#bilingual dissonance

[peoplecallmelucifer]

Ok I had a few people ask me how knowing another language can make it so you have less people to share your jokes with in response to m poem "jokes" on @peoplecallitpoetry qnd the answer is thaz when you learn a new language tue opportunities for jokes grow exponentially because now you can make jokes that only work if you know both languages involved. So the only people who will get to wnjoy those jokes are the other people who speak those languages .... and the more languages you get involved... the less people you have to share the joke with.

My favorite bilingual joke is "Tenk juri veliku mačku" it's pronounced simmilar to "thank you wery much" bit it means "a tank is chading after a big cat"

Another is simly the word gorilla because in serbo-croatian "gori" means "it burns so Goir LA means Los angeles is engulfed in flames

The list foes one and on and on and that's not even counting for bilongual dissonance where the same phrase can have a completely opposit meaning

For example smoking someone in USA= Shooting them

Smoking somwone in the balkans= giving them a blowjob

[forumkedis]

can July 29th also be "what is laerfhel and uvhao day?

Laerfhel is from Interior Emanations and appears to be a spread made of lard and garlic. I could have s w o r n that uvhao was an alternative name I came up for it for out in the boonies but I cannot, for the life of me, find anything on my thought process about it in my notes, which is pretty damned weird. I have a lot of those things sketched out in the drafting document for the Abomination, because, as I've sometimes mentioned, the original plan was to linger way, way longer on that holiday and really carve into the cultural differences between these rich city ghersit and even their best rural equivalents as well as the ones between the haves- and have-nots within Orafine itself, because I thought that was interesting, but most of it got axed.

Related pivot to several completely different topics under the cut.

For example, Anne is bilingual, just like the good and proper city ghersladies, but she would rather die than speak to them in it, because she's super, super uncomfortable doing so. She can understand it spoken somewhat slowly and/or pick out enough to get the gist spoken well, and she can read and write (we'll get back to that) in it, but it is a very, very second language to her. Artur is fluent, but he speaks with a heavy, heavy accent, and Aloysius is sort of somewhere in between - more than survival, less than conversational, probably gonna have to repeat himself sometimes for the accent and errors. Lettie has the strongest Continental in Orafine other than Brother Srebron at this point, just because she's the only one who uses it. Right behind her would be the other Srebrons, with Frederic Sr. at the lead and Harma and Fred jostling somewhere behind him*. But It's still Lettie's second language, and she has a strong pidgin tendency**, which is why when she went to meet with Lady Martin Miss Blaire reminded her to watch it - Tainish also has formality indicators, so it reminded Lettie to use the highest levels of formality, which at this point in her life simply includes the code-switch to textbook Tainish, much like an English speaker might switch to elocutionary recieved pronunciation if they were in certain high society settings.

Also, Anne can write! The Grises are one of the most upper-class families in Orafine, so they have more use than most in the town. The Srebrons get pretty much all of the travelers coming to see them, and ship hounds all over the country, so ditto. Anne is also extraordinarily intelligent and a good study - she's the model of the life Lettie can best hope for in Orafine. Most of the other women in town probably really can't, and those who can are going to mainly be the upper-class girls. Being able to write would also be a great way for, say, a three girls of uncertain-suspected-efghersit parentage and dishonourable matrilineage to end up in extremely respectable marriages***. The schoolhouse puts to good use ladies who can write, but having a personal in-home tutor for their children is a massive boon for any man whose family is reliant on the skill. And, to be frank, the village's gene pool could use a little more efghersit input - especially in those best-off families.****

Anyway, the food culture is super different in Orafine and central Durlyne city, but so are the actual culture-cultures, and I was largely going to play with that in relation to all the festivities, but then... stuff happened and I had to shift a major chunk of the actual plot that was needed for that section to later (though I do think it'll be more gratifying there anywayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy so fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine) so some of that has temporarily fizzled out to be picked up later in a different way. Lettie's also acclimated, largely, to Durlynian urban culture, because she's been at school for a couple years. While we sometimes get peeks into her earlier experiences with that, Anne still had her job of illustrating the dissonance more fully for us to see, even if the full arc has changed trajectory. But because all this info was cut, a lot of it still exists in drafting, so I can go look at it and be like, okay, this is something they refer to in Tainish while the Durlynians refer to it in Continental or are translating a known Continental name for it into Tainish or are like can you please be more goddamn specific (munakhiwellul which is literally just "fermented stuff" but can be contextually used to specifically refer to a local apertif), while this other thing has a name in Orafine that is specifically just its name (like simolaa, and I could have sworn this was the category uvhao fell into), or this has a name in Durlyne that is specifically just its name (laerfhel), or this doesn't have a special name, it's just called what it is, so it doesn't matter how that gets written (stuffed pig, sweet potato dumplings)

* Then Artur, then most of the other town businessmen, then Al, then Anne, then the schoolhouse ladies, then, like, everyone else in reverse age order

** So do the Durlynians, but in reverse. Lettie, when speaking Continental, is pretty comfortable tossing a Tainish word out if she needs to say something she doesn't have the Continental for and just moving on, because she comes from and is in a predominantly Tainish-speaking society. Everyone around her knows Tainish, and if she's speaking Continental in a group for one of the few who don't, someone will either fill in the non-speaker, they'll catch it from context, or someone will helpfully supply Lettie with the word at next opportunity. They may or may not judge her for doing it, but it simply isn't a notable impediment to communication. The Durlynian Silvers, though, use something more akin to a full Creole, blending Continental grammatical constructions into their Tainish, using Continental words as slang that is sometimes divorced from its native-speaker meaning and/or connotation, and Tairet-ifying Continental words to create new Tainish ones. The difference is like an English speaker in their language class forgetting the Korean word for being well-spoken and just throwing out "uhh... charismatic" before moving on (Lettie) whereas the other is an entire vocabulary of whatever the the K-pop sphere means when they say "charisma" because it definitely isn't "ability to speak engagingly". But, because they are an urban population, they're also going to be able to code switch depending on their audience to either include or freeze out outsiders - this even happens occasionally to Lettie, who usually reacts by thinking about something else or finding an opportune way to circumvent the issue, like shoving cake in her mouth. There's even an additional dynamic available to urban Silvers who aren't from a high-falutin' ~society~ rank, which has briefly come up before and will probably come up again in a less fraught but more direct way later - both times with David, because he isn't from that ghers.

*** Anne and her sisters are not of high-class parentage, but they were somewhat-ostensibly ghersit (no one was inclined to waste the resources to check with them all being girls anyway, particularly because the truth could, rumouredly, have instead turned out to be any number of perfectly upstanding non-efghersit men and their legally-assumed father wouldn't involve himself in the controversy and then promptly died), so they still got to go to school. Anne really, really lucked out with Artur; her sisters less so. Anne and Artur also largely married for love - Artur asked for her and was able to use a lot of her personal merits as rationales to argue his case, they weren't a made match - and Anne's incredibly affluent marriage and subsequent hardcore fulfillment of it largely secured her younger sisters' upward betrothals, too.

**** It's significant enough a problem that that's literally Artur's role as a ghers elder, and as a result, he's one of the most powerful men in the entire town now. That was what Frederic Srebron and his father and his father's father also did in their seats, and they were so influential because of it (and being the town's most notable market producer) that the only thing preventing Artur from unquestionably being in that same position is a semi-absentee elder who just shares their name.

[wisp-of-thought]

l o v e l a n g u a g e

language: the principal method of human communication or

a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings

~

93% of communication is non-verbal. and i tried to learn a new language for you.

it was not an easy one. there were no textbooks, or online review tests, or vocabulary sheets. there was only my hastily scrawled notes trying to understand. there was only me, practicing my pronunciation in the mirror, watching my mouth form around unfamiliar vowels, my hands trying to learn how to hold the consonants so you might be able to better understand my accent. there was only you, trying to teach me a language that had never been transcribed.

you lend me one of your earbuds on the bus and play a song i cannot understand because there are just chords. just brushstrokes of sound. just melody threading notes together. the music is trying to say something. but you are trying to say something too by giving me this rythem. i cannot understand. but i listen anyways. and these are the ways in which i try to learn. you memorize my coffee order but forget my birthday. you never say you miss me but you look back twice exactly when we part every time. your eyes are always closed when we touch. i do not understand what these things say, or what you are trying to tell me but i listen anyways. and these are the ways in which i try to learn.

once, we don't speak for too long and the first night you spend in my bed again, i ask you, before i turn the light off, what it means. you don't look at me. you say you don't know. so i flick off the light switch and curl around myself under the covers. your hands find my hair, find my waist, find the soft skin of a scar, find the place where the flesh is thinnest between the world and my heart. i ask you what that means. you say it means, "you still have me." and so i kiss every one of your finger tips and in this way i respond, "i am glad." i let my legs tangle with yours under the blankets and in this way i say, "you still have me, too." in this moment you have not learnt my language yet either. but we are both learning. and some things are hard to misinterpret.

you take me to the movies to watch the same film for the second time. i do not understand what this is trying to say or what you are trying to tell me but i listen anyways. on the drive home, we take the leftover silence of the theatre with us, and i ask you what you meant when you did this. you are still picking the quiet out from your teeth with your tounge and so i say, "in my language, this means, 'i would choose the silence over your voice.' in my language this means 'you are only worth the past, over again. there is no moving forward, only backwards. until we fall into the oblivion from which we came'. " you pull off the road. you shake your head. say, "in my language, this means, 'the quiet is hard sometimes but never with you.' in my language, this means 'i think we have time enough to reread stories twice'. this means, 'you are the familar and for this i am grateful'. this means, 'i do not need adventure to stay'. that I am content to sit with you and the dark and devour a peice of the world together."

and so i come to learn that your leg slipping over my hip when i am just on the cusp of sleep means: i forgive you. learn that a sandwich found in the fridge made the night before for me to take to work means: im sorry. learn that the hour long shower means: not now. learn the bitting of the nails means: now. now, please. i learn the sunday morning pancakes mean: i love you. but so do the forehead kisses and the 1:30 am texts about tomorrow and the you telling me about your day. i learn the offer to fix my car means "let me be something for you, please." i learn 2 dirty mugs in the sink mean a bad day unless one of them is the red one and it's thursday, because then that just means working late, and in this way i learn about the context of a phrase.

you learn things too. pick them up slowly. through daily conversation. murmmer things in passing. nonchalant and nervous. i don't correct you. i just smile. because I know what you are trying to say.

i wince sometimes at the misused vocab and poorly built sentences that crumble quickly, but i do not offer to teach you until you ask. because i know for certain what you are saying then. saying:

i want to know how to speak to you in the language you feel most at home in.

i want to be able to know you in the words there are no direct translations for.

i want to be able to find you in the dialect you retreat to when the day has gone on too long.

you are saying:

i want to be able interpt everything you think there are no words in my language to say, and so you don't say them.

i want you to be able to tell me everything

you are telling me:

i want you to know that i want to try and talk to you even when it is hard.

you offer to walk with me in the fall afternoon even though you hate the crunch of the leaves that you say sounds too much like endings and i ask you if this offer means "i love you" or "i don't want to be alone right now" and you are looking away from me when you explain that sometimes things can have more than one meaning.

i tackle you half screaming half laughing when you buy us the concert tickets for my birthday and you ask me if this means "thank you" or "i love you" and i am smiling when i explain sometimes things can have more than one meaning.

i come home late to find you sobbing on the bathroom floor and i hold you for hours. i show you videos of baby's laughing until the tears subside long enough for you to kiss me with salt sorrow stained lips and i ask against your mouth if this means "thank you" or "i love you" and you whisper of how different things can have the same meaning and in this way i learn of synonyms.

