#because on the one hand in some parts it reads like an undergrad philosophy major’s ideal project

[theodore-sallis]

Giant-Size Man-Thing (Vol. 1/1974), #1.

Writer: Steve Gerber; Penciler: Mike Ploog; Inker: Frank Chiaramonte; Colorist: Petra Goldberg; Letterer: John Costanza

[inkykeiji]

i'm already hooked on your dark academia au, especially after this recent post about touya. just those details are making this version one of my top favorites on your takes on his character. any additional headcanons on dark academia tomura or keigo? obviously totally okay if not! i'm just in love with this au already, your brain is so big and beautiful, clari!

ARE YOU ehehehehehe aw that makes me happy to hear!! oh my gosh wow, ahaha well thank you! YES let’s get into them under the cut!!

prof keigo

✰ literally everyone’s favourite prof on campus, and everyone either wants him or wants to BE him. it’s extremely difficult to get a spot in any of his lectures—they fill up ridiculously quickly

✰ he’s actually a fantastic professor with a passion for teaching and, despite how scummy he is underneath it all, is committed to genuinely educating his students and hopes for all of them to succeed!! he does actually care for them, you know—those extended office hours aren’t just for the pretty girls playing dumb to get a few extra minutes alone with him, they really are to help students who actually need help, too.

✰ ^^ these students absolutely cannot stand the girls who come to office hours just to twirl their hair and bat their eyelashes and giggle about how funny he is. he knows this, too, and is always sure to extend his office hours for as long as he needs to until he works through all of the students waiting outside his door, even if it cuts into his own research time. he’s fair, after all. he is a teacher first, and a corrupting playboy second

✰ has an award-winning smile that you just can’t resist smiling back, and it always warms your insides when he shoots one your way

✰ always wears thick-framed black glasses, either slipping down the bridge of his nose or behind his ears, pushing back that wild golden hair of his, and always comes to class with coffee from either 1. some hipster cafe or 2. some absurdly expensive european cafe

✰ he’s the youngest member of the university faculty by far, but is already making a name for himself in his field, publishing incredible papers as well as holding additional lectures. most of his colleagues like him and are in respectful awe of him, but there are a few that are jealous, of course

✰ is a little technology challenged and often has several students jumping up at the opportunity to help him getting his keynote working, again. it’s okay, though, it just adds to his charm <3

tenko

✰ believe it or not, he actually comes to class meticulously prepared and takes the most beautiful notes—he’s super organized in all aspects of his life!! seeing touya come to class so carelessly irks him beyond belief

✰ his handwriting is tiny and neat, for the most part, unless he’s writing very quickly; then it becomes a little sloppier

✰ he doesn’t bring a laptop to class, even though it’s more efficient to take notes on, because he gets distracted and ends up coding, working on whatever new game he’s begun creating or, worse, playing a game

✰ absolutely thinks he’s better than every single person in every single one of his classes and, as a result, has next to no friends. he doesn’t mind, though. he likes being alone, and claims that he would never want the company of those other students anyway

✰ hates his major but is finishing his undergrad just so his father will shut the fuck up and not pull his inheritance from him. his father knows this, too, but really just wants tenko to fill his time with something other than video games. he is secretly hoping that throughout his undergrad his son will ‘grow up’ a little and find a new, more sophisticated passion, but he knows that it’s next to impossible

✰ on the other hand, tenko hopes that his father will eventually give into his incessant whining and complaining and allow him to switch to a computer science major. he’s very skilled in breaking his father down and getting what he wants, so he assumes it’s just a matter of time

✰ tenko’s a streamer + programmer online with a decent following, though he uses a pseudonym and refuses to show his face. still, he knows it’ll be great for when he finally releases his own game

✰ chews on his pens. like, BAD.

✰ is incredibly intelligent—not to touya’s level, of course, tenko actually has to put in a teeny tiny bit of effort to his assignments and studying. and this BOTHERS him, because touya’s such a jackass and why does he get to have it so easy??? it isn’t fair!!

✰ he loves to read, and often brings a book or two to class with him to read on break. if you manage to somehow strike up a conversation with him and talk about either 1. gaming/programming or 2. the fantasy/sci-fi book he’s currently reading, his face will absolutely light up and he’ll become much more animated than usual. touya thinks it’s so childish, and spends his time reading ‘great literature and philosophy’ to ‘better himself’, but tenko isn’t concerned with anything like that. he reads for fun, and as an escape <3

[adapembroke]

Reading Tarot Like the Fool

I grew up in a small, conservative Christian community in New England. I went to church school until I was in junior high. Until I was eleven or so, I could count on one hand the people I knew who weren’t members of my family or members of my church. It was a small world, smaller because women weren’t allowed to speak in church or on religious subjects with men or hold jobs outside the home.

It didn’t take very long for me to know that life wasn’t for me, but I had to pretend that it was until I was free to go to college. I lived for freedom, counting down the years and then the months until I could get away and live my own life.

Then I left. And I was utterly lost. If life was a number line starting at 1, I would have been at 0. I had no idea who I was, what I was doing, or where I was going. I was in Fool time. I was off the map.

So, I did the only thing you can do when you don’t know where you are and no one is looking for you: I started exploring. I studied philosophy, psychology, art history, and literature. I eventually got a degree in English only because my advisor absolutely forbid me to stop changing my major. When I ran out of undergrad, I went to a graduate school that didn’t require you to know what you were studying—or even what academic program you were in—until you had to write a thesis. Everyone around me thought I was crazy, but I had an instinct that the way forward for me was to travel light and cover as much ground as possible. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, how do you know where to look to find it? The only solution is to look everywhere.

The Holy, Bellowing Fool

Look up the word “fool,” and you’ll see that the origin of the word is the Latin word for “bellows” or “empty bag.” To be a fool is to be empty. The dictionary says “empty headed.” It’s tempting to go from empty headed to ignorant or stupid, but an empty bag has room to be filled. The poet Keats called this “negative capability.” Being in a place of negative capability means that there is room in your head for new ideas. You don’t approach everything you see with a firm set of assumptions. You know you don’t know everything. You’re teachable. The Buddhists call this ”beginners mind.”

