an average of 300 new videos with ‘Technoblade Never Dies’ in the title are uploaded every day.” Technoblade, or Alex was born on June 1st, 1999, and died around June of 2022 at the young age of 23. He lived in San Francisco, California, and had three sisters and one brother, as well as a dog named Floof. He’s taken a fencing class before in middle school and was in California for the start of his career in YouTube until after his gap year in 2018 where he graduated high school, moved to Chicago, Illinois, started college and became an English major for over a year before dropping out and returning to San Francisco. An addition to this is that he’s been diagnosed with ADHD, yet it is unsure of when, but in a post on a Hypixel Forum from September 27, 2014, he states, “I have ADHD, that was a fully comprehensible and flowing paragraph of nonstop wisdom to me,” to a post with a long sentence that contains zero breaks or pauses. The first reason he is inspirational to me had to be back in July of 2020, where he was invited as backup for Calvin & xNestorio in Minecraft Ultimate because half of their team had dropped out, but since Technoblade is known as a professional at PVP, the organizer said that if Techno joined, then they would have to be the only 3-player team in a game with 56 other teams, equaling to 217 players not including their team according to the side bar in the video, but there might be less due to old members possibly still counting.

In this tournament, he absolutely nerfed everyone alongside his team, starting the Technoplane meme when he flew around with his elytra while his teammates rode on top of him, and breaking the old record of the highest number of kills in the tournament with a combined 116 kills, with the previous record being 19.

The event had raised $36,264 for charity, which almost a third of that he raised, the exact number being $11,625, which was donated to the Miracle Foundation, a charity that supports orphans. It's also ironic because it's been a running joke that his parents were killed by orphans, and in fact has a sword in the Dream SMP called "Orphan Obliterator". The second would have to be The Potato War (Late 2019-Mid 2020), when Technoblade had seen that he had been making a ton of potatoes (242,000/day) on Minecraft due to potato minions on a server called Hypixel, in one of its games called Skyblock, and decided to get the #1 rank on the potato leaderboard, which you get by having farmed the most potatoes. It was also because he was in the top 50 already, and the #1 was a guy called im_a_squid_kid.

With his goal confirmed, he decides to get to know his enemy by going through the forums on Hypixel.net and discovered a post from September where Squid Kid bragged about being rank #1 in potatoes, having 4 million during then. Technoblade went through his profile and found a post weeks later where he had stated that he was around 7 million, so then Technoblade put the two dates together and calculated the slope to estimate Squid Kid’s growth, but then later found out he could just go to his island and figure it out from there.

Basically, so on and so on where Technoblade tends to one-up Squid Kid, meanwhile Squid Kid is still a few steps behind. By around after the first video, I’m not sure if he already streamed before, but he was doing twitch streams as due to being in Techno’s video led to more viewers for him and helped grow his community.

In fact, in I believe the third video, Squid Kid actually complained about being unable to replant potatoes immediately after picking them up compared to melons or watermelons, which are much more efficient to farm because you don’t need to replant them, while for potatoes, with a huge multi-layer farm, half of that time spent on the potatoes is replanting them, and by the time you go back to the bottom, some of them have already regrown. But due to this, the admins added a new update where the potatoes replant when you have a hoe with the enchantment called “replenish”, which is a custom enchant.

The two had also been working hard on getting bonuses to help get even more potatoes farmed that included the legendary rabbit pet, which had a farming bonus where farming minions work 0.3% faster and leveling it up to 100 got a bonus of 30%.

In fact, in the second video, it is revealed that Technoblade has chests upon chests of materials for Flycatchers, which increases the speeds of minions by 10%. The problem with that is that it’s hard to create them in the first place, because they have less than a 1% chance to drop from a high-level tarantula boss, and then need over 10 million coins worth of tarantula silk. And despite having chests and chests full of materials, all of it combined could only make 24 Flycatchers, which you use for individual minions. 

That’s not even mentioning how since he needed to level his legendary rabbit pet in the same video, he grinded alchemy since they level based off skill experience, which is a rich man’s skill, meaning if you have the cash, then you can level quickly. By the end of it in fact, he ended up ranked #4 in Alchemy.

Technoblade had also been watching every one of Squid Kid’s livestreams on Twitch to where he amassed 9k channel points, which you get overtime for free by watching their stream.

He had also crawled through Squid Kid’s farm and timed all his minions with a stopwatch every day to calculate about the exact number of potatoes harvested.

The point is, there were a lot of tactics used to get one step ahead of the other, until it eventually ended in the 3rd episode, where they decided to end it at first person to earn 500 million potatoes, and the owner of the server Hypixel, who also goes by Hypixel pitched in, stating that the winner gets a surprise.

Of course, Technoblade won, and the surprise turned out to be 3 exclusive items, that being the Potato Talisman, given to anyone who spoke to the NPC labeled “Potato King” which had Technoblade’s skin. There was also Basket of Hope from the Great Potato War, which was for those ranked top #1000 in the Potato leaderboard, or Potato Collection according to the Hypixel wiki, as well as the Potato War Silver Medal for the player ranked 2nd, aka Squid Kid, and the Potato Crown for Technoblade.

Lastly, my third reason had to be in his fight against cancer and how he treated it. In the video titled, “where I’ve been”, posted August 27, 2021, he explains where he had been and what was going on. In fact, he says that his arm had been hurting, and when he got it checked out, the doctors said he had cancer. In fact, he had Sarcoma. According to curesarcoma.org, or the SFA (Sarcoma Foundation of America), which is a charity that Technoblade had started a fundraiser for back in February of this year (Minecrafters vs Cancer), which raised $119,420 according to the SBI wiki over the fundraiser, Sarcoma is a cancer that has many subtypes since it can be anywhere in the tissue, which is also everywhere on our body. It’s mainly in the limbs, and tend to be hidden deep inside the body, which means Sarcoma tends to be diagnosed when it is already too large to be able to be cured.

Sarcoma has a chance of being cured by surgery, or surgery with chemotherapy, which we know Technoblade took. In fact, in TommyInnit’s video called “100 Minecraft YouTubers VS Natural Disasters!” posted on March 5th, 2022, towards the end, Technoblade states that he must get chemo (short for chemotherapy) in fifteen minutes.

Despite all of this, he still makes a joke about it in his past videos where he talks about it, especially in his “I Almost Became An Amputee” video where he talks about where they trolled him because they say that the treatment’s going fine and so is his arm (which has the tumor). Then 3 days later he met up with his radiation therapist who talked to his surgeon, stating that they might need to amputate his arm next week because the tumor is swelling dangerously due to cells dying off, and that it might be too late.

