okay so my linguistic background is absolutely diabolical and i need to lay it out chronologically for you
grew up speaking Russian at home with everyone except my father
why not my father? oh, because him and i spoke LATIN. he sat me down for intensive lessons and then we just… kept going. pretty sure he just wanted a secret language we could use in public???
meanwhile, the country we lived in was mostly French-speaking. so that’s the language of the grocery store, the playground, the government forms etc
then i went to high school in a predominantly German-speaking area of another country, so German (which I never got the hang of) for weekend trips
oh and the high school was English-speaking. so classes in English. also i was taking Chinese as a subject because why not add a tonal language to the mix
now i’m in university. in an English-speaking country
so my internal monologue is basically four languages in a trenchcoat trying to pass as a normal person, and none of them feel like a default home language except maybe Latin???
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“All in the immediate vicinity of the ship, is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe.”
- Edgar Allan Poe (1833). MS. Found in a Bottle.
My summer break is going very well. I am perpetually cold, but that is because I did not pack smartly.
there isn't a lot i like about tiktok but without lord of the rings edits i would not be the man i am today (i need them to recharge my fanfic writing batteries)
"When I am alone in a forest, even briefly, even within earshot of my friends ahead, I feel something settle in me that does not settle anywhere else. It is like recognition, as if some part of me is constitutionally forest-shaped and is only at ease when surrounded by the things it was apparently designed for. I am aware that this is probably a psychological artefact of spending too much time in modern environments and investing the natural world with a romance it does not reciprocate. The forest does not care that I am here. The forest does not care about anything. But the indifference of trees is, I find, much more restful than the indifference of institutions."
A few days ago, I went fishing and caught SEVEN fish.
I saw this cute plaque and took the time to slow down and read it. It made me feel melancholic. I really hope Nelson still wanted to be a fisherman by the time he was grown, and I hope he didn't get seasick so he could achieve that dream.
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"What I want from her, (and I am going to allow myself to want things for the space of this paragraph, which is more than I allow myself in most other contexts), is something I am not sure I can give her in return, and this asymmetry seems to me the most significant constraint of all."
Summary: Every profound spirit needs a mask; even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing.
On Wall Street, everyone wears a mask. Ajax's is gilded—wealthy, brilliant and a little ruthless—the youngest Vice President of Snezhnaya Group and the envy of men twice his age. But beneath the polish lies Tartaglia: the murderous creature born in frozen Leningrad and buried beneath years of performance and starvation.
Then he meets Zhongli, the untouchable chairman of a rival firm. He is irrevocably handsome, utterly composed, absolutely revered without even trying to be. Ajax’s fascination festers. He wants him. He wants to be him. He wants to crawl beneath his skin, wear his calm like a second face, and feel what it’s like to be adored without effort.
To love Zhongli is to envy him.
To envy him is to become him.
And as the bodies around Zhongli begin to appear in the forms of his secretaries, partners, and friends, Ajax must confront the most terrifying possibility of all.
Perhaps the mask has slipped.
Pairing: Childe x Zhongli
Tags: Modern Setting AU, Corporate AU, 1990s, Murder Blood and Violence, Unreliable Narrator, Past Abuse, Emotional Manipulation, Dubious Morality, Dubious Ethics, Psychological Horror, Body Horror, Descent into Madness, Secret Identity, Childe is Called Ajax and Childe and Tartaglia, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Healthy Relationships (kinda), Love at First Sight, Soft Zhongli (Genshin Impact), Murder Mystery, Touch-Starved, Symbolism, Literary References & Allusions, References to Canon, Character Development, Historical Accuracy, Explicit Sexual Content, Fluff, Yandere Tartaglia, Power Dynamics, Invisible Foreshadowing, Chekhov's Gun but with Red Herrings?
Words: 43k/?
Authors Note: This fic is very inspired by American Psycho, and I wanted to capture the aesthetic of 1990s Wall Street. Childe is a Vice President of Snezhnaya Group, and Zhongli is the Chairman of Liyue Group.
