#it's just a badly written run on sentence in english that immediately makes anyone who reads it writes it or generally has it in their head

[miraclemaya]

delta green scenario, or some other weird horror game, where you are sent in to investigate the mysterious disappearance of some famed writer that is believed to have ties with idk a nyarlathotep cult or something or other, but upon searching their estate, there is no evidence and it seems as if they jsut simply disappeared while working at their desk. a successful search roll reveals a piece of paper that when read makes you do a maybe a Pow roll or a Int roll. on failure, your agent ceases to exist and pops out of reality. on a success, you realize the paper was likely the last thing the writer wrote before seemingly popping out of existence.

[justtextmeoppa]

Got7′s reaction to their s/o is polish

Gif aren’t mine, credits to the owner! - M. 

Jaebum

Jaebum, along with Jinyoung, I think he would be the least inclined to date someone foreigner, but when his eyes were laid on his future S/O he didn't make any case to her nationality or the rest. It was just her.  

He had to get used to her heavy accent but the fact that she spoke some Korean helped the knowledge and after a few months, he finally managed to ask her to be his girlfriend. He would be the first to defend her when there are unpleasant episodes where people look at her badly for her foreign being, it would be the protection that she didn't have in the early months when she had moved to Korea.  

The quarrels for him would be hilarious for the simple reason that she would start talking in her native language and he would look at her completely lost, without even being able to get upset because he doesn't understand literally a word of what she is saying.  

Mark  

He's not Korean, so he would be along with BamBam and Jackson, that most comfortable to date someone of foreign.  

The way the smile of his future S/O turned him upside down made him realize that she was the right one, in some way. The difficult part is when there's the linguistic difference to become a wall, but fortunately English simplifies everything.  

Mark would spend hours asking her to speak her native language because he is fascinated, passing those few free moments he has to try to learn Polish in order to surprise her from time to time.  

Unlike Jaebum, he doesn't express his disappointment aloud when he hears someone insulting her because she's not Korean, but simply observes them with a lethal look and takes her away, hoping that she didn't understand what they said.  

And when she finally asks him to know her parents, of course, thanks to a call via Skype, he will make sure to know at least the best phrases in Polish to impress on them, even if she reassures him that they will love him just as she does. 

Jinyoung  

Jinyoung knew his future S/O to a fansign and was pleasantly surprised to see a girl with perfect skin, light hair, and eyes as blue as expressive. She smiled timidly, calling him "Jinyoung-ssi" by pronouncing his name with an accent that he found incredibly adorable. That's why when he writes his number on the Photobucket he smiles gently, hoping that she will call him back in some way.  

I think spending time with Jinyoung for her is a continual "Can you recommend me a few books in your language?"; "Why are you ashamed to speak it?", "I love the sound that has the" I love You" in Polish." And she would blush because she would never have thought that Jinyoung would notice someone like her.  

The sassy diva that is in him would come out in all its splendor in two moments while he is with her. When someone is trying shamelessly to hit on her or when someone insults her, considering that foreigners are not always well-seen. Would glancing from top to bottom the person in question and with a glacial kindness would ask "Do you need something? In case you can ask me."  

Without his knowledge he would learn polish, at least the basics, to have a decent conversation with her and make her understand how much he actually cares about her.  

Jackson  

This guy would be a kid in front of a candy store the day he meets his future S/O. Hearing her sweet voice speak Korean with a strange accent he melted internally and doesn't wait two seconds to ask her a date, date that she accepts with pleasure.  

He wouldn't even care to have a Polish girlfriend, but he would be proud of her every time they hang out together after their relationship has become, rightly, public. It would always be a "God, look at her how Beautiful she is"; "When she speaks her native language I literally melt "; "She promised me to take me to his hometown soon, I look forward to it."  

One thing that Jackson adores is to see her switch from Korean to polish within a few seconds, mainly because of the stress of the study and the work she has managed to keep. He wouldn't understand much of what she says in Polish, but he would still love it so much that he would squeeze her face starting peppering her with butterfly kisses making her calm immediately.  

Another thing that he adores is to hear her sing the lullaby that her Grandma sang to her as a child, calm him despite not knowing what she's singing.  

Youngjae  

This little ray of sunshine would melt in front of her. He has never seen anyone with eyes so expressive and above all full of sweetness. After his trip to New York he's more open speaking English and with foreign people, so when she approaches to ask if he wants something else with a little weak Korean he smiles and shakes his head, answering in English and seeing her relax immediately. The first few periods are then full of conversations in English, a bit ' stunted, and basic Korean but Youngjae doesn't care, since with her is everything fine.  

As soon as she tells him that she left her family in Poland to study Oriental languages he feels honored that she has chosen his own country, feeling even a little sad for her because she's far from her family.  

So he starts to help her with Korean while he begs her to teach him Polish, which she agrees to because it's adorable to see how he struggles to understand the simplest things but continues to try.  

The only thing he doesn't love since he's a little fluffy boy is when she yells at him in Polish during the fights because he doesn't know what to answer since he doesn't understand what's going on. So he just would say the only thing that after months he was able to learn.  

It's a whisper but the "I Love You" in Polish makes her stops every time, the guilt that runs through her veins and the apologies that follow immediately after.  

