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enigmalea · 1 year

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Why I Contributed to FujoGuide

If you follow me here or mastodon you may have noticed that I've been reblogging/boosting a lot of posts for something called The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development (@fujowebdev). There's a good chance you followed me or know me from the Dragon Age fandom where I run communities, events, and zines and write fanfic, and you might be wondering why the sudden and drastic departure from my normal content. Why would a writer contribute to something related to webdev? Why have you stopped seeing thirst for Dragon Age characters and started seeing… whatever a FujoGuide is?

The answers to those questions (and more!) are below the cut.

My Coding Journey

I wrote my first lines of code in 1996 (yes, I'm old AF). It was the early days of the internet and tutorials for how to make your own websites were literally everywhere. You couldn't go more than two clicks without finding a how-to written in plain language. But it was painstaking and tedious. CSS didn't exist yet (literally, I started coding about six months before it was released) and even when it appeared it wasn't widely adopted or supported.

It was the "glory days" of Geocities, Myspace themes, Neopets, and Livejournal. If there was a cool site, you could use HTML and/or CSS to customize it. I honed my skills by coding so many tables character profiles for RPs, creating themes, painstakingly laying out user info pages, and building my own site.

Gradually, things changed. Web 2.0 showed up with locked down profiles and feeds you couldn't customize, free website hosts became more difficult to find, and point and click page builders became the way of the web. Shortly after, I took a long break from fandom; frustrated and disappointed with site closures, lost communities, and general fandom wank… it felt like it just wasn't worth it anymore.

I eventually came back, and when I did it meant customizing themes, figuring out how to create tools for my communities, coding tumblr pages (and learning they're not really supported on mobile), and looking at automations for my common tasks. One day, I woke up and thought, "I'm going to make a Discord bot… it can't be that hard."

So, I did it.

An Unexpected Friendship

About a month after I launched my bot to the public, I received a random Discord message from @essential-randomness. A friend had told her about my bot, and she was working on BobaBoard which needed volunteers. I was shocked. First, people were talking about my bot. Second, I wasn't a real coder. I didn't know anything! I just googled a bunch of stuff and got something working. I had no idea what I was doing.

She assured me it was okay. She was willing to teach me what I didn't know - and most of all, that she wanted my help. I took a day or two to think it over, and fatefully filled out the volunteer form. I didn't know if I could be useful or how I could be useful, but I wanted to try.

Programming Is Awful

In the years months that followed, I spent a lot of time in @essential-randomness' DMs complaining about programming… at least once I realized she wouldn't judge me. I was still very much doing things the hard way, taking hours to update a site to add a single link on all the pages. I knew there were easier methods, but I either couldn't find them or once I found them, they were filled with dense jargon which was terrifying.

"An all-in-one zero-javascript frontend architecture framework!" Is that even English? "A headless open-source CMS." Cool. Sounds good. "A full-stack SSG based on Jamstack extending React and integrating Rust-based JS." Those sure are words. With meanings. That someone knows. Not me, though.

I spent so much time looking at what sites claimed was documentation and losing my mind because I had no idea where to even start most of the time. With @essential-randomness' encouragement, I kept at it, experimenting with new things, and jumping in headfirst even when I had no idea what I was doing. And I was so glad. Where I used to struggle keeping one website updated, last year I managed to deploy and update 7 websites. Yeah, you read that right. It was amazing.

The new stuff made it all much, much easier.

An Idea Is Born

Meanwhile, we spent hours discussing why it was difficult to get fandom to try coding. Part of the barrier was the belief you must be some sort of genius or know math or that creative/humanities people can't do it. It is also partially coding communities being unfriendly to newbies and hobbyists; a culture which often thrives on debasing people's choices, deriding them for not understanding, and shouting rtfm (read the fucking manual) and lmgtfy (let me google that for you)- all of which are unhelpful at best and humiliating and abusive at worst. The tech dudebro culture can be unforgiving and mean.

The number of coding-based Discords I've left far outnumbers the ones I've stayed in.

We determined what fandom needed was a place for coders of all skill levels to come together to help and support one another; where they could learn to code and how to join open-source projects they love, and where they could make friends and connections and show off their projects whether they were new or experienced programmers.

And thus… Fandom Coders was born.

What About FujoGuide?

Of course, running a coding group and working on BobaBoard together means we spent a lot of time talking about the state of the web. We both lamented over poor documentation, jargon-rich tutorials, and guides which assume a baseline of knowledge most people don't have. What we needed to do was provide tutorials which start at the beginning… from the ground up (what is a terminal and how do I open it?) without skipping steps. What we needed to do was make those tutorials fun and appealing.

I don't remember exactly the journey it took to get us here if I'm honest. I have no clue who said it first. But I do remember I first started thinking about anthropomorphizing programming languages when we attempted to cast the languages as the Ouran High School boys… and again when I suggested we do a [TOP SECRET IN CASE WE DO IT] group project in Fandom Coders to help people learn about programming.

What I do know is that as last year ended, @essential-randomness became laser-focused on creating our gijinka and moving forward with FujoGuide… and I couldn't say no.

Okay, But… Why Contribute?

To be honest, it's not just that I was around for the birth of the idea. It's ALL of the things in this post - the culmination of three years of frustration trying to figure out what I'm doing with coding, of wading through dense documentation, of wanting to give up before I even start. It's three years of dipping my toes into toxic techbro culture before running away. All added to decades of watching the web become corporate-sanitized, frustratingly difficult to customize, increasingly less fun, and overtly hostile to fans who dare enjoy sexual content.

To sum all of this up, it's the firm belief that we desperately need a resource like this. Something that's for us, by us. Something that builds fans up, instead of tears them down; that empowers them to create for themselves and their communities what no one is creating for them. It is a project I'm deeply passionate about.

And I can't wait until we can bring it to life for you all.

#FujoGuide

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littlejohn734 · 2 years

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How Can I Become a Full Stack Certified Website Developer?

This question comes in because of the confusion in the heart as to where do I start from?

First, You want to know that this walk is hard and it will need self-discipline. So without wasting your time here is your map.

Learn HTML and CSS

Well, take a step into HTML and CSS. This is the initial thing you must learn. In fact, anyone who doesn't tell you to start from here is a Pharisee and not a web developer. You must learn them first because there is no other method by which you can develop into a website developer without knowing these. So you boast to master them, but don't be upset they are simple also. HTML does the Markup and CSS does the Makeup; the style. So what will be your battle axe when you start here? You will need all of the following. Well, for me I will use all of them, but people are different you know google oauth .

A text editor

Any photo editing software.

File Transfer Protocol FTP

Browser

A cloud Storage There are many text editors for web design such as Vim, Notepad++, Brackets, Atom etc. Learn the basics of JavaScript So after HTML and CSS go for basic JavaScript and on this vacation don't get lured by neighboring areas like Node.js and some other frameworks. JavaScript is a programming (also referred as a scripting) language. JavaScript is purposefully limited, I.e it only works inside another application (the web browser). It is a client-side language designed to manipulate web pages. However, the language is evolving more and more which I would not want to go into. Just stick to the basics of JavaScript for now. This is while you will like to learn things like data types and that will be, post, objects numbers, arrays and other related data types like functions, conditionals, loops, and operators. These are the really important things you need to learn in any programming language. Truth is knowing this will help you when you want to learn another programming Learn Basic Web Deployment. You have to get a provided hosting account. Don't complain about money of getting one because I will show you how to build money even as a student. Check out 50 freelance websites where you can locate Jobs and make money. You can also learn how to get a job through networking, YouTube and blogging in this post. This shared hosting will have to be either Hostgator or who host, Namecheap or something you like. Don't forget everyone is different. As you find this, begin learning CPanel basics, SSL, email, FTP configuration and the rest. You will then learn how to upload your project using FTP links Filezilla. And then you will need to get a domain name so that you can hyperlink this to your hosting account and while you are good to go. Now if you have overcome all I have talked about so far, then you can call yourself a web designer. Learn web frameworks You can begin learning any front-end HTML and CSS frameworks like bootstrap or basis or any other one out there. You are supposed to also start learning server-side languages such as PHP, Python or Ruby on rails. You know how to begin on the road of JavaScript frameworks like React, Angular or any other. You also include to the alternative of learning databases like MySQL, POSTGRESQL or any equivalent. Now you have options of where you can go. But I will not leave you here. Out of all these, I have mentioned the one I would advise that you learn is Front End Framework. The reason is that something like bootstraps will save you a ton of time when you are generating UIs.And if you don't have the really good eye for design I.e if you aren't a graphic designer, then these should be your best option. Because that is what I'm suggesting I will also show you some Front End Bootstraps.

