#and can google it which I usually can't for scholarship

[librarycards]

based on someone elses recent ask (and apologies if you've answered something like this before): do you have any tips for exercising and picking up the skill of being able to parse and make sense of academic language, especially for those of us who can't be in a formal academic setting? thx!!!

yes! the most important way to get yourself ready to parse academic texts is practicing close-reading & critical reading of any kind. you can do this with novels, nonfiction, popular articles/news, poems, and so on.

try printing out or having a paper version with you. read once without annotating. read again with a highlighter/pencil, and make it your goal to find the thesis and sub-arguments of the text. if you're looking at a creative work, substitute thesis for primary themes and motifs. then look for supporting evidence, imagery, and/or other details in the text that help further that argument.

on your next read-through, focus not only on the text but on what surrounds the text: where is this printed, who published it, who is the author, what are their credentials? when was it published, in what country, under what sociopolitical conditions? take some notes on how this may have influenced the text itself, particularly if you're reading an article funded by a specific entity/entities. if an article has citations/external links, check those out too. this is a good exercise in media literacy more broadly, but it will also help you better understand the argument a text is making.

all of this can happen before you open up an academic article, or an article you consider to have challenging, dense, or otherwise unfamiliar language. you do this for the same reason you train shorter distances before running a marathon - you get your body used to something so that when the time comes, you can go all-out. when you get to the dense peer-reviewed article, use this same three-step method, but take the piece one or two sentences at a time. try decoding and rephrasing a text sentence-by-sentence; if a word is used in an unfamiliar way, take a break and use google scholar to find other texts using that word. for example, if an economics paper is using the word "materialism," it's useful to find other (likely marxist) economists using and discussing the word, because it will mean something distinctly different from its colloquial usage of "having a lot of stuff."

I also recommend using command+F in longer papers especially, as well as reading the abstract and conclusion before reading the middle of the paper. you do this for the same reason that it's good to read a book in your native language before trying it in your L2, 3, 4, etc.: you already know the shape of the story, and now get to focus your energy on filling in the blanks. search (especially in humanities texts) for terms like "i argue," "drawing on" (for the texts it's in conversation with), "first," (this can get you to a roadmap of the text/arguments, usually at the end of the introduction), and, of course, "in sum/in conclusion". in a scientific or social scientific text especially, words like "evidence," "results," "limitations," and "implications" can also get you to vital information.

my last piece of advice is this: don't expect an academic text -- or any text, tbh -- to be a one-and-done thing. there are papers i first read as a teen, then read in undergrad, then read in grad school, and now cite in my scholarly work, that i am still returning to, asking questions of, being confused about, and googling terms in. learning is a process that we have the honor of engaging in with scholarship old and new, and often, the writing style in which work is presented is actually vital to that learning process. give yourself over to the unfamiliar language and take your time, annotate liberally (leftistly), and prepare to read other works "around" the one you're interested in to get a fuller picture of what you're reading. and if you can, do it with other people!!!!

A few texts we did this with in high school that were helpful in my learning:

Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own

Toni Morrison - Beloved

Frederick Douglass - What to the Slave is the Fourth of July

Dion, Berscheid, and Walster - What is Beautiful Is Good

Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart

[reverieaudios]

How were you able to move out of your parents house?

The short answer is that I went to college 8 hours away from my dad's place and was lucky enough to get quite a bit of funding from scholarships and grants

The long answer (if you're looking for advice) I'll put under the cut

Saving money was very difficult growing up because most of it went toward family bills/groceries, so I totally get that saving up can be hard, but you'll need some if you're planning to move out. So first things first is to get some sort of job.

Also, this was what I did, and is by no means the only/best way to do things. Use your own discretion to decide what will work for you.

So basically, my process (which could be different in some ways if you aren't from the us) to move out was:

1: Start building credit - If you're starting from nothing with no other credit lines (like student or car loans), then the easiest to get is usually a secured credit card with a low limit. Use about 10% of your limit a month (so if your limit is $200, don't spend more than $20 a month with the card. I recommend just putting some kind of bill on it). Make sure to pay it off fully every month by the due date, but don't pay it so early that the card company doesn't get the chance to report your usage to the credit bureaus. If they can't report that you're using the card then your credit won't grow.