Chapter 1: Everything absolute belongs to pathology
Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.
Summary: In a world where Middle-earth and Earth have established diplomatic and academic relations, a doctoral student at Harvard specialising in cultural trauma studies, finds himself unexpectedly hosted by Glorfindel, a legendary elven warrior and visiting professor from Imladris. What begins as a practical housing arrangement evolves into something deeper as they navigate cultural differences, academic challenges, and growing feelings for each other.
Pairing: Glorfindel x OMC
Tags: Modern Setting AU, Friends to Lovers, Developing Friendships, Character Development, Re-embodied Glorfindel, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Slow Burn, Feelings Realisation, Cultural Differences, Elf/Human Relationship, Elf Culture & Customs, Mutual Pining, Love Confessions, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Mortality, Classical References, Character Study?, Lots of academic talk and lore, Skippable Sexual Content, Earth and Arda exist simultaneously, Post-Fourth Age of Arda, Late Sixth Age, Multiple Religion & Lore Sources, Healthy Relationships, Angst and Feels, The Inherent Angst Of Immortal/Mortal
Words: 282k + alternate epilogue (29k)
Authors Note: This is 100% a passion project that got out of hand. I've recently gotten into posting on Tumblr, and what better thing to do than promote my finished fic!
This fic has a lot of lore involved, but it's nearly all from canon (just expanded upon).
Chapter 1: Mercy, Pity, Peace: The Golden Professor
Thou fair-haired angel of the evening,
Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
I didn’t grow up expecting to fall in love with another man. I didn’t walk into adolescence thinking, “One day, I shall develop a deep, ruinous attachment to a boy who will, in the end, leave me in a state of ridiculous emotional turmoil.” No, I thought I was straight. Firmly, unquestionably straight.
Which made it rather inconvenient when, at fourteen, I met a boy.
It didn’t happen all at once. There was no grand realisation, no cinematic moment of clarity. Just a slow unraveling. A shift in how I looked at him, in how I noticed the way he moved, the way he laughed. A quiet, insidious thing that dug its roots in before I had the good sense to stop it.
There’s this memory I keep coming back to.
A summer night, years ago, when we were fifteen and slept outside on a trampoline in his backyard. His younger brother had suggested it as a mocking joke (don’t ask the context), and out of pure teenage spite, we pleaded with his parents until they relented. We were stubborn like that, turning offhanded comments into personal challenges, as if winning at something so trivial would mean something in the grand scheme of things.
It was around eleven at night. We lay on our backs, staring up at the stars (not that we could see any, but let’s pretend otherwise for the sake of romanticising this). The air still held the warmth of the day, though it was steadily growing cooler, sneaking into the spaces between us. We had a speaker, a plate of pretzel twists, and a hand knitted blanket from his grandma that was equal parts cozy and vaguely itchy.
I should have been cold. It was kind of damp, with a creeping chill that settles in your bones when you’re too stubborn to admit defeat and go inside. But I wasn’t. And I didn’t realise why until I noticed just how close we were lying.
Neither of us said anything about it. That would have ruined the fragile balance of the moment. So instead, we talked about everything else. Music, school, hypothetical fights between historical figures (his money was on Napoleon, mine on Alexander the Great, which, in hindsight, may have been a subconscious bias).
At some point, we fell silent and he started humming along to Genesis by Grimes (to this day I cannot listen to it without feeling both content and also like a boulder has just been dropped on my chest). I let my eyes drift shut, forehead pressed against his shoulder in the fetal position.
I don’t remember falling asleep. I just remember warmth.
And then, morning.
The pretzels were a tragic sight. Left out overnight, they’d somehow absorbed the dew and transformed into something limp and vaguely sad. The speaker was long dead. And I had woken up with the kind of cold that makes you question whether modern medicine has advanced at all since the medieval era. My throat was on fire, my head felt stuffed with wool, and my body was waging some kind of pathetic rebellion against me.
He found this absolutely hilarious.
