#it's insane just how often you lose any kind of progress because of some random fuck up in this game

[nekrophoria]

Okay, yeah I give up.

[tunashei]

First impressions of Animoprhs!

I'm listening to the Animorphs series while I work, through Animorphs Aloud - a fan made reading of the series. Here are my first impressions/random thoughts about them! Spoilers below if you haven't read them.

Book 7: The Stranger

I often think how you'd REALLY react if you were faced with something paranormal or magical, because it wouldn't just be the monster or ghost or superhero you have to contend with - but your entire knowledge of the universe flipping on it's head. Legit consider how insane you'd go if you found out monsters were *really* real. And they do this to a random person in the start of most books! Ha.

Kind of surprised they consider a human-alien relationship with any sort of seriousness. How progressive. But then there's been a few hints towards Rachel liking Tobias and he's...a bird. Rachel is very open minded.

Somehow I have my doubts Rachel will move away. The clue is the 47 books that come after this.

Man I feel for Tobias, having to spend the rest of his life as a hawk while potentially watching his friends move on. It's not like he can make new friends. Also how long does he even live? Does he have a hawk lifespan now of 10-15 years?

Rachel wants more firepower and she skips the POLAR BEARS? GIRL. Those things are fucking terrifying! Though I did do a bit of research and turns out when Polar Bears and Grizzlies compete for food it's usually the Polar Bears that leave.

Also I have a hard time believing a bear has more 'firepower' than an elephant. Bit easier to move around and get into places as a bear though.

Still can't get over the frequent use of the slang 'hooked up' to mean meeting. Very different meaning nowadays.

The mental image of them fitting pretty much a centaur into a dressing room is very funny.

Wow. Stopping time definitely blindsided me. This Ellimist is like a god?? Was not expecting that.

The descriptions when the Ellimist is showing off the beauty of earth make me very sad I will likely not get to experience it. It's so sad to know coral reefs exist out there, beauty unparalleled, and you can't simply go and see them. Not without money. It's a cruel joke that we're placed on such an amazing planet and yet how little of it we'll see.

Man this is a genuinely tough decision. I really like Cassie's perspective, that humans are now the endangered animals potentially rejecting the one thing that could save them. Honestly if what seemed like a literal god told me the fight is unwinnable I'd probably give in and tell them to take me to a new planet.

Aaaand now the kids are getting eaten alive. I LOVE the amount of traumatising scenarios in these books. Main reason I started em. Feel a bit bad for the Taxon, imagine eating some innocuous snack and it swells up and bursts you from the inside.

Ax has a thing for cutting off people's arms.

You're the second largest carnivore on land Rachel, Polar Bears got you beat.

Also Rachel totally just murdered a bunch of human people.

Now...time travel? Hm not a big fan of time travel.

Damn the Yeerks invested in free, superfast and wide-covering public transport? I'd vote for them.

This is why I don't like time travel. Is it deterministic? Can it be changed? Boggles the mind. The implication is they refuse the Ellimist's offer and stay and fight, and lose, and Rachel becomes a controller. But why would Ax being there mean the future has changed? Did future-Rachel lie about there being six humans to Visser-Three? Why?

PFFFF I'm sorry but as horrifying as the idea of them killing and consuming Tobias after being infected and turned into controllers is, it's also like Disney-level villainy.

If this is the future and it can be changed, why can't Visser-Three kill them? Sure he wouldn't have controller Rachel so the future would be different but the goal of invading would work?

Well this is looking bleak.

I wonder who is keeping Ellimists in check that they even need rules.

Surprisingly quick and efficient mission! And that's the end of that one. A bit confusing, but I wonder if the Ellimist stuff will get clearer later on.

[faunusrights]

yeah, all i got is this belly button lint: a happy huntresses short fic

wrote this real quick because i love thinking about the random crap fiona has in her Inventory(tm). also i just like thinking about these clowns in general, so,

=

"Okay, so, what's actually in your Semblance right now?" Joanna asks one day in third year, when Fiona and May have sneaked away to Robyn's dorm to lose at cards and help edit her new batch of flyers promoting union creation in the workplace. Fiona had given a couple a look and accepted them as good enough, but May is weirdly exacting about her standards and is currently trying to convince Robyn to nudge the text headers over by ten pixels to the right. That's why, as she's sat on the floor and wrapped up in the drama of watching Robyn try and slowly fail to ignore May's insistent pleas for her to boot up her editor, Fiona's caught just a little bit off-guard by the question.

"My Semblance?" she asks, and Joanna nods all serious-like from her place on the bunk above Robyn. Joanna often looks very serious, because she suffers from what Robyn calls resting thoughtful bitch face, so sometimes it's hard to gauge how actually serious about something she really is. "I mean, it's probably a mess in there right now."

"I keep forgetting you actually use it like storage space," Robyn adds cheerfully, having now progressed onto shoving May away from her laptop computer every time she tries to creep closer. "Since most Semblances are, y'know, combat-only things or like... special occasions, I guess. And yet here you are, telling people you really don't need a bag for all your groceries!"

It is fun to flex on all the people struggling to carry like six bags to their car or their home, and Fiona preens. "Yeah, it's nice. I mostly keep things in it that I'd wanna have in an emergency, but it's been a while since I last sorted through it, so, who knows what garbage I've put in there."

"Tell me Robyn's braincell is in there too," May says imploringly, still trying to slide an arm around Robyn to get at the keyboard, but Fiona just shakes her head. She can't and won't be blamed for that particular disappearance any time soon. Instead, she rubs her hands together, scrunching up her face as she tests the edges of the Semblance. It's a funny thing, a Semblance like this--she never really has to think about it, but it's always just in reach, like this extra weight in her chest that she can totally forget about. It's strange to think about, so she often just doesn't.

"Okay," she starts, and she goes for the biggest item she can sense, which is an easy one to explain. In her hands materialises an acoustic guitar, worn and scuffed with age, and this attracts to attention of every girl in the room. "Well, this one's easy. This is my guitar, and honestly? If I ever leave it behind in the meatspace and don't pick it up on my way out the door, know that you've just seen my evil clone and you have to kill her."

Joanna blinks, and Robyn seems caught between asking about the guitar, the evil clone, and also the fact that Fiona insists on referring to the physical world as the meatspace. So, she does as Robyn does best, and settles on an expletive. "Shit! You play?"

"Been playing since I was... like seven? Something like that." Fiona shrugs, because she really can't be sure; her first vague memory of even seeing this guitar was a long time ago, her uncle telling her it used to belong to her grandmother who'd never managed to learn a damn thing on it. So, Fiona had taken up practice, if only because it was something for a little lowlands Mantellian Faunus to do during the long, cold polar nights and the endless sunshine of the midnight sun. "But, yeah, this is always on me in some form or another."

"You should've played it whilst we were on watch our last mission," May says, with a certain scowl that Fiona knows is 100% directed at their team leader, who is currently off doing... some sort of bullshit with their partner, no doubt. Gods, this team is a nightmare. "All those hours trying to stay awake so we could stare into nothing..."

"Sorry," Fiona says, and she means it. She'd intended to, but, well, she'd sort of chickened out. The echo in the mountains is kind of insane. "Next time?"

May nods, but Joanna cuts off whatever she's about to say next by waving her hands through the air like she can physically dissipate the conversation. "Okay, okay, cool, but now I gotta else you got hiding in there."

Re-compressing her guitar--and oh, is Fiona thankful that dematerialising and rematerialising it doesn't leave it out of tune--Fiona has a mental root around. "Uh, okay, so, we've got--"

In no particular order, she starts pulling things out: a pair of thick gloves for the brutal Solitas chill, an extra pair of socks (hugely understated by most, but never by Fiona), a ushanka that Robyn instantly cheers for, and a couple of jackets ranging from light windbreakers to thick furred jackets that feel like she's wearing a mattress around her ribs. Her Scroll and wallet are in there too, naturally, as are her keys and some extra ammunition, and she pulls out a load of old train tickets with a grimace. "Hm. I was meant to throw these away years ago."

"You're basically carrying around a wardrobe in there, then?" May asks in a way that'd maybe be a little teasing if she didn't look about as jealous as she sounds, but it becomes a thoughtful expression when Fiona shakes her head again.

"Bold of you to think I haven't got a whole pantry in here too," she says, and now Joanna looks very interested. "Check this out."

The first thing she pulls out is a gallon jug of clean water--endlessly fucking useful, she's found, especially when you're in some situation where you can't sit on your ass for an hour waiting for the water purification tablets to do their job--before pulling out a whole host of Atlesian MREs that she keeps around just in case shit really does hit the fan. Atlas rations are... not good, in a phrase, but she's owed them her life more than once, so, whatever.

"What dates are on those?" May quickly interrupts with a critical eye, trying to make out the printed numbers on the snow-patterned packets, and Fiona tosses her one if only to distract May's hands from trying to puzzle out Robyn's password when Robyn isn't directly paying attention.

"Things don't really degrade in my Semblance," Fiona admits. "I've tested it before on stuff with a short shelf-life, like cheese and milk, and honestly I can leave it in there for months and have it come out just as fresh as when it went in. Something to do with a sort of... internal stasis, I guess." Then, she adds, "One thing in my Semblance is a goldfish in a bowl, but he's part of a practical theory I'm running, so I can't materialise him for another fifteen years or so."

"That sounds very normal," Joanna says, and Fiona is glad she agrees as she barrels right over the inherent sarcasm.

As May agonises over finding the date, though, Fiona continues to unveil her pantry--there's plenty of snacks, like dried fruit and nuts and energy bars and chocolate, and when she reveals she carries extra for every member of her team and then some (then some in this instance being Robyn and Joanna, not that she'll admit it), Robyn looks delighted. "That's so sweet! Look at you, making sure nobody goes hungry. You're one in a million."

That's cute and very gay, but Fiona has a lot of stuff to be working through and so she keeps on going--there's a flask of coffee that, thanks to the maybe-stasis, is eternally hot, a bottle of dark Mantellian ale she keeps as, uh, moral support, and she blushes when she pulls out half an uneaten tuna sandwich. "I wondered where that went. Whoops."

May looks up from the MRE for a second, and then does a double-take as she takes in the sight of the very limp and sad-looking sandwich, made courtesy of the Atlas Academy cafeteria. "Wait! Isn't that the sandwich you accused me of stealing last month?!"

"Anyway!" Fiona says with a forced grin, quickly making it disappear back into the void where it can safely continue not existing. "I think the final thing in here is... wait."

She blinks, and suddenly in her hands are at least a hundred little booklets entitled The Pocket Guide to Communist Outreach, scattering right over the floor. Robyn yelps, and then reaches down the side of her bunk to pick them up. "Oh shit! I forgot I asked you to hold onto these! I thought we ran out, nice."

Joanna's face is in her hands, and May sighs long and hard before tossing the MRE back to Fiona with a distinctly pained expression.

"It goes out of date in a month," she notes with distaste, and Fiona just sucks it up without a word. She'll be thankful for it when they end up down a dark cave with no backup, but Fiona figures she'll sit on that one for a bit before being able to make the greatest told you so call in history. She can wait.

"So," she says, watching as May takes advantage of Robyn's momentary distraction to try and access her computer again. "I guess... do you wanna hear me play a song?"

Joanna watches as her partner leans too far over the side of the bunk, yelping as she nearly slams her head directly into the hard vinyl of the floor, and she grimaces. "Please do."

Grinning, Fiona finds her guitar again--somewhere buried, she mentally notes, beside the gallon of water but under the coats--and she slings the broad strap about her shoulders before settling it on her lap, crossing her legs tightly beneath herself before finding her place on the fretboard. After having not played since being back home, it relaxes her more than she'd ever realised it did. It helps to be surrounded by friends, though. Helps to be with family.

"I don't take requests," she adds, flatly, and Robyn laughs from her place on the floor before music fills the dorm, soft and deep and achingly familiar of a place far, far below.

But she's okay with calling this place home, too.

