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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years ago

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Delegating trust is really, really, really hard (infosec edition)

CORRECTION: A previous version of this thread reported that Trustcor has the same officers as Packet Forensics; they do not; they have the same officers as Measurement Systems. I regret the error.

I’ve got trust issues. We all do. Some infosec pros go so far as to say “trust no one,” a philosophy more formally known as “Zero Trust,” that holds that certain elements of your security should never be delegated to any third party.

The problem is, it’s trust all the way down. Say you maintain your own cryptographic keys on your own device. How do you know the software you use to store those keys is trustworthy? Well, maybe you audit the source-code and compile it yourself.

But how do you know your compiler is trustworthy? When Unix/C co-creator Ken Thompson received the Turing Prize, he either admitted or joked that he had hidden back doors in the compiler he’d written, which was used to compile all of the other compilers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/11/rene-descartes-was-a-drunken-fart/#trusting-trust

OK, say you whittle your own compiler out of a whole log that you felled yourself in an old growth forest that no human had set foot in for a thousand years. How about your hardware? Back in 2018, Bloomberg published a blockbuster story claiming that the server infrastructure of the biggest cloud companies had been compromised with tiny hardware interception devices:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

The authors claimed to have verified their story in every conceivable way. The companies whose servers were said to have been compromised rejected the entire story. Four years later, we still don’t know who was right.

How do we trust the Bloomberg reporters? How do we trust Apple? If we ask a regulator to investigate their claims, how do we trust the regulator? Hell, how do we trust our senses? And even if we trust our senses, how do we trust our reason? I had a lurid, bizarre nightmare last night where the most surreal events seemed perfectly reasonable (tldr: I was mugged by invisible monsters while trying to order a paloma at the DNA Lounge, who stole my phone and then a bicycle I had rented from the bartender).

If you can’t trust your senses, your reason, the authorities, your hardware, your software, your compiler, or third-party service-providers, well, shit, that’s pretty frightening, isn’t it (paging R. Descartes to a white courtesy phone)?

There’s a joke about physicists, that all of their reasoning begins with something they know isn’t true: “Assume a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density on a frictionless surface…” The world of information security has a lot of these assumptions, and they get us into trouble.

Take internet data privacy and integrity — that is, ensuring that when you send some data to someone else, the data arrives unchanged and no one except that person can read that data. In the earliest days of the internet, we operated on the assumption that the major threat here was technical: our routers and wires might corrupt or lose the data on the way.

The solution was the ingenious system of packet-switching error-correction, a complex system that allowed the sender to verify that the recipient had gotten all the parts of their transmission and resend the parts that disappeared en route.

This took care of integrity, but not privacy. We mostly just pretended that sysadmins, sysops, network engineers, and other people who could peek at our data “on the wire” wouldn’t, even though we knew that, at least some of the time, this was going on. The fact that the people who provided communications infrastructure had a sense of duty and mission didn’t mean they wouldn’t spy on us — sometimes, that was why they peeked, just to be sure that we weren’t planning to mess up “their” network.

The internet always carried “sensitive” information — love letters, private discussions of health issues, political plans — but it wasn’t until investors set their sights on commerce that the issue of data privacy came to the fore. The rise of online financial transactions goosed the fringe world of cryptography into the mainstream of internet development.

This gave rise to an epic, three-sided battle, between civil libertarians, spies, and business-people. For years, the civil liberties people had battled the spy agencies over “strong encryption” (more properly called “working encryption” or just “encryption”).

The spy agencies insisted that civilization would collapse if they couldn’t wiretap any and every message traversing the internet, and maintained that they would neither abuse this facility, nor would they screw up and let someone else do so (“trust us,” they said).

The business world wanted to be able to secure their customers’ data, at least to the extent that an insurer would bail them out if they leaked it; and they wanted to actually secure their own data from rivals and insider threats.

Businesses lacked the technological sophistication to evaluate the spy agencies’ claims that there was such a thing as encryption that would keep their data secure from “bad guys” but would fail completely whenever a “good guy” wanted to peek at it.

In a bid to educate them on this score, EFF co-founder John Gilmore built a $250,000 computer that could break the (already broken) cryptography the NSA and other spy agencies claimed businesses could rely on, in just a couple hours. The message of this DES Cracker was that anyone with $250,000 will be able to break into the communications of any American business:

https://cryptome.org/jya/des-cracker.htm

Fun fact: John got tired of the bar-fridge-sized DES Cracker cluttering up his garage and he sent it to my house for safekeeping; it’s in my office next to my desk in LA. If I ever move to the UK, I’ll have to leave it behind because it’s (probably) still illegal to export.

The deadlock might have never been broken but for a key lawsuit: Cindy Cohn (now EFF’s executive director) won the Bernstein case, which established that publishing cryptographic source-code was protected by the First Amendment:

https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice

With cryptography legalized, browser vendors set about securing the data-layer in earnest, expanding and formalizing the “public key infrastructure” (PKI) in browsers. Here’s how that works: your browser ships with a list of cryptographic keys from trusted “certificate authorities.” These are entities that are trusted to issue “certificates” to web-hosts, which are used to wrap up their messages to you.

When you open a connection to “https://foo.com," Foo sends you a stream of data that is encrypted with a key identified as belonging to “foo.com” (this key is Foo’s “certificate” — it certifies that the user of this key is Foo, Inc). That certificate is, in turn, signed by a “Certificate Authority.”

Any Certificate Authority can sign any certificate — your browser ships with a long list of these CAs, and if any one of them certifies that the bearer is “Foo.com,” that server can send your browser “secure” traffic and it will dutifully display the data with all assurances that it arrived from one of Foo, Inc’s servers.

This means that you are trusting all of the Certificate Authorities that come with your browser, and you’re also trusting the company that made your browser to choose good Certificate Authorities. This is a lot of trust. If any of those CAs betrays your trust and issues a bad cert, it can be used to reveal, copy, and alter the data you send and receive from a server that presents that certificate.

You’d hope that certificate authorities would be very prudent, cautious and transparent — and that browser vendors would go to great lengths to verify that they were. There are PKI models for this: for example, the “DNS root keys” that control the internet’s domain-name service are updated via a formal, livestreamed ceremony:

https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/dnssec/root-signing-ceremony/

There are 14 people entrusted to perform this ceremony, and at least three must be present at each performance. The keys are stored at two facilities, and the attendees need to show government ID to enter them (is the government that issued the ID trustworthy? Do you trust the guards to verify it? Ugh, my head hurts).

Further access to the facility is controlled by biometric locks (do you trust the lock maker? How about the person who registers the permitted handprints?). Everyone puts a wet signature in a logbook. A staffer has their retina scanned and presents a smartcard.

Then the staffer opens a safe that has a “tamper proof” (read: “tamper resistant”) hardware module whose manufacturer is trusted (why?) not to have made mistakes or inserted a back-door. A special laptop (also trusted) is needed to activate the safe’s hardware module. The laptop “has no battery, hard disk, or even a clock backup battery, and thus can’t store state once it’s unplugged.” Or, at least, the people in charge of it claim that it doesn’t and can’t.

The ceremony continues: the safe yields a USB stick and a DVD. Each of the trusted officials hands over a smart card that they trust and keep in a safe deposit box in a tamper-evident bag. The special laptop is booted from the trusted DVD and mounts the trusted USB stick. The trusted cards are used to sign three months worth of keys, and these are the basis for the next quarter’s worth of secure DNS queries.

All of this is published, videoed, livestreamed, etc. It’s a real “defense in depth” situation where you’d need a very big conspiracy to subvert all the parts of the system that need to work in order to steal underlying secrets. Yes, bottom line, you’re still trusting people, but in part you’re trusting them not to be able to all keep a secret from the rest of us.

The process for determining which CAs are trusted by your browser is a lot less transparent and, judging from experience, a lot less thorough. Many of these CAs have proven to be manifestly untrustworthy over the years. There was Diginotar, a Dutch CA whose bad security practices left it vulnerable to a hack-attack:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar

Some people say it was Iranian government hackers, who used its signing keys to forge certificates and spy on Iranian dissidents, who are liable to arrest, torture and execution. Other people say it was the NSA pretending to be Iranian government hackers:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/new_nsa_leak_sh.html

In 2015, the China Internet Network Information Center was used to issue fake Google certificates, which gave hackers the power to intercept and take over Google accounts and devices linked to them (e.g. Android devices):

https://thenextweb.com/news/google-to-drop-chinas-cnnic-root-certificate-authority-after-trust-breach

In 2019, the UAE cyber-arms dealer Darkmatter — an aggressive recruiter of American ex-spies — applied to become a trusted Certificate Authority, but was denied:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spying-raven/

Browser PKI is very brittle. By design, any of the trusted CAs can compromise every site on the internet. An early attempt to address this was “certificate pinning,” whereby browsers shipped with a database of which CAs were authorized to issue certificates for major internet companies. That meant that even though your browser trusted Crazy Joe’s Discount House of Certification to issue certs for any site online, it also knew that Google didn’t use Crazy Joe, and any google.com certs that Crazy Joe issued would be rejected.

