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sophsicle · 4 years ago

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Chapter 26

The friendship of Lily Evans and Mary Macdonald began under a bed. Lily’s bed, to be exact. See, she’d been having a bad day. It was first year and everything was just…a little…much. She missed her mum and dad, back then she even missed Petunia, and Severus was there but he wasn’t there-there. He was in Slytherin. After the sorting Lily had briefly considered begging the hat to put her in Slytherin too. Especially after being placed in the same house as Black and Potter. There hadn’t been any posh kids at her old school but they were about as obnoxious and self-obsessed as she had expected. And Potter was so gaga for Gryffindor that she was certain it would be filled with people just like him.

In the end, however, Lily had not had the guts to ask anything of the sorting hat, so she had remained in Gryffindor. And mostly that had been okay—posh bespectacled prats aside. Her roommates were nice, her classes were fun, and she did rather like not living in a dungeon. But she was also…lonely. And out of place. And uncomfortable. There were so many things that the kids around her—even if they weren’t Purebloods—seemed to know, and it felt impossible trying to keep up with it all. Severus did his best to help her along but she could tell that he was sometimes a little bit embarrassed by her. That was the worst feeling honestly.

One afternoon, at the end of September, for no reason in particular, it had all just felt too much. So she’d crawled under her bed, trying to make the world smaller. Easier to manage. About fifteen minutes into her pity party Mary had walked in. Lily watched her feet, listened to the David Bowie song she hummed under her breath. Her and Mary had barely exchanged more than a few sentences but she was secretly Lily’s favourite roommate, if only because she was the one who reminded Lily the most of home. The posters she hung on the walls were all of people Lily recognized and they didn’t move or talk, plus, sometimes she would complain about things that Lily could relate to—like missing ballpoint pens and three-ringed binders.

She’s not sure, to this day, what compelled her to speak then. Surely the smart thing to do would have been to remain silent and hope that her new roommate wouldn’t notice her having a complete and utter mental breakdown. But being quiet had never been Lily’s strong suit.

“Do you have records?” she wondered out loud.

“Ah!” Mary shouted, her feet stumbling back into her bed. “Jesus Christ, Lily? Is that you?”

“It’s just that I’ve never seen you play any but you hum them all the time,” she said in lieu of an answer.

“Where the hell are you?” Mary demanded.

“At home I have a bunch of records but my mum wouldn’t let me bring them, she didn’t know how safe it would be here and she was worried they’d get stolen, not that Wizards are dying for Muggle music but, of course, she didn’t know that. Still doesn’t know, I suppose—“

“Lily,” Mary said harshly. “Did you get turned invisible or something?”

“What? Oh,” Lily blinked. “No, I’m not invisible.”

“Then why the hell can I hear you prattling on but there’s not a single freckle in my line of vision?”

Lily scowled up at the bottom of her bed. “I don’t have that many freckles.”

“Uh-huh and the Giant Squid doesn’t have that many legs.”

“Did you just—“

“Where are you?” she was beginning to sound genuinely exasperated, but to be honest, Lily quite liked being a disembodied voice. It was freeing

“I’m under here,” she said eventually, and with great reluctance.

“Under—oh honestly,” some shuffling later Mary was kneeling on the floor and peering at Lily under the bed.

What the hell are you doing, is what Lily expected her to say. If it had been Petunia “freak” might even have been thrown in there somewhere. But the thing about Mary—the beautiful, fantastic, brilliant thing about Mary—was that she never did what you were expecting.

“I see,” is what she actually said, before sliding under the bed to lie right alongside Lily. “What’s happened then? You and your boyfriend have a fight?”

“Boyfriend?” Lily repeated confused, and then; “Oh—OH—no. Sev isn’t—we aren’t—we’re just friends.” Though her face blushed so furiously it burned.

Mary turned her head to look at Lily, brow arched. “Really? Then you two might want to stop making googly-eyes at one another all the time.”

“We don’t do that!” Lily said almost desperately.

“You do.”

“Don’t.”

“Do.”

“Don’t.”

“Do.”

“Don’t infinity.”

Mary rolled her eyes. “Whatever. So if that’s not why you’re under here, what is?”

Lily chewed on her lip, looking back up at the bottom of her bed. “I just think…I don’t know…that someone made a mistake.”

“Probably, but you’ll have to be more specific.”

At eleven Mary’s dry sense of humour was largely lost on Lily. Mary would later credit her wit to her childhood obsession with Monty Python.

“I just don’t think I’m supposed to be a witch.”

Lily didn’t have to turn her head to know that Mary was staring at her. “What do you mean “supposed to be” ? You ARE a witch?”

Lily let out a frustrated noise. “But I’m not really though, am I? I’m a Muggle.”

“That is literally not true.”

“Yes, but I know Muggle things and I like Muggle things and I don’t know anything about Wizards really. People like Marlene or Alice or, God, even James bloody Potter, those people are meant to be Wizards and Witches. It’s in their blood. It comes to them so naturally. None of this is natural to me.”

Mary continued to stare at her for long enough that Lily started to squirm. She had rather been hoping that out of everyone Mary would understand.

“Did you know that the Gryffindor Quidditch team is almost always Half-Bloods and Purebloods?” the other girl said suddenly.

Lily blinked, adjusting to this change in topic. “I—no, no I didn’t.”

Mary nodded. “And even when there are Muggle-borns they’re always seventh years, because it takes them that long to pick up the game,” her voice was determined. “Not me though, I’m gonna get it in three. I’m going to be the youngest Muggle-born Quidditch player ever on the Gryffindor team and you know why?”

Lily shook her head and Mary inched a little closer. “To piss them the fuck off.”

At that time swearing was still rather new to Lily so she actually gasped, and after several moments of shocked silence managed to stammer; “Them?”

Mary waved her hands above her as much as the bed would allow. “The powers that be, the system, the Man. The snooty Purebloods. Because I am every bit as much a Witch as they are,” her eyes locked onto Lily’s, “and so are you.”

After that they’d gone to the Great Hall and only eaten dessert for dinner and eventually Marlene had joined them and Lily had felt better and by Christmas she didn’t want to leave. But that moment under the bed, the moment her and Mary really became friends, had always stuck with her. Always made her smile a little. Made her feel better when someone in her class laughed at some bit of magic she didn’t know—something that was obvious—that little kids learned. I am every bit as much a Witch as you are, she’d think, channeling Mary as best she could. Because Mary never apologized for herself. Never felt embarrassed. Never backed down from a fight. She was unstoppable.

#Lily Evans #Mary MacDonald #jily #Marauders #jegulus #James Potter #regulus black #james x regulus #wolfstar #Remus Lupin #Sirius Black #Harry Potter #hp fanfic #choices

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hermitcraftheadcanons · 5 years ago

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Rabid Debate Club AU Masterpost:

'Random weird Au idea where it's a basic hs/uni AU but like two of them try to start a debate club, then invite some friends just so there's enough people. Cut to like, two months later, it's all the hermits just fighting over whether or not pineapple should go on pizza or not lol it isn't very good i'm sorry but ya know rabid debate club AU.' -Anon.

Some headcanons to start us off:

-The NHO are the jocks and typically get the most aggressive.

-Things don't usually get too political, it's usually just about dumb stuff that's for some reason controversial. (Ie, Pineapple on pizza, yes or no? Should we reclass 5 as an honorary even number?) sometimes they treat themselves to a little heavier topics but it's mostly about things like that.

-Cub and Joe are the founders.

-False, although physically strong, isn't as great at navigating around her words.

-Doc and Grian usually end up arguing the most.

-ImpulseSV is a science nerd and often offers scientific explanations to things. (IE, if ghosts were real, no because they behave similar to how 4th dimensional beings act so they probably aren't your dead relatives unless every time we die we move up a dimension.)

-Iskall85 is usually just there to have a good laugh and see how dumb the points get.

-iJevin typically does not back down from a point even if everyone else is against him.

-Keralis is as rich as always and the group socialists like to take jabs at him for it.

-Mumbo Jumbo is also a bit of a nerd like Impulse but he knows more about chemistry whereas Impulse knows more about physics and biology.

-Rendog only came because it said there were free biscuits to anyone who showed up.

-Stress is usually the one who bakes said biscuits.

-TFC is a teacher who sometimes joins in.

-XbCrafted is very much an animal rights activists. Impulse is a bit too but not to the extent Xb is.

-Xisumavoid is usually the one with controversial opinions, (political.) Enter: Should chicken be seasoned? No.

-Zedaph is a communist.

-Cleo was the first member to join who wasn't a founder.

-Tango usually just ends up agreeing with Impulse most of the times because he knows Impulse is smarter than him.

-Hypnotizd only joined because Xb joined.

-Welsknight is that one kid who knows way too much about history. Say for example if they were debating about 'is it actually worth having a president over a monarch' or something Wels would just be like, 'acTually, Historically---' and drop more knowledge than anyone was ready for. It gets to the point they just use him as a history-fact-checker-Google.

-Wels' main participation (aside from being Google) seems to be pointing out times when people are going in circles just restating points over and over again. He doesn't talk too much but when he does, his arguments are very strong because he's good at picking up patterns from previous debates. When people ask him how he's so good, he says "History always seems to repeat itself."

-Scar joined the club at when everyone was in the debate of, "cats or dogs?" So Scar brought Jellie to the club. After that everyone chose Jellie as the clubs mascot.

-TFC is a geography teacher- you know, cuz of all of his branch mining... and one day Joe and Cub showed up and were like “we need a teacher to start a club can u sign off” and TFC was like “k as long as u dont burn down my class...”

-For the rabid Debate club au- after Scar brought Jellie in, it became a bit of a challenge to see who could sneak their Pet or Pets in with out anyone noticing. Mumbo won, bringing both Kubo and a new member Grian. Everyone was freaking out about the big fluffy dog, no one noticed Grian sitting in a corner, kinda awkward. Which started Grians own challenge of "see how long I can go until someone notices Im here." It was several days...

-ngl this au is doing better than i thought it would when i first saw it, noice. as for hcs, cub & joe were supposed to register as an official debate team near the beginning of the year for like statewide competitions and stuff, but joe conveniently lost the paperwork after realizing the club was chaos. joe and cub do love the monstrosity they've created, but sometimes you'll find them in tfc's supply closet actually speedpresenting debate arguments they spent hours on while xb or cleo judges

same anon: yes, joe n cub wish the debate club was legit sometimes. they're very glad it ended up the way it did, and have massive fun doing they stuff they do, but like... it gets to em sometimes. every once in a while, cub gets in a Mood and ends up just hanging out the supply closet doing his homework. someone else will judge for the day. everyone just figures cub's just havin one of those days, but it's usually bc there's a debate competition happening that day that they would've gone to.

(All in red above are from our community's wonderful Anons!)

-Cub often judges the tournaments/meeting, and he absolutely never takes bribes at all ever, why would you say something like that? Anyway, his favorite kind of cake is red velvet. Just so everyone knows. :)

(-@shadeswiftdraws.)

-Debate au: tensions are high after a bake sale where the hermits debated with each other to prove their bake sale stand was the best. Things get out of control and everyone is really confrontational. All hell breaks loose when in one evening the question of ‘do you pour the milk or cereal first?’ is brought up. There has been conflicts before but this time it explodes, the hermits organize teams to defeat eachother, and thus, civil war of season 6 happens. (-@ivi-prism.) Zedaph drinks cereal with water, Python doesn't eat cereal, TFC drinks bottle/carton cereal from the box/pack. Concorp does both. (Anon adds.)

#hcraft #hermitcraftheadcanons #auheadcanon #debateclubau #masterpost #posted 14.06.20

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notbecauseofvictories · 6 years ago

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Can I ask what field your new job is in? I know you wanted to move away from law; I want to move away from the career path I've spent all the years since graduating university bolting myself to, and I just wondered how you did it/ if you did it, and what kind of sideways movements made sense for you?

For privacy reasons, I won’t talk explicitly about my new job, though you’re correct it’s not an attorney position. (I still love law but I’m not barred in Illinois and I haven’t been practicing long enough to waive in, which makes finding attorney jobs very difficult until I can retake the bar.)

I will say that if you want to move away from a particular career path, there are a couple questions I’ve found helpful to ask myself:

1.) What do I want to do when I grow up?

I am a big proponent of the game plan.

You can, of course, jump off a cliff with no parachute or idea of what waits for you at the bottom. That is a certain kind of game plan! And some people pull it off with great aplomb, I’m not knocking it. However, I am a risk-adverse, pragmatic scaredy cat, and I absolutely never start something unless I have at least a vague idea of the best- and worst-case results. So when I’m about to make a life change like “get out of terrible job, move back to Chicago” I start by figuring out—well, what the hell does that actually look like?

But before I think about what that looks like, I take a step back and ask myself a whole battery of questions:

What is my ideal, perfect-world job? What’s my title? What are the hours I work? Do I travel often, not at all, somewhere in between?

What do my dream responsibilities consist of?

How much interaction am I comfortable with—would I be happy sitting behind a desk all day, or do I want to be out among the people?

How much authority would be happy with? Do I want to be in charge, or is following orders where I’m most comfortable?

What else do I want in my life, such that I’m willing to make career tradeoffs? (e.g., do I want a family I spend lots of time with, a hobby I can devote myself to outside of the 9-to-5, a charity or start-up that I see as my real passion?)

Where do I want that perfect-world job to be? Am I happy changing cities, moving frequently, to pursue the work I want to do, or does location come first and drive what jobs I’m willing to take?

[An additional question you encounter a lot as a lawyer is: “are you okay not necessarily believing in the organization you serve? do you care whether you serve a particular mission, or are you really just here to draw a paycheck and not break laws?” but I recognize that’s a conundrum probably….unique to lawyers.]

After answering the questions above, you might realize that your exact, ideal dream job doesn’t exist—that’s fine! but a valuable first step is understanding what your priorities are, where you see yourself being happy, and what you think is important in your professional life.

2.) What steps would I very likely need to take to get there?

Even if it does exist, chances are you won’t be able to leapfrog from your current position to your exact, ideal dream job. (FYI, my current position is not my dream job or even really a stepping stone to the dream job; I made compromises based on other criteria.) So the next step is the inevitable plunge back into reality—namely, okay, so how the hell do I get to where I’m going???

If you don’t already know (which is likely, given that this isn’t your field) then this step is a knowledge-gathering endeavor. You’re trying to figure out what the path looks like, so naturally, consult other people on the path you’re interested in.

Personally, I highly encourage you utilize the absolute crap out of your network.

By which I mean: stalk facebook, LinkedIn, your school’(s) alumni pages, your parent’(s) friends, your friends’ friends, the people who work at the same place you do (even if you’ve never met them), everyone you have a mutual connection with via social media, individuals who belong to a professional association you hope to join, academics/journalists/lawyers/etc. with non-private twitters who you’ve looked up to for a long time and whose career you want to emulate, etc. If they’re nearby, invite them to a 15-20 minute coffee break. If they’re interested in mentoring, do lunch, dinner. Follow up with the professors who inspired you and email people who make news about stuff you want to work on. If you’re interested in going back to school for a degree (the clearest way to communicate a professional shift, fyi) then email the school you’re interested in and let them fete you. You’re going to be so obnoxious!!!*

* Do not be obnoxious. If you’re looking for a polite way to introduce yourself to someone you don’t know personally but hope to make a professional connection with, see me after class.

And honestly, sometimes the answer is a degree, a certification, a particular internship or a personal connection. Sometimes the answer is redrafting your resume. Sometimes the answer is “well, you’d really want to work as X or Y before I consider you for Z.” Sometimes the advice is, “sorry, we only consider graduates from this school/that internship/etc. and you aren’t so.”

You end up having to keep looking, and looking and looking. There are a lot of ways to get rejected from a job these days. There are similarly a lot of ways to get where you’re going, whether you know about them or not.

………I’d also urge you to keep in mind that all advice (all of it, even mine!) is personal. When people talk about their careers, career paths, and their strategies for attaining both, they are speaking from a deeply private place—as much as “how to know your romantic partner is The One.” It’s just a bit more prosaic in its outlook.

