#this is kind of incomprehensible and has like 5 different topics all mixed in and is objectively kind of shit
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dizzythegreat · 11 months ago
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a God
do you believe in a God?
well it's complicated, i say. is it really? here's what they told me: there is someone out there who loves me. no matter my sins, no matter my faults. He loves me, i will never be worthy. forgive me, father, for i have sinned, and there is nothing i will ever be able to do to make up for that fact.
there is someone out there who created me, piece by piece, and made no mistakes. took each part of this broken body and mind in His hands and curved them all together in a wretched attempt to create something beautiful.
they say i have His love, but how can i accept it knowing what i was made from? i'm stretched between desire and resentment, acceptance and rejection. they say that the woman committed the original sin, that although the man slipped the fruit into his own mouth, it was her who convinced him, although having been deceived herself. i think i'm both the man and the woman, continually deceiving myself, continually sinning. i hand myself the apple. just take one bite, and another, and another, and another, and. i know exactly what i'm doing and i do it anyways. i am the original sin and the generations damned for it afterwards. i am the tree and i am the fruit and i am the hands that passed it between them and i, too, will fall as they did, be thrown from the garden that my God created for me, cursed as i deserve to be. screaming the whole way out, i'm sorry to be like this. i'm sorry to have crumbled and cracked this body back into the dust it was made from. i'm sorry you love me.
/ / / /
well, it's sort of the same with you, in a way. i want you here with me and i want you exactly where you are. i want you to want me too and i want you to reel back in disgust. i want you to see me, to take in all my cuts and bruises, and i want you to close your eyes. i want you in a glass case, for me to look, but not touch, and i want you in my mouth. i want you to love me the way i love you, and i can think of nothing more terrifying.
this was supposed to be a religous poem, goddamnit, and i've brought it back to you again. well. i'm sorry to be like this. i'm sorry i love you in a way that you might not be able to reciprocate. i'm sorry i'm the way i am. just please keep me with you, i'll perch on the arm of your chair like an angel, keep my mouth shut and my lips upturned, close but never too close, just as i was made to be. i love you in a way that's just right and nothing less. i feel for you the way i am meant to. give me my undeserved love, pour it down my throat into the starving hole that lives beneath. i will never be worthy and you will never stop giving, and i hate you for it.
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femsff · 6 years ago
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Every number that contains a 2 please 🍍
“hi, I’m not from the US” ask set
given how Americanized this site is, it’s important to celebrate all our countries and nationalities - with all their quirks and vices and ridiculousness, and all that might seem strange to outsiders.
For the record, I’ve included previously answered questions.
1. favourite place in your country?
Is it weird if I say my bed?
2. do you prefer spending your holidays in your country or travel abroad?
This is a toss-up. If I could choose without any consequences it would definitely be abroad. However, holidaying for me has always meant relaxing, preferably near the beach and an occasional stroll around town and maybe, depending on the company, a cultural outing, but I’ve been diagnosed with melanoma in the past and therefore such vacationing is out of the question. So, in actuality, it more often means I’m staying in my country and I’ll go somewhere (or visit friends/family) for a long weekend or something. It’s unfortunate, but I’m pretty sure my two cats are happy with the arrangement.
3. does your country have access to sea?
4. favourite dish specific for your country?
5. favourite song in your native language?
Hmm. I actually don’t listen much to the radio and especially not to songs in my native language specifically. The only one that really comes to mind right now is an older one that I heard a lot in my teens and it’s actually a sequel to another song by the same band. Part one is about when a good relationship starts to get rocky, all the dangers threatening their relationship, but that he (the singer) will keep the course because he knows their final destination. It’s pretty hopeful, I guess. Part two is when everything is ending, how they’re always fighting and love has turned to hate. Both songs have a maritime theme, and in the beginning he’s the strong one, the captain who’ll get them through it and in the second it’s like their ship has two captains and they’re steering in opposite directions.
6. most hated song in your native language?
7. three words from your native language that you like the most?
Gezellig - has no direct English translation but basically means something along the lines of cozy, intimate, warm, fun, snug, homey and can be applied to situations (like having a great time with family/friends), an atmosphere or even the interior of a house or something.
