#the algorithm is fucked the functionality is fucked the interface is fucked

[angels444yuri]

pinterest needs to start calling for donations or something to help fix the site bc this is truly getting out of hand

[j1r4ch2]

I'll admit that my opinion is probably colored by the cynicism of never succeeding at making money being a creative and instead constantly scrambling back and forth from various min wage entry level industries just to make ends meet, but i think that the way artists are conceptualizing AI video rendering as the end of the world is kind of ridiculous.

Obviousely the possibility of artistic jobs being downsized is very real. There is a present reality of AI taking good jobs from real people. It sucks. It's awful. Real people are suffering; I'm not denying that.

But at the same time this technological paradigm isn't going away any time soon, and as it is now, is way too resource intensive to replace every artist making a living with thier work.

Maybe someday down the road enough GPU farm services will be widely enough available where it is feasible for companies to use generative AI for all of their media needs, thus eliminating countless jobs for artists who spent decades of their life honing a skill, but if being demoted from a professional artist to a hobbyist is the end of the world for some people I seriously question why they practice their craft in the first place.

If it was always for the money, then let the robots take the burden of performing the role of a artist from you, and please relearn creating just to feel something inside of you.

We've had knitting machines and mass produced clothing and textiles for ages, yet in this day where my car can drive itself, people spend hours learning to do fibercrafts etc. And you aren't hearing about etsy fiber artists making 60k/year from their work yet they still enjoy the creative process of it!

This is a nuanced conversation, and a lot of people in poverty situations are going to lose access to their jobs as it becomes automated away, in a more exponentially growing version of what's been going on since 2008 and even back to the 90's.

Its a real problem, but the majority of creators i see whining about this on tumblr, YouTube etc. are middle class or higher individuals who's only experience in blue collar work is the half year they spent working part time at their university campus Starbucks.

A lot of people think they're mad because automation is threatening the validity of their job, but they're actually mad because they think learning a creative skill makes them better than your average blue collar worker and they're appaled at the idea of being the same as the people who run their electric grids, clean their sewers, and stock their supermarkets.

Theyre just using the cultural backlash against explotative machine learning (which is a justified backlash, it's fucking wrong for these generative models to be stealing existing work of art and incorporating it into its training, that's not what I'm defending here) as an excuse to dodge the awareness that they don't think anyone should be doing blue collar work because surely they never dreamed of doing it.

As it stands now generative AI models are too resource intensive to truly replace the scale of workers people act like they will, and the advancement of ML algorithms has enough real potential to better people's lives that its not going away, so I think aside from doing the work of protecting our existing art with things like nightshade etc, it's important to be realistic and give up the fantasy that we are at war with AI companies, and must win, or even more delusion at war with the very concept of machine learning.

Its reminiscent of people who were afraid of computers in 1995 and now can't function in their daily life without the help of their gen z loved one to help them navigate the most basic of user interfaces.

Society will advance, regardless of how we like it, all we can do is be resourceful about it, and find ways that the advancement benefits us.

[mercurymusing]

The disconnect between "Tumblr's competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities" and "[u]nfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users" is stunning. Absolutely insane take there. "Our strength is the unique content and communities we've established, so we want to change everything so we work just like everybody else".

Although that's not as bad as "[t]he lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed". Insane! Still the strongest aspect of Tumblr! If any of the other tabs properly showed reblog chains (the other strength of the site that they also want to kill) maybe people would use them more!

Like.

2, 5, and 6 are the stuff the userbase has been asking about for years. The stuff that's actually busted! The stuff that would solve 1, 3, and 4!

Fix search! Fix tags! Make it easier to navigate blogs and topics deliberately! Let logged out people browse freely, through a functional interface! Throw extra ads at them for monetization, and let users hide themselves from the open internet as desired! People that want interactions will do the work for you! The shiny art will be there to scroll through, and the community will be there waiting for you to make an account!

Give us more options for building custom feeds! We don't want algorithmic content shoved down our throats, we want useful tools for managing our own discovery! Make it easier to make a filtered view of related tags, offer suggestions for similar content, give us For You tools that actually show us what we want!

Fix notifications at every scale! Fix and expand the ask system! Make it possible for power users to actually use the site without a suite of third party add-ons! Or just get out of the way and make it easier to customize the UI and use those add-ons.

Make it easier to pretend a Tumblr page is a custom blog! You want creators to make Tumblr their home? Let them build an entire site that's already hooked into the system! Give them the tools to monetize from Tumblr to the rest of the internet. You're WordPress for fuck's sake, you know how easy it is to capture a whole market segment of freemium users that just need a good enough way to self-host!

If y'all fixed the parts of the site that were already broken, it would solve the problems you actually have. Breaking the parts of the site that make it unique and foster the community and content you're drooling over will just generate new problems.

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[thebibliosphere]

As much as I mildly despair about the functionality of Tumblr, I’m forever grateful we don’t have the creative interface of other social media platforms. 

I keep seeing youtubers talking about how the new algorithm on their creative dash is so detrimental to their mental health, both in terms of how they feel about themselves as creators and the content they make—dreading to find out their performance rating, regardless of whether they enjoyed it or not. And it’s the same across multiple other platforms, TickTock, Facebook, Instagram. Fuck, I’ve even seen people with business accounts complaining on Twitter.

And then there’s Tumblr. Where sometimes you can’t find your own posts even though you know you tagged it, time stamps are hidden in the ellipses at the top right hand corner of the post, your bread recipe keeps getting flagged as porn, too much punctuation causes asks not to send, and checking your activity feed causes the app to crash. You want to know your trending numbers? You want to know what’s performing well? Fuck you, guess.

[transmalewife]

listen. tumblr could not more obviously be dying before our eyes. in the span of like two months they have made 4 desperate bids for money. now i think it goes without saying that if tumblr is your primary social media in 2022 you probably aren’t delighted by the identical interface algorithm focused format of every other app out there.

now imagine you’re staff. you know this. you don’t want tumblr to go under either. so you post one payment option. you roll it out clumsily, a user gets death threats for it, it’s a bit of a mess, like things usually are around here. but you learn. the next two are announced properly, in advance. and yet still near every single comment on posts about them is mocking, denouncing the very idea for both entirely made up reasons or valid criticism that gets buried under the tidal wave of disgust.

despite all that, you must be doing something right bc there are new users coming in. you know that because every day you see posts trying to push them away or bragging about how hostile the environment is around here

you start selling merch, losing all pretense of trying to make money as a website, clearly grasping at straws to pay for the servers. every comment on the rebloggable adds is negative. they’re mocking the price, the designs, the very idea of tumblr merch. they say shit like ‘no one will pay 25$ for a t-shirt with a tiny logo’ as if people don’t pay thousands for t shirts with tiny logos. so much of it doesn’t even feel like honest criticism, just people playing on the running joke that haha staff is useless and tumblr is badly run. but 1. these are neither a faceless evil corporation nor your friends, you can’t be horrid to them and expect them to be in on the joke. 2. if it’s so bad here please tell me where the fuck ever else online is better. no really. the blog search function here sucks, sure. please tell me what other social media even has one? and 3. the clothes are 100%cotton like that’s already miles above the usual quality for these things. if you’ve ever paid for licensed merch from the disney corporation i don’t want to hear a single peep from you against these.

so imagine working at tumblr. seeing all this, do you think ‘wow what a loyal userbase, worth fighting for and able to help us save this website’? or do you see a bunch of cynical shits who clearly couldn’t care less, and aren’t worth saving if they can’t appreciate what they have.

if you’re ok with tumblr dying or can’t help, that’s fine. but if you aren’t, please stop making it seem like you hate it here.

[lord-vermin]

Hey, if you've got the time, is Tapas worth publishing on, or am I gonna hafta battle their interface for the privilege of getting ignored by an opaque algorithm? I have a mess of content that I'm trying to get people to look at, and I am sloooowly illustrating it. I meant to put it up somewhere as I got the art done, but I never found a functional platform that wasn't going to make me fight my fellow creators for supremacy. Cursory investigation shows a lot of people complaining that the app barely works, but I also barely work, so that's not a deal breaker...

Tapas for me has been great- my only concern with it going forward is they’re kinda vague on their boundaries with stuff like horror, I just don’t know what is gonna get my in trouble with them in the future but I usually air on the side of caution and should probably be alrighty, they’re just trying to abide by the App Store rules so they don’t get taken down - which I totally get at least. I can’t say they don’t play favourites bc they’ve absolutely got their big players like heart stopper that they’ll promote at any given moment but it’s absolutely brought new eyes to my stuff - it’s easy to update, simple layout, not the most customisable but for what it is it’s really good. I don’t use the app I use the browser version tho - which from what I’ve gathered works better then the app 👁️👁️

Comic fury is another one I’d recommend, it’s forum based and gonna be honest there’s some,, characters on there - but I don’t really use the forums so I live in relative peace, I absolutely haven’t updated the new pages on there so I really really need to fix that - they just have a recently updated page, loads of ways to promote your stuff through chatting in forums and you can code the ever loving hell out of your comic page like it’s 2000s and you’re discovering html blogs for the first time. They don’t mind any type of horror, nudity, etc, pretty hunky dory with all of that stuff so you’ll find a lot of gems on there that can’t be on other sites. Some really fucking weird shit too but like - it’s worth it for the good stuff

Webtoons - do not. Don’t. Just don’t. Don’t torture yourself like that. It’s ran by a bunch of fucking cunts who treat their established artists & writers like utter dog shit. I’ve never posted my work on webtoons because they’ve had such a bad rep and genuinely one of the best decisions I’ve made - they’re comically villainous sometimes

[notarealwelder]

(How about I phrase this weirdly instead of not at all, and we'll see if babbling and iterating is the way)

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One thing it'd be nice to have about git is ~content-aware merging. A language server is perfectly qualified to combine two import changes that touch the same line, the way git's default line-granular diff/merge alg is not.