3.)What skills do I currently have, or can reasonable acquire in my current role, that will take me from A to X/Y/Z/or ultimately B?

Even if you could snap your fingers and go from point A (where you are) to point B (where you ideally, perfectly, want to be) chances are the you that currently, professionally exists wouldn’t be prepared for it. So as you think about transition to a stepping-stone job, or a new field, think seriously about what the hell you bring to the table and how you’ll convince that interviewer that actually, you’re perfect for the job.

It does take some creative thinking and a little bit of conniving corporate wordplay (which is fair game, as the corporations invented it first.) For example:

Have you worked as a McDonalds’ drive-thru window representative and shift manager for the past 5 years? well, congratulations, you are, right now, an expert in customer service and human capital resource management.

Are you currently a lowly typist-slash-clerk? well, mazel, because actually your specialty is in database management and particularly data cleansing, you could probably pass yourself off as an analyst if you knew a little R, python, or other programming languages.

Do you deal with disgruntled customers all day? Well done, because literally every industry will hire you, they all have angry people who call the hotline/helpline/tipline/etc. and are constantly on the lookout for humans who will not shout YOU ABSOLUTE ASSHOLE back at said disgruntled customers.

Have you been in a different industry, but are looking to transition to a similar role in a new industry? Well done, you, talk about your leadership, curiosity, and self-starter attitude. Managers love a self-starter, probably because they like to entertain visions of not having to do work.

If you feel you could attain the necessary skills in your current role, sometimes it’s just matter of talking to your current boss (depending on the boss!) Saying, “hey, I’m really interested in Z, could you put me on Z? is there any Z to be had?” is a good first step. Even just to tell the interviewer for a position with a lot of Z duties that you went to your boss saying “I want to do Z, Z is def a priority for me.”

4(ish): Keep reevaluating, based on the new information you acquire.

Going through Step #1 now, answering those questions about myself and my ideal work/workplace/job, is a completely different experience than it was in early 2018. As a recent law school graduate, all I thought about was finding the best learning experience—a year and 6 months later, having been run through the wringer of one helluva a learning experience, I can tell you that there is other stuff to think about. It’s not that my answers have changed, I would still be happy traveling, working long hours, with diverse clients. But there’s other stuff I couldn’t even conceive of then, that I realized (the hard way) was very important to me.

So don’t be afraid to revisit your answers, to keep thinking, reevaluating, considering where you are and where you want to end up.

#Anonymous #sarah gives advice #long post for ts

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superlinguo · 6 years ago

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Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Software Engineer

Like today’s interviewee, Brooke Lynne Weaver, I worked through my undergrad degree. While not everybody is lucky enough to be able to do both study and work, it can be a useful way to develop skills beyond those in the classroom. I now use my coffee making skills only for self-caffeination, but cafe life taught me a lot about task prioritising and staying upbeat under pressure. Brooke used her work experience to move into Software Engineering, and uses her linguistics in her approach to her work, and her everyday life. Brooke is also on Twitter (@Milayou).

What did you study at university?

My degree is in English Language (Linguistics with an emphasis on the English language) from Brigham Young University in Utah, U.S.A. Basically, when we covered morphology, syntax, phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics etc. it mostly focused on those applications in English, with some examples and work from other world languages. I also took a couple computer science classes and worked as a web developer while in school.

What is your job?

I'm a software engineer. Right now my job title is Platform Engineer, and at my last job it was Platform Architecture Engineer. I write code based on the needs of my company, which generally involves understanding the task you need the computer to perform autonomously, and doing a bunch of Googling to remind yourself (or learn) how to tell it to do that. You run the code, look for certain things to happen, tweak the code, run it again, look for different results, tweak it again, run it again etc. The ask from the company is generally as specific as humans tend to be, which is not nearly as specific as machines tend to be; you have to be on the lookout for instructions that should be given that were never expressly asked for by the company in order for everything to run smoothly. Our stack is mostly written in Python 2.7 but we're moving to Go, and the project I just finished up has parts written in both. It's really satisfying when you've finally communicated your message properly to the machine and it behaves accordingly.

I work for Vivint.SmartHome right now, doing home automation. I help the Vivint centralized system interact with peoples' homes and phones all over North America. When someone pulls up their Vivint app on their phone, it requests data from our platform. When they want to make changes to their smart home system, it interacts with our platform. Recently I've been helping migrate our Nest integration from using the (now deprecated) Works With Nest API to the new Google Home/Assistant API (a transition Google recently made public).

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

I like to tell myself I went into translation, just between human and machine languages rather than from one human language to another. The things I learned studying linguistics help me in less obvious ways.

Knowing how flexible semantics is and how language changes so much across time and space, I feel like I'm a much better communicator than I was when I first started college. I'm a lot more flexible in interpretations and I care a lot more about getting to the root of what a person is trying to communicate, rather than what words they chose and what those words mean to me specifically. Communication is a pretty important part of writing software, because you're almost always trying to realize the ideas of other people. Knowing how to be confident you're on the same page as the people requesting your work is critical.

Linguistics also gave me a much better understanding for how important context is. I leave comments everywhere it makes sense to in order to help future engineers understand why I did certain things, which puts them in a better position to understand what to change down the line. It's very common to come across some code written a few years back that seems to make no sense at all (or seems like a bad way to do something), and if someone left a comment explaining why they wrote it that way at that time, you can better decide whether to leave it or in what ways to change it. The comment might say "Here's the current state of affairs and we need to do this weird thing to avoid this problem" and now, several years later, that problem is irrelevant or the current state of affairs has drastically changed; you might not need to do that thing in such a weird way anymore. You can then feel more confident about making your change. Or, maybe the state of affairs has not changed or the problem still exists and still needs to be avoided; you now have really important context and that weird thing might actually look logical now, or you know how to change it while still avoiding the problem it was originally trying to avoid. As an example, earlier this year I implemented a library I wasn't very familiar with in a pretty short amount of time. I left a comment explaining that if someone else was more comfortable with the library, they should feel free to rewrite it in a more idiomatic way; I explained what parts of it I wrote somewhat poorly due to lack of time and familiarity (something like "I know you should be able to do it like A, but I couldn't figure out how to get A to work so I did B instead which isn't as good but gives an acceptable result. It's not deliberately done this way for any other reason, so if you know how to do A, please change it."). A lot of times we try to change legacy code as little as possible, for fear of unknown downstream affects, because we weren't there when it was written and don't know why it was done the way it was; I hope by leaving context comments I can help future engineers feel more comfortable keeping the codebase clean and efficient.

Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I have some advice I was given that I think is valuable. I had a really hard time choosing a major field of study because I was interested in almost everything. A counselor reminded me that you can still have any hobby you like, regardless of what you study at university. I was afraid that by choosing something I was cutting myself off from other things, but that's not actually true. I still love playing the piano even though I didn't go into music, and I still love math even though I didn't go into mathematics.

Also, my university offered a lot of student jobs. These were jobs that were only allowed to be worked by students, which meant the barrier to entry was fairly low. I don't know if other universities offer student on-campus jobs, but if they do, I very much recommend them. I worked student jobs the entire time I was at school, which meant I graduated with seven years of work experience. Yes, it took me seven years to get my bachelor degree, but that work experience meant I had no trouble getting jobs after (and even before) I graduated. That said, maintaining a job while going to school is an awful lot of work and it's not the right path for everyone; everyone's situation is different, this just worked out well for me.

Any other thoughts or comments?

Besides how linguistics training helps me at work, it's made me a FAR better human. I'm a reformed pedant. I was really condescending and had a bit of a superiority complex about language when I was young. I was all about correcting and fixing people and being exasperated when people wrote or said things "wrong." Studying linguistics has given me a LOT of empathy and understanding and freed me from most of my pet peeves. My perspective on language and communication is so different now. I feel free. It's a far pleasanter experience to put your energy toward really understanding and being understood by a person than on looking down on people and discrediting their thoughts because they don't know how some dude in the 19th century wanted a part of English to work that doesn't even make sense anyway. I think a lot of unnecessary conflict comes from different groups of people having different understandings of certain words, and fighting over the definition of the word rather than over the real human issue at the heart of the debate. It would be nice if we taught language a little differently in schools, so more people could be aware of how semantic drift occurs and how different people can use the same word to mean different things, and that language change is okay and actually beautiful.

Recently:

Interview with a Product Manager

Interview with a Communications Specialist

Interview with a Learning Scientist

Interview with a Lexicographer

Interview with a Journalist

#language #linguistics #linguistics job #linguistics jobs #linguist jobs #lingjobs #careers #job #career #work

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justforbooks · 5 years ago

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Terry Jones obituary

One morning Brian Cohen, completely naked, flung open the shutters at his bedroom window to find a mob below hailing him as the Messiah. Mrs Cohen, played by Terry Jones, who has died aged 77, had something to say about that. “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy,” she told the disappointed crowd. It became a classic cinema moment.

The 1979 film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a satire about an ordinary Jewish boy mistaken for the Messiah, which Jones directed and co-wrote with his fellow Pythons Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle and Michael Palin, was banned by 39 British local authorities, and by Ireland and Norway. Jones and his chums were unrepentant: they even launched a Swedish poster campaign with the slogan: “So funny it was banned in Norway.”

As for Jones’s performance as Mandy Cohen, it united two leading facets of the funnyman’s repertoire: his fondness for female impersonation, and his passion for historical revisionism. The latter was evident not just in his work for Monty Python – in which his historian’s sensibility proved essential to the satire of Arthurian England in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), which he co-directed and co-wrote – but also in several documentaries and books in which he stood up for what he took to be the misrepresented Middle Ages.

“We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition,” he said. “We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.”

Arguably, without Jones, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-74) would not have revolutionised British TV comedy. He was key in developing the show’s distinctively trippy, stream-of-consciousness format, where each surreal set-up (the Lumberjack Song, the upper-class twit of the year show, the dead parrot, or the fish-slapping dance) flowed into the next, unpunctuated by punchlines.

For all his directorial flair, though, Jones may well be best remembered for creating such characters as Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson, Cardinal Biggles of the Spanish Inquisition, the Scottish poet Ewan McTeagle and the monstrous musician rodent beater in the mouse organ sketch who hits specially tuned mice with mallets.

Thanks to the show’s success, Jones was able to diversify into working as a writer, poet, librettist, film director, comedian, actor and historian. “I’ve been very lucky to have been able to act, write and direct and not have to choose just the one thing,” he said.

Jones was a second world war baby, born in Colwyn Bay, north Wales, and brought up by his mother, Dilys (nee Newnes), and grandmother, while his father, Alick Jones, was stationed with the RAF in India. He recalled meeting his father for the first time when he returned from war service: “Through plumes of steam at the end of the platform, he appeared – this lone figure in a forage cap and holding a kit bag. He ran over and kissed my mum, then my brother, then bent down and picked me up and planted one right on me. I’d only ever been kissed by the smooth lips of a lady up until that point, so his bristly moustache was quite disturbing.”

When he was four, the family moved to Surrey so his father could take up an appointment as a bank clerk. Terry attended primary school in Esher and the Royal Grammar school in Guildford. He studied English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and developed a lifelong interest in medieval history as a result of reading Chaucer.

At Oxford, he started the Experimental Theatre Company with his friend and contemporary Michael Rudman, performing everything from Brecht to cabaret. He also met Palin and the historian Robert Hewson, and collaborated with them on a satire on the death penalty called Hang Down Your Head and Die. It was set in a circus ring, with Jones playing the condemned man. He and Palin then worked together on the Oxford Revue, a satirical sketch show they performed at the 1964 Edinburgh festival, where he met David Frost as well as Chapman, Idle and Cleese.

After graduation, he was hired as a copywriter for Anglia Television and then taken on as a script editor at the BBC, where he worked as joke writer for BBC2’s Late Night Line-Up (1964-72). Jones and Palin became fixtures on the booming TV satire scene, writing for, among other BBC shows, The Frost Report (1966-67) and The Kathy Kirby Show (1964), as well as the ITV comedy sketch series Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967-69).

In 1967, he and Palin were invited to write and perform for Twice a Fortnight, a BBC sketch show that provided a training ground not only for a third of the Pythons (Jones and Palin), but two-thirds of the Goodies (Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie) and the co-creator of the 1980s political sitcom Yes Minister, Jonathan Lynn.

Jones and Palin wrote and starred in The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969) for LWT. Its conceit was to relate historical incidents as if TV had existed at the time. In one sketch, Samuel Pepys was a chat show host; in another, a young couple of ancient Britons looking for their first home were shown around the brand-new Stonehenge. “It’s got character, charm – and a slab in the middle,” said the estate agent.

In the same year, he became one of the six founders of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. They expected the show to be quickly decommissioned by BBC bosses. “Every episode we’d be there biting our nails hoping someone might find it funny. Right up until the middle of the second series John Cleese’s mum was still sending him job adverts for supermarket managers cut out from her local newspaper,” Jones recalled. “It was only when they started receiving sackfuls of correspondence from school kids saying they loved it that we knew we were saved.”

After Python finished its run on TV, Jones went on to direct several films with the troupe. The first, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, was, he recalled, “a disaster when we first showed it. The audiences would laugh for the first five minutes and then silence, nothing. So we re-cut it. Then we’d show it in different cities, saying, ‘We’re worried about our film, would you come and look at it?’ And as a result people would come and they’d all be terribly worried about it too, so it was a nightmare.”

He had more fun co-writing and directing two series for the BBC called Ripping Yarns (1976-79) in which Palin starred as a series of heroic characters in mock-adventure stories, among them Across the Andes by Frog, and Roger of the Raj, sending up interwar literature aimed at schoolboys.

Jones directed and starred in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which some religious groups denounced for supposedly mocking Christianity. Jones defended the film: “It wasn’t about what Christ was saying, but about the people who followed him – the ones who for the next 2,000 years would torture and kill each other because they couldn’t agree on what he was saying about peace and love.”

In 1983 he directed Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, in which he made, perhaps, his most disgusting appearance, as Mr Creosote, a ludicrously obese diner, who is served dishes while vomiting repeatedly.

During this decade Jones diversified, proving there was life after Python. In 1980, he published Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, arguing that the supposed paragon of Christian virtue could be demonstrated to be, if one studied the battles Chaucer claimed he was involved in, a typical, perhaps even vicious, mercenary. He also set out to overturn the idea of Richard II presented in the work of Shakespeare “who paints him more like sort of a weak … unmanly character”. Jones portrayed the king as a victim of spin: “There’s a possibility that Richard was actually a popular king,” he said.

He wrote children’s books, starting with The Saga of Erik the Viking (1983), which he composed originally for his son, Bill. A book of rhymes, The Curse of the Vampire’s Socks (1989), featured such characters as the Sewer Kangaroo and Moby Duck.

In 1987, he directed Personal Services, a film about the madam of a suburban brothel catering for older men, starring Julie Walters. The story was inspired by the experiences of the Streatham brothel-keeper Cynthia Payne. Jones proudly related that three of four films banned in Ireland were directed by him – The Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life and Personal Services.

Two years later, he directed Erik the Viking, a film adaptation of his book, with Tim Robbins in the title role of a young Norseman who declines to go into the family line of raping and pillaging. In 1996, he adapted Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows for the big screen, giving himself the role of Mr Toad, with Ratty and Mole played by Idle and Steve Coogan. But it was rarely screened in cinemas. “It was ruined by studio politicking between Disney and Columbia Tristar,” he said. “We made a really nice film but no one saw it. It didn’t make any money, even though it was well reviewed.”

Jones was also unfortunate with his next film project. Absolutely Anything, based on a script he wrote with the screenwriter Gavin Scott, concerned aliens coming to Earth and giving one person absolute power. Plans were scuppered when a movie with a similar premise, Bruce Almighty, starring Jim Carrey, was released in 2003. Only in 2015 did Jones manage to film Absolutely Anything, in which Simon Pegg, playing a mild-mannered schoolteacher, is given miraculous powers by a council of CGI aliens voiced by Jones and his former Monty Python colleagues. Robin Williams, in one of his last roles, voiced Pegg’s dog.

