#THIS SERVER IS A SLAM DUNK JOIN IT NOW

[devstamps]

[burnedbyshoto]

Can I request a scenario where Aizawa and Present Mic (separate) are swimming with their shy female s/o and their bathing suit comes undone without them realizing? How would the men react, would they swim and get their shy female s/o missing swim top or just be blushing mess? How would the react if other people where staring?

aizawa shouta x reader ; yamada hizashi x reader

warnings: your titties be out

a/n: ngl, ive really come to fall in love with both these characters. they share the same braincell. aizawa’s braincells, and I THRIVE FOR IT!!!!!! enjoy!!!!!

Aizawa Shouta

Why was it whenever Aizawa took you anywhere, something always went wrong? When he took you to the movies, he had soda spilled on him. When he took you to the park, you got chased by a very aggressive bird. When you two went shopping, a bunch of villains attempted to steal from the very same store. When you two went out for dinner at a dance restaurant, he had to grip your hand because some douchebag server kept flirting with you, and then Aizawa got food poisoning. Well, you get the point.

Don’t get him wrong, Aizawa didn’t care, it always left the two of you stronger and with another funny story to eventually tell your future kids should you walk down that path with him, but it just really sucked sometimes.

For instance, the two of you had decided to go on a tropical vacation, nothing too fancy. But fancy enough that Aizawa could get a break from his life as a teacher which had been entirely demanding this past semester. He had to be back in a few days, but he really enjoyed this time with you.

Aizawa watched as you smiled at him, and jumped into the pool with a small splash, his own smile never fading as you resurfaced and motioned for him to join so. Well, Aizawa guessed it wouldn’t be a big deal and he stood up, taking off his shirt and got in after you.

The two of you swam for what felt like hours, soaking up the sun. Aizawa has been listening to you for hours about how much you hated the bikini you were wearing. You didn’t really enjoy how much attention you were getting, but Aizawa understood why. You were drop-dead gorgeous in it, but it was annoying him slightly too.

As Aizawa held you in his arms, teasing you about dunking you into the deep end, you edged him on playfully because you thought he didn’t have it in him. So all you knew is that you were being thrown underwater, and when you resurfaced your top was gone.

“Sho-Shouta!” You scream, your hands going immediately to cover your exposed chest, your eyes frantically looking for your stupid top. Aizawa looked at you, his face confused until he saw your panicked state and his eyes narrowed. He heard the wolf whistles, and just like that locked in on your top and immediately swam over to it, and back to you faster than any water Pro-Hero could ever manage.

You felt stupid as he quickly tied it back up for you, his eyes clouded, and you winced as he made it the slightest too tight. You watched your clenched hands in embarrassment as you felt Aizawa glaring at anyone looking your way.

“If you’re going to striptease next time,” Aizawa mutters soft enough for only you to hear him, “Make sure it’s back in our room.”

You moan in embarrassment as you slam your too hot face onto his chest, as the low chuckles vibrate against his chest.

Yamada Hizashi

When you had suggested going to a waterpark for a date, Hizashi flipped his shit, he was so excited to go it was almost hysterical. So two hours after stating where you wanted to go on a date during the insufferable summer, the two of you were pulling up at the nearest water park.

Water parks were childish, or whatever, but they were so fun and it helped bring out your childish excitement, plus you had this new bathing suit you wanted to try out. You were a shy person, everyone knew that, but you were wanting to show off to Hizashi that you were confident in yourself, even if you weren’t extroverted.

The two of you picked out the nearest lounge chairs you found, Hizashi talking about how fun it would be to immediately go to the tsunami wave pool because he was nearly positive he could surf those waves. Something you doubted, but nevertheless encouraged that he tried because there was no point in trying to get him out of the dumb things he wanted to do sometimes. With a shaky breath, you stripped over your shirt and shorts and covered your face in embarrassment as Hizashi’s mouth dropped. It was a blue and white bikini that showed off your beautiful body.

“You look HOT!” Hizashi accidentally shouted as he looked you over, twirling you were you stood and dropped you dramatically like a tango dancer.

“Hizashi, people are staring!” You squeaked as sure enough, attention came your way. Being a Pro-Hero and also a celebrity with the loudest, most recognizable voice on Earth always meant that Hizashi was a means of attention. 

Without further stress, Hizashi laughed, scooping you up in his arms and ran off towards the wave pool. 

“Sunscreen!”

“We’ll live!!!”

A few minutes later, you found yourself in the deep end of the pool, laughing as Hizashi was leading the chants for the waves to start again. The bell rang, and a chorus of cheers rang as the tall waves started up again. You were a strong swimmer, and the waves themselves were nothing crazy, so you easily stayed in the deeper end with a bunch of other people that Hizashi had rallied. 

You watched almost mesmerized as your boyfriend swept his long gorgeous blond hair out of his face after swimming under a wave, and you blushed, damn he was breathtaking like that. Except, a wave came crashing on your head, wiping you out. 

You easily came back up, spluttering as the wave took you by surprise, but you waved off the lifeguard that was ready to call of the waves, showing that you were fine. A choke came from the lifeguard who was now staring at your chest, and your cheeks flared in utter embarrassment as you saw your bikini top floating several meters away.

“Y/N!” Hizashi screamed as you watched as Hizashi swam to you with such intensity waves were being created by him, and you felt like dying on the spot as your arms covered your bare chest as he enveloped you in a hug glaring at the lifeguard who continued gaping at you.

“I would appreciate it if you LOOKED AWAY!” Hizashi yelled up at the lifeguard as if he couldn’t hear him without yelling. Within his arms, Hizashi swam backward towards your floating top. Another guy handing it over, to which Hizashi glared at him too.

And as you wanted nothing more than have another tidal wave come and end your embarrassment. You couldn’t move as the soft hands of Hizashi gently put your top back on without you exposing yourself to the entire pool who was now staring at the two of you. You glanced up at your boyfriend who placed a kiss on your forehead, winking at you before turning away and at the top of his lungs yelled:

“LET’S GET THIS PARTY ROLLING!”

[hermits-that-craft]

Chapter 51 - Redux

AO3:https://archiveofourown.org/works/23509375/chapters/63894079 TW:blood, mentions of death, gross icky undead stuff

Scar follows Impulse deeper into the jungle, his hand still clutching onto Impulse’s. He felt sick, the image of their bodies having been sent to the hermits. They can’t contact the hermits, Night will find them if they do, but Void does Scar want to. Tears stream down his face as blood soaks through his shirt.

Impulse stumbles over some vines, and in a panic Scar’s magic buries them in the vines, Scar collapsing into Impulse’s arms, crying tears of deep gold and bright blue. Impulse holds his breath as Observer walks over them, a bloodied sword resting just above Impulse. Scar holds his hand over his mouth, and Impulse copies him with a vague confusion. The person possessing Mumbo turns around, and Impulse and Scar freeze in fear.

“They aren’t here!” Observer calls.

“Okay, help us look for them this way!” Butcher calls back, his voice unnaturally flat and empty. 

The two men stay like that, Scar’s breathing becoming more ragged as night falls over the server, but they don’t fall asleep. They don’t rest, they don’t move. Something tickles at the back of their minds, something familiar and dangerous, something that they thought they left behind in season five.

The jungle temple glows as Scar and Impulse fall asleep on the dirt.

---

Iskall blocks Cleo’s sword, ducking as she swings around. It’s almost a dance, her hair flying behind her even though Iskall told her to put it up. Sweat drips down Iskall’s back, Cleo putting up a good fight.

A well placed kick sends her flying backwards, hitting the wall.

“That’s not fair!” Keralis protests, his already huge eyes growing comically wide. 

“Keralis, this is war.” Etho says, rolling his eyes as he picks at his skin, sighing. “Cleo, when does it stop being itchy?”

