#student vc when are we going to use this

[luminousrider]

"And their movement slows through difficult terrain," Altena replies still keeping a safe distance from Duessel and his horse. She doesn't care for them. Their mouths are weird. They're not at all cute and cuddly like a wyvern. "I know a cavalier's weaknesses."

It was impossible not to growing up in Thracia. She grew up on stories of the brave dracoknights armed with their horseslayers above the desert sands. Even if Travant avoided the subject with her, someone was always willing to regale the wide eyed little girl with the story of Thracian victory.

Altena tenses as the horse leans closer to sniff her hair, its breath hot near her ear. This is not at all enjoyable and seems almost pointless. There is little reason for her to need to know anything about riding a horse and she takes a step away.

"Is there a reason this class is necessary?"

✧･ 𝘢 𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦.

teaching a young student - w/ Altena.

[timeslipcamp]

thoughts on episode 2

sho was the first boy i picked when i started playing so i was so stoked to get to his chapter. this is also the episode where i had to cover the screen while i was reading because the anomaly scared the shit out of me lmao

let's go!

spoilers through episode 2

seriously though that tulpa is fuckin scary

i do love sho and leo's dynamic lol they're so different to the frostheim ghouls. i would love an origin story on them someday and how they made their pacts and when they started running scams. i do respect leo's hustle about trying to dig into why everyone made their pacts because i ALSO would be nosey as hell about that. that being said this is still my fav comment ive seen in the game

i LOVE that initial contact we get between jin and alan. jin's polite at first and even apologizes while alan stays distant, and i can totally see this whole awkward vibe where like, there's this begrudging respect between two powerful ghouls but there's just enough history that makes them weird with each other. tohma left alan for jin's house and maybe that's why jin was polite (because as we see later in the scene he doesn't necessarily care) but alan's still kind of cold and UGH i could do a whole post on jin/tohma/alan and their dynamic its so SPICY

i neeeeeed more info on the clash. what was jin doing that he saw the repercussions of other houses? was he an observer in whatever resulted in the other houses going defunct? did he witness whatever fight happened in clementia? was he at the sidelines? given that his next comment was about alan's fists being for "taking lives" i almost want to say he witnessed dante dying, or heard about it in detail. i need to know what happened last year so bad.

"girl receives devastating news" yeah we have to hang out with leo

apologies to all leo stans i don't actually hate him lmao it's just too easy to make fun of him. he is a really interesting character and i do like what he adds but god does he remind me of this one kid i used to coach

"for strangers? compassion's not a one way street." ALAN I LOVE YOU god this dude is so good. sooooo so so good. i love him so much. give me a good ol worthy complex any day of the week. and he wears it so well

leo asked someone to unseal the juvie records of alan, is it a contact he had previous to coming to darkwick?

i forgot we got alan tohma this early!!! the rendezvous..........so alluring, so mysterious. this is actually the first mention of the traitor i believe, when tohma mentions they're closing in on the spy. i didn't think we heard about it until taiga brought it up. interesting, thanks tohma

i do also like that the vagastrom students of all people say "sketchy priest" lmao like okay pot calling the kettle black there. they have to be referring to haku, right? what other priest is there lmao

me when my theories are proved right

god i fucking hate this thing hahahaha just looking at it makes me crack up. i messed up a voicemail at work by laughing at this thing. anyways towa intro!! love that freak

oh alan said he became a ghoul by coincidence. interesting. does he mean it's a coincidence that he survived or a coincidence that the opportunity arose in the first place?

god i can't stop laughing at that fucking dog

honestly i don't think i can state just how much i love alan. like the grandpa thing is definitely a little overdone sometimes but he's so funny. alan you can do no wrong

"From this year, all captains and vice captains are ghouls." thanks hyde, that's interesting, so they could have been gen students in years past

also personal biases aside, i think it's really interesting that leo was chosen as vice captain. i'm sure hyde had a hand in it so that way sho was still free to go on his lil errands for him. leo however is EXCEPTIONALLY nosey and i'm sure that's going to serve him well as vc

also it's still so crazy to me that sho's stigma didn't work correctly when we held his hand. hear me out for a second, i have a crazy theory i've been working on. i'm kind of wondering if sho isn't fully a demon and somehow got roped in with leo's pact and that's how he became a ghoul. granted i haven't read all their affinity lines and i have like zero evidence for this except for how him and leo seem like a package deal, but something about their constant deals doesn't sit right with me. idk. theory is still in the oven, i have a post i'm working on as i do these rereads.

or maybe it's just that since his stigma is "jamming" which hasn't been fully expanded on, it jammed things so hard that it even jammed himself? idk still working on that

this is the first point i started wondering about what i had mentioned in my post about hera's snakes--a few of the ghouls have made comments like this, and while i don't think mc might be like, the cure or whatever, i think either the ring can help fully complete whatever partial thing the ghouls have gone through that still ails them, or maybe even her curse cancels out some of the ghouls' transformation, if it can be considered a curse. idk. no that doesn't feel right. the pentacle is a common wiccan symbol for balance of the elements, especially when surrounded in a circle like that, so i think it just "completes" something within them and unlocks their full abilities

also first look at the tree!! towa and that tree are so so fascinating, i can't wait to get to the part in my reread where we have that first convo with him about it

all in all episode 2 is shorter than the first but just as good. vagastrom has such a different vibe from frostheim and it's so cool to see how it played out. vagastrom is so fun they're definitely one of my favorite houses

see you all for my episode three reread!! workplace enemies here we come!!!

[jovenshires]

the official iwks lore dump post

okay this is long-overdue but basically both @spencersagnew and @hoohoobeanie asked me to do a little lore dump for if we keep score and here it is!! this is not everything by far (some of what's missing will be covered in future fics and some im simply forgetting) but this is the basics for all the stuff i felt like i couldn't include but i had in my brain - ages, mascots for different schools, etc

THE AGES OF THE MAIN CAST:

st charles:

SENIORS: spencer, damien, shayne, brennan

JUNIORS: alex t, jeremy, patrick, ify

SOPHOMORES: rock and tim

FRESHMAN: marcus

our lady of perpetual sorrow:

SENIORS: tommy, keith, garrett

JUNIORS: alex a, luke, duran

SOPHOMORES: andre and greg

FRESHMEN: chanse, josh, peter

THE AGES OF THE MINOR CAST:

holy trinity (based on the try guys and second try):

SENIORS: zach (captain), keith (vc), kwesi, nick

JUNIORS: johnny, hughie, alex, jared

SOPHOMORES: miles and jonathan

FRESHMEN: jack

aquinas academy (based on dropout tv):

SENIORS: sam (captain), brennan (vc), josh, murph

JUNIORS: zac, grant, trapp

SOPHOMORES: raph and tao

FRESHMEN: lou and jacob

st. george's (based on mythical):

SENIORS: josh (captain), david hill (vc), carney, jordan, lucas

JUNIORS: chase, davin, matt lieb, pasley, zack

SOPHOMORES: trevor

MASCOTS:

st charles: cheetahs (chosen because it alliteratively went with st charles)

our lady of perpetual sorrow: pirates (chosen because it alliteratively went with perpetual)

holy trinity: triceratops (i meannn. when they have a mascot already i simply must)

aquinas: spoonbills (lil inside joke for brennan lee mulligan's love of birds and that one game changer ep where sam tortured brennan with birds)

st. george's: roosters (once again i feel like i had to. i almost went with 'beasts' but i think roosters makes more sense)

MOTTOS:

st charles: Dirige Nos In Fide - Guide Us In Faith. (i knew this one from the very start because i had the speech ian gives him in my head. where spencer has faith in his team and that's why ian chose him to lead them. guide us in faith!!!)

our lady of perpetual sorrow: Est Gaudium in Dolore - There is Joy in Pain. (honestly this is tommy bowe's personal motto to me. no but i picked it bc tommy persevered despite all that he suffered

holy trinity: Conare Iterum Conare - Try Try Again. (this one is pretty on the nose BUT they're all about giving it their best shot even when they're the underdogs!! when they get knocked down they get up again! ain't nothing gonna bring us down!)

aquinas: Virtus in Culpa - Strength in Fault (their students are really, really intelligent and like. the best of the best. but that's because aquinas, though it's a school for academic excellence, is very relaxed with consequences for failure. like there's a lot of support for students who are struggling academically or behaviorally. we are only as strong as our faults!!)

st. george's: Esto Tuus Optimus - Be Your Best Self (once again they had it right there. be your mythical best!)

WHY I CHOSE THE SCHOOL NAMES:

(ive posted this before but im making this comprehensive!)

st. charles’ academy for boys: this is entirely based on spencer’s first name actually being charles LNDKNFLKNK like i knew i wanted to go with an all-boys school (as opposed to olops which is actually a co-ed school!) and i thought. “this is kinda funny.” and it was!

our lady of perpetual sorrow: this is actually - and i Did Not Know This - the catholic school from suite life of zack and cody SDFGHJK which means one of two things: 1. either i heard it there and it stuck in my brain and i didn’t realize OR 2. i just have the same brain cell as the suite life writers. i have no idea. but i chose that name bc, growing up in catholic school, i heard So Many ‘our lady of ___’ school names and i thought tommy, known Mental Illness actor, would enjoy 'perpetual sorrow’ as a nod to that knfkfnfk

holy trinity preparatory school: ah the easiest one tbh!! holy trinity because TRI. TRI bc there’s three of them and also it sounds like TRY. try guys! no more thought to it than that tbh.

aquinas academy: i went into it in more detail here, but basically st. thomas aquinas is the patron saint of college students - thus college humor, thus dropout!!

st. george: this one was a little more deep-cut!! i almost went with st. martha, the patron saint of the culinary arts, but i wanted their patron to encapsulate more of the crew rather than just the kitchen. even if it was josh’s world and we were all living in it. but basically, st. george is the patron saint of knights, cavalry, and armourers. he’s frequently depicted as slaying dragons and was often compared to many mythic heroes. therefore, you can consider st. george your official patron saint of mythicality!

