#at the very least the spelling feels out of place in an american context

[hogwartseighthyear]

i’m sorry but i refuse to believe that an american wizarding school would be called ilvermorny that is such a painfully british-sounding name. idk if it’s just me but i don’t think it works well with an american accent either like it doesn’t roll off the tongue right. we speak too flatly for a word like ilvermorny to sound natural. even if it was initially called ilvermorny someone would have changed that name somewhere along the line okay trust me.

[demi-shoggoth]

2023 Reading Log, pt 5

Is it obvious that my local library has lots of books about birds?

21. Penguins and Other Seabirds by Matt Sewell. This is a small book, hardcover, with color paintings of fifty seabirds and short informational blurbs about each. The blurbs are a combination of science and poetic writing, and are often anthropomorphic and occasionally judgmental (it’s okay gulls. I don’t hate you). The book is cute, but very short and faintly disposable. It feels like a gift book you get someone who you don’t know very well, but you do know likes penguins. Suitable for a bird-themed bathroom reader.

22. The Complete Language of Food by S. Theresa Dietz. This book baffles me; it feels like it was written by a space alien, or possibly a Dan Brown character. The “language” the title refers to is both symbolic and magical, and each of the foods is granted a laundry list of things it could possibly represent in a reference or a spell. These lists are sometimes nonsensical (or am I the asshole because I don’t know what “colorize” means in the context of magic?). Each entry is marked with symbols to tell if the plant has poisonous parts, or medicinal use, but said toxins and/or medicines may or may not be referred to in the actual text! The main text itself combines world cultural lore, magic and folklore, and recipe ideas in a seemingly random assortment. The book at least looks nice—good paper quality and color illustrations—and it actually has a bibliography. So it’s getting at least some of these ideas from somewhere. I am really confused as to the target audience, and what they’d hope to get out of it. I don’t think this book is for me. Although there’s at least two other entries in the series, so there is an audience out there.

23. Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps by Seiran Summer. This book aims to give wasps a reputation boost from “the insects that are assholes” (thanks to @screamscenepodcast for that excellent summary of the popular culture view of wasps) to the vital part they play in ecology, our understanding of evolution, and the services they provide to humans. The book talks about the evolution of the Hymenoptera, and how both bees and ants are really just subdivisions of wasps that evolved in specialized directions. It covers some of the great naturalist observers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, like Fabre, and discusses what they got right, what they got wrong, and what we still don’t know. And in a very amusing change of pace, it frames the comparisons and contrasts between social wasps and honey bees as a drunken dinner conversation with a resurrected Aristotle. It even brings up The Wasp Woman! If you can’t tell, I really liked this book.

24. Over My Dead Body by Greg Melville. This is a history of the United  States as seen through its cemeteries. The author is a big fan of graveyards, and each of the chapters is bookended with his personal experience of a visit, then talking about the history of the place and how it ties into greater themes in American history. Themes like colonialism, racism and segregation, the military industrial complex and the death industrial complex. The author blurb makes sure to point out that Melville is a “decorated veteran”, but any worries that this book was going to be jingoistic are dispelled basically immediately. He refers to Arlington National Cemetery, for example, as a beautiful, profoundly sad monument to the American god of death. I got this from the library, but I’m buying a copy for my mom for Mother’s Day. Because she likes cemeteries, not as some sort of weird threat.

25. Water Babies: The Hidden Lives of Baby Wetland Birds by William Burt. This is a photography book covering a hard-to-photograph subject. Baby water birds, including ducks, herons, terns, sandpipers and coots. The book is sorted roughly by taxonomic group, with pictures of each the juveniles and adult of each species, along with some commentary about the animal or the process of finding and photographing it. The book has a great sense of pacing—it’s arranged in a way that immediately hooks the reader (with grebe chicks, which are super cute and ride on their parents’ backs), and photos are arranged in space to allow for artistically pleasing contrasts (like turning the page from the scruffy chick of the purple gallinule to see the magnificent adult plumage).

[littlepadika]

Calling Home (1) | Frankie Morales x Reader

Summary: You are a receptionist at the VA. Frankie Morales keeps calling. Yearning ensues...

Rating: M -> E in later chapters

Warnings: fem!reader, age gap (legal), praise kink, voice kink, discussion of addiction/PTSD/trauma, no use of y/n, no beta reader, reader is bad at Spanish, Frankie has a sexy voice 😩

Masterlist here

AN: My first fic. Pedro writers have inspired me to finally start writing again 🥺. Concept inspired by the movie RED. I hope you like it ❤️Set after triple frontier.