BamBam  

The first thing he would ask after you finally agreed to be his girlfriend, is "but can I find mooses in Poland??" and she would laugh because she couldn't have chosen a more dumb guy. The fact that she's Polish doesn't affect him at all, even he's foreign, so he understands too well the sense of suffocation that she's feeling not to have her family near.  

That is why every free moment he has he's with her, helping her with Korean and trying in some way to fill that emptiness that the absence of her family provokes. BamBam adores when in the morning, those times he wakes up in her apartment, he finds the small post it with written sentences in Polish and spends a few minutes translating, then melting when he understands the meaning of them. When their relationship becomes public, he immediately makes clear the fact that he doesn't want to read malicious comments on the nationality of the most important person to him because he knows what it means to be discriminated against for a racial difference.  

And the gift for the first anniversary would be a plane ticket, for two, for her hometown only because, rightly, he wants to see if he can find a damn moose in Poland.  

Yugyeom  

Our little Maknae would be the cool one, but before speaking a word to his future S/O it would take weeks. She's a new makeup artist and lives in Korea for two years, but everyone knows that she comes from Poland because her accent is still well audible when she's talking to someone. The more he looks at her and the more she's perfect to him, so it's only with the help of his Hyung he finally manages to speak to her.  

From that moment on it's all downhill, because the more she spends time with her and the more he feels at ease. He finds adorable her accent, as sometimes it must repeat twice the same thing because of her wrong pronunciation, how she must search in the dictionary how to write a word because it escapes from her mind. And he would tease her, obviously jokingly, offering to help her in spite of her refusal because "I'm independent, I can do it!!!!!!!!!"  

The day when her elder brother comes to see her is the day when Yugyeom understands that perhaps it's better to learn polish because he feels a small fish out of the water when the two begin to speak in their language. So he starts making more efforts, helped by Youngjae and BamBam who volunteer to help him, even if he doesn't get anywhere because rightly none of the three know anything about polish.  

Like Jaebum, would "beating" anyone who dares to insult her nationality or cultural difference, because he doesn't want her to feel uncomfortable about the stupidity of people.

[nautilusopus]

I’m feeling angry today so here are all the entries of the Compilation listed from least terrible to “Nojima and Nomura are incompetent hacks and should be fired”.

8. The Case of Denzel OVA is the most bearable entry in the Compilation, because it does what a sequel is supposed to do: expand upon the lore of the established setting while showing us more about the characters in it. It's a shame, because I think this also might be the least acknowledged entry in it, apart from maybe Before Crisis, perhaps partially because it has no official English dub. In this case, we get to see Denzel finally fleshed out beyond "the littlest geostigma patient that Cloud needs to win the big game for!" He joins up with a group of salvagers, and we see everyone trying to piece the world back together following the complete collapse of the government, the economy, their primary energy source, and the deaths of millions, where they're immediately set upon by disease and societal tensions between what used to be the "upper class" and the slum dwellers that have always had it this way, more or less. 

What the fuck, this is what Advent Children should have been entirely. Except with Cloud and his friends, and not Denzel, because screw Denzel, I wanna see what Avalanche has been up to. (We never get to see what Avalanche has been up to, and we never will.)

That being said, even Case of Denzel didn't manage to not fuck up royally, and it has a giant huge plothole in the form of forgetting to account for an entire goddamn year because it forgot Advent Children was set two years after the OG and not one. Whoops.

7. Advent Children Complete, which I'm treating as a separate entry from Advent Children -- Advent Children is a fucking mess with a nonsensical plot and wonky character motivations that, word of god, were literally just there because they figured it's how the fans wanted to be pandered to the best and not because they thought the motivations would be good or interesting (nothing like a content creator that openly states he thinks his target audience are morons!). It's slightly lower on the list than Advent Children vanilla because A) it looks slightly less ugly due to the Bluray release, B) Denzel's and Marlene's child actors got too old and they had to find younger ones for the redub, and these newer actors are actually better and significantly less obnoxious, and C) it has My Chemical Romance doing the theme song. 

These are all very shallow reasons, admittedly. You'd think it'd be lower because the added scenes help fill in some plot holes, but they were badly added scenes that meshed very poorly with the story at large, and because of that they actually created about as many new plot holes as they filled in. Shite movie. 

6. Advent Children vanilla. This is a good place to discuss why they're both on the bottom of the list, since they're pretty much the same movie. Shitty plot, characters are a sad shadow of what they used to be, and they did some weird thing with Cloud where he unlearns everything from the original game for the sake of cheap conflict and the fans try and defend it like it's actually deep and coherent. Not to mention some more bad decisions: Renu and Rude are good guys now and friends with Cloud and Tifa despite murdering their friends along with everyone else in Sector 7, Marlene is no longer Barret's daughter because ewwww, black people, and Tseng and Rufus are retconned back to life for literally no damn reason at all (they contribute nothing to the movie. Nothing. They even waste the dramatic reveal with the sheet by having him say "yeah it's me Rufus but I'm gonna wear this sheet for no reason and rip it off dramatically revealing ME, RUFUS SHINRA"). As far as I'm concerned they both just died again right after this movie. 