“I don’t know, ask a stray.” Cleo says, slowly standing. “I’m a zombie, I can barely help Keralis and he’s a water zombie.”

“Not my fault I can breath underwater and you can’t!”

“Shut up, walking glow stick!” Cleo jokes back as Iskall rolls his eyes, grabbing a water bottle.

“No, seriously, will my skin stop itching? I want to peel it off.” Iskall spits out his water, staring at Etho.

“Don’t peel your skin off.”

“It’s itchy!”

“Etho, you’re a stray. It’s probably because the mob doesn’t have skin. I’ll talk to Xisuma, ‘kay?” Cleo smiles sympathetically. “We’ll see what we can do.”

Etho nods quietly, picking up a sword and spinning it around a few times, humming to himself under his breath. The door slams open, Tango and Zedaph bursting in and falling onto the floor as they both try to run through the door at the same time.

“Does Xisuma or Joe need-”

“Teach me how to kill someone.” Zedaph says, standing up and walking to Iskall. “I want to know how to-”

“Woah woah woah.” Cleo says, her hands up. “You two are on the redstone trapping team for a reason.”

“I want to kill Night.”

“We will, don’t-”

“No, Iskall. I want to make sure that they never have the chance to hurt someone again.” Zedaph’s eyes are serious, hardening like stone. “I’m not losing another friend to them.”

“Zed, taking someone’s life isn’t something to take lightly.” Iskall must look as tired as he feels, because everyone in the room winces in sympathy. “It’s not something you can ever take back. You might not regret it in the moment, but it’s still there.”

“It’s Night, they deserve it.” Tango growls, and Iskall’s eyes grow even more tired.

“That’s what I was told before every mission I was sent on. Tango, think on it.” Iskall takes a deep breath in. “I will teach you both how to fight, but I refuse to teach you guys how to kill.”

“Cleo, will you-”

“TFC’s gone mining again.” Etho says, distracting everyone from what they were doing. “And in other news, has anyone seen my hand? I’ve lost it.”

“What do you mean you’ve lost it!”

---

False sits, chained to a wall, determination on her face. She can’t show fear, not around Stress. Whatever Night’s done to her, whatever blackmail Night is using, she can’t let Stress know that it’s getting to her. That she’s scared. Stress isn’t scary.

The woman with the void black hands that crack and ooze when they move is.

False doesn’t know why Stress’ hands look like they’ve been dunked in black ink. She doesn’t know why her hands crack as she moves them. She doesn’t know why the dark liquid that oozes from her fingers also stains her tear trail. False doesn’t know why it hurts more when Stress trips now, as though it was hurting her.

“It’s alright Stress.” False says, her breaths shaky as she tries to calm herself down. “The hermits are coming for us. They’ll save us, just you wait.”

“My name isn’t Stress.”

“I know you’re in their.” False says, forcing herself to ignore the comment. “Stress, I know you’re in there. I will never give up on you.”

“Stress is dead.”

“We’re going to be okay, alright Stress? They’ll kill that bastard, send them to the worst place the Queen of Death can imagine.” False shakes as the door opens, trying to will herself still as Night enters, a cracked mask on their face. False stands up, ready to fight. 

“Oh, will they just?” Night says, their voice light. “I can’t wait to put those undead where they belong, I’d like to see the mortals try.”

False opens her mouth to speak, but before she can a sword plunges through her chest. Pain blooms, hot and burning, in her chest. The sword leaves her chest, and False falls onto her knees, blood falling out of her mouth. Tears pour down her face, though she isn’t scared or sad. No, False is furious. Her tears burn as she refuses to go down quietly.

“I will never willingly follow you.” False spits. “You will never learn what peace is, not as long as anyone knows my name.”

“Is that your final curse?” Night laughs. “I will welcome into my ranks, Warrior. My newest star.”

False coughs, blood spilling from her lips and mixing with her tears. She looks up at Stress, who looks as though she’s struggling to maintain composure. As though she’s struggling to keep control. Fog fills False’s mind, familiar and unwelcome.

“It’s okay, Stress.” False struggles to force the words out of her mouth, her body weak and struggling. “They’ll save us. You’re still loved.”

TheNight stabbed FalseSymmetry.

---

Ren hugs his knees, humming to himself as he tries to make himself calm again. His mind wanders, first to Doc, than to Impulse, then to Scar. He wonders how Impulse and Scar are doing, after he was dragged out by Night.

He wonders if the stab wound in his side will heal over before it kills him.

He can’t calm down, no matter how much he hums. He’s scared, he doesn’t want to die. Not by Night’s hands. He doesn’t want to become a mindless puppet hellbent on killing his friends. He doesn't want to die. He doesn’t want to die.

He doesn’t want to die.

---

Impulse helps Scar out of the vine pit, leading him on shaking legs to the jungle temple. The sun beams through the jungle leaves, and for a blissful moment everything is right in the word. They slowly creep towards the temple, keeping it in their sights even as they get distracted by birds and pandas. Impulse ducks into the temple, leaving Scar outside the building. 

They need to summon the Jungle back to hermitcraft. They can’t leave it in season five, they need it back. They need its help.

Scar enters the building with a flock of parrots following him in. Impulse laughs, the sight of Scar surrounded by parrots bringing tears to his eyes. Scar joins in with him, and the two men lean over, their laughter echoing down the empty halls of the building.

“How do we summon them, then?” Scar says, sitting on the floor.

“I don’t know, maybe we could ask them politely?” Impulse asks, his eyes crinkled as he snorts with laughter. “Hey Jungle, could you come to this season of hermitcraft to help us kill a god please?”

Scar bursts into laughter again, clutching his sides as he loses his mind laughing. Suddenly, the warm room turns colder than a tundra, and regret eats at Scar and Impulse. They two men lock eye contact before Impulse turns, grabbing Scar’s hand to pull him up.

And they’re in the middle of the training room, surrounded by Cleo, Iskall, Tango, Zedaph, Etho and Keralis.

Cleo’s eyes widen and she bows to an empty corner of the room, shock on her face.

“Amari, did you bring them back from the dead?” She asks, the shock on her face turning to everyone else's faces. 

Impulse and Scar summoned the goddess of death.

[poipoipoi-2016]

Since Google Plus is going away,  I’m going to back up Steve Yegge’s platform rant.  And confirm the opening paragraph.  

One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right.  Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.  It's pretty crazy.  There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly.