Chapter One

~~~~~~~~~~~

The first time he called was an ordinary Thursday.

“Veterans Affairs, how can I help you?”

You had been working at the VA office for about two weeks. Fresh out of college you felt lucky to have a job in the first place. You went to school to be a writer but your big idea for 'The Next Great American Novel' had yet to present itself. At least here you had access to the most inspiring stories and interesting people. Men and women who had seen more and done more than you probably would in your entire life. You loved talking to clients on the phone. It was weird but something about only being able to hear people’s voices excited you. You would sometimes write little stories in your head about the people you'd talk to, filling in the details that were unknown.

Your desk accessories reflected your love of books and writing. You had your growing collection of books sitting on your desk sandwiched between baby pink bookends. Next to them was a matching desk organizer filled with your favorite sparkly pens and sticky notes. You had decorated the plain cubicle walls with posters of quotes from your favorite books. You also brought your favorite candle from home. Even though you couldn’t light it you still liked to lift it to your nose once and a while and smell it between chapters. When you weren’t on the phone or scanning documents you would read. You finished To Kill A Mockingbird in your first week on the job and were now halfway through Murder on the Orient Express.

You were starting a new chapter when Frankie Morales called the first time.

You picked up the phone on the second ring already mustering your chipper 'customer service' voice. “Veterans affairs.” You stated your name. “How may I help you?”

“H-Hi. My name is Frankie- uh-Francisco Morales." A deep voice answered you. "I’m calling because I have gotten my benefits check yet. It’s been a month. I was hoping you could tell me if it got sent?”

“Okay Mr. Morales." You flipped on the computer. "Let me check. Can you spell your last name for me?”

“M-o-r-a-l-e-s”

“Okay... let's see.” You clicked on his account. You were momentarily distracted by his picture likely taken when he graduated basic if you had to guess based off the uniform. He looked sweet. Sharp nose and strong jaw balanced by kind eyes and a shy smile. You could imagine how age would continue to soften his expression making him even more handsome. The image was a strange juxtaposition to the voice you were hearing on the phone which was much deeper and rougher. His profile said he was special forces. A pilot. The rest of the information was blacked out. Something you were used to seeing on many people's accounts but even his years of service were redacted. He must have been involved in some dangerous stuff, you thought to yourself. The dates that were not redacted were mostly in Latin America. You clicked over to processing requests. “Looks like the check got sent one week ago.” You informed him.

"I'll look again but I haven't seen anything-" It sounded like he was apologizing when clearly it was not his fault.

"No no. It's probably a mistake on our end." You interrupted. With how shitty and outdated the payroll interface was you wouldn't be surprised if there was a mix up. "I’ll go ahead and let payroll know to send another."

"Great. Thanks." He replied sounding relieved. The roughness in his voice gave way to a smooth baritone.

“No problem. I'm sorry for any inconvenience it may have caused. We'll get it sent right away." You hoped he was not relying on this benefit check for anything important. While you could promise you'd fix the problem, the administration was notoriously slow. When he didn't respond you asked, "Is there anything else I can help you with today, Mr. Morales?”

“Uh-no" The roughness back in place. "Thank you." He paused before adding your name onto his thank you which made you smile. People usually never remembered your name.

“Alright. Have a nice day and thank you for your service.” You chirped before hanging up. The smile he put on your face lingered for a few minutes as you returned to your book.

The next time he called was exactly twelve days later.

“Veterans affairs” you answered, your routine greeting cut short as your eyes were still on your book.

“Hi- I’m calling because uh I still haven’t gotten my benefits check. This is Frankie Morales.”

“Oh Mr. Morales.” You recognized his voice even before he even said his name. You quickly shut your book, pushing your hair out of your face. Had you been thinking about him? No! Okay maybe you stared at his picture for a few minutes longer after he hung up. Yes, it was probably very unprofessional but you couldn't fight the curiosity. You were trying to rationalize the contrasting sharpness and softness of his features with his voice. How it all worked together. How one person's voice could change textures and colors so easily. You wondered what kind of things this man might have seen on the job. Most of the veterans you would help day to day did not have so many redacted missions and deployments. You were in the middle of Narcos season one so you immediately thought of drugs or something equally dangerous. After much pondering, you had come to the conclusion that Frankie Morales was both insanely attractive and insanely courageous. “Still no check, huh?”

“Nope.” He sighed the sound making the phone's shitty speaker crackle as you held it to your ear.

“Let me just check that it was approved...“ you found his profile again and scrolled to the status page. “Hmm... it says it was sent out last Friday after we spoke. That’s so weird...”

“Yeah. Really weird.” He echoed your frustration on the other end.

Typical payroll, you thought to yourself as you rolled your eyes. “I'll get another one sent to you right away. I'll see to it myself.” You tucked the phone under your chin and typed out a short email to Mary in payroll letting her know you'd be stopping by her office to explain the situation. You realized he hadn't hung up yet.

“Sorry for the back and forth.” You said, trying to fill the silence.

“It’s not your fault." The earlier irritation gone. "You’ve been really helpful.” His voice sounded warm and reassuring. Less gruff than it was last you spoke. Instead it was that rich baritone that you caught of glimpse of last time.

You feel your face warm at his compliment. It was this annoying reflex you had. Praise always made you blush no matter what context but it was worse when it came from a (you assume) gorgeous stranger.

“And just to verify that your address is correct- you’re on Maple Lane in Miami, Florida?”

“That’s right.” He confirmed.

“Okay. Sent!” You clicked send on the email, which caused the window to close and reveal Frankie’s profile page again. “I was curious-" You spoke before you really made the decision to speak. You didn’t want to overstep but once again your curiosity got the better of you. Honestly, you were just searching for a way to keep him on the phone. The day had been so boring.

“Your profile says you were stationed in Costa Rica.”

“For a bit.” He replied after a moment. He didn’t sound too defensive but there was definitely some tightness in his answer that made you feel bad for asking. Like you were scratching a wound.

“Did you like it? The country I mean.”

“Are you planning a trip?” He sounds a little amused.

“Yeah- well- kind of. It's more a trip in my head right now. I’d like to go there one day. It looks so beautiful.” You sighed closing your eyes trying to imagine the heat on your skin.

“It is." He agrees. "Really humid though.”

“Mm that sounds nice.” You would kill for some warm weather after such a long winter in DC.

“It was too muggy for me at times." He grumbled. "If you do go, stick to the costal areas where it’s more breezy or else you’ll just be sweating the whole time.”

“I don’t mind a little sweat” you shrugged, still thinking of the awful east coast winter you were currently suffering through. The sexual connotation of what you said hit you hard as soon as you heard the statement in its entirety. You felt your face flush again, though the man on the other end would never know.

“I’m learning Spanish!" You announced loudly trying to move the conversation past your awkwardness.

“Wow. Muy impressivo.”

“Si” you replied but after a moment you admit “I don’t really know what you said.”

Frankie laughed loudly on the other end and you couldn’t help but join in, drawing dirty looks from the elderly lady, Donna, working in the cubicle across from you. You ducked your head behind a stack of papers to avoid her glare.

“Fake it till you make it.” He chuckled.

“Maybe you should help me out.” You took on an indigent but still playful tone. “You sound better than duolingo” Your smile widened when he laughed again. His laugh was what you hoped it would be, by all your assumptions from his picture. It was an unencumbered, unburdened, rich sound with only a hit of roughness from the air behind it.

“Tell me you’re not using that dumb app to learn.” he scoffed, saying your name in an almost scolding tone.

“I’m got my thirty day streak today.” You boasted.

“You’ll be a total tourist if you go by duolingo.”

“But the owl is so cute every time I get something right!” You argued your voice taking on a more childish cadence.

“That’s how they trap you, silly girl.” He teased right back. Usually such a condescending nickname would piss you off but something about the affection behind him using it made you feel very differently. You felt warm like you were proud to be silly as long as it made him laugh.

“Then you saved me just in time, Mr. Morales.” You bit your lip. His scoffing and laughter died down on the other end.

“Frankie” He corrects you.

“Frankie…” You repeated it, smiling at how well the nick name suited the voice over the phone. Honest, sincere, and not pretentious at all. Way better than the pompous guys you know with equally stuffy names like “Edward” and “Christopher.”

“So what do you want to know?” Frankie interrupted your thoughts. “Dime”

You started asking him questions in Spanish to the best of your ability. Granted they weren't particularly probing questions. What is your name? What is your favorite color? What is your favorite animal? What's your favorite book? I am reading Gone Girl. He answered them all with patience and amusement, occasionally interrupting you to correct your pronunciation or explain what a word meant. Every time you’d repeat the word back correctly he would say something like “good” or “there you go” or “you got it”. You hated to admit that his kind words and his praise was doing something to you. You didn't even realize you were clenching your legs together unconsciously, almost in anticipation of his next correction or next answer. His low voice so sweet and encouraging against your ear, more tangible when he was speaking Spanish. You just wanted to hear more of it. Would it be this sweet in other situations? Would it get huskier or rougher? If you closed your eyes it was like he was sitting right next to you. It would be all too easy to slip into that daydream and escape the dull office.

Suddenly out of the corner of your drooping eyes you saw a flashing red light on the phone console meaning another caller was waiting.

“Shoot- i’m sorry, Frankie- I have to take this call.” You shot forward in your chair, legs uncrossing.

“Of-Of course. I should let you get back to work.” He sounded a little sad or so you hoped. You felt bad for interrupting him after you both were having so much fun. You wanted to say he could wait on hold but he killed that idea when he said, "I have work too. Technically I'm five minutes past my lunch break."

Your pout turned to a smile. He was spending his precious lunch break with you? Get a grip! you snapped at yourself.

“You’re welcome to call again if you want.” You threw out the offer in a small voice, scared you would be rejected. You peered over the cubicle wall to see if you were still being glared at. Thankfully Donna was away from her desk. Probably out for a smoke. “It’s really boring here and usually no one calls.”

“Maybe I will.” He replied and you could hear the smile behind those words. You felt your heart clench weirdly in your chest like it didn't know how to process the sudden spike in emotions.

“Bye, Frankie.” You beamed.

“Bye”

This time the smile on your face lasted for hours. Frankie’s laugh echoed around in your head, taunting you, sending your mind to the gutter. His voice went from grit to molasses on a dime. You wanted to be the one to bring out those sounds. You wanted to hear his voice bend and stretch and strain as you fucked him. What the hell is wrong with me? you screamed internally. You had never been so depraved and with a stranger no less! You clearly needed to get laid fast because this much yearning would not end well.

Frankie got the second VA check a few days later and this time he didn’t even feel bad about ripping it in half. He was already reaching for the phone to call you.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: Message to be added 💕 no minors please!

[spanishskulduggery]

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

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

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

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

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

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

[lovelikedestiny]

2. Nile: But I've lost your war

Two mirrors deep as sky and sea,

can see your bare soul, always testing.

Humming an indefinite melody, Nile pours the boiling water into the waiting cup and notes with subliminal amusement that Copley has a small sieve for loose tea in his household because his British-American heart would probably come to a standstill if he were to use bagged tea.

Exactly this sieve, together with the loose fruit tea that she found in a cupboard, is now in the cup that she intended for Nicky and she watches for a few seconds, lost in thought, how the water turns red. Involuntarily, the memory of Nicky's bloody hands and Joe's face contorted with panic rises in her and Nile blinks frantically, clears her throat and turns to the coffee pot.

The freshly brewed coffee gives off a strong, familiar smell as she pours it into the other cups and after she has placed all the filled cups on a tray, she carefully carries it into the living room. Just because she's suddenly immortal and injuries heal in seconds, doesn't mean Nile is particularly keen on scalding herself on spilling fluids.

When she enters, Copley looks up from his laptop, almost relieved, and Nile strongly suspects that this is not only because he is longingly waiting for the caffeine in the coffee, but also because he is still a long way from warming up with the other immortals . Nile doesn't have particularly friendly feelings towards him either, but at least she behaves normally in his presence and doesn't announce in every word that she will kill him should he make a serious mistake and betray their trust.

Quite different from Joe, who is as open with his feelings as always and rubs his skepticism and distrust at every opportunity in Copley's face. And to be honest, Nile can't blame him in the slightest. After all, it was partly Copley's fault that he and Nicky were tortured in the lab. What brings her to the problem child in their group.

Nicky.

A protector, Joe called him affectionately when he went shopping with Nile and Nicky and Nicky seemed content to stroll after them, eyes on their surroundings. The soul, Andy said with the rare look of tenderness on her face as Nicky kept an eye on the pan in the kitchen, singing softly. And even Booker said to Nile in the cave when he told her a little about Joe and Nicky: Joe wears his heart on his sleeve and manages to cast a spell over everyone with his charm and his radiant smile, his passion. And Nicky...Nicky is the guardian.

At the time, Nile didn't know what he meant by that. Now the meaning becomes more and more clear to her. And she just doesn't think it's fair. Doesn't think it's fair that Nicky is sitting next to Joe on the sofa with pale cheeks and a thick blanket around his shoulders, and that not only Joe is deeply worried by his deteriorating condition, but also Andy.

And for some reason, Nile didn't expect this situation to throw Andy, the ever steadfast, ancient warrior who stoically accepted her sudden mortality, off too. It reminds her how long Andy, Nicky and Joe have known each other and how deep their family bond goes and although Nile has only been part of this team for a few weeks, she doesn't feel excluded but strangely welcome in any way.

The cups clink softly as she sets the tray down on the living room table and she places the teacup with a small saucer for the tee strainer in front of Nicky. “Here Nicky, I made you tea. Really classy with Copley's little tea strainer.” It still hurts her heart to speak about her family, but she does it anyway. "My mom always said that tea makes everything better."

"Your mother passed her wisdom on to her daughter," Nicky says with a smile and pulls the cup closer to him to put his hands around the warm vessel with a barely audible sigh. "Thank you, Nile."

“Thank you, Nile. Coffee is exactly what I need now.” Joe leans forward with a dramatic groan and skillfully fishes for one of the other cups. He inhales the scent deeply, but immediately leans back into his previous position, balancing the mug on one knee and casually wrapping his arm around Nicky.

