Hi there! I'm Lamp. I'm going on 22. I found Subeta through someone discussing it on Tumblr. When I was a wee little one I was a huge Neopets fan, but I lost interest when my account was hacked and I lost all my hard work. These days so much has changed around there that I'm not really interested anymore: it's not really the same place I remember from my childhood, y'know?

To be honest I'm not normally much of a community person on sites like these, but I noticed incentives here (notably needing 100 posts in the forum to enter the Blue Building) and I'm not directly opposed, it's just not normally something I view as a social activity. I really like it here so far, the pet designs are awesome, the human avatars are unique for a pet site, the setting and lore are really well developed (I'm a huge sucker for deep setting lore, lemme tell ya) and for the most part I'm finding my way around pretty well. Plus one of the shopkeepers is canonically trans, so bonus.

Offline, I'm a college student (working on my English associates for transfer and eventual linguistics bachelors) and martial arts instructor working mainly with disabled students. I'm disabled myself, so it's cool to be able to be a figure in my students' lives that I really needed when I was their age. I write a lot (both poetry and prose), and roleplaying is probably how I spend the majority of my non-work/non-school/non-sleep time. I don't play a lot of video games, but my biggest fandom is Dragon Age (I mentioned my love of lore?) and I also like Mass Effect, Star Trek, Marvel (mostly MCU but a chunk of Earth-616), The Adventure Zone, Harry Potter (though I've lost a lot of interest due to recent developments with the creator)... I'm probably forgetting a bunch. I play a couple instruments and I like the color purple and I mix up Commonwealth and Webster spellings a lot (I'm half American, half Scottish, full mess) and I should probably be washing my bedsheets instead of talking about myself online.

I'm queer as heck (my primary pronouns are xe/xem/xyrs) and I like social justice, but I don't always have the energy for it. Takes a lot of spoons to argue with bigots. I have an emotional support cat named Jynx, who is my love, my light, and a huge jerk to just about everyone but me, and I have a lot of interest in becoming a service dog handler somewhere way down the road.

TL:DR: Lamp. 22-ish. student. queer dweeb. needs to wash xyr sheets.

Hey Lamp! Welcome to Subeta! 😁

I totally understand what you mean about Neopets. I still have my accounts there, but I don't really log into them anymore...just not interested in how it is now. 😓

Glad to hear you're liking the site so far! 😀 I love the various features around the site; there's definitely something for anyone and everyone to enjoy. And no pressure to be super social either! You can come and go as you like. You can feel free to chat on the forums, or you can keep to yourself--or you can lurk, as I often do, lol. In any case, you'll always find nice people around whenever you're interested in mingling. 😊

Ooohhh, linguistics, eh? What do you want to be once you graduate?

Martial arts instructor?! 😮 Wow, that's amazing! And aww, that's sweet to hear you're such a role model for your students!

If you haven't yet, you should check out the "Writing Discussion" and "Roleplaying" forums! The community is full of writers and people who enjoy roleplaying like you, so you could join them if you're interested. 😀

Loll, no worries about mixing up spellings. English is complicated anyway, lol. 😆

Thanks! Nice to meet you!

I'm not 100% sure what I wanna do with linguistics, I just know I love it! My dream job would be getting snapped up by some fantasy or sci-fi creators to create non-human languages from scratch. I already do it in my spare time, might as well get paid for it. (Bioware, if you're reading this, I'll work for minimum wage, please let me fix your Elvish.)

Yeahh I've been doing taekwondo since I was 8! It's been a huge part of my life and I love helping other people experience that, especially if they might not get the opportunity elsewhere.

I haven't looked yet, but I did see those forums! Definitely on my to-do list to check them out, thanks for the rec!

Nice! It's definitely good to get into something you're so passionate about. 😁 I took an introductory linguistics course when I was working on my bachelor's degree, but I became a lot more fascinated by it when I came to Japan to teach English as an assistant language teacher in junior high schools. I don't by any means have a knack for it, but I have a much better understanding of the field now than I did a few years ago.

You started that young?! 😮 Wow! No wonder you're an instructor now. What made you interested in taekwondo at the time?

And you're welcome! 😊 I hope you enjoy the forums!

I've thought about doing one of those programs in Japan! I don't know any Japanese atm (I've been largely focused on European languages plus Korean because of the taekwondo) but I hear a lot of people in the Japanese ESL programs pick it up really quickly in their time abroad? I'm especially interested in sociolinguistics, which is actually sort of a field of anthropology; it focuses a ton on how cultures develop alongside their languages, so you end up learning a lot of not-quite-translatable words because your own language doesn't have a word for a concept that doesn't exist outside of that culture. That's especially relevant for many Asian languages/cultures, since they're so different from Western languages/cultures.

Oh gosh, hahah, I was actually a tap and ballet dancer at first. Started at age 4 I think? I was pretty good at it, but it wasn't really my crowd. I'd always been interested in martial arts but never really said anything about it (I was a really go-with-the-flow little kid) and at some point a dojang opened up right next to my dance studio, and every week after dance class I would go outside and watch the sparring through the window while waiting for a parent to pick me up. Eventually I confessed how much I wanted to try, and my mum was sort of sad because she had always wanted to be able to put her kid's dance trophy on the mantle, but she had promised herself when she was young and her parents were controlling all of her hobbies that she would never do the same thing to her future kids, so there was no fuss. She settled for broken boards on the mantle.

Oh yeah, spending time abroad is definitely good for picking up a second language relatively quickly! But it partially depends on where you go/live. In Japan, if you mainly stick to big cities, you might not pick up Japanese as quickly because there's a lot of English support available in big cities. But if you go to/live in a more rural area (like where I currently live), there aren't many people who understand English, so you're constantly surrounded by Japanese--so it's easier to pick up things. 😁 I think Korea has a similar exchange program(s), so you could check that out as well if you want to do a program in Korea. 😊

YES, I totally know what you mean about those kinds of special words/expressions that can't really be translated into other languages! Japanese is rich with them--there are several that I really love, but trying to translate them into English just isn't possible because there's really no good equivalent.

Aww, that was really sweet of your mother to support you in doing what you really wanted to do! 😊 I think broken boards are good trophies as well. 😉 (I definitely can't break any boards, so I'm impressed, lol.) Is that dojang the same one that you teach at now, or do you teach elsewhere?

Different dojang! Right when I got my black belt, my master sold the place to some different guys who had a wildly different teaching style. I tried to stick with it, but it wasn't much fun anymore, and I ended up taking some time off before going somewhere else, which is where I ended up becoming a teacher!

Aww, I see. That's a shame... 😢 But good that you were able to find somewhere else that you like!

Aw, thanks ! I've already figured a lot of this on my own, hahah: I'm kind of an obsessive researcher, so I clicked around a lot and dug through things like the FAQ and Subetapedia first thing when I showed up. I hadn't seen Newbie's page though, I'll check it out!