#i think this is a more precise version of a poll I made like last year

[throwaway-yandere]

His Version Of You [Yan!Kaveh & Yan!Veritas Ratio/Reader]

a/n: tis another solid “twas a crack idea but I made it too serious” fic. kavetham rivalry is overrated af, KaTio is the way to go /j. when you finish it, can you answer the poll at the bottom on who you would pick between these two? bless you.

unreliable synopsis: When one grieves, sometimes it is best not to be reminded of who you're grieving for. Especially not by fighting over a recreation of their heart and soul. [based on @2broschlininahotub & @meimeimeirin's request]

content warnings/tags: [light yandere vs yandere]/[implied poly!yandere/reader] fic, geniuses who can't take a W, au shenanigans, the girlies love to bicker it’s their love native language

"What were you thinking, you idiot?! Thank my reflexes that I caught the statue beforehand or else I would have to explain what a monumental mistake that is. Just use your common sense for once, will you?!"

"Please— I don't want to hear that from YOU of all people! This is MY stone. Stop acting like you actually care. You took us away from my world! You're the one who's too obsessed with researching it! It's like a damn test subject and not a companion to you!"

"That's because it is, you fucking oaf!"

"YOU'RE THE ONE GIVING ME FALSE HOPE THAT IT'S A LIVING BEING!!!"

Veritas stood with his arms crossed, eyebrows scrunched and his frown the deepest Kaveh had ever seen. The architect, absolutely baffled at his experiment partner's harsh evaluation, felt his eyes dampening. His bumping of the sculpture was pure accident, but Veritas' sharp tongue cut deep into Kaveh's pride. Even the most understanding of men would find his tone abrasive.

Getting riled up…Over a damn statue.

"Just because it's alive, doesn't mean it's a companion. And just because it is a test subject, doesn't mean you can just near-topple it as you damn please."

The arguments subsided. They exchanged long looks as they tried to figure out how the "little dispute" had come dangerously close to abusive. With his anger gradually fading, Kaveh was the one to take the first initiative. Kaveh steeled himself. The architect's shoulders dropped, and his expression softened. Jaded.

"Veritas... I'm sorry. As much as this statue… means… to me, I shouldn't have yelled at you. I-I was just upset, you're aware that I've been working all afternoon polishing the statue and I took that anger out on you. I'm sorry." Kaveh said.

"Right." Veritas closed his eyes. "Apology accepted. I understand that you're visibly distressed, but I will not tolerate low-quality work."

As Kaveh was about to get defensive, Veritas placed a hand on his shoulder.

"Which is to say, take a rest, Kaveh. Work when you can guarantee peak performance." Veritas sighed. "Rest. Pompom has already prepared your bed for you."

Kaveh cast his gaze down on the floor, wearing a feeble smile. Though their list of grievances from the past days was enough to fill two pages, Veritas is steeped in cunning. He knew exactly how to plaster Kaveh's impulse.

"Right… I'm just tired."

"Precisely. The faster the progress, the greater the chance of errors." Veritas smiled back, although looking less sincere as Kaveh's. "Take a rest, Kaveh."

With a murmur, Kaveh got up and dusted off his pants from the metamorphic rock that had been sandpapered. People aren't made to stay cooped up inside all the time. He took one last look at the project before heading out for the night, noting that while the foundation was in place, work still needed to be done before they could decide on the final look. If he could just make the hands softer-looking…

"Kaveh…" Veritas chimed, warning with his arms crossed.

"Right, right!" Kaveh laughed nervously, still slightly vexed by the reproach. "Maybe I'm getting too brave at night, I don't know why I'm boldly thinking of trying my hand at smoothening the statue again."

"I'd consider you more weak-hearted than stouthearted," Veritas dusted Kaveh's shoulders off. "And do try to keep yourself clean."

"I'm too tired to run a shower…"

Veritas sighed loudly.

The both of them had decided to leave the studio with a degree of finality. Hunched over, the kidnapped architect left to take his well-deserved slumber while the doctor decided that a warm bath would benefit him more. The night "concludes", or so Kaveh thought.

Looking back, these two are the most unlikely friends to exist, are they not? A professor slash doctor of the Intelligentsia Guild and the architect "Light of the Kshahwerar" collaborating over a glorified arts and crafts project. To truly understand this bizarreness, it is wise to look back to its beginning.

In his quest to rid the galaxy of a disease he dubbed "ignorance", Dr. Veritas Ratio sallied forth to practice his preachings. Even joined the Astral Express at some point, but it was only in this instance did he found companionship with an extremely empathetic individual. 

And their first meeting was not a decent starting point.

Veritas set out on his umpteenth assignment handed out by the Express. He was sent to explore the dangerous land formations of Sumeru with the trailblazer. Every extended curve revealed pyramids and sand, and Veritas kept Stelle close by using her straps as a leash. Nevertheless, when they accidentally entered an unstable domain, his disgruntled complaints ceased. Deciding it would be best for only one to investigate further, Veritas volunteered.

There was just one discernible light path inside the mostly collapsing structure. Yet, every step he took was curiously inaudible, and when he reached the Apex, he met the sight of blonde hair. 

Enter: Kaveh.

"You get what I mean right? It feels like my problems just keep piling up and up, like an impossible mountain. There's never anyone who would listen to me complain, but you…" The words that fell from the stranger's lips were sweeter than honey as he waxed poetic. "You're always here to listen. And it makes me feel so much less alone. Thank you…"

The blonde man had his cheek against a large rectangular rock, caressing it appreciatingly. His eyelids were lowered and his cheeks were puffy. Whether he cried beforehand or was merely exhausted cannot be assessed from Veritas' distance from him.

February 5, ████.

Kaveh had recently lost his lover that day. They died due to an unforeseen heart attack, which pains him more since his darling had always been healthy. Since his "delam" has passed away, he has been inconsolable. He refused to part with any possessions they left. No matter how many of their fellow archeologists begged for (Y/n)'s notes, he barked with gritted teeth that his mind would not change.

… How ironic that he used to call his lover "my heart" when the very same organ was the cause of death.

Neither wine nor friends can get a reaction out of him. The best he could do to continue living was to focus on his work and his young mentees. (Y/n) always wanted to be a teacher but couldn't because of their daytime job, so Kaveh fulfilled their dreams instead.

That includes continuing their research on the strange rock they had found in the desert.

Kaveh remained hotly bent on preserving everything they loved. Despite its unconventional and jagged appearance, the rock struck him as the most beautiful thing he had seen in a long while. Its lack of clear patterns didn't matter; it stood tall, capturing his fascination. It had ended his slump and had become an integral part of him. This hyperfixation had not gone unnoticed by Lesser Lord Kusanali, but when she visited him, she… strangely endorsed of his newfound lunacy. She knew something he did not.

Something about the rock… felt so similar to his deceased "delam".

The doctor, lacking any context for the sight before him, raised an eyebrow. His duty may be to educate others, but this was beyond help. A pell-mell of incoherent ramblings filled the room with the hither and thither of blonde hair to match. But this was the first person he encountered in Teyvat. And he was determined to get any info out of him.

"Excuse me."

The blonde man blinked repeatedly, eyes going wide at the sight of Veritas approaching.

"I'm Dr. Veri—"

"T-This isn't what it looks like!!!" The blonde freaked out. "This is– It's just! This rock, it has sentimental value and–"

"…" Veritas drawled. "Riiiight. I'm… Dr. Veritas Ratio. I'm not of this world— I believe my companions and I are what you refer to as Descenders. We wish to collect petrology info for databank purposes. May you offer assistance?"

Kaveh did not know what to say. But by instincts, he knew something was not entirely right with this man. 

He'd be right. Veritas wasn't there specifically for rocks. He's just, crudely put, nosy.

"And I am supposed to blindly believe any stranger who wears such a strange getup?" Kaveh stood up and protectively hid the rock behind him. "Sorry, I kindly refuse. And I am not equipped to help either."

Veritas smirked and cracked some knuckles with his left thumb.

There was a damn good reason why Stelle was left behind. On the entrance of the gate laid an inscription that roughly translates to the words "adepti" and "tribute". His intellect in this linguistics may be rusty, but it is not incorrect.

He had an inkling that the rock this peculiar blonde was obsessing over was imbued with a sliver of ambuscade soul who took arms against the worst opponents imaginable.

A "yaksha", if you were a Liyue local.

Veritas was by no means unmindful of Kaveh's obsession. He held his tongue, assessing that to set a quarrel with an unpredictable variable would prolong his journey. There was no profit to be had in angering an unreadable man. 

"Well then, if I can't take that rock within reason…"

Dr. Ratio opened his book.

…

…

…

"… Long story short, that's why this chick is all wrapped up like a present."

Through brute force, both Stelle and Veritas managed to drop both Kaveh and the rock inside the Express, to the surprise of many. They were initially sent to only survey Teyvat (which meant Veritas positively lied to Kaveh earlier). No one expected an angry Sumeru man to "visit." 

"I-I am not a chick! I am a man! I'm Kaveh— an architect!!!" The self-proclaimed man wriggled around the trailblazer's yellow ropes, looking pale as he stared at the unfamiliar faces and scenery before him. "H-Hey!!! Unhand me at once!!!"

"Oh, you're not a girl? You're pretty, though."

"I should've known you would bring something peculiar on board, Dr. Ratio, I just didn't expect it to be a weird human-sized rock..." Said the red-haired lady. "But anyways, you, Sir Kaveh, have quite a remarkable sense of fashion."

"I haven't seen any guy wear earrings that big before…" The grey-haired girl said with grabby hands.

"Please don't try to yank it off him," the brown-haired man sighed and pulled her back with his cane.

Kaveh was a little taken aback by the diversity of tongues in front of him. It was clear based on their accents that they didn't quite come from the same world, yet they communicate as near-family. 

"Do all Teyvat people have rocks for friends or is it just you?" A strawberry-haired young lady asked as she approached the rock, which set Kaveh in an even more panicked frenzy when she attempted to poke it.

"N-NO!!! DON'T!!!" 

March flinched at his sudden scream and nearly fell had Stelle not caught her.

"Yeah, March, be respectful, you never know if that's the love of his life or something like that," said Stelle.

Kaveh's eyes widened. "You… How did you just understand me better than my friends…?"

The room went quiet. Dan Heng glanced at Veritas, who pretended not to notice him. Mentioning romance near him had always been a dangerous move. Veritas' face crumpled slightly. 

There were scars in his own heart he had yet to patch up, and he needed no reminder that he was procrastinating.

Dan Heng cleared his throat.

"It's bad news to have Stelle be the only one who "gets you" if you consider yourself of sane mind." Dan Heng spoke. "But then again, you remind me of Argenti…"

"Where did you find this man, Doctor?" Welt digressed, concerned as he towered above the tied Kaveh. The older man doesn't have objections to his (kidnapped) presence. He can tell by the look on both Kaveh and Veritas' faces that neither was a man with no substance, and the latter saw to exploit the former.

Veritas only shrugged and jabbed his thumb in Stelle's general direction. "Assistant…"

"On it." Stelle saluted solemnly. "We found him in a pyramid. The doctor thought he would be a worthy individual to study if we wish to understand the culture behind one of the seven nations. Since Mister Yang told us to befriend important people–"

"Since when was kidnapping synonymous with befriending?"

"–this is Ratio's candidate."

"That is correct, and he's not just any other person. I have seen him in the Guild's Persons of Interest. He is Kaveh, the light of the Kshahrewar," Veritas claimed. "A certified scholar of the Akademiya and the face for the Darshan he was an alumnus of."

The Express quietly signaled shock over Ratio's interest in the man. 

Kaveh slunk back, defeated. When there's little progress, a man naturally turns restive. Kaveh no longer had much to fear in his life. The worst had already come to pass, and the world became mere static noise. He had no hope of escaping soon, not when he saw his homeworld's true "sky". Or at least, back then, he thought it was one. The world he knew was a mere tapestry of ████…

…

"Not that there aren't enough rooms in the Express, but why bring him and the rock here?" Himeko paused to take a sip of her piping hot coffee. "Isn't it a bit, I don't know, overkill?"

"It's because that pyramid is no place to cultivate a living species, and there's no better–... lab assistant... than this man before us." Dr. Ratio looked at the man on the floor. 

Dan Heng tried not to comment on how sad his tone was when Veritas referred to Kaveh as a "lab assistant". He knew what had happened to Ratio, but it was not the right time or place. 

"What do you mean by living?" Himeko asked.

"That rock has adeptal power within it that we can awaken. That is, if he'd help us make his little rock come to life."

With his words, he moved the unweariable Kaveh to act complacent.

Kaveh felt as though the floor caved beneath him. An unholy mixture of disbelief, awe, and joy swirled within his already jetlagged mind. The fact of the matter was, despite being incredibly unstable, he was lucid enough to know that a miracle was possible. 

"What…?"

"It's been a month since that whole debacle," Veritas muttered to himself as he flicked the wrist that held his book away from the bathtub's bubbly waters. "I suppose I was harsh to the poor man. But is that treatment not at all deserved?"

Over time, Veritas grew to like Kaveh, especially after knowing he was tutoring young aspiring architects free of charge. Still, Kaveh's strangely compliant behavior does not deviate from his first impression. His empty eyes were enough sign that Kaveh lived through emotionally draining struggles and came out with few real friends. He lost his raison d'etre, that's why he willingly threw his life in Teyvat away.

… In Kaveh's words, he only wished for a "vacation". If his prize was to go elsewhither with a satisfying result, then he's not opposed to (getting kidnapped) a new "collaboration".

The doctor can't say no to it either.

Deep down, prodigy genius Veritas couldn't deny the harsh truth: witnessing that pitiful man finding solace in an inanimate object was a stark reminder that he harbored the same "illness".

Hence, Veritas offered consistent "insults" to the brightest of Kshashrewar, and each time, Kaveh took the opportunity to improve. Veritas considered it a necessary evil. But even after surpassing those challenges, Kaveh was helpless to overcome the deep emptiness that persisted in his soul.

Kaveh never really spoke about who his previous lover was. All everyone knew was that he lovingly called them "delam"– his heart. They didn't want to bring him more pain by even asking a simple question like delam's real name.

A huge mistake later on.

"... Tch," Veritas grunted, his eyebrows furrowing sadly. The thought of his last love affairs had soured his mood.

Veritas stood from his bath, drying himself and wrapping a towel on his lower half.

… He likely won't sleep tonight.

Forgetting his agreement to continue the project tomorrow morning, he unlocked the door to the studio room Himeko lent them. He left trails of his wet footsteps. His wavy hair also remained damp, but he could not care much for it. Veritas will dress himself up later. Just a towel will suffice for now.

"Sculpting…"

Veritas laughed to himself as he took some tools off the table.

"Wasn't this your pastime and not mine—" he closed his eyes, muttering the next words with a teasingly melancholic tilt. "Assistant (L/n)?"

His grip on the chisel tightened, painting his knuckles white.

Professor (Y/n) (L/n).

The person responsible for the Council of Mundanites' existence. Their name rarely escapes his lips, treating their memory like a curse. Just exhaling the thought of them out of his system makes him nauseous. As if the air inside him gets knocked out. His eyes would flutter shut, no different from a dying man who held weakly holds on. Veritas hated this anguish. The doctor hated this vicious seemingly never-ending cycle called "grief".

"(Y/n)…" Ratio muttered. "Your face is still etched in my mind. What more do I need to eradicate these… unnecessary burdens?"

He could practically hear them laugh beside him.

Haha, please. You think about me so much that you consider me burdensome? Oh, you dork! If you loved me so much, you should've written a love letter.

"You absolute ignoramus," Veritas laughed softly. "You cannot discredit my efforts, though, can you?"

"My dearest…" He breathed out in pain once more. "My most wonderful partner. The best teaching assistant I ever had. You…"

… Never loved him back.

Dr. Veritas Ratio was no idiot. He despised any form of delusion. Throughout his life, he had been a tyrannical figure who pursued truth and not stagnant idolatry for every "patient". But when an immovable force meets an unstoppable object, would you consider him a tamed emperor?

Professor (L/n) was the first person he met who brazenly called themselves a "mundanite". A true mediocre. And they were beautiful at their very core.

Not free of sin, but free of hubris.

Molded as a genius since birth, the very foundations of (L/n)'s philosophies dismantled Ratio. (L/n) admired geniuses like Herta, but never romanticized the notion of natural-born wits. They always strived to eradicate their own "ignorance". But even when they are more knowledgeable than they let on, (L/n) never boasts. This behavior provides no benefit in an academically competitive field. Nothing confused the irrefutable prodigy like their longtime academic partner.

Geniuses— Masters— when I achieve great things, I don't want to have silly titles before my name. It's so… rigid, don't you think so, Veritas?

I wouldn't know.

Ha! Of course, you wouldn't. You've lived your entire life as one. But level with me for a second. Wouldn't life be less boring if…

He raised the chisel.

… we never stopped considering ourselves as mere beginners? Isn't there more joy to being a mundane with untapped potential than a stiff jack of all trades? C'mon, Veritas. Doesn't the idea that there's always more to explore make this vast world seem less dull?

Veritas bit his lip. Tears were threatening to spill.

February 5, ████.

It was Dr. Veritas Ratio's fault that they died that day. He thought (L/n) was capable of handling an extremely dangerous laboratory mishap. They were not. Despite his assistant's years of experience, every man is an unsuspecting fledgling in the face of death. It does not discriminate between the mediocre and the brightest.

That's absurd, (L/n). What is the point of learning if not for its mastery?

"Assistant… Let me offer this final tribute so that you can finally s-stop… haunting… me."

But they will never stop. Their last long exchange repeated in his head throughout the night. No matter how many times he hammered, the clanging sound did not drown out the voices in his head. The words mocked him, over and over, and over.

I'm sorry Veritas…

Why are you apologizing?

… I'm afraid I just don't see you that way. I'm just an ordinary person, and I doubt I could ever genuinely return the love of someone as brilliant as you. I'm afraid your affection might be akin to caring for a pet, and I can't find it in myself to figure out how to respond in kind.

… That's not true. You cannot simply decline my confession with a lukewarm excuse—

I'm afraid I'm just an ordinary college professor with no PhDs. I will have to reject your love. I'm so sorry.

But why?!

"(Y/n)… The one person I can never grasp…" Veritas muttered as he looked at the finished piece. "Here you are... Created by my own hands..."

Beautiful. Not a single doubt that it was carved in their likeness. The (Y/n) he knew was a professor who loved their teaching job, but wished they were more of an adventurer. Secretly, (Y/n) wanted to be an archeologist, and perhaps that's one of the reasons why Veritas let the mysterious rock formation inside the Express. Maybe if they continued living, they would've liked this gesture.

Ha… As if.

