#I got at least some basic HTML knowledge in

[sugarspunfaerie]

Granted I’m taking a break from coding my Neocities but I’m so into it I would love to start coding my own Toyhouse & Tumblr themes once I get more confident in my skills

[liliths-missing-pen]

Idia With Yuu Who Wants To Learn How to Program Games

Not gonna lie this is a very self indulgent piece because my computer programming class is making me want to code but I also want to write 💀 This is my compromise here.

Notes/Warnings: Reader is Yuu, I am in the English server and wish to not know what happens in Book 6 till it comes out so artistic liberties will be taken. Also, Idia might seem a little ooc but when checking the wiki it says he gets excited and talkative when stuff he likes gets brought up so I took it and ran with it. Enjoy!

Masterlist

Before you came to Twisted Wonderland you already known how to code. Mostly just from camps that your family made you do or just out of general interest. Nonetheless you only knew the minimal to basic things, like HTML, CSS, a little bit of Javascript and Python as well C++. So to say the least there wasn’t that much you could do especially as a beginner. You’ve always seen video games or visual novels and wished you’d be able to do something like that one day but yet, you never got around to polishing skills or making yourself actually do anything to get yourself to that goal.

Jump skip to know that you are in Twisted Wonderland. You didn’t know much about this world at all, lots of things were different than your own world. The way things were done, school expectations, slang, magic. So to say, you just expected that anything you knew would be just thrown out the window one way or another. Once you met Idia though you felt more secure in your knowledge. Idia was someone who you can imagine to be the most normal in your world. He was one of those kids in your class at the back of the room, typically not speaking to anyone unless prompted. Now you may wonder, “How did the Ramshackle prefect become associated with the shut-in hermit?” Well like any other instance, Ortho.

Ortho was extremely persistent that once you expressed interest or made an off-handed comment that you knew some code and loved visual novel games, you should meet his brother. Honestly, the issue wasn’t to convince you, it was Idia that needed convincing.

Since it wasn't Idia who invited you to his dorm, he was flipping out when Ortho told him to expect you. He's heard about the notorious Ramshackle prefect who dealt with Overbolts even though they're magicless. He couldn't lie and say that he wasn't interested in you though. Not everyone was able to do that. He just wasn't sure if he could do this right now.

Once you did arrive, Ortho carried most of the conversation. Idia was trying his best to try to make conversation as well but he couldn't bring himself. It was hard to talk to a normie okay?!

Well, that's what he kept thinking after each of his failed attempts. Ortho knew what to do though, he knew his brother would have issues so he hacked into your Magicam account to learn more about you till he ran upon all the gaming and anime accounts you followed. He put to and to together and this was Ortho's plan to make you two talk normally. Once he mentioned a game he knew both you and Idia played it was the start of something great.

Idia's attitude towards you changed completely once you talked about video games and anything else he was into. Which dragged into how the game was coded and whatnot. Once you mentioned how you wanted to program your own game and your vision he was just like an over-excited child he ushered you over to his game, asking how much you knew about code and how fun it would be to create a game.

But basically, once he dragged you in it'll be very hard to leave. Your whole friendship with Idia from then on was built on the game y'all were creating together, anime and gaming. Not that you'd complain it was very to have Idia around. Just that you'd always have to start up the conversion since Idia will always second guess himself

Even once you two finish creating your game Idia would still keep you around. He'd even start being the one to invite you instead of just showing up! After helping you learn and sharpen your skills in programming by working on a game together, you'd start to help him out too! If you know anything about programming, especially C++ you know how picky it is with its writing. Whilst he's off typing quickly you start to point out to him certain things he's missing, like a semicolon on something that'll screw the whole code up.

Wholeheartedly once you make friends with Idiai from one of his special interests it's going to be hard to pull him away from you <3

[nanimoshiranaikoneko]

20/100

Hello Tumblr I'm back with some updates of my coding journey

I got a little ill so i was doing everything in a listless manner but still i proceeded to learn new things. And currently I am feeling motivated to continue progressing in that field even more

In the last 10 days I: - Finished Beginner CSS Course by Dave Gray (i am obsessed with his tutorials lol) - Revised HTML basics one more time - Played around on my foolish website with the only purpose of practicing new knowledge (i made this HTML about cats with the help of freecodecamp and reused it again to practice CSS basics so don't judge it i know it's cringy af but at least it works and) - And i finally started JavaScript and it's super complicated so i need much more time to proceed it to draw any conclusions

and some small off topic... i was watching some videos on YT about coding languages etc and I was reminded that I actually kinda(?) had Pascal basics in the middle school (even tho i hardly remember anything since it was more than a decade ago)

so a question for everyone have you had Pascal at school and does anyone know is it used for anything nowadays or it remains as a thing of the past?

see you in ten days, nya if you started cringy proceed to be cringy with a pride till the end

[mentalisttraceur-software]

Could you elaborate on how software is applied philosophy?

Software work ends up using and empirically testing a lot of the thinking and conclusions that get serious discussion in philosophy, or that would look like philosophy if generalized beyond software.

---

My go-to example of this, probably not the best example but it's simple and accessible, is "Chesterton's Fence", which is basically the idea that we shouldn't change something unless we understand why it is (or was) good/useful.

Outside of software, some philosopher named Chesterton popularized this idea like a hundred years ago with an analogy about a fence, and it has been discussed enough that today it still has an established name from that. People debate and hair-split when it applies and what other values/heuristics should take precedence. You can even find people arguing whether it's a good heuristic at all or always wrong.

In software, getting any real work done depends on already having a practical, working solution to this problem space. When you need to change code but you feel that desire to understand more of it first, or you want to get more testing with a new change before rolling into production, that's your brain already having a whole philosophy paper's worth of ideas expanding on Chesterton's Fence. When is it safe or an acceptable trade-off to proceed without learning more? Precisely what edge cases do you need to look into or rule out? What tests can take the place of needing to know the consequences? What design of my implementation or API can eliminate the need for code guarding against special cases?

---

So that's just one example, but I think this generalizes pretty well.

A lot of philosophy boils down to: how think, what's true, what do? The study of correct thinking, what we can know and how, and what we ought to do. (Logic, epistemology, and ethics.)

And in software, we use all those skills. If our logic is bad, we make more mistakes. If our ability to know what we know and how to verify truth of our ideas is bad, we'll make more mistakes. If we have bad ideas about how to make decisions, or bad skills at reviewing ourselves for errors in thinking and knowledge, we'll have more inefficiencies in our processes/workflows and be slower to improve. Very few activities have as tight/short/fast of a feedback loop between how your think and what results you get.

---

There is a lot of overlap in the mental skills involved in sound philosophical thought and coming up with good software designs for a given problem. In as little as I can claim to have done both, I seem to need mostly the same mental skills for them.

---

A lot of decisions and trade-offs in software have ethics impacts. We get a lot of personal freedom within our code that will have real impacts on other people - edge cases frustratingly unhandled vs handled in an intuitive and helpful way; errors silently swallowed or harmfully ignored or cryptically unadorned vs considerately detected before destructive actions and informatively wrapped before being shown; code left opaque and complected vs helpfully tuned to guide understanding and written so as to minimize what needs to be known or changed to work with any given spot. All that adds up to affect people, sometimes very significantly, wasting hours of work or losing data.

Two examples of that in one. Just the other day I helped someone save a lot of stuff they had typed from a website that got stuck in some state where their text was unclickable+unselectabled and covered by an overlay. Losing all that text and having to retype it would've been severely unpleasant, mentally+emotionally costly, and probably would've ruined an evening for at least one person. I was only able to help because I am fluent with web browsers' dev tools, so I was able to find the text box in the HTML inspector. I doubt the devs of either the web app or the browser dev tools had this particular situation in mind, but these were predictable ethics impacts on both sides - and besides ethics in general being a subset of philosophy, the thought shapes that enable you to automatically predict entire categories of impacts like those are also a kind of philosophy.

---

When you design a class hierarchy in code, or a database schemas, or a REST API, or just come up with a way to factor some logic into separate functions... you're doing ontology. And while the philosopher ontologist sees no real consequences if they get it wrong, you will feel the difference between getting it right and getting it wrong as the difference between a force-multiplier and an awkward hindrance - edge-cases and boilerplate elegantly become naturally unnecessary and more things Just Work "for free" when the abstractions and factoring and data shape are right for the problem. You're decomposing things into concepts and identifying relationships between them, and you're testing if the thinking you use to do that is actually good at distilling what's functionally important to the problem space. (This is why "naming things" is one of the "truly hard problems in computer science" - naming things well sometimes entails all the work of coming up with an ontology that's good for thinking about what you're doing, which also must map concisely and intuitively to a language like English.)

---

Sorry for the lack of cohesion/connectedness, this is just what I could think of / remember off the top of my head today.

[willinglyghoulified]

Just a lil life update since I still have some people upvoting my work on Wattpad, and some are still giving my work kudos on AO3 (thanks you guys, I love y'all and I'm sorry I don't have more time to write right now ♥).

I started an account through Coursera and have found tons and tons of classes that I can take "for free" with the exception of the monthly Coursera fee, and when I tell you that I feel like I've found a trove of knowledge...

I've got classes planned for grammar, English basics, creative writing, editing, outlining, website management, self management, HTML, freelancing, portfolio creation... I'M SO EXCITED. I haven't been this excited to learn in so so long.

I have a feeling that by this time next year, I'll be a copy editor doing freelance work at least for free to get my foot in the door. This year is all about learning and saving my money (since I'm going to get a different job anyway to fit my study lifestyle and anything I get from here will be a paycut, RIP). I just wish that finding work from home jobs didn't feel so fucking impossible?

