He stretched his elbow backward a bit further from the bow, and the tension in the bowstring increased noticeably. A red synthetic string cut deep into his fingers, causing a few micro-fractures to appear on the skin. The archer pulled the bowstring a little bit more and let his grip go. All of the power accumulated in the bowstring, immediately launched an extremely lightweight carbon arrow forward, it rushed driven by the pressure passed to it from the bowstring. One of the feathers sliced the tip of the archer’s index finger. The arrow cut through the air with its pointed head. It was barely visible, wobbling and racing towards the bullseye. The archer moved his gaze to his finger; it had been deeply cut by the feather.

“Did you bring it?” said a familiar voice. “We have what you requested,” a cold, inhumane voice slowly responded. “Did you deliver on your part of the agreement?” “Sure, I did. Still, I don’t understand why you may need this.”

The guy sitting at the window in a coffee shop on the corner of Church Street and Left Side Street got up from his table to get the order. The pen that he dropped, when standing up, rolled to the edge of the small, wooden square table and stopped there, demonstrating quite distinct bite marks around the barrel.

I set the spaceship on course to the universe’s most delicious edible and maxed out the engines. “Treat of the ages, here I come.” I had been waiting for it long enough.

TL;DR: 8/10. I like the book; it is a captivating story written in a fantastic style, which I completely fell in love with! There are a few weird moments in the second part of the book, but they can be perceived realistically, depending on your perspective. Also, the climax of the novel truly deserves a “what a twist” meme reaction :-D

Once, when I was about six years old, I found myself looking inside a tube of super glue. The thing is, I was curious about how it can work so well. I wasn’t able to figure out much by peeking inside, so I decided to squeeze some glue out in order to examine it closer. I pressed the tube while holding it in front of my face, the glue erupted towards my mouth …and glued my lips together. I panicked. I didn’t know what else to do, so I ran to my grandma — I was staying alone with her that day. My grandma cleaned up my mouth and hid the glue on the very top shelf of the tall wardrobe. This is not the end of the story. Neither the incident nor the present location of the glue was enough to stop my curiosity. After I waited for some time and made sure that grandma was busy in the kitchen, cooking something delicious for me like she usually did, I expertly constructed a ladder by putting one wooden stool on top of another. And, in a short while, I continued the ever so important study. Once again, I applied pressure to the tube, and, this time, I glued one of my eyelids shut. My grandma saved the day once again. Thanks to the blink reflex, I didn’t get any glue in my eye. But, to be safe, she called my dad to take me to the doctor. The doctor cleaned up my eye using some mixture and made me an incredibly cool eye-patch as the one actual pirates had!

Mike, the hedgehog, was out late evening looking for food. It was getting dark too fast, almost like someone was playing a trick on him. He was afraid of the darkness. “Darkness is uncertainty; darkness can hide all kinds of threats, like this tiger sitting in the tree — oh, it is just a carving someone made on a hike, how barbarously,” - came through the hedgehog’s mind. Suddenly, his train of thought was interrupted by a crow’s cry, and then he heard another, and another. “It sounds like there is a murder,” - Mike says to himself, too quiet, almost like he is afraid of the sound of his voice. He cannot pretend that he does not hear this. A chill went up through the hedgehog’s spine — another “kraa” rings through the air. Mike considered returning to his warm nest, and, after a short period of hesitation, decided that his hunger is stronger than his fear of crows, darkness, and whatever other filthy omens can be hiding in the woods.

TL;DR: 7/10. Alita is an OK movie. Stunning visual, a few good actors, and a fine story. Being familiar with some live-action anime adaptations (awful Netflix’s Death Note comes to mind immediately), I haven’t been expecting much from this one. And, perhaps, my lowered expectations are the reason that I’ve enjoyed the movie.

A continuation of my previous post, “Why do I write?”. I’m excited about learning languages. Learning new languages is an incredibly useful exercise for your brain that expands your horizons, familiarizes you with different cultures, with different ways of thinking. By studying how language evolved, you can explore how knowledge and thinking evolved. By studying the etymology of similar words from different languages, you may find how this word is perceived in different cultures, and surprise yourself a lot with how structurally similar are a lot of, at first sight, completely different words.

I write this blog to improve my English. Simple as that. I’m a native Russian speaker, heavily invested in learning English, C1 level certified. For a few recent years, I’ve been consuming all media - movies, shows, books, articles, etc. - exclusively in English. In addition to that, I continuously have speaking practice, and a blog could be a great way to top it off with some writing practice, which is more than text communication.