Veritas—

W-What aspect must I improve on? To dismiss me so impatiently— do I lack the charm? I can always learn to suit your tastes. Don't tell such a bold lie. I highly doubt that it is due to my academic performance. There's another man you've wasted your affections on, is there?!

Veritas, please…

Enough! Enough with these lies and tell me! J-Just… Just tell me, (Y/n)!

He's tired. Veritas just wanted to hold them again. He just wanted to "fix" their hair- tucking his golden hairpin to subconsciously teach their associates and students that Professor (L/n) was his. He missed the way he would hide (L/n)'s lab coat just so he could make them wear his as he left for the day. He missed secretly leaving small love confessions on their class grade spreadsheets, add/drop forms, and even their private online journals so he would read messages about how they must've caught a computer virus. He missed teasing them when they hadn't got a clue that he was unserious. He missed hearing (L/n) whine. He missed the way it made him warm.

He missed the warmth.

"Stop..."

He missed you.

"Stop this..."

And he continues to miss his (Y/n) so much.

"Please..."

It's unbearable.

There is no one else.

Yes, there is! I refuse to believe it! It's your recent lab partner, isn't it!? The man everyone has fallen for— you have taken a liking to him more than me, the person who has been with you all this time!!! You… You ungrateful!—

Veritas is so, so tired and more chipped than the rock he had worked on… Unlike the statue, he cannot tangibly pick up the pieces (L/n) that broke him in. There's only a hollow void of what could've been.

Why... Why did they have to reject him? If they hadn't rejected him, he wouldn't have coldly assigned (Y/n) to deal with the containment breach alone. He would've thought it through. He would've realized he was plagued with ignorance. He would've changed so many things that February 5th.

But that's all there was to it. Just "would have"s, not "have done"s.

Ngh–?! Why… did you... slap me…?

Veritas, maybe you should stop and look down and listen to us common-minded folks for once in your life! The simple fact is that you're just so out of reach. How can you love me, when you don't even understand me, Genius Ratio? How can you confess when you don't know what it's like to work for the knowledge you have? How can you love a "mundanite" like me?

… (Y/n)… T-That's simply untrue, and you are aware of that...

It's morning, an appropriate time to head back to his guest room.

When he was certain that he was alone, Veritas finally allowed himself to cry.

"There's no mistake that we both are- were idiots. We both failed to see that I'm a mundanite, just like you."

In contrast to his former roommate, Kaveh is an early riser. Not exactly a morning person, but a man of discipline nonetheless. Perhaps the concluded argument last night made his rise more motivating. He had no qualms with getting out of bed, heading straight to take a shower before drinking coffee with Himeko.

The morning was wordless but calm.

Whatever happened after he reentered the studio, however, was the exact opposite.

"Delam…?" Kaveh knelt with both knees down on the floor, shocked.

"Is that you…? Delam… Delam!!!"

You tilted your head.

Delam. That was the first word you've heard upon your birth or "rebirth", depending on whose narrative was at play. You first rose from your slumber much like an earth's crust would give way to a volcano. Warmth seeped from your chest and then throughout your body, filling you with life and newfound nerves. But no one was around. You had been observing the fading trail of wet footsteps, yet lacked the courage to leave the room.

Veritas was right. The rock does have life. And you have been awakened.

You looked human. You move human.

But you do not sound human.

"Delam! I-I can't believe this!"

For words fail.

「… Who are you?」

After all, since when can statues speak?

With unsteady legs, he attempted to approach your nearly nude figure. The sheet they used to keep out dust was the only cover you had. He pulled you in when he got close enough, and you wanted to squeak when he rested his nose on your shoulder. His breath tickled hot. However, his warm tears helped you to accept the melancholic reality.

"Delam! D-Delam, my sweetheart, my (Y-(Y/n)… A-Ah… Ah…"

Kaveh pulled back only to kiss your forehead. He was warm. You are not. Despite the fabrics he wore, you can feel his heat against your "skin". His heart was beating. Such an organ does not exist inside of you.

"(Y/n), my (Y/n)…" He gasped out between peppered kisses on your neck. "Mine… My heart has returned to me. Can you hear it too? It's beating again… It beats… I never thought I'd hear my heart again since you've been gone…"

His words made little sense to you, but you knew he liked your form. Kaveh's fingers traced around you, loving each inch, whether it was curved flesh or bone-like sharpness— he didn't care for he knew it was his (Y/n) (L/n).

He's so colorful. Reds, yellows, oranges, and even hints of blues and greens. It made you silently conscious about how you were a boring dull gray.

Warm, like the sun.

「… Baobei?」

"My (Y/n)… D-Delam…" Kaveh pressed his forehead against yours, your lips nearly touching.

You wiped his tears away.

Was that your name? (Y/n)…?

"Kaveh, what the hell are you doing?!"

The blonde man momentarily stopped cradling you out of shock.

This new man was all purples, blue, gold, and small taints of cyan and red. The expression he wore made you believe he might be covetous beyond mankind. There's a level of gluttonous greed in his anger that makes even the earth like yourself phased.

「… Who is he…?」

Both of them feel familiar to you, but you do not know why.

"Veritas!" Kaveh's eyes widened. "A miracle just happened— delam— they're—!"

"Put (Y/n) down this instant!!!"

Kaveh blinked.

"What… What did you say?"

"I said put them down, damn it! Who the hell are you, touching them so carelessly like they're yours?!"

Kaveh's eyebrows furrowed.

"How do you know that name?!" Kaveh yelled. "How did you know who (Y/n) is!?"

The doctor was equally confused.

Why would the ignorance-prone Kaveh know the name of his deceased love too?

Veritas has not talked about his old assistant to any breathing being for a long time. Talking felt like admitting that they were gone for good. But in this case, it produces a contrary result.

"Why the fuck wouldn't I?!"

"I don't know— maybe because you're not from Teyvat?!"

"What are you on, you imbecile?! Can you stop defiling them with your filthy hands?!" Veritas scowled and summoned his book. "Hands. Off."

The warning only made Kaveh even more possessive. He gently pushed you behind his back, glaring at him.

"No."

"Kaveh, you pestilence ridden—!!!"

"No, not until you tell me why the hell you know the name of my fiance!"

Veritas' heart sank.

… Fiance?

No… No, no way.

What's happening? How would that make sense?!

(Y/n) is his. Why should you belong to Kaveh?

"Are… are you insane?!" Veritas screamed. "I should've—"

"What?! Threw me off the Express?! I dare you!!!" Kaveh glared. "You knew you couldn't win against me alone, that's why your best bet was to knock me out— and you know it."

"Ngh."

Neither of them realized the greater reason as to why they knew the "same" person. The doctor may have jumped through various universes, but he had not done enough to notice a key factor.

There they were, claiming to love the image behind their animated statue— when they didn't know what it was they cried for.

"Just answer the question: who is (Y/n) to you?" Kaveh grumbled.

Somehow, he was far more frightening when his voice was calm and low. 

The usually diplomatic architect materialized his weapon out of thin air.

"Go on. Tell me."

The doctor stiffened. There was no way Veritas was losing this argument. 

It's unethical. Wholly unethical to appeal to pathos in this manner. To weave tales for his benefit.

But the end justifies the means.

Veritas flashed you a guilt-ridden expression…

Before he said the biggest lie known only to himself.

"Professor (Y/n) (L/n) is MY dead lover, and I molded the statue based on their appearance last night!" Veritas yanked a fistful of Kaveh's shirt and brought him closer. "So why are you claiming them as YOURS?!"

…

…

The sound of a cane hitting the floor stopped all hell from possibly breaking loose.

Welt Yang had one foot inside the room and one out the door. He wore a knowing and empathetic look. The others were behind him, looking particularly shaken up.

This screaming match was the worst the two ever had.

"Kaveh, Dr. Ratio, enough." He calmly spoke up. "I think I understand the confusion."

"Allow me to explain…"

"I'm surprised you have no comments on their flower-bespangled clothes, yet…" 

"The aesthetic is... tasteful. I like the headdress." 

"Of course, you like the crown of laurel…" 

"However–"

"Oh Lord Kusanali, here we go…"

Upon Welt's intervention, every piece started to fit together. The explanation was a frustratingly simple but difficult truth. (Y/n) (L/n) was not just one entity in the vast universe— there are inevitable variations.

The two eventually calmed down as they heard both sides. Veritas' (Y/n), who Kaveh later refers to as an "expy" as a placeholder name, was a professor— while Kaveh's "delam" was an archeologist. Almost the same, but not a complete copy-paste.

You, however, they are unsure of. No one knows yet if you do carry (Y/n)'s soul or if you're a mere replica. Veritas is working on the hypothesis that you were an adeptal tool who aided in freeing the vigilant yaksha from a malevolent Sumeru God.

But those bits of info doesn't matter in the end. Why?

Because they both love "you" deeply.

And these intelligent men can "learn" how to share.

"Are you not tired? Perhaps it is time I take over. Only a fool would work when completely drained." Dr. Ratio then added. "Does it not fall in my skilled hands to weave such clothing for them now? Even better than mere fabric, I'm willing to handle clay and mold it around their bo—"

"Considering how many fools can also calculate and perhaps wear an asbestos mask as a quirky character trait, it is surprising that the fool in front of me thinks he can show proficiency over a tedious task." Kaveh raised an eyebrow, seething at the thought of Veritas' unfair perverted touch lingering on your body, again.

"I think you are experiencing what is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, as Mister Yang calls it." He added.

Veritas scoffed.

They may be revered both as geniuses in their fields, but they're reduced to kindergarten-like rivals when it comes to you. Their first order of business after another truce was to provide your clothes. Fortunately, Stelle's fashion sense was more unisex than anticipated so you borrowed hers in the meantime.

While you sat on the sofa with the bubbly March 7th, the two started planning your wardrobe. Kaveh returned later on the same evening with the most… floral clothes much to Veritas' dismay.

He missed seeing his version of (Y/n) who wore classic academic styles, not— whatever this was.

"It is mere confidence; no other variable is at play. The fool in question is the artisan responsible for the expeditious sculpting of the aforementioned statue within a singular nocturnal interval. A fact that eludes your appreciation, my less-than-appreciative and unskilled interlocutor."

Kaveh momentarily had the face of a man unpracticed in speech. People often forget that he majored in STEM, not HUMSS. Though he had some essay-based minors in his first & second years, he lacked preparation for Veritas' otherworldly vocabulary. Kaveh would whet his greatsword if Veritas said something bluntly deprecating.

Still, he can't deny that it was through Veritas' handiwork that made your hands as soft as Kaveh wanted them to be. And that secretly pisses him off.

You tilted your head.

Somehow, your creators are arguing again. 

"Are you threatening to rob me of the joys I have toiled nights for just to sate your shortlived desires, Veritas?" Kaveh rebuked him sternly. "I didn't know you were kind of a brat."

"I am only offering a hand. But it's clear that you are projecting onto me."

「You two–. 」

You tried to cut in, but can't utter a word…

"I'm not projecting! I know that once you prove you can make clothes, you'll kick me out of the Express, that's just the kind of man you are! Manipulative, arrogant—"

"And you're insecure. There is no more loathsome creature than a man who does not acknowledge his own hubris and repeats his mistakes."

「Master Veritas, Master Kaveh—. 」

You loathed to watch them fight for another round of meaningless squabbles. Why weren't you blessed with speech?

"Is that so? Do you seriously subscribe to that belief?"

"Why, of course."

"You should listen to better men than yourself, then."

"Oh c'mon, knock it off!!!" March cut in, giving them both a light smack with Veritas' book. "Can't you get along better? Your little darling looks upset!!!"

The two halted. She was right, you weren't comfortable. Veritas cleared his throat awkwardly while Kaveh looked down, both apologetic.

"See, Kaveh? Your persistence caused this."

"How is it MY fault?"

"I'm merely stating that the lack of options is bound to make them uneasy." Veritas deadpanned and handed you an IPC magazine he had been trying to get you to browse. "Why don't you pick to your liking? Don't worry about expenses. I have it covered."

"What?! Do you want them to wear those un-stylish clothes? Please, you just want to have them wear your brand!"

"Don't project your carnal possessiveness as my own." Veritas scoffed. But Kaveh was right. He missed seeing his (Y/n) wear his lab coat.

"Oh really?! Fine then! Let's ask (Y/n) what they really think!"

March sighed. "Guys, I think you're forgetting that you're fighting over clothes—"

But they didn't hear her. Nothing else mattered to those two except you. And you alone.

Their partner.

Their heart.

Their reason for living.

Hence, they yelled in unison.

"Who do you prefer, assistant? Him or me?!"

"Who do you prefer, delam? Him or me?!"

Taglist: @vennnnn-diagram, @meimeimeirin, @korianne, @prophecy-harmony, @shellofthewell, @sagekun,

[sketching-shark]

I think it's the ironic fact that JTTW fans already know how DBK and Sun Wukong's friendship broke apart but are more curious on LMK versions of Sun Wukong and the Six Eared Macaque were friends alongside falling out.

HA! Well, while it often does seem that way, I'm going to go ahead and be a complete snob in a Journey to the West purist kind of way by wondering how many Six Eared Macaque fans would consider themselves more JTTW fans or more Monkie Kid fans, or if they feel they're a mix of both...

I've seen a lot of people argue that these two works of fiction are their own thing and that as such Monkie Kid (and associated fanworks) shouldn't be expected to follow the canon of JTTW, and fair enough for some parts. I've also, however, seen people who argue for this complete separation seeming to use it as an excuse to not acknowledge or learn about ANY original aspects of characters such as Sun Wukong and the Demon Bull King, or even very important deities such as Guanyin and the Jade Emperor, and who as such end up making some pretty gross generalizations/assumptions about them even though they are of great religious and cultural importance.

For example (and while I know a lot of the fun people get from fan works is in exaggerating certain traits), Sun Wukong seems to often be presented with an "inherently" evil/thoughtless/chaotic character, while his intelligence, deep love of his family, genuine efforts to become a better person, & many acts of saving lives, as presented in JTTW, aren't even mentioned. I feel like a lot of this is due to the way he acts in Monkie Kid (while I maintain that this version of Sun Wukong seems to be Bad End Monkey King, he does do a lot of deflecting his issues with a show of humor/a carefree attitude & does seem really bad at communicating due to a fear of making things worse). Even so, the popularity of Thoughtless/Evil/Selfish Sun Wukong that doesn’t really allow for any of the nuance or a display of his beneficial traits as shown in JTTW does make me wonder how many people have been exposed to a good translation of og classic Sun Wukong...As I've said before, I've noted that a number of Chinese people on this site have expressed frustration with the fact that a good chunk of the monkey king’s Western audience seems to be getting their impressions about Sun Wukong, the Demon Bull King, the Six Eared Macaque, etc. from some mix of Overly Sarcastic Productions, Monkie Kid, and social media instead of from at least a translation of the original text, and it is true that a LOT of the nuance of these work and these characters can be very easily lost, especially if your drawing your information of them primarily from a cartoony version of the original source. 

That would be an interesting poll though...out of curiosity, how many of you fine folk have read the break-up & fight between Sun Wukong and the Demon Bull King either in the original text or in a translation, or is your exposure to them primarily through Monkie Kid? 

Again, I need to make it clear that I'm not Chinese & didn't grow up with the story, but I will admit for my own part that reading the DBK/SWK break-up in the Yu translation actually made me more curious about how their dynamic is going to play out in Monkie Kid than I am curious about what's going to happen with Mr. Macaque. 

This is primarily because besides SWK’s fight with Princess Iron Fan and DBK being given a LOT of page space in JTTW, there seems to have been some serious stuff that went down between the three of them in the events post-JTTW and pre-the main plot of Monkie Kid...the last we see of DBK in JTTW (if memory serves correctly) was him being hauled off by a host of heavenly warriors to be judged for his crimes of not giving SWK the palm leaf fan & also eating humans. When Monkie Kid starts, however, we are told that DBK had emerged “from the Netherworld” & immediately starts wrecking everything around him. What this suggests--if Monkie Kid is something of a fan continuation of JTTW--is that DBK ended up being executed by the heavenly forces, but managed to fight his way out of the underworld in a manner somewhat similar to SWK, who we are told he is equal in strength to in JTTW. In that beginning fight of Monkie Kid DBK is also shown as so enraged that he won’t stop his path of destruction until SWK buries him under a mountain for 500 years. It’s never said in the show, but--and this is important--this is basically exactly what Buddha did to SWK to start him on the path of atonement. So there seems to be some very intentional parallels between SWK’s havoc in heaven & DBK’s havoc on earth, which may suggest that one of the things Monkie Kid SWK really wants is for his former dear friend, his sworn brother, to find a way like him to be less violent and thus ultimately less vulnerable to destructive and self-destructive behavior, and that the way he tried to start this was by giving DBK the same treatment he got when he was a raging warlord. 

We are furthermore told that it was right after DBK was sealed that SWK disappeared for all those centuries, and while the impulse may be to write it off as him just wanting to enjoy himself (given a lot of his behavior in the show’s timeline), given the indications that this SWK may be deeply depressed, I feel like the answer could be something a lot more tragic...there seem to be a number of clues in Monkie Kid that while the journey of JTTW happened, something made it end disastrously, with SWK either assuming or knowing that Zhu Bajie, Sha Wujing, Tang Sanzang, and Bai Longma are dead. And per JTTW, this wouldn’t be the first time that he’s experienced a horrific loss, given the war with heaven and the burning of Flower-Fruit Mountain. And then right after THAT, it seems DBK emerged from the underworld, and so Sun Wukong was put into a horrific position: either murder his sworn brother, or let him continue to rampage & harm and/or kill who knows how many humans. SWK ultimately gives up his staff to do the repeat of “500 years under a mountain in solitary confinement route,” which as per JTTW he considers better than the alternative, but he immediately follows that by exiling himself. In JTTW SWK is a really sociable person who makes friends wherever he goes, but man, for this SWK...his life must at that point just feel like one failure after another, that in spite of all his best efforts he wasn’t able to save anyone he really cared about, and now he just trapped someone who was so important to him under a mountain & fated him to suffer the same things he had when he was in that position. How much more does he have to hurt his fellow yaoguai? How many more times does he have to choose between yaoguai and humans, feeling like no matter what he decides it’s just going to result in pain for him and/or his loved ones? I can easily imagine super sociable & easily upset (he cries a LOT in JTTW) SWK feeling like after sealing DBK, he just can’t do this any more. He just...can’t. 

This is all just speculation, but knowing the JTTW backstory between SWK and DBK does, at least for me, make their Monkie Kid relationship a lot more intriguing than it might be otherwise. Especially now that DBK seems to actually be making some small steps to quell his constant rage & lust for power. He even saves SWK and Qi Xiaotian from an explosion/nasty fall in the season 2 special! The Bull family weren’t really present in season 2, but I really hope they make a comeback in season 3 (if/when we get it) precisely because Red Son, Princess Iron Fan, and especially DBK have such an involved history with SWK. Plus it would be really fun to see two old warlords trying to awkwardly make amends with each other & struggle to be good teachers & positive role models to their student & son. 