But pinning has a scale problem: there are billions of websites and many of them change CAs from time to time, which means that every browser now needs a massive database of CA-site pin-pairs, and a means to trust the updates that site owners submit to browsers with new information about which CAs can issue their certificates.

Pinning was a stopgap. It was succeeded by a radically different approach: surveillance, not prevention. That surveillance tool is Certificate Transparency (CT), a system designed to quickly and publicly catch untrustworthy CAs that issue bad certificates:

https://www.nature.com/articles/491325a

Here’s how Certificate Transparency works: every time your browser receives a certificate, it makes and signs a tiny fingerprint of that certificate, recording the date, time, and issuing CA, as well as proof that the CA signed the certificate with its private key. Every few minutes, your browser packages up all these little fingerprints and fires them off to one or more of about a dozen public logs:

https://certificate.transparency.dev/logs/

These logs use a cool cryptographic technology called Merkle trees that make them tamper-evident: that means that if some alters the log (say, to remove or forge evidence of a bad cert), everyone who’s got a copy of any of the log’s previous entries can tell that the alteration took place.

Merkle Trees are super efficient. A modest server can easily host the eight billion or so CT records that exist to date. Anyone can monitor any of these public logs, checking to see whether a CA they don’t recognize has issued a certificate for their own domain, and then prove that the CA has betrayed its mission.

CT works. It’s how we learned that Symantec engaged in incredibly reckless behavior: as part of their test-suite for verifying a new certificate-issuing server, they would issue fake Google certificates. These were supposed to be destroyed after creation, but at least one leaked and showed up in the CT log:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/google-takes-symantec-to-the-woodshed-for-mis-issuing-30000-https-certs/

It wasn’t just Google — Symantec had issued tens of thousands of bad certs. Worse: Symantec was responsible for more than a third of the web’s certificates. We had operated on the blithe assumption that Symantec was a trustworthy entity — a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density — but on inspection it was proved to be a sloppy, reckless mess.

After the Symantec scandal, browser vendors cleaned house — they ditched Symantec from browsers’ roots of trust. A lot of us assumed that this scandal would also trigger a re-evaluation of how CAs demonstrated that they were worth of inclusion in a browser’s default list of trusted entities.

If that happened, it wasn’t enough.

Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Joseph Menn published an in-depth investigation into Trustcor, a certificate authority that is trusted by default by Safari, Chrome and Firefox:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/08/trustcor-internet-addresses-government-connections/

Menn’s report is alarming. Working from reports from University of Calgary privacy researcher Joel Reardon and UC Berkeley security researcher Serge Egelman, Menn presented a laundry list of profoundly disturbing problems with Trustcor:

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-policy/c/oxX69KFvsm4/m/etbBho-VBQAJ

First, there’s an apparent connection to Packet Forensics, a high-tech arms dealer that sells surveillance equipment to the US government. One of Trustcor’s partners is a holding company managed by Packet Forensics spokesman Raymond Saulino.

If Trustcor is working with (or part of) Packet Forensics, it could issue fake certificates for any internet site that Packet Forensics could use to capture, read and modify traffic between that site and any browser. One of Menn’s sources claimed that Packet Forensics “used TrustCor’s certificate process and its email service, MsgSafe, to intercept communications and help the U.S. government.”

Trustcor denies this, as did the general counsel for Packet Forensics.

Should we trust either of them? It’s hard to understand why we would. Take Trustcor: as mentioned, it has a “private” email service called “Msgsafe,” that claims to offer end-to-end encrypted email. But it is not encrypted end-to-end — it sends copies of its users’ private keys to Trustcor, allowing the company (or anyone who hacks the company) to intercept its email.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Trustcor is making an intentionally deceptive statement about how its security products work, or it lacks the basic technical capacity to understand how those products should work. You’d hope that either of those would disqualify Trustcor from being trusted by default by billions of browsers.

It’s worse than that, though: there are so many red flags about Trustcor beyond the defects in Msgsafe. Menn found that that company’s website identified two named personnel, both supposed founders. One of those men was dead. The other one’s Linkedin profile has him departing the company in 2019.

The company lists two phone numbers. One is out of service. The other goes to unmonitored voicemail. The company’s address is a UPS Store in Toronto. Trustcor’s security audits are performed by the “Princeton Audit Group” whose address is a private residence in Princeton, NJ.

A company spokesperson named Rachel McPherson publicly responded to Menn’s article and Reardon and Egelman’s report with a bizarre, rambling message:

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-policy/c/oxX69KFvsm4/m/X_6OFLGfBQAJ

In it, McPherson insinuates that Reardon and Egelman are just trying to drum up business for a small security research business they run called Appsecure. She says that Msgsafe’s defects aren’t germane to Trustcor’s Certificate Authority business, instead exhorting the researchers to make “positive suggestions for improving that product suite.”

As to the company’s registration, she makes a difficult-to-follow claim that the irregularities are due to using the same Panamanian law-firm as Packet Forensics, says that she needs to investigate some missing paperwork, and makes vague claims about “insurance impersonation” and “potential for foul play.”

Certificate Authorities have one job: to be very, very, very careful. The parts of Menn’s story and Reardon and Egelman’s report that aren’t disputed are, to my mind, enough to disqualify them from inclusion in browsers’ root of trust.

But the disputed parts — which I personally believe, based on my trust in Menn, which comes from his decades of careful and excellent reporting — are even worse.

For example, Menn makes an excellent case that Packet Forensics is not credible. In 2007, a company called Vostrom Holdings applied for permission for Packet Forensics to do business in Virginia as “Measurement Systems.” Measurement Systems, in turn, tricked app vendors into bundling spyware into their apps, which gathered location data that Measurement Systems sold to private and government customers. Measurement Systems’ data included the identities of 10,000,000 users of Muslim prayer apps.

Packet Forensics denies that it owns Measurement Systems, which doesn’t explain why Vostrom Holdings asked the state of Virginia to let it do business as Measurement Systems. Vostrom also owns the domain “Trustcor.co,” which directed to Trustcor’s main site. Trustcor’s “president, agents and holding-company partners” are identical to those of Measurement Systems.

One of the holding companies listed in both Trustcor and Measurement Systems’ ownership structures is Frigate Bay Holdings. This March, Raymond Saulino — the one-time Packet Forensics spokesman — filed papers in Wyoming identifying himself as manager of Frigate Bay Holdings.

Neither Menn nor Reardon and Egelman claim that Packet Forensics has obtained fake certificates from Trustcor to help its customers spy on their targets, something that McPherson stresses in her reply. However, Menn’s source claims that this is happening.

These companies are so opaque and obscure that it might be impossible to ever find out what’s really going on, and that’s the point. For the web to have privacy, the Certificate Authorities that hold the (literal) keys to that privacy must be totally transparent. We can’t assume that they are perfectly spherical cows of uniform density.

In a reply to Reardon and Egelman’s report, Mozilla’s Kathleen Wilson asked a series of excellent, probing followup questions for Trustcor, with the promise that if Trustcor failed to respond quickly and satisfactorily, it would be purged from Firefox’s root of trust:

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-policy/c/oxX69KFvsm4/m/WJXUELicBQAJ

Which is exactly what you’d hope a browser vendor would do when one of its default Certificate Authorities was credibly called into question. But that still leaves an important question: how did Trustcor, who marketed a defective security product, whose corporate ownership is irregular and opaque with a seeming connection to a cyber-arms-dealer, end up in our browsers’ root of trust to begin with?

Formally, the process for inclusion in the root of trust is quite good. It’s a two-year vetting process that includes an external audit:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Application_Process

But Daniel Schwalbe, CISO of Domain Tools, told Menn that this process was not closely watched, claiming “With enough money, you or I could become a trusted root certificate authority.” Menn’s unnamed Packet Forensics source claimed that most of the vetting process was self-certified — that is, would-be CAs merely had to promise they were doing the right thing.

Remember, Trustcor isn’t just in Firefox’s root of trust — it’s in the roots of trust for Chrome (Google) and Safari (Apple). All the major browser vendors were supposed to investigate this company and none of them disqualified it, despite all the vivid red flags.

Worse, Reardon and Egelman say they notified all three companies about the problems with Trustcor seven months ago, but didn’t hear back until they published their findings publicly on Tuesday.

