#i don’t think people understand how common and normal it is to make math mistakes tho esp doing it by hand or in ur head | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

webslingingslasher · 2 years ago

Note

just horrifically bombed a math test so… peter comforting reader after failing a test but accidentally making her feel really stupid?

don't worry bestie, as somone several years out of high school, and a college dropout, grades really don't matter in the grand sceme of things. my testing has never once affected my life, but me (and peter) believe in you!

“C’mon, gimme a kiss.”

Normally kissing Peter Parker would snap you out of any kind of upsetting mood, however today nothing felt like it could get you out of your funk, and nothing could; not even the escape of sighing into your boyfriend's mouth.

You also weren’t one to turn down a kiss, so when he pressed a kiss to your mouth upside down, your head laying on his lap, his neck bent to kiss you, you still enjoyed it but it couldn’t wipe the frown from your mouth.

“Not even a Peter kiss can help? You must be really upset.”

You give him a big frown, his thumb rubs between your eyebrows.

“Tell me, baby.” His words are a whisper.

With a groan you sit up and stretch over the bed to grab your backpack, Peter takes this time to appreciate the view and smack down your ass, you whimper a ‘heyy,’ before grabbing a paper and shuffling back to him.

“Here, look at my failures and dump the dummy.”

Peter snatched the paper with a grumpy face, a sympathetic frown takes front when he sees the grade circled on top.

“Oh, baby.”

You take it as patronizing.

You rip the paper from his hands, it tears at the edges. “Nevermind, Peter. My fault for thinking you would have some form of sympathy, I forgot I was talking to the genius of Midtown.” Peter’s hands chase you, frantic, “No, no, no! I wasn’t being mean, baby! I swear I wasn’t being mean, c’mere, lemme see it.” You look him up and down wearily, he seems authentic, you hand it over one more time.

Peter looks over the test, front and back, flipping it multiple times to line up numbers. He looks your way a few times and back at the sheet, he’s trying to figure out how to say what you did wrong without you thinking he thinks you’re an idiot.

Finally he pats the space next to him, you slink over on your knees, the sheets scrunching around your pants. His left hand holds your worksheet, his right is resting on your thigh. “You made a common mistake, most people get it wrong, no biggie.” You lean against his arm, “show me, please.”

Peter grabs a pen and starts circling your missteps and rewrites the formula, he runs it through one more time. “And I just multiply that for the answer?” Peter was really pretty when he was explaining things to you, most of the time you were checked out, blissfully blinking at each word curled around his lips; you were trying to piece together what he was saying. “Correctomundo, babe.”

“Ew, don’t say that.”

Peter shoulder checked you, “disrespect me now but without me you’d be failing every class.”

He laughed. Peter laughed, like what he said was funny. Like he didn’t understand how that made you feel, not like you just basically hinted that your biggest insecurity was being dumber than him.

Fine, if he thinks you can’t pass without him, you’ll show him you can.

You fake a laugh with him, usually he can catch it. This time he doesn’t. You put away the test after that, not that you’ll tell him but you’ll ask for a retest, and pass, and then not tell Peter so he doesn’t feel like he can take the credit.

—----------------------------------

Peter is, what he thinks, jealous for the first time in his life.

Well, he’s been jealous before. Like when Ned got that new monitor for his gaming setup, or when MJ was able to solve a rubik's cube in under a minute. Even that one time when Ashley Mulligan, a third grader, cheated off his test and that made her win star student of the week.

But he’s never been jealous before in his relationship with you, he’s never felt the need to. But after you spent so much time with Jeremy, he can’t even think of his name without souring, he can’t help the bubble forming in his gut.

“I really don’t mind helping you out, baby! I even cleared the desk for you!” Peter’s been grasping at straws for you to study with him, he’s always loved the extra time with you, and you actually learned from him and he feels like he helpt, and he loves helping you, he feels needed.

Maybe you felt like you didn’t have enough space?

You check to make sure everything is in your bag, “It’s not a problem, I don’t want to keep J waiting.”

She has a fucking nickname for J.

“J?”

You tilt your head like a dog, “Jeremy?”

Peter scoffs, his arms cross defensively. “Oh, we’re on nickname basis with this dude?”

“This dude,” you air quote, “is helping me with school.”

Peter runs a hovering hand down his body, “so was this dude!”

You understand now, he’s jealous and you switching up on him really hurt his feelings. But he did too, and if he thinks it was funny then so do you.

“He just understands me better.”

Peter feels like he’s been shot, his head is underwater. The one thing he thought he had, the thing he thought he was the best at, wasn’t good enough for you anymore. He doesn’t know when you started to feel this way, he’s only ever tried to help you and he thought he was doing it well, did he misread the signs?

“Oh, okay.”

Does he have something to worry about?

You feel bad, he looks upset. But maybe you’re too dumb to read it well.

“Okay? I’ll call you on my way home.”

Peter’s smile didn’t match his eyes.

—-----------------------

Peter flopped on the couch next to his aunt.

May looked to her side at her nephew and continued watching ID TV, Peter sighs loudly, May speaks without breaking eye contact on the screen. “It’s always the husband, watch it be the husband.” Peter sighs again loudly, May again talks, “everytime I watch these I always expect a twist and guess what? It’s the husband.” For the third time Peter sighs, this time May lets one out of her own and raises the remote to pause the channel.

“Okay, I’ll bite. What’s wrong, Peter?”

Pouty lips mumble words, his fingers play with the fringe on a throw pillow.

“Y/N’s gonna break up with me.”

May thinks her eyes are going to pop out of her head, “what?!”

Peter nods like it can’t be true, but it is. “Yup. So she can be with this guy, ‘J,’’ he uses air quotes, “she has a nickname for him now.”

Her eyebrows furrow, “what’s his name?”

Peter mocks a high pitched tone, “Jeremy.”

May snorts, “that’s a shit name, don’t worry.”

“My name is a euphemism for penis.”

May waves her hand, “when did she start hanging around him?”

Peter shrugs, “a few weeks ago. Apparently they only study together.”

This bothers him a whole lot more than he’s saying but May can pick up on it, she always can.

“I thought she only studied with you?”

“So did I.”

May hums, “any idea why she might?”

“She failed a math test and she thought I was going to call her dumb, but I never have!”

A gentle smile, “Pete, honey. Do you think it’s possible she feels intimidated by you? You’re smart, and you have a good heart but when you’re already embarrassed for flunking and you have a super smart boyfriend over your shoulder who you know thinks it’s childs math, you start to feel intimidated.”

Peter deflates, “but I’ve never made her feel inferior, and I don’t think of her as any less! Math is hard, you have to be exact, I know it can be hard! Everyone thinks Peter’s a genius, but Peter gets stuck on problems too!”

May tilts her head, he’s proved her point. “Does she know that?”

You’ve never seen him struggle but he’s watched you do it a million times. He doesn’t think you’re stupid or below him in any way, everyone has different strengths, yours isn’t math and that’s perfectly okay. Maybe if he shows you that he’s not some all knowing mathematician you’d feel less threatened.

Peter looks over at the TV, then at May.

“It’s the husband, right?”

May clicks play, “oh, totally.”

—--------------------------------

Peter spun in his desk chair, a one eighty to face you.

He had almost forgotten.

“How’d you do on your test?”

You snap your neck up to see his face, he looks excited. It’s hard feeling upset when he only wants you to succeed, even when he’s not the one teaching you.

“I got a B.”

Peter rolls his eyes and huffs, “well, I would've gotten you an A, but I’m sure Jeremy is just fine.”

You blink, “he is, thanks,” you go back to reading, Peter decides it’s time for a heart to heart. He comes to find you on his bed, rolling until his knees hit yours. Peter’s fingers tap on your knees getting your attention.

“Baby, I can’t fix it if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”

You freeze, “nothing’s wrong.”

His fingers squeeze your knees, “don’t lie, it doesn’t look cute on you.”

Peter reaches for your face, his hands cup the sides and forces you to look at him. Your lips are slightly squashed from his placement, you can’t avoid him now.

His voice comes out as a delicate whisper, he’s begging for the truth. “Be honest, did I make you feel dumb?” Peter feels your cheeks warm under his touch, your eyes dart around the room, anywhere but his face. “Baby?” Your eyes close, you can’t cry, not now.

“Oh, c’mon, baby. No crying, I’m the one that made you feel like a dummy.”

Your silence was answer enough, “hey, look at me,” he taps against your cheeks until you blink them open. His smile made you feel safe.

“I’m sorry. I promise you baby, there is nothing, shy of getting yourself hurt, that could make me think you’re dumb. Anything after algebra is useless math anyways, I just do it to keep my ego in check.” He smiles when you snort, “And if I did or said something to make you think otherwise then I’m sorry, but I really, really hate you’re getting help from another dude with a nickname.”

Your words are jumbled because of his hands, “you said I’d fail every class without your help.”

Peter frowns, “fuck, that’s mean.” His head shakes disapprovingly, “I didn’t mean it, I don’t even remember that, baby. I swear, it was just a shitty joke.”

“It might’ve been a joke but it really hurt my feelings.” Peter moves his right hand to brush some hair behind your ear, “I know I did, you had to outsource another man.” You smack his wrist away, “are you actually sorry or do you just feel threatened?”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t pleasing you and you had to find someone who could, I can’t blame you for that.”

You groan, “you’re impossible.”

Peter gets serious again, when the moment gets too much he can always break the tension for a second. “Hey, I mean it. I’m sorry, it was a stupid thing to say and I really, really miss having you over. And I promise if you ever feel that way again, let me know and I’ll dial it back. Sometimes I even get ahead of myself.”

You push your forehead against his and pull back, “it’s okay, I didn’t tell you so it’s not your fault you didn’t know.”

Peter holds his breath, “does this mean Jeremy fucks off now?”

You can’t help the laugh that tumbles, “yes, Jeremy can fuck off now.”

“Good.” Peter’s hand pulls you in, right before you connect you grab a hand at his shoulder and clench the fabric as he settles his mouth against yours. He tries to pull away but you hold him there, just a moment longer.

“I wanna show you something.”

You’re in a post kiss haze, you’d say yes to anything he wants right now. He kicks his feet off the floor and it sends the chair back to his desk, his hands digging through his drawers. Peter finally untucks a leather notebook from the back of a drawer, you’ve never seen it before, and you’ve been together for a while.

Consider your interest peaked.

Peter pats his thigh, an invitation to a seat. Who are you to ignore the call?

His left arm loops around your waist when you sit.

“This notebook holds all my dirty little secrets, wanna see?” Peter chuckles at your amusement, your head bobbles with your nod, he pinches your side, you lean into his body to escape his fingers.

“Contrary to popular belief, Peter Parker, the thoughtless, no effort, mega genius who knows everything, does not know everything. And I’m definitely not always perfect on the first try, most of the time I’m just lucky.”

You tried to question where this was going, how did it have any connection to a journal?

He pushes it in front of you.

“Open.”

Your fingers twitch, you open the front cover, it creaks. The inside page is empty, no ‘this journal belongs to,’ no name, no number, nothing. The next page is full of notes, cursive letters you’d need a moment to decipher, circled markings and animated question marks.

The next page had numbers all over it, it bled into the opposite page. Numbers written over and over and over, each one crossed out, arrows to move numbers around, swapping patterns and numbers. Frustrated scribbles that broke through the page behind it when you turned.

The same combination of numbers jumbled on the page, now a string of ‘fuck’s’ gradually got bigger in the collums of the page, finally a number and equestion was circled in bright red three times. You flipped through seven more pages, each one riddled with most of the same math patterns, some of them were with spanish triple underlined with a ‘dumb fuck,’ written in the corner, it drew your lip down, he wasn’t allowed to think of himself that way.

Peter wasn’t perfect. He struggled with things too, and he wasn’t always right. Sometimes he had to get through thirty possibilities until he found one that worked, other times he just couldn’t remember that damn word. He had just shown you an incredibly private thing in his life, something that you knew he’d never planned to show someone. Something that showed the human in him, he wasn’t so superb all the time.

“Math is fucking hard sometimes.”

Peter was nervous, your Peter was nervous that you saw that. You saw his breakdowns and frustrations and negative self talk. He’s glad you stopped when you did, the next section was AP probability and statistics, and if you saw the things he said about himself then? You’d have him committed.

You blow air from your mouth, “tell me about it, champ.”

His fingers tickled along your hips, your stomach tightened with butterflies and pulses when his hands sneaked under your t-shirt and layed above your beltline. “Why’d you never show me before?”

Peter places a kiss on your arm, “it’s embarrassing.”

You scoff and turn to him with fervor, “it’s not! I don’t think it’s embarrassing, and I don’t think you’re dumb at all! I’d never judge you for that, petey. Math is fucking hard sometimes, you’re right! But no, not embarrassing and definitely not a dumb fuck, please never call yourself that, I’d have to fight you and I don’t want to actually embarrass you.”

Peter tries to stop the growing grin, he has to bite his lip, the irony is sticky sweet to him. You wait for a response, his amusement both aggravating and confusing you. After a moment in silence and staring at his smug grin you connect the dots.

“Oh, fuck. It’s a ditto, moment, huh?”

He just nods happily.

#peter parker blurb #peter parker x reader #peter parker angst #peter parker fluff #tasm! peter parker x reader #tasm!peter x reader #tasm angst #mcu peter parker #peter parker #my writing

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vixxscifiwritings · 5 years ago

Text

coffee and cream

Length - 3460 words

Characters - Taekwoon x Original Female Character, VIXX Ensemble, Original Characters

Rating - General Audience

Summary - Minah doesn't know why Taekwoon shows up to her games when he doesn't know anyone on the team. Or rather, she knows why but finds it quite incredulous.

Tag List - @tomatoholmes @merlionmen @seraphistols @k-craze-97 @blossomtearsleo

“Taekwoon is here again” Miya points out as she laces up her shoes tighter.

Minah doesn’t dignify her statement with a response as she ties up her long braided hair into a bun because she knows what will come next.

“I think he likes you” Miya whispers conspiratorially. She wiggles her eyebrows and Minah shoots her a deadpan look.

“I don’t know what gave you the impression,” Minah says, pushing the freshman kid physically onto the field so she can focus on the game and not the audience. Although it’s not hard to wonder why the captain of the basketball team is at the football match in a rival school. As far as Minah knows, Taekwoon is not friends with anyone on the team. But the boy in question is here with his best friend Jaehwan and watching the game.

Minah wonders if the measly support they do have is of any use because the girls are huddled up and giggling about their audience today instead of brainstorming strategy.

“Get your head in the game girls” Ara calls out when she notices Minah scowling. She offers her an understanding look before jostling everyone into a huddle to get them to focus. Their team is one goal behind their rivals and at a risk of losing if they don’t get their act together.

Minah makes the mistake of looking at the audience and Jaehwan catches her eye to cheer her on. She watches as Taekwoon tries to hide his face out of embarrassment and almost chuckles if not for the indignation over the entire affair. She feels his eyes on her as she joins the huddle and they cheer before breaking off and returning to the field for the second half. She shakes it off because she has a game that she wants to win and that requires her entire focus. Not silly boys who are in random places for reasons she can’t fathom.

Their coach cheers loudly when they score a goal and tie with the other team. There is fifteen minutes still on hand. If Heeyeon can push through the defense line on the other side, she can easily score with Miya’s help. Minah focuses on going on the offensive. They have thirteen minutes and nothing to lose if they don’t score. Her team is good at penalty shoot outs if it comes down to that.

The regular time ends in a draw but Heeyeon and Miya pull through in the over time and score, leading their team to victory. Minah gets thrown into the air as a long running victory tradition of the team and lands on her butt and is surrounded by a rush of girls apologising and pulling her to her feet and a frantic coach yelling about injuries mid season when they should all be in top form.

“I hope you’re not actually injured,” Taekwoon says and Minah is surprised to see him here by the benches instead of by the bleachers. Jaehwan is off talking to Ara and Minah is surprised because she didn’t know they were on talking terms. There is clearly a lot she needs to catch up on with her best friend and team assistant.

“Nothing that I’m not used to” Minah shrugs. Injuries and roughhousing are a part and parcel of being an athlete. Taekwoon sports his own knee brace and is no stranger to this knowledge.

“And here I thought only the boys team got this rough,” Taekwoon says, sitting down next to her. He hands her a water bottle and she accepts it with as much grace as skepticism affords. Why is he here again and why is he offering her a water bottle?

Miya’s words echo through her mind but she brushes them off. The rough landing has affected her brain more than it has affected her body clearly if her mind is willing to entertain such ridiculous thoughts.

“I need to go,” Minah says, standing up when Ara calls everyone to round them up for the bus trip back to school.

“Right,” Taekwoon says, standing up as well. He pushes his hands into this pocket and awkwardly shuffles his weight from one leg to another as Minah gathers her things.

“That was a good game. You… play good” he calls as Minah walks away and she freezes. A nod is all she can manage as her cheeks flush warm on the words. He likes how she plays. That’s… something, she supposes as her brain goes haywire trying to figure out what in the ever loving fuck she must do with this knowledge.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him hit his head and sigh in embarrassment that mirrors her own and feels marginally better. She boards the bus and tries to avoid how Miya and Ara both shoot her knowing looks.

“I don’t know why cheerleaders can’t attend away games” Qiuyue huffs as she leans over the sink and fixes her lipstick. The maroon shade suits her lace blouse and Minah thinks that it's incredibly high maintenance for a normal school day compared to her own sweater and jeans combo.

“It’s common sense that you would need cheering the most at an away game. You already have a large audience that supports you when you play at school” she adds, frowning at Minah.

“You can apparently attend away games so I don’t know what is stopping you from just accidentally showing up in your cheering uniform with pompoms to boot” Minah throws a suggestion out to the wind.

“I’d need someone to drive me there” Qiuyue huffs. Knowing Qiuyue, the cheerleader is not going to give up till she convinces the coach and Minah thinks she can pull it off if she begs enough. Or if she shows up with the sweet apple tarts from the local cafe that their coach likes so much.

“Speaking of people attending games, I heard from Hyojin who heard from Ara that Taekwoon showed up at your game again,” Qiuyue says, lowering her voice to a whisper.

“He did and before you ask me, no I don’t know why” Minah replies with a roll of her eyes. Jung Taekwoon is popular and hot news wherever he goes but Minah doesn’t fancy ending up on the gossip network that the entire sophomore year runs on.

“That’s easy, silly. He likes you and so he comes to watch your games” Qiuyue reasons as if it is the most perfectly normal thing in the world. And maybe it is for boys who like girls but Taekwoon doesn’t like Minah because that is not the sane course of action for anyone involved.

“Yes well not everyone is as obvious as Hongbin when it comes to wooing you” Minah retorts and Qiuyue chokes on the water she is drinking.

“Hongbin is not ‘wooing’ me. He shows up to the games because he likes sports. He even tried out for Taekwoon’s team, remember? And by that logic, you are admitting to Taekwoon showing up to your games to woo you” she points out.

“No one is wooing anyone in my case” Minah retorts with a half snort.

“Well no one is wooing me either and I think we’ve said wooing too many times because the syllables sound weird now” Qiuyue says, repeating the word to herself with a grimace that makes it look like it left a sour taste in her mouth. Minah thinks it is more denial than sourness but doesn’t push the other girl further.

“We have a free period next. Do you think I can copy your math homework before submission time?” Minah asks, changing topics.

“You’re still not done?!” Qiuyue exclaims in shock. “That assignment is the longest we’ve had!! You better be good at power writing or just be plain simple fast.”

Qiuyue pulls Minah out of the bathroom and off to the library and Minah thanks her lucky stars that Qiuyue has never stopped Minah from copying her homework.

Minah thinks that the only thing that makes school on Saturdays bearable is the fact that they can arrive an hour later and leave two hours earlier. It gives her time to avoid the weekday rush and pick up coffee and that does wonders for her morning mood.

She finds Miya and Jungkook sitting at the stairs and listening to music on a shared ipod. The two of them are lost to the world and very likely to miss the first bell in ten minutes but she doesn't want to be the one to disturb the bubble they are in.

She finds Taekwoon by her locker and is surprised. He's waiting for Kyungsoo to pick up his books. Kyungsoo who has a locker right next to hers (a fact that greatly helps Ara when she wishes to stop by and drop letters to the one she admires while drawing no attention to herself).

"I didn't know you liked coffee," Taekwoon says, looking at the cup in her hands. It's long cold and empty but has the drawing of a teddy bear face that the barista who works on Saturday mornings likes to draw for everyone.

"Isn't caffeine the lifeblood of every rational human?" Minah asks and Taekwoon laughs a bit. It's a pleasant laugh that sounds like wind chimes on a windy summer day and is infinitely more pleasant than the warning bell that rings a moment later.

Minah grabs her textbooks and slams the locker shut because the lock is faulty and does not actually lock without the use of force. Taekwoon helps by re-slamming the door when it swings open and jamming it in place. Minah gives him an awkward smile because the locker is embarrassing her now and hopes he hasn't seen the insides which she meant to clean up lastonth but never got around to.

"There's this really nice cafe near the public library" Taekwoon starts before Kyungsoo yells and exclaims he will be late and interrupts their non existent conversation. Taekwoon sighs and yells at him to go along first and turns to Minah who is already balancing the coffee cup on top of the books she needs to carry.

"I can help you with that," Taekwoon offers, gesturing to the growing pile of books and notebooks in her hands.

"I'll be fine" Minah waved him off. He watches her with concern as she walks to her classroom and narrowly avoids bumping into Sanghyuk and Wonshik by the door.

"I see why you insisted on accompanying me" Kyungsoo comments with a smirk.

"Shut up" Taekwoon replies eloquently before turning around and walking to his own classroom, leaving Kyungsoo to carry the huge pile of assignments on his own. He deserves it for the interruption.

"How did you know that you liked Kyungsoo?" Minah asks Ara as she paints her nails. Light purple is a lovely colour on her and Minah has half a mind to borrow it for herself.

"I just woke up with a deep bottomless pit in my stomach and a feeling of dread and knew" Ara replies. It matches how Minah feels every time she sees Taekwoon in the hallways so it must be right. It still unnerves her.

"But how do you know it isn't just a stupid crush that will go away?" Minah asks. Taekwoon is the first boy to show interest in her in a very long time. The first boy ever actually.

"That's the beauty of it. You don't. You could wake up the next day and not like the same person you were obsessing over the day before. You take every day as it comes" Ara explains.

"You've liked Kyungsoo for a while," Minah remarks. Ever since freshman year if her deduction skills have any merit.

"What does it mean if you like someone for a very long time? Even if it is just a simple crush or just being interested in them?"

"You should ask Qiuyue that. She's liked one person for the longest time I've ever known. Even if she says she doesn't" Ara replies.

"Qiuyue thinks Taekwoon likes me" Minah confesses, coming to the topic that's actually on her mind.

"Do you think so? Do you like him too?" Ara asks in return.

"He talked about this really nice cafe he knew and I… kind of liked the thought of spending time with him," Minah admits.

"Was he trying to ask you out on a date?" Ara gasps.

"Stupid, I know. And he never really asked because Kyungsoo interrupted us but I thought he would" Minah says, flopping onto Ara's lap with a sigh.

"On the contrary, I thought he would ask you to come see one of his games before asking you out on a cliche cafe date. And rest assured that no one will find Kyungsoo's body after this grave crime" Ara tells her, frowning heavily at the offense.

"I guess it's because he saw me with my Saturday morning coffee" Minah says as Ara fixes her hair and applies some lipstick on her. It's a shade of brown that's lighter than she usually wears but it doesn't look half bad.

"He has the right spirit, I'll give him that" Ara says, checking her work. She adds eyeliner and glitter blush and Minah lets her experiment because she's lost in thought.

"You look super cute!" Qiuyue exclaims when she sees Minah. It's a Saturday evening and she would rather be sleeping at home but Ara insists that Minah accompany her and Miya to the basketball game so they can support Qiuyue who's cheering for the home team.

"Besides, it's only fair that you go to one of Taekwoon's games since he attends yours," Miya says as she pushes Minah to wear a skirt instead of jeans. It's a decision she regrets because it makes her legs freeze. At least she looks cute, she thinks.

"We'll go grab some seats and you can get snacks?" Ara asks.

"Please get candy that I can steal" Qiuyue adds on, strapping her pom poms on her wrist bands so that they don't fall off during the routine. She takes off before Minah can respond and Minah sighs, knowing her motherly instinct will make her feed Qiuyue anyways.

She grabs popcorn and a bar of rice crispies and chocolates that Qiuyue likes and treks over to the bench before heading over to the seats Ara found. She finds Hongbin kneeling down and helping Qiuyue with her shoelaces and the girl in question coloured the deepest shade of red she has ever seen her.