2. Save as much money as you can. To rent an apartment, you'll need a minimum of the first and last month's rent + the security deposit (which in my experience is usually close to a month's rent). There's also the cost of the move itself- can you move your stuff there on your own/with friends/family, or do you need to rent a uhaul or hire movers? Are you staying in the same town/city or moving hours away? Those things all factor into the cost to move out.

I'd also recommend saving as much as you can in an emergency fund. The more, the better. Obviously times are tough right now so saving a lot might not be feasible, but if you can have enough saved up to cover at least a month or two of rent+bills+food then that'd be good. I'd also set aside $100-200 for random little expenses when you first move out, little things like to pop up like that.

3. Pay attention to the things you use all the time at your parents' place, the things that would really suck to even go a day or two without, and slowly starting buying some for yourself. I split my list into three- the things I used every day, the things I used maybe once a week, and the things that I used, but not often enough to make buying them a priority.

4. Look for roommate(s). Chances are you'll have a hard time moving out without getting a roommate or two, so moving in with a friend, a friend of a friend, someone from a facebook group or off of the many roommate search websites out there is probably the way to go. Be careful living with a friend, though, people aren't kidding when they say moving in together can turn best friends into enemies

5. If needed, find a guarantor. When applying to rent a place, landlords usually look for credit score, proof of sufficient income, and rental history. But if you're just moving out for the first time, you probably only have two of those things. In that case, they may ask for a guarantor. That's someone who does meet all the previous criteria who will sign your lease with you. They won't be a tenant, but if you don't pay rent/there's some other issue, then the landlord can go to the guarantor and make them pay what you couldn't. It can be a family member, a friend, whoever, as long as you trust each other to not screw each other over. There are also professional guarantors who you can hire to sign on. (If you have roommates, sometimes landlords will kind of pool all of your qualifications together so a guarantor might not always be needed in that case)

6. Budget. To know what you can afford for rent, add all your current monthly bills + expenses (round them all up a bit to be safe), and google things like "average electricity/water/gas/grocery/etc bill *insert your city here*" to get an idea of what you'll be spending every month. Then take your monthly income (round this number down a bit to be safe) and subtract your expenses from it. That'll give you the most you can afford to spend on rent.

Hopefully this helped a bit!

[halfwaydeepunofficial]

give me something absolutely batshit raph has done, one in backstory and one in something you've actually written

OOOOOOOOH i am a fan of this question. love ya kye.

fair warning: this gets rambly and a bit hard to follow. sorry

honestly in most aus raph doesn't have a batshit backstory. it's mostly the same stuff - from manhattan, dirt poor, alcoholic, insanely ruthless social climber, his greatest ambition in all the world is to be a famous actor. and he's always abandoning his sister. it's this last part that has the most potential for batshittery, which reaches pretty much its full potential in the dreampack and remix dreampack aus. (especially the latter.)

he basically lives full time in virginia in those ones - he never goes home even during breaks. meaning he left his 12 year old sister in a not super safe neighborhood of manhattan, basically living alone because both of their parents are overworked to fuck in dead end working class jobs. their grandparents, who have more of an active role in raising both of them, are probably even more of a presence for olivia in those aus, but still. insane move. you were probably expecting murder or something, but yeah as much as he WOULD kill (and implied has killed in the six of crows aus), it hasn't really been an explicit part of his backstory in any au.

the most batshit thing he's done as an active part of an rp plot is in the (og) dreampack au.* unfortunately it's not something i actually wrote out, bc kinda the whole point of it is that he acts alone and in complete secrecy (except for charlotte, but she doesn't go with him, she just gives him what he needs to do it) and the downside of rp format is that you can't explicitly write about things that characters do alone unless you go out of your way to do a fun little google doc sidequest. now i love my fun little google doc sidequests, but usually those are for slightly more extended narratives or lore backstories, not single missing scenes. (dreampack/remix dreampack raph (they have the same lore and backstory, they just serve diff functions in the plot) actually DOES have a fun little google doc sidequest, but it's more of an origin story.)