SOME FUN FACTS THAT DIDN'T MAKE THE CUT:

damien is in the st. charles' choir which is why spencer plays guitar for them; he also does the school plays. he's a busy boy!

patrick is an altar boy and that's how he stole the communion wine

patrick and jeremy almost kissed when they got drunk off the communion wine and have NEVER talked about it

shayne is in the running to be valedictorian

chanse has a crush on tommy (and who can blame him.)

jackie does not do soccer and although she was at most of the games in iwks did NOT know what was going on

jackie also goes to public school bc i love her so she gets to win <3

i've mentioned this before but yes amanda and angela were on the same team in high school and were best friends (and..... you know. a little more than that maybe.)

tim is rock's calc tutor and it's not going well

if spencer had any input he would push for jeremy to be the next vc because he just has a soft spot for the guy and he thinks it would do him some good. but jeremy would rather die than be in charge of anything so <3

alex's hello kitty bandaids have nothing to do with like a ravenous love of hello kitty or anything - frankly they bought them because he thought they were cute and pink and sparkly. he didn't even realize they were hello kitty but that just makes them even better. they make All the players wear them when they can.

literally no one has told marcus who ian is so when he shows up at that one party he's just like. haha! who tf is this guy :) just smiling and nodding as if he knows what's going on but EXTREMELY confused by the stranger in jeremy's house

ify and patrick were buds before either of them met jeremy

brennan took four years of latin as we know, but what you don't know is that tommy took four years of french and damien took four years of german! (spencer took the minimum requirement of spanish and that's it LKDNKNFLFKN)

a lot of the team member's relationship with religion fluctuates but ian specifically is like. agnostic-christian. where he's like "idk what's out there but the Idea of christianity is comforting." he's not sure what he thinks about god but he's cool with praying does this make sense

tommy has spencer in his phone as "charles" forever and ever bc he said so. what is spencer gonna do. stop him?

despite the ban on interactions between the two teams damien and keith have been buds/texting each other for years. they are buds to ME.

chanse is like. en route to play professionally. he's being scouted like right now. he wanted to go to like a Specialized sports high school but his parents insisted on keeping him in catholic school

aaand trevor is putting in a transfer request as we speak LKSNDLK

okay i think that's it for now as far as lore goes. i hope you all enjoy!!

[soficrson]

alô alô tag! acho que depois de 1 mês, quase 2, posso fazer um novo post (sem data de validade, então não importa quando meu desespero chegar até vcs), mas basicamente tô vindo implorar por alguns plots que são meus favoritos, num geral esse é um pedido para jogadores do tumblr (não consigo jogar em outra plataforma infelizmente, espero que ainda exista alguns). vou deixar abaixo do read more os plots e preferências já que tô querendo diversificar um pouco, mas se alguém quiser ver todos os meus plots abertos, vou deixar linkado aqui (pessoas indecisas não abram essa tag hehe).

↝ plot (f/f, preferência pela barwoman): “ok but someone give me that cute bartender storyline though? like this guy tends bar at a restaurant or a pub or something and always sees this cute girl hanging out there, but she’s always either with friends or with some guy so he never really gets the time to talk to her BUT ONE DAY she walks into the place alone and orders so many drinks until she’s so bloody drunk, screaming about how her boyfriend cheated on her, that the bartender had to bring her home himself. she wakes up with a horrible hangover, stumbles out the room to find the bartender cooking breakfast and rolling his eyes, laughing. “first of all, you’re an idiot. second, we didn’t have sex if that’s what you’re wondering. third, breakfast will be ready soon. sit.” and fluff commences HELP PLZ”

↝ plot (f/f): “listen…. middle aged ships are my jam. there’s something hopeful about seeing two older people fall in love (or still being in love) on my screen. give me two people who’ve been married for decades and are more in love than ever.”

↝ plot (m/m): we started this band in high school and i developed a HUGE crush on you, but i had to let things go for the sake of the group. now we’ve hit it big, and with all of these press conferences, and photo shoots, and media attention i’m beginning to see you in a new light, but god you’re still the person i remember from before the fame, and i think those feelings are coming back. bonus if: fans are beginning to ship us and management thinks it would be a good idea/good for our public image if we pretended to date. you go along with it because you think you’re being selfless but i don’t think i can keep it professional.

↝ plot (m/m): i just want a plot where it’s two rich kids who live in neighboring estates and their families always throw parties together and they have vacation homes in the same spots and their elite parents are too busy to notice when they sneak off to fuck in that second guest bathroom that no one uses or get high in the back library and makeout

↝ plot (m/m): i met you when you stayed in my little beach town almost the entire summer when we were 15/16 and we had a summer fling and i’m pretty sure we were a little bit in love but then you left and we just kinda stopped talking and now i’m well into college and holy shit i ran into someone at a party that looks like an older version of you–wait that IS you??? and we’ve been going the same college the entire time?? and now i feel like i see you everywhere??? what the hell is this you’re even hotter than you were back then what the HELL

↝ plot (f/m, preferência pelo male): my boyfriend just up and dumped me out of nowhere and even though we share a place my name isn’t on the lease so to add salt to the wound he KICKED ME OUT so i call you crying and you immediately offer me a place to stay with you until i can get on my own feet and find my own place. you were my previous ex and we were really good friends but i cut you off because my new ex didn’t like me being friends with you and i really wanted this to work.

↝ plot (f/m, preferência pelo male): you left 3 yrs ago in the middle of the night with not even a goodbye letter and now you’re on my door step w a kid that looks exactly like me

↝ plot (f/m, preferência pela professora): plot idea?? you’re one of my ballet students’ fathers that i sometimes get distracted by in the middle of teaching class, and tonight you found out about my second job where you’re paying for a vip room at the strip club.

↝ plot ( f/m, preferência pela muse que tem namorado, preferência pela female): we met at one of your concerts and you’re super famous and we fucked at the meet and greet once everyone was gone but now you’re asking to see me again and fly me out to these incredible locations but i’ve actually got a boyfriend and he doesn’t know about any of this. are you sure that the paps won’t see us?

↝ plot (f/m ou m/m, preferência pelo muse a): what if muse a has been talking to someone on a dating app for a little. after a week of chatting, muse a and the person decide to meet up to have their first date. when muse a gets there, to their surprise, it isn’t the person from the profile but muse b who is someone completely different. muse b is the friend of muse a’s date and they came because muse b’s friend was going to ghost muse a but muse b felt too bad to let that happen. luckily for muse a, muse b is actually much better looking and much more interesting than their original date. the best part of it all? they seem to hit it off amazingly…

↝ plot (f/m ou m/m, preferência pela pessoa desconhecida): imagine that you’ve been stood up by your douche of a boyfriend on date night and the waitress keeps asking if you’re ready to order but you keep asking for more time hoping that he’s just late. people are starting to look at you with those apologetic looks like they know and you start to feel worse and worse about the whole situation but as you decide to just get up and leave, this boy you’ve never seen sits down explaining loudly ���sorry i’m so late, babe, traffic is crazy right now.” and he quietly adds, “i’m —–. just go with it, yeah? whoever didn’t bother to show up is a dick.” and so you do go with it because he’s being sweet and trying to save you (and plus he’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen) and as you’re leaving the restaurant after the best non-planned date ever, he asks you out for real this time.

↝ plot (f/f, f/m ou m/m): my friends keep setting me up on shitty blind dates in the same restaurant and i keep getting you as my waiter/waitress every time

[mariacallous]

In February 2022, Ukraine’s tech sector was booming. Between 2016 and 2021, the country’s IT exports tripled to nearly $7 billion a year, according to the IT Association of Ukraine. Its universities have long been a formidable production line for STEM talent, and thousands of these young graduates helped Ukraine first become Europe’s back office, stocked with developers and designers working for international clients, and then an innovation center in its own right, with a flow of cutting-edge startups: From deep-tech and robotics to translation and AI.

The war should have ended that. Russia’s full-scale invasion has killed or injured tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers, many of them pulled from ordinary lives onto the front lines. Millions have been displaced from their homes and are now scattered across Europe and beyond. Russia has targeted infrastructure, knocking out power and telecoms and threatening to cut Ukrainian businesses off from their customers and backers overseas.

And yet, the tech sector has not just survived but thrived: By the end of 2022, Ukraine’s IT exports had grown nearly 7 per cent, even as the economy shrunk by almost a third. These are the stories of how four startups have survived, but they’re just a sample of the thousands of acts of extraordinary resilience, defiance, courage, and cooperation in Ukraine’s tech sector.

“Music is a very powerful instrument.”

As a PhD student in quantum physics in the dying days of the Soviet Union, Andriy Dakhovskyy would hide bootlegged vinyl of western rock music in his room. “I was lucky not to be caught by the KGB,” he says. “When the Soviet Union fell and you could easily go to a record store and buy Led Zeppelin, something important was missing for me. The feeling of exclusivity, of being underground.”

Dakhovskyy spun his forbidden love of rock into a career, ending up establishing Universal Music’s first office in Kyiv, and becoming a central figure in the development of Ukraine’s music industry in its anarchic post-Soviet revival. He got Elton John onto Ukrainian TV and produced Kyiv’s first rock opera. As we drive through central Kyiv, he points out the nightclub he ended up running, kind of by accident, after being convinced to invest in it by a friend in need of a loan. It’s now closed, battered first by Covid, then by the war.

In 2020, Dakhovskyy launched Djooky with business partners in Ukraine and the US, based on a belief that less well known recording artists—particularly those from outside America—get a raw deal on platforms like Spotify, where only a small number of high-profile musicians make good money. “The music industry is heavily, heavily monopolized and centralized,” he says. “I know the system … and I couldn’t change the system from within.”

Djooky is a marketplace where fans can essentially buy shares in artists, helping them to build a profile, with the potential to profit from their success. When the Eurovision Song Contest was canceled due to the pandemic in 2020, the company launched its own Djooky Music Awards, letting fans vote for their favorite song in a huge multinational competition that attracted artists and listeners from all over the world. The platform has 200,000 registered users, submissions from artists from more than 140 countries, and has held 15 successful auctions.