Minah approaches her with a smirk and Qiuyue shoots her a warning look before thanking Hongbin and practically running from him to Minah. "Careful or you'll fall and then Prince Charming will have to carry you" Minah teases and Qiuyue punches her shoulder.

"Don't worry I've got her" Hongbin says, slinging an arm around her waist and Qiuyue starts.

"Lover boy, you can flirt after the game" Taekwoon yells and the entire cheerleading team breaks into giggles at the expense of the two. Qiuyue scoffs and leaves to hide behind any kind samaritan since her own friends are of no help.

"I was going to give this to her but maybe you can for me" Minah says, handing over the chocolate to Hongbin who takes the excuse to follow Qiuyue.

"You're ruining my teammate" Taekwoon complains when he walks over to greet her.

"I'm helping the cause of love" Minah replies with a bright smile.

"Cupid is grateful I'm sure" Taekwoon says sourly with a frown. Minah laughs and watches the cheerleading team get into formation and Hongbin wistfully push the chocolate into his pocket and save it for later.

"I think that's your cue" Minah points out.

"Will you stay till the end?" Taekwoon asks before leaving.

"Hard to say. I was supposed to be Qiuyue's ride home but I don't think she'll be leaving with me and I am sure you guys would be busy celebrating the end of the season" Minah reminds him.

"I'm still glad you came" Taekwoon says.

"Me too" Minah agrees even though it hasn't even been thirty minutes since she arrived.

"Taekwoon asked me for your number" Qiuyue texts Minah after the game. "I guessed you both looked friendly enough so I thought it was okay to give it to him."

"He hasn't texted me so I guess he didn't really need it for anything" Minah responds because what else can she say.

She wishes she hadn't told her because now she checks her phone every five minutes. Much to her disappointment, her volume is up and she just has no notifications.

Her phone chimes two hours later with a simple text saying " hey, did you get home safe after the game ?" and she almost screams in the middle of putting a facemask on.

" I was not the one at a wild party after the game " she replies.

" Touché "

" Mango ice cream or strawberry?"

" Mango "

" You have terrible taste "

" Says the man who chose milk chocolate over dark "

" I am offended "

" Guess what I felt when you chose lattés over black coffee "

" Not everyone has an edgy bitter dark soul "

" No, some people have souls full of cream from the designer coffee they consume "

" Ha ha ha "

In hindsight letting Qiuyue dress her up for her date is a very bad idea because Minah finds herself in a floral dress ("It has pockets!") and a white jacket that Minah is worried will stain very easily. Qiuyue does let her wear her flat sandals in place of heels and agrees that they will be easy to run in if she gets cold feet and Minah gives her extra friendship points for that.

"You look… really pretty" Taekwoon says when he comes over to pick her up. Minah meets him downstairs on the street instead of the apartment so that her sister won't see that she's going on a date and hopes Taekwoon doesn't mind.

"Thanks. I don't usually dress this fancy" Minah says because she has a habit of putting her foot in her mouth.

"I think it looks nice on you" Taekwoon says, blushing because he feels honoured and happy that she put in the effort for him. He might even giggle into his phone if he wasn't serious about impressing her on their first date.

"We should get going. We'll be late for the movie" he tells her. They're going to watch the new indie romance movie. Though if Minah is honest, she's just going to watch Taekwoon who looks stunning in plaid shirt and jeans. He is wearing the long earring he considers lucky and it's Minah's turn to blush now. He doesn't need luck for a date with her. She already knows they will get along well from all the late night conversations they've had till now.

Movie is followed by a late lunch in a McDonald's that both of them feel overdressed for. The lunch also coincides with a child's birthday party and they forsake conversation because talking over sugar induced screaming is a futile exercise.

They do end up talking about whether it is possible to kidnap the baby toy poodle that is left unattended for a minute by its owner. Minah thinks Taekwoon just might follow through with the plan if the owner doesn't return soon. She laughs when the owner does return and Taekwoon's face falls.

It's a pleasant afternoon so the two of them end up in the cafe by the public library. The small cafe is covered in wall decals of cat figures and there are cartoon stickers on their cups and Minah laughs at how childish but pleasing all of it is. It's not a side of Taekwoon that she expected but is happy to get to know.

The conversation flows smoothly despite Minah rolling her eyes at the amount of cream in Taekwoon's coffee and his wariness over the strength of her coffee.

"Sleep is for the weak" Minah whispers and he sighs.

"Never considered you weak" Taekwoon replies but occasionally looks at her coffee like it would sprout two extra heads at any moment.

"Just pretty" she teases, mixing the sugar in.

"Beautiful" he corrects her and smile triumphantly when she blushes. He's smooth and she marks him down as a player and bad for her health in her book. Her heart is not going to survive if it is going to flip-flop at this inhuman rate every time Taekwoon compliments her.

She still doesn't know why he's here in a cafe with her, looking at cat stickers and drinking bad coffee and fighting over ice cream flavours but she quite likes it. Even if he's going to be clearly bad for her.

#vixx fanfiction #vixx leo #high school au #romance

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gargaj · 5 years ago

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A breakdown of the Revision 2020 Threeway Battle shader

Those of you who have been following this year's edition of Revision probably remember the unexpected twist in Sunday's timeline, where I was pitted in a coding "battle" against two of the best shader-coders in the world to fend for myself. Admittedly the buzz it caused caught me by surprise, but not as much as the feedback on the final shader I produced, so I hope to shed some light on how the shader works, in a way that's hopefully understandable to beginners and at least entertaining to experts, as well as providing some glimpses into my thought process along the way.

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Recorded video of the event

But before we dive into the math and code, however, I think it's important to get some context by recounting the story of how we got here.

A brief history of demoscene live-coding

Visual coding has been massively opened up when graphics APIs began to introduce programmable fragment rendering, perhaps best known to most people as "pixel shaders"; this allowed programmers to run entire programmable functions on each pixel of a triangle, and none was more adamant to do that than a fellow named Iñigo Quilez (IQ), an understated genius who early on recognized the opportunity in covering the entire screen with a single polygon, and just doing the heavy lifting of creating geometry in the shader itself. His vision eventually spiraled into not only the modern 4k scene, but also the website ShaderToy, which almost every graphics programmer uses to test prototypes or just play around with algorithms. IQ, an old friend of mine since the mid-00s, eventually moved to the US, worked at Pixar and Oculus, and became something of a world-revered guru of computer graphics, but that (and life) has unfortunately caused him to shift away from the scene.

His vision of single-shader-single-quad-single-pass shader coding, in the meantime, created a very spectacular kind of live coding competition in the scene where two coders get only 25 minutes and the attention of an entire party hall, and they have to improvise their way out of the duel - this has been wildly successful at parties for the sheer showmanship and spectacle akin to rap battles, and none emerged from this little sport more remarkably than Flopine, a bubbly French girl who routinely shuffled up on stage wearing round spectacles and cat ears (actually they might be pony ears on second thought), and mopped the floor up with the competition. Her and a handful of other live-coders regularly stream on Twitch as practice, and have honed their live-coding craft for a few years at this point, garnering a considerable following.

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Just a sample of insanity these people can do.

My contribution to this little sub-scene was coming up with a fancy name for it ("Shader Showdown"), as well as providing a little tool I called Bonzomatic (named after Bonzaj / Plastic, a mutual friend of IQ and myself, and the first person to create a live coding environment for demoparties) that I still maintain, but even though I feel a degree of involvement through the architectural side, I myself haven't been interested in participating: I know I can do okay under time pressure, but I don't really enjoy it, and while there's a certain overlap in what they do and what I do, I was always more interested in things like visual detail and representative geometry aided by editing and direction rather than looping abstract, fractal-like things. It just wasn't my thing.

Mistakes were made

But if I'm not attracted to this type of competition, how did I end up in the crossfire anyway? What I can't say is that it wasn't, to a considerable degree, my fault: as Revision 2020 was entirely online, most of the scene took it to themselves to sit in the demoscene Discord to get an experience closest to on-site socializing, given the somber circumstances of physical distancing. This also allowed a number of people who hasn't been around for a while to pop in to chat - like IQ, who, given his past, was mostly interested in the showdowns (during which Flopine crushed the competition) and the 4k compo.

As I haven't seen him around for a while, and as my mind is always looking for an angle, I somehow put two and two together, and asked him if he would consider taking part in a showdown at some point; he replied that he was up for it - this was around Saturday 10PM. I quickly pinged the rest of the showdown participants and organizers, as I spotted that Bullet was doing a DJ set the next day (which would've been in a relatively convenient timezone for IQ in California as well), and assumed that he didn't really have visuals for it - as there was already a "coding jam" over Ronny's set the day before, I figured there's a chance for squeezing an "extra round" of coding. Flopine was, of course, beyond excited by just the prospect of going against IQ, and by midnight we essentially got everything planned out (Bullet's consent notwithstanding, as he was completely out of the loop on this), and I was excited to watch...

...that is, until Havoc, the head honcho for the showdowns, off-handedly asked me about an at that point entirely hypothetical scenario: what would happen if IQ would, for some reason, challenge me instead of Flopine? Now, as said, I wasn't really into this, but being one to not let a good plan go to waste (especially if it was mine), I told Havoc I'd take one for the team and do it, although it probably wouldn't be very fun to watch. I then proceeded to quickly brief IQ in private and run him through the technicalities of the setup, the tool, the traditions and so on, and all is swell...

...that is, until IQ (this is at around 2AM) offhandedly mentions that "Havoc suggested we do a three-way with me, Flopine... and you." I quickly try to backpedal, but IQ seems to be into the idea, and worst of all, I've already essentially agreed to it, and to me, the only thing worse than being whipped in front of a few thousand people would be going back on your word. The only way out was through.

Weeks of coding can spare you hours of thinking

So now that I've got myself into this jar of pickles, I needed some ideas, and quick. (I didn't sleep much that night.) First off, I didn't want to do anything obviously 3D - both IQ and Flopine are masters of this, and I find it exhausting and frustrating, and it would've failed on every level possible. Fractals I'm awful at and while they do provide a decent amount of visual detail, they need a lot of practice and routine to get right. I also didn't want something very basic 2D, like a byte-beat, because those have a very limited degree of variation available, and the end result always looks a bit crude.

Luckily a few months ago an article I saw do rounds was a write-up by Sasha Martinsen on how to do "FUI"-s, or Fictional User Interfaces; overly complicated and abstract user interfaces that are prominent in sci-fi, with Gmunk being the Michael Jordan of the genre.

Image courtesy of Sasha Martinsen.

Sasha's idea is simple: make a few basic decent looking elements, and then just pile them on top of each other until it looks nice, maybe choose some careful colors, move them around a bit, place them around tastefully in 3D, et voilà, you're hacking the Gibson. It's something I attempted before, if somewhat unsuccessfully, in "Reboot", but I came back to it a few more times in my little private motion graphics experiments with much better results, and my prediction was that it would be doable in the given timeframe - or at least I hoped that my hazy 3AM brain was on the right track.

A bit of math

How to make this whole thing work? First, let's think about our rendering: We have a single rectangle and a single-pass shader that runs on it: this means no meshes, no geometry, no custom textures, no postprocessing, no particle systems and no fonts, which isn't a good place to start from. However, looking at some of Sasha's 3D GIFs, some of them look like they're variations of the same render put on planes one after the other - and as long as we can do one, we can do multiple of that.

Rough sketch of what we want to do; the planes would obviously be infinite in size but this representation is good enough for now.

Can we render multiple planes via a single shader? Sure, but we want them to look nice, and that requires a bit of thinking: The most common technique to render a "2D" shader and get a "3D" look is raymarching, specifically with signed distance fields - starting on a ray, and continually testing distances until a hit is found. This is a good method for "solid-ish" looking objects and scenes, but the idea for us is to have many infinite planes that also have some sort of alpha channel, so we'd have a big problem with 1) inaccuracy, as we'd never find a hit, just something "reasonably close", and even that would take us a few dozen steps, which is costly even for a single plane and 2) the handling of an alpha map can be really annoying, since we'd only find out our alpha value after our initial march, after which if our alpha is transparent we'd need to march again.

But wait - it's just infinite planes and a ray, right? So why don't we just assume that our ray is always hitting the plane (which it is, since we're looking at it), and just calculate an intersection the analytical way?

Note: I would normally refer to this method as "raytracing", but after some consultation with people smarter than I am, we concluded that the terms are used somewhat ambiguously, so let's just stick to "analytical ray solving" or something equally pedantic.

We know the mathematical equation for a ray is position = origin + direction * t (where t is a scalar that represents the distance/progress from the ray origin), and we know that the formula for a plane is A * x + B * y + C * z + D = 0, where (A, B, C) is the normal vector of the plane, and D is the distance from the origin. First, since the intersection will be the point in space that satisfies both equations, we substitute the ray (the above o + d * t for each axis) into the plane:

A * (ox + dx * t) + B * (oy + dy * t) + C * (oz + dz * t) + D = 0

To find out where this point is in space, we need to solve this for t, but it's currently mighty complicated. Luckily, since we assume that our planes are parallel to the X-Y plane, we know our (A, B, C) normal is (0, 0, 1), so we can simplify it down to:

oz + dz * t + D = 0

Which we can easily solve to t:

t = (D - oz) / dz

That's right: analytically finding a ray hit of a plane is literally a single subtraction and a division! Our frame rate (on this part) should be safe, and we're always guaranteed a hit as long as we're not looking completely perpendicular to the planes; we should have everything to start setting up our code.

Full disclosure: Given my (and in a way IQ's) lack of "live coding" experience, we agreed that there would be no voting for the round, and it'd be for glory only, but also that I'd be allowed to use a small cheat sheet of math like the equations for 2D rotation or e.g. the above final equation since I don't do this often enough to remember these things by heart, and I only had a few hours notice before the whole thing.

Setting up the rendering

Time to start coding then. First, let's calculate our texture coordinates in the 0..1 domain using the screen coordinates and the known backbuffer resolution (which is provided to us in Bonzomatic):

vec2 uv = vec2(gl_FragCoord.x / v2Resolution.x, gl_FragCoord.y / v2Resolution.y);

Then, let's create a ray from that:

vec3 rayDir = vec3( uv * 2 - 1, -1.0 ); rayDir.x *= v2Resolution.x / v2Resolution.y; // adjust for aspect ratio vec3 rayOrigin = vec3( 0, 0, 0 );

This creates a 3D vector for our direction that is -1,-1,-1 in the top left corner and 1,1,-1 in the bottom right (i.e. we're looking so that Z is decreasing into the screen), then we adjust the X coordinate since our screen isn't square, but our coordinates currently are - no need to even bother with normalizing, it'll be fine. Our origin is currently just sitting in the center.

Then, let's define (loosely) our plane, which is parallel to the XY plane:

float planeDist = 1.0f; // distance between each plane float planeZ = -5.0f; // Z position of the first plane

And solve our equation to t, as math'd out above:

float t = (planeZ - rayOrigin.z) / rayDir.z;

Then, calculate WHERE the hit is by taking that t by inserting it back to the original ray equation using our current direction and origin:

vec3 hitPos = rayOrigin + t * rayDir;

And now we have our intersection; since we already know the Z value, we can texture our plane by using the X and Y components to get a color value:

vec4 color = fui( hitPos.xy ); // XY plane our_color = color;

Of course we're gonna need the actual FUI function, which will be our procedural animated FUI texture, but let's just put something dummy there now, like a simple circle:

vec4 fui ( vec2 uv ) { return length(uv - 0.5) < 0.5 ? vec4(1) : vec(0); }

And here we go:

Very good, we have a single circle and if we animate the camera we can indeed tell that it is on a plane.

So first, let's tile it by using a modulo function; the modulo (or modulus) function simply wraps a number around another number (kinda like the remainder after a division, but for floating point numbers) and thus becomes extremely useful for tiling or repeating things:

We'll be using the modulo function rather extensively in this little exercise, so strap in. (Illustration via the Desmos calculator.)

vec4 layer = fui( mod( hitPos.xy, 1.0 ) );

This will wrap the texture coordinates of -inf..inf between 0..1:

We also need multiple planes, but how do we combine them? We could just blend them additively, but with the amount of content we have, we'd just burn them in to white and it'd look like a mess (and not the good kind of mess). We could instead just use normal "crossfade" / "lerp" blending based on the alpha value; the only trick here is to make sure we're rendering them from back to front since the front renders will blend over the back renders:

int steps = 10; float planeDist = 1.0f; for (int i=steps; i>=0; i--) { float planeZ = -1.0f * i * planeDist; float t = (planeZ - rayOrigin.z) / rayDir.z; if (t > 0.0f) // check if "t" is in front of us { vec3 hitPos = rayOrigin + t * rayDir; vec4 layer = fui( hitPos.xy, 2.0 ); // blend layers based on alpha output colour = mix( colour, layer, layer.a ); } }

And here we go:

We decreased the circles a bit in size to see the effect more.

Not bad! First thing we can do is just fade off the back layers, as if they were in a fog:

layer *= (steps - i) / float(steps);

We have a problem though: we should probably increase the sci-fi effect by moving the camera continually forward, but if we do, we're gonna run into a problem: Currently, since our planeZ is fixed to the 0.0 origin, they won't move with the camera. We could just add our camera Z to them, but then they would be fixed with the camera and wouldn't appear moving. What we instead want is to just render them AS IF they would be the closest 10 planes in front of the camera; the way we could do that is that if e.g. our planes' distance from each other is 5, then round the camera Z down to the nearest multiple of 5 (e.g. if the Z is at 13, we round down to 10), and start drawing from there; rounding up would be more accurate, but rounding down is easier, since we can just subtract the division remainder from Z like so:

float planeZ = (rayOrigin.z - mod(rayOrigin.z, planeDist)) - i * planeDist;

And now we have movement! Our basic rendering path is done.

Our little fictional UI

So now that we have the basic pipeline in place, let's see which elements can we adapt from Sasha's design pieces.

The first one I decided to go with wasn't strictly speaking in the set, but it was something that I saw used as design elements over the last two decades, and that's a thick hatch pattern element; I think it's often used because it has a nice industrial feel with it. Doing it in 2D is easy: We just add X and Y together, which will result in a diagonal gradient, and then we just turn that into an alternating pattern using, again, the modulo. All we need to do is limit it between two strips, and we have a perfectly functional "Police Line Do Not Cross" simulation.

return mod( uv.x + uv.y, 1 ) < 0.5 ? vec4(1) : vec4(0);

So let's stop here for a few moments; this isn't bad, but we're gonna need a few things. First, the repetition doesn't give us the nice symmetric look that Sasha recommends us to do, and secondly, we want them to look alive, to animate a bit.

Solving symmetry can be done just by modifying our repetition code a bit: instead of a straight up modulo with 1.0 that gives us a 0..1 range, let's use 2.0 to get a 0..2 range, then subtract 1.0 to get a -1..1 range, and then take the absolute value.

vec4 layer = fui( abs( mod( hitPos.xy, 2.0 ) - 1 ) );

This will give us a triangle-wave-like function, that goes from 0 to 1, then back to 0, then back to 1; in terms of texture coordinates, it will go back and forth between mirroring the texture in both directions, which, let's face it, looks Totally Sweet.

For animation, first I needed some sort of random value, but one that stayed deterministic based on a seed - in other words, I needed a function that took in a value, and returned a mangled version of it, but in a way that if I sent that value in twice, it would return the same mangled value twice. The most common way of doing it is taking the incoming "seed" value, and then driving it into some sort of function with a very large value that causes the function to alias, and then just returning the fraction portion of the number:

float rand(float x) { return fract(sin(x) * 430147.8193); }

Does it make any sense? No. Is it secure? No. Will it serve our purpose perfectly? Oh yes.

So how do we animate our layers? The obvious choice is animating both the hatch "gradient" value to make it crawl, and the start and end of our hatch pattern which causes the hatched strip to move up and down: simply take a random - seeded by our time value - of somewhere sensible (like between 0.2 and 0.8 so that it doesn't touch the edges) and add another random to it, seasoned to taste - we can even take a binary random to pick between horizontal and vertical strips:

The problems here are, of course, that currently they're moving 1) way too fast and 2) in unison. The fast motion obviously happens because the time value changes every frame, so it seeds our random differently every frame - this is easy to solve by just rounding our time value down to the nearest integer: this will result in some lovely jittery "digital" motion. The unison is also easy to solve: simply take the number of the layer, and add it to our time, thus shifting the time value for each layer; I also chose to multiply the layer ID with a random-ish number so that the layers actually animate independently, and the stutter doesn't happen in unison either:

vec4 fui( vec2 uv, float t ) { t = int(t); float start = rand(t) * 0.8 + 0.1; float end = start + 0.1; [...] } vec4 layer = fui( abs(mod(hitPos.xy, 2.0)-1), fGlobalTime + i * 4.7 );

Lovely!

Note: In hindsight using the Z coordinate of the plane would've given a more consistent result, but the way it animates, it doesn't really matter.

So let's think of more elements: the best looking one that seems to get the best mileage out in Sasha's blog is what I can best describe as the "slant" or "hockey stick" - a simple line, with a 45-degree turn in it. What I love about it is that the symmetry allows it to create little tunnels, gates, corridors, which will work great for our motion.

Creating it is easy: We just take a thin horizontal rectangle, and attach another rectangle to the end, but shift the coordinate of the second rectangle vertically, so that it gives us the 45-degree angle:

float p1 = 0.2; float p2 = 0.5; float p3 = 0.7; float y = 0.5; float thicc = 0.0025; if (p1 < uv.x && uv.x < p2 && y - thicc < uv.y && uv.y < y + thicc ) { return vec4(1); } if (p2 < uv.x && uv.x < p3 && y - thicc < uv.y - (uv.x - p2) && uv.y - (uv.x - p2) < y + thicc ) { return vec4(1); }

Note: In the final code, I had a rect() call which I originally intended to use as baking glow around my rectangle using a little routine I prototyped out earlier that morning, but I was ultimately too stressed to properly pull that off. Also, it's amazing how juvenile your variable names turn when people are watching.

Looks nice, but since this is such a thin sparse element, let's just... add more of it!

So what more can we add? Well, no sci-fi FUI is complete without random text and numbers, but we don't really have a font at hand. Or do we? For years, Bonzomatic has been "shipping" with this really gross checkerboard texture ostensibly for UV map testing:

What if we just desaturate and invert it?

We can then "slice" it up and render little sprites all over our texture: we already know how to draw a rectangle, so all we need is just 1) calculate which sprite we want to show 2) calculate the texture coordinate WITHIN that sprite and 3) sample the texture:

float sx = 0.3; float sy = 0.3; float size = 0.1; if (sx < uv.x && uv.x < sx + size && sy < uv.y &&uv.y < sy + size) { float spx = 2.0 / 8.0; // we have 8 tiles in the texture float spy = 3.0 / 8.0; vec2 spriteUV = (uv - vec2(sx,sy)) / size; vec4 sam = texture( texChecker, vec2(spx,spy) + spriteUV / 8.0 ); return dot( sam.rgb, vec3(0.33) ); }

Note: In the final code, I was only using the red component instead of desaturation because I forgot the texture doesn't always have red content - I stared at it for waaaay too long during the round trying to figure out why some sprites weren't working.

And again, let's just have more of it:

Getting there!

At this point the last thing I added was just circles and dots, because I was running out of ideas; but I also felt my visual content amount was getting to where I wanted them to be; it was also time to make it look a bit prettier.

Post-production / compositing

So we have our layers, they move, they might even have colors, but I'm still not happy with the visual result, since they are too single-colored, there's not enough tone in the picture.

The first thing I try nowadays when I'm on a black background is to just add either a single color, or a gradient:

vec4 colour = renderPlanes(uv); vec4 gradient = mix( vec4(0,0,0.2,1), vec4(0,0,0,1), uv.y); vec4 finalRender = mix( gradient, vec4(colour.xyz,1), colour.a);

This added a good chunk of depth considerably to the image, but I was still not happy with the too much separation between colors.

A very common method used in compositing in digital graphics is to just add bloom / glow; when used right, this helps us add us more luminance content to areas that would otherwise be solid color, and it helps the colors to blend a bit by providing some middle ground; unfortunately if we only have a single pass, the only way to get blur (and by extension, bloom) is repeatedly rendering the picture, and that'd tank our frame rate quickly.

Instead, I went back to one of the classics: the Variform "pixelize" overlay:

This is almost the same as a bloom effect, except instead of blurring the image, all you do is turn it into a lower resolution nearest point sampled version of itself, and blend that over the original image - since this doesn't need more than one sample per pixel (as we can reproduce pixelation by just messing with the texture coordinates), we can get away by rendering the scene only twice:

vec4 colour = renderPlanes(uv); colour += renderPlanes(uv - mod( uv, 0.1 ) ) * 0.4;

Much better tonal content!