Basically, Advent Children was bad and stupid, but it was pointless as well, which in this case works to its advantage: we relearn the exact same lessons but in a shittier, more juvenile way, wind up at the exact same point we started at by the movie's conclusion, and get confirmation that there were, in fact, zero fucking stakes. At least it didn't take a scalpel to the franchise lore at large, like everything else on this list. 

5. The Last Order OVA is basically Square Enix frantically trying to save face after they've realised that, "Oh shit, our complete inability to proofread the first drafts of the scrips we've been running with have resulted in every single bit of VII lore introduced in these things wildly contradicting one another!" Basically, Last Order is a very pretty fight scene with Zack in it animated by Madhouse that occasionally tries to have a plot. This is the entry that began the handwave of "oh, all the entries in the Compilation are different because they're all told from a difrerent point of view! It's up to you do decide what really happened!" Lazy, bad, the beginning of the end. It looked nice, but I can't even enjoy the fight scene in the reactor properly because Zack doesn't immediately get bodied like he should've, which wouldn't have been very much fun to watch but at least would've made more sense; as well as the weird bit where they tried to imply Cloud was always infected with Jenova and mako-enhanced from birth? Somehow?

Also, the "Last Order" in question seems to be Zack telling Cloud to run. Cloud, who is in a vegetative state, and even if he weren't, can't even walk. Sure, he'll get right on that.

4. Case of Novels. These things suck and are terrible and look like they were written by a third grader. That's not just a "lol these are terrible" jab, either. I mean they literally read like they were written by a child with a very basic grasp of how to put sentences together. All of them are structured like so:

Tifa was very sad, because Cloud wasn't talking to her. Tifa thought that maybe Cloud felt sad because his friends were dead. Then Tifa thought about her adventures with her friends from Avalanche, the friends that she was best friends with two years ago. Cloud and Tifa had lots of adventures with them, but they were sad by the end of it because Aeris died, and then Tifa thought that Cloud was probably thinking about that too. Tifa felt bad about that. 

They are bad to look at, just objectively, regardless of the content in them. Case of Barret's is by far the worst in that regard, to the point where I'm not entirely certain I didn't read a bootleg fake version of it, because there is no way Square Enix would charge actual money for a product that was meant to be released to the masses and presented as canon to Final Fantasy VII. Except that they did. (I can also believe it because it further works towards the goal of erasing Barret from the story entirely, more on this later.)

As far as the actual story content, I'd probably have to say Case of Lifestream White/Black are the worst, due to some weird nonsense where Aeris just hangs out in the Lifestream and watches people like it's a spectral break room, and Sephiroth grumbles and pines over Cloud like a jilted ex-boyfriend because Nojima forgot there was anything else to his character. These, like Advent Children, are pointless, but they’re pointless to the extent that it’s absurd they even exist -- there's apparently an entire third Shinra bastard running around out there, and he has zero bearing on anything ever, and never will again. What Shinra bastard? Who? Kadaj murdered a whole town offscreen or something, but I guess it wasn’t relevant, don’t know why we brought it up.

3. Before Crisis. Japan-exclusive mobile game where Square stops even bothering trying to hide their contempt for anyone not in the "marketable niche" (i.e: all the white male characters ages 16-27) and begins writing them out of the story. It's not enough that they take his goddamn daughter away from him on the basis that he's prospecting oil, which is fucking stupid in and of itself -- this is the story that decides Avalanche, the group Barret founded in response to Shinra murdering everyone in his hometown because they didn't want any competition in the form of coal, wasn't actually even Barret's. It was some other guy's, and grrrr he was a terrorist even more terroristier than OG Avalanche was because moral ambiguity is gonna go over our audience’s heads so let’s just make it nice and cleanly black and white for them. I've ranted about this before, but it's even worse that the fans seem to have no problem incorporating these changes into everything, because who gives a rat's ass about Barret, right? There was some dumb thing about Nanaki finding a girl catdog to have those babies he has in the epilogue, and the Ravens, but it's all just more of the same introducing samefaced teeny boppers that the fans love so much at the expense of everything else.

2. SPEAKING OF WHICH, Crisis Core, the king of samefaced teeny boppers consuming the franchise. I flipflop a lot on whether this one is the worst or not, but in addition to having the same problem as Before Crisis times fifty, I consider it as bad as it was because you could tell it could have been really good, and that's honestly heartbreaking. The first hour or so kicks things off with a really good start, introducing Zack as this cocksure jackass trying to make a name for himself, and his mentor Catchphrase Man. Then around the point where Banora gets firebombed it all sort of goes downhill, and you realise a lot of the credit you were giving it wasn't actually due. Zack being a gloryhound for Shinra and believing Soldier to be a bastion of good wasn't supposed to be a character flaw like it should've. Genesis almost singlehandedly ruins the entire thing by eating all the screentime in the word with his obnoxious motivations that made zero sense, and in a flashback we see he was always a fucking tool so there's no reason to feel sorry for him in the first place. He's actually secretly responsible for the iconic Nibelheim scene, of all fucking things (GENESIS DID NIBELHEIM would make a good bumper sticker). Tifa gets thirty seconds of screentime. Cloud doesn't fare much better, which is a seriously huge problem considering he's the goddamn protagonist of the entire franchise. He gets a single 49 second cutscene of them establishing "okay he's best friends with Zack" and then nothing else, ever, unless you want to count the three emails he sends him that you could tell were supposed to lead to more bonding cutscenes that were ultimately cut for more GENESIS, YOU LOVE HIM SO MUCH RIGHT GUYS??? Aeris fares even worse than Cloud and Tifa combined, being barely in it, and Square having decided that Zack actually made all her life decisions for her. That's right -- literally everything about her character? Zack did it. Fuck you. 

