#to be honest my french and german have declined so much too

[zetdeg]

After studying Mandarin in uni I’ve forgotten so much of it, does anyone know how to keep up with it? like a server or a group or a study buddy

[radarchives]

I dont think youve gotten an ask like this before since this is an om! blog and all and this is possibly gonna sound weird or dumb of me to ask a german native this, but how hard is your grammar really?

Reason (1-1) for my question: languages are my guilty pleasure. I'm only fluent in arabic and english rn but I wanna learn as much as I can, even if just basic facts, not a language itself

Reason (1-2): people learning german insist that the grammar is "brutal" especially for english-speakers but frankly it kinda feels that theres exaggeration or a "trend" along the lines of "german grammar is impossible because everyone says so" even if it's not THAT gory, yk?

Any new language IS gonna be hard at first- thats a given. And some languages like arabic / chinese / japanese / korean are listed at the top for difficulty. Ik that german grammar has many many rules and has exceptions... Linguistic sites say thats a reason for its complexity and the majority of learners agree with "yeah it's too difficult"

But tbh?? Idk

At this point it feels like a stereotype that was based off facts at first but then got negatively exaggerated?? I think yes german grammar is more "detailed" than the english norm / other grammar rules but it isnt monstrous like whats being often said and spread about it?

Thats why I wanna hear an authentic objective thought on this from a german if you dont mind🎤

hey there!

i really don't think German is one of the most difficult languages to learn. if you're an english native speaker the things you might struggle the most with are:

- pronunciation (harsher sounds, less soft than english, äöü sounds. when you have someone who can correct you this isn't as difficult to learn)

- grammar (lots of rules and lots of exceptions as well. words are gendered with der, die, das /feminine, masculine, neutral. also learning how to decline words can be tricky as well, but i think that just comes down to memorisation and practice)

- the sheer volume of vocabulary. a lot of words are HIGHLY specific (which is the fun part to be honest. there's lots of german words that are difficult to translate to english bc of this. an example would be the German word "doch" which is something similar to "yes it is" or "is not, is too")

i can imagine the difficulty level might be similar to learning french (at least from what i can compare). honestly i can only judge this so far, at work i do have lots of people around me who are just starting to learn the language, these are a few things that i saw them struggle with as well.

i think it mostly comes down to dedication and interest. you do have to put in a lot of effort, but you obviously have to do that for every language.

i think German gets a bad rep for sounding harsh and brutal, but i think it sounds quite beautiful. here's a little comp of German words i appreciate.

Nickerchen - nap

Maus - literally means mouse, but more recently has become youth slang. you can call someone "eine süße Maus" / literally a cute mouse / when they did something nice for example. Maus is originally gendered female = die Maus, but is used in a gn way like this. Meine Follower sind zum Beispiel richtig süße Mäuse 🥰

also used as an adjective (mausig)

Fremdschämen - being embarrassed for someone else. Wenn ich sehe, dass Lucifer redet als hätte er drei Wörterbücher verschluckt, schäme ich mich fremd.

unschön - unattractive, unpleasant. this one isn't special but it's my morally acceptable way of saying "well that fucking sucked" at work. Das ist jetzt aber unschön verlaufen.

so yeah! if you want to learn it don't let the naysayers stop you!

[kiruuuuu]

Siegemas Day 24

Happy holidays everyone, it’s me again! I stepped in for this day :) Once again, thank you @dualrainbow​, this event is a delight 💝💝

Today, my prompt is the very first line of the fic you find below. I hope you all enjoy it, and have a wonderful time no matter what or whether you’re celebrating! ✨ (Twitch/IQ, Rating T, fluff + emotional comfort, ~2.8k words)

.

“We made… too many cookies.”

The comedic timing is impeccable, the line delivered with perfect hesitance as to imply awareness of the understatement while hiding its undoubtedly practised nature. She’s a born people person with a knack for being charmingly endearing, and IQ is absolutely and horrifically powerless.

“This is ridiculous”, she states, deadpan, not giving away how amused she is in reality – it’s not often that she opens the door to a stunning young woman with pretty cheekbones tinted pink from the cold outside, clad in a flattering deep purple coat and holding several tin boxes in gloved hands. Patterned gloves, a row of snowflakes adorning the fabric. A very familiar row of snowflakes.

“I know, and I’m really sorry, but I don’t know anyone else who’d appreciate these.” Her hair is laid in neat waves framing her pale freckled face, light make-up completing the elegant look. She could be a film star, certainly possesses the same unselfconscious attitude one would expect, even though she’s displaying embarrassment right now. Her slim figure hugged tightly by her form-fitting clothes is visible clearly despite the frankly laughable amount of cookie tins and IQ can’t help herself.

She invites her in.

Twitch is a waterfall, bubbling excitedly about how or why she came across certain recipes, casually throwing in a French or German word amidst the usual English, and it’s impossible for IQ to follow her but she smiles and nods anyway while relieving her visitor of her cargo and placing it gingerly on the kitchen table. So far, this last Sunday before Christmas – the fourth Advent, as it’s called in her mother tongue – had been almost serene, began with chores and continued with a quiet cup of coffee and a good book before slowly tilting over into planning and researching for her next chapter. A regular occurrence. As a result, IQ is mentally somewhere else still and needs a few minutes before she can concentrate on her unexpected guest.

“Good to see you”, she chimes in during a small pause (wouldn’t you know it, even Twitch needs to breathe), and the two of them hug as a greeting. Twitch always gives her a good squeeze, really presses the two of them together, which is one of the reasons IQ looks forward to meeting her every day: it makes her feel appreciated. No one else comes close to these embraces, not Blitz, her decade-old friend, or even her own siblings. In Twitch’s arms, she closes her eyes and finds peace for a brief second.