There are 169 root certificate authorities in Firefox, and comparable numbers in the other major browsers. It’s inconceivable that you could personally investigate each of these and determine whether you want to trust it. We rely on the big browser vendors to do that work for us. We start with: “Assume the browser vendors are careful and diligent when it comes to trusting companies on our behalf.” We assume that these messy, irregular companies are perfectly spherical cows of uniform density on a frictionless surface.

The problem of trust is everywhere. Vaccine deniers say they don’t trust the pharma companies not to kill them for money, and don’t trust the FDA to hold them to account. Unless you have a PhD in virology, cell biology and epidemiology, you can’t verify the claims of vaccine safety. Even if you have those qualifications, you’re trusting that the study data in journals isn’t forged.

I trust vaccines — I’ve been jabbed five times now — but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to doubt either Big Pharma or its regulators. A decade ago, my chronic pain specialist told me I should take regular doses of powerful opioids, and pooh-poohed my safety and addiction concerns. He told me that pharma companies like Purdue and regulators like the FDA had re-evaluated the safety of opioids and now deemed them far safer.

I “did my own research” and concluded that this was wrong. I concluded that the FDA had been captured by a monopolistic and rapacious pharma sector that was complicit in waves of mass-death that produced billions in profits for the Sackler family and other opioid crime-bosses.

I was an “opioid denier.” I was right. The failure of the pharma companies to act in good faith, and the failure of the regulator to hold them to account is a disaster that has consequences beyond the mountain of overdose deaths. There’s a direct line from that failure to vaccine denial, and another to the subsequent cruel denial of pain meds to people who desperately need them.

Today, learning that the CA-vetting process I’d blithely assumed was careful and sober-sided is so slapdash that a company without a working phone or a valid physical address could be trusted by billions of browsers, I feel like I did when I decided not to fill my opioid prescription.

I feel like I’m on the precipice of a great, epistemological void. I can’t “do my own research” for everything. I have to delegate my trust. But when the companies and institutions I rely on to be prudent (not infallible, mind, just prudent) fail this way, it makes me want to delete all the certificates in my browser.

Which would, of course, make the web wildly insecure.

Unless it’s already that insecure.

Ugh.

Image:

Curt Smith (modified)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sand_castle,_Cannon_Beach.jpg

CC BY 2.0:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: An animated gif of a sand-castle that is melting into the rising tide; through the course of the animation, the castle gradually fills up with a Matrix-style 'code waterfall' effect.]

#pluralistic

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runningdownthatroad · 3 years ago

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So basically, AH just proved herself that she's been planning this shit for a long time. She literally just said "No one has this much evidence. Five. Years."

While she's correct that most real DV survivors don't have as much evidence as she does, why compile five years' worth of evidence? While it's true that it has been statistically proven that some survivors take up to seven attempts to leave their abusers, you're telling me that while you were being beaten frequently during this extended period of time that you always had the presence of mind to collect evidence during and/or afterwards? To make sure each and every single incident (that you allege happened) is documented?

And then on top of it, when you do have evidence it's this kind of evidence?

And evidence of your reported injuries are photos that a digital forensic expert testified had gone through photo editing software consistent with your phone type, are testified as to happening by your friends and sister, and TMZ sporadically caught you coming out of the courthouse after filing a TRO and photographed for you?

Not to mention:

a video that has you setting up the camera and laughing edited out as testified by a former TMZ employee who received the video you sent (yep, you sent it, they wouldn't be copyright owners otherwise, not to mention your text message confirming it)

audio recordings that confirm you are the abusive party 99% of the time (that can be proven 100%) while JD was actually trying to get away from you

an ex-fling of his who testified at the time of their involvement that she saw JD throw a bottle but it wasn't directed at her

text messages where JD expresses his anger at everything you have put him through (are they disgusting and some horrid? absolutely; do people who have gone through this type of abuse before get that you are basically driven to the edge of your sanity every single day? yep)

This has been one big setup from the beginning. She keeps mentioning JD's "power" and "support" because she wants it for herself and she's angry she doesn't have it, a fact that is driven home each time she is reminded of people coming out to support him, like Kate Moss. Like Winona Ryder (whose name she didn't want on JD's body if you remember). Like Vanessa Paradis. Like his sister who was his personal manager. Like Eva Green. Like Angelina Jolie. Like all of the other ex-girlfriends and people who have come out in support of him. Like the public. She hates that and it shows each time she's asked about others' testimonies in this case that aren't in her interest.

That's why she makes sure to mention how all of this has affected her career and how she now faces threats every day. She wants your sympathy, she wants your belief, and she wants the table tilted towards her.

Think past JD. She became close friends with James Franco, another actor who at the time was a hot ticket. More than likely, that's why Elon Musk came into the picture. Hell, I bet had he proposed, she would have accepted. (and don't think it didn't burn her when she saw the Twitter deal either) That's why you didn't see her dating some TV actor or screenwriter or some average Hollywood Joe/Jane. She wanted someone with power, prestige, and money, and all three in Hollywood. She even testified herself to how abundantly generous JD was when they started dating, when they met, etc. She saw it all and she knew.

The question is, just how early on did she form this plan? The claims of abuse, I mean, and the evidence gathering.

Like she said herself: Five. Years.

That's an awfully long time to collect evidence for what she thought would be a solid case. To keep him in line should he ever step out of it. She wanted to latch her wagon to his and be propelled into super-stardom.

Five. Years.

And that's fucking evil.

#anti amber heard #amber heard is an abuser #amber heard is a liar #justice for johnny depp

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queenlua · 4 years ago

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

huh, an interesting question, ty!

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

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

(stuff under cut because long)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

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

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

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domjaehyun · 4 years ago

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Big questions here. You don't have to answer them but if you do thanks I'm just curious as a writer myself. Do you edit the grammar and spelling of your writings during the writing process or afterwards? And do you use a specific website e.g. Grammarly to help with any corrections you've missed? Do you write up your writings in tumblr drafts, word, or something like that? And when you have new ideas for writings do you note them down, start up a quick draft or how do you remember new ideas?

omg no you’re totally fine i actually. really genuinely love being asked about my writing process and habits it’s so fun to me !!!! okay i feel chatty so this got rly long apologies 😭😭😭 i tried to bold keywords from your questions so you could pick out my answers more easily :D

ngl my grammar and spelling is like. pretty damn good like any mistakes i ever catch in my stories are never genuine spelling errors theyre literally just typos 😭 and as for grammar, the grammar issues i ever ever find are birthed from like. inconsistency w the preexisting sentence structure djfjsjfj bc i always always always reread and edit while i’m writing especially when i’m starting out w the fic, but the longer it gets, the more exhausting it becomes to reread the whole thing sjfkdkdkd

also sometimes i’ll stop writing a fic mid sentence that’s semi-long and when i come back, i just pick up from where i left off without. rereading the sentence 😖😖😖 whenever i reread my like published works and catch mistakes just know i thought about putting my head directly through a wall 😭😭😭

so!! i do edit it obsessively during, i proofread it after i’m done (even though i’m usually exhausted and honestly sick of the story at that point) and then i send it to a friend or multiple friends so they can beta it for me, then i make any changes as i see fit, proofread it on my own AGAIN usually very lazily, then i’m like “i cant bear to look at you anymore” and i just post it sjjjdkddj

i don’t use any sort of online tools to “help” me write apart from google docs and the built in suggestion feature they have! i hate grammarly, actually skfjskdkd it doesn’t know half as much as it thinks it does and its software fucked up so often when i used it that i was just like. “what the fuck are you talking about.” also, i think that in very specific occasions, general sentence rules can be slightly subverted in order to achieve some sort of goal, and i enjoy doing that from time to time, so it got annoying when grammarly was like being dumb or that hemingway website said shit like “this sentence is rly long and complex” like….yeah. i know. i did that on purpose.

i will never in my life trust tumblr to host any drafts of my work. never. ever. ….ever. i either make a google docs draft or a notes draft for like. actual longer ideas like scenes and more plotting and stuff!! if it’s a small little idea and i have a bunch for some reason, occasionally i’ll write the ideas down physically either onto paper or w my apple pencil onto my note taking app on my ipad sjfjskkd !!

but yeah tbh i was just talking to nova abt this the other day bc we were talking abt wips and our storage of them and. when i was trying to count how many wips i even have, i had to search in like. 3 different apps (technically 4 but that’s bc i already have lists on here in my drafts that i have elsewhere but it’s easier to find them here shfjsj) in different documents until i rounded up all the lil ideas like stray sheep 😭😭😭 so hopefully soon i can set aside time to sit down and compile every single wip, at least the idea and where i have more info stored, into one single google doc for my convenience !!!!

BUT YEAH THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ASKING OMG I LOVE LOVE LOVE QUESTIONS LIKE THESE 🥺🥺🥺 if you or anyone else has any more writing process questions, totally feel free to ask!!!!