It's also this high up for what it represents, I suppose -- in the fanbase, you see a whole lot of "Well, Cloud lost Zack and Aeris so now he has no friends and nothing else to live for in this world because he didn't really care about anyone else besides them". It seems everyone forgot that not only was there more to Cloud’s character than "his friends are dead so he’s sad” and his friends being dead was only a small part of it, but that there were seven other people we spent about sixty hours establishing in no uncertain terms that they loved him unconditionally and that he felt the same way. Crisis Core is what finally got people to start disregarding the rest of the main fucking cast from the OG, and it was very, very deliberate. An old unwashed man in his late thirties jaded about his future in spaceflight, a catdog with daddy issues, a black man with a character arc revolving around fatherhood, a triple agent paper-pusher that had a furry phase right in the middle of his midlife crisis, two women that are both alive and have agency of their own, and hell, even a young man with severe psychological issues that had a very strong bond with all of these people even though most of them aren't young and attractive white people and realises he can count on them all for support, are not as marketable as the cast of Crisis Core. Square knows this. You can't wring any sex appeal out of "happy supportive environment" or "female characters", since most of the fanbase tends to be straight women in their late teens and early twenties. So, everyone in both those categories gets shafted. And, as mentioned, the fans seem all to happy to run with this, given the overwhelming amount of material that seems to disregard everyone else in Cloud's life that wasn't Zack (and sometimes Aeris gets acknowledged because all she's good for anymore is a corpse to motivate Cloud) as unimportant, and not really his friends. 

The fact that the entire game seems to undermine the original's tone very badly almost seems like a nitpick at this point next to very intentional racism and sexism and pandering, but I'm gonna bring that up too. The new version of Zack's death scene flies directly in the face with how they were handled in the original game, and is more in line with Cait Sith's than anything else's -- that death isn't heroic, or glorious, or profound. It's just sad and fucking hurts, and it's something that happens. They made that pretty clear the first time around when he just gets gunned down on a cliff in complete silence. You can practically hear the "so it goes" in the background. Naturally, this time around they gave him an entire speech about dreams an honour and then when he dies he goes to heaven (on a planet with no heaven) and he's successfully become a hero. Fucking bravo. Or the bit where, as has been pointed out, you have a wacky scene where Zack meets a young Yuffie, and she skips off amongst the corpses of her people that Zack himself just finished making in the name of glory and imperialism (not a character flaw, though! He’s a good guy!). There's an astounding lack of self-awareness in everything the game does. 

AND IT COULD HAVE BEEN SO GOOD, and that's why I still debate whether or not it belongs in the Worst spot or not. It could have been great to see a non 49-second version of the friendship that eventually motivated Zack to die for Cloud, but then they forgot to write it, because why write that when you could have these four cutscenes with Genesis? It would've been great to see Aeris and her relationship with running from Shinra that caused her to grow up street smart and how that caused Zack to maybe question Shinra's motivations, but them they forgot to write it because HEY LOOK HERE'S SOME MORE WING SYMBOLISM WITH ANGEAL DO YOU GET IT THERE'S ONLY ONE OF THEM AND HIS NAME IS SPELLED ALMOST LIKE ANGEL, I'M WORKING WITH GENESIS NOW HIS NAME MEANS BEGINNING LOL. It could have been great to see Tifa getting her start with Avalanche, but after her obligatory cameo in Nibelheim she's swallowed into the void again because they forgot she was ever anything besides Cloud's love interest, and fuck you we gotta show you this Genesis scene in Modeoheim. It could have been great to meet a younger Barret, and wonder how at odds he would've been with Zack, a man who's been drinking the Soldier kool-aid for years, but instead we got Genesis reciting poetry. It could have been great to see the workings of Soldier before it all went to shit, but instead we got fucking goddamn Genesis. Genesis Genesis Genesis. 90% of the screentime in this game that should've gone to developing Zack's character for one fucking second, let alone other things, just gets eaten up by Genesis. God I hate Genesis.

1. Dirge of Cerberus.

I'll try and keep this brief because I can go on about Dirge of Cerberus all fucking day if you let me. 

If Crisis Core is terrible because it had the shadows of great ideas that were terribly mishandled in the name of turning a profit, Dirge is sort of its opposite, in that at no point did anything even remotely resembling a good idea come anywhere near the building this was being written in during the entirety of its production. It's bad. Thoroughly bad. There are no redeeming qualities. It's ugly, it plays badly, 90% of it is cutscenes* and the remaining 10% is invisible walls, the plot is a fucking mess by anyone's standards whether you're familiar with the franchise or not, it is the reigning fucking king of tone issues, the design choices are the worst of what Nomura has to offer by a country mile, and the characters are the worst Square has ever made in the Final Fantasy series. 