A few days later, they’re in the waiting room with the reception and he must fill out this form such as if he’s ever had surgery before, and including dates, so then he goes onto his phone to see, and he sees a new procedure on November 8th called ‘Arm Amputation’. He found it funny and joked about it being called arm amputation, saying in the video, “why would they call the procedure arm amputation? Like- Like you’re gonna get the tumor as well, right? … Like I’m gonna wake up on the operating room table, and I’m gonna like push myself up with my one arm and I’m gonna be like, ‘Doc! Doc, did you get the cancer?’ and he's gonna be like, ‘You have cancer? Wow, that’s crazy, you should see a doctor about that.’”

Techno treated it lightheartedly, so when in June of 2022 the news of his death reached the internet, everyone was caught off guard.

Another thing he did that I wasn’t sure where to put was another charity for SFA, for his stream on YouTube labeled, “Minecraft But Viewers Control The Game [CHARITY EVENT]” where viewers could donate to either help or sabotage Techno as he plays Minecraft with his friends on September 25, 2021. There, he raised a total of $363,495, which according to SFA’s Technoblade Tribute, overall raised over 500k. My point is, is that Technoblade is an amazing and inspirational person who stayed strong throughout it all to the bitter end, and while he may be gone from this world now, “Technoblade Never Dies.” He will never die because he will live on from his friends’ memories and from their posts, from videos he’s been in, and new videos that are still coming out now about him, as well as any work of art. Therefore, while he may has left physically, his memory will forever be preserved on the internet. ----- Sources ----- (i was supposed to have only 3 lMfao)

YouTube. “Technoblade Never Dies.” YouTube, YouTube, 28 Oct. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_fZjGm2OrM.

“Technoblade.” Wikitubia, https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Technoblade.

Lol Technoblade | Hypixel - Minecraft Server and Maps. https://hypixel.net/threads/lol-technoblade.185404/.

technothepig. “Absolutely Ruining a $36,000 Minecraft Tournament.” YouTube, YouTube, 2 Aug. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAACnDkKqFo.

“Minecraft Ultimate.” Sleepy Bois Inc Wiki, https://sleepy-bois-inc.fandom.com/wiki/Minecraft_Ultimate#Season_2.

technothepig. “Skyblock: The Great Potato War.” YouTube, YouTube, 13 Nov. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qjnDd1rsII.

technothepig. “Skyblock: Potato War 2.” YouTube, YouTube, 7 Mar. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PAEqgfAts4.

technothepig. “Skyblock: Potato War 3 (Finale).” YouTube, YouTube, 13 July 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09CeBwGbCeg&t=73s.

“Rabbit Pet.” Hypixel SkyBlock Wiki, https://hypixel-skyblock.fandom.com/wiki/Rabbit_Pet#:~:text=Bonus%20stats%3A,%E2%9C%A6%20Speed%3A%20%2B0.2%20per%20level.

“The Great Potato War.” Hypixel SkyBlock Wiki, https://hypixel-skyblock.fandom.com/wiki/The_Great_Potato_War. automatic replanting potatoes | Hypixel - Minecraft Server and Maps. https://hypixel.net/threads/automatic-replanting-potatos.3023907/. technothepig. “Where I've Been.” YouTube, YouTube, 27 Aug. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9_aYyEDMD0.

“Patient Resources- What Is Sarcoma? Treatments & More.” Sarcoma Foundation of America, 5 Jan. 2022, https://www.curesarcoma.org/sarcoma-resources/patient-resources/.

“Minecrafters vs Cancer.” Sleepy Bois Inc Wiki, https://sleepy-bois-inc.fandom.com/wiki/Minecrafters_Vs_Cancer.

“100 Minecraft Youtubers vs Natural Disasters!” YouTube, YouTube, 5 Mar. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h61SlPZfWfw.

technothepig. “I Almost Became an Amputee.” YouTube, YouTube, 23 Dec. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG1Q1ouemVA.

technothepig. “So Long Nerds.” YouTube, YouTube, 30 June 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPMluEVUqS0.

technothepig. “Minecraft but Viewers Control the Game [Charity Event].” YouTube, YouTube, 25 Sept. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHKsjtB9Q30.

“Made for Fundraisers.” Tiltify, https://tiltify.com/+team-technoblade/tests35352.

Saunders, Cindy. “Technoblade Tribute.” Sarcoma Foundation of America, 31 Oct. 2022, https://www.curesarcoma.org/technoblade-tribute/.

[bisluthq]

Oh I don’t think Harry is dumb at all. He’s not the best at expressing himself, I think the problem is that he overthinks every word and is desperately afraid of saying something that will ruin his career. It’s not a rational thought, but he’s described himself as very anxious multiple times and we can’t really control anxiety, nor is mental health a sign of someone’s intelligence.

He talked about being afraid of doing drugs in 1D and being caught, so he waited until he went solo. There’s a tattoo artist who said Harry was once threatened with being thrown out of the band for not being very careful with the way he got his tattoo (the one he got with Ed Sheeran). Like, Simon personally called him to tell him he might be thrown out (which I believe cause Louis told a similar story of Simon flying him from London to LA and threatening with taking him out of the band for getting drunk during a performance).

Harry said he cried tears of joy when he signed his solo contract, after asking his manager what happened if he got arrested. He’s clearly someone who’s afraid of making the wrong move and saying the wrong thing, and has been that way since he was 16, so I’m never gonna come for him for having issues verbalizing his thoughts in public. I mean, he said that as a working class, poorly connected, former boybander who came from a reality show (he didn’t say all of this, but context), he never thought he’d win AOTY and was crucified online for being “a white straight male” (even though he’s probably not straight). I don’t blame him for being careful.

Like, “a movie that feels like a movie” is a quote that was paraphrasing what Olivia Wilde said (“it’s a movie-movie” were her exact words), very early in the morning for him, after performing like 5 shows in a row in New York and taking a red eye to Venice the prior day. He said in multiple interviews that day that he was exhausted and hadn’t slept.

So, in terms of his interviews and stuff, I really don’t think Harry is the least bit dumb. He’s just overly careful and often misconstrued or taken out of context, because of the level of fame he has, where every word that comes out of his mouth is analyzed to death. This happens to Taylor too, except she doesn’t come off dumb cause she’s more assertive in her words, but people accuse her of being self-centered, cunning, and completely out of touch, which I’m sure she is to SOME degree but not because she said stuff like “Travis and I aren’t hiding” (Joe’s widows would claim that she was actually dissing Joe in juxtaposition and I personally don’t think it’s that deep).

Beyonce swore off interviews because of this. People would accuse her of being dumb as well, which I think is so ridiculous because you don’t get to be on that level of successful on some many aspects if you’re not smart.

Anyway, and in terms of decisions during DWD, I think he made the best out of a bad situation. He couldn’t have known what a mess the whole thing would be. I mean, Olivia is incredibly smart and well-educated and she was the main issue with that whole thing. Harry was thinking with his dick (his heart, really, I don’t wanna be cheesy but I do think he was in love), when he got with her, because I think he knows that he should never mix relationships with work. But oh well, it’s something that he did once and most likely learned from it. Taylor thinks with her clit 90% of the time and she’s an incredibly smart celebrity.