sometimes the learning of a new language is difficult.

is frustrating.

is silences that scream two things in dissonance.

for the hardest things to define are the absences.

for there are a million subtle ways the pronunciation of quiet differs depending on what you are trying to convey.

sometimes learning a new language is

mistakes.

is misunderstandings.

is apologies

for violating customs

and muddling unfamiliar proverbs.

i'm sorry,

this is not my native tounge.

but i am trying.

i am learning.

if you are willing to teach me.

sometimes a new language is something we become fluent it. the bilingualism comes easy. it rolls off our tounge like second nature. you realize now there are new ways to love in this language. but there are also new ways the hurt. and new ways to heal. and new ways to apologize. you realize there are new ways to know someone when they are not afraid to be misheard.

sometimes a new language is a patchwork quilt of simple words and poorly stitched grammer. sometimes i pull out a few words at the restaurant to impress you. you smile less at the phrase, more at the gesture. sometimes i stumble over the words and you help me up, help me along the sentence, because you know it means the world to me to try for you.

sometimes all we can do is learn to understand. the words never come out right so we stop trying. but we listen. we nod. we laugh. we hold them at all the right parts of the story.

sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone is to understand

what they are trying to say.

when she makes paper flowers and sends me photos of them. i know she is trying to tell me: "look. i got out of bed today and created something beautiful. i thought of you in the slow process of the cultivation of this miracle." and i don't know how to reply. not in her language atleast. and so i don't. but i know what she means.

sometimes it is enough to understand someone.

sometimes it isn't.

sometimes a new language is not for us. we tell ourselves we are too old to pick it up. we tell ourselves it is too difficult. too forgien. too complicated. we try for the sake of saying we tried. but we don't.

in the end, we know how to say hello and goodbye and thank you and a handful of curse words. sometimes we know how to say i love you. in the formal tounge. with textbook pronouns and rigid verbs.

sometimes learning a language is

things lost in translation

is

how was I supposed to know what that meant?

is

why didn't you just tell me?

is

i didn't know how.

is

being too tired to roll your r's and remember the right tense.

sometimes learning a language is screaming everything you cannot translate at the language barrier between you. hoping they understand. hoping they don't.

but there is something unmatched about being welcomed home in your mother tounge.

something about being forgiven in words you could never misinterpret.

about being called to bed by the familar.

t h e r e i s s o m e t h i n g u n p a r a l l e l e d a b o u t b e i n g l o v e d i n

y o u r o w n l a n g u a g e.

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

My Personal Opinions on Some French Grand Opéras

Here we go. I’ll be focusing solely on pieces in what’s widely considered the “Golden Age” of grand opéra (from 1828 to about 1870).

1828, Auber: La muette de Portici: never seen or heard so I cannot comment, but I do think it slaps that it helped start both the Belgian Revolution and the genre of grand opéra.

1829, Rossini: Guillaume Tell: I love this one. it’s one of the few grand opéras that has a happy ending and it’s fully deserved. it’s long but it all has a point-- the first act introduces us to the community spirit that drives the rest of the action; even though it’s called Guillaume Tell, it’s not just about Guillaume Tell. it’s about a whole movement coming together, with all these vividly-drawn people of different social statuses, ages, heritages, and livelihoods coming together to do good in the world in the face of oppression. also it’s Rossini so it bops start to finish. the finale is one of opera’s best. I could not have higher praise and admiration for this piece.

1831, Meyerbeer: Robert le diable: another rare case of a grand opéra with a happy ending, but it feels a bit more contrived, something I wrote about when I watched it about a year ago for the first time. it’s quite a clever ending, however, and I love that these lovely characters get a happy ending. Robert is the least interesting principal character both musically and dramatically; the musical highlights of the show are mostly Bertram and Isabelle’s big scenes. the former is also arguably grand opéra’s most exciting ballet sequence, the Act III ballet of the nuns (or as I like to call it, the Zombie Nun Ballet). it’s long but it is incredibly worth it. overall, I really do enjoy this opera although it is very much an uneven piece.

1833, Auber: Gustave III, ou le bal masqué: here’s a thing I wrote about it like 3 months ago and I stand by every word.

1835, Halévy: La juive: It’s damn near impossible to find an even remotely close to complete recording. However, what the recordings have is excellent. The score is marvelous all the way through, although for the most part I tend to prefer the ensembles to the arias (the exception, of course, being Éléazar’s 11 o’clock number). Speaking of Éléazar, he’s an extremely complicated and frankly uncomfortable character, toeing the line between being one of opera’s most complex characters, an even more complicated proto-gender-swapped-Azucena if you will, and being an unfortunate vessel of antisemitic stereotypes. This is made even more complicated because Halévy was an assimilated Jewish composer. On the whole, Rachel is the only wholly sympathetic character in the piece, although all five of the principals are lovingly scored. 

1836, Meyerbeer: Les Huguenots: *holds things in because otherwise I would write an entire essay about this opera and you all know that because I have done that several times* Both a great strength and a great weakness of this piece is its sheer wide-ranging-ness, particularly in terms of mood. Unlike, say, La juive, this opera does not have one overall mood, instead steadily progressing from bright, brilliant comedy to one of the most horrifying endings in opera. Dramatically, this is great for the most part, although the sheer amount of exposition in the first two acts may take getting used to. Just as the drama gets more intense and concentrated as the opera goes on, the music gets more intense- and frankly, more often than not better- as the opera goes on. The window/misunderstood engagement business is something I still struggle to see the exact dramatic purpose of, because I think the question of religious difference would likely be enough to separate Raoul and Valentine at the beginning anyway; to me, it feels like Scribe and Deschamps were struggling to find a way to integrate Nevers into the story, as he is crucial to the opera’s lessons about love and tolerance, so they stuck in a quasi-love-triangle in order to justify his presence earlier on. (Also, for goodness sake, could you at least have given him an onstage death scene?) Anyway, in this way the story can be a bit unwieldy and uneven at first, but stay the course with this one...and even a lot of the first couple of acts are wonderful. The characters are all wonderfully written if rather episodic in many cases, but this opera is ambitious and by the end, it’ll tear your heart to shreds. It’s amazing. Uneven, yes, but amazing nonetheless, and I will defend it to the death.

1840, Donizetti: La favorite: I’m not as familiar with La favorite as with some of the others on this list (I’ve seen two different productions once each and I have a recording of it saved to my Spotify library that I listen to bits and pieces of very occasionally) but I do think it’s an excellent piece overall. LÉONOR DESERVED SO MUCH BETTER. The music is lovely all around; I know Donizetti wrote at least one other grand opéra in full and part of another, both of which I need to check out because in its own way, Donizetti’s style works wonderfully with grand opéra.

1841: Halévy, La reine de Chypre: here is a post I wrote about La reine de Chypre. basically all my thoughts remain the same except I have to add: Halévy as a whole just needs more love. there’s a few other of his operas I have waiting (a recording of Le dilettante d’Avignon that has been sitting in my Spotify for who knows how long and a film of Clari with Bartoli and Osborn I’m also sitting on) but there are so many pieces that sound fascinating but have basically ZILCH in terms of recordings.

1849, Meyerbeer: Le prophète: before I say anything else about this opera, I need to ask a burning question: WHY THE HELL IS THERE ONLY ONE GOOD VIDEO RECORDING OF THIS OPERA?!?! on the one hand, I adore the Osborn/Aldrich/Fomina production; on the other, I would also like other productions, please. anyway, I said one time in the opera Discord that while Les Huguenots will probably always be my favorite Meyerbeer opera for an array of reasons, this one is definitely Meyerbeer, Scribe, and Deschamps’ strongest work. it is both unusually dark and unusually believable for an opera of its time—and the fact that it still holds up so well is disturbing to say the least. this opera thrives on complexity in all forms and yet has probably (and paradoxically) the simplest plot to follow of the four Meyerbeer grand opéras. the score is brilliant start to finish, mixing the best of bel canto, Romanticism, and something altogether darker, stranger, and more original. definitely one of the most underrated operas ever. the aforementioned production is on YouTube with French subtitles; give it a watch here.

1855, Verdi: Les vêpres siciliennes: Vêpres is an opera I love dearly although I have yet to find a production that is completely satisfying. I think it’s because this opera is a lot deeper, a lot more complex, and a lot more troubling, frankly, than people are willing to go. also it should be performed bilingually and I am dead-set on this: the dissonance of an opera about French capture of Italian land being sung entirely in either French or Italian is always a little off at least (and also part of the reason why my brain probably adjusted to hearing this opera in either language better than, say, Don Carlos). but anyway, neither side comes off particularly well here, particularly due to the violence and sexual assault on both sides of the equation: both Montfort and Procida are heavily in the wrong, and while Verdi sympathizes with both for personal reasons (Verdian Dad in the former case, Italian Liberator in the latter), there is a lot of troubling stuff in here. nevertheless, the music bops, the story is intriguing, and I think we can all agree that Henri and Hélène both deserved better, especially considering how close they got to bliss (although I think we can also all agree that the end of Act IV twist to almost-rom-com is pretty abrupt).

1863 (full opera: 1890), Berlioz: Les Troyens: I wrote this review of Troyens after watching it in the Châtelet 2003 production in December 2019 (first time ever watching it) and I still stand by just about every word. Such a fascinating opera, great adaptation of the first few books of the Aeneid, marvelous score (of course, it’s Berlioz!)...but could there be a ballet or two fewer, Berlioz? Or at least shorten them up? And that’s coming from someone who likes ballet. But anyway, in every other respect it’s absolutely marvelous. Some people say it’s the greatest French opera ever, and while I hesitate to say that, it comes pretty damn near close.

1865, Meyerbeer: L’Africaine (Vasco de Gama): Vasco da Gama/L’Africaine is even more troubling—much more troubling—of an opera than Vêpres to me and I wrote a whole thing here as to why. I still stand by most of it, although upon reflection, I feel like the ending that drove me so crazy has virtually the exact same idea behind it as the end of Troyens/Book IV of the Aeneid: empire has consequences and those consequences hurt real people, who, though different and not among those perceived as “heroic”, are worthy of being treated as human, not being collateral damage. (I’ve written at least two essays about this for different classes, both specifically in regards to the Aeneid.) It may be time to revisit this one. The score is lovely, after all, although it didn’t stand out to me as much as others by Meyerbeer.

1867, Verdi: Don Carlos: *holds myself back from writing a 10-page essay* y’all, there is a reason that when someone asks me what my favorite opera is, I always choose this one even though I’m horrible at favorites questions. it’s Verdi, grand opéra, romantic drama (SO MUCH romantic drama and SO MUCH gay), political drama, religious/social struggle, personal struggle, social commentary, spectacle, intimacy, masterful characterization all in one. what more could you want? I first saw/heard this opera in Italian long before I did in French, so my brain is more hardwired to hearing the Italian but both are good. my motto is “Italian or French, I don’t care, but Fontainebleau has to be there.” fuck the four-act version. I mean, I will watch four-act versions but five-act versions are just superior. I’d prefer uncut performances (the first part of the garden, the Lacrimosa, the extended opening and ending), but these aren’t dealbreakers for me. it’s the perfect synthesis of Verdi and grand opéra, much less unwieldy than Vêpres (as much I love that one), both musically and dramatically.