Jones made well-received history documentaries, including in 2002 The Hidden History of Egypt, The Hidden History of Rome and The Hidden History of Sex & Love, in which he examined the diets, hygiene, careers, sex lives and domestic arrangements of the ancient world, often appearing in the films as an ancient character, sometimes dressed as a woman.

In his book Who Murdered Chaucer? (2003), he wondered if the poet had been killed on behalf of King Henry IV for being politically troublesome.

He wrote for the Guardian, about the poll tax, nuclear power and the ozone layer. He became a vocal opponent of the Iraq war, and his articles on the subject were collected under the title Terry Jones’s War on the War on Terror (2004).

In his 2006 BBC series Barbarians, Jones sought to show that supposedly primitive Celts and savage Goths were nothing of the kind and that the ancient Greeks and Persians were neither as ineffectual nor as effete as the ancient Romans supposed. Best of all, he sought to demonstrate that it was not the Vandals and other north European tribes who destroyed Rome but Rome itself, thanks to the loss of its African tax base.

When Jones was asked what he would like on his tombstone, he did not want to be remembered as a Python, perhaps surprisingly, but for his writing and historical work. “Maybe a description of me as a writer of children’s books or maybe as the man who restored Richard II’s reputation. I think those are my best bits.”

In 2016, it was announced that Jones had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, a form of dementia that impairs the ability to communicate. He and his family and friends spoke about his experiences to help others living with the condition.

Jones is survived by his second wife, Anna (nee Söderström), whom he married in 2012, and their daughter, Siri; and by Bill and Sally, the children of his first marriage, to Alison Telfer, which ended in divorce.

• Terence Graham Parry Jones, writer, actor and director, born 1 February 1942; died 21 January 2020

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS

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aetherbunny · 5 years ago

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Here we go. Olympic AU stuff

This is stuff that was developed to potentially make it into the fic, that was cut out of the fic or I needed to develop it in order to write something that DID make it in lol. The fic itself is here, just in case you’re seeing this post first...

Minor characters cut from the story were Gabe’s Olympic roommate Alexander “Sandy” who was a bit of a weirdo and followed Gabe around making it hard for him to spend time with Prince.

Uriel is barely mentioned as the fencer Gabe knows and not by name. She models to better fund her fencing, and Gabe has been in front of the camera a few times himself. they met that way. She was going to be Fish’s original target until Gabe introduced her to Mikey.

The Mikey and Fish bits were unfortunately cut. I could not decide what I wanted Mikey to be like and she was really inconsistent in her characterization. So to keep her well done I had to keep her short.

Lyle (Ligur) is the the member of the Judo team FIsh references. Harry (Hastur) runs the marathon. They’ve been together one way or another for as long as anybody can remember.

ON to the childhoods, they were developed slightly, because maybe there would have been calls home or mentions of family... going to put this under the cut because it’s so much...

Dorothy “Fish” Fischer, was an only child for a while and then wound up with a younger step-brother. Other than that she had a remarkably average childhood. She realized she was a lesbian pretty early on and so did her parents quite frankly. No real issue when she finally came out. She’s known Prince since they were in high school. They were low key bad girls, skipping classes, smoking under the bleachers, the occasional fight. Ya know. Her mom had a problem with that, and made her pick an extracurricular to take up some of her time She picked swimming and the rest was history.

Elizabeth Prince is second last in a family of 7 kids. I was actually “challenged” to make up her whole family. My pre- reader called my bluff on something, and I had to. More on all of the Princes later.

Ezra Fell had a nice peaceful childhood! He’s an only child and his parents love him very much! His mom is a seamstress and his dad does woodworking. They participate in a lot of historical re-enacting events and make props and costumes for the local theater! Mr. Fell used to weight lift when he was younger and Ezra thought he’d give it a try. For the time being he still lives with them and will still do historical re-enactments! Adam and Them live near the Fell’s and occasionally show up to the historical things and ask increasingly silly questions about whatever is going on. The organizers have little patience for it but the Fell’s like the kids and keep them out of everyone else’s hair.

Anathema has a gigantic extended family. Some of them are, uh, in a mostly harmless, self contained cult? Agnes did still write that book after all but none of it is actually coming true. Her immediate family knows a lot about the “cult” but doesn’t participate. Her family is also still incredibly rich, due to some excellent investing choices. Her parents are lovely, attractive people who dote on their daughter. Anathema is also the only one of the gang competing for a country they don’t live in (full time)! Adria has dual citizenship in Puerto Rico/US so I can imagine Anathema does too. With that she chooses to compete for Puerto Rico (after qualifying of course).

Newt is very much the same. He lives with his mom, his dad was just never in the picture, but the two of them are perfectly happy. Ms. P is a grade school teacher, and the kids and parents love her. After Newt met Crowley she might as well have had a second son, and she’s perfectly happy with that.

Crowley had a pretty bad childhood. His mom died when he was very young and his dad was a piece of shit and left him to fend for himself most of the time. He became very resourceful even if it involved petty theft. He saved Newt from getting beat up (by getting beat up himself) and then they became nearly inseparable. Crowley just calls Ms. P mom, since she basically was.

If Crowley couldn’t be with the Pulsifer’s for whatever reason he was with “Auntie Tracy” or Shadwell. They broke up the fight that introduced Newt and Crowley.

Auntie Tracy is pretty much exactly her book counterpart. When she was “Busy” Crowley would go across the hall with Shadwell who only pretended to dislike him. Shadwell would never tell him but he actually knew Crowley Sr. and thought he was an asshole and it was no surprise he didn’t care about his kid. So Shadwell “begrudgingly” taught Crowley things he’d need to get by.

Both Crowley’s surrogate families knew about each other, and Mom and Auntie had a sit down about everything and worked it all out.

Crowley moved out of his house as soon as he could and moved into the apartment building with Shadwell and Tracy. The Dowlings also live in the apartment block. They’re ex-pats who moved for Mr. Dowling’s job. They’re not bad parents per-se but they could be a lot better. Their son Warlock has taken a shine to Crowley and hangs out with him sometimes. Crowley knows what it’s like to be a kid uncomfortable in his own home so he lets Warlock in whenever.

Crowley works as a mechanic when not diving, he has a pet ball python named Eden he spoils, and he’s obsessed with astronomy. He loves kids and happily volunteers for things at the school when they don’t have enough parents. He’s ambivalent about his gender and sexuality.

Gabriel Herald also had an unfortunate childhood. His dad was in the military and had every hope his son would follow in his footsteps. Gabe, and his mom were not so keen. Gabe was a gentle affectionate kid and she knew that did not make her husband happy. Mr. Herald was a short tempered, verbally abusive man and took most of it out on his wife. Mrs. Herald was a kind woman who loved her son and did everything she could to make sure he never got the brunt of his father’s temper. They moved to the UK when Gabe was young and lived off base.

However it happened they met the Fell’s and spent a lot of time there. Ezra was too young to know what was going on and Gabe never said, but the adults were well aware. The Fells gently talked Mrs. Herald into considering divorce or at the very very least therapy for everybody. Luckily she took their advice to heart. They moved back to the states before the Fell’s knew what happened.

She did get her and Gabe some therapy and was eventually able to divorce her husband. Gabe met Michelle, who was in the US with her military family, at a catholic high school. She had a fairly normal childhood with no huge tragedies. She and Gabe actually dated for just a little while before she realized she wasn’t into men. They proceeded to fake date the rest of high school so the faculty wouldn’t catch wise. Her family took a little adjusting when she came out but accepted it in the end. Gabe and Mikey have been close friends ever since.

Gabe got into boxing right about the time of his parents divorce. His therapist suggested some kind of physical activity and teenage Gabriel wanted to be able to protect his mom in the event his dad got physical…

Mrs. Herald eventually remarried a very kind man who loves her (and Gabe) very much. And Gabe couldn’t be happier. None of them are in contact with Mr. Herald any more.

There was going to be a little scene where Gabe calls home to talk to his mom. Because he’s a mamma’s boy if that wasn’t obvious lol.

Now, for the entire Prince family…I was “required” to give them all names…

Martha and David Prince are now retired and have been for a while. David was a postal carrier, Martha worked at a nursing home. They never pushed their kids to do anything, just supported what they enjoyed. They have no idea how ALL their kids wound up so successful and even with all their love and support they’re overwhelmingly serious and introverted. They’re slightly relieved their youngest is happy to be “something boring.”

Arthur has numerous paintings hanging in fine art museums. He lives on a little farm and cares for his animals in between paintings.

Katherine (Kath) is a sought after architect with her own firm. She’s the second most athletic, keeping in good shape and occasionally running marathons.

William (Will) is a heart surgeon, Martha and David live in his detached cottage.

Charles (Chuck only to his family) Is a property lawyer, and relatively laid back compared to his older siblings. He’s more introverted than serious.

Benjamin (Ben/Benny) is quite friendly and outgoing compared to his siblings. He’s a violin virtuoso and has played around the world.

Elizabeth (Lizzy ONLY to Eleanor) is a world champion archer several times over, and has multiple Olympic gold medals. She teaches lessons but her teaching style drives all but the most dedicated away. She’s not cruel or aggressive, she’s just incredibly blunt.

Eleanor (Nora) is the most bubbly and outgoing of the family. She’s in school getting her higher mathematics degree and will likely become an accountant. She and “Lizzy” are especially close. There was going to be an ongoing text conversation between the two. Nora is also pretty good friends with Fish.

Katherine, William, and Charles are married with kids. Elizabeth and Gabriel get married a few years into their relationship. Ben is in a long term relationship, but neither of them are in a hurry to get married. Arthur and Nora are single. Arthur has no desire to marry and Nora is just too busy with school to devote time to dating.

Also I know this is in the back of some of your minds, the medal breakdown!

Fish and Newt take bronze

Crowley, Gabe and Anathema get silvers

Ezra and Prince take Gold, Ezra nearly breaking a world record for his lift!

and sadly the UK women’s volleyball team does not medal at all.

#good omens tv #good omens au #good omens fanfiction

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goodticklebrain · 6 years ago

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Q&A August: Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company

They say you should never meet your heroes, but obviously “they” were never enlightened enough to consider Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company a hero. Like many Shakespeare geeks, I was exposed to Reduced Shakespeare Company’s performance of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) at an impressionable young age. Once the DVD came out, I watched it over and over again, soaking up the irreverence and affection for Shakespeare like a sponge. It never occurred to me that I would one day meet the curly-haired pompous idiot in the black pants whose antics had entertained me so much, let alone be lucky enough to call him a friend, but that’s exactly what has happened.

I first met Austin (after exchanging mutually admiring tweets with him) in April of 2016, during their world premiere of William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) at the Folger Library. I was prepared to be utterly starstruck, but Austin was so wonderfully down-to-earth that within minutes I felt like I’d known him forever. Totally lacking the pomposity and idiocy of his stage persona, Austin was overwhelmingly encouraging and supportive of my work, immediately welcoming me to play with him in the Shakespeare comedy sandbox. I had literally just started working full-time on Good Tickle Brain, so his enthusiasm meant the world to me.

I could gush about Austin for many more paragraphs, but I’m sure you’d rather hear from him, so here he is, my Comedy Fairy Godfather, in his own words!

1. Who are you? Why Shakespeare?

I’m Austin Tichenor, a playwright, director, and actor. I'm the co-artistic director of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, a three-person comic theatre troupe that reduces long serious topics into short silly comedies.

My first exposure to Shakespeare was undoubtedly in the original series of Star Trek! I read Shakespeare in high school English classes and got to see fantastic productions of Shakespeare at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco and the Berkeley Reprtory Theatre, but I didn’t get to actually WORK on Shakespeare until grad school where I both played Claudius in a production of Hamlet and reduced my first Shakespeare (it was a directorial exercise: a five minute reduction of Much Ado About Nothing). My first professional theatre job was creating plays for young people so I went to Shakespeare immediately, creating 45 minute cuttings of Much Ado, Midsummer, and The Tempest.

So the opportunity to join the RSC in 1992 and perform its signature work The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) (written by the RSC’s founders) in London’s West End for eight months combined all my theatrical loves: smart silly comedy, non-realistic theatricality, and Shakespeare — which is kinda redundant, now that I think about it

2. What moment(s) in Shakespeare always make you laugh?

My favorite moments are typically when characters make incredible discoveries about themselves, and these are usually comic. Malvolio’s “I am…happy!” Terrible actor Francis Flute fully committing to the moment on “Dead, my dove?” Benedick’s “There’s a double meaning in that.” Hamlet toying with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or telling Claudius he “shall nose” the dead Polonius as he goes upstairs. Olivia’s “Most wonderful!” when the penny drops and she realizes “Cesario” is actually Viola (and Sebastian’s twin).

3. What's a favorite Shakespearean performance anecdote?

I have two!

1) We were performing William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) for the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference — the savviest and most knowledgeable group of people I’ll probably ever perform for, ever. I was playing Richard III and limping downstage to say my first line, one of the most famous first lines in all of Shakespeare. But I was distracted because I saw there were people sitting on the sides and I didn’t want to limp too far downstage for them to see — and in my distraction I said, “Now is the moment of our...” As soon as the word was out of my mouth, I knew I’d blown the line (it’s supposed to be “Now is the winter of our discontent”) and I knew I couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t happened; not in front of that crowd, not in our style of show. So I quite audibly said, “Oh f&$# me,” and limped back offstage to come in again. This time I said the line right and emphasized the first word: “Now is the winter of our discontent!” It brought down the house and everyone asked whether I’d planned it. Sigh…no, I hadn’t.

Mya interjects: I was in the house for this performance and this moment remains one of the highlights of my theatre-going career. What Austin neglects to mention here is that Reed, who had been left alone onstage after Austin had retreated, went over to the wings as if to confer with Austin, and said, sotto voce, “No, I don’t think anybody noticed.”

2) We were performing The Complete Works on a stage that had a little runway that circled the orchestra pit. In one of the scenes, Adam Long (one of the RSC’s founding members) decided to hop over the pit, from the stage to the runway, and he ended breaking the runway floor and falling through the boards. Thankfully uninjured, and delighted that he had this opportunity, he immediately uttered the immortal words, “Don’t worry, it’s just a stage I’m going through."

4. What's one of the more unusual Shakespearean interpretations you've either seen or would like to see?

I’m glad that nowhere in here have you asked what my favorite play is. I don’t have favorite Shakespeare plays, but I do have favorite productions. Here are two:

1) The Folger Theatre at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC’s production of Love’s Labor’s Lost was delightful from start to finish: Incredibly smart, wildly funny, and wonderfully charming. The director and her team made the King’s desire for “a little academe” quite literal by re-creating the Folger Library’s handsome reading room onstage. (I wrote about this terrific production here.)

2) The Chicago Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest, co-directed by Aaron Posner and the magician Teller, turned Prospero into an actual wizard and filled the production with literal magic. (There must have been magic in Shakespeare’s original production as the First Folio has a stage direction that mentions that characters disappear by means of “a quaint device”. Teller filled his production with many quaint magic tricks and devices!) With music by Tom Waits and great comedy from its clowns, it was the most entertaining and completely realized production of The Tempest I've ever seen.

Favorite moments?

When Henry IV (Jeremy Irons) slaps his snotty son Prince Hal (Tom Hiddleston) in The Hollow Crown adaptation of Henry IV, Part 1 taking him (and the audience) by total surprise.

When Francis Flute’s (Sam Rockwell) emotions bubble to the surface unexpectedly in the ridiculous “Pyramus and Thisbe” in the film version of Midsummer.

When Juliet (Claire Danes) stirs and almost wakes up in time to prevent Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) from killing himself in Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet.

When Antigonus (Gregory Linington) distracted the Bear, dooming himself but preventing the death of Perdita, in the Goodman Theatre production of one of my least favorite plays The Winter’s Tale.

5. What's one of your favorite Shakespearean "hidden gems”?

The hidden gem of Shakespeare is actually right out in the open: He’s written incredibly theatrical plays, filled with rich and elusive characters that still fascinate us 400 years later, and even the most serious of his plays (including his Histories and especially his Tragedies) contain more comedy than is generally realized (or pulled off). Shakespeare was a showman whose livelihood depended on entertaining his audiences, so he created plays filled with music, devices, comic bits, fascinating characters, time jumps, changing perspectives, and shifting tones that are always serious (especially his Comedies) but never solemn.