The Fool is a beginner. He doesn’t know anything but what he sees. He is like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The child might not be the only one in the crowd who sees that the emperor is naked, but he is the only one whose head isn’t so full of manners that he can’t tell the truth.

Being a fool isn’t always about speaking your mind and hoping for the best. In Medieval Europe, the king’s fool had an essential role in court. His job was ostensibly to make the king laugh, but his real job was to say the things no one else in court could say. In an age when the king could lop off your head for no reason at all, being a fool was a careful dance of wisdom and cunning. A fool needed the wisdom to see the truth under the facade of court and the cunning to speak the truth in a way the king could hear. This is a more mature face of the fool, closer to the idea of the holy fool, the saint in ancient times who went around town doing crazy things to snap people out of their super-serious assumptions about what it means to be holy.

Another face of the holy fool is the trickster. The trickster wears many faces all around the world. In ancient Greece, he was Hermes and Prometheus. In Norse mythology, he’s Loki and Odin. For some Native Americans, he’s Raven or Coyote. In Hinduism, his name is Krishna. Like his name suggests—and the trickster is, for some reason, always male, according to Lewis Hyde—his role in society is to play tricks. “Pushing, goading, jabbing the kings and heroes whenever they turn away from the inner world of truth,” Rachel Pollack says.

She points out that he is carrying a wand. In the major arcana, the Magician, Chariot driver, and the World dancer are the only other archetypes who carry wands. While the Magician and Chariot driver carry theirs “self-consciously, with a powerful grip,” the fool and World dancer “hold their wands so casually we hardly notice them.” The fool is even using his wand to carry his bag. While the other wands in the major arcana are white, the fool’s wand is black. Black is the color of “all things being possible, infinite energy of life before consciousness has constructed any boundaries.” The Fool does not know his own power. This means he can’t use it consciously, but it also means his power cannot destroy him.

Ultimately, though, the Fool is a light-hearted card. If you are working with the Fool, Michelle Tea says that “the Fool wants you to be spontaneous…If it is bathed in optimism and takes you into unknown territory, the Fool wants you doing it.”

The Polyglot Fool

Tarot is a language of the soul. There are many other languages of the soul. Just like spoken languages, there are ideas that overlap, and there are ideas that are found in one language and not in others. If you want to know about longing and nostalgia, ask someone who speaks Portuguese about saudade. English is one of the world’s most preeminent languages for swearing, and there are branches of philosophy that are nearly impossible to understand without a basic working knowledge of how to construct a German verb.

When you know lots of things and you bring what you know into your practice of reading Tarot, it increases your literacy. The cards are literally able to say more things to you.

For example, Tarot has a sun card, and astrology also works with the sun. The sun is an important part of Wicca and the Norse, Egyptian, and Greek religions. This morning, I was reading a theory from an anthropologist’s doctoral thesis from a hundred years ago that Arthur is a memory of a Celtic sun god and the tales of the round table are all that are left of his lore. The Anasazi and the Romans planned their cities around the path of the sun, and Japan was once known as the Empire of the Sun. Florida and California are obsessed with the fact that it’s sunny there, and there are places in the north called the Land of the Midnight Sun. The place I live right now is defined by sun season and no-sun season. There is a song by They Might Be Giants about the sun and a Beatles song and a children’s song about “Mr. Sun” that is currently stuck in my head and driving me crazy. Those of you who are more scientifically minded than me can probably find a lot of meaning in the finer details of the sun’s nuclear reactions or whatever it is that makes the sun burn.

I’m sure that if we put our heads together, we could come up with dozens of other references. Any of those references could inform your readings as long as you—and the person you’re reading for—find meaning in it. You could draw the sun card and have it mean that the person is going to move to a place with a strong association with the sun. It could mean that they need to work on developing their ego. It could refer to one of the solar holidays. If your client venerates a sun god, that card could point to a message from them.

You might be feeling a bit dizzy right now wondering how you know which reference to choose, but that’s a good thing. It means that you have possibilities. Knowing which one to choose is a matter of trusting your intuition, which we’ll deal with later.

Begin Each Reading Foolishly

When you begin a reading, be the Fool. Explore everything. Make as many connections as you can. If a card reminds you of someone from your favorite TV show, write it down in your journal. Find yourself assigning cards to all the characters in Harry Potter? Fantastic! (And I want to see!) Collect as many connections with each card as you can.

Resources:

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack

Trickster Makes this World, Lewis Hyde

Modern Tarot, Michelle Tea

This post was originally published on Aquarius Moon Journal on 21 December 2019.

[bts-love-sweat-tears]

Philosophy Forum

Pairing: Namjoon x reader

Rating: PG?

Type:  I thought it would be fluffier when I imagined it but I guess it’s angst?

Inspiration: A number of things-the NYC concert, someone being rude to others in ch+ re: physical appearance (they got flagged so fast, don’t you worry); general philosophy stuff; (third-wave) feminism.

Let’s play a game: guess my major in undergrad lol

Also: this is my first fic EVARR (not counting the weird Draco shit I co-wrote with friends in middle school, may it never see the light of day again), so kindly let me know what you think/feedback/ways to improve. Please don’t attack me personally as I will be v. sad. If you think of a snazzier name, let me know. 

You, October 2016

Can you be in love with someone you’ve never met?

This is the question that loops through my head. Logically, I don’t believe you can. You need to know if you have chemistry with that person, see them at their spontaneous best and worse, and to know if you feel that “spark” that everyone talks about endlessly. Emotionally, though, I want to believe otherwise. We are also told from the time we are young, that there is more than meets the eye, and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t want to objectify or be objectified. Can you love someone you’ve never met? Can beauty be in the mind of the beholder?

I sigh and flip open my computer, and quickly log into the philosophy forum that has started to take up almost all of my free time. What started out as a way to finish a term paper quickly turned into a place where I felt truly present, even if it didn’t exist physically. The other members of the forum were intelligent, interesting, and helped me to challenge the perspectives that I took for granted.