1868, Thomas: Hamlet: Part of me wishes this was more faithful to the actual source play (why??? the??? fuck??? does??? Hamlet??? live??? although there are alternate endings), but part of me also realizes that the play is already four hours long as is and singing it plus ballet would make it WAY too fucking long. This does a pretty respectable job. The music is gorgeous, by turns almost sugary-sweet and thrillingly ominous. The Murder of Gonzago scene is an absolute masterpiece. The Mad Scene is justifiably one of opera’s best (although I’m not sure it was a good idea to have that and a frequently-cut 20-minute ballet with no relation whatsoever to the main plot to make up all of Act IV). There are a lot of bops in this one. The four principals are closely followed and still very well-drawn. Both of the stagings I have seen were excellent. An underrated opera.

1869 (grand opéra version), Gounod: Faust: Another of my absolute favorite operas. Since this existed for a decade before its transformation into the grand opéra we all know and love, I won’t comment much about its actual format and adherence to grand opéra tropes aside from saying the Walpurgisnacht ballet is one of grand opéra’s best and extremely good at giving off Vibes TM. I used to hate how the character of Faust was written and thought he was incredibly boring. Not anymore (although of course, I still hate him as a person. fuck him tbh). This opera has a reputation for being saccharine and old-fashioned and I think that’s a bunch of garbage right there. It’s about the search for eternal youth and the expectations of conforming to social values and people’s struggles with themselves when a) they “fall short” and b) when the world ostracizes them for being “different” and “out of line”. I am also firmly convinced that Marguerite is the real protagonist of Faust (like how I’m convinced that Valentine is the protagonist of Les Huguenots if there even is a singular protagonist in that opera but I digress). The music slaps. People need to stop cutting whole scenes out of this. I’m still undecided on the order of the church and square scenes of Act IV. Marguerite and Siébel just need everything good in this world.

Anyway, those are my two cents! I tried to keep these pretty short, so if y’all want any follow-ups, let me know!

[eurosong]

Undo my ESC '21 (semi-final two)

Good afternoon folks, and welcome to the second part of Undo my ESC – my annual quest to make the year’s Eurovision better (at least, for me xD) by making a feasible change in each country – it could be something as small as altering a lyric or a staging detail, or as big as a different artist entirely winning the NF. Semi-final one was here so let's jump straight into SF2!

🇸🇲 San Marino: We're thrown into the deep end here with a fan fav that doesn't do at all for me. I'm one of maybe 5 people on the planet who prefers Freaky by far, I guess? I'm happy for Senhit to be getting so much love and for the diminutive serene republic to finally have a shot at a good result - but I'm not so keen on the way it's been done. There's a bit of cognitive dissonance for me because my favourite thing about Adrenalina is Flo Rida's rap, but I don't like the idea of bringing in famed American artists like "ringers" to elevate a song above one with "only" local talent. I would be so tempted to give the rap part to local artist IROL instead to spit some hot bars in Italian.

🇪🇪 Estonia: I had hope this year, I really did, for my era of absolutely adoring Estonia at ESC to be revived after 4 painful years. There were so many good songs at this year's Eesti Laul, like those of Ivo Linna, Egert, Gram of fun, Heleza - but ultimately, my huge favourite was, as expected, Jüri Pootsmann. Anyone who followed this blog back in 2016 knows how much I adore Jüri and was desperate to see him get a redemption arc at ESC itself. Magus melanhoolia was one of the best songs of the season for me and one of the best stagings. As much as I prefer '20 artists to get their shot in '21, problematic Uku with his toxic ex vibes song will have to step aside and let the Jüri renaissance happen here.

🇨🇿 Czechia: I really dig Benny Cristo - he has personality, presence and his own enjoyable style. At first I was kinda disappointed with Omaga because I was expecting something more in the vein of Kemama, with more pronounced Afrobeat influences. But it has grown on me a lot too. My change? Add more Czech than just one blink-and-you-miss-it line, mate! (Article continues below)

🇬🇷 Greece: I see this being talked up as potential televote top 3 and I just don't get it. Maybe it's the way the chorus rhymes dance with itself three times (and uses the term rockin' romance unironically); maybe it's the way that there are better 80s-inspired songs both in ESC and many fallen tributes in the NF season... it just leaves me cold. I actually preferred Supergirl and my change would be for Stefania to bring something with some actual Greek flair.

🇦🇹 Austria: I’ll echo what I said last year about Österreich – how did they go from Conchita to a guy who wished he wouldn’t have gay kids like this? I find both of this guy's songs insipid in different ways and I would invite Pænda back instead to avenge her getting robbed with the beautiful Limits. Or give a second shot at glory to the incredible Cesár!

🇵🇱 Poland: Unpopular opinion, but I absolutely love The Ride, and I feel bad for Alicja, but I much prefer it to Empires. What started as an ironic fondness for Rafał's cringy uncle vibes ended up being genuine appreciation - it's one of the few 80s-inspired songs that sound like they actually could have come out of that decade rather than like modern pastiches. And Raf actually does have an awkward charisma. My change - insert some Polish! Poland does so well with natural sounding bilingual efforts in JESC, they should bring it to the main contest too!

🇲🇩 Moldova: I was lowkey prepared to be disappointed by Moldova - I actually enjoyed Prison a lot and the news that they were going in a completely different direction didn't sit so well with me. And yet, I also love Sugar. Natalia's power! My changes: get rid of that weird scene with literally egg on her face - too on the nose for me. And incorporate a bit of the stellar Russian translation, Tuz bubi, because I'm always going to be advocating for more linguistic diversity xD

🇮🇸 Iceland: Daði Freyr can literally do no wrong with me. Whilst it doesn't have the same intense extra-fandom hype that Think about things did, I think I like Ten years even more. Nothing to change here.

🇷🇸 Serbia: It's no secret that Hurricane were far from my favourites at Beovizija 20, and that I find this a downgrade for Sanja compared to her powerful '16 song. And yet... Hasta la vista grew on me a lot, and so has Loco loco. It's something that is definitely scratching an itch at this year's ESC and the burst of anarchic energy it'll provide will be amazing. I am seriously tempted to change to the acoustic version, though, which has all the attitude of the original but is more beautiful for me and lets the girls' voices shine more.

🇬🇪 Georgia: Georgia keeps serving acquired tastes, and as a patron saint of marginal genres and I love them for that. This year, they've gone for something that even many fans of Tornike find hard to swallow - gone is the roaring rock of last year, replaced with a much more contemplative, soft effort that reminds me a little of Lou Reed. I enjoy both songs, but I can't deny preferring 2020. At the same time, I admire the chutzpah required to send something so different. I just wish there could be a moment to properly showcase T's powerhouse vocals.

🇦🇱 Albania: It was an odd Festival i këngës this year, outdoors in the freezing cold and without the orchestra that makes the songs soar so much more for me. Karma is a perfectly respectable winner, albeit one that lacks the immediacy and rawness of Shaj, Ktheju tokës and Mall. In my ideal alternate reälity, Arilena Ara would have been invited back. She'd bring a song as beautiful as Shaj - and not do a revamp into English that removes its edge this time.

🇵🇹 Portugal: 2015-2020 was a full on Portugal stan era for me. I want to believe that this year is an aberration and that in 2022, our lusitanian neighbours will produce the goods once again. Because ending a colossal streak of not sending songs that don't include Portuguese for this? I am baffled. I wanted the anthemic Joana do mar, produced beautifully by Luísa Sobral, or the timeless Contramão, which sounds like it escaped a Nouvelle Vague soundtrack. Saudade, Por um triz or a number of others would have been grand too.

🇧🇬 Bulgaria: I wasn't expecting much from Bulgaria - I really didn't and don't like TGS and the majority of songs in Victoria's NF-but-not-really aren't my cup of tea. I was happy she got her second chance, but resigned to not liking the song much that would get picked. And then, my fav, which was last in many community ratings, ended up being her pick. I adore GUIGO and believe it has the possibility to do very, very well at Rotterdam and be one of the 'moments' of the evening.

🇫🇮 Finland: CRIMINAL how YLE treated Aksel - it felt like he wasn't the defending champion, and that Erika Vikman had won the previous year. They also - I believe, deliberately - split his vote by making his just one of a number of ballads, so of course what stood out most were the two decidedly non-ballady songs. Finland only two years ago had a single-artist UMK. They could and should have brought it back for Aksel. I'd hope Hurt would win it, because that song is stunning.

🇱🇻 Latvia: I was, and am, delighted that Latvia stuck with Samanta Tina. The lady lives and breathes ESC, even wrote a university thesis about it, and if she tried so many times, finally won and then DIDN'T get to go to ESC, I would have gone to LTV headquarters personally to remonstrate. I really like both her songs. The moon is rising is poised, powerful and like nothing else this year. The only thing I'd change is adding some Latvian because it's a gorgeous language and we've been waiting for ages to hear it again.

🇨🇭 Switzerland: Gjon's song is once again not really my cup of tea, or tears - but I enjoy it better than last year's and I'm glad he's back. Highkey wish it did include Albanian or Romansch like confused commenters last year thought it did.

🇩🇰 Denmark: There is literally no excuse for Denmark's treatment of Ben & Tan. I'm not even a big fan of their music at all, out to not even allow them to compete in DMGP to defend their win with Iron heart? Even though there are songs that competed in DMGP that I prefer a lot, most notably Står lige her, I would probably have let them have a proper second chance.

And the automatic qualifiers voting in this semi -

🇫🇷 France: For me, France had an absolutely enthralling, sincere, perfectly Gallic entry that hit me so hard in the feels. And whilst I respect Voilà, no, that wasn't it. It was Pourvu qu'on m'aime, easily one of the best songs I heard all year inside NFs or out. I find Voilà a little too mannered and affected, whilst PQM is a shot straight from Juliette's heart into mine. In my dream, it'd have won CVQD and be receiving the same love that Voilà is right now.

🇪🇸 Spain: Whilst it is getting next to no love in the fandom and seems quite forgotten, I find Voy a quedarme one of the best songs sent from this country in several years - and I say that having preferred Memoria. I am proud of Blas and love that he had a hand in writing this song. My change? He said recently that the staging in Rotterdam won't be inspired by the poignant music video despite wanting it to be - I would incorporate elements from it in the live.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom: Frankly, I think almost all the Big 5+1 brought it this year, with the notable exception of Germany. Embers is the banger that I never thought was coming from James Newman, and it's been one of the biggest earworms of the season. I wouldn't change anything about it - I'd just ensure that the staging replicated the energy of the video as much as possible!

[aces-to-apples]

Applefic Masterlist

Sorted by wordcount within fandom, with summaries, chapters, ratings, and notable tags included, all under the cut. Bundled by series when applicable.

AO3: TheAceApples

Ko-Fi: acestoapples

Up-to-date as of January 2, 2021

Red vs. Blue

“Haat Verd”, Rating: Teen, Crossover: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Words: 5980, Chapters: 2/?

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Trooper/Trooper Relationships

- Work Summary -

Barriss Offee took a right turn when before she might have taken a left, everything changes, and six years into the Clone Wars, the 501st and the 212th find themselves in a strange temple with no way out.

At the end of "Test Your Might", Caboose isn't the only one to step back out of the Testing Grounds.

“Unfortunate Luck”, Rating: Explicit, Words: 3614, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Locus | Samuel Ortez/Lavernius Tucker, Post-Season 13, Not Season 15 Compliant, Sex-Pollen, Temple of Procreation, Oral Sex, Blow Jobs, Hand Jobs, Unsafe Sex

- Work Summary -

Somebody accidentally activates the Temple of Procreation.

Tucker and Locus reap the benefits.

“swap meet” series, Highest Rating: Teen, Words: 5130, Works: 3, Latest Work Chapters: 1/3

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Role-Swap, Simulation Trooper!Sam, Mercenary!Tucker

- Series Summary -

Prompt by Norcumi: Role swap! Locus ended up a sim soldier, and Tucker somehow ended up a merc

“Lost Relic”, Fusion AU: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Rating: Teen, Words: 1636, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Non-Graphic Violence, Implied Sexual Assault

- Work Summary -

The aftermath of a quest for a hammer and two groups of very interesting people.