[feijoacrumble]

NOTE TO FUTURE SELF:

don’t think beyond the next 10 minutes, cry as much as you want, try and breathe deeply if you can and I promise your mood will swing up again quickly.

the reason you feel that all these weird new symptoms started at once is probably because you only noticed them when they got really bad, and just forgot/ignored/dismissed them when they started--maybe months ago! it is reasonable and to be expected that they will take time to clear up, and also that progress will be non-linear.

reminder of measurable progress all of which happened within the past 10 days when you asked for help:

sleeping through the night, every night! that’s a massive improvement! please stop dismissing this!

a LOT more awake/a lot more energy during the day! recently you were basically comatose

I feel like you’re thinking more clearly

trailing off less mid-sentence and keeping hold of ideas and concepts in mind! this is a massive improvement and was very scary and please stop dismissing this!!! your mind was a SIEVE recently and it was actually terrifying!

barely any stomach cramps when you’re just like, walking

crying 1x some days, as opposed to 3-5 times every day uncontrollably, including in inconvenient places such as work, on public transport, at bunnings warehouse and in the supermarket

a lot fewer headaches/random other pains--think about the amount of nurofen you were getting through recently! it was daily! and you haven’t had any in like, a week!

heart palpitations are basically gone! they were a constant nuisance as recently as a fortnight ago! please don’t forget this! you literally thought something had gone really wrong with your heart!

stress levels--they were through the roof recently and are now back to mildly above your usual, probably neurotic, anxiety-prone self, and will only get better over next few weeks while on holiday! don’t worry abt this, just do your best for the time being and we’ll work on long-term solutions next year.

you don’t feel as often like you’re going to throw up after eating anything, even if you’re not back to normal. remember how you used to have to breathe deeply after meals to stave off this feeling?

I know it is deeply frustrating because those symptoms “”””aren’t as bad””””” and you’d rather instead have cleared up the other, weirder, brand new symptoms you’re still experiencing, but actually it’s not pick’n’mix, and we’re going to clear up ALL your symptoms and you’re going to get fully better!! this is true!!! it’s just going to take time!! 

The reason you feel hungry all the time isn’t “weird”, it is logical and makes sense: you lost weight, you just didn’t notice you lost weight until you were weighed. at least two people you know noticed a difference and were concerned about your weight and mentioned it as early as mid-november and you dismissed them. just because you didn’t notice doesn’t make it not real. look at your ribs: it is visibly true. you were recently/currently are underweight, and are now either still underweight or borderline. you didn’t notice because your body didn’t lose weight in the same places as last time you were stressed and depressed, likely because of all the other weird symptoms you’re experiencing. we need to put weight back on. you will then look healthier, feel stronger, and won’t feel faint, shaky and winded so often. you will also then not feel constantly hungry . It may even help with mood problems and remembering things??? it is ok if you overshoot and weigh more than before: you have HEAPS of wriggle room to maintain a “healthy” weight, and I promise if that happens it is a fair exchange for not feeling like this. 

the following are all true facts:

you’re already on the mend!!!!!!!!

the cause of these weird, varied, symptoms is not “a complete mystery”: it is a vitamin deficiency combined with extreme stress. this is fixable and we’re already working on it. I know it’s insane that all these varied problems that kind of ruined your life came from such a simple source and you want there to be something really deeply wrong with you to be diagnosed and fixed, but the chance of this is like, vanishingly small. even if this is the case (it’s really unlikely), the FIRST thing we’re going to do is fix the easier problem first to eliminate that, and you’re not going to bother the doctor for at least another fortnight to give your body half a chance at recovery--your doctor has done all she can for the time being! please examine the facts logically, make a timeline, and this will once again make sense to you as the way forward. 

you’ve made a lot of progress already, and this progress happened INCREDIBLY quickly!

it will probably take at least a few more months to be completely/very nearly back to normal

your progress will NOT be linear, and as the doctor said, some symptoms will likely be better on some days then briefly make a comeback with increasing infrequency, etc, but she fully expects will in the long-term (a few months) clear up completely. 

you feel progress ought to happen overnight because you feel the problem occurred overnight, but actually this is UNTRUE--you only NOTICED the problems all in one go when they were already very bad and were like “what the fuck???? this isn’t my body????!!”. 

next year, when we can think clearly again and are over the worst, we are going to develop a long-term plan to look after ourself better and pay attention to our body better, so if/when things go awry next time it won’t get so bad. for the moment, we’re going to do our best and get through this.

[too-many-kpop-hubands]

30 Day Fandom Challenge

I'm going with a musical fandom this time, one of my favorites and I still watch reruns from time to time.

As always tagging @domsberto

Day 8- Glee

1 & 2) Favorite Character & Most Relatable Character: Sam Evans [Close Call Honorable Mentions: Kurt Hummel, Blaine Anderson, Santana Lopez, Sebastian Smythe, Jesse St James....yes I have alot of favorites]

Reason: You guys should know first of all that this was a really freaking hard decision but I had always planned to put Sam as my most relatable character. The more I went back through my rewatch of Glee not to long ago the more I realized that the Southern Dork had my heart more than I realized. Sam can be a bit of a himbo most of the time but he has a heart of gold that got trampled on time and time again. He was willing to do whatever he could to be there for his friends and sometimes came up with insane conspiracy theories that were sometimes true, like when he theorized that the Warblers were juicing and it turned out he was right. He was a talented guy, able to sing and play guitar, and always managed to brighten up anyone's day no matter how shitty it was with one of his jokes and impressions. Sam got the short end of the stick in terms of an endgame ship, everyone he had ever been in a relationship with either cheated on him or left him. He literally stood right next to two of his ex girlfriends when they married *each other* and was still happy for them. Despite his family losing everything when the market crashed, he was grateful for what little he did have even if it meant he had to wear clothes given to him by friends or cheap items. He proved that he would literally do anything to help his family, like when he found a job as a male stripper to make extra cash to help his family afford certain luxuries they wouldn't be able to without extra help. He would also do anything for his friends, like when he helped Blaine gather all the rival glee clubs together to help him propose to Kurt. He could also be self conscious at times. He would often brag about his body but when no one was looking he found flaws that he didn't like about himself. Sam was an easy going, sweet, funny, closet romantic and I stan the hell out of him.

3) Most Underrated Character: Elliott Gilbert

Reason: The beautiful Adam Lambert only graced us with his presence on the show as Elliott for a very short time but it was enough to make an impact on me. He was very talented and a good friend to our Gleeks living in New York at the time. He sometimes acted as the voice of reason, being an unbiased middle man when Rachel and Santana were fighting. He refused to pick sides when his friends were fighting but gave them someone to talk to and vent to. He was a fun person to be around and have a way about him that made anyone at ease once they got to know him. When Blaine moved to New York, he felt threatened by Elliott and his friendship with Kurt but Elliott reassured both Blaine and Kurt that he believed in their relationship and wasn't out to come between them. He was a chill dude who was just an all around great person to be around and I missed him when he was written off the show so that Adam could go back to his music career. I loved Elliott so much.

4) Most Overrated Character: Rachel Berry

Reason: First of all Lea Michele has an amazing voice but her character Rachel is overrated because she *knows* she has an amazing voice and tends to rub it in everyone's face every chance she gets. She is always on about how she's going to be a star and how she's so much better than everyone but let's look at the facts. There are better, or equally as talented, characters on the show and when Rachel had the chance at her dream role on Broadway, she left it too soon to do a TV show that flopped after only one episode causing her to run back home with her tail between her legs to revamp the Glee Club. Sure she made it in the end after she decided to go to college (and married Jesse....yes!) But she became more humble after she lost everything and got knocked off of her high horse. I still thought she was an overrated character.

5) Least Favorite Character: Tina Cohen-Chang

Reason: Tina Cohen-Agitator as Kitty once dubbed her was one of the most annoying characters on the show. She was self absorbed, even more so at time than Rachel, and constantly whined because she wasn't the center of attention. She hurt people without any remorse, like when she dumped Artie for Mike Chang or when she dropped Sam as a prom date when he didn't get nominated as prom king. She also had her weird tendencies, like rubbing vaporub on Blaine's chest when he was asleep and trying to propose to Mike when they weren't even together. She complained about *everything* and it just grated on my nerves. I really couldn't stand her. Sorry not sorry.

6) Favorite Canon Ship: Quick- Quinn Fabray & Noah Puckerman [Honorable Mentions: Brittana (Brittany & Santana), Klaine (Kurt & Blaine), and St Berry (Rachel & Jesse)]

Reason: Before I start this, I know Mark Salling did some shitty things before his suicide and that is not ok but this reflects on his *character* Noah Puckerman, not Mark personally.

From the moment Quinn found out she was pregnant with Puck's baby and we the fans first see them alone together onscreen the chemistry insane. They loved each other but they never *really* dated despite having a daughter together and making out a few times. It wasn't until later, after Quinn went on the Yale and Puck joined the Air Force that they finally officially got together but even throughout the seasons you could see their love for one another. They were a beautiful couple who had a beautiful daughter (who they have up for adoption to give her a better life since they were only 16 when they had her), and probably more later after the show ended.

7) Favorite Non-Canon Pairing: Blam- Blaine Anderson & Sam Evans

Reason: They were best friends and there are alot of great romances that grow from friendship. While in the show Blaine had feelings for Sam that Sam didn't return because he was straight, in the eyes of the fans they were in love. They had undeniable chemistry and were cute together. They looked out for each other and would do anything for the other. I stan Blam so much. And honestly when Blaine sang "Against all Odds" to Sam, I adored that moment because Sam saw him and even though he didn't return the feelings, though I still say Sam was in denial because later he was way too focused on the fact that Blaine wanted to do him.

8) Least Favorite Pairing: Rachel Berry & Sam Evans

Reason: I thought Rachel and Sam was such a random pairing. Yeah they had their cute moments but the chemistry felt forced between the two of them, especially since Sam was still in love with Mercedes and Rachel hadn't been with anyone since Finn died. Honestly when they eventually broke up, and Rachel ended up with Jesse (yasss), I wasn't that upset by it. I was just upset my man Sam ended up being the only one left unpaired by the end of the show, minus Mercedes.

9) Favorite Part/Moment: The Double Rainbow Wedding

Reason: I stan both Brittana and Klaine so much. When Santana proposed to Brittany in the final season I was like yassss Queen because I adore them so much, though I was still kind of salty like Kurt was that Klaine called off their engagement. The day of the wedding, or days leading up to the wedding, however saw my other pairing getting back together and the reunion of Klaine was epic as always. Fast Forward to the day of the Brittana wedding and Brittany, with the approval of Santana and Sue, made Klaine an offer they couldn't refuse. They surprised everyone when they made their way to the alter walking Brittany and Santana and actually staying so that they could get married to. It was a beautiful ceremony that left me with one of my favorite quotes that I plan to get tattooed on my wrist "I'm a work in progress". It was moving, shocking and beautiful and I love this moment so much.

10) Least Favorite Part/Moment: The Quarterback - Finn's Death

Reason: First of all, Rest in Peace Cory! You left an impact and will always be missed.

Because of the unexpected death of Cory Monteith, the writers had to kill Finn Hudson off on the show as well which lead to one of the saddest and most emotional episodes of Glee ever. It is my least favorite because I can't watch it without sobbing like a baby because you can tell the emotions of everyone in the episode are genuine. It was a sad time for us Glee fans.

[maverick-werewolf]

Hello! I'm trying to write a werewolf story, but I'm too worried about things we see in every single one (painful transformations, silver weakness, it's a curse, etc), so I'm trying to twist them kind of (painless transformations but you feel the beast fighting for your mind, silver weakness is a myth, it's a rare virus spreading by blood, etc), 'cause "all cliches and predictability are bad" but I never saw anything about cliches that are necessary to the story. Is there any such thing?

Ooh, a fun question! Thank you for asking. Get ready for a long answer! I have a lot of thoughts on this.

I already wrote one very big post on werewolf tropes we commonly see in fiction, and which ones I do and do not like. That’ll help a lot on this topic! But I have more to say, in regard to the points you brought up.

To me, a werewolf is - by definition - a variety of types of people that can, in different ways, turn into a wolf or wolf-man hybrid…

But also, to me, a lot of the fun can get removed with people trying to subvert too many of the fun werewolf tropes we’re familiar with today. The good ones, I mean. Especially the ones that came from folklore, or at least have an amount of basis in some legends.

For instance, painful transformations do have basis, though of course that wasn’t always the case, and I am very biased in that I love them - but non-painful ones and/or mental ones also sound very fun! Personally, I do both.

More than that, though, today we have so many people throwing around the word and idea of subversion that, frankly, almost none of the “classic” werewolf stuff remains. Just to use the examples you gave-

In quite a lot of things today (Teen Wolf, Harry Potter, Warcraft, Twilight [with both the retconned “we’re not actually werewolves” Quileutes and the “children of the moon”], and a lot more), werewolves are not sensitive to silver and that’s 100% a myth. Now, I don’t mind that at all, frankly, because a lot of very stupid and silly and preposterous things result from the Hollywood contrived silver weakness concept, which was never remotely in folklore, but I also think it can be done well and can be fun if properly worked into a setting (I myself use this trope in my main werewolf setting and series, heavily worked into lore so it isn’t just a random weakness).