"No problem, I like to shine with my ability to operate the kettle,” Nile replies with a grin and threatens to raise a finger in front of Nicky. "And don't you dare to not finish the tea. Then I'll force you to do it with my puppy eyes and it won't be pleasant.”

"Oh, habibi, I would listen to her." Joe chuckles gently into his cup. "We don't want you to be the focus of their puppy eyes."

Nicky's mouth twists into the barely noticeable smile, which Nile has come to appreciate very much. “Very well, Nile. I will follow your instructions nicely.”

She winks at the couple and then continues her round, pushes a cup into Andy 's hand, who is standing by the window and stares out, and then she hands one to Copley before she takes the last one. After blowing softly, she takes a sip of the bitter brew.

Nobody complains that it's just plain coffee, which is partly due to the fact that Nile still doesn't know exactly how her team members prefer coffee and partly because she didn't feel like turning Copley's kitchen upside down. He offered to help her make the coffee, but Nile politely declined - the more he sits at his laptop, the sooner he will hopefully find an answer to Nicky's inexplicable condition.

Copley didn't seem offended by her refusal and thanks her for the coffee with a small smile and a nod, doesn't make a face as he takes a sip and looks at his screen again.

The only approach they have right now is the laboratory, because everything that has happened in that context was their last mission. And while they'd been under the radar to get used to the new situation, nothing suspicious had happened. They'd always been together, so it's impossible that just Nicky caught anything, especially since their immortality should have cured that certain something long ago.

“In all of the material I've found on Merrick's servers and in his building, I couldn't find anything that would explain why Nicky is in his current state,” Copley informs them, without taking his attention off his laptop. “I deleted everything to erase your traces and destroyed any samples from the lab. There is no evidence of your existence or any connection to what happened at Merrick's."

"And the bitch of a doctor?" Andy still has his back to them, but it's more than obvious that she asked Copley.

Continue reading on AO3 ;)

[langernameohnebedeutung]

Is it bad to have an accent ? I’m studying English at uni and all my teachers say I have to work on my accent and adopt an RP or GA accent because having an accent is bad and terrible . I have a pretty thick French accent and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to correct it and it’s making me feel very self-conscious so I almost never talk , which affect my performance in class .

Seeeee..........the thing is, there is this ideal. This gold-standard: The accent-free foreigner. (And if you do have an accent it better be from a rich white country and it better be barely noticeable and you won’t mind if someone is creepy about it)  And many learners ascribe to that ideal as well. And honestly, it doesn’t go anywhere, as far as I’m concerned. There are just very little professions where you will profit from not having an accent outside of people being happy about it. There is no practical gain. Unless you want to become an actor or a spy or the Queen’s professional doppelgänger.

So, to make this short, it’s not bad to have an accent as far as I’m concerned and your teachers sound like dicks tbh. 

We often complain about native-speakers who are rude about people’s accents or mistakes when they only know one language themselves. But I think it’s time to address that: ESL-speakers do it too - in fact, I would say that especially among people from countries where fluency in English is expected for  the younger generation, it is very common to lash out against people from the same community who have a thicker accent when they speak English and to make fun of them. And that’s just as rude as when a native speaker does it or when you make fun of anyone else for doing something you excel at.

On the personal note: You can only do something about accent if you speak and if you’re getting berated for the way you speak and that keeps you from speaking - then you’re not going to improve. It’s fair for a teacher to point out how to pronounce a word or to point out if someone’s grammar is wrong - but I study English too and while we had to stick to a specific variety when writing (either American or British), we were never told how to speak beyond pointing out mistakes in classes that were about language proficiency. And most people do improve over time, simply because their studies expose them to a lot of spoken English. I would meet people from my first semesters again in higher semesters and note how they have become more fluent and made less mistakes. Personally, I would try speaking to at least the lecturers you think might react decently about it that you’re working on it (whether you are or not) and that for that you need to speak and right now this kind of feed-back is making you more anxious about speaking and whether they would mine focusing their criticism on more structural aspects of your speaking.

As far as accents or being “accent-free” is concerned-  

I don’t even think it’s something that all speakers should aspire to. And even if someone’s end goal is to speak perfect RP or GA, that should be their personal goal. Many people uphold this strange notion of purity when it comes to people learning a language where everyone should aspire to be “accent-free” or “sound like a native-speaker”. And I guess it makes sense if you’re teaching someone how to speak that language as a beginner. It makes sense to show  them how to pronounce words and how sounds work in that language. If you have a person sitting in front of you who doesn’t speak English, it makes sense to stick to one version instead of saying “wa-t-er” in one lesson and “wadder” in the next or ���caahn’t” in one sentence and “cèèn’t”in the next. It gives them a certain structure, helps them tell one variety from the other and to avoid confusion. Not to mention that if someone wants to study English they are expected to write their papers and essays in one variety of English so it makes sense that they know the general rules of telling them apart or recognizing or recognising how a word would be spelt or spelled. 

But when you finally become more fluent, you still have an accent and you still might not be perfect recognising one variety from the other. There are people who live in a foreign country for the majority of their lives but you can still tell where they come from. 

But the question is...who cares?

Don’t get me wrong, if someone wants to put their effort into learning a specific variety perfectly, I don’t see anything wrong with it and if they accomplish that - it’s quite some feat and it’s cool. Commendable. But the truth is that we all have accents. Even in our native languages, we speak in a regional accent, we probably have specific slang-words that are particular to some group. Age, class, sex, gender, education, interests - there are thousands of factors  that determine the way we speak. And it’s the same for native English speakers. There are hundreds of versions to speak English. 

I actually once took part in a public speaking class and the woman who held that class was a logopaedics trainer. And she could tell by the way people spoke and moved their mouth while speaking whether they used to wear braces, which parent they had a closer relationship with and other things. The way we speak - and the way we aspire to speak - is an important aspect of our personality and who we are and where we come from and personally, I don’t see the value of erasing that. It’s like a hand-writing and no one would tell you to alter your handwriting until you write in Times New Roman or Arial.

The thing is, when Anglos complain that they don’t understand a Scottish person or an Irish person or some other regional dialect, that is because that person grew up speaking a particular variety of English in a specific community. But for someone who isn’t a native speaker, they learn English in a community with a different native language - which means we simply speak that language with them (unless it’s for practice or a joke). I learnt English in a German school among kids with German accents and German language-habits - and teachers who had the same accent and the same habits and one who pronounced “wipe” as “whip”. And you probably learnt it in a French-speaking school among kids with French accents and French language-habits. So there is practically no way for any of us to leave school without speaking in that respective accent. But unlike a Scottish person or an Irish person, we didn’t speak that variety of English with our peers. We spoke our our native language. And I think that’s the difference for most people - that one group has a native community to fall back on and the other doesn’t, so the second one should aspire to imitating a native-speaker instead of adding another variety to the mix. 

Also you’re just as likely to speak English with people from any other European country (who also have their own accent and speaking-habits) as with a native speaker, so it’s not like you’re only going to be exposed to people who light you the way to a native accent. I remember when I made this post about “Euro-English” and people from absolutely random countries with different native languages all commented with: “No this is definitely how we speak, this is definitely our variety of English!” - meaning there are also a lot of unifying factors there too, based on our language families and cultural similarities - and how many people are there speaking like that? Hundreds of millions, probably.

Someone once pointed out to me that there are more Germans who speak English than there are Canadians. And you can do that maths  for a lot of countries: There are more Norwegians or Swiss people who speak English than people from the Republic of Ireland. There are more French people who speak English than there are Australians. That means with the exception of Americans, we outnumber people from the countries these “ideal” accents come from. And in fact, how many British people speak RP? How many Americans speak GA? And that’s just looking at western countries. There are so many varieties of English spread around the globe due to colonialism. It’s ridiculous to expect the entire world to sound like the Queen. In the end, each version is their own variety and just because it doesn’t have a native community to fall back on, I think it’s harmful to treat it as something only worth of erasing when a person’s English skills are a factor in professional success and social standing even in the community they come from.

English is the current lingua franca - a language that non-native speakers communicate in. And as I said, it makes sense to teach it in a specific way and to teach it the dialects that exist - because if everyone would just make up their own version of English, we wouldn’t understand each other and might as well not have bothered learning English in the first place. But you don’t need to have a cut-glass accent to accomplish that or aspire to have one.   

And this brings me to what I think should be the central question: 

What do you want to use your English for?

See, I did mention that if you want to become a British spy or play a British role as an actor or be the Queen’s bodyguard slash doppelgänger (a film I would watch) - then it would probably pay off to master a specific native accent as well as possible. (That said, there are enough British actors who get roles as Americans and vice-versa who don’t fool anyone and there are a lot of skills other than a specific accent that you would need to master each one). 

But those are jobs where you actively have to shed your own identity. That’s the point. You have to pretend to be a native speaker. But that’s not what you do in every-day life. In fact, most people you will interact with will probably know you’re French from the social context you are in or because it comes up in conversation, so beyond being a neat party trick, I don’t see what purpose having an RP or GA accent has here.

Of course, you might want to become a teacher, in which case, it would be important to have a specific pronunciation - but also all English teachers I had had German accents and I wouldn’t say that they would have been a million times better at teaching if they hadn’t had that - it’s far more important to know how to teach, to understand the grammar and vocabulary and to help your students to improve themselves and to understand why people speak the way they do.

You might want to be a journalist - if your interview-partner understands you and you can write in English, it’s fulfilling its purpose. If you want to work in a specific field - for example become a doctor in an English-speaking country - it’s important that your patients understand you and that you know your medical terms, but you don’t need Received Pronunciation. If you want to go into tourism, a bit of a foreign accent might actually come across as more authentic and desirable. 

So I think the central question is whether the English you speak right now serves its purpose for what you want it to - or if it is at odds with what you want to do with it.

If your accent wouldn’t pose a problem for you, then my profeschionel opinion is to fuck ‘em haters. Do what you like.  If you want to work on your accent: Do it. If you don’t: Don’t. 

But...if you feel like the way you speak English now would cause you difficulties in your job or every-day life later on - then I think the best thing to do would be to look into the specific skills you need and to invest your energy into acquiring these skills. Whether that is a specific jargon specific to one field or translate very quickly - or whether you really need to learn RP or GA. If you take a professional interpreter for example, many of them do lean to a specific variety, but have accents. It can’t be so heavy that it’s difficult to understand them, but their work requires skills beyond having a specific pronunciation. 

So erm...those where just my 2 cents on accents.

If you do want to change something about your accent - maybe even just to get your teachers off your case - I recommend listening to native speakers and particular, sticking to one variety you prefer. If you are already fluent and you understand them, your brain is very quick to pick up on dialects. (You know the thing where you watch someone speak in a specific dialect and for a while after you find yourself saying things in that dialect? The brain is very fast too do that and it also works in English, even if you don’t internalise it immediately and it feels artificial at first). Also don’t be afraid of speaking to yourself to practice. Obviously, speaking to others is important (and if you’re self-conscious or you are worried about your teacher commenting on it, maybe try asking a friend or sibling or someone to speak English with you or see if you can find a learning buddy) but I think talking to oneself can also be helpful. Because you are not trying to get a point across as you would in a conversation or have to focus on the words you are saying. You can focus on your accent and the way you speak and I think that is an important aspect when it comes to accents: Knowing your accent. Being aware of the way you pronounce words. You know the thing where you try pronouncing a word but you can never quite get there - much less if you’re trying to speak quickly or in a sentence? - It really helps to pay attention to the differences between the way you say it and a native speaker says it. Also if there is word you don’t know or that you aren’t used to hearing out loud  and you encounter it in the wild like a video or a film - it really helps to stop it and to pronounce it to yourself.

But generally, you cannot change the way you speak over night, even if you do it. It’s something that takes time and effort and it might never work completely. So really, I would focus on what you want to accomplish with your English and what future use you see for it - and focus on your strength as well, the things you’re good at. And in the short-term, I would try convincing the teachers that you are working on it but that their current course of action is actually making it more difficult for you.

[gimme-a-hand-scaevola]

A review of the book The Rook by Daniel O’Malley that nobody ever asked for...

Ok so @chemcat92 recommended me this book and I listened to it on audiobook and I just... have a lot of thoughts. I haven’t read the sequel and I’m torn if I will. Having watched some AMVs of the show, it’s a hard pass. My review is going to be in three parts:

1. The plot

2. Wasted Potential - In General

3. Wasted Potential - Gestalt the Most Wasted Character Potential I’ve Read since Drizzt Do’Urden 

Obviously spoilers under the cut. 

Part 1: The Plot - i.e. I think Daniel discovered books four days before he started writing 

Ok so... The plot of this book. It starts off STRONG I will give it that. Myfanwy Thomas wakes up in a rainy part surrounded by bodies wearing latex gloves and no memories. She soon discovers her previous self lost her memories but because she was organized and knew it was coming, she has eased new Myfanwy’s transition. She gets to choose to stay in her life through letters and then we get an easy way to give flashbacks. Anyway this part RULES. 

