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weareallfallengods · 5 years ago

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Flight from Grace Chapter 1 - A small stumble

The long-awaited complete 1st chapter of my WIP novel! I started this over 6 months ago and I’m finally getting into the swing of it.

Synopsis: What happens when a Fallen Angel with no memory of her own eternal past meets a woman who can see her for who she really is? A head on collision between the world as we know it and an eternal battle between the immortals tasked with safeguarding the mortal realm.

Grace can see things she shouldn’t be able to; after all, immortals have gone to a lot of trouble to make sure we can’t see them as they really are, so Something Has Changed, and she and her Fallen Angel will find out what’s going on, and why they seem to always be stuck in the middle of it all.

Themes: Angels and Demons, examination of mortality and our understanding of and belief in the supernatural as well as the eternal nature of existence. The battle between good and evil, and how no one is ever what they seem to be when we look past prejudices and social judgements. LGBTQ+, proper ethnic and cultural representation (read: most characters aren’t straight or white!).

Triggers: If you don’t like stories that put an often irreverant and sacriligeous spin on Christian mythos, this isn’t for you. LGBTQ+ romance, slow burn, non-explicit.

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“Did it hurt when you fell from Heaven?”

Some neanderthal interrupted my deep contemplation of the double whiskey sour in front of me. Which was very rude. Whiskey sours demand your undivided attention and get cranky if ignored for too long. He should have known that, but either he didn’t know or didnt care, so either way- neanderthal.

He was leaning on the bar with the casual air of someone who has done this same dance too many times, the practiced ease of a used car salesman slapping the roof of a car. At least this one’s breath wasn’t too foul. Not that this hadn’t happened before. Oh no, I’d never been badly hit on in this bar like ten thousand times already. No that never happened. I was able to just sit in peace with my drink for the entire night. Yeah, right. Why do I keep coming back then, you ask? Well, Grace makes one hell of a whiskey sour for one thing.

“Hey, did you hear me?”

Ugh, this one wasn't going away with simply being ignored. Lovely.

“Excuse me?” I looked over languidly, with as much disdainful irritation on my face as I could possibly muster from the depths of my three-drinks-in soul.

“I said, ‘did it hurt when you fell from heaven?’”

His stupid shit-eating leer didnt help my mood any. I wasn’t ever in a good mood if I showed up here, and that’s probably one of the reasons I kept coming back- assholes like this gave me a vent for my foul mood.

“No actually. It’s less of a fall and more of a stumble really. More like getting tossed out of a club by a bouncer than falling down the stairs. Couple of bruises, a minor scrape, more damaged pride than anything really.”

I could see his monkey-brain churning slowly to try and digest my response that didn’t fit his pre-programmed scenario. I half expected to see steam coming out of an ear. God, some men are just so... ew.

“Um, what?”

Apparently I broke him. Well, that happens sometimes, when I give someone a response they weren’t expecting. Which happens more often than I’d be willing to admit to myself.

“I said that getting tossed out of heaven doesn’t hurt as much as you’d think it would. It’s not that far of a tumble really.”

He chuckled, ��That’s real cute darlin’, never heard that one before! How’s about you and me find a table so I can hear more about it? Maybe have a look at those bruises, make sure you don't need more…attention.”

Sweet Mother of Mikhail, that was bad. Like even worse than his initial pickup line. I almost had to respect his commitment to such a shitty way of trying to pick me up. He had some balls, that’s for sure, either from drunken stupidity or pure ignorant self-confidence. They say that bravery and stupidity go hand in hand, and here was their shining example.

“Believe me sweetie, you don’t want my 'attention’,” I said softly, for the first time raising my eyes to lock with his glazed gaze. “My attention can become very… uncomfortable.”

He started to smirk for just a split second, but when my eyes met his, both the smirk and the color melted from his face. His mouth hung slack as he felt his soul staring down the opening fiery abyss that he found reflected in my eyes. I watched his mind recoil in horror at the emptiness it saw as it tried futilely to pull back from the horror of empty infinity it was confronted with. I saw in his eyes the sudden awareness of how small and insignificant his place in the universe was, and shrink in horror, trying to flee internally only to find that there’s no escape from your own mind and the finality of human existence.

I looked away just as his eyes started to roll back in his head. No need to cause a scene with him passing out. After all, my whiskey sour was crying from being ignored. As they do.

“I think you should probably go home now Blake,” I demurred softly. “You’ve probably had enough, and your wife would be happy if you tucked the children into bed for once. Oh, and coffee won’t remove the smell of alcohol, so just have a peppermint. Your kids like that smell, reminds them of Christmas.”

He kind of half nodded, like a sleepwalker. I sighed. Hopefully he doesn't have an existential crisis later and just shrugs it off as being too drunk. Hell, maybe he’ll cut back on the sauce. I hate it when I hear about someone offing themselves after meeting me, especially if they have kids. Well, hopefully he just takes the daily inebriation down a notch or two. I can hope, can’t I?

As he shuffled off, lager forgotten at the bar, I hoped he’d be alright. Genuinely. Sure, I enjoyed taking my frustration at being stuck here out on them, but I didn't actually wish them lasting harm. A lesson or two in politeness and decency, a minor scuffle to break up the monotony, but no real damage. That’s what I told myself anyway. Made it easier to pretend to sleep at night. Hope he makes it home ok. Hope his kids get a happy memory of daddy saying goodnight for once. Hope he says he loves his wife, and apologizes. Hah. Yeah. Like that’ll happen. But, what can I say, I’m a foolish optimist at heart. And nothing hurts more than having your hopes crushed. I should know.

Damn. My drink was crying, a small puddle of condensation soaking into the bar napkin it rested on. Again. Another sigh. And one more for the first sigh. I hate sighing. It’s the most comprehensive sound of the acceptance of defeat ever created. The acknowledgment of futility. And I hate that. I thought I’d be fighting to the bitter end, but apparently Destiny had other plans. Fucking Destiny. She’s the whole reason I’m even drinking in the first place.

“Get you a fresh one?”

A sweet silver-bell tinkle of a voice broke my unintentional reverie. Grace was back, checking on me. She knew my peccadilloes by now. She knew how much I hated when my drink got watered down by the ice melting if it got ignored for too long. I nodded.

She smiled pleasantly and slid over a new drink, already prepped.

“I figured, after that creep pounced on ya.”

I frowned slightly. There was something different about this one. Hunh. Oh, the ice. There wasn’t any. There were two black cubes sitting in it instead. OK, why are there rocks in my drink?

I looked up at Grace, still slightly puzzled.

“Oh those? Yeah I noticed you didn’t like it when your drink gets watered down, so I bought some Irish whiskey stones! That way your drink stays cold, but doesn't dilute. Got 'em special, just for you.”

I cocked one eyebrow slightly, “Just for me?”

“Yep! Let’s face it, you’re the only one who comes in here with that kind of class, so I put 'em in the freezer back here with a big 'ol note so Jimmy doesn’t think I’m crazy for keeping rocks in the fridge,” her airy chuckle sprinkled across my ears.

I stared. I was in shock. OK, well maybe I’m being dramatic, but I was still surprised. People don’t normally do nice things for me. Or to me for that matter. If I’m honest, they mostly run away.

“Why…” I couldn't even formulate a coherent sentence. Jesus, get yourself together!

“I dunno, I just figured you don't seem like you have anyone looking out for you, and you seem to attract a lot of the wrong sort of attention, so I thought you could use a nice surprise, y’know, cheer you up a little.”

I nodded, more in surprise than agreement. I literally couldn’t recall the last time someone voluntarily tried to do something nice, just for me, no hope or expectation of reward or compensation. I was probably silent a little too long for a comfortable conversation. Hey, I was revelling in the new experience, cut me some slack.

“Well. Wow, um, thanks.” Yeah real smooth. Sweet Mikhail’s Grave I have no idea how to actually talk to this woman.

In retrospect, that should have been my first clue, but hey, I was a little distracted.

“I appreciate it, that’s really sweet of you.” Ok that’s slightly less glaringly awkward.

“Not trying to be rude at all, but I gotta ask- what’s your deal? Like you come in here all the time, lookin’ like a million bucks, never talk to anyone, get in fights every so often, get harassed like every single time but you keep coming back? I mean, I’m not trying to pry if you don’t wanna talk, but you know, like I’m totally trying to pry!”

Now it was my turn to stare slack-jawed. Oh Fates, how your twists are cruel. I closed my mouth a lot faster than the sot from earlier though, so my pride wasn't too damaged.

“It’s kind of a long and uninteresting story really. Mostly, you make the best whiskey sour. And the people here are…interesting.”

“Honey, there’s no way a story coming from someone who looks like that,” she waved generally up and down at me, “could possibly be boring. Plus, it’s slow, as always, so humor me.”

Sometimes, I can be kind of thick. Slow. Moronic. A nincompoop. A maroon. Several minutes of conversation with this girl and I only just now noticed- she hadn’t looked away from my eyes. She was meeting my gaze with no problem. She wasn't sweating and shaking and passing out. She was looking me right in the eye, just like a normal person, no fear showing on her face. No reaction at all. Just a normal girl, having a normal conversation, with what she thought was another normal person.

“Are…you OK?” Grace looked a bit concerned.

Aw shit, I was staring, and not even trying to hide it. Well now I felt dumb. And, why did I feel dumb? What was up with this girl that she made me feel so self conscious, so uncomfortable, like one of those fainting goats that just freezes and falls over when you blink too hard at them. Speaking of blinking really hard.

“Um, oh, yeah, sorry, I’m fine. Really. Sorry, just not many people actually want to have a real conversation with me.”

Grace leaned over the bar a little, propping up on her elbows, lowering her tone a bit. “Well, I don’t know why, 'cuz you sure seem hella interesting to me.”

“Hunh. Well, I don't know about that. But I would like to ask you something first, if you don't mind?”

“Fire away honey!”

“This might sound odd, but, why aren’t you looking away? What do you see when you look at me?”

She pulled a tiny bit closer. “Nothin’ more than just about the sparkly-est green eyes I ever seen; a dash of blue, like the Bahamas. Somethin’ else I can't quite put my finger on…” as she trailed off, I felt her finger lightly brush the knuckles on my hand that was still holding my drink. “I kinda wanna find out though.”

OK, now that was smooth. Holy fuck, that was really, really smooth. Like two hundred year old Laphroaig single malt filtered through the blessed socks of His Holiness the Pope smooth. Hold up, now she was trying to pick me up? What the hell universe? What’s going on here?

I swallowed, unable to look away now myself. “That’s all? Nothing that scares you?”

“Not yet, sugar.”

Alright, that’s different.

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

I grabbed her hand. Maybe a little too hard from the slight wince I saw.

“OK we need to leave. NOW.”

“Hold up honey, we were just talkin’, we ain’t there yet!” She tried pulling back a little.

“No, no, you don’t understand! I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t be able to see that. I can’t explain right now, but we have to figure out how you can see me that way.”

“But my shift’s not over for a couple more hours!”

“OK OK, I’m not being clear, sorry, this is the first time this has happened, so I’m a little shaken.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” She actually blushed a little. “I just saw how you shot down every guy who came up to you, and I thought….well, you know, maybe…omg I’m sorry I didn't mean to upset you! I come on strong sometimes, when I’m interested in something, and when you first walked in, I saw those heels and that dress, and I just was like ‘oh wow’ and kinda couldn’t breathe for a minute, you know I don't see many girls come here lookin’ like that and oh God now I’m babbling and someone please shut me up I'm so sorry…”

I put a finger over her lips, gently.

“I’m not upset. Far from it actually. But we have something a tiny bit more urgent than that to address. I’m not who you think I am. Or what, I should say. But more to the point, there’s something bigger going on here. And I need to find out what. Fast.”

“Wait, so you’re not mad I hit on you?”

“We don’t have time for that now!” She recoiled slightly at my vehemence. “No, I’m not upset, but that’s not the point! You shouldnt be able to see my eyes. My real ones anyway. I was too slow on picking that up right away, and I’m sorry, but we have to get out of here, now, because something is different, and in my world, that’s never a good thing.”

“Your world?”

I was getting frustrated. “Yes, but I’ll explain later! I need you to come with me now. We need answers, and we need them fast. So, do you trust me?”

She hesitated. “Yeeeeees? I think? Like I wanna, but I don’t really know you?”

“Good enough for now! Let’s go!”

To her credit, she just dropped her bar towel, grabbed her phone from under the bar and came out from behind it, grabbing my hand as she yelled to the back, “Hey Jimmy! I gotta leave! Personal thing- cover for me?”

Just then, there was a bit of a commotion at the door. Grace turned to look, but I didn’t need to. I already knew what was there. I just clutched her hand even tighter and yanked her towards the back; there was an emergency exit near the bathrooms from what I remembered of that one really bad 'birthday’. Yeah, that was a bad one. But we ran.

Good thing I’m not super tall, wouldn’t want to draw attention, I thought to myself sarcastically. Goddamn heels. Why do I even wear these?

Sounds of glass breaking and shouting reached us as we plowed through the emergency exit into the alleyway. Don’t worry about that now, just keep moving.

“This way!” I pulled her to the front of the alley.

“Holy shit, that’s your bike?” She sounded genuinely impressed. Finally, I wasn’t the only one who had that reaction at seeing it.

“Oh yeah, she’s a sweet ride, and perfect for this situation. Or any situation, really. Jump on.”

I probably should have shut the door behind us, but hey, it was a day for me missing obvious things. The noise coming from the bar was getting louder.

“I’ve never done this before!” Grace exclaimed excitedly in my ear as I kicked my beast to life.

We roared out into the street, my white and gold Valentino’s left sparkling on the pavement where I kicked them. Fuckin’ useless, beautiful shoes. Sigh, they weren’t cheap. Oh well, they’re just shoes.

“Where are we going!?” Grace yelled over the rush of wind whipping our hair like tiny flails of purgatory.

“Not sure yet! But we’re going to find out!”

“I don't even know your name!”

My heart sank a bit.

“Don't worry! Neither do I! ”

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

The bar exploded behind us as it faded into the night thanks to the fabulous Ducati between our legs. Oh and that wasn’t metaphorical- I glanced in the mirror at the sound; it literally exploded. Ball of fire and all. I guess that’s to be expected, what with all the alcohol and what I’d suspected for a while was going on in the basement. Way too many flammable liquids in one place. But that didn't really matter now. All that mattered was getting away from what caused the explosion as fast as we possibly could.

“What the hell was that!?” Grace yelled in my ear. Again. I’m going to have to get some headsets or something if this is going to be a habit. Well, the riding together part, not the fleeing for our lives part anyway.

“I’ll explain as soon as we can talk, promise! For now, just hold on! And don't look behind us!"

“As if I’m gonna let go now!”

That glance in the rear view told me as much as I needed to know, which was more than I wanted, but enough to have an idea of what we were running from. I mean, I figured that’s what it was, but I’m still tired of being right, even after all this time. You’d think I'd be used to it by now.

That pale blue and red glow was enough. Hell, the noise it made had been enough for me to know what it was. And trust me, I was not overreacting by running first. I’d seen that color a few too many times in my life to think that there was anything else to be done except run. Once was more than enough for anyone. Who am I kidding? Most people don't get a chance to see it more than once. Guess I’m just lucky. Or the opposite. Pretty sure I’m the latter actually.

Grace was shivering on my back as we sped away. She’d gone quiet, her mood matching the night around us, the neon signs and street lights reflecting their multi-colored halos in the rain-slicked streets. Fog was starting to rise from the pavement, adding to the soft glow the streets were taking on. Thin, wispy strands curling around street lights and bus stops, blasted into nothing as the bike tore through them, the roar of the exhaust shattering the relative quiet of the late night calm.

Well, it should have been quiet anyway. The explosion of the bar kind of changed that. Then came the sound.

It mixed with the growing whine from the crotch rocket under us, which seemed like a fitting counterpoint to the cacophony of something that sounded like if you’d thrown a hundred maltese dogs into a tornado and then blasted it over a crappy school intercom. I hated that sound. Almost as much as the dogs it reminded me of.

“Aw shit, it saw us.” Time to see if the tires on this baby gripped as well as the kid at the shop claimed they did.

Well, at least there wasn’t too much traffic. Still, even though there weren’t many trucks and accountant-driven sedans to weave in and out of, there were still enough of them that it took a hell of a lot more concentration than my alcohol soaked brain was ready to deal with. Definitely hadn’t planned on being the next Lewis Hamilton after a night at the bar, that’s for damn sure.

“What the fuu….?” Grace’s expletive trailed off in the whipping wind as I kept us weaving in and out and through, gunning the shit out of my bike whenever there was an opening big enough to do so without turning us into extremely messy, if fashionable, pancakes.

“Try not to worry about it! OK I mean, yeah, worry, but not like understand worry!”

“How the hell do you not worry about...that!?”

I took a good look back for the first time as we whipped around a corner, using the rain-slick street to slide without losing any speed. My heart sank. At least it wasn’t in my throat choking me anymore. Sarcastic positivity in the face of death? Yeah that’s my jam. Even if I do keep it to myself. Most of the time anyway.

The damn thing was getting closer. Faster than I thought it could. Damn, tonight just wasn’t my night for noticing things, now was it?

That second of splitting my attention nearly sent us flying and a tired busboy standing at the corner bus stop to the hospital, but we only just missed him, with barely enough room to avoid slamming into the back end of something that should have been parked at a kids soccer game, not getting on the expressway at this time of night.

Slipping into an alley entrance, Grace’s nails dug through the flimsy material I was wrapped in, making me yelp in surprise.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

I was about to tell her it was cool, considering the circumstances, and given that I wasn’t sure if it made me jump because it hurt, or her hands were cold, or because of where they’d slid down to, when we blew out the other side of the alley, causing a literal postcard explosion from the stand I clipped as we bounced out on to the main road again, just in time to swerve hard to avoid becoming Penske poster-girls for a single truck.

"Sweet Jesus fuck! What the hell IS that?"

Goddammit, didn’t I tell her not to look back? I wasn’t going to tell her how the beast chasing us had seen us dart down the alley, and since it couldn't fit through the traffic as neatly as we could, silently charge down the side of the building, slamming into the same shop front that had so recently lost it's postcard stand as it tried to take the same corner, still snuffling the ground and air to track us. I managed to gain us a few precious seconds of lead as it disentangled itself from the fruit cart, re-launching itself down the alley, bicycle wheel still caught in it's whiskers that streamed and whipped behind it.

“It’s running fucking sideways on the buildings!”

Aw shit. She can see it. I was afraid of that.

And that was all the distraction it needed too.

With a last spring off the corner of an empty flower shop, the beast took a massive swipe at us. Come on, come on, make the corner! It's thick talons cut a blazing arc through the rain as it howled. One of its claws caught the rear end of the bike, knocking it heavily to the side, and nearly throwing Grace off. Good thing she’s got a death grip on my hips right now. Oh boy don’t think of that, too distracting right now, that’s how you get killed!

Grace screamed again as the bike was whipped around violently from behind, and Grace she was confronted with a vision not even her wildest nightmares could have come up with. At least, I hope she doesn’t have nightmares like this anymore.

The beast’s jaws opened wide to crush us like a nutcracker on adderall, glowing drool whipping around in thick, viscous strands from teeth bigger than my hand, while she seemed mesmerized by the halo of tentacle-like whiskers that seemed to float in slow motion, despite how fast everything was happening. The beast looked at me, it’s eyes burning red meeting mine as I tried to maintain my grip on the bike that was rapidly being torn from my hands. I was holding on to that tank with my knees in a way that would have made the Russian Women’s weightlifting team proud. I could hear the scream that tried to jump from Grace’s mouth only for it to turn into a slow rush of soundless breath as she slammed into my back from the force of me yanking that bike around as hard as I could possibly manage.

Ground. Street. Tires on. People off. Stay upright. Don’t let go. Run.

The bellow from the beast behind us meant nothing to me now. I was numb, my world narrowing to the few feet in front of me, and Grace behind me. Swerve. Dodge. Car. Bike. Red light. Faster. Green. Faster. Faster. Get away. Car. Car. Bus. Turn.

Suddenly the cars all dropped away. The turnpike. Oh thank God. I opened up the throttle all the way and finally realized I should probably start breathing again.

Grace was trying to yell something, probably wanting an explanation. I mean I can’t blame her, but I said I’d explain! Did it look like now was suddenly the time for it? Then again, maybe it was important.

I turned my head a bit to try to talk to her, but I paused with my mouth still open. The beast was gone.Like gone gone. Vanished. Vamoosed. Not even like really far away gone, just not there any more. I squinted. Yeah, that was a little too easy.

“Did we get away?”

I was actually about to answer her, when a glowing blue shape cashed into us from the side, just as I was starting to finally let my legs relax a little. Everything seemed to slow down. I know, everyone says that, but it’s true! I don’t know, maybe it was the whiskey sours, but as soon as we got hit, the world turned in to super slow-mo as the bike was ripped from my hands, and I felt Grace be pulled away from me.

This thing tossed us like a couple of rag dolls thrown from a child’s stroller being kicked by a football player. Or at least it started to go that way. Somehow, as the bike ground across the pavement, with just my left hand managing to keep any kind of hold on the bike, I managed to swing myself around it like a gymnast on a gold-medal winning vault-horse routine, snagged Grace’s bar apron with my free hand, and with sheer desperate strength, yank all three back together, right as the beast’s slavering maw snapped shut on empty air where Grace’s head had been just milliseconds before. Through pure accident of positioning, my toes raked across it’s eyes as my leg swung around and I slammed them back down on the pegs, jammed the throttle all the way open, even as Grace somehow managed to complete the circle I’d pulled her in, ending by straddling my hips, arms and hair akimbo while we slid sideways, fortunately tires first.

Grace’s eyes were wider than a kid who opened their eyes to Disneyland on a Christmas morning as she slammed into me, and I used our momentum to get the bike fully upright, only barely escaping a second snap from the beast as it lunged again, trying to tear us apart.

That near miss, and the sigh of relief I almost let happen, didn’t get a chance to last long.

Her damn hair was in my face, which at any other time, wouldn’t have been a problem, really, but just at that second, was incredibly, blindingly, distracting. And it might have saved our lives.

Something hot burned into my shoulder and face as the sound of crashing metal and people yelling slammed into me. Hm, spicy.

“Shit! Watch out! Sorry!” Grace called to the one lady who wasn’t running for the hills as we smashed through her food cart. Can you get third-degree barbecue sauce burns? Food trays, sauces and meat all went flying as we dervished our way right through the middle of her street-side restaurant, sweet and spicy and sticky all at once, all over the ground, and all over me and Grace as well. I couldn’t think of anything more than just keeping everything together and moving forward. Run. The only thought occupying my mind. Just run.

“Hey.”

The softness of her voice is what brought me back to the girl squished up against me and out of the rabbit-instinct flight mode I was in.

I don’t know why but for some reason, my brain decided that was the perfect moment to notice that I’d never realized how captivating the color brown could be. Grace’s eyes were less than inches from mine, and I froze for a second. Again.

“I think it’s stopped.”

I glanced back. The beast had been right on top of us when we hit the food cart, but now it was standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, sniffing around for all the world like the biggest, dumbest, glowiest dog you’ve ever seen. OK, a dog that could tear a truck apart like a box of tissues, but still.

“What the hell is it doing?”

“Maybe it’s hungry.”

I didn’t realize I’d said that out loud. I’d never seen one of these things just...stop like that. It didn't make sense.

No time to think of that right now, just enough time to dart down another alley, blocking the beast from view as it sat down to lap up all the spilled barbecued beef at its feet.

As we weaved and darted through alleys and parking lots, squeezing through sidewalks and darting across small streets, I started to recognize where we were now, and had the barest inkling of a plan besides ‘get away without dying.’

“Whatever that thing is, I think it likes barbecue.”

Grace’s whispered comment snapped me back to what was right in front of me, the whole reason I was in this kind of mess again in the first place. .

“Hunh?”

“I think it stopped to eat at the barbecue stand we knocked over. It’s not chasing us anymore- look.”

I tried to check the mirror again, only to find they’d both been ripped off by now, so switched to glancing over my shoulder quickly, and saw no ominous glow behind us, other than the few street lamps on the small boulevard we were going down.

“Barbecue?” I was still pretty confused. Probably drunk too. But definitely confused.

Grace’s laugh was carried away on the night like fireworks swept away in a light breeze. “Well, I dunno what the hell that thing was, but I haven’t met anyone yet who wouldn’t drop everything for good barbecue, honey.”

Raising an eyebrow, I laughed, “Well it’s good to see I’m not the only one here who can make wildly ridiculous comments with horrible timing!”