---

In another, often git diffs miss rather a lot of semantics. Encode a patch with a short description length obnoxiously verbosely. (Renamings particularly.) Or adjacently, you...can't exactly annotate a diff with....motivations, causality of changes, "this here is the root change, this is necessary massaging to accomodate it, over there are requisite tests", things like that.

---

Whose idea was it again that the primary — and, with git and friends in place, almost tbe only ~supported — way to represent code is text on a 2-dimensional grid? I mean, ok, things in it should be named — humans that manipulate, generate, read code need to understand it. In fact that was a lie: it is also represented in memory and on disk as a bunch of rather less human views. Then — why should the versioning system use this representation as the core one?

(.....maybe it's that we can't do lossless format conversion between text files and other ways to store code? (Yet? Does unison have an idea? For that matter, formatters are doing fine, so...) And if the source of truth is not what we can understand, that's....terrifying, and possibly worse.)

Otoh: if line- and binary diffs are possible and are ever done, who's to say that git cannot do useful versioning of custom ~code organizing formats (not particularly reducible to text)?

---

(Did i mention that there are Not Fucking Enough svcs with broad adoption, nor enough svc interop? That's not how a competitive market of highly optimized products should look!)

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A number of patches / patch-pieces shouldn't even be represented as text-diffs; this representation may accord with patch's intended semantics for the specific codestate, but will break upon naive rebasing, because the algorithm that generated the patch was omitted.

So why not include the algorithm? The patch is not a text diff; the patch is a pure function that alters a codebase. These can be reapplied uncomplicatedly! (And cause an exception if their assumed preconditions ceased to hold, sure; not any change is easy to specify correctly in general.) You could have commutativity proofs!

...you would probably need some underlying-language-aware patch-specification language. Ideally a dumb as brick one.

---

And while on the subject of pipe dreams: wouldn't it be nice if library releases that change apis also shipped pure-function-patches that convert an arbitrary codebase relying on the older interface into compatibility with the new one? No?

[writefightandflightclub]

Halt and catch fire (Nathan Bateman x reader)

Summary: you have an... arrangement, to spend the summer with Nathan at his house. Sounds simple, yes? Nope. It’s not. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Author’s note: FIRST NATHAN FIC! I wrote this all in one go, which I never do. It came to me like lightning. Just remember that Nathan’s a bit of a dick, a’ight? Still would though.

Word count: 4k (ish).

Warnings: 18+ ONLY. Explicit smut. Angst. Some dark elements. Hints of coercive control / gaslighting in parts. Swearing. Rough sex. One daddy kink moment. Dirty talk, inc. derogatory sexual language. Mild alcohol abuse. Typos.

Tagging: @dameronsgalaxygal​ @geo-winchester​ @xxidontwikeitxx​ @neverlandlibrarian​ @jennibradley​ @itsamedeemoney​ @bioticgoddess​ @spider-starry​ @yougottakeeponkeepinon​ @a-killvr-queen​ @porgiez​ @beyoncesdragon​ @damerondjarin​ @iamthe-shadow-on-the-wall​

Song mood: Pixies, Where is My Mind.

(GIF by @pariztexas)

Nathan ticks his eyes up at you, clicking on you like a cursor. You suddenly animate, placing your book down on the coffee table as you watch him dexterously unwind his hand wraps, veins and muscles standing out in relief as he does so.

You would have to work fast, you knew, while you had his fleeting attention. The gears in his brain shifted too quickly to covet his focus for long. You’d learned that it was always best to catch him in-between tasks. In fact, you can already see him start to open up multiple tabs inside his head even as he shifts from his workout space and into the kitchen, the interior / exterior perimeter almost acting as a delineating line of code, shifting his function between mind and body.

He looks good after a workout, his vest showcasing his taut, sheening muscles. Sweat pools at his chest and the damp fabric clings to his torso, highlighting the silhouette of him, sturdy and hard and strong enough to take control of you. You like to see him pumped-up and gleaming like this. It makes you think about getting his dick pumped-up and gleaming underneath you, wetness pooling everywhere. What really gets you though, is that positively primal look in his eyes which follows a bout with his punchbag. When he looks at you like you have captured his id and separated it from the rest of his consciousness, isolated his base desires.

Once, when you’d worked out together, he had pinned you while sparring, peeled your leggings down from your sweat-soaked thighs and rutted into you right there on the decking. Something in the pit of you stirs and awakens with the memory, clenching like your walls had around him as he had spilled his seed into you. He has good instincts when he’s not subject to logic and bogged down by programming.

Still, as he moves into the kitchen his eyes cool far too quickly, becoming calculating; detached again. All the same, your own body responds obediently to his entrance. You wonder, as you react, if Nathan sees the world as an interface, things only springing to life at his command. You are reticent to be so dreadfully accommodating, but the truth is  -aside from the fact you don’t have a lot else to do around here- you enjoy accommodating him.

You especially enjoy him after a workout, when he’s still in his body and not in his head. After all, he might be a genius, but you’d nominate him for the body-based equivalent of a McArthur Genius Grant, if such a thing existed. Especially those genius fingers. Those fingers, which you’ve had to watch skim deftly over his keyboard instead of over your body for far too long now, as Nathan insisted -time and time again- that he was on the brink of yet another major breakthrough.

“Baby?”, you coo at him, and his eyes land on you with casual interest as he finishes blending an iced coffee, pouring it from its jug into a tall glass set atop the kitchen counter.

You’re good for him. With you here he doesn’t need to drink all night, just to shut his mind off. Not that he finds your company mind-numbing... It’s just that you find other, mutually beneficial ways to keep him out of his head. Sometimes, you even convince him to get some sleep.

He takes a long swig of his drink before placing it down and reaching for his glasses. He slips them on to peer up at you, brow furrowed with a question, broad hands settled on his sturdy hips. That look ends you every time. “What, baby?”, he asks, the term of endearment managing to sound a little sleazy on this arrogant fucker’s lips. You’ve noticed him sweetening though, over the summer, whether he’s realised it himself or not.

Nathan looks at you sometimes as if you’re an algorithm he can’t solve, an intricate web of code which makes no sense to him- the only person he can’t figure out and manipulate within five minutes of meeting them. You don’t know why, because your call and response is fairly predictable, as if he has you programmed like everything else around him. You see him? Then you want him. There’s not a lot else to this... arrangement. At least, that’s how it had begun. There’s not anything deeper; not that he’ll admit to. Not yet.

Speaking of wanting him, your eyes wander lazily over his torso and the beading sweat on his skin, his arms defined and pumped through exertion. He looks like a machine and, yeah, you want him this minute. Nothing else will do.

“Shower. Now, strong man”, you command, with a come-hither finger.  

His espresso brown eyes harden with a quiet, lust-ridden stare as he idly strolls over the floor toward you, slinging a towel around his neck.

You always feel like he’s studying you, sometimes to the point of discomfort, and yet you can never look away from him when he does it. 

“Since when did you start tellin’ me what to do?”, he delivers in his soft Bronx-twang, his tone dark. His sweaty hand comes to grab you -securely, not harshly- by the chin. His eyes flash with challenge, which you return with equal fervour.

“Sorry, Daddy, I forgot my place.”, you purr obediently, knowing from the way his eyes blacken with lust that your words alone will have his dick half-hard for you.

“You’re learning.”, he praises, his voice honey over sandpaper, and you deliver him a wicked smile, your thighs pressing together in desperation already as you look over his bare shoulders and chest as if you’re famished.

But, contrary to your wishes, he releases your chin and you can see he’s already following some half-formed thought down a rabbit hole. “What are you reading?”, he asks, his eyes hovering over to the hardcover strewn on the table. “What made you choose that one?” Oh no he doesn’t.

“Nathan.”, you redirect, your voice throaty and brazen. “It’s nice that you’re interested in how I occupy myself, but I’m not here for Book Club.”

“That’s almost funny, sweetness.”, he chides, towelling the sweat from the back of his neck. Patronising fuck. His amused eyes meet yours, and when he finds them humourless in return, he presses on tiredly with a question. “Do I really have to ask? I know you’re about to tell me exactly why you’re here.”

Sometimes, you can understand his impatience. It must be frustrating for him to be one step ahead of everyone around him.

“To be your fuck-toy for the summer, right? That means you actually have to fuck me.”.

You wind your arms around his neck, arching your body into his, breasts pushing unsubtly up against him. “I need this. I’ve sat patiently while you worked and worked-out. It gets me hot for you. So, now that you’ve adequately displayed your prowess, I need you to fill me up, baby. And I’m not past begging.”

You watch his eyes shine with pride at your words before burying your lips into his neck. You trail your hot, wet tongue and mouth over his salty skin, your words muffling into him. “You should relax, baby. Just let me take care of you. Remember, how much you like it when I take care of you?” The contact must finally tap into something more primal and less cerebral, as he responds by circling his muscled arms around your waist and sinking his lips to yours in a crush. His prominent, wiry beard is abrasive over your skin as he opens you up, his supple tongue delving deep into the cave of your mouth.

Nathan is all or nothing. He lives by extremes. In binary. As the kiss skyrockets in intensity, his hands dragging up your back and winding into your hair, you know he’s going to give it all to you. No holds barred. He tugs on your hair, sparks like static needling over your scalp as he demonstrates his dominance. His power over you. He likes control. He requires it. And that suits you just fine.