(You don’t ask what my Shakespearean pet peeve but here it is: Productions that lack urgency and ignore the above, as in: Comedies that are beautiful-looking and melancholy but not funny. Histories that ignore the comic chaos that Shakespeare layers in. Tragedies that are one-note, over-the-top, and not in any way believable. Romances that equate pastoral with languid and not compelling. Argh.)

6. What passages from Shakespeare have stayed with you?

Oh so many...

Beatrice’s “Kill Claudio,” which comes seemingly out of the blue and yet is so right.

Falstaff’s honor speech, when done right, in front of a live audience.

And I find Miranda’s “O brave new world that hath such people in’t” just incredibly moving. (I’m always moved by Joy. Tragedy can suck it.)

Mya interjects: “Tragedy can suck it” might be my new personal motto now. Thanks, Austin.

7. What Shakespeare plays have changed for you?

Henry VI, Part 1. Reading it again recently, I was struck by the level of chaos Shakespeare depicts in a kingdom struggling without a ruler. It’s almost like Monty Python meets Veep: Sentences can’t get finished because people are running in and out, declaring “I’m in charge! I’m in charge!” with grand impotence. Of course Shakespeare would write it like that: He needed to entertain his audience, who were probably also nervous about their aging queen who had yet to declare a successor. Shakespeare created a chaotic warning that England shouldn’t descend into that kind of comically dangerous madness again — a warning that wasn’t really heeded, unfortunately.

8. What Shakespearean character or characters do you identify the most with?

Having played so many of them (albeit in reduced forms), that’s a tough call. But because I’m also an actor and a playwright, the ones I probably identify with the most are Shakespeare's seemingly autobiographical ones: Peter Quince, the only (I think) actor-playwright in the canon. Hamlet, the Danish prince with surprisingly strong opinions about theatre’s power and how certain speeches should be played (and how annoying comedians can be). Benedick, who struggles with his writing so comically. Suffolk, who in Henry VI, Part 1 declares, “I’ll call for pen and ink and write my mind.” And Bottom, of course, who thinks he can play anything.

Mya interjects: PETER QUINCES OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

9. Where can we find out more about you? Are there any projects/events you would like us to check out?

I’ve spent the last several years doing incredibly deep dives into Shakespeare, across many media:

My RSC partner Reed Martin and I wrote Pop-Up Shakespeare, an incredibly fun (and useful) introduction to the Bard’s life and works with beautiful, amazing, and funny illustrations by Jennie Maizels.

I contribute monthly essays about the intersection between Shakespeare and popular culture for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare & Beyond blog.

My weekly podcast (now in its 13th year) is a backstage glimpse into the life and works of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, featuring interviews with our many comedian, actor, playwright, author, director, composer, dramaturg, and artist friends and many many deep dives into matters Shakespearean.

Reed and I also wrote the definitive irreverent reference book, Reduced Shakespeare: The Complete Guide for the Attention-Impaired (abridged), which is still inexplicably in print (perhaps cuz it’s definitive).

We also wrote the stage play William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) (“An absolute resolute hoot of a bawdy comedy of errors!” Broadway World), which premiered at the Folger Theatre in 2016, has toured the US and the UK, and is available for licensing via Broadway Play Publishing.

And in November 2019, the RSC will perform the international premiere in Israel of our brand new script Hamlet’s Big Adventure (a prequel) — what would happen if Tom Stoppard wrote Muppet Babies. It’s the comedy of the Prince of Denmark!

If after reading all this, for some insane reason you still want to get in touch, come find me here on Twitter. I think Mya will agree that it’s a much more civilized and fun place than its reputation suggests.

(Back to Mya) Thanks so much to Austin for taking the time to answer my questions! If you want to HEAR us actually talking to each other check out:

Reduced Shakespeare Co. Podcast #493

Reduced Shakespeare Co. Podcast #532

Reduced Shakespeare Co. Podcast #653

Q&A August continues next week with two phenomenal women who are using Shakespeare to build the most amazing things.

#Q&A August #shakespeare #reduced shakespeare company

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fisherfurbearer · 6 years ago

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I would absolutely live to hear about Future Plans and heritage fruits! My partners and I are looking at buying a house by the end of the year and I'm so excited at the prospect of a back yard to fill with food plants and gardening and everything! So I'd love to know more about someone else's plans!!

mmMMMMMMMMMMMMMM YOU OPENED THE CAN OF WORMS THE WORMS ARE OPEN THEY ARE EVERYWHERE NOW!!!! OHHHHHHH JEEZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NOTHING CAN STOP THIS!!!!

MMMMMM. I LOVE. DOMESTIC CROPS AND ANIMALS. SO MUCH.

SPECIFICALLY “heritage” varieties. The pre-industrial/commercial varieties that people lived on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, or even the stuff younger than that, it’s just...so!! Good!!!

You didn’t QUITE ask for this but this is where I’m going with it. I LOVE. LOVE. LOVE. The HISTORY of our domesticated crops (specifically fruits and vegetables, but mostly Tree Fruits!!!! But I’m also suuuuper partial to heirloom sweet potatoes/normal potatoes even though I don’t like the taste of sweet potatoes, they’re just SO FRICKING COOL and I want to learn more about other vegetables too) and animals is just....HOOOOO!!!!

Locally adapted,, perfect little....NUGGETS that just...perfectly fit their own SPECIFIC LITTLE NICHES...no matter WHERE you live, no matter HOW much space you have, no matter HOW good or bad your soil, NO MATTER WHAT, there is ALWAYS something to grow or raise, and we can thank so, so much of that to the incredible variety of heritage crops/animals (and methods of agriculture) out there. Mild, cold, hot! Lots of space, little space, no space!! Fertile, barren!! Every condition in every color and shape and flavor and size and ahhhhhhh!!!!! AHHHH!!!!

Hold onto your butts because this is one Hell of a Mega Ramble okay, there is so much to talk about here, oh man.

Some background, which you can skip if you want...!!! It’s a LOT and it get’s VERY NEGATIVE but also VERY GOOD AND HOPEFUL, it’s a real big story and it’s My Story and gives a lot of insight into Why I’m Like This but it’s okay to skip for sure!! Anyway:

I’ve been researching (i.e. writing literally 1.5-2k+ words nearly every single day) for literally 7 years now about all of my various Passions and Plans in life. Obviously breaks were taken due to Sad Times but no matter what I did, no matter what happened, I’d always come back to my dumb awful stupid notes. I have notes on my current laptop, my old harddrive, my SO’s laptop, my stepdad’s laptop, my SO’s OLD gaming laptop, my old netbook, my OLD OLD netbook, every phone I’ve had in the past 7 years (which has been like uhh...five? I have bad luck with phones..) and COUNTLESS pieces of paper and cheap composition books.

To call it research, it seems to silly. Writing these words here, to you strangers on the internet, I CANNOT EXPRESS TO YOU how VITAL these notes are to my VERY EXISTANCE.

I have been researching and writing and talking to folks and asking questions and LIVING AND BREATHING this stuff for LITERALLY, LITERALLY HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS if not ALMOST A THOUSAND OR MORE HOURS at this point!!!! If we were to actually SOMEHOW backtrack all the way to late 8th grade/freshman year when I first started dipping my toes into reptiles and fell in love with my first jumping spider that landed on my arm after I read Darren Shan’s Cirque Du Freak, after being so fascinated by the intelligent giant magic tarantula in the first book, and gathered ALL of my notes from then to NOW (I’m 21 now, if I was in college, I’d be graduating next May) it would EASILY surpass that. For YEARS in high school my family thought I was always playing games on my laptop, but really from the moment I got home to the moment I went to bed, I was watching lets plays with one side of the screen and reading, reading, reading, and writing, writing, writing with the other. For HOURS. Every. Single. Day.

Hell, this has been my most recent “Renaissance” of writing, after The Big Realization of earlier this year (I’ll get to that), and this is AFTER I went on a horrible depressed/manic rampage and deleted like 80% of my notes (that would have been from...hmm. This is what I didn’t delete, what Jessie recovered, and what I’ve added...so March to Early September, when Jessie switched my notes to a new program (I lost a lot of notes from lack of autosaving so now they’re on our nextcloud so I can’t lose them...but I’m too stubborn to use it still) and this is still like. A lot.

Keep in mind the average 10-11 kb file is 1500-1700 words for me. My biggest files (only of the ones I still have, on this laptop) are 40-60 kb. (Also these are Big Secrets that I don’t ever show anyone but Jessie, who I’ve been with now for almost 7 years, so this is pretty dang important to me and a big thing to be revealing.)

Current folder I’m usually saving to:

Nextcloud I don’t bother to use usually but probably should use:

Again, this is ONLY on my newest laptop, and this DOESN’T include the files I deleted a few months ago, nor the files I lost from February-early April after Jessie updated my computer and wiped my files, and I still have a BUTTLOAD left on my old harddrive from last year, but we never moved it up and I don’t feel a need to. (I’ve learned so much. So. Much. In the past year. I think I’ve matured a lot and really become more...Me. But I’ll get to that.)

Also doesn’t include the SEVERAL notebooks I’ve filled front to back this year (cheap $0.50 ones from work...I’ve blown through a couple biggish ones and I think 2-3 little quarter-size memo books) and all the receipt papers I have crammed into my work uniform...

But anyway why is this important? It really helps iron in just how HUGE this is to me. My future “Plans” aren’t just...it’s really important to me. Okay? I am but a humble stranger on the internet and my life and everyone elses’ respective lives are infinitely more complex than we can ever dare imagine one anothers’ existences to be, but just trust me when I say that I’m not pulling this from nowhere, this shit isn’t some sort of “fad” to me, this has been a long, long series of events and realizations and heartbreaks and so, so much pain that have finally led to everything kinda falling into place sometime this year where it hit me.

You see...all of my research topics followed a pattern. It went, in my rough memory, something like this.

It started with reptiles. Lots of reptiles. So many reptiles. I was so naive and young then and my sources sucked and I was very much a novice who dreamed of owning all sorts of cool reptiles when I got older, and of getting a gecko when I went to college. That was how it started and it went downhill from there. I branched off into gardening (I wanted and still want a blue tongue skink and had thoughts about how I’d grow a garden for vegetables and squashes and stuff for the skink and feeder insects) and THAT grew into this whole THING about raised bed gardening, square foot gardening, then into permaculture, which planted the seed for many things to come...and now I’ve ALWAYS LOVED BIRDS,, but when I learned that keeping CHICKENS was a thing (thank you Jennifer (Nambroth)!!!!!!!!!! Our emails back and forth are still saved forever, our talks about chickens changed my life and way of thinking Forever!!!) and I researched that, then I’d jump back to reptiles again, and back to chickens, then more reptiles, then chickens and QUAIL, or OTHER poultry,, and so on and so on. This beautiful fluid branching path that would always rebound on itself and I’d drop some topics, gain new ones, revisit old ones, learn what I liked, what I didn’t like, what were brief interests, and what were there to stay.

Some topics (chickens, new caledonian geckos, antaresia pythons, tarantulas, gardening...) would always come back. No matter what I did...they came back. As I grew as a person, I started to figure out what was important to me (CONSERVATION, animal welfare, reptile/invertebrate enrichment, vivarium design, combining art with animals, and did I mention CONSERVATION? and combating climate change/The World but that came later.) and while some of those points didn’t show up in my research until later...like my obsession with native wildlife/plants and domestic species...it never went away.

And as I grew older, outside of my research life went on, and I really went through A Lot in these seven years. Undiagnosed anxiety/depression all through high school, practically living in the guidance office junior/senior year, dealing with an emotionally abusive and animal abuser teacher for many years, living with my emotionally abusive/narcissistic mother, and eventually going to an amazing art college and having both the best and worst time of my life (Hahah!! Almost straight As and skipped a writing class with my amazing scores and was top of my class, Dean’s list first semester, in the Visionary Women’s Honors society, worked in the admissions office and did lots of cool things, but hahaha also really wanted to die and was Destroying Myself) and trying to get help while keeping it a secret from my mom...lo and behold of course she eventually found out about the Depression when I had to go inpatient near the end of my second semester, and she. HA, I can’t even cry about this anymore. She literally disowned me (took all my money, sold my car, cut me off of health insurance, made me pay my own hospital bills, refused to do my FAFSA for college anymore, dropped all support, and later when I had to come home because I relapsed again and the college made me go on a medical leave of absense, she threatened to kick me out and call the police [hilariously enough though the house was owned by my stepdad, not her, so she couldn’t do anything. Also I never did anything to her and she was just crazy and made up excuses. But yeah not fun trying to walk to work and being threatened over the phone that she was going to have me dragged out of work by the cops and not to come home, hahaha!!!!!! But then also when I did live with my neighbor for a few days she was apparently so distraught?? Haha what a weird person!!!! I haven’t seen her for three years now and it’s been the best thing that ever happened to me. Don’t mourn for me, it’s SO Much better now. Speaking of, she was a PETA-hugging ARA nutjob and if she knew what I was planning on doing she would’ve disowned me either way!!!!!!), and of course fighting to be able to move out and rent an apartment with my SO (I hate the word boyfriend. It’s been 7 years come January 11th, and we’ve been through so fucking much. And she [my mom...] and other people always made fun of him being my BOYFRIEND that that word is tainted for me...so Significant Other it is) and then being forced to live alone there for a couple months,, and then even after that, the fights with his family, the car accident in November, my mom ruining all chances of me going to college (keep in mind I had after leaving college, spent the next TWO AND A HALF FUCKING YEARS OF MY LIFE trying to make it so I COULD go back, spent all of my time, energy, hope, eVERY OUNCE OF MY BEING trying to do so,,, and she manipulated me and then lied to me and made it so I couldn’t), my rebounding depression, my Intensifying Aggression (terrifying. Developed when I was in college...I guess it’s some kind of rapid bipolar disorder, maybe triggered by me going on antidepressants in college, they said. But it was so long ago and they never knew the full story for a proper diagnosis anyway. But it’s gotten manageable and We’re Coping), the housefire on Christmas, moving Once Again to the new place and being told I can’t bring my 15 year old cat (he’s with my stepdad still now but it’s not okay.), the rats have to be in the basement, and oh yeah if you want to attend college again loans will be nearly 13% interest hahaha!!! and then finally just straight up breaking down in February and not leaving bed for DAYS and nearly committing suicide, just the real worst time ever, and my former therapist/psychiatrist place weren’t responding (turns out they discharged me!! haha kinda hard to make appointments WHEN YOU DON’T PICK UP THE PHONE and we DIDN’T GET THE NOTICE IN THE MAIL because our HOUSE WAS CONDEMNED and my mail was being sent to my STEPDADS an hour away!!!!!!!! Also really hard to talk to you when you BLOCK OUR FUCKING NUMBER and HANG UP ever time we fucking call haha!!!!!! Literally on the verge of suicide and not on my anxiety meds for MONTHS but hey sure that works too guys!!!!) which really didn’t help, and yeah it was really just the pits! Just the absolute pits, the Very Worst.

Now at this point I don’t remember exactly when/what changed, but SOMETHING did.

Leading up to February, I wanna say it was about October that I started getting kinda weirdly depressed, and I started REALLY tanking after the fire. After the fire, I had to move back to my stepdads within the night, and had to live without Jessie again and commute really far and keep the tarantulas a secret and in general be very alone and very sad. I started wearing down and it was getting so hard to just...enjoy. Anything. Even just taking care of the pets became difficult, and doing art or researching was impossible. I just...didn’t care anymore. I stopped caring.

On top of that, my climate grief and general feelings of Despair were at an all time high, and I just didn’t. Fucking. CARE. What happened next.