Dakhovskyy knows Djooky is a strange kind of startup, a hybrid of a record company and a fintech—one which VCs need to grasp on an emotional level, as well as a financial one. He is a low-key but compelling speaker with an infectious enthusiasm for music, but for most of the past two years, he’s been stuck in Kyiv, first pinned down by the pandemic and then by the full-scale invasion. Over the winter, he says, he barely left his apartment, other than to trudge down the stairs to the bomb shelter. Djooky had to put its prize-giving on hold.

Then, in the spring,“I thought, fuck the war,” he says. In March, Dakhovskyy made the 14-hour overland journey to Warsaw to pitch Djooky to a crowd of international investors at an event organized by the tech giant Google. When we meet in Kyiv two months later, he’s just returned from the US, where a delegation of Ukrainian startups pitched to US business and political leaders. “I had only a four-minute speech,” he says. “So it was a choice between either being open and emotional, to speak about the subject, which is my love, which is the job of my dream. Or just, like, machine-gun through the numbers. I chose to be emotional.”

He’s still waiting for a VC to come through with funding, but he’s restarting the Djooky Music Awards this August. His pitch now kicks off with a ballad by a Ukrainian artist, Kler, recorded in the spring of 2022, as Kyiv was still under siege and Russian tanks were just 20 kilometers from her studio. “I give her as an example because she simply cannot imagine she can do anything else but make songs and perform them for people. No matter if there are air raids and shelling, she's in the studio,” he says. “Music is a very powerful instrument.”

“We call it war-life balance.”

On the first night of the war, Roman Sevast and Stacy Pavlyshyna drove west out of Kyiv. Russian forces had swept across eastern Ukraine and were converging on the capital. American banks had halted withdrawals for Ukrainian clients, wary of impending sanctions on Russia. But the startup founders still had to make payroll.

So, as a Russian attack helicopter buzzed low over their car on the edge of the city, Sevast was on the phone to their bank manager in the US. In the darkness, the bank’s security systems couldn’t recognize Sevast’s face, so the pair pulled over to the side of the road. He peered into the screen, lit by the dashboard light, just long enough to pass the verification checks. Then they sped onwards.

A few months prior, Sevast and Pavlyshyna had opened a new office in Kyiv, with a full-sized yellow helicopter dominating the lobby. The startup they founded together, Awesomic, had recently graduated from the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator and raised a $2 million round. For a monthly fee, Awesomic matches businesses all over the world with designers and developers—most of them Ukrainian—like a kind of bespoke Fiverr on subscription that’s built, like much of the country’s tech sector, on abundant, affordable talent.

Sevast, Awesomic’s CEO, and Pavlyshyna, its COO, are both small-boned, slender, dressed in black. When we meet in Warsaw, on the fringes of a Google for Startups event, they talk over one another in a rush of overlapping sentences, finishing each other’s stories, correcting details. “It was a great life,” Pavlyshyna says. “We just had this life for a few months,” Sevast interjects. “And then the war started.” He has a picture on his laptop of the two of them, on the fourth day of the war, in a bomb shelter, eating a cake for his 26th birthday. “Celebrating,” he says.

The first few weeks were a rush of logistics: getting employees, who were scattered across Ukraine, out of cities under siege. The company hired a “kamikaze driver”—a local who knew secret back roads, to extract a designer from a town close to the Russian border. The designer had been hiding in a basement for two weeks, but had kept on working. Burying herself in work was, she told Sevast, an escape from the horror: “The only place where I can have a stable mindset.” This, Sevast says, is the approach that he and many others in the country have settled on to get through the dark days. “We call it war-life balance.”

The outsourcing industry can feel very transactional—freelancers and contractors are just email addresses in some far-off, low-cost country. (Upwork annoyed many Ukrainian freelancers by sending a note to clients in late January 2022 warning of disruption to its service in the case of an invasion). But Awesomic’s founders say their clients have stuck with them, even as Russia attacked civilian infrastructure, knocking out power and internet access, threatening to take the country offline for long periods. Awesomic bought generators and Starlink terminals, and the work went on. “We’ve done the craziest things as managers,” Pavlyshyna says.

The company kept on growing through 2022, reaching “multimillion-dollar” revenues, according to Sevast. After they moved their Ukraine operations to safe zones and got their people set up and working, the founders moved on to their next milestone, opening a new head office in Silicon Valley, where Pavlyshyna and Sevast are now based. “We believe that we can go through anything. The startup journey, it’s not scary when we’re already going through this,” says Pavlyshyna. “Resilience isn’t really a choice.”

“I see missiles, but I will deliver it in a couple of hours.”

Howly’s offices are in an airy, brick-walled warehouse in central Kyiv, with a gym space and glass-walled meeting rooms on the mezzanine floor. They’ve had to abandon it twice. The company, which is less than two years old, offers an online concierge service for customers all over the world. At the basic level, it’s like tech support for your day-to-day life. Experts, most of them in Ukraine, will help you figure out how to set up your smart TV, or get into an email account after you’ve lost the password. Some customers use the platform like a personal assistant, seeking restaurant recommendations and travel advice. The longest troubleshooting session lasted eight hours.

In the days following the full-scale invasion, most of Howly’s staff joined the enormous queue of people flowing to the relative safety of the west of Ukraine, spending upwards of 24 hours in the traffic jams reaching out of Kyiv. A couple of employees had near misses: One person’s house was destroyed around him, another was hit by debris from a missile. But once everyone was out, they got back to work. “The week after the war started, we had to put everything back in place,” says Slava Matskov, Howly’s CEO. “People were ready to work 24/7. They were calling us saying, ‘OK, I see the planes flying next to me, I see missiles, but I will deliver it in a couple of hours. So, no worries.’ That was amazing.”

By the autumn, they were all back in Kyiv. Matskov prefers his team—which has grown from 30 at the start of the full-scale invasion to 41—to be in the office. But then Russia started hitting power stations and telecoms infrastructure. Some days, the electricity was only on for a few hours at a time. As temperatures fell, Howly once again moved the whole team west, to where it had generators and Starlinks set up to keep the lights on and the internet running. Employees brought with them family members and even pets. “I think the electricity was cut, like, 10 times a day. And after the electricity drops, you hear somebody running to the generator,” Matskov says. In mid-January, the team voted to return to Kyiv.

The war has pushed Howly to speed up its plans to diversify. It’s branching into legal advice, signing up lawyers who can spend a few hours online to answer queries from users. And it’s moving into Spanish language services. Growing in the current environment isn’t easy—venture capitalists are leery about investing in a leadership team that’s entirely based in a war zone. But there is still some money available, and the war has driven a new kind of solidarity and mutual support within the tech sector—whether that’s unicorns reinvesting into the ecosystem, or companies sharing generators and survival tips. “All the biggest tech companies in Ukraine, starting February 24, they just work together,” Matskov says. “The cooperation was amazing.”

"In 10 to 20 years, Ukraine will be the new Silicon Valley.”

January 1 is a huge day for the health and well-being industry. It’s when millions of people, fired up by their New Year’s resolutions, sign up for gym memberships and fitness apps, and order sportswear and wearable tech. To prepare for the start of 2023, Victoria Repa ordered $300,000 worth of generators and water-treatment equipment for the BetterMe office in Kyiv. Russia was in the middle of a ferocious campaign of air raids that targeted civilian infrastructure, including power stations and water-treatment plants, and Repa needed to make sure her team could get online, stay warm, and have access to showers and clean water. “It’s strange,” Repa says, laughing at the absurdity of it. “But we compete with companies that aren’t in this situation, so we don’t have time to complain.”

Before the war, Repa was planning BetterMe’s path to IPO. She launched the company as a health and well-being app in 2016, offering consumers, mainly in the US, access to home workouts and coaching. The app has been downloaded 150 million times. The most popular workout at the moment is “Wall Pilates,” which is, as it sounds, a series of contortions that you can do at home, up against a wall. The vision, Repa says, is “creating happiness within,” and building health care products that feel like entertainment. “In reality, we compete with Netflix, we compete with Instagram, TikTok for people’s attention.”

BetterMe, which has more than 200 employees in Kyiv, always had a “plan B” to relocate people to the west of Ukraine if the Russians invaded, which they triggered in February last year. “It’s not something I’d ever learned at business school,” Repa says. “But the war changed everything.” After the capital was liberated, many of the staff returned. They’ve continued to launch new products, including sportswear and fitness bands.

The company grew its headcount and revenue by 20 percent in 2022, and Repa—like others in the tech industry—says that success is now about more than just making money. “It's highly important, not only as a business mission, but also how we can help our country.” The unemployment rate in Ukraine hit 20 percent last year, and keeping the economy going is vital for the war effort. BetterMe has made its mental health products available free to all Ukrainians, and created a stress management course with the World Health Organization.

Repa has had to balance being with her team with being able to access investors and partners overseas. From Kyiv, it is a long slog on a train to the Polish border, so she’s temporarily relocated to Warsaw. But she says it’s important that, even though BetterMe’s customers are in the US, Western Europe, and Asia, the company remains Ukrainian. “I hope that in the future after the war … that young people stay in Ukraine, build businesses in Ukraine, grow in Ukraine,” she says. “It’s my patriotic mission that, in 10 to 20 years, Ukraine will be the new Silicon Valley.”

[douchebagbrainwaves]

FOR EXAMPLE, IF YOU HAVE THE HACKERS, WHO ARE TOO INTIMIDATED TO TRY

You're now one of the most immediate and mundane sort. Copyright owners tend to focus on the hot ones; convincing the hot investors is the best Unix machine you can buy. VCs will already be onto them. And R. Y Combinator has now funded 564 startups including the current batch, which means increasing numbers of things we find interesting will surprisingly often turn out to be a rock star or a brain surgeon. It is for all ambitious adults. Being friends with someone for even a couple days ago: The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: After Altamira, all is decadence. The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups October 2006 This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.

Best of all is when people call what you're doing as soon as you can.1 Perl, and the art and literary establishments. For centuries the low countries were the place to watch shows is on a computer screen. People seeking some single thing called intelligence. Come work for us, they did it.2 What is Medialive International? The difference is that in practice socialist countries have nontrivial disparities of wealth, and indeed the whole concept seemed foreign to them.3 In our test drive, users actually used the software. Just as happens in college. Startups are not just something happening now in Silicon Valley. I could put it online right away.