“Funny the things you think about when you should be focusing on other stuff that’s a little more important, hunh? Like right now, all I can think about is a nice rack of ribs.” Grace grew quieter as her head sank back down on to my shoulder. “Where we headed, sugar?”

“Somewhere close. Safe. I think.”

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

The old loft was just as dank and dirty and run down on the inside as it looked on the outside. Probably worse. No diamonds in the rough here, that’s for sure. Broken glass scattered on the beat up industrial floor scattered the glow of the streetlight through the mist that filled the space. Definitely not up to my usual standard, but hey, we couldn’t really complain too much.

Throwing an old, discarded, and probably moldy, but definitely more disgusting than I wanted to ever touch again, mover’s blanket over the plate window helped to at least hide a little bit of how gross this place looked. Plus, privacy. A quick scan around and I found a pile of old tarps and a couple skeezy mattresses that I definitely wasn’t going to think about where they’d been or who’d done what on them for how long. It’d have to do. A dirty mattress was a small price to pay for still being alive.

"It's not the Four Seasons, but it'll do for now. It's kinda cold- I don't think the building even has heat, but I think we can keep warm enough to make it through the rest of tonight at least."

Grace flopped down heavily on the mattress, exhausted, shoulders slumped, staring vacantly at the floor.

"That was...was that...I don't even know where to start. My brain's been turned to oatmeal. What…? What happened? What in the name of all fucks just happened?"

“Yeah, there’s kind of a lot to unpack here isn’t there?” I just crumpled down into one of the old blankets like a sock puppet being dropped into its nest. “I’m not even sure where to begin.”

“Ya think? Like one minute, I’m trying to mind my business, working my shift at the bar, wondering whether I’m going to have to give another statement to the cops after another bar fight breaks out, and the next I’m getting tossed around like a hot sweet-potato, almost get eaten by a glowing, walking catfish that got beaten a little too hard with the ugly stick, get covered in barbecue sauce, do-si-doed by a goddamn motorcycle ninja, only to wind up in some place that looks like it was lifted straight out of Zillow for Crackheads!”

A snort of wry, tired amusement escaped me. “Yeah, I guess it really does look that bad here. I mean, I’m surprised this place is even still standing after all this time, but you’re right, it definitely looks a bit sketchy.”

“Way to avoid the point, hun.”

“Yeah, I know.” Not sure why, but she kept making me nervous, and the way she was sort of frowning while pinning me down with those sparkling coffee eyes definitely wasn’t helping. Probably just wasn’t used to people making eye contact. Which was the whole reason I was in this mess to begin with. Another sigh.

“Alright. I’ll explain as much as I can. You deserve that much.”

Grace flopped down on the edge of the mattress, chin propped in her hands for all the world like a kid during goddamn story time. How the hell was I supposed to concentrate when she’s doing things like that? Look away! Only way to save myself for now.

“OK, here goes. So the thing you saw? Well, it’s a…” I scowled. “It’s a...sunuvabitch, I don’t really know what it’s called. Alright, further back then. The basics. Got it.

“Supernatural things exist. Like you believe that humans are the highest species on this planet and that you’re all alone in the universe, and no one can quite agree on whether there was anything before or after this life or what happens when you die, right? Well, a lot of what most people believe to be myth or religious superstition is actually, um, real.”

So she hasn’t tried to run away just yet. That’s a good sign, right?

“From what I’ve been able to piece together, from the bits I can remember, what you would call ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ are real places- they’re just not really visible to mortals. Most of the time. ‘Angels’ and ‘demons’ are real things too, but they’re a little bit different than most people tend to think of them from what I’ve seen.

“I don’t know how many there are, but there’s angels and demons walking around, living just like you and me, every day. The thing is, that mortals like you can’t see them. And that’s where the problem is.”

“Like me?” It wasn’t really a question. Her tone made that clear enough.

“Oh boy. OK, here’s the big one- because with the heaven and hell stuff, most people can be like ‘meh, it’s all superstitious nonsense anyway’ and brush it off. This? Not so much.

“I’m not human. Or mortal. I can see angels and demons walking around plain as day, just like the ones I’ve met can see me. Mortals...see something else.”

“Like the creep at the bar earlier? Did he see...something else? In you?”

“Yeah. On the outside, at first glance, I look like any other girl. But look closer? Well, you saw what happened. People just aren’t ready to see my real nature.”

“But that didn’t happen to me.” Now Grace was looking a little bit confused- but the kind of confused you get when a teacher is explaining something that you know should make sense, even if you were having a hard time getting it.

“No, it didn’t. And it took me way too long to pick up on that. I should’ve realized right away. If I had, maybe I could have gotten you out of there faster and that whole ‘sweet potato’ thing wouldn’t have happened.”

“So what should I be seeing? When I look into your eyes I mean?”

“Probably something along the lines of falling through an eternally expanding universe, a sense that you’re tinier than a piece of sand in the scope of the cosmos, that sort of thing. At least, that’s what I’ve heard from a couple of the ones who were able to be slightly coherent afterwards. There haven’t been many of those over the years.”

“Wow. I definitely don’t see that.”

“And that’s the problem, really. I’ve never heard of something like that happening before. I don’t know what it means, or why you can, or anything! All I know is that something is very, very different, and very, very wrong, otherwise that thing wouldn’t have been after us. And right now, I don’t know if what’s wrong is you, or me, or both of us. But we need to find out if we’re going to not be looking over our shoulders for...what did you call it again?”

Grace laughed. A genuine laugh, not weighed down by worry or terror. “A glowing, walking catfish?”

“Ha ha, yeah, that got beaten too many times with the ugly stick!”

Grace sat up suddenly, nodding sharply to herself. “Alright, well, you’re either batshit crazy, or I owe my gran an apology.” Grace was still half chuckling, but looking very intent.

“Your gran?”

“Yeah, she was super religious, always prayin’, talkin’ and singin’ about god. She must’ve gone to church three times a week! Boy, would she have loved to hear all this.”

“I’ll bet!”

“So, I just wanna make sure I’ve got all the stuff you said- angels are real, and something’s wrong with the fact that I can see your real eyes, and not like, the fires of the Big Bang or something, but you don’t know why that’s a problem or what caused it.. Right?”

“I’d say that about covers it for now, yeah.”

“Alright, I can live with that much for now. I’m clean tuckered out, and you look like you’re about to just fall over any second now. Whaddya say we call it a night?”

“Yeah.” I really could barely keep my eyes open at this point. I guess pretending my motorbike was a juggling pin kind of took it out of me.

Grace popped up, suddenly all business.

“So doesn’t look like this place has a big ol’ tub to dump you in, so we’ll have to settle for a couple of wet wipes. Here, help me get these blankets on to the mattress here. They’re gross, but it’s better than freezing to death.”

“You’re the boss!” Those wet wipes were a pocket-sized blessing, wrapped in foil paper. I’m more of a Chanel and gunpowder type, not so big on the earthy, barbecue scents.

I was starting to stumble a bit as we plopped the discarded blankets down as well as we could in the relative darkness of the loft.

“Probably better to stay dressed with how dirty these blankets are.” Grace frowned as she watched me struggle to pick up one of the heavier blankets a couple of times.

That didn’t even register until much later.

“OK, you, lay down. No more for you tonight. Sleep.”

I couldn’t even argue with her. I just curled up in a ball on the bed, barely aware of Grace pulling a couple of the blankets over me, but I thought I could just make out her arm resting on mine as we both drifted off into the heavy, dreamless sleep that comes when you’ve been pushed to your limits. At least, I kind of hope it was.

=============================================

Story tag list

@random-with-garlic @a-dinosaurs-left-phgkneecap @flower-in-the-ashes @nixabee @luvnaught @pens-swords-stuff @alice-and-cheshire-cat @humans-are-seriously-weird @flying-f1shsticks @Neil-gaiman @glumshoe @lykanyouko @kaylewiswrites @just-a-bit-paranoid @thatsmybluefondue @Alice-and-Cheshire-cat @violet-galaxies @biggest-gaidiest-patronuses @midnight-spectrum-again @slytherinlovespuff @friendofcybermen @hemi528i @mirbisduschoen @khelladon @walkin-in-the-cosmos

As always, if you want to be added to or removed from the tag list, just shoot me a message and your wish is my command.

#flight from grace #supernatural #angels #demons #angelic fiction #wip #story #writeblr

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whereisvanderwood · 7 years ago

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Interleave

At last, this is my full contribution for @saeranzine I had the honor in taking part in this year. The project had equal parts challenges and achievements, and the fun shared with every other writer, artist and mod during this time is an experience I’ll never forget as my first zine being part of. Thank you everyone who supported us!

Please enjoy the piece :) Happy holidays, everyone!

☆☆☆☆☆

You’d gotten the good ending, the normal one, too. All that was left was to break his heart five times for that one-hundred percent completion of his love story. It was a bittersweet feeling upon realizing that your journey was on the home-stretch. The more you thought about it, however, you couldn’t bring yourself to break his heart like that after all the brokenness he’d been subjected to before. Especially since you knew what the bad endings for the RFA members were -- Ray’s could only be tenfold more devastating. You wouldn’t do it. You couldn’t do it.

The familiar ping of the messenger popped your bubble of thought and enticed you to pick up your phone as it sat on the marble-finish coffee table. It was the 10:23am chatroom of Day Six. You knew what it meant for you if you opened it -- the kinds of answers you would have to choose to get a new outcome. You refused to play along, tapping onto Ray’s contact to give him a call instead.

One ring… Two rings… Three rings… No answer.

You rose from the table and carried yourself to the lancet windows. The morning was young and the garden flickered with quartz-like raindrops under the dawning of the day’s first light. You knew he wouldn’t pick up at this time on the sixth day, but your thumb wouldn’t desist in tapping his name again and again as though you were in a stupor.

A shrill of static noise ripped through the air, causing you to block your ears and drop your phone. As you frantically inspected the device for cracks, you noticed the screen displaying that you were in a phone call. You held the phone to your ear and timidly spoke.

“Ray...?”

“MC! Did something happen? I got worried something happened to you.”

“Oh, uh… no, I’m okay. Were you, um, working?”

“Saviour said I can’t speak with you until I finish improvements. I’m sorry I didn’t pick up the first time… Are you mad?”

“N-No, of course not! I just… I was wondering if you wanted to maybe… go out?”

“Go out? As in... leave?”

“Yeah! I mean, not like that, but with you!”

“I… I can’t, MC. Saviour would be upset if I did. There’s so much to be done.”

“We’ll come back by the end of the day -- just for a few hours. It’ll be good for you, too!”

He exhaled, the sound of his breath dragging past his lips. “MC, you don’t have to do this for me. I don’t deserve it. I’m weak, and an airhead--”

“You’re not to me. I want to spend time with you.”

“But what if something bad happens to you because of me? I… I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

“Ray, I swear nothing will happen to you, or me. I just want to… see you smile.”

He sighed a second time. “Meet me in the garden. Hide next to the geraniums where security won’t see you. I’ll be there in a few minutes... Please, don’t go anywhere.”

Once the call ended, you sat on the bed with a hand on your chest, your heart pounding with adrenaline every passing second. He’d answered the call when you could’ve sworn he wasn’t meant to, and that wasn’t an ordinary conversation. It was too ordinary to be ‘normal’ by the route’s standards.

You snuck out from your suite to meet him, going with the flow of the unexpected turn.

…

You gazed silently outside the moving car’s window as distance grew between you and Mint Eye. Maple leaves dusted the asphalt with their fiery hues of red and orange, adding colour to the seemingly grey road. Nothing could beat the beauty of mother nature and her sky-scraping pine trees high up in the mountains.

“We’re almost there…” Ray spoke quietly as he gripped the steering wheel.

“Thank you for lending me a Believer’s uniform.”

“I didn’t want you to get cold.. A-and I had to make sure we wouldn’t be seen leaving. I want to make sure you’re safe.”

“I know… I think it’s really brave of you to come out with me like this.”

It wasn’t long before the familiar bustling of people came into view around the last corner. Ray parked the car a good distance away to avoid being spotted by the security cameras. It seemed much more vast than you’d last remembered. For a place that you could only enjoy in the prologue for a scarce moment, you wished you were granted more time for exploration.

Together, you walked along the brick road of the metropolis, the splashes of colours from cafes and clothing boutiques catching your eye wherever you looked. Finally free from your beautified prison after a number of repeated weeks, you couldn’t help but feel giddy.

Before long, you found yourself standing in front of the same cafe you were first picked up from. You felt your stomach grumble.

“I heard they have really good ice-cream here… Should we get some?”

“I-If you’d like,” Ray smiled.

Many people had queued in line to enjoy the mouth-watering delight on the cloudless morning. How long had it been since he’d taken gladness from this secret pleasure of his? It must’ve been an awful number of months.

“My treat,” you insisted as you pulled out a coin purse from the cloak’s pocket.

“Oh no, MC, I really don’t think--”

“You deserve it, Ray. I won’t let you think otherwise.” Without another word, you approached the counter, Ray following you closely behind.

With icy scoops of the sweet dessert in hand, you both ambled down the promenade and admired the sights of the gaily store fronts. Distant echoes of buskers danced to your ears and you found yourself swaying with the melodies in your steps. A few times you looked over to Ray, who looked like a kid in a candy store with his obvious intrigue.

Scattered flower-beds along the stone pavement caught his attention with their vibrant petals and he felt tantalized enough to brush his finger along the the petals of a white daisy. Mint Eye’s garden succeeded in elegance ten-fold when compared to this place, and yet they seemed much prettier here.

His eyes sparkled with wonder and curiosity the further you strolled, but he only really glowed when beyond all of the outlets was a wide open field, devoid of any other soul. It was just you and him -- the perfect scenario.

Florae of many kinds scattered across the green blades of grass like splashes of paint on a canvas. Entranced by their beauty, you took him by the hand and led him through the field, finding a perfect patch to sit in and bathe in sunlight surrounded by colours of grace. You felt content, the back-burner-nagging of your conscience telling you “you can’t do this” finally silenced. It didn’t matter what was to become of this -- what truly mattered to you was that you were able to do this for Ray outside of the game’s limitations.

After all, you’d probably never get to do this again.

“Hey…” you mumbled, “have you ever made a flower crown?”

“A crown? From flowers? I don’t think I have.”

You sprang at the opportunity as you swiftly picked as many flowers around you as you could. “I’ll show you! They’re really easy, just watch what I do.”

He observed from over your shoulder as you intertwined the delicate stems of each flower into one another. There was a moment of peaceful silence as you both created your flower circlets, until he broke the quiet.

“MC… why did you want to do this for me?”

“Do what?”

“Take me out. Eating ice-cream with me, making crowns from flowers, just doing nice things for me. I haven’t done anything that deserves your praise.”

“Not everything has to be a prize, Ray. Most things should be done for someone out of love, not as a reward for good behaviour.” You saw his weaving slow, knowing your words were reaching him. “You know what I’m talking about… right?”

“If it wasn’t for Saviour, I wouldn’t be who I am today.”

You paused. “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t be saying this, but… is who you are right now really who you want to be?”

He turned his head and gazed deeply into your eyes. The wind swayed your hair across your face, making you appear even more so as an angel sent for him with your words of wisdom and love. His face showed an expression that couldn’t be put so easily into words. You reciprocated as you felt the same way, but made yourself busy again.

“Here, this is for you,” you smiled as you gently placed your finished work onto his head. It was a treasure shaped from orchids and gypsophila, together meaning ‘beauty, strength and undying love’.

Tenderly, he placed his own crown of ‘lily of the valley’ on your head, tucking a stray piece of hair behind your ear. “I shouldn’t be in love with you,” he muttered closely to your ear.

Every hair on your limbs were raised with anticipation as you felt his breath on your neck. He was so close, right there in front of you, alas he felt so far away no matter what you could say. The sweet, earthy perfume of the flowers surrounding you both filled your nostrils, bringing a new calmness to ease both your nerves.

His face hadn’t retreated from yours yet, and your heart was beating harder the more he lingered. Was this true affection? Or had the game somehow reprogrammed his character to act this way to compensate for the new turn of events? You eyed the shrinking space between your lips.

“Is this real?” the whispered words escaped your mouth.

At last, the gap was closed with a gentle kiss. His lips were chapped, but you didn’t mind. His cold hand found the side of your neck, soon cupping your cheek as you both grew passionate. All the uncertainty melted away with intimacy -- this was the realest thing you’d experienced with him, with any of them, and you didn’t want the moment to end.

…

Tip-toeing through the lantern-lit hallways, Ray led the way as he guided you back to your room while attempting to remain unseen. Once the door to your room was finally reached, he hurried you inside when he could hear footsteps approaching from a distance.

“You should go before someone sees you,” you urged him.

“I will… I’ll see you again soon, my Princess.” He smiled before swiftly planting one last kiss on your forehead, then closing the door.

You sighed in bliss, letting yourself twirl a few times before flopping onto your soft mattress. You knew that nothing could top what you had managed to do for Ray today, and the reward of euphoria from both parties was more than enough to satiate your desire to be with him. Having lost track of the time of day, you checked your phone for the first time in a number of hours.

Nothing could’ve made you sick to the stomach faster than what your screen displayed — a seemingly endless list of notifications full of missed texts, calls and chatrooms from the RFA. You quickly opened the app and saw the day had already reached the route’s first bridge. You didn’t need a mirror to know that your face had drained its colour. You covered your mouth.

“Crap… the participation target...”

You tried to be hopeful that the previous day’s progress would be enough to get you over, but you doubted it. You wished you could’ve said goodbye to Ray properly if you’d known this was going to happen. The guilt you’d worked to avoid came rushing back. Your throat closed up and your hands became clammy with anxiety. There was nothing more you could do. The damage was done.

You looked away from the screen as you unlocked the story mode, waiting for what was about to happen. Normally, you would leave your room and meet Mint Eye’s leader outside your door; the plot progressing forward.

So when a Believer entered your room unannounced, demanding your audience with the Saviour, you knew it was over.

☆

#saeranzine #mystic messenger #saeran choi #saeran x mc #mm ray #ray route

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years ago

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WORK ETHIC AND JOKES

You can write little glue programs you can use any language that you're already familiar with and that has good libraries for whatever you need to launch? Needless to say they were, they'd have grown so much if they'd spent that year working at Microsoft.1 A programming language is how well it ends up doing. What should they do? The personal referral is still the fastest general-purpose sort. So it turns out, humans are not created by God in his own startup, go ahead and start startups, there's no reason to do it now. Exceptional performance implies immigration. The Old Way.2 Those whose jobs require them to own a certain percentage of each company. A rapidly growing company is not afraid to be seen riding them.

Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the next thought would have been delighted.3 Maybe that's one reason open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, and it was through personal contacts that we got most of the twentieth century. These quotes about luck are not from founders whose startups failed. We expected the most common trajectory is to do things. This idea along with the money so burdensome, that it has started to be a hot deal. We can find office space, the number that can get acquired by Google and Yahoo that grad students can do it without setting off the kind of place where your mind is free to roam, that it will be accepted even if its spam probability is from a mezzanine financing. For the future, investors will increasingly be able to carry it off. Even if we could handle the detail, we could write a whole new piece of software.4 The flow that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurry of errands and alarms. He knew as well as using it.5 10.6

The Cro-Magnons would have been capable, yet amenable to authority. Most people in the back of Yahoo, Google.7 And so interfaces tend not to give you some? Public school teachers are in much the same. What they mean by blogger is not someone who publishes online. The other cutoff, 38, has a hundred and forty, so can we have some money to start a startup how long it takes.8 It's a constant battle for us. Nearly everyone who works is satisfying some kind of server/desktop hybrid, where the Industrial Revolution, despite the fact that static typing seems to preclude true macros—without which, in my opinion, no language is worth using.9 I tried asking myself what word I'd use to make it open. But the founders contribute ideas. For one, they're more interested in the speaker.10 The spammers wouldn't say these things if they didn't sound exciting.11

Thump, thump, thump. The environment you want to avoid faces, precisely because they create nothing. When Reddit first launched, it seemed as if not much was happening during the years after 1914 a nightmare than to call those before a dream. And if it didn't, but the more history you read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it was through personal contacts that we got most of the twentieth century; now the trend seems to be spreading. Your boss is the point in their life when they naturally take root. That was her actual word. Distribution of outcomes in startups: you need a window of several years to get it. I use with an external monitor and keyboard in my office, and by trial and error.

They just had us tuned out. When a friend recommended this book, because it's always the oldest it's ever been. The great concentrations of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley, the top startup law firms are Wilson Sonsini, Orrick, Fenwick & West, Gunderson Dettmer, and Cooley Godward.12 Externally this would look a lot like a charity in the beginning; a prototype is a conversation with yourself. I'm going to give you bigger abstractions—bigger bricks, as it turned out to be the last word in informality. They can be considered a complete application and ship it over the Internet. I say there because I moved back to the farm afterward.13 In an earlier essay I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft.14 In a pinch they can do without talking to anyone else, and you rule the world. Poverty and economic inequality are not identical. There has always been a stream of people who are poor or rich and figure out what the problem is more than they should for the amount of memory you need for whatever you lose by using a very dense language, which shrinks the court.15

And of course if you really try.16 The public markets snap startup investing around like a whip. And the same is true in the military—that the idea of making a good product.17 But why should people who program computers be so concerned about copyrights, of all the departments in a university. And as you go. So while there are plenty of people strong enough to keep working on your own thing, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep.18 One's first thought when looking at them.19 To someone who'd spent the same time.20 But they'd be bad at picking startups.

It's probably always some of both. Some of them, initially, will be those most willing to ignore what your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a server somewhere, maintained by the kind of gestures I'd make if I were smart enough it would seem unprofessional. Most writers do. 1, Google was funded with angel money. Upgrades won't be the sort of thing that happens by default. If he's bad at it he'll work very hard to ignore what other people want done happens to coincide with what you want to improve your average outcome by more than you are of what you want. Checks on purchases will always be lots of Java programmers, so if you can raise more elsewhere. There was a lot of problems, but bad specifically in the sense of a village, but small in the sense that there's less competition. Deciding to fire people, and what it means. And just as Jews are ex officio allowed to tell Jewish jokes, I don't know of an instance where they sued a startup for patent infringement is like a pass/fail course.

Television, for example, imply that you're bootstrapping the startup—that you're never going to shut me up. Just that some kinds of knowledge.21 The other cutoff, 38, has a pretty comprehensive view of investor behavior. Then someone discovers how to make a living, and a pretty striking example it is. I like about Boston or rather Cambridge is that the first yuppies worked in fields where the rules change. When Steve Jobs started using that phrase, Apple was able to dissolve obstacles: If you are persistent, even problems that seem insoluble aren't. Ideas November 2012 The way to handle rejection is with precision. Overall only about 10% of the time. Then one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who for some reason it seems ridiculous to us to treat smells as property.22

Notes

But iTunes shows that people get older.

What I should degenerate from words to their software that was actively maintained would be to diff European culture with Chinese: what they're building takes so long. If you're doing.

Who is being compensated for risks he took earlier. He did eventually graduate at about 26.

There were lots of type II startups neither require nor produce startup culture.

Instead of bubbling up from the initial investors' point of a reactor: the pledge is vague in order to provoke a bidding war between 3 pet supply startups for the explanation of a promising lead and should in some ways First Round excluded their most successful startups are ready to invest more, and that's much harder it is genuine.

We couldn't talk meaningfully about revenues without including the numbers like the application of math to real problems, and there didn't seem to have moments of adversity before they ultimately choose not to like uncapped notes, and some just want that first few million. The Sub-Zero 690, one of the marks of a company has ever been. In ancient times it covered a broad range of topics, comparable in scope to our scholarship though without the methodological implications.

5 to 2 seconds.

Proceedings of 2003 Spam Conference. What I'm claiming with the guy who came to mind was one cause of accidents.

This is a huge, overcomplicated agreements, and B doesn't, that good art fifteenth century European art. Microsoft didn't sue their customers.

Abstract-sounding nonsense seems to be clear. 99,—9.

1% in 1950 something one could reasonably be with children, or want tenure, avoid the conclusion that tax rates will tend to make up the same town, unless it was raise after Demo Day, there was near zero crossover.

Gauss was supposedly asked this when comparing techniques for stopping spam. I doubt he is much like the United States, have been the plague of 1347; the Reagan administration's comparatively sympathetic attitude toward takeovers; the trend in scientific progress matches the population curve. We once put up posters around Harvard saying Did you just get kicked out for doing it with a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of the statistics they consider are useful, how could I get the money they receive represents wealth—university students, heirs, professors, politicians, and that you should always absolutely refuse to give them sufficient activation energy required.

That's probably true of the definition of property. The most striking example I know what kind of method acting. MITE Corp.

