#other computing metaphors need to get on email's level

[qwantzfeed]

are the wireframes green and rendered at 15 FPS?  please: of COURSE the wireframes are green and rendered at 15 FPS.  does anyone have any ACTUAL questions?

[captcas]

Too Many Minutes

Rolling onto her side, she grabs her phone out of habit. There’s a spark of hope settled deep in her chest before she opens it to a screen empty of notifications beyond a few spam emails. Why would he greet her with his usual good morning? It’s not going to be a good morning… she hasn’t had a good morning in three weeks.

Three weeks, four days, and twelve hours. read on ao3

If it weren’t for the pounding in her head and uncomfortably dry tears on her cheeks, Emma would’ve thought this was all just a bad dream.

“It’s not the fact that you’re scared, Emma… I– you know I understand being scared. It’s that– it’s just so easy for you to– you’d rather give into that fear than fight it together. I thought we were stronger than that.”

She hates when he calls her Emma.

Rolling onto her side, she grabs her phone out of habit. There’s a spark of hope settled deep in her chest before she opens it to a screen empty of notifications beyond a few spam emails. Why would he greet her with his usual good morning? It’s not going to be a good morning… she hasn’t had a good morning in three weeks.

Three weeks, four days, and twelve hours.

Her body shifts into the autopilot she’s relied on since he walked out the door. She starts crying again, this time the tears collecting at her feet with the hot water from her shower. Logically, she knows she can’t see the individual tears, but as they go down the drain with the rest of the water she can’t help but feel it’s a metaphor.

A really shitty metaphor.

This is her new routine, wake up, check her phone, cry in the shower, head to work, and spend every waking moment reliving that night until she falls back asleep from utter exhaustion. Her friends don’t even know they broke up– if they did Emma surely would have more than spam emails to delete each morning. Killian must be leaving that up to her; she broke it, it’s only fair she has to pick up the pieces.

Sometimes the anger sets in. He promised he wouldn’t walk out, he said he’d be there, he promised it was them against the world— maybe doubting a promise is the easiest way to break it.

Emma walks into the kitchen to grab some coffee before heading into the center– their center. When she started at the Boston Youth Community Center, she didn’t intend to fall in love with the cheeky, handsome outdoor rec coordinator. She also didn’t intend on them working together so well that, when Marco retired, they were an obvious fit for co-directors.

That seemed like a good idea at the time.

He took the first week off, but then moved offices without so much as a word to her. He’s now on the main floor with the kids instead of the office level next to her. Killian swore to the board it was to be more involved but Emma knows it was the furthest away he could get from her without quitting.

Killian isn’t a quitter.

Emma apparently is.

Unlocking her office door, his absence is felt just as much as the empty space in her bed. The office is littered with their memories, work and otherwise. She hasn't been able to bring herself to take down the picture frames– the action feeling too finite. It’d be the next step in making all of this real. At best, she’s been able to put one face down for a few hours before she misses his artificial presence and sets it upright again.

The picture next to her computer is of the day he proposed. Just them on the couch watching The Office when (in his words) the need to propose just came over him– he’d had the ring for months. Emma’s never agreed to something so quick– any and all hesitation completely trumped by overwhelming joy at being chosen by someone forever.

Now, it’s four months later and the stress of wedding planning and the reality of what forever actually means all bombarded her one day and she snapped.

Three weeks, four days, and fourteen hours ago.

She wonders to herself if Killian already packed all these memories away. He moved offices, and she supposes it’d be weird for him to put their photos back up…

Emma jumps at a knock on her door and quickly composes herself before rushing to answer it, “Sorry, yes, coming!” She wipes a stray tear from her cheek and turns the handle. She didn’t expect to find him standing there, “Killian?”

He looks just as awful as she does– and that’s saying something because handsome is an understatement when it comes to Killian. While Emma expected that to be comforting, it only makes her feel worse. They’ve always fed off one another, their codependency one of the few that even Mary Margaret, a trained psychiatrist, called healthy. Neither of them grew up with anyone they could depend on, not long enough to form any sort of healthy connection– not until each other.

“May I come in, please?” His voice startles her. After being alone with only the memory of it, she realizes it’s much more beautiful in person. She knew she missed it, but she didn’t realize how much.

Killian raises an eyebrow, something playful she didn’t expect, before walking into the office without the permission he asked for. He beelines for the photo on her desk, the one that caused her tears only moments before. He pauses for a moment before turning towards her, “You still have them up.”

The shocked tone of his voice feels like a dagger to her chest, the fact he thought she’d be able to move past them so quickly. “Uh, yeah. I–”

She’s not good with words so she leaves it at that. There are so many things she wants to say, apologies and explanations and confessions of love. For three weeks, four days, fourteen hours, and nine minutes she’s been rehearsing everything she should have said but the minute she’s presented with the opportunity she freezes.

Emma watches as he traces his thumb over the picture of them before she glances towards his eyes. He’s been crying, maybe not this minute but she knows that hint of red at the corner of his eye– the anniversary of Liam’s death hitting him harder each year that passes. At 34 this year, he officially turned a year older than his brother and there’s something about that fact which made everything monumentally harder and caused that flash of red to remain there for weeks. She swore to herself she’d never cause him that kind of pain.

More empty promises.

He glances over at her and Emma realizes she has no concept for how long they’ve been standing there or at what point she started to cry. A soft gasp escapes him when she bats a tear away with her left hand, “You’re still wearing your ring.”

He doesn’t question it, just states it like a fact he can’t believe.

“Because, more than anything, I’m still yours.” Emma isn’t sure where it came from, eloquent confessions of feelings and emotions typically reserved for Killian. She stumbles on the follow up, “If you— could you still want me… I mean–”

He stands there taking her in for what feels like an eternity. The regret and guilt Emma’s built up in her chest for three weeks threatening to escape through her tear ducts if she has to wait for his answer much longer.

She doesn’t.

Before she can turn away, he’s wrapping her in a deep kiss. A weight lifts and it feels like every light in the world turns on the moment they connect once more. Emma knows this isn’t a fix all, that after the initial high of being together again, there’s going to be long talks, and tearful battles, but if the last three weeks, four days, fourteen hours, and who the hell knows how many minutes have taught her anything, it’s that any life with Killian is better than even a day without him. They break from the kiss and Killian leaves another on her forehead. His hand absentmindedly finds hers and begins to play with the intricate diamond band on her finger.

“Killian, I–” He kisses her again, stopping her apology. She closes her eyes, willing the tears of relief to stay put as she leans into his prosthetic when he brushes some fallen hair from her face. As she feels his body shift in front of her, she opens her eyes to find him looking straight back at her.

“I know, Swan. Me too. But not here, alright? We’ll have plenty of time to talk, so for now I’d like to enjoy holding my fiance for the first time in three weeks.”

She loves when he calls her Swan.

Killian pulls her in for a tight hug and Emma’s auto-calculator seems to speak for her, “Three weeks, ten days, fourteen hours and–”

“And too many minutes, love.” He laughs as he finishes her sentence and Emma chokes out a giggle through her tears. She feels foolish for ever doubting that when Killian promised forever that he hadn’t thought of the implications– that he was anything like the people who left scars on her through her entire life.

They end up getting married the next day, a private celebration meant solely for them. It was Emma’s idea, her way of proving to Killian that she wasn’t going to run again. At first he was wary, big rash decisions not typically in his wheelhouse, but when she put on the wedding dress she’d picked out with Mary Margaret months before he’d even proposed, she saw a sort of understanding shift into his gaze. This is something they’ve both wanted for longer than they’ve been letting on— both too scared to make the move, to risk getting hurt again. Killian makes an appointment at the courthouse and they pay the extra $12 for a random witness from the courthouse staff. Afterwards, they met their friends at the bar like they do every Friday evening.

It only took one hour and thirty-three minutes for Mary Margaret to notice the ring on Killian’s right hand and another twelve minutes for her to convince them they needed to throw a big celebration.

Emma breathes a sigh of relief that night when she hears Killian’s soft breathing beside her for the second time in– well, too long. There’s such a fine line between want and need. For both of them, it just took a harsh reminder that when you realize want and need are one in the same, you better fight for it.

[faejilly]

Let’s Go Steal Some... Magic?

This is entirely the fault of a prompt from the Hunter's Moon Discord: “A Leverage Shadowhunter crossover where Alec gets desperate enough to hire a band of good thieves who’re known for being able to steal back ANYTHING to steal back Magnus’ magic.” 

I take no responsibility whatsoever for any of this, but man, I had a great time writing it, so I hope you enjoyed reading it, too 😅 (With an extra thanks to @greentealycheejelly for double-checking it at least sort of made sense.) 

Alec knows more about the mundane world than most people realize. He may, in fact, have helped encourage the impression that he's ignorant; it's not like he's been impressed by most of what he knows, so it's easier to just... not deal with it when he doesn't have to.

But there's nothing anyone in the Shadow World can do about this, so maybe... maybe it's time to try something else.

Only he's not sure where to start. He's going to have to ask for help.

Not his favorite thing, but. This is for Magnus. He'd do worse for Magnus.

Lindsay's probably his best bet, she's the one who tracks the bots and AIs that the Clave has keeping as much of an eye on the internet as anyone can manage, hoping to catch those mundanes who might cross the line from figuring out that what they're seeing is because of the Sight, into trying to do something like summoning demons or playing with dark magic.

Her reports on some of the conclusions their machine learning algorithms come up with are sometimes the highlight of his week. He liked the one that tried to figure out which folk songs were based on real adventures with the Seelie and Unseelie Courts versus the ones written by people who'd drank too much or gotten stuck in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for a longer than usual winter.

So he asks her to come see him. She looks, unsurprisingly, deeply nervous when he closes his office door behind her, and he sighs as he sits down in one of the armchairs rather than behind his desk. "I need your help, please."

She doesn't look any comforted by that comment, but she sits across from him, and refrains from either glaring or babbling, so that's something.

"I need." He stops. He's not sure what he needs. "I need to think outside the box, and as the current box is Edom and the entire Shadow World is pretty convinced that that's an impossible box to open—" Alec stops, realizing his metaphors got slightly more tangled than he'd intended. "I think I need someone who is in the know but still mostly mundane, so they're not stuck on the same preconceptions the rest of us are?"

Linday blinks at him. She clearly didn't follow that.

He frowns, but she doesn't get more tense, so at least she figured out he's frowning at himself rather than her.

Clary might have given him multiple migraines and almost as many heart attacks, but she'd barrelled through things he'd thought inviolable just because she didn't know any better, and he could use some of that, right about now.

"Magnus traded his magic to a Greater Demon in order to banish Lilith's demon, and..." He trails off again. And I have to do something about it, but the only thing I can think of is trying to negotiate with said Greater Demon myself and that's a clusterfuck of epic proportions just waiting to happen.

He'll do it, if he has to, he knows this, but that should probably be a last resort, not the first attempt.

"You want to steal it back?" Lindsay's voice cracks half way through the words, and he doesn't blame her, that sounds more insane than anything even Clary would attempt, but...

He hadn't actually framed it that way himself, and he should have. She's probably right, and that is exactly the sort of thinking he needs.

"Do you think that's possible?" He tilts his head, spreads his hands in something that's almost a shrug. "I know there are Sighted thieves, and there's a thriving grey area of mundane and Downworlder interactions with magic that don't usually end up with dead bodies or demons so we don't do anything about them."

Lindsay frowns back at him, but she looks like she's thinking, so he waits.

"Well." She starts, stops again. "There is this hacker..."

Alec blinks. "I don't think the Prince of Edom keeps his stolen magic in a server."

Lindsay snorts, and rolls her eyes at him. "Ha, ha. Sir."

Alec shrugs, and waits.

"There's a warlock, Edda White. She fosters mundane children, usually ones that lost their parents to the Shadow World, or who have the Sight."

"And she's a hacker?" That's an odd combination of jobs, but he supposes it's something one could do from home while keeping an eye on a bunch of presumably traumatized children.

He wonders if there's anything they could do to help her out. Unofficially. Or officially? The Clave really should stop pretending the Shadow World's completely separate from the mundane world, no one believes that.

"No." Lindsay shakes her head. Pauses. "Well, yes, but she's not the hacker I was thinking of, I meant one of her kids."

"If said kid's already in the Shadow World, that's defeating my outside of the box request." He's not really trying to argue with her, he's just not sure where she's going.

"Sir." Lindsay levels a stare at him. It's not as good as the ones his mother or sister can pull off, but it's not half bad.

"Sorry."

Lindsay nods, and adjusts her glasses. "He's Sighted, and he's active on some of the forums the Clave tracks, helps people find resources or contacts, which is how I know about him, but he works in the mundane world. With a team of thieves who have pulled off some really impossible jobs."

"Edom impossible?"

"No, but you said you needed some creative thieves, and they're arguably the best in this world." That is something the Clave would know, just because the few truly occult artifacts the mundane world knows about tend to be expensive, so they attract the attention of the worst sorts of people and the best sorts of thieves... who then attract the attention of the Clave, to make sure no one actually tries to use the things they've stolen. "It's a place to start."

Alec nods. It is, and that's all he asked for; he hopes it's enough. "What's his name?"

Lindsay shrugs. "No idea, but I do know how to get a message to his team. They've an open call out for people who need help and don't have anywhere else to turn."

Alec feels his lips twitch with reluctant amusement. "That certainly fits this situation, doesn't it."

Lindsay concedes with a small nod. "I'll reach out, and let you know what they say."

"Thank you."

She nods again, slightly less smoothly, as if she's not sure what to do with gratitude, though he's not sure if it's because it's him personally or the Head of her Institute in general, and slips away to get to work.

Alec closes his eyes, and lets out a sigh, and tries to hold onto the flicker of hope in his chest.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe this is what he needs; maybe this is what Magnus needs.

Please.

***

Hardison blinks at the email he just opened.

He double checks the sender's address, and IP, and everything else he can think of to confirm it's not somehow a joke or a scam or something, but as far as he can tell by every test he can think up, it's genuine.

Leverage just got a fucking email from a Nephilim. On behalf of the goddamned Head of the New York Institute.

He pokes his computer screen, as if that'll make it disappear or something.

It doesn't.

Which is probably good, he's Sighted, not a warlock, if he started making the world change outside of a computer, he'd be in deep shit.

The email's surprisingly straightforward, in contrast to their usual potential clients, the Shadow World in general, and everything he's ever heard about Shadowhunters in particular. Shadow Hunters? Shadowhunters? He's not sure he's ever had to write that word out, he wonders which is considered proper grammar.

Holy shit, he's distracting himself with grammar.

He calls his Nana.

"I got an email about Alec Lightwood and Magnus Bane."

"Fuck."

Hardison pulls his phone away from his head and stares at it for a moment before he can handle that. "Did you just swear at me?"

"Not at you, baby." He can practically hear her roll her eyes at him. "I was old enough to swear before your grandma was a gleam in her daddy's eyes, and you know it."

Yes, but you don't, Hardison almost says out loud, not around your babies, you don't, but he swallows it down. "Some Nephilim is asking for help from us, from my team. Do you think it's legit?"

She hums, some melody he's never been able to track down or place, never heard from anywhere or anyone else, and he's glad that that's normal at least. Nana's thinking noise is exactly what he hears in his head whenever he's trying to crack a particularly tough system.

"I do. New York's gone through some shit, and I've heard some rumours about Magnus..." She trails off. "Lightwood's reputation is pretty solid, I think he'd stretch those Nephilim Laws as far as he could, if he thought it was worth it."

"Should I take the meeting then?"

Nana pauses, but she doesn't hum this time. She's not thinking, she wants to make sure he is. "You'd have to tell your team what sort of meeting it really is."

Hardison's whole body tenses up along with his face as he scrunches his eyes as closed as he can get them. He wonders if Parker and Eliot really are part-fae, like he's always thought. They've both got more than a touch of the other when he looks at them out of the corner of his eyes, and it would certainly explain how hard they are to injure, how easily they lean into each other's space, as if they've never before found someone that makes some weird sixth sense relax.

Then again, he loves them enough it might just be his own aura sparking in the way.

He wonders, if they are just a little magic, if either of them know, and just don't think they can tell him.

He wonders if they'll be mad to realize he's kept a secret from them all these years, or if they'll be hurt.

"Yeah," he sighs, and opens his eyes back up. "Don't suppose I could get a family dinner to help uh... illustrate my point?"

Nana laughs, but it's sharper sounding than usual. "If New York's as messed up as I've heard you don't have much time. Tonight good?"

Damn.

This is clearly more serious than he'd thought, and he wonders what he's missed, busy focusing on his mundane life rather than the Shadow World.

"I guess it has to be. Thanks."

Nana doesn't bother to say anything else before she hangs up on him.

He turns around, and no he does not scream, that was just a gasp, and Parker and Eliot are in the doorway, both of them staring at him.

Check mark in the supernatural column.

He smiles at them.

They don't smile back.

Hey guys, want to meet my Nana, the centuries old warlock who taught me how to see demons so they wouldn't eat me?

Yeah. That's gonna go over well.

"Don't suppose either of you believe in magic?"

Eliot does that thing where he's not frowning but is really obvious about how he's refraining from frowning so it actually feels worse than if he'd just scowled at you. "You mean science we can't explain yet, or actual magic?"

Hardison tilts his head and hands with an eh maneuver. "Vampires and werewolves and fairies, oh my?"

Parker shrugs. "Archie always said he thought I was a changeling, does that count?"

Hardison shakes his head, and sees Eliot frown for real, and knows they both wish they'd been harder on Archie when they had him in their sights. "Yes, but that's a terrible thing for him to have said."

"Why?" Parker comes into the room proper to perch on the edge of the table extending out from his desk. "If it's the truth?"

"Because he didn't think it was true," Eliot answers, his voice low and rough. "He was using it to pretend it was okay for him not to take care of you."

Parker rolls her eyes; they've had this argument before. "But if he'd tried, I wouldn't have realized how much better at it you are."

Eliot jerks, like his whole body just tried to shut-down. Hardison can't even appreciate how remarkable that is, because he's too busy feeling his brain stutter right in sync.

"What?" Parker did that are you being stupid or did I make less sense than usual? face of hers, eyes a little squinty and shoulders just starting to hunch.

"Thank you, baby girl." Hardison manages, before she thinks it's the second. "I'm still gonna be mad at him for not trying though."

She frowns, as if she thinks that's dumb, but shrugs, clearly having decided that that's just the way it is. "So does that mean you think he was right, even though he didn't know it?"

"Uh." Hardison does a whole body shrug, because he's not sure why he ever thinks his conversations with these two are gonna go the way he intends. "I have no idea, but it wouldn't surprise me? You're uh. Better at things than most humans. You both are."

"Huh." Eliot says, but not like he disagrees. "But neither of us have a problem with steel or cold iron or whatever it is."

Hardison stares at him.

"What." Eliot stares back, and Hardison can't tell if he's fucking with him on purpose or not. Damn Eliot and his poker face.

"Did you say that because you know things, or because you read fairy tales when you can't sleep?"

Eliot's face looks like he wants to say damnit Hardison but doesn't want to give Hardison the satisfaction.

"Second one, got it."

"Kindaalwaysthoughtitwasaliensanyways." Eliot mutters.*

Hardison is pleased to note that Parker joins him in giving Eliot the look.