ANYWAYS the thing that he actually does is he enacts destruction on sebastian's cult mansion (which is literally made of dreams btw) in retaliation for sebastian stalking olivia and hugh beating the absolute shit out of him to the point where he had at least one broken rib and had to go to the hospital. (tangent: thank god his boyfriend hunter was willing to foot the bill for that one, bc lbr otherwise he would've gone into debt. i've mentioned this a bit before but raph gets a LOT of plot convenient scholarships and hunter-footing-the-bill-for-things in order to justify putting him in the same circles as upper middle class and true rich characters. but it comes free with impostor syndrome and angst! ok tangent over.) anyways x2. he breaks everything breakable, steals anything valuable he can find, beats the shit out of hugh, and drains all the poison from the room where it's literally dripping from the walls. basically he completely and utterly snaps. it's really fun to play with - i haven't actually written his perspective in that au since before he did that, but it's already had so many fun effects on sebastian and charlotte and hugh. damn this is getting me excited about it all over again. maybe when nic and i wrap up the rp scene we're currently doing, i'll suggest we go back to it.

*i've never actually explained the difference between the og dreampack au and the remix dreampack au. basically, this happens when we want to mess with the character setup of a given au but the core premise remains the same. so in the og dreampack au, charlotte is dating sebastian. in the remix dreampack au, sebastian's pet dreamer (they are NOT dating) is will instead. in the og dreampack au meera is a ghost, in the remix au it's maddox. et cetera. similar things have happened with other aus, but the dreampack is definitely the most straightforward example of it.

[kouhsuu]

hii hello who are you whats your lore!!

MY LORE okay that's a new one

*THIS IS GONNA BE LONG AND RAMBLY*

Who I am? 17 year old genderfluid digital and traditional artist 👍

For my lore as an artist: My dad is a painter so from a very young age i was surrounded by art materials literally taking up half our small living room because of the easles, giant canvas rolls, wood, cabinets full of paints and brushes, etc.

Essentially I was very encouraged by him to draw lol, and it also came out of me just finding art so much fun in general. I knew that if I got good enough at it I could draw almost anything I wanted if i pushed myself to learn.

I get verrry engrossed learning anything creative and visual, whether it be making my own website, sewing, sculpting, video editing, 3d modelling, painting, woodworking, etc it's all SO! MUCH! FUN!! I also have to specify visual creativity because oh boy can i not stand trying to make music as much as i want to.

In school I was very obviously the art kid and one of the weird kids, but luckily never got bullied because i was charismatic enough and generally there weren't major major assholes at my schools somehow. I usually was involved with the special programs in my schools because of my enthusiasm to learn and participate, so I got an opportunity to enroll into an early scholarship program for LaGuardia art school in middle school which... i ended up turning down because i thought it would be too much work being in a college like that... which honestly only kind of regret because honestly now i'd rather get into drafting and architecture.

Speaking of drafting and architecture! The reason my dad became a painter is because my grandma couldn't afford to send him to school to become an architect, so he pushed me to go into the field as well now that I have the opportunity. I didn't really feel like it but it seemed kind of interesting designing buildings because if i knew how buildings were made, i could more accurately put detail into my art xD Most decisions I make are to improve my own artwork because it's my life and soul, and luckily i ended up getting interested into working with more drafting.

My first social media i posted art on was google plus, then came deviantart, then came youtube, then twitter, and now tumblr (and cohost & itaku). I still use twitter but my main account (@/hamunako) is essentially inactive, I don't care enough to keep posting there nor do i have the motivation NOR do i want to have the anxiety to feel like I have to keep posting because uh oh people wont interact with me otherwise!!!!! Now I just use a private account with less than 25 followers and its the best. I made this Tumblr account though just in case twitter finally deleted itself off of the face of the planet, and also because i've always wanted to figure out how tumblr works & instagram confused me even more than tumblr...

As for why i've been drawing SOOOO much lonely wolf treat lately??? Short answer: ADHD (possible autism too?), Long answer: A long long time ago I watched manlybadasshero's playthrough of lonely wolf treat and loved it, then i forgot about it until i went on itch a while ago and saw that nami had posted mochi in frosting so I was like WOAH THERE'S STILL NEW CHAPTERS?! I got even more into it when it turned out one of my new friends ALSO had played lonely wolf treat so we drew the characters and it allllll spiraled from there.

Can't think of anything else interesting to share regarding my lore but yeah!!! Also I take commissions, just message me and i'll show what I can do and my prices! Don't have a formal post yet but i'll get to it at some point, i'm not very formal in the first place xP

[bedlamsbard]

Putting aside aesthetics and characterization (inasmuch as I can), I have been trying to logic out why Mando Ahsoka feels so different from Rebels Ahsoka (to me, personally; I know many other people feel fine about it), especially in terms of having a character who’s known in Rebels for her “I am no Jedi” line going to a character who is specifically introduced as “The Jedi” in The Mandalorian.  (And who is identified as “Ahsoka Tano, Jedi Knight” on merch -- merch is merch, it’s essentially meaningless, but it’s still a choice that was made somewhere along the line.)