I spent YEARS of my life WEARING MYSELF TO THE BONE trying to get into college, the get back into college, to just try to do this thing that I was supposed to do, my ONE hope of having a career and a future that I probably wouldn’t even be happy with (I was an illustration major. I liked drawing. It’s what I was best at. But looking back, I wouldn’t have been happy doing it for a living. And Moore [no that’s not what my blog is named for, it just also happens to be my last name] was a great college but it just...wasn’t worth $30k a year with no cosigner for loans, even AFTER my scholarships) and my body and mind were wearing down and no matter what I did I didn’t care about myself, my animals, my partner, my life, nothing. I can’t explain how terrifying that is. Of all the time in my life, I think this was the worst. On top of my life problems, it must be said again that my climate grief and Misery regarding the state of our country and the world was also at an all-time-high, and I just felt...POWERLESS. Powerless and empty and uncaring and dead inside. I really wanted to just...drive off a bridge or eat a ton of pills (which I did do a couple times, don’t do that. Please. It’s NOT worth it.) and just stop Existing.

But then something just...changed.

I don’t know what it was, exactly. But I got SOMETHING back. SOMETHING “clicked”.

I’m crying a bit now. It’s so stupid to say, but I truly believe this is what saved my life. Realizing my purpose in life. That everything fell into place and finally made sense.

I’m going to be a bit more concise here but...basically...many of my passions and smaller aspects of myself all fell into place, so PERFECTLY.

It hit me that...ah jeez.

I will digress one more second. For those of you who don’t know, I have two Eurydactylodes geckos, named Vladimir (E. vieiliardi) and Estragon (E. agricolae). They are named for my favorite drama that we read in AP English, Waiting for Godot. It’s an aburdist theater play about two men who wait under a tree for someone (we don’t know who, just that his name is Godot) and that’s about it. Everyone had a lot of different things to say about that weird little book, but my take on it was that it’s supposed to be what happens to two men when they lack a “purpose” in life. Existentialism, and all that. They sit there and sit there and completely lose themselves just WAITING for this guy that they don’t even remember, they don’t even know why they’re there, and they do nothing to try and change that. The difference between existentialism and absurdism, however, is that absurdism specifically discusses this idea of a Chaotic Universe, this Lack of Meaning, this pointless quest of humanity to seek value and meaning in a universe without reason. It’s a fruitless effort, it’s Absurd! But the beauty of absurdism, this tiny idea that stayed with me in the goofy names of my geckos (I chose the names because I thought the play was amusing and I loved the characters’ relationship, which is Quite Gay and so Loving and Charming it warms my heart, and I loved that they called each other “Didi” and “Gogo”) and really held true to my own life. I DO NOT believe that THIS is why this change happened for me, but it’s ironic, no?

Back to Absurdism, Absurdism says... “here is this meaningless, Chaotic, RIDICULOUS universe. There is NO reason for ANYTHING, there NEVER will be, you DO NOT MATTER, you DO NOT HAVE A PLACE HERE. There is NO POINT to anything. So fuck it, and try to find one anyway.”

My original therapist did not understand why I found this so wonderful and inspiring. It’s so rebellious and selfish, I LOVE IT. To embrace the Absurd is to take the bull by the horns and flip it upside down! It’s to stare all of this dreadful pointlessness in the Void, and when it says “Why bother? Why care about these insignificant invertebrates? These ridiculous reptiles? These ABSURD apples???” and flip the bird both hands and say “BECAUSE I WANT TO, BECAUSE I SAID SO, BECAUSE I AM HUMAN, AND I CAN!!!” It’s...also more than that, it’s this long, defiant lifelong journey, this stupid, ridiculous journey of fumbling about trying to find one’s place in a cruel, vast world, and finding oneself in that journey.

I love people. I love the ABSURDITY of humanity, of people, of myself, of others. A Huge part of my Future Plans has to do with People, and Community, and Changing my little patch of the world. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but I know it can make a difference to someone and myself and that’s what matters.

Anyway back to the Clickening.

Around that time I had a moment like that. It was as if something in my mind was screaming at me, listen. You are here, and you have always been here to love animals, to love life, to make art, to tell stories with your art, to raise little sheeps.

And like that, it started Something.

I agreed to go to a local doctor, and was put on antidepressants. I’ve been on them since late February. I also got accommodations for work, so I have two excused absenses due to mental illness each month, which was good, because they tried to fire me 4 times now and they haven’t succeeded yet. (I’m DAMN GOOD at what I do, I’m just Sad and Unlucky and Dumb, but I’m doing a lot better now!!) I started taking all of the things I learned in the past many years and what I’ve learned about myself as a person (I won’t talk about it here but I’ve always struggled with my Identity [not gender wise, just...with my mental health and my mood disorder, it’s really hard to know What is ME and What’s The Illness) and it all started falling into place. My needle felting, my love for animals, conserving native wildlife AND heritage breeds with restoration grazing and positive impact forestry, utilizing my Overwhelming Charisma (in person I swear I’m quite a good talker! Way better than my typing here!) for education, outreach, and farmers market sales, my love for life and my fellow human beings and my plans to work hard to help feed my local communities and encourage sustainable agriculture and the dismantlemant of capitalism Love of our native wilds and backyards alike (I also have Big Thoughts about getting native peoples input as well, but I need to research that more and actually talk to people, but that would be in future years!!), and so, so many things!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That started in late February/early March now, and since then I’ve still had Really bad times, but I’d say in the past mmmmm...probably since late July? I think yeah since about then things have really taken great turns. I’ve Matured a lot, really embraced who I am and what I want to do, and while I KNOW my plans are going to keep changing over time (tentative goal is to look for/buy our property in 2025!! That gives us 5 years post-graduation to settle down and see how things go, where Jessie will be working, where we’ll be living, how my mind changes, all of that!!) but I KNOW in my BONES in my SOUL that this is what I have always been meant to do. To raise things, grow things, and to Care.

ANYWAY WOW HAHAHA YOU SURE DIDN’T ASK FOR ALL THAT BUT THERE YA GO THERE’S THE BACKSTORY, THE FIRST HALF OF THE WORMS!!!!!!

TL;DR: I’m a sad sap who is now slightly less sad and has Big Plans that were 7 years+ in the making and I want to take all my Big Thoughts about exotic welfare (well, reptiles and spiders mostly, but sure) and also apply it to DOMESTIC welfare and Make a Dang Difference!!!!

Okay now I’ve become very burnt out, I’ve been writing for like two hours now? So this part will sadly be shorter, but I will definitely write more about it again if you or anyone else has questions or actually wants to hear about it.

Basically...the amount of These Plans that I am willing to let you folks know, is uhh...oh jeez where do I even begin, haha...

Well it started small plans (early years of research, when I used to think a small greenhouse was Super Wild and Crazy) but nah bruh we goin’ full hog, literally. My plans are to get a decent sized property, still in my state, and have a HUGE focus on Sustainability and Positive Grazing/Management! That means rotational grazing to IMPROVE soils!!! Thinning the woodlot and clearing brush for the HEALTH of the forest!!! Reintroducing blight-resistant american chestnuts to restore our forests and support a healthy wildlife population!!!! Using both honeybees AND cultivated native bees [did you know that’s a thing???? You can buy native bee cocoons, like raised humanely, and raise them for pollinating plants!! Like Orchards!!] and grazing pastured pigs and chickens under orchard trees, while also providing BUTTLOADS of native flowers and domestic tree blossoms for native pollinators!! All that great stuff.

My biggest focuses would be raising practical heritage livestock for sustainable agriculture and conserving heritage fruit trees, with a focus on apples and pears. I also want to grow a lot of mutually beneficial/low-impact perennial resources...think honey, maple syrup, nut trees, stuff like that! And I want to graze on pastures with native grasses and locality-specific wildflowers (check out Ernst Seeds, especially if you live in/near PA like I do!! Wow it’s so frickin’ cool) and focus on northern european short-tailed sheep (finnsheep, gotland, icelandic, leader, shetland, and soay) and small landrace American hogs (american guinea hog, ossabaw island hog) and the more recent but so full of potential idaho pasture pig. I also want to raise icelandic landrace chickens for utility (parasite/pest management, composting), conservation, and eggs. I also want to raise rabbits (silver fox crosses for meat, and french angora crosses for fiber! I have a dream of producing high quality tri color angora for spinners...three colors on one animal, and I want them to be especially great for fiber artists who want to raise their own fiber animals but don’t have a ton of space) and I have BIG orchard plans...SO MANY ORCHARD PLANS, HHHHHOOO YES....SO GOOD...also COPPICE WITH STANDARDS and FORESTRY and HOO YES!!!!! I LOVE SOME GOOD OL FORESTRY!!!

I think the best way to describe my current plans standings is that it seperates into a couple different “zones”, for my Current Ideas. This has taken months and so many countless hours of thinking, researching, and ironing out, and I’ve made so much headway in just this past week, but basically imagine this...

It’s mostly split into two pastures, the orchard, and the woodlot.

PASTURE 1

Pasture 1 would be the largest, where we would rotationally graze two primary groups of ruminants. Polled NES-T sheep (finnsheep/gotland) and horned sheep (icelandic/leader) with dairy cows (dutch belted) as well. Dutch belted for milk and specifically cheese production, and they would be grazed in front with the icelandics to help take care of the taller grasses that the sheep would avoid, and help keep the sheep a bit safer. All would be guarded by livestock guardian dogs. Group #1 of the icelandic chickens would be grazed behind them, to help break up manure and disrupt parasite cycles.

Pasture itself would be mostly a big bluestem/little bluestem/indian grass/switchgrass mix, with a good variety of livestock-safe wildflowers (small portion being nitrogen-fixers like tick trefoils and pasture pea) and seed-producing flowers for birds (wild birds and our birds!). Would be rotationally grazed 1-2 days at a time (avg. 3-4 days total) with a 21-35+ day rest period. Polled NES-T sheep would be moved to “silvopasture” (copse with standards, a portion of the woodlot, with coppiced trees for fuelwood/timber interspersed with standard-sized mast producting trees [would double as nut and persimmon orchard, and hog foraging in fall/winter!!!]) in the summer to help them deal with the heat. Summer would be the best time, as it’s after the spring predator pressure and before the acorns fall, which could be bad for them if they ingest too many. Rams and hogs would otherwise graze this land with much longer rest periods otherwise (more like 30-45 days or so).

PASTURE 2

Smaller pasture with similar planting, arranged ‘paddock paradise’ style for a small group of icelandic horses (SO GOOD, and useful!! Little horse hooves are much kinder to the forest than a UTV, and herding on horseback is less stressful for the livestock) and rotationally grazed shetland and soay sheep. Pretty simple, but important. Would also contain Icelandic chicken group #2.

ORCHARD

Worthy of a novel all on it’s own. I want to grow semi-dwarf heritage fruit trees with the fruit drop type synced to the rotation of pastured hogs (idaho pasture pig, american guinea hog, ossabaw island hog) and group #3 of icelandic chickens. Hogs would be in orchard spring-fall, and in the copse with standards fall-early winter. Hogs and chickens would be moved to a holding area during rainy times to help preserve the orchard floor and during winter, where we would also have a large waste management/composting set up for them to root and turn to their hearts content. Should be a lot warmer than the outside in the winter too, and I plan on it being in a high tunnel/hoop house so its covered.

I am ALL ABOUT pairing livestock with crops and encouraging multi-purpose acreage in general, so this is definitely one of my FAVORITE plans so far, and every time I revisit it, it gets better. I also want to raise BEES (honeybees, mason bees, leafcutter bees!!!) for honey and pollination. I also want to plant BUTT-TONS of native flowers and goodies for pollinators, as well as lots of seed producing plants and sunflowers for the chickens to forage for by themselves. These would be some happy livestock, for sure.

WOODLOT

Another huge part of the plan is that I want at LEAST 1/3-1/2 of the property to be Woods. Only a small fraction of the Woods would be managed for livestock foraging and more frequent harvesting (still looking at a good 7-10 year coppice cycle though for trees) and the rest would still be tended to, with the help of the local forestry folks, but it would be preserved for wildlife and low-impact timber and nut/fruit/sap collection.

The VAST MAJORITY of the farm would be multi-purpose acreage for both livestock AND wildlife benefit (and people too of course) and I truly, truly believe and KNOW it can be done. In fact it HAS been done, IS being done, in so many different ways by so many different people in different times, and I know that I want to be a part of it and I can make a difference and use my weird passions for Good and make a dang difference.

Ohhh jeez I’m real sorry I didn’t quite answer your question though but I hope this gives a little insight into what I mean?? And if anyone has Specific questions after reading this (if you make it to the bottom, bless your cotton socks, I’m so proud and also distressed) I can definitely answer them a bit better than this. And hopefully much less...whatever this is, haha!!

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blubberquark · 6 years ago

Text

Seven Types of Game Devs And The Games They Make

The Computer Science Student

The computer science student had to write a game for class in the fourth semester. The game must demonstrate OOP design and programming concepts, and solid grasp of C++.

This game is written not to be fun to play, but to demonstrate your skill to the professors - or to their poor assistants who have to read the code and grade the accompanying term paper. The core loop of the game is usually quite simple, but there are many loosely connected mechanics in there that barely don’t really fit. For example, whatever the core gameplay is, there could be birds in the sky doing some kind of AI swarm behaviour, there could be physics-enabled rocks on the floor, there could be a complicated level and unit editor with a custom XML-based format, and all kinds of weird shaders and particle effects.

And with all this tech infrastructure and OOP, there are just two types of enemies. That’s just barely enough to show you understand how inheritance works in C++.

The core gameplay is usually bad. Un-ergonomic controls, unresponsive game feel, flashy yet impractical 3D GUI widgets make it hard to play - but not actually difficult to beat, just unpleasant. The colours are washed-out, and everything moves a bit too slow. There is no overarching design, the moment-to-moment gameplay is not engaging, and the goal feels like an afterthought.

But that’s ok. It is to be expected. The professors are CS professors. They (or rather their assistants) don’t grade the game based on whether the units are balanced, whether the graphics are legible, or whether the game is any fun at all. They grade on understanding and correctly applying what you learned in class, documentation, integration of third-party libraries or given base code, and correct implementation of an algorithm based on a textbook.

The CS student usually writes a tower defense game, a platformer, or a SHMUP. After writing two or three games like this, he usually graduates without ever having gotten better at game design.

The After-Hours Developer

The after hours programmer has a day job doing backend business logic stuff for a B2B company you never heard of.

This kind of game is a labour of love.Screenshots might not look impressive at first glance. There is a lot going on, and the graphics look a bit wonky. But this game is not written to demonstrate mastery of programming techniques and ability to integrate third-party content, tools and libraries. This game was made, and continues to be developed, because it is fun to program and to design.

There is a clear core loop, and it is fun and engaging. The graphics are simple and functional, but some of them are still placeholder art. This game will never be finished, thus there will always be place-holders as long as the code gets ahead of the art. There is no XML or cloud-based savegame in there just because that is the kind of thing would look impressive in a list of features.

More than features, this games focuses on content and little flourishes. This game has dozens of skills, enemies, weapons, crafting recipes, biomes, and quests. NPCs and enemies interact with each other. There is a day-night cycle and a progression system.

While the CS student game is about showing off as many tech/code features as possible, this kind of programmer game is about showing off content and game design elements and having fun adding all this stuff to the game.

This game will be finished when the dev gets bored with adding new stuff. Only then, he’ll plan to add a beginning and an ending to the game within the next six months, and go over the art to make it look coherent. The six months turn into two years.

The after-hours developer often makes RPGs, metroidvanias, or rogue-like games. These genres have a set of core mechanics (e.g. combat, loot, experience, jumping) and opportunity for a bunch of mechanics built around the core (e.g. pets, crafting, conversation trees, quest-giving NPCs, achievements, shops/trading, inventory management, collecting trinkets, skill trees, or combo attacks).

The First-Time Game Jammer

The first-time game jammer wants to make his first game for an upcoming game jam. He knows many languages, but he does a lot of machine learning with torch7 for his day job, so he has decided to use LÖVE2D or pico-8 to make a simple game.