Honestly, the book starts strong as hell. Myfanwy discovers she has supernatural powers over people’s nervous systems and is a trained bureaucrat for a supernatural wing of the government. This all runs sort of like a combination of Heroes and Harry Potter in the best way possible. And here is where we find the strongest part of the book: the superpowers. 

We don’t have to look that far to find Heroes type shows or books where everyone has a special ability, so if you’re going to go that route, you’ve gotta bring it. And honestly, Daniel brings it. They powers are cool as hell, they’re inventive, they’re well bounded. I felt like I understood what people’s powers and limitations were. We were in a land with magic, but it never felt cheap. This is going to dovetail into my absolute RANT about Gestalt but give me a sec to get there. 

Ok. So honestly I don’t even have any complaints until the third act. Act one gives us the set up, act two introduced the big bad the Grafters and so far so good. We’ve got good but elitist supernatural guys vs. bad but more egalitarian supernatural guys. We also know that it was someone in the supernatural org (it has a name but the name is so stupid I can’t spell it) that betrayed our protag and stole her memories and they’re still around and teamed up with the evil Grafters. Intrigue?? Don’t know who to trust???? Love it. 

For some reason everyone is either old, or hot, or so inhuman it’s viscerally horrifying. Love this touch. Eleanor from the Good Place taught us that it’s totally free to imagine everyone in a story as super hot. And it is. So they’re all super hot. Love it. Good commitment, Daniel. 

But then we get to Act three. So, this was a big swing on ol Danny’s part because a lot of the effect of this had to do with carrying out mystery. We’d built a lot of tension on the suspense  Who Betrayed Myfanwy. So obviously it’s really important for me to be surprised or at least satisfied with who this is. (As an aside, I would have been ok with guessing correctly, I definitely don’t subscribe to surprise trumping cohesive plot). Ok. With that on paper... like... holy shit. What a stupid “reveal.” 

So in part 1, like the first scene we get of old Myfanwy’s letters giving us context, she says that her apartment at work was inherited from a dude Conrad something that got promoted. And then she says it’s super badly decorated, and later we see it and this shit is straight out of Austin Powers, mirror over a round bed, The Whole Shebang. But she also says that this guy who otherwise is supposed to be very smooth and charismatic like... asks her about the decor.... every time they interact. Every Time They Interact. The second this was mentioned (WHICH IS AFTER WE KNOW SHE WAS BETRAYED) I'm like “oh ok so this guy bugged her room he’s the villain” and I only wasn’t sure because it was WAY too obvious. 

But no. He’s the villain. He has a big reveal where he’s like “AND I BUGGED YOUR ROOM” and I'm like... well... yeah. Of course you did. But here’s the thing tho... Myfanwy’s like... WHOLE ASS JOB is planning covert ops. So... is she good at her job??? IS SHE???? 

But we also don’t actually show how characters are based on their actions, we are just told how they are. But we will circle back to that in the Gestalt part. That’s honestly the sum of my rant about the plot. It was nothing. It put all its eggs in the basket of the worst most boring reveal of all time. Daniel, I think you might just be boring. 

Part 2: Wasted Potential - Everything but Gestalt who gets a special part to themselves.

The big sin of this book might just be too many good ideas. There’s a lot of characters, they all do cool stuff, but we have like 200 pages, so there wasn’t enough time to do anything with all these guys. I got lost about who was who like 80 times because they’re basically all sneaky hot magic guys. One of them smokes and is a soldier and he seems chill. 

There’s a vampire and he gets a scene and a long intro that reads more like a wiki page. Like it was interesting but you would have lost NOTHING cutting him as a character except that he was cool. You never ever believe that he was the bad guy because it’s super well established in the Certified Back Story that he could give two shits about the politics of the humans. He’s there bc he’s an adorably young vampire who is very curious so his dad set him up as a powerful government agent as though it was enrolling him in a prep school. Love it, but again, we don’t.... need him around. 

There’s a lady who can walk through dreams and I thought she was going to be important based on the fanfare of her introduction but then we forget about her basically entirely. 

There’s a whole American wing that we also only see anything interesting about in side story. Basically the world building is really good. Like pretty superb to be honest. But it’s bracketing a story that is nothing so it makes even good characters seems really random. And that bring us to:

Part 3: My Darling, Gestalt. My Type. My Weakness. What a Sad Little Thing You Are (Also misogyny)

Alright... if the rest of this review wasn’t salty enough for you... let the salt begin. Gestalt. So named because of the word meaning larger than the sum of its parts. And so they were destined to be. And so they were most definitely not. So Gestalt’s whole thing is that they are one consciousness with four bodies. They can either control one body at a time and sort of shut the others down or they can control them all at once but that becomes harder if one of them requires more attention than another, like if one is in a fight. 

Two twins (men), one fraternal brother, and a sister. If anyone is thinking “uhoh, only one girl, hmm can Daniel handle that? Seems like maybe some Smurfette style misogyny-lite is coming,” you would be wrong. Super wrong. Because it is not misogyny-lite. It’s aggressive Fight-Me-In-A-Perkins-Parking-Lot misogyny. So go fuck yourself, Dan. 

Alright, so to number Gestalt’s sins. 

1. Scrape off some of that intro mustard.

They’re introduced in the LONGEST fucking passage I’ve ever read telling me that this dude is hard to talk to and weird. Like, I’m in an urban fantasy book already, I'm all set. Also... bitch SHOW ME they’re weird. Like can I see some interactions that give me second hand embarrassment??? No. It is actually never uncomfortable to talk to Gestalt. I only know that because people are super fucking rude about them. But it is never earned. So I don’t feel sympathy when people are like “Oh noooo you have to spend a car ride with Gestalt? Ewwwww sorry.” I’m just like, “What’s your fucking problem? They seem fine.” 

2. They’re supposed to be Bad At Planning but when?? 

Alright so there ARE times they’re bad at planning and we will GET TO THAT. But it’s only post-reveal like... what we are told during a monologue that they were dumb as shit. And that wasn’t even like not being good w/ details like it’s implied they are, it’s literally like doing dumb ass stuff. And it felt more like my bud Dan didn’t have a good handle on why stuff was dumb as rain than Gestalt being silly. 

Also.... this is a stupid use of this sort of character. They’re dumb and bad at planning??? THEY’RE A JOINT CONSCIOUSNESS why would you waste that making them “Good at kicking ass.” ugh. Fine. 

3. They get sidelined IMMEDIATELY 

So a guy named Pumice Stone or Kettle or Lil boy Bad At This or something outs that Gestalt is working with the Grafters because he like.... wasn’t paying attention. It was boring. But anyway so they capture two of the bodies and then stop addressing Gestalt until the end. They have one weird scene where the protagonist like.... freaks them out but ok. Fine. Why is Gestalt so Yelly. Why are so many villains in this book yelly. Ew. 

4. The REVEAL MONOLOGUE. 

I know this is a long ass review already. But my Feelings Must be Heard. So in the end when Conrad surprises no one but “smart” Myfanwy that he was the bad guy, we also get a reveal from the surviving Gestalt bodies that:

a. There’s an incest baby

b. They’re afraid of death

c. They’re so phenomenally stupid I have lost all interest in them

So... this is where the misogyny comes in. I’ll note here that the only time we interact w/ Eliza, the special girl body, is when she takes a carried to Hogwarts the super secret magic school with Myfanwy and she doesn’t do anything except we get the internal note that she’s like... gained weight. This is the misogyny-lite we expect. (And no, Dan, you don't get any points bc a female character is the only pleased she got pudgy bc YOU wrote the female character so we’re all set there.)

And then we discover that the weird blonde (lol oh yeah they’re all hot blondes) baby that Conrad “Evil Austin Powers” British-Last-Name has with his weird wife is actually a Gestalt body that Eliza had after she boned down with her other body who is genetically a brother and consciously herself. 

K. Ok. I have. Ok. Alright. Daniel. Ok. 

SUBPART A: My Feelings about Gestalt: Oh Eliza, my darling, my dear, would that I could bring you Justice

So after Eliza is shot dead one of the interchangeable boy bodies of Gestalt yells at Myfanwy about how terrible that is bc it was the only body who could bear children so now THE HORROR they’ll die. 

For god’s fucking sake Daniel O’Malley. What the fuck is your goddamn problem. You LITERALLY wrote a Smurfette Syndrome character who is only important because she can have babies. She is literally just there to be a baby-box. What the fuck. Get fucking wrecked. Thank GOD Starz cut your program and fuck the Aurealis Awards for giving you an award for this fucking book. But they’re a sci-fi award so this is probably super progressive for them. I was pleasantly annoyed by the basic nature of this book until this part. Now I am just done with your content. This was more overtly sexist that Supernatural. So... real swing and a miss. 

ANYWAY FORTUNATELY this opens a whole new can of worms that I get to ruthlessly mock certified Basic Bitch Daniel O’Malley for. 

SubPart 2: Gestalt Raises Interesting Philosophical Questions Daniel Isn’t Smart Enough to Address

So, remember, I would have cut this dude more slack if he didn’t do that to Eliza. Gestalt, to be honest, this whole review is dedicated to what you Could Have Been. 

Interesting Questions or Comments We Could Have Asked:

Does having a baby being one of five of your bodies affect your consciousness? That thing doesn’t have object permanence? Is there like an intellectual cost to having another baby body? No, we don’t care. I think we just had there be a baby bc “Weird sister-sex” was as interesting as Daniel could get. Side Note: The obvious question of “lol haha lol is it incest or mAsTurBation is not going to be addressed here bc it is literally too boring to consider)

Does having a body who textually is said to have post-partum depression affect your joint consciousness? If not, why bring it up?? Bc she has “weird lady disease” is that why???

Are they....afraid of death????? Why didn’t you ever bring this up? Why have they showed only excitement at the prospect of very dangerous fights up to this point? Why are all four bodies in the field. 

WHY ARE ALL FOUR BODIES IN THE FIELD. Ok so here is one of those points that is definitely stupid but stupid in a dumb as dirt way. If you were afraid to lose your baby-box body, why would you send her into battle? 

Why didn’t they freeze a bunch of her eggs? In fact, why did she bear it at all? Why put your one female body that you only want for babies through that sort of danger? Canonically they all get paid an absurd amount and Gestalt is paid for each body, they can afford a surrogate.  

Why let a weird dude who is at best contemptuous of you raise your baby body? Why wouldn’t you want to do that? Doesn’t that give him a huge amount of leverage over you? 

Is the quality fo Gestalt’s form destined to decline if genetically they can only make more bodies by full genetic sibling offspring? Does that scare them? Again... does their physical brain affect their consciousness? 

If so... maybe that would be a good reason for them to want to join up with the Grafters who are way ahead in genetic research and engineering. 

ANYWAY Gestalt is sexist as shit and boring as hell and had SO MUCH WEIRD POTENTIAL. 

In summary: It was definitely fun but Fuck you, Daniel O’Malley 

[vamonumentlandscape]

Washington D.C: Day 1

Our first stop on our trip was to Lorton, more specifically the Occoquan Historic District. The Occoquan Regional Park is on the land where the inmates of the Lorton Work House Prison worked in the brick kilns. Only one survives today, but it gives you a look at what once took over the large park space by the river. After eating at the cute riverside spot Brickmakers, we walked up the hill to see the nearly complete Turning Point Suffragist Memorial. According to the park’s website, over 150 women were imprisoned at the Lorton Work House in relation to the women’s suffrage movement from June to December of 1917. The “Silent Sentinels”, as the monument described, were the women who peacefully demonstrated outside the White House, but were detained and charged with falsified information. Those charges led them to be imprisoned at Lorton or in the District of Columbia Jail. These brave suffragists, like Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, and Lucy Burns, were the sparks of change that paved the way for women's rights. Paul and Burns both endured much pain fighting for their rights, like with the notoriously long hunger strikes they would enact when imprisoned. The statues done for Paul and Catt are beautiful depictions and show their strengths as activists. Alice Paul is holding her famous picket sign, MR. PRESIDENT HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY, to greet you at the beginning of the memorial. After you have rounded out the beautiful garden path, you end with seeing Carrie Chapman Catt with a big bouquet of flowers to symbolize their success. While Paul took the more radicalized approach with Burns which they picked up from British suffragists, Catt was a peaceful activist who took a more amicable approach. Another interesting piece of the memorial was the original White House Fence from Wilson’s time in office on display. It was powerful to see the large black fencing these brave women stood in front of almost daily to fight for their rights. The goal of women’s suffrage never would have been achieved without all of these brave women.

Unveiled in 1876, the Emancipation Memorial (also known as the Freedmen’s Memorial) has been controversial since its unveiling. Though the sculpture of Lincoln and a former enslaved person was funded by free African-Americans, there was some shock during the dedication ceremony in response to the deification of Lincoln and the stance of the African-American male. In his keynote address, Frederick Douglass expressed some criticism for President Lincoln. In the end, Douglass acknowledged an “earnest sympathy” for Lincoln. When talking about this statue in the spring semester, we knew that a stop at this memorial was essential. During a hot afternoon, Lincoln Park was packed with families with their children and their four-legged friends. We took a close look at the statue that has garnered more-recent criticism from activists like Glenn Foster of Palm Collective, who we were fortunate enough to talk to just a few weeks ago. Foster believes that a hidden narrative exists with the statue actively marginalizing African-Americans. “What does it mean for an African-American child to see the statue?” Foster asked. As we saw it with our own eyes, we understood why the memorial was so controversial. Though Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved persons in the South and made the cessation of slavery the goal of the Union during the Civil War, we were taken aback by the depiction of the man kneeling at Lincoln’s feet. It is problematic, to say the least, and requires a sign for historical context if the city does not take it down. Just across from the Emancipation Memorial is a statue that honors Mary Bethune. As a child of formerly enslaved persons, Bethune became a notable educator, civil rights activist, philanthropist, and feminist. She was the leader of many organizations like the National Association for Colored Women and was an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She most notably started a school for African-American students in Daytona Beach, Florida, which became Bethune-Cookman University. Throughout the life of “The First Lady of the Struggle,” she never gave up in standing up for the right to improved opportunities for African-Americans. The Bethune monument, which was unveiled in 1974, stood in direct contrast to the feelings we had with the Emancipation Memorial. We may not know what should be done with the depiction of Lincoln, but it certainly requires some sort of action. Lincoln will always be one of the most consequential presidents of our history, but our society must be honest in interpreting his legacy along with that of African-Americans.

We took a quick ride on the Metro over to the L’Enfant Plaza stop to see the memorial for Dwight D. Eisenhower in front of the Department of Education. A statue of a young Eisenhower raised in Abilene, Kansas can be seen looking towards his future of being the General that commanded the D-Day invasion in Nazi-occupied France and the 34th President of the United States. All depictions of Eisenhower and his close allies during his time in the military and the Oval Office are beautifully done. The memorial shows the powerful presence that Eisenhower had in every role that he had. We made sure to also read through the speeches on the back of the marble pedestals, which included his famous farewell address where he warned of a military-industrial complex. During his presidency, Eisenhower sent in Federal troops to ensure the integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. His largest project would be the Interstate Highway System, which has been the way that most Americans get around ever since. One can understand why Eisenhower is seen as a President of a higher echelon. We certainly did after viewing this memorial.