“Shroud of Darkness,” Rebels 2.17

“Twilight of the Apprentice,” Rebels 2.21

This is strictly Doylist and not Watsonian; I don’t care what went on in the character’s life in between Rebels and Mando; I’m trying to guess what was happening in the writers room.

I was noodling through this on Twitter, in case it looks familiar.

My first thought was Dave taking a cut scene from Rebels as canon going into Mando, something he shared on Twitter back in the lead-up to S4.  Looking at this again I’m not sure this was a cut scene or a scene that he wrote that never made it into the actual script. (Certainly I can’t see how it would have fit into the episode.)

Here Bendu specifically identifies Ahsoka as “former Jedi Knight.”  This is also obviously not canon, because Twitter posts aren’t canon, Dave.  (Though that doesn’t mean that he might have taken it as part of his working backstory for the character anyway.)

I was then thinking about TCW and the unused TCW arcs as they existed in 2016 when this aired (with the rough guess that Rebels S2 was probably written in 2014).  There are three Ahsoka arcs that were written and existed in 2016 in some form (”scripts and some artwork” is what Pablo Hidalgo says, and some pre-viz and recordings from the original Walkabout arc that were shown at a couple Celebrations), but which hadn’t made it into S6 (which came out in 2014): Ahsoka’s Walkabout (in its original form with Nix Okami instead of the Martez sisters), the Siege of Mandalore, and an arc which would have taken place between those two, “Return to the Jedi.”  We know about these because of a panel from Star Wars Celebration Europe in 2016 called Ahsoka’s Untold Tales -- I was actually at this panel, but I haven’t thought about it in a while.  Here’s the SW.com liveblog of it; here’s the video.

I remember hearing somewhere that the TCW team had nine seasons or so written, but can’t find the source for that number now.  When S7 was made, there were obviously a lot of compromises made that we’ll never really know about, minus a tell-all memoir or documentary, which probably isn’t coming any time soon.  Knowing that this Return to the Jedi arc existed, I wondered if at one point Dave had tried to get all three Ahsoka arcs into S7 before having to give one up for the Bad Batch arc (especially as we now know there’s going to be a Bad Batch TV show); it’s also entirely possible that at one point in the production process there was the possibility of a full 22 episode season floated, which would have made three Ahsoka arcs in one season less unbalanced.

I went to go look up what the Return to the Jedi arc actually was, since 2016 was a long time ago and I haven’t really thought about this panel since.  My guess is that it had been intended for one Ahsoka arc per remaining season (7, 8, 9).  Pablo Hidalgo says that after the Walkabout arc, Ahsoka would have stayed on Coruscant as “an under-city vigilante of some degree, helping people who can’t help themselves,” and Dave points out that he talked about this with George Lucas, as well.  The Return of the Jedi arc would have involved Ahsoka finding out about a nefarious plot targeting Yoda and working with the Jedi to figure out what’s what with that -- this revealed that below the Jedi Temple was an ancient Sith shrine. (Some details of this were revealed at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim in 2015.)

Ahsoka would have been protecting the holocron vault from Darth Sidious, putting her lightsaber blade through the door while Palps shoots Force lightning up the blade.

“The whole purpose of that particular arc would have been to bring Ahsoka back. She’s not a Jedi, she doesn’t change her decision, but she gets involved in Jedi business again.”

The next Ahsoka arc and the final arc of the series would have been the Siege of Mandalore arc, which “reunites Ahsoka with the clone troopers, with Anakin.”  My guess is that the end of the Return to the Jedi arc would have involved Ahsoka making the decision to go to Mandalore because the Jedi themselves couldn’t get involved in that conflict at the time (especially the emphasis in the panel that Pablo and Dave put on Ahsoka as being “a responsible person” who couldn’t ignore that the war was still going on, and because Ahsoka knew Satine).  (It would be interesting to know when if this arc would have fallen before or after the Darth Maul - Son of Dathomir comics, which are based off another unmade TCW arc.)  This would probably have put as much as a season between this arc and the final arc -- given TCW’s funky timeline that doesn’t mean much, but in terms of audience expectation it helps.

(also, damn, the context of the beginning of Siege of Mandalore in the original concept vs. how it actually happens in S7 is very different -- like, on the surface identical but the emotions involved are totally different.)