It might be the absence of her family which has left her this sentimental – normally, she’s too busy to analyse her friends, to scrutinise them to this amount, but today an odd sort of nostalgia and possible bout of loneliness has overtaken her. She did light four candles on her wreath, the first one almost burnt out completely from being lit on all the previous Sundays, yet instead of providing warm illumination, it caused subtle brooding. Their house was always lively around Christmas, bustling with fights, pretend fights, singing, louder singing, future plans yelled through the staircase, raucous laughter, and various songs on repeat trying to drown each other out.

Here, in her small apartment in England, the silence felt foreboding.

“I tried my hand at spéculoos, which Marius called a German staple, and let me tell you – the dough I had was a nightmare to work with, much too sticky. I wanted to roll it out and use Julien’s cookie cutters but it wouldn’t cooperate, so you now have small poop piles of what I think you call Spekulatius. It’s in the blue tin, right on top there. I also made vanilla… uh, vanilla croissants? Shaped like moons? They’re Dom’s favourites, apparently, and Gilles begged me to help him, but he got the recipe wrong and we got so many that he just gave me half. Elias really wanted pain d’épices, um, spicy bread? No, gingerbread, that was it. You guys have the best name for it, by the way, Lebkuchen, it makes it sound like you’re Frankenstein: live, cake!”

Twitch somehow manages to wander through the flat while babbling on, accepting a cup of lukewarm coffee IQ puts in her hands and instinctively helping to pick a few cookies from each box to create an inviting-looking decorative paper plate which IQ carries into the living room where they settle down, fingers curled around warmed ceramic and eyes gleaming in the candlelight.

“You need to try these, it’s actually one of James’ mum’s recipes. Poppyseed and chocolate, they turned out better than expected, but after Liza told that story about her acquaintance failing a drug test because of poppyseed bagels, people refused to eat more than one and I definitely can’t stomach all of these alone.”

She watches, expectantly, as IQ dutifully picks out one of the spotted cookies shaped like a flower and bites into the crumbly bakeware. Surprising no one, it’s delicious – if there’s anything Twitch can’t do, IQ hasn’t found it yet.

“Really good”, she agrees, allowing for Twitch’s instant beaming smile to tug the corners of her own mouth upwards while she chews. “Manu, these all look lovely. You know I’d die for good Christmas cookies, so thank you. Even though this is way too much for me.”

Her laugh is melodic and as contagious as her constant sunny mood. “You should see how many I still have at home. Elias claimed he needs to watch his figure, Julien should be watching his figure, Doc doesn’t really like sweets, and Gilles eats maybe one cookie a day. Which you know is illegal at Christmastime.”

“Still, this is a wonderful present and I’m afraid I have nothing to give in return.” IQ isn’t being entirely honest. Still testing the waters; maybe Twitch will manage to read between the lines and they can finally address it. The moment the Frenchwoman stepped over the threshold was the moment IQ decided they’d talk it through today. It’s been going on long enough.

“Not true, you gave me the gloves!” Twitch’s triumphant gotcha! expression is self-satisfied and smug and sweet. Sweeter than the cookies calling to IQ – they really do look fantastic, a variety of shapes, sizes and colours, all together smelling of spices and memories and Christmas.

“Someone had to, you kept complaining about your icy fingers.”

“And you were probably sick of warming them up.” Twitch hasn’t caught on yet, her tone is still breezy and carefree. “Have you written some more? Any new scenes for me to read? I need to know whether the captain really is dead or not.”

IQ laughs, half embarrassed and half delighted – when the news broke in Rainbow that she writes stories in her spare time, she expected an outcome way worse than what she ended up facing: Castle immediately expressed interest in reading them, no matter the topic, and once word got out that it was usually science-fiction-centric, even more people approached her out of curiosity. None of them as enthusiastic as Twitch, however, who dove into the narratives like an age old fan into new material, sparking an unknown productivity in IQ which has yet to subside. Knowing there’s at least one person who devours anything she dreams up has been fantastically motivating, and they’ve begun spinning yarn together now and then. Twitch is the only one whom she trusts enough to proofread for scientific errors or inconsistencies, and she’s helped develop a character into a much more compelling version of themselves several times.

The next hour is spent on discussing IQ’s research, involving frantic googling and article hopping on Wikipedia to help with finding the correct jargon – Twitch knows most of the technical terms in French, which doesn’t mesh well with IQ’s rusty school French, whereas her German accent makes it difficult for the other woman to understand her, so they try to meet in the middle somewhere by using English, despite the laborious process involved.

They’re on one wavelength. Always have been, from the moment they came across each other in Rainbow’s workshop, when Twitch still dyed her hair auburn and IQ barely spoke a word with the other operators: a friendly smile, an engineering-related question, a brief introduction, and they were a house on fire. Inseparable at work.

Twitch made sure it bled into their private lives as well, even if it took considerable effort. IQ never asked, but she’s sure her friend secretly celebrated that one day when she finally said yes to one of her suggestions of meeting up.

.

And it’s exactly why it hurts so fucking much to think -

.

“Manu.”

Twitch stops talking mid-sentence, probably caught off guard by her serious tone of voice. “Yes? Is everything alright?”

It might be. She hopes it will be. Her fingers stray to a loose thread peeking out of the seam of her trousers, picking at it. “We’ve been friends for a while now.”

Several years, in fact, an unimaginably long time. Not that IQ hasn’t been able to keep friendships alive for this long, but never one this close. The level of intimacy usually kept declining after a certain point, usually prompted by nothing, sometimes spatial distance, sometimes emotional. There aren’t many people who keep up with her over a long time, and even fewer she keeps up with – Blitz is a great friend, but he just doesn’t share her passions.

“And you’re one of the most generous people I know. Your first instinct when you have too many cookies is to give them away. I’ve always admired this about you.”