So what else can we do? Well, most of the colors I chose are in the blue/orange/red range, and we don't get a lot of the green content; one of the things that I learned that it can look quite pretty if one takes a two-tone picture, and uses color-grading to push the midrange of a third tone - that way, the dominant colors will stay in the highlights, and the third tone will cover the mid-tones. (Naturally you have to be careful with this.)

"Boosting" a color in the mids is easy: lucky for us, if we consider the 0..1 range, exponential functions suit our purpose perfectly, because they start at 0, end at 1, but we can change how they get here:

So let's just push the green channel a tiny bit:

finalRender.g = pow(finalRender.g, 0.7);

Now all we need is to roll our camera for maximum cyberspace effect and we're done!

Best laid plans of OBS

As you can see from the code I posted the above, I wrote the final shader in GLSL; those who know me know that I'm a lot more comfortable with DirectX / HLSL, and may wonder why I switched, but of course there's another story here:

Given the remote nature of the event, all of the shader coding competition was performed online as well: since transmitting video from the coder's computer to a mixer, and then to another mixer, and then to a streaming provider, and then to the end user would've probably turned the image to mush, Alkama and Nusan came up with the idea of skipping a step and rigging up a version of Bonzo that ran on the coder's computer, but instead of streaming video, it sent the shader down to another instance of Bonzo, running on Diffty's computer, who then captured that instance and streamed it to the main Revision streaming hub. This, of course, meant that in a three-way, Diffty had to run three separate instances of Bonzo - but it worked fine with GLSL earlier, so why worry?

What we didn't necessarily realize at the time, is that the DirectX 11 shader compiler takes no hostages, and as soon as the shader reached un-unrollable level of complexity, it thoroughly locked down Diffty's machine, to the point that even the video of the DJ set he was playing started to drop out. I, on the other hand, didn't notice any of this, since my single local instance was doing fine, so I spent the first 15 minutes casually nuking Diffty's PC to shreds remotely, until I noticed Diffty and Havoc pleading on Discord to switch to GLSL because I'm setting things on fire unknowingly.

This is fine.

I was reluctant to do so, simply because of the muscle memory, but I was also aware that I should keep the show going if I can because if I bow out without a result, that would be a colossal embarrassment to everyone involved, and I only can take one of those once every week, and I was already above my quota - so, I quickly closed the DX11 version of Bonzo, loaded the shader up in a text editor, replaced "floatX" with "vecX" (fun drinking game: take a shot every time I messed it up during the live event), commented the whole thing out, loaded it into a GLSL bonzo, and quickly fixed all the other syntax differences (of which there were luckily not many, stuff like "mix" instead of "lerp", constructors, etc.), and within a few minutes I was back up and running.

This, weirdly, helped my morale a bit, because it was the kind of clutch move that for some reason appealed to me, and made me quite happy - although at that point I locked in so bad that not only did I pay absolutely not attention to the stream to see what the other two are doing, but that the drinks and snacks I prepared for the hour of battling went completely untouched.

In the end, when the hour clocked off, the shader itself turned out more or less how I wanted it, it worked really well with Bullet's techno-/psy-/hardtrance mix (not necessarily my jam, as everyone knows I'm more a broken beat guy, but pounding monotony can go well with coding focus), and I came away satisfied, although the perhaps saddest point of the adventure was yet to come: the lack of cathartic real-life ending that was taken from us due to the physical distance, when after all the excitement, all the cheers and hugs were merely lines of text on a screen - but you gotta deal with what you gotta deal with.

A small sampling of the Twitch reaction.

Conclusion

In the end, what was my takeaway from the experience?

First off, scoping is everything: Always aim to get an idea where you can maximize the outcome of the time invested with the highest amount of confidence of pulling it off. In this case, even though I was on short notice and in an environment I was unfamiliar with, I relied on something I knew, something I've done before, but no one else really has.

Secondly, broaden your influence: You never know when you can take something that seems initially unrelated, and bend it into something that you're doing with good results.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, step out of your comfort zone every so often; you'll never know what you'll find.

(And don't agree to everything willy-nilly, you absolute moron.)

#demoscene #live coding #livecoding #shaders #glsl #programming #gamedev #game development

10 notes · View notes

stealinghero · 5 years ago

Note

Any headcanons on the pasts of some of the characters? Like there is the historical stuff but like, there isn't a ton of information that I could find on certain characters like Magoichi (cuz woman lol) and Kasuga (cuz never existed) and Kojuro (since multiple people carried the name I guess?). Anyway, any headcanons on anyone would be fun if you want to add any additional people :)

Ohh, general headcanons are always great!! I’ll just write down what comes to mind! I tried to include their past if possible. (Edit: I won’t tag this post with very individual, because there are simply too many!)

It’s under a cut because this will be freaking HUGE!!

Akechi Mitsuhide:

- he opted for his scythes because his wrists aren’t strong enough for fighting with a sword. he usually uses long weapons and likes the aesthetic of a scythe, cutting down people like corn because they are just as “worthless”.

- his hair colour is an effect of an genetic dysfunction and has been white/grey from his early childhood on.

- he is allergic to peaches.

- his past is a mystery and he will rather die than tell anyone about it (he acutally had a great upbringing with lots of love, but when his mother was killed, he changed)

Chosokabe Motochika:

- has a pet parrot and loves it to bits. Actually it’s a family he cares for and raises on his own.

- his normally black hair is bleached and styled to make him look more like a demon, he once saw a sailor do this with a face paint of a skeleton. Young Motochika was so impressed (and afraid) that he copied the style. On special occasions he still paints his face like a skull.

- he can juggle but not stand on one leg.

- if he gets a partner, his crew has to approve them first before he considers dating

- he fled from home because of all the responsibilities and made his crew his family. That’s why he’s the big brother and not their father figure, he still detsts his own father.

Date Masamune:

- he is afraid of chicken. Nothing too serious but he will never hold one or be close to one if he can opt out. As a kid he got pecked bloody by a swarm of them and he never got over it

- he loves to prank Kojuro and will get hit and scolded for it. Still he does it, especially if Kojuro is stressed to make him laugh.

- he doesn’t like the most types of sweets and dislikes honey. But he can bite into a lemon and keep a straight face.

- he upholds traditions and visits the shrines of his province on a regular basis. The priests know not to bother him with bad omens as he might be traditional but not really religious.

- he has a knack for learning languages and can imitate most dialects of Japan.

Fuma Kotaro:

- he is the funniest guy alive!! This man can tell the best jokes and keep a straight face while doing so.

- he has a small family that he loves to bits. Whatever his parents want from him, he will do it.

- he was raised strict (outside) and very beloved (inside), making it easy for him to think outside of the box. He follows orders on his own terms and this is what makes him dangerous.

- his upbringing is his guideline for leading his men. He will acknowledge those who follow his orders and will punsh those who don’t. He’s always fair and tries to find the best result for all included

Honda Tadakatsu:

- he can speak if he wants. But often he thinks his opinion is too insignificant to make public so he remains silent.

- to be honest: he is the best singer. He has a nice deep voice and will often hum or sing melancholic songs.

- he trains up to 20 hours per day to keep his body and soul at its peak condition. His training consists of lifting weights, sparring with sword and bare hands, meditation, reflection of his past flaws.

- he is a bit vain and loves to hear even the mightiest warlords praise him, so he gives his all to maintain his status

- he isn’t too fond of Ieyasu’s way of thinking of friendship and peace as he is a man of war. But he would never defy Ieyasu.

Ishida Mitsunari:

- grew up as an orphan and was taken in by Toyotomi’s family. That’s the reason he’s loyal to Hideyoshi. He sees him as a brother (even if Mitsunari doesn’t think himself as a Toyotomi)

- he uses a tachi because his shoulders aren’t the strongest although he has a good core strength. He needs the length to deliver fast and heavy strikes using the momentum of his sword.

- he loves math and can calculate even huge sums in his head

- he has a stutter that gets worse when he’s aggravated and it takes a lot of willpower and concentration in order not to show it too much

Kasuga:

- in order to live amogst men a woman has to be tough and Kasuga went through an even harsher training than her male colleagues, making her harder than she looks

- but inside she is a very girlish girl and wants to be a princess. Uesugi is the perfect prince for this daydream and that’s the main reason she stays with him even if she knows she has no chance.

- she is as deadly as any Shinobi and she hates if her colleagues make fun of her because she shows more skin/curves without realizing this is also a form of camouflage to lull the enemy into a relaxed and trusting state.

- she grew up without parents (as most Shinobi do) and has no desire to meet them. She hates them for abandoning her

- she sees Sasuke as an annoying little brother. Other than him she doesn’t have any ties.

Katakura Kojuro:

- at 5 years old he climbed a tree because of a dare and had to be saved by Masamune’s father because he was too afraid to come down. He still has fear of heights and a horse is the highest he can get without being anxious.

- in his youth he broke every bone in his body at least once. Often there were multiple fractures at once. He was lanky and clumsy until his early 20s and people loved to compare him to a newborn foal, some old people still call him like that, embarrassing him

- he has a good medical knowledge and might have become a doctor if not for his duty. he still is the number one in caring for Masamune and only if he deems it impossible, he will call for a real doctor. Without knowing this, people tend to think Masamune’s wounds heal by themselves and he only needs assistance when near death.

- he is an open book to read if there are strong emotions. Normally everyone at court knows how he feels by just looking at him. if needed he has a really good pokerface, but doesn’t use it very often. He simply doesn’t care.

- his nickname at court (behind his back) is Raba (translating to mule) because he is stubborn and a workaholic. Some even joke about other similarities between them, but these are the most common.

Maeda Keiji & Toshiie & Matsu:

- Keiji found his little pet Yumekichi on a market in Kyoto where he was sold with his half-dead mother. Despite Keiji’s efforts to save the mother she died a few days later, but Yumekichi got better and sees Keiji as his family.

- Keiji is afraid of an angry Matsu and opts to run away from her rather than from Toshiie

- he might seem a bit carefree and stupid sometimes and he admits he’s not the brigthest. But he’s smart enough to survive with his lifestyle in this time and is pretty proud of it.

- Toshiie worries a lot about Keiji and wants him home because of this. He couldn’t bear to lose Keiji who he sees more as a brother than a nephew.

- he is alway asking for more food of Matsu because he’s afraid that one day he might not be able to eat her food anymore. It’s like he thinks he can “save” the taste of it in his brain forever.

- In her youth Matsu couldn’t cook. She learned it for Toshiie and is always on the search for new ideas and recipes to surprise him with.

- she has strong motherly feelings for Keiji with results in her scolding him more often than Toshiie despite Keiji being only a bit younger than she is

Matsunaga Hisahide:

- he grew up without his parents caring too much. But they were rich and he from early on learned that money IS power. People can be paid to like you, to kill for you, to die for you.

- there are many legends about his fight with Nobunaga and both of the most common are actually true. Nobunaga let him live, thinking he was “interesting” but only because Hisahide matched his strength and power, almost equalling the Demon King.

- he is stronger than he looks and is prepared for the day when money won’t hold his army down. he’s a skilled fighter with almost every weapon but he dislikes the guns Nobunaga’s so fond of. They have no style, he thinks.

- what is in his possession will remain there. he will defend his collection with everything he has. This man can go toe to toe with the biggest warlords of his time and he’s not afraid to demonstrate his power over a thing he had almost forgotten. It’s HIS and he will kill for it (or make someone do it)

- he is the most intelligent of them and often ruthless, making him an enemy nobody wants to have.

Mori Motonari:

- if he would live in modern times, he would be the bullied nerd with thick rimmed glasses and suspenders

- he grew up in a very protected house without too much care and love, making him self-sufficient. Paired with his intelligence that almost equals that of Matsunaga, he is a terrible foe if there wasn’t a huge mistake in his plans: emotions.

- he struggles to keep his army in check simply because he can’t lie like a Matsunaga or Oda. he will tell his soldiers bluntly that they are worthless to him when they are defeated. Strangely this statement makes him a good leader who will risk much to gain much. His men follow him because they most often are rewarded for their wounds or lost comrades.

- he has a problem with emotions and doesn’t understand sarcasm. That’s a reason why he hates Motochika so much. But this makes him honest to a fault, too. if someone asks his opinion he will answer truthfully, sometimes making this person change plans.

Oda Nobunaga & Oichi:

- those two are the most identical siblings after twins, even if it might seem different on the outside.

- Nobunaga cares for his sister and doesn’t want her hurt and Oichi is more of an evil mastermind than she appears to be.

- from early on those two spent lots of time together, playing pranks on the retainers and their own family. They grew up in an actually caring family making people wonder sometimes how they became like this when they had grown up.

- the motives are most often pride and an arrogance/belief everything should be theirs. Even the “little princess” Oichi defended her dolls with claws and teeth if she had to.

- while the Lady Oichi hides her true ambition she sometimes is jealous of her brother who shows them to everyone and succeeding with it. She hates him for being a man whereas she’s just a woman to be played as he wants.

- he had many options to marry his sister to but he chose not the best one but the one that would care the most for her. He would never admit that.

- they both have emotions and those are very strong but most of the times they are not controlled or even guided and most often end in bloodshed.

Otani Yoshitsugu:

- with his childhood a miserable time for him because of his disease (leprosy) he hid himself behind books, learning about the world, the history of it and other useful things

- he isn’t the smartest but one of the most versatile to use his resources, making him flexible in any given situation

- he is a great strategist with his vast knowledge and by being able to get in someone’s thinking, he is able to differ his strategy for any opponent. He has a great work of spies and often knows how a lord will act

- he loves being outside in the sun. His bandages are a hindrance to him but he doesn’t dare to take them off. He likes to sit in the sun for hours, reading.

Saika Magoichi:

- she grew up in the same village as Motochika, knowing him since childhood

- as an orphan living on the streets, she tried her best to find something close to a family. She reufed Motochika’s offer to join his crew, wanting to be independent

- she never trained enough to fight with a sword but can use a Tanto quite skillfully. When she heard about guns, she begged Motochika to get her two. Since then she was fascinated by those things.

- while she actually used one of the guns, she completely disassembled the other, learning all about the mechanics involved. by now she can not only build them but also has her own mixture of gunpowder thats’s a bit more explosive than the usual.

- she was officially invited to have a talk with Nobunaga and they remained friends until he died. They exchanged various types of guns and Nobunaga even invited her to join his army as an advisor because of her extensive knowledge of firearms.

Sanada Yukimura:

- his allround emotion is determination and happiness, often getting on the nerves of people around him with his seemingly undisturbed energy. This is only a facade he keeps up in order not to think too much about things he can’t change.

- he admires Kojuro as a man he can never be and often tries to talk to him about his views on the world, hoping to learn a lot from it that would allow him to grow not only as a soldier but as a man

- despite the differences of rank and class, he thinks of Sasuke as his brother and is closer to him than to his actual brother Nobuyuki

- he is not afraid to admit his faults and does his best to learn how to be better. But sometimes it frustrated him not being able to be a good person in his own eyes

Sarutobi Sasuke:

- contrary to his beloved legend of being raised by monkeys, he grew up as an orphan in a village of Shinobi until he was 10.

- he hasn’t many people he really trusts but is relieved if he can rely on Kasuga or Takeda (sometimes even Sanada)

- he loves to spend his free time fishing and is quite good at spearfishing.

- he wants to stay mysterious and doesn’t share much of his own history but his body is almost without a scar while his name is often whispered with fear, showing what kind of fighter he is

- he doesn’t talk much about himself mainl because ther is nothing to talk about. He sees himself as a bit boring and his life is filled with his duties. Sometimes he envies Kojuro but has to admit he would’ve strangled Masamune years ago.

Takeda Shingen:

- he resents his own father and wanted to be a better father to Yukimura, thus their strange relationship despite being Lord and General.

- he likes tigers and had at least one as pet throughout his life, spanning the same tiger family over generations.

- he’s very conflicted about his rivalry with Kenshin. He respects the man as a fellow warrior and even wants Yukimura to be a bit like him, but deep down he never got over the fact that Uesugi killed his younger brother. he doesn’t know what he should do and this is why he stays the same: fighting with him without too many emotions.

- he is fond of horses and is a skillful breeder. His horses are very renowned as the best warhorses. He wants to survive this in the future to remind the following generations of him being a gentle animal friend and not only the warlord (even if he is very proud of his victories)

Takenaka Hanbei:

- in his childhood and youth he was a normal kid, growing up in a normal family. He was never the best or the worst but he got bored of it as soon as he heard of the “adventures” of Nobunaga.

- he always was a quick thinker, not overly intelligent but flexible and in this way outwitted whole armies, gaining him a name and reputation to use for his rise to the top.

- he never wanted to be a warlord. He swore himself that he would be the best adviser/strategist because he thought he would be worth more like this in any fight for survival. Every warlord needs an advisor, right?

- his loyalty for Toyotomi is mostly an act. He hates brutes without brains as it is intelligence that wins a war and not strength alone. This is a reason he respects people like Motonari or Kojuro.

Tokugawa Ieyasu:

- as a kid he lived with dangerous surroundings. One wrong word could mean war and Ieyasu was right between the conflicted sides, making him yearn for bonds and friends he could trust.

- normally he is outgoing but he often still sees the world as black and white, making it hard to discuss things with him in a calm manner. Luckily he tends to flare up quickly and also come down as fast, being his old self

- behind his smiles there is a machine working day and night. he has his goals and will not rest before getting there, sometimes making it hard for people to follow him. He doesn’t understand that fact and tends to think they are against him, resulting in various consequences

- he wants friends he can trust but he will never trust somebody. he did it in the past and he was left down by these friends, making his walls harder and thicker to get through

- his personality would be somewhere between a tantrum throwing child in the sweets aisle and a ruthless dictator, solely depending on his mood.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi:

- with his past an open secret he has no remorse in being like he is, seeing no other option anyway.

- being a ruthless warlord doesn’t mean being without emotions and he still cares a lot for his army. He knows a few soldiers by name and will often wander around the camp, asking here and there if everything is alright or something is needed.

- he doesn’t have friends anymore and the friendliest he can get with someone is by calling them “advisor”, even if he’s not bound to listen to their words. he doesn’t trust anyone around him and this makes him successful in leading an army, not trusting the enemy will make the same mistake twice or behave “as always”.

- he doesn’t know if he should kill Matsunaga for changing him or be thankful. He normally tries to stay away from him as far as possible. He might even command his army to take a detour to avoid Hisahide’s territory.

Uesugi Kenshin:

- he loves to fuck with people’s thoughts to make them think they are smarter/more powerful/faster than him, only for him to strike them down as easy as he can. This is the truth behind his title and his favourite saying about it is: “I can be an generous god. Or a cruel one. It depends solely on you.”

- there are no feelings involved, not with Kasuga, not with Shingen. He simply enjoys his power over them, using them as he likes to amuse himself. At least this is when he’s not defending his territory. Then he will be ruthless and strike quick, not caring much about alliances or promises.

- despite being like that he truly stands up for what he believes, only because he thinks whatever he believes is the right thing. he doesn’t care much about any other viewpoints and can be called stubborn at it.

- yet he has a certain respect for every living thing, even if some humans are seen as cockroaches by him. he would never start a war without reason and even then he acknowledges every death and every wound, making him a beloved leader by his men.

#sengoku basara

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mirohed · 6 years ago

Text

kim seunghun | love me, love me not

pairing: kim seunghun + gender neutral reader

wc: 3.7k

genre: hanahaki au + angst

synopsis: daffodils represent unrequited love. is that why you keep coughing them up?

warnings: implications of suggestive content, descriptions of illness (and mention of surgery), mention of alcohol

playlist: love me, love me not.

a/n: happy birthday to me!! im glad i finally got to finish and post this (its,,, been in my wips since at least february LMAO) !! they prob wont read this but i wanted to thank my irls for dealing w me and my kpop bullshit (esp bc none of them stan ygtb 😔)

It's getting worse.

Your knuckles turn white, gripping the porcelain of the toilet. Tears and blood alike fall into the bowl, disturbing the gentle peace of the water. You pound at your chest, the action causing you to hack up yellow daffodil petals stained suspicious red. It's a monotonous process at this point. Pound. Cough. Pound. Cough. Repeat until the damned coughing stops.

It takes ten minutes before you return to normal. Or at least as normal as you can get. You got lucky this time.

You watch the petals spiral downward into the gaping hole in the toilet and get flushed away.

Being with Seunghun wasn't always accompanied by a tightness in your chest and petals tickling your throat.

june 19, 2005; 2:52 PM.

"I wanna grow up," you had grumbled, your hands squeezed around the chains of the swingset. You and Seunghun had been riding your bikes for the first time since getting the training wheels off. You had sped down a hill ("First one down’s a rotten egg!") and lost control, falling off and scraping your knee on the pavement. He rushed you to your parents' house, supporting your weight with an arm around your waist. The two of you had settled for playing on the swingset in your backyard instead.

"Me too," he said. "I think." He'd been rocking forward and backward on the swing, eyes focused on the blades of grass underfoot.

"You think?"

"I don't know." You stayed silent, trying to gain as much height as possible with your uninjured leg. "I don't wanna grow up and stop being friends." That got you to stop right in your tracks, your leg planted on the ground.

"What?" You sent an incredulous look his way. "Why would we stop being friends?"

He had let go of the swing, his hands finding his lap. "Some of the older kids stopped being friends when they grew up," he mumbled. "I don't wanna stop being friends, but neither did they..."

You got off the swing, limping over to him and wrapping Seunghun in the biggest hug your six-year-old arms could muster.

"We're gonna be best friends forever. Don't forget that."

"Best friends forever." If he wrapped his arms tighter around you then, you didn’t pick up on it.

[09:54 PM] huniebee🐝: i had fun today :^))

[09:54 PM] huniebee🐝: i wanna adopt a puppy!!

[09:55 PM] huniebee🐝: will you promise to help me take care of it

You brighten as the messages come in, your phone's vibrations distracting you from the way your throat clogs.

[09:56 PM] you: ofc

[09:56 PM] you: well be the best puppy parents the worlds ever seen

[09:57 PM] huniebee🐝: wait i need to send the pics from the pet shelter

[Attachment: 8 images]

You save each picture, cooing over the puppies you got to meet. This time, you only get a precious few minutes of relative clarity before things get too distracting to ignore. You return to the bathroom with a resigned sigh that devolves into a fit of coughs.

You cough and retch and cough some more. By the time you're done, there are less petals and more blood in the toilet bowl. Your chest still feels full of something you can't quite spit out.

Then you hack up something new: a bloody stem with wet flowers still attached.

There's nothing left to do but cry, your whole body wracked with pain both physical and emotional.

august 29, 2011; 3:15 PM.

"Today was fun," you said, making yourself right at home on Seunghun's bed. Your new backpack hadn't lasted more than a couple minutes in his house before getting neglected on his carpet. Your best friend hummed in acknowledgement, already sitting at his desk with his workbook out. "I'm glad we got to meet some new people," you continued, "but that Hyunsuk guy? Seems like a major pain in the ass."

"Give him a chance."

"I know, I know. I will. But still," you huffed, “it was his first day too. No need to act like a know-it-all."

"I know. But it's the first day. Maybe he'll even himself out with time."

The conversation ended there, and you spent some time staring at his ceiling fan, the blades going round and round in a big, beautiful blur. Before long, you had grown bored, looking over at him only to see his pencil flying across the paper.

"Hey. Let's go to the mall and get pretzels." Seunghun spun around to face you, a foot stopping his chair from going too far.

"Sure," he gave a placid smile. "Do your work first."

You groaned as loudly as you could, sounding much like a petulant child straight out of elementary school. (Which was more or less the truth, but you thought you were better than that.) After a few minutes of uninterrupted whining and failing to get Seunghun to break, you spoke up. "Why do I need to do my work? You're Mr. Hardworking, Mr. Teacher's Pet."

"We're in middle school now," he had said, and you remember thinking you were in for a long lecture, "and pretty soon, we're gonna have to go to high school and take entrance exams and decide which university we want to go to and..." He averted his gaze, put down his pen. "We need to start growing up."

"We're still young," you reasoned, sitting up and letting your legs dangle off the side of his bed. "If anything, this is our time to experience things and, you know, make mistakes before we become adults!"

He was silent for a few long, agonizing moments, long enough to make you think you'd won. The pretzels were within reach; all you had to do was ask for them.

"I call a compromise."

Shit. Compromises were common in your friendship. Seunghun was always a little too good at stopping you from making stupid decisions. The worst part was that you could never argue with them. "We go to the mall to get pretzels—my treat—if, and only if, you do your work. We don't go until we're both finished. Deal?"

You opened your mouth, determined to pick the proposal apart, but his reasoning was (unpleasant, yet) bulletproof. Instead, you reached for your backpack with a heavy sigh. "First of all, fuck you. Second of all," you said, tugging your own workbook out, "you're impossible."

"I know. Do your work."

"Fine."