#answered #anon #bye bc this was so fun to answer #now i’m chipper

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weedle-testaburger · 4 years ago

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one of these days if I get editing software again i have to make a compilation of every time jonathan pearce lost his shit at something on robot wars

#personal crap #i could basically just include hypno-disc's entire first battle for starters

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kenzieam · 5 years ago

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Linked - Chapter Two

Rating: M (smut, language, mature themes, potential major character death)

Genre: Drama/Angst

@captstefanbrandt @iammarylastar @kiiiimberlyriiiicker1995 @notimetoblog @captain-ariel-barnes @lancefvckertvcker-blog @bitsandbobsandstuff @softlybarnes @lovelybbarnes @buckitybarnes @bucky-plums-barnes @moonbeambucky @badassbaker @citylights221 @shynara51 @diinofayce @casestudy-mw @jewels2876 @damnaged-princess @everythingisoverrated @allmyfanficfaves @wowspideyholland @smilexcaptainx@shirukitsune @chook007 @jeremyrennerfanxxxx123

If you want to be removed or I’ve missed tagging you, let me know!

*******************************************************************

Bucky and Levi find themselves connected through tragedy, can they let go of the past to find their future????

*******************************************************************

I have not added to this since last September, shame on me!! Reread Chapter One here and let me know if I should continue with the story.

*******************************************************************

WHAT ARE YOU DOING? The voice in Bucky’s head screamed. YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO SAY NO! DANGER, DANGER! You don’t want to get involved with this! She doesn’t want you; YOUR WIFE KILLED HER HUSBAND... HER HUSBAND KILLED YOUR WIFE. WALK AWAY!

His mind was screaming loud enough that it wouldn’t surprise Bucky if Levi could actually hear his thoughts and he winced internally as he caught sight of her hand, clutching white-knuckle tight to her messenger bag.

Shit.

Despite his misgivings, Bucky nevertheless sat at the table the hostess indicated, pausing awkwardly as he debated holding out Levi’s chair for her. She sat quickly, however, as if expecting him to offer and not wanting it. King clamored into his own chair; reaching for a menu, asking for a chocolate milk and maintaining a rundown of the best parts of their game all at the same time and Bucky couldn’t hide a smile. He would rather rip his tongue out by the roots than admit it, especially in his present company, but King had become very precious to him in a short amount of time and he very much looked forwards to seeing the little guy. Maria had been totally against the subject of children, but Bucky had always wanted to be a dad. He needed to be careful though, he knew, for this was a minefield he wasn’t sure he would ever be either ready or able to walk through.

“What do you want, Coach? I want pizza!”

“King, keep it down.” Levi chastised gently.

“Sorry, mom.”

“It’s alright, just use your inside voice, okay?”

“Okay.”

Levi’s eyes flicked unwillingly towards him. “What do you want, Mr. Barnes?” She asked softly, sounding nervous.

Jesus, doll. You. “Call me Bucky, please. Pizza sounds good...?” Bucky offered shyly.

Pizza safely ordered (half-pepperoni, half-Hawaiian – gross, mom!), Bucky cleared his throat and asked tentatively, his heart hammering in fear. “How are you liking it here so far?”

Levi looked startled for a micro-second before answering. “It’s nice. I met Nat and Steve right away, so that made everything so much easier, I-” a loud chime interrupted her, and she flushed. “Sorry.”

Bucky watched as Levi reached down and rustled in her messenger bag, pulling out a tablet and tapping quickly at it before tucking it back inside.

“Sorry about that,” she repeated. “That was a client.”

“What do you do?” Bucky blurted, his nerves loosening his tongue. “Sorry, I-”

“No, it’s alright. I’m a graphic designer; but lately I’ve been designing a lot of book covers.”

“Like novels?”

“Yeah, just small time. First-time authors, independents, people that haven’t really made it big yet.”

“How does that work?”

Levi flushed, glancing down at her glass before answering, her fingers toyed with the condensation forming at the base, drawing small but enchanting patterns. “I’m compiling a catalogue of images and pictures of subjects; I snagged some professional editing software a while ago and can manipulate a stock image fairly realistically. Some are live models, others are no-license. The client emails me what they’re looking for, I make something up and send them a few choices; it’s fairly straightforward really.”

“Live models... like pictures of real guys, like Fabio?”

Levi giggled, a sound that arrowed straight into Bucky’s heart. “Not that famous, but a few wannabe models have let me take their picture, usually in exchange for a series of headshots. They get their portfolio; I get a few brooding pics.”

“Shirtless?” Bucky wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but the idea intrigued him.

“Yes, mostly. Why, are you volunteering?” Levi snapped her mouth shut in shock. What the fuck is gotten into you?

Now Bucky flushed, eyes flicking to Levi’s for a heartbeat; a shy grin pulling at his mouth and the sight arrowed straight into Levi’s heart. “Think I’d make it?”

Fuck, yeah. But I don’t want to share. "I think you’d do. Romance readers love a dark and handsome mystery.”

“You think I’m handsome?” Bucky teased, loving the way Levi’s face went so adorably red, her amethyst eyes widening as she realized her slip.

Finally, the universe took pity; Levi was saved from answering by the arrival of their pizza and King’s triumphant shout.

The next few minutes were spent eating, King devouring his slice with typical 5-year-old gusto.

“How do you like coaching so far?” Levi asked, wiping tomato sauce from her bottom lip, something Bucky suddenly and desperately wanted to do with his tongue.

Bucky struggled to focus on her question and not her plump lips and what they would look like wrapped around his cock.

What the fuck, dude???

“A lot actually. I didn’t expect to, honestly; I was just going to help Steve out a bit. I played soccer in high school and a bit for my university team, so I guess he figured I knew what I was doing.”

“You played for your university? You must have been good.”

Bucky flushed. “Yeah,” he hedged, unsure whether he should mention that he had already been drafted in the pros. “But I busted up my knee pretty bad and decided to get out.”

“That must have sucked.” Lev offered quietly, looking surprisingly upset at the news.

Bucky nodded, clearing his throat. “I lucked out with a good surgeon. I signed up for the military and, after a couple of tours I got out and into security. Mostly I just consult now.”

“Is that how you met Steve?”

Bucky couldn’t stop a wide smile. “Yeah, he wanted me to review and streamline the security system for his business.” He hesitated before adding, “I was always pretty mobile with that anyways, consulting all over the country, sometimes the world. I didn’t need to stay in one place, so... it made it easier when I decided to move… after-”. He broke off, Levi would know exactly what he meant without him spelling it out.

“Yes.” Came her quiet reply. “I understand... About that, did you ever-”

“No.” Bucky kept his voice gentle even as his heart raced. “Not now, please.”

Levi nodded shyly, her cheeks going pink. King had fallen silent, looking between the two adults, puzzled.

“What’s going on?” He asked, a pizza slice forgotten in his hand.

Levi sent Bucky a beseeching look. She’d not told King who Bucky was. At most, he knew that his coach’s wife had died, but he didn’t know that she’d taken his father with her.

“Nothing, buddy.” Bucky grinned in King’s direction, but Levi could see the faint tightening at the corners of his eyes. Fortunately, King, who was uncannily observant, even for a child, took Bucky’s lie at face value and happily tucked back into his pizza.

‘Sorry,’ Levi mouthed, and Bucky shook his head gently, returning quietly to his pizza.

Lev refused to let Bucky pay for full bill, insisting on half and completely crushing any thoughts that this had been anything but an entirely platonic meal.

But, whether by luck or serendipity, they found themselves again at May’s after the next game, sharing a table due to King’s enthusiastic ‘Coach! Sit with us!’ that he’d bellowed across the room.

The third time was planned, and Levi felt herself almost ashamed at how much she began to look forward to aftergame pizza with Coach Barnes.

*****************************************************************

King ran ahead, hollering at the top of his lungs to his teammates, who shouted and yelled back. Levi followed behind, trudging really, she’d not gotten much sleep last night, and stumbled, biting back a surprised squawk, when a soccer ball connected suddenly with her temple. She staggered, clutching at her head but the ball hadn’t been flying with too much force and it had startled her more than anything else.

“Hey!” Bucky appeared like magic, the offending ball in his hands. He touched her shoulder, peering into her face with concern. “You okay?”

Lev nodded, not wanting to make a scene, she probably could have avoided being hit if she’d been more cognizant of the field, but Bucky wasn’t having it.

“Fucking Seymour. I’ll handle this.” He marched over to the nearby group of players and spoke in low, furious tones to them, starting in on their coach, obviously the maligned Seymour, when he bumbled over, trying to cover up the fact that he’d been too busy playing Candy Crush on his phone to monitor his players.