Looooooong text below the cut

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long.  One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right.  Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.  It's pretty crazy.  There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly.  I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it. I mean, just to give you a very brief taste:  Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out.  And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw.  They don't give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that.  Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it.  Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas.  Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook.  But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it.  Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place. To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for.  But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases.  We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free. I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google. I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way.  They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run.  So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk. But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups. Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager.  He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site.  He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company.  Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page.  They were like millions of his own precious children.  So they're all still there, and Larry is not. Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way.  I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything.  I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened.  We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon.  He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him.  The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess.  Except without the fashion or design sense.  Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong.  He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies. So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate.  He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses. His Big Mandate went something along these lines:  1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.  2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.  3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed:  no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever.  The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.  4) It doesn't matter what technology they use.  HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter.  Bezos doesn't care.  5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable.  That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world.  No exceptions.  6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.  7) Thank you; have a nice day! Ha, ha!  You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day. #6, however, was quite real, so people went to work.  Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell.  Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot.  Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it. Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture.  They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation.  There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street.  Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way.  A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:  - pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified.  If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metrics and reporting.  - every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker.  Nobody can make any real forward progress until very serious quotas and throttling are put in place in every single service.  - monitoring and QA are the same thing.  You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA.  But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice.  In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls.  The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA.  So they're a continuum.  - if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups' code via these services, then you won't be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism.  And you can't have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service.  So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.  - debugging problems with someone else's code gets a LOT harder, and is basically impossible unless there is a universal standard way to run every service in a debuggable sandbox. That's just a very small sample.  There are dozens, maybe hundreds of individual learnings like these that Amazon had to discover organically.  There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizing services, but not as many as you might think.  Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust external developers. This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced.  From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion.  It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally. At this point they don't even do it out of fear of being fired.  I mean, they're still afraid of that; it's pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all.  But they do services because they've come to understand that it's the Right Thing.  There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long.  But overall it's the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms. That's what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course.  He didn't (and doesn't) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up.  But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform. You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform.  Would you? Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform.  So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com.  These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch. The other big realization he had was that he can't always build the right thing.  I think Larry Tesler might have struck some kind of chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn't use the goddamn website.  It's not even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn't really matter, because nobody's mom can use the goddamn website.  In fact I myself find the website disturbingly daunting, and I worked there for over half a decade.  I've just learned to kinda defocus my eyes and concentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the page above the fold. I'm not really sure how Bezos came to this realization -- the insight that he can't build one product and have it be right for everyone.  But it doesn't matter, because he gets it.  There's actually a formal name for this phenomenon.  It's called Accessibility, and it's the most important thing in the computing world. The. Most. Important. Thing. If you're sorta thinking, "huh?  You mean like, blind and deaf people Accessibility?" then you're not alone, because I've come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you:  people for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn't been able to get through to you yet.  It's not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability.  When software -- or idea-ware for that matter -- fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea.  It is an Accessibility failure. Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security.  And boy howdy are the two ever at odds. But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network. So yeah.  In case you hadn't noticed, I could actually write a book on this topic.  A fat one, filled with amusing anecdotes about ants and rubber mallets at companies I've worked at.  But I will never get this little rant published, and you'll never get it read, unless I start to wrap up. That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms.  We don't understand platforms.  We don't "get" platforms.  Some of you do, but you are the minority.  This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years.  I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services.  Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it:  all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on. But no.  No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority.  Or fifteenth, I don't know.  It's pretty low.  There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don't think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way. It's a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations.  Most of them think they're building products.  And a stubby service is a pretty pathetic service.  Go back and look at that partial list of learnings from Amazon, and tell me which ones Stubby gives you out of the box.  As far as I'm concerned, it's none of them.  Stubby's great, but it's like parts when you need a car. A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product. Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo).  We all don't get it.  The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood.  The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought.  We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call.  One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked:  "So is it the Stalker API?"  She got all glum and said "Yeah."  I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream.  So I guess the joke was on me. Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years.  It's been part of their culture for a whole generation now.  You don't eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food.  Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes.  Platforms are all about long-term thinking. Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product.  But that's not why they are successful.  Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work.  So Facebook is different for everyone.  Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars.  Some spend all their time on Farmville.  There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone. Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said:  "Gosh, it looks like we need some games.  Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us."  Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now?  The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them. You can't do that.  Not really.  Not reliably.  There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably.  Steve Jobs was one of them.  We don't have a Steve Jobs here.  I'm sorry, but we don't. Larry Tesler may have convinced Bezos that he was no Steve Jobs, but Bezos realized that he didn't need to be a Steve Jobs in order to provide everyone with the right products:  interfaces and workflows that they liked and felt at ease with.  He just needed to enable third-party developers to do it, and it would happen automatically. I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I'm saying is incredibly obvious, because yeah.  It's incredibly frigging obvious.  Except we're not doing it.  We don't get Platforms, and we don't get Accessibility.  The two are basically the same thing, because platforms solve accessibility.  A platform is accessibility. So yeah, Microsoft gets it.  And you know as well as I do how surprising that is, because they don't "get" much of anything, really.  But they understand platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started life in the business of providing platforms.  So they have thirty-plus years of learning in this space.  And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you've never seen it before, prepare to be amazed.  Because it's staggeringly huge.  They have thousands, and thousands, and THOUSANDS of API calls.  They have a HUGE platform.  Too big in fact, because they can't design for squat, but at least they're doing it. Amazon gets it.  Amazon's AWS (aws.amazon.com) is incredible.  Just go look at it.  Click around.  It's embarrassing.  We don't have any of that stuff. Apple gets it, obviously.  They've made some fundamentally non-open choices, particularly around their mobile platform.  But they understand accessibility and they understand the power of third-party development and they eat their dogfood.  And you know what?  They make pretty good dogfood.  Their APIs are a hell of a lot cleaner than Microsoft's, and have been since time immemorial. Facebook gets it.  That's what really worries me.  That's what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing.  I hate blogging.  I hate... plussing, or whatever it's called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even though it's a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you really do want Google to be successful.  And I do!  I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it'd be pretty easy to just go.  But Google is home, so I'm insisting that we have this little family intervention, uncomfortable as it might be. After you've marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and Amazon, and Facebook I guess (I didn't look because I didn't want to get too depressed), head over to developers.google.com and browse a little.  Pretty big difference, eh?  It's like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader. Please don't get me wrong here -- I know for a fact that the dev-rel team has had to FIGHT to get even this much available externally.  They're kicking ass as far as I'm concerned, because they DO get platforms, and they are struggling heroically to try to create one in an environment that is at best platform-apathetic, and at worst often openly hostile to the idea. I'm just frankly describing what developers.google.com looks like to an outsider.  It looks childish.  Where's the Maps APIs in there for Christ's sake?  Some of the things in there are labs projects.  And the APIs for everything I clicked were... they were paltry.  They were obviously dog food.  Not even good organic stuff.  Compared to our internal APIs it's all snouts and horse hooves. And also don't get me wrong about Google+.  They're far from the only offenders.  This is a cultural thing.  What we have going on internally is basically a war, with the underdog minority Platformers fighting a more or less losing battle against the Mighty Funded Confident Producters. Any teams that have successfully internalized the notion that they should be externally programmable platforms from the ground up are underdogs -- Maps and Docs come to mind, and I know GMail is making overtures in that direction.  But it's hard for them to get funding for it because it's not part of our culture.  Maestro's funding is a feeble thing compared to the gargantuan Microsoft Office programming platform:  it's a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex.  The Docs team knows they'll never be competitive with Office until they can match its scripting facilities, but they're not getting any resource love.  I mean, I assume they're not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet right now, and it doesn't even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its API.  That team looks pretty unloved to me. Ironically enough, Wave was a great platform, may they rest in peace.  But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success.  A platform needs a killer app.  Facebook -- that is, the stock service they offer with walls and friends and such -- is the killer app for the Facebook Platform.  And it is a very serious mistake to conclude that the Facebook App could have been anywhere near as successful without the Facebook Platform. You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant?  I'm a Googler, so I get as irritated as you do when people say that.  We're not arrogant, by and large.  We're, like, 99% Arrogance-Free.  I did start this post -- if you'll reach back into distant memory -- by describing Google as "doing everything right".  We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we're arrogant it's because we didn't hire them, or they're unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines.  They're inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better. But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we're being fools.  You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever -- it doesn't matter in the end, because it's foolishness.  There IS no perfect product for everyone. And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size.  Talk about an affront to Accessibility.  I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind.  For real.  I've been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close.  So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing:  it can lock you out of the product completely.  But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here:  they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever.  Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life. It's not just them.  It's everyone.  The problem is that we're a Product Company through and through.  We built a successful product with broad appeal -- our search, that is -- and that wild success has biased us. Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform.  That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out.  But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers... if only they could be monetized somehow... you can see how he arrived at AWS, in hindsight. Microsoft started out as a platform, so they've just had lots of practice at it. Facebook, though:  they worry me.  I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure they started off as a Product and they rode that success pretty far.  So I'm not sure exactly how they made the transition to a platform.  It was a relatively long time ago, since they had to be a platform before (now very old) things like Mafia Wars could come along. Maybe they just looked at us and asked:  "How can we beat Google?  What are they missing?" The problem we face is pretty huge, because it will take a dramatic cultural change in order for us to start catching up.  We don't do internal service-oriented platforms, and we just as equally don't do external ones.  This means that the "not getting it" is endemic across the company:  the PMs don't get it, the engineers don't get it, the product teams don't get it, nobody gets it.  Even if individuals do, even if YOU do, it doesn't matter one bit unless we're treating it as an all-hands-on-deck emergency.  We can't keep launching products and pretending we'll turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms later.  We've tried that and it's not working. The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything."  You can't just bolt it on later.  Certainly not easily at any rate -- ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office.  Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon.  If you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front.  You can't cheat.  You can't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason.  You need to solve the hard problems up front. I'm not saying it's too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late. I honestly don't know how to wrap this up.  I've said pretty much everything I came here to say today.  This post has been six years in the making.  I'm sorry if I wasn't gentle enough, or if I misrepresented some product or team or person, or if we're actually doing LOTS of platform stuff and it just so happens that I and everyone I ever talk to has just never heard about it.  I'm sorry. But we've gotta start doing this right.