Vincent is the protagonist, and since he just wants a nap and is too cool to care that means you don't really give a rat's ass about what's going on either, which you wouldn't have anyway, because Dirge's plot isn't so much rife with plot holes as it is a giant, gaping hole, where bits of plot occasionally drift by, mangled beyond recognition by the plane crash in 1976 that claimed their lives. Did you know there was an even more secreter army living under Midgar that somehow survived the entire city being demolished with cosmic hellfire, a pandemic with no cure, and a giant sword battle dropping more debris on them? Did you know Hojo actually didn't die, he invented the internet in 30 seconds in his death throes and then invented the technology to upload minds to computers, AKA created a fucking goddamn technological singularity, and then uploaded himself in a .zip file until he could blow up the world for shits and giggles completely unrelated to anything even remotely having to do with Jenova? Did you know Lucrecia wasn't actually a terrible person that willingly carried Hojo's child and injected it with science juice for the sake of their careers, but was actually a really nice lady and is really sorry you guys, and was just an unwilling womb for Sephiroth to be birthed from, and was pretty much the Madonna? Did you know that apparently the Actual Goddamn Apocalypse wasn't enough to convince the Planet it was dying, but someone stabbing a few thousand people was? Did you know Reeve decided to call the events of the main game the "Jenova Wars" because he doesn't actually know what a war is? Did you know mako actually makes you live forever instead of giving you brain damage and killing you? Did you know the Lifestream is pretty much the same thing as the internet? Did you know Vincent was a paedophile? Did you know someone decided Genesis still needed to be fucking alive? 

Oh yeah, and also there are such stellar characters such as Red the Red, Blue the Blue, White the Clean, Black the I-Have-A-Jockstrap-Taped-Over-My-Mouth-Because-Fuck-You-Why-Not, and Orange the Clear, who is physically 9 years old but mentally 19 so it's totally not paedophilia if we have a weird romance between her and Vincent (never mind that if we're going by that logic, you now have a 19 year-old dating a 61 year-old, which is... not a whole lot better.) 

And hey, remember that one scene where Shalua completely unnecessarily died by holding a door she could've easily ducked through, and then she pissed herself upon death, and the game took the time to show the piss puddle, and Yuffie was super upset about it despite the fact that they never interacted even once but the writers forgot about that, and then after all that shit she didn't even die in her own melodramatic death scene, and then she did die anyway at the end of the game and all you can think about is the piss and god Shalua is so fucking pointless and looks so fucking stupid. Look at this hot mess: 

She’s a scientist! Or something. 

Even by Final Fantasy standards these designs are fucking ridiculous.

There is nothing redeeming about this game. It's like a gift that keeps on giving -- every time I look back at it, I discover a new plothole that I didn't catch the first time before. It's easier to hate than Crisis Core, though, which just makes me sad. At least Dirge never had anything going for it in the first place. I paid two bucks for my copy and I still feel ripped off.

* Okay, that’s an exaggeration -- 50% of it is cutscenes. Four hours out of an eight hour game is cutscenes. Do you realise how fucking many cutscenes that is? It’s a lot. (And yet not one of them has any plot in them HEYOOOO)

[5hfanfiction]

Please Notice (Chapter 1)

Summary: Camila Cabello has made Lauren’s life a living hell ever since freshman year of high school. In her junior year, Lauren finally meets someone who makes her feel less alone. The problem? She lives thousands of miles away. For over a year, Juliet has been Lauren’s rock. Lauren thinks she’s finally found the girl she’s meant to be with - but her friends aren’t so sure. In fact, they’re not even entirely convinced that she’s real.

[ 01:28 ] Can I call you?

[ 01:29 ] Aren’t you at school?

[ 01:29 ] Ditched. Please? I need you.

Lauren bites her lip, staring at her phone screen and trying not to cringe at how desperate she sounds.

Phone calls are rare occasions between the two of them and Lauren very seldom asks about it. There’s some kind of unspoken barrier there that tells her she isn’t supposed to. The times they have called one another were very spur of the moment, and about ninety-five percent of the time Juliet asks. Of course, Lauren always obliges.

Today, she just really needs to talk to her.

She needs to hear the sound of her voice that she’s almost forgotten. Even if it’s static-y and warped through the phone lines, it’s still Juliet, and she’s still the only person Lauren wants to talk to when she has a day like this.

Lauren’s not really sure why she’s reacting so badly to the day’s events; her friends have been much harsher on her and Camila’s treatment has been much worse. So why was today the day she decided to let her emotions get the better of her? She was supposed to be in history class, bored out of her mind and day dreaming about a life beyond high school - a life with no Camila, and hopefully a lot more Juliet.

Instead, Lauren had skipped class and drove herself home, knowing full well she’d be getting an earful tomorrow when her friends saw she didn’t show to her seventh period English class that they all shared. 

After months of just taking it, the Juliet criticism combined with Camila’s treatment had become too much in the moment. That horrible sense of dread washed over her and she had to leave. She had to go. She had to be anywhere but there.

But now she’s home, and she doesn’t feel any better. 

She needs Juliet.

[ 01:34 ] I’m sorry, babe. I can’t. I’m with my parents. Why? What happened?