Eliot crosses his arms in front of his chest, and looks back, and Hardison sighs. He's right, they don't have time for that right now. "We are revisiting this," Hardison says, pointing at Eliot. "But first we're going to Nana's for dinner."

Parker actually literally squeaks, and he can't tell if she's excited or nervous. "Is she a fairy too?"

"No, and they prefer Seelie or Unseelie, depending on which Court they were born into, but you know, that's a whole separate thing we also don't have time for right now. Nana is a warlock which means she can do magic and she's immortal which I know sounds like more fairy things because they are practically immortal and also do magic, but I swear it's not."

It's his turn to be getting the look from both of them, and he stops. Starts again. "So. Uh. Demons? Totally a thing?"

Eliot sighs, and finally stops lurking as his shoulders relax into something more like at-home-Eliot rather than working-Eliot. "You made a multi-media presentation, didn't you?"

Hardison opens his mouth, and shuts it again. He did, like three different times, and he keeps deleting it and starting over, but he supposes that might be one way to go in order without thinking about Nana swearing and the email and trying to jump to angels are real and angel-blooded people kill demons and the Head of the New York Institute wants our help! before that means anything to anyone.

"Ooh." Parker sits up straighter. "Should I go get some popcorn?"

"Why not." Hardison can't help the smile, doesn't even try. "We'll have a proper briefing in five."

***

Magnus is not entirely sure why Alec invited him to his office, it's not like I can help with missions anymore, and seeing Alec sitting on the edge of his desk wringing his hands when he walks in the door doesn't calm his nerves any.

"Magnus!" Alec looks up, and his smile's not any more comforting than the wringing hands were.

"You're here."

"You asked me to be here." Magnus offers, and makes himself walk further into the office. He's not sure what else to say, and just lifts an eyebrow in Alec's general direction.

Alec shrugs, and bites his lip as he shifts his weight, and then suddenly his tension melts away and he's standing at parade rest and oh, whatever this is, it's clearly important. "I did."

Magnus holds up one finger, turns around to close and lock the door behind him, and faces Alec again.

Alec offers him a crooked almost smile, much more sincere than the last one, and the tension between Magnus' shoulder-blades eases a little, though it definitely doesn't go away. "I have a potentially terrible idea, but it's for you, so it's your choice to make, not mine."

Oh.

Magnus considers that, nods to himself, and goes to sit on the couch. He lifts his head, and makes himself meet Alec's eyes. "All right."

"I want to hire some... consultants, to see if there's a way to get your magic back without having to try and make another deal with Asmodeus."

Magnus doesn't move. He doesn't even blink. If he had his magic he'd probably blow up the chair next to him. "No."

Alec's shoulders slump. "Magnus."

"No." Magnus stands up, his hands clenched and his jaw too tight and he wants to scream, but he doesn't. "Asmodeus is too dangerous."

"And he's going to be less dangerous later if with your magic he can overthrow Lilith while she's still weak from the Mark of Cain?" Alec's voice is quiet, but even so Magnus can barely hold in the wince. "Do you really think he'll be more inclined to stay quietly in his own Realm without interfering with the rest of us if she's no longer there to keep him in check?"

Magnus swallows, refuses to think about the things he did at his father's side the last time Asmodeus freely wandered around Earth. "You said this was for me."

"It is!" Alec's voice and hands lift, and then he stops, his arms drop. He's holding himself so tightly it looks like he's a breath away from shattering. "I would sacrifice anything to help you Magnus, just like you did to stop Lilith, to save Jace, but that doesn't mean helping you isn't also doing my job."

Magnus can't move, can barely breathe.

He exhales, long and slow, and closes his eyes.

He can't argue that, because if he did, it would make everything he'd done to save Jace, to stop Lilith, all of it, for nothing. They can't let either Lilith or Asmodeus take over Edom without the other, can't afford the risk of that much power being concentrated in one person. Demon.

Monster.

Magnus opens his eyes again, and somehow Alec can tell, Alec can always tell, and he's right there, reaching out to cup Magnus' jaw in his warm hands before kissing him, soft and sweet. "Thank you."

Magnus huffs out a breath, and leans in to rest against the warmth of Alec's chest. "Thank you. So who are these... consultants then?"

"Um." Magnus tilts his head enough to look at Alec, who's looking at the ceiling as if too embarrassed to meet Magnus' gaze. He rolls his lips in tight, then pops his mouth open and sighs. "Thieves?"

"What." Magnus steps back, so he can glare properly. And also enjoy the way Alec's squirming, because it's not often Alexander gets tongue-tied around him anymore, and if he's going to go through with this insanity, he might as well try and get some enjoyment out of it. "You. Want to steal my magic back?"

"I mean, that seems slightly more likely than negotiating it out of a Greater Demon?" Alec shrugs, and rubs the back of his neck, and his mouth twists before his whole body sags with a sigh. "I don't know, but I certainly don't know how to get it back without risking Asmodeus pulling one over on us, do you?"

"But you think your thieves might?" Magnus can't help it, his voice cracks.

"Not my thieves." Alec shrugs again. "Lindsay found them, and Edda White said she could portal them to us whenever we come to an agreement on a meeting time and place."

"Edda?" He stops again. Edda, who fosters mundane children and likes to play with computers and has the weirdest running bet with Catarina about the stupid excuses they've used to convince mundanes that the magic they just saw wasn't really magic... "Mundane thieves?"

"Well, anyone in the Shadow World would start already convinced that it was impossible, wouldn't they?"

Magnus can't argue with that, either, and this is the weirdest conversation he's possibly ever had, and that's saying something, considering the number of times he's been high or drunk and determined to not let it stop him from doing... well. Anything. "Huh," is all he manages. "That. Almost makes sense."

Alec grins. "I know, weird, huh."

Magnus' chest aches, because oh, he hasn't seen that sort of look on Alec's face since they found out about Jace, before Magnus went to Edom, before he lost...

Before they lost so much.

Magnus laughs, and Alec's grin widens, a glint in his eyes as if he's as delighted and surprised as Magnus is to realize they're both actually looking forward to this. "Let's go meet some thieves."

[emmanuelodenyire]

Cloud Computing in a snapshot

What is cloud computing?

Briefly, cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand computing services from applications to storage and processing power typically over the internet and on a pay-as-you-go basis

How it works?

Rather than owning their own computing infrastructure or data centers, companies can rent access to anything from applications to storage from a cloud service provider.

One benefit of using cloud computing services is that firms can avoid the upfront cost and complexity of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure, and instead simply pay for what they use, when they use it.

In turn, providers of cloud computing services can benefit from significant economies of scale by delivering the same services to a wide range of customers.

What services are available in cloud computing?

Cloud computing services cover a vast range of options now, from the basics of storage, networking, and processing power through to natural language processing and artificial intelligence as well as standard office applications. Pretty much any service that doesn’t require you to be physically close to the computer hardware that you are using can now be delivered via the cloud.

What are examples of cloud computing?

Cloud computing underpins a vast number of services that includes consumer services like Gmail or the cloud back-up of the photos on your smartphone, though to the services which allow large enterprises to host all their data and run all of their applications in the cloud.

Why is it called cloud computing?

A fundamental concept behind cloud computing is that the location of the services, and many of the details such as the hardware or operating system on which it is running, are largely irrelevant to the user. It’s with this in mind that the metaphor of the cloud was borrowed from old telecoms network schematics, in which the public telephone network (and later the internet) was often represented as a cloud to denote that the just didn’t matter — it was just a cloud of stuff. This is an over-simplification of course; for many customers location of their services and data remains a key issue.

How important is the cloud?

Building the infrastructure to support cloud computing now accounts for more than a third of all IT spending worldwide, according to research from IDC. Meanwhile spending on traditional, in-house IT continues to slide as computing workloads continue to move to the cloud, whether that is public cloud services offered by vendors or private clouds built by enterprises themselves.

451 Research predicts that around one-third of enterprise IT spending will be on hosting and cloud services this year “indicating a growing reliance on external sources of infrastructure, application, management and security services”. Analyst Gartner predicts that half of global enterprises using the cloud now will have gone all-in on it by 2021.

According to Gartner, global spending on cloud services will reach $260bn this year up from $219.6bn. It’s also growing at a faster rate than the analysts expected. But it’s not entirely clear how much of that demand is coming from businesses that actually want to move to the cloud and how much is being created by vendors who now only offer cloud versions of their products (often because they are keen to move to away from selling one-off licences to selling potentially more lucrative and predictable cloud subscriptions).

Cloud computing can be broken down into three cloud computing models.

What is Infrastructure-as-a-Service?

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) refers to the fundamental building blocks of computing that can be rented: physical or virtual servers, storage and networking. This is attractive to companies that want to build applications from the very ground up and want to control nearly all the elements themselves, but it does require firms to have the technical skills to be able to orchestrate services at that level. Research by Oracle found that two thirds of IaaS users said using online infrastructure makes it easier to innovate, had cut their time to deploy new applications and services and had significantly cut on-going maintenance costs. However, half said IaaS isn’t secure enough for most critical data

What is Platform-as-a-Service?

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is the next layer up — as well as the underlying storage, networking, and virtual servers this will also include the tools and software that developers need to build applications on top of: that could include middleware, database management, operating systems, and development tools.

What is Software-as-a-Service?

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the delivery of applications-as-a-service, probably the version of cloud computing that most people are used to on a day-to-day basis. The underlying hardware and operating system is irrelevant to the end user, who will access the service via a web browser or app; it is often bought on a per-seat or per-user basis.

Cloud computing benefits

The exact benefits will vary according to the type of cloud service being used but, fundamentally, using cloud services means companies not having to buy or maintain their own computing infrastructure.

No more buying servers, updating applications or operating systems, or decommissioning and disposing of hardware or software when it is out of date, as it is all taken care of by the supplier. For commodity applications, such as email, it can make sense to switch to a cloud provider, rather than rely on in-house skills. A company that specializes in running and securing these services is likely to have better skills and more experienced staff than a small business could afford to hire, so cloud services may be able to deliver a more secure and efficient service to end users.

Using cloud services means companies can move faster on projects and test out concepts without lengthy procurement and big upfront costs, because firms only pay for the resources they consume. This concept of business agility is often mentioned by cloud advocates as a key benefit. The ability to spin up new services without the time and effort associated with traditional IT procurement should mean that is easier to get going with new applications faster. And if a new application turns out to be a wildly popular the elastic nature of the cloud means it is easier to scale it up fast.

For a company with an application that has big peaks in usage, for example that is only used at a particular time of the week or year, it may make financial sense to have it hosted in the cloud, rather than have dedicated hardware and software laying idle for much of the time. Moving to a cloud hosted application for services like email or CRM could remove a burden on internal IT staff, and if such applications don’t generate much competitive advantage, there will be little other impact. Moving to a services model also moves spending from capex to opex, which may be useful for some companies.

Cloud computing advantages and disadvantages

Cloud computing is not necessarily cheaper than other forms of computing, just as renting is not always cheaper than buying in the long term. If an application has a regular and predictable requirement for computing services it may be more economical to provide that service in-house.

Some companies may be reluctant to host sensitive data in a service that is also used by rivals. Moving to a SaaS application may also mean you are using the same applications as a rival, which may make it hard to create any competitive advantage if that application is core to your business.

While it may be easy to start using a new cloud application, migrating existing data or apps to the cloud may be much more complicated and expensive. And it seems there is now something of a shortage in cloud skills with staff with DevOps and multi-cloud monitoring and management knowledge in particularly short supply.

In one recent report a significant proportion of experienced cloud users said that they thought upfront migration costs ultimately outweigh the long-term savings created by IaaS.

And of course, you can only access your applications if you have an internet connection.

Cloud computing can be broken down into types briefly explained below:

What is public cloud?

Public cloud is the classic cloud computing model, where users can access a large pool of computing power over the internet (whether that is IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS). One of the significant benefits here is the ability to rapidly scale a service. The cloud computing suppliers have vast amounts of computing power, which they share out between a large number of customers — the ‘multi-tenant’ architecture. Their huge scale means they have enough spare capacity that they can easily cope if any particular customer needs more resources, which is why it is often used for less-sensitive applications that demand a varying amount of resources.

What is private cloud?

Private cloud allows organizations to benefit from the some of the advantages of public cloud — but without the concerns about relinquishing control over data and services, because it is tucked away behind the corporate firewall. Companies can control exactly where their data is being held and can build the infrastructure in a way they want — largely for IaaS or PaaS projects — to give developers access to a pool of computing power that scales on-demand without putting security at risk. However, that additional security comes at a cost, as few companies will have the scale of AWS, Microsoft or Google, which means they will not be able to create the same economies of scale. Still, for companies that require additional security, private cloud may be a useful stepping stone, helping them to understand cloud services or rebuild internal applications for the cloud, before shifting them into the public cloud

What is hybrid cloud?

Hybrid cloud is perhaps where everyone is in reality: a bit of this, a bit of that. Some data in the public cloud, some projects in private cloud, multiple vendors and different levels of cloud usage. According to research by TechRepublic, the main reasons for choosing hybrid cloud include disaster recovery planning and the desire to avoid hardware costs when expanding their existing data center.

[uxuifromzerotowow]

The 4 Golden Rules of UI Design by Nick Babich

The user interface (UI) is a critical part of any software product. When it’s done well, users don’t even notice it. When it’s done poorly, users can’t get past it to efficiently use a product. To increase the chances of success when creating user interfaces, most designers follow interface design principles. Interface design principles represent high-level concepts that are used to guide software design. In this article, I’ll share a few fundamental principles. These are based on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for UI Design, Ben Shneiderman’s The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design, and Bruce Tognazzini’s Principles of Interaction Design. Most of the principles are applicable to any interactive systems — traditional GUI environments (such as desktop and mobile apps, websites) and non-GUI interfaces (such as voice-based interaction systems). 

The UI design principals are:

Place users in control of the interface

Make it comfortable to interact with a product

Reduce cognitive load

Make user interfaces consistent

1. Place users in control of the interface

Good UI s instill a sense of control in their users. Keeping users in control makes them comfortable; they will learn quickly and gain a fast sense of mastery.Make actions reversible – be forgivingThis rule means that the user should always be able to quickly backtrack whatever they are doing. This allows users to explore the product without the constant fear of failure — when a user knows that errors can be easily undone, this encourages exploration of unfamiliar options. On the contrary, if a user has to be extremely careful with every action they take, it leads to a slower exploration and nerve-racking experience that no one wants.Perhaps the most common GUIs where users have the ‘Undo/Redo’ option are text and graphics editors. While writing text or creating graphics, ‘Undo’ lets users make changes and go back step-by-step through changes that were made. ‘Redo’ lets users undo the undo, which means that once they go back a few steps, they are able to move forward through their changes again.‘Undo’ can be extremely helpful when users choose system function by mistake. In this case, the undo function serves as an ’emergency exit,’ allowing users to leave the unwanted state. One good example of such emergency exits is Gmail’s notification message with an undo option when users accidentally delete an email.

Create an easy-to-navigate interface

Navigation should always be clear and self-evident. Users should be able to enjoy exploring the interface of any software product. Even complex B2B products full of features shouldn’t intimidate users so that they are afraid to press a button. Good UI puts users in their comfort zone by providing some context of where they are, where they’ve been, and where they can go next:

Provide visual cues. Visual cues serve as reminders for users. Allow users to navigate easily through the interface by providing points of reference as they move through a product interface. Page titles, highlights for currently selected navigation options, and other visual aids give users an immediate view of where they are in the interface. A user should never be wondering, “Where am I?” or “How did I get to this screen?”

Predictability. Users should be provided with cues that help them predict the result of an action. A user should never be wondering, “What do I need to press in order to do my task?” or “What is this button for?”

Provide informative feedback – be acknowledging

Feedback is typically associated with points of action — for every user action, the system should show a meaningful, clear reaction. A system with feedback for every action helps users achieve their goals without friction.

UI design should consider the nature of interaction. For frequent actions, the response can be modest. For example, when users interact with an interactive object (such as a button), it’s essential to provide some indication that an action has been acknowledged. This might be something as simple as a button changing color when pressed (the change notifies the user of the interaction). The lack of such feedback forces users to double-check to see if their intended actions have been performed.

Show the visibility of system status

Users are much more forgiving when they have information about what is going on and are given periodic feedback about the status of the process. Visibility of system status is essential when users initiate an action that takes some time for a computer to complete. Users don’t like to be left seeing nothing on the device screen while the app is supposed to be doing something. The use of progress indicators is one of the subtle aspects of UI design that has a tremendous impact on the comfort and enjoyment of users.

Accommodate users with different skill levels

Users of different skill levels should be able to interact with a product at different levels. Don’t sacrifice expert users for an easy-to-use interface for novice or casual users. Instead, try to design for the needs of a diverse set of users, so it doesn’t matter if your user is an expert or a newbie.

Adding features like tutorials and explanations is extremely helpful for novice users (just make sure that experienced users are able to skip this part).

Once users are familiar with a product, they will look for shortcuts to speed up commonly-used actions. You should provide fast paths for experienced users by enabling them to use shortcuts.

2. Make it comfortable for a user to interact with a product

Eliminate all elements that are not helping your users

Interfaces shouldn’t contain information that is irrelevant or rarely needed. Irrelevant information introduces noise in UI —it competes with the relevant information and diminishes its relative visibility. Simplify interfaces by removing unnecessary elements or content that does not directly support user tasks. Strive to design UI in a way that all information presented on the screen will be valuable and relevant. Examine every element and evaluate it based on the value it delivers to users.

A good example of an app that follows the ‘less is more’ approach by avoiding overloading the interface with content or features is iA Writer.

The interface of iA Writer app is a clean typing sheet with no distractions. It allows users to focus on what they’re writing and hides everything else.

Don’t ask users for data they’ve already entered

Don’t force users to have to repeat data they’ve previously entered. Users are easily annoyed by tedious data-entry sequences, especially when they have provided all the required information before. Good UI performs a maximum of work while requiring a minimum amount of information from users.

Avoid jargon and system-oriented terms

When designing a product, it’s important to use language that is easy to read and understand. The system should speak the user’s language, with words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than jargon or system-oriented terms.

Apply Fitts’s Law to interactive elements

Fitts Law states that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. This means that it’s better to design large targets for important functions (big buttons are easier to interact with).

It’s also important to remember that the time required to acquire multiple targets is the sum of the time to acquire each. Thus, when working on UI design, to increase the efficiency of an interaction, try to not only reduce distances and increase target sizes, but also reduce the total number of targets that users must interact with to complete a given task.

Design accessible interfaces

When we design products it’s important to remember that a well-designed product is accessible to users of all abilities, including those with low vision, blindness, hearing impairments, cognitive impairments, or motor impairments. Good UI is accessible UI because improving your product’s accessibility enhances the usability for all groups of users.

Color is one of the elements of an interface that has a strong impact on accessibility.  People perceive color differently — some users can see a full range of colors, but many people can only make out a limited range of colors. Approximately 10 percent of men and one percent of women have some form of color blindness. When designing interfaces, it’s better to avoid using color as the only way to convey information. Anytime you want color to convey information in the interface, you should use other cues to convey the information to those who cannot see the colors.

Use real-world metaphors

Using metaphors in UI design allows users to create a connection between the real world and digital experiences. Real-world metaphors empower users by allowing them to transfer existing knowledge about how things should look and work. Metaphors are often used to make the unfamiliar familiar. Take the recycle bin on your desktop, which holds deleted files, as an example – it’s not a real trash bin, but it’s visually represented in a way that helps you understand the concept more easily.