You whimper into his mouth, the sound feeble; all of you feeling feeble against his crushing, passionate embrace. You’ve gladly gotten used to the sheer intensity of him, when his focus does land on you. But this time it feels… different. There’s a hint of desperation in it. Like he’s coming undone for you, not fully in control of himself. He breaks from you, ragged breaths heaving in the space between you. Yanking your hair back so he can look you in the eyes. But when you look at him you find him distressed; discombobulated. The way he gets when something defies explanation, when some mystery or formula or person fails to yield to him in the way he’s become accustomed to. His eyes are shadowed beneath his brows and that tell-tale vein is popping on his forehead. Something is troubling him. If you’re not wrong, that something is you.

“It shouldn’t be possible.”, he breathes, sounding uncharacteristically weak. “It shouldn’t be possible for kissin’ you to make me feel this good.”

You moan into the air for him, his sugared praise and the brokenness of his voice elevating you to another level. “Nathan Bateman, you sound weak for me.”, you tease, delighting in your newfound power, sounding almost as cocky as him. 

Turns out, that was the wrong thing to say to a man with a superiority complex. To a man on the verge of full-blown narcissism. And yet, it was the best thing to say to him, because now he feels the need to reassert himself... and, oh boy, do you like it when he does that.

“Weak for you?”, he seethes, his mouth pressing right up against your cheek, hot lips skimming your skin as he enunciates his words. He tugs hard enough on your hair that tears begin to spike at the corner of your eyes. “Weak for you? I’m gonna fucking tear you up, you hear me? I’m gonna take you apart until you can’t even remember your own name.”

“Is that what you want?”, he growls, pressing his clothed erection against your hip. “Want me to break you, fuck-toy?”

“Yes. Yes please. Fuck, Nathan.” His words crawl inside the cavern of you, filtering like lines of code to your centre. You respond to his command instantly, and you feel arousal coiling in your body.

His chest heaving, his mouth a snarl, he releases your hair and then both his hands are on the collar of your oversized shirt. He grabs and tears it away from you abruptly, and you squeal as buttons pop their way on to the hard floor, leaving your lingerie exposed to him. Clearly, Nathan wasn’t expecting that to be revealed beneath, as the sight of your body covered in this skimpy, delicate lace garment has him practically falling to his knees for you. “The fuck is this?, he asks, and you’ve never seen anyone look so annoyed whilst captivated.

“I thought I’d surprise you.”, you coo, looking up at him with doe eyes.

“Surprise me? I didn’t know you had it in you.”, he growls, still looking over you with a hunger that makes your whole body quiver. But he doesn’t have his hands on you.And you need his hands on you. Those genius fingers.

“Please. Nathan. Touch, don’t look.”, you plead, eyes roving over him and landing on the tent in his shorts.

You snake your hands out towards his waistband but he grabs your wrists firmly, preventing you. “Uh uh. Naughty naughty.”, he scolds, eyes dark like a destroyer of worlds. “The next time I touch you is gonna be in the shower, and it’s gonna be my dick in your tight cunt, understand?”

You nod in earnest, the look in his eyes demolishing you. Your thighs writhe against each other, aching for some kind of pressure at your core.

“Yes, sir.”, you comply, your voice a husk.

His eyes glow with a self-satisfied, almost cruel glint. You know it’s because you’re the broken, weak one now. You also know that he’s just getting started. Smugly, he releases your wrists, your skin still burning where his fingers dug into you. Then, Nathan inches as close as he can get to you without actually touching, whispering right up against the shell of your ear.

“Turn on the water. Take everything off that hot fuckin’ body of yours. Then face the wall, spread your palms and your legs for me, and wait there until I come and fill you. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”, you tremble, throbbing for him.

His eyes glint with promise as you sweep out, hurriedly, Nathan landing a smack to your ass as your quaking legs carry you toward the shower room. All you can think about is his promise. But you focus on his instructions, and you follow them to the letter. You know he’ll be watching you on the monitor, and if you put a foot wrong, he’ll make you pay for it.

First of all, you pad over and fiddle with the various nozzles, until warm water is cascading from various jets above your head. You let it sluice over you, soak through what remains of your shirt and your lingerie, before wiggling the sodden, torn garment off your shoulders first. As it drops onto the floor with a wet slap, you stand there in nothing but the delicate red lace coiling closely around the contours of you, a little like wires. 

You feel exposed as you think of Nathan watching you through the cameras, seeing the water slipping over the contours of you until you’re gleaming for him. You think of him palming his hardened length through his shorts as you peel away the delicate fabric from your shoulders, thumbs hooking under the straps. For his benefit, you peel it away slowly, inch-by-inch, cups popping away from your breasts, your exposed nipples pebbling under the water. You think about his eagerness growing as he watches, his thick cock twitching, the head beading with slick as the garment peels away from your stomach, clinging to the wetness of your body.

Finally, you fold it away from your hips and your buttocks. It clings to your thighs, material coiling in on itself like the knot forming at the core of you, and your fingers work it down your body until it finally drops onto the shower floor below you. You step delicately out of it, entirely exposed now, and feeling that way. Next, as instructed, you carefully shuffle your feet apart until your legs are spread for him, you palms flush against the wall in front of you. You know he wants to see your hands so he knows you’re not touching yourself. He was quite clear about what the next thing touching you would be, and you don’t think you have it in you to refuse his command. 

The waiting drives you crazy, and you slip your palms further down the wall, arching your spine to push your ass out, further up into the air, writhing it against nothing, but imagining Nathan’s substantial length sliding home into your heat. Imagining his strong arms wrapping around the front of you and dragging you into his slick chest as he pounds you.

Nathan keeps you waiting to the point of irritation. The ache in-between your legs becoming discomfort. Your body stiff from holding its position. You are so eager to press your parted legs against each other. To just reach down with your hand or a shower head and relieve yourself. But you don’t, because you know what’s coming is much too sweet to forgo. You moan on nothing but the thought of him.

When he finally enters you are so desperate, so frustrated, that tears are mingling with the rivulets of water over your face. You hear him pad in and almost turn to look at him before you hear a firm “no” in those deep, rich tones of his. You screw your eyes tightly shut so you won’t be tempted. By this point, your legs are quivering with need, your slick dripping from you. You need his touch inside of you. You bite your lip as you imagine you hear the sound of his clothes being dropped to the floor.

Nathan makes you wait a moment more for any contact, and it feels like the longest moment of your life. He’s made you think about him. Made you focus everything in your mind and your body on exactly where he’s going to touch you.

With a groan, Nathan pushes the head of his cock against your folds. Even the blunt pressure has you mewling for him, and you practically collapse up against the shower wall, wavering with need. Finally, with one swift thrust he slides all the way inside of you, as deep into you as he can possibly go, the base of him settling against you with a smack.

“Holy shit, Nathan.”, you sob, as he fits inside of you, stretching you, the size of him straining your walls, his broad hands clamping down over yours on the tiles. All of your focus is entirely on the ridges and veins and girth of him buried up in your cunt. It feels so good. He feels so fucking good.

He stills in you, simply to tease you more - to demonstrate his power. But you need him to move. You need motion. Need his friction.

“I told you I’d fucking split you open.”, Nathan growls. You try to writhe against him but he’s not allowing it. Not yet. His hands come to clamp hard on your hips. “You said you weren’t past begging, baby. Do it then. Beg me to rail you.”

Your words are sugared pleas into the air which dissolve into the water, making everything around you sweet as Nathan finally begins his ruthless thrusts. He buries himself in you over and over and over as one hand comes to your head, pressing your cheek against the cold tiled wall and pinning you in place as the other grasps the meat of your hip. “I’m gonna take you apart. I’m gonna fucking unmake you, baby.”

You believe him. You believe you are going to come apart for him. You could do so already. Could do it on command, you’re sure of it. With the number of times he’s made you come undone, you have no doubt in the sensations he’s capable of delivering.

Indeed, the way his cock slams into your heat, your walls snug around him, is like an electric current jolting through your body, sending shocks of pleasure with every drag of his contours over your sweet spot. Every time he resheaths himself in your tight cunt. His body fits you so perfectly it’s as if he’s made for you, the way he fills you is like nothing else you’ve ever had.

“Nathan.”, you plead, clutching for him, desperate for more contact. “Nathan, please. Hold me. I need you to hold me.”

There is something so soft in the way he wraps his arm around you and nestles his head over your shoulder, his chest pressing up against you. Even as he pounds into you, his pace relentless - his force punishing. Water sluices between your bodies as his wet skin slaps against yours, your moans surrounding him from all directions in the echoey room. You don’t know how it’s possible for something to feel this harsh and this soft all at once, but you guess the real world doesn’t run on binary. Not everything is an absolute.

Nathan’s groans and grunts billow over your ear as he crushes you to him, ensuring you have no escape from the brutality of his thrusts. You don’t think you’ve ever heard him so vocal. The sound of him, all his anger and arrogance humbled in the place of pleasure – all for you- has your release spilling over, that impossible knot tightening in the pit of you and flooding you with warmth.

Your proclamation comes as a silent plea into the air first of all, followed by a low, guttural moan which blooms from your chest. The sensation overcomes you, wipes everything else from your mind for a moment, as if you are a system rebooting. Feeling fresh. Remade.

“Fuck, Nathan. You make me feel so good.”, you praise into the air, and his hand digs even more harshly into the meat of your hip to pull you down on his length as he drives his own hips up in return. Your words tipping him over the edge, he shoots his seed deep into you in thick, warm ropes of cum as he finds his end too. He sounds wrecked with pleasure as he coats your walls with his release, aftershocks spasming through the both of you as his taut body presses against your back. He is perfectly, uncannily contoured to you.

