#who invented scratch notation

[tenderwatches]

summary: Viktor and Jayce get a little too close in the lab + a look at how viktor learnt the rules of surviving in Piltover as an Undercity transplant cw: this chapter contains ableist language (canon, self-referential) and descriptions of medical suturing

When Viktor first became aware that he’d die early, he’d been angry.

It hadn’t been pretty. He’d yelled at his mother, at his father, had thrown things—his cane, books, half-assembled inventions. He’d cried and screamed until he’d worked himself up so badly that his father had needed to sprint to a breathing station with Viktor on his back in hopes that the cleaner air would dampen his desperate wheezing.

After that, he’d been listless for days, lying in bed, trying to conjure up the motivation to work for anything when his time would be so short, so inconsequential.

And then he remembered Rio.

The waverider was a huge creature he visited where a strange man in a strange place beyond the ravine kept her. She was like a salamander glistening in shades of blush and blossom, with big eyes full of curiosity and a tongue that craved sweet nectar. Such a simple creature, but he still thought of her, even years after he’d last seen her. He still thought of her and of the man who was so determined to keep her alive that he had not cared if she lived.

He thought of infants, cold in their cradles, their lives snuffed out, breaths robbed by the Gray. He thought of children wasting away, disfigured by the slicks of toxic chemicals oozing from chemtech seams deep in crevasses, and how he, at least, knew sunlight.

Since then, Viktor has done his best to ensure that every moment of his short life contributes to something greater than himself. The people whose lives he’s saved in the Undercity will go on to have families; they’ll impart their knowledge upon others who will do the same, who will do the same, who will do the same.

Life, like an object in motion, stays in motion.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed—it can only be transformed.

Viktor hopes that after his death, the energy that was once heat in his body will permeate into the ether, atoms ricocheting into the endless universe.

Until then, he’s resolved to stay in motion.

This determination presses his lips into a thin line of concentration as he makes minute adjustments to the dials on the microscope before him. Crystalline structures resolve into sharp focus, forming wild geometries that defy every principle of natural formation. Unlike genuine hex crystals with their orderly lattices, the synthetics’ birefringent patterns are irregular, and the arcane’s response is unlike anything he’s ever seen.

Viktor pauses to scribble a few words alongside one of Jayce’s diagrams, adding to the existing maze of their notations. They’ve managed to offset interference caused by the unexpected new compounds identified in their lab tests, but there is still residual output to deal with. He takes this moment to rest his forehead in his hand, momentarily closing his eyes. The urge to surrender to sleep swells slowly, like a building tidal wave, and he forces his eyes open before it can break over him.

One of Jayce’s hexscopes (an adaptation of one of his early designs) sits open on the table, tracking arcane energy as it moves through the crystal matrix. He stares hard at the pen attached to the end of its thin metal arm, scratching softly on continuously rolling paper as it records the waveforms. The resulting bonds are irregular with equally unpredictable chemical reactions—

Chemical reactions! Viktor straightens up so quickly that the momentum almost carries him over backwards. Head reeling, he stumbles to steady himself against the desk, pulling the diagrams in for a better look before jamming the microscope against his eye again, squinting hard at what he sees under the lens. These erratic bonds must be the cause of the arcane’s volatile reactions and inconsistencies. They’re brittle instead of strong, releasing energy in unexpected spurts. They’re illogical, full of contradictions. Only chemtech can force such incompatible combinations to hold.

Simultaneous thoughts fire off in all directions—what this means for the outputs they’re attempting to handle (harness? Eliminate? Neutralise?), the tenuous nature of these bonds, the undersized reactions sustained by the crystals—and the nagging feeling he’s seen this all somewhere before. Somewhere in Zaun, near the seams, where, in his youth, anger at the injustice of his life had gotten the better of him. Somewhere he'd nearly gotten buried in collapsing pipes, flashing fuchsia and green in the darkness of the sump.

He drops away from the microscope and back into his chair. Perhaps he should consider bringing some of this work back to the lab Heimerdinger had set aside for him. It’s closer to his Academy-issued apartment than Jayce’s lab is, and with the constant travel across the city, he often finds himself exhausted before he’s even really gotten started. Today, just like many other days, his leg aches as if he’s been standing for the entire morning, though it’s only been a couple of hours since he arrived. The considerations of the crystals, his small inconveniences, the way they all still stagger him, make the walls begin to feel oppressive. The clean lines and polished brass are a far cry from the corrugated metal and improvisation he was used to in the Undercity, and yet—he’s now facing the same kind of problem. These synthetic crystals with their arcane violations bear toxicity here, whilst below, poison is a by-product of unholy greed.

In both places, they stand to lose so much, and yet the eyes of the elite are perpetually closed.

Viktor’s teeth grind as he grips the edge of the workbench to pull himself up again, ignoring how his muscles protest. He begins recalibrating the containment field to account for an array of chemical reactions, instead of only the ones they’d adjusted for earlier in the week. If he can just isolate the unstable compounds, maybe apply some of the principles he’d developed during his academy years, they can counteract or capture the arcane fluctuations.

He’s so deep in focus that he almost jumps when Jayce walks in, chatting before he’s even crossed the threshold. “I thought you might want to see the latest stability readings from—” He breaks off, and Viktor knows his eyes are fixed on the modified containment field setup. “What are you doing?”

“Testing a theory.” Viktor doesn’t look up from the controls. The crystal’s glow intensifies, casting flickering shadows across his hands. “The synthetic crystals are made with chemtech. The instability isn’t a flaw—it’s a signature.”

“Testing a wh—wait, chemtech?” Jayce’s footsteps quicken across the floor. He unceremoniously drops his papers onto the desk, knocking the pen of the hexscope out of alignment. It continues to dutifully work through arching waves, up and down. “Hold on, you can’t just—we don’t even have protocols for working with—”

“We don’t have time for protocols,” he hisses, sharper than he intends. He forces patience into his voice. “It’s like Councillor Medarda told you—every day, Clan Ferros grows more restless—”

“Viktor, wait—”

The crystal flares with brilliant lances of blue-white light, shattering into shards that streak across the lab, acid green and electric purple tails in their wake. Viktor recoils from it and finds himself crashing first into the chair behind him, then the ground.

His breath leaves his lungs without being replaced by another—it’s a second too long before he can gasp again, sucking in air that smells of Jayce’s aftershave. Sandalwood mingles with the smell of sulphur and iron. Stars shrink and grow in his eyes.