[kiritwink]

neurodivergent klance headcanons

so me, @spaceklace and a few others from our server (if you want to be tagged here lmk!) were coming up with some headcanons for autistic!keith and adhd!lance that we thought we'd share.

there's also some mentions of other characters being nd too so keep an eye out for those!

some time after the series has finished keith gets a cat named after red who is perfect for sensory related things. listening to him purr is a great auditory stim, plus his fur is super soft and relaxing to touch. it also doesn't shed because it's long and keith likes to rest his head on his stomach for a while. he also likes to lie on keith when he's in his bed and the feeling of being crushed is nice. it's a match made in heaven as keith gets tons of ways to stim with his feline friend and red gets constant affection from his owner.

lance also has one named after blue, though he has her for less stim-related things and more because he just loves cats, and owning two named after the lions of voltron is nice for reminiscing about their time in space together. owning two cats is also great for keith because if there's ever a point when red just wants to do his own thing then blue will be more than happy to cuddle keith in his place.

shiro owns a service dog to help him cope with his ptsd so when he comes to visit it lets keith and lance touch its soft fur.

hunk, looking for lance: "hey shiro have you seen lance anywhere?"

lance, crushed from underneath a dog, two cats and keith: "sup"

guess you could quite literally call it a dog pile

keith is definitely a happy flapper! and it gets better when lance lets him wear his jacket as it's too big for so the sleeves end up being longer than his arms, which is great for flapping!! he likes putting the hood up too because it simulates the feeling of getting hugged by lance and makes keith feel safe.

because of the mystery surrounding his blade of marmora knife, keith has a lowkey special interest in knives. he likes the cold, smooth surface of stainless steel and he loves the holographic knives that shine in rainbow colours.

another special interest is on motorbikes. he definitely learned to build that one he rides in the pilot episode by himself.

keith is really happy when he learns that pidge is also autistic (even though her traits affect her a lot less than his does). they both share an interest on cryptids and conspiracies.

LANCE, KEITH AND PIDGE ALL SHARE A HUGE SPECIAL INTEREST/HYPERFIXIATION ON SPACE! they all originally joined the garrison because of their similar interests, though with the disappearance of shiro and his crew keith and pidge's goals changed slightly.

on nights when he has too much energy and can't sleep, lance likes to look up any facts for space that he doesn't already know.

lance, slam dunking into keith's room at 3 am: KEITH DID YOU KNOW THAT WHEN YOU BREACH A BLACK HOLE YOU GO THROUGH A PROCESS CALLED SPAGHETTIFICATION

keith: lance ily but pls go to bed

they start up a conspiracy that bii boh bi could survive going through a black hole.

lance: we need to throw bii boh bi into the void

keith: lance no

lance has a hyperfixiation on video gaymes and they're great for his adhd as they give him something to do with his hands. keith doesn't really understand but loves hearing lance infodump about his favourite games.

lance likes to wear strong cologne because the smells are gud, but when he learned that some of them are too strong for keith he switched over to a weaker type that still smells nice.

hunk has anxiety and fidget toys help to keep him calm so keith and lance both share their toys with him and they play with them together as a group.

a hunk hug™ is the best. lov the crush.

keith: hunk i need you to fucking crush me right now

hunk: woah buddy, are you sure? i don't want to end up accidentally hurting you or anything

keith: pls

hugs from shiro and allura have similar effects.

lance loves playing with hair so he can move his hands. his mom owned a salon on the sidewalk in veradero that would let him braid the hair of tourists and he became really skilled at it. he then started to broaden his horizons and experiment with different hairstyles.

sometimes tourists would revisit him just so he can do their hair again.

since he can't really do that up in space anymore, allura lets him braid her hair. keith sometimes likes to help out because it's soft and fluffy.

keith's father isn't perfect but he tries his best with raising an autistic son. he believes that his son is incredible in his own right and wants to curb stomp all of the 'autism parents' that want to cure keith.

being a single father living in the middle of fucking nowhere is hard but he makes do until he disappears.

if anybody wants to add anymore headcanons then feel free to!!

[travelling-trooper-blog]

By the time Trevor and I reached Takayama, it was already 9:30. We bought our bus tickets to Shirakawago and got in the gigantic line. As we got closer to the front, I noticed a poster on a pole that promoted a tour of Shirakawago and Gokayama. I asked a woman walking by if there were any tickets available left for the tour. She went inside and confirmed that there were. The bus left in fifteen minutes, and there were only three tickets left, so we had made it just in time.

Gokayama and Shirakawago are tiny little rural villages inhabited by silk farmers. The villages are lined with traditional thatched roof houses called gassho-zukuri. The most impressive thing about these houses is that they are built without a single nail; they use nothing but wood from the massive trees that grow here, straw rope, wedges, and sapling.

The 60 degree roofs are meant to prevent snow from piling up, but as you can see, the system isn’t perfect.

The roofs have to be replaced every 30-40 years, though it used to be every 40-50 years before people started using electricity to heat their homes rather than relying solely on the fire place. The re-thatching is done in the spring using kariyasu grass that was harvested in the Fall. Despite the huge size of these roofs, they are usually re-thatched in a single day thanks to an amazing collaborative effort requiring 100-200 villagers. The re-thatching method is passed on from one generation to the next.

Walking towards the village.

Gokayama

At some point, I must have smudged my lens with my finger. I didn’t notice it until now. Looking back, a lot of my recent photos had smudges on them in the same spot. Lesson learned: Always put the lens back on your lens when you’re not using it, no matter how annoying it is.

I bet even the snow in Japan tastes better.

They were that really beautiful fat, fluffy type of snowflakes.

Safety first.

Of course, the downside to large organized tours like this is that you can’t take your sweet time. That meant that I didn’t have time to check out the gun powder museum. On the other hand, I got to visit both Gokayama and Shirakawago, which I didn’t think I’d be able to do. So, on we went to Shirakawago after an all-too brief stop in Gokayama.

First, though, it was time for lunch. Considering how much the tour costs, I was happy that lunch was provided. I was seated across from a Spanish girl and her mother, which gave me the rare opportunity to practice my Spanish. I don’t remember where in Spain they were from, but their accents were really difficult to understand. All of the words kind of slurred together. Sometimes I was just nodding and smiling.

Shirakawago is down there somewhere behind me.

We were given 90 minutes to explore Shirakawago, but alas, a car had gotten stuck in front of us on our way to Shirakwago and we couldn’t pass it. This cut our time by twenty minutes.

With those twenty minutes gone, I didn’t have time to explore the open-air museum, where you could actually walk through the houses.

Nonetheless, it was a beautiful little Winter Wonderland. It was well worth the trip.

This impressive little bell tower took a whopping 1425 people to build.