Lev continued walking, almost scurrying, picking up speed to avoid any other flying missiles and sat gratefully on her usual spot at the bleachers. Her eyes drifted to find Bucky,he was still speaking to the other coach and it was starting to look heated, but then Bucky took a visible deep breath and stepped back, obviously pulling himself away before things got out of hand. His eyes searched for her and he exhaled noticeably once he found her, moving unerringly to her side, concern evident on his handsome face.

“You okay?” He murmured, reaching up to brush where the ball had connected. His touch left goosebumps in its wake and Lev hissed at the contact, at the tingle of energy that frizzled between his fingertips and her skin. He seemed to feel it too, eyes widening slightly and pulled his hand away, not fully dropping it, gaze searching hers. “Lev?”

“I’m fine. I’m sorry, I should have been paying attention-” Levi ducked her head.

“Not your fault.” He retorted curtly. “Wayne Seymour needs to be watching his players better.” He visibly exhaled out his mounting irritation and leaned down to meet her eyes again. His brows drew together in question and he looked so startingly puppy-dog at that moment that Lev forgot how to breathe.

“James, I’m fine.”

His brows jumped slightly, nobody called him by his given name, he always corrected them and told them to call him Bucky, but hearing Lev say it made something inside him sit up and pay attention. Reluctantly, he drew away; he had to start coaching but right now he wanted nothing more than to stay beside her.

His hand, drifting without official orders, rested lightly on her knee for a beat before he pulled it away, startled by his actions. It wouldn’t do for the coach to be seen touching one of the player’s moms, but his hand suddenly ached as it was drawn away, tingling to touch her again.

“Pizza tonight?” He asked, stumbling over his words.

Lev studied him for a beat, her cheeks going adorably red. “We’ll see you there.” She replied softly.

***************************************************************

“Coach, can you come to my party?!” King asked excitedly, bouncing in his chair like it was a small trampoline.

Bucky took the empty chair at the table, mouthing a ‘Hey’ to Lev before focusing on King. “What’s that, Little Man?” He’d heard King babbling something about this during drills earlier, but he’d still been so caught up in Levi being hit that he hadn’t paid much attention.

“My birthday!”

Lev hushed King with a low shushing sound. “His sixth birthday, I’m planning a small get-together this weekend; King’s teammates, some school friends and their parents. You’re certainly invited, can you make it?”

“Of course.” He grinned down at King. “Thanks, buddy.”

“Yay!!”

“Kingston Sebastian Riel!” Levi hissed. “Tone it down.”

“Sebastian?”

“His father and I couldn’t agree. Brock wanted Kingston, I wanted Sebastian. We ‘compromised’.” She made air quotes with her fingers.

“I love that name.” Bucky smiled. That had been his name, whenever he’d indulged in picturing having children with Maria, naming his son ‘Sebastian Barnes’.

“I don’t need to use it very often; King usually knows how to behave in restaurants.” Lev replied, eyeing her son.

“Sorry, mom. Sorry, Coach.”

Lev’s serious demeanor broke and she ruffled his hair. “Inside voice, remember. I know you’re excited but we’re not the only people here, right?”

“Yes, mom.”

Bucky gazed at Lev while pretending to peruse the menu. She wasn’t like some of the other mothers out there, that let their kids get away with murder, ignored the little darlings as they ran around screaming and disturbing people, getting in screaming matches with bystanders that told her to rein in her offspring. She loved her son, that was obvious, and she loved him enough to actually parent him. That distinction mattered to Bucky, something that he probably would have argued with Maria about, had she ever agreed to having children. She had been raised to believe herself always correct, her parents always backing her, no matter if she was right or wrong in any situation, and it had chafed Bucky at times; something he found he could reflect back on now, with time, although with no less diminished guilt at remembering your dead spouse as anything but an absolute water-walking saint.

“Mom, I have to go to the bathroom.” King announced. When Lev moved to stand, he continued. “I can go myself.”

Lev looked torn, then nodded slowly. “Wash your hands.”

King nodded once then disappeared.

“What can I bring?” Bucky asked.

“Sorry, what?” Lev pulled her attention away from the direction King had gone, focusing back on Bucky.

“What can I bring to King’s party?”

“Oh,” Lev cleared her throat, thinking for a moment. “Beer? If you want to drink any, I don’t have a lot hanging around and… I’m not sure how many are coming, but maybe a chair too. The backyard is pretty big and there should be room, but you never know.”

“Any food?”

“No, thank you. I’ve got it.” Lev’s lips curled in a small smile and Bucky wasn’t surprised to feel his heart skip suddenly in his chest. This had been happening more and more around her and he was losing the strength to fight it.

“What does the Little Man want?”

“You don’t need-”

“I want to.”

Lev chewed her bottom lip before answering. “He talks a lot about some ‘Ronaldo’ guy?”

Bucky chuckled, shaking his head. “Yeah, I’ve heard him during practices. Cristiano Ronaldo, he’s a famous Portuguese soccer player. Think he’d like a jersey?”

“He’d probably never take it off. But James, seriously-”

Bucky leaned forwards suddenly, resting his hand onto of Levi’s and startling her silent. “Please. I’d like to.” A little awkwardly, he pulled his hand back, straightening slowly in his chair, cheeks heating.

“Do you have any children, James?” She asked, abruptly but not unkindly.

“No.”

“Did you ever want any?”

Bucky traced the edge of his glass, staring hard at the liquid inside. This seemed both an insanely private question to ask, but also one he didn’t mind answering, at least for her. “Yes. Maria-”

“I’m back!” King announced, as if he’d trekked to Papua New Guinea and was just now arriving home, footsore and weary from outrunning cannibals.

“Did you wash your hands?”

“Yes, mom.”

A part of Bucky was insanely grateful when the pizza arrived moments later, and he was saved from further discussion of children he’d wanted but never had the chance to have.

*****************************************************************

Lev opened the door, a slight look of panic on her face and smiled widely when she saw who it was.

“Bucky, hey! I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

He’d thought about it; for some reason, after their last pizza ‘date’, he’d spiraled down into a dark shame, one he’d not felt since those early months immediately after Maria’s death. It must have been because of Lev’s question, harmless as it was for someone you could consider a friend, someone you shared dinner with on the semi-regular now, to ask; but it had triggered something inside him, a buried guilt, a hidden tangle of emotions he’d been too afraid to grab and study up close, but King meant too much to him to bail and, if he was being honest with himself, Levi did too.

“Sorry I’m late-”

“No, it’s fine! I’m just a little-… I haven’t had a get-together like this since before…” She broke off, cheeks going pink and Bucky knew immediately what she meant, how she felt.

“Here, let me take that-” Bucky reached for the bags of chips grasped tightly in her fingers but she pulled away.

“No, thank you, it’s fine. You’ve got your hands full too.” She said, jerking her chin at the six-pack of beer and folded lawn-chair taking up most of his hands. She paused for a moment and took a deep breath, gifting Bucky with a genuine smile. “Thank you for coming, I’m glad you’re here; and King’s going to go crazy.”

Their eyes met and held for a heartbeat and something warm flashed in Lev’s gaze, something that matched the tentative eagerness burning low in Bucky’s chest.

“C’mon in.” Levi shook herself slightly, as if breaking out of a trance and smiled a bit nervously. “I’ll be right out, just head on through the kitchen and out the back door. Everyone’s out there, you’ll see Steve and Nat right away.”

“Okay, thanks.” Bucky tried not to look as Levi sashayed in front of him, unaware of how the natural sway of her hips made adult thoughts flood his mind. Maria had not had curves like this, she’d been almost fanatical about calorie counting and restriction, resulting in a toned but unwelcomely bony body under Bucky’s caresses, but Lev was curvy, deliciously so, in all the right places. He didn’t mean to compare, but Maria had lamented to him many times about all the squats and lunges she did and how she still never achieved an ass even close to what Lev seemed to have naturally. His hands ached to touch her soft skin, trace her delicate lines and supple curves, lose himself in her feminine body.

A chorus of greetings hit him as he stepped outside and Steve launched himself at him, tearing Bucky from his musing as he prepared to collide against a brick wall, reaching Bucky in about two bounds; half-dragging him towards where he and Nat were seated, managing to yank the beer from his hands, open Bucky’s chair, push him to sit in it and slap him on the shoulder all at the same time.

A lot of the parents and kids Bucky realized he knew, mostly from soccer, and Nat and Steve introduced him to the rest. Most of the kids were screaming like banshees in a large bouncy castle set up in the corner of the yard, while others ran around holding all sorts of toy, shrieking at each other at the top of their little lungs.