The math problems had been difficult, definitely harder than you were used to, but doable. If anything, the greasy mall pretzels that were way too salty to be healthy made it all worth it.

Seunghun gets understandably very worried when you text him from the hospital, but he comes to see you nonetheless. In his arms is a bouquet of daffodils.

"They symbolize friendship," he says, setting it down on the table next to you. You stare at the pristine yellow petals and flatten your lips in a tight smile. How ironic, you think, that he doesn't know they also symbolize unrequited love.

"The doctors wouldn't tell me why you're here. Classified information, they said." That much is true; nor much is known about the disease outside of shitty romance movies with unrealistically happy endings. Seunghun always believed in them. You never did.

You don't think your story's gonna have a happy ending.

You didn't want him to know anyway, lest he worry. (And you don't want to think about what would happen to your friendship if he found out he was the cause of it all.) "You don't have to tell me," he begins, sitting himself down on one of those rigid hospital chairs, "I just wanna know if it's bad. Like, well...you know.” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Terminal."

"Like if I'm gonna die?"

"Yeah," he rubs the nape of his neck, a bit abashed, "more or less."

"I don't know. Sure hope not," you chuckle. That brings on a coughing fit, and Seunghun looks on, brows knit together. He moves close to offer what little comfort he can, but you hold your hand up to stop him; having him near will only make things worse.

Petals threaten to spill out of your mouth, and panic bubbles in your chest when he asks if you're okay. Your doctor, bless her, chooses that moment to enter. She shooes him out "to speak to you in private." Seunghun, to his credit, obliges and flashes you a smile and a thumbs-up as he goes. You try to mirror his expression (and hope your smile isn't more of a grimace).

The door closes behind him with a soft click. "Friend of yours?" the doctor asks.

You spit the blood-stained petals into your hand, your doctor graciously looking the other way as you toss them into the trash. "You could say that."

october 4, 2013; 5:11 PM.

You tugged at your clothing, feeling more than a little uncomfortable as you waited for your best friend to show up. The DJ, a former student, was already hard at work inside the gym. You heard the bass-boosted beginning of the Cupid Shuffle and shot a frantic text to Seunghun.

[05:11 PM] you: holy shit theyre playing the cupid shuffle can you PLEASE hurry up

[05:12 PM] you: idc if this is our first homecoming you better get your ass over here

[05:12 PM] huniebee🐝: give me like two minutes!!

[05:12 PM] you: THE SONGS GONNA BE OVER IN 2 MIN

"Are you waiting for Seunghun?" Hyunsuk had asked, tie already loosened. You two had gotten close—not as close as you and Seunghun, of course—this year as a result of having classes together. You wondered why you ever hated him.

"Yeah. He won't be too late, thank God, but I'm pissed we're missing the Cupid Shuffle. What about you? I remember you bragging all week about 'flexing your dance skills in front of the ladies.' Or are you all talk, as usual?"

"You know, it's almost like you don't want me to wait with you."

You had laughed, knocking your shoulder into his. The chatter kept up for a minute or two before he made his leave. ("Well, it's time for me to flex my dance muscles in front of the seniors," he chuckled, giving you a salute as he walked off.)

"I'm here! God, I can't believe I missed the Cupid Shuffle," Seunghun said, head hung low. You began to feel a little self-conscious; you were feeling out of place in your semi-formal outfit, yet he looked right at home in his dress shirt.

Chasing those thoughts away, you grinned. "You're here now, aren't you? Come on." You took his hand and dragged him into the gym.

You don't talk to Seunghun or to Hyunsuk after that. You're not sure if you should tell Hyunsuk about the whole situation when he texts you. Seunghun must have told him something was up, of course, and he's insightful enough, sensitive enough (when he wants to be), but you worry. You're afraid he'll open his big mouth. Instead, you send a few messages to your best friend.

[04:29 AM] you: hey

[04:29 AM] you: i just wanted to say in advance that im sorry

[04:29 AM] you: im so so sorry for everything ive done and for what im about to do

There's one last message in the text box, daring you to send it. "I'm sorry I love you," you whisper instead, deleting the message before you do something you’ll regret. To seal the deal, you tap through a few menus until you reach his contact. The picture you've assigned to him is one you took; he's about to take a big bite of cotton candy bigger than his head.

With a heavy heart (though you hope it’s just the weight of the daffodils in your chest), you block his contact. It's better this way. It has to be.

Your doctor said you could get rid of the thick, thorned vines with a vicegrip around your heart and lungs, could pluck the flowers that threaten to spill out at the mere thought of your best friend.

The biggest side effect of it all, she told you, was that you'd forget all about Kim Seunghun. So you steel yourself.

The last thing you think about before they insert the thin needle of anesthesia in your veins is Seunghun's smile, and how you'll never see it in person again.

And how even if you did, you wouldn't remember it as the grin from the boy you love.

october 4, 2013; 9:16 PM.

The frenetic strobe lighting in the gym slowed to a stop, having been replaced with a spotlight making lazy rounds through the gym.

You knew that marked the beginning of a slow song, and dragged Seunghun off the floor in search of some punch. He seemed to have different plans, tugging you back on the floor and pulling you flush against him.

"Where are you going?" he had asked. "You're the one who wanted to dance the night away." His hands found your waist, yours instinctively folding behind his neck. You had wanted to say something about how that claim was void now; he was the one that made you miss the Cupid Shuffle, but the words get extinguished when you look at him.

It was just like that time you practiced in fifth grade, but you swore there was something different about tonight and the way you swayed. You thought back to your practice session in fifth grade, how you had stepped on each other's feet, how you spent the whole time laughing. (For the record, it wasn't for any lack of balance; you started it, laughing as he cried out before he stomped on your toe.)

There was no laughing during the song. Everything was vibrant and deafening and there all at once. But at the same time, it was like everything had been stripped away. Everything but you and Seunghun.

Things changed after that. You were left with a dizzying, free-fall sort of feeling that picked up with each glance at your best friend. Almost every butterfly in the world was taking current residency in your stomach, making you feel light as your body moved to the music. Before long, there was something lodged at the back of your throat, nudging its way forward.

"I'm gonna go to the bathroom real quick," you said, a particularly heavy cough bringing the mysterious lump to your mouth.

Running your tongue along the smooth texture of the lump (okay, so not phlegm), you spat the offending object into the sink: a single yellow petal, coated in saliva.

You blinked.

Blinked again.

"Oh, what the fuck," you muttered, unlocking your phone. One quick Google search later—why the fuck am i coughing up flowers—you found an answer.

Flora mortem. You were loath to believe WebMD, of all things, but you found yourself tapping the link regardless. There was another term for the rare disease: Hanahaki.

Revising your search query was a mistake. The first result was the "hanahaki" tag on Tumblr, which showed nothing but models with tears in their eyes and bloodied flowers in their mouths. Yikes.

You made your way back to the party after that, but lingering in the back of your mind was the cause of the disease: a severe case of unrequited love.

There is only one definite cure for Hanahaki Disease: having the object of the afflicted's affections return their feelings.

You almost manage to purge the petal and the stupid WebMD page from your mind for the rest of the night.

Almost.

You wake up hours later. It's a little disorienting, sure, to come to with little memory of what landed you in the hospital. You peek under the oversized hospital gown to see bandages over your chest, get tempted to rip the IV drip from your arm. The doctor comes in right before you make a move on the needle. She tells you all about how the flowers in your lungs are gone for good.

"You're saved. But the final test," she says, pulling a phone from her pocket, "is this. Do you recognize the people in this picture?"

You recognize yourself next to a boy you don't know. His hand's around your waist, pulling you close. You wear matching grins. Given the way you're both dressed, you suspect the picture's from your freshman year's homecoming dance. Weird. Memory's kinda fuzzy from that night.

"Yeah. Myself. I don't know the other guy. Am I supposed to?"

"No. You're not. Congratulations," she smiles, placing a hand on your shoulder. "You're cured."

You look through all the old messages and pictures when you have some time to yourself. You reach out for the memory, the feeling of knowing Kim Seunghun. You get nothing, and while your brain knows something's wrong, you're more concerned about being able to breathe easy.

You move to a new city, far, far away from the place you grew up in. You finish your last year of high school, get a job, start college. You make new memories with new people. You forget all about Kim Seunghun.

It gets easy to forget that you weren't born with the ugly faded red scars that run up and down your chest. It's your only remaining tie to the man you loved so much you almost let yourself wither away. You think it's a good thing you cut him off; why stick around, why force yourself to suffer, for someone who doesn't love you back? Why be with someone if it physically hurts to stay by their side?

But sometimes you wonder. What happened? What happened to him after his best friend walked out of his life for good with no explanation?

Those days are never good. You distract yourself then, often with the familiar kick of alcohol burning in the back of your throat. You've never been much of a drinker, but you figure it's never too late to start.

Sometimes, the distraction comes from being in the arms of another.

(One of your favorite distractions, a young man named Byounggon, had run his fingers along the angry lines one night, jotting them down in his map of your body.

"Do you regret it?" he asked then, eyes half-lidded with drowsiness. You cupped his cheek, ran a thumb along the planes of his face.

"I wouldn't be here if I regretted it, now would I?" He let the corners of his mouth turn up just so, pressing his lips to yours.

You don't talk to him much nowadays, your interactions reduced to likes on Instagram, views on Snapchat. He's moved to a bigger city. "More opportunities," he said. You keep up with his dream of being a musician, always. There was a time when you were his number one supporter, after all.)

"Will that be all?" the cashier asks, jotting your order on the plastic cup. When you nod, he asks for your name. He jots that down too.

But then his eyes widen and he looks at you with renewed interest. "I'm sorry?"

"Is there a problem?" you asks, peering at your name (spelled correctly) on the cup. His eyes search for an answer within yours, some sort of explanation you can't seem to give. He averts his gaze, shakes his head, places your cup in the queue of orders.

"I'm sorry," he says. "Just thought you were someone I knew. Have a nice day." You parrot the phrase, catching a glimpse of the young man's name tag.

Seunghun, it reads in cheerful yellow. There's a doodle of a puppy in the top right corner. You think it's rather cute.

Two weeks later, you meet Seunghun again. This time, you're out for a morning jog. The crisp autumn air greets you as your feet meet the pavement and let out a satisfactory crunch under the burnt orange leaves on the sidewalk.

You both get stopped at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. While you catch your breath, you don't miss the way he flinches, as though he didn't expect you to show up. He schools his expression into something friendly within no time, and you wonder if you imagined the whole thing.

"The weather's nice, isn't it?"

"It is," you pant. "On your way to work?" He raises a hand to tug at the strap of his backpack with a small smile.

"Yeah. You should come by, give us business," he grins. "On mornings like this, I recommend the hazelnut latte." You hum in agreement, not yet recovered enough to converse. "Tell you what, you come and get one when I'm working, I'll make sure it's on the house."

"Really? Maybe I'll swing by." The light changes, and you leave Seunghun behind, waving goodbye as you do.

You come in later that day, ordering a hazelnut latte as promised. Seunghun's manning the register, same as two weeks ago, and when he takes everything down, he smiles. You miss it as you pay, but there's something extra on your cup.

As you take a sip of the (delicious; his coworker Yedam must be some sort of brewing prodigy) latte, you catch a glimpse of the extra writing.

Along the side of the cup is his phone number.

[10:58 PM] seunghun!: more than anything i want to adopt a puppy

[10:59 PM] seunghun!: or rather another one

[10:59 PM] seunghun!: i named this one after an old friend

[Attachment: 1 image]

The picture of Seunghun and his dog brings a smile to your face. You've been spending more time with him recently, whether it be going on coffee runs ("Are you sure you're not just using me for my employee discount?") or complaining about life as a broke college student ("My card got declined trying to buy a bag of chips last night...").

It's nice. Spending time with him is...nice.

It's more than a simple distraction, somebody to hold close on nights your decisions try to haunt you. It’s friendship, something to hold onto when you lose your way in the dense forest of your mind and to cherish when you manage to make it to a clearing and bask in the sunshine.

You've caught a cold recently (probably from that bastard Seo Changbin in your communications class). Seunghun's given you some homemade tea, swearing on its usefulness. It certainly tastes good, the sweet honey chased by tangy lemon. Unfortunately, the tea isn't able to stop the persistent cough you've been plagued with.

Feeling phlegm start to come up, you turn the bathroom lights on, hacking it up and spitting into the sink.

Huh. That's weird.

There's no phlegm.

The only thing in the sink is a single golden petal, coated in saliva.

#seunghun scenario #seunghun imagine #seunghun angst #kim seunghun scenario #kim seunghun imagine #kim seunghun angst #ygtb scenario #ygtb imagine #ygtb fluff #yg treasure box scenario #yg treasure box imagine #yg treasure box angst #seunghun #ygtb #ari.doc #ariweek 2019 #c9boyz

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weirdfluffyunicornpig-blog · 6 years ago

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7 Simple Ways to INSTANTLY be More Attractive to Women

👉 WTF is “the scrambler”? (and why it forces her to chase you). Click here to learn more...

7 simple ways to instantly attract more women. Let’s start with the most obvious stuff. This consists of things like actually brushing your teeth, having a decent hair cut, working out, not dressing like a little kid or a slob, smiling and so on. There are lots of video clips and articles out there concerning this. I have no doubt someone will write an article about something like "3 tricks for getting more women". The problem is it's almost always stuff like #1 obtain a haircut, #2 don't be fat. Well ... DUH!... Gee, thanks. I had no idea that if I cut my hair like Justin Bieber's when he was.14, that most women wouldn't like it or would be turned off by it. I had no concept that if I was 200 pounds overweight, girls would not normally be into that. Thanks for informing me! Wonderful recommendations! I hope you sense my sarcasm. So yeah, I'm not going to waste time with crap like that. I'm going to presume you're intelligent enough to know that if you're 5000 percent body fat, you need to go to the gym and if your hair is 2 feet long, you need to cut it. Instead, this article is about things that you can actually begin doing today. Things that you may not have actually thought of previously or at least didn’t really understand why it made a difference.

#1: Grow a beard. Something I've uncovered is if you have a face that is incredibly good looking normally, then you typically look far better without a beard - so people can see it. But if you have a face that's ordinary, or second-rate, you typically look better WITH a beard. Mostly this is because is it helps to conceal the flaws. You may have heard that people view symmetrical faces as eye-catching. The majority of faces aren't in proportion though. However, when you have a beard, it can cover fifty percent of your face which means that fifty percent of that crookedness is now concealed! So you look twice as in proportion as you did prior to having a beard! It's called math and the more things you can get working in your favor, the better. Likewise, it helps to hide your screwed up jawline or your acne or anything else you may not like regarding your face. Try it out!

#2: Be confident. As many of you may know, girls like self-confidence. They do not like to be around somebody who's insecure and hopeless and often times clingy because of it. If that's you, then you need to work on learning and improving how to be confident at all times. Keep in mind, there is a difference between being confident and being a jerk or arrogant. Don’t question if you’re good enough. You ARE good enough and it’s your job to show not just woman but everyone that you are.

#3: Be positive. In addition to confidence, something that's frequently forgotten or overlooked is need for being positive. Most people, including most women, like to be around positive people. Think about it. Do you want to be around a person that's always whining, complaining or being negative in general? No you don't! The problem with guys is a LOT of them act negative around women. They whine, they question them about "why don’t you like me” or “why don't you text me back faster”? Doing these things comes across as needy or desperate which is a HUGE turn off for women. Most guys also like to test things around women. For example, they will tell a joke and see if the girl is laughing at it or not and then get all mopey if they aren’t. Stop that, girls dislike it. Every person dislikes it! People like being around positive people because positivity simply makes you feel much better. Duh! Favorable people are energetic, they appreciate doing things, If you're smiling and having a good time, you will INSTANTANEOUSLY be a lot more attractive if you just relax, enjoy yourself and be positive.

#4: Have a pet. Truthfully, almost everybody likes pets and having a family pet simply makes you appear like a nicer, much more all-around person or at least someone that isn't an a$$hole. It also shows that you are caring, protective and responsible which are all extremely good traits to have when it comes to attracting women. Not to mention if you have a cute dog with you, it’s often an easy ice breaker for approaching women - or better yet having women approach you.

#5: Have stuff you appreciate. Attractive people aren't just empty shells. They typically have at least one activity or hobby that they are truly passionate about. Dreams that they truly intend to accomplish and more. If you're just a generic dude who doesn't appreciate or have passions about anything, that's INCREDIBLY unattractive because it makes it seem like you are just coasting through life without any real goals in mind. Also, you’ll probably come across as someone who isn’t a decision maker or a go-getter and that you probably lack confidence.

6: Get a nice car or truck. This one is simple. All you have to do is drive to your local Lambo dealership, take your care and trade it in for one. Seriously though, having a nice car or truck will get you points with women even if you aren’t normally attractive. Why? Because it’s a good ice-breaker and women love envisioning themselves looking good in your car. Is it shallow? Yes obviously but who cares depending on what you are looking for anyway. If you’re looking for an easy hook up, having a nice car is a must though and you don’t have to break the bank doing so in most cases.

#7: Less is more sometimes. One of the most common mistakes guys make is talking too much about themselves around women. Of course you don’t want to be completely quiet either as doing so will make you seem shy or that you lack confidence. Instead it’s a balance. Let the lady talk. Seem genuinely interested in what she has to say too. Also, don’t divulge everything right away. Add some mystery, make her work for the info. It will spike her interest and make her chase you. This is something that just takes time to perfect but once you do, you’ll become extremely attractive to women.

👉 WTF is “the scrambler”? (and why it forces her to chase you). Click here to learn more...

#how to be more attractive #how to be attractive #how to get girls #attraction women #attractive to women

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financiallymint · 7 years ago

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Why They Don’t Teach us About Money in School

The reason I created this website in the first place was because of this: lack of financial education in school.

It made me angry and frustrated that governments simply don’t believe it’s an essential part of our education. Ever since I took notice of this huge lack of education, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot on the topic – but I’ve never had a proper sit down and thought about the why. Why have governments so royally messed up on this one? So I did a bit of research and asked a few questions – and I think I have a few answers.

Times have changed

This is how it worked before: study hard, get good grades and get a high paying job. Once you get the job, stay with the company for 40 years and in exchange they’ll pay you a pension with benefits and rewards.

It’s all very fancy and dandy but times have indeed changed. In the past 50 years the pension system, the tax system and the legal system have evolved and changed drastically. Now, you’re responsible for your own retirement and you’re the one who has to make sure you’ll have enough money at 70. So yay, government has decided to give us a bit more of space and independence (I’d say that’s a good thing). But there’s just one issue – we have no idea how.

Schools are still teaching us the whole get good grades and a high paying job deal – but the truth is, that’s not enough anymore. Now, people are job-hopping, the economy has had a few crashes and there’s a lot of robots about. If you want benefits, a secure retirement and something stable, a job isn’t the answer. Financial education is. And schools haven’t caught up yet.

Teachers don’t know

Working on from the last point, teachers are older than the students (normally). Since they’ve been taught through the old education system, they too have no idea about personal finance, and therefore don’t feel capable of teaching it themselves. As you see, it’s a vicious circle.

Governments and financial entities have to step in and offer education to the teachers before it can follow on to the students.

Teachers are also under a lot of pressure to get the students passing exams and getting good grades. This means they prioritize other subjects such as maths and chemistry, leaving personal finance forgotten next to sex ed.

Not only that, but personal finance is that: personal. If the teacher’s financial situation is a mess, they’re unlikely to know how to teach it to students.

So you see how it is – not only do the governments have to educate teachers on personal finance, but they also have to help them improve their own financial situation. This means fixing previous mistakes, encouraging self-education and self-improvement. Financial education starts with the individual, and will governments be bothered to help the individual teachers? Considering the current low pay and pension cuts, I think we have quite some way to go.

Parents don’t know

We learn a lot from our parents – habits, politeness, cooking, etc. Another big thing we learn from them: money. If parents take time to teach their children the important aspects of money and some good financial habits, the child will grow up with the essentials of financial education. But if the parents have no idea about finance… surprise surprise, neither will the kids.

This is especially true if the parents have bad financial habits: constantly in debt, making bad decisions, complaining about the lack of money. All this influences the child and will lead to future financial ignorance as well as bad money habits.

So once again, governments would have to step in and help the individual parents sort out their own finances before they could start relying on them to bring up financially aware kids.

No one knows where to start

From what it seems, no one really knows where to start. No matter how many times we shout ‘we don’t know what are taxes! Or mortgages! Or venture capitalism!’, the system will still be like ‘but what do we teach them?’.

Ok so maybe I’m being a bit mean – the British government did in fact add personal finance into the education curriculum in 2014. It’s now compulsory for schools to teach it in their maths and citizenship classes But guess what? Nothing has changed.

Why is that? Because the curriculum and teaching methods are lacking. And we shouldn’t be surprised: half of students dislike maths, reading, history, economy, etc. Simply because the education system is antiquated and we’re still teaching with boring theory books, memorisation techniques and lectures. But that’s another rant I won’t go on; the simple fact is that students aren’t being taught well in any subject, which is why personal finance isn’t any different.

Experts think people aren’t interested

Ewww.. finance? Is that some kind of disease?

Experts seem to think that the general population isn’t interested in learning the basics of money.

I have to say I disagree. I bet if you went into a classroom and shouted ‘Who wants to be rich?’ everyone would raise their hands. Once again, it’s about using effective teaching methods and making the topic interesting: activities, real life experiments, interactive games, etc.

In college, we get our first proper taste of money. More freedom, less supervision from parents, etc. Because of that, students go all out with their money: ‘let’s all see who can spend their student loan money the fastest’ (we’ve all done it). Honestly, it’s fine: college is there to experiment, to try out the weird stuff and allow the crazy to flow. If you get kicked out of your accommodation well that’s on you – better now than at 30 with a family.

Students want to go crazy with their money simply because they think budgeting is boring, saving means more restrictions and investing is only for the rich. But the thing is that financial education isn’t just about that – it’s about being aware, being in control of what happens and knowing what to do. Want to waste half your student loans on cheap alcohol? Go ahead, just make sure that you’re aware and know how to deal with all the problems that come next.

What I’m trying to say is that people are interested in managing their money and being financially stable – we’re just living in a culture that doesn’t teach us how to.

Consumerism

A slightly darker reason for the lack of financial education: it’s easier for others to steal your money.

Ignorance is bliss? Yes, but not when you’re money is slowly disappearing into the pockets of others. Banks, companies, media corporations, governments – they make more money when you don’t know what to do with your finances. The more debt you accumulate on a credit cardthe more you’ll have to pay back to the company. The more adverts out there convincing you to buy a new car the more money you’ll spend on something you should be buying second hand.

It’s scary and it’s sad, but I think we can all agree that it’s true.

It’s also the reason why people are scared of money and believe that it’s ‘evil’. All the financial jargon makes it hard to understand what really is going on. All we are taught is that we need money for food and for a roof over their heads, so we cling onto something secure, something stable: a job. And many times, it’s a job we dislike, or even worse – we tolerate. This common occurrence is called the rat race and it’s what a large part of our society is based on. A discussion for another time.

just look at that APR

It’s not all bad news:

I may have painted a pretty negative picture of our governments and society as a whole. Although there is a lot of work to be done on financial education, I’m happy to say quite a few organisations and charities have been campaigning for financial education for years.

Here are a few of them:

CAP (Christians Against Poverty): This British charity is all about counseling people out of debt and helping them back on their feet.

Young-Money: An organisation with resources on helping children understand money. They create programmes for schools to teach personal finance to kids.

MyBnk: Another cool organisation creating programmes and workshops to help young children learn about budgeting, saving, loans, etc.

The Money Charity: Very awesome charity that works on products and services teaching finance in schools – they also talk to policymakers and try to change the laws.

There’s a lot going on in other parts of the world. I see more and more personal finance blogs in America taking on financial education and talking about curriculums and the different steps to take. There’s work to do, but at least we’re getting started.

What we can do about it

It’s true that a lot of it lies in the hands of the government and the education system. They need to work not only on implementing an efficient personal finance class in the curriculum, but they also need to focus on the individuals: the teachers and the parents. And that’s not always easy.

As a member of society, we can also help out. You don’t need to go all out and create a blog (#me), but I think one great way to increase awareness is to simply talk more about money with friends, family and strangers. Money is still a taboo topic, and asking someone how much they make is like asking them how their sex life is doing – it simply gets awkward. So let’s make it less awkward: talk to your friends about your current money problems, ask them how they’re dealing with theirs and try to find a solution together. What you’ll learn will be with you for life.