I just want to say thank you to the ones that have supported me so far and helped me on my way. When I've asked for advice or help, at least ONE OF YOU has been there and I can't thank y'all and this hellsite enough. ♥

[henfox]

KYLOSOLO’S/KRYLORENS’ STEP BY STEP BASIC GIFFING TUTORIAL, inc. ALL RESOURCES:

this is part one out of two not don’t worry, part two is just me filming the process, i just had to put it onto a separate tumblr post since i can’t place it in this one.  PART TWO HERE: [x]

i’ve been giffing for about over six years and it’s only very recently that i feel i’ve got a grasp on a pretty good method, for me at least. if you’re reading this you probably have prior knowledge already but this tutorial is also going to go over the basics as if you know nothing. → this is just how i do everything and my ordering process, there are way better gif-makers out there but i know how finicky the process can be so i wanted to give out all my tricks! it might seem like a lot but it becomes second nature easily. (let me know of any broken links and or questions.) just to note i use windows not mac.

SORRY FOR SPELLING AND GRAMMAR ISSUES, i really pushed myself and i struggle with articulation. 

things you will need/learn: (it’s all free!)  →the ones in bold are essential.  —adobe photoshop; i use cc2020 which you can get here: [x] —mpv; (a frame captures, i’ve used pretty much every type over the years, even ps’ inbuilt one but this is my favourite & this tutorial on how to use/dl it is the best) [x] —***at least 1080p footage; if you don’t have any you can still use this frames folder to follow along with me :) [x]*** —4k video downloader [x] —a megasync account [x]

actions: —@kylos tumblr sharpening; (these are just my favourites you can use any you find/make really but this makes your gifs look even more hq) [x] —@kylos twitter sharpening: [x] —@rory-amy tumblr/twitter save; (i just use the save action out of this pack and it’s a LIFESAVER) [x] —if you’re not sure how to put these into your ps i’ll show you how later on in this tutorial. 

how to learn colouring + how to add subtitles correctly + how to make hq twitter gifs: —all later on in this tutorial with links to my own resources and might have my twitter watermark by mistake. 

*what this tutorial isn’t including: —how to t*rrent. —how to upscale footage. —how to make multiple gifs/gifset are crop them the same way/move frames over to a new document; (i’m just focusing on how to make one simple gif) —how to use gradient/html text for captions but here’s a great tutorial on it. [x]

i just want to give a big shout out to @kylos because all her tips are just amazing and top-tier!!!

‧͙⁺˚*・༓☾ ☽༓・*˚⁺‧͙  ok now onto the good stuff!  ‧͙⁺˚*・༓☾ ☽༓・*˚⁺‧͙

★ how to load in and sort out your layers: [1/2] ★ —once you’ve dl the frames or gotten your own you’ll need to load them into ps like this;

when load layers pops up, you can select individual files (for a more complicated set this is good) but i prefer to just use the folder option. now select your captures folder from wherever you saved it. depending on how many frames/how hq they are will effect how long the loading time is. it can really vary.  —ONE THING YOU SHOULD NEVER DO: is take EVERY OTHER FRAME when making your gifs this destroys the flow of them and is an older method to gifs that isn’t needed. 

—if your ps is brand new you’re going to have to add some stuff, which i’ll show you how to do. — first go to window and select TIMELINE and ACTIONS. then move your ADJUSTMENTS bar up and close the tab it came from since you won’t need those. (if you ever do, just click workspace and then RESET ESSENTIALS) and next you’re going to click on your timeline bar, then CREATE FRAME ANIMATION. — *your screen should now look like this:*

—then on your timeline bar at the right top corner there’s three little lines, click that. then select MAKE FRAMES FROM LAYERS and after SELECT ALL FRAMES and next REVERSE ALL FRAMES. (depending on the ps you use your frames might be like mine and need to be reversed, just click the play icon on your timeline to make sure). —i always play through the gif before doing anything and i noticed the gif frames are a bit long for my taste so i’m going to press my shift key and then select up to frame ten by right clicking (they should now be highlighted) and click the trashcan icon on the TIMELINE bar to delete them. you can trim your gifs at the end doing this if the mb is too high and your gif doesn’t load when uploading. currently tumblr is up to 10mb and twitter is around past 15mb.  —after deleting your frames you then need to SELECT ALL FRAMES again and then CONVERT TO TIMELINE.

★ how to crop your gifs: ★ ***here is when i like to do it: (4th icon on the bar on your left)*** —however, you can do this before or after, just as long as it isn’t after making it a SMART OBJECT or sharpening.  —there should now be a new a bar on top of your gif and next to RATIO is where you should put your dimensions in (as in width:height) 

—there are tumblr dimensions but i find you can be more lax with them, i like to change it up a lot but for now i make square gifs around 450px x 450px and rectangular ones around 500px x 340px but it’s up to you. if you’re really struggling and see a set with a size you want to use yourself you can study the size of it by inspecting its elements on desktop, and rounding up. but i would recommending doing it yourself. making your own style is the fun of it!!! —for twitter the best size is 600px x 600px. this is a square, sometimes frames can’t just fit neatly into this shape/sizing so find what’s best or copy my tumblr dimensions if you’re struggling. 

***note: when cropping your gif you can get weird transparent lines around it. → to get rid of those when cropping your gif, you have to: crop inwards a bit, (or as much as you want) and move the cropping square/shape a bit into the middle. 

now, make sure you go to IMAGE on top bar select and put in your gif dimensions.***

‧͙⁺˚*・༓☾ ☽༓・*˚⁺‧͙  

★ back to your layers: [2/2] ★ —now go to your LAYERS bar and select every frame with an eye icon next to it, right click and select on top of them and select CONVERT TO SMART OBJECT. this should leave all the frames you have deleted earlier and those have no eye icon, you can select those akin to how you did it on your TIMELINE bar, just use the trashcan icon on your LAYERS bar or just select DELETE LAYERS when right clicking. 

★ how to insert and use actions: ★ —to do this you need to locate your actions folder. so, go to your adobe photoshop file, right click on the ps icon and then click ‘FILE LOCATION’ then search in it for ACTIONS. next if your action(s) are downloaded go open another file explorer tab:

then drag and drop it like this:  —if it says administer permission is needed click yes.

—once you’ve done this head back into ps to use the ACTIONS, first to sharpen, then to save: —you’re going to click the arrow icon on the sidebar on the left side to your LAYERS and then the three lines as shown here: 

—you’ll see where it says SELECT HERE, do that and then click the arrow icon below it and just click continue if you get the make layers error, this won’t affect anything. (sometimes gifs can glitch at this stage but just undo or you may need to restart your gif.)  —ok now your gif is sharpened! if you think it’s too much you can add gaussian blur from the FILTERS bar at the top but i just prefer to lower the opacity by double clicking the bars next to the word SMART SHARPENED which has now appeared x2.  —for me gif colouring at this stage is hard because playing the gif in this mode blurs it and i like having the individual layers so this is where the action pack (save) comes in handy! *it also saves you from having to open your gif at the end and adjusting to 0.07 sec bug to 0.05 gif speed the action auto does it to 0.05 for you (which i’ll explain next.) just select the action the exact way you did sharpening. just scroll down to where it says save.  —now your ps should look like this (this is a good point to save, but i’m the worst and do it after i colour usually.)

adjust the gif speed by double clicking the numbers if you want to change it from 0.05 speed but even if your gif is short making it anything more slower or even faster can mess up your flow. the best range imo is around 0.04-0.06, although i usually never stray from 0.05. i also like to put do not dispose on all the frames (which you again can do by shift clicking or the three lines on your timeline to get select them all and then any frame right clicking to do that should work for both things.)

★ how to colour (basic not colourful): ★ —now this is the best part for me, however it’s the most tricky and vague in a way. one psd (your saved photoshop document that contains your colouring and usually the gif too) might not work for the next gif even if it’s the same film or ‘footage’ and getting your own style can take a long, long time. you can use other peoples psds but i find making your own is the most rewarding. but! i have studied those psds given out and incorporated them into my own style over time.   —*so, what i have decided to do is just that. i have made a base psd for this gif for you to study. but i really recommend looking at other tutorials to teach you how to do that. i’m just gonna get you started, which i hope no one minds. i did try and make it less my very blue-toned grunge style and more ‘normal’. [x] —note 1: select all of the adjustment layers on the side and then to put them into a multi-set just select DUPLICATE LAYERS and put them onto your document/next gif. be smarter than me and don’t name randomly or keyboard smash your psds, sorting out your psds makes life so much easier trust me and you can reuse them!!! (i keep ALL of mine in folders in my documents and then they are sub-dived).  —note 2: i like to go more extreme and lessen the vibrancy/saturation and then constantly edit and mess with the opacity rather than being subtle, there’s so many ways to do this. so again, it’s just messing around. however, even if you all your frames selected sometimes this can bug out and mess up one of the frames. so, keep watch on that and either undo or just duplicate the new version of your adjustment layer and delete the bugged one. 

*if you do want me to make a how to on my colouring that goes more in-depth/colourful please let me know.