In any case I feel this potential is more interesting than whatever fanfic The Six Eared “I’mma Plagiarize The Demon Bull King’s Backstory Of Being Best Friends with Sun Wukong” Macaque is creating lol. 

[detective-crescend]

break up with your girlfriend (i’m bored)

There is a game that Klavier Gavin sometimes likes to play.

‘Likes’, however, may not be the appropriate term.

It isn’t a nice game, or one that makes him feel like a particularly good and decent person. And yet, when he wins—which he almost certainly does, on all but two notable occasions—the rush of chemicals that his victory incites within his clearly damaged mind will cover up all but the most persistent cries of outrage from what remains of his decaying moral compass.

It is a private challenge, it is a weakness he has long since conceded to… it is played like this:

There are plenty of people in the world who would love Klavier Gavin simply for what he represents. Conversely, there are people who will despise him for those very same reasons.

When the small voice in the back of his mind begins to speak too loudly—the one that sounds so very familiar, calm and leveled while it interrogates his every action—when he, in turn, begins to doubt himself, Klavier will search out the nearest member of the latter group. The more this individual seemingly dislikes him, the better the effect. And, having identified someone who must dislike Klavier more than he dislikes himself, he will do whatever is necessary to change that person’s opinion.

Sometimes it is as simple as attention and kindness, gifts and persistence; sometimes it is through a display of vulnerability or chagrin that is only somewhat manufactured for the moment. Though Klavier’s motivation for doing so is horrifically selfish, the goal is to be perfectly genuine in his search for their affection. It needs to be; only once his target has offered up their adoration can he tolerate himself once more. If it is a false version of Klavier that they are idolizing, it only strengthens the voice’s position inside his own mind.

The point of this game is emotional intimacy, not physical. Klavier has never been in the game of intentionally breaking hearts. One of the cardinal rules that he has set for himself, then, is that his appointed convert must be maintained as a friend, not a lover. In actuality, the majority of the rules pertain to limits and boundaries—monetary, time, distance, and attitude—or to create clear definitions of what constitutes a win or a loss of the game. It is important, Klavier feels, to keep things consistent among matches and, therefore, fair.

But, although Klavier has flourished in this diversion since his now distant childhood, he had also never encountered a contender quite like Apollo Justice before.

It wasn’t that Apollo was particularly difficult to read or to predict what it might take in order to shift his perception—on the contrary, Klavier had known exactly what needed to be done to achieve his goal almost immediately upon meeting the man. Whether or not Klavier is capable of it, however, is where the debate hinges.

There are rules that will need to be broken, for one thing, along with a set of small, concealed truths that must be unearthed—things that Klavier had long since been in the habit of burying below several layers of his own psyche. As of this moment, there are only two that Klavier has managed to excavate and examine with any sense of composure.

The first, that Apollo has beaten him so thoroughly in Klavier’s own game that their exchanges have ceased to be a game at all. Instead, they have taken on the frantic and impetuous nature of an entirely different emotion. Klavier’s desire to win Apollo’s affection had ceased to be a simple desire; it now felt like a need, pulsing bright and warm from somewhere so deeply within him that he had long since stopped believing it was possible to feel this way at all.

The second truth—both far more recently understood and infinitely more frightening—is that the aforementioned need may, in fact, be love.

It is not as pleasant an emotion as he had once anticipated, more like gnawing hunger that rumbled when Apollo was absent and roared with an open maw when he was nearby. It made Klavier indecisive and introspective in an entirely different way than the voice in his head, made him overthink every word he spoke and every thing he did when Apollo was nearby. It made him impulsive and greedy, wont to push his luck at every opportunity he could possibly take.

And, as luck would have it, this emotion was ruining any chance he could have with Apollo in the process.

“I am performing at a local studio tomorrow,” Klavier is attempting to begin one afternoon, in the immediate aftermath of a trial he has just lost. Though he’d meant the words to sound suave and unintentionally cool, the force of Apollo’s indifferent gaze strangles the words into an awkwardly insistent rush. “Would you like to come, as my guest? You may bring Fräulein Wright as well.”

Before him, Apollo’s dark eyes narrow, his hands still in the process of packing up the strewn remainder of his courtroom notes. “What kind of performance?”

“It is for a streaming service, ja?” Klavier replies, grinning through the nerve induced flips his stomach has been performing since the moment he opened his mouth. “They invite artists to come for an interview and to cover a song of the audience’s choice. There is usually free food and drinks.”

“So no Gavinner’s music?” Apollo looks skeptical.

“Nein, I promise.”

Another moment of cautious consideration is given before Apollo eventually, reluctantly, nods. “Trucy’ll kill me if she finds out I said no. Text me the address and time.”

Of course, it isn’t until hours after the requested message had been sent that Klavier thinks to check the status of the polls online that will decide the theme of his performance. One glance is all it takes to know that his invitation could be nothing but an absolutely terrible idea.

The damage, however, had been done.

As such, Klavier wakes the next morning with his emotions an odd amalgam of dread and anticipation that carries through the remainder of his day. By his arrival at the indicated studio—far earlier than the time he had provided to Apollo due to the ever-necessary addition of hair and makeup—Klavier is certain he has thought of nothing else the entire day other than Apollo’s arrival.

“Trucy couldn’t come,” Apollo says later, looking exceedingly uncomfortable in clothes other than his courtroom ensemble. It is the first time since the Guilty as Charged concert that Klavier has seen him in anything so casual; he had forgotten that, in the absence of hair gel and when wearing something that is not a shocking scarlet in hue, Apollo looks good. Good enough that Klavier is far from the only one casting surreptitious looks as they walk together from the lobby to the studio.

Those small glances are enough to send his imagination into a tailspin that, consequently, causes his response to be just moments too late to sound entirely casual. “But you still came.”

“I already said I would,” Apollo replies, ignoring the delay with a dismissive shrug. “It would’ve been rude to bail at the last second. Anyway, Trucy made me promise I’d record your song. When is it, by the way?”

“Twenty minutes—I won’t keep you for too long, ja?”

The problem is, during a performance, Klavier is practically incapable of any sort of critical thought at all. Years of practice have led to a near Pavlovian response to the appearance of a camera in his face; at just the glint of a lense reflection, any doubts or worries he had previously been wrestling with will be delicately tucked away to make room for the public persona Klavier presents to the world.

The same thing happens, here. Within moments of the interview starting, Klavier forgets about his apprehension in having Apollo present for this performance. By the time he eventually starts to sing, he’s forgotten about Apollo sitting just beyond the camera in a plastic folding chair all together.

The song picked for him to sing is almost certainly a joke, intentionally selected due to his recent and rather outspoken declaration of bisexuality. But Klavier has never been one to back down from a challenge or to let anyone know they’ve gotten under his skin. His take on Ariana Grande’s morally bankrupt classic is stripped down and irrevocably smoky, just the sound of Klavier’s voice and an electric guitar with absolutely zero changes to the lyrics, as was expected.

Klavier is not singing to Apollo, precisely—as far as he is aware, Apollo does not have a girlfriend from which to break up with—but a song will always sound better with some sort of emotion attached to it. Klavier has long been in the habit of searching any lyrics that are not his own for a handhold that he can grab on to relate to; here, the idea of wanting someone unavailable, no matter the cause, is an easy enough choice.

And things go seamlessly for the majority of the song. It isn't until nearly two minutes in, just as Klavier is finishing the bridge, that his gaze slips past the camera he has just recently glanced up into, and finds Apollo’s eyes wide and locked upon his. Perhaps it is not entirely professional, to maintain uninterrupted eye contact with the opposing counsel as the lyrics “you can hit it in the morning like it’s yours” are murmured seductively into the microphone bent towards one’s face. The suspicion is confirmed when, thirty seconds later, the song’s end is met by an uproar of applause from everyone except Apollo, who stands and leaves the room altogether.

“Stop messing with me,” Apollo shouts in the parking lot when Klavier has finally caught up with him. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, I don’t know what sort of advantage you think you’re playing at, but stop.”

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND WIRED

There is rarely a single brilliant hack that ensures success: I learnt never to bet on any one feature or deal or anything to bring you success. When we cook one up we're not always 100% sure which kind it is. The Web may not be. Some believe only business people can do this with YC itself. The floors are constantly being swept clean of any loose objects that might later get stuck in something. The really juicy new approaches are not the ones that matter anyway. Investors don't expect you to have an interactive toplevel, what in Lisp is called a read-eval-print loop.

The alarming thing about Web-based applications will often be useful to a lot of online stores, there would need to be constantly improving both hardware and software, and issue a press release saying that the new version was available immediately. Admissions to PhD programs in the hard sciences are fairly honest, for example. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. Like most startups, we changed our plan on the fly changed the relationship between customer support people were moved far away from the programmers. It's the same with other high-beta vocations, like being an actor or a novelist.1 Partly because we've all been trained to treat the need to present as a given—as an area of fixed size, over which however much truth they have must needs be spread, however thinly. Bootstrapping sounds great in principle, but this apparently verdant territory is one from which few startups emerge alive. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another, and though they hate to admit it the biggest factor in their opinion of you is other investors' opinion of you. Knowing that test is coming makes us work a lot harder to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices. Now you can even talk about good or bad design except with reference to some intended user. I can sense that.2 I don't know of anyone I've met.

How can this be? Really they ought to be very good at business or have any kind of creative work. And they're astoundingly successful. The Detroit News. In fact, it may not be the first time, with misgivings.3 The eminent, on the other hand, are weighed down by their eminence.4 And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. Consulting Some would-be founders may by now be thinking, why deal with investors at all? Just as you can compete with specialization by working on larger vertical slices, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than one discovered when Christmas shopping season came around and loads rose on their server. Once a company shifts over into the model where everyone drives home to the suburbs for dinner, however late, you've lost something extraordinarily valuable.

Y Combinator and most of my time writing essays lately.5 It was only then I realized he hadn't said very much. Actually, there are projects that stretch them. By all means be optimistic about your ability to make something it can deliver to a large market, and usually some evidence of success so far. It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they currently use spend a lot of restaurants around, not some dreary office park that's a wasteland after 6:00 PM. At Viaweb our whole site was like a bunch of people is the worst kind. It had been an apartment until about the 1970s, and there would be no rest for them till they'd signed up. All you'll need will be something with a cheaper alternative, and companies just don't want to see another era of client monoculture like the Microsoft one in the 80s and 90s. We can learn more about someone in the first place.6 If you try writing Web-based software will be less stressful. In Ohio, which Kerry ultimately lost 49-51, exit polls ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. Be able to downshift into consulting if appropriate.

You wouldn't use vague, grandiose marketing-speak among yourselves. Focus on the ones that matter anyway. If they hadn't been, painting as a medium wouldn't have the prestige that it does. These are not early numbers. C: Perl, Python, and even have bad service, and people will keep coming. But angel investors like big successes too. If someone had launched a new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it.

Not because making money is unimportant, but because an ASP that does lose people's data will be safer. In a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. For a lot of other people too—in fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. You can shift into a different mode of working. Maybe they can, companies like to do but can't.7 Fortunately, I can fix the biggest danger right here. It was not until Hotmail was launched a year later that people started to get it. If a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place. I wish I could say that force was more often used for good than ill, but I'm not sure. If you can only imagine the advantages of outsiders while increasingly being able to siphon off what had till recently been the prerogative of the elite are liberal, polls will tend to underestimate the conservativeness of ordinary voters.8

This was apparently too marginal even for Apple's PR people.9 These were the biggest. Give hackers an inch and they'll take you a mile. Be flexible. When did Google take the lead? But if you were using the software for them. When did Microsoft die, and of all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million dollars for a custom-made online store on their own servers. I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker at that conference was that everyone else did. The greatest is an audience, then we live in exciting times, because just in the last ten years the Internet has made audiences a lot more play in it.

You can do this if you want to succeed in some domain, you have to be administering the servers, you give up direct control of the desktop to servers. A few steps down from the top you're basically talking to bankers who've picked up a few new vocabulary words from reading Wired.10 There is a role for ideas of course. And that's who they should have been choosing all along. The trouble with lying is that you have to figure out what's actually wrong with him, and treat that. Lots of small companies flourished, and did it by making cool things. As Fred Brooks pointed out in The Mythical Man-Month, adding people to a project tends to slow it down.11 Every audience is an incipient mob, and a lot of compound bugs.

Notes

Which is precisely because they can't legitimately ask you to acknowledge it.

A great programmer might invent things an ordinary one?

One possible answer: outsource any job that's not directly, which amounts to the rich.

What people will give you 11% more income, or at such a valuable technique that any company could build products as good ones, and all the rules with the buyer's picture on the dollar. By this I mean forum in the Sunday paper. 1% a week for 4 years.

Whereas the activation energy required to switch. If Bush had been with us he would have. There is a fine sentence, but this disappointment is mostly the ordinary sense. 1323-82.

And for those interested in investing but doesn't want to live. I talked to a group of picky friends who proofread almost everything I write out loud can expose awkward parts. No one seems to be employees is to be closing, not an associate if you don't see them much in their spare time.

Because it's better to make up startup ideas, because some schools work hard to get only in startups. But you can't mess with the Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Edgar v.

Which helps explain why there are no misunderstandings. If you like the Segway and Google Wave. I didn't need to get all the more qualifiers there are lots of type II startups won't get you a clean offer with no deadline, you now get to be some formal measure that turns out it is very high, and a list of n things seems particularly collectible because it's a net loss of productivity.

If he's bad at it. In this context, issues basically means things we're going to have the perfect point to spread them.

A Plan for Spam I used thresholds of. Google's site.

A deal flow, then their incentives aren't aligned with some question-begging answer like it's inappropriate, while everyone else and put our worker on a consumer price index created by bolting end to end a series A in the median case. Possible exception: It's hard to say that it makes people dumber.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Joe Biden currently has a robust lead in polls. If the election were held today, he might even win in a landslide, carrying not only traditional swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania but potentially adding new states such as Georgia and Texas to the Democratic coalition.

But the election is not being held today. While the polls have been stable so far this year, it’s still only August. The debates and the conventions have yet to occur. Biden only named his running mate yesterday. And the campaign is being conducted amidst a pandemic the likes of which the United States has not seen in more than 100 years, which is also causing an unprecedented and volatile economy.

Nor has it been that uncommon, historically, for polls to shift fairly radically from mid-August until Election Day. Furthermore, there are some reasons to think the election will tighten, and President Trump is likely to have an advantage in a close election because of the Electoral College.

That, in a nutshell, is why the FiveThirtyEight presidential election forecast, which we launched today, still has Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, despite his current deficit in the polls. This is considerably higher than some other forecasts, which put Trump’s chances at around 10 percent. Biden’s chances are 71 percent in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, conversely.14

If these numbers give you a sense of deja vu, it may be because they’re very similar to our final forecast in 2016 … when Trump also had a 29 percent chance of winning! (And Hillary Clinton had a 71 percent chance.) So if you’re not taking a 29 percent chance as a serious possibility, I’m not sure there’s much we can say at this point, although there’s a Zoom poker game that I’d be happy to invite you to.

One last parallel to 2016 — when some models gave Clinton as high as a 99 percent chance of winning — is that FiveThirtyEight’s forecast tends to be more conservative than others. (For a more complete description of our model, including how it is handling some complications related to COVID-19, please see our methodology guide.)

With that said, one shouldn’t get too carried away with the comparisons to four years ago. In 2016, the reason Trump had a pretty decent chance in our final forecast was mostly just because the polls were fairly close (despite the media narrative to the contrary), close enough that even a modest-sized polling error in the right group of states could be enough to give Trump a victory in the Electoral College.

The uncertainty in our current 2020 forecast, conversely, stems mostly from the fact that there’s still a long way to go until the election. Take what happens if we lie to our model and tell it that the election is going to be held today. It spits out that Biden has a 93 percent chance of winning. In other words, a Trump victory would require a much bigger polling error than what we saw in 2016.

Let’s briefly expand on the points I made above.

Biden’s lead is pretty impressive

In this article — partly as a corrective against what I see as overconfident assessments elsewhere — I’m mostly focused on the reasons why Trump’s chances are higher than they might appear. But we should be clear: Trump’s current position in the polls is poor.

Biden is currently ahead in our polling averages in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Ohio and in the second congressional district in Nebraska — all places that Clinton lost in 2016. If he won those states (and held the other states Clinton won), that would be enough to give him 352 electoral votes. He’s also within roughly 1 percentage point of Trump in Texas, Georgia, Iowa and Maine’s second congressional district. If he won those, too, he’d be up to a whopping 412 electoral votes.

It’s important to remember that the uncertainty in our forecast runs in both directions. There’s the chance that Trump could come back — but there’s also the chance that things could get really out of hand for him. Our model thinks there’s a 19 percent chance that Biden will win Alaska, for example, and a 13 percent chance that he will win South Carolina. The model also gives Biden a 30 percent chance of a double-digit win in the popular vote, which would be the first time that happened since 1984.

But there are downside scenarios for Biden.

Polls often change substantially between now and November

Every day, my colleague Nathaniel Rakich tweets out a list of what our national polling average would have looked like at this stage in past campaigns. And it can be a pretty wild ride. Here is Tuesday’s version, for instance.

The @FiveThirtyEight nat'l polling average with 84 days until E-Day:

2020: Biden+8.3 2016: Clinton+6.6 2012: Obama+0.5 2008: Obama+2.6 2004: Kerry+2.5 2000: Bush+10.0 1996: Clinton+11.3 1992: Clinton+20.1 1988: Dukakis+5.6 1984: Reagan+16.0 1980: Reagan+22.1 1976: Carter+26.6

— Nathaniel Rakich (@baseballot) August 11, 2020

Three of the candidates leading in national polls at this point — Michael Dukakis in 1988, George W. Bush in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004 — did not actually win the popular vote. Bush blew a 10-point lead, in fact, which is larger than Biden’s current advantage. (Luckily for Bush, he won the Electoral College.) In other cases, the polls at this point “called” the winner correctly, but the margins were way off. Jimmy Carter eventually beat Gerald Ford by just 2.1 percentage points — not the 26.6-point lead he had at this point in the campaign. Bill Clinton won by 5.6 points — not 20.1 points. And Barack Obama won a considerably more commanding victory in 2008 than polls at this point projected.

Now, there are some mitigating factors here. Some of these polls were taken at the height of a candidate’s convention bounce, although there are ways to try to correct for those. And in general, polls have become less volatile over time, probably because increased polarization means there are fewer swing voters than there once were. The polls have been particularly stable so far this year, in fact.