“A Planet Named After A Song”, Rating: Teen, Words: 1593, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Alternate Season 11, No Chorus, Background Relationship Agent Ohio/Sherry

- Work Summary -

"Colorful Space Marines Convicted of Corruption"

It takes Carolina considerably longer than ten seconds to calm down after she sees it.

“Where Sleepy Dragons Lie”, Fusion AU: Sword Art Online, Rating: Teen, Words: 1428, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Locus | Samuel Ortez/Lavernius Tucker, dragon!Tucker

- Work Summary -

Blood Gulch Online has glitched—yet a-fucking-gain—and now Tucker is a motherfucking dragon. He's not exactly upset by this development.

“where there’s poison, there’s a remedy” series, Highest Rating: Teen, Words: 2615, Works: 2, Latest Work Chapters: 1/5

Notable Tags: Time-Travel, Alternate Season 15 Ending

- Series Summary -

Nobody notices a shimmer in the air when there’s a portal to the past and a dead man staring them in the face.

“Attentive Listening”, Rating: Teen, Words: 1237, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Locus | Samuel Ortez/Lavernius Tucker, Slice of Life, Miscommunication, Post-Season 13, Not Season 15 Compliant

- Work Summary -

@izzybutt prompted: “And that’s how I ended up standing naked on the Brooklyn Bridge on Christmas Eve.”

“simmons says”, Rating: Teen, Words: 1183, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Dick Simmons/Agent Washington, Genderbending, fem!Agent Washington, Post-Season 13, Pre-Season 15, Fluff

- Work Summary -

Two nerds doing nerd things.

“Cognitive Dissonance”, Rating: Teen, Words: 724, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Humor, Original Characters, Genderqueer Character(s)

- Work Summary -

Some Federal soldiers discover what Locus looks like under his helmet and have a hard time coping.

“Deux Décimales Zéro”, Rating: Teen, Words: 665, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bilingual Tucker

- Work Summary -

Lopez Dos.0 doesn't speak Spanish, and neither does Tucker.

“fluffy and sweet”, Rating: General, Words: 598, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Franklin Delano Donut/Lavernius Tucker, Post-Season 13, Pre-Season 15, Coping Mechanisms, Off-Screen Character Death

- Work Summary -

Some things you don’t just get over, and people have a lot of different ways of dealing with trauma.

“Are you drunk?”, Rating: Teen, Words: 561, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Slice of Life, Freelancer Shenanigans, Pranks and Practical Jokes

- Work Summary -

@randomalfonso asked: “if you’re still up for the short fics, how about York and Wyoming with the drunk one?”

“missed connections (and other tragedies)”, Rating: Teen, Words: 285, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Agent Carolina/Agent York, Time-Travel, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Bittersweet

- Work Summary -

Sometimes the universe gets things out of order.

“burning love”, Rating: Teen, Words: 231, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Locus | Samuel Ortez/Lavernius Tucker, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Self-Harm

Star Wars

“king of the damned” series, Highest Rating: Mature, Words: 15,710, Works: 3, Latest Chapters: 3/?

Notable Tags: CT-5597 | Jesse/Kix, CT-5597 | Jesse/Darth Maul, CT-7567 | Rex & Ahsoka Tano, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Mind Rape, Memory Manipulation, Implied Sexual Roleplay, Mind Control, Order 66, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Untranslated Mando’a, Fix-It Of Sorts, CT-5597 | Jesse Lives, Obsessive Behavior, Possessive Behavior, Weird Power Dynamics, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Trauma Bonding, That’s Not How The Force Works, Force-Sensitive Jesse, Dark Side Jesse, Enemies To Reluctant Allies, POV Outsider, Grief/Mourning, Obi-Wan’s Final Message, Mentioned Alpha-17/CT-5597 | Jesse, Tumblr Ask Box Fic

- Series Summary -

Sometimes, bad guys make the best good guys...

“Codywan Week 2020″ series, Highest Rating: Mature, Words: 10,115, Works: 7

Notable Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Blood and Injury, Concussions, Mandalorian Culture, Fix-It of Sorts, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dehumanization, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, clone culture, time-travel, Canon-Typical Awful Treatment of Clones, Discussions of Murder, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Implied/Referenced Future Rexsoka, Fae & Fairies, Changeling Cody, Discussions of Child Murder, Emperor Cody, Sith Cody, force-sensitive cody

“A Non-Comprehensive Guide To Force-Sensitivity” series, Highest Rating: Teen, Words: 9074, Works: 2

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Not A Jedi!Obi-Wan, Not A Sith!Maul, Families of Choice, Found Family, Mandalorian!Maul, Skywalker Family Shenanigans, canon timeline what canon timeline, Force Shenanigans, Tatooine Slave Culture, Referenced Satine Kryze/Darth Maul, Referenced Satine Kryze/Obi-Wan Kenobi, george lucas is a hack, dooku takes qui-gon’s place in the narrative because i like him better

- Series Summary -

Even the Force has its favorites, and sometimes it takes care of them, too.

“got me all beguiled”, Rating: Explicit, Words: 5241, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: CC-2224 | Cody/Anakin Skywalker, CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker, Minor Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Established Relationship, Fuckbuddies, Interrupted Sex, Safe Word Use, Safer Sex, Anal Sex, Threesome - M/M/M, Getting Together, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Polyamory, Dom/sub Undertones, Light Dirty Talk, Oral Sex, Spitroasting, Face-Fucking, Finger Sucking, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Overstimulation

- Work Summary -

Commander Cody and General Skywalker don't have a relationship so much as an agreement. They're both willing to amend it for General Kenobi, though.

“wilderness”, Crossover: Stargate SG-1, Rating: Teen, Words: 5240, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: A Star To Steer By ‘verse, Star Fever, Feral & Savage Opress, Darth Maul & Vala Mal Doran, Goa’uld Atrocities, Sith Atrocities, Referenced Mind Control, Long Author’s Notes

- Work Summary -

Vala is eight years old when she meets her daddy for the very first time; his new wife glares daggers at her when he isn't looking.

She’s thirty when the leaders of the local rebellion drag her from Qetesh’s throne and spend a week beating her to within an inch of even a Goa’uld host’s life.

“Renegade”, Rating: Teen, Words: 4983, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Time-Travel, Original Clone Trooper(s), Post-Umbara, PTSD

- Work Summary -

Noun: a person who deserts a party or cause for another.

“Family Before Honor”, Rating: Teen, Words: 3505, Chapters: 2/3

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, The Deserter AU, Character Death

- Work Summary -

Desertion: an act of leaving military service or duty without the intention of returning.

“half-dozen of the other”, Highest Rating: Mature, Words: 3199, Chapters: 21/21

Notable Tags: Tumblr Ask Box Fic, Canon-Typical Violence, Clone Trooper Reconditioning, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, LARPing, Pre-Canon, Misunderstandings, Miscommunication, Kinks, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Drunken Shenanigans, Morning After, Fae & Fairies, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Strip Poker

- Work Summary -

Six sentence (and a little bit longer) stories prompted over on tumblr. Index inside.

“on your mark”, Rating: Teen, Words: 2118, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Dogma/Darth Maul, Pre-Relationship, Relationship Negotiation, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Vampire!Maul, Past Abuse, Past Dogma/Pong Krell, Discussions of abuse, Anxiety, Autistic Dogma, Stealth Sugar Daddy AU, Non-Graphic Discussions of Blood Drinking, Contracts, Magical Realism, Star Wars Rarepair Exchange Treat

- Work Summary -

Nobody calls them "thralls" anymore.

“omne trium perfectum”, Rating: General, Words: 1903, Chapters: 2/2

Notable Tags: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi/CT-7567 | Rex, CC-5052 | Bly/Kit Fisto/Aayla Secura, Polyamory, Original Clone Trooper(s), Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Non-Traditional Soulmates, Happy Feet AU, Background Trooper/Trooper Relationships

- Work Summary -

The song becomes love.

“war stories”, Rating: Teen, Words: 1569, Chapters: 3/?

Notable Tags: Obi-Wan Kenobi/CT-7567 | Rex, CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi/CT-7567 | Rex, Snapchat AU, Snapchat Format, Tag As I Go, Time-Travel, Bickering 

- Work Summary -

A series of stories, sometimes ongoing and sometimes self-contained, caught on holocamera by ARC Trooper Fives throughout the war.

“new romantics”, Rating: Teen, Words: 1430, Chapters: 2/?

Notable Tags: CT-5597 | Jesse/Darth Maul, Tumblr Ask Box Fic, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks

- Work Summary -

The many AUs of ARC Trooper Jesse and Darth Maul.

“through victory, my chains are broken”, Rating: Teen, Words: 862, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hardcase Lives, Darth Maul & Hardcase

- Work Summary - 

The Death Watch aren’t the ones who find the escape pod.

“Dab’ika Vaar’kara”, Rating: Teen, Words: 810, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Camp Half-Blood, half-baked worldbuilding, Ficlet

- Work Summary - 

anonymous asked: “19 [Summer Camp AU] and 99 [Magical Accidents] with Cody and Rex for the mashup tropes please!” @ anon, I saw your very clever request for a Camp Half-Blood AU and, obviously, I greatly approve.

“cheese and chocolate”, Rating: General, Words: 547, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Fluff, Sick Character, Tumblr Ask Box Fic

- Work Summary -

Cody has the sniffles and Obi-Wan's cooking abilities are limited, but limited to comfort food.

“blue was my favorite color (until i saw you”, Rating: Teen, Words: 401, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Dogma/Hardcase, Force Sensitivity, Force Ghost(s)

- Work Summary -

The aftermath of Umbara.

“it don’t run in our blood”, Rating: General, Words: 383, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Jedi!Satine, Duke!Obi-Wan, Mandalorian!Maul

- Work Summary -

Some things change while others stay the same.

“tentatively abandoned AUs”, Rating: Teen, Words: 4653, Chapters: 4/?

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Skyrim Fusion, Inspired by Anastasia (1997 & Broadway), Time Travel, Alternate Universe - Treasure Planet Fusion, Original Clone Trooper Character(s)

- Work Summary -

WIPs that are pretty much guaranteed to go unfinished at this point.

The Magnificent Seven 2016

“she wore it wonderfully well”, Rating: Mature, Words: 5836, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Emma Cullen/Vasquez, Post-Canon, Wall Sex, Anachronisms

- Work Summary -

The Unconventional And Wholly Unintentional Courtship Of Emma Cullen And Diego Manuel García de Vasquez.

“flux capacity”, Rating: Teen, Words: 3998, Chapters: 5/5

Notable Tags: Joshua Faraday/Vasquez, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Genderqueer Character(s), Bigender Faraday, Genderfuck, shifting pronouns

- Work Summary -

One time Vasquez decided Joanna Faraday wasn’t someone to fuck with, one time Vasquez decided Joshua Faraday might in fact be someone to fuck with, one time Vasquez decided to see if Joshua Faraday had enough room in life for another love, one time Vasquez decided that Joanna Faraday was the craziest person he’d ever met, and one time Vasquez said to Hell with it all.

Or: One introduction, three kisses that weren’t, and the start of a beautiful relationship... of some kind.

“honey, we got your disease”, Fusion AU: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle Movies, Rating: Teen, Words: 3392, Chapters: 1/4

Notable Tags: Joshua Faraday/Vasquez, Goodnight Robicheaux/Billy Rocks, Original Character(s) Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Genderqueer Character(s), Bigender Faraday, Genderqueer Red Harvest, shifting pronouns

- Work Summary -

Jumanji is the bane of Joshua Faraday's fucking existence.