★ how to add perfectly in the middle subtitles: ★ —here i’m going to give you my subtitles with its settings preset, but edit it to your own liking! [x] —if you’re loading it in, different sizes/factors effect your subtitle placement and your text can looks random like this: 

so what you’re going to do this: drag it into the place you want and then make sure your text bar looks like this: 

—since this is also an adjustment layer you can get the same bug of it being fixed on one frame only and then the rest are how it used to be. so, just duplicate it into a new file like this: 

—and after duplicating it back onto your main gif and get rid of the old one.it should be good. (again, this is just my own learned solution) —this is also applicable to twitter watermarking which i’ll mention later on. 

now that you’ve done all of that and hopefully saved your gif it’s time to export it!

the save settings i use:

★ how to make hq twitter gifs: ★  —read this tutorial, already linked above but: [x]  —if you’ve read everything above then making a hq twitter gif won’t be a hard adjustment, you just need to change and add a few things. —first: make sure it’s 600px x 600px (you can change this but to get the best result) —second: use the twitter sharpening action!!! you can adjust this, but twitter can really repress the quality if you use just the tumblr one, or your preferred method. although some footage needs you to lower the sharpening or else it can look like a lot, but don’t be afraid it’s an easy fix! —if you’re adding subtitles make them a bigger than you would for tumblr just make sure it doesn’t go through the bottom left side of your gif. —before posting, make sure you have watermarked it! which you can only do on the top left/right corner and bottom right or else it’ll get covered up! you can also place in somewhere else if you’d like it’s up to you. —the video of me making a gif will be one for twitter so if you’re unsure about anything from this or the entire tutorial hopefully it clears that up. :) 

it should look something like this, just in your style!:

✨✨✨ now that should be everything!!! if you have made it this far, thank you for bareing with me and let me know if there’s anything confusing!!! this took a very long time of planning and making so if it helped, interact with this post? <3 ✨✨✨

[queenlua]

hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue.  see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP.   and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP.  so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on.  there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc.  you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

[faterpresources]

Anonymous:

Do you have any advice on how to start an rp blog? I feel like there's so much to do and so many specific things, it looks intimidating, but I really want to get into it (and your blog seems like a safe space to ask as a baby in the matter)

Hi! Thanks you for asking and for trusting. I do admit that rping on tumblr can look daunting and there is a series of things that are considered “etiquette” that might not be obvious for newcomers. And the only way to learn is to ask, right? As I’m not sure if you would like something more specific or a step-by-step, I’m going to go through the whole process.

note: this is a repost from an ask in a more reblog-friendly format

1.       Setting up the blog

You might want to make a new e-mail account for each blog you want. I recommend making a gmail/google account, so you may be able to use other services and associate them with your blog. I’ll go into more details in a minute.

Some people would rather have a personal blog and then making the RP blog as a side-blog. Or a “hub” blog and many side-blogs so they have everything centralized. The downside is that you can’t follow people with side-blogs, only the main – and some rpers are a little suspicious of personal blogs, so if you intend to go this route it might be a good idea to state somewhere in your blog that you have a RP blog.

Tip : It isn’t said too often, but I recommend saving your blog’s e-mail and password somewhere, maybe a flashdrive or even google drive. This way, if something happens you will be able to retrieve your account.

When picking the URL, for a very long time tumblr had problems tagging URLs with a hyphen ( - ). I’m not sure if it has been fixed or if there are still some issues, so I recommend only using letters and maybe numbers. Other than that, pick anything that sounds nice to you!

Themes are nice, but not entirely necessary. Not everybody has photoshop skills and all that. Some people do have commissioned themes, but if you want to try your hand at it my first stop is usually @theme-hunter  or @sheathemes . They reblog many themes from many creators, so there are always many options that might suit your needs.  Some creators offer very newcomer-friendly themes that you can configure a lot of things without much hassle but some might require basic HTML knowledge – a few creators have guides on how to properly set up their themes and are willing to and answer questions, so don’t be afraid to contact them! You can also send me an ask, I’m not a specialist but I can certainly help walk you through the basics.

Tip: @glenthemes have very good themes and a basic installation guide here.

When fiddling with the options, try to pick colors that have nice contrast and are easy to read. If you are bad at picking colors or have problems in finding the code for them, I recommend trying this link. There is also this one that auto-generate palettes.

Tip : If you mess with your theme, remember there is the Theme Recovery.

Tip: If you use Chrome or Firefox you can set up different profiles and associate each with a different blog, so you don’t need to log out from any of your accounts.

There are two pages that I recommend having: one is an about your muse. If they are an OC, it is always a good idea to have at least some information out there to make things easier. If they are from a canon source, not everybody is familiar with the material so it might be a good idea to state. For example, if you are going to roleplay as Altria/Arturia, it is a good idea to have a “RP blog for Saber (Altria Pendragon) from FGO/FSN “ somewhere visible. The other page that is a good idea having is a rules/guidelines page. This one can be a little intimidating, but it is usually a way to communicate important things. For example: are you comfortable writing violence? Do you have any personal triggers? There is something you absolutely won’t write? There are things you may figure out along the way and it is absolutely ok to fine-tune this session every now and then. Some people also credit source for their icons and graphics in general in their rule/guideline page.

If you are using the tumblr default themes, when you create a new page you can turn on the option to show a link to the page. If you are using a custom theme, most of the time you will have to link it manually.

Oh, and if you are planning to do a multimuse, it might be a good idea to list which muses you have. The same goes for a hub blog; list the muses and link to the pages.

Icons aren’t necessary but are considered commonplace. You can find some icons I’ve done here but there are plenty of other sources. If you want to do your own icons, keep in mind to don’t make them too big, as a courtesy to your mutuals.

Tip: Anything larger than 300 pixels will be stretched to fit the post. As of today ( 4/29/2021 ) the posts are currently 540 pixels wide. This can be useful as making banners for your blog.

Tumblr allow users to “pin” posts. This mean that they will always visible if you access your blog, even on dash/mobile. You can use this to set up a post with basic links for mobile users or something else. For example, if you are out on vacations and won’t be able to do replies, you can pin a hiatus notice and then remove the pin once you are back.

2.       Introducing yourself

Time to officially join the fun! (insert a “Hi, Zuko here” joke) Don’t worry if you don’t have a fancy promo graphic or anything, most people make their initial introduction with a simple post.

(as you can see, I’m not very good at saying ‘hi’)

Try to introduce yourself in a few lines, but make sure to state which muse you RP as. Some people also like adding their pen name/alias and establishing a brand. Follow as many people as you want that reblogged or liked your post, and tumblr is going to start recommending other blogs that are related to the tags you use normally or have any relation to the people you follow. You can put as many tags as you want, but tumblr will disregard more than 6 tags in their system. Try tags like “<fandom> rp” and “<fandom> roleplay” along with the media, such as “movie” “video game”, “anime” and so on.

It might also be a good idea to follow a few RP memes blogs. They often have options to break the ice, like one-liners that your mutual can send you.

Tip: Don’t forget to turn on the asks and the anon

3.       Practical advice

Alright, now that you have a few mutuals, it is time to get to some general tips:

Tumblr can be a little “iffy”, and a great quality of life extension for RPers and navigation in general is installing the New Xkit extension. They offer a number of options to enhance your tumblr experience, but the ones I consider essential are the “editable reblogs”, “quick tags” and “blacklist”. Get it for Chrome or Firefox.

As a rule of thumb I recommend writing your RPs using Google Docs before posting or replying. By doing this you can do some spell check and if your browser crashes for any reason you can easily recover your work. You can also use Word, Open Office, or any text editor you feel like.

Because I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I also have Grammarly ( Chrome / Firefox ) installed for an extra layer of spell/grammar check. There is a subscription option, but the free one works perfectly fine.

To make things easier to locate, always tag the URL of your RP partner when doing a reply. There are other useful things you can tag, such as open starters, memes, and such.

Risking being obvious here, but when you are not interacting as your character it might be a good idea to tag as “ooc” or “out of character”.

Some people like making google docs with basic info and other useful stuff for easier access on mobile. It is a recent trend, it might be easier to edit as opposed to going through tumblr page editor and dealing with the HTML.  You can find some templates here and here.

Tumblr’s activity can be unreliable, so don’t be afraid of contacting your partner to see if they have gotten your reply after a few weeks. However, some people also enjoy using the RP Thread Tracker in order to be on top of things. It might be a good idea to check it out.

Because of Tumblr shadowbanning and shenanigans, it isn’t unusual for people to have NSFW sideblogs (sometimes referred as ‘sin blogs’). If you want to write smut, it might be a good idea to consider making one.

Some people don’t like replying to asks, as Tumblr won’t let you remove the initial ask. It has become common to see people making new posts to reply to asks.  This is a simple example:

As you can see, I used the mention to have the RP partner notified then I copied and pasted their question on my post and used the quote to indicate it. You can also have fancy graphics, like a line to separate the contents, just do whatever you feel like with the formatting or keep it simple.

To make sure your partner got the answer, I recommend copying the link to the post and pasting on the ask and then replying it privately.  An example sent to my rp blog:

4.       Basic Etiquette

Ok, this is a little subjective most of the time but here are a few things that are considered universal courtesy.

Never reblog someone else’s headcanons. If you enjoy it, maybe it should politely contact the author and ask if it is ok to write something based on their original idea but you should never downright copy or lift something from another creator. It is considered rude, or even theft in some cases.

Don’t reblog threads you are not involved with. It is ok to leave a like, but never reblog. This is because Tumblr can mess up the notifications and disrupt the flow of the RP.

Don’t copy other people’s graphics. It is very rude and sometimes they commission (aka: paid) for it.

Trim your posts. What does that mean? Every time you reblog with a reply, the post tends to get longer and longer, and it can cluster your and your mutuals’ dashes. This is why the New X-Kit’s “editable reblogs” is an almost must-have tool. If for some reason you can’t install X-Kit (if you are on mobile for example), then remove the previous post or ask your partner to trim for you.

Never take control of your RP partner’s muse. This is called “godmodding” and it is heavily frowned upon. It is ok to control your muse and the possible NPCs that you inserted, but never seize someone else’s character. Likewise, it can also be very upsetting if you use what people call “meta-gaming”, applying knowledge that your muse shouldn’t know about the other. For example, let’s say your RP partner’s muse is a vampire, but they have never disclosed that information to your muse, who also doesn’t have an excuse to know that (for example, being a vampire hunter) so it can be quite jarring sometimes. When in doubt, contact your partner.

This should go without saying, but RPing sexual themes with users under the age of 18 are illegal. It doesn’t matter if the age of consent in your location is lower, once you join Tumblr you are abiding by their user guidelines and the law of the state they are located in. If you are an adult, don’t engage minors with these topics, maybe a fade to black would be a better option. If you are a minor, don’t insist or you might cause a lot of legal problems for others.

Try to tag anything triggering. Violence, gore, NSFW. Both Tumblr and the New Xkit have options to block keywords.