But while there are some factors that reduce uncertainty, there are other factors that increase it.

COVID-19 is a big reason to avoid feeling overly confident about the outcome

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to more than 150,000 fatalities and has upended pretty much every American’s life, and Trump’s approval ratings for his handling of it have been awful.

But to the extent this is an election about COVID-19, there’s the possibility that the situation could improve between now and November. Cases have recently begun to come down after an early-summer spike, and recent economic data has shown improvement there, too. There’s also the possibility that a vaccine could be approved — or rushed out — by November, though it’s highly unlikely it could be widely distributed by then.

How to account for this? No, we aren’t building a COVID-19 projection model. (It’s really hard.) But we have built an “uncertainty index” that essentially governs the margin of error in our forecast. It contains eight components, two of which are very high because of COVID-19. Specifically, these are the high volatility in recent economic data, and the volume of major news events, as measured by the number of full-width New York Times headlines. There’s more news this year — not just about COVID-19, but the protests around police brutality, Trump’s impeachment earlier this year, etc. — than in any recent election campaign.

We also expect turnout to be harder to predict this year based on primary elections held during the pandemic that had highly variable turnout — which, in turn, could lead to more polling error. So even if the polls don’t change that much between now and November, that could create some additional uncertainty on Election Day. See the methodology guide for more on how we handle COVID-19.

But the other components of the uncertainty index are low, pointing toward a stable campaign. For instance, polarization is high, poll movement so far has been limited, and there aren’t that many undecided voters; the index accounts for all of those things.

In fact, the uncertainty index points toward the overall uncertainty going into November being about average relative to past presidential campaigns. So our model isn’t necessarily saying that things are going to get crazy, although they could. But it’s also saying you shouldn’t necessarily expect highly stable campaigns like 2012 to be the new normal in the time of COVID-19. (And keep in mind that 2016 was a pretty volatile campaign, too, even without COVID-19.) Empirically, the polls can move quite a bit from August to November, more than you might expect intuitively!

There are some sources of uncertainty that the model doesn’t account for, however. We assume that there are reasonable efforts to allow eligible citizens to vote and to count all legal ballots, and that electors are awarded to the popular-vote winner in each state. The model also does not account for the possibility of extraconstitutional shenanigans by Trump or by anyone else, such as trying to prevent mail ballots from being counted.

It’s hard to know what the “fundamentals” say

I’ve long been critical of models that use economic “fundamentals” to try to predict election results, mostly because — although they claim to be highly precise — they haven’t actually been very good at predicting the outcome of an election where they don’t already know the results.

And those models are especially likely to have problems this year because of highly variable economic data. One model based on second quarter GDP projects Trump to win -453 (negative 453!) electoral votes, for example. But if you built a model based on third-quarter GDP, which is expected to be highly positive, it might predict a Trump landslide.

This isn’t to say that we don’t employ a fundamentals forecast of our own. We do, but it’s much less confident than others, and it receives relatively little weight in the overall forecast. It also isn’t currently that bad for Trump. In fact, it essentially predicts the popular vote to be roughly tied. Why?

Although three of the economic factors we use in the model (jobs, spending, manufacturing) have been terrible, a fourth component (income) has been very strong because of government subsidies in the form of the CARES Act, though that could change if stimulus payments lapse. The fifth and sixth components, inflation and the stock market, have also been reasonably favorable.

Most of the variables that declined are now improving, and are expected to continue to improve. (Our model projects what the economy will look like by November rather than relying on current data.)

High polarization potentially blunts the impact of a poor economy.

Trump is an elected incumbent, and elected incumbents are usually favored for reelection.

We extended our analysis back to elections since 1880 (!) to expand the sample size, and found the relationship between the economy and the election likely isn’t as strong as other models claim, anyway.

In other words, our forecast thinks it’s far from obvious that the economy will doom Trump, especially if he can tell a story of recovery by November. Indeed, Trump’s approval ratings on the economy are still fairly good, so our model seems to be doing a reasonably good job of capturing how voters actually feel about the economy.

Another way to look at it is that our model is just saying that, in a highly polarized environment, the race is more likely than not to tighten in the stretch run. Empirically, large leads like the one Biden has now tend to dissipate to some degree by Election Day. And if the race does tighten…

Trump appears to have an Electoral College advantage again

Our model says there’s an 81 percent chance that Biden wins the popular vote — compared to his 71 percent chance in the Electoral College. That means there’s about a 10 percent chance that Trump again wins the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote. (Conversely, the model puts the chance that Biden wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote at only around 1 in 750.)

That reflects the fact that the tipping-point state — the state that would provide the decisive 270th electoral vote — is somewhat to the right of the national popular vote. More specifically, our projection as of Tuesday had Biden winning the popular vote by 6.3 percentage points nationally, but winning the tipping-point state, Wisconsin, by a smaller margin, 4.5 percentage points:

The Electoral College could once again help Trump

Forecasted vote margin in battleground states and lean relative to the nation, from FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecast as of Aug. 11

State forecasted vote margin Lean relative to nation New Mexico D+11.8 D+5.5 Virginia D+10.6 D+4.3 Colorado D+9.2 D+2.9 Maine statwide D+8.2 D+1.9 Michigan D+6.9 D+0.6 New Hampshire D+6.4 D+0.1 National D+6.3 EVEN Nevada D+6.2 R+0.1 Minnesota D+4.7 R+1.6 Pennsylvania D+4.7 R+1.6 Wisconsin* D+4.5 R+1.8 Florida D+3.2 R+3.1 Nebraska 2nd District D+0.9 R+5.4 Arizona D+0.8 R+5.5 North Carolina D+0.3 R+6.0 Ohio R+1.0 R+7.3 Georgia R+2.8 R+9.1 Maine 2nd District R+3.9 R+10.2 Iowa R+4.3 R+10.6 Texas R+4.4 R+10.7

* Wisconsin is the tipping-point state as of Aug. 11.

That 1.8-point gap is actually smaller than what Clinton experienced in 2016, when there was about a 3-point gap between her losing margin in Wisconsin (which was also the tipping-point state in 2016) and her winning margin in the national popular vote. This analysis is a simplification, too. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the outlook, so the tipping-point state could easily turn out to be Florida or Pennsylvania or something more unexpected like North Carolina.

Still, as a rough rule-of-thumb, perhaps you can subtract 2 points from Biden’s current lead in national polls to get a sense for what his standing in the tipping point states looks like. Add it all up, and you can start to see why the model is being fairly cautious. Biden’s current roughly 8-point lead in national polls is really more like a 6-point lead in the tipping point states. And 6-point leads in August are historically not very safe. That margin is perhaps more likely than not to tighten and at the very least, there’s a fair amount of uncertainty about what COVID-19 and the rest the world will look like by November.

Biden is in a reasonably strong position: Having a 70-ish percent chance of beating an incumbent in early August before any conventions or debates is far better than the position that most challengers find themselves in. And his chances will improve in our model if he maintains his current lead. But for the time being, the data does not justify substantially more confidence than that.

[momestuck]

Epilogues

Oh boy, we’re back.

So if anyone’s not heard The News this 13/4/2019, Homestuck’s gone and done its epilogue(s) at last.

I am now several hours behind the hype curve, so no doubt the kind of person who reads this blog has already read the upd8 and developed an Opinion. Nevertheless, the duty falls upon me to liveread this.

So, it starts with an AO3 joke. Obvious comments out of the way:

“oh hey it’s well known fanfic author Cepheid_Variable” (which answers my question of whether Hussie’s still the only author: no)

“damn that’s a hefty content warning”

“this is a nice way to repeat the theme that ‘canon’ is less important than the personal and collective understandings developed by each reader, by presenting the ‘canon’ ending as just another fanfic”

of course, not every interpretation is created equal in terms of its social reception. Homestuck has already touched on discourses of ‘good fandom’ vs ‘bad fandom’ with the Calliope/Caliborn dichotomy; no doubt, with Hussie inviting a fanfiction writer on board, he took care to make a choice of a generally respected author

It continues the joke by being straight up prose. Physics terms are thrown about like a series of slightly dubious similes. The prose gets purpler and purpler until...

Your name is John Egbert, and you have just had a terrible, deeply pretentious nightmare. You snap out of bed, soaked in sweat, your heart hammering like a fire alarm. It is just as you feared. You’ve been dreaming in anime again. And you have no idea what it could mean.

Haha, got you again, suckers. Cake: had, and eaten. (Also, act 7 was literally anime so... yeah, sure thing.)

[ @drc4ble tells me there’s another level to this troll, in that Cephied_Variable is quoting a part of her own fic in this intro.]

You’ve always been confused about what, exactly, they contribute to the global economy. But it’s pretty cute how much they love playing at being suburban businessmen.

“cw: capitalism” indeed

So, in the idyllic world we saw in the credits upd8, all is not so well for the beta kids. John is 23, which means it is now, in canon as well as out, 10 years since the comic began.

Rose starts dropping some exposition, drawing on her Seer of Light abilities; of note is the ‘breakdown of boundaries’ between the different incarnations of the kids she describes:

ROSE: It’s not about gaining additional power, so much as the gradual dissolving of the boundaries between your own awareness and that of your many doomed selves who perished in other timelines.

ROSE: It’s a slow and apparently rather uncomfortable accretion of knowledge. Perhaps I’m the only one to notice any change, since my aspect explicitly relates to knowledge.

Jade has apparently detected that godtier!Calliope destroyed the Green Sun, ‘from this frame of reference’.

In much more important news than the end of the universe(s), we get confirmation of Jadedavekat OT3, or something like it:

she’s been gallivanting around with Dave and Karkat under whatever perplexing social arrangement they have settled on.

Another interesting turn of phrase:

ROSE: You will need to travel back into canon and defeat Lord English.

‘Canon’ is certainly a choice of words, given this is being presented as a fanfic. This is spelled out, which I’m going to quote at length:

ROSE: In other words, there is an important distinction between events which can be considered to occur inside canon, outside canon, and those which are not canon at all.

ROSE: The day we went through that door and claimed our reward, we passed a threshold between continua marked by differing degrees of relevance, truth, and essentiality.

ROSE: Those are the three pillars of canon.

JOHN: what?

Rose shoots you an irritated look. You know what that look means. It’s reserved for the sort of bozo who just said “what” once too often.

ROSE: Any event said to take place inside canon will have nonzero values of relevance and essentiality, while maintaining an absolute foundation in truth, by definition.

ROSE: Whereas events outside canon have diminished values of relevance and essentiality. Or, for the most part, can be considered neither relevant nor essential at all.

ROSE: But such events can’t be said to be untrue either. Instead, it’s better to regard their truth value as highly conditional.

ROSE: Are you still following?

In short: what happens in the ‘C’ universe, stays in the ‘C’ universe; it is not ‘essential’, either in the carefully-constructed-timeline sense, or, I think it’s implied, in the development of plot and theme in the story. This is one perspective on how John, Rose etc. choose to return to ‘canon’, but we are implicitly invited to come up with our own.

More precisely, everything after ‘today’ is declared non-canon, which is to say we have completely free rein; everything before ‘today’ is outside of canon, meaning we have explicit invitation to decide what happens ‘off screen’, but I presume we need to accept such things as, e.g. Rose and Kanaya getting married and the rest of the credits upd8.

But because they’re about to enter the 無 state of non-canon, they must tie up the comic’s major loose end, and deal with Lord English - since their ‘escape’ depends on that being canon.

It’s exactly as dumb-clever-convoluted as I want Homestuck to be, at this stage.

Further caveats on this whole ‘canon authentication’ gig: by reaching the ‘victory state’, Rose and all the other main characters have relinquished their ability to play a major role in canon, so John - who retains his retcon powers - has to go it alone. Or not quite alone - he has to pick up different versions of the MCs, from different points in the timeline.

So this is going to be a total fanservice fest huh. But then, I mean who would come back three years later to read a Homestuck epilogue but the kind of nerd who cares very very much about minute details of canon?

Anyway, that aside, back to shipping discourse. Roxy and Callie’s relationship is underlined, while being explicitly vague about the details of that ‘weird, ambiguous’ relationship. The narration has John dwelling on unrequited feelings for Roxy. Also there’s a mention of the ring of life, which is a plot detail I had totally forgotten about. Three years, huh.

Going to highlight this quote:

Suddenly, Calliope bolts upright.

CALLIOPE: of coUrse! what was i thinking.

CALLIOPE: this decision is far too important to be made on an empty stomach.

Callie is exactly right to check if her friend has eaten when he’s suffering an anxiety attack :) :)

Unfortunately she then makes him make another decision... which might imply Homestuck is going to return to a reader-prompted format, or at least a poll, which they’re testing out here. I don’t know. Anyway, the ride never ends, etc. etc.

[snkpolls]

SnK S3E10 Poll Results (Anime Viewer Only Version)

The poll closed with 115 responses. Thank you to everyone who participated!

Please note this is the anime only viewer version of the poll. Manga readers, please click here for the results of the manga reader poll!

RATE THE EPISODE 102 Responses

Another episode with nothing but positive feedback. Voters agree that the episode was enjoyable!

One of the best episodes from the entire series.

this was the absolute best episode so far.

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING WERE YOUR FAVORITE SCENES? 105 Responses

It was close, but Levi’s reaction to Historia punching him was ultimately the favorite scene of the episode. Followed behind by just one vote less is Levi and Kenny’s final moments together. Many respondents were also thrilled to see Reiner, Bertolt and the Beast Titan again, and getting Levi’s backstory was satisfying.

Thanks for letting me see Levi's smile.

HOW MUCH DID KENNY’S DEATH AFFECT YOU? 106 Responses

Most respondents voted somewhere in the middle, but overall more viewers did feel something for his death than those who didn’t. We can all agree that it made Levi feel something!

I honestly expected Kenny to play a bigger role / have more screentime than he did this season. I am now completely emotionally invested in his character, so I'm pretty gutted that his strongest episode was also his last. I wish we could have seen more of him! Kenny's complicated relationships with both Uri and Levi are so compelling and intriguing with so many layers and nuances.

WHAT DO YOU FEEL IS THE MOST TRAGIC PART OF LEVI’S CHILDHOOD? 104 Responses

40% of respondents feel that Levi losing his mother at such a young age was the most tragic part of his childhood. At a tie for 18%, respondents also agree that Kenny abandoning him and almost starving to death are the worst parts of his backstory. A few wrote in that they couldn’t choose just one thing.

His mom slowly starving to death in front of him

All of the above

Having a deadbeat dad.

Not knowing why Kenny abandoned him

All of the above is tough for a kid

Why is there no 'all of the above' option.

ARAKI REQUESTED NO MUSIC FOR LEVI AND KENNY’S LAST CONVERSATION SINCE THEIR SEIYUUS DID SUCH A GOOD JOB. WAS THIS A GOOD CHOICE? 103 Responses

The vast majority of voters are happy that Levi and Kenny’s final moments weren’t overshadowed by music.

I think it was a great choice, because I was consciously struck by how profound the silence was.

Didn't really notice

I don't feel one way or another. I just can't wait for the dub tbh!

HOW DID YOU FEEL SEEING HISTORIA’S CORONATION? 105 Responses

Overall respondents felt positively about Historia’s coronation, with 45% of voters feeling proud of her and 32% agreeing she looked stunning. 13% could have taken it or left it.

I thought it was a flashback to a previous queen, like the Christa from the books, at first, because she looked so different from her usual appearance that I didn't even recognize her.

Queen Historia Reiss, the first of her name, Queen of the Walls, titans and humanity.

i loved the music and how pretty she looked

THUS FAR, THERE ARE NO REMAINING AIRDATES POST-EPISODE 12, HOW LONG DO YOU THINK IT’LL TAKE FOR THE SEASON TO CONTINUE? 104 Responses

Opinions are split, with the largest group believing we’ll be waiting a couple months to pick the season back up, some think the wait will be shorter, and a few believe it’ll be a bit longer. 30% agree anything is better than waiting 4 years for new content.

WHAT DO YOU THINK KENNY WAS TRULY “A SLAVE” TO? 102 Responses

About 57% of respondents agree that Kenny was more invested in wanting to understand Uri after meeting him than he was trying to become more powerful.

Being batshit crazy.

Between seeking power and want to understand Uri

To feel normal

Being able to love

trying to understand compassion!

Both. Yes, he wanted to understand Uri, but more precisely he wanted to understand the perspective of someone who possesses ultimate power; thus Kenny was a slave to the idea that only violence can get you to the top

WHAT DO YOU THINK URI WAS “A SLAVE” TO? 102 Responses

66% of voters believe that Uri was simply a slave to the First King. 32% believe he truly cared for love, peace, “and all that.” Only one voter had another idea:

Wanting to create "Paradise" within the walls

DID YOU FIND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN KENNY AND URI COMPELLING? 105 Responses

Over half of respondents thought Kenny and Uri’s relationship was very interesting and would love to know more if they could. 30% found it interesting enough, but don’t need any more details. 16% believe they weren’t given enough material to care.

Yes, very compelling and my favorite part of the episode, but I don't think there's more to know.

YOUR REACTION TO LEVI’S SMILE? 105 Responses

Altogether, about 80% of voters total reacted positively to Levi’s smile, agreeing that it was beautiful and heart-warming. Some thought it was okay, and a few actually thought it was very out of character for him!

Better than a million dollars!!!

I could survive in a desert for three weeks on this image alone

It was so out of character that I thought he was going to inject the titan serum and eat them all right there and gain the Founding Titan and Coordinate.

i would die for that smile

WE HAVE THREE CONFIRMED ACKERMAN CHARACTERS WHO’VE FORGED A DEEP BOND WITH ANOTHER PERSON. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT EACH ONE?

Overall, Levi and Erwin’s relationship is the one that voters find the most enjoyable. Most voters also agree that Mikasa/Eren and Kenny/Uri are also quite enjoyable, however Mikasa and Eren’s relationship was also the one with the highest votes for “boring”.

WERE YOU EXCITED TO SEE REINER, BERTOLT AND THE BEAST TITAN MAKE AN APPEARANCE? 106 Responses

Overall, voters are happy to see these characters again and curious to see what’s in store for them moving forward or what they plan to do.

This season's cliffhangers will be the death of me.

no, it feels unsuitable

YOUR REACTION TO SEEING THE BEAST TITAN’S HUMAN FORM? 106 Responses

37% of voters believe the Beast Titan’s human form was really cool to see. 25% are already bracing to punch him in the face and 20% of you guys are just thirsty.

When the monkey titan doesn't have nipples??

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE EPISODE?

Forever missing Kenny. Oh and I shall make Levi’s smile and Mikasa’s smirk a picture I can hang on my wall.