Here’s the big one for me, though. A curse or a disease - which way should it be handled, and which one might be considered cliche? This is a can of worms for me.

First off, the concept of being a werewolf very much started off as a wide variety of things - a curse, a blessing, something one was born with, some other type of magical ability…

And being a werewolf was never, in folklore, considered a disease. This is completely a modern concept, and one that basically everyone everywhere uses today thanks to the Early Modern period and later concepts. This is a huge topic I could go into even more detail about.

Be it a disease spread by bite and/or through saliva, a disease spread by bite or scratch (ugh, the scratch thing…), a disease spread through blood, an experimental “disease” caused by “science gone wrong,” a disease spread through sex (don’t get me started, though, really)…

Today, it is pretty much always called a “disease.” This is especially when it is associated with madness and/or bloodlust. This is where the word lycanthropy first comes from - in the Early Modern period, people called those suffering with the “insanity” of being a werewolf were said to have lycanthropy. Later, this term was picked up by popular culture, so the term we still have today for people with certain types of mental illnesses is “clinical lycanthropy.”

Most pop culture today tends to turn lycanthropy into a disease instead of a curse. Even in terms of fantasy settings where one might think of it as a curse, it’s still largely considered a disease. D&D, for instance; it’s called an affliction, a disease, etc. Look on the wiki of any number of modern things with werewolves in them and it’ll refer to it as a disease first, if it refers to it as a curse at all, and many paranormal TV shows and the like will have some kind of reference to various bodily fluids in terms of how it’s spread/how it works/what it’s infecting.

Can it be both a curse and a disease, in a way? Yes, definitely! I actually kind of prefer it that way, myself. Though if I had to pick just one, I would pick curse, personally. I also prefer a less scientific explanation than “just” a disease, more often than not, though that’s just me - especially if it starts turning into some kind of STD or something… Bluh.

Details, though. In my setting, just to clear things up, I refer to it as both a curse and a disease. It is, of course, in this case, a setting in ancient transitioning into medieval times, so they wouldn’t really have a more scientific explanation, but some people are looking for a more logical one sometimes. Anyway, I do have other werewolves in other settings that are done differently, so don’t take all those ramblings as meaning that I only like werewolves done one way.

There are lots of ways someone can become a werewolf in folklore. And there are lots of reasons that werewolf might transform.

So, ultimately, you might be more unique in terms of werewolves if you dialed it back toward some of the “classic” “tropes,” like making it more of a mysterious curse.

But that, of course, is 100% up to you! There is no right or wrong way to tell a story that you want to tell. There are just people who’ll tell you which way they would prefer it told. Like me! I can definitely tell you how I prefer a werewolf story handled, and I’m very flattered you’d ask me for my thoughts on it.

And I will say this emphatically, while we’re at it - I love what most people call “cliches.” They are cliches because they are fun and they work. I am a classicist. A traditionalist. I love traditional stories, storytelling, and classical myths, folklore, and - generally - tropes, at least and especially when it comes to things like monsters.

Werewolves, vampires, dragons, elves, dwarves - I like the classics. I think people trying to subvert them too much is creating a world in which we are losing perception of what those things were in folklore and what they were meant to be and represent, and that’s pretty tragic to me, because now everyone is subverting. That’s a big part of my research and academic work.

People cry “cliche, cliche!” but there is no cliche. Because you can hardly find the stuff that is based on what used to be considered cliche anymore, since everyone is scared of being considered “cliche,” and thus are all mutually adopting new cliches in attempts to avoid the older ones.

That being said, sometimes it’s cool when people swap things up, of course, and I definitely don’t want to shoot anyone down!

I also would argue that cliches don’t necessarily mean predictability. A “cliche” done well is a beautiful thing. It’s all about the storytelling. It’s much more about that than the idea of “cliches” themselves.

So let’s reframe the word “predictability” - think of it as “familiarity.” Familiarity can be a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. I think some familiarity, at least, is a good thing. Because if you can recognize a werewolf as a werewolf, then that’s good. If it’s so different people don’t even recognize it as a werewolf, I kind of start losing interest, personally.

I don’t like “our [creatures] are different,” but that is just me.

Getting back on track - are there any werewolf tropes necessary to a story? Completely an opinion piece.

In my opinion? I don’t think so. I think you can make some radically different werewolves that are still werewolves and they’d be neat. BUT I have basically never seen this done, and my favorite werewolves remain ones that others might consider “cliche.”

Is it necessary to have a werewolf that howls at the moon? Absolutely not. Is it more fun than one that doesn’t? It very well might be. Is it necessary to have the werewolf be based in magic instead of science? Nope! Is it necessary to have being a werewolf be based in some kind of disease? Absolutely not. Is it better to have werewolves as rare monsters or as a plague sweeping across the earth? I can certainly tell you I deeply detest werewolves being turned into the zombie plague and/or plague rats, but hey, some people juggle geese.

A whole ‘nother can of worms is if there are cliches necessary to the storytelling itself and progression of the werewolf character(s), or werewolves as monsters within the setting itself if you are not telling a story from a werewolf POV. I’d pretty much reiterate what I said above in that case, too.

If we get technical, no, recognizable tropes are by no means necessary. If we get personal, I wouldn’t call them necessary, but they are familiarity and they are a personal preference - so I rather like at least a few of them.

Oh my goodness, this is a long post. Quite a bit of rambling! Sorry about that. Hopefully some of this was/is helpful, though! Please feel free to shoot me any followup questions this might’ve spawned, I could talk about this all day. :D Plus I totally feel like I left tons of things out, somehow.

Bottom line, though?

Tell your story the way you want to tell it. That is the most important part. Don’t feel like you have to alter something just because someone somewhere might call it “cliche.” Even if they think that, they are likely to enjoy it, anyway!

And ultimately, your story is yours; do what you want with it and have fun. Don’t let anyone anywhere tell you something you do is going to be bad just because of a silly term like “cliche.”

A “cliche” story can be just as amazing or just as terrible as a wildly original one. It all depends on how you tell it. And if you enjoy telling it, and tell it the way you want to instead of letting anyone strongarm you into altering things from your vision, it will be a story well told.

[jamestkirkish]

Fanfiction Stats

I was tagged by the lovely and talented @ariaadagio

Author Name: amandaithink on AO3, schntgaispocked on FFN (not that I’ve been on there in forever so let me quick update that profile because I’m not 25 anymore...o.o)

Fandoms You Write For:

Active - Lucifer

Not so active - Star Trek, MCU, Doctor Who, Supernatural

Where You Post:

Current - AO3

Former-ish (I’m not planning yet on moving the fics because it seems like a lot of effort but I might) - FFN, Livejournal (I can’t remember my account info)

VERY FORMER - Message boards back when I was in middle school and high school. 

Most Popular One-Shot:  By Kudos/Favs AND Comment Threads/Reviews - Hardly the Best Choice (Lucifer) [I count this as a one shot because I wrote it as on and posted it all at once. The ‘chapters’ were just a formatting choice]. 

Most Popular Multi-Chapter Story: By Kudos/Favs - Take This To Your Grave (The Avengers) God I miss writing this story. I broken record about losing all of my fic notes, I feel like. Like I complain about it too much. I think about it every day, though, and rarely voice the thoughts. But it bothers me. At some point I’m going to have to give up ever finding them and sit down and reread everything I’ve written and reoutline and plot all of them.

By Comment Threads/Reviews: Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen (Doctor Who) That is super flattering, actually. This is the most self indulgent thing I’ve ever done and it’s super hard to write. I didn’t lose the notes for this. I’m actually still working on it. I haven’t posted in forever because it is SUPER HARD TO WRITE. If you’re in the DW fandom you probably are well aware of how popular season rewrites are, and chances are if you read any OC fics we’ve read the same ones because people don’t jump into OC rewrites lightly and if they do, it’s done in a certain way. I decided to go a whole different and difficult way for this fic.  Not going to lie I have so many random Holly Ashby docs on my computer because I write little random stories set further ahead than what I’ve got written in the actual fic just so that I can KEEP FIGURING OUT MY OC. And because I like what I’m doing even if I’m stuck for the main story. It’s so much fun.

Favorite Story You Wrote:  Of Broken Worlds and Changing Times (Star Trek) I found most of my notes for this, but not the main notes. If I have to give up ever finding my notes, I think this one will be able to stay most true to my original intentions, but I’m still missing so much. Writing this story (as much as I have of it) helped me learn so much. I had never done action shots before. I had never done that much research before (I read a lot of zombie and survival lit, and I’ll probably have to reread a lot of that stuff before I can get back into it). 

I also really loved writing Did We All Fall Down (Supernatural).  It takes place around Season 8 of Supernatural and is a spin off full of OCs. I did it for NaNoWriMo awhile back (I won for wordcount but didn’t finish the story - lost notes, man [playing it cool like it doesn’t break my heart, look at me go]). It’s only on tumblr, because I felt like there wasn’t really a desire for that kind of thing on the fic sites. It was so much fun, though. Which was the point. As always.

Story You Were Nervous to Post:  All of them. Every single one. I’m still nervous about their existence sometimes. Especially the really old ones, because writing is something I continue to get better at the more I do it, and when I look back at some of them I’m just like ‘oh no why’. I so badly want to do rewrites for my incomplete fics when I eventually complete them. Because they could be improved. Really. And I may do that if I move my FFN ones to AO3 once I get going on them again. Like that would be part of my ‘hey guys, if you could read over here post’. Like: “I’m moving this story to AO3 and also I’ve rewritten what is on here because I wrote that X years ago and honestly I can convey ideas better now I’ve been practicing, trust me”. Something like that. Maybe. Who knows. I also feel like I’m supposed to let them be. You know, so that I can watch myself improve. Would be very disjointed for the reader, though ... who knows. 

How Do You Choose Your Titles:  Depends.

For Lucifer fics, I’ve been grabbing lines I like from the fic and using it as the title because that’s how the episode titles work and I think it’s fun. HOWEVER I didn’t do that for Devil Undone because I wrote that in an hour with Hallucinogenics on repeat and then slapped a title on it super quick because I didn’t care what the title was. I want to change it, but I’m worried about breaking the matrix. ALSO I did do that for Before There Was Light and I wish I could change that one too because I feel like Once Before Time is a better title and the current title is too similar to another fic (and that wasn’t intentional, but could easily have been subconscious I have no idea, because my brain is an ADHD trainwreck). Still worried about breaking the matrix.

A lot of my fics are named after album titles, song titles, lyrics, etc. Take This To Your Grave is very directly Fall Out Boy. If you listen to the corresponding chapter’s song as you read it you will see what I was doing there. Also you will experience how i wrote it (writing with one song on repeat is something I actually do kind of often bahaha). 

Sometimes I just think something sounds cool (ex. Of Broken Worlds and Changing Times). 

Do You Outline: Most of the time, yes. Heavy outlines, too.

For one shots? Not at all.

For Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen, not at all, but now I technically have an outline if only because I wrote so many personal ficlets and one shots with the characters that I know what has happened in the future.

For Mischief Managed (Avengers), not at all. As part of an experiment. I actually think I have a few chapters of that handwritten that haven’t been posted yet. I like actually handwriting things more than typing, I’m more likely to finish that way but it also takes forever. 

How many of your stories are…

Complete: 5 (on those sites, as we’re not looking at any of my childhood work)

In-Progress: 7

Coming Soon: Based on my WIP folder? 13. Including NKTTIS extras? 17. What I can actually feel decent about committing to? 2 things. Because my WIP folder is insane and ridiculous and the epitome of ‘writing fanfiction because it’s fun’. 

EDIT: I remembered google docs. There’s like ... 4 partial things on there ...

It’s safe to assume at all times that even if you’re not seeing anything posted by me, I am writing something. Perhaps I should post random snippets on my writing tumblr. 

Do You Accept Prompts: Yes (though if you send them to this blog I will probably still post them on writingithink because that’s what that blog exists for, as my writing tumblr). 

Upcoming Story You Are Most Excited to Write: The Shift (Lucifer) - that’s a working title. It’s so much fun so far, the only problem is it will probably take me forever to write and by the time it’s ready the @luciferbingo prompts will have expired bahahaha. I’m not going to start posting this one until it’s finished, though. Because having all of those incomplete stories out there frustrates me. I wasn’t planning on any of them taking this long. 

Tag Five Fanfic Authors to Answer These Questions As Well: My god, who writes fics or has written fics. Erm ... I TAG @oh-mylordy, @swishandflickwit, @lucks-eterna, @thesupercousin and @aziraphalesrarebooks and anyone I have forgotten in this current moment of panic.