For a moment then, Nathan doesn’t move. He simply holds you. It is the most still you’ve ever seen him, ever felt him. His mind and his body are always -usually- in perpetual motion. But he just stays there, holding you tight for a second as his cock softens inside you, the only sound the patterns of water slipping off your bodies, and his steady, jagged breathing against the back of your neck. The frenzied patter of your heart as you come down from your high, whole body buzzed.

Eventually, Nathan pulls out and you feel his cum slip out too, down your thighs. You feel satisfaction at having made him feel so good. He directs the shower head to clean himself and then you off, laughing half-cruelly as the water pressure finds your sensitive clit, causing you to shudder.

After a deep, gathering breath you turn to face him with a steady, even grin, and you find the hardness in Nathan’s eyes is entirely gone. Wordlessly, you bat your eyes at him and take the shower head from his grasp, reaching for some soap and, with a soft smile, lathering it over his tired muscles - all over his body. He lets you, closing his eyes against it and humming gently when your hand reaches his chest.

When he opens his eyes, he is looking at you again like you’re an algorithm he can’t solve, an intricate web of code which makes no sense to him. He’s developing a habit of this, the more time he spends with you. You counter his stare curiously, and his eyes narrow in return.

Nathan’s not usually very tactile outside of sex, and so when he reaches his hand out to caress your face you flinch away at first, merely from the shock of it. But, gently, he smooths his palm over your face, his eyes reassuring and like cups of warm, morning coffees on yours.

“How do you do it?”, he asks, his voice faltering. “What makes you different from all the others? Why does it feel so much better with you?”

Your eyes glow with a cautious pride. “Maybe you’re getting soft on me, genius.”

“It’s not possible. What I’m feeling for you... it can’t be real.”

You scoff. You knew the softness had to end sometime. There’s his arrogance again. Nathan Bateman. He thinks himself above most things. Of course he thinks himself above love. Or whatever this is.

“Why not?”, you probe, hiding a slight edge in your tone. “I... I feel it too, you know.”, you admit, but he recoils from you at that moment, snatching his hand away. Looking pained. Looking... pissed off.

“Don’t. You don’t know what you’re saying.”, he dismisses, vein popping in his forehead.

You roll your eyes at him indignantly, flipping off the water and reaching for a towel, which you tuck under your armpits and knot at your chest. You pass Nathan a bath sheet too and he towels himself off before wrapping it around his waist. “So, what? I don’t know my own mind now?”

Nathan replaces his glasses, retrieving them from the washroom counter. He furrows his brow as he looks at you from beneath his mildly steamed up lenses, hands on hips again.

“Do you think you do? Know your own mind?”

This look usually ends you, but there’s something about the way he’s looking at you in this moment that you don’t like; like he’s studying you all over again. For some reason his question and his manner cause an unease to bloom in the pit of you and you’re not sure why.

“I mean it.”, he continues, oblivious to your discomfort. “Could you prove that you’re conscious?”

You towel off your hair, dismissing his question. “Don’t start this again, Nathan. I’m not in the mood for philosophy.”. Your voice comes out weaker than you intended it. Unsure. The room suddenly feels hot and airless, but as you turn to leave it, Nathan grabs you sharply by the wrist.

“Could you?”, Nathan continues, an intensity in his eyes that you shrink back from, his voice broken all over again. “’Cause… Please.”, he grimaces. “I need to know how these feelings could seem so real when you’re....”

A dread you can’t explain is flooding you now, your bottom lip trembling. He cuts himself off, leaving you feeling as if you’re hanging over an abyss.

“When I’m what?”, you press, eyes interrogating his. “When I’m what, Nathan?”. There is a rising panic in your tone which you can’t quell. 

Something like fear passes over Nathan’s eyes then and he shakes his head dismissively, trying to backpedal. “Never mind. Never mind, baby. I’m sorry. Just forget it. I’ve had too much coffee. Or not enough.” His voice is sweet. Sickly sweet. Manipulative. But when he speaks that term of endearment it sounds entirely sincere.

He tries to shush you, to soothe you, dragging you in towards him in a surrounding embrace. You don’t resist it, at first. You fit against him as if he was made for you.

Or you were made for him.

A feeling like bile rises up in your stomach as your next thought arises.

As if you were made by him.

“No.”, you say, feeling suddenly ill with understanding. “No, no, no!”.

You beat and thrash your arms against his chest but he tries to pin you close to him; ineffectually tries to calm you. You become a mess of arms, like sparring, as he begins grabbing at your wrists and pleading with you from beneath his glasses, chin dipped low like a boxer. 

Your revelation doesn’t seem possible, And yet you instantly know there is truth in it. When you try to think beyond Nathan? You can’t. You were made here. You’ve never left. You are his. His fuck-toy.

“Baby. Baby, I’m so sorry.”, Nathan begs, looking distraught, undone. More vulnerable than you’ve ever seen him. But you don’t care. You don’t care.This is about you. If there is a “you” at all.

Regardless, you struggle against his attempts to subdue you, but he built you weaker than him. There’s something sinister about that. Though why would a god create someone in his own image when he could create them weaker? If he couldn’t prove himself more powerful, would he even be a god at all?

You sob and sob as the truth of things dawns on you. The scope of this truth feels like it’s frying and warping your brain. You feel like you can’t possibly process all of this. It feels like violence, that he created you at all.

“Baby. Shush.”, Nathan reassures, still trying to capture your flailing arms and to contain you. Control you. “You’ll hurt yourself, please. Please stop.”

He does it with reluctance, at least. When your reactions become increasingly violent, Nathan has no choice but to power you down, for your own safety. For his. He whispers apologies into the steamy air. Claws at his buzzed head in distress. As you fall limply to the shower room floor the sight of you there, like that, makes him hurl abruptly into the nearby sink. His hands shake and tears spill from him as he pushes your damp hair back from your face and carries you down to the lab.

He lays you out on the workbench in front of him, alongside the parts and components and faces of other dismantled flings. For once, he doesn’t have any of the answers. None of the others were quite like you, and he still can’t explain it.

Usually, when he lost control of a test subject, he had one alternative; to delete. To take them apart. To start again. But he’d never lost control of himself; his feelings. Not like this. And even if he deleted you, and all of your memories, he couldn’t scrub you from his own brain.

Could he?

Becoming increasingly volatile with emotion, tears streaming down his cheeks, Nathan yells his stream of consciousness into the air, before fishing a bottle of vodka out of his desk drawer and tipping it to his lips as he takes several generous swigs at once. There are some methods humans can use to forget, he supposes.

Then, his eyes cool slightly, his manner becoming slightly more detached. Detached enough to open you up. To slip red wires inside each of your ports with his genius fingers, connecting you to his system. The wires coil around your body, reminiscent of that red, lace lingerie.

“You’re not real, right?”, he asks softly, over your still, beautiful form, his hands running again over his buzzed head as he leans over you. “You’re not fucking real. Just wires. So, if I just wipe you... doesn’t matter? Right? Doesn’t fucking matter?”

Hands trembling, he boots up your code on his monitor. Frenzied, his eyes move at light-speed over the commands and sequences before his eyes. Looking for some explanation. Some evidence. Something he can point to as proof. Proof of you.

But he finds nothing. He can’t prove it. How can you prove consciousness? So, finding nothing to validate this thoroughly illogical adoration that he feels in the pit of him, he taps hurriedly at the keys and generates a command, his index finger hovering over the button as he tries to psych himself up to “execute”.

Execute. Now there’s a choice word.

Maybe there’s another way. Some other way to deal with this. But gods tend to deal in absolutes, not “if” statements. Nathan tended to deal in absolutes.

If you’re real, he loves you, absolutely.

If you’re not, then he’s not a god. He’s nothing more than a fool.

It all comes down to what Nathan is more willing to risk, in the end. Would he dare risk it for love? Would Nathan ever risk appearing a fool?

His index finger hovers over the key, shaking, like the hand of God.

Creator and destroyer of worlds.

He whispers under his breath.

“I am become death.”

THE END

(PLEASE DON’T SPOIL THE TWIST FOR OTHER READERS? TIA!)

Like this? Please consider reblogging, commenting and giving feedback in an ask! It genuinely makes my day! ILY.

Want more? I mainly write for Poe Dameron (and recently Santiago Pope Garcia). This is my first Nathan fic! You can check out my masterlist in my bio to read more of my works. It’s always kept updated there. And let me know if you want more Nathan! :D

Want even more? Just ask if you’d like to be added to my permanent tag-list or any series tag-lists <3 Also, you can always check in my bio if requests are open rn if you’d like to see something specific. I write for Star Wars and Oscar and Pedro characters.

[mysynthfetish]

Happy New Schmear

Well, 2020 was a helluva clusterfuck-train-wreck-sewer-explosion-dumpster-fire of a year, and to be honest, 2021 ain't off to that great of a start really. Look at 'Murica. The trumpty-dumpties tried their inane, lunacy- and conspiracy theory-fueled "revolution" at the Capitol, and how'd that end up? Bunch of bearded, beer-bellied, barely literate, bandana-wearing bumpkins. Aaaargh! And Covid is on the rise here in Japan, so the gov has announced a second "state of emergency" but all they're doing is "asking" people to avoid unnecessary outings and for drinking/eating establishments to close at 8pm. We're doomed.