I was wrapped up in the same scratchy blanket, teeth literally chattering, when he shoved a mug of instant hot chocolate into my hands. “Idiot,” he’d called me, but it was somehow the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said.
Naturally, I told myself, this was just admiration. Brotherly affection! Intellectual camaraderie! Lies, of course. But convincing ones.
I spent years pretending it wasn’t there. And then, at eighteen, all that pretending collapsed.
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I know what I am and I know the distance between what I am and what I am meant to be. I am saying so aloud, into the architecture, so that it is witnessed.
There is a classification system, ancient and mostly ignored now, which divides all of humanity into four types according to the dominant hu
Just saw this super cool partial family tree of the Indo-European (IE) languages.
"Branches are in order of first attestation; those to the left are Centum, those to the right are Satem. Languages in red are extinct. White labels indicate categories / un-attested proto-languages."
Here some of my favourite facts about IE:
As you can see, English sits in the Germanic branch, meaning its closest relatives are Frisian, Scots, Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, etc. But because England spent a thousand years enthusiastically being invaded, conquered, converted, traded with, and educated by foreigners, English vocabulary is stuffed with words from Latin and French.
Spoken Latin is long gone, but it produced almost an entire continent's worth of descendants: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, and others. Even where it did not leave direct descendants, it left enormous influence. Scientific terminology, law, medicine, theology, and academia are still dominated by Latin.
People often assume Sanskrit is 'dead' like Classical Latin, but there are still communities that use it conversationally, alongside its enormous liturgical and scholarly role. More importantly, Sanskrit preserves incredibly ancient features of Proto-Indo-European. When nineteenth-century linguists noticed how closely Sanskrit resembled Greek and Latin, it fundamentally changed our understanding of language history. Entire fields of linguistics were built on people looking at words like mātṛ (mother), pitṛ (father), and trayas (three) and realising they looked suspiciously familiar.
Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and many others all belong to the Slavic family. Their common ancestry is relatively recent compared to some other branches, which is why there is often a surprising amount of mutual recognition between them.
The really astonishing thing is that all of these languages (probably) ultimately trace back to a single reconstructed ancestor language that nobody ever wrote down (Proto-Indo-European).
Source: Multiple authors (2013). Indo-European language family tree. [online] World History Encyclopedia. Available at: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/1028/indo-european-language-family-tree/.
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I have always found it suspicious that people expect revelations to arrive standing upright.
Most of the important thoughts I have ever had came to me horizontally: in bed, on cold floors, on bathroom tiles, once memorably in the boot of a car. There is something about lying down that makes the world honest.
The grass was stiff with frost, the kind that snaps faintly when you move, as if the earth itself disapproves of being disturbed. I remember thinking, very clearly, that I should not be there, and then thinking, just as clearly, that I did not care.
The sky was enormous.
This is most definitely not an original observation. Every human who has ever looked up has noticed this.
And yet, each time, it feels so personal. The sky does not scale itself to us, but it exists at a size that makes your tiny ambitions look embarrassing.
I lay on my back and stared until the stars started feeling oppressive.
We are trained, from infancy, to orient ourselves vertically. Up is aspiration. Down is grounding. The sky is backdrop. The earth is substance. This arrangement is so deeply internalised that we rarely question it.
But lie flat long enough, and the arrangement dissolves.
There are many nights in my life when the sky feels false, like a ceiling mural painted on. This was not one of those nights.
The stars stopped being points and became holes. Or perhaps the other way around. Perspective lost its grip, and suddenly this winter sky leaned downward, or upwards. And I leaned upwards, or downwards; the distinction dissolved quickly...
There’s a type of grief attached to becoming a person your younger self would not recognise.
sometimes i’ll smell cigarette smoke in winter air or hear distant traffic at 2am and get hit with this overwhelming sense that i have misplaced something enormous and irretrievable.
there are years of my life that feel mythological now. all gold light and cold hands and trains and half-finished conversations and the unbearable conviction that everything mattered more. i don’t even know if they were good years...
anyway, it's strange to think there are versions of us wandering around only in memory now.