Twitch is listening intently. She knows something is up, yet can’t put her finger on it. Her brows are furrowed. IQ knows this from a brief glance before her gazed drops back down to her restless fingers.

“Julien and I had a conversation about you, not too long ago. And some of what he said was… unexpected.” Rustling; Twitch is beginning to fidget as well. “Unrelated to that, Dom overheard you voicing your frustration about your being single and mentioned it to me. I didn’t know you were that unhappy. You never said anything.”

She really likes you. Yeah, don’t wave me off. I’ve never seen her fawn over someone like this. You get special treatment all the time.

And then, more poignant: At this point, I’m basically ready to fuck anything that moves.

The second quote echoes in her mind as if she’d heard it herself instead of it being delivered second-hand. Both of them made her look back at the past months and re-evaluate some events. Showed them in a very different light.

Twitch is radiating anxiousness. It’s easy to pick up.

“I realise now that I’ve received a lot of special attention from you, and… I just have to wonder.” It’s harder and harder to push the words out, her throat closing up. “Wonder whether your present today is cookies and friendship, or cookies and a confession, or cookies and an expectation. Whether there’s some kind of motive attached.”

Her entire life, there’s never been anyone outside her family who understood her better. Being a woman in a male dominated field is difficult enough, especially as a competitive one, and her experiences aren’t easily conveyed to her guy colleagues – Twitch understands, of course, has faced the same obstacles and prejudices. Seeking patterns everywhere, striving for excellence, despising complacency, the overwhelming need to reverse engineer anything new or remarkable, exploring new places, wanting to always keep moving and improving – Twitch understands, has had a similar upbringing and equivalent goals.

They share almost everything at this point, have been on holidays together, mastered several projects with each other’s help, stayed up till sunrise because sleep was the inadequate alternative to exchanging ideas and pushing each other further than they’d go by themselves. Others have always tried to slow IQ down, force her to relax, take her mind off something she enjoyed chewing on, and it was infuriating.

All Twitch does is encourage her. Which paradoxically calms IQ more than any massage or empty-brained film ever could.

She doesn’t want to lose all this. Her chest hurts with the pressure of potentially losing someone this dear to her. But at the same time, she doesn’t want Twitch to get the wrong idea.

When silence is all she receives, she looks up to find Twitch fighting for composure – wide eyes filled with moisture and lip quivering. It’s a stab in the guts. IQ has never seen her cry.

“I don’t -”, Twitch chokes out, adding more quietly: “This isn’t -”

IQ sits next to her, reaching out but retreating when Twitch shakes her head, so all she does is take her hand. As always, her fingers are cold, so IQ closes her own around them. This isn’t at all what she intended, but she needs to know.

“Your friendship means the world”, comes a much more composed statement after a minute. “You should know this.”

She nods. She does know.

“And – and yes, if there was more, I’d be happy. Even happier than I am now. But there doesn’t need to be.” Twitch is speaking faster now, rushing the words, her melodic French accent thickening. “I’m fine with everything staying the way it is. I love being around you, no matter how, so if you’re not okay with – with anything else, it’s fine. I’m fine. I’ll get over it, no worries.”

“Manu. Breathe.” Seeing the other woman in a panic is a rare sight and IQ doesn’t enjoy knowing she’s the cause. “I love being around you, too. You’re my best friend, by far. But… I don’t want anything casual.”

Twitch needs a moment to digest this and IQ readies her responses: she’s had bad experiences with it in the past, and as far as she knows, arrangements like friends with benefits tend to make everything messy and awkward. Staying friends is the better option.

“Yes. Me neither.” A beat. Their eyes meet, Twitch’s still glistening.

There is an even better option, as far as IQ is concerned. And it seems to slowly dawn on the nearly perfect woman next to her.

“And… what about something not casual? But still more?”

Oh. The pressure begins to lift off her chest with every passing second, with every second that Twitch stares at her, hopeful, unsure. Slowly, she clarifies: “You mean – cookies and a confession?”

The nod is nearly imperceptible, and IQ probably almost breaks her fingers by squeezing so hard. The next thing she knows is she’s leaning forward and pressing their lips together, tasting the saltiness of perceived rejection as well as the disbelieving smile of actual acceptance, and then Twitch is laughing as well, crying in between relieved giggling, almost hysterical, and IQ joins in, and before they know it, they’re a mess on the sofa, hugging, seeking physical contact, pressing kisses to temples and hair and cheeks and lips again, wrapping arms around warm bodies.

Her heart is singing because while she so fiercely hoped, she barely dared to, was used to disappointments and therefore expected the worst, even ascribed traits to her best friend in the whole world who’d never stoop so low as to demand something from her she wasn’t ready to give. No, Twitch understands her and vice versa. Even so, it took them an embarrassingly long time to get to this point. In their shared joyousness, they barely manage to finish their sentences:

“What Dom heard me say wasn’t, I mean, I was just -”

“Yes, I figured, but it still got me thinking -”

“I was having a bad day, I’m not that frustrated -”

“Oh? That’s a shame, you know, I was actually looking forward to -”

“Monika!”, Twitch exclaims, scandalised even though they’re both aware IQ is joking, and by now they’re laughing like mad, especially because Twitch only uses her full name when she’s done something, so IQ resorts to tickling her in retaliation or maybe to distract her, and they both yelp when Twitch’s foot shoots up, gets caught on the rim of the cookie plate peeking over the coffee table’s edge, and catapults its contents everywhere. One manages to hit IQ in the face, the rest is scattered all over the floor, which sets them off again after a second of total silence.

“It’s fine, it’s fine”, Twitch gets out in between breaths, “I really do have tons more at home.” Which IQ believes her in a heartbeat.

Even though she’s pretty sure she got the lion’s share of the leftovers.

And just a second before they notice that the napkin on which the cookies were presented has caught fire, IQ thinks about how she dreaded spending Christmas at Hereford without her family – and she realises now she’ll be in great company regardless.