“Are you—” When Jayce speaks, Viktor slowly becomes aware that he’s caged by a pair of smooth, sturdy forearms. His former partner is propped above him, but not so much that their bodies aren’t pressed flush together. Heat grows between them. Jayce’s chest heaves as his own gives, and for a moment, Viktor can’t speak.

A gentle furrow forms between Jayce's brows as he quickly pushes himself up onto one palm, the other coming up to cup Viktor's cheek. The motion is gentle and unthinking, fraught with the effortless care these kinds of gestures bore in their past. His eyes search Viktor's face with worried intensity, thumb brushing along the angular line of his cheekbone and coming away bright red and wet. “Hey, V—” he soothes, voice soft with an intimacy that makes Viktor's chest tight. “V-Viktor—hey.” The feeling dissipates.

Viktor pushes Jayce’s touch away and tries to sit up. He slides his hand back to support himself as he does, successfully forcing Jayce back on to his heels. Viktor finds the resulting breadth of air between them too cool on his skin, and wheezing feels like a flurry of knives in his chest. “I’m fine, Jayce,” he dismisses, muffling an accompanying cough in the crook of his elbow. He winces at the taste of copper in the back of his throat, hot embarrassment coursing through him. He can’t meet Jayce’s eyes; they are too bright with concern, honest anxiety spilling forth, unguarded. “You did not have to—” But both the words and his irritation die in his throat as dark droplets begin to dot the tiles at Jayce’s feet. “You’re bleeding.”

“Oh.” Jayce twists slightly to look over his shoulder, but immediately relaxes his posture when the movement elicits a wince. “It’s nothing. Besides, you are, too,” he points out, vaguely indicating Viktor’s cheek.

“A scratch.” Viktor feels nauseous. Not only did Jayce need to protect him like a helpless child, but he’d gotten himself hurt in the process. He leans forward, breath escaping him in a frustrated huff. “You’re bleeding on the floor. Let me see.”

“Viktor, really, it’s—”

“Take off your shirt.”

Jayce’s amber eyes turn into burning discs, his dark brows lost in his messy hair. Viktor feels the back of his neck flush with heat. “Your back, Jayce. Let me see,” he repeats, mortification sharpening the edges of his demand.

Viktor tries to ignore the inherent eroticism of demanding that Jayce turn around and strip—only to immediately fail when Jayce simply does it. By the time the two of them settle again (the lab’s robust first aid kit to one side of Viktor, Jayce sitting cross-legged in front), Viktor is dizzy. He wishes he could say it’s purely due to the sheer amount of bronze skin on display, but the headache blooming up from the base of his skull tells him otherwise. He concentrates on applying a local anaesthetic to the scattering of gashes across Jayce’s broad shoulders, then dabbing each with an antiseptic. “Well, the good news is you’ll live,” he jests, managing to thread a thin, curved surgical needle. His movements are slow but steady, and when he leans in closer to begin his work, the room rocks by only a small margin.

“Thanks, doc, what a relief.” Jayce turns his laugh into a soft snort, presumably so as to not disrupt Viktor’s stitching. Though he hasn’t needed to exercise this skill in months, the repetitive motions return to him with ease. They sit in stillness a while longer before Jayce hesitantly raises the question, “What… were you saying about chemtech?”

In spite of himself, Viktor smiles. What he wouldn’t give for the world to have the kind of insatiable curiosity that Jayce Talis has.

He walks his former partner through the process of his discovery, naming the impossibilities, the idiosyncrasies, and the ways in which he suspects the arcane clashes with the chemical compounds. Jayce is just as intrigued as Viktor, and Viktor can’t help but think that, had Jayce been in his position, they might have ended up in this same situation despite the other man’s usual adherence to safety precautions. Words of science, math, and discovery pass between them with the easiness of butterflies on a breeze, punctuated by an occasional excited exclamation from Jayce.

His progress on Jayce’s back is clean and methodical—habits formed from years of treating injuries in the Undercity, where wounds proved you couldn't stay out of trouble and seeking proper care marked dependency. He uses a pair of forceps to guide the needle through each wound, stopping only to tie off each suture as he moves from one cut to the next.

“When did you learn to do this?” Jayce has never been good at silences.

“Long ago.” Viktor keeps his eyes fixed on his work, feeling perverse as he notices the warmth radiating from Jayce’s skin, even through the sterile gloves he’s donned. “I have always fixed things. Mending clothes or skin, it makes little difference to me.”

His hands have moved now, lower down, from the broad muscle of the trapezius. He rests his fingers there for a second too long, and the name of the muscle floats through his mind, 'latissimus dorsi', as if the words are a subconscious effort to pull him from other thoughts.

“I had to learn some of this too, actually. In the forge—hot metal doesn't always go where you want it to,” Jayce offers, and Viktor’s hands still, his thoughts returning to the present.

The differences in their circumstances are not lost on him, but he recognises Jayce’s attempt to… relate to him. “I suppose we both learnt through trial and error,” he acknowledges.

“Not that—not that it’s, uh, the same.”

Viktor hears the uncertainty in Jayce’s hurried addition, as if he’s waiting for a sign from Viktor to indicate he’s irritated that Jayce has drawn the comparison. “You can relax, Jayce.”

Viktor pulls the gloves from his hands and sits back to survey his handiwork. He’s stitched four lacerations in total, covering each with neat squares of gauze taped down over Jayce’s tanned skin. The damage, thankfully, wasn’t worse than any of the other countless accidents they’ve had in the lab, but Viktor still feels that curl of shame at being impatient enough to have caused this one.

Silence expands to fill the gulf between their differences—Viktor’s skills hard-won through necessity, Jayce’s forged with the security of his family and promises of a bright future. And yet, an uncanny symmetry has brought them to this point, just as it had years ago; one extraordinary moment in which their paths converged.

“Why would you risk this?”

Back then, he’d told Jayce that he hadn’t aspired to be an assistant for the rest of his life—and that was true. But beyond that, he’d known he was running out of options.

Every action, every movement, all the things he’s ever contributed, has an impact, however imperceptible in the long line of the universe. But it’s not enough for him to simply have been; he wants to be remembered.

Though energy can neither be created nor destroyed, human legacies are far more fragile things.

𐡸.:𐫱:.𐡷

Summertime, 978 AN - fifteen years ago

Nothing tasted as bitter as cruel irony, Viktor thought, as he made his way up what had to be the seventh staircase between him and the first stage on which he’d have to parade himself like a show dog. Progress Day in Piltover arrived with fanfare, as always, and the usual thrum of city life had become more of a coursing roar.