In response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and in support of calls for justice, Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington D.C. supported the renaming of a section of 16th Street NW to Black Lives Matter Plaza. This section of the street is located at the Lafayette Square end of the White House. This action may have been a jab at the former president, who did not look favorably upon calls for police reform, but it was also a move to show that the city was listening and understood where people were coming from. The vast majority of protests were not composed of “thugs” and “looters” as charged by the media, but involved peaceful calls for ending police brutality and systemic racism. We were able to walk on the bright yellow letters that spelled Black Lives Matter. Though it has been over a year since most people were out in the streets of Washington protesting, the street still felt like a pilgrimage place for all Americans. Saying the words “Black Lives Matter” should not be treated as taboo and it is not claiming that other lives do not matter. BLM is all about the issue at hand, which is that African-Americans are disproportionately targeted by police, even when they are unarmed. Unwarranted killings and attacks by those meant to protect must end, and they must end now. As evidenced by our stop at this living memorial, the movement is here to stay and legislation must be passed in favor of fulfilling justice for all.

After seeing Black Lives Matter Plaza, we took a stroll to Lafayette Square just across from the White House. Just like BLM Plaza, this park is a social hub for tourists and residents alike. It was great to be able to walk upon this park to see the beauty of the White House up close. With the previous President, no one had been able to get very close for a while. Music, voices, laughter, footsteps, and the whirr of the sidewalk scooters filled the air. The beautiful weather made it an even better atmosphere. The one statue that took us off guard while enjoying the grounds was of Andrew Jackson. He is one of the most controversial presidents in American History. His fame originates from being a famous soldier in the wars against Native Americans. Later the “common man” became more popular as he was not an elitist running for president. Duels were something he took part in quite frequently as we have learned. Rebecca Grawl, an alumnae from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and our tour guide for part of DC, told us that he actually had been shot at around 12 times and had 2 bullets lodged in him from previous duels. The worst part of his legacy was the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that led to the infamous Trail of Tears. Thousands of Natives were displaced, died of disease and exhaustion, and were forced out of their homes. Another one of his blunders was his dismantlement of the National Bank. It is ironic that the man who destroyed and hated the national currency of the United States resides on the twenty dollar bill. Another fact learned from Rebecca Grawl was that his equestrian statue is wrong. There is a rule for when there is an equestrian statue built for someone - the front two feet symbolize how the rider passed away. Two feet on the ground means that they died of natural causes, one foot off of the ground means they died due to an injury or disease from battle, and two feet off the ground means they were killed in battle. Jackson’s horse has two feet off of the ground, yet he was not killed in battle. Despite his title of being an American president and winning the popular vote three times for president, his legacy is troubling to say the least.

Our last stop for the day before heading to Shake Shack (YUM!) was the World War I Memorial. It is unfinished, but what is complete is absolutely stunning. A statue of John J. Pershing towers over the memorial representing his incredible military leadership of U.S. troops during The Great War. Beside his grand statue are maps engraved in gold, red, and blue on black granite with descriptions of each campaign. This is a place for reflection and education as many of those lost in the war may only have distant descendants living and those who visit are mostly coming to learn. The largest unfinished part of the memorial is right behind the small pool of water. A Soldier’s Journey is a large sculpture that follows a young male soldier through the “myth of a hero’s journey” from home, to the battlefront, and his return home where he is changed from the war. This part of the memorial will be complete in 2024 and we all are eager to return to see the finished product.

[thebellwitchblog]

Hello! I'd like some advice. All my life I've been carried back and forth on religions and beliefs by mom, but I've never had any pull to any "field", so right now I'm agnostic. But I've had a witch friend explaining some stuff in a chat and it's probably the first time I've ever been truly interested in knowing more about this type of thing. Should I give it a try to check if this is The Path™️ for me? If so, how can I start, test the waters?

If you're feeling a pull, I would definitely encourage you to give it a try. You can even remain agnostic and still be a witch. Practicing magic is compatible with most religious practices, even mainstream christianity, and I know many agnostic and atheist witches.

There are also many different paths to choose from within the "witchcraft" umbrella, so I dare say there is most likely something here that'll work for you!

Magic is extremely customizable. I once saw witches described as "magpies with socio-religious context" and it's true. Almost every witch I know combines techniques from multiple kinds of magic in their personal practice, and it's wonderful! Just make sure you aren't taking from closed practices or other places you shouldn't. A quick google search should let you know, but when in doubt ask a person in that practice or.. just find something else lol there's plenty out there, so it's best to err on the side of caution.

As far as where to start... well that's a tricky one. I'm a big proponent of research. If you want some good book recommendations for beginners, here's a few that are good and won't break your bank:

Grovedaughter Witchery by Bree NicGarran (@breelandwalker )

The Sisters Grimmoire: Spells and Charms for your Happily Ever After also by Bree

If you're like me and live in the Southern US, or have an interest in folkloric witchcraft, Southern Cunning: Folkloric Witchcraft in the American South by Aaron Oberon is a nice little primer.

Of Witchcraft and Whimsy: A Beginners Guide to Basic Witchcraft by Orriculum Rose (@orriculum ) is another tiny little book that's a nice primer for more casual magic from what I can recall (I'm afraid I havent read it since it came out and my copy is currently loaned out so I can't double check)

Wow trying to recommend good beginner books is really revealing how much of my bookshelf is specialized

If anyone else wants to pop in with book recommendations I certainly won't object.

There are also blogs all across the internet. Rune Soup, Inciting A Riot, the ones I tagged above, and many others on here just to name a few. Blogs and communities will be a valuable resource for you. I suggest finding a few blogs to follow and possibly a discord server to join. I'm a moderator on a server run by @witchella for instance and we have a lot of baby witches there just starting out on their path.

But no matter how much research you do or witches you hang out with, the best and most important thing you can do is simply do magic. As I said before, I'm very much a proponent of research. I love to sit down and card through dusty, centuries old tales for any bits and bobs I might find useful. But oftentimes we get so caught up in doing the research that we forget to do the magic!

I promise that you will learn more from rolling up your sleeves and doing a spell, any spell, whether it succeeds or fails. If it succeeds- congrats! If it fails, ask yourself why and see if you can fix it. Keep it simple at first. Find what works for you and what doesn't. Probably stay away from summoning entities and what not until you're experienced enough to banish whatever pops up in case things go bad.

I suggest a protection spell as the first usually. If you mess up, there isn't much damage it could do. And everyone needs to now how to protect themselves. But, you could also start with healing, cursing, hell I started with glamours, whatever strikes your fancy. If it's something you need? Even better. There's no spell stronger than one you actually Need to work.

Some other miscellaneous tips for me practitioners:

Ask yourself what your interests are. Do you like to garden or work with plants? Look into green witchery. Do you like to cook? Kitchen witchcraft. Are you interested in geology and rocks and Crystal's and the like? Crystal magic. For any interest, there's probably a branch of magic.

Learn some breathing exercises and meditations. These will help you get used to your body and mind, as well as help you get a feel for the energy in your own body. The more familiar you are with your own magic, the easier it is to draw on and direct.

Podcasts are another good resource, and free unlike books. You can find a lot on any music streaming service.

Go out in nature. Get familiar with your local flora and fauna, the feel of the areas. You may even run into some local spirits.

Learn a form of divination. Tarot cards are most common, but there's also bibliomancy, runes, throwing bones, scrying, pendulum, etc. Keep a divination journal. This will be great to look back on and keep track of patterns.

Speaking of journals, start keeping a dream journal and a spell journal. Document each dream you have and each spell you do. Then you can look back and see patterns in your dreams, what spells worked, what dreams came true, what spells didn't work, etc.

Pick up a book or two on local folklore. If you can't find any for your state/province, you can definitely find some for your country at least. I'd also suggest grabbing a field guide for your area. Your local library should have these or be able to get them through an inter library loan.

Know that Wicca, while a large, vocal part of the community and a lovely path, isn't the only way to practice witchcraft. If you like it, great. If not, you don't have to follow it.

One last piece of advice. Despite me saying communities and blogs will be a great resource for you, do your best to stay away from any drama in the community. Pagans and witches aren't all great people and we have a lot of drama going around. It's best to ignore it. And also be on the lookout for leaders that are actually narcissists and want to be praised as some divinely enlightened master or what not.

This got a lot longer than I originally intended and I probably left a lot out, and also somehow include too much lol, but I hope it helps.

My inbox is always open for any questions you have. I may not always give you an answer, but I will point you in the direction to find your own.

[liskantope]

[Warning: good old gratuitous rant describing really bad SJ/wokeness ahead.]

Over the past 4-5 years or so, I’ve had exactly one person on my Facebook newsfeed who is both a PoC and talks on a personal level about racial issues. Plenty of my white Facebook friends (predominantly from academia) constantly demonstrate wokeness on racial issues there, but this is the one PoC Facebook friend (an African-American, who grew up with white parents and mostly away from African-American culture to the best of my knowledge, isn’t academic, and isn’t liberal or even particularly woke on other issues) who does it.

(Well, for the sake of honesty, that’s not entirely true. For a few of those years I had another PoC friend (not black) who effusively espoused woke views on race, and who disturbed me from a psychological standpoint on an even deeper level than the person I’m focusing this post on. But a while back I had to cut her off completely for entirely personal reasons some of which involved third parties. I’m pretty sure she’s somewhere on Tumblr, considered her a friend once, and don’t care to talk about her here.)

I was Facebook friends with the subject of this post for longer than the 4-5 years I’ve mentioned; we were originally friendly acquaintances (she seemed like a super nice and fairly functional person at the time) and I haven’t seen her since well before the time around 2015 or 2016 (can’t remember exactly when) she very abruptly went down a certain ideological rabbit hole.

Anyway, since she’s really my only PoC Facebook friend talking about these things and writes really well, and I’m at least woke enough to acknowledge that it’s the job of white people like myself to listen to the experiences and points of view of PoC on race, I do try to get what I can out of her posts.

Therefore, it’s unfortunate that she

went from 0 to 100 in the direction of modern wokeness on racial issues so fast that her brains flew out of her head and her hyper-awareness of race-related dangers clearly mixes in a really unhealthy way with her anxiety (clinically diagnosed and very apparent outside of racial issues); for an example see the story I described at the end of this post

considers all of her extreme opinions on race objective knowledge that she (alone of my African-American friends) feels forced to disseminate (or maybe it’s out of her purely generous nature?) and writes about how generously she’s “educating” white people with the most subtle yet exquisite condescension I can possibly imagine or would have the writing skills to convey myself if I wanted to, while complaining how exhausting it all is, eventually reaching a point that she’s charging money for her “emotional labor”* in meeting white friends for coffee to give them her “education” and occasionally advertises this minor side-business in Facebook statuses

seems to analyze every single everyday activity in terms of what race everyone is classed in to an extent that to my thinking would logically lead to complete cultural segregation rather than increased diversity; to take a minor example she wrote a rueful diatribe against a black woman on the bus who didn’t meet her attempt to make eye contact because “we black women are supposed to stick together”

occasionally espouses the (to my ears very-pseudoscientific-sounding, and anti-black racist!) theory that African-Americans’ genes were permanently damaged by slavery however many generations ago and talks about the collective trauma she has directly suffered because of slavery -- when she briefly wrote about it in a status she got comments that thanked her for (exact words) “giving us this education”

frequently shares posts of Ally Henny, a prominent writer who comes out with mini-essays on a daily basis some of which (at least the ones I see shared) sound exactly like conservative everyone’s-an-irredeemable-sinner Catholicism with certain words replaced, as if she’s not even making the slightest effort not to sound that way -- one (from the end of last year that I’m not up for hunting down right now) even described what in essence sounds like a second coming!

is surrounded by (mostly white) worshippers and sycophants who immediately dogpile anyone who posts a disagreeing comment (to be fair, the quality of dissenting comments is not high and often comes from an ignorant or obtuse place, making the discussions on her wall even less beneficial to me) in a vicious, vindictive manner

loves to make posts deriding “mediocre white men” (e.g. paraphrased from memory “Maybe the reason so many white men refuse to acknowledge their privilege is that they just don’t want to acknowledge their own mediocrity”, and just the other day, “To have the boldness of a mediocre yt man. That is my goal in life!”) which promptly get applauded by her big group of snickering (mostly white) sycophants; I don’t even want to try to get into the layers of abusive this tactic is (and again she came across, both in-person and online, as a super sweet person prior to 2015-ish)

(and oh yeah, for some reason my white privilege blinds me from seeing, she can no longer actually spell out the phrase “white person”; following Ally Henny she has to write the modifier as “wight” or “yt” or “wh*te” or use “person of whiteness” [EDIT: just found out this, at least on Henny’s part, apparently has something to do with too much use of the phrase “white people” setting off red flags for Facebook’s “community standards�� algorithms])

the other day described a conversation on black friend’s wall (which I can’t see) about a representation issue where a white guy politely disagreed; she proudly reports that she told him that “disagreeing with a black woman is not a Good Look, even if done respectfully” at which point the guy angrily left the conversation; she holds this up as an example of white fragility