How can we build a silicon valley, if they can just hire enough people it somehow will be.4 This seems obvious too, so why wouldn't they? They want to work ten times as hard, so please pay me ten times a much. The summer founders were as a rule people planning to go into attaining users. The founders will run engineering directly, and the answer is, surprisingly far. So if you're a young founder under 23 say, are evil.5 Nothing is hidden from you that doesn't absolutely have to be to start a startup: Watch people who have till now on average been overcontrolling their portfolio companies.

Delivering solutions in an informal way means that instead of Windows NT? Running a business is so much harder. But whatever the reason, starting a startup, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. Writers now deliberately write things to draw traffic from aggregators—sometimes even specific ones. A web site for college students to stalk one another. They won't necessarily buy them outright. It's a big advantage. For better or worse informed about literature than art, despite the fact that you're mainly interested in hacking shouldn't deter you from writing Web-based software assumes nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Whereas it's easy to believe it. But the staff writers of newsmagazines. Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this.

The distinctive feature of successful startups have lots of worries, but you knew there would be a lot of them in Silicon Valley. It will actually become a better investment. And the way to find good problems in another domain: a the inhabitants of that domain are not as bad as I feared. In one place I worked, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. Over and over, and discipline is no longer written in Lisp, but it isn't the life they were designed for. So is it meaningless to talk about average quality, because that's what it means. It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success. The last nail in the coffin came, of all rich countries the US is disorganized about routing people into careers.6 And could I have honestly claimed that he was just very poker faced.7

Notes

VCs will offer you an artificially low valuation to see the apples, they seem to someone in 1880 that schoolchildren in 1980 would be better for explaining software than English. Interestingly, the LPs who invest in a cupboard saying this is mainly due to Trevor Blackwell wrote the image generator written in C, which shoppers used to those. So instead of the rest of the most important information about competitors is what people mean when they got to the code you write has a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say that intelligence doesn't matter in startups is that promising ideas are not just for her but for the tenacity of the lawyers they need them to switch.

Obviously this is one of the web and enables a new version of Explorer. It would probably never have worked; many statements may have to talk to mediocre ones. The nationalistic idea is that they won't be demoralized if they were only partly joking.

Indiana University Bloomington 1868-1970. In the late Latin tripalium, a growth graph is mostly the ordinary sense.

Thanks to Paul Buchheit for the next time you raise money, the government. Mozilla is open-source projects now that VCs miss.

Doing Business in 2006, http://www. Most were wrong, but I couldn't believe it, I'm guessing the next one will be out of the venture business barely existed when they say this amounts to the yogurt place, we can easily imagine. So managers are constrained too; instead of admitting frankly that it's up to two of each type of x.

At first I didn't need to fix once it's big, plus they are themselves typical users. It will also remind founders that an artist or writer has to convince at one point a competitor will deliberately affect more interest than they expected and they begin by having an associate cold-emailing a startup, as far as I know, the thing to do right. But if A supports, say, of course, or pigs, to drive the old one. This would penalize short comments especially, because unions will exert political pressure against Airbnb than hotel companies.

A investor has a title. More generally, it seems to have lunch at the time 1992 the entire period since the war. The ironic thing is, it often means the slowdown that comes from ads on other sites. And in World War II was in his twenties than any other field, and no one who's had the discipline to pull ahead in the computer hardware and software companies constrained in a couple years.

[epiclevelup]

12-02

Morning update:

Clearly, yesterday I was too busy/excited/absent-minded to remember my daily entry (yes, I am still pretending my entries are daily). What happened, you may ask?

The morning didn't start off well, as I woke up late and proceeded to do nothing useful until I left my house at 11. This is why I dislike not having morning lectures. At least when I have lectures at 8:30 it forces me to try and be up and running at a good time.

Still, went to uni and got through my lectures. Was quite proud of myself, as I actually followed and took notes attentively in both classes. In between the two classes I was at the caffe studying, and I actually managed to make some decent progress with my game theory material. I did have to ask for some help at one point, and guess who I got helped by? German date guy friend. She's actually really sweet, I really like her.

On the job side, I still haven't heard back from the job in Switzerland which is distressing me a bit. After my exam today I will just make sure to also send in my application the traditional way. Also, I have not really had any time to practice for my test on Friday, which is causing me a bit of anxiety. I also really feel like I should be more actively applying to things AND also, most importantly, exploring more. My deadline to end of March is fast approaching and I really need to be more proactive and take more risk.

On the love side, ahhhhhhhhg. Something sooooo cute happened. German date guy texted me if I'm in university on Friday, as he wants to have a surprise delivered to me. This is sooo sweet. I'm trying not to be too impressed by it, but I actually am. Such a sweet thing, tho I'm of course already overthinking it. But still, this is really good for my confidence and standards. I do have the feeling that it'll be flowers, which I love but also am a but apprehensive about, as I'll have to bring them home, and my mum will ask questions about them. Which will be hard to answer truthfully, given I've not told her my ex and I broke up quite yet.

Afternoon update:

First thing this morning, as I was grabbing coffee, I run into one of my female professors for VC. Funnily, she still seems to think I'm an exchange student. Anyways, it was super nice, she greeted me warmly and even patted me on the arm while passing me!

Second, kinda random, thought: I kinda want to slowly get my hair to be a tiny bit more ginger-ish. I think it'd be even more distinctive, go well with my friends (blonde + brunette + redhead kinda rocks), and also I think people find redheads super hot.

Anyways, today was really nice. I'm liking my data analytics course more and more. Maybe that should be telling me something about what I should do next year. Then, we had the game theory test, which was a bit meh, but I did end up understanding the problems afterwards. And they'll be good practice for the exam.

Lastly, this afternoon we ended up staying in the cafè with my project group and just yapping. It was very nice. Found out classmate guys most definitely has a girlfriend, and also made some nice dinner plans with the group.

Still, ended up not doing anything in prep for my test on Friday. I shall try to do something tonight hopefully, but I guess we'll see. Also did nothing risky and proactive. Shall try to do at least one thing tonight.

[universalcollisionleaks00]

Universal Collision: Meet the Story Characters!

Name: Mashiro Kurata

Class: 4★/5★/5★ Another Style

Summoner/Duo: No

🎂Birthday🎂: No

Weapon Type: Staff (EX Weapon: Symphony Microphone)

STELLAR AWAKENING Release: N/A

Info

A quiet and reserved girl. Has an active imagination and tends to get caught up in daydreams. She had high hopes to go to the prestigious Tsukinomori Girls' High School, but upon getting in, became overwhelmed by the gifted students surrounding her. She spent her days in sorrow until she met a certain band...

VC

(VC Level 2, S1 Chapter 30) C-Come on! We will go for it! - Speed of all allies +30% (1 Turn)

(VC Level 3, S1 Chapter 56) To our promised land! - Speed of all allies +60% (1 Turn) and type resistance of all allies +100% (1 Turn)

(VC Level 4, S2 Chapter 30) No matter the performance, I-I’ve got this! - Restore HP of all frontline and subline allies (XL) and deploy Shiny Crystal Zone

Skills/Abilities

Tier 1 Skills (2★)

Lunatic (Copy) - Activate Lunatic status Copy on user (3 turns)

- Copy: Skills execute twice.

- Copy counts as another move for move-based buffs.

- Copy animation happens after the original skill use and plays out fully.

- Copy will move on to the next enemy if the original target dies from the first attack.

- Lunatic replaces the basic attack skill until used, and can only be used once per battle.

Shine - Magic attack on a single enemy (S)

Crystal Light - Crystal type Magic attack on all enemies (S)

- increase damage if used consecutively

(Passive) Shiny Crystal Zone buff - Crystal type attacks of all allies +50%/+100% (1 turn)

(Passive) Bloody la vie en rose notebook - if Ultimate skill is “Bloody la vie en rose” Place Mashiro’s Notebook on a random opponent before using Ultimate skill at the start of battle

- Unlocks after Chapter 62

Tier 2 Skills (3★)

Sing - Activate Choir Zone for 3 turns, and restore the HP of all allies (M) (3 Turns)

Light Waters - Water type magic attack on all enemies (M) and water type resistance of all enemies -30% (3 Turns)

- When attacked by an enemy, Crystal type Magic attack on all enemies (M) and Type attacks of all allies +50 (2 Actions)

Tier 3 Skills (4★)

Daylight - Restore the HP of all allies (L)

- Daybreak - Physical and Type resistance of all allies 50% (3 Turns) and inflict Break on all enemies

Tier 4 Skills (5★)

Ahnkar Melissa - Crystal type Magic attack on all enemies (L)

- After Season 1 Chapter 56, type resistance of all allies +45% (3 Turns)

To the promised Land: Type Morfonica - Crystal type magic on all enemies (XL) and Restore the HP of all allies (XL)

Weapon Skills/Abilities

When Mashiro equips Symphony Microphone

- In the first turn of battle, user becomes immune to damage

- When Baton Passing with a subline ally, type attacks of that ally +35% (3 Actions) and Critical Rate +50% (3 Actions)

Ultimate/Linked Skill

We shall aim towards a higher performance! - Restore the HP of all allies (XL) and amplify the buffs of all allies by 2

- Unlocks after Chapter 56

- Consumes 100% of the Ultimate Skill Gauge after use

Bloody la vie en rose - Piercing attack on the enemy with Mashiro’s Notebook (XL) and inflict pain (6 turns)

- Unlocks after Chapter 62

- Consumes 100% of the Ultimate Skill Gauge after use

Other Skills

(Another Style) Mirror Butterfly Exclusive Skills

Einfarbiges Gemälde - Magic attack on a single enemy x2 (XL) and Type resistance of all allies +50% (3 Turns) and Physical resistance of all allies +20% (3 Turns)

- Element and Resistances change depending on elemental zone

Smaragdschutz: Morfonica - Place a barrier that reduces the next attack by 100% (1 Hit, 3 Turns)

- Double Hits and Turns if ally is a Morfonica member

[doughma]

some time ago i got tagged in the twst ask meme w/e and me n my friend wanted to redo them since its been a year and our tastes have changed and, i have no where else to post this big ass blog post so dont look at me

Would you be a mer, a beastman, a fae, or a human? (or other!)

most of the time i like the human option cause its the default and what i would be if i got transported in and also human/non human is always top tier BUT i also played with the idea of my yuusona being a fae or more specifically the twst version of tinkerbell so id like either human or fae

Would you be at rsa or nrc?