From Glasswell Street to Sidereal Avenue and Incognia Plaza, crowds gathered around vendor carts and at the colourful merchant tents, blissfully caught up in the spirit of innovation and promise.

Not one seemed to remember that, centuries ago, this day had not been marked by celebration but by terror and half a city being swallowed by the sea.

In the four years since his arrival at the University of Piltover, Viktor had marked each Progress Day by lighting a candle in remembrance of those Zaun had lost in the disaster. Earthquakes, resulting from the blasts detonated to clear the way for the Sun Gates, had thrashed the streets of the Undercity, sacrificing thousands of lives to the ocean—all in the name of progress.

Now, here he was, prepared to submit himself to the judgement of those who had so greatly benefitted from the influx of trade the Sun Gates had ushered in. He had only two destinations in mind, but the journey to the merchant families’ tents was already enough to send pain lancing up his leg. Maybe it was his penance walking over those watery graves to attend their school, study their sciences, and pretend like he was one of them.

He felt that he was doing a rather shoddy job of it, by the way the artificers peered at him with narrowed eyes that flicked between him and his papers. This overt display of suspicion made him curse Professor Heimerdinger for forcing him into this lavish ordeal. Auditioning had never been in Viktor’s plans—he knew better than to fool himself into thinking he could join the ranks of Piltover’s apprenta.

Rule number one: They will not make space for you.

He could build bridges upon bridges over the work his classmates created, but the city’s artificers, ruled by the wealthiest of the merchant class, would sooner retrofit their workshops with last year’s scrap metal than take on a cripple from the Undercity, even when the dean of the academy and head of the council himself had singled him out.

Graduation loomed ever closer, and despite his time at the academy, the future felt uncertain. Piltover’s clean air and bright sunlight had undoubtedly improved his health (incredible what being able to breathe did for a person), and the prospect of returning to the Undercity daunted him. He needed an apprenticeship probably more than anyone else stood waiting in the chamber, and yet, he was certain that he was the least likely to receive one, no matter how sound his work was.

“Name?” One of the artificers asked as she handed back the paper that clearly bore his name. He tightened his grip on his invention in an effort to hold his tongue.

“Viktor.”

“Full name?”

“It’s… just Viktor.”

She treated him with the kind of disdain that only someone with a meagre amount of power could manage. He hated her for it, and then hated that he did. It was too petty to warrant such a response from him, but his entire body was sore now. He’d pushed himself through the uneven cobblestone streets faster than he should have dared. He’d even risen with the sun, well before he’d needed to. He wanted to give them as few reasons to dismiss him as he could manage, thinking his dedication to punctuality might also communicate his regard for their time and win some small amount of their favour.

From the placid way the artificers looked at him, he could see that was not the case.

Of course, he’d known this and had even explained such to Heimerdinger when the dean had urged him to take on the auditions. How difficult it would be for him to simply make the physical journey in a process that was designed to showcase resilience and determination; how his accent would immediately mark him as ‘other’, and how the inventions he was proudest of were things that would not sparkle and flash the way Piltover expected. His progress was for the Undercity, and thus, it might as well have been invisible.

Already, their attention drifted, and other hopefuls surrounding the tent seemed to bear down on him. He grimaced as he set up his contraption of pipes and dials that looked out of place within the sleek lines of the tent. It wasn’t until his machine began hissing shrilly and emitting puffs of Gray that the artificers paid him any mind. One of them started shrieking, making it very difficult to explain that he’d also released an aerosolised alkali to neutralise the toxicity—the whole point of the showy demonstration.

Rule number two: their grace is precarious.

Whilst he’d never been foolish enough to think that the artificers might like what he brought to the auditions, he’d not been expecting their fury. With stomach-piercing fear, he realised that they, in all their self-aggrandising glory, seemed to think that his audition was an assassination attempt of the mercantile family. The absurdity nearly made him long for simpler days, when people merely saw his mistakes as proof of unworthiness, and his greatest lament was how they judged his errors more harshly than his peers' mere learning experiences.

He’d packed his machine in a hurry and practically fled the tent, almost tripping himself like he’d not done since he was a child in his haste to slip into the crowd.

Rule number three: They will lie to you.

By the time the day ended, he’d attended only one more audition, though he was hardly sure that it counted. He hadn’t spent very much time at the Holloran tent, but the experience still clung to him like a stubborn mood, even as he sat in the safety of his favourite haunt in Piltover. The mechanical oasis overlooked the promenade level of the Undercity, waters running through the ravine below, where he’d played as a child. He’d always appreciated the serenity of this place, finding even in his youth that its quiet tranquillity suited him.

“Viktor, my boy,” called a reedy voice from behind him, and he lifted a hand off his cane in greeting without turning to look at Professor Heimerdinger. “How did your ventures go today?”

“I don’t believe it really ‘went,’” he responded wryly, easing himself into a seated position in the arch of the open-air window, legs relaxing over the ledge. “Can you say it ‘went’ if one family thought I was attempting a murder, and the other refused me at the door?” Heimerdinger’s poro scurried over his lap and around his back, which he found both ridiculous and… cute. It made his bitter remark come out with a slightly amused lilt, even if there wasn’t much to find amusing in being turned away, only to almost be knocked over by the next hopeful student when the Holloran family admitted them mere moments after.

The professor gave a soft hum, a gloved hand at his chin in the perfect pose of refined thought. “What will you do?”

Viktor rolled his shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. “I still have some time. I will need to finish the year, of course, and then… Well, then, probably the, ah, how do they say? ‘Crunch time’? Comes?”

Heimerdinger’s moustache twitched in a smile that didn’t quite meet his eyes, even though Viktor thought that his use of the colloquialism had been rather apt. When the professor spoke next, his words were soft and cautious, as if he thought that Viktor might snap. “Why don’t you consider being my assistant, lad? You could stay on at the academy, and though I’m sure you’d rather be doing something more ambitious, you’d have time to pursue your own projects.”

Silence hung in the air between them for a moment. Viktor tried to read the expression in Heimerdinger’s eyes but only saw a soft sorrow there. “I appreciate your offer, Professor,” he started, the words tasting of defeat even before he’d spoken of any decision.

Heimerdinger seemed to sense Viktor’s aversion and interjected before he could continue. “So you’re aware, Viktor, this isn’t mere charity.” The professor turned inwards, eyes downcast, a slight droop to his large ears. “I was… perhaps hasty,” he admitted, still looking at the cement floor, “in urging you to audition.”