and finally, tonight’s post which was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me: she complains that in her “largely unproblematic” cooking group online forum a black woman asked if any other PoC could share a recipe for banana pudding with her and several white people replied, “I’m not a PoC but...” and provided a recipe; she decries this as white people taking space away from PoC... in a NON-RACIALLY-SEGREGATED ONLINE FORUM. FOR COOKING. Because apparently the need to acknowledge race in each and every daily activity extends keeping the taint of whiteness out of BANANA PUDDING RECIPES**, and anyone who fails to respect this by giving her unsolicited white-person recipe suggestions is oppressing her.

Of course, when I say “straw that broke the camel’s back” I don’t mean that it will necessarily cause me to un-follow this person -- no, that would be much too responsible and sensible of me! -- I just mean that it caused me to stay up past my bedtime ranting on Tumblr. (And yes, at this point I probably should un-follow her. And go back to staying away from Facebook altogether.)

I guess if this post actually had a point, it would be that my social media sphere has not exactly served me well in providing PoC voices that I can actually learn from (and yes, I’m aware of the laziness and disingenuousness this comment implies, but I’ll leave it here as a tongue-in-cheek conclusion).

*Her implication that this falls under the umbrella of “emotional labor”, even taken in a broader pop activism social context, is on shaky ground in my opinion.

**This would be significantly different if we were talking about a dish coming from a nonwhite culture, e.g. jambalaya, but as far as I know you can’t get much more culturally white than banana pudding.

[purplesurveys]

833

Given the chance, would you ever go into space? I’ve answered this exact question on a recent survey...but yeah absolutely, as long as it was a free opportunity. Outer space has always interested me so it would be awesome to actually get there. What is your all-time favorite thing to snack on? A local brand of chips called Nova, corndogs, powdered fries, and pizza. I couldn’t choose just one :( Have you ever been jealous of anyone's socks? Not in a toxic way but I have seen socks that made me go “damn, I wish I had that” and it’s usually socks based off of famous paintings like Starry Night, The Scream, etc. Do you match your clothing, or are you careless about fashion? The most I’ll match is colors; I’ll make sure the colors I wear complement each other. But I’m not likely to buy outfits that come in parts, like a matching top and skirt that have their own price tags. It’s an annoying scam that makes you have to pay more money for one outfit lol. Know anyone that has amazing fashion taste? There’s a professor in the communication research department of our college that dresses SOOOO well. She’s never recycled an item of clothing either. She dresses literally exactly like Audrey Hepburn, except with more printed clothes.

Do you know or wish you could knit? I don’t know how to knit and have no desire to learn.

Like earmuffs? They’re alright, I guess? I never have to wear them, so I don’t have much of an opinion. Have you ever had the roof of your mouth sore? Yeah, that one time I ate takoyaki while it was still burning hot and I burned off the skin on the roof my mouth. Do you like orange juice? I’ll drink it if it’s served or if it’s free, but I never crave for it. How many times a day do you brush your teeth, honestly? Once or twice. Do you think anyone really looks good in a jumpsuit? Yeah. Well it’s since become a trend so that’s really all there is to know about people’s preferences nowadays. I have several jumpsuits that I feel really good in. Have a collection of anything? Not anymore. Ever ran out of something that made you very upset? Sometimes my family will bring home leftovers from a really good restaurant. When we finish them all up it bums me out. Biggest lie you ever told? Saying ‘yes’ with a big ol’ smile on my face to my high school guidance counselors whenever they ask if my situation at home is good. Is there a song that makes you want to rock out? For sure. I have my fair share of favorite punk/rock bands. Do you have a religion? No. Believe that there is a point to churches? Not a single one. How do eat Oreos? I just bite into them. Never really got into the whole twist-lick-dunk thing because 1) I don’t want to bite into something I had already licked (even if it’s my own saliva lol), and 2) I can’t consume a lot of milk, anyway. -This or That- Sunsets or sunrises? Sunsets. I’ve seen more sunsets than sunrises with Gabie, so I have good memories of them. I don’t like the idea of getting up early just for a sunrise either. Pennies or dimes? Can’t relate because we don’t use these concepts. Coffee or tea? Coffeeeeeeee. Never been a tea person, actually. Windows or Mac? Mac. I did use Windows for a while, but when it comes down to it I would rather get a Mac. Headphones or speakers? Headphones. You get more of the sound when you listen to music, so the listening experience is a lot better. Loud or soft & quiet? Depends on the context...I like my concerts loud, but I obviously prefer soft and quiet when I’m doing something like going to bed. Odd or even numbers? I don’t really have a preference lol. The cookie dough or the actual cookies? Cookie dough, heh. Speaking of, I recently found a recipe for edible cookie dough but I keep putting it off... Mp3 players or iPod? iPod, mostly because MP3s went out of style like, a decade ago. Calm or rock music? Again, depends on my mood. I’d listen to rock music if I’m pissed off or going through a similar emotion, and I’d prefer hearing calm music when I wanna focus on something, like if I’m doing surveys. Love or lust? Love. I don’t feel lust for the most part. Converse or Vans? Converse. They’re AJ’s favorite and I find them more comfy. The few times I borrowed my sister’s Vans I always got blisters at the end of the day. Lipsyncing or actual singing? I would prefer to lipsync than to let people hear my actual singing voice; but if I’m watching a performance obviously I’d want the performers to be using their real voice. Walking or running? Walking. I find strolls to be relaxing. Dancing or watching others dance? Watching others. Dancers are crazy talented. With friends or by yourself? When it comes down to it, I wanna be with friends. Local concert or a popular band? Popular band. It’s rarer, so I find it more precious. I still support local though! Blond or brown hair? Brown. Idk, I just don’t know a lot of people who are blonde. Red or black? I like both, but I like black slightly more. Blue or green eyes? Green. Having fun or being asleep? Having fuuuun. Carnival or park? Park. I can’t go on rides anyway, so a nice stroll and picnic at the park sounds lovely to me. -Favorites- Favorite thing to buy? Uh food, I guess? I’m super easy to please lol. What do your favorite pair of socks look like? My bacon and eggs one. Kind of tea/coffee? Iced tea/iced caramel macchiato. Way of communication? Face-to-face with Gab, instant messenger/text for everyone else. Time to sleep in to? Midnight is most convenient for me. Band to dance to? PARAMORE. Also helps that their music has turned dance-y too. Favorite gum? Don’t really have one. I’ll chew on any kind/flavor of gum. Type of cereal? Cookie Crisps. Color of hoodie? I don’t mind color, as long as the hoodie is comfortable and keeps me warm. Spice? Cumin smells lovely. Favorite thing to touch/feel? Dogs. Website? Probably Twitter. I’ve been on it the longest and still have no reason to be tired of it. Person in your life? My girlfriend...but also my dogs, if they can count. -Would you Rather- Hire one of your friends, or fire an enemy? Hire one of my friends, as long as they work well without me. Firing an enemy seems a little bit more unprofessional, especially if they objectively perform well. Be a contestant on American Idol or America's Got Talent? I’d go with AGT I guess? I’ve watched some snippets of the show and their judges seem more nice, whereas on American Idol the judges tend to laugh or embarrass you if you do badly. Live in Britain or Australia? Australia. I feel like it’s a more Filipino-friendly country, not that Britain isn’t but yeah. Travel by plane or helicopter? Plane. Aren’t helicopters loud? I think I’d be more relaxed in an airplane. Trade places with a male or a female for a day? I’d rather remain a woman, thanks. Shop at Wal-Mart or Target? I don’t know. I’m honestly curious though – for the Americans survey-takers, what’s the difference between them and what do y’all prefer? Hahaha Read Shakespeare or Artistotle's work? I internally winced at both lol but when it comes down to it, Shakespeare. I do like his work, as long as I’m reading a modern English version. I hate philosophy straight up, so that’s a definite no on Aristotle. Have a regular donut or donut holes? Regular donut. Spell better or smell better? Smell. I can already spell well. Rather be in a tornado or a large earthquake? This is horrible, no one ever *wants* to be stuck in a natural calamity. 80's or 90's music? I like the 80s sound better. Eat a plain peanut butter sandwich or PB & J? Peanut butter sandwich. I tried PB&J before to see what the hype was about, and it just didn’t work for my Asian tastebuds. Wear a uniform every day or go half-naked? Wear a uniform. I wore one in Catholic school for 14 years and survived, so it’d just be the same thing. Would you rather Santa or the Easter Bunny actually exist? Santa. I’m more familiar with him. The Easter Bunny’s not really a part of our culture so I don’t actually know what it’s supposed to do. Apple pie or Pizza pie? Pizzaaaaa. Y’all should know me by now haha. Spend an afternoon cleaning or clean things later? I’d rather work early so I can be satisfied earlier. Flying or X-Ray vision? Flying. Dentist or Doctor? I guess dentist? There’s fewer reasons to be scared when you go to the dentist because the health problems are just limited to your mouth, I guess. Would you rather spread gossip or start a fight? Both sound awful. I’m never one to start a fight and I never initiate gossip myself, though I do take part in it sometimes. Get rid of your favorite shoes or your favorite pants? Pants. I love my shoes. Visit Florida or New York? New York. Myspace or Facebook (or do they both suck)? Facebook. It sucks, but at least the memes there are hilarious as fuck.

[tessatechaitea]

The Invisibles #3

This is exactly what taking drugs isn't.

Our world is composed of geniuses and not-geniuses. That's the kind of statement a not-genius makes because it's so fucking obvious. Do you ever have to say anything that pretty much says "All of the people on the world are either this or that"? Anyway, the point I was making wasn't that I'm one of the not-geniuses even though it's the point I accidentally made. The point was that in the non-genius camp, we have those who are smart enough to recognize genius and those who sit grumpily in their pee-puddles whining about how the high-falutin' elites are trying to make things different. Different, in this case, generally means better but if you're a non-genius who can't recognize geniuses, you're just mad that somebody said french fries might not be the most nutritional side dish (even though you could still live in a world where you acknowledge that french fries are both not even close to nutritional and also the best food on the planet. I mean, you have that choice. But I guess the pee-puddle you're sitting in (which is slowly leaking into your gun cabinet) has probably distracted you from rational thought). Again, that wasn't the point I was going to make (about the french fries!) but I have a problem staying on topic. Partly it's because I've never been able to stay on topic (you should read some of my college essays which I'm not going to release to the public so even though I suggested you should read them, you won't be reading them. Ever) and partly it's because of another reason that I forgot while typing the college paper parenthetical statement. My point might have been that you can recognize a genius because they can state plain what other people are obfuscating in their pronouncements. If you're not smart enough to recognize the genius, you might think the genius is spreading propaganda, mostly because you really want to believe the thing that isn't true because it shields you from guilt or blame or repercussions stemming from following your own selfish desires at any cost. The genius is reviled by people who can't recognize genius and viled by people who can. Or unviled? Previled? Maybe I should have just gone with lauded. You might think I'm saying all of this in regards to Grant Morrison but you'd be wrong. I'm actually saying this about A.R. Moxon, the author of The Revisionaries, whose Twitter handle is @JuliusGoat. He did not pay me to point out that he's a genius although he probably should have. I suppose it's not too late. Being that he's a genius and knows the smart thing to do, I'm sure he'll buy my RPG when he Googles his name and/or Twitter handle and finds me sticking my tongue way up his asshole in this post. I mean, I'm basically saying he's smarter than Grant Morrison! Getting back to Grant Morrison, is he really a genius? I'm not so sure. I think maybe he's just a libertine who did a lot of drugs and traveled to a lot of sort-of-spiritual places (not to be more spiritual but to get his hot genius take on spirituality in a place that smells of burning corpses and goat semen while he shits his guts out back at the hotel high on hashish). Sometimes when you've done acid and other illicit substances, you feel the need to think you've risen above the flock by doing a thing most people will never consider doing. Maybe Grant doesn't exactly feel this way but some of his stuff sometimes comes across as that. I mean, sure, if you've ever done LSD or the like, you've definitely experienced a sort of melding of yourself with the profound and the mundane and the timeless in a way that usually only schizophrenics experience. You have done something that has changed you from the person you were before. But thinking that it has somehow made you different or better than those who haven't done it just means that you've never talked to people who went to high school in the flyover states. I've known some really boring and backwards people who did a lot of acid simply because there wasn't anything else to do out in the cornfields. It really did surprise me, a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, to discover how prevalent psychoactive drugs were in the Midwest and Plains states. I thought that was just the hippies and children of hippies! What I didn't think, though, was that it made me a non-sheep (like the guy in my San Jose State creative writing class who once wrote a story about how he had broken from the flock because he dared to try LSD. The teacher loved his take and luckily for me, she was blind so she didn't see me rolling my eyes and making jerk-off motions from the back of the class. I mean, wow, dude. You dared to try LSD. I was probably on LSD while listening to the teacher read that stupid ass story!). Okay, maybe my whole take on "Grant Morrison thinks he's better than everybody else" stems from my envy of the idiot jock who wrote a stupid story that the teacher loved while she mostly just reacted to my stuff with "WTF? I guess I see how nostalgia can seem like a dream and the pop culture death of Superman can sometimes be more powerful than the death of a close family member but why did you choose to make none of this linear and what the hell do your Star Wars figures have to do with your future death? Also, the baseball game between Heaven and Hell where Heaven wins because Hitler snarls 'Jew' and then beans Jesus with the pitch to push in the last run was decent." Now that we've resolved some of my issues (I mean, maybe not "resolved" but at the very least "put out there in the open so you know where my biases are coming from"), let's get on with The Invisibles #3. When we last left our homophobic pouting white suburban "my mother doesn't hug me enough" anarchist protagonist, he was about to be hunted to death by a mystical group of human fox hunters in the secret London hidden beneath the one everybody thinks of as the "real London." I sort of hope the kid gets murdered. But then we won't get to see him learn his lesson which allows viewers to also maybe a learn a lesson. It's sometimes why you need characters like Mrs. Oleson from Little House on the Prairie. Although it was kind of enough to have Laura Ingalls who was a selfish devil child who was always learning lessons from humble and righteous Pa (who probably only killed one or two Native Americans, making him a stalwart saint of the frontier). I suppose the audience didn't need an over-the-top scurrilous villain like Mrs. Oleson. Although without Mrs. Oleson, how could the show have glorified the true saint of the frontier, Nells Oleson? The patience and kindness of that man were a testament to, um, patience and kindness!

I'm assuming Dane spends the next twenty pages snot-crying into a used coffee filter.