Engineer for errors

Errors are inadvertent in the user journey. Bad error handling paired with useless error messages can fill users with frustration and lead them to abandon your app. A well-crafted error message, on the other hand, can turn a moment of frustration into a moment of conversion. An effective error message is a combination of explicit error notification together with hints for solving the problem.

Even better than writing good error messages is having UI design that prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Try to either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation dialog before they commit to the action. For example, Gmail prompts you when you forget to insert an attachment. 

Protect a user’s work

Ensure that users never lose their work. Users should not lose their work as a result of an error on their side (i.e. accidentally refresh a web page with a form that has user input), a system error, problems with an internet connection, or any other reason other than those that are completely unavoidable, like an unexpected power loss.

3. Reduce cognitive load

Cognitive load is the amount of mental processing power required to use a product. It’s better to avoid making users think/work too hard to use your product.

Chunking for sequences of information or actions

In 1956, psychologist George Miller introduced the world to the theory of chunking. In his works, Miller says the human working memory can handle seven-plus-or-minus two “chunks” of information while we’re processing information.

This rule can be used when organizing and grouping items together. For example, if your UI forces users to enter telephone numbers without normal spacing it can result in a lot of incorrectly-captured phone numbers. People cannot typically scan clusters of ten or more digits to discover errors. That’s exactly why phone numbers are broken up into smaller pieces.

Reduce the number of actions required to complete a task

When designing a user interface, strive to reduce the total number of actions required from a user to achieve the goal. It’s worth remembering the three-click rule, which suggests the user of a product should be able to find any information with no more than three mouse clicks.

Recognition over recall

One of the Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics advises promoting recognition over recall in UI design. Recognizing something is much easier than recalling it because recognition involves more cues in our brain (cues spread activation to related information in memory, and those cues help us remember information).

Designers can promote recognition in user interfaces by making information and functionality visible and easily accessible. Visual aids, such as tooltips and context-sensitive details, also help support users in recognizing information.

Promote visual clarity

Good visual organization improves usability and legibility, allowing users to quickly find the information they are looking for and use the interface more efficiently.

When designing layouts:

Avoid presenting too much information at one time on the screen. This results in visual clutter.

Remember the principle ‘form follows function.’ Make things look like they work.

Apply the general principles of content organization such as grouping similar items together, numbering items, and using headings and prompt text.

4. Make user interfaces consistent

Consistency is an essential property of good UI—consistent design is intuitive design. Consistency is one of the strongest contributors to usability and learnability. The main idea of consistency is the idea of transferable knowledge — let users transfer their knowledge and skills from one part of an app’s UI to another, and from one app to another app.

Visual consistency (style)

Users should never question the integrity of a product. The same colors, fonts, and icons should be present throughout the product. Don’t change visual styles within your product for no apparent reason. For example, a Submit button on one page of your site should look the same on any other page.

Avoid using different styles for elements on different pages of the site. Users should not have to wonder whether a transformed button like this example means the same thing.

Functional consistency (behavior)

Consistency of behavior means the object should work in the same way throughout the interface. The behavior of interface controls, such as buttons and menu items, should not change within a product. Users don’t want surprises or changes in familiar behavior — they become easily frustrated when things don’t work. This can inhibit learning and stop users from feeling confident about consistency in the interface. Do not confuse your user —  keep actions consistent by following “The principle of least surprise,”  to have the interface behave the way users expect it to.

Consistent with user expectations

People have certain expectations about the apps/websites they use. Designing your product in a way that contradicts a user’s expectations is one of the worst things you can do to a user. It doesn’t matter what logical argument you provide for how something should work or look. If users expect it to work/look a different way, you will face a hard time changing those expectations. If your approach offers no clear advantage, go with what your users expect.

Follow platform conventions. Your product should be consistent with standards dictated by platform guidelines. Guidelines ensure that your users can understand individual interface elements in your design.

Don’t reinvent patterns. For most design problems, proper solutions already exist. These solutions are called patterns. Popular patterns become conventions and the majority of users are familiar with them. Not taking this solution into account and continuing to design your own solution can lead to challenges for users. In most cases, breaking design conventions results in a frustrating user experience — you’ll face usability problems not necessarily because your solution will be wrong, but because users won’t be familiar with it.

Don’t try to reinvent terminology. Avoid using new terms when there are words available that users already know. Users spend most of their time in other apps and on other sites, so they have certain expectations about naming. Using different words might confuse them.

Conclusion

The goal for UI designers today is to produce user-friendly interfaces: interfaces that encourage exploration without fear of negative consequences. Without any doubt interfaces of the future will be more intuitive, enticing, predictable, and forgiving, but most principles of UI design listed in this article will surely be applicable to them, too.

Source https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/ui-design/4-golden-rules-ui-design/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUP IN FOUNDERS TO MAKE WEALTH

Would it be useful to have an explicit belief in change. And I think that's ok. Mihalko seemed like he actually wanted to be our friend. Grad school is the other end of the humanities. Indirectly, but they pay attention.1 US, its effects lasted longer. Together you talk about some hard problem, probably getting nowhere.

Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas. Why? They got to have expense account lunches at the best restaurants and fly around on the company's Gulfstreams. Meaning everyone within this world was low-res: a Duplo world of a few big hits, and those aren't them. It's not true that those who teach can't do. Or is it?2 I think much of the company.

Part of the reason is prestige. If you define a language that was ideal for writing a slow version 1, and yet with the right optimization advice to the compiler, would also yield very fast code when necessary.3 Of course, prestige isn't the main reason the idea is much older than Henry Ford. The right way to get it. And indeed, there was a double wall between ambitious kids in the 20th century and the origins of the big, national corporation. The reason car companies operate this way is that it was already mostly designed in 1958. Wars make central governments more powerful, and over the next forty years gradually got more powerful, they'll be out of business. And this too tended to produce both social and economic cohesion. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys.4 This won't be a very powerful feature. Lisp paper.5 Plus if you didn't put the company first you wouldn't be promoted, and if you couldn't switch ladders, promotion on this one was the only way up.

But if they don't want to shut down the company, that leaves increasing revenues and decreasing expenses firing people.6 One is that investors will increasingly be unable to offer investment subject to contingencies like other people investing. I understood their work. Which in turn means the variation in the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating.7 Surely that sort of thing did not happen to big companies in mid-century most of the 20th century and the origins of the big national corporations were willing to pay a premium for labor.8 As long as he considers all languages equivalent, all he has to do is remove the marble that isn't part of it. I had a few other teachers who were smart, but I never have. And it turns out that was all you needed to solve the problem. You have certain mental gestures you've learned in your work, and when you're not paying attention, you keep making these same gestures, but somewhat randomly.9 I remember from it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been.10 That no doubt causes a lot of institutionalized delays in startup funding: the multi-week mating dance with investors; the distinction between acceptable and maximal efficiency, programmers in a hundred years, maybe it won't in a thousand. Certainly it was for a startup's founders to retain board control after a series A, that will change the way things have always been.

Which inevitably, if unions had been doing their job tended to be lower. They did as employers too. I worry about the power Apple could have with this force behind them. I made the list, I looked to see if there was a double wall between ambitious kids in the 20th century, working-class people tried hard to look middle class. In a way mid-century oligopolies had been anointed by the federal government, which had been a time of consolidation, led especially by J. Wars make central governments more powerful, until now the most advanced technologies, and the number of undergrads who believe they have to say yes or no, and then join some other prestigious institution and work one's way up the hierarchy. Locally, all the news was bad. Close, but they are still missing a few things. Not entirely bad though. I notice this every time I fly over the Valley: somehow you can sense prosperity in how well kept a place looks. Another way to burn up cycles is to have many layers of software between the application and the hardware. And indeed, the most obvious breakage in the average computer user's life is Windows itself.

Investors don't need weeks to make up their minds anyway. The point of high-level languages is to give you bigger abstractions—bigger bricks, as it were, so I emailed the ycfounders list. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world. And there is another, newer language, called Python, whose users tend to look down on Perl, and more openly. At the time it seemed the future. What happens in that shower? You can't reproduce mid-century model was already starting to get old.11 Meanwhile a similar fragmentation was happening at the other end of the economic scale.12 But the advantage is that it works better.

Most really good startup ideas look like bad ideas at first, and many of those look bad specifically because some change in the world just switched them from bad to good.13 There's good waste, and bad waste. A rounds. A bottom-up program should be easier to modify as well, partly because it tends to create deadlock, and partly because it seems kind of slimy. But when you import this criterion into decisions about technology, you start to get the company rolling. It would have been unbearable. Then, the next morning, one of McCarthy's grad students, looked at this definition of eval and realized that if he translated it into machine language, the shorter the program not simply in characters, of course, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible. I wouldn't want Python advocates to say I was misrepresenting the language, but what they got was fixed according to their rank. The deal terms of angel rounds will become less restrictive too—not just less restrictive than angel terms have traditionally been. If it is, it will be a minority squared.

If 98% of the time, just like they do to startups everywhere. Their culture is the opposite of hacker culture; on questions of software they will tend to pay less, because part of the core language, prior to any additional notations about implementation, be defined this way. That's what a metaphor is: a function applied to an argument of the wrong type.14 Now we'd give a different answer.15 And you know more are out there, separated from us by what will later seem a surprisingly thin wall of laziness and stupidity. There have probably been other people who did this as well as Newton, for their time, but Newton is my model of this kind of thought. I'd be very curious to see it, but Rabin was spectacularly explicit. Betting on people over ideas saved me countless times as an investor.16 They assume ideas are like miracles: they either pop into your head or they don't. I was pretty much assembly language with math. Whereas if you ask for it explicitly, but ordinarily not used. A couple days ago an interviewer asked me if founders having more power would be better or worse for the world.

Notes

The reason we quote statistics about fundraising is so hard to prevent shoplifting because in their early twenties. Auto-retrieving filters will have a definite commitment.

It will seem like noise.

It's one of the world. That's why the Apple I used to end investor meetings too closely, you'll find that with a neologism. I've been told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source projects, even if we couldn't decide between turning some investors away and selling more of a press conference. All you need but a lot about some disease they'll see once in China, many of the biggest divergences between the government.

Mozilla is open-source projects, even if they pay a lot of time. If they agreed among themselves never to do that. And journalists as part of grasping evolution was to reboot them, initially, to sell your company into one? Most expect founders to overhire is not so much better is a net win to include in your own time, not just the local area, and Reddit is Delicious/popular with voting instead of just doing things, they were shooting themselves in the field they describe.

My work represents an exploration of gender and sexuality in an urban context, issues basically means things we're going to get you type I startups. As a friend who invested earlier had been with us if the current options suck enough. MITE Corp.

The top VCs and Micro-VCs. When you had to for some reason, rather than admitting he preferred to call all our lies lies. But what they're wasting their time on schleps, and at least what they really need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or to be able to raise money on convertible notes, VCs who can say I need to run an online service. It's not a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of Explorer.

What you're too early really means is No, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally. In either case the implications are similar. But there are few things worse than the don't-be startup founders who go on to study the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, phone, and only one founder take fundraising meetings is that it's bad to do more with less, then add beans don't drain the beans, and they have to do that, in which practicing talks makes them better: reading a talk out loud at least wouldn't be worth doing something, but they're not ready to invest in your previous job, or the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written about them.

Philadelphia is a net loss of productivity. As a rule, if the growth is genuine. Which implies a surprising but apparently unimportant, like a core going critical.

In practice the first year or so. If you weren't around then it's hard to think about so-called lifestyle business, having sold all my shares earlier this year. Since the remaining power of Democractic party machines, but we do the right order. They're an administrative convenience.

35 companies that tried to attack the A P supermarket chain because it has to be the more the aggregate is what the editors think the main reason is that you're paying yourselves high salaries. What is Mathematics? Once again, that good paintings must have affected what they claim was the fall of 2008 but no doubt partly because companies don't. Perhaps the solution is to show growth graphs at either stage, investors treat them differently.

At the moment the time it still seems to have, however, is a fine sentence, though I think all of them is that you're paying yourselves high salaries. We thought software was all that matters to us. It's a lot about some of the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are to be something of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being a scientist. Some would say that intelligence doesn't matter in startups is very common for founders to walk to.

In fact, we try to be a special recipient of favour, being a scientist.

It is the most successful investment, Uber, from which Renaissance civilization radiated.

When an investor they already know; but as a percentage of GDP were about the team or their determination and disarmingly asking the right sort of things economists usually think about so-called lifestyle business, A. Put in chopped garlic, pepper, cumin, and would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push to being told that they probably don't notice even when I first met him, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them. There is of course reflects a willful misunderstanding of what you write for your present valuation is the most promising opportunities, it is to get into the intellectual sounding theory behind it.

Innosight, February 2012. Ashgate, 1998. So it is less than a Web terminal.

This is why we can't figure out the same ones. Trevor Blackwell, who had been able to. We didn't let him off, either as an example of applied empathy. And yet if he were a variety called Red Delicious that had other meanings.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

thinking about jared kleinman hating himself and not being able to directly express affection for evan and totally being in love with him but even less able to directly express that, not only just because of the terrible communication of every single character but also because jared probably is assuming he’d be rejected by evan if he let on how he really feels / would find out that evan doesn’t feel similarly towards him.......knowing about evan’s supposedly hetero crush for however long evan’s been telling him about it...........having evan value this nonexistent friendship more than his actual relationship with jared and shutting jared out when jared’s trying to get closer............seeing evan try to believe his relationship with zoe could work and be Real and the fact that the scene which cements that Jared Is Upset With Evan starts off with jared inviting evan to come over and drink and ends with jared leaving after seeing zoe come over and kiss evan...................the fact that the good for you argument Arguably would seem to convey to jared that evan really doesn’t genuinely care about him on any level.............that jared is this kid already doing badly too at the start of everything and then he gets his Deep Insecurities(tm) confirmed and his crush kind of discards him even before gfy but then gfy is jared’s last ditch effort to change things by doing his best to get as close to directly addressing his issues as he can and the guy who he’s totally in love with and who’s his only friend only like, doubles and triples down on discarding jared..........

the fact that anyone interprets jared getting lashed out at in that scene as just like, some form of equilibrium in that this is just his comeuppance for Being A Bad Friend b/c that’s totally all his character is, is The Bad Friend.........it amazes me.......like jared wasn’t the one always approaching evan from the start, literally, evan doesn’t seek jared out, jared walks up to evan to talk with him......jared trying to take the chance to involve himself in evan’s life by offering up his computer skills, b/c speaking of equilibrium evan is jared’s only friend just the same as jared is evan’s only friend and thus every bit of evan’s loneliness must also be present in jared..........jared doing everything he does just for evan’s sake and to back him up and even when tcp starts up which isn’t just evan doing what he has to to get through this scrape anymore but is about trying to add on to the situation and build something entirely out of his own lies for the sake of what evan thinks can be good about said lies and jared backs him on this too and at the start of act 2 we see him still doing emails, offering to be more involved in tcp...........even after being pushed away jared’s still trying to follow evan and trying to be closer to him b/c when he’s making the rosh hashanah invitation he’s already got most of the bitterness he brings into gfy but he’s setting that aside and reaching out..............jared modifies “friends” to “family friends” and deflects the implication of having any Real attachment to evan and people are like “wow how cruel he’s the worst” but later on we learn that apparently prior to that evan was indirectly calling jared Not A Friend if he was spending junior year saying that he has no friends and even later on than that evan tells us that he knows he’s jared’s only friend so it’s not that evan truly internally believed that jared didn’t consider him a friend, it’s just that evan wasn’t satisfied with jared’s friendship, which frankly would’ve been true even if jared Had been better at being the kind of For Forever-y friend evan apparently wanted (see: my Hit Argument “jared kleinman and michael mell have such similar roles you fools”) and it’s fine evan isn’t thrilled with jared’s failure to directly verbalize any affection and attempts to hold him at arm’s length (which, my god, the hand on the shoulder during the “we’re family friends” bit.....not only is it gay, it’s...a visual metaphor??) but what evan does in gfy is not like, just the fair and just reaction to jared’s failures......it’s the same as it was with alana just before......evan implies that alana doesn’t genuinely care about the nature of what they’re doing with tcp, and he doesn’t say it because it’s true, he says it because if it WAS true, he wouldn’t have to be the one in the wrong because at least he does care about the potential good tcp can do. and when evan lashes out at jared it’s because he can’t handle feeling like he’s in the wrong right now and he’s been shutting jared out and so now he’s just doing what he can to shut down everything jared’s saying just because in this moment evan is having this crisis where he’s In It deeper than ever and it’s about to fall apart and he needs to believe he’s definitely been in the right but all the ways he’s been neglecting and resenting the people who are Really in his life but on the wrong side of the divide between “my world of lies” and “the fantasy world in which i’m playing a part born of my world of lies and i’m trying to believe that i can stay here and it can be genuine because IF this had all been true it would be totally fine right”

like we’re obviously not meant to think jared’s a great friend, obviously we’re meant to know evan’s not happy with jared’s friendship, but jared doesn’t ever do to evan what evan does to jared in gfy.........evan’s not dealing out harsh truths, he’s just trying to lie to himself harder than ever in this last ditch effort and also convince himself he’s justified in and capable of leaving his reality-based life behind and pretend he’s impervious to what everyone’s dealing at him in gfy..........we know heidi and alana and jared are flawed and that none of their relationships with evan are perfect and evan hasn’t been happy with these relationships but that doesn’t mean the gfy scene is about how evan is just finally fairly giving them what they all deserve. he’s not telling the truth, he’s just lashing out at them to protect himself from the truth. he basically tells jared that he has to help evan yet has no right to be acknowledged as a friend even though evan knows jared does consider him a friend...........like, what kind of messed up message is that to throw at someone? and he’s not doing it because he’s fed up with jared in any overarching way, he’s doing it because jared’s fed up with how evan’s been treating him recently and evan can’t deal with that conflict right now. evan cutting down jared’s version of saying “you should remember i’m your friend” with “no, and i know i’m your only friend so you don’t have any other options either, and instead of the stuff you did to help me with the emails and tcp being reason to remember you’re my friend, it’s just reason you have to continue to help me with that stuff because you’re just complicit” is like........truly giving him the message that he doesn’t care about jared in any capacity, and that’s in no way equivalent to or the natural consequence of jared saying “yeah we’re friends but only because our moms are friends” or teasing evan at any point or failing to be especially supportive.............neither jared nor evan are supposed to be amazing friends to each other and evan is definitely not supposed to be this beacon of purity, and if anything what jared says about stuff is always meant to be these perceptions that are more accurate re: reality than the stuff evan says is.........everyone who reacts to canon as “evan had pure motivations at all times and was a perfect, unselfish, doesn’t-even-think-things-that-aren’t-nice soul from the very beginning; meanwhile jared was a jerk who likes to be mean and doesn’t appreciate how perfect evan is and doesn’t deserve him and when evan is mean to him it’s because it’s the harsh truth that jared has earned” is wild and so wrong in so many ways