There was one person in particular I hoped would be online, and sure enough, he was. His handle was @godofdestruction. When we first chatted, I thought that he would be an asshat with an ego problem with a name like that, but it turned out that he was self-deprecating and extremely witty. The name came from the fact that he apparently broke everything in his vicinity, and his six brothers gave it to him as a joke. I wondered what kind of family he came from, with so many siblings, but I knew so little about his personal life. I knew he would be on at random times, and I could never quite pin down what time zone he was in despite my best internet sleuthing (hello, future career in the NSA). All I really know about him is that he speaks English (duh) and has six brothers. I know he’s smart, loves coffee/coffee shops, and is interested in aesthetics. This whole debate of beauty also scares me, because if I’m being honest with myself, I already rely way too much on these conversations with a stranger halfway around the globe, but if we met would he reject me? I am only able to wallow in self-despair and existential angst for a few seconds, before our rapid-fire conversations begin, and my fingers are flying across the keyboard. We somehow get into a discussion of Arendt’s “banality of evil” and I forget my personal problems for societal ones.

Namjoon, January 2017

My smartphone screen flips to black, with the dreaded white swirl that means the battery has died. I roll to my side and chuck the phone across the bed. I guess my conversation with @kantdealwithmarx is over. This is a dangerous move for me, but for once in my life, the phone hits the Ryan plushy and falls unharmed to the carpeted floor. I sigh and run to the kitchen for a glass of water. In the hallway of the dorm, I see myself in the mirror. My lavender hair is sticking everywhere, and my lips are chapped as they always are. It’s ironic that I discuss philosophy and beauty for hours on the internet but look like a cartoon character. Tae and JK are in the living room playing (what else?) Overwatch, and for a second I enviously wish the game held the same appeal for me. It would certainly be easier.

It scares me how reliant I am on my conversations with @kantdealwithmarx. They’re god knows where, and I’m a K-pop star. Though we meet almost every day in the philosophy forum, we might as well be on different planets. It’s completely crazy, but the most rewarding experience that I have made a friend who knows nothing about my life or who I am. I definitely still have friends from my time in school and when I was Runch Randa (lol, I cringe so much looking back on those days, but who doesn’t when they see things from their past?), but it’s hard to meet people who aren’t also in the industry or who have some weird delusions about what our relationship will be or what I can do for them.

@kantdealwithmarx is the first new friend I’ve made in ages. I want to meet them in person, and wander Seoul’s myriad bookstores, then go for coffee, and spend an afternoon in the park, just walking and talking. It’s a nice daydream, but I’m endlessly worried that if I reveal more about myself then it will ruin the comfortable and open dynamic we have. Producing music and leading BTS are my number one priorities, and will be for the foreseeable future, but I’ve been distracted wondering what this friendship would or could be. Maybe if I could see this person in real life, and know that they exist outside of a 6-inch screen, I could better understand this ambiguous relationship.

You, March 2017

I swallow as my ears pop as the L descends further under Brooklyn, rushing away from Queens, where I live. Ridgewood is lovely, but it is FAR from almost everything people associate with New York City. I commute into Manhattan every day for school and my part-time job, which is with a private catering company. Today, my commute will be even longer as I have to cover some event in Newark. A concert of some kind? I hadn’t heard from @godofdestruction recently, and was irked.  But I was still up super late discussing Butler’s theory of gender as performance on the forum. I have no idea how we got on the topic of gender, but it was definitely very involved, as many of the best conversations are. What that meant for today though, was that I was struggling to keep my eyes open. Class flew by in a blur, and before I knew it, I was on my way to Newark with enough food to feed an ARMY. Seriously, how many people were going to be at this event?

I soon found out that it was seven boys (men?) with various shades of pastel hair and bedazzled clothes. I set up the food, and then stood in the corner quietly, while awaiting further instruction. They were all getting their makeup and hair done, so no one was really looking at the food. To be honest, they were all staring at their smartphones, most of which were in cases that cost more than the actual phones. The boy with lavender hair was looking at his phone particularly intently.  

While it wasn’t very professional (do not attempt at home), I snuck a glance at my phone and opened the philosophy forum. Since I hadn’t heard from @godofdestruction in a few days, I had an irrational fear that something had happened or I had said something that hadn’t translated well to the internet and that maybe I inadvertently offended him. As if we were on the same wavelength, my phone dinged and his name popped up on my screen.

@godofdestruction: Hey! Hope you’re well! Sorry I’ve been neglectful- I’ve been super busy with work.

I quickly typed back:

@kantdealwithmarx: Whoa, stranger danger. Glad you’re okay. Where does your work have you these days?

He replied almost instantly.

 @godofdestruction: Us, strangers? Never. I’m in NYC. Wish I had more time for touristy things though… 🤢

I swear the room stopped moving, and I stared at my phone. We were in the same city? Should I ask him to meet? Right as the wave of anxiety and indecision hit me, a brown-haired boy with the broadest shoulders I’d ever seen came up to the table. I quickly flung my phone to the side. If my boss knew, she would be livid. The boy winked though, and I knew my secret was safe.

“Annyeonghaseo. Hello. Can you tell me about the different food options? I’m thinking of filming a mukbang later…you know? EatJin?”

I honestly did not know EatJin, but I explained the different dishes as clearly as I could, and his smile made me feel like he understood what I was saying. We exchanged a bit of limited small talk, with him laughing and acting like my weird uncle. But for some reason (maybe the shoulders?) I found it less annoying and more endearing. He glanced over my shoulder, and said something I couldn’t understand in rapid fire Korean. I slowly turned around, and then froze.

The purple haired boy was staring at my phone, which I had accidentally left unlocked and on the philosophy chat screen. I quickly grabbed my phone out of his hand as politely as I could and shoved it into my back pocket. I could only hope that he didn’t speak English and had just been acting out of curiosity rather than reading through my personal chats.  I apologized profusely, but when I looked up, he was staring at me as though he had seen a ghost. I was frozen to the spot, my face redder than the lasagna on the table. He slowly backed away never taking his eyes off of me, and grabbed his phone. His hands were shaking as he unlocked the phone and slowly turned it around, so that I could see the screen.  There were all of our previous messages, and I knew that from this point on things would never be the same for us. I also knew, without a doubt, than you CAN in fact love someone without seeing their face. But it sure doesn’t hurt.