Dane continues to hang out with Tom of Bedlam because Dane can't survive on the street on his own and he knows it. He's not hard at all. He's a little wanna-be suburban gangster who read half of a book on anarchy and now thinks he's better than the slack-eyed populace going about their normal day-to-day bullshit. But he also thinks he still needs money and a place to live. He's not really great at the anarchy thing. But maybe if he listens to Tom, he'll learn a little bit about life and his heart will grow three sizes. Not because he suddenly cares more about everybody; it'll be a side-effect from learning the Dark Arts. Tom casts a spell so that Dane can look through the eyes of a pigeon as it flies about London. While Dane is seeing the hidden, creepy monsters lurking behind reality that pigeons can see (just as Pigeons can enter the afterlife in Moore's Jerusalem. I'm sure there are other urban horror stories that tell of the magic of pigeon vision. Did Lovecraft ever right any pigeon poems?), Tom tells Dane the secret history of cities. They're a virus that has propelled man from small villages which barely change across the centuries into huge population centers that use up the life force of the hosts as they build more and more and more, bigger and bigger, until, one day, they can build a rocket to propel the city virus into space and onto a new planet. Tom has seen, in visions, other planets affected by the virus, dead planets where the buildings stand as gravestones for the previous used-up races that contracted the virus. It's all very Lovecraftian. Not in the racist way but in the visions of other realities that change the nature of your own reality once you realize their existence. Hmm, that can actually kind of describe racism. I suppose Lovecraft's xenophobia was what made his stories about strange, unknown terrors so compelling. After teaching him loads of magic, Tom decides to teach Dane the most important lesson:

It's a really good lesson but also it's just Tom's attempt to get Jack Frost to appear.

Tom teaches Dane not to be a sheep or, in Tom's words, a robot. It's one of those weird lessons that everybody thinks they learn but nobody really learns it. Like when people read just that one Frost stanza on some poster in their English Lit class from "The Road Not Taken". Everybody gasps in air as the profundity of that single stanza (extracted from the context of the larger poem, much to the detriment of all of us) washes over them and they suddenly believe they've seen what life really is. Life isn't doing the thing you're supposed to do! Life is living to the fullest! Carpe diem! But the feeling of that moment erodes. It is eroded by the path we all take as we pretend we've taken the other path. We stop seeing that their weren't just two paths but many. And we get a job and we get a spouse and we get a house and we get a child and we occasionally think of Frost's single stanza and we decide, "You know what? I'm going to find the time to jump out of a plane!" or "I'm going to climb Everest!" or "I'm going to sleep with somebody of my same sex because I've always wanted to and hopefully my wife won't find out!" And sometimes we do and sometimes we don't; it doesn't really matter. Because the thing about taking the path less traveled is that it's still a path and it still represents the path you took and, you know what, there's that other path over there that I never got to experience and it's just shitting all over the path I'm currently on. Some people somehow block out the phantom possibilities and they're the lucky ones. The ones you can claim they have no regrets and maybe they're speaking truth when they say it. But mostly they just try not to think about it. Because once you start peeling at the wallpaper of your current life because the wallpaper, which others upon first glimpsing might think is beautiful and extraordinary, but which you've looked at every day for thirty years, you're done for. And you don't do it to find the beauty of what's underneath; you simply do it to see something different. And the new thing hasn't been scrutinized and deconstructed and critiqued; there's been no time to obsess over it. It's imaginary and if you happen to be like most people, imaginary must be better because why imagine the worst?! Okay, okay. I've just outed myself as not an anxious or depressive person! But I also don't go peeling at the wallpaper, so who knows? Maybe I do imagine the path less traveled was an intense tragedy?! The Invisibles #3 Rating: A. It's still pretty good and I'm still upset that I only have a few issues. Recently, I was thinking of writing an essay about how the worst thing about growing up is how you stop feeling things. Not that you stop feeling anything at all! Just that you stop feeling feelings that were once overwhelming and all-important. Like the crush you had in junior high. Can you imagine if, at forty, you still felt those feelings so intensely (among all the other ones you've felt across your life)? I understand that feelings must abate over time or we'd all be fucked up from not being able to get over our first crush while simultaneously not moving past the death of our closest grandparents. I get it. And some would say it's a mercy. But lately I've been wondering, "Is it?" Maybe I want to still feel those seemingly inexhaustible passions. I was reminded of wanting to discuss this because Tom says in this issue, "They made you forget how to feel, eh? Remember it now? Like everything new and the sun itself spinning behind your ribs, filling you up with silver. Like the way it was before they made robots of us, sentenced to a life behind bars we're trained to set in place ourselves." Now, that Tom speech was more about the whole "we're the shepherd of our own sheepdom" thing but in a robot and prison analogy. But the other thing about feelings made me remember how I was recently lamenting not feeling all of the things I once felt. Like the basket case from The Breakfast Club says, "When you grow up, your heart dies." And while you can argue whether that's true in the sense that you just stop caring about things, I think it's absolutely true in that it just slowly winds down and isn't capable of feeling how it used to. It's like a rechargeable battery that can no longer keep a charge. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, every single one of my friends, at one time or another, wound up weeping in my basement apartment about something in their lives (usually a woman!). I can't even fucking imagine that now. Maybe they'd be a bit upset or hurt or depressed but hardly disconsolate. I thought I would never get over the sadness at the loss of my grandfather or (and this might sound ridiculous to some but others will understand) the loss of my first cat as an adult, my precious little Judas. And while I obviously won't ever "get over" them (my eyes tear as I write this), I am no longer destroyed by the mere thought of their non-existence. A week after my Judas died, I saw Guardians of the Galaxy in the theater. Judas was always my Raccoon Boy so I almost broke down near the end when one of the characters put their arm around Rocket to console him. I made it out of the theater before absolutely losing it and snot-crying all the way back to the car. And so I can see how retaining that level of feeling over anything would be counterproductive to actually living, I absolutely miss it. I profoundly miss it. I want to be kicked in the stomach until I can't breathe by my feelings. I want this every day even if I know it's the cursed wish of a Monkey's Paw. How can anybody feel everything so palpably for their entire lives? And yet, how can we not?!

[noirenigma]

Everything is awful

Friday night in the city of Chicago, the place I live now. Not near, not around but in the city proper. This has been of dream of mine for sometime and I’m on the computer typing a half thought out Tumblr post, life comes at you fast. 

Should you read this when context is not so obvious, the world is currently in the grips of a pandemic, protest, and the most blatant coup of American democracy the country has ever seen. So while all that’s going on I’m being my best self and staying inside even though bars are opening; beckoning me to take a gamble that I’d love to say is easy to resist but its not.

Ever one to try and find that elusive silver lining I’ve discovered that being in the same place for so long can grant you a certain insight into yourself if you take the time to let it. Its happened a few times and if I’m being honest I think this is more of the same, just in a different medium. So what have I learned, what nuggets of wisdom has solitude granted me?

Everything is awful.

Now hold on just bear with me because I think this is far more positive than it appears at first. See currently I work a full time job that I absolutely do not love, but I’m incredibly grateful for. I busted my ass to get into a position that would let me live by myself how I want. In my early 20′s the life I live now would be a dream and I’d look you straight in the eye and tell you I was too dumb or too weak or some other such thing, to accomplish it. 

And the thing is I hate it, my job is awful. I don’t love what I do, I kinda like the people I work with but other than that, my day to day is simply “Meh”.

Everything is awful.

Where I’m at now is realizing that there is nothing you can do in life that won’t come with its own brand of awfulness, so why not do what you want? Why not chase that stupidly insane dream that you got in mind? “Because you can’t do it?” N’aw I don’t believe that anymore - see I KNOW you can do it but its going to be AWFUL until you get to where your trying to go, and even when you’re there it may be awful still. But trust me the troubles you face when chasing what you want is much better than the awful you’ll face when you’re just “Surviving”.

I don’t know, to me that’s a comforting thought that’s made some of the harder days easier to deal with. Even internally - see one of the ways I was abused is that I was constantly compared to people who “Had their shit together”. I remember when teaching myself to play guitar I’d be yelled at for being terrible at it and playing too long. And when I started to get good I’d be compared to a friend of the family that was a professional musician. It cut deep, I love playing - making music is what I imagine casting spells feels like. 

I dropped out of High School and got my GED. Then I dropped out of College, and that has been a great source of shame for me, it still is. I was often compared to a cousin that became a lawyer like my pops wanted me to, I was everything that’s wrong with black folx. When I hear the statistics of black graduation rates I still flinch, when my friends talk about their majors and minors I shrink - when I hear about greek  life my stomach churns (One because nothing good usually follows and also FOMO) 

But I had a conversation with someone recently that notes that I’m living really alright and they forcefully reminded me that I don’t have student loans. Then they took me through their regrets from going to school and something clicked.

Everything is awful.

The grass isn’t greener you just tell yourself it is, and the people that appear to have their “Shit together” are on a completely different journey than yours with its own unique brand of awful that you may be very glad that you don’t have to deal with. 

Everything is awful.

Seeing this and embracing it makes it a bit easier to forgive myself for all the things I truly do hate about myself. 

I hate how I look

I hate that I’m short

I hate that I’m fat

I hate that I’m bald

I hate my weak ass beard

I hate this stupid line on my nose (WTF IS THAT EVEN!)

But the thing is everyone has those things that blare out like a beacon to them. And that’s the gag of it all - that Super model that I wish I could look like may obsess over one of his packs in his six pack not being perfect or some shit (I don’t know the troubles of good looking people haha) It’s easy to be cruel to that person because they are the perfect I wish I was but to them its a whole different journey and I can’t even begin to comprehend their troubles if I don’t remember that...

Everything is awful.

So why not be kind? Why not chase that dumb idea? Why not laugh as loud as you want and not as loud as you think  everyone is comfortable with? If you dance like an idiot the bills will still be due, you will still need to stay inside and the world will still be on fire - but at least you gave yourself that one thing. And you know what. fuck it you deserve it because...

Everything is Awful.

[spanishskulduggery]

What are some cultural differences you (or your follwers) have discovered while studying spanish?? I’m curious, i’m from the US & recently talking to my latina cousin I realised that when she says she is going clubbing she’s talking about going out after 2am and coming back at like 8am!!! Which is mental to me, i need my sleep lol. So now i feel like there are so many things we do different & i’m so eager to find out more 😂

Is this a culture thing or a language-y thing. Either way, in no particular order:

- Weddings are a big one. Latin American weddings are a BIG thing and go on at least 24 hours pretty much.

- Another I’ve noticed is that Spanish uses a lot of nicknames that sound really demeaning if you used them literally in English. Like in a lot of countries, you could just be known as el gordo/la gorda if you’re fat, or judío/judía “Jewish” if you’re Jewish. In English, if you went around calling someone “Jew” it would make you sound like a Nazi, and if you just referred to someone as “fat” without any context you would sound like a monster. English is very PC at times and Spanish sounds very rude when translated literally. [I definitely took that one from Joanna rants but I knew someone who went by Flaco growing up]

- I’ve also found out that sometimes these nicknames just last for life? Like I don’t know where I saw it but someone had been hearing their relative’s nickname all their life and thought it was their actual name.

- Last names are very unique. I had no idea that so many Spanish-speaking countries had women keeping their own last names even when married.

- Names in general. I didn’t realize that so many people seemed to have multiple first names. I have met people in the US named like “Ann Marie” or “Mary Margaret” but it wasn’t as common as Spanish.

- Also English tends to assume the last name you mention is your last name, while Spanish tends to have the first last name mentioned be the father’s surname and is the one you’d use most often. Or like… if your name was Miguel Díaz Vega or something, in English-speaking culture you’d call him “Mr. Vega”. In Spanish-speaking culture, you’d say “Mr. Díaz”.

- I didn’t realize that for a time Franco made it so you had to give a child a Christian name in Spain.

- That Spain and Latin America don’t always get along, which I did sort of know but I thought it was like how the US and the UK don’t always get along but it’s a lot more intense. 

- Also, not all of Spain gets along with all of Spain. And all of the autonomous communities have kind of a reputation among each other. It’s kind of like how in the US everyone thinks of California as one way. Except in Spain it’s a little more serious and contentious at times.

- And some Latin American countries are like… openly hostile about other Latin American countries, which again, the US and Canada are neighbors and generally both speak English but we’ve got stereotypes and not seething hatred. Not to say all Latin American countries hate all other Latin American countries, but I knew someone who nearly got disowned because they were dating a Colombian person.

- That “racism” in the US is almost always black or white, literally. In Latin America most racism comes out as “colorism”. In the US and a lot of English-speaking places, people think of anyone from Latin America being a person of color. In Latin America, everyone realizes that some people have European ancestry, some people have African ancestry, some people have indigenous ancestry, some people have Asian ancestry, and some people are any combination therein.

Meaning that you could be “white” by US standards like a blonde and blue-eyed person who just happens to be Mexican or Puerto Rican, but the US assumes outright that you’re a person of color.

But in Latin American society, the colorism comes out in that everyone seems to understand that most people are mixed in some way, but there’s preferential treatment or more representation for people of lighter skin tones. This comes out especially in families where some family members might just not associate with other branches of the family or ignore they exist. And that there are all kinds of words in Spanish (different words in different countries at that) for people who are light skinned or people who are darker, or people who are light skinned who act like they’re darker and vice versa.

- Also there are weird superstitions and things that are kind of vaguely racist by US standards. Like in some countries if you see a black person it’s customary to pinch someone you’re with for good luck.

- In some places you’re supposed to pinch a redhead when you see them for good luck which is less racist but more invasive I guess?

- People are also very relaxed about certain words or traditions that I as an American have some politically correct visceral reactions to. Like in Spain it’s not that uncommon to see someone in blackface when it’s Three Kings Day, or how in the US it’s no longer considered acceptable to say “gypsy” you’re supposed to say Roma or Romani, but in Spanish gitano/a is not seen as anything that bad except for when it is

- Also Three Kings Day is a thing and very important. I mean we do have the Epiphany in the US but unless you’re religious, it means nothing for you. On Three Kings Day, it’s kind of like Christmas because you get gifts and you leave out grass or food for the camels.