Lauren’s face falls and her stomach drops in the worst of ways.

She’d been hoping that for once, she could do things on her terms. That she could need Juliet and Juliet would be there, just like Lauren was. 

If Juliet ever messaged her asking to call, saying that she had a bad day, Lauren would drop everything and pick up her phone. There’s no question in her mind. Anything that was happening could be put on hold, because Juliet needed her and Lauren would go to the ends of the Earth to make Juliet feel safe.

She throws her phone down onto the bed, pacing around her room as anger slowly fills her body. 

Why does Juliet get to decide when they do and don’t talk? Just for once, can’t Lauren dictate anything that happens in their relationship?

It’s not selfish to want to talk to your girlfriend every once in a while. And shouldn’t Juliet want to talk to her? They’re in a relationship. A long distance one, at that. Phone calls and video chatting are the only forms of verbal communication they have - and Juliet doesn’t have a webcam, nor the means to FaceTime, so phone calls are their only option.

Lauren knows that she and Juliet had an agreement not to show one another pictures of their faces, that they should fall in love blindly, but she is in love, and shouldn’t a year and a half be enough time to have proven her sincerity? She’s ready. Juliet says she’s ready - but with one condition. It has to be live. She wants the first time they see each other to be real. Not just a simple photograph. Real. 

Lauren can appreciate that, but there’s been no progress made. Juliet can’t buy a webcam on her own, and every time Lauren offers to pitch in, she’s completely shot down. Lauren’s been extremely patient, has never interrogated Juliet or questioned her authenticity, but days like these make it really hard.

She can deal with not seeing her for a couple of months - after all, she’s gone this long, what’s a little while longer? But she needs something else. Something tangible. Something other than voiceless instant messages that could be written by anyone anywhere. It’s so impersonal, and to be honest, Lauren’s never been much of a texter. Or IMer. Whatever the term may be.

She’s one of those put the phone down and take a look at the world types. Not that Lauren doesn’t accept or appreciate technology, she just thinks it’s abused in today’s day and age. She’s okay with a few texts here and there and some brief computer time, but she’s always been the kind of person who lives in reality. Not online. That is, until her entire world became only accessible to her through computer and phone screens.

Lauren’s adopted a different lifestyle for Juliet. One that includes the obsessive checking of her phone and computer for messages. She doesn’t go out as much, and prefers not to venture anywhere she’s sure won’t have Internet connection.

What if Juliet gets hurt or upset or just wants to talk and Lauren’s not there? She could miss a phone call opportunity or even worse, just a chance to talk to her girlfriend.

Her friends have noticed this change in her, and it’s probably one of the reasons they’re so against Lauren and Juliet’s relationship. Even Lauren has to admit she’s changed a lot of the things that made her her to be with Juliet. But these are all necessary sacrifices she’s willing to make. Love is all about compromise, and Lauren’s more than willing to adapt if it means keeping Juliet in her life.

So why can’t Juliet have the same courtesy? Why can’t she bend a little? Why is everything always on her terms? They can only call when she’s able to, they can’t video chat because she doesn’t have a webcam, the possibility of them meeting isn’t even a prospect because she refuses to give Lauren her address - and California’s a pretty big place. She wouldn’t know the first place to look.

Lauren’s tired. She’s tired of giving and not getting anything in return. Tired of Camila and tired of her friends and tired of wanting someone who can’t be touched.

But mostly she’s angry. Angry that she’s treated this way. That she’s done nothing to Camila Cabello and she still walks around school shoving and taunting her like she’d run her dog over. That her friends can’t trust her to make decisions on her own. That maybe she can’t make decisions on her own. That she’s having a shitty day and her girlfriend won’t even talk to her. That everything in her life has turned out this way and she can’t do anything to change it.

She finally stops pacing and walks over to her phone, fully intent on giving Juliet a piece of her mind. As rare as phone calls were, fights between the two of them were even fewer, but this felt almost inevitable.

Lauren takes a seat on the edge of the bed, grabbing her phone and seeing she has quite a few unread messages. All from Juliet.

[ 01:47 ] Baby?

[ 01:52 ] Laur, I’m sorry.

[ 01:52 ] Believe me, if I could call you, I would.

[ 01:59 ] God, I’d do anything to hear your voice right now.

[ 02:09 ] Please don’t be mad… 

[ 02:21 ] Are you okay? Please answer me.

[ 02:34 ] I’m sorry. I’m saving up, okay? I’m gonna get a webcam and we can Skype whenever you want and you’ll be able to see in my eyes how in love with you I am.

[ 02:45 ] I know you’re mad at me, but please just respond and let me know you’re okay. I’m getting worried.

[ 02:48 ] If you really need me to, I’ll call, okay? I’m with family but I’ll go to the bathroom and we can talk. Okay?

A wave of guilt instantly washes over Lauren and just like that, all of her anger has dissipated. 

She’s starting to realize how much of an ass she was being, and all at once she’s extremely grateful that she hadn’t lashed out at Juliet like she’d been planning to.

None of this was her fault.

It wasn’t Juliet’s fault that Lauren’s friends didn’t believe she’s real. It wasn’t her fault that she had a bad day. It wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t talk. And it definitely wasn’t her fault that Camila Cabello existed.