Twitter Bootstraps most popular

Zurb Foundation similar to Twitter

Skelton

MUI and

Pure Next, I will decide PHP as my server side language because it's good though it's not the greatest language This is my own choice, you can choose Python or any other server-side language. Node.js this is essentially not a language but a JavaScript runtime. It's new, powerful and fun to use as well. If you know some JavaScript that's fine for you. Now we also have Ruby on Rails, this is greatly remarkable. It's a huge framework but has leveled off. Learn Database Operation System and Version Control In order to set up a data system so that it can simply be restored or manipulated, programmers use a database management system. The data stored in a database can be in the form of text, numbers, or encoded graphics. You must know that it's not required for you to master the server side language before you move to databases because they basically go hand in hand. Here are some Database system you can learn: Relational Databases

-MySQL recommended and popular

-PostgreSQL powerful

NoSQL Databases works similar to JSON

MongoDB

CouchDB

At the level, you need to pick only one and focus on it. With your pick:

PHP/MySQL or

Js/MongoDB

"At this time you are A Web Developer with knowledge of both front-end and back-end technologies". I'm pretty sure that when you get to this position you can:

Create a simple to advance web application.

Build backend APIs

Work with servers

Work with Admin Databases by making tables both using the command line or with phpMyAdmin

Get an excellent job, startup own business or do freelancing. This is the real, full and most relevant guide to becoming a full stack web developer

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izicodes · 2 years

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C# Late Project | C# Study

Hello Hello! ✪ ω ✪

I just thought it would be cool to give an update on my current (late) c# project my apprenticeship gave me, which was due 2nd May and which I still haven’t completed, and just talk about where I am at with the project!

The actual project is:

▢ Completely create a ‘search user’ webpage

☑ Create a textbox in which you can search for the user by their forename

☑ Create a dropdown list - in which you will be given the option to pick which particular user you want information on

☑ Create a gridview - in which a table is displayed with the selected user’s information

▢ Use CSS3 to change how the table looks - anything but the default styling

Key Knowledge To Know:

▢ C# x SQL - How to retrieve data from a database from SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio)

▢ ASP.NET

▢ Gridview, Dropdown List, Textbox, HTML, CSS

This is what I have so far:

[ 1 ]

[ 2 ]

[ 3 ]

* Don’t worry, the actual emails and information are fake! I am using a test database for this!

Problem: It’s not done because I can’t figure out how to add the ‘Job Role’ column to the table because some people have lots of roles and for some reason, I can’t merge the rows into one to fit in the column as one row.

After I figure out that problem, I will move on to the CSS3 part and make it look like the page from the actual company’s website.

What was I having issues with before?

I am a slow learner, even slower if I’m ill for a long time and having meltdowns whenever things go wrong and I can’t find out why, so having all those issues go on for over a month made things worse.

I had issues with binding the textbox and the dropdown list together. They just wouldn’t work at all. I couldn’t find out why. That led to me thinking I’m not right for programming if I couldn’t find out why I couldn’t bind two elements together. It’s so simple and it was but my brain couldn't work out what was going on! ＞︿＜

The solution to that? I didn’t remove the [ ] from the SQL query I put into the .cs file I was working on:

The SQL query in general:

"SELECT Users.Forename + ' ' + Users.Surname AS [Name], Users.ID FROM Users WHERE Forename like '%'+@Forename+'%' ORDER BY [Name]";

I initially wrote in Visual Studio:

DDLSelectUser1.DataTextField = "[Name]";

The correct way was:

DDLSelectUser1.DataTextField = "Name";

THAT WAS IT! I was stuck on this for a good week! I also couldn’t get help from my colleagues because my apprenticeship said this is an independent project i.e figure things out yourself, no matter how long it took!

The website that helped me the most with this problem was: Fill ASP.Net GridView on Selecting Record From DropDownList which helped select and populate the grid!

Everything has been hectic but once I overcome this new problem of the Role column, everything will be fine and once I complete the homework I have to write a one-page essay on the whole experience - I would just be complaining!

But, overall this has definitely been a learning experience and makes me wonder if my fellow developers at work go through the same stress when they can’t find the answer to their tasks? 〒▽〒

#csharp #csharp programming #programming #coding #software developer #comp sci #100 days of code #projetcs #csharp study #backend #html css #html5 css3 #studying #studyblr

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queenlua · 3 years

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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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purplesurveys · 4 years

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1042

survey by egooverdose

Apple Cinnamon: Do you like anything with this flavor? I don’t recall doing so...I like some cinnamon in my desserts, but I think if you threw some apples in there I might back away.

Berlin: What is a foreign country|city you would like to visit? My dream vacation overall is Morocco or Iceland. If we’re talking in terms of what is probably more accessible to me at the moment, I’d love to go to Thailand.

Bill Kaulitz: What do you think of his hairstyle(s)? Oh my godddddddd I haven’t heard this name in a HOT MINUTE lol Andi was completely bonkers over Tokio Hotel and also unhealthily obsessed with Bill’s twin, Tom. When she showed me photos of Bill, my 11 year old self definitely thought his hair was a tad bit too wild but I didn’t judge it or hate him or anything like that.

Bleak Landscapes: What is your favorite type of landscape? Looking into mountains has always had a calming effect on me. That’s why it’s my desktop wallpaper.

Blogging: When was the last time you updated your blog? Idk, by the time I finish and post this survey it probably would turn up to be around half an hour since I posted the last one.

Body Language: Can you generally tell how someone is feeling by his or her body language? Are you good at this? I’ve usually had a good eye for it, yes. I’ve seldom been wrong about it; though to be honest, it’s easiest and quickest to tell when someone is upset, than any other emotion. My radar is strongest for that haha.

Books: What book would you recommend, and what makes it so good? I’d recommend to turn this question over to other survey-takers who read way more than I do and have better books to suggest.

Cairo: Is there any place with an ancient culture that fascinates you? All ancient cultures fascinate me but if given the choice, I would jump at the chance to visit Pompeii.

Carbohydrates: How many grams of carbs, approximately, have you had today? I don’t count those or any of the other stuff in food, so I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Coffee: What is one hot beverage that you like? Mmm, never been a big fan of hot drinks. There are drinks that are meant to be hot, like hot chocolate, that I would order because there’s no other alternative; but what I’d do is wait for it to cool down until it was room temp. I just really don’t like the feeling of something hot touching my mouth, especially after I completely burned the roof of my mouth eating freshly-cooked takoyaki.

Cold: When was the last time you were cold? Right now. Christmas weather has finally made itself at home and I’m not complaining about it.

CSS: Do you know any programming languages? Nope. Not my territory at all.

Emptiness: What is something you like when it is empty? How about full? Nothing relieves me more than seeing my to-do list with all the items crossed out by the end of my shift. If we’re talking of full, it feels great when my gas tank is that :D

Endearing Stereotypes: What are some stereotypes you think are funny? I don’t really find stereotypes funny; I think a great deal of them silently reinforce a lot of hurtful thinking for most groups. One stereotype I’ll hand a pass to, though, just because I’ve lived and continue to live through it and because it feels nice to poke fun at it once in a while, is the ridiculous strictness of Asian parents. That’s a lighter stereotype that’s easier to have a chuckle over; Sindhu Vee’s stand-up work on Indian parenting (”Did you put two spoons of chocolate in your milk? Fine, I am going to go beat myself up. Enjoy your milk”) has me rolling every time because it’s so relatable.