NRC hands down, im too chaotic neutral for rsa i would go insane there i may look cute and very femme but the way i talk is anything but lady like and i dont wanna hear the gasps from rsa students when i tell them to fuck off

What dorm would you belong to?

tests gave me pomefiore which i absolutely accept, but i woudnt mind diasomnia either for the uniform lol but pomef with the poison potion makin love would be the most fun imo even if vil and i would butt heads all the time

What character(s) would you be best friends with?

imm just go down the list of every dorm Heartslabyul: tbh tbh, probs fucking none of them MAYBE DEUCE but honestly all their first impressions i would just avoid the whole ass dorm all together

Savanaclaw: all of them, idc i see fluffy ears and tails and im already making my way over to try and get them to agree and let me pet them I WILL DO ANYTHING TO SHOVE LEONAS EAR INTO MY FUCKING MOUTH also im a women so its already in my favour with them, ruggie would be easy to befriend because its in his dna to be submissive to women and we both love doughnuts, leonas gonna take some work but MY BOY I PROMISE THIGH AND TITTY PILLOW IF YOU LET ME PLAY WITH YOUR EARS AND HAIR PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE IM BEGGING JUST ONE CHANCE- and oourgh jacks so cute and big and would have the best reactions because hes tsun i cant help but wanna pet and tease him i OUGGRHU

Octavinelle: azulu, MAYBE maybe floyd maybe maybe! maybe tweels! maybe! it really fucking depends because ill give they a pass for chapter 3 because theyre fish people and my burning curiosity would make me forgive them just to be able to ask them questions about being mer folk and maybe try to ask if i could touch them while theyre fish people LIKE LISTEN I JUST LIKE TOUCHING FISH OKAY???? I LIKE THE SLIMEY FEEL IM SO DAMN CURIOUS AND IM DYING TO TOUCH AN OCTOPUS my personal need and love for fish would win over their wrong doings, that one voice clip of THEY WERE THE BEST TRIO AROUND what about the people they murdered WHAT MURDERS???? is how i feel about them

Scarabia: none. chapter 4 would have ended differently if i was there and it would have been violent. kalims also too sunshine boy for my tastes even if i would humor him if he talked to me but i would just find it too exhausting to deal with on a personal level

Pomefiore: rook! i love my fucking hunter mans! i love how weird and passionate he is and i wanna hear all the gossip i KNOW HE KNOWS AND HEARS and i wouldnt judge him for being a fanboy because honestly same lol i got that obsessive trait in me too bbgirl i understand show me more pictures of neiges knee caps i would love to see it vils a maybe but honestly, even if i wish to pull him into a deep kiss and then choke him out i dont really see the two of us getting along

Ignihyde: oh both of them easily, orthos the cutest baby brother and i would love to hug and care for him and tell him all kinds of praise and HES SO CUTE HES THE BABIEST AND NEEDS TO BE PROTECTED idia because were both reclusive gamers and i wouldnt care to hang out with him irl he can hmu on the twst discord and we can vc game together hed be the best gaming buddy

Diasomnia: i dont care for silver im sorry, hes so pretty but he has the personality of someone i would just look over and forget he was even there sebek LOL sebby my sebz,,, mr sebster,,,,, emotionally i love that stupid fucking croc, realistically? the moment hes too loud, im already leaving the room and judging from a distance lilia is my gamer bbfy #2 i love grandpa bat sm UGH hes so cute and small god i wanna hold and HE WOULD FUCKING LET ME i think my talk of calling myself mommy would amuse him malleus is a funny case tbh! his horns and whole demeanor would interest me and im walking over to ask if i can touch his horns also begging crying PLEASE LET ME TOUCH THEM his little gaogao kun would be a fun topic because i love tamagotchi and i would want one lol and wed probs let them met up and play with each other :]

What character(s) would you hate?

Ace. hes a cunt idc tho like respect ig because he doesnt care hes an asshole and doesnt change so like you do you ig? but i would hate him! like from the moment he made fun of you for not knowing the seven it was already over, i would have started a fight right then and there with him and thrown hands I COULD FUCKING TAKE ACE HONESTLY EVEN AS A GIRL hes all bark and if you start to get physically it would throw him off at first and thats more than enough time to get at least one punch to his face, hes deff the type that likes to bully out of affection but im someone who fucking hates that so it would never work out even if we had a decent first impression

epel, sorry hime it just aint happening i LOVE my cute shit and anything i find cute and he would react poorly to our first meeting and me calling him a cutie pie and im not here for people who have over reactions to the most nothing of anything like if you have personal problems with those kinds of things, thats a YOU problem and you need to work on that yourself and not snap at people you just fucking met, id forgive him if he apologized but i still wouldnt wanna get close to him and would still side eye him scarabia, chapter 4 just ruined it honestly like jamil, i dont care how fucking hot you are the canon ruined you for me. gods tho hes so fucking hot and it sucks I WOULD HAVE FORGIVEN HIM IF HE APOLOGIZED IN CANON BUT NOOOOOOOOOOOO- i also dont hate kalim but IM TOO FUCKING TIRED FOR HIS CHARA TYPE OKAY

What character(s) would you date?

i still kinda like the idea of dating rook because i do like the idea of someone being obsessed with me, but on the other hand my jealous hand....... rooks a man of love for everyone and i respect that but i wouldnt be able to truly handle it if im being honest IM SORRY ROOK I LOVE YOU AND I LOVE YOUR HUNTER PERSONALITY AND THE THRILL OF THE HUNT BUT I WANT A MAN THATS ONLY GONNA LOOK AT ME AND I KNOW I CANT FUCKING COMPETE WITH VIL OF ALL PEOPLE WAHHHHHHHHHHHH leona is honestly a chara i didnt expect to love as much as i do now because it hit hard how compatible we are- also hes a leo and aquarius can get along well with leos an- but um in my obsessive au writing for leona he really is my fucking type god do i wanna just take a nap with him and gently brush his hair and take care of him and LEONA IF YOURE LOOKING FOR A NEW MOMMY IM RIGHT FUCKING HERE MY THIGHS ARE FAT AS FUCK ugh i just love a man thats pathetic and depressed it makes me wanna give them the motherly tender love they need and fix them OR make them worse depends on how im feelin atm i also kinda feel id be a good or okay match for azul idunno? hes also kinda pathetic but in the cute way i wanna squish his face and coo at him and then violently shove my tongue down his throat, hes also someone who needs tender love and im here to provide it I ALSO WOULD BE DOWN TO FUCK AN OCTOPUS its on the bucket list idia but only because we fit the image couple thats tall skinny dark punk dude with his thick high femme pink gf, im the EXCUSE YOU HE ASK FOR NO PICKLES gf and in my monster fuckers dreams, malleus lilia and sebek are also on the list because PLEASE ITS ON THE BUCKET LIST I NEED TO FUCK SOMEONE NON HUMAN BECAUSE I GO BACK TO MY WORLD PLEASE-

What would floyd’s nickname be for you?

maybe frilled shark lol, i dress cute but im also elusive when i wanna be and dont like to personally share info about myself and not much is know about frilled sharks, im also bite first ask questions later WILL STAB AS A WARNING

and rook’s?

mademoiselle gaieté, or mademoiselle merriment is still absolutely it, im forever gonna have laughing as my talking filler/quirk its just apart of who i am as a person and how i talk i cant help it

What twst character(s) are you most like? (personality-wise)

floyd still, we are both moody bitches and can change at a drop of a hat tho im better at controlling it and getting over it without having a reaction at the other person, as long as they leave me alone for at least five mins i tend to get over it nicely if you leave me alone for a bit and let me calm myself down instead of bugging me more about it or continue to poke at me cause then im gonna get mad and violent also a little like leona with being stubborn as a person and not wanting to change and being a lazy fucking cat like bitch lol i took a test once and got trey so, do with that info as you will

Which subject(s) do you think you would excel at?

normal stuff probs math or art, but which one i would be doing my best at because i want to? potionology because it SOUNDS FUCKING COOL MAN IT SOUNDS LIEK SM FUN TO BE A LITTLE WITCHY GIRLY WITH MY WITTLE CAULDREN MAKING SOME POTIONS and because i also want to bark for crewel papa

What club would you join?

im still forever on the board games club man it just sounds like fun and i only wanna do clubs that is fun also azululu and idia are there so its a fun club with some people id be friends with so even more fun!!!! another fun one imo would be science club since theres all the new magical flowers this world has and potion making??? it would be fun to experiment and learn new things tho clubs i personally was in during my school days were art club and the recycle club

How do you think you would survive in twisted wonderland/what would your life be like in general?

i still personally think i would be okay, like im alive, tho emotionally? depends really. i think i probs would be a little more aloof and standoffish being taken away from my family and brother and would be a little worried about my brothers mental state with me being suddenly gone that it might make me crack a little when im alone at night like a bitch might cry herself to sleep and be more snappy with random students talking or bothering me but im also very used to being alone in life, at work, at school, so being the only girl might cause me to be alone further so i dont think it would bother me that much and id be able to handle it fairly well tho i might end up clinging to a teacher or crowley lol like after school im just gonna go hang out with crewel to see if he needs help with anything like IM A LONELY LITTLE PUPPY PAPA PLEASE LET ME DO SOMETHING WAHHHHHHHHHHH and tbh i probs would end up in the science club because of him kdfngfdjkgnjkfd i used to be an assistant teacher for a pharmacy class during covid and helped teach the students that were ready for iv making while he dealt with the new students so i wouldnt mind helping out the teachers with paper work and grading since its sometime ive done and enjoyed but overall maybe a little lonely life until i find friends but not anything i wouldnt be able to handle, and im not above whining to crowley for stuff since i am now in his care lol

[optional!] What would your unique magic be?

still probs anything that would freeze or petrify the people i use it on lmao a UM that would make people leave me alone is perfect imo my brother likes to joke that i am a ice queen so its fitting

[umichenginabroad]

Week 4 in Denmark - Part 1!