[lalainajanes]

KC, 97 & 86

97 Time Travel + 86 I  Didn’t Mean to Turn You On. 

Send me two (2) tropes from this list and I’ll combine them in the same story

The house is darkwhen she walks up, her mom’s car absent. Caroline’s relieved, glad she’ll havea little time for herself to process her whirlwind of a day.

The party was stillgoing at the Salvatore’s, when she’d slipped out Damon had been crowing aboutbreaking out another bottle of the good bourbon. She’s pretty sure no one hadnoticed her leaving and Caroline’s not mad about that. She’d spent the eveningtense, making an effort to keep her distance from anyone with super senses.

She smells like sex,like Klaus even though there hadn’t been all that much post orgasm cuddling,and Caroline needs to figure out how she feels about that before her friendsstart butting in.

She makes a quickstop in the kitchen, fishes a pint of ice cream from the freezer, a spoon fromthe drawer. She strips her jacket as she walks upstairs, tossing it in thehamper outside her room. Her shirt hadn’t made it out of the forest, nor hadher underwear, but her bra is fine. And it’s gotta go now. She tucks the icecream under her chin and reaches behind to unhook the clasp.

Her door’s ajar andshe pushes it open with her toes, reaching in to flip on the light.

She shrieks and dropsher ice cream when she sees that it’s not empty, feels her vision sharpen andher fangs cut through. She’s flashing across the room before she even thinksabout it, hands out and ready to rip into flesh. 

Her visitor isfaster, much faster, easily dodges her attack. When he says her name, frombehind her, Caroline pulls up short.

 Trust Klaus to springan insane surprise appearance on her twice in one day.

“What are you doinghere?” she spits, yanking her quilt off her bed. She wraps it around her torso,spinning to face him. “What happened to ‘I’ll never come back?’”

He’s leaning againsther door his eyes carefully fixed on her face. Considering how up close andpersonal he’d gotten with her boobs just a few hours ago she’s wondering whyhe’s bothering. “I’m afraid that’s a bit complicated.” He bends, picks up thecarton she’d dropped, setting it on her dresser.

Caroline lets out afrustrated noise, clutching the blanket tighter. “It’s always complicated,isn’t it? Start explaining.”

“I didn’tspend the day with you.”

Well that didn’tclear anything up. She stares at him, waiting for more. Klaus runs a handthrough his hair and wait a minute. Caroline takes a step closer, her fingersitching with the urge to reach out. She’s sure his hair had been shorter,hadn’t been much to grip at all. “You didn’t spend the day with me,” sherepeats slowly. “Meaning…”

If Klaus tells her hehas a doppelgänger she is going to lose it.

“I got into sometrouble with some witches. They’ve managed to throw me back in time.”

Caroline’s not sure if she finds that more orless believable that the doppelganger possibility. “Time travel. You’re tellingme you’ve time travelled?” She hadn’t known that was a thing but, in the grandscheme of random and weird and impossible she’s experienced over the last fewyears, it’s not that farfetched.

“About seventyyears.”

Caroline takes a stepback, sinking down onto her bed. “That’s… wow.” She studies him more closely,her eyes narrowing. Klaus straightens but stays silent, doesn’t fidget or tryto distract her. “I feel like I need a little more proof here.”

His expression growsexasperated, “I’ve been told not to tell you anything that might influence yourfuture path.”

Okay, that was a goodpoint. If Klaus wasn’t playing some weird trick on her - and she has no ideawhat his motivation could possibly be to do such a thing at this point - thenshe should probably tread carefully. “I don’t suppose you have a newspaper orsomething in your pocket?”

He huffs a laugh,“Print media is well and truly dead in my time, love. I do have my phone.”

That had potential.Caroline holds out her hand, “Gimme.” It’s placed in her hand and Klaus staysclose. “Passcode?” She prompts.

He shakes his head,“It’ll recognize your prints. Just touch the screen.”

She stares up at himfor a long moment, her mouth open as she struggles for words. “Oh,” she finallysays. Kind of dumb, but she’s not capable of anything more articulate.

“May I?” Klaus asks,nodding down at her bed.

“Not the first timeyou’ve been in my bed.”

“True.” He sitsgingerly. She can feel him, the heat he gives off, but he’s not touching her.

Caroline stares atthe phone in her hand, hesitating. Her fingers shake when she reaches to wakeit up. She gaps when her face shows up even though Klaus’ hints had been broadenough to give her a clue what was coming. “And it won’t be the last timeyou’re in my bed,” she mutters, more to herself than him.

“Also true.”

She looks the same inthe picture, of course. The same blue eyes, the same smattering of freckles onher nose. But she knows she’s never looked at Klaus like that, save perhapstoday. And he hadn’t been taking any pictures when they’d been stripped of theirclothes and greedy for contact out in the woods.

“What happened to notinfluencing my path?”

The sound Klaus makesis amused. His shoulder bumps hers. “If anything, I’m hurting myself here, hmm?The current version of you is stubborn enough to stay away for a whole century,maybe two, given what I’ve just dropped in your lap.”

He kind of has apoint. She can’t quite conceive of that much time at this point, seventy yearsor a century. Her life’s milestones are progressing at a normal human pace. Sheknows that won’t last forever, that her seventeen year old face will becomesuspicious, that she’ll have to start over someday.

It’s not somethingshe’s really thought about but, when she starts over, no matter how many timesshe does, Klaus will be out there.

It’s weirdlycomforting to know.

“So, what happened? Imean, vaguely. No need to go breaking the space time continuum.”

He laughs again andshe finds herself shifting closer, resting her arm against his. “Thingssometimes get… contentious in The French Quarter.”

That was the mostbelievable thing he’d said yet. “Have you tried not murdering them when theyrefuse to do your bidding? I feel like that would go a long way towards interspecies harmony.”

He smiles, shakes hishead, “Funnily enough, I’ve been told that often lately.”

“Sounds like you’vebeen hanging out with smart people.”

“I’ll be sure to passon your compliments once I’ve returned.”

Did complimentingherself make her a narcissist? Caroline is too exhausted to care. “I take ityour here because you need a place to crash?”

“The present versionof me and Rebekah spent the night at my house here. They’ll leave for NewOrleans early tomorrow. I’ll go then, contact some witches to straighten thingsout. Keep his promise.”

“How long until wesee each other again?” Caroline asks. She freezes once it’s out, not havingreally meant to say those words. It’s possible she’s had second thoughts aboutcompletely shutting Klaus out. Given how much supernatural nonsense went downin Mystic Falls he was a good ear to have.

And maybe it’s nice,at least occasionally, to acknowledge that being a vampire is awesome. Shedoesn’t get to do that with her friends.

“That’s up to you,Caroline.”

Cryptic, but sheguesses he makes sense. She thinks about offering him something to sleep in butshe doubts he’d be willing to wear anything that had once belonged to Tyler.“I’m going to grab something to sleep in. Make yourself comfortable.”

“You don’t want me tosleep on the floor?” Klaus sounds puzzled and Caroline smiles, gives herself amental pat on the back. How often did something puzzle Mr. Most Powerful BeingOn The Planet?

“We already had sex,Klaus. No need to strain and play the gentleman,” she teases. “Just don’t expect to share my ice cream.”

She shuts herselfinto the bathroom before he can reply. Something tells her he’s not going toargue. She’s decided that it’s not like anyone’s going to be less judgementalif she and Klaus have more sex. The first time against the tree hadpretty much sealed her fate.

Magic had a bad habitof screwing with her. It owed her something nice. Klaus in her bed, theirprevious deal intact and just on hold until tomorrow, definitely counts.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

Google didn't come close to that. For example, thinking about getting a job will make you want to do it well, those who do raise VC rounds will be able to set x to some value and then start doing things to x. Between these two sources of variation, the college someone went to Stanford and is not obviously insane, they're probably a safe bet.1 But you can never predict how big a Microsoft is going to be seeing in the next couple years. When you're a kid and you face some hard test, you can only imagine the advantages of young founders are. One of the biggest individual fortunes, but they are still missing a few things. Sometimes it's because the writer only has very high-level data and so draws conclusions from that, like the role of technology in wealth creation. But if they don't invest more. But the just-do-it model and the careful model, I'd probably choose just-do-it model and the careful model, I'd probably choose just-do-it model and the careful model, I'd probably choose just-do-it model and the careful model, I'd probably choose just-do-it. What made oil paint so exciting, when it first became popular in the fifteenth century, was that you had to get over to start a startup with someone you like, because a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world if people who wanted to do that? I don't know much about mail headers then, and they seemed to me full of random stuff. Because Woz designed this computer for himself, and he wouldn't have had time to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good.2

Otherwise Robert would have been it. This varies from field to field in the arts, and particularly in oil painting. Just that all other things being equal a painting with people in it will be. In addition to being the right sort of experience, one way or another it will be more interesting than one without. It will be longer on the Internet in 20 years, I wouldn't dare to make any predictions, except that things will change a lot. Most people could see how it might be, but it is quite true. Bittorrent and YouTube have already trained a new generation of viewers that the place to watch shows is on a computer screen. Before Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, his default expectation was that he'd end up working at Microsoft.

Books in most fields are written by people who don't understand it. And that also means there will always be lots of Java programmers, so if they saw a startup they liked, they should make them an offer. Even in cable TV, the long tail was lopped off prematurely by the threshold you had to get over to start a startup, don't write any of the code while you're still in school. Over time, the default language, embodied in a succession of popular languages, has gradually evolved toward Lisp. 16% false positives means that filtering is not just classification, because false positives are my bug list. And if at the last minute two parts don't quite fit, you can probably get the right answer. When a VC firm can only do about 2 series A deals per partner per year, they're careful about the headers and the bodies became much spammier. There's something fake about it. Usually it's the replacement. This is one reason I'd bet on the 25 year old has some work experience more on that later but can live as cheaply as an undergrad? All users care about is whether you make something they like.

The most common way to do it with no indication of whether you're succeeding. What do you do?3 It increases the work of being inconsistent. Once it became possible to get rich as a startup founder, but that you have to put up with some inconvenience to do it. It's a little misleading to put it into words. When they were in school they knew a lot of C and C as well as all uppercase and all lowercase. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft was 24, and that assumption turns out to be convenient.

Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.4 The key to this mystery is to revisit that question, are they really worth 100 of us? The solution to this puzzle is to realize that economic inequality should be decreased. A really good hacker can squeeze more out of better tools. If you open an average literary novel and imagine reading it out loud to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader. Code size is important, because the Internet dissolves the two cornerstones of broadcast media: synchronicity and locality. It seems to be x. If you're writing software that has to pervade every program you write. Now high school kids could write software or design web sites.5 Python copies even features that many Lisp hackers consider to be mistakes. So you can test equality by comparing a pointer, instead of the head of a list.

There they have the right idea, but it's extraordinarily rare for one to talk about startups, but philosophically they're at the opposite end of the spectrum could be detected by what appeared to be unrelated tests. He didn't foresee the future of startup investing, realize it would pay to be upstanding, and force himself to behave that way. Where is the breakeven point?6 That seems like it would be useful not just to would-be startup founders but to students in general, because we'd be a long way toward explaining the mystery of the so-called super-angels seem to care about valuations. And the big hits often look risky at first. I'm less American than I seem. Is the author flippant, but correct? Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for a while and observing certain other signs, I have a lot of Internet startups are, though they may not have had this as an explicit goal. This practice is not only quicker, but you get feedback as it progresses. If you had one, you were rich.7

Notes

Everyone else was talking about why something isn't the last step in this essay, I want to save the old one was drilling for oil, over fairly low heat, till onions are glassy. There is not much use, because they want to approach a specific firm, the median VC loses money. Yes, I would take Abelson and Sussman's quote a step later in the future as barbaric, but one by one they die and their wives. Donald J.

05 15, the employee gets the stock up front, and so effective that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality—that an idea that could start this way, because the kind of people thought it was the season Dallas premiered. Down rounds are bad.

4%? All he's committed to believing anything in particular made for other people thought of them is a self fulfilling prophecy. This doesn't mean the hypothetical people who did it with.

Spices are also the golden age of tax avoidance. In fact since 2 1. The philosophers whose works they cover would be to become a so-called signalling risk.

When I was a test of investor is just like a loser they usually decide in way less than 1.

University Press, 2005. Heirs will be maximally profitable when each employee is paid in proportion to the rich paid high taxes during the Bubble a lot about how to use those solutions.

Now to people he knew. But that was a small company that could evolve into a decent college. Founders are often surprised by this standard, and the exercise of stock the VCs want it. What they forget is that we're not.