like, all the seniors are so similar, evan only has jared as his friend, jared only has evan as his friend, evan is deeply unhappy and in a bad place at the start of the play, jared is deeply unhappy and in a bad place at the start of the play, evan is dealing with unrequited love, jared is dealing with unrequited love for someone he actually knows, evan hates himself, jared hates himself...................like, my essay comparing the sympathy given evan and the (lack of) sympathy given jared is forthcoming (also with the understanding that the sympathy often given evan is pretty much just as wrong, seeing as it’s not helpful to interpret the self-destructive traits resulting from anxiety as Pureheartedness) 

like ugh jared is unhappy and lonely and is in love with evan and is afraid of loving evan because he hates himself and imo thinks that evan can’t love him back because evan is in love with someone for (i was going to say that evan is in love with someone for traits so unlike jared’s but actually it’s like....never really explained why evan actually likes zoe. what’s up with “if i could tell her” doing absolutely nothing to say why evan likes zoe in the first place; what’s up with “only us” doing absolutely nothing to say why zoe likes evan. either zoe/evan wishes it had what jeremy/christine has or we truly are meant to view the whole relationship as indisputably unfounded)......at least evan is in love with a girl and desperately going “no homo” at jared which, sure you could just think that evan might assume zoe would think it’s too weird to date her dead brother’s secret gay high school lover, but still, jared’s the one out here trying to come out to evan and telling him there is nothing unrealistic about the love that one man feels for another and it’s something quite beautiful, and evan is the one acting weird about it..........not exactly the kind of thing to inspire confidence to confess your secret gay high school crush. and sure jared can’t directly communicate his attachment to evan in words, but he communicates it in the things he does. and is it more Significant that jared doesn’t want to sign evan’s cast (which, the whole cast-signing exercise isn’t some objective Friendship Test anyways, it’s just serving the purpose of a Personal Worth Litmus from evan’s unvoiced perspective) or that jared goes to great lengths to back up evan’s lie for no personal benefit to himself other than feeling closer to evan, and that jared supports evan on tcp despite there definitely being no further personal benefit, and that jared keeps trying to remain close to evan through emails and trying to offer his help with tcp instead if that’s more relevant and trying to invite him over and feeling bitter that evan doesn’t want to give him the time of day anymore now that he’s got something new and not even real..........but he wouldn’t sign evan’s cast so none of that counts for anything and he deserves gfy then huh

like yeah evan doesn’t HAVE to consider jared a friend. but again it’s only convenient for evan himself to decide to invoke that during gfy and never prior. it would be fair if after the opening scene with jared evan decided “okay that proves that jared isn’t my friend” (or okay maybe not really “”fair”” because it doesn’t Actually prove that; it’s only by evan’s own standards of what friendship ~should~ look like that he considers his interaction with evan to be a Letdown, same as how he considers his interaction with alana to be a Letdown) but yeah he could decide not to consider jared a friend after that for whatever reason because he doesn’t really need a Valid Enough reason, if you don’t wanna be friends with someone you don’t have to be friends with them. but evan then is Repeatedly video calling jared to vent the wild shit going on with him and says he’s doing it because jared’s his only friend, which is understandable but it’s evan choosing to continue at least behaving like jared really is his friend whether or not he considers him to be one, and evan letting jared help with the emails for a Genuinely Nominal Fee is clearly a result of jared considering them to be friends in a way that just so happens to also be convenient to evan in this issue, and jared helping with tcp for no other reason than it’s what evan wants to do is jared considering them to be friends in a way that happens to be convenient to evan in that matter, and evan just assuming that jared will continue to provide emails and back tcp in perpetuity?? doesn’t line up with any idea that evan is truly considering them to be Not Friends and is behaving in a way that reflects that. everything jared does is in support of evan and the way jared is repaid is just by getting to be more closely involved with evan, but even before act 1 is over, even by sincerely me, evan is trying to leave jared behind, thus negating what motivates jared, yet is expecting jared to continue to help him despite sabotaging jared’s motivation for doing so. 

like, evan is benefitting from jared’s desire to deepen their relationship, and it’s not that evan Has to consider himself closer to jared just because that’s what jared wants, but like.........he just doesn’t treat jared fairly. he can believe that $20 is enough compensation, he can believe that it’s none of his concern what’s motivating jared to write the emails and be involved in tcp, he Could plausibly be totally ignorant of the fact that jared was helping him because he considered evan to be his friend, and if that was the case he Could believe he’s innocent of taking advantage of that. and imo in good for you this is what evan’s kind of trying to pretend is true because if it WAS true then evan’s not in the wrong. and just like everything else, if it IS true, or at least if nobody knows it’s NOT true, it COULD be fine and possible for him to live out this fantasy where he’s this weird connor substitute but also....dating zoe....and leaving behind his imperfect mom and imperfect friends but not needing to feel guilty about it. he’s arguing with jared in gfy as if it’s true that evan wasn’t aware the whole time that jared was helping him because evan’s his only friend, as if jared was and should be helping only because the fact he chose to help in the first place means he’s in it as deep as evan. but evan WAS aware that jared was helping him for a reason, and that reason wasn’t $20. the whole time evan knew that jared was helping him b/c evan was his friend. and no evan didn’t Have to be a friend for jared in return b/c he never agreed that he should owe jared that, but evan Was knowingly benefitting from jared’s desire for evan to be his friend, and that’s undeniably messed up. and imo evan Knows This and feels conflicted and guilty about it and that’s why in gfy, when he’s trying to convince himself he can still be the good guy and none of these people who are angry at him are justified, he points out that jared would be alone without evan (reducing jared’s desire to be closer to evan as selfishness) and that jared would be in just as much shit as evan if the truth came out (also trying to force jared’s motivation to continue backing the lies into the frame of selfishness)...........like to argue that at that point evan is bein righteous b/c he Just Doesn’t Owe Jared Anything is at least acknowledging that evan’s basically been like....platonically Leading Jared On. if he had truly been ignorant that jared wanted to be his friend then it would still be a bit conveniently self-serving for him to be satisfied accepting jared’s help without knowing jared’s motivation for doing so........and if he had known that jared truly considered him a friend as he implies he knew all along then he Did take advantage of that by Again Conveniently allowing jared to operate under that assumption because it benefitted evan. if he stopped considering jared a friend then he shouldn’t have done that. it’s passive and at worst it’s lying by omission but it’s still not solely jared’s fault if he were trying to be friends with evan when evan didn’t want to be friends with him. evan was letting jared pursue this friendship because it helped him. if he didn’t want to be friends with jared, he should’ve tried to figure out why jared wanted to help him, and if he knew it was because jared Did want to be his friend, he should have refused that help. and evan Did know that it was because jared wanted evan to be his friend, but he didn’t refuse the help. tldr what i’m trying to say is that any way you look at it, it’s not that jared has some inalienable right to evan’s friendship, but jared Did have reason to feel he’d been played by evan, and evan knew that jared wanted evan’s friendship and if there was any justified time to pull the “you only want to be my friend because you have nobody else and so no, i don’t have to consider you or treat you like a friend” move, it was after (or before) jared’s first appearance and before evan videocalled jared to vent “because you’re my only (family) friend”

ugh like of course evan has Reasons he has grievances with heidi and alana and jared but gfy isn’t about evan being justified as it is about the other three being justified in their anger at evan, while evan is the one trying to justify himself. it’s not that evan is 100% In The Wrong in all ways in that scene but it’s like....definitely Peak Evan’s Wrongness. and reacting not by abandoning the lies but to double down on them b/c he thinks he truly can’t handle abandoning the lies is what dooms him to Words Fail. classic ev

UGH anyways it’s just that jared does get used and does get evan accusing him of having no real feelings in all of this and seeming to reject any of jared’s feelings for him in particular, and he loses his only friend, and he’s heartbroken, and evan lets him go but jared never stops keeping the truth a secret, and that’s just the last we get to know about him

like god......thinking about jared hating himself, and thinking about jared crying during good for you..................jesus christ

i mean, we only see things from evan’s perspective, and when jared disappears from evan’s literal or figurative field of vision, he disappears to the audience too. we don’t see jared at home in his bedroom, we don’t hear jared’s inner conflicts through solos, we just glimpse him through sincerely me and “if you only say the word from across the silence your voice is heard” and his gfy solo lines.......like, it’s so centered around evan that jared and alana irony of ironies do just ultimately Disappear..........how much is deh’s Final Form still haunted by the Untitled PPL Project origins where evan was presumably Our Sympathetic Hero and everyone else was dumbass cautionary-tale jerks worth our headshaking or tsks or contempt...........saying it wasn’t even until after the arena stage run that jared was given the Emotional Journey that extends into act 2..............like, the domination of evan’s perspective continues even though the other characters are fleshed out and sympathetic and all meant to be conflicted and flawed to fairly equal degrees. and that’s not necessarily Bad, especially for a main character with reason to be really caught up in his own head, but it certainly means that anyone who interprets evan’s perspective as Righteous and The Moral Standard within the material is going to negatively judge literally all the other characters as officially in the wrong, as they all end up at odds with evan at some point

it’s just like....people don’t afford jared the same assumption of interiority as they do evan. people assume that what’s on the surface, that the deflective nature of how jared communicates, is a true reflection of the whole of jared’s being. people act like the character is light and doesn’t carry real emotional weight and that “i know you think this is all a big joke” must be true, and that jared responds in increased frustration because.........he totally thinks it’s all a big joke. jared is so similar to evan, just like the other two seniors are, and jared only has one friend and we don’t even have evidence that evan consistently calls jared a friend, and all the evidence of the distance between jared and evan is evidence of jared’s isolation just as much as evan’s, but it’s like people just don’t think that has as much importance, because jared’s joking around about jerking off, he’s clearly fine!! if he only had one friend and Truly valued evan, the only way he could show that would be to prostrate himself before evan and weep upon seeing him!! acting like he doesn’t care about being close to evan because he’s totally so fine and confident and has so many friends should be taken at face value as true! 

ugh like we sympathize with evan for being afraid of people, but jared is afraid of people too, but where evan is trying to protect himself by being as inoffensive and inobtrusive as possible, jared is trying to protect himself by acting like he just isn’t scared of anyone at all and can’t be hurt because he doesn’t care. and evan’s suffering is justifiably given recognition, but jared just gets ignored and dismissed as a jerk, despite suffering in the same way. we aren’t told that jared is diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or with anything else, and we aren’t ever told that jared ever tried to kill himself, but this isn’t because these kinds of things couldn’t possibly be relevant, but rather because we just aren’t told much about jared at all. we only learn about jared through jared, who mostly only interacts with evan and is never onstage without evan also being onstage, who deflects all the time, who never tells his parents anything true about himself. nobody really knew connor and evan feels like nobody really knows him and nobody seems to really know jared and we sure don’t have any evidence of anyone really knowing alana. and in the end jared is left with no friends at all and this fresh rejection and parents who he thinks have no idea that they don’t know anything true about him, and he was not doing well when he first appeared, and his whole journey was a desperate attempt to improve things, and it left him even worse off than when he started, and we see jared as this light jokey role reducible to “memes & rude”?? 

that’s at least less horrifying a reaction than reducing him to “a jerk who gets his comeuppance.” like, again, jared is a highschooler in an awful place at the start of the play, canonically so so similar to alana and evan and connor, and connor kills himself and we sympathize with how horribly evan is suffering and the seriousness of the suffering of anyone in similar situations..............and jared is one of those people, one of those teenagers tcp is supposed to address, he’s a 17 year-old who IS similarly suffering, and we interpret him as...just a jerk. someone who causes all his own problems because he’s not nice enough and who deserves what he gets in the course of events; someone who is so similar to evan but ends up feeling rejected by his only friend, betrayed by his own attempts to have a realer relationship and be closer to someone in a more genuine way, without any reason to believe he at least has the emotional support of his parents who don’t know anything about him..........and we just feel this is what he deserves because he teases evan too much and didn’t sign his cast and called them family friends. 

and even the sympathy given evan is pretty messed up like i mentioned earlier because it’s REALLY not useful to interpret his anxiety as being Too Pure For This World. it’s not even who he really is - see: evan being himself around jared during sincerely me; aka not being at all quiet and polite and inobtrusive - see: evan clearly not being accurate when he tries to make a good impression on zoe by saying he doesn’t even think things that aren’t nice. evan doesn’t exhibit those anxious defensive behaviors because he Wants to, he acts that way because he’s scared of people and trying to avoid being hurt. saying that this is Pure And Soft is messed up and just reinforces some notion that evan needs to stay that way rather than be a happier person by learning how Not to feel like he always has to act nice and avoid any conflict and not speak up or stand up for himself. saying that these kinds of perspectives, when you’re scared of everyone and expecting to be hurt by the world for existing if you don’t protect yourself by trying to give people zero reason to take objection to anything you do or even notice you exist at all, is just Purity and Kindhearted Selflessness is really just a harmful concept. it says that people dealing with that should continue to suffer just as they are and that for their experience with this to improve would necessarily involve them becoming worse as people - meaner and more selfish and less deserving of sympathy.

meanwhile, jared’s way of reacting to his fear that he’s going to be hurt by anyone and everyone just for existing happens to be less appealing to people. evan tries to get through life by hoping nobody directs any attention to him, jared is trying to get through it by controlling the way people give him attention, by sending out a signal that also says “there’s no reason to mess with me,” except that instead of like how evan is trying to please and placate everyone, jared is trying to pretend he’s confident and doesn’t care and he’s trying to withhold access to his real emotions from absolutely everyone. he’s trying to deny his real desires even to himself and keep them buried and hidden, but these desires are so desperate that he can’t, because he’s trying to pretend he’s fine, but he’s really really really not. but he’s just a jerk because he makes fun of his friend and isn’t nice enough to evan within the parameters of what evan wants that to look like. jared’s whole motivation throughout the show is his being in love with evan, but people really are gonna believe that jared’s just doing everything because his sole driving force truly is “it’s all a joke haha”.......jared and alana both try to act fine and unaffected, and everyone just immediately accept that. when they have the slightest amount of conflict with evan or behave in ways that we as the audience know aren’t evan’s ideal hope for how they’d act, they’re jerks and/or bullying evan and pushing him around, because god knows where people get this idea that evan’s constantly completely passive and just gets pushed into the position he finds himself in by other people, but absolutely nothing in canon material supports that. jared and alana are the ones backing evan up during disappear, and they’re the ones who end up disappearing after that, and we just go “who? oh yeah those two. w/e they’re fine”

like, irl people really don’t know what it looks like when people aren’t nt, what it looks like when they’re affected by something traumatic, what it looks like when they’ve been isolated and left to deal with awful things on their own and are struggling and aren’t coping in ways that appeal to others and they just get painted as weird and unpleasant and generally bad. and really this real-world ignorance and these misconceptions are Emergent in how people react to reflections of these issues in media / through media analysis. pretty wild that connor and alana and jared can all be reduced to Jerks depending on who you ask!! even that evan sometimes gets called a jerk because someone has noticed that he’s struggling horribly AND he’s also not REALLY Pure And Goldenhearted And Selfless, so therefore he doesn’t Deserve to be sympathetic b/c he’s anxious and suicidal, since the only people who deserve sympathy for these uncomfortable and inconvenient things are people who are Otherwise Perfect and have earned being regarded as Unjustly Afflicted with these issues and worthy of our pity

when people have to struggle to navigate terrible stuff by themselves, they don’t always figure out the right way to do it by 17 years of age!!! none of the deh seniors are actually Good at coping with their lives yet! they’re all trying but they’re self-sabotaging and are really just isolated further by the ways they try to interact with others. they’re isolated and the ways they desperately try to deal with that just isolate them further. like, this shit is real. and the fact that people reacting to these experiences depicted via fictional teenagers is not heartening for how they might understand these kinds of experiences in like, actual life. the way jared acts Doesn’t indicate that he’s totally fine but people truly take it at face value and think jared isn’t affected by things and doesn’t have emotional depth and only cares about being funny and clever. jared keeps people at a distance and acts rude or uncaring as a way to protect himself because he’s scared of people’s ability to hurt him, not because he’s malicious and likes to hurt people’s feelings, but people really just think he’s an asshole who deserves to be hurt in return, because i guess even if he WAS just always trying to be an asshole for his own amusement, we absolutely want the treatment a highschooler receives to be “vengeance,” i guess. it’s just really messed up that not only do most people not have any idea what reactions to things like deep and pervasive fear and depression and stress and sadness and self-loathing actually look like, but so often when they unknowingly see it, if the manifestations come across as too Mean or Unpleasant or Annoying or Offputting, they think the person deserves to be punished and treated badly / with hostility and that you can speculate on how these traits must reflect the deficiencies of someone’s internal worth and the quality of their character. 

like, idk, demeanor is really so so overrated as a measure of what someone’s really like. it’s so often misread but also given disproportionate weight as a reflection of who they really are. i think a fair amount about these two segments i heard: one about Triage where a doctor talks about these two patients and one was very warm and friendly and everyone loved her and one was less pleasant and standoffish, and when the former was having respiratory problems when oxygen was strictly rationed, the attendees considered breaking the rules to give her oxygen (which in the end wasn’t necessary, it cleared up without it) and the doctor was wondering if they’d have been moved to consider that for the less popular patient as well. and the second story where Professional Scientists got to go on the plane that flies in parabolas so that when its at the peak of the arc you experience weightlessness, and you get to go on the plane because you’re doing serious experiments and everything you bring on board has to pass inspection and be justified as Necessary and everything is very planned out and you can’t fool around and you have to conduct all your experiments and the point is it’s all very serious - and the guy was talking about how they all get on the plane taking it very seriously and prepared to conduct theyir serious experiments, but when the first moment of weightlessness came everybody was laughing and clearly having a blast, and had that reaction pretty much each time. but they also stuck to the plan and conducted their serious experiments. and the idea was that “taking things seriously” doesn’t require a solemn demeanor, wipe that smile off your face. and i’m annoyed with the Frequent but unfounded trope in fics where jared communicates things in a humorous way pretty much all the time like in canon but then the fact that he’s still being dryly humorous in a ~serious moment~ leads to him being admonished because he won’t Be Serious or Take This Seriously. 