Viktor had never known Professor Heimerdinger to be prideful, but the dean’s guilty posture struck him, even so. His kindness still burnt; Viktor’s stubborn independence made him reactive to the idea of being handed anything out of pity, particularly given the assumptions of other students who already believed his mere presence was an excess of anything he had any right to. “Thank you, Professor.” He found that he meant it. Heimerdinger had always believed in his potential, even when doing so set him at odds with the rest of the faculty. “Perhaps… give me some time to think it over,” he relented, looking back out at the city below. The streets still bustled with the activity of Progress Day, even as the sun began to cast warm, dusky shadows amidst the revelry.

“Take the time you need, my boy. The offer stands.” With that, the professor retreated at a quick trot, his ever-present poro shuffling along behind him. Viktor sat in the wake of their departure, contemplating the glint of mechanical contraptions dotting the landscape (so far as he could tell, they were only constructed as decor for the day, which was an awful waste, considering what you could buy in the Undercity after selling parts of just one). Perhaps it had been a blessing that he’d not managed a successful audition. Being the assistant to the academy's dean would mean he would have access to lab spaces and materials that most others would not, including unusual things that would need to be assessed for danger.

That could be interesting.

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an: this chapter was SO fun to write - definitely one of the ones we were most looking forward to when we were posting on AO3!! i'm so bad at these tumblr updates im going to try to get a bunch of them scheduled at once and see what happens haha anyways tho we just posted chapter 23 yesterday on AO3! 🙌🏽 fic come so far 😭

[whosxafraid]

The invention of the telephone.

He'd been around for it. The absolute insanity that gripped the world. The idea that one could talk into a device and be heard hundreds of miles away. It was a game changer. One that a certain yet to be convicted thief had stolen from lesser known and/or lesser liked men. Paraded it about as his own simply because he bought a piece of paper stating he owned the idea.

Most days it'd make half a present ear twitch and he'd get on with it but today--it doesn't even occur to him as he swims through one call to the next. But thankfully its only three calls before he manages to find the particular being he's after. Not Luka's fault the creature can't be assed to update their contact info every time they changes things up for the thirtieth time this year.

Still once the line picks up...it becomes a conversation that floats between half a dozen languages. Information asked for in Greek, stipulations given in Russian, payment arranged in both Hindi and Arabic--it's a flowing river of language, and then for what Luka can only assume is 'for giggles and gigs' Nordic is even thrown in when the information is finally spit out.

Information that has him making a short trip to the laptop set up on the dinning room table that's never once been used for an actual dinner. Blue prints and notations for a job that has nothing to do with Watch at all, pushed out of the way. Keys tapped as the current conversation on the phone turns into listening to a man curse another's mother in Persian for taking too long in drink preparation. Apologies to Luka in German and what he's looking for recited too him in Gaelic. It's a game he and the other play each time they're work or interest cause them to cross paths. And not for the first time Luka takes a bit of comfort in knowing he's not the only ancient thing that is still 'yet living'.

. I cannae understand it. Watch is such a sweetlin'. Who could possibly want to hurt the lass?

. "Ye sentiment be koi'nd Alba bu' we bo'd be knowin' d'reason could be anyd'in, Me, d'next customer on 'er resume...ye."

There's a pointed pause. Just a few seconds before the being on the other end makes a sound. One that Luka has come to know as quiet agreement. Still both of their statements stood on their own two feet. And Luka knows Islay will no more allow a finger to touch Watch uninvited than they would leave a hare to their death on the side of the road. And so the information is given. What Islay has of it at any rate, which unfortunately is painfully little.

Still the new bout of news has green and off yellow side eyeing the large windows at the far side of the room. A thought to pull the curtains closed skipping across his mind as he hangs up with one of his eldest friends. His attention zeroing back on the wee thing sitting on his couch. A blanket pulled over top her, to the point she looks more like a blanket tent than a person.

Something that catches up one side of the immortal's mouth as he moves to turn down the volume on the lamps that had fired up by all the unexpected movement at two in the morning. And once that is complete he's quick but silent to move on. Pausing at the media server that hold another library. One of music. And he picks out one title that he knows will help Watch settle. The Swan from the Carnival of the Animals : XIII. And as the music begins its gentle hello Luka wanders himself over to the far window.

Cigarette case collected from a near by window pane, matches caught up. The scratch and tiny fwoosh igniting his face for the briefest moment, the reflection of him clear in the glass. The easy clink of a smoking match dropped into a minuscule trash can. Islay had thought it was funny, and Luka hadn't the heart to dampen the being's joy over the silly gift. But now isn't the time to let himself settle there, and his mind moves at the same place as his gaze does.

Green and off yellow looking beyond the glass before him. Studying the rain in a way no human could possibly study it. Lights from billboard a few streets away shimmering off each drop that falls between it and him. And its an after thought to reach out and crack open the only functioning pane of glass. Not much mind. Just enough to encourage the smoke to be sucked out into the wet night. Luka scanning the building across the street. Gaze straining to see anything out of place or otherwise new thing that maybe wasn't there before. But he sees nothing.

. That's not fair you know.

The mumbled French pulls a brow up. The red head turning only so much to acknowledge the statement.

. "An' ye' s'werkin' aye?"

A small nearly non-existent chuckle when 'hmph' is all he gets in response. But Watch does extricate her head at least. Shifting about to lie down properly. And Luka knows it won't be long before she's asleep. The adrenline has all but run out. So back to the window he turns. Mulling over what little information Islay had been able to provide. Hoping his old friend finds more and quickly. But for now--

An off yellow eye twitches into the idea of a squint. What was that? A nose follows in kind with an eye. And for all of half a heart beat all of an apex predator has gone utterly still. All of him focused upon one spot on the roof. Daring it to move. Daring it to give itself a way. Because for the slightest fraction of a moment? Luka could have sworn he saw and scented...something. But as soon as the moment of stillness happens its over and with as much casualness as possible---

The cigarette is ground out in the ashtray on the window ledge, as feet turn him away. An easy walk back to the couch, where he shifts the blanket up a bit more soundly onto Watch's shoulder. She's out and will be for a while. One more reason to be thankful she trusts him the way she does. She's never bucked him when he's said 'take these'. But then he has been the only safe space she's had since she was ten. The only breathing being she could trust without a lick of paranoia.

Living because well she trusted her apartment did she? Or at least she did. And for good reason. He'd made sure Fort Knox could eat its own ass when it came to how he'd built that space for her. Inside a building that hadn't had another tenant since eight years before he had moved her in. So maybe that kind of trust just came with the territory. But that also begs the fecking question--how in the hell had someone gotten in? Watch was paranoid sure but hallucinations weren't part of her kind of overly cautious. Not by miles.