This guy has no training in digital art, game design, or game feel. But the he has a working knowledge of high-school maths, physics, and logic. So he can write his own physics engine, but doesn’t know about animation or cartoon physics. He doesn’t waste time writing a physics engine though. He just puts graphics on the screen. These graphics are abstract and drawn in mspaint. The numbers behind everything are in plain sight. Actions are either triggered by clicking on extradiegetic buttons or by bumping into things.

The resulting game is often not very kinetic or action-oriented. In this case, it often has a modal/stateful UI, or a turn-based economy. If it is action-oriented, it could be a simple platformer based around one core mechanic and not many variations on it. Maybe it’s a novel twist on Pong or Tetris.

The first-time game jammer successfully finished his first game jam by already knowing how to program in Lua, copying a proven game genre and not bothering to learn any new tools during the limited jamming time. Instead, he wrote the code to create every level by hand, in separate .lua files, using GNU EMACS.

The Solo Graphic Designer

The graphic designer has a skill set and approach opposite to those of the two programmers described above. He is about as good at writing code as the programmer is at drawing images in mspaint. The graphic designer knows all about the principles of animation, but has no idea how to code a simple loop to simulate how a tennis ball falls down and bounces off walls or the ground. He used to work in a team with coders, but this time he wants to make his own game based on his own creative vision.

The graphic designer knows all about animation tools, 3D modelling, composition. He has a graphic tablet and he can draw. He knows all about light and shade and gestalt psychology, but he can’t write a shader to save his life.

Naturally, the graphic designer plays to his strengths and uses a game engine with an IDE and a visual level editor, like Unity3D, Construct, or GameMaker.

The graphic designer makes a successful game by doing the opposite of what the coder does, because he does it well. The screenshots look good, and his game gets shared on Twitter. He struggles writing the code to aim a projectile at the cursor in a twin-stick shooter, but we live in a world of Asset Stores and StackOverflow.

The resulting game is a genre-mixing thingy full of set pieces, cut scenes, and visual-novel-style conversations. The actual gameplay is walking around and finding keys for locks, but it’s cleverly recontextualised with a #deep theme and boy does it look pretty.

The Engine Coder

The engine coder is like the CS student on steroids. He has nothing to prove. He knows his C++. He lives in a shack in Alaska, and pushes code to GitHub over a satellite connection. He also knows his Lua, C#, Python, and Haskell. The engine coder writes a physics engine, particle system, dialogue engine, planning-based mob AI, savegame system, a network layer and GUI widget library.

He has written five simple demos for the engine: A first-person walking simulator, a third-person platformer, a very pretty glowing orb swarm shader thingy, a non-interactive simulation of a flock of sheep grazing and a pack of wolves occasionally coming in to cull the herd with advanced predator AI, and a game where you fly a spaceship through space.

Somebody comments in the forums that it’s hard to even write Pong or Tetris in the engine. The Engine Coder is more concerned with optimising batched rendering and automatically switching LoD in the BSP tree so you can land on planets in space without loading screens.

The Overeager Schoolboy

The schoolboy has an idea for a game. He saves his money to buy Game Maker (or RPG Maker) and tells his all friends about his amazing idea. Then he makes a post about it on tumblr. Then he makes a sideblog about the game and posts there too, tagged #game development.

Unfortunately, the schoolboy is 15, and while he is talented, he doesn’t really know how to program or draw. He’s good at math, and he can draw with a pencil. Unfortunately, he wants to learn digital art, level design, and programming all in one go. He already knows all the characters for his game, and he writes posts about each of them individually, with pencilled concept art and flavourful lore.

Even more unfortunately, our schoolboy is hazy on how big the game is actually going to be, and what core mechanic the game should be based around.

After designing sprite sheets and portraits for ten characters you could add to your party, plus the Big Bad End Boss, he realises that he has no idea how to get there, or how to make the first level. He starts over with another set of tools and engine, but he doesn’t limit his scope.

In an overdramatic post two months later, he apologises to the people who were excited to play the game when it’s done. A week later he deletes the tumblr. He never releases a playable demo. He never gets constructive feedback from game developers.

The Game Designer’s Game Designer

The game designer’s game designer is not exactly a household name, but he has done this for a while. While you have never heard of him, the people who made the games you like have. All your favourite games journalists also have. Through this connection, many concepts have trickled down into the games you play and the way your friends talk to you about games they like.

The game designer’s game designer has been going at this for a while. When he started, there was no way to learn game design, so he probably studied maths, psychology, computer science, industrial design, or music theory.

The games fall outside of genres, and not just in the sense of mixing two genres together. They are sometimes outside of established genres, or they are clearly inside the tradition of RTS, rogue-likes or clicker games, but they feel like something completely new.

The games of the game designer’s game designer are sometimes released for free, out of the blue, and sometimes commissioned for museums and multimedia art festivals. Some of them are about philosophy, but they don’t merely mention philosophical concepts, or use them to prop up a game mechanic (cloning and transporters, anyone?). They explore concepts like “the shortness of life” or “capitalism” or “being one with the world” or “unfriendly AI” through game mechanics.

But they also explore gameplay tropes like “inventory management“ or “unidentified magic items“ or “unit pathfinding“.

Sometimes bursts of multiple games are released within weeks, after years of radio silence. Should you ever meet the game designer’s game designer, you tell him that you got a lot out of the textbook he wrote, but you feel guilty that you never played one of his games. So you lie and tell him you did.

#game design #video games #game development #jokes #listicle

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occasional-darksides-doodles · 6 years ago

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Hells Cross Academy: Sanders sides AU

Hells Cross Academy is a school for the supernatural to go, whether it be demons, demigods, wolves, woodnyphs, elf's, or the undead, if your supernatural that's your one stop shop for education.

The giant castle is on the end of Hells Cross Valley, Connected to Cross Counter City. The school receives a significant amount of funding every year, and will continue to get more with the increasing halfling population.

In Hells Cross we have many classes such as potion making, magic, dark arts, science, arts, theater, computing, game design, English, Japanese, draconic, demonic, elvish, lycancy study, and may other wonderful programs.

Students from all around the globe and in the globe travel to the school for top notch education.

Our dorms are always in pristine conditions for both teachers and students to use! Dorms can hold up to 9 in a small community housing like room, as each room is about the size of a 4 bedroom apartment, and sharing is recommended by staff so the children may make friends with each other.

The communal dorm housing room has 2 bathrooms, 1 open space kitchen, 1 living area, 4 bedrooms with 2 inbuilt study areas and large walk in robes, and a storage room for those who may need it, such as witches and sorcerers.

Hells Cross Academy has a relaxed uniform policy while on school grounds, but the uniform is recommend for those who may be taking the built in train system to Cross Counter City or Hells Cross Valley.

Potion material collection is between 5-9 pm, those who wish to go at a custom time or early morning please speak with madam dragon witch, as she will accompany a small group out. Those who sneak out past curfew (half an hour past midnight) will be punished and put under house arrest.

The cafeteria is open from 4 am till 10 minutes before curfew, and custom orders are open. Please use your student allowance to buy food, and if you are having trouble please speak to some of our staff.

Your student allowance is 2000 a month, which is used for everything, from food to clothes to travel to replacing broken supplies. Students in the technology, fashion, theater, arts, music, and outer knowledge language departments shall be granted and extra 1000 if needed. Please use your allowance wisely.

If you run out of money there are many jobs you can get at Cross Counter City and you will be granted extra help for being a student at Hells Cross Academy.

If you have any remaining questions about your time here at our school please contact principal Thomas J. Sanders or Madam Draconia Wither (Dragon Witch). Thank you for your time and enjoy your education at Hells Cross Academy.

Orientation is mandatory and in 5 days (Monday).

- Principal Thomas J. Sanders & Vice principal Tallen Kat

Characters

Virgil Blackwitch

She is the so called "Princess of Hells Cross High", a genderfluid shape shifter who loves causing mischief and slacking off. She changes his gender whenever they feel like it. Child of the queen of Hell, Lucifer. There father is a shape shifter so he is a half shape shifter. He always wears his crown due to missing home, but plays it off as showing off his power. After an encounter with Roman prince (see below) Virgil tends to stay far away from him. (I'll be drawing him when he feels like a boy as well don't worry)

Age: 16

Gender: genderfluid

Sexually: questioning

Team: Aspect

Likes: friends, spiders, mischief, hot coco.

Dislikes: Prince Pain! Studying, getting in trouble or caught causing trouble.

Proficiencies: most magic (black specifically), potion making, shape shifting, witch craft.

Familiar: spider named Charles.

Weapon: grim reaper scythe (a gift from his mother).

Patton heart

Patton heart is the son of the grim reaper and is half human half reaper. He is best friends with Virgil and Logan. He puts on a nonthreatening appearance so people won't be so afraid of him. He is next in line in his family to be the grim reaper even though he doesn't want to, and is trying to make friends and enjoy life while he's here. He and Virgil have known each other since they where kids and there family is very close, they are best friends and Patton has a crush on Virgil. (normally wears a white hooded cape with a heart on the back, also he's covered in freckles but the app doesn't have a freckle option)

Age: 16

Gender: male

Sexually: panromantic ace

Team: Aspect

Likes: helping people, colorful band aids, Virgil, friends

Dislikes: mean people, accidentally hurting people, spiders

Proficiencies: hand to hand combat, black, magic, social skills, most languages, animal communication

Familiar: a cat named purrline, a little ghost who's watching over Patton (sent by his father)

Weapon: family scythe, has a needle in his backpack he also uses.

Roman prince

Roman is a celestial demi-god, his father is a half human half witch, while his mother is a celestial goddess. He came to the school on his parents request, and wants to marry Virgil, whom he believes is the person he's destined to marry from a prophecy he was told as a child. The prophecy in question was one where a heroic demi god born from the celestial goddess would join the sky's above and the depths below by defeating the evil prince born from the queen of hell with love, joining the two kingdoms in a peace treaty. He's very certain that Virgil is the one from the prophecy (and totally not because Virgil is super cute or anything nahhh). Hes very heroic and strong headed so he tends to act before thinking (ie. Proposing to Virgil in the middle of the hallway). He and the dragon witch do not get along to a point where its almost comical to watch them argue. His halo is actually a color humans and non celestial beings can't comprehend, thus it looks blue in the day and yellow at night, and it always glows. He wears his hair in a high bun (his hair goes a little past his shoulders when down).

Age: 17

Gender: bigender (agender and male)

Sexually: questioning

Team: Aspect

Likes: Virgil ♡, astrology, acting, singing, friends

Dislikes: being ignored, violence, spiders, the Dragon Witch!

Proficiencies: hand to hand combat, mele and sword fighting, white and light magic, astrology, all languages, most creative classes and skills.

Familiar: poko the pup (he changes from household pet to ferocious monster when need be)

Weapon: hero's sword (it's a regular sword he's had since he was a kid)

Logan Crofter

Logan Crofter is half woodnymph half wearwolf (part witch). his mother is a woodnymph and his father is a half-witch infected with lycanthropy. nobody knew logans father had lycanthropy, not even Logan's father, and they didn't find out until Logan's mother was already pregnant. Logan didnt show signs of lycanthropy until age 12, when he grew ears and a tail over the course of a week. he has a crush on patton. Flowers grow from his hair and tail when he's emotional. He covers the scratch marks on his cheeks with bandaids Patton gives him. He hates most magic and supernatural courses. He sticks around his roommates because there the only people he really knows. He's anti social and has autism (aspergers).

Age: 15 (3 months off becoming 16)

Gender: questioning (thinking demi boy or trigender)

Sexually: homoromantic demisexual

Team: Aspect

likes: science, astronomy, plants, reading, Patton, some potion making.

Dislikes: loud noise, weed killer, cages, full moons, magic class

Proficiencies: english, maths, computing, literacy, gardening, animal communication, animal handling, beast training, witch craft.

Familiar: none

Weapon: his claws, plant life, or offensive magic (witch craft)

Dolion Viper

Dolion Viper is the son of Dolos, his mother is a naga. He likes the others a lot. He doesn't like to mention the fact he's a demigod since he doesn't want people to be scared of him. He's not very social and sticks to the others. Most people call him Deceit since nobody but the group knows his real name. He tends to let his pet python penny rest around his shoulders when he goes out and is very rarely seen without her. He has a slight lisp when pronouncing the letter S, and gets embarrassed by it. His snake tail moves to convey how he's feeling, and he can use it like an extra arm. He has pointed elf like ears but he tends to wear a cat ear shaped beanie to hide them. He has a crush on everyone in the group and struggles to hide it, half of them know already. He wears his hair in a little pony tail.

Age: 17

Gender: gender fluid

Sexually: gay

Team: Esper (later moved to Aspect)

Likes: snakes, nature, painting, acting, friends, the others ♡

Dislikes: rude people, stereotypes, maths, cold weather

Proficiencies: animal handling, animal communication, beast training, dark arts, black magic, most creative classes and skills.

Familar: fox named Vixen, a 1'5 ft python named penny.

Weapon: multiple magical scissors, his tome.

Remy Paralax

Remy Paralax is a half alicorn sandman. He likes manipulating peoples dreams and causing mischif. he can use magic from his horn and can manipulate/sit and sleep on clouds. he doesnt like when people pull on his tail or hair (especially his ponytail) and will try to smack you. His stomach, legs (knee's down), and random patches around his body are a soft lavender. He tends to hang out in the city more then on the school grounds, and despite never going through his school allowance, works at a coffee shop called madam espresso, he gets paid in free coffee. He likes Virgil's attitude and tends to hang around him. Alot of people refer to Remy as Virgil's lacky, despite Virgil absolutely despising that term since Remy is one of his best friends. He's pretty efficient with a bat and has a nasty hit if he manages to hit you, most of the time he'll knock your head off.

Age: 17

Gender: trigender (male, female, agender)

Sexually: pan

Team: currently waiting to be assigned one

Likes: coffee, starbucks, sleeping, dreams, mischif

Dislikes: being woken up, daylight, yelling, spicy things

Proficiencies: physical combat, hand to hand combat, mele combat, baseball, white magic, weather patterns, cooking, drawing, animal handling, animal communication, beast taming.

Familiar: enchanti the giant rabbit (sent by his mother to keep him out of trouble)

Weapon: baseball bat

Emilie Pacini

Emilie Pacini is a unrestable spirit currently possesing a life sized doll. they love femmine clothing and lean more to the femminie side of the gender spectrum. Emilie isnt much of a fighter and as such only has magic to defend herself. he can posses other people with consent. He is on a waiting list to get a human body of a recently deceased, but its difficult because he's so young. He still ages (like all permanent spirits) and constantly has to modify the doll whenever he feels like she's supposed to grow, cut hair, adjust weight ect. But because of the limitations of the doll they can't be there actual weight, which tends to depress him slightly. She's training to become a nurse and knows a phenomenal amount of healing, calming, soothing, sleeping, ect. Magic, but knows very little combat magic. Absolutely hates people making fun of his appearance.

Age: 15 (16 in 1 month)

Gender: genderfluid (feels bigender male and female most of the time)

Sexuality: demisexual

Team: Esper (later moved to Aspect)

Likes: soft toys, disney, cartoons, puppets, friends

Dislikes: fire, sharp objects, salt, holy water, yelling

Proficiencies: white magic, healing magic, calming magic, music, woodwork/doll crafting, craft in general, medicine, psychology, biology, science, potion/medicine making.

Familiar: none

Weapon: none, uses magic to defend herself

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

I guarantee you'll be surprised by the consequences of the licensing deal for DOS, just as it's easier to get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be more interested in an essay about why something isn't the problem, even though you know that free with just two exclamation points has a probability of. Then when you reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, because you can, to a limited extent, simulate a closure a function that takes a number n, and returns a function that refers to variables defined in enclosing scopes by defining a class with one method and a field to replace each variable from an enclosing scope.1 The US Is Not Yet a Police State. Better Judgement Needed If the number of users and the problem is usually artificial and predetermined. There are two main kinds of error that get in the way you'd expect any subculture to be, in certain specific moments like your family, this month a fixed amount you need to simplify and clarify, and the threat to potential investors and they hope this will make it big is not simply to give them at least 20 years, and then at each point the way such a project would play out? You could do it than literally making a mark on the world.2 I'll come running.3 They make such great CEOs. First of all, for the most part they punt. For all its power, Silicon Valley is that you get discouraged when no one else at the time.