What did Levi do to deserve that treatment? Is Mikasa seriously still holding a grudge against Levi from season 1? He saved their asses more often than not, also injured himself so save her...wtf

levi's child voice makes me wanna cry

Im dead.

There, you got your stupid smile, now will y'all shut up about it

WHERE DO YOU PRIMARILY DISCUSS THE SERIES? 100 Responses

Thanks again to everyone who participated! We’ll see you again on Tuesday!

[sneek-m]

Perfume Interview: An End to Their Twenties and an Infinite Future

Music website Natalie recently interviewed Perfume in conjunction to the release of their new single, “Mugen Mirai.” It has a lot of great conversation about the group’s recent switch into future bass, the performance for Docomo, and the meeting of Yasutaka Nakata and Perfume’s parents. I wanted to share this with other Perfume fans who can’t read Japanese, so here you go! The original interview is here.

A Heartwarming Result

Natalie: Great performance at your fan club show! I wanted to talk about how you announced fans can share info about the show after it was done, but I read it was a requested setlist made from fan votes...

Kashiyuka: It was really fun. I thought, “so everyone wanted to watch a song like this.” But it was full of songs we haven’t performed in years, so it was difficult trying to remember the choreography. [laughs]

The set list was made from a fan club poll asking “tell us one song you want to see live,” but were you originally going to use the poll results for your show?

Kashiyuka: No. When we were deciding on the set list, we started to think how it would be fun if we just did the songs from the poll.

Nocchi: Right. When we tour to promote an album, we want to play all of our new songs, and include everything we want to show, but our number-one priority was for the fan club members to enjoy themselves. Though, even we didn’t know which songs would make them happy.

A-chan: The number-one song “The Best Thing” was a song we first performed at our first fan-club tour in 2010, so it was a song that was special between us and the fans. So, it was heartwarming to see that the number one ended up being that song. There was a big gap for votes between first place and the rest.

There’s going to be a fan club tour in 8 cities during May, but because you allowed fans to share what happened at the show, does it mean the shows are going to be different?

Nocchi: We haven’t decided yet. But there’s so much time between now and May, so we thought it would be kind of sad if we didn’t allow fans to share. Also, February 14th is the anniversary of the fan club launch date, so there was also us wanting to share a special moment with the fans. So we put ourselves in a corner having to make something new. [laughs]

Nakata’s message in “Mugen Mirai”

How did you feel when it was decided you will do the title song for Chihayafuru again?

Kashiyuka: We were very happy! At the celebration of the Japan Acadeny Awards, director Norihiro Koizumi and the staff told us, “if there’s a sequel, the title song will definitely be by Perfume,” but we thought they were just mentioning that because they were in such high spirits.

A-chan: Mackenyu-kun (Arata) and Suzu Hirose-chan got an award that time. We were congratulating each other, so I thought they told us that just because we happened to be there. I felt kind of bad.

Nocchi: I mean, if they said “congratulations on the sequel,” we would’ve replied “let’s do well next time too.”

A-chan: They’re such loyal people, actually offering it to us...

...And after you got the offer, “Mugen Mirai” was recorded.

A-chan: Yes, if there was no Chihayafuru, I don’t think “Flash” would have been made, and the same with “Mugan Mirai.” It was made specifically for Chihayafuru.

Kashiyuka: The moment they let me hear it for the first time, I imagined it playing with the end credits rolling. The song fit perfectly to conclude the story.

“Flash” definitely had this excitement to it that made it feel like a “title song,” but this time, the song felt like the ending theme.

Kashiyuka: See. Like how the lingering feeling in the music moves you.

A-chan: Whenever we reach a goal, (Yasutaka) Nakata-san would often tell us, “This isn’t the end, it’s going to continue from here.” When we got to play our dream venue Budokan for the first time, he gave us “Dream Fighter,” and I feel the same feeling from “Mugan Mirai,” so I felt Nakata-san really liked Chihayafuru and put a lot of love into the song.

Kashiyuka: I think I hear more wistfulness the more I listen to it, so I like it more and more. But since Nakata-san shifted our sound into future bass with “If You Wanna,” I was still worried about how the sound would fit into this more traditional mood of Chihayafuru.

Nocchi: That’s right.

Kashiyuka: Even when I actually hear it in the end credits after feeling so much from watching the movie, I was really worried that I felt that way because I’m so used to hearing it, and people watching it for the first time might not fully have a feel for it.

A-chan: When we watched it at the press preview, it got really quiet the moment the music started to play. [laughs]

Kashiyuka: But when we did press together with Suzu-chan, we heard responses like “the music hit exactly at the right time, and it added color to the movie” and “I started to cry at the ending,” so we were relieved. It might be thanks to director Koizumi who really likes music. He’s so good at tying scenes and music together. Not just the title song but the timing for the different sounds and the transitions were brilliant.

A-chan: Director’s probably good at making music videos.

Nocchi: Aside from our music video, they also made a version with footage from Chihayafuru, and we were grateful for that.

A-chan: When we watch that, the scenes in the movie start flashing back.

The Importance of Perfume Trying Out Future Bass

Just before, Kashiyuka-san mentioned how Perfume’s sound shifted into future bass with “If You Wanna.” "The Perfume sound” definitely has been technopop and EDM until recently, but I thought it was going to change through these two singles...

Nocchi: We sang over four-on-the-floor EDM for a while, so there wasn’t much shock hearing “If You Wanna” for the first time. That song would be the more assertive song on an album. But when we were discussing whether to make “If You Wanna” or “Everyday” the A-side, we heard from Nakata-san why it’s so important for Perfume to put out a future-bass single right now. He would teach us about it many times when we do our recording or meet up to have a meal. He told us future bass is already the norm all around the world.

Kashiyuka: But even then, I’m Japanese, so I have these ingrained ideas like how the chorus should have the important message of the song, so it’s a bit worrisome. Like, we’re just dancing without singing anything. Even though what we made before was still dance music, there were still a lot of songs structured like a J-Pop song with the verse, pre-chorus, and then the chorus, so I think I was still not adjusted to songs with calm verses or without anything during a build-up. I’ve been getting used to future bass quite a bit, but some parts of me are still nervous.

But in a good way, I think it’s obvious for current Perfume to release a single like this.

A-chan: Does that mean people think it’s normal for us to take new sounds from overseas with our own spin?

Exactly. I feel this current image of Perfume of “doing J-pop by taking in new dance-music styles while using new technology for your performances” has become so accessible, so if you make music that’s away from the center, the public will still take it as a standard.

Kashiyuka: Mikiko-sensei’s choreography has a big influence on making that happen too. And single covers and music videos or outfits. The entire team makes this song seem good. It’d be so embarrassing if it was just us and the music.

The Dance for “Mugen Mirai” Would’ve Been Different 5 Years Ago...

Speaking of choreography, I thought the dance for “Mugen Mirai” was quite different from what came before.

A-chan: When we asked sensei, she said something like “contemporary-like jazz.”

Nocchi: Ohh. We used to take jazz classes in Hiroshima. So nostalgic.

A-chan: I love a loose type of dance where you move your hand, and your whole body moves, but I don’t have an opportunity to do that with Perfume. [laughs]

There are a lot of dance where your move your body very precisely.

A-chan: Right, right. It’s the first time dancing to choreography like this, so it’s fun.

I think it’s a mature dance fit for the three of you now.

A-chan: I’m going to go back to our talk about our fan club tour, but going back to the choreography for “The Best Thing” after such a long time... Oh, it’s so cute!

Nocchi: Hahaha. [laughs]

A-chan: I wanted everyone who came out to have fun, so I’ll do the dance all the way through, but it’s a little embarrassing. Really, the type of dance is different from then and now. On the other hand, I used to think, “what kind of things are they making us kids do, who are not even quite 20-years old?” with the moves in “Take Me, Take Me.” With that now I feel it’s finally OK. [laughs]

Kashiyuka: It’s fit for that age. [laughs]

A-chan: Would it mean something different now that it’s actually fit for our age? [laughs] Even the dances that I had mixed feelings about back then, the more years I put in, I learned how to dance more different types of choreography, so it feels good to realize my ability to express has been expanding. The dance for “Mugen Mirai” probably would’ve been something different 5 years ago.

The ability to change how you express yourself with any age means you can continue to do your thing for years without problems. I think that’s something the fans find relieving as well.

Nocchi: Oh, I see. If that’s so, then we’re glad.

The Fun in Being an Adult

Sorry we keep talking about your age...

Nocchi: No, it’s fun. [laughs]

2018 is going to be the last year the three of you will be in your twenties.

Nocchi: Whoa...

A-chan: I just turned 29, but now that I think about it, that’s amazing.

Kashiyuka: Right, amazing. Our twenties will be over.

Nocchi: People who don’t normally think about us probably have a image of us in our teens, so if they were told that Perfume is turning 30...

A-chan: They’ll probably think, “wow... I’m old.” [laughs]

Nocchi: In my early twenties, I didn’t know how we were going to look or how the public image of Perfume was going to be. It’s a miracle that we’re still in Perfume.

Kashiyuka: No one expected us to be around for this long.

A-chan: Only our mothers. [laughs] There are no female artists in our agency (Amuse) who have been around this long, so they expect a lot from us.

How do you want to spend the last year of your twenties? Well, I think you barely realized it after I brought this up, so I don’t expect you to have had thought of anything special.

Kashiyuka: Hm, I don’t really have anything decided for my last year. Because I don’t know what it is that I can only do in my twenties.

Well, there might not be anything. [laughs]

A-chan: Or, being an adult is really fun.

Kashiyuka: Yeah, the more I become an adult, the more it gets fun. The world keeps getting bigger.

A-chan: When I turned 20, there was a time I felt disconnected with my age. I was irritated, thinking “why am I not understood? I want to be an adult already.” I was probably inexperienced, so it’s no surprise I wasn’t really being heard. So being an adult is a great thing. I can use my time how I want, and I have experience so I can think of what to do without making mistakes, but of course the responsibility is all on me.

There are definitely more things you can finally do now that you’re an adult than things you can’t do anymore. You probably couldn’t launch your apparel line when you were younger.

Nocchi: Ah, you’re right.

A-chan: Oh, speaking of, you were talking about that, Nocchi. How we put out a photoshoot for our last year as a teen, so maybe we’ll do another for the end of our twenties.

Nocchi: My twenties are over in half a year. [laughs]

Kashiyuka: Right, because you’re born in September.

Nocchi: Yeah, A-chan says she feels like she also gets older the moment I turn a year older. But I’m the opposite where I don’t feel like I get older until A-chan’s birthday.

A-chan: What is that? That’s so funny. [laughs]

Nocchi: So I feel like 30 is already in six months even though I just turned 29.

Kashiyuka: So you feel you grow old in half-a-year’s time... That must hurt a lot.

Nocchi: Hey, don’t say that! [laughs]

You Can’t See the Intensity

We got away from our talk of “Mugen Mirai” a little bit, but I heard you filmed the music video overseas for the first time.

Kashiyuka: We went to Guam.

Nocchi: It was an intense schedule too when I went to New York and Kashiyuka went to London for the Docomo shoot, but that experience came in use this time around. Now we’re used to travels after such quick notice.

Kashiyuka: We also improved in skill.

Nocchi: Yeah, Kashiyuka had a lot, getting to the hotel at 11 p.m.

Kashiyuka: They told me, “OK, make-up at 3 a.m.” What? In 4 hours? [laughs] They wanted to film at dawn, but it’s a far place from the hotel, so calculating travel time, we had to do make-up at 3 a.m.

So, how long did you exactly get to sleep?

Kashiyuka: I was afraid I was going to oversleep, so I couldn’t really sleep [laughs] We all did our solo shots at different places, so we couldn’t really meet up at each other’s shoots. So the first day in the morning was me, A-chan took hers in the morning on the second day, and Nocchi said she hadn’t done much and slept pretty well both days. [laughs]

A-chan: When we did our close-ups, she asked, “I haven’t done anything, but is that all right?” [laughs]

Nocchi: Yeah, for my solo scene, we took it during the two hours of sundown.

Kashiyuka: The sun is important while filming outside, so we can’t really film when it’s cloudy, but the sunny days in Guam were really hot and really bright. They record right when it gets really bright, so all of us are seen with serious faces.

The wind was strong, so it looked pretty chilly.

A-chan: Then I’m glad. [laughs]

Kashiyuka: You can’t tell from the video, but the wind was strong, it was really humid, and the sun was shining so strong. It was all really intense.

A-chan: It was ridiculous. There was nowhere to hide from the sun, so it was beaming on us the whole time, and the whole time I thought, “wow, this must be how it feels to faint from the heat.”

Kashiyuka: “This must what they call a heatstroke.” [laughs] Nocchi filmed hers at an edge of a mountain where I was impressed from how far they hunted for that location.

Kashiyuka: You can’t really see the intensity.

A-chan: There’s a lot you won’t know even when you’re watching the music video. I was standing on this base with red sand, but it was so windy that the sand would start flying. I was also on this slope, so I’m standing on this peak on one foot trying my best to keep balance, but they used none of that scene. [laughs]

Kashiyuka: I was also dancing by the water on these little slippery rocks covered in moss, but most of it wasn’t used. [laughs] Everyone did their best in the most intense places.

Feeling Each Other in Separation

The B-side, “Fusion,” was the song used in the Docomo project that Nocchi-san mentioned earlier. I was actually at the Shinjuku venue with A-chan-san to cover the event.

Nocchi: A witness! Amazing.

I was a witness, but one person started dancing without no information beforehand, so I did not know what was happening seeing it at the actual venue.

A-chan: Yeah, it’s hard to know what was going on. [laughs]

Though, it was a unique experience. I never saw a performance where only one person dances to a song.

Nocchi: Yeah, there’s never really a time where we aren’t together as three of us in front of a live audience.

Kashiyuka: Right, there’s never been a time when we were alone.

A-chan: When we film, there are many times we dance alone. But this is the first time we’re seen alone in front of an audience.

Kashiyuka: It was also set up where the footage of the three of us in three separate countries will come together as one, and we had to dance while feeling each other’s presence that wasn’t actually there, so it wasn’t the same at all as our music video filming. Each of our dances became different when we rehearsed in different countries. So I realized just how much I danced while feeling the other two next to me. The rehearsal was just 12 hours before show time, so we panicked. We watched each other through our monitors with time lag and adjusted our movements little by little, telling each other, “raise your arm at this angle during this part.”

If you danced with the three of you together, you could’ve shown that it synced nicely, but it wasn’t going to work the same layering footage of each of you alone?

A-chan: Right. If you put together footage from cameras set up in the same way like that, you can see the mistakes clearly from tiny differences in how we move. We practiced a lot together many times, but we practiced at home alone because we were unsure. And because we practiced alone too much, we got our own ticks with our dance so that might have messed things up too. [laughs]

Nocchi: We didn’t know that it was going to be a performance where parts from the three of us will combine to show one person. So when we were told that, we were taken back a little from how serious this was.

Kashiyuka: Even when we rented out separate studios and brought in the same triangle set-up, we didn’t really know how exactly they were going to put together the footage.

A-chan: They could only use the 5G technology for the live stream, so we had to rehearse with time lag, and that was also tough. Even when we tell each other, “oh, that angle,” when we were dancing, the song has already moved on, so we didn’t know what the other would be talking about.

Kashiyuka: The song has no lyrics, so it was even more difficult. We couldn’t tell which part using song lyrics, so we had to rewind the rehearsal videos to be like, “here, here!” So it was really tough. Even we prepped ourselves, our chant would be off due to time lag.

But it all came together in those 12 hours.

Kashiyuka: That’s what we had to do. It’s like that whenever we work with the people at Rhizomatiks, but they always tell us, “Perfume can do it 100%. If it works or well or not is up to the gear.”

It’s assumed that it will go well because Perfume always takes on the task.

Kashiyuka: Yes, yes. There’s a lot of pressure because it’s expected for us to succeed, and failing is out of the norm. It was such a different atmosphere with us standing by alone in the triangle with the room really quiet.

That’s such a high level of demand...

Kashiyuka: But I’m happy they chose Perfume to take on such a difficult challenge, so it makes us want to answer to their expectations more.

Nocchi: In my mind, I don’t see myself who’s given such high expectations, so I’m glad they trust us to think “you’re Perfume, so you can do it, right?”

You can’t see the other two while dancing in separate countries, so you must have had some worries when you were actually performing.

A-chan: In the end, I believed in myself. Once we realized we weren’t in sync even when we practiced so much, we tried so many different things in those 12 hours before the real thing, so I figured all I could do now is trust it. But what’s so surreal is, sometimes I feel the presence of the other two when I dance!

Nocchi: Yeah! I feel like that too!

Kashiyuka: There were times I got chills because I felt the others controlling their breath. I almost had tears. Going through this experience, I think we grew another step in terms of our performance. I think our bond grew stronger too,

Aside from it being used for the Docomo project, “Fusion” was also performed with Nakata-san at his OTONOKO festival. It was the first time Perfume and Nakata-san performed together, so it made quite the headlines.

Nocchi: Perfume never played at Nakata-san’s events. On my own, I thought we weren’t allowed. The same way we think taking stage with Nakata-san as something special, Nakata-san unexpectedly thought it was something special too. So, through that, Nakata-san’s parents and our parents first met each other. [laughs]

Kashiyuka: They told each other something like, “thank you always.” [laughs]

A-chan: They cried while talking to each other. [laughs]

Nocchi: They told each other, “we finally met!” It was apparently the first time for our family to meet Nakata-san, so we were really moved.

A-chan: We feel a certain distance away from Nakata-san, and part of that, we keep on purpose. We had a fun, candid conversation that time, but our families were crying.

Kashiyuka: The conversation didn’t stop.

A-chan: We kept on talking. Nakata-san’s mother is the complete opposite from her son where she’s so passionate and full of emotion. She was also a character. I saw that and thought, “ah, Nakata-san is also a child to another person, he also has blood flowing in him.”

Even after 15 years, it looks like Nakata-san still has that sort of image for Perfume. [laughs]

A-chan: Speaking of, just recently when we were talking with Nakata-san, we were talking about how nice it would be to perform together again. We got to discussing where would be a good place to play, and we thought how about for Natalie?

Really! We’re grateful.

Kashiyuka: Definitely, if there’s anything we can do with Natalie.

Nocchi: Yeah, it would definitely be really fun.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

_ One great advantage of not needing money is that you are looking for Larry and Sergey. I thought studying philosophy would be a shambles. He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups, because it's an early instance of what will become a common pattern.1 That's a big advantage.2 The latter is much more damping. The idea sounds horrible, doesn't it? In the average car restoration you probably do make it.3 The whole thing was only a couple thousand left. You could call it Work Day.