[dieofthatroar]

Story-a-day #8: The New Hedonism (part 1?)

Am I storytelling? Or simply procuring extraordinary sensations?

Here’s a parlor trick that you can try with your friends: ask them to sign their name with both hands at the same time. They must be mirror images.

You’ll find that they can only do it if they aren’t thinking about it.

Once you actively try to control it, it all falls apart.

Katie learned this in her intro psychology lecture in her second year of university. Something about the subconscious and Freud and Surrealism, blah, blah, blah. She was only taking the class to fulfill her science requirement and the misadvised foray into art history made her want to run back to her English major tent of solitude. Give her a 19th-century British novel and an endless cup of tea and she would never leave her blankets. Instead, she had to drag herself to a half-assed class that was neither science nor social science. They should have just picked one. No, she should have just picked one. If she had taken Rocks for Jocks at least she would have been able to shut her brain completely off. Maybe check out a few morning boners rising from the sweats of the hockey players, nodding off to sleep after a morning workout. Instead, she gets this vaguely annoying buzz of frustration each time the professor talks about Foucault without the social context of his time.

And this class had discussion sections.

There were twelve of them in a hardly used back room in the physics building. The air conditioners “worked” but only in that they were loud. Katie turned one on in the middle of the hour because she was sick of the mouth breathing coming from the pockmarked freshman by her side.

“Allergies,” he said.

“I don’t care,” Katie said.

She drew cartoons of brains in the corner of her worksheet.

The grad student teaching their section was cute, at least. His name was Basil and all Katie could think of was Dorian Gray and part of her hoped that this particular one wasn’t gay. Curled hair that he definitely did up in the mirror every morning, but probably insisted to his friends just fell that way. He dressed nice, but it might be the pressure of being in front of undergrads that’ll do that - slim fitted shirt all buttoned up, tailored pants. He drew his lines of chalk on the board with swift and precise gestures, though clean lines don't make an artist. He had nice hands, though. Long and limber. She wondered if he played an instrument.

When the class was dismissed, Katie lingered. The air conditioner was the excuse. She could fiddle with the knob and sigh with the distilled drama of three years of Shakespeare summer camps. She followed the cord to the wall and unplugged it. Then, she trekked back to her bags and packed up her things.

“Seems a Sisyphean effort, don’t you think?” Basil said.

Katie straightened and smiled. This would be more fun than she anticipated. “Are you going to teach us Greek Myth along with Dali?”

“God, I hope not,” he said. “They torture us enough as it is.”

“Are you talking about us students, or you TAs?”

“TAs of course. Do I look like an empathetic creature to you?” He put the last of his papers into his messenger bag and slung it over his shoulder. “Katie, right?”

“Basil,” she said. “Tell me, is the double life as terrible a pleasure as they say?”

Basil laughed. “Most people go the herb route,” he said. “I enjoy Wilde quite a bit more.”

“True namesake?”

“I wish,” he said. “In fact, it was the Great Mouse Detective.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“My parents were fans.”

“You’ve got a lot to live up to.”

Basil held the door open for Katie and they walked side by side down the hall and up the cream and fluorescent stairs. She tried to calculate how old he was. Undergrad… 3 years more… he was at least a second year Ph.D. candidate… maybe time in a lab in between. What year did that movie come out again?

Katie realized that Basil had asked her a question only when they had stopped moving outside the doors of the building. His hair was stiff in the wind, she was right about the gel. His eyes glowed a strange olive green in the sun. She had thought they were brown.

“Sorry?”

“Which way are you going?” he asked, for what she assumed was the second time.

“I was thinking of doing some reading,” she said, quickly trying to remember which side of campus the psychology graduate department was housed. Or was he on his way home? Shit. “I’m thinking of branching out. What library do you suggest?”

“Besides Peterson?”

“You know I won’t get the smell of anxiety out of my clothes for days.”

He gave her a smirk. “Since my masters, I got in the habit of studying in Wilkin. Charge up your computer, though. Not a lot of outlets.”

Masters, huh? Her age estimate rose two years. “The philosophy library?”

“The lighting is nice.” Basil checked his phone, hesitated over the screen, and pocketed it again. His next suggestion sounded more like a question. “But I also like Cafe Susan.”

And there it was. Katie thanked the ghosts of dead authors, this boy liked girls. “I’ve been craving something sugary,” she said. “Let’s give in to temptation, shall we?”

[nanahoshis]

Hi! I think it's so cool that you like Ace Attorney and that you're going to law school! I'm not gonna lie, Ace Attorney is part of the reason I want to be a lawyer! Do you mind telling your experience as a law student? I'm going to be a political science major for my undergrad and I plan to take the LSAT after getting my bachelors and getting into law school. I know being a lawyer is hardly close to Ace Attorney in real life, but how is studying for it? What school did you go/are you going to?

I’m only a first year law student, so I really can’t give all the great advice. Hoping this can give a little bit of reference and some pointers to know before taking up law.

Before taking up law school, make sure you really enjoy your college life first… and especially the summer break before law school. Reading lots of books will definitely help you, if you love reading books for the whole day, then I know you can survive.

“Ace Attorney is part of the reason I want to be a lawyer! ”

I love your wording, that it is ‘part of the reason’ and not the whole reason. But I’m also not gonna lie, I took up law because I really enjoyed the games as and that I want to know my rights as a citizen, and save all the animals from abuse (bring those cruel people to jail grrrr).

LSAT - This test is needed before taking up law school, this will help you in your admissions for law school. Make sure you get a high grade, so you can get in Harvard Law (I also bet that the students there are 100000x better than me).