I also ventured into a temple. There was a bunch of machinery and tools on the second and third floors. I had no idea what they might be for. Upon reading my brochure later, I learned that these attic spaces were often used for silkworm cultivation and farming.

Before I knew it, it was already 3:02; we had eight minutes to run back to the bus. Crap!

We started hustling as quickly as we could, making sure not to slip on the slippery snow. The guide had said we would leave at 3:10 SHARP because some people had to catch their trains from Takayama Station. Every second counted at this point. We weaved my way past slowly-walking families, hurdled over children, and stiff-armed grandmothers who couldn’t get out of our way. We had to catch that bus. I’d missed a bus once before in San Francisco after losing track of time as I enjoyed the greatest portabella mushroom and blue cheese burger of my life, and I didn’t want to repeat that mistake. God knows how much a taxi back to Takayama would run me.

Then I saw ice cream.

Don’t judge me; it was ice cream coated with green tea powder. I know it sounds weird, but that stuff was deeee-lish!

We made it back to the bus in the nick of time. As we walked towards our seat at the very back of the bus, everybody flashed us a friendly laugh or smile. I could just imagine how my hair must have looked after running through that thick and fluffy snowfall. It must have glistened. I must have glowed like an angel.

Once back at Takayama, we hopped on a bus back to the hotel.

The plan for the evening was to grab a quick dinner, and get in some blogging before I completely ran out of energy.

The previous night we’d gone left from the hotel to a nearby restaurant, so tonight we went right to a place called Ken Ken. The first thing that jumped out at me from the menu was beef innards. I figured I’d try it just because it was different. It wasn’t bad. The beef and noodles were delicious, sopped in some juicy sauce.

The server typed “Country” into her phone to ask where I was from just a one of the young guys in the room behind us came out. I replied that I was from Canada, and the young guy jumped right in. “Canada? Toronto?”

“Yeah!” I replied.

“Raptors! DeRozan slam dunk!”

“Yeah, that’s right!” I laughed. He sat down and we started talking sports.

He asked me what my favourite sport was and I said I liked American football, expecting that he wouldn’t know anything about the NFL.

Wrong.

“NFL?” he asked.

“Yeah!” I shouted, probably louder than necessary.

“I like Adrian Peterson. What is your favourite team?”

“I like the Green Bay Packers.”

“Aaron Rodgers. He is a machine!” He made a throwing gesture as he said machine.

I cannot express how much I loved this guy at this point.

At this point, his friends came down and joined us. Turns out they worked at the hotel where I was staying. One of them even greeted me that morning, but I didn’t recognize him. He was from Tokyo and spoke the best English of the three of them. They were all working there working for a few months. “I’ve never heard him talk about the Packers before,” he chuckled.

The Peterson fan stepped in and asked me who I thought was the best Packer of all time. I answered with Rodgers, but he had his own opinion. “Rodgers is a machine, but Brett Favre…” At this point, he thumped his chest before finishing, “Brett Favre had heart.” He explained that he started watching football because of Brett Favre.

This guy was officially the coolest Japanese person I’d met.

He was from some small town that, by the sounds of it, had more animals than people living in it. He was quite proud of it, though. He kept bringing it up in conversation throughout the night. I think the place was called Tokushima or something. He’d say things like “Tokushima number one! Best ramen in Japan!” The others laughed at his level of delusion, which made me laugh even more.

The guy from Tokyo was 36 and a travel enthusiast with some Couch Surfing experience. His name was Yuta. He and I spent most of the night talking about this and that.

The girl was 24, and since she didn’t speak much English, she just sat back with her sake and enjoyed the show. All that I learned about her was that she loves her sake. In fact, I think Yuta said she enjoyed sake more than the guys.

I had so much fun with those guys. Before I knew it, I was 5 beers and 3 sake shots in, and it was time for bed. Trevor and I had to be up at 5:45 tomorrow to catch the train back to Hiroshima.

We walked back to the hotel, and the trio escorted me right to my door. We took a selfie, I went inside, and lay down, promising myself that I’d only be down for a couple minutes. I still wanted to hit the onsen one last time before saying goodbye.

I never made it. I must have passed out in 30 seconds.

Kompai, guys. Thanks for a great unexpected night.

The Travelling Trooper Tours The Traditional Villages Of Shirakawago and Gokayama By the time Trevor and I reached Takayama, it was already 9:30. We bought our bus tickets to Shirakawago and got in the gigantic line.

[roguenewsdao]

New Revelations Threaten Mueller's "RussiaGate" Case

Their indictments of Paul Manafort and his longtime aide and suborning of false testimony about an allegedly 'Kremlin connected' Maltese professor from a flaky and possibly British planted canary in the campaign George Papadopoulos resulted in screaming headlines. But absolutely nothing incriminating Trump nor demonstrating 'collusion' with the Russian government has been produced, and the money laundering conspiracy indictments against Manafort relate to his work for the Viktor Yanukovych government the State Department and CIA helped overthrow in Kiev, months before he joined the Trump campaign (in fact Mueller's indictment writers, in their haste named ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko as president of Ukraine when Manafort worked in the country).

Perhaps owing to the reality that his full cooperation with the CIA would come out, Carter Page remains a free and unindicted man. Months of furious #TheResistance and Democratic deep state loving troll speculation on Twitter and Facebook that Page would be indicted proved false. In over 200 pages of testimony the investigating House Committee released, Page denounced the dirty Hillary team funded Steele dossier as a Democratic deep state plot, and a pretext for politically motivated wiretaps against himself and the campaign. In his testimony, Page also ridiculed the low level of knowledge regarding modern Russia many have in the U.S. media and government, who mostly persist on Boris and Natasha type stereotypes from the Soviet era. Try as they might, his questioners like Rep. Adam "full of" Schiff (D-CA) could criminalize Page's sincere desire to see Trump improve U.S.-Russian relations.

However, the nastiest exposes of the deep state at its dirtiest lie ahead, which is why Mueller is a man in such a hurry to throw as many charges against the wall in hope that one of them will stick as possible.

Wikileaks exposure of actual CIA hacks where they posed as Russia's anti-virus company Kaspersky Labs, long accused by Washington of back dooring its software for Kremlin spy services, has raised the specter of numerous 'Russian hacks' Fancy Bears or otherwise being false flag operations to frame Moscow. The meeting of CIA Director Mike Pompeo and NSA whistle blower William Binney who challenges the 'Russians hacked the DNC' claim at the heart of the entire RussiaGate conspiracy theory as a hoax has enraged the ex-spooks and agency sock puppet 'journalists' now wedded to the story for their credibility and possibly under the table payments from FusionGPS and other parties. -- JWS

Full article by Harley Schlanger published below:

Nov. 10 -- On October 24, CIA Director Mike Pompeo met for one hour with Bill Binney, to hear the evidence that the whole story of "Russian hacking" of the emails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 presidential election is a fraud.  Binney, a former technical expert with the National Security Agency, was involved in a detailed forensic study of the charges of Russian hacking, which concluded that there was no hack involved, but an insider leak, which provided the emails later released by Wikileaks.

It was the publication of these emails which led to the charges; by Hillary Clinton and her campaign operatives, that the Russians had hacked DNC servers, as part of a plot by Russian President Putin to help Donald Trump win the election, over Putin-hater Hillary Clinton.  These charges served the narrative being cooked up by intelligence community officials in the Obama administration, who were "investigating" Trump's alleged Russian ties, at the instigation of, and in collaboration with the highest levels of British intelligence.

The investigation which was the subject of Binney's briefing to Pompeo had been made public in a memo to President Trump, released on July 24, 2017, by the VIPS, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.  The VIPS is an organization of distinguished former U.S. intelligence officers, of which Binney is a member.  Despite their sterling credentials, and past record for accurately exposing various intelligence community hoaxes -- such as the claim by CIA Director Tenet that it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction -- there was a blackout on this report by the mainstream media, which was busy instead pushing increasingly bizarre theories about Russian hackers, and Trump's "collusion" with them. 