This week was my class’s field study tour! We took a 1 hour flight to go to Stockholm, Sweden where we spent the week meeting start ups, VC Firms, and accelerators.

I had a great deal listening to presentations from the smaller startups. We got to hear each founder’s journey and get first hand perspective about the challenges of building, raising funding, and marketing products.

I found the company Mattr’s presentation to be one of the most interesting. Mattr is a foot tech startup is that is creating a sustainable vegan meat. They use byproducts from other industries to build their products that taste phenomenal!

The CEO of the company, Jan Hall, told us the struggles of scaling a business like Mattr. Because their product relies on local byproduct such as potato or barley for the fungus to transform into mushrooms, the product has to be redesigned for different ecosystems that don’t have the same key ingredients. This also means that their product tastes different in different places.

What I also found interesting was how during her journey presentation, Ms. Hall continued to emphasize on selling the product to us students. It was clear from this that Ms. Hall’s biggest challenge when introducing her product was to make people feel comfortable eating a fungus. Because of the adversity her product faces, Ms. Hall faced extra challenges in raising funding and getting her product out there.

That being said, we all found her product absolutely delicious!

During this week, we also got to present to a VC Firm, J12. They’re a small and relatively new VC Firm focused on AI startups in the Scandinavian region. We had the opportunity to pitch our product to them. In this process, we learned what VC Firms actually look for when they talk to small companies about raising a seed round.

Because of how many companies apply to VC Firms, it’s difficult to get VC funding which is why it was all the more important to be extremely prepared before pitching to them.

I found this presentation to be a great deal of fun, and I enjoyed learning more about boiling down a startup into a short and sweet 3 minute presentation. My takeaway from this process was also how concrete the VC firm expected your answers to be. The two investors we spoke to wanted to know about each team’s go to market strategies and understand how we could infiltrate our respective markets.

[merakiui]

Tw: slut shaming, incel!Idia, him being gross, noncon, size kink kinda, afab but crossdressing, etc

Imagine just bullying Idia daily when you game with him, calling his penis small repeatedly, this man had enough of your daily shenanigans, but the more he sees you the more he notices just how small you are compared to him to be just a normal male.

Your body is just so..... Feminine. Your frame is small but your thighs thick? Now he just has to test for himself, he bets that you were a slut who only likes getting gangbanged by the Savanaclaw students.

Come on? A girl crossdressing in an all boys school? We all know this troupe. He bets you are all loose from all the fucking you did,( little did he know you were a virgin all along, what non virgin would hang out with him daily anyway?)

He decided to take action against your mockery and pins you on the floor while you were distracted with your game,

"Hey prefect, tell me, why would a man wear more clothes around their chest?"

"W-what?! Get off me you tiny penis bitch, even squidward's nose is bigger-"

Idia wasted no time to strip you off your clothing, he was right after all, you were a girl, all girls are the same after all, it's their fault that no one wants to fuck him, you are just yet another loose slut.

He zip ties your hands then begins licking your cunt, this taste is quite addictive, but why isn't it all wet an soppy like in hentai? He attempts to shove a finger in but his single finger is getting clamped like crazy, no way..... You were a virgin? But no aren't you a slut?

He continues to lick your clit while his large hands keep your legs open, he stares at you, you really are a girl huh? How did he never catch that? As he did what hentai taught him you slowly gushed on his face, no longer fighting back from being all brain mushy.

He almost cummed in his pants but it's okay, you were meant to be bred anyway like the bitch you are. As he inserted his long dick you started to cry.

"Its too big, it won't fit. Can we stop this already?"

"Where did this your snarky bitchy attitude go? What happened with calling me tiny? No no, you're staying right here, this is all your fault. You finish what you started."

When he filled you to the brim, he can notice the massive bulge of himself inside of you, tiny you say? You were regretting your words right there, you started to scream and squirm as he thrusted.

It burns, it stings, it hurts, its feels good...wait what? You began slurring your words, you went from screaming no to screaming more. He finished inside of you.

White was oozing out, he took pics for later purposes. From that incident onwards Idia started to take action against you. You were converting from a brat to a cutie pliant kitten.

You do what he asks you to, like wearing a collar with his name on it, and wearing the skirts with tights you oh so despise. Every time you wanted to act out, he always threatened to share pictures of you and hack into the whole campus's phone just to spread it, maybe next time you should have watched your words.

UUUWUAAAAA IZUNA, THIS IS DELICIOUS OTL OTL OTL OTL

(cw: yandere, nsfw, unhealthy behaviors/relationship, implied captivity, non-con, pregnancy mentions, incel idia, misogyny)

And he’ll make you sit on his lap and cockwarm him while he’s gaming. Maybe he’ll make you wear a ball gag so you won’t be too noisy when he’s on vc. If you’re good and you don’t cum, he might let you take off that cute, revealing outfit you can’t stand. Maybe he’ll let you wear his hoodie. It’ll be so oversized on you. He might just fuck you in it. :) he probably uses you as a reference for when he’s sketching. He’ll stuff you full of all kinds of sex toys just so he can improve his anatomy or certain poses. Or he’ll want to recreate scenes from his favorite hentai.

And if you can just stop complaining and take his cock like the good kitten you are, he’ll bring you birth control, all that stuff girls need for their monthly periods, and anything else you might want. But that’s only if you’re obedient. He’ll dangle all of these good things in front of you because with the click of a button he can have them ordered to his dorm, but he can take them away just as fast. All it takes is one bratty comment from you and he might not let you take any birth control. He never bothers to wear condoms either because doing it raw is so much better. Idia has plenty of money and resources to care for a child (not that he’s truly ready for parenthood, but you’d look cute with a round belly and he’s always wanted to try pregnancy sex…), and if it’s you he wouldn’t mind it. But maybe that’s just his dick talking. Logical Idia says there’s no way he’d be able to take on that sort of challenge, but Idia when he’s buried to the hilt inside of you and you’re digging your nails into his shoulders thinks there would be nothing better than knocking you up and waiting for your belly to swell and your tits to grow a size or two and begin leaking. :)

That’s really all you’re good for, isn’t it? You should’ve known what you were getting into when you found yourself stuck at an all-boys academy. That’s basically a hentai waiting to happen. You’re basically signing yourself up to be a communal cumdump. Idia feels lucky he got to you before anyone else did. There are so many eligible bachelors here… there’s no way he can compete with them, but now he has you and he doesn’t have to compete. You may be a little brat when you aren’t stuffed full of cock, but at least he sees the real you when you’re under him, completely at his mercy and always melting at the slightest touch. He’ll condition his kitten well until you know exactly what to say and do when he expects it.

[dialovers-translations]

DIABOLIK LOVERS DARK FATE Animate Tokuten Drama CD “I’m the Strongest! ~Subaru VS Yuma VS Ayato~“

Original title: 最強はオレだ！ ～スバルVSユーマ時々アヤト～」

Source: Diabolik Lovers DARK FATE Animate Tokuten Drama CD

Audio: Here

Seiyuu: Midorikawa Hikaru, Takashi Kondou & Tatsuhisa Suzuki

Translator’s note: Even though I have listened to this CD at least five times by now, it still remains hilarious. Definitely one of my favorites although I realize that I’m biased because of Subaru and Yuma. I also really enjoy the dynamic of Ayato with either one of them as well. He’s an A+ troll in this one and I live for it, haha. It also reminded me of the one sub-scenario in VC where Subaru and Yuma try to decide who is stronger by arm-wrestling, but it ends with a draw when the two of them break the table in the process. I guess Yuma has the physical advantage but Subaru is a pureblood Vampire so he has the edge there, balancing things out in the end. 

→  LIKE MY TRANSLATIONS? SUPPORT ME ON KO-FI!

*Rattle* 

Yuma: …Fuckin’ shithead of a Teacher! Goin’ on forever with their stupid preachin’...!

Subaru: Exactly. And the fact I was in there gettin’ scolded alongside you is what pisses me off the most. 

Yuma: Aah!? That’s my line! ーー Haah…If Ruki finds out I got scolded by a teacher…

Subaru: Heh. Must be rough havin’ a ‘dad’ keepin’ you in check. I’m glad I don’t have to worry ‘bout that in my family. 

Yuma: Nah, you’ve got one of those too, don’t ya? Ya know, Mr. ‘Smarty Glasses’. 

Subaru: You’re talkin’ ‘bout Reiji? I mean, it’s definitely annoyin’ how he’ll always find somethin’ to complain ‘bout. 

Ayato runs into them. 

Ayato: …Hm? Now this is a duo you don’t see every day. What are you guys up to over there? 

Subaru: Che…Ayato, huh? 

Yuma: Why, ya ask? Can’t ya read? Look. 

Ayato: Hm? …’Student counselor’...? Pfft! Lame! Both of you got called in? What did you do this time? 

Subaru: Oi! Don’t make it sound like I’m a regular at this place! Haah…It wasn’t a big deal, really. 

Yuma: …Ah? Not a big deal, you say? Fuck off! ーー Oi, Ayato! You’re this dude’s big bro, aren’t ya? Then make sure to teach him some proper manners! Tell him that you’re not supposed to go ‘round kickin’ rocks into someone else’s garden!

Ayato: Haah…? The fuck…? 

Yuma: This fucker had the nerve to kick a rock right into the vegetable garden I had been secretly growin’ behind the school building!

Subaru: How many times do I have to tell you that’s not what happened!? Your stupid vegetable garden just happened to be right where the rock landed, that’s all! I had no idea it was even there after all. 

Yuma: I mean, I made sure to kick it into the opposite direction before it could hit the garden, but then it ended up breakin’ the glass of the principal’s office. 

Ayato: And that’s why you got called in? Somethin’ along the lines of ‘let’s not fight and try to get along?’ …Lame! Hahaha…

Subaru: Shut up!

Ayato: By the way, which one of you is stronger? 

Subaru: …!? What are you askin’ all of a sudden? 

Yuma: Which one of us is stronger? No point in askin’ that, is there? It’s obviously none other than myself!

Subaru: Aah!? Look who’s talkin’! I’m obviously the stronger one!