[i-am-a--lionheart]

~◇~ To all of us ~◇~ ◇~ Day 3 of sunorweek by @sildesalaten and @ryuokowolf - 'Family' ~◇ {my Lovely cosplay partners are @butterbu-t-t and @prunormis } ~ It was around 8pm as their ship came into the haven of Copenhagen - the City was cold and dark but certainly not quiet at all - It seemed as if the City would never Sleep at all. And Lukas remembered with a slight wince that he, too, had spend far too many sleepless nights here. The Norwegian hated the City, he hated its size, he hated its drive but he also loved it, he loved the colourful buildings and the Scent of the ocean lingering in its streets. Well, it kind of was the same for the man that was so connected to this City that was most likely his heart. Yes, Lukas still loved him dearly but he despised him all the same. And the cold metal around his ringfinger reminded him again that he did not belong the Dane at all. It relieved him on the one Hand but...to be with Mathias meant to be with Emil, his brother that he could only visit so little, his former Colony that they had robbed from him. Lukas could still kill the both of them for ripping them apart but then again he could not because they finally talked again to each other (like adults and without reaching for a gun although Berwald would Never come here without one). He also could not kill them because he still hadnt the strenght and because he loved them so much that it Hurt. Mostly he wished to forget everything, to ban every feeling from his heart because it made him worn out, because it hurt ihm like that. Sometimes, when he was full of sorrow, even Berwalds soft touch hurt like hell. And he was glad that today wasnt one of those days and that this Moment was not one of those when he would flinch when his partner tried to take his hand. The ship had reached one of the keels and Berwalds Hand was guiding him off the boat. The Swede did not talk - he barely did when they first arrived here and it often took one to tree bottles of beer to loosen up his tongue. Lukas would not talk that much either because he was too shaken with the sensation of being back here, because the chills that ran down his spine needed to be ignored. Lukas was stronger now and much more independent since he had left the Union with Mathias and everybody here should See that. Should see that despite being bound, he could be strong - and he would not stay in a union forever, no matter if he loved Berwald or not. "Are ya alright?", came Berwalds voice, still in swedish - he refused to speak anything else until he met Mathias and even when they were together, all three of them, he tended to talk Swedish with Lukas. Lukas always spoke Riksmål in those meetings because he did not like the sound of Swedish but he did not want to talk danish and French was Not at all familiar enough for the Three of them. "I can't forget.", answered Lukas, his voice weak nur steady as he responded to the light pressure of their intertwined hands. Berwald sighed softly, a very familiar sound. "I know.", the answer was short and a mere whisper - maybe because the both of them could see that a familiar face was approaching them. Mathias smiled because he always did - It was more of a habit than because of happiness, although he truly was happy to see them - he was nervous too, he always was, and anxious. To see the both of them together was, well, difficult to say the least. He could stand it - mostly because he knew that Lukas had become stronger and better under Berwalds Hand but then again it was Berwald and he still seethed because the Swede had ripped them apart and was the one to have it all and it was too much to bare but he had to keep calm. He always did during those meetings and the five of them that they had had during the last twenty years had always worked perfectly fine. Berwald did not like it, but sometimes it felt like he would truly miss the Smile that Mathias granted them. It reminded him of when they were Youngsters and when he had considered the Dane as his closest friend, his best ally...And he responded to it with a small, nearly invisible smile that faded just slightly as Mathias came closer. They Shook hands, as always and the oldest of them Greet them with a "Welcome to Copenhagen." He could literally see that Mathias was a bit shaken up, even more than last Time. Maybe the German States, especially Prussia, really wanted to harm Denmark. But Sweden could not help them, not with arms at least.. "Hej.", Berwald greeted After he had let go of his hand but he knew that Mathias was not focused on him - Not when Lukas was around at last. His king always said that he should talk alone with the Dane but Berwald always declined this order - Lukas was a Part of this Union just like he was and he wanted him to Take Part at Every important Meeting as long as he wanted to participate. When Mathias took his Hand it felt awfully formal but the Norwegian was thankful that he kept the distance between them. When they had first seen each other again, around 1830, Mathias had hugged him so forcefully that it had bruised him for days. Lukas' gaze was neutral but it held a small glimpse of feelings when he looked into those Sky blue eyes of his former partner without letting go of Berwalds Hand. The Swede was his Anchor, he would Not be able to Stay calm around Mathias without him. Because Mathias was a Danger although he had grown weaker during the last decades...and he was still like Fire and Lukas was attracted to all of it but Berwald kept him in Every way there was. "Hei Mathias.", he uttered while watching the Smile on his Face - a mere mask, Lukas could See it wavering but Mathias steadied himself, Let go of his hand and turned around. "I have reserved the same booth as always.", the Dane proclaimed. And his smile turned more honest as he heard Lukas' Deep Voice behind him. "I like it there." Berwald just nodded and it seemed like he would grab his hand just a little more thighly. The booth was truly Beautiful - It belonged to a small bar in the heart of the city, the people around here were simple but rather Quiet compared to the lower workers that used to visit the bars at the haven, near the fish market. The beer was even better and this was the Main reason for Mathias to even come to the Place that he called his 'resort'. Lukas had taken Place already, after finally letting go of Berwalds hand. He always sat in their middle - maybe because that was where he had always belonged to, maybe because he was the only one that would stay calm - nearly always at least - if they did not talk about Emil that was. Today they did not talk about Iceland, Mathias had more important Problems to discuss. And the more beer he drank, The better he could discuss. They talked about nearly everything, taxes, armys, how prussia threatened him and much more. Berwald was fierce with his goals just like he always was - but he seemed more Good willed than usual, especially when it came to the threat in the south. Normally he would Not Support him but if Prussia could take Denmark, what should Stop him then from attacking the Two of them afterwards? Plus they were still Brothers and although none of them could ever forget what Mathias had done to either of them, they did not want to abandone him. "We will support you. Could lower the Tax on Steel. Not on wood though...", Berwald offered After he had taken another sip of his beer and folded his arms. "Could reserve some finer Stones for ya also.", said Lukas, nearly softly. All Anger was forgotten for the moment and the alcohol had whiped away the neutral gaze and the strength and Emotion let his Deep blue eyes Shine in the dim candlelight and Berwald knew exactly why he loved this man. And as Mathias slowly raised his glass, the both of them did the same. " To all of us. To Scandinavia.", his voice was stronger now, fueled by warmth and alcohol. "To all of us."