“taste the bright lights”, Rating: Explicit, Words: 2903, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Red Harvest/Vasquez, Post-Canon, Drunk Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Unsafe Sex

- Work Summary -

Red Harvest and Vasquez, after Rose Creek.

“gunpowder and a spark”, Rating: Explicit, Words: 1633, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Teddy Q/Vasquez, Hand Jobs, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot

- Work Summary -

Shooting guns out by yourself is a dangerous business when you're not very good and your crush is visible from space.

“strangers in the dark”, Rating: General, Words: 994, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Red Harvest/Vasquez, Time-Travel, Outsider POV

- Work Summary -

The desert has a strange magic to it, make no mistake.

“melting point”,  Rating: General, Words: 952, Chapters: 1/?

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Leverage Fusion

- Work Summary -

A collection of fusion ficlets and one-shots that otherwise won't leave my brain.

“The Ice Man”, Rating: Teen, Words: 856, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags - Red Harvest/Billy Rocks/Vasquez, Alternate Universe - Leverage Fusion

- Work Summary -

A hitter playing grifter is a bad joke.

A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms

“The Sun, The Moon, And All The Stars”, Fusion AU: Winx Club, Rating: Teen, Words: 9465, Chapters: 3/3

Notable Tags: Crack Treated Seriously, Background Relationships, Pre-Brienne of Tarth/Jaime Lannister, Lannister Family Shenanigans, No Incest, Female Friendships, Genderqueer Character(s), screw canon timeline and screw canon genealogy

- Work Summary -

When the twin heirs of Queen Joanna of the Westerlands are born, the capital planet of Solaris celebrates for nine days and nine nights: three for the princess, three for the prince, and three for each Solarian sun. Soothsayers and sibyls, fortune-tellers and prophets, all agree that the children of the Sun and Moon carry great magical power within them—one shall assuredly become a Guardian Faery of the Western Realm, and the other a great hero like those of old to bring peace to all the Magical Dimension.

On the morning that Queen Joanna’s death is announced, every light and fire in Casterly Rock is extinguished in honor of their beloved queen. It is regarded as the darkest day in the history of the Realm of the Sun. Few revelries are thrown when word spreads that their queen’s last child survives, but some brave souls whisper about the Prince of Stars, whose gentle light echoes that of his mother’s.

“canis lupus familiaris”, Rating: Teen, Words: 987, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Outsider POV, Ambiguous Time-Travel, Ambiguous Greenseeing

- Work Summary -

“Get her a dog, she’ll be happier for it.”

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

“concupisces”, Fusion AU: Fright Night, Rating: Teen, Words: 1347, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Implied Pedophile!Grindelwald

- Work Summary -

For the kinkmeme prompt:

After a new neighbor moved into the house next door, Credence discovers that he is an ancient vampire.

"Percy is a terrible name for a vampire"

“You Play (But Never Games)”, Rating: Unrated, Words: 483, Chapters: 1/?

Notable Tags: Original Percival Graves/Credence Barebone, Vampire!Graves, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat

- Work Summary -

Percival catches a scent.

The Umbrella Academy TV

“look at the way (we gotta hide what we’re doing)”, Rating: Explicit, Words: 3129, Chapters: 1/2

Notable Tags: Diego Hargreeves/Vanya Hargreeves, Pseudo-Incest, Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Canon, Mentioned Ben/Klaus, Mentioned Allison/Luther, Netflix/Comic Fusion

- Work Summary -

Nothing is the same when they get back.

(One thing is the same when they get back.)

BBC’s The Musketeers 2014

“lives not lived”, Rating: Teen, Words: 926, Chapters: 2/?

Notable Tags: Ana de Austria | Anne d’Autriche/Porthos du Vallon, Original Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence

- Work Summary -

Various AU ficlets.

Ch. 1: 1x02, "Sleight of Hand", canon divergence Ch. 2: pre-show canon divergence

Kingdoms of Amalur

“calcified hearts”, Rating: Teen, Words: 655, Chapters: 1/1

Notable Tags: Fateless One & Famor | Bloody Bones, Genderqueer Character(s), Neopronouns

- Work Summary -

Why struggle against Fate when it is so easily shifted?

[wearejapanese]

hi do you guys know any Japanese politics podcast/YouTube channels/ websites in English? trying to be more informed but I really don't have the language skills to be interacting with such heavy material in Japanese

Unfortunately, hardly any good English language content about Japanese politics is circulated in non-newspaper formats because much of it is filtered through non-Japanese journalists (through websites like the Japan Times or NHK’s International division) who may not always have the best grasp on what is actually happening in Japan (This is why you’ll often notice that many expats in Japan report very different assessments than their Japanese counterparts. They literally get different news).

I’d say your best bet is probably to read the English versions of the following papers: the Nikkei Asian Review , Asahi Shimbun, and The Mainichi .  Pay close attention to who is writing about what and when non-Japanese correspondents are used v. Japanese correspondents. The labor pool for bilingual journalists in Japan is quite small, so, unfortunately, there’s tremendous variation in the quality of English language correspondents in Japan. Here’s the breakdown:

Nikkei is basically the Economist. They have excellent journalists, but focus mostly politics when relevant to the economy. (They have a paywall)

Asahi is left-wing and prone to sloppy reporting (rather like Vox and Vice in the US).

Mainichi focuses on domestic issues and is also not as diligent as Nikkei. 

Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s center-right newspaper with the largest circulation (both in Japan and worldwide) is behind The Japan Times, propagating the whole “News for Outsiders v. News for Japanese people” dissonance I was talking about earlier.

Finally, though they focus on international affairs, NHK International‘s online radio program covers domestic issues. NHK World-Japan does a livestream of domestic news that is subtitled by AI in six langauges (Chinese, French, Spanish, Thai and Vietnamese), plus English.

In terms of foreign newspapers, Al-Jazeera does great reporting on Japanese politics. I have a pretty low opinion of most American and British news sources when it comes to Japanese politics. They tend to re-confirm stereotypes people in both of those countries have about Japan. Most of these stereotypes are harmless, but it’s mediocre reporting.

Honorable mention:

I know the youtube channel Asian Boss is popular for their handling of Japanese political issues, and while I appreciate their easy accessibility and attempts to engage with younger audiences, I personally think their reporters pull their punches when covering Japan. To their credit, they are clear that they are an amateur news network, but it really shows.

- Saitō

[beaboutitpress]

SONG: LOS ANGELES   BAND: X     PLACE: LONG BEACH YEAR: 1980 by Peggy Morrison

What’s a song that you listen to in order to remember something? That’s what we asked our writers for this edition of Be About It zine, and we are loving the responses we got. Check out this entry from Peggy Morrison!

SONG: LOS ANGELES   BAND: X     PLACE: LONG BEACH YEAR: 1980

I had heard this other kind of music that I was attracted to because it was full of rash, urgent energy I asked this bassist I knew, Steve, where was it? Where could I hear more of it? He told me it was punk and I could hear it every week on Rodney's show; I forget the name of the radio station.   I had an upstairs apartment on the West Side of Long Beach. I met Patti through her boyfriend, Alan. She had platinum hair in a short, asymmetical cut, a swashbuckling way of walking and bold red lips. She needed to get away from her alcoholic mother and I had a two-bedroom place. Patti's friends were a gaggle of buzz-cut teenagers in kilts and leather and safety pins   Punk clubs Long Beach, downtown LA, Hollywood, Redondo Beach I was in the mosh pit jumping in time with the noise; shot tons of pushed tri-x film, published the pictures in local rags and zines and gave them to the bands for the 45 and LP covers   Went to shows or made shows happen and partied after hours I was in the Strong Silent types. We practiced obsessively in a cheap rented rehearsal space. My role was to screech, howl and hum backup choruses to Crystal's deep-voice, epic lead singing, plus, I played the flute, X's album came out: The world's a mess; it's in my kiss   Everybody knew each other. Fast-moving. never planning where to end up or when to go home, It was non-stop. We had to go out almost every night just to be there when our friends played. We were a milling herd   She had to get out, get out get out, get out   I was taking classes at CSULB to get my teaching credential and become a "citizen" -- get my first legit job. I was in the placement office of the university looking at the job advertisements. I wanted to get out of the city and be a teacher in a small town in California. In the back of the big three ring binder there was an advertisement for a teaching job in a school in Guatemala. On a reckless whim, I mailed my resume. She had to leave LOS ANGELES   and when they called to offer me the job in Guatemala, I recklessly accepted. It seemed about as far as you could get from Long Beach, about 3000 miles They sent my plane ticket She found it hard to say goodbye to her own best friend It felt strange it felt strange. It felt sad In Guatemala City, en la zona 9, I would go out of the house at night and walk around in the silence, not knowing what to do with myself, missing the city, missing LA, with Exene and John's dissonant voices ringing in my head   She gets confused 'Cause the days change at night Change in an instant   She had to leave it felt strange it felt sad it felt sad

- Peggy Morrison

Name: Peggy Morrison

Location: Ohlone land, AKA Alameda, CA

Favorite sad song: Never Mind by Nancy Griffin  

Brief Bio:

Peggy Morrison is a California writer who lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, enjoying its creative and fertile literary community.  Her poetry has been published in Cloud Woman Quarterly, riverbabble, Poecology, Let the World Wonder, Naked Bulb Anthology, Day Without Art,  DoorKnobs & BodyPaint. She was honored to be part of the United States delegation to the CubaPoesia International Poetry Festival in La Habana in 2017. Peggy is the author of one book of poetry: Mom Says (2020, https://www.amazon.com/dp/1657735192). Along with poetry Peggy is a mom who loves reading, teaching, gardening, music, and backpacking. And she is a bilingual teacher committed to working for social justice.

[lyonsdenprojects]

The Psychology of Fruits Basket: Momiji

Finally, as promised, today I will talk about the Psychology of Momiji! (Better late than never, right?) Momiji is definitely one of the top most loved characters of the Fruits Basket universe. He is also, fascinatingly, one of the most well-adjusted members of the Zodiac. Continuing with my ongoing theories regarding Tohru and Kyoko’s impacts on the other characters, Tohru acts as a “mom friend” for Momiji, and rather than teaching Momiji vital social skills as with other, she instead grants him the mother-esque validation that Momiji has been seeking.We see this most clearly in episode 14 where we learn his full backstory but the full impact occurs later on in the story. (Spoiler Alert: There will be a very small spoiler for a scene that will likely happen in Season 2 of the anime. This does not spoil any major plot points though and shouldn’t ruin anything for those who haven’t read the manga.) 

It is, admittedly, really surprising how well adjusted Momiji is given that he was shunned by his mother so badly to the point that her memories of him had to be erased. We’ve seen both Kyo and Yuki shunned repeatedly in their lives and they display major adjustment issues. Momiji, however, had many things working in his favor that enabled him to work through this traumatic experience as positively as one could hope to.

Doing the math given his younger sister’s age, Momiji was about 6 or 7 years old when his mother’s memories of him were erased. A child’s relative age can have a huge impact on how they process and adapt to a change in parenting dynamic such as this, including events like divorce, a parent walking out, or a death. It is a theme we see repeatedly in the Fruits Basket series: Tohru’s father dies, Kyo’s mother kills herself, Uo’s mother walks out. Each situation has slightly different elements, however.

In Momiji’s case, he was old enough to have developed an attachment to his mother. Given his love and affection for his mother, as well as his age as described above, my guess is that Momiji’s father attempted to foster acceptance in Momiji’s mother. Momiji’s first language is German after all and even though he is bilingual, we frequently see him miss nuances when describing things in Japanese. Also, 6 - 7 years is an extremely long time to hang on to such an extreme reaction as Momiji describes it. It is most likely that his mother’s rejection grew to that point over time though he may have been to young to remember.