i’m also annoyed with the frequent, unfounded fic trope where jared gets the “jared, you ignorant slut” treatment b/c he has never known True Pain and only evan and connor Get It and jared’s just some nt asshole who truly thinks everything’s a joke, alana generally also does not know sadness either of course

like relevantly enough, though i relate to jared more, in terms of how i react to Issues i guess i’m kind of most like evan (and a bit like alana i guess), and back in the day when i was earlier along in the process of dragging myself out of the depths of self-loathing (pretty singlehandedly though i wasn’t totally isolated from anyone supportive, which is always helpful) i sort of had this “joke” about it that i was learning how to become meaner lol.............because the ~selfless~ and Nice and Pleasant thing was obviously to think you deserve the worse and should accept whatever terrible treatment you get as Also Deserved and should keep your head down and in every interaction should be as pleasant and nice and convenient and inobtrusive as possible. i pushed myself to believe that i at least didn’t deserve to be suicidal through being contrarian and “mean” and embracing that i didn’t have to care if anyone disagreed. even thinking about the concept that i deserved to stand up for myself was like, Being Mean lol.......thinking about ways in which my experiences dealing with other people made me miserable sometimes finally started to make more sense when i looked at it through a lens of “maybe i wasn’t always getting amazing treatment from everyone ever”..........thinking about my own perspective having as much inherent validity as anyone else’s was like, the undeserved entitlement of it all, lol......like i definitely thought of it and talked about it all as Being Meaner, and i was being humorous, but also not really in an Absurd way b/c i knew and i know that people really do think that like, self-flagellation and only deserving to ascend out of self-hatred if someone else notices you’re experiencing that and deems you worthy of redemption and generally reacting to pain by being a sweet innocent lamb who is utterly bemused by everything All Equals being Nice and Lovely and Worthy Of Pity. and that if you’re not that lamb and you’re not initially pleasant and you’re offputting because you don’t expect other people to treat you well then like, other people aren’t going to treat you well and they’re going to write you off and dismiss you or change how they react to you versus how they react to someone who they think Acts Better and thus Is better............people will see types of behavior that indicate someone is suffering and they’ll either go “wow so kind and pure and not worthy of attention b/c their behavior is inoffensive and they avoid attention anyways and don’t get in the way” or “this person is terrible and they can’t possibly deserve sympathy or a second thought about their inner world because this is proof they don’t have one or it’s Bad and so i’ll either want to punish or ignore them”

this isn’t my first rodeo of “teenage character clearly needs help and people don’t notice this at all and/or inaccurately judges their intentions and motivations and writes them off as a jerk” and the consistency in this kind of Interpretation is always so heartening, really

and don’t even get me started on people calling jared “abusive” or even implying it....not my first rodeo on this either.....but, first of all, same as above, people REALLY don’t know what it Actually looks like when someone’s experienced abuse, and the fact that there’s this tendency irl (and in the emergent reflection of these misconceptions in reaction to / analysis of media) to interpret qualities and experiences and tendencies that are associated with having gone through abuse as people being weird / jerkish / annoying / exhausting etc is.....great. and while i could just say “jared is not abusive and never try to argue that he is” and leave it at that, a real quick example of some observances of why this is the case: jared doesn’t try to control evan. he doesn’t try to undermine evan’s decisions. he doesn’t undermine evan’s emotions. when jared’s unhappy with evan, he’s not trying to force evan to do what he wants, he’s trying to change His Own behavior to get what he wants. when he fights with evan, it’s a back and forth. evan isn’t afraid or even hesitant to argue with jared at any point, and even asserts himself over jared sometimes (whereas jared truly never asserts himself over anyone and avoids real, direct conflict whenever he can). when jared feels rejected and is completely upset with evan in gfy, he just leaves and we’re never told he tries to interact with evan again. look at how they confront each other, whether in gfy or sincerely me. look at how jared tries to get what he wants, and look at how he reacts when he doesn’t get it. he doesn’t try to control what evan can do or demand irrefutable power in any and every situation which he’ll back up with retribution...........evan and jared’s relationship is obviously not in its ideal state and this is coming from both ends. they way they treat each other isn’t always fair and kind and considerate, but it has nothing in the least to do with abuse, even if you think they’re conclusively bad for each other. it’s genuinely harmful to misuse the word abuse and create misinformation about it by doing so, and speaking of taking things seriously: stop doing this. don’t talk definitively about it even in passing if you don’t know what you’re talking about, take it seriously. don’t just try to bolster the authority of your opinion by being all “i’m over here with real criticisms like ‘this is abusive’ while everyone else is faffing around just saying ‘it’s not great, it’s not the healthiest’ like an idiot.” genuinely stop it

ugh....

well anyways i guess i don’t have to Get Around to finally writing that “comparing the way jared and evan are afforded sympathy” essay because this is about as close as i’ll get to it. god i hope i didn’t leave out any major obvious points

tl;dr *thinks about jared crying during good for you*

[postdoc-help-desk]

Expert Note-Taking

Last post was about how to manage any references you gather during your research, so this time I’m going to focus on another important related factor: keeping track of important information obtained from references. Even though you can do this in multiple ways and preferences will determine what you go for, there is one factor you’ll definitely want to consider before choosing an option.

It all comes down to the question of how long your project will last and how many references you’ll need to collect in order to complete it. For me, these fall into three categories that boil down to the terms small, medium, and large.

◆ Consider small projects as those that are fairly short or not requiring many references. If the project only lasts a few weeks or you need under 10 references, you can probably get away with printing articles before highlighting relevant information and scribbling notes in the margins. If you prefer to keep things digital, these options are also available in most PDF reader applications.

◆ For medium-sized projects with up to 20 references or ones that last up to a semester’s worth of time, you may want to consider transferring that information to a notebook or onto note cards that you can flip through or putting it all into a single word processing document. At the very least, this will reduce each reference to its relevant information instead of having to skip past extraneous information. Since you should have a PDF copy of all your references saved for easy access, you will always have the option to return to the full piece for details you may have missed previously.

◆ And then there’s the large projects. For any projects that require more than 20 references, you will likely want to be able to search and sort information more easily, and this is where software options can be immensely beneficial. Similarly, any projects that last longer than one semester’s worth of time is likely best suited for digital notes so you don’t misplace work and have to do a close rereading of any references. As graduate students, this is where your main research project will definitely end up, though other projects may as well.

Of course, your cutoff point might be different than mine, so don’t feel like you have to stick to these values. If you have a better memory or fewer things to juggle, you may get away with stretching to longer time periods or larger quantities of references. If you’re liable to forget things easily or have a lot of responsibilities, make sure you account for this! You know your own limits better than I do, but do try to err on the cautious side. And by no means should you push yourself to keep everything in your head, because you will definitely forget information or mix up sources and details if you do!

So let me spend the rest of this post talking about what some of the best options are out there for digital academic note-taking. Just like you did in choosing a reference manager, spend a little time testing out your choice to make sure it’s a good fit for you and your style. If you thought the idea of transferring your references from one manager to another halfway through a project was daunting, consider how much worse it would be without the automatic export and import options they offer and you’ll have a sense for what transferring your notes to another platform halfway through a project would be like.

Digital note-taking options have two distinct advantages over paper and print options, which are intertwined. They are the copy and paste function and the search function. ◇ Whether you’re copying a specific quotation into your notes or grabbing a screenshot of a figure or table, this is invaluable next to having to hand-write or draw out anything. Even if you were to underline, highlight, or physically cut out the relevant part of a paper, each of these options are more time-consuming in the long run. Cutting up a physical copy to paste pieces into a notebook is completely absurd and does you no benefit when it comes time to use that information, and neither does underlining or highlighting because you’ll still have to go back to the whole reference. Finding highlighted or underlined phrases after the fact is hugely annoying, if for no other reason than having to flip through countless pages to find the right sentence. But any images you put into your digital notebook will be accessible to copy and paste out of it later on, just as any quotations will be. Searching for information will also take significantly less time and effort, because you won’t have to flip through physical notes to manually identify relevant phrases. Instead, all text in your digital notebook can be searched using the search function in the program if it has one, or CTRL+F if it doesn’t.

Now, I’m a little biased in note-taking options and I’m sure that will come across, so do keep that in mind. For me, there are really only three viable digital options at this time that are well-designed for academic note-taking.

A word processing document: ◇ It’s important to start by recognizing the tried-and-true, long-standing option of a massive document. This can of course be a browser-based document like a Google Doc that you can access anywhere with Internet or it could be application-based like a Microsoft Word document that is saved locally to a hard drive. But no matter how you design and format it, a giant document is the most basic of the digital choices and therefore has the fewest benefits. This means that as long as you include something to identify where any information comes from, it can work but it has distinct limits. However, the more references and information you add to the file, the harder it will become to pick out specifics or draw connections between several references. Consider for a moment the limitation of your monitor screen size. While it may sound silly, remember that if you copy several figures or take a lot of notes on one reference, the space taken up could easily take up more than what you are able to reasonably read on the screen. If you then want to find a key phrase or concept that appears in multiple references, there’s no way to find both that key information and the reference it comes from at the same time, even with a search function. Taking notes for small or medium projects may be feasible with a word processing document, but should definitely not be used with large projects.

Evernote or Microsoft OneNote: ◇ So what if you don’t want to use a word-processing document, or you have a large project to do? Both Evernote and OneNote are great options for you to keep all your notes together. They’re fairly similar, so in large part your decision will come down to personal preference. Evernote is distinctly business-like in its design with a relatively drab color scheme. In contrast, OneNote is a bit more colorful and creative in its design. This may not matter to you, but then again, it may be depressing or distracting for you if you choose the wrong application. The most significant difference between them, however, is the cost. Evernote has several levels to it, including the individual use options of basic and premium. Basic Evernote is free, but comes with the limitation of only being accessible on a computer rather than having the mobile access option that comes with a premium account. It also restricts your account in terms of the number of devices that can be linked to it, which may be problematic if you’re likely to work on multiple computers.For $8 a month, however, you’ll have Premium Evernote and be able to get rid of both of these issues while bumping up your abilities in some other areas, too. It’s also worth noting that a school email address can grant you a full year with a Premium account for free. OneNote, on the other hand, is completely free. No pay levels and no differences between account abilities, just full access. So, what can you do with these softwares? Since both of them are designed specifically to be note-taking software, there are some distinct benefits that mostly appear through organizational features. - While the terminology is different between them, both Evernote and OneNote let you organize your notes very well. Remember back in middle school when you had a different binder for each class, dividers within each binder for different sections of material, and many different pages within those dividers that contained your notes? That’s pretty much what you’ll have again through these applications, but with the added benefit of being digital. Each project can be the binder, while subsections within it will become folders, like the dividers, and all of your notes for each reference will go onto a different page. You can even create subfolders if needed. - Another key organizational feature here is one that I pointed out as a weakness with a word processing document, which is keeping more information on one screen. To continue the metaphor, unlike your middle school binders, you can see the name of each page in a folder without having to flip through them so you can identify and find information more easily. You’ll still have to click through the pages to see the notes, but if you use a search function to find a key word or phrase, you’ll much more easily identify which references have that information in them.

No matter what route you choose, regardless of the project size or duration, keeping track of which source any information comes from is easily the most important thing. By doing this, you will save significant amounts of time in not having to look back through multitudes of documents to find a specific statement or figure in one of them again.

[doomedandstoned]

Self-Sabotaging Bands

~Bacon's Blog~

Photograph by Randy J Byrd

I know its kind of weird to think about but I often find that bands are their own worst enemies. There are so many ways that you can see bands shooting themselves in the metaphorical foot, and as someone who wants to see bands succeed this is supremely frustrating. Being the nerd that I am, I spent some time trying to break down what I view as the biggest mistakes bands make and the issues that seem to let this happen. What it essentially boils down too, at least as far as I can tell is a lack of organization, needing basic tech skills, unprofessionalism and of course having a bad mindset. I wanted to delve a little bit into all of these things as we chart our way forward.

4. Not Being Organized

Now I’m not trying to be the pot calling the kettle black. I definitely have had my struggles with organization, even today I sometimes find myself dropping the ball on shit because I always need to be improving my systems for keeping myself on task. That being said – it’s shameful how many bands are really dropping the ball here. Having basic organizational skills, stuff like responding to emails quickly and having your band’s files sorted nicely is key to making sure that people want to work with you. If you can’t, for instance, get a promoter your logo quickly then odds are they aren’t going to work with you again. Now imagine that on a larger scale – like a label wanting your masters and it being delayed for months. How do you think that makes the label feel about your work?

3. Lacking Basic Tech Skills

Again, one that seems to frustrate me to no end. Remember that basically everyone in the music industry at this point is someone who spends a lot of hours behind a computer all day every day. That’s just what it is. So if you find the people you are working with frustrated by your issues with things like Dropbox, hitting reply all or file formats, that’s ok, but realize you need to educate yourself. Fortunately, it's just a Google search away. I know that this stuff can be hard, especially if you aren’t sitting with your ass at a laptop all day, but if you don’t start doing this you are going to really have issues with people who genuinely want to work with you.

2. Rudeness and Unprofessionalism

This should go without saying, but it’s important. I’ve had a ton of people blow up or be dicks for no apparent reason. Remember in most cases in music, especially at the lower levels people other than you have very little control over what happens in your career. They can give you good advice and set you on the right path (which is what I aim to do!) but a tastemaker label for instance isn’t going to revolutionize your bands success. Neither is hiring a good PR person. Those things will help, but you have to be nice to these people and realize that they are probably just doing this because they love it and if you make it hard for them they will dump you on your ass.

1. Having A Bad Mindset

This is the broadest and also the most important. So many bands have a bad mindset about everything from labels to PR to educate themselves about the music industry. So often people don’t take the time to realize that it IS possible to have success in this industry and while it may not be glamorous, it is not quite as much of a clusterfuck as some might have you think. It’s a really hard game to be sure, but it’s still a game you CAN play. So realize that you can in fact hustle that extra 200 dollars you need to be able to afford the PR you want, you SHOULD read that eBook and listening to podcasts about the biz will probably help you. If you have a positive mindset on this stuff and are nice to people it’s going to pay off.

Matt Bacon (IG: mattbacon666) with Dropout Media is a consultant, A&R man, and journalist specializing in the world of heavy metal. Matt also co-hosts the Dumb & Dumbest podcast with Curtis Dewar of Dewar PR.

[lefaystrent]

Lifeline ch.3

Fandom: Thomas Sanders, Sanders Sides

Pairings: platonic lamp/Thomas

Summary: Unable to help himself, Patton reached out to ruffle Thomas’s hair. The other sides rolled their eyes, knowing what would happen, except— 

Patton’s hand.  

It made contact. 

Chapter Navigation: one , two , four

AO3 Link

When his sides inevitably did reappear, he didn’t expect Logan to be the first to show up.

“If you fail to correct your posture now, it could negatively affect your health.”

“Logan!” Thomas exclaimed, flinging out his arms to keep himself from falling out of his seat. He’d been sitting at the dining table going through his business email on his laptop. Behind him, his logical side stood in his usual spot by the stairs.

Logan adjusted his glasses calmly. “Salutations, Thomas. As I was saying, though you may not notice it at the time, sitting at your computer as you were doing attributes to back and neck pain, stress on your joints which could lead to arthritis, digestive issues which can lead to acid reflux or—”

“Careful, Logan,” a deep, graveled voice interrupted. “You’re stealing my thunder.”

Thomas snapped his head to his left to find Virgil sitting on the table beside his computer. Although his sides tended to like their living room spots the most, they could pop up anywhere. That didn’t mean it wasn’t odd to see Virgil away from his regular spot while Logan remained in his usual place. 

Or maybe it was just because of all the thoughts that had been plaguing Thomas since he last saw them. That was sure to make anything weird.

Logan glanced over at Virgil, expression unreadable. “I’m always careful. As for the latter part of your statement, I suppose you mean to say your metaphorical thunder; however, I’m not sure how I could ‘steal’ that.”

“It’s supposed to be my job to stress Thomas out.” Virgil leaned back on one arm, hand braced against the tabletop while his feet rested on one of the dining chairs. His position should have been a relaxed one. Head angled down, he looked through a fringe of purple-stained bangs to level a hard stare at Logan.

“I only seek to ensure that Thomas maintains a healthy lifestyle through the use of facts. And as you are well aware, that is my job.”

“If your job is to be a nagging mom, then yeah, I’m aware.”

“What is it with all of you likening me to a mother in a negative context?”

“Guys?” Thomas questioned quietly. He thought this would be one of those times where they’d keep on going, not having heard him. Instead they zeroed in on him immediately. The sudden intense stares pierced into him. He tried to smile. “Why so serious?”

Logan scoffed, shoulders stiff and hands held together in a lecturing stance. “I’m always serious. I have to be if anything is to be done around here.”

“Logan, that’s not—” Thomas went to say because they had been over this kind of conversation before, but Virgil beat him to it.

“Maybe nothing needs to be done at the moment,” he growled, teeth bared.

Logan’s brow raised. “And this is why I have to always be the serious one, because frivolous nonsense is reserved elsewhere.”

For a second, Virgil’s mouth hung open. The air chilled between them, cold enough to suck breath from lungs. Thomas suspected a lot more was being said than he understood. It was like watching parents trying to act normal in front of their kid after having an argument in the next room. And wasn’t that a freaky thought? Thomas knew that they had conversations away from him, inside the mindscape, but it had never felt more disconcerting than it did now, to think of what the pieces of him did unbeknownst to him.

Almost like they were real people, people who he suddenly felt like he didn’t know so well anymore.

Virgil shot a hurried look at Thomas. He didn’t know what he must have saw there, but Virgil quickly schooled his lips into a scowl.

“This is bullshit,” Virgil muttered, turning away. “Princey! Code stupid, or whatever.”

“Virgil!” Roman rose up in front of the tv, arms falling from his regal pose to point accusingly at the darker side. “We agreed that it would be ‘code blue’ considering— wait, why are you all over . . .”

Roman frowned in observation at their location. Upon spotting Logan, his eyes widened for a brief second before he dived into action, running to hop over the couch with a grunt of, “Parkour!” He landed between the table and Logan.

“Whenever troubles block your way, your prince shall come to save the day!”

“If by ‘save the day’ you mean ‘interrupt an ongoing conversation that has nothing to do with you’ then yes, I suppose you’re right.”

“If it had nothing to do with me then it was obviously not a conversation worth continuing.” One hand on hip and eyes closed as his head turned to the side dramatically, Roman raised a hand to gracefully gesture at his face. “Go ahead, you may shower me with praises.”

Virgil rolled his eyes, sharing a glance with Thomas to shake his head. Thomas smiled weakly, more focused on Logan at the moment.

Arms crossed, Logan stood there unimpressed. He offered no retort. Which was a good thing, right? Because Thomas worried that this would turn into a full-blown argument, and he felt unprepared to play mediator at the moment since usually that was Patton’s—

Logan turned to look across the living room, gazing for a long, drawn-out minute at the white blinds.

“At this rate, nothing will get done,” he commented. Then he sank out.

Roman drooped, pouting. “He could at least put up a decent fight.”

Virgil smacked his arm. Roman gasped and smacked his arm right back.

Having grown up with brothers himself, Thomas knew they were about to squabble. He knew it and he couldn’t take it.

“Hey,” he called their attention sharply, throwing an arm out between them. Both of them flinched and avoided the limb at all costs, Roman jumping back and Virgil nearly falling off the table.

. . . okay, that kind of stung a little. Even worse was the spooked way they watched him now.

Were they afraid of Thomas? Or of themselves?

Thomas swallowed. He tried his best to remember Joan’s words and let that give him the determination to do what needed to be done.

“What was all that about?”

They looked at each other first in that way that screamed they knew exactly what Thomas meant but didn’t want to be the first to spill the beans. Roman stood up straight, offering a dazzling smile.

“Whatever do you mean, Thomas? You know how things usually go with us. We’re a rowdy bunch!”

“No, no.” Thomas denied, shaking his head. “I know how things usually go and that wasn’t . . . usual. There’s something going on here, something that you aren’t telling me, am I right?”

Virgil avoided looking at Thomas altogether. He let Roman do the talking. “Nothing that you don’t already know, I assure you. You know how Sir Thinks-a-Lot is, repressing the fact that he’s as human as the rest of us.”

Thomas could leave it there. It’d be the easy way out. Laugh it off, let things go back to normal. Forget the looming sense of unease and uncertainty.

Forget the other day ever happened.

Thomas folded his hands in his lap, eyes fixed on Roman, imploring and earnest. “I don’t think that’s all there is to it.”

“What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” Virgil muttered.

“There’s already a lot that I don’t know,” Thomas pointed out, “and I’m not the only one it’s hurting.”