[bigyack-com]

Where Are the Tech Zillionaires? San Francisco Faces the I.P.O. Fizzle

SAN FRANCISCO — Seven months ago, the Four Seasons in San Francisco sent out a news release announcing the glad tidings that would come soon: New residences for the new money. Builders were hoisting glass and steel into a 43-story tower where residents would have their own on-staff wine concierge, plus Blue de Savoie French marble, German milled Poggenpohl cabinetry and Dornbracht fixtures. The building’s $49 million penthouse would be the most expensive in San Francisco. “Just in time for the coming wave of I.P.O. millionaires in San Francisco,” the Four Seasons said, promising “an elevated sales experience” to cater to “this new class of buyers.” But then the wave of tech initial public offerings — the one that was supposed to mint San Francisco’s new ultra rich — fizzled. The stock of Uber, the ride-hailing giant, has dropped nearly 30 percent since the company went public in May. Lyft shares are down nearly 40 percent. Pinterest and Slack have declined, too. San Francisco has been left as a slightly more normal town of tech workers who got rich-ish, maybe making a few hundred thousand dollars. But that doesn’t go far in a city where the median cost of a single family home is about $1.6 million. “Everyone that came back post-I.P.O. seemed to be the same person. I didn’t see any Louis Vuitton MacBook case covers or champagne in their Yeti thermos,” said J.T. Forbus, a tax manager at Bogdan & Frasco in San Francisco.Private wealth managers are now meeting with a chastened clientele. Developers are having to cut home prices — unheard-of a year ago. Party planners are signing nondisclosure agreements to stage secret parties where hosts can privately enjoy their wealth. Union organizers are finding an opportunity. Everyone had gotten too excited, and who could blame them? The money was once so close: A start-up that coordinated dog walkers raised $300 million. The valuations of the already giant ride-hailing behemoths had nearly doubled again. WeWork, a commercial real estate management start-up that owned very little of its own real estate, was valued at $47 billion. Towers rose across San Francisco to house the money. The marble was polished. The bathroom floors were warm. The private pools were being filled.“The world has changed in a year,” said Herman Chan, a real estate broker with Sotheby’s International. “We expected an upward trajectory at least, and it really kind of deflated. These companies aren’t dying but the cultural zeitgeist, that momentum of I.P.O.s, is gone. You don’t even hear anyone talking about it anymore.”The developers who had fought the odds of regulation and zoning to build their glass residences in the sky had timed their units to the I.P.O.s. But on a recent visit with the Four Seasons sales team, they acknowledged that techie wealth was not what they were seeing. Interest was mostly coming from overseas buyers, young heirs to foreign fortunes and older executives looking for city pieds-à-terre, they said. Also in time for the wave that was not a wave are more luxury towers: The Avery, The Harrison, 181 Fremont, The Mira. “The definition of luxury is scarcity, and there’s so many now,” Mr. Chan said. “Nowadays, my buyers are getting a contingency period and inspectors. Things you would never ask for before. There’s not 10 offers on a house anymore.”Case in point: A full-floor apartment in San Francisco’s poshest neighborhood of Pacific Heights was listed at $21.6 million and advertised that “a sommelier-worthy wine cellar awaits 1,500 of your most prized bottles.” But more than a year later and after a $5 million price cut, it is still on the market. Prices for the top 5 percent of San Francisco area real estate listings — the cream of the crop — rose 7 percent between 2017 and 2018. This year, they have fallen more than 1 percent, according to data prepared for The New York Times by the real estate listing service Zillow. The malaise has spread south into Silicon Valley. A $10.8 million home listing in the town of Portola Valley, Calif., was slashed to $5.7 million. The median sale price for a nearby home in San Jose, Calif., has dropped 10 percent in a year to just under $1 million, according to data from the real-estate listing site Zillow. Before the tech I.P.O.s, Deniz Kahramaner, then a real estate data analyst with the property brokerage Compass, had rallied packed rooms of real estate agents and investors about the bonanza that lay ahead. He had charts and estimates of thousands of new millionaires raising the average price of single family homes in San Francisco above $5 million.Now, he is more muted. “The I.P.O. cash-out hasn’t played out as I mentioned in my original presentation,” he said. Mr. Kahramaner added, hopefully, that it was still early. “People need more time,” he said.