Katuitdeboomkijker - has no direct English translation but literally translated means ‘someone who stares a cat out of the tree’ and basically means that you tend be a bit reserved and will observe everyone/a situation first before engaging. Often used to describe a person’s behavior in social settings.
Mierenneuker - literally translated it means ‘ant fucker’ and is basically the same as a nitpicker or hairsplitter.
8. do you get confused with other nationalities? if so, which ones and by whom?
9. which of your neighbouring countries would you like to visit most/know best?
I’ve already been to all my neighboring countries several times. My least favorite was probably Belgium (no offense, Belgians) although my friends and I did have a blast there when we went there on a week-long school excursion in high school (I think as freshmen or maybe sophomores). I haven’t explored much of Germany yet, so maybe that would be it? I also like the UK and would definitely want to explore more of it (and yes, I’m using UK rather than England because that way there’s more to explore!).
10. most enjoyable swear word in your native language?
Oh my. Hmm. I think I’m going to have to go with ‘kut’, because of the k-sound which just sounds really good when expressing it in dismay/anger. It’s basically a vulgar word for a woman’s private parts and can be used in a similar manner as the English ‘fuck’. It is not considered as being on the same level of offensiveness as the English cunt. I also like ‘tering’ because you can really draw out the e. That’s the word for consumption (tuberculosis), by the way, but I only use it as an exclamation (there are variations where people basically wish it on you or, from the olden days, accuse you of suffering from it).
I probably should have prefaced this answer with the fact that in my culture, we tend to use diseases (often dreaded ones from the past) and sex organs in our swearing and profanity (also, often food for insults, like calling someone a pancake for being a dumbass).
11. favourite native writer/poet?
12. what do you think about English translations of your favourite native prose/poem?
Eek! I feel like this answer might disappoint folks, but I’m not a big fan of prose/poems and honestly, couldn’t name one. In my experience, translated written works always seem to lose something in translation though.
13. does your country (or family) have any specific superstitions or traditions that might seem strange to outsiders?
14. do you enjoy your country’s cinema and/or TV?
15. a saying, joke, or hermetic meme that only people from your country will get?
This is a tough one. I think I’m gonna go with a saying, “doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg”, which basically means ‘act normal, that’s weird enough’ because we don’t like crazy or over the top things.
16. which stereotype about your country you hate the most and which one you somewhat agree with?
17. are you interested in your country’s history?
I feel like this is a trick question and am now wondering if this questionnaire was created by an American or non-American. Why? Because, in comparison, Americans are very patriotic and nationalistic. My country and many in Europe are far less so, not in the least due to having seen the devastation such extremes can bring (WWII). This is not in any way meant as an accusation, it’s just an observation and I think, for the context, an important distinction that should be made.
Anyway, to answer the question, I’m not obsessed with my country’s history but am informed. History has never been my favorite subject (dropped it in high school as a freshman) but I do like to learn the origin of certain things in my country/culture.
18. do you speak with a dialect of your native language?
19. do you like your country’s flag and/or emblem? what about the national anthem?
20. which sport is The Sport in your country?
Looking at the Olympics, probably ice skating. But soccer (football for the Americans) comes as a pretty close second and it’s definitely one the whole country goes wild for when the national team is in the EC/WC (think: orange madness). Don’t get me wrong, we also like the Olympics but it’s not on the same level. Yet.
21. if you could send two things from your country into space, what would they be?
In order to destroy them? Or to make contact with the aliens?
22. what makes you proud about your country? what makes you ashamed?
Like I’ve said in another answer, we don’t really do the whole national pride thing to the same extent as some countries, but I like how we’re so small and yet are pretty good at certain things (water management, infrastructure, sports, agriculture, healthcare, science). My identity is not really tied to my country or vice versa, so I can’t say I’m really ashamed of something my country as a whole has done or does, but we used to be known for being very tolerant and the past decade or so you see more and more intolerance and that’s just a shame.
23. which alcoholic beverage is the favoured one in your country?
Good question. I think maybe beer or wine? A quick google search gave me no definitive answer either.
