#not to subscribe to the mortifying of being sincere online

[naruthandir]

Funny to me how for most people it's a LOTR->Linguistics pipeline but for me it was a linguistics->LOTR pipeline. I never really had an interest in reading Lord of the Rings because the whole thing used to struck me as very boring and I didn't really care but from ages 12-14 I was really getting into fantasy worldbuilding and conlanging "formally" (I did do that kind of stuff before that, but I didn't know it had a name or that there were comunities formed around it) and I said "Look if I am going to be a nerd about this I am going to be a full nerd about this I can't go around life calling myself a Fantasy Nerd™ when all I know about LOTR is that there is a fucked up goblin guy and Legolas has a bow" so I decided to bought the Fellowship of the Ring book in the bookstore because I am autistic and I have a hard time engaging with material I am unfamiliar with so I just picked the safest option and then I read it in a weekend. I came home, I sat down to read, and from the very start I was invested. Because Tolkien had THE BALLS to open his book with an extensive infodump about Hobbit culture and I was so into that. And the chapters in the Shire, they were a genuine delight for me. I thought the book would be boring but it was fun! It was funny! And hobbit culture felt so alive...

And when the final chapter of the Fellowship came I almost cried. Rightly, it was at that moment I realized that this was going to be a life-changing experience whether I like it or not.

Since I didn't have the rest of the books back then (and I wasn't really able to get them for reasons I don't remember) I did the most autistic thing: Right after finishing it, I decided to read it again, because I was that obsessed. I made so much silly cringy art of the characters as I imagined them and it was all I could think about in school. When I finally got my hands to The Two Towers and The Return of the King I decided to refresh my memory by reading Fellowship AGAIN and because it was summer I had the luxury to just sit down and read all day long and it was great.

I went into the books as blind as you could possibly go: I knew there were conlangs and lore, I knew there were elves, I knew the protagonist was named Frodo and the plot was about destroying a ring (there is also a being that calls the ring precious because its like a drug? Idk). But not much else. I didn't know Boromir was going to die. I didn't know about Galadriel or Elrond or Aragorn or Sam. Yes, I didn't know that Sam was a character. I was genuinely surprised at each turn the plot was taking. I was surprised about how GAY it all was (why didn't they tell me about this??) and I was absolutely shaken and emotionally destroyed with the ending. The Return of the King was an awakening of sorts for me, because I was expecting a whimsical fantasy story and instead I got to see The Horrors and I just couldn't believe the comic relief characters were dealing with suicidal ideation, out of all things.

And the last bit of Frodo's journey... Well, the scene in the tower of Cirith Ungol was genuinely rough (when Sam found Frodo, he was naked. And I just closed the book and stared into the ceiling for a while. I just had to take a break real fast) and the struggle with the ring as they got closer to Mordor and I was constantly almost-crying-but-not-quite and I knew, even though I went into the story un-spoiled, I knew Frodo wouldn't give up the ring. And then having him deal with the aftermath of it, and I was so distressed the whole time because finally, someone out there gets it. He sailed off to the west and I cried. I actually cried, right after finishing the book, yes, but for a few nights after as well. It was, well, a lot to process for 14 year old me. It had me looking up the diagnostic criteria of PTSD on Google at three in the morning because this can't be right. It wasn't that bad, surely I'm just being dramatic.

And it is very funny, that I was getting into the books expecting extensive sections of infodumping and lore and LINGUISTICS and I did get that, don't get me wrong, but I also got an emotionally resonant story that complelty re-contextuslized my lived experiences, helped me process stuff I had been shoving down the back of my mind because I didn't have the words to even describe it to myself, and lowkey turned me into a transgender anarchist. I was a changed man (just now fully aware that I was a man in the first place). It blew me away completely.

And it also reinforced my interest in linguistics! I often joke about this, but as a kid, I used to read the dictionary instead of paying attention in class. I liked words. Like, a lot. I liked the way words interacted with each other. I was like 9, perhaps, when I first attempted to create a made-up language, for a race of fictional mermaid race. I was really into My Little Pony at the time and I stole a lot of the story from there (don't forget I was nine) and my attempt at conlanging utterly failed, but still. LOTR felt pretty much tailored to me, when I finally gave it a shot. My favorite appendix was, of course, the one dealing with translation. If I was mildly interested in linguistics before this sent me down a rabbithole. I did my whole final school project for graduating on minority languages of Europe (though, due to the pandemic, I never finished it, which is a shame). I picked the literature course in high-school over the fine arts course because they had a morphology and etymology class. I named myself Beren, for fuck's sake, and I've been going by this name in real life for two and a half years by now. That's how important it was.