Read more like this over at Financially Mint

#financialeducation #financiallymint #financial diy mentality #success #money management #moneytips

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heydisneyhiremeplease · 6 years ago

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Do you ever get sick of people telling you to just hold on? They don’t get it. They don’t feel what you’re feeling. They just want to feel like they’re doing something good. But they can’t make all your stress go away, or end your depression, or fix your bad relationships. You want to feel better. There are happy things in the world. There are people who love you, or could love you if you felt like letting them. But it’s too hard to crawl out from under the shadows some days. Every now and again, a good day comes up. A day when maybe things aren’t as bad as you thought. Maybe there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe you can finally get it together. You begin to feel like you just needed new perspective on life. But those days come once in a blue moon, and before you know it the sun has gone down and you’re in your bed again, trying to fall asleep. But you can’t, because your worries and anxiety are making your heart beat too fast, and your thoughts won’t quiet down. Day after day, night after night, you struggle. It’s easy, for a while, to think that this is just a phase. That when this school year ends, or when you get a different job, or when start a new hobby, or when you finally start dating someone, this will all be over. But the longer you suffer, you realize that this could last for the rest of your life. And eventually you wonder...do you want to live that life? That many years, each of them composed of 365 days just like the ones you’ve been living. Like staring into some deep abyss. What is going to make the suffering worth it? What are you suffering for? Can you do anything about it? But every question you ask, every corner you turn, there’s more of the same waiting for you. It’s just who you are now. Was there a time when you were happy? Or were you always like this, but with more good days sprinkled in so that it was harder to notice the ongoing hopelessness? Does anyone else notice your pain? Do you want them to? Would they help you? Would they pity and belittle you? Would they believe you? After all, no one can see into your mind, or feel your feelings. If they haven’t experienced what you have, how could they know? How could they understand or relate? Your thoughts run in circles, the same notions swirling and echoing endlessly. No one gets it. No one ever will. I am alone. This is permanent. I am alone.

But what if you weren’t? What if someone understood so well, and loved you so desperately that they would give anything to take your pain away? That they themselves would endure tremendous pain just to give you hope? Seems unlikely. That kind of thing only happens in movies or fairytales, where ideas of love are nothing like real life. Nothing like the abuse and betrayal you’ve experienced or seen others experience. No, that “love” is found only in stories.

But what if you’ve just been listening to the wrong stories? What if there’s one that you’ve ignored, or never heard, or never gave much weight to? And what if this one was completely, legitimately true? What if this story could give you hope? What if this story could give you a reason to live?

I believe that there is a God, who made you, and loves you more than your parents, grandparents, friends, teachers, or even your dog ever could. Because of this incredible, unconditional love, He sent His only Son to die for you. That sounds crazy, and unbelievable. But what if it really was that simple? That someone loves you so much that they would sacrifice something so important, just to give you hope? Jesus, God’s Son, willingly died for you and everyone else. Maybe you question why that would even need to happen. What was the purpose? What did that do? To understand, we have to talk about Adam and Eve. You’ve probably heard of them. If not, let’s review.

Adam and Eve were the first human beings God created. He made them to live in the Garden of Eden, where they were happy for a long time. However, Satan, of whom you have also likely heard, became jealous of these humans, because God cherished them. Satan, or the devil, as he is often called, took the form of a snake, and found Eve in the garden. He tempted Eve to break God’s rule, and she in turn tempted Adam. You see, Adam and Eve had never done anything against God before that point. God had only one rule by which He asked them to live. This one rule was that they could not eat a certain kind of fruit, which grew on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Satan tempted Eve to eat it. She listened. She tempted Adam to eat it, too. He listened. God sent Adam and Eve out of the beautiful Garden of Eden. They set out into the world, which was now full of sin. The sin that Adam and Eve unleashed when they made the choice to disobey their Creator.

Now, people living today have a choice, just like the first two people to ever live did. We can do good, and we can do bad. This is known. But why is it so easy to do something that is considered bad? Every time you ever ignored your mom when she called you because you didn’t want to get up was selfish. Every time you ever told someone else gossip about a mutual acquaintance was a betrayal. Every time you ever borrowed something without asking, even if you later put it back, you stole. Every time you ever told on a classmate just to get them in trouble, you bore false witness against them (lied about them). Every time you looked up one or two of the answers on your homework, you cheated. But these are small things. You feel like you’re not a bad person for these little mistakes, especially since nobody got hurt in the end. So we’ll not worry about trying to classify you as a good or bad person. Don’t even think about that. Just think about why you did any of those things.

You did them because they were easy. Why were they so easy to do? Because sin is in the world. And while we all have been through similar situations, and we all have the ability to choose our actions, we’ve probably all done at least one of these things. Again, don’t worry about trying to label yourself or others as good or bad people, just think about how we all have this type of thing in common. We all feel this desire to do the easy thing. To do the sinful thing.

This is why Jesus died for us. Not because we cheated on a 9th grade math test, or because we ignored our parents when they said to do the dishes. Try not to put it in such simple terms. Jesus died for us because of the way that living in a world inhabited by sin affects us. So maybe you’ve never robbed a bank, or killed someone. Maybe you’ve just never been desperate enough. Think about things you’ve done while under stress. Think about what you’ve seen other people do while under stress. For example, my father is a very kind man. I love him. But when he gets stressed out, he screams at me and the rest of my family. He throws things and yells so loud it hurts our ears. When my mother gets stressed out, she treats us all like we’re stupid and she’s superior. When I get stressed out, I do some sort of combination of the two. I suppose that’s fitting. We’re all normally very kind and gentle, but when just a bit of stress is applied, we break down and start screaming or hurling insults. Because that’s the easy thing. Because that’s what a hint of desperation does. Because that’s what happens when human beings are born into a world inhabited by sin.

A lot of people ask why God would allow such pain to remain in the world. They say He must not exist, because if he did, then obviously He would take care of our problems. I see how that seems very logical. And God did do something, even if it wasn’t the instant cure-all that most people want. God sent Jesus. And Jesus willingly left heaven to be here on earth. He came to earth as a baby, and grew into a man. He experienced hunger and thirst, discomfort and temptation. But Jesus was different. Despite having a full understanding of what it’s like to be human, He was unaffected by the sin in this world. He never did anything bad. Ever. And when it came time for Him to actually be put to death, he did that willingly.

Jesus was crucified on a cross. The Jews, His people, chose to reject Him. They voted for him to be crucified just before the start of Passover. As He was waiting to die, Jesus took all of our sin upon Himelf. All the sin of the people living at that time, and all the sin of anyone who would ever live. When He was finally dead, He was buried behind a heavy stone so that Christians could not come and steal His body. Roman guards were also placed there. The followers of Jesus felt hopeless then, because the person they had given their lives to was gone. They had loved Him, supported Him, trusted Him, and now He was just dead. And they felt lost.

But three days later, on the day we celebrate Easter Sunday, the ground around His tomb began to shake. A blinding light scared away the Roman guards. Some followers of Jesus came to visit His tomb, and upon arriving they saw that it was empty. An angel was waiting there for them, and informed them that Jesus was alive again. They felt joy for the first time since His death. Pure joy.

This all took place a long, long time ago. No one alive today has seen Jesus. There are historical records that prove He was a real person, that He was crucified, and there are recorded accounts of his reappearance after death. But similar to how science cannot prove the existence of God, nothing can completely prove that the man they called Jesus was truly God’s Son. That’s where faith comes in.

Do you want hope? Do you feel like no one is ever going to understand how you feel? Are you afraid that the rest of your life is just going to be a series of bad days repeated over and over? Are you becoming desperate for a way out? Are certain things or actions starting to look easy to you that never did before hopelessness took over?

Someone loved you enough to sacrifice something precious in order to give you hope. God sent His Son to die for you. Someone loved you enough to actually die a painful death to give you a way out that doesn’t end in your death. Jesus died on the cross for you. And neither God nor Jesus will ever hold this against you. You don’t need to think about how you never asked either of them to do anything for you, or feel guilty about what they did. That’s just the strength of their love for you. Did you ever have a person you thought really loved you? Perhaps a parent? Did that person just do things for you without your asking? It’s like that, but on a much, much larger scale.

So...what now? What does all of this mean? It means that if you want hope, you can have it. Have you ever heard of heaven? Probably. It’s where God and Jesus live. It’s perfect. There is no pain or suffering there. Ever. And once you go there, you will never have to leave. It is the place where the souls of people who have accepted Jesus go when their human bodies die. It’s no secret that humans eventually pass away. We can’t live on earth forever. Even children die of cancer long before their time. But our souls will not die. They live on. They can enter heaven after our bodies perish. All you need to do to ensure that your soul will go to heaven when you die is accept Jesus as your personal Savior. That’s why He died. He’s already done the hard work. He’s already suffered for us. Now we need only accept Him.

What if you don’t want to do that? You don’t have to. It’s a choice that each individual person must make. No one can force it on you, not really. But if you don’t, your soul will spend eternity in a place called hell when you die. That’s where Satan is. Remember him? He tempted Eve to betray God. And he really doesn’t like you. He’s the source of all your pain. Literally. All of it. Yes, sometimes others hurt us or we hurt ourselves, but sin is in the world because of him. He’s still jealous of humans to this day. And he loves hurting you. He loves that you’re hopeless. He loves watching you toss and turn at night. And he’ll be really excited to see those of us who don’t choose Jesus, because when those people die they’ll be spending time with him. In hell. Suffering. Forever.

If you think hell sounds bad, you’re normal. Remember how you can avoid going there? Right. Accepting Jesus as your personal Savior and Lord. Wait...where did the “Lord” part come from? That means that you’re surrendering your life to Jesus as well. It means that if you accept His free gift of hope and salvation, and the free ticket out of hell, every decision you make needs to be for Him. You need to read the Bible, and tell others about Him. Here’s where a lot of people really start to dislike the idea of accepting Jesus. I can see why. Sounds like a big commitment. But so does agreeing to spend eternity in hell. The funny thing is that you don’t have to choose hell or Satan like you have to choose Jesus. It’s the default. It’s why bad things are easy to do. Satan has control of this world because God and sin are opposites. God can’t be here like He was before Adam and Eve betrayed Him. But He still sent Jesus to save you.

You might not choose to accept Jesus. Just as I said before, it’s a personal choice. No one can make you. Likewise, if you know someone who has accepted Jesus, you are not saved just because you know them. This is on you. All of it. That’s both a relief and a burden, huh? I understand. Choosing Jesus doesn’t mean that your life will be perfect and you’ll never be hurt or hurt others again. You’ll still be a human being living in a world inhabited by sin where God cannot stay. But it’ll be like increasing your once-in-a-blue-moon good days tenfold, because it will grant you perspective. It will give you hope.

Even if you are not ready to make a decision, are you ready to hear about the process of accepting Jesus? Even if you don’t want to, go ahead and skim over it. You’ve stuck with me this far, after all.

Someone who wants to accept Jesus needs to do three things, and these things conveniently follow the first three letters of the alphabet. Part of this process is meant to be done in a prayer. Start by saying “Dear God.” There are many ways to address Him, and this one works just fine. Then, follow up with these three steps:

A - Admit. A person who wants to accept Jesus needs to admit that they have sinned. We all do it. Don’t let any shame you might feel stop you. God already knows everything you’ve ever done. You don’t even need to recount individual sins. Just admit that you have sinned, and that you understand you are still a sinner.

B - Believe. A person who wants to accept Jesus needs to believe that He is God’s only Son, and that God sent Him to die on the cross for us. If you want Jesus to save you, you must believe He did something to save you. You must also believe that Jesus is alive and residing in heaven with God at this very minute, that death could not hold Him. At this point, you can end your prayer by saying, “In Your Son’s name, Amen.” The final step is carried out around other people.

C - Confess. A person who wants to accept Jesus needs to confess to others that He is their Savior. Tell people about your hope and joy. Tell them how excited you are to go to heaven, because the person who does these three things will spend eternity in peace and comfort, with Jesus. The person who accepts Jesus’s gift of salvation doesn’t need to worry about suffering here on earth, because even death cannot separate a Christian from God.

Here is a sample acceptance prayer from the website LifeWay. You do not have to pray this exact prayer:

“Dear God, thank You for choosing to love me! I know I am a sinner. I believe You sent Your Son, Jesus Christ, to die for my sins. I believe He rose again and lives today. Today, I repent and turn away from my sin. Thank You for Your wonderful love and for changing my life forever. In Jesus' name I pray, Amen.”

If you choose to complete all three steps, you are officially a Christian! And as a Christian, you’ll want to make some Christian friends. This doesn’t mean leaving your old friends, just adding on. In fact, you should really keep your old friends, because they just might be the first people you tell about Jesus. As for finding Christian friends, you can start by looking for a church near you. This can be really hard, especially if you’ve never been to church before. Please try to remember that churches are full of human beings, who, even though they have trusted Jesus, can still sin. They might not always be friendly to you. That’s unfortunate, because they ought to be spreading God’s love. You may need to try a few churches before you find one where you feel comfortable. This is normal too.

Something else that is essential is a book called the Bible. The Bible is God’s instruction for humans. In it, you’ll find His commands, as well as His promises. Promises that He loves you and will never stop loving you. Promises that He will protect you. Read your Bible regularly, and try to get a daily dose. When and where is up to you. If you feel like you’re having trouble understanding something (which can happen to anyone), see if the church you’re trying out has a Bible study group you can join. Or ask the pastor. It is also possible to do research to find answers to your questions. However, the internet has a lot of weird stuff on it, so make sure you really trust the source you’re using.

Lastly, now that you’ve trusted Jesus, you have a direct link to God. Talk to Him! Tell Him about your day, your fears, and your hopes in prayer. Ask Him to guide you, and keep you and your loved ones safe. Ask Him for peace, especially in times of discouragement or anxiety. You can even pray for sleep to come when you’re having trouble drifting off. Nothing is too simple or personal for God. He already knows what you’re thinking, why not go ahead and present your desires and requests to Him? Remember that no is also an answer, as in, not all prayers are answered with a yes. You may have a sick friend, someone that you ask God to heal. God will answer that prayer, but He might not do what you asked. He doesn’t always send the miracle you want. I don’t know why. But you must have faith that God has a plan—because He does. You can ask God for strong faith as well. He will help you.

When you pray, you also need to ask God for forgiveness of your sins. This includes white lies and muttered insults that the person you dislike at work can’t hear. But if you ask for forgiveness (and you must), you need to understand that you’re promising to stop doing the things for which you want to be forgiven. If you ask God to forgive you, it will be like you never did those things. However, this is not a license to whatever you want. Sin separates you from God, even here on earth. Christians do sin, but we know to turn away from that sin. You can be forgiven, but you must try not to keep doing the same things. You can ask for God to help you with this, too.

If you love someone, or even if you don’t, ask if they have heard about Jesus. You don’t have to start the conversation on this topic. I didn’t start this post by talking about Jesus, did I? Ask them about their day. Listen to them. Learn to understand how they feel. Let them vent to you, if that’s what they want. Offer them patience and kindness. Once they feel better, or feel comfortable talking with you, introduce the topic of Jesus by telling about something you did. Tell a funny story that happened at church this week, or about a new friend you made in Sunday School. Maybe ask if they want to go to church with you next week to meet this person. You can pray about finding ways to tell others about Jesus. I pray about this myself, and God gives me just the right words every time. Remember that just because you tell someone about Jesus doesn’t mean they will want to choose Him. That’s not your fault. You can’t make someone become a Christian, nor should you try. They might grow to dislike you, and God by extension. Instead, you are merely presenting them with the opportunity, just as I presented it to you here. God wants you to tell others about Him—that’s your responsibility. Making them accept Jesus is not. You cannot save them. Only Jesus can.

How do you feel now? Whether you trusted Jesus or not, do you still feel completely hopeless? Now that I’ve shared this with you, hope is yours to accept or decline. Ignoring this and not choosing Jesus might feel like the easy thing. But, as we’ve been discussing, the easy thing is often easy because it’s wrong. Choose wisely, my friend. Happy Easter, and may God bless you and those you love.

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cardshcrp · 6 years ago

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-slowly slides in, pushes u a $20- 5 times kissed pls and thank <3

FIVE TIMES KISSED.

@jeangreyed // JEAN GREY // always selectively accepting !

Jean Grey is an enigma. She’s the ideal woman, for most - beauty, kindness, power, all wrapped up in a gorgeous bundle and topped so pretty with bright red hair she might as well be a blessing. Or that’s what people think, anyway. Remy understands why they do.

Funny enough, all the perfection doesn’t do it for him, though his judgment is probably skewed because his heart’s already hung up to dry for two pretty girls as it is and he really isn’t looking for more pain.

It doesn’t stop the fact that she’s objectively attractive, of course, or a colleague that might be something close to a friend. There’s still a fifty-fifty chance his eyes drift to her when she enters the room and that he flashes her a smile; it isn’t hurt any by the fact her hair is one of the brightest things he can see, his color-muddied eyes so drawn to things as fiery as they are.

Gambit likes Jean Grey fine, but he isn’t in love with her, isn’t caught up by her. He doesn’t plan to be. Doesn’t want to be.

So it’d figure that the one woman out of his league he actually didn’t pursue would be the one to start shadowing him. His life has always been a divine comedy, and it’s an obvious twist. He’s a clever boy. He should’ve known.

It’s not immediate, of course. She’s got plenty of suitors, on and off, the ones that speak up and the ones that don’t and linger waiting. He’s busy chasing Rogue and dreams he’s tried to put away and hasn’t quite managed to, an odd little tug-of-war in his heart over an unused house in the Garden District that’s just waiting for him to usher in a belated blushing bride.

It takes fucking years, and death, and Death, and being left for dead. It takes Remy’s heart drying up so bad he thinks it’s never going to feel okay again, and him finally leaning into it, accepting the fact that he just isn’t cut out to be loved, or that maybe it’s how he loves that fucks things up.

But for all that, he hasn’t forgotten how the game is played, the way meaningless flirting feels and the way heavy looks push down until pulses quicken. He hasn’t forgotten how it feels to watch from across a room and pray that they notice and that they don’t, all at once.

He can’t forget heartache when it’s all he can taste, forget-me-nots and the tang of rot.

He tracks her down as a friend when she disappears, stays with her because he knows what it’s like to be alone, for once a thief with no ulterior motive. He cooks for her, trades stupid little chores, lives like the world isn’t falling down around their ears just for a while. He’s good at playing house for someone who’s never done it before. Remy figures it’s kind of healing for both of them, being normal.

He’s good at pretending he doesn’t notice when her eyes start linger at the curve of his mouth after a few months, or the flashes of longing pressing into his empathy just for half a second. He’s good at it for a while, but it’s hard not to love back when someone wants to offer you their heart even if they’re hiding it, and he’s a starving thing at the end of it.

Remy respects her too much to push for something she doesn’t want to embrace, so he does nothing. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done, but he does it anyway, mostly.

And sure, maybe he really shouldn’t, but if he slips a chocolate candy into her jacket pocket when she isn’t watching with exchange me for a better kiss scrawled inside the wrapping, he can pass it off for playing if he absolutely needs to.

Turns out he doesn’t, though, ’cause she drops the wrapper in his lap three days later before settling herself right on top.

ii.

They aren’t very public about it. Maybe that’s surprising; Remy doesn’t really want to waste the brainpower on figuring out if that contradicts their respective public images, because frankly, everything about them side by side contradicts their public images anyway, so fuck it.

The more observant ones notice, of course, when they come back. The fact that they come back together isn’t in itself that unusual - Remy had said he would find her. He was good at tracking. He delivered, even if it took longer than they might have expected.

Logan knows, right off, Remy’s sure of that. He can act as much as he likes, but nothing is going to cover up the way their scents layer atop one another, and despite common misconceptions he isn’t really fond of bathing in cologne, so he’d accepted in advance that Logan would be onto them. He’s also the type not to ask questions or try to pass judgment, so it works out.

Rogue is more of a problem, and more of a giveaway for everyone else, because Remy flirted with her out of sheer familiarity and in the name of friendly banter before. Now, he doesn’t at all - inside jokes, teasing, time together, sure. But there isn’t any of the ever-pervasive sexual tension lingering between them, and none of his quips are double entendres, because he’s not about to lead her on. She isn’t exactly mad about it, more puzzled, but it’s the lack of push and pull between them that tips some of the others off.

Logan knows, then Rogue. Kitty figures it out quick after she sees Rogue glare at Jean a little, ’cause even if she’s forfeited the rights to Remy’s heart old habits die hard. Once Kitty knows, Piotr knows, and once Piotr knows so does Kurt, and Kurt accidentally lets slip to Jubes, and once Jubilee knows everyone knows; it’s just a damn chain reaction, all within two months.

Remy doesn’t mind, exactly, and Jean doesn’t too much either. It had been inevitable.

The bad part is how many people tell her not to waste her time with him.

She doesn’t tell him that, of course she doesn’t, but he knows. And it hurts because it’s the truth. She’s Jean fucking Grey and she deserves to have a paragon of virtue that doesn’t keep his head shut up, but there they are, and it hurts like hell that he’s actually a kind of happy for once and it’s to her detriment.

But every time he pulls away even a little, she pulls him back. She gets it, of course she does, because even if she doesn’t entirely know his mind she knows human cause and effect better than anybody else.

She takes him on walks by the lake, moves a few of his scant personal belongings into her room (which results in such a scolding, because Remy, don’t tell me this is the real Mona Lisa - ). She perches on the kitchen counter and volunteers for taste tests like it’s any kind of ordeal at all when he’s the one cooking.

On an overcast Saturday in mid-March, she wraps gentle fingers around his fragile wrists and pulls him down into a kiss right in the front of the very full dining hall. It works; she makes her point, crystal clear. There’s no doubt about the rumors then.

Later Remy finds out she’d also stuck her middle finger up at the whole hall, students and instructors and all, behind his back. He has to smother a smile when he does, because well, they hadn’t been wrong after all. He was a terrible influence.

iii.

It’s not easy to get inside Remy’s head. It’s one of the things that infuriates people most; hard to read, hard to understand. He puts up a good front, and he keeps his head locked up tight, shielded by the nature of his powers, shields of energy in crackling flux that even the esteemed Professor can’t touch for long.

It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible, either. The Shadow King has done it. Xavier has managed. The Phoenix cracks him open and scoops him out raw.

He is so used to being impenetrable to all but the worst that he has forgotten that when he does put the massive effort in to let someone peek, even a little, it leaves the door open. He’d let Betsy and Jean in, this time, for the sake of teamwork, because that’s always worked out for him so well.

He’s paying for that mistake right now.

Remy whirls around - another way out, he needs to minimize the damage he can be used for against the others - the hole in the side of the jet is big enough to jump through, so he does, coat catching at jagged metal edges for barely a second before he’s gone, twisting like a rag doll through the air with the lingering panicked shouts falling away behind him. The pressure in his head builds, screaming, until it feels like it’s about to burst -

He pulls himself out of freefall, flings his arms out to the side to slow his fall just a little. It ain’t much. It doesn’t have to be.

Two thousand seven hundred meters up, clocking in at eighty-one kilograms, he figures on the fly he’s got about twenty-three, twenty-four seconds before he’s out for good. It’s hard to check his math with a wrestling match in his head, but that’s alright. He’s not going to need that long.

Seventeen seconds left.

In the back of his head, the voice builds, demanding he do something, save himself, and he can’t help but grin even though it feels like his face is peeling apart because even once they’re in, they have to fight - and he doesn’t make it easy. There’s a split-second struggle, and the intruder realizes that yes, Gambit is that much of a suicidal moron -

He hands the tele control of his body, plummeting towards being an extra-gross smear on the pavement, and takes the opening to crack open his mind and scream, tossing it out as best he can. It’s clumsy, unrefined, weak underneath the crushing pressure of his piggybacker, but he knows at least one person will hear him. Jean is always listening for him.

H E A D S U P !

The voice twists, working its will into his body, coaxing him to give in. Surrender is easy. Surrender is bliss. Surrender is ecstasy. The pain squeezes his brain until it feels like gray matter is dripping out of his ears. The acrid iron taste of blood fills his mouth.

Give in. It’ll feel so good if you do.

But he’s not the surrendering type, never has been. He’s a pissed-off piece of pure dynamite. And psychic links are two-way.

I can save you.

Six seconds left.

Red eyes spark to life, and he reaches around with fingers to his temple, bang!, shoves a goddamn payload of hyperactive energy through his own skull. His bones and brain are built for it. The tele’s aren’t, and he can feel their eyes widen and the link snap as their brain gets fucking pulped. Maybe they’ll recover, maybe they won’t, but he’ll worry about that later if he’s around to.

He’s still falling, terminal velocity now, dropping at a hundred twenty-five miles an hour to splatdown and he really hopes he hasn’t miscalculated this one, ’cause the ground is coming up real fast, about as quick as his heartbeat.

Four seconds left.

His body jerks, not slammed upwards so much as pulled, dragged around like he’s a damn kitten being hauled by the nape of his neck except it’s his whole body and eh, it’s a stupid comparison but the more important thing is that he isn’t about to die.

