Identity Reboot [post-Round 10]

[Plotinus]

/in stranger

[Plotinus]

V/LA until the end of Saturday

[Plotinus]

I was a precocious and trouble preteen, who had a penchant for reading their mother's magazines, and believing most of what I read because the target audience was grown ups. One of the articles was about twins have an innate connection to each other and that people who lose a twin in the womb wind up going through life always missing something that should be there and being depressed. The article said that a lot of pregnancies end in miscarriage and that if there's some bleeding early on during the pregnancy it could be the loss of one of the twins, so it's possible there are a lot of people who are missing a twin who don't even realise it! This clearly explained all of my problems!!! So I named my dead twin and wrote them letters and I could talk to her about my problems that i couldn't talk to anybody about. I really did believe it for a while but I guess as my teenagehood progressed I just stopped keeping in contact with this dead person who probably never existed.

[Plotinus]

Like StrangerCoug, I also named mine after my middle name. I thought saying that might throw you off though because it'd look like I was copying him

[Plotinus]

Duolingo is kind of fun and a suitable outlet for boredom or killing some time but it doesn't mesh very well with my learning style; I completed the German tree but if I were to visit Germany I would not be able to hold a conversation. I don't get bored very often but if I got really sick again I might reinstall it.

[Plotinus]

Interesting fact: Plotinus's Duolingo account, which hadn't been logged into for a long time, apparently has Plotinus as working on exactly 28 languages and a reverse tree. We chatted about whether the identity felt true of Plot or not and concluded that the verb didn't seem accurate to how Plot views and uses Duolingo. But that was a very good initial guess, and a tough call on my end.

My 28 are Arabic, Catalan (from Spanish), Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Navajo, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish (the one my reverse tree is in), Swedish, Vietnamese, and Welsh, and I've been tempted to add Hungarian and/or Scottish Gaelic (the latter of which recently came out) to make 29 or 30. What were Plotinus's?

I think mine were "all the ones that were available at the last time i was looking at it"

Ones with more than 1000 XP: German, Hungarian, English (from Hungarian), Spanish, Italian, Dutch
More than 500 XP: Japanese, Swedish, French, Greek, Russian, Esperanto
More than 100 XP: Polish, Turkish, Norwegian (Bokmål), Welsh, Romanian, Vietnamese, Ukranian, Irish
Less than 100 XP: Korean, Swahili, Portuguese, Danish, Navajo, Hawaiian, Indonesian, High Valyrian, Hebrew

Of those, I'd be comfortable claiming that I can:

• understand most of what I hear/read and produce arbitrary sentences in English, Hungarian, a few other languages that Duolingo doesn't have
  
• produce at least one useful sentence without the help of a dictionary in: German, Russian, Italian
  
• understand a surprising amount by relying on cognates given that I can't produce any sentences in: Polish, Ukranian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, French
  
• produce non useful sentences by quoting song lyrics in: Spanish, Swedish, Romanian

[Plotinus]

He~y KMo I've sent you two identities for future games and I'm not listed as NQ yet

Sorry, what?

I think I have the same question. I sent you 4 or 5 indentities when I PMed you before round 1, but I'm not listed as a stranger now

[Plotinus]

Both of you are on the "Current Strangers" list because I was planning to put you in N's round

oh, thanks, I guess I skipped the line with my name or something

[Plotinus]

I also drink a ton of tea, probably more than 300 bags/2 months, but I purchase my tea in boxes of 20 because I like to vary the flavours between pots.

[Plotinus]

i make a litre of tea with two teabags, and then when it's gone i make another litre of non-caffeinated tea (fruit infusions, herbal teas, roisboos) and so on for about 3-4 litres/day

[Plotinus]

My father was doing missionary work in Guinea-Bissau shortly after it gained independence in the 70's. My mother was distributing mosquito nets and that's how they met. You can buy someone a mosquito net for about $5 and can really make a difference in someone's life.

[Plotinus]

It's a great colour!

[Plotinus]

I was swimming in the Adriatic the summer I was 18. The only sharks they have there are basking sharks, which aren't dangerous to humans. It was a really surreal experience though.