Harry is doing the lifestyle brand in a really smart way. He invested in stuff like the Calm App and an arena in Manchester, which were both really smart. He has an entire company just for investments. He created a record label and a publishing company for his music. He reads a lot and has good takes on the books he reads. He knows how to speak two languages fluently (aside from English). He started networking in 1D when he was 17 years old. He said stuff like “we’re exhausting the fan base” when asking for a break from 1D in 2014, and got Irving Azoff, one of the biggest music moguls of all time, to be on his side. He self invests on his tours which means he gets most of the profits. He’s best buddies with the CEO of Sony Music and literally recorded As It Was on his living room. He taught himself how to play guitar and piano, and how to write music. He created his current collaboration team from scratch, out of two mid to low tier producers who weren’t working with anyone big. Now they’re working with everyone and literally stood behind Miley Cyrus when she won ROTY this year. One of them worked on Cowboy Carter with Beyonce on multiple tracks!

He talked about not diluting his brand, which is why he does very few interviews and appearances. He will absolutely not show up at an awards show unless he’s nominated. He will not do any events. He only went to the met gala when he co-chaired. The only two clothing brands he’s associated directly with are Adidas, because they collaborated with Gucci, and his collaboration made sales up 1,900%, and his tenure as a Gucci ambassador was the most successful one of the brand’s history. His Gucci capsule is the most sold capsule in Gucci’s existence. He’s only ever done one other commercial ad, for Apple Music, and it was talked about a ton and won awards.

He did all of that without any music industry connections btw! No singing lessons as a child, no stage mom pushing him, not even a cousin in the music industry. He’s had a few missteps of course, he’s been in the industry 14 years, but his amazing decisions outweighs the few meh ones by miles.

The guy won AOTY, swept the Brit Awards, had the biggest song of 2022 (and one of the biggest of all time, 15 weeks #1, on track of becoming the most streamed song on Spotify), the fifth biggest tour of all time, he has the highest average per track on Spotify (that is above Taylor btw), and that’s with 3 albums, 35 tracks, never collaborating with anyone, never releasing a remix song.

There’s not an aspect of his life or career that’s dumb imo

fair enough.

[usaevents]

Veterans Day 2022

Just by coincidence, my trip most recent trip with Uber included a conversation that got a little political. Per usual, the driver struck up a conversation asking standard questions:

Q: Did you grow up here?

A: No. I'm from San Diego. I moved here to go to school.

Q: Did you go to CU?

A: Yes. It is a beautiful campus. I met my husband there and we decided to stick around here in Colorado. He is from here, I can't imagine him moving.

Q: What did you study?

A: English and communication. (He laughed.)

Q: What do you do for a living?

A: I was an admin assistant for an oil and gas company but was laid off not too long ago when the industry took a hit.

veterans day images 2022

I answered all these questions and more. When I told him the general area we were heading, his interest peaked. "You're over by the high school, huh? My son used to have wrestling matches there."

Now, whenever a driver opens up about their family, it is a perfect way to steer the conversation away from me. A lot of times I don't have much to say. I rather be the one asking questions and have them talk. I asked, "You have a son that wrestles that is cool."

"I have three boys. Triplets!" he replied proudly.

"Wow, you must have your hands full then," I said.

"Well, they are no longer at home. They enlisted in the army right after they graduated high school."

He talked a little further about his boys. They were all spread out over the country and were involved in different aspects of the armed forces. He laughed, "It's funny. One of my sons' can't even talk about what his work is about. I've learned it is not worth asking anymore." He continued on and then revealed that another one of his sons' served in Iraq.

When he had finished talking, I said, "That's great. I appreciate their service for our country."

He got a little more political as the drive went on, which was okay by me. It wasn't like we debated about anything, more like him expressing how proud he was to have family serving our country. One thing he did mention though, was some of the things his son experienced over in Iraq. Seeing others get hurt and unfortunately seeing others die.

Inspirational Veterans Day quotes

"These service men and women. The things they see. They certainly don't come back the same way as when they had left to serve over there."

I was curious about some of the common neurological effects war has on our veterans. My thought being that brain injuries do occur, so some must have seizures or develop epilepsy because of that. Research conducted by the office of Veterans Affairs found many Veterans' seizures are tied to traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The thought being that the increased anxiety and stress PTSD and TBI cause can trigger a seizure. To be clear, the study points out that this doesn't necessarily mean that these veterans will develop epilepsy.

"VA treated more than 87,000 Veterans with seizures diagnoses during fiscal year 2011. While a relatively small number of those, only 3,792, served in operation Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, or New Dawn, Veterans diagnosed with seizures from those conflicts were proportionately much more likely to also have TBI than their peers who have not had seizures. Previous research has pegged TBI and PTSD rates as high as 22 percent for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans. The new study suggests that nearly 70 percent of Veterans with seizures also have TBI and PTSD." Research: Many Veterans' seizures tied to TBI and PTSD, not epilepsy, VA Office of Research and Development, January 15, 2014

I can sympathize with these veterans as stress and anxiety seem to be a trigger for my seizures. I know how frustrating and scary it is to have a seizure out of the blue. Once again, I can only hope and pray that one day there will be a cure for these complex neurological disorders. Thank you to all of those who have served our country. Your good deeds do not go unnoticed.

I think it is important to share that anyone can develop epilepsy. It is fourth most common neurological disorder that affects over 1 million Americans. A common trigger for seizures is stress. There are both positive and negative ways of dealing with stress. My hope is that not only our veterans but every American develops a proper way of managing their stress in order to steer clear of disorders, like epilepsy. Some ways I have found to help is exercise, meditation, and prayer. We all need to learn how to cope with it.

[macrolit]

Thank you, from “Professor” MacroLit

Many years ago, a love of literature suddenly caught fire in me. I was almost finished with my major (advertising), but I started taking literature classes. I was able to make literature my minor, but I thought I wanted more. I entered into a conditional Master’s program for literature, thinking I would try to fast-track my way on to becoming a literature professor. It didn’t happen. Life happened. Some good, some bad. I’ve been extremely lucky to work in high tech marketing my entire career, but -- as this Tumblr is proof -- my love of literature never went away.  Tonight something occurred to me. As I was scheduling tomorrow’s posts -- something I’ve done every night without fail for 3+ years, and on 99.9% of nights since I started Macro Literature in 2014 -- I realized this is my classroom. I don’t pretend to have or pass on the knowledge of a true literature professor or even an English major, but each photo, quote, discussion, etc. is my own version of a tiny lesson; and there have been 16,091 lessons (posts) to 92,391 students (followers) to date. I’m grateful. I longed to teach because I wanted my love of classic literature to be contagious. In some small way, I’m accomplishing that here. Additionally, I’ve given away over 800 works of classic literature to scores of people in 17 different countries. That number will continue to go up because I have no plans of stopping anytime soon. So, thank you! Thanks for following, for leaving notes and comments on my posts, for chiming in on discussions and teaching me new perspectives, and for listening to a corny, old “professor” as he realizes he achieved part of his dream. Class dismissed. =)

[allthingslinguistic]

9 years of All Things Linguistic

This blog has been around for almost a decade now! This year, despite the global pandemic, it feels like a major theme was collaborating and working with people. Let’s celebrate by looking back at some of my favourite posts and other linguistics things I worked on this past year. 