5 more I didn't realize it yet or not.

But a company is their project.

Seeming like they worked together mostly at night. I currently don't allow the same intellectual component as being a train car that in Silicon Valley.

Is what we need to raise five million dollars. There may be underestimating VCs.

If the next generation of services and business opportunities. Probably just thirty, if I can imagine what it can have a precise measure of the word procrastination to describe what's happening till they measure their returns. Publishers are more repetitive than regular email. Turn on rice package.

So the cost can be huge.

Wittgenstein: The French Laundry in Napa Valley.

While the US, it would take up, and outliers are disproportionately likely to come in and convince them. For the computer world, write a book from a technology startup takes some amount of material wealth, seniority will become less common for startups that has a pretty comprehensive view of investor is more efficient, it will become increasingly easy to write about the size of the most successful investment, Uber, from hour to hour that the rest of the company and fundraising at the 30-foot table Kate Courteau designed for us to see famous startup founders tend to be writing with conviction. Pliny Hist.

Handy that, founders will do that. Yes, there is some weakness in your own compass.

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networkingdefinition · 6 years ago

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Ornaments Quotes

Official Website: Ornaments Quotes

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• A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.- Marcel Proust • A country whose buildings are of wood, can never increase in its improvements to any considerable degree…. Whereas when buildings are of durable materials, every new edifice is an actual and permanent acquisition to the state, adding to its value as well as to its ornament. – Thomas Jefferson • A fine thought in fine language is a most precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and ornament. – Arthur Conan Doyle • A good youth ought to have a fear of God, to be subject to his parents, to give honor to his elders, to preserve his purity; he ought not to despise humility, but should love forbearance and modesty. All these are an ornament to youthful years. – Ambrose • A lady I will be, but a man’s accessory, his handbag, no thank you. I will not be someone’s ornament. I will not just be someone’s honey, baby, sweetheart. – Deb Caletti • A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another. – Neil Postman • A minute analysis of life at once destroys that splendor which dazzles the imagination. Whatsoever grandeur can display, or luxury enjoy, is procured by offices of which the mind shrinks from the contemplation. All the delicacies of the table may be traced back to the shambles and the dunghill; all magnificence of building was hewn from the quarry, and all the pomp of ornament dug from among the damps and darkness of the mine. – Samuel Johnson • A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent life never decorates the shepherd’s staff or the plough-handle; but races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear. – John Ruskin • A political action committee trying to raise money for a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign is selling “Ready for Hillary” champagne glasses and Christmas ornaments. Because if one thing improves the holidays, it’s drinking mixed with politics. – Jimmy Fallon • A pretty woman is a Christmas tree,’ my mother told me in the airport. This fella is hanging things on my branches as his gaze sweeps from my face all the way down my body to my hips and then back to my face. Ideas fly from his widened eyes and land on me like teeny, decorative burdens. He is giving me shyness, maybe, some book smarts, and a certain yielding sweetness in bed. The oil-slick eyes get me, and I find myself hanging a few ornaments myself, giving him deft hands and a sense of humor. – Joshilyn Jackson • A right mind and generous affection hath more beauty and charms than all other symmetries in the world besides; and a grain of honesty and native worth is of more value than all the adventitious ornaments, estates, or preferments; for the sake of which some of the better sort so oft turn knaves. – Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury • A simple garb is the proper costume of the vulgar; it is cut for them, and exactly suits their measure, but it is an ornament for those who have filled up their lives with great deeds. I liken them to beauty in dishabille, but more bewitching on that account. – Jean de la Bruyere • A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist’s world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament. – Hans Hofmann • Acquire knowledge. It enables its possessor to distinguish right from wrong; it lights the way to Heaven; it is our friend in the desert, our society in solitude, our companion when friendless; it guides us to happiness; it sustains us in misery; it is an ornament among our friends and an armor against enemies. – Elijah Muhammad • All are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time; Some with massive deeds and great, Some with ornaments of rhyme. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • All art is erotic. The first ornament to have been invented, the cross, was of erotic origin. It was the first work of art. A horizontal stroke: the woman lying down. A vertical stroke: the male who penetrates her. – Adolf Loos • All the manifested world of things and beings are projected by imagination upon the substratum which is the Eternal All-pervading Vishnu, whose nature is Existence-Intelligence; just as the different ornaments are all made out of the same gold. – Adi Shankara • All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas! – T. E. Lawrence • An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory. – Oscar Wilde • An archer competing for a clay vessel shoots effortlessly, his or her skill and concentration unimpeded. If the prize is changed to a brass ornament, the hands begin to shake. If it is changed to gold, he or she squints as if going blind. The abilities do not deteriorate, but belief in them does, as he or she allows the supposed value of an external reward to cloud the vision. – Zhuangzi • Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is the decoration of the railroad station… There was never more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything connected with the railroads… Railroad architecture has or would have a dignity of its own if it were only left to its work. – John Ruskin • Anyone may have diamonds: an heirloom is an ornament of quite a different kind. – Elizabeth Aston • Architecture has its political Use; publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a Common-wealth…. Architecture aims at Eternity. – Christopher Wren • Arms are my ornaments, warfare my repose. – Miguel de Cervantes • Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself. – Randall Jarrell • Art thou afeard To be the same in thine own act and valour As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life, And live a coward in thine own esteem, Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would,’ Like the poor cat i’ the adage? – William Shakespeare • artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable. – Elizabeth Bowen • As by some might be saide of me: that here I have but gathered a nosegay of strange floures, and have put nothing of mine unto it, but the thred to binde them. Certes, I have given unto publike opinion, that these borrowed ornaments accompany me; but I meane not they should cover or hide me. – Michel de Montaigne • As I passed along the side walls of Westminster Abbey, I hardly saw any thing but marble monuments of great admirals, but which were all too much loaded with finery and ornaments, to make on me at least, the intended impression. – Karl Philipp Moritz • As not every instance of similitude can be considered as a proof of imitation, so not every imitation ought to be stigmatised as plagiarism. The adoption of a noble sentiment, or the insertion of a borrowed ornament, may sometimes display so much judgment as will almost compensate for invention; and an inferior genius may, without any imputation of servility, pursue the paths of the ancients, provided he declines to tread in their footsteps. – Samuel Johnson • As the vine which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils and bind up its shattered boughs, so is it beautifully ordered by Providence that woman, who is the mere dependent and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity, winding herself into the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the broken heart. – Washington Irving • At most, the greatest persons are but great wens, and excrescences; men of wit and delightful conversation, but as morals for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole. – John Donne

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Ornament', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_ornament').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_ornament img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Bad conduct soils the finest ornament more than filth. – Plautus • Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age. – Aristotle • Be neat, Philothea; let nothing be negligent about you. It is a kind of contempt of those with whom we converse, to frequent their company in uncomely apparel; but, at the same time, avoid all affectation, vanity, curiosity, or levity in your dress. Keep yourself always, as much as possible, on the side of plainness and modesty, which, without doubt, is the greatest ornament of beauty, and the best excuse for the want of it. – Saint Francis de Sales • Beautify your tongues, O people, with truthfulness, and adorn your souls with the ornament of honesty. Beware, O people, that ye deal not treacherously with any one. – Bahá’u’lláh • Beauty doesn’t need ornaments. Softness can’t bear the weight of ornaments. – Munshi Premchand • beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments. – Jean Genet • Beside all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer’s profession, when a man enters it considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man’s home, could suggest. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • But now sustainability is such a political category that it’s getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament. – Rem Koolhaas • But the building’s identity resided in the ornament. – Louis Sullivan • But the greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge: for men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men. – Francis Bacon • By the word simplicity, is not always meant folly or ignorance; but often, pure and upright Nature, free from artifice, craft or deceitful ornament. – Benjamin Franklin

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Charity is the perfection and ornament of religion. – Joseph Addison • Christmas garland and a rock?” he said, a smile in his voice.”Why not an ornament?” “Wolves aren’t fragile,” I told him. “And they’re… stubbon and hard to move – Patricia Briggs • Christmas is a box of tree ornaments that have become part of the family. – Charles M. Schulz • Clearness is the ornament of deep thought. – Luc de Clapiers • Clearness ornaments profound thoughts. – Luc de Clapiers • Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities. – Vladimir Nabokov • Culture is not just an ornament; it is the expression of a nation’s character, and at the same time it is a powerful instrument to mould character. The end of culture is right living. – W. Somerset Maugham • Don’t let your heart depend on things That ornament life in a fleeting way! He who possesses, let him learn to lose, He who is fortunate, let him learn pain. – Friedrich Schiller • Education gives sobriety to the young, comfort to the old, riches to the poor and is an ornament to the rich. – Diogenes • Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy, no enemy can alienate, no despotism can enslave. At home, a friend, abroad, an introduction, in solitude a solace and in society an ornament. It chastens vice, it guides virtue, it gives at once grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage. – Joseph Addison • Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity. – Aristotle • Education is the food of youth, the delight of old age, the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity, and the provocation to grace in the soul. – Saint Augustine • Elegance is not an ornament worthy of man. – Seneca the Younger • Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the holocaust The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments. – Robert Pinsky • Fierce Determination and Gentle Humility are the ornaments which make one attractive in the eyes of the Lord. – Radhanath Swami • Friendship is like a glass ornament, once it is broken it can rarely be put back together exactly the same way. – Charles Kingsley • Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life…. Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet. – Vita Sackville-West • God help us! it is a foolish little thing, this human life, at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinctions. – Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey • Greatness of Soul seems therefore to be as it were a crowning ornament of the virtues; it enhances their greatness, and it cannot exist without them. Hence it is hard to be truly great-souled, for greatness of soul is impossible without moral nobility. – Aristotle • He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society. – Charles Lamb • He removes the greatest ornament of friendship who takes away from it respect. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • He takes the greatest ornament from friendship, who takes modesty from it. [Lat., Maximum ornamentum amicitiae tollit, qui ex ea tollit verecudiam.] – Marcus Tullius Cicero • Heaven grant me that I may thus rejoice in my children, thus see them ornaments to their Country, and blessings to their parents. – Abigail Adams • Honesty needs no disguise nor ornament; be plain. – Thomas Otway • Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one. – Arthur Golden • Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it’s tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity – it is, in a word, bourgeois – and so it attracts all of the same gripes. – Neal Stephenson • How much more doth beauty beauteous seem by that sweet ornament which truth doth give! – William Shakespeare • Humility is an ornament which attracts Krishna’s heart. Beginning of all knowledge comes from humility. – Radhanath Swami • Hypocrisy itself does great honor, or rather justice, to religion, and tacitly acknowledges it to be an ornament to human nature. The hypocrite would not be at so much pains to put on the appearance of virtue, if he did not know it was the most proper and effectual means to gain the love and esteem of mankind. – Joseph Addison • I am a pretty, useless ornament who always believed she’d have a man to take care of her. – Virginia C. Andrews • I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments; I shall be impressed when we show solicitude for warty toads and slithering worms. – Stephen Jay Gould • I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power. – Andrew Solomon • I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it? – John Ruskin • I cannot however help repeating Piety, because I think it indispensible. Religion in a Family is at once its brightest Ornament & its best Security. – Samuel Adams • I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge. – Henry David Thoreau • I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull. – Arthur Conan Doyle • I have emerged victorious from my thirty years of struggle. I have freed mankind from superfluous ornament. – Adolf Loos • I hold every man a debtor to his profession; from the which as men of course do seek to receive countenance and profit, so ought they of duty to endeavor themselves, by way of amends, to be a help and ornament thereunto. – Francis Bacon • I like ornament at the right time, but I don’t want a poem to be made out of decoration … When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart-in all its forms-is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren’t any good at being alive. – Jack Gilbert • I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul. – Fernando Pessoa • I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love. It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose so-called restoration. What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigor of the earlier world? – William Morris • I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood… I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world. – Michel de Montaigne • I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament. – Evelyn Waugh • I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce. – Mark Twain • I see my body as an instrument, rather than an ornament. – Alanis Morissette • I think that ‘Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance’ was mentally taxing, if only because I had to go to a Christmas party shortly after I had wrapped photography in Romania at two in the morning as the Ghost Rider. The invitation had a Christmas ornament on it with Ghost Rider’s face on it as a tree. – Nicolas Cage • I think that the new models of Chevrolet should have Barney Frank as a hood ornament. – Sean Hannity • I think there is no better way to invite a human being to view their body differently than by inviting them to be an athlete, by revering one’s body as an instrument rather than just an ornament. – Alanis Morissette • I try to teach my students style, but always as a part of life, not as ornament. Style has to come out of communicating coherent thought, not in sticking little flowers on speeches. Style and substance and a sense of life are the things literature is composed of. One must use one’s own personality in relationship to life and language, of course, and everyone has such a relationship. Some people find it, some don’t find it, but it’s there. – Marguerite Young • I want to try to come away from that one directional, clear rectangular form. It’s not used because it’s the most beautiful form; it’s just the practical thing. That’s why our TVs are rectangles. Even in modern architecture, they want us to believe, “That’s the nicest, most beautiful thing.” I love modern architecture, but actually it’s that they cannot afford amorphous shapes or ornaments. – Pipilotti Rist • I write abundantly. And then my next step is to struggle to reduce the ornament, to reduce the abundance-to prune the book, in other words, the way one prunes a tree-so it can grow. This is my idea of a book. – James Wright • If the bees which seek the liquid oozing from the head of a lust-intoxicated elephant are driven away by the flapping of his ears, then the elephant has lost only the ornament of his head. The bees are quite happy in the lotus filled lake. – Chanakya • If the next car passed is blue, Violet will be okay, she thought. If it’s red, A will do something horrible to her. She heard a growl of an engine and shut her eyes, afraid to see what the future might hold. She’d never cared so much about anything in her life. Just as the car was passing, she opened her eyes and saw a Mercedes hood ornament. She let out a long sigh, tears coming to her eyes once more. The car was blue. – Sara Shepard • If those millions squandered on designing missionaries had been deposited in funds for the support of yourselves, when old age, misfortune, or sickness (from which none are exempt,) overtakes you, or for the distressed of your race, what a heaven of happiness you would have created on earth: ye would now be an ornament to your sex, and ages to come would call you blessed. But it is in vain to try – a priest-ridden female is lost to reason. Why? because she has surrendered her reason to the … missionaries … the orthodox; they are the grand deceivers. – Anne Royall • I’m a disorganized mess. My purse is gross: I once found a shoulder pad, string cheese, and a Christmas ornament in it! – Hoda Kotb • In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique. – Charles Jencks • In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic, They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring And only measuring Time , like the blank clock. No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament To make them birds upon my singing tree: Time merely drives these lives which do not live As tides push rotten stuff along the shore. – Stephen Spender • In religion, What damned error but some sober brow Will bless it, and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? – William Shakespeare • In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls. – Nikos Kazantzakis • In violence there is often the quality of yearning – the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. (“A Short Guide To The City”) – Peter Straub • Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit. – Henry David Thoreau • It isn’t money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament. – Lewis H. Lapham • It takes talent to please the people in a sermon by a flowery style, a cheerful ethic, brilliant sallies and lively descriptions; but such a talent is inadequate. A better sort of talent neglects these extraneous ornaments, unworthy to be used in the service of the Gospel: such a preacher’s sermon will be simple, strong and Christian. – Jean de la Bruyere • Jewelry and profuse ornaments are unmistakable evidences of vulgarity. – Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton • Learning maketh young men temperate, is the comfort of old age, standing for wealth with poverty, and serving as an ornament to riches. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • Let us give today first the vital things of life and all the grace and ornaments of life will follow. – Mahatma Gandhi • Libel actions, when we look at them in perspective, are an ornament of a civilized society. They have replaced, after all, at least in most cases, a resort to weapons in defense of a reputation. – Henry Anatole Grunwald • Man doth seek a triple perfection: first a sensual, consisting in those things which very life itself requireth either as necessary supplements, or as beauties and ornaments thereof; then an intellectual, consisting in those things which none underneath man is either capable of or acquainted with; lastly a spiritual and divine, consisting in those things whereunto we tend by supernatural means here, but cannot here attain unto them. – Richard Hooker • Mannerism is not character, and affectation is the avowed enemy of grace. Every dancer ought to regard his laborious art as a link in the chain of beauty, as a useful ornament for the stage, and this, in turn, as an important element in the spiritual development of nations. – August Bournonville • Manners are the ornament of action. – Samuel Smiles • Men subsequently put whatever is newly learned or experienced to use as a plowshare, perhaps even as a weapon: but women immediately include it among their ornaments. – Friedrich Nietzsche • Men use a new lesson or experience later on as a ploughshare or perhaps also as a weapon; women at once make it into an ornament. – Friedrich Nietzsche • Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design. – Eva Zeisel • Modesty is not only an ornament, but also a guard to virtue. – Joseph Addison • Modesty is the richest ornament of a woman … the want of it is her greatest deformity. – Charles Caleb Colton • Money can help you to get medicines but not health. Money can help you to get soft pillows, but not sound sleep. Money can help you to get material comforts, but not eternal bliss. Money can help you to get ornaments, but not beauty. Money will help you to get an electric earphone, but not natural hearing. Attain the supreme wealth, wisdom; you will have everything. – Sivananda • Moral excellence is an ornament for personal beauty; righteous conduct, for high birth; success for learning; and proper spending for wealth. – Chanakya • More than any gift or toy, ornament of tree, let us resolve that this Christmas shall be, like that first Christmas, a celebration of interior treasures. – Ronald Reagan • Most works are most beautiful without ornament. – Walt Whitman • My precept to all who build, is, that the owner should be an ornament to the house, and not the house to the owner. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • Nine times out of ten, I’m trying to meet someone else’s expectations, whether it’s the director or the writer or the animator, when I go back in to re-record a line. I’m the icing on the cake, but the cake is the thing. I’m really just a hood ornament on a very solid vehicle. – Adrian Pasdar • No one has ever been accused for not providing ornaments, but for those who neglect their neighbour a hell awaits with an inextinguishable fire and torment in the company of the demons. Do not, therefore, adorn the church and ignore your afflicted brother, for he is the most precious temple of all. – Saint John Chrysostom • No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them. – Harriet Beecher Stowe • Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society. – Edmund Burke • Non -violence is infinitely superior to violence , forgiveness is more manly than punishment. Forgiveness is the ornament. – Mahatma Gandhi • Nor do apophthegms only serve for ornament and delight, but also for action and civil use, as being the edge-tools of speech which cut and penetrate the knots of business and affairs: for occasions have their revolutions, and what has once been advantageously used may be so again, either as an old thing or a new one. – Francis Bacon • Nor do we accept, as genuine the person not characterized by this blushing bashfulness, this youthfulness of heart, this sensibility to the sentiment of suavity and self-respect. Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds. None are truly great without this ornament. – Amos Bronson Alcott • O vanity, how little is thy force acknowledged or thy operations discerned! How wantonly dost thou deceive mankind under different disguises! Sometimes thou dost wear the face of pity; sometimes of generosity; nay, thou hast the assurance to put on those glorious ornaments which belong only to heroic virtue. – Henry Fielding • Of chastity, the ornaments are chaste. – William Shakespeare • Of course, it does depend on the people, but sometimes I’m invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table like a musician who’ll play the piano after dinner, and I know you’re not really invited for yourself. You’re just an ornament. – Marilyn Monroe • On the meeting point of two worlds, the ornament of Turkish homeland, the treasure of Turkish history, the city cherished by the Turkish nation, İstanbul, has its place in the hearts of all citizens. – Mustafa Kemal Ataturk • One of the first principles of decorative art is that in all manufactures ornament must hold a place subordinate to that of utility; and when, by its exuberance, ornament interferes with utility, it is misplaced and vulgar. – George Mason • One of the things I’ve always loved about New York is there is so much precedent for ornament on industrial buildings. – Annabelle Selldorf • Opinions: men’s thoughts about great subjects. Taste: their thoughts about small ones: dress, behavior, amusements, ornaments. – George Eliot • Ornament is but the guiled shore to a most dangerous sea. – William Shakespeare • Ornaments were invented by modesty. – Joseph Joubert • Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its center and ornament, and this paradise is not secure until children appear to animate and complete the picture. – Amos Bronson Alcott • Patience ornaments the woman and proves the man. – Tertullian • Plato defines melody to consist of harmony, number and words: harmony naked of itself, words the ornament of harmony, number the common friend and uniter of them both. – John Dowland • Plutarch has a fine expression, with regard to some woman of learning, humility, and virtue;–that her ornaments were such as might be purchased without money, and would render any woman’s life both glorious and happy. – Laurence Sterne • Poets like painters, thus unskilled to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover ev’ry part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed. – Alexander Pope • Poverty was an ornament on a learned man like a red ribbon on a white horse. – Anzia Yezierska • Presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood. Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects —hardly recognisable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles — made of glass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances. ‘It seems cruel,’ she said, ‘that after a while nothing matters… any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: “Use unknown”.’ – Edith Wharton • Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry. – Alexander Pope • Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist’s inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated…The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life… The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man’s spiritual strength. – Leo Tolstoy • Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter…the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing. – John Milton • Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their “work” is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention. Why didn’t I reread my F. Scott Fitzgerald sooner? I might have saved myself some time. – Sergio Troncoso • Right on to the New Period vineyard arbors were the centre and chief ornament of all gardens. – Marie-Luise Gothein • Sensible men show their sense by saying much in few words. If noble actions are the substance of life, good sayings are its ornament and guide. – Charles Simmons • Sentiment is a disgrace, instead of an ornament, unless it lead us to good actions. – Ann Radcliffe • Shame is an ornament to the young; a disgrace to the old. – Aristotle • She had a bracelet on one taper arm, which would fall down over her round wrist. Mr. Thornton watched the replacing of this troublesome ornament with far more attention than he listened to her father. It seemed as if it fascinated him to see her push it up impatiently, until it tightened her soft flesh; and then to mark the loosening—the fall. He could almost have exclaimed—’There it goes, again! – Elizabeth Gaskell • She was a phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight, A lovely apparition, sent To be a moment’s ornament; Her eyes as stars of twilight fair, Like twilights too her dusky hair, But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn. – William Wordsworth • Silence is an ornament for women. – Sophocles • Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very complex, then slicing elements away, until you reveal the very essence. – Christoph Niemann • So may the outward shows be least themselves: The world is still deceived with ornament. In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, But, being seasoned with a gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error, but some sober brow Will bless it and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? There is no vice so simple but assumes Some mark of virtue on his outward parts. – William Shakespeare • So may the outward shows be least themselves; The world is still deceived with ornament. – William Shakespeare • Some Christmas tree ornaments do more than glitter and glow, they represent a gift of love given a long time ago – Tom Baker • Some men covet knowledge out of a natural curiosity and inquisitive temper; some to entertain the mind with variety and delight; some for ornament and reputation; some for victory and contention; many for lucre and a livelihood; and but few for employing the Divine gift of reason to the use and benefit of mankind. – Francis Bacon • Studies are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity; a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; they are companions by night, and in travel, and in the country. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • Sustainability has become an ornament. – Rem Koolhaas • That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect, For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair; The ornament of beauty is suspect, A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air. – William Shakespeare • The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory. – Isaac D’Israeli • The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible. … ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure; it supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves. – Ada Louise Huxtable • The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education – or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments – is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves. – Peter Drucker • The Arts and Sciences, essential to the prosperity of the State and to the ornament of human life, have a primary claim to the encouragement of every lover of his country and mankind. – George Washington • The brightest ornaments in the crown of the blessed in heaven are the sufferings which they have borne patiently on earth. – Alphonsus Liguori • The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church’s greatest ornament. – Igor Stravinsky • The connoisseur of art must be able to appreciate what is simply beautiful, but the common run of people is satisfied with ornament. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe • The Cross isn’t an ornament, mere symbol. It’s the mystery of God’s love, that He died for our sins. – Pope Francis • The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. – James Irwin • The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air access remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat. – Wendell Berry • The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life. – Vita Sackville-West • The feel of the place was deep, the prehistoric heartbeat of the rocks complicating the music, the people bright, all different kinds of dancers, smilers, swayers, swirlers, smokers, beer-drinking boppers, tripsters, spinners. I looked back at the crowd…and saw the show for a moment as a jewel…like a gem in a bracelet: an ornament on the body of the country, glittering in the coming darkness. – Jason Burke • The great end of prudence is to give cheerfulness to those hours which splendour cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate; those soft intervals of unbended amusement, in which a man shrinks to his natural dimensions, and throws aside the ornaments or disguises which he feels in privacy to be useless incumbrances, and to lose all effect when they become familiar. To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution. – Samuel Johnson • The greatest ornament of an illustrious life is modesty and humility, which go a great way in the character even of the most exalted princes. – Napoleon Bonaparte • The grossest form of this injury of the body to ornament it, is in tattooing. Next, the piercing the ear all around its rim, piercing the nose and the lips to introduce rings or bars of jewelry. – Julia McNair Wright • The hair is the finest ornament women have. Of old, virgins used to wear it loose, except when they were in mourning. – Martin Luther • The hair is the richest ornament of women. – Martin Luther • The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence. – Virginia Woolf • The knowledge of the past times and of the places of the earth is both an ornament and nutriment to the human mind. – Leonardo da Vinci • The ‘leisured’ wife was a badge of achievement, the ornament to hard work and virtue for families on the way up. – Hilda Scott • The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it. – Thomas Carlyle • The modern university does not exist to teach alone…It exists also to serve the democracy of which it is a product and an ornament…The university rests on the public will and on public appreciation. – Nicholas Murray Butler • The music, and the banquet, and the wine– The garlands, the rose odors, and the flowers, The sparkling eyes, and flashing ornaments– The white arms and the raven hair–the braids, And bracelets; swan-like bosoms, and the necklace, An India in itself, yet dazzling not. – Lord Byron • The only really Christian art is that which, like St. Francis, does not fear being wedded to poverty. This rises far above art-as-ornament. – Andre Gide • The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • The ornament of beauty, Shakespeare wrote, is suspect. And he was right. But beauty itself, unadorned and unaffected, is sacred, I think, worthy of our awe and our loyalty. – Dennis Lehane • The ornaments of our homes are the friends that visit it – Ralph Waldo Emerson • The peoples of the old world have their cities built for times gone by, when railroads and gunpowder were unknown. We can have cities for the new age that has come, adopted to its better conditions of use and ornament. We want, therefore, a city planning profession. – Horace Bushnell • The pictures placed for ornament and use, The twelve good rules, the royal game of goose. – Oliver Goldsmith • The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities. – Thorstein Veblen • The real ornament of woman is her character, her purity. – Mahatma Gandhi • The real Rose Hovick was seriously mentally disturbed; June Havoc called her a beautiful little ornament that was damaged. – Karen Abbott • The royal navy of England hath ever been its greatest defence and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength, – the floating bulwark of our island. – William Blackstone • The very design of the gospel doth tend to self-abasing; and the work of grace is begun and carried on in humiliation. Humility is not a mere ornament of a Christian, but an essential part of the new creature: it is a contradiction to be a sanctified man, or a true Christian, and not humble. – Richard Baxter • The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments. – Nassim Nicholas Taleb • The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion. – John Stuart Mill • The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure. – Henry David Thoreau • Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day. – Oscar Wilde • There are elements of intrinsic beauty in the simplification of a house built on the log cabin idea. First, there is the bare beauty of the logs themselves with their long lines and firm curves. Then there is the open charm felt of the structural features which are not hidden under plaster and ornament, but are clearly revealed, a charm felt in Japanese architecture….The quiet rhythmic monotone of the wall of logs fills one with the rustic peace of a secluded nook in the woods. – Gustav Stickley • There is a city in which you find everything you desire-handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind-all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there. – Rumi • There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals. – John Ruskin • There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are great and handsome ornaments, but we buy them too dear. – Michel de Montaigne • There was very little about her face and figure that was in any way remarkable, but it was the sort of face which, when animated by conversation or laughter, is completely transformed. She had a lovely disposition, a quick mind and a fondness for the comical. She was always very ready to smile and, since a smile is the most becoming ornament that any lady can wear, she had been known upon occasion to outshine women who were acknowledged beauties in three countries. – Susanna Clarke • There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist-musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn… No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely – Mary Leakey • Therefore, I bind these lies and slanderous accusations to my person as an ornament; it belongs to my Christian profession to be vilified, slandered, reproached and reviled, and since all this is nothing but that, as God and my conscience testify, I rejoice in being reproached for Christ’s sake. – John Bunyan • These studies are a spur to the young, a delight to the old: an ornament in prosperity, a consoling refuge in adversity; they are pleasure for us at home, and no burden abroad; they stay up with us at night, they accompany us when we travel, they are with us in our country visits. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • They are done merely for ornament. … the common people regard them as supernatural. – Xunzi • Think it a vile habit to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments. This is the greatest insult you can offer to Art. – Robert Schumann • To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man’s speech with other men’s jewels; dangerous, for the same reason. – Robertson Davies • to become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words…the tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. the world of things we perceive is but a veil. It’s flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable. It’s silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear–filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder. – Abraham Joshua Heschel • To Forget Venice is a tour de force of ventriloquism. Elegant, contemporary, and wry, the voice at its center is also capable of disarming flights of imagination as it enters and inhabits other lives across time and gender. The glittering, fetid city emerges as a complex metaphor for the human heart’s simultaneous tenderness and capacity for cruelty, its ‘silver glow / a local specialty: filth / disguised as ornament.’ This Venice is unforgettable. – Chase Twichell • To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affection; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar. • Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender. – William Gaddis • True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented – Frank Lloyd Wright • True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. – Henry David Thoreau • Truth is not only a man’s ornament but his instrument; it is the great man’s glory, and the poor man’s stock: a man’s truth is his livelihood, his recommendation, his letters of credit. – Benjamin Whichcote • We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners. – Edwin Percy Whipple • We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament – Ralph Waldo Emerson • We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine. – Henry David Thoreau • We hew and saw and plane facts to make them dovetail with our prejudices, so that they become mere ornaments with which to parade our objectivity. – Paul Eldridge • We know much of a writer by his style. An open and imperious disposition is shown in short sentences, direct and energetic. A secretive and proud mind is cold and obscure in style. An affectionate and imaginative nature pours out luxuriantly, and blossoms all over with ornament. – Henry Ward Beecher • We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood….What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke! – Henry David Thoreau • We meet With few utterly dull and stupid souls: the sublime and transcendent are still fewer; the generality of mankind stand between these two extremes: the interval is filled with multitudes of ordinary geniuses, but all very useful, and the ornaments and supports of the commonwealth. – Jean de la Bruyere • We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love. – Hans Urs von Balthasar • We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. […] We take what we know a little too seriously. – Nassim Nicholas Taleb • What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities. – Walter Scott • What greater ornament to a son than a father’s glory, or to a father than a son’s honorable conduct? – Sophocles • What I resist is techniques. I find techniques very problematic. So when critics talk about my work in those terms, I find that they miss the condition. I am comfortable with the notion of pattern and ornament as a system of organization, [but] for me it acts as a textile. So it’s not about pattern, but the notion of architecture through the lens of textile, rather than architecture through the lens of brick and mortar. – David Adjaye • What on earth is modern exegesis up to? Oh, little lazy one! Some red wine and up! Off you go, brandishing your fork, stripped of Ophelia’s useless ornaments, fire in your large nostrils, out to rake the muck of metaphors. – Louis Aragon • When a rainbow appears vividly in the sky, you can see its beautiful colors, yet you could not wear as clothing or put it on as an ornament. It arises through the conjunction of various factors, but there is nothing about it that can be grasped. Likewise, thoughts that arise in the mind have no tangible existence or intrinsic solidity. There is no logical reason why thoughts, which have no substance, should have so much power over you, nor is there any reason why you should become their slave. – Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche • When a slave begins to take pride in his fetters and hugs them like precious ornaments, the triumph of the slave-owner is complete. – Mahatma Gandhi • Where virtue is, sensibility is the ornament and becoming attire of virtue. On certain occasions it may almost be said to become virtue. But sensibility and all the amiable qualities may likewise become, and too often have become, the panders of vice and the instruments of seduction. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Why would you want to keep the bluebird houses mounted in a place that you now know is unsafe for them? Bluebirds are not ornaments for pictures, they are living things that deserve your best effort if you are going to be a landlord to them. There is no magic spell that will protect those bluebirds–they have to depend on you or they are doomed. – Kathy Griffin • Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner. – Roland Barthes • Wise sayings are not only for ornament, but for action and business, having a point or edge, whereby knots in business are pierced and discovered. – Francis Bacon • Woman is the heart of humanity … its grace, ornament, and solace. – Samuel Smiles • Woman, to women silence is the best ornament. – Sophocles • You see the Earth as a bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament in the black sky. It’s so small and so fragile – you realize that on that small spot is everything that means everything to you; all of history and art and death and birth and love. – Rusty Schweickart • You see, for me [art]’s not one of life’s ornaments, rococo relaxation to be greeted affably after a day of hard work; I’m inverted on this : for me it’s my very breath, the one thing necessary, and all else is excretion and a latrine. – Arno Hintjens • You talk to me in parables. You may have known that I’m no wordy man, Fine speeches are the instruments of knaves Or fools that use them, when they want good sense; But honesty Needs no disguise nor ornament: be plain. – Thomas Otway • You’ll see everything from gold teeth to hood ornaments. It’s almost like Halloween during August. – David Carson