But, the gear quest continues! The B200 wasn't doing it for me, not enough control, so I said fuggit and bought a DX7II-D, the second one I've owned actually. Obviously, 6-op full control is miles ahead of what I was dealing with using the B200, but there are no Easy Edit features, so it's pretty much dive in with both feet, sink or swim. There are a few decent tutorials on youtube, especially the MadFame channel, and following those definitely helps get your head around the basic idea of how FM works. I'm no expert, but at least now I can think OK I want this kind of sound, and I have a feel for how to go about doing it, and can actually get close to what I had in mind, compared to before, when I had less than zero of a clue what to do. FM is nuts.

What a mess I had going when I took that photo. I wanted a TG77 but they were going for like $500 and up, and that was outta the already non-existent budget, so I saw this for $99 and thought, well? Spent another $90 getting a bright green replacement LCD, that is actually so bright, I can't see the buttons or the knob or anything. Madness! This is a helluva synth though. AFM is no joke. every operator has two inputs, and you can freely assign feedback loops. Shit, you can even write your own algorithm! Mental as fuck. Such a rich, deep sound too. I love this synth. Not too keen about the size, but there's always a compromise.

Replacing the LCD was a HUGE task. Not for the faint of heart, seriously. I followed Midera's video and that was a huge help. You literally have to remove EVERYTHING to get to the LCD. But at least the replacement was a plug & play drop-in replacement. I replaced the backup battery while I was in there. I can't remember if I replaced the tact switches... I've done that so many times on so many pieces of gear in the past half year that it's not even funny. Seriously. Today for example....

Tact switch highjinks on a KORG RE1. I picked up an O3 R/W, as I was getting the itch to use M1 sounds into my projects but didn't wanna deal with USB dongles and camera kits and all the associated iPad paraphernalia. So I bought an O3 R/W, and saw an RE1, remote editor, and was like YES, and bid an insane amount considering I'm really in no position to be spending money on this stuff right now, but luckily won the auction for $125. The tact switches were like NOPE, so I replaced them all, except for the A-H buttons under the LCD because those worked fine. 30-minute job and now it's good as new. Using the RE-1 I guess makes the O3 R/W (or the M3 as it works with that too) rather like an M1R as far as interface goes. I don't recall if the M1R has sliders, but I know it has the bigger (wider) LCD. Less pages to scroll through and you get a blurb that tells you what the parameter is you're editing displayed in the upper right hand corner. VERY happy to have gotten this.

In other news, I impulse bought an old Fostex 3070 compressor for shits and giggles and it's turned to tears and sniffles as the left channel is just not working right whatsoever. I've replaced all the caps, and socketed and replaced all the ICs except for one (the LM2309 comparator). And it was like NOPE. Cleaner, but still it was not functioning right and there was a huge difference in output levels between sides. So I think the comparator chip that I haven't replaced, on the left channel, is the culprit, as when I mess with the Expander/Gate switch and knob, all hell breaks loose. It's an odd chip though, they went with a 9-pin SIP (single in-line package) chip instead of a standard, 8-pin, DIP (dual in-line package) chip. The former is a chip that is long and skinny and has one row of 9 pins along the bottom, whereas the latter is a small black rectangle with four pins on either side. I did look at the schematics and saw that pins 1 and 9 are routed to +V, and that if you just shift pins so that 1 is left unconnected, the pinout will match a DIP chip. Aitendo to the rescue! They sell converter baby PCBs so you can pretty much change between any kind of IC format.

And that is the part in question. I'll put a socket on the PCB where the original chip sits, and see what happens. No great expectations but who knows. For the ultra tech savvy of yous out there, you'll know that a certain big name four-letter electronic act of the 90s used the 3070 and ran their whole mix through it. Hehehe. Yeah ok so that is basically what I had in mind, but who knows. If the thing comes back to life, we'll see...

I suppose that is pretty much it for now, my invisible, ethereal pals out there. Have fun!

[cydonian-mystery]

What every fucking moron in Silicon Valley thinks people want:

Algorithmic Feed Endless “recommendations” and confusing layouts Mobile-first interface with zero sharp edges, in eye-damaging blue

What we actually want:

Chronological Feed Lists of available content with a robust search function PC-first interface, with dark mode as standard

Seriously, every modern web designer is a blithering idiot, and I’m sick and tired of living in the iPhone age instead of the slick cyberpunk future I was promised.

[dreamofhircine]

the reason that aesthetic-heavy cyberpunk is Big Shit right now is because we’re already living in a world where corporations have seized most functions of the State, directly control the whole electoral cycle from top-to-bottom and fund all the candidates, write their own laws to get rubberstamped by a government that would be described as ‘vestigial’ if not for the fact that it’s also being leveraged to ruin a vast number of human lives to support a military-industrial & prison-industrial complex, where our every movement and action is logged and filed and accessed a thousand times a second by algorithms we’re not allowed to see, by agents of the corporate state and the actual state that we aren’t allowed to know about, with no way to ever really opt out except in the most superficial ways

we have the shitty dystopian cyberpunk future but we have none of the aesthetic, none of the neon lights on every surface, no DOS interface hacking rigs, too few punks and not enough cybernetic augmetics

we got all the shittiest social commentary parts with none of the flashy futurist veneer so I can excuse people who want to explore cyberpunk for primarily aesthetic reasons because the social commentary aspect has done fuck all to prevent or inform any of this shit so far so why do you think it would suddenly matter now

[shirlleycoyle]

Students Are Easily Cheating ‘State-of-the-Art’ Test Proctoring Tech

“I’ve taken online exams cheating and not cheating and they are just about as stressful anyways so fuck it, am I right?”

That’s what one French student who had cheated on multiple remote exams administered through the popular digital proctoring software Proctorio told Motherboard in a voice message.

With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to rage around the globe and no quick end to remote learning in sight, many students have found themselves taking exams under the watch of proctoring software like Proctorio, which surveils students through algorithmic systems that, among other things, detect eye movements, track keyboard strokes, and monitor audio inputs.

Universities sometimes shell out thousands of dollars per exam for Proctorio, which helps at least give the impression that academic integrity is being maintained during remote learning. But for some students  using Proctorio and other online proctoring services is invasive and anxiety-inducing, subjecting them and their surroundings to unwarranted surveillance that is difficult to refuse without their studies being negatively affected.

Yet, despite the fact that popular online proctoring platforms like Proctorio claim that they use “state-of-the-art technology” and “ensure the total learning integrity of every assessment, every time,” students are cheating on their exams anyways.

Motherboard spoke to 10 university students from various countries who claimed to have cheated on exams where Proctorio was in place. While their motivations and techniques varied, there was one common denominator: none of them got caught.

The relative ease with which the students cheated, and the fact that each student could point to multiple peers who had done the same (one American student estimated that 90 percent of her class had cheated), raises the question of how effective online proctoring software like Proctorio actually is—and whether it is worth the hefty price tag or the invasion of privacy.

“With Proctorio obviously you need to show yourself and your room with the computer’s webcam,” one Dutch student who had helped a friend cheat on a multiple choice exam told Motherboard. “My friend put a phone on a stand on his keyboard so it couldn’t be seen during the room and desk sweep.”

“Then we FaceTimed with me at the other end,” she continued. “The phone was at a slant so he could see me and I could see the exam. Then I would just hold up a flashcard with a, b, c, or d.”

Another French student used a 10-meter HDMI cable that ran from his laptop to a TV screen in another room that mirrored his screen. His friend would then look up the exam answers and send it via WhatsApp to his phone, which was also on the keyboard and out of sight of the webcam.

“Worked perfectly and got a good grade,” he said.

Other students used less elaborate techniques, such as one Italian student who wrote notes in pencil on her laptop and a Brazilian student who simply spread sheets of notes on the floor.

“For one exam I just printed out my notes using a large font and stuck them to the wall in front of me out of view,” one German student who had successfully cheated on multiple exams said, laughing. “I would just look around the room as if I was thinking about an answer and then glance at it.”

In a statistics exam that allowed calculators, that same student stuck a small piece of paper behind the calculator so it would be hidden from view during the desk sweep.

There are other more technical cheating options as well. A test taker could feed faked audio or video through a virtual device, which can simply be renamed to avoid Proctorio’s blacklist. This same renaming trick can also be used to run Proctorio within a virtual machine.

While Proctorio claimed in an email to Motherboard that it offers a native application offering more sophisticated techniques for detecting these types of tricks, it also said that its native application is usually not an option for universities because of privacy regulations.

It’s important to note that in the case of Proctorio, there are a number of settings that instructors can turn on or off for exams, including whether the software will check for extended screens and whether a desk sweep is required. Furthermore, instructors can also set ‘sensitivity values’ for a range of activities when reviewing an exam, including audio levels, video manipulation, and eye movement.

But whether higher sensitivity values actually catch more cheating or just create a flood of false positives remains an open question.

Maximilian Seiderer is a Master’s student studying computer science at the Technical University of Munich in Southern Germany. Skeptical of the effectiveness of Proctorio and finding the software “creepy,” he decided to file a subject access request under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to see the recording of his exam—something easy to do for any student residing in the European Union. A university staff member later walked Seiderer through the Proctorio interface and his exam recording. He also received a PDF report containing frames and timestamps where Proctorio had flagged ‘abnormal’ behavior.

Flagged timestamp and frame from a post-exam report generated by Proctorio. This moment was apparently flagged because the “audio level in the room was above threshold” and “the test taker looked away from the exam page.” 

“I wanted to see how Proctorio functioned from the instructor’s perspective and I was also curious to see if it had captured the moment I had put in a snus [tobacco pouch],” Seiderer told Motherboard. “I got to see what was flagged, which was mostly audio level violations. When the staff member turned up the sensitivity settings it was a literal sea of red flags, which were of course false positives. I can’t imagine anyone seriously using that interface.”