But there is also huge source of implicit tags that they ignore: the text within web links.4 It was more prestigious to be one of those things until you strike something. Both self-control and experience have this effect: to eliminate the random biases that come from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist.5 It's very common for startups to exist.6 But even in the mating dance, patents are part of the mob, stand as far away from it myself; I see it there on the page and quickly move on to the next step, whatever that is. Meanwhile the iPhone is selling better than ever. 4 million is starting to appear in the mainstream media came from. People's best friends are likely to be careful here to distinguish between them. If you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in one place for a certain percentage of your startup. There is more to be actively curious. Most CEOs delegate taste to a subordinate.7 The closest thing seemed to be synonymous with quiet, so I won't repeat it all here.

The nature of the application domain.8 Mean People Fail November 2014 It struck me recently how few of the startups we fund. Angels don't like publicity.9 That can be useful when it's a crappy version one made by a company called Y Combinator that said Y Combinator does seed funding for startups is way less than the measurement error. But there is no argument about that—at least in computational bottlenecks. And in the film industry, though producers may second-guess directors, the director controls most of what is now called VoIP, and it will take off. Instead of bubbling up from the bottom, by overpaying unions, the traditional news media, and the techniques I used may be applicable to ideas in general.10 If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. But because patent trolls don't make anything physical.11

They work well enough in everyday life.12 This site isn't lame. It's all evasion.13 A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about it, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. Spend little. Someone like Bill Gates? In the last 20 years, grown into a monstrosity. I'm not writing here about Java which I have never seen any of ITA's code, but according to one of the causes of the increase in disagreement, there's a good chance the person at the next table could help you at all. Also, startups are an all-star team. I can solve that problem by stopping entirely. Wouldn't it start to seem lame?

It would be a good idea.14 I read most things I write out loud at least once a week, cooked for the first couple generations.15 I'm not saying it's correct, incidentally, but it happens surprisingly rarely. I've learned about VC while working on it for a couple years for another company for two years. The word boss is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.16 I assumed I'd learn what in college.17 But also it will tell you to spend too much. The problem is not the one that is. Inexperienced angels often get cold feet.18

Even more important than others? File://localhost/home/patrick/Documents/programming/python projects/UlyssesRedux/corpora/unsorted/schlep. But after a while I learned the trick of speaking fast.19 Why wouldn't young professionals make lots of new things I want to reach users, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to analyze based on what a few people think in our insular little Web 2.20 Fortunately if this does happen it will take a big bite out of your round. What difference did it make if other manufacturers could offer DOS too? One of the things I had to condense the power of compound growth. Then they're mystified to find that there are degrees of coolness. It requires the kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they will always be made to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing. This bites you twice: they get less done, but they need more help because life is so precarious for them. Unless they've tried not taking board seats and found their returns are lower, they're not drifting.

Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-so is an animal.21 But it is very hard for someone who publishes online.22 Not because starting one's own company seemed too ambitious, but because it didn't look like a car spinning its wheels. It's hard for them to change. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they weren't going to wait. Wufoo seem to have any teeth, and the useful half is the payload. This is arguably a permissible tactic.

Most books on startups also seem to be joined together, but really the thesis is an optimistic one—that everyone should go and start a startup during college, but it was simpler than they thought. I do in proper essays. Because they personally liked it. Game We saw this happen so often that we made up a name for what I learned from this experiment is that if VCs are only doing it in the plainest words and you'll be free again.23 That's the worst thing about our software. Now the results seem inspired by the Scientologist principle that what's true is what's true for you. Also, the money might come in several tranches, the later ones subject to various conditions—though this is apparently more common in deals with lower-tier investors sometimes give offers with very short fuses, because they get their ideas? If you do that you raise too many expectations. There's no reason to believe there is any field in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than working on the company to become valuable, and you don't have significant success to cheer you up when things go wrong.24

Notes

That's a good nerd, just that if the statistics they use; if anything they could to help you even be tempted to do is adjust the weights till the 1920s to financing growth with the other hand, launching something small and traditional proprietors on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the recommendations. If you're doing. There were a property of the world will sooner or later.

And yet I think it's publication that makes curators and dealers use neutral-sounding language. Google and Facebook are driven by money, then you're being gratuitously troublesome. We walked with him for the next round.

People were more dependent on banks for capital for expansion.

That's not a remark about the idea upon have different time quanta. Since the remaining power of Democractic party machines, but since it was 10. The chief lit a cigarette.

Without the prospect of publication, the average Edwardian might well guess wrong.

In fact, for example I've deliberately avoided saying whether the 25 people have responded to this talk, so that you can't help associating it with the founders' salaries to the prevalence of systems of seniority. Moving large amounts of new stock. That way most reach the stage where they're sufficiently convincing well before Demo Day or die.

This form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly neutral that they're really saying is they want to learn.

This is an interesting sort of dress rehearsal for the first 40 employees, with the issues they have that glazed over look.

According to Sports Illustrated, the first duty of the anti-dilution protections.

Currently we do at least seem to understand technology because they could not process it.

Doing a rolling close usually prevents this. The liking you have to replace you. Convertible debt is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than given by other people.

Investors are fine with funding nerds. Cascading menus would also be argued that we wouldn't have the concept of the war, federal tax receipts have stayed close to the inane questions of the Fabian Society, it often means the startup will be, unchanging, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was wiser for them by the National Center for Education Statistics, the activation energy to start with consumer electronics and to run an online service. Seeming like they worked together mostly at night.

Instead of making n constant, it is. I started using it out of their due diligence tends to happen fast, like good scientists, motivated less by financial rewards than by you based on respect for their judgement. If you're sufficiently good bet, why not turn your company into one? Which explains the astonished stories one always hears about VC while working on such an interview.

Com/spam. So if you're a YC startup you can do it to colleagues. Doh.

That's the difference between good and bad measurers. I get the money, then their incentives aren't aligned with some question-begging answer like it's inappropriate, while she likes getting attention in the nature of server-based applications, and how unbelievably annoying it is. That's probably too much to hope for, but they can't teach students how to deal with the other direction Y Combinator.

The downside is that there's more of the expert they send to look you over.

If he's bad at it he'll work very hard to pick a date, because the median case.

They're motivated by examples of how hard they work. They're so selective that they won't be able to hire a lot of people like them—people who have money to spend a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this type: lies told by older siblings. But no planes crash if your goal is to make money from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p. Structurally the idea that they probably wouldn't be irrational.

They thought most programming would be to say for sure whether, e. Travel has the same investor to do it to them, but investors can get done before that. To get all that matters, just as he or she would be on demand, because universities are where a lot of startups will generally raise large amounts of our own, like a wave. So as a naturalist.

It's interesting to consider behaving the opposite. Which in turn forces Digg to respond with extreme countermeasures.

Maybe that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then being unable to raise money, you can base brand on anything with a slight disadvantage, but historical abuses are easier for us, they are bleeding cash really fast. Though in fact it may be underestimating VCs. 25. And I've never heard of many startups from Philadelphia.

For example, understanding French will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred mystery that surrounds a hot startup. Those investors probably thought they'd been pretty clever by getting such a dangerous mistake to believe that successful founders still get rich will use this technique, you'll be well on your product, just harder.

Common Lisp for, but those are probably not do this right you'd have reached after lots of back and forth. This is isomorphic to the company's PR people worked hard to get a real partner. In fact since 2 1.

I'm not saying that's all prep schools is to give them sufficient activation energy for enterprise software.

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bellanope-blog · 6 years ago

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hey all! i'm ellie and i’ll be writing my lil sad comp sci nerd, bella! i haven’t been in the rp community for... awhile... so i apologize if i'm a little rusty. also a quick disclaimer... i’m not very knowledgeable when it comes to computer science. i’m fairly decent with html but know nOTHING when it comes to java, python and anything else. but i'm going to do my best! you can read below if you wanna get to know her a little better. i LOVE plotting so plEASE im so we can get our little babs writing together! you can also like this post and i’ll message you. i'm going to start reading everyone else intro posts now. can't wait to get to know all of you!

disclaimer: bella is very very loosely based on abigail from stardew valley. TLDR:

bella grew up primarily in stardew valley. she left the city for four years during her undergrad and graduated with a comp sci degree three years ago.

she’s a programmer ( hit her up fix your printer :-) she’ll only be somewhat annoyed. ) and doesn’t have a lot of professional experience. this basically means she’s a little worker monkey for software developers.

she has depression but he refuses to acknowledge it.

she’s pretty pessimistic and definitely isn't the easiest to get along with it. 54% of the time she’s sad. 54% of the time she’s angry and about 2% of the time she’s content.

MORE INFO:

bella was born to carol & philip romana in the city.

bella’s mother and father separated when she was just five years old.

bella father is CTO ( chief of technology ) of an oil & gas company in the city and after a three year affair her mother eventually learned that her father’s business trips were actually visits to see his second family, his girlfriend and the child they now had together.

bella’s parents tried to work things out but after 6 short months bella and her mother left. they moved back in with bella’s widowed grandmother in stardew valley.

despite having an empty resume since her wedding day, bella’s mother managed to get a job at jojomarket.

rather than being educated by the local tutor, bella was home schooled online. despite being primarily raised in the valley she felt like an outsider. she hated the small town she was bound to.

despite only living an hour away, bella didn’t have much contact with her father. he was always consistent when it came to material things though and never once did he forget to send her a gift for christmas or her birthday. sadly, no card was to be found in the wrapping paper and honestly, all bella wanted to read was an “i love you” from her father.

fitting to a CTO, many of these gifts were the latest tech and this what began her deep interest in coding.

bella has always blamed her father’s leaving for the reason her personality is so sad. she hates her father. sadly, she and her father are eerily similar. though she will never know this.

when bella was eighteen years old she left stardew valley for the first time since her childhood. the reason for this departure? university.

bella attended university in the city and majored in computer science. her education was paid for by her estranged father.

in the city she lived with five roommates in a home that was meant to hold only three.

after just her first year of university, bella had planned on staying in the city. sure, living in the city was expensive even with five roommates but her naivety and greed for more than just a small town life outweighed the reality of her situation.

only a few days after celebrating the completion of her last class. her grandmother passed.

bella had known that her grandmother was sick but the death crept up on the small family and left her mother distraught. unable to handle the pain bella’s mother decided she would stay in the city for a couple weeks with a friend and bella would stay in stardew valley to look over the house. a funeral would be held once her mother was in a better place.

months went by and bella started to realize how much she enjoyed the independence of living alone. no roommates. no family. alone.

finally, a funeral was held. it was a small service and considering her grandmother was only survived by a single child and was not close with her other family members it was mainly towns people that came to say their goodbyes.

after the funeral bella’s mother told her that she would not be returning to stardew valley and gave her two choices: bella could move back to the city if she so chose or she could stay in stardew valley, rent free and they would sell her grandmothers home at a later date.

bella chose the ladder. she told herself that she would only be staying in stardew valley for a year at the most but three years have now passed and she still lives rent free in the home of her late grandmother. her four walls feel deafening lonely but the fear of failing in the city are keeping her from making the big move.

since bella was a child her mother had been her best friend. bella’s mother is currently rebuilding her life in the city and due to this has been very busy over the past few years. bella hasn’t spoken to her mother in half a year and the last time they spoke they got into a fight over cardboard boxes.

currently bella is working as a freelance programmer and building up her portfolio. she hates stardew valley. she wants more. but she can’t work up the courage to be brave and achieve it.

for work bella mainly writes codes for apps that will inventible fail and accidentally spends a lot of time helping out the other towns people with mundane tech problems.

due to bella’s shy nature and sorrow filled soul, she doesn’t have many friends and is seen as quite pessimistic when compared to others.

after the death of her grandmother and the quick departure of her mother bella has developed major depressive disorder. actually, her lack of courage to move on from stardew valley has nothing to do with courage at all. her depression has left with a lack of motivation and is also the reason she spends most of her time indoors either playing games, listening to music or studying code.

bella is anything but self aware and hasn’t realized she’s her depression is more than just her personality. it’s a mental illness. being a crestfallen individual she passes her sorrow off as just being a part of who she is.

#stardewintro #catch me only using gifs of courtney eaton smiling when i'm posting ooc #: - )

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fortunatelylovelytyrant · 6 years ago

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A Garter Snake and a Python

A/N: I have no self-control whatsoever. There are some latin-y things in here cause I’m a nerd. It’s also 1,328 words excluding this and the title.

“Have you thought about herpetology?” the academic advisor said, looking at his reflection in sunglasses. If he shifted his gaze a little, he’d be looking at her hair. It’d probably look back just taunt him, but that wasn’t the issue at hand.

“No. Isn’t that some science thing?”

“It’s the study of,” he paused, watching something twitch at her shoulder. “Snakes. I think you would be very. . .interested.”

“Sign me up then, when do classes start?” she asked, picking at her nails.

“August 17th and you have to pick your major yourself.” He replied, sliding a clipboard towards her.

“Do you have this in Greek or Latin?” he couldn’t see her eyes but knew she had glanced away from him. “I can’t, um, r—.”

“We have the last copy in Greek. You aren’t the first person to have this problem.” He interrupted, taking the clipboard back and switching documents. Save the woman and himself some embarrassment.

She slid the clipboard back a few minutes later, messing with the strap on her bag before standing up to leave.

“Welcome to the University of Phoenix, Medusa.” He said before she was fully gone.

For years her name had been spoken with contempt and fear. Academically, it had been said in sorrow out of the mouths of women who didn’t know the smell of seawater disgusted her and Athena had in some way protected her. Though she may have flourished, happy and blessed, she fell from the peak and deprived of glory because of one man.

She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of being a god any longer. Her name had been a war cry once out of the mouth of Perseus and learned two things: Athena’s shield and Hades’ helmet were fake, and Perseus was clumsy with a sword.

“How’d it go?”

Medusa jumped, unwinding as she looked at Sappho. “Why don’t you make noise?” she asked, folding her arms over her chest. “Classes start in August and—.”

“I knew you could do it,” Sappho interrupted, arms around Medusa’s neck, lips just as close even though she was a whole foot shorter. It warmed Medusa, lingering after Sappho pulled away. “We should celebrate. Hercules is going bar hopping with a few people.”

“I thought you writer types liked staying home. Can’t we just ask Dionysus for a bottle of wine and call it a day?” she asked, following her to the car.

“It’s a special occasion,”

“Meaning wine. He owns a vineyard and he owes me.”

“What for?” Sappho asked, getting in the car.

“He knows what he did.”

***

“I still can’t believe you did that,” Sappho said, wheezing as Medusa closed the door to their apartment.

Medusa shrugged, tossing her bag by the bed. “Hercules had a snake so I showed him mine. He’s got about a Brahminy,” she paused, moving her hair off her shoulder. “Maybe smaller.”

“Medusa,”

“Beau is a good boy and he meant it,” she said, holding her arm out for said boa constrictor. She was grateful to have controlled the whole snake-hair thing, but they came in handy. Such as earlier when Hercules had the nerve to harass her about her sunglasses and put his hand in her hair. So, naturally, she struck and got them kicked out of the bar.

Well, at least she got her wine. She watched as Sappho moved around the room, changed into shorts and a tank top and maybe Medusa should not have looked at Sappho for too long because they were roommates and roommates didn’t spare longing glances at each other. Or sleep in the same bed or go to the same university or oh. Oh.

“I’m gonna go get ice,” Medusa said. “For the wine.” She added, leaving the room before Sappho could reply. White wine and ice went together, right? Or was it red?

Either way, it didn’t matter because Sappho was in the next room, unbothered and most likely doing homework. Or waiting for Medusa to get back since she’s been standing at the sink under the pretense of rinsing glasses for almost fifty minutes and the water went cold already.

She gathered herself, topped both glasses off and headed back to the room. They had known each other since Sappho had got accepted into the university and now she was a junior; Medusa had never been to college before so the disparity in knowledge worried her more. She couldn’t even read English! What kind of mortal would be in love with a Gorgon anyway?