(this varies from country to country though)

In my country, if you want to get admitted to prestigious law schools, I highly suggest that you take this test. The prestigious school will always ask for this upon presentation of your application. Note that there are schools that don’t require you take this test and you can still get admitted with or without it. This test won’t help you in anyway with what law school will bring you but if you really need to get in that good school, you have to take it. I didn’t take the test because I had enough units with my English subjects in college to get admitted (LIKE A BOSS).

1) Do you mind telling your experience as a law student? 

It’s REALLY REALLY REALLYYYYY different from college, I used to complain that college was so hard, but in reality, I was a lazy student who tries to finish all the Pokemon games hehehe… Law school is harder than college.

In my country, the professor are harsh and strict. There are professor who are nice but aren’t nice with giving the grades, the sight of you beside them makes you so inferior to their knowledge orz…

Law school uses a Socratic Method, meaning that the professors learn from the students by asking them questions continuously on what the students have read. They ask about cases and definition of terms, they would also give you a case and you have to explain where the law would apply on that case, they don’t just ask you one question, they will keep on asking you questions. The written exams are similar to the bar exams, they would give you a case and you have to apply the law for you to solve the question asked, some professors would ask you to define the terms and provisions of the law in verbatim. You will memorize a lot of laws, cases, terms and many more. But at the end of day, you still want to feel that you don’t want to be forever inferior to their knowledge so you study and study again. You never know, maybe one day, you get to be able to shake their hands but not as a student but as a lawyer. Take note, I don’t know what law school is like in other countries. I hope they also teach the same method?

2) I know being a lawyer is hardly close to Ace Attorney in real life, but how is studying for it?

You might be staying in a coffee shop, at your room or even at the library for a lengthy period of time just to finish a chapter (or two) of the book and they also give you cases to read, so you will need a smart gadget (e.g. phone, tablet, laptop, computer) because most cases are all saved online. Memorizing is the easiest part in law school (it is hard to memorize a lot though, but for me that’s better than anything else), the hardest part is applying and interpreting the law, some questions are tricky and it takes a lot of logic to get the correct answer, but practice makes you better.

I had an experience that the professor was taking about the properties of each spouse, that the law states that:

 ‘The following shall be excluded from the community property: Property for personal and exclusive use of either spouse. However, jewelry shall form part of the community property (community property is when both spouses own the property, co-ownership)’.

The professor asked if the comb was covered in jewelry, will it still be owned by one spouse or for both spouses? It is a tricky question… In this case, the general rule will still apply, since the comb is covered in jewelry, the law states that it will form part of the community property. Unless, the spouse can prove she uses it for personal use such as a daily necessity. (but who uses a comb covered in jewelry anyway?!), The terms like ‘general rule’ and ‘exceptions’ will also be very common, so you need to watch out for that. Other than that, I also had a hard time with the ‘lawyer language’. The best ‘lawyer language’ that I always remember is ‘The man wants to have carnal knowledge with the woman’ (The man wants to have sex with the woman, in short, this is very common in Criminal Law cases).

AND of course, you need to rest from all the pressure. I always take around 2-3 hours of rest before studying again. This is why I go online in tumblr and get distracted hehehehehehehhehehe

3) What school did you go/are you going to?           

It’s not one of the top schools but It will do hehehehehehe

I have this philosophy ‘that the school won’t make you a better person, it’s you yourself.’

It think I will just leave this question open-ended and in anyway, whatever law school you will go to, they just teach the same thing since you are going to take the bar exam altogether with other students from different schools.

Lastly, I hope this won’t make you lose your interest in law school. I want to encourage you to take it in the near future. It’s worth an experience and it will definitely test you physically, mentally and emotionally, but at the end of the day… you won’t regret that ‘ATTORNEY’ word on your name :)

I wish luck on your future endeavors.

OBJECTIOOOOOOON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

^ I just wanted to type this sorry orz  *crashes into the sun*

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW TO START A BIG DEAL

Read their job listings. And she too knows the creative director of GQ. This phenomenon is one of the reasons, though they may not be easy. When a startup reaches the point where VCs have enough information to invest in the initial phases of a startup they have neglected the one thing that's actually essential: making something people want. The VCs also insist that prior to the deal the option pool be enlarged by an additional hundred shares. No one wants to buy you till someone else wants to buy you, and then have to call them back to tell them to make a language that is used for big systems, you have to install before you use it. Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over 90% blocked and 3 days later he had a quadruple bypass.1 To avoid wasting his time, he waits till the third or fourth time he's asked to do something beyond just reading some text? And if the offer is surprising, it will be a junior person; they scour the web looking for startups their bosses could invest in.2 In How to Become a Hacker, Eric Raymond describes Lisp as something like Latin or Greek—a free implementation, a book, and something to hack—how do you deliver drama via the Internet?

Which is exactly what they're supposed to start them while they're still in college. But is it really impossible? It's so easy to understand what it meant. With angels we're now talking about venture funding proper, so it's time to introduce the concept of exit strategy. But they're also desperate for deals. Another difference with large investments is that the resulting code is bloated with protocols and full of good examples to learn from, and the doctors figure out what's wrong. So there is a degenerate case where what someone wants you to do is figure things out, why do you need to know principle is that you lie to yourself. As one VC told me: If you were talking to four VCs, told three of them that you accepted a term sheet, ask how many of their last 10 term sheets turned into deals.3

The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry them through. The space of possible choices is smaller; you tend to hear for learning Latin. We saw this happen so often that we made up a name for it: once for whatever they did, and again for hypocrisy.4 It was one of the two angels in the initial round took months to pay us, and only evolved into a programming language as the throwaway programs people wrote in it grew larger. There are only two things you need initially: an idea and cofounders. What was special about Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia was not that they were stupid. Even if you don't, a low initial offer will demoralize you and make you easier to manipulate.5 Facebook got funded in the Valley and not Boston. I was a philosophy major. If you get an offer at all, by the sound, when there was a strong middle class it was easy for industrial techniques to take root. Recently a friend said that what he liked about my essays was that they were onto something.6

The second or third tier firms have a much higher break rate—it could be as high as 50%. When we started Viaweb, we had 1070 users. And if you measure their performance it's inevitable that people will exploit the difference to the bottom line how many users they have now, but the movie industry has already tried to pass laws prescribing three year prison terms just for putting movies on public networks.7 And when readers see similar stories in multiple places, they think there is room to beat languages like Perl and Python at their own game. Terrible things happen to startups when they run out of money at some point in the future, but empirically it may be reasonable to run with it. If I met an undergrad who knew all about convertible notes and employee agreements and God forbid class FF stock, I wouldn't think here is someone who is way ahead of their peers. Think about what you have to write in an hour. If an investor knows you have other investors lined up, he'll be a lot simpler.