[Plotinus]

I was visiting a friend who lived in a village on the other side of the border for the weekend, back in 2004 or so. The busses don't go across the border, instead there are separate bus companies on either side of the border that have stops near it. The friend's family had a car, though, so when it was time to go home, they took me right to their side of the border. We'd done a little shopping so I was carrying my things in a plastic bag. I got out of their car and said goodbye, showed my passport to the border guards, listed the tiny villages I'd visited for them. I didn't speak their language back then and they didn't speak mine so we had to do this in English. After they were satisfied with me and had given me my exit stamp, I walked over to our side of the border and presented my passport the guards on our side, got my entry stamp, then walked to the bus stop and got on the last bus back to my town.

The trains do go across the border, but there's only one a day and it takes 2 hours because they practically dismantle the train looking for drugs at the border.

[Plotinus]

It was little squirrel little squirrel climbed up the tree, it fell down, it fell down, broke its leg, mr doctor don't heal it, the squirrel is naughty and will climb the tree again



I said my friend's kid had been playing with my phone but truth is I never outgrew this music.

[Plotinus]

It is true that I have not outgrown children's music and that I non ironically enjoy the squirrel song. Little Ducky Swims is probably my favourite, but I didn't go with it because it doesn't sound all that unprofessional

[Plotinus]

It was "Bananaphone" by Raffi, and it kept me out of grad school for a whole year.

ooh that's a great idea for a ringtone

[Plotinus]

It was "Bananaphone" by Raffi, and it kept me out of grad school for a whole year.

ooh that's a great idea for a ringtone

YOU'D THINK SO BUT NO

I'm sorry you missed out on that year of grad school over it.

Another great ringtone baba telephone

Daddy telephone!
Tell them I'm not here!
Daddy is saying that he is not here!

[Plotinus]

I was sixteen and it was at a birthday party on a hot summer afternoon. Someone else did it first and I wanted to see what it was like, so I did it, too, and a few other people joined in. I liked the sense of drag my clothes created as I tried to move around in the water. I had a baggy shirt on and it billowed out around me.

When I was seven, my friend and I used to like to ride our bikes down this one hill, which seemed incredibly steep at the time but I imagine if I went back there now and looked at it with adult eyes, it would be a lot smaller. The forest did, when I found it on google maps years later, a small patch of trees between our two apartment buildings. We'd ride down it screaming the whole way and then push our bikes up back up the hill again. My friend advised me to try it without screaming and it was even more exhilarating that way: the scream would just build up inside of you, filling your whole body and stay there. Anyway, one of the many times, my tire hit a rock just wrong and I fell off onto some gravel and scraped up my arm and then I wasn't allowed to go swimming until it healed.

[Plotinus]

I got into my mother's family books, which talked about using mucous consistency to determine when you were fertile, but I only knew about the head cold kind of mucous

[Plotinus]

She had a kidney infection. It came on very suddenly and I was one of her older students so she had me take over the lessons just until she was better.

[Plotinus]

strangercoug should get some extra guesses for replacing in because saladman wasted some of his i think

[Plotinus]

I'm a geocacher, so I already had a list of places I wanted to see because it's common to hide caches in places that you'd want to visit anyway, so I planned out a route for our group and shared the information on the cache pages.

[Plotinus]

I was 9 and my mother's friend had it in a potted plant and it just looks so soft and fuzzy and I knew what a cactus was and that cacti were sharp but it just looked so soft

[Plotinus]

It wasn't soft and the little stickers in my fingers were so light and tiny it was hard to see them to get them out

[Plotinus]

Hi Plotinus! Guess I'm first getting to know more of the players I don't know too well. I'm excited to ask my first question. I decided to go for one of the identities about childhood because I enjoy learning about early developmental history.

@Plotinus, why was your family so worried about having a door on your bedroom?

The door had been damaged by a previous tenant so we just took it off its hinges, but the landlord wouldn't pay for a new one so I got this green beaded curtain that I used to like to run back and forth through. The lack of privacy didn't really bother me at that age, fortunately I was pretty young when we lived there.

[Plotinus]

I was 9. It was lemon scented and it smelled so real, so much like lemon that I just couldn't believe it wouldn't taste like lemon. I only tasted a drop. It was very bitter and it did not taste like lemon at all.