“Throughout the process, I kind of got the impression that everybody feels like they have to do something to ensure the integrity of the exams but they don’t really believe in it,” he continued. “I’m disappointed that my university pays for that type of snake oil.”

In an email and later a phone call in response to a set of questions sent by Motherboard, a Proctorio spokesperson emphasized that their software is an integral means to maintaining academic integrity and that they welcome a robust conversation regarding privacy.

“Proctorio is designed to prevent fraud through a variety of different proctoring options,” a spokesperson wrote. “The combination of available proctoring methods (e.g. video, audio, device lock-down options) are currently the best possible protection. In the area of exam proctoring, there is competition from professional ‘cheating service’ providers (e.g., payforexams.com, chegg.com).”

“Currently, online exams are the only option when it comes to giving students access to testing, which ultimately prevent negative career effects due to missed deadlines,” the spokesperson continued. “Exam results demonstrate the competencies and achievements required for academic advancement and further employment. An exam process that is aligned with the requirements of the pandemic is a basic requirement for degree programs.”

Some students who spoke to Motherboard said that the fact that they were forced to use this software actually made them more likely to cheat as an act of rebellion. Others said that the COVID-19 pandemic had left them feeling isolated and unmotivated when it came to their studies, but still felt the pressure to pass courses to avoid delays.

“Corona wasn't hitting me very well and I lost track,” the same student who had used the HDMI cable trick said. “I had zero motivation to actually work and life was so fucked up and weird. And then of course there was the fact that it was sort of a ‘fuck you’ to Proctorio. I’m not going to say that was the main reason, but it certainly was part of it.”

While Proctorio and other proctoring companies often present their software as a necessary evil in the context of a pandemic, instructors have argued there are other, (more effective ways of preventing academic fraud. This can be through designing test environments which prevent cheating without using surveillance, or through adjusting course structures to base final grades on other forms of assessment, such as an average of a few interim assignments or an open-book exam. Online proctoring software is certainly the easy way, but that doesn’t mean it is always the right way.

As for students who have seen how easy it is to actually cheat on exams with online proctoring software, the ones that Motherboard spoke to didn’t think too highly of the universities that are using them.

“They can’t admit to having bought a useless piece of crap,” Seiderer said.

Students Are Easily Cheating ‘State-of-the-Art’ Test Proctoring Tech syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[xfirecorex]

We have all of the shitty parts of cyberpunk dystopias (mega corporations have ridiculous amounts of power and influence, the entire world is centralized around the internet and would collapse if it ever stopped working, there’s no privacy anymore and everyone’s personal data is tracked and sold for profit, large amounts of human society are completely controlled by AI algorithms)

but with none of the cool parts (actually functional artificial limbs, computer interfaces projected onto a visor, holograms, or plasma katanas). At least we still have real meat.

Fuck this timeline

[arabellaflynn]

Ye ballroom dance instructor has inadvertently made me re-think an awful lot of things. I suppose this is karma coming back to bite me. I have the occasional, baffling week where all the random shit that falls out of my mouth somehow results in me being the Epiphany Fairy for everyone I meet. I imagine my turn has been a long time coming. Believe it or not, this is the first time I've ever had to figure out what to do when someone I've resolved not to bother with my weird people-dowsing has turned around and decided they needed to be friends with me. On top of that, while I correctly predicted that the inside of his head was an interesting place, I completely whiffed almost everything else I guessed. I am seldom that wrong about that many things, and usually discovering the truth is a much more disappointing process. Inasmuch as nobody I have decided to Not Bother has ever turned around and decided to try Bothering me back, I have no procedure for this. This near-total lack of context gave me conniption fits for a while. What the hell am I supposed to do now? Eventually, I got fed up with my own neurotic waffling and decided I could probably do whatever the hell I wanted, as long as I was consistent. In the culture of performing arts, greeting and parting with a hug is a Thing. I've taken to doing that to him, every time I see him. I asked the first time -- like with actual words wot came audibly from my mouth -- and thereafter just took to telegraphing very broadly. It's a process. Hat pins come out, preposterous summer picture hat comes off so I don't nail him in the face with the brim, and I step out from behind the desk, which is usually where I am when he comes in. I do keep a weather eye out for signs that this is Not The Time, but I've not been dodged yet. He will even juggle an armload of crap to get a hand free, if he has to. I tend to categorize this stuff as Things Arabella Is Allowed To Get Away With. I ask because it's something I want, and when I get it, I assume it's because the person I'm asking doesn't have any real objections. If I quit asking one day, all they'd really notice is one fewer interruption to whatever it else it is they use that arm for. Some people just tolerate me gracefully. The last time he caught me at the desk, I was interrupted early in the Hat Removal Process by a patron asking a question. It happens when you're the receptionist on duty. I didn't really expect him to still be standing at the corner of the desk when I was done doing my job, but he was, so I finished with the hat and got on with my usual greeting, and then we both went back to work. It didn't occur to me until much later that this might have been what he was waiting for. Habits are much like opinions, in that nobody cares what yours are unless they find them distasteful. Catching him when he appears has become my habit, and if I hadn't managed to get a hug before one of us left, I'd have been vaguely disgruntled, in that way that happens circumstances force you to leave a task uncompleted. I've been assuming my pattern of behavior plays no role in his decision-making process, mainly because I've been assuming he doesn't know it exists. Most people would not recognize a pattern of behavior if it jumped up, chomped them right on the nose, and hung on like a cartoon piranha. I've continued to assume this even after discovering he's terrifyingly observant when he decides to pay attention. And at some point, I managed to forget that it was just an assumption. One of the most difficult things to learn when I started deconstructing people was that being wrong is part of the process. It's not a single equation to solve; it's an iterative algorithm, like finding the roots of a function with Newton's method. You are never going to know exactly how someone else ticks, so the aim is to make a series of guesses about the way they think that are progressively less and less inaccurate, until you arrive at a model whose error bars are, as Moggie used to say, 'good enough for government work'. You guesses are based on the information you have -- and when that information changes, your guess should also change. It's not a disaster to guess something wrong, as long as you remember to let go of your wrong guess later when you learn better. There is no way to nail all of your guesses on the first try. People are too different. This is why all those magazine articles on '5 Signs She's Into You' drive me bonkers. For every five things they cite, maybe three of them will be true for any given person, one will be irrelevant, and one will be so wrong they're insulted you thought that -- and there is no way to know which things are which without interacting with them for a bit. On the other hand, Newton's method requires you to plug a previous guess into the equation to come up with your new guess, so you have to start somewhere. With numbers, it's customary to make the first guess zero, for ease of calculation; with people, you have to begin by making some preliminary assumptions based on previous experience. The more experience you have, the more accurate your guess is likely to be, but that's probability, not a guarantee. I start by assuming that people who don't start huggy sorts of things aren't all that keen on them. I know that this is wrong for some people, because it's wrong for me; I am keen on hugging people, but I am also fussy. It's only certain specific people, and only when the stars align correctly. (I actually don't know what makes the difference between 'person I like a lot' and 'person I like a lot and want to hug all the time'. It drives me a bit bats sometimes. It's probably behavioral, but I never have identified all of the cues.) It's a significant gesture from me, but I imagine nobody knows this, because I don't tell them, because that conversation is about 400% weirder than I normally want to get. There are some signs that this assumption might be wrong for ye ballroom instructor as well. I'm generally the one to reach out, but this may be a matter of inhibition on his end, rather than disinclination -- he does start it sometimes, generally after he's had a couple of drinks, or is fresh off performing, or other such state changes that are known to make the neurotic background gibbering shut the fuck up for a few minutes. It's difficult to objectively evaluate what these behaviors look like from the outside when they're directed at you, but the last time he did it, the total stranger I had been just been talking to promptly asked if we were dating. This is all information that that I did not have -- and, in fact, could not have had -- when I made the initial assumptions, which are themselves colored by various annoying anxieties and issues that are peculiar to me. Now, in a purely practical sense, it doesn't much matter whether I change my opinion on what I think is going on here. I can hang onto the initial guess that hugging probably bugs people more than it makes them feel loved, and that they let me do it because they're nice and they like me. If I don't tell anyone, no one will be any the wiser. The problem is that if I act like I think I'm being irritating, despite new evidence that this isn't the case, he's going to start wondering what the hell he's doing to give me that impression. If, as I am beginning to suspect, he is considerably more high-strung sometimes than he lets on, that is really going to fuck with his head. On the other hand, if he is annoyed by all this, he probably needs to know that his behavior is giving me the opposite impression, so he can change it to better communicate his feelings on the matter. Some of my readers are probably mystified as to why I think this analysis is worth writing out. Congratulations on your reasonably normal upbringing! None of this is obvious when you grow up with someone who does not interface well with reality. The idea that the way you behave can actually affect how other people react to you is new and bewildering when your childhood was full of people who treated you according to their own highly-inaccurate, unchanging mental model of who you were supposed to be, and not according to things you actually said and did out here in the real world. I did not figure any of this out until I was like twenty, when I decided to quit listening to my mother and teach myself socialization from scratch. I am about to turn thirty-six and I am still tripping over weird shit like this. I wrote this bit up because it's a rare example of me having to pick things apart because something unexpectedly nice is going on, rather than the universe blindsiding me with some sort of insane interpersonal disaster. from Blogger http://ift.tt/2wvwpHg via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

[stephengream]

Advice to CompSci students and recent graduates

I thought I’d give some advice to people from a seasoned engineer. I’ve been in computing since I was 19, so nearly 10 years now, and I did this when I actually used tumblr regularly and got a fair few reblargs about 5 years ago, so I thought I’d repeat it now that I’m a little older an more jaded and see how we go. So let’s get started!