Two tousled heads of hair, one chocolate brown, the other blond suddenly appeared at Bucky’s side, waving foam swords and screeching his name. It took Bucky a moment to recognize Steve’s boy, Hunter, and King, and then King was scrambling into his lap like a puppy, narrowly missing his balls.

“Coach! COACH!” He bellowed, as if Bucky were miles away across a shadowy moor and they were reduced to using only their voices for communication.

“Hey, Little Man.” Bucky leaned back from the dangerously waving weapon, thighs tensed to protect his jewels. He caught Steve’s smirk at his situation but then Hunter decided to do the same, leaping into Steve’s lap with the same reckless enthusiasm as King and Steve was suddenly too preoccupied trying to protect his own nads from destruction.

“You came to my party!”

“Yeah, buddy. I did.”

Grubby hands unexpectedly wrapped around his neck and Bucky suddenly didn’t care about anything else. Wrapping his arms around King, he basked in the little boy’s enthusiasm, the fondness for this child he’d held in his chest sharpening into something far more profound and intense.

When King finally scrambled back down and bounded away to rejoin his gang of rabble-rousers; Steve, who’d managed to detach his own son and send him on his criminal way as well, slapped his shoulder and grinned widely at him, making Bucky’s cheeks go pink.

Other parents eyed him with small smiles as well, making Bucky clear his throat self-consciously, and then Lev was back, falling into the empty chair beside Bucky with a laugh and a groan and his attention was immediately diverted, pulse beating just a little bit harder as he caught a hint of her scent; reminding him of sunshine and meadows of beautiful wildflowers.

Lev seemed more relaxed and a small, fleeting part of Bucky hoped it was because of him, but he pushed the thought away quickly. He couldn’t feed this wolf anymore; he couldn’t keep up with this idea that there was something between him and Lev. They were joined by tragedy, united by death and that was as far as it should go.

But if that was the way it was supposed to be, why was he so drawn to her? To her son? Why had he found his thoughts turning more and more to them, rushing into his mind first thing in the morning, the last scene to play in front of his eyes before he closed them at night?

Why, if this wasn’t ever supposed to be his, did he want it so badly?

Despite his turmoiled mind, there was enough going on in the backyard for him to push it aside, at least pretend it wasn’t gnawing insidiously at his brain and Bucky was surprised when he started to enjoy himself. He had avoided large crowds, big gatherings, since Maria’s death and had never truly been a social butterfly of his wife’s caliber anyway but, before he realized it, a few hours had passed and even the kids were starting to wind down.

King had looked adorable, pink-cheeked and grinning, as he sat in front of his cake, blowing out the candles with not too much spit thankfully, when his guests had finished singing. Some friend of Nat and Lev’s had made it, and had tasted surprisingly good, although the almost neon icing had taken more than a few hard sucks to completely pull the stain from your fingers.

Each present had been worth a cacophony of yells from both the birthday boy and his guests, but it had been the last one, Bucky’s gift that seemed to have the showstopper. When King had opened the gift bag and pulled out the pint-sized Ronaldo jersey, his eyes had gone huge and, when Lev had leaned over, murmuring to him who it was from, the little boy’s eyes had searched the crowd for Bucky and he’d scrambled from his chair to launch himself at him, crashing into his arms with a howl of pure excited glee.

“Thank you!” As fast as he’d landed in Bucky’s lap, King had again scrambled away, tearing off his shirt to yank on the jersey before snatching the new soccer ball from Uncle Steve and Aunty Nat and scampering away, leading a whole posse of screaming kids behind him

“Good job, man.” Steve murmured, leaning over to Bucky’s ear.

King had then bounded up to him, begging him and Uncle Steve to come play soccer with him and Hunter, and that had taken up Bucky’s attention until Lev called a game over and Bucky had finally looked around, realizing that almost everyone was gone.

“Mom. MOM?!” Hunter bellowed, running up to Nat. “Can King stay over? PLEASE?” He grabbed onto Nat’s shirt and tilted his head up, sending her an angelic look that left no doubt as to who his father was. Steve had used that same pleading puppy-dog look on Bucky last weekend when he’d begged him to help move an obnoxiously heavy fridge from his garage to the dump.

Nat glanced up at Lev, brow raised, and Lev smiled, shrugging. “If you think you can handle both little monsters tonight, go ahead.”

“Get your stuff, buddy.” Nat grinned.

“YAY!!” Both boys screamed, dashing into the house, barely avoiding a crash as they both tried to fit through the doorway into the house at the same time.

Bucky hovered, knowing he should be leaving but not able to muster the energy. He wanted to stay, even a bit longer and so far no one had zeroed in on him and demanded to know what he was still doing here. He watched with a fond smile as the boys reappeared, carrying an assortment of varied weapons and miscellany and shooting at each other with small Nerf guns.

“Did you pack any clothes?” Lev asked dryly, snagging King by the back of his shirt as he scampered by. He was still wearing the Ronaldo jersey.

“Clothes?” King asked, confused, peering up at his mother as if she’d suddenly started speaking a new language and Lev smirked. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

“Have fun today?” Nat asked Bucky innocently, stepping over to lean her back against Steve’s chest, who immediately wrapped his arms around her and dropped his chin to rest on the top of her head as he too awaited Bucky’s answer, a cat that got the canary grin on his big stupid face.

“Yeah, didn’t expect it to be so…”

“Insane?” Steve suggested.

“Loud.” Bucky finished. “I should know better, coaching half of them but still…”

“You’ll get used to it.” Nat replied, a knowing gleam in her eyes that made Bucky frown in confusion at her. Steve mumbled something in her ear, brow furrowed, and she just giggled, pressing a kiss to his chin and whispering back.

Lev reappeared, carrying a small backpack shaped like a Stegosaurus and called King to her. He skipped up, becoming serious when Lev dropped to one knee and gripped his upper arms gently, whispering earnestly and probably telling him to behave tonight. After a moment, she pressed a kiss to his forehead and the boy made a show of squirming away and wiping at his face, but the delighted grin on his face showed his true feelings.

A few minutes later, both yelling boys had been herded into the SUV and Bucky found himself standing alone beside Lev, waving as Steve and Nat backed out of the driveway and drove off with a honk.

“I should go.” Bucky mumbled, wanting to do anything but. He’d been spared any comments by Steve and Nat as they’d bundled the boys into the vehicle, but that didn’t mean he’d be safe later from any ‘observations’ they’d make of how he’d stayed later than them.

“NO,” Lev’s cheeks went pink “I mean…. stay for a bit, please. Today was so crazy we didn’t get any real chance to talk-” She trailed off uncertainly, her cheeks full on red now, matching the heat in Bucky’s face.

Twist my rubber arm, doll.

“Sure, okay.” He exhaled a little shakily, timidly, lips curving into a smile at Lev’s delighted grin.

“Go grab a seat, I’ll be right back.”

Bucky nodded, venturing into the backyard and sitting on the high-backed bench closest to the freestanding patio heater. The warm glow was comforting against the beginnings of twilight chill, while a firepit squatted nearby, ready to be lit as well.

Levi returned a few minutes later, carrying two bottles of beer and a blanket under one arm; then, after the briefest pause to peruse seating, plunked down on the same bench with Bucky and handed him a bottle.

“Here, try this.” She grinned. “An old friend of mine got me started on these oatmeal stouts; I didn’t have enough to go around.” She pulled the blanket between them. “Cold?”

Bucky gestured with his chin to the heater. “Nah, I’m good.”

Lev smiled, turning to face him and pulling her feet up to sit cross-legged. She squirmed for a moment to adjust the cushion at her back then opened the blanket to lay over her lap and settled back with a sigh.

“Thank you for staying.” She said quietly. “It’s nice to just sit down for a few minutes.”

“No problem.” Bucky mumbled, hiding his please grin behind another swallow. “This is good.” He nodded to the sweating bottle in his hand.

“I know, right?” Lev smiled, then fell silent, regarding him quietly long enough that Bucky felt the urge to start squirming in discomfort. “How are you doing?” She asked gently and Bucky knew immediately what she was referring to.

“Getting better.” He replied, his voice low. “Having work and the team to coach definitely helps. You?”

Lev nodded, then swallowed, looking suddenly uncomfortable herself. She glanced up at Bucky from under long lashes, looking surprisingly anxious. “I uh…” she cleared her throat. “I shouldn’t let you think the wrong thing about me and Brock, we…” she broke off, picking anxiously at a cuticle.

Bucky’s brow furrowed in confusion as he waited quietly.

“We weren’t like you and Maria, we weren’t… forever.” she finally continued, looking ashamed. “I was… I had divorce papers drawn up, I was ready to give them to Brock, but then he…”

Bucky stared for a moment, stunned. A thousand thoughts suddenly racing through his head. A small, secret little part of him rejoiced; Levi had been ready to leave her husband, akin to available, before his death. She’d already been looking to move on.