So he makes his way around the room. Picking up her plate and tea mug. Quieting the lights to near silence and setting the music on a loop. He himself shuffling away to the kitchen, where he makes short work of loading the dishwasher. Next her soaked through clothes are tossed in the washing machine and set to clean. And then finally he moves off towards his bedroom. Makes as though he's going to sleep on the affair--even if from where he thinks the unknown is they wouldn't be able to see him at all. The view broken by fifteen foot walls he'd installed himself to break up the open lay out of his home between the bedroom and the rest of the place. But once all the lights are extinguished...he does the exact opposite of resting.

Hovering just inside the archway to his room. Where the dark can not be penetrated by any living or mechanical eye. Not unless he wants them too anyway. And his trap is set, simple as it is. Watch is the bait, the 'forgot to close it' window pane the opportunity. Now all a hunter has to do is wait. And waiting is something this immortal is incredibly good at. Even the skewed stories woven from his tragic truth kept that bit.

He has a reputation in certain circles. He's the one they call when the job is nearly impossible, when it requires a certain finesse. Not that anyone would typically associate finesse with Eliot Spencer, but his record speaks for itself, and with limited failings, he's in high demand.

This job isn't even one he wanted. The woman he's watching seems to be harmless but looks can be deceiving. He's been on her trail for three weeks, gathering information about her, about who she sees. There aren't many trips like this one, so he's paying extra attention as he slips behind a dumpster in the alley.

The place she goes into has excellent security, he can tell. The kind of security that Eliot can't crack alone. But he'll have to figure out a way. Moreau doesn't accept failure, not from Eliot, and the punishment for disappointing him is one that Eliot would rather avoid. He'll have to find a way in.

The woman disappears into a black void and Eliot takes that as his cue to find somewhere to hole up. The rain has already soaked him to the bone, cold permeating everything he's wearing. He wants to go change but he hasn't left this duty for weeks and he's not going to now. He leaves the dumpster behind, going high instead. Most people don't look up high when they're trying to see if they're being followed. He knows she knows that she's being followed, but he hopes she doesn't know much more than that.

There are excellent windows into the building once he goes high and switches sides, watching as the target and a man who has at least a foot on Eliot walk around what appears to be a living space. The windows are probably bulletproof, not that Eliot plans on using a gun to eliminate his target. He much prefers his knives. But the option would be there, if he weren't who he is, if he didn't feel the way he does about guns.

He watches them for a while, wondering if the woman is going to leave, if the man she went to is going to come searching for him. He has no information about this guy, something he's going to bring up to Moreau once this job is done. He's going to have to gather some, learn what he's up against. Research has never been his strength, but he knows how to case a target. Now there's just two of them.

Making himself comfortable on the roof, Eliot settles down to wait.

[anocana]

the simple version of the notation is basically "f[g] <=> h", where f is the function to be applied, g is the function defining the property of the result, and h is the function which relates the property on the inputs to the property on the output. it's basically a simplified way of writing "for all x0, ..., xn, g(f(x0, ..., xn)) = h(g(x0), ..., g(xn)))".

"and[not] <=> or" says "if you negate the result of an And, it's equivalent to taking an Or of the negation of the inputs", and "concat[len] <=> add" says "if you take the length of a concatenation of lists, it's the sum of the lengths of the inputs".

in its full generality you can do stuff like "f[g1 x g2 -> g3] <=> h" which I'm p sure is "g3(f(x, y)) = h(g1(x), g2(y))", the notation f[g] is syntactic sugar for f[g x g x ... x g -> g]. the functions in the brackets, which define the properties we're concerned of are called "paths" and you can add further paths which apply by function composition, f[g1][g2] <=> f[g2.g1].

i think the motivation for trying to build a whole logic from scratch around this is that it's genuinely tricky to define what, exactly, f[g] is. if the type of f is (a x a -> a) and g is a -> b, then f[g] needs to be a function of type (b x b -> b), and there's not a simple way of constructing that from f and g afaict (though it's easy to check whether f[g] matches some specific h on any given input). in fact, i suspect there shouldn't be - functions are complicated and it's undecidable in general how they'll affect any properties of their input. but the person who invented the notation is very focused on defining functions without having a specific input in mind.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW TO BE AN EXPERT IN 13 SENTENCES

Let's get Bill Gates out of the way so the founders can use that time to build or finish building something impressive. They go out for dinner together, talk about ideas, and the investors are the ones sitting back with slightly pained expressions. But this year there may have been. Even if you could read the minds of the consumers, you'd find these factors were all blurred together. Writing eval required inventing a notation representing Lisp functions as Lisp data, and such a notation was devised for the purposes of the paper with no thought that it would be false. When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. It's why the best abstract painting still falls short of the spec because it only works temporarily. If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing confidence in their opinions are implicitly concluding the world is static. A company that could pay all its employees so straightforwardly would be enormously successful. Indeed, the more ideas you'll have.

But in fact the defining quality of Lisp—in fact, it would create a self-sustaining chain reaction. Bittorrent and YouTube have already trained a new generation of viewers that the place to watch shows is on a computer screen. Arguably it's an interesting failed experiment. The best way to get rich by creating wealth and getting paid for it. You don't need to join a company to do something people want. You can see why people invent gods to explain it. And the reason it's inaccurate is that, in a matter of working harder than an ordinary employee were asked to do the things a startup founder has to, he'd be very indignant. That's the best-case scenario.

So there you have it: languages are not equivalent, and I am not surprised to hear it. It turns out to be flaky, high-maintenance investors. That's why the Internet won. Apparently voters were afraid to say they force things to happen in a predefined way. Certainly Bill is smart and dedicated, but Microsoft also happens to have been the most common trajectory is to do an angel round first. At Viaweb now Yahoo Store, we raised some eyebrows among VCs and potential acquirers by using Lisp. The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup or not. No one thought to go back and debug Aristotle's motivating argument.

But the advantage is that it can be written in itself. And why do they so often work on developing new technology? It means he makes up his mind quickly, and follows through. You should of course have your lawyer review everything. But I think I've figured out what's going on. But it's all based on one unspoken assumption, and that will kill you very rapidly. But houses are very expensive—around $1000 per square foot. What if both are true? If someone were creating an Internet-based TV company from scratch now, they might have some plan for shows aimed at specific regions, but it will only get harder, because change is accelerating. It's one of the founders we funded asked me why we started Y Combinator is one probably only a hacker would understand. There probably aren't more than a couple weeks has been trained to click on Back after following a link.