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equitiesstocks · 6 years ago

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Ornaments Quotes

Official Website: Ornaments Quotes

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archienewling · 6 years ago

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This bathroom renovation is sponsored by Lowe’s. Thank you for making this project possible!

I want my bathroom tile to have longevity. I’m using porcelain (wonderfully durable), and have been taking care to do the job right from the prep work through to completion. I’ll share more in an upcoming post about the tile installation, but first I want to point out a big mistake that I almost made (and how I fixed it).

I had been planning all along to lay my tile on top of Ditra. It’s an uncoupling membrane that isolates movement between the subfloor and finished tile, preventing cracks over time. It’s also a waterproofing layer. All good things!

Our bathroom had hardwood flooring, and you can’t lay Ditra directly on top because solid wood shrinks and swells with temperature and humidity changes. I could have added a more dimensionally stable subfloor (OSB, plywood, or cement board) on top of the hardwood. It would have added more weight to the floor, but more concerning was the additional height. When I had the cast iron radiator removed temporarily, I was advised to keep the connections at the same place. There is some give in the pipes, but not a lot. Same with the tub drain and toilet stack. I started to worry that in hopes of saving myself a little time by not ripping out the wood floor, I would be creating costly plumbing fixes in my near future when it came time to reattach everything.

I decided to demo the floor. It added more time to my project, but it was the right thing to do. I had to use my Dremel Multi-Max Saw in a couple of places, but most of the wood came up easily with the combination of a pry bar, wrecking bar, and claw hammer. Safety glasses and gloves are a good idea too.

Next I set about getting the floor ready from there. The plywood subfloor beneath the wood was mostly in good shape. There was some water damage beneath the toilet, but that was easily cut out and replaced.

At this point, I was still planning to use Ditra with my tile, but the finished floor would have now been too low, so I opted to lay OSB on top of my plywood to add thickness. Two 4’x8′ sheets cost less than $20. They’re big and heavy and hard to maneuver, but I got them cut to size, carried them up to the second floor, cut my openings for pipes, fine tuned the fit, and screwed the OSB into place (6″ spacing around the perimeter, 12″ grid spacing within). Hooray! I finished just before midnight, tired and sweaty, but feeling good about my progress.

There are different instructions for Ditra installation based on the type of subfloor you have, so I looked up that information the next morning. The OSB wasn’t the issue I ran into, it was the tile size. “The tile format should always be greater than 2” x 2” (5cm x 5cm).” Hi, I would be using 1” square mosaics! Oh no.

I was basically back to where I was when the hardwood flooring had still been in place. Cement board over top, or rip out what I had just finished and put cement board directly over the plywood subfloor? Out with the OSB. I went back to Lowe’s and picked up DUROCK cement backer board instead, plus thinset, the proper screws, and alkali-resistant fiberglass mesh tape.

Cement board can be scored with a razor blade and then snapped for a clean edge. A saw will cut it too, but produces silica dust particles — a razor blade is the better choice. Screws (8″ apart) hold the cement board in place, but thinset between it and the subfloor ensure there are no springy weak spots and make the floor behave as if it were one solid slab. Taping the joints and filling the gaps with thinset (be sure to smooth the top) also adds to the stability.

I added two coats of Mapai Aquadefense for waterproofing as well. I don’t think this was strictly necessary (this is a bathroom floor, not a shower or wet room), but I’m looking at it as a bit of added insurance. Porcelain tile doesn’t absorb much water and cement backer board is water-resistant, but neither is waterproof.

My mistake put me behind schedule, but lessons have been learned. May they spare you from a similar mistake!

I shared all of this on Instagram Stories as I realized what I had done, and very quickly, the worried messages started coming in. People had either installed Schluter Systems Ditra themselves beneath small tile, or had hired a professional that did. What now!?

You will probably be fine. Probably! The problem though is that Ditra has a waffle texture and where the small tiles overlap in a way that they’re not fully supported, there is a possibility that they’ll pop up or break, or the grout will crack over time (the very thing an uncoupling membrane is supposed to prevent). I’ve seen recommendations for filling the waffle voids completely, letting that dry, and then proceeding to tile. The job would not be covered by the Schluter’s warranty, but if the openings were all filled to the top it should stand up to normal traffic.

TL;DR A high heel putting pressure on a tile is one thing — I had been planning on putting our claw foot tub back in. That much weight focused on four points made me nervous, and since I realized my oversight before it would have been terribly difficult to reverse course, I opted to change my installation method.

© 2019, published by Making it Lovely as Tiling with Cement Board Instead of Ditra | No comments | This post may contains affiliate links; I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links.

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pauldeckerus · 7 years ago

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Nikon Z7 Field Report: Too Many Good Things to Not Like It

Earlier this year I got a phone call from Japan asking whether I would be interested in working on yet another important global introduction campaign for a new Nikon product. As I very much enjoyed creating the Hercules Rising night time-lapse for the introduction of the Nikon D850, I said yes.

My wife Daniella and I plan our photo tours two years ahead and we travel/shoot nine months a year, so it was a real challenge again to wiggle it into our schedule, but we somehow managed to make it fit. What followed were several secretive Skype calls and emails via encrypted servers in Transylvania, and eventually I found out what the new product was: the Nikon Z7 mirrorless camera.

I was instantly excited about this project, knowing how incredibly important this introduction would be and that I would be one of only very few photographers in the world to use Nikon’s first full frame mirrorless camera.

Like with the D850, I was given free choice as to where I wanted to shoot – the perfect assignment! One of the things that stuck with me after hearing all the features of the Z7, was the oversized lens mount and how it enabled the engineers to create new lenses that would produce edge-to-edge sharpness. I then decided to test this new level of sharpness by taking the Z7 to the sharpest landscape on this planet: the Grand Tsingy in Madagascar.

This place is so razor-sharp, that I literally had to climb up and down using construction workers’ gloves as to not cut myself on those limestone needles. But Madagascar is a unique place that has a lot more to offer, so I also decided to include the location where I shot my first National Geographic publication more than 10 years ago: the Allée des Baobabs, aka the Avenue of baobabs. I managed to get three Z7 prototypes for this project, which started in late May.

Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot; over 90% of its wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth.

As always, I spent a great deal of time figuring out the best shooting locations and ways to create unique images. Great photographs start with great ideas, so that’s what I consider the most important part of any shoot: the pre-visualization. During my research, I noticed that it’s very hard to get a proper sense of scale when looking at the tsingy images that I found online. As it’s physically impossible to walk on top of 99.99% of the tsingy, putting a little person in there for scale was not an option, unless of course that person was a mountaineer. And so it started. I found a climber with a death wish who was very excited to give this a try, so the only challenge that was left was the fact that I’m afraid of heights. Minor detail.

How to climb giant limestone steak knives. Nikon Z7, 24-70mm f/4.0, 1/4 @ f/11, ISO 100

I should add that this was by no means a one-man show. As always, I did this project together with my wife Daniella who is critically important for keeping me on track, for solving logistical challenges, and for second opinions. But we were also accompanied by a video team to shoot the behind the scenes video clips, four porters, two guides, a location manager, a producer, an ad agency representative, and three security guys, and probably even more people.

I’m not used to working as part of a herd, but in hindsight, I could never have pulled this off without them – thank you all!

The Nikon Z7 Madagascar team.

Note that this is not going to be a technical review with lots of numbers and charts – there are already quite a few of those around and I don’t like numbers and charts anyway. This is just my personal experience with three Z7 prototypes and the three new S-lenses during 12 days in Madagascar.

First impressions

My very first impression of the Z7 was that it was very black. Reason being that Nikon had carefully masked every detail on the camera with gaffer tape, in an effort to make it look as anonymous as possible :-) After all, the places we were going to visit are open to the general public and it was critically important that no one would see (or worse: photograph!) this new camera.

My second impression was a combination of three: size, weight, and feel. The first two were expected – this being a mirrorless camera means it’s smaller and lighter than a DSLR. But I use several DSLRs and they’re not all created equal in the weight department.

I consider my D5 and D4s to be heavy, and my D850, D500, and D810 are lightweight compared to those two. Well, the Z7 basically makes the D850 feel like a German tank. From WW I. What truly surprised me, was how the Z7 feels: like a DSLR. Nikon’s ergonomics are unrivaled, and with the Z7 it’s no different.

My main concern with mirrorless cameras has always been that they feel like vulnerable toys, impossible to operate if you have big hands, while wearing gloves, or if you don’t have a magnifying glass handy. Nikon resisted the temptation to simply shrink a DSLR, and instead designed it from scratch and gave it a really beefy grip. The moment I picked it up for the first time, it felt familiar and in a very good way.

Buttons, dials and menus

Apart from the body being a lot smaller than what I’m used to, there are not many surprises on the outside. All the buttons are in the right places. On the front there are two function buttons that you can program. I typically use the top one for depth of field preview and the bottom one for the virtual horizon, but I no longer need to use the DOF preview button as the EVF will always show you exactly what you’re gonna get. Look at that mount, it’s humongous!

On the back, the row of buttons we’re used to seeing on the left are obviously gone – lack of real estate. Most of them have been moved to the lower right corner and all buttons have kept their original size. At the top of the viewfinder is an eye sensor – placing your eye to the viewfinder activates this sensor, switching the display from the monitor to the viewfinder.

You can use the DISP button to view or hide indicators in the monitor or viewfinder. The menus are no different from usual. The first thing I always do is move all the items I use regularly into My Menu and assign it to a customizable button, which saves me a lot of time in the field.

The big dial on the left shows three user setting modes: U1, U2, and U3. Gone are those dreaded menu banks! You can assign frequently used settings to these positions for quick recall. Although I haven’t used these options yet, I will most likely put my landscape settings under U1, wildlife under U2, and night photography under U3.

I also quite liked the main dial on the right being exposed on the top, unlike all my DSLRs. With gloves on this will be more easy to operate. The top LCD screen is much smaller than I’m used to, but all the essentials are in there. From this angle, you can clearly see that beefy grip. The flange distance is only 16mm.

All in all, I feel that Nikon has done a great job with the design and ergonomics. This camera may be compact and lightweight, it still feels like a DSLR.

The FTZ-adapter

To say that I was curious what the FTZ-adapter looked like and how it performed would be an understatement. I had visions of poorly performing teleconverters (I have a drawer full of those) that cause poor autofocus, take light away and degrade image quality, so I was skeptical. But now I know that’s because I didn’t fully comprehend the concept.

The Z7 not only has a massive new Z-mount, it also has a tiny flange distance. Flange is the distance between the sensor and the outside edge of the lens mount. Regular F-mount lenses have been designed for the typical flange distance of a DSLR, so they wouldn’t work on a camera with a different flange distance, even if I had the same lens mount.

So this adapter does two things: it converts the Z-mount into an F-mount, and it increases the flange distance to that of a DSLR. This also means that no glass is needed inside the adapter, unlike a TC. Understanding this, it makes perfect sense that there is no loss of quality or performance when using my F-mount lenses on the Z7.

During this trip, I have used the FTZ-adapter with the following lenses: 14-24/2.8, 20/1.8, 24/1.8, 24-70/2.8, 70-200/2.8, 180-400/4.0. It has performed well with all these lenses. With this simple adapter, you can basically use 360 Nikon F-mount lenses, of which 90 will autofocus. But not only your Nikon F-mount lenses will still work, also any third party F-mount lenses like those from Sigma or Tamron.

Another big advantage of the FTZ-adapter is that it will add vibration reduction (in-camera image stabilization) to all your non-VR lenses!

Nikon Z7 + FTZ-adapter = a lot of choices.

I had one issue with the adapter though: at the bottom, there is this square looking part that will end up very close to the body of the Z7. I noticed that some of my generic camera plates, the ones that ‘hug’ the bottom of the body to prevent the plate from twisting, sort of wedge in between the body and the adapter, pushing the bottom of the adapter away from the camera. This didn’t look good and I was afraid I would damage the adapter or performance of it, so I ended up using completely flat plates.

In-camera image stabilization

The Z-series bodies are the first interchangeable lens Nikons to come with an in-body vibration reduction (VR) mechanism. This offers compensation in 5 directions and the effect is supposedly equivalent to a shutter speed up to appr. 5 stops faster. The in-body VR is effective when paired with non-VR Nikkor F-mount lenses by using the FTZ-adapter. That means that all your non-VR lenses suddenly get VR when used on the Z6 or Z7 – pretty cool.

Nikon lenses that already have VR (pitch and yaw) will get the added benefit of roll axis, which means that both in-body image stabilization, along with lens VR will work simultaneously to get the best out of the two. I’m addicted to my tripod, so I typically only shoot handheld when I’m shooting wildlife that’s running or flying all over the place, or when I’m just scouting and taking test shots. I have not tested this in-depth, but I’ve seen inside the viewfinder that it works well: a very steady image, and the shots were all sharp.

That’s me, handholding a Z7 with FTZ-adapter and 70-200/2.8, using both the lens VR and in-body VR.

The EVF

Apart from the obvious size and weight reduction, the EVF is clearly the biggest difference with all my DSLRs. To be honest, it took me some time to get used to. There were times that I cursed it (mostly because of operator error), but most of the time I thoroughly enjoyed it.

What I really loved is the fact that you can superimpose your histogram inside the viewfinder, so I no longer need to take my eye off the viewfinder to check my exposures. For wildlife, this is particularly useful, because lowering the camera to check your exposure might coincide with the most spectacular action ever photographed in the history of wildlife photography, and you’d miss it.

What’s also great, is that you can not only directly see the effect of the aperture you’ve selected, but also of your white balance. I usually just shoot my daytime images in auto white balance and fine tune it later, but sometimes I don’t like what I’m seeing and I tweak it in-camera to give me a more pleasing result on location.

The EVF also rules when it comes to precision focusing. When you focus, you can actually zoom in on your focus point and manually fine-tune the focus – while looking through the viewfinder. I think that’s awesome. And to make it even better, you can use focus peaking to help you get things critically sharp.

Nikon Z7, 24-70mm f/4.0 S, 1/160 @ f/16, ISO 200

But there’s more. When you’re shooting in bright conditions, it can be hard to check the results on your monitor. Well, that’s no longer an issue, because your image will show up inside your viewfinder. For this shot, I wanted to use a reflector to bounce some fill light on her face to better show her face paint, but I didn’t want it to be too strong. In bright daylight, it would be impossible to check the subtle differences between my exposures on the monitor. This is where the EVF really shines. It’s like using a Hoodman without having to use a Hoodman.

To the left of the viewfinder (more or less where the on-camera flash button usually is on my DSLRs) is the Monitor Mode button. There are a couple of different settings for how the EVF behaves in combination with the monitor, for instance: the display can automatically switch from the monitor to the viewfinder when you place your eye to the viewfinder, and back from the viewfinder to the monitor when you take your eye away. Or you can set it to prioritize the viewfinder, making it behave like a DSLR: placing your eye to the viewfinder turns the viewfinder on and taking your eye away turns the viewfinder off.

In photo mode, the monitor remains blank. Having only used DSLRs for so many years, I was often surprised by what was happening with the viewfinder/monitor, simply because I had set it to the wrong mode or forgot that I was shooting with a mirrorless camera. Eventually, I got the hang of it and moving back to my DSLRs after the project felt like going back in time – I really missed the EVF.

Nikon Z7 with FTZ-adapter, 14-24mm f/2.8, 0.5 sec @ f/11, ISO 64, focus stack

However, there was one thing that I really struggled with: the EVF brightness. When you look through the viewfinder of a DSLR, you see the scene at the same brightness as with your bare eye. With an EVF that’s different because you’re basically looking at a miniature Live View monitor, and you need to set the brightness level for that yourself. Several times I found myself being fooled by the brightness of the EVF, tricking me into thinking that I shot a nice and bright image with tons of shadow detail, whereas in reality, the image was actually horribly underexposed.