“I’m sorry.” He muttered, knowing his words were totally inadequate and also, not truthful.

“No, it’s fine. We weren’t working out. I… I was young and stupid and thought the college boy I fell in love with would change, grow up with me. He wasn’t a bad guy, we just…. I was hopeful and naïve, and I forgave a lot.”

Anger burned low in Bucky’s chest; what had Levi been forced to ‘forgive’?

“It’s not stupid,” he began and, at Lev’s confused brow lift, continued. “Hoping someone will grow up, most people do.”

“I’m happy he’s gone.” She whispered in a rush then clapped her hand over her mouth, mortified. “I don’t mean it like that,” her eyes were huge. “I just…. It’s extreme yes, but… I don’t have to deal with him anymore, try and work with him over custody of King or anything.”

Bucky nodded, reaching over to squeeze her knee. “I understand, it’s alright.”

Lev wiped at her cheeks. “I mean, he would have fought me on everything, just to be a dick.” Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath, but thankfully Bucky’s words seemed to have mollified her guilt. He never would believe she’d truly meant she was happy Brock was dead, she wasn’t that type of person, even if a small, secret part of Bucky was.

“How’s King doing, if I can ask that?”

Lev nodded. “No, it’s fine, you can ask. He’s… surprisingly good, actually. Brock was never really in his face anyway, never really a hands-on dad, so there wasn’t much to miss.”

“He didn’t help out?”

Levi shook her head, her tears finally stopping. “No. Not when King was a baby waking up all night hungry, or teething, never. He… I don’t know, he looked at King like an accessory or something. An object to compare to his friend’s kids. He didn’t like that King couldn’t walk as fast as his friend’s boy, or that he wasn’t using full sentences as soon as his boss’ daughter. Never mind that they weren’t the same age, King was never good enough for him, he was always pushing him to do more and… sooner rather than later it would have started to mess with his head, make him think there was something wrong with him when there’s not.”

Rage burned low in Bucky’s chest, a whole new facet of hatred for Rumslow. What kind of man treated his wife and kid that way? King was an incredible little boy, smart and articulate, kind and funny. Bucky knew he’d be proud to call King his own.

“I feel so guilty.” Levi whispered, the tears returning. She dropped her head into her hands. “I don’t regret having King at all, and I will always be grateful to Brock for giving me him, but…. What was I thinking? Bringing a child into that type of environment?” She shuddered. “Right up until King was born I hoped my pregnancy would trigger something in him, some switch would flip and he’d stop being such a frat boy, start paying attention to me and my wants, and the baby he’d helped make. But he didn’t, he wouldn’t.” Her voice broke and Bucky stopped thinking about what was right and proper in this situation.

Setting down his beer he scooted towards her, drawing Levi into his arms. She clung to him with surprising desperation, burying her face in his throat and, if the timing weren’t so gloomy, he probably would have groaned at the sensation, at the shiver of delight that shot up his spine.

“Hey,” he whispered, pressing his lips to her hair and closing his eyes, indulging in a heartbeat’s length of adoring the feel of her so close to him. “Hey, stop thinking that. You’re not a bad person, you’re not a bad mom; all that shit, that’s on him; it’s not your fault. He sounds like a total asshole, who wouldn’t love King? He’s such a special little man. Shit, I would’ve-” he broke off, suddenly dangerously close to unsteady ground, that minefield he’d worried about stepping through.

Lev went still in his arms and he could feel her desire to ask him to elaborate, to explain what he’d been about to say.

Shit, I would’ve treated you and King like the treasures you are, I never would have taken you for granted that way.

Levi raised her head; eyes glittering with tears and searched his face. Bucky gazed back down at her, dangerously close to letting everything he was fighting so hard not to feel flood his eyes. Her eyes dropped to his lips for a heartbeat, then back up to his eyes and time stood still.

Fighting himself every inch of the way, Bucky slowly lowered his head, searching Lev’s gaze for permission, some hint that she either wanted this or suddenly was coming to her senses and wanted to stop; but she never wavered and, as their lips touched in a sweet and tentative way, her lids fluttered shut in relief and Bucky let his own fall closed, warmth flooding his body.

Desire raged hot and hard in Bucky, demanding more but he kept the kiss light and gentle, a shy exploration of each other’s mouths, the taste of stout still on their tongues as he slicked his along her bottom lip then plunged gently inside as she parted her mouth for him, a sweet moan rising in her throat.

Pulling back, easily one of the most difficult things Bucky had ever done, he rested his forehead to hers, fighting to calm his breathing, to control his body from all but attacking her.

Lev panted with him, fingers curling against his shirt then one tentative hand reached up to cup his face, rasping against the stubble and he leaned into her touch, letting out a low groan.

“I’m sorry.” He whispered, each word burning like acid. “I shouldn’t have.”

“It’s okay.” She breathed back.

“I… we need to-” He couldn’t force the words and so he acted instead, pushing gently away from Levi and returning to his end of the bench. He shivered at the loss of her body, her heat, against him and Lev watched him for a moment, multiple emotions warring in her eyes.

Part of Bucky hoped she stayed over there, while a bigger part wanted her to close the distance again.

Finally, she relaxed her shoulders and managed a shy smile, then unfolded the blanket to its full size and offered him one side. Bucky accepted, draping the cover over his shoulders, allowing himself this substitution. They shouldn’t be crawling all over each other, kissing, but they could share this blanket, that was bashfully intimate as well and far more the speed they should be going if they did plan on seeing where this went.

Levi settled back against the bench, turning to face forwards. There was space between them now, so much that it would difficult to lean over and nudge the other with their shoulder, but close enough that, if one dared, they could hold hands under the blanket.

For a time they were silent, gazing at the emerging stars, or the muted red glow of the patio heater, listening to the sporadic sounds of life around them, the occasional vehicle, owl hoot or dog bark but then Lev exhaled slowly and spoke, her voice hesitant.

“We were interrupted at dinner, but I asked if you ever wanted children. I don’t want to pry, but-”

“No, its fine.” Lev had bared enough of her wounds tonight, it was time for him to disclose a scar or two. “I did… I do. But Maria wasn’t interested… ever. It wasn’t a big deal when we got together but… as time passed, seeing friends have babies and stuff, I started to think about it more and more. I…” He trailed off, studying his hands knotted together, fingers twisting. “I kept putting it off, really talking about it with her though. It was obvious what she felt, she’d never babysat as a teenager, she never offered to hold any of our friend’s babies, even if I was always asking, just to feel that little bundle, that tiny weight in my arms; I’d test the waters, and hint and stuff, but she would always laugh and be like ‘no way’ and I just… let it go until there was no more time.”

“She never would have?”

Bucky considered a moment. “No, I don’t think so. One of the things I always loved about Maria was her conviction, even if it was against me. No meant no to her, every time.”

Levi gazed at Bucky silently, but he kept his gaze down. He wasn’t ready to show her, she wasn’t ready to see, the emotions crashing through his eyes right now. Finally, he found the strength to say what had been nibbling at the corners of his mind for some time now, a hard truth that had come with hindsight and miserable evaluation during long, sleepless nights, something he’d never even voiced out loud before, not ever really examined up close, just knew deep down, no matter how hard it was to acknowledge verbally.

“I think…. It would have been the issue that pushed us apart eventually… if she hadn’t died.”

He heard her breath catch but was too scared to look over and squeezed his eyes shut, praying that Lev didn’t show kindness right now, some form of acceptance for his stark confession, maybe reach over to touch him, or whisper sweet words, because he was too raw, too open right now for it to do anything but agonize.

“I’m sorry.” She finally murmured, barely audible but he heard her in the silence, felt the pain all the same.

Me too.