No, there will also be a need for such infrastructure companies. Another way to figure out who the client is. You have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but I have never heard hygienic macros explained in one sentence. In fact they were more law schools.8 The path it has discovered, winding as it is, right?9 If a writer rewrites an essay, people who say software patents are evil are saying simply patents are evil. Once you had enough good startups in one place, it would create a self-sustaining chain reaction.

To many people, rather than by, say, making the language strongly typed. There patents do help a little. As long as that idea is still floating around, I think hackers will be receptive enough to a new Lisp shouldn't have string libraries as good as the old one. And in fact one of the 10 worst spammers.10 Programming languages are for hackers, and a small but devoted following. Indeed, it evolved from actual warfare: most early traders switched on the fly from merchants to pirates depending on how strong you seemed. There are two possible problems with prefix notation. The big bang guys. Common Lisp has neither.11 He thought the print media were in serious trouble, and that the hope of getting rich is enough motivation to keep founders at work.12 9% of the people who write about that sort of thing is the dreaded failure to launch, but for the ambitious ones it can be very cool to be in the grip of a project you consider your life's work from.13 If your startup grows big enough, however, trust your gut.

Notes

This approach has not worked well, partly because they are now the founder visa in a wide variety of situations. Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives were, we can teach startups a lot of the essence of something or the distinction between money and disputes. Currently we do at least 10 minutes more.

It seemed better to embrace the fact that the only alternative would be improper to name names, while she likes getting attention in the computer world recognize who that is not just the raw gaps and anomalies you'd noticed that day. 05 15, the thing to do the equivalent thing for startups, so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter case, because at one remove from the DMV.

Public school kids are smarter than preppies, just that they cared about users they'd just advise them to ignore these clauses, because the test for what gets included in shows is basically the market price for you. So it is possible to transmute lead into gold though not economically at current energy prices, but he got killed in the 1920s to financing growth with retained earnings was one cause of accidents.

There are two ways to do. That's the trouble with fleas, they tended to be able to invest more. Its retail price is about 220,000 drachmae for the others. But that being so, why is New York.

If this is why we can't believe anyone would think Y Combinator.

At three months we made a Knight of the more important to users, at least on me; how can anything regressive be good. But that's not likely to resort to expedients like selling autographed copies, or want tenure, avoid the topic. They'll tell you them. Users may love you but these supposedly smart investors may not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to walk to.

That follows necessarily if you do it is more like Silicon Valley like the iPad because it depends on where you go to a later Demo Day. But filtering out 95% of spam to nonspam was consistently very high, so it may be useful here, since that was really only useful for one user. I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to solve a lot better.

Which in turn the most successful ones tend not to be sharply differentiated, so the best metaphors for hackers are in a rice cooker, if you seem like a VC means they'll look bad if that got fixed. They shut down a few actual winners emerge with hyperlinear certainty. We walked with him for a year, but also the fashion leaders.

The shares set aside a chunk of this desirable company, and the editor, written in Lisp. If someone speaks for the government, it is certainly part of an urban context, issues basically means things we're going to give up, but simply because he was skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like the other hand, he wrote a prototype in Basic in a large company? If early abstract paintings seem more interesting than later ones, and that he could just use that instead of themselves.

Sullivan actually said form ever follows function, but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. If you actually started acting like adults. Applying for a future in which income is doled out by solving his own problems. Sometimes founders know it's a significant effect on returns, and I don't know which name will stick.

If they were saying scaramara instead of bookmarking. It will require more than determination to create wealth in a band, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York the center of gravity of the young Henry VIII and was troubled by debts all his life.

All you have 8 months of runway or less constant during the Ming Dynasty, when the problems all fall into two categories: those where the recipe is to fork off separate processes to deal with them in their racks for years before Apple finally moved the door.

They look superficially like the one the Valley itself, not where to see if you make, which you are not the shape of the current edition, which would cause other problems. Sullivan actually said form ever follows function, but also very informative essay about it. Programming languages should be working on your thesis.

Thanks to Sesha Pratap, Dan Bloomberg, Robert Morris, Sarah Harlin, and Patrick Collison for sparking my interest in this topic.

[architeuthid-blog]

Books That Have Made an Impact On Me

The Pale King: It’s strange to read a book by a dead man, I mean a book that wasn’t finished because the author died but which was published anyway. In the literary world this is taken as a matter of course; one expects posthumous publications from renowned authors. It’s pathological, and it was hard to shake the feeling when reading one of these artifacts that you’re looking at something unintended for your eyes, like you’ve wandered into a dressing room and stumbled upon a clown who hasn’t finished putting on his makeup. Then again, the novel ends with the same abruptness and feeling of ruined orgasm as Infinite Jest, so maybe the difference is academic for Wallace.

That’s not what made this an impact though. It’s a certain scene, in the chapter from the point of view of the slacker-stoner character, who’s wandered into the wrong classroom and ends up listening to a lecture from an accounting professor. It’s the way he describes, in his airy confessional, the teacher’s attitude, a self-possessed man, without any of the corny jokes he’s used to from the humanities department, an assurance that everything he is saying is true and necessary, no filler, no need for emotional connection, just pure knowledge, a Kantian understanding of the world and its phenomena.

This semester I’m teaching a world literature course in the science & engineering building. Every day I arrive a few minutes early to set things up, and every day the previous professor is still occupying the classroom, either still lecturing about mathematics or staying after to answer students’ questions about the material. Every moment is filled. It’s pedagogy at its most efficient and essential. I bet she never feels the need to justify what she’s doing; the importance of differential equations is self-evident, even if one has (probably) never moved anyone to tears.