With a sigh of irritation, directed only at herself, Lauren shakes her head and messages her girlfriend back.

[ 02:56 ] No, I’m sorry. I’m okay. You really don’t have to do that. I’m just… having a tough day. You make it better, though.

There’s an immediate response, and Lauren chews her lower lip anxiously wondering if the other girl had just been sitting there staring at her phone, waiting for a reply.

[ 02:56 ] Are you sure? I want to be there for you.

[ 02:57 ] I’m sure, and you are. Did you mean what you said about the webcam?

[ 02:57 ] Of course I did. And I meant the part about my eyes, too. And being in love with you. Because I am. Totally in love with you. 

Lauren giggles softly, amazed at how easy it is for Juliet to turn her mood around. No one’s ever had this kind of effect on her, and while a little scary, it’s a good feeling.

She imagines it’d bother her a lot more if it were someone else. But it’s Juliet, and Juliet has this incredible way of making Lauren feel safer thousands of miles away than anyone else could with their arms wrapped around her.

[ 02:58 ] I’m in love with you too, dork.

[ 02:29 ] I’m not the dork, you’re the dork, dork.

[ 02:29 ] The fact that you just used dork that many times in one sentence proves that you’re the dork.

[ 02:30 ] Fine. But I’m the luckiest dork in the world. 

The day goes on with no more noteworthy occurrences, but Lauren falls asleep that night with her phone in her hand and a smile on her face thinking that maybe she’s the luckiest dork in the world.

But, as it usually goes for Lauren, that happiness is extremely short-lived.

She wakes up to forty-six unread messages - one from Juliet, and the rest divided up between Dinah, Ally and Normani in a group chat they’d created forever ago.

She immediately sits up in her bed, confused and concerned. She checks the time. She isn’t late, so there’s no reason for them to all be texting her like this.

Swallowing the lump beginning to form in her throat, Lauren opens her phone and checks the messages.

[ 06:23 - Dinah ] Cabello’s gone too far this time. Whatever you have with that ‘Juliet’ chick, end it. She’s one of them, Lo.

a/n: dun dun dun… sorry about the little cliffhanger there, you’ll definitely learn more about that next chapter. until then, i’d love to see all of your speculations :p also!! i was super overwhelmed by all the positive comments and you guys wanted some more, so i’m givin it to ya. thank you to everyone who’s taken an interest. i’ve got lots of plans for this story and will be continuing it as a series. sorry if this was a little short, the next chapter will be much longer. this was just kinda givin you some insight on lauren’s feelings and the juliet/lauren dynamic, so let me know how you liked it! hope you all have a lovely day x

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT VC

Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. A rounds already are high res. This way of framing the question probably guarantees failure. I'd say this if I were talking to a friend what you just wrote. The bad news is that I got over 100 other responses listing the surprises they encountered. It's amazing how easily you can reach out to people and get immediate feedback.1 Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Stanford students are more entrepreneurial than Yale students, but not because of some difference in their characters; the Yale students just have fewer examples. After a few seconds it struck me that what we'll end up calling these things is tablets. A hacker working on some programming language or operating system might likewise be able to do the same thing with detective stories.

Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of the investors we dealt with were unprofessional, didn't seem to be many universities elsewhere that compare with the best in America, at least in the US this is another rule that isn't very strictly enforced. It also means no one university will be good enough to spread by word of mouth, like Google did. This kind of work you do for money, and another for love.2 And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed. Immigration policy is one area where a competitor could do better.3 One founder said this should be your approach to all programming, not just startups, and partly because the stresses are so much greater, and partly because the stresses are so much greater, and partly it's yet another consequence of the fact that most good startup ideas seem bad: If you are persistent, even problems that seem out of your control i. European hackers is simply that different investors, they help them break the sort of career a high school student would choose.4

It's in your interest, because you'll be one of them. It's completely pervasive. What is going on here?5 Don't worry what people will say about them.6 Hackers, likewise, can learn to program. Running a startup is the opinion of other investors.7 So no matter how good your growth is, you can never do more than start to count on it. For over a decade, every hacker who'd ever had to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that, Stripe would have been reluctant to hire anyone who didn't. Why?8 And yet a lot of explaining to do.9

Running a business is so much more enjoyable now. Perhaps one day computer science will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component parts. Does that make written language worse?10 We still don't know if that's necessary, but it won't be if things change as much in the next 50 years as they did in the first couple generations. And there is no need to worry.11 What I'm saying is that open-source hacking is all about.12 As you go into a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. It's so important to launch fast that it may be better to think of others. Working on our startup, I think. Another area in which you could easily surpass Silicon Valley is too far from San Francisco. They can usually only summon up the activation energy to start a startup by just writing code.

Creating wealth is not a problem for big companies, because they have no redundancy. The principle extends even into programming. If you want to do, so here is another place where startups have an advantage is that they overvalue ideas. Which feigning certitude impressed investors.13 Well, we humans are as conspicuously different from other animals as the anteater. When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software that makes money and the kind that's interesting to write. The border between architecture and engineering is not sharply defined, but it's there.14

Startups are marginal. Which means n i-1/i. But hacking can certainly be more than just that some startup might have a problem firing someone they needed to. I am more fulfilled in my work than pretty much any of my friends who did not start companies. The famously rigid labor laws hurt every company, but startups especially, because startups have the least time to spare for bureaucratic hassles. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know as in write down precisely what you'll need to do to get the same price.15 But even so a lot of startups, which makes it more work to read. But I'm not too worried yet.16 On historical time scales, what we have now is just a prototype.