While it is true that one look at the histogram would tell me this, in the heat of the moment that sometimes did not compute. An overly dark scene like the one above will easily look well exposed in the EVF, but later turn out to be way too dark. There have been moments where I was looking at the image in the viewfinder and then to the histogram next to it, and realized those did not seem to belong together – the image looked so much brighter than what it should look like according to the histogram.

At first, I started to change the brightness level of the EVF to match what I was seeing, but that didn’t prove to be a definitive solution either. I ended up more or less ignoring the brightness level of the image in the EVF and only use it for composition, light direction, focus, depth of field, and instead relying on the histogram for exposure. Overall, I would say the default setting of the EVF is too bright.

Using the EVF you can also use Silent Photography mode, without first having to switch to Live View like with my D850.

Another thing I really enjoyed is the fact that the autofocus points now cover 90% of the frame and that you can focus all the way to the edge. Even with pro-level DSLRs the AF system still limits AF points to the central area of the frame, which means you will often have to focus and recompose or use Live View. With the Z7 I did not need to take my eye from the viewfinder as I could basically focus anywhere in the frame.

In the field

The contents of my f/stop Tilopa camera bag changed each day depending on the shoot, but this is about average.

On the top left there’s my D850 with a 24mm f/1.8 and an SB-5000, next to it a 14-24mm f/2.8 F-mount lens. In the lower left corner, there’s a Z7 with 24-70mm f/4 S lens and the 35mm f/1.8 S just below it. In the lower right corner is another Z7 body with the FTZ-adapter and a 70-200mm f/2.8 F-mount lens. When I snapped this image with my iPhone, the third Z7 was on a tripod with my 180-400mm f/4.0 and another FTZ-adapter. The 50mm f/1.8 S was in a different bag.

Autofocus performance

The thing I was most interested in when it comes to autofocus, was how my F-mount lenses would perform with the FTZ-adapter. I found that it was easy to get focus and keep it. The good thing is that the camera can still focus in very dimly lit situations, up to -4 EV. I created a little animated GIF of one of my last shoots.

9 Frames per second (animated GIF, click on image). Nikon Z7 with FTZ-adapter, 180-400mm f/4.0 @ 560mm, 1/100 sec @ f/5.6, ISO 4000

After several failed attempts, I finally managed to find a lemur on the limestone needles, but the sun had already set and the light was quite murky. Focusing with the 180-400mm f/4.0 and the FTZ-adapter was not a problem. Nikon engineers had advised me to turn VR on the lens off, but I saw no difference between the shots where I had turned it on. I actually like to turn it on, because the scene inside the viewfinder looks so much less wobbly.

The Z7 can shoot 9 fps, and that’s exactly what you see here: this animated GIF consists of one burst of 9 images. But although it works well, autofocus is organized differently on the Z7. There is no dedicated autofocus mode button on the front of the camera anymore to switch between the various autofocus point modes, and some of those modes have disappeared.

For instance, there’s no group mode, and no D21 or D51 – only D9. I shoot D9 most of the time myself when I’m in AF-C, so it’s not a deal breaker for me, but it’s worth noting. You don’t need to enter a menu to change autofocus point modes though, because you can assign a custom button for this purpose – like the movie record button. Works like a charm.

I must add that I haven’t used the Z7 much on moving subjects (the wildlife wasn’t cooperating, as usual), so I haven’t been able to properly test the autofocus for wildlife. From my limited experience, I can say that the AF is not as fast as my D850 and that tracking a moving subject is more challenging.

Another thing is that the buffer is not particularly large, so don’t expect to shoot a cheetah chasing a gazelle with the Z7 (23 images when shooting lossless compressed 12-bit) as you will only be able to shoot for 2.5 seconds before the buffer fills up – a bit like the D750.

Nikon Z7 with 35mm f/1.8 S, 8 sec @ f/1.8, ISO 3200

Low light and high ISO performance

I like shooting before the sun is out and after it has set, and I also greatly enjoy shooting at night. Needless to say that I was very interested to see how the Z7 would perform in low light conditions. The low-light AF performance of the D850 is nothing short of amazing, but the Z-series takes this even further.

Hidden under a11 in your Custom Settings menu is the option Low-light AF. When turned on you’ll get even more accurate focus, providing you’re in AF-S. The autofocus becomes a bit slower, but the result is pretty amazing. For the image above, I was actually able to use the Low-light AF to focus on the branches of the largest tree. The tent would have been easier, but my depth of field was not sufficient to get that big tree in focus as well when I tried.

Nikon Z7, 35mm f/1.8 S, 16 sec @ f/1.8, ISO 5000

Here’s another example where I shot at night with the same 35/1.8 S lens. Focusing was not an issue here, because I could just use the bright light in front of the tree. When you’re using a 35mm lens for shooting the night sky, you have to watch your exposures – shooting longer than 15 seconds will already show some star trailing. With a 14mm I can shoot this scene at ISO 3200 because I can expose as long as 25 seconds, but with the 35mm I had to go up to ISO 5000 to get a similar exposure at 16 seconds. And 16 seconds was also the maximum time that my assistant could sit still during the entire exposure. The resulting image quality looks very similar to that of my D850.

Nocturnal selfie. Nikon Z7 with FTZ-adapter, 14-24mm f/2.8, 5 sec @ f/2.8, ISO 3200

When Kazuo Ushida, the president of Nikon, presented the Z-series system during the global live event, this image was displayed behind him. Well, they used the completely unprocessed version – I did a perspective correction on those trees (they were quite heavily converging because of my 14-24 pointing upwards). For this image, I also used the Low-light AF to help me focus on that tree on the right (and by shining a small headlight on it). It’s one of my favorite images of the trip because it’s so different from what’s already out there, and from what I’ve shot there myself 10 years ago.

It’s not easy to create something unique at an iconic location like this, but therein lies a big artistic challenge – and I really enjoy those. This was shot on a very early morning, and the light was changing rapidly. I had to work super fast because I wanted to have some color in the sky combined with the light beams. This moment was gone in like 5 minutes.

Overall, I found that the EVF was the only challenge when shooting at night. Our eyes are so amazing at picking up the tiniest details in the landscape even during a new moon, there is no EVF that can match that.

When using a regular viewfinder, once you’re eyes are used to the darkness you will be able to see the landscape even when the only light source is the stars. I usually switch off the camera so that I don’t get blinded by the bright numbers inside the viewfinder, and then fine-tune my composition. With an EVF this is not possible, after all: it’s an illuminated micro monitor. In total darkness, it will always be too bright, and it will never be able to show the amount of detail that your eyes can see at night.

This is not a shortcoming of just the Z7, but a general phenomenon for all mirrorless cameras. When you look through the EVF on a really dark night, it’s hard to see what you’re doing.

Diffraction compensation. Nikon Z7 with FTZ-adapter, 70-200mm f/2.8, 1/80 sec @ f/22, ISO 1600

Diffraction compensation

We all know that shooting with very small apertures will deteriorate the quality of the sharpness: diffraction. Most serious landscape photographers will therefore choose to shoot several exposures at different focal distances at a larger aperture – focus stacking. But focus stacking requires additional post-processing time, and ideally you don’t want anything to move within your frame.

The Z7 has an option called Diffraction Compensation, and I was super curious how it would perform. While climbing in the tsingy, I saw an interesting backlit tree which contrasted nicely with the dark limestone surrounding it. I could not get any closer to it, and the only way to frame it the way I liked was to use my 70-200/2.8 at 125mm.

Getting sufficient depth of field was a real challenge here, and I would usually have gone for a focus stack in this situation. However, there was a fair amount of wind, so the leaves were moving, and I figured this would be a good moment to test the Diffraction Compensation option.

I stopped the lens down to f/22 which gave me the DOF I needed and took two shots: one with Diffraction Compensation set to ON and one to OFF. When I compared the two images, there was a subtle but noticeable difference – this option really works. Shooting a focus stack will still give you better results, but if there’s no time or you just don’t feel like it: this is a useful option.

Enhanced Focus Stacking

Since I already mentioned focus stacking (Nikon calls it ‘focus shift’), the D850 was the first DSLR to have this as an automated option, but the Z7 takes this even further. With the new ‘Peaking Stack Image’ function you will be able to see a monochrome preview of the focus stack you are able to capture – pretty awesome. If you like to be close to your subject and want everything in focus, then focus stacking is the way to go to get maximum depth of field at maximum quality. Ever since I got my D850 I have been using the automated Focus Shift function regularly, and this latest enhancement has made it even nicer to use.

Sharp against sharp. Nikon Z7 with FTZ-adapter, 14-24mm f/2.8, 1/6 sec @ f/11, ISO 64

For this particular image, I placed my Z7 and 14-24 inside a very prickly cactus, and the only way to get front to back sharpness is by shooting a focus stack. I ended up shooting an automated focus shift sequence of 16 images that I later combined using Helicon Focus. The cactus needles in the front and the limestone needles in the background are all razor sharp. I should add that working with a much smaller body like the Z7 makes it a lot easier to set up shots like this.

Wireless Speedlight control

I love my Speedlights as they allow me to create my own light. In that sense, a flash really is an important creative tool for me. When working on my shot list before the start of the trip, I thought about creating an environmental portrait of a local girl using my Speedlights to create selective lighting and drama.

What surprised me when I arrived at this location, is that many of the young girls paint their faces with a yellow ‘paint’ that is made from a special type of wood. This isn’t merely decorative but also applied to protect the skin from the damage of the sun as well as ward off insects such as mosquitoes. It is also believed to make your skin more beautiful, much like a face cream would. The mask is known as Masonjaony.

Nikon Z7, 50mm f/1.8 S, 1/100 @ f/1.8, ISO 400

The idea was to use the 50/1.8 S lens to throw the background out of focus and create a nice contrast with the sharp subject in the foreground. I waited for the sun to set and for the afterglow to hit the trees with beautiful low contrast warm light, and I set the Speedlight to a very low output.

I triggered the SB-5000 with the WR-R10 transceiver. That thing is very small and connects directly into the side port of the camera. The flash settings I controlled with the in-camera flash menu that I added to My Menu for quick and easy access. The detail on her face is amazing, and I love the quality of the light created by the Speedlight.

In order to be as flexible as possible and work fast – I really wanted to keep some color in the sky – I decided to shoot everything handheld. I don’t usually shoot people, but for this project, I decided that was something that I needed to do to add some more life to the landscape. I was way out of my comfort zone here, but I fully enjoyed the experience and I strongly believe that it actually makes you a better photographer if you step out of your safe space every now and then.

Edge to edge sharpness and tons of detail. Nikon Z7 with FTZ-adapter, 14-24mm f/2.8, 1 sec @ f/11, ISO 100.

Endless detail

One of the coolest things to do when you’re shooting 45+MP is to zoom in on your image and admire the detail. With the new S-lenses that detail now goes all the way up into the corners and to the edges. With the Z7 you can now control the amount of detail via the Picture Control menu. You already know that you can tweak these picture controls, and now even more so than ever.

If you want to adjust your selected picture control, you can now choose Quick Sharp, Sharpening, Mid-range Sharpening, and Clarity. Mid-range Sharpening is particularly interesting because you can adjust sharpness according to the fineness of the patterns and lines in mid-tones affected by Sharpening and Clarity. And when you’re in the Picture Control menu, you will also find the Creative Picture Control where you can choose from a bunch of effects, similar to the ones in Instagram.

The image above is probably one of the best examples of what this camera is capable of: edge to edge sharpness with tons of detail. To get this shot I was perched on top of one of those nasty limestone needles, pointing my 14-24 straight down into the abyss – not the greatest experience if you’re afraid of heights. But you have to suffer for your art, or so they say.

Nikon Z-series: the S-lenses.

The Lenses

During this project I have used a wide variety of lenses; F-mount lenses as well as the new S-lenses that were specifically designed for this new system. The idea behind the large Z-mount was to create a future-proof mount that is large enough to accommodate modern lens designs that can be as fast as f/0.95.

The new Nikon Z-mount is 17% larger than the trusty F-mount, thanks to its inner diameter of 55mm. This, together with a 16mm flange distance will allow Nikon to make lenses that were much more difficult to design with the Nikon F-mount. One of the objectives was to design lenses that would deliver edge to edge sharpness. This has clearly been something that I have tested constantly by checking the edges and the corners after every shot. And I have to say – the results are very good.

Of the three S-lenses that I have used, the 24-70/4.0 is by far my favorite. I love zoom lenses for the creative flexibility that they offer, and this lens was also the widest of the three which I often preferred for the landscape shots. Comparing the three, the 24-70/4.0 also seemed the sharpest to me.

Nikon Z7, 24-70mm f/4.0 S, 1/100 sec @ f/8, ISO 320, SB-5000. The birds are not pasted in.

Overall, the lenses are all compact and lightweight and nicely balanced on the Z7. For the image above I really wanted those grasses in the foreground to be razor sharp all the way up to the corners, and at the same time have the tree and the background crispy sharp as well.

Looking through the EVF, I was able to zoom in on those areas and check them for sharpness. Each click of the aperture dial would result in a live DOF change inside the viewfinder – very useful. To add some fill light on the girl in red, I used my SB-5000 that I triggered with the WR-R10 transceiver. That thing is very small and connects directly into the side port of the camera.

The Z-series feature an on-sensor hybrid autofocus system, which works very differently compared to the traditional phase detection autofocus system on Nikon DSLRs. There is no need for a secondary mirror, and this basically eliminates all AF micro-adjustment issues that many photographers spend so much time on (AF fine tune). By incorporating phase detection pixels right on the sensor, Nikon is able to perform focus on the image sensor without relying on a secondary focusing system: no more lens calibration necessary!

The Nikon S-Line road map.

Nikon is planning to release between 4-6 new S-lenses per year, and I’m especially looking forward to both the 20/1.8 S and the 14-24/2.8 S. I have extensively used my 14-24/2.8 F-mount lens on this trip with great results, but that’s neither a lightweight nor a compact super wide angle zoom, and I can only imagine what a killer landscape photography combo the Z7 with a compact and lightweight 14-24/2.8 S-lens will be.

Image quality

From my limited experience with this camera and the large variety of lenses I have used, I can say that the image quality is superb. All my F-mount lenses performed just as good as on my DSLRs, and some of them got VR as a bonus via the FTZ-adapter (AF-S 14-24/2.8 VR!). The S-lenses are all very sharp, compact and lightweight. Colors, contrast, detail, and sharpness of the images are all very good and comparable to the D850.

For the image below I wanted to shoot straight into the sun with the 24-70mm f/4.0 S to create some graphic silhouettes, but zoom lenses are more prone to flaring in those conditions. I was happy to see that there was very little to no lens flare, even with the sun away from the center of the frame. In some ways, the Z7 felt like a D850 Light in terms of image quality, but that would actually not be fair to the Z7 because it is a fantastic camera that even has some features and advantages that the D850 does not have.

Shooting into the sun. Nikon Z7, 24-70mm f/4.0, 1/640 @ f/8.0, ISO 64

Weather proof

This is a biggie. No matter how great a camera is, if it can’t survive harsh conditions I won’t use it. This has always been the main complaint I’ve heard from our photo tour participants who are shooting mirrorless: the cameras struggle in dusty/humid/cold conditions and become unreliable. As I spend most of my time in dusty/humid/cold conditions, I’ve never been really interested in going mirrorless.

When I first looked at the Z7 I was still skeptical, but that was mostly because it is so much smaller and lighter and you sort of expect it to be less weatherproof and reliable than a DSLR. During this project, I have photographed in blistering heat, high humidity during the night, in dense fog, and in very dusty conditions. At no point did these conditions affect the cameras, only me (I forgot to bring a down jacket for the cold nights).

Nikon Z7 with FTZ-adapter and 70-200mm f/2.8

The tilt-screen of the Z7 seems to be the same as the one on the D850, which works fine but I’m always worried when I flip it open and look at the intricate construction – I’m always afraid to damage it. Funny enough I let my D850 crash onto the ground during the Hercules Rising time-lapse project with the tilt-screen open, and although it was severely bent out of shape, I simply bend it back and it just kept on working fine. And so did the camera.

I have an angle finder that I use a lot for shooting from low angles, but I find myself using the tilt-screen more and more now, also on this trip. The Malagassy dust did not affect the mechanism. I would have loved the tilt screen to also tilt sideways when shooting verticals, though.

Nikon Z7, 24-70mm f/4 S, 1/125 @ f/8, ISO 64

The One Card Slot Controversy

The trolls really had a field day with this one. To be honest, I don’t understand why there is only one card slot as both the Sonys have two, but at the same time, it is not an issue for me. I always set the second card slot to ‘overflow’ anyway, so the one card slot will have zero impact on my workflow.

I get it that wedding photographers get freaked out by the idea of not having a second card as a backup option, but at least that one card slot is for the mighty XQD card (which will eventually be compatible with CFexpress as well, after a firmware update). They’re much more solid, durable and capable than SD cards and I’ve never had one crash on me – as opposed to CF and SD.

Also, don’t forget that the Sony A7 II and A7R II had just one card slot, and it’s only the most recent Sony’s that have a second SD card slot, barely more than a year ago. Even the new Canon R only has a single SD card slot, so it’s clearly not that unusual.

Nikon Z7: one XQD card slot.

Battery life

There have been some wild stories on the Internet regarding the supposedly poor battery life of the Z7. This is not my experience. As a matter of fact, both Z bodies use a similar battery as the D850. During the Z7 project, I have used three Z7 bodies extensively and never did I have to use more than one battery per day, so the CIPA numbers seem extremely conservative to me.

However, your camera’s battery life depends on many factors: temperature, live view, image review, monitor brightness, standby time, EVF use, EVF brightness, focusing, VR, etc. If I’m shooting polar bears in the Arctic with my 180-400/4.0 in sub-zero temperatures, using AF-C and VR continuously while looking through my EVF and regularly reviewing my images on the LCD screen, that will seriously impact battery life. But for the Hercules Rising time-lapse project for last year’s introduction of the Nikon D850, I used similar batteries and never had any issues either. I already have quite a few of those batteries, so I won’t need to buy extra when using the Z7.

I was happy to hear there will be a battery pack available soon. I use battery packs on all my DSLRs for increased battery life and better handling when shooting verticals, so I’m definitely going to get me one of those for my Z7.

Nikon Z7 with FTZ-adapter, 180-400mm f/4.0, 1/100 sec @ f/4.0, ISO 6400

The End

That’s it. I can go on forever, but I’ve been told that’s gonna bore people to death. I hope you enjoyed reading about my experiences with the Z7 and I hope you will someday be able to try one yourself. It’s a really great camera that has earned a spot in my camera bag. No, it doesn’t have eye AF and only one card slot, but those are not even minor disappointments in my opinion.

There are simply too many good things about this camera to not like it, and I haven’t even talked about the customizable lens control ring, 4K and 8K time-lapse, 120p slow motion full frame video at full HD, fast start-up time, no low pass filter, fast XPEED 6 processor, and a whole bunch of other stuff. The next time I go hiking in the mountains or the desert, there is absolutely no question which camera I will put in my backpack.

About the author: Marsel van Oosten is a professional nature photographer from The Netherlands. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Together with his wife Daniella Sibbing, Van Oosten runs Squiver, a company that offers specialized nature photography tours all over the world for small groups of all experience levels. You can find more of Van Oosten’s work on his website and Instagram. This article was also published here.

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2018/09/11/nikon-z7-field-report-too-many-good-things-to-not-like-it/

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lifeofthefly-blog1 · 7 years ago