When picking PSDs or graphics for your blog, you should avoid templates that change the color of the skin of POCs muses and try to pick the right race/ethnicity of the muse you are going to RP as. I won’t go through a lot of details, as it is a rather lengthy subject in an already lengthy conversation but keep this in the back of your mind.

Some RPers don’t like when you reblog memes from them without sending anything. Try to always reblog from a source or to interact with the person you are reblogging from, it can be rather disheartening to be seen as a meme source rather than a RP blog. This isn’t a rule and some people don’t mind, but it is always a good idea to try to do this.

This might be more of a pet peeve of mine than proper etiquette, but it is ok to use small font. What is not ok is use small font + underscript. Some people have disabilities that might make it harder for them to read it, so it might be a good idea to refrain from using it. Maybe if you feel like doing something fancier every now and then, but I wouldn’t recommend making this a habit.

Mun and Muse are different entities. Remember that it isn’t because a muse does something (especially a villain one) that the mun condones something. Never assume anything about the mun, when in doubt talk to them.

Be mindful of your partners and treat them the way you would like to be treated.

As a rule of thumb, always talk to your RP partner. It is only fun as long both of you are enjoying it.

5.       Closing Words

This got longer than I expected.

Despite all of that, don’t be too worried about not being very good at first. I assure you that you will get better with time, so don’t be afraid of experimenting as long you feel comfortable. And don’t be afraid of saying “no” if something bothers you.

My inbox is always open to questions and ideas, so feel free to contact me anytime!

I would also ask my followers: there is advice I missed/overlooked? Anything you would like someone have told you when you first started? Add your thoughts so I can update this.

Happy RPing!

[wenevergotusedtoegypt]

I am SO FRUSTRATED!

Basically there is a project coming up that has 2 components, let’s say X and Y. For some reason, Coworker 1 decided that even though sending out the types of emails required for both X and Y is my literal job, I would only send out the emails for X and Coworker 2 would send out the emails for Y. 

Problem: Coworker 2 does not know how to format the type of email required for Y. She is only able to set up emails using a template which is too limited to accommodate the needs of this type of email. I on the other hand set up emails using a more complicated and less user-friendly program that we for some inexplicable reason use, which requires at least some basic knowledge of HTML to format things correctly. Coworker 2 had previously asked me to show her how to fix one of the issues that arises with this program in almost every email and while I sent her a screen share video explaining how to find the relevant part of the HTML and fix it even if you don’t know everything about what the HTML means, she has absolutely zero familiarity with HTML and was not able to handle that. 

So Coworker 2 tried to set up the first email for Y last week and, predictably, was not able to do so, and had to pull me in to clean up the mess at the last minute. It would have been way simpler and more efficient if we had just assumed from the start that I would be doing it, and again, it is literally part of my job to do this type of thing. I told Coworker 1 that for the rest of the Y emails we should just assume my involvement from the start.

There are supposed to be emails going out for both X and Y respectively early next week and I had received zero of the info for them, so I emailed Coworker 1 asking if she had them ready. She does not have anything ready for X (which is ridiculous but predictable) and she told me that Coworker 2 had actually been able to set up the Y email by copying that first email that I set up so they were all set. I had a feeling this was NOT as much the case as she thought and went to look at what Coworker 2 had done. She did mostly get it set up ok; however, she formatted it weirdly and had some spacing issues that didn’t look great, neglected to update one of the links to the correct analytics URL for this email, had introduced some grammar/typo issues that didn’t exist in the original copy provided by Coworker 1, and most importantly, had not noticed a typo that WAS present in Coworker 1′s work. Namely, there was a misspelling in the name of a major donor foundation - think something along the lines of “Prevention” instead of “Presentation.” Think major donor as in contributing around $100k to this project alone. This is a donor that got really upset during a previous project because they didn’t think the perfectly decent marketing materials looked adequately high-end for their taste, so blatantly misspelling their name in their sponsorship would uhhhh....not go over well.

I fixed all the issues and let Coworker 1 know that I had fixed several issues but didn’t specify exactly the typo. I then contacted my boss (who was CC’d on that original thread) separately to tell her about the donor typo and how frustrated I was that Coworker 1 had chosen not to involve me after the first Y email incident. She thanked me for the catch and basically said that while she agrees with my frustration and admires my dedication, I can’t be sitting in the shadows cleaning up other people’s messes all the time, and it seems like there is nothing we can do at this point going forward but let them fail and make it clear that I wasn’t involved. She CC’ed her boss on this email to make him aware.

Before I was in this position I was in a different one that I really disliked. Because I was so unhappy, I wasn’t performing my best. My boss davka offered me my current position because she knew that I would and could do better in a position more suited to my interests and strengths. But ever since then I feel like I am constantly being told, “You’re right that ___ is a problem, but because of ____ there is nothing we can do about it really, so it would be better if you stop caring so much about doing your job well and keep your head down.” The whole point of my being offered this position was that I would be more motivated to do my job well, but I am motivated and trying to do it well, and am regularly being told that I just need to be less motivated because our hands are tied. It’s extremely demoralizing and it’s ridiculous that the solution to “our structure as it relates to your job is dysfunctional and Coworker 1 is incompetent” is not “so we will fix the structure and/or address Coworker 1′s performance in a meaningful way” but “so just stop wanting this organization to succeed as it pertains to your job for the time being and maybe one day things will change.”

[aliceslantern]

Give/Take, a Kingdom Hearts fanfic, chapter 2

Ienzo has been too busy since the war to be overwhelmed by the past. But with little progress to be made in his work with Kairi, old nightmares start to invade.

Riku is a glorified housesitter. Lonely and faced with no choice but to wait for a way to find his friends, he eagerly accepts when Ienzo asks him to help do repairs around the castle. Before long, the two strike up an unlikely friendship, united by their dark pasts and their attempts to be better people.

But just as they begin to consider something more... Kairi wakes up.

Ienzoku (Ienzo/Riku), post-Melody of Memory, slow burn. Updates Thursdays until it's done.

Chapter summary:  Ienzo and Ansem have an honest conversation about his time as Zexion. Riku is restless.

Read it on FF.net/on AO3

---

Ienzo thought often about sleep. Most of his days were preoccupied with sleep, and hearts, and trying to remember what he had studied years ago. In the intervening years in the Organization, he had cared less about hearts and more about Kingdom Hearts.

Hearts. Sleep. Old men passive-aggressively jabbing at each other.

His hands were on the keyboard, and he saw code slowly and steadily ticking in. Code he should subsequently be de coding. But he… felt…

Ansem’s hand on his shoulder startled him, making him gasp aloud like a startled animal. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

Ienzo shook the fuzz out of his eyes, his heart still pounding in his chest, adrenaline making him shaky. All of these human reactions were so sensorily intense . “It’s… it’s alright. I was the one far away.”

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” He stood, feeling woozy. “I’m…” He pressed two fingers to his brow, trying to hide the dizziness.

“How long have you been here?” Ansem asked softly.

Ienzo blinked, and realized, “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you go get some rest?”

“I don’t need rest, I need to keep working through this.” He scowled. “It doesn’t help that my memory of coding is hazy at best--”

“Then why don’t you let me help you? I can give you a refresher on the basics.” He smiled kindly, and Ienzo felt an unexpected stab of memory--sitting as a small child on Ansem’s lap as he taught him the very basics of HTML, his eyes gleaming with pride at Ienzo’s first project (a page that simply said “HELLO!”).

But then, equally… his eyes flicked over to the closed door to the lab, the one he’d begged Ansem to finalize. And he was reminded for the millionth time that this was his fault.

“Would that help?” Ansem prompted.

He shook his head to dismiss the memories. “Yes. Yes, that would be prudent.”

“When was the last time you slept?” Ansem asked.

“I’m fine.”

He frowned.

“Really. I’m fine.”

There was a pause. Ansem knotted his hands together. “Naminé once told me that Nobodies do not need sleep. Is that true?”

Ienzo’s eyebrows shot up. Ansem hadn’t brought up the reality of their pasts--namely, the ten years he and Even had been Nobodies. “Yes, it’s true,” he said. “One physiologically can , of course, but it is not necessary to live.”

Ansem pursed his lips. “Does it feel… odd, to return to those needs, then?”

Ienzo considered, woozily. “Yes, it does,” he admitted. “I feel like I’m losing a lot of time from my day.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, then finally said, “do you like being human again?”

“Well, I had no say in the matter,” he said, “but it is… better than being the monster I was. I…” He rested his hand on his chest, feeling the pound of his heart. “I like having choice.”

Ansem smiled. “I’m sure you must.”

Ienzo exhaled. “I’ve done a great many awful things,” he said. “I wasn’t… a passive captive. Were it not for Saїx’s machinations, I likely would’ve been second in command. I… cared for their goals. I wanted it.”

Ansem cocked his head. “To be whole?”

“I don’t think so.” Ienzo squinted, trying to remember how it had felt to be Zexion. “In pursuit of… knowledge. Of growth of the Organization. I’m… I’m sorry.” Guilt hardened into a sour seed in his stomach, making him nauseous. “I’m so sorry.”

Ansem digested this, his eyes going somewhere distant and sad. “It says a lot about who you truly are, that the moment you were whole again, you chose the path of light,” he said gently.

“It does not feel that way.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “But we’ve all done things we regret. There’s no changing the past, as paltry as that sounds. Helping Kairi, and ergo, Sora and Riku… is a good first step.”

“I’m not sure it will ever be enough.”

“You can’t help how you grew up,” Ansem said. “In darkness, in nothing, manipulated, I’m sure, by them. You were just a boy. You said so yourself. How old were you, Ienzo?”

“Just shy of nine,” he said, not wanting to make eye contact.

“Precisely. A brilliant child… but still a child.”

“But what of--when I grew older? When I should have known better?”

Ansem squeezed his shoulder a second time. “By then you already believed.”