You'll pay more for Internet services than you do.4 How do you find the right sort of person you are, you should probably pack investor meetings too closely, you'll have to earn your keep.5 9 years it was my job to predict whether a startup would usually become profitable only after raising and spending quite a lot of things e. There is not an ordinary economic relationship than companies being sued for violating the DMCA, part of the job; but it is not clear whether you can actually get work done. Wealth is defined democratically.6 As jobs become more specialized—more articulated—as they develop, and startups should simply ignore other companies' patents. Design by committee is a synonym for very. But I suspect it's the startup world. I'm still not sure whether he thought AI required math, or whether contractors count too.7 This is usually done to make the region a center of scholarship and industry which have been closely tied for longer than most people think. And indeed, that might be at different companies. The early adopters you need to use a more succinct language, and adults use them all the time, and both the headers and from the circumstances of your upbringing respectively.

And more to the point where they're issued, we may in some cases it's possible to be part of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of people fast.8 If all companies were essentially similar, but some of the other programmers what language to use, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected. Till now, nearly all humans find human faces engaging. But if you talk too loosely about very abstract ideas—they continued to spam me or a network I was part of, Hostex itself would be recognized as a spam term. Bill Yerazunis. Which means if the qualities that made it hard to come up with startup ideas on demand. And since no one is doing them yet. Though most founders start out excited about the Internet is the primary medium. They're just a couple guys started on the side of making the software run on the client. Impossible? Measurement alone is not enough. In another year you'll be making $80k a month instead of $160k.9

But I don't see why it ought to be writing about them. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can show you only things that are missing. Overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people who are bad at deciding what to do once you've thought of it. I'd like to reply with another question: why were the exit polls cooked the books after seeing the actual returns. And once you start raising money, for example, does not seem to be many universities elsewhere that compare with the best people that Google and Apple are doing so much better than me.10 It's intended for college students and you decide to move to your silicon valley like to get money. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. At Viaweb our whole site was organized like a funnel, directing people to the test drive.11 The ones who keep going are driven by exit strategies. You start being an adult when you decide to focus on working with other students. But there's a magic in small things that goes beyond such rational explanations. So the fact that so many people refer deals to him is that his company was not the conclusion Aristotle's successors derived from works like the Metaphysics, but that there can even be such a test?

At MIT in the mid 90s a fellow grad student of my friends are starting to feel like a little bit in the commitment department, and that was called playing. Systematic is the last word after all.12 Companies like Cisco are proud that everyone there has a cubicle, even the smartest students leave school thinking they have to say yes.13 The unsexy filter is to ask, could one open-source browser. Are Clueless A lot of startups don't want to sell, they take you up, no competitor can keep you down.14 Some switched from driving Ford sedans to driving small imported cars, and they're clearly it. In Lisp, functions are first class objects.15 Whereas now the phrase already read seems almost ill-formed. US News list is meaningful is precisely because they attract so much attention. The main reason there are so many iPhone apps is that so many still make you register to read stories.

Kids know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end. The professors will establish scholarly journals and publish one another's papers. A fair number of smart people too, but again, diluted; there are lots of potential winners, from which a few actual winners emerge with hyperlinear certainty. I go to bed leaving code with a bug in code you just wrote. How much is that extra attention worth?16 He was one of few they had that we didn't even know they were recording. And if things go well, this shouldn't matter. We just took it for granted. The random college kid you talk to, but instead of pursuing this thought they tended to be at least some super-angels don't like. If you work on changes you. After we were bought by Yahoo, the customer support people and hackers.

Notes

For example, if your school, and partly because you can eliminate, do it is.

It would be to say that Watt reinvented the steam engine.

If you believe in free markets, they made more margin loans. 166. Analects VII: 36, Fung trans.

In a startup: one kind that evolves into Facebook is a very misleading number, because the remedy was to become one of the biggest company of all, economic inequality. That's the lower bound.

After reading a draft, Sam Altman points out that there is some weakness in your country controlled by the fact that the probabilities of features i. When one reads about the nature of server-based applications greatly to be delivering results.

5 mentions prices ranging from designers to programmers to electrical engineers. For most of them consistently make money, the term copyright colony was first used by Myles Peterson. Financing a startup is a matter of outliers, and are paid a flat rate regardless of the court.

Parker, William R. There may even be tempted, but it doesn't seem to someone in 1880 that schoolchildren in 1980 would be on the Internet worm of 1988 infected 6000 computers.

8 says that 15-20% of the edge? Not startup ideas, because unions will exert political pressure to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a face-saving compromise. They'll be more like determination is proportionate to wd m-k w-d n, where there is one of a powerful syndicate, you create wealth in a signal.

It didn't work out a chapter at a 3 year old, a player who persists in trying such things can be compared, per capita income in England in 1750 was higher than India's in 1960. But that is not to. Delivered as if having good intentions were enough to answer the question is only half a religious one; there is one you take out your anti-dilution provisions, even though it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. But that oversimplifies his role.

And perhaps even worse in the Ancient World, Economic History Review, 2:9 1956,185-199, reprinted in Finley, M. This is almost always bullshit.

It was common in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, go ahead.

The meaning of a place to exchange views. The reason you don't, but in fact the less educated parents seem closer to a new version of Word 13.

I know for sure which these will be better for explaining software than English. Most unusual ambitions fail, no one is going to work in research too. P supermarket chain because it was because he was exaggerating. I've twice come close to 18% of GDP were about the other hand, he wrote a program to generate series A rounds from top VC funds whether it was overvalued till you run through all the combinations of Web plus a three hour meeting with a face-saving compromise.

You can safely write off all the East Coast. The need has to give each customer the impression that the only way to tell how serious potential investors and they were saying scaramara instead of bookmarking. Information is too general. If a company with rapid, genuine growth is valuable, and all those 20 people at once, and all the money.

Garry Tan pointed out that successful startups have elements of both consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and stir.

But the money.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Our presidential forecast, which launched today, is not the first election forecast that FiveThirtyEight has published since 2016. There was our midterms forecast in 2018, which was pretty accurate in predicting the makeup of the House and the Senate. And there was our presidential primaries model earlier this year, which was a bit of an adventure but mostly notable for being bullish (correctly) on Joe Biden and (incorrectly) on Bernie Sanders. But we’re aware that the publication of our first presidential forecast since 2016 is liable to be fraught.

We’d like to address one thing upfront, though: We think our model did a good job in 2016. Although it had Hillary Clinton favored, it gave Donald Trump around a 30 percent chance of winning on Election Day,1 which was considerably higher than other models, prediction markets, or the conventional wisdom about the race. Moreover, the reasons the model was more bullish on Trump than other forecasts — such as detecting a potential overperformance for Trump in the Electoral College – proved to be important to the outcome.

Also, we’ve found that FiveThirtyEight’s models — including our election forecasts since they were first published in 2008 — have been well calibrated over time. Candidates whom our models claim have a 30 percent chance of winning really do win their races about 30 percent of the time, for example.

So if this were an ordinary election, we’d probably just say screw it, take the 2016 version of our model, make some modest improvements, and press “go.” We’d certainly devote more attention to how the model was presented, but the underlying math behind it would be about the same.

We are not so sure that this is an ordinary election, though. Rather, it is being contested amidst the most serious pandemic to hit the United States since 1918. So we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how COVID-19 and other news developments could affect various aspects of the race, ranging from its impact on the economy to how it could alter the actual process of voting.

Put another way, while we think “ZOMG 2016!!!” is not a good reason to rethink a model that tended to be pretty cautious in the first place, we think COVID-19 might be.

What’s different from 2016

In the end, our model still isn’t that different from 2016’s, but let’s run through the list of changes. After that, we’ll provide a front-to-back description of how our model works.

First, a number of changes in the model are related to COVID-19:

In forecasting how much the polls could change, we now account for more components related to uncertainty. Two of these components include estimating i) economic uncertainty and ii) the overall volume of important news, both of which are very high under COVID-19. These offset other trends — such as greater polarization — that would lead to less uncertainty.

We’ve put a lot more work into our economic index: i) extending it back to 1880 to capture a fuller range of economic conditions, ii) adjusting it for increased partisanship and iii) developing an economic forecasting component to reflect potential changes in the economy between now and November. This is important because most projections forecast substantial improvement in the economy before November.

We attempt to account for additional uncertainty in Election Day results because turnout will potentially be less predictable given the pandemic.

We allow COVID-19 to be a factor in determining covariance. That is to say, states that have had high rates of COVID deaths and cases (such as Arizona and New York, which otherwise don’t have that much in common politically) could have correlated outcomes. Likewise, we also consider covariance based on a state’s anticipated rate of mail voting.

With the party conventions being substantially scaled down and largely held virtually, we’re applying only half of the usual “convention bounce adjustment” (see below for more on the convention bounce adjustment).

Other changes fall more into the category of continual improvements we’re making to our models that aren’t directly related to COVID-19:

Since 2016, we’ve made various changes to how our polling averages are calculated, as described here.

We now account for changes in how easy it is to vote in each state, as empirically, this yields higher turnout and a higher share of Democratic votes.

The model is now more careful around major events such as presidential debates that can have an outsize impact on candidates’ polling averages. If a candidate gains ground in the polls following one of these events, he will have to sustain that movement for a week or two to get full credit for it.

We’re running only one version of the presidential model this year. Things are complicated enough in an election held during a pandemic without getting into “polls-only” and “polls-plus” forecasts. Nor is there a “now-cast.” Our polling averages are the best way to reflect the current snapshot of the race, but the snapshot is not the same as the projected Election Day outcome.

The rest of how our model works involves three major steps. What follows is a pretty detailed walk-through, but I’ll be more circumspect when discussing steps described at more length elsewhere, such as in our 2016 methodology guide.

Step 1: Collect, analyze and adjust polls

Our national and state polling averages, which we began publishing in June, are the first steps we take in building our election forecast. We detailed our process for constructing those polling averages when we released them, so I’ll just review the highlights here.

Our polling averages are intended to be as inclusive as possible. We don’t want to have to make a lot of arbitrary decisions on which polls to include. But please review our polls policy for some exceptions on when we can’t use a poll in our forecast. Sometimes there are also delays in adding a poll until we can get more information about it.

Polls are weighted based on their sample size and their pollster rating, so higher-quality polls have more influence on the forecast. And if there are a large number of polls from one polling firm, the weight applied to each individual poll is discounted so no one pollster dominates the average.

Our polling averages reflect a blend of two methods. The first is a relatively simple weighted average, and the second is a more complicated method based on calculating a trend line. Of the two, the trend line method tends to be more aggressive. So early on in the campaign, we rely mostly on the more conservative weighted average method, while in the final few weeks, we mostly use the trend line method — that means our polling averages become more aggressive as Election Day nears.

The polling averages are subject to three types of adjustments:

The likely voter adjustment, which reflects that polls of likely voters and registered voters differ in predictable ways, adjusts polls of registered voters2 to make them more comparable to likely voter polls. Generally speaking, this means that Republicans (such as Trump) gain ground relative to Democrats when applying a likely voter screen, although this effect is mitigated when the Republican is an incumbent. Indeed, polls this year that have both a registered voter and likely voter version usually show Trump doing slightly better in the likely voter version. However, he does only modestly better, gaining around 1 percentage point on average.

The house effects adjustment, which detects polls that consistently lean toward one party or that consistently have more (or fewer) undecided voters than other polls of the same states, and adjusts them to correct for this. For example, Rasmussen Reports polls typically have very Republican-leaning results. So this adjustment would account for that. However, polls are allowed to retain at least some of their house effect, since an apparent house effect over a small number of polls could reflect statistical noise. In calculating house effects, the model mostly uses polls from the same state, so a polling firm could theoretically have a Trump-leaning house effect in one state and a Biden-leaning house effect in another.

Finally, we apply a timeline adjustment, which is based on a poll’s recency, and adjusts “old” polls for shifts in the overall race since it was conducted. For instance, say a poll of Arizona last month showed Biden up 3 points there, but there’s been a strong shift toward Trump since then in national polls and polls of similar states such as Nevada. This adjustment would shift that older Arizona poll toward Trump.

As we noted, the calculation of the polling averages is the first step in calculating our forecast. But they are not the same thing.

One time when this distinction is particularly relevant is following major events such as the debates and party conventions. These events sometimes produce big swings in the polls, and our polling averages are designed to be aggressive following these events and reflect the changed state of the race. However, these shifts are not necessarily long-lasting, and after a couple of weeks, the polls sometimes revert to where they were before.

Therefore, the model relies only partly on the polling average of the race after one of these events happens. For instance, say there is a debate on Oct. 1 and you’re looking at the model on, for example, Oct. 5. It will use a blend of the post-debate polling average from Oct. 5 and the pre-debate polling average from Oct. 1. After a week or two (depending on the event) though, the model will fully use the post-event polling average because it no longer necessarily expects a reversion to the mean.

In addition, our presidential model has traditionally applied a convention bounce adjustment that reflects the predictable boost in the polls that a party tends to get following its convention. Clinton surged to some of her biggest leads of the cycle following the Democratic Convention in 2016, for example. However, three factors could mitigate the convention bounce this year.

First, convention bounces have become smaller over time, likely reflecting a reduced number of swing voters because of greater partisanship. Based on current levels of polarization, for instance, we would expect a party to poll about 5 percentage points better at the peak of its convention bounce on the day just after the conclusion of its convention, with the effects fading fairly quickly thereafter. This is down from past convention bounces that could sometimes be measured in the double digits.

Second, as mentioned before, we are applying only half of the usual convention bounce adjustment this year because due to COVID-19, the conventions are being scaled back.

Third, because this year’s Republican National Convention occurs the week immediately following the Demoratic National Convention, the effects could largely cancel each other out — Biden’s bounce could be derailed by Trump’s bounce, in other words. Because Trump’s convention occurs second, the effects of it might linger for slightly longer, but the model expects the net effect to be small given that the Democratic convention will also be fairly fresh in voters’ minds.

Thus, the convention bounce adjustments will be small this year. Polls conducted in the period between the Democratic convention and the Republican convention will be adjusted toward Trump by around 2 or 2.5 percentage points, depending on the precise dates of the polls. And polls in the two to three weeks after the Republican convention will be adjusted toward Biden but only very slightly so (by less than 1 full percentage point).

Step 2: Combine polls with “fundamentals,” such as demographic and economic data

As compared with other models, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast relies heavily on polls. We do, however, incorporate other data in two main ways:

First, the polling average in each state is combined with a modeled estimate of the vote based on demographics and past voting patterns to create what we call an “enhanced snapshot” of current conditions. This is especially important in states where there is little or no polling.

Second, that snapshot is then combined with our priors, based on incumbency and economic conditions, to create a forecast of the Election Day outcome.

Enhancing our polling averages

At the core of the modeled estimate is FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean index, which reflects how the state voted in the past two presidential elections as compared with the national average. In our partisan lean index, 75 percent of the weight is assigned to 2016 and 25 percent to 2012. So note, for example, that Ohio (which turned much redder between 2012 and 2016) is not necessarily expected to continue to become redder. Instead, it might revert somewhat to the mean and become more purple again.

The partisan lean index also contains a number of other adjustments:

We adjust for the home states of the presidential and vice presidential candidates. The size of the home-state adjustment is much larger for presidential candidates than for their running mates. The size of the state is also a factor: Home-state advantages are larger in states with smaller populations. We also allow candidates to be associated with more than one state, in which case the home-state bonus is divided. For Biden, for instance, his primary home state is Delaware (where he lives now), and his secondary state is Pennsylvania (where he was born). And for Trump, his primary home state is New York (where he was born), and his secondary state is Florida (where he officially claims residence).3

We also adjust for what we call a state’s elasticity. Some states such as New Hampshire “swing” more than others in response to national trends because they have a higher proportion of swing voters, which can cause wider fluctuations from cycle to cycle. The elasticity scores we’re using for 2020 are based on a blend of each state’s elasticity in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

And finally, we account for changes in how easy it is to vote in each state based on the Cost of Voting Index, as researchers have found that states with higher barriers to voting tend to produce better results for Republican candidates and states with lower barriers tend to lean more Democratic.4

We then apply the partisan lean index in three slightly different ways to create a modeled estimate of the vote in each state.

First is what we call the “rigid method” because it rigidly follows the partisan lean index. In this technique, we first impute where the race stands nationally based on a blend of state and national polls. (Most of the weight in this calculation actually goes to state polls, though. National polls play relatively little role in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, other than to calculate the trend line adjustment in Step 1.) Then we add a state’s partisan lean index to it. For instance, if we estimate that Biden is ahead by 5 points nationally, and that a state’s partisan lean index is D+10 — meaning it votes 10 points more Democratic than the country as a whole — the rigid method would project that Biden is currently ahead by 15 points there.5

Second is the demographic regression method. Basically, the goal of this technique is to infer what the polls would say in a state based on the polls of other states that have more polling. In this method, adopted from a similar process we applied in our primary model, we use a state’s partisan lean index plus some combination of other variables in a series of regression analyses to try to fit to the current polling in each state. The variables considered include race (specified in several different ways), income, education, urbanization, religiosity6 and an index indicating the severity of the COVID-19 situation in each state, based on the number of cases and deaths per capita as recorded by the COVID Tracking Project. (Technically speaking, the model runs as many as 180 different regressions based on various combinations of these variables, but there are limits on which variables may appear in the regressions together in order to avoid collinearity, as well as how many variables can be included.) We then take a weighted average of all the regressions, where regression specifications with a higher adjusted R2 receive more weight but all regressions receive at least some weight.

Third is the regional regression method. This is much simpler: It consists of a single regression analysis where the dependent variables are a state’s partisan lean index, plus dummy variables indicating which of the four major regions (Northeast, Midwest, South, West) the state is in.7

We then combine these three estimates to create an ensemble forecast for each state. The rigid method, which is the most accurate historically, receives the majority of the weight, followed by the demographic regression and then the regional regression.

Then, we combine the ensemble forecast with a state’s polling average to create an enhanced snapshot of the current conditions in each state. The weight given to the polling average depends on the volume of polling in each state and how recently the last poll of the state was conducted. As of the forecast launch (Aug. 12), around 55 percent of the weight goes to the polling average rather than to the ensemble in the average state. However, in well-polled states toward the end of the campaign, as much as 97 or 98 percent of the weight could go toward the polling average. Conversely, states that have few polls rely mostly on the ensemble technique (and states that have no polls use the ensemble in lieu of a polling average).

Next, we combine the enhanced snapshots in each state to create a national snapshot, which is essentially our prediction of the national popular vote margin in an election held today. The national snapshot accounts for projected voter turnout in each state based on population growth since 2016, changes in how easy it is to vote since 2016, and how close the race is in that state currently — closer-polling states tend to have higher turnout. National polls are not used in the national snapshot; it’s simply a summation of the snapshots in the 50 states and Washington, D.C.