Thanks to Paul Buchheit, Raph Levien, Matt Cohler, Sam Altman, Fred Wilson, Jessica Livingston, Ron Conway, Langley Steinert, and Ross Boucher for putting up with me.

[anyways-wonderwall]

Album of the week #1

Dream Chapter: Eternity

(2020)

By Tomorrow x Together

Overall rating: 6/10

TL;DR: this album is meh but has the greatest song ever recorded, “Fairy of Shampoo”.

So the first album (well, mini album) of the week is kpop because I recently got back into listening to it and wanted to choose a random album I’d never listened to before. I asked my friend who is deep in kpop hell for a recommendation and this is what she threw at me, which honestly was a great pick on her part.

So for the album of the week, I’m gonna just go over each song one by one, then a full summary. But first, I’ll go over my general thoughts because I’m sure you don’t want to read hundreds of words.

General Thoughts:

Honestly pretty good. This is the first 4th gen Kpop album I’ve ever listened to and was kind of worried it would suck. I’ve been listening to kpop since 2015 off and on, and the last break I took was because all the new music that was coming out just sounded like American pop to me. That doesn’t mean it just got bad, it just became something I didn’t want to listen to.

Maybe I was just listening to the wrong groups because this album didn’t feel like that for me. I don’t think any of the songs were super unique, but each was different from the other, making an album that didn’t blur together. The fact that I won’t mix them up after only knowing them a week shows that this has a pretty nice variety.

That being said, the album wasn’t super unique. All of the songs were good, but something I could see any other kpop group doing. Maybe I don’t know TXT enough, I don’t know. Oh and one more point that is more directed at the entire kpop industry: why is falsetto the only way to sing? You guys are employing some of the greatest singers on earth and you’re really only letting them sing soprano. If that would change I would listen to only kpop til the day I die.

Song Breakdown:

1. Drama

THIS is how you start an album. It hooks you in right away with strong chords and sets a tone for the whole album that quickly changes and keeps you guessing. It’s kind of obvious how much I love the art of putting together an album, given that I’m only reviewing those, but this group does it well. Definitely one of my favorite album openings.

That aside the song isn’t my favorite, but it’s pretty dang good. It gives me a summer road trip to the beach vibes, and I really want to blare this on my car stereo with my friends. The chorus annoys me just enough that I’m on the fence about putting it on any of my playlists though. I think this is one of those songs that if I listen to it over and over I’d probably love it, but as of right now I just like it and will vibe to it on occasion.

Also, doing a Japanese comeback with a Haikyuu themed video? Very bold. They definitely knew what they were doing

2. Can’t You See Me?

Okay this is definitely a song that doesn’t match up remotely with the music video, something Bighit just loves doing. I’m not even going to remotely think about the greater storyline with these because I’ve already wasted enough of my life on kpop.

But onto the song, I don’t like this one much at all. It’s definitely not unlistenable and I get while people like it, I just really don’t. I know it’s hard to believe, but I actually don’t like much pop music at all, and this would fall into the not-good category.

It’s just a bit too computerized, and when you mix that kind of background music with auto tune I instantly lose interest. Plus there’s no real instruments in this one :/.

3. Fairy of Shampoo

Hey so do you ever want to take a song, put it in a blender, then inject it into your veins and become it? That’s what this song is for me. It’s not even an ear-worm at this point, it has become part of my brain and plays during any time I’m not talking. It’s hands down my favorite out of the album and one of my favorite kpop songs ever. I could gush about this song for 50 years but I’ll keep is short.

So apparently this song is a cover of a pretty famous disco kinda song from the 90s. I expected to like the original more but TXT’s version sounds better than any other one I’ve heard. The driving baseline makes me move to the song every time and every part of the song is ethereal, down to the fantastic choreography.

God and the chord progression?? It itches a scratch in my brain I didn’t know I had. When it shifts down to the G and the trumpet comes in I’m gone. Seriously you are doing yourself a disservice not listening to this song, it’s a solid 50/10.

4. Maze in the Mirror

So you know how I was saying that while each song was unique the album wasn’t? This song is what I mean. It’s very safe in everything that it does, to the point it is forgettable. I can only remember what it sounds like just after listening to it, and it falls very much into the forgettable middle part of an album.

While I don’t like it as it is I think this song would sound incredible unplugged and live. I think if it’s just them and an acoustic guitar, no editing on the voices, I would love this song. The overdubbing smooths over any character this song would have, and leaves it pretty meh.

5. PUMA

So when my friend recommended this album to me she said “don’t bother listening to Puma, it’s not good” and she’s right. Some people must like it because the music video 27M views, heck even the fact that there is a music video shows they thought it would be popular.

The song seems to meander without any purpose, and it borders on annoying for me. It’s just basic kpop to me with nothing fun added, and I was pretty bored listening to it. I thought Yeonjun’s rap would save this for me but it totally didn’t, it just made me sigh even more.

I don’t throw the word hate around often with songs, and I don’t think this really deserves it. It’s just unlistenable for me to the point I really dislike it. (But hey if you like this song more power to you, wish I could be you).

6. Eternally

Hey, another music video that makes no sense! It’s honestly in the short film category with how long it is, and I have to give them credit for making something super aesthetically pleasing that makes zero sense. But onto the song.

Drama was the perfect way to start this album and this was the perfect way to end it. Just as ethereal as the rest, with the coolest shift I’ve ever heard. The two parts of the song sound so so different from each other but somehow seamlessly shift from one part to another. The beginning sounded like any other BTS song to me but the shift made this song incredible. This is my second favorite on the album, only because Fairy of Shampoo is untouchable.

Final Verdict:

So the final verdict for the album of the week is whether I buy it and put it on my phone. Usually, I buy physical albums, since I’m super bad with technology and am paranoid I’ll lose my iTunes, but kpop makes that tricky. An album comes with so many bells and whistles that it costs an insane amount. This mini-album only has six songs but costs like $20, yikes.

On iTunes it only costs $6 though, so will I buy it? I’m still on the fence, but leaning towards yes. I think I might just buy the three songs I like because the other ones would just be skipped anyway.

[him-e]

What do you think it was that made Jaime confide his secret to Brienne? Was it just a breaking point for him and he would have spilled had it been someone else in Brienne's place

Someone else? No.

(just… imagine Jaime confessing to a naked-as-his-nameday Qyburn, I’m howling)

Like, of course he could have, because Jaime is a fictional character and he does what GRRM wants him to do. Which is precisely why his confiding in Brienne is such a BIG authorial decision, even if, in-narrative, it were completely random. But it’s not. Brienne is a huge part of what leads Jaime to that breaking point. The fact that Jaime makes this confession to her (and nobody else) is essential in understanding why he does it, why he kept that secret for so long, his troubled relationship with knighthood, and many other things about his arc.

1. a breaking point. the jaime we meet in ASOS is a man at the end of his rope (re: carrying the burden of the secret about Aerys all alone / not sharing with anyone the reason why he killed him). He’s spent an entire book in captivity, surrounded by people who despise him, and this probably had the effect of forcing him to think about Aerys harder than he usually did (more on that later). Since early in ASOS, we see that Jaime thinks of Aerys often, reluctantly but often, and as his chapters progress he becomes increasingly and visibly exhausted at being addressed as “kingslayer”. His memories of Aerys are easily triggered and surface in scattered, angst-ridden flashbacks, each revealing a specific piece of the puzzle, but not the main course. His mind wants to go there, but at the same time retreats from it. Aside from doylist reasons (to create suspense and curiosity in the reader) I think this proves how killing the king represents a highly traumatic event for him—or better, the culmination of a traumatic series of circumstances he was subjected to when he was barely an adult (let’s not forget that Jaime’s first 2 years of service in the kingsguard coincided with the nadir of Aerys’ paranoia and madness. He witnessed unspeakable horrors, was told to shut up, had to learn how to “go away inside” while Aerys raped and barbecued people, all of this when he was 15-16 and knew exactly that the king considered him his tool to humiliate Tywin. Remember, Aerys’ last order was for Jaime to bring him Tywin’s head, or “burn with all the rest”.)

(the reason why Jaime kept his mouth sealed on the wildfire plot for 15+ years is an interesting question. It can’t be only misplaced commitment to the oath of keeping the king’s secrets, can it? This fandom seems to have settled on the idea that Jaime is a narcissist with a victim complex who just loves playing the unsung hero, and apparently this one note can be retroactively used to explain all his actions. Ahem, in this circumstance, who would he be playing the unsung hero to? Himself? lol, that’s not fucking worth it if you don’t have an audience, not even an imaginary one. But it IS about pride. He knew it since his father’s bannermen laid their eyes on him with silent judgment—there’s no workable extenuating circumstance for a knight of the kingsguard committing regicide, simple as that, and coming up with some ~averted wildfire apocalypse~ nonsense without any pyromancers or other witnesses left to back his claim would sound like begging for forgiveness. Jaime is a Lannister, he doesn’t beg. He doesn’t justify himself, that’s for scoundrels and small time crooks. No, he lifts his chin and owns it. Oh, and it’s also possible that he genuinely thought it was safer for the entire citizenship to ignore the existence of the wildfire caches altogether, as there’s absolutely no evidence of Jaime knowing that the hidden wildfire can be accidentally ignited, but I digress.)

Since we don’t have access to his pov before ASOS, we don’t know if this constant back and forth between present and past is something that Jaime has always done, or a more recent thing. I headcanon that the long captivity Jaime suffered in Riverrun is a key factor. That’s where I think he started to seriously weigh up “his life, his choices” (he’s still halfway through that process). Imprisoned for months, surrounded by enemies all the time, removed from the things that made him a proud Lannister, that gave him joy and relief and a solid sense of self (Cersei), his coping mechanisms began to fall apart. Jaime has always relied on his sense of superiority, on his “I am a Lannister, and you can all kiss my arse” mentality to cope with his broken reputation. Hiding behind sarcasm, reveling in the addictive thrill of his forbidden relationship with Cersei, sneering at his fellow kingsguards / the hypocrisy of the court / Ned’s honor, all of this helped him to keep functioning without falling apart, because kingslayer or not he was the lion of Lannister, better than the rest, stronger than the rest, he and Cersei living a life closer to the gods than to ordinary mortal people. Jaime has learned how to dgaf about those who whisper “kingslayer” behind his back, but that’s different now. The captivity in Riverrun is probably the longest time he’s had to deal with people’s open, unmitigated contempt with no shields or barriers, no safety nets aside from his own mind, which is an increasingly unpleasant place to be in. (jaime is both insecure and prideful, a terrible, terrible combo when you receive criticism)

so when Catelyn comes to visit (actually to force an oath on him), he’s exhausted. He still relies heavily on sarcasm, but his walls are low enough to start blathering about “too many vows” (also because, well, he’s drunk) which sounds like the beginning of… an explanation, perhaps. But it’s too early for that, Catelyn is not the kind of audience who has any patience for his shit, and he will have to lose much more than his dignity to finally spill the beans.

2. it’s particularly Brienne’s accusations that sting. It becomes personal. He always reacts when she addresses his oathbreaking and kingslaying with contempt. Sometimes jokingly:

“I’ve had a bellyful of silence, woman.”“Talk with Ser Cleos then. I have no words for monsters.”Jaime hooted. “Are there monsters hereabouts? Hiding beneath the water, perhaps? In that thick of willows? And me without my sword!”

sometimes deflecting:

“Do you deny that you slew a king?”“No. Do you deny your sex? If so, unlace those breeches and show me.” He gave her an innocent smile. “I’d ask you to open your bodice, but from the look of you that wouldn’t prove much.”

“A man who would violate his own sister, murder his king, and fling an innocent child to his death deserves no other name.”Innocent? The wretched boy was spying on us. […] “You will be courteous as concerns Cersei, wench”.

sometimes (kind of) apologetically:

“Your crimes are past forgiving, Kingslayer.”“That name again.” Jaime twisted idly at his chains. “Why do I enrage you so? I’ve never done you harm that I know of.”

sometimes aggressively:

“It was that white cloak that soiled me, not the other way around. So spare me your envy. It was the gods who neglected to give you a cock, not me.” The look Brienne gave him then was full of loathing.

sometimes attempting to corner her into the logical fallacy of “your reputation isn’t that different from mine, so we’re practically the same!”:

“I know what I swore.”“And what you did.” She loomed above him, six feet of freckled, frowning, horse-toothed disapproval.“Yes, and what you did as well. We’re both kingslayers here, if what I’ve heard is true.”