“Medusa, could you help me with this line?”

“You know I can’t read English, but I’ll,” she paused, leaning her head on Sappho’s shoulder as she looked at the laptop. Most of it was in Latin, about an unnamed woman who was the object of an unnamed narrator’s affections from what she gathered. “What line did you need help with?”

“This one. It’s supposed to be a free-form mixing English and a dead language so I, ya know, did something you’d enjoy too. Unfortunately, I can’t write Greek well.” She said, pointing at the bottom of the screen and taking a sip from her glass.

“People reference Icarus too much,” Medusa said. “It’s a cliché and he was only a boy.”

She remembered when it showed up on the news, and how Daedelus’s grief nearly killed him. He had begged her to turn him to stone after a year had passed so she did.

“You’re right, I’m sorry,” Sappho mumbled, hitting the backspace button until the line was blank and the cursor blinked.

“How about this: Illa est Nyx, et luna. Crescis aut decrescis ad imperium illius ad sui amorem.” She said, the end coming out as uncertain. For once she was lucky Sappho couldn’t look her in the eyes directly, her skin felt warm unrelated to the wine as she pulled away, leaning against the pillows.

Sappho’s fingers tapped against the keyboard, the sound becoming soothing at some point. Medusa started channel surfing, the relative quiet making her nervous and stirring up half-formed thoughts she didn’t want to entertain right now. Most of them concerning the woman next to her.

She glanced over as Sappho stretched and set her empty wine glass aside. “You done?” she asked, ignoring the way her pulse ticked up as Sappho lay next to her.

“Yeah,” Sappho answered. She glanced up at Medusa, shifting up and taking Medusa’s sunglasses off.

Medusa closed her eyes, feeling Sappho’s hands cup her face. She let out a shaking breath, afraid to look at Sappho. Not because of her beauty, Aphrodite forgive her, but because she didn’t want to watch Sappho still and turn to stone. If she would was another question, but Medusa had enough of tempting fate.

“Medusa,” Sappho said, voice low and so close. “Look at me.”

Medusa swallowed, opening her eyes and meeting Sappho’s dark brown gaze. Her dark skin with a smattering of freckles seeming otherworldly in the fading daylight. “Yes?” she asked, unsure what to do with her hands as Sappho’s thumb brushed her bottom lip.

Not even Dionysus’s oldest bottle could compare to Sappho’s lips on hers. Intoxicating, yes, but the back-of-the-throat burn gone and inviting Medusa to have just a little bit more.

Sappho wasn’t someone to be stripped and gawked at. She wasn’t a flower to be pried open or a cave to be explored or a honeypot to be cracked as men described in romance novels.

Medusa was convinced they had never actually kissed a woman’s thigh or felt them clamp around their head to stay close as they teased, licked, and sucked.

No, men were too focused on themselves to ask what worked and what didn’t, if they should do something again for her pleasure.

For once, Medusa heard her name being said in genuine love, in between kisses and half asleep mumbles. Sappho was so much more than a poet. She was Medusa’s just as Medusa was hers.

#tyrant writes #medusa #sappho #medusaxsappho #greek myth #modern au #I almost died while writing this no lie I need to sleep

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adadevacademy · 6 years ago

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Teaching Inheritance

by Dan Roberts, Lead Instructor

Not one of them is like another. Don't ask us why. Go ask your mother. -- Dr. Seuss

Think back to when you were learning your first object-oriented programming language. If you learned to program in the last 15 years, there's a good chance that was your first language, period. You probably started off with simple concepts like conditionals and loops, moved on to methods, and then to classes. And then at some point your instructor (or mentor or tutorial video) introduced a concept called inheritance.

If you're like me, your first exposure to inheritance was a bit of a mess. Maybe you couldn't quite get a handle on the syntax. Or maybe you were able to make it work on the class project and pass the exam, but couldn't quite figure out where you would ever use this in the real world. And then once that introductory course was over, you probably packed inheritance back up into your mental toolbox and didn't use it again for a long time.

The fact is, inheritance is complicated. It's hard to use correctly, even for experienced engineers - it took me several years in industry before I felt like I had a good handle on the subject. Yet inheritance is a tool with first-class support in most modern languages, and which is taught to many novice programmers almost immediately.

In this blog post I'll dive into why teaching inheritance is hard, some of the problems with current methods, and what Ada Developers Academy is doing to try and address this problem.

Do We Need Inheritance?

The first question we should ask is, "do we really need to teach inheritance?" This might seem like a silly question - everyone teaches inheritance, it's a key part of object-oriented programming! However time is a scarce resource in a program like Ada's, and everything we do teach means there's something else we don't teach. We've found more often than you might expect that we can drop something that "everyone" does, and end up with a leaner curriculum that is more valuable to both our students and their employers.

But as it turns out, we do need to teach inheritance. This is due to the way we leverage frameworks like Ruby on Rails and ReactJS later in the course. Both Rails and React use inheritance at a fundamental level, and our curriculum wouldn't make sense without it. Moreover, inheritance is an important technique for building real-world software, and our graduates use it on a regular basis in the wild.

Whether inheritance should be taught to novices who don't have an immediate need for it, for example in the first year of a 4-year university program in CS, is a different question. It's also not a problem I'm being paid to solve / write a blog post about. We know that the curriculum we cover at Ada does need inheritance, so we can confidently move forward with our analysis.

What it Means to Teach Inheritance

I have heard using inheritance when writing software compared to using a lathe as a craftsperson. Both solve a certain class of problem extremely well, and neither is particularly useful if you don't have that problem. Both lathes and inheritance take a fair bit of training to use well, and both are liable to make a big mess if used incorrectly. Every machine shop has a lathe, and most modern programming languages support inheritance.

The lathe metaphor allows us to break down the problem a little more. Thinking about it this way, we can see that any curriculum on inheritance needs to address two types of questions.

How do you use inheritance? What specific syntax do you need, and how does that change the way information flows through your program? What rules do you need to keep in mind as you work (e.g. Liskov substitution, the open-closed principle)? These questions are more mechanical, and the answers are often language-specific.

When should you use inheritance? How do you identify that a problem is likely to be neatly solved by inheritance, or that inheritance is a poor choice? What are the tradeoffs involved in deciding whether or not to use inheritance? These questions are more theoretical, and the answers are likely to apply no matter what language or framework you use.

Thinking about these questions leads us to two main issues that make teaching inheritance difficult:

The syntax and semantics of inheritance are tricky

Problems that are well-suited to inheritance are complex

Let's dive into each of these a little deeper.

Programming with Inheritance is Tricky

One of the main reasons teaching inheritance is hard is because inheritance itself is hard. At a high level inheritance is easy to explain: one class gets all the code from another class, and can override pieces and add its own bits. As so often happens, the devil is in the details.

For example, with Ruby the following questions arise:

Are static methods inherited? Can they be overridden?

How are instance variables, class variables, and class-instance variables handled?

Can constants be overridden? If not, what should you do instead?

How does inheritance interact with nested classes?

What has precedence, methods from the parent class or from a mixin?

And that's for Ruby, which is supposed to be beginner friendly! Other languages have their own wildcards:

Python: multiple inheritance

JavaScript: prototypical inheritance model, multiple types of functions

Java: static typing and explicit polymorphism, interfaces, templating

C++: all the Java problems plus memory management and object slicing (shudder)

Whatever language you choose, there's going to be a lot of rules to remember. How do you encode all these, especially for a novice? How do you decide what to include up-front, what to put in the appendix, what to omit entirely? How do you introduce specific details while still keeping the discussion general enough to translate to other languages? This is an important part of the problem - all your theoretical knowledge of how inheritance is used and what kinds of problems it solves won't do you any good if you can't apply it in code.

Fortunately, this part of the problem of teaching inheritance is well-understood. There are many excellent texts that round up the complicated syntax and semantics of inheritance into digestible, intuitive chunks. Any alternative treatment of inheritance needs to acknowledge this challenge and build upon this existing work.

Problems that Need Inheritance are Complex

The other reason that teaching inheritance is hard is because problems that benefit from inheritance tend to be complex. At a minimum, a problem to be solved with inheritance needs:

Two or more domain objects that are similar enough they need to share code, but not so similar that they could be combined into one class

Enough other things going on that it's worth encapsulating the domain objects as classes in the first place

That's a non-trivial amount of complexity, especially for a classroom full of beginners. How can you reasonably build a school project that establishes this complexity, but still fits within the tight time limits of the course? This is where existing curriculums tend to break down.

One tool that springs to mind to address this challenge is scaffolding, possibly by implementing some portion of a project in advance. This allows an instructor to reduce the complexity of the work required of the student, without reducing the complexity of the problem space as a whole. Deciding exactly what and how much to scaffold requires us to do a little more research, so we'll come back to this problem later.

How is Inheritance Used?

Since Ada is a workforce development program, one of the most valuable things we can do is ask "what's going on in industry?" Specifically,

How is inheritance used in the real world?

How is inheritance most likely to be used by a junior engineer in their first year or so on the job?

Understanding how inheritance is used can give us some direction on how it should be taught. Let's look at a few examples.

Rails

In Rails, almost every class you write will inherit from something. The two most common are

ActiveRecord::Base for models

ActionController::Base for controllers

You also see inheritance used for everything from database migrations to configuration management - its the Rails Way™. If you want to do something, you inherit from a class somewhere in the Rails framework. These superclasses are generally quite abstract, and each covers some functionality specific to the domain of an MVC framework.

Another important idiom is the template method pattern, as made famous in the Gang of Four book. A great example of this is with database migrations, where you define an class that inherits from ActiveRecord::Migration and implement the change method, and Rails takes care of the rest. Controller actions also mimic the template method pattern, particularly if your application uses the builtin tools for RESTful routing.

For the most part, Rails does not have you define your own superclasses. The exception to this is ApplicationRecord and ApplicationController, which sit in the hierarchy between concrete models or controllers and the abstract Rails implementation - these are generated automatically by Rails, but are open for you to modify.

React

React isn't quite as broad in its use of inheritance as Rails. However, every component class inherits from React.Component.

In React we again see the template method pattern pop up. Whether you're implementing render or componentDidMount, React knows the algorithm and you fill in the details.

React also does not encourage defining your own superclasses. In fact, their official documentation is rather explicit that inheritance between components should be avoided.

Other Frameworks

Rails and React are the two industry-grade frameworks I'm most familiar with, but I've dabbled in some others, namely Android (Java) and Unity (C#).

Android follows a similar pattern: everything you write inherits from some builtin class, template methods abound, and developers are discouraged from building their own inheritance relationships.

Unity matches the pattern as well, but they seem to be more lenient about extending your own classes, at least as far as I can tell from the Unity documentation on inheritance.

Industry Experience

This matches my experience of how engineering work tends to be done. Design work, in this case identifying the abstraction and building the superclass, is done by the team as a whole or by someone with an impressive sounding job title like "principal consulting systems architect". Implementing the details in a subclass is the job of an individual engineer.

Concretely, as I was spinning up at Isilon I spent a lot of time working on C++ and Python classes that filled in the details of an existing pattern, and not a lot of time inventing new patterns. Template methods were something I used frequently without having a name for them, and which I later wished I had learned about in college.

Summary

Setting Use case Write subclasses Write superclasses Abstract classes Template methods Rails Web servers ✅ ❌ ✅ ✅ React Single-page applications ✅ ❌ ✅ ✅ Android Mobile apps ✅ ❌ ✅ ✅ Unity Video games ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ First year in industry Any or none of the above ✅ ❓ ✅ ✅

There are a few clear takeaways from this quick survey:

Inheritance solves a complex problem. Programs that benefit from inheritance tend to be fairly large

Writing a subclass is much more common than writing a superclass

Often the superclass is provided for you by whatever framework you're using

Superclasses tend to be abstract, both semantically (embodying a high-level concept) and functionally (never instantiated)

The template method pattern is extremely important

Existing Work

We've built an understanding of what a new engineer needs from an introduction to inheritance. How well does existing computer science curriculum match up with this?

Building Java Programs

We'll use a case study to demonstrate: the excellent Building Java Programs: A Back to Basics Approach by Stuart Reges and Marty Stepp. This text is used by many introductory CS courses, including the University of Washington, as well as by AP CS classrooms supported by the TEALS program. My first exposure to the book was while teaching with TEALS back in 2014.

Building Java Programs does an great job introducing the vocabulary and syntax of inheritance.

The first example is different types of employees in an HR system. This is simple enough to demonstrate syntax while still somewhat plausible - not an easy balance to strike.

The text includes a discussion of where inheritance is not appropriate, and the difference between is-a and has-a relationships.

The chapter introduces interfaces, abstract classes and abstract methods, and the ability to override a method. However, it makes no mention of the template method pattern.

The chapter finishes with a more complex example dealing with different types of stocks and assets.

This is substantial enough that inheritance is an appropriate technique.

In this example, the pieces at the top of the hierarchy are abstract (an interface and an abstract class), matching the pattern identified above.

The book does not provide any context for how this code will be used. I would argue this is a major oversight. Writing code in a vacuum is fine for experienced engineers, but in my experience novices benefit from concrete examples of how code will be used from the "outside". With inheritance in particular, this would demonstrate how polymorphism is useful.

There is no mention of the idea of extending a class implemented by a framework.

In general Building Java Programs is excellent, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for Reges and Stepp. It certainly did a good job of preparing my students for the AP CS exam. However, it does not introduce inheritance as it is used in the real world, particularly by novice engineers. As far as I can tell this is typical of introductory CS courses - certainly my undergraduate education at Purdue followed a similar pattern.

Design Textbooks

There is another type of text that addresses inheritance: books on software design. Famous resources like Practical Object-Oriented Design: An Agile Primer Using Ruby (POODR) by Sandi Metz, or Design Patterns (the "Gang of Four" book) by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides address software design more generally, employing inheritance as one tool among many.

However, these books are targeted at experienced engineers trying to up their game, not at novices learning their chosen language for the first time. Moreover they discuss design from a ground-up perspective, whereas an engineer beginning their career is likely to build on the shoulders of giants, extending existing designs rather than inventing new ones.

An ideal curriculum would bridge the gap between these two approaches, introducing both syntax and common inheritance idioms, and getting new engineers used to the work of extending an existing class.

Ada's Approach to Inheritance

The instructional team at Ada has been unhappy with our approach to inheritance for a while now, but we haven't quite known what to do about it. Now that we've done some research and formalized our engineering and pedagogical intuition, here's the approach we've come up with:

Simple examples and accessible metaphors are fine for introducing syntax and semantics, though as Reges and Stepp demonstrate they don't have to be completely unrealistic.

Common idioms like abstract classes and the template method pattern should be introduced as soon as the basic syntax is understood.

Students' first serious inheritance project should involve extending an existing superclass.

This matches the way inheritance is used in the real world, and makes the benefits (not having to re-write a bunch of code) immediately clear.

Instructors would provide the following scaffolding:

Superclass implementation

Driver code demonstrating polymorphism

Another subclass, to model the inheritance mechanism

Possibly a test suite or test stubs

If time permits, a second inheritance project would focus on design, and have students build both the superclass and subclasses, as well as driver code.

At Ada, the first inheritance project takes the form of OO Ride Share. Students are asked to load information about drivers, passengers and trips from CSV files; we provide a CsvRecord superclass and Passenger and Trip subclasses pre-built. We feel this problem is complex enough to justify inheritance but simple enough to spin up on quickly. It also mimics the way ActiveRecord is used in Rails, which will hopefully lead to more comfort and deeper understanding once we get into our Rails unit.

The second project is still in the planning phase, but the idea is a command-line app that integrates with the Slack API. After an in-class design activity students will implement a Recipient superclass that handles most of the API interaction, and User and Channel subclasses that fill in the details. They will also build a command loop that interacts with the user, demonstrating the power of polymorphism. We don't have the project write-up finished yet, but there is a prototype of the end product.

We've spent a lot of time thinking about this fresh approach to teaching inheritance, and I'm excited to see the results. Watch this space for an update in a couple months as we conclude our Intro to Ruby unit and move into Rails.

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