“I’m not innocent. I… the things I’ve done…” He exhaled. “I cannot simply absolve myself of guilt. I… I don’t want to.”

“I do hope that someday you can forgive yourself,” Ansem said. “You’re too young to live with such a heavy heart.”

“I think it is earned,” Ienzo said.

Ansem sighed.

“I’m going to go try to sleep for a few hours,” he said. “I’m sorry to leave this all in your lap.”

“It’s quite alright. I don’t mind.”

Ienzo wasn’t sure what else to say, so he started walking back to his room. He thought about what Ansem had said. His heart did feel heavy--quite literally. But how could he just… move on and have a normal life after everything he’d done? He didn’t know of anyone who’d messed up as colossally as he had. Wouldn’t it be wrong ? Masturbatory, so to speak? Where was his karmic payback? Why had he gotten this wholeness so many craved so dearly? He didn’t even want --

There had to be some way to silence the noise in his head.

Ienzo took a quick shower, put on some pajamas, and climbed into bed. His bedroom felt more cluttered and cramped than he remembered, the window by his double bed drafty. The overburdened bookcase was packed two and three deep, the rolltop desk flooded with yet more papers. He should clean and organize, remove the very last of his childhood things; there was still kid’s clothing in some of his dresser’s drawers.

His mind was swimming hopelessly with memories of the Organization’s plans to take down worlds--

Somehow, Ienzo fell into a restless sleep.

He recognized this dream, this nightmare. The tight, dark corners of the basement of Castle Oblivion. A redheaded demon, a boy in a black-and purple jumpsuit. A sharp glove at his throat, the tight heat of darkness swallowing him, and he couldn’t breathe couldn’t breathe--

Ienzo sat up. Slowly. He touched the scar at the base of his throat, thick and ridged. It was the darkness, not the replica’s sharp gloves, that had left this mark on him. Tears burned his eyes. He felt pathetic, weak, for being in the grip of this memory. It was over with. It was the least of what he’d deserved.

Human.

He thought of the dizzy spin of those first few moments after he’d woken, on the cold lab floor, bleeding from the marks around his throat. How the swelling had made it feel like he couldn’t breathe, still, how everything felt like it was echoing loudly around him, his heart like a weight in his chest. Trying to push himself up, seeing Even and Dilan’s brutalized forms, Aeleus trying not to show how much pain he, too, was in. Being the least injured, it had been up to Ienzo to try and tend to their wounds. At least he’d had the foresight to study medicine in the Organization.

And truthfully, even though it had been nearly two months back in this body, with this heart, Ienzo… still was not used to humanity, the pulse and pound of unexpected emotions. Once he couldn’t get open a jar of peanut butter for his breakfast toast and the anger he felt when he struggled was so overwhelming he’d just thrown the damn thing. But more than anything he felt a guilt so thick it was like lead, and an anxiety he could never fully set this right.

He looked at the clock. He’d slept about five hours, which he supposed after that nightmare was all he’d get. He was feeling nauseous and achy again, shaky with low blood sugar. So much time I must spend doing maintenance on this body. It seemed almost like a waste.

But he needed to stay alive. To help, to atone.

Ienzo got up and went to the kitchen.

---

Riku couldn’t take the silence anymore. It was almost making him jumpy, and after so long without human interaction, he thought he was starting to hear sounds that weren’t there. The dizzy nightmares of that city didn't help. He wondered if he should tell Ienzo and the others about it; but every time he tried to remember fine details, all he could recall was the deep blue color of the sky. Not helpful.

If not for the gummiphone, Riku would’ve lost track of time, too. Ienzo had told him how to use it, but he still struggled a bit with the interface. But, he figured, if Sora , who had nearly failed their high school computer literacy course, could grasp it, so could he.

Sora.

Riku felt something like a stab of pain. It felt like it had been a long time since he’d seen him, since they’d gotten to do more than chat for a few minutes. Kairi, too, he’d barely gotten to speak with at the beach during their brief victory party. At least he knew she was--physically--okay.

He felt so… alone.

He took a deep breath in and let it out, slowly. I’m not alone, he forced himself to think. Even if it feels that way. Our hearts are connected.

That didn’t make the silence any less piercing.

Riku got up. He had to go get some laundry, make himself something to eat. At least this was something he could do.

He wondered if it were too soon to go back to Radiant Garden. He knew Ienzo said he’d call the moment something came up, but maybe Cid had something new, or maybe there were even some Heartless to fight. Something. Someone.

“Oh god, I’m losing my mind,” he said out loud. He took out the gummiphone and looked down at its screen. It was still set to the generic background it came with, mostly because he didn’t know how to change it. With clumsy thumbs, he opened the text messaging app and started to write. The keyboard felt awkward in his hands.

Mickey,

I hope your journey with Donald and Goofy is going well. I’m guessing it must be good to spend time with them again. How’s the Queen?

I’ve been staying in the Land of Departure. Terra asked me to, but I think it’s partially because he wanted me to feel like I had an official duty as a Keyblade master. Mostly it’s just housesitting. If you ever have time, you three should come by. It’s a lot prettier than Castle Oblivion. It feels more alive.

The Radiant Garden guys are still hard at work studying Kairi’s heart, so she’s been asleep. They warned me it might take a long time. I still wish there was something I could do, but the power of waking won’t help in this case. So they say, anyway. I don’t really understand it fully myself.

If there’s anything I can do to make your journey any easier, let me know. Take care of yourselves out there.

--Riku

This written, it didn’t make Riku feel any less alone. More like he was speaking out into nowhere. He went and finished his chores, worked out for a little while. When he came back there was a response.

Howdy Riku!

Great to hear from ya! The Queen and Daisy are both doing great. We actually got to talk to them last night--love these nifty gadgets! If only we’d had them years ago… can you thank Ienzo for them the next time you see him? Chip and Dale also say hello to you both.

So far we’re doing our best to find more information about Sora, but so far there are no leads that I can tell, anyway, and you know how sharp Goofy is looking for these things. This all got so complicated… but I have hope that we’ll all be together soon!

I hope you’re not getting too stir crazy up in there. If you like, the Queen says you’re welcome to visit any time. And if we’re in the area I’m sure we’ll drop by! I hope staying there isn’t too hard on you.

Thanks for writing! Speak soon.

--Mickey.

Riku exhaled. He was positive he was reading too much into the tone of the letter. Mickey was never condescending towards him. Every word he’d written, he’d meant.

Maybe Riku should get out of here. He could thank Ienzo, for one thing, maybe help with some Heartless there, or the restoration committee was always working on some project or another. Get his hands dirty, like the work he used to do on the play island--

He was used to the accompanying stab of pain he got when he thought of them, but it didn’t make it any easier. Yes. Riku very much needed to get out of here.

---

It was raining in Radiant Garden when Riku got in. It washed away the rest of the gel in his hair, making it fall hopelessly into his eyes, and he kept trying to blow it out of his face. The haircut had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, something to get rid of that old self, but this current in-between length was unbearable. He didn’t want to think about spikes or spiky hair. (The fact that he’d run out of hair gel was also besides the point.) He wandered the streets for a time. Just seeing other people was nice, made him remember he was real.

The slope up to the entrance of the castle was muddy in the deluge. At least I’ll have an excuse to do laundry when I get back, he thought. One of the guards--he didn’t remember their names yet, and decided he really should--waved him in. “Try not to track mud all over the place,” he said, rolling his eyes.

Riku washed off his shoes with a water spell and kept walking. The place was always dank and damp in the best of circumstances, but today it was downright cold. He shivered and wished he knew air magic, something to dry himself off. Oh well. He’d had worse recently than being a little cold and wet.

The path up to the lab was very much familiar now. He saw places where the people here were trying to repair all the structural issues; the moldy carpeting torn up, the fallen pipes cleared away. The circular office before the lab had been cleaned up too; the bits of broken glass were finally gone.

Riku saw them before they saw him. He observed them for a few minutes, in their long white coats and oddly formal scarves. He tried not to audibly shiver, his hair sending droplets onto the floor.

“All looks… very much ordinary , from what we’ve been able to decipher,” the one formerly known as Vexen was saying. “Would help if I could understand your shorthand.”

Riku saw a scowl cross Ienzo’s face, the first mean expression he’d seen on the young man since they’d met again. He thought of Zexion, all claws and cruelness and teeth. “My shorthand is up-to-date. It’s not my fault your knowledge of coding has fallen by the wayside.”

“Boy, I have more important things to do--”

“Like what? Is this not our priority?”

“ She is our priority. Keeping up with some language is not.”

“Your sniping does not help either,” Ansem the Wise added. He went over to the console computer, punched some things in, and shook his head. “Though I agree with Ienzo that we should all at the very least be on the same page.”

Ienzo’s smirk became a hesitant smile.

Then, “I think we can all use a crash course.”

The smile became a scowl again. Riku chuckled despite himself. So the politeness was partially an act. Good to know. He crossed over into the hallway, letting his footsteps make more noise than earlier. Their heads snapped up; Even seemed to struggle to get his expression to be neutral, while Ansem offered a kindly smile. Ienzo’s face simply went blank, and Riku felt an odd surge of jealousy for his control over his emotion. “Oh, hello, Riku. We weren’t expecting you,” he said.

“I’m sorry just to drop by like this,” he said, feeling a blush color his face. “But I was wondering if--” Seeing their faces fall just slightly, “there’s… no news, is there?”

Ienzo took a few steps closer to him. He always seemed to be a little… cautious, in the way he moved around Riku. Could this really be about the bad blood in their past? “I’m very sorry, but no. No significant change.”

He glanced over towards Kairi, still fast asleep in the chair. He noted that at least they’d given her a blanket. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s being kept very comfortable, I assure you,” Ienzo said. “Neurological functioning is the way it should be.”

He crossed his arms, trying to suppress the shivering; it was even colder in here. “Could I… can I go up to her? It won’t interrupt anything, will it?”