Following his meeting with Pompeo, Binney said that the CIA Director told him that he met with Binney, because "the President told me I should talk to you."

This set off a predictable furious reaction by the media, which has been using Russiagate to push for the removal of President Trump.  CNN, for example, described Binney as "one of the principal deniers of Russian interference in the U.S. election," deriding him as a "conspiracy theorist."  Hillary Clinton apologist Robert Reich accused Binney of pushing "a bizarre right-wing conspiracy theory," asserting that Pompeo's meeting with him shows that the CIA Director is "a stooge of Trump."

Why did this meeting trigger such an hysterical reaction?

The attempt to blackout the VIPS memo was broken by the LaRouche organization, which featured it in publications, town meetings, including two addressed by Binney and VIPS member Ray McGovern, and public leafleting, including distribution to the Congress.  On August 9, the influential magazine The Nation ran a thorough article by Patrick Lawrence, detailing the results of the VIPS investigation, leading to several other breaks, including an August 15 feature by Danielle Ryan in Salon magazine.

Despite efforts to counter these articles, the fact that the intelligence community -- i.e., the CIA, FBI and office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) -- has been unable to produce any evidence to back up their January 6, 2017 claim of Russian intervention, has increased the public skepticism of Russiagate.  The first indictments announced by special counsel Robert Mueller of Trump campaign officials on October 31 have deepened this skepticism, as the charges are obviously fraudulent, or unrelated to Russiagate, as reported in Neue Solidarität on 9 November ("Faule Methoden von Briten and FBI kommen ans Licht").

A series of revelations in the past week has added to the evidence that the whole of Russiagate is in fact nothing but an actual conspiracy launched to undermine President Trump, and to remove him if necessary.  Those involved include the highest level of British intelligence; the former intelligence community leaders of the Obama administration: CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, and DNI Clapper, as well as many operatives of these agencies who remain in place; Obama himself; George Soros and his web of NGOs and fake grassroots organizations; Hillary Clinton and her top campaign officials; and the mainstream media on both sides of the Atlantic.

Among these revelations are first, that the Fusion GPS dossier against Trump, produced for "former" MI6 agent Christopher Steele, was paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC.  Efforts to confirm the accuracy of its claims have proven fruitless, despite continuing efforts by Mueller's team to find corroborative evidence.   Secondly, that Fusion GPS and its operatives have ties to at least two British/FBI sting operations.  These are the June 6, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, at which a Russian lawyer was alleged to be presenting anti-Clinton "dirt" to Donald Trump, Jr., and other campaign officials, including Paul Manafort; and the strange case of George Papadapoulos, who has entered a guilty plea of lying to the FBI about his involvement with "Russian agents."  Despite all the hype surrounding these events, nothing incriminating has been produced.  There was no "dirt" offered at the Trump Tower meeting; and the Papadapoulos story is full of lies and contradictions, discrediting it.

Third is the release of excerpts of former interim DNC chairman Donna Brazile, who revealed that the Clinton campaign did engage in underhanded and probably illegal tactics to defeat Bernie Sanders in the campaign for the Democratic Party nomination in 2016.  Brazile exposed an August 2015 deal, the "Joint Fund-Raising Agreement" between the Clinton campaign and the DNC that, in return for the campaign paying off some debts left by Obama's 2012 campaign, Clinton would takeover the functioning of the DNC, which was supposed to be neutral in the campaign for the party nomination.   This deal was signed a year before Clinton "won" the party's nomination.  Brazile not only reveals possible money laundering operations by Clinton and her campaign, in violation of Federal Election Committee rules, but proves the validity of the emails published by Wikileaks, of the anti-Sanders operations run by the DNC -- which Clinton and her supporters had attempted to hide, by launching the attacks against the Trump campaign and the Russians!

Still to come are the results of investigations currently underway in the Congress on whether the FBI used the discredited Fusion GPS report to obtain FISA court warrants to conduct surveillance against the Trump campaign; whether Comey lied to Congress when he said there were no warrants, that he knew of, to spy on the Trump campaign; and whether the FBI made payments to Steele or Fusion GPS.  These should shed more light on the collaboration of U.S. and British intelligence, in conjunction with the Clinton campaign, during the campaign, and after Trump's election victory.

The briefing given by Binney to Pompeo at the request of Trump makes clear that the president is not only fully aware of the VIPS report, but that his rejection of lies of the intelligence community at the heart of Russiagate, and his dismissal of the Mueller investigation as a "witch hunt", is not designed to cover-up a crime, but an attempt to put an end to one of the most disgraceful post-election dirty tricks operation in history.  There is no question that this operation has seriously affected his ability to act on his campaign promise to "drain the swamp" of private, special interests which dominate both parties.  However, as his trip to China demonstrates, with the deepening of his ties to China's President Xi Jinping, which has the potential to bring the U.S. into the New Silk Road global initiative, and his willingness to work with Putin, it has not deterred him from breaking with his predecessors' London/Wall Street dictated policies of war-like provocations against those nations.

[shuying877]

Front End Developer (Ruby/JS/Backbone/Angular) Wanted job at Viral Foundry Vietnam

Viral Foundry is a product studio that builds world class digital products and mobile applications. Our small team is based out of Vancouver, Canada but we have teammates working in various countries and timezones around the world. We have a few teammates working out of Jogja. This is a great opportunity to have a ton of responsibility, fun, and work on exciting new technologies.

  Saigon (HCMC), Vietnam // Jogja, Indonesia // or Vietnam Remote

We're looking for a JS hero to help develop digital products for web and mobile. Do you love JavaScript and totally appreciate JS in all of it's incarnations (client, server, mobile, etc)? Do you regularly geek out and enjoy exploring/playing with modern JavaScript tools such as CoffeeScript, Backbone, Angular, jQuery, etc? Read on!

We're looking for a JS hero to help develop digital products for web and mobile. Do you love JavaScript and totally appreciate JS in all of it's incarnations

You will join the team to build beautiful web apps and mobile applications. We have internal products and partner with other companies to build products/MVP's.

We have a small team in Indonesia, and looking to build out a development and product management team in Vietnam. Ideally you are located in HCM, but we're open to anywhere in Vietnam.

Our first internal product = <a have 2 other products in development and 2 partners working on a fintech startup and a consumer app for North america.

You will take over working on projects that were previously built by an amazon + yahoo! engineer. You will be managing both the backend and sometimes develop frontend repos. Exciting opportunity for the right person. Code is organized and should be a nice landing for you.

Our Stack: ROR, heroku, aws, github, iOS, angular 1/2, slack

Open to remote candidates, HCM candidates preferred. Relocation packages potentially available. Looking to work with someone aligned with goals of building multiple successful products and delighting customers.

  General Qualifications

You are passionate about clean code and elegant solutions.

You have at least 2 year of experience writing maintainable JavaScript, preferably with a shipped website, web app, or native app to showcase.

Experience with jquery and at least one JS framework.

Familiarity with common JavaScript design patterns.

Experience in web development technologies including HTML5, CSS3, JS.

Good sense of design/UI for the web and working knowledge of Photoshop + Sketch.

You enjoy working in a fast-paced, agile environment.

Unquestionable Fluent English (Spoken & Written).

Outstanding communication skills, can read/write/speak english

Degree in Computer Science or related field (Preferred).

  Requirements

Strong on Ruby on Rails 4/5 + angular 1/2

Communication + reliability, no talkers, but people that execute

Building estimates for client projects (writing user stories + good at estimating projects properly)

Accountable, and will do whatever it takes to ship products and always puts customers first

Have a deep desire to ship products and get the job done at all costs attitude

Fun, likes travel, happy, positive, team player. Enjoys working in a small team

Have experience with consuming RESTful JSON API

Comfortable with building the entire front-end stack on your own (hello internal hackathons + mvp projects)

Nice To Haves

  Experience

  What would I be working on in the first month?