Momiji’s backstory with his mother sheds a lot of light for us on the nature of the Sohma Curse and how it is designed to make the members of the Zodiac entirely reliant on the head of the house which in this generation is Akito. I promise, this isn’t a spoiler because it’s never explicitly stated this way (to my recollection). But watching this episode, some pieces clicked into place in my mind. Until now the narrative paints the curse as more light hearted with cute animal transformations. In episode 14, however, Momiji reveals how it is typical for the mother’s of Zodiac children to either completely reject the child or become overly protective of the child (as we see with Kyo’s mother) due to the fact that the male children immediately transform when held by their mothers. This could feasibly create a cognitive dissonance in the mother due to having a son she could not embrace or in anyway relate too. For Momiji’s mother, we see this ultimately lead to a suicide attempt.

I’ve discussed many times before, especially in Kyo’s post, the importance of touch and parental figures in childhood development. If a large part of the Sohma Curse alienates the male child from what traditionally in Japanese culture was the main parental figure (I’m purposely leaving out the 3 female Zodiac members for now), then Zodiac children will need to rely on either the second parental figure OR a surrogate parental figure such as the head of the household. We get peeks throughout the story at how traditions and estate planning within the Sohma clan facilitate the Zodiac children migrating eventually towards staying within the “inside” of the central compound.

However, Momiji is blessed to have a very strong and loving relationship with his father, even with the given circumstances. His father made a point of communicating clearly and appropriately with him about what was happening with his mother rather than keeping it a secret or sugar coating the experience for him.  Momiji was able to develop really strong protective and caring personality traits that his father modeled for him. Momiji thus had a strong support system in just the single parent and has no need for a surrogate father figure in Akito. (Though it is also worth pointing out that the loss of his mother and subsequent need to pretend he’s not his father’s child when she’s around likely resulted in his more childish acting out traits such as presenting as younger than his actual age despite being fairly worldly.  

Tohru, having learned great empathy for the plight of others from Kyoko, is able to grant Momiji the only piece he was secretly yearning, acceptance from a mother-like figure. Not to say that she is his replacement mother, simply that she gives him the validation that he missed from his actual mother, she accepts his sadness, confirms that it is ok to be sad, and confirms that none of the circumstance is his fault. It may be such a small thing, but this sets Momiji up for the small conflict we see between him and Akito later on when we learn that Momiji is not one of the favored Zodiac members. As I’ve mentioned, this will likely show up in Season 2.

The juggling of children’s welfare during a family upheaval is hard, without a doubt. It is not something that I envy any parent having to cope with in addition to their own emotional welfare during such a time. It is my hope that by sharing some of this perspective on the psychological side of child development, as illustrated in media, that my readers can gain some insight. I encourage anyone going through such a transition to feel comfortable searching to assistance and support. A good website on the topic of children and divorce can be found at this link.

Until next time!

[chimeraofeloquence]

Russian prefixes (1/3)

Hey, I decided to make posts about all these prefixes (btw, there`re 70 in total), with examples and significations, to help you understand how meaning of the word changes with its parts (or to confuse you even more). Word formation is what truly makes language learning so much easier and more exciting, isn`t it?

As they teach it in schools, there`re three types of prefixes in Russian language (classified by spelling). Therefore, I`ll make three posts about each type. If you believe that I missed something or if you have any doubt or question, feel free to say it.

part 2 | part 3

[m. stands for meaning, ex. for example] [first of the verbs pair is perfect, the other is imperfect] [outdated and most borrowed prefixes are usually not marked out in most words]

Неизменяемые — Unchanged

The easiest ones. You always write those in the same way — simply as they are.

В-/ВО- : m. into, in, inside; ex. войти́/входи́ть (v) (to come in), вокрýг (adv) (around), вложéние (n) (input), вдýмчивый (adj) (thoughtful)

ВНЕ- : m. out, exo-; ex. внеплáновость (n) (unscheduledness; out of plan),  внеземно́й (adj) (extraterrestrial)

ВНУТРИ- : m. inside, within, intra-; ex. внутриве́нный (adj) (intravenous)

ВСЕ- : m. all, every, whole; ex. всезнáйка (n) (know-it-all, wise guy), всеми́рный (adj) (worldwide)

ВЫ- : m. out, off; ex. вы́йти/выходи́ть (v) (to go out), вы́бор (n) (choice), вы́чурный (adj) (pretentious)

ДО- : m. until, before; ex. дойти́/доходи́ть (v) (to reach /destination/, to come), добелá (adv) (/until sth is/ white-hot), достижéние (n) (achievement), доистори́ческий (adj) (prehistoric)

ЗА- : m. over, behind; ex. зайти́/заходи́ть (v) (to come in), заоднó (adv) (at one, together with), зака́т (n) (sunset), зама́нчивый (adj) (tempting)

ИСПОД- : m. from under; ex. исподтишка́ (adv) (stealthily), исподлóбья (adv) (sullenly /lit. from under forehead/)

КОЕ- : m. some; ex. кое-чтó (pr) (something /particular/), кое-где́  (pr) (somewhere /particular/)

МЕЖ-/МЕЖДО-/МЕЖДУ- : m. between; ex. междуре́чье (n) (interfluve), межвидовóй (adj) (interspecific)

НА- : m. on, upon, to; ex. найти́/находи́ть (to find, to discover), наси́льно (adv) (by force), наза́д (adv) (backward), напóр (n) (pressure), напряжённый (adj) (tense)

НАД-/НАДО- : m. upon, beyond; ex. надме́нно (adv) (arrogantly), надзóр (n) (supervision), надстрóчный (adj) (superscript), надтре́снутый (participle) (cracked /a little/)

НАИ- : m. the most /makes a stronger superlative/; ex. наиме́нее (adv) (the least), наилýчший (adj) (the very best)

НЕ- : m. not, non-, un-; ex. неторопли́во (adv) (slowly, unhurriedly), неве́рность (n) (disloyalty), неблагода́рный (adj) (ungrateful)

НЕДО- : m. under, not enough; ex. недоста́точно (adv) (not enough), недобóр (n) (shortfall), недонóшенный (participle) (premature /baby/)

НИ- : m. no-; ex. ника́к (adv) (no way, nohow), ниче́й (adj) (nobody`s)

О-/ОБ-/ОБО- : m. over, close to, to make, …; ex. обойти́/обходи́ть (v) (to bypass, to get around), обы́чно (adv) (usually), оплóшность (n) (mis-step, oversight), осторóжный (adj) (careful)

ОКОЛО- : m. near, close to, around; ex. о̀колоцве́тник (n) (perianth), о̀колонау́чный (adj) (near-scientific)

ОТ-/ОТО- : m. off, away, apart; ex. отойти́/отходи́ть (v) (to back off), отстóйно (adv) (lame), отда́ча (n) (recoil), отде́льный (adj) (separate)

ПА- /outdated/ : m. related to/incomplete; ex. па́луба (n) (deck), па́дчерица (step-daughter)

ПЕРЕ- : m. over, cross, trans; ex. перейти́/переходи́ть (v) (to cross), переме́нно (adv) (alternately), переýлок (n) (alleyway), перекрёстный (adj) (cross-), перепóлненный (participle) (overfilled)

ПО- : m. by; ex. пойти́ (v, perf) (to go), поспе́шно (adv) (hurriedly), поте́ха (n) (fun), подрóбный (adj) (detailed)

ПОД-/ПОДО- : m. under; ex. подо��ти́/подходи́ть (v) (to come up), подчинённый (adj/n) (subordinate),

ПОЗА- : m. before; ex. позавчера́ (n) (the day before yesterday), позапрóшлый (adj) (before the last /time/)

ПОСЛЕ- : m. after; ex. послеза́втра (n) (the day after tomorrow), по̀слесле́дующий (adj) (after next /time/)

ПРА- : m. grand-, great-, proto-; ex. пра́внук (n) (great-grandson), праязы́к (n) (proto-language)

ПРЕД-/ПРЕДО- : m. before, in front of; ex. предположи́тельно (adv) (presumably), представле́ние (n) (performance), предвари́тельный (adj) (preliminary)

ПРО- : m. through, over, per; ex. пройти́/проходи́ть (v) (to come through, to pass), провóрно (adv) (agilely), прове́рка (n) (test, check), прока́зливый (adj) (puckish)

ПРОТИВО- : m. against, contra; ex. противостоя́ние (n) (confrontation), противоречи́вый (adj) (contradictory)

С-/СО- : m. co-, together, from, with; ex. сойти́/сходи́ть (v) (to come from /upstreirs/), сли́шком (adv) (too /much/), спра́ва (adv) (from left), собра́ние (n) (collection, meeting), сме́жный (adj) (adjacent)

СВЕРХ- : m. upon, super-, hyper-; ex. сверхурóчно (adv) (overtime), сверхси́ла (n) (superpower), сверхъесте́ственный (adj) (supernatural)

СРЕДИ- : m. among, between; ex. Средизе́мье (n) (Middle-Earth), средиземномóрский (adj) (Mediterranean)

СУ- /outdated/ : m. admixture/likeness/with; ex. сýмрачно (adv) (sombrely), сугрóб (n) (snowdrift), сýдорожный (adj) (convulsive)

ТРЕ- /outdated/ : m. three times; ex. трезвóн (n) (peal), трекля́тый (adj) (damned)

У- : m. completely; ex. уйти́/уходи́ть (v) (to leave), успе́шно (adv) (successfully), уби́йство (n) (murder), уста́лый (adj) (tired)

And the borrowed ones:

a) Greek

А-/АН- = a-/an-; ex. ассиметри́я (n) (asymmetry), анома́льный (adj) (abnormal)

ГИПЕР- = hyper-; ex. гиперакти́вный (adj) (hyperactive)

ГИПО- = hypo-; ex. гипотерми́я (n) (hypothermia)

МЕТА- = meta-; ex. метафи́зика (n) (metaphysics)

НЕО- = neo-; ex. неоната́льный (adj) (neonatal)

ОРТО- = ortho-; ex. ортодокса́льный (adj) (orthodox)

ПАН- = pan-; ex. пантео́н (n) (pantheon), пансексуа́л (n) (pansexual)

ПАРА- = para-; ex. паради́гма (n) (paradigm)

ПРОТО- = proto-; ex. прототи́п (n) (prototype)

b) Latin

ИН- = in-; ex. иннова́ционный (adj) (innovative)

КВАЗИ- = quasi-; ex. ква̀зинау́чный (adj) (quasi-scientific)

ПОСТ- = post-; ex. по̀стмодерни́зм (n) (postmodernism)

СУБ- = sub-, semi-; ex. субти́льный (adj) (subtle)

СУПЕР- = super-; ex. су̀перлу́ние (n) (supermoon)

ТРАНС- = trans-; ex. трансгресси́ровать (v) (to transgress, to Apparate)

УЛЬТРА- = ultra-; ex. ультразву́к (n) (ultrasound)

ЭКС- = ex-, ec-; ex. эксцентри́чный (adj) (eccentric)

c) Other

АНТИ- = anti-, dys-; ex. антиуто́пия (n) (dystopia)

АРХИ- = arch-; ex. архипиздри́т (n) (cunt-chaser /rare and strong swear word/), архисло́жный (adj) (very complicated)

БИ- = bi-; ex. билингви́зм (n) (bilingualism)

ВИЦЕ- = vice-; ex. ви́це-губерна́тор (n) (vice-governor)

ДЕ-/ДЕЗ- = de-; ex. дезодора́нт (n) (deodorant), демонти́ровать (v) (dismantle)

ДИС- = dis-, dys-; ex. диссона́нс (n) (dissonance)

ИР- = ir-; ex. иррациона́льный (adj) (irrational)

КОНТР- = contra-; ex. контраба́нда (n) (smuggling)

МАКРО- = macro-; ex. ма̀кроу́ровень (n) (macrolevel)

МИКРО- = micro-; ex. микроволно́вка (n) (microwave oven)

ОБЕР- = chief, master, first; ex. о̀бер-прокуро́р (n) (chief procurator)

ПСЕВДО- = pseudo-; ex. псевдони́м (n) (pen name, pseudonym)

РЕ- = re-; ex. регенери́ровать (v) (to regenerate)

ЭКЗО- = exo-; ex. экзоге́нный (adj) (exogenous, environmental)

ЭКСТРА- = exstr-; ex. экстраве́рт (n) (extrovert)

[crazed-rambling]

Day 27 Language

“Kevin isn’t this a little much?” No in fact he did not think this was a little much, this was in fact a perfectly reasonable response to the problem at hand. It just so happened to look slightly suspicious without the full explanation.