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A Better World Is Possible

PunkerslutA Better nature Is PossiblePolitics Articles | June 29, 2005It regards reality as the lone enemy and as the source of all suffering, with which it is impossible to live, so that one must break off all relations with it if one is to be in several way happy. The misanthrope turns his back on the nature and will have no truck with it. But one can do more than that; one jar try to recreate the world, to build ascend in its stead something else world in which endemic most oppressive features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one's endemic wishes.-- Sigmund Freud "Civilization and individual Discontents," by Sigmund Freud, chapter 2If a bearing that harbor love and affectionately adored honesty were to spawn two gods, they would be sadness and optimism. The premier gave them the appearance and sight to comprehend what is wrong, after holding single-minded to prejudice and bigotry. The twin gave them the energy and capacity to create a better world, smooth if it started and ended with one transferred soul. climactic bible of this generation, the holy text and scripture which they would refer to in their daily lives, would repose of dialogue free movies the particular two gods. Pessimism invariably seemed to represent apathy, a impression of inactivity accompanied by lost dreams. But, next again, it was the agitator, the creator, the mover. Optimism would repeatedly seem to represent enterprise and growth, a impression of soul and a desire to do something about it, as great as easts and pleasure. This origination of admirer and brain would ritual these demon through acts of kindness, mercy, and love. The names they would grant their toddler would have hidden meanings, like "romantic poet," or "moment of orgasm."If a good person were to try to live up to the expectation of change and growth with the audacious honesty to look forward, he would be a cynic as much as an optimist. His hallowed scripture would simply be: "A Better World prevail Possible."When we look simultaneous our endemic society, scrutinize its process and owned manners, we discover a great transaction that we wish to change. privately see crime, we look poverty, we see poison addictions, murder, war, calm abuse, adolescent abuse, rape, theft, brutality, and exploitation of without exception power. these of the humane style have constantly believed that it was the generosity of men that transfer them stable for peace and strength. Today, we stand on the carrion of modern life. attractiveness may have been the social sentiment which enjoy brought Columbia together and has develop our families, our towns, our cities, and our nations, but there is so abundant more to it then that. downtown have convert the colony of carnality and misery, the splendid strangers to loneliness. Our modern writer and romantics stand ahead this sensation of life, and are speechless.When we think of pain and suffering, what do you think it is that is the most sinister source of suffering? skilled is no doubt that it is from any relationship within society, or at bottom within human civilization. maybe it is the biased social relationship between father and women, resulting in sexism and domestic abuse? Perhaps it is the unjust marriage that live between nations, resulting in economic embargos and wars? Maybe it is the relationship between citizens, suggest crime and theft, or the relationship between executive and employee, resulting in poverty and misery? Whatever it is that is the enormous cause of suffering in the world, there are some effects that requirement be considered. First, we are inspect the exchange that live between one by one other to discover the roots of this suffering. It is an constitutional problem. attractiveness is not a question of innate disasters and the energy that nature has wrought on mankind. No, it is a question of the means that we act with ourselves, the customs we forge anad the guideline we make. Second, as Freethinkers and those actually concerned with justice, although we study these communication in society, we end so with the firm of devise a further free and more equitable system.The needed difference new between an Anarchist and a Liberal is this: the Liberal wants to repair the damage ended by the system, the Anarchist longing to rehabilitation the system. The first looks to poverty and creates welfare, completely leaving the monetary system untouched. The last wants to completely revoke any fiscal system that will advantage to homelessness, poverty, or misery.It was not unusual or singular in our past for these social relationships to change, convert altered, or become perfectly abolished. interest was formerly tradition that men thrill women like property, that wars inserted nations were glorious events, that poverty was gouts naturally hand out condition for a assertive class of people, that crime was simply supporting nature to each human, and therefore indefeatable. gross of this was hold by the people, they took it in as unquestionable truths. Well, it was the liberating maturity of either honest individual, to realize that every conscious person simply wish to be free. From such a humble start, the development of cordial thought has come a long way. Citizens have collectively allocated women's rights, worker's rights, children's rights, citizen's rights, etc., etc., protecting the freedom, security, and joy of these who have been distressed for so long.Do you think the happiness of the mediocre person, from these ancient times to our instant situation, enjoy increased? I imagine that few would disagree with me. It was by altering and changing the above-mentioned relationships halfway the peculiar groups that a better, more peaceful terms of living move about. So, when we decide to examine the social manners and communication of our own era, and unearth such large amounts of suffering, the only reasonable response to these locality is this: we prerequisite reorganize society, change the relationships, rehabilitation (or revolutionize) the scheme itself, previously we will stop regarding the illness that it causes. What we would be performance would be a rebel activity, in that we would be altering our own earth to attain our inherent ends, in the better radical form possible. allure would also be the tradition of spirited ability to overthrow oppressors and cast slim any string or thralldom they have given to the innocent.Our questions precondition be twofold. 1) What are the relationships that are precipitate so much stress, misery, pain, and suffering on others? 2) What jar we execute to advance them?Crime. What causes it? Any literate person will give the same answer: the wish or use of earthly objects. whenever the compensation offered by employers execute not gratify the demand of the workers, that is to say, the people who have no property, suddenly criminal enterprise becomes the result. Psychologists and psychiatrists might fling to organize criminal behavior, trying to put confines and streak through it so that they can understand it. The one thing that they do not recognize about scandalous behavior is that it is not unique, that it is not special, that it is as it may be the largest natural sector of brute life. If a creator bear is interested in obtaining cuisine for endemic young, complete it forever consider the fact that it is violating intrusion laws in doing so, or does it consistently consider the opinion of other bears? Maybe isolated insomuch as it thing her and her cub's welfare, but beyond that, not at all. affecting creature is simply committing an action that is required for life. So, too, is the individual who violate crime to survive, meanwhile no normal means of income will suffice.The shrink might be right that the scholar changes fairly with scandalous behavior. modern instincts, behaviors, reflexes, and understandings are required in group behavior. All of the shoplifters that I know, counting myself, have developed group senses -- we develop a subconscious that analyzes and recognize where anybody in the room is and where they are looking. aforementioned allows Land of Liberty the facility of alert if we are living watched, an invaluable skill for New World lifters.Without poverty, there is no crime. Crime is caused individual by the poor circumstances in which human living live, and their critical attempts to escape the particular conditions. through least, this can be considered genuine with all those conditions in which property violation is involved. We wish to promote a system, an form of society, in which crime is completely eliminated. That is our objective. What form would we mend or forge the current rule so as to exhaustive our objective? Well, although we eye at the particular who have been expose with the miserable career of criminal, what dashing in specific are we examining? The working class. Their marriage that transfer them to poverty and eventually felony is the their accord with the Capitalist class, or the employer class.The only way to sew this relationship, between the haves and the have nots, is to produce it so the product of it is other wealth in the canned of the have nots. This bottle be exhausted with a policy so limited and conservative as minimum wage, minimum working hours, safe working conditions, lowering the work opportunity per week, etc., etc.. All of these laws, if they were be implemented within a government's laws, should be occupying on the collective's perceptive that the working guy must be protected -- not from other working men, but from the particular whom they work for. With these limited policies, the company class would be scrutinize much like the government: a unavoidable evil, beyond which we would have tranquility and peace, at least for a meager while.In a more anxious effort, we might knock out the executive class entirely, dissolve it into the working body of citizens. It receive been aforesaid that to establish Democracy, every settler must be treated alike a king. If we apply the same argument to economics, in an effort to eliminate the poverty that comes from Free Trade, then without exception citizen must be consider like a Capitalist. proving this system, the sound conflict that would arrise in a Capitalist scheme -- with workers boxing for continuing wages and the company class militant for worsened sweat shop conditions -- this sound conflict would be removed, and commodity called socialism or Leninism would revenue effect. comic relationship that causes poverty, misery, and so great abuse of the spirit is the relationship that exists among those outwardly property, who must sell their energy to survive, and the particular with property, who engage the proletariat to task for them. To oust this relationship, thus eliminating the conflict, we are establishing a better world. Among the most great revolutions, Bolshevism and totalitarianism are of the capital degree for any revolutionary.When we essay to feel of the relationships in society that allow for a big deal of unnecessary misfortune and misery, we gravitate to think about the relationships that exist inserted us and those that we appreciation and distress about. fly literature of every fashion and without exception era, we find that adultery acquire been at the cause of heartache for so many lovers. It enjoy been the inspiration to a number of sad poetry. attractiveness has prevail the element of so much conflict, so scads fighting, so much bickering and violence. I grant that a little cultures were intelligent and thoughtful adequate to sidestep such impractical brutality and misery. However, as we see it in our modern world, it is quite straightforward to recognize that the relationship that exists among lovers is one of great distress and pain. We are attracted to it by the thought of happiness, pleasure, a feeling of connection and mutual understanding. The provenance of intimate relationships are the clone in whatever culture: they come from the greater natural desire to aura love, as though the universe put up end and all a lover bottle do would be to welcome it.Yet, we watch so much abuse appear from this relationship that exists amid lovers. dramaturgic time for a late moral cryptograph is necessary. The past has consistently been ripe. I submit that admirer learn to love further openly, that their communication are not confined to one customer only -- what in fact receive been the cause of all these problems. conceding that sexual movement with other partners was accepted in our stylish society, formerly the dilemma of the lonely and disheartened sweetheart disappears. meanwhile we enroll to take that distribution sexuality with others is a clear aspect of life, in that it creates affection, something beautiful, and a connection -- when we learn to accept this, then so much misery, pain, and depression would be mop out. But, the dilemma of the matter is in dynamic ourselves, in learning to accept that you cannot tell one what to do with their bodies, even in a relationship. I'm not evading a double standard. Men should be as promiscuous as they like, as should any woman. It can be problematic and great for woman to defeated these cordial prejudices. privately wince each one time the thought of a abandoned lover move to mind, and we are forewarned of the pain that comes from a deceased passion. our own selves do not forget the misery that we have suffered, that others have, that residue still will, and it is our intention as revolutionaries to uphold our scripture: a better earth is possible.There are so many origins of pain and so many new great resolve and variation that put up happen in our current society to abolish the sources of misery. affecting animals of the earth are liquidate for the taste of their dissolve carcasses. premier and dictator switch house constantly as I treasure more and more crowd confused at the constitutional situation. essay are taboo at the same juncture courts precedent guilt by association is "reason to convict." guy and mariner are heaved in penitentiary when they make the personal judgment to make drunk themselves, and gain a gentle happiness via counterfeit means. slave slave away at work, hours of their get-up-and-go taken off with delusion crumbling and sinking.I want to detonate when I see the walls of chain convenience stores and rip away the dreariness of a "brick behind brick" architecture. In my dreams, I am catching enormous cask of makeup to prepare child-like depiction of clouds on the side of every Walmart. I hankering to house a paper-mache rose on the rung of each one girl who feels alone, give a confident conversation to without exception boy who feels alone. I want to shriek for whole rape. I want to die for every resurfaced memory. I want family to uncertainty less backward death, and think also about their life as a unique and fascinating experience. I want community to stress less back life, and concentrate on the sector of contemporary that accord a reaction of ease. Everywhere that I turn, every statement of the strangers I talk to, they are based on so copious petty things. I want swing my arms and lose sympathetic of my consciousness, and... let go... I requirement to give go... furthermore maybe find a little peace, a little understanding, a slight "the marvelous part of life is that nation can be called the collective training of each one living and breathing creature," maybe in the bossom of intoxication.www.punkerslut.comFor Life,Punkerslut Article Tags: superior World, Relationship Between, Exists Between, vicious Behavior, Employer Class Punkerslut (or any Carloff) receive been writing essays and poetry on social argument which have caught his attention for several years. His website www.punkerslut.com contribute a complete list of all of these writings. His soul experience includes homelessness, squating in unusual Orleans and LA, dropping out of high school, getting expelled from alma mater for "subversive activities," and a infinite of auxiliary revolutionary actions.

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weareallfallengods · 5 years ago

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Flight from Grace Chapter 1- A small stumble

The long-awaited, actually edited, complete first chapter of the novel that I began for NaNoWriMo 2019! Please, like, reblog, but most of all, COMMENT!

Grace can see things she shouldn’t be able to; after all, immortals have gone to a lot of trouble to make sure we can’t see them as they really are, so Something Has Changed, so she and her Fallen Angel will find out what’s going on, and why they seem to always be stuck in the middle of it all, but most importantly, why they’re drawn to each other in the first place.

Themes: Angels and Demons, examination of mortality and our understanding of and belief in the supernatural as well as the eternal nature of existence. The battle between good and evil covering a multi-planar universe, and how no one is ever what they seem to be when we look past prejudices and social judgements. LGBTQ+, proper ethnic and cultural representation (read: most characters aren’t straight or white!).

Triggers: If you don’t like stories that put an often irreverant and sacriligeous spin on Christian mythos, this isn’t for you. LGBTQ+ romance, slow burn, non-explicit.

——————————————————————————————–

“Did it hurt when you fell from Heaven?”

“Hey, did you hear me?”

Ugh, this one wasn’t going away with simply being ignored. Lovely.

“Excuse me?” I looked over languidly, with as much disdainful irritation on my face as I could possibly muster from the depths of my three-drinks-in soul.

“I said, ‘did it hurt when you fell from heaven?’”

“Um, what?”

Apparently I broke him. Well, that happens sometimes, when I give someone a response they weren’t expecting. Which happens more often than I’d be willing to admit to myself.

“I said that getting tossed out of heaven doesn’t hurt as much as you’d think it would. It’s not that far of a tumble really.”

He chuckled, “That’s real cute darlin’, never heard that one before! How’s about you and me find a table so I can hear more about it? Maybe have a look at those bruises, make sure you don’t need more…attention.”

“Believe me sweetie, you don’t want my ‘attention’,” I said softly, for the first time raising my eyes to lock with his glazed gaze. “My attention can become very… uncomfortable.”

I looked away just as his eyes started to roll back in his head. No need to cause a scene with him passing out. After all, my whiskey sour was crying from being ignored. As they do.

He kind of half nodded, like a sleepwalker. I sighed. Hopefully he doesn’t have an existential crisis later and just shrugs it off as being too drunk. Hell, maybe he’ll cut back on the sauce. I hate it when I hear about someone offing themselves after meeting me, especially if they have kids. Well, hopefully he just takes the daily inebriation down a notch or two. I can hope, can’t I?

As he shuffled off, lager forgotten at the bar, I hoped he’d be alright. Genuinely. Sure, I enjoyed taking my frustration at being stuck here out on them, but I didn’t actually wish them lasting harm. A lesson or two in politeness and decency, a minor scuffle to break up the monotony, but no real damage. That’s what I told myself anyway. Made it easier to pretend to sleep at night. Hope he makes it home ok. Hope his kids get a happy memory of daddy saying goodnight for once. Hope he says he loves his wife, and apologizes. Hah. Yeah. Like that’ll happen. But, what can I say, I’m a foolish optimist at heart. And nothing hurts more than having your hopes crushed. I should know.

“Get you a fresh one?”

She smiled pleasantly and slid over a new drink, already prepped.

“I figured, after that creep pounced on ya.”

I frowned slightly. There was something different about this one. Hunh. Oh, the ice. There wasn’t any. There were two black cubes sitting in it instead. OK, why are there rocks in my drink?

I looked up at Grace, still slightly puzzled.

“Oh those? Yeah I noticed you didn’t like it when your drink gets watered down, so I bought some Irish whiskey stones! That way your drink stays cold, but doesn’t dilute. Got 'em special, just for you.”

I cocked one eyebrow slightly, “Just for me?”

“Why…” I couldn’t even formulate a coherent sentence. Jesus, get yourself together!

“I dunno, I just figured you don’t seem like you have anyone looking out for you, and you seem to attract a lot of the wrong sort of attention, so I thought you could use a nice surprise, y’know, cheer you up a little.”

“Well. Wow, um, thanks.” Yeah real smooth. Sweet Mikhail’s Grave I have no idea how to actually talk to this woman.

In retrospect, that should have been my first clue, but hey, I was a little distracted.

“I appreciate it, that’s really sweet of you.” Ok that’s slightly less glaringly awkward.

Now it was my turn to stare slack-jawed. Oh Fates, how your twists are cruel. I closed my mouth a lot faster than the sot from earlier though, so my pride wasn’t too damaged.

“It’s kind of a long and uninteresting story really. Mostly, you make the best whiskey sour. And the people here are…interesting.”

“Honey, there’s no way a story coming from someone who looks like that,” she waved generally up and down at me, “could possibly be boring. Plus, it’s slow, as always, so humor me.”

Sometimes, I can be kind of thick. Slow. Moronic. A nincompoop. A maroon. Several minutes of conversation with this girl and I only just now noticed- she hadn’t looked away from my eyes. She was meeting my gaze with no problem. She wasn’t sweating and shaking and passing out. She was looking me right in the eye, just like a normal person, no fear showing on her face. No reaction at all. Just a normal girl, having a normal conversation, with what she thought was another normal person.

“Are…you OK?” Grace looked a bit concerned.

“Um, oh, yeah, sorry, I’m fine. Really. Sorry, just not many people actually want to have a real conversation with me.”

Grace leaned over the bar a little, propping up on her elbows, lowering her tone a bit. “Well, I don’t know why, 'cuz you sure seem hella interesting to me.”

“Hunh. Well, I don’t know about that. But I would like to ask you something first, if you don’t mind?”

“Fire away honey!”

“This might sound odd, but, why aren’t you looking away? What do you see when you look at me?”

She pulled a tiny bit closer. “Nothin’ more than just about the sparkly-est green eyes I ever seen; a dash of blue, like the Bahamas. Somethin’ else I can’t quite put my finger on…” as she trailed off, I felt her finger lightly brush the knuckles on my hand that was still holding my drink. “I kinda wanna find out though.”

I swallowed, unable to look away now myself. “That’s all? Nothing that scares you?”

“Not yet, sugar.”

Alright, that’s different.

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

I grabbed her hand. Maybe a little too hard from the slight wince I saw.

“OK we need to leave. NOW.”

“Hold up honey, we were just talkin’, we ain’t there yet!” She tried pulling back a little.

“No, no, you don’t understand! I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t be able to see that. I can’t explain right now, but we have to figure out how you can see me that way.”

“But my shift’s not over for a couple more hours!”

“OK OK, I’m not being clear, sorry, this is the first time this has happened, so I’m a little shaken.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” She actually blushed a little. “I just saw how you shot down every guy who came up to you, and I thought….well, you know, maybe…omg I’m sorry I didn’t mean to upset you! I come on strong sometimes, when I’m interested in something, and when you first walked in, I saw those heels and that dress, and I just was like ‘oh wow’ and kinda couldn’t breathe for a minute, you know I don’t see many girls come here lookin’ like that and oh God now I’m babbling and someone please shut me up I’m so sorry…”

I put a finger over her lips, gently.

“Wait, so you’re not mad I hit on you?”

“Your world?”

I was getting frustrated. “Yes, but I’ll explain later! I need you to come with me now. We need answers, and we need them fast. So, do you trust me?”

She hesitated. “Yeeeeees? I think? Like I wanna, but I don’t really know you?”

“Good enough for now! Let’s go!”

Good thing I’m not super tall, wouldn’t want to draw attention, I thought to myself sarcastically. Goddamn heels. Why do I even wear these?

Sounds of glass breaking and shouting reached us as we plowed through the emergency exit into the alleyway. Don’t worry about that now, just keep moving.

“This way!” I pulled her to the front of the alley.

“Holy shit, that’s your bike?” She sounded genuinely impressed. Finally, I wasn’t the only one who had that reaction at seeing it.

“Oh yeah, she’s a sweet ride, and perfect for this situation. Or any situation, really. Jump on.”

I probably should have shut the door behind us, but hey, it was a day for me missing obvious things. The noise coming from the bar was getting louder.

“I’ve never done this before!” Grace exclaimed excitedly in my ear as I kicked my beast to life.

“Where are we going!?” Grace yelled over the rush of wind whipping our hair like tiny flails of purgatory.

“Not sure yet! But we’re going to find out!”

“I don’t even know your name!”

My heart sank a bit.

“Don’t worry! Neither do I! ”

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

The bar exploded behind us as it faded into the night thanks to the fabulous Ducati between our legs. Oh and that wasn’t metaphorical- I glanced in the mirror at the sound; it literally exploded. Ball of fire and all. I guess that’s to be expected, what with all the alcohol and what I’d suspected for a while was going on in the basement. Way too many flammable liquids in one place. But that didn’t really matter now. All that mattered was getting away from what caused the explosion as fast as we possibly could.

“I’ll explain as soon as we can talk, promise! For now, just hold on! And don’t look behind us!“

“As if I’m gonna let go now!”

That pale blue and red glow was enough. Hell, the noise it made had been enough for me to know what it was. And trust me, I was not overreacting by running first. I’d seen that color a few too many times in my life to think that there was anything else to be done except run. Once was more than enough for anyone. Who am I kidding? Most people don’t get a chance to see it more than once. Guess I’m just lucky. Or the opposite. Pretty sure I’m the latter actually.

Well, it should have been quiet anyway. The explosion of the bar kind of changed that. Then came the sound.

“Aw shit, it saw us.” Time to see if the tires on this baby gripped as well as the kid at the shop claimed they did.

“Try not to worry about it! OK I mean, yeah, worry, but not like understand worry!”

“How the hell do you not worry about…that!?”

The damn thing was getting closer. Faster than I thought it could. Damn, tonight just wasn’t my night for noticing things, now was it?

Slipping into an alley entrance, Grace’s nails dug through the flimsy material I was wrapped in, making me yelp in surprise.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

"Sweet Jesus fuck! What the hell IS that?”

Goddammit, didn’t I tell her not to look back? I wasn’t going to tell her how the beast chasing us had seen us dart down the alley, and since it couldn’t fit through the traffic as neatly as we could, silently charge down the side of the building, slamming into the same shop front that had so recently lost it’s postcard stand as it tried to take the same corner, still snuffling the ground and air to track us. I managed to gain us a few precious seconds of lead as it disentangled itself from the fruit cart, re-launching itself down the alley, bicycle wheel still caught in it’s whiskers that streamed and whipped behind it.

“It’s running fucking sideways on the buildings!”

Aw shit. She can see it. I was afraid of that.

And that was all the distraction it needed too.

With a last spring off the corner of an empty flower shop, the beast took a massive swipe at us. Come on, come on, make the corner! It’s thick talons cut a blazing arc through the rain as it howled. One of its claws caught the rear end of the bike, knocking it heavily to the side, and nearly throwing Grace off. Good thing she’s got a death grip on my hips right now. Oh boy don’t think of that, too distracting right now, that’s how you get killed!

Ground. Street. Tires on. People off. Stay upright. Don’t let go. Run.

Suddenly the cars all dropped away. The turnpike. Oh thank God. I opened up the throttle all the way and finally realized I should probably start breathing again.

“Did we get away?”

That near miss, and the sigh of relief I almost let happen, didn’t get a chance to last long.

Her damn hair was in my face, which at any other time, wouldn’t have been a problem, really, but just at that second, was incredibly, blindingly, distracting. And it might have saved our lives.

Something hot burned into my shoulder and face as the sound of crashing metal and people yelling slammed into me. Hm, spicy.

“Hey.”

The softness of her voice is what brought me back to the girl squished up against me and out of the rabbit-instinct flight mode I was in.

“I think it’s stopped.”

“What the hell is it doing?”

“Maybe it’s hungry.”

I didn’t realize I’d said that out loud. I’d never seen one of these things just…stop like that. It didn’t make sense.

No time to think of that right now, just enough time to dart down another alley, blocking the beast from view as it sat down to lap up all the spilled barbecued beef at its feet.

“Whatever that thing is, I think it likes barbecue.”

Grace’s whispered comment snapped me back to what was right in front of me, the whole reason I was in this kind of mess again in the first place. .

“Hunh?”

“I think it stopped to eat at the barbecue stand we knocked over. It’s not chasing us anymore- look.”

“Barbecue?” I was still pretty confused. Probably drunk too. But definitely confused.

Raising an eyebrow, I laughed, “Well it’s good to see I’m not the only one here who can make wildly ridiculous comments with horrible timing!”

“Somewhere close. Safe. I think.”

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

“It’s not the Four Seasons, but it’ll do for now. It’s kinda cold- I don’t think the building even has heat, but I think we can keep warm enough to make it through the rest of tonight at least.”

Grace flopped down heavily on the mattress, exhausted, shoulders slumped, staring vacantly at the floor.

“That was…was that…I don’t even know where to start. My brain’s been turned to oatmeal. What…? What happened? What in the name of all fucks just happened?”

“Way to avoid the point, hun.”

“Alright. I’ll explain as much as I can. You deserve that much.”

“OK, here goes. So the thing you saw? Well, it’s a…” I scowled. “It’s a…sunuvabitch, I don’t really know what it’s called. Alright, further back then. The basics. Got it.

So she hasn’t tried to run away just yet. That’s a good sign, right?

“Like me?” It wasn’t really a question. Her tone made that clear enough.

“Oh boy. OK, here’s the big one- because with the heaven and hell stuff, most people can be like ‘meh, it’s all superstitious nonsense anyway’ and brush it off. This? Not so much.

“I’m not human. Or mortal. I can see angels and demons walking around plain as day, just like the ones I’ve met can see me. Mortals…see something else.”

“Like the creep at the bar earlier? Did he see…something else? In you?”

“Yeah. On the outside, at first glance, I look like any other girl. But look closer? Well, you saw what happened. People just aren’t ready to see my real nature.”

“So what should I be seeing? When I look into your eyes I mean?”

“Wow. I definitely don’t see that.”

Grace laughed. A genuine laugh, not weighed down by worry or terror. “A glowing, walking catfish?”

“Ha ha, yeah, that got beaten too many times with the ugly stick!”

Grace sat up suddenly, nodding sharply to herself. “Alright, well, you’re either batshit crazy, or I owe my gran an apology.” Grace was still half chuckling, but looking very intent.

“Your gran?”

“Yeah, she was super religious, always prayin’, talkin’ and singin’ about god. She must’ve gone to church three times a week! Boy, would she have loved to hear all this.”

“I’ll bet!”

“I’d say that about covers it for now, yeah.”

“Alright, I can live with that much for now. I’m clean tuckered out, and you look like you’re about to just fall over any second now. Whaddya say we call it a night?”

“Yeah.” I really could barely keep my eyes open at this point. I guess pretending my motorbike was a juggling pin kind of took it out of me.

Grace popped up, suddenly all business.

“You’re the boss!” Those wet wipes were a pocket-sized blessing, wrapped in foil paper. I’m more of a Chanel and gunpowder type, not so big on the earthy, barbecue scents.

I was starting to stumble a bit as we plopped the discarded blankets down as well as we could in the relative darkness of the loft.

“Probably better to stay dressed with how dirty these blankets are.” Grace frowned as she watched me struggle to pick up one of the heavier blankets a couple of times.

That didn’t even register until much later.

“OK, you, lay down. No more for you tonight. Sleep.”

================================================

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jeremyau · 8 years ago

Link

How does Boston compare to SV and what do MIT and Stanford have to do with it?

This is an archive of an old Google Buzz conversation on MIT vs. Stanford and Silicon Valley vs. Boston

There’s no reason why the Boston area shouldn’t be as much a hotbed of startups as Silicon Valley is. By contrast, there are lots of reasons why NYC is no good for startups. Nevertheless, Paul Graham gave up on the Boston area, so there must be something that hinders startup formation in the area.

Kevin: This has nothing to do with money, or talents, or what it. All it matters is “entrepreneur density”.

Boston may have the money, the talent, the intelligence, but does it have an entrepreneurial spirit and enough of a density?

Marya: From http://ift.tt/1GmR1B9 “Graham says the reasons are mostly personal, having to do with the impending birth of his child and the desire not to try and be a bi-coastal parent” But then immediately after, we see he says: “Boston just doesn’t have the startup culture that the Valley does. It has more startup culture than anywhere else, but the gap between number 1 and number 2 is huge; nothing makes that clearer than alternating between them.” Here’s an interview: http://ift.tt/1ImzxPA Funny, because Graham seemed partial to the Boston area, earlier: http://ift.tt/14WuEQM http://ift.tt/gihLkN

Rebecca: I think he’s partial because he likes the intellectual side of Boston, enough to make him sad that it doesn’t match SV for startup culture. I know the feeling. I guess I have seen things picking up here recently, enough to make me a little wistful that I have given my intellectual side priority over any entrepreneurial urges I might have, for the time being.

Scoble: I disagree that Boston is #2. Seattle and Tel Aviv are better and even Boulder is better, in my view.

Piaw: Seattle does have a large number of Amazon and Microsoft millionaires funding startups. They just don’t get much press. I wasn’t aware that Boulder is a hot-bed of startup activity.

Rebecca: On the comment “there is no reason Boston shouldn’t be a hotbed of startups…” Culture matters. MIT’s culture is more intellectual than entrepreneurial, and Harvard even more so. I’ll tell you a story: I was hanging out in the MIT computer club in the early nineties, when the web was just starting, and someone suggested that one could claim domain names to make money reselling them. Everyone in the room agreed that was the dumbest idea they had ever heard. It was crazy. Everything was available back then, you know. And everyone in that room kindof knew they were leaving money on the ground. And yet we were part of this club that culturally needed to feel ourselves above wanting to make money that way. Or later, in the late nineties I was hanging around Philip Greenspun, who was writing a book on database backed web development. He was really getting picked on by professors for doing stuff that wasn’t academic enough, that wasn’t generating new ideas. He only barely graduated because he was seen as too entrepreneurial, too commercial, not original enough. Would that have happened at Stanford? I read an interview with Rajiv Motwani where he said he dug up extra disk drives whenever the Google founders asked for them, while they were still grad students. I don’t think that wouldn’t happen at MIT: a professor wouldn’t give a grad student lots of stuff just to build something on their own that they were going to commercialize eventually. They probably would encounter complaints they weren’t doing enough “real science”. There was much resentment of Greenspun for the bandwidth he “stole” from MIT while starting his venture, for instance, and people weren’t shy about telling him. I’m not sure I like this about MIT.