Because Internet

Because Internet, my book about internet language, came out in paperback!

Here are some photos of the new paperback edition, same bright yellow cover, now with 10x more nice quotes from people, which was featured in the New York Times Paperback Row. I also wrote an old-school reflexive blog post about what it's like to hit the final milestone in a book journey that began in 2014.

If you're a Lingthusiasm fan, and you're considering reading the Because Internet audiobook but you wish Lauren was there too, not just my voice all by itself, we now have a solution to that problem! That's right, we've made a clip of Lauren-backchannelling audio that you can now play on loop in the other ear while you listen to the Because Internet audiobook.

Wired Resident Linguist column

Covid-19 Is History’s Biggest Translation Challenge 

A Mission to Make Virtual Parties *Actually* Fun 

My Wired article about preliterate children texting in emoji from a while back was translated for Wired Japan. Here it is in Japanese and here it is in English again.

Crash Course Linguistics 

I worked with a large team of excellent people, including linguists Lauren Gawne and Jessi Grieser, host Taylor Behnke, and the teams at Complexly and Thought Cafe on a series of 16 short intro videos for Crash Course Linguistics. We’re very proud of how they turned out and we’ve already been hearing from people who’ve used them in their intro linguistics classes and even discovered that linguistics existed because of them. 

Introduction

Morphology

Morphosyntax

Syntax

Semantics

Pragmatics

Sociolinguistics

Phonetics, Consonants

Phonetics, Vowels

Phonology

Psycholinguistics

Language acquisition

Historical linguistics and language change

Languages around the world

Computational linguistics

Writing systems

We also made supplementary posts with further resources and exercises to go with the Crash Course Linguistics videos through Mutual Intelligibility with Liz McCullough. Here’s a directory of all Mutual Intelligibility posts. 

Assorted interesting crossovers 

I was this year’s recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America. (My acceptance speech as a blog post.)

The latest set of draft emoji from Unicode include three emoji that I co-wrote the proposals for, along with Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel. 

I made a cameo in an xkcd comic about Proto-Indo-European and also may or may not have been in a xkcd comic about the Tower of Babel. (I am choosing to consider it representation of curly-haired linguists everywhere.)

I late-night-wrote a parody version of "Jolene" but about vaccines ("Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaciiiiine / I'm begging you please go in my arm") which someone made an excellent video recording of and then it got picked up by quite a lot of media outlets.

Someone made a musical tiktok video asking why adults over 40 use ellipsis so much, a lot of people tagged me in it so I tweeted about it, and then A Capella Science made an extremely catchy response video, also in music, featuring a cameo from Because Internet. 

Lingthusiasm was featured on the Patreon’s official accounts as part of #MadeWithPatrons, and Because Internet was featured on the official tumblr books blog. 

LingComm

After experimenting with lots of different styles of virtual events in the preceding months, I co-organized two lingcomm-related events in parallel weeks: 

#LingComm21

The first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, for practitioners of linguistics communication to meet and learn from each other, was organized by me, Lauren Gawne, Jessi Grieser, Laura Bailey, and Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!). 

We designed the schedule and the virtual conference space in Gather to facilitate social interaction between conference attendees, not just one-way attendance, and were delighted both that so many people were interested in the topic (200 registrants!) and to hear from attendees that we seem to have succeeded at the social side. Meta posts about how we planned it with tips for other virtual events are in progress.  

LingFest 

LingFest was a fringe-festival-style series of independently organized online events for linguistics fans, which featured 12 events that were attended by over 700 people in total, including a Lingthusiasm liveshow about backchannelling   from me and Lauren Gawne. 

Grants

We also announced the winners of the 2020 LingComm Grants, a project that began last year, and later made a post with the completed 2020 LingComm Grantee projects for you to check out! 

Other virtual places I talked with interesting people 

Talks

A chat at Planet Word, the new language museum in Washington DC, about internet language

Two panels for Predictive Text, a series with Slate’s Future Tense: about translation and the juxtaposition of historical texts with modern language  with Maria Dahvana Headley (translator of the new "bro" Beowulf edition) and Alena Smith (creator of the show Dickinson) and about the meaning of emoji with Jennifer Daniel from the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee

Lauren Gawne and I gave a talk for Abralin, the Brazilian Linguistics Association, about emoji and gesture

A Linguistics in the Pub panel about linguistics podcasting 

The Cheese Plate Is A Technology - Interview with the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books podcast

Conferences

Australian Educational Podcasting Conference: From mythbusting to metaphors - Learning from cross-disciplinary research to communicate complex topics better. 

Online National Association of Science Writers (NASW) conference

Virtual Word of the Year at the American Dialect Society annual meeting

Annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of American and the American Association for the Advancement of Science

An impromptu panel about linguistics in science fiction/fantasy at the online version of WisCon (#WisConline) with a fun group of linguists

Lingthusiasm episodes

We reached our 100th episode of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne! Here are the main episodes that came out this year: 

Tracing languages back before recorded history

Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics

The happy fun big adjective episode

Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates

How translators approach a text

Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P

Small talk, big deal

Writing is a technology

Listen to the imperatives episode!

How linguists figure out the grammar of a language

R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity

Not NOT a negation episode

And the twelve monthly bonus episodes: 

Doing linguistics with kids

Tones, drums, and whistles - linguistics and music

LingComm on a budget (plus the Lingthusiasm origin story)

The quick brown pangram jumps over the lazy dog

The most esteemed honorifics episode

Crash Course Linguistics behind the scenes with Jessi Grieser

Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster

Deleted scenes - outtakes from Lingthusiasm interviews

100th episode Q&A about naming dogs, modifying English, linguistics research, and more

The episode-episode (reduplication)

Talking to babies and small children

Lingthusiasm liveshow: the listener talks back (on backchannelling)

Language Files videos

More videos from my ongoing collaboration with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl:

schwa

the Bouba/Kiki experiment

Corpus statistics behind the pronunciation of "gif" 

The complicated question of how many languages there are

Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French 

Other blog posts

Linguistically relevant books I liked this year

The Language Lover's Puzzle Book by Alex Bellos

Highly Irregular by Arika Okrent

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine 

68:Hazard:Cold, a short story by Janelle Shane which does interesting things with language

Linguist humour

Scuba, an exotic English word meaning "to keep breathing even though the water rises all around you"

The language after "Modern" English: English_final_FINAL?