Before going into the next part of the panel (post-war), Pablo Hidalgo adds “We consider it to have happened and that’s how we inform the writing in Rebels, because that’s the history that these characters carry in their heads.”

So going into Rebels, the writing team was working with the background that Ahsoka had not only left the Jedi Order once, in “The Wrong Jedi,” but had reinforced her decision not to go back to the Jedi by not returning to the Order during the Return to the Jedi arc.  That explains why in Rebels she’s so adamant about not being a Jedi or being in the Order; it’s a decision that she has made not once, but twice.

Fast forward four years to 2020, where we have the Siege of Mandalore arc in S7.

It’s heavily implied that Ahsoka was planning to go back to the Order after the end of the war, and in fact Yoda treats her as such.

Now, there’s no way to know if this exchange was in the original Siege of Mandalore scripts short of those being released at some point (which is possible but seems unlikely when the character is still in play), but because of the way S7 plays out there is no way to put the Return to the Jedi arc back into the story, which means all the emotional context and Ahsoka doubling down on not returning to the Order is thrown out of the window.  That’s a fair chunk of backstory to take into the Rebels writers room.

(It should also be noted that presumably E.K. Johnston wrote the Ahsoka novel with the assumption that that arc was still part of Ahsoka’s working canon, though she may not have seen scripts for it; I feel like I read somewhere that she had seen scripts for the original version of the Siege of Mandalore, which changed quite a lot between original concept and the eventual 2020 version, as is evident from the novel vs the show.)

Going into The Mandalorian, then, Dave Filoni is not only working without a writers room (as Mando has only had two writers, Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau), but working with an entirely different continuity than what the Rebels writers room was working with.

Trying to backtrack when various scripts were written is an exercise in futility to some extent; I usually guess anywhere from a year to two years out from when the shows air.  (I seem to remember that around this time in 2016 it came out that Katee Sackhoff was doing something for Disney, which ended up being the recording for Bo-Katan in Rebels S4, which wouldn’t air for another year, but don’t quote me on these dates.)  Dave ends the panel by saying that “After the season 2 finale for Rebels I was very adamant that that was it for Ahsoka...in Rebels...but after this reaction it might just be possible...it might be possible to see her again. She might have something to do. Maybe.”  (For those trying to run dates in their heads: the con was in July 2016, the season 2 finale aired in March 2016, WBW aired in February 2018.)  My guess is that they hadn’t recorded for that part of S4 yet (and S4 is so weirdly paced that I have questions about how it was made), but that the initial scripts for S4 had already been written at this point.

Looking back at the Star Wars Celebration Chicago 2019 TCW panel where Ashley Eckstein talks about getting the news about TCW S7 from Dee Bradley Baker (rather than from Dave Filoni, and hoo boy is this uncomfortable to watch knowing that the script for “The Jedi” had almost certainly been written and Dave may have already made the decision not to talk to Ashley about it), there’s still not like...a clear way to tell when that happened.  Except that Dee talks about “wine tasting with the Rebels,” which likely puts it back when Rebels S4 was either still actively airing (2017-2018) or before it had wrapped filming (2017).  (I actually vaguely remember seeing pictures from this wine tasting but I can’t remember whose twitter it was on and going to look feels creepy.)  Probably the scripts weren’t fully revised at that point but they may have been -- still, this was certainly after S2 and could potentially be before S4 had been fully finalized.  We got the TCW renewal announcement in 2019, but the animation wasn’t fully completed yet so didn’t get more than that teaser trailer.  This is only important insofar as it involves which set of backstory was being used for WBW Ahsoka, an episode that Dave Filoni wrote and co-directed.  (Honestly? I think Mando Ahsoka matches okay with WBW Ahsoka but is a little off Rebels S2 Ahsoka, but that’s off my memory of WBW, an episode I refuse to rewatch.)  Certainly with the epilogue he knew he was setting up for something else.