Explanations: When was the last time you were confused about something? This morning when I had a slight, harmless misunderstanding with a client. It was resolved relatively quickly.

Expression: What is your favorite way to creatively express yourself or do you even do this? The most creative thing I do nowadays is embroidery, but even the ones I work with already have a template. I’ve never been creative enough in that I can craft things from thin air.

Fog: Do you like fog, or do you find it bothersome? It’s extremely bothersome when I have to drive through it, but if I’m staying in then it can feel super cozy seeing fog. Fuck, I miss going to colder places :(

Foreign Cultures: What is your heritage? Are you interested in learning more about it? I’m fairly certain I am pure Filipino, maybe a very thin chance of having Spanish blood if my ancestors got into inter-marriages with foreigners but I highly doubt the possibility. I’m already Filipino, so I already know a great deal about my own history.

Foreign Music: Do you listen to music in other languages? Name a band? Yes. English. I’ll go with my fave, Paramore.

Free-Writing: When was the last time you wrote just for the sake of it? September. I didn’t really keep my journaling habit that I thought I was gonna get to develop, and I ended up writing only two entries.

Germanic Languages: What language do you think sounds the most beautiful? What about powerful? Spanish or Italian. Idk if there’s a language that I think sounds powerful.

Germany: Do you think Grammar Nazis come from there? :D Ba dum tssssssssssssss

Hello Kitty: Did you ever watch the animated show? Nah, I wasn’t into Hello Kitty and Sanrio in general. My cartoon show of choice was Spongebob.

Hoodies: What is your "comfort|security" clothing item of choice? My favorite pair of mom jeans that I probably overuse at this point.

Horror Films: Do you like watching scary movies by yourself, in the dark? Not anymore, but I did this a lot in high school when I had been more into my horror movie phase.

HTML: Do you know what HTML stands for? Do you know any funny acronyms? Hypertext Markup Language. Not really. Most of the acronyms I use are slang or shortcuts and aren’t really supposed to be funny per se.

Icons: Do you collect any icons, graphics, or quotes? What sites do you use? No.

Imaginative Streaks: When was the last time you created something? I created a deck for work yesterday, if it counts.

Irises: When you see that word, do you think of the flower or the part of the eye? I thought of the eyes first.

#survey #surveys

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roberteshelman-hakansson · 4 years

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Missing: Her Name Is Amber, But I’m Not Sure

My neighbor appears to be gone.

For a week and a half, her dry coughs—random, but consistent—felt like COVID-19 banging on my door. They were an alarm. But I’m a fairly collected person in situations like these, so they didn’t transform me into becoming alarmist.

Now, though, her apartment is silent. No coughs, and I haven’t heard her front door slam for days—an occurance which would drive me crazy. The sound would reverberate through the otherwise sublimity of my apartment.

Maybe she fled to Rhode Island or the Hamptons, where, in the former, police were surveying license plates, seeking out virus-carrying New Yorkers, and, in the later, wealthy inhabitants have contemplated blowing up the bridges in order to keep out disease-carrying city dwellers—never mind that all those helicopters flying in could be depositing COVID-19 cases in high-end suits and cocktail gowns.

Perhaps my neighbor’s sick in one of New York’s overrun ICU wards or emergency rooms. She’s young, probably in her 30s, but smokes—I smell it through the walls. Points for, points against.

Maybe she’s dead.

Maybe she’s dead inside the apartment.

By now, I’m days into contemplating whether I’m a bad neighbor for not knowing where she has gone—or if she’s even alive—or a good neighbor for even recognizing that something is askew.

I’ll phone the building manager today; I promise.

I’ve always loathed my neighbor, though. She had a cat, which she spoke to constantly. (Am I horrible for speaking about her in the past tense?) I find people who talk to their pets as if they’re human to be unhinged. But that’s not why I loathed her.

Her apartment reeked of cat litter. Even my neighbors on the opposite side of the hallway complained about the smell.

One night, drunk, I banged on her door. She opened it, and I pleaded for her to deal with the cat litter. She was embarrassed and apologized. She would order out for food twice a day, which also made me loath her. So, in the morning, feeling embarrassed, I apologized and gave her a gift certificate to a nearby Mexican restaurant.

As an adolescent, punk music grabbed me. The bands were concerned about the big existential concerns of the time: nuclear war; the politics of Reagan or Thatcher; revolutionary, leftist struggles around the world; the morality of eating meat or conducting medical tests on animals; sexuality and AIDS; capitalism; God and the church; family. The sound of the music and the swagger of the musicians were sharp, angular, subtle like a brick through a window.

Those interests and swagger have remained with me, as a political organizer in the 1990s and early 2000s and as a writer since then.

The COVID-19 outbreak is no different. I think about what this will mean for the prospects of the left and right, whether it represents a rupture in the decades-long dominance of neoliberalism, what impact it might have on Americans’ fixation on individualism rather than the social. So many questions, and everything seems unstable—perhaps.

But I’m also reminded how my fixation on the existential—the broad and big registers of the world—has meant that I’ve often been less attentive to events closer to home.

For example, I think my neighbor’s name is Amber. I'm not sure, though.

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fourteenacross · 6 years

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So, if you don’t follow me on other social media, I had..........kind of a crazy weekend!

If you are unaware, @twentyghosts and I have been friends for twenty years this year. We met after I joined a mailing list she ran because a mutual friend told me it was full of other people who loved Rent. Online fandom was just finding its feet and most fannish stuff happened on bulletin boards, mailing lists, or people’s personal fansites. It was 1999 and we were fourteen and now it’s twenty years later and we’re still friends and we have literal decades of inside jokes and weird shit we’ve made up together (including a successful podcast), but it all started because of Rent.

So, when Renata got a chance to attend the dress rehearsal for Rent Live and asked me to go with her, it felt very narratively satisfying.

Rent was a HUGE part of my adolescence. I can’t overstate that fact. Between 1998ish and 2005, I saw the musical on Broadway (and a couple times on tour) dozens of times. I made many lasting friendships, people I’m still friends with today. I learned all sorts of skills, including HTML and CSS, but also things like how to socially interact with a “celebrity” in a way that’s not massively embarrassing, how to manage a group of people and delegate tasks, how to be an adult human person on your own in the world. I had a really bad break-up with Rent in the mid-aughts thanks to some friendship issues, but it’s been over ten years and I’ve moved on enough to appreciate what the show has given me. This show is a part of my DNA and always will be, for better or for worse.

(And yes, I’m aware that the show has issues and is “problematic,” as the kids like to say, but it’s also a product of its time and it wasn’t like there was a ton of stories about queer people in the mainstream media in the mid-nineties. We’ve come a long way, and that’s good, but it doesn’t negate the importance of the show Back In The Day.)

Anyway.

Renata and I went on this whirlwind three day trip to LA to attend the dress rehearsal. If you watched the show last night, you know that Brennin Hunt broke his ankle during the dress rehearsal and that the bulk of the final aired product was taken from that dress rehearsal. Life is weird!

We managed to squeeze in some touristy things and see a friend from that mailing list we met on twenty years ago, but the highlight of the weekend was, of course, Saturday night’s show. We had zero idea what to expect--Renata won the tickets in a contest and the contest people weren’t super forthcoming with the actual details of what was happening. The people from Fox were a little better, but we still showed up at the Fox Studio lot on Saturday largely unsure of what was going to happen.

We were given red wrist bands and led all the way to the side of the lot to stand on line with other red wristband holders. We ended up seated in the “back” of the stage, where “La Vie Boheme” and “I’ll Cover You” were staged, along with some other little bits of the show. We could sort of see other stuff happening on other parts of the stage, but there were monitors as well, that showed what the cameras were filming as it happened.