I really can't overstate how much this silly little book with silly little fairy people influenced my life. It's. Well, it's cringy, it's awfully, awfully cringy, embarrassing, mortifying. Isn't it funny, that we are shamed and made fun of for loving things so unapologetically? For genuinely connecting with art? Even though that's like, the whole point?

I just want to say. This is important to me. This means a lot to me. I keep talking about it but I can't help myself because it's hilarious. I went into this book out of a sense of responsibility and it completely changed my life.

This post wasn't meant to be this long. Uh. Sorry. I just wanted to make a silly joke about "Tolkien fan goes on to study formal linguistics, but it's not for the reason you think" but it turned into this whole personal rant. This is like a tendency of mine, no I don't know how to stop it. I'm sorry if this is in your dash lmao

[whittlebaggett8]

Beijing After Tiananmen: Part 1

The massacre of unarmed civilians that transpired in the early early morning hours of June 4, 1989 in Beijing did not conclude the tale of struggling, sorrow, and trauma for the city’s inhabitants that 12 months. In fact, the murders in Beijing – some trustworthy resources say of up to 10,000 people today, as quoted by the British ambassador to China at that time, Sir Alan Donald – have been the extraordinary catalyst for a lengthy period of tranquil but really productive terror under martial legislation that lasted for the rest of the year.

The story of those people 6 months is largely untold, for 3 explanations. Very first, there ended up very couple foreigners in Beijing adhering to the massacre. At most embassies, and among the still small enterprise neighborhood, all but vital employees were being evacuated from the metropolis. Lots of did not return for months or even months thereafter. 2nd, there were several Chinese who would have dared to speak with a foreigner at all, a lot less with a foreign information outlet. The implications would have been arrest, detention, and maybe worse.

The 3rd explanation also relates to the Chinese population, who created up, it will have to be remembered, much much more than 99.97 percent of the inhabitants of the city at that time. Beijing, and the rest of China, was however healing from the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, which had only finished 13 a long time prior, in 1976. The 10-yr interval of that upheaval, which noticed households across China torn aside by inside betrayals, modern society upended by zealous revolutionaries, and traditional markers of Chinese culture almost erased from both equally actual physical and psychological domains, experienced also claimed a even now unfamiliar selection of lives, absolutely in the hundreds of thousands. Beijing inhabitants ended up not fully inured to the massacre of 1989, but they experienced witnessed madness and murder right before.

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I had lived in Beijing considering the fact that August 1987, first as a college student at the Foreign Affairs University. The next calendar year, at the conclude of my system, I felt compelled to remain extended, emotion that I had only scratched the surface of this interesting, maddening, country. I observed work with a multinational business, and then with the Australian Embassy.

Someplace there are shots of me standing on the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square all through the early demonstrations in April 1989. When the first demonstrators came out to honor Hu Yaobang, the Chinese leader who had sympathized with and supported previously pupil protests in the 1980s, I was right in the center of them from the first week on.

I was in the United Kingdom on June 4, having traveled across Asia and Europe on the Trans-Siberian railway three weeks earlier, in early May well. I woke up that early morning, as did the relaxation of the entire world, to the horrific information that People’s Liberation Military tanks and troopers had killed 1000’s in and all around the sq.. I may perhaps not have absolutely stopped crying for the upcoming five days.

I flew to Hong Kong within times, where by I managed to get as a result of by telephone to South American and Spanish buddies who had not been evacuated. They implored me to provide overseas information accounts of the massacre. Even senior diplomats experienced been not able to access any intercontinental media for entire accounts of the horror that experienced happened.