I’m sure it’s not always the case. Some of my students do seem to care about the Epic of Gilgamesh; I’m actually surprised how many, this semester around. And everything is more complicated than it first appears. I know nothing of this other professor’s life, her dreams, whether or not she’s happy, whether or not such a question actually matters. But every time I’m up at the lectern and have to fill an awkward silence, every time I’ve run out of things to say about some classical Indian epic and then realize there’s still 20 minutes of class time left, every time I ask a question about the text and am met with a sea of blank stares, I can’t help but think about The Pale King and the way that layabout was inspired by an accounting lecture.

Have I ever inspired anyone?

2666: Ah, and we’re hopping right back into morbidity. Another book that was never finished due to the author’s sudden non-existence. This might actually be, unintentionally, my favorite genre of literature. Few will argue against Bolaño’s genius, and 2666 holds up even incomplete, even incomplete and in translation (for Natasha Wimmer, though less celebrated, is also a genius). Beyond general prose mastery, this book is also remarkable for being telepathic: About halfway through The Part About the Crimes, I was sitting in a coffeeshop, thinking to myself, “Wow, all this violence is really starting to become a chore to get through, I wish something else would happen for a change,” and lo and behold, on the next page, the book suddenly lapsed into a bizarre, extended parody of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have to respect that.

Bolaño has also been one of the largest influences on my writing style, mainly because I decided to write a story that imitated his prose, and, it turns out, imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery, but also the best way to learn from someone. I swear less in my writing though. I’ve been uncomfortable with swearing, I don’t know why.

The Story of My Teeth: The first book on the list that isn’t a doorstopper and whose writer didn’t die before finishing it. Wow! Also the first book on the list written by a woman. Double wow!! Actually, I’m not quite sure what impact this book made on me, but it was a good one. It certainly made me fall in love with Luiselli’s writing. Her prose is just the kind of weird and humorous that I adore. (I was originally going to write “She’s just the kind of weird and humorous that I adore,” but I’ve never met her in real life, and so cannot make that kind of qualitative judgement. I was going to meet her, back in 2015, at a conference in Tucson, but I miscalculated when booking my flight and hotel, and so had to leave a day early. On top of that my flight was on Halloween, so I also missed out on one of my favorite holidays. I wouldn’t say that I was inconsolable, but I was certainly in an ill mood for a while.)

I’d talk about how Luiselli is like a reincarnation of Scheherazade, a master of the art of the story-within-a-story, but this isn’t LitHub, and the onanism I’m engaging in here is a different animal altogether.

(Even though I’ve written for LitHub before, I kind of despise them, for reasons that don’t quite add up. I think mainly they seem like yet another vanguard of the fake-woke brigade, and I can’t stand people who seem like nothing more than the masks they wear. Ooh, what to do, you’re being problematic again. And you just used “seem like” twice in quick succession. That’s shoddy craftsmanship.)

Not One Day: I actually just finished this book a few days ago. Actually, it hasn’t even been officially released yet (tee hee, I have an advance copy, well that’s less titillating that you might think). The conceit of the book is that the author, Anne Garréta (a member of the Oulipo, nonetheless!), has decided to spend five hours every day writing about different women she has desired over the course of her life. So it’s a confessional novel, but Garréta is very self-conscious about the fact that she’s writing a confessional novel, she knows how the sordid game is played. I, too, often feel self-conscious about the things I do, like I’m always late to the party. Fortunately, Garréta knows how to innovate. And not all her tales are erotic adventures; actually, very few are. One is about a little girl who develops a fascination with her. Another chapter centers around her learning that someone has a crush on her, but she never figures out who.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. I like the style. I’m narcissistic enough that I may steal it for something (just like I’m stealing this from someone--but I’m getting ahead of myself).

The Elephant Vanishes: This was gateway drug into the world of Murakami. Short stories are easier to digest than full novels; there are natural starting and stopping points, along with the sly exhortation that you can walk away at any time if you’re feeling unsatisfied. Of course, I was reading the book for an undergrad course, so that wasn’t really an option for The Elephant Vanishes, but then again I never felt the need to take advantage of that particular safety cord.

(The course was called “The Poet In Asia” and was a general survey of Asian literature, more or less. We also read Rumi, Li Bo, Du Fu, Matsuo Bashō,   etc.)

Actually, there’s not much else to say about this one. I guess it also introduced me to post-modern literature, literature that maybe went beyond the mainstays of plot, characterization, and so on. Does that mean anything? Plenty of writers today would say no, that post-modernism is just privileged navel-gazing. But I do gaze at my navel a lot; it collects a worrying amount of lint over the course of the day.

Notes From Underground: Another required reading from my undergraduate years, twice: first in a mandatory “Narratives of the Self” class, then later in an elective course on Russian literature (Anna Karenina would have also made this list, but, I mean, c’mon). My major, incidentally, was philosophy. All of this is just tangentially related.

Notes From Underground taught me an important life lesson, one I didn’t even realize I needed until I had it. Oh wow, I hate myself a little bit more for writing that. I don’t even want to tell you what it is now.

Okay, I’ll give you a hint.

I saw some of myself in the Underground Man, and correctly understood that to be a bad thing.

Pale Fire: Did this book actually make an impact on me? Thinking about it, I’m not really sure. Formally it does something I think is cool. Moving on.

Minor Angels: The first Volodine novel I read. Of course that carries significance. It certainly delivered on its promise of its effect hiding not in the text itself but within the reader’s dreams. After finishing Minor Angels I woke up locked outside my apartment, around midnight, in January, barefoot in the snow, braving my way over slippery ice and pointy rock salt to reach the emergency phone. I need to stop talking about this event, or at least stop pretending that it somehow makes me interesting. This isn’t even the post-exotic novel that made the biggest impact on me. That honor would belong to. . .