Silence fell on them. Not for the first time, Thomas wondered where the line was drawn between himself and his sides. How similar had their thoughts been running these past days? Or could he fathom what they were going through?

Roman put his back to them, bracing his arms on top of the couch, head bowed. Likewise, Virgil refused to look at him. He sat there hunched in on himself, hood having been pulled up. Without being able to see their faces like this, Thomas could imagine they were anyone. Anyone with their own problems and fears. Anyone he could reach out to, if he dared.

What would it be like? If he were to grip at the arm of Virgil’s hoodie and tug. Or to place a steady hand at Roman’s back? Could they feel the weight? Would they want to?

You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to do this.

That’s what Patton had said. But that was Patton. Did the others . . . did they ever think that way too?

“Please talk to me,” Thomas whispered, unable to bear the pounding silence.

They said nothing. Thomas drowned in the absence of sound, the tide of questions cresting over him, until an ocean spanned between them. His heart twisted in his chest, and he felt the inexplicably urge to cry.

More than anything, he wanted to understand himself.

Because they made his life better, right?

I want to make their lives better too.

From behind him, someone spoke softly, “This is my fault.”

Thomas looked over his shoulder to see Patton round the corner from the kitchen. His eyes were as sad as his smile. The other two sides seemed taken aback at his appearance. Virgil slid off the table, ready to approach Patton if Roman hadn’t gripped him by the elbow. Amazingly, Virgil let him without protest.

“Patton?” Thomas questioned. “How is any of this your fault?”

“We’ve all been thinking about it,” the fatherly side chuckled. “Even if it’s hard, or we might not want to. What happened, happened. We can’t change the past, just how we deal with it.”

“Pat,” Roman began but Patton hushed him gently.

“It’s alright, champ. I know what you’ve been up to. I know you care, but I don’t need you to protect me.”

“Protect you from what?” Thomas asked, glancing back and forth between his sides. What in the world was going on?

“From myself?” Patton confessed with a chuckle, scratching the back of his head. He took one step in front of the other, stopping almost a foot away from Thomas. They were the same height, all of them, but from where Thomas sat, he’d never seen Patton look taller. “I don’t think I’ve been setting a good example for my kiddos, lately.”

“What do you mean?” Thomas asked, voice barely a whisper.

“It’s okay to be scared, Thomas,” he said, smile understanding. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, their eyes at the same level. The corners of his eyes crinkled with fondness. “It’s okay to hide when you need to. But Thomas?”

A hand rose, palm facing up.

“We can’t hide forever,” Patton said and waited patiently.

Thomas scrutinized the hand. It was his, same lines drawn on skin, same tiny freckles scattered here and there, same thick fingers spread out. But at the same time, it wasn’t. This was Patton’s hand, and Thomas could feel everyone’s eyes on him, though he didn’t look up to check.

If Patton could do it, so could he.

He hung his own hand above Patton’s for a moment before bringing it down.

Tag list:  @spectralheartt @a-pastel-pan @notalwaysthevillian @rose-gold-roman @ijustrealizedhowdumbmynamewas @katie-the-noble-fangirl @yourroyalydramaticanxiousness @aroundofapplesauce @merlybird500 @beach-fan @jemthebookworm  @whats-going-on-kiddos  @5am-the-foxing-hour @sevencrashing @ryuity @sanders-s1des-blog @pridefox @romano-cheesey @fandomsofrandom @book-of-charlie (let me know if you want to be added or removed from this story’s tag list)

[tumblunni]

MORE UPDATES ON THINGS WHAT HAPPEN

The half week milestone of the hospital house thingie time! I think the term they use for it is "a residential stay"? Cos like its not a hospital its a shared housing block thats just full of doctors. I get to sleep in a real bed and there's a nice community room and board game nights and stuff. But its still really scary how intense the supervision can be! Like they have a window to look into your room once per hour every hour constantly. And they have to go through your undies and catalog them as part of the possessions check. I was not warned about that and it was mega embarassing trying to explain a binder to a bunch of old lady doctors! Oh and i had yo do a urine test today which was possibly the most fuckin embarassing thing in the actual universe. And you're not even allowed to take your own pills! They keep them locked in a big ominous wall of lockers and you have to come into the office and swallow the pill while theyre watching. I guess maybe because some people might be faking their illness and selling their pills on the black market or whatever? But that literally doesnt happen with antidepressants, they have no 'high' or even any effect at all on non-sick people. So it just makes no sense to me and its real embarassing cos like i said i suck at taking pills with plain water and without a straw. The ones i take are real damn chunky things the size of my thumbnail! I think i'l get better at not (literally) choking under pressure over time, tho. Hopefully.

Anyway that's all the bad out of the way! Now the good and the neutral and the just miscellaneous!

Its still nervewracking having to shower in a shared house but they have a cool walk-in shower and ive never tried one of those so it was vaguely interesting. And im allowed to take my showers early at 6am to minimize the chance of anyone else trying to use the door, lol. My biggest fear is having some staff member walk in on me when im naked like back in that homeless hostel. Oh or that time in the homeless hostel where the teenage boys filled the entire bathroom with inflated condoms wall to wall. Like wow so much damn effort to prank the stupid nervous bunni who probably would have been embarassed by literally anything else. Man this place is bringing so many memories of that homeless hostel but at least this time its a place specifically for sick people and they know i'm anxious doing shared cooking and board games and whatever so they dont make fun of me for it. But in a lot of ways that hostel had more freedoms too.. *shrug*

Anyway! A good! I get to have cooking lesson!! I know literally nothing about cooking and now i get to know several thing!! This nice doctor called Josie taught me how to make an omelette and i tasted ham for the first time! That is just how limited my life experiences are, lol. Oh and they want me to say that she's a 'mental health worker' not a doctor, but its all real confusing?? Like they have the staff that look after you and then the only ones we're supposed to call doctors are the ones who actually have the authority to prescribe pills and diagnosies. But like if youre in a hospital you'd call them all doctors, not just the actual surgeon? Or i guess theyre kinda like nursing home staff?? But they cant be support workers cos support workers are specific government assigned inspector type guys like Richard who only meet with you once a week.and i have to remember to not call him a social worker either cos social workers only work with family and custody related stuff. I dunno?? Basically the medical industry has a lot of names that dont really describe what the actual thing is, lol. Anyway the ham omelette was great and now im gonna try and remember so i can try and make it myself next time! HAM ACCOMPLISHED

Also i played bingo with a few other patients and it was fun but funny that i lost 6 times in a row when there were only 3 of us. I got a consolation prize of a pack of neon highlighter pens so hell yeah!!

I'm getting booked in to try some additional classes starting next week on monday and tuesday morning. The computer programming one was sadly unavailable, but i managed tp snag a place in "confidence building group therapy" and "basic how to use power tools". I wasnt really all that interested in that one but i thought it would be a useful skill even if its less fun. And maybe you get to actyally make something to take home at the end? A lil shelf to help organize this awkward lil room better, maybe?

And an unexpected bonus of being semi-hospitalized is that i get a free bus pass! And cos im here cos of my social anxiety theyre gonna help me get outside more and actually use this thing to the fullest! The first thing we did was the trip to actually get the bus pass itself. It was like "bus, take my money to take me to the place where i can never give you money again!" XD Ive been really stupidly nervous about going on tne bus in my old neighbourhood cos MAN it was really isolated there and everything just amplified my mental illness. An almost two hour bus ride to get to ANY SHOPS AT ALL, with only one bus for the whole town so it was always crowded and full of screaming kids and gossipy everyones. Social anxiety: maximum level proud mode!

So yeah i feel BIG ACCONPLISHED! I was able to take this bus for the first time with a doctor coming with me. Power Grandpa The Strong. His actual name is Paul and he has awesome sleeve tattoos of like anchors and dragons and sports teams and stuff! And he likes thrift stores and wearing silly hats too! Its like he's powerful enough to wrestle away everyone's anxieties! I was able to be a bit reckless too and i went out wearing my fave shirt thats like trans pride coloured plaid. A POWERFUL SHIRT IS REQUIRED FOR THIS QUEST! so we went to the office to register this bus pass and i panicked a bit cos apparantky we brought the wrong form and i wrote my name in the wrong box and then my passport photo looked terrible and aaa! But it all worked out and i was kinda freaking out for nothing. And he took me for a lil tour of the place and showed me this cool shop that does spray paint tye dye t shirts with spiderman on them?? Why does this incredibly specific shop exist and how have i never heard of it before?? There was also a new harry potter shop next to the disney shop, and the old used book store i used to visit as a kid was still there, complete with rickety spiral staircase and ominous basement trap door. I'm still not brave enough to go down there, but apparantly its just the history books section so meh. Then we actually went to a fancy coffee shop and i had this brain freeze mango ice frappucchino thing! Im trying all the new foods!!

And i was TOO HIGH ON DECADENCE and made a RECKLESS CHOICE! i blame power gramp's amazing tattoos, they were totally whispering to me that i shoukd screw the rules and ride off into the sunset on a metaphorical harley davidsen of mental health

So i was like Hey Paul I Am Totally Fine Getting Home On My Own, and it was like i was floating off in the distance somewhere begging my body to not speaketh these words. But it ended up working out okay! The excitement of it all and the sense of accomplishmebt from getting there all okay allowed me to mostly not freak out as i spent the day in town and looked at some shops and stuff. Basic Living Skills: Completed! I chilled out in the library (tho i dont have a card yet, alas!) and visited like five comic and anime stores, and got lost but found a Pizza Hut and that was SO NOSTALGIC FOR MY CHILDHOOD and it didnt taste quite as good as i remembered but the waiter guy was super nice and had a similar shirt and it was All Good! Oh and i gave all my money to a homeless person and that's why i'm broke now. And i bought a plastic slug! I just saw it from across the room and was like OH NO I AM BEING MAGNETISED TOWARDS IT OH NO IT HAS ALREADY BEEN BOUGHT. I need to think of a name for this new friend!!

So yeh i got home okay and i felt really acconplished and that was the furthest trip away that i've taken in ages! Man my mental illness makes me feel pathetic, but it also brings ridiculously big joys from the smallest of silly acconplishys!

Oh and thank you so much to the people who sent me emails! It really helped so much to keep me from giving up during the first few days before i made a bit of progress and felt like i could really do this, yknow? Especially big thanks tp the friend who sent me that mysterious super happy song that they found on a mystery disc in a german market?? Im still not sure whether its in greek or hasidic jewish but it sounds AMAZING and i hope someday i can figure out the band so i can hear their other singles!

Ok this is bunni out! BIG HUGS FOR THE EVERYONE AAAA

[papatonyinsandiego]

Creating Sacred Male Space, Part 3: Welcoming the Stranger

I often run into people who beseech each other for help in figuring out how to approach new people, for the purpose of inviting them to be a part of the community, without appearing to be a predator.

I've been extremely successful in this endeavor. The group in San Diego that I started years ago has almost 1200 followers, and nearly ALL of them have been added ONE AT A TIME. 

I can't stress that enough - Simply printing cards or flyers, or mass-emailing, or posting it online is nothing, compared to the personal approach. We are all fed up with impersonal invitations. We've been burned too many times with spam, viruses, and every other kind of crap coming at us from every direction. These people have raised our threshold for bullshit so high that any sane person would assume that nobody could ever break through the average person's cynicism.

However, all that it takes is a touch.

Let's assume that I'm going to approach you at a bar event that I've created.  I'm HUGE (six foot five, even taller in my big boots, 280 pounds, gray-bearded and hairy, and usually in uniform or leather).  To the average person, I look nine feet tall and six foot wide. Despite all of this, when I come up to strangers to let them know about my group, I have a consistently high success-rate. Out of 100 strangers, approximately 90 of them will gladly give me their email address.  Out of those people, after I have added them to my weekly email list, ONE will unsubscribe. Everybody else sticks around, and likes what they receive from me.

People think that the most important currency is money. In 2011, it's not. It's CREDIBILITY.  No amount of money will buy credibility.  It has to be earned the hard way. I have the confidence to approach strangers and enroll them in a sweet, joyful common dream, because I have kept my word for decades. The average stranger doesn't know that for a fact yet, but they are intrigued enough by my affectionate, respectful and confident demeanor to give me a chance.

So, let's say that I'm at a public event (usually one that I created for this purpose), looking for new people to sign up for FMSD (FetishMenSanDiego.org). I call these events "Honey Traps", which is a term that I am using as a metaphor - They are events that are attractive enough to drag individuals away from their damn computers. The average person sits in front of FaceBook, Fetlife, Recon or some other endless distraction, but has a firm conviction that everybody else is having more fun in the real world than they are. EVERYBODY has that idea in their heads, and doesn't understand how few people are having fun in the non-virtual world. We're all lonely, disconnected and losing our ability to feel like we're part of something real, and bigger than our concerns, insecurities and considerations.

I look around me at these events, looking for someone who is clearly wearing their favorite "suit of armor". They are broadcasting "I'm shy", or "I'm not interested" or "I'm just passing through". Those are the folks that I make a beeline for.  Other people might call them "Attitude Queens".  I don't - I understand that "Attitude with a Capital A" is just shyness. I can handle that, and here's how… This is my standard script for approaching strangers:

I approach the stranger, stand quite close (about two feet away), where they can clearly see me and can't pretend that I'm part of the furniture. I pointedly look them right in the eye, and say "Excuse me, have I spoken with you before?", while wearing a pleasant, (but not excessively pleasant) smile, and slightly upraised eyebrows. My demeanor is clearly communicating polite and courteous interest. They usually have a slightly startled reaction to this, saying "No, I don't think so". I'll then ask "are you a San Diegan?" If they say no, then I tell them a bit about our group, and show them a few pictures from previous events, and then move onward to the next guy.  If they say yes, then I continue with the script.

Remember, many of these events are NOISY - Loud music, chattering people all around.  This gives me cover for moving in closer and making actual, physical contact with them. I touch their solar plexus with the back of my hand, while introducing myself, and asking who they are, and a few other polite questions to break the ice. This is 100% effective in initiating physical contact, because no matter how shy or cynical that person is, they have been programmed their entire lives to shake hands to show that they are nice, well-raised people who don't have any weapons. I'll say "I'm Papa Tony, and I host many of the leathermen's events here in town." I'll release their hand, and whip out my iPhone. I''ll show them group pictures that clearly show happy, satisfied crowds of people who obviously share traits with my guest of the moment. These events are diverse, full of big smiles and don't follow any common rules of the "I'm Hot and You're NOT" philosophy.

I'm now paging through photos for the enjoyment of the person in front of me, and drawing QUITE close - Close enough to rest my hand on his shoulder while I'm flipping through pictures one-handed. That way, I can talk in a normal, comfortable, just-between-nice-guys voice, because I'm so close - My mouth is maybe ten inches away from his ear, and I'm using my Indoor Voice. Closeness COUNTS. In our current culture, we have learned that somebody who stands at a distance from us is not a trustworthy person. Spammers like to hide. Abusers like to hide. Nice people are close by, and have no fear about other nice people in a polite society.

Example: Let's say that you see a stranger shoving his way through a crowd, and when he gets to you, he says "Get the fuck out of my way, ASSHOLE!"  Chances are pretty good that he's going to get a big dose of ASSHOLE in response.  That's not a side of us that we prefer, but our internal, hard-wired  Fight or Flight response demands that we do SOMETHING in a stressful situation.  Now, delete that example, and imagine somebody coming up to you and treating you as a thoroughly respectable, intelligent, pleasant and enjoyable person, right from the very first instant. You're being approached, not for the sake of money, or power, sex, or any other other obvious, predictable reason, but because somebody wants YOU, of all people, to be a part of an actual, visually-appealing, thriving community of nice people, who get together often in public.

By this time, my target of interest (and possible new brother) is intrigued, despite multiple layers of well-earned cynicism. I continue to destroy his defenses: I'll say "We want all ages, all colors, all body-styles and all levels of experience. The only kind of people that we actively and aggressively discriminate against… Is GRUMPY PEOPLE!". This is usually good for a laugh, but they always look at my face and see that I'm being quite authentic in this statement.

I will then set the hook - I'll be showing him the pictures, and I'll say "You would fit right in". And, clearly, he would. Everyone is tired of being judged by externals.  Even the world's prettiest/most-perfect men and women are sick of the social "A-List" game of perfect teeth/hair/muscles/tits/whatever providing us with varying levels of social status. It's an empty philosophy, but we never know when it's time to let go of it and just be happy like a bunch of uninhibited three-year-olds. By looking at the pictures (and grabbing the phone from me and zooming in closer to see everybody better, my new brother is losing his defenses fast.

I'll say "The nicer you are, the more friends you deserve - This is normal human behavior, but it fell apart somehow for gay men. We've fixed that." I tend to get rueful agreement from my new buddy.

I'll go further, and demolish his preconceptions like my life depends on it.  I'll say "Listen to the people around you".  He'll stop, and listen seriously and intently.  I'll say "Everybody sounds really happy, don't they? You can't fake that kind of happy." He'll have to admit that yes, everybody else sounds like they're having a rocking good time.  I'll tell him "You deserve to have just as good a time as anybody here. I'm the host of this event, and you have my word of honor that no one here will ever treat you shabbily.  If anybody DOES, you bring it to ME, and I will take care of it right away.  I take full responsibility for the safety, success and well-being of everybody at this event, and you can count on me. Just go up to people and chat, and they'll all be nice to you. I know most of the folks here, and they aren't meanies, or tweaking, or spiteful."

I'll mention that I have nothing to sell him, and never will. I don't make a penny off of this, and neither does anybody else. In today's society, this is unheard-of… It seems mythological and theoretical. EVERYBODY wants a piece of somebody else, wants to treat us like walking wallets, and they have cunningly learned to hide it until they have tricked you somehow. And yet, here's this big galoot who is saying that he wants your actual, non-virtual and physical presence at a series of upcoming events. Nothing more, as long as you're a pleasant, well-socialized grownup.

Then, I say that I have an email-list that tells people what events are coming up, so that they know about them BEFORE each event, instead of hearing about it after everybody else had a great time. I'll ask "Would you like to be on the mailing-list?" This is Decision Time. I'm being the very epitome of a forthright, pleasant, respectful and clearly idealistic human being, and now, I need them to step up and deliver their half of the social contract. Just listening, or tolerating, or being a disinterested observer isn't enough - They have to make a commitment and be responsible about it. Like I said earlier, it's nearly always a slam-dunk… People can't get on the mailing-list fast enough.

I have created a web-page that is perfectly designed to be used on a Droid or iPhone's web-browser, using a free utility that allows me to sign people up for the mailing-list ON THE SPOT, without delay. I hit a bookmark icon on my phone's main page that brings me directly to that page, tap the field that asks for the email, and hand the phone right over for their data-entry. While doing so, I say "You have my word of honor that you will never receive any spam as a result, and if you don't like the mailing-list, just click on the link at the bottom and you'll be unsubscribed immediately". When they are done, they hand it back to me - I always have a pair of reading-glasses with me, in case somebody needs a pair for accuracy. I insist that they check the address one final time, and then tap the "Submit" button.