Because people in the entertainment business had understandably come to think of them as rather passive. Saying YC does seed funding for startups is a description in terms of the old one. Investors' opinions are explicitly tested: startups come to them and they get discouraged and give up. If you have to extract parameters manually in Perl. With Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. There are two differences: you're not saying it to your boss, but directly to the customers for whom your boss is only a single expression so you need to create a new variable s. It's a tossup whether Castro Street or University Ave should be considered the heart of the Valley is done in the cafes on or just off University Ave in Palo Alto. More importantly, such a company would attract people who wanted to work especially hard. At Viaweb now Yahoo Store, we raised some eyebrows among VCs and potential acquirers by using Lisp.

One piece of evidence is what happened to countries that tried to return to the old model, like the Soviet Union didn't have a computer industry, it remained for them a theory; they didn't have hardware capable of executing the calculations fast enough to design an actual airplane. But houses are very expensive—around $1000 per square foot. Ideas beget ideas. And only good people can ride the thermals if they hit them anyway. I've figured out what's going on. In a startup, there's always one right there. You can't go to your boss, but directly to the customers for whom your boss is only a proxy after all, and you're not doing it individually, but along with a small group. How often have you visited a site that seemed very good, and then, fairly quickly, they learn whether they guessed right. Plus your referrals will dry up.

People talk so much about technology and design. But if you control the whole system. Money is a side effect of specialization. They do something people want. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal described how TV networks were trying to add more live shows, partly as a way to steal it. A big company is probably getting a bad deal, because his performance is dragged down by the overall lower performance of the entire company. We did it because it seems such a great hack. In the rivalry between Perl and Python. By then it's too late for angels. Silicon Valley. Now would be a shortcut straight to wisdom.

I think it's a good idea. How can you get errors asking that? I'll just be able to do at least know now why I didn't. Salesmen are an exception. And even then they rarely said so outright. With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. Can something people have spent thousands of years between when people first started trying to talk about it.

[thefatalmarksman]

AU: I GAVE YOU GUYS FIRE AND THIS IS HOW YOU REPAY ME SMH

a.k.a.

Hey I Finally Joined That Modern Mythos AU With @verumace & Others Because Why Not Have a Depressed Luxu Being A Prometheus Parallel And Also There’s A Possum Involved So That’s Gonna Be Neat

[[bio subject to change/additions if necessary]]

Name: Luxu, but he’s not totally married to the name

Parallel: Prometheus

Age: Gawrsh he’s pretty old by now but he looks like he’s early- to mid-forties

Birthdate: He’s claimed May 22nd to be His Day

Height: 6ft (About 183 cm)

Weight: 180-ish lbs (About 82-ish kg)

Race: Titan

Sex/Gender: Cisgender Male

Orientation: Pansexual / Demiromantic

History:

[Excerpt from an unpublished and untitled autobiography in an old spiral notebook sandwiched between a beat up and mockingly-hand notated copy of Atlas Shrugged and a vintage 1995 “(Not Only) Blue” magazine]

Once upon a time---

Well, this ain’t too much of a fairytale, really. But then again, most folks are more comfy with the glamorized, watered down, hippie-dippie Disney versions of Grimm’s Fairytales, which are, like, way crazier. Did you know that at the end of the Little Mermaid she just straight up fuckin’ turns into sea foam? And the evil queen in Snow White was punished by wearing red-hot iron shoes and was fated to dance until she just straight-up died? Like, geez, that’s pretty fucked up.

But I digress.

There were gods. Like... a lot of ‘em. And I just happen to be one of ‘em. Gone through a lot of names, a couple different faces when I had to, but you can just call me “Luxu” for now. And, despite my currently dashing good looks (the eyepatch and scar? Killin’ so many of the ladies I should be arrested for mass murder) and youthful posturing, I’m pretty up there in years. Just had a birthday, and I’m in the upper-(muffled noises) by now. Give or take. But ya can’t be sure given I was around before, y’know, time was even invented.

Freeze-frame, record scratch---I bet you’re wondering how I’m here now, then, huh?

To be honest, most of the partying I did back in the early ADs turned my brain to partial mush, and makes some of the details real sketchy and coated with a gossamer blur effect, but it all started with Chaos. But really, when doesn’t it? And boy was it Calamitous, and from that swirling Aether, you got your Titans---amongst them, yours truly. But then you start getting siblings, and then you gotta deal with them, and try not to give ‘em wedgie burns---and then, eventually, you kinda realize that they’re way more interesting than your other Titan siblings that aren’t willing to be crafty and sinister, and you sorta, kinda just end up switching sides.

Anyway, Shit calmed down. But then Shit un-calmed when I got to make humanity. Lemme tell ya, I did a right bang-up job---wish ya coulda been there during those first Golden Days. Y’all look like damn gremlins in comparison to what I made. And I’ll be honest, I took a shine to ya. Even went out of my way to trick my Big Baby Brother---y’know, the Dude with the ‘Tude who got to run everything up on his Mighty Throne Up There---so that y’all could get the best pieces of meat and not have to sacrifice ‘em unto us.

Which was pretty funny, but it pissed him off pretty fierce, and he ended up, y’know, taking away your only means of cooking that meat: fire.

But not only that---not only literal fire---but the “fire” of inspiration, the fire of thought and sentience. Again, y’all were so Grade A right when I made ya, but without that beautiful flame burnin’ bright in ya? Y’all were as effective as wet twigs rubbin’ together to make a spark.

I mean, I coulda just left it at that. But back in the day, I had a wee soft spot for y’all, and took it upon myself to restore that fire so you guys could, like, eat and all that. I mean, raw meat back in the day wasn’t stuffed with all the chemicals that clean it up and make it juicy. There’s a whole diet dedicated to that, y’know. But takin’ it straight from the diseased cow’s haunches---not too good for the stomach lining.

And with that, I gave you guys your Sight back---of creativity and exploration. I ain’t called “forethought” for nothin’, y’know.

But yeah, if I thought he was seein’ red before from the meat ordeal, it was probably only pinkish in comparison to what were now intense oxblood levels.

I mean, if I could go back, I don’t think there’s really a lot that could be changed. Y’know, insert some kinda sentimental bullshit about ‘I wouldn’t be the person I am today---’ yadda yadda. But if I could have skipped the whole being chained to a mountain and plucked apart piece by piece then being subsequently devoured daily by a horrific beast for offering mankind a slim chance of survival bit? ...Yeah, I might actually take a change or two.