The dress rehearsal ran through exactly like a live taping would. An emcee told us what to expect and walked us through how the taping would occur. It started at 5pm on the dot and was expected to end at 8pm on the dot. They would run through the show and stop for commercial breaks, during which we could stretch and talk while they set up the next “act” of scenes. There was a countdown from each commercial break and the show started up again and ran straight through til the next. The emcee warned us that the footage would likely be used in commercials and behind the scenes footage and special features on the eventual DVD release, so if we were sitting next to someone we “shouldn’t be sitting next to,” that we should move. (Of course, it ended up being much more than that, but...that’s life!)

We had joked a lot during the run up to the show. We didn’t know anyone in the cast except for BVD, Vanessa Hudgens, and sort of Jordan Fisher. We didn’t know what to expect or if we’d even like it. We were still half-convinced the whole thing was an elaborate joke.

But, dang, what a night.

Straight up, I started crying when the song “Rent” started. It was just such a visceral moment--I always get amped up and emotional at that part anyway, but I just couldn’t believe where I was and what was happening and who I was with. It was profoundly emotional in a way I can’t quite describe. Like seeing an old friend after a decade apart, I guess.

Overall, I had a fantastic time. I loved the performance--it was super high energy and emotional. I loved most of the changes they made and the way they adapted the material for the medium. I loved how they made the Life Support group a bigger part of the narrative and how they wove “Seasons of Love” into it. The whole thing felt incredibly true to the spirit of the show. I saw people on Twitter complaining about changed costumes and slightly altered lyrics, which was confusing after a bunch of these live musicals where they added new parts and new songs and all that shit. Like, it’s 2019, a lot of kids watching WEREN’T EVEN BORN when Rent came out. I think it’s good that they added narrative context. Things might make sense to those of us who saw it fifty times in 2002, but less so for people who are so divorced from what the world was like when the show takes place.

Anyway, here are some more random thoughts I wanted to get down, including some stuff I said on Twitter:

Mark’s added narration really helped frame the story while simultaneously acting as another barrier that kept him apart from the rest of the group, which really worked for me.

It was super hard to divorce myself from Rent as a stage show when it came to certain aspects of the experience of watching it. For example, I didn’t start applauding after OSG even though it was a great performance because you don’t applaud after OSG! Mimi comes in too quickly and it slides right into “Light My Candle,” so I wasn’t even prepared to do it. Same with a couple other song breaks.

Also, the designated pee break, “I Should Tell You,” was unavailable as we were not allowed to leave the sound stage once filming started.

The audience was CRAZY for Jordan Fisher. Too crazy--there was a quick reshoot at the end because the screaming at the start of “Rent” was so loud it blew out the actors’ vocals. (more on that later)

There were a couple things that I missed, like “You have to get out of the house,” because sometimes when you accidentally create an entire mega ship you can’t ever shake how much you ship the characters, but I think that they did a good job of adding in enough of Mark’s caretaking in that scene that it would have been redundant.

Most of the line changes seemed to be about contextualizing the show for a 2019 audience or removing things that were inappropriate for television, but there were a couple small changes that didn’t seem rooted in either things, but were objectively MUCH BETTER LINES. “You wanna produce films and write songs? / You need somewhere to do it. / It’s what we used to dream about; / think twice before you pooh-pooh it” was switched to “You wanna produce films and write songs? / You need somewhere to perfect it. / It’s what we used to dream about; / think twice before you reject it” AND THAT IS JUST OBJECTIVELY A MUCH BETTER LYRIC. People were so mad at the change and like....chill, my friends! I have probably seen Rent more times than you, stop trying to seem superior by bashing what is an OBJECTIVELY BETTER LYRIC.

Maureen’s costume and props were AMAZING in OTM. Renata said something like, “I can’t believe that we ever thought Maureen WOULDN’T be super over the top for that number!” and she’s right--with all we know of Maureen, ridiculous props and costume felt right on target.

I liked how the use of cameras helped highlight some small details of the show people might have missed in the staged version. At the end of “Happy New Year B,” when Mimi is “comforted” by The Man, Mark lingers in the doorway to the building and witnesses the interaction. A bunch of people I follow on twitter hadn’t even noticed that when they saw it on stage, and I think it’s such an important moment.

Ditto with the staging of “Without You.” The guys behind us at the show were so confused that Roger was in the hospital bed because, despite having seen the staged show multiple times, the minimalist staging of that scene didn’t make it clear to them that Roger was sick for part of that song. (I, on the other hand, wrote at least three fics about it. It was my favorite stupid angsty thing to delve into for like, six months in 2003.)

I had never heard of Kiersey Clemons before this and she legit was one of my favorite parts. She’s amazing.

After ICY:R, which blew the doors off the place, predictably, BVD exited by our audience section and people started spontaneously sobbing and cheering again as he walked by. He was so fucking incredible.

Jordan Fisher’s real life tears during “Halloween” MURDERED ME.

Okay, so, like most dumb nerd kids who got into Rent in 1998, Mark was my favorite character. I loved him, I super over-related to him, I wrote a zillion words of fic about him, etc. And, honestly, I didn’t know what to expect from Jordan Fisher. But my god, if he wasn’t my favorite part of the show. He fucking nailed it. He was perfect. He was able to pull all of the things I love about Mark from all the different performances I’ve seen and completely encapsulate it in what he did. I walked in like, “eh, whatever” and walked out like, “I WOULD DIE FOR THIS ACTUAL TWELVE YEAR OLD CHILD WHO PLAYED MARK TONIGHT.”

My favorite segment of the show is “Halloween” through “What You Own.” Predictably. And it was super on fire. Everyone totally nailed all of the emotional highs and lows of those songs. It was so intense and perfect.

HOWEVER.

The one thing they cut that I got legit mad about was the “For someone who’s always been let down...” Mark/Roger exchange. That exchange is important to me and important to that relationship (no matter how you read it) and I was so bummed that it was cut. Most of the changes/deletions didn’t bother me, but that one rankled.

(As my friend Jen reminded me on Twitter, they could have at least replaced it with the NYTW “Love you” exchange.)

“What You Own” was amazing, even though Renata was bummed they cut the “Compulsive Bowlers” line. (If you are unaware, the main Rent message board, which we were both a part of, Renata for much longer than me, was called “Compulsive Bowlers.”)

Okay, so it was after WYO, off stage, that Brennin Hunt hurt his foot. We had no idea anything was wrong at first; we stretched and sat at the end of the commercial break and there was no countdown. Nothing. A few people started running back and forth across the stage, including Jordan Fisher a couple times. No updates, no information. The lights came up. Still no updates. Finally, someone got on mic and explained that Brennin had hurt his foot and that he was determined to finish the show, so they needed a few minutes to reblock the last couple scenes.

They also informed us at this point that the whole OBC was there (which we knew from social media) and that there was going to be surprise at the end.

I immediately guessed what the surprise was, and was slightly mad at myself for it, because I thought I would be less emotional knowing what was coming.

(Spoiler alert: I was not)

So they brought Brennin out, carried across the stage by two other people with his foot in an aircast. They set him up on the table, got all the lights and things set again, and finished out the show.

There was one terrible/hilarious/terrible moment, where they find out Mimi is sick, where Roger would normally run to the “window” in anguish. Instead, they just cut to Brennin screaming “NOOO!” while sitting perfectly still. We laughed. I feel bad about it, but...I couldn’t help it.

The end was great (another great line replacement: “Time to see what we have, time to see” became “Now we measure how that year has passed,” which is SO MUCH BETTER), etc

And after the finale, when I was already sobbing, they lower this “Rent - 1996 - 2019″ banner and when they raise it, THE OBC IS THERE.

Which, of course I knew the OBC was going to come out and sing SOL. Of course they were. But that did not stop me from losing my shit and full on sobbing.

I still can’t believe that part happened.

Some other highlights: Jordan Fisher and Vanessa Hudgens were so incredibly gracious to their fans. They had very limited free time between “acts” and commercials, but they made a point of giving out as many waves and high fives and smiles as they could in their limited time.

At one point, during a commercial break, Jordan Fisher walked by where Anthony Rapp was sitting in the audience and stopped to shake his hand and talk to him and I got very emotional watching that.