ETA: I FORGOT AN IMPORTANT PART OF THIS TIMELINE AND THAT’S THE RISE OF SKYWALKER because I try not to think about TROS, frankly, but as we may remember Ahsoka is included in the “be with me” scene in the final confrontation.  This always struck me as weird given the “I am no Jedi” thing from Rebels, but she’s the most well-known female Force-user so I had just mentally written it off as easy shorthand and JJ Abrams being lazy about it. HOWEVER, presumably JJ talked to Dave about which prequel era Jedi to include (there’s a note in one of the previous SWC liveblogs about Rian Johnson being in the Rebels writers room at some point).  TROS came out in December 2019, I can’t recall exactly when they did the voiceovers for that scene (if anyone has ever mentioned it), but it was probably fairly late in the process since I believe that there were still edits being made up until fairly soon before the premiere.  (I have a completely different theory that the Lego Star Wars Holiday Special from this year was written off an earlier version of TROS.)  If Dave had already moved towards making Ahsoka more inclined towards the Jedi, with a full-on return to calling herself one regardless of the existence of the Order (as Mando implies), then her inclusion here makes a LOT more sense than it did a year ago.

Anyway this is all very conspiracy theorist, but it does explain something that was puzzling me: Rebels S2 Ahsoka and Mando Ahsoka (as well as TCW S7 Ahsoka and potentially Rebels S4 Ahsoka) were written off slightly different backstories which differed in one very key thing: how committed Ahsoka was to no longer being a Jedi.

Now, this sort of thing happens all the time in anything with an ongoing continuity; obviously TCW makes major changes to how viewers might read or write Obi-Wan and Anakin/Vader in RotS or the OT.  I was just trying to narrow it down in this particular case because until I started thinking about it I had assumed that it was all being written off the same assumed backstory. And many people read Ahsoka differently in Mando than I did or found her perfectly in character, this was for me to track references down about something that was bothering me in hopes of an explanation that would satisfy me.

[qqueenofhades]

Out of curiosity, how much do you know about the ancient Near East, particularly the religion? I had the idea for a novel that started off in Akkad (and goes through a five-thousand-year-long love story/drama about an immortal woman and a man who remembers all his past lives, and how they keep finding and losing one another, and eventually come to break the curse). But I don't want to necessarily rely on the old "use the sources from the Wikipedia article" method of research. There are multiple historical (and a couple of future) settings in the novel, but I haven't nailed down much yet except that it starts in the now-lost city of Akkad during the reign of Naram-Sin.

Mainly what I'm asking is, do you have any recommendations for places to start doing this kind of research? If I do end up writing this, I want it to be an accurate picture of what these societies were actually like, rather than a shallow Google search that might be glaringly wrong.

Hmm. This is, unfortunately, quite far from my usual area of expertise, so I can't give you any subject-specific resource or database recommendations. I will say, however, that "use the sources from the Wikipedia article" is not at all the worst strategy in the world. There are obvious ones that you can filter out, like the link to people's personal websites or random 19th-century newspapers and obviously outdated scholarship (the reason you see the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 cited so much is that it's one of the volumes in public domain and thus accessible to read for free, but to say the least, scholarship on most issues has advanced since the Catholics in 1911). But most quality Wikipedia articles will have a lengthy bibliography/reference/extended reading list with genuine scholarly resources of relatively recent vintage, and I myself often use this tactic as a general starting point. You also aren't expected to give yourself a PhD in the subject to write a historical fiction novel, and nobody's going to read it expecting an accurate anthropological report, but yeah, of course it's always good to do some work and research.

Other places where you can look for resources, some (but not all of which, alas) will be free and offer most of the text online, include:

JSTOR (the original). Last time I looked, they had a pandemic-era provision where anyone could read 100 articles for free in a year, but I'm not sure if they're doing that anymore. It can quickly get expensive to pay for access to individual papers, so obviously we want to avoid that if we can, but JSTOR also has reasonable monthly subscription rates, wherein you can pay for one month, go in and get what you need, and then end if needed.

Google Scholar, which searches specifically for scholarly papers and publications, rather than just whatever some random peon has decided to slap up on the subject. Also, academia protip: if you discover something that looks really interesting, but you don't have the credentials to read it, search the author's name, see if they have a current email address, and if so, contact them directly and ask if they would be willing to send you a copy. I have obtained multiple papers that I couldn't get elsewhere via this tactic, since academics LOVE to share their work and to hear that people are actually finding it/requesting it/wanting to read it.

Google Books is also a place to find at least some useful titles, though it's everything published in any era and may or may not be current, scholarly, or relevant. However, there are usually good chunks of chapters or articles that can be read for free, and it's worth browsing through.