Ienzo shook his head. “She’s too deeply asleep to be disturbed by our voices. Though perhaps--” Looking him over and wrinkling his nose. “You might like a towel?”

Riku looked at his palms. His wrist braces were awkwardly wet, and he knew they’d take hours to dry out. “Sorry. It’s, uh, raining.”

He nodded. “Come with me.”

He followed Ienzo. He was only the slightest bit taller than Riku now, but his strides seemed long, quick and precise, the white coat flaring out. “If you’d like, I can get you something dry to wear,” he said. “We’re probably about the same size.”

The idea of dry clothes was appealing, but the idea of wearing something of Ienzo’s made him feel, well, pretty weird. “No, that’s okay, thanks,” he said. “I’m probably gonna head out before too long anyway.”

“I imagine you must be quite busy.” Ienzo opened a door to a very average linen closet and pulled out a white towel. Riku did feel much better with it around his shoulders.

He just shrugged in response. They started walking back.

“If you’re worried about her health, she’s in quite good hands,” Ienzo said. “I… understand why you might be hesitant.”

“It’s… not that.” Not entirely. “I just…”

“Worry about your friends?” Ienzo prompted. “I can imagine. Yes, it’s been… a rather tectonic year or so.”

“We’ve all been separated on and off since our world fell,” he said, feeling a stab of guilt. “Though that was… kind of my fault. Not kind of. It was .”

Ienzo’s eyebrows shot up. “Is that so?”

“I know, I know. Some hero, right?” he forced himself to laugh.

“I… know that feeling exactly.” Ienzo cleared his throat. “Were it not for all we’ve done here… well.” He sighed. “We cannot… change the past. Not without a lot of nonsense.”

Riku smiled a little despite the heaviness of the conversation. “It almost feels… fake, how all this happened. When I heard about the… vessels, and the time travel, I was just like… are you kidding me? ”

Ienzo chuckled. “I think we all had that reaction. Even I cannot comprehend what exactly he was planning to do--and I was part of some of it.”

Riku thought about that laugh for a moment, how different it sounded than Zexion’s. More human, softer. Then again, the boy next to him was human. Trying to be better. Aren’t we all, he thought, wryly.

Back in the lab, he crossed over to Kairi and took her hand, hoping his wasn’t too cold. Her breathing was deep and even, and she looked peaceful. He wondered if she actually felt that way, what the “examination” made her feel. He almost asked, but Ansem and Even seemed to be deep into some conversation he couldn’t understand, and Ienzo seemed distracted, his brows furrowed. “So, uh,” he began slowly. “How’s the Heartless population around here?”

He looked up, startled. “The claymore defense system manages it quite well,” he said, with a touch of defensiveness. “Though I guess there might be a few hanging around the edges of town.”

“Gotcha,” he said. “Well. I’m going to go check in with the committee. But before I go. Um. The King said thank you for the gummiphone. And that Chip and Dale said hello.”

“Of course,” he said, his expression again quite neutral. “That was kind of them.”

Riku took off his damp towel and folded it. He left the castle and went back out into the rain. If anything, the deluge had gotten heavier, to the point where his left wrist (which had never quite healed correctly) was throbbing. Ienzo had been right about the Heartless; the few ones in the center of town were easily dispatched without him even having to draw his Keyblade. Riku found himself scowling. Logically, he knew that the system was fantastic for the civilians here. But it took from him the only thing he could do to be of use. As it grew darker, he wandered farther and farther into the fissures surrounding town, where he finally found something worth fighting.

He tried to vent his frustration into these Heartless, especially at his own uselessness. He was a Keyblade master , and all he could do was beat up a few mooks, was wait around for things to happen. He hated feeling like this; it was so like the old days on the island. At least this time he wouldn’t do something so off-the-walls stupid like let a creep in a robe persuade him to do what they wanted.

No, instead he was fighting Heartless. Alone. In the rain.

By the time he’d fought the last one in the vicinity, it was dark, and he could no longer suppress the shaking. “Idiot,” he said out loud. The clothes might protect him from darkness, but they wouldn’t protect him from the common cold. He should go back to the Land of Departure, take a hot bath, make himself some soup, and go to bed.

Riku went deeper into the fissures.

[warmonger0]

#100DaysOfCode

Day 1 -

I’ve dabbled in web development on and off for years. I have the basics of html and css down and I can read most javascript but i could really use a formal deep dive into web development.

Even thought I’ve played around for so long, I’ve never successfully built more than a static website or two.  I’ve made the excuses that real life is in the way, that I don’t have the time, or or that it’s too hard. But, the truth is that I haven’t been disciplined enough to devote just a little time to working on it, regularly.

So, I’ve decided to make a commitment to myself to spend time, each day, diving into web development.  The mission is to work for at least 15 minutes a day, each and every day, for 100 days. A successful day is NOT just listening to someone talk about code for 15 minutes.  A successful day IS reading, listening, and then actually applying what I read and heard with actual time typing code.

My goal is to use the knowledge I gain to develop the front end of a web tool for use in my law firm.  That app will need to track my time spent on individual clients and matters, track and manage open tasks, and remind me to follow up on open items.  There are plenty of off the shelf solutions to this but after testing out well over 40, I have yet to find one that suits my practice needs.  That would also defeat the fun of making it myself.

To that end, i’m going to be focusing on vanilla javascript and React to implement the front end design of my web application.  I’ve been halfway into a React course for months and today I finally felt like I needed to take the plunge and commit to myself and my learning. The winter break and wind down of year end legal work mean that I have a few moments each day to focus on programming. 

Today, I ran through some old lessons from react and have started an introductory course on javascript.  The short term goal in doing this is to reinforce basic javascript principles and remind myself of where I left off in my React lessons.  As an added bonus, scrimba.com is running an advent calendar of daily javascript problems.  You can find more about that my going to scrimba.com or by searching the hashtag #javaScriptmas on twitter.

For today’s #javaScriptmas challenge, I was able to complete the solution with a bit of research, but I got through the problem quickly.  Thankfully, logic and math are strong suits for me but I am a bit rusty. Drafting contracts, I rarely have to do math.

Tomorrow, I’ll probably be back to a couple more lessons of vanilla javascript, another lesson on react, and I’m going to tackle setting up my environment in VSCode.  I think that by week end, i’ll try my hand at my first react component for use in my law firm application. 

If you read this, I hope you’ll wish me luck and, if you have the time I hope you’ll encourage me to post more.  Starting a new habit is never easy but encouragement really helps. Thanks in advance.

-p

[stelloids]

hi I really love your town name generator!! thanks for sharing it with all of us. I got the name alderdust from it and I love that name!! I was wondering what you used to make the generator?

awh alderdust!! makes me imagine little dust motes floating around in a sunbeam that’s streaming through the trees

i literally just googled “how to make a generator” and “generator maker” to find some sort of tool to do the heavy lifting for me, lmao. i tried out a few different tools/sites/what-have-yous to find something that was suited to what i wanted to make, and there were a lot of really good contenders!

the one i used is called perchance and so far i really like it but i’m honestly not sure if i’d recommend it?? it assumes you have at least a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, and a lot of the more fun features get pretty complicated, so if you haven’t done much coding before it’d probably be kinda frustrating. there are much simpler ones out there if you just wanna make something basic with minimal coding knowledge!!

[bitob]

4 , 9 , 17 , 22 !

four: who is your most-used fc?

of the characters that i’ve played in the last... half a year to a year, i’d say there’s a pretty good mix, i don’t tend to favour one fc over the others... but long-term it’s definitely yoongi.

nine: tell me about your favorite group you ever joined

so this wasn’t on tumblr because a solid 9/10 of rps ive been in on tumblr have died way too fast for me to get attached, but there was one rp i was in in like... 2018? where i had a few rlly iconic plots including a one-sided rivalry to lovers, we-like-each-other-but-hes-always-in-another-country-and-also-im-a-coward (which lasted across like 5 diff groups and also was angsty but had moments of meme-y-ness such as how one of them woke the other up at like 3am when they were teens for an ‘emergency’ which was actually abt manga), the ‘babies’ (they were all like. 17-18. and bullied each other about crushes constantly), the ‘seize the means of production’ gang (dont ask it was so ridiculous sjgkshdk), the twelve idiots who spoke about three languages each and had equally many braincells between them (and one of them keeps harassing the rest with images of terrifying australian bugs). sometimes i go back and read through the threads just for fun bc i miss it that much.

edit: icb i forgot the star-trek-but-not-because-i-literally-had-no-knowledge-of-it-at-the-time group with the duct tape cult that one was also excellent

seventeen: name an fc you wish people used more

like,,, all of victon,,, why r there no gif icons of sejun from the last two years,,, i thought the rpc liked pretty people,,,

twenty-two: do you have any rp horror stories you’d be willing to share?

i have a very small handful but there is one that stuck with me for a long long time and that i’m still bitter about.

so on the site where my favourite rp occurred, my least favourite also occurred. i don’t recall when it was, but i think it was like, 2017? maybe 2016. and it was a high school rp, because of course it was, the plot was something like there r the regular kids and then also the delinquent kids who r there because no regular school will take them iirc, and it started off pretty good — i had characters i liked, plots i enjoyed, and i was helping to admin the rp — running the character & fc masterlists, things like that. and then the main admin dipped. so i was essentially running this thing on my own for about two weeks. and it was going great. and then she came back, and it all went to hell. because she appointed a few extra admins — and on this site that comes with actual privileges of moderation. and one of them i was cool with — she was a friend (at the time, bc the conglomeration of rpers who knew each other that joined that rp split apart in like... 2018? over some nazi apologist or not respecting people’s triggers). the second one, though, i didn’t know and she wasn’t officially appointed as a moderator? and she was going around changing things up and like. she had permission to from the main admin, which is fine! but the main admin didnt bother to like. tell me, the person who had been running the rp for the last nearly three weeks, that this person had the authority to do that. because ‘oh we’re childhood friends’. but then things settled down again, and everything was going well,,, until these two (the main admin & her buddy) thought it’d be fun to enact a plot along the lines of ‘these two people really hate each other, how about one of them shoots the other’ which got the group flagged by the site as 18+ bc fucking yikes and i was like. 15? small anyway. so naturally the website was like ‘no this group is adults-only u cant see it’ so i had to change my age on my profile to be able to actually see the group,, brought this up to the main admin she was just like ‘oh sorry lmao i cant do anything abt it’. so i got the fuck out of there after the other admins started getting on my case about not doing anything for like. a week. because like. i had put so much work into that group - formatting masterlist posts in html, generally running things (accepting characters, updating pages, etc). and i wasnt being acknowledged or respected at all. so yeah, bye.

another time she was running another group and me n one of my friends who had also sorta fallen out w her over her bullshit but were still pretending to be friends w her made a plot together that was basically ‘look if her and her friend are going to have their cliquey plots that affect the whole group why cant we’ which like. in hindsight was maybe not a great decision. but it was therapeutic and probably what she deserved.