Not to say I’m jaded by your Collective Ungratefulness, but, y’know, not having even a handful of olives placed on your altar in over two-thousand years kinda toasts my buns a little.

Though that Black Box bit for you guys wasn’t too pretty---y’know, it opening up and unleashing all the Evils of Humanity from the Void and into the world---but it makes for a fine conversation piece on my mantel, now that it’s come into my possession.

...Eh, maybe it evens out in the end.

So how many centuries of that exquisite torture did I endure, you might have the audacity to ask? Well, you lose count at about one-thousand, and eventually you’re just noddin’ your head in relent when the Chimera with three heads and five-hundred jagged teeth between them crawls on out of its cave at noon-sharp, and you’re just like, “yeah, yeah, get on with it already, I’ve got a date with the boiling summer sun in an hour.” I mean, gotta admit, my tan was pretty sick at that point. Haven’t been able to replicate the look since, but I almost managed it when I visited Australia for a few months. Was sorta shocked I didn’t see a Chimera there, to be utterly honest.

Then some dude comes along and cuts me free. The best part---oh, the absolute bestest part? Turns out he’s the son of the Dude that put me there. And he’s, like, totally okay with it. What a coinkidink, am I right? But I’m not gonna launch a complaint or look a gift Pegasus in the mouth, and slink on off to enjoy my freedom after, well, not having it for who knows how long.

And to be honest, I don’t... really know what to do with it. Partied hard, been ‘round the world a thousand times over, maybe had a few kids (no official paperwork and no one’s bothered me for child support, so I think I’m in the clear), killed my liver a total of seven times---yes, I know, after having it spooned out by a forked tongue for a millennia, you’d think I’d take better care of those things---and here I am. Writing this... mess. I mean, it’s all just rough ideas in diary-form right now, and I’m trying to figure a working title---something catchy---something that’ll have it flying off the shelves. Give the likes of ol’ Hesiod and Judith Viorst a run for their money in creativity.

I’m thinkin’...

I Gave You Guys Fire and This Is How You Repay Me SMH

...Yeah. Really rolls off the tongue.

[glennmalcolm]

Sonic Pi - Making, Mixing and Live Coding Music

"Two performances did seem to transcend the present, with artists sharing music that felt like open-source software to paths unknown. The first, Sam Aaron, played an early techno set to a small crowd, performing by coding live. His computer display, splayed naked on a giant screen, showcasedSonic Pi, the free software he invented. Before he let loose by revising lines of brackets, colons and commas, he typed: #This is Sonic Pi….. #I use it to teach people how to code #everything i do tonight, i can teach a 10 year old child….. His set – which sounded like Electric Café-era Kraftwerk, a little bit of Aphex Twin skitter and some Eighties electro – was constructed through typing and deleting lines of code. The shadowy DJ sets, knob-tweaking noise and fogbank ambient of many Moogfest performers was completely demystified and turned into simple numbers and letters that you could see in action. Dubbed "the live coding synth for everyone," it truly seemed less like a performance and more like an invitation to code your own adventure."  -- Sam Arron @ MoogFest 2016 via Christopher R. Weingarten Rolling Stone Magazine

Music. Code. Art. Sonic Pi is all of these. 

Sonic Pi. What is it? Where can you get it? What can you do with it in your class?

Get it here: Sonic-pi.net

Sonic Pi allows you to make music with code. It's a seriously simple peice of software (to begin with) that allows you to program loops and samples all in time with one another. It also allows you to keep things simple by emulating musical scales either with midi or regular notation. The way you expeirience it should not be how we think about traditonal instruments it's way beyond a single instrument with a single range of sounds. You pick up a guitar and you pluck the strings, then you press down on the frets and the length of the string that you re-tune defines the sound that comes from the strings. This is something you can do in Sonic Pi however Sonic Pi goes way beyond this.

In a nutshell, you can mix samples, live mix samples, splice sounds, edit them, bend them, break them and reattach all while keeping each 'Live Loop' in sync. This is the big deal: it's all in sync whether you are using a BPM counter or the rhythm of the sample you're using. And, if you're making music on a Raspberry Pi then you can pretty much make an accompanying video in Minecraft. Amazing.

The session I'll be leading at Fobit 2017 is an introduction to what is possible using text to code. Sadly, we were not able to get Sam Arron himself (@SamArron/ @Sonic_Pi) the creator of Sonic Pi over or his counterpart who I saw live demonstrating at Bath Ruby, Xavier Riley (@XavierRiley). Alas, we tried! Even so, we have people here who are ready to run additional workshops, Sam's write-up in MagPi Sonic Pi Special Edition and attendees to produce fine, fine tunes and compete too.

The main reason I like this is that Sam and his team specifically laid out the vision for Sonic Pi that if an addition to the application was beyond the understanding of a ten year old child then it was not to be added. As a tech integrator in the primary school this is, quite literally, music to my ears. We have been after a text-based language to peel our kids away from Scratch as I feel we use Scratch to death. I also feel that there is a lot of learning that takes place in coding that really has no real goal attached and Scratch can fall into that category pretty easily. Where as Sonic Pi doesn't. In order for Sonic Pi to be successful there needs to be an instructor present to guide students towards their goal. Scratch can be a little wishy-washy at times unless there is a very specfic goal such as producing game or animation (minus that Cat or its ilk!).

So what can we do with Sonic Pi? 

The beauty of Sonic Pi too is that within the application there is jargon-less support and tutorials all the way through. Heck, while I was running the session for FOBIT, Tine Pendred from Garden International School, KL tweeted Sam with praise and for support. He tweeted back with directions on which tutorial she needed to sync buffers!

This session was by no means a masterclass and, when you are being watched while typing, it's rather off putting to the point where I forgot a load of syntax and my code didn't play. The competition got people motivated and the chance to win an Rapsberry Pi 3 meant people took this seriously with great results.

Several people from the conference have taken this on where students are using soundtrap to collaborate and build their musical creations from there. You can hop on over here to see what Jonathan Kitchin is doing with with his classes and their soundtrap project.

Below are a few of the links I posted out including some very basic level intros from a guy named Dave Conservatoire, the most amazing Bath Ruby set and walkthrough by Xavier Riley and, finally a live set by Sam Arron.

Enjoy.