  Perks:

  Before Applying / Final Notes / Showstoppers

We only respond to serious candidates that have the qualifications above. Simply scroll to the bottom of this page and submit your application today.

  Company Description

Viral Foundry is a digital product studio. We split our time between developing our own ideas and partnering with startup founders, existing businesses, private equity funds, VCs and local government agencies to build new companies. Our team is strong on all areas of digital, including design, development, and marketing. Clients are based in North America and SEA.

  Company Culture

Startup culture and family vibe. We're a small ambitious team that's fun, friendly, tech + design savvy, “work hard and play hard” mentality, spotify music, team lunches, good times, and great peeps. We regularly attend tech + design conferences and on top of latest trends.

  Apply Now

Submit your application below.

  Understanding of advanced JavaScript features (closures, prototypal inheritance)

You know jQuery, Backbone.js, Angular 1/2, Ruby, WordPress, Bootstrap

An eye for design and user experience

Previously shipped a wordpress theme/plugin

An entrepreneurial spirit when it comes to attacking new projects

Enjoy and appreciate all areas of development.

Competence and understanding of design and development processes.

Passion for being involved in the big picture, while fearlessly diving into the details.

Adaptable attitude; comfortable with a fast-paced, agile development process.

Sound judgement; makes product decisions based on best available qualitative and quantitative user feedback.

No ego when it comes to product or developent; the focus is always on getting quickly to the right answer and doing what is right for the customer, product, and the company.

Interest and experience in startups is a plus, you should be comfortable working in a close-knit team and fast-paced environment.

The ability to flourish with minimal guidance, be proactive, and handle uncertainty, ambiguity, and quickly evolving goals.

Help create 2 new MVP's from scratch! You will write the first line of front end code for these projects

Cleaning up the promo front end repo, improving the consumer experience

Launching new features for + developing our wordpress plugin

Slicing some sweet new landing pages from Sketch to valid/responsive html

Helping to build web/mobile MVP's for clients

Creating landing pages and marketing websites for internal and external projects

Impact. Have direct input into our digital products and the types of projects we get involved in. You will own the entire development process for multiple products.

Grow. Level up your development chops with support and mentorship from startup entrepreneurs, senior developers, and online training.

Attend conference events and potentially travel overseas.

Work with the latest digital tools, frameworks, languages, techniques, and great group of people.

Potentially work remotely.

Talented team. We have fun, but work very hard. Strong on product, move fast.

Competitive salary, team lunches, stock options, and other benefits.

Applications must be written in English.

You must provide a portfolio of your work. Please send github code examples and real web apps in the wild

Remote candidates must travel and work in person during the probation period. Working remotely is a possibility after successful probation period. VF can potentially cover some of these travel costs, more information during interview process.

Show your personality. There can only be one ‘you’. Just own it. Tell us who you are, what makes you tick, and why you think this is a slam dunk fit.

No attitudes or egos. Leave them at home.

Ability to work under pressure and willing to get the job done at all costs mentality.

Salary – Negotiable. Based on your experience.

  Please applyhere

From http://www.startupjobs.asia/job/24983-front-end-developer-ruby-js-backbone-angular-wanted-it-job-at-viral-foundry-vietnam

from https://startupjobsasiablog.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/front-end-developer-rubyjsbackboneangular-wanted-job-at-viral-foundry-vietnam/

[ameliamike90]

Front End Developer (Ruby/JS/Backbone/Angular) Wanted job at Viral Foundry Vietnam

Viral Foundry is a product studio that builds world class digital products and mobile applications. Our small team is based out of Vancouver, Canada but we have teammates working in various countries and timezones around the world. We have a few teammates working out of Jogja. This is a great opportunity to have a ton of responsibility, fun, and work on exciting new technologies.

Saigon (HCMC), Vietnam // Jogja, Indonesia // or Vietnam Remote

We’re looking for a JS hero to help develop digital products for web and mobile. Do you love JavaScript and totally appreciate JS in all of it’s incarnations (client, server, mobile, etc)? Do you regularly geek out and enjoy exploring/playing with modern JavaScript tools such as CoffeeScript, Backbone, Angular, jQuery, etc? Read on!

We’re looking for a JS hero to help develop digital products for web and mobile. Do you love JavaScript and totally appreciate JS in all of it’s incarnations

You will join the team to build beautiful web apps and mobile applications. We have internal products and partner with other companies to build products/MVP’s.

We have a small team in Indonesia, and looking to build out a development and product management team in Vietnam. Ideally you are located in HCM, but we’re open to anywhere in Vietnam.

Our first internal product = 

You will take over working on projects that were previously built by an amazon + yahoo! engineer. You will be managing both the backend and sometimes develop frontend repos. Exciting opportunity for the right person. Code is organized and should be a nice landing for you.

Our Stack: ROR, heroku, aws, github, iOS, angular ½, slack

Open to remote candidates, HCM candidates preferred. Relocation packages potentially available. Looking to work with someone aligned with goals of building multiple successful products and delighting customers.

General Qualifications

You are passionate about clean code and elegant solutions.

You have at least 2 year of experience writing maintainable JavaScript, preferably with a shipped website, web app, or native app to showcase.

Experience with jquery and at least one JS framework.

Familiarity with common JavaScript design patterns.

Experience in web development technologies including HTML5, CSS3, JS.

Good sense of design/UI for the web and working knowledge of Photoshop + Sketch.

You enjoy working in a fast-paced, agile environment.

Unquestionable Fluent English (Spoken & Written).

Outstanding communication skills, can read/write/speak english

Degree in Computer Science or related field (Preferred).

Requirements

Strong on Ruby on Rails 4/5 + angular ½

Communication + reliability, no talkers, but people that execute

Building estimates for client projects (writing user stories + good at estimating projects properly)

Accountable, and will do whatever it takes to ship products and always puts customers first

Have a deep desire to ship products and get the job done at all costs attitude

Fun, likes travel, happy, positive, team player. Enjoys working in a small team

Have experience with consuming RESTful JSON API

Comfortable with building the entire front-end stack on your own (hello internal hackathons + mvp projects)

Nice To Haves

Experience

What would I be working on in the first month?

Perks:

Before Applying / Final Notes / Showstoppers

We only respond to serious candidates that have the qualifications above. Simply scroll to the bottom of this page and submit your application today.

Company Description

Viral Foundry is a digital product studio. We split our time between developing our own ideas and partnering with startup founders, existing businesses, private equity funds, VCs and local government agencies to build new companies. Our team is strong on all areas of digital, including design, development, and marketing. Clients are based in North America and SEA.

Company Culture

Startup culture and family vibe. We’re a small ambitious team that’s fun, friendly, tech + design savvy, “work hard and play hard” mentality, spotify music, team lunches, good times, and great peeps. We regularly attend tech + design conferences and on top of latest trends.

Apply Now

Submit your application below.

Understanding of advanced JavaScript features (closures, prototypal inheritance)

You know jQuery, Backbone.js, Angular ½, Ruby, Wordpress, Bootstrap

An eye for design and user experience

Previously shipped a wordpress theme/plugin

An entrepreneurial spirit when it comes to attacking new projects

Enjoy and appreciate all areas of development.

Competence and understanding of design and development processes.

Passion for being involved in the big picture, while fearlessly diving into the details.

Adaptable attitude; comfortable with a fast-paced, agile development process.

Sound judgement; makes product decisions based on best available qualitative and quantitative user feedback.

No ego when it comes to product or developent; the focus is always on getting quickly to the right answer and doing what is right for the customer, product, and the company.

Interest and experience in startups is a plus, you should be comfortable working in a close-knit team and fast-paced environment.

The ability to flourish with minimal guidance, be proactive, and handle uncertainty, ambiguity, and quickly evolving goals.