- I was not prepared for Pascua being used for both Christmas [also Navidad] and Easter by the way. That’s real difficult for me.

- You also kiss your elder family member’s hands in some places. I’m not totally sure if it’s like la bendición exactly, but in some countries it’s a sign of respect or how you ask for someone’s blessing

- “Heal, heal, frog’s tail/ass, if you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow” when someone - especially a little kid - gets hurt or sick. It’s kind of like “kissing a boo boo to make it better” except it is literally phrased like a magical spell

- In most places, the idea of “Friday the 13th” is “Tuesday the 13th” in Spanish countries. Unless you literally mean a date, “Tuesday the 13th” is the unlucky day, which kind of makes me think of Ides of March I dunno

- Being told not to walk around barefoot because your ovaries will freeze

- Gross, but if you’re a girl being told to “serve” your male relatives like your cousin or your brother; sírvele 

- Sometimes there are terms of endearment that translate very badly in English. I could never call someone mi gordito/a or mi negro/a as a term of endearment, regardless of body type and regardless of skin color and it translates as “sweetie” or “dear”. I would never feel comfortable saying those words to anyone at anytime for any reason because it took me years to get over feeling weird about negro/a being “black”

- Trying to figure out whether to use a comma or a period when talking about thousands because some people will do 100,000 and some people will do 100.000 and then SOME people will just do 100 000 

- It’s not a “party” if there isn’t dancing. If you’re just standing around talking, it feels like a funeral. You at least need a space where people can dance if it’s a party.

- Las Mañanitas being the Mexican Happy Birthday song and if you listen to it literally you’re just like “why are we talking about dawn so much??”

- “suburbs” in the US are nice places where people live who work in a big city, they’re like nice slightly rural communities and they’re the dream of the middle class. A suburbio in Latin America is a “shanty town” or a “slum” usually, like makeshift houses built out of sheets of metal and bits of wood. 

- “Middle class” in general just means something completely different for the US than it does for Europe and parts of Latin America. In Europe especially the “middle class” are the snobs who act like they’re better than each other and are obsessed with materialism. In the US “middle class” is “I’m not poor because I worked hard and I’m not rich because I’m self-made and I picked myself up by my bootstraps and I now live in comfortable stability with a wife and 2.5 kids and a picket fence and this is the American dream”. Europe is like “the middle class is the worst part of humanity” and is more like how the US would describe “keeping up with the Jones’s”

- Trying to explain the times Spaniards eat is very difficult because in the US you have breakfast when you wake up, 12 noon is lunch, dinner is sometime between 5-7 usually. In Spain there’s a breakfast, a snack, a second breakfast, a huge lunch, maybe another snack, dinner if you’re hungry but it’s late and probably tapas. I’m like 90% sure that the US definition of meal time was based on a factory schedule because it is so weirdly strict and on a timetable.

- The US cares more about Cinco de Mayo and the majority of us don’t even know what it symbolizes for Mexico, or that the majority of Mexico doesn’t celebrate it

- The US is very rushed as a culture especially in big cities. If you make people wait for you, you’re the rude one and you should be ashamed. In a lot of Spanish-speaking countries, it’s more relaxed. Like I’ve heard “Spanish time” or “Mexican time” etc when people are saying they’re operating slower but I think the US is just VERY rushed

- The US is very weirdly affectionate and loving but also very prudish. Like we smile at each other, we laugh and say “I love you” as a goodbye. But when sex comes up we act like it doesn’t exist and it is so bizarre because it is the exact opposite in Europe because many countries would consider you being weirdly inappropriate or disingenuous for smiling at strangers or asking people how they are as a greeting [and make no mistake, in the US except in the South, we say “how are you?” and if we don’t know you, we aren’t looking for an answer other than “good”]… We really must seem like overly emotional liars sometimes to people in Europe.

- The grading system in general

- I can’t even get into the metric system and Celsius. I’ve seen fear when I tell someone it’s 98 degrees outside. 

- La chancla

- There are some superstitions that most countries have about not putting your wallet or purse on the floor and itchy palms meaning money coming your way

- People making jewelry out of baby teeth

- Speaking of, the Tooth Fairy is a mouse named Ratoncito Pérez

- el hombre del saco is a common thing to scare children with if they misbehave

- You’re gonna learn real quick that in Latin America if you’re from the US and you say soy americano/a you might get some nasty responses about how they’re also Americans living in the Americas, which is valid and why I say estadounidense

Spain on the other hand says americano/a pretty often and also norteamericano/a which I guess is closer but also I guess canadiense is distinct enough? I dunno. I usually stick with estadounidense because I don’t want to be That Gringo

- Along the same lines, generally avoid calling people in Latin America “Hispanic”… that’s a term that really only Spanish-speakers in the US use. For everyone else it sounds kind of like you’re calling them “subjects of the Spanish Crown”

- SPANISH REGIONALISMS THAT NO ONE TAUGHT ME AND NOW GROCERY SHOPPING IS THE WOOOOORST IT’S NOT EVEN A CULTURE THING ALL THE TIME BUT I JUST WANT SOME BEANS AND WHY IS BANANA A PLANTAIN THEY ARE DIFFERENT

-Also Chile. Just Chile. Just Chile in general. Shout out to my lovely Chilean followers, you know what why you’re on this list and not just because yellow is your lucky color, ya po

Anyone else want to add some because I want to learn

[ratherashleigh]

First off, I really like reading your tumblr and am glad that I found it again after tumblr was a shithead about your old url (If there's ever some petition to sign or inbox to fill to help you get through to tumblr support, I'm all ears! Also, funny fact that would go well with one of those anon memes: I always misspelled 'embarrassing' until I started reading your tumblr. That's just about the only improvement to my English in the last 10 years; the rest has been all downhill).

Second off: you mentioned in your tags to the bodyguard post that you had a movie rec. I assume that you were being a bit sarcastic and mean the movie of the same name (which I like), but since I dig the trope a lot, I feel compelled to ask if there is some other (potentially queer!) bodyguard movie out there that you would recommend.

message 3 of 4 (poor planning/wordiness) I remember a while back you were looking for the Killing Eve EW cover? My old roommate had a subscription, but never changed the address after moving out, so we just kept getting his magazines. I have mild hoarding tendencies, so I kept ones I was sort of interested in, and just found them again while moving into a new place. I would love to send it to you if you still want it. My email address is *************[AT]gmail[DOT]com.

[final message, I swear] I recognize that “stranger on the internet wants to mail you stuff” is weird, but I can send it through an intermediary or I can give you my info first or whatever? I got bored today while unpacking and thought about how I should tell people on the internet that I appreciate them (in the spirit of doing something positive for thanksgiving? since I appreciate y'all more than most of my extended family and the genocidal undertones of the holiday as it stands?)

what a delightful set of messages, pal! i’m glad you find me again, too!

first, it took me at least a year of having that url before i learnt how to spell embarrassing correctly first go. my one goal for the rest of 2019 is to work out how to get in contact with someone at tumblr, because they very clearly have a do not reply policy when it comes to contact about terminations. i message them every few months - if i keep it to some other issue, i get a response within days, if it’s about terminated accounts, nothing. but i have not given up!

second, it was definitely a joke about the movie of the same name.

third, i actually ended up with a copy a month or so later, but that’s unbelievably sweet of you to offer. also, your email address is hilarious.

fourth, happy thanksgiving to you! we don’t do anything remotely similar here, but it’s the one american holiday where the general idea seems like a good one to me, if you separate it from the historical context.

[ajebjorkman-blog]

The Long Cold Open to Socialism or Barbarism... or Party Space Alpha

Recently, I bumped into a few of those unfortunate zombies propelled into mindless shuffling by the absolute horror of the hollow center; and, if it’s the case that the concept of the hollow center draws a blank—the dank whiteness of the silver screen before some Clint Eastwood shooting-gun-male-sociopath-revenge-drama—try to imagine a vast pit of waste, much like the overarching metaphor of Don DeLillo’s mind-numbingly boring Underworld. All in all, though, and to cut my tendency toward preciousness to at best shorter, the hollow center is cra(aa)p—the hollow center is a space endlessly differentiated and endlessly atomizing and endlessly unfeeling, and as is the case with the very idea of all things endless (whatever that may mean), time and history stops to matter, specifically history. The end of history has already happened, though, with the fall of the Soviet Union—at least according to Frances Fukuyama. He’s still alive, right?  

Or, or… 

or think of the hollow center like this: it’s the forever-noon party—or whatever time of day the elderly booze up and kick down—of Hypercharged Capital held at Party Space Alpha.  

Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek are adored keynote speakers, brought back from the dead by scientism-magic to white-counter the supposed browning of the world, or, as some religious zealots opine, the existential threat of the tainting of the world.

Rand says, “The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.”

The crowd cheers and chants, “Galt! Who the fuck is Galt!!?”

Friedman says, “Shock, shock, shock!”

The crowd cheers and chants, though quizzingly, “Who is Galt?”

Hayek says something about force from afar as a corrective while the crowd tries to find the one voice who said, “Galt is Atlas, no? Greek stuff, I think.”

After speeches and rants, lobotomized servants serve finger food from gold platters, and Ted Nugent takes the stage, humps his guitar and sings about pedophilia and freedom.

And look at those skeletons shuffle and jig, some pumping their fists and whiplashing their necks.

Joy and sanity, re-enter my world. You enter Party Space Alpha, try to get a feel for the place, and you think:

So this is where I’ve come to.

You mingle...and look, there’s one of those Zoomer-influencers you’ve heard about, always be gramming.  

“What I’m trying to do, see,” the Zoomer-influencer says, “is to make jokes about race and fucking and such, you know, make them great again, hint, hint.” (Yes, he says hint, hint out loud-) Also, ”That dead man hanging. Sad, very sad. I already said I’m sorry, ok!” He storms off, leaving you to think about things when a hand, moist, so moist, graces your shoulder.

You turn around. A somewhat cross-eyed dude—on closer inspection, however, he’s not cross-eyed, just dead-eyed—speaks to you in an affected, puppet-like voice, like his vocal chords are somehow placed inside his Adam’s apple.

The dead-eyed dude with weird Adam’s apple-voice says, “Want to discuss ideas?”

You nod. You’re already here, you think, so why not. You throw a few ideas up for consideration and deliberation: Socialized housing and healthcare, that’d be a good start, you think, after which you mention structures of oppression and that they’re crap; you mention essentialism, the idea of Spinozian substances and God-given grace and soul and pineal gland homunculus’ puppetry and phrenology and sociobiology and Steven Pinker, and how these fucked up descriptive statements prescribe fucked up social agendas; you skip from Hume (you can’t experience causality, am I right) to Kant (Let’s critique pure reason, am I right) through Hegel (History isn’t purely spiritual, am I right) to Marx. Also, because why not, and it’s not really and ad hominem,  you mention that it would be quite funny to create a Japanese game show where libertarians, fascists, conservatives, and dangerously daft liberals are mildly tortured for the prize of cool trinkets.

The dead-eyed dude nods, furrows his brow and smacks his tongue—a hint of anxiousness, like eels speeding his dead eye-water, momentarily turns him somewhat human. He says:

“I see. But you see, I want to discuss high-level ideas, like do you have an iPhone? If so, you’re no oppressed.”

You leave because the dead-eyed weird dude was about to have a stroke, or so it seemed, ranting about oppression O(h)lympics and whatever else.

From the corner of the vast space, a dwarfed dude with a boyish bowl-cut speedily espouses that facts don’t care about your emotions and that the labor theory of value is anachronistic balderdash. He espouses this to a party-fun-house-mirror, in training for debate-destroying. To his right, arms crossed, stands a gang of clean-shaven dudes. They all wear Fred Perry- shirts. They’re all sweaty, and their sweat forms a cloud, and the cloud spells: We Are Disenfranchised Also, Blue Lives Matter. Also, one of the dudes holds a katana. Lord knows why. Another dead-eyed dude-bro-boy close by—there’s so many of them, more or less affective, this one like a flat line—explains that the Lord is dead, which, sure, you think, sounds like a shame.

In a dull monotone, the Flatliner continues:

“The hadith… the muslem or Mos-Lem religion, Islam—that explains the katana. It’s a necessary precaution to ward off the onslaught—and don’t take me out of context, please, I’m only ideating like Socrates in the, eh, in the Atheneum.  

“What onslaught?” you ask.

“It’s a moral priority to honestly and openly assess the geopolitical and, eh, moral consequences of the actual content of the Quran, and, eh… so, turning a blind eye to, eh, to statistically significant increases in, eh, rape and… so rape and terror, yes terror—that’s not only morally ambiguous, it’s morally vacuous, and my contention and intention as a civil Western…”

“Sorry to interrupt, but I do wonder what you think about this, Mr. Flatline: Socrates was deemed dangerous and such, right, and he was killed by the state for riling up the hoi polloi, for advancing critical thinking and debate. He was force-fed that killing drink, right, the one that killed him off in increments from feet to head. So, as a latter-day Socrates, will you help me understand if there is an analogy between being forced to drink the killing drink and, how should I phrase it—being coerced to drink the Kool-Aid, in that both drinks literally kills off something? I know it’s somewhat heady and not entirely coherent, but you know, nothing is entirely coherent. Contradictions and that.”

“Well, this is typical muddying of the water…”

“Or muddying the fluid? Kool-Aid, killing drink, Kool-Aid, killing drink…”

“Woo-woo. If you look at the end of my first book, in the last footnote of the epilogue, I clearly refer to a footnote in a blog post about this subject, and that footnote, if only you’d just read it—it clearly refers to what I said in my podcast some year or so ago, so.”

You leave, not daring to continue what already initially was a torturous exchange. You start to feel heavy and kind of fragmented at the same time. Weird.  

   Somewhere else in Part Space Alpha an orange blob in diapers eats hamburgers and ribs and chocolate and wipes the drooping and drooping corners of his mouth with the flag of Palestine while a hunched over assistant takes notes:

NEED TO BUY MORE FOOD FOR LEADER. (It’s so Alpha to capitalize notes.)

Someone fires a gun into the air and laughs amidst applause. Such a nice gun! The orange blob stops munching and laughs without it sounding like laughter. He just opens his mouth and shows his teeth. He says:

“My guy. Give him a tank.” He realizes, shouts: “Where’s my African American!”

No one responds or arrives. There’s few to no black or brown people in Party Space Alpha; also, quite a few women dare venture into Party Space Alpha, because… Party Space Alpha.

Hunched over one of the few women present, Slender Man in a fedora and a pinstriped suit berates and gestures and cries a little:

“The absence of women in Party Space Alpha forms the materiality of the legitimacy of the perceived subordination of those young men to whom the existential and the individual necessity of sexual intercourse is denied. If only these young men were allowed to slap and slap happily, there’d be mental equilibrium.”

Enough.

You exit by the back door unto the Wasteland, your only refuge from the constant violence of Party Space Alpha; and you’re not feeling morally vacuous for being ok with the idea of this vast space somehow eating itself to death. So, Party Space Alpha is the hollow center. It WILL fuck you up.