“Your wits are quicker than mine, I confess it. When they found me standing over my dead king, I never thought to say, ‘No, no, it wasn’t me, it was a shadow, a terrible cold shadow.’“ He laughed again. ”Tell me true, one kingslayer to another—did the Starks pay you to slit his throat, or was it Stannis? Had Renly spurned you, was that the way of it? Or perhaps your moon’s blood was on you. Never give a wench a sword when she’s bleeding.“ For a moment Jaime thought Brienne might strike him.

Brienne is an endless challenge. He can see the disapproval in her eyes even when she says nothing, and it drives him insane. It’s not just physical and mental exhaustion and frustration at his own powerlessness—Brienne is his captor, so naturally he’s going to lash out at her, try to goad her into lashing out herself, or just be annoyed at her in general—it’s also that he sees in Brienne a genuine judgment, free of the hypocrisy of those who were well content with serving Aerys and watch him roast people alive, until Aerys was no more the king and Robert was. Or those who have their hands covered in blood and have slit countless throats with their sword, throats that belonged to better people than Aerys.

Brienne isn’t like that. Her hands are clean (book!Brienne has yet to kill her first man at this point), her eyes are truly guileless, and her only fault is a lack of experience. An infuriating one, sure—it angers Jaime to hear her describe the kingsguard as “a rare and precious gift […] that you scorned and soiled”, because what does this child know of the kingsguard. but that’s the point. She doesn’t belong to the world that soiled his dreams. She wasn’t much older than the two children who were brutally murdered under his watch at the time of the sack of King’s Landing. Indeed, Jaime sometimes calls her a child in his internal monologue. It’s innocence, not hypocrisy, that is judging him. It’s something his usual performative cynicism doesn’t really have a grip on.

So basically he finds trapped in endless discourse with this young woman who just won’t leave him alone and always finds a way to throw his broken vows and monstrosity in his face, and it becomes harder and harder to dismiss her accusations. Because deep down Jaime is impressed and moved by her unflinching faith in knightly values. He thinks she’s stupid for doing so, sure, but it hits a nerve.

3. truces are built on trust. After Cleos dies and they are captured by the Bloody Mummers, Jaime and Brienne’s mutual relationship drastically changes. They stop being a prisoner and his captor, and become both prisoners of a bunch of brutal outlaws. Jaime is maimed, Brienne is repeatedly threatened with rape. I believe this is called traumatic bonding? But anyway, the point is that, willing or not, Jaime starts relying on Brienne. Heavily. Literally:

After the second time he fell from the saddle, they bound him tight to Brienne of Tarth and made them share a horse again. One day, instead of back to front, they bound them face-to-face. “The lovers,” Shagwell sighed loudly, “and what a lovely sight they are. ‘Twould be cruel to separate the good knight and his lady.” Then he laughed that high shrill laugh of his, and said, “Ah, but which one is the knight and which one is the lady?”If I had my hand, you’d learn that soon enough, Jaime thought. His arms ached and his legs were numb from the ropes, but after a while none of that mattered. His world shrunk to the throb of agony that was his phantom hand, and Brienne pressed against him. She’s warm, at least, he consoled himself, though the wench’s breath was as foul as his own.

She becomes a sort of anchor for him, someone whose physical proximity is comforting and reassuring and sometimes a literal crutch, and don’t forget that she’s also tasked with cleaning and nursing him while he’s feverish and gave him a pep talk when he was feeling suicidal, so he gets to experience her nurturing side, too. He knows her mission is to take him alive and unharmed to King’s Landing and that—unlike Vargo Hoat & co.—she takes it very, very seriously. At this point, in this situation, Brienne is the closest thing to a friend he has. Now fast forward to the bathtub scene:

“That was unworthy,” he mumbled. “I’m a maimed man, and bitter. Forgive me, wench. You protected me as well as any man could have, and better than most.” She wrapped her nakedness in a towel. “Do you mock me?” That pricked him back to anger. “Are you as thick as a castle wall? That was an apology. I am tired of fighting with you. What say we make a truce?” “Truces are built on trust. Would you have me trust - ” “The Kingslayer, yes. The oathbreaker who murdered poor sad Aerys Targaryen.“

the scene begins as your typical Jaime VS Brienne banter, with Jaime being a complete asshole, teasing and taunting Brienne even though he’s literally half dead (right before that: “Does the sight of my stump distress you so?” Jaime asked. “You ought to be pleased. I’ve lost the hand I killed the king with. The hand that flung the Stark boy from that tower. The hand I’d slide between my sister’s thighs to make her wet.” He thrust his stump at her face. “No wonder Renly died, with you guarding him”). But I think he’s genuinely desperate to have someone on his side, which is why he quickly swallows his taunts back and apologizes (in his own way).

Strange as it is, he trusts Brienne. He needs to. But she won’t trust him, not yet: he’s still the Kingslayer in her eyes, even after all they went through together. 

You need trust to have a truce, so he makes the first step, and volunteers his most guarded secret. Mind, it’s not like he knows what he’s doing—it’s not a completely deliberate choice. He’s exhausted and feverish and lightheaded: “why am I telling this absurd ugly child”, he wonders, while he “floats in heat and memory” and the story practically begins to tell itself, for it was bottled up for too long and was only waiting for a trigger that could let it loose. 

But I think the need to build that truce with Brienne is that trigger.

Now, can you really picture Qyburn in Brienne’s place? Or Roose Bolton? Or Pia? Or anyone? I can’t, because these people are nothing to Jaime—worse, most of them are his enemies. He hasn’t developed a complicated, conflicted relationship of begrudging respect with them. Besides, none of them would understand or particularly care about this confession; none of them wants desperately to be a knight of the kingsguard, believes in the sacrality of the institution and is deeply offended at the idea of someone revolting against its vows for apparently no reason—Brienne is. So it’s her opinion the relevant one. The one Jaime implicitly hopes to change (though he will never admit it to himself, and carefully avoids putting it in these terms in his internal monologue). 

He didn’t wait 16 years to just tell a random stranger. And if he merely wanted to unburden himself, he could have told Tyrion, or Cersei (the people he’s closest to). He didn’t, because they couldn’t get it either—they will never know (or so he thinks) the inherent contradiction of being an institutionalized killing machine bound to the whims of another person and still have to answer to your own conscience. Jaime is a knight, and one of a kind, so he’s going to tell another knight who is also one of a kind (for completely different reasons). Somehow, in some fundamental way, he understands that Brienne is his peer, and that she has already started to see a side of him that he’s always kept hidden; hopefully, his words won’t fall into the void with her, they’ll sink deep and stir a reaction, whatever it is.

(that’s why, in the end, he’s SO frustrated by Brienne’s silence: has my tale turned you speechless? Come, curse me or kiss me or call me a liar. Something. Jaime is desperate for either outright, definitive condemnation, or—finally—some kind of acceptance. I think part of him craves closure. And validation: please, tell me that my tale impressed you! (the narcissism discourse isn’t wrong, just very simplistic). But also: please, can you confirm that this is in fact a Big Deal? because back then I thought it was enough of a big deal to murder everyone involved with it!)

back to this:

“why am I telling this absurd ugly child?”

—this is actually lampshading on grrm’s part. It does require some suspension of disbelief that Jaime kept this secret for sixteen years, only to reveal it to someone who’s still, technically, his enemy, and whom he’s spent half the book cursing and mocking, right? But that “absurd ugly child” is not random at all, she is, in fact, the only possible recipient for Jaime’s secret, and on a deeper level he knows it. That’s why his conscious mind formulates the question, which, from a storytelling perspective, is there to tell you to pay attention. It means a lot that Jaime, that Jaime’s subconscious, chose Brienne. This is an incredibly layered, poignant scene. They’re both naked, exposed to each other without their armor and clothes and respective house sigils and all those concrete symbols of their political, social, ideological, ethical distance. All of that is removed, dissolved like the dirt on Jaime’s skin. It makes sense that only in this context, with all these underlying connections to cleansing, rebirth, nakedness, and in front of the person who most embodies the purest form of the ideal of knighthood, Jaime is finally compelled to tell the truth, all of it.

one last thing I’d like to mention is that there’s an ongoing thing on Jaime’s part about ~breaking in Brienne’s walls ~ that probably played a part here. He often notices how closed off she is, how guarded. In the early stages of their journey, he mistakes it for dullness, and tries to turn this to his advantage, to piss her off, to find her sore spots to make her lose her temper. Later, as their bond deepens, he discovers that this is a trait she shares with him:

Brienne was always bound beside him. She lay there in her bonds like a big dead cow, saying not a word. The wench has built a fortress inside herself. They will rape her soon enough, but behind her walls they cannot touch her. But Jaime’s walls were gone.

Yet he heard himself whisper, “Let them do it, and go away inside.” That was what he’d done, when the Starks had died before him, Lord Rickard cooking in his armor while his son Brandon strangled himself trying to save him. “Think of Renly, if you loved him. Think of Tarth, mountains and seas, pools, waterfalls, whatever you have on your Sapphire Isle, think…”

Brienne’s guardedness, much as her virginity, both intrigues and repels Jaime. One of the catalysts of the confession is that Brienne shrinks away and turns her back on him. She’s basically retreating behind her walls and shutting him out, while he actively sought her company (he chose the tub she was in, rather than an empty one). Jaime is met once again with rejection and scorn, and he knows that it’s not really about the fact that he just saw her naked, or about something he’s said or done, no, it’s about something he did 16 years ago. It always comes back to Aerys, so Jaime confesses. And I think that yes, in part, he’s trying to get past Brienne’s walls.

[oliampic]

HERE IN THE BLACK → Solo Para

TAGGED→ Liam Sayoc, heavy mentions Griffin Sayoc and Devone, smaller mentions of Bianca Rivera, Rory Marshall, and Carolyn Sayoc

DATE/TIME→ Monday, February 27th, 2017

LOCATION→ One of NYU’s Bobst Library study rooms

SUMMARY→  Liam figures out that Griffin is the Black Ranger, and also thinks that the rest of the Power Rangers are survivors from Nexus 

AUTHOR’S NOTE → I put *** in here so if you want to start reading from where Liam actually starts talking about what he’s figuring out/see that thought process without having to read EVERYTHING, start from there

Liam's eyes were trained to the ground as he was walking to the half mile towards Bobst Library in the fridged New York city weather. His hands were in his pockets, a thermal was on under one of his favorite shirts that read Starling City Archery Club on it. He was bundled with a scarf, hat, gloves, and his messenger bag hanging at his side. There were others on the street, as there often tended to be in the constantly busy city, but Liam was walking right by them. His body was there among the rest of the world, whereas his mind was miles away.

Liam was trying not to think as he walked, simply using the ground as a point of focus so his brain could turn itself off without getting lost. He had gone the NYU student site to reserve an individual study room at the library he was now approaching the entrance of. He was quick to get to the room, closing the door, and taping his email confirmation of having a two-hour reservation on the glass window within it so he would have more privacy and ensure he didn't get kicked out. It was odd behavior for a normally social person like Liam, however, he wasn't giving it any thought.

Now that he was sure to be left alone, Liam tossed his bag on the table and took his laptop out. He opened the device up, clicking and typing his way through it until it was set up to record on his webcam. He hadn't taken a seat yet, choosing to be looming over the table instead. His finger was hovering over the space bar, debating if he really wanted to hit it to start recording or if he was was going to close his computer and leave. Liam's eyes glanced at his hand and his attention fell on to a light scar on his hand that hadn't been there before the semester started. That was the push he needed to make the silence be broken by the ding on his laptop to signify recording had started.

"Uh, the-the date today is February 27th, 2017 and this is my first time saying any of these things out loud," Liam's words fumbled and his eyes were looking all around the room as he spoke. He had to be absolutely sure no one was around and he was truly as secure as he was desperately needing them to be, "I don't normally talk to myself, but I have no one else I can really-" He cut himself off, sighing and hanging his head low, "Who am I trying to explain this to?" He groaned, struggling to comprehend was he was even doing. He hadn't ever been in a position where he had no one to talk to. This was a true first for him, and it had been something gnawing at the back of Liam's mind for weeks.

In his life, whenever hardships started happening, he had had Griffin, his mother, and his aunt to talk to. After his mother's accident, he still always had Griffin and Aunt Lynn. In his lifetime, Liam had friends, and he had made great ones here at NYU. However, there was no one he could truly talk to about what was going on his head. He had secrets that he was sworn to keep, as well as protect, and he wasn't going to break that trust. He had always been the type to think out loud and bounce ideas off of whoever he was talking to. Since he didn't have anyone to do that with, he had decided that maybe he just needed to talk to himself to be able to finally get answers. He was looking at the shoes he was wearing and smiled as he recalled they were a pair his aunt got him for Christmas. A moment later he remembered that what he was trying to understand did also affect her, and it was enough to get Liam to look back up at the camera to give it another shot. He sat his body in the chair he had been ignoring, cleared his throat, took a deep breath and tried again.