[drunkblushed]

hi love! kind of weird question but I wondered how you got started coding? I've been really interested in starting to make my own themes but I don't know where to start. thanks for whatever answer you can come up with, your themes a beautiful.

not a weird question at all and i’m kinda flattered that you came to me to ask me about this omg. but honestly, i started coding, because although some themes are beautiful as is, i like to change them up to my liking. my degree made me take 9 units of graphic design, so i’m all about making things look good. 

whenever there’s a theme i use, i try to change it up – changing fonts, making the containers and pictures bigger, adjusting the placement of stuff like links and pictures. that’s how i started familiarizing myself with the basics. for me, the basics would be knowing what to add to a code to make it appear how you want it to be. for example, if i want something to move to the left, i’ll change the margin-left property. or if i want an image to have rounded corners, i’ll add a border-radius property. this and this cover some of that. when you’re familiarizing yourself with the basics, i would suggest you use a theme – any theme – and try to change things up as practice! if you want to get to know the tumblr basics, this guide by tumblr is very useful!  it really teaches you how you can change certain html elements that are only exclusive to how tumblr functions (what to do if you want photos posts to be bigger) and their basic variables (description, tumblr urls, icons). 

the next step after that, for me, was a lot of research. i like to read up on tutorials and guides on tumblr blogs, and w3schools. my favorite tumblr blogs for coding are shythemes and theme-hunter. they have reblogged a lot of coding tutorials which can be very useful! they have tutorials for update tabs, scrollbars, pop up tabs, and more. researching can also help when it comes to planning/designing the themes you want to make, because it teaches you to code with what you already have/know instead of starting a theme then abandoning it because you don’t really know how to move forward or do what you wanted. 

before designing a theme, you should start planning first. planning involves looking through pinterest for inspiration for do-able themes, and then establishing what it should look like. for example, my theme cruel summer is actually based on this pin. so my mental process about that is okay – it’s going to be a contained theme with a sidebar, and a center image at the front. since it’s a contained theme, you’d need a base code for that, and there’s a lot over at theme-hunter. 

now when it comes to actually designing a theme. my first thought is – what do i need? i would have to need attributes for the sidebar, the center image, the links, the subtitles at the side. and then how big should each thing be? personally, i like coding because i like computing how big containers should be to accommodate the sidebar and the posts. for example, if i want 300px posts with 15px padding then my container should AT LEAST be 330px wide [300 + 15(2)], and that’s just for the posts. if i have a sidebar that’s 180px wide, then that’s more or less a 510px container. for customizing the look of text, posts, and images – this is where your knowledge about the basics come in. if you need to visualize the theme more clearly, it helps if you do a sample first on photoshop before coding it. other things to make your code a little prettier would be font icons, and nice fonts! 

the last step for me is testing. this is usually the fun + the worst part, because you really get to see all the coding mistakes you’ve made. for testing, i like to make posts (ask posts, text posts, photosets) on the blog i use for coding to see what they look like. you also need to check out the permalink pages (these are the individual post pages). sometimes i like to show the themes to my friends as well just in case they can see some things that need to be changed.

that’s all that i can cover for now (but i’m sure i’ll come up with more eventually!). i hope this was able to help! if you have any more questions, you can IM me! 

[dhruvdhingra02]

9 Highest Paying Freelance Jobs In 2020

Today I will tell the highest paying freelance jobs in the world.

Do you want to earn some extra money by doing any past time business online?

Making money through a business nowadays has become very challenging than it was in the 20th century.

So, in this situation, many entrepreneurs are hiring freelancers in order to help them out.

And because of this reason, why freelancing has become the second main source of income. It has become one of the quickest ways to make money online.

Freelancing is a place where clients can hire you to work on different jobs for a small period of time instead of hiring you as a permanent employer.

Many freelancers are earning a good amount of money through freelancing.

Basically, a freelancer makes money depending upon the number of hours he is investing. Freelancers are paid per hour depending upon the work they are doing.

There are some freelancing websites where you can work as a freelancer such as Upwork, Fiverr, and many more.

There are over 70 million freelancers all over the world but over 50% of them are not making a sufficient amount of money.

The reason is that they might not be having any particular skill or they don’t work seriously.

In this article, I’ll walk you through with some of the best paying freelance jobs you can do in 2020.

9 Highest Paying Freelance Jobs

So, below you’ll see a list of 9 highest paying freelance jobs which you can choose according to your skills and passion.

1. Content Writing

Content writing is one of the highest paying freelancing jobs of all time and it is growing rapidly day by day. As you all know content is the king therefore freelance writing is the best business for those who have the capability to create high-quality content.

There is a huge demand for content writers in any field whether you write a blog, book, newsletter, sponsored post, magazine or any other article.

So, in order to become a content writer, all you need to do is to polish your writing skills, improve your grammar and learn to write high-quality content.

There are different types of freelance writing such as content writing, SEO writing, copywriting, B2B writing, etc. which are in demand.

According to a money perspective, you can charge between $50-$500 per hour depending upon the length of your content, skills, and experience you have and also the site at which you are working as a freelancer.

It is a good source to make money for those who know how to play around the words.

Average monthly income – $5000

2. Graphic Design

Graphic design is another most popular skill which will be in huge demand in the upcoming years. Many digital marketing companies, bloggers, newspaper and magazine publishers want to create beautiful graphics in a short period of time. So, in this case, they hire a freelance graphic designer.

There are various free software companies providing these services where you can easily start making designs on platforms like Canva, Piktochart, Inkscape, and many more.

So, even if you are not a graphic designer you’ll still be able to create beautiful graphics and make a bunch of money

Make sure that when you are a beginner, you must offer a little amount of money because you won’t be having any rating and reviews on it.

Setting at a low price will really help you to attract more clients; more offers, and thus you’ll to make a living from freelancing.

You can charge up to $50-$100 per hour depending upon your skills and experience in it.

3. Social Media Manager

Every business owner wants to interact with their potential customers to promote their products and services online but due to lack of time, they need to hire a social media manager.

As a social media manager, your job is to help business owners to promote their products and services on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a lot more.

In simple words, the job of a freelance social media manager is to manage social media partnerships with other brands, execute and analyze the campaigns, promote products by sharing it on social media in order to increase the number of sales, leads and brand awareness.

The best part is that you don’t need any expertise skill as long as you are good at building good relationships with people.

If you are a newbie, you will able to make around $20-$40 per hour.

But on average, a social media manager makes around $100-$150 per hour.

You can use Hootsuite tool that will help you to manage social media in a short period of time.

Average monthly salary – $4000-$6000

4. Web and Software Developer

Software and mobile app developers are the highest paying freelancing jobs.

There are many big organizations and associations looking for the best developers to handle the backend process for their website.

You need to have good technical skills in order to make money as a web developer freelancer.

If you are good at any programming language such as c++, Java, Python, HTML, etc. then you can easily charge up to $200 per hour.

You can learn these languages through various online educational platforms such as Codecademy, Codewars, Coursera, etc.

Toptal is the best freelancing website for those who are professional and experienced web developers. Toptal hires only 3% of talented people and most of them are expert programmers. Once you got selected in Toptal, you will easily make up to $250 per hour.

5. Translator

It is another one of the best freelancing jobs. Translating jobs are the ones where people have the ability to translate audios, documents into various languages.

You need to have a comprehensive and deep understanding of any language; you have to be able to show that you use that language almost at a native level.

Many companies hire freelance translators to work for them as they want to connect with people from other countries where they may require written translations.

It is one of the high paying jobs for freelancers.

On average, a translator can make up to $20-$25 per hour. An experienced freelance translator can also make more than $100 per hour.

If you want to make more money as a translator, you should learn at least 1-2 languages that are in demand such as Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, etc.

You can learn these languages from online websites like FluentU, Rype, Babbel, etc.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialist

Every website needs traffic to grow business and make money online. A freelance SEO specialist helps companies, bloggers to rank their websites higher on various search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. which are the major source to generate traffic.

It is one of the best freelancing jobs in the world.

The job of a freelance SEO specialist is to work on both on-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO involves technical work such as setting up HTML codes, meta tags, meta descriptions, reducing on-page time, etc.

Off-page SEO is the work that is done behind the website such as building backlinks, getting traffic, etc.

To work as an SEO specialist, you need to have analytical skills, mathematical skills, and also some basic knowledge of HTML. This will help to gain more visitors to your client’s website.

On average, you can earn up to $50-$60 per hour as a freelance SEO specialist.

You can start learning SEO for free on websites like SEO 101, Moz, Webmaster World, etc. There are also some YouTube channels that are providing complete free tutorials to learn SEO.

It is one of the best freelance jobs from home.

7. Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is someone who helps to manage the everyday task of an online business. It is similar to a personal assistant or secretary.