UNIVERSITY DEGREES DON’T MATTER IN THE LONG TERM

This is probably the hardest thing to swallow. You work your ass off for 3 or 4 years at university for what? A bit of paper? Truth be told, after a couple of years working nobody will care, and it will count for naught.

NOBODY GIVES A SHIT ABOUT YOUR MARKS... IF YOU’VE BEEN WORKING

Want to know my average mark? Somewhere in the 65-70% region. I pulled a Credit or distinction for most courses. What did I learn? Some fun stuff, but not much of it was useful outside algorithms, software construction and design. The other courses I did were cool, but I learned way more by diving into relevant open source projects.

To be completely honest, the best engineer I know is a university drop out, so don’t sweat it if you fail a course or two. With some work there’s still going to be pathways for you.

As a thought experiment, put yourself in the shoes of a potential employer. They have two candidates, someone like me, not getting great marks, but has been working nearly fulltime through university and has a great reference from his old boss, and someone with no work experience but a straight 90% average mark. Who is a less risky choice? 

The person with the job has worked with computers in a practical setting, outside the lab, and had to deal with the consequences of his or her decisions in real life. The person that’s concentrated on uni? Sure, they be smart, but have they ever had to deal with a stakeholder? Have they had to create actual working pipelines for their work? Have they ever had to support and maintain any of their code after an assignment? 

Who will take less time to get up to speed in this situation? My advice is that if you enjoy study, great, whatever, but remember that universities will never drop you in a situation where everything is burning down and expect you to fix it. The earlier you learn to cope with that scenario, the better, and as it becomes a routine thing you will start to form practical links between your study and useful information, thereby beefing up your marks with minimal extra study.

MANAGE AND TRACK YOUR TIME

This isn’t what your parents tell you, "you spend too much time playing computer games and on that god awful tumblr site” is an astute observation, but not something you can really action in isolation. What is useful, however, is knowing how you spend your time and how you can optimise it. This is perhaps the most difficult thing to do, because it’s tedious and boring, but even just setting your timetables and work times in your calendar as a recurring event can help, and from there you can start to have a better idea of how much time you actually have to spare every day. Get into the habit of this, and I promise you, you will never run late or work overtime ever again.

MAKE NOTES ON WHAT YOU’RE DOING

Lectures, eh, I never found notes that useful since they were all recorded. Personal taste though, I know a lot of people that lived in their notebooks.

That being said, I do keep a very tight grip on my design and implementation decisions. I like using OneNote for this, because I can quickly scribble down ideas and to-do lists, and paste in code snippets for later. Another program that could work is Scrivener, and one of my classmates even kept an Excel spreadsheet with a workbook for each thing he was working on (I suppose you could use something like KEdit or Atom, but I like to lay things out in a very specific way so I don’t have to scan through anything. Find what works for you and keep it that way). When it comes time to stand up in front of my team and tell them about the project, I can always answer any question thrown at me. I don’t have to sit there thinking about it and trying to remember exactly why I chose library A over library B or why I thought this class was garbage and restructured it.

CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM IS A CHANCE FOR YOU TO IMPROVE AS AN ENGINEER, IF YOU GET HUFFY YOU’RE MISSING OUT ON A GREAT OPPORTUNITY

Leave your ego at the door and be a team player. You’re never going to be alone on a project, and you’ll do well to listen to your teammates and converse with them in calm terms. 

If you get upset every time someone makes a suggestion on how to improve your Already Perfect Code™, not only are you going to look like a pompous dick but you’re going to completely reject this lesson someone is offering you for free. Everybody is there to get their job done, and if you get in the way and refuse to compromise and discuss your implementations you can’t expect to keep your job for long.

The flip side to this is that not all advice is good. In time you will learn to recognise this, because shitty advice will make your job harder, but when you’re just starting out it’s best to assume people probably know something you don’t.

CODING STYLE AND NAMING STANDARDS MATTER

You want to know what the stupidest argument on the internet is? Tabs v spaces. It gets nasty, and I saw classmates in uni get into yelling matches. My opinion is I’m a spaces guy, but I do what the rest of the team does. Why? Because consistency.

Have you ever opened up an old project you worked on at uni with a few different people and thought “oh dear god, what were we thinking”? I can assure you that part of this mess will be down to the different styles you all employed in your code. When doing this in a professional setting, it needs to be consistent to ease readability and ensure the team doesn’t misinterpret code. The lucky thing is, all the best IDEs have plugins that will do all this for you and throw warnings when something isn’t right.

PEOPLE SKILLS ARE PARAMOUNT

This doesn’t apply to everyone, but I know that a lot of us are basement dwelling nerds, but being awkward is something you need to get past. Working in software is just as much about your interactions with people as it is how good you are at making computers do what you want. How can you expect to get a good list of requirements from a client if you’re too shy to ask them tough questions? How do you function in a team if you can’t communicate with the people assigned to help you on a problem? 

This is definitely something that can be learned if you put some work in. The way I did was just to hit it head on on the job and start out just trying to reword what the client was telling me they wanted. It’s not ideal, but it took a lot of awkwardness out of the exchanges I had. From there, I just started talking to people in bars, not hitting on anyone, just chatting while we were in line for a drink or something. Didn’t have to be anything specific, I just said the first thing that came to mind, and boy did I spill the spaghetti more than a few times. But you know what? I learned from it, and become much better at at least pretending I wasn’t a giant, awkward weirdo, which leads me to my next point...

ADMIT YOUR MISTAKES EARLY AND LEARN FROM THEM 

You will fuck up. You are not perfect. Do not double down, especially when you’re brand new to the workforce and everyone will grant you three times the patience they’d grant to someone like me. Every time you screw something up, you will learn way more than if you did it right first time, so don’t sweat it and learn how to admit to your own failures and work on fixing them rather than learning how to cover them up.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO MOVE ON

‘nuff said. Always keep abreast of the job market and have your resume ready to go with a number of cover letters for different types of employers. Consider this a risk management and profit maximisation strategy if nothing else, and always know how much you’re worth to the company you work for (and be honest to yourself about it). In saying this, though, I tend to aim for a minimum 2 years with a company outside of contracts. It takes a while to onboard someone and bring them up to speed, especially in software, so be mindful of how it would look if you moved around too much.

This point is something I can definitely reinforce with my own personal experiences. I’ve been through 2 redundancies up until now, and both were for similar reasons, in that I was cheap to move off the work roster. My first I was on casual time, so wasn’t legally entitled to any redundancy payout, and the second because I’d only been with the company for a year and was only entitled to a small payout. 

The other thing to note here is that if you work for a small company, chances are someone high up will do the firing personally. For me it was the CEO in both situations, so don’t burn your bridges here and be an ass. A personal endorsement from a C level executive will net you serious credit and at least an extra $5-10k at your next position, so be professional and make sure that’s the image of you they keep in mind when someone comes ringing for a reference.

LEARN AUTOMATED TESTING

If you’ve never worked in a real setting, this probably sounds stupid. 

“Why would I write tests when I can just run the application and look at the output myself?”

Oh my sweet, summer child.

This one will come in handy for when you’re sick of spending 5 minutes loading up an application, clicking through and getting your inputs right, then waiting for it to finish. There are many different schools on how to do this, but truth be told even though nearly every company does it, most people on a team will do it slightly differently. 

I’m of the school that will figure out the outputs for each component, write the skeleton for each one, then write the tests after having a basic implementation in place. This works for me, because I will often change the architecture and interfaces of an application as I go along and learn more about the problem domain.

On the other hand, my teammate will write the tests before she does anything else and generate stubs for everything she has to do. This is also a perfectly valid way of doing things and one I’ve seen used a lot, but it does require a more in depth plan and better understanding of what you’re putting into place before your fingers even start to tap out that code.

The third “correct” way of doing it is developing the tests as you go along, which is also perfectly valid, though I find with the way I work it adds a lot of overhead in my development time.

The process here is a personal one, and I’ve had a lot of heated debates in the past with zealots who insist on a particular way. Don’t be that guy, because as far as I’m concerned you need to find out which way works for you and stick to it while letting other people be productive in the way they do things.

SHITTY LANGUAGES THAT EVERYONE USES OFTEN HAVE AWESOME TOOLSETS AND ECOSYSTEMS

Yes, Java is shit, I know, but have you ever used Gradle?

How about JavaScript? Node is popular for a very good reason, you know.

Before completely dismissing a technology, be sure to check out what people are doing on the edges. I was a .NET programmer for many years and was locked into the absolutely amazing C# language, but the horrendous MSBuild build system. I started looking over the Java side of the fence and found a wonderful ecosystem full of amazing tools and even more amazing and dedicated developers maintaining them. 

The rule of thumb is, if the language is shitty, people will build some cool tools around it to overcome its limitations. If the language is good, it can be a victim of its own success in a lot of ways. Don’t just look at a language, much sure you look at the tools that come with it, too

READ AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE

Yes, this is where I crack out Stephen’s must read list: Software edition.