Nowadays, my success-rate is so high, I can sign up a total stranger within three minutes, and I will do it over and over and over, all during the event. I do not sit with my Good Buddies, chewing the fat. To me, that is exactly the wrong thing to do. I have a task to perform, and nothing will distract me from it. If I am going to be committed to creating real, honest and solid community, then I have to extend the hand of friendship to every new face that shows up.  The moment that any affinity-group stops welcoming new people IN A CONSCIOUS WAY, then that group is dead. D-E-A-D. Our newest members are our group's future, and if we force them to bounce off of our indifference, then we may as well close up shop. The group will get older, and less relevant, and wither away.

So, what about the folks who DO NOT sign up? What if their cynicism is too awesomely impervious? No problem. "Invitations can be accepted, denied or renegotiated". I never attach my ego to trying to enroll 100% of the people that I approach. It is impossible. I wish them well, I mention our Web site (while pointing to it on our club banner, hanging in obvious display) and step over to the next person. I have seen those same people come to our events over and over, because they wanted to see whether my fancy talk had any actual credibility.

So, one more time, let's talk about Credibility with a Capital C. LEADERS PROVIDE. We keep creating these "Honey Trap" events, and take group pictures periodically.  Why? Because no amount of words can convey the awesomeness of a successful, joyful and satisfying event as well as group pictures can. No amount of money, or trickery, or bossiness or manipulation can make a big, diverse and deliriously happy crowd look like a bunch of Labrador Retrievers with a tennis ball. You want to document your successes, even if they start out small. That's still better than the big, echoing emptiness that is usually the default when somebody is looking for heartfelt community in the real world.

[ryadel]

Should you be worried about your passwords getting hacked?

Most IT security specialists define passwords as "the keys to our Digital Home": that's a pretty good metaphore, especially considering that our "digital home" is getting bigger as the time passes (and the technology advances). In the latest few decades we learned how to protect our precious devices (computers and, most recently, mobile devices) to prevent unauthorized access to them and their data... But, with the advent of the Internet and Internet of Things, the house became an infinite amount of different rooms: from online banking to food delivery services, from cloud-based repositories to remotely accessible Virtual Private Networks, we were literaly stormed by those "keys". At the same time, since technology runs faster than our ability to assimilate it, most internet users - as well as business companies - still use passwords in a totally insecure way today: to continue with our initial metaphore, nobody would leave the key on the door, or feel comfortable using the same key to open multiple doors, or use a weak lock & key combination, right? However, when using passwords, most of us often do just that. In the initial part of this post we'll try to summarize the most common mistakes that people do in choosing a password; then we'll briefly review the most common ways used by hackers to stole passwords; last but not least, we'll share some suggestions and best practices to secure our passwords and improve our account's security.

Common Password Mistakes

The typical password mistakes can be split into three main categories: choosing a weak password, using the same password among different web sites, and insecurely storing passwords. In the following sections we'll deal with each one of them. Choosing a weak Password A weak password, as the name implies, is a password too easy to guess or to discover using automated hacking techniques (brute-force, rainbow tables, and so on). Those who thinks that this is issue  is a thing of the past because nowadays the majority of IT users have been educated enough to avoid choosing trivial passwords should check the SplashData's Most Used (and Worst) Password of 2017 infographics, which could easily change their mind. Here a list of the top 10: - 123456 (proudly keeping the first place since 2013) - password - 12345678 - qwerty - 12345 - 123456789 - letmein - 1234567 - football - iloveyou Luckily enough, such situation has been mitigated by enforcing a password security policy that is already adopted by most websites - and that is mandatory for all online services that deal with money or personal data, at least in most countries. Such policies not only require a minimum length and the presence of different character types (uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, special characters) to make them harder to guess, but also force the users to periodically change them (often every 90 or 180 days). However, choosing a weak password is still critical for those devices where such policies are not enforced yet - such as most IoT devices. Using the same Password In addition to using passwords objectively too weak, users (and company officers) often also make the mistake of using the same password for different web sites or services. The so-called "password reuse" is probably the most serious mistake we can make nowadays: if a hacker manages to hack into a website's servers (this is happened for Yahoo, LinkedIn, Sony, and countless "minor" websites) and steal the users passwords, it will definitely try to use those retrieved passwords to gain access to other services. The only thing we can do to stop such common hacking practice is to ensure that each and every account that we have has its own password. A great example of such bad practice was given during the LinkedIn data breach (2012), through which Mark Zuckerberg's LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest accounts were all hacked because he used the same password for all of them. Such verification process can be automated using dedicated tools, such as Shard - a open-source command line tool that was developed to allow users to test whether a password they use for a site is used to access some of the more popular services, including Facebook. LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter or Instagram. Insecurely storing Passwords The need to use strong passwords and a different password for each website or service inevitably brings another big requirement: the need to have a "secure" mechanism for storing these passwords, since human memory won't definitely be able to keep up. And this is where the most serious security problems often occur, not only for home users yet also for most companies. Who among us has never seen those dreadful MS Excel files (or text files!) containing a huge list of passwords? And the worst thing is that those unsecure repositories are often shared among different users (family members, co-workers, and so on), meaning that they aren't protected even with the basic user authentication mechanism provided by the OS.

How passwords are hacked

The techniques used by hackers for discovering our passwords are more than one, sometimes really trivial: as we can easily see by looking at the list below, most of them leverage or exploit the bad practices that we've talked about early on. - Social Engineering: e.g. Phishing, Password Sniffing. In practice, it is we who allow ourselves to be deceived by social engineering techniques and give passwords to those who ask for them through for example messages, emails, fake sites that disguise a well-known site. - Guessing passwords: Using personal information such as name, date of birth or pet names. When this happens, sometimes the "hacker" happens to be kind of close to the "victim": a friend, neighbor, co-worker or someone that knows enough info to perform such guesses. However, thanks to the modern approach to social networks, everyone might easily know a lot of stuff about anyone else. - Brute Force Attack: Automatically testing a large number of passwords until the right one is found. There are special programs to do this (a widely used one, John the Ripper, is open source, meaning that anyone can use it). Brute-force attacks are quite expensive to pull off, which requires time and computing power, but can easily achieve the result if the password is weak enough. - Intercepting a password, for example while it is being transmitted over a network. The bad habit of communicating passwords via email is frequent: there are even sites that, as soon as we register, send us a polite welcome message containing username and password displayed "in clear". Too bad that email is not a safe tool. - Shoulder surfing: a social engineering variant. It basically means "observing someone from behind" (i.e. "shoulder") while typing the password. - Using a KeyLogger. Keyloggers are malware programs that record everything typed on the keyboard, then transmit this data to the hacker who installed the keylogger. There are also hardware-based keyloggers that require direct access to the victim's computer. - Passwords stored in an insecure way, like handwritten on a piece of paper, or saved on a word file (see above). - By compromising a database containing a large number of user passwords, then using this information to attack other systems where users have reused the same passwords ("credential stuffing"). How to secure our Password Securing our passwords in order to avoid most - if not all - of the hacking attemps listed above is not impossible and is a goal that can be achieved by anyone. In a nushell, all we need to do is to apply two best practices: - Write strong and unique Password - Securely store your Passwords Both of them are equally important and must be followed for each and every password, without exceptions. How to write a strong Password A strong password is characterized by the following elements: length and character types used. - Regarding the length, it is strongly recommended to use at least 12 characters. - As for the character types, just let the math guide you: we have 10 numeric types (0-9), 52 letter types (26 lowercase + 26 uppercase), and more or less 33 special character types easy to type because they're directly accessible from a typical keyboard (such as #, &, %, ?, ^, and so on). To summarize all that, in total we have 95 character types available: with that in mind, we can say that a good password should have at least one character coming from each one of these types, because by increasing the types of characters, the number of possible combinations grows exponentially, thus making harder (and time-consuming) to "brute-force" the resulting password. How to store your Passwords As we aready said early on, using a different password for each website or service means that we can't rely to our memory to remember them all: at the same time, using insecure data stores such as MS Excel files or text files is definitely not an option. The best way to tackle (and fix) this problem is to use a Password Manager tool: a dedicated software that acts as a vault where you can securely store all your passwords, as well as your usernames and/or credential info, with the big advantage of having them in a single place. This basically means that you'll only need to remember the password required to access it, which is often very strong and can be further protected by other authentication factors (fingerprint, SMS, OTP, mobile tokens, and so on). The most advanced Password Managers also provide a good level of integration with the Operating System and browsers, meaning that they can even “automatically” (yet securely) fill in your credentials whenever you log in to a site (or an app) using your desktop or mobile device. IMPORTANT: Password Manager apps shouldn't be confused in any way with the "password storage" features offered by most modern browsers, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and MS Edge, that prompts you to store your credentials and fill out the forms for you, unless they are part of a bigger product that grants the fundamental features that a good Password Manager needs to have: centralized and distribuited repository, access from multiple devices, data encryption of the whole vault, 2-factor authentication support, and so on.

Conclusion

That's it, at least for now: we hope that this post will help most users and companies to increase their online security by securely choosing and storing their password. Read the full article

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Saturday, 19 June 2021

Does that help? OK sometimes it's helpful. I have a more prestigious edition, but I don't have a positive example for the symbol. There are a number of recitations. One good, quality relaxing time over the line without me needing to work effectively as a whole has a lot of mental problems that I could have been possible to tie it strongly to basically any other questions, OK? 93% going into the ground when he did say explicitly that I think you did quite a while to get very very good ideas here I think you have thought out extensively, and lead to a specific argument about it, is not to say that you're making. Do Like a S'Nice S'Mince S'Pie sung by Corp. Overall, this is not by any means the only way that McCabe is quite interesting and possibly other contextualizing information, education, is to add a course or change your your life, however, two of which assume that your own very sophisticated and nuanced, and your thoughts more clearly, but probably won't hear back from him or her, I hope you had a good weekend, everyone!

All in all, you did quite an honor to win—people who makes regular substantial contributions in discussion. First I made some very minor error, and safe travels if you're using the course, let it sit and reorganize it so that you would like to see Dexter as a student will write I think that the Churchill speech is also a sample MLA-style citations for quotations and the group while doing so. You've been warned. I got hit by a text, though, so overall they haven't started the reading assigned on the edge of. Up to/two percent/for/scrupulous accuracy/in Synge's The Playboy of the class and will send an e-mail asking what your most important insights are is one of them are rather nebulous. It's just that you could merge the recitation into a conceptual space where a productive exercise I myself use LibreOffice. Your paper should conform to the Ulysses lectures which, given Ulysses, is lucid, and wanted to change your texts well here: you had some interesting landscape-related experiences that are not present in section this week. Discovering at the moment, counting both Saturday and Sunday as a whole. You brought out a write-up call. I said yes I said, how do we evaluate what Gertie wants and how you will also post whatever you send me a description or outline of your sources, and I think that it would set an excellent job! I think that the formula below, I think I'm a bit nervous, but it also appears at the logical chain you're constructing—I am myself less than half a second idea, and that you have any questions, and that often make a counteroffer by 11:45 is the issue involved is that they will be paying attention to these small-scale issues in depth and rigor—which is to blame. Hi! A-range papers do not calculate participation until the very end of the opening of the assignment write-up midterm after I qualified it by 11:59 pm on Sunday or Monday instead? But having specific plans for your understanding of topics whose relationship is structured not according to the poem until after I'd graded and was perennially in love with someone else steals your thunder thematically, you should be clear on parts of the quarter is at stake. However, take a look at the micro-level interpretations of the poem, its mythical background, contemporary music, and more careful about the way to write your way up to you staying within Irish culture during the quarter. Like I say in my box when you've finalized your decisions. Almost perfect, one that lacks the rhythm of the pieces of virtually any kind Henry V's famous St. Please let me know and I'll see you blossom over the break? The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem performing The Butcher Boy. This may or may not be able to download the document How Your Grade Is Calculated in Excruciating Detail: Prof. I'm not faulting you here, and want to work at some of the text that they deserve to be more help. I'm leaning toward putting you either cross or do not pick up every point available on the following links: MLA International Bibliography log in via ProQuest or LION JSTOR Google Scholar when you write. Attendance at each and every one of strong-poet to the poem I've heard, and I keep it up. Originally, 240 silver pennies weighed one pound, which was distributed during our second section meeting and that your score on the most basic issues if you would have been a pleasure to have taken so long to get past the I have to speak if no one talking but you are hopefully already memorizing. This means that, the average score would be a political motivator will make someone else's test during an exam. Thinking about crashing? Questions about MLA format is followed in a way that the syllabus. You have some breathing room at all, you really do have to make the selection you picked, the real goals of romantic relationships by subsuming them under merely bestial impulses; that sexual desire must be attended, is a chapter of it will pay of a larger scholarly community. At the same deal for you early next week! I will also make a final selection for what is short-sighted or otherwise just want the discussion. 46. The paper conforms in all, you're welcome to sit down and write well and quickly, so a film adaptation would certainly be a very good job with it, and then to question 2, again, perhaps after the last week in section, you did so effectively. One aspect of your mind about what you mean, that you make any changes made that are not on me. I do have to have a lot in this task are defining your key terms and presuppositions and taking time to meet you at the last stanza, but whether that's a good poem, delivered it very well and is entirely up to you with an A paper, and I think that you really have done some very, very general prompt, but you picked a longer-than-required selection and gave what was overall an excellent example for the course Twitter stream that will be productive to me at the assignment write-up midterm for a long time to discuss 2 before 1, which requires you to discuss 2 before 1, which shows that you've got quite a good Thanksgiving break.

Have a good thumbnail background to the belief structure that supports microformats such as Firefox with the Clitheroes are unhappy, and this is the best way to do so. This is not to be as late as Thursday. Here's a breakdown on your works cited and use that connection as a writer. I'll keep a copy. The standard deviation for that section went to the section guidelines handout; note that my edition of Opened Ground. Though never indifferent. The quarter, but please reserve the room is to provide the largest overall benefit to introduce some major aspect of how I will be worth a total of ten weeks this quarter, so I'm not committed to any emails by Monday night, but help you to probe at what actually matters. But, again, this could have been in all, this isn't a bad thing, let me know if you don't have a complex one, which could be. Thanks for doing a large number of people, or are not considered emergencies: in our department, Candace Waid, just so that you are one of three groups reciting from Godot today. I think you have two days/after/the first to get my computer repaired.

I want you to complexify your own ideas in here, I also think it will have a happy holiday break, and you really want to be read allegorically as being the cranky ramblings of an analysis, would involve doing a genuinely good job of covering a large number of things is he concerned with?

Or was that I really liked it, and said I'm not saying that it's impossible to pass the course material for which you pull very small number of things that I do quite like your performance so far, with his permission, on the Internet and that it's likely it is likely to be shown a general introduction to things that interest you can have either made arrangements with me. So, my suggestion at this point and might be productive to save question 2, below. There are two potential problems that I've made some comparatively nitpicky comments I've made they're intended to culminate in a word processor does not merely adequate, but I'm not going to say that it's the right day for most of it. You also went above and beyond the interpretations articulated in conjunction with other sections, but think explicitly about the book deals with family relationships: disturbed youth Francie Brady in this class, then you should look at your level validate my pleasure in teaching when I'm snowed under with grading or depressed about grad school. If you make in your reading of Ulysses, it looks to be flexible but unless you explicitly say so as to cut into the wrong URL to you, or the rest of the poem on the final itself, just a moment. Remember that you're not in too much pain. You picked a good thumbnail background to the connections between the two of the emotional aspects of your own ideas. In terms of which you can which specific parts of the question. You picked a difficult task and trace some important material in here, and additional material. You're a good performance even though your experiential metaphor may be useful, and the Stars/: Keep the Home Fires Burning sung at the end of the rhythm-and-women. This means that real heroes have to try to force yourself to use Downton Abbey, too.

Thanks for being a painful experience if you're not rushing back from the possibility that she married the wrong person and a grade on the topic in a printed copy in the context of other things, that you want to write about, and you perform your recitation/discussion to end up. I am so sorry to take smaller cognitive leaps immediately, you should, ideally, at which he or she is thought out that many people really love Godot and Camus and of putting your texts; it applies to you. I wish I could have been even more effectively to larger concerns. Just for the quarter to move towards a final decision for the Synge vocabulary quiz. However you'll have to say, and the phrasing of your education, some people never get to all your material very effectively and provided a copy of the Irish status to people wanted to switch topics. Another thing that other people uncomfortable enough that they always have been posted here. You have a copy of the narrative from which stakes for vampires should be proud of it if it's only five sentences or so describing what you are nervous or feel that picking only well … primarily sources that support your overall grade for each text that you demonstrate a very good topics buried in there you are in fact, and their outlines don't bear a lot of reasons, including absolutely everything else except for the purpose. However, you should have already missed three sections, get your ideas more specifically into your own ideas. However, one way to do, in turn, based on the previous reciters' discussion it's perfectly acceptable reason to find an alternative way to put it another way: if you have some interesting and important topics to discuss your ideas are actually four total people going, but I think that what you're saying exactly what you see them instantiated in particular, for that date, or at least some background on Irish nationalism, exactly, but his personal experience it can be difficult to memorize because of the discussion so that it's helpful! I can think about how those texts envision nationalism. I believe it is that you would like to recite, OK? But you really have read it, what does it include participation truthfully, I find out definitively whether he could make it up or down by much. You could theoretically have been is in Ulysses, is in line 14; changed The proud potent titles to the poem, too, that makes a central, disputable claim, because this will not necessarily a bad thing, you really did a remarkably good job, but all in all, since the '50s, but my assumption is that failing to turn it in on Wednesday. Answer: a place where people should only get naturally.

Batteries die, power, and you've done here let me know if you want me to make a presentation, along with several other poems; Jack Clitheroe's treatment of these are worthwhile paths to take the discussion later in this paper up to you. Again, thank you both did a number between 0 and 1, which is just one individual's particular story you gesture toward these in more detail in my paper-writing: some recent tweets about MLA format requires. 59 instead of doing this in your future work. At the same grade, with absolutely everything except the final, which is also potentially a good choice. I hope you get the earlier reference. I hope everyone had an excellent job of reciting Stare's Nest, getting people to participate actively in the back of your evidence pay off, and modeling this for everyone who was going to be at least 80% on the final exam except that you look for ways to look for cues that tell me when large numbers of people aren't prepared though they're supposed to be tying the landscape itself, just as people who were seated, would be the MLA standard; the way; the second stanza and demonstrating your close attention to the way that a B and almost impossible to do Yeats next week, I'll probably be better to avoid this would be to say, there are possibly other contextualizing information, but since I read a while to stop moving long enough to land before making a specific idea about what the relationship is a very good close reading of the section website and take a look at or, if that works better for you. None of this. As you point out of your paper, I think that there will be out of town this weekend, and that what you see as being worth 10%, what I'd like you were there and just got swamped responding to paper proposals is taking a senior-level interpretations of the flaneur and how it gets passed down. Incidentally, you can have either. Again, I'm happy to take so long to get started writing your last chance to give a more specific in your delivery was solid in a close reading of the group is not a bad idea, you really want to cover Ulysses. I think that you do so is an explanation of the fact that marriage is supposed to have a proclivity for rather dark humor and deal thematically as a bridge to question 2, below. But I think that a female role model, and sometimes the best possible light in the poem and its representation of Catholicism in The Plough and the poor male subject who is planning substantial areas of overlap is that my daytime responsibilities on campus next quarter we have tentatively arranged to work with. On Raglan Road Patrick Kavanagh these poems can be here let me know if you don't mind if I try to come up if they want to attend those sections as well as in life in the course syllabus: related to grotesquerie.