***"Today is February 27th, 2017 and I'm pretty sure I'm only days away from going completely insane. So, that's why I'm here, hoping I can figure out what's been happening the last couple months and at least have something that makes sense to think about obsessively." Liam started, trying to keep an even tone as he thought of where to really begin this one-sided chat, "So, what do I know so far? Let's see..." Liam fished out a piece of paper and pen from his bag to begin writing, "I know that Power Rangers are real. I know that there are lizard monsters out there who seem pretty in to destroying everything. I know they turn to dust when delt a, uh..." He paused, not wanting to say the morbid answer, "finishing blow. I know there's a Black Ranger that's not part of the Power Rangers. I know that the last time Griffin was... well, Griffin was before he went to Shadow Island on his birthday last month." It left a sour taste in his mouth to remember such a misfortune, and that he hadn't been there with his cousin, "Thanks to Griffin, I know that more Nexonian's survived than just him and Princess Ariana. I know that Devone has a daughter, and that Devone is very much alive. And I know that he's... here." As he scribbled the note on the paper, Liam felt the heavy weight of dread come back. He couldn't allow himself to get crushed under it though. Not now, hopefully not ever.

"So, this is my working theory. Devone is here, and is trying to do what he did on Nexus," Liam decided not to mention how Griffin said that Devone would succeed this time around, "then he has to of been who was in the cave on Shadow Island. He sounded like he knew about Griffin... about where he's really from. The footage wasn't much, but if I remember it as vividly as I'm sure I do... there's evidence there of that. If he's from Nexus, that'd explain why he took Griffin and not Sawyer. Thankfully, I don't think she knows the truth about Griff, but she was brave for trying to get them both out of there. I haven't had a chance to really thank her for that, mainly because I don't know what I would say. No one really wanted to talk about Shadow Island. Granted, everyone seemed to have hazy memories but... still." He hated that he was casting a shadow of doubt on his friends being truthful, though he still believed the best of them.

"Anyway... besides the island, there was that night Griffin called me when Bianca was hurt. At first I was so focused on getting Bianca somewhere safe, I didn't think about what could have happened. Now when I talk to her about it, she avoids answering, so I gave up trying to get anything else from her about it. Especially because I..." Liam looked away from the camera to the corner of the table for a moment. While he wasn't telling anyone these thoughts, it felt like some level of betrayal for even coming up with the thoughts he had, "I think that Griffin hurt her. I don't know how, or why, but he was the only one there. Even if he's not himself, the voice he had... it was his, and he genuinely sounded scared that night. It had to of been an accident. It had to." Liam tried to justify, finding comfort in the idea of it not being intentional. It wasn't much, but it was all he had.

"Then after that was the giant-lizards-attacking-the-city thing. I haven't told anyone yet but... I saw Griffin there. The Power Rangers saw him too, and they seemed to know who he was. Or at least... seemed to think he was dangerous. Although... I don't know why..." Liam couldn't see the faces of the yellow and white rangers when he met them, but he could tell they were unsure about Griffin. At the time he wasn't sure what to make of it, but now that he was saying it out loud finally, it stuck him as odd, "Why would they be so ready to keep me from getting near Griffin? He was there but he didn't attack them like the lizards did. Or even like the Black Ranger did. He was there and then once the rangers won, he...left." Liam's brain seemed to click some puzzle pieces in to place as he sprung forward to Google search footage of the Power Rangers vs the Black Ranger, "See, a few weeks after that, there comes another Power Ranger, this Black Ranger, that collectively kicked their butts." As he finished his sentence, Liam found a video and watched the events progress, and at the end of the video, when the Black Ranger had clearly won, they left.

"What's weird about the fight though is that Black Ranger didn't do anything big to Power Rangers. He just came in, showed he was more powerful, then left, like a power move. Like he just wanted to play around and show off." He looked at his notes, piecing together events:

Devone takes Griffin- wants him to join the dark side

Griffin's behavior change - trying to cut ties with everyone (including me), insulting everyone, not being in the dorms

The night Bianca got hurt - Griffin calls me, I arrive, he leaves

The morning the lizards attacked - appeared out of nowhere (both lizards and Rangers), Griffin's there but leaves once its over. Rangers talk to me then leave

The Black Ranger - appears out of nowhere wins in a battle with the Rangers, leaves once its over

Griffin tells me Devone is here, and will succeed

By the time Liam wrote the last sentence, his hand was shaking. The events had all seemed random on their own, but almost all of the incidents Liam had been involved in lately also included Griffin somehow. All except the fight with the Black Ranger, at least that's how it looked on the surface, "Griffin's been talking about how the Power Rangers are going to lose, and how they're fighting for a losing side. Except... he's been saying that since before the Black Ranger showed up. Even if Griffin's not fully himself, he's always been the kind to want to prove himself. Always. I remember when he first wanted to do Little League football and-..." Liam stopped himself from going on the tangent, trying hard to not let his emotions get in the way of the break through he was having.

"That's not the point. What I'm trying to say is that... if the night where Bianca got hurt proves anything, it's that some warped version of Griffin is still there somewhere. And if he were to prove himself worthy of Devone's... cause... what better way to do it then take on the group that destroyed a fleet of lizard monster allies?" Liam's eyes were wide and he could feel his heart rapidly beating as he was taking to make sense of the situation, "That's why he didn't kill the Rangers, but just beat them. It was to show he could be an asset while knocking the enemy down a peg." Being around the military in some way, shape, or form his whole life had made Liam be able to pick up on talking about battle stradegy and tactic. He didn't like to do it often, but for now he couldn't help it.

"Maybe in order to have the abilities of a Ranger, you need to be an alien. That's why Devone wanted Griffin, because he could have him fight in his name without putting himself in danger." While it was only a theory, the idea of Griffin being seen as an expendable pawn made Liam's blood boil while making him fear for his cousin's life as well, "But... that's the case, then maybe the Power Rangers are also from Nexus!" Liam exclaimed, feeling like he was blowing this case out of the water now that he was laying out all the information he knew, "That would explain why they're inexperienced so far, and how they knew Griffin was dangerous. Whatever technology Devone had, there's obviously some resistance that has it, too. Griff's had to of been training this whole time with how easy he took out everyone. I can only imagine what it's like to be under the spell of some intergalactic hell raiser..." Liam's mind wondered to think about the kind of terrors Griffin certainly had to be experiencing, while thinking it was all part of some wonderful greater purpose.

The feeling of being powerless to help him started to creep back over Liam despite all the progress he had made. It was a short lived feeling though as the room filled with the sound of his phone ringing. Liam had forgotten to silence it before going in to the library by accident, apparently. He looked at the screen, seeing it read Aunt Lynn with a picture of her from Christmas with dot of flour on the tip of her nose and felt reindeer antlers on. Part of him wanted to not answer so he could avoid having to lie, but he couldn't do it. She already didn't have Griffin at the moment and was more in the dark than Liam was, so he couldn't leave her to fend for herself. Griffin was their family, and always would be, so Liam was going to be sure that his cousin was going to still have a family to come back to once he was himself again. So Liam took a deep breath, stopped the recording on his laptop, and answered, "Hey Aunt Lynn, I'm packing up my stuff at the library real quick. Hold on one sec, okay?"

[pricelessmomentblog]

Rethinking Discipline

What is self-discipline? I think everyone has at least a hazy picture of what it means to be self-disciplined. From the outside, self-discipline looks like suppressing impulses to do things you shouldn’t do. Self-discipline means not eating too much, not succumbing to the temptation to check your phone every two minutes, ignoring what you want to do and doing what you should.

Everyone has experienced being self-disciplined—that time when you valiantly resisted an impulse you thought you shouldn’t follow. But, more often than not, we have the opposite experience: failing to be self-disciplined, succumbing to temptations.

This outside-view and numerous experiences would make it seem likely that we should all be experts in self-discpline. If not in practice, then at least in theory. We should know why we persist when we do, why we give up and what’s going on inside our heads in both cases. After all, experiences of self-discipline—both in failure and in success—happen every day.

Yet, I think this familiarity doesn’t necessarily equate to understanding. I’ve written about self-discipline for years, but recently I’ve had some experience that make me rethink what it might be all about.

Is Self-Discipline a Resource?

The easiest metaphor, and the one I’ve operated on implicitly for most of my life is that self-discipline is a kind of resource. Use more self-discipline and it will get used up and you’ll feel tired.

Intuitively this seems to be the case. With few exceptions, most people can’t endure indefinitely in a situation that requires constant willpower. Eventually we give up, and when we do, it seems likely that there was some kind of fuel that was used up in the process.

Scientifically, this also seemed to be the case until recently. Roy Baumeister’s research into ego-depletion was seen as a pretty solid edifice to the idea that there is a bottleneck in the amount of willpower you can expend, and when it gets used up you succumb to whatever temptation you’re facing.

However, Baumeister’s work has also fallen victim to the replication crisis in psychology. Whether this is truly an invalidation of his theory, or the presence of statistical complications that go over my head, I think remains to be seen. For the moment at least, it appears that science doesn’t have a definitive answer to the question of what is self-discipline.

Although less scientific, the concept of energy management dovetails nicely with ego-depletion. The fundamental idea is that there are different stores of an abstract quantity of energy and that managing this resource, and not time management, is the key to productivity. This has also been a foundational idea in my own thinking on productivity and I’ve written in support of it quite often.

What if Self-Discipline Isn’t a Resource?

I just got back from an intensive 10-day silent meditation retreat. Some of the experiences bordered on insanity, and perhaps I’ll share more about them when I’ve had time to process them. But one of the aspects of my life it shed light on was this concept of self-discipline.

Going on a meditation retreat is like becoming a monk for ten days, except instead of even the duties one would have as a monk, there’s just more meditating. There’s no speaking, no phones, no computers, no reading, no writing, no exercising and no sex. Instead you wake up at 4am, meditate for ten hours per day, with short breaks to stretch your legs and eat two meals a day.

The outside-view of the meditation retreat is that all of the worldly pleasures you’re giving up will be the temptation. That you’ll be tempted to speak, want to eat in the evening, crave checking your phone or do something fun.

I can’t speak for others’ experience, but in my case, none of that was hard at all. The thing that’s hard about a meditation retreat is the meditating. Because even when you have nothing to do, there’s still a lot you can do: you can look around at things, walk around a little, scratch your face, change your position. When you meditate, even those minor pleasures are discouraged. Instead you’re to sit as still as possible and focus on some object of meditation, say your breath or sensations in your body.

Needless to say, meditating requires a lot of self-discipline. But is it the kind of self-discipline that gets consumed as a resource?

At first, that answer seemed obvious to me: the longer a meditation session went on, the more willpower I’d need to resist the urge to quit and go do something else. My back and legs would hurt, so I’d want to change my posture. I’d want to daydream about something else, engage in a little mental theatre imagining this scenario or that one. Yet—according to the technique—whenever this happens you’re to remind yourself you’re here to work and shift your focus back onto something happening right now.

As the days wore on, however, I started to notice something about my own self-discipline that seemed to contradict the resource metaphor. Sitting still and doing meditation was hard, but it was hard to the degree to which I was somewhere else. If my attention was fully focused on what I was doing, and not on, say, thinking to myself about how long this will last and when I’ll be free, the act got a lot easier. The longer attention was paid to the meditation without these interruptions, the easier it got.

This suggests a very different model of willpower, one based on attention and mental habit patterns, instead of a consumable resource.

A Closer Look at Self-Discipline

The idea is still very speculative, but here it is: at any moment, there are mental habit patterns that are compelling you to engage in some kind of action. Move. Change your posture. Think out a plan to solve this problem.

In addition to these mental habit patterns, there’s a broader quality of attention. What is being paid attention to in this particular moment. What is filling the field of your consciousness, at varying degrees of precision and intensity.

Self-discipline occurs when there is a mental habit pattern encouraging some further action and the attentional response is to not engage in that habit pattern. Not to resist it or try to push it out of your thoughts, but just to ignore it.

One metaphor that comes to mind is it is as if your mind is full of tons of whiny children who all want you to do something for them. At any particular moment, you can engage your attention onto one of the children—either by trying to fulfill its wishes, trying to argue with it or telling it to shut up. Or you can just see it and not react.

When you ignore it, the impulse will still be there, but it will eventually diminish in intensity, over both the short and long-term. Over the short-term, it will eventually quieten down because no thought, sensation or feeling can be permanent. They’re all unstable and eventually decay to normal neuronal background levels. Over the long-term, it will become less noisy in the future because that impulse, through being frustrated, is conditioned to be quieter next time.