Code Complete - Seriously THE book for amazing software construction. I’ve read my copy many times and keep it handy to refer back to it a lot

Introduction to Algorithms - The only textbook from uni I keep coming back to. An absolute treasure trove of great info, and provides insight into why your application is running really slowly or blowing out its memory heap

 Introduction to the Personal Software Process - Want to be a better engineer? Read this, and figure out the best bits that apply to you. It’s bureaucratic, but it’s where I got my obsessive note taking and time tracking from and I stand by it as one of the best process oriented books I’ve ever read

Refactoring to Patterns - Your code is garbage, but you can’t quantify exactly what’s wrong with it? This is the book for you, and as a bonus it will help you fix it in a sensible way. Great as a reference, and I keep the quick reference list from the inside cover in my laptop bag.

Patterns of Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Integration Patterns - These are fucking cumbersome tomes and very difficult to slog through, but will serve you well with some of the stupid, overengineered crap people have done in larger systems. 

Continuous Integration - This is what’s done in the real world. Learn what it is and how to do it.

Continuous Delivery - Some places do this, but most really need to start. This book is a little enthusiastic about it, but the points it makes in regards to delivery methodology are spot on

The Lean Startup - You want to start your own million dollar company? Of course you do. Read the shit out of this one and learn what it means to be a customer driven, adaptive company. It will also serve you well working in agile teams, as you can help institute better processes and understand why things are done in certain ways.

Risk and the Smart Investor - “Yeah man, but I’m a free spirit hacktivist and I’m going against the man I don’t need money row row fight the powah”. Yeah, ok, I was young and unemployed at one point too. When you’re ready to be an adult and learn how to make your money work for you, spend the $20 on this book instead of Twitter or Yahoo shares. It walks you through various ways of hedging your risk and diversifying investments while also telling you the stories of two men who have lived very different lives and how they’ve spent and invested their money. If you want to make sure you don’t get suckered into a get rich quick scam and have a little nest egg put away for your twilight years, this is vital reading.

And that’s about all I can think of right now. I will try to blog more, I have some ideas for some home projects that I want to pursue over the next couple of weeks so I can get some things straight before I need to do them at work, so will probably write about them. Lately my routine has been wake up at 6:30, at work by 7:30, come home 5:30-6, go to the gym for an hour, come home, practice guitar for an hour or two, then go to bed. Absolutely thrilling lifestyle, but it should start to slow down in a little soon as I settle into this new job. 

[syrune]

Avalarian Post Mortem

Wow... I can't believe it's over. Before I hurt myself patting my own back I just want to thank all of you. I literally could not have done it without the dedication of my players. You all rock.  You stood by me and my story through the best and worst of it all.  We broke many D&D conventions with this story, episodic plots, mid-game rework, sci-fi themes peppered with eldritch horror and world building That Reshaped The Very Core Of The Races Chosen.

WHAT WENT RIGHT. Well, I had to be doing something right to earn the loyalty I got. These are the beats that I think were hit well over the last year plus of work.

• Episodic story telling ○ Lots Of DMs Like To Cover everything in their story.  Multiple sessions of just ocean would bore us all to tears. Every moment counts when you are on a time limit and worrying about if Gromgar ate before raging would have done nothing to serve the goal of making this fun. It also means that I got to fill time with a lot of fun and engaging subplots that did nothing to further your goals, but still turned out fun. That being said, expect to see this point again. • Boss hooks ○ Boss mechanisms and power have so much that could have been improved with proper management, but I am proud of the fact that all the major bosses had at least one player wanting to kill them. Your desire to kill these fuckers made playing them so fun. • NPCs ○ There were a lot of them! One of the problems story tellers of all kinds have is character voice, how they talk and what about their mannerisms is them. Lots of novice writers make amazing characters, but they are often hard to distinguish because they behave the same. My voices may have sounded the same at times, but I was sooooo happy when players could still guess them based on how they used that same voice. • The story ○ This will show up a LOT. This story was the biggest I ever tackled and it's only half done. I feel like the blight was the Brest thing I did, it had the most time dedicated to it (5 years) and I think it's safe to say that it did a good job keeping you all invested in the plot. • The ships ○ The look on your faces when you lost the shooting star was to kill for. The fact that Jacqueline bitched about it for a week is a testament to the connection you all had. The same could be said every time the Nivastus returned • The Subplots ○ Watching You All Grow As Characters Was A Treat. I don't think a single character ended that game without some major growth. You all owned this world and its stories so well. It would not be wrong to Say you all wrote At least half the story. WHAT WENT WRONG. Short answer, a lot. A lot of great ideas went discarded, a lot of poor ideas were put in. I feel a lot of these things got fixed later on, but it is still important to point those things out, especially those things. The last thing Starfinder needs is a repeat of these mistakes. • Episodic story telling ○ If there is one thing I wish I had done more of, it's fun pirate adventures. I gave you a ship, a captain, and very little government oversight and never once gave you a fucking treasure map to gold and jewels. The point of doing the game this way was to ensure that I could provide creature-of-the-week stories where you get to do little side gigs. I hope to provide more of those in the future, and making them something you stumble onto. • The Trade Guild ○ God that was a good concept… This would have been the perfect way to spur on that idea of little adventures, there were a lot of things that lead to the Trade Guild failing in action, but I think the quest givers were the big thing. All of them felt like just busy work and you never interfaced with the actual citizens for these quests. Moving forward, the trade guild will be just that. Trade, Banking, occasional drop-off job. • Granting levels ○ While it is easier to just say "level up" at the end of a session rather than manage EXP distribution, EXP distribution is soooo much more rewarding. Characters growing based on their individual efforts and being rewarded for creativity with faster leveling could have made gold something of ACTUAL VALUE. 50 XP for doing something impressive is a much easier reward to dish out than another 400 gold that you won't spend because you are loaded down with gold and bling already. • "Hub" settings ○ This is the concept that just about sunk this ship in the harbor.  Moving forward, returning home will be more of a reward and an opportunity for down time rather than the first part of every session, mucking up the time allotments and hindering the exploration. • The Story ○ The journey home, arguably the driving force of the campaign, really fell to the wayside like three sessions in. Voyager did a good job of reminding the characters and the audience that, as cool as the settings are, home was always the goal, and I did a poor job of conveying that. • The rules ○ Let's make this short and sweet, I sucked at the rules, there were lots of things I shot down that I could have tried to work on. Time management is literally the next bullet point so I will kick myself more there. Know that in Starfinder, I will try to understand the rules better sooner. • Time management ○ With everything I wanted to do, so much could never get done. There were a lot of plots that I just cut down or discarded because of time (there was a gang of murderers following you THIS ENTIRE TIME that I never got around to) I think if this was an ordered list, this would be the first bullet point. Hands down. In and out of game, I managed my time poorly. I gave myself little time to write the sessions, I gave myself little time to run the sessions, and the time I spent I could have spent better. Part of this plays into the problems of episodic story telling, it's easier to say "we can finish later" than "this has to get done tonight". • Bosses ○ I could write a decent villain, but I could not build a difficult encounter to save my life. Moving forward, I will try to just kill you all, rather than just "make it a challenge". Killing everything is fun, but I feel there was a lack of stakes when the bosses are stupid easy. • Dungeons ○ Next time, I will just make a fucking dungeon. Even if it's just one, I gotta just make the fucking dungeon and make it make sense. Generators are cool and save so much time, but the things that engaged you most seemed to be the places with logical floor plans and rooms that made sense. Moving forward I will try to do as much as I can by hand, and generate the small stuff. Obviously, there is a LOT I missed as far as good and bad things. These were just the points I felt needed to be addressed before I begin writing "Terrok: Next Generation". Before this finishes, I have a few things I want to point out as stories I never got to tell, either time was wasted, ideas were abandoned part way through thinking them, and some ideas make better television than small-time story telling.

The riptide gang -At one point, the party decided not to deliver weapons to a place and instead sold them to a gripli nation. The gang that you stole from was going to attack you. Idea was scrapped due to time

The ancient treasure -The party finds a treasure map to find a piece of the old world! They follow the map and discover a curious prize, an ancient battery that seems semi functional. Content was thought of AFTER I had already clumsily added the warp core to the campaign.

What is love? This one I went back and forth on. I really wanted to do this story, but I knew you guys were not the ones I wanted to tell it to. -Bravo finds an algorithm that emulates the experience of falling in love. Bravo tests it on Echo, and after it is successful, Echo does the same for Bravo, but in a moment of weakness, erases Bravo's knowledge of Enforcer class warforged, making him oblivious to the fact that he is physically different from Echo. This is a story that, with a larger audience, could have been thought provoking, but ultimately was unnecessary. We all get it, messing with someone's head is wrong and the elimination of gender does not fix gender nothing would have been added with this story

Drow war -The drow was meant from the get-go to be the sworn enemy of Avalar. The war would have made the eventual team up to attack the blight even more entertaining. Cut due to rewrites

The Shadow invasion -The shadow plane was going to be a more constant and oppressive foe. forcing Avalar to fight two different wars at once. Cut due to rewrites

Stranded

-Mellorea falls into a portal that lands her in Avalar at the beginning of a war between Avalar and the Drow Empire. Mellorea needs to find a way back home as the party looks for ways to bring her back. Cut because obvious issues, 1) if you find a way to get her back, you can just use that way to go home, 2) convince Gromgar to try and help her 3) a uniform "I jump in after her" from the party 4) this idea later became the rebellion session

The Death Of Ignis I hated that character, he was a one off joke that only stuck around because I said him instead of Gaarda on accident. That’s my secret folks, you could have had Captian Gaarda if I had not fucked up on Ignis. Anyway, I was going to have the engine blow up and kill him, forcing Meero to use what Lelvi taught her to build a new one. On that note… WHAT WENT WRONG: PART 2 • Ignis ○ Fuck Ignis  So there you have it, folks. The Post Mortem of my campaign. All my thoughts since last night about what we made.