#au bucky #au bucky barnes #au bucky barnes fanfic #au bucky barnes fanfiction #au father bucky #au bucky drama #au bucky romance #bucky and levi #bucky and lev #bucky dad #bucky family

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thewriterslament · 6 years ago

Text

writing a resume from scratch

as with literally everything i write, this got really fucking long! like, wordcounter.net estimates this will take 7 minutes to read. so i’ve placed the bulk of this post under a read more

this is not a quick tips kind of post; this is a detailed breakdown of how to write a resume from scratch, with examples that are largely taken from my own resume. this is primarily a resource for people who don’t know where to start with writing a resume, not for people who just want resume hacks

i’m saying all this so i don’t get people in my inbox complaining about how long this is. writing a resume takes a lot of time and effort, and this post does not shy away from that

creating a resume will take you a while, especially if this is your first attempt. don’t be discouraged! take breaks, and don’t try to make the perfect resume on the first try. this tutorial is designed to be completed in rounds

it usually takes me a week to get a new master resume into working order

don’t worry about page length right now. you should make a multipage master resume that contains every relevant experience before making a 1-page resume. after you’ve made the master, you can build custom resumes from it for job applications

this post is best viewed on desktop, because i use nested bullets, and tumblr mobile hates those

let’s get into it!

step 1:

list out everything you’ve ever done that could feasibly count as a resume entry: extracurriculars, jobs, volunteer positions, research, organizations you were a part of (professional or casual), freelance work, long-term hobbies. i will refer to each different experience as an “entry”

for each entry, write where (city + state) and when (timespan) you did that thing

ex. tritones a cappella group, los angeles, ca, august 20xx - present

going forward, update this list as you join or complete new jobs/hobbies/whatever so that you don’t have to wrack your brain a year down the road wondering how long you held down that job or leadership role

step 2:

describe each entry

use bullet points to list out all the things you did within that role. start with the big picture, then move on to the small stuff

big picture: the goal of the role/organization/research, overarching and long-term projects, what results you were trying to achieve + why

ex. “studied the neuroanatomy and synaptopathy of the inner ear to determine the role of glutamate receptors in hearing loss”

small stuff: literal day-to-day tasks, every software and hardware you worked with, any particularly successful moments

basically, walk through a typical day or week in this role and list out every single thing you have to do, even the grunt work.

ex. “used redcap to administer neuropsychological batteries and collect biological data”

ex. “designed and implemented a novel article format that yielded a 10% increase in audience retention”

if you still have access to the original job posting or a corporate description of responsibilities for your role, pull that up and see how much you can paraphrase from it

no duty is too stupid rn. did you google weather forecasts for your boss every week? write it down. you can make it fancy or choose to delete it later

step 3:

fancify this shit

rewrite your bullet points from step 2 with better jargon. tell your employers what you did in a concise yet assertive manner

it helps to break down each point into its most basic components, which you can then generalize or rephrase

ex. “googled weather forecasts” might become “compiled weekly reports on changing data points to assess weather trends over time”

use action words. you can find resources all over the internet for this, but if you’re still struggling, shoot me an ask and i’ll link some of the resources i’ve used myself

caution: you don’t want to sound like you used a thesaurus on every word. make sure you aren’t obscuring the meaning of your bullet points. “googled weather forecasts” should not become “utilized online databases to assemble weekly communications on meteorological variations”

start thinking about how your responsibilities for each entry relate to a) what skills you want to showcase and b) what the employer wants from you. does the employer want you to demonstrate familiarity with online databases, or does the employer want you to demonstrate familiarity with weather forecasts? your bullet point for “googled the weather” will change depending on the answer to these questions

step 4:

look at the big picture

you probably have a metric buttload of bullet points for each entry. now you need to cut that down to what’s relevant. think about which bullets are most impressive, noteworthy, and descriptive of each entry

aim for 3-5 bullet points. any less than that and you have to ask why you’re including that entry. any more than that and the employer’s eyes will glaze over

try to combine bullet points

ex. “identify content and write articles when necessary,” “maintain a pool of freelancers,” and “identify key graphics and maintain tagging structure when uploading articles” all involve the process of creating an article, so they can be combined into: “identify content, assign stories to freelancers, write articles when necessary, and upload with appropriate graphics and tags”

start thinking about tailoring your word choices and bullet points to what the employer is looking for

if you can, pull up the job posting or a sample resume for the job you’re applying to and compare your resume to it. are you using similar language? are you demonstrating similar skills?

jobhero.com is a lifesaver

finally, eliminate redundancy in your resume, both in every individual entry and in the resume as a whole. if a skill can be demonstrated by multiple entries, you only need to list it once

kill your darlings! it may sound harsh, but the things that seem super impressive to you probably won’t even be a blip on the employer’s radar. “but saying i made coffee runs shows i’m dependable and a team player!” the employer isn’t looking that deep, my dude. you can showcase your dependability in your cover letter or your interview

you should redo steps 3 and 4 several times, soliciting feedback from your parents, peers, career center, etc each time

step 5:

add the Other Stuff

education

typically, you should only include institutions for the highest level of education you’ve attended. (undergrad and grad school both count as college for this purpose)

there are exceptions to this, depending on how long you’ve spent at a higher level of education, whether your alma mater will earn you brownie points, whether you had genuinely impressive accomplishments earlier in your life, etc.

once you hit, like, 2 years in college, you should try to get rid of high school achievements and showcase college achievements instead

list the school name, city + state, degree type (BA/MA/etc) and expected graduation date (even if it’s in the future), your major(s) + minor(s), and any related coursework (ie preprofessional tracks, specific courses related to the job). you can list your gpa if you feel it’s relevant, but i caution against doing this once you’ve graduated

ex. (where // indicates a new line) harvard university, boston, ma, may 2020 // bachelor of arts in cognitive neuroscience // minor: english: focus in creative writing // related coursework: pre-medicine, computer science 101 and 102 // gpa: 3.9/4.0 (dean’s list, all semesters)

skills

a list of items without descriptions. you can do a bulleted list or you can list the entries in paragraph form, separated by commas or bold bullets

hard skills: hardware, software, languages (spoken and programming), digital and communication platforms, social media proficiencies, other technologies and devices

ex. microsoft office suite, java, wordpress, slack, familiarity with ap and chicago style

soft skills: general qualities, buzzwords, personality traits

ex. leadership, conflict resolution, time management

certifications and awards

can be one section or two depending on how many of each you have

list each one on a separate bullet point

for each, write the certification or award, the institution that granted it, and the month and/or year you received it if relevant

publications

tbh i just cite my publications in the following format instead of following a style guide

lastname, firstname. “article or chapter title.” book title, publisher (aka company or website). publication date.

if you’re the sole author, you don’t need to list the author’s name

interlude: stretch the truth a bit. don’t lie about having experience or skills you don’t, but if you can reasonably google how to do something, boom! you’re proficient in it. if you worked with two team members who never pulled their weight? you just became the sole project lead. were you a beta reader for anime fanfiction back in the day? you’re a freelance editor, baby!

step 6:

now you have to organize all the entries from step 4

separate your entries into relevant sections. what’s relevant might change based on what you’re applying for

i’ve had, at various points in my life, some subset of the following sections: work experience, volunteer experience, leadership experience, research experience, writing experience, other relevant experience

list sections in order of descending importance

write all entries in reverse chronological order: start with the most recent and work your way backwards

write all bullet points in order of descending importance. unfortunately, i don’t have any quick tips on determining what’s important, but it helps to look at the job posting and see what matters to the employer

i tend to list big picture goals, then personal accomplishments (leadership skills, projects), then daily tasks

step 7:

format this shit

you can find resume templates online or in your word processor. templates serve as a good starting point, but i recommend creating your own format so you can edit and customize it with ease. this will probably involve a lot of fiddling with indentations, paragraph spacing, and moving things around

don’t go smaller than 10pt font

mess around with line and paragraph spacing to get the right balance of white space. if you’re curious about what i use, shoot me an ask and i’ll share my weirdly specific settings

keep an eye out for bullet points with orphan words (ie lines containing only 1-3 words) and get rid of them to streamline your resume

margins can be anywhere between 0.5″ and 1″

consistency is key! make sure each entry has the same kind of spacing. don’t use hyphens in one entry and en dashes in another

in the header, write your name, email, phone number, and address

interlude: save this version of your resume as your master resume. this gives you an unedited list of everything you ever did that you can now pick and choose from when you apply to jobs. update this list every 3-6 months.

step 8:

customize your resume for the job application

unless you’ve been in the industry for several years, your job-specific resume should be no more than 1 page

if you have more than 1 page: compare the job listing and your resume side by side and ask which entries demonstrate your capabilities most effectively, which bullet points are the punchiest, and if there’s any extraneous info

match each job requirement to one bullet point on your resume. then match each bullet point on your resume to a requirement in the listing. get rid of any bullet points that don’t meet either of those criteria. if multiple bullet points match the same job requirement, get rid of the extra bullet points

if you have significantly less than 1 page: see if you can add more bullet points or reformat your resume to introduce some more white space. a 2-column set-up is great for this, with section headers on the left and bullets on the right. do you have any hobbies you’re forgetting about? any soft skills you could add?

emulate the language of the job posting; use the same action words, the same soft skills

coda

your resume should work in tandem with your cover letter, but that’s a topic for another post. maybe in another 6 months i’ll write a post on that, too

always save your resume as a pdf! you don’t want your employer to have access to your metadata

if you made it through this whole post... i’m so sorry lmao but also thanks for sticking with me

let me know if you found this helpful or if this method scored you a job!

#studyblr #adulting #adulthood #job hunt #job applications #applying to jobs #resume #resume writing #studyspo #study blog #mine

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