[scratch-notation]

DJ Raedawn : Inventor of Scratch Notation 

In the Winter of 1999, dj Raedawn Phoenix invented the first known documented System of Notation for DJ music. He self published this book, calling it “The Fundamentals”, and presented a physical copy to filmmaker John Carluccio and industrial designer Ethan Imboden with whom he had heard were working on a similar albeit unreleased system. These 3 skratch enthusiats joined forces to create the system known as the “Turntablist Transcription Methodology 1.0” and released the book on February 17, 2000 at Symphony space in New York. The Turntablist Transcription Methodology ,known as “TTM”, has been featured in such media outlets as CNN, TIME, BLACKBOOK magazine, SCRATCH the Movie, CSI, XLR8R and many More.

[anocana]

just spent a couple days talking with a math crank on reddit who has invented, as it turns out, what is actually a coherent notation for properties which are preserved by the application of functions (or related between inputs and outputs in a structured way, e.g. the length of a concatenated list is the sum of the lengths of the inputs, etc). this might actually be useful if they presented it in a comprehensible way. the problem is that they're trying to invent their own logic from scratch to ground this notation because they think it needs to be a first-order concept instead of just a notation for things that can absolutely be expressed in normal systems.

the fundamental grounding of this logic is that, to define type membership, every single object is a function which takes its type and returns itself and is undefined on everything else. so e.g. "true(bool) = true", "2(integer) = 2", and they can't take any other inputs. they claim this is not a circular definition. they think this is deeply connected to "Continental philosophy" because some other guy with two PhDs (neither in philosophy, math, or computer science) wrote a completely incoherent paper about how this is somehow connected to the "Alpha male father" and Hegel's master/slave dialectic. also there's some weird thing they call a "qubit operator" which i can't make heads or tails of but which apparently doesn't work anything like a real qubit.

they are building this system in Rust.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND FOUNDERS

I'm proposing that the core language, prior to any additional notations about implementation, be defined this way. Partly I mean designed in the sense that the authors didn't know when they started the companies that made them famous. You don't have to answer to anyone. Practically every really big startup could say, five years later, believe it or not, we started out doing. That generates almost as good. In theory this is possible for species too, but it's so beautiful that you can't do it quickly. It's wrong to call it a trick in his case, though. We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate they think they can hit, and then just try to hit it every week. They're very capital efficient. It's not just that technical innovation happens slowly. Since the invention of the quartz movement, an ordinary Timex is more accurate than a Patek Philippe costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As knowledge gets more specialized, there are three possible explanations: a that technical innovation has stopped, b that the people who run the company. One group got an exploding term-sheet from some VCs. I exchanged with him at the time. Their model of product development derives from hardware. What if you run out of ideas on one point, you don't need to have a very limited capacity for dealing with detail. And because startups tend to have. It's fascinating to think this prize might be within the reach of so many cities. In practice any program that wanted to do any amount of math would probably represent numbers in binary, but this predisposition is not itself intelligence.

At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for a week should give anyone ideas for two or three. There's selling, promotion, figuring out what they need. Till now, VCs' claims about how much value they added were sort of like having a guilty conscience about something. So even though they'll all still spend the money on the stadium, at least more convenient. What changed there was not solubility but bigness. We need to add one more qualification: we should ignore cases where someone knows what to do because they have less to prove, and partly it's yet another consequence of the fact that static typing seems to preclude true macros—without which, in my opinion, no language is worth using. But the better you do, the less you can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. Competitors riding on lots of good blogger perception aren't really the winners and can disappear from the map quickly. Want to know if the selection process was biased against some type of applicant? Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so must people trying to measure it have concentrated on the aspects of it that are most measurable.

I'm not saying that if you let motivated people do real work, they work like watertight compartments in an unsinkable ship. It's amazing how easily you can reach out to people and get immediate feedback. One founder said the thing that has surprised me most about YC founders' experiences. I think these two paths converge at the top: The surprise for me was how accessible important and interesting people are. Whereas a search engine you have to sound intellectual. When I encounter a startup with about 70 programmers how many more he'd hire if he could get all the attention, when hardly any of them can succeed is if they all do. Three months' funding is enough to get into the deals they want. But he insisted it was good, we should also ask, where does that income come from? 8x 5% 12.

The closest you can get is by selling your startup in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words software and publisher fit together, the underlying concepts don't. And you had better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to tell apart, and there I find the ancient rule still works: try to understand the forces driving it. All you need to get yourself in a situation with measurement and leverage. For example, I use it when I get close to a deadline. Why? Bill Gates is middle class. Will we get rid of numbers as a fundamental data type? The startup is the embodiment of your discoveries so far. People sleeping on airbeds in strangers' apartments? That is, if you needed money on the scale only VCs could supply. Who needs investors? As I was making this list I found myself thinking of people like Douglas Bader and R.

Even if you could read the minds of the consumers, you'd find these factors were all blurred together. Another group was worried when they realized they had to rewrite their software from scratch. Saying less about implementation should also make programs more flexible. They can't pay as much attention to the author's choices as to the idea itself. Which is almost necessarily impossible to predict. That's particularly worth remembering. We'd hire 30 tomorrow morning. Why does this sound familiar? Why are founders surprised that VCs are clueless? Deals fall through. Indeed, there is even a saying among painters: A painting is never finished, you just add them to the end. Much of what's in the App Store.

And since the ability and desire to create it vary from person to person, it's not necessarily because there's something wrong with you. There are several types of investors: They don't even know that. In 1900, if you combine them, suggest interesting possibilities: 1 the hundred-year language now, it would arguably be immoral not to. The contribution of investors tends to be an inexhaustible source of research papers, despite the fact that most good startup ideas generally seem wrong. A minimum of several hundred thousand dollars to the market value of the startup community in the larger sense: How advantageous it is to take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware? And not just in its beautiful lines: it was at the edge of what could be manufactured. This way, they were guaranteed a social event at least once a week. There are two ways to do that with hardware, but because of what they intended: the version of an app currently available in the App Store is an ongoing karma leak. They don't need any given startup to succeed, like founders do, just make it faster, you almost always guess wrong. For example, a city could attract angels from outside. It would be a pretty cheap experiment, as civil expenditures go.

There is a large random factor in the success of any company. That's why I don't have anything like this serenity when I'm writing, four nights out of five I go to bed discontented, feeling he hadn't made enough progress. Wanted: Woman with hammer. The reason he bought Instagram was that it was too late to change. Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it: barriers to entry.1 It's a general historical trend. You turn the fan off, and the essay will still survive.

Notes

What I dislike is editing done after the fact that you're not trying to work your way up. But I think you could end up.