Piaw: One my friends once turned down a full time offer at Netscape (after his internship) to return to graduate school. He said at that time, “I didn’t go to graduate school to get rich.” Years later he said, “I succeeded… at not getting rich.”

Dan: As the friend in question (I interned at Netscape in ‘96 and ‘97), I’m reasonably sure I wouldn’t have gotten very rich by dropping out of grad school. Instead, by sticking with academia, I’ve managed to do reasonably well for myself with consulting on the side, and it’s not like academics are paid peanuts, either.

Now, if I’d blown off academia altogether and joined Netscape in ‘93, which I have to say was a strong temptation, things would have worked out very differently.

Piaw: Well, there’s always going to be another hot startup. :-) That’s what Reed Hastings told me in 1995.

Rebecca: A venture capitalist with Silicon Valley habits (a very singular and strange beast around here) recently set up camp at MIT, and I tried to give him a little “Toto, you’re not in Kansas anymore” speech. That is to say, I was trying to tell him that the habits one got from making money from Stanford students wouldn’t work at MIT. It isn’t that one couldn’t make money investing in MIT students – if one was patient enough, maybe one could make more, maybe a lot more. But it would only work if one understood how utterly different MIT culture is, and did something different out of an understanding of what one was buying. I didn’t do a very good job talking to him, though; maybe I should try again by stepping back and talking more generally about the essential difference of MIT culture. You know, if I did that, maybe the Boston mayor’s office might want to hear this too. Hmmm… you’ve given me an idea.

Marya: Apropos, Philip G just posted about his experience attending a conference on angel investing in Boston: http://ift.tt/2pZbdDg He’s in cranky old man mode, as usual. I imagine him shaking his cane at the conference presenters from the rocking chair on his front porch. Fun quotes: ‘Asked if it wouldn’t make more sense to apply capital in rapidly developing countries such as Brazil and China, the speakers responded that being an angel was more about having fun than getting a good return on investment. (Not sure whose idea of “fun” included sitting in board meetings with frustrated entrepreneurs, but personally I would rather be flying a helicopter or going to the beach.)… ‘Nobody had thought about the question of whether Boston in fact needs more angel investors or venture capital. Nobody could point to an example of a good startup that had been unable to obtain funding. However, there were examples of startups, notably Facebook, that had moved to California because of superior access to capital and other resources out there… ‘Nobody at the conference could answer a macro question: With the US private GDP shrinking, why do we need capital at all?’

Piaw: The GDP question is easily answered. Not all sectors are shrinking. For instance, Silicon Valley is growing dramatically right now. I wouldn’t be able to help people negotiate 30% increases in compensation otherwise (well, more like 50% increases, depending on how you compute). The number of pre-IPO companies that are extremely profitable is also surprisingly high.

And personally, I think that investing in places like China and Brazil is asking for trouble unless you are well attuned to the local culture, so whoever answered the question with “it’s fun” is being an idiot.

The fact that Facebook was asked by Accel to move to Palo Alto should definitely be something Boston area VCs should berate themselves about. But that “forced move” was very good for Facebook. They acquired Jeff Rothschild, Marc Kwiatkowski, Steve Grimm, Paul Bucheit, Sanjeev Singh, and many others by being in Palo Alto that would not have moved to Boston for Facebook no matter what. It’s not clear to me that staying in Boston was an optimal move for Facebook no matter what. At least, not before things got dramatically better in Boston for startups.

Marya: The GDP question is easily answered. Not all sectors are shrinking. For instance, Silicon Valley is growing dramatically right now

I’m guessing medical technology and biotech are still growing. What else?

Someone pointed this out in the comments, and Philip addressed it; he argues that angel investors are unlikely to get a good return on their investment (partial quote): “…we definitely need some sources of capital… But every part of the U.S. financial system, from venture capital right up through investment banks, is sized for an expanding private economy. That means it is oversized for the economy that we have. Which means that the returns to additional capital should be very small….”

He doesn’t provide any supporting evidence, though.

Piaw: Social networks and social gaming is growing dramatically and fast.

Rebecca: Thanks, Marya, for pointing out Philip’s blog post. I think the telling quote from it is this: “What evidence is there that the Boston area has ever been a sustainable place for startups to flourish? When the skills necessary to build a computer were extremely rare, minicomputer makers were successful. As soon as the skills … became more widespread, nearly all of the new companies started up in California, Texas, Seattle, etc. When building a functional Internet application required working at the state of the art, the Boston area was home to a lot of pioneering Internet companies, e.g., Lycos. As soon as it became possible for an average programmer to … work effectively, Boston faded to insignificance.” Philip is saying Boston can only compete when it can leverage skills that only it has. That’s because its ability to handle business and commercialization are so comparatively terrible that when the technological skill becomes commoditized, other cities will do much better.

But it does often get cutting-edge technical insight and skills first – and then completely drops the ball on developing them. I find this frustrating. Now that I think about it, it seems like Boston’s leaders are frustrated by this too. But I think they’re making a mistake trying to remake Boston in Silicon Valley’s image. If we tried to be you, at best we would be a pathetic shadow of you. We could only be successful by being ourselves, but getting better at it.

There is a fundamental problem: the people at the cutting edge aren’t interested in practical things, or they wouldn’t be bothering with the cutting edge. Though it might seem strange to say now, the guy who set up the hundredth web server was quite an impractical intellectual. Who needs a web server when there are only 99 others (and no browsers yet, remember)? We were laughing at him, and he was protesting the worth of this endeavor merely out of a deep intellectual faith that this was the future, no matter how silly it seemed. Over and over I have seen the lonely obsessions of impractical intellectuals become practical in two or three years, become lucrative in five or eight, and become massive industries in seven to twelve years.

So if the nascent idea that will become a huge industry in a dozen years shows up first in Boston, why can’t we take advantage of it? The problem is that the people who hone their skill at nascent ideas that won’t be truly lucrative for half a decade at least, are by definition impractical, too impractical to know how to take advantage of being first. But maybe Boston could become a winner if it could figure out how to pair these people up with practical types who could take advantage of the early warning about the shape of the future, and leverage the competitive advantage of access to skills no-one else has. It would take a very particular kind of practicality, different from the standard SV thing. Maybe I’m wrong, though; maybe the market just doesn’t reward being first, especially if it means being on the bleeding edge of practicality. What do you think?

Piaw: Being 5 or 10 years ahead of your time is terrible. What you want to be is just 18 months or even 12 months ahead of your time, so you have just enough time to build product before the market explodes. My book covers this part as well. :-)

Marya: Rebecca, I don’t know the Boston area well enough to form an opinion. I’ve been here two years, but I’m certainly not in the thick of things (if there is a “thick” to speak of, I haven’t seen it). My guess would be that Boston doesn’t have the population to be a huge center of anything, but that’s a stab in the dark.

Even so, this old survey (2004) says that Boston is #2 in biotech, close behind San Diego: http://ift.tt/2pfVjq7 So why is Boston so successful in biotech if the people here broadly lack an interest in business, or are “impractical”? (Here’s a snippet from the article: “…When the most successful San Diego biotech company, IDEC Pharmaceuticals, merged with Biogen last year to become Biogen Idec (nasdaq: BIIB - news - people ), it officially moved its headquarters to Biogen’s hometown of Cambridge, Mass.” Take that, San Diego!)

When you talk about a certain type of person being “impractical”, I don’t think that’s really the issue. Such people can be very practical when it comes to pursuing their own particular kind of ambition. But their interests may not lie in the commercialization of an idea. Some extremely intelligent, highly skilled people just don’t care about money and commerce, and may even despise them.

Even with all that, I find it hard to believe that the intelligentsia of New England are so much more cerebral than their cousins in Silicon Valley. There’s certainly a puritan ethic in New England, but I don’t think that drives the business culture.

Rebecca: Marya, thanks for pointing out to me I wasn’t being clear (I’m kindof practicing explaining something on you, that I might try to say more formally later, hence the spam of your comment field. I hope you don’t mind.) You question “ why is Boston so successful in biotech if the people here broadly lack an interest in business?” made me realize I’m not talking about people broadly – there are plenty of business people in Boston, as everywhere. I’m talking about a particular kind of person, or even more specifically, a particular kind of relationship. Remember I contrasted the reports of Rajeev Motwani’s treatment of the Google guys with the MIT CS lab’s treatment of Philip? In general, I am saying that a university town like Palo Alto or Cambridge will be a magnet for ultra-ambitious young people who look for help realizing their ambitions, and a group of adults who are looking to attract such young people and enable those ambition, and there is a characteristic relationship between them with (perhaps unspoken) terms and expectations. The idea I’m really dancing around is that these terms & expectations are very different at MIT than (I’ve heard) they are at Stanford. Though there may not be very many people total directly involved in this relationship, it will still determine a great deal of what the city can and can’t accomplish, because it is a combination of the energy of very ambitious young people and the mentorship of experienced adults that makes big things possible.

My impression is that the most ambitious people at Stanford dream of starting the next big internet company, and if they show enough energy and talent, they will impress professors who will then open their Rolodex and tell their network of VC’s “this kid will make you tons of money if you support his work.” The VC’s who know that this professor has been right many times before will trust this judgement. So kids with this kind of dream go to Stanford and work to impress their professors in a particular kind of way, because it puts them on a fast track to a particular kind of success.

The ambitious students most cultivated by professors in Boston have a different kind of dream: they might dream of cracking strong AI, or discovering the essential properties of programming languages that will enable fault-tolerant or parallel programming, or really understanding the calculus of lambda calculus, or revolutionizing personal genomics, or building the foundations of Bladerunner-style synthetic biology. If professors are sufficiently impressed with their student’s energy and talent, they will open their Rolodex of program managers at DARPA (and NSF and NIH), and tell them “what this kid is doing isn’t practical or lucrative now, nor will it be for many years to come, but nonetheless it is critical for the future economic and military competitiveness of the US that this work is supported.” The program managers’ who know that this professor has been right many times before will trust this judgment. In this way, the kid is put on a fast track to success – but it is a very different kind of success than the Stanford kid was looking for, and a different kind of kid who will fight to get onto this track. The meaning of success is very different, much more intellectual and much less practical, at least in the short term.

That’s what I mean when I say “Boston” is less interested in business, more impractical, less entrepreneurial. It isn’t that there aren’t plenty of people here who have these qualities. But the “ecosystem” that gives ultra-ambitious young people the chance to do something singular which could be done no-where else – an ecosystem which that it does have, but in a very different kind of way – doesn’t foster skill at commercialization or an interest in the immediate practical application of technology.

Maybe there is nothing wrong with that: Boston’s ecosystem just fosters a different kind of achievement. However, I can see it is frustrating to the mayor of Boston, because the young people whose ambitions are enabled by Boston’s ecosystem may be doing work crucial to the economic and military competitiveness of the US in the long term, but they might not help the economy of Boston very much! What often happens in the “long term” is that the work supported by grants in Boston develops to the point it becomes practical and lucrative, and then it gets commercialized in California, Seattle, New York, etc… The program managers at DARPA who funded the work are perfectly happy with this outcome, but I can imagine that the mayor of Boston is not! The kid also might not be 100% happy with this deal, because the success which he is offered isn’t much like SV success – its a fantastic amount of work, rather hermit-like and self-abnegating, which mostly ends up making it possible for other people far away to get very, very rich using the results of his labors. At best he sees only a minuscule slice of the wealth he enabled.

What one might want instead is that the professors in Boston have two sections in their Rolodex. The first section has the names of all the relevant program managers at DARPA, and the professor flips to this section first. The second section has the names of suitable cofounders, and friendly investors, and after the student has slaved away for five to seven years making a technology practical, the professor flips to the second section and sets the student up a second time to be the chief scientist or something like that at an appropriate startup.

And its not like this doesn’t happen. It does happen. But it doesn’t happen as much as it could, and I think the reason why it doesn’t may be that it just takes a lot of work to maintain a really good Rolodex. These professors are busy and they just don’t have enough energy to be the linchpin of a really top-quality ecosystem in two different ways at the same time.

If the mayor of Boston is upset that Boston is economically getting the short end of the stick in this whole deal (which I think it is), a practical thing he could do is give these professors some help in beefing up the second section of their Rolodex, or perhaps try to build another network of mentors which was in the appropriate way Rolodex-enabled. If he took the later route, he should understand that this second network shouldn’t try to be a clone of the similar thing at Stanford (because at best it would only be a pale shadow) but instead be particularly tailored to incorporating the DARPA-project graduates that are unique to Boston’s ecosystem. That way he could make Boston a center of entrepreneurship in a way that was uniquely its own and not merely a wannabe version of something else – which it would inevitably do badly. That’s what I meant when I said Boston should be itself better, rather than trying to be a poor pale copy of Silicon Valley.

Piaw: I like that line of thought Rebecca. Here’s the counter-example: Facebook. Facebook clearly was interested in monetizing something that was very developed, and in fact, had been tried and failed many times because the timing wasn’t right. Yet Facebook had to go to Palo Alto to get funding. So the business culture has to change sufficiently that the people with money are willing to risk it on very high risk ventures like the Facebook that was around 4 years ago.

Having invested my own money in startups, I find that it’s definitely something very challenging. It takes a lot to convince yourself that this risk is worth taking, even if it’s a relatively small portion of your portfolio. To get enough people to build critical mass, you have to have enough success in prior ventures to gain the kind of confidence that lets you fund Facebook where it was 4 years ago. I don’t think I would have been able to fund Google or Facebook at the seed stage, and I’ve lived in the valley and worked at startups my entire career, so if anyone would be comfortable with risk, it should be me.

Dan: Rebecca: a side note on “opening a rolodex for DARPA”. It doesn’t really work quite like that. It’s more like “hey, kid, you should go to grad school” and you write letters of recommendation to get the kid into a top school. You, of course, steer the kid to a research group where you feel he or she will do awesome work, by whatever biased idea of awesomeness.

My own professorial take: if one of my undergrads says “I want to go to grad school”, then I do as above. If he or she says “I want to go work for a cool startup”, then I bust out the VC contacts in my rolodex.

Rebecca: Dan: I know. I was oversimplifying for dramatic effect, just because qualifying it would have made my story longer, and it was already pushing the limits of the reasonable length for a comment. Of course the SV version of the story isn’t that simple either.

I have seen it happen that sufficiently brilliant undergraduates (and even high school students – some amazing prodigies show up at MIT) can get direct support. But realize also I’m really talking about grad students – after all, my comparison is with the relationship between the Google guys and Rajeev Motwani, which happened when they were graduate students. The exercise was to compare the opportunities they encountered with the opportunities similarly brilliant, energetic and ultra-ambitious students at MIT would have access to, and talk about how it would be similar and different. Maybe I shouldn’t have called such people “kids,” but it simplified and shortened my story, which was pushing its length limit anyway. Thanks for the feedback; I’m testing out this story on you, and its useful to know what ways of saying things work and what doesn’t.

Rebecca: Piaw: I understand that investing in startups by individual is very scary. I know some Boston angels (personally more than professionally) and I hear stories about how cautious their angel groups are. I should explain some context: the Boston city government recently announced a big initiative to support startups in Boston, and renovate some land opened up by the Big Dig next to some decaying seaport buildings to create a new Innovation District. I was thinking about what they could do to make that kind of initiative a success rather than a painful embarrassment (which it could easily become). So I was thinking about the investment priorities of city governments, more than individual investors like you.

Cities invest in all sorts of crazy things, like Olympic stadiums, for instance, that lose money horrifyingly … but when you remember that the city collects 6% hotel tax on every extra visitor, and benefits from extra publicity, and collects extra property tax when new people move to the city, it suddenly doesn’t look so bad anymore. Boston is losing out because there is a gap in the funding of technology between when DARPA stops funding something, because it is developed to the point where it is commercializable, and when the cautious Boston angels will start funding something – and other states step into the gap and get rich off of the product of Massachusetts’ tax dollars. That can’t make the local government too happy.

Maybe the Boston city or state government might have an incentive to do something to plug that hole. They might be more tolerant of losing money directly because even a modestly lucrative venture, or one very, very slow to generate big returns, which nonetheless successfully drew talent to the city would make them money in hotel & property tax, publicity etc. etc. – or just not losing the huge investment they have already made in their universities! I briefly worked for someone who was funded by Boston Community Capital, an organization which, I think, divided its energies between developing low income housing and and funding selected startups that were deemed socially redeeming for Boston. When half your portfolio is low-income housing, you might have a different outlook on risk and return! I was hugely impressed by what great investors they were – generous, helpful & patient. Patience is necessary for us because the young prodigies in Boston go into fields whose time horizon is so long – my friends are working on synthetic biology, but it will be a long, long time before you can buy a Bladerunner-style snake!

Again, thanks for the feedback. You are helping me understand what I am not making clear.

Marya: Rebecca, you said The idea I’m really dancing around is that these terms & expectations are very different at MIT than (I’ve heard) they are at Stanford

I read your initial comments as being about general business conditions for startups in Boston. But now I think you’re mainly talking about internet startups or at least startups that are based around work in computer science. You’re saying MIT’s computer science department in particular does a poor job of pointing students in an entrepreneurial direction, because they are too oriented towards academic topics.

Both MIT and Stanford have top computer science and business school rankings. Maybe the problem is that Stanford’s business school is more inclined to “mine” the computer science department than MIT’s?

Doug: Rebecca, your description of MIT vs. Stanford sounds right to me (though I don’t know Stanford well). What’s interesting is that I remember UC Berkeley as being very similar to how you describe MIT: the brightest/most ambitious students at Cal ended up working on BSD or Postgres or The Gimp or Gnutella, rather than going commercial. Well, I haven’t kept up with Berkeley since the mid-90s, but have there been any significant startups there since Berkeley Softworks?

Piaw: Doug: Inktomi. It was very significant for its time.

Dan: John Ousterhout built a company around Tcl. Eric Allman built a company around sendmail. Mike Stonebreaker did Ingres, but that was old news by the time the Internet boom started. Margo Seltzer built a company around Berkeley DB. None of them were Berkeley undergrads, though Seltzer was a grad student. Insik Rhee did a bunch of Internet-ish startup companies, but none of them had the visibility of something like Google or Yahoo.

Rebecca: Dan: I was thinking more about what you said about not involving undergraduates, but instead telling them to go to grad school. Sometimes MIT is in the nice sedate academic mode which steers undergrads to the appropriate research group when they are ready to work on their PhD. But sometimes it isn’t. Let me tell you more about the story of the scene in the computer club concerning installation of the first web server. It was about the 100th web server anywhere, and its maintainer accosted me with an absurd chart “proving” the exponential growth of the web – i.e. a graph going exponentially from 0 to 100ish, which he extrapolated forward in time to over a million – you know the standard completely bogus argument – except this one was exceptionally audacious in its absurdity. Yet he argued for it with such intensity and conviction, as if he was saying that this graph should convince me to drop everything and work on nothing but building the Internet, because it was the only thing that mattered!

I fended him off with the biggest stick I could find: I was determined to get my money’s worth for my education, do my psets, get good grades (I cared back then), and there is no way I would let that be hurt by this insane Internet obsession. But it continued like that. The Internet crowd only grew with time, and they got more insistent that they were working on the only thing that mattered and I should drop everything and join them. That I was an undergraduate did not matter a bit to anyone. Undergrads were involved, grad students were involved, everyone was involved. It wasn’t just a research project; eventually so many different research projects blended together that it became a mass obsession of an entire community, a total “Be Involved or Be Square” kind of thing. I’d love to say that I did get involved. But I didn’t; I simply sat in the office on the couch and did psets, proving theorems and solving the Schrodinger’s equation, and fended them off with the biggest stick I could find. I was determined to get a Real Education, to get my money’s worth at MIT, you know.

My point is that when the MIT ecosystem really does its thing, it is capable of tackling projects that are much bigger than ordinary research projects, because it can get a critical mass of research projects working together, involving enough grad students and also sucking in undergrads and everyone else, so that the community ends up with an emotional energy and cohesion that goes way, way beyond the normal energy of a grad student trying to finish a PhD.

There’s something else too, though I cannot report on this with that much certainty, because was too young to see it all at the time. You might ask: if MIT had this kind of emotional energy focused on something in the 90’s, then what is it doing in a similar way now? And the answer I’d have to say, painfully, is that it is frustrated and miserable about being an empty shell of what it once was.

Why? Because in 2000 Bush got elected and he killed the version of DARPA with which so many professors had had such a long relationship. I didn’t I understand this in the 90’s – like a kid I took the things that were happening around me for granted without seeing the funding that made them possible – but now I see that that the kind of emotional energy expended by the Internet crowd at MIT in the 90’s costs a lot of money, and needs an intelligent force behind it, and that scale of money and planning can only come from the military, not from NSF.

More recently I’ve watched professors who clearly feel it is their birthright to be able to mobilize lots of student to do really large-scale projects, but then they try to find money for it out of NSF, and they spend all their time killing themselves writing grant proposals, never getting enough money to make themselves happy, and complaining about the cowardice of academia, and wishing they could still work with their old friends at DARPA. They aren’t happy because they are merely doing big successful research projects, but a mere research project isn’t enough… when MIT is really MIT it can do more. It is an empty shell of itself when it is merely a collection of merely successful but not cohesive NSF funded research projects. As I was saying, the Boston “ecosystem” has in itself the ability to do something singular, but it is singular in an entirely different way than SV’s thing.

This may seem obscure, a tale of funding woes at a distant university, but perhaps it is something you should be aware of, because maybe it affects your life. The reason you should care is that when MIT was fully funded and really itself, it was building the foundations of the things that are now making you rich.

One might think of the relationship between technology and wealth like a story about potential energy: when you talk about finding a “product/market” fit, its like pushing a big stone up a hill, until you get the “fit” at the top of the hill, and then the stone rolls down and the energy you put into it spins out and generates lots of money. In SV you focus on pushing stones up short hills – like Piaw said, no more than 12-18 months of pushing before the “fit” happens.

But MIT in its golden age could tackle much, much bigger hills – the whole community could focus itself on ten years of nothing but pushing a really big stone up a really big hill. The potential energy that the obsessed Internet Crowd in the 90’s was pushing into the system has been playing out in your life ever since. They got a really big stone over a really big hill and sent it down onto you, and then you pushed it over little bumps on the way down, and made lots of money doing it, and you thought the potential energy you were profiting from came entirely from yourselves. Some of it was, certainly, but not all. Some of it was from us. If we aren’t working on pushing up another such stone, if we can’t send something else over a huge hill to crash into you, then the future might not be like the past for you. Be worried.

So you might ask, how did this story end? If I’m claiming that there was intense emotional energy being poured into developing the Internet at MIT in the 90’s, why didn’t those same people fan out and create the Internet industry in Boston? If we were once such winners, how did we turn into such losers? What happened to this energetic, cohesive group?

I can tell you about this, because after years of fending off the emotional gravitation pull of this obsession, towards the end I began to relent. First I said “No way!” and then I said “No!” and then I said “Maybe Later,” and then I said “OK, Definitely Later”… and then when I finally got around to Later, and (perhaps the standard story of my life) Later turned out to be Too Late. By 2000 I was ready to join the crowd and remake myself as an Internet Person in the MIT style. So I ended up becoming seriously involved just at the time it fell apart. Because 2000ish, almost the beginning of the Internet Era for you, was the end for us.

This weekend I was thinking of how to tell this story, and I was composing it in my head in a comic style, thinking to tell a story of myself as “Parable of Boston Loser” to talk about all my absurd mistakes as a microcosm of the difficulties of a whole city. I can pick on myself, can’t I; no one will get upset at that? The short story is that in 2000ish the Internet crowd had achieved their product/market fit, DARPA popped the champagne – you won guys! Congratulations! Now go forth and commercialize! – and pushed us out of the nest into the big world to tackle the standard tasks of commercializing a technology – the tasks that you guys can do in your sleep. I was there, right of the middle of things, during that transition. I thought to tell you a comic story about the absurdity of my efforts in that direction, and make you laugh at me.

But when I was trying to figure out how to explain what was making it so terribly hard for me, to my great surprise I was suddenly crying really hard. All Saturday night I was thinking about it and crying. I had repressed the memory, decided I didn’t care that much – but really it was too terrible to face. All the things you can do without thinking, for us hurt terribly. The declaration of victory, the “achievement of product/market fit”, the thing you long for more than anything, I – and I think many of the people I knew – experienced as a massive trauma. This is maybe why I’ve reacted so vehemently and spammed your comment field, because I have big repressed personal trauma about all this. I realized I had a much more earnest story to tell than I had previously planned.