Jean is so nice about it, in fact, that he finds himself being deposited bridal-style in her arms, which he’s sure is to really emphasize how much of a mess he currently is in comparison to her. Bright green eyes drift down to meet far darker ones, half-worried; the nudge of m’fine he pushes at her is enough to have full lips turning upwards just a bit.

“Cuttin’ it a little close there, Jeannie,” he wheezes, so out of breath he can’t even pretend to be slick this time, and she rolls her eyes so damn expressively he can’t help but cough some more as he cackles, her voice measured and full of I’m-so-done-with-you in response. “Maybe I’d have an easier time helping people that don’t decide to jump out of planes without parachutes.”

He’s about to argue that it’s not his fault that he’s been shoehorned into another dumbass spandex nightmare, and that if he had it his way he’d have his breastplate and included chute, but instead the faint burgeoning banter is cut off rather abruptly when she actually dips him back and kisses him full on the mouth, shutting him up in the most time-tested, scientifically-proven effective way available.

“Oh,” he breathes, and if he’s grinning like a jackass she probably knew it was coming anyway. “You really have been spendin’ way too much time around me, Jean Grey.”

iv.

It doesn’t take him that long to figure out she’s still got some Phoenix in her.He’s a fool for Lady Luck and nobody else; he sees when she pulls away, looks at him with guilt and fear. Concern for him. It’s an interesting change, one that’s oddly unwelcome in the context it comes in.

He can take care of himself, but he can’t say that to her without making it worse, so he doesn’t.

Instead, he plays the part of pretty distraction well; he notches up every bit of overdone personality when they’re in public. Spoiled. Flashy. Smug. It didn’t matter much, because the truth of it was that he was capable and reliable, but being the class clown on missions kept the wan look from her face - even Jean Grey didn’t have time to worry about little things like shitty psychic firebirds when her boyfriend/lover/nuisance was causing trouble.

Ironically, he succeeds best when he isn’t actually trying to.

Gambit is particularly well-suited to reconnaissance and infiltration, in settings of any quality; as infrequently as the X-Men’s work calls for those things in a more lavish circumstance, it does happen once in a while. He can’t remember the last time he’d dropped by a gala with bad intentions, at least on hero business, but he’s quite certain that whenever that last time was, he’d been with Rogue. And Rogue was not allowed to come with, because sometimes these jobs called for a little more than flirting, as nasty as that was - and Rogue had a temper about seeing these things, even if he’d gotten out of all circumstances so far without having to stoop so low. Just the flirting was bad enough.

Jean was more mission-focused, or that was the thinking, and she was making the rounds as a waiter, checking for hidden exits on her trips to the kitchen. Doing a lovely job, too, he’s sure.

He, on the other hand, has to isolate and charm a particularly violently anti-mutant senator’s wife. It turns out it isn’t as difficult as he’d expected; she’s pretty, but not exquisite, and she’s clearly feeling more than a little sour towards her husband as he laughs with his colleagues. It’s also likely that one of said colleagues’ newest trophy wives standing five feet from her and glimmering all over in the most expensive latest fashions isn’t helping her self-esteem either.

Remy blowing the girl off with a smooth smile and excuse and sliding right on up to her side likely boosts her ego more than a bit - it isn’t hurt by the way he snags a fresh champagne flute for her off of a passing tray.

“You’re not the dangerous kind of mutant, are you?” she asks, and the second her eyes lock onto his, he’s got her. The flare of irritation that rose up with her words is squashed quick enough, though he’s sure he’ll be stealing from wherever it is she lives next he’s in the area.

Remy shakes his head just quickly enough to be boyishly earnest about it, lets his cheeks dimple with a demure smile. “No, ma’am - don’t think I am.”

She flaunts. He flatters. She flutters. He flirts. The whole damn tricky jig of it takes so little time the ice in his drink hasn’t even begun to melt before she’s making a calculated departure towards the upstairs study.

He crosses over to Jean, who’s holding two full glasses of merlot for him with an impassive look on her face; draining the last of his whiskey, he swaps out. Head tipping back, she asks, “You got the information?”

“I’ve opened up avenues of communication,” he says, amiable as ever, and turns to go.

The muted twinge of jealousy that decidedly isn’t his hits him like a sack of bricks, and he spins on his heel, eyes wide in surprise, because, well, he just hadn’t expected Jean to care.

Somehow, it’s nice that she does.

“Hey,” he murmurs, and stoops to press a kiss to her cheek, a quiet chuckle escaping him. “The flash drives are in a desk drawer. I’m getting those, telling her to go start a shower and that I’ll catch up, and then locking her in. She’ll be embarrassed, not hurt, nothing else. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Promise.”

He’s back in six, with a sparkly paperweight to boot.

The days are kind of a mess, but that’s okay. They slide by alright just the same, and they’re still sticking together fine, just fine. Some nights they don’t talk at all, just lie around in silence because it’s easier; some nights he disappears without a word because it’s how he is. She doesn’t ask him where he’s been, because she knows that if it mattered he’d say. She swipes his sweaters and feeds his cats until they’re extra-plump. They pretend that they’re normal like they’re ever going to get there.

“I’m not a good man,” he reminds her, smudges her nose with flour just enough that her eyes cross when she assesses the damage; she doesn’t say anything for a long moment, just confiscates the mixing bowl in his arms so that he can’t smudge her anymore.

When she smiles at him, it’s a little sad, but that’s alright. They’ve both been broken for a long time.

“You’re not as bad as you think you are,” she tells him, the same conversation as always, played out over and over again because some things can’t be fixed but that doesn’t mean they aren’t alright, alright. He doesn’t bother to fight it when her fingers trace over his cheek and she stands on tiptoe to slant warm lips over his.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” she says, and her smile says she means it. “You’re mine.”

#jeangreyed #♠️ ANSWERED.#♥️ JEANGREYED ⁠— JEAN GREY.#♠️ DRABBLES.#long post.

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saionofvalflame · 3 years ago

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❀ enthralling tales

He’s so very tired.

It’s been months since he was sucked in, or at least he thinks that might be the case—for all he knows, time hardly moves at all in the real world while it flows free and fast here. If it were simply him being stuck here in this strange new world, it probably wouldn’t be so exhausting; however, he made the choice (mistake?) to get a job at an emergency clinic, and ever since then it’s just rush-rush-rush almost all the time. True, he’s helping save lives, but continuously treating injuries and consoling family members and patients alike while they await help and recovery, day in and day out? It’s taken a toll on his body and spirit, and he has no idea how much longer he can do this.

Saias carefully slips off his gloves (snapping them off like they do in TV shows, he’s learned, is a surefire way to spread whatever contaminants are on them) and deposits them in the garbage with a weary sigh. He cleans up with a swift efficiency gained throughout his time here and clocks out, scrubbing at his eyes with freshly-washed hands. Leaving the clinic with a wave tossed to his coworkers over his shoulder, the redhead makes his way to the nearby coffeeshop in search of a quick bite and a quiet place to read. In his current state, he won’t be able to deal with his roommates back at his apartment, and he takes his newly acquired drink and breakfast sandwich to a small table in the corner of the café that he’s come to haunt lately. Setting his meal down, he takes out his phone and unlocks it, finding a new message in the group chat with a few of his friends from this place. The three Marines are a frequent enough presence in his life, what with them living near his own place and often seeking treatment for themselves or their squadmates at his clinic. He’s interacted enough with them that they’ve become their own people to him, not simply characters in whatever story he’s in.

seraphimdown: ange found this, thought you might be interested.

seraphimdown: fictionfans.net/s/1234567/1/They-First-Dreamed-of-Electric-Sheep

Saias raises an eyebrow at the link name, but clicks it anyway; it opens to the familiar website and the first chapter of another unofficial story. Science fiction isn’t completely his favorite, but if his friend recommended it, then this particular piece must be up his alley in some way. With a shrug, he settles in to read.

The story’s fun so far, he thinks, though a few names here and there catch his eye as familiar. He must be really homesick if he’s finding his friend’s names in a bit of fanfiction; several of them have names that he’s come to understand as relatively common or normal in this world. But then he reads the name “Marth” and his heart stutters to a stop.

It can’t be a coincidence... right?

He continues on, recognizing more names from the academy, until he finishes the last chapter. The data for the story reads “Updated: Aug 19, 2022.” That’s today’s date. Checking the publishing date reveals the first chapter was posted on August 1st. There are nineteen chapters.

What are the odds?

Clicking on the author’s name, RBK Emblemers, brings up a profile and a list of other works by this person (or people if the name is any indication). The redhead counts six total works, then picks the one titled Queen’s Compass and begins to read that one as well. More familiar names pop up as he reads, and Saias has to return to the author’s profile to check some things. Six works, all of which were first published on August 1st, all of which have nineteen chapters, one for every day that has occurred this month. If he has his math right, this is around the same time as that fateful mission to the Sealed Forest and the other locations around Fódlan during last year’s Lone Moon, the one that supposedly never happened because time reset.

Mind racing, Saias reads and reads. He blasts through Divas Don’t Write Love Songs and I Became the Villainess and Now I Have to Break Her Curse?! and picks out more and more names from the academy. He gasps in delight when he finds Chrom’s name in Edge of Eden and breaks down sobbing when he finds Father’s name in Quiet Wood. Someway, somehow, they’re here in the Projectionist’s book too. The monastery must’ve put together a rescue mission of sorts to come get him and everyone else trapped in the enchanted tome. They’re coming for him, and the month is drawing to a close... when it ends, will they find him?

saionic: you’re a lifesaver, you know that?

seraphimdown: ... i assume you are not referring to my occupation???

For the first time in a long time, he has hope.

Saias smiles in anticipation.

#✿ drabbles #✿ in character #toaunscripted2022 #//this got a little meta XD was inspired by the vero post! thinking about those trapped in the books waiting to be freed

0 notes

angeltriestoblog · 7 years ago

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Your Comprehensive Guide to Passing the College Entrance Tests

College entrance tests season is a time in my life that I look back on with equal parts pain and fondness, which somewhat serves as a justification as to why I’ve been putting off this post for so long. Although I spent many sleepless nights re-absorbing lessons I never even got in the first place—all while having to deal with agonizing self-doubt and anxiety—I guess it’s safe to say that it was all worth it. After all, ya girl passed three out of the four universities she applied for: I have yet to find out if UP is willing to take me under their wing, but whether or not they want me, I can say that I am very much contented with my results.

Since I feel I’m in a position to speak on a topic like this, I’m back at it again and ready to help anyone about to tackle the beasts that are the CETs this year. I’m dividing this post into three parts, which will contain tips on how to go about everything before, during and after taking what most consider to be the most important tests of your life.

Obligatory disclaimer: This is ridiculously long and not everything that I’ve written here will apply to you, but hey, if I were you, I’d start taking down notes.

BEFORE THE TEST

One thing most people fail to stress when giving advice on this topic is the importance of adopting the best mindset. Understand that the CETs are a very serious and urgent matter, for you are tasked with preparing for the succeeding chapters of your life all within a short time frame, but at the same time, don’t allow the pressure that comes with it to lead to overthinking and comparison that will ultimately distract you from achieving your goal: passing. Stay driven and positive, and focus on yourself.

Now, on to the actual studying part. I’d hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the best way to breeze through these exams without breaking a sweat is by being a good student all throughout high school. Be the type to maintain a stellar general weighted average, keep all notes taken down during the past four years in an expanding file folder instead of using them to wrap dried fish and join as many extracurricular activities as possible. If you’ve already failed at this, it’s time to proceed to Plan B: review school.

I personally didn’t enroll in any classes over the summer, because I thought they only took place during the month of April, which was when my parents had scheduled our overseas trip for the year. Well, apparently, I couldn’t have been any less well researched and by the time I found out, it was already far too late. So, I had made the decision to opt for self-study. For some reason, I was the only one in the household who was worried out of my mind: my parents were very much convinced that I would be able to handle reviewing on my own, and prove that review school was not a requirement for acceptance into prestigious universities. I was touched by their unwavering confidence in me, but every word felt like an additional kilogram I had to carry on my back.

I got by through borrowing old review modules from my dentist (Tita Meng, I have no idea how you’re ever going to read this, but thank you so much for saving my life… and also straightening my teeth) and downloading sample tests from the Internet for me to test my knowledge later on. My efforts never felt like they were enough for me though: I remember looking up the curriculum for each subject I needed to tackle on the website of the Department of Education, researching each sub-topic that was vague to me and Khan Academy-ing my way to proficiency. Definitely an unnecessarily extra way to tackle the reviewing process, but hey, my mind was very much laden with doubt and I was willing to do the most. I also put up cartolinas on my bedroom walls with formulas for different Math and Science subjects, which proved itself useful since I actually spend a decent amount of my time staring off into space.

If the thought of doing all of this alone is stressing you out, then maybe it’s time to go down what is considered by most to be the safe route: enrolling in a review school. Doing so will provide you with all the lessons covered during high school in the form of actual lectures with qualified teachers, and hardbound notes that often come with sample tests that resemble the real thing. It guides you through the application process as well as gives updates on the schedules of most universities, and helps in parts of the test that cannot be achieved by poring over textbooks such as essay writing and even techniques for plain old guessing. All these benefits seem to provide their students with the confidence boost to top everything off, and I admit that I did feel inferior to most of my peers at some point for this reason. They all just seemed so put together, so at ease with their binders and pastel highlighters that it made me go through a period of regret and resentment. Do not let the perceived advantage they have blind you, though: do note that even if attending a review school helps you ace the entrance test, it does not measure your aptitude nor your ability to handle the workload that you will have to face as you make your way in the university of your choice.

Because I had to do everything alone, I had firsthand experience when it comes to waging a war with time: it was truly my biggest enemy during this point in my life. It’s obviously crucial to create a schedule and follow it regularly. If you’re anything like me, you’ve read this in several self-help books or heard this over and over again on productivity podcasts but planning truly is key. First, list down all the topics that you want to cover, complete with the estimated time it’ll take you to master them. Then, distribute them per day evenly so you don’t end up overwhelming yourself and cramming so much information in your head that you barely get to retain anything. It’s important to have a contingency plan ready as well, in case you needed more time digesting a particular topic.

Eliminate all distractions while reviewing. This is a cardinal rule for studying in general, so it will definitely increase in importance during a time like this. One thing I found important is to tell yourself why you have to do it, so it’s easier for you to follow through. For example, I’m pretty addicted to watching YouTube videos, so having to cut down my marathons and look at the number of videos on my Watch Later pile up was a bit painful at first. But upon conditioning my mind into thinking that I’d rather spend my five month summer vacation before college binge watching all the videos I had missed out on instead of looking for a university that was still ready to accept me, it was much easier for me to cut down on it.

Remember to prioritize breadth over depth. Cover as many topics as you possibly can, going over the basic concepts and important formulas. Then, knock yourself out with practice tests so that you’re fully familiarized with them by the time CETs roll in, because you never know how even the simplest questions can be twisted around to baffle you. A common mistake most incoming seniors make (myself included) is overthinking what could possibly be asked and going too into detail when reviewing. In my defense, it seemed like the natural thing to do during a situation of panic but if I had only known, I would have been able to save so much of my time and devote it to mastering everything I had learned.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help if ever the need arises, whether it be from teachers, friends or upperclassmen. It might come off as a surprise to some of you, but there are many people who will be more than willing to help you, whether out of pity or genuine human decency. I asked tons of my classmates if I could borrow the notes they received from their review center, so I could learn more than I could have on my own (and maybe even compare their progress with mine). Sometimes, I’d disturb them at ungodly hours and call them up on Messenger to plead them to teach me the shortcuts in problem solving, mnemonics or acronyms. I was never the type of person to do that: honestly speaking, it felt like a direct blow to my pride to have to beg for something. But, it was my future at stake and upon remembering that, I no longer felt any shame [shrugs]

On another (but equally important) note: stay on top of your requirements for the different universities you’ll be applying to. Although they don’t normally start until July or August, it’s much better to get these out of the way as early as possible. Take it from me, who ran around Megamall looking for a photo studio a week before ACET apps needed to be passed. Stock up on ID pictures of different sizes, preferably 1x1, passport size and 2x2. Photocopy important documents like your birth certificate and grades forms, as well as your ID from the current or previous school year. Start thinking of who to ask recommendation letters from, brush up on your essay writing and interview skills and work on your CV if needed. Also, have a scanner ready if you plan on trying out for La Salle, since their application process is purely online. Be sure to keep track of your deadlines: don’t wait around for people to remind you, and please please please For The Love Of God do not cram everything until the very last second.

Strive to finish reviewing over summer break so you don’t have to worry about balancing CETs and academics, which is an entirely different playing field. I’ll come clean and say that I failed to do this, because there were still so many topics I couldn’t understand and questions I couldn’t find the answers to, even with the guidance of the Internet. Let me tell you, it was absolute hell as I didn’t have the time or brain capacity to digest lessons both for school and entrance tests. Please have mercy on yourself and focus on the classes you are to take during the school year, flipping through notes and flash cards sparingly when you have free time.

Now for the part that will probably be most useful to you all: the actual subject matter to study, focused specifically on the entrance tests for the Big 4 universities. Don’t use this as the sole basis of your review, since it’s not a guarantee that the topics covered this year will be the same as the succeeding ones. I remember looking up this one CET tips thread which said that the ACET was going to have mostly geometry-related questions. Since Ateneo is my dream school, I spent a ridiculous amount of time cramming everything from theorems to tangents in my head. So, you could just imagine my surprise when I actually took my test and was greeted by a maximum of four geom questions and a predominantly Algebra II and Trigonometry-centered Math portion.

ACET

Language proficiency

This test will assess your knowledge on basic grammar: correct usage of verb tenses, S-V agreement, analogy-type and a cloze test, where you are required to fill in the blanks with the appropriate word for the sentence. It also included an essay question about a particular word that differed from session to session. I had to make one on the word “superstition”, so I had written something on how I didn’t believe in them because I was raised by my family with a very strong faith in God. One tip people give out a lot is to try and relate your answer to either love for God or being a man for others, but do it only if it doesn’t come out forced. From what I remember, we were given 50 minutes to answer all of this, and I don’t mean to come off as boastful but English is and has always been my first language, so it didn’t serve as a problem on my part.

Mathematical ability

This test is feared most by previous test takers, and it was only when I crawled my way through it that I realized why it has that reputation. It’s composed primarily of basic algebra, algebra II and trigonometry questions, all of which are quite lengthy and require a decent amount of time to think through, especially if you’re not really the best in this subject.

Abstract reasoning

This test… Boy, what do I even say? It requires you to pick out the figure or shape that completes the pattern. There were 30 items all in all that needed to be accomplished within 10 minutes, and I couldn’t tell anything apart from each other. I feel anyone who tells you they took this test seriously and finished it without breaking a sweat is just messing with you. I don’t think there’s any way to answer this test without turning to our old friend (the shotgun method).

Logical reasoning

This test includes questions with a set of premises that you are supposed to analyze, and a list of choices containing possible conclusions that can be drawn from them. Your task is to pick the most logical one, which sounds like common sense at first. Apparently, this was a topic discussed in General Math, so there is a certain set of rules to follow. Not only did I not remember ever taking this up in my life, but I also skipped it during review so I had to borrow my classmate’s book and cram everything I could during ACET week (DEFINITELY NOT ADVISABLE). There was one part of the test that involved a lot of technical terms, which I did not read about or study but thank God ya girl was desperate enough and ended up finding hints in the instructions!

Vocabulary

Pretty self-explanatory type of test, with 25 words in five minutes. It seems overwhelming, but contrary to popular belief, it’ll be easy even for those who aren’t voracious readers.

Reading comprehension

This test will require you to fully understand the message of the text, and apply it practically or draw sensible conclusions from it. I breezed through this one as well, because I’ve been reading since I was in the womb, but this can prove to be difficult for those who aren’t used to it. I’ve been seeing this tip circulating that goes “Look at the questions first before the passage itself, so you know what to find” and although it can fool just about any lazy reader out there, I tried it for myself during the ACET because I was in the mood and it didn’t help me at all. If anything, it just slowed me down because I was doing twice the work: looking at the question then going over the whole thing to find the answer, then repeating the process instead of just reading the text once.

Numerical ability

This test was all word problems—age, work, mixture, speed—with a dash of ratio, proportion and variation. This was the last portion of the ACET, and not only was my brain fried to a crisp but I was also very eager to leave so this definitely made me want to scream as I was taking it. It could have been much easier if I had memorized the exact formulas, and practiced lots so I could work rapidly without sacrificing accuracy.

DCAT

Mema test

I don’t know the actual name of this test, but I called it as such because it was so all over the place it felt like the ones in charge of making the DCAT looked at the final draft, saw they were an entire subtest short and crammed these questions two hours before the deadline. It was a mix of both abstract reasoning and vocabulary, and was generally easy: the AR patterns were understandable and didn’t require a lot of analysis, while the vocab words were very few and quite common.

Math I

I read in this one CET tips post that this portion was, and I quote, “pretentiously difficult and time-consuming” and it’s absolutely true! It’s big on derivations of formulas and advanced concepts in algebra, it barely had any basics much to my dismay. My mental block during this part was at its peak: I didn’t know how to solve anything, so I simply substituted each of the missing values in the problem with a number and worked it around until both sides of the equation were equal. That obviously took a lot of effort, which stemmed from my refusal to let go of an item until I feel like I’ve tried my best in solving it. But, it doesn’t have to be the case for you, especially if you’re terribly pressed for time: don’t hesitate to skip if you can’t move forward!

Math II + logical reasoning

Undoubtedly the hardest part of the exam, because no one saw it coming and thus, no one was able to prepare for it. And to think I was already warned by my friends who took the DCAT the week before I did to review statistics: I went through my notes from Grade 9 on combination and permutation, completely unaware that it was going to focus on hypothesis testing and estimation of parameters, which we failed to cover in Grade 11. I thought I’d be able to get by, I remember even praying that there would be only a few items but the entire test revolved around it so I almost literally crawled my way through. As for logic, it was alright until they started using technical terms like I had no idea what modus ponus (hocus pocus?) is and I don’t think I’ve ever had to study that in my life, so I think it’s safe to say I didn’t perform well there.

Reading comprehension

This was pretty similar to the ACET, so the same description and tips apply. Nothing to worry about.

EAPP/Research

This test was the plot twist of the year: DLSU completely took out the traditional type of English subtest (identifying errors, vocabulary, cloze test, etc.) and replaced it with citing in APA format, the principles of academic writing and the parts of a research paper. I had no idea that this was going to be included, and thankfully, those who enrolled in review centers didn’t either so we were all pretty much on equal footing. But, I walked out of it without a scratch: I guess it’ll be easy for you if you contribute to the making of your research papers, but if you’re a freeloader, ayan diba sinabi ko sa inyo may araw rin kayong lahat O ETO NA YUN

Science

This test covers the four major areas: earth science, biology, chemistry and physics. It was so much easier than I expected, because it only centered on terms and definitions of important concepts. I was most worried about the physics portion, since I’ve always considered it to be my waterloo, so you could just imagine my relief when I saw that it was very formulas-based and could be aced by anyone who took it up in Grade 10. (Super long run-on sentence, I’m sorry) I definitely wouldn’t have been able to survive it without the help of Tyler DeWitt, the best Chemistry teacher anyone could ever ask for – I found him on YouTube during a moment of desperation and binge-watched all his videos the day before DCAT, and he is probably the sole reason behind my success.

Life skills

The easiest and best part of the DCAT, because it’s simply a test of your character. It provides you with a set of situations, and all you have to choose which one best applies to you—so, yes there are no wrong answers. It’s easy to think that the most logical way to answer would be to feign sainthood and pick which one makes you look like an Ideal Lasallian/Catholic/Person, but I advise you to stay as true to yourself as possible. Those in admissions have probably seen many people apply this strategy in the past, and will most likely appreciate your honesty and view it as a way of seeing a true glimpse of your character.

UPCAT

Language proficiency

I think I was only sure of about 75% of my answers in this test, and to think this was the easiest part of the UPCAT for me as language is supposed to be my forte. Although it revolved around the basics—identifying errors in sentences, cloze set, rearrangement of sentences to form a paragraph and vocabulary—it came in both English and Filipino, which really tired me out early on.

Science

Hardest test of them all, to the point that taking it felt like my brain was getting hit by different trucks all at once. It covered all four major areas, including earth science. There were a ton of tables, graphs and diagrams that needed to be interpreted, and experiments to be analyzed: it’s big on practical applications and understanding of concepts. Don’t memorize any formulas, acronyms and mnemonics as you definitely will not need it at all.