English's avoidance register in front of certain animals: W-A-L-K

xkcd does dialect quizzes (a parody)

Ancient Sumerian meme dogs

General linguistics 

An interactive visual database for American Sign Language

The linguistics of hyperlinks

Names in fantasy maps

New kanji for social distancing

Towards a new language of the global language crisis

Gestural theories about the origin of language

Indigenous activists are reimagining language preservation under quarantine

What is a heritage language? Infographic

The Scots Wikipedia saga

"Language features are not neutral in the way that the calculator feature is neutral."

A video singing the names of the Indigenous languages of Australia

Writing in ways that communicate our tone of voice

The poetic process powering real-time language translation in Namibia

How do you sign "Black Lives Matter" in ASL?

A linguistic perspective: The harmful effects of responding 'All lives matter' to 'Black lives matter'

Linguistics jobs (mostly from Lauren Gawne)

legislative drafter

speech pathologist

freelance writer (and creator of Dinosaur Comics)

dance instructor and stay-at-home mom

at the American Anthropological Association

law student

developer advocate

metadata specialist and genealogist

ESL teacher

Full list of 60+ linguistics jobs interviews from Superlinguo to date

Practical advice for if you want to start a podcast

Haven’t been with me this whole time? You can see my favourite posts of year one, year two, year three, year four, year five, year six, year seven, and year eight. 

For shorter updates, follow me as a person on twitter or instagram, follow lingthusiasm on twitter or instagram, or for a monthly newsletter with highlights, subscribe on substack.

[parismystere]

Do you know the timeline of the production of miraculous? When zag got involved, I think Toei was going to originally animate it back in the 2D days but I'm not sure. I'm very curious since it seems Astruc has been working on it for a very long time and likely pitched it to many studios.

so from what i know, zag became involved in 2010, the good ol' gorgeous nathan from the gym club days :') bizarrely enough, in 2010 ml was going to be a movie, not a show, but that never came to fruition.

the actual idea came to astruc in 2005 or 2006. some versions say that he had a co-worker on totally spies who came with a ladybug shirt and he had an eureka moment that he hasn't seen a ladybug-themed superhero. BUT, he has said that the girl marinette was based on is his ex-girlfriend who loved ladybugs, was french-chinese and was named sabine (yes; tom and sabine are thomas astruc and that sabine, and marinette is his 'virtual daughter' with his ex, real quote).

there were many different versions - it started as a comic idea (mini menace, marietta, whose father got murdered and left her a ladybug necklace... yes, marinette had actual plot relevance beyond being a superhero once upon a time); then for a short while there was a ladybug and chat noir wheel-of-fortune online game, called super lady luck:

that was back in the quantic kids era - ladybug was supposed to be aided by a superhero team, but the executives didn't like the idea and they got scrapped; some of them appeared in the new york special, some of them will be in other zag shows (i presume this is why we have to suffer through a fucking superhero team of SEVENTEEN holders :))

i haven't read anything about why toei wasn't involved in the 3d (perhaps my pv mutuals can help?), but it isn't too far-fetched - 1) i don't even know if they do 3d; 2) even if they do 3d, that doesn't mean they'd want to take on ml. even samg have limited themselves to 6 episodes per season now, because animation takes a long time, they are a small studio and their work is top-notch. they wouldn't want to half-ass it because they have a reputation, you know?

but the animation wasn't the only thing that changed - pv was almost an entirely different story, starting with the fact that felix was the typical angsty anime boy. here is a post that contains some interesting info about the pv. [nota bene: it isn't clear if hawk moth was felix's father; i was also told that the kwamis were still being developed and that also even the villains had their own kwamis; also astruc wanted to make ml for an older audience and address political issues and sociological issues, but no one would fund him, i do not know if this is the pv or something else]

a few years ago zag released a book in south korea about the history of ml that had a lot of pv material. unfortunately, it is still not available in english. there is also this 2014 video that goes behind the scenes.

also, because i am an adrien stan, goddamn it, here is a post about the timeline of ladybug's love interest.

[spesalvi]

The Nothing Burger's Tale

One of the pieces of literature that has become the 1984 of the intersectional progressive has been The Handmaid's Tale.

Written in the 80's as a cautionary tale if the Neo Conservatives and Religious Right were ever to have full control over the culture and political institutions.

It imagines a United States, now The Republic of Gilead where it has been taken over by a group of White Supremacist Evangelicals who have established a theocracy in the wake of an ecological and biological disaster which has rendered many women infertile so, now there are Handmaids who also get their legal names stripped from them and replaced with new names(Margret are you trying to say something about Christianity at a fundamental level or at least female religious?), who act as mistresses to the powerful men in Gilead and have a bizarre mating ritual to boot as well.

The book follows a Handmaid named Offred and her attempt to escape the confines of Gilead and make it to Canada (obviously a reference to slaves escaping to Canada in the 19th century before the American Civil War.).

The book ends in a university lecture in the future and questions the validity of the text and if it can be even trusted since, it was written by a woman.

This was a relatively obscure book mainly read and quoted by English majors, activists and the more hardcore feminists out there. However, after the Orange Man got elected it became this rallying cry women's rights and the like because a sex pest was elected president and somehow that meant we were going to rollback a hundred plus years in the struggle for equality for women.

But it never happened, in fact women hold more cultural pull than men and it's been this way for awhile. Women are allowed to get away with things men simply cannot and often are for lack of a better term "cancelled" or called into question. For example, in 2014 Lena Dunham openly admitted that she had molested her sister when they were kids and she still has a lucrative acting career.

Or the fact that for the most part, the entire Me Too movement has been female centric, with the token inclusion of Brendan Fraiser. A movement that got killed in 2020 whenever it became obvious that Joe Biden would be the Democratic frontrunner we just swept the very credible sexual assault allegations under the rug.

Not to mention that organizations like Planned Parenthood has been caught aiding pimps in order to continue prostitution and sexual exploitation. They engaged in intersectional rhetoric in order to get away with this stuff and also hides behind other layers like being pro LGBT (which makes no sense since 95% of their business model focuses on women, biological women who are seeking to destroy/terminate/end the life inside of them). It only makes sense if they want to be beyond the reproach of criticism.

However, what people don't see is that this is mainly a cudgel by one side in order to shut the other down. No one talks about the sexual assaults perpetuated by Bill Clinton (allegedly) or how Ted Kennedy killed his secretary (allegedly) but these are never really given much if any consideration when it comes to the opposition then it's treated as fact from day zero, rarely if ever will there be a retraction.

[chissa-chan]

The  main and TRUE information that you should know and share

I am quoting a text about the real situation in Ukraine and Russia’s real face from a journalist Oleg Surajev, who knows his sources and who is also a comedian and gives sick burns about fucked up politicians and government in general:

 “ This message is for the people all around the World about the Russia’s agression against Ukraine. I'm Lithuanian-Russian speaker, born in Ukraine, my grandparents live in Kyiv right now.