“No! He is possessed and we are not taking any chances.”

“Is he though?”

“Am I though?”

“Shut up you!” he didn’t have to take this from a demon “And give me my friend back!” All he wanted was Matt back and then they could go on with their lives and he could ignore this whole mess. Well if he was gonna get everything he wanted, he would also like to tear the demon out from under his skin and hurt it for ever thinking it could take anything from Matt. It was only the fact that this creature was in Matt’s body that he stayed his hands. He wondered what Mark might think, hearing these thoughts? He’d always been the softer of them and Kevin had worked hard to shield him from the worst of himself. Demons would not get the same curtesy.

“Look, do you have any proof that he’s possessed?”

“He was speaking in tongues.” Start with the classic sign of possession. A good move, safe and easy to explain. Also, if he doesn’t believe possession talking gibberish is a sign of madness so he could still convince Mark something was wrong.

“He’s bilingual.” Never mind, he forgot he was friends with the dumbest of bitches.

“I know what Spanish sounds like Mark. That was not fucking Spanish.”

“I’m pretty sure it was.” It was actually becoming uncomfortable to hear Matt’s voice in this scenario, something he’d always associated with safety was clashing with the knowledge that this was not his friend. The dissonance of the feelings getting louder with each word spoken.

“You don’t count as a witness. You’re possessed.”

“Anything else?”

“He stabbed a guy!” Probably should have led with that argument if he was perfectly honest but he was stressed so it’s not his fault.

“That just doesn’t sound like something he’d do. Look at him.” That was the thing, he was looking at him and all he saw was the way that this creature had twisted Matt’s face in ways he never did. Nothing that could give him away as inhuman but every little detail screamed not Matt, even as he used his face to try and manipulate them both.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Contact Zone and the Family

By Aaron Homem 

July 26, 2018. Portugal. It’s around seven at night, but it couldn’t feel any later - the lack of air conditioning and overwhelming heat has brought on both nausea and exhaustion. Around an extended aluminum table, I have within my reach every possible meat product that I can possibly name: cow, goat, pig, followed by numerous other “mystery meats.” A Super Bock in hand, or was it a Sagres? Didn’t matter the name, I drank. Everyone at the table was family, what did it matter if I had one, two, or three beers. This was an easy alternative to making an unsuccessful conversation; they all speak Portuguese, and each movement of their lips registered as secrets that I couldn’t latch onto. So I kept drinking. Across the table, I caught my cousin David (pronounced Da-veed) condescendingly speaking in my direction, as if I was a newborn with no conscious idea of what was taking place. His words left his mouth like rapidfire, but I could only make out a single word: Spielberg. My mother did love telling people that her son was an aspiring film major, so David’s attempt to connect with me by speaking about film didn’t exactly go over my head. 

Still, all I did was nod. 

I can acknowledge that there was an attempt by my monolingual Portuguese speaking cousin to form a relationship with me, a monolingual English speaker, but even then I didn’t feel a connection. How could a relationship exist on the basis of only occasionally understanding each other? The language barrier was not an abstract concept, but a tangible obstacle that wasn’t going to be easily overcome: at least not in the present moment. With language being an inherent factor in my inability to relate with my Portuguese family, I will use this paper to dissect a single major question: how does being monolingual (English speaking) affect my ability to form a relationship with my monolingual (Portuguese speaking) family?

To grapple with the natural separating factor brought upon by language, I use Stanford Professor Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone,” which she originated in the article “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Pratt’s term is used to refer to “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 4).  Using a two-part historical letter to Spanish King Philip III - New Chronicle and Good Government by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (or simply Guaman Poma), an account of an indigenous Inca’s view of Spanish conquest of Peru - Pratt systematically furthers her definition of a contact zone. Poma’s letter is uniquely written in two languages (Spanish and Quechua), with Poma using “the official Spanish genre for his own ends” as a way to address both his own community, and that of the metropolitan Spanish Community (Pratt 4). In the first part of the letter, Poma rewrote Christian history with the Incans rather than Europeans at the forefront of the narrative; the New Chronicle is what Pratt identifies as an autoethnographic text, in which people (in this case Poma) “describe themselves in ways that engage with representations that others have made of them” (Pratt 5). 

These texts are constructed “in response to” representations of the subjugated culture (the Incas) by the conqueror (the Spanish), merging the indigenous language and customs to intervene in the typical “metropolitan modes of understanding” (Pratt 6). While autoethnography is seen as a literary art of the contact zone by Pratt - along with transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, etc - she stressed that miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning are “some of the perils of writing in the contact zone” (Pratt 11). Pratt, a professor of higher education, is also focused on the concept of “safe spaces,” which “refer to social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, and temporary protection from legacies of oppression” (Pratt 17). These places can foster wisdom and understanding, but also breed misunderstanding and hurt, particularly in relation to the classroom setting. Although Pratt is mainly focused on the contact zone in relationship with higher education, Oxford professor James Clifford expands Pratt’s original idea to include “cultural tensions within the same state, region, or city” (qtd. in O’Connell 850). Working from this principle, the dinner table setting is another way to explore “culture tension” relating to the intersectionality of language and identity. Furthermore, location (Portugal) can now act as a greater focal point in illustrating the effects of monolingualism on family relations. 

Neither my cousin nor I (or our family for that matter) verbally defined the unique auditorial roles that we occupied at that moment: but while unspoken, they were actively present. While I won’t speak on behalf of David, I found myself incapable of relating to his identity as Portuguese-speaking, when I was mainly attuned to relating with family, who like me, were self-identified as English-speaking. While Pratt’s concept of autoethnography is based around an inherent historical power struggle - between the subjugated and the metropolitan conqueror - she doesn’t often explore the contact zone on the small scale; the contact zone present not defined by a power struggle, but by comfort and discomfort. Noel Patrick O’Connell, a Sociology professor whose career has focused on the autoethnographic ethnographic study of the lives of deaf people, describes the contact zone between deaf and hearing identities as a “disjuncture” (O’Connell 858); when examining how my cousin and I relate, there is an apparent disjuncture (or tension) caused by who is comfortable and uncomfortable in the given situation. 

Auditorial contact zones, as defined by O’Connell, create an environment (defined by hearing) where people become “consciously aware of their identity” (O’Connell 858). What’s present at this moment of “conscious awareness” is a glaring case of cognitive dissonance for both parties. In Lagahrinhos, Portugal, where the majority (the comfortable) of people speak soley Portuguese, I have become a minority (discomfort) and I can’t possibly expect for anyone to suddenly speak in a language that I would understand. The discomfort arose from my ability to recognize that language, like Pratt insists, doesn’t exist to create a “unified and homogenous social world,” and that it would require more will than I had to cross the language barrier. However, “Spielberg” was an attempt by my cousin to break the disjuncture, perhaps unknowingly, unleashing a torrent of discomfort upon himself. Yet, my cousin’s English wasn’t exactly enough, at least for myself; for me, comfort could only be attained during a full conversation, preferably in my own native language. Being an English-speaking male in English-speaking America has always been an inherent privilege, but having that verbal and auditory privilege stripped away was jarring, even if somewhat expected. This bias manifested itself into the mounting number of beer bottles, remnants of my reluctance to build off the foundation laid out by David. In her essay “Out and About as a Global Citizen” about an English speaker visiting Kenya, Dr. Anu Taranath argues that while we travel to experience “something different,” we are often confronted by our inability to reconcile “what to do with the differences we have found.” My inability to react to David only drove him back from a place of discomfort to a place of comfort, returning to his conversation with the rest of the family: our difference only breeding disconnect.  

Uncomfortable: all I wanted at that moment was some quiet. Even at seventeen I was expected to ask permission before leaving the table. The act left me at my mother’s mercy. Without even looking up from her plate, and giving it to me straight, I knew my request was denied: all she said was “talk.” I mustered a sly response, bluntly telling her the obvious, “I can’t understand them.” Hitting her like a curse, my mother looked me straight in the eyes, and just as bluntly, said “that’s your problem.”

Her eyes returned to her plate.

Without knowing it, my ineptitude at picking up languages, indirectly (and perhaps metaphorically) lead to one of the perils of the contact zone: lost letters. I didn’t let this bother me too much; some people are neurologically better at learning languages, and I didn’t believe I could be blamed as such. However, I found myself confounded when I saw David relating with my younger cousins. For them a relationship was not built on a verbal or auditory level, but on action: simply kicking around a soccer ball earlier was enough to help build a relationship. In referencing the “cultural devastation” that can accompany language loss, Joshua Fishman, who is widely credited for founding the field of sociology of language, stated that “A traditionally associated language is more than just a tool of communication for its culture... [It] is often viewed as a very specific gift, a marker of identity and a specific responsibility vis-à-vis future generations” (qtd. in Haynes 2). Noticeably, my cousins aren’t confronted with this idea of language as a “specific responsibility,” whereas the notion was quite ubiquitous during my own childhood: my loss of the language was its own unique “marker of identity.” Whatever the reason for this phenomenon (and perhaps they were just too young to realize it), they seemingly didn’t have to consider language as a separating factor. However, in my own experience, I have typically found it easier to relate with others on a verbal level. Admittedly, I identify this as a particular flaw in my thinking, but because of my complete assimilation into one culture (English-speaking), I can’t overcome the difficulty in accepting another. Fortunately for my mother, who is bilingual, both English-speaking and Portuguese-speaking cultures act as “safe spaces.” For her, the idea of being Portuguese and American is intrinsically linked to her identity, whereas my only “shared understanding” with my Portuguese relatives is that we are related by blood. Personally, this disconnect is best summarized by John Milton’s Adam, who claimed “solitude sometimes is best society;” instead of embracing the culture around me, I retreated inward, to my own thoughts, to my safe space, defined by the sole language I knew (Paradise Lost XIII. 249-250). 

Work Cited

Haynes, Eric. “What Is Language Loss?” Cal.org, Center for Applied Linguistics, 2010.

www.cal.org/heritage/pdfs/what-is-language-loss.pdf. Accessed 27 Nov. 2019.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Third edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 2017. 

O'Connell, Noel Patrick. “Teaching Irish Sign Language in Contact Zones: An 

Autoethnography.” The Qualitative Report, vol. 22, no. 3, 19 Mar. 2017, pp. 849–867.

nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol22/iss3/11/. Accessed 14 Nov. 2019.

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone," Profession, 1991. pp 33-40.

Taranath, Anu. “Out And About As A Global Citizen.” Away.

awayjournal.org/article/out-and-about-as-a-global-citizen. Accessed 29 Nov. 2019. 