Yuma: Nah, it’s me.

Subaru: Are you deaf!? It’s me!

Ayato: Ahーah. We won’t get anywhere like this. How about Yours Truly decides which one of you is stronger? 

Yuma: Bring it on! But don’t ya dare show bias towards this Shut-in ‘cause he’s yer brother. 

Subaru: Who are you callin’ a Shut-in!? 

Ayato: Yeah, no worries. You really think I’d stand up for this guy? 

Yuma: True that.

Subaru: Tsk…You said you’ll decide, but how are you gonna do that? Should we fight or somethin’? 

Yuma: I won’t lose in a battle of fists. 

Ayato: Geez, you guys don’t get it at all. That’s not what I’m talkin’ ‘bout. We’re goin’ to determine your strength in various categories. 

Subaru: …!? It kind of pisses me off to hear Ayato say somethin’ intelligent for once…

Yuma: Yeah, gotta agree with ya there…

Ayato: Well, I guess that just shows the difference between us. Anyway, I’m gonna present a couple of ideas to you two. …First up is physique! What’s your height and weight? 

Subaru: My height is 178 cm and my weight is…67 kg.

Yuma: Wait, your height is 178 cm!? Hah! Midget!

Subaru: Midget!? …How tall are you then, huh!? 

Yuma: Me? My height is 190 cm. And I weigh 70 kg. 

Ayato: Eh!? Subaru…You’re a whole 12 cm shorter than this dude! Wow…Talk about lame!

Subaru: One sec…You’re 174 cm tall, aren’t you? You’re even shorter than I am!

Ayato: My stats don’t matter right now. …Well then, I guess Yuma wins this category. 

Yuma: How’s that? 

Subaru: …!! No, strength is defined solely by one’s physique. 

Yuma: Sounds like someone’s a sore loser.

Ayato: Anyway, we’re gonna test which one of you has the stronger mind next. 

Yuma: How are ya gonna determine that? 

Ayato: Good question. …How about this? Let’s say the two of you did somethin’ wrong. 

Subaru: Sure. 

Yuma: And? 

Ayato: Reiji or Ruki will be on your case when they find out, right? 

Subaru: …

Yuma: …

Ayato: Tell me how you’d react to them. 

Subaru: Ignore him. 

Yuma: Apologize. 

Ayato: Ahー Subaru gets this one. 

Yuma: Nah, that doesn’t make any sense! You’d ignore him, the fuck!? 

Subaru: You really think I’m gonna bother listenin’ to that guy’s lecture? Your route of apologizin’ is out of the question. 

Ayato: Yeah! I agree as well. There’s nobody in our family who actually takes Reiji’s scoldings seriously. 

Yuma: …I feel for the dude. 

Ayato: So? How come you’d choose to apologize? 

Yuma: Ya guys just don’t understand how terrifyin’ Ruki can be! …Aah, I’m gettin’ the shivers just from rememberin’...

Subaru: The fuck happened…?

Ayato: Anyway, Subaru wins this round. 

Yuma: Yeah, yeah, let him have the win. 

Subaru: Che…Why are you soundin’ so confident? Don’t be cryin’ ‘bout it later!

Ayato: Next…You’ll be pitted against each other based on how you wear your school uniform!

Yuma: How we wear our uniform? I don’t see how that’s related to determining our strength? 

Ayato: Nah, that’s not true. I mean, take a look at Subaru’s uniform!

Subaru: Hah…? 

Ayato: The fabric is all ripped up and he’s got some chains hangin’ from it as well. 

Subaru: Oi! Don’t make it sound like I’m the one who ripped it to shreds! It was handed to me in this state!

Yuma: I mean, I guess it looks ‘strong’ in more than one way. Hahaha....

Subaru: Don’t you dare laugh, Yuma!!

Ayato: On the other hand we’ve got Yuma’s uniform…

Yuma: Mine hasn’t been customized all that much. Ruki wouldn’t let me live it down if I added too many accessories to it. 

Subaru: Still, you’ve got quite a few buttons of your shirt open, don’t you? You need to button it all the way up. 

Yuma: Shut up, it’s just fine like this. I can barely breathe when it’s closed to the top. 

Ayato: Hmー 

Subaru: I really don’t see how this’ll tell anythin’ ‘bout our strength. Let’s just not. 

Ayato: I’m decidin’ the winner right now so shut up!

Yuma: You’re actually makin’ a choice? 

Ayato: I’ve made my decision. 

Subaru: Who is it? Who’s stronger? 

Ayato: Yours Truly!

Subaru: …

Yuma: …Hah? 

Subaru & Yuma: Haaah!? 

Ayato: Lookin’ at both of your get-ups made me realize, you see…Both of you look hella lame. 

Subaru: Fuck off! It was never ‘bout clothes in the first place, was it!? 

Yuma: And what do ya mean ‘lame’, haah!? 

Ayato: My uniform is the coolest of the bunch, in other words, I take this round!

Yuma: Hah! This is one fucked up competition!

Ayato: Well then, this is the final round. Right now it’s a draw with each of us havin’ one point after all. 

Subaru: Why are you participatin’ as well…? 

Ayato: For starters, check this out…!

*Thud* 

Subaru: Wha…!? This is…!? 

Yuma: A picture of…the Sow!? 

Ayato: Heh! What do you think? 

Yuma: How did you…? 

Ayato: I stole it from a certain someone. 

Subaru: W-What are you…goin’ to do with this picture…? 

Ayato: It’s easy. I want you guys to confess your love towards the Chichinashi in this picture. 

Yuma: Aah!? It’s kinda creepy to do that when it’s just us three dudes ‘round, don’t you think? Why not just actually bring her here instead? 

Subaru: Yeah! Exactly! Where is she right now? 

Yuma: She’s probably in her classroom, no? I’ll go call her real quick. 

Ayato: Ah, you can’t do that. 

Yuma: And why not!? 

Ayato: She’ll end up findin’ out where I got this picture. 

Yuma: Ah? The fuck? 

Subaru: Find out…? Ayato, where did you get this picture? It’s not from Laito? 

Ayato: Idiot. Who knows what kind of pictures that guy would pull out. I took this one…directly from her own room. If she finds out I’m usin’ it for this, it’ll only complicate things even further.

Yuma: Ahー I guess it can’t be helped then…

Subaru: ‘It can’t be helped’...!? Don’t you think there’s other things we should point out here!? 

Ayato: Anyway, we’re gonna settle things with this round. Whoever takes the win can have this picture. 

Yuma: For real…!? 

Subaru: …!!

Ayato: What do you say? I bet you’re feelin’ a little more up for it now, huh? 

Subaru: W-Who…would even want such an ugly photo!? Hah!

Yuma: ‘Kay. I guess Subaru’s droppin’ out of the competition then. 

Subaru: Wha…!? I-I bet you don’t want this picture either, do you!? 

Yuma: Nah, I want it. I was just lookin’ for somethin’ I could pin to the face of my scarecrow. 

Ayato: Fuck off! Don’t be usin’ the picture which took me blood, sweat and tears to obtain for somethin’ like that! I’ll keep it in that case!

Subaru: H-Hold up…! You were never part of this competition in the first place, were you!? So I guess I have no other choice…but to take it instead. 

Ayato: What’s that? You really can’t be honest with yourself, can you, Subaru? If you want it that badly, then just honestly say so. 

Subaru: …!? I don’t really…

Yuma: Then why bother participatin’...? 

Subaru: Che…Shut up!! I’m in, end of the story!

Ayato: ‘Kay! Now you’re talkin’! You can go first then, Subaru. 

Subaru: Ah!? Me!? 

Yuma: Exactly. You seem rarin’ to go, so I’ll let ya go first.

Subaru: N-No…I…

*Flip* 

Ayato: Here you go. Give it your best shot while lookin’ at the picture. 

Subaru: Umh…Well…

Yuma: Oi, hurry up! We haven’t got all day!

Subaru: …Ugh…Ahー You know…Well…You’re alwaysーー 

Ayato: Oh! Is that Chichinashi walkin’ over there? 

Subaru: Wah!? T-This is…It’s not what you think…!!

Subaru quickly rips up the picture. 

Ayato: Haha, just kiddin’...!

Subaru: …Hah!? 

Ayato: The fuck…Subaru, you lil’ shit! Why did you rip the picture apart!? 

Subaru: N-Not my fault! Maybe if you didn’t say that stupid shit!

Yuma: Oi…What are we gonna do ‘bout this? I’m pretty sure even the Sow will get mad if she finds out ‘bout this? 

Ayato: Not my problem! Subaru’s the one who shred it to pieces!

Subaru: But you’re the one brought it out, right!?

Yuma: Ah, shut up! You’re the one at fault here, Subaru. This means I’m the winner, right? 

Subaru: Hell no! We should have never tried to determine strength through this kind of shitty competition anyway!

Yuma: Heck yeah. A man’s true strength is defined by how he performs in battle after all. 

Yuma cracks his knuckles. 

Subaru: Fine by me. …You’re on!

*THUD*

Yuma: Take this!! 

*THUD*

Ayato: Ahーahー I can’t believe they’ve started fightin’ in the middle of the hallway like that. Not my problem! …So, who was stronger in the end? 

Yuma: Hah! That’s all you’ve got!?

*Thud* 

Subaru: Shut up!!

Ayato: Haah…In the end, the strongest guy has to be Yours Truly! Well then, guess I’ll dip before one of the teachers gets here. 

Ayato walks away.

ーー THE END ーー

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND IDEAS

And if you set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. We charged a flat fee of $300/month for big stores, so it is unfair to delay. I found that I got over 100 other responses listing the surprises they encountered. The first stories about Jaynes cited this source, but now it's simply repeated as if it were hard to reproduce in other countries too. They just wanted to fix a problem they encountered in their research. There are two things that take attention: convincing investors, and negotiating with them. When your company is only a few percent of the world's population will be exceptional in some field only if there are still some countries that are not copyright colonies of the US, they'll want to come here. And some that don't still manage to have the government invest in the nerds? Wearing suits, we're told, will make us 3. It's like telling the truth.