1. There's no surprise about the Russian war in Ukraine, it all started in 2014 - after the second Maidan revoliution and Putin’s Russia lost "soft power" control of the Ukraine. 

2. The so-called “separatists” Doneck and Lugansk are just fake states, there are no such nations as Donecks and Lugangs, it’s just Russia’s controlled marionettes, fake terrorists states. They brought down Boeing airplane in July of 2014. 

3. All the past 8 years Russia had hybrid war against Ukraine. 

4. Context is very important. For example, today New York Times posted a photo of Ukranians leaving Kyiv. It doesn’t mean that Ukranians are LEAVING UKRAINE. Kyiv is a capital so many people are going to their hometowns to their families and loved ones all around Ukraine. So this example can show how important is to understand the context behind the photo/video footage.

5. Huge amount of information found on the internet can be fake because Russia has a strong troll-resourses on social media. Ukranian army is strong and highly motivated. 

6. This act of agression it’s all (European and Western culture) fail because we flirted with Russia for too many years. But the moment of thuth has finally came, war is war.

7. Don’t read "what’s on another side" - there's is no another side of the conflict. Russia is spreading disinformation for two decades and it's part of the war. Also there is no "West VS Russia." Western World has democracy, your politicans can be bad people, but they fight inner political battles in your country, Putin in Russia is Tcar, dictator, he can do whatever he wants. He can easily poison his political opponents and kill them.

8. This is very serious situation, Putin won’t stop in Ukraine, Putin will come for us, it’s a total madness. You should listen to Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Polish people - we know how dangerous Putin really is.

9. My grandmother was born in Ukraine before the Second World War and now she is 85+ and she can and will see the Third World War too. Brave new world. Sorry for my english,”

I didn’t correct the mistakes but I did highlight. You can find the original post on his Facebook.

I am begging you to share this information, especially with the people you might know from USA or other countries that brainwash into supporting russia and putin

I am not Ukrainian but I am also from a post soviet country, so I do ache for Ukrainians and I am doing all that I can to somehow help them, please be kind to at least share this information. Thank you and stay safe and vigilant!

[kh-genvs3000w22]

Shinrin-Yoku

I want to share a really cool practice with you all.  And I hope that it inspires you to spend as much time as you can out in nature wherever you can find it.  'Shinrin-Yoku', translated into English as Forest Bathing, is the Japanese study of using the beauty and rejuvenation of the forest to heal.  The research and data continue to show a lot of potential in reducing many mental and physical health issues, where the main way to reduce the issues has been medications (Hansen, et al 2017). The idea of letting time in nature heal the mind and reminding people that it is okay to go slowly in life was promoted in Japan during the 1980s as preventative health care (Hansen, et al 2017). The combination of  Shinrin-Yoku with environmental interpretation and education has enormous potential to help both environmental degradation and mental health. In our course reading, the Richard Louv term 'Nature Deficit Disorder' (Hooykaas, 2021) refers to the negative effects that can come from people spending all their free time on electronics, for example short attention span, anxiety, and depression, due to missing out on the benefits that come from spending time in nature.  Although Louv is not from Japan, his ideas have been connected to Nature Bathing which is seen as a cure for Nature Deficit Disorder. An article by the Government of Canada states that Shinrin-Yoku has been studied for nearly 40 years and is an evidence-based wellness practice (Health Promotion, 2021).  

This is one of my favourite spots to experience Shinrin-Yoku at the Bruce peninsula.

Our textbook says that when people are just browsing online, their attention span is often that of a goldfish: that is 9 seconds (Beck et al. 2018). Set the timer and see how long that is—I bet you won't, you'll get bored—you're currently reading this on the web! The idea of nature being a cure can give the environment even more standing against developers. Shinrin-Yoku is motivation to protect natural habitats and visit nature centers with interpreters so visitors can learn and understand the importance of nature in their life: for example, physical improvements of walking, climbing, emotional relaxation, and purposefully being present and interacting in the community. It is very easy to feel isolated in buildings and this disconnect from others can have severe consequences. These issues can be not just reduced but may even be cured with as little as a daily 30 minute walk in the forest.  An impactful quote in our textbook says: “But if the trance induced by electronic gadgets makes us oblivious to the wood, the wildflowers, and the songs and smells of resurgent spring, then we have suffered a grievous loss” (Beck et al. 2018). There are a lot of reasons for the disconnect from nature, not just electronics, but the main emphasis for me is to not lose the natural health benefits of nature for children and adults and to make experiencing nature a priority.  I would love to hear if anyone else has heard of Shinrin-Yoku or have felt the benefits of time in nature for themselves.        

                                                 References

Beck, L. Cable, T.  Knudson, D. (2018). Interpreting Cultural and Natural Heritage For a Better World. Sagamore-Venture Publishing LLC. ISBN 978-1-57167-865-2

Hansen. (2017). Shinrin-Yoku (Forest Bathing) and Nature Therapy: A State-of-the-Art Review. PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5580555/

Health Promotion .(2021). Health Promotion- Improve your mental well-being with forest bathing and fall into wellness. Government of Canada.  

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/corporate/news/regional-news/western-sentinel/2021/09/improve-your-mental-well-being-with-forest-bathing-and-fall-into-wellness.ht

Hooykaas, A. (2022). Sense-Making of Nature Interpretation. [Unit 9 course reading]. Nature  Interpretation Course University of Guelph.

Wals, A. Bordy, M. Dillon, J. Stevenson, R. (2014). Convergence Between Science and

Environmental Education. Science. https://www-science-org.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/doi/10.1126/science.1250515

[lightsonparkave]

HAPPY TWO-YEAR ANNIVERSARY TO LIGHTS ON PARK AVE! 🎂🎉 In celebration of LoPA’s birthday (August 22, to be exact), all of the prompts from the previous year are up for grabs.

Round 24 will end on August 31, 11:59 PM ET (what time is that for me?).

As always, you’re free to jump in whenever you’d like during the round, a wide variety of work types is accepted, and there are no minimum work requirements. Unfinished works and works for other fandom events are allowed. You can find more information about Lights on Park Ave and the participation guidelines here.