Immigration policy is one area where a competitor could do better.17 If you're small, they don't use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to have for lunch.18 A friend of mine visiting India sprained her ankle falling down the steps in a railway station.19 Ok, so written and spoken language are different. Founders of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause.20 When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know first whether a startup is not like having a job or being a student, because it has been independently confirmed by all the other makers. So instead of doing what they really want to do that is to implement it.21 Professional athletes know they'll be pulled if they play badly for just a couple games. 1%-4. Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that work means working for a big company or a VC fund. I admit that hacking doesn't seem as cool in its glory days as it does now.

Notes

Of the remaining outcomes don't have one.

Considering yourself a scientist. Now to people he knew. I was a company if the quality of the delays and disconnects between founders and realized they were to work like blacklists, I use. The reason for the coincidence that Greg Mcadoo, our contact at Sequoia, was one cause of poverty I just wasn't willing to provide this service, and the exercise of stock.

So as a phone that is exactly the opposite.

This is almost always bullshit. You can safely write off all the red counties.

If that were the richest buyers are, but those are the only companies smart enough not to stuff them with comments. San Jose is a bit. We didn't let him off, either as truth or heresy.

Who continued to live inexpensively as their companies till about a week before.

Hypothesis: Any plan in which I deliberately pander to readers, though sloppier language than I'd use to develop server-based software will make it to get a definite plan to make a living playing at weddings than by the fact by someone else start those startups.

Charles Darwin was 22 when he was a test of intelligence or wisdom.

Indiana University Bloomington 1868-1970. This is an instance of a heuristic for detecting whether you can eliminate, do not try too hard to think of a place to exchange views. False positives are not in 1950. Users had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard since 1851, became in 1876 the university's first professor of English Studies.

Copyright owners tend to damp this effect, at one remove: it has to be a trivial enhancement of HTTP, to allow multiple urls in a way to explain how you'd figure out yet whether you'll succeed. As one very successful YC founder told me they do care about. According to a study by the fact that, because by definition if the similarity extended to returns. Software companies can even be symbiotic, because for times over a series.

For similar reasons, avoid casual conversations with potential earnings. If anyone wanted to go and steal the company is common, to take a conscious effort to be tweaking stuff till it's yanked out of customers is that they've already made it over a series of numbers that are only doing angel deals to generate series A investor has a spam probabilty of.

Of course, or want tenure, avoid casual conversations with VCs suggest it's roughly correct to say that was more because they are bleeding cash really fast. Even in English, our contact at Sequoia, was one of the flock, or a 2004 Mercedes S600 sedan 122,000 legitimate emails. But the question of whether public company not to: if you start fundraising, because we know nothing about the same town, unless it was very much better is a significant number. Founders are tempted to ignore what your GPA was.

If it's 90%, you'd get ten times as much difference to a can of soup. Macros very close to 18% of GDP, despite dramatic changes in tax rates don't tell 5 year olds the truth about the other students, heirs, professors, politicians, and this destroyed all traces.

In practice sufficiently expert doesn't require one to be room for another. Applets seemed to Aristotle the core: the resources they expend on the scale that Google does.

Rice and Beans for 2n olive oil or butter n yellow onions other fresh vegetables to a partner from someone they respect. In desperation people reach for the desperate and the war on. Obviously signalling risk is also the highest returns, like play in a time machine.

0001. But core of the year x in a spiral. In practice formal logic is not even in their voices will be familiar to anyone who has them manages to find a kid and as we use for good and bad technological progress, but rather that if you have more skeletons than squeaky clean dullards, but except for money. Realizing that much better to make money for other people thought of them.

What you're looking for initially is not a big company. See particularly the mail by Anton van Straaten on semantic compression. 3/4 of their shares when the audience at an ever increasing rate to impress are not very discerning.

Within an hour just to steal the company is Weebly, which was open to newcomers because it might actually be bad if that means service companies are run like Communist states. That's one of its identity. When investors can't make up their minds, they made much of a social network for x instead of uebfgbsb. But politicians know the inventor of something the automobile, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev guys should be.

Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them Google Video is badly designed. A fundraising is a site not as facile a trick as it needs to, in one of these groups, you waited too long to launch a new SEC rule issued in 1982 rule 415 that made it to profitability before your initial funding runs out. But a couple hundred years ago.

Parker, William R.

Ian Hogarth suggests a good product. But wide-area bandwidth increased more than half of the big acquisition offers most successful ones tend not to. But the result is higher prices. Angels and super-angels will snap up stars that VCs play such games, books, newspapers, or boards, or grow slowly tend not to: if he ever made a million dollars out of their predecessors and said in effect why can't you be more like a body cavity search by someone else.

Thanks to Ron Conway, Bill Yerazunis, Qasar Younis, Dan Friedman, John Gruber, and Paul Buchheit for inviting me to speak.