Wealth and Unions

Instead of yachts, tech workers are funding more mundane ventures like college savings plans. “This year brought a lot of people back to reality,” said Ryan S. Cole, a private wealth adviser at Citrine Capital, a wealth management firm in San Francisco. “We’ve had a lot of people fund 529 plans for their kids. Pretty boring stuff.”Some private wealth managers said they were actually somewhat relieved. “At the end of the day, it’s funny money until it’s realized," said Jonathan DeYoe, another private wealth adviser. “I’ve got Uber and Lyft clients that are disappointed. It’s a different house now. It’s a different school situation for the kids. But they’re still by and large in good places. No one’s impoverished.”And so workers who thought they would upgrade from Allbirds to Berluti shoes are remaining, after all, in the Allbirds.As some rank-and-file tech workers realize they might not get rich from company stock, the allure of working long hours without comparable real money pay is also wearing thin, said labor organizers. They have found traction this year in an industry long resistant to unions. “The incentives to take the licks that you do are in the hope of some sort of big payoff down the road,” said Paul Thurston, who focuses on unionizing San Francisco tech workers and is the organizing director at the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. Now, “the engineers and the app designer and the developers are going to be treated a lot more like the employees that they are rather than like partners, which is what they’re told pre-I. P. O.,” he said.Jonathan Wright, the organizing director of Engineers and Scientists of California, said he was in talks to unionize the workers of several big tech companies. “There’s a promise: you work 100 hours a week, you sleep under your desk, and then you’ll be rewarded with the wealth of Bezos,” Mr. Wright said. “That mythology has been fading for years. The day of the unicorn is over.”Where there is new wealth, it’s coming from the older tech companies like Apple and Alphabet, whose stocks this year have soared. And some fortunes are still being made from the I.P.O.s. While Uber’s shares have fallen, the company’s co-founder, Travis Kalanick, has sold off more than $2 billion in stock, according to securities filings. “Especially with things like Uber, almost all the I.P.O. wealth was going to a couple of people,” said Kalena Masching, a Redfin agent in San Jose. “They are not looking to buy a standard house here.”Another bright spot: female-led companies, with more becoming unicorns in 2019 than any other year, according to Aileen Lee, the venture capitalist who coined the phrase “unicorn” to refer to a private company valued at $1 billion or more.And post-I.P.O. parties are happening. They are just secret — and phone-free. “We’re signing a lot more nondisclosures,” said Jay Siegan, who curates party entertainment for corporate tech clients. “A year ago, people would set up social media stations at the party, signs with the hashtag for Instagram. Now we have clients asking guests to check their phones at the door or using those Yondr bags.”These are pouches used to lock phones en masse at concerts and events where someone might be tempted to record.

Self Reflection

However, in public, the tech world is all about reflection and self-critiquing after the year that was. The I.P.O. disappointment has gotten so extreme that two Silicon Valley techies are setting out to do what few have done before: Make fun of themselves. David Cowan, a venture capitalist with Bessemer Venture Partners, which invested in Lyft, and Michael Fertik, the founder of Reputation.com, are launching an online talk show called “The Bubble Report.” It will feature interviews with other tech executives. The point, they hope, is to poke fun at Silicon Valley from within Silicon Valley.Mr. Cowan, either in character or just being very honest, decried the falling stock prices of newly public tech companies as victims of cruel Wall Street analysts.“It should be against the law for unscrupulous analysts to assess stocks based on cash flow and profit, to impugn a company based on eight lines of a financial report,” he joked. “Imagine how much more value we’d have in the stock market if we got rid of that arcane thinking.” Mr. Fertik said his inspiration to mock his industry came in part from realizing how far from reality it had all gotten. “I want people to understand that Silicon Valley is a deeply religious place that thinks of itself as agnostic,” he said. “It has some of the strengths and many of the frailties of organized religion.”For now, most people are waking up to find they are still on Earth. This is good news for those in San Francisco who mostly viewed the tech exuberance as bad news: housing rights activists, first-time home buyers, and renters. “We are excited by any resetting of Bay Area rents that bring them down from their artificially inflated high,” said Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, the executive director of Housing Rights Committee, which fights against evictions. “Eventually all bubbles burst.” Read the full article

[autodidact-adventures]

Ballet History (Part 19): The ballet d’action

By now, ballet in Paris had reached a crisis.  Sallé and her generation were gone, and dance was moving towards virtuosic technical feats, but not much more.  Both artists and critics scorned dance for its shallow artifice and insincere deceit.  “Like a dancing master” was a common insult to describe anything that had fallen into a false, decadent state.

This criticism of ballet came from the cultural upheaval of the French Enlightenment.  1600's French classical culture had declined into decorative excess and overindulgence, and the current generation of artists & writers were at odds with the society they lived in. The Enlightenment wasn't just about the ancien régime's underlying principles, but everything – how people dressed, moved and danced. Politics, art, fashion, performing arts – all these were the subject of strong debate.  Many of the articles written about dance were published in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (compiled 1751-80).

Noverre acknowledged his debt to Diderot in his Lettres.  Diderot had written a lot about the problems in French theatre, which he found “wooden” and far too formal.  The actors postured & preened at the front of the stage (where the light was best) to perform their dramatic speeches.  Then they would drop out of character and wander aimlessly around the stage.

Diderot wanted to develop a new kind of theatre, which would have sustained action, dramatic tableaux, and pantomime as its base.  He wanted actors to remove their masks; look & speak to each other, not the audience; and stop using the traditional declamation techniques (like Garrick). Others had the same ideas.

Diderot & others also wanted to make the costumes more realistic – peasants didn't wear silk!  And in the 1750's, actors began to listen.  In 1753, Madame Favart (Comédie Italienne) wore simple peasant dress when playing the part of a village girl.  In 1755, Mademoiselle Clairon (a tragic actress) performed without hoopskirts and toned down her delivery.

But if the problem with theatre was that it didn't say things realistically, then the problem with dance was that it didn't say anything at all!  Louis de Cahusac was a writer & librettist who worked with Jean-Philippe Rameau, and he complained that ballet had reached its limits – Sallé had been expressive, but ballet-dancers nowadays were nothing more than technicians, and they were debasing their art.

Diderot said: “I would like someone to tell me what all these dances such as the minuet, the passepied, and the rigaudon signify...this man carries himself with an infinite grace; every movement of his conveys ease, charm and nobility: but what is he imitating?  That's not singing, that's solfège.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had composed operas & ballets in Paris in the 1740's and 50's, but he would later turn against ballet, saying that it was an example of how society “enchained” individuals, destroying their natural goodness with unnecessary social graces:

If I were a dancing master, I would not perform all the monkeyshines of Marcel, good only for that country where he engages in them.  Instead of eternally busying my pupil with leaps, I would take him to the foot of a cliff.  There I would show him what attitude he must take, how he must bear his body and his head, what movements he must make, in what way he must place now his foot, now his hand, so as to follow lightly the steep, rough, uneven paths and to bound from peak to peak in climbing up as well as down.  I would make him the emulation of a goat rather than that of a dancer at the Opéra.