Here are all 149 prompts. Go crazy and have fun! 🎈

ROUND 13: TIME

A quote about being infinite in the present moment from The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Vellichor,” the the strange wistfulness of used bookstores

“How long is forever?” dialogue from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

“Time” - Hans Zimmer (Inception OST)

A quote and gifset from Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) about the nonlinear structure of time

Agnès Varda’s portraits when she was 20, 36, and 80 years old

A John Irving quote about what time does to the people who matter to us

Ten traveling back to see Rose on New Year’s Day in 2005 before he dies and reincarnates in Doctor Who

Future inventions in 2015 as seen in Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future Part II (1989)

A quote about what time does for wounds

ROUND 14: LIMINALITY

A photoset of various liminal spaces

Illustration of a black cat in front of a red-lit house with the caption, “They say no one is living here—but the lights come on, once every year”

A photoset of Victorian-era spirit photography, an art form that attempted to capture the ghost of a deceased loved one

Information on the famous Mojave phone booth, a lone telephone booth in the middle of the desert that received calls from all over the world

Rosemary Ellen Guiley’s The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits Third Edition’s definition of “witching hour”

Illustration of a ghost train on an abandoned trestle bridge in the Pacific Northwest

A quote by Isabel Allende about spirits coming out at night in the library

Gifset of the spirit world in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001)

Illustration of a neon roadside sign of a motel that only appears at night by a long-forgotten highway

“Pacific Coast Highway” - Kavinsky

A gifset quote from The Twilight Zone (1959)

Scenery from Twin Peaks season 1 (1990)

A quote about something shifting into a strange, new place inside of a person from Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

ROUND 15: LOSS

A quote about being lost and found by someone special by Sue Zhao

A photo of the Mildred, wrecked off Gurnard’s Head, Cornwall in 1912

A quote about ephemerality and the beauty of it from Troy (2004)

Two paintings of people visiting ruins by Caspar David Friedrich

A quote about desire and loss by Lara Mimosa Montes

A photo of an overgrown, abandoned conservatory

A passage about what disappears and what remains in ruins from Suicide by Édouard Levé

Dialogue about gratitude for people who aren’t meant to stay in your life but shape who you are from BoJack Horseman

A scene from Fleabag where the Priest chooses God over Fleabag and gently tells Fleabag that her love for him will pass before they part ways

A prayer to St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things, people, and souls

Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, covered in lipstick kisses from admirers

Photos of a cemetery statue in Austria, wrapped in branches and dead leaves, holding a single flower

ROUND 16: DEVOTION/SERVICE

A gifset of Kevin on the phone, telling Chiron he’ll cook food for him from Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight (2016)

Buttercup’s monologue to Westley about how she would do anything for him from The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Gifs of Merlin saying that he was born to serve Arthur from BBC’s Merlin

An excerpt about giving all of oneself to someone despite what it costs from House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

A gifset of various times Jaime and Brienne demonstrate their loyalty to and love for each other in Game of Thrones

A gifset of all the different ways Cliff is there for Rick in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

A gifset of Nadia deciding to be by Alan’s side no matter what in Russian Doll

“Devotion” - Ocean Vuong

A gifset of Bond comforting a traumatized Vesper in the shower in Casino Royale (2006)

A gifset of Sookhee refusing to leave Hideko, saying her job is to look after her in Park Chanwook’s The Handmaiden (2016)

ROUND 17: DREAMS

A dreamscape gifset and quote about repressed thoughts in dreams and the Internet from Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006)

A gifset of Mitsuha and Taki finally meeting in their own bodies in a dream from Shinkai Makoto’s Kimi no Na wa (Your Name) (2016)

A quote by Tinker Bell telling Peter Pan where he can find her and where she’ll always love him in Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991)

The scene where Keating tells his students that poetry, beauty, romance, and love give life meaning in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989)

An animated illustration of a storefront called “Hauntings” with a flickering “99¢ dreams” neon sign

Various dreamscape scenes and a quote about ideas being the most resilient parasite from Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010)

A quote about how all living beings must dream to survive reality from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

A comic about people we love taking turns to visit us in dreams every night

Lovers and Sleeping Couple, two drawings by Egon Schiele

A quote about belief in a better world by Robert Frobisher to his lover, Rufus Sixsmith, in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

A quote about the feeling of falling in love lingering when you wake up from a dream in Alexis Dos Santos’s Unmade Beds (2009)

A photo of subway graffiti by an unknown author insisting that they’ll never give up making the world a better place to live in

ROUND 18: PHYSICAL TOUCH

A scene about how to return a stolen kiss from Daniel Ribeiro’s The Way He Looks (2014)

A line about kissing someone the way a flower opens from “I Know Someone” by Mary Oliver

A gifset focusing on showing affection and care through hands from Park Chanwook’s The Handmaiden (2016)

A passage about two people leaving invisible marks on each other through the accumulation of touches over the years from A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

Two conversations about never being touched before and only being touched by one person from Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016)

Going from yearning to touch someone but stopping oneself to being allowed to touch them from Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy

Moving art of two bodies made of stars and the cosmos embracing

A quote about maintaining sanity by touching someone but being separated despite proximity from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

A line about proving that one still exists and is real through touch from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Different touches between Villanelle and Eve expressing violence, threat, sexual tension, comfort, and companionship in Killing Eve

A juxtaposition of two scenes from Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) of Su Li-zhen rejecting and accepting Chow Mo-wan’s hand

A compilation of marble sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Syd (Chris Evans) trailing kisses down London’s back in London (2005)

ROUND 19: IMMORTALITY

James Baldwin talking about how art helps you discover that people before you have experienced the same thing as you and you are not alone

Dr. Brand saying that love transcends time and space in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014)

Nadia and Alan meeting for the first time as they’re about to die and relive the same day again in Russian Doll

The loneliness of losing everyone by having a long life as expressed by Ten in Doctor Who

The doomed eternal time loop romance of Simon and Alisha from Misfits

A quote by Edvard Munch about becoming eternal through the flowers that grow from his body after death

Nagai Kei recalling the traffic accident that killed him and triggered his immortality, making him one of the rare persecuted humans to possess the power, in Ajin

A collection of moments from Jay Russell’s Tuck Everlasting (2002)

A quote by Mary Wollstonecraft hoping for something that lasts inside the heart

Various scenes with Jack Harkness from Doctor Who

Aya telling Asou-kun to live on and live forever as she nears the end of her life in 1 Litre of Tears

An excerpt about the immortalization of the self through love from “Love of the Wolf” in Hélène Cixous’s Stigmata

A collection of scenes from the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero”

Naoko telling Toru to always remember her and remember that she existed in Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Dom explaining to Ariadne that he uses the PASIV to dream as it’s the only way that he can be with his wife and children in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010)

ROUND 20: POETRY

“I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense” - Danez Smith

A line about wanting to forget how much you loved someone and then actually forgetting from Bluets by Maggie Nelson

“Perhaps the World Ends Here” - Joy Harjo

“In Time” - W. S. Merwin

“By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.” - Jack Gilbert

“Magdalene: The Addict” - Marie Howe

“Wild Geese” - Mary Oliver

“Morphology 2″ - CJ Scruton

“20″ from Moscow in the Plague Year by Marina Tsvetaeva

“To Hold” - Li-Young Lee

ROUND 21: LONGING

“I Loved You Before I Was Born” - Li-Young Lee

A poem about longing for someone through worlds by Izumi Shikibu

A gifset of Marianne and Héloïse falling in love from Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