The University of Chicago Press website hosts subject-specific journals in multiple academic/humanities fields, including anthropology and archaeology, history, medieval and renaissance studies, and general humanities. You would also find it useful to have a click through, search for some keywords, and see which articles turn up. This is a case where it would be useful to have university credentials to get access to full text, but again, if you find something that looks interesting, try to find the author's contact information first and see if they will send it to you.

Anyway, I hope that is somewhat useful, and happy researching (and writing!)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT HAPPENS TO PUBLISHING IF YOU CAN'T EXPLAIN YOUR PLANS CONCISELY, YOU DON'T HAVE TO HAVE IMMEDIATE PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS TO BE INTERESTING, THE KINDS OF THINGS YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN TWO THEORIES, PREFER THE ONE THAT DOESN'T CENTER ON YOU

Both publishers and investors are down on advertising at the moment, are NPR values. Eventually by trial and error I found that the best way to discover startup ideas is not to try to solve problems you're bad at: find someone else who can think of names. The qualities of the founders discovered that the hardest part of arranging a meeting with executives at a big cell phone carrier was getting a rental company to rent him a car, because he was a fairly big spammer. You can't say precisely what the miracle will be, or even for sure that one will happen. The old ideas are so powerful that even the most successful startups almost all begin this way. It seems unlikely that will work if they're just streaming the same files you can get. They can hire people who will put up with them because they need a job. It's this pattern that makes them startup hubs. The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts. And make the topic so intellectually bogus that you could not, if asked, explain why one ought to write about it. Junior professors are fired by default after a few years later were billionaires.

That's one reason I'm not typing this on an Apfel laptop. Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of newly created wealth consumers can absorb, any more than there is a common thread. As Galbraith said, politics is a matter of choosing between the unpalatable and the disastrous. We funded it because we liked the founders. All the super-angels are in most respects mini VC funds, they've retained this critical property of angels. Is anyone able to develop software faster than you? If your current trajectory won't quite get you to profitability but you can get over the threshold by cutting salaries a little, you might be able to avoid the worst pitfalls of consulting. Now it's possible to ask that question, and the number of startups is the pool of potential founders. You don't have to be in a position of power. And if you want to sell early.

We fell into the classic problem of how when a new medium comes out it adopts the practices, the content, the business models of the old medium—which fails, and then when you explain this to investors they'll believe you. In a small country, a startup meant a company headed by an MBA that was blowing through several million dollars of VC money to get big fast in the most literal sense. And then on a random suburban street in Palo Alto. Notice I've been careful to talk about how to raise money, you have to pay for subscriptions. The best was that the Chinese government restricted long trading voyages. The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money. The idea that we're the center of the universe—not even the center of things is difficult to discard. If Mark Zuckerberg had built something that could be built with the amount many wanted to raise.

This is to be battered by circumstances—to let the world have its way with you, instead of having your way with the world. The schlep filter is more likely to get them in a society where it's ok to make career decisions on the fly. But schools change slower than scholarship: the study of literature. I suspect the pin will be wielded by a couple of 20 year old hackers who are too naive to be intimidated by the idea. When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. Startups are the kind of thing people don't plan, so you're more likely to get them in a society where it's ok to be overtly ambitious, and in others they're live oaks. The writing is the familiar word salad: Gender is not like some of the time. If the players have the usual distribution of ability, the 21st best.

Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word thesis, the better. The big successes are so big they dwarf the rest. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 6x a year, you can have a fruitful discussion about the relative merits of programming languages, so long as you have a ten page paper due, then ten pages you must write, even if you're never called on to solve advanced problems, you can also get into Foobar State. Most will self-destruct before you can destroy them. There are a handful of people than 15. 0 now, I have a nice edition of his collected works. Empirically, the way they used to. And whereas Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's good enough. And so good writers just you wait and see who's still in print in 300 years are less likely to have readers turned against them by clumsy, self-appointed tour guides. And what drives them both is the number of startups is the pool of potential founders.

The most diffident person would be puzzled and even slightly contemptuous if they told a VC one plus one is two, because they know it's true. A round they often don't. To answer that we have enough data points to see patterns clearly. If it seems like that's what one does in order to grow. For companies with mobile apps, especially, having the right domain name is not as simple as possible. Worrying that you're late is one of the things that put them over the edge. Startups in other places are just doing what startups naturally do: fail. But Palo Alto north of Oregon expressway still feels noticeably different from the area around it. This group says one thing.

Thanks to the rest of the Python crew at PyCon, Matt Cohler, and Sam Altman for sparking my interest in this topic.