Math

This test ran through a little bit of everything: from basic algebra to geometry, trigonometry, word problems and even statistics, sequences and number theory. It’s important to memorize all the formulas and learn how to solve problems fast even if they’ve already been twisted around. Math has never been my strong suit, so at this point, I was very close to hyperventilating. I even remember shading the wrong circles for ten questions in a row because I skipped one item. I also took around three bathroom breaks at this point, and spent 30 seconds sat on the toilet praying.

Reading comprehension

This was the first time I ever loathed this kind of test, when it’s supposed to be my strong point. It’s just that the previous subtests were so mentally and emotionally draining, that I didn’t have the brainpower to tackle it. It didn’t help at all that the passages chosen for the UPCAT were not the usual narrative types that are actually entertaining to read, but were incredibly information and detail-heavy. (They made really good memes on Twitter, though: no one was over the patis, newsboy or Super Ferry 9 for a long while.) The best thing to do at this point would be to go for the easiest and shortest ones first, to give your brain time to repair and prepare itself.

USTET

Mental ability

This test seeks to assess your common sense through a mix of logical reasoning, analogical and basic language and arithmetic problems. I don’t think I have to give you tips about this part at all, because it’s that easy.

Science

This test also includes question on all four major areas, but the main difference is that there are close to no practical applications of concepts – surprisingly, UST only cares about the definition of terms. Thus, intensive review probably won’t be needed: you could just skim through your notes from junior high school and have a good grasp of what’s going to be included.

Math

This test had mostly basic algebra and geometry, as well as some word problems – nothing too difficult. One other fun thing was that there was so many of the same type of question, so if you have the formulas memorized and a certain technique in answering, you could get so many (if not all) correctly.

English

This test focused mainly on basic grammar, figures of speech and subject-verb agreement. There was also a tiny part about oral communication and research, which I wasn’t able to prepare for but it’s a good thing I actually bothered paying attention to my teacher in Grade 11 or else I wouldn’t have been able to answer a thing.

THE DAY BEFORE – DURING THE TEST

Now, normally people would tell you to rest the day before any big test: drop all books and notes and mentally psych yourself for the battle up ahead in the form of face masks and comfort food. Although it sounded incredibly tempting, I obviously didn’t follow it because I was running short on time and had so many things I had yet to fully understand. Contrary to popular belief, I didn’t experience any adverse effects and even retained everything I had crammed into my head. So, you’re technically still allowed to review: run through flash cards and try a bit more practice problems if you wish. The only thing you have to make sure of is that you do not stay up late: sleep is crucial for memory retention and BASTA PARA DI KA LUTANG, and you do not want to realize that you’ve taken it for granted on such an important date.

Pack all your essentials the night before in (preferably) a small backpack that you can easily lug around. Bring two #2 Mongol pencils, an eraser, your test permit, a school ID just in case and food to snack on: my personal favorites of the season were seaweed crisps that I got for a buy one, take one deal in Robinsons Supermarket, raisins and trail mix. Scientific studies in the past have claimed that chewing motions can help stimulate your brain, but I just believe it just doesn’t feel right to engage in battle on an empty stomach. Coordinate with friends who’ll be in the same testing center as you, in case you won’t be able to survive in such an environment without someone to sympathize with you. Personally, I didn’t bother meeting up with friends for three out of my four tests because I wanted to feel independent and possibly run into new people.

If you’re anything like me and you hold on to God for dear life in almost every situation that brings you difficulty, don’t forget to pray for enlightenment and the capacity to accept His will, whatever it may be. As much as possible, try to hear Mass the day before your entrance test. Funny story, I was supposed to do this on ACET Eve, but we got stuck in traffic and missed the opportunity to. I ended up running to my parish while the staff were closing it (I didn’t even know that was a thing – what about the troubled souls who need guidance in the wee hours of the morning!) and muttering the most desperate prayer under my breath in a minute. I even lit a candle outside because I wanted to pass Ateneo that badly. Looking back, I found that it helped me lots because I was able to lift up all my worries to Him so I wouldn’t have to bring them along with me the next day.

On the test day itself, the best weapon to have in your arsenal is a good mindset. Walk into the testing center like you already passed, stroll along the corridors like it’s your first day in that university and look at every question as another step closer to freedom. Do not overthink or panic: I know it is much easier said than done, but it won’t hurt to fake it till you make it (sometimes, in situations like this, it’s the best option available).

Keep track of time limits: don’t be afraid to glance at the wall clock or your wristwatch from time to time so you can pace yourself properly. Don’t take too long on one item: if you don’t know what to do with it in 20 seconds, just come back to it when you have extra minutes to spare. If you’re not sure about the answer to an item, make the most intelligent guess you can by racking your brain for the very limited stock knowledge you have on that topic. Choose one letter to be your go-to choice if you really don’t know the answer: mine was C (for Christ, truly) although I don’t know if that’s still a wise decision because universities might start picking up on this strategy.

Look back on all your answers: if you have the luxury of time, re-read everything from the instructions to the passages to the choices provided, because sometimes, even if you were 110% sure of what you were answering during that moment, you may have missed something important. If you happen to be one of those beasts who come prepared enough and you’re completely sure of everything already, catch a quick nap to recharge those batteries instead of scouting for attractive fellow test-takers. I swear, there will be many more of them in college: at present, it’s best to exhaust all efforts into actually getting a university.

AFTER THE TEST

The minute the proctor makes you put your pencil down one last time and submit the questionnaire forward, let it go. Completely forget that it happened: don’t spend the succeeding days discussing answers with peers, as it will almost always end with you regretting things you can no longer change. Do not keep a countdown until judgment day ticking in your head either: choose to take this time to let your life return to its normal state. Shift your focus back to your academics for the school year, and be preoccupied with your interests once again during your free time. Remember to treat yourself as well, because we all know it’s not easy to study while simultaneously worrying about your future. After all my CETs, I made sure to eat out with my family and spoil myself with chick flick marathons and skin care products. Most importantly, be sure to keep praying as it is the key to accepting what happens in the future and regaining peace of mind. As cheesy as it sounds, trust in God’s plan for You and know that He has a reason for everything that is about to happen.

Now, on to the final stretch: the release of results. (This is a pretty timely thing to be talking about right now, since as of this writing, I’m waiting for UP to make a move within the week) If you pass your dream school—or any university for that matter—congratulations! Your hard work has finally paid off, and the promising future you’ve built up in your head is slowly turning into a reality. Don’t forget to thank all those who made this possible for you: God, your family, friends and teachers who believed in you through every sleepless night and mid-morning breakdown. Remain humble though, and be careful not to gloat in front of those who didn’t pass. I know you’re not really obliged to act a certain way to please them, especially during a time as joyous as this, but it’s all a matter of empathy: I’m sure you’d feel the same way if the roles were reversed. One thing you’re left to decide with if you’re lucky enough to pass more than one college is where you’re headed off to. Personally, it’s course over school: go for the program that suits you best and will help you pursue the career path you wish, since that will do you more good in the future than the reputation of any institution. If you are not entirely convinced by that spiel, do not hesitate to ask help from those you trust most: preferably family members, teachers and counselors. I left out friends, because I don’t think it’s a wise decision to choose a specific school just because that’s where they’re headed.

If you fail to make the cut, however, indulge in your right to cry right now. I’m sure that it must be disheartening, planning out a future in a school that ended up “rejecting” you in the end, but news flash: the race does not finish here! Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get ready for the results of the other schools you have applied for. Be sure to surround yourself with only people who are capable of uplifting your spirits and helping you believe in yourself during such a trying time. If the worst case scenario happens and you are left with no college at the end of the day, it’s time to get hustling: look for universities that are still accepting applications (some schools out there have entrance tests every month, and results come out instantly), or send in letters of appeal if ever you truly have your eyes set on a specific campus. That’s not something I have much expertise on though, but almost everything you will need to know is on the school’s official website.

And, there you have it! Everything I could tell you about the college entrance tests! I spent approximately three days trying to kick my writing slump in the ass: my eyes hurt and I may be suffering from carpal tunnel but all of that means nothing as long as I’ve been able to guide one hopeless soul out of the dark. (Yes, I patterned that after my comprehensive guide to surviving Grade 11 – my brain is dying, and I have no time to think of an ending catchier than that.) I’m on summer break now and I’ll be going to Korea next week, so expect a lot of lighter and more amusing content!

Stay in school, kids!

Angel

#angeltriestoblog #cets #college entrance tests #philippines #upcat #acet #dcat #ustet #cet tips #life dump #recs

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years ago

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THE COURAGE OF PERSON

So don't be demoralized by how hard it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads. Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up.1 Too much money seems to be a bunch of guesses, and guesses about stuff that's probably not your area of expertise. Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly conclude that manipulating these forces is the essence of fundraising. But that's not how any of the specific heresies it sought to suppress.2 For example, at the high water mark of political correctness, because it enabled one to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. Time after time VCs invest in startups founded by eminent professors. So don't even try to bluff them.3 Since we all agree, kids see few cracks in the view of the world.4 At every point in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. There are two things you have to worry about.

But boy did things seem different. I was doing: sketching.5 The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people, the same term was used for both products and information: there were distribution channels, and TV and radio channels. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. That's ultimately what drives us to work on something interesting with people I like.6 The view of history we got in elementary school. The average startup probably doesn't have much to show for itself after ten weeks.7 Relentlessness wins because, in the sense that it sorted in order of how much money should they take and what kind of software that makes money and the kind that's interesting to write, and Microsoft's first product was one, in fact, but no one will work on a harder problem unless it is proportionately or at least log n more rewarding. The ideas that come to mind first will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions e. Not likely. This applies to dating too. When there's something we can't say that are true.8

Related fields are where you go to college. It's a lot harder to create something people love and figure out how to connect some company's legacy database to their Web server. It's true they have a lot of people think they're too young to start a company to do something they don't want to take responsibility for telling 22 year olds to become mothers.9 But they work as if they had.10 And since success in a startup depends so much on motivation, the paradoxical result is that scientists tend to make their offices less sterile than the usual cube farm. So how can I claim business has to learn it? Then if things work out you can be pleasantly surprised. There is a threshold you cross. Usually their motives are mixed.11

So your site has to say Wait! I like. The best was that the three-month batch format, which we were forced into by the constraints of the summer, turned out to be 13: Pick good cofounders.12 The list of what you can't ask in job interviews is now so long that for convenience I assume it's infinite. When I left high school I was, I thought, a complete skeptic.13 The problem with the facetime model is not just that hackers understand technology better, but that you can stop judging them and yourself by superficial measures, but that they're driven by more powerful motivations.14 Last year one founder spent the whole first half of his talk on a fascinating analysis of the limits of the conventional desktop metaphor.15 Disasters are normal in a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent that covers what you're doing, and b any business model you have at this point is probably wrong anyway. Backing off can likewise prevent ambition from stalling.16 Not intelligence—determination. The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup what location is for real estate.17 Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal.

I found to my surprise that I was interested in AI a hot topic then, he told me I should major in math. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people working for you have to worry about novelty as professors do or profitability as businesses do. When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it. You learn to paint mostly by doing it, and gradually beat it into shape. I repeat is to give people everything you've got, right away. Subtract one from the other, and the most common reason they give is to protect them.18 Why didn't anyone think of that. A suburban street was just the right size.

Another way to be good. And Hewlett-Packard. In fact most aren't. Was it because the founders were bad at presenting, or because they're a way to work faster.19 The biggest fear of investors looking at early stage startups is that there is even something of a fashion for it in some places. I suspect the only taboos that are more than taboos are the ones likely to succeed in a startup.20 You don't need to. But more people could do it than do it now. There are worse things than seeming irresponsible. 2 2 is 5, or that we'd meet them again.21

So they invested in new Internet startups. Except our choices are immediately and visibly tested. We have some evidence to support this. So for all practical purposes, there is nothing so wrong as the principles of the most valuable things you could do in college. And since most of what big companies do is boring, you're going to stick around no matter what, they'll be more likely to get money. The median visitor will arrive with their finger poised on the Back button.22 The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates, support people yes, there were actually support people telling users to restart their browsers, and so on.

Notes

Well, of course, that alone could in principle 100,000 computers attached to the yogurt place, we found they used FreeBSD and stored their data in files. Or more precisely, investors treat them differently.

But the most recent version of everything was called the option pool as well, since human vision is the desire to do good work and thereby subconsciously seeing wealth as something you can control. I preferred to call them whitelists because it is. In either case the money is in the field.

It would be to say because most of his first acts as president, and instead focus on the other sense of not starving then you should be asking will you build this? I mean by evolution.

Unless we mass produce social customs. You should always get a sudden drop-off in scholarship just as on a scale that Google does. But the most abstract ideas, they tend to be low.

He couldn't even afford a monitor.

Thanks to Daniel Sobral for pointing this out.

A scientist isn't committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads. I learned from this that most people will give you money for other people think, but since it was 94% 33 of 35 companies that got bootstrapped with consulting. Mehran Sahami, Susan Dumais, David Heckerman and Eric Horvitz. Most new businesses are service businesses and except in rare cases those don't involve a lot on how much they liked the iPhone SDK.

For more on not screwing up. They have no idea what most people realize, because what they're really saying is they want it. One-click ordering, however, you can talk about the qualities of these people.

They may not be far less demand for unskilled workers, and there are certain qualities that some groups in America consider acting white. One sign of the things you like a headset or router. He made a lot of detail. People were more the aggregate are overpaid.

Obviously, if an employer.

And the expertise and connections the founders want to take board seats by switching to what you call the years after Lisp 1.

Some founders deliberately schedule a handful of lame investors first, and no one who's had the discipline to pull it off. Or a phone that is exactly my point. There's not much to say that was killed partly by its overdone launch. Cook another 2 or 3 minutes, then their incentives aren't aligned with some equivocation implying that you're small and then just enjoy yourself for the spot, so the best approach is to say that a company tuned to exploit it.

Advertisers pay less for ads in free publications, because any invention has a spam probabilty of. Put in chopped garlic, pepper, cumin, and Smartleaf co-founder before making any predictions about the origins of the products I grew up with an online service, and one didn't try to make money from writing, he found himself concealing from his predecessors was a good product. What you learn in college. It did.

This is, it would take Abelson and Sussman's quote a number here only to the option of deferring to a can of soup. Related: Reprinted in Gray, Donald J. I quote a step further. Vision research may be a distraction.

The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. If you want to trick admissions officers. The reason is that it had no natural immunity to messianic figures, just as it's easier to get the money is in itself deserving.

I'm not saying that's all prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.

This wipes out the same intellectual component as being a tax haven, I use. People tell the craziest lies about me. If big companies to build consumer electronics.

They won't like you raising other money and wealth. Then when we created pets. A rounds from top VC funds whether it was actually a computer. VCs.

And yet when they talked about before, and since you can ignore. Whereas when the audience already has to be free to work like blacklists, for example. In fact, for the more effort you expend as much time it was wiser for them.

There are two very different types of studies, studies of returns from startup investing, but there are signs now that VCs play such games, but unfortunately not true!

Some of the rest of the War on Drugs.

Robert Morris wrote the ordering system, written in 6502 machine language. The first assumption is widespread in text classification. To be fair, the transistor it is probably part of wisdom.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #money #product #version #constraints #places #school #people #founders #history #claim

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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Tracking Down DOPE, the First Computer Language for Normal Humans

BASIC holds an important place in computer programming canon. Hugely popular in the 70s and 80s this programming language introduced an entire generation to computing. The reason for its widespread adoption was simple: BASIC wasn't meant for programmers, it was designed for beginners. The language meshed well with the egalitarian worldview of early home computing. If you could type then you could become a computer user, and if you could become a computer user you could become a programmer.

BASIC didn't come from nowhere. Like any language it has a family tree complete with phylums and roots. The descendants of BASIC are fairly easy to spot, Visual BASIC is about as far afield as they get. But it's ancestry is a different story that not many people know about. The language that inspired a generation does, in fact, have a predecessor called the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, or DOPE.

That name's probably not familiar, but that shouldn't be a surprise. I ran into it almost by chance. Once I learned of this obscure language I found myself in a pretty deep rabbit hole. At the bottom I became one of the few people to run a DOPE program in nearly 60 years. The language is strange, but undeniably shows the skeleton of BASIC starting to form.

What is DOPE, and where does it fit into the larger story of BASIC?

The history of computing is easy to sum up in terms of problems. In the corporate parlance of IBM the worst of these problems were once called dragons, evocative of monsters that programmers were sent out to slay. In the earliest days of the computer one of the biggest dragons around was accessibility. That is, how to get people using computers in the first place. Early computers were hulking beasts in their own right: huge, expensive, and difficult to use. Most often programmers never even touched computers themselves. Instead they would drop off stacks of punched cards for technicians to carefully feed into well protected machines.

In isolation a computer is a novelty. It can hum, crunch numbers, and heat up a room. You need people to actually make computers useful, the more people the better. The state of the art in the late 50s was progressing at a steady pace, but there just weren't enough people in the game. To make matters worse access to machines formed a tight bottleneck. It was never disputed that computers were going to be the future. How exactly that future would develop was another matter.

Programming languages came into being. FORTRAN, ALGOL, and a handful of ancient dialects have their roots in this period. The whole point in developing FORTRAN was to make computing more accessible to non-computer scientists. The key word here being scientists. If you follow FORTRAN's logic then computers are tools for research, something you tuck away in a lab. And while that's one important application it's a limited one. In the grand scheme of things not that many people are scientists. Luckily for us not everyone was a devotee of FORTRAN's vision of the future.

Enter the dragon slayers of our story: John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. Kemeny was the longtime chair of the mathematics department at Dartmouth college, and Kurtz was his colleague and fellow researcher.

During WWII Kemeny was involved in the Manhattan Project as a mathematician. While on the project he worked directly with John von Neumann, one of the key figures in early computing. Kemeny spent a year on the project crunching numbers and running figures. In early 1945 his work was done using cumbersome IBM tabulating machines. By the end of the year the first electronic digital computers became operational, and Kemeny witnessed their impact on the Manhattan Project firsthand. The next year Kemeny wrote his first program.

Thomas Kurtz came to the field only slightly later. In 1951 Kurtz attended one of UCLA's Summer Sessions where he saw a computer running for the first time. At the time he was enrolled in Pricneton's graduate program for mathematics. That demo was enough to interest him. Once he learned to program, computing became an integral part of his career. Both saw for themselves how computers changed their own lives, and they realized the technology wouldn't stop there. Computers would only get better and more widespread, the future was going to be digital.

Surrounded by young and impressionable minds the duo set out a task for themselves: teach every student at Dartmouth how to use a computer. STEM students at the college were already being exposed to computers, at least in a limited sense. But that only accounted for a fraction of the student population.

How can you teach an English student to talk to a computer? Why would an aspiring psychologist care about silicon? Sure, computers were going to change everything for everyone. That's nice to say in a lecture, but how do you introduce students to machines?

This would eventually lead to BASIC. Unlike its contemporaries BASIC was designed for non-scientists, and really for non-programmers. Unnecessary constructs were stripped out, data was simplified, syntax was reduced to the bare minimum. The final language would be a masterpiece of restraint. It's not a language a programmer can love but for the vast majority of the populace it's easy to learn.

Compared to its contemporaries BASIC is simple, almost to a fault. Take FORTRAN as an example. In that language variables need to be declared with specific data types, and variable declarations need to be made in specific locations within a program. BASIC doesn't use explicit types, any variable can hold anything you want. You don't even need to declare a variable, just say "LET A = 1" and you are done. Even BASIC's syntax is a breath of fresh air. The language only uses letters, numbers, and a few mathematical operators. You don't have to deal with line endings or brackets.

The downside is that more powerful features are dropped in favor of simplicity. Objects, abstraction, even the aforementioned variable typing, are all absent. BASIC offers just the necessities.

On campus BASIC was a hit. Teachers integrated the language into classes, and students were happy to adopt it. The transition to home computers was an obvious choice. BASIC became the de facto introduction to the digital realm for millions.

The most authoritative source on BASIC's development is the aptly named "Back to BASIC", co-authored by Kemeny and Kurtz themselves. This is where I first encountered DOPE. Or, rather, where I first saw the language mentioned. During the late 50s and early 60s the duo experimented with how to introduce students to computers, specifically looking for a programming language for the absolute novice. When existing languages proved ill fit for this task they shifted to creating a new programming language.

The Dartmouth math department was armed with an LGP-30 computer, a relatively cheap and underpowered machine. In total it had 30 kilobytes of RAM to work with. That computer would see years of hard use and strange experiments. DOPE was one of those experiments, but details in "Back to BASIC" are slim. In a passage near the beginning of the book Kemeny wrote:

"I had a high school student, Sidney Marshall, who was taking calculus at Dartmouth. I had him experiment with a language called DOPE on that same LGP-30. DOPE was too primitive to be useful, but it was the precursor of BASIC."

DOPE was used on the math department's computer and Kemeny supervised it's creation. As a programmer myself I don't really do mysteries—I much prefer resolutions—and this was a massive mystery to me. I've written a good deal of BASIC, it wasn't my first language but it was a big part of my diet early on. I always assumed it was it's own language isolated from any others, and I think that's an easy mistake to make. BASIC doesn't look like anything but BASIC. It's name doesn't hint at some larger lineage. I was left with a glaring hole in my knowledge, and as I soon realized I wasn't the only one out of the loop.

Image: Marcin Wichary/Wikimedia Commons

Running DOPE

There isn't that much readily accessible information about DOPE. Notably a passage written by Thomas Kurts for the book "History of Programming Languages" has a small chunk of code. It's a handful of lines of DOPE, not enough to understand the language but just enough to confirm it's existence. Scouring through interviews and citations I started to build up a picture. DOPE had been developed in 1962. It was only used for a single term in a single math class. It was a step towards accessible programming but didn't go far enough.

The trail led me to a file folder tucked away in Dartmouth's archive. The manuscript within was simply titled "Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment", filed under a collection of Kurtz's notes. The paper was written in 1962, and for the time gave a radically different approach to programming. It's definitely not BASIC, but it's getting close.

First of all, the DOPE manuscript answered one of my biggest questions: why was there so little information about the language? The name should give a little away, DOPE was an experiment. It was used as a proving ground for ideas Kemeny and Kurtz were brewing. The paper describing DOPE was also never published. Partly, because it wasn't really a formal language description. Instead it was part primer, part lesson plan. Students were being used as guinea pigs on the path to a better programming language.

The next step for me was clear. The DOPE paper laid bare all the details of the language, example problems, logical diagrams, and every idiosyncrasy. Reading it is one thing, but I wanted to understand DOPE, and the only way to understand a language is to use it. The larger issue was that there was no way to run DOPE code that really existed. GNU binutils—the most popular compiler package around—definitely doesn't ship with support for the language, and I wasn't able to track down any of the code for the original implementation. So I set to work reviving the language by building an interpreter. Simply put, an interpreter is a program that can understand and execute source code.

Making my own implementation of DOPE was a way to understand the language on a deeper level, and try to reason out why it failed and what ideas made it into BASIC. That, and preserving a dead programming language sounded like a fun challenge. How hard could it be?

As it turned out, not that hard. Even before I had a running interpreter I was starting to see the connection to BASIC. One of the reasons BASIC became so popular was because it was easy to implement. That was by design. The language was structured to make compilation simple, Dartmouth's BASIC follows very rigid syntax structure. Each line of BASIC starts with a number, then an operation, then arguments. It's simple, easy to parse with a computer, and easy to write for a novice.

Each line of DOPE starts with a line number, then an operation, then arguments. This is where BASIC got its structure. For someone implementing the language that saves a lot of time and code. You just break each line into tokens, the operation is always in the same place, arguments are right after. There is zero ambiguity and zero wiggle room. It's easy to zoom through the process.

The Dartmouth team had similar mileage. According to Kemeny's paper the DOPE compiler could turn code into executables in under a minute. That's slow today, but sounds pretty good for the slow LGP-30. Later this same simplified syntax structure allowed Kemeny and Kurtz to pull some slick tricks with their BASIC implementation. Dartmouth BASIC was compiled, but presented to users as an interactive environment. On the backend BASIC code was compiled on runtime with minimal latency, to students it just looked like the school's computer spoke fluent BASIC.

But there's a hitch, and it's one of the biggest issues with DOPE. BASIC deviates from the rigid format slightly. You can actually write mathematical expressions in BASIC, so "LET A = 1 + 1" is a valid line of code. Under the hood a mathematical expression may be treated as arguments, but to a user you can write math in BASIC the same as you'd jot down an equation.

DOPE doesn't work that way. The language is much more terse, no doubt a result of the limited hardware it was developed on. Let me give you a taste. In DOPE that same BASIC statement, just adding 1 and 1, comes out to "+'1'1'A". That's not very pretty, is it? Superficially, DOPE looks a lot more like assembly language than anything else. Most operations are a single character, each line can only perform a simple operation, argument lists are all of a fixed length. All the usual operations for math, assignment, loops, and printing are present, just in a consolidated form.