“Make Me Feel” - Janelle Monáe

A quote about living in longing being better than realizing that longing from 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

“I Want You” - Mitski

Orpheus and Eurydice in Hades - Friedrich Heinrich Füger

Long definition of the word “saudade”

Definition of the word “hiraeth”

“Something About Us” - Daft Punk

Two lines about burning quietly from the poem “The Pillowcase” by Annelyse Gelman

A conversation about wanting each other after decades of separation from Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory (2019)

A Hanahaki disease mood board

“Shrike” - Hozier

Two lines about wanting someone to return from Herakles by Euripides

“Love of My Life” - Queen

“Eyes, Nose, Lips” - Taeyang

A screenshot of Kathy and Tommy holding onto each other desperately from Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) and a quote from Kazuo Ishiguro’s eponymous novel

ROUND 22: YOUTH

“Perfect Places” - Lorde

A piece about realizing you’ll never be this young again, but it’s the first time you’re this old by Kalyn Roseanne Livernois

A conversation between Neil and Mr. Keating about Neil feeling trapped and unable to live the life he wants because of his father from Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989)

An excerpt about being too young to know how to love properly from Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor” - Arctic Monkeys

Elio’s father telling Elio not to try to rid himself of his sorrow and pain—and with that joy—which he feels so strongly because he’s so young from Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman

A quote about how everything feels final to young people because they’re experiencing it for the first time from Middlemarch by George Eliot

Lara Jean telling Peter that she had to make it seem like she liked him to deal with her love letter fiasco in Susan Johnson’s To All the Boys I Loved Before (2018)

Rue and Jules dancing together and partying it up in Euphoria

“Le Plongeoir” by Laurent Roch

A quote about being pushed into adulthood and not being ready from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

A photo of a roller rink illuminated by pink and purple lights

Pastel photo series of Coney Island by Mijoo Kim and Minjin Kang

“Hips Don’t Lie” - Shakira feat. Wyclef Jean

“Young Dumb & Broke” - Khalid

Different moments accompanied by the letter to Mr. Vernon at the end of detention from John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985)

Various scenes and a quote about growing up and realizing life isn’t like a fairy tale from Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Stills of the young lesbian couple in love from the music video of “You Know” - Jaurim

Lines by Effy about her emotional and mental struggles from Skins

Nathan chiding the group for not taking advantage of their superpowers as young offenders from Misfits

ROUND 23: HEDONISM

A passage about giving into passion and losing control from The Secret History by Donna Tartt

“Thot Shit” - Megan Thee Stallion

An aesthetic photoset of the Greek god Dionysus

A quote about living for ecstasy rather than balance from From a Journal of Love by Anaïs Nin

A photo of an anonymous person in nothing but a silk robe and lingerie

A photo of Donatella Versace lounging in a chair, surrounded by shirtless, muscular men sunbathing around her in Capri, Italy in 1994

An aesthetic photoset based on The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The music video for “Heartless” by The Weeknd

A plea for summer to never end from Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman

“Plastic Love” - Mariya Takeuchi

A gifset from the music video of “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd, a continuation of the “Heartless” music video

“XS” - Rina Sawayama

A gifset from the music video of “Body” by Mino

Photos of people dancing at the legendary Studio 54

Photos and a description of the party scene at Studio 54

Chris Evans and Evan Rachel Wood hooking up in a car in the “Gucci Guilty Black” commercial

[skzfairies]

nct 127 extra member profile

birth name → monique lee

stage name → maria

korean name → lee nari

nick names → moni , legendary, mari

birthdate → january 15th, 1995

zodiac sign → capricorn

chinese zodiac sign → ox

nationality → french

ethnicity → korean

place of birth → lyon, france

languages → korean(fluent), french(fluent), english(fluent), italian(conversational)

sexuality → lesbian

—career

company → sm entertainment

training → 2014-2016 (two years)

debut → nct u(2016), nct 127 (2016), nct femme fatale (2021).

group → nct

sub units → nct u, nct 127, nct femme fatale

position → main rapper, lead dancer, sub vocalist

—physical

face claim → wheein from mamamoo

vocal claim → wheein from mamamoo

rap claim → cheetah

dance claim → mimi from gugudan

height → 179cm (5’10)

—facts

her mother is french (ethnicity: korean) and her dad is korean. she learned korean at home and spoke it with her dad, and spoke french outside of home and with her mom. she learned english and italian in school, she is more fluent in english, though.

she lived in france until 2014, she moved to seoul, south korea in 2014 with her dad. the move was supposed to be temporary, they were staying there because her aunt needed help with her kids, but maria ended up auditioning for sm in 2014 after being casted on the street. her mom came to move to south korea after news of her making it in, but her parents moved back to france in 2017.

maria has been practicing rapping, song writing, and producing since a very young age of 7. her uncle was a producer, and he often let her visit his studio when he wasn’t busy, and he taught her everything he knew. when she was able to make her own songs, he bought her equipment for her 13th birthday. she used to publish her songs on youtube, but deleted the account when she became a trainee.

she has helped write and produce 35 nct tracks, and has written 4 tracks on nct female fatal’s first mini album.

her favorite food is “anything spicy”, she has a very good spice tolerance and doesn’t even tear up.

maria’s favorite subjects in school were science and art, she studied biology at an online university, and she still draws from time to time. her and taeyong designed a pair of shoes for jieqiong for her birthday last year!

jieqiong and maria are very close, they were in classes together and became friends very quickly, both of them were so excited to figure out that jieqiong would be debuting in wayv. both of them actually came up with the idea of nct female fatal together!

she is also close to sooyoung ! they met before debut and got close to her and they are now besties <3 maria often visits the dream dorm to hang out w the dreamies, but mostly sooyoung hehe.

she loves to play games, but she doesn’t stay up late. she is often seen playing games with her other members, mostly haechan and johnny. she is in haechan and johnnys room more that she is in her own 😭.

her favorite color is blue, favorite season is summer, and her favorite number is 3.

likes: sunshine, swimming, stuffed animals, tea, makeup, icecream, jieqiong (🤭)

dislikes: spiders, uncleanliness, sqeaking of shoes, having nothing to do, veggies.

strengths: hardworking, passionate, easy to know, confident.

weaknesses: sensitive (not really a weakness, but can suck at times. it’s okay if your sensitive tho!), can get irritated quickly.

habits: playing with necklaces that she is wearing, cleaning, randomly singing or quoting a movie.

loves loves skinship, but liked to be more of a giver than a receiver, yk? so she randomly gives ppl shes close to (ex:members, staff, friends) back hugs, hugs, or holds their hand.

she is close friends with red velvet, twice, mamamoo, ateez, and seventeen.

ideal type: someone who is calm and collected, responsible, respectful and caring, and cute!

motto: “be yourself, you only get one chance!”

she shares a room with taeyong!

her instagram is @/ monqiuelee !