Rousseau believed that performing ballets within operas interrupted the story and wrecked its dramatic effect.  Baron Grimm agreed, worrying that ballet had taken over French opera: “French opera has become a spectacle where everything that is good and evil in the characters is reduced to dances.”  And these dances, he said, were nothing more than academic exercises.

Rousseau's decision was that “all dances that depict only themselves, and all ballet which is just dancing, should be banished from lyric theatre.”

Noverre wrote about these issues in his Lettres.  He wanted to turn ballet away from the shallowness & pleasure-seeking of the aristocracy, and towards the study of man, towards tragedy and moral dilemmas. Performing beautiful movements against beautiful sets with beautiful costumes was not enough – ballet should appeal to the emotions as well as the eyes, becoming a “portrait of humanity” with manking & truth as its subjects.  The German critic & dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (who admired Noverre) said the same thing, in a different way: “If pomp and etiquette make machines out of men, it is the task of the poet to make men again out of these machines.”

So dance had to tell a story without words of any kind – only with movement.  Not just light, entertaining stories – Noverre wanted to choreograph ballets about murder, betrayal and incest, and he went on to do so.

But he had no intention of changing the actual steps & poses of the noble style.  The reformation of ballet would be done with pantomime, not with the  steps.  Noverre would create the ballet d'action – a mixture of pantomime, dance and music.  It would be a new genre.

By “pantomime”, Noverre didn't mean the “low and trivial” gestures of the Italian bouffons, or the “false and lying” gestures of society, which people practised in front of mirrors.  This type of pantomime would cut through the pretense and artifice of court forms, and reach the human core.  It would be a “second organ” and a “cry of nature”, revealing man's deepest & most secret feelings.

Words often failed, Noverre wrote.  Or they could be used to cover up what you truly meant.  But the body couldn't lie – it moved instinctively, the muscles twisting the body into positions that conveyed inner torment far better than words ever could.

But pantomime had its limits – for example, it couldn't express the past or the future.  So Noverre decided that ballets should be like paintings, not plays.  They should be a series of “living tableaux” that followed one after the other, like a triptych.

Noverre studied art & architecture, and then applied the laws of perspective, proportion, and light to his ballets.  He arranged the dancers by height, shortest at the front and tallest at the back, and then worked out patterns of chiaroscuro (light & shade) onstage.

The dancers, he argued, shouldn't be just pretty ornaments lined up in neat rows, but individual people, each given a specific role, with gestures and poses, to realistically show a moment of action.  In his tableaux, the dancers often froze in a photo-like image and then moved on. Noverre even introduced pauses into his ballets, to bring attention to “all the details” of these “pictures”.  [Not sure if that's referring to his regular ballets as opposed to the ballets d'action, or the dancing within the ballets d'action.]

The use of tableaux wasn't an original idea – as mentioned earlier, Diderot wanted to use pantomime for a new form of theatre.  Parisian lawyers had begun using dramatic poses & tableaux to strengthen their arguments, as a rhetorical tool.  The aristocracy used tableaux for art, too – when Louis XVI married Marie Antoinette in 1770, the celebrations included tableaux, with actors freezing in painting-like scenes, each marking an important symbolic moment in the celebrations.  In the late 1700's, staging “live paintings” became a popular salon activity, especially for women.

But Noverre's use of tableaux changed how ballets were structured.  In French opera, ballets were divertissements (numbers), arranged around an overarching theme, for aesthetic purposes.  Symmetry, hierarchy, and patterns gave order to the dancers and the stage.  Instead, Noverre created a series of static tableaux, in which irregularly-posed groups fixed their bodies in expressive postures, limbs at angles.

Noverre also wanted to change how the dancers looked: “Children of Terpsichore...abandon these cold masks, imperfect imitations of nature; they denature your expressions, they eclipse, to put it bluntly, your soul and deprive you of your most necessary resources for expressing yourselves; get rid of these huge wigs and gigantic coifs, which distort the proportions of head and body; do without these tight and fashionable underskirts, which deprive movement of its charms, which disfigure elegant positions and efface the beauty of the upper body in its different poses.”

Like Garrick, Noverre insisted that the theatre should be darkened & quiet during the performance.  The audience members should be seated at exactly the right distance from the stage to best enter the world of the performance.  The backstage area should be hidden from view, and set changes should be invisible and carried out smoothly – in Paris, set changes were usually announced by the stage manager loudly blowing a whistle, and the crew carried them out noisily and in full view of the audience, with curtain raised.  This was the practice until the last decades of the 1700's.

Like Diderot & others, Noverre wanted to strip away the social mask & artistic constraints, to rediscover the natural man beneath it.  The idea of the ballet d'action had a lot in common with the utopian desire to return to a pre-social world, with a primitive & universal language that would speak directly to all people, no matter their social class.  Utopians disliked the French language (one critic called it “a perfidious language”), and many philosophers looked to pantomime as an alternative, one that was clear and completely honest.  Louis-Sébastien Mercier would later say that gesture “is clear, never equivocal; it does not lie.”

These people didn't want to just change art – they wanted to create a new society, one that was honest and direct, and not based on a decadent court culture.  So pantomime was part of a wide array of social/political issues, and thus the subject of a wide-ranging debate.  Ballet was a part of the intellectual life of the time, not separate from it as it is now.