Brandon Victor Dixon is just............so wonderful??? At everything???

We had detailed instructions on when to hold up our candles during “Will I?” and they told us many times that we couldn’t take them with us, but Renata and I were annoyed that we were unable to steal posters and screenplays, as is our right as annoying Rentheads.

(If you know a person who went to Rent like it was their job as a teenager, they probably have at least one “poster” or “screenplay” or “stash” that was stolen from the set.)

They had a lot of nice nods to the classic costumes in places, especially on the ensemble.

I loved how diverse the ensemble was wrt age. That’s not something you get a lot of in the stage show (which makes sense given the cast limitations and needing understudies, etc) that really added to the show.

And, listen, you can take the shipper out of the fandom, etc, but dang, I remember why I accidentally started a fandom revolution by creating Mark/Roger. Mark is SO in love with Roger, my friends.

(Also, my rarepair, Mark/Benny, which I will forever love as well.)

Everyone was so talented and gracious and really seemed to be putting their all into what was happening. The energy was intense and amazing and electric.

They needed to do one quick reshoot at the end because, like I said, the cheering at the start of “Rent” blew out the sound of the first few lyrics. They reshot just starting from “The power blows...” and asked the people in the SRO pits to not ACTUALLY scream this time, but for everyone else to scream and cheer like we did the first time. Jordan Fisher ran through Mark’s first verse and then started in on Roger’s first verse before they cut it and thanked us all for our help, and I stg I’d watch that child’s one man show version of Rent. He was super into it 😂

And I’m gonna finish with this, cut directly from Twitter:

Look, I know this show has issues and is, as the kids like to say, problematic, but it literally brought me almost every good thing I currently have in my life. I met Becca through Rent fandom a hundred million years ago, and that's why I moved to Boston with my amazing Boston friends. I met Renata through Rent fandom and that's why I have a podcast. I met SO MANY PEOPLE who are still dear to me because of this show.

Some of my longest fandom relationships - @isjustprogress, Jen, Priscilla, and a ton more I'm probably entirely forgetting because I'm so emotional right now. If we start breaking off tangentially, I know @leiascully through Renata, and @coffeesuperhero through Mary. I know all of my Boston friends because of Becca. I know so many of you because of Renata and the podcast.

Rent was a thing that happened to me at the exact right time in my life, first online and then in person. I feel like a huge amount of my independence as an adult started to bloom when my parents would let me go into the city alone to meet up with Rent friends. This show is a part of who I am, for better or for worse, and getting to see that performance last night, with one of my best friends in what will be the twentieth year of our friendship was just...enormously powerful and special to me.

So that is............pretty much all of it! I might try and jot down more notes as things come to me, but I am very hungry and want to write a few more words of fic today, so I’m leaving it here for now. Thanks for reading this nonsense, if you did, heh 😅

#stuff about me #rent live #rent #apparently #stupid stuff renata and i make up #twentyghosts

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gaslightgallows · 5 years

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portraitoftheoddity replied to your post: *chants* I will not strangle my well-meaning...

mood

UGH. Sorry you’re dealing with this as well. :/

And sorry because now I’ve had coffee and I’m going to rant.

This woman... this woman.

So, I told the newsletter coordinator yesterday that I'd finish the webpage first thing in the morning, and she said okay. Logged in this morning to discover that Well-Meaning Coworker had finished it after I left, and copy edited it. And then sent me a list of the copy edits, complaining about “doesn’t the coordinator proof these before she finalizes them?”

NO. SHE DOESN’T. BECAUSE SHE EXPECTS ME TO. BECAUSE IT’S MY JOB.

Also my job: to take all the articles and photos and video links and cobble them together in html for use on our decade-old website that doesn’t want to play nicely with ANY OF IT. Meaning that I spend most of the week leading up to the newsletter launch wrestling with div tags and grids and 5 layers of embedded CSS in a legacy system that needs to be taken out and shot.

Once that’s done, then I can copy edit. In theory.

Except my well-meaning coworkers keeps coming over and critiquing how the page looks WHILE I'M STILL FIGHTING WITH THE HTML. And no matter how many times I say, "It's not done, I know there are still issues", it doesn't help.

Because she’s the 2nd worst control freak I’ve ever worked with, and I’m so tired of it. It genuinely feels like she doesn’t want me to have anything to do with this project, like, she’s begrudgingly letting me build the page, and then she swoops in at the last minute and touches everything and it’s hers now! So she can feel good about herself.

I swear, I am going to deliberately start hiding .shtm files in inappropriate subfolders just so I can finish them IN PEACE, her own work be damned.

#portraitoftheoddity #gaslight talks to people #*angry grumbling*#office hell

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letstalkmediastuff · 3 years

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WordPress is my daily companion in my working life. I currently maintain a total of four WordPress sites and feel confident in using this platform. Accordingly, my joy was great when I heard that we would be taking a short detour into WordPress alongside programming with CSS and HTML. But it quickly turned out that there is a big difference between creating a website and filling it with content. Too often I heard my colleague swear when he had to adjust something on the theme of our website and thought silently: that can’t be so hard! And it’s not necessarily difficult, but it is complex. WordPress offers complete freedom in designing a website, which has both advantages and disadvantages. While you have the possibility to build the website of your dreams, for example by creating your own theme and integrating special effects, at the same time these possibilities can easily overwhelm you: Where do I start? Which theme should I choose when they are all so beautiful? And what exactly do I want my website to look like? I realised relatively early on in my work with WordPress that it is just as important here as when working with HTML and CSS to first think about the content before creating the website and to record initial ideas for the design in sketches. With a model, all the options can be narrowed down more quickly and effectively, which makes it easier to create.

An additional challenge we have is being tied to the university server. As I am used to uploading all media directly to the WordPress site via the media library due to my daily tasks, I have to rethink this. Nevertheless, these extra steps help to understand the processes behind websites. Even though working with WordPress is fun, I am now aware of the effort behind the creation. So the next time my colleague complains, I will pity him appropriately.

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mineofilms · 3 years

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nées arches

nées arches is Greek for “New Beginnings…” Over writing about the year in review, which contains me, my bullshit, and my problem with the world, I plan to write about “New Beginnings…” I am going to write about what I feel I want to do, strive towards, and accomplish in 2022.

I have spent this year being respectably active in the blog circuit. Before this, I wrote 11 blogs this year. Probably closer to 15 if you count the mini-blogs I wrote on certain social media platforms that really weren’t blogs, more like bulletins. This will be number 12, officially, and I am fine with that. What I am not fine about is how many of those blogs are more about me, for me, than my audience, my friends, family, my therapist, and my potential writing career at some point. I spent too much time complaining about my health, the Government, politics, medical industry bullshit.

I have spent just as much time being on this MySpace clone called SpaceHey, which is exactly what you think it is. It looks like MySpace, sort of behaves like MySpace, but it is NOT MySpace… It’s just a good tribute to that platform. There I spent a lot of time retooling my HTML/CSS skills, interacting with strangers who are not in the “Cancel Culture” groups or a Karen/Kevin, who are people of any sex between an identity crisis, menopause, and retardation. People that are not batshit-hypersensitive and require the rest of the INTERNET to follow suit.

I probably wasted more time, online, trying to better understand this narrative of NORMAL-being groups, um, tribes, of hypersensitive nonsense about culture change, cancel culture, Kevin/Karen mentality of not being able to mind their own business. These tribes do not believe in prerequisites anymore. In order to be a Doctor, one has to go to medical school. To be a lawyer one has to go to law school and pass the bar exam. To be a musician, at some point one needs to learn how to read/write music, practice their instrument(s) to become said musician.

Not these people.