24. what other nation is joked about most often in your country?
Belgium! There’s a long standing tradition of us calling the Belgians dumb and, apparently, they do the same thing about us! However, lately, the US is a very hot topic as well.
So, I’d say historically/traditionally the former but in every day conversation and such it’s the latter.
25. would you like to come from another place, be born in another country?
I used to feel that way, but now that I’m older I think I’m far more appreciative of my country and culture.
26. does your nationality get portrayed in Hollywood/American media? what do you think about the portrayal?
Yes, sometimes. They’re all cliches and many of the stereotypes are very dated. Also, for some reason certain movies/shows like to use the language probably because they feel it’s “special” since, relatively speaking, so few people speak it worldwide but then they apparently can’t be bothered to actually hire a voice coach who speaks the language and it ends up being incomprehensible for native speakers as they pronounce the words often in a mix of German and some kind of Eastern European language or something. Very strange. I mean, why even bother?
27. favourite national celebrity?
I’m not really into celebrities, so I’ll pick the king&queen.
28. does your country have a lot of lakes, mountains, rivers? do you have favourites?
Nope, flat as a pancake as we like to say.
29. does your region/city have a beef with another place in your country?
Not really, anymore. We just have a long standing tradition of mocking the Belgians for their lack of intelligence and accusing Germans of stealing our grandparents’ bikes.
30. do you have people of different nationalities in your family?
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dlamp-dictator · 7 years ago
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Allen’s Rambling: The Four Dreaded Questions of World Building
Y’know, I was going to write this Rambling on my RP blog about why trying to mix world-building and RPing can make things confusing and difficult for your RP partners, but as of editing this I’m going to make this a bit more general.
For a lot us that want to make an epic fantasy or sci-fi world I’m sure we all took a few days or weeks to sit down and draft a bunch of notes on how we want to things to go down in that world. How people live, how they dress, how they talk, what kind of environments they have, and so on. Just... create a living, breathing world to get yourself and your readers lost in. I know the feeling, I’ve wanted to do that myself for awhile now. The issue is... how to exactly do that. Making a bunch of notes about a faction here or a faucet there can have building that world take forever. I’ve done a lot of thinking on this topic of the past few months, ultimately decided to not bother with it anymore due to my own... weaknesses as a writer. While I’ve personally decided to change how I write my original stories so I don’t have to worry about world building, I think I’d try and do a little good and try to share the system I made for world building before deciding to scrap it.
In short, world building can basically be boiled down to answering three to four questions:
Where/How does this group of people get their food?
What do these people do after they get their food?
Is there magic?
If yes, how does that magic effect how these people get their food?
You think I’m kidding, but that’s really it. Answering those 4 questions will lead to so many, many others. “But why the focus on food?” I hear some of you ask. A simple answer.
If there is no food, there is no world. 
If there is no grass for cows to graze, there are no cows. If there are no cows, there is no beef. If there is no beef, there is no meat for humans and predators to eat. You see my point? A few years ago I took a college course on ancient history as an elective, and that class went into great detail about how many great civilizations got started by the blessing of merely being formed by a river of large source of fresh water to grow crops. That history of Japan video that was floating around awhile back was a great example of my point, research ancient history in general is a great way to learn world building, but moving on.
Just to show I’m not all talk I’ll use one of my own worlds/societies that I’ve been trying to make. Awhile ago in one of my RP Ramblings I said that I had a group of female forest ninja that I was writing a story for. I’ve since then deleted that story due to... issues I was having, but I’ll answer those questions about that group here.
Where/How does this group of people get their food?
The forest ninja get their food by hunting and gathering in the forest they live in, eating while plants and forest animals like deer and bears. Most are vegetarians and only eat plants, but hunting and the consumption of meat isn’t forbidden.
What do these people do after they get their food?
Before actually eating, most will prayer in thanks of the meal. In terms of general activities most go through religious rituals. Prayer, dance, training in either martial arts or religious studies.
Is there magic?
No. At least not in this society.
See? Pretty easy right? 
WRONG. 