Rousseau was against ballet, but for pantomime.  He felt that it could capture & express essential parts of the human nature, parts that had existed before people had been corrupted by society – the “cry of nature” that Noverre was interested in.

But Rousseau also agreed that pantomime had limitations.  As a form of communication, it was primitive – it could convey basic needs, but nothing complicated.  Humans couldn't fully express their emotions without words, he believed, or become morally self-aware.

So he imagined a golden stage in the development of human culture & society, where people would have enough language to communicate, but not enough to be deceptive & hypocritical.  In this utopian world, people would live among music, dance and poetry.  They would be ethically aware and good.  It was the perfect middle ground between primitivism and decadence.

Rousseau was interested enough in pantomime to write one of his own.  He wrote the one-act Pygmalion in 1763, and it was performed in 1770.  It mixed pantomime, speech and music, and the performers used gesture instead of words at moments of great emotion, when they had been reduced otherwise to silence.

Diderot, on the other hand, wasn't so sure about pantomime.  It is true that he laid out instructions for a new genre of drama, but there was a part of him that was not happy with pantomime.  In 1761, he wrote Le Neveu de Rameau (it wasn't published until after his death).  In it was a dialogue between Diderot and Jean-Philippe Rameau's nephew, who was a real person, a failed composer who had irrational outbursts but did have insightful ideas.

He writes the nephew as a desperate, defeated man, because of his inability to live up to his uncle & revitalize French music with a “cry of animal passion”.  He is scornful, bitter, and self-indulgent, and extremely skilled in the art of pantomime, which he uses to make his way in the world.  He demonstrates it for Diderot, showing how he mimes opera scenes and scenes from his own life.  He is vain, manipulative and ingratiating, and uses his skill to get the luxuries he desperately wants.

Diderot tries to persuade him to give all this up, because it is false.  But the nephew refuses to.  Society is unrelenting, he says and social species devour each other (like Mademoiselle Deschamps against the financiers), so he has to join in, too, or he will be nothing.  And so “he leaps, he climbs, he twists, he drags: he spends his life taking and performing positions.”

Diderot is furious: “The fact is you are a weakling, a gourmand, a coward, a muddied soul...No doubt worldly experiences come at a price; but you don't realize the price of the sacrifice you are making to get them. You are dancing, you have danced and you will continue to dance this vile pantomime.”  The nephew is like Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, self-serving and depraved, morally ruined by social posturing, corrupt and fawning.  He's given up on everything that matters – but he is at least honest by admitting it, and this in a way makes him better than Diderot's philosopher & man of high principles.  By the end of the story, it's not clear who's teaching whom a lesson.  The contrived pantomime may be all we have, in the end.

Diderot considered Le Neveu de Rameau to be one of his “mad” works.  But it shows that behind the self-assured tone in his writings of pantomime & the “natural man”, he was aware of just how impossible it was to escape or get rid of social conventions.  For him, pantomime was all tied up with the failures of French music & social corruption.  It seemed impossible to separate them, let alone get out of it all.

There were others who opposed pantomime.  Jean-François Marmontel was a prominent librettist and a protégé of Voltaire, and he wrote a long article for the Encyclopédie, in which he argued that pantomime was morally dangerous & decadent, a form of pure passion which would seduce audiences and put them into a highly emotional state, unable to reason or think critically.  The Romans had yielded to pantomime, and look what had happened to them!  They had preferred sensational theatrical forms over rational forms that encouraged wisdom and moderation.  Manners and comportment civilized man, but pantomime made him a beast.

Another critic argued that the raw gestures of pantomime were an insult to the French elite, and their formal, restrained manners.

So the ballet d'action wasn't just a new ballet/theatre genre.  Noverre was focusing on pantomime, one of the most fundamental ideas of the French Enlightenment, and tying ballet's future to it.  If he succeeded, if pantomime could cut through the social conventions that stifled & dragged humans down, then it could become the foremost new art of a modern man.  It was very ambitious.

But, as mentioned earlier, Noverre didn't go all the way in eschewing the court origins & roots of ballet.  Ballet and its steps were a court art, rooted in the court etiquette that he wanted to get away from.

Most of his ballets were not ballets d'action, but regular ballets, which stuck to the same conventions & techniques he criticized so strongly in his writings.  He continued to use the steps & poses of the noble style.  By focusing on pantomime, Noverre could use gestures to reform ballet, without going as far as to think about the actual steps, and how to take the court out of them.  It was a safer route to take.

Of course, there were practical reasons for this as well: it wasn't just that he shied away from questioning the foundations of the art he'd been trained in & danced himself.  Outside of London, he depended on the aristocracy to survive.  He opposed the etiquette & conventions of the French elite, and was known for his rough manners and impulsive outbursts, but he was also a courtier, and could be charming & smooth when he needed to be.  His portraits show him very well-groomed, as would be expected of him.

Diderot had the same problem.  He was voluble, gobbled at table, and was far too unrestrained & enthusiastic for polite society, who were offended by him.  But when Louis-Michel van Loo painted him at his desk with messy hair, he complained that he had not been depicted with his wig on.  And Rousseau dramatically renounced Parisian society in the 1750's, getting rid of his fancy clothes and accessories, but he was extremely self-conscious about his appearance for the rest of his life.

Foreign courts usually hired Noverre as a French ballet-master, not as a radical. They expected him to stage the usual Parisian ballets that would be performed at the Opéra.  When Noverre travelled to Stuttgart, Vienna & Milan to work there, he brought French dancers with him, and had them keep training in the serious style, even though he was composing his radical pantomime-ballets at the same time.

Throughout his career, Noverre preferred the French costume-designer Louis-René Boquet, who had trained with Boucher.  His costumes were extravagant, following Parisian fashion, and were the exact opposite of what the ballet d'action required.  Noverre represented both the French aristocratic style and the Enlightenment criticism of it (and did very well out of it.)