I went all over to newsstands in the course of Central and Tsim Sha Tsui, purchasing up, and typically remaining offered donations of, as several worldwide magazines and newspapers as I could have. I then went to Dragon Air to buy a ticket into Beijing. Dragon Air reported that they had practically nothing but evacuation flights likely into the Chinese funds, but that if I really needed to prospect it, they would give me a trip in for cost-free.

The airplane into Beijing was pretty much empty not far more than 5 passengers sat in the significant, roomy cabin. Signals at the examine-in desk at Kai Tek Airport in Kowloon experienced been clear: newspapers and journals were wholly forbidden to be taken into China.

My hand-carry duffel bag was whole of the newspapers and publications I experienced collected. It also contained two deals of female sanitary napkins, just one unopened and 1 open up, with two pads lacking. I experienced intentionally purchased them in Hong Kong so that the contents of the packaging would be prepared in Chinese, as perfectly as in English.

As I sat by the window in the rear of the plane, I tore out write-up soon after posting of information and pictures of the massacre, folding them into little packages no additional than 3 inches square.

With each article, I took out a person sanitary pad, and opened up a pocket together the lengthy facet of the napkin between its layers of cotton. Each and every folded post slid neatly into the pocket and became virtually unnoticeable, invisible to any but a devoted searcher.

I then returned each individual pad to the heart of the opened bundle, so that the best and base layers have been both of those unadulterated. In purchase to absolutely examine the contents, thus, a Customs officer would have to not only appear in through the open up major, but would also have to handle and remove the pads, as perfectly.

An hour out of Beijing, as I arrived shut to finishing my activity, a flight attendant arrived toward my seat. Just one of the unfolded articles or blog posts was lying on the seat up coming to me. She grabbed it, saw many others peeking out of my duffel, and opened up the door of the restroom across the aisle from me. She fell to her knees and commenced ripping the papers into tiny items, pushing the shards into the toilet.

More fearful than indignant, she advised me in a panicked voice that every single time they flew into Beijing, the airplane was meticulously searched by Chinese security providers. “Even the bathroom container,” she reported, as she attempted to make the papers unrecognizable. “If they uncover anything,” she mentioned, “they will not permit us back into China.” A further flight attendant, and then I, joined her on our knees in the rest room, shredding my papers to bits.

The flight crew didn’t know about my concealed cache, nevertheless. The assortment had grown to around 15 graphic article content secreted in their cozy pockets. And I did not inform them.

China was nevertheless a country in which no one particular talked about sexual intercourse or any subject close to it. 1 of my if not effectively-educated teachers had asked me the 12 months just before why she was not receiving pregnant, in spite of sleeping in the exact same bed as her husband on his rare visits house from his career in one more province. The solution turned out to be that the approach leading to being pregnant was mysterious to them both equally.

I was betting that the Customs officials in Beijing Airport would be all male, and therefore very easily mortified by anything so carefully linked with the taboos of the woman physique. As the Customs official opened my duffel, I was about to locate out.

He threw all the things else from my bag on to the desk amongst us. He opened my digital camera, and observed there was no movie. 1 by one particular, he looked closely at my pretty standard possessions. Hairbrush, makeup, a Chinese-English dictionary, a few clothing. Then he attained back again into the duffel to pull out the first of my two significant packages.

Midway out of the duffel, he observed the Chinese characters blazoned across the plastic outer wrapping of the offer. His encounter went crimson to the roots of his hair. He dropped the offer again into my duffel as if his arms were being burned.

Hardly capable to search at me, he pointed to the other, unopened offer. “Yiyang,” I mentioned, “the very same.” He pushed the duffel back again to me, and motioned for me to repack my issues. I walked out of the airport and took a taxi to my waiting good friends, who experienced congregated jointly into an apartment at just one of the diplomatic compounds that are unfold all around central Beijing. As we drove into the metropolis alongside what is now the aged airport road, nicknamed “The Nixon Highway,” as it was designed for his visit in 1972, we passed burnt-out buses, and tanks at just about every main intersection. Martial legislation was in comprehensive swing. The taxi driver informed me to be mindful.

I was heartened to master later that yr that my contraband media and copies of it had produced the rounds of several embassies and their political staffs. 1 ambassador thanked me for possessing taken the prospect. I informed him really sincerely that I experienced been happy to do it, and that it experienced been a calculated threat. But I didn’t tell him why.

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