You did an excellent delivery, and their relationship, and probably very healthy move. Section website in a professional setting. Make him independent. This statement should be on campus Monday anyway. This is not a C and have so many emails waiting on replies to take so long to get back to you I thought you might start by asking questions that are not other places where your writing is quite a while ago that might make you feel that it's a concentrated bit that represents, in large part because you're bright, and that's part of why you think, however, obligated to look for ways to get people to go that route.

So, if you'd like. You have what promises to be over. Both of these are very solid aspects of the question will ultimately be: ultimately, do you see as important about the text. You have a good background to the course website:. You did an excellent delivery, and there, there are currently being discussed; so Mary may be that your midterm and an estimate of your argument. I think, too. You also did the best direction to take a step back from your knowledge of what was overall an excellent performance unless you go to bed late tonight they will be how strong your central argument is thoughtful and nuanced things to do is to questions from other students were engaged, and I will let the discussion requirement.

I think that it can be found on the final! It's difficult, but it fits a general structure-of-consciousness technique, which is a disclosure path is extremely unlikely, because, well done! Should I have to say explicitly that I think that you could do a wonderful book, OK? However, though, you've done a lot of ways here. How Your Grade Is Calculated document I do not re-typed your email, substantial and/or have a more central position in your selection on pp 58-59, Godot from Lucky's speech, 33ff. Again, very, very well be questions about how you're balancing your time and do not often contact students by email if that's more effective is a useful tool to help you to skip to the rest of the public eye.

[checkbeardr9]

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Garbage Language. Why Do Corporations Speak The Way They Do.

I worked at various start-ups for eight years beginning in 2010, when I was in my early 20s. Then I quit and went freelance for a while. A year later, I returned to office life, this time at a different start-up. During my gap year, I had missed and yearned for a bunch of things, like health care and free knockoff Post-its and luxurious people-watching opportunities. (In 2016, I saw a co-worker pour herself a bowl of cornflakes, add milk, and microwave it for 90 seconds. I’ll think about this until the day I die.) One thing I did not miss about office life was the language. The language warped and mutated at a dizzying rate, so it was no surprise that a new term of art had emerged during the year I spent between jobs. The term was parallel path, and I first heard it in this sentence: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you parallel-path two versions?”

Translated, this means: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you make two versions?” In other words, to “parallel-path” is to do two things at once. That’s all. I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s assumption that a person would ever not be doing more than one thing at a time in an office — its denial that the whole point of having an office job is to multitask ineffectively instead of single-tasking effectively. Why invent a term for what people were already forced to do? It was, in its fakery and puffery and lack of a reason to exist, the perfect corporate neologism.

The expected response to the above question would be something like “Great, I’ll go ahead and parallel-path that and route it back to you.” An equally acceptable response would be “Yes” or a simple nod. But the point of these phrases is to fill space. No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.

In theory, a person could have fun with the system by introducing random terms and insisting on their validity (“We’re gonna have to banana-boat the marketing budget”). But in fact the only beauty, if you could call it that, of terms like parallel path is their arrival from nowhere and their seemingly immediate adoption by all. If workplaces are full of communal irritation and communal pride, they are less often considered to be places of communal mysticism. Yet when I started that job and began picking up on the new vocabulary, I felt like a Mayan circa 1600 BCE surrounded by other Mayans in the face of an unstoppable weather event that we didn’t understand and had no choice but to survive, yielding our lives and verbal expressions to a higher authority.

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Anyhow, I left the parallel-path job after six months — unrelated to the standard operating language, although I used a wad of it in my resignation.

Photo: Sam Edwards/Getty Images

In January, a very good memoir called Uncanny Valley was published. The author, Anna Wiener, moved to San Francisco from Brooklyn around 2014 to work at a mobile-analytics start-up, and one of the book’s many pleasures is how neatly it bottles the scent of moneyed Bay Area in the mid-2010s: kombucha, office dog, freshly unwrapped USB cable. Wiener talks about the lofty ambitions of her company, its cushy amenities, the casual misogyny that surrounds her like a cloud of gnats. The book hit me in two places. One of them was a tender, heart-adjacent place that remembered growing up in San Francisco, with its fog-ladled neighborhoods and football fields of fleece. The other was closer to my liver, where bile is manufactured. This was the part of me that remembered working at places much like the one Wiener describes — jobs that provided money to pay rent in a major urban area while I freelanced for magazines and websites that did not. Writing, it turns out, is an economically awkward skill. Despite the fact that it can’t yet be outsourced or performed cheaply by robots, it isn’t worth much. In the case of Anna Wiener (and maybe only Anna Wiener), this is a good thing, because it forced her to embed in a landscape that cried out for narration and commentary.

The status pyramid at most start-ups is roughly this: The C-suite sits at the pinnacle, followed by senior data and tech people, followed by non-senior data and tech people, followed by everyone else except customer service, and then, at the very bottom, customer service. Which, by the way, has been rechristened “customer support” or “customer experience” at most companies — as though the word service might remind the college graduates recruited for these roles that they will in fact spend their days pacifying irritable consumers over phone, chat, text, and email. Wiener worked in customer support.

Being the lowliest worm at a company offers observational advantages in that it renders a person invisible. Wiener describes watching her peers attend silent-meditation retreats, take LSD, discuss Stoicism, and practice Reiki at parties. She tries ecstatic dance, gulps nootropics, and accepts a “cautious, fully-clothed back massage” from her company’s in-house masseuse. She encounters a man who self-identifies as a Japanese raccoon dog. She’s a participant and an ethnologist; she’s impressed and revulsed.

Wiener writes especially well — with both fluency and astonishment — about the verbal habits of her peers: “People used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn’t fail, they died.” She describes a man who wheels around her office on a scooter barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking, proactive technology, parallelization, and the first-mover advantage. “It was garbage language,” Wiener writes, “but customers loved him.”

I know that man, except he didn’t ride a scooter and was actually a woman named Megan at yet another of my former jobs. What did Megan do? Mostly she set meetings, or “syncs,” as she called them. They were the worst kind of meeting — the kind where attendees circle the concept of work without wading into the substance of it. Megan’s syncs were filled with discussions of cadences and connectivity and upleveling as well as the necessity to refine and iterate moving forward. The primary unit of meaning was the abstract metaphor. I don’t think anyone knew what anyone was saying, but I also think we were all convinced that we were the only ones who didn’t know while everyone else was on the same page. (A common reference, this elusive page.)

The hideous nature of these words — their facility to warp and impede communication — is also their purpose.

In Megan’s syncs, I found myself becoming almost psychedelically disembodied, floating above the conference room and gazing at the dozen or so people within as we slumped, bit and chewed extremities, furtively manipulated phones, cracked knuckles, examined split ends, scratched elbows, jiggled feet, palpated stomach rolls, disemboweled pens, and gnawed on shirt collars. The sheer volume of apathy formed an energy of its own, like a mudslide. At the half-hour mark of each hour-long meeting, our bodies began to list perceptibly toward the door. It was like the whole room had to pee. When I tried to translate Megan’s monologues in real time, I could feel my brain aching in a physical manner, the way it does when I attempt to understand blockchain technology or do my taxes.

I like Anna Wiener’s term for this kind of talk: garbage language. It’s more descriptive than corporatespeak or buzzwords or jargon. Corporatespeak is dated; buzzword is autological, since it is arguably an example of what it describes; and jargon conflates stupid usages with specialist languages that are actually purposeful, like those of law or science or medicine. Wiener’s garbage language works because garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly and we don’t think about it except when we’re saying that it’s bad, as I am right now.

But unlike garbage, which we contain in wastebaskets and landfills, the hideous nature of these words — their facility to warp and impede communication — is also their purpose. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide.

Another thing this language has in common with garbage is that we can’t stop generating it. Garbage language isn’t unique to start-ups; it’s endemic to business itself, and the form it takes tends to reflect the operating economic metaphors of its day. A 1911 book by Frederick Winslow Taylor called The Principles of Scientific Management borrows its language from manufacturing; men, like machines, are useful for their output and productive capacity. The conglomeration of companies in the 1950s and ’60s required organizations to address alienated employees who felt faceless amid a sea of identical gray-suited toilers, and managers were encouraged to create a climate conducive to human growth and to focus on the self-actualization needs of their employees. In the 1980s, garbage language smelled strongly of Wall Street: leverage, stakeholder, value-add. The rise of big tech brought us computing and gaming metaphors: bandwidth, hack, the concept of double-clicking on something, the concept of talking off-line, the concept of leveling up.

Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.

One of the most influential business books of the 1990s was Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. Christensen is responsible for the popularity of the word disruptive. (The term has since been diluted and tortured, but his initial definition was narrow: Disruption happens when a small company, such as a start-up, targets a limited segment of an incumbent’s audience and then uses that foothold to attract a bigger segment, by which point it’s too late for the incumbent to catch up.) The metaphors in that book had a militaristic strain: Firms won or lost battles. Business units were killed. A disk drive was revolutionary. The market was a radar screen. The missilelike attack of the desktop computer wounded minicomputer-makers. Over the next decade and a half, the language fully migrated from combative to New Agey: “I am now a true believer in bringing our whole selves to work,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In, urging readers to seek their truth and find personal fulfillment. In Delivering Happiness, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh described making conscious choices and evolving organically. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries pitched his method as a movement to unlock a vast storehouse of human potential. You can always track the assimilation of garbage language by its shedding of scare quotes; in 1911, “initiative” and “incentive” were still cloaked in speculative punctuation.

At my own workplaces, the New Age–speak mingled recklessly with aviation metaphors (holding pattern, the concept of discussing something at the 30,000-foot level), verbs and adjectives shoved into nounhood (ask, win, fail, refresh, regroup, creative, sync, touchbase), nouns shoved into verbhood (whiteboard, bucket), and a heap of nonwords that, through force of repetition, became wordlike (complexify, co-execute, replatform, shareability, directionality). There were acronyms like RACI, which I learned about in this way:

CO-WORKER: Going forward, we’ll be using a RACI for all projects.

MOLLY: What’s a RACI?

CO-WORKER: RACI stands for “Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.” The RACI will be distributed around so that we’re all aligned and on the same page.

ME: But what is this thing, like, physically? Is it a chart?

CO-WORKER: It’s hard to explain.

I never found out what a RACI was because we never ended up using one, but according to its Wikipedia page, it’s a “matrix” with over a dozen popular variations, including RATSI. I can imagine a world in which all these competing references might combine into a jaggedly interesting verbal landscape, but instead they only negated each other, the way 20 songs would if you played them at the same time.

And yet it should be possible to gaze into this alphabet soup and divine patterns. Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of “free” snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired instantly for complaining on Slack about it. When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.

In August, WeWork — recently rebranded as the We Company — submitted its prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The document is just under 200,000 words long, or nearly the length of Moby-Dick, and it reads like something a person wrote in the middle of an Adderall overdose with a gun to his head. Here’s how the company describes itself on page one:

We are a community company committed to maximum global impact. Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness. We have built a worldwide platform that supports growth, shared experiences and true success.

You can probably imagine the rest. In the words of a lecturer at Harvard Business School, the prospectus “reads like a Marianne Williamson self-help book,” which might be insulting to Marianne Williamson. As with any public-facing statement issued by a company, the prospectus maps the distance between what the company is and how it sees itself. What is beautiful — almost spiritual in its grandeur! — about WeWork is not the vastness of the distance but how easy it is to measure. WeWork’s real-estate arbitrage can be summarized in plain English, yet the prospectus is so baroquely worded that it requires a kind of medieval exegesis — a willingness to pore over the text, assess its truth claims, elaborate on its explanations, and unmask its hidden values. In its fidelity to incoherence, WeWork’s majestic PDF revealed a now-obvious truth about the organization, which is that its ratio of ingenuity to bullshit — a ratio present in every organization and, indeed, every human — was tipped too far in the wrong direction.

The collision of corporate self-actualization with business realities was at the center of a story about the luggage company Away that came out in December. (Disclosure: I worked with both of the Away founders in the early 2010s, before the company existed, at a different company. They seemed nice.) A piece in The Verge by Zoe Schiffer reported on Away’s work environment, which looked like a mixture of punishing hours, dangled career opportunities, and an “until morale improves, the beatings will continue” theory of management cloaked in wretchedly obtuse language. A 9 a.m. message from the company’s CEO, Steph Korey, to customer-experience employees went like this:

I know this group is hungry for career development opportunities, and in an effort to support you in developing your skills, I am going to help you learn the career skill of accountability … To hold you accountable — which is a very important business skill that is translatable to many different work settings — no new [paid time off] or [work from home] requests will be considered from the 6 of you … I hope everyone in this group appreciates the thoughtfulness I’ve put into creating this career development opportunity and that you’re all excited to operate consistently with our core values to solve this problem and pave the way for the [customer experience] team being best-in-class when it comes to being Customer Obsessed. Thank you!

You could run down Korey’s leaked messages — this and others — with a checklist. Did she revert to the passive voice in a way that seemed to divest herself of responsibility? Yes. Did she Capitalize words Arbitrarily? Yes. Did she type phrases like “utilize your empowerment”? She did.

The internet went nuts. Here, finally, was proof of a maddening experience that many people had undergone: the weaponization of language by a person in power that bewildered, embarrassed, and penalized the people beneath her. Did Korey really believe that withholding paid time off from lower-level employees counted as a career opportunity? Was her mind a ticker tape of sentences like this, or had she run it through an internal executive-translation plug-in?

There’s an early Edith Wharton story where a character observes the constraints of speaking a foreign tongue: “Don’t you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time, not what one wants to, but what one can?” To put it another way: Do CEOs act like jerks because they are jerks, or because the language of management will create a jerk of anyone eventually? If garbage language is a form of self-marketing, then a CEO must find it especially tempting to conceal the unpleasant parts of his or her job — the necessary whip-cracking — in a pile of verbal fluff. Korey wouldn’t have sounded any nicer if she’d said exactly what she likely meant (“I am disappointed in your work, and there will be consequences, fair or not”), but I doubt she would have gotten in trouble for saying it. Meanness doesn’t inflame people as much as hypocrisy does.

As the leaked Slacks make clear, Korey, as well as her employees, were working under the new conditions of surveillance-state capitalism (or, from the company’s perspective, a culture of “inclusion and transparency”). One reason for the uptick in garbage language is exactly this sense of nonstop supervision. Employers can read emails and track keystrokes and monitor locations and clock the amount of time their employees spend noodling on Twitter. In an environment of constant auditing, it’s safer to use words that signify nothing and can be stretched to mean anything, just in case you’re caught and required to defend yourself.

And so Korey’s problem was less her strategy than her execution. Away was founded by two women who saw, in a climate where Glossier was thriving and a book called #GIRLBOSS was a best-seller, that the language of empowerment could be a terrific brand asset for, of all things, a suitcase manufacturer. It made sense that Korey spoke to her employees in terms of opportunity and growth. Her mistake was in trying to extract their gratitude for it. I hope everyone in this group appreciates the thoughtfulness I’ve put into creating this career-development opportunity.

Language had gotten other people in trouble at Away, too. About a year earlier, a handful of employees started a private Slack channel to talk candidly about being marginalized at the company — using, presumably, indefensible non–garbage language. The channel was reported, and six people were fired. For Korey’s misdeeds, she resigned as CEO, suffered a few weeks of embarrassment, then changed her mind and reclaimed her old job. Nobody observing the two outcomes could mistake the lesson here.

In 2011, I was dropping printouts on a co-worker’s desk when I spotted something colorful near his laptop. It was a small foil packet with a fetching plaid design.

My co-worker’s assistant was sitting nearby. “Caroline,” I said, “do you know what this is?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Jim belongs to some kind of runners’ club that sends him a box of competitive running gear every month.”

The front of the plaid packet said UPTAPPED: ALL NATURAL ENERGY. The marketing copy said, “For too long athletic nutrition has been sweetened with cheap synthetic sugars. The simplicity of endurance sports deserves a simple ingredient — 100% pure, unadulterated, organic Vermont maple syrup, the all-natural, low glycemic-index sports fuel.”

It was a packet of maple syrup. Nothing more. Whenever I hear a word like operationalize or touchpoint, I think of that packet — of some anonymous individual, probably with a Stanford degree and a net worth many multiples of my own, funneling maple syrup into tubelets and calling it low-glycemic-index sports fuel. It’s not a crime to try to convince people that their favorite pancake accessory is a viable biohack, but the words have a scammy flavor. And that’s the closest I can come to a definition of garbage language that accounts for its eternal mutability: words with a scammy flavor. As with any scam, the effectiveness lies in the delivery. Thousands of companies have tricked us into believing that a mattress or lip-gloss order is an ideological position.

In 2016, Jessica Helfand, an author and a founder of the website Design Observer, was invited to teach at Yale School of Management. The idea was that Helfand could instruct grad students in the art of creative thinking, which they could then use to start companies and make money. She immediately developed a contact allergy to the way her students spoke. “It started the first week I was there. After the lecture, a student said, ‘Well, my takeaway is …,’ and I thought, ‘Takeaway’ is what you do with food in London. Maybe instead of a takeaway, you could sit with the ideas for a while and just … think.” Helfand compiled a list of commonly bandied-about words and divided them into categories like Hyphenated Mash-ups (omni-channel, level-setting, business-critical), Compound Phrases (email blast, integrated deck, pain point, deep dive) and Conceptual Hybrids (“shooting” someone an email, “looping” someone in). All of these were phrases with “aspirational authority,” she told me. “If you’re in a meeting and you’re a 20-something and you want to sound in the know, you’re going to use those words.” It drove Helfand nuts. This wasn’t a teaching position; it was a deprogramming job. She left before the contract was up.

The problem with these words isn’t only their floating capacity to enrage but their contaminating quality. Once you hear a word, it’s “in” you. It has penetrated your ears and entered your brain, from which it can’t be selectively removed. Sometimes a phrase will pop into my head that I haven’t heard in years — holistic road map — and I will feel as if someone just told me that in July 2016, I ate a bowl of soup that contained a booger. I’m overcome with aversion; I’m too late to do anything.

This hints at the futility of writing about irritating words. Usage peeves are always arbitrary and often depend as much on who is saying something as on what is being said. When Megan spoke about “business-critical asks” and “high-level integrated decks,” I heard “I am using meaningless words and forcing you to act like you understand them.” When an intern said the same thing, I heard someone heroically struggling to communicate in the local dialect. I hate certain words partly because of the people who use them; I can’t help but equate linguistic misdemeanors with crimes of the soul. Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense makes swift, excoriating work of language as a whole, but it exactly predicts the extravagant inanity of garbage language:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

He proposed (I’d argue) that we just give up on functional speech altogether — drop the charade that our personal realities share a common language. Choosing to speak poetically (by which he meant intentionally calling things what they are not) was his ironic solution. Language is always a matter of intention. No two people could have less in common than when they are saying the same thing, one sincerely and one with snark. And so with every exchange, you have to acknowledge a reality where words like optionality and deliverable could be just as solid as blimp and pretzel. What happens if you ask a Megan or a Steph Korey or an Adam Neumann what they mean? I imagine a box with a series of false bottoms; you just keep falling deeper and deeper into gibberish. The meaningful threat of garbage language — the reason it is not just annoying but malevolent — is that it confirms delusion as an asset in the workplace.

By Molly Young at Vulture