Now here comes the hard part. Answer those questions leads to so many others. Why do the forest ninja only hunt and gather? Do they grow their own food? Why don’t they if not? What kind of plants do they eat? If most are vegetarians why isn’t hunting and eating meat outlawed in their religion? Why do their leisure activities focused on religion? What is their religion? What are the tenets? What kind of god do they follow? Is it just one god or many? Are all members of these forest ninja religious? Why is there no magic? The list goes on, and on, and on. And even answering all of those questions will lead to others, and you just keep going, and going, and going until you run out of questions and every faucet of that civilizations daily life and existence is answered.
Sounds fun, right?
“No Allen, that sounds like a lot of work.”
Oh, you poor child, we aren’t even if at the fun part yet. There’s a fifth question in this I didn’t mention:
5. Do other groups/civilizations interact with your main character’s society? If so, how?
And this is the question that leads you asking the previous four at least 1 more time.
You see what I mean? You understand why this is a pain to do properly? And don’t even get me started on magic and superpowers. I’ll spare you all 5 paragraphs and just link these two great videos on Hard and Soft Magic and how they relate to world-building made by a Hello Future Me. The long and short of it that magic changes everything about your world. 
If your characters can spawn fire out of their hands to cook food it means harvesting firewood isn’t a thing that people need to do as frequent, which changes how much wood is gathered in your society, which changes how wood is viewed in your society as a resource. If your characters can shoot out lightning it means industrial-level uses of electricity works very differently, which my lead to certain jobs not existing and your economy running in a completely different way than our own. If you characters can spawn and control water it means that water distribution and droughts are probably not a thing, which mean there is likely a huge population boom due to the abundance or clean drinking water, which means a high disparity between rich and poor and large city areas in general, which mea- 
You see my point, right? World Building is complicated.
Thankfully, there’s a nice way to get around, which is to explain literally nothing about it. This was covered in that soft magic video, but a tumblr post I reblog a while back explains it much quicker than that video does, and I’ll just quote it here for those that don’t don’t want to be view several tabs.
Either explain it or don’t.
When authors include things that don’t fit within the real world–magic, time travel, anachronisms–there is an impulse to explain how it works. Which can be fantastic for worldbuilding, but if you don’t know what you’re talking about, it can make more problems than it solves.
Stephenie Meyer tried to explain some bizarre thing about chromosomes, and it made the biology of vampires and werewolves make no sense. Suspending disbelief worked better in that case before she tried to ground it in the real world.
Lemony Snicket, on the other hand, just has random anachronisms that are never explained, but because there’s nothing even close to resembling an attempt at an explanation, we can just shrug and go, okay, that’s how it works. The magic in Harry Potter seems to basically not be grounded in anything, but we can believe it within the context of the story because she doesn’t try to ground it in anything.
In Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera, on the other hand, he goes into a lot of magic theory, and it gives us a strong feeling of worldbuilding. There’s enough logically coherent explanation for it to feel grounded within itself.
It is possible to go too far (see: Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide and Children of the Mind) where the plot ends up so tied in the reader understanding intricately detailed scientific and pseudo-scientific minutiae that the story is incomprehensible without it.
Generally, though, if you’re going to make something up, either say it exists and leave it at that, or entirely figure out how it works. Halfway is always less believable than nothing at all.
So, while I could go through all the effort of explaining how the forest ninja live their lives, I could also just say forest ninja exist and show off all the cooler more interest parts I want to show off and not worry about explaining any of it. The major flaw in doing this however is the lack of immersion and the risk of losing a reader’s suspension of disbelief by having something really nonsensical happen.
So... why write about this? 
Honestly, I just... wanted to get my thoughts out on this topic before redoing my forest ninja story. I plan on moving to writing more short stories and little vignettes with my original pieces as opposed to writing longer, chapter-based stories since trying to do something longer will always lead me to writing myself in a corner. That’s a topic for another day, but for now... I suppose that’s it. Thanks for bearing with me folks. Feel free to reblog with your own tips about world building. I’ll be playing Under Night In-Birth in the meanwhile getting my butt handed to me by Merkava and Gordeau mains.
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