Many company owners hire a virtual assistant because they don’t have enough time to handle work on emails, social media, blogs, podcasts, etc.

Almost every business needs a virtual assistant, therefore, it will always be in huge demand.

It is one of the best freelancing jobs to start your career as a freelancer where you don’t require any strong skills to make money. Also, it is a high-paying job.

On average, a freelance virtual assistant can make up to $20-$30 per hour.

To become a virtual assistant, you need to have a basic knowledge of computer and communication skills.

You can offer various services as a virtual assistant such as Pinterest manager, Facebook ads manager, YouTube editing and management, etc.

8. Copywriter

It is a way of convincing someone to take action by writing words. It is in the form of advertising or promoting a product or services that make people buy instantly.

Copywriters basically motivate people to take some type of action on it.

Copywriters are different from content writers. They don’t have to write articles, blogs, newsletters, ebooks, etc. instead they need to text on emails, catalogs, billboards, etc.

Many business owners and publishing companies hire freelance copywriters to work with them.

An average freelance copywriter can charge up to $40-$50 per hour. An experienced freelance copywriter can also reach up to $250 per hour.

To make a plethora of money as a copywriter, you need to work on your writing skills, listening skills, and research skills.

Before working as a copywriter you must be having some knowledge of sales and marketing otherwise it will get hard for you to grow your career as a freelance copywriter.

9. Transcriptionist

Transcription is the process of converting speech into text format. A transcriptionist is basically a typist who needs to listen to the recordings or audio and type what they have heard into a document.

You need to type the text as accurately as possible.

Transcription is a freelance job which you can do while sitting at your home and make money online.

A transcriptionist can earn up to $0.40-$0.80 per audio minute transcribed.

It usually takes 1 hour of transcription time for 15-minute long audio.

The pay is low as compared to other jobs because you don’t require any tough skill to work as a freelance transcriptionist; you just need a headphone, a computer with an internet connection and good listening skills.

The most common mistakes that a transcriptionist makes during transcription are spelling and grammatical mistakes. So, make sure you work on this.

Conclusion

So, in this article, we have discussed 9 highest paying freelance jobs that you can try working at home.

You can easily make an account on the best freelancing websites and start making money online as a freelancer.

Although you will find it difficult to attract clients at the beginning of your freelancing career but with time, you will be able to find and work with clients that may convert into your customers.

Make sure you work consistently and build relationships with the clients. There are many people who are making a ton of money from freelancing by just working for a few hours a day.

Freelancing has now become a full-time job for most of them and if you have these types of skills, you must look after it.

I will upload more articles related to this, and in the meantime if you find something good in our article, you can share your opinions with us in the comment section.

Also, tell which of the technique you find best in our article.

[jeanjauthor]

This article gets a little bit into the science-y math-y side of food flavor combinations, but only a little bit, so it’s still quite easy to understand.

I stumbled across it trying to find out if almonds are popular in Indian cuisine. (Basically, I was having takeout leftovers and thinking “mmm, slivered almonds would go good with this saffron & cracked mustard sauce on basmati rice”...turns out almonds come from South Asia & the Middle East, so yes, it’s definitely in the cuisine, just not that particular dish I’d ordered.)

Sometimes you just fall down into a rabbit hole of “I wonder if...” and some days you just get super-lucky in your research, finding a really fascinating article.

How does this relate to writing?

Uh, duh, almost every story will contain protagonists that eat, right? (Not all, but the vast majority.)  Food is vital to life as we know it...but the same old food day after day gets very disheartening.  Therefore, flavoring your food in new and different ways is a major impetus for travel, trade, warfare, and economic power.

Plus, food as medicine is important.  Not just in the literal sense (lemon juice contains vitamin C, chamomile is a calmative, etc, etc), but in the sense of, if your character is in a great deal of pain, or suffering from an illness...their appetite will be diminished.

One of the medicines I”m taking kinda...kills my appetite.  I still get hungry...but I have no cravings for anything.  It’s not stimulating.  It comes across as same old same old, nothing appeals, I don’t know what to eat, it’s all just fuel that makes me go “meh.”

Except...the myriad plethora of scents in Indian cuisine can stimulate my appetite.  Not every time, but more often than not, when my appetite has been dull for a while, that’s when I’ll just go smell curries and so forth.  (American chili recipes have similar highly complex flavor profiles, so sometimes a good texmex chili will stimulate my appetite, too.)

It may be simply because there are so many different scents and flavors, something catches my gastronimic senses.  Or it may be that only in combination can my body find whatever micronutrients it needs.

In most cases, your body craves certain foods because it’s trying to tell you what nutrients it needs.  (Of course, it could be an emotional craving that needs fulfilling, but I’m talking nutritional cravings, the kind where you feel satisfied after you eat the whatever-you-crave, which doesn’t happen with an emotional hunger...and sometimes you’re just thirsty and think you’re hungry, so try drinking something first, then checking in with your body in ten or so minutes.)  This is why pregnancy stirs up the weirdest food combinations; it’s literally the uterus telling its person, “I need X, Y, G, W, E, D, and Z to make a baby, GIMME!”  and anyone else hearing that combo would go, “you don’t pair E, D, and G, with W, let alone X, Y, and Z!!”  (Aka the pickles, peanutbutter, yogurt, and chocolate all at the same time syndrome, or the “send the partner out to get cottage cheese at 3am, please!” cliché.)

So when you’re building your worlds, your nations, your cultures, their resources...what flavors do they have?  What flavors do they crave that they have, versus what they crave that they don’t have?  Can they afford exotic flavors from far-flung corners of existence?  Is it common to find in their local market, or something that costs half a year’s wages for the average peasant/peon...?

What combinations do your people put together?  How do they react when traveling to other lands?

...I want to point out one more thing about flavors.  The reason why Western (European-influenced) cuisine uses so many “similar flavor” spices and herbs is because exotic spices started getting transported in such great quantities, that it no longer was a status symbol to be able to afford to consume exotic flavors from far-flung nations.

This pissed off European nobles.  Whereas before cumin and coriander and nutmeg and so forth were exotic and costly, literally a single meal’s worth of spices costing a peasant’s wages for a week or a month or even a year...became so affordable that even *gasp* the farmer-class colonists in the Americas could afford to have a personal supply of nutmeg and use it in every meal!! (Well, not quite, but...)

So they had to distance themselves from the peasants...and switched on the “national pride” stuff and started insisting that herbs grown in France were the best flavoring for foods, far superior to that foreign stuff--aka the “your tastebuds are too coarse and unrefined to appreciate the delicate subtleties found in similar-flavor-profile seasoning!” 

...Also, better food preservation techniques had a hand in it, because they got better at keeping meats fresh rather than spoiled, and didn’t need strong flavored herbs & spices to cover up any gamy or starting-to-go-off flavors.  All of which had the peasantry wanting to imitate their local nobles, etc, so they, too, started going for the locally grown stuff as the “fancy food”...and of course everyone wanted to be thought of as “fancy” in their class/caste level, fancier than they actually were so...recipies emphasized “French cuisine” influences with all those local-grown herbs...

This is literally why it took generations for curry restaurants to get a foothold in Great Britain, even if it was popular in the British colonies of South Asia.  People who lived in colonized India loved the food flavors over there, but when they got back home, the Upper Crust weren’t touching that “foreign food stuff” because it wasn’t “national pride” enough, and “belonged to the overseas subjects (subjugated peoples) of the Crown” who weren’t “British enough” to have it be considered “noble enough”...and just...ugh.  Just trust me that there was a LOT of racist bigoted bullshite going on underneath the surface of a seemingly simple “preference” for one style of seasoning versus another.

Anyway, this is why American Colonial cuisine was...pretty bland and boring, really, until they started experimenting with flavor profiles of the Americas.  The first major complex food flavoring developed in America was...well, chili.  Chili con carne (sans/con frijoles, doesn’t matter) has a gazillion different flavor profiles.  Sweet, salty, spicy, fatty, acidic, creamy, sour, peppery, oniony, meaty/umami...incredibly complex flavors that seem like they would clash and not go together, yet so much ends up going into them that they meld together into a melange of deliciousness.

(Seriously, if you want to know just how complex a dish can be, try this link for Oaxacan mole negro, 30-ish various different ingredients, takes hours and hours of preparation, different methods of evoking flavors (smoking, frying, baking, grinding, etc...:  https://youtu.be/ysiEyAQ27P4  Mole can be just as complex as chili, but it’s very much a thing developed in Mexico, not in the U.S.; I’m just saying that in the United States of America, chili was the first truly complex dish that we developed with our own explorations into developing our own complex flavor profiles...of all the dishes that got written down.  I’m sure we lost a lot of complex dishes due to the slaughter of indigenous peoples and/or the destruction or suppression of their cultures & local knowledge of non-agriculturally-based food resources../)

So food needs to be considered when you’re creating cultures.  Flavoring food needs to be considered.  Are there specialists who grow and/or process foods?  Are the recipes written down and widely available, or are they controlled by only a few producers?  Which areas produce the best local sauces (everyone knows that the best garum (ancient Roman fermented fish sauce) came from such-and-such port town) or the best spice blends, or the best...  On and on and on, these things drive trade, commerce, wealth, warfare, exploration, travel, and more.

Don’t be afraid to have one or more of your characters be a culture-appropriate foodie.  Don’t be afraid to have your characters be hesitant about new foods...but make sure to have them like at least some things, and even like it enthusiastically. (Whatever you do, don’t promote cultural isolationism & bigotry/xenophobia...because what we write, others absorb and emulate.  We got waaaay too much of those things in the world.  We need to open people up to new experiences...and not do it in conquest-minded genocidal ways.  Waaaaay too much of that in the world already.  That trope’s been done, so move along & pick something new.)

Anyhoo, long digression short, this is a complex mix of fun food science and good background ideas for both your own personal food exploration & experimentation, as well as a healthy consideration for your worldbuilding and/or characterization efforts.