A rounds. Between the volume of people we judge and the rapid, unequivocal test that's applied to our choices, Y Combinator exerts less. One way to answer that is to ask yourself at what point you'd bet against it. People look at Reddit and think I wish I could say it was this way for every startup they fund. You now have to get good grades or want to be a good language. Most of them myself included are more comfortable dealing with abstract ideas than with people. They think they're going to raise $200,000. This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School. Custom work doesn't scale. You want the deal to close, so you have to resign yourself to everything taking longer than it should.

So you'd only want to talk to you about a series A in phase 2 sometimes tack on a few investors after leaving fundraising mode. I often spent money I desperately needed on stuff that I didn't want to start your own company, which costs a couple thousand left. We have the potential to ensure that the US remains a technology superpower just by letting in a few months later saying This is supposed to be. I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd find something in almost new condition for a tenth its retail price and what I paid for it. They just looked like they were compared to the VCs who funded them. That scenario may seem unlikely now, but it feels young because it's full of rich people, it has few nerds. Then if they decide they do want to invest—usually because they've heard you're a hot prospect, because it takes most of the difficulty of fundraising, that should be resisted.

The name is more excusable if one considers it as meaning that we enable people to escape cubicles. And if we, who were 29 and 30 at the time seemed a lot of companies do. The Men's Wearhouse. Essentially, they lead you on. We should have expected this. Why are founders surprised that VCs are clueless? Founders are often competitive people, and what progress you've made so far.

But it often comes as a surprise to startups how much harder it is to change directions. So look for simple things that other people have overlooked—things people will later claim were obvious—especially when they've been led astray by obsolete conventions, or by redesigning the product in the way we do. Do the extra work of getting personal introductions. I'm convinced, is just the seed. Most people in America do. If you work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to notice startups nearby. It would be great if schools taught students how to choose problems as well as a duck, it's hard to change something so simple as a name, imagine how hard it is to judge startup ideas, particularly their own. Meaning that unpleasant work pays.

Either businesses aren't supposed to be. And aside from that, grad school is professional training in research, and you have to seem confident, and you just have to do an angel round before going to VCs. Dressing down loses appeal as men suit up at the office writes Tenisha Mercer of The Detroit News. But I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought I was one. And since good people like good colleagues, that means the best programmers could collect in just a few hubs. Don't get addicted to fundraising. And that sort of thing you'd expect Google to do. Viaweb wasn't the first startup Robert Morris and I started. If you work patiently it's less stressful, and you just create Carnegie-Mellon. It makes me spend more time on the demo or the business plan, addressing the five fundamental questions: what they're going to do this.

With the help of some part-time jobs they made it last 18 months. They make the experience of buying stuff so pleasant that shopping becomes a leisure activity. 7 that matter: Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Lycos, and HotBot. I. Will you be able to come up with surprising new ideas. Rapid growth is what makes a company a startup. I wanted to keep people from getting spammed.

Their investors agree. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time what they are talking about and are years behind in their thinking. It's obvious why transparency has that effect. Same story in 2004. Bill Gates started either. Perhaps it was even better than we'd hoped. If you're benevolent, people will rally around you: investors, customers, other companies, and potential employees. When we started Artix, I see signs of all three. Most of them had never seen the Web before we came to tell them why they should be planning to raise a lot more intimidating to start a company by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan, and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software that would convert sound to data packets that could be sent over the Internet. When del. I have thought about a lot. If you turned it over, it said Inside Macintosh.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, and Aaron Swartz for putting up with me.

[collapsedsquid]

That [Venture Capital] industry has, frankly, done the exact opposite of having covered itself in glory over the last week.  We have discovered that major VCs put pressure on their portfolio companies to deposit at Silicon Valley Bank.  Then they encouraged those same companies to run on the bank.  And then some of them spent the weekend attempting to raise panic about the rest of the financial system, in order to put pressure on the government for a bailout.  All after having spent the previous decade talking about “moral hazard” with respect to student loan forgiveness, and praising themselves for “disrupting” the old fashioned financial system with cryptocurrency.

If there had been no bailout – if the FDIC had operated normally and not extended insurance to people who hadn’t paid the premium – then the bill would have arrived at the VCs’ door.  They are the owners of the tech startup companies, and they would have been the ones responsible for ensuring that those companies could make payroll if they had lost money in a bank failure through no fault of their own.  It might not have been pleasant for the VCs to put up more funding, or to admit that their contribution of management expertise and financial acumen had been so spectacularly negative, but they would still have done it. To let a good investment go bad in this way would, as Professor John Cochrane points out, a clear example of the sunk cost fallacy.  The venture funds were the source of the cash that was at risk in the SVB failure; it’s their loss that has been socialised.

And the fact that the VCs were able to use their portfolio companies as human shields in this way – a natural extension of the pretence that venture capitalists are in the tech industry rather than the financial industry – shows us what the real long-term cost of our current system of bailouts is, in terms of policy.  Because the Fed and FDIC will always find a way to stabilise the system, populist yahoos and libertarians can rail against “bailouts” and pass legislation to “protect the taxpayers”, all on the understanding that it is purely playtime; that when things get serious, someone will find a way to bail them out.

[0zzysaurus]

🎉Mistocord Summer Event🌲

Week 1 - Welcome to the Wilderness

For our introductory week of our Summer Event, the focus is on those first few exciting days of Summer Camp. The grounds must be established, the tents pitched, and the wonder of the wilderness begins to set in. Our Jellicles will be embarking on hikes, wildlife surveys, and spending much of their time getting to know the stomping grounds of Lake Jellicle National Park.

Sunday 3rd: Community Canvas - Campsite Hustle This week's Community Canvas will see your OCs exploring the camp grounds, getting to know each other, and taking their first tentative steps into the wild. Draw your OC to match a preset pose, and submit your art to us so they can be added into the picture!! 20 slots are available this week starting on Sunday. To claim a character slot, reply in the #cc-claims channel in the Event category on Mistocord - or alternatively, reply to the Community Canvas post on Tumblr when it is posted. You will recieve a png file of the slot you've chosen to use as sizing reference. Your submission must be completed in time for the reveal on Saturday 9th. This is an art challenge open to both Tumblr and Discord community members. These slots are first-come-first-serve. If you aren't able to secure a slot this week, don't worry! There will be two more opportunities to participate in the Community Canvas throughout the duration of the Event!

Monday 4th: Quick Fic Challenge - Adventure Prompt Munkustrap is taking a cohort of plucky campers out on a hiking trail, but things inevitably go awry. Write about the group (canon characters/OCs) running into some sort of trouble in the forest, and how they are able to get out of it again. While our prompt is optional, we recommend it. Please do your best to adhere to the theme of the event. If you'd like, feel free to post your works in the #fanfic-submissions channel in the Event category on Mistocord on the 4th!

Wednesday 6th: Artist Challenge - Wildlife Prompt Alonzo has given each camper a Spotter's Guide to Wildlife in order to conduct a survey. Draw the campers (canon characters/OCs) discovering and encountering different wild animals whilst out on the trail. While our prompt is optional, we recommend it. Please do your best to adhere to the theme of the event. If you'd like, feel free to post your works in the #art-submissions channel in the Event category on Mistocord on the 6th!

Friday 8th: Movie Night - The Cat Returns (Studio Ghibli) Come join us in the Mistocord VC for our weekly film! 23:59GMT 'High school student Haru rescues a cat from traffic and discovers the cat is actually a prince. The Cat King invites her to marry his son, and Haru is brought to the Cat Kingdom where she starts to develop feline features. When she is prevented from leaving, the Baron and Toto, two statues that have magically been given life, provide assistance in gaining her freedom.' This is a Mistocord exclusive event. Mic muting will not be mandatory, and you may chat during the film if you choose. Individuals will have the option on their own Discord client to mute others if they'd prefer a silent viewing, and a guide on how to do so will be explained to new users of the platform.

[ziggyevenstar]

Hi, ate! I'm an incoming college student. Any tips abt productivity. 🪴

I think it’s important that you know your learning style - whether you’re an auditory learner, visual learner, kinaesthetic or “read/write” learner. If you don’t know yet, there are a lot of tests online that you could take. Knowing this - you could build your study habits and routines around what learning approach works best for you. Alam mo kung mas effective ba sayo note-taking, pag color code ng highlighters, pag gamit ng flashcards, pakikinig ng lectures, etc. Result: hindi sayang oras mo because you know HOW you learn best.

Take me for example: I am a visual learner - I make flashcards whenever I can, I learn better with graphs or any visual stimulation, I make concept maps, and I color code my notes. I play brown noise to cancel out any other noise as I am easily distracted by sounds. I make to-do lists because it helps me visualize my progress.

I’d also like to share this, I got this from my friend: “Patulan mo na” — this has been my mantra for a while now. We always encounter this when we talk of dating, “ay sige patulan ko na” , “patulan mo na yan”. WE NEED THAT MINDSET. Except not on guys, but on readings. When you’re 50-50 about studying - patulan mo na. When you can’t seem to start - game na patulan mo na. Andyan na yan patulan mo na haha. Because you’re not going to feel motivated all the time.

And then the usuals…

Use pomodoro, and if you have time - animedoro hahaha. Right now I use lifeat.io — it has pomodoro timer, different calming backgrounds, to-do list, different sounds, you can play yt videos/spotify playlists, and I use it to study with my friends kase may vc. 10/10 recommend it.

Try not to use your phone that much when you’re studying. I have this app: focus quest. It’s pomodoro din but also you can’t use your phone during focus time. Plus it’s a game type of timer/focus app - very entertaining kase in order to like level up kelangan mo mag focus. It’s cute.

Another app I use is Habitica - to help me build good habits. Also for my to-do lists. Because the only way all this would be normal for you is if you do it regularly - make it a habit.

Also have scheduled breaks. “Scheduled” being the operative word. If you don’t make time for breaks, trust me, your body WILL MAKE TIME for breaks. Mabuburnout ka, magbbreakdown, magkakasakit or magrerevenge bedtime procrastination. At hindi mo alam kelan ka magiging okay to study ulet.

Pero all this is for when I REALLYYYY need to study - enjoy-in mo college life mo. Mag inom ka ng malala haha