[beevean]

R? :0

R. FAVOURITE SONG AT THE MOMENT.

Uhm... The song I have currently stuck in my head is Obsesion, which I appreciate much more now that I can understand the lyrics and how dissonant they are :P although I prefer the bilingual version in Spanish and French.

I’m not much into lyrical songs so this was an harder question than expected ^^’

Thanks for asking!

[tainbocuailnge]

here’s some relatable bilingual/non-native english speaker content from me: the linguistic dissonance of talking in your native language with someone about content both of you usually engage with and talk about in english and the resulting horribly mangled mix of the two languages

[hyacynthbaby]

i feel like my biggest frustration with being bilingual (and trying to become trilingual?) at this point is how i can’t exist in more than one language at the same time. like understanding that there are different registers in each language for different contexts and stuff i honestly feel like i have to fully live in a language 24/7 in order to EMBODY it yanno!! like taking french classes and reading french literature isnt enough!!! even watching tv shows in french and listening to podcasts in french isnt enough!! like i gotta cook in french and procrastinate in french and do nothing in french yanno! every part of life is embroiled in language!!! how can i leave out any part of it??? how can i engage in academic conversations with professors about collective memory and self-reinvention through photography in french but then fail to do post-coitus chitchat with a fuckbuddy????? like do u see the dissonance?? and equally how can i claim to be fluent in mandarin when i dont even know how to begin to be emotionally vulnerable and intimate with my parents or my partners in that language??? like these blockages aren’t just something i can chalk up to cultural differences or my non-fluency in certain social codes yanno??? like RIGHT NOW i feel like i should be able to translate this post in its entirety into chinese and french but i dont even know where to begin because i just i DONT KNOW the chinese and french equivalent of tumblr english!!!!!!!! i dont know!!!! i dont know the chinese or french internet lingo appropriate for this kind of context and medium!!!!! i cant translate this!!!!!!! i dont know!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[unixcommerce]

Dave Isbitski of Amazon: Voice Tech Knows No Generational Bounds

In 2016 I did my first presentation on Amazon Alexa and Echo, and at the time there were about 700 skills available.  Today there are over 100,000.  And hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices.  So, since most of us are spending more time than ever in our houses, I wanted to catch up again with Dave Isbitski, Amazon’s Chief Evangelist for Alexa and Echo.

In a pretty extensive chat we had on LinkedIn Live recently, Dave shares some of the stories of how people are using Alexa/Echo and smart assistants in general during the Covid-19 pandemic, why he thinks voice technology is uniting generations, and how he sees voice playing a major role in the PC (Post Covid) era.

Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation.  To hear the full convo click on the embedded SoundCloud player.

smallbiztrends · Dave Isbitski of Amazon – Voice is first technology my parents are as excited about as my kids

Small Business Trends: How far have things come with Alexa and Echo devices?

Dave Isbitski: In 2014, if I would say, who has an Echo? I had to explain what that even was. Now in 2020, most people know what Echo is. I mean, there’s even the Saturday Night Live skit. They get what Alexa is. They probably have multiple devices. They’re just smart assistants and AI across the board. That’s really changed as part of the vernacular. It’s part of people’s daily routines.

What people may or may not know is that you have the ability to teach these AIs. So it’s just not Alexa, it’s any of these smart assistants. What we do at Amazon is we make that free, open and available for everyone. So whether they want to have Alexa in things, so that could be automobiles, it could be car stereos, it could be your phone. Windows has Alexa built in now, or you want to teach Alexa how to have conversations about things.

And when you have a conversation about something, we call that a skill. So you’re teaching Alexa a new skill and you can have a conversation about anything. And that could be stuff like ordering your Domino’s right now, right? When we’re sitting at home in a pandemic, they deliver. You could do an easy order or it could be just pulling up games. Just go to Amazon… If people are curious, because I do hear from people that are, “Hey, my kids are driving me crazy. Are there games?” There absolutely are games. Go to amazon.com/skills. You’ll see categories up there, Brent, that we didn’t have like a while ago. So you’ll see all these categories, just like any other Amazon product, you can sort, you can say, show me four stars and above ratings. Some of these have tens and tens of thousands of ratings now.

One of the things you can do right now as an Amazon customer is you can go to blueprints.amazon.com and you can create these things visually. So I hear from parents their kids are creating their own stories.

Small Business Trends: Yeah.

Dave Isbitski: Maybe you’re taking care of someone else who’s at home. You want to remind them to do things. You want to create the ability for them to ask questions. Like what medication do I take? What time do I take it? All of those you can do and then you can assign it to their Amazon account.

I’ve done that for my parents, where I’ve set up things. And so that’s something where we’ve tried to create the process as seamless as possible for you to start teaching Alexa to be able to have conversations, to create content you want, whether you have the ability to write code or not.

Small Business Trends: Are you seeing a lot of behavioral changes and folks leveraging their speakers to do things that they just weren’t really doing before?

Dave Isbitski: Well, one of the things I hear and you’ll see this online, you may even see this come across in your Facebook feeds and Twitter is that it’s so important to connect during all this. We actually have… We try once a week to connect with my parents over video, just to see. And one of the things we consistently hear… If you go here. That’ll take you to a blog post around Alexa and devices, and what’s going on. You’ll hear us talk about some of this.

I don’t think this was available when we last talked, but a popular feature is the ability to drop in. And so you set up people in your life and then they just say, “Alexa, drop in on grandparents.” Or “Alexa drop in on mom.” Or “Alexa drop in on kids.” And it’s incredible how seamless that becomes. And especially during this pandemic is the ability to just communicate like that without needing a phone, without updating apps, right? This is an experience. It’s just there. And voice is seamless. It’s inclusive. Everybody can do it. Voice is the first technology my parents are as excited as my kids are, right? And my dad still doesn’t use a computer, but he can pull up things on-

Small Business Trends: Really?

Dave Isbitski: Yeah, I know it’s crazy, right? Both my brother and I are tech, my mom prints out emails for him. He never logs… Yeah. But I was talking about where we’ve donated these devices in the hospitals and people have the ability to just talk through at any time and connect, right? Because you’re not touching it either, which is an important thing. We’ve been giving them to hospitals where nurses have the ability to check in and talk through that, all completely hands-free.

I was just talking to the folks at Johns Hopkins. And I won’t mention his name. He’s a surgeon out in New York. And it was very heartwarming. He just said, “I just want to thank you. Two years ago, my mother, she had dementia and Alzheimer’s and we used Alexa all the time. She had the ability to call for help. She had the ability to call us at any time. And it’s the way that we were able to communicate with her.”

So a couple of things we added. One of the themes is feedback from customers about making Alexa more personal. For example, anybody at any time, you can just tell Alexa to remember things, which is the first thing I did was remember the Wi-Fi password, right? And so if we have guests over, they can be like, “What’s the wifi password?” Right. And she can tell you, or it could be things like for my parents to remember dates and birthdays and things like that.

We all have different personalities. If you go look at Myers-Briggs, if you look at NBTI and five core personality types, like I’m in INFJ. I don’t know if you’re familiar with those types. A lot of times I can’t get out of my own head, but I can juggle multiple ideas in my head. I can live in cognitive dissonance. Other people aren’t like that. And mobile and web is one size fits all. It’s like, here’s our design. And if you don’t like it tough, and then we train our brains, right? We build up these neural pathways and how to use an interface. And then if you change that interface, it’s staggering to people. If one of these social media sites changes the way their feed looks every day.

Small Business Trends: Right.

Dave Isbitski: What’s great about voice is it could be the way that you want to consume that. You can decide what type of person you want to hear. In fact, we have a service called Polly Brand and it creates voices. KFC, we worked with them and you can get the Colonel’s voice. This is my absolute favorite is right today, with the Alexa device, you can say, “Ask Sam.” So Samuel L. Jackson, and he’ll tell you weather and jokes. And all of that is using a technology called Neural TTS (text to speech), right?

There was a breakthrough using neural nets in order to reproduce sound.  So now through Neural TTS, if you use a computer and you’ll look at it that it’s computer generated, but to the human ear, it sounds like a human being and you can change inflection. You can make it excited. We’ve done that with Alexa where, when you’re creating these experiences, I mean, you choose what the voice sounds like. You can make her sound excited. We added the thing for customers where we’re hearing like we’ve got little ones and I go play a lullaby or I shut the lights off at night, right? Because a lot of people that are using Alexa with smart home, they’ll be like, “Turn off the lights.” And she’s super loud and wakes the baby, right? Like never wake the baby.

So you can whisper to Alexa and then she’ll be like, “Oh, it sounds like you’re whispering. Would you like me to whisper back?” And you say, “Yes, it’s whisper mode.” And so you’ll be like, “Turn off the lights.” And she’ll be like, “Okay, I’ll turn off the lights.” Right? But it’s very human. Another area you can say is, “You know what, talk faster, talk slower, slow down.” And so she’ll say things slower, or she’ll say things faster.

We have the ability to detect tone, right? So it’s very different. If I say, “Alexa, shut up.” Versus, “Alexa, thank you. Stop.” And we have all sorts of things. Like we’ve always had the ability… I think we talked about this on your last show. Since day one, since we launched, you had the ability to delete everything you’ve ever said to Alexa. You had the ability to go in and see things. And if you didn’t want to deal with technology, you can just call up Amazon, have it done. But people wanted to hear and have the ability on the fly. So we’ve opened that up and you can say things like, “Alexa, delete what you just heard.” You could say, “Alexa, what did you just hear?” And then she’ll repeat it back. You could say, “Alexa, delete everything you’ve heard today.”

And it’s interesting. You can even say things like, “Alexa, why did you do that?” And she’ll be like, “Well, this is what I heard and this is why I did that.” And so it’s very empowering because it helps people understand, because even as human beings, I’ll say one thing, but it’s not necessarily what you heard or processed the same way, right? And so giving people that ability, they’re like, “Oh, she keeps hearing this word. Or maybe I’m saying this way.” It’s very empowering in an open set up.

Some of the other things is bilingual. So you can switch between English and Spanish in the US on the fly and behind the scenes, we’re taking that, putting it into a lexicon. And so that both language models are working and you can switch between same thing with… In Canada, French Canadian, Hindi and English in India. Because that’s how we speak as human beings. If you’ve grown up in a bilingual family, just moving back and forth between words and languages and she’ll be able to do that.

And so it’s those types of things because nothing’s faster than just being able to ask for it. And so that’s where I would say, we’re evolving like in present day, that’s where we are and we can talk about future looking.

Small Business Trends: Are you seeing some of the interactions that typically would have taken place with your phone starting to take place with your voice devices?

Dave Isbitski: Well, I look at it this way. The mission of our group has always been Alexa anywhere that you want it to be. And so right now that’s in the house. But if you go for a drive, you should be able to say, “Alexa, read my book.” And it was the audio book maybe you were just listening to in your den, right? It’s just, it’s seamless. I’ve been quoted saying this before, and I think it’s still the best analogy, is that voice is the new HTML.

So think about when the web first came out and the internet first came out. How did you contact companies? Right? It was like, you wrote a letter, you walked into their lobby or a phone call. And suddenly through HTML, right? And I didn’t want to say voice is the new web, because web is so encompassing with social and everything too. Because it’s the interface. So HTML suddenly became the interface to connect with anybody, anywhere in the world, any brand in the world to learn, right? To ask questions about anything. It was really how HTML brought the web together. And that’s the way you should look at voice. It’s the HTML for everything.

This article, “Dave Isbitski of Amazon: Voice Tech Knows No Generational Bounds” was first published on Small Business Trends

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