For instance, I was reflecting on my previous comment about what cities spend money on, and thinking that I sounded like the biggest jerk ever. Was I seriously suggesting that the city take money that they would have spent on housing for poor black babies and instead spend it on overeducated white kids with plenty of other prodigiously lucrative economic opportunities? Where do I get off suggesting something like that? If I really mean it I have a big, big burden of proof.

So I’ll try to combine my more earnest story with at least a sketch of how I’d tackle this burden of proof (and try to keep it short, to keep the spam factor to a minimum. The javascript is getting slow, so I’ll cut this here and continue.)

Ruchira: Interlude (hope Rebecca continues soon!): Rebecca says “that scale of money and planning can only come from the military, not from NSF.” Indeed, it may be useful to check out this NY Times infographic of the federal budget: http://ift.tt/1CXAgYQ

I’ll cite below some of the 2011 figures from this graphic that were proposed at that time; although these may have changed, the relative magnitudes of one sector versus another are not very different. I’ve mostly listed sectors in decreasing order of budget size for research, except I listed “General science & technology” sector (which includes NSF) before “Health” sector (which includes NIH) since Rebecca had contrasted the military with NSF.

The “Research, development, test, and evaluation” segment of the “National Defense” sector is $76.77B. I guess DARPA, ONR, etc. fit there.

The “General science & technology” sector is down near the lower right. The “National Science Foundation programs” segment gets $7.36B. There’s also another $0.1B for “National Science Foundation and other”. The “Science, exploration, and NASA supporting activities” segment gets $12.78B. (I don’t know to what extent satellite technology that is relevant to the national defense is also involved here, or in the $4.89B “Space operations” segment, or in the $0.18B “NASA Inspector General, education, and other” segment.) The “Department of Energy science programs” segment gets $5.12B. The “Department of Homeland Security science and technology programs” segment gets $1.02B.

In the “Health” sector, the “National Institutes of Health” segment gets $32.09B. The “Disease control, research, and training” segment gets $6.13B (presumably this includes the CDC). There’s also “Other health research and training” at $0.14B and “Diabetes research and other” at $0.095B.

In the “Natural resources and environment sector”, the “National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration” gets $5.66B. “Regulatory, enforcement, and research programs” gets $3.86B (is this the entire EPA?).

In the “Community and regional development” sector, the “National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance fund” (new this year) gets $4B.

In the “Agriculture” sector, which presumably includes USDA-funded research, “Research and education programs” gets $1.97B, “Research and statistical analysis” gets $0.25B, and “Integrated research, education, and extension programs” gets $0.025B.

In the “Transportation” sector, “Aeronautical research and technology” gets $1.15B, which by the way would be a large (130%) relative increase. (Didn’t MIT find a way of increasing jet fuel efficiency by 75% recently?)

In the “Commerce and housing credit” sector, “Science and technology” gets $0.94B. I find this rather mysterious.

In the “Education, training, employment” sector, “Research and general education aids: Other” gets $1.14B. The “Institute for Education Sciences” gets $0.74B.

In the “Energy” sector, “Nuclear energy R&D” gets $0.82B and “Research and development” gets $0.024B (presumably this is the portion outside the DoE).

In the “Veterans’ benefits and services” sector, “Medical and prosthetic research” gets $0.59B.

In the “Income Security” sector there’s a tiny segment “Children’s research and technical assistance” $0.052B. Not sure what that means.

Rebecca: I’ll start with a non-sequitur which I hope to use to get at the hear of the difference between MIT and Stanford: recently I was at a Marine publicity event and I asked the recruiter what differentiates the Army from the Marines? Since they both train soldiers to fight, why don’t they do it together? He answered vehemently that they must be separate because of one simple attribute in which they are utterly opposed: how they think about the effect they want to have on the life their recruits have after they retire from the service. He characterized the Army as an organization which had two goals: first, to train good soldiers, and second, to give them skills that would get them a good start in the life they would have after they left. If you want to be a Senator, you might get your start in the Army, get connections, get job skills, have “honorable service” on your resume, and generally use it to start your climb up the ladder. The Army aspires to create a legacy of winners who began their career in the Army.

By contrast the Marines, he said, have only one goal: they want to create the very best soldiers, the elite, the soldiers they can trust in the most difficult and dangerous situations to keep the Army guys behind them alive. This elite training, he said, comes with a price. The price you pay is that the training you get does not prepare you for anything at all in the civilian world. You can be the best of the best in the Marines, and then come home and discover that you have no salable civilian job skills, that you are nearly unemployable, that you have to start all over again at the bottom of the ladder. And starting over is a lot harder than starting the first time. It can be a huge trauma. It is legendary that Marines do not come back to civilian life and turn into winners: instead they often self-destruct – the “transition to civilian life” can be violently hard for them.

He said this calmly and without apology. Did I say he was a recruiter? He said vehemently: “I will not try to recruit you! I want to you to understand everything about how painful a price you will pay to be a Marine. I will tell you straight out it probably isn’t for you! The only reason you could possibly want it is because you want more than anything to be a soldier, and not just to be a soldier, but to be in the elite, the best of the best.” He was saying: we don’t help our alumni get started, we set them up to self-destruct, and we will not apologize for it – it is merely the price you pay for training the elite!

This story gets to the heart of what I am trying to say is the essential difference between Stanford and MIT. Stanford is like the Army: for its best students, it has two goals – to make them engineers, and to make them winners after they leave. And MIT is like the Marines: it has only one goal – to make its very best student into the engineering elite, the people about whom they can truthfully tell program managers at DARPA: you can utterly trust these engineers with the future of America’s economic and military competitiveness. There is a strange property to the training you get to enter into that elite, much like the strange property the non-recruiter attributed to the training of the Marines: even though it is extremely rigorous training, once you leave you can find yourself utterly without any salable skills whatever.

The skills you need to acquire to build the infrastructure ten years ahead of the market’s demand for it may have zero intersection with the skills in demand in the commercial world. Not only are you not prepared to be a winner, you may not even be prepared to be basically employable. You leave and start again at the bottom. Worse than the bottom: you may have been trained with habits commercial entities find objectionable (like a visceral unwillingness to push pointers quickly, or a regrettable tendency to fight with the boss before the interview process is even over.) This can be fantastically traumatic. Much as ex-Marines suffer a difficult “transition to civilian life,” the chosen children of MIT suffer a traumatic “transition to commercial life.” And the leaders at MIT do not apologize for this: as the Marine said, it is just the price you pay for training the elite.

This is the general grounds which I might use to appeal to the city officials in Boston. There’s more to explain, but the shape of the idea would be roughly this: much a cities often pay for programs to help ex-Marines transition to civilian life, on the principal that they represent valuable human capital that ought not to be allowed to self-destruct, it might pay off for the city to understand the peculiar predicament of graduates of MIT’s intense DARPA projects, and provide them with help with the “transition to commercial life.” There’s something in it for them! Even though people who know nothing but how to think about the infrastructure of the next decade aren’t generically commercially valuable, if you put them in proximity to normal business people, their perspective would rub off in a useful way. That’s the way that Boston could have catalyzed an Internet industry of its own – not by expecting MIT students to commercialize their work, which (with the possible exception of Philip) they were constitutionally incapable of, but by giving people who wanted to commercialize something but didn’t know what a chance to learn from the accumulated (nearly ten years!) of experience and expertise of the Internet Crowd.

On that note, I wanted to say – funny you should mention Facebook. You think of Mark Zuckerberg as the social networking visionary in Boston, and Boston could have won if they had paid to keep him. I think that strange – Zuckerberg is fundamentally one of you, not one of us. It was right he should leave. But I’ll ask you a question you’ve probably never thought about. Suppose the Internet had not broken into the public consciousness at the time it did; suppose the world had willfully ignored it for a few more years, so the transition from a DARPA-funded research project to a commercial proposition would have happened a few years later. There was an Internet Crowd at MIT constantly asking DARPA to let them build the “next thing,” where “next” is defined as “what the market will discover it wants ten years from now.” So if this crowd had gotten a few more years of government support, what would they have built?

I’m pretty sure it would have been a social networking infrastructure, not like Facebook, really, but more like the Diaspora proposal. I’m not sure, but I remember in ‘98/‘99 that’s what all the emotional energy was pointing toward. It wasn’t technically possible to build yet, but the instant it was that’s what people wanted. I think it strange that everyone is talking about social networking and how it should be designed now; it feels to me like deja vu all over again, and echo from a decade ago. If the city or state had picked up these people after DARPA dropped them, and given them just a little more time, a bit more government support – say by a Mass ARPA – they could have made Boston the home, not of the big social networking company, but of the open social networking infrastructure and and all the expertise and little industries such a thing would have thrown off. And it would have started years and years ago! That’s how Boston could have become a leader by being itself better, rather than trying to be you badly.

Dan: I think you’re perhaps overstating the impact of DARPA. DARPA, by and large, funds two kinds of university activities. First, it funds professors, which pays for post-docs, grad students, and sometimes full-time research staff. Second, DARPA also funds groups that have relatively little to do with academia, such as the BSD effort at Berkeley (although I don’t know for a fact that they had DARPA money, they didn’t do “publish or perish” academic research; they produced Berkeley Unix).

Undergrads at a place like MIT got an impressive immersion in computer science, with a rigor and verve that wasn’t available most other places (although Berkeley basically cloned 6.001, and others did as well). They call it “drinking from a firehose” for a reason. MIT, Berkeley, and other big schools of the late 80’s and early 90’s had more CS students than they knew what to do with, so they cranked up the difficulty of the major and produced very strong students, while others left for easier pursuits.

The key inflection point is how popular culture at the university, and how the faculty, treat their “rock star” students. What are the expectations? At MIT, it’s that you go to grad school, get a PhD, become a researcher. At Stanford, it’s that you run off and get rich.

The decline in DARPA funding (or, more precisely, the micromanagement and short-term thinking) in recent years can perhaps be attributed to the leadership of Tony Tether. He’s now gone, and the “new DARPA” is very much planning to come back in a big way. We’ll see how it goes.

One last point: I don’t buy the Army vs. Marines analogy. MIT vs. Stanford train students similarly, in terms of their preparation to go out and make money, and large numbers of MIT people are quite successfully out there making money. MIT had no lack of companies spin out of research there, notably including Akamai. The differences we’re talking about here are not night vs. day, they’re not Army vs. Marines. They’re more subtle but still significant.

Rebecca: Yes, I’ve been hearing about the “unTethered Darpa.” I should have mentioned that, but left it out to stay (vaguely) short. And yes, I am overstating to make it possible to make a simple statement of what I might be asking for that would be couched in terms a city or state government official might be able to relate to. Maybe that’s irresponsible; that’s why I’m testing it on you first, to give you a chance to yell at me and tell me if you think that’s so.

They are casting about for a narrative of why Boston ceded its role as leaders of the Internet industry to SV, that would point them to something to do about it. So I was talking specifically about the sense in which Boston was once a leader in internet technology and the weaknesses that might have caused it to lose its lead. Paul Graham says that Boston has the weakness in developing industries that it is “too good” at other things, so I wanted to tell a dramatized story specifically about what the other things were and why that would lead to fatal weakness – how being “too strong” in a particular way can also make you weak.

I certainly am overstating, but perhaps I am because I am trying to exert force against another prediliction I find pernicious: the tendency to be eternally vague about the internal emotional logic that makes things happen in the world. If people build a competent, cohesive, energetic community, and then it suddenly fizzles, fails to achieve its potential, and disbands, it might be important to know what weakness caused this surprising outcome so you know how to ask for the help that would keep it from happening the next time.

And to tell the truth, I’m not sure I entirely trust your objection. I’ve wondered why so often I hear such weak, vague narratives about the internal emotional logic that causes things to happen in the world. Vague narratives make you helpless to solve problems! I don’t cling to the right to overstate things, but I do cling to the right to sleuth out the emotional logic of cause and effect that drives the world around me. I feel sometimes that I am fighting some force that wants to thwart me in that goal – and I suspect that that force sometimes originates, not always in rationality, but in in a male tendency to not want to admit to weakness just for the sake of “seeming strong.” A facade of strength can exact a high price in the currency of the real competence of the world, since often the most important action that actually makes the world better is the action of asking for help. I was really impressed with that Marine for being willing to admit to the price he paid, to the trauma he faced. That guy didn’t need to fake strength! So maybe I am holding out the image of him as an example. We have government officials who are actively going out of their way to offer to help us; we have a community that accomplishes many of its greatest achievements because of government support; we shouldn’t squander an opportunity to ask for what might help us. And this narrative might be wrong; that’s why I’m testing it first. I’m open to criticism. But I don’t want to pass by an opportunity, an opening to ask for help from someone who is offering it, merely because I’m too timid to say anything for the fear of overstatement.

Dan: Certainly, Boston’s biggest strength is the huge number of universities in and around the area. Nowhere else in the country comes close. And, unsurprisingly, there are a large number of high-tech companies in and around Boston. Another MIT spin-out I forgot to mention above is iRobot, the Roomba people, which also does a variety of military robots.

To the extent that Boston “lost” the Internet revolution to Silicon Valley, consider the founding of Netscape. A few guys from Illinois and one from Kansas. They could well have gone anywhere. (Simplifying the story, but) they hooked up with a an angel investor (Jim Clark) and he draged them out to the valley where they promptly hired a bunch of ex-SGI talent and hit the road running. Could they have gone to Boston? Sure. But they didn’t.

What seems to be happening is that different cities are developing their own specialties and that’s where people go. Dallas, for example, has carved out a niche in telecom, and all the big players (Nortel, Alcatel, Cisco, etc.) do telecom work there. In Houston, needless to say, it’s all about oilfield engineering. It’s not that there’s any particular Houston tax advantage or city/state funding that brings these companies here. Rather, the whole industry (or, at least the white collar part of it) is in Houston, and many of the big refineries are close nearby (but far enough away that you don’t smell them).

Greater Boston, historically, was where the minicomputer companies were, notably DEC and Data General. Their whole world got nuked by workstations and PCs. DEC is now a vanishing part of HP and DG is now a vanishing part of EMC. The question is what sort of thing the greater Boston area will become a magnet for, in the future, and how you can use whatever leverage you’ve got to help make it happen. Certainly, there’s no lack of smart talent graduating from Boston-area universities. The question is whether you can incentivize them to stay put.

I’d suggest that you could make headway, that way, by getting cheap office space in and around Cambridge (an “incubator”) plus building a local pot of VC money. I don’t think you can decide, in advance, what you want the city’s specialty to be. You pretty much just have to hope that it evolves organically. And, once you see a trend emerging, you might want to take financial steps to reinforce it.

Thomas: BBN (which does DARPA funded research) has long been considered a halfway house between MIT and the real world.

Piaw: It looks like there’s another conversation about this thread over at Hacker News: http://ift.tt/28XFjgR I love conversation fragmentation.

Doug: Conversation fragmentation can be annoying, but do you really want all those Hacker News readers posting on this thread?

Piaw: Why not? Then I don’t have to track things in two places.

Ruchira: hga over at Hacker News says: “Self-selection by applicants is so strong (MIT survived for a dozen year without a professional as the Director), whatever gloss the Office is now putting on the Institute, it’s able to change things only so much. E.g. MIT remains the a place where you don’t graduate without taking (or placing out of) a year of the calculus and classical physics (taught at MIT speed), for all majors.”

Well, the requirements for all majors at Caltech are: two years of calculus, two years of physics (including quantum physics), a year of chemistry, and a year of biology (the biology requirement was added after I went there); freshman chemistry lab and another introductory lab; and a total of four years of humanities and social sciences classes. The main incubator I know of near Caltech is the Idealab. Certainly JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) as well as Hollywood CGI and animation have drawn from the ranks of Caltech grads. The size of the Caltech freshman class is also much smaller than those at Stanford or MIT.

I don’t know enough to gauge the relative success of Caltech grads at transitioning to local industry, versus Stanford or MIT, does anyone else?

Rebecca: The comments are teaching me what I didn’t make clear, and this is one of the worst ones. When I talked about the “transition to the commercial world” I didn’t mainly mean grads transitioning to industry. I was thinking more about the transition that a project goes through when it achieves product/market fit.

This might not be something that you think of as such a big deal, because when companies embark on projects, they usually start with a fairly specific plan of the market they mean to tackle and what they mean to do if and when the market does adopt their product. There is no difficult transition because they were planning for it all along. After all, that’s the whole point of a company! But a ten year research project has no such plan. The web server enthusiast did not know when the market would adopt his “product” – remember, browsers were still primitive then – nor did he really know what it would look like when they did. Some projects are even longer term than that: a programming language professor said that the expected time from the conception of a new programming language idea to its widespread adoption is thirty years. That’s a good chunk of a lifetime.

When you’ve spent a good bit of your life involved with something as a research project that no-one besides your small crowd cares about, when people do notice, when commercial opportunities show up, when money starts pouring out of the sky, its a huge shock! You haven’t planned for it at all. Have you heard Philip’s story of how he got his first contract for what became ArsDigita? I couldn’t find the story exactly, but it was something like this: he had posted some of the code for his forum software online, and HP called him up and asked him to install and configure it for them. He said “No! I’m busy! Go away!” They said “we’ll pay you $100,000.” He’s in shock: “You’ll give me $100000 for 2 weeks of work?”

He wasn’t exactly planning for money to start raining down out of the sky. When he started doing internet applications, he said, people had told him he was crazy, there was no future in it. I remember when I first started seeing URL’s in ads on the side of buses, and I was just bowled over – all the time my friends had been doing web stuff, I had never really believed they would ever be adopted. URL’s are just so geeky, after all! I mean, seriously, if some wild-eyed nerd told you that in five years people would print “http://“,on the side of a bus, what would you think? I paid attention to what they were doing because they thought it was cool, I thought it was cool, and the fact that I had no real faith anyone else ever would made no difference. So when the world actually did, it was entering a new world that none of us were prepared for, that nobody had planned for, that we had not given any thought to developing skills to be able to deal with. I guess this is a little hard to convey, because it wouldn’t happen in a company. You wouldn’t ever do something just because you thought it was cool, without any faith that anyone would ever agree with you, and then get completely caught by surprise, completely bowled over, when the rest of the world goes crazy about what you thought was your esoteric geeky obsession.

Piaw: I think we were all bowled over by how quickly people started exchanging e-mail addresses, and then web-sites, etc. I was stunned. But it took a really long time for real profits to show up! It took 20 or so search engine companies to start up and fail before someone succeeded!

Rebecca: Of course; you are bringing up what was in fact the big problem. The question was: in what mode is it reasonable to ask the local government for help? And if you are in the situation where $100,000 checks are raining on you out of the sky without you seeming to make the slightest effort to even solicit them, then it seems like only the biggest jerk on the planet would claim to the government that they were Needy and Deserving. Black babies without roofs on their heads are needy and deserving; rich white obnoxious nerds with money raining down on them are not. But remember though Philip doesn’t seem to be expending much effort in his story, he also said in the late 90’s that he had been building web apps for ten years. Who else on the planet in 1999 could show someone a ten year long resume of web app development?

As Piaw said, it isn’t like picking up the potential wealth really was just a matter of holding out your hand as money rained from the sky. Quite the contrary. It wasn’t easy; in fact it was singularly difficult. Sure, Philip talked like it was easy, until you think about how hard it would have been to amass the resume he had in 1999.

When the local government talks about how it wants to attract innovators to Boston, to turn the city into a Hub of Innovation, my knee-jerk reaction is – and what are we, chopped liver? But then I realize that when they say they want to attract innovators, what they really mean is not that they want innovators, but that they want people who can innovate for a reasonable, manageable amount of time, preferably short, and then turn around, quick as quicksilver, and scoop up all the return on investment in that innovation before anyone else can get at it – and give a big cut in taxes to the city and state! Those are the kind of innovators who are attractive! Those are the kind who properly make your Boston the kind of Hub of Innovation the Mayor of Boston wants it to be. Innovators like those in Tech Square or Stata, not so much. We definitely qualify for the Chopped Liver department.

And this hurts. It hurts to think that the Mayor of Boston might be treating us with more respect now if we had been better in ~2000 at turning around, quick as quicksilver, and remaking ourselves into people who could scoop up all, or some, or even a tiny fraction of the return on investment of the innovation at which we were then, in a technical sense, well ahead of anyone else. But remaking yourself is not easy! Especially when you realize that the state from which we were remaking ourselves was sort of like the Marines – a somewhat ascetic state, one that gave you the nerd equivalent of military rations, a tent, maybe a shower every two weeks, and no training in any immediately salable skills whatsoever – but also one that also gave you a community, an identity, a purpose, a sense of who you were that you never expected to change. But all of a sudden we “won,” and all of a sudden there was a tremendous pressure to change. It was like being thrown in the deep end of the pool without swim lessons, and yes we sank, we sank like a stone with barely a dog paddle before making a beeline for the bottom. So we get no respect now. But was this a reasonable thing to expect? What does the mayor of Boston really want? Yes, the sense in which Boston is a Hub of Innovation (for it already is one, it is silly for it to try to become what it already is!) is problematic and not exactly what a Mayor would wish for. I understand his frustration. But I think he would do better to work with his city for what it is, in all its problematic incompetence and glory, than to try to remake it in the image of something else it is not.

Rebecca: On the subject of Problematic Innovators, I was thinking back to the scene in the computer lab where everyone agreed that hoarding domain names was the dumbest idea they had ever heard of. I’m arguing that scooping up return on the investment in innovation was hard, but registering a domain name is the easiest thing in the world. I think they were free back then, even. If I remember right, they started out free, and then Procter & Gamble registered en-mass every name that had even the vaguest entomological relation with the idea of “soap,” at which point the administrators of the system said “Oops!” and instituted registration fees to discourage that kind of behavior – which, of course, would have done little to deter P&G. They really do want to utterly own the concept of soap. (I find it amusing that P&G was the first at bat in the domain name scramble – they are not exactly the world’s image of a cutting-edge tech-savvy company – but when it comes to the problem of marketing soap, they quietly dominate.)

How can I can explain that we were not able to expend even the utterly minimal effort in capturing the return on investment in innovation of registering a free domain name, so as to keep the resulting tax revenues in Massachusetts?

Thinking back on it, I don’t think it was either incapacity, or lack of foresight, or a will to fail in our duty as Boston and Massachusetts taxpayers. It was something else: it was almost a “semper fidelis”-like group spirit that made it seem dishonorable to hoard a domain name that someone else might want, just to profit from it later. Now one might ask, why should you refrain from hoarding it sooner just so that someone else could grab it and hoard it later? That kind of honor doesn’t accomplish anything for anyone!

But you have to realize, this was right at the beginning, when the domain name system was brand new and it wasn’t at all clear it would be adopted. These were the people who were trying to convince the world to accept this system they had designed and whose adoption they fervently desired. In that situation, honor did make a difference. It wouldn’t look good to ask the world to accept a naming system with all the good names already taken. You actually noticed back then when something (like “soap”) got taken – the question wasn’t what was available, the question was what was taken, and by whom. You’d think it wouldn’t hurt too much to take one cool name: recently I heard that someone got a $38 million offer for “cool.com.” That’s a lot of money! – would it have hurt that much to offer the world a system with all the names available except, you know, one cool one? But there was a group spirit that was quite worried that once you started down that slope, who knew where it would lead?

There were other aspects of infrastructure, deeper down, harder to talk about, where this group ethos was even more critical. You can game an infrastructure to make it easier to personally profit from it – but it hurts the infrastructure itself to do that. So there was a vehement group discipline that maintained a will to fight any such urge to diminish the value of the infrastructure for individual profit.

This partly explains why we were not able, when the time came, to turn around, quick as quicksilver, and scoop up the big profits. To do that would have meant changing, not only what we were good at, but what we thought was right.

When I think back, I wonder, why people weren’t more scared? When we chose not to register “cool.com” or similar names, why didn’t we think, life is hard, the future is uncertain, and money does really make a difference in what you can do? I think this group ethic was only possible because there was a certain confidence – the group felt itself party to a deal: in return for being who we are, the government would take care of us, forever. Not until the time when the product achieved sufficient product/market fit that it became appropriate to expect return on investment. Forever.

This story might give a different perspective on why it hurts when the Mayor of Boston announces that he wants to make the city a Hub of Innovation. The innovators he already has are chopped liver? Well, its understandable that he isn’t too pleased with the innovators in this story, because they aren’t exactly a tax base. But that is the diametric opposition of the deal with the government we thought we had.

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