If this model is true, then self-discipline isn’t a resource at all. The problem is simply that voluntary attentional control is itself a somewhat random process that has ups and downs, starts and stops.

These ups and downs, or to use the term from Buddhism, arising and passing away, of both the impulses and one’s voluntary control over focus will occasionally create gaps, particularly in the short-term, where one succumbs to temptation. That’s because one’s impulse exceeds the attentional resources to not pay attention to it in that moment, and you succumb. However, no resource was consumed either before or after, simply an inevitable result from somewhat noisy processes competing for control over your body.

Side note: I’m creating a dichotomy between volitional control over attention and the impulses that impinge on it. This is probably not accurate. It’s probably better to say that the impulses of discipline are themselves one of the voices, but it’s that this is the voice you’re trying to amplify with attention while the others are being ignored. My explanation is probably a little less accurate, but I think it’s a bit easier to wrap your head around than the deeper idea that there’s no one thing really in control when we think of voluntary control.

Why Does It Feel Like Self-Discipline is a Resource?

This then raises an interesting question, why does it *feel* as if there’s a resource being used up, if the reality is just competing habit patterns in the mind and “voluntary” control over attention, why does it feel like we can run out of willpower. If I’m able to resist an urge for five minutes, why can I not do it indefinitely?

I think there’s three reasons for the seeming presence of an underlying resource. The first is environmental feedback. The second is in thinking of averages instead of individual events. The third is that knowledge of time is itself a feedback signal that influences our habits.

Environmental feedback can happen when, as one persists, the urge gets stronger and stronger because there is continued reinforcement in the form of bodily sensations that make it feel stronger. Hunger works like this. When you’re a little hungry you can easily resist paying attention to it. When you’re starving it’s the only thing you can think about.

In this model, some activities of self-discipline will create an increasing intensity until they are satiated. These intensities cannot reach infinity, so there’s always the possibility of someone resisting even the most intense urges when the voluntary control over attention is even stronger, but these are rare because it is very unusual to develop that kind of self-discipline (and probably harmful, in most cases—such as diseases like anorexia or pain-seeking behavior).

While meditating for instance, as you sit for longer, your body itself becomes increasingly uncomfortable. This means that it can be very easy to sit for 20 minutes, but very hard to sit for 2 hours, if your volitional control habits aren’t very strong. It’s simply much more likely after the 2-hour mark that the habit pattern to quit will overwhelm you.

This idea may seem to be bringing back the idea of a resource in a covert form, so it’s important to understand the distinction: nothing is getting used up. The only thing modulating behavior is the relative strength of different mental habits, and feedback from either the outside world or internal sensations, can trigger those habits with different intensities.

The second reason that willpower “feels” like a resource is that, if we consider it a stochastic process, there will always be an expected value. A Poisson process is a statistical model that envisions this nicely. In such a process, events always have some small probability of occuring in every moment. This creates an average time between events, but it doesn’t create a “building up” of energy that needs to release itself if an event doesn’t happen soon.

The third reason for willpower seeming like a resource is that one of the regulators of habits is itself a kind of knowledge of time. One powerful mental habit is that if you’re in some kind of discomfort, either physical or psychological, and you believe that this situation will persist for a long time, the urge to take action to change it becomes much stronger.

This tendency of the mind became very clear while meditating. In normal life, this mental habit can receive reinforcement from a clock or some internal pacing rhythm, which tells you roughly how long you have left. If it is a short time, this mental habit doesn’t react as strongly. If it’s a long time you need to persist, it can be a stronger urge than almost any other.

While meditating, however, one doesn’t have external time cues. Therefore this mental habit frequently gets frustrated because the amount of time left may be a few minutes or it may be over an hour, and you have no idea. Once again, by ignoring this urge to ask how much longer the experience will be, this time-habit diminishes in intensity.

What are the Implications of an Attention-Habit Versus a Resource Model of Self-Discipline?

All of this may sound a little too technical. Most people probably don’t even think of self-discipline clearly enough to see it as a resource, nevermind asking whether that is a simplification. Why bother thinking about this?

I feel like this idea, if it turns out to be correct and properly applied, opens up many new ways of thinking about self-improvement. So many of the things we want to achieve in life are based in requiring some kind of self-discipline. So many of the negative things we experience that we’d like to be free of are also mental habits of this sort.

I don’t have an exact picture of how to use this idea yet, but here are a few specultative suggestions for where it might be useful:

Building a “now” habit. The mental habit of taking mildly unpleasant conditions and making them seem excruciatingly unbearable if they are imagined to persist for a long period of time is quite a strong one. Does this mean it might make more sense to work in a room without clocks? So the feedback signal from this mental habit becomes less precise and therefore more unstable over time? In practice it could be replaced with a bell or timer indicating the time allotted for the task was finished and one could make an adjustment.

Ignore, don’t engage. Habits get stronger with use. At the behavioral level this is clear, but I believe it is also true at the mental level. To “use” a mental habit is to engage in it in any way. Trying to fulfill it, suppress it, even feeling guilty about having it are all forms of engagement. Just let it be, and don’t do anything. The Buddhist wisdom to simply accept a reality takes on a subtle meaning here of not engaging leading to mental freedom seems to be putting this idea into practice.

Far more self-discipline and control is possible than we realize. The idea that we have to succumb to certain temptations, that we couldn’t possibly put in *that* much effort or that life would be unbearable if it weren’t like X, Y or Z, may be false at a fundamental level. By slowly building habits of attention and letting ones you don’t want extinguish, much of the internal conflict you feel over what you should be doing and what you actually do might go away.

Applying this Idea in Recursive Stages

Part of what always bugged me about Eastern philosophies was that they told you to “accept” reality as what it was, but isn’t my own non-acceptance part of reality and therefore what I should accept? This seemed like a straightforward contradiction and I didn’t know my way out of it.

Now I see that the answer is that there are different levels of mental patterns and sometimes to counteract a particularly strong one you need a lot of attention onto an alternate pattern. However, this alternate pattern eventually creates its own weaknesses and so to go further, you have to give this up as well. This means that the idea of accepting non-acceptance has to proceed recursively, first working on the bigger picture and then onto subtler and subtler realities. If you just dismiss the whole notion because you know it eventually self-contradicts, you’re missing the progressive aspect.

What does this mean for self-discipline?

Well I can imagine starting out where one feels that they have no self-discipline at all. Here, this person needs to have fairly crude mental habits to rectify the worst of their impulse control. In this area, setting minimal habits to put even a tiny amount of effort into the task might be necessary.

Later, once some mental control structures have been built that avoid being completely at the whim of negative impulses, one might try setting up systems: things like GTD, fixed-schedule productivity, weekly/daily goals and other systems that work over a longer time-scale. These can placate somewhat that strong tendency of the mind to look for escape when the current unpleasantness will last for too long. By forming a structured system with a predefined escape time, you can build a habit of working hard inside that structure.

However, further levels of self-discipline might transcend this system itself. By reducing the impulse to do other things to a low enough level, one might be able to “work” on whatever you need to do nearly continuously as if it were a fun activity.

This isn’t to say that one *should* work continuously, obviously there is more to life than work. Rather its to say that the unpleasantness of work, the desire to have leisure time when you’re supposed to be working, would go away.

These successive layers of self-discipline, resulting in an extreme of an effortless kind of action, would require a lot of patience to slowly develop. Because going deeper into the structure involves working against the structure previously established, there’s always a risk of not realizing impulsive habits have been building up and losing the entire structure and needing to partially start over. However, that may be a worthwhile price to pay in the long-run.

As I said previously, there’s a lot to explore here and I’m not even certain that this is true. However, it lines up more closely with neurobiology than a resource-based theory of self-discipline, so I’m willing to accept it tentatively. Whether one can reach this theoretical end-goal of endless, effortless action, is still an open question, but the possibility is very interesting nonetheless.

Side Note: Robert Wright’s book, Why Buddhism is True, discusses many similar ideas, so if you think this discussion is interesting and want to hear from a better meditator and scientist than I am, you may want to check it out.

Rethinking Discipline syndicated from https://pricelessmomentweb.wordpress.com/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT HALF

By then it was merely a tradition. All you need from a launch is some initial core of users. VCs have no value. We have to be on the receiving end of a paternalistic relationship, no matter how inexperienced you seem or how unpromising your idea sounds at first, because they've all seen inexperienced founders with unpromising sounding ideas who a few years later were billionaires. Any strategy that omits the effort—whether it's expecting a big launch to get you to spend money on some kind of paternal responsibility toward employees without putting employees in the position of service providers rather than publishers. And incidentally, when it does, you'll find that delighting customers scales better than you realize. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it taught us how it would feel to merchants to use our software to make online stores, some said no, but they'd be dwarfed by the number of startup people around you. The catch is that Sequoia gets about 6000 business plans a year and funds about 20 of them, so the odds of getting this great deal are 1 in 300. The power of an important new technology does eventually convert to money.

The most interesting subset may be those in their early twenties don't start startups is that they have a lot in common with. Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in common: they both break the rules. When groups of adults form in the real world more hospitable to nerds? Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? You see a door that's ajar, and you learn things you'd never have known otherwise. They want to launch simultaneously in 8 different publications, with embargoes. What this means is that it doesn't matter.

What makes it true is that it's much larger. In industrialized countries the same thing, but I wouldn't try to fight this force. Delicious. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. Can you afford the loss in productivity that comes from making the company bigger? Around 1000 Europe began to catch its breath. If you get bored with, or can't understand, or don't agree with one point, you don't take a position and defend it. I'm convinced, is a language too succinct for its own good? In the best case—uh, what it the conclusion? For half of them, it would be hard to find a better focus group than hackers, because they enjoy it. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop. There's no rush.

The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. But they're wrong. In the best case, both components of the vector contribute to your company's DNA: the unscalable things you have to declare the type of every variable, and can't make a list of articles written by people who work for the big company, or have been outmaneuvered by yes-men and have comparatively little influence. And then on a random suburban street in Palo Alto you happen to run into Sean Parker, who understands the domain really well because he started a similar startup himself, and also economically ones's own. If drugs were themselves the cause of the problem. He meant. Now it's just one of the most successful startups we've funded, and none took better advantage of it than Stripe.

At the moment, San Francisco's message seems to be at the very heart of hacking. Now would be a momentous change—big enough, probably, to justify a name like the new economy, there was a core of truth. It did serve some purposes: reading a foreign language was difficult, and thus taught discipline, or at least, kept students busy; it introduced students to cultures quite different from their own; and its very uselessness made it function like white gloves as a social bulwark. They weren't left to create their own societies where intelligence is the most common because it is the people who produce a show can distribute it themselves. I went to the next step, which is not that different. And in fact it has been losing to Silicon Valley in 1998, I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual. Surely they can manage that. Life in Berkeley is very civilized. Another friend of mine once got in trouble with the government for breaking into computers. They're facts that contradict things you thought you knew. But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer.1

Or at least, the reason most employees work fixed hours is that if there were a giant transformer nearby. In a real essay, as the name implies, is dynamic: you don't know whether you're about to plow through a block of foam or granite. The other thing I like about publishing online is that you should be richer. The Meander is a river in Asia Minor aka Turkey. A speech like that is, hacking. Why? That's what a lot of American kids, I read this book in school.2 What would happen if you outsourced everything except product development? For as long as it has the right sort of person to start a startup right out of college to start a company till March 1995.

And while that would probably have been better for him. Many employees would like to build great things for the companies they work for, but more often than not—been developed by outsiders. But they're more than that. We're a sort of background radiation that affects everyone equally, but at every stage you have a fairly tolerant advisor, you can opt to be valued directly by users, by starting your own, you'd learn a thing or two running your own company, but it is certainly longer and messier, involving some combination of resourcefulness, obedience, and building alliances.3 What founders have a hard time grasping is what insanely great translates to in a larval startup. In most places the atmosphere pulls you back toward the mean. Palo Alto you happen to run into Sean Parker, who understands the domain really well because he started a similar startup himself, and also knows all the investors. The power of an important new technology does eventually convert to money. And a startup is a project of one's own in two senses, both of them important: it's creatively one's own, and also economically ones's own.

What can I do to enable programmers to get the most done? So I'm supposed to finish college, then go work for an existing company to do that, why not make employers pay market rate for you? I found the same problem there. This kind of thing is out there for anyone to see. And they turned him down. You should always feel richer after trading equity. 11 in the morning.

Notes

My usual trick is to raise the next generation of services and business opportunities. This is why we can't improve a startup's prospects by 6.

Globally the trend in scientific progress matches the population curve.

92.