We know this is starting to get pretty involved — we’re really in the guts of the model now — but there is another important step. Our national snapshot is not the same thing as our prediction of the Election Day outcome. Instead, our prediction blends the polling-driven snapshot with a “fundamentals forecast” based on economic conditions and whether an incumbent is seeking reelection.

Polls vs. Fundamentals

I’m on the record as saying that I think presidential forecasting models based strictly on “fundamental” factors like economic conditions are overrated. Without getting too deep into the weeds, it’s easy to “p-hack” your way to glory with these models because there are so many ways to measure “the economy” but only a small sample size of elections for which we have reliable economic data. The telltale sign of these problems is that models claiming to predict past elections extremely well often produce inaccurate — or even ridiculous — answers when applied to elections in which the result is unknown ahead of time. One popular model based on second-quarter GDP, for example, implies that Biden is currently on track to win nearly 1,000 electoral votes — a bit of a problem since the maximum number theoretically achievable is 538.8

At the same time, that doesn’t mean the fundamentals are of no use at all. They can provide value and gently nudge your forecast in the right direction — if you use them carefully (although they’re hard to use carefully amidst something like the pandemic).

So, since 2012, we have used an index of economic conditions in our presidential forecast. In its current incarnation, it includes six variables:

Jobs, as indicated by nonfarm payrolls.

Spending, as indicated by real personal consumption expenditures.

Income, as measured by real disposable personal income.

Manufacturing, as measured by industrial production.

Inflation, based on the consumer price index.9

And the stock market, based on the S&P 500.

All variables are standardized so that they have roughly the same mean and standard deviation — and, therefore, have roughly equal influence on the index — for economic data since 1946. The index is then based on readings of these variables in the two years leading up to the election (e.g., from November 2018 through November 2020 for this election) but with a considerably heavier weight placed on the more recent data, in particular, the data roughly six months preceding the election. Where possible, the index is calibrated based on “vintage” economic data — that is, data as it was published in real time — rather than on data as later revised.

Although the quality of economic data is more questionable prior to the 1948 election, we have also attempted to create an approximate version of the index for elections going back to 1880 based on the data that we could find. (It’s extremely important, in our view, to expand the sample size for this sort of analysis, even if we have to rely on slightly less reliable data to do so.) Our economic index for elections dating to 1880 (see below) is expressed as a Z-score, where a score of zero reflects an average economy. And, as you can see, extremely negative economic conditions tend to predict doom for the incumbent party (as in 1932, 1980 and 2008).

The economy is a noisy predictor of presidential success

FiveThirtyEight’s economic index as of Election Day, since 1880,* where a score of zero reflects an average economy, a positive score a strong economy and a negative score a weak one

Year Economic Index Year Economic Index 1880 +1.37 1948 -0.29 1884 -0.18 1952 +0.21 1888 -0.25 1956 +0.07 1892 +0.71 1960 -0.01 1896 -0.15 1964 +0.70 1900 +0.56 1968 +0.23 1904 -0.23 1972 +0.46 1908 -1.03 1976 +0.26 1912 +0.13 1980 -1.71 1916 +0.75 1984 +0.86 1920 -1.52 1988 +0.09 1924 +0.44 1992 -0.29 1928 +0.15 1996 +0.36 1932 -2.34 2000 +0.36 1936 +1.55 2004 +0.01 1940 +0.77 2008 -1.34 1944 +1.01 2012 -0.10 2016 +0.08

*Values prior to the 1948 election are based on more limited data and should be considered rough estimates.

But, overall, the relationship between economic conditions and the incumbent party’s performance is fairly noisy. In fact, we found that the economy explains only around 30 percent of the variation in the incumbent party’s performance, meaning that other factors explain the other 70 percent.

We do try to account for some of those “other” factors, although we’ve found they make only a modest difference. For instance, we also account for whether the president is an elected incumbent (like Trump this year or Barack Obama in 2012), an incumbent who followed the line of succession into office (like Gerald Ford in 1976) or if there is no incumbent at all (as in 2008 or 2016). We also account for polarization based on how far apart the parties are in roll call votes cast in the U.S. House. Periods of greater polarization (such as today in the U.S.) are associated with closer electoral margins and also smaller impacts of economic conditions and incumbency.

One additional complication is that the condition of the economy at any given moment prior to the election may not resemble what it eventually looks like in November, which is what our model tries to predict. Thus, the model makes a simple forecast for each of the six economic variables, which accounts for some mean-reversion, but is also based on the recent performance of the stock market (yes, it has some predictive power) and surveys of professional economists.10

Although we’ll discuss this at more length in the feature that accompanies our forecast launch, the fundamentals forecast is not necessarily as bad as you might think for Trump, despite awful numbers in categories such as GDP. One of the economic components that the model considers (income) has been strong thanks to government subsidies in the form of the CARES Act, for instance, and two others (inflation and the stock market) have been reasonably favorable, too.

In addition, Trump is an elected incumbent, the economy is expected to improve between the forecast launch (August 12) and November, and the polarized nature of the electorate limits the damage to him to some degree. Thus, one shouldn’t conclude that Trump is a huge underdog on the basis of the economy alone, although he’s also not a favorite to win reelection as elected incumbents typically are.

The closer to Election Day, the more our model relies on polls

Share of the weight assigned to polls and the “fundamentals,” by number of days until the election

Days until election Polls Fundamentals 0 100% 0% 5 97 3 10 94 6 25 89 11 50 84 16 75 79 21 100 74 26 150 65 35 200 57 43 250 47 53

However, our model assigns relatively little weight to the fundamentals forecast, and the weight will eventually decline to zero by Election Day. (Although the fundamentals forecast does do a good job of forecasting most recent elections, there are a lot more misses once you extend the analysis before 1948. So keep that in mind in the table, as the assigned weight is based on the entire data set.) Nonetheless, here is how much the model weights the fundamentals up until the election.

As of forecast launch in mid-August, for instance, the model assigns 77 percent of the weight to the polling-based snapshot and 23 percent of the weight to the fundamentals. In fact, the fundamentals actually help Trump at the margin (they aren’t good for him, but they’re better than his polls), so the model shifts the snapshot in each state slightly toward Trump in the forecast of the Election Day outcome. States with higher elasticity scores are shifted slightly more in this process.

Step 3: Account for uncertainty and simulate the election thousands of times

As complicated though it may seem, everything I’ve described up until this point is, in some sense, the easy part of developing our model. There’s no doubt that Biden is comfortably ahead as of the forecast launch in mid-August, for example, and the choices one makes in using different methods to average polls or combine them with other data isn’t likely to change that conclusion.

What’s trickier is figuring out how that translates into a probability of Biden or Trump winning the election. That’s what this section is about.

Before we proceed further, one disclaimer about the scope of the model: It seeks to reflect the vote as cast on Election Day, assuming that there are reasonable efforts to allow eligible citizens to vote and to count all legal ballots, and that electors are awarded to the popular-vote winner in each state. It does not account for the possibility of extraconstitutional shenanigans by Trump or by anyone else, such as trying to prevent mail ballots from being counted.

That does not mean it’s safe to assume these rules and norms will be respected. (If we were sure they would be respected, there wouldn’t be any need for this disclaimer!) But it’s just not in the purview of the sort of statistical analysis we conduct in our model to determine the likelihood they will or won’t be respected.

We do think, however, that well-constructed polls and models can provide a useful benchmark if any attempts to manipulate the election do occur. For instance, a candidate (in a state with incomplete results because mail ballots have yet to be counted) declaring themselves the winner in a state where the model had given them an 0.4 percent chance of winning would need to be regarded with more suspicion than one where they’d had a 40 percent chance going in (although a 40 percent chance of winning is by no means a sure thing either, obviously).

With that disclaimer out of the way, here are the four types of uncertainty that the model tries to account for:

National drift, or how much the overall national forecast could change between now and Election Day.

National Election Day error, or how much our final forecast of the national popular vote could be off on Election Day itself.

Correlated state error, which reflects errors that could occur across multiple states along geographic or regional lines — for instance, as was relevant in 2016, a systematic underperformance relative to polls for the Democratic candidate in the Midwest.

State-specific error, an error relative to our forecast that affects only one state.

The first type of error, national drift, is probably the most important one as of the launch — that is, the biggest reason Biden might not win despite currently enjoying a fairly wide lead in the polls is that the race could change between now and November.

National drift is calculated as follows:

Constant x (Days Until Election)^⅓ x Uncertainty Index

That is, it is a function of the cube root of the number of days until the election11 times the FiveThirtyEight Uncertainty Index, which I’ll describe in a moment. (Note that the use of the cube root implies that polls do not become more accurate at a linear rate, but rather that there is a sharp increase in accuracy toward the end of an election. Put another way, August is still early as far as polling goes.)

The uncertainty index is a new feature this year, although it reflects a number of things we did previously, such as accounting for the number of undecided voters. In the spirit of our economic index, it also contains a number of measures that are historically correlated with greater (or lesser) uncertainty but are also correlated with one another in complicated ways. And under circumstances like these (not to mention the small sample size of presidential elections), we think it is better to use an equally-weighted blend of all reasonable metrics rather than picking and choosing just one or two metrics.

The components of our uncertainty index are as follows:

The number of undecided voters in national polls. More undecided voters means more uncertainty.

The number of undecided plus third-party voters in national polls. More third-party voters means more uncertainty.

Polarization, as measured elsewhere in the model, is based on how far apart the parties are in roll call votes cast in the U.S. House. More polarization means less uncertainty since there are fewer swing voters.

The volatility of the national polling average. Volatility tends to predict itself, so a stable polling average tends to remain stable.

The overall volume of national polling. More polling means less uncertainty.

The magnitude of the difference between the polling-based national snapshot and the fundamentals forecast. A wider gap means more uncertainty.

The standard deviation of the component variables used in the FiveThirtyEight economic index. More economic volatility means more overall uncertainty in the forecast.

The volume of major news, as measured by the number of full-width New York Times headlines in the past 500 days, with more recent days weighted more heavily. More news means more uncertainty.

In 2020, measures No. 1 through 5 all imply below-average uncertainty. There aren’t many undecided voters, there are no major third-party candidates, polarization has been high and polls have been stable. Measure No. 6 suggests average uncertainty. But metrics No. 7 and 8 imply extremely high uncertainty; there has been a ton of news related to COVID-19 and other major stories, like the protests advocating for police reform in response to the death of George Floyd — not to mention the impeachment trial of Trump earlier this year. Likewise, there has been as much volatility in economic data as at any time since the Great Depression.

On the one hand, the sheer number of uncertainties unique to 2020 indicate the possibility of a volatile election, but on the other hand, there are also a number of measures that signal lower uncertainty, like a very stable polling average. So when we calculate the overall degree of uncertainty for 2020, our model’s best guess is that it is about average relative to elections since 1972. That average, of course, includes a number of volatile elections such as 1980, 1988 and 1992, where there were huge swings in the polls over the final few months of the campaign, along with elections such as 2004 and 2012 where polls were pretty stable. As voters consume even more economic- and pandemic-related news — and then experience events like the conventions and the debates — it’s not yet clear whether the polls will remain stable or begin to swing around more.

It’s also not entirely clear how this might all translate into the national Election Day error — that is, how far off the mark our final polling averages are — either. In calculating Election Day error, we use a different version of the uncertainty index that de-emphasizes components No. 6, 7 and 8, since those components pertain mostly to how much we expect the polls to change between now and the election, rather than the possibility of an Election Day misfire.

Still, our approach to calculating Election Day error is fairly conservative. In order to have a larger sample size, the calculation is based on the error in final polls in elections since 1936, rather than solely on more recent elections. While polls weren’t as far off the mark in 2016 as is generally reputed (national polls were fairly accurate, in fact), it’s also not clear that the extremely precise polls in the final weeks of 2004, 2008 and 2012 will be easy to replicate given the challenges in polling today. Given the small sample sizes, we also use a fat-tailed distribution for many of the error components, including the national Election Day error, to reflect the small — but not zero — possibility of a larger error than what we’ve seen historically.

There could also be some challenges related to polling during COVID-19. In primary elections conducted during the pandemic, for instance, turnout was hard to predict. In some ways, the pandemic makes voting easier (expanded options to vote by mail in many states), but it also makes it harder in other ways (it’s difficult to socially distance if you must vote in person).

This is a rough estimate because there are a lot of confounding variables — including the end of the competitive portion of the Democratic presidential primary — but we estimate that the variability in turnout was about 50 percent higher in primary elections conducted after the pandemic began in the U.S. than those conducted beforehand. Empirically, we know that states that experience a sharp change in turnout from one cycle to the next are harder to forecast, too. So we estimate that a 50 percent increase in error when predicting turnout will result in a 20 percent increase in error when predicting the share of the vote each party receives.

Therefore, we increase national Election Day error, correlated state error and state-specific error by 20 percent relative to their usual values because of how the coronavirus could affect turnout and the process of voting. Note that this still won’t be enough to cover extraordinary developments such as mail ballots being impounded. But it should help to reflect some of the additional challenges in polling and holding an election amidst a pandemic.

When it comes to simulating the election — we’re running 40,000 simulations each time the model is updated — the model first picks two random numbers to reflect national drift (how much the national forecast could change) and national Election Day error (how off our final forecast of the national popular vote could be) that are applied more or less uniformly12 to all states. However, even if you somehow magically knew what the final national popular vote would be, there would still be additional error at the state level. A uniform national swing would not have been enough to cost Clinton the Electoral College in 2016, for example. But underperformance relative to the polls concentrated in the Midwestern swing states did.

In fact, we estimate that at the end of the campaign, most of the error associated with state polling is likely to be correlated with errors in other states. That is to say, it is improbable that there would be a major polling error in Michigan that wouldn’t also be reflected in similar states such as Wisconsin and Ohio.

Therefore, to calculate correlated polling error, the model creates random permutations based on different demographic and geographic characteristics. In one simulation, for instance, Trump would do surprisingly well with Hispanic voters and thus overperform in states with large numbers of Hispanics. In another simulation, Biden would overperform his polls in states with large numbers of Catholics. The variables used in the simulations are as follows:

Race (white, Black, Hispanic, Asian)

Religion (evangelical Christians, mainline protestants, Catholic, Mormon, other religions, atheist/nonreligious)

A state’s partisan lean index in 2016 and in 2012

Latitude and longitude

Region (North, South, Midwest, West)

Urbanization

Median household income

Median age

Gender

Education (the share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher)

Immigration (the share of a state that is part of its voting-eligible population)

The COVID-19 severity index (see Step 2)

The share of a state’s vote that is expected to be cast by mail

One mathematical property of correlated polling errors is that states with demographics that resemble those of the country as a whole tend to have less polling error than those that don’t. Underestimating Biden’s standing among Mormons wouldn’t cause too many problems in a national poll, or in a poll of Florida, for example. But it could lead to a huge polling error in Utah. Put another way, states that are outliers based on some combination of the variables listed above tend to be harder to predict.

Finally, the model randomly applies some residual, state-specific error in each state. This tends to be relatively small, and is primarily a function of the volume of polling in each state, especially in states that have had no polling at all. If you’re wondering why Trump’s chances are higher than you might expect in Oregon, for example, it’s partly because there have been no polls there as of forecast launch.

Odds and ends

Whew — that’s pretty much it! But a few random bullet points that don’t fit neatly into the categories above.

The model accounts for the fact that Maine and Nebraska award one electoral vote each to the winner of each congressional district. In fact, these congressional districts have their own forecast pages, just as the states do. For the most part, though, the statewide forecasts in Maine and Nebraska just reflect the sum of the district forecasts. However, because not all polls provide district-level breakdowns in these states, the model also makes inferences from statewide polls of Maine and Nebraska, too. In total, the model calculates a forecast in 54 jurisdictions: the two congressional districts in Maine, the three in Nebraska, the other 48 states and Washington, D.C.

In 2016, as well as in backtesting the model in certain past years (i.e., 1980, 1992) we designated “major” third-party candidates such as Gary Johnson and Ross Perot. We defined major as (i) a candidate who is on the ballot almost everywhere, (ii) who is included in most polls and (iii) who usually polls in at least the mid-to-high single digits. There is no such candidate in 2020.

However, we do predict votes for “other” candidates in each state. The predictions are based on how many third-party candidates appear on the ballot in the state,13 whether write-in votes are permitted, how much of the vote a state has historically given to third-party candidates, and how competitive the state is (third-party candidates historically receive fewer votes in swing states).

Electoral College ties (269-269) are listed as such in the model output. This is a change from past years, where we used various methods to break the ties. We do not account for the possibility of faithless electors or candidates other than Trump and Biden winning electoral votes.

Got any other questions or see anything that looks wrong? Please drop us a line.

[imaxpostproductionworkflowl-blog]

Best Post Production Software Film

Easy to implement collaborative editing solutions for your web application. If anyone else is working on the document, you'll see their presence and the changes they're making.

What makes a film successful?

But making a lot of movies doesn't necessarily make you the most influential person. Last year, the most prolific person in “film” was the adult director and cinematographer Miles Long, who was principally involved in 41 movies with 265 total collaborators.

It's happened a few times – we senda Google Doc to someone (accessed by a link) only to have them save it or paste it into a Word document and send it back to us with their changes. To save the changes you made, so that other users can view them, and get the updates saved by your co-editors, click the icon in the left upper corner of the top toolbar. ProseMirror is a simple but effective editor that favours minimalism, speed, and precision.

What does finishing mean in post production?

In film making, post-production jobs refer to activities that take place after the movie has been shot. Post-production crew members learn their craft at film schools or through apprenticeships. First jobs are often without pay, but offer valuable contacts and work experience.

The Tools of Color Correction

iWork is Apple's first party productivity apps that handles word processing (Pages), spreadsheet creation (Numbers), and presentations (Keynote). Weld supports real-time collaboration similar to Google Docs, allowing you to work more efficiently as a team. It would honestly be a dream for me to get something like that because I’ve wanted to be able to quickly show people code. It would make explaining things a lot faster when I can show them in real time without screensharing and have them run the code.

Your text is saved on the web, and more than one person can edit the same document at the same time. And I am not the only one who thinks so — almost all collaborative text editors that I have used, including Google Docs, can fail undo in the exact same ways. This is enough that you could render your text editor and those cursors however you want.

Both support collaboration and code merging in case of conflicts while working simultaneously on the same document. They can make notes and suggest changes that editors can carry out in real-time right in front of them. And because media managers have complete control over access permissions they can rest assured that clients see only what they need to see. In the fast-growing digital video economy, media managers need to ensure ongoing harmonious relationships with clients and stakeholders. Collaborative editing has the potential to revolutionize workflows and improve operational efficiency.

What are post production jobs?