Help create 2 new MVP’s from scratch! You will write the first line of front end code for these projects

Cleaning up the promo front end repo, improving the consumer experience

Launching new features for + developing our wordpress plugin

Slicing some sweet new landing pages from Sketch to valid/responsive html

Helping to build web/mobile MVP’s for clients

Creating landing pages and marketing websites for internal and external projects

Impact. Have direct input into our digital products and the types of projects we get involved in. You will own the entire development process for multiple products.

Grow. Level up your development chops with support and mentorship from startup entrepreneurs, senior developers, and online training.

Attend conference events and potentially travel overseas.

Work with the latest digital tools, frameworks, languages, techniques, and great group of people.

Potentially work remotely.

Talented team. We have fun, but work very hard. Strong on product, move fast.

Competitive salary, team lunches, stock options, and other benefits.

Applications must be written in English.

You must provide a portfolio of your work. Please send github code examples and real web apps in the wild

Remote candidates must travel and work in person during the probation period. Working remotely is a possibility after successful probation period. VF can potentially cover some of these travel costs, more information during interview process.

Show your personality. There can only be one ‘you’. Just own it. Tell us who you are, what makes you tick, and why you think this is a slam dunk fit.

No attitudes or egos. Leave them at home.

Ability to work under pressure and willing to get the job done at all costs mentality.

Salary - Negotiable. Based on your experience.

  Please applyhere StartUp Jobs Asia - Startup Jobs in Singapore , Malaysia , HongKong ,Thailand from http://www.startupjobs.asia/job/24983-front-end-developer-ruby-js-backbone-angular-wanted-it-job-at-viral-foundry-vietnam

Startup Jobs Asia http://startupjobsasia.tumblr.com/post/157055661434

[startupjobsasia]

Front End Developer (Ruby/JS/Backbone/Angular) Wanted job at Viral Foundry Vietnam

Viral Foundry is a product studio that builds world class digital products and mobile applications. Our small team is based out of Vancouver, Canada but we have teammates working in various countries and timezones around the world. We have a few teammates working out of Jogja. This is a great opportunity to have a ton of responsibility, fun, and work on exciting new technologies.

 Saigon (HCMC), Vietnam // Jogja, Indonesia // or Vietnam Remote

We're looking for a JS hero to help develop digital products for web and mobile. Do you love JavaScript and totally appreciate JS in all of it's incarnations (client, server, mobile, etc)? Do you regularly geek out and enjoy exploring/playing with modern JavaScript tools such as CoffeeScript, Backbone, Angular, jQuery, etc? Read on!

We're looking for a JS hero to help develop digital products for web and mobile. Do you love JavaScript and totally appreciate JS in all of it's incarnations

You will join the team to build beautiful web apps and mobile applications. We have internal products and partner with other companies to build products/MVP's.

We have a small team in Indonesia, and looking to build out a development and product management team in Vietnam. Ideally you are located in HCM, but we're open to anywhere in Vietnam.

Our first internal product = 

You will take over working on projects that were previously built by an amazon + yahoo! engineer. You will be managing both the backend and sometimes develop frontend repos. Exciting opportunity for the right person. Code is organized and should be a nice landing for you.

Our Stack: ROR, heroku, aws, github, iOS, angular 1/2, slack

Open to remote candidates, HCM candidates preferred. Relocation packages potentially available. Looking to work with someone aligned with goals of building multiple successful products and delighting customers.

 General Qualifications

You are passionate about clean code and elegant solutions.

You have at least 2 year of experience writing maintainable JavaScript, preferably with a shipped website, web app, or native app to showcase.

Experience with jquery and at least one JS framework.

Familiarity with common JavaScript design patterns.

Experience in web development technologies including HTML5, CSS3, JS.

Good sense of design/UI for the web and working knowledge of Photoshop + Sketch.

You enjoy working in a fast-paced, agile environment.

Unquestionable Fluent English (Spoken & Written).

Outstanding communication skills, can read/write/speak english

Degree in Computer Science or related field (Preferred).

 Requirements

Strong on Ruby on Rails 4/5 + angular 1/2

Communication + reliability, no talkers, but people that execute

Building estimates for client projects (writing user stories + good at estimating projects properly)

Accountable, and will do whatever it takes to ship products and always puts customers first

Have a deep desire to ship products and get the job done at all costs attitude

Fun, likes travel, happy, positive, team player. Enjoys working in a small team

Have experience with consuming RESTful JSON API

Comfortable with building the entire front-end stack on your own (hello internal hackathons + mvp projects)

Nice To Haves

 Experience

 What would I be working on in the first month?

 Perks:

 Before Applying / Final Notes / Showstoppers

We only respond to serious candidates that have the qualifications above. Simply scroll to the bottom of this page and submit your application today.

 Company Description

Viral Foundry is a digital product studio. We split our time between developing our own ideas and partnering with startup founders, existing businesses, private equity funds, VCs and local government agencies to build new companies. Our team is strong on all areas of digital, including design, development, and marketing. Clients are based in North America and SEA.

 Company Culture

Startup culture and family vibe. We're a small ambitious team that's fun, friendly, tech + design savvy, “work hard and play hard” mentality, spotify music, team lunches, good times, and great peeps. We regularly attend tech + design conferences and on top of latest trends.

 Apply Now

Submit your application below.

 Understanding of advanced JavaScript features (closures, prototypal inheritance)

You know jQuery, Backbone.js, Angular 1/2, Ruby, Wordpress, Bootstrap

An eye for design and user experience

Previously shipped a wordpress theme/plugin

An entrepreneurial spirit when it comes to attacking new projects

Enjoy and appreciate all areas of development.

Competence and understanding of design and development processes.

Passion for being involved in the big picture, while fearlessly diving into the details.

Adaptable attitude; comfortable with a fast-paced, agile development process.

Sound judgement; makes product decisions based on best available qualitative and quantitative user feedback.

No ego when it comes to product or developent; the focus is always on getting quickly to the right answer and doing what is right for the customer, product, and the company.

Interest and experience in startups is a plus, you should be comfortable working in a close-knit team and fast-paced environment.

The ability to flourish with minimal guidance, be proactive, and handle uncertainty, ambiguity, and quickly evolving goals.

Help create 2 new MVP's from scratch! You will write the first line of front end code for these projects

Cleaning up the promo front end repo, improving the consumer experience

Launching new features for + developing our wordpress plugin

Slicing some sweet new landing pages from Sketch to valid/responsive html

Helping to build web/mobile MVP's for clients

Creating landing pages and marketing websites for internal and external projects

Impact. Have direct input into our digital products and the types of projects we get involved in. You will own the entire development process for multiple products.

Grow. Level up your development chops with support and mentorship from startup entrepreneurs, senior developers, and online training.

Attend conference events and potentially travel overseas.

Work with the latest digital tools, frameworks, languages, techniques, and great group of people.

Potentially work remotely.

Talented team. We have fun, but work very hard. Strong on product, move fast.

Competitive salary, team lunches, stock options, and other benefits.

Applications must be written in English.

You must provide a portfolio of your work. Please send github code examples and real web apps in the wild

Remote candidates must travel and work in person during the probation period. Working remotely is a possibility after successful probation period. VF can potentially cover some of these travel costs, more information during interview process.

Show your personality. There can only be one ‘you’. Just own it. Tell us who you are, what makes you tick, and why you think this is a slam dunk fit.

No attitudes or egos. Leave them at home.

Ability to work under pressure and willing to get the job done at all costs mentality.

Salary - Negotiable. Based on your experience.

  Please applyhere StartUp Jobs Asia - Startup Jobs in Singapore , Malaysia , HongKong ,Thailand from http://www.startupjobs.asia/job/24983-front-end-developer-ruby-js-backbone-angular-wanted-it-job-at-viral-foundry-vietnam