The other fun complication is the matter of single quotes. DOPE doesn't separate things with spaces, as near as I can tell this is due to its host hardware. Other languages used on the LGP-30 computer follow the same convention. I think it was just one of those functional restrictions that made life a little harder at Dartmouth. Better hardware was available on campus when BASIC was developed, so it escaped that fate.

Appearances aside, there is something deeper going on with DOPE. Variables are the bread and butter of any programming language, it's where you store and manipulate data. It's also another place where DOPE directly presages BASIC. DOPE has a very special kind of typing system. It's almost implicit, but only slightly.

Every variable is a floating point number, that's a number with a decimal point. Adding a little complication, DOPE has four special variables named E, F, G, and H. These are 16 element arrays, lists that can hold up to 16 numbers. When you work with DOPE you just have to remember that these four variables are different.

There are also no strings in DOPE, you can't store or manipulate words or letters. Nearly every other programming language can handle strings in some way, so this restriction is pretty noticeable. DOPE was only ever meant for mathematical work so lacking strings isn't a total dealbreaker.

There is a little bit of subtlety here that I find intriguing. All variables are stored as floats, so any number you enter is converted. Set a variable to 1 and DOPE turns that into 1.000. When you print a variable DOPE figures out the most reasonable format and displays that. So if the float doesn't have anything past the decimal place it shows up without the decimal. To a more serious programmer this should sound like a nightmare. DOPE takes away any control over data types by just not having data types. Programmers don't like giving up control, this was especially true during the era DOPE was developed.

Image: Marcin Wichary/Wikimedia Commons

This language wasn't meant for programmers. It was meant for english students who didn't know the difference between an integer 1 and a floating point 1. It was designed for political science majors who had never seen a computer before. The bizarre typing system in DOPE meant you could teach programming without teaching about data types. Instead of having to explain the subtle differences between 1.0 and 1 a teacher can just cut to the chase. To the uninitiated these rules don't make that much sense, so just drop them. What you get is a much more gentle introduction to computers.

It may come as a surprise for BASIC users, but early versions of the language had a very similar typing system. In v1 of Dartmouth BASIC every variable was stored as a float, with smart formatting for input and output. Strings came in subsequent versions. But there is a key difference, and it comes in the form of arrays. In BASIC an array is declared using the DIM operation. It tells the computer to make room for a new array, and gives that array a name. In early versions this changed a variable into a 10 element array of numbers. This is one of the areas where BASIC broke from DOPE, and I think in a good way.

DOPE reserved four variables as arrays. That works just fine, but it's clunky. Having to remember which letters are lists and which are numbers is annoying. It adds in a layer of illogical complexity. Why is E an array? Well, it just is. My educated guess is that E, F, G and H were hardcoded as arrays since those are common names for vectors in physics, but that's just a shot in the dark. For a newcomer it's just an arbitrary rule. Kemeny and Kurtz were right to ditch this one.

The last part of DOPE that bears mentioning is also one of the key parts of BASIC: line numbers. Anyone who knows BASIC, or has seen BASIC, will be familiar with this syntax. Each line has a number that doubles as a label and a way to edit your program. With line numbers being explicitly defined a programmer gets to name each part of their code. DOPE also uses line numbers, but in a more limited way. Each line has an implicit number, you start at 1 and go up to 99.

You don't have control over DOPE's line numbers, but each number does have it's own label. These aren't just superficial, line numbers in DOPE are what makes it into a fully fledged programming language. The much-maligned GOTO statement exists in this earlier language, just by another name. GOTO tells BASIC to jump execution to a specific line number. It's a simple way to handle flow control of a program, but there are often better options. Many programmers dislike GOTO for that reason alone, but the statement can also make code hard to read and debug. You can't instantly tell what "GOTO 11" means unless you know what is waiting for you on line 11.

In DOPE the "T" operation lets you jump TO a given line number. Once again, this is the kind of feature programmer's don't really like. GOTO, and by lineage T, has been called a danger to programmers everywhere. It can be unsafe to overuse, if code changes a stray GOTO can jump into the unknown. For large programs jumping by line number gets weird, but that's an issue for programmers.

For the novice jumping by number is simple and understandable. You don't need extra code to add labels. Since most new programmers aren't writing massive and intricate programs a lot of the dangers of GOTO disappear. Conditionals work in a similar way in DOPE, specifying line numbers to jump to dependent on a comparison. Again, in line with early versions of BASIC. And again, kept as simple as possible.

The only outlier here are loops. One of the parts of BASIC that always struck me as strange is how it handles FOR loops. In general loops are how you repeat operations in a program. If you want to do something over and over again you use a loop. BASIC's specific flavor of loop is the FOR loop. As in, do something FOR values of X from 1 to 10.

Most flow control in BASIC is handled using line numbers. Some later versions allow if statements to contain expressions but Dartmouth BASIC only allows for conditional jumps. Loops are different, a FOR loop in BASIC encloses a block of code, ending in a NEXT. Once again this quirk is straight from DOPE, loops enclose a chunk of code to run and rerun until complete.

However, DOPE loops have their downsides. And really, this gets into the problems I ran into with DOPE. Kemeny was right to say the language was too simple, and loops are a perfect example. Really, loops have been something of a thorn in my side during my journey. On the interpreter side that means extra code. Executing code by block instead of line number means loops have to be handled a little differently than anything else in the language. When I was actually able to get DOPE code running loops remained annoying because they only go one way. Loops in DOPE can only increment, and only in steps of 1. Fine. It's a loop. It's the most basic loop possible. It works, but it's very restrictive. Something as simple as a countdown takes a little extra code to achieve.

The total lack of strings also restricts what you can do with DOPE. There are operations to output strings, sort of. One operation lets you print a newline character, and another outputs a string literal. This can be used to format and label your outputs, but without variable strings you can't write very flashy code. I can write the classic "Hello World," but you won't be seeing any games in DOPE. Luckily BASIC would include strings after a fashion.

DOPE's Legacy

What I've found is that DOPE works well for math and not much else. Calculating tables of values is straightforward. Running a loop to figure lists of roots or squares is easy. I've even been able to tackle larger equations in DOPE, so far the most complicated thing I've written is a program that approximates pi. There's a certain zen to converting equations into simple operations, that is if you have some patience. Straying from simple math turns into a struggle. I keep trying to make a number guessing game but running into the wall of random number generation.

This restriction to simple math isn't necessarily a bad thing. The language was developed by mathematicians as a way to introduce complete novices to computing. It's not fully general purpose, true, but that's not important. DOPE isn't the kind of language you could stick with for a career, it was never intended to be. It's just enough to show students what a computer is, what kinds of problems a computer can solve, and how a programmer might solve them.

So why haven't more people heard about DOPE? Is it just a failed language? I don't think so. DOPE has remained hidden because it was successful. The E stands for experiment after all, and after a single class at Dartmouth the experiment had ran its course. The ideas in DOPE worked well enough for Kemeny and Kurtz to continue their line of research. BASIC is the direct result of DOPE's success. The reason BASIC worked so well in classrooms and on early home systems was because it was simple. The language was easy to learn, easy to implement, and easy to understand. DOPE itself didn't last, but the core concept was sound enough to birth BASIC.

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omgokiguess · 7 years ago

Text

TW long post about computers, the cloud, other tech bs, etc

i like already know i’m gonna get a B in algorithms. i’m kind of like what is even the point of trying my best because even if i try my best my perfect 90 year old female professor will write such hard tests and there’s just no way i’ll be able to get an A. even if i took her class twice i don’t think i’d get an A. but i also think it’d be pretty hard for me to get a C as long as i just do the work. which i will obviously. so i like.... idk i don’t feel as motivated. like with math i was motivated, i knew i was one of the only people that had enough math background to possibly get an A. and it still did take quite a bit of effort tbh but i did. but with this i’m really like.... no. it wouldn’t be worth it. i’d have to never sleep and even then i just don’t think i could. not with her as the teacher, (basically the entire grade is tests except for 5% homework). but i also know i won’t get a C so it’s like.... i guess i’ll just not kill myself over it and accept the B and not freak out too much. i’m sure i’ll always be over the median still but... it’s still gonna be a B, it just is.

i’m not sure how hard it will be for me to get an A in cloud computing. i think i can get an A and i’ll def give my best in there to get an A. like.... maybe i can? idk if there will be a curve or not and idk anyone that’s ever taken this class or has had this prof.... but he’s like honestly a really brilliant guy. i kind of imagine he won’t give a curve. i’ll actually try my hardest in cloud for sure though.

and surprisingly data analysis.... which i thought would be really hard.... is by far my easiest class and even with no effort i will get an A in that. i actually wish we were going into more math models but it’s more focused on learning R and understanding a meaningful and useful approach to analyzing data. which is fine. but i really thought it would be more math. cause yervand took a different data class and he told me they went through all of these continuous random variable models and that sounded really cool to me but... guess this class is just not the same.

so like i think best case i get two As and a B and worst case i get one A and two Bs. and i’m gonna accept either. anything less than that and i’ll hate myself. just... just no C’s allowed. and also nothing but an A allowed in data analysis.

idk i just really thought a class titled “applied data analysis” would like.... teach us how to properly like..... use algorithms to make meaning of genome analysis or shit like that like i thought it’d be really cool. right now so far it’s been more like analyzing data in databases which like.... i didn’t need a class for that. but the syllabus does say more math later so hopefully it changes. but the prof isn’t even smart tbh. like.... he gets a lot of stuff wrong like i had to tell him that the standard deviation of a normal curve was 68% like... that’s p common knowledge among math people. i have to say though between cloud and algorithms i do need an easy class so i’m glad i do have one. i had no idea cloud would be this hard. the syllabus was like “know web programming!” and i was like yeah i know web programming fuck i know socket programming v well but i’m just not used to programming applications that are made for distributed systems. almost ALL academic classes just teach you to program standalone shit. i’ve really never even come close to doing anything for a distributed system. and even at work we didn’t use AWS at ALL. we literally had like.... 400 of our own servers and since there were only like.... 150 employees, most of whom were not programmers, the distributed aspect of that was kind of negligible. and everything customers used was basically their own problem, we had a support team but we didn’t help operate any of their shit. i haven’t been trained to think about failing resources and i definitely don’t program accordingly. so i’m really gonna have to switch mindsets here.

it’s kind of disappointing that at this point i care the most about cloud tho. cause like.... i thought i was just taking it to learn about AWS tbh. but like.... since it’s a questionable A/B for me where as alg isn’t i care more about cloud. and since data is easy i don’t even care about it. i actually really like cloud.

and my prof for cloud, who is really a fucking CLOUD EXPERT like i won’t go through his credentials but it does blow my mind, he like REALLY emphasizes the cloud tradeoffs and honestly it does blow my mind. he talks about tradeoffs sooo much and like.... idk the tradeoff with the cloud is such an understatement. Amazon’s cloud service totally beats google’s and microsoft’s (actually i think it may have been a mistake on microsoft’s part to even try to roll out a cloud service) but like idk even AWS i’m like.... idk like i just totally get it. i totally get why you’d opt to pay money for AWS. but like..... idk depending how much computing power and memory you actually need..... i feel like most normal tech companies would only save like 5% by switching to the cloud, including absolutely all costs possible, sysadmins, infrastructure, everything. and the thing i don’t like about AWS is performance is not guaranteed. like you’re SHARING resources with so many other people. and.... idk. it’s hard for me to believe that it was a wise business decision for netflix to move to AWS. that’s really hard for me to believe really.

like idk.... i would honestly try to stay away from AWS as much as possible personally. i don’t want to force sysadmins to have to work for major companies that have cloud services, i don’t like the lack of transparency in what/where my shit is happening, etc. but... really.... there are certain ventures i could pursue where i would say yeah i really have to use AWS.

and as for security.... people generally think AWS is safer from a resource failure standpoint but man.... most datacenters are fucking safe and like idk.... resource/power failure just isn’t that concerning to me if you keep your resources up to date and in a datacenter. and i GUESS AWS is safer from attacks.... but is it really? like tbh.... i know amazon has more money and power but like.... your security can really be only so up to date. i mean i guess security does have to incorporate finances in some point.... but like.... idk i just CANNOT think in terms of “not having enough money”. If you’re really confident in yourself.... debt is not scary. You just take money from whoever and have full faith in your idea until you make it. If you know what you’re doing, if you really know what you’re doing, it’ll work. and i really never pursue anything unless i have full confidence. like i can’t think of a time i had full confidence in something and was incorrect, so i’m like .... just not worried about it lol.

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roidespd-blog · 6 years ago

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Chapter Twenty : B IS FOR BI

“… But it ain’t no lie, Baby Bi Bi Bi (Bi Bi)” N’Sync, 2000

Prior to the redaction of this article, I asked a very close friend of mine, who happens to identify as bisexual/pansexual (more on that later) one simple question — a way for me to see if I was heading in the right direction and be sure to do justice to this part of our community. What do you think the biggest obstacle for bisexuals is in 2019 ? “Invisibility. The lack of representation of bisexuality as a legitimate identity. The more you are out there, the more everything is normalized, and there’s so much talk about the G in LGBT, Gay men, and next to nothing when it comes to Bisexuals.”

Communities tend to make the same mistakes as societies, as we are born in the same environments and are influenced by the same principles. When it comes to the Queer Community, patriarchy wins. In the L G B T Q I +, the G is omnipresent (because they represent the MAN, usually white), the L takes a little place on the side, T is the most persecuted, I is invisible. But it’s the B that keeps being so fascinating to me. B is the most under appreciated, denied and dismissed of them all.

WHAT IS AND WHAT IS DEFINITELY NOT

Bisexuality : romantic or sexual attraction to both males and females, or to put more in a 2019 kind-of-term, to more than one sex or gender. Bisexuality is part of the three main classifications of sexual orientation alongside heterosexuality and homosexuality, but we’ve already talked about this. This is bullshit and it doesn’t matter. These are just principles that the world kept cramming into our faces when they didn’t know any better. Not anymore. Just like its three other “main” terms, Bisexuality was coined in the 19th century, and its history is as old as the rest of them.

Ancient Greeks (at least 550 BC) incorporated bisexual relationships into their practices, but not exactly in a sexual way. Men with wisdom and experience would often pass along their knowledge or strength (if you were a soldier) to the younger generation through the act of sodomy. Once the young would reach maturity, the relationship became non-sexual — supposedly. It did interesting to point out that stigmas were present when the sexual relationship continued after the boy’s adulthood. A preview of things to come, in terms of bigotry.

Another interesting detail into History, it is never mentioned that women could have sex with other women as well. Sure, Sappho wrote about the female beauty, but this was just poetry. History itself only mentions the Men, as only them could dominate and be part of the wisdom. In Ancient Rome, it was acceptable for a man to have sex with other men outside of marriage, as long as they were younger, not another man’s son (so, slaves) and if the man would be the one to penetrate. Patriarchy, La-dee-da, La-dee-da.

In our modern society, what is REALLY interesting to point out though, is that when it comes to bisexuality, it is not easily owned by the person who could represent him/her/themself as bisexual. Terms like queer, polysexual, heterofexible, homoflexible, MSM or FSM are thrown around as alternatives to bisexuality. Hmm.

Bisexual activist Robyn Ochs defines bisexuality as “the POTENTIAL to be attracted — romantically and/or sexually — to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same TIME, not necessarily in the same WAY and not necessarily to the same DEGREE” which is going into more detail than the human heteronormative brain might comprehend at the moment, but pretty accurate to my knowledge.

What bisexuality is not, though, is what some papers found smart to call a transitional period. A study ‘found evidence of both considerable consistency and change in LGB sexual identity over time’ (there it is again, the confusion between orientation and identity. See my article from June 9th). Apparently, youth under that study who had identified only as bisexual at earlier assessments would then assume the gay/lesbian “identity” over time by 30 to 40%. I feel the need to clarify the situation ONE. MORE. TIME. Sexual orientation and identity are two separate things. Yes, scientists substitute those terms as easily as you might replace regular mayo with non-fat mayo, and it would be correct. But it creates way too much confusion. Sexual orientation is who you are attracted to. Identity is who you are, and it includes but not limited to sexual orientation. You can’t define yourself by your sexuality only. What the study is trying to explain (I hope) in a very broad and clumsy way is that sometimes, social circumstances prevent you from assuming and owing your real sexual orientation, whether it is straight or gay or whatever your orientation is. So a nice teenage cover up is the use of the term “bisexual” as a transitional period of time. I get it. I’ve done it. I made myself believe it for a long while. But that doesn’t make us bisexuals for a while THEN something else. I was always a homosexual. My non-nurturing environment didn’t give me the tools to put my dick on the table and say “I’m gay, bitches”. But to keep going back to that stereotype of the half closeted homosexual when it comes to have a general image of bisexuality is just so fucking wrong. A cliché, my dear. And now that I’ve mentioned it.

COMMON UNREAL NOTIONS

A person can be smart. People are dumb. So when it comes to understanding someone that you are not, crowds tend to go to the silliest questions. Like :

“So… Is there a percentage of how gay you were and how straight you can be?” Nop. Maybe someone can put a number on it, but it seems quite unrealistic to say “I’m like 40/60”. Sexuality is not be quantifiable.

“Do you think you’ll ever make a choice ?” There is no choice to make. Bisexuality is a definitive (though somehow less finite exploration of the human form) sexuality and thinking it has to evolve is offensive. Like saying that a gay man will get over it and go back to women eventually.

“But if you had to choose ?” You’re dumb. Your mother definitely fucked your uncle nine months before your birth.

“So you are dating someone of the opposite gender. Are you straight now ?” Fuck no. The gender of the person that I’m dating does not tilt the needle of the fucking outdated Kinsey scale.

“You are probably confused” You are probably ready to go fuck your mother’s pussy with a rake. And that was not a question.

“I could never date a bisexual. I would never be sure if he/she’s not looking at another guy/girl” So ? Your straight/gay boyfriend/girlfriend can still look around no matter what. If he/she’s a horn-dog, you should be worried. Bisexuals do not have more sexual desires because they can be attracted to multiple genders. Still not a question, dumbass.

“You’re so lucky, you have twice the chances to find someone, right ?” You failed math and it shows. AGAIN, being bisexual does not mean that romantic and sexual feelings are constant towards all genders all the time. They have the same troubles with human connexions as everyone because people are dumb, remember ?

“But you can’t actually know for sure until you’ve tried it both, don’t you think ?” I don’t know, did you try humping your uncle/father before you realized you were incestuous and you liked it ? Sorry, I meant to say sexual orientation does not need a try run to be real. You are what you are no matter what. You may sometimes ignore it for a while but it’s mostly because society never showed you it could exist.

“Do you believe that everyone is bisexual ?” No, I’m not Freud. I’m a grown man perfectly capable of understanding that bisexuality is not an umbrella-term for ALL sexuality.

“Don’t you think Bisexuality is a myth ?” This whole conversation is a myth. Gurl, Bi.

And that’s just the tip of the crushingly big iceberg. Bisexuals are constantly under the microscope of the rest of the world for existing outside the binary system of human recognition. You are a woman or a man. You like women or men. Simple. It never was. But the public (whether LGBTQ+ or not) insist on pushing the idea of bisexuality to the side and ignoring its legitimacy.

OSTRACISM

Worst than the usual queer rejection from society, bisexuals have it both ways by being denied true existence by society AND by the Queer community. Just look at their flag. The purple is crushed between the blue and pink, ready to disappear, not taking much space. You queers who are reading this article, don’t try to cop out and say “but I have no problems with bisexual people”. Fuck the fuck off. You fall into the same trap as heterosexuals. You fear someone who isn’t exactly like you. And do you actually date a lot a bisexual people ? Because last time I checked, bisexuals weren’t really talkative about their sexuality since it’s welcomed with such cold shoulders the white walkers are asking if they put on a nice little sweater. I keep coming back to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a lesbian woman I know who said she could never date a bisexual woman as she would never be sure if she would stay gay for her and that she liked girls who knew what they wanted. Bisexuals know what they want. It may change from Monday to Tuesday (matter of speech) but I do believe the sexual attraction does not come from a switch inside them with two modes (either gay or straight) but from the individuals, whether closer to masculine or feminine traits, they might encounter that day. Again, that’s prejudicial and it makes you kind of a bigot but whatever.

Still on the subject of rejection, it’s not just romantic or sexual. If you go on the internet, there are countless examples of bisexual men or women who, after they came out as WHO THEY FUCKING ARE, had to face a change in the way people would treat them and act around them. A straight girl who couldn’t sit too close to her bisexual female friend because she could have a crush on her. A straight man who stopped giving hugs to his close bisexual male friend in case he would get the wrong ideas. OR a gay man or woman who would just end a relationship when they found out about their partner’s sexuality. Yep, I went back to sexual. Sue me.

Let’s put this out there : bisexual people are just as capable to commit to a monogamous relationship. It’s not because you fell in love with someone with a V that you’re gonna suddenly get hungry for the P. Don’t be a child.

Now, being rejected by society is one thing. We are queer, that’s our song, we twerk to it with vigorous enthusiasm. But the treatment of bisexuals in the Queer community is plainly unacceptable.

In France, when the Mariage pour Tous (fuck, I promised myself I wouldn’t use France again. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Whatever.) succeeded after months of lobbying and manifestations from all sexual orientations, this was considered a victory for the LBGTQ+ community as a whole. But really, it was a success for Gay men and Lesbian women, as Bisexuals are not viewed as a consequential orientation. They are not visually recognizable to gay, lesbian or straight people, they don’t have the same historic tragedies that the general public know about and their sexuality has been used and abused as a motor for heterosexual male fantasies in pornographic movies and myths, thus keeping it from becoming a reality in people’s minds. It then becomes a vicious circle where the moral is low and the activism is nowhere to be found, so nothing changes. Bisexuals stay in the darkness (until they make a fucking choice, right ?). By the way, the term biphobia is never uttered but it’s real and it happens constantly.

WHAM, BAM, THANK YOU PAN ?

Something I haven’t totally mentioned yet is the term Pansexual. It’s actually the part of the article I was the most apprehensive about as if uninformed, is quite difficult to distinguish with Bisexual. Bisexuality is the romantic or sexual attraction to more than one gender. Well, Pansexuality is the romantic or sexual attraction to all genders, outside of the binary scope of what gender is, I guess ? That’s when things get complicated because people are really attach to the label “Bi” would argue that it does not limit them to only boys and girls but other genders. And then those really attach to the label “Pan” could argue that their term is more inclusive to transgender people, who are men and women but also non-binary individuals who do not identify with male and female identities’ basic definitions. Then I would say that to me, bisexuality is the more known and comprehensive umbrella term for what this romantic or sexual orientation is and that pansexual is a more recent word and kinda beyond the scope of bisexuality (in a good way). And then someone would tell me I have it all wrong and then I would shut the fuck up. Definite differentiation between bisexuality and pansexuality is a mindfuck for the ages, as is the term “feminism” to some these days. By the way, “Pan” means “All” in ancient greek and a synonym to Pansexual can be Omnisexual (“omni” is latin for “All”). But I don’t want to get too much into that, I don’t feel like I have the energy.

DOUBLE JEOPARDY

As I kept my searches broad for this article, I ran into a term that was used by SOS Homophobie to talk about discrimination of bisexual people. Double Jeopardy. We talked a lot about ways that straight folks can discriminate against bisexual people and a little bit about biphobia inside the Queer community but I would like to come back to the latter. I do write these articles for everyone but I seem to keep repeating myself quite a lot at the end of each of them, only because the problem seems to always be the same : as long as we are tearing each other apart, we won’t advance as one. Live together, Die alone, that sort of thing (Damn, I really do repeat myself).

To my queer peeps, do not fear the sexual preferences of your partner as your relationship do not depend on what gay or straight orientation she/he/they is/are gonna have that day. Do not make the mistake to judge them by their supposedly easy-way-out heterosexuality as they are not straight. They don’t hold more privileges than you in this world, as they might flip flop at convenience from one side to the other. A bisexual woman who falls in love with a man is still a Queer woman. It’s not your queer experience, but it is one and you need to embrace it. Do not put them down for it because they are already being put there by straight people on a daily basis.

All of this is based only on your own insecurities which have been fed by your minority status, your heteronormative education, your own ostracism from said heteronormative society and possibly your capabilities as a lover (ndlr : your fear of being dumped).

But most of all, do not ignore them. Those are your people. They hurt just as much as you (but between us, you can’t rank genders but in the prejudice scale, I’d say it comes at a close number 2. Think about it.) and they need your support, as you needed theirs when it was time to get that Mariage Pour Tous — damn, last time, I promise. Remember that this MPT was also for them. Every action you take as a community is an action to benefit them as well. As they are the B in LGBTQ+. Say it out loud. See how weird it sounds without the B.

Mic dropped.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUDab9piv_U

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