They say something that they want and they just keep saying it regardless if it is right or wrong, true or false, until the lot, us, accepts it. Well… I DO NOT ACCEPT THAT…

I am, and always have been, grounded in Logic, Common Sense, Critical Thinking & Problem Solving…

Again, this woke, extreme left, cancel culture, poop logic, Kevin/Karen, Racist or Anti-Racist, which is racist, mentality trying to re-educate the country on social justice with their bullying/name-calling, misinformation tactics of control. I leave the bitchin’ and complaining part of the blog with this quote by John Cleese, the dude from the Monty Python…

“If people cannot control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people’s behavior. When you’re around super-sensitive people you cannot relax and be spontaneous, because you have no idea what’s going to upset them next… The political correctness has been taken from being a good idea; which is, let’s not be mean, particularly, to people who are not able to look after themselves very well (mentally/emotionally). That’s a good idea… Flash-forward to now, to the point where any kind of criticism of any individual or group can be labeled cruel (domestic terrorist). The whole point of comedy/humor is that ALL comedy/humor is critical, even if you make a very inclusive joke. If we start to say, we musn’t offend them! (Whomever “them” are)… Then humor’s gone, we’re living in the book 1984.” ~John Cleese

Forward onto nées arches (new beginnings…)

I have a pretty long laundry list of goals I want to work on in 2022. Of course, my health is the number one concern, but I have spent all of 2021 and 4 of my 12 blogs on the subject. I am going to break down my project goals; things I want to work on that have been left alone for too long.

While not working on school materials I will be focusing on more blog writing. I have a few that I had planned to write this year, but the holiday really cramped my style and time for writing blogs.

I have notes I have been gathering for months on many different subjects and topics… Do Ghosts Have Mass? If so, by how would we manipulate it? This came from when I watched the 1982 Sidney J. Furie film “The Entity,” starring Barbra Hershey. This to me was one of the scariest movies I had seen. It’s on most of my top horror films. The story is based on a novel of the same name about an alleged poltergeist that happened to a single mother and her children. Where the mother reported she had been violently raped by one or more ghosts in her home on multiple occasions. The movie does a fantastic job of making it extremely unsettling to watch this in a narrative. I was far too young to be seeing this movie in 1982, I was 4, but don’t teach a 4-year-old how to use a TV then hahaha. The movie goes off the rails when the scientists involved in the case attempt to trap, verify, freeze and manipulate a ghost.

This part of the movie poses the question, do Ghosts have actual physical mass in our reality? I wanted to explore that “if” Ghosts do have mass then that mass must obey the laws of physics. If it has mass, then it exists in this reality and can be manipulated under the correct circumstances.

I have learned that ANYTHING that is currently impossible can be “made to be possible” if all the engineering and technical challenges preventing its possibility are overcome. So if Ghosts have mass what would it take to manipulate that mass? That is what I will be exploring there.

The perspective of a child is something, in general, I have been interested in exploring as well. Children are children because they have not grown to be an adult. We look at this literally, but what if we looked at this in a digital world. What would be the difference between a child in the digital world over an adult? DATA…

You ever have that thought that if you could go back to grade school or high school, now, with the current level of knowledge, experience and do it all over again? Be it in a time travel situation or just poof, you are a kid again but trapped in an adult’s body. I plan to explore a little bit on what happens to that child-like perspective when you see/do something for the first time. We see things as adults much differently than a child does.

A child doesn’t nearly have the level of sophistication of a filtering system than us adults do. We see through the eyes of time, what we experienced, and what we know. A child does this too but on a much thinner wavelength. If we could upload that to our children, would they be able to understand it? Hey, it’s a good question and I am looking forward to seeing how this one plays itself out…

Staying with the digital world. I want to explore ACLs – Access Control Lists and how we can think correctly following their attributes. The Simple Definition of An ACL Is; can be used to manage and filter traffic that enters a network, as well as traffic that exits a network. The primary use of ACLs is to identify the types of packets to accept or deny. It is a list of IP Addresses used to “Control Access” to a network or specific device. These can also be used to select specific traffic and/or all traffic that comes into a network device(s). Think of ACLs like a traffic cop. You get pulled over for speeding and/or other offenses. The ACL actually prevents or allows said traffic based on the rules. Allow/Deny… I plan to look into how these simple computer-based rules work in the real world, with real information that is not stored digitally…

Been wanting to dive back into the dating pool since I got out of the hospital in July 2020. I realized that I do not wanna be alone anymore, but at the same time, I do not wanna be with someone just so that I am not alone. I do not function well in that situation. I am actually better off alone than being with someone for loneliness’ sake. It got me thinking about Internet Dating and how it has changed over the years and what/why/how people make assumptions about people that are on dating apps or what they believe a person “is” based on that little blip of a write-up and a few pics. People seem to make very big assumptions about other people based on the very little. That is what I plan to explore. This might even go hand and hand with my blog on The 3As of The Delusional Mind . People can be straight-up delusional on those apps!!! They must be, with some of the nonsense I have seen and experienced.

At some point, I want to discuss “What is Art in 2022” As Perceived From An Idiot… This will dive into a small delusional group of people on social media that believe themselves to be “real working artists.” These people do not really have any training in creating art or anything, but they downloaded TikTok and now claim to be a working artist. An example of this… People who do not understand song structure in music, but try to create something on some digital platform that mixes/arranges samples and putting them in a way where the creator thinks they made a song or music, but to anyone that is a real musician and gets paid to create music not by promotional ads/clickbait systems, will laugh and call it garbage because it is.

Now the counterargument is pretty solid, what is art? What is good, what is bad? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Hey, those are some good points. I plan to explore that deeper and come from an objective place, but yet, still stay grounded in Logic, Common Sense, Critical Thinking & Problem-Solving… Lastly, My Goddamn Opinion…

I also will discuss why it is important to make it clear and concise why we cannot let people off the hook with that fake praise and accomplishment. You know how many fake music people are out there literally trying to make money, a career out of some really untalented content they posted on IG, FB, TikTok, SC, YT, Reddit? Millions of nonsensical videos/songs out there claiming to be art. No, it’s POOP, literally poop.

Would you tell someone they are pretty if you believed they were not pretty? Well, you probably would in 2022, but I would not, why? Because it isn’t true. I understand that a review or comment can harm and hurt, but if one is serious about their craft, they need to be able to handle things when people refuse to buy into it.

It is the same thing as the prerequisites statement I made earlier in the blog. If people want to be artists/creators in 2022 culture, they do not go get training or go to school or even practice as they should. No, they just keep saying it regardless if it is right or wrong, true or false, until the lot, us, accepts it. If you are on these platforms then I am sure you know what the heck I am talking about.

This one is probably gonna be my biggest subject to tackle. God… Well, more like, GOD, God, god… All 3 have different spelling/grammar and definition. GOD, is the creator of the Universe, Universe means everything, everything inside and outside of the Universe. The supreme entity of EVERYTHING… This isn’t a God based on religion.

It’s just EVERYTHING, INFINITE.

I-N-F-I-N-I-T-E…

God, is your typical God based on whatever religion you believe in. This God is not the literal creator of the Universe. This God, if it did create this Universe, would be outside of the Universe. This God would not be able to influence our current Universe from the inside, it would be outside of it, therefore outside of physics. If something is inside our Universe then it must obey the laws of physics. The exceptions are black holes, singularities and if humanity, us, does not have a full understanding of physics, which we do not, so this God could also still be a real possibility, just no actual “physical evidence” to suggest it. This God is the God of BLIND FAITH. Blind Faith could be a blog all by itself, but I will do GOD and God justice ( smiles).

Now god, god is nature. This god is the god of shape, sacred geometry. Sacred Geometry is geometric patterns that exist all around us – they are the perfect shapes and patterns that form the fundamental templates for life in the universe. Plato’s solids (platonic shapes) are said to form the basis for every design in the universe, even down to a molecular scale. Sacred Geometry tries to explain the possible shapes to the Universe as: 1) A flat Universe (Euclidean or zero curvature.) 2) A spherical or closed Universe (positive curvature.) 3) A hyperbolic or open Universe (negative curvature).

Sacred Geometry also attempts to explain consciousness. Not human consciousness, per say, but the concept of consciousness itself. That nature itself is a conscious entity.

I will not be stopping here with these world views of GOD, God, god, the shape of the Universe and consciousness; but I will go into the fiction world as well. One of my favorite science-fiction writers Arthur C. Clarke takes a stab at consciousness with his interpretation of the birth of the Starchild in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the monolith absorbs Dave Bowman into “unbound consciousness.”

The last tie-in to the GOD Theory here will be Multiverse concepts with Telomeres. Telomeres are the end of a chromosome. They are made of repetitive sequences of non-coding DNA that protect the chromosome from damage. Each time a cell divides, the telomeres become shorter. Eventually, the telomeres become so short that the cell can no longer divide. In the conversation of the multiverse; Telomeres are the space-time/dimension number for when this will happen to you; moment of death.

As the year progresses I will dive back into political commentaries about our society. I want to write about people, “UNwoking” themselves. I am calling it. UNwoke Yourself… I understand the Right hijacked the word WOKE and use it to describe the extreme left. I know where WOKE came from and how it used to be used before the social justice phrase became a phrase. WOKE was officially added into the dictionary in 2017 and its definition is listed as “to be awake to sensitive social issues, such as racism.”

However, the word and its use date back to at least a 1962 New York Times article; “phrases and words you might hear today in Harlem”. A novelist William Melvin Kelley, (Black Man), wrote the earliest known use of the word under its new definition in an article titled, “If you’re woke, you dig it”.

In 1972, in a play by Barry Beckham, “Garvey Lives!” a character says he’ll “stay woke,” with the line: “I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke. And I’m gon’ help him wake up other black folk”.

In the modern-day the word also was used by Conspiracy Theorists to describe they were “in the know” on a subject or theory. Other close definitions are “well-informed, up-to-date.” These two are still accepted as definitions of the word.

You can see how crazy this one word’s journey through existence has been. It was used by a black writer, in a black story, other than that it has no association with racism, but here-we-are… So I will go full-on against both the Left and Right on this one. I personally, use the word to describe all the tribal people I tend to talk about here and on other blogs.

I can either write Three or four sentences of words to describe them or we can keep it simple and just use one universal word that is now openly accepted as much as the words up and down mean to their respective meanings…. WOKE… UNwoke Yourself in 2022…

The last blog I have notes for is for Fact = Fact-Checking. I have talked about or at least demonstrated on most of the blogs written over the past year on what a Fact is, and how we are supposed to prove a fact to be a fact. I plan to write a blog just on this process. Not sure how much copy/paste I will do from other blogs. My other blogs that include these concepts are about other things. Proving something to be a fact usually comes in on all those subjects.

This blog would be solely on what is a fact? How do we prove a fact to be a fact? How do we test it to be a fact? How do we test it to NOT be a fact? All that stuff. I should call Bill Nye the Science Goofball to explain this one…

Onto bigger projects… Before I got sick I was working on my first novel. It’s been in my head since the year 2000. I took a bunch of notes in an old Notepad.exe file from a Windows 98 machine I wrote this in back in the day and began work on it in middle 2015. With all my life issues I didn’t get back to working on it till May/June of 2020. Then I got sick and I haven’t touched it since. I plan to go get back on it.

My working title as of now is “The Great Change” and it is the story of first contact. The first time humans meet an intelligence from outside the Earth. You can read the Prologue here “The Great Change.” At the moment that is all, I am willing to discuss about the project.

I have some other writing projects coming up. I want to convert to spec script my interpretation/iteration of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2061: Odyssey Three. 2061 picks up after the events of 2010: Odyssey Two, where the “Big Brother” Monolith transforms Jupiter into a mini-sun to give Life on Europa a chance to develop. Man vs Monolith meet again 50 years later… I used to be Dave Bowman…. End Transmission…

I want to do a second entry on my “THROUGH the Sick Mind’s, Eye” Horror Short-Story Series. I have one entry now, from 2016, “Close Encounters of the 8th Kind.” “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” ― Alice in Wonderland.

This is the story of Jack’s point of view of being abducted by ALIENS… My second entry I am calling it “The Noisy Alive.” It will deal more with ghosts, demonic possession. Could be a B-side, of sorts, to the 1999 movie “End of Days” tone. “If ever there was in the world a warranted and proven history it is that of vampires.” ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788).

I have never been one to think of myself as someone that might be able to write horror. However, with all my poor luck, health, whatever you wanna call “it,” I have felt, seen, experienced, and imagined great horrors this reality can present. With that said, if I can write about that in a productive way and scare the crap out of people while I do it for my own entertainment, even if I am commissioned to write for someone else, sign me up…

Cheap Therapy… “We’re on to Cincinnati…” ~Bill Belichick

Closing out another year of frustration. However, it could be worse and I guess I know that it isn’t worse, because I know exactly what that looks like. I plan to leave 2021 with a smile on my face, but behind the smile, I will be in deep thought. Looking towards… Remembering… Remembering… Remem… Remember: the light at the end of the tunnel may be you, nées arches…

“Hell is other people… By the mere appearance of the other I am put into a position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the other.” ~Jean-Paul Sartre

nées arches (End of the Year Blog, 2021) by David-Angelo Mineo 12/30/20212 3,428 Words

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dancingskys · 6 years

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So at university we have some practical courses where we have to attend and hand in tasks we got from the supervisor.

I have four of them this semester and one of them is in Mediainformatics (is that a good translation?) and we have to use HTML, CSS and Java Skript. We are working on a digital CV (uhu exciting) and gradually make it more complex.

We always get a sheet with the exact task written down and the requirments to pass every time the course takes place.

My professor is not the same guy who supervises the practical course but he always gives us feedback that he got from the other guy so last time he just sighed sadly and said: “You know... Mr. XXX is happy that people are doing alright but he really wants you to invest more time and do more than just the basic regirments. He wants you to make the design look nice and really work on it.”

And I was like BITCH, this is university, not school. We do the basic shit and that’s it! (not that I did more than the basic shit in school but.... who cares)

Seriously what’s he complaining about? x,D My CV looks nice, thank you, and I fullfilled all requirments that were written down and even added colors! So just take that and be happy to be graced with my beautiful CV

I have three other practical courses where we need to create an entire fake person with accounts, internet activity and all that shit and document every little detail, we have to write a screenplay and do accounting stuff so just take my freaking CV and leave it at that x,,,,D

#sky's diary #am I the only one who has this mindset?#like... it's not liek he can do anything because we all complete the tasks but he's so... urgh #that kind of person who is always overly nice but once you are 30 seconds late you're suddenly an awful person

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nerdwiththehat · 6 years

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New Media Incoming

Guys I’m so behind on personal posts I literally have a post from the beginning of last school year about how nice my dorm was that I never published (I’ll bring the highlights up in a bit once I publish this post), along with a post about The Shape of Water that just began with “RETRIBUTION. FISH DICK WON BEST PICTURE” which I get is a highly reductionist way of talking about one of my favourite pieces of media from last year outside of like, I dunno, Blade Runner 2049 which was gorgeous.

Okay, so, updates time, and more stuff is incoming, I swear. I haven’t just spent the last year doing sweet fuck-all.

First things first - I’m not dead? I have a different romantic partner than the last time I posted about stuff on Tumblr, I’m way more active on Twitter now (follow me on Twitter pls I crave that mineral attention), I’m still in the midst of goin’ to school and doin’ that learnin’, I’m now working even more full time than I was previously, though now I’m working for an ISP in Boston, as opposed to working with the unemployment connector as the underpaid unofficial in-house IT woo woo. Of course, I’m still doing events and PR and all that other fun stuff. So, like I said, new media incoming! Here’s what I’ve been working on.

New Website

I got a new website! I’ve been meaning to fix my old website for a while now, because I was really unhappy with just plopping a Wordpress bucket on whatever hosting I had, and now I’ve actually gone and just made a very simple HTML/CSS/JS thingy and plopped it on there and it looks great! And I’m proud of myself for getting everything set up without an issue, aside from the whole “GoDaddy is a terrible host and doesn’t support all this nice SSL and whatnot” so I’m going to take my ball and play somewhere else (proooobably BlueHost because dang cheap) where I can get my Let’sEncrypt cert working and everything woo security and stuff.

New Projects

You’ll notice I’ve got a “Projects” section in my website - I’m working on some new stuff! I’ve got a webtoy I’m still finishing the upload on from school that I’m “proud” of because I thought it was fun to work on, that’s going to get rolled and popped into my site. It’s a fake company site for an engineering company that I made up and I thought it was hilarious.

There’s also some really exciting developments with media I’m working on - I’ll put up a much larger prospectus in a bit, but Monica @justdontfeelincredible and I are working on a podcast-type-thing in the style of one of my all-time-favourite web series, This Exists. Some time in the middle of last year, we found out about the majestic spirit Kirin J. Callinan, and his insane artistic journey. What started as, I imagine, a hilarious 1 am conversation on “Hey you know that video with the transparent screaming cowboy?” ended up in a 30-minute laugh-fest and “He’s doing WHAT on the cover of his album?!” So, we ended up with the working title of Rabbithole://, exploring the weirdness online, and jumping down the rabbit hole on content from weird Australian singers, to online communities, to the meme of the week - we’ll figure it out. Right now, we’ve got at least a few fun stories to tell, and we’ll be recording some more soon - I’ll update when there are any updates to share.

I’m sure I’ll get a personal rant/post/thing incoming soon, but for now, my other instagram, sadbadhatter, is the place to find that content. It’s like a finsta, if a finsta was all about trains and complaining!

#update #podcast #website #personal #work #media

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nervousavenueenthusiast · 4 years

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Xcode For Mac Iphone

Xcode For Windows (12 Ways To Build IOS Apps On PC)

Xcode For Mac Iphone 6s

Xcode For Ios

Download Xcode 11 For Mac

Mac Install Xcode

Xcode Iphone App

Mac Xcode

While there isn’t an official release of Xcode for Windows, I’ll show you step by step how to do iOS development with Xcode on a Windows PC using the best so. The Xcode IDE is at the center of the Apple development experience. Tightly integrated with the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, Xcode is an incredibly productive environment for building apps for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Xcode provides everything developers need to create great applications for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Xcode has unified user interface design, coding, testing, and debugging all within a single window.

Zoom in. Or out. Or don't, it's your life.

Apr 21, 2020 Developers use Xcode to create apps for iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS. However, Xcode is a complex app and has only ever been available on Mac. Buildwatch is a menu bar app that lets you keep an eye on your compile times throughout the day. With a glance, you can see how much time you spent building in Xcode.

Toggle between hourly, daily, and weekly views right from the menu bar. Need a birds-eye view? Not a problem. Open the 'More info' window and go all the way back to the beginning of time.

Pin stats that matter to you.

With just a glance at your menu bar, see how much time you spent building in Xcode today and how many times you've built your apps. Or, if you prefer, just display a minimal watch icon.

Show and tell.

Hover over any segment of a graph for a deeper look at the data behind it. We'll tell you how many builds there were and how long they took.

Totals aren't the total story.

Cycle between average build time, total build time, and number of builds by clicking the header anywhere in the app.

In the grand scheme of things..

Dvd making for mac. Select from a dropdown of all your recent projects to get detailed stats, or combine all your schemes to see the bigger picture.

Not just for novices.

Use the default derived data location if you're new to Xcode, or customize it for your setup if you're a pro who needs a little extra control.

Start logging at login.

Check a box in Preferences to make sure Buildwatch is running before you get your morning coffee. That way, you'll never miss a single build.

Private, always.

We'll never track, sell, or even be able to see your data. Your apps are your business.

You can make an app for iOS even if you’re on a PC running Windows 10.

Xcode For Windows (12 Ways To Build IOS Apps On PC)

I wish I had known this when I first started because I delayed myself for 3 years before biting the bullet and buying a Mac.

Had I known about running Xcode on Windows or about the solutions below, I might’ve started building iPhone apps much earlier!

Rent a Mac

Before committing to buying a new Mac, you can actually “rent” one for development. You’ll remotely access the Mac and Xcode through your PC.

It’ll be like having the Mac desktop in a window on your Windows Desktop.

The really nice thing about this option is that the cost is really low and it’s the fastest option to get up and running.

If you decide that app development isn’t for you, you just cancel your plan.

Xcode For Mac Iphone 6s

1. MacStadium These guys were featured in the recent Apple keynote when they introduced the updated Mac Mini! They have the newest Macs available.

(Use coupon code “CODEWITHCHRIS” for 50% off your first month. If you do, please let me know in the comments below. I’ll get a small kick back at no extra expense to you so thank you for supporting my site!)

If you go down this route for iOS app development, make sure you get my Xcode cheatsheet with references and keyboard shortcuts for Windows users.

There are a couple other companies that provide this service:

2. MacInCloud This is the most well known service out of the three. You won’t have to install Xcode because it comes preinstalled. You can also do pay-as-you-go so it’s a pretty low commitment. Some people complain that it’s slow but you can try it out for yourself since it’s only about a buck an hour!

3. XcodeClub XcodeClub is run by Daniel who is a passionate developer himself. From the reviews I see, the service is fast and friendly. The pricing is less flexible than MacInCloud and you’ll have to commit to at least a month.

Virtualize MacOS

If you’re a little more technically savvy, you can use virtualization software and run a “virtual Mac” on your PC.

The services above are essentially doing the same thing on their servers and then they charge you a fee to access the virtual machine.

By setting it up yourself on your own PC, you essentially cut the middle man out of the equation.

Unfortunately it does take a little bit of technical know-how to get this up and running.

The two most popular pieces of software to do virtualization are VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation.

You can download them below and then use Google to find a guide on how to install the latest MacOS (Mojave) with either VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation.

After that, spin up your new virtual Mac and download Xcode. This is as close as you’ll get to running actual Xcode on Windows!

Xcode For Ios

4. VirtualBox VirtualBox is open source software which means that it’s free. That probably explains why it’s a lot more popular than VMWare Workstation when it comes to running MacOS on your Windows machine!

Download Xcode 11 For Mac

5. VMWare Workstation Unfortunately you’ll have to pay for this piece of software and at the time of this writing, a license costs about half the price of a brand new Mac Mini which is perfectly suitable for iOS app development. I would recommend you try VirtualBox first or try to buy a used Mac Mini.

Build a “Hackintosh”

You can also build a “Hackintosh” which is a PC that has been customized to run MacOS.

Ultimately, this behavior can lead to further high risk infections - users might inadvertently visit malicious websites. Additionally, cyber criminals use such tactics to increase the traffic of certain websites, which allows them to generate revenue through advertising. Proxy for mac server download. The presence of Proxy Virus significantly diminishes the browsing experience and can lead to further computer infections.

This requires the most effort out of all the options presented so far but it can work for someone who wants a separate physical computer running MacOS.

6. Hackintosh.com A great resource for all things Hackintosh. The first How-To section contains links to a number of great tutorials for building your own Hackintosh and installing High Sierra.

Mac Install Xcode

7. Hackintosh Subreddit I love looking for Reddit communities on anything that I’m interested in because there are always interesting conversations happening. Reddit provides a way to have a dialogue with like minded individuals, to get help and to help others!

Xcode Iphone App

8. Hackintosh Articles on 9to5mac.com I included this link because it contains up to date news and articles for Hackintosh builds.

Third Party Solutions

Lastly, there are many third party solutions that you can use to do iOS development on Windows.

You won’t be using Xcode in these solutions but you’ll be able to generate an app that can run on iOS devices.

Check out these great Xcode alternatives:

9. React Native Use JavaScript to build native mobile apps.

10. Xamarin Use C# to build a mobile app that you can deploy natively to Android, iOS and Windows.

11. Appcelerator Build native mobile apps using JavaScript.

Mac Xcode

12. PhoneGap Build hybrid cross-platform mobile apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

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