We Monks & Soldiers: Everything comes around in great circles. Or small circles. Fuck, I don’t know. Everything is at least repeated here, and by here I mean in We Monks & Circles, er Soldiers. I like how we see the narrative twice, with slight variations the second time. It’s a genuine post-exotic form, the Shaggå, a series of seven sequences, repeated, and interspersed with commentary, impenetrable to the outside reader, any of which could be the enemy of post-exoticism.

Yes, this is hell of pretentious. No, I don’t care. Shut up. I hate you. I’m going to kill you. Oh noble son or daughter, you who are reading this, you shall die by my hands. Think on the Clear Light, though you will not reach it. You are doomed the wander the Bardo for forty-nine days until you are reborn into another miserable existence.

Also, the scene with the spider-girl in the burning hotel is pitch-perfect.

The Soul of an Octopus: This book made me jealous more than anything. Here Sy Montgomery is, going backstage to prestigious aquariums across America, getting to meet firsthand the octopuses in their care (not to mention a rather handsome-sounding marine biologist), and then she goes and writes a best-selling, award-winning book about the experience! Whenever I go to an aquarium, the octopus isn’t on display. Or they’re hiding. I can’t blame them for hiding, I’d be shy too if I were on display like that, but the former just seems like rotten luck. I was so looking forward to seeing the Enteroctopus dofleini at the New England Aquarium two Decembers ago, and her handlers had spirited her away that inauspicious winter day for some well-deserved r&r. At least I got a t-shirt.

I have gone to the following aquariums:

~Georgia Aquarium (Atlanta) ~Tennessee Aquarium (Chattanooga) ~New England Aquarium (Boston) ~Mystic Aquarium (Mystic) ~Tybee Island Marine Science Center (Tybee Island) ~South Carolina Aquarium (Charleston) ~Aquarium of the Bay (San Francisco) ~Shedd Aquarium (Chicago) ~National Museum of Play (Rochester) ~Aquarium (Endless Ocean: Blue World)

Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic: It’s not the book itself that made an impact on me here, but rather its translation, by Chris Tysh. She takes Genet’s Notre dame des fleurs, a prose text, and transforms it, in her interpretation, into a poem. The effect is striking and opened the door to a vast array of translatory possibilities. Things were no longer one-for-one (nor had they ever been, but before this, it was merely an academic matter, shadows on a distant wall).

Granted, I’ve never translated a prose text into a poem, but then again, I’m not a poet. Poets have an easier time going crazy with translations, I think. The older generations didn’t even bother learning the source language. That’s probably taking things too far. But if Quine is right, then it doesn’t matter either way, I guess. Is Quine right? Who the hell would have a special word for “rabbitness instantiated”?

Autobiography of Red: Another book of poetry, another liberal interpretation of an earlier work. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, etc.

I’ll come out and say it: This book made me cry. I straight up teared up. I bet it made other people cry too. If you say you read Autobiography of Red and didn’t cry, I’m going to assume that you’re lying. Or that your literary sensibilities are far more refined than mine. Probably that second one. (Putting aside the fact that it’s hard to get more refined than Anne Carson, but rationality rarely enters my autoevaluative equations.)

Why did I cry? For all the normal reasons. Even when we identify with them, tragic characters will always be way cooler than we could ever dream of ourselves.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods: I’m including this book here specifically because it did not impact me the way I thought it would. While reading it, I often felt tired, like I was running a surrealist marathon (especially once the narrator stopped transforming into a cephalopod). I can’t begrudge Matt Bell’s style; he does some interesting things with his prose. I get the feeling that he’s an ace when it comes to unreliable narrators. But things have to come to a close at some point, and so many times I thought I was finally reaching some sort of conclusion, only to discover that, nope!, we were just going a layer deeper, into the house, or the protagonist’s psyche, or the married couple’s past. So, even though this book was kind of a let-down, I still talk about it, because every condition contains the seeds of its opposite nature, and I’ve read Hegel too, Sam. Maybe Cataclysm Baby is better.

The Pillow Book: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention to book to which I am indebted for the form in which I wrote this whole shindig. I admire the way Sei Shōnagon writes about whatever seems to capture her fancy at any given moment. It’s incredibly intimate (and with reason: we’re essentially reading her diary. Why do people think it’s okay to publish others’ private writings? What would Anne Frank say if she knew her personal thoughts during a time of great trauma were now required reading for middle school students?). Her poetry is beautiful, yes, but it’s the lists that get me. They’re just lists of things, a show about nothing. But they convey so much about her, about her compatriots, about courtly life in Heian Japan. Last semester my students weren’t huge fans of this text; they preferred the Tale of Genji. They found the Pillow Book “too hard to follow.” I think maybe they just didn’t like how long the selection in the anthology was. But then again, judging by their research papers, many of them had no problem reading the New Testament Gospels (even if they had no idea how to write about said Gospels--it turns out, coming as a surprise to no one, that devout undergrounds have no fucking clue how to do Biblical exegesis). So here I am, taking up the one-woman literary tradition of a courtier who lived over a thousand years ago, for no reason in particular beyond a habitual shrug and a muttered “just because I felt like it.”

A Google search reveals that TV Tropes has an article on the Pillow Book. According to the anonymous author or authors of the page, Sei is an example of the “Alpha Bitch” trope. So, that’s enough of that web adventure.

Post-Scriptum: Reading over what I’ve written so far, it would be tempting to ask (like the rote commentator of any list on the internet), “Are these really the only books that have impacted you? What about The Dew Breaker? What about If on a winter’s night a traveler? What about Horror Recognition Guide?” That’s all well and good; plenty of other books have certainly stirred something inside me. The practical answer is one of laziness: I’ve written what I felt like writing about, and now I’m done. Or maybe, if I didn’t mention some book, then I didn’t inspire me as much as you might think it did. Or, I only wanted to include one book by any given author (with one obvious, but pre-eminent, exception).

Incidentally this entire exercise also borrows heavily from not just the Pillow Book but also Not One Day: Anne Garréta ends her confessional narrative with a P-S that’s essentially an apology and a shrug. Which is what I’m doing here, explicitly so.  

Okay, I think I’m done.