Film PRoduction Schedule DEFINITION A film production schedule or shooting schedule is a plan that every film, TV show, or commercial follows to make sure that the video production goes smoothly. It's a simple breakdown of the scenes, talent, time, cast, company moves, and day breaks.

open source collaborative text editors

Team collaboration in the workplace is more than just teamwork—it’s an approach to project management that combines working together, innovative thinking, and equal participation to achieve a common goal. Successful team collaboration in the workplace is often supported by technology tools or collaboration software that improve communication, decision-making and workflow, as well as a work culture that values every individual’s contribution.

You can add annotations and these annotations are just X, Y, Z values, and you add this to the shared data structure. And the notion, I think, of peer-to-peer, decentralized, shared editing, allows for local copies of those documents to be on every single node, let's say, of every single person who's working on the document. Everyone on the team can view, edit, and update information easily at any time. Your team members can discuss requirements, elaborate on product design, create a conference agenda, and find solutions to problems. For instance, Google Documents allows multiple people to make edits, suggest changes, and leave comments simultaneously.

What is track freeze?

Sometimes Pro Tools will fail to launch because the wrong device is selected as the Current Device under Setup>Playback Engine. When this happens, you will likely see the following error message: ”Pro Tools could not initialize the current playback device.

Convergence Labs is a software development agency specializing in real-time collaborative applications, and the creators of Convergence, the real-time collaboration engine. A real time collaborative integrated development environment can provide developers with the facility to collaborate over software projects over a network even when developers are thousand of miles away. Real-time Collaborative IDE provide developers with the ability to collaboratively write code, build and test it as well as share their projects with other developers. Chatting with other fellow developers over a project is also possible. Besides several other useful features of a complete IDE including saving snapshots, project management are also provided to ease the entire project development process.

No Film School

Stop worrying about whether you remembered to save — Team Projects auto-saves all your personal edits and provides access to them if needed. When you’re ready to share changes as a new version with collaborators, an infinite-level versioning system makes it simple to quickly share a new version and collaborate on work in progress. The Google Docs team did a little bit of a case study around how the real time collaboration worked, but I can't find the blog entry. Just poll the server ever half second or second with the current user id, filename, line number and row number which can be stored in a database, and the return value of this polling request is the position of other user's cursors. ACE (Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X) is a free and easy-to-use collaborative text editor.

Bonus lesson: The Project Manager and Audio Conform Files

The option appears when two (or more) users join the same project. Another way to collaborate on documents is to use https://www.behance.net version control systems such as Subversion or Git, but these tools don't allow real-time collaboration. In the optimistic locking scheme all the users can have edit access of the document at the same time. This problem cannot be solved using traditional locks (so called Pessimistic locks) like Mutex or Semaphore because they give turn based access, and only allow one user to get edit access at a time.

In this post, we'll take a look at five open source collaborative text editors available to anyone. You can download the desktop client to work, and your changes will be uploaded to the online service when you next connect to the internet. The web app offers plenty of editing tools and is compatible with Microsoft Word. You can track changes, comment, and have full conversations either in real time or at your convenience, and you can choose to be notified whenever someone updates the document.

[citypillow2-blog]

What Makes a Great American Food City?

What makes a great modern food city in America? Over the nearly five years I roamed the country as Eater’s national critic, this question almost involuntarily rumbled through my brain. Some standout criteria are obvious: A city’s dining culture needs baselines of excellence and eclecticism in every tier of restaurant. It needs first-rate grocers, farmers markets, and single-focus shops (coffee, ice cream, wine, bread, and pastries). Restaurant-goers should support culinary traditions but, at the same time, encourage creative momentum. And the “sense of place” about which food writers love to crow must include an innate respect for a city’s collective communities, both rooted and new.

But at some point during my wanderings, I realized greatness might boil down to the Long Weekend Theory. The core hypothesis is this: In most every American city with a sizable population and sufficient degree of cultural density, you can eat (and drink) with consistent pleasure throughout three leisure-filled days.

Almost anywhere, for example, you could kick off Friday at the irreverent cocktail bar; fill the major meal slots with the buzziest restaurant in town, the big-ticket splurge, and the indie marvels serving regional dishes from, say, Mexico, or Thailand, or Syria; go crazy at the do-what-we-want sandwich shop serving delicious monstrosities; moon over the soulful pie counter or the ice cream parlor concocting mind-jangling flavor combinations; and wrap it all up with one final blowout at the coolest breakfast hangout in town.

So the real test of a superior food city is, what would happen if you kept eating past the dreamy Monday-morning breakfast?

In a merely standard city for dining, a steep drop in quality and enticement becomes evident. Other hyped restaurants wobble in execution; places serving similar cuisines seem to duplicate one another’s menus. A great food city surpasses the long-weekend itinerary. It is replete with restaurants that deliver their own unique versions of the special something that can make dining out one of life’s sincerest joys.

Of course it’s unrealistic to expect that every meal at every restaurant will be near-mystical in any place. But an exceptional dining town has enough restaurants delivering abundant individuality and constant attention to detail that the choices don’t feel limited to a dozen or fewer true standouts.

Our most immense and our most richly aesthetic metropolises (New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans) can pass this test easily, as do the expected smaller urban centers whose food scenes draw plenty of notice, like Austin, Charleston, and Portland, Maine.

But what about a place like Phoenix? It’s the fifth-largest city in the United States by population, and, including adjacent cities such as Scottsdale and Chandler, the country’s 11th-largest metropolitan area. Despite its magnitude, Phoenix’s restaurant scene largely goes overlooked in the national media. There’s a vague perception of the city as an indistinguishable, sprawling flatland full of middle-of-the-road dining options, many of them chains. Local publications are acutely aware of its reputation as a culinary dead zone.

Scattered national acclaim does materialize. Veteran local chefs like Kevin Binkley (chef-owner of the tasting menu restaurant Binkley’s) and Silvana Salcido Esparza (lauded for her Barrio Café and sublime chiles en nogada) receive steady nods as James Beard semifinalists. Chris Bianco, whose game-changing Pizzeria Bianco has made him the country’s most famous pizzaiolo, is Phoenix’s most recognizable food ambassador. On a countrywide level, that’s about it.

I’ll admit to largely ignoring Phoenix on my Eater beat. I went once during those five years, and even then sped through only a polite survey of the town — I was really there to research a story about Bianco and how his dominion had grown since I’d first tasted his pizza in the 1990s. This past September, the Association of Food Journalists held their annual conference in Phoenix. I didn’t go, but the few attendees I informally polled about their dining experiences didn’t seem overly impressed.

Still, I wondered if treasures had gone unnoticed. Latino residents comprise 41 percent of the population: Surely they were paragons serving specialties from the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora? Ranching and agriculture is a $23.3 billion business in Arizona, and the intense heat equates to unique growing cycles: Asparagus was in high season during the February when I blitzed through Bianco’s restaurants. What other chefs were plugged into the rhythms of the Arizona seasons, and how were they expressing them? Dominic Armato, dining critic for the Arizona Republic, ate hard to compile a recent list of his 100 favorite metro-area restaurants. His roster of curries, tacos, tasting menus, biscuit sandwiches, and dishes that defy easy labeling makes a compelling case for the scope of local dining.

So in October I returned to Phoenix to see if the Valley (as its metro area calls itself) could pass — or surpass, really — the long-weekend test. I came for seven days to understand dining in Phoenix as best and as quickly as I could. A week, obviously, could never be enough to truly absorb the depths of a city’s food culture, though I trusted it was enough to judge if we’ve all been missing something. Or not.

Dinner at Tratto, a handsome restaurant of calming white walls and oak in the Town & Country shopping center, began with chicken livers spread over some righteously charred toast. Sweet-sour plum jam offset the livers; the fruit was left in big, melting hunks and scented with lemon verbena. Wide-mouthed rigatoni came next, sauced in a guinea hen ragu whose lightness felt ideal for a warm Arizona fall evening.

Conveniently located right next door to my favorite branch of Pizzeria Bianco, Tratto is the restaurant I’d most fervidly recommend to anyone visiting Phoenix right now. The finessed cooking, focus on stellar ingredients, and spirit of generosity put it on par with the finest modern Italian restaurants in the country.

A colleague and I ended up sharing the pork chops with apples, and a side dish of garlicky oyster mushrooms, with the group of four seated next to us; it was our sixth meal of the day. We were pointed toward a bottle of Klinec Medana Jakot, a funky Slovenian varietal that was as orange in color as it was in its citrus-blossomy notes. The wine saw us through to the finale, a wedge of custardy lemon tart exactly right in its simplicity.

Tratto opened in 2016 to rhapsodic reviews by local critics. Why don’t more people know about it coast to coast? As a maker of best-new-restaurant lists, I’ll speak to my own (flawed) thinking: Chris Bianco owns Tratto, and I didn’t think he needed any more attention. Yet Bianco has moved into a career phase where he is as much or more of a restaurateur and mentor as he is a chef. At Tratto, he cedes some of the spotlight to the energized team of chef Cassie Shortino, pastry chef Olivia Girard, and beverage director Blaise Faber for the day-to-day operations.

Bianco steps into more of an advisory role at Roland’s Cafe Market Bar, an all-day restaurant launched last year as his collaboration with Armando Hernandez (who previously worked for Bianco), Seth Sulka, and Nadia Holguin. In my long-weekend matrix for Phoenix, Tratto is the Friday-night stage-setter, and Roland’s is the Monday-morning finale. Hernandez and Holguin, who are husband and wife, also run three-year-old Tacos Chiwas on McDowell Road, a bastion of old-line Mexican restaurants northeast of downtown. “Chiwas” riffs off of Holguin and Hernandez’s heritage; both have roots in the northern border state of Chihuahua. The tacos and burritos at Chiwas are solid, but the gorditas — yawning wheat-flour pockets most memorably filled with deshebrada roja (shredded beef in red chile sauce) — steal focus from every other dish.

At Roland’s, the Mexican-with-hints-of-Italian cooking is uplifting and individualistic. An open-faced (read: pizza-shaped) quesadilla dotted with mortadella and asadero cheese is a palpable tribute to Bianco, whose company provides the organic Sonoran wheat flour for the tortilla on which the quesadillas are built. Yet this is really Holguin’s show — an expression of la cocina norteña (the cooking of northern Mexico, born of its desert and Gulf of California geography) that merges her background and her culinary training.

Beyond the fantastic quesadillas (they rightly star on the breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus), the entomatadas highlight Holguin’s precision with textures: crisped and stacked corn tortillas bathe in chile-spiked tomato sauce, fused by shredded asadero melting in the heat, and crowned with a fried egg. Alongside the flaky, painstakingly plaited empanadas filled with cabeza (beef head meat), ask for an array of salsas, bright in color and flavor, that aren’t automatically brought to the table. Chihuahua is the spiritual home of the burrito; Holguin fills her concise, captivating version with pork saturated in ruddy, garlicky chile colorado.

Breakfast or lunch at Roland’s makes for an apt conclusion to a long-weekend agenda, especially in how it frames la cocina norteña: This is a chef ascending to her deserved platform. If in a decade Phoenix becomes nationally synonymous with chefs ingeniously upholding and interpreting variations on northern Mexican cuisines, I predict Roland’s will be seen as a major touchstone in that progression.

Before a meal at Roland’s, seek out some Sonoran- and Chihuahuan-style cooking throughout the Phoenix metro area: It puts a nationally under-sung aspect of the city’s culture in delicious perspective. A rambling Saturday outing began for me with those lush wheat-flour gorditas at Tacos Chiwas. At the original Carolina’s Mexican Food, not far from downtown, sunshine slipped through narrow windows, revealing a nearly imperceptible blizzard in the streaks of light. The air was filled with flour; Carolina’s doubles as a tortilla factory. I ordered a simple, blazingly hot burrito wrapped around scrambled eggs and machaca — a Sonoran staple of dried and rehydrated beef, served shredded and often combined with other ingredients.

I’d return to Carolina’s for the atmosphere, but El Horseshoe Restaurant, on an industrial stretch west of downtown, is the place to truly savor homemade machaca for breakfast. Here, the Avitia family sautees it among potato, egg, and onion, its concentrated beefiness permeating every molecule of the dish, with sides of rice, beans, and a freshly made tortilla. The state of Sonora, beyond its desert interior, stretches across much of the Gulf of California’s eastern coastline; Horseshoe serves a restoring version of cahuamanta, a classic brothy stew bobbing with shrimp and pearly hunks of manta ray.

For a deeper immersion into regional seafood dishes, I swung by El Rey de Los Ostiones, a seafood market in a low-slung strip mall northwest of downtown. The bilingual staff graciously quizzed me on my tastes, finally delivering customized aguachiles and ceviches full of shrimp and oysters, along with several kinds of hot sauce and other condiments to tweak the seasonings. A 10-minute drive from El Rey, I had my favorite tacos of the trip at Ta’Carbon, an always-packed draw specializing in carne asada (among other meats like lengua and cabeza) grilled over mesquite.

Before the afternoon ended I veered off the Sonoran trail for a “taco” of another kind: a puffy, palm-scorching, mood-elevating flatbread filled with green chile-laced beef, refried beans, and cheese at the Fry Bread House, a Phoenix institution started in 1992 by Cecelia Miller of the Tohono O’odham Nation.

Restaurants serving American Indian cuisines are too few around the country and in the Southwest. Kai, the flagship restaurant at the Sheraton Grand at Wild Horse Pass and one of the Valley’s toniest dining experiences, vaguely themes its dishes in Native American directions with indigenous seeds and beans and plants. But really, Kai falls more into the category of modern-American splurge restaurant.

The signature grilled buffalo tenderloin came surrounded by sides and adornments straight from 1990 — smoked corn puree, cholla cactus buds, a light chile of scarlet runner beans, chorizo, a drizzle of syrup made from saguaro blossoms — that manage to coalesce. That entree is $58. The setting, with the sun disappearing behind mountains in the distance, is gorgeous, but for a more consistently dazzling and sure-file splurge, I’d suggest Binkley’s immersive tasting menu, or Silvana Salcido Esparza’s Barrio Café Gran Reserva for beauties like pan-seared corvina served with rose pepper mole sauce and salsa fragrant with smoky morita chiles (and her chiles en nogada, as superb as ever).

On Sunday, I needed extra coffee to jolt me after Saturday’s taxing schedule. A skillful macchiato and pour over at Giant Coffee animated me. First stop: Little Miss BBQ. Every major city in America has a pit master whose next-level dedication has pushed its scene to great smoked-meat raptures in recent years. Scott Holmes achieved this in Phoenix with his blackened, barky brisket, deliriously fatty in the style of Austin’s famed Franklin Barbecue. Loved the on-theme smoked pecan pie for dessert.

Second lunch, a restaurant recommended by local food-writer friends, was the trip’s sweetest surprise. I’d been briefed on the setup at Alzohour Market. Owner Zhor Saad takes orders and prepares the tiny restaurant’s Moroccan specialties herself. I poked around, looking at the clothing and candies and bric-a-brac she sells in the retail space adjacent to her dining room while I waited for bastilla, the sweet-savory masterpiece traditionally made of spiced pigeon and roasted almonds wrapped in phyllo and dusted with sugar and cinnamon. Saad substituted shredded chicken in her bastilla, but it was among the best versions I’ve had in America. Her lamb tagine was nearly as poetic.

Charleen Badman, chef and owner of FnB, also regularly appears on Beard semifinalist lists; her restaurant in Old Town Scottsdale gave me the trip’s most accurate and evocative sense of Arizona’s growing cycles. Salads of persimmon and pistachio, or little gem with pears, plums, and pecans; rice-stuffed squash blossoms with a riff on shakshuka made with summer squash; sheets of pastas entwined with foraged lobster mushrooms: I felt myself settle into the land in Badman’s dining room. Like many modern chefs, she thinks about flavors globally. For example, wonderful lamb manti (Turkish dumplings) dolloped with yogurt, sprinkled with pine nuts, and served in butter flecked with urfa chile was one of several dishes that evoked Middle Eastern cuisines. That dish also paired well with a fairly spectacular syrah from Rune Wines, a luminary among Arizona’s maturing viniculture industry.

I sat finishing the last bites of huckleberry-lemon sponge cake with fig-leaf ice cream, thinking that in a city with a glossier dining reputation, Badman and FnB would be basking in even more accolades. If I’d have beelined to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport right after this dinner, I would have climbed into the heavens happy and sated.

A quartet of Addison’s favorite tacos in Phoenix, at Ta’Carbon

Assuming that most people don’t gorge through a city like a food critic on a research jag, I’ve detailed more than enough meals to exceed a long eating weekend in Phoenix. (And here I’ll fill in a couple of potentially empty slots in the Long Weekend Theory itinerary I vaguely followed above: You can drink as well as you eat at Tratto, but for a pre-Friday night dinner starting point, the move is Bitter & Twisted Cocktail Parlour, cheekily located in a building where the Arizona Prohibition Headquarters was once housed. Also, for a second breakfast option, try local darling Matt’s Big Breakfast for Americana personified.)

Sure, there were ups and downs as I continued grazing through the area. Other charmers included Pa’La, where Claudio Urciuoli writes out his affordable daily menu on a chalkboard behind the counter, anchored by a top-shelf mix-and-match grain bowl. But there were mid-level letdowns, too. Two memorable disappointments came from newer arrivals with strong local word of mouth. Maybe I totally misordered at Cotton & Copper in Tempe, but the oddly mealy corn dumplings in parmesan cream and carpaccio topped with citrus segments and chunks of chewy cheese felled my dinner at the bar. And I was intrigued by the promise of “modern Southwest cuisine” at Ghost Ranch in Chandler; that amorphous genre could use some sharp redefining. I didn’t find it in a ho-hum sampler platter (pork and chicken enchiladas, cheese-filled chiles rellenos, grilled skirt steak) and bland grilled chicken with polenta and green chile jus.

Overall, though, I left impressed by Phoenix. I knew there were pleasures and pockets of potential gems I’d left untried: dim sum at Mekong Palace Restaurant in Mesa, other serious pizzerias spurred by Bianco’s success, and upscale stalwart Rancho Pinot, for starters. But even after only a week of immersive gorging, it’s clear that dismissing the Valley as a snowbird’s destination for chains and lowest-common-denominator palates is anachronistic and plain wrong. I’d nudge other national food writers to come test out the Long Weekend Theory here for themselves. Is Phoenix’s restaurant culture on par with a similar sprawl of urban vastness like Houston? Not yet. Is the breadth and depth of dining better than most of us are giving it credit for? It won’t take more than a few happy, immersive days of eating to know the answer is: absolutely.

Bill Addison is a food critic for the Los Angeles Times; he was Eater’s roving national critic for nearly five years until November 2018. Fact checked by Pearly Huang Copy edited by Rachel P. Kreiter

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Source: https://www.eater.com/2019/1/23/18183